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aibari · 1 year

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fic poetics: open up your door

for the bind of open up your door, I ended up making a little reference list with things I didn’t have the time or space to write into the author’s notes. I love liner notes! since the bind is only a physical copy, I wanted to put these up online somewhere.

references (alphabetical)

adrian. I think I gave Adrian the teenager the name because it starts with an A and I tend to start at the top of the alphabet and then not get farther when naming characters. I only remembered Adrian Mellon afterwards.

Teen Adrian is a trans guy – this was originally going to be more present in the story itself, but in the end I didn’t have enough words to really do it justice, so it’s just kind of a background thing about Adrian. I’m not sure if Richie realizes or not, beyond clocking him as lgbt in some way. In the future, they definitely have some sort of Conversation about it (and being queer in Derry). And then uhhh probably Richie and Eddie semi-adopt him, and any other queer kid in Derry they can find.

Anyway, I forgot about Adrian Mellon, and then suddenly I had a character who was not just a trans kid in Derry, a small town that has soaked in hate and small-mindedness since before its inception (up until ten years ago!), but also a kid who picked out his own name and he chose a name he shares with Adrian Mellon, a gay man who was killed a decade ago in the town where teen Adrian lives. And uh! That’s a lot! That is very very much of a something!

Initially, I thought about changing it.

But Derry (like a lot of places) is a town where, even ten years down the line, things aren’t always easy for queer kids. And somehow accidentally giving this kid the name Adrian became instrumental to his characterization for me – he’s taking this and making it his own, and fuck anyone who has a problem with it. (And if it’s sometimes harder to keep up that front than other times, well. He’s got some people to lean on. With Richie and Eddie, maybe soon he’ll have more.)

brave as a noun. This is a title of an AJJ song – and like much of their work, the lyrics are violent and visceral. Their work generally circles around themes of mental illness, poverty, politics, and THE BODY OF IT ALL. Something about Brave as a Noun (like their later Body Terror Song) just reads very Eddie Kaspbrak to me:

I could go off the deep end I could kill all my best friends I could follow those stylish trends And God knows I could make amends But I've got an angry heart Filled with cancers and poppy tarts If this is how you folks make art it's fucking depressing And it's sad to know that we are not alone And it's sad to know that there's no honest way out I'm afraid to leave the house I'm as timid as a mouse I'm afraid if I go out I'll outwear my welcome I'm not a courageous man I don't have any big lasting plans I'm too cowardly to take a stand I want to keep my nose clean And it's sad to know that we're not alone in this And it's sad to know that there's no honest way out In this life we lead We could conquer everything If we could just get the brave to get out of bed in the morning

But also, that title is just too good to pass up.

beaker’s dozen. This fake movie title was one of several suggested to me by @stravaganza on the Losers Club Bang server. Is it an Ocean’s Eleven rehash where all the players are anthropomorphized elements of the periodic table? Is it a comedy about a scientist who accidentally clones themself? You decide!

Other title suggestions include: Mind the Gap, Deer Me!, The Way There, Beeswax, and Baker’s Dozen.

cups. This section title comes from a couple of different associations – Eddie is literally leaving cups around the place, but there’s also the Cups song (“you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone”). I was thinking a lot about the thing where you pour one out for the dead, too, but what actually happens here is a bit of an inversion of that – the dead pouring one in(to your cup). Anyway - what’s love if it isn’t making cups of something warm for someone you care about?

derry air. So Londonderry Air is a really famous Irish piece of music that (among other things) has given the melody to songs like Danny Boy.

That’s not air as in oxygen, by the way – it’s air as in “songlike vocal or instrumental composition”. Also spelled ayre, or aria if you’re speaking Italian. (An aria in English is typically a vocal composition of the kind you’re most likely to find in an opera – La donna è mobile is a kind of clichéd example.)

Anyway, (London)derry Air and Danny Boy! I thought sneaking in the reference would be funny for wordplay reasons, and Danny Boy is overwrought and overdone to the point where it is a little bit hard for me to take it seriously. As it turns out, though, the lyrics work well with this idea of the interlinking of death and place:

Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side. The summer's gone, and all the roses falling, It's you, it's you must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow, Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow, It's I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow, Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so!

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying, If I am dead, as dead I well may be, You'll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say an Ave there for me. And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be, For you will bend and tell me that you love me, And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!

don’t you (forget about me). So I wrote two reverse bangs this year and both of them have the title of this song in them! It was released by Simple Minds in 1985 and plays over the iconic ending of The Breakfast Club, which was released the same year. I’m not personally huge on The Breakfast Club, but I DO think it makes a good combo with IT – these are 1980s misfits who come together and become friends despite the odds (of their social roles in TBC, and of Derry and Pennywise in IT). IT was published in 1986, so they’re originally products of the same time, too.

ghost. Depending on the story, a ghost can be a lot of different things. Grief given physical form, a memory walking; unfinished business; wrath and vengeance animating a walking curse; rot; love; love (rotting); a person held together by connections to their loved ones; time out of joint and in the wrong place.

Eddie’s path back to being is love and care and connection, obviously, but the occasional vagueness of being is also very much an accidental long covid/fatigue illness metaphor. I had long covid fatigue for what felt like forever in the spring of 2022, and it’s just a really ghostly existence – like you are periodically slipping in and out of time and space. I kept feeling like I didn’t all the way exist, and I (kind of unintentionally) put a lot of that into Eddie when I wrote this. Ultimately, I think it works.

good bones. “Good Bones” is a poem by Maggie Smith that has done a couple of rounds on tumblr at this point:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

From Waxwing, 2016

forget-me-not. Its scientific name, myosotis, comes from the Ancient Greek word for “mouse’s ear”. (This is the second time I have come across a scientific term that means “mouse” used for something that is definitely, absolutely not a mouse – the first is muscle, which comes from the Latin musculus, and means “little mouse”. Wild!) It’s a family! There are so many different types of forget-me-nots! For the sake of this story, though, it’s the emotional (and straightforward) theme of holding on to a loved one and not forgetting them that tied in too neatly with the idea of Richie being haunted by ghost Eddie for me not to make a big deal out of it. The vase of flowers in the picture really ended up unlocking the entire story for me a lot more than I had expected!

if you see something, say nothing (and drink to forget). A classic Welcome to Nightvale quote that is also, I think, a very in character sentiment for Richie.

inspirations, fanfic. This fic takes some inspiration from a Losers Club Big Bang fic from 2021, Nothing Dies in Derry (art by Cordlesshamilton, words by glorious_spoon), and the (as of now still unfinished) SMAU One Ring to Bind Us (@richiesring) – both stories about ghost Eddie (and Stan) trying to communicate with Richie (and Patty) through whatever means will work for them.

modern odyssey, the. Being gone for a very long time and coming back to the person you love (though Richie has less suitors in this one).

not exactly casper. He’s a bit too rude to be Casper, I think.

r+e. I just really wanted to get this in here somehow.

real/not real. So in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, this is a thing Katniss and Peeta do after Peeta’s (spoiler??) been thoroughly and relentlessly brainwashed, and struggles to keep hold of what’s real and what isn’t in the aftermath. This section title is a reference to that. For this fic, I guess what I want to pull in here is that there is something about a ghost that is also very malleable and ephemeral – a ghost is real and not real, in a sense, at the same time. Eddie’s occupying both positions at the same time, sometimes more on one side than the other.

section titles; capitalisation. I just love the idea of someone else’s point of view slowly breaking through, even if it doesn’t translate to the main parts of the text. The section titles in capital letters reflect Richie’s state of mind – often through referencing other things – and the ones that aren’t reflect Eddie’s. Well, mostly. I don’t think I’m a hundred percent consistent, but it’s fun to play around with.

there was a hole here. it’s gone now. A reference to a line that shows up in Silent Hill 2. The way it’s written out there is a bit more unsettling: “There was a HOLE here. It’s gone now.”

#stephen king's it #i write stuff #reddie

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tdcloud · 2 years

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Ruari Character Overview (blog#9)

Good god, where has the year gone? It’s already August and it feels like New Years was like, a month ago… They say time flies when you’re having fun, but to be honest, time never moves faster than when you’re juggling deadlines and praying for a few extra days at the end of the week just to keep caught up. July was definitely another month of me trying to get myself caught up, and while marginally successful in that regard, I’ve still got a lot I need to get working on to be in a good place come October. For that reason, let’s keep things simple this month and do another character profile.

Ever since I posted the Corbet profile I’ve had several people ask for a Ruari one. I held off on it for a bit since I just didn’t think Ruari’s profile would be as interesting as Corbet’s—after all, Ruari’s backstory was explored pretty heavily over the course of Deluge and Apricity. He had a lot more screen time, and his past played an active role in the events of the series. I figured there wasn’t a whole lot more to tell when it comes to him, but I don’t know, maybe there’s some tidbits of lore hiding in the recesses of my memory that’ll give you guys something new to learn about him!

Let’s get to it!

I suppose I’ll start with some general fae lore since Ruari being fae in my world building inhibits the concept of a “childhood” the way Corbet had. If you guys recall, there’s the concept of a “Spring” in the series as a sort of origin point for fae. It’s called that because it happens in Spring but also because fae “spring” into existence. I don’t think I ever got more detailed about it than that—as we’ve covered in previous Tempest deep dives, I didn’t plan this series as well as I would today and therefore didn’t bother coming up with particulars or specifics on what “springing into existence” entails. In vague terms, it’s meant to imply that every spring nature spawns new fae. During Petrichor we learned that sometimes nature makes mistakes, such as the Twins’ situation, but for the most part, it’s a normal, natural process that births new fae into existence a handful at a time.

If you've ever been curious about Ruari’s birthday or zodiac, I’m sorry to say that information like that doesn’t exist. He was just one fae of maybe half a dozen born around the year… 300 C.E.? Maybe 400? Again, I’ll have to apologize because it’s been so long since I’ve thought about Tempest minutiae that I’m not positive if I ever specified how old Ruari is. I know he’s younger than Aisling and Avenir by a fair amount, but still very old compared to most fae in the time of Corbet’s inception into the story. Brontide is set in the mid-1400s, if I recall correctly. I know he’s at least a thousand…?

What I can be more concrete on is his life AFTER his creation. Ruari joined the royal guard. He had to work his way up the ranks like anyone else, proving his merit as he went, and it was there that he met some of the familiar faces that survived the centuries at his side, namely Corin and Gali. He would have met Eolande there as well, though Eolande was older than him and already established within Aisling’s ranks—though not yet her personal guard. That occurred after Eolande countered an attempted assassination contrived by Unseelie insurgents when the treaty between the Courts was far less stable than it became in “modern” times. I’m only mentioning Eolande in a Ruari overview because we own them for Ruari getting the chance to prove himself as a military leader. It was Eolande who, after rising up to become Aisling’s personal bodyguard, nominated Ruari to fill their position in their stead.

After that, it’s fairly present in canon what happened next with Ruari. He established himself as a captain of the guard, earned Aisling’s personal trust, and was well loved among his soldiers. When the war between the Courts and Milesians broke out, he was on the front lines from day one with his army to stop the enemy’s progression towards the Courts. While so far from Aisling, he had an unrestricted view of the banality of the war they were fighting, of the pointlessness of it, and the sheer amount of death being wrought all the same. At some point you hit the point of no return—there’s a cost sunk fallacy reference in all of this somewhere, and it spirals into the situation we see so clearly on display in Deluge. Aisling called to surrender and Ruari couldn’t stomach the thought after all the death he’d seen. He staged a coup with the remnants of his loyal army, slaughtered those who opposed him, and crowned himself King in hopes of reclaiming the world above the Sidhe.

The thing I still really like about this series—and specifically the dynamic between Ruari and Aisling—is that everyone makes the best choice they have at the moment of truth. And yet, it’s still always the wrong one. Hindsight is a bitch. Aisling saw her own horrors and simply desired to spare everyone from further ones. She capitulated and reaped the consequences in turn. Ruari saw his share of blood and despair and desired to find meaning in all of that sacrifice, to honor those who had died by continuing to fight on. He rebelled, usurped, and realized quickly enough that there was never any chance of winning the war—but by then, it was too late. Everyone makes their choices and learns that the ripples of fate are far more disruptive than their own limited perspective ever could have led them to believe. Corbet himself carries that theme, too. The events of Brontide and his spiraling mental health in Petrichor showcase for the reader how badly these sorts of decisions ferment in a mind unaccustomed to living with an eternity of guilt one one’s shoulders.

But let’s get back on track. I originally came up with Ruari’s backstory and overall Vibe while researching Emperor Constantine. He was sent into Britain with his army to fight alongside his father, one of the members of the Tetrarchy (a group of four men who served emperors of Rome). After his father died, his army declared him Emperor outright. They served under him and fought the civil wars that followed, emerged victorious, and saw Constantine crowned sole Emperor of Rome. I wanted to capture in Ruari the sort of person you’d have to be to inspire such faith in battle-worn soldiers. It was treason they asked him to commit by declaring himself sole Emperor the way he did, and their faith in him was so strong that it was worth the risk of him failing. You’d have to be a special kind of leader to inspire half of what those soldiers felt towards Constantine. I tried to make Ruari that kind of person, or at least my best attempt at what I thought I could manage.

Ruari, at his core, is a soldier who yearns for the light. He takes his duty seriously but was well known as a flirt and heart-breaker before his ascent to the throne. After that, he lost a lot of his levity. I didn’t write Brontide with enough pre-canon in mind, and therefore lost a lot of my chances to make Ruari’s perusal of Corbet more meaningful than what it came off as, but I do want to stress now that Corbet was the first mortal Ruari ever stole, the first person he’d tried to romance with any sincerity since he became king, and was generally just the first chance Ruari took on attempting personal, selfish happiness after his stint in war, usurpation, and the killing of his kin—and then the failure to bring about the change he killed to attempt. What we see of Ruari in Brontide is a glimpse of the old Ruari before everything went to shit for him. I think that’s why Corin and Gali were so intent on helping him, so supportive of Corbet’s presence there, and so determined to keep Corbet alive when Avenir launched their assault on the Seelie Court. He’s the first selfish thing Ruari’s let himself want and they wanted him to have it without being punished for the attempt.

I wish Ruari had more of an unseen backstory to divulge, but given how the story went, he had a lot of his life told on screen. Hopefully, that was still interesting for some of you, and maybe there was something new learned? If not, maybe this next segment will shed some light on new corners of Ruari’s character. Let’s move on to some fun facts and fan submitted questions from Instagram, Twitter, and Discord!

The name “Ruari” translates into “Red King” and is one old spelling for the name Rory—it’s also pronounced the same, so sorry for all of you out there saying it some other way XD

Ruari’s love of baths comes from his time spent in the field. He couldn’t bathe much then and it’s his number 1 way to relax and destress

He’s 6ft 1 I believe… maybe 6ft 2, something around that

Despite being a soldier, he doesn’t have a ton of scars that show through his glamour. Magically inflicted ones tend to be easily enough to cover but ones caused by metal or inorganic material are harder, which is why Maol’s ring wound showed until he consciously put effort into hiding it

The real reason why Tailan dislikes him isn’t necessarily Ruari-specific, but just a general aversion to fae inclined to trickery/deceit. It’s after he befriends Corbet and sees what Corbet goes through that he gets outwardly and directly antagonistic towards Ruari—though a portion of that is just Tai being jealous of Ruari getting Corbet’s attention XD and that street goes both ways

He’s too guilty to sleep with fae which is why he sticks to mortals

As you’ll soon learn in Hiraeth, he’s a bit of a bridezilla

Onto questions:

Why doesn’t Ruari have long hair?

Linden, my effervescent flower, how many times must I tell you? He doesn’t have long hair because he’s a soldier and because I don’t want him to XD No matter how many times you draw him with Disney princess hair I will not change my stance on this! Go play with Avenir or Eolande’s long hair!

Did Ruari choose his human like “glamour”? Or can he look any way he wants to at will?

I’ll answer the second part first because that’s the easier question: He can look any way he wants at will, but the further he departs from his current form/size/limbs/structure, the more effort it takes to hold and the more taxing it’ll be to maintain. If you recall in Deluge, he only managed to make himself blond while in the Unseelie Court. That’s a demonstration of both glamours taking effort to pull off but also the limiting factor of being surrounded by Unseelie magic—the most he could change was hair color. Corbet, on the other hand, was able to fully change his gender, hair length, and body type while surrounded in Unseelie magic because he is technically an Unseelie fae—or was, at that moment in time. Aisling managed her disguise because she’d incredibly skilled magically and also insanely old. Hopefully, that makes sense and puts it all into perspective. A lot of the magic in these books is based more on Vibes than hard and fast rules, but at its core, a glamour is a glamour and can let a fae take any guise.

Now, as to Ruari’s appearance… that’s more complicated. Fae tend to base their looks on their own idea of personal aesthetics. Unseelie embrace inhumanity and Seelie tend to live closer to mortals and therefore tend to take their forms into account when sculpting their own, and any “inhumanity” that bleeds through typically looks more nature/plant-like than the Unseelie’s animal-inspired shapes. Ruari does have a “true form” that isn’t what we or Corbet see, but he’s shaped it into our handsome redheaded king because that’s who he views himself to be. He’s been in that form for so long that it doesn’t take much effort for him to maintain now.

Please don’t ask me what he actually looks like XD I am not creative enough to begin to design something like that.

Has Ruari ever been malicious to humans because of what happened in the past?

Since I know the person who asked this question hasn’t read enough of the series to know the answer to this, I’ll just say that Ruari’s antagonism towards humans was mostly expressed during the war with the Milesians and a few years after that. Once he realized the futility of the situation he distanced himself from mortals at large until the strong emotions faded and let cooler heads prevail. I’d say once several generations had passed he wouldn't have held the bad blood earned in war against those who weren’t involved. The Seelie are tricksters, not malicious neighbors. If they’re attacked or given just cause, they can retaliate or protect themselves, but they don’t seek out humans anymore to harm.

Does Ruari let other fae have human pets/partners?

Oh lord, no, not his subjects at least. He has no issue with them going above to trick or find lovers or what have you, but he doesn’t allow them to bring mortals below—at least, not Irish ones. There’s a section in the treaty following the war that forbade fae from either Court from purposefully seeking out Milesians or their descendants for malicious purposes. The reason Ruari took Corbet was because he heard Corbet speaking French and realized he wasn’t a native mortal. That prevents Corbet from being protected by the treaty, and therefore free game. Given how militant most Irish-folk are about warning travelers away from dangerous/fae areas, what happened to Corbet wasn’t common and only Ruari would’ve had the balls to turn it into a kidnapping.

Now, the Unseelie on the other hand… Well, stuff about that will come up in Hiraeth.

Ruari’s always been a favorite of mine. I think it’s becoming a joke amongst my friends and fans alike when I say I like “disaster redheads” best, and it’s just so real. Writing Deluge let me really get into Ruari’s head and show just how much he feels and cares, how he compartmentalizes to stay sane, and how he’s always finding new causes to fight for, even if death is on the table in return. I think back to writing Apricity when I had to write the chapter where Aisling tells Ruari that they’re surrendering the war, and just… God. Seeing how bloody and broken he is, how hard he tries to summon up some of his usual levity for Aisling just for her to crash the roof down on top of his head and destroy what little faith he had left in her… I made so many missteps in the process of writing this series, but there’s still so much buried in the characters and their decisions that I can’t help but adore. Ruari is the epitome of what I love most in my fiction: flawed people making decisions and then being forced to live with the consequences. I fell in love with him alongside Corbet in some ways, and I pity him in so many others.

How do you guys feel, though? Ruari isn’t even remotely close to my most contentious love interest I’ve written—that’ll have to wait for whenever Navidae’s overview happens—but there are a fair share of comments I’ve heard from people who either hate him or love him. I think he’s a moron, but one I can understand. Do you guys like him? Are you team Aisling like my artist Sun XD Or are you team Corbet like the vast majority of my readers seem to be? Chime in below, let me know, and as always, until next time!

T.D. Cloud

P.S.

I suppose I’ll plug my patreon again here and entice you guys with the knowledge that I have a lot of non-canon/canon scene studies, extras, aus, and scrapped smut scenes involving Ruari, Corbet, Aisling, Avenir, Shea, and Breena on there, as well as annotated chapters and all of the story outlines and chapter notes I used while writing the full series. For as little as $1 a month you can have access to my backlog, $5 will get you all my writer’s extras, and anything more than that will just get you into my good graces for the rest of eternity XD Check me out and help support what I do in between book releases! https://www.patreon.com/terminallydepraved

#author blog #ruari #the tempest series #character lore

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neocatharsis · 3 years

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NCT’s Mark Lee on Dreams, Instagram Poetry, and Growing Up

Mark has a lot going on — but he’s making time for poetry, introspection, and, of course, the members of NCT Dream. - Vivien Wu

“I’ve been thinking about dreams a lot these days!” Mark Lee exclaims over Zoom from SM Entertainment’s Seoul headquarters.

The 21-year-old leader of NCT Dream is enthusiastic as he mulls over the meaning of dreams, his back against a wall of pink and yellow flowers assembled by his fellow NCT members. He’s wearing a simple, white tee, and when he gestures with his hands, you can catch glimpses of the friendship ring that all seven members of NCT Dream wear as a symbol of their bond.

“I actually feel like dreams hold a large portion of a life, and I’m not just talking about the subconscious dreams that we all have when we sleep,” he continues. “If you put it in a way where dreams are actually things that motivate us, and the drive that keeps us going, especially as a strongly driven person myself, I feel like… a guy with no dreams is like…” He looks up, thinking. “…A car with no engine. So, I think it’s as important as yourself. That’s how deep I go with dreams.”

His interest in dreams is fitting, considering that they are also the central, underlying concept to the lore behind NCT Dream’s parent group, NCT. They connect their three subunits, NCT 127, NCT Dream, and WayV, in a complex, Inception-inspired fictional universe where dreams are the only way they can find each other, and where upon uniting they can mix to form new subunits collectively referred to as NCT U. In practical terms, this has resulted in a 23-member mega-group that is multifaceted in every way — from their musical styles and visual aesthetics to their cultural backgrounds and spoken languages.

NCT Dream’s original teenage concept meant that members were supposed to “graduate” when they came of age, and as the oldest, Mark was the first to leave the group at the end of 2018. Having grown attached, however, fans were devastated at his departure; after a year of separation, SM announced that the graduation system would be scrapped and that he would rejoin the group. Their new album, Hot Sauce, is the first with Mark in over two years. As fellow member Haechan declared in an interview with Teen Vogue earlier this week, “Mark [is] very special. NCT Dream means Mark.”

But before the rapper led NCT Dream, and before he joined NCT U and NCT 127 and SuperM — the man is in high demand — Mark’s childhood dream was writing. He grew up in Toronto, and through doing school projects and essays quickly discovered that he had a natural way with words. Inspired by Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan, Harry Potter, and James Patterson, Mark dreamt of becoming an author, long before he was recruited by SM at a global audition in Canada in 2012. “When I was in school, I was always the kind of guy who would write more than expected, and that became a thing that clicked for me,” he says. “I was like, ‘Maybe it’s something that I naturally do?’ But then that kind of turned into rap writing too, so I guess they kind of clicked together.” It explains his prolific career as a lyricist; since debuting, he’s amassed over 30 songwriting credits across his various groups, contributing to songs as iconic as NCT U’s “Boss,” NCT 127’s “Cherry Bomb,” and NCT Dream’s “Chewing Gum.”

Even with such an extensive body of work, however, penning lyrics hasn’t satiated his appetite for literary expression. In an interview with Japanese magazine Men’s Non-No, he revealed that he still hopes one day to write a book, whether that be a novel, autobiography, or something more philosophical.

In the meantime, he’s taken to writing what are basically short poems on his Instagram, which he created just a few months ago. He’s gathered over 4.5 million followers since then, but having such a large audience hasn’t deterred him from being endearingly vulnerable with the way he writes. When I refer to them as poems, he laughs and looks embarrassed, but when I ask him to tell me the stories behind them, he’s enthusiastic again. They’re short, but offer brief glimpses into Mark the writer — sharp, inquisitive, and thoughtful. As pieces of literature, they’re a little rough around the edges, but the sincerity he’s known for shines through, illuminating the introspective, philosophical side that may not be so obvious in person.

His first poem, loosely titled “Late Night Scribbling,” put into words his musings about sleep, thoughts, feelings, and writing. It meanders from topic to topic, hovering between feelings of hope and hopelessness, before ending with a comically awkward “haha.”

“I actually wrote that by imagining how I wanted to organize my Instagram page,” he explains. “I was thinking of creating an Instagram, then I realized that, well, I’m not really a picture kind of guy, I’m not really a travelling kind of guy… I kind of studied who I am first, and I [asked myself], ‘What’s something that I can really portray in an intimate way?’ and it turned out to be writing.”

“I started to brainstorm what kind of topics I could write about, and then from there on, I started to write a little each and every night, and that turned into Late Night Scribbling,” he continues. “That kind of gave me courage to start Instagram in the first place, that piece of writing.”

Two weeks later, he followed it up with “Black Socks,” a whimsical ode to, well, black socks — complete with accompanying photos of him wearing said socks. Immediately, it feels more confident and cohesive than its predecessor. Using the neat and tidy look of black socks as a metaphor, he describes his own mindset for living life: “Pleasure from perfect alignment; That also goes for my ability to be parallel with my thoughts and actions; I try to live out what’s in my mind, and keep it consistent even when forgotten like a working habit.”

Comments on the posts praise his writing and encourage him to continue sharing these small pieces of himself. On the stage, Mark takes on a confident, larger-than-life persona, while in vlogs and spoken interviews, he’s a bubbly character full of laughter and boyish charm. What the poems show is that, beneath these outer appearances, there’s another layer of complexity that is yet to be fully explored, and it’s not surprising that fans want to know more.

His day job as a K-pop idol doesn’t allow a lot of time for hobbies, though, and he confesses to not having written much lately. Despite that, he’s determined to stay in the industry for as long as possible. “Longevity is something that I’ve always been aiming for,” he says. “I’m willing to do this for a long time, and that requires a lot of work. I’m willing to take that as a challenge and I’m trying to stay as long as I can, but with quality.”

That focus on quality informs his preparations for the upcoming promotions with NCT Dream. In both their fictional world and ours, NCT Dream are a central component of NCT by virtue of their unique focus on growth — the seven members were aged between 14 and 17 when the group first debuted in 2016. Fast-forward five years, and the members are now 19 to 21, having reached a milestone in January when the youngest, Jisung, finally became a legal adult in Korea. When asked if he feels like an adult yet, though, Mark gives an extremely relatable answer with zero hesitation.

“I still feel like I’m in middle school, I’m gonna be totally honest. I swear to God, I feel like I’m… All right, I’ll put it up — I feel like I’m in high school!” He laughs. “I even had this talk with Jisung, ‘cos he’s the latest that turned into an adult. He said that he still feels like he’s a student, he doesn’t feel like he’s 20 [19 in international age] right now.”

It’s been a long time since all seven Dream members — Mark, Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Jaemin, Chenle, and Jisung — have released an album together, and as the first full-length album since their debut, the fan anticipation is palpably intense. Mark himself has mentioned in various vlogs how important he believes this comeback to be, and that conviction becomes obvious whenever he talks about it.

“We had a talk all together, the seven of us, without any cameras or anything. I brought all the guys together and we talked before the whole momentum started, and I said that I’m willing to put my everything on this one. Like, I always had, but I feel like… the whole universe, or like— ” He pauses, trying to figure out how to articulate himself, and his next line is the most emphatic of our whole conversation. “There are things that are out of our control, but we can see and feel when the pieces match together sometimes, and I feel like this specific moment, this particular album, kind of had those essential parts.”

He’s thinking about all of the context surrounding this comeback: the group’s coming of age, the reunion of all seven members, the scale of the album, the fact that Jisung has only just recovered from a leg injury that meant he couldn’t dance for months — even the fact that 2020 was, against all odds, the best year yet for NCT, with release after release bringing them unprecedented success and momentum.

“I felt that coming and I explained all of that [to the group],” he continues. “This whole period of time has a lot of meaning to it, and we’re not taking that for granted, we’re working hard.” With everything that’s happened, Hot Sauce is a historic moment for NCT Dream, and that’s been reflected in their numbers — the album clocked over 1.7 million pre-orders, obliterating their previous record of 500,000 for last year’s EP, Reload.

Their familial bond and the success that has come with it is the culmination of years spent living, working, and growing up together. The members have collectively missed out on key experiences that most teenagers might take for granted, distanced as they are from normal life, and the group also benefits from an unusually loose adherence to traditional Korean age hierarchy. The result is a brotherhood that goes beyond just being colleagues. “What we have is pretty intimate, and it’s also genuine,” Mark says.

About his role, he is matter of fact. “I’m by far the most easily approachable punching bag for the team. I am not… complaining…” He laughs. “But all jokes aside, I feel like my role for this team… Yes, I am the oldest and I am the leader but I’m also… In Korea, in the culture, age is very important, but we’ve come so far that all those borders kind of just vanished and we’re all pretty much friends, and I guess I’m just a friend of theirs too.”

It’s true that, despite being the leader, his friendly personality and endearingly awkward mannerisms mean that he commands about as much authority as a small puppy. Instead, much like a puppy, he is showered with love and affection (fellow member Chenle refers to Mark as his son and his actual puppy Daegal as Mark’s little sister), but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a dependable leader figure. The opposite is true — in Renjun’s words, Mark’s presence unites the group in a way that makes him irreplaceable.

And while this may be the fifth year since their debut, in the grand scheme of things, the members of NCT Dream are still very, very young — by most standards, they would still be considered to have their entire careers ahead of them. Growth has brought them here, but where does Mark think it will take them in the future?

“Growing just never stops for us, I can see us growing continuously, endlessly,” he replies. “What the future holds is something that we will never know, but we always do try to prepare during the present, and so with whatever time we have currently and with whatever album, or whatever stage, or whatever piece of music it may be, we’re willing to make sure that we have the next one coming too.”

A final thought. “I’m glad that we’re striving for that, ‘cos we started off as…” Mark shakes his head, “…as babies.”

#nct #nct dream #Mark #nct 127

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disneydeb1928 · 4 years

Text

One Piece Theories: Blackbeard’s Connection to Rocks D. Xebec

- Blackbeard Theories, Part 6

Connection to Rocks D. Xebec

I have seen a lot of people talking about a possible connection between Teach and Xebec. I’m going to be exploring the possible validity behind this theory.

Establishing a Timeline

For starters, let’s look at the established timeline.

Teach was born in 1484, which is the same year that the Rocks Pirates were said to be terrorizing the world (Ch. 907). In addition, when God’s Valley Incident was said to have occurred (in 1486), Teach would have been around 2 years old.

Many of the theories suggest that perhaps Teach is Rocks D. Xebec’s son. At a glance, this does fit in the timeline. Some people refute this by pointing out that the two don’t share the same last name. However, as seen with Ace, who took his mother’s last name, that doesn’t disprove that they could be related.

At the very least, Teach appears to be following in the man’s footsteps (whether that be purposeful or unknowing). For instance,

· Teach’s main ship is called the “Saber of Xebec”

· He is currently occupying Hachinosu as his main base of operations, the same place where the Rocks pirates were supposedly formed over 40 years ago

· Both are described as power hungry individuals

· Probably one of the most interesting tidbits, is Teach’s laugh. We all know that Oda loves to give each character their own unique laugh and Teach is no different. His is “Xehahahaha”. Now, we all know that Oda loves to foreshadow and hide clues. Could the “xe” in his laugh, be referencing Xebec?

Addendum - The Shanks Connection: Finally, I did a deeper analysis of Teach’s personality in an earlier part of these set of theories. While doing so, I mentioned his confrontation with Shanks that ended with the red haired pirate’s scar over his eye. I discussed what could possible drive Teach to this, since it was established by Shanks himself that he’s not going to do anything unless he sees an opportunity for power. There is a theory out there, that perhaps it is not Teach who shares a familial connection to Xebec, but Shanks. I know it may be odd me discussing a theory within a theory (theory inception), but just hear me out. There have been several instances in the recent years that support that Shanks had been on the Jolly Roger since he was very young. For starters, we know from the canon, that by the time Shanks was 9 (in 1494), he and Buggy were already members of the Roger Pirates (Ch. 964). In the most recent flashback chapters (Ch. 958 - Ch. 973), when Roger first meets Oden’s children, he says “It’s been a while since I last held a baby!”. This, by itself, wouldn’t necessarily raise any eyebrows. I mean he is a pirate. However, it is Silver Rayleigh’s comment a few scenes later that make it apparent that this is important. He says, “That reminds me of the past...”. This seems to indicate that in the past there has been a baby on the ship. It doesn’t necessarily confirm that it was Shanks, but if you use common sense, it has to be either Shanks or Buggy.

That also reminds me of the fact that, in Chapter 958, Oden refers to Shanks as “tarou”, a suffix usually used for first sons (source: Library of Ohara). While it is used as a joke, to make Buggy angry, Oda is famous for hiding important things in throw away lines.

As I’ve said before, the fact that any of Teach’s motivations and plans parallel Xebec’s so much, is not a coincidence. I definitely believe that Teach is, at least, aware of Xebec’s existence (though how he would know this, is still a mystery, if he is, in fact, not his son). Perhaps he idolizes the man or feels a sense of connection. All we do know is that at some point from 1500 to 1511, Teach gives Shanks his scar. If Shanks is Xebec’s son, I believe that would give Teach motive in attacking him (and, as we’ve established, Teach is a man who always has a motive for doing something).

His Special Body

I think out of all of the Blackbeard theories I’ve read, this is the one I see the most discussed. Somehow Teach is able to wield more than one Devil Fruit, a feat that would kill a normal person. The conclusion? Teach is not a normal person. Or, at least, his body isn’t normal. Marco even describes it as “atypical”.

The general census I see on the internet, and probably the Blackbeard theory with the most validity, is that he has a condition that makes basically makes it so that he has more than one “body” inside of his own. Two possible explanations could be Fetus in Fetu or Chimera Disease.

Some suggest, that with Fetus in Fetu, Teach could have twins growing inside of his own body. This would allow him to possible possess three devil fruits. This is supported by Blackbeard’s flag, which shows three scowling skulls.

His Country of Origin

It is a very common theory, and almost an accepted truth to many fans that Teach hails from an Ice Country.

This theory all goes back to a comment Luffy made during the Drum Island Arc in Chapter 134. He says that “people who live in snow countries don’t sleep” because “if they fall asleep, they’ll die”. More than 800 chapters later (in chapter 966), when we get a flashback to the Whitebeard vs. Roger fight we get a discussion between Shanks and Buggy, where Buggy says that Teach “didn’t sleep during the truce” they had for the “last few days”. He then goes on to say that there’s a rumor that “[Teach has] never slept in his life”.

Now, even though this theory has a lot of clout within the fandom, it still has not been confirmed within the story or by Oda himself. However, given Oda’s history of foreshadowing, I personally feel that this theory has a large chance of being true. So, if it is true, this still leaves a lot of speculation and questions that need answers.

· Is this ‘ice country’ where Whitebeard found him? Or had Teach somehow found himself on a different country/island by then?

· Which ‘ice island’ would be most likely his country of origin?

#My OP Theories #One Piece Theory #op #One Piece #op theory #Marshall D. Teach #Blackbeard Theories #Blackbeard Theories Part 6 #One Piece 966 #op 966 #One Piece 134 #op 134 #Shanks #red haired shanks #buggy #buggy the clown #roger pirates #whitebeard #whitebeard pirates

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irelise · 4 years

Text

Fic “Behind the Scenes” - Alex Rider

Trying to dip my toes back into writing, so I thought I’d ramble about some fics I’ve already written! This started off as ranting about my title choice and how they’re usually Final Fantasy XIV songs I butcher in order to forcibly fit the fic, but it expanded into musings about things that didn’t make the cut into the final fic, and potential sequels/things that happen down the line.

Just doing Alex Rider fics for now since that’s my current active fandom, but drop me an ask if there are any fics you’re especially interested in from any fandom!

Starting off with: Time (2368 words, gen, Alex & Yassen focused) aka my untagged Inception-flavoured AU where the plot twist was that it was a dream all along That said, this title was probably one of the easiest to come up with and was obviously from the main theme of Inception, Time! Which is fantastic like the whole movie aaaa i love Inception AUs and this fic is probably the one I’m most likely to expand into longfic if I dredge up the motivation from somewhere. It would be a mission style fic, possibly a heist, where Alex and Yassen are seemingly working together in order to steal some valuable intel from another group. Of course, it’s all a dream! Through copious dream symbolism and mind fuckery the real mission was set up by MI6 for Alex to extract intel from Yassen, who by this point is steadily losing his grip on dreams and reality after months, possibly years, spent under sedation.

Yassen has a few tricks up his sleeve, though. He’s aware that he’s (probably) dreaming and he can see the fractures in Alex’s resolve after such a long time of being used and manipulated by MI6. It would only take a little nudge to get Alex to defect -- or, at the very least, to escape.

So while Alex is busy trying to extract information from Yassen, Yassen is trying to do the opposite: inception.

The rest below cut for length and also because they’re nsfw since most of my writing was for the kink meme! Warning for general fucked-upness and unhealthy relationships

at the end, on a dusty road (8154 words, Yassen/Alex) aka the reputation sabotage fic, aka where’s part 3b?!

Title from Origa’s Polyushka Polye:

The wind scatters your brave songs Across the green field. Songs of the past, Leaving them alone with your glory, And right at the end, on a dusty road…

i just wanted something wistful and Russian about past soldiers and fading glory ok....... I came pretty close to titling the fic leaving them alone with your past glory but decided it didn’t make much sense out of context.

ANYWAY my first Yalex fic! Very much inspired by a hodgepodge of comments on Discord about how MI6 would react if they ever saw Yassen paying Alex visits in the middle of the night - “Could they be exchanging information?” “The whole night? Maybe the answer is something more obvious...”

ANYWAY the ending at the moment is pretty open - there’s two main ways I see it going:

1) Yassen comes back shortly afterwards, realises he had fucked up colossally, stays and helps Alex rebuild even though Alex (very justifiably) no longer trusts him. Very slow reconciliation and healing but ultimately happy ending.

2) aka the one where I broke Nanibun’s shipper heart over Discord: Alex and Yassen eventually reunite, but it isn’t until years later, when Alex is nearing middle age and Yassen has faded into obscurity. Alex managed to pick up the pieces of his life and even moved on properly from MI6, and now lives a fulfilling life. Married, 2.5 kids, white picket fence, the whole lot. So what if his marriage is more for partnership than for love? He’s content with the direction his life had taken and has strong ties to his community. He even managed to forgive Yassen, even though it took him a long time.

He and Yassen meet for the last time in a sunlit cafe in spring. Alex looks at Yassen and sees only a stranger with lines crinkling under his eyes.Yassen is getting old, he realizes. He thinks he should be happy that Yassen even had the chance to get old, but all he feels is relief that their paths had diverged. Alex is done with that life and he can never trust Yassen again. All that old passion had burned away to nothing, not even a flickering flame. Even though the initial parting had been painful, Alex had managed to find peace long ago, and he hopes Yassen will be able to do the same. But it's a distant, unemotional hope, the sort of hope you'd have for a distant acquaintance you haven't seen in years. The type of well wishes that are etiquette more than actual sentiment.

He's glad when their drinks are finished and Yassen melts away into the chattering springtime crowd, one final dangling chapter of his life closed at last.

...............or, 3) Alex throws himself into increasingly dangerous situations in an attempt to feel something and dies young.

(part 3b is coming someday i swear! it’s the alternate path where Yassen has second thoughts, tells Alex the truth, and doesn’t send the sex tape to MI6)

---

Lemniscate (3562 words, Julia Rothman/Yassen) Not a whole lot to say about this one, except after I finished I realised it was really similar to another fic I previously wrote which also involved a young man desperate to reinvent himself completely being taken advantage of by his superior............ i have a Type

Title - I was jamming out to Locus while writing this which is a song all about an inability to escape from cycles - When fighting back right out of this system/Means falling back right into this space ; When falling back is better than simply/Falling back into pieces again - but it was long and unwieldy so I thought about shortening it to Moebius but that was a bit overdone... In the end I settled with Lemniscate which is also an infinity symbol, Moebius-like shape. Mostly it’s a reference to how Yassen never quite breaks free of his “cycle” even though he’s with Scorpia now - he was Sharkovsky’s slave and bedwarmer and...now he plays basically the same role for Julia Rothman. (Just with a bit more murder and moral erosion!)

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This probably needs a special content warning - major character death (gun suicide from the second Russian roulette scene), gore, necrophilia

closing the circle (3650 words, John Rider & Yassen) aka is it still a gen fic if there’s offscreen necrophilia?

This was originally written for a kink meme prompt for corpse mutilation + necrophilia but then the John and Yassen plot thread kind of took over and I never actually ended up writing the gory stuff oops since it was too out of place compared to the rest. So everything below can be considered not “canon” since the fic diverged so heavily from its original plan (which is why the section numbers skip around - I cut out Yassen’s bits). But if you’re curious, here’s the details for what I originally planned to happen to Yassen (well, his corpse) and the Sharkovsky family, copy-pasted straight from my notes and full of as much karma as I could stuff in:

Yassen’s death, Sharkovsky shoves his fingers in the bullet hole and spits on the body in disgust. Yassen regains consciousness halfway through this; he can feel what Sharkovsky is doing

Ivan comes running in, attracted by the sound of the gunshot. Sharkovsky tells him to do what he likes with the body as long as it’s disposed of in the end. Necrophilia scene? Afterwards Ivan disposes of the body by locking it in the cellar alone with the Dalmatian for a few days

Yassen starts getting his revenge. Ivan is the first to go when he comes to let the Dalmatian out – the Dalmatian savages him and tears out his throat before it’s finally shot. Yassen’s bones get buried along with the Dalmatian. Ivan’s body is kept in the cold storage room in the basement where they kept the old food taster’s body while they decide what to do with him.

Maya, Sharkovsky’s wife, is next. She passes away in the middle of the night. Sharkovsky wakes up next to a cooling corpse.

There are whispers that there is some sort of curse. One of the maids talk about finding blood on the carpet of Sharkovsky’s study. She’s the next to disappear. Some other workers stop turning up.

Finally it’s Sharkovsky’s turn. He dies of poison. The dacha burns down that same night.

A Scorpia agent was sent to tie up loose ends (Scorpia didn’t know Sharkovsky is already dead); Yassen kills him too. He has no loyalty to Scorpia and just wants to be left alone.

Hunter is sent to investigate. He and Yassen talk, in the end, Hunter invites Yassen to come with him, Yassen agrees. But when they leave the dacha and Hunter looks back, he finds that Yassen is gone.

And an excerpt:

Yassen is dead. He does not remember dying. There are some things the human mind tries to shield itself from, and the memory of a bullet traveling through bone and brain to erupt on the other side in a shower of gore is one of those things.

Yassen is dead. He had hoped death would mean oblivion. At his most naïve and optimistic, he had hoped death would mean reunion. Happiness. A return to simpler days.

He discovers, instead, that death is not so different from life, except he is even more powerless now than before.

There is a body on the floor of Sharkovsky’s study. Its hair had once been pale white-blond, but now it is matted with coagulating blood. That same blood spreads in a dark pool against the carpet, clotting the fibres together into ugly clumps, stiff and flaking. The fire in the hearth is still burning sullenly. Its light glistens against the grotesque strands of viscera splattered against the ground, the furniture, the wall. A round hole had been punched into the side of the corpse’s head, piercing bone and brain. That was how the man who had once been Yassen Gregorovich had killed himself. The fingers of the corpse remain loosely curled around the old-fashioned revolver that had been the instrument of death.

The only living person in the room rises slowly from his wheelchair. Sharkovsky’s skeletal face is twisted into an ugly grimace of anger. He totters over to the corpse, nudging it with the tip of one polished leather shoe. “Waste of time,” he says coldly. “Ruining a perfectly good carpet, and for what?”

In a sudden fit of temper, he lashes out with a kick. Once, it would have been strong enough to break several ribs (Yassen knows from intimate experience). Now, the corpse merely flops limply to one side. It incenses Sharkovsky further. He drops heavily to his knees, breathing harshly, and backhands the corpse across the face with one shaking hand.

#fandom: alex rider #My writing #meta

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bondsmagii · 4 years

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I mean to ask this genuinely, no hostility, but can you explain how you correlate scp to being in a cult? I dont disagree, I just cant articulate the reasoning as to why I dont disagree, and would like to see where youre coming from with this. Also, could you tag it with cults or cult discussion or something similar, please? Thanks! Have a good day.

OK [cracks knuckles] I will try and keep this as short as possible, but you have to understand I’ve been observing the wiki in the wild literally since its inception, so there is a lot of stuff to consider. anyway let’s buckle up.

[EDIT: after finishing, this is obnoxiously long. sorry. I encourage people to read it though, because yikes.]

I base this theory on a set of guidelines set out for spotting if an organisation might be a cult. generally cults are religiously based; obviously this does not apply here. as far as I’m aware, nobody sees the SCP wiki as a religion (yet). because of this a couple of the points regarding spotting a cult are irrelevant (they concern things like separation from the Church which obviously doesn’t apply) but nearly all of the others (even some religious ones) can apply if we provide context. so without further ado:

Signs You’re In A Cult and How the SCP Wiki Literally Fits Into All of Them

let’s start with the most obvious:

opposing critical thinking

something that has long pissed me off about the SCP wiki has been its complete inability to think critically. staff will literally ban people for criticising them, and the parameters of “criticism” have only grown wider and wider over the years. anything that is the “party line” is sacred; nothing can be improved upon because it’s already perfect, and Staff Knows Best. any policy changes are law, and any dissenting voices are silenced – even among younger staff members (length of service wise, not age wise). I have seen staff put on probation or demoted for arguing against pointless or pedantic policy changes; I have seen people of all levels banned for arguing with staff. if this doesn’t happen right away, arguing with staff over their decisions will absolutely get a target on your back, and they will find a way to ban or demote you as soon as they can.

any criticism on the wiki is frowned upon unless it comes from the Major Staff Members – these are people at the top of the hierarchy who can do no wrong, and as you can imagine, they’ve done some shit. staff has always had a problem with elitism, bullying, and even abusive behaviour (blah blah blah #NotAllStaff, but the ratio is quite concerning) and any criticism of their behaviour or even pointing this fact out is dangerous if you want to remain on the wiki. hell, I know many people who are aware of this who don’t speak up because they’re genuinely scared of retaliation. a lot of staff are really nasty people, and because of this attitude they are beyond criticism.

isolating members and penalising them for leaving

the penalising them for leaving part isn’t strictly accurate, because as far as I know, nobody has ever been bullied or threatened into staying on the wiki. however, I do remember a while back (2011/2012-ish) when the Foundation RP community began to show up on Tumblr, and the wiki began to get a fanbase that wasn’t contained on the site itself. staff were not happy about this and to this day they still constantly try and get a monopoly on all off-site locations. they have an official Offsite Outreach Team (yes, that’s its real name) who “reach out” to communities on other platforms (YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, etc) and set up an Official Presence there, and then they encourage everyone to use the Official Presence rather than the fan-made ones (which are often more established and better/more consistently run). there have been several off-site spats between staff and the fandom, because they arrive demanding the authority and respect they have on the wiki and get Big Mad when they don’t get it. just recently one (now ex) staff member, djkaktus, went absolutely primal on Reddit and banned a whole bunch of the community for daring to say that they didn’t like the new LGBT logo for pride month (many of these people were LGBT themselves and felt as though it was pandering/putting targets on their backs); several more years ago (2014, I believe?) I myself had a run in with the Outreach Team and it was one fucking hell of a headache that ended in a malicious smear campaign against me, so like. yeah.

as for isolating members, they do this via elitism. the above is an example of it (making everyone feel a sense of obligation or loyalty to the Official Presence), but a huge part of it has always been the elitist attitude prevalent on the wiki. the SCP wiki has high standards for writing (allegedly… I’ve seen some garbage on there tbh, same as any other website) and it uses this to bully and demean its users. criticism of writing is overly harsh but highly encouraged; anyone complaining that it was too cruel (which it often is) is ridiculed for being too sensitive. (staff have been working on this for years, but really nothing has changed; people have just gotten more between-the-lines about it.) this encourages a kind of desperation among new users to “rise up the ranks” and earn respect so they can be the ones dishing out the criticism instead; they will do so and then immediately act in accordance to their status, bullying others how they were bullied and sticking to their own “rank”. brief interruption: staff and bootlickers if you’re reading this and thinking of reblogging to defend yourself, the code word is yeet. if I do not see the word yeet in your reply I will know you have not read this thoroughly and tell me why I should then bother reading anything you have to say.staff themselves is incredibly removed and closed off from the rest of the community; they have a bunch of private chat rooms they hang out in, and inter-dating is common. they don’t tend to interact much outside the flock, and are the definition of cliquey. joining this rank is supposed to be an achievement, but really it’s probably the most dangerous place to be. I have seen so many staff members have literal, clinical mental breakdowns over the strain and treatment they suffer.

(there’s nowhere to neatly slot this in, so: I don’t know how many people have noticed this, but SCP fans, when you spot them on other platforms, are snooty. not casual fans, but those involved with the wiki? I can spot them from a mile away, because whenever the Foundation is mentioned, there they are, acting like they’re part of some cool club. some of these people are innocent (they’re just mimicking the behaviour of other members) but some of them really do seem to think that their site is somehow better than whatever site they’re on, and it’s really creepy to see.)

emphasising special doctrines outside of scripture

obviously this is religion-specific, but with context it can fit. if we take scripture to mean SCP lore, and special doctrines to mean differing headcanons, ideas, writing styles, etc… oh boy.

there’s something that’s often said on the wiki: there is no canon. buddy, there is. yes, you can write whatever you want technically, and you can disregard headcanons you don’t like and you can build on different things and theoretically people can just ignore your shit if they don’t like it, but that is not what happens. there is absolutely a canon, and deviating from it will get you downvoted into oblivion and even personally attacked. people will accuse you of the most ridiculous shit, like desecrating the wiki or betraying the universe or whatever. so where does the emphasising part of this come in?

why, it’s simple! if one of these special doctrines (headcanons or whatever) comes from staff or an Approved Member, it’s fine. go nuts. even if it’s something that anybody else would be absolutely slaughtered for, it’s fine if staff approves. there is no creative freedom on that wiki, and anyone attempting to carve a piece out for themselves will suffer for it. one of my close friends still gets hate for an SCP he wrote featuring heavy headcanons and building on existing lore about a well-known character, and some of this hate is because he didn’t set the fucking article out “how it should be”.

seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders

oh boy. staff are god on that website. they’ll deny it, but they know it’s true. many of them are arrogant and, in my opinion, some of them are pathologically narcissistic. they think they are hot shit, and they encourage people on the site to believe the same. a huge majority of users on the wiki are high school students, so 15-18 years old. the next huge group are college-aged, so 19-22 or so. several staff members are in their mid-20s up to 30s, maybe even coming 40s or early 40s now. when you’re in your mid-20s, it’s very easy to look cool to a 15-year-old. it’s very easy to look at a young userbase and convince them that you’re hot shit, and that’s what staff do. they act like it; most users respond to it, and if anyone dissents? see point one.

staff have always had double standards. from the very beginning of staff, they have gotten away with a lot more than the average user. staff have been allowed to bully, ridicule, harass, dismiss, shit upon, and target people with reckless abandon, usually only meeting punishment when other staff members feel too inconvenienced by them. a lot of the time when they’re punished, it’s a lot lighter than it would have been for an average user (a month ban rather than a permaban, for example). this is seen as almost a point of hilarity for a lot of people, who think it’s cool and just a right you get when you’re staff. you know best, you’ve seen some shit – who can blame you for slamdunking a 15-year-old’s first SCP?

the amount of respect and adoration these people demand is ridiculous, and anybody daring to criticise them ends up on a shitlist. staff show up in other areas (Tumblr or Reddit) and expect that same amount of respect, even among people outside of the wiki who might just be casual fans. they act a lot more important than they are, and demand that everyone treats them appropriately. I’ve seen staff members throw shitfits because they didn’t get enough upvotes for their articles, and many staff members’ quality of work declines when they make staff, simply because they know that they’ll get easy upvotes as soon as people realise it’s a staff member who wrote it. downvotes are enough to get you put on a shitlist.

publicly, their word is law. you are not allowed to debate with them in the forums if they put a “stop” on the topic; the same applies in the IRC chat. if staff says “stop”, you will be punished if you mention it again. you are allowed to discuss it with them privately, but I think that’s rather insidious, as staff have been known to twist facts and withhold information before. this gives them a public persona of always being right – and something else that cults do is silence dissenting voices so nobody who might agree can see other people saying the same things and feel encouraged/emboldened.

crossing Biblical boundaries of behaviour

again, we’ll need to contextualise this. if Biblical boundaries are things like sins and all the stuff the Bible says Do Not Do, then in this context these are the wiki rules. staff (and their friends) will constantly cross the rules, as previously mentioned, and they will get away with it.

the wiki rules say “don’t be a dick”. I have caught staff bullying people countless times, and no doubt there’s more I haven’t caught. even out in the open, staff are argumentative, dismissive, rude, intimidating, and oftentimes plain nasty. the wiki rules say “don’t coldpost articles; get feedback”. staff is just out there throwing their shit onto the wiki and expecting an avalanche of upvotes in five minutes Or Else. policies are made that set parameters and staff changes them whenever convenient – for example, the long-standing rule that things that occur off-site are not the responsibility of the Disciplinary Committee (yes, its name.). unless, of course, it’s someone they don’t like. a major staff member bullies somebody on Tumblr? “sorry, it was offsite, not our problem”. someone staff doesn’t like gets into a brief spat on Reddit? banned for harassment.

there are countless examples of this, from small things to major things like bullying, harassment, and even abuse (or enabling of abuse). staff will punish people for transgressions and then turn a blind eye to a fellow staff member committing a transgression that was ten times worse. they have even protected rapists and sexual predators in the past – another kind of behaviour common in cults, because that’s what happens when you combine narcissism and entitlement with total authority.

that’s the main bulk of it

but now the context has been established, here are a few more concerning things I’ve noticed (quickfire now):

cults shit on former members

and the wiki does the same. any staff member that’s grown fed up of the groupthink and the cliquey attitude and how nasty people are or who has been mistreated by staff themselves; any regular user who feels the same and vocally quits? shat upon. lauded as a bastion of whatever is wrong with the wiki. declared an Enemy and rallied against. it is so creepy.

cults use Us vs Them mentality, especially in language

broad declarations establishing a community and a community spirit in the face of adversity are common in cults. appeals to emotion and loyalty are used in a very manipulative way. catastrophising and fearmongering is common, too. I’m seeing this in how the recent drama with the legal issues is being handled. broad appeals to “defend the wiki”, hashtags being encouraged, emotional speeches from staff about how it’s a make or break situation…

…and this is being reflected in the absolutely insane comments people are responding with.

this is a fucking writing website. the above is not a normal reaction at all.

the attitudes of regular users quickly grow concerning

people very quickly get obsessed with the wiki and it defines their lives. they seem to feel as though they owe something to it or they need to serve some kind of a purpose; many people try and “get the word out” and become voluntary spokespeople. they go around practically preaching, and I do not see the users of any other website doing this.

cults want full control over how they’re seen by outsiders

and the scp wiki does the same. as mentioned previously, when the fandom grew and spiralled off the wiki to other sites, staff debated for weeks over what to do. brief interruption the second code is shrek is life.they were not comfortable with the idea of the wiki having an independent fandom, and for years now they have been in constant struggle with offsite communities, trying to gain the same amount of control they have over the wiki. it’s impossible to do so thoroughly, and it’s clearly an annoyance for them.

cult leaders will let “lesser” members do their dirty work for them

and guess what staff does? rather than wade in there and get their hands dirty with internet arguments, they’ll sit back and let regular users dogpile on dissenters and say all the things staff shouldn’t be seen to say in public. note how even if this would violate the bullying policies, they’ll just get a warning so long as staff agrees.

in conclusion

@ everyone on the scp wiki: yall know you’re in a cult, right?

#scp shenanigans #scp foundation #cult discussion #long post #like LONG post #anon #asks

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tsaritza-mika · 3 years

Text

Just some thoughts I have about things

So recently, this picture came across my dash, and while I can always appreciate a good joke at my personal expense, it also got me thinking: Why even should this be a joke pointed at myself and others like me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m still laughing about it, even now, but it still got me thinking about the subject it pokes fun at, and my overactive brain decided to analyze things a bit.

Now since this is the internet and it’s customary to overshare, I recently figured out that I’ve been in a deeply depressive state for... I wanna say about the last 5-7 years or so. How did I figure this out? Well, as the picture says, I fell in love with a fictional character. Like yeah, love. I get these huge, dopey as shit smiles on my face when he crosses my mind, the joy in my brain gets turned to the max, and I’m unbelievably happy knowing that even if he is considered to be ‘just a drawing’, that he exists, and despite it being obviously scripted, he loves me with all his fictional heart and soul.

But anyway, back to the oversharing part of this, because what’s a good internet story without some trauma, right? A little over five years ago, I spent my 30th birthday getting drunk on the front porch of my parents house in Southern California, knowing that when I was done I was going to go back to their back house and continue my then two years, post-divorced status, and attempting to rebuild my life without someone at my side for the first time in roughly ten years. Before then, my joys in life came from just about anything artistic. I drew my favorite characters, I watched a ton of cartoons and anime because since I was four, I wanted nothing more than to be an animator. I also played video games and hung out with friends regularly.

Well, after the divorce, a lot of that went away. Now, I knew I was upset. I could point that out without issue, but the longer time went, the drive and creativity that had been with me my whole life didn’t seem to come back the same way it had. Sure, I’d still draw, still made some pictures I could be proud of, but rather than taking maybe a few hours to a day or so, maybe a single picture from inception to completion would take a few weeks. If it ever got completed at all, of course. Instead, I buried myself in my video games. I didn’t have to think or process anything I was personally feeling when I played them, because it was always reflective of the feelings of the games’ main character/chosen toon I played at the time.

Then, on a whim, a few months ago when America’s West Coast decided to burn, I decided to listen to my best friend and download a mobile dating game. I’d played dating games before, I’m no stranger to tropes and anything else that pops up in them. Hell, one of my favorite dating games is Monster Prom, and yes, my favorite is Damien because let’s face it, he’s deliciously destructive and handsome as fuck. But I digress, it wasn’t Damien that really made me feel this way. It was Julian.

I should probably say here too that I’ve been this way my whole life, you know, before I get too much further into this. My first fictional crush was, like many my age, Chiba Mamoru, better known to some as Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon. Even now I’ll still swoon at the right line and the right picture at the right time. Because I mean, let’s face it, he’s hot as fuck. Since then, there have been others: Heero Yui, Tamahome, Inuyasha, Sousuke Sagara, Kurz Weber, Kyo Sohma, to name only a few. And that’s just the anime side of things. However, none of these loves/crushes, have ever negatively impacted my ability to love someone real. I’ve had boyfriends, and even been married, and they’d never felt threatened or stated anything wrong with these feelings what-so-ever.

Yet there are still those out there who will roll their eyes at this and try to convince me that ‘you’re not in love’, or ‘it’s not real because he’s not real’, and whatever other bullshit they feel like saying at the time. But here’s my rebuttal to that: What makes my love for this fictional character any less valid than say, someone with a celebrity/musician crush? Chances are those people will never even manage to be in the same room as that celebrity, and even if they are, there’s never a guarantee they’d feel anything in particular for them anyway if they managed to get close. But, when they smile, when they do something admirable, when you learn something new about them, doesn’t that happiness feel the same? I was one of those people too, except my walls were plastered with every poster imaginable of Johnathan Taylor Thomas. Because it was the 90s bitches. I knew I’d never get anywhere near him or anything, but when he laughed, I smiled. When he was upset, I was upset for him.

My depression left me with essentially nothing but an empty shell for so long, and because I’d only ever heard of symptoms from more severe cases than my own, I mistakenly thought that maybe that part of my life was just over, and that it was something I had to get through and find something else to make me happy. But then I played a game, I ‘met’ Julian, I spent time with him, got to know him and how much of a dramatic disaster he is himself. Yes, he was written and coded to make someone like me happy, but because, like so many others before, pieces of him resonated so deeply inside me, I fell for him and all of his flaws.

He can drink too much, is very depressed and in need of some actual sleep, he’s altruistic to the point of masochism, he has a pain/BDSM kink, he’s practically if not literally addicted to coffee, he’s had trouble letting go of bitter feelings regarding his ex and how it ended, he has regrets about how he’s handled things in his life, he doesn’t believe he deserves to be happy when he’s made so many perceived mistakes. But... he’s also incredibly smart, loves a good dramatic entrance, making those around him feel special, performing in some fashion, he’s studied hard to become the best damn doctor he could be because he wanted to help people, he loves his sister dearly and wants her to be happy, among so many other things and quirks I can’t say it all.

This fictional man makes me so fucking happy, I have art ideas again for the first time in almost ten years. I want to save up and get a new tablet so I can contribute to the fandom he’s a part of with animatics and animations. I want to make so many pictures, I want to write more, I want to animate, and a part of me has even been considering the thought of looking into some kind of musical instrument for the first time since I was twelve and learning the saxophone. And above everything else, I can recognize the depression I was in, and can move forward from it. I can still love everything I used to and be happy with them again. So what if all of these things are coming from my mental and emotional love for a fictional man. It doesn’t make these feelings any less real, nor the happiness that’s come as a result of it.

And whenever I meet someone for real, I will love them with the same fire from when I loved, and still will love Julian, and they won’t even be able to tell the difference. Because love is love, in all it’s forms.

#TLDR; just because I love an F/O doesn't invaidate my love for real people #julian devorak #ilya devorak #let it be obvious as the sun in the sky that i love Ilya Julian Devorak #tsaritza mika #mika rambles

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insanityclause · 5 years

Link

Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hiddleston sit down at a back table of a midtown Italian restaurant and launch into it.

“I don’t know …” “I think I’ll have the …” “Are you getting a starter?” “If you get that, I’ll share it with you.” “Whisky at lunchtime?”

“We’re not doing this on purpose,” Hiddleston assures me, although their staccato rapport bears an uncanny similarity to dialog that Harold Pinter—in whose Betrayal the three are currently starring—might have drafted. “Sometimes, you just find yourself recreating his rhythms.”

I hadn’t actually assumed that there was anything staged about their chatter. It seemed more like the results of months of close collaboration and a natural intimacy. The current Broadway production is a transfer of a West End show from last year; the three actors have been performing together since March, but their association began earlier than that.

Back in October of 2018, Hiddleston and Ashton participated in an Intelligence Squared debate pitting Tolstoy against Dickens. Hiddleston dramatized the part of Levin from Anna Karenina, Ashton played Kitty. (In an odd convergence, we discover that my father also participated in the debate.) Cox’s take when he discovered that the other two actors had met on a panel debating the virtues of two nineteenth-century intellectual giants: “This is going to be the worst four months of my life. Can we just talk about Friends?”

But the two men also go way back: In 2011, Cox—best known for his turn as Daredevil in the Marvel franchise—took Hiddleston to an Arsenal game at Emirates Stadium, arriving to pick up the 6’2” actor in a Fiat cinquecento. “That’s smaller than a smart car,” Cox clarifies for those (like me) unfamiliar with the ‘90s-era Italian hatchback. Cox is an avid Arsenal fan—he even bought a house in the north London neighborhood of Stoke Newington to be close to the stadium—but when I ask Hiddleston if he shares the same allegiance, he speaks with the measured care of someone sensing the rabid scrutiny of a million Premier League fans. “When I was younger, in the 1980s,” he says, “I supported Liverpool, but I would never elevate myself to the level of a Liverpool fan.”

Photo: Courtesy of Marc Berner

We seem to be moving backwards through the actors’ acquaintance, not unlike the movement of the play itself, which begins with the cold dregs of an affair, and moves in a reverse chronological order through its more heated center and inception. It’s hard to talk about Betrayal without emphasizing this ostensibly experimental aspect of its construction, but as we speak, it occurs to me that this is in fact often the way that people tell the story of their relationship to one another: first comes the lunch order, then comes the January football match years ago, then the casting, and so on.

I had assumed that this version of Betrayal, when it first appeared in London, was part of a season of Pinter plays performed at The Pinter Theater in London and directed by Jamie Lloyd, but it turns out that its origin was more fortuitous. Ashton and Hiddleston had been brought in to perform a scene at a gala commemorating the playwright’s birthday, and at the conclusion, Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, turned to Hiddleston and said: “It was wonderful, that scene, perhaps you’d like to do the whole thing?” And then they were off—led by Lloyd, who, Hiddleston says, the actors inherited “match fit” from his season of directing the Nobel Prize–winner. Cox was tied up when he was first approached to play the third point of the tortured love triangle, but when he became available, he leapt at the opportunity. “I just googled ‘Betrayal word count,’ and then said: I’m in,” he jokes.

Continuing the backwards momentum, I leapfrog further, discovering that all three actors grew up in London: Ashton in Hackney in north London, around the corner from the house where the playwright lived most his life—“There’s no membrane between me and Harold,” she jokes—Hiddleston in central London and then Wimbledon, and Cox south of the river, in Victoria. Between the three, they’ve covered a lot of the capital’s geography, and so I ask them about the role that the city plays in Betrayal, a fourth factor in the love triangle, the characters traversing the city to reach the secret Kilburn flat where they’re conducting the affair or visiting posh Hampstead houses. Does anything get lost in translation among American audiences? “We never get a laugh with Kilburn, and we never will!” says Ashton. “It’s such a London-centric piece. Especially in our production, which is more conceptual in design, you’re asked to imagine a lot.”

But if the three performers are London-bred (and based), they have taken to their New York residencies. Hiddleston lives near Central Park, a location he chose so that he can run there every day: “The first time, I thought there was a race on—turns out, people just run in New York.” (Though he ran the London marathon once, he’s not planning on repeating it in New York—“probably wouldn’t be able to do the show afterwards,” he muses.) Cox has settled for the time being in Tribeca, where his routine is structured by preschool drop-off for his three-year-old daughter, Elsie, and weekly visits to the Russian and Turkish baths. Ashton is busy preparing for a production of a play of her own, for all the women who thought they were Mad, which has its U.S. premiere at Soho Rep later this month. She rattles off a list of shows she’s seen or would like to see—Ain’t Too Proud, Slave Play, The Inheritance, and all three chime in with exuberant appreciation of the energy of Broadway—“the density of the lights,” as Ashton puts it, “the collective energy of all the people in the vicinity.”

“I love entering the theater through a stage door that’s the door for three other theaters,” says Cox, and Hiddleston, too, seems to appreciate the on-top-of-each-other architecture of Broadway theaters. “Before the show, I open my window, and I can hear the audiences coming in for Ain’t Too Proud,” he says, “and the usher telling them to ‘step this way.’”

“I keep getting told off for being too loud when I leave,” Ashton interjects. “It’s clearly a quiet part of Phantom of the Opera. But even that’s delightful.”

With such palpable enthusiasm, and since we’ve also covered the beginning (birth, childhood) and the middle (their friendship, the play), I ask them about the (hypothetical) end: Gun to their head, if they could only do film and television or theater for the rest of their life, what would they choose?

Reluctant silence, followed by some grudging admissions: “In terms of the lifestyle,” Cox says, “I don’t think it gets better than the theater. I spend all day with my family. On a Thursday, I leave the house at 6:30. I get out of bath time.” And then there’s the iterative rewards of performing the same lines night after night: “There are changes you get to make over the course of a run, you can subtly shift your performance to make it richer.”

“We’re in a play that was written a long time ago by a legendary playwright,” says Ashton. “And we’ve brought something fresh to it. You can do that in theater.”

Hiddleston takes the longest to weigh in. “I know in my bones, I feel like a creature of the theater. But I’ve had very meaningful experiences on film sets as well. But we’re very happy.” Ashton interjects: “Rehearsing this play was one of the happiest experiences of our lives.”

The three actors are unlikely to be able to perpetuate this mutual contentment beyond the play’s run. Hiddleston is scheduled to begin work on Loki after spending the holidays back in London with his family. Ashton will be busy with the two productions through the fall, and Cox is unsure of his next project. (Dealer’s Choice, he answers quickly, when asked about his dream role: “I’m just about getting to the right age to play one of the characters.”) I suggest they find another wrenching play about love gone awry to keep them content. “It's true,” says Hiddleston. “I remember doing Othello in London, and people in the audience would be in floods of tears. And then they'd come backstage and we’d all be laughing. There’s a cognitive dissonance.”

An assistant arrives to inform them that it's time to prepare for the show. And so all three stand up and depart, more than happy to perform their nightly tragedy.

#Tom Hiddleston #Zawe Ashton #Charlie Cox #Betrayal #interview

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tomhiddleslove · 5 years

Text

Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hiddleston sit down at a back table of a midtown Italian restaurant and launch into it.

“I don’t know . . .”

“I think I’ll have the . . .”

“Are you getting a starter?”

“If you get that, I’ll share it with you.”

“Whiskey at lunchtime?”

In October 2018, Hiddleston and Ashton participated in an Intelligence Squared debate pitting Tolstoy against Dickens. Hiddleston dramatized the part of Levin from Anna Karenina; Ashton played Kitty. (In an odd convergence, we discover that my father also participated in the debate.) Cox’s take when he discovered that the other two actors had met on a panel debating the virtues of two 19th-century intellectual giants: “This is going to be the worst four months of my life. Can we just talk about Friends?”

But the two men also go way back. In 2011, Cox—best known for his turn as Daredevil in the Marvel franchise—took Hiddleston to an Arsenal game at Emirates Stadium, arriving to pick up the 6-foot-2 actor in a Fiat Cinquecento. “That’s smaller than a smart car,” Cox clarifies for those (like me) unfamiliar with the ’90s-era Italian hatchback. Cox is an avid Arsenal fan—he even bought a house in the north London neighborhood of Stoke Newington to be close to the stadium—but when I ask Hiddleston if he shares the same allegiance, he speaks with the measured care of someone sensing the rabid scrutiny of a million Premier League fans. “When I was younger, in the 1980s,” he says, “I supported Liverpool, but I would never elevate myself to the level of a Liverpool fan.”

We seem to be moving backward through the actors’ acquaintance, not unlike the movement of the play itself, which begins with the cold dregs of an affair, and moves in a reverse chronological order through its more heated center and inception. It’s hard to talk about Betrayal without emphasizing this ostensibly experimental aspect of its construction, but as we speak, it occurs to me that this is in fact often the way that people tell the story of their relationship to one another: First comes the lunch order, then comes the January football match years ago, then the casting, and so on.

I had assumed that this version of Betrayal, when it first appeared in London, was part of a season of Pinter plays performed at the Harold Pinter Theater in London and directed by Jamie Lloyd, but it turns out that its origin was more fortuitous. Ashton and Hiddleston had been brought in to perform a scene at a gala commemorating the playwright’s birthday, and at the conclusion, Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, turned to Hiddleston and said, “It was wonderful, that scene, perhaps you’d like to do the whole thing?” And then they were off—led by Lloyd, who, Hiddleston says, the actors inherited “match fit” from his season of directing the Nobel Prize–winner. Cox was tied up when he was first approached to play the third point of the tortured love triangle, but when he became available, he leapt at the opportunity. “I just googled ‘Betrayal word count,’ and then said: I’m in,” he jokes.

Continuing the backward momentum, I leapfrog further, discovering that all three actors grew up in London: Ashton in Hackney in north London, around the corner from the house where the playwright lived most his life—“There’s no membrane between me and Harold,” she jokes—Hiddleston in central London and then Wimbledon, and Cox south of the river, in Victoria. Between the three, they have covered a lot of the capital’s geography, so I ask them about the role that the city plays in Betrayal, a fourth factor in the love triangle, the characters traversing the city to reach the secret Kilburn flat where they’re conducting the affair or visiting posh Hampstead houses. Does anything get lost in translation among American audiences? “We never get a laugh with Kilburn, and we never will!” says Ashton. “It’s such a London-centric piece. Especially in our production, which is more conceptual in design, you’re asked to imagine a lot.”

But if the three performers are London-bred (and based), they have taken to their New York residencies. Hiddleston lives near Central Park, a location he chose so that he can run there every day: “The first time, I thought there was a race on—turns out, people just run in New York.” (Though he ran the London marathon once, he’s not planning on repeating it in New York—“probably wouldn’t be able to do the show afterwards,” he muses.) Cox has settled for the time being in Tribeca, where his routine is structured by preschool drop-off for his three-year-old daughter, Elsie, and weekly visits to the Russian and Turkish baths. Ashton is busy preparing for a production of a play of her own, for all the women who thought they were Mad, which has its U.S. premiere at Soho Rep later this month. She rattles off a list of shows she’s seen or would like to see—Ain’t Too Proud, Slave Play, The Inheritance—and all three chime in with exuberant appreciation of the energy of Broadway. “The density of the lights,” as Ashton puts it, “the collective energy of all the people in the vicinity.”

“I keep getting told off for being too loud when I leave,” Ashton interjects. “It’s clearly a quiet part of The Phantom of the Opera. But even that’s delightful.”

Reluctant silence, followed by some grudging admissions. “In terms of the lifestyle,” Cox says, “I don’t think it gets better than the theater. I spend all day with my family. On a Thursday, I leave the house at 6:30. I get out of bath time.” And then there’s the iterative rewards of performing the same lines night after night. “There are changes you get to make over the course of a run, you can subtly shift your performance to make it richer,” he adds.

“We’re in a play that was written a long time ago by a legendary playwright,” says Ashton. “And we’ve brought something fresh to it. You can do that in theater.”

The three actors are unlikely to be able to perpetuate this mutual contentment beyond the play’s run. Hiddleston is scheduled to begin work on Loki after spending the holidays in London with his family. Ashton will be busy with the two productions through the fall, and Cox is unsure of his next project. (Dealer’s Choice, he answers quickly, when asked about his dream role: “I’m just about getting to the right age to play one of the characters.”) I suggest they find another wrenching play about love gone awry to keep them content. “It’s true,” says Hiddleston. “I remember doing Othello in London, and people in the audience would be in floods of tears. And then they’d come backstage and we’d all be laughing. There’s a cognitive dissonance.”

An assistant arrives to inform them that it's time to prepare for the show. All three stand up and depart, more than happy to perform their nightly tragedy.

[ Link to the original article is in source below. ]

#Tom Hiddleston #Zawe Ashton #Charlie Cox #Betrayal Broadway #Vogue Interview #Jamie lloyd production #harold pinter play #hiddles 2019 #Theatre tom #Tom Hiddleston interview #new york city

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maryxglz · 5 years

Link

Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hiddleston sit down at a back table of a midtown Italian restaurant and launch into it.

“I don’t know . . .” “I think I’ll have the . . .” “Are you getting a starter?” “If you get that, I’ll share it with you.” “Whiskey at lunchtime?”

But if the three performers are London-bred (and based), they have taken to their New York residencies. Hiddleston lives near Central Park, a location he chose so that he can run there every day: “The first time, I thought there was a race on—turns out, people just run in New York.” (Though he ran the London marathon once, he’s not planning on repeating it in New York—“probably wouldn’t be able to do the show afterwards,” he muses.) Cox has settled for the time being in Tribeca, where his routine is structured by preschool drop-off for his three-year-old daughter, Elsie, and weekly visits to the Russian and Turkish baths. Ashton is busy preparing for a production of a play of her own, for all the women who thought they were Mad, which has its U.S. premiere at Soho Rep later this month. She rattles off a list of shows she’s seen or would like to see—Ain’t Too Proud, Slave Play, The Inheritance—and all three chime in with exuberant appreciation of the energy of Broadway. “The density of the lights,” as Ashton puts it, “the collective energy of all the people in the vicinity.”

“I keep getting told off for being too loud when I leave,” Ashton interjects. “It’s clearly a quiet part of The Phantom of the Opera. But even that’s delightful.”

“We’re in a play that was written a long time ago by a legendary playwright,” says Ashton. “And we’ve brought something fresh to it. You can do that in theater.”

An assistant arrives to inform them that it's time to prepare for the show. All three stand up and depart, more than happy to perform their nightly tragedy.

#tom hiddleston #betrayal broadway #betrayal #bernard b jacobs theater #broadway #theatre #harold pinter #charlie cox #zawe ashton #jamie lloyd

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tisthenightofthewitch · 5 years

Text

How Ghost became the face of the new generation of heavy metal

Pressure. Controversy. An army of haters. It seems like nothing can throw Ghost off-course. How Ghost's mastermind Tobias Forge took on the world… and won

Paris, tell me… did that make your asses wobble?” It sure as hell isn’t “Scream for me, Hammersmith!” but somehow, inexplicably, this flirty, moustached, makeup-splattered dandy wiggling about in a tux and leather gloves has 9,000 people in the palm of his hand like he’s Bruce Dickinson in ’86. Hammer is at hallmark gig venue Le Zenith in France’s capital city, witnessing Ghost deliver their latest sermon.

The City Of Love might be frozen solid on this chilly February evening, but the unstoppable Swedes are heating things up in style – fire, steam cannons, confetti, a dazzling light show and enough costume changes to make Lady Gaga dizzy are just some of the ingredients reaffirming their status as one of metal’s premier attractions in 2019.

It all makes a two-hour set fly by in no time, guided masterfully by that aforementioned, ’tache-donning Daddy. Cardinal Copia, Ghost’s Master Of Ceremonies, raised a few confused eyebrows when he was unveiled this time last year, breaking an eight-year streak of Papa Emerituses who’d fronted Ghost since its inception. But he’s since become the beating heart of a band that have continued to evolve, grow and adapt beyond all expectations.

He’s also a world away from the blue-eyed, slick-black-haired, quiet and thoughtful man we spent time with two hours earlier, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, decidedly sans-moustache and doing much less wiggling.

When Hammer last spoke to Tobias Forge, he’d recently (some may say forcefully) been outed as Ghost’s resident mastermind – its very own Wizard Of Oz, working behind the scenes and behind the mask to help orchestrate one of the most unlikely success stories of recent times.

We are creating a dynasty.

Soon after our last conversation, Ghost dropped their latest album, Prequelle – an instant classic stacked with playful menace and 80s-tinged pop-rock bangers – and have pretty much been on the road ever since.

“Hey, if you wanna rock, you gotta rock,” shrugs Tobias of his relentless schedule. “It takes a lot of effort, a lot of cogwheels spinning and turning, to make all this work.” He’s not kidding.

A weary roadie will later inform us that it takes almost four hours to pack up Ghost’s monstrous set each night – a towering, multi-platformed, chapel-esque set-up that recalls the kind of backdrops Maiden have made home for decades. “But, once you’ve got that whole machine rolling, you don’t wanna stop,” Tobias adds. “At some point, we will have to wind down a bit, but we’re not there yet.

If you wanna be comparative, look at all the big bands; even though they made it in a different time, statistically it takes five records, about 10 years, to go from nothing to something to something great.”

And that, right there, sums up Tobias Forge. The reason Ghost have been such a triumph isn’t because of great songs, a good live show and a savvy gimmick – metal history is littered with bands that never made it despite boasting all those things.

The difference is that Tobias is the man with the plan. He may not be the tortured artiste or swaggering hellraiser that rock’n’roll loves to stick on a pedestal, but he’s a leader: a brand ambassador with a calculating mind and a shrewd business acumen who knows exactly what needs to be done to immortalise Ghost’s legacy.

He’s playing the game, and he’s winning. And if you look hard enough, the seeds for it all were being sown right at the very start.

“You can find all the details in my record collection,” he says with a knowing smirk – and he’s not wrong. Before Cardinal Copia, there were Papa Emeritus I, II and III – a line of frontmen that not only enabled Ghost to set up a deep-running narrative, but change up the formula and the image for every album cycle. Sound familiar? It should – it’s what rock’n’roll superstars have been doing for decades.

"I’ve always been a big fan of Kiss,” he continues. “Most Kiss fans can tell the era [of the band] by the photo, what they’re wearing. You can say, ‘That is ’75, that is ’76, it’s in the spring, it’s in the fall, it’s Rock And Roll Over, it’s Destroyer.’ So I figured that in order for this band to age, we need to create dynasties.

"And that way, there’ll also be nostalgia. Because I come from a heavy metal background, I know how important nostalgia is, and the attention span nowadays is so short, so you need to create it quickly. You need people to be able to say, ‘I was there when this part happened.’ That’s why it was always Papa Emeritus I, right from the start.”

It’s a meticulous level of forward-thinking that has come up trumps, but amazingly, you’d have been hard-pushed to find anyone who’d have backed Tobias to carve such a path 10 years ago.

Before 2010, it was with respected Swedish death metallers Repugnant that the Linköping native had had his most ‘success’, his love of rock’s theatrical side flirted with via a splash of corpsepaint and a drop of fake blood here and there.

A spate of EPs and splits and one well-received album, 2006’s Epitome Of Darkness, ensured a small part in heavy metal folklore was guaranteed, but it was what happened next that changed everything.

Channelling his love of catchy NWOBHM mainstays like Angel Witch and Demon, Tobias wrote what would become Stand By Him – an irrepressible schlock-rock anthem a world away from the guttural noise of Epitome…

He called up former Repugnant bandmate Gustaf Lindström to help record it, and more songs quickly followed in the same, earwormy vein – “I’ve always liked the NWOBHM bands that had melody and pop sensibility,” he says today.

But there was still something missing. The songs Tobias was now writing were following a formula that had been laid down since the 70s. It needed something different. Something fun. Something… metal.

Deciding that this new project should carry an image that’d bring it a world away from its influences – a band that, in Tobias’s words, should “sound like Angel Witch but look like Death SS,” he began doodling some ideas. One scribble stuck – the image of a Pope-like character, plastered in ghoulish corpsepaint. Papa Emeritus was born.

I was 29 years old. I wasn't going to get another chance at this.

“And as soon as it was confirmed that he’s gonna be a Pope… well, when a Pope dies, you have a new one!” adds Tobias with a laugh. Soon after Papa I came the idea for the Nameless Ghouls – masked, anonymous backing musicians that’d add to the band’s hokey mystique.

By 2009, the project had an image, some songs and a name: Ghost. But it’d be a little while before things started to move forwards, and Tobias’s grand plan would take shape.

Between 2008 and 2009, there were maybe 20 people who knew about Ghost,” says Tobias, who ended up fronting the band through default after unsuccessfully offering the gig to a variety of names from around the metal scene.

“The guys in In Solitude, the guys in Tribulation, the guys in Watain… they were the only people who knew about it! But I knew at that point that it was gonna have the ability to turn heads, because it made everyone [excited].

"Repugnant were popular, but nothing I had ever done had had such an immediate impact on people. They were all like, ‘Ghost! I wanna hear more!’ I knew that there was gonna be some sort of buzz.”

A “buzz” is an understatement. When Ghost’s first songs were finally made public – on MySpace, no less – things began to move very, very quickly. Metal messageboards were set ablaze with excitement and offers came flooding in.

“I was quickly in touch with Will from Rise Above,” notes Tobias now, and he would eventually accept a deal with Lee Dorrian’s much-respected label. An album, Opus Eponymous, was recorded, and the metal underground waited with baited breath for its new favourite band to deliver on the hype. And yet, even at this stage, Tobias wasn’t totally certain just how far things would go.

“Originally, I thought that Ghost was gonna become more like a theatre/installation sort of band, like Sunn O))),” he reveals. “We would play Roadburn, arthouse concerts, five dates at the London Scala, that sort of thing.”

So a kind of ‘event’ band. You’d show up to play special shows and residencies.

“Exactly,” he confirms. “I never thought we would be the band that would play metal festivals, play in daylight, play with other bands.”

But then more offers started steaming in. Suddenly Ghost – with not so much as a gig to their name – were being asked to go on tours, play festivals and do interviews. For Tobias, there was a straight decision to be made: keep this project as a ‘cult attraction’, stay within the underground and become everyone’s favourite ‘Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of them’ reference point, or take a leap into the unknown and reach for greatness.

For a man that had spent years keeping a lid on his grand ambitions, now was the time to sink or swim. And, really, there was only ever going to be one option.

“I wasn’t gonna get another chance,” he states flatly. “I was already 29 years old at the time, so it was like, ‘This is the train and it’s leaving now.’ You can choose to stay, and sit there and fucking wonder all your life, or you can get on.”

Tobias got on the train, and it hasn’t stopped rolling. Opus Eponymous was released on October 18, 2010, and within three years intimate club shows became packed-out academy shows in front of 5,000 people, and soon after that the band could be seen supporting everyone from Metallica to Foo Fighters to Iron Maiden.

They won a Grammy for Cirice (and have been nominated for two more); they’ve been championed by everyone from James Hetfield to Phil Anselmo; their merch has become obscenely big business, t-shirts selling out in no time at gigs (including the show Hammer attends tonight) and the Ghost IP being plastered across everything from baubles to butt plugs to custom plague masks.

Tobias has manoeuvred that quick sketch of a spooky lad in a Pope hat into a machine Gene Simmons would be proud of, all underpinned by a storyline that has fans salivating as they wait for the next chapter to be revealed.

And if there was any doubt that this is still very much Tobias’s baby, you need only look at the casualty list littered with names that have crossed him. There are the disgruntled ex-bandmates who attempted to bring a lawsuit against Tobias in 2017 after claiming they were denied their rightful share of the Ghost pot.

The lawsuit was thrown out in October last year, his former colleagues ordered to pay Tobias’s legal costs (around $145,000, if you’re counting). There was also the Sister Imperator incident, where the elderly Ghost matriarch and star of their ongoing vignette series had to be swiftly recast after a mysterious falling out.

“All of a sudden, you’ve an actress who decides to start making fucking trouble and makes herself unemployable,” Tobias says. “Well, then you have to do what they do in any soap opera… a car accident.” That’s not allegorical, by the way.

Tobias literally had a new vignette made revealing that the Sister was in a car wreck and needed reconstructive surgery. The new actress was brought in so smoothly that many Ghost fans assumed it was the same person with a different haircut. How’s that for efficient?

“That’s how you solve things,” the frontman shrugs. “But that was not planned at first, because we’d been working with the same actress for three years, and then all of a sudden, things fell apart. But, you have to roll with the punch, you have to bite your finger, and come up with another plan… car accident. Boom.”

That Tobias won’t be moved on what actually happened between he and the original actress is understandable – after all, this is a man that spent years holding his cards close to his chest.

That this all managed to play out under the noses of one of modern metal’s most fanatical fanbases, however, is pretty damn impressive. Basically: don’t cross the boss.

While Tobias’s masterplan may seem iron-clad, he will at least admit that there is room for fine-tweaking along the way. He recently revealed that Cardinal Copia’s character could stick around for another five years and multiple albums – a first for Ghost, who have thus far changed up their protagonist for every record.

“That’s just because of the potential of him being a ‘Pope’ or a Papa Emeritus IV,” he explains, before adding: “If he becomes a Papa Emeritus.”

So there could be multiple endings planned for Cardi C?

“Absolutely. All of this is an organic movement, and that is one of the biggest paradoxes for me, as a control freak. To be part of this living world, I can’t control everything. I can control a lot, and I can influence a lot, but I can’t control it [all]. And coming to terms with those things and accepting that is a big struggle for me.”

He’ll also admit that being the mastermind behind a machine as big and ever-evolving as Ghost has had a serious impact on his personal life. Being a part of a successful band is one thing, but having that success rest almost entirely on your shoulders is something altogether different.

“It’s very hard to do this without any casualties,” he muses. “It takes a toll on your surroundings, your crew, your parents, your children… I have two kids, 10 years old. They were toddlers when this whole thing started. My family’s had to endure a lot for this to happen.”

He’s also had to face up to the reality that being in a big rock band means you’re going to attract the attention of

a fair few haters – and Ghost have an army of them. Check out Hammer’s Facebook page to see the dizzying levels of vitriol that a post about Ghost will attract. Recurring issues seem to be accusations of selling out, anger at Tobias’s treatment of his former bandmates and, most commonly, whether Ghost belong in our world at all (and to be fair, you’d be hard-pushed to describe Prequelle as a true heavy metal record by any standards).

“I’ve noticed it,” says Tobias. “I noticed it in the beginning. I think that it’s the same old discussion. ‘Is Ghost a metal band?’ ‘Are we a clone of Mercyful Fate?’ It’s the same old thing. But now these people are saying the new record is not as good because it’s not as much of a clone of Mercyful Fate! OK…”

Why do you think Ghost wind people up so much?

“Because we are ever-present, all the time. We are being shoved into people’s faces, and we’re rubbing it in. They wouldn’t talk about us had we not been successful. Does it worry me? Not really. If they’re talking shit about me, that’s one thing, especially if it’s someone that I know. That can hurt me deeply. When you’re at the beginning of your career, especially nowadays, you spend a lot of time surveying what’s going on, because you need to feed off anything that’s happening to the band. So I noticed there was a lot of ‘controversy’, a lot of mixed opinions. It’s surprising they don’t understand that the more they talk about us, the more traffic there is about our band. More than we would have had had they not spoken!”

Once again, it’s there: the unnerving feeling that Tobias is metal’s modern-day puppet master, pulling the strings above a performance that we all continue to play our parts in. Whether it’s the media, his fans, his critics or the few who have attempted to foil him, everything only ever seems to play into his hands, and the Ghost train rolls on.

“A few months ago, based on metadata alone, a website made a list

of the biggest bands in metal,” Tobias reveals as a PR informs us our time together is up. “We were number four! Right up there. And that’s thanks to these people that keep on fucking hating. So I have nothing but great feelings for them.”

He makes to leave before adding: “That’s how all these bands made their careers. You think Lars would shy away every time people would talk shit about Metallica? Fuck. That.”

Hated, adored but never ignored. This summer, Ghost will play in front of stadium crowds with Metallica once again – something Tobias calls a “PR exercise” – before more global dates and, eventually, a new album that’ll reveal the next chapter of his grand plan. You can imagine that people will have plenty to say about it. And you can imagine that Tobias Forge is going to relish every second.

ALL RIGHTS OWNED BY METAL HAMMER

#The Band Ghost #Ghost Band #Cardinal Copia #Nameless Ghouls #Tobias Forge

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squidmangoes · 5 years

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Royai Fic Rec

Sooo I compiled a small list of some of my favorite Roy/Riza fics both for my own reference and for anyone else looking for some good fic to read?

Just a point of reference, I have a BIG OL’ Riza Hawkeye bias so I tend to gravitate towards fics that are more Riza-centric? Also I have a preference for AU’s so there’s going to be a disproportionate amount of those in this list lol.

If you like any of the fics listed PLEASE make sure to leave the writers some comments and give them lots of love!!

[ ❤️ = links to gratuitous fanart ]

❤️ Our embalmed hearts, our desolate kingdoms by spooky_bee (T, Multi-Chapter, Complete) Summary: "He leans back, palms connecting with the concrete, and looks up over their city, their desolate kingdom. In the rain, Central City might as well be the ruins of Xerxes, empty and grey, and he and she may as well be the last two people on earth." Or, Love in the Time of Giant Robots.

Possibly my favorite Royai fic? It’s a Eva AU with a really well executed but SLOW build. I’m going to try not to ramble too much about this fic but uhhhhh it’s one of the main reasons why I even started making this list to begin with, just so I had an excuse to shamelessly suggest people to read it. There’s a lot of love put into the writing, world building and character development and it has one of the most extensive Riza characterizations I’ve ever read? It’s just a beautifully introspective piece of work and the way Roy and Riza’s relationship is written is so sincere and earnest that it KILLS me that this fic isn’t more popular than it is.

You definitely get your action fix but the character interactions and relationships are really the star here and it’s done PAINFULLY well. (Also spoiler warning for major character death but it’s left kind of ambiguous tbh so it didn’t bother me too much)

❤️ Well-Behaved Women by ehmazing (T, Multi-Chapter, Complete) Summary: If she'd known she'd be entangled in so much politics, dog hair, and personal business, maybe Sheska would not have become the First Lady's personal assistant.

Recently came across this fic and it’s also become one of my top favorites! Really good character writing and third person perspective done so well you wish it wasn’t because you want! to know! more! Though I have mixed feelings about whether or not Roy and Riza should/would get married in canon, if it were to happen, this is probably the only way I could see it working.

Basically: good writing and gREAT re-readability factor for those little understated and subtle character interactions. Also Sheska/Maria as a pairing has a lot of untapped potential that the writer takes advantage of lol. They’re!! really!! cute!!

❤️ A GOOD ASS FMA UNI FIC!!

Another!! top fave fic

OKAY so this one does get pretty steamy at some parts and I know minors follow me, which is why I’m choosing not to include a direct link to this fic. BUT if you’re 18+ and want a link feel free to drop me an ask (off anon pls) and I can send it your way! The modern characterizations of the fma cast are fantastic and everyone vibes really well together! I have a super soft spot for this fic bc i’m sentimental about my uni days and it made me hardcore miss my friends lol so uh kristine if you ever read this just know you’re vry talented bravo you got me good

无用 / you might get what you're after by roxast (T, Multi-Chapter, Ongoing) Summary: “Is Mustang being bossy again?”“It’s called 'delegating'.”[Or, Roy spends his senior year of college wrapped up in more ways than one.]

Hehehe another uni fic that I really like! ....I feel like I’m exposing myself lmao it’s very obvious what au I’m most partial to but ANYWAYS super fun concept with two other great follow-along stories in this series (The first being scar-centric and the other through riza’s perspective). All the character interactions are super sweet and I’m looking forward to where it’s going next!

Lucidity by orphan_account (T, Multi-Chapter, Incomplete) Summary: Inception AU. Roy Mustang was one of the finest Extractors in the business until he broke ranks and left his old job behind. Now he and his trusted Architect, Riza Hawkeye, are risking their lives to undo their former employers.

A short and unfortunately abandoned fic but I still really like it! There’s a good sense of atmosphere and I think the writer did a good job of maintaining a level of intrigue in Roy/Riza’s relationship. Definitely worth checking out for the little soft moments of interaction they have.

❤️ Infernia by mitsys (T, oneshot) Summary: Some stories aren't told in headlines or newspapers, but in the touch of hands and minds. A Pacific Rim AU following Riza Hawkeye and her partner, Roy Mustang.

So...listen. I have low standards when it comes Pacific Rim AU’s…because they already automatically meet my one standard. But!! This fic is short, sweet, and really well written. The writer really captures what I think makes the Roy/Riza dynamic so interesting to me in the first place: unspoken understanding and subtlety!! Their interactions with each other definitely has a subtle established relationship feel without being too over the top or out of character. Overall just a really solid oneshot. I love it.

Where is Our Gravity? by the_musical_alchemist (T, Multi-Chapter, Incomplete) Summary: Ed remembers the hopelessness of the arena and how it sunk under his skin like poison. It’s a curse that never leaves you, just something else you resign yourself to in order to keep on living.

Hunger Games AU: Roy/Riza in roles of Finnick/Annie and Ed/Winry in roles of Katniss/Peeta. Not really spoilers if you’ve read the book series but warning for major character deaths. However the events aren’t ordered chronologically so you can...technically...trick your mind into thinking it didn’t happen and you’re still in the past lol. Writer does a good job of both keeping the tone of Roy/Riza as adults and also maintaining the right amount of intrigue in their relationship in a way that implies a lot of weight and shared history. Which I dig! A lot!!

Larded All with Sweet Flowers by FullmetalArchivist (1stTimeCaller) (T, oneshot)

Summary: There's enough on Riza's plate as it is; closing night of one of the most famous plays in the world, press conferences and trying to herd actors to their places. She really doesn't need the extra headache of having to navigate her feelings for the star of the show.

Short, fun and sweet theatre AU! I love when modern AUs give Riza positions of power; in this case she owns the theatre, so...BIG OL’ thumbs up here. Make sure to check out their other works too! All good stuff.

And the Band Plays On by sceptik (G, oneshot) Summary: Roy ran a hand through his hair, and, as he did about twice a day, wished he’d never been hired by Bradley and Son, all those years ago.

Lawyer AU. Subtlety. Intrigue. Themes of corruption. Also uhhh what’s that trope called, where there’s slow dancing but also tension from the subtext of “we must keep up this façade that we’re not close,” I love that shit!! This has it.

Another Military Party by ryfkah (T, oneshot) Summary: Shockingly, certain traitorous conspirators are finding this year's Central Officer's Ball a little tense.

Again, dancing + tension + good writing, I love it.

Take Aim and On the Line, or Five Times Roy Mustang Drunk Dialed Riza Hawkeye by glamophonic (T, oneshot)

I won’t go too in depth with these fics since you’ll most likely see these two on a lot of peoples’ fic recs and yeah it’s well deserved. Basically if you love Riza Hawkeye, you’ll probably like these! Solid characterization, good chemistry, and sweet character interactions.

You’ve Got Mail! by tootooroo (T, Multi-Chapter, Complete) Summary: Just like high school students who like to text during lessons, the teachers are pretty much the same—except that they do it by e-mail, using their PC, so that their supervisors think they are doing work errands. A little bit of Royai.

I’m usually not a fan of texting/email formats in fic but it works well here! The writer does a good job writing comedic character interactions in a really charming way and for the most part it feels very in character (or as much as it can be when transferring canon personalities to modern AUs). In short: fun universe, good writing!

***So there’s definitely a lot of other good fics out there that I haven’t gotten around to reading but that’s all I’ve got for now! aaaand again If you like any of the fics listed PLEASE make sure to leave the writers some comments and give them lots of love!!

#royai #riza hawkeye #roy mustang #fic rec #it's been a while since I've read straight fics tbh lol #bc women can sometimes be written very.....👀#if ya know what I mean #but these writers do a great job so pls give em some love!!#also still planning on doing some fanart for a couple more fics but i'm slow so #we'll see

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apriltheshoegirl-blog · 5 years

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Midge and Lenny ship

ok, so I have been growing an obsession over midge and lenny ever since I finished watching the last episode of season 2, few days ago. I’ve been following and reading fandoms and posts about how people ship them and how it breaks their heart that it’s NOT gonna happen..., since the upcoming season is around the corner, I want to point out a few things, I find interesting.

well, let’s get to the point

I think the authors are deliberately planting a romance between Lenny and Midge and they’re pretty much endgame. and they EXACTLY KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING!

call me crazy, but I have solid evidence, I watched the scenes over and over and could find subtle, but obvious hints here and there! so here it is :

1. why should Midge be from a conservative Jewish family? back in 50′s marrying into non-Jewish families, even dating them, used to be pretty much frowned upon and if it occurred by any chance, Like it did with Noah and his wife, she could never quite blend in, no matter how hard she tried to stick to the religion. she was an outsider.

Lenny Bruce is Jewish. so is Midge.

If they were supposed to be just friends or Lenny was supposed to picture a mentor to midge, couldn’t they just use a fictional character or even a Christian comedian. hence, why he had to be Jewish? coincidence? I don’t think so!

2. The chemistry,

we all know the spark is there... ! it blinds me out every time I see it ... on the other hand, I read all the stuff about platonic friends ships, and believe me, I don’t buy it what so ever! they have such undeniable crazy chemistry between them, that can set the entire room on fire! I mean come on! It’s like Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennette from Austin’s pride and prejudice, would remain antagonists till the end of the book, and she ends up with the priest! it can’t be all for “just a friendship”

3. The time span,

the Movies is set in 1958, the end of season two is set somewhere in 1959. The real Lenny Bruce divorced his wife in the same year! before Lenny’s divorce was finalized, he had an affair with a jazz singer, on the show people get Midge mistaken for a “singer” every now and then. such a subtle irony, but I find it a hint, a hint that declares “Midge is a love interest for Lenny, but they won’t realize it until the divorce is finalized” they don’t want to acknowledge the romance, and certainly Lenny doesn’t want to cross that line with Midge, He sees midge furthermore than an affair or a fling... there’s a real connection in here.

4. the introduction of Lenny Bruce

Ok, that one might sound a bit odd. but I actually find it in favor of lenny-midge ship. so here’s the thing. so let’s face it. many of us cringed when we first saw Lenny (I even didn’t know he is a real person) bailing midge out for the first time, trying to be a little bit flirty, believe me....even I was like : duh ! another love triangle cliche! that dude is gonna be the new love interest, and compensate all the damage the douchy soon to be ex-husband forced on her! but we were not watching another cheesy drama, the writes were so brilliant, bright, and exactly knew what they were doing... they planted the idea of blossoming romance into our heads and “inception” the sh*t out of us... and yet, didn’t let it blossom. as the two had more encounters, Lenny started to turn from “the other guy” to “ the one that got away” leaving the audience frustrated and yearning to see something happen between these two,,. but not only that didn’t happen, but also, they didn’t even touch... thus, there were other annoying, dreary, love interests in the picture which narrowed the idea of two of them ever being together down to a thread... which subsequently made us want Lenny and Midge to be together even more! now after the season 2 finale, people literally are leaning on their knees, begging to God for “at least a brief romance”.... and it might not happen for another season.. they want the audience to beg for it! pure genius!

5. the tribute to Lenny Bruce.

OK, so we think the show is about Midge? wrong! the entire show has a theme of stand-up comedy. it’s not only about midge, but it’s also about the profession of “stand up comedy” and also one of the most misunderstood and underrated history figures on his own time “the infamous Lenny Bruce”. even the hardcore fans who worship him, still agree on the dark side of his life and how he was dealing with his inner demons.

I read the interview with her daughter, noting she used to be bullied at school for being Lenny’s daughter. He died in such a tragic way and so lonely. I assume, setting him up with a fictional character, portraying “the bright side” and “silver lining” of his dark last years, would not only be disrespectful but a tribute to him. I mean the guy died so tragically and so young... at least he deserves an epic love story, maybe he had one ... we know a little about what was really going on his life... hence, I don’t find it disrespectful, on the country, it will be a tribute to his persona... even if it would be setting him up with a fictional character in an alternate universe. the point is “to remember him as Lenny Bruce, the lover and the person who presented a talented comic to the world”the marvelous mrs maisel” AND ... not just the guy who was dealing his last years with alcohol and drugs until his death... however, the authors will remain loyal to the “historical accuracy” and take him all the way down the road, and kill him off eventually. because that’s the whole thing is about. but with midge alongside, it won’t sound as dark as it presumably is. it would be a “perfect love story”

my theory: Midge and Lenny will have an epic romance sometime in between season 3 and 4. the romance will be on and off, but he is going to remain the main love interest. as midge’s career starts to take off, Lenny's goes downhill. but midge will help him through all the good and bad and ugly... she will be by his side until the very end. I assume they would even get engaged sometime, but never actually get to be married.... Lenny popping the question would be LEGENDARY ( I swear on this...midge never had a proper proposal, with Joel it was so juvenile and lame! as for benjamin, it was never a romantic one, his proposal to midge’s dad was so conventional like he was asking for a bank loan)... but they never get to get married... Midge will wind up with nobody after Lenny's death. she is not supposedly wind up with “a special someone” in the end, even if she does get married to someone else at some point ... she is meant to pursue her career and end up with one and only true love of hers for the rest of her life... the “comedy”.

#lennymidge #lennymidgeship themarvelousmrsmaisel

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amandajoyce118 · 5 years

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Captain Marvel Easter Eggs And References

My goal for Easter egg lists is always to get them up within a week of a movie’s opening, or the same night that a television episode airs, but I’ve had an injured wrist/thumb that has made writing difficult. So, Captain Marvel hasn’t been delayed because of a busy life, but because I’ve been trying to rest my hand. I’ve been wearing a brace and thumb stabilizer for most of my day for the last few weeks, so I should be getting back to normal soon.

As usual with my Easter egg lists, this list assumes you’ve seen the movie, and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for that matter. There will be spoilers. You have been warned. I’m sticking mainly with comic and MCU references, so you won’t find a lot of pop culture ones here. If you want someone to give you the 90s rundown, I’m sure you can find it online.

The Stan Lee Tribute

Every MCU movie opens with the same sequence, highlighting the heroes that are part of the universe. This is the first Marvel movie to hit theaters since Stan Lee’s death, so they did something a little different. That sequence instead highlights him. The color scheme and the background text remains the same, but none of the actors are there, just shots of Stan Lee from different movies and red carpet events. I won’t lie. I’ve teared up a little every time I’ve seen it.

Hala

Both the name of the main planet and the capital city in the Kree Empire. MCU fans saw it before in Guardians of the Galaxy, though it was a bit darker and didn’t seem as tech-friendly. It makes me wonder just what happened in the years in between.

“There are tabs for that.”

Not an Easter egg, but a tiny bit of world building. Going into this movie, I think most people knew that Carol Danvers AKA Vers was really from Earth. But, I find it interesting that Yon-Rogg is so quick to offer Carol a Kree sleeping aid. It reinforces the idea we’ve seen on Agents of SHIELD that human and Kree physiology are relatively compatible.

Supreme Intelligence

Less of an Easter egg and more of a direct comic book adaptation, the Supreme Intelligence is also an A.I. in the comics. There, it’s made up of all of the minds of the smartest and most distinguished Kree after they day. That’s presumably what Yon-Rogg’s “join the collective” comment meant in the movie as well. The idea of it becoming the person you most admire is created for the movie.

Carol’s Inhibitor

The comics have tried many different inhibitors on characters with super powers over the years. The X-Men usually have collars. Alien species like their neural inhibitors though, which is what Carol appears to have when she trains with Yon-Rogg. Kudos to the MCU for keeping their tech consistent across movies and TV since it appears to be the same type as what Quake ends up with in the future on Agents of SHIELD. Interesting that Daisy’s is embedded in her brain tissue while Carol’s is on the surface of her skin. Something changed in the decades in between - probably the fact that Carol was able to disable hers. Then again, so was Daisy.

Starforce

This is considered a group of supervillains in the comics, so perhaps movie fans might have expected their turn if they knew that. A few of the members are different in the comics. For example, Yon-Rogg isn’t a member, but Ronan the Accuser is. ScreenRant did a good job at running down who’s who in the movie version since they’re all comic book characters. You can see that here.

Torfa

Torfa is a relatively new creation in the planets. It first popped up in 2014, which tells you the movie pulls from a lot of the new comic book continuity. Like the movie, Torfa was a planet where refugees lived. Also like the movie, not all of them survived the hostile atmosphere, though in the comics, it was chemicals, not Kree that were hostile. Carol also had it out with Starlord’s comic book dad there.

Talos

Talos is in the comics, but apparently he’s also a Star Trek reference. Not a Trekkie, though I do find the franchise interesting, so I’ll direct you to this article for a full explanation.

Carol’s Look

One of Carol’s most iconic looks in the comics is her mohawk. She gets it for the movie in the form of her helmet keeping her hair in place. Her uniform, with the green color scheme, is one all of Starforce uses, but it’s also a nod to the original Captain Marvel’s uniform in the comics. In fact, the color changing of her suit appears to be a nod to a few other costumes she had in the comics too. The red, yellow, and blue came later. I’m just glad we didn’t have her bathing-suit like uniform of her Ms. Marvel days.

Maria “Photon” Rambeau

Maria is created for the movie (her daughter is from the comics), and though we learn more about her much later, we see her callsign on her jet during Carol’s early flashbacks. Photon is actually one of the many superhero names Monica Rambeau uses in the comics. Nice touch.

Carol’s Family

Carol’s family flashbacks only ever show us her brother and her father. We don’t get much of an idea about her homelife other than her relatives not wanting her to be as rough as the boys. That’s very much a part of her comic book background. Her father favors her brother so much that, even though Carol has the better grades growing up, he only pays for her brother to get a university education. Carol joins the Air Force for the free tuition and to prove she’s as good as the boys to her father. (It’s also interesting that we never see her mother since a recent retcon in the comics has her mother as a Kree refuge and Carol’s birth name as Car-El as she’s half Kree.) It’s also interesting to note that a lot of Carol’s major stories in her classic comics involve her losing her memories and having to figure out who she is all over again.

Lieutenant Trouble

It’s a cute nickname for Monica with Carol’s military background. It’s also a nod to another little girl Carol new in the comics with the same nickname and Monica being a police officer in the comics when she’s introduced as an adult. She’s also from Louisiana, just like the Rambeaus are in the movie.

Dr. Lawson

We’ve got some genderbending going on for the new generation. In the comics, the original Captain Marvel is Mar-Vell, a Kree soldier sent to Earth to monitor the planet as it gets destroyed by Galactus. Mar-Vell comes to sympathize with humanity and turns on the Kree to help the humans. He also takes the guise of a scientist with NASA named Dr. Lawson while he’s undercover. Sounds familiar, except her Lawson and Mar-Vell are a woman and the race she sympathizes with are the Skrulls. The original story also had Mar-Vell and Carol ending up in an accident with a piece of Kree technology that left Carol with his powers. I love the twist on this origin story. There’s plenty of nods to the source material without Carol’s jealousy of Mar-Vell from the comics, and without her playing second fiddle to a heroic dude for a long time.

Project PEGASUS

In the comics, Project PEGASUS is a unit researching alternative energy sources. It also acts as a prison for those with superpowers. We’ve actually seen mention of it in the MCU before. For the MCU, it was created in the 1940s when Howard Stark found the Tesseract in the ocean while looking for Captain America. It was a joint venture between the Airforce, NASA, and what would become SHIELD to study it. It gets a mention in a few of the tie-in comics for the MCU movies, but specifically, Tony Stark mentions he wants files on it to JARVIS when he’s going through his dad’s stuff in Iron Man 2. A sign for it also appears on the wall in a SHIELD facility in Agents of SHIELD.

Blockbuster And Radio Shack

A+ choices for the businesses for Carol to run into. Two companies that are essentially extinct 20 years later, but were cutting edge at the time. (From what I understand the Blockbuster scenes were actually filmed at the last Blockbuster left in the US. It’s in Arizona. Go figure.)

True Lies

True Lies gets noticed in the video store because Carol shoots the standee, but the spy movie is known for a fighter jet sequence, and it was the first true “blockbuster” movie because it cost over $100 million to make - unheard of in 1994. The fighter jet prop used in it was also repurposed and used in The Avengers, so it’s like Easter egg inception here.

Universal Translator

So much is made about alien races speaking English in the MCU. In the comics, pretty much anyone traveling through space has a universal translator built into their ship or their helmets. This one off mention from Carol reminds us of that, though she’s likely speaking English anyway.

Coulson the Skrull

Phil Coulson appears as a rookie agent in the 90s. I’d wager this is one of his first big jobs since he’s still on evidence collection. You know him from the Iron Man and Avengers movies as well as, you know, Agents of SHIELD. I like that he’s the one a Skrull simulates instead of Fury because there were so many theories about who could be a Skrull when they were announced for this movie. It’s also a nice misdirect from Marvel that there’s concept art out there of Fury’s transformation from a Skrull, but not Coulson’s.

And, I mean, Nick Fury’s not an Easter egg, so I don’t need to remind you he basically started the MCU with Hulk and Iron Man, right? Though this movie does make me worry about his driving record in the MCU. He seems to end up in a lot of accidents.

Stan Lee And Mallrats

Stan Lee’s cameo is extra special because it’s also a nod to a real life cameo of his. How very meta. The script he’s holding on the train is for Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, where he really did say the line, “trust me, True Believers,” something he also said a lot in his editorials in the comics.

Kelly Sue Deconnick

When Carol gets off the train, she passes a woman with red hair and glasses in her walk. That’s Deconnick. She wrote the Captain Marvel comic book series a few years ago that this movie pulls a lot of its nods (and aesthetic) from. We can likely credit her with the surge in popularity Carol’s seen the last few years, and the reason she had a movie in development at all.

1989

In case there’s anything noteworthy for you in the year Carol ended up in Hala: Ron Perelman bought Marvel Entertainment Group, the massive X-Men Inferno story arc played out, the new Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD comic launched, and Jubilee made her comic book debut.

1995

Likewise, for Carol’s return to Earth: the Age of Apocalypse comics launched, Thor made his 400th comic book appearance, comic books like The Fantastic Four and The Amazing Spider-Man had landmark issues as well, and a bunch of Punisher comics were cancelled, only for Marvel to turn around and launch a new Punisher comic later in the year. The Skrull Kill Crew mini series also launched.

SHIELD Logo

Thanks, Carol for calling out the fact that a covert group shouldn’t put their logo on everything. Fans have been saying that for years. Also, nice touch that it’s not the sleek and modern logo we see in Agents of SHIELD, but the older one seen on the Wall of Valor in the MCU before.

“Smile for me.”

I know that Brie Larson was asked about this moment in an interview and said it wasn’t an Easter egg. But the fact that she was criticized so much by male fans for not smiling in promotional materials made me add this to the list.

SHIELD Medical Examiner

Nelson Franklin played him. He also appeared in an episode of Agents of SHIELD. Maybe they’re just relatives.

A “Full Bird Colonel”

Carol calls Fury this during their chat at Pancho’s. His military history before joining SHIELD is right in line with the comics. Of course, he was from New York, not Alabama there. He also says he likes the B’s and spent time in Budapest. Not the same mission as Hawkeye and Black Widow though, right?

“Just Fury”

Nick Fury also points out that he only goes by Fury. Not Nicholas. Not Nick. Just Fury. I intend on going back and finding when in the MCU someone calls him Nick to his face. Maybe it’s like a distress signal for him.

“You look like someone’s disaffected niece.”

Fury says this to Carol when he points out her clothes not fitting in on a secret base. But it reminded me of the comments about her looking like Emily VanCamp, who plays Peggy Carter’s niece Sharon.

The Welcome Wagon

Carol’s not familiar with the term, though Fury is. Probably because that’s what they call the intake program for new “assets” with SHIELD. That’s what Coulson eventually wants Skye to do when he adds her to his team in Agents of SHIELD.

Ronan The Accuser

You probably recognize Lee Pace’s character from Guardians of the Galaxy. In that movie, he was after a little purple gem that turned out to be the Power Stone. He’s a Kree purist, out to conquer neighboring lands and make sure the Kree stay in power. He’s not all that different here. His mention of coming back for the weapon and the woman at the end is likely a nod to him pursuing other Infinity Stones, even if it’s not clear that he knows what they are here. By the time of Guardians, he’s got whole rituals he’s participating in, which includes painting his face in Blue Kree blood. It doesn’t look like he’s quite that fanatical here. He does, however, inspire loyalty in Korath, who eventually works for him directly, which does make me wonder what happened to Yon-Rog after this and how much Korath told Ronan about their encounter with Carol on Earth as well.

“That’s a flerken.”

Goose likely gets his name from Top Gun, but he gets his alien identity from the comics. In the comics from a few years ago, Carol has a companion on her spaceship - a cat named Chewie. As Rocket Raccoon points out to her, “that’s no cat. That’s a flerken.” Like Talos, Rocket was right. Chewie ends up having a whole litter of flerkens. Goose just eats things and people at convenient times.

Women Flying Combat

Maria notes that women weren’t allowed to fly combat in 1989. That’s true. They weren’t allowed to fly combat until 1993, a few years before the movie is set. The first woman to get to after the ban lifted? That would be Jeannie M. Leavitt. Now Brigadier General Leavitt, she actually trained Brie Larson for her role in the film and appears in the new Air Force ads.

ASIS

The name given to Lawson’s new aircraft, as mentioned briefly by Maria, is ASIS. It’s a nod to Marvel’s Ultimate universe where that version of Captain Marvel developed it. Carol was his head of security, and his girlfriend, in that universe.

A Kree Blood Transfusion

We find out that when Carol was brought to Hala, she needed a blood transfusion to stay alive. I like this nod to GH-325 on Agents of SHIELD, but it does make me wonder why Carol was saved from going mad. Is it because that particular Kree on the series had something in his blood that made everyone end up with it driven to find the ancient city? Is it because Carol was already brainwashed into thinking she was Kree? It’s interesting that Kree blood often comes with messing with memories though.

A Kree Imperial Cruiser

Mar-Vell much have had some military connections when she left Hala and came to Earth if she had a cruiser. We’ve seen them before in the MCU commanded by Ronan’s people. The design here is basically the same, but again, it looks like she’s got more tech, likely because the scientific nature of her work. It does make me wonder if she ever ran into the other smaller ships stationed near Earth that were monitoring the planet for Inhuman activity. (Remember the ones left in orbit to destroy the inhuman abominations in Agents of SHIELD?)

The Tesseract

The Space Stone certainly gets a lot of mileage in the MCU. Hydra wanted it, SHIELD experimented with it, Loki stole it, and now, we found out what else SHIELD was doing with it besides Fury’s secret weapons making team. Lawson, though we see her as part of the air force, is a SHIELD scientist. Like I said, PEGASUS is a joint effort by a few groups. She’s using the Tesseract for space travel though, like it should be.

Quadjet

Nice touch that Carol and Maria use a quadjet to rescue the Skrulls. Why? Because just a decade later SHIELD is using the later model - a quinjet.

Carol Stopping The Warheads

This imagery, like a lot of what comes with Carol glowing and flying, is straight out of the comics. She actually flies into Earth’s atmosphere and slows a sentinel from crashing to Earth in one comic. It looks nearly exactly like this sequence, except, you know, there are other Avengers with her in the comics.

Sizzling Power Lines

We hear the crackle of electricity and see power moving along the lines when Carol brings Yon-Rogg to Earth. This looks to be a nod to how her power works in the comics. She doesn’t just magically produce photo blasts. She absorbs ambient energy from her surroundings to fuel herself. That’s why she doesn’t technically need to eat, or even why she doesn’t need to breathe in the vacuum of space. Her power converts energy around her to sources to sustain her.

Mother Flerken

This has to be a nod to the fact that MCU movies don’t drop F-bombs, though Samuel L. Jackson loves them.

Mar-Vell. Two Words.

Fury mistakenly calls Mar-Vell Marvel. Carol corrects him. That’s kind of how the Captain Marvel term came to be in an alternate universe in the comics though. No one could pronounce Mahr-Vell in the Ultimate universe, so people called him Captain Marvel.

“We found her, and we weren’t even looking.”

I know that this is a nod to Fury’s eventual gathering of the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye together. But this is also a reminder that for decades, SHIELD was seeking out people with powers. As Agents of SHIELD showed their audience, some of those people were then locked up and exploited by Hydra agents working undercover. SHIELD still likely has a lot of super powered skeletons in its closet.

Mid Credit Scene

What a surprise. Captain Marvel will show up after the pager is activated in Avengers: Endgame. We’re all surprised, right? (Sarcasm, I know.)

Special Thanks

During the credits, there are a slew of comic creators listed in the special thanks section. Among them are heavyweights like Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Waid, Ralph Macchio, Gene Conway, Jack Kirby, and Chris Claremont. I honestly missed that section the first time and didn’t read them fast enough to catch more. But they aren’t directly responsible for Captain Marvel, but instead had a huge effect on Marvel comics as a whole with massive runs for different properties.

Post Credit Scene

Goose coughing up that tesseract was necessary for Fury to later use to attempt to develop weapons, just like Hydra, in a secret SHIELD program that Captain America won’t like in The Avengers.

A few side notes:

Coulson’s Gut

To be perfectly honest, I feel like Coulson’s part was originally just a generic rookie SHIELD agent in the script. I think when they got the chance to add Clark Gregg to the cast, a few things changed, like this exchange between Fury and Carol about going with your gut instead of following orders. That has always been Coulson’s thing. And, even though Fury is always yelling at people to follow orders, it’s actually how he operates too. It’s why he’s always set up ways for himself, and his proteges, to work around the system. I like that it was touched on here since it’s such a big part of Agents of SHIELD.

Coulson’s Kree Knowledge

Does this create a plot hole? Coulson specifically remarks to Fury at the end of the movie that he heard a Kree took out his eye. But when Lady Sif made her appearance on Agents of SHIELD, Coulson had no visible reaction to her telling him that Kree were one of the blue skinned aliens she knows of. Also, does Coulson even know they were (mostly) blue? After all, he might not since his only face to face with a “Kree” was Carol. It makes me wonder if he suspected the alien that provided GH-325 was Kree all along. Obviously, this is just the kind of thing that happens when universes expand, and it can all be explained away with SHIELD’s use of their memory machine on him, but it still makes me wonder.

Fury And The Women Around Him

I love the theme in the MCU of Fury surrounding himself with powerful women. We’ve seen that Maria Hill is his right hand over and over - even when she was working for Stark. We also saw that he and Natasha Romanoff were close. He trusted her to do the dirty work Steve Rogers wouldn’t. We also know he trusted Sharon Carter and Melinda May to report to him directly during their spy work. Now, Carol Danvers inspires the Avengers Initiative and he invites Maria to work with him after spending one mission with her. I want to meet Fury’s mom. Because she must have been one hell of a woman.

That’s it. Anything I missed? Feel free to tell me because there’s no way I caught every Easter egg.

#captain marvel #marvel comics #marvel easter eggs #agents of shield #iron man #easter eggs

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930club · 6 years

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9:30 INTERVIEW: Chris Thile of Punch Brothers

Punch Brothers’ new album, All Ashore, has been described by mandolinist Chris Thile as "a meditation on committed relationships in the present day, particularly in the present climate." He continues, "we were hoping to create something that would be convincing as a complete thought, in this case as a nine-movement, or nine-piece, thought. Though it's rangy in what it's talking about, and in the characters who are doing the talking." We asked Thile some questions about the album and more ahead of their upcoming show at The Anthem.

Jon Chen [9:30 Club]: So, I was a pretty big fan of your newest album— I saw how it kind of kept in step with The Phosphorescent Blues. I felt like they were both sort of meditative takes on some nuanced aspect of society. The Phosphorescent Blues was about connection in an increasingly digital age, and All Ashore being about more committed relationships. I was wondering, who do you try to reach with these albums, and is there a common link in what you try to communicate?

Chris Thile [Punch Brothers]: I think both records share a yearning for a deep connection, or a feeling that there’s some sort of salvation in forging a lasting connection with another human being, or that there’s a salvation or an antidote to the malaise of our times. In a way, looking back at The Phosphorescent Blues, I almost wish those were our problems still: just railing against a life of distraction or never being fully present in any one moment. If there’s a silver lining to everything going on right now, it’s that I think people seem a little more engaged than before all this stuff that’s happening, between Brexit, and Trump, and this sort of creeping— although I guess it’s not really even creeping anymore— this advancing nationalism, which seems to be something of a global phenomenon. It definitely has gotten our attention, so I do think those records are thematically related, although not directly or intentionally. I think in All Ashore, stakes have been raised, on a macro level as human beings, and also on a micro level for us as bandmates, in that we’re having children now: two out of five of us have kids, myself included; three out of five of us are married, and everyone’s in a committed relationship. The record is very much a product of the times, as is Phosphorescent Blues, and I guess that’s the main connection, that they’re both records of their respective times. I think especially now, you’re seeing a whole lot of that; I think artists can’t really ignore what’s going on right now, our work is fairly consumed by it.

Absolutely. I think all of you have kind of been in different projects, living in different cities, being in committed relationships. And somehow in spite of this, I felt like All Ashore really showed signs of growth as a band: I thought you guys seemed tighter, and I felt closer to the message you guys conveyed through the writing. Maybe it was a result of hearing your music that was a product of the times. I was wondering, how have you managed to keep growing as a band while being so far apart?

I think everyone’s growing as musicians individually, and Punch Brothers takes up less of the year since its inception. You know, these days people becoming family men, myself becoming the host of this radio show [Live From Here], the band sorta just has less “acreage.” I actually think that may have brought us closer together creatively because when we’re together, there’s this sense of urgency, and this necessity of focusing on getting the job done in maybe less time than we’ve had before. There’s also this real joy and refreshment and affirming aspect of being in a band— it’s a treat now to work together, which is a pretty crazy thing to say twelve years into a collaboration. Every time we get together to put together new music, or deliver to the people who are interested in it, it’s just taken on a new identity. To maybe put it more simply, I think we know what we have now, since we’ve taken more time away from it, and every time we get to do it, we are fully engaged.

Wow. I’ve often been fascinated by how as a band, your actual instrumentation is, you know, officially “bluegrass-y,” but you often borrow from pop, rock, classical, and other repertoire. What makes you want to pursue this genre-bending, and how does it inform your songwriting and composition?

The main thing for me is that the string band is kind of what my bandmates and I understand the best, just texturally. So that’s what we’re going to use, it’s what we understand. I almost feel like the genre discussion is a discussion of medium, like an artist might use pencils, or watercolors, or oils, or whatever. That’s how I feel about the bluegrass ensemble; me saying, “I play in a bluegrass ensemble,” is like saying, “I work primarily with oil.” But that doesn’t give you any more information than that. If I say, “Yeah, we play bluegrass instruments,” I have given you no more information than if an artist says, “I paint with oil.” You can think of that, but as far as what we’re gonna paint, you have absolutely no clue yet. For me, when a musician says “I play ____,” that’s how I take it. “So, what do you paint?” would be my next question. A lot of times I think people maybe assume something, like how we play bluegrass instruments, and all of a sudden what you’ve heard before on bluegrass instruments is popping up in your ears. So, we’re not interested in that, not because we don’t love it, but because it’s already been done. And so, I think most musicians or artists, that’s kind of where they’re coming from: you love what has been made well. You don’t wanna do it because it’s already been done well; you wouldn’t be doing your job if you just did something the way someone else did it.

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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Genres are just labels to a lot of us, and as an artist I guess you wouldn’t want to constrain yourself to that.

Yeah. It’s not that it’s not important— it is, the choice to paint with a specific kind of medium is a choice worth talking about and thinking about. But I would just always encourage people to think of it like that: there’s still a lot of questions to be asked after the question of genre.

Totally makes sense. Kind of along the same lines, your last tour was the American Acoustic tour where you kind of represented a lot of American folk music. I’m wondering, what do you think the future of American folk music is?

I guess I think that all music is folk music— any music made by humans. That tour was a celebration of this medium of acoustic instruments, but it was also something to give people a vague idea of the aesthetic that they were in for. To talk about where acoustic music is headed… I do think people kind of think acoustic music is synonymous with folk music and that they’re one and the same. That’s fine with me, just a question of semantics, all of which is interesting, but again, doesn’t tell the whole story. I think that acoustic music is headed in precisely the direction we’re aiming this conversation, which is forward, forward, forward. What are we going to do now that we’ve made this textural decision? How do we justify our existence as artists, I think, is the question. The way that you justify is by doing something that is both new and useful. Doing something new is pretty easy. I could just play an old fiddle tune on stage, and, I don’t know, rip the stuffing out of a plush giraffe, and that would be new, nobody would’ve ever done that before. But is it useful? No. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I would argue that’s not terribly useful. The fiddle tune might be useful, but again, a lot of people have already done that. Again, that’s not to decry purely doing something new— doing something useful by definition is of use— but I think we all have to concern ourselves with doing something useful and new. I think that’s what most of my peers, I hear them striving to do, that’s what I’m trying to do, and certainly what Punch Brothers is trying to do — make something new and useful.

And it sounds like you’re doing it well! Going back to American Acoustic, which ended almost exactly a year ago, you were on stage then with a lot of your most frequent collaborators, and it had kind of a “Punch Brothers and Friends” kind of feel. Your All Ashore tour seems like, though Madison Cunningham will be joining for a large part of it, the tour will be a much more intimate gathering of the band members. Would you say this tour will carry a different tone than the last tour?

Yeah, for sure. Madison, first of all, is incredible. She’ll be opening for us, there hasn’t been a “collaboration” as of yet, it’s more of a traditional concert experience. I absolutely feel like it’s a pretty intimate experience, like the boys and I are inviting you to a small gathering at our favorite bar. It’s like we’re there to escape, and then to discuss what we’re escaping from, and I think that’s kind of how a lot of small intimate social gatherings are functioning right now. You’re looking to escape the cares of the day, which are many, and many of them are shared. You have a lot of mutual cares right now with human beings, like climate change, how divided we are as a country and world, and a lot of stuff that’s really happening to us as a people right now, not in the abstract. They’re serious, life-affecting issues, and we’re all experiencing them. The record is also about how these kinds of issues are affecting our daily lives. For example, the record starts at the micro level with this small, new-ish family, and kind of ends with humanity, in “Like It’s Going Out Of Style” as something of a mantra. It takes a pretty major political detour as well, which basically all conversations are doing right now. That’s kind of where this record is, as the second round is hitting the table at a good cocktail bar, amongst close friends, and the conversations that arise at that moment.

I think that sounds really great, and I think The Anthem is going to be a really special place for that to happen. I’m excited to see what you think of it.

Yes, my first time there!

My last question is: what’s next for Punch Brothers?

The boys and I are more committed than ever to forging ahead as a creative entity. I think the experience making and now disseminating All Ashore has just underlined this project’s importance in our respective lives, and I think we’re presenting a pretty unified front, and want to continue to. We’re already starting to talk about what the next project will be, and have some ideas. I think whatever it is, it’s going to be ambitious, is the best I could give. It’ll be fun.

-Jonathan Chen

Tickets for Punch Brothers at The Anthem are available here.

#930 Interview #Artist Interview #Chris Thile #Punch Brothers #All Ashore #The Phosphorescent Blues #Live From Here #Bluegrass #Americana #Folk #Like It's Going Out of Style #The Anthem #Upcoming Shows #Jonathan Chen

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