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black-mesa-slut-voice · 4 years

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THE ERRANTEL

[ More info below the cut! ]

Due to popular demand, I finally made a ref sheet for the species my Swap Benrey’s belongs to- the Errantel.

Their name, originally, had no human translation, since they are not from Earth. Benrey himself describes it as loosely translating to “Unkillable hobo”, though Tommy thought it was too long, and seemed... rude, almost. So, with the help of his friend Forzen, they came up with the term Errantel; a combination of the words for “immortal wanderer” in french.

Biologically, Errentel are very interesting species, as they’ve earned their reputation for being “unkillable”. They’re essentially the equivalent of giant, interdimensional tardigrades. They can withstand nearly all conditions- the vacuum of space, temperatures hot enough to usually make things combust, and temperatures nearing true zero. This grants them safety when they manage to worm their way through dimensions and travel to different planets that might be otherwise inhabitable.

Not only that, but they are also proficient at rudimentary “shapeshifting”- they can compress and expand the mass of their form, ranging from very very small to extremely large; rivaling skyscrapers. Their average size is normally a healthy in between- the size of a two-story house (the size that Benrey took during the final battle).

They can also shift the amount of limbs, mouths, eyes, and other features they possess, with some restrictions mentioned above. This allows Benrey to take an arguably very humanlike form to better fit in with his coworkers. Their diet is extremely varied. Their near unkillable state and rapid healing is because of their physiology. In short- their body is made of completely different things than ours, so they need a wide range of nutrients and minerals to stay healthy and unkillable. This is what causes the most competition amongst them- sometimes even eating other Errantels for the specific nutrients in their bodies.

Socially, they’re sapient; generally human-level intelligence, sometimes slightly above (mostly due to their outstanding lifespans). How they are seen, however, varies wildly between dimensions, planets, species and societies. In some places, they’re considered normal people. They could, arguably, wander into a space McDonald’s and get a job, and be treated as a normal person. In other places, they’re considered wild beasts, to be avoided or even hunted for sport.

Amongst their own species, they’re pretty extreme. Honestly, because of their extreme lifespans and nearly unkillable status, the only thing keeping their population in check is... well, their own species, and the fact that they’re so widespread.

When an Errantel meets another (or honestly, any species they see as ‘equals’), they see them as competition. Rivals, in a sense. One of the few things that can truly threaten them. And so, their main goal is to remove that competition by any means necessary. This can go one of three ways:

Put enough distance between them that they don’t have to compete. This is pretty easily done, considering they can worm through dimensions and travel through the void of space to reach entirely new planets.

Kill each other. Errantels are, unfortunately, highly cannibalistic. The can and will eat other Errantels if they see them as threats, or even as weaker. Some of them will even eat their eggs and young in times of duress or if they simply don’t want to have any at the moment.

Become partners. And I don’t put that lightly- Errantel ‘partnerships’ are almost complete codependency; putting their full trust, safety, heart and soul into each other. They’ll trust each other with their lives, share their food, young- and even other partners. It’s not unusual to have a group of 2-5 Errantels all in a polyamorous partnership. This eliminates the competition and threat of death through a much more friendly way.

So, a meeting between two Errantels usually starts as a long winded display at a distance, dancing around each other and judging whether or not they’re going to partner up, fight, or flee. There are no half-measures among them- you will almost never see two Errantel hanging out together for fun. Though, of course, in a social situation, most of them can behave long enough to share a space in a formal environment (think about having to go to a meeting with your ex. Sure, you don’t like it and there’s tension, but you put up with it for formalities).

When communicating, Errantels use a communication system composed of a high-dense light, sound, and color they can expel from their mouth, which can help communicate emotions both visually and sensually (”Sweet voice”). My guide for Sweet Voice is the same one I use for the Errantels. They’re very intelligent, however, and commonly learn other languages as well.

When it comes to reproducing, Errantel can go two ways. They can reproduce both sexually and asexually! All Errantels have both bits, so any Errantell can reproduce with another. When done sexually, it’s pretty much only ever with those they’ve partnered with- there’s very little ‘infidelity’ amongst partnerships, or even one night stands for single Errantels. The children produced are just like humans in where they can have features of both parents, though other mutations are pretty common.

When done asexually, it is something they can choose to do if they want a child but either don’t have any partners, or their partner can’t reproduce for some reason. Young produced this way are usually very similar to the parent- if not identical- but not always! Due to variations in DNA and self-alteration of sexual cells, as well as mutations, asexually produced young are usually slightly-off versions of the parent. Joshua, for example, was created this way- he’s almost identical to Benrey in every way except for a slightly different skin tone, and different colored eyes.

Also, because they don’t differ at all between what’s in their pants and travel so many dimensions, Errantel have little care for gender or how they’re perceived. Most will go by whatever neutral pronouns a language has, or will simply use any pronoun- though of course, some do enjoy being gendered and are free to do so.

Errantels also lay eggs. They’re usually in batches of 1-3; any larger and you risk the parents eating the extras to save resources. They’re usually the size of chicken eggs, and Errantel will often shift down smaller during this to hide away and go unnoticed.

A freshly hatched Errantel simply looks like a very small adult- except for the fact that their ‘fur’ is white instead of black, and they’re usually much more covered in it. As they become juveniles, their white fur quickly starts molting away into the signature black color.

Once their fur is molted into being fully black, they’re technically able to survive on their own. However, good parents often keep them around much longer than this, until they’ve reached full and true maturity. Once they’re old enough, they usually voluntarily leave to go find their own territories and partnerships!

Errantels can continue to breed throughout their whole lifetimes, and so their territory will often be surrounded by the territories of their children- and so each child reared often has farther and farther to travel to reach an uninhabited space. This can be quite dangerous, but most make it. And thus, the whole cycle starts again!

FAQ

So this is what your Benrey is? Sort of. Mainly just my Swap AU Benrey and Joshua- my other Benreys are all completely different, really.

What the fuck is your Swap AU? It’s my Roleswap AU for HLVRAI. Benrey is the scientist and Gordon is the guard, etc etc. You can find out more about it here, and this is the tag I have for it on my tumblr!

Can I make an OC of this species? Fuck yeah! Go nuts, dude! The only thing I ask of you is that 1) You give credit if anyone asks what they are, and 2) send them to me! I’d love to see them!

If I do make an OC/Use this species, does it have to be HLVRAI? Nope. Because they travel dimensions, they can arguably appear in any media- if you want you can use them for anything. Original universes, other fandoms, other AUs of any sort, etc etc! Same rules apply as above- credit, and I’d like to see them!

Can they be albino/melanistic/piebald? I’m gonna say yes because it’s cool as hell. Love that shit.

My question isn’t answered here! Help??? I have an ask box and you are 100% welcome to use it! I’d love to talk more about these guys and anything I didn’t cover.

#my art #swap au #xenobiology #...fuck it.#hlvrai #ask to tag #potentiallly #eye horror #?#ok to rb!#errantels

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theclockworkmonk · 3 years

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Desire and Will

This is the most popular fic in my "Aang/Katara Missing Moments" series on AO3. This is the first time I'm posting it to tumblr.

Summary: With Aang still having trouble letting loose with his firebending, Zuko asks an alarming question:

"Have you ever kissed a girl?"

Words: 3,944

Read on AO3

FF.net

*******

Katara was awoken by what was, to her, the scariest sound in the world: the sound of Aang in pain.

"OW!" she heard him cry out, and she wrenched her eyelids open and rolled to face where his voice was coming from. There, she saw Aang still laying on the ground where he had been sleeping, rubbing his backside like it had been kicked. Towering over him, fists clenched and face scowling...was Zuko.

A jolt a fear cut through Katara's still half-asleep mind as she reached over for her bending skin and flicked it open with her thumb. She was ready to fight, ready to—

"You're burning daylight!" Zuko barked at Aang, "Get up! Twenty hot squats, now!"

Katara's sleep fog finally cleared and she remembered why Zuko was here in their camp. She remembered their whole reluctant arrangement to have Zuko teach Aang firebending, and the nerve-wracking few days they had disappeared together and apparently danced with dragons.

Katara groggily collapsed back onto her pillow, too tired to even growl at Zuko that the rest of them didn't have to train to defeat his evil dad, thankyouverymuch, so maybe bark his orders more quietly at absurd hours in the morning.

Aang seemed to be feeling the same way, because he just moaned in response. Zuko squatted down next to Aang and pointed out into the canyon that contained the Western Air Temple, where the sky was already turning blood red.

"You see that? That's sunrise, Avatar. That's the sign of a firebender's inner strength coming to life with a new day." He grabbed Aang by the shoulder and started shaking him, "Can you feel it, Aang? Can you feel your inner fire starting to reignite?"

"No," grunted Aang plainly.

Katara was remembering more now, and becoming more annoyed. Right, what had Zuko said to her at the north pole? "You rise with the moon, I rise with the sun?" of course it made perfect sense that on top of being cruel, bloodthirsty monsters, firebenders were also something far worse: morning people. Ugh, did this mean that Aang was also going to be a morning person from now on?

"Well we've got to fix that," said Zuko, and he practically dragged Aang to his feet and started pushing him off towards the courtyard that they used to train, that jutted out from underneath the rock overhang so they were actually in the sun. With their sleeping area quiet again, Katara tried to go back to sleep, but now the knowledge that Aang was off with Zuko, alone, at the other end of the temple was nagging at her brain. It wasn't like she thought Zuko would suddenly attack him or something; she had accepted by now that this wasn't some kind of absurdly elaborate plot against them—mainly because she didn't think Zuko was clever enough to pull off something like that. But still, whenever she thought about Aang with no one around him but Zuko, she found that she...didn't like it.

After a few minutes, she accepted that she wasn't getting any more sleep, so she got herself up and started making her way in the same direction Zuko and Aang had gone. As she was rounding the last corner before the courtyard, she started to hear their voices.

"So if my firebending wakes me up with the sun, and my waterbending keeps me up with the moon, when exactly am I supposed to sleep?"

"You slept for a hundred years, isn't that enough?"

Aang laughed, but Katara recognized it as his uncomfortable laugh. Aang never liked being reminded of all that time he wasn't there for the world, which Zuko would know if he wasn't such a heartless jerk and a terrible teacher. The fact that he barely knew Aang and had no way of knowing what he was uncomfortable with was entirely beside the point.

Katara decided to not announce her presence and instead leaned against one of the stone pillars within the shade of the overhang, while they were out in the increasingly bright morning sun. She was far enough away and in enough shade that they were unlikely to notice her, but if they did happen to look her way then she could plausibly deny she was snooping. She didn't like the idea of leaving Aang alone with Zuko, but she still realized hovering would interfere with them. Aang was always trying to impress her and Zuko was still visibly terrified of her ever since she threatened to kill him the day he joined their team (which she definitely didn't take any pride in).

Aang and Zuko finished their warm-ups and faced a target at the far end of the courtyard, a few wooden logs they had haphazardly nailed together in the vague shape of a human.

"Okay, let's see if that trip to almost get eaten by dragons was worth it," said Zuko, "set your stance..."

Aang positioned himself in a sideways battle stance in opposition to the dummy.

"Now, control your breathing…"

Aang drew in a deep breath and slowly released it.

"Now…STRIKE!"

Aang punched his right first towards the dummy, and a single fireball erupted from his knuckles, traveling about 10 yards to the dummy, briefly engulfing it in flames before dissipating. After the fire and smoke had quickly cleared, Katara saw that the dummy was slightly singed, with a few spots glowing orange for a few seconds before cooling down. Katara could feel the heat of the blast from where she was standing.

Zuko, however, didn't look impressed, "Well that was...certainly better, I guess."

"You guess!?" Aang incredulously asked out loud, and Katara incredulously asked in her head at the same time, "Come on, that was the biggest blast I've ever made!"

"Yeah, and if you were any other novice, we'd call that a really promising start. Heck, you might even be called a prodigy. People would be saying you could become a master in just a few years."

Aang's shoulders slumped in disappointment.

"But we don't have a few years, obviously, so sorry, but we need to find a way to fast-track this."

Aang threw his hands in the air, "Well what more can I possibly do!"

Zuko frowned and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, "Well to be honest, I think you're still being too timid and restrained. You're certainly doing a lot better than before our trip, but I still sense a lot of energy in you that you're not letting out."

Aang looked confused and started to get defensive, "Well of course I'm holding a little back, I'm trying to stay in control! Jong Jong said that firebending requires constant discipline or fire will destroy you. He didn't even let me shoot fire, he had me try to stop a bit of fire from growing, and when I didn't listen to him—" Aang managed to cut off his own rambling and managed to take a deep breath and closed his eyes, "that was when I burned Katara."

Zuko's face cycled through several different expressions as a lot of things suddenly started making sense.

"...Oh," was the only thing he could say.

Aang continued, "I hated that version of myself, even more than when I've gone into the Avatar State. After that, I promised myself I would never firebend at all!"

Katara tried to keep track of all the different emotions she was feeling. She was touched by the fact that Aang cared about her so much that the memory of hurting her still got him to be this upset, annoyed at him for being this worked up over something that happened months ago, she had long since forgiven, and was really not important in the context of their mission, and guilty that her getting hurt and the way she reacted had caused him this much heartache, even while she knew that she hadn't really done anything wrong.

Zuko sighed, raised his hand, and after a few seconds of hesitation, lightly patted Aang's shoulder in the most awkward, panicked "there-there" gesture Katara had ever seen.

"Look Aang," said Zuko, "I can't speak to what this 'Jong Jong' guy taught you. Maybe his way is better, I don't know, but it sounds like it takes a lot longer, and we don't have the luxury of being patient and deliberate about this."

He pulled on Aang's shoulder and turned him around so he would stop looking at his feet in self-pity and look his teacher in the face again, "The people of the world don't need their Avatar to be a wizened sage right now, they need a stick of dynamite."

Zuko took a few steps away and tried his best to pretend to be a wizened sage himself, "I can only teach you how I was taught, and I was taught that even when it's not fuelled by anger and rage, all firebending is still fuelled by strong emotion. When teaching me about the elements, my uncle said—let's see if I can get this right…"

He started rubbing his hand on an invisible large belly, stroking an invisible beard, and speaking in an old man's raspy voice in his best impersonation of his uncle.

"Fire is the element of Power. The people of the Fire Nation have Desire and Will, and the energy and drive to achieve what they want."

Aang chuckled at the impression, his mood clearly improving, while Zuko looked really impressed with himself. Katara wouldn't have been surprised to learn that this was the first time in his life the dour prince had made someone laugh.

"See what I mean? Remember what we learned with the dragons. Fire is Life. And passion for life is what fuels firebending. You need to stop thinking like a monk and use your passion."

Aang didn't look frustrated or dejected anymore, but he did look puzzled.

"Um...okay," Aang said, thoughtfully scratching his head, "How am I supposed to do that?"

Now it was Zuko's turn to get frustrated. He hadn't anticipated one of his jobs as a teacher being having to explain how to feel things to this guy. That was something he was not qualified for.

"I don't know," said Zuko, not hiding the annoyance in his voice, "just think about it. Try to recreate those emotions when you're channeling your energy for your bending, and it might make your firebending more powerful. Hasn't there ever been something you...desired? Coveted, even? Something that you needed to have or to win more than anything?"

Katara almost laughed out loud, boy are you barking up the wrong tree.

Aang spent a few seconds earnestly considering Zuko's question, "I don't think so. My people believed that worldly material possessions were meaningless, and attachment to them was the source of suffering. We didn't really have anything beyond what we needed and a few toys that we shared. I played games with all my friends, but I didn't really care much if I won, I just tried to make sure everybody had fun."

Katara was grinning at what an unbelievable dork the mighty savior of the world was.

Zuko, however, groaned and dragged both hands down his face, "Yeah, of course you did." It seemed to Katara that this was the first time Zuko was having to relate to someone who was actually a good person.

Aang just shrugged at Zuko's exasperation, "Sorry, hotman."

"Stop calling me that!" Zuko thought for several more seconds before his eyes lit up and he snapped his fingers with an idea, but then immediately looked like he regretted having the idea, and started looking deeply uncomfortable.

"Hey...can I ask you a personal question? It's going to sound weird and unrelated, but just trust me, okay?"

Aang raised an eyebrow, "Uh….sure?"

"Have you ever kissed a girl?"

Aang's eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, his face turning bright pink, and Katara's heart seemed to stop in its tracks.

After what seemed like an eternity, Aang finally found his voice again, but all he could manage was a weak, "Uh...what?"

"Just bear with me for a second," pressed Zuko.

"Um," Aang squeaked, "Yes. Yes I have." and his face moved past pink into deep scarlet.

"Okay," breathed Zuko, "Now, I know I'm sounding like a gossiping school girl, but I promise I'm going somewhere with this. Ugh."

He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, like this conversation was physically painful. "Tell me about your first kiss," he finished in a too-deep voice, very transparently overcompensating.

Katara was positively screaming inside her own head, No Aang, do not, under ANY circumstances, tell him about your first kiss.

She felt like her heart and stomach had completely removed from her body. She refused to believe that these were the circumstances where The Incident between she and Aang was finally getting verbalized. Aang hadn't even bothered to talk to her about it yet, there was no way he was going to spill it all to Zuko. The fact that the main reason Aang hadn't talked to her about it was the fact that she had been avoiding him non-stop was entirely beside the point.

Katara started running through a hundred scenarios to try to find some way to stop this conversation. Should she rush in and pretend to be sick? Say that they're under attack? Just stay hidden and bloodbend them both unconscious? But before she could decide on one, to her horror, Aang started talking.

"Well," Aang began, his cheeks still red, "it was back at the Southern Air Temple—"

All of Katara's panic seemed to instantly vanish and be replaced with confusion.

Wait, what? Why is he telling him that? Katara thought, We barely knew each other at the Southern Temple….Does he THINK we kissed at the Southern Temple? I guess that would explain a lot. Did he hallucinate or something while in the Avatar State—

"—and she was part of a visiting caravan."

….Oh.

Oh.

"We got along really well while she was there, she was really good at all of my favorite games, and while we were saying goodbye she just kissed me."

OH.

"By the time I realized what was going on, she just giggled and jumped up on her bison."

Katara was simultaneously feeling unbelievable relief that her big secret wasn't being talked about and unbelievable white-hot fury at Aang. She had just spent several weeks believing that her first kiss had also been Aang's, and now she finds out that she's just the latest? Latest of how many? Exactly how friendly had he gotten with those fangirls on Kyoshi Island? She was two years older than him, by all rights she should be on at least equal footing with him in this mess between them, who gave him permission to have more experience with kissing than her? The fact that he had never once told her that he had never kissed a girl before was entirely beside the point.

But Katara cycled through all these thoughts in just a split second before calming herself down and realizing that she had no reason to care about this. What did it matter if Aang had kissed some girl a hundred years ago? It's not like she thought of Aang that way. Aang had clearly just misunderstood her platonic affections. It's not like she had ever seriously thought about kissing him (especially not during some of the more recent times she had kissed him on the cheek). In fact, she doubted that even he had given any serious thought to kissing. He just had a little crush and the intensity of the moment got to his head. So this is fine.

It's fine.

Seriously, it's fine.

It's completely fine. Whatever she was feeling certainly wasn't jeal—

"Wait, she kissed you?" Zuko interrupted Aang's rambling and yanked Katara back to reality, "I asked you if you had ever kissed a girl."

"Well you also asked me to tell you about my first kiss!" Aang yelled with his hands in the air, frustrated again, "Which one is it!" He was clearly angry that in his panic he had revealed an embarrassing story for no reason.

Zuko put his palms up defensively, "Okay, okay, sorry, bad wording on my part. So, to clarify: have you ever kissed someone else? Have you ever been the one to take the initiative?"

Katara's heart started racing again. Why couldn't Zuko get distracted and drop this?

"Um…" Aang's face had been red before, but now all the color seemed to drain from it and he looked like a ghost, "...yes. But I don't think dwelling on that will help fix my problem. In fact, it's kind of a downer, actually."

"Why, was she an airbender too?" Zuko asked. He supposed dwelling on a girl he had feelings for that had been killed a hundred years ago would be counterproductive in fueling Aang's inner fire.

Despite how angry she had gotten at Aang's kissing experience, Katara now found herself hoping this girl was another airbender.

"No," Aang responded, rubbing the back of his neck, "this was after I came out of the ice. Pretty recent, in fact…"

No such luck.

"Okay, so what's the problem?" asked Zuko.

"Well...it didn't exactly work out well for me. She didn't really kiss me back."

Katara scowled, well that's not fair, she thought with more than a little bitterness. It's not like she had a chance to. You're not allowed to act upset if someone doesn't kiss you back when you spring a kiss on them with no warning and then fly away before they even know what's going on. If he hadn't been so dramatic and used his actual words then she would have—

Katara let out a gasp of fear at where her train of thought was leading her. She would have….what, exactly? If she had known the kiss was coming ahead of time, what would she have done? Let him down easy? Told him to focus on the mission? Thrown him into the ocean?...or would she have kissed him back?

No.

Well…

Certainly not.

Maybe?

Perhaps if they tried again wow where did THAT thought come from?

Meanwhile, back in reality, Zuko was waving away Aang's concerns, "That doesn't matter. Don't think about anything that happened afterward. Just bring yourself back to that one moment, where you overcame caution and went after what you wanted. Set your stance."

Aang faced the dummy and resumed his fighting stance.

Katara couldn't help but inch a little closer away from her "hiding" spot. Now that Zuko had stopped pressing Aang for details and was doing his job, she felt like she could observe with a nervous curiosity instead of outright panic.

"Now," instructed Zuko, "take a deep breath, close your eyes, and picture this girl, how she looked in that moment."

Aang's eyes closed and drew in a breath.

Katara swallowed hard. At this moment, there was no more uncertainty about Aang. He was thinking about her, in that way, right now. And that knowledge made her hold her breath and made her face get a little warm.

"Try to remember how you felt immediately beforehand. How she made you feel. Try to recreate how your heartbeat was affected. It's starting to get faster and harder. How your breathing changed—remember, it's your breath that creates energy in the body for firebending. Yours is getting shallower and more intense. Remember how your stomach muscles reacted. They're tensing in anticipation. Now, in your mind's eye, make your move and kiss her, and at the same time….STRIKE!"

Aang punched his right fist towards the dummy, and his hand exploded.

There was no whoosh like with the previous fireball, but a roar as a conical wave of fire erupted from Aang's knuckles, completely enveloping the dummy 10 yards away and continuing onward to blast past the outer railing of the stone courtyard into the vast expanse of the canyon. And to Katara's alarm, it kept going. It wasn't a single blast but a continuous, monstrous stream of fire easily 15 feet wide at its biggest and so hot that Katara had to turn away and shield her eyes.

Several seconds later, the flames finally died down and Aang blinked his eyes open, looking equal parts proud and terrified of himself. The wooden dummy….did not exist anymore. There was no way to tell if Aang had burned it to ashes or simply blasted it backwards into the canyon. The previously white stones that made up the part of the courtyard that had been in front of Aang were now blackened and cracked.

Zuko had reflexively thrown up his arms to shield his face, stumbling backward. He was still sitting on the ground, eyes widened to the size of Appa's, and his mouth hanging open in shock. He sat there for several more silent seconds until Aang gave an awkward cough, then his face split into the biggest grin Katara had ever seen on him and he started cackling with delirious relief and excitement.

"All right!" Zuko exclaimed, jumping to his feet, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" he loudly clapped his hand on Aang's back, who had returned to looking embarrassed.

"No, don't you clam up again," warned Zuko, "hold onto that feeling. Come on, I'll show you how to make a flame whip."

Katara slinked backward away from her pillar and began a very undignified scurry back to their sleeping area. The fire had long since dissipated, but her face still felt hot and flustered, and her stomach felt like it was doing somersaults. Her mind was filled up by the same three words, repeating over and over again:

I did that.

Thinking about her made Aang able to do that. She could no longer simplify things by telling herself that this was just a confusing crush he had let get to his head. For most of the time she had known Aang, the thought that he would have any….desires like that for anyone simply didn't compute for her. He was too selfless, too kind, too pure. He was a monk for crying out loud.

But what she just saw Zuko coax out of her sweet, innocent friend was….not pure. Had he had this inside of him the entire time? And what brought this out of him was thinking about her. Thinking about kissing her. As much as she tried to deny it, when she thought about this power she had over him….she liked it. She was now able to see Aang in a new light, and at least consider the possibility of being more than friends with him.

But she still fought against it, because that realization was absolutely terrifying.

Katara shook her head and splashed some of her bending water on her face. She resolved to keep doing what she had been doing: focusing on their mission. She could sort out all this confusion when the war was over.

Although….

If the goal was to help Aang defeat the Fire Lord and end the war, then naturally they all had an obligation to assist Aang with his bending in any way they could, right? So she supposed it couldn't hurt to give Aang the occasional extra-tight hug now and then. Purely for training purposes, of course.

After all, she thought with a slight smirk as she arrived back at camp, everyone else still sound asleep, what kind of teacher would I be if I didn't give my student the attention he needed?

#kataang #aang x katara #katara and aang #avatar aang #aang #katara #zuko #avatar #avatar: the last airbender #avatar: tla #atla #atla fanfic #missing scene #one shot #feelings #tsundere #avatar fanfiction

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propalahramota · 4 years

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Today I`ve stumbled upon this tweet:

which made me realize that not a lot of people actually know the sad but fascinating story of Carol of the Bells.

So listen up, kidz.

First of all, Carol of the Bells isn`t really called Carol of the Bells, and it`s not really a Christmas carol, and it`s also much older than most Christmas carols, like most likely pre-Christianity.

Carol of the Bells, or at least its original version (well one of the original versions), is an ancient Ukrainian pagan chant called Shchedryk. It`s a shchedrivka which means it was traditionally sung on the night of the Shchedry Vechir (Bountiful Evening), January 13. Although some historians argue that it was originally associated with the celebration of the pagan New Year which would be in April. But now in Ukraine, it`s more of a go-to Christmas song. Bountiful Evening, however, is a very old Ukrainian holiday of the winter cycle which is believed to be a remnant of the old pagan traditions later combined with Christmas and Saint Mykolay`s Day (Ukrainian st.Nicholas) in one happy Christmas bundle.

That`s why the original lyrics of Shchedryk have fuck all to do with Christmas. It`s about a little bird flying over to some dude`s house and praising him and wishing him to continue to be awesome in the following year:

Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka A little swallow flew and started to twitter, to summon the master: "Come out, come out, O master look at the sheep pen, there the ewes have yeaned and the lambkins have been born Your goods are great, you will have a lot of money, If not money, then chaff: you have a dark-eyebrowed [beautiful] wife. Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka, A little swallow flew.

Also, yeah, we, Ukrainians, kinda have a thing about brown eyes and dark bold eyebrows, so to every person with dark eyes reading this: if you have ever been led to believe that your eye color is plain and not romantic, check out Ukrainian folklore.

So, you probably think: “Gee, how did this weird Ukrainian pagan song has become Carol of the Bells?”

Well, meet the man responsible for the job!

Mykola Leontovych!

Born in 1877 in Monastyrok village, in Podolia (Поділля), which is a historical region in the south-western part of Ukraine, Leontovych was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, and a folklorist. According to the story, during one Christmas season somewhere between 1905-1909 he went to visit his parents for the holidays and heard the locals singing Shchedryk. At the time, Leontovych had already started his lifelong work of collecting and preserving traditional Ukrainian songs. Naturally, he was captivated by the haunting melody and in the following years, he wrote a version of Shchedryk for a choir.

In 1914 his best friend, also a composer, Kyrylo Stetsenko finally convinced Leontovych to show his renditions of the folk songs to Oleksandr Koshyts who was a pretty cool guy actually. He also collected folk songs, he made a lot of effort to help popularize Ukrainian music and Ukrainian culture in the world, he conducted the first mixed choir of Kyiv University when women had been finally allowed to attend (which is also where I got my Bachelor`s degree, hey!) as well as the choir for the local school for the blind.

Koshyts was completely enchanted with Leontovych`s work and asked for permission to let the university choir perform his renditions. On 26 December in 1916 Shchedryk was performed on stage in Kyiv, modern capital of Ukraine and back then one of the cultural centers of the Russian Empire. It was a huge success. It basically made Leontovych famous overnight and started his career in Kyiv.

In 1922 Koshyts went on tour to the United States and Canada with his new choir. He never went back home settling in Canada instead. They had left independent Ukraine and at the end of their tour in 1926, it had already become a part of the Soviet Union. However, before that, the choir had performed Shchedryk for the New York audience in 1922. This was the first time Carol of the Bells was heard in America.

In 1936 a Ukrainian-American composer Peter (Petro) J. Wilhousky wrote English lyrics for the song for NBC radio creating the name - Carol of the Bells. And then John Williams made it super popular by using the melody for his Home Alone soundtrack. He received an Oscar nomination and he`s never acknowledged any of the people mentioned above.

As for Leontovych, his story ended strangely and tragically. For years the circumstances of his death were covered in mystery and his name and his work have been forgotten.

A few days after Bountiful Evening of the year 1921 Leontovych and his family were staying at his parents` house where he had first heard Shchedryk many years ago. A stranger came to their door. He asked to stay the night. It would be considered disrespectful to turn a guest away during the holiday season so Leontovych invited him in. At dawn, he shot the composer and let him bled to death while he was robbing the house. The true motive was uncovered only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A declassified document shows that the murderer was a Soviet agent, a Chekist. Most historians believe that Leontovych was killed out of suspicion that he could flee the country like Koshyts but he was too popular at the time to just arrest him. So they decided to assassinate the composer quietly instead.

Sorry for such a bummer ending for this Christmas story but I`m not finished making you sad yet.

Ok, this part is actually more for the Ukrainian Tumblr as we are the only ones who can do something with this information. The very house where Carol of the Bells was born now lies in ruin. Completely neglected and forgotten during the period of the Soviet Union, Leontovych`s house remained to be ignored even after Independence. It was dragged into some petty land dispute and even pronounced “fake” by the local bureaucrats who want to destroy it. It continues to slowly fall apart today.

What can we do to stop this? Well, not much, really, but we can spread the information! Not enough people know about this place and how important it is. Also, you can follow these guys. They seek out abandoned cultural landmarks including Leontovych`s house, map them out, spread awareness and soon they are even planning to start a big crowdfunding campaign to restore at least some of them. So you can watch out for the start.

As Mykola Leontovych once said, “we need to show how these dreams touch lives”.

Thank you for reading all this. At least now you have a cool weird story to tell at your next holiday party.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

youtube

#long post #carol of the bells #christmas #Mykola Leontovych #Ukraine #Ukrainian history #Shchedryk #christmas carol

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theyearsiturnedintoaghost · 3 years

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Hello, Is This Thing On?

Hi! (as mentioned above). Do people still use this thing? I have no idea. Years ago, and I do mean YEARS ago, I had one of these. I didn’t use it for much, just reposting things, following humans I’d met in online communities, a ‘celebrity’ here or there, sometimes screaming about shit I couldn’t control into the void that is the endless scrolling interweb, and being pointless in wasting my time between classes, work, and twenty-something. Regardless, my previous tumblr had minimal followers, made minimal impact, and that was okay. It was honestly just a nice place to sort of hide in plain sight. Still be part of a social world without actually having to do much. This was also pre a billion other apps and social media outlets to express yourself or scroll mindlessly at a million other pointless things that people were posting to make you giggle or even just stop for a second and think.

Clearly, the point of this, back then, felt like something I would use to help propel my writing career. Turns out, it did not. I did not write much, if at all. And most of the time I think it was because I was scared nothing was as good as any of the other stuff I was reading from people I liked, and thought were so much cooler and smarter than me; I still feel this way all of the time, but I do realize this was me being nervous, small minded about myself, and completely unconfident.

Unfortunately, I am still most of these things a lot of the time, but recently, after getting fired from a job, having my heart broken by pretty much everyone on the planet, especially a few specific people, cancelled by all of my friends (?) - this is a thing btw. (It’s not as awful as being cancelled publicly, but it does still ruin your life, mindset, confidence, and overall physical and mental wellbeing) Getting a new job, hating it and feeling like I was going no where, and missing out on living a life I felt proud of and that I was actively participating in, I decided maybe I should just try to write it all out and see what happens.

To be frank, I expect nothing of this. I can’t fathom a world where anything I have to say truly matters to people because lets be real - everyone has this own shit and everyone is going through so much all of the time. And we all think we have something new, quirky, interesting, and important to say. And in a world that constantly shoves perfection down our throats and works so hard to make each of us feel completely inadequate to every Kardashian, Beyonce, Grande, etc., it’s hard to really think that anything I have to say will matter to anyone; at all.

(I also hate that all of my ‘perfectionist’ people were female, but maybe it’s harder to compare to Golden Boys when you are a female. Either way, there are many boys/men/theys/thems that are put on a pedestal and made out to be perfect out there, as well, and they deserve that notation as well. I just have no points of reference off the top of my head, so please forgive me; I am trying to do this in a stream of consciousness type thing.)

I mean, the truth is, I’m a fucking mess. I’m 33, single, living at home, afraid of my own shadow most of the time, and spend about 98% of my time alone. I pay for a phone plan that I literally only use to send memes to my two sisters, and that’s about it. I rarely receive texts, invites out, or even calls to make plans for something. And while a lot of this is my own doing - again, I did cut off most of the world after I realized I was sort of the joke to a lot of people - it’s still kind of pathetic, and entirely uncool. I am not a socialite, or someone cool and trendy, and to be honest, I kind of never want to be.

Which is a semi-false statement, because years ago, when I had one of these previously, I sort of hoped it would work out and that I could write and be ‘cool.’ Whatever the fuck that means. But now, years later, I’m honestly beyond glad I am not cool; not in the slightest. Maybe that’s making it to your 30s? Maybe the trade for having to create a daily routine of lathering up my body with like 9 different versions of FDA-Approved-Vampire-Juice on my skin to prevent me from looking any older than I already do, you in turn get to have a brain that finally realizes... having a ‘normal’ life is honestly pretty cool? Normal is clearly subjective here as everyone is normal, famous, notoriety, or not; They’re all still humans and people with feelings, thoughts, and emotions. This is a hard thing to realize when you see stadiums full of people screaming at Harry Styles (Boom! found a male perfect in this scatterbrain) or hundreds of paparazzi lined up to take photos of every person on a red carpet wearing clothing that costs as much as my student loan debt (Which sidenote, is VERYYYYYY much). It’s hard to fully realize that maybe some of those people who became ‘icons’ never really knew what they were getting into when they signed that deal with the Devil to make them seemingly immortal; especially in a world with the internet where everything can exist forever (or until the world explodes, clearly). But maybe getting into my 30s and removing myself from most social media outlets, even listening to the news, or caring about whatever fucking popular haircut was in this season (it’s always bangs, and I’ve already made that mistake. No thanks), that I learned to realize - the truly most important people in your life are the ones that stick with you when it’s tough. When getting out of bed is so hard your limbs ache and you cry every morning on your way to work, at your desk behind your computer screen hidden in a corner, or in a bathroom stall during your lunch break. The normalcy that comes with realizing your prayers to ‘just make it to five o’clock,’ are heard and that you are just so thankful for that that you don’t even desire the innate feeling in most of our egos to stand out, be seen, ‘Make it’ in a way that lets people notice we ‘succeeded.’ Maybe this only comes with the realization of how nice it is to go to a grocery store braless and unnoticed.

Maybe this is also something I, and so many of us in this point and shoot viral world, are trying to still learn.

Sure, a lot of days I still crave being able to make a perfect Pintrest project, practice my Late Night interview with Letterman where I sound funny, charming, and likeable to all walks of life, or recreate a recipe from the New York Times website so great that The Barefoot Contessa finds out through word of mouth, and comes to my basement hide out, and offers to give me, a fellow barefoot loving bitch, her title and crown along with a glass of wine and a kiss from her husband, Jeffery. We’ll both laugh at how lovely it feels to be Barefoot ladies who understand that wanting ‘fame’ or ‘recognition’ in your twenties is only really a pathway to destruction by your 30s.

And this is not exactly something that I learned easy. In fact, I spent most of my twenties destroying my body with drugs - plenty of hard ones - and alcohol - various kinds of the same things - in order to numb my brain from the sadness that is just... being young, lonely, scared, unsure of yourself, and nervous that all of your hopes and expectations for yourself in your ‘dream life’ are too much for what you and your actual self will ever be capable of ever becoming. That I would never become the comedian I dreamed of being, or sing the perfect song in front of a crowd of admirers, or write that best selling book to tell everyone who thought I was nothing they could go fuck themselves. It’s something I still have to remind myself, and my brain and ego, that are most likely things I will never do because those are lottery dreams. And people you know don’t actually win the lottery. And at the end of the day, I am people you know. And sometimes it breaks my own heart to realize I may never feel that rush of making a crowd laugh, or creating a piece of art that makes someone feel seen, but as Pam, from The Office said, and I am paraphrasing, ‘there is beauty in ordinary things.’ And I think reminding myself of that as I sat on the beach this summer and watched a dad teach his son to surf, and how happy they both were when he got up, gave me that brief feeling of... being okay. I won’t lie, I did cry a little at this realization at that moment, and I am slightly teary now as I write it, but I think I’m not ashamed of that because being normal means I get to feel things as I do, in that moment, and that is something I think I lacked in my desiring-bigger-flashier- twenties; actually being present in the world and your place in it. Even if that is just as small as being kind to a random person on the street.

I think that is why everything I felt I wanted to write never came out correct. It never came out ‘Perfect.’ And that was my problem for most of my life, even up until today, I’m afraid that I am a perfectionist in the ways that are preventing me from becoming... me. I’m still fearful that I am too late in ever ‘accomplishing’ anything I ever dreamed. I doubt I will ever actually write a book. I’m unsure I’ll ever make a decent living. I am beyond doubtful I am ever going to be loveable to someone whom I also want to love back. And maybe I’m a little scared that I’ll never have a kid, or that if I do have a kid, I’ll never be a decent parent. And I’m still working on breaking the cycle of thinking something has to ‘sound’ or ‘be seen as important’ to be meaningful. There is beauty in the ordinary. I’ve started to make it my mantra. Spoken in my head every time I see a teenage couple holding hands walking in town, a father holding their baby close to his chest, a woman dressed in a power suit striding through an office building or city on their way to make their own careers or push equality further. I’ve started to dream of how actual normalcy makes the real changes. How every 4th grade teacher has a chance to change some kids life.

Clearly, a lot of these personal fears I have about myself not being ‘enough,’ or doing something good enough to become successful at it and build a life out of it, are monotonous fears and privileged middle-class complaints. I’m aware they may not resonate with anyone, anything, or mean much more than just being an online public diary entry to my own meandering thoughts, but, still - I finally felt like I had to try.

So here it is, the whole truth on how I let myself become a ghost for years.

I hope someone will stick around while I just... try to explain it all, figure it all out, and hopefully make sense out of even being whatever a human who is hoping to grow even means. Hopefully, something here will resonate with someone else and we can create our own little weirdo corner of the world where we’re not seeking more than just trying to be honest with ourselves and what it means to be human. Even if that means just posting a recipe for banana bread (thank you Gwen Steffani for keeping me able to spell Banana), reposting random memes about how we all want to scream for 30 seconds and feel better, or sad-girl diary entry posts about how I ruined my own life a million times over. Oh, and maybe I’ll give you tips on how to stain your wood deck, because I spent my day doing that yesterday and basically, Home Depot is calling me to be in their ADs.

But at the core of it all, lets be very real, it’s hard to be human in so many ways. And I’m just hoping this connects with anyone. Especially any of us who wished we were different - in any way.

xoxo

-K

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saltykong · 4 years

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Hello All! ❁ I hope you have been well and that you have been staying safe~ This is going to be one LONG message, but I hope it reaches you ♥

I started this Tumblr blog in the height of my struggles in life. Not knowing what I wanted to do, failing at what I thought I was meant to do, and even finding myself becoming more lonesome with no way out. That is when KPOP came in. I think it’s safe to say many of us came to KPOP whether we were in a similar internal struggle or even wanted to escape to something that sounded and felt new to what we knew growing up. That is exactly what it was for me. KPOP was used as a means of escape from the troubles I was having. Through those troubles, I met VIXX. These six boys, having a sound like no other. Their concepts, instrumentals, outfits, all of it was always heavily in-tune with their theme, creating some of the most amazing discography, music videos and stages I have ever seen. VIXX aren’t concept kings for nothing. In that, my bias became Hongbin. A sassy, and sometimes blunt but well-meaning individual that was, unfortunately, often ignored by his company on his musical talents. Instead he was placed in the box of, “visuals.” This isn’t a bad thing but to him, he wanted to be more than just a “face.” He was also the least popular and most ignored member when I joined the fandom. But he didn’t let this stop him and continually pushed to be seen. It was this determination and drive that I wanted to support. Hongbin was the underdog and in my own struggles, I wanted to be one too. I created what can jokingly be called a “shrine” to my comfort kpop boy. I wanted him to be seen more by the fandom in someway and so I picked up learning to make gifs, understanding Photoshop, and even learning basic HTML. In fact, because of this blog, I found a love and passion for web development and coding. It was something I liked to do, even if I wasn’t that good at it. It was hard but I was able to switch gears from a Biology degree to one that was Computer Science focused, despite many in my life saying that wasn’t possible. With that, I found a new path with new struggles but I persevered through it, just as Hongbin had been doing with each new single and album. 2019 was arguably Hongbin’s year. Coming off from the high that was the Eau de VIXX album and Scentist single, Hongbin started to stream on Twitch because he loves video games and wanted to share that. He also was in a drama and on a variety show. Not to mention that he saved Summer 2019 with “COOL LOVE,” a collaborative effort with MONSTA X’s Hyungwon. I wanted 2019 to be my year as well and worked hard at it. Simultaneously, I created projects, graduated university with a CS degree and got a job within the first three months. I had been fortunate in my endeavors. But with more responsibilities, this blog in recent years has been lacking content. I haven’t made anything on here in two years and I feel bad about that. Every time I want to come back, I don’t ever have a drive to do it. There may be a chance that I feel like I’ve outgrown Tumblr. I apologize for thinking like this. Now let’s talk about what has happened in recent months. Hongbin, yet again, found himself in a messy situation. There is a cycle when it comes to Hongbin where he will do something that is unfavorable, he will leave on hiatus, and then he will comeback. Hongbin stans will know, we go MONTHS without hearing from him or seeing him. It’s an unfortunate situation to be in but I truly believe Hongbin stans are some of the strongest people in this fandom because of it. This recent situation was not what we were expecting. Hongbin ended up in a bad situation again and had been gone since March. He finally popped up again two weeks ago, much to everyones surprise. This was a moment of happiness that was short lived due to the following news that arrived. Hongbin would be leaving VIXX. It feels unnatural to even be typing that sentence but here we are. I don’t know what happened to come to this decision but I felt fatigued from that news. I couldn’t concentrate on work, I talked to everyone about how I was feeling, and even took a brief hiatus from social media. It seems dramatic to feel like this about someone I don’t know but again, he is the reason I worked as hard as I did to be were I am. I’m sure many of you understand this emotion. I came to the resolution that, although it hurts, if Jellyfish wasn’t going to help him or promote him, it was probably best he leaves. He would definitely become popular on Twitch. But the moment I had resolved that, he came in with more news that would break the wall. He would be enlisting as early as today, August 17-18th 2020. This one did not hurt as much because I believed it would be best he go early to get it out of the way. Him leaving VIXX was unseen however. Hongbin stans have had it the hardest, I hope you all, even non-Bean stans, are taking care of yourselves and doing your best to stay positive. I guess with this extremely long note I wanted to say that I don’t think I will be active on this blog for a while. I’m not on Tumblr everyday anymore and with Hongbin leaving VIXX, content won’t be as easily available or gif-able. I’ve grown a little tired as well and I truly don’t think I have enough space in my computer anyways. I will leave my blog open so that if anyone wants to see some interesting gifsets with Hongbin or even if a new baby STARLIGHT comes across content or is seeking it, it’s there. The only thing I hope people can protect my gifs from being stolen. Many gif-makers have this issue and I’m not any special to be asking of this but I don’t think people understand how long and arduous the process to create them are. We sacrifice a lot of computer space and run our systems hard to start up our programs to make them. Not to mention we hunt for videos constantly and even sacrifice sleep to be able to get performances live sometimes. Then there is the compliance with Tumblrs gif limits to take into account. Some times there is a lack of creativity or individualism in content, so we constantly brainstorm to give the fandom something fresh for their own blogs. It’s extremely tedious to make them but the satisfaction of not only creating them, but having people interact with them and share them, makes the process worth it. You don’t know, but every single person that reblogs my gifs, I tend to go to that persons page to look at their interests and read their tags. Thank you to those that write in the tags of my posts, I find enjoyment from reading them. If I can say, I trust my gifs with STARLIGHT fandom, please don’t let them be stolen or used unnecessarily. This is my gift to you. ❤ As for gif-making, the one thing I regret is that I didn’t finish a particular series I was working on. That doesn’t mean I won’t come back to finish it however, just not right at this moment. As for mutuals, much of them migrated off the platform at the same time as me. But I just want to thank them and the STARLIGHTS who were especially close to me and lent an ear when all I wanted to do was talk about Hongbin. I’ve made some of the greatest friends through VIXX. Thank you for being there. The VIXX fandom gave me something to work for, to look forward to, and what could be improved. Coming on to Tumblr after so long, I am so happy that my efforts and the efforts of other blogs that were there when I was, made more people become Hongbin fans and even birthed new and talented gif-makers. Thank you for being the next bunch to push it forward. Lastly, thank you to all the people that follow me. I did my best to interact with all of you as much as I could, and even now, thank you for supporting my work. You are the reason I do what I do, and I hope it inspires you in some way too. I wish Hongbin a safe military stint and hope he comes back with a fresh and new perspective on what he wants to do. Thank you Hongbin for what you have inspired me and others to do. You can now follow me on Twitter if you still want to see what I’m up to, there are changes coming there as well but I hope you do follow. I will always support VIXX, even as a five-man group but, VIXX will always be SIX to me. Thank you for everything, I hope to come back to this blog one day to create again.

#personal #this is LONG omggg but its important #sorry if it feels a bit off here and there i suck at writing LOL

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strangledeggs · 4 years

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Strange Nostalgia For The Future – or: Death By A Thousand Taylor Swifts – or: This Is Pop?

Holy shit, when did this article get to be over 8 pages? Sorry everyone, Tumblr isn’t letting me do a cut, so this is just going to clog your feed for a while.

This began as a long-form review of Dua Lipa’s album “Future Nostalgia” with comparisons to the styles of a variety of other pop artists, but has since turned into something much broader and more nebulous. Call it my (incredibly subjective) attempt at defining a current “state of pop music” as it stands in the year 2020.

I’ll admit, I have a bias here, so I’ll lay that on the table: I didn’t particularly care for Dua Lipa prior to the release of “Future Nostalgia”. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, she didn’t really register on my radar until the album’s release, and so I didn’t hear any of her earlier songs until I spent a few minutes on Youtube scrambling to remember who she was and why this release was supposed to be such a big deal. I came up relatively empty-handed, with “New Rules” having more interesting production than anything in the way of a vocal hook and “Be The One” sounding blandly forgettable.

But music journalists were spinning this narrative that “Future Nostalgia” was Dua Lipa’s big moment, her “disco” album, her album full of “bangers” (yes, I know, that’s an archaism at this point, but what am I going to do, call them “vibes”?). We’ve seen hype like this before (at least I have), so we should always take some time when an album arrives with this much fanfare to ask that crucial question: is it justified? Does it live up to expectations?

I’m going to answer that question, but before I do, I want to take a step back and place that music journalism narrative within a broader music journalism meta-narrative that has been slowly gaining traction over the last decade. About 7 years ago (so around 2013), I wrote a guest article for the (what I assume is now defunct) blog Hitsville UK on another meta-narrative called “rockism”, by which older listeners and journalists tended to use to justify their dismissal modern pop music through the glorification of (and comparison to) the canon of rock music. This was not a unique article – many music journalists were writing about this same phenomenon that year; it will likely mark some sort of watershed moment in music journalism. Frequently contrasted with the meta-narrative of “rockism” (not so much in my own article, but definitely in others’) was a countering meta-narrative named as “poptimism”. It’s basically what it sounds like: an optimism that current pop music could be just as good as music of the past, or even better. This was, of course, already known in a lot of mainstream music journalism circles, but it did cause a bit of a stir in independent music journalism, especially since it seemed awfully hard to deny; then-recent examples of indie stars like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean* aspiring to make genuinely great pop music seemed like they were making a pretty good case for the poptimist outlook. Plus, as a new generation of music journalists raised on hip-hop began to cover the genre more seriously, it soon became clear that, given the crossover-laden history of rap, they would have to take pop music seriously too.

Needless to say, poptimism gained a lot of traction as a new paradigm, until it became the default outlook of music journalism by the middle of the decade. It has, as far as I can see, yet to relinquish its grip, and that’s not such a bad thing; arguably, a lot more women, queer people and people of colour have had their music taken more seriously since the shift. Before we get back to “Future Nostalgia”, however, there’s one more piece of this puzzle I want to put in place: coinciding with those early years of poptimism, pop itself hit a bit of a turning point in the year 2014. This was, of course, the release of Taylor Swift’s album “1989”.

What was so special about “1989”? It’s still a bit hard to answer that completely coherently, but it clearly changed the pop music landscape in meaningful ways. For one, it demonstrated that the overcoding of global pop music made at the hands of big-name producers was not just an approach reserved for the “born pop star” figures of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. Taylor Swift, formerly a country singer with pop leanings, now went headlong into Max Martin-penned chart-topping smashes, and just like that, she had become deterritorialized. It was a huge success, and, interestingly, one of the first albums that got a lot of independent music journalists (and me) to take her seriously despite being her most overtly commercially-driven. I think this speaks to the power of poptimism in 2014 from two angles: for the journalists, the lesson seemed to be that if someone is already doing something near-enough to mainstream pop and then breaks through with a mass-appeal hit, why not see this as a kind of fulfillment of artistic intent? And for Swift, if you’re already doing something near-enough to what’s playing on pop radio, why not go all the way with it and sacrifice your country “credibility” for the ability to have hits beyond the genre-specific? “1989” marked a turning point at which pop music, formerly seen as something people “sell out” to make, became something you “sell into”, erasing a specific, localized identity that could be exposed as a construction anyway and replacing it with the ambition to conquer the ears of the masses.

I should clarify here, however: there are two possible conclusions one can draw from poptimism. The one I just documented, that pop music as a global/commercial phenomenon can be great and should taken seriously by music journalism, is the more frequently-taken interpretation, but it’s not my preferred one. I would rather the alternative view, which is that most music that people have tended to hear the last several decades, whether marked by the seal of “pop” or not, has been pop music. Rock is a form of pop. So is country, so is hip-hop, so is jazz, folk, metal, etc. We can distinguish between, say, the commercial radio pop – which I’ll from this point on designate as “Pop” with a capital “P” – and the pop tradition, but everything descends from pop tradition in the end, and Pop is just one more subgenre among many, albeit by definition the most popular at its given moment. Seeing that this is pretty indisputably true (and if you don’t believe me, you a) haven’t been reading my blog for long enough and b) have some serious research to do), we might as well take Pop as seriously as any other form of pop and subject it to the same criticisms, while simultaneously adjusting our criticisms of other pop subgenres in relation to our new appreciation of Pop. Who created the texture of this Pop song? Does this metal song have a hook? Is the phrasing in this hip-hop song conducive to its overall rhythmic feel? And so on, and so on.

I prefer this approach because it doesn’t necessarily assume a supremacy of one genre so much as level the playing field to allow for a more robust and less prejudiced criticism. It also doesn’t let listeners off the hook, as many (non-critics/journalists, most likely), given the opportunity raised by the previously-detailed interpretation of poptimism, would lazily slip back into listening to Top 40 radio without attempting to seek things beyond the charts; this alternative interpretation challenges us to try and hear the similarities between Led Zeppelin, Rihanna, Young Thug and The Clash while recognizing what each do uniquely. Unfortunately, it seems like the former interpretation has won out, at least for most audiences, and we now have a listener-base that, instead of keeping their ears peeled for next-big-thing indie groups like Arcade Fire as they might have circa 2008-2012, is content to wait for an already-famous star to drop the next “1989” crossover smash**.

This brings us back to “Future Nostalgia”, the latest in a line of Pop albums that seem primed to vy for that coveted position. There is, however, a bit of a gulf between “1989” and “Future Nostalgia”, and it’s not just because the moment of “1989” and poptimism has already happened. It’s also not because Dua Lipa isn’t “crossing over” from any outsider genre like Swift did with her move away from country – if anything, Dua Lipa is doubling down on her Pop ambitions here by putting them up-front and trying to make this album as blockbuster-signalling as possible. The biggest gulf is the musical one: compared to “1989” (and, I should add, a slew of other blockbuster Pop albums from the last decade, which I’ll get to discussing soon enough), “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are oddly lackluster.

Let’s start with the good, though. On my first listen to the album, I wasn’t completely baffled that critics were hearing something momentous in it. There are absolutely (again, sorry) bangers on this. Ironically, the two that stood out to me immediately were two that I later learned weren’t even released as singles, which might speak to the marketing team’s inability to judge the quality of the music they were handling here. “Cool”, easily the best thing on “Future Nostalgia”, rides a sort of bouncy warping of the riff from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” as Dua Lipa gushes about how she just can’t control herself in front of her lover; it’s sweet, both lyrically and musically. “Love Again” (no relation to the Run The Jewels song) is perhaps the album’s most explicitly “disco” song with swelling strings and everything, and expresses a similar sentiment to “Cool”, though perhaps from a more reluctant angle: “God damn,” Dua Lipa sighs in the chorus, sounding simultaneously annoyed and amused, “you got me in love again”.

The songwriting on “Cool” and “Love Again” also happens to be some of the most basic on “Future Nostalgia”; the beat loops, albeit with some nice flourishes and rhythmic quirks, and Dua Lipa cycles through a few simple melodies, the catchiest always winding up in the chorus. “Love Again” is practically a blues song with its AAAB-repeat phrasing. I highlight the virtues of this simplicity because it throws much of the rest of the album into a stark contrast and exposes its greatest weakness: many of the other songs on “Future Nostalgia” feel fussed-over and patched together out of pieces that don’t always fit, as if the several writers*** involved in these songs weren’t in the same room when the track was finally put together. The album seems to be a case study in throwing everything at the wall and not bothering to consider whether it will stick. And yet it seems to have a small army of critics defending it, even going so far as to call it the pop (or at least Pop) “album of the year” – which has me wondering exactly what all the hype is about.

“1989” has something that a lot of other blockbuster Pop albums since its release do not: a personal touch. Taylor Swift worked hard prior to that album at building her brand as a confessional singer-songwriter, and even with the big-name productions and radio-primed hits, she maintains that image: one of her biggest “1989” hits, “Blank Space”, explicitly addresses her (supposed) romantic history and relationship to the media. Elsewhere, she does some fantasizing about classic movie archetypes and the impulse to drop everything and run away from it all, strongly reminiscent of her past work. It’s not as easy as it might sound to pull off this kind of thing, and I think Swift deserves credit not just for the excellent musicality of the songs she put her voice to, but the consistency of the strong personality she built across her career (with misstep “Reputation” sticking out as the glaring crack in the portrait).

So I won’t compare “Future Nostalgia” to “1989” beyond the initial poptimism narrative it bolsters. No, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t particularly personal – its mode seems to be more in line with what Robyn was already doing a few years before Swift, anticipating a poptimism that would effectively result in her deification over the course of the 2010s. Similar to Robyn in her “Body Talk” series, Dua Lipa seems to approach “Future Nostalgia” with a kind of assumed confidence as a dancefloor queen – more celebratory than confessional.

The celebration, however, proves to be pre-emptive; “Future Nostalgia” lacks two crucial things that “Body Talk” had in spades. The first is a general willingness to experiment. Robyn’s albums were packed with silly throwaways, but some of them stuck, and the best are featured on the collected version of the album, from the Snoop Dogg collaboration “You Should Know Better” to the cybernetic-pop-anticipating “Fembots” to the sassy “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do”. The title track of Dua Lipa’s album demonstrates a little bit of adventurousness, but it unfortunately flops, arriving in the form of awkward half-rapped verses that aren’t fun enough to leave a lasting impression. The only other potential outliers are the aforementioned “Cool” (which just happens to sound less disco than the rest but is otherwise a fairly standard, if well-written, pop song) and the album’s absolute nadirs, “Good In Bed” and the closing ballad “Boys Will Be Boys” (we’ll get to that in a bit). Otherwise, the album carries its aesthetic pretty consistently between tracks, giving little impression of any desire to experiment.

The second missing element is the consistency of the songs themselves. When Robyn’s songwriters toss her, say, a pseudo-dancehall song, they commit to it, making sure there are no weird melodic/harmonic/rhythmic hiccups and that the pieces fit together. And unfortunately, the majority of “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are full of exactly those kinds of hiccups and disjointed structural assemblages that leave me scratching my head. A lot of it’s subtle to the point that I can almost understand other critics missing these details, but I pick up on this stuff fast, and once I hear it, I can’t unhear it.

A lot of it’s in the phrasing; too often, Dua Lipa will go for a quick succession of staccato notes in a chorus when a simpler, slower phrase, or maybe just silence would have worked better (see “Break My Heart”, or the post-chorus of “Future Nostalgia”, in which she sings the 100% non-credible line “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha” – side note, has she even listened to top 40 radio in the last decade?). “Physical” is almost fun until you realize that the phrasing, melody and harmonic structure of the chorus would fit perfectly into any godawful Nickelback song.

Actually, “almost fun” is one of the phrases that I feel best describes so many songs on this album. Too many of the tracks set up something great only to follow through with some baffling songwriting choices. The second track in, “Don’t Start Now”, disrupts an excellently-phrased verse and infectious bassline with a chorus awkwardly parachuted in from what sounds like a 90s house song. The more in-character post-chorus that follows can’t help the song recover once you realize that it’s nowhere near as endearing as the original verse melody. That half-assed rapping makes a re-appearance in the bridge of “Levitating”, which is otherwise perfectly acceptable. If not for that moment, “Levitating” would come close to being the third pick of my favourite songs here, although you can’t fool me, Dua Lipa: I know that chorus is just a sped-up re-hash of the Jacksons’ “Blame It On The Boogie”. “Pretty Please” is also fine, funky and subtle, displaying some restraint on part of the songwriters and producers for once – though there’s also nothing about it that jumps out and grabs me. Besides the two standouts, is that the best I can hope for on this album, a song where nothing goes horribly wrong? At any rate, it’s better than the bland, shameless Lily Allen rip “Good In Bed”, which also features an utterly confounding “pop” sound effect in the chorus replacing one of the mind-numbingly repeated words.

There are some exceptions with regard to singers that can make use of this kind of disjointedness. Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener” walks a thin line, but it often pays off. See, Grande is a singer’s singer, at least by Pop standards; she’s known for crooning, for belting, for singing her lungs out. But she also wants to be a Pop icon to young people right now, and that means staying up-to-date in her production and songwriting. The trouble is, one of the most popular genres with the kids these days happens to be trap, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to Grande’s showboating vocals, favouring short, choppy phrasings and half-mumbled half-singing mixed almost low enough to blend with the music. So she compromises: some of the songs on “Sweetener”, such as the title track, have verses and choruses that feel as though they’re pulling in opposite directions, with Grande getting an opportunity to flaunt the long high notes in a percussionless section before dropping into those staccato bursts that suit the heavy 808s of trap. Despite it being more drum’n’bass/R&B throwback than trap, a similar dynamic is at play in Grande’s biggest hit from that album, “No Tears Left To Cry”. Unlike Dua Lipa’s lurching song structures, Grande’s feel intentional and thematic; the songs aren’t always bulletproof, but I feel like I learn something about her by hearing the tension of styles she’s struggling to stretch herself between. All I feel like I learn about Dua Lipa from the messiness of her songs is that either her, her songwriting team, or both are very confused about what goes into an effective pop song.

Of course, Ariana Grande is also operating in a slightly different mode than Dua Lipa in the first place: whereas Dua Lipa is engaging Pop radio in the recent tradition of satisfying formulaic hits like those of “1989”, Grande has one foot (or maybe even one and a half?) in the parallel tradition of R&B. While the two traditions frequently mix and crossover on the radio, they represent very different approaches to music whose distinction might provide some insight into why some of what Dua Lipa is trying to do isn’t working.

To put it simply, the basic unit of what we’ll call traditional pop is the song, and the performer of the song is meant to convey the essence of that song as a relatively unwavering whole – the performer is effectively the conduit for the song, which reaches the listener through the medium of the performer. The singer has some room to “interpret”, but once a given interpretation is found to be effective in its “hook” potential, it’s typically kept as part of the formalized song, written in stone, more or less.

R&B, true to its roots in “rhythm and blues” and, before that, jazz, essentially reverses this. Songs are present in R&B and not necessarily unimportant, but they typically become conduits for the performer’s own expressiveness. In this setting, the performer’s “interpretation” is actually the most important ingredient, as the performer’s style is effectively the product, the listener’s focus. This places greater emphasis on experimentation with phrasing, melody and other aspects of a song, as well as the potential differences between multiple recordings and performances of that song.

These two paradigms have consequential implications for singers of songs operating in a given mode. A traditional pop singer, for example, is going to be more likely to defer to the song as-written in their performance of it for a recording. An R&B singer, by contrast, is more likely to improvise, often delving into explorations of how to make their voice a more expressive instrument – in many cases, actually, it can be a matter of making their voice more like an instrument, full stop. The notes aren’t sung to express words so much as they are sung to express pure sound. Vocals can vary wildly in rhythm, giving off phrasings that might normally be considered unnatural, but, if placed artfully enough, can re-shape our expectations of pop music in the first place. These aren’t ironclad rules, by the way – the genres cross over frequently and the lines are often ambiguous. But I think defining the differences here can at least help us understand the split in the approaches of, say, Taylor Swift vs. Janet Jackson.

Arguably, the biggest R&B star in the world at the time of writing this remains Beyonce, and with fairly good reason: her powerful voice brings a lot to what are often already well-written songs. Take note here: something like “Formation” (which I have previously written about in my article on hip-hop’s inheritance of the post-punk legacy) or even “Drunk In Love” probably wouldn’t fly in the realm of Pop. Tracks like these are mainly embellished not necessarily with flashy songwriting or production flourishes (although they can have those too), but with Beyonce’s vocal interpretations of them, sometimes approaching something more like rapping than singing****. Note also: vocalizations in this context are given a certain freedom, a license to be weird within a certain range of acceptability. Need I remind you of “surfboard, surfboard, / Grainin’ on that wood”?

My point here is that R&B singers are playing by different rules than Dua Lipa. This isn’t just me arbitrarily deciding that what she’s doing isn’t “R&B enough” – you can here it in her approach. My criticism of her awkward phrasing is based largely on the fact that it doesn’t sound like she’s doing it to “experiment” with the songs she’s given. She repeats these phrases exactly the same way each time, as in the chorus of “Break My Heart”, just so you know it’s intentional. If she is, in fact, improvising, the songs aren’t very suited to it and her attempts are mostly unsuccessful; they become hooks that highlight their own weaknesses rather than bold forays into new rhythmic territory.

The most interesting part of “Future Nostalgia” is, by far, the backing music. Even when Dua Lipa’s singing and hooks fail, the production shines through (even here, though, there’s a caveat with regard to the last two tracks). Consider the sublimely gauzy vocal(?) loop at the beginning of “Levitating”; the sweeping disco violins of “Love Again”; the finger-popping funk bassline of “Don’t Start Now”; even the Justice-lite bass synths in the chorus of the otherwise by-the-numbers “Hallucinate”. “Physical”’s best aspect is, in fact, a small countermelody running in the background of the obnoxiously bland chorus.

This is where I can most understand what got music critics hyped up on this album in the first place: superficially, at least, it sounds pretty damn good. But I suspect the willingness to overlook its other obvious faults stems from a tendency among “poptimistic” critics to treat singers as interchangeable in a system they perceive to be dominated more by “sounds” than by music proper. In fact, the singer is a real make-or-break point in much of modern pop music (Pop or otherwise), likely due to the focal point they occupy; a great singer can occasionally salvage a terrible song, while a bad (or even just mediocre) singer can easily bring down the most well-constructed powerhouse hit.

A case against valuing “Future Nostalgia” solely on the basis of its production: the last Pop album I remember listening to where the production outshined the songwriting was Billie Eilish’s “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO?” Eilish’s songs aren’t bad, and are frequently even good – but I was surprised at how conventional, or even “traditional”, most of them were. “Bad Guy” and “All The Good Girls Go To Hell” are basically jazz songs. “Xanny” and “Wish You Were Gay” (the most lyrically immature, it must be acknowledged) are pretty standard singer-songwriter fare. Others tend to play to a type: either sleepy ballads (“When The Party’s Over”) or, the most interesting songs on the album, the hip-hop influenced minimalist pieces (“Bury A Friend”, “You Should See Me In A Crown”).

But of course almost all of these songs are transformed in part by some rather astonishing production. No one who’s heard “Bad Guy”’s synth-squiggle chorus would mistake it for jazz, and the chorus of “Xanny” squirms in a shroud of distorted bass that pull back when you least expect it – hardly typical sonic territory for most singer-songwriters. Even the already-powerful “Bury A Friend” hits harder than it might have without the surging crunches it’s afforded in the production.

My point, however, is not that the production is what makes this album – it doesn’t, at least not entirely. The production is roughly half of what’s interesting here. The other half is comprised by two things: the fact that most of the songs are fairly strong already (though I think Eilish could lose a few of the ballads and come out better from it), and the fact that Billie Eilish also happens to have a very distinct vocal style. Actually, that last part alone is probably the selling point for most people: Eilish’s eerie half-whispered delivery plays more of a role in constructing her album’s overall dark mood than the production. It has its limitations, and I wonder what her future will bring in terms of her ability to move beyond the role she’s effectively typecast herself in, but it has something on Dua Lipa: it has personality.

So vocal style is important, but that’s not all: as I mentioned, Eilish’s songs are also consistently stronger than Dua Lipa’s, even when both are at their lyrical worst. Sure, “Wish You Were Gay”’s self-absorbed whining about unrequited love and sexuality sounds exactly like what you’d expect to come from a undeveloped teenage singer. But the lyrics are the only thing wrong with that song; take those away, and the melodies and instrumentation sound pretty damn great. The same cannot be said for the overblown dollar-store balladry of Dua Lipa’s execrable “Boys Will Be Boys”, which, despite projecting an ostensibly more “progressive” outlook than “Wish You Were Gay”, falls flat on its face anyway. And I’ll take an Eilish ballad over “Good In Bed”, which sports an obnoxiously repetitive chorus – static, plastic, it sounds like a strained smile looks, desperately trying to convince you that this is fun, right?

“But wait,” you might say, “pop music is supposed to be fun! And isn’t that what most of ‘Future Nostalgia’ aspires to? Shouldn’t we forgive Dua Lipa for some of her mediocre songwriting if her goal in making us dance is at least a defensible one?”

And the answer is no, because Pop is already full of music more fun than this. The way I see it, there are several ways in which one could make music more fun than “Future Nostalgia” (better songwriting being one I’ve already discussed to death here), but I’ll wager that a fairly reliable method is that frequently employed by Lady Gaga: do something musically outlandish and downright weird.

“Bad Romance” is the obvious lodestar here, but Gaga’s career is full of the absurd: just take pretty much any song off of “Born This Way”. Even the “normal” songs like “Yoü and I” (at least pre-“Joanne”) come across as weird by virtue of being placed next to something like “Electric Chapel”. And all this is done in the service not only of raising eyebrows, but in the name of fun. Even some of Gaga’s weaker efforts like “Venus” (or many others on “Artpop”) have a winking slyness to them that lets you laugh along with her. It rarely feels like she’s “serious” when she’s singing about love, sex, or dancing all night, but she gets you dancing anyway.

“Future Nostalgia”, by contrast, has few attempts at any kind of weirdness, and those it does have fall flat. I’ve already mentioned the cringe-y pseudo-rapping, but the spoken-sung pre-chorus of “Physical” is just as embarrassing, bringing the song’s momentum (its second-greatest virtue) to a screeching halt with an awkward phrase that feels totally unnecessary. And then there’s that sound effect on “Good In Bed”. These moments detract from the album because they feel half-assed, like Dua Lipa never bothered to commit to the bit she tacked on. And aside from this, “Future Nostalgia” remains pretty conventional Pop – she’s not exactly reinventing disco here, just emulating it for a new generation with mixed results. If only she could pull a “Heartbeat” or “Love Hangover” out of her bag, but the album is so radio-oriented that the songs rarely reach the 4-minute mark even when they find a groove worth hanging on to. It’s as if she mistook the law M.I.A. ironically lays down at the end of her biggest hit for sage advice: “Remember: no funny business!”

There is one more aspect of the poptimism that helped propel this album in the eyes of critics I have yet to discuss: the paradigm’s coinciding with the recent wave (is it the fourth? I’ve lost count) of popular feminism. This was significant for Taylor Swift at the moment of “1989” because it allowed for interpretations of songs such as “Blank Space” to reach beyond a simple commentary on her stardom and discomfort with media coverage, branching out into a more expansive reading of the song as representative of the ways in which women in general are demonized for their past relationships. Feminism, as a cultural framing device, was crucial in shaping listener perceptions not just of “Blank Space”, but of many other songs on the album. It also helped to launch a whole wave of emerging and returning Pop artists’ albums and singles that traded in similar (vaguely) politically-charged lyrics.***** In the years that followed, a veritable opening of the floodgates would happen with regard to public feminist consciousness-raising, culminating in specific incidents such as the #metoo movement.

For the record, I think this was largely good. I’m under no illusion that “1989” is in any way a politically radical album, but I think the return of pop feminism has generally had a net positive influence in getting pop artists of all kinds of re-think their music’s relationship to gender politics. That being said, there are two things I resent about its lasting impact. The first is the kind of forced extrapolation of songs that bring up gender in any way into “feminist” anthems when they’re largely about relations that have little to do with the matter. One case in point might be Dua Lipa’s pre-”Future Nostalgia” hit “New Rules”; inexplicably, I often see fans trying to make the song’s lyrics out to be some kind of political diatribe about the cruelty of men to women or something like that, when in fact it sounds more like a typical “bad relationship” song, the kind that have been on the charts for decades by now.

But the other thing I’ve come to dread from pop-feminist Pop is the inevitable half-assed “message songs” that seem designed to cash in on using feminism as a signifier that an otherwise apolitical artist is still hip and knows what’s up. Whether through “New Rules” fan encouragement or her own hubris, Dua Lipa has regrettably chosen to end “Future Nostalgia” with such a song: “Boys Will Be Boys” (no relation to the significantly better-written song of the same name by Stella Donnelly). I don’t really want to write a lot about this song because part of the problem with it is that it’s bad in a lot of boring ways, but I do think it’s significant that it was singled out by several other critics (even those who liked the album) as the album’s worst song by miles. I’m hoping this shows a change in perspective here, as critics get harsher about flops like this one, and hopefully the eventual end result from this pushback is that Pop stars will stop trying to convince us they’re “real feminists” with empty songs like “Boys Will Be Boys” that are tacked on to the end of their “bangers” album as a kind of placating afterthought.

So a number of critics have indeed placed too much stock in this album: contrary to the feeling you may have gotten from my relentless criticisms here, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t call it “good” either. It sits in a mid-tier of Pop albums over-enthusiastically pushed out during this era of high poptimism. It’s not the next “1989”, or “Lemonade”, or “Body Talk”, or “WHEN WE ALL ETC.” It’s just a mediocre album with a few great songs that were somehow never released as singles.

Is the inflation of “Future Nostalgia”’s reputation a sign of poptimism’s imminent bust? Are we entering a period of critical groupthink and gradual decay? These questions are too big to answer here, or perhaps at all for now (likely we’ll know the answer for sure in another decade). But I want to end this on a positive note by singling out a singer I haven’t mentioned yet as perhaps the greatest Pop artist of the last 20 years: in all these comparisons, I never got around to bringing up Rihanna.

On one hand, much of the poptimist revolution in criticism has involved taking the studio albums of Pop artists as seriously as their counterparts in other genres. On the other, Pop has never really stopped being a singles genre, and few have demonstrated this better than Rihanna. This is not to deny that she’s released some totally listenable, or even great, albums in her own right: “Talk That Talk” and especially “ANTI” stand as excellent records that came along relatively late in her career. But, well, raise your hand if you’ve actually listened to, say, “Good Girl Gone Bad”. Now raise your hand if you know “Shut Up And Drive”, “Don’t Stop The Music”, “Disturbia”, and, of course, “Umbrella”. See what I mean?

Perhaps I could blame “1989” again in part for this shift in focus from Pop singles to Pop albums. It’s pretty remarkable, after all, that the album is as consistent as it is, and I think that might have caught a lot of critics who were expecting otherwise off-guard. I think another problem, however, resides in the dominant mindset among critics in the first place, the idea that albums are the more valuable art form, the standard by which greatness is measured. Even I find myself incapable of breaking free of that format of evaluation – I’m much less likely to seek out more of an artist’s stuff based on a few great singles of theirs compared to if I hear an entire album from them that I like.

This might be slightly unfair of us critics, but there are workarounds to help correct this bias. One of those workarounds is the compilation. If an artist can make an album’s worth of great songs, but they happen to be spread across a number of their otherwise-mediocre albums, they can still win favour by collecting all (or most) of those gems in the same place, a “greatest hits” collection being the most common******. This seems like a pretty reasonable way of enjoying singles-oriented artists for those of us who are still stuck on the old album format.

But compilations have also never been as popular to review among critics as studio albums (I don’t know, maybe many feel like it’s cheating to collect the best stuff in one place?) and, as stated, it seems like poptimism’s paradigm shift has only reified the bias towards albums by putting more weight on Pop artists’ studio albums than before. Further, as compilations have started to die out (since anyone in the streaming age can assemble their own “greatest hits” playlist that will have all their own personal favourites on it), recent Pop artists often aren’t even given the chance to be evaluated at their best in a compilation format. I wonder if this is also a contributing factor in the hype surrounding “Future Nostalgia”; though it would probably be better remembered for its singles which could be collected on a later “Best Of Dua Lipa”, the fact that such a collection is unlikely to materialize pushes critics towards trying to sell listeners (and themselves) on this being Dua Lipa’s “definitive statement” and reason to take her seriously as an artist simply because it’s the most consistent thing she’s released so far.

Regardless, Rihanna is a model artist in terms of being a singles-oriented Pop singer deserving of a great compilation. If someone were to put it together, I’m fairly certain it could rival Madonna’s “The Immaculate Collection”, the former (basically archetypal) gold standard for a Pop artist’s greatest hits. Imagine hearing “Umbrella”, “Work”, and “We Found Love” all in the same place, uninterrupted by the inevitable string of lesser artists’ hits you’d inevitably hear if that place was the radio or some poorly algorithmically-generated playlist. My concern is that with the death of the compilation and shift in the expectation for the Pop artist’s studio albums to be their defining moments, such an album will only ever exist in an unofficial capacity. Which is fine, I guess – if you hate pop canon. But I don’t, so I patiently await the return of a collective memory for singles that extends beyond the radio and the playlist.

*Interesting to see how these examples have aged.

**Don’t get me wrong, I like “1989”! But its potentially negative influence will be detailed further as I continue.

***This isn’t a criticism of songwriting teams in general – certainly great songs have come out of the modern collaborative approach to pop songwriting, and I’ll get to those soon.

****And of course there’s a whole other conversation to be had about the ways in which hip-hop and R&B, formerly more separate genres, have been in the process of merging for the last two decades as performers in each have realized how much their interpretive approaches have in common.

*****It should be noted that this trend started several years earlier in “underground” and “indie” scenes and only just made its way into the Pop mainstream around 2014, but that’s a discussion for another article.

******Actually, even if an artist has only one great song, multi-artist compilations can step in to help. But since I’m focusing mainly on the respective cults of personality of specific Pop artists here, I won’t get into those. I should also add that Pop is by no means the only genre in which this happens: there are definitely so-called “classic rock” artists who I wouldn’t bother listening to outside of a compilation of their best stuff (Queen, for example).

#Music #Music criticism #Pop music #Dua Lipa #Future Nostalgia #Rihanna #Billie Eilish #Beyonce #Taylor Swift #Robyn #Lady Gaga #Ariana Grande

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btsfan15 · 3 years

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Interview

Interviewer: I am here with the biggest K-Pop boy band in the world, BTS! And with their friend, Navya!

*everyone claps*

Interviewer: Thank you guys so much for coming.

RM: Of course.

Interviewer: Have a seat.

*everyone sits on the couch*

Me: Oh, there’s no more space for Jin.

Jin: Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just squeeze next to Navya.

*sits down next to me*

*everyone laughs*

Interviewer: Welcome, guys. So, what’s it like being popular all over the world with thousands of fans?

RM: It’s really amazing. ARMY is so nice and sweet to us and they’re always supporting us.

V: We want ARMY to be happy through our music, and we will be there for you, with love.

Interviewer: ARMY is very lucky to have you guys. You make such amazing music. There’s so much positivity that you guys and ARMY bring to the world. Why is this message important to you?

Jin: It’s all because of ARMYs. They always give us positive energies.

Jungkook: ARMY! Thank you for all the love. We can’t wait to surprise ARMY with a great show and let’s get it!

Interviewer: How do you feel being on stage and performing at the AMA’s?

RM: Everything is surreal. *laughs*

Interviewer: The AMA's is well known as the most American and as one of the major awards along with Grammys and the Billboard. A singer having the presence and the invitation to perform at the AMA must be meaningful. I am sure there’s something more to it than “feeling unreal.” What else can you share with us?

J-Hope: I’ve grown up watching the AMA's on television. To be able to perform at the AMA's, especially in front of all our fans here, it definitely was an unbelievable experience. It was a great honor to be here and it’ll be great to have another chance to perform here at the AMA's, in front of our fans. I’d like to thank our fans again for their continuous love and support.

RM: As you mentioned, AMA's is the most American, yet one of the major awards. I also agree that AMA has a great reputation. We definitely felt throughout the process that AMA has put a great thought and consideration in inviting us to perform on stage, not just introducing as "some strange kids from Asia". AMA made us feel like we were part of the award ceremony in many ways, such as having the The Chainsmokers introduce us and in terms of the order of performances. We were the 16th out of the 17 performers, performing right before Diana Ross, who won AMA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Many details that were prepared by the AMA's made us feel welcomed and we really felt that they prepared a lot for us, taking the time in getting to know us, as well as showing respect to us as artists.

Interviewer: Starting with the Billboard Award in May and now your presence at the AMA's show that BTS suddenly is on a continuous rise. How do you feel?

Jin: We only got our first big win at the Mnet Asian Music Award in Korea last year. We all hugged and cried. I still cannot believe one year has not yet passed since that day. Over the year, we won a Billboard award and performed on the AMA stage. We debuted four years ago, but so much has happened during these years. Events like winning the Billboard award and performing at the AMA's happened so fast.

RM: Twitter is our main social media platform and it is very easy for us to use. We had five million followers six months ago, but now we have over ten million followers. (BTS has around ten point three million followers, which is the greatest number of followers in Twitter's Korea accounts). We have used social media for five years, and suddenly the followers doubled within the span of less than six months. Also, the 'Billboard Hot 100 chart' is the chart that every artists in the world dreams of entering. (BTS's song DNA, released in September as title track of the new album, entered the chart on no. 85. It is the second time a Korean song entered the chart after Psy's Gangnam Style). To be able to debut on the AMA's is an honor that is totally surreal and all of this is 100% due to our fans who made it possible. We have never seen a such fandom before. *laughs*

Interviewer: BTS has a lot of characteristics. One of them is that you pick a topic and create a series off of the topic such as 'School Trilogy' or the 'Youth Series'. In the process, the growing story of each BTS member becomes the core content. This correlates into the meaning that BTS's own growth is equivalent to BTS's musical content. Do you think that these stories matches the ones of your real life? And if yes, how much do they match up with your real life?

Suga: I cannot say that our lyrics are 100% based on our experiences. But our experiences are very well-embedded in the songs. We try to tell our generation's story through our songs.

RM: Our debut song was 'No More Dream'. If you listen that song, you realize the lyric "Hey, what is your dream?" keeps repeating through-out the song. At that time, my friends were about twenty years old and most of my friends were ones with no dreams. I was very angry and frustrated to see these friends because I just could not understand why they didn’t have any dreams. I tried to convey my emotion through the lyrics. In that way, our lyrics tell the life story of teenagers and now my peers. It makes them easy to listen and relate to. The song 'Danger' also expresses such hardships. However, when we released song 'I Need You', we got so many new fans. It seems they understood title of the song. *laughs*

Interviewer: Some people said that using social media is one of the reasons why you have succeeded. I wonder, what was your plan when you started making video content like the Bangtan Bombs?

Jin: With the Bangtan Bombs we take videos of our lives and upload them without any editing. When we shoot the videos, we try to do funny things. But we don't edit anything. Uploading videos weekly is really hard to do, so we try to keep the videos simple. But it seems that our fans really enjoy these uploads from our everyday life.

Suga: In the past, I did not like social media very much. When I started doing social media, I was afraid of the risks. But in doing it, I think that the most important thing is to show my natural self to the fans. Cool, cute and handsome looks can be seen on TV or other media, but the fans are curious about the rest. The Bangtan Bombs are closely related to our daily life and shows what's happening behind the surface. We really have befriended social media. We don't look at it like work at all. We just upload whenever we want. And the upload cycle is fast. Maybe this is why fans like our social media accounts.

Jimin: Fans say that we use social media a lot, but in fact, since we all use one account it seems like we use it more often. *laughs* This is one of the advantages of using one account all together.

Suga: If we use one account, we can be seen as a team so many more times over.

RM: These days, all of us do social media a lot. I think it is natural for us to do it, not as work but because we want to upload for our fans.

V: We have uploaded over one million posts on Twitter since our debut. So far, we have released over one hundred songs. Sometimes I look at our songs and melodies and feel regretful and ashamed. But at the time we did them, I sang them sincerely so I hope it was good enough.

Interviewer: Navya, do you have any social media?

Me: Yes, I do. I have Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. I have a lot of social media. I have so many people following me on Instagram. Whenever I post a photo of me or with the other members, I get so many comments. *laughs*

Interviewer: *laughs* Really? What kind of comments?

Me: I get so many saying “So pretty!” or “Love you!” or just emojis. *laughs*

Interviewer: What’s the most common comment you get?

Me: Um...it’s probably “You are so lucky!” or “I wish I was with them!” or “I wanna take a selfie with BTS!” *laughs*

*everyone laughs*

Interviewer: Wow, I guess you are really lucky to be living with BTS! All those fans out there are jealous of you!

Me: I guess I’m lucky, aren’t I? I’m famous all over the world! *laughs*

Interviewer: Yes, you are. So, what are the goals of each member?

Jin: I want to be happy. I do not have a huge life goal. I just wish that I can laugh and have a happy life like I do now.

Me: I want to make everyone happy. I want to laugh and have fun with everyone.

Jimin: I want to do well at what I am doing right now. I want to hear the fans say "you are doing well". My wish is that when I've grown up and look back at myself, I will be able to think I was really cool back then.

J-Hope: I want to release my mixtape. I'm ready now. I want to release it as soon as possible. It's not just a short mixtape, but on the level of a full album. After seeing RM and Suga release their mixtapes, I felt that I really wanted to make music with my own colors. I also want to study languages so that I can communicate with American and other foreign fans.

Jungkook: I want to do many things during this and next year. I want to write songs, improve my dancing and speak foreign languages well. The goal is not to be lazy, but to become a practitioner.

V: I want to add various charms and improve in more fields as an actor. I want to continue to study photography and take better pictures. As a singer, I want to become a more wonderful person as a member of BTS. I want to be someone that is doing a lot in many fields.

Suga: The final goal is that when the day comes for me to quit doing music, I want to leave when people still applaud. But I really hope that the departure will happen gradually. I've been playing music for quite some time now, but I hope I will get to do it far longer than the time I've been doing it so far. I do not know if it will be possible in reality, but I think that I want to leave music at a time when I'm still on top.

RM: Loving myself is my dream, but I don't know if I will achieve it before I die. *laughs*

Interviewer: Those are some good goals. Now I want to know: Do you guys date?

RM: We just wanna focus on our careers right now. We don’t usually have time to find that special someone. *laughs*

Me: I’ve always wondered what it’s like to date because when I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to date. I would *laughs* always see everyone holding hands at school and I would get jealous, to be honest. *laughs*

Interviewer: Well, you have multiple choices right here in this room, so take your pick! *laughs*

*everyone laughs*

Me: I don’t know about that. Everyone is busy with everything, so I’m gonna wait for sometime. I don’t want to stress anyone out.

Interviewer: Yeah, being an idol is hard. Okay, my next question is what’s your ideal type of girl or guy?

RM: A sexy girl who can converse with me for a long time with a nice voice, is appropriately tall, has pale skin, feminine Girl, looks good in a white T-shirt + Jeans + Red Converse High. Someone sexy, even to a brain. Someone that are thoughtful and confident.

Jin: Someone who's fun to be around. A soft-hearted girl who'd wear elegant make-up. A girl whose looks and personality is similar to that of a puppy, whose good at cooking, kind and takes good care of me. I want her to laugh at my jokes and play Mario games with me.

*everyone laughs*

Suga: A girl who has a peaceful manner, but also has a great sense of humor. I don’t laugh very much, so I think that she can make me laugh on a regular basis is very appealing to me.

J-Hope: I like a girl that wears feminine clothes but not too fancy because I think most important thing is to wear clothes that suit your body. I like girls that are interested in books, good at not only taking care of me but also others, besides I would like to have a girl that is very supportive of me.

Jimin: I want a girl who truly loves me and gives me all the love I want. She has to be smaller than me and is caring, cute, loves sharing, and has a big heart. She has to love to cuddle, too.

V: I want a girlfriend who’s kind and compassionate. I want her to be healthy mentally. Even better if she talks nicely too. It doesn’t matter if she’s not beautiful. But everyone says let’s wait and see how my future girlfriend looks like, I’m curious too.

Jungkook: I like a girl who’s intelligent, talented, and competitive. I want her to be older than me and I want her to be a gamer girl to impress me with her talents and not be afraid to show off her strong points.

Me: I like a guy who’s sweet to my friends and gives me lots of love and cuddles. I want him to teach me how to cook something cause I don’t know how to cook a proper meal. *laughs* I want him to play Mario video games with me and make jokes to make me laugh. He has to be cute and handsome, too.

Interviewer: Hey, that sounds like Jin! Looks like we got a match, everyone!

*everyone laughs*

Me: I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.

Interviewer: Do the members always tease you?

Me: Oh my god, yes they do! Especially about Jin. Whenever Jin and I are together, they say stuff like “You both look like a couple’ or “You two should date since you both hang out so much.”

Jin: Even for me, too! I always get mad at them and have to scold them!

RM: It’s true. He actually gets mad at us.

Suga: Jin always talks fast whenever he’s mad at us about something.

Me: Yeah, that happens a lot. I always crack up laughing. We all do, in fact.

Interviewer: Really? It must be very embarrassing.

Me: Yes, it is very embarrassing. Every time they do something like this, me and Jin are like “When are they gonna stop doing this” or “How long are they gonna keep this up?”

Jin: But they keep on assuming these things about us, but we just go with it.

Interviewer: My next question for you guys is what are your favorite songs?

RM: My favorite songs are ‘Panini’ by Lil Nas X and ‘Super Rich Kids’ by Frank Ocean.

Jin: Mine is ‘Senorita’ by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes and the remix of “Despacito” performed by Luis Fonsi, Justin Bieber, and Daddy Yankee.

Suga: ‘Loco’ by Mustard and ‘Summer Story’ by DJ Doc.

J-Hope: I like ‘The Big Day’ by Chance The Rapper and ‘Beauty and a Beat’ by Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj.

Jimin: My favorites are ‘Goodbye Days’ by Yui and ‘Love Song’ by Sara Bareilles.

V: My favorite songs are ‘Floor Seats’ by A$AP Ferg and ‘Blue Room’ by Chet Baker.

Jungkook: I really love one of our songs, ‘Mikrokosmos’ and I also love ‘Just Hold On’ by Steve Aoki with Louis Tomlinson.

Me: I love ‘Handclap’ by Fitz and the Tantrums and ‘War of Hormone’ by BTS.

Interviewer: All great songs. I have another question for you guys: Have their been any embarrassing moments before?

RM: Um, I think there’s one between Navya and Jin.

Interviewer: Oh really? Can we hear about it?

Jin: Um, it’s kind of embarrassing, but I’ll tell it. So, one day, me and Suga’s dorm door wasn’t working. If we closed it, then we couldn’t get in. The person on the outside has to open it. Anyway, we both didn’t know what to do, so Suga went to call the other members to see if they could fix it. I waited in the dorm for him, but it took a while, so I called Navya to see if she could fix it. She came over and I told her what the problem was. She came in the room and guess what happened? Navya locked the door.

Interviewer: Oh no! Then what happened?

Me: I didn’t know the door would get locked. We both tried to pull the door open, but it wouldn’t open. So, we were both stuck in there for a while. Who knows how long. *laughs*

Interviewer: What did you guys do in there?

Me: We just talked and laughed. I mean, we WERE in a bedroom, so I don’t really know what happened...*smiles*

*everyone looks at me*

Me: I’m just joking. All we did was talk and laugh. Jin told me a lot of jokes. I cracked up so hard.

Jin: Yeah, I did. I have so many in mind right now.

Me: I laughed so hard that my stomach was hurting. I almost died.

*everyone laughs*

Interviewer: That does sound fun. How did you both get out?

Jin: Suga got us out. He found the members and brought them to our dorm room. Me and Navya were both relived that we got out.

Me: The funny part was that Suga was so confused about what happened. *laughs* We both laughed and explained what happened.

Jin: We were still laughing after that. *laughs* We also told the other members what happened.

Interviewer: Well, that was an amazing story! Did the door get fixed?

Suga: Yes, it did. It won’t lock again from the inside. I think Navya’s gonna be careful next time. *laughs*

Me: I sure will. I probably should ask one of you if I can close the door. *laughs*

Interviewer: That was an amazing story, but I thought it was an embarrassing story.

Jin: After we got the door fixed, the embarrassing things started happening. At dinner that same day, the guys kept on nagging me and Navya about what happened. They kept on asking what we did in the room while it was locked.

Me: Jin and I were so embarrassed. We both said that we both talked and laughed, but they kept on suspecting that something else happened.

Jin: Now, that I think about, I think there was something else. I can’t remember.

Me: Me neither. *remembers* Oh, I remember what it was!

RM: What?

Me: Jin and I both fell asleep on the bed.

Everyone: Ohhhhh!

Jin: Oh yeah, now I remember.

Interviewer: How did you both fall asleep?

Me: I guess we were both laughing so much that we were both tired and fell asleep.

Jimin: I knew there was something else!

V: We keep on saying it, but they just won’t admit it.

Jungkook: Admit what?

J-Hope: That they make a perfect match.

Suga: They would make a perfect couple. Just imagine.

Jin: *embarrassed and blushing* Ah, Yoongi...

Me: *embarrassed* I seriously don’t even know how long this is gonna go.

RM: Jin’s embarrassed! His face, neck, and ears are red!

Jungkook: They are!

*members start teasing Jin by poking him*

Me: *giggles* Okay, guys. Stop teasing Jin.

Interviewer: *laughs* Well, it might happen in the future. Who knows? Well, thank you guys for taking the time to chat with us today! I had an awesome time!

RM: Thank you! For having us! We all had a great time!

Interviewer: *looks at the camera* ARMY, know that BTS is there for you whenever you need it and stay tuned for more awesome music!

Us: Bye!

Me: Saranghae! Annyeong!

Jimin: We love, ARMY!

Jin: Since I can’t blow a kiss for you in person, I’ll just do it to the camera. *blows a flying kiss to the camera*

*everyone laughs*

I hope you guys enjoyed the story!

#bts #bts rm #bts jin #bts suga #bts jhope #bts jimin #bts v #bts jungkook #kim namjoon #kim seokjin #min yoongi #jung hoseok #park jimin #kim taehyung #jeon jungkook #bts at a interview #bts x me #indian army #jin x me

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wings-of-indigo · 5 years

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So, Waitress is closing and Why I am Happy about that: An Exceedingly long essay Rant about Broadway

Look. Nobody's gonna read this, most likely, but it's 2 in the morning and my brain's been obsessing over Broadway (more than usual, anyway) since communing with my people at intensive this week. So, in the interest of getting some sleep before 8 hrs of dance and shitty high notes tomorrow, here goes.

I love classic, high-school-and-community standard musicals. I love new and experimental musicals. I love Disney film-to-stage musicals. I love institution musicals like Chorus Line, Cats, and Wicked; I even have a soft spot for Phantom. I am eagerly anticipating West Side Story next Christmas (seriously, I have a calander).

BUT.

As I said to one of my fellow dancers during post-class stretch (after noting his insane flexibilty and making yet another resolution to stretch more) I am Sick to GoDAMnEd DEATH of revivals, franchise adaptions, and restagings taking up the Broadway and greater theater markets.

I get why it's happening; I do. Musical theater, even shows that never make it out of Regional productions (Be More Chill, btw, I'm so proud of you bby :'-D ) are REALLY FREAKING EXPENSIVE, not just to stage, but also to develop. Broadway productions nowadays regularly go upwards of TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in costs.

Those costs are more and more frequently being met through funding by large groups of wealthy investors, who can expect basically little to no return on that investment. Only a select few shows that make it to the Great White Way do well enough to turn a profit (let alone the kinds of numbers that Hamilton, DEH, and Wicked continue to make), and more and more shows are closing in defict or once they break even. (Coincidentally, this is probably why we're seeing more and more straight plays on Broadway, especially in limited engagements. They're quicker, cheaper, and still have the same level of prestige.)

It makes sense then to assume that a show linked to an already successful property has a better chance of reaching that break-even mark, or perhaps generating a small return, than a more original idea. It's a surer bet, and we've seen it a lot these past few seasons. Anastasia, Beetlejuice, Pretty Woman, Moulin Rouge, Mean Girls... we get it. We promise. Investors want some security in an extremely and notoriously insecure market before they're willing to lay out the dough.

I get it. Everybody gets it.

And, to be fair, some of those shows are and continue to be GOOD. Tony nominees and award winners, even. But here's the problem: it's boring.

And not because I know how Act 2 ends without getting spoilers on tumblr. Unless they're younger than ten, the population of Broadway-and-musicals fans generally has a good handle on where a show's relevant plotlines are going. It's really not the wanting to know the end that keeps your butt in your overpriced red velvet seat and your eyes on the stage. It's the score, the words, occasionally the choreography, and most importantly the magicians on, off, and backstage bringing those things to life in a new and interesting way.

The antithesis of this, then, is having to watch slavish recreation of iconic scenes, lines, and characters from iconic films, presented Onstage! (TM), now with Bonus Songs! for your reconsumption. (Yes, Pretty Woman, I'm looking at you.)

Hey, I love Pretty Woman the Movie, slightly dodgy messages about feminity aside. I love it as a movie, and I really don't need to watch the knock off version of it, even if it comes in a shiny Broadway package.

Anastasia, and Beetlejuice, on the other hand, work extrodinarily well as musicals because they are NOT carbon copies of the original, somehow miraculously transplanted onto the stage.

Ironically, musicals based on original ideas are actually some of the most successful and well reviewed recent productions. Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away, and Hadestown this season are all original works, and well, look at them. (Fishy, huh? Coincidence, I think the fuck not.)

Recently I got to see The Prom on Broadway, the day after I saw Pretty Woman. The contrast between shows and my enjoyment of them was well defined. I couldn't look away from The Prom, despite many of the major story beats being as obvious as our Cheeto-in-Chief's spray tan. I and the entire rest of the theater were completely engaged by what was going on onstage, both comedically and dramatically. At Pretty Woman, I found myself checking the Playbill to see how many songs were left for me to make it through and anxiously comparing the size of my thighs to the dancers onstage to pass the time (ah, pre pro Body Issues, welcome back! We all thought you'd retired!)

Three guesses which show I'd choose to see again.

When I read that Waitress was closing, the first thing I did was panic and start marking pre January weekends where I would both be free and possibly have disposable income (I've never gotten to see the show, and frankly I would like too). My second reaction was, yes, to mourn the closure of a wonderful show, but it was mixed with hopeful anticipation. Waitress had a good long time in the sun, and just like a well lived life, eventually it must and should end. It's better, in my humble student opinion, to live with memories and cast albums (and regional productions) than the stodgy life of a show that's jealously clung to its Broadway berth through the tourist-and-date-night trade (*cough*Phantom*cough*). It's sort of like your 40 something mother taking selfies in booty shorts in an effort to prove she's still 'hip' and in her twenties. Cringe.

Ephemera is the nature of live performance, and probably part of its allure. And just like in the natural world, old things have to end so that new things can become. Waitress closing is a vital part of this cycle.

Broadway has a limited number of theaters. That's a hard and absolute fact. Maybe a quarter of them are effectively taken off the market for new shows by productions apparently cursed with immortality. Waitress has just opened up another spot both physically and creatively for a new project- hopefully something we haven't seen before- and I hope to God, Satan, and Sondheim that it doesn't get filled with another franchise spinoff, celebrity jukebox musical, or -Lin Miranda forbid - yet another revival.

Why the revival hate, though? Aren't revivals an major way to revisit the landmark and important musicals of the past and bring them to a new audience?

Well, yes. They are, especially when they're staged and presented with the emphasis on letting the music and words speak for themselves and giving the actors leeway to work with the material, without the typical levels of Broadway Extra (TM) and creative meddling from the producers. (The recent Lincoln Center staging of A Chorus Line is a good example of the stripped down style I'm talking about.) But even if they have their place, once again, revivals (while valuable and cool and all that) are Something We've Already Seen.

Let's take Newsies for example. A show with a huge fan base (mostly teen, mostly girls) who I frequently see wishing for a revival.

Now, I am a raging Newsies fan. Newsies is the show that got me started on attempting to make a profession out of dance and theater. I can sing both the OBC and Live albums back to front. I may or may not have had embarrassing crushes on certain cast and characters that I will take to my grave (I'll never tell and you'll never know, mwahhaha). So, do I love and worship ever iteration of this show? Yes. Do I wish I had been able to see either the Natl Tour or Broadway productions? Hell yes, with all my heart. Do I wish the Gatelli choreography was in any way accessible for me to learn? More than I want Broadway tickets to cost less than my soul, kidney, and hypothetical but unlikely first born combined.

But do I want a Broadway revival? Hell FUCKING No.

It's over, it's done, and it lives on in reinterpretation in regional and junior productions. Good. That, to be quite honest, is where it should belong.

It doesn't need to be rehashed on the biggest stages, and to be frank, neither do most of the ultra popular revivals that have been happening. (Yes, Ali Stoker is awesome and deserves the world, but Broadway does not need Oklahoma. If you need to see it that bad, go find a high school production somewhere. I recommend the midwest.) Broadway does not need 1776 (even though I am looking forward to it). Broadway does not need a Sweeney Todd revival (even though I want one like I want ice cream after suffering through jazz class in an un-air-conditioned studio on a 90 degree afternoon with no breeze. Seriously, I might be making sacrifices at my altar to this cause in the back of my closet).

Broadway needs musicals that are at least nominally original, and if not, come from something obscure enough (Kinky Boots, Waitress, Newsies) that they can make their own way. Barring that, investors, writers, and directors, please have the courage and decency to take established content in a new direction. Please, I'm begging you. I'd honestly-and-truly much rather sit through something that didn't try to shove the better version of itself down my throat even as it bored and annoyed me to tears. If I'm going to pay $80+ to sit through two hours of something terrible (and less engaging than my dancer body image issues) at least let me get my money's worth in unique horribleness.

#broadway #newsies #hadestown #mean girls #anastasia the musical #musical theater #waitress #hamilton #beetlejuice #tony awards

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mikeshanlon · 5 years

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Happy Pride! .... Like... more than halfway through the month lmao sorry, better late than never ig! I’ve compiled a list of some of my fave LGBT+ books, as well as a few I’m planning to read for pride/in the near future. Please feel free to reblog and add some of your own recs, especially for the sexual and gender identities that are lacking in my list!!!!!

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz: This beautiful, wholesome coming of age novel is pretty popular on tumblr and with good reason! It’s set in the 1980′s and follows Aristotle, aka "Ari”, as he grows up an tackles with his identity-- he feels like his story is written by someone else, that his path is not up to his control. Whether this is due to his complex relationship with his family, or societal expectations/stereotypes of Latinx men, or the fact that maybe his friendship with Dante might be more than that, and that kinda terrifies him. (Rep: Gay, Latinx, (I believe this is own voices) Warnings: it’s been a minute since i’ve read this but i believe some racism, internalized homophobia, and an instance of violent transphobia)

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston: LGKNLKNGRG okay this is truly one of my favorite books of the year so far and part of the whole reason i wanted to make this. This is a New Adult Contemporary romance set in sort of a like... parallel America where a woman won the presidential election. We follow The First Son, Alex Claremont-Diaz, who’s charming, smart ass, genius icon. Him, his sister June, and their best friend Nora are easily marketable and loved by the public for the most part, but when Alex and his rival Prince Henry of England get into a public spat at a Royal Wedding, Alex and Henry must pretend to be friends to patch up relations and public image for his mother’s re-election campaign. Eventually their fake friendship turns real, and then becomes more as they get to know each other, Alex and Henry begin a secret romance that we follow over the course of the re-election year. This book is fucking HILARIOUS (like I have so many tabs for funny moments and i was trying to be restrained), but it’s just so. Like full of love and hope and it’s so beautiful???? It’s definitely political escapism from our current situation in America but still deals with current issues such as racism and homopboia, etc, but gives the reader hope for future progress. Alex and Henry’s relationship is so fun, and sexy, and beautiful and the friendships are so iconic and Alex’s journey with sexuality is... chefs kiss. Also like. Casey McQuiston mentioned that she listened to Texas Reznikoff by Mitski a lot while writing this in the acknowledgments so. what more do you need... (Rep: Bisexual (Own Voices), Gay, Biracial-- Mexican/White (Own Voices), Warnings: Racism, homophobia, mentions of a past sexual harrassment/assault. Since this is a New Adult, there are smut scenes. I wouldn’t say it’s like. Super explicit or anything but there is sex, though it’s often during Important Moments of their relationships so it doesn’t feel like p*rn-- again the sex is happening but its not in hella explicit detail or anything or for the same goal as say an erotica. P much proceed with caution if it’s not ur thing but it’s not too wild!)

Blanca y Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore: This is sort of a Snow White/Rose Red and Ugly Duckling retelling following two sisters, Blanca and Roja, who’s family curse destines that one of the sisters will be trapped into a swan’s body, never to be seen again. (So this is magical realism lmao). We also follow two boys, Page and Yearling, who were wrapped up in the magic of the nearby woods, but have returned to society. Page is a gender queer trans male, and his whole arc that was so beautiful and made me cry, but in a good way (also warning that I’m cis so like. I would love to hear what gender queer trans individuals think about the rep in this book bc I cannot really attest to it.) This book is really about sisterly love and love in general, with all the complexities that come with it. (also wlw grandma’s who grow apple’s it’s p iconic) (Rep: Latinx-- colorism plays a huge role in the story as well (Own Voices), Gender Queer Trans, Queer (Own Voices) Warnings: Some transphobia, racism, and abuse). (I believe most of Anna-Marie McLemore’s books are magical realism and have some Latinx and queer elements to them as well)

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: god..... This (gay ass) novelization of The Illiad is just so tragically romantic and beautiful... We follow Achilles and Patroclus as they grow up and grow closer, and eventually fight the Trojan War. There are so many beautiful quotes and scenes but like. You will most likely cry so keep that in mind eklrgerg. (Rep: Gay Warnings: Violence, there’s like..... a weird r*pe/homophobic scene)

Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan: YA Fantasy set in a world where there are three castes: Moon-- the highest caste, demons with animalistic features in a humanoid form, Steel-- humans with part demon physical features and abilities, and Paper-- fully human, the lowest caste. We follow our protaganist Lei, who despite being a Paper caste, has beautiful golden glowing eyes that end up garnering attention from the Demon King. She’s stolen from her home and forced to join The Paper Girls-- a group of paper caste concubines in training at the palace. As she tries to find a way to escape, she ends up falling for one of the other paper girls, Wren, who might be just the key to freedom. I love Lei and Wren’s relationship and I’m excited to see it play out in the sequel! (which i believe ngan said will introduce more LGBT characters) (Rep: Asian (Own Voices), WLW (I believe this is Own Voices as well). Warnings: As their role as concubines suggest, a large part of this book revolves around the patriarchy using women for power and sexual assualt/rape. There are no explicit rape scenes-- though they do occur ‘off screen’, however there are a couple attempted sexual assault scenes that I believe could be p triggering. This book is also largely about the Paper Girls taking back their power, and I don’t believe these scenes are done for shock value, however please proceed with caution. Subsequently, sexist and patriarchial views are present within the authority, though shunned by Lei, however there’s a lot of internalized sexism and objectification among some of the other Paper Girls.)

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell: I probably don’t have to talk about this one much since it’s super popular, but in what is like essentially Harry Potter but like gay and wholesome, we follow Simon Snow, the Chosen One who’s actually not that good at magic, his best friend Penelope, and his roommate and arch nemesis that’s totally a vampire but won’t admit it, Baz. (Except Baz is, like, totally in love with Simon and Simon’s just too dumb and wrapped up in his own shit to realize it). Truly just,... an iconic enemies to friends to lovers story that unfolds as the three of them try to uncover a mystery surrounding Baz’s late mother. Ik some people have found it confusing bc it’s sort of like starting the Harry Potter story off at book 7 and only getting some background info along the way but honestly I really enjoyed that lmao. Also there’s a sequel coming out this fall, Wayward Son. (Rep: Gay, Some POC rep. Warnings: not rlly any i dont think??? There’s like. some Homophobia lmao bc we can’t have a gay book without it.)

Her Royal Highness by Rachel Hawkins: This is a cute YA contemporary following Millie Quint who, post being cheated on by her best friend and wanting to have a fresh start, flies to Scotland to finish off her senior year at her Dream prestigous boarding school, joining a handful of other girls as the first female class in the institution’s history. Plus like. Cool Rocks and Scotland. Only problem is that her roomate is sort of a bitch and also the Princess of Scotland who she totally just told off. So yeah yet another royal gay enemies to friends to lovers with a dash of and they were roomates LMAO. This book could be like.... a bit cheesy and rushed but overall it was cute and like...... The Cover.... (Rep: Bisexual, Lesbian, Warnings: Some homophobia. Also this is a companion novel to Prince Charming but you don’t have to read that first, there’s just some references to the couple in that book as the Prince is well.... The Princess’ brother and where they end up so if you don’t wanna be spoiled read that first ig!)

The Devouring Gray by Christine Lynn Herman: I talked about this some in this post, but I feel like I did kinda a shitty job so. A YA fantasy/paranormal series about the descendant’s of the town’s four founding families-- Violet Saunders, Justin Hawthorne, Harper Carlisle, and Isaac Sullivan (the most iconic one). The latter three have lived in Four Paths their whole lives, protecting the town from The Gray-- p much the Upside Down from Stranger Things lmao, using powers specific to each of their families. Violet and her mother move back after Violet’s sister died in a car accident, and she’s thrust into helping save the town as the Gray grows more restless and having to uncover the secrets of her family as well as all the history brewing between the other three. The Stranger Things and Riverdale comparisons are p valid, (but like. Riverdale in the sense of small town secrets and a bunch of tense history that the kids don’t really understand and must uncover, and some like love triangle but..... not Rlly Love triangles just a mess of ppl being like oh shit i like this person and this person.... Bisexual Chaos if u will... not like. The I’m cuckoo bananas for u let’s go get high and play dungeons and dragons and smash in a bunker LRGKJRLKGJ), the Raven Cycle comparison’s are kind of a stretch, I can see the abstract comparison’s if i squint but like. Don’t go into this expecting TRC lmao. I really enjoyed the theme of grief throughout this book and seeing the powers unfold (and one of the dynamics a lot) and while not perfect the series has a lot of potential and like. Bisexuals. So. (Rep: Bisexual (two mc’s are bi and say the word!!!!!!!! As well as some secondary characters), Disabled (one of the mc’s is missing one arm from the elbow down). Warnings: Grief, Violence)

The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee: Also talked about this in this post and did a better job there, but to sum it up it’s essentially a friends to lovers, bed sharing, road trip au with a dash of magic but set in the 1700′s! There’s also a sequel/companion, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy that I have yet to read but it follows Monty’s sister, Felicity, and I believe goes more in depth with her identity. (Rep: Gay, Black, Disabled, Aromantic, Asexual, Warnings: Period typical homophobia/biphobia, racism, ableism, sexism)

Simon vs. The Homosapien’s Agenda by Becky Albertalli: Like. I don’t think i really have to explain this one LRKGJJRG but added it just in case. YA contemporary following Simon as he e-mails another gay student at his school and falls in love. (Rep: Gay, Black, Jewish, Warnings: Homophobia)

All For the Game Trilogy (The Foxhole Court, The Raven King, The King’s Men) by Nora Sakavic: If y’all have been on my blog at all you know i’m back in aftg hyperfixation mode after another reread lmao. Is it a lil messy is it a lil dramatic... yes. but i love it!!! We follow our protagonist Neil Josten, who’s been on the run from his crime lord father, The Butcher of Baltimore, since he was young. After his mother dies on the run, Neil finds a new place and adopts yet another identity, and ends up playing high school exy (a made up sport but like we’re barely here for the sports lmao), something he used to play as a child. Despite playing a new position, he attracts the attention of the PSU Foxes, who’s coach David Wymack specifically recruits players with a troubled past to give them a second chance. Neil really shouldn’t sign-- it goes against everything his mother told him, it puts him at risk of being in the spotlight for his father’s men to find him, and puts him on the same team as Kevin Day, someone from his past that knows his true identity. Still, something draws Neil to joining the team, to finally try to live instead of just survive. UGHHHH like truly this book just makes u fall in love with all the characters and the beautiful and broken found family that develops over three books and one of the most iconic and amazing (ha....) slowburn relationships ever.... Also if i recall they’re super cheap on iBooks (at least when i bought them, the first book was free and the other two were $1.99). (Rep: Gay, Demisexual, POC, Warnings: MAJOR trigger warnings for like. everything bc all the foxes have fucked up pasts. But the biggest ones are probably rape, abuse/torture, and substance abuse)

Six of Crows Duology (Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom) by Leigh Bardugo: Idk how much I really have to talk about this bc it’s popular but I am physically unably not to reccomend this duology bc its just. So. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The most barebones summary is that this is a YA Fantasy about six people coming together to perform an impossible heist. This is truly like...... a masterclass in developing characters and has one of the best m/f ships i’ve ever read... But also since it’s on here there is some gay shit going on, 3/6 mains are Not Straight and there’s a cute m/m couple! Also you don’t have to read the Grisha Trilogy to read this but u can if u want (I have yet to). (Rep: Bisexual, Gay, Disabled, POC, Warnings: Again these ppl have fucked up pasts, biggest are PTSD, past sexual abuse)

The Raven Cycle Series (The Raven Boys, The Dream Theives, Blue Lily Lily Blue, The Raven King) by Maggie Steifvater: Again i don’t think I really have to explain this one but like. In case you haven’t read this series it’s truly iconic..... Idk even how to explain this LKGJLJRG just like magical realism wonderfulness and found family and amazing relationships and shit.... (Rep: Gay, Bisexual, Disabled, Warnings: Abuse)

The following are books I plan to read for pride/in the near future. I can’t wholeheartedly reccomend them obviously, or fully detail all the rep/warnings, but I’ve heard some great things about these books and a lot of them have representation that the first part of the list is lacking, so I figured I would add them! (Also if I use ‘queer’ that’s because that’s the only label I have been given by the authors or reviewers, or the characters identify as queer)

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman: To my knowledge this is a really emotional YA coming of age/college story that has to do with like. A podcast? Idk a lot of people love it and side note I’ll be suing B&N bc they NEVER have it relkj (Rep: Bisexual, Demisexual, I belive Latinx.)

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand: I believe this is a YA horror-ish novel where there’s a monster stealing girls on and island. (Rep: I believe all three main girls are queer Warnings: Since this is horror im assuming. Horror stuff LMAO)

I Wish You all The Best by Mason Deaver: A YA contemporary romance about Ben who comes out as non-binary to their parents and gets kicked out, and moves in with their estranged sister. They soon are taken under the wing of a senior named Nathan Allan and begin to fall. (Rep: Non-Binary (Own Voices), MLM/Queer, Black (im assuming from the gorgeous cover lmao. Warnings: Misgendering, homophobia, anxiety, depression)

Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno: YA Magical Realism about Georgina, who has yet to inherit the magical powers that have been passed down her family, including her twin sister Mary who, unlike Georgina, is coming into her powers. (Rep: Lesbian, Queer, Aro/Ace, Warnings: Rape and sexual assault, underage drinking, animal death, drug use.)

#books #lgbt #pride #lgbt books #idk what else to tag lmao pls feel free to add ur own yall!!! or correct anything i got wrong lmao

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bookcub · 4 years

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My Decade in Books

@aliteraryprincess @the-forest-library @lizziethereader all tagged me!!!

2010- So this was when I was sixth to seventh grade for me. I was a small child, I tracked my books on a Word Doc, where I used weird fonts and colors. I did one of my favorite plays in sixth grade (Lady Pirates of the Caribbean), which we performed the day after The Last Olympian came out, which I read the day after, and then proceeded to lend it to three other people. I actually forgot that I read The Name of the Wind this year (gasp!!), but my school librarian handed it to me, and I slowly fell in love. I think this is the year I read Cassandra Clare’s books, which was big for me because I was able to talk about it with friends. (I think it was The Mortal Instruments I binged at one). I must have read Mockingjay. . .

2011- I got my Goodreads account in April!!! So I have access to me tracking my books. I don’t think I got really vigilant with it until later, but I put the important ones down!!! This was the year I got into ereaders!!! I borrowed one from the library (same librarian who got me to use ereaders got me to read kkc, so she’s the best as you can see). I read Warped on it, which made me love Nooks, and inspired my parents to get me one. This was also the year I started WAITING. I read The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss and Pegasus by Robin McKinley. I have not gotten a sequel for either. I am being very, very patient, and I feel like waiting is a very important part of my development as human being. And a reader. And also, a good lesson because closure is not something you always obtain quickly, and sometimes never at all.

2012- I read Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers this year and couldn’t stop crying. One of the most emotional books I’ve read. I also was in the middle of the Elemental series by Brigid Kemmerer, which I read a new one of every year. I think I discovered Sarah Rees Brennan the year before, but didn’t record her books until this year. She is one of my favorite authors, so it’s very notable. This was the year of huge cliffhangers (at least, I’m pretty sure) as I read The Mark of Athena and Beautiful Chaos this year (seriously people were falling off of things and their fate was left uncertain and it sucked). (oh God, this was the year I read 8 House of Night books) (on the bright side, I read Soulless by Gail Carriger) (and Howls’ Moving Castle!!!!)

2013- Looks like I actually tracked all my books this year!! 103 books, so it was a good year for books. I read the Worst Book Ever (tm) this year (ie Taking Chances by Molly McAdams) and will forever be haunted, but at least now I know whatever I write in the future will be better than this. I also read the entirety of Vampire Academy and the first half of Bloodlines by Richelle Mead in like 3 weeks. I read Hushed by Kelley York, which was super dark and honestly simply amazing and possibly the beginning of my obsession with fictional serial killers. I read Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor as well as The Duff by Kody Keplinger, which were influential books for me as well. Anyways, it was a good year for books.

2014- The year I made by book blog!!! I was only doing reviews every now and then and really didn’t get the community yet (it was also in like, October). I read 99 books this years (apparently my goal was 100, I’m a little confused at me). I read a lot of Shakespeare this year, including The Tempest, which I got to star in years later, and The Taming of the Shrew, which I later directed. I think I started a book club this year as well at my high school. I read a bunch of parts of series I love (including Rebel Belle, The Lynburn Legacy, The Lunar Chronicles, Bloodlines, The Mortal Instruments). I finished Heroes of Olympus and it sucked. Pride and Prejudice was amazing because, Jane Austen!!! The Slow Regard of Silent Things came out and it was the most lovely thing ever.

2015- I graduated high school and I started college this year!!! I also realized I was ace this year. Idk some notable things that happened. I read my favorite Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing. I read The Turn of the Story by Sarah Rees Brennan, which is like, the first draft of In Other Lands. It was amazing even then. I read my first and only book in another language, Le Petit Prince. I took a children’s lit class, and it was awesome, but I didn’t like most of the books. I read the Seven Realms in like, a month, which was cool. But it wasn’t a great year for books. That being said, August is when I made my first Denna essay on my blog. Which was the very small start to my book blog becoming something I actually put time into. It was still a while, but it was very important to me.

2016- The first book I read this year was the most memorable. The Storyteller by Antonia Michaelis. It rips your heart out and just stays with you. One of the best books, hands down. I took a fantasy class, and that was tons of fun, and read alot of classic fantasy and new fantasy. I read The Martian, which actually lived up to the hype for once. I read two of the most popular tumblr books, Six of Crows and The Raven Cycle. I did a lot of rereading. I read Quicksilver by RJ Anderson and Every Heart a Doorway by Seannan McGuire, my first ace books!! This is also the year my book blog started to pick up. I started writing more meta and some fanfic for Kingkiller and the occasional meta and meme for other fandoms. I also started @incorrectkingkillerquotes.

2017- One of the first books I read this year was The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which continues to be a book that I just have . . .very complicated feelings about, even to this day. I read it for a class, which was decent enough. I found one of my new favorite fantasy novels, Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor, which I adore and covered so many amazing themes as well. The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman is one of the few true adult fantasy novels I love, where there aren’t young protagonists. I read Tash Hearts Tolstoy by Kathryn Ormsbee this year and it just was the most me book I have ever found. I read Trickster’s Queen by Tamora Pierce, which had been on my tbr since 2011, so that was a big win for me. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francis Zappia and Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Macekzie Lee came out this year and I devoured them both almost consecutively??? They both resonated with me and were completely consuming. I read the PUBLISHED version of In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan and then proceeded to obsess about it. I think I started making even more Book Discussions this year and making more posts about being ace on here.

2018- I reread sooooo much. And I reread a lot. But I was in another country, and I needed them for comfort. I’m a little talked out by now but here are some notable titles fromt hat year: Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann, The Poppy War by RF Kuang, Anne of Avonlea by LM Montgomery, Little White Lies by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

2019- I mean, I just lived that,,, y’all were here. I am Tired(tm), and I’m also sorry.

Red White and Royal Blue, Ari and Dante, HRH, Starflight, The Gilded Wolves, A Very Large Expanse of Sea, started listening to audiobooks more, stared more romance novels, graduated college this year, good year.

#tag game #sorry i lovst so much steam

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copperbadge · 6 years

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There was a recent discussion on tumblr, which I didn’t reblog for obvious reasons, about how people with a large readership cope with a heavy interaction load -- how the person would be anxious if they dealt with that volume of notes on each post, that amount of interaction and contact. I was tagged in it because of my habit of "lochnessing", where I cause an activity spike on posts I reblog that looks like the loch ness monster.

It never occurs to me, because I’ve dealt with high-volume social media for so long -- realistically about ten years, probably closer to fifteen -- that it’s difficult for people to handle that, because they don’t have the systems in place that I do. I mean it does occur to me in the sense that I have become more cautious about what I reblog and its impact on the OP; there are things I’d like to share with you but don’t because I recognize it would be harmful to the person who wrote them. But it doesn't occur to me that someone might struggle with a high volume of notes purely because it's a volume that they don't have a system in place to deal with the way I do.

So I said I'd do a writeup on the "entire ecosystems" I had in place for handling the high volume of interaction I receive online. I sit at a weird place where I'm not so well known that I can just ignore most of what comes at me with impunity because everyone acknowledges I can't answer it all, like say a youtube star. But at the same time I do get too much attention to return it at the same level I receive it. I am one and you are sixteen thousand. So I had to make systems to return as much as I could and feel okay about not returning the rest.

Reading through this, of course it sounds like a weird humblebrag: "Here's how I deal with my MASSIVE POPULARITY". There's no real way around that; I can't talk about how I deal with comments without talking about how I get a disproportionately high number of them. The fact that I do is what leads me to do things like the Zero Comment Challenge, or Radio Free Monday, to try and balance shit out. So, as I mention occasionally below, you can think I'm an asshole for talking about how I am popular, but I can't talk about how to deal with that popularity without acknowledging the reality of it, and someone somewhere's gonna think I'm an asshole anyway, so whatever.

These are the systems I use to manage my life -- work, play, the weird inbetween space that's kind of both. Many of these are akin to the systems that I use in managing my depression, in that they involve a lot of small steps building up to a big result, but each small step on its own is manageable.

Let's start with AO3, because it's actually probably the simplest.

I clean out my comments once a week. Usually there are between forty and a hundred and fifty, depending on if I’ve published something recently or been recommended by someone.

I go through all the one-sentence comments first, because those are the ones that are least likely to require a response. I read all comments but I learned through trial and error, twice in ten years, that I am physically and emotionally incapable of responding to every comment I receive even if it's just with a "Thank you!" and I'm just going to live with the fact that people think I'm an asshole for that. Also while I appreciate someone who leaves a "Great fic! <3" comment, that's genuinely really cool and validating, I don't think they truly need or expect a response. So most one-line comments, unless they are super weird or contain a question, get read, appreciated, and then deleted.

Then I go through the longer comments that need a closer reading, and delete any that are cool but still don't seem to require responses. If someone has left a ton of comments, I'll find the one I think is coolest or most needing of response, delete the others, and reply to that one comment with a thoughtful response including a line thanking them for all their other comments.

Finally, I respond to comments that are in-depth or have questions that require some thought. I find that if I don't respond to these on a weekly basis they pile up and then someone who asked a question like six months ago is still waiting for an answer, so this one is non-negotiable: my AO3 inbox has to be empty at the end of each week, and everything that needed a reply has to have one. (I do have one or two that just live in my inbox because they are cool ideas I will one day get round to writing, and I want to credit them when I do, but it's never more than two.) For me, it's easiest to wait until Friday or Saturday and just take an hour to clear them all out, rather than clearing as I go, because I don't have AO3 open all the time the way I do some other sites.

Tumblr: Every morning, before work, I go through the previous night's responses; I open all reblogs/mentions in new tabs to read and reply-as-necessary, and I reply to all comments that need responses. (This is also something I'll do throughout the day, but especially if I'm tired or pressed for time, the comment replies might be saved as a draft or left in an open tab until I can get to them). Occasionally shit doesn’t show up or I miss stuff but I’ve learned to just live with that as the price of doing fandom on Tumblr.

If there's a post by someone else that requires a response from me -- either a reblog of one of my posts, or someone tagged me in a post -- I Like it to find it later or I save it as a draft. I don't use Likes as anything other than "I want to be able to find this again in less than a week's time" and I never have more than about 20 Likes in my files. (Unless I’m traveling; it’s easier to Like something than save it as a draft or respond, so when I get home from traveling I often have 30-50 Likes in my file.)

Often on Tumblr I go through what I call the Line Cycle -- I read my dash, and then I go "down the line" and open all the other pages that might need attention, in specific order. I open asks and try to respond to a few -- I try to answer at least five every time but sometimes I don't manage to answer any for whatever reason -- then I open likes and try to convert as many likes as I can to either queued reblogs or drafts. I open drafts and try to convert some of those to queued reblogs. Then I go through the same process for one or two side blogs.

(Also in drafts are a lot of things that I'm not sure I want to put in my queue yet, or things that I put in the queue weekly like the Zero Comment Challenge post, which I dust off when I'm ready to queue it, then immediately re-save to drafts when it posts.)

Occasionally if I feel shit is getting out of hand I dedicate myself to, every time, not leaving the page I'm on until I've reduced its "count" (number of asks, likes, drafts, etc) by five, or at least to below the next multiple of five -- if I have 23, for example, I'll try to get it below 20.

Sometimes posts in tabs sit open for a while because in order to respond I have to read an article or watch a video, which take a lot of focus and attention. It used to be that recommendations for books or stuff to watch also sat open forever until I could get round to doing it, but now I just have a "reccs" file on the cloud that is a list of what I've been recommended and who recommended it, and I work my way through them slowly.

Email: Once I've read them, site notifications in my inbox get deleted; I've turned off follow/kudos notifications because they tend to be white noise.

Email is tough for me, it requires a lot of focus and emotional attention to answer emails, so I treat it the same way I would asks or likes or whatnot, but much more slowly. I tend to have a backlog of about thirty emails in my inbox, though often five to ten of those are emails that don't need response and that I'm saving (I star them to mark them as not needing attention). I have the multiple-stars function in Gmail turned on, and when it gets really bad, I start opening emails and triaging -- "This will be easier to answer" "This will take some time" etc. by starring them different colors.

I like to have no more than fifteen emails in my inbox but that is a rarity.

The Internet: Because social media takes up a lot of my time and I also work eight hours a day (well, four, we'll get to that in a bit) I have streamlined the way I encounter the internet, as well. I have a list of "daily reading" bookmarks that I open every morning and check through -- the horoscope page, the mustard tag on tumblr (which I don't follow because then the same dumbass two hipster fashion posts keep showing up on my dash), a blog that follows and posts about new small flash games that I might enjoy playing, a few others. (I also have a Monday file that I open once a week, it's calendars of events and such, and I go through on Mondays and add anything to my calendar that looks interesting.)

But if I can, any regularly-updated page that has an RSS feed gets converted to RSS and put into my Netvibes reader account, where I peruse it at my leisure. The Netvibes reader account includes a direct feed from the Steve/Tony and Steve/Sam tags on AO3, plus a few others; longform.org, some cooking blogs I follow, a bunch of podcast pages, a few webcomics, and one or two tumblrs that I don't want showing up on my dash (mainly artists' porny sideblogs, what up you glorious pervs) or think I would make the person uncomfortable by following them.

I have five tabs pinned to Chrome at any given time, and four tabs pinned to Firefox. The Chrome tabs are my personal Netvibes, Google Drive, a Google Sheets spreadsheet with my calendar and accounting tabs in it, Gmail, and Tumblr. The Firefox tabs are a second Netvibes account I use for work (we have several news sources we all monitor daily), my non-fannish gmail, my non-fannish facebook with a custom reading page so I never see anything twice, and the Google "family calendar" that I and my family use to track where we all are and what we're doing.

My parents use this more than I do, which is why I often open the calendar app on my phone to check my work schedule and find that my parents are taking the dogs to the groomer's today (yes, I know I could turn this off, but it amuses me). When I introduced my mother to Google Calendar her eyes got super big and she fell in immediate love; the first three things she added were the birthdays of her two dogs, followed by the birthday of Jesus. I would be more insulted by this but I had already added all the family birthdays, so at least I didn't come in behind the dogs AND the Christ Child.

Once in a while, when I'm at work and I feel like I'm not sure what I should be doing or that my day is spiralling out of my control, I'll take a deep breath, pull up Chrome, and go through all my pinned tabs, one by one, changing or fixing something on each -- I'll clear out my Longform reading, answer a few emails, check the calendar, etc. Then I'll go through any open tabs and try to close at least one. I get anxious if I have more than five or six non-pinned tabs open. Like having an inbox that's rarely over thirty emails total, it's not a sign I'm more effective or efficient than anyone else, it's just a sign I'm debilitatingly anxious about this kind of thing.

Work: I've read, many times, that people who work eight hours a day in a white collar job like mine really only do four hours of actual work. And for a while I joked that I wondered if I even did four, because I dick around on the internet A LOT. But lately I started to genuinely wonder, and so for the past six weeks, I've put that statement to the test.

When I arrive at work, I immediately put in two hours of solid work. I don't read tumblr, I don't read anything but work-related material. I triage all my work emails, I go through my Google Task list for the day and sort things by most to least urgent, and then I work my way through them for two solid hours. It's not easy at all, but any time I think "This is when I would stop and read tumblr" I shake my head and try to do one more work thing, and then I get back in the groove and can do like, three more. I also use this first morning period to take care of "personal work", stuff which has to get done to keep my life running smoothly, like mailing packages or replying to my parents' emails or whatnot.

Then I get a half-hour break to read tumblr, play a flash game, maybe read a piece on Longform. (I don't read fanfic at work; I sometimes clean out Netvibes of fics that from the tags and summaries I know I won't be interested in, but I don't open fanfic at work at all.) I also use this time to get some food in me.

Then I do another two hours of work, same deal. And that's four hours of work. And I get a shitload done, let me tell you.

For the next three hours after, I am basically free to do whatever I want. I usually use about an hour to do some freelance work, and I spend time on tumblr or on personal email, reading articles, listening to podcasts, playing games. I eat a snack, I talk to my coworkers. I find I actually run out of new stuff to read, and I do try to process the old stuff, like empty out my drafts and likes. And of course the nature of my job means that sometimes there is work to be done that comes up suddenly, but it's usually just a matter of teeing it up for the following morning's work shift.

For the last hour of my work day, I go through my work inbox, make sure everything's set up for tomorrow, send any last emails, do any last wrap-up, and make sure all my documents are either saved or closed. (Our IT team likes to run updates and involuntary restarts without warning, so I've learned to always save at end of day.)

So, yeah. Those are some of the systems I have in place in order to run a very mentally busy life. I'm not necessarily recommending them; a lot of them won't work for everyone because everyone is different, and I recognize that some of them are inapplicable (I work a job with no outward-facing element to it; a barista or a librarian or a teacher can't do what I do, schedule-wise), and some of them are a level of regimentation I'm not sure most people would find healthy. But that's how I do my thing, and maybe some of my techniques will sound appealing to other people who occasionally feel, as I do, like they're drowning a little bit.

(Did you find this useful or interesting? Keep me organized and drop some change in my Ko-Fi or at my Paypal!)

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