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astorinx-writes · 2 years

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I Rewatched The 2009 Movie... And It Was Okay!

If you were to ask any Gen Z fan of Astro Boy how they got into the fandom, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who says anything besides its 2009 CGI film rendition. But ironically, for the past 2 times that I’ve surveyed the fandom, 3 out of 5 fans consider it to be their least favorite rendition. Why is that? Well, many argue it comes down to the poor writing and acting in the movie, as well as how different it is compared to renditions of the past. Despite this, I was inspired by newly cropped up blogs dedicated to talking about the 09 movie– even going as far as defending it. So, I decided to give the movie a rewatch and talk about my overall thoughts.

Now, as a disclaimer, I will say that I too did discover Astro Boy through the 09 movie. That said, it is not the sole reason why I joined the fandom. This does, however, mean that I am susceptible to bias. So I’ll be trying my best to hide it whilst writing this review. This is also not meant to sway you one way or another, I am simply discussing my thoughts on this movie. Because though the 2009 movie is still arguably the worst Astro Boy rendition so far– there is some good and charm within it that makes it worth a watch.

The Bad… and Arguably Confusing

One of the biggest complaints about the movie (and rightfully so) are what I’m calling “watered-down characters.” What sets them apart from previous versions is how their personas aren’t how they usually are. The biggest example of this has got to be the portrayal of Tenma. The 2003 series posies him to be the big baddie and overall fucked up dad that seems to be only looking out for himself and his motives, and no one else’s. He forces Astro to combat villains so that they can “evolve” and become “The King of All Robots.” Yet, in the 09 movie, he comes across as more of a science dad (who definitely listens to Nickelback in his spare time) who doesn’t really seem to know what he wants and seriously lacks depth. This isn't to imply that being a baddie is remarkable, or that being just casual is bad. But the plot hinges on Tenma’s character, and thus he must be at least interesting.

Speaking of villains, many of them in this movie are also just shells of their archetypes and nothing more. President Stone, is obviously meant to be the corrupt, rich politician that wants nothing more than power and money. But the way he’s showcased makes him look like a little bitch boy with no spine. There’s supposed to be stakes at play regarding his “big scheme” to inflict war on the surface, but not even anyone outside his circle seems to take him seriously. He mentions this when talking to his right-hand man regarding how low he was doing in the polls, saying “… I’ve cut taxes for a lot of very influential friends. What more do the people want?” So, what’s the point of making him the villain if you aren’t going to commit to making the things he’s done actually mean something. Or, at the very least, they could’ve given us something to psychoanalyze and pick apart, à la 03 Tenma.

Astro’s characterization in the movie is also incongruent with how they are in past series. Typically, Astro is seen as a lovable kid who only wants to see the best in others, and exercise the least amount of physical force to combat the baddies that get in their way. In this movie, nonetheless, they seem to take more of a “sarcastic” approach (for lack of a better term). This isn’t to say they’re mean, but I’ve found it much harder for fans to look at them as the adorable “baby” (their words, not mine) to fawn over and make memes about.

The most interesting thing about Astro’s character in this movie is that they seem to have a chip over their shoulder the entire time for no real reason (at least not one that gets brought up). And they accept their fate of being deactivated rather quickly. I’m reminded a lot of an old head canon I’ve dubbed “Sasstro Tenma” who, like 09 Astro, has a bit of an attitude (hence the “Sass” part of “Sasstro”). Of course, this could be contributed to them being 13 instead of 9. But no matter how you slice it, they just aren’t as pleasant to watch, or be willing to root for.

Elefun is also British in this movie… for some reason. According to a Discord server I’m in– the voice actor for Elefun, Bill Nighy, is quite renowned for his voice. Now, while I’m assuming no one was talking about this movie when they made such a statement. I guess if he did want the role, then there was probably not a chance in hell that he was going to do anything but that voice for Elefun. What confuses me about this, howbeit, is that regardless– Elefun is Japanese.

Yet, this doesn't imply that the movie is a total pan in this area. It does seem by the looks of it that they tried as best they could, and they did have a clear vision on what was intended. Unfortunately, it still falls short nonetheless. What they wanted the movie to come out like and be shown, is very much not how it ended up. I mean, the movie went through numerous directors before finally ended up in the hands of David Bowers. Saying that his intention with joining the film was simply to try his best to see it to the end and finish it. Obviously, with a mentality like that, you can’t expect for it to do an impressive job at achieving its goals, especially in the characterization department.

Stone turning down the blue core at the beginning of the movie, only to desperately want it midway through, is also just one of the ways this movie can’t seem to get it right. In addition, there are minor details, like how the first question Toby gets in his pop quiz is as follows:

These broader theories may be formulated using principles such as parsimony (e.g., “Occam’s Razor”). They are then repeatedly tested by analyzing how the collected evidence (facts) compares to the theory?

When a theory survives a sufficiently large number of empirical observations, it then becomes a scientific generalization that can be taken as fully verified?

They should’ve honestly just used Lorem Ipsum.

We could take this even further, and question why he even did a physics quiz after a history lesson in the first place! Is Mustachio Astro’s teacher for all subjects???? We don’t know for sure the location for where Metro City is to figure out how perhaps their school system works. It’s only stated as being a “floating [city] in the sky” and that it used to be Mount Sofia. Other (minor) fun facts include: “The Surface” being the nickname given to Earth. And Metro City also getting nicknamed, “The Jewel In The Crown” (what crown in particular, remains unsolved).

There are other ways anyhow that this movie is bad. Quite possibly the biggest reason among fans (myself included) is the painfully bad writing. Yet, there are some gems here and there, it mostly comes down to it seeming a bit… off.

Take the RRF for example, a rag-tag team of robots who “supposedly” are fighting for robot liberation, but don’t seem to follow through? I understand that this is a kid’s movie, yes. But if you’re going to go through the effort of having them call everyone around them a comrade. Put up Trotsky AND Lenin posters in their hideout (whether this means the RRF are tankies is a discussion for another time). Then, at the very least, don’t write them off as law-abiding robots. That’s just leftism 101, dude. No genuine leftist gives a shit about whether they’ve “gotten permission” beforehand or kept keenly aware of the legality aspect in regard to acting against something.

We also can’t forget about the role Stone plays in the film. His main motivation seems to be wanting to wage war against the surface, which is fine enough, I suppose. But the issue here is that because he is so uninteresting and honestly a giant laughingstock, it’s hard to take the shit he’s doing seriously. Although, I think we must find what he’s doing to be legit because there’s a teachable moment at play here.

Many have theorized that this movie has undertones of anti-government and anti-capitalist sentiments– but as a leftist, I can’t really say I agree. Because this movie could very well make true leftist-aligning arguments if it wanted to. Particularly, that the State, and all the businesses that rule the world and corrupt the State, are (for the most part) wholly responsible for the disenfranchisement of its people. I mean, they went as far as to say at the beginning of the movie that the people of Metro City are, in fact, wealthy, and basically look down at the poor (potentially working class) people on the surface. But why could they never commit? Why are all that I and others left with is just that Stone is a bumbling fool?

Then, of course, we have the ending. An alien invasion that quite honestly didn’t need to happen. Especially when you consider that this movie never got a sequel. I guess you could potentially argue they wanted something impactful to leave with, but they already had all the characters go through a heart-to-heart moment with each other. If the power of love isn’t impactful enough to end a movie on, then consider me a loveless prick.

“But Sage!!” You might argue. “This is just a kids film, it doesn’t need to be serious! Why are you taking it so seriously???” And you’re right, it doesn’t. But non-seriousness isn’t a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, so your movie can get a good rating, it still has to be good. Because seriousness ≠ good writing. You can have movies that are written phenomenally and are a total blast to watch, but maybe are devoid of any thought-provoking meaning. Or, you could have a movie with writing so bad it’s good. This movie, withal, is just stuck in the middle. It wants to be better, It tries to be better at many points. But ultimately, it succumbs to what I believe to be its biggest flaw, and what summarizes pretty much everything mentioned: a lack of care.

Where It Redeems Itself

Originally, if you had asked me when I was around 12-13 if this next point I’m about to make was good or not, I’d assume my answer would’ve been that it’s not good. But honestly, this (in my opinion) is how the 09 movie has surprisingly aged well in my eyes. I’m talking about the romance (or lack thereof) in this film. Personally, I don’t like seeing romance in any Astro Boy series or movies ever. It just makes me a bit uncomfortable when you remember that in no rendition is Astro ever at least 16. This is not a suggestion that kids don’t go through crushes, or that perhaps I’m being a prude. But I just feel like it’s not something I want to see canonically. You can save the romance for your fanfics (hopefully, assuming they’re post canon) or theorize who they might end up with if Astro Boy got the All Grown Up treatment (If you don’t know what that show is… I am way too old).

Like I mentioned, this isn’t a stance I held at the time when I originally saw (and rewatched a couple of times) the movie when I was younger. It is, anyhow, a considerable breath of fresh air. It’s pretty progressive on this movie’s part to not have Astro and Cora get together at some point. Yes, they do hang out together, and some may argue that that alone means the movie was at least trying to hint at them being romantically involved. But, might I remind you that this is a children’s CGI animated “indie” film from 2009? Budding romance between A male protagonist and anyone vaguely female with a pulse was pretty much the standard, and they would never shy away from it, either. Not necessarily in the same time frame, but I’m reminded of my watch-through of Mr. Peabody & Sherman, where it built up the big kiss at the end from the start– and I anticipated it! And felt vindicated when it happened! In the 09 movie, per contra, no such scene occurs, with only Astro and Cora having a friendly talk with one another. I honestly find that to be much more entertaining than any romance they could’ve possibly forced.

Another (completely self-centered) reason I enjoy this movie, has got to be one of the “strangest” things ever, and that’s its use of blobitecture. Blobitecture, for the unaware, is a style of architecture that emphasizes roundness and organic forms. There’s no sharp or straight edges to be found there. And Metro City (as shown in the film) is just oozing with blobitecture everywhere. I think what I like about it so much, is how it gives the city a clearly futuristic and sci-fi appeal. Which would explain why blobitecture being a staple of the Y2K aesthetic is a no-brainer. Speaking of Y2K, can we talk about the color palette??? So many blues and lilacs, I could die (not literally, thank god). And its use of holograms, particularly when Tenma calls Elefun, is so, so Y2K. It’s probably one of the funnest things about this movie.

The character designs, however… well… they suck. Big time.

It’s such a let-down, honestly. Like if you have the means to make say, Tenma’s house, look cool as fuck with it’s mid-century inspired furniture, but can’t be bothered to actually make TENMA look good– what’s the point???? Like, why does Tenma have a wonderful couch that I so desperately want, but his eyes look like he does Coke in his spare time to cope with the bullshit President Stone puts him through?

This doesn’t take away nevertheless from the fact that I still like the backgrounds and the overall aesthetic, especially during the introduction video we see in the beginning that very much gave me 70s meets The Jetsons. It just means that their decision to make the characters look as shitty as they did, that much more confusing, and downright disappointing.

It’s Obviously Not The Crème De La Crème of Astro Boy Renditions… And That’s Okay

I’m sure just by reading that headline, some of you are already thinking to yourselves, “But just how so?“ Or “why?” And I’m here to explain.

For starters, there’s a plethora of additions and tweaks this movie has done regarding the “typical” Astro Boy plot-line. This bills the movie as more of a standalone project than something meant to be included in the “Astro Boy Canon” (or the “ABCU” (Astro Boy Cinematic Universe), if you will). Examples of this include an OC count that certainly rivals the amount of OCs I had in my fan fiction series, Vivid Insomnia. And, the (obviously) different plot.

But I hear you: “If it bears the Astro Boy name, then it must be considered a part of the universe!” The issue with this take, is that it implies there’s only (1) way to re-tell a story, allowing no depictions to take the story in a (completely, or only minor) different direction. Now, whether the changes they make are good or not, is a separate discussion I already went through earlier. Even if I (and many others) think the changes made were bad, that doesn’t mean they weren’t allowed to make them. So if they’re allowed to make changes, we as fans can, similarly, interpret those changes as meaning what we’re watching is something of a freestanding creation. No person who worked on the film has ever come forward and admitted that the movie is canon, so it’s fair game to assume it’s not.

Another reason that sets it apart, are the little things it includes that I, personally, find to scratch itches I’ve been begging to have scratched for ages. Particularly, Tenma taking Astro back and owning up to his faults. Both as a father and regarding his initial rejection of Astro, under the basis that they were simply a “replacement” of Toby, instead of their own entity that he was entitled to support and care for. So many renderings portray Tenma as a deadbeat, or as a villain, but this one takes the cake for having the best (morally speaking) Tenma you can find. Sure, maybe he shouldn’t have rejected Astro in the first place, or maybe he should’ve quit his boot licking ways and made a bigger effort to be part of Toby’s life. But, so long as he tries now to right his wrongs and do better, then all is good in my book.

Secondly, Elefun telling Astro that none of their circumstances are their fault or of their volition. When I tell you I immediately jumped for joy upon him telling Astro this, I’m not joking. Rendition after rendition, we see Astro go through the most heinous of things, and no one seems to ever think to console them. I want Astro to know that what’s happened is out of their control. That there was nothing they could do to make Tenma be a better father, to make Stone get off their ass for good, to have perhaps saved Toby’s life. Radical acceptance.

Of course, still, detractors of all kinds will probably say that such things make the movie boring! Tenma being the complex villain that consistently treats Astro like shit with no recourse (like in the 03 series). And, Elefun taking Astro under his wing and subjecting them to a life-long mission of being the neoliberal middle man to the high stakes clashing between humans and robots is what we’re after– nothing less! And I hear you, but even if it may be “boring,” that doesn’t mean it’s not well-needed. No matter what you think, Astro deserves to be treated well and told the truth about their circumstances. This, again, goes back to what I said earlier about this movie being a separate thing. If we are to believe and accept that it is, in fact, a standalone project, then there’s nothing standing in their way of attempting to right the wrongs that are consistent throughout all prior versions. They have all the right to make Tenma and Elefun out to be better at handling the tough emotional situations they go through. Also, Astro is 13.

Conclusion

Again, this was not me trying to sway you one way or another. The 2009 movie is still obviously polarizing, and I don’t think it’ll ever stop being that way any time soon. If I did another round of surveying, I wouldn’t expect any other statistic than one that says that 3 out of 5 Astro Boy fans hate the 2009 movie. And rightfully so! It’s got characters that are basically a shell of either who they are in past adaptations, or of the stereotypes they’re meant to emulate, and poor writing galore. But I think the way in which it subverted the “forced hetero romance” stereotype that plagues many movies of this caliber is well appreciated. And we cannot forget the background and set design, oozing with blobitecture inspiration; as well as what gave us Tenma’s amazing couch. If I had to rate this movie, Anthony Fantano style, I would say it’s a light to decent 6 out of 10. The things that make this movie different (justifying the score) are arguably why most (myself included) choose to see this as a standalone thing. It may not be the behemoth that is the 2003 series, but it doesn’t have to be. It has all the charm and good it needs to, at the very least, convince people to watch it just once.

#astro boy #tetsuwan atomu #astro boy 2009 #tezuka #movie review #movie opinion

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dirtyoatmeall · 4 years

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Bokuto’s Cool Sister (Tsukishima Kei x Reader)

A/N: Here is an actual fic! I have a list of shit to write I’m slowly working through, next will either be more head canons or a one shot. I’m re-watching AOT rn to get caught up with the new season so sorry about being absent! Luv u guys a lot

Pairing: Tsukishima x Bokuto sibling reader (No pronouns or gendered language used toward reader, not referred to as sister just used for title purposes), Bokuto x Akaashi, Kenma x Kuroo

Word Count: 2k! (longest ever!)

Warnings: Mentions of underage drinking (everyone at least 20), mentions of secs

~~~

You groaned as you neared the door to your apartment, seeing that the door was not cracked open a little for you to nudge open like you had asked your brother to do as you pulled into the complex. You remember him vaguely mentioning friends coming over, and you can hear music faintly coming from the apartment, but he always checks his phone, especially when you're coming from the store.

You try to balance the milk on your knee to open the door, and just as you think you have it, the door doesn’t budge. You close your eyes and take a deep breath. Your brother never locks the doors, why would he now? His car is in the parking lot and you can hear noise inside, so he’s home. Instead of putting groceries on the ground and fishing your keys out of your purse like a normal person, you make the decision to kick the door, not very hard, but hard enough to be heard in the apartment.

“Kou! Why is the door locked? Will you come open it for me, I have groceries!” You can hear your brother tumbling towards the door, apologies flying out of his mouth a mile a minute. The door swings open, revealing your brother, grimace on his face. “Sorry! I totally forgot you were at the store, I think ‘Kaashi might’ve locked it.” You sighed, not being able to stay mad at your brother’s friend.

You walk in, jerking your head in the general direction of the parking lot, “I have some more in my car, can you go grab it?” He nods, grabbing his key ring and jogging out. Both of you had the spare key to each other’s cars, which turned out to be more convenient then you originally thought.

You move toward the kitchen, yelling out a greeting to your brother’s boyfriend. “Akaashi! Next time you come over to fuck my brother let me know before so I can have my keys out, or just leave the door unlocked and go in his room!” You had a joking, yet scolding tone of voice, imagining his flustered state at your words. What you did not expect, was a hyena-like laugh to come from the direction of the living room. You were almost positive your brother said Akaashi was here.

You place the groceries on the counter and make your way to the living room, freezing in the doorway. Akaashi was there, but so were 3 other people. Akaashi was red, shaking his head that was resting in his palms. There was someone playing on a gaming console on the couch who had their legs thrown over the lap of the laughing one, and one on the other couch, tall and blonde, who looked weirdly familiar, who had a faint smirk on their face. You grimace, you didn’t realize your brother had actual friends over, he usually just meant Akaashi or the occasionally Hinata. “Oops sorry ‘Kaashi, didn't know Kou was having other people over.”

He lifted his head, face still slightly flushed and smiled. “It’s fine (Y/N)-san, do you need help with the groceries?” You shook your head, pointing behind you in the direction of the kitchen, where you could hear your brother rummaging around. “Nah, I made Koutaro get the rest. If you guys are staying for dinner let me know and I’ll make something instead of making him go to the food truck for me. By the way, who are the rest of you? I literally thought Kou was lying about having friends.”

The blonde one snorted, you narrowed your eyes slightly, he looked so familiar, you just couldn’t quite place it. The one playing the console seemed familiar too, you think you might’ve seen him on Twitter. The only one you didn’t recognize was the first to speak. “I’m Kuroo Tetsuro, we all played volleyball together in high school, I’m surprised he hasn’t talked about us before.”

You nod in understanding, “Oh so that’s where. I’m sure he has, I just probably wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I mean you guys seem kinda familiar, more the other two than you, were you like benched a lot?” The quiet one next to him looks up to see his reaction and snorts at the disbelief on Kuroo’s face. “Yeah, Kuro wasn’t very good.” The half blonde says, giggling softly as Kuroo gasps and yells at him. “Kenma!” He turns to you, “I was the captain and a very good player actually.” You laugh as Kenma behind him makes a face that says ‘That’s what you think.’ Before Kuroo could whine some more, Akaashi speaks.

“Kenma-san is a YouTuber, which is probably where you’ve seen him. He and Kuroo-san played for Nekoma, I’m surprised you didn’t remember them from that, you remembered Lev-san.” Kenma actually laughs at that, and Kuroo is pouting as Akaashi continues, a cheeky smile on his face that told you he purposefully sprinkled that last little tidbit in.

“Tsukishima-san, aren’t you a museum-studies major?” The blonde on the loveseat across from the other three nods, and you snap your fingers, finally realizing where you know him from. “Oh, that makes sense! I think we’ve had a class or two together. I’m an archaeology major.” Tsukishima’s eyebrows raise in surprise, but before he could speak, your brother finally comes in from the kitchen.

“(Y/NNNNN), I put everything away, we were going to go to Onigiri Miya tonight, wanna come?” You nod and swat at his had when he ruffles your hair before plopping down to his boyfriend. You go to leave your brother and his friends, taking one last glance at Tsukishima, who seemed to have the same idea, he averted his eyes the moment yours met, and you smirked to yourself on the way to the kitchen to re-put away the groceries. You loved your brother, but he definitely did not know where to put things, your thought validified as you pull the eggs from the pantry, switching it with the instant ramen packets in the fridge. Good thing he was a great volleyball player. ` Later that night, you join the boys for dinner at Onigiri Miya. You take two separate cars, you driving your brother and Akaashi and Kuroo driving Kenma and Tsukishima. Kuroo made a joke about racing there, which you took as a personal challenge, much to the dismay of Akaashi. You would’ve won too, but you had to pull over to kick Koutaro in the backseat for playing Nickelback. He buys your food as an apology, and Kuroo’s food because he won (you venomed him later for your share of food, which he promptly venomed back to you with angry faces in the description.). The 6 of you sat in a corner booth, you were sandwiched between Akaashi and Tsukkishima with Kuroo between your brother and Kenma on the other side.

The table was loud with jokes, laughing, and yelling as everyone ate their meals. You snuck drinks of ‘Akaashi’s’ margarita when the waitress wasn’t looking (You were 20 and Akaashi submits to peer pressure from you easily). “(Y/N), are you not 21 yet?” Kuroo asked as he watched you nudge the drink toward Akaashi as the waitress talked to the other table. You turned to Kuroo, cheeks just barely flushed. “Hm? Oh no I’m not, I’m two years younger than you guys, I turn 21 in a few months.”

Kuroo hummed in understanding and got a suspiciously mischievous look on his face. “Oh, you’re the same age as Tsukkishima, and you guys have similar majors, how interesting” Your eyebrows furrow and you snort. “So do over a thousand other people Kuroo, its not a super niche subject.” You turn to Tsukkishima and continue, “Hm I didn’t realize we were in the same year, I thought you were older, must be your grumpy grandpa like disposition.” Akaashi explained what disposition meant to your brother and Kuroo snickered before he was shut down by Kenma, who has been doing an excellent job of roasting Kuroo at every chance he gets. “You laugh like everyone doesn’t call you old man behind your back.”

You laughed for the umpth time that night, Tsukishima watching you, he could really see the sibling resemblance when you laughed. You throw your head back and laugh loudly, from your gut much like your brother. Tsukishima looks away from you, catching Kuroos eye in the process, the blonde rolls his eyes at the smirk on Kuroos face. Out of the 5 of them, he was the only one not in a relationship and Kuroo has been trying to set him up since Bokuto and Akaashi finally got together at Akaashi’s graduation.

Tsukishima looks at you again, watching you take a sip of the margarita, and subsequently watches it almost come out of your nose as you laugh at something Akaashi said to Bokuto, clutching the former's shoulder, hand over your nose. There was no doubt that you were pretty, and you did have similar interests. His thoughts were interrupted by you turning to him, knee-knocking against his thigh. “Have you taken Anth 267?” He nods “I took it last quarter.” He replies and watches you sigh in relief. “Oh thank god, I’m having trouble meeting her insane essay expectations. I usually have ‘Kaashi read through mine but would it be ok if I sent them to you? Or at least bounced topics off you?” When he agrees you smile, unlocking your phone and sliding it towards him, a new contact open. “Oh great, here, why don’t you put your number in?” As he fills it out, his eyes involuntarily flit to the text message appearing at the top of your screen. From: That Sunny Bitch

Ew you think Tsukki’s hot? He’s a good volleyball player but he was a meanie in high school 😝

He held back the urge to smirk. That must be Hinata based on the name. He quickly finished the contact and gave your phone back before giving his to you, and you quickly typed in your contact info, as well as snapping a quick contact photo. It was super close to your face with your tongue out, a good tell of your personality. You give his phone back and the two of you talk more about school and classes before everyone gets ready to leave.

Your brother stands up first, and you take advantage of his large frame and chug the rest of the margarita down, smiling big at Akaashi who chastises you about drinking it so fast. You all wave to Osamu as you leave, and before Tsukishima can get to Kuroo’s car, he turns to the group, smirking. “I've got to run Kenma by our apartment to grab his charger, we’ll meet you guys.” You nod, handing your keys to Akaashi and turn to Tsukishima. “You can sit in the back with me Tsukishima!” Though you might be promoted to passenger if Bokuto makes bad music choices again.” You glare at your brother as you finish the sentence, and he whines about how his taste ‘isn’t that bad!’

The car ride back to your apartment is short, and you spend it chatting with Tsukki, as you’re now allowed to call him, and you spend the rest of the night with the boys, playing games and watching movies until early morning. Kuroo and Kenma leave first, and Kenma made your night when he looked you in the eye and said goodbye. Tsukki left about an hour later, his roommate picked him up. Akaashi ended up staying over, and you were glad your bedroom was on the other side of the apartment from your brother’s. You fell into bed content with the day, happy you were able to meet your brother’s friends.

You awoke mid-day, and you browsed your notifications before dropping your phone on your bed when you read one text message, heat spreading over your cheeks. You definitely do not remember changing his contact name.

From: Hot classmate Tsukki

Hey, how about we go over your essay over some coffee tonight?

#my writing #haikyuu!!#haikyuu #haikyu #haikyuu x you #haikyuu tsukishima #tsukishima kei #tsukishima x y/n #tsukishima x reader #tsukishima kei x reader #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu x reader #tsukishima x you #tsukishima kei x you

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wetwellie · 4 years

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It’s christmas season now so let me give you an au to chew over: Eric Bittle is Santa.

Like think about it: Eric Bittle: Goody Bag King. He would run around year after year tirelessly making sure that everyone has at least one gift. (well, the ones that are deserving. But Bitty isn’t super judgemental, so there’s not a lot of people on his naughty list) He also encourages people to leave whatever baked good out for him. Most people do the traditional milk and cookies. Bitty just wants to see more people baking, it’s one of his favorite things to do in his little spare time. There’s also no elves. Instead there is...an entire workforce of semi-living toys? That doesn’t sound much better in terms of labor, but I swear Bitty never overworks them. Senor bun is in charge. Bitty adores his job so much, which is why it broke his heart a couple decades ago when he noticed an extreme change in christmas spirit. It’s not that people are becoming ungrateful, it’s that he doesn’t really know how christmas is celebrated now a days. The last time he actually observed christmas firsthand was 1913. It definitely has changed. People don’t sing as many carols, and they ask for increasingly complicated gifts. What is wrong with a stuffed animal? What are oreos and why aren’t people baking anymore? So Bitty decides to do what he always does when he feels a disconnect with the world, he joins it for a couple years (”a couple years” being something like, 30 or so years). Suzanne Bittle and her Husband from Madison, Georgia believe that they are adopting a 12 year old boy. And Bitty absolutely adores them.

He spends the next 6 years working hard from his new home, and relays the information to Senor Bun whenever he can. He absolutely loves Georgia with its heat and it’s peaches and its rustic way of life. It’s definitely a big change from...well...the north pole. It actually gives him a bit too much of a culture shock at first. He practically begs his parents to let him do SOMETHING with ice. Bitty takes to skating like he took to baking and toy making: like a motherfucking champ. Along the way, he learns a lot of things about Christmas. For many, it’s lost the heavily religious undertones in exchange for images of himself...or what everyone down south thinks he looks like. Jolly? yes. Wears lots of red? Yes. Rosy cheeks? Yes. Full laugh? yes. Enjoys Coke? Eh sure why not. Large old man with a big ass beard? uh... no. never. He looks more like those elf depictions than anything else. Some of the traditions he’ll miss. There’s a lot less horse-drawn sleds and a lot more, “tie an inflatible inner tube to the back of a 4 wheel drive and drag someone behind it in the mud/snow”. And there’s a lot more collectible ornaments and less fruitcake. There’s hallmark movies that tug at Bitty’s desire to someday find some sort of love for himself, even though that’s impossible. And perhaps his favorite thing that has changed with this century of Christmas: Mariah Carey

Holy moly. After hearing that song Bitty made sure to look at Mariah’s biggest desire for that year and get Senor Bun on that stat. She deserve’s the very best. Michael Buble is definitely strong in his heart too. Bitty wishes that he could send an endorsement to those folks. “Santa’s favorite music” it would say. If he slipped a note in Beyonce’s present one year saying “Christmas Album maybe??? :DD”, she kept it to herself. But a boy can dream. So the years pass and he get’s this “live like a human” thing more or less in the bag. Until he is trapped in a closet by a couple of assholes on the football team. Bitty has to spend the night in there, no one able to hear him. What’s worse is that he knows where everyone is, and what they are doing. The football douches are currently sitting in the parking lot of a wal mart drinking shitty beer and laughing about how they hope Bitty doesn’t ever get found.

He sees his dad telling Suzanne not to worry, because the team called him to tell him they were gonna bond with Bitty tonight. Suzanne is so thrilled that Bitty’s “finally getting some friends at school”. And Bitty curls in closer to himself and wonders what will break her heart more: seeing Bitty like this or knowing that he still hasn’t found his place. Probably both, he thinks. With no one around him, he decides the best thing he can do is rest. He plants thoughts of sugar plums and pecans and jam into the minds of those he loves. He’s saved by a janitor named Rudy. Bitty knows his full name is Rudolph, but he refuses to acknowledge this. Not at a time like this, and probably not ever. And his parents, of course, move him to a new school. That was that, he was supposed to start new and “put the past behind him”. It’s not that easy, though. In all his years, he has never felt more helpless. Bitty can’t understand how there are people in the world like that, but now he can’t stop seeing them in the eyes of far too many people.

He can’t bring himself to be so exceptionally cheerful after that, so he sort of switches to autopilot for a while. While he seems fine on the outside, nothing is getting to him. He has basically shut down. The toys that he chooses to make are a lot less personal, he doesn’t bother checking the naughty and nice list. It doesn’t change the first time, or even the second time usually. So what does it matter? The gifts will get to where they go. And during the following christmas, he doesn’t even bother to eat the cookies left out for him. He just chucks the presents with sub-par wrapping under the tree and moves on to the 300 millionth house that night. When he gets to the homes of the football team, however, he might have buried their entire tree in coal and set their alarms to blast nickelback. Bitty can have spite. It’s Christmas morning and people are...confused. Not ungrateful, just confused and worried. Did everyone truly ask for a deck of playing cards for christmas? Or a stuffed rabbit? Or a tiny polar bear toy with a candy cane striped sweater? Because that’s really it as far as gifts go. It lacked any type of personal touch. Children might have cried. Bitty feels like a failure and is refusing to get himself out of bed. “Don’t you want to open the presents under the tree?”, Suzanne asks. “I don’t really feel like I deserve presents this year.” “Eric Richard Bittle, you are the boy that deserves the most in the whole world” Bitty doesn’t respond to her, and buries himself deeper into his blankets. He hopes that he can just sleep until the next year.

#omgcp #check please #au #eric bittle #this is the crackiest thing I've ever written #wipitgood #oh god i forgot about this one #Bitty knows all when he comes to samwell #but he keeps stuff to himself learns to find his holiday cheer by coming into his own

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happymetalgirl · 4 years

Text

2019

Despite all the hubbub about year-end wrap-ups, and decade-end wrap-ups this year, it feels to me like as soon as the year is over and the next one starts people immediately stop caring about all the top tens and bottom tens.

I got really busy over this past December and, along with missing out on reviewing several albums I wanted to review, I totally missed writing the extensive year-end lists I had planned. Last year I had listed over 50 of my favorite albums and nearly 100 of my favorite songs, and I wanted to do lists this year that would follow 2018′s lists respectably. Unfortunately, time got the better of me, and it still has the better of me, but I feel like I still should at least offer some kind of closure on last year.

It’s not going to be nearly 150 entries, but I do want to very briefly give an abbreviated list of my favorite songs, my favorite metal albums, my favorite non-metal albums, my least favorite albums of 2019. I’ll be keeping the lists pretty short, but I’ll go numerically still, starting with the bad news first.

The Bottom 10 Albums of 2019:

Maybe it’s my being calloused to what’s awful, or just doing a better job of avoiding it, but I feel like I wasn’t as angry at my bottom ten this year (2019) as I was at the two that preceded it, and perhaps it’s because I feel like I got pretty much what I was expecting with most of what I heard here; not as many of these were tremendous letdowns like Bullet for My Valentine with Gravity or just horrendous beyond comprehension like Black Vale Brides’ Vale. But just because I expected the shit didn’t mean it necessarily went down any easier when I had to ingest it this year.

Like the two years before 2019 when I did worst-of lists, a lot of the worst of the genre came from obviously contrived mainstream playlist/radio bait projects from bands to which it comes as no surprise. This year didn’t include as much shitty political commentary (being that I could probably fill this list with NSBM if I actively sought that shit out) or nostalgic cash grabs as the past two years, but the staleness of the long-tired formulas by which these radio-aspiring bands adhere to in their pursuits of mainstream crossover (or maintenance) only grows more frustrating the older they get. And the amount of surrender by so many bands to Imagine Dragons’ way of dominating the rock charts has been similarly frustrating. Often cited as the new Nickelback, we now kind of look back on Nickelback with a little bit of rose-tinted hindsight with the realization that it was mostly their omnipresence that irritated us all, and the case is the same for Imagine Dragons, but I don’t remember quite as many bands trying to copy the very unoriginal Nickelback and replicate “Photograph” or “Rockstar”. But I have heard so many acts churn out knock-offs of “Radioactive”, and “Believer”, and “Whatever It Takes” in obvious attempts to get themselves into that band’s royal court on the rock charts. There was of course plenty of unimaginative atmospheric blackgaze and post-metal to be found, but even the worst of that was just ineffective and boring at worst and not so much torture upon the eardrums like the albums to follow are.

10. Bad Wolves - N.A.T.I.O.N.

We didn’t get a Five Finger Death Punch album this year, so Bad Wolves came to the rescue to fill that void in 2019, despite also releasing an album in 2018. Though I’ve seen already that FFDP are slated for a release in 2020, so, great... While I would say that N.A.T.I.O.N.’s few high points made it a slightly better project overall than the band’s debut, those highlights were not nearly enough to outweigh the bafflingly poorly arranged variety pack of trashy alt rock ballads and formulaic alt metal from ten years ago that made up the majority of this album. As erratic as its flow was, everything on this album was so predictable once you got a ten-second taste of any given song, a few too many of which reeked heavily of Nickelback (and I know I just got done saying not that many bands really copied them, but that’s how obsolete and dated this album sounds at times). It’s obvious trying to market to FFDP’s demographic and co-occupy that giant, lucrative SiriusXM niche with them, and I’m just not thrilled to have basically a clone of FFDP walking around, taking up space in the metal ecosystem to keep an eye on.

9. Municipal Waste - The Last Rager

It might seem mean to put an EP down here, but my god this was terrible. If it had gone on longer it would undoubtedly quickly make its way to the top (well, bottom) of this list. I feel like my negative review of Slime and Punishment and this EP could at face value be miscontrued as me just being a sourpuss and a way too self-serious critic or just having it out for Municipal Waste, but I love thrash, I love totally not serious music, and I wish there was more high-profile fresh thrash being released these days. I wish one of the few notable thrash releases I heard in 2019 wasn’t bottom-ten quality. But that is just where Municipal Waste are right now, lazy, run-of-the-mill party thrash that is so deficient in that real vibrant party energy that this style of music needs to work. Yeah, I get that it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, but it’s so clearly recycled that it’s not even fun, the one thing it’s supposed to be. It’s like the shit near the end of the human centipede.

8. King 810 - Suicide King

I really wasn’t expecting much from this album, and that’s pretty much what I got, with the added bonus of a weirdly amateurishly experimental flair to King 810′s usual street-cred chest-puffing brand of retro rap/nu metal. I imagine fans of the band enjoyed the added theatrics and the usual chug-backed struggle bars, but I found the whole thing to be just kind of ham-fisted and kooky. It wasn’t one of the more infuriating releases I heard all year, but I sure as hell won’t be eagerly returning to it.

7. Attila - Villain

This was another musically recycled album from a band that usually makes their appeal through fun, nasty bangers. While the music on the album was, sure, as derivative as Attila’s deathcore usually is, the primary issue with Villain was the soured attitude of the band’s usually charismatic frontman. Fronz went from being the life of the party (who, while oozing with fratboy energy that you really wouldn’t want to be around anywhere else except a crowded rager, you could at least count on to be cool and keep the party going) to that loud, overzealous asshole trying to turn up when it’s totally not the time and then getting pissy when met with resistance, making it about him and making everyone around him uncomfortable and totally. Fronz sounds like a drunk asshole challenging you everyone to chug faster than him at best and like a pushy frat bro at worst, embodying the title of the album way to much in a manner where it’s justified that he be viewed that way, if not generous given the term’s romanticized connotations. Silver lining: I listened to “It Is What It Is” during a workout the other day, and that track is a qualified banger.

6. Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus

I think this is the only doom metal album to reach a bottom ten spot for me at any point this decade, and I’m not surprised that it’s Saint Vitus doing it. The band’s self-titled record was so derivative and wholly unoriginal, it was like listening to a cheap Sabbath cosplay. It was so long ago that I listened to it in full that I honestly don’t remember anything specific about the album, but I sure remember how I felt while listening to it every time.

5. Steel Panther - Heavy Metal Rules

Probably the biggest letdown on this list, I actually really enjoyed the band’s 2017 effort, Lower the Bar; I felt like they had got a better handle on their comedic parody of 80′s glam metal than any of the three albums before it, despite it not getting as much attention as their debut, for instance. This one, however, captured the cringe and cheese of the 80′s just fine, but with the jokes falling flat or way too repetitive, it just sounded like a less subtly raunchy version of an actual hair metal album. It’s another album that’s just supposed to be fun, but wasn’t nearly the experience it set out to be, the difference being that this one’s failure seems to have come more from a bout of writer’s block than anything else, which is understandable, five albums in, to a project that specifically makes fun of one dead subgenre of metal.

4. Arch Enemy - Covered in Blood

This has to be one of the shittiest covers albums I’ve ever heard, with Arch Enemy earning record points for monotony on this one. The whole thing sounds like the band just tossed a hefty album’s worth into an Arch Enemy processor that just stripped away all the songs’ character and replaced it with low-effort growls and robotic melodeath guitar playing. At its best, the band offers up passable by-the-books rehashes of songs up their melodeath alley; at its worst they butcher songs they have no business putting so little effort into covering. And it’s fucking 70 minutes long! So they get points for the agonizing length too, as well as incompetence points (I’ve yet to hear a death-growled cover of an Iron Maiden song go well), and, yeah, laziness points too. So many of these were recorded already years ago as bonus tracks to past albums, yet the band couldn’t spare the effort to make the new recordings like a little bit exciting.

3. Papa Roach - Who Do You Trust?

I’m not even mad about this one; I knew it was gonna suck, my curiosity just got the best of me and I was treated to some of the most laughably amateurish lyricism and poorly dated rap rock and alt metal instrumentation I’ve heard since the Prophets of Rage album two years ago. Jacoby Shaddix is doing features these days with hit or miss results, but what the hell is Papa Roach going to be this coming decade? More of this? I just don’t know whose socks this is supposed to knock off. Who’s getting hyped for more Papa Roach in the 2020′s? Probably me, just to see how poorly this band continues to try to keep up with the already sluggish pace of radio rock trends as the signature style they feel obligated to keep a tether to ages poorly.

2. Skillet - Victorious

Now this one I was kind of mad about, and I was expecting it to be pretty bad too. Skillet sold their soul to the whim of pop rock radio early last decade and haven’t been interesting to listen to for a long time now, to the point where it’s so obvious that raspy frontman John Cooper started his own side outlet for his more passionate urges while he lets the winds of pop rock and Christian rock playlist curation steer his main project for little more than a paycheck. The band’s reputable touring work ethic is such a stark contrast to their transparent artistic laziness and spinelessness. Again, despite the formulaic broad-reaching rock radio fodder, embarrassingly cheesy ballads, the token heavy tune at the end for the long-time fans, and even the obviously contrived Imagine Dragons mimicry being totally predicted, it was still so frustrating how blatantly soulless and capital-motivated this thing was to hear.

1. Mark Morton - Anesthetic

I didn’t really have any expectations for this album, but my god was it the year’s quietest disaster of a collaboration project. I didn’t hear anyone else talking about this thing after it came out nearly as much as I did leading up to it, and thank god. The album is supposedly a solo project from the Lamb of God axeman, a distilled showcase of his creative voice, but the whole thing feels like it was in the hands of label execs the whole time and he was just the guy who recorded guitar tracks to all these songs. For some reason, a lot of these “star-studded”, compilation-album-feeling projects in the metal world don’t seem to come out so well, maybe because no one involved is bringing their A-game to a feature in a compilation album, and that is exactly what Anesthetic suffers from, and it suffers fucking hard, not just from the utter lack of cohesion and poor flow from track to track, but from the phoned-in performances of the guests on the variety of generic, underwritten, surface-level songs. Like, again, this is a project under Mark Morton’s name, one that’s supposed to be guided primarily by his artistic vision; you’re telling me, Spinefarm Records, that the Lamb of God guitarist’s vision of a solo album is various flavors of neutered rock/metal radio bait? And he was satisfied with everyone’s contributions to this thing? The whole thing feels like he was just along for the ride and the project was never even in his hands, like Spinefarm had the idea/opportunity to do a various artists comp. album but thought putting under Morton’s name would be more marketable or something. Maybe that hypothesis is totally off, but regardless, this album is a colossal failure on the performance and writing fronts, the worst thing I voluntarily heard in 2019.

My 20 Favorite Songs of 2019:

Okay! With the trash taken to the curb, I feel like it might be time to address before getting into my favorite songs that they might not resemble my favorite albums quite as much as previous years, one, because this is very abbreviated, and, two, because some songs really lend themselves to enjoyment outside the context of their album more than other songs. One band here lands three entries and probably would have landed a whole lot more on a slightly longer list simply because of how great of music their album this year was for me to work out to. But I tried to diversify this list a bit so that it wasn’t just my favorite additions to my workout playlist. The top albums, I promise, are a far better representation of the year in metal for me. But anyway...

20. Periphery - “Blood Eagle”

Periphery have pretty much crystallized their brand of djent now and spent much of this year’s album doing a little adventurousness with it, but the first single, “Blood Eagle”, was one of the more traditional, crushing, explosion tracks from the album, harnessing hardcore groove, punishing accents, tasty guitar tones, and emphatic vocals of both the coarse and soaring variety. The song isn’t anything new for Periphery, but it’s a tremendous example of how potent they are at their heaviest and how easy it is for them to disprove their detractors who lampoon them for Spencer’s clean singing.

19. Panopticon - “The Crescendo of Dusk”

Despite being a one-off piece kind of off the beaten path for Panopticon for a two-track EP recorded during the previous double-albums’ sessions, this song is a fantastic example of bold, cathartic blackgaze whose soulful choral climax is built up to and pays off phenomenally, and that’s not the side of atmospheric black metal Panopticon usually wanders too. It’s a gorgeous piece that is worth it for every moment of its 12-minute runtime.

18. Car Bomb - “Scattered Sprites”

Switching quickly to a much shorter and more jolting song, it was hard to pick a prime highlight on Car Bomb’s new album, but ultimately I found myself loving the tasty, effects-laden, Meshuggah-esque 8-string mathcore groove of “Scattered Sprites” and the rest of the song’s fascinating tonal jumps from Deftones-ish atmosphere to crushing distorted madness. It certainly represents very well the constantly transforming beast that the band’s fourth album was.

17. Spirit Adrift - “Angel & Abyss”

On yet another album full of songs that would have packed a longer list, Spirit Adrift’s standout moment on Divided by Darkness was, for me, the melodically soulful trad-doom power ballad of sorts, “Angel & Abyss”. The melodic guitar leads being the obvious driver of the song’s feels, the clean and rhythm backing and the seething vocal delivery are perhaps the underappreciated foundation for the extra emotive NWOBHM-influenced guitar leads to shine through.

16. Inter Arma - “The Atavist's Meridian”

Definitely the standout track from Sulphur English, “The Atavist’s Meridian” is a menacing mammoth of a song, twelve-and-a-half minutes of brooding, towering sludge and haunting echoed throat-gurgling growls. Even when the wall of sound gets less jagged, the lour does not let up as the band maintain their fearsome, ominous presence in the song’s more atmospheric middle section and burst back so satisfyingly to round it out. There are bands out there that stick to this form of sludgy, death-y doom metal much more exclusively and religiously than Inter Arma who wouldn’t be able to top this.

15. Opeth - “Charlatan” My favorite cut from Opeth’s most ambitious album this decade, the band actually sound energized and adventurous on this song rather than just playing 70’s prog dress-up. The Meshuggah-esque bass groove on here is of course right up my alley, but the whole song is full of actual progressive dynamic that keeps you fixated on it and it’s intriguing emotive journey.

14. Sermon - “The Preacher”

Being the second-to-last song on the album, “The Preacher” kind of goes hand-in-hand with “The Rise of the Desiderata” as part of the album’s climactic ending, and it’s as meticulous and calculated as every track on the album with its small, this song being a standout for its particular dynamic between is louder and softer sections, making it such a thriller of a track that serves its role as part of the album’s climax beautifully.

13. Misery Index - “New Salem”

I’ve loved Rituals of Power all year and there have been several standout tracks for me, but “New Salem”, with its gruff refrain and relentless powerviolence aggression, has been my favorite from the album this year, one of them top workout playlist tracks for me this past year. It’s a pretty straightforward, fast, brutal track, but god is it effective.

12. Korn - “You’ll Never Find Me”

From the irksome guitar wails from Munky and the thick and tasty seven-string accents from Head, to Jonathan Davis’ volatile vocal delivery, “You’ll Never Find Me”, is one of the (several) prime examples of Korn’s committed return to their old-school sound on this album that really fucking stuck the landing and impressed. That build-up to that fucking intense headbanging crash at the bridge is exactly what made me such a fan of Korn’s early work in the first place, and this song is one of, again, several that shows why more than twenty years down the road while all their imitators have come and gone, Korn have been the dedicated champions of nu metal.

11. Cattle Decapitation - “Time’s Cruel Curtain”

It was honestly hard picking a favorite from Death Atlas, but I felt like this song captured the album’s lyrics’ overall dread and gloom in the musical sense pretty well through the dissonant clean guitars and Travis Ryan’s melodic snarling, which is particularly gut-wrenching on the chorus. And it’s as fierce, fast, and disgustingly brutal as we’ve come to expect of Cattle Decapitation now.

10. Motionless in White - “Thoughts & Prayers”

One of the many vibrant, tasty alternative metalcore bangers from the band’s fifth LP that dominated my workout playlist this year, “Thoughts and Prayers” is undoubtedly the most blasphemously in-your-face, Slipknot-influenced cut that highlights the highs of metalcore heaviness the band have no trouble reaching. The defiant attitude of the melodic chorus’ refusing of prayers for help, and really the whole song’s self-sufficient denial of religion over some of the band’s most potent metalcore to date, got me past a lot of physical thresholds this year.

9. Babymetal - “Arkadia”

Babymetal on their first two albums for me have been a project trying to iron out their vision of J-pop metal fusion in real time with the first and second albums’ primordial experiments producing the odd hit among many more misses, but this year’s Metal Galaxy was far more consistent, less stylistically clumsy, and packed full of hits. And if this list was longer, there wold be several bops and bangers from that record here. And while circumstance had just one song in my top 20 this year, what a tremendous entry it is. The album’s closing track, “Arkadia” starts out like a basic-ass Dragonforce cut, but the triumphant melodies quickly lead into higher and higher echelons of catharsis with the guitar vocalist Su-metal delivering the most powerfully soaring performance of the band’s career. It’s like a Dragonforce song that blows most (if not all) Dragonforce songs out of the water through its sheer unashamed passion. And while I know there are many in that camp who stiff-arm Babymetal and would wretch and rage-quit upon simply hearing Su-metal’s voice come in, I imagine they would have a hard time denying this song’s power if tricked into listening to a guy’s vocal cover over the instrumental.

8. Rammstein - “Puppe”

While Cattle Decapitation’s “With All Disrespect” is certainly a gut-punchingly grim outlook on humanity’s self-destruction, this standout cut from the German industrial metal juggernauts’ self-titled album is undoubtedly the most chilling cut on this list, and quite possibly Rammstein’s entire catalog. Till Lindemann’s poetic narration of the song’s dark story is expertly timed and laid out, but his gripping, manic, wholly unsettling vocal performance, coupled with the rest of the band’s brilliantly scored instrumental tracking, is what paralyzes you in terrified awe of the song.

7. Motionless in White - “Disguise”

Another alt-metal banger that dominated my workouts this year, the opening title track to the band’s fifth album isn’t really doing anything all that revolutionary or stylistically original, yet it’s somehow distinctly Motionless in White and it succeeds and makes it here simply because its execution of such a straightforward, yet often fucked-up style is so on-point.

6. Sermon - “The Rise of the Desiderata”

The grand finish to one of the subtlest, yet most magnificent progressive metal albums of the decade (spoiler I guess), “The Rise of the Desiderata”, even outside the context of the album building up to it, is a tremendous work of patient, well-measured progressive metal that exemplifies so magnificently what that band did with such a small musical arsenal on Birth of the Marvelous. The slow, brooding build-up to the absolutely orgasmic finish is hardly a mere waiting game, with not a dull second of the song, and the thematic climax of “rise! rise!” chants the song finishes on is, for me, the kind of representative of rewarding and immersive journey prog metal is all about!

5. Motionless in White - “Holding on to Smoke”

This one was the sleeper hit (in my eyes) for the band this year; in the album’s marginally weaker second half after the slew of bangers that occupied the first, “Holding on to Smoke” is the perseverant anthem among anthems that almost single-handedly lifts that second half. But outside the context of the album, “Holding on to Smoke” is not excessively heavy like “Thoughts & Prayers”, not even as catchy as the bouncy “<c/ode>”, and not even as sick in the breakdown department as “Disguise”, but it more than makes up for it in sheer performative passion and the compositional consistency that characterizes the whole album and strings the determination teeming throughout the song together into a hugely triumphant banger of a track.

4. Periphery - “Satellites”

Periphery really outdid themselves on the grand, ethereally cathartic closing track to their fourth (and best) self-titled album. Unlike the directly aggressive “Blood Eagle”, “Satellites” is a much longer, more multi-staged, moodier piece that gradually builds up from bright, somber reverb-driven ambiance into several tremendously heartfelt and instrumentally full-bodied crescendos, with the band timing their bursts of heavy energy perfectly. Spencer wildly outdoes himself in particular with his gloriously high-flying vocal performance during the song’s cathartic climax. It’s such a great ending to a great album, and such a great picture of Periphery’s constant perfecting of their sound.

3. As I Lay Dying - “My Own Grave”

It was released in 2018, but I included it here instead of that year’s list because I had the hunch at the time that it would be part of an As I Lay Dying album, and it was. But the first song the band released after their unlikely reunion was always going to be a contentious one given the situation with Tim Lambesis, and being that the song was released at a time when Tim would have still have almost two years in prison to go if he had done his full original sentence of six years, the importance of the band’s first release since that whole terrible situation transpired is hard to overstate. Everyone else in the band had to justify linking back up with a convicted felon and reentering the fold of music again, and “My Own Grave” is exactly the statement they needed to make. During his trial and after his early release, Tim had kept pretty quiet, but from the one somber video exposition he gave before entering prison, it was pretty clear he knew and finally accepted how badly he fucked up, and that awareness of his own terrible failure, succumbing to evil, and his understanding that he still has a lot to do to make things right is what makes this song so vitally confessional and the determination expressed so powerful. And this all comes through not just in the lyrics, but in the passionate performances from everyone on the song as well. It’s an emphatic triumph in classic metalcore fashion through (higher, more real-life stakes than usual for the genre) the worst of one’s own faults.

2. Demon Hunter - “Peace”

This one is kind of the enigma of this list, a more subtle, hard rock track than the rest of the heavy, boisterous bangers here, but what an excellent song it is from the mellower of the sister albums the band released in 2019. Ryan Clark’s smooth, baritone subtlety serves as a veneer of calmness in the face of collapse as he sings a tearful welcoming of the peace from the pain of a sin-ridden world that finally comes with death. There’s almost a suicidal angle to the song, but it might be more representative of one’s readiness to be taken into a divinely peaceful afterlife after a lifetime of struggle, which is pretty insightful from Ryan Clark and captures that feeling in a tangible way even for people with (ideally) many years ahead of them like me, I must say. Either way, it’s a much more sober pondering on one’s own mortality and the temporariness of everything around us than its upbeat rock tempo initially lets on, the kind of meditation that gives people hope and faith in a heavenly afterlife.

1. Rammstein - “Deutschland”

Simultaneously subtle and directly expressive, Rammstein’s lead single from their self-titled 2019 album may not have been as musically outrageous as its grand, ambitious video was, but the song itself sure stands on its own just fine as a tense, conflicted song of pleading heartbreak to a nation and its history, and who better in metal to write a threnody for a Germany caught in the middle of the rest of Europe’s refugee crisis and its own version of many nations’ recent fights against a resurgence of right-wing extremism than Till Lindemann. The tone of the song is so mournful and heartbroken, as though it’s a song about leaving a lover you still want to love, yet stern and firm in its principle.

5 Outside Albums of 2019:

I’ve made a point the past two years to highlight the music I enjoyed outside the metal sphere, usually keeping it to a few mini-reviews of five “outside” albums, and this year it was certainly hard to narrow down the immense amount of quality hip hop, indie rock, experimental rock, especially jazz (Jesus, there was so much good jazz this year), and even some respectable pop music I heard this year. The paragraphs are going to be shorter this time around, but I still wanted to show my appreciation for these albums.

Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

Formed by David Berman, the former frontman of Silver Jews (who helped pioneer the flavor of indie rock/alt country in the 90′s and early 2000′s that got me more into indie music) ten years after the termination of Silver Jews, his short-lived return from retirement from music through Purple Mountains’ sole eponymous album only became more tragic after Berman committed suicide less than a month after the record’s release. The subject matter was as confessional and depressive as anything from Silver Jews, my favorite song from the record immediately after its release, “Nights That Won’t Happen” (a song very clearly indicating Berman grappling with the guilt of his suicidal mindset), being an even more bleak song in the posthumous context. Upon learning that Berman had come back to music, formed this project, and made this record full of emotionally retching expositions of his mental state in an effort to pay down a crippling mass of debt (which I’m sure had a significant impact on his decision to end his own life), it makes the album all the more devastating and my feeling toward it much more complicated. Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar, Purple Mountains takes on a different light in the aftermath of its creator’s death so soon after its release, the songs on Purple Mountains pretty much as prophetic as those on Blackstar, though Berman’s foreseeing of having to take his death into his own hands as opposed to Bowie’s waiting for the inevitability of the progression of his cancer gives this album a much less celebratory, commemorative feeling than that of Blackstar, though listening back through it now with 20/20 hindsight really puts the similar element of inevitability into perspective too, and it makes it hard to really enjoy this album in a sense similar to how I enjoy most of my metal and most other music. Knowing that this album was secondarily a last ditch effort by Berman to lessen the burden of the tremendous anxiety caused by his poor financial state, and primarily a means of talking himself through his decision to end his life in the likely event that the album and its touring cycle didn’t make that burden bearable enough, it’s very hard to listen to and be thankful for this album that kind of indirectly killed its creator. The existential dread of crippling debt is no light weight, however, and the art Berman made and was proud of should not bear the brunt of the blame for what the procedures of a heartless and oppressive economic system at least catalyzed, if not caused. Purple Mountains is a hard album to listen to, but its tragic surroundings aside, it is a welcome return of one of indie music’s most brilliant and influential voices, even if just for a moment.

Denzel Curry - ZUU

On a much different note, Denzel Curry made a quick return to the studio after creatively upping his game yet again on his 2018 album, TA13OO. And while not as ambitiously conceptual or dense as TA13OO, ZUU was yet another banger-packed display of pure rapping prowess. It’s been stated that good form is just that, temporary, and a mere snapshot of an artist’s trajectory, and that it takes time and consistency to prove class. Well Curry is undoubtedly in very good form right now, and has been for the past five or six years and has been making the most of it, only getting better and better across his main projects and his consistently fire guest appearances. And sure it’s arguable that he’s just making the most of his hot streak by putting out as much as possible while he’s one fire, but it’s at the point where if this was a flash in the pan it would have been over by now, and Curry’s still going. The dude put out a megamix of spare verses already this year, and it’s killer! The man at this point, in my eyes, is class, and definitely one of hip hop’s most exceptional forces now that he’s finally getting his long-deserved acclaim. As far as ZUU goes, yeah it’s quick and more about tight bars and emphatic delivery than any grand concept, but to reduce assessment of this to as if it mere turn-up music would be improper, as Curry uses this album to jump at the opportunity given to him by the traction of TA13OO to elevate his hometown and pay tribute to his friends and family who have been with him throughout his journey, and shed light on the roughness of the reality of life for the people he cares about in Carol City, Florida. And he pays tribute to those who got him here with such passion and splendor that it’s tangible and invigorating even from far outside.

Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

I saw a fair amount of people (mostly outside her fanbase) complaining about Angel Olsen’s handling of her more instrumentally dense fourth LP, which I don’t get at all. Olsen had tread the ground of minimal indie folk thoroughly on her early work and she proved she could handle a bigger instrumental pallet on 2016′s My Woman, of which All Mirrors is a well-executed expansion on that bolsters Olsen’s emphatic sonic presence without suffocating her out of her own songs, which I never had any worries about with the raw vocal power she’s showcased convincingly before. And Olsen remains at her open, heartfelt best in terms of lyricism and songwriting on the album, no drop-off in emotional potency or sonic beauty, so I’m a little confused with some of the griping over this album. I love it and highly recommend it.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah - Ancestral Recall

It was hard to pick a from the several great jazz records this past year (so much great afro-percussion-driven stuff coming from the UK lately that has been scratching my itch like crazy), The Comet Is Coming had an LP and a similarly impressive follow-up EP both in 2019 that made thrilling use of electronics amid the energetic jazz madness and Matana Roberts had put out an intriguing spoken-word concept album tied together with some of the most eccentric avant-garde jazz instrumentation I heard all year. But I ultimately went with the dynamic and delicious Ancestral Recall from Christian Scott, whose impressively holistic weaving together of traditional jazz elements with hip hop and modern jazz atmosphere, despite not being as quite up my violent jazz alley as other records this year, I could not deny the magnificence and accomplishments of. The electronics are kept to a minimum and used only to highlight the work of the piano, horns, and percussion typically associated with the genre, but none of it feels at all unnatural or clashing, rather a cooperative interplay between old and new that elevates both and shows what they can achieve in harmony. And yes, there are plenty of boisterous trumpet performances from the main man to quench that thirst. But it’s an album about respect for the foundational work of the genres incorporated and expanding on it rather than demolishing and rebuilding it.

clipping. - There Existed an Addiction to Blood

My favorite non-metal album of the year, clipping. really took the campy genre of horrorcore to far more cinematic and tangible realms through their signature noisy/industrial approach. And There Existed and Addiction to Blood is a project where after hearing it, it left me with a sense of “well, duh”. Of course clipping. would absolutely nail an actually immersive and not totally laughable horrorcore album. The members’ experiences in cinema serve as a tremendous asset to this album as William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes produce an industrially enhanced horror score to soundtrack Daveed Diggs’ gripping rapped storytelling, which takes so many of the genres tropes and breathes fresh air into them to make them far more vital and consequential in this day and age. And the songs (many of which are serious bangers) are immersive, cinematic, and intense in a way that I could see a lot of metalheads enjoying. I could seriously go on about the chilling bursts of distortion on the twisted club turn-up track, “Club Down”, or the cold swagger of Diggs’ delivery on the industrially tense “All in Your Head”, or the suspense of the more instrumentally traditional house-hideout cut “Nothing Is Safe”, but I would be going on for paragraphs, and I said one. If there’s one album for people reading this section to check out, it’s this one.

My 30 Favorite Metal Albums of 2019:

Yeah, 30 is keeping it really short here; I feel like I could have included a couple dozen other very praiseworthy metal albums here, but this post is massive enough and I don’t have time for that. As far as patterns or trends go, metal’s respective subgenres largely continued to mind their own business as the divergent evolution that the genre has been undergoing since the passing of its peak of mainstream limelight has progressed. The metallic hardcore revival is still going strong with a lot of bands outside that scene taking notice and influence from these vibrant younger bands (Code Orange being the obvious prominent example) and their ancestors. I heard a lot more hardcore-influenced breakdowns and noisy industrial-ish guitar work this year than usual, and even though it graced that shitty aforementioned Bad Wolves album, the metallic hardcore song was a highlight and most of the hardcore influence I’ve heard outside that scene has been implemented well. The year also saw a lot of big, storied names in metal releasing high-profile projects and really coming through and exceeding most realistic expectations (with one quite notable exception), so a good portion of this top 30 is going to contain your basic bitch, Loudwire-type picks, but, you know, those acts delivered and earned their way here in my eyes. This whole thing has gotten pretty out of hand, and what was planned as a quick year’s recap is now a gargantuan mega-post, so I’m going to TRY to make these quick.

30. Full of Hell - Weeping Choir

It’s hard to complain about a pretty continuous sequel to one of the most addictive deathgrind albums in years (Trumpeting Ecstasy); I’m sure not griping about it. Weeping Choir may not have as high of peaks as its predecessor, but it’s a similarly compact, dizzying, and forward-thinking release that definitely earned similar respect.

29. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest

Thank god King Gizz released this, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bonafide thrash album in this top 30. Despite not really being a “thrash band” or even a “metal band”, King Gizzard’s adventurousness and versatility makes their adaptability to this style come as no real surprise. In fact the naturalness with which the band play shows that they have clearly always had a true reverence for the genre and have wanted to make this album for a long time. The album is as fuzzy as King Gizz usually is, taking on a very old-school vibe in tribute to the genre’s progenitors without being mere nostalgia. I doubt they’ll do it, but I can dream of more of this from the Gizz.

28. Knocked Loose - A Different Shade of Blue

Knocked Loose have quickly established themselves as one of the strongest forces in metallic hardcore these days, with each album improving significantly off the last, and A Different Shade of Blue being the latest in a string of stronger and stronger releases from them, embodying pure hardcore aggression with precision accuracy and efficiency.

27. Lord Mantis - Universal Death Church

Looking back through this band’s catalog (I hadn’t heard of them before this album), they’ve always taken a very sinister and esoteric approach to experimental black metal that makes them and Profound Lore a match made in heaven as a prime representation of the boundary-pushing ethos the label does well to curate, and Universal Death Church is a fine example of the band’s signature incredible capacity to make black metal nastier and more nightmarish than it already is.

26. Infant Annihilator - The Battle of Yaldabaoth

The Battle of Yaldabaoth is such a ridiculous album and such a treat for it, the unreal, gratuitous techdeath wankery so obscene, it’s impossible to take too seriously and not love for its absurdity. It’s a fun album and one that fast-forwards much of the increasingly fast and techy death metal straight to its next musical checkpoint.

25. Venom Prison - Samsara

A far more holistic death metal album than Infant Annihilator’s, Samsara is just teeming with performative power and calculated technicality. I had said at first that it wasn’t really much of a step up from Animus, but as I’ve listened to it more throughout the year, the band’s subtle maturation really began to show and the album grew on me more and more, so it’s definitely one of the year’s best death metal records.

24. Misery Index - Rituals of Power

Even more emphatic than Samsara was Misery Index’s reaching the pinnacle of their form of powerviolence on their best album to date, Rituals of Power, which suffers no loss of intensity in its incorporation of infectious (though still hardly melodic) hooks, and it puts them at the top of their league.

23. Demon Hunter - War

I had originally cited the more measured, hard-rock-driven partner album, Peace, as the better of the two records Demon Hunter had released this year, but over time, so many of the tracks on the intentionally heavier War that I thought might wane on me stayed strong and some of its other tracks grew on me. The album and its counterpart were such a refreshing pair of releases for the band that I hope revitalizes them going forward.

22. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

And we’ve got the most basic pick of the list so far here, post-Watershed Opeth. That term has annoyed, frustrated, and infuriated so many within the band’s fanbase who have, at this point, given up (either out of acceptance or intolerance) on hopes of the band’s death metal sound ever returning to the progressive music they make, and I myself have found the band’s lack of ambition beyond simply eschewing growls and metallic elements on the band’s past three albums to be a bit underwhelming with the clear 70′s-prog LARPing finding them punching pretty below their weight. Wow, that was an annoyingly long sentence too. But Opeth finally came through with an album that did more than just imitate the likes of their prog idols like King Crimson, Styx, Yes, and Pink Floyd. In Cauda Venenum is a theatrically big album that puts the band in the kind of creative context in which they’ve proven to succeed in and established themselves in their career in it as the death metal pillar of the prog palace, and the band came through with a rewarding progressive rock album without needing to bring their death metal elements out of retirement.

21. Deadspace - Dirge

Dirge was not the album I expected from Deadspace, but it shifted them from their more somber atmospheric style of black metal into something so much more suffocatingly dark and sinister that they went on to produce another full-length album and an EP in the style of before the year’s end, and I have been loving the Australian band’s more menacing side since the transformation. The band’s first album in this newly terrifying style for them is a masterpiece of vile, demonic black metal that still features what has made Deadspace a worthwhile figure to follow in the worldwide atmospheric black metal scene, and I imagine there is plenty more to come from the tenacious Australian group and have been so proudly supportive of, which I am eagerly looking forward to.

20. Uboa - The Origin of My Depression

This is the first not-completely-bonafide-metal-album entry on this list, but it is a worthwhile and impressive one that I think a lot of fans of the kinds of experimental and black metal that incorporate dark ambiance, industrial elements, and harsh noise could get into. But it is an album as intensely depressive as its title suggests, a meditation on the turmoils associated with its creator’s gender dysphoria and the efforts to cope with and mitigate it that comes through in all shades of pain, from melancholic-ambiance-backed stone-faced recitations of doubt about self-worth to seething, agonized screams of torment for release from the hell of the creator’s condition over abrasive industrial noise. It is not by any means easy listening, and its lyrics demand a lot of emotional energy. Be advised. But also it’s really painfully cathartic and expresses an important and often quieted perspective for those not affected by gender dysphoria to hear.

19. Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

I do like this album a lot, I really do, but it has to be the most overrated album on this whole list. So many people wetted their britches over this damn album and jumped to call it a perfect masterpiece of death metal. It’s a very very good death metal album, but it’s not beyond improvement. And, again, it’s good and I don’t want to be tempering the jubilee over this thing in this list where I’m supposed to be highlighting my appreciation for it, but it makes me wonder if this is how people who aren’t that into Meshuggah see the band’s adoring fans (like me). But Hidden History of the Human Race, mind-blown ancient aliens sci-fi concept aside, is a great continuation of the semi-psychedelic modern twist on early death metal that started on Starspawn, and the band’s progressive compositional abilities certainly do deserve a lot of praise, and I do hope that they continue building on this.

18. Inter Arma - Sulphur English

Another band making continual improvements on their sonic foundation, Inter Arma have never let their labels of death or sludge or doom or post-metal box them in or make them feel forced to pick one and stick with it, and Sulphur English is a fantastic example of how wide the band’s capabilities span, with elements of all the aforementioned subgenres mashed together in so many different configurations together and on their own, and it makes for such an overpowering record whose wall of sound really takes a lot of spins to withstand the continuous impact of.

17. Fit for an Autopsy - The Sea of Tragic Beasts

Okay, I’m gonna have to really start being shorter now, because now we’re getting into the top of the list, the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop. And I’ll be here until 2021 if I don’t slow down. Anyway, Fit for an Autopsy reinforced their melodic supplementation to their brand of deathcore on The Sea of Tragic Beasts, and clearly put the work into making sure it meshed well with their style. And the work paid off. While a lot of deathcore these days is kind of departing from that original “core” core that the genre’s early contributors established for more straight-up death metal and other progressive or techy styles (basically just retaining the affinity for breakdowns), albums like this are a fine example of how beneficial this evolution is for the genre.

16. Rammstein - Rammstein

It’s hard to be brief with an album ten years in the making, featuring the best song of the year, but I’ll try. Rammstein’s long-awaited follow-up to Liebe ist für alle da does very much pick up where the band left off in 2009, feeling like a natural successor rather than some contrived nostalgia trip to Sehnsucht or Mutter to appease fans for their patience. And for as much as I unpacked every song in detail in my review, the album as a whole is hard to sum up beyond simply a solid offering of Rammstein tracks, several of which have grown on me since my write-up, like the ballads “Diamant” and “Was ich Liebe”, and especially the whimsical “Ausländer”. Lindemann’s lyricism remains a strong point for the band, and the tight compositions another positive on the album. I just hope it’s not so long until the next one.

15. Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Like I had said in my review, every new Slipknot album is one of the biggest events of the year for metal, if not the biggest, and aside from Tool’s underwhelming return to the studio with Fear Inoculum, We Are Not Your Kind was definitely the year’s biggest release. As has become kind of the norm for them now, Slipknot’s sixth album was steeped in its own turmoil, this time being the confusingly ugly departure of Chris Fehn. Nevertheless, the rest of the band pulled through with a solid album that did quite well to highlight the band’s various strengths and a good balance of classic Slipknot aggression with forward-thinking experimentation with their sound. Yet another big name delivering the goods this year.

14. Korn - The Nothing

And speaking of success from storied bands, Slipknot’s supposed nu metal rivals also really came through this year with one of their best albums in a long long time, and this is coming from someone who has been a fan of Korn’s later era, their untitled album, See You on the Other Side, etc., but the band’s increasingly more committed return to their old-school sound this decade, after the flop of The Path of Totality, has culminated magnificently on The Nothing, which essentially sounds like a modern-produced Untouchables or Issues. The songwriting is consistently well-measured and Jonathan Davis’ chilling performances in the wake of the loss of his wife especially give the album such a real sense of turmoil that heightens the intensity of everything around them. As therapeutic as music is in times of great pain and loss, and as great as this album is, I hope Jonathan’s grief wasn’t exploited or exacerbated for this art, and I hope he is doing okay.

13. Baroness - Gold & Grey

This album got a lot of flack for its indeed frustrating production, with a lot of critics not being able to get past the blown-out, fuzzy, lo-fi crackle that blurred a lot of the songs’ finer details away. And I agree that the band certainly could have put their sonic strengths in a better light with clearer production and probably should going forward. Nevertheless, underneath the hazy veneer of grainy mixing, Gold & Grey boasts great songwriting in the styles of Purple and Yellow & Green, as well as treading newly segue-heavy ground for them. And after a few listens getting used to (or getting over) the album’s production, the sharp-as-ever songwriting and booming-as-ever vocal performances from John Dyer Baizley really come through and are worth appreciating.

12. Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Arguably the weirdest album to come out of 2019, yet so much more than a novelty project, Grand Guignol Orchestra takes the creepiness of the often-mishandled dark carnival aesthetic and applies it to the band’s twisted brand of avant-garde black metal to make something truly weird and unsettling, yet fixating. The psychotic clown-like screams and wails across the album reinforce this aesthetic to the point of perhaps creating a new subgenre of metal: carnival metal perhaps.

11. Waste of Space Orchestra - Syntheosis

The work of two whole bands (Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising) joining forces in their entirety, Syntheosis is a surprisingly cohesive and immersive project, as synth-driven as its name suggests and cinematic in its massive sound. It’s a weirdly atmospheric form of experimental, psychedelic black metal that is both serene and crushing; the artists involved clearly had this ambitious project in mind and they worked meticulously to make sure their vision was realized.

10. Spirit Adrift - Divided by Darkness

Again, really trying to keep it short here, but what an album from Spirit Adrift. Divided by Darkness is the album that sounds most like and reminds me most of the most recent perfect album I heard (2018′s Desolation by Khemmis), and the emotional potency bubbling up to the brim of this album’s doomy melodies and soaring vocals is similarly enriching, while not as ridiculously perfect as Khemmis’ latest release, Divided by Darkness takes Spirit Adrift to new heights and makes them one of modern doom-influenced melodic metal’s most promising figures.

9. Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites

The departure of longtime guitarist/vocalist Dallas Toler-Wade was arguably a blessing in disguise for Nile, with their ninth album, Vile Nilotic Rites, being a roaring comeback from the relative lull of their previous two albums, much of which is due to the reinvigorating performances of new guitarist/vocalist Brian Kingsland, whose more traditionally roaring growls breathe new life into and provide a fitting new angle to the band’s Egyptian-themed brand of extremely fast, technical old-school death metal. It’s great to have them back in such emboldened form.

8. Lingua Ignota - Caligula

This is the album that just got me. Very much in a similar, yet more neoclassically-inspired vein of industrial darkwave as Uboa’s album, Kristen Hayter herself has said that Caligula is also not a metal album, and she’s right, but holy shit does it hit harder than a lot of metal tries so hard to hit. I had been trying for months to write a review for this album, but it never came, partly because the subject matter from which the album is pulled is tender and not easy at all. But it’s incredibly important to talk about, and I want to give Caligula some of the written attention it deserves from me. Sure if I just put the album on for unassuming listeners, they probably wouldn’t immediately pick up on the manically shrieked and operatically wailed languishing and biblically proportioned defiance being curses of the project’s creator toward her sexual abuser, but the resilience she puts forth into these proclamations of insubmissive survival is certainly tangible even without knowledge of the heartbreaking history that birthed it. And while it makes tremendous compositional strides from All Bitches Die and Let the Evil of His Lips Cover Him, Caligula, like the two albums before it, is such an enigmatic album that feels wrong to consume in the conventional sense or without anything other than pure undivided attention and empathy for what Hayter is so courageously pouring out of her mind and body for the music. It feels wrong to just put music on as a background for room-cleaning or even working out that comprises real, unbridled emotion about its creator’s rape. Yet I know that everything about Caligula and Lingua Ignota has been about surviving that and overcoming that suffering, so it certainly deserves to be listened to and respected; I would posit, though, that if you’re going to enjoy the sounds borne from Kristen Hayter’s subjection to sexual abuse, its candid portrayal of its aftermath should at least serve as further deterrent from committing such abuse to another person, if not convicting you to stop doing so if you are or actively seeking to prevent it where you know you can.

7. Periphery - Periphery IV: HAIL STAN

Periphery have been a band who I have gradually come to realize I quite respect and rate very highly. Their Juggernaut double-album in 2015 was the major catalyst in this and has become one of my favorite albums in djent (if not my favorite if you don’t count Meshuggah’s music as djent). And while I wasnt as into their 2016 album, Periphery III: Select Difficulty, I have definitely seen this band’s continuous improvement and strong upward trend that their fourth self-titled record has continued. The band went for more than just thick, tasty djent on this album, though the thick tasty djent that is here (like “Chvrch Bvrner” and the aforementioned “Blood Eagle”) is some of their thickest and tastiest. But the band expanded their sound to more ethereal corners that produced impressively cathartic results (such as the aforementioned “Satellites”, and the swaggering “Crush”, and the bright “Garden in the Bones”). Major respect to this band that keeps getting better and making it harder on their stubborn detractors.

6. As I Lay Dying - Shaped by Fire

To say this album was controversial would be an understatement, and to point out that it was important that As I Lay Dying come through in several big ways would be as well. Yet for every bit of vocal disapproval and expression of how irredeemable Tim Lambesis was there seemed equal rejoicing about the metalcore legends’ return. It was important, though, that the band come through with and album the showed their understanding of the heaviness of the context and didn’t come across as trying to bypass it or sweep things under the rug, and they did a tremendous job of rising to the occasion. The band continued where they left off before their disbandment as the strongest force in metalcore, sounding even more impassioned and vital upon their return, clearly enriched by the real-life consequentiality of their music. And while it certainly looks even more impressive given the withering state of NWOAHM metalcore in 2019, let that not detract from the incredible power of the genre’s juggernauts’ return to and improvement upon their best form of themselves before their disbandment.

5. Motionless in White - Disguise

When this album came out I honestly didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it. I had hoped that the band would expand on the best tracks from their previous album, Graveyard Shift, the alternative metal bangers, and focus on what worked well for those songs, and to my surprise that’s actually what the band did on Disguise. I had initially said that the high points on Disguise were not as high as the peaks on Graveyard Shift but after listening to Disguise so much this year, it’s shown itself to me to be such a ln impressive improvement on the direction that Motionless in White we’re heading in, and to put it any lower on this list for the sheer fact that it’s not a particularly critic-friendly album would be dishonest. But after getting more into their catalogue I think that this band are one of the best in their field, and sure, they’re very much an amalgamation of their influences, but goddamn do they channel those influences so effectively into so many flavors of delicious, nu metal, gothy, metalcore bangers. And it’s totally accessible too, I wish more of the bands who are trying to achieve more mainstream success would take the approach Motionless in White are taking, because this shit is actually really fucking enjoyable and full of soul.

4. Numenorean - Adore

Making strides from their debut full-length, Numenorean’s sophomore album is a great example of atmospheric blackgaze at its best without resorting to cheap Deafheaven imitation. Numenorean have found their own way to harness the power of blackgaze into emotionally vibrant compositions that come through triumphantly. I just hope the band can keep this up and expand on what they did here.

3. Car Bomb - Mordial

I had this as the number one album for a hot minute, and even teased about it maybe being a perfect release in my eyes as well, and even though it’s neither of those things, Car Bomb’s deeper foray into melodic and slightly atmospheric territory with their Meshuggah-esque brand of technical mathcore produced some seriously impressive results that I can’t wait to hear more of in the coming years.

2. Sermon - Birth of the Marvelous

I already said so much about this debut album, and it was so close to clinching that top spot, but Sermon deserve to be basking in so much more acclaim than I have seen for them, as this album is a nearly perfect prog metal example of how to do a lot with relatively little. I had expressed my disappointment in Soen’s and Tool’s albums this year, but I think this album really fits nicely into that cleaner section of progressive metal and knocks it out of the park. I know I’m repeating myself a lot from my review, but every little detail and accent is expertly calculated to make as positive of an impact as possible on the album, every note is arranged with both microscopic precision and with the grander scheme in mind, and I cannot get over how mind-blowingly well done this album is with so few bells and whistles or shortcuts. This is THE new band to keep an eye on.

1. Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

I don’t know if I like giving the top spot to such a grim, hopeless album, but fuck have Cattle Decapitation earned it, and I can’t blame them for their pessimism either. After aptly applying the disgustingness of goregrind to commentary on human mistreatment of animals and the ugly underbelly of the food industry, Cattle Decapitation turned their sound and their scope to even grander proportions, expanding the boundaries of deathgrind and the possibilities of dirty vocal technique to criticize humankind’s fucking up of the entire planet and foretelling the catastrophe that science has long foreseen. Despite their already bleak outlook on Monolith of Inhumanity and The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation somehow sound even more hopeless in Death Atlas, and Travis Ryan’s greater expansion of his melodic vocal application helps facilitate this, and the band takes their ever-furious rapid grinding battery through so many channels to enhance its epic scope. I should probably try my best not the just regurgitate my very long review of this album, but the band are essentially reading humanity its eulogy in advance and beckoning the end of our species in no romantic fashion, beckoning the universe to ruthlessly purge the species they refer to as a shit stain and move on like we never even happened. This is obviously an exaggeration of their frustration at the inaction and denial of many of the consequences our actions are inviting into our future, but it’s so fitting for the grave circumstances at hand. If there’s any band whose lyrics and sound represent humankind’s self-inflicted ecological apocalypse, it’s Cattle Decapitation, and of there’s any album that paints an adequately dismal picture in fittingly horrifying bluntness of where the world is headed that needs to be understood, it’s Death Atlas. The best and most important album of the year.

And that’s it. 2019, great as always for a genre that refuses to go quietly into the night. A lot of people have been doing decade-summarizing lists, but seeing how long this was, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Maybe I’ll just post a quick tribute to a few of my favorite albums of the decade that I didn’t get to write about before. But for now, 2019 is over, here’s to 2020, it’s going to be a big year, and I have a few things about that I need to say about that, so that’ll be coming soon too.

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inotherland · 4 years

Text

Aliens on Earth

Before you get excited, I don’t have any original thoughts. At least none that we can prove. Someone, at some point, maybe even right now is thinking the exact same thing I am. I guess that’s why it’s so hard to authenticate originality in the societal sense. Regrettably, loads of my time is spent thinking through a societal telescope.

I’ll spare you the psychology behind who I am, it’s probably a beautiful compilation of symptoms that match textbook narcissism. Yikes. I seriously fucking hope it isn’t. Yeah, it’s way easier to joke about being self-absorbed than admit you’ve got to be at least a little self-centered to want to write your own thoughts down. What the fuck makes you so fucking important and worth being listened to anyway?

In truth, at times I feel so far removed from the masses, I imagine that I’m in space and everyone I know is on Earth. I can watch through the eyepiece as they boil eggs and fill out Turbo Tax and I’m terrified to keep looking. Maybe they’ll wash the dishes by hand in the same pattern my mom does. Or I’ll see a little girl with blonde hair and a curl pattern I recognize in photos of myself when I was five. I’m pretty nostalgic like that and it’s one of my best qualities. One time I actually saw this guy sitting at a red light. He was was by himself and it was a busy intersection. Though I couldn’t hear what was playing through the radio, I bet it was Nickelback.

That was a test.

Nickelback rules and everyone who disagrees is a hipster. Listen to “How You Remind Me”and tell me the drum intro doesn’t absolutely slap.

ANYWay, the guy was just sitting there sweating. It really looked like he was in a rush like he was about to shit himself right there and then. Cars were passing fast in both directions and the crazy fucker put his foot on the gas and pushed.

Here’s the thing--

As children, we mirror others, right? We start adopting their vocabulary, their opinions, and their lifestyles. Well, I don’t think I ever outgrew certain aspects of that process. Partly it’s probably because pretending to do, say, and be “other” was the only way I felt a connection to anyone. Being myself felt alien.

#alienthoughts #showerthoughts #writing #nickelback

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tryingthisfangirlthing · 6 years

Text

Like an Explosion in Slow Motion

Myka has been through all kinds of hell due to the Warehouse; what they don't tell you is that it's hell when it's gone, too.

Rating: Either a high Teen or low Mature. References to sex but nothing graphic, some sensuality Word Count: ~5.5k Contains: Myka/Pete (but they break up), angst, hints of Bering and Wells, the Warehouse is gone and everything hurts, the Warehouse family falls apart, did I mention Angst?

Many, many thanks go to the lovely @tinknevertalks for looking over this for me, poking me to write a proper ending, and just generally making sure the mess that was the first draft of this was not inflicted upon the general public. You're the best. <3

Also on AO3

She can't point to one instant when the chain reaction started, not even in hindsight. Maybe it was the moment the new cornerstone was struck, but maybe it was the moment Paracelsus was unbronzed, or maybe even the moment one of her normal cells split and began to mutate into a tumor, or maybe… In the end, it doesn't really matter what sets off the bomb, not to those who are caught in the blast.

It hits Artie first. Slowly, slowly, as the very back aisle begins to fade from view to god-knows-where (and they won't tell them, won't tell the people from the past about the future, to keep them from trying to muscle in on it, she supposes), he stops going near those back aisles. Stops going anywhere where he can see that gap. When that gap gets wide enough to be visible from his office, he pulls the shutters down over the windows, and keeps them closed.

Claudia starts disappearing, suddenly, more and more, arriving often in the company of Mrs. Frederic (though the latter never stays). “Where do you keep going?” Myka asks her, softly, one day, in the B&B over a quiet lunch. “I thought you didn't want to be Caretaker.” “So did I.” A quiet wry, smile, precious in its rarity, because she is hardly ever quite so sincere or still. “But the Warehouse is my home, you know, and I feel like — like it's a part of me, and I'm a part of it, and I just can't — I can't leave. I'll be an agent for as long as I can, and then when I can't —” She lifts one shoulder, and her smile turns almost beatific, serene, with the knowledge and wisdom of many many years beyond Claudia’s age behind it. An alien gesture, on Claudia; everything is changing, absolutely everything, the members of Myka’s little Warehouse family included. Her heart cracks. “I can't explain it. I’ll stay with the Warehouse, and it’ll stay with me.” “I'm — I'm glad for you, Claud.” She is; she really is. “That you know what you want, and you're — moving towards it. I'm proud of you.” Claudia ducks her head, a little bashful, the girl Myka knows again. “I can’t really take any credit. In the Warehouse, things just sort of happen to you, you know?” She does know.

With his partner away, and Artie avoiding setting foot on more and more sections of the Warehouse floor, shelving and inventory falls mostly to Steve. He bears it with his natural quiet, with a sort of stoicism Myka both envies and doesn't. “I could take over for a while,” she offers, one day. “You go on retrieval with Pete, and I can stay here and keep things running. It's not fair that you're stuck here so much.” He smiles at her, tired and terribly melancholy. “No, you and Pete are a team. And I kind of prefer it here. I'm not reminded of — anything,” and he gestures vaguely, “So often.” “Okay.” And she understands, even if she doesn't really know what he's talking about. “But if you ever change your mind.” He nods, and his inhale seems a little lighter, a little less weight on his shoulders. “Thank you, Myka.” “You're welcome.” She brushes her fingers over his arm, a brief gesture intended to offer comfort where there isn't really any to be had, and leaves.

She and Pete can pretend, for the most part, that everything is normal. At least on the surface. Or at least they try. He still eats anything remotely edible in sight (which was very bad the time they were looking for that batch of Kinder Eggs) and she still argues with him over the music in the car (she wants opera, he likes Nickelback) and they still get rooms with two separate twin beds. But then they'll bag an artifact that belongs in one of the missing sections, and they’ll have to go down to the empty section of the Warehouse, and put it inside a goo-slathered box, and then as soon as the box is shut it will vanish right before their eyes. And Pete kisses her, when they get to the door of the B&B (because they both take her “never at work” seriously). He's gentle about it, and it's nice, and then she’ll let him walk her backwards up to his bedroom, and there’s nothing normal about that. Sometimes, they have sex, which is a little weird, and sometimes they don't have sex, which is even weirder: start and stop, driven by the strangeness of it all, the is-this-even-happening, and sometimes she stops it and sometimes he does, and sometimes they don't even start. (And God, she’s happy those nights, too, maybe happiest, because everything is wrong in so many tiny ways but at least she still has her partner beside her.)

Usually, she tries not to think of Helena. There's the occasional e-mail, utterly mundane things. Furniture restoration, Victorian recreation had been Helena’s most recent venture. Now Giselle has a job in New York (State) and Helena is going to try her hand at writing a book again. I fear I will always be a restless soul in this world, she writes, of it, and yet still so utterly alien. You just need to find yourself again in the now, Myka writes. That sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense; she immediately deletes it.

The Regents come for Artie, one day. Or at least that's how Steve tells it, when they get back from Capetown: that Kosan just walked in one day, while he and Artie were talking stock, and Kosan just greeted him and nodded, and Artie just stood up and walked out with him. “‘Take care of the Warehouse, Agent Jinks,’ he said, ‘It won’t be much longer now.’” “Do you think he’s gonna be a Regent?” Pete asks. “I mean, they are kind of short on them, I think, given all that's happened…” “He'd like that.” Myka decides, for her own peace of mind, that that's what’s happened.

She overhears Pete on the phone, as she slips downstairs after her shower. “But Mom, can't you —” He stops, listens, and starts again. “No, you don't know what the Warehouse means to me! To me and Myka, to us! I can't — and it'll be a help to have experienced agents break in the newbies, right? That can only be a good thing.” More quiet, as Jane responds. “Just for a little while?” Space for another response, brief, and then the sound he makes isn't quite human. It's a stage of grief, bargaining. She turns the corner, and approaches him. He hangs up, and swipes at his red-rimmed eyes with the back of his hand. “We can't expect special treatment.” It comes out all wrong, like a rebuke instead of the sympathy she intends. She tries to soften it. “But there's nothing wrong with trying. Do you want a hug?” “Yeah.” And he staggers into her arms. “I'm sorry.” Myka rubs a hand over his back. She loves him, she does, and she hates seeing him like this.

The H.G. Wells aisle fades out. Myka tries not to notice. At least her grappler doesn't leave with it.

She comes across Claudia in the office one day, sitting at the computer, typing away. And it's almost like normal, except for that little black box she recognizes as an external hard drive. “Has that been approved?” she asks, instead of a greeting. Claudia spins around, and they both grin a little sheepishly at each other. “Hey, Claud. It's good to see you.” “You caught that, huh? I'm making a backup of the database, in case something goes screwy in the moving. First move since computers were invented, after all. And I miiight be taking a copy of the ping system home with me to tweak a bit in my spare time. See if I can't improve artifact detection time. Maybe.” Incorrigible. But if anyone can do it, and keep the project secure, she can. “You're going to run a very different Warehouse to the one Mrs. Frederic does, that's for sure.” “I'm going to run a different Warehouse to the one Artie did,” Claudia corrects her, and finger-guns. Myka laughs, for what feels like the first time in a long while.

Somewhere in between all of this, Myka starts packing her things, pulls out the “M.O.B.” crate and carefully wraps up the more delicate items: her CDs, the antique books, the picture frames. Sometimes, she tears up. There's never any good way of saying goodbye.

Abigail and Steve leave next. There’s only about two days’ worth of the Warehouse left, and any incoming pings are put into a holding queue for the next agents to take care of. Abigail just disappears during the night, and the next morning the B&B holds no trace of her, save a small note in the middle of the kitchen counter, as if she’d just gone out for her morning jog. I'm sorry I wasn't able to say goodbye. I wish you all the best, and please reach out if you need a therapist or someone to talk to. The note is signed with a nearly incomprehensible e-mail address. It's probably a little tragic, that this doesn't really surprise her. Typical Regent cloak-and-dagger. It’s a shame; she liked Abigail. “You want to head over with me or with Pete?” Myka asks Steve, keys jingling between her fingers. He’s an early riser like her, but he prefers to take his mornings slow, so it's generally a toss-up as to whom he'll go into work with. “Actually, I'm not going back to the Warehouse.” Steve sets his mug of tea on the counter, and watches her reaction. “I'm going back to the ATF. I might try things with Liam again.” She gulps in a breath with surprising difficulty, like the wind has been knocked out if her. “That's… I'm really glad for you, Steve. Uhm, do you need — do you need any help taking your things anywhere?” “No, I already took my things down to the post office for shipping last week. But thanks.” It is senseless to want what we cannot have, his mug reads. “Is that new?” She points to the mug. Why he'd have gotten that for himself when the B&B has plenty of dishware eludes her… though it is very him. “Personalized?” He arches his eyebrows a little wryly, smiling as he regards the ceramic. “No, I just found it in the front of the cupboard this morning.” One more slice of the sort of everyday magic you get so used to here. They smile at each other. “I'm really gonna miss you.” “Me, too.” He sets down his tea, and she hugs him, tightly. “Don't be a stranger.”

Pete still hasn't even started packing. It itches at her, as she sees at all his things still strewn around his room. But she does her best to be gentle. “Putting things off doesn't make them any easier,” she tells him that night, softly. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I'll do it tomorrow.” She doesn't think he will. “Thanks for being patient with me, Mykes.” “Of course.” It doesn't feel self-evident, all her patience, not any more. At least he appreciates it.

But there isn't a “tomorrow.” They wake up, get ready, drive to the Warehouse together — though they have no clue what they might do there — and it's gone. The place is the right one. That flat, dusty depression they walked across every day for the past five years, is exactly as she remembers it. Except that there's no Warehouse there anymore. “You think the football is still hanging around?” Pete asks. She laughs, at the absurdity of the small things they focus on to ignore the large ones, laughs so as not to cry. (They wait, just to see if it is. The sky stays empty.)

At the end of their return trip, a “For Sale” sign crouches at the beginning of the B&B drive, with matching crates beside it. She pulls over, gasping in a breath. “It's really gone, Pete. All of it.” Her voice is wet, and so are her eyes. He kisses her, and they cry; his sobs wrack his entire body, while her tears stream silently down her cheeks.

She doesn't know how long they sit there, in quiet mourning; it doesn't really matter, anyways. She hasn't sent her things anywhere yet, because she doesn't know where to send them to. They could go back to Colorado Springs, but that’s not where she wants to go. She doesn't know where she wants to go. Where does anyone go when their home isn’t there anymore? “I guess we still have jobs with the Secret Service.” She toys with the idea out loud. It seems flat, now, flat and bleak and lifeless, but everything else seems just as much if not more so. “I guess we do.” He looks at her, and she looks at him, and she unlocks the trunk.

They're not put back on protection detail, not right away. They're investigating, potential threats. And it's good to still work with him, good to still be putting her skills to use, but there's little of the same adrenaline and none of the wonder. She moves into his apartment, because his place is bigger and why not? The previous Myka Bering, the Myka Bering most people here still vaguely remember, would have laughed outright at the idea that she could ever be with Pete Lattimer. It's unsettling to have your own ghost haunting your footsteps.

“I think—” Pete kisses her as he backs her towards the bedroom. “We should celebrate—” another kiss — “bagging that guy.” “I don't know, Pete.” She rests her hands on his lapels, turning her head slightly to the side. “It doesn't feel like much to celebrate.” “We stopped someone who was going to try to set off a bomb!” “Yeah, and it probably wouldn't have gone off either way.” She sighs, and offers him a tired smile. “At least he's getting help, now.” “Yeah.” Pete rests his forehead against her temple, brushing his lips over her cheek. “Feels a little like the old days, helping people, saving the world.” Pulling back, he offers her that boyish grin, the one she can't help but smile back at. “You know, after some of those cases, I always wondered what it would be like if you and me —” “Okay, no! I do not need to hear your — fantasies — about —” But she's his girlfriend, shouldn't she want — she punches him in the arm, instead of trying any further to find words, to piece apart her thoughts. His eyes darken. “I know you know what that does to me.” “I know.” And he wants her, and she loves him, and it’s easy to let him have her (even if it still feels like something is missing).

It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat. I perceived it coming towards me by the flashing bushes it touched, and was too astounded and stupefied to stir. “Morning, babe,” he mumbles, as he shuffles to the counter where she's left his mug of coffee to cool. She doesn't look up from The War of the Worlds she's reading with her cereal. “Morning.” I heard the crackle of fire in the sand-pits and the sudden squeal of a horse that was as suddenly stilled. Then it was as if an invisible yet intensely heated finger were drawn— “How come I'm always the one to start the sex?” he asks, the words sleep-slurred, so it takes her a moment to really register them. “Wait, what?” Sharp, because he wants to bring this up now? When they have to leave for work (she has to drag his butt out the door) in half an hour? “‘Start the sex’ isn't even an actual phrase—” “Mykes.” His morning ‘dial it down’ gesture. “Just let me.” She lifts her hands, nodding for him to continue. “Sorry.” “How come you don't ever really seem to want to have sex with me? I mean, am I doing something wrong? You used to tell me when what I was doing wasn't working for you.” It sounds practiced, far too clear for usual him at this hour. How long has this been on his mind? “What? No, you're fine, you're doing perfectly — perfectly fine. No complaints.” He makes sure she comes at least once, and he cares about her pleasure, and it might not be mind-blowing but she really, really has no complaints. — were drawn through the heather between me and the Martians— “Well, that's hardly a five-star review,” he mutters. She sighs, and finally gives up on reading. “Well, what do you want me to say? ...Never mind, don't answer that. We need to get going.” He stuffs a doughnut in his mouth, and she suppresses a cringe.

It's harder to ignore all the little things, when it's just the two of them. When she doesn't even have her own room to retreat to. The crumbs on the counter, how he wants to keep her up half the night and waste half the morning dozing, not just sometimes but every. single. weekend. She reads beside him while he plays his Halo or Diablo or Super Mario Brothers, but it doesn't feel cozy or family-like, like it did when Leena was baking in the kitchen and Artie was playing the piano and Claudia alternated between cheering Pete on, giving him advice, and worming her way into yet another top-secret database from her laptop balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa. Now, it just feels disconnected, like two puzzle pieces missing the bits in between.

Steve is settling in fine with the ATF again, and to hear him tell it things are going well enough with Liam. She hopes he isn't just putting on a good face, but then she's never known him to lie. The tone is just a little melancholy, that's all. Her emails probably sound the same.

She finds a message in her inbox one day, from “Next Generation,” no subject, no sender address. There's not much to it, just Claudia assuring Myka she's okay, and she’ll be fine in the future, too, and she hopes Myka’s doing well. Somehow, Myka knows this will be the last she hears from Claudia. Say hi to H.G. for me, the next time you see her. I think you should talk with her soon. I know she'd love to hear more from you. Myka wonders just how close the two of them are — or were, or still are? — and an irrational stab of jealousy threatens to gut her.

“Emily Lake” is publishing a new book, or so she writes Myka in her latest e-mail. Indulge me setting up this little game, darling. I shan't tell you the title, nor my pen name, because I'd like to see how long you take to pick it out. I'm quite certain you'll know it when you see it. This feels wrong, too. I thought we were supposed to solve puzzles together, and no matter how hard she tries she can't make that sound any less whiny. She hates it, but she leaves it in. And she starts scouring bookstores.

Twisted Time and Sparks Afly, she sees one day, by Eileen G. Wellington. A dark-haired seductress stares out at her from the cover, a far-too familiar stunner weapon in her hand and her chin lifted in something like a dare. It’s tucked onto a corner stand in a shelf, instead of put out in the center of the window like it belongs. Myka buys it without even looking at the synopsis.

“Come to bed, babe.” It's not a demand or a plea, but maybe a little of both. She looks up from the book, slowly untucking her legs from beneath her in the armchair. “What time is it?” She hasn't lost herself in a book like this in a long time, but this is the very best of H.G. Wells and better. She can see so much of Helena in this, Helena now, and a new side of her, in this story about someone from the past who wakes up to an incomprehensible future. “I don't know, two, three in the morning? Way too late. Or early. Or both. Time to sleep. Usually you're the one talking about work tomorrow.” Pete rambles when he's tired and has to speak anyways. “Oh god! Sorry, I just… book.” She gestures at the cover, and he nods. It's nice, to have that kind of shorthand figured out with someone. The one person who knows you better than anyone else, and maybe that someone is Pete now. (Or maybe it still isn't, because she just wants to finish reading.)

“This isn't gonna work out, is it, Mykes?” he asks, in the car on their way to their latest person of interest’s residence. There's no recrimination in the question, no self-pity, just a bone-deep sort of sorrow. “What do you mean? This investigation?” She knows, though, or at least she thinks she might. “Us.” He gestures between them. “This. Our relationship.” “What makes you say that?” She can't — she just can't. He's her partner. “You're not happy. Not like you were.” Gently, he says this, like he needs to ease her into the idea. “And I care about you, and I want you to be happy.” “Of course I'm not happy, Pete! It's not like it used to be!” She doesn't know where this vehemence is coming from; this isn't like her. “I'm sorry.” She forces herself to be quieter. “I miss it all, you know?” “Of course I know.” He sounds mildly insulted, like he doesn't know how she could think otherwise. “I didn't mean it like that.” And it's snippy and also not her. “I know.” Bitterness lurks there, somewhere. “A-are you mad at me, or at the world? Or at yourself?” She shakes her head at him, because she cannot stand this passive-aggressive bullshit, and it's not like him either. Road noise fills the silence, as the seconds stretch into double digits and she can see him really thinking it over. “I think I'm a little mad at everything, right now.” She isn't sure if he means it as a confession, or if it's a revelation to him as well. Another pause, and then, “We aren't good for each other, are we? Not like this.” She doesn't want to say it, doesn't want to admit that even this isn't right any longer. “I guess we're not.” He pulls over, and for the second time that spring they cry together in the car. They may have survived the blast, but they’re breaking apart on impact.

She moves out as soon as she can, puts her things in storage and puts her resignation in with the Secret Service. There are far too many ghosts here, ghosts and scars and stumbling blocks. She needs a clean break, needed it months ago. Maybe, just maybe, she understands a little better now what Helena did.

She tries to find the words to talk about Helena’s book to her, tries and fails. I did recognize it the moment I saw it, is all she says, finally, on that topic. Where are you living right now? I'd like to visit you. I'm not sure that's a good idea, Helena replies. But she gives an address anyways.

Myka is not the kind to just show up on people’s doorsteps, but it really does seem like Helena is the exception. Except it's not Helena who answers the door, it's a different woman, petite and olive-skinned, with dark curls tumbling over her shoulders. “Uhm, hi, is — is —” Myka really wants to avoid a repeat of the Nate thing; she isn't here with the Warehouse, just looking for a friend. “Does she still go by Emily?” The woman — Giselle, Myka guesses — wrinkles her brow, and glances back inside the apartment. “Hel? I think she wants you.” “She?” And then there's Helena in the foyer, drying her hands on her jeans, and when their gazes meet Myka could swear she pales and flushes at the same time. “Myka! I —” She glances at… her girlfriend, Myka forces herself to think, though it feels like swallowing chunk of ice just a little too large. “We weren't expecting you.” “No, we certainly weren't.” Giselle arches an eyebrow at Helena, but extends her hand. “Hi, I'm Giselle.” “Yeah, she's told me about you.” Myka shakes her hand. She’s happy for the both of them, really, she is. “I’m Myka. It's great meet you.” “I haven't heard a thing about you yet.” Giselle glances at Helena again. “To hear her talk, you'd think she'd met no one and done nothing until she became a forensic scientist in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin.” “I told you, darling, I spent a great deal of time with books. There isn't much there to tell.” And if Myka didn't know better herself, she might just believe her. “You don't get up to much with a roommate-slash-research-partner, I promise. Myka, do come in.” “Thanks.” She wipes her shoes, and offers a polite smile that maybe comes out more of a grimace, and they all shuffle out of the narrow foyer. “Roommate like her? Damn, Hel, you did know you were gay back then, right?” She doesn't whisper quite quietly enough, not for Myka, who has been conditioned to listen for strange quiet voices where you least expect them. “Sorry, know you were bi already.” “I've been well aware of my ‘bisexuality,’” and she says the word like she's still getting used to the taste of it, “for far, far longer than you, I'll wager.” Helena doesn't bother to keep her voice down. “I told you, I realized I was gay in, like, fourth grade.” It sounds like an old back-and-forth. “And I keep telling you, I realized I loved women as well as men in 1884.” Giselle lets out some small grunt of frustration. “Fine, don't tell me. Again.” Myka shouldn't be happy that Giselle doesn't know everything, but her stomach flutters a little nonetheless.

“Did she do this thing back in college, too?” Giselle asks, accompanied by the quiet snick of her knife through carrot. “This ‘I'm from the Victorian Era’ joke? Like, sometimes it's cute in a quirky way —” charming, Myka mentally corrects, the word you're looking for is dangerously charming, “and sometimes it just drives me absolutely nuts. I had to sneak a look at her driver’s license to figure out her actual birthday.” “I did tell you it was the 12th of August.” Helena pushes the noodles and onions around in the wok. “And I’m right here, in case you’d forgotten.” “Yeah, but then you always followed it up with ‘1868.’” Giselle reaches for a bell pepper. “And I’ve already told you this, so now I’m telling Myka.” She glances towards where Myka stands just outside of the small kitchen area. “You know, sometimes I half-believe it, like her knowledge of the time period is phenomenal, and she still acts like the refrigerator and microwave are these new and amazing inventions. But, I mean.” She waves her knife dismissively, a gesture that makes Myka clench. Giselle and H.G. have a similar disregard for safety, that’s for sure. “There's no such thing as immortality. Or, like, time travel.” Yes, there is, Myka wants to say. On both accounts. Some form of it anyway. She glances at Helena; their gazes slide together, and linger. There’s a sort of helpless indulgence, of people who just can't know, and it's good to have someone around who does know, a shared secret, a quiet bond. When Myka looks back at Giselle, the other girl is watching Helena and her, brow wrinkled. Myka’s been asked a question. “Yeah, Helena’s been doing that for as long as I've known her.” “I don't know if I should be relieved it's not just me, or worried.” Giselle laughs, ducking her head, a little wryly, and then nudges Helena with her hip as she adds the vegetables to the pot. “Gorgeous weirdo.” “I think that's a compliment...” Helena nudges back once Giselle is finished, perhaps a little harder than necessary. Myka is quick to reassure her, “It is.”

It's a small apartment, with a fairly open floor plan, so of course Myka sees part of and hears most of their goodbye. She turns her back, wandering to the far side of the living room to try to give them some privacy. But if you're trying so hard not to hear something… “We need to talk, Hel. I'm serious. I've been trying to give you your space and privacy, but I don't like things — people — being hidden from me. Tomorrow, or sometime this weekend, maybe.” “I didn't hide her from you. I did say I kept up with some old friends via e-mail. I never really expected her to just—” Myka can almost hear Helena shaking her head. “But you're right, I should have.” Sometimes, just sometimes Myka wants to be just as damn cocky as H.G. was: if some small part of you didn't want me here, you would never have given me your address. But she won't. She's never been that sort of person (except “never” and “that sort of person” seem to flee out the window when Helena enters the room). “We'll talk about that, too. Later. Go see your guest now.” “Wait,” Helena demands, and then there's the sound of someone being backed against the door, a muffled, needy whimper, and it's seventeen long seconds before Myka finally hears, “Now you can go.” “Bitch,” Giselle mutters, but there's plenty of affection and no trace of venom. The door opening and closing, the click of a latch, and then Helena returns, one hand on her hip and running her fingers through her hair. Myka is suddenly lost for words.

“So.” Helena makes the word almost an entire sentence as she settles on the couch beside Myka, close, but not too close. Expectation hovers in the air (in her aura, Leena might have said, and maybe that was what an aura actually was). “So, this whole ‘I'm from the Victorian Era’ thing?” It's not what she came here to talk about, but it's the easiest. Helena exhales, slowly, and leans back. “Oh, I know it's ridiculous. No one believes I'm actually over a century old, and my official documents say 1979. I just…” She stares at the ceiling, shaking her head minutely, the way she does when she's searching for words. “I knew I needed to do something differently this time. This way feels a little bit less like lying.” Myka hums, and it's not assent or dissent, just sympathy. “I guess it's hard.” She looks down at her hands, runs them down to her knees. “Of course it's difficult.” Helena snaps the edges of the consonants between her teeth, leaving them sharp, jagged. “Myka, look at me.” Despite herself, Myka glances up at her. “What did you come here for?” Myka swallows, and glances away again. When she finally finds the words, they crack wetly in the back of her throat. “How did you do it? Just — leave the Warehouse behind? How can you — I'm so lost without it.” It's a relief, to get it out, all of it, to someone who isn't struggling alongside her. “Pete and I, we're not — we just don't work without the Warehouse. Claudia’s gone, just — gone. I'll probably never see her again. Artie’s gone, too, and so is Abigail. I think — I think Steve’s doing okay, but I can't know, and we're all trying, but you can't just — forget, endless wonder like that.” Helena chokes out some mangled parody of a laugh. “Of course you can't forget. It's senseless to even try.” “You managed to get away.” And it's partially an accusation, one she didn't mean to level here and now, one she ends up voicing anyways. “You really think —” Disbelief floods Helena’s tone. “For God’s sake, Myka — Nate broke things off, Adelaide’s —” She shakes her head. “You're here. I haven’t the slightest idea what will happen with Giselle after this — that I'm here, in this time, at all —!” Gesturing demonstratively, she meets Myka’s gaze, as if that's supposed to help her understand. Myka doesn't. Helena licks her lips, and tries again. “That's the downside of the Warehouse, Myka. It might destroy you, drive you mad, or abandon you —” and they both know the Warehouse is something alive, something sentient — “but it never, ever lets you go.” Myka shakes her head. “That can't be — there has to be something. Something you can do, something —” She doesn't even know what she wants to happen; she doesn't want to forget, but remembering hurts, too. “If there is any solution,” Helena says quietly as she shifts closer, lays an arm around Myka’s shoulders, pulls her into a gentle hug Myka didn’t realize she’s been starving for, “I haven't found it yet.”

There’s a crater where the rest of her life used to be, and too much is broken, and she doesn't even know where to begin to pick up the pieces. But she's not alone, and sometimes you just have to stumble forwards from wherever you’ve landed. She starts composing an email to the address Abigail left.

#warehouse 13 #rinari's fic #myka bering #i don't know what else to tag this #any ship tags would feel dishonest #bering and wells #myka x hg #myka x pete #angst #explosion imagery #family falling apart #the warehouse is gone and everything hurts #this is That™ fic #which is not in the sense I meant it a year or so ago #surprisingly i am not yet a smut writer for this fandom and that needs to change :p

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surveys-at-your-service · 7 years

Text

Survey #91

“does he love you the way that i do?”

would you rather have stars in the sky or the moon? moon do you ever stop and appreciate little things? all the time. what is the worst natural disaster you’ve experienced firsthand? hurricanes do you cuddle with your pet (if you have one)? yeah! you are completely alone with your favorite celebrity/person/whoever. what do you do? just talk to him about stuff. if you had the power to instantly transform someone’s life (for the better), who would you choose to use this on? off the top of my head, my mom. if a family member (or boyfriend/girlfriend, if you have one) happened to be infected by a zombie, how would you go about dealing with that situation? i'm a merciful person that doesn't want to see someone suffer. i'd kill them in the quickest way possible. if you were paralyzed from the neck down, would you still want to continue living? why or why not? absolutely fucking not because that's just awful. has any medication you’ve taken ever made you sick? how so? yeah. the mood stabilizer i'm on now, latuda, sometimes makes me so nauseous that i actually do get sick. did you ever listen to avril lavigne when you were younger? dude she was like my crush full homo. i loved her. did you ever buy "now that’s what i call music" cds? as a kid, my older sister did do you like turkey or ham more? ham. do you like rihanna? no. have you ever become good friends with someone you never met in person? most of my closest friends i've ever had i met online. what do you consider your default mood to be? content have you ever dipped french fries in a frosty? once. disgusting. favorite undertale character? uhhh. asriel is honestly really cool. but i also love sans and papyrus. what do you think about lizards? SO CUTE is there a certain place or store you especially hate going to? walmart. the flourescent lighting makes me yawn. do you like any cover songs? which ones if you have any favorites? sure. i love "hurt" by johnny cash, "another brick in the wall" by korn, "whiskey in the jar" by metallica... if you’re old enough, do you go clubbing on the weekends or not? i've never been to a club. don't want to. what is/was your best subjects in school? science. have you ever gambled and won? i don't gamble. do you ever count the presents you're getting for birthdays or holidays? no! that's awful! be grateful for whatever you were given! do you have your ears pierced? twice in each earlobe. are you easily offended? sometimes. what is the best prank you have ever pulled? i don't pull pranks. when you’re in a relationship, do you tend to be very physical? no. have you ever ended up dating someone you initially disliked? no. do you wear a lot of yellow? no. i don't like yellow. do you and your siblings actually look alike? yeah. have you ever suffered from chronically bad acne? no. if you could own anyone’s autograph, and not be allowed to sell it, who would you choose? mark fischbach's *heart eyes* how many dogs have you had, and do you remember all their names? oh god. trigger, angel, harley, delilah, teddy, cali, bentley. how do you feel about snakes? i absolutely adore snakes. how many cats have you owned and can you remember their names? we have, without a doubt, had about 50 cats. there's no way i could remember all of them. were you sick a lot as a child? what illnesses plagued you the most? no. i like... never get sick. do you have any sinister or morbid tattoos? no, but i do have some pretty dark ones planned. do you feel that you are better than most humans? i mean some, sure, in regards to being better in temperment. i don't believe any human is ultimately "better" than the other, though, in essence. what is your favorite type of meat to eat? chicken or pork. have you ever dated a red-head? no. what do you call small children? (children, kids, tots, etc.) kids how old were you when you took driver’s ed? 16 have you ever pet-sat for someone? yeah. what’s one theme song you will NEVER skip? the one to "deadman wonderland" what’s something that gets much more hate than it deserves? nickelback. like shut up, you like at least one of their songs lol what show/movie never gets old for you? the shrek series lol are you an official couple with the last person you kissed? not anymore are you happier now or three months ago? now! how old do you think you will be when you finally have kids? i don't want kids. do you think you’ll be married in ten years? probably? what do you miss most about your ex? my most recent ex, all the things we had in common, i guess. my "main" ex, i miss a lot of things about him, but more than anything, i miss him actually being a caring person. are you attracted to the last person that kissed you? no. how long have you liked the person you like? since late 2011. are you one of those people who are always cold? people usually tell me my skin is freezing, but i'm typically very hot. if you won a trip to a nude beach would you go or give the trip away? i'd definitely give it away. tongue piercings - cute or trashy? i honestly find them cute. when it comes to jeans: skinny, flared or boot cut? skinny would you rather be a star ballerina or a star break dancer? ballerina. ballet is beautiful. honestly - can you say that looks don’t matter at ALL? you can't tell me with a straight face that they don't matter at all. i’ve got to know, who do you prefer: mario or luigi? luigi! yes or no: techno music? no. yes or no: pigtails? cute mostly on kids. how old were you when you had your first boyfriend/girlfriend? i was about to turn 16, if you mean my first "serious" boyfriend. i don't remember what age i was when i started "dating" aaron, but i was in the 7th grade. is your home town nice? noooo do you believe in love at first sight? explain. hell no. you can't just look at someone and automatically "love" them. do you currently have any medicine in your bag / purse / etc? if so, what kind? yes, my adivan. what do you like on your pasta / noodles? sauce, butter, grated cheese, etc.? sauce ultimately, do you believe nature controls man or that man controls nature? explain. both. do you think it’s wrong to put yourself before others? in what sort of situations? it strictly depends on the situation in school, are / were you ever reluctant to ask questions? what about to answer questions? for what reasons? yes, but i was worse at asking questions. i was and still am shy. are you weary of displaying signs of affection for your significant other around adults? why or why not? no, when i do have a s.o. there's no shame in expressing love. have you ever had red velvet cake or carrot cake? have you ever made either of those? i've had both, but never made either. what is your favorite take out food to get? what do you usually order? bojangle's, and it's called a chicken supreme dinner. if I handed you a concert ticket right now, who would you want to be the performer? i REALLY wanna go to a metallica concert. what color looks best on you? black name three facts about your family. uhhh. we're german, irish, and polish; our surname is scottish; and we live all over the country. if you could pick the gender and appearance of your child, would you? gender yes, appearance, it'd be cool to select a few features if you died right now, what song would you want to play at your funeral? "took it like a woman" by alice cooper favorite holiday dish? spiral ham would you ever get into a long distance relationship? i honestly don't think i could. favorite kind of soup? vegetable soup. the best was surprisingly from my elementary school. what’s your favorite hot beverage? hot chocolate. for your birthday, what kind of cake do you ask for? red velvet did you ever play an instrument? if so, what? i played flute for years, and i shortly played around with guitar. best i could do was probably the intro to "crazy train" would you rather carve pumpkins or wrap presents? carve pumpkins favorite kind of candy? reese's if you're including chocolate, sour punch straws if not. what’s a movie you cried while watching? "the notebook" destroyed me how old were you when you had your first kiss? 16 would you rather have hair that changes color with emotion or get injured each time you’re touched by the person you love? hair that changes color with emotion, obviously. do you have a laptop? yes, but mine's currently broken. i've been using mom's. have you ever been the object of someones affection, when they were ‘taken’? yeah. does it bother you when people lie to spare you ‘heartache’? it depends. have you ever had a black eye? no. would you sacrifice your dreams, to help someone else reach theirs? no, i wouldn't. ever wished you were alive when there were dinosaurs? lmao no?? do you believe we “live and learn”? depends on if you want to learn. what is on your wrists right now? nothing on the left, my tattoo on the right. reason for the last tear shed? i was fighting with my mom. have you ever been called a babe or baby? yes, and i don't like it. name one person you wish you could fix things with? if i could only pick one person, jason. but i also really really wish my old best friend megan and i could be friends again. if you’re single, then why don’t you get a girlfriend/boyfriend? because you don't simply "get" a boyfriend?? are you and the last person you kissed in a relationship or just friends? we're not even friends anymore what was the worst night of your life, or the night you have been scared the most? the night jason broke up with me. what three places in the world do you want to travel to? south africa, germany, aaaand... australia, maybe? are you allergic to cats? no have you ever babysat? once what’s your second favorite color? pink do you refuse to use public toilets? i avoid them as best i possibly can. how do you feel about golden oreos? never tried, don't want to, because i know i'll hate them. favorite cheese? i only like american. favorite lunch meat? salami what's the strangest animal you've had for a pet? rats are you more annoyed when decorations are up two months prior to a holiday or still up two months after a holiday? hmmm. prior, maybe. what’s the strangest art piece you’ve come across? i've heard of one where a woman vomits onto a canvas in abstract designs. and they actually sell. fucking gross. can you legally drive? not without someone who's had their license for seven years. do you know any songs that are older than you are? most of the songs i enjoy are older than me lol are you comfortable sharing drinks with your friends? not really. what season were you born in? winter have your parents ever questioned your virginity? yes. what pizza place do you usually order from? domino's, my favorite. if we want something quick though, little ceasar's. do you have a least favorite color? what is it? brown, puke green do you find graveyards scary? no. do you swear a lot? yes. do you know if you were born in the am or pm? am do you sit on the mattresses in furniture stores? ha ha yeah have you ever read the bill of rights/declaration of independence? we had to memorize the bill of rights in high school. have your parents ever thought you were gay? what happened? no. my old therapist thought i was though once. she was awful. what do you normally order when you go to subway? turkey, bacon, american cheese, pickles, jalapenos, banana peppers, chipotle... and i feel like i'm forgetting something. are you comfortable talking to both your parents about sex and boys? just vaguely with my mom. what is your idea of “too big” when it comes to weight? when you can no longer properly function. how about “too thin”? once your bones are clearly visible. have you ever experienced an overly clinging boy-/girlfriend? yeah. partially why we only dated for two weeks. have you ever decided that you like/dislike someone based on their survey answers? i wouldn't say entirely. but i'll sometimes get a bad idea about some people. a bloodied, possibly wounded man is on the side of the road: do you stop to see if you can assist him, or do you drive past? i'd call 911. i wouldn't help because who knows if he's dangerous. what’s the ultimate cake topping? chocolate have you ever walked into a wall? more like ran ha ha can you name all 50 american states? no. have you ever needed stitches? yeah. when i passed out onto the floor on my chin. have you ever been in a submarine? no. do you believe there used to be dragons? no. who’s your favorite god from ancient history? hmmm. athena. could you go out with someone who had a child from a previous relationship? no. what was your first alcoholic drink? strawberry mike's hard lemonade where did you go on your first ride on an airplane? ohio who was your first kiss? the first person who kissed me was juan, but the first person i kissed and who reciprocated was jason, so i consider him my "first kiss" what nicknames do you have/have had? britt, britt-britt, brittany bear, ozz, ruby, flower did you ever have a treehouse as a kid? no. we only had tall pine trees where i grew up. have you ever planted a tree? an apple tree, yes. have you ever dated someone with longer hair than yours? no. do you have any cats? no, but i want one. are you a moody person? i have either bpd or bipolarity ii. of course i am. how many girls do you know named alison? my little sister's best friend's name is allison. do you prefer to do the asking out, or be asked out? be asked out. have you ever been evicted? yes. do you know anyone who snores? my mom snores louder than anyone i've ever met. dad, too. what is your favorite font? garamond. have you ever seen a rooster? yep. have you ever seen a lunar eclipse? yeah. what is your favorite number? 13 what color are your slippers? they're meerkat slippers lol. so tan. what state were you born in? north carolina. do you know anybody who has been diagnosed with cancer? multiple people. do you ever feel self-conscious when you eat around other people? rarely. where is your favorite place to get fries? bojangle's. their seasoning is ohhh goodness how many romantic relationships have you been in so far? one have you ever been camping in the wilderness? no. would you consider yourself to be a picky eater? VERY do you have gluten intolerance or anyone who does? i don't, but my cousin does. do you trust the media? HA what kind of cookies are your favorite? chocolate chip do animals have souls? yeah. are you easily embarrassed? YES how well do you handle your alcohol? apparently extremely well. i've never been smashed, despite drinking a moderate amount. how can people tell if you're drunk? i'm talkative and kinda loud. tell me about the best pet you ever had: the dog i currently have now, teddy<3 are any of your siblings married? ashley, yes. who was the last person to spend the night with you at your house? chelsea. that was fun. who was your date to senior prom? jason. does your dad smoke? yes. he's getting better about it, though. is your mom over 50? yes. who would you tell, or who did you tell when you lost your virginity? i'd tell my mom first. that or i'd tell nobody because it's not really anyone's business. do you have a debit card? no. why did you stop working at the last place you were employed? i was getting so anxious that i was puking. do you have freckles? no. what would you do if you found out your ex was pregnant/fathered a child? tyler, wouldn't care, jason... i'd feel weird. do you think the drinking age in america should be lowered to 18? no. what is the nearest big city to you? raleigh. do you think what bill clinton did was wrong? ... obviously? have you ever run away? yeah. what is your favorite holiday? halloween. how often are you online? like... all the time. what are you obsessed with? mark fischbach, link neal & rhett mclaughlin, meerkats, "silent hill"... backstreet boys or nsync? backstreet boys. what is your favorite disney movie? "the lion king" who did you last go bowling with? colleen, bradley, girt. do you have any pets? three great dogs, one lovely snake. who do you look like in your family? vaguely like my sisters, and an equal amount of people say i look like my mom or dad. could you ever believe in assisted suicide? no. have your parents ever put one of your pets to sleep? we had to. he had spleen cancer and was dying. have you ever been hunting? no. what oceans have you swam in? atlantic. are you ugly? i feel like i am, mostly because of my weight. what was your favorite park ride as a child? the carousel gnr or aerosmith? ohhh. hmmm... i think aerosmith, but i love gnr too. could you pull off red hair? i have red hair now and it looks great. do you know any guys with their nipples pierced? i think so. favorite beatles song? "hey, jude" have you ever seen a tornado? no. have you ever felt an earthquake? no. do you eat apples with the skin on or skin off? skin on. what is the first thing you do when you get on the computer? open youtube what do you mainly watch on youtube? let's plays do you sing in the shower? no. are you the competitive type? not at all. have you ever stolen someone's boyfriend/girlfriend? unintentionally would you ever consider being a scientist? no. are you scared of cancer? who isn't? do you want to get married? yeah. how many bisexual friends do you have? two, off the top of my head. would you get married four times? well first of all, i'm against divorce unless you're in an abusive/neglectful/overall horrible situation, so. are you good at chemistry? no. do you have online friends? yep. do you like your handwriting? i do. have you ever been called emo? yeah. describe your favorite shoes: i have this pair of slip-ons that is a black cat design with sunglasses lol do you like zombie movies? no opinion. have you ever volunteered in a hospital? if not, would you ever want to? no to both. have you ever had to give a pet away? yes. what kind of wild animals do you see most frequently where you live? squirrels, i gues? besides birds? if a stranger went in your room, would they be able to tell what gender you are from just looking at it? no. i actually think a lot of people would think i was a guy. well... that is if you exclude my huge meerkat display lmao does the smell of cigarettes, weed and beer repulse you? yes to all. do you like sitting on the inside or outside of a restaurant booth? inside. i feel safer. do you own a nightgown? no. have you ever made a tent out of sheets in your bedroom? ha ha yeah. have you ever had sex or something like it? something like it, yeah, but not actual sex. have you ever worn fishnets? fishnet gloves, yes. do you always wear your seat belt? always. is there ice cream in your freezer? i wish. does your bathroom have a window? a small one. do you go somewhere to get your eyebrows done? yes. a family friend's salon. do you have a fish tank? no. if you found out you couldn’t have kids, would you adopt? finding out i couldn't have kids would honestly be relieving. i don't want kids, so i obviously wouldn't adopt, either. do bunnies roam around your backyard at night? yes, actually.

#survey #quiz #questions #asks #answered

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