#compiling everything and putting it in a coherent form was so much more work that i expected

[spacedustmantis]

alright me and @chaos-caverns just spent the past few hours spitballing back and forth thoughts and ideas about triton biology within the jrwi riptide universe. here's what we got so far:

triton evolved to survive both in water and out of it (i mean they breathe air), but it's unlikely that they evolved to live on land/above water. obviously being on the surface won't kill them (we have three very alive examples to prove that) but they probably experience some serious debuffs while up there.

triton are described to live in very deep places, therefore being deep sea inhabitants.

in riptide we also have multiple references to the fact that the buildings in the undersea, or at least in the area that gillion grew up in, are in fact not filled with water, but with air. this means that triton can maneuver both through water and through air/on ground without issue. (this includes any differences in stuff like gravity, drag, walking vs swimming etc.)

we also see humans inside the capitol building, which means the atmospheric pressure inside that building, or at least that room, has to be much lower than the pressure in the water surrounding the buildings, which in turn means that triton (and other underwater races) are not harmed by drastic changes in pressure, nor by the much lower pressure of above water at mean sea level.

however, since building structures that can withstand the difference in atmospheric pressure is unnecessarily expensive and inefficient, it's likely that in general the rooms, even if filled with air, have the same pressure as the water outside, meaning that triton are not at all used to the low atmospheric pressure of the oversea, and any triton coming to the surface will most likely face some aches and pains while their body adjusts.

on top of that, fish can and will get sunburnt if the water is too clear or they swim to close to the surface, and the sunburns are much worse, sometimes even detrimental to the fishes health. this would mean that triton probably have very sun sensitive skin and if at the surface might need to stay in the shade or get some special potions to avoid permanent damage to their skin.

deep sea fish are much less dense than other fish for buoyancy reasons (if you've ever scuba dived before you know this). that includes their bones. triton have brittle bones and weigh much less than one would suspect.

triton definitely have some mammalian traits, as gillion has been described to sweat on multiple occasions

now for something really fun: the opah is the only known full warm blooded fish, and because of that has much more energy and is much faster than the other, very slow, deep sea fish that need to conserve their energy. it also has an internal temperature regulation system not unlike a radiator built in that is mostly used to keep it warm, but can also cool it down. considering triton seem to be the strong, agile, fighter type (pursuit predator), and don't overheat despite the vast difference in temperature between the undersea and the oversea, a circulatory system reminiscent of the one the opah has seems likely. again that just means the temperature change won't kill them, they might still get uncomfortable with the heat at first, or just in general. this could be one reason why gillion keeps jumping overboard. (trying to fact check some stuff and i just found out that some lizards cool off by standing around with their mouths open. i think that would be a very gillion thing to do)

now for something really really fun: the lungfish! and yes it's exactly what it sounds like, it's a fish with both gills and lungs. and it can fucking breathe below and above water. triton having both gills and lungs officially makes sense. (the lungfish is a freshwater fish found in shallow rivers and such, and i don't know how this would translate to a saltwater deep sea humanoid creature, if at all, but this is fucking fantasy alright? we're allowed to pretend that this is flawless logic)

fish, like amphibians, need to keep their skin moist if they want to survive. we just don't talk about it because most fish can't breathe above water. another reason why gillion jumps off the ship constantly. also explains why he keeps saying "stay moist" to caspian, who does not, in fact, need to stay moist.

now for the eyes. there's two factors to that: light sensitivity and light refraction.

let's start with light sensitivity. as we have previously established, triton did not evolve for survival on the surface, and they are deep sea creatures. both of that explains the darkvision, but also implies that their eyes are very likely to be highly sensitive to light and the daylight might be too bright for them to really be able to see well. as for a real life example, shark eyes are super well equipped to see in dark, murky waters as they have a layer of mirrored crystals behind their retina, reflecting the picture into the retina again to increase clarity. and bottom-dwelling or nocturnal sharks are in fact pretty light sensitive. all in all this makes for a good estimate for triton eyes. the fact that gillion's vision would already be too bright makes the fact that he keeps staring into the sun even more concerning. then again if you're already constantly blinded you might as well, right? (also i don't know if i'm remembering this correctly but isn't gillion's perception pretty low? this could be part of that. potentially)

now light refraction. the refraction of light underwater is different from the refraction in air. that's why everything is blurry when we open our eyes underwater, but not when we wear goggles. but we evolved to live above water, while triton, as previously established, evolved to live both in water and in air. since evolution would have no clue that they already see bad when in the sun and the smartest move would be to make them able to see when underwater really good, the most likely result would be that in an attempt to optimize triton would end up farsighted underwater and nearsighted in air, like frogs.

since triton's eyesight seems to be less than optimal no matter what, they have probably developed some senses to compensate, for example picking up subtle vibrations in the water around them, or good hearing or sense of smell.

a lot of aquatic mammals can close their nostrils so they don't get water in them, and seals can do the same to their ear canals. triton would also do that i think.

the fins on the side of triton's heads might be used for not only the usual fin stuff, like balance and steering, while underwater, but also as a sort of outer ear that funnels the sound waves into the ear canals to amplify their hearing while outside of it, and on top of that to express emotion, similar to almost every mammals ears except humans'. the fins on triton's limbs might also reflect their emotions, though probably much subtler. a lot of animals also use their ears to regulate heat, and this could very well translate to triton's fins.

also one final fun thought we had was that even though triton seem to be pursuit predators (actively hunting and fighting and running and stuff), they might be ambush predators instead (sneaking, ambushing etc.) and the reason gillion is Like That is because of his training, not because of triton biology.

i desperately hope there's no mistakes in this because there is no way that i am proof reading all of that at 1 am. anyways if you read this and think "oh hey, i know some stuff about deep sea fish/ aquatic mammals/ physics!" feel free to add some stuff. and if i said something wrong don't hold back.

@grizzlyplays i feel like you might enjoy this. we certainly did

#yeesh that took fucking ages #compiling everything and putting it in a coherent form was so much more work that i expected #jrwi spoilers #<- just in case #jrwi riptide #gillion tidestrider #jrwi show #buggy thoughts #connecting the dots #silver screen

[slavghoul]

Phantomime is the band's third album of covers, after If You Have Ghosts and Popestar. Cover songs are usually the preserve of young, inexperienced bands. Is doing covers a way to maintain a link with your formative years and not forget where you come from?

Tobias Forge: Absolutely. I think it does that. It serves as a return to the roots, in the same way as for... I don't know, let's say someone who practices martial arts, who starts in a certain dojo and ends up changing it. If you want to become a good fighter, you have to move and train with different people. It's the same for a footballer: if you play with the same team all the time, your team might be very good, but you always have to play against others. I think the same logic applies with covers: it can help to go back. You don't necessarily have to release them. We chose to do a real album, but in parallel I worked on other songs - not only Impera music, but other covers. We selected the best ones, and said, "Let's put these out; this looks coherent and presentable".

How much did learning to play other artists' songs contribute to your formation as a musician? What were the most formative songs in your youth?

The answer to the first question is yes. Listening and playing at the same time is very formative. I've never really been... A lot of guitarists, especially, take the time to read tablature and learn how to play something very precisely, and in my opinion, theorise the music too much. I can't say that I'm not theoretical; I just don't follow the rules or the classic terminology. I try to categorise and understand the logic, but I do it in my own way, based on what I have learned over time. I never spent much time with tablature; I just played to the music. I would put the music on and play. I wasn't trying to learn how to play the song in the same way as the band. I would play as if I were invited to play with them. So my style is very free, because I played The Doors as well as Kiss, Slayer and DJ Bobo! It could be anything. Whatever I heard, whatever I listened to, whatever song I could get my hands on, I would play it. I think the chaos of it all made it... When you understand that, you understand the way I write, the way I do things, and why I sometimes seem to be a bit scattered.

That's what may surprise you when you listen to the EP: you can find Iron Maiden as well as Tina Turner...

Yes, I grew up with both, so it's not strange to me. But of course, in order to go from just wanting to do something to a homogeneous work that is supposed to have some commercial appeal, you have to make decisions. One of those decisions was, "If we're going to do this Tina Turner song, it really needs to be punchy." It's supposed to be a rock EP, it's got to be set to 10. I think that's what sets this cover apart from the moose. By the way, thematically, I didn't think of it as 'a Tina Turner cover', but as 'the Mad Max song'. It fits with the times we're living in.

Phantomime features a cover of Iron Maiden's "Phantom Of The Opera". Two years ago, you also recorded a version of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" for the Blacklist compilation. In rock, people like to pit the Rolling Stones against the Beatles, and I think the metal world tends to do the same thing with Metallica and Iron Maiden. Do you feel more affinity with Metallica or with Maiden?

[He thinks] Good question. I'm trying to formulate a coherent answer. I think... It's so fifty-fifty. Both. Not just in terms of inspiration, but in terms of their whole careers, especially when I was a kid. In many ways, like many fans of both bands, there's a cut-off date where my interest in new music started to wane. But I have such a love for everything they did before that it doesn't really matter. The limit is basically the Black Album and Fear Of The Dark. I mean, I like The X Factor, and Brave New World was an absolutely great comeback album. But as a kid and a teenager, settling down with Live After Death was such an inspiration - not just for what I was hearing, but for the tour dates and everything to do with that. Same with Metallica and the Black Album. That was the first time I saw them, and it was the first time I was confronted with commercial greatness in metal, when a band is on top. It's happening now, they're the biggest band of all time. They're playing in such and such an arena, but when they come back next year, they'll be doing such and such a stadium. Even back then, I had a hunch that not only were they great, but they were doing well in life. These guys are getting richer by the hour [laughs]. That's the kind of thing that matters when you're twelve. "And imagine all the girls they get!" That kind of nonsense.

And of course, these bands inspired me musically and professionally and brought me a lot of joy, but they also became mentors in my professional life. I have so much gratitude and respect for those two bands. If I were to be super picky and specific, I would say that since we are a more melodic band, we are probably closer to Maiden. Metallica is more of a "speed" band, I think. To be honest, what I've always liked most about Metallica, and especially on my favourite albums, which are a lot of people's favourites, is not the speed. The speed and the violence on those albums are just added value. The reason their music was so great in the 80s was because it was so melodic. It's the melodies. What changed in the 90s was that they stopped the melodies. They became a blues band, and all of a sudden all the movements were different. It wasn't neoclassical like in the 80s or on the Black Album. I'm very neoclassical myself, that's why I feel so close to the melodic side of Metallica. On the other hand, I spent my teenage years listening to death and black metal, so I love big riffs and speed and stuff like that, but that's not what we do with Ghost.

For a long time, fans have been asking who could be the Maiden or Metallica of tomorrow. Considering the impressive success of Ghost, do you think you have an answer to that question?

Obviously, I know that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg will die one day, but I don't think Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino can be considered as a replacement. These directors don't have that much in common, but you know what I mean, I hope. I don't see us as taking their place. You know, I try to be as transparent as possible. What I do is very much inspired by those two bands. I try to do it in a different way, and with respect. But of course, from a practical point of view, when the day comes when there's no more Iron Maiden and you want to see a rock concert with staging and solos, you can come and see us. It's a very curious concept, but it's obviously relevant, because we live in a time when the previous generation is disappearing one after the other. I think Lars [Ulrich] and James [Hetfield] have spoken about how the physicality of their music is not the same as the Rolling Stones. Charlie [Watts] playing the way he played when he was seventy-nine or eighty, it's nothing like what's expected of Lars. And what is expected of James is also very different from what is expected of Keith Richards, with his very open chord style. The meticulousness of James' riffs and Kirk's solos can be difficult to achieve at eighty - and they're approaching sixty. Kirk already has them, by the way. So, as much as I don't want to think about it or remind people, nothing lasts forever. Sooner or later, fans are going to have to decide which bands they want to go see, because a lot of the people they grew up with won't be around anymore.

Your cover of "Enter Sandman" was very "ghostified", while "Phantom Of The Opera" is more faithful to the original in comparison. How do you decide how to approach a cover? Are there songs that offer more latitude in terms of arrangement and appropriation, and others less?

There are several factors, which differ from song to song, and the result can therefore be different. If you go back in time and take "Waiting For The Night", for example, I always thought that song in its original form... Obviously it's cool, but I thought there was a bigger song underneath. In the original, it's diffuse, vague, underlying. The chords are just hinted at, and the vocals suggest that you can build something bigger around it. When I did the cover with Dave Grohl, he asked me, "Can we do a really slow version of it like Trouble?" I said, "Yeah, that sounds cool." And of course, working with Dave Grohl, it seemed like a good idea at the time. In the end, we thought it was too slow, too heavy and too long. It was a good idea, but the result was not very convincing.

Enter Sandman' and 'Phantom Of The Opera' were conceived in two different ways. If someone had asked me to do a Metallica tribute, I would have accepted, but I would never have chosen 'Enter Sandman', in the same way that few people would choose 'Paranoid' or 'Smoke On The Water'. You automatically try not to pick the biggest hit. But in this case, it was Swedish television that asked me to play. It was for a music award, and they said: "Since Ghost and Metallica are close, you are seen as friends, so you should open the show. And we want you to play their biggest song, 'Enter Sandman'." I asked, "Do I have a choice?" And they said, "Not really! We want you to do it, otherwise we have to rethink the whole show. Could you think about it?" OK, I'll think about it and see what I can do. So I started to play the song and see what I could get out of it. The original structure of the song is very simple, and the melody, like "Waiting For The Night", suggests chords that they don't play. All I had to do was see which chord suggested the melody and fill in the gaps. I ended up with a five-minute arrangement. If I sing the melody with a guitar, this is what chords it suggests. That's the somewhat academic version of the song. I was at the stage where I had a completely different version of the song, and I recorded it and thought, "Fuck, I hope James doesn't hate it..." Because I don't want to disappoint anyone. It's supposed to be a tribute. My version was like, "You guys have all my love, but I was forced to do this! And in the end, the result was great.

"Phantom Of The Opera' was a bit different. I knew I wanted to cover a Maiden song, but not just anything, of course. I wasn't going to do 'The Number Of The Beast'. I've had fun with 'Phantom' in the past, because it's a long song and quite complicated. As a musician, it's quite common to sit on the couch and try to figure out a riff. What are they doing there? [What's the rhythm? How are they counting? Because I couldn't hear the beat. And suddenly, once I understood how the beat works in this song [he sings the riff while snapping his fingers], I thought: "Wow, you can't hear that at all on the record. You can't hear anything, it's just a controlled mess." I managed to figure out how to play other elements of the song, and I was like, "Now I have a reason to record it. Not because I want to improve it, but to come up with a different version where you can clearly hear the different parts." First of all, it was a personal experiment in the studio. I wanted to record it to see what it sounded like, and suddenly, after working on it for a few hours, doubling the guitars, adding the drums and playing everything perfectly with metronomic precision, the track was different and a bit updated, so to speak. So I said to myself, "I'm going to take the gamble of covering this song, and see what happens. It seemed like a good reason. I'm not saying my version is better, I'm just saying it's different. There's a bit more contrast and fluidity, you can hear the different elements better. It underlines how good the song is.

Phantomime's covers also include Genesis' 'Jesus He Knows Me'. Genesis is a rather peculiar band, which started out in progressive rock and ended up with huge radio hits. Do you find yourself in this ambiguity, in this duality?

Yes, I do. The other band on that level that did something similar is Pink Floyd. In the beginning, their music was really strange, really eccentric, and then they became more and more pop as the albums went on. People still mistakenly think they're a prog band, whereas 'Wish You Were Here' is really just a series of four pop songs stretched to the max. Not only am I very inspired by that, but I also feel an affinity with that kind of thing. You try to come up with variations of the traditional, if you like. You try to change the form, to present elements that people know in a different way. It's a bit like running a fusion restaurant and offering an Asian-inspired onion soup and adding coriander to the dish. It's still recognisable, but you try to make the recipe different. Another analogy is Stanley Kubrick, who told stories that weren't very complicated, but presented them in an epic way because of their façade - literally. It was the choice of set and costume and the attention to detail that made the difference. That's why, as a composer, I always try to go back to the simplicity of the writing; the simplicity of 'Another Brick In The Wall'; the simplicity of 'Comfortably Numb'. It sounds like a huge, epic song, but it's not complicated at all. They have a lot of songs like that. For a lot of songs in the Genesis catalogue, especially in the later part of their career, the only thing that makes it a bit weird is the middle part. In "Jesus He Knows Me", that's one of the things that made me want to... Not only have I always loved that song, but there are three factors that made me want to do my own thing with it. One: it's a very upbeat rhythm. The way they play it is so quiet that it literally sounds like they're playing on the table [he beats the rhythm on the table] with an acoustic guitar. There's a real metal track in there.

Do something with those guitars! [Laughs]

Yeah, but I'm glad they didn't, because that means we can! I'm really surprised that a band like Metallica never covered this song, because it sounds like a song from Garage Days. It has the same atmosphere. So I thought, "I'm gonna make it sound like a Garage Days song by Metallica. And I fucking hate the bridge of the original, when they go into white boy raggae. I like reggae, but this is the whitest reggae in the world! And it totally destroys the song. As much as I've always loved the song as a whole, I've always hated that part. So getting rid of that section and making it very heavy was also on the to-do list. I had to go into Trouble mode on this. And of course, that goes without saying, but the lyrics were also perfect. It's meant as a tribute, even though I spit on that bridge a lot. But they've done a lot of these kind of prog bridges, like "Let's do anything here", and they'll throw in a rumba or something like that. Some people might find that really interesting, but in most of their songs, I don't think it adds anything. But yes, Genesis has a lot of... I like a lot of their older prog music, with Peter Gabriel, although I think they almost became even better after they split up. Peter Gabriel did his own music, and he did it very well - very epic music. And Phil [Collins] came in on vocals and they did their own thing. To me, it was the best of both worlds, even if it sounds sacrilegious to say that. I'd love to see Peter Gabriel come back and sing with them, that would be cool, but their separation brought so much to the music, between Peter Gabriel's career, Genesis' career and Phil's career. That amount of work, man!

It's one of the few cases where the split was a real success for everyone, and the result is as good as the original band.

Absolutely, I think so. The most amazing thing they could do now, especially now that Phil is not in good shape... What I wish they had done, or could have done, or would do one day, is a triple tour. For example, Phil and [Peter] could do a solo show each to start with, maybe just five or ten songs, and then get together with Genesis. That way we could have 'Here Come The Flood', 'Another Day In Paradise' and 'In The Air Tonight', and then a bunch of Genesis. I think everyone would love to see that. It would be the perfect concert. For me, it would be one of the best experiences possible.

You see, that's the kind of idea that made Ghost into Ghost. If you can come up with a plan like that for other bands...

[Laughs] You can always call me before it's too late, guys!

Another band that has come up with sophisticated yet super catchy music is Def Leppard, especially on their multi-platinum album Hysteria. Speaking of which, this year you released a new version of "Spillways" with Joe Elliott on vocals. When you hear him on this track, the link is obvious, especially with the very elaborate backing vocals. Would you draw a parallel between your approach to songwriting and arranging and that of Def Leppard?

On this album, yes, because I tried to emulate elements of... It's something that's been done throughout their career, but especially on their two biggest albums, Pyromania and Hysteria, the length of the songs is remarkable. It's very common these days, especially in pop, to be very fussy about the three-minute limit. In the pop world, there's this need to always get to the chorus very quickly. You have to start with the chorus, go straight to the point all the time. In the 80s, there was more courage in songwriting - a more adventurous side. Songs like 'The Riddle', for example, were very strange, very proggy. There were weird chord progressions and stuff that nobody does anymore. The pop world has been so chicken for so long. Of course, I've always had an ear for pop; I'm not exactly impressed with what I hear today, but in my life I've always listened to the radio and liked a lot of what I heard, especially the 80s super hits. That's totally my thing. And I love Eurodisco from the early 90s. There are a lot of great composers in that scene. Max Martin started in Eurodisco, at least professionally, but before that he was in metal. What makes him such a great composer is his metal ear. He was writing Eurodisco songs, and then all of a sudden he started writing huge pop songs for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. This whole school of Swedish songwriters is made up of former metalheads, former rockers, former guitarists.

So I wanted to challenge myself in my own songwriting, because sometimes I keep it too short. Even though "Square Hammer" is a good example of a well-written song, it was almost frustrating, because I thought, "OK, that's one more song like that. Now I have to stop doing that, because it was almost too simple." It was a very intuitive song; I literally wrote it in ten minutes. I had the melody, I played it, and the song wrote itself very quickly. There's almost no finesse in that song, and I thought I should avoid doing the same thing again, because it would be too easy. I wanted to see if I could write in a Def Leppard way. On Hysteria, there are six, seven, eight singles, a good half of which were huge hits. In 1987 or 1988, they were on a par with Coldplay at the height of their career, that's for sure. How could they write five-minute songs, with like five distinct parts? It wasn't conventional, verse-chorus-verse-chorus writing. It was verse, another verse, pre-chorus, bridge, and then finally, after two minutes, you'd get to the chorus. And it was so rewarding, because it was such a long way to get there. I thought, "This is what I have to work towards. I want to dare to add another part, dare not to follow the path. That was a mental exercise I did on Impera, and I'll try to do better in the future. It's an interesting way to challenge yourself.

When people talk about the length of songs on the radio, I always think of the story of "Bohemian Rhapsody": "This is going to be a disaster, it's never going to be played on the radio!" That's it, yes...

For a long time they called that song "Freddie's thing". It's such an anomaly in the middle of what we've just been talking about. Of course, I don't recommend... For a young band that's just got a contract, it's best to avoid the six-minute "Rhapsody". But if you can find a compromise between 'The Passenger' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody', I think you've got something.

On that subject, how did Joe Elliott end up on "Spillways"?

The story is very simple. I talked about Def Leppard a lot before Impera came out because of the mental exercise I mentioned, and both Phil and Joe had been talking about Ghost for a few years. It got to the point where our respective managements wanted us to do something together. In the modern world, that often means collaborating, as hip-hop artists do. I explained that I was willing to explore the idea, but that for me, a collaboration is a trendy but outdated concept. We do it all the time. In hip-hop, it's almost ridiculous to see... If an artist is hot this week and you go look at the American top 40, it's just "this artist feat. this other artist". I totally understand that one plus one can sometimes be three, but it gets very cynical. I don't want to do things cynically. I sing cynical things, I'm a cynical person, but I don't want to be cynical about my fans or my career. So I said yes, I would discuss it with Joe, but we'd have to see if we could agree on something, if there was romance in the air.

Joe and I sent a lot of messages to each other to try and arrange a meeting. He lives in Ireland, but also in LA. I live in Sweden, but I also spend a lot of time in LA, so we tried to find time to see each other. He was getting ready for his tour, I was getting ready for my tour, and we were just hanging out. And then out of the blue, he wanted to experiment; he went into the studio, recorded some vocal lines and sent them to me. I thought it sounded really cool and I said, "Look, I have nothing but good things to say about what you did. It sounds great. I'm not surprised by your voice, but by the fact that we sound so good together. I like that very drawling vocal, you really added something. But I have no desire to throw this on Spotify and say to people, 'Here's another thing you can buy.'" I asked him, "You know we do little skits to communicate with our fans in a funny way? Instead of posting on Instagram saying we'll be in such and such a city, we come up with little episodes." He had seen a few and said, "Yeah, that's funny. Let's do something funny with that." The gag is the important part, and the end result is a bonus.

It's like what we did with 'Kiss The Go-Goat' and 'Mary On A Cross'. The idea for the episode came first, and then we said, "OK, but we need a song. So I came up with the idea for this 60s-style sketch that was "Kiss The Go-Goat". Then, as I was writing and recording 'Kiss The Go-Goat', 'Mary On A Cross' came up in the process, and I thought, "Great, now we have a B-side! It'll be a physical single." So I put that in the script: "Let's start showing the single, now that it's official." Things work in tandem. Looking back, we now know that the end result was different. It was meant as a joke. There was 'Kiss The Go-Goat', which was the joke itself and was very successful. And then it turned out that "Mary On A Cross" was completely different. That's also what I told Joe: we do this to mess around with the band. My job is to write records and entertain people, but apparently I also have to communicate with my fans, and do all this promotion that I'm not really interested in. I have no problem doing this interview, but I don't want a fucking Instagram account where I post pictures of myself. I don't want to be that person. So, I'm doing this so that people... They're diversions, and sometimes those diversions become cool. "What do you say, Joe?" In the end, we found this way to spend time together and do something fun. Instead of turning our creativity into songs, we turned our creativity into episodes. It became something fruitful and fun, and I think it was a great success.

The title of the EP is clever, as it mixes the terms 'ghost' and 'pantomime'. The latter term is defined as "a type of musical for the entertainment of the whole family". Is this your goal with Ghost? Do you see the band as "a musical for the whole family's entertainment"?

Broadly speaking, yes. Of course, that suggests that the more adult elements and innuendos in our show are suitable for children, which I don't claim. But I would also like to stress that I have never asked people to bring children to our shows. So if the children in question are exposed to jokes involving penises, farts and copulation, that's their problem. I grew up in a very liberal family, where there were very few barriers and no censorship. I think it's possible to have a conversation, if others are open to it. I have no problem with whole families coming to us, as long as no one suffers. So, for me, it is indeed entertainment for the whole family. But I wouldn't sell it as such to most people, because there are still elements that are not suitable for all children.

I remember a Rammstein concert where I noticed children in the audience. I thought it wasn't really a good idea... Ghost seemed a bit more appropriate, but for young children, some things can still be a bit biased.

It's hard for me to have a clear line on this, because I'm not just speaking as a musician, but also as a parent. There's a constant debate about the right age to talk about certain things. Now, with two teenagers, things are more open. But that's one of the weird things about being a semi-public figure, talking openly and publicly about your life and what you do and sharing your opinions. My kids read that, too. They are aware of it. As soon as I say something, especially nowadays, where everything becomes a meme or a clip... People may think what I say is funny, which I don't mind, but my son and daughter, now fourteen, heard it when they were eight or ten. It's hard for me to be a parent and say, 'Go to school! Don't do that", when they know perfectly well that I didn't follow any of these precepts. I'm not trying to lie to them at all. I tell them: "I did this, I don't recommend it. I did this; I totally neglected this other thing. But I was lucky and I got there. My career isn't over, so I don't know if I've really "arrived", but for now, I'm here. It was a bit silly of me to be so confident, to think I could burn all the bridges, burn all the ships and throw the oars. I was lucky enough to make it to land, but I don't recommend this technique. Don't do the same thing! [Laughs]

#the band ghost #Tobias Forge #interview

[scuttle-buttle]

Chapter 10

WC: 1633

Rated: E

Chapter Tags: anxiety, angst, brief fears of infidelity, discussions of childbearing and marriage/gender roles, psych theories, some manipulation, age difference, brief mention of domestic violence (there is none)

A/N: If you have any questions regarding the tags for this chapter and want to ask me about it before reading please do so! The chapter is not necessarily dark but I understand that some may want me to give a more detailed warning/context. I want all my readers to be as comfortable as possible 💙

🧠

It started out small. He would bring up Dr. Stratton during conversation more and more often. Three times now he had been late to office hours, causing you to have to wait outside his room, nervously checking the time. But it’s nothing, you continue to remind yourself. They’re just good friends that haven’t seen each other in years. And you trust them both.

When another Friday night passed with Laszlo skipping drinks in favor of meeting with Karen, you decided to stay in as well. It had been a month since they reacquainted with one another. In those weeks you had seen less of him outside work. Your sex life was stagnating too, much to your annoyance. He had even canceled at the absolute last minute on a dinner date. Naturally, you had begun to feel a twinge of jealousy at his lack of attention. He kept saying it was work related. Nevertheless, the sullen temperament you'd adopted went unnoticed by the doctor. You felt foolish; you weren’t so needy that you had to make a big deal about it. So you said nothing on the issue.

You sat on the old couch in your apartment. Bitsy was getting ready to go out with Lucius for date night. Picking at your fingers, you decide to ask your roommate for advice. “Hey Bits?”

“Yeah?” she called from her bedroom.

“Can I ask you a question about Lucius?” you start.

“Sure, what’s up?”

You pause as you think of how to word your thoughts. “Do you ever, like, get jealous? When he hangs out with other girls I mean.” Her head pops out of the door frame as she finishes fastening her earring, eyebrows raised in question. “It’s just that Laszlo has been spending a lot of time with Dr. Stratton now that she’s back in town. I trust them and everything, but I’m starting to feel a bit left behind I guess…” you trail off.

“Oh honey, that's normal.” She waves a hand through the air as she speaks. “There’s this girl at the lab that Lucius works with and for the first month I was convinced she was trying to steal him away from me. Turns out she just wanted Marcus, his brother!” Bitsy lets out a cackle.

“Right…” you pick at the skin around your fingernails. “I just feel silly about it. I’m sure I’m overreacting to the whole thing, though. Laszlo would never do anything, and I don’t think Dr. Stratton would either,” you remind yourself outloud. "There's just this thing John said to me about them having a past and I can't get it out of my head."

“It's not silly.” Bitsy had moved further into the bedroom, causing her voice to be slightly muffled. “But if it bothers you that much, talk to him about it. He’s a psychologist, it’s kinda his job to understand emotions and things like this. And if he loves you like you say he does then he’ll put a bit more effort into giving you his attention.”

You marinate on what she’s told you. Bitsy is right, if it bothers you that much then you need to bring it up with him. Be an adult, use communication, and all that. “Why’re you always right and level-headed about everything?”

“Someone’s gotta be, with a hot head like you,” she snarks. Her phone buzzes letting her know her date is downstairs. With a squeeze on the shoulder she bids you goodbye, telling you to let her know if you need anything.

_

The atmosphere in Dr. Stratton’s office felt off. What was usually so open and warm had felt forced and awkward. You were still ignoring the guilt of your jealousy at the doctor. She wasn’t as talkative today, unlike usual. Instead, it was strictly business. You chalked it up to her having an off day.

The two of you discussed in more depth the fetishes and kinks from the list you had compiled. Unfortunately, due to spending less time with your boyfriend the last few weeks you hadn’t had much of an opportunity to try any of the new tricks you were learning about. Therefore, you had little to really talk about in that regard. You found that you didn’t particularly mind, as you were feeling less inclined to want to share about your love life due to your envy towards the woman in question.

Dr. Stratton quietly gathered together her notes from the session and placed them into the folder. You were about to ask if she needed anything else from you when her lips parted before closing again. She leaned forward on her desk towards you. Her fingers steepled under her chin.

She licks her lips. “There is something I wish to discuss with you unrelated to the study.”

You didn’t like where this was going. Dread pooled in your gut at the concerned look on her face. “O-okay.”

“Now I want you to understand that I only bring this up out of concern for your wellbeing and emotional health. But some of the things you have told me over the course of this study have me worried.”

What on earth could you have said that would cause this sort of reaction from her? She was the most calm and collected person you had ever known. To have her speaking out made your heart race in your chest.

She takes a moment to gather her thoughts before opening her mouth again. “In truth I worry about your current relationship. I fear that-”

Brows furrowing, your mind goes to the worst conclusion. You blurt out “what? No! He doesn’t hurt me or anything, I don’t know what would have given you that impression but I- ”

The doctor reaches out with her hand to settle on your forearm. “My dear take a breath, I meant no such thing.”

You take a deep inhale to compose yourself. “Then what are you talking about?”

“Speaking as your friend, and as an alienist, I fear that this boyfriend is potentially using you for your youth,” she begins the tale she concocted, unbeknownst to you. “In my experience as a psychologist, the young women such as yourself that I encounter with significantly older male companions find themselves locked into the relationship. Typically, it is from dependence on money at first. Over time, the male pressures the woman to be compliant in things like marriage and childbearing. I understand how difficult it is for a woman as driven as you to balance your aspirations with relationships and domestic matters. Do you want children?”

Her statement and question take you back. Confusion is written all over your face. Marriage? Children? Neither you nor Laszlo had ever brought up either subject. You didn’t even know if it was something he was interested in. “Wait what? I'm not sure I follow…”

“Men around his age go through an identity crisis in which they begin to become aware of their mortality. A change in priorities. The most common desire is to procreate, to start a family in which to pass on their wisdom is strongest here. Are you prepared to give him children soon? Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a mother, it is a very noble role. Yet you do not strike me as someone ready for such a large step.”

You can barely form a coherent thought at her onslaught. The whole conversation was so out of the blue that you felt incredibly lost. Did you want children? Did he want children? Now? You wrap your arms around your torso to stave off the uncertainty and anxiety you feel creeping in. No words come to your defense at her interrogation. You are speechless, jaw dropped.

She stands and crosses the room, placing her cool hands on your cheeks. “My dear you are still a child yourself. This is something you need to consider. To… consider the possibility that you can’t give him what he needs. That he may need someone closer to his age with the same priorities, someone more willing to give in to his needs now. I don’t think you’re ready for that. I’ve seen the cost that these girls face. And the societal pressures and judgement you would face being with someone so much older? I think it could throw you into a state similar to after your friend passed. I wouldn’t want to see you in that position again. I want you to have your freedom."

Dr. Stratton looks up at the clock suddenly; “oh! My, I’m going to be late for a meeting, you’ll have to go. I don’t believe we need any more sessions for the study, but I will let you know if anything changes.”

You are too in shock trying to process everything she said to you as she ushers you out of the door with a “think about what I said, dear.” The door shuts behind you.

Karen sat with a huff. She felt a tad guilty for what she had said to you. She had no idea if Laszlo wanted marriage or children, he hadn’t when they were first together. But times change. She hoped that by using the angle of kids and identity crises that she could subtly plant a seed of doubt in your mind. Strike quickly and overwhelmingly, plant the doubt that you weren’t right for him, then push you out before you have the chance to seek answers or reassurance from her. It seemed you bought her false concern as actual worry. You were a great girl. But you were just that - a girl. You couldn’t give Laszlo what he needed, not like she could.

Now she simply had to wait and let your mind eat away at itself, leaving him for the taking.

Tag list

@hardlyinteresting @lorna-d-m @livvyshmiv @somethingthatsaysbubbles @greeneyedblondie44 @unbeatablecurlgirl @apparrio @marchingicenotes7 @anteroom-of-death @bruhidaniel @lemairepstuff @thehuiabird @zemosimp05 @alindeluce @iamnotthecatladynextdoor @laura-naruto-fan1998 @trelaney @boneheadduluc @i-am-dead-inside-666 @fictionlandslanddreams @thatoneartgalsstuff @hb8301 @fandom-princess-forevermore @foggycandywitch @creme-bruhlee @andy-rocks @nonamec0s

#psychopathia sexualis #the interpretation of dreams #laszlo kreizler x reader #laszlo kreizler #laszlo x reader #laszlo kreizler fanfic #the alienist #the alienist angel of darkness #daniel brühl #daniel bruhl #daniel bruhl laszlo kreizler #tw anxiety #tw infidelity #tw psychological manipulation #gender expectations #scuttle-buttle

[plush-rabbit]

SFW Alphabet - Kaminari

A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

Denki is a very touchy friend. He constantly has an arm wrapped you, nudging you constantly, leaning against you and anything else you can think of. If he’s unable touch you- mainly because of distance- then he’s calling you nicknames.

B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

As an extrovert, friendship started with him coming up to you and flirting, giving you sly grins, winks and anything else that he has up his sleeve. As a best friend, he’s constantly flirting but it’s a bit more toned down or flirts more but it’s much more teasing like- marriage proposals when you’re both forty and single, putting his face close to yours until you shove him away- it all depends on the mood he’s in.

C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

He loves to cuddle. If you ask him for a cuddle, he is already dragging you to the nearest soft surface and pulling you close to him. He loves being the little spoon and nuzzling into your neck. Alternatively, as long as you’re able to play with his hair, he’s happy.

D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

He eventually wants to settle down. He would like a partner but he doesn’t see himself having an actual committed one until he’s older. He’s fairly okay at both cooking and cleaning. It’s enough where he can make simple dishes and where his room is cluttered but it does have a few empty bottles and pants where they’re not supposed to be.

E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

Face to face. He’ll go to your place and just explain that you two aren’t a good fit for whatever reasons. He tries to be sensitive with your feelings but no breakups ever end on a good note. If he’s left clothes or any of his possessions at your place, they’re already gone. He doesn’t want to have to come back and face you once the breakup has happened.

F = Fiancé(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quick would they want to get married?)

He’s not interested in commitment when he’s young. He enjoys his youth, the freedom and fun that comes with it. He only decides to settle down when he’s older, wanting the domestic life that comes with it. Once the relationship does start, he will know fairly early that you’re the one but it’s still a wait until he’s on his knee.

G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

He’s good at reading your emotions and knowing if you need space or comfort. He enjoys being near you and kissing your wrists and just sitting in silence with you if that’s what you need. He doesn’t need to be popular with you, he doesn’t have to put up a front because you’re there.

H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)

He loves hugs. He’s wrapping his arms around you and pulling you tight into his chest with a huge smile on his face. It’s a type of hug where you’re left breathless and giggling at how much he’s into it. You can expect a hug from him at least once a day but will gladly hug you if you ask for it or even hint that you want one.

I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)

Despite not being too interested in commitment he says the l-word fairly often. He means it, he does love you but with how often he’s said it, you don’t really believe that it’s the actual meaning. It’s until he’s serious and holding your hands in his and the words leave his mouth that they actually mean something.

J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?)

Denki is a fairly positive person, always happy and making friends with other but when you’re being hit on, he gets possessive. His arm is around you and he’s planting a kiss on your cheek and talking to you like the other person doesn’t even exist. If you scold him and continue to talk to the person, he’s bound to sulk in a corner until you hold his hand.

K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

All types of kisses. Quick, little ones. Deep, passionate ones. Ones where it’s a mix and he’s holding onto your face or hands that dip to your hips. He loves to kiss you on your lips, he loves how personal and intimate it all is and how he can feel your smile against his lips. If you kiss him on his jaw, he’s putty in your hands.

L = Little ones (How are they around children?)

Children love him. He’s just so energetic and friendly that kids feel safe around him. He loves being around little kids, they’re so easy to impress and they usually love his quirk because it reminds them of a certain mascot.

M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

A morning with him is usually where you both lay in bed awake for a few minutes and just sort of wait until you can both move without feeling as if you’re going to fall over. Usually you both are still curled into each other or even just holding hands.

N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)

Nights are spent with him giggling in bed to a joke or memory of the day, with him nuzzled into your chest of you into his neck. It’s late nights where you to watch a Vine compilation and quote them, convulsing into a fit of giggles where once it’s quiet, laughter fills the room all over again until your stomach hurts.

O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

He’s not secretive about his life in the slightest except it’s more like he won’t say anything unless asked or mentions it nonchalantly. He’ll be cleaning and then mention some memory as if he were asking you what you wanted for lunch. Usually if you do ask him to reveal some personal stuff, he’ll just ask what you really want to hear and he’ll tell you. He trusts you enough to allow his form of secrecy to go down.

P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)

He usually isn’t angered quite easily until he’s pushed. He has a surprising amount of patience where he can tolerate most things. It’s until he’s jealous that he’s actually a bit more annoyed. However, once he’s angered, he becomes very agitated and sometimes will shoot out little sparks. He’s a lot more bratty during these situations, complaining, making pouty faces and the works.

Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing, or do they kind of forget everything?)

Denki tries to remember more of the everyday stuff. Like your medication, favorite food, specific things that come up more often than like little ticks of yours. He knows if you dislike the taste of something but he won’t be able to remember why.

R = Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)

One of his favorite moments in the relationship is when he came home from patrol, ragged and weary, and you’re still awake, waiting up for him, you whisper, opening your arms for him to rest. He’s stressed and hands are limp and you’re playing with his hair, singing him a song and with closed eyes, you whisper that you love him and little sparks jostle you awake and he’s asleep with a smile on his face.

S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

He’s fairly protective of you. Always wants to be your knight in shining armor and proudly wrapping an arm around you and pulling you away from a situation that you’re in. If you’re being physically threatened, he’s pushing you behind him and puffing out his chest. If you were to protect him, he likes it when you snap at the offender, insults spewing and fists balled up. He likes to be held afterwards.

T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, everyday tasks?)

It’s the cliché things, chocolates, flowers, balloons, and what not where you scoff and roll your eyes. You have a collection of different themed plush animals hiding somewhere in a closet.  Usually for bigger dates like anniversaries and birthdays, things are a bit more lowkey, dinners and handwritten poems that aren’t usually good but it’s sweet and the thought that counts. You keep the collection safe in a binder decorated in pictures of both of you.

U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)

Old habits die hard. He can’t help flirting with others, a coy smile on his face, eyes that shine and an attitude that won’t quit. He’s still very committed to you and he doesn’t even realize that he’s flirting until you give him a look.

V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

He takes care of himself. He has a whole night routine that that he follows regularly. He always makes sure that he looks groomed and well taken care of.

W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

Yes. Once he loves you, an actual love where he just sees you and mind goes blank and he can’t stop the smile that’s growing, he would feel incomplete if you were gone. He likes to joke you’re the better half but ever joke holds some truth to it. Losing you would leave him feeling empty and a constant what-if.

X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)

If you start singing, he’s bound to join in. If he doesn’t know the lyrics, he’s mumbling and belting out the words he can make out. He’s holding your hands and pulling you into a dance. If you’re driving, he’s bouncing in your seat and looking at you and doing all sort of motions.

Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)

He doesn’t like people who badmouth others. He finds it distasteful and will become a bit more aggressive and dismissive. He doesn’t mind the occasional rant because that’s what it is, a rant to just vent off your feelings but when you make a snide comment about someone’s appearance, he isn’t taking that lightly.

Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habits of theirs?)

He sleep talks. Often times the sentences are barley coherent, just little whispers about the toaster. There have been times where he’ll say sentences out loud and they’re a bit alarming; always “Who’s that?” or “Check the closet.” Sometimes you wonder if he’s just messing with you and he promises he’s not but he has been known to be cheeky. You’ll either get a good night sleep or a night full of paranoia.

#kaminari x reader #bnha kaminari #kaminari headcanons #bnha kaminari x reader #denki x reader #sfw alphabet #i hope you enjoyed these #he was actually p hard to like write for #im not super proud of these but i couldn't find any other way to improve or get his character dowm #so #wow i misspelled a lot of words there #oh well #anyways #bye! #feedback is always appreaciateed #bnha

[believerindaydreams]

Does it count as a slow burn if it's been less than 15000 words I dunno anyway here be the shagging chapter.

"Arcade Gannon, you're extremely drunk."

That he's saying it aloud seems to confirm the validity of the statement. Good.

Boone looks up briefly from his compulsive scribbling. It seems backwards somehow that he's sitting here with the drink while Boone is writing, but he can't entirely think of why. Tomorrow Arcade's problem.

Tomorrow along with the hangover and scavenging for survival and getting to one of the people they're meant to be rescuing. He giggles, tenderly adjusts the angle of his new glasses. They're utterly priceless, at least until he gets back to the Old Mormon Fort and can grab one of the three pairs he's put by for emergencies.

"What are you doing?"

There is a definite moment during which Boone has decided not to answer, but then he does. "Letter for my wife."

"Oh. Uhh, sorry about her...I can't, you know, take too many more emotional shocks before falling asleep. The-" he frowns abruptly, feels at his neck to see if the collar is still there. It is. "The thing thing. Enough for one day."

Compiling a list of the variables causing him to have hit this level of coherency would take long enough he'd be sober before finishing. Never mind.

"That thing," Boone says, sharply enough to break his pencil between words. He takes out a knife and starts whittling a fresh point. "Don't ask about the thing."

"Understood." He is absolutely dying to know what science involves making targets glow, but that's not Brotherhood or Legion business and it might not even be his. Much as he wants to find out. Man has a right to secrets.

He shuts up and just watches for a while. The scratch of pencil lead. The way Boone's frowning over the letters, a hint of pink tongue at the corner of his mouth, so profoundly earnest. The slight glisten on one side of his jumpsuit, catching the light-

oh. Oh! Fuck.

"I was crying on your shoulder earlier." The whole chain of memories pops up obediently, now he's looking for it.

"Don't worry about it."

"I-", Arcade starts, and promptly stops, because he was going to say he's sorry now but that might be misconstrued as rude, and why can't he offload some of this eighteen-caret vocabulary right now except making his mouth say it sounds difficult. "So you don't mind."

"In your position I'd have beaten my brains out against a Legion tentpost ages back. You're pretty coherent for a prisoner of war."

Now isn't that rich, being told he's coherent by...why is he thinking like this? That's Enclave talk, isn't it?

He firmly shoves that whole line of thought into a box and locks it away. "I should shut up and go to sleep now."

"Probably," Boone agrees. He folds the letter up, tucks it in a pocket. "I'll wake you when I can't stay awake any more."

"A watch? Do we really need one?"

"I'd rather not risk it."

It's either argue or go to sleep. He falls asleep trying to decide.

***

"Wake up before I pass out."

A return to the land of the living. Not as rough as it could have been, he's drunk so much water in ecstatic indifference to lurking radiation. Rads can be cured, dehydration can't.

He returns to the sink for more and turns around to find Boone already out, small and vulnerable the way people are when they sleep. Dragging the mattresses from the cells into this kitchen had been a good idea, there's a double layer to sleep on, another to sit on.

Compared to the life he was living, sustenance on sufferance and a guard every moment, this is the lap of luxury. Even the slave collar-

he feels the harsh metal against his throat again and shudders, returning sobriety hitting hard. This is not normal. This is not a state to get used to. He deserves better than this, as does Boone.

For a moment he considers crawling right back into a bottle, but they don't have an infinite supply and besides, Boone's trusting his life here. Best keep steady hands.

Old world poetry marching through his skull. Center cannot hold. If he has to get to terms with what's been happening to him, he will fall apart right here in this kitchen.

Focus, Gannon. Focus.

Boone turns over in his sleep, emits a soft snore, and it's silly to say that does it when it's the weight of death pressing down on them, attraction formed out of raw aching need, spending the most stressful hours of his life wrapped up in concern for the life before him; and something turns over and now he's in love. Or at least lust. His body, fed and watered and rested, is absolutely desperate for release.

A jumpsuit's not ideal for this sort of activity. Arcade removes it, adjusts his position to be able to see the entryway and Boone both, the other man's body gently rising and falling with each breath. The rhythm of it is steady, reassuring, makes for a fine counterpoint to his own meditative movements.

If an enemy comes in now, his senses are on high alert. Listening, seeing, it's an acceptable risk.

Boone isn't asking for this.

Boone doesn't need to know. They're keeping enough secrets from each other, he can have one more.

The crescent-shaped scar trailing down past the ear, normally covered by the beret. Rounded curve under the ribcage, a callus on the forefinger of indeterminate origin, every small detail whispering him on as he pulls and pulls and comes-

- the whoop of pleasure as he does so, clutching the butt of the holorifle for support, is tremendously unintentional.

Boone opens one eye, fixes his squarely.

"Huh. Nice to know you're human like the rest of us."

Sitting naked and covered in cum is so far past any reasonable course of denial or explanation, truth will have to serve. "I do find you very attractive, but we seemed to have enough to deal with without me dumping that on your head."

"...how about you give me a handjob, and we'll call it quits."

There are so many more extravagant ways to show a man a good time, but- this is Craig Boone. No surprise if he likes to keep it simple.

Arcade wipes himself off, ruining the lining of a poorly made fedora in the process, and crawls over to strip his lover.

(Can you say lover, etymologically, before actually committing the act? Never mind, it's bound to be a moot point shortly.)

He struggles to get the jumpsuit off- it's tight and Boone isn't helping much, limp with exhaustion- doesn't give him much to work with here. They might not get very far.

Nevertheless, it's incumbent on him to make the attempt.

Arcade teases the soft uninterested cock into a slightly more pliable form, careful application of fingertips that have touched more than their share of yielding flesh. Back and forth, back and forth, the hold is blessedly familiar after the holorifle grip and rightly so.

Still not getting very far. He lies down, tests a quick light lick along the shaft for a sounding before putting his mouth to work.

Boone twitches beneath him, shifts his weight, like the whole world turning over just for him. "Thought you'd just do it quick, not massage and swallowing thrown in."

Arcade doesn't hurry his investigation, the gentle play of tongue and lips, before withdrawing to reply. "Do you want me to argue or get you off?"

Boone does the thing he does best and shuts up.

He does quicken the pace after that, though- manipulation here, delicate squeezing there, minimizing the exploratory touches he would quite like to linger over- and it really is much too soon, when the warm rush hits his mouth.

Normally he would swallow, but the act ends in an anti-climatic puddle of spit and less attractive flavors, drooled out into a rusted tin can. "Tastes like cloud. No offense."

"None taken." Boone does, actually, sound relaxed now. He's unconscious in seconds.

Arcade clambers back into his jumpsuit and covers Boone best he can, before picking up the holorifle to keep a proper watch this time.

Everything that's stewing between them right now, he's not even sure this will change the dynamic between them. Death is the only thing more intimate than sex.

In the Sierra Madre hell, though, it's nice to have one thing to simply feel good over.

#fallout new vegas

[altumvidetur]

Good Omens: Crowley/Aziraphale Fic Recs

So, I was thinking about the coronavirus pandemic and what I could do to help people out. I’m isolated because I’m at higher risk, so I can’t really offer to go out for my elderly neighbors or my family… but I thought I could try to help keep people entertained.

Because I don’t have an AO3 account right now, I’ve been compiling fic recs for my own amusement for a year or so. And I thought – maybe that’s the time to share these with everyone? So everyone will have plenty of things to read while they have to stay at home, or even to escape anxiety a little bit if you’re forced to go out.

Of course, these cater to my own tastes, so you may find stuff you don’t like around here. I never include works in progress. The Mature and Explicit works will be in italic. I ask you to READ THE WORK’S TAGS before continuing, so you won’t find anything that makes you uncomfortable.

Let’s go for the Ineffable Husbands fanfics!

In Nomine, by tinsnip

The first time he’d given in to the impulse to just make up a name, he’d felt a bit odd about it. But everything had gone so smoothly. He’d been able to just go in and eat and then leave and it hadn’t mattered at all, the human hadn’t really wanted to know his name, they’d just wanted something to peg him by while he was there.

And so: Fell. Ezra Fell. Ms Azee Phale. Mme A Zinnia File. A Z Fell, bookseller.

That last one has stuck around the longest, now. He’s grown rather attached to it.

A... A... what begins with A?

Aziraphale makes dinner reservations for himself and Crowley, and is a bit thoughtless. Silly business.

swimming in your ocean (i can get pretty sidetracked), by tinsnip

Under him, Aziraphale makes a soft, deep sound.

He lets go, leaves his lips just where they are. “You’re sweet. You taste sweet.”

Apparently Aziraphale isn’t up to making words right now.

***

Three little chapters of happy smut. Immortal genderless beings assuming mostly-human forms would, I figure, have a bit of a different approach to sex. They've got no particular drive, and all the time in the world. Getting sidetracked is part of the fun.

Eyes Closed, by tinsnip

Aziraphale makes love with his eyes closed.

Crowley doesn’t.

Bad Habits, by tinsnip

Clearly, both Crowley and Aziraphale used to smoke. We know this. We’ve been told this by Mr. Gaiman.

I’d be very surprised if either of them still does. But the reasons for this, and the methods by which their statuses changed, are different.

Notably: Crowley cheats. Aziraphale doesn't.

Like light, refracted, by tinsnip

Full steam ahead, decided Crowley: “I think we should get naked.”

Ethereal/occult lovemaking of the rather fluffy variety.

tell me all the ways, by tinsnip

Crowley was out in the garden.

Aziraphale was in his study, most definitely not looking out the window.

Really. Really. One little speck of sentiment: was it so much to ask?

what a way to make a living, by attheborder

Without any more assignments coming from Downstairs, Crowley is struck with a bad case of the doldrums.

It takes a bit of trial and error, but eventually a solution is found.

(Or: the one where Crowley becomes an Uber driver.)

summer and his pleasures, by witching

for summer and his pleasures wait on thee, and thou away, the very birds are mute; or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer, that leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. // william shakespeare, sonnet 97

absence makes the heart grow fonder, and crowley and aziraphale’s hearts were plenty fond to begin with. a story told through phone calls while they are separated for work-related reasons.

nothing but the wild rain, by Raven

"The internet, Aziraphale!" Crowley says. "This is what the internet is for. This is, quite literally, what the internet is for."

"Oh," Aziraphale says, and Crowley knows, he just knows, that Aziraphale is going to say something about how it's jolly useful for hard-to-find first editions and tickets for the Last Night of the Proms.

or, Aziraphale and Crowley find sex confusing.

Forever, by goodomensblog

Heaven’s execution chamber was elegant, magnificent - and bare. Polished floors gleamed, immaculate; their cleanliness made it impossible to guess at the atrocities committed upon them. Clean, white walls glared, and a window as large as the room was tall, teased of freedom just out of reach.

At the center of it all, was a chair.

And upon that chair, an angel sat.

Across the cold, stark room - too far from the angel - a demon knelt, bound.

The ropes burned, and Crowley hissed, hunching his shoulders as he turned his head up. The angel, his wrists tied to the chair, met and held his stare.

No, it couldn’t - it wasn’t - this wasn’t right.

Confused and in pain, Crowley called, “Angel, you alright?”

Aziraphale’s light hair appeared white in the harshly lit room, and his face had gone pale; but at Crowley’s call he sat up in the chair, bound hands giving a feeble wave.

London. 1944., by AliceinSpace

The air ripples and stars blink in and out of existence as the fabric of the universe creates a loophole in the middle of the street. A figure drops unceremoniously from that loophole and hits the pavement in a tangle of limbs.

"-is that a gunshot wound?”

Or the one in which a fatally injured Crowley runs to the only place that makes sense: a bookshop in Soho.

Of Eclairs, Feathers and Complex Reactions to Trauma, by oneatatime

“Do you know,” Aziraphale said, his voice muffled in the shoulder of Crowley’s jacket, “that when humans go through trauma, they can be quite calm and competent throughout, but then the terror comes out later, as it must?

Take My Hand, Take My Whole Life Too, by Demorra

He didn’t want to think about the bookshop. It hurt in a way that was entirely too visceral to be angelic, and entirely too earth shattering to be human. It was the love of several hundred years, burned up in an instant. It shouldn’t have mattered, not if he were truly angelic. But he shed a few silent tears anyway and felt somewhat better for it. All things considered, it wasn’t the end of the world.

No, that had been much more complicated.

And yet, somehow so very mundanely human. No great battle, no heavenly sounding of horns or hordes of demons. Just a choice, a choice not between Good and Evil, but between darkness and light, hope and despair, fear and… and love…

the mortifying ordeal of being known (biblically), by FlipSpring

"Relax, angel, it's not much worse. It's just our bodies. It's not like we enfolded or anything." ~ Crowley, in 500 AD, after having physical sex with Aziraphale for the first time, blissfully unaware that he has just foreshadowed himself into a corner

*

Crowley procrastinates on his feelings by taking a 5-year nightmare nap after the End Of The World. Aziraphale comes in like, "dude wake the fuck up, also, do you wanna metaphysically bang maybe? no pressure." and then Crowley loses his goddamn mind, because he is a delicately-stacked bundle of neuroses in black skinny jeans.

Also they have breakfast and check in on Tadfield.

Re-Recalled, by Jennistar

Halfway through an argument, Aziraphale gets accidentally discorporated and doesn't come back. Crowley does the sensible thing and panics.

Luminosity, by bethagain

A quick trip to bless someone with a miracle takes a wrong turn, and Aziraphale and Crowley are stuck overnight in rural Iceland. The northern lights are beautiful, but it turns out demons, cold-blooded, tend to seize up when it's freezing out. Aziraphale finds a way to get him warm again.

i don’t know how to stay tender with this much blood in my mouth, by Princex_N

(Summary by me: the one in which Crowley has been living with chronic pain for thousands of  years.)

Queen’s Greatest Hits, by BuzzCat

Good Omens fanfic with no coherent through-line between fics aside from each one is inspired in one way or another by a Queen song, listed in the notes for each fic.

i know i’ve kissed you before (but i didn’t do it right), by gallantrejoinder

They'd given it a go once. Ages ago. And they'd both agreed it wasn't for them.

the whole damned world seemed upside down, by citadelofswords

(Summary by me: facing the odds and moving on with the world.)

Leaves of Grass, by Laura Shapiro

(Summary by me: the world is saved, and now they’re left to explore each other.)

The Sacred and the Profane, by afrai

(POPULLI.NET link) Somewhere else, the happy ending was different. AU.

Be Ye Therefore Merciful, by AmberDiceless

Crowley does something utterly unexpected, and Aziraphale must face an opponent who cannot be thwarted. Hints of pre-A/C.

Full Circle, by Hekateras

Nothing lasts forever and the final Apocalypse can only be delayed for so long.

There is a school of thought that says you cannot fight fate.

And another that claims there's no such thing as predestination, only those powerful enough to make your choices for you - if you let them.

Aziraphale puts both to the test.

Living Arrangements, by afrai

(POPULLI.NET link) Everyone is more or less human, even when they aren't.

Nanny Knows Best, by DictionaryWrites

Summary by me: an exploration of Crowley’s experience as Warlock’s nanny. 

From the Top (Say Your Lines Once More), by CoffeeStars

Crowley lives and dies and wakes up to repeat the cycle. And every single time Aziraphale is there, a different face and new memories.

Manchester Lost, by Moczo

(FF.Net Link)  -an ensemble sequel to the novel- Our heroes have managed to make things worse, as the Apocalypse is starting up... again. Drama! Action! Humor! Adventure! Tea! Suspense! Snark! Romance!

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #fic recs #otp: goodness and bastardry #if you haven't read manchester lost yet start with that #because it's goddamn hilarious #please warn me if any links are broken #and reblog it if you can so more people will see it

[spriterpt]

Hey Liss, I really want to start a small horror group rp but I never ever done one on Tumblr and I'm scared of messing up. Could you give me some advice? Is running a group rp on tumblr too stressful?

First of all, I’m so sorry for the late reply!

The biggest factor in how challenging it will be to run a group is how much time you have to put into it. That’s not to say that if you go to school or work full-time you can’t run one, but if you don’t have much time to commit to being online, it can be a lot to handle. That said, it’s incredibly rewarding to watch a roleplay thrive!

The two most important parts of your group are going to be your plot and your graphics. I wish the second wasn’t the case, but how your roleplay (and your promo graphic) looks is a huge deal when it comes to drawing people in. Roleplays with ‘basic’ graphics, sadly, often find it difficult to gain any traction in the community. If you’re not great with graphics, you may want to consider getting a co-admin who is, or contacting RPHs who do those types of services. That said, a solid plot or location is what will make people stay. Your roleplay will need to be either plot-driven or character-driven. A plot-driven roleplay is going to be harder to keep up with, as you’ll have to provide lots of events and plot drops to keep the ball rolling. Character-driven roleplays can often take a little longer to set up, as you really want to make your location come to life by providing a history and places around town for people to set their interactions, but require less upkeep as the members create their own plots. For a horror group, chances are it’s going to be a little more plot-driven.

Setting up your blog can be one of the more stressful parts of running your own group. You want to make sure everything looks good, all of the writing is error-free, and the page is properly organized so viewers can find what they’re looking for. Below is a list of important pages your page should include and my advice for them.

NAVIGATION: It’s very, very important that your navigation be properly laid out. People aren’t going to want to join a roleplay if they can’t easily find everything they need to do so. Most roleplays divide their navigation into two sections–before applying and after acceptance. The first should include your plot, rules, characters, taken/banned face claims, wanted connections, and application. It should also include any other information you’d want people to know going into it, like locations around your town. The second should include your checklist, blogroll, trigger list, and OOC masterlist.

PLOT: This should be at the top of your navigation page and, ideally, directly linked from your home page. It shouldn’t be too long or too short, just a few paragraphs. Your paragraphs also shouldn’t be too lengthy–large blocks of text can turn people away. 

RULES: The most important rules are as follows. Activity–most roleplays have an activity limit of 5 or 6 days. This allows members to balance RP with real life while still preventing too much inactivity on the dash. Characters–the number of characters you can have, the age requirements for characters/face claims if you have one, and whether characters can be on a multi-muse account or should have separate blogs. Drama/inclusivity–there should always be a zero tolerance policy for OOC drama, and rules in place to promote inclusivity such as requiring that members reply to at least 3 starters before posting their own.

CHARACTERS: This is where keeping up with a roleplay can start to get tricky. There are two types of RPs you may choose to go with–bio or appless. If it’s a bio roleplay, you need to make a graphic for and post the biography of every character. If it’s appless, you need to make sure that each time you get a new character, you update your character page. Either way, you’ll also need to keep on top of your taken face claims page. Many admins choose not to post a bio or add a character to their page until they’ve received the account for that character.

WANTED CONNECTIONS: This isn’t required, per se, but can inspire more people to join your roleplay. You should have a form for your members to fill out, and they’ll send in their wanted connections. That’s another thing to keep up with–you’ll have to put all of these on your WC page as well as remove taken connections, or edit connections that have 1 out of 2 or more muses taken (think bandmates, or multiple siblings).

APPLICATION: Your application should include, at the very least, the character’s name, age, gender AND pronouns, and face claim. Most choose to add positive and negative personality traits to their app. If it’s a bio roleplay, you’ll need to request a biography, either by simply stating ‘bio here’, or by dividing it up into sections. For instance, you can split it up into background, present, and personality, and include a paragraph or word requirement for each section if you’d like. 

CHECKLIST: This should be the first thing in your ‘after acceptance’ section and should include everything your new member has to do after being accepted. This should include getting their account in within 24 hours, following everyone on the blogroll, tracking your tags, looking at your trigger list and sending in any triggers they’d like added, sending in wanted connections, asking for the OOC blog/Discord link, posting an intro for their character, and finally posting their first interaction. Speaking of tags to track–yours should include tags for character intros, starters, events, tasks, admin notes, and new blogs to follow.

TRIGGER LIST: Some basic triggers you should include: sexual assault, suicide/self-harm, eating disorders, blood, drugs, death, abortion, violence. You should also ask that your members send in any personal triggers that they’d like added, and this should always always always be kept confidential.

OOC MASTERLIST: You may choose to only include OOC information on your character page, but an OOC masterlist can be helpful when it comes to plotting. This lists each member’s name and which characters they play, and often includes other OOC info such as age, timezone, and pronouns. This way when plotting with someone, members can immediately see all of the characters the person they’re plotting with plays.

As mentioned before, graphics and theme are also very important. Your theme should be neat, organized, but ‘pretty’. Almost all themes are going to involve at least one graphic. The color scheme of your graphic(s) should closely match that of your theme so that everything looks coherent. If there’s more than one graphic, they should look nice together without being repeats of each other. You’ll also need to create a promo graphic to post in the tags. Note that you should create a sideblog to post your promo graphics, rather than flooding your main page with them. Your promo doesn’t have to look quite as similar as the others, since they won’t be shown side-by-side, but should still give off the same ‘vibe’. You’ll want to make sure to double-check all of the writing on your page for errors, click on all of your links to see that they’re working properly, and go through your navigation from the point of view of a potential member.

The next part is being a good admin. You should be able to get on almost every single day, even just for long enough to post something in the tags and empty your inbox. Admin activity is crucial to group activity. As soon as members see the activity of the main die down, they start to decline in activity or find other groups. 

There are three key elements to promoting your roleplay. The first is through your promo sideblog and promo graphics. You should be posting these often enough that they regularly show up in the tags without being too overbearing. You’ll have to check the tags you choose and use some trial and error to figure out how often that is. {Remember that your post will only show up in the first five tags you put down.) The second is posts on your main. You can let viewers know a little about your roleplay, let them know you’re going to be around for a while, or just include a tidbit about your day. The same rules apply for how often to post these as with your promo graphics. The third element is requesting shoutouts from RPHs. This gets your RP back into the tags without having to put yet another post on the main, as well as gets news of your RP around the RPH community. Remember to always read the RPH’s rules, be polite (please and thank you), and use their name if it’s on the blog. You only have a certain amount of characters for your shoutouts, so make them count. Keeping on top of all three of these things can be difficult, but is incredibly important to running a successful roleplay. You need to make sure you have time to do this on top of your other admin duties. I’ve always found it easiest to take care of all of my other admin things first, then dedicate a chunk of time solely to promotion.

Keeping the main up-to-date is one of the most important things you’ll have to do. This includes your character page/biographies, taken face claims list, triggers list, wanted connections, OOC masterlist, and one more thing we haven’t mentioned yet. Something Tumblr has been doing lately is eating posts in the tags. That means even though you have a tag dedicated to your group’s starters, most of them won’t show up in the tag. As an admin, it’s your responsibility to keep track of all of the starters in your group and get them out to your members another way. Some groups choose to compile a list on their page, while others choose to creat a sideblog and reblog all of the starters there. Either way, this is very, very important to making sure all of your members are included. As an admin, I prefer to take things one ask at a time. New account comes in? Post the follow, add the character, add the face claim, onto the next one. Wanted connection? Put it on the WC page, post a new wanted connection on the main, onto the next one. I find that this makes it easier to keep track of everything than getting everything out of the inbox and then trying to go back through it all. 

Because there’s so much to do, you may want to consider getting one or more co-admins to help you. At least to me, it seems like most RPs have around 3 admins. It is possible to run one yourself, but you can always try on your own and ask for co-admins if you’re having trouble. You want to make sure you stay on good terms with your co-admins and consult them about updates, events, and plot drops.

Speaking of events and plot drops, that’s another thing you’ll have to take care of. Plot drops and events keep the RP alive, and if you find that the RP’s activity is a little low, something like that can help. You don’t have to do it super often, but a few days every month or so dedicated to an event can be really fun. With a horror RP, you may also want to have plot drops here and there.

You’ll also have to deal with any problems that arise in your RP. If someone comes to you with a concern about another member, you’ll have to use your critical thinking and problem-solving skills to determine exactly what’s going on and what action you should take. If you notice that someone is only writing with one or two other people, you’ll need to address it to them directly. This part can definitely be stressful and nerve-wracking, but it’s an important part of being an admin. 

One way to see how you can improve your RP is to ask RPHs for their opinions. The trick is you actually have to listen to them. If you’re repeatedly being told that your graphics need work, consider getting some help with them. If they point out a broken link or typo, you’ll need to fix it. Another way to improve is to check out other RPs! You definitely should not lift anything directly from another RP, but it can help you get a feel for how everything should be set up and what types of themes and graphics are ‘in’ right now.

I’m going to end this with a link to this amazing masterlist from rpthemehelper that includes multiple posts on every topic you could need help with. I’m sorry that this was probably way more than you were expecting to read, but I hope it helped some!

#rph #rpa #rpt #answered

[nautilusopus]

I’m feeling angry today so here are all the entries of the Compilation listed from least terrible to “Nojima and Nomura are incompetent hacks and should be fired”.

8. The Case of Denzel OVA is the most bearable entry in the Compilation, because it does what a sequel is supposed to do: expand upon the lore of the established setting while showing us more about the characters in it. It's a shame, because I think this also might be the least acknowledged entry in it, apart from maybe Before Crisis, perhaps partially because it has no official English dub. In this case, we get to see Denzel finally fleshed out beyond "the littlest geostigma patient that Cloud needs to win the big game for!" He joins up with a group of salvagers, and we see everyone trying to piece the world back together following the complete collapse of the government, the economy, their primary energy source, and the deaths of millions, where they're immediately set upon by disease and societal tensions between what used to be the "upper class" and the slum dwellers that have always had it this way, more or less. 

What the fuck, this is what Advent Children should have been entirely. Except with Cloud and his friends, and not Denzel, because screw Denzel, I wanna see what Avalanche has been up to. (We never get to see what Avalanche has been up to, and we never will.)

That being said, even Case of Denzel didn't manage to not fuck up royally, and it has a giant huge plothole in the form of forgetting to account for an entire goddamn year because it forgot Advent Children was set two years after the OG and not one. Whoops.

7. Advent Children Complete, which I'm treating as a separate entry from Advent Children -- Advent Children is a fucking mess with a nonsensical plot and wonky character motivations that, word of god, were literally just there because they figured it's how the fans wanted to be pandered to the best and not because they thought the motivations would be good or interesting (nothing like a content creator that openly states he thinks his target audience are morons!). It's slightly lower on the list than Advent Children vanilla because A) it looks slightly less ugly due to the Bluray release, B) Denzel's and Marlene's child actors got too old and they had to find younger ones for the redub, and these newer actors are actually better and significantly less obnoxious, and C) it has My Chemical Romance doing the theme song. 

These are all very shallow reasons, admittedly. You'd think it'd be lower because the added scenes help fill in some plot holes, but they were badly added scenes that meshed very poorly with the story at large, and because of that they actually created about as many new plot holes as they filled in. Shite movie. 

6. Advent Children vanilla. This is a good place to discuss why they're both on the bottom of the list, since they're pretty much the same movie. Shitty plot, characters are a sad shadow of what they used to be, and they did some weird thing with Cloud where he unlearns everything from the original game for the sake of cheap conflict and the fans try and defend it like it's actually deep and coherent. Not to mention some more bad decisions: Renu and Rude are good guys now and friends with Cloud and Tifa despite murdering their friends along with everyone else in Sector 7, Marlene is no longer Barret's daughter because ewwww, black people, and Tseng and Rufus are retconned back to life for literally no damn reason at all (they contribute nothing to the movie. Nothing. They even waste the dramatic reveal with the sheet by having him say "yeah it's me Rufus but I'm gonna wear this sheet for no reason and rip it off dramatically revealing ME, RUFUS SHINRA"). As far as I'm concerned they both just died again right after this movie. 

Basically, Advent Children was bad and stupid, but it was pointless as well, which in this case works to its advantage: we relearn the exact same lessons but in a shittier, more juvenile way, wind up at the exact same point we started at by the movie's conclusion, and get confirmation that there were, in fact, zero fucking stakes. At least it didn't take a scalpel to the franchise lore at large, like everything else on this list. 

5. The Last Order OVA is basically Square Enix frantically trying to save face after they've realised that, "Oh shit, our complete inability to proofread the first drafts of the scrips we've been running with have resulted in every single bit of VII lore introduced in these things wildly contradicting one another!" Basically, Last Order is a very pretty fight scene with Zack in it animated by Madhouse that occasionally tries to have a plot. This is the entry that began the handwave of "oh, all the entries in the Compilation are different because they're all told from a difrerent point of view! It's up to you do decide what really happened!" Lazy, bad, the beginning of the end. It looked nice, but I can't even enjoy the fight scene in the reactor properly because Zack doesn't immediately get bodied like he should've, which wouldn't have been very much fun to watch but at least would've made more sense; as well as the weird bit where they tried to imply Cloud was always infected with Jenova and mako-enhanced from birth? Somehow?

Also, the "Last Order" in question seems to be Zack telling Cloud to run. Cloud, who is in a vegetative state, and even if he weren't, can't even walk. Sure, he'll get right on that.

4. Case of Novels. These things suck and are terrible and look like they were written by a third grader. That's not just a "lol these are terrible" jab, either. I mean they literally read like they were written by a child with a very basic grasp of how to put sentences together. All of them are structured like so:

Tifa was very sad, because Cloud wasn't talking to her. Tifa thought that maybe Cloud felt sad because his friends were dead. Then Tifa thought about her adventures with her friends from Avalanche, the friends that she was best friends with two years ago. Cloud and Tifa had lots of adventures with them, but they were sad by the end of it because Aeris died, and then Tifa thought that Cloud was probably thinking about that too. Tifa felt bad about that. 

They are bad to look at, just objectively, regardless of the content in them. Case of Barret's is by far the worst in that regard, to the point where I'm not entirely certain I didn't read a bootleg fake version of it, because there is no way Square Enix would charge actual money for a product that was meant to be released to the masses and presented as canon to Final Fantasy VII. Except that they did. (I can also believe it because it further works towards the goal of erasing Barret from the story entirely, more on this later.)

As far as the actual story content, I'd probably have to say Case of Lifestream White/Black are the worst, due to some weird nonsense where Aeris just hangs out in the Lifestream and watches people like it's a spectral break room, and Sephiroth grumbles and pines over Cloud like a jilted ex-boyfriend because Nojima forgot there was anything else to his character. These, like Advent Children, are pointless, but they’re pointless to the extent that it’s absurd they even exist -- there's apparently an entire third Shinra bastard running around out there, and he has zero bearing on anything ever, and never will again. What Shinra bastard? Who? Kadaj murdered a whole town offscreen or something, but I guess it wasn’t relevant, don’t know why we brought it up.

3. Before Crisis. Japan-exclusive mobile game where Square stops even bothering trying to hide their contempt for anyone not in the "marketable niche" (i.e: all the white male characters ages 16-27) and begins writing them out of the story. It's not enough that they take his goddamn daughter away from him on the basis that he's prospecting oil, which is fucking stupid in and of itself -- this is the story that decides Avalanche, the group Barret founded in response to Shinra murdering everyone in his hometown because they didn't want any competition in the form of coal, wasn't actually even Barret's. It was some other guy's, and grrrr he was a terrorist even more terroristier than OG Avalanche was because moral ambiguity is gonna go over our audience’s heads so let’s just make it nice and cleanly black and white for them. I've ranted about this before, but it's even worse that the fans seem to have no problem incorporating these changes into everything, because who gives a rat's ass about Barret, right? There was some dumb thing about Nanaki finding a girl catdog to have those babies he has in the epilogue, and the Ravens, but it's all just more of the same introducing samefaced teeny boppers that the fans love so much at the expense of everything else.

2. SPEAKING OF WHICH, Crisis Core, the king of samefaced teeny boppers consuming the franchise. I flipflop a lot on whether this one is the worst or not, but in addition to having the same problem as Before Crisis times fifty, I consider it as bad as it was because you could tell it could have been really good, and that's honestly heartbreaking. The first hour or so kicks things off with a really good start, introducing Zack as this cocksure jackass trying to make a name for himself, and his mentor Catchphrase Man. Then around the point where Banora gets firebombed it all sort of goes downhill, and you realise a lot of the credit you were giving it wasn't actually due. Zack being a gloryhound for Shinra and believing Soldier to be a bastion of good wasn't supposed to be a character flaw like it should've. Genesis almost singlehandedly ruins the entire thing by eating all the screentime in the word with his obnoxious motivations that made zero sense, and in a flashback we see he was always a fucking tool so there's no reason to feel sorry for him in the first place. He's actually secretly responsible for the iconic Nibelheim scene, of all fucking things (GENESIS DID NIBELHEIM would make a good bumper sticker). Tifa gets thirty seconds of screentime. Cloud doesn't fare much better, which is a seriously huge problem considering he's the goddamn protagonist of the entire franchise. He gets a single 49 second cutscene of them establishing "okay he's best friends with Zack" and then nothing else, ever, unless you want to count the three emails he sends him that you could tell were supposed to lead to more bonding cutscenes that were ultimately cut for more GENESIS, YOU LOVE HIM SO MUCH RIGHT GUYS??? Aeris fares even worse than Cloud and Tifa combined, being barely in it, and Square having decided that Zack actually made all her life decisions for her. That's right -- literally everything about her character? Zack did it. Fuck you. 

It's also this high up for what it represents, I suppose -- in the fanbase, you see a whole lot of "Well, Cloud lost Zack and Aeris so now he has no friends and nothing else to live for in this world because he didn't really care about anyone else besides them". It seems everyone forgot that not only was there more to Cloud’s character than "his friends are dead so he’s sad” and his friends being dead was only a small part of it, but that there were seven other people we spent about sixty hours establishing in no uncertain terms that they loved him unconditionally and that he felt the same way. Crisis Core is what finally got people to start disregarding the rest of the main fucking cast from the OG, and it was very, very deliberate. An old unwashed man in his late thirties jaded about his future in spaceflight, a catdog with daddy issues, a black man with a character arc revolving around fatherhood, a triple agent paper-pusher that had a furry phase right in the middle of his midlife crisis, two women that are both alive and have agency of their own, and hell, even a young man with severe psychological issues that had a very strong bond with all of these people even though most of them aren't young and attractive white people and realises he can count on them all for support, are not as marketable as the cast of Crisis Core. Square knows this. You can't wring any sex appeal out of "happy supportive environment" or "female characters", since most of the fanbase tends to be straight women in their late teens and early twenties. So, everyone in both those categories gets shafted. And, as mentioned, the fans seem all to happy to run with this, given the overwhelming amount of material that seems to disregard everyone else in Cloud's life that wasn't Zack (and sometimes Aeris gets acknowledged because all she's good for anymore is a corpse to motivate Cloud) as unimportant, and not really his friends. 

The fact that the entire game seems to undermine the original's tone very badly almost seems like a nitpick at this point next to very intentional racism and sexism and pandering, but I'm gonna bring that up too. The new version of Zack's death scene flies directly in the face with how they were handled in the original game, and is more in line with Cait Sith's than anything else's -- that death isn't heroic, or glorious, or profound. It's just sad and fucking hurts, and it's something that happens. They made that pretty clear the first time around when he just gets gunned down on a cliff in complete silence. You can practically hear the "so it goes" in the background. Naturally, this time around they gave him an entire speech about dreams an honour and then when he dies he goes to heaven (on a planet with no heaven) and he's successfully become a hero. Fucking bravo. Or the bit where, as has been pointed out, you have a wacky scene where Zack meets a young Yuffie, and she skips off amongst the corpses of her people that Zack himself just finished making in the name of glory and imperialism (not a character flaw, though! He’s a good guy!). There's an astounding lack of self-awareness in everything the game does. 

AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO GOOD, and that's why I still debate whether or not it belongs in the Worst spot or not. It could have been great to see a non 49-second version of the friendship that eventually motivated Zack to die for Cloud, but then they forgot to write it, because why write that when you could have these four cutscenes with Genesis? It would've been great to see Aeris and her relationship with running from Shinra that caused her to grow up street smart and how that caused Zack to maybe question Shinra's motivations, but them they forgot to write it because HEY LOOK HERE'S SOME MORE WING SYMBOLISM WITH ANGEAL DO YOU GET IT THERE'S ONLY ONE OF THEM AND HIS NAME IS SPELLED ALMOST LIKE ANGEL, I'M WORKING WITH GENESIS NOW HIS NAME MEANS BEGINNING LOL. It could have been great to see Tifa getting her start with Avalanche, but after her obligatory cameo in Nibelheim she's swallowed into the void again because they forgot she was ever anything besides Cloud's love interest, and fuck you we gotta show you this Genesis scene in Modeoheim. It could have been great to meet a younger Barret, and wonder how at odds he would've been with Zack, a man who's been drinking the Soldier kool-aid for years, but instead we got Genesis reciting poetry. It could have been great to see the workings of Soldier before it all went to shit, but instead we got fucking goddamn Genesis. Genesis Genesis Genesis. 90% of the screentime in this game that should've gone to developing Zack's character for one fucking second, let alone other things, just gets eaten up by Genesis. God I hate Genesis.

1. Dirge of Cerberus.

I'll try and keep this brief because I can go on about Dirge of Cerberus all fucking day if you let me. 

If Crisis Core is terrible because it had the shadows of great ideas that were terribly mishandled in the name of turning a profit, Dirge is sort of its opposite, in that at no point did anything even remotely resembling a good idea come anywhere near the building this was being written in during the entirety of its production. It's bad. Thoroughly bad. There are no redeeming qualities. It's ugly, it plays badly, 90% of it is cutscenes* and the remaining 10% is invisible walls, the plot is a fucking mess by anyone's standards whether you're familiar with the franchise or not, it is the reigning fucking king of tone issues, the design choices are the worst of what Nomura has to offer by a country mile, and the characters are the worst Square has ever made in the Final Fantasy series. 

Vincent is the protagonist, and since he just wants a nap and is too cool to care that means you don't really give a rat's ass about what's going on either, which you wouldn't have anyway, because Dirge's plot isn't so much rife with plot holes as it is a giant, gaping hole, where bits of plot occasionally drift by, mangled beyond recognition by the plane crash in 1976 that claimed their lives. Did you know there was an even more secreter army living under Midgar that somehow survived the entire city being demolished with cosmic hellfire, a pandemic with no cure, and a giant sword battle dropping more debris on them? Did you know Hojo actually didn't die, he invented the internet in 30 seconds in his death throes and then invented the technology to upload minds to computers, AKA created a fucking goddamn technological singularity, and then uploaded himself in a .zip file until he could blow up the world for shits and giggles completely unrelated to anything even remotely having to do with Jenova? Did you know Lucrecia wasn't actually a terrible person that willingly carried Hojo's child and injected it with science juice for the sake of their careers, but was actually a really nice lady and is really sorry you guys, and was just an unwilling womb for Sephiroth to be birthed from, and was pretty much the Madonna? Did you know that apparently the Actual Goddamn Apocalypse wasn't enough to convince the Planet it was dying, but someone stabbing a few thousand people was? Did you know Reeve decided to call the events of the main game the "Jenova Wars" because he doesn't actually know what a war is? Did you know mako actually makes you live forever instead of giving you brain damage and killing you? Did you know the Lifestream is pretty much the same thing as the internet? Did you know Vincent was a paedophile? Did you know someone decided Genesis still needed to be fucking alive? 

Oh yeah, and also there are such stellar characters such as Red the Red, Blue the Blue, White the Clean, Black the I-Have-A-Jockstrap-Taped-Over-My-Mouth-Because-Fuck-You-Why-Not, and Orange the Clear, who is physically 9 years old but mentally 19 so it's totally not paedophilia if we have a weird romance between her and Vincent (never mind that if we're going by that logic, you now have a 19 year-old dating a 61 year-old, which is... not a whole lot better.) 

And hey, remember that one scene where Shalua completely unnecessarily died by holding a door she could've easily ducked through, and then she pissed herself upon death, and the game took the time to show the piss puddle, and Yuffie was super upset about it despite the fact that they never interacted even once but the writers forgot about that, and then after all that shit she didn't even die in her own melodramatic death scene, and then she did die anyway at the end of the game and all you can think about is the piss and god Shalua is so fucking pointless and looks so fucking stupid. Look at this hot mess: 

She’s a scientist! Or something. 

Even by Final Fantasy standards these designs are fucking ridiculous.

There is nothing redeeming about this game. It's like a gift that keeps on giving -- every time I look back at it, I discover a new plothole that I didn't catch the first time before. It's easier to hate than Crisis Core, though, which just makes me sad. At least Dirge never had anything going for it in the first place. I paid two bucks for my copy and I still feel ripped off.

* Okay, that’s an exaggeration -- 50% of it is cutscenes. Four hours out of an eight hour game is cutscenes. Do you realise how fucking many cutscenes that is? It’s a lot. (And yet not one of them has any plot in them HEYOOOO)

#forfdorfsorf #Squid Alienates VII Fans #man fuck dirge

[83gigsof90semocore-blog]

Post 4: The letter C

Welcome back! It sure wasn't yesterday, how have you been? I'm fine thanks, been a little busy myself and had to put this project on the backburner as you can probably tell. I alluded to being really busy in the last post and that's been pretty much true for all of the past year. Luckily, things are looking a bit better up ahead so I might actually start posting regularly soon!

Much has happened outside of the blog too. I toyed with the idea of moving this beuat over to blogspot (where all the real emo blogs are anyway) when it looked like tumblr was self-destructing for a hot minute. But in the end cooler heads prevailed and it looks like tumblr is just gonna keep existing albeit with less popularity. In the emo world, 125, Rue Montmartre, the first band I covered about a year ago are releasing their discography on vinyl and are now on spotify. All thanks to my blog, I'm sure. Don't be fooled by my modest follower count

I actually have quite a few prestigious readers. Most notably perhaps being Prof. Anders Ahlén, a man important enough to have his own wikipedia page.

C has been the longest letter so far by far clocking in at a mighty 6.56 GB as opposed to the average of 2.8. I've been listening to it in phases with sometimes a month or more in between so it hasn't really been a coherent experience. It has been a real slog though, which is part of why I gave up several times. This has also been a letter with a great number of "famous" emo bands. Because part of the purpose of this listening experience is to experience 90's emo "as it was" rather than colored by nostalgia or what is deemed worthy of attention by the internet discourse I'm disqualifying bands that are prominent in the emo canon from best name, song or image. I will however still do a quick write up on them for those of you not as familiar with emo, chances are I'll reference them in the future so do take notes.

Emo classics

Cap'n Jazz

It's almost impossible to tell the story of 90's emo without Cap'n Jazz. Among their members they have Tim Kinsella, who would later go on to play in Joan of Arc and Owls, his brother Mike Kinsella who would later play in American Football as well as Owls, Their/They're/There and Owen and also Davey von Bohlen who would later play in the Promise ring. When they formed in '89 they where just a bunch teenagers, Mike being just 12. They released their first album 6 years later which goes by the title Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over, but is simply referred to as Schmap'n Schmazz by fans. Most of the lyrics where supposedly written by Tim one night while high on mushrooms. They have a wonderful surreal dadaist quality to them with lines such as Hey coffee eyes, you've got me coughing up my cookie heart or You are colder than oldness could ever be. The music is chaotic and full of a warm messy energy. I am personally absolutely enamored with their cover of Aha's Take on me which I insist on putting in as many playlists where it makes some sense whatsoever. As you can hear, Tims vocals do absolutely not Morten Harkets heights (not an easy feat in Tims defense) and you can plainly hear a teenagers voice falseto-cracking and it's absolutely amazing somehow.

Cap'n Jazz really hit the spot of this awkward sensitive yet punk energy that from the start was very central to emo. Although Cap'n Jazz are a big helping sillier and more pubertal than, say, Rites of Spring.

One popular quip about the Velvet underground is the following:

The Velvet Underground didn't sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.

I suppose Cap'n Jazz is a bit like that for emo although their presence was perhaps felt as strongest around 2010 with bands such as Snowing, Glocca Morra and in particular Algernon Cadwallader aping their style.

Christie Front Drive

I think part of the reason for Cap'n Jazz's status as a cornerstone band stems from their originality. Christine Front Drive is in contrast a very prototypical 90's emo band. They have a sound that borrows heavily from both post-hardcore and indie-rock with the slightly whiny vocals typical for the genre and era. On their song November they sing Still the same // Fucked for what you've done // Still over // Staged over // November's almost done // Still the same which I think is a nice cross section of their lyrics (most of the rest of the song are just variations on the same words with "remember" also thrown into the mix). The overall sound is slow, moody and a bit dreamy, very typical of their brand of emo. As easy as it is to find bands that sound similar to CFD, I dare say that they did it better than most and that this is what has earned them their spot in the emo cannon.

Cursive

Cursive formed in 1995 and has since been together on and off up to the present day, the drive only has music up to 2005 though. This includes their 2003 release the Ugly Organ which was released by Saddle Creek and is the only one I've heard before starting this project. By that point they had already moved away from their emo roots though, and I'm glad to finally have gotten around to their earlier stuff. The Ugly Organ is artsy, catchy and a bit baroque, but also definitely on the outskirts of emo to the point where I'd perhaps describe it as an indie/alternative album if I wasn't talking about them in the context of emo. This doesn't mean that it isn't worth a listen because it absolutely is. Their early stuff is more typical of what the rest of the drive is like with a sound more in the ballpark of CFD but much more punk, with a higher tempo and angrier vocals while still maintaining a somewhat whiny voice, introspective lyrical content and the cold, big guitar sound typical to this branch of emo.

My favorite band

Car vs Driver

So far I've generally picked bands that stand out a bit because in a long stream of relative sameness, that's what you end up paying attention to. Car vs Driver is however not one of theses bands that stand out but rather pretty typical of the emocore sound. They do it pretty well though. They are undeniably punk, but with more introspective lyrics and a slightly melodic edge, which is exactly how emo was first conceived. One some of their tracks like the featured Without A Day day even flirt a bit more with an alt-rock sound but they also have songs that are a lot more hardcore like Livid Step.

When researching them I half expected them to be a pretty substantial band that I had somehow managed to miss, but they're actually very unheard of, something which I consider to be a shame.

I did however find that the drummer of the band has a blogspot at beyondfaliure.blogstopt.com where he catalogs various bands he's been a part of. There is a collection of Car vs Driver flyers as well as two live recordings and this summary he wrote for their discography

Car vs. Driver began when I was 17 years old. By the time we played our final show, I was 19. This band was the music of my life during a period when people usually experience the greatest amount of freedom, which is what I think of whenever I listen to this music now. There were so many new experiences: living on our own, meeting new people, getting a new perspective on life. Our lifestyle in turn gave us a new perspective on expressing music, and we poured all of our energy and emotion into it. Music that now seems a world away – music from a different life. It’s hard to remember that everything about being in a band at that time was simply making a 7”, buying the cheapest van you could find, and touring the country for the summer. There was no infrastructure to build your music around, which also removed its barriers. Instead of running our band like a corporation, we played peoples living rooms and basements, engaged in kickball tournaments, made record covers out of manila envelopes, slept on top of our van, cooked pasta, and played with some of the most amazing bands in the process. Bands that epitomized the time – like Spirit Assembly, Policy of 3, Friction, Current, The Yah Mos, Assfactor 4, Frail, Hoover, Freemasonry, Scout, and Inkwell. The experience we had is something that could never be recreated, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been a part of that moment in time. Thank you Matt, Steve, and Jonathan for bringing this to me.

James Joyce August 2004

This compilation is dedicated to our faithful roadies Ashley Lawrence Moore and William Anthony Nation.

We froze, sweat, bled, argued, and laughed.

Amazing stuff in all, I can highly recommend clicking around their for a while if you, like me are a bit obsessed with the 90's emo scene.

My favorite band name

Christopher Robin

Christopher Robin is a screamo band that go pretty hard. The name is a funny contrast to this and the juxtaposition between childhood nostalgia and angsty screaming works really well.

My favorite picture

Featured is the cover to a demo tape by french screamo band Cather Mathra, which features songs such as Ils M'ont Oubliés (they forgot me) or Leur Révolution (their revolution). You can read more about them on psychoviolence, a blog dedicated to French punk & violence. I think that using a medieval (?) drawing for a cover is pretty cool, especially if you're a french screamo band.

Curiosly they don’t have any music on youtube, you’ll have to check out the drive if you want to listen to them. Tumblr has a limit of 5 embedded videos anyway, so that worked out nicely I suppose.

#emo #emocore #cap'n jazz #cursive #christie front drive #car vs driver #christopher robin #cather mathra

[land-of-vanmara]

A reading of the Coming of the Skotein story I’ve been posting on here. You’ll note some differences in the story, as it’s been edited from the original posts I made. 

If this is interesting to you, you’ll be happy to know I’m going to try making this a regular thing! I may or may not go in sequential order, but I think I’ll at least work on having the story complete before posting it from now on. That weird “updating a story as we go, 200 words at a time” thing really didn’t work, I don’t think. 

Please, any feedback or constructive criticism is welcome! I put some good effort into this, and I really enjoyed it a lot.

Below the cut, I have the story I read from (almost word for word) all compiled into one nice piece of text. It’s a little rough, yes, but that’s because I still intend to edit and revise it at some point (and yet I still recorded it and posted it? Yeah, because I was trying to test it out and see what all was involved).

Also, it’s ready in time for world building Wednesday! Yay!

It’s easy to think of a time when there was nothing as simply that: Nothing. No land, no life, no people, and no gods. But these tellings are wrong. Instead, this was a time where everything existed, at least, in some form or another.

Life flowed through this void, almost thinking and almost aware for some time indeterminate. This energy would weave itself into a net that could support existence, so that the first god, Varos, could come to. So she was born, the spirit of Vanmara itself.

Varos was the whole of the universe, but this made her a very lonely soul. This loneliness wore on her through time, and she soon grew weary of herself and her own thoughts. Being the sole being of an entire universe was despicable, as the young god could feel her soul burning for the company of another like herself. In a desperate attempt to leave solitude, she splintered off a fragment of her soul so that it would grow to be the universe’s second being.

Gryalano, she was dubbed. Her purpose was to keep Varos company in the endless night of Vanmara. She was, in Varos' mind, a beautiful creation. Though she had no eyes, she could tell that the soul of her companion was one of love, and one of dedication. She was also the first will independent of Varos’ own, and so she enraptured the god, who could know nothing of her actions. Time sailed on, and they grew close, learning of each other in every way that they could conceive. In these times of the first two Skotein, Vanmara would be at its happiest, though this time would not last.

Varos and Gryalano loved one another unconditionally, but they were two immortal beings in a vast and empty plane who couldn't help but feel solitude creeping up on them again.

When this feeling returned to Varos, she and Gryalano agreed to create yet another soul. So the third Skotein was born into existence, and her name was Shevarein.

Shevarein was sent into the universe to populate it using  shards of her own soul. The soul she was given was made fragile for this purpose, so that she could bestow fragments of herself with individuality.

These new beings would be much smaller and less powerful than any of the few previous beings in Vanmara, so Varos offered herself as a home for Shevarein’s Skotein. They would be bound to the top of her head so they wouldn’t feel lost to the vastness of Vanmara. And it was here that Shevarein first began to fracture herself, and her first aspect would be shorn from her in gratitude to Varos.

Shevarein continued to divide her soul for several days. Each new feeling was the discovery of a new Skotein, and every realization of self brought forth new souls as well. Shevarein began to shrink until the only aspects she was left with were those of negativity: Despair, fear, loss, self doubt, and so forth.

She had split herself nearly a thousand times, and with each realization the withering god became aware of a painful truth. With each new Skotein that she blessed with individuality, she lost a part of her own individuality. She began to question a great many things, but chief among these questions, the most difficult to linger on was the question of identity. Was she still the same Shevarein?

Searching for answers lead to the crumbling of her soul, one shard tumbling off at a time. After a day, her soul was comprised of only two shards, and these she clung onto, hoping against hope that she could keep herself together. No dread or pain lingered in the two shards of her soul, they had drifted off long ago and formed their own wholeness. It was hope and desperation that drove her to become an outcast, in an attempt to be her own self once more. For less than a day she lived in a cave, blocking her thoughts and senses.

After many hours of sitting in silent meditation, an old fragment of herself, which had been exploring the strange world atop Varos’ head, found her way into Shevarein’s cave, diverting her focus from stillness. Questions flowed forth from this fragment, asking her why was she here? And who was she? Shevarein was silent. In her mind, she answered, but putting the thoughts into words would surely be the end of it. She was here, in hiding from the fragments of herself that now roamed the world. The one who entered the cave was her, even if she didn't want to admit it. Thoughts were still swirling in her head, letting her deny her fears. The ears of another would surely hold the inevitable against her, though. The cavern held silence as Shevarein held her words. No certainty could come to her as she tried her best to leave the question behind her, but she had forgotten of the other presence in the cave. Her curious fragment asked her why she wouldn't speak. Her answer was only more silence. A buzzing filled Shevarein's mind as she made an attempt to quell yet another question, and it grew louder and louder as her face contorted in concentration. The fragment spoke again, asking what thoughts she was holding back, and why? At last, she could bare it no more. When she parted her lips to let forth her words, she stuttered, and no words came out. She felt herself splitting, and heard the fragment stumble back. In mere seconds, on the eighth day of living, Shevarein was fully apart. And she heard them, all calling out in that moment: All of her shorn fragments. It was her, in her entirety, but divided amongst the mass of soul shards. They all spoke to one another through some unseen connection, and her mind, it seemed, was once again whole. Questions began to swirl, but she quelled them as she called out to Varos, seeking guidance. Varos heard her call, all as one consciousness and as many individuals. It seemed that, though Shevarein had gained some sort of coherence, her shards still acted of their own accord. Both Varos and Shevarein were troubled by this, that a thousand souls could form a consciousness independent of themselves. Still, both knew that there wasn’t anything they could do. Shevarein would remain a ghost and a memory of the whole form of these thousand new Skotein. These Skotein would be named the Shevarlka. No single member of the Shevarlka could be thought of as Shevarein, but this was also true of Varos. Shevarein, Gryalano, and anyone else she would create would no longer be her, in and of themselves, but they were and would be their own minds and their own wills. She, as their god and creator, carried more responsibility for their well-being than she could have realized, but with this, she would have to make peace. For some time, she adjusted to the presence of the Shevarlka. In conversing with them, she would learn a little of herself, as well as a vastness of how a group lived. But soon, they grew lonesome, for they all knew each other, and the monotony of their personalities, thoroughly . Each of them began desperately calling out for new companionship. Hearing them, Varos denied their plea. Instead, she sent them a message, warning them not to sacrifice their own identities to stave off solitude. For some time, this quieted them, especially those who were most connected to Shevarein's ghost. They began to dread that what had happened to them might happen to whoever or whatever else might come to comfort them, so they hushed themselves, for a time.

The Shevarlka began to develop rituals to strengthen their bonds and heighten their intimacy with one another. Through these rituals, the practice of Tarmalosa was born. In this practice, two or more could come together and exist purely in a mindspace, known as the Tarat. Here, in what was the collection of stored knowledge and experience of the Skotein, they could create their own private experiences, which would be hidden from all others. With this ritual, the few Skotein that existed grew closer to one another, and were happier for it. At the same time, they all felt a fervid desire to share something begin to grow within them. What exactly they wished to share, however, was rather uncertain . . . Tarmalosa was a great discovery for the Skotein. but even the deepest of intimacies could not stop time from stirring up their desire for something new. Time did, too, make them ponder this strange wish they had; they realized that their true desire was to take part in something greater. Upon realising this, all of the few who existed begged for a new age. They wanted to realize a dream, and bring to this young world an end to solitude. Company and intimacy was not what they had desired, it seemed, but they wanted to create something, instead. Many crafts had been created, deep secrets of magical lore had been uncovered, and they had founded the universe's first society, but all of that was in isolation with themselves. The state of existence never changed in a way that was unpredictable.

After a long battle against it, Varos heeded to the Shevarlka's wishes, for even her beloved Gryalano had sided with them, She agreed that her power should be dispersed more freely than it ever had been, and started by weaving life into a single Skotein, named Lifvydia. Her task was to hear the needs of the Shevarlka and to give them power to accommodate those needs. Lifvydia would lend Varos' very essence to the Skotein of the Shevarlka, and they would go on to create new minds, and new souls. This did bring about a new age, as the Shevarlka desired, and all of their longing had been satisfied by the constant flow of new life into Vanmara.

#writing #fantasy #storytelling #dramatic reading #world building #worldbuilding wednesday #speculative fiction #coming of the skotein #varos #vanmara #skatain

[yuvilee]

5th November 2019 Student-led seminar 3

Text: Filipović, Katarina (2018) ‘Gender Representation in Children’s Books: Case of an Early Childhood Setting’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Routledge, 32(3), pp. 310–325. doi: 10.1080/02568543.2018.1464086.

Table of content:

Introduction Main part: A coherent picture, or is it? From 15 between 1967 - 2013 to today's releases Conclusion: How far have we come? Notes: Books and articles Picture(s)

About the author: International Master in Early Childhood Education and Care (IMEC). Dublin Institute of Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Malta and University of Gothenburg.  Erasmus Mundus joint degree.

BSc. in Pedagogy – Psychology. University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Katarina Filipović had previously worked in a range of educational roles such as primary school Pedagogue and Psychologist, Early Childhood Educator and Associate Faculty Lecturer.

Research interests: Children’s and educators’ well-being, work related stress and burnout, impact of educational policies on practice, professionalism in ECEC, and gender in early years.

Teaching Areas: Professional Practice In The Early Years, Child Protection And Safeguarding, Supervised Practice Placement(1)

Introduction: 

The end of 2019 is just around the corner and humanity can look back at many great achievements by men and women alike, such as landing on the moon, curing or even eradicating many diseases or fast communication technologies, to name just a few. With all those accomplishments, one might think we as a species live in an equal society that strives to build a better world from generation to generation. And I do believe this is the case! Some aspects, however, are still ongoing issues, such as gender equality or ethical equality. 

To think equal, to act equal, live equal also means to teach equal, to live as equal role-models for our next generation. It starts with small things like labelling clothes, hair-styles, or colours to be dominantly female or male. 

To teach equality means to offer learning material that depicts this virtue. In this discussion, I am looking at educators who are aware of gender equality and their use of picture books. Going through recently published picture books one might think that things have changed, for example with the bestselling book ‘Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls’ by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo from 2016. This book compiles short-story biographies of 100 real-life women that could be role-models, including Amelia Marie Curie, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen. Favilli and Cavallo self-published the book with money raised in a Kickstarter campaign. Their original target was set for $40,000, they ended up receiving $675,614 by 13,454 backers between April 27th and May 26th, 2016 (28 days), which shows an amazing response and acceptance by society(2). 

Above: My screenshot of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, (2019)

A coherent picture, or is it? 

The given research by Filipović uses picture books chosen by skilled educators for younger children between the ages of waddler to early school, the books in that study are a mixture from 1967 to 2013(3). 

In my view this study, however, only scratches the surface of the actual topic: the image of the woman in modern societies. Her research shows a glaring imbalance that fits the narrative perfectly but shies away from really forming a conclusion and making a strong statement. And that even though Filipović underlines her research with a broad variety of similar research outcomes highlighting an ongoing problem between gender representation in early childhood picture books. 

Looking back into recent years, we find many different movements with this as their main topic, not just #metoo. Gender studies are more common than ever as Filipović’s references show, and pay-gap has long entered mainstream discussion(4).

Women still tend to enter nurturing professions more than risk-taking, managerial or scientific ones, even though they have equal or sometimes better qualifications. Germany just released a governmental study that showed young girls out-matching boys in mathematics at school, yet they perceive themselves as clearly inferior to their male classmates(5).

Looking at depictions of women vs. men in media and advertisement would open a whole other can of worms(6).

And it all fits together so coherently: we are coming from a patriarchal past(7). Just a few generations ago, men ruled everything and women were confined to the kitchen or tending to the children. While we are looking with suspicious eyes at other societies such as the conservative Muslims in Saudi-Arabia, where this is still very strongly the case, we believe to have developed far beyond this point(8). 

From 15 between 1967 - 2013 to today's releases

Shifting our focus away from the 15 books in Filipović’s study one might think that - as stated in my introduction - the book publishing market would have adjusted by now. Especially since the Rebel-Girls book became a best-seller(9). Publishers might offer more on this topic, right? On the contrary, as The Observer and The Guardian in an in-depth analysis found out:

‘The most popular picture books published in 2018 collectively present a white and male-dominated world to children, feature very few BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) characters and have become more biased against girls in the past year, (...) Male characters continue to dominate the most popular picture books: a child is 1.6 times more likely to read one with a male rather than a female lead, and seven times more likely to read a story that has a male villain in it than a female baddie. Male characters outnumbered female characters in more than half the books, while females outnumber males less than a fifth of the time.’(9)

And even continuing in 2019, in research by Sarah Mokrzycki, Victoria University with 100 best-selling books, similar results are to be found. In her research, books for girls were also highly stereotypical:

‘In the female-led stories, protagonists only showed ambition for traditional feminine pursuits. There were three ballerinas, three princesses and one fashion designer - Claris, a mouse, who “dreamed about clothes” and “read about handbags in Vanity Fair”. (In this story, a misbehaving girl is also chastised for being “neither proper nor prim!”) In comparison, the male-led stories showed protagonists in roles ranging from farmers and chefs to zookeepers and scientists.’(10).

To be fair, her research was for the Australian book retailer Dymocks, a comparable research would need to be done for the UK market. 

How far have we come? Conclusion

It all forms a very coherent picture that is not difficult to understand and to accept and which explains every single problem in gender inequality we have - when considering our past, the way we have developed over the last generations, and the problems that very obviously and provenly still linger. We are still fighting the same problems, not to the same extent as women in Saudi-Arabia have to, but they are the exact same problems, yet it appears that resistance and denial are still extremely present.

Maybe stemming from conservative thinkers who still want the ‘good old times’ back when things were easy and women didn’t meddle in their affairs, maybe people just want to live their lives without being bothered by topics like tolerance in nuances (‘Am I still allowed to tell this joke?’, or ‘This picture is funny but now someone tells me it’s sexist? 5 years ago it wasn’t, why now?’). Maybe, though, it’s a much more underlying issue, one that is ingrained into our very beings from the moment we start learning about it. From large factors like the role our mothers portrayed to us as kids, to the value of boys in the schoolyard who can be daring and risk-takers vs. girls who need to be protected and sheltered and rather should play with puppets that they need to take care of and role-playing games, down to the smaller things like an obvious miss-portrayal of genders in the children’s books we read to our kids. 

Perhaps this is where the foundation is laid, where we will raise yet another generation that accepts slightly sexist images or objectifying women in advertisement. From there, it’s only a few steps to underpaying and discriminating women and worse. So yes, it does make a difference whether we choose a book about a boy and read it to a girl or if we rather choose to tell the girl a story about an adventurous girl. It does make a difference if the female part in a book is only there to care and the male character is away or depicted as brave and working and fun and successful. Those choices by our parents shaped our future and they will shape the future of our children(11).

It’s not difficult to see or understand this, which is why I wished this study would have put things into context more directly and was more critical. Because there is a lot of reason to be direct, and critical, and loud.

So what can we do as illustrators? Let’s identify and lock away the stereo-typical from our stories. Try to address this matter with our publishers, families, gift our children non-stereo-typical books and toys. Create role-models. But what kind of alternative presentation possibilities could be used for male and female figures? Could custom-made children’s books work as a good alternative? What are other alternatives? 

During my research for our presentation on this topic, I stumbled over the campaign ‘Let Toys be Toys’. Their focus is to create a non stereo-typical environment for children in the toy and book industries in the UK. They not only try to convince publishers of books and the toy industry to shift their focus from gender related products to uni-sex products. They also offer help for parents to address their concerns and provide discussion material and lesson plans for teachers(12). I found this to be very encouraging.

Another part that I did not address here but found during my research for the presentation are tests like the Bechdel-Test which was mainly created for movies but can also help to identify books with female protagonists. It’s not only about male-female ratio alone, as The Guardian article quoted above already indicates. We could add more and more tests, such as the BAME test as well(13). 

Notes:

Books and articles

Biography retrieved from TU Dublin (2019), Staff Articles. Available at: https://www.dit.ie/llss/people/socialsciences/staffarticles/name176641en.html (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Kickstarter (2019), Good night stories for rebel girls. Available at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timbuktu/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls-100-tales-to-dr (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Filipović, Katarina (2018), ‘Gender representation in children’s books: case of an early childhood setting’, Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Routledge, 32(3), pp. 310–325. doi: 10.1080/02568543.2018.1464086.

The gender pay gap among full-time employees was 8.9% in 2019 according to the Office for National Statistics in a recent release from 29 October 2019. Office for National Statistics (2019), Gender pay gap in the UK: 2019. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/genderpaygapintheuk/2019#the-gender-pay-gap (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

Institut zur Qualitätsentwicklung im Bildungswesen (201), National Assessment Studies and IQB Trends in Student Achievement. Available at: https://www.iqb.hu-berlin.de/bt (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). Cf. Schmoll, H. (2019), ‘Leistungsniveau in Mathe und Naturwissensschaften gesunken’, FAZ Online, 18.10.2019. Available at: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/iqb-bildungstrend-leistungen-in-mathe-und-naturwissensschaften-gesunken-16439167.html (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Still to this year advertisements like recently from VW and Philadelphia got banned, cf. BBC (2019) ‘Philadelphia and VW ads banned for gender stereotyping’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49332640 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Not only due to belief system but also family structures, social surroundings, education, and media.

Cf. Power, G., (2019) ‘Things that women in Saudi Arabia still can’t do’, The Week, 3rd of September. Available at: https://www.theweek.co.uk/60339/things-women-cant-do-in-saudi-arabia (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. Best Sellers in Philosopher Biographies by Amazon.co.uk: Amazon (2019) ‘Best Sellers in Philosopher Biographies’. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/268059/ref=zg_b_bs_268059_1 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Ferguson, D. (2019) ‘’Highly concerning': picture books bias worsens as female characters stay silent’, The Guardian. 13th June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/13/highly-concerning-picture-books-bias-worsens-as-female-characters-stay-silent (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Mokrzycki, S. (2019) ‘I looked at 100 best-selling picture books: female protagonists were largely invisible’, The Conversation, 03rd June. Available at: https://theconversation.com/amp/i-looked-at-100-best-selling-picture-books-female-protagonists-were-largely-invisible-115843 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. McCabe, J., Fairchild, E., Grauerholz, L., Pescosolido, B. A., & Tope, D. (2011). Gender in twentieth-century children’s books: Patterns of disparity in titles and central characters. Gender & Society, 25(2), 197–226. doi:10.1177/0891243211398358. Also cf. Blake, J., & Maiese, N. (2008). No fairytale. The benefits of the bedtime story. The Psychologist, 21(5), 386–388.

Let Toys be Toys (2019). Available at: http://lettoysbetoys.org.uk/ (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Cf. Darby, S. (2016) ‘11 children's books that pass the bechdel’, Romper, 17th May. Available at: https://www.romper.com/p/11-childrens-books-that-pass-the-bechdel-test-10544 (Accessed on: 04th November 2019). 

Picture(s)

Hanser Literaturverlage (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.hanser-literaturverlage.de/buch/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls/978-3-446-25690-3/ (Accessed on: 04th November 2019).

[mattgrips]

Divinity

Power -> The potential to do work (overtime). A simple scientific attempt to ascertain the meaning of power. A great definition to establish power grids and make batteries but without further elaboration, it’s hard to see it in more of the kings and rulers kind of sense. Certainly, the president is powerful -> he/she can do a lot of work (overtime). I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right to me. A powerful engine can produce a lot of work to move a hunk of junk around, but the way a president/manager/CEO does work is more indirect – they are only one piece in the system where many other movers expend additional energy that accumulates into the later fruits of collective labor. But following the same logic, I would be hard pressed to isolate an individual engine component and declare it as powerful. There’s a lot about us people that isn’t taken into account when looking into power in this abstract sense.

The difference is Will. Once this is established, it is easy to see how power is both defined and allocated within a system of human beings. Now power is not a matter of how much work one can do, but how much work one can command. Following this additional concept into our universe is a snowball of newer concepts amalgamating into our anthropocentric worldview: respect, class, shame, pride, reputation. All wonderful terms that help us distinguish each other and enrich a world that would be rather dull without. I’m partially kidding – obviously power is one of the first ways we are introduced to our vices and fallibility. By inventing power we have essentially created the currency that enables our vanity, greed, and selfishness to run amok in the world. Life is no longer indifferent matter and energy. It now has us. Woohoo

I’ve cut going into a longer tangent to get to the original point of my post. Obviously, just like with ‘purpose’ (discussed in my previous post) the combined elusiveness and necessity of power has inspired many to try and write a book about it. The massive pile of power-related books attempts to see power in many different perspectives; from diplomatic (The Prince) to military (The Art of War), to business (Something by 50 Cent probably), to fantastical (fables i guess). Obviously this isn’t a topic that is only found in specific publications. Power is an apparent revelation in literally everything we do, so many perspectives exist outside of literature. It’s all quite a bit to wrap your head around. Luckily there exists a book that has compiled most of our history of power into a comprehensive anthology for totally academic and not pecuniary purposes.

Enter Robert Greene’s ’48 Laws of Power’. I picked it up last week and have enjoyed reading it up to this point. Much like other books, it is filled with obnoxious and facetious rhetoric, but it’s all good because it’s all in reference to historical accounts where it was okayy to talk like a sociopath. I can go on about the 48 Laws’ many contradictions, impracticalities, and immorality but to do so would be like intelligently discussing youtube drama. It would force me to talk like I was above the book’s pettiness, cynicism, and condescension. I most certainly am not, and I appreciate a book that understands when a topic is too broad and undefined to be talked about in a way that has no humor and play in it.

So I’ve enjoyed this book for what it is -> the book equivalent of Assassin’s Creed: an action packed adventure sprinkled in with historical tid-bits meant to not so much explicitly teach me something, but take me through a journey of the human experience through story, myth, and anecdote. And it does quite a good job. The stories are engaging enough to have me pondering many things happening in my life.

I want to discuss on the last law I read about today. Law number 30: ‘Make your accomplishments seem effortless’

I like this one because it’s one of the less objectionable laws. Also, it is one of the laws that has a more coherent connection to the underlying concepts of power that the book is trying to express (assuming the author had an underlying logic to his writing and was totally not just regurgitating content into a marketable way for money). Throughout the book, there has been a recurring theme on maintaining appearances. Greene cleverly recognizes that in the game of power most people are more equally matched than the power differences we observe in the world suggest. What differentiates people from each other is more of a matter of public perception. Two people can perform at the same caliber of whatever on the public stage but still be perceived very differently. One may be seen as the more honest competitor, or the more likable character, or be attached to a more noble cause, or a higher virtue. Whether these perceptions are true or not is not a practical concern in terms of transaction costs, and societal well-being. If there is to be any social fabric keeping us together, people can’t be in continual skepticism throughout the day. The result is a world based on appearances which creates a playing field where objectivity is obscured and people can be exalted to higher realms that any physiological, intellectual, or conscientious basis could never accomplish.

This is the only idea that is so apparently and consistently followed throughout the book. There are so many gaps in our perceptions of everything, all of which require too much rigorous work to actually figure out. Also deterring us is the likely prospect that whatever we discover will be a thousand times more boring than whatever we can imagine in our heads. Of course this last point is subjective as many find wonder and excitement in what others would call dull, but there is a well-defined picture of what the ‘public’ finds objectionable, boring, exciting, and just even though this majority is becoming more and more blurred these days (ill elaborate later).

Anyways, one of the many gaps in our worldview is the one inquiring on the varying capacity of human potential. The main driver of this gap is the inconsistency in seeing amazing human beings on TV, radio, stories etc. while also seeing the abysmal existence most of us live out for whatever reason. How could it be that some live to be great men and women while I struggle to get up everyday? Possible rational (but not necessarily true) explanations can be drawn from the social sciences, using a varying arsenal of socio-economic theories, or from the physical sciences where we can explain everything away with biological and atomistic determinism. If I’m really unfortunate , I may end up with an explanation that puts sole responsibility on myself, and my ego would hate that.

No matter how you slice it, finding a rational explanation for the outcomes of other people’s lives as well as my own is way too rigorous, and boring. What is more natural/probable (not necessarily more desirable) is subconsciously drawing conclusions from what I see from the outside. From the limited time I spend with people, I pick up clues on how happy, stressed, and well-adjusted a person is. Drawing these conclusions within the context of other things I know about the person will draw even more inferences. A person I see as stressed out and know as a working class shmuck will draw sympathy from my mind. A person I see as sad and know to be well-off will draw disgust. A person I see as easy-going and think to be in a highly difficult position will seem like a god to me.

And with this emerges the most well-defined aspect of power -> appearances. Finally a framework that can be elaborated on in a productive studious way. From this a multitude of Laws come about aside from Law 30. Law 5: Protect ya rep; Law 3: Conceal your intentions; Law 12: Use selective honesty; Law 21: appear dumber than your mark. All recognize the reality that we can’t background check every person we meet and have to use expedited forms of perception to form a worldview. From this we have a beautiful world of acts, stories, narrative, rhetoric; it’s all just one big play!

But I did emphasize Law 30 for a reason. It’s because while other Laws seek to have the user be perceived as ignorant, virtuous, or innocent, Law 30 aims to exalt the user into Godlike status. This brings us back into the gap of human potential. Because of this inconclusive aspect in our psyche, many of us won’t be too against the possibility that some among us are exceptionally divine. It makes life fun and brings excitement into our existence without actually taking on the stress that undertaking divinity in our own individual lives would entail. So even though it may be unlikely that an individual is divine, under the right conditions, many of us would want to believe that some of us are paragons.

This certainly brings excitement into my own personal life. To say that I don’t place existential burdens on celebrities, idols, and myths by holding them to unreasonably high standards would be dishonest. The trick (i guess) to not making this totally messed up is by a) being aware of how I am viewing people to continually find ways to reduce harm in the world; and b) using the use of idols as role models to continually push me to achieve greater things. Don’t sound that bad now eh? Oh well. Either way, this perception of divinity allows me to enjoy an exciting and productive thought process. I love my favorite bands, authors, and public figures based on how divine they seem to me. Outward appearances matter for me in this. I look out for: absolute disinterest (or even disgust) for others, elusive social media, lack of engagement, but of course with the occasional burst of exceptional performance or amazing revelation that asserts why I think whoever is amazing in the first place.

This is is really the idolized character I place in my mind. I hate it when someone on a screen I don’t know tries to reach out and establish a personal connection with me, and continually tries to establish relatableness with me. For me I really don’t want validation of who I am from others. I think I get that enough from my own existence. What I truly seek out are people to attach aspirations and goals to. I think many people do that too. And in that lies the empty space for people to obtain power from. Whether you think that’s unfortunate, or exploitable, or whatever, I find that it is a definite reality, and kind of makes life interesting.

Of course there are other people, or rather times when people, are on the other side of the coin. Sometimes we do look to others to feel validated in our current state. Sometimes we’d probably want someone to say things like ‘you can do it too!’, but from my experience I think those times are few and far, and are used in toxic ways that ultimately stagnate any sort of growth in an individual. I’m not sure if our tendency for this sort of comfort is on the rise, or just a simple pattern that occurs in all generations as they age. Whatever the actual answer, this is yet another vacancy for others to claim influence and power over.

Appearing divine by observing the 30th Law of Power does have its obstacles in this day and age. There is an increasing need and ability for transparency and accountability from anybody who does anything. How is one to give the appearance of ease when people now demand to see everything, from behind the scenes, to documents, to emails of all the workings of the system we live in. Obviously this is a great thing, I’m just saying that it is now harder to take on an exalted appearance now.

Which brings me to the actual point I was trying to make in this whole blog post. I didn’t think it would take this long to lay the groundwork for the only original contribution in this blog post but thank you for reading this far in. As the future brings in less ways to isolate yourself and give off appearances through subtle signals, there is still one signal that brings divine hope. It’s simple: Happiness. This world is an increasingly aware place that places a lot more emphasis on what to be sad about than anything. The world wants people to be aware that everything they do holds a negative consequence to someone else, and that the world is a large injustice that should just be done away with. With this in mind, how else can one go about life without being solemn, dull, and disillusioned?

This disillusion simply brings in the vacancy to obtain power through a new ‘illusion’ (I use illusion loosely because I don’t mean it like something different from reality. Rather I’m using illusion as anything that differs from what the public would like to enforce as ‘reality’). Before, the amazement from watching a virtuoso performance was partially by seeing how easy heshe made it seem. In other instances, where I see myself, I can see it beneficial to give the appearance that I can carry on my duties with happiness, hope, and optimism. Taking on Engineering and Law School, very socially demanding occupations, I have the feeling that society sees STEM and continuous learning to be undertakings of present sacrifice for future gain. A rational, and BORING perception of someone. How exciting would it be rather, to see someone undertaking such an act for deeper reasons. To see someone pursue something for virtuistic, philosophical, dare I say it divine ambitions.

I think this is why I derive much enjoyment from the book. Not for its simplistic listing of steps to crush enemies and feel all high and mighty. In its words, it kind of sets a framework of appearances that allows for creativity, innovation, and fun to be had when thinking about public perception, the human experience, and how power all plays a part in it.

That’s pretty neat.

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: The Men - Drift

The Men Drift [Sacred Bones; 2018] Rating: 3/5 It’s easy to overlook the beauty of anonymity in craft. At least since the Renaissance, Western societies have considered authorship and originality as essential to any noteworthy creative work. The continuity of a tradition through skillful interpretation was thus dismissed as a minor modality of creation, derided as mere artisanship, as “folk art.” The troubadour, a performer working on variations of styles and themes so long established that the notion of authorship became meaningless, was trusted with mastering said forms so that their preservation would be ensured and a record of the experiences of a community and its times kept. To repurpose such a role for American garage rock and its many intersections is not an objective one should put past a band that chose to name itself using the transparently generic The Men. A decade into a career where each year has seen the band shift in sound, Drift unsurprisingly finds The Men breaking from the stylistic touchstones of their preceding works. Yet the NYC four-piece’s seventh album is the first where such mutability occurs both at the micro and macro levels — that is, song to song but also with respect to what we’ve known the band to sound like. But each change can now be traced to a previous incarnation of The Men, providing a context that was not there the first time they went from post-punk raucousness to scrappy acoustic guitars to channeling the Stones. Indeed, the framing of such changes under DIY aesthetics illuminates the album as something like a compendium of garage rock in America, resignifying The Men’s apparently fickle trajectory as a path toward compiling a repertoire of underground folklore. Taking 1984 as their year zero, The Men champion a tradition as solid, codified, and longevous as the one identifiable in Americana-infused retro-rock. Employing garage rock as a vernacular, The Men propose in their praxis a parallel history to the one traceable in the staples of the average bar band’s repertoire — The Doors, CCR, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, etc. — with the The Feelies, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, Pussy Galore, The Replacements, and R.E.M. outlining the syntax and vocabulary for such a lore. The possibilities of that foundation, an underground-bred sonic ethos where expression overrides everything, are ably materialized in Drift, itself a mixture between a stylebook and a freewheeling historical account; think of a PBS-style adaptation of Our Band Could Be Your Life where the music rights have not been cleared and nameless chums mimic the songs inches away from a lawsuit. Drift by The Men Through that prism, Drift’s nine songs acquire a new coherence: the distorted bass line and feral tension of opener “Maybe I’m Crazy” complementing the Beefheartian undertones of “Secret Light,” the fingerpicked atmospherics of “Come to Me” bridging the Paisley Underground throwback “Rose On Top of The World,” and the Spacemen 3-like dirge “Final Prayer,” etc. Taking an allographic trip through American DIY stylistic mainstays, The Men reverse-engineer the genetic code of most underground bands this side of post-punk, positioning themselves beyond the realm of imitation and into what could be considered the safeguarding of a legacy. It’s somewhat of a pity that The Men’s most conceptually rounded album lacks the songcraft of their previous work, with none of its tracks coming close to past gems like “Animal,” “The Brass” or “Bataille.” Then again, the role of standard-bearers for an underground folklore might be something The Men already hinted at when they took an “analogue sample” of Spacemen 3 on their breakthrough album Leave Home (2011) or when they decided to abandon their noise rock roots for a version of the SST records aesthetic. Crediting 10 years of underground militancy, the Brooklyn act is no longer worried of being accused of sounding too much like their influences or of having their constant transformations be characterized as anything but deliberate artistic choices. The Men have earned their place amidst the lineage they celebrate in their music, even if only by virtue of stewardship. There is genuine freedom in that, and the NYC four-piece seems acutely aware of it. In the arc of the band’s career, Drift is a step up from Devil’s Music (2016), which attempted to recreate Leave Home’s career-making abrasion with little of its viscerality. On the other hand, with nearly every song on the album performed in a different style, Drift lacks the cohesion of The Men’s less acclaimed albums. Yet it feels wrong to characterize this album on such terms. An equivalently meandering nature is already present in The Stooges’ debut album, as close to an Ur-text for American underground music one is to find. Identity and originality no longer seem to concern The Men, nor establishing a semblance of narrative clarity in their trajectory. And why should it? There are few forms more aesthetically durable than the vessel. Drift’s cover, with a beige screen containing a shifting fluid, confirms the band’s belief in flexibility. Through the past decade, The Men have charted an expansive canvas and mastered a potent language, both sufficient to sustain many albums, if not careers. The aesthetic coordinates The Men have chosen to represent do not constrain their creative possibilities nor submit them to orthodoxy. On the contrary, the unpredictability of The Men’s next move attests to the potential of the American underground folklore repertoire, reasserting the band’s fluctuating essence and the inexhaustible richness that garage rock has to provide. http://j.mp/2F1tY43