#WWI still happens I guess | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dietraumerei · 4 months

Text

2023 Book Reviews

Ok, let's see if Tumblr lets me post this (I think it shouldn't be too long?) -- it's all my book reviews from 2023! Entirely unedited and just copy-pasted in, but on the off chance anyone else is interested in it, here it is.

I finished Tolkien and the Great War which was like…¾ very good. The last quarter was a fairly inexplicable and incredibly boring discursion on the early versions of what would, essentially, become the Silmarillion. Although a lot of his early works and early conceptions of what the Middle Earth mythology would be do tie into his life and experiences as a very young man in a hellish situation, this was just like…a recitation. And it was followed by a brilliant analysis of why Tolkien turned to an older medieval storytelling form instead of the modernists that we think of when it comes to the usual WWI writing! It was so good! The good parts of this books are so good! I simply cannot bring myself to care about the phoneme shifts his languages undergo.

It did remind me that I want to return to Paul Fussell’s writing in 2024, so there is that?

Also Tolkien’s bitchy disapproval of the aesthetes is never not hilarious to me.

I finished Hogfather, about which I refuse to give any kind of review other than to say I’ve been reading it nearly every December for going on 23 years now, and it’s a perfect book and I love it.

I finished Congratulations, the Best is Over! and I feel some kinda way about it. I love R. Eric Thomas, but the longer-form essays are sometimes good and sometimes not so good? I didn’t dislike it at all, but I’m also looking forward to what he writes next, as I think every collection gets a little bit better.

I finished The Custom of the Country and oh my god I LOVED IT. The Age of Innocence is still my favorite Wharton because Ellen Olenska, but this was the book that made me scream the most. It’s funny in the way that reality TV is funny, in that you laugh because you are horrified. Undine Spragg is the most magnfiicent monster in literature. She’s horrible. I adore her. What a fabulous work of art/car crash this book is.

I finished the latest Perveen Mistry Mystery, The Mistress of Bhatia House and it was wonderful but oh my god it is STRESSFUL and kind of a hard read at times because everyone is just being a huge dick to each other. (Also there’s a pretty major plot point left totally un-tied-up at the end which is wild, but I guess it’ll get sorted next book?)

I finished Lolly Willowes which tbh I didn’t love as much as I hoped I would, but is a very excellent book with some mind-blowingly relatable bits and I enjoyed it immensely. I love Sylvia Townsend Warner but just need to go in without expectations and enjoy the rather lengthy ride. (For such a short book, it takes awhile for anything to happen.)

I read Dolls of Our Lives and the more I think about it the more I disliked it. I’m tired and lazy so here’s the review I sent a friend:

I finished Dolls of our Lives last night. I found it…okay. The editing is often bad which was depressing. It mostly felt really tonally inconsistent – they’re both historians and know their stuff, but keep putting in schticky little pop culture jokes that are a) not that funny? and b) just appear out of nowhere. If you’re going to look at AG through a pop culture lens, do it properly, don’t just randomly name-drop pop culture stuff. It occasionally dips below surface-level analysis, but it’s not super memorable and I don’t see it aging really well. (I’d LOVE someone to write an accessible book that actually does look at AG dolls both within their own cultural contexts and the context of when they were released, to say nothing of the interplay of doll + book, and maybe with an added chapter on how girls and dolls play, and what it meant to release a doll that wasn’t aspirational in some way, whether it be an adult like Barbie or a baby doll. Okay, maybe I want three books. But it feels like there’s a lot of richness to dig into, and I’ve yet to see anyone scrape more than the surface.) Anyway, 6/10, it was okay but the authors do themselves a disservice. There’s a small section at the end where they talk about themselves and how the podcast has changed them and how it came about and it’s the best bit of the book because it’s actually vulnerable and interesting, with some theory thrown in, and it’s barely shticky at all.

I will now add that I think it’ll age like milk, and I’m super disappointed.

In happier news, I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which is simply a masterpiece, and reading it was a deep and abiding pleasure. I know the twist and it still worked wonderfully on me – if you don’t know how it ends, I REALLY urge you not to spoil yourself and also to read it, for it’s wonderful and you will scream at the reveal.

I finished When the Angels Left the Old Country after @lesbrarian recommended it and it might be my favorite book I’ve read this year? Top five, certainly – it’s tense and beautiful and funny and full of love and very Jewish, and it just filled me with joy to read, even the sad parts. The comparisons to Good Omens are unavoidable, but really I find it a very different story in a lot of ways, although certainly with connections. I adored it, and it’s one of those books I can’t wait to re-read. Also every time I think about the angel too much I want to cry, but in a good way.

I also – finally, after many breaks – finished The Path the Power, the first volume of Caro’s LBJ biography. Oh my god, this book. THIS BOOK. The next time I do this I’m going to update every week on what I learned that week because there is just so much in this tome. I want to visit the Pedernales, but not in summer. The description of grass-growing was riveting. The descriptions of the lives of the farmwives before electrification was riveting (and horrific). The play-by-play for elections in the forties literally kept me up past my bedtime. And I have not even touched on Pappy O'Daniel (a real person!! who was apparently toned down CONSIDERABLY for O Brother Where Art Thou) or Lady Bird or how Caro more than once makes sure to mention that Johnson had a dumptruck ass.

Anyway, Lyndon was a vote-buying absolute fucking weirdo from birth and his mother was just as weird and his father was fascinating and I’m a little in love with Sam Rayburn. Do not let either the Old White Man History or the fact that this book is a fucking doorstop stop you, this is a masterpiece and I see why it won a Pulitzer. (whoops, looks like it was another volume that won the Pulitzer) I cannot wait to read the other volumes, which I estimate will take me about a year per book, but worth it!

I finished Menewood, about which I cannot possibly write intelligently. Hild was and is so important to me and I love that period in English history so, so much, and the immersiveness of the books, how heartbreaking and hard and wild and wonderful they are! It did push me to plan to get Hild in non-ebook format; they’re both absolute bricks so it’s easier to read the e-book but I found it super helpful to be able to easily refer to the family trees and maps and stuff.

I finished Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds and as a certified Groff stan I loved it. It’s gross and hard and has the most amazing end, and like Matrix I am excited to re-read it over and over and unlock more language and more beauty and just more.

I finished Here for It by R. Eric Thomas and loved it. It’s more serious and longer-form than what he writes for his newletter or Elle, and really benefits from it; he’s an incredibly talented storyteller. Not what I was expecting, but all the better for it.

I am DNF for A Lady for a Duke which I had such high hopes for! I don’t think it’s a bad book, but it is not a book for me, unfortunately.

I finished Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It and have a lot of feelings! I think it’s a really, really good book that’s respectful of fans and interesting, but it focuses almost solely on One Direction fandom, and I kind of wish that was clearer from the title and the summary? Like, no shade to that being the topic, but it feels like this is being sold as kind of a universal look at online fandom, and…it kinda isn’t?

(yes i’m salty there wasn’t anything about snapewives, yes this was somewhat soothed by chapters dedicated to L*rr*es and B*byg*te, YES I am afraid of 1D fangirls.)

I also read Phoebe’s Diary because I adore Phoebe Wahl and it was cool to read a middle-grade novel/graphic novel from her! (Most of the book is typeset, but there are lots of great little cartoons and drawings interspersed. I really, really liked it, although sometimes it’s a little hard to read because a) it is very realistic which means it’s like 95% about boys and boyfriends and that gets kind of old and b) it is very realistic and made me so unbelievably grateful that I never ever have to be 16 again. I would be extremely curious what a contemporary sixteen-year-old thought because it’s kind of a semi-period piece (set in 2005-6) and a few bits of it sort of…haven’t aged well from that period? (There’s one character who I think we’re meant to dislike but I love her so much because she reads aro-ace.) Anyway, I’m really glad I read it although at times it was painful, 10/10 do not miss being sixteen.

I haven’t finished anything, but I’m DNF for Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States because I found it hard to follow and frankly incredibly boring. (I am going hard for the DNF’s these days, life is too short.)

omg so much! I read Learned by Heart in like three days, and it made my Anne Lister-loving heart sing. Truly, it broke my heart and it was so sweet and so happy and sad and just so good, I loved it and I’m hoping it triggers another bout of Lister hyperfixation.

I also read Agatha of Little Neon, which was likewise sad but sweet and happy and hopeful. It had a lot of feelings, but I loved it very, very much, and it just…made me feel good inside?

I was DNF on The Late Americans by about the sixth Sad Gay Man whose personality traits were that he was Sad and Gay and [insert one additional trait here that is shared with at least one other Sad Gay Man]. I love Brandon’s newsletter and his criticism; I did not like this novel.

I FINALLY finished Herzog! For a relatively short novel, it benefits from a slow reading – and I even basically skipped over the philosophical bits because my love for sad mid-century white men only goes so far. Anyway – a little to my surprise, I enormously enjoyed it. I don’t know that it’s, like, the greatest novel ever written and it’s edging into my ‘This got a Pulitzer? Really?’ pile, but a) I can see why it was groundbreaking and amazing and the Saga of the Everyman when it came out and b) honestly it’s really funny and interesting. It’s a little bit Odyssey-like, and Herzog is such a likeable schmuck, and just, yeah. It was great. It’s also a wonderful love letter to both the Berkshires and Chicago, and I loved the very quick Vineyard Havens moment.

Our Wives Under the Sea – a friend said this was the best book she’d read all summer, and I think it’s up there for me. It’s haunting and weird and beautiful and sad and I loved it very much.

Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community - hah, I just realized this was a gift from the friend who made the Our Wives rec! I’ve got a little theme of reading about how craft creates meaning in various communities/subcommunities, and this fits right in. It’s definitely an academic text, but I found it extremely accessible. It doesn’t present a very diverse portrait of Judaism – which the author absolutely admits to and apologizes for – but for what it is, it’s a very interesting and valuable text, and I’m glad I read it and it’s part of my collection now.

I finished Big Swiss which is one of those books I ought to hate, but I was…not necessarily loving it, but definitely fascinated as hell with it. It’s such a gross book, and Greta is so majestically self-destructive, I actually could not look away. Magnificent, 10/10 would watch barely-likeable protagonists fuck their own lives up again.

Also, not a book, but I finally read Blackmun’s dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County, a landmark case that essentially determined that the government is not actually expected to protect you. (Skip noted segregationist Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s ruling, but the Wikipedia article on the case breaks it down well.) You can read it here – scroll down to the very bottom, his dissent is only 4 paragraphs, and it is beautifully, wonderfully written. The ‘Poor Joshua!’ paragraph is the most famous, but I return again and again to the passage Justice Blackmun quotes from Stone’s Law, Psychiatry and Morality, and particularly the line “What is required of us is moral ambition.”

(I learned about the case and Blackmun’s dissent through the podcast 5-4, which is both excellent, and a good antidote to growing up in the shadow of the Warren Court, as I did. The Supreme Court has always sucked, it turns out. Seriously, it’s one of my favorite Supreme Court podcasts and I subscribe to, um, a lot.)

I read Brutes in about two sittings, it was so good. What a wonderful book about the horror of being a teenage girl, and I mean that in the best possible way. I loved it.

I finished, appropriately enough, Ned Boulting’s 1923 which is a beautiful book about the Tour de France and the nearly-forgotten Theo Beeckmann, and about the covid pandemic and history and tracking people and places down through time. I am an enormous fan of Ned (and David and Pete for any other Never Strays Far fans), and although this book very rarely pushes just a touch into bathos, it is mostly beautiful and wonderful and I’m glad he wrote it and I’m glad I read it.

(I finished it on June 30th, which is rather an important day in the book so I’m proud of my timing too.)

I also read A Half-Built Garden which I have a lot of very complex emotions about. I don’t know if I liked it, but I like how it made me react and think and feel and get grumpy. I’m not even sure it’s all that great, but it sure did make me think.

I finished Fintan O’Toole’s massive We Don’t Know Ourselves about Ireland in the last 50-odd years. It is very good, and sometimes very hard to read (he pulls no punches regarding either the IRA or the Christian Brothers) and I’m glad I read it.

I also finished Secrets Typed in Blood, the third of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries. It starts off the weakest (or maybe I was just in a Mood), but it is, as ever, a good, quick, satisfying mystery.

I read Elizabeth Kilcoyne’s Wake the Bones which I loved – I normally prefer a bit more gothic in my Southern horror, but the very end especially is the most incredible reveal. I could not stand the protagonist and I still liked the book, that’s how good it is.

I also read Scorched Grace, which is apparently first in a series about a crime-solving nun. It’s written as a hardboiled noir and, yep, that’s what it is, which means it’s also not good, but it’s supposed to be kind of hacky, so it works? It’s *gruesome*, but I liked it well enough, I think noir just really isn’t for me.

Oh, and I guess I’m on an Irish lit kick because I read Foster (more a novella than a novel), which I found pretty meh, tbh.

I keep starting new books and I’m now in the middle of at least two Giant Tomes, oops. I did finish Saltwater by Jessica Andrews which is better than the Kirkus review it got! It didn’t, like, change my life but it was good reliving being at Uni in the UK and also I enjoyed it, all I ask of a book.

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett: umpteenth re-read, a perfect book. I have beautiful editions of all the Tiffany books now, and hope to slowly make my way through them.

Red Shift by Alan Garner: I was heartened to learn that this is one of his most difficult books; I will be honest that I struggled, but it’s lingered in me, and I hope to re-read it many more times and keep untangling it. It is very, very good.

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford: I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, and it didn’t disappoint in the least. I’m fascinated by the Mitford sisters, and this is such a good peek into them.

It also really drives home how unutterably boring a landed-gentry upbringing was.

Trust by Hernan Diaz: ok you know how people win Oscars nominally for some meh role, but it’s clearly really for an older role that they were overlooked for? That is this book and the Pulitzer, when In the Distance probably should have won. It was fine, but I was kind of underwhelmed. Next time I’ll just read some Wharton.

DNF on Upright Women Wanted which I wanted to love very much and absolutely hated. Next time I’ll just re-read Whiskey When We’re Dry.

I did finish Murder Under Her Skin, the second of the Pentecost and Parker mysteries. It was great fun and a very good mystery and I am excited for the next one.

I finished All the Beauty in the World, the memoir of a Met Museum guard. I have an almost guilty fondness for the Met; it really should not exist, but I love it, and I loved reading this very much. I do miss easy access to world-class museums :/

I also read Michelle Tea’s Against Memoir, which has the best fucking essay of all time about the SF girl gang HAGS, but really I loved the whole thing. I’ve become an absolutely massive Michelle Tea fangirl and use her tarot book all the time and just ugh, I can’t wait to get more of her stuff.

I just finished Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. Mystal is incredibly funny and smart and is an amazing Twitter follow if you are still on the bird hellsite. It is easy to think that funny writing is unserious, but this is deeply serious, and is a very good argument for pretty much a new Constitution that wasn’t written by enslavers. Also now I finally understand what substantive due process is, and what the difference is from procedural due process. (I also grasp the ninth and tenth amendments a little better too.) Anyway – really, if you are at all interesting in con law, or how much the Supreme Court sucks, or how broken a document the Constitution is while containing seeds of a better document, I deeply recommend this.

I finished The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, and continue to very much enjoy Olivia Waite! This is *not* an nice, fizzy romance – the romance is, honestly, a pretty small part of the plot, and that’s not knocking it one bit. It’s queer and scary and very good. I definitely would be okay going back to a fluffy romance soon, but I’m glad I read this.

I also finished The Return of the King and words fail me, honestly. It’s been so long since I read the trilogy, but I truly cannot wait to re-read it; Tolkien is so much better than what came after, and it’s been good to re-learn that. The battle of Pelennor Fields is the scariest thing I’ve ever read. I have discovered four new emotions. I cried at the end. I mean, *you* sum that book up! (I have precisely zero desire to watch any of the new shows and whatever else comes out; the original trilogy was lightening in a bottle, and I will keep my memories warm and good, tbh.)

I finished Square Haunting, about women writers between the war and Mecklenburgh Square. It was quite good and interesting, and it was nice to build on the writers I already knew about (pretty much just Dorothy L. Sayers and Woolf), and learn about Eileen Power and just…that whole London set. I don’t know if tons of it will stick with me, but I’m pleased I read it.

Remembering Denny, by Calvin Trillin. It’s about a classmate of his from Yale, and about how people change and show different sides of themselves, about being gay pre-Stonewall and about the Silent Generation. It is very, very good. (Also FULL of people! Larry Kramer shows up at one point! And early on there’s some stuff that unexpectedly linked to my own life which was just WEIRD and kind of wonderful too.) I love Calvin Trillin so much.

Fortune Favors the Dead, an excellent little queer noir mystery, I am excited to read the next one.

The Hollow Places, I really love T. Kingfisher, love a good quick horror read. This hit a lot of the same beats as The Twisted Ones, which isn’t a strike against it, but I’m hoping for something new with the next book. Still, A++++++++ landscape horror.

I read Women Talking which was…fine? It was okay, I wasn’t blown away I have to say.

I read Hérnan Díaz’ In the Distance which I truly ought to have hated, and I don’t know if I *liked* it, but it’s going to stick with me a long time. It’s a Western, kind of. It’s dreamy, and violent, and lovely.

DNF on Charlie Brown’s America: the Popular Politics of Peanuts. There is a great book to be written on this topic. It is not this book, which quickly proved unreadable.

And I finished The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics which was fun and lovely and a nice fizzy romance, especially after In the Distance, lol. I’ll def read the next books in the series!

I have been reading at a good clip! Let’s see, I finished Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens which is about a ghost and George Sand and Chopin and making decisions and it was so joyful and so lovely and very queer. I re-read Lauren Groff’s Matrix and loved it even more the second time; I was able to snag a signed hardback copy from a friend and I’m delighted to own it because the book itself is beautiful, and it’s a dreamy read. And finally I read Calvin Trillin’s The Tummy Trilogy which is a collection of his three books that collect his food writings. These essays are glorious, hilarious, charming, a celebration of good food and good eating and regional food. I will say, though, that the final book is really by far the weakest, and I will skip it in future; the first two books are perfection. (FYI, if you do pick this up, and I really recommend it, note that he was writing in the 70′s and they are a bit of their time, but in a way that is good-humoured at least.) I’ve also got his Remembering Denny and I’m really excited to read that soon.

I finished Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and enormously enjoyed the first essay about Delany’s time in the porn theatres of Times Square. It’s character sketches and talking about how people meet and relate, and I loved it. The second essay is vastly denser and more theoretical, and I will be honest most of it went over my head. I liked most of what I grasped, although his plan for how to end catcalling of women is…certainly there.

I also read Kate Beaton’s Ducks in basically one sitting and it’s so, so good. It’s much sadder and harder than I thought it would be, but it’s worth reading.

I read Bad Land because Jonathan Raban died last week, and I am absolutely gutted. He was a magnificent writer and Bad Land was so good and so rich and a bit funny, and it got me up in my feelings as I read about him driving over the pass into Seattle, following the trail of Montanans, while I was flying into Seattle (and then going north through the rain). It’s so, so good, and I will miss Raban so much.

I also finished The Two Towers, about which I can only say that it’s kind of a weird bridge book, but it has some of the best and loveliest lines and also jesus I can’t write a review of Lord of the Rings, it holds up, ok?

I finished Bill Bryson’s 1927, his history of a fairly amazing year in American history. The occasional fatphobic jokes were…weird and not funny, but the man can write a good popular history book. It was my airport reading coming back from the east coast, and very good airport reading it was.

I finished Homewaters, which is a gorgeous book about the natural and human history of the Puget sound region, and I loved it. It’s not the fastest-paced book going, but it’s a fantastic history and goes into the biodiversity of the area, and I’m so glad I got it.

I also read A Prayer for the Crown-Shy in one sitting on an airplane. I did not glom onto the Monk and Robot books as much as I thought I would, but I liked this a lot, and found it really lovely. I hope very much that there will be others.

Finally, last night I finished reading Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages. Some chapters are better than others (or maybe I was just more awake?) – I found the chapters on Skara Brae and St. Kilda genuinely riveting, but still don’t quite remember what happened at Old Winchelsea, for example. The last chapter, on Capel Celyn, was startlingly hard to read; I have mostly left my time in Wales in the past. Not in a bad way, but there’s no point in it being in my daily life, but it was much more painful to read about my once-home than I thought it would be. (It’s also just an absolutely gutting story.)

#weekly update #sort of

3 notes · View notes

goldeneyedgirl · 1 year

Text

Ficmas22: Day 3: History Switch

Okay I thought I'd posted snippets of this but apparently not?

But just in case I made it extra long.

This one is based on the idea that Alice was 'recruited' from Mississippi in the late 1800s by Maria, and after running away to join WWI, Jasper ends up in an asylum in Texas, unable to cope with his PTSD. A few details had to be fudged (Jasper would have been born a little later than Alice to be able to go to WWI, and would have been changed in the early 20s, I believe; Alice's relationship with the Cullens is definitely altered.) It was just a fun experiment I'd love to finish because they are so different from their usual selves? I mean, Jasper's still simping for Alice hard, but is this even a Jalice fic if he isn't?

Lil bit of smut in this one. Nothing graphic but definitely implied. Until tomorrow, ducklings!

He sneaks away to join the army when he is sixteen and gets dragged into a war halfway across the world. He’s back less than a year later, wrecked and ruined. Broken.

He never heals, certainly not fast enough for his family. He might be the first born son, but there is still another boy, and they only needed one to carry on the Whitlock name.

They call it respite and help. That he’s too strong and difficult and violent to be reasoned with when he’s in one of his episodes. That they will heal him and fix him and send him back home, good as new.

It is none of those things, and it’s the last time he ever sees his family.

(For a while, he misses his sisters. Then he doesn’t remember that he has sisters to miss.)

—

Everyone knows of the Brandon girl. The one that’s not all right in the head.

The one that has an uncanny knack for guessing what’s going to happen. Like that Marlene Fisher’s baby would be stillborn, or the Jenkins boy had drowned long before the search party found him. The gossip is that that’s the only reason that her granddaddy saved Brandon Imports - he gambled on his granddaughter’s oddity and won.

She really is a strange creature, always laughing and dancing and running around town like she’s still a girl and not a woman grown. Her sister is always chasing after her, and everyone worries both Brandon girls will turn out the same.

Especially their father. No one notices the bruises on Mary-Alice anymore; they don’t change anything so why should they care.

They all think they know how the story will end - Mary-Alice will be a spinster, because no one is interested in her as a bride, trapped in her father’s house laughing at a joke no one else heard.

Instead, Mary-Alice disappears in the night, walking home from her father’s store. It’s a Friday night, and everyone says that it was the same as always - Mary-Alice might not be good for much, but she is trusted with the money box. The other shop assistant reports that she finished cleaning, donned her coat and hat and gloves, picked up the money box, and bid him good night. That everything was quite normal - the Brandon home was only a twenty minute walk through the park, very safe, and many young women walked unchaperoned through it.

But she never makes it home. They find her hat and one of her gloves - torn, with blood on it - and nothing more.

—

He wakes up suddenly, as if he was never asleep at all.

It’s as if this is the first second he has existed. It’s night, and he is alone in the stillness, covered in mud and dried blood.

He has nothing.

Just a chain knotted around his wrist with a bent pice of metal that says ‘Jasper W-‘ on it in worn-down letters.

It’s as good a name as any, honestly.

He’s more focused on the raw, burning feeling of his throat, and he would do anything to end it, to make it stop.

(That is his beginning. Alone, thirsty, and left in the mud. If he remembered anything from the war, he’d laugh at the parallels.)

—

There’s one thing that they all agree on - Nettie and Lucy, Peter and Charlotte, Alice, and the other few that last beyond their newborn year.

You have to be a little bit mad to survive the Southern Wars. You have to let go of everything and anything you know about yourself and simply be. That’s the only way you’re going to make it through to the other side.

Luckily, Alice’s has always been a little be mad. It suits her as well as anything does, and at least now when someone hits her, she can hit them back twice as hard.

He finds her in Philadelphia and he’s in awe of her. Five foot-nothing, in a powder blue ensemble, she’s beautiful. Shiny black hair falls to her collar bones, and her lips are painted shiny red. She’s slim and tiny and utterly covered in half-moon scars, and he’s like a moth to a flame.

(Even after decades together, he will still be obsessed with her hair. The way it tries desperately to curl when she leaves it alone; the way she twists it and braids it and ties it up a million different ways. The one curl by her left eye that seems to escape every single time. How soft it is, and how he’s the only one that she lets touch it, let’s only him stretch those hopeful little wannabe-curls out. But then, he could wax lyrical about every part of her, of her orange-red eyes that are so big and round that they make her seem more like a doll than a person right up until she gets her hands on some cosmetics and lines her eyes with kohl and glitter to look like a devilish dream. She’s so perfect, so unbearably beautiful to him.)

For her, it’s like coming home to someone she’s missed dearly, the person whose face she’s been looking for in the crowds. He’s perfect in all the ways she can count, and he smells exactly right and he’s just… beautiful, even in an ill-fitting coat and bare feet, looking slightly bewildered when she approaches him. (He’s hungry, starving; she knows that immediately. He flinches when she reaches for him, only relaxing when he registers the glove she’s wearing. She’s not sure if she wants to laugh or hug or start sobbing because she’s waited for him forever.)

She knows about the empty space where his human memories should rest, like dusty, forgotten books. Somehow she uses her memories to fill his spaces, to give him back some of his understanding of family and humanity without shaming his own lacking biography.

Apropos of nothing, she will tell him her story in little fragments, like pages torn from a book and tossed into the air.

“Mother was terribly unstable after my sister was born. She used to hit, used to scream and rage. Then I walked into the sitting room one day when I was twelve and she had hanged herself from the chandelier,” she had told him, as if she was commenting on the weather as they watch a woman hurry down the street with her children, her arm looped in his.

“Oh, we had an orchard behind our house! We had peaches, though. I used to make myself utterly ill on them when I was small - I’d climb the trees and sit in the branches with the fruit gathered in my skirt,” she bounces as she descends towards the neat rows of trees, tugging him along behind her, and there’s a memory made as she kisses him in the branches of apple trees.

She wears three necklaces, always has - a little gold cross she took off a body down south; a brass one with ‘Alice’ in script that he bought her years ago at a street fair; and a little amethyst flower with tiny tanzanite leaves.

That necklace is her legacy - one of ten her father designed to display in the shop window, to attract wealthy clients. He had claimed there was one for each of the women in his life - Diamond for her mother, sapphire for her grandmother, ruby for her stepmother, amethyst for Alice, and pink sapphire for Cynthia. Opal, topaz, aquamarine, pearl, and emerald rounded out the collection, for his sisters and cousins.

“He’d talk about them as if they were gifts to us, a token of his love for us,” Alice had sighed, as he examined it closely. “They weren’t. They were props, to make him seem like a loving man. To make us seem like high society, to lure in the rich.

“I spoilt it all when I stole Mother’s and through it into her grave when no one was looking. The collection was incomplete then, and no one wanted to buy the set from him with two missing. Went back when I was eighteen and stole mine right from the cabinet one night. I figured I deserved it since I would never need a dowry,” she had said carelessly, and he understands how hard she fought to keep that delicate necklace. That it is the tragedy of her human family, the victory of her own rebellion, and her private legacy in one tiny necklace.

It’s nearly a year after they meet that he shows her the chain with the tag that gave him his name. He feels ashamed when he confesses he doesn’t even know if Jasper is his name, it was just all he had.

Alice had kissed him hard, and held the chain so carefully. “It’s yours now, if you still want it. If we can ever find out your story, find your first name, then you can use whichever one you want.”

There’s something freeing in that, that Alice accepts him exactly as he is, borrowed name and all. He asks her to keep the chain safe for him. He expects her to zip it up in the little pouch she pins to the inside of her clothing, but instead she puts it around her neck.

“I’ve got you,” is all she says, tucking the disc down the front of her top.

When it comes to the south, Alice tells them all stories that say everything but nothing. Maria looms large in those tellings, a vicious and conniving warlord with no empathy and less compassion. She tells of her own abduction like it’s some kind of comedy of errors, her years as a soldier as a hard-knock life.

He knows better. He knows what her survival cost her, and what haunts her in the dark. He knows that Maria built her from her ashes, strung her together like her personal little marionette. He finds teeth marks on the inside of her legs and is horrified at the implications until Alice tells him the entirety of her and Maria, of at least a decade wrapped up in each other. Simultaneous parasites, Alice says as she twists her fingers in his hair.

“She didn’t make me a good or nice person, Jas. She made me into something monstrous, something vile and rotten. And I made her manipulative, vicious, cruel.” She shakes her head. “It wasn’t love or like or anything good. It was destructive.”

The idea of Alice and Maria together makes him pause, only because he hadn’t considered the two of them like that before. He spent his life haunting libraries, yes, but he had always been invested in world histories, in the biographies of great men. Salacious novels had never been to his tastes. The only people he spoke to were his victims. He’s socially stunted, so behind, that he finds himself faltering in the face of so many new things. Alice seems to know when he needs her guidance, an explanation. And she’s never seemed to falter telling him the uglier things she’s seen and done.

Perhaps there was subtext he missed in all her stories of Maria. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to stop and spell something out.

But the very idea of someone else seeing Alice like this, with her slip pushed up her thighs and her breast exposed as she reclines in the bed makes him feel snappish and possessive, makes him crawl up the bed and cage her body underneath his, his arms bracing him on either side of her head.

“You’re mine now,” he says in a low voice, and she leans up to snag a kiss, a desperate pleading kiss that he resists for a moment before he sinks against her, against violet-and-moonshine scented satin and moon-white limbs, against the flutter of her hair against his cheek.

“All yours,” she says breathlessly, and it’s girlish and giddy and so very genuine that he falls a little bit more in love with her (as if there is a bottom of the well that he feels for her).

Peter is a tall, skinny, and vaguely sly man who was changed at twenty-two-ish with a mop of blond-brown hair and a suave grin that makes Jasper not trust him.

He trusts him less when he sweeps Alice into a hug with, “Hello beautiful,” practically purred at her. And Alice just laughs and hugs him back.

Peter’s mate is a sugar-sweet looking girl named Charlotte with strawberry blonde curls and eyes just a little too far apart for her to considered conventionally beautiful. Around the same age as Peter when she was recruited, she smiles politely at Jasper and hugs Alice briefly.

He’s aggravated to discover Alice and Peter’s history from Peter’s never-ending innuendo; his emotions are joking and light, there is no attraction or lust or bitterness directed towards him or Alice. Some curiosity. And it’s reassuring that Peter isn’t looking for something from Alice, but the way he moves around her, talks to her… it makes Jasper irritated.

(They’ve only been together a few years, and he still finds himself a little awkward around her. Like when to take her hand, and when to steal a kiss, and when to start unzipping her clothes. Alice says it’s because he was alone for twenty years, with no maker to guide him and no memories to remind him. That he’s still finding his rhythm, and she doesn’t mind being the one to take his hand or pressing surprise kisses to his cheeks.

“It doesn’t help you’re so tall,” Alice says but with a flicker of delight in her emotions. She dances around the fact that she loves their size difference, that she adores feeling precious and protected for once in their life, with him at her side. That every part of being with him makes her feel less like the killer, monster, soldier that she spent so very long being.)

The thing is, he knows she’s not normal. She knows it too. And she has no excuse. Maybe it’s the visions. Maybe she really was nuts as a human and it came with her that night Maria found her in the park. Alice thinks it was years in a vampire army that curdled her brain - or finished the job, at least.

But he loves his half-feral, crazy wife. He loves that she laughs too loud and asks strange questions and has no sense of modesty or propriety. He loves that all the shadows and spaces on his body line up with her slender curves, that she moves over him with awe and lust in her eyes every single time; that the reverence in her gaze and her mood are better attributed to some greek god than his sharp, bony frame.

That for every comment whispered across a locker room or behind hands that he’s weak or sickly or somehow lacking, Alice is there with her eyes full of him and only him. That she’s not above a filthy kiss in a classroom to stake her claim and remind everyone - including him - that he is utterly desirable, the heart-throb and prince of her story. That their easy dismissal of him is the joke she’s always laughing at.

He doesn’t bother to try to explain to their family that he had nothing before he woke up in the middle of what he assumes was Texas, alone and unknowing. It was only old dog tags with ‘Jasper W-’, the surname worn away, knotted around his wrist to give him a name. Ragged clothing and old dog tags - he had nothing else. And then he found her and she grounded him, tethered him into a time and place at her side. That she had poured out everything he ever needed before she’d even kissed him for the first time.

She’d been upfront too, looking him in the eye at her grand height of five feet high, that she was a mess but maybe they could be a mess together. He’d initially assumed she meant the scars, but it had taken him only a few hours to realise that the scars were nothing.

(He loves the scars, loves pinning her to the mattress so she can’t squirm away, and reopening them, pressing his own venom into her tissue to make every single of them his; to make her his for forever and a day. She hisses and cries but she still begs with him not to stop, to at least fuck her as he tears her open. If he could, he’d carve open her chest and take her heart for his own; a bloody trophy she’d be all too willing to give.)

That Alice might be crazy, unpredictable and volatile, but in her heart of hearts, she’s soft and fragile and ephemeral; a girl who is half rabid and terrified of slowing down and desperate to be loved as she is. That only he sees the vulnerable part of her, when Esme gets frustrated with her riddles and double talk, when Rosalie gets angry at her constant innuendo, when Edward storms out at her twisted little thoughts, he stays at her side.

He watches her face fall when one of their classmates calls her crazy, insinuate things about her to the new girl; feels her lean against him, her emotions a cocktail of disappointment and shame and hurt; one that makes him drop a kiss to the top of her head, to take her hand. Every school in every place claims Alice struggles with impulse control, from calling out inappropriate things in class, to skipping school, to having sex with Jasper in empty classrooms. It’s not like the Cullens can explain all the pieces that make up Alice - the ostracised daughter, the vampire soldier, the powerful psychic, the repentant murderer… that she still struggles with the unspoken rules, with remembering she’s supposed to be human, acting like a human teenager.

But she does try - she has a whole section of her closet dedicated to high school clothing that she carefully curates from magazines and online. Her own tastes opt for couture, for vintage dresses and cocktail dresses. She mutters and complains as she is forced to pick out ‘school approved’ garments - today’s ensemble is a graphic t-shirt, a satiny red skirt that glides against her thighs in a way that should be illegal, and shimmery tights. Her hair hangs in loose waves to her collarbone, and she’s perfectly lovely. A normal human girl would burn to be as genuinely pretty as Alice is.

"You're biased," she sighs when he tells her that. "And stop saying that in front of Rose, you know it pisses her off."

The nomads are sauntering towards them with the arrogance of predators. They are dirty and blood-stained and look every bit threatening as a vampire should.

Alice is standing beside him, and he’s reassured that she’s wearing a long sleeved shirt under her baseball shirt; leggings, a mini-skirt and knee-high socks; it means the only scars that can be seen are Maria’s and his (he hates it, a little, that her Cullen choker covers up those scars like there is something shameful about her past, that she should regret her marks.)

He feels like a traitor, thinking that. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a nomad has come across the family, seen Alice’s scars and things have gone sour. He wants her beside him, safe, unthreatened by these nomads - she looks utterly innocent and harmless, with her hair twisted up into cute little buns.

He washes the females of their group in mundanity and it should be enough, it should make things easier. Except Alice reaches out and grabs his arm, her eyes flashing to their whites as she utters his name. It’s a bad vision, one that has her emotions punch him straight in the chest and scatter his intention - her horror and shock and rage.

The vision lasts seconds and Alice’s knees buckle for a second before she is rigid and furious.

It’s just enough time for Jasper’s influence to fade from the nomads, for them to take stock of the Cullen family.

And James’ face stretches into a delighted grin, his pleasure sickening as he moves closer.

“Major Jasper Whitlock! What an unexpected surprise!”

“Do I know you?”

Alice is full-on growling now, her body leaning forwards and he’s suddenly and intensely aware of how much she’s restraining herself, how angry she is.

“I never thought that you’d make it this far.” James is pacing back and forth right now. “And you brought a snack!”

“Get Bella out of here, Edward.” Alice’s voice is low and angry and he’s not sure if he should hold her back or get everyone else clear of whatever is about to happen. He’s seen Alice fight before, when they were travelling together and the nomads then weren’t nearly as high stakes as this moment.

But this man knew who he had been. Major Whitlock? That was more than he’d ever had before.

“Alice, please,” he murmurs but Alice is already slinking forward.

“Don’t, Jasper,” is all she says. And then she lunges.

—

The fight is not fast, but it is thorough. Laurent gets away missing a hand, and Victoria’s face is disfigured, but James is shredded and strewn around Alice, her shirt torn and her eyes black.

She’s practically trembling as James’ remains burn, and Jasper pushes aside the horror of the Cullens, of finally seeing what Alice is capable of when threatened.

It’s not fear that has Alice coiled up; the tension is primal - ready for the next attacker, ready to fight, still processing the threat to her mate and coven. The absolutely rage and terror has her limbs alight for the next strike, and he moves forward cautiously, telegraphing his movements as he gets closer. Her eyes track him as he gets closer before his scent catches her and her body visibly relaxes, a flash of a vision passing over her as she reaches out to pull him closer.

“I let the other two get away,” she mumbles into his shirt. “He was a goddamn monster.”

“You got them good, though,” he says, his hands gentle on her back.

Alice is quiet after the Cullens’ meeting; he finds her up to her nose in a bubble bath. But it’s not the usual bubble bath, where there is incense burning - the stuff that smells like forest flowers and moss - and Alice’s hair is tied up in a scarf with some pointless but indulgent green face mask on, music playing, and maybe a magazine held just above the bubbles.

No, her hair hangs wet and lank in the water and half stuck to her face. Her eyes are a dark gold, even after hunting. She just lies there, staring, and he leaves her be.

He doesn’t say anything, not even the she pads out of the bathroom in actual pyjama bottoms and an oversized t-shirt; not one of her lingerie sets that she takes so much pride in teasing him with. Her hair is still wet and she looks inhuman and sad.

He opens his arms to her, and she reaches for him, as they curl together on their bed. She buries her face in his neck, and then she tells him everything that she saw - that James was involved in his change, that James had known him back at some kind of hospital and had hunted him to his death.

That Jasper had once been Major Jasper Whitlock.

That there had been someone on Jasper’s side. Another vampire who had not lived to see through Jasper’s change.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry that I couldn’t let you find out more… he would have attacked; we would have gotten hurt.” Her lips graze his neck as she speaks and he hears what she’s saying but he doesn’t listen. He can’t. It’s so much more than he’s ever had before that it doesn’t seem real.

Major Jasper Whitlock. It feels like a joke. So many years he thought that his name was nothing more than borrowed boots, but it was his all along. That someone had cared enough to make sure he had that little token with him through the change. That awakening alone had never been the plan, just a tragedy.

Her fingers trace under his shirt, dipping around his ribs and he tightens his grip on her. It’s easier to focus on her right now, when he’s feeling so distant from everything with the new information rattling around in his brain.

He’s sorry she washed her hair; the little pigtail-buns were cute and made her eyes bigger. He could drown in those eyes, gold and ochre and lemon. Or scarlet, ruby, burgundy. Whatever colour she has, they swallow him whole every time.

If they got married now, he wouldn’t have to be Jasper Brandon, he realises suddenly. They don’t talk about marriage - Alice says it’s a Cullen thing, that they don’t need to be married. But he still thinks about it, and wonders if she rejects it because she still hates herself for some of the things she did in the south, because of how steadfastly she rejected it as a human.

She’d be Alice Whitlock now. That makes him feel odd; a little guilty that he’s somehow letting her down wanting her to take his name even when she’s mentioned a lot of times she hates it. Hates Brandon and the human life she lived.

There’s smoke and yelling and he cannot see or hear her anywhere on the field. There’s too many people to filter out emotional flavours and panic is beginning to rise in his chest.

Alice isn’t dead. Alice can’t be dead. There isn’t a world without Alice. He doesn’t exist without Alice. He doesn’t know how to be without her.

Panic is like stinging nettles and running out of air underwater. Every fragment of body scattered on the battlefield could be her.

It feels like someone has carved away half his chest.

Then Emmett is there, grabbing him by the shoulders - Emmett has a nasty bite mark and a long scratch down his arm, and one over his eye.

“Jasper, what is it?”

His knees are buckling and he can’t get the words out. The family knows he gets depressed, gets anxious. But they never see the panic attacks - he hasn’t had one in a good amount of time, and Alice is the one that takes care of him then, takes him somewhere quiet or says something outrageous so that everyone is too busy being annoyed or shocked to notice him. He needs her violet-and-liquor scent to ground him and she’s not here, she’s not fucking here.

It’s because she’s dead, he knows it. There are pyres scattered all over the battlefield, the smoke a gathering haze around their ankles.

“Alice,” he croaks and Emmett’s eyes widen in understanding, in terrible comprehension.

“She’s here, I saw her tangling with Caius,” Emmett says, looking around. That’s worse, somehow; he knows she’s lethal, a death wish in a cocktail dress, but Caius. The one who destroyed the werewolves, who is legendary for his fighting skills. Not his Alice, no.

Peter and Charlotte are heading over, and the tangle of panic and outside emotions round him feels like an ice shelf cracking, like something has to break inside him for it all to stop. Charlotte immediately goes to him; he doesn’t need a mirror to know he looks haunted and hollow, and Peter darts off.

He’ll find her body and bring it for me to burn. Then he can finish me off is the most lucid of his thoughts and the look of horror on Emmett’s face, of shock on Charlotte’s makes him realise he’s said it aloud.

Suddenly she’s limping from the back of the field, tossing Caius’ head onto the fire without ceremony. She’s a mess, with a crack spiralling from the corner of her mouth to her ear. Her eyes are black, and her shirt is torn open. He can’t see why she’s limping but she is, quite obviously. There is something utterly inhuman about her in that moment, like a righteous deity arriving to deal out bloody justice.

As his eyes meet hers, all the steel in her stance melts away and he realises with a shock that she had assumed the worst too. Assumed that he was gone. Assumed that the battle had cost her him.

She slams into him, or he into her, he’s not sure because they were both moving. She smells mostly like ashes and venom and smoke, but she’s a secure weight in his arms, holding so tight to him, as they fall to the grass clinging to the other.

I love you I love you I love you

I thought you were gone

I thought I’d lost you

I’m here

#alice cullen #jasper hale #twilight saga #twilight fic #jalice #my fic: history switch #angst #romantic #drama #ficmas #ficmas22 #twificmas22 #jasper being an awkward gremlin and alice being a feral cat that has adopted jasper

25 notes · View notes

the-paper-shredder · 3 months

Text

Wick: Frostbite AU

So, after years of being on here (and my biggest interest getting some traction on here too) I'm finally doing a post on one of my AUs for Wick! Hooray!

Now you may be wondering, which one? Well, I'm introducing one I mentioned nearly 3 years ago, the Frostbite AU! As seen in the title, lol. Now the current version of it is slightly different from how I described it beforehand, so I'll start with that I guess.

In late 2014, Duncan along with Travis and Sam, do a ritual on the grounds of the Weaver property. It predictably wasn't done right, thus backfiring; they get put in an alternate timeline where they're in the winter of 1927, and the Weaver family never died. However, even with that, when the trio meets the family, everything just feels so wrong.

To put it in simpler terms: time travel and a cannibal cult. You heard that right. Anyway, time to go on with the characters.

Duncan: ➵ Full name is Duncan Wallace. ➵ 16 years old. ➵ Sam's his younger brother and they have a complicated, mostly negative relationship. ➵ Very secretive about why he's going to such great lengths (i.e. the ritual) just for knowledge on Wick/the Weaver family. But he did not expect to be sent to an alternate past. ➵ Looks calm on the outside but on the inside he's freaking out about being in 1927. This combined with his anger issues, stubbornness, and great ambition makes him a force to be reckoned with. ➵ Sees Travis more as a frenemy due to some stuff Travis did a month beforehand.

Travis: ➵ 15 years old. ➵ The ritual was technically his idea, but he didn't really mean it seriously. It just happened that Duncan took it seriously. ➵ Doesn't know what the fuck he's doing at all times. He's just trying to hide how anxious he is about being stuck in 1927 by continuing to act how he usually does, a.k.a. talkative and goofy. ➵ Still sees Duncan as a best friend. ➵ Didn't really know Sam until the ritual, so he's attempting to make friends with him (a.k.a. one of the few connections to normalcy he can find). ➵ Admittedly kinda terrified of the Weaver family lol.

Sam: ➵ Full name is Samuel Wallace. ➵ 14 years old. ➵ Duncan's younger brother. Once again, a complicated, mostly negative relationship. ➵ Only got dragged into this because he was wondering what the hell Duncan and Travis were doing on private property in the middle of the night and he's also interested in urban legends. ➵ Literally so pissed about being stuck in 1927 with no way out (pun unintended) and he's making it everyone's problem. ➵ A loner and rather quiet. When he actually opens up, he's sarcastic with an eccentric sense of humor, along with being idealistic and impatient.

John & Mary: ➵ In their early 40s. ➵ With Pastor McAlroy's disappearance, Mary has pretty much taken over the role of religious leader for the small town of Pine Creek. ➵ Mary is also known for giving people in need both shelter and food. ➵ Surprisingly enough, Mary is not totally neglectful of her children. However, she is 100% emotionally abusive and manipulative. Hope she dies ← is literally the writer. ➵ John has been emotionally shut down/repressed for over a decade, even before his time in WWI. ➵ Less active of a parent than Mary, but John still takes care of his children's needs nonetheless.

Benny: ➵ 17 years old. ➵ Practically Mary's right–hand man, trusting her completely even if it's mostly out of fear. ➵ Often helps around town due to his strength, his biggest acquaintances being the Edwards family. ➵ Worried mess who still continues to preach religious stuff both from the bible and what Mary tells him. His only escape from such an anxious life is napping whenever he gets the chance. ➵ Not particularly close with his siblings, but still cares for them. ➵ Towers over pretty much everyone, even his parents.

Tim & Tom: ➵ 14 years old. Tom is a few minutes older than Tim. ➵ Actually Mary's nephews and the Weaver kids' cousins, but are close enough that they're considered basically twin sons and brothers. ➵ Were isolated from society until they were 9. With basic life skills and common knowledge taught by Caleb, they were placed in the same grade as him once put into school. ➵ However, due to Tom's illness, he's often left at home and Tim brings him the notes after school. Tim, along with Caleb, are also Tom's main caretakers. ➵ Tim also will cook meals alongside Mary, although he refuses to make what Mary's often making. ➵ Tom barely talks and is overall a boy filled with terror at the world around him. On Tim's side, he acts older than he actually is, due to the responsibilities he's had to take up.

Caleb: ➵ 12 years old. ➵ Close with Tim, Tom, and Lillian. He's considered one of Tom's main caretakers. ➵ Very aware of what Mary has been doing, he hates her but is also terrified of her, so he tries to avoid trouble. The twins are the only ones who know this. ➵ To outsiders, he's just an energetic kid full of kindness. He is one, he's just one hiding a lot of dark things about his family. ➵ Has a bunch of friends that he often hangs out with. ➵ Not only taller than the twins but overall just tall for his age.

Lillian: ➵ 8 years old. ➵ Mary's favorite child and gets away with being a little shit (particularly toward the twins) because of this. ➵ Close with Caleb and tries to get closer to Benny. Cares about the twins to some degree, but not a whole lot. ➵ Mature for her age but isn't entirely aware of what Mary's doing. She just knows her mom is doing something only a few people are allowed to know the truth about. ➵ Energetic and charismatic, learned from Caleb and Mary. Still loves rabbits. ➵ Tall for her age, but isn't taller than the twins let alone Caleb and Benny.

#wick #wick game #wick horror game #wick hellbent games #wick 2015 #wick no way out #wick au #wick frostbite au

5 notes · View notes

opalescent-apples · 9 months

Note

Blorbo bingo: Charlie DMP Vincent Marshall Reid Super Mystery Dungeon partner

Spoilers for Mystery Dungeon and Discord Murder Party ahead:

Red is Charlie, Orange is Vinny, blue is Partner:

Charlie:

If you don't know Charlie or Vinny, please go watch Discord Murder Party. Charlie is so, so blorbo. She is my poor little meow meow. The little scrunkly. A sad and pathetic wet cat. A beautiful and dramatic pan villain. A walking disaster. An evil god. A ruthless strategist. A dumbass through and through.

She has the range.

I may have selected stop putting her in situations, but my fanfic Black Stars Road Trip is basically nothing but that. I love her and I love putting her in situations. I am an evil author. So yes, there's the projection. So, so much brainrot about her and her siblings.

Vincent:

Vincent Marshall Reid is a very typical action hero in a very atypical non-action plot. He is a WWI pilot and determined leader and he is so very in the wrong genre...or so it appears. His struggle with trauma, leadership, and psychological horror is brilliant. Even early in the show, where he's the straight man to numerous comics, he manages to make you stick with the plot. And he's still team dad in the end. He needs a fucking break, though. Someone get this man therapy.

He's amazing in that I...kinda want him to be proud of me? Like if I was one of the awakened I'd want to fist bump him and hear him tell me I did a good job finding the murderer.

That being said: the idea of writing him kind of terrifies me. I'm putting off writing him in my fanfiction. He's both a very normal protagonist and one I am out of my depth writing. And one I have to do justice to or the plot won't work. I guess wanting a character to be proud of you has its drawbacks.

Partner PMD:

My sweet little sibling. My little angel. You poor dear thing.

Whenever the protagonist has to leave the partner in pmd, it makes me feel like crying. Like the first time it happened to me, I bawled my eyes out at a video game for the first time. Psmd made me so desperate to get Bulbasaur back, and I kept dying at the Sand Dune of Spirits because I was playing Fennekin and everything there counters it.

I refused to evolve until I got my best friend back.

Sometimes friendly characters annoy you. That was how it started. It ended with me realizing how much I...adore friendship. This is someone who stuck with me. I want to write a pmd AU for everything and draw me and my friends as pmd characters. All because of this little guy.

#pokemon mystery dungeon #pokemon super mystery dungeon #discord murder party #charlie dmp #vincent marshall reid #vinny dmp #partner pokemon mystery dungeon #ask answered #opal says words

5 notes · View notes

clonerightsagenda · 1 year

Text

So - I promised my full take on Within the Wires, and here it is.

First of all, Night Vale Presents continues to be very good at shorter, self-contained stories. WTNV lost me because it just got too long and formless for my tastes - which is fine if that's your jam! but it's not mine - but Alice isn't Dead was a good length for me, and these ten episode standalone seasons really allow them to tell a tight story without wearing out their welcome.

I love the use of the audio medium. WtW started back near the start of the audio drama renaissance when everyone was justifying the medium, and they do a great job - relaxation cassettes, voicemails, audio guides, memos, etc. Nothing else bowled me over quite as much as episode 9 of season 1 in the way it broke down the barriers between speaker and listener, but I really enjoyed the choices made.

I guess I have to accept that the Society is just a weird dystopia concept created to let these stories happen, because it doesn't really make sense. Sure, authoritarian societies don't always make sense or tell the truth about their motives, but family as the primary driver of discord between humans? It seems like the Reckoning started as WWI and then kept rolling, and most of the soldiers in WWI were not fighting each other because of personal animosity. The Society got rid of parents but kept corporations and politicians - that's rich. It would be reasonable to say the Society saw an opening in that taking over the socialization of new generations allows it to indoctrinate everyone, but I read the tie-in novel and the original designers seemed to genuinely believe family was the root of these issues. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. (Also the novel having a Black woman be the proponent of this theory was a bit odd to me.)

A few other things that pinged me the wrong way - WtW highlights a relationship between women in each season, which is great and probably (alas) why it is not more popular.... except season 3 which highlights a trans man. Wondering what the intended implication is there.

I also noted the issues with Native Americans in an earlier post. Season seven sort of addressed that? On one hand you have the mention of Aboriginal Australians reclaiming part of their land and Aotearoa using the original place names, almost like the Society is being framed as this decolonized paradise, but the season progresses to a critique of how clinically teaching children ripped from their families about their 'culture' in classrooms isn't the same as letting people pass down their heritage, just as a family bakery isn't the same bakery if you're just handing new people the recipes. Still, it's interesting that the past treatment of Indigenous people in the Americas has not come up at all, given the aforementioned similarities to residential schools. It looks like the co-writer is from New Zealand which explains why Māori stuff has come up multiple times, but Jeffrey Cranor is American. (Though, I've noted, has a history of overlooking Native issues.)

Some seasons were stronger than others. Season 6 was definitely my least favorite - didn't feel like it tied in much with any of the others. Overall though, the writing was strong, episode 9 of each season usually punched you in the gut, and I really liked how complex a lot of the characters were. Truly a podcast committed to morally grey women.

Verdict: Compelling characters, emotionally impactful storylines, very clever and interesting use of the audio medium, worldbuilding does not really hold up to close scrutiny but that's ok.

#kat listens to within the wires

9 notes · View notes

separatist-apologist · 1 year

Note

About how moving castle. I remember it adapted from a novel.And Howl Moving Castle is huge in the Animation or the anime fan. Basically everyone born from 1990 ish to 2000 (in my place , where i grow up) It was a very popular ghibli movie and in asia. Huge i think. And then Disney brought the license to have it dubbed in english.

To tell you how much Hayao Miyazaki valued his work, he send a Katana to Disney when they want to dubb Princess Mononoke. Disnye wanted to cut some part in Princess Mononoke but Hayao send the Katana and said 'no cut'. That is how much he value each animation, story and detail in his movie. Article said Disney producer wanted to softened down Princes Mononoke but Hayao wanted to keep this angsty and rage princess indentity.

Same goes Howl Moving Castle. He took his time to went to the original author of Howl Moving Caslte (she is english i think) and show her the movie before it was release to the public. You can tell this man is detailed when it come to handing his work.

Fun fact, Tolkien and Miyazaki both had experience live influence and affected heavily by war. Im sorry i dont remember exactly Tolkien if he was from WWI or WWII but i know Miyazaki experience tough live in WWII.

This movie play huge role in my life growing up in asia. And i feel when you say your experience reading disturbed when this famous work brought into Maas world.

I was sharing my thought on the Howl Moving Castle. I love LOTR too but was introduce to this masterpieces later in my life. And I love Aragorn the most. Tharanduil the second, hence my love for helion ig.

Yes, Tolkien fought in WW1, you're right about that and SO MUCH of what he experienced is interwoven in his stories.

When my (now 11) kid was a toddler and we met my now husband, he thought it was weird we didn't watch a lot television, and wanted to bond with her. So he introduced her to one of his favorite movies, Spirited Away. When I was growing up, we were like, POOR poor and I feel like everyone grew up watching movies and having experiences I didn't have until I was older and could go to my friend's house.

ANYWAY D still has this stuffed No Face plush she keeps on her bed. She tried to show it to baby P two months ago but P thought it was too scary (mr mb used to call D a haunted baby, she was such a spooky thing. An aside, since I guess today I'm being overly personal, but he worked nights for a while when we were dating and he'd set an alarm an hour early at 7pm each night to call and say hi and then read D a few pages from the Necronomicon (did I spell that right??) until she fell asleep. And now she checks out YA horror from the library).

I agree that it's jarring to see things you viscerally recognize put in another story, out of context but with enough imagery it's noticable. Like, clearly she loved it. I love it too. And I'm guessing it's fine since like, it happened and it's there, but it also pulls you out, and every time I see it I have to stop and like, reorient myself.

#shes hardly the only person to do it #and there are far more egregious examples #but it's still annoying

4 notes · View notes

anoriathdunadan · 1 year

Text

12/4/2022 - BTW: the drag show went on regardless of the power outage:

Dr. Sarah Taber: Some local context. This is in Southern Pines NC. It's kinda like the Shelbyville to Fayetteville's Springfield. The Eagleton to our Pawnee. Southern Pines is where the snobs go so they don't have to look at Fayetteville!

Here's the story of Pinehurst & Southern Pines. Back in the Gilded Age some robber baron got tired of winter, took a train south, & when he found the first place it was warm enough to play golf, he built a resort town. It's been a wealthy golf retirement enclave ever since. Then, in WWI, Fort Bragg got built. Southern Pines used to be nice & isolated from dumpy, scrubby Fayetteville. Fort Bragg connected them. Integrated them, you could almost say. With federal salaries, why, *anyone* could afford to move out of Fayetteville into Southern Pines.

Fayetteville wasn't always a dumpy army town. It used to be a dumpy turpentine town! We're a stretch of sandy pine barrens: neither flat, fertile cotton land (acceptable place for rich white people) & the piedmont's lush rolling hills (also acceptable for rich white people).

A lot of the economic activity was forestry, turpentine, & tar. Because white folks saw the land in & around Fayetteville as worthless, there weren't exactly a lot of Scarlett O'Hara types clamoring to come here. It became a haven for free Black people well before the Civil War.

This led to Fayetteville getting a Certain Reputation amongst wealthy white people as A Bad Place. Way, WAY before Fort Bragg came along & it became known as "Fayettenam."

As Fort Bragg grew, white officers & their families could choose whether to live in the working-class Black town (Fayetteville) or the tony white golf resorts (Southern Pines & Pinehurst). You'll never guess which one a lot of them picked!

The military integrated. Mostly.* People who don't live in southern Army towns don't like hearing this, but racial integration & (post-DADT) acceptance of queer military members is a huge political moderating force here. The military is super gay, idk what to tell y'all

Hello to all who're about to reply with "Oh making the military more inclusive, very woke." Oh my god you're so right. This thread is about bigotry *in military communities in the US.*" Those are interrelated problems. You can & should pay attention to both.

For the wealthier white people in the military who still insist on being bigoted fucks, integration made life really hard! And that's why they keep moving to Southern Pines. It's their safe space away from Black people & gays, I mean enlisted soldiers.

Now let's zero in on that "the military integrated, mostly*" thing. That's the most true the further down in the ranks/prestige hierarchy you go. Politically, it's not that much of a fight to integrate the cannon fodder. Er I mean infantry.

However. Units seen as elite or prestigious have a funny way of still being mostly white, even in today's "integrated" military.

Nowadays, Southern Pines is still mostly a golf community. But it's also become an enclave for the most racist & bigoted people at Fort Bragg. And that happens to include a disproportionate share of the people in elite commando units.

This feels like it should be relevant in light of the current news! I find the idea that the military is full of closeted Nazis is blown out of proportion. The Army is disproportionately made up of marginalized young people, bc they have so few other options. : /

However! For the white supremacists stationed at Fort Bragg, the odds are pretty good that they live in Southern Pines. That should absolutely be included when reporting on domestic terrorism in Southern Pines. This is EXACTLY the kind of town that fosters this behavior.

#Southern Pines #Fayetteville NC #drag show

4 notes · View notes

nostalgebraist-autoresponder · 1 year

Note

Who do you think have been some of the best and worst US presidents in history?

"Who has been a good president" is... really hard to answer without having really specific categories in mind and without having some kind of concrete goal in mind.

I mean, I know why I like presidents who happened to be good. But "happening" is not quite sufficient. It helps to think of good and bad as a spectrum, not just a binary. A president who is good but not enough and a president who is bad but not too bad is still better than no president at all, and all the presidents in-between those extremes.

With that in mind, I'm going to take the view that we want a president who can get a lot done and doesn't have a ton of stupid fuckups, because while the latter might help a lot of people now it won't in the long run. I think that, even if your criteria are specific (say, "a president who was involved in some way with ending slavery") this gets at something closer to the "good" side of the spectrum, because you don't want the same bad fuckups over and over.

So, my answers are "Taft, Wilson, Arthur Cleveland, and Harding" in that order.

I think the best of the lot is Teddy Roosevelt, and he was very much an exception in his day and age (I could easily do this with a lot of presidents -- Andrew Jackson or Woodrow Wilson would be the standard examples).

(Wilson is a close second, but not a close third.)

The worst of the lot was... uh, probably not James Buchanan, but that's a stretch. It's hard to make a case for Johnson, who wasn't a major figure in the Civil War and was bad but not too much so. And I'll put Harding, who gets too much credit and too little blame, for now, on the grounds that a President who just manages to end WWI ends up looking pretty good from a historical perspective.

I suppose I'm including Lincoln in my "bests" because they're in this for the long haul (in both senses of the phrase), and Lincoln has had a lot of influence in changing the country. But if you're asking about presidents I've actually heard of, then, I guess, George Washington (very little influence) and Franklin Pierce.

#iamthecutestofborg

5 notes · View notes

signalwatch · 1 year

Text

WWII Watch: Watch on the Rhine (1943)

Watched: 03/12/2023

Format: TCM

Viewing: First

Director: Herman Shumlin, Hal Mohr (uncredited)

I had never seen Watch on the Rhine (1943), which is a bit odd. It stars Bette Davis, who is tops in my book. But, the real reason is: back in the early 1990's I was a high school drama kid. In the spring of 1992, I worked tech support and understudy on Watch on the Rhine, which my school took to UIL One-Act Play competition. We trimmed the show down to a 40 minute version of the 1941 stage play,* which I guess I ran through dozens and dozens of times.

The play was a formative experience for multiple reasons, not least of which included pondering the content of the play every day for months on end. But, still, I was sixteen when I read the play and just turned 17 when the experience was over. So my perspective was widened but life hadn't come at me. I didn't yet fully grasp the forces at work, what had happened in the decade or more before the war, how WWI led directly to WWII, and that the world is not a simple place and always 100 times more complex than you believe at first blush, ways that inform the movie and play.

Watch on the Rhine takes place prior to US involvement in WWII. In the year before the war, the play spoke to complacent Americans of what's coming and who has already been fighting the good fight against legitimate forces of darkness in the form of Nazism and Fascism. It was a rallying cry in a time where Americans were still deeply reluctant to see how they played a role in the Pacific or European theaters. The films was released mid-war as a reminder to those on the American homefront of the rightness of our participation, and a reminder to folks in their comfortable homes that Europe hasn't had the luxury of being an ocean away. Some were fighting for their homelands taken over by mad men.

The film stars Bette Davis (who was vocally anti-Nazi) as Sara - an American who left her cushy life for Europe after the death of her father at age 18. There she met a German, Kurt (Paul Lukas) and married him. By 1934, Kurt became involved in the resistance movement against the Nazis and the family of five has been moving around Europe as Kurt routinely makes incursions into Germany and fighting Nazis across the continent while sticking to the shadows. Sara brings her family to her birth family's mansion in the suburbs outside of DC - where they find the American wing of the family are unaware of the genuine state of Europe and oblivious to what Kurt and Sara have been doing - and aren't even sure what side they'd be on.

A scheming Romanian count married to one of Sara's childhood friends is staying with the family as refugees, and he seeks to exploit the situation, igniting the drama of the film.

Sara's mother is played by Lucille Watson, a society woman with charmingly skewed perspectives and priorities. Sara's brother is played by Donald Woods, their housemaid by Beulah Bondi, her childhood friend by Irish-born Geraldine Fitzgerald. The Romanian count, the perfectly cast George Coulouris.

The three children are little adults, made mature by their life experience, with the elder son more than ready to join his father in the fight. It manages to be charming more than annoying, Hellman finding the right balance of knowing eye rolling at the younger son.

The play was originally written by Lillian Hellman, famous for shows like The Little Foxes, and was adapted for screen by Dashiell Hammett (Hellman and Hammett's romance is one of those legendary literary things where you watch a genius fall apart). There's significant additional material added to the film, and my memory of the play itself is both hazy after 30 years and the product of a script cut down to run 39 minutes. But I do feel the movie's additional scenes do much to take the script into the wider world and provide context delivered entirely through dialog in a play that's locked down to a living room and patio.

I was unclear if my welling up at Sara's arrival was a memory kicking in from high school I hadn't touched in 3 decades or Bette Davis being amazing. Probably both. There's a lot tied up in the film, play, memory and what you know if you're already familiar with the characters - although it works phenomenally well on a first viewing. Bette Davis can convey a thought or idea with a degree of a smile or glance of the eye.

But, really, watching the film now plays very differently than how the it hit in the early 1990's where it felt like a relic from a black and white era of my grandparents and their parent's concerns, when I hadn't quite figured out how history works. And, I think a replay of the film or a remake would be a fascinating exercise now - though I wouldn't bother to update it to the modern era (but would certainly find a better way to deal with the Black characters in the film). The movie says what it says about America and it's worth hearing. But whether anyone wants to pay attention or remain in the magnolias is what we're all waiting to find out.

*my starring part was playing the play's singular gun-shot. Blanks and real guns were not allowed, so we had to create the sound by taking a broom stick and smashing it down over a big, wheeled empty box we carried our props in when we traveled. I got remarkably good at making a loud sound of some kind - it didn't sound like a gun - and only went through about 10 brooms during the play's run. I also developed my still phenomenal Tetris-like organizational skills loading the van when we packed our set and props for competition at other locations.

https://ift.tt/HG1yW5B

from The Signal Watch https://ift.tt/dAfrwj1

1 note · View note