#hopefully one of them circulates eventually because god!! they look so cool and i love him!

[i-dont-want-your-hysteria]

PSA- How It All Went Down On February 10th

Today is the one year anniversary of when I got into Def Leppard, and how everything on this blog came to be becuase of today. Below is the entire story of how I came across Leppard, and how this blog came about. 

Happy one year!

Let me get one thing clear- I definitely grew up on Def Leppard in one way or another.

My dad’s been a huge fan since ‘83, so of course, I heard their music growing up. However, I didn’t exactly know it was them that I was hearing- I just always heard their name from my dad. I kept my own taste in music, and never paid attention to them (since I didn’t exactly know who they were).

So, the road to my current state of Leppard-loving actually began at the beginning of my sophomore year (fall 2016). For some reason I "rediscovered" Sugar (as in I never knew the title or the artist of it but always heard it as a kid) and started listening to it a lot. A lot.

During my sophomore year, I transitioned my music taste into classic rock. I don’t remember how this happened, but it was for the best.

 At the end of my sophomore year, I "rediscovered" Animal (same scenario) and started listening to it a lot, but never listened to any other song by them voluntarily. 

In the summer following this (summer 2017), whenever we burned a fire on our deck, we would always play Weird Al/ Electric Amish (stuff like that) when we were out there late at night. Eventually, one night in July, I was out of ideas of what to play so I asked my dad (a huge DL fan) what I should put on and of course he simply says "Def Leppard." I asked him what song and said to just pick one, so I thought, “oh god I don't really know any of their songs and I don’t know what he likes, what should I pick? Okay, I’ll pick one I don’t know. Let's just pick the first one that comes up that I don't know" and it just so happens that that one was Hysteria, and I put it on and immediately my dad goes "Ahh.. you had to pick this one...” and tilts his head back, looking up at the sky.

He then told me the story of the first time it was played for the rest of the band (which isn’t 100% true, but this is just what he knew) he said that one of the guitarists (it was actually Phil and Sav) played what they had so far for the rest of the band around a campfire like we were doing (which turned out to be some of Sav and Phil's Irish friends).

But it felt really cool being out there with this song playing, and it was the first time I had ever heard it, too. Hysteria was my favorite song within a week. But, still, I could probably only name 3 or 4 DL songs at this point (I apparently did know more, but none by name). Those 3 or 4 DL songs kinda defined that summer for me, funny enough.

October of 2017: I don't exactly know how it happened, (I think I heard it on the radio) but I rediscovered Photograph (I actually knew this one by name) and became OBSESSED WITH IT FOR ALL OF NOVEMBER. Making music videos in my head, writing it into my NaNoWriMo novel, listening to it whenever I could, just wow- I love it. That's when it became my favorite song of all time (and it still is- tied with Hysteria).

It's January of 2018 now, and I'm still cooing over Photograph and Sugar and Hysteria and Animal, then January 14th, 2018 comes around- I almost meet Rick by accident, then a week or so later I'm watching the Metal Mayhem block on MTVC...

A video ends, it fades to black, and then suddenly I hear that "pck......" pluck of a string that echoes away and my heart jumps- “IT'S PHOTOGRAPH OHMYGODOHMYGOD...!!” 

It occurred to me right then and there that I had never seen the music video before (or even considered that there may have been one)

It had ALSO occurred to me that I had never once actually looked at a picture of the band. I'd never seen their faces. 

So I’ve got a favorite song I’ve been obsessed with for a solid two months, I discover its music video, and look at the band who sings it for the first time- and who starts singing my absolute favorite song of all time but an absolutely daSHING young man in a Union Jack tank top and a white scarf.

And then he hit me out of nowhere and I actually said to myself "God... the lead singer's actually kinda cute... like... really cute..." followed by an "oh no" shortly after because I knew I'd eventually fall madly in love with this simply adorable man who sings my favorite song, and I’d remember that that is what started it all (but that's not what started it all. It was simply an “I’ve been down this road before and this is typically how it starts.” I was more shocked than anything that my dad’s favorite band had a pretty cute lead singer- like how was that possible?) I was now, however, teetering on the edge of falling into an obsession... anything could set me off. 

And it finally did- on February 10th, 2018. My dad was taking me to a drama club rehearsal, and Bringin On the Heartbreak came on the radio. My dad turned it up and went "Yes! Old Leppard!" and at the chorus I went "WHAT'S THIS SONG CALLED I THINK I'VE HEARD IT BEFORE"

It was just the chorus I remembered, not exact words, but it just sounded all familiar, the melody of their forces, the screaming of the words, I'm pretty sure I heard it a really long time ago. And thus, it had begun. I went home, I found it on our iCloud and downloaded it.

Then I remembered my dad saying something when he was drunk about how "I nEED ROCK. LIKE ROCK. I'M TALKING LIKE- PYROMANIA. TWICE."

So I thought "I really really like a small handfull of Def Leppard’s songs. I think I should listen to them more. I'll listen to Pyromania- twice." (I’d heard of the album beforehand but never listened to it- or had I?). So I did one day. I listened to it. Twice. And BOOM; there were at least 4 songs on there right off the bat I most definitely recognized. Turns out I did know a ton of songs by Def Leppard- I just didn’t know it was them.

And of course I looked into them a bit more, hearing about all their popular stuff, listening to all of Hysteria, FINALLY looking up that handsome son of a bitch's name (Joe), finding out that one of the main composers of my favorite song went and died before I was born (Steve), and finding their more popular songs, and listening to all albums soon enough. 

I kept going back to tumblr to find pics of them and such, but there weren’t a lot. There wasn’t much on here at all about them. Whatever I did find, though, I reblogged. I was straight up obsessed within days. That week was crazy for my old tumblr. 

However, at the end of the week, on Feb 18th, only a week after it all began, I accidentally deleted my tumblr account (long story, don’t ask). I was honestly devastated because I had it for almost 4 years and all that history was now gone in the blink of an eye. Within the hour, I restarted and created a new tumblr account. I was lost on here and didn’t know where to begin, or get back on my feet. For one thing, I got my old url back ( @mccoys-killer-queen ) and immediately made my background the same pic of the guys as it was before to kind of trick myself into thinking nothing had changed.

I was wrong, and that was a good thing.

I got back into a fresh new blog, and started going around to people and asking them to spread the word on what happened and to hopefully get most of my followers back.

To this day I don’t remember all of them, and that’s been a good thing so far.

While I was doing this, I started talking to @raised-on-radio (whom I had only become mutuals with about a week earlier), 

“thinking about legit starting a def leppard blog tho” I said in the tags of a post I reblogged. She sent it back to me saying that I totally should (thanks, by the way!). And while I wasn’t totally serious about it at the time, I thanked her for the support so early on.

The next day- literally- the next day (Feb 19th), I messaged her and said that I couldn’t help myself, and made a DL blog (you’re looking at it right now). I’d never had a sideblog before, but within a week, I really enjoyed it (and obviously, I still do). Upon looking at this dead/sleeping fandom on tumblr, I realized right away it needed some sort of revival- to become like other fandoms in the modern day. There was no fanfic (on tumblr at least), there were no memes (oh heLL NO there was not), there wasn’t much circulation of posts, and it just felt dead- which I KNEW it wasn’t. It was very far from it.

Over the next month or so, it seemed now that I was involved with the fandom, it was starting to awaken in some ways. There were people actually posting content, more people were making blogs, memes got involved (I’m taking the credit for that, lmao, it seemed no one else posted memes except me and @stupidpicturesofdefleppard ). I don’t want to say I caused this awakening, but it just seems that it happened around the time I got involved with everything. A divine coincidence.

The year that followed was amazing in so many different ways. In a year, I went from not even looking at a photo of the guys and not even knowing their names, to interacting/having one of them and their official twitter interact with me on Twitter a few times, to meeting one of them in person (and putting my arm around him and having him call me ‘darling’), to having a year long obsession that’s still going strong, to knowing much more songs by them than any other artist, to knowing more facts and history about them than anything else, to being able to recognize them if given the slightest detail, and to being absolutely in love with every member and everything Def Leppard has done (not in that order!)

One year later, here we are! The past 365 days since I first heard Bringin’ On The Heartbreak in my dad’s car has been one hell of a story that’s taken me months to completely type out, and I can’t thank everyone enough for somehow making me gain 364 followers in the past year for something I never thought would get off the ground! If I told myself a year ago that I’d be where I am now, I don’t know what I’d think of it. I’d think it absolutely crazy- which it is!

But I wouldn’t change a thing about the last 365 days, that’s for damn sure. 

Rock on, guys!

#def leppard #pyromania #hysteria #psa #this year's been wild guys really #kind of personal #it's been so wild and I still can't believe all of this happened the way it did #it's literally as if fate had something to do with every part of this

[joemerl]

“A Swiftly Tilting Planet” is Awful and I Hate It

I don’t know if anybody cares about my opinions, but I built up a lot of bile reading this book and I have to get rid of it somehow.

Background

For those who don’t know, this is the third book in Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quintet, aka “A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels that you’ve never heard of before.” The series involves a family that goes on Science Fantasy-type adventures with beings sent from a vaguely-defined, vaguely Christian bureaucracy of magical aliens. I’ll discuss the previous books a bit, but the series is pretty episodic so we don’t really need to recap them. 

In this story, the world is about to end because a South American dictator has a nuke. Our protagonist, the psychic teenager Charles Wallace, must work with a time-traveling winged unicorn from space to prevent this catastrophe by entering the minds of people from the past. It is much less interesting than it sounds.

Spoilers to follow.

These One-Dimensional Characters Keep Giving Birth to Themselves Like a Flock of Infuriatingly Dull Phoenixes 

The main plot has Charles Wallace travel to ca. 1170, ca. 1693 (Salem Witch Trials), ca. 1865 and ca. 1930s (or whenever Mrs. O’Keefe would have been a kid), plus the then-present day of 1978. Along the way, he chronicles the histories of several families, which include, by my count, about 30 characters who have only half a dozen different names and two personalities between them. 

The Maddox-Llawcaes: Technically two families, but they keep intermarrying each other to the point where I’m seriously questioning how inbred their modern descendants must be. This family was founded by a bunch of cliché Native Americans (stoic, wise, and otherwise devoid of personality) who married some woke Welshmen, repeatedly over multiple generations. They’re good. 

Gwydyr and his descendants: Distant relatives of the above, but descended from their patriarch’s ~evil~ brother. They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The Mortmains: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women.

The O’Keefes: They’re evil and lust after virtuous Maddox-Llawcae women. Also, they seem to hate disabled people. 

This is arguably a sex-linked trait; the one female character from an “evil” family seems relatively alright, but when she marries a Maddox-Llawcae she still passes evil on to their descendants. This turns out to be the driving crux of this story: Charles Wallace learns that the dictator is descended from that couple and was corrupted by his ancestress’ ~evil~ genes. To avert the apocalypse, Charles Wallace has to change history so that the Maddox-Llawcae man marries a Maddox-Llawcae woman instead. 

It’s pretty much impossible to interpret this as being about upbringing; it’s about blood. "Gwydyr’s line is tainted,” Charles Wallace says near the end. “There is nothing left but pride and greed for power and revenge.” At another point, a Maddox-Llawcae immediately writes off his unborn half-brother as evil because he has a Mortmain father. And he’s right---Unnamed Mortmain Sibling grows up to be a criminal and dies in jail. Hopefully without managing to pass on his dirty, inferior genes first, amirite? 

It doesn’t help that, even separated by centuries, relatives are often described as looking alike and/or having variations of the same names. Of those 30ish characters in these families we have three Mad(d)o(c)(k)/Madogs, two Gwydyrs, five Rich/Ritchie/Richards, three Bran(don)s, two Matt(hew)s, two Duthbert Mortmains (yeah, because that’s a name you want to keep in circulation for 300 years), and most egregiously of all, four of the main female characters are Zyll, Zylle, Zillah and Zillie. (Technically there are three Zillahs, if you count middle names.)

Obviously, genetic determinism is a questionable moral. It’s also really annoying, because each time period has the same basic characters just going through a variant of the same plot. There is hardly any character development across 800 years of history, and no permanent change from good to bad or vice versa.

In a way, this even ruins the previous books---Calvin O’Keefe became a good guy despite his dysfunctional family, but now I get the feeling that this isn’t supposed to be a testament to his strength as a person, it was just his mom’s Good Maddox Genes breaking through the Evil O’Keefe Heritage. But hey, the focus on Mom O’Keefe was nice in this book, since she’s practically the only one who has an actual character arc. 

Though, as you’ll see below, she was not actually needed for this story at all.

This Universe Has No God, Just a Tyrannical Plot Outline

Charles Wallace is the protagonist of this story, but probably gets mentioned on fewer than half of its pages. Mostly, he’s just psychically possessing people, during which time he does not control them so much as see their lives and...vaguely influence them, sometimes. What I’m saying is, he doesn’t really do much in this story. His grand moment, in the penultimate chapter, is to vaguely influence Matthew Maddox #1 to vaguely influence Rich Llawcae #3 to not to get stabbed by Gwydyr #2. This saves the world, but seems somewhat anticlimactic after 287 pages of build-up.

What’s worse: he actually tried to make this story shorter, and save me so much suffering. Unfortunately, “God” wouldn’t let him. At least, for a certain sense of the word. 

The Time Quintet is sort of like Chronicles of Narnia in that it’s a Christian story, but you have to dig a little beneath the surface to realize that. L’Engle’s beliefs were also more liberal than Lewis’, and in this book they seem almost pantheistic: Charles Wallace’s help seems to come less from a personal deity and more from a sort of implied sentience of the universe itself. This usually comes in the form of “the wind,” which blows him and the unicorn to different time periods at its own whim. 

Charles Wallace’s arc is that he is apparently a control freak, and needs to trust God/the universe to lead him, or something. He figures out early on that the key to everything is in 1865, but the unicorn says that no, we have to let the wind blow us where it wants. Twice he tries to fast-track things, and each time he and the unicorn almost die as a result; thus he learns that no, he should not be relying on his own intelligence or logic, he should just ~go with the flow~ and assume that things will work out. 

So basically, Charles Wallace has been tasked by Vague God to prevent the apocalypse, but he’s not allowed to do anything to actually try to prevent it---he’s basically just pushed into random corners and told to stay quiet, with the hope that his presence will change history through osmosis. I find myself comparing this to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While I have some criticisms of this subplot, in that book Harry is presented with a choice: do what he thinks will save the world (looking into the Deathly Hallows), or what the Omniscient God Stand-In says will work (finding Voldemort’s Horcruxes). That works well enough, but here, Charles Wallace is given the choice between his own ideas and no actual instructions. He’s told to save the world, and then criticized for trying. 

There’s a part where the Echthroi (demons who want the nuclear apocalypse to happen) try to trick Charles Wallace by preying on his ego. This involves telling him he was selected to save the world because he’s intelligent and psychic and is a generally moral person, all of which is true. He rejects this, as he is supposed to, and at the end of the book notes that the mission did not succeed “because I was intelligent, or brave, or in control,” but because he let the wind guide him. Which just leads me to wonder why he was the one chosen to save humanity, when Vague God could have sent anyone else, or just cut out the middle-man and had a unicorn tell Bran Maddox #3 whom he was supposed to marry. 

But what really makes this intolerable? Charles Wallace was right. The key to everything is in 1865, he eventually gets blown there anyway, and it’s the only place where he concretely needed to do anything. So why the hell did we need 40 awful pages set during the Salem Witch Trials?! To teach us that the Salem Witch Trials were bad? Even the whole part in ca. 1930s was pointless---the only plot-relevant thing that we got there were hints about 1865′s importance, which Charles Wallace had already figured out but was scolded for suggesting. Other than that, these sections were just used to hammer in the idea that Maddox-Llawcaes are always good and the other families are always evil. 

So, my rewrite: Charles Wallace goes to 1170 and sees Madoc and Gwydyr. Then he either a.) figures out the importance of 1865 with his family’s help, as he does in the book, or b.) goes to the 1930s and figures things out from the clues there, while also learning the fairly-interesting-but-technically-irrelevant backstory about Mrs. O’Keefe. Either way, he decides to go to 1865, thus justifying his role as protagonist, and the fact that he is actively trying to save the world is not treated as a moral failing. 

Comparisons to the Previous Books, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love at Bombs

This is my third Madeline L’Engle book, and really, these problems were present in the first two, even if they were less pronounced. Both ended with the protagonist (Charles Wallace’s older sister Meg, who arguably is more important than him in this book, too) saving the day with the Power of Love---meaning that she didn’t so much do anything as feel a certain way. Here, Charles Wallace does even less, just watching other people fall in love while his own character arc is in opposition to the actual plot. 

L’Engle’s strength does not seem to be coherent stories or complex characterization so much as weird, cool ideas---for example, a time-traveling space unicorn. But compared to previous books, this one is pretty down-to-earth; after hitching a ride on said unicorn, Charles Wallace mostly just watches people live fairly typical lives. While A Wrinkle in Time’s villain, a demonic alien brain, could theoretically wither at the approach of a sibling’s love, it’s harder to imagine a nuclear war being averted by nothing more than some shoehorned character development. 

For the record, I bought the fourth Time Quintet book at the same time as this one. I really, really hope that it’s better, but it will probably be a while before I get to it. 

Other Nitpicks

The whole clue leading to 1865 involves a book written by Matthew Maddox #1, who’s from that time. It’s about time-traveling unicorns and family feuds and the like, the basic idea being that he witnesses Charles Wallace and all the supernatural happenings and writes it down as a novel. Fine, okay, but people who talk about this novel keep emphasizing how revolutionary and amazing it was, which kind of feels like L’Engle just patting herself on the back for this awful, awful story.

At the end of the book, the time-traveling unicorn erases the memories of Charles Wallace and his sister Meg, for...some reason? I honestly don’t know why he did this; the pair knew about supernatural creatures even before this book, and they can still half-remember what happened anyway, so this seems pretty pointless. 

This line, from the 1865 arc: “When the sons of men fight against each other in hardness of heart, why should God not withdraw? Slavery is evil, God knows, but war is evil, too, evil, evil.” Not a bad point, but juxtaposed to the characters’ passivity I can’t help but snark: “Yeah, why can’t people just love at each other and magically fix everything, right?”

I’m Tough But Fair: Some Good Points

There are time-traveling winged unicorns from space. They eat moonlight, drink starlight, and hatch from eggs, as we see on a brief trip to their home planet. So yeah, L’Engle is pretty good at Science Fantasy weirdness.

Honestly, the other filler chapters were pretty good too, if only because they distract from the annoying main story. Even the purple prose about “the harmonies of the universe” are alright sometimes. 

Like I said, Mrs. O’Keefe could have been cut, but her arc, going from innocent little girl to crotchety old lady to redeemed old lady, was a good one. And her brother being named “Chuck,” like Charles Wallace, actually felt like it meant something instead of being yet another case of Generation Xerox. 

Along those lines, I like that the Murrays didn’t turn out to be some distant cousins of the Maddox-Llawcaes. That would have been annoying.

The 1865 arc was easily the best in the book. Even with the blood-based moral alignments, the characters still had actual arcs about overcoming disabilities, PTSD...like, expand this and cut out the stupid Salem Witch Trial arc, which was so, so bad. Also, was I just imagining it, or was Matthew #1 in love with Zillah #1? ‘Cause him arranging for her to marry Bran #3 is even more touching if he did. 

Conclusion

Um...the book sucked. 

I wrote this over three days, and it wound up being more than 2,200 words. Wow.

#A Swiftly Tilting Planet #Time Quintet #Madeline L'Engle #Charles Wallace Murry #Book review #Religion #Religion in pop culture #Christianity #Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows #Review