#also i just find the 'where are our heroes' idea that it is taylor swift's responsibility to come in and solve homophobia so stupid sorry | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kasagia · 3 months

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How do you get into writing. I have just started and would love some tips. Xxx

And this surprised me very much, dear anonymous. 😅🙈

I'm not some kind of 'guru' on this or a professional writer or anyone who is... qualified or even learning in this direction to tell the others how to do it and get into writing or give some tips or anything. I believe that everyone should find their own way.

Writing is just my hobby, but I'll try to answer something for you, dear anonymous. And I hope it will be helpful somehow. 🩵🖤🩵

You can't force yourself.

At least it doesn't work for me. I can't set times for myself when I should sit down and just write. And even if I do, the things I write are... kind of shallow and unnatural (at least when I read them).

Inspiration comes by itself, and sometimes you have to stimulate your imagination yourself.

You've probably ever had this feeling where various ideas and words come to your head, and sometimes there's a barren void and you can't put together one sensible sentence or figure out what to do next with the plot.

I get inspired through music and edits on YouTube or Instagram about the characters I write about. They stimulate my imagination to create new scenarios and stories. ESPECIALLY THE MUSIC. (TAYLOR SWIFT, LANA DEL REY, FLORENCE, RUELLE, BIRDY I LOVE YOU!!!!)

It is helpful to imagine the scene in your head.

You don't know how to write what a given character should do next? You don't like leaving only dialogue? Imagine that you are talking to a given hero. What would you do, and what would he or she do? Does he move his hands, approach, move away, frown, laugh, fix his hair—all these movements that we observe every day when we talk to others or watch a movie?

Imagining myself in a given situation helps me write not only the dialogues but also the environment around them. So, mainly, the movement of the second character. I don't necessarily like descriptions of landscapes and places personally; I only do it when I have to and need it for the plot. I'm not an expert at this; I know I still need to work on it, so for now, this is my solution when it comes to writing these other things around the dialogue.

Constantly writing is essential.

You can't give up after the first few tries. We are constantly improving our writing, and so on.

I'm afraid to read my first oneshots because my writing style has evolved since this all time and since I've been writing "publicly." AND THAT'S NORMAL. At least I think so.

Everyone has their own beginnings and started somewhere, and this path is beautiful—these first excitements, the satisfaction that someone liked and commented on your work. (IT STILL IS! SHOWING THE AUTHOR WITH LOVE AND ADORATION IS VERY IMPORTANT IF YOU WANT TO BE FEED WITH CONTENT! xD) 😅

And over time, the longer you stay at it, the more you want to keep going (at least for me).

But sometimes writing block comes and you just have to simply wait it out. What helps me is listening to music (different from the songs I know) or reading someone else's work. The brain remembers how fun it is to write and suddenly you feel like writing.

BUT we don't copy other people's work or use an idea that someone else had. The golden rule. Besides the fact that it's wrong, immoral, and just plain not cool, who wants to read about the same thing all the time? Creativity is key. (ALTHOUGH NOBODY WILL TAKE THE MOON SUMMONER AND DARKLING FROM ME. THIS IS MY HOLINESS SHIP AND I WILL WRITE ABOUT IT AS MUCH AS I WANT. UNFOLLOW OR BLOCK - I DON'T CARE. xD) 🙈🙈

This is not a grade assignment for school; there is no wrong way to write. And as long as YOU are satisfied and happy, then write.

This is probably the most important thing. It's supposed to be fun—playing with words and imagination, creating your own story with the character you love, creating your own world, having fun. You can share it with other people or keep it for yourself. The choice is yours.

Haters will be everywhere; you can't avoid them, but I believe that nobody can please all people.

Some will like it, others will not, and that is also beautiful—that each of us likes different things, that we are not stuck in one monotonous way of thinking, and that we simply like different things.

Create a writing atmosphere may help.

It's good for some people. A candle, a blanket, coffee, tea and other drinks. Just you and your laptop or anything else.

Words matter.

I remember Googling every time to learn how to say this and that in English. Is it possible to use this and that meaning of the word for a given situation? Or when I was writing a dance scene and I was wondering how to write different moments, I went to Google to check what the hell to call it.

The more you write, the more practice you have with it, and the more you remember the words you need. (If your native language is not English, like mine.)

And adjectives. They are important because when someone else reads them, they can better imagine the situation. But as I said, I'm not sure about the rest—the description of the situation and feelings. I feel like I'm writing a bit too much, maybe boring; maybe I could skip some parts and focus more on others? I don't know, so I won't say much about it. 😅😅😅

I hope I helped somehow! Although I'm not sure if I'm the right person for this or if my mumbling will help you.

Have a nice day! 🩵🖤🩵🖤🩵🖤🩵🖤🩵🖤🩵🖤🩵🖤

#anon ask #anonymous #writing problems #writing tips #not professional #i hope it helps #uncertainty

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lingerlikeastolenkiss · 3 years

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the archer theory about taylor swift coming out.

well, i've seen some people talking about this song and i had to listen to it again, since it's one of my favorite songs on lover and it also has to do with the theories and the meaning this song has to me.

i don't want to apply this to anyone so feel free to SKIP and NOT READ if you don't agree that this is a LGBTQIA+ song.

pure my own interpretation but you don't have to come to me if you don't like, she has a lot of songs and some of them are free for interpretations and they have different meanings to different people.

the first line it's:

“combat, i'm ready for combat / i say i don't want that but what if i do?”

this line to me has the deepest meaning and it comes along with the one in you are in love “and you will understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars” and in ivy “this is the goddamn fight of my life and you started it” and both songs are before and after the archer which makes the archer in the middle.

the combat she's (maybe) referring to it's about coming out being (still) the american dream and the woman everyone looks up to when it comes to pop music, she says she don't want it but what if she does? what if she want to fight for it, fight for who she is and who she wants people to see that she really is? it's a combat because you can't come out if you're not ready to start a war against the world.

“cause cruelty wins in the movies / i've got a hundred thrown-out speeches i almost said to you”

cruelty here, to me, it's about how cruel it is to not have the story of your life in the big screen, like, we grow up seeing the bad stories about LGBTQIA+ couples and it's always about how they didn't end up together or how bad they are treated. the “speeches i almost said to you" looks like something she was ready to say to us, her fans, and she didn't had the chance or she wasn't really ready.

“easy they come, easy they go / i jump from the train, i ride off alone / i never grow up it's getting so old, help me hold on to you”

when i first saw the miss americana documentary, i highlighted that part where she is trying to convince her father and the rest of the team that it was a good idea/good move to speak up about the politics and the situation of the trump thing. and it was very hard for me to watch because it was clearly a bunch of old men that grew up and still have in mind their conservatory concepts that goes against what taylor wanted to tell her whole life, they were just trying to silence her and she decided to do it anyway because she is a grown woman and she never spoke up about those things before the reputation era.

the easy they come and easy they go line goes for the fans, they are always in and out and sometimes some of them never want to come back and stay because in the first bad thing that happens to her it pulls them away. she jumps from the train and ride off alone, the train maybe is about her life that never stops and she takes a break from it, the media, the relationships, the image she has in front of the whole world and she ride alone because there's no one in the world that could understand her more than herself. she never grow up when it comes to being more mature when it comes to some things and having the capacity to speak her truth, she's asking us to let her hold on to us when things go harder and when everyone else has left her.

“i've been the archer, i've been the prey / who could ever leave me darling, but who could stay?”

i fucking love this line so much because when you are a LGBTQIA+ kid growing up, you always has to fight against being the bad person and the good person, you grow up seeing in the news that you will die young and that there's people out there that will try to tell you that loving someone of the same sex is the wrong thing to do. being the archer and also the prey is like haunting yourself until you realize who you really are, you have that idea internalized in you, the homophobic jokes you grew up listening and you're also the target and it's like both sides of a coin. who could ever leave her for being a (bi, pan, lesbian) woman? who could ever stay if she's a (bi pan, lesbian) woman? it's like “who could stay in the darkest of the darkest times here with me because it looks like i am lost and i don't know where to go”

“dark side, i search for your dark side / but what if i'm alright, right, right, right here?”

the dark side is not the bad side like people point out, the dark side of someone is like when the moon is half shown and half hidden, and you can only see the part that's out for the light. here the dark side of taylor is the one she haven't showed to us, and to me this line is not about a potential lover but about herself. and this song feels like a mirror, so to me, she's talking to herself and trying to find her dark side in front of her own image. the sequence “alright, right” it's like the dark side saying “i am here and it's good”.

“and i cut off my nose just to spite my face / then i hate my reflection for years and years”

this fucking line is the deepest for me, because it's like, she cut a part of herself to looks like someone who she wasn't made to be, it reminds me of having to hide your true side in despite of being hurt or left aside. how many LGBTQIA+ kids and teenagers has to hide from their parents? we change our way to see the world, we lie to everyone about our love interestings, we hide in the closet and we don't face ourselves because this is not who we are and then we spent the rest of our life hating our reflection because we don't recognize this person but everybody loves this version we created, it's easy, it's very easy to love a straight person but it's the hardest thing to let a queer kid feel loved. it's very easy to not tell a straight person how to be but it's the hardest thing teach a queer kid how to love themselves.

“i wake in the night, i pace like a ghost / the room is on fire, invisible smoke / and all of my heroes die all alone / help me hold on to you”

she's s ghost to the people who live with her so she's not seen, everything is burning and there's an invisible smoke that's where she fades in, and all of her heroes, probably the queer ones that are dying everyday all alone and the ones who died were left alone in their final days. again she's asking if she can count on us to keep going if things go hard.

“i see right through me / they see right through me / can you see right through me?”

seeing through someone means that you see their true version, like if you're looking at their soul and they're so open that you can read anything. it's understanding someone and knowing someone inside and out. just like the lover mv where she's inside the fish tank, it's a metaphor for a thing that can be seen by everyone just like a mirror. and the delicate mv where she's not seen until she enters the bar and sees a person. she can see through herself and people are seeing through her but not in the way she wants to be seen and then she asks (for the fans?) if we can see right through her. could we fight the wars with her? be the shoulder for her to lean on? stay even when she's about to face the fight the biggest war of her life?

“all the king's horses, all the king's men / couldn't put me together again / cause all of my enemies started out friends”

king's horses and king's men also align with the chorus and the universe of being the prey in a world of men. also it can also be the world of a society that lives inside a bubble and cannot accept diversity. not even the men, (her father, team, men she dated?) could put her together again after all that she have been through, and it matches with the “i cut off my nose just to spite my face”. all of her enemies once were friends which implies that she can't trust anyone and as the song goes as (in my vision) a LGBTQIA+ letter to her fans, she's saying that there's no one that could handle this secret and she already tried to tell them but it ended wrong.

that's it. to me this song has a deep meaning and i couldn't put everything i wanted to in this post. also i just want taylor to know that there's a lot of sapphic connotations in her songs and i will always stay.

#taylor swift #gaylor #gaylor swift #the archer #gaylor theory #gaylor proof

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cocoartistwrites · 2 years

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what are your favorite t swift lyrics to date? “just between us did the love affair maim you too” recently has me on the verge of tears just thinking about it so yeah ….

I have honestly no idea how long you expect this to be lol I've been waiting my whole life to answer this and now there's too many, so here are a few stand-outs that are by no means the only best ones or my only faves.

I'm ignoring all the bridges because I think Swiftian Bridges are their own category. I'm also just gonna do post 1989 otherwise this will be too long.

1. the whole of peace but specifically:

And you know that I'd swing with you for the fences Sit with you in the trenches Give you my wild, give you a child

2. you already picked one of my fave All Too Well 10 lyrics but I can't overlook this (and also ofc the punchline)

You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath

3. all of Majorie, which is one of her greatest-ever songs, and always makes me cry:

Never be so kind / You forget to be clever Never be so clever / You forget to be kind

4. The story this one single fucking line tells in august:

I remember thinkin' I had you

5. mad woman is again filled with incredible writing but this always grabs me:

And you'll poke that bear 'til her claws come out And you find something to wrap your noose around

6. LWYMMD gets slated and I don't know why, she really threw herself all in to the campy villain bit look at this fucking writing:

But I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time I've got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined I check it once, then I check it twice, oh!

7. is this the saddest lyric in Swift's canon? maybe. fuck you scott bruschetta.

I didn't have it in myself to go with grace 'Cause when I'd fight, you used to tell me I was brave

8. cruel summer is <3 but this line is especially clever:

I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you

9. there's enough spilled ink on the glorious storytelling of TLGAD so I'll just say the switch from she to I? flawless.

I had a marvelous time ruining everything

10. No one has ever captured the fragility of the start of new love this well. The contrast of cool/delicate in terms of vernacular and literary language is *chef's kiss*

Is it cool that I said all that? Is it too soon to do this yet? 'Cause I know that it's delicate

11. seven makes me go absolutely feral as I too feel girls are robbed of something as they grow

Please picture me in the weeds Before I learned civility I used to scream ferociously Any time I wanted

12. the way she writes about finding shelter in love on reputation, an album that is just so Dear to me but especially call it what you want:

And I know I make the same mistakes every time Bridges burn, I never learn At least I did one thing right

13. idk just fucking love this one from willow. like we have all these ideas and goals about what our lives will be then we fall in love with someone and realise we have to take them into it and everything might change, and that's ok (in contrast to the wave of you can have it all feminism)

Wreck my plans, that's my man

14. the noise i made when i first heard this:

They told me all of my cages were mental So I got wasted like all my potential

15. this is so evocative and the delivery is unreal:

And I was catching my breath Barefoot in the wildest winter Catching my death

16. remember when she wrote this and called the damn song happiness:

But now I'm right down in it, all the years I've given Is just shit we're dividin' up Showed you all of my hiding spots I was dancing when the music stopped And in the disbelief, I can't face reinvention

17. every single second of ivy but specifically,

I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones

18. I could write a phd about the archer, but I won't. I'll just say that when Taylor said:

I wake in the night, I pace like a ghost The room is on fire, invisible smoke And all of my heroes die all alone Help me hold on to you

I lost my fucking mind. [XR name one hero who was happy from TSOA, and every writer and artists anxiety that they'll have to choose between art and happiness in love]

19. the fact that she wrote a song about cunnilingus already makes false god incredible but the way she wrote it as

religion's in your lips / the altar is my hips

ma'am,,,,

20. cardigan is lyrically fantastic around the central image of the cardigan itself, which I think distracts from knife cuts like:

Leavin' like a father Running like water And when you are young, they assume you know nothing

[side note there are very few father refs in Swift songs - see also 'a careless man's careful daughter']

21. turning her own Americana (remember those 4th of July parties) back on herself here, iconic Trump call out, etc.

American stories burning before me I'm feeling helpless, the damsels are depressed Boys will be boys then, where are the wise men? Darling, I'm scared

22. leaving you on number 22 with this absolute soul-destroyer from nothing new

Will you still want me when I'm nothing new?

#taylor swift #anon #answered #anon ask #anonymous #exposing myself as a swiftian scholar tbh

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ifuckinglovestvincent · 3 years

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THE FORTY-FIVE: ST. VINCENT

Sleazy, gritty, grimy – these are the words used to describe the latest iteration of St. Vincent, Annie Clark’s alter ego. As she teases the release of her upcoming new album, ‘Daddy’s Home’, Eve Barlow finds out who’s wearing the trousers now.

Photos: Zackery Michael

Yellow may be the colour of gold, the hue of a perfect blonde or the shade of the sun, but when it’s too garish, yellow denotes the stain of sickness and the luridness of sleaze. On ‘Pay Your Way In Pain’ – the first single from St. Vincent’s forthcoming sixth album ‘Daddy’s Home’ – Annie Clark basks in the palette of cheap 1970s yellows; a dirty, salacious yellow that even the most prudish of individuals find difficult to avert their gaze from. It’s a yellow that recalls the smell of cigarettes on fingers, the tape across tomorrow’s crime scene or the dull ache of bad penetration.

The video for the single, which dropped last Thursday, features Clark in a blonde wig and suit, channeling a John Cassavetes anti-heroine (think Gena Rowlands in Gloria) and ‘Fame’-era Bowie. She twists in front of too-bright disco lights. She roughs up her voice. She sings about the price we pay for searching for acceptance while being outcast from society. “So I went to the park just to watch the little children/ The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome,” she coos, and you immediately recognise the scene of a free woman threatening the post-nuclear families aspiring to innocence. Clark is here to pervert them.

She laughs. “That’s how I feel!” From her studio in Los Angeles, she begins quoting lyrics from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’. “It’s a blues song for 2021.” LA is a city Clark reluctantly only half calls home, and one that is opposed to her vastly preferred New York. “I don’t feel any romantic attachment to Los Angeles,” she says of the place she coined the song ‘Los Ageless’ about on 2017’s ‘Masseduction’ (“The Los Ageless hang out by the bar/ Burn the pages of unwritten memoirs”).“The best that could be said of LA is, ‘Yeah it’s nice.’ And it is! LA is easy and pleasant. But if you were a person the last thing you’d want someone to say about you is: ‘She’s nice!’”

On ‘Daddy’s Home’, Clark writes about a past derelict New York; a place Los Angeles would suffocate in. “The idea of New York, the art that came out of it, and my living there,” she says. “I’ve not given up my card. I don’t feel in any way ready to renounce my New York citizenship. I bought an apartment so I didn’t have to.” Her down-and-out New York is one a true masochist would love, and it’s sleazy in excess. Sleaze is usually the thing men flaunt at a woman’s expense. In 2021, the proverbial Daddy in the title is Clark. But there’s also a literal Daddy. He came home in the winter of 2019.

On the title track, Clark sings about “inmate 502”: her father. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his involvement in a $43m stock fraud scheme. He went away in May 2010. Clark reacted by writing her third breakthrough album ‘Strange Mercy’ in 2011; inspired not just by her father’s imprisonment but the effects it had on her life.“I mean it was rough stuff,” she says. “It was a fuck show. Absolutely terrible. Gut-wrenching. Like so many times in life, music saved me from all kinds of personal peril. I was angry. I was devastated. There’s a sort of dullness to incarceration where you don’t have any control. It’s like a thud at the basement of your being. So I wrote all about it,” she says.

Back then, she was aloof about meaning. In an interview we did that year, she called from a hotel rooftop in Phoenix and was fried from analytical questions. She excused her lack of desire to talk about ‘Strange Mercy’ as a means of protecting fans who could interpret it at will. Really she was protecting an audience closer to home. It’s clear now that the title track is about her father’s imprisonment (“Our father in exile/ For God only knows how many years”). Clark’s parents divorced when she was a child, and they have eight children in their mixed family, some of whom were very young when ‘Strange Mercy’ came out. She explains this discretion now as her method of sheltering them.

“I am protective of my family,” she says. “It didn’t feel safe to me. I disliked the fact that it was taken as malicious obfuscations. No.” Clark wanted to deal with the family drama in art but not in press. She managed to remain tight-lipped until she became the subject of a different intrusion. As St. Vincent’s star continued to rocket, Clark found herself in a relationship with British model Cara Delevingne from 2014 to 2016, and attracted celebrity tabloid attention. Details of her family’s past were exposed. The Daily Mail came knocking on her sister’s door in Texas, where Clark is from.

“Luckily I’m super tight with my family and the Daily Mail didn’t find anybody who was gonna sell me out,” she says. “They were looking for it. Clark girls are a fucking impenetrable force. We will cut a bitch.”

Four years later, Clark gets to own the narrative herself in the medium that’s most apt: music. “The story has evolved. I’ve evolved. People have grown up. I would rather be the one to tell my story,” she says, ruminating on the misfortune that this was robbed from her: a story that writes itself. “My father’s release from prison is a great starting point, right?” Between tours and whenever she could manage, Clark would go and visit him in prison and would be signing autographs in the visitation room for the inmates, who all followed her success with every album release, press clipping and late night TV spot. She joked to her sisters that she’d become the belle of the ball there. “I don’t have to make that up,” she says.

There’s an ease to Clark’s interview manner that hasn’t existed before. She seems ready not just to discuss her father’s story, but to own certain elements of herself. “Hell where can you run when the outlaw’s inside you,” she sings on the title track, alluding to her common traits with her father. “I’ve always had a relationship with my dad and a good one. We’re very similar,” she says. “The movies we like, the books, he liked fashion. He’s really funny, he’s a good time.” Her father’s release gave Clark and her brothers and sisters permission to joke. “The title, ‘Daddy’s Home’ makes me laugh. It sounds fucking pervy as hell. But it’s about a real father ten years later. I’m Daddy now!”

The question of who’s fathering who is a serious one, but it’s also not serious. Clark wears the idea of Daddy as a costume. She likes to play. She joins today’s Zoom in a pair of sunglasses wider than her face and a silk scarf framing her head. The sunglasses come off, and the scarf is a tool for distraction. She ties it above her forehead, attempts a neckerchief, eventually tosses it aside. Clark can only be earnest for so long before she seeks some mischief. She doesn’t like to stay in reality for extensive periods. “I like to create a world and then I get to live in it and be somebody new every two or three years,” she says. “Who wants to be themselves all the time?”

‘Daddy’s Home‘ began in New York at Electric Lady studios before COVID hit and was finished in her studio in LA. She worked on it with “my friend Jack” [Jack Antonoff, producer for Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Taylor Swift]. Antonoff and Clark worked on ‘Masseduction’ and found a winning formula, pushing Clark’s guitar-orientated electronic universe to its poppiest maximum, without compromising her idiosyncrasies. “We’re simpatico. He’s a dream,” she says. “He played the hell outta instruments on this record. He’s crushing it on drums, crushing it on Wurlitzer.” The pair let loose. They began with ‘The Holiday Party’, one of the warmest tracks Clark’s ever written. It’s as inviting as a winter fireplace, stoked by soulful horns, acoustic guitar and backing singers. “Every time they sang something I’d say, ‘Yeah but can you do it sleazier? Make your voice sound like you’ve been up for three days.” Clark speaks of an unspoken understanding with Antonoff as regards the vibe: “Familiar sounds. The opposite of my hands coming out of the speaker to choke you till you like it. This is not submission. Just inviting. I can tell a story in a different way.”

The entire record is familiar, giving the listener the satisfaction that they’ve heard the songs before but can’t quite place them. It’s a satisfying accompaniment to a pandemic that encouraged nostalgic listening. Clark was nostalgic too. She reverted to records she enjoyed with her father: Stevie Wonder’s catalogue from the 1970s (‘Songs In The Key Of Life’, ‘Innervisions’, ‘Talking Book’) and Steely Dan. “Not to be the dude at the record store but it’s specifically post-flower child idealism of the ’60s,” she explains. “It’s when it flipped into nihilism, which I much prefer. Pre disco, pre punk. That music is in me in a deep way. It’s in my ears.”

On ‘The Melting Of The Sun’ she has a delicious time creating a psychedelic Pink Floyd odyssey while exploring the path tread by her heroes Marilyn Monroe, Joni Mitchell, Joan Didion and Nina Simone. It’s a series of beautiful vignettes of brilliant women who were met with a hostile environment. Clark considers what they did to overcome that. “I’m thanking all these women for making it easier for me to do it. I hope I didn’t totally let them down.” Clark is often the only woman sharing a stage with rock luminaries such as Dave Grohl, Damon Albarn and David Byrne, and has appeared to have shattered a male-centric glass ceiling. She’s unsure she’s doing enough to redress the imbalance. “There are little things I can do and control,” she says of hiring women on her team. “God! Now I feel like I should do more. What should I do? It’s a big question. You know what I have seen a lot more from when I started to now? Girls playing guitar.”

If one woman reinvented the guitar in the past decade, it’s Clark. Behind her is a rack of them. The pandemic has taken her out of the wild in which she’s accustomed to tantalising audiences at night with her displays of riffing and heel-balancing. Instead, she’s chained to her desk. Her obsession with heels in the lyrics of ‘Daddy’s Home’ she reckons may be a reflection of her nights performing ‘Masseduction’ in thigh highs. “I made sure that nothing I wore was comfortable,” she recalls. “Everything was about stricture and structure and latex. I had to train all the time to make sure I could handle it.” Is she taking the heels off when live shows return? “Absofuckinglutely not.”

Clark is interested in the new generation. She’s recently tweeted about Arlo Parks and has become a big fan of Russian singer-songwriter Kate NV. “I’m obsessed with Russia,” she says. In a recent LA Times profile, she professed to a pandemic intellectual fixation on Stalin. “Yeah! I mean right now my computer is propped up on stuff. You are sitting on The Gulag Archipelago, The Best Short Stories Of Dostoyevsky andThe Plays Of Chekhov. I’m kinda in it.” The pop world interests Clark, too. She was credited with a co-write on Swift’s 2019 album ‘Lover’. At last year’s Grammys she performed a duet with Dua Lipa. It was one of the queerest performances the Grammys has ever aired. Clark interrupts.

“What about it seemed queer?!”

You know… The lip bite, for one!

“Wait. Did she bite her lip?”

No, you bit your lip.

“I did?!”

Everyone was talking about it. Come on, Annie.

“Serious? I…”

You both waltzed around each other with matching hairdos, making eyes…

“I have no memory of it.”

Frustrating as it may be in a world of too much information, Clark’s lack of willingness to overanalyse every creative decision she makes or participates in is something to treasure. “I want to be a writer who can write great songs,” she says. “I’m so glad I can play guitar and fuck around in the studio to my heart’s desire but it’s about what you can say. What’s a great song? What lyric is gonna rip your guts open. Just make great shit! That’s where I was with this record. That’s all I wanna do with my life.”

More than a decade into St. Vincent, Clark doesn’t reflect. She looks strictly forward. “I’m like a horse with blinders,” she says. She did make an exception to take stock lately when the phone rang. “I saw a +44 and that gets me excited,” she says. “Who could this be?” Well, who was it? “Paul McCartney,” she says, in disbelief. “Anything I’ve done, any mistake I’ve made, somehow it’s forgiven, assuaged. I did something right in my life if a fucking Beatle called me.”

Now there’s a get out of jail free card if ever she needed one.

Daddy’s Home by St. Vincent is out May 14, 2021.

#‘I HAVE NO MEMORY OF IT’#LOOOOOL #WHY ARE U LIKE THIS #st vincent #full of shit #annie clark #Annie Clark on beds #yellow is the color for dull ache of bad penetration?

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thegirlwhohasnochill · 3 years

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The Disease of Addiction

Euphoria Special Episode Part 1: Rue (Recap & Review)

Before I begin my official review of this episode, I would like to preface my thoughts with a bit of a primer about spoilers and trigger warnings. The show covers a range of topics from addiction to mental health. Still, I specifically want to warn anyone reading that I explicitly talk about and mention the topic of suicide in my review. If this is triggering for you in any way, please, don’t read ahead and take care of yourself! Okay, that’s it; I hope you enjoy my thoughts, and please let me know if you have any feedback or comments for my review and things I can change or fix in the future.

Where to begin with such a loaded episode...we knew the format and style of the episode would be simplistic based on the current realities of filming amidst a pandemic and what we saw to be a scene from Season 2 that the creator Sam Levinson expanded upon. Zendaya herself let us know that the episode's storytelling method would be vastly different from what we’ve already seen on the show. The format and simplicity of the episode, in contrast to the loaded dialogue and content of the scenes, are perfect. The camera takes you right into the middle of these conversations with Rue and Ali. But before we can even dive into what they talk about, we have to address the elephant in the room that is Rules. The episode begins with what is probably one of the most gut-wrenching sequences I have seen on the show. Because we know the reality and truth of their current predicament, Rue’s peppered kisses across Jules’ body and her tight squeezes and hugs from behind Jules evoke a strong sense of loss and pain for the viewer. The sheer intensity of the physicality of Rue’s affection for Jules is so overpowering and overwhelmingly present, we can almost feel the imbalance in their relationship through the screen. There is something to be said for the harsh reality of Rue’s dependence on Jules being reflected even in such a non-objective dream-like sequence. And yet, even in Rue’s wildest dreams and happiest stupor, she does not imagine the sobriety of her future. To me, that is indeed the crux of her character and the essence of this episode. Ali himself says, “The point is your sobriety.” And while it may feel like a focal point of discussion, the conversation flows in a way that seems to bounce back and forth between the two like a simple tennis match. It is easy to follow between Ali’s most potent clearest convictions about how the world works and Rue’s drug-addled hazy perception. The inherent contrast between their mental states and the different points of life in which they are both standing hit the viewer at alternate moments.

But we know Rue is not sober even as she lies to Ali and stumbles out of the bathroom, the shaky camerawork conveying her recent use. She is wearing the same shirt from the dream but has her signature hoodie on, her messy curly locks running down her back and glassy eyes staring straight ahead. The scene moves from her imagination of life with Jules to her lies about use. Her eventual admittance to being a high-functioning user happens as quickly as the conversation moves from sobriety to faith.

So I might be biased and hence don’t think I am incorrect in admitting that Zendaya has never given us a bad performance in her life. Even as she lies to Ali’s face and he is quick to call out her apparent contradictions, the faint slurring of her voice and her glazed eyes tell all. As striking as the conversation is, it feels even stranger for me to admit I felt comforted by Rue’s confession to thoughts of ending her life. And even as she admits to the darkest moments in her mind, Ali’s face and reaction are an even better neutralizer for what would generally be such an alarming thing to say to someone you barely know. As they continue to discuss her eventual relapse and all the reasons behind it (including racing thoughts encompassing “all the things I remember and all the things I wish I didn’t”), the viewer can envision the sequence of events that was shown to us in the finale - her fights with her mother and sister, her first time using when her father was fast asleep, her father’s death, her sister finding her after her overdose.

As much as I would like to quote the entire episode, I have to say Ali’s monologue about the idea that none of us are born evil and that society views mental illness and addiction as a personal moral failure rather than an overarching system many of us are incapable of overcoming, to be one of, if not the most decisive moments of the entire show. The line about coming out of the womb with “a few wires crossed” but still a beautiful baby girl eventually messing her way up through life struck a chord in me. I didn’t ask to be born this way. I don’t feel in control of my mind or the way it ever seems to work. And I’m always going to be a bad person. The disease of addiction and mental illness lets you - no, it makes you - view everything you have ever done in your life as not a consequence of the way your mind works, but as an active choice, you have consistently made, as you screwed up everything you’ve ever loved, and let down everyone you have ever cared about. The disease is not you as a person or even the way you think, and yet it is powerful enough to feel that way. Almost like the rapid cycling between mania and depression, the disease flips between, making you feel like the most powerful, invincible person alive and the absolute scum of the earth. There is nothing in between.

Ali’s backstory and his monologues about his change in faith from Christianity (when he was previously known as Martin) to Islam and the world's revolutions were fascinating. Side note: I did think the line about women converting to Islam was unnecessary, but I digress.

Rue’s understanding of the Narcotics Anonymous program's steps was the perfect way to bring in the conversation of faith. As she mentions her difficulty in coming to terms with the idea that there is greater power in charge of her behaviour and the way she surrenders herself to drugs, Ali chimes in with, “You don’t believe there is a power on Earth greater than Rue.” She disagrees and continues quoting and citing different sources she believes to be omniscient and great. And I absolutely agree with her. To me, there is no greater power than the source of art, the music that keeps me going, that feels like it’s the only thing keeping me from stopping the blood pumping through my veins. I understand Rue. But I also understand Ali. And yet, when Rue goes on to talk about the inexplicable workings of the world, my heart stops. There is no reason. There is no reason for the absolute pain and loss and suffering I’ve experienced, for the trauma I’ve witnessed and endured. For the absolutely horrifying things, the people closest to me have lived through. It is merely chaos. There is no reason I wake up every single day, regretting the fact that I did indeed wake up and that I am alive and breathing. So I Understand Rue. But Ali’s monologue about the moral arc of the universe and the unfathomable ways in which life and history line themselves up, to open our very eyes to the realizations we come to daily, is overwhelming. And yet, while he is waxing poetic about the intricacies of the world, we can see Rue’s exhausted eyes glaze over further, still unimpressed. “Maybe I’ll start a revolution like Malcolm X or something”, she quips back. But Ali is quick to counter; revolutions are no longer revolutionary.

Life as we know it is hypocrisy and foolish symbolism, only emphasizing his point about the universe's ridiculousness. Does any of it have meaning? Or is the meaningless void just another puzzle piece in a picture we will never get to see? There is also something to be said about Rue’s facial expressions as Ali continues his train of thought about her “generation”. As we often do when we hear our elders dismissively brush off our many concerns, she almost rolls her eyes. But he is listening, and he knows. “You think you’re out here fighting a revolution, and Bank of America is on your side? Give me a fucking break.” He’s not wrong. His speech reminds me of the masses of teens on TikTok creating video content specifically catered to an audience with an aesthetic that glamorizes the image of a revolutionary teen hero. But instead of a blazing bow and arrow, it is the common cell phone and a punchy soundtrack filtered through digitized audio. What would typically come across as preachy in any show catered to teens is, in fact, poignant. It also reminds me of how self-aware Euphoria is, knowing it’s guilty of falling into the same trap it accuses the viewer of doing.

You have to commit to bettering yourself, Ali essentially tells Rue. And to me, that is the most inherently human struggle we will ever face in our lifetimes. As long as we exist, we have to face the idea that each day is, in fact, not going to be easier than the last. And when he tells her that he believes in her and that the hope of her success (that may one day come) should be greater than the failure of her current demise holding her back, I want to cry. I keep thinking about that edit of Rue to this is me trying by Taylor Swift.

The music of the song that Jules has texted to Rue swells, and it is easy to get caught up in the angst of the moment. It accompanies the words, “I miss you.” And if it wasn’t for Ali’s conversation with his daughter as background noise, one would simply soak in the gut-wrenching pain of their separation. The juxtaposition of Ali trying his absolute best to cling to his family as Rue continues to isolate herself from her loved ones and push herself further into the abyss makes my heart physically hurt.

Ms. Marsha’s spell-binding words of wisdom about sobriety and relationships compared to Rue’s tired exhaustion imminently displayed on her face make the viewer a little wary of what comes next. Her misunderstanding of a juvenile relationship with Jules is made clear when Ali confronts her about the fact that the two of them never had a real conversation about their feelings for one another. Rue’s distrust in the idea that things will eventually work themselves out stems from the fact that she feels disappointed by how her loved ones have left her so far. She eventually spirals into this negatively destructive way of thinking. She cognitively recognizes and justifies getting left behind because she thinks and believes she deserves terrible things in life. She lists examples of past deeds to further cement her argument. But Ali counters back with the simple statement that “Drugs change who you are as a person.” Regardless of her actions, he believes she is still a genuinely good individual while she argues that she is absolutely not. My favourite part of this whole conversation and the entire episode is the manner in which Ali questions Rue’s negative cognitive patterns. Her brain and mind essentially excuse bad behaviour by convincing her that she will never be a good person. Hence she can never forgive herself, and thus, she will continue to remain in this cyclical pattern. Our actions may be inexcusable, but they do not line up with our intentions. The inevitable human struggle is not whether we are fundamentally good or bad, evil, flawed or perfect, but if we are (and again, not to quote my other favourite show, The Good Place) trying to be a better person than we previously were. If we recognize that our actions are wrong and we are capable of experiencing remorse and regret for said actions, who's to say we are entirely incapable of change. This reductive polarizing, and dismissive way of thinking is characteristic of the brains of most people living with a mental illness. Our outside influences, such as drugs, can all be contributing external factors to how we conduct ourselves through life. Ali’s short bit about redemption and human beings deeming actions unforgivable forever can easily be paralleled to direct conversations we have online about “cancel culture”. The phenomenon of dismissing and reducing someone to their mistakes instead of allowing them to grow from them is a nice sentiment. Still, if we do not truly take accountability into action and witness no real changes or remorse, we can quickly get stuck in that cycle. Even if our beliefs do not line up with our actions, drugs can eventually change that. The belief system we hold so dearly, the convictions we strongly feel, can all be washed away by the simple use of drugs, Ali explains as he tells Rue about his family background. His experiences with abuse and his eventual hypocrisy as he plays the role he always feared in his family leave the viewer speechless. As we watch him tell his tale of regret, there is no woe or sorrow in admitting he is or isn’t a fundamentally good or bad person, just the thought of his attempt to change his ways that impacts the viewer.

As the viewer waits with bated breath to see what comes out of Rue’s mouth next, it is not a surprise (to me personally). Rue has no intention of staying sober because she has no intention of staying alive much longer. Ali asks her why she feels that way. She responds with her sentiments about the cruelty of the world. Ali understands. We truly are living in dark times, witnessing truly horrific events, and the fact that we even have the capacity to care any longer is indicative of our will to stay alive. It doesn’t make much sense when you think about it, but when you are so sad, so grief-stricken by the news, by the world’s turn of events, by the mere thought of witnessing more tragedy that you cannot bear to be alive any longer, it means that you are deeply invested. Invested in the way things will turn out even if you do not personally believe you want to participate or even be privy to being complicit in a system that does nothing but churn out pain, anger, and hatred. When I was at the lowest point in my life and attempted to end my own life, I was overwhelmed by the goings-on of the world. As emotionally drained as Rue is, a part of her still cares. She wants her sister and mother to know that she really tried. Just as I wanted and still want my parents and friends to be okay without me when I do eventually leave this earth. Of course, I care about what happens to them. The idea that suicide or suicidal ideation is inherently selfish is so contradictory to the reality of how suicidal individuals genuinely feel. It is the opposite. We care more than most, and we care to the point that it hurts to extend another moment of kindness to ourselves amid all the chaos and madness of the world. But still, we try. We do our best. Ali believes in Rue. He has faith in her.

The entire episode ends on a melancholy note as Rue and Ali depart the diner with Rue wistfully staring out the window as he drives her home. Ali loves his conversations with Rue and vice-versa. The fact that two people can be sitting at a diner alone on Christmas Eve talking about the beauty and cruelty of the world and everything ranging from politics to addiction to suicide to love to family and anything in between goes to show us that humans will always find a way. The fact that two people struggling and suffering from addiction can find their own way about and amidst the chaos of the world and still have these meaningful conversations about life and existence tells us that ultimately, Trouble Don’t Last Always.

#euphoria #zendaya #sam levinson #colman domingo #rue bennett #jules vaughn #rules #hbo #recap #review #nanwrites #rue #jules #zendaya coleman

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songsofacagedbird · 3 years

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you’re something out of a dream

a love letter to luxor’s balo driskell

While I think tissues are needed at this point for all three of these playlists, can I just say with Balo’s I think they’re especially needed? Maybe I’m just extra soft for Balo in general but hers personally made me the most emotional, she definitely went hard with this one. Anyway, it covers the entire Luxor timeline for her just about, major plot points and stuff, but a bit less so the reveal of her main secret that occurred during graduation honestly - as this playlist was made before that and given it took me ages to perfect the end, I’m just going to leave it be.

Again, there’s references to other muses / plot points littered throughout, as well as references to eating disorders and a couple nicer things like her love for art. I’d also like to thank Lex for her help during these playlists, from the idea itself to helping me test listen yet again, this is going to be a pattern in these descriptions and I’m sorry for anyone who like “Katie stfu” already but genuinely it’s really thanks to her that these even exist and honestly they’re actually some of the playlists I am most proud of to date.

Please keep in mind that the standard Balo triggers apply (mental health, eating disorders, abuse / child abuse). Any additional tws will be noted on their sections if they apply.

in dreams you will lose your heartaches. whatever you wish for, you keep | pre-luxor (aka pre-rp):

balo before luxor, navigating her life

Song of the Caged Bird (Lindsey Stirling) [ instrumental ] // Castle On A Cloud (Isabelle Allen) [ I know a place where no ones lost. I know a place where no one cries. Crying at all is not allowed, not in my castle on a cloud. ] // Paint the Pictures (of Verona) [ I paint the picture of the oceans I'll never see. I hold a candle through the darkness so I believe. ] // almost home (mxmtoon) [ No one ever says all the love you give might not be enough. Broke my heart in two a couple times before it hurt too much. ] // A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Lily James) [ Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing the dream that you wish will come true. ]

does it hurt to see how our smiles have changed, my friend? | summer & fall 2019:

the period of time I was playing Balo in Luxor originally, from June 2019 right up until her intervention in October

Friends In The Corner (Foxes) [ Do you need someone? Everybody's looking like they need someone. All of my friends in the corner, everybody's looking like they need someone. Pretending we don't fear the morning. ] // Scars To Your Beautiful (Alessia Cara) [ She says, “beauty is pain and there's beauty in everything. What's a little bit of hunger? I could go a little while longer,” she fades away. ] // Never Gonna Let You Down (Colbie Caillat) [ I'm never gonna let you down, I'm always gonna build you up. When you're feeling lost, I will always find you, love. ] // Running with the Wolves (AURORA) [ There's blood on your lies, the scars open wide. There is nowhere for you to hide, the hunter's moon is shinin'. ] // She Is the Sunlight (Trading Yesterday) [ And it will take this life of regret for my heart to learn to forget. Tomorrow will be as it always has been, and I will fall to her again. ]

you keep trying to get inside my head while i keep trying to lose the words you said | winter 2019 & early Spring 2020:

Balo’s hospitalization, and the time at home following it.

All the King's Horses (Karmina) [ Is it still a home when you're all alone? All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put me back together again. ] // Safe (Britt Nicole) [ Oh no, my walls are gonna break. So close, it's more than I can take. I'm so tired of turning and running away. ] // Lost Boy (Ruth B.) [ There was a time when I was alone, no where to go and no place to call home. My only friend was the man in the moon, and even sometimes he would go away too. ] // Keep Your Head Up (Ben Howard) [ 'Cause I'll always remember you the same, eyes like wild flowers with your demons of change. ] // Wake Me Up (Madilyn Bailey) [ They tell me I'm too young to understand. They say I'm caught up in a dream. My life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes, well that's fine by me. ] // Dance (Foxes) [ I want you, got no shame. This therapy's gone to waste; when the midnight hour comes in vain, you're in my head, you say my name. ]

what the fuck are perfect places anyway? | spring 2020:

Balo’s return to Luxor, leading up to her breakdown at prom additional tws: drugs and alcohol (perfect places)

Good Day for Dreaming (Ruelle) [ There's a hope, there's a spark, there's a fire. There's a light in the dark burning brighter. It's a good day for dreaming. ] // Perfect Places (Lorde) [ All of our heroes fading, now I can't stand to be alone. Let's go to perfect places! ] // prom dress (mxmtoon) [ I'm sitting here, crying in my prom dress. I'd be the prom queen if crying was a contest. Makeup is running down, feelings are all around. How did I get here? I need to know... ]

i would sell my sorry soul if i could have it all | summer 2020:

summer camp adventures, and the starts of questioning who she is

Live Life (Zayde Wølf) [ Sometimes I think that I'm the dreamer, the one that's standing all alone. Sometimes it feels like it's forever since I've truly felt at home. ] // Celeste (Ezra Vine) [ You're something out of a dream, messing with my head and I've been looking for you. Are you hiding? ] // The State of Dreaming (MARINA) [ If only you knew my dear, how I live my life in fear. ] // If Only (Dove Cameron) [ If only I knew what my heart was telling me. Don't know what I'm feeling; is this just a dream? If only I could read the signs in front of me, I could find the way to who I'm meant to be. ]

my heart can't possibly break when it wasn't even whole to start with | fall & winter 2020:

balo’s disownment, her breakup with kitty, and coming to terms with them

raindrops {an angel cried} (Ariana Grande) [ The day you left me, an angel cried. ] // Because of You (Kelly Clarkson) [ I was so young, you should have known better than to lean on me. You never thought of anyone else, you just saw your pain, and now I cry in the middle of the night for the same damn thing. ] // human (Christina Perri) [ Your words in my head, knives in my heart, you build me up and then I fall apart 'cause I'm only human. ] // Illusion (Zedd feat. Echosmith) [ It feels like the fairytale is over. I really wanted these pages to begin with once upon a time like all those lullabies. I should've known better. ] // Cry (Kelly Clarkson) [ Is this as hard as it gets? Is this what it feels like to really cry? ] // drivers license (Olivia Rodrigo) [ Sidewalks we crossed. I still hear your voice in the traffic, we're laughing over all the noise. God, I'm so blue, know we're through, but I still fuckin' love you. ] // Until The Sun Comes Up (Gabrielle Aplin) [ Do you want to get lost? Go waste our time, lose this city skyline. Be so much better if you're by my side, find myself and lose my mind; think I need a moment to re-align. ] // Part Of Me (Katy Perry) [ Throw your sticks and your stones, throw your bombs and your blows but you're not gonna break my soul. ] // Love Not Loving You (Foxes) [ You were always giving me all of your insecurities. How could you do it? You knew what you were doing to me. ] // no tears left to cry (Ariana Grande) [ Right now, I'm in a state of mind I wanna be in like all the time, ain't got no tears left to cry. ]

you forgive, you forget, but you never let it go | spring 2021:

her classmates choice in the gym, and it’s aftermath additional tws: drowning (When the Storm is Over)

Bad Blood (Taylor Swift feat. Kendrick Lamar) [ Remember when you thought I'd take a loss? Don't you remember? You thought that I would need ya, follow procedure, remember? Oh, wait, you got amnesia. ] // Talking to Ghosts (Foxes) [ And I can be your guiding light if you just let me, but I can’t be your guiding light if you have left me. ] // When The Storm Is Over (Sofia Karlberg) [ But when it comes down something in the air says we're 'bout to drown. Baby, we wеren't meant for closure, tеll me when the storm is over. ] // Try (Colbie Caillat) [ You don't have to try so hard, you don't have to give it all away. You just have to get up, get up, get up, get up, you don't have to change a single thing ] // Still Have Me (Demi Lovato) [ So take my faith but 'least I still believe (I still believe, in me), and that's all I need. I don't have much but 'least I still have me. ]

and i don't really care if nobody else believes ‘cause i've still got a lot of fight left in me | early summer 2021:

the story of therapy, the start of recovery, learning to love oneself, and a little bit of romance.

Daisies - Acoustic (Katy Perry) [ They told me I was out there, tried to knock me down. Took those sticks and stones, showed 'em I could build a house. They tell me that I'm crazy, but I'll never let 'em change me 'til they cover me in daisies. ] // Home (Gabrielle Aplin) [ I'm a phoenix in the water, a fish that's learnt to fly. And I've always been a daughter but feathers are meant for the sky. ] // Change (Taylor Swift) [ ’Cause these things will change, can you feel it now? These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down. ] // Dear Happy (Gabrielle Aplin) [ Don't you worry, oh no, don't be alarmed. I'm just working it out here, working it out here. I'm somebody with a recovering heart, you've waited there for me, keep waiting there for me. ] // Fight Song (Rachel Platten) [ And all those things I didn't say, wrecking balls inside my brain. I will scream them loud tonight, can you hear my voice this time? ] // Catch My Breath (Kelly Clarkson) [ Catching my breath, letting it go, turning my cheek for the sake of the show. Now that you know, this is my life, I won't be told what's supposed to be right. ] // Wildflowers (Elle Fanning) [ Wildflowers you brought me are crumbled in my hands. This love that you taught me, I still don't understand. ] // Begin Again (Taylor Swift) [ And for the first time, what's past is past. 'Cause you throw your head back laughing like a little kid, I think it's strange that you think I'm funny 'cause he never did. ] // Let's Sort The Whole Thing Out (Carly Rae Jepsen) [ I love you, this is a new thing. One more drink, let's get to the bottom of it. I love you, let's sort the whole thing out. ] // Youth (Foxes) [ And as we cross the line, these fading beats have all been severed. Don't tell me our youth is running out, it's only just begun. ] // Soft to Be Strong (MARINA) [ I took my bitterness and made it sweet, I took a broken heart and made it beat. ] // Way Less Sad (AJR) [ Don't you love it? Don't you lovе it? No, I ain't happy yet, but I'm way less sad. ]

#musings ( playlists )#a dream is a wish your heart makes ( musings )#eating disorder tw #abuse tw #child abuse tw #disownment tw #drugs tw #alcohol tw #drowning tw

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forgottenyogurtgods · 3 years

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Author stuff: After much wait, here’s chapter two! I still don’t know how long this baby’s going to be. Everyone’s positive reactions so far is giving me tippy-tappy toes, so thank you!

Possible trigger warning! COVID-19 is briefly mentioned and, ultimately, the lockdown that came with it as well. (I’ll try to post all trigger warnings at the top here. If I don’t, give me a shout. I’m pretty easily accessible on the websites I post on.)

no body, no crime

by forgottenyogurtgods

Summary: [I think he did it but I just can’t prove it. No, no body, no crime But I ain’t letting up until the day I die.]

Adrien is a Swiftie. To be fair, who isn’t? And her Evermore album? Chef’s kiss! Except… one song put an idea in his head and now he can’t get it out.

Inspired by this tumblr post.

Chapter 2/?

Last chapter

Episode Two

Two years ago, Emilie Agreste vanished without a trace. Her car was found abandoned on the side of the road, just outside of Paris. All of her things were still inside.

No one has seen or heard from her since that night.

The police are officially calling it a missing person’s case.

I am your host, Adrian Agreste, and I plan to use this podcast docu-series to find out what happened to my mother and prove to the world that my father killed her.

This all kind of started with Taylor Swift.

You know, country music star turned pop singer turned alt-folk-rock singer? The one who’s won an award for almost every album she’s ever released? Yeah, that Taylor Swift.

And you can blame some of my classmates on this, too. Specifically, Mylene and Rose.

I’ve always been a Swiftie. Her music helped me to actually learn quite a bit of English. And my mom used to like singing her music with me, so Taylor kind of has been… important in my life, I guess you can say.

As a Swiftie, I was perfectly obligated to join my classmates in our discord chat to stream the albums together. Because, you know, COVID-19 is a thing.

[Future Adrien here! Hey, if you’re from the future and listening to this, first off, hello! Second, thanks for stopping by. Third, yes, I made this podcast during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was a… questionably strange time. Of being isolated to my house once again — we’ll talk about that later in the series.

Anyway, back to the show!]

Classes were over for the day, and we were all just helping each other get through our homework. As I said before, Mylene and Rose kind of started it.

And everyone went along with it, because they’re Mylene and Rose. They’re just… I can’t really explain it. You just can’t say no when they ask to stream the latest Taylor Swift album over discord for everyone to listen to.

I don’t think anyone was really paying attention to the music much at first, we were just talking over it. I actually didn’t really notice “No Body, No Crime” until the chorus came in for the last time.

I ended up buying the album later that night and relistening to the whole thing while I was supposed to, umm, be working on my English. Which, technically, I was. Just not in a way that was approved by my English language instructor.

Anyway, “No Body, No Crime” kind of stuck out to me. And it stuck with me. For a while.

And it got me thinking about my mom again. About how she was never found, and no matter how hard they searched, no new information was ever uncovered. How her case is still open and unsolved.

Okay, so I think about my mom a lot, just in general, but I was thinking about the night she disappeared and how everything played out after that.

Something… something just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t place what, but just that something had been off.

Things just didn’t add up.

So, like any sane person, I ordered a transparent dry erase board and markers. I also printed out all the information I possibly could when I had some spare time.

And I looked over all of the details that had been available to the media and, essentially, the public. As well as the conspiracies that can be found on Reddit and other forums.

We’ll, uh, we’ll get to the conspiracies in a later episode. Those kind of deserve their own episode. They really, really do.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Getting everything in order.

I ended up recruiting outside help. Not just my friends, like Nino who is my producer and editor, or Marinette who actually designed a really cool logo for this podcast. I’m actually getting help from one of Paris’s akuma-fighting heroes — Chat Noir!

[Dude, when did you even get a chance to talk to Chat Noir?]

Oh, uh, a couple of days ago.

[Alya is going to freak out. You know that, right?]

Yeah, I, uh, kind of figured she would.

I should… probably explain who Alya is and why she’d freak out. Alya loves superheroes. More than me and Nino, and trust me when I say we binged the entire Marvel and DC movie universes. So many hours…

Anyway, Alya.

Alya runs a blog — the Ladyblog — that reports on Paris’s own superheroes, mainly Chat Noir and… and Ladybug. She’s been faithfully reporting on everything since day one. News reporters all over the world rely on her for not only information but live footage from every battle.

She has actually been really useful in helping me organize everything.

And it’s because of Alya that I finally figured out what was so wrong with my mother’s case. The thing that had been nagging me at the back of my mind.

The investigation on my mother’s disappearance wasn’t that deep of an investigation. It barely scratched the surface. It was all for show.

No one was putting in any effort to find out what happened to her. But why?

Author stuff cont’d.: So! This being kind of a story told through a podcast was heavily inspired by a few true crime podcasts. Most notably In the Dark (both the Jacob Wetterling case and the Curtis Flowers case) and Up and Vainished (the Tara Grinstead case), as well as To Live and Die in LA (the Adea Shabani case).

Also available on

[Ao3]

[FanFiction.Net]

[Wattpad]

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous ladybug fanfiction #miraculous fanfic #miraculous ladybug fanfic #fanfiction #fanfic #mlb fanfic #mlb no body no crime

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jbbarnesnnoble · 4 years

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Hello lovely humans!

I’ve recently hit the 500 follower milestone and want to celebrate with another challenge! This time, dark fics are welcome!

I have a lot of prompts here and what doesn’t get used will probably be put aside for a future challenge. I like to make sure there is a wide array of prompts to be chosen from and tend to go overboard. Whoops.

The Rules:

1. Use the hashtag #JBBNN500

2. Dark fics are welcome - Just be sure to utilize trigger warnings and indicate that it is a dark fic.

3. Even if you aren’t writing a dark fic, use trigger warnings if the content warrants it. If you write something that has heavier themes, like those that delve into mental health topics, be sure to label it appropriately.

4. Selecting Prompts: Just let me know which one you want to do! 2 people per prompt! Tell me which subheading and the number of the prompt so I can mark it down! If it’s a lyric prompt, please give me the song and the number!

5. You don’t have to be following to participate!

6. Deadline: January 11, 2021

Yes, I’m giving about 3 months for this. January 11 also happens to be my birthday, so I figured that would be a good date to choose.

The subheadings are: dialogue prompts, sentence prompts, quotes from popular media, and song lyrics!

Find the prompts under the cut!

Dialogue Prompts

“Life is made up of maybes and regrets. I don’t want this to be one of them.”

“You can’t do this. It’s my choice to make, and mine alone. If you don’t agree with it, the door is there. Feel free to use it.”

“I used to be afraid of the dark, you know. Until I learned that the real monsters thrive in the light.”

“So, what you’re saying is if I gave you a nickel, you’d do it.”

“No, I don’t know how the cheese got there, and honestly, I don’t think I want to know.”

“You’re sounding more like a cult leader every time you open your mouth. Don’t think I’ll be accepting any Flavor Aid from you anytime soon.”

“How did you...you know what, I’m going to forget I saw a thing, and go read a book. Or bathe in Holy Water. Or both. Both is good.”

“If you say one more word I swear--” “One more word” “I hate you”

“You can’t come in here singing my favorite song and expect forgiveness, that’s not how this works!”

“No. You mean nothing to me. You never did. You never will.”

“But if it did, it would work and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

“You are simultaneously the smartest and least intelligent person I have ever meant. Truly, an amazing accomplishment.” @bonkywobble

“Next thing you’re going to say is that ghosts are real...please tell me that’s a joke”

“All I’m saying is, I could do that blindfolded.”

“But why was there pizza on the ceiling?”

“If you write me a four thousand word essay on why you think that’s a good idea, then sure.”

“I didn’t think you were serious. Do you know how illegal this is?!”

Sentence Prompts

Feel free to change the pronouns used to suit your needs, even if they aren’t bracketed! You can also change the tense if you need to!

The January rain fell, feeling like razors against [your/her/their] skin as [you/she/they] stared out over the horizon.

This was it, the moment where life as [you/she/they] knew it ended.

[His/her/their] gaze fell on [her/you], like a lion circling its prey.

You never thought that it would come to this, come to being the one to end it all.

You took a moment to calculate [his/her/their] next move, figuring out the perfect counter.

Hanging by your ankles from a tree was most definitely not how you planned on spending your Saturday.

Glancing around the room at the decor, one thing was obvious: it was [his/her/their] doing.

Hurt was the only thing you felt, the only thing you could cling to in this abyss.

Lies, it had all been lies and they were crumbling around you.

The screech of tires on the pavement sent a shiver down your spine.

He/She used to love this time of year, the beauty of it all.

It was like climbing Everest: ambitious, dangerous, and maybe a little insane.

Forgiveness was not something you were willing to offer so freely, not this time.

Chaos may as well have been the code name of this mission. @nekoannie-chan

Silence was your new best friend, one that never seemed to leave you alone.

That smile, that smile was something you could get used to waking up to every day.

Your face twisted in disgust as you realized what you had fallen into.

You were beginning to wish you had taken [him/her/them] up on that trip to Madrid.

Quotes from Popular Media:

With these prompts specifically, you can use the full thing, paraphrase, etc, since some of them are quite long, or just write something based off an idea it sparks.

“There are so many stories where some brave hero decides to give their life to save the day, and because of their sacrifice, the good guys win, the survivors all cheer, and everybody lives happily ever after. But the hero... never gets to see that ending. They'll never know if their sacrifice actually made a difference. They'll never know if the day was really saved. In the end, they just have to have faith. Ain't that a bitch.” -Epsilon, Season 13, Red vs Blue

“We're so arrogant, aren't we? So afraid of age, we do everything we can to prevent it. We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone. Someone who doesn't drive you to commit murder or doesn't humiliate you beyond repair.” - Daniel, P.S I Love You

“After centuries of men looking at my tits instead of my eyes and pinching my ass instead of shaking my hand, I now have the divine right to stare at a man's backside with vulgar, cheap appreciation if I want to!” - Denise, P.S. I Love You

“Life isn't just death. Don't ignore the living.” - Vada Sultenfuss, My Girl

“Life's full of barbaric customs. But I hope they all end with a kiss like that.” - Vada Sultenfuss, My Girl

"You're a little scary sometimes, you know that? Brilliant ... but scary." - Ron Weasley, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

"It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends." - Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

"I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there." - Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Sweetie, this is one of those times when I know what's right and everybody else is confused.” - Angela Montenegro, Bones, Season 3

“Oh, God. I'm in the middle of something, aren't I? Oh, look! Dead guy!” - Cam Saroyan, Bones, Season 5

“Don’t make it sound trivial when you know it isn’t. You keep talking about how we just need a little more time, but you’re not the one having to struggle.” -Nora, RWBY, Volume 7

“It's called survival. But I forgot, you two at best are functional morons.” - Crowley, Supernatural, Season 5, Episode 10

“I once had to judge a tighty-whitey contest for Lambda Kappa Pi. Trust me, I can handle anything.” - Elle Woods, Legally Blonde

“How were we supposed to know? It's not like we run background checks on all her boyfriends.” - Kathryn Kennish, Switched at Birth

“Don’t try to get on my good side. I no longer have a good one” - Ouiser, Steel Magnolias

“I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” - Shelby, Steel Magnolias

“You have the handwriting of a serial killer” - Clairee, Steel Magnolias

“I didn’t know if you would hire someone who might be married to someone who may or may not be a criminal” - Annelle, Steel Magnolias

Lyric Prompts

What Do You Think Of - Lauren Alaina ft. Lukas Graham

What do you think of when you think of me?

When you look back on us what do you see? Is it the good times, is it the bad times, is it somewhere in between?

I can’t even drive down 8th Avenue because the whole damn town reminds me of you

Hurts to Know - 1551

But you stayed when I made another promise to keep

And you waited and waited for the life you saw in your dreams

You walk in and begin to try to heal me again, but each night is a fight that’s getting harder to win.

Sick - 1551

Everyone I meet feels like another target

I’m feeling sick, I’m feeling twisted, I wasn’t home before this feeling existed

I never knew that wrong could feel so right

seven - Taylor Swift

Sweet tea in the summer, cross your heart won’t tell no other, and though I can’t recall your face, I still got love for you

Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long

I think your house is haunted, your dad is always mad and that must be why

We’ll hide in the closet, and just like a folk song, our love will be passed on

the last great american dynasty - Taylor Swift

How did a middle class divorcee do it?

The wedding was charming, if a little gauche

And they said “There goes the last great American dynasty. Who knows if she never showed up what could have been.”

epiphany - Taylor Swift

With you I serve, with you I fall down

Something med school did not cover

And some things you just can’t speak about

Chapters - Brett Young

Chapter one, I was raised on the Dodgers

There’s no perfect life, you can’t hold back time

Everybody expecting perfection

Things change in the blink of an eyelid, guess my body knew way more than I did

The Daughters - Little Big Town

Girl, know your place, be willing and able

Girl, watch your mouth and watch your weight

Pose like a trophy on a shelf, and dream for everyone but not yourself

I wash the dishes, feed the kids, and clean up all this mess, do my best, forgive myself, and look good in this dress

It Won’t Always Be Like This - Carly Pearce

I remember how I couldn’t wait to get out of my hometown, now I’m looking for every excuse to go back on the weekend

I remember hearing the door slam, twenty-two, didn't have a clue who I was, who I could trust, and who were my real friends

The heart won’t ache forever, no matter how hard it gets, it won’t always be like this

Next Girl - Carly Pearce

You overlook a lot when he looks like that

He’ll charm your mama with that smile, hide the red flags for a while

He’ll make you think it’s love, but I promise you it’s not

Bar Back - Lauren Alaina

You can have that coffee shop we went on our first date

I’ll give you back that sweatshirt, that one you know I love

I’m taking back that little hole in the wall, the red door sign saying “come on in y’all”

If I Was a Beer - Lauren Alaina

Honey you’re in luck, ‘cause I’m a fine, fine, wine. I’m a slow sweet pour, I can be a little bitter, but I ain’t a hard hitter, like a 30 from the grocery store

Waiting for Superman - Daughtry

She says “he’s still coming, just a little bit late”

She’s talking to angels, counting the stars, making a wish on a passing car

If life was a movie, then it wouldn’t end like this

Before You Go - Lewis Capaldi

When you hurt under the surface, like troubled water running could, well time can heal but this won’t

Before you go, was there something I could have said to make your heart beat better?

Our every moment, I start to replay, but all I can think about is seeing that look on your face @arrowsandmixtapes

Hard to Forget - Sam Hunt

It's kinda funny how I can't seem to get away from you, it's almost like you don't want me to

You’ve got a cold heart and the cold hard truth

Told me to leave all your things out on the porch on the swing

Oh you’re breaking my heart, baby you’re playing hard to forget

This is It - Scotty McCreery

You can open your eyes

Can’t you see forever

On top of the world here together

If there ever was a time for a perfect kiss, this is it

Wish You’d Miss Me - Chase Wright

I was good for you, you were bad for me

I was solid ground, you were broken wings

I gave you love you gave me pain

You gave me hell, I gave you grace

I knew all along that you were gonna leave

What a Man Gotta Do - Jonas Brothers

I’m not trying to be your part time lover, sign me up for that full time @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad

This Feeling - Chainsmokers ft. Kelsea Ballerini

I lay out all my reasons you say that I need help

They tell me think with my head, not that thing in my chest

They got their hands at my neck this time

I tell you all my secrets and you tell all your friends

Hold onto your opinions and stand by what you say

What Are You Gonna Tell Her - Mickey Guyton

She thinks life is fair

But what are you gonna tell her when she’s wrong?

What are you gonna tell her when she figures out that all this time you built her up just so the world could let her down?

Do you tell her not to fight?

Can you look her in the face and promise her that things will change?

#writing challenge #marvel writing challenge #jbbnn500 #mcu #steve rogers #natasha romanoff #bucky barnes #sam wilson #wanda maximoff #marvel

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path-of-my-childhood · 4 years

Text

Miss Americana Is A Coming-Of-Age Story, Says Director Lana Wilson

By: Madeline Roth for MTV Date: February 12th 2020

Miss Americana, which premiered last month at Sundance and is now on Netflix, charts the pop star's transformation from a people-pleaser who measured her worth in pats on the head to a 30-year-old woman who's stopped worrying and learned to speak her mind. Wilson told MTV News about the doc:

"When I started, there wasn't a set, 'This is the story,' or anything like that. I just started filming immediately after meeting her and then just filmed, filmed, filmed, and saw what emerged."

Wilson tells MTV News about how Miss Americana is a coming-of-age story, the delicate balance of portraying Swift's romantic relationship, the studio footage she left on the cutting room floor, and the now-infamous "cat backpack."

This film made me really excited to see what kind of artist Taylor Swift is going to be in her 30s, now that she's seemingly more comfortable speaking her mind and isn't as worried about being a quote-unquote "good girl." Do you see it as capturing a turning point in her life? Absolutely. I think it's a coming-of-age story about this woman at a pivot point in her life and career. Taylor went through all of this pain and then stood up and became the person she wanted to be, but didn't have the ability to be for so many years, because of the leash that she put on herself. To be able to take that leash off, I think it's really amazing for people to see that. It's amazing from a documentary director's perspective when you get to go with a subject who really changes in the time that you film with them. That's what I was lucky enough to get to see.

You do get that sense that she doesn't feel the need to constantly reinvent herself anymore. How do you think the film sets a tone or an expectation for her going forward? I think she's always going to artistically challenge herself no matter what. What I saw when I saw her writing songs, and even from the videos of her when she's 11 years old writing her first songs on the guitar, is that she's someone who is always going to write something she hasn't written about before and do something new and experiment. I do think she's more comfortable with who she is now, though. It's about her journey to self-acceptance. She's less focused on being the person other people want her to be and more focused on being the person who she wants to be and who she is.

You definitely saw that throughout the film. At the same time, I loved seeing those moments where she's insecure, like when she finds out that Reputation didn't get nominated for a Grammy or when she's criticizing the way her face looks while shooting the "ME!" video. She even says at one point that she feels like there's a better version of herself out there. Why do you think those moments are important to see as well? I think when you see any insecurity coming out of the mouth of a superstar, that's a really powerful thing. And in fact, how we deal with insecurity is really what defines our strength. Taylor writes so candidly in her lyrics about the hardest times and the times when things didn't go well. That's what her fans love her for. We all want to feel less alone, and that's one reason why people turn to art. It's great for people to see that their heroes are human.

I found it really effective how her ages showed up on screen throughout the film. It really made you realize that she was so young when all of these big, formative life events were happening to her. Why did you decide to highlight her ages like that? That was my editor Greg O'Toole's idea, and I thought it was brilliant. It changes the way you see everything. When we think about Taylor Swift, I think we tend to forget how young she was when she started. You feel that amazement of, "Wow! She was writing those songs at that age?!" But then there's also, "Oh my god, she had to go through that when she was a teenager?!" You see the good things and the hard things at once. It gives context, but it’s also this reminder throughout the film that this is a coming-of-age story.

Totally. When it came to portraying Taylor’s relationship with her boyfriend, that three or so minutes where he's shown backstage and then you see cell phone footage that looks like it was shot by him — I found that particularly moving and a nice way to acknowledge something that is an important part of her life but is also sacred and private. What kind of care went into achieving that balance? It really was a balance. Taylor's had so many relationships go through the public ringer, so it was important to respect her desire to keep her relationship private, while still acknowledging the important role that relationship plays in her life. I remember we had done the first rough cut and we had this whole section of her writing Reputation. She was like, "I do have a few videos on my phone that I think could capture the fact that while I was out of the public eye, it was one of the happiest times of my life." When I saw those videos, I was so moved by them. Especially by her singing "Call It What You Want" when she's in the slippers. I was like, "This is everything. This is all we need to know." It's really special. You don't even have to see her boyfriend's face; you could feel it.

I loved that scene and I loved the song choices in general. "Out Of the Woods," "Getaway Car," "Call It What You Want"... I thought it was really cool how you didn't just use "Shake It Off" and all the big hits. I so appreciate you saying that because not a lot of people have commented on that. I really did not want to do, "here's all of Taylor's greatest hits in the first 10 minutes of the movie," which you often see in this type of project. I wanted to use songs that were emotionally and thematically related to what was going on in the story at that time. With "Getaway Car," it's this moment of total freedom for her in the story of the film. Or "Clean," after the sexual assault trial, for example.

When you're making this kind of film and you're capturing Taylor during such a long stretch of time, how do you know when it's done? What was the moment when you realized you had enough of the story you wanted to tell? My sense was that we had to film through the Lover album release. I think you feel at that point in the film that Taylor isn't as concerned with what people will think of the album. It's more like, it was a joy for her to make and to put out into the world. She went through this period where she went away from the public eye, but she wants to keep entertaining people and making music, and nothing is going to stop her from that. I loved the idea of ending the movie with her walking onstage, and that idea of this bravery she's had since she was 12 years old, of walking out to perform. I wanted to end it with her going back out into the world again to face the public, but you have the sense that something's a little bit different about her now. That's the sense I hope the audience has.

Was there anything you had to leave out of the film that you were particularly bummed about cutting? There was so much more songwriting and recording in the studio. It's so special to see something come from just the seed of an idea - a fragment of a melody or a lyric typed in her phone - and get to then hear it as a finished song. That's some of my favorite stuff in the film, but there was a lot that we had to leave on the cutting room floor, heartbreakingly.

I'd imagine. Do you think that footage will ever be used for anything? I don't know. People have asked me about it, so it's giving me hope that maybe we could just release the 40-minute version of Taylor writing "Only the Young" as a standalone film or something.

Honestly, I would watch. A lot of people would watch! I think a lot of people would.

Last question: How long did it take for Meredith and Olivia to warm up to you? I don't know if they ever did, honestly! They're very cute and they're quite friendly. They're often hiding under things. They just kind of pop out from somewhere, so you do have this feeling of, "There are cats everywhere!"

I loved the screen time they got. Especially the cat backpack. I remember watching the cat backpack scene with one of my editors and I was like, "Is this too long? Are we spending too long on the cat backpack?" He looked at me and he was like, "Definitely not." And he was absolutely right.

#Lana Wilson #mtv #interview #Taylor Swift: Miss Americana #about taylor #taylor swift #tay & joe #songwriting

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linphd · 4 years

Text

katsuki x villain!reader | you belong with me

katsuki bakugou x reader

female reader

U.A students are targeted by the League of Villains, once again, else there is a familiar new member with them.

warning : mention of death, kinda angsty

the lyrics are from you belong with me by taylor swift but here listen to the punk goes pop cover

youtube

And I know your favorite songs.

And you tell me about your dreams.

Izuku was the only one who knew about this, only because he had gone to the same middle school as them. Katsuki and (Y/N) used to date. Well, they would surely still be dating if (Y/N) hadn’t run away. They had started to date during their 3rd year of middle school, and the girl had also planned to go to U.A, she wanted to be a hero. The boy couldn’t even tell how she was able to make Katsuki soft for her.

He was actually very happy that she was going to U.A with him, but it was until her dream got crushed. Her parents got killed by villains. Because some heroes were too late to save them. They didn’t do anything for her. They just saved whoever was still alive and put the villains to jail, but they didn’t look for her nor help her. They didn’t try to know if the dead couple had a family. ‘’Those were shitty heroes ! If it was All Might, he would’ve done anything he could-‘’ Katsuki would try to tell her. But she wasn’t listening. She seemed like she wasn’t able to. Her jovial attitude was gone.

‘’You could stay at my place, my mom really likes you.’’ The blonde would continue. But she couldn’t stay at the Bakugou household forever. For days, he tried to talk to her, text her, go to her house since she wasn’t going to school anymore. But she only sent him a single text : ‘I’ll go somewhere else. I’m sorry but don’t follow me cause you’ll get in trouble.’ Izuku had received a shorter text, as they were still friends. Indeed, despite dating the blonde, (Y/N) was actually friendly towards the boy.

I think I know where you belong.

I think I know it’s with me.

Katsuki was mad, no- enraged. Izuku knew it was only to hide his sadness and desperation. He even knew that once the blonde got closer to All Might, he confessed about his girlfriend being gone suddenly, without anyone looking for her but him. The number one hero had promised him he was going to do anything to find her. But it seemed like she had disappeared. And even if now the blonde was at U.A and his girlfriend had disappeared some months before graduating middle school, he was still thinking about her. All the time. He knew she would love his hero costume.

But actually, (Y/N) wasn’t that far. After finding some villain associations here and there -since the villains seemed actually more caring than the heroes- she found the League of Villains. She actually saw that Katsuki had been missing on the news, and as a villain, she had some contacts and relations. But when she finally found the League, the blonde had already been rescued. ‘’Did he fight you well ?’’ She asked Toga, who was now her best friend. ‘’Yes ! He avoided all of our attacks !’’ She said, (Y/N) nodding and smiling at the thought.

However, she was going to finally see him again, after so many months. She hoped he didn’t have a new girlfriend. He was hers, after all. She had maybe run away and become a bit crazy in the process, but she never stated that she wanted to break up with him. Even if some villains gave her some boosting drugs to make her quirk evolve and train her as she was still young, she still was sane enough to know that Katsuki was obviously meant to be with her. She was the one who knew everything about him, who was making him open up.

Can't you see that I'm the one,

who understands you.

(Y/N) had seen him again, actually. He just didn’t know. So many times, she checked his house, waiting outside, only to see the light of his room on -until he moved to a dorm. Indeed, she knew he was at U.A now, so how couldn’t he notice her stalking ? But it wasn’t a problem anymore ; she was going to see him again in person now, with him knowing ! She was so excited.

The League of Villains was attacking U.A, once again targeting the 1A students. They had been training in a forest this time -as if they could hide from them. And it was the perfect moment to strike again. The girl was still hiding in the forest, somewhere, waiting only for her boyfriend to show up. He had his hero costume on -weirdly, weren’t they training only ? And how handsome he looked !

He was with a bunch of his classmates when she attacked one of them. He recognized that quirk. Izuku did too. ‘’Hi, Kacchan.’’ She almost whispered, her voice creeping out the students. The said boy jumped at the voice, his eyes widening when he saw her. ‘’(Y/N) ?! (Y/N), you’re ba-‘’ he cut himself off. She was wearing a shitty version of the hero costume she had designed, surely because since she hadn’t made it to U.A, she couldn’t ask for professionals to design it and had to do it herself with anything she could find. And the look in her eyes had changed. Her smile was creepy. Her voice was creepy. Everything about her felt creepy to Katsuki.

Standing by and waiting at your back door.

All this time, how could you not know ?

Baby you belong with me.

Still, she was so beautiful. She had dyed her hair a different color, and Katsuki could tell she had become a bit older, despite only it being a few months. ‘’Where did you go ?!’’ He shouted, furrowing his eyebrows -maybe it was that blonde villain that had taken his former girlfriend’s appearance. ‘’I don’t know, I just stayed here and there. But then I knew the League of Villains caught you, so I joined them. You escaped, so I’m taking you back.’’ She said, walking towards him.

‘’Be careful ! She just attacked Kaminari !’’ Izuku shouted, making the girl arch an eyebrow. ‘’Deku-‘’ (Y/N) sang. ‘’You’re not included in the conversation.’’ she continued, her tone changing drastically. She turned her head towards the blonde once again, and smiled. ‘’Your hero costume is so cool ! You’re intimidating -like you wished, right ?’’ She asked, but it only made Katsuki gulp, his palms emitting tiny explosions at his panic.

Of course he was panicking. She was obviously a villain and there was something wrong about her. He had to attack her, but how could he attack his missing girlfriend ? Her quirk started to show up as Sero tried to make a move towards her. She sent him away quickly, making him yelp in pain. The blonde got even more panicked now. ‘’You’re stronger.’’ He muttered. ‘’Of course I am !’’ She replied, giggling. ‘’The villains did a lot of things to me so I could get stronger... but now I can protect myself when the heroes don’t help me ! Aren’t you proud, Suki ?’’ He gulped, not replying anything.

Have you ever thought just maybe,

you belong with me ?

‘’What do you want ?!’’ He finally shouted, holding his hand in front of him so he could attack her if needed -she was very close now. But she stopped when he asked, giving him a genuine smile. ‘’I want to take you home with me.’’ She said. He frowned. ‘’I won’t be a villain, (Y/N) ! You don’t have to be one neither !’’ He said. ‘’Come with us, (Y/N) ! Our teachers will help you to get healthy and safe !’’ Izuku shouted, wanting to help Katsuki by catching the girl’s attention. She became mad at this point. ‘’This... isn’t... about... YOU !’’ She yelled, using her quirk and giving the boy the same treatment she had given Kaminari and Sero.

Katsuki started to attack her, though, despite her being as fast as him, maybe even faster now. He had a plan ; kidnap her and get her safe and sane again. She mostly avoided him, not wanting to attack him. However, as he exploded whatever she wa sudoku to attack him -that was a part of her quirk- she lost it and attacked back. However, she smirked, finally having someone who she could struggle to fight with. ‘’You’re so strong ! You’re so strong, Suki !’’ She was very proud of him.

The ‘Kacchan’ was already something very intimate -and irritating when it was Izuku- to say, but the ‘Suki’ was too much. And once again, the blonde preferred to get enraged instead of showing his sadness. ‘’You won’t follow me, right ?’’ He asked, before throwing an attack the girl easily dodged. ‘’Not if it’s to talk to heroes.’’ She replied, throwing an attack back, with him only using explosions to counter-attack.

Oh why can’t you see,

you belong with me ?

Seeing how powerful the fight was, the students decided to get deeper into the forest, but still close enough to see Katsuki if he needed help. But Izuku told the boys their story, and they had decided they couldn’t step into their fight. After getting hurt enough to actually bleed, (Y/N) got angry. ‘’Can’t you see that I’m doing all of this so we can be together ?!’’ Katsuki frowned, once again. ‘’I do that too ! But you’re too stubborn to come with me !’’ He replied, still fighting. ‘’You’re too stubborn to come with me !’’ This time, she threw him in the air. Bad idea. Katsuki had developed a special attack throughout time ; the Howitzer Impact.

Once she saw she couldn’t avoid it, (Y/N) smiled, almost tearing up. ‘’You’ve gotten so strong, Suki ! I’m so proud of you !’’ She said, before being crushed by the impact. He surely didn’t hear her, though. Katsuki landed a few meters away, breathing heavily with his mask torn in half, looking at her -he still wanted her to be okay enough to follow him.

She was laying, but she turned her head towards him and smiled when she saw him. ‘’Why do you do all of this, (Y/N) ?! Why can’t you just... come back ?’’ However, the said girl didn’t really reply to his question. Still, it seemed that to her, she did. ‘’Cause you’re the only thing from my previous life that I still love.’’ He gulped, his eyes widening. She seemed so sad !

You belong with me.

He was about to cry. He could see the sadness in her eyes. A single tear was rolling down her cheek. ‘’I do all of this because you belong with me, and nobody else can understand you like I do. They don’t know everything about you.’’ She said, her voice fading a bit due to her lack of energy. Suddenly, a purple portal appeared, right beside her. But Katsuki was far enough to be out of reach. The scarred villain came out of it. ‘’Dabi.’’ (Y/N) whispered, reaching for him with her arms -she couldn’t walk, her legs were so bloody. Surely that Katsuki’s attack had landed more on her lower body.

The brunette sighed and carried her, looking briefly at the students. ‘’You’re lucky this time, kids. The boss wants us to go back home.’’ He said, not even wanting to be here in the first place. They didn’t have a proper plan ! Why did they even attack them ?! He settled the girl in his arms -they needed her, but they needed to fix her legs- and started to walk towards the portal, again. Still, (Y/N) looked at Katsuki, her arms sneaking around the villain’s neck so she could be more comfortable. Her chin was resting against his shoulder.

Seeing the blonde’s expression -fear, sadness, despair- she smiled at him, but it was actually a sad smile. Maybe she was showing compassion ? However, quickly, her smile turned back into a casual one. ‘’I love you.’’ It was a whisper, but Katsuki could read her lips. And even if she was a villain, even if she was changed, he still replied : ‘’Me too.’’ unsure himself of if it was right. That said, the girl rest her cheek against the villain’s shoulder, as if she was now contented, as he walked into the portal and they disappeared.

#bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #katsuki bakugou #bakugou katsuki #katsuki bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #katsuki x reader #bakugou x reader #angst

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crewhonk · 5 years

Text

Only Happy Accidents (four)

Summary: YN and Steve spend their first Christmas together, and YN and Steve go to a New Years Eve party at the Tower the days she hits three months. YN also meets her hero, Pepper Potts and her daughter, Morgan Stark. YN and Steve have a Moment as the ball drops.

Songs: “Winter Song”- Sara Bareilles / “You Matter To Me”- Sara Bareilles, Jason Mraz / Songs: “What’s Inside”- Sara Bareilles / “Out of the Woods”- Taylor Swift / “My, My, My”- Troye Sivan

Masterlist

_____________________

December 25th / 7th Week

The snow on the windowsill was fluffy and white and fresh, untouched by the dirt of the street or footprints fo the people who had to trudge their way to work on Christmas Day. YN spelt soundly under her pile of blankets in a sea of pillows, hand under her cheek and pink rays of the first light illuminating her form.

Steve Rogers looked in on her, a flutter in his heart and stomach making the tray of hot food tremble in his hands. He had learned how to cook during the snap— less people meant less crime and the crime that did seem threatening had been taken out by Clint. So, Steve cooked. He provided for Natasha, mostly, and slowly she gained her weight back and her hair grew healthy and her eyes seemed less set in her skull.

By the time everyone came back, Steve could cook a whole cookbook of good meals that made Natasha actually dance in her seat, and another cookbook of food that she would nod to.

Todays breakfast was nothing special. Two waffles with fruit and whipped cream (in the shape of a smiley face, obviously)— a homage to their first morning together. Coffee— the one half cup YN limited herself to and the one half cup he drank for support. He never used to like the taste of it, but for her he found himself doing more things for her and he found himself looking forward to the cup in the morning. Her vitamins and medication— a colourful cup of candy.

He set the tray on her still-empty bedside table, and sat on the bed, hand falling on her shoulder and shaking her gently.

“YN” He whispered and she moaned, cuddling harder into the blankets and wrinkling her nose as she did so.

“Waffles are gonna get cold, YN.” He whispered and she cracked one bleary eye open at him, smirking and closing her eyes again.

“The waffles did get cold. That’s how we got here in the first place, Rogers.” She mumbled and he chuckled, nudging her again and making her reach up, the blanket falling away from her chin and neck to reveal a Captain America vintage comic book t-shirt that seemed to be three sizes too big for her.

“Really?” He smiled and she winked, pulling herself to sit up and frowning, hand falling to her stomach. “You okay?”

“Morning sickness, obviously. Always sickness, honestly— your super-sperm means super-symptoms.” She replied and he fake gagged, making her giggle.

“I hate when you call it that.” He sighed and handed her her pills, watching as she swallowed them all with the bottle of water on the blanket beside her.

“It’s true. I really appreciate this whole thing, but I don’t think I can stomach more than that coffee, this morning, I’m sorry.” She frowned and he shrugged as if it were nothing. He reached over to the separate waffles and flipped one over onto the other, making a sandwich and nodding.

“Done.” He smiled when she laughed loudly.

“You’re the cutest.” She joked and scooted over, patting the place where she was sitting. Hesitantly, hoping to not cross any unspoken boundaries, he sat against the headboard beside her. “Good thing too, cause I haven’t seen the sunrise for the past two months for a reason.”

“Well, it is Christmas Day.” He sighed, lolling his head to look at her and she rolled her eyes.

“We promised each other we wouldn’t get each other anything.” She pointed out and he shook his head, digging into his sweatpants pocket and pulling out a long necklace box, handing it to her.

“You said that, I made no such promise.” He replied, She took it shakily, slowly opening it and gasping. She pulled the necklace from the box and held it up. It was a heart locket with a single diamond on it, and it glinted pink in the ever-brightening sun.

“Steve,” She breathed and he nodded.

“Open it.”

When she did, she had to squint to decipher that was on it, but when she did her eyes welled with tears. It was a small picture of their first ultrasound on one side, and the other side was empty.

“For our wedding picture.” He answered and she sniffed, wiping her nose hard.

“Fuck, Steve. This is— this is perfect. I didn’t get you anything, though I’m sorry—“

“You got me you. You got me him,” He said, pointing at her belly. “You got me a family, YN and that’s the greatest gift you could have ever given me.” He said simply, and she let out a wet sob, leaning her head on his shoulder and bringing the locket to her lips.

“You’re the biggest, dorkiest cheeseball in the world, Steve Rogers.”

“And you got me until you don’t want me anymore, YN.” He whispered and she wrapped her arms around his bicep, hugging him to her and curling around him.

“Same here, buddy.” She mumbled, and he gasped quietly in shock.

“Did you just buddy-zone me?”

“No.”

There was a pause in the conversation and YN breathed in deeply, sitting up and turning her back to him and lifting her hair, passing him the locket.

“It’s only fitting you put it on me, you know.” She whispered and he moved to kneel behind her, hands suddenly too-hot and shaking with nerves. He took the delicate necklace in his huge hands and clasped it, quickly. Before he could think twice about it, he ducked forward and planted his lips against the back of her neck. It was a brief kiss, nothing more than a ghost of one, actually, but he could hear her heart triple in pace and her breath catch in her throat.

“I told you, I’m not going anywhere.” He whispered and she shivered, letting her hair down and turning to him.

“You should eat, Steve.” She breathed, looking down at his lips and shaking her head, turning away and reaching to grab her laptop. “‘Cause after you’re done we’re only watching good Christmas movies until we both fall asleep or this kid makes me vomit.” She stated, voice stiffly excited.

“ELF?” He asked, reaching for the food and taking a bite of his waffle sandwich.

“Have you ever seen ELF?”

“No?”

“If anyone ever tells you that ELF is their favourite Christmas movie, run in the other direction. Run, very fast.”

__________________

December 31st 9:30 / 8th Week

YN really didn’t want to be at this party. There were too many people fawning over her and Steve and standing too close to them and offering her too many drinks she had to say ‘no’ to. Steve was ansty as well, pulling her to his side when reporters got too close and when he felt YN was in danger— which, since she and he had moved in together was all the time they were out of the house.

Her boobs were horrendously sore and she had thrown up three times today, cried twice as much. Pregnancy had been miserable so far, and honestly, YN had no idea how mothers did it alone. Alone, and not with a man who made her coffee the way she liked in the morning. Not with a man who made sure she was wearing two jackets and bought her new mugs and other knick knacks that were slowly filling up their apartment. How did women do it without someone who wouldn’t watch Jurassic Park with them because it was the only movie that settled her stomach.

She liked Steve. More than she probably should have by this point. I mean, granted, she was carrying his love child and he /did/ kiss the back of her neck when he gave her that locket on Christmas Morning.

She liked Steve the proper amount. Which was a lot.

They walked to the top floor of the tower which used to be Stark tower, having been rented out by Tony Stark every New Years Eve for the next fifty years even if he didn’t make it fifty years. This floor was quieter, the lights glimmering off of YN’s dress (bought by Natasha with Steve’s card as an ‘I’m sorry for judging you, here’s my number and I also have a wedding Pinterest board already’ gift. It was a good one— the measurements were perfect and the length was perfect, and somehow it made the dress even better when Steve’s jaw dropped when she walked out of her bedroom.

His hand seemed glued to the small of her back, coasting her expertly through nosey reporters and new recruits trying to get close to the man who used to be Captain America. Eventually they made it to the VIP section and somehow, YN didn’t mind the reporters all hat much.

Natasha Romanoff was there, wearing a long black dress that dragged across the floor as she walked from the bar and to the spot on the couch beside Bucky Barnes. His blood red suit jacket was slung lazily over the back of the couch, his black button up and matching blood red pants seemed strained over his muscles. Both Natasha and Bucky seemed regal and so very much in love.

Sam Wilson was wearing a classic blue suit and was talking animately to James Rhodes. Scott Lang was there with his family, and YN was sure it was his idea to wear matching sweaters with his daughter and the woman she assumed to be Hope Van Dyne.

Wanda Maximoff was wearing a white dress with a plunging neckline, her new blonde hair glinting healthily under the lights. Stephen Strange and Clint Barton were walking with her, wearing classic black.

Next, YN stumbled over her heels when she saw her, was Pepper Stark and Morgan Stark. Pepper, wearing gold, Morgan, wearing something similar but closely resembling something a Disney princess would wear.

“Steve.” YN gasped, grabbing his hand and holding tightly. Steve looked down at her, brows furrowing and looking briefly at her stomach before stopping.

“You okay? Do we need to find a bathroom? I know you’ve had a bad day, so—“

“No. Everyone is here. Pepper Stark is here. Natasha and Bucky and Sam and oh, god what if they still don’t like me.” She gasped, looking up at Steve with wide, scared eyes. He pulled them behind a pillar quickly, as to hide them from the party and he pushed her hair over her shoulder, trailing his hand down her arm and grabbing her other hand gently while he encouraged her to breathe.

“We can go home if you need,” He said, and she shook her head.

“No, I’m good. These are your people.” She tried to hype herself up and he shook his head with a small smile on his face.

“You’re my people.” He whispered just loud enough over the people and the music and making YN’s heart rate tumble the way Steve liked. “My world revolves around you, YN. We can leave if you’re not comfortable.”

“I adore you, Rogers. But no we’re here, and I’m wearing a dress with a price tag the made me vomit and I’m pretty sure Bucky saw us, anyways.” She shrugged and he nodded.

“Probably.”

So they asked out from behind the pillar, and YN immediately met Natasha’s eyes. She expected a lot of scenarios to play out in her head, but none of them included Natasha rising from her place under Bucky’s arm and walking to the roped-off entrance.

“YN. Steve. We weren’t sure if you were going to show up.” She smiled, unhooking the rope and waiting for them to enter before leading them to the couch set where everyone was at. Bucky didn’t stand at the sight of YN, but reached forward to shake Steve’s hand in that bro-way guys do and nodded politely at YN who offered a small, shy smile and hide slightly behind Steve’s arm.

“Hey!” Sam crowed from across the room, sauntering over to Steve and pulling him into a hug before turning to YN and doing the same, kissing her temple and smiling. “I just wanted to say we’re all really sorry for how we acted the other day. Again.”

YN smiled and nodded, putting her hand on Sam’s arm and squeezing.

“I get it, and it’s okay. Steve’s been all of your person and all of a sudden this stranger shows up claiming that she’s pregnant with his kid? It’s very Gossip Girl of me.” She joked, hoping to all the Gods that the joke would land.

And it did, not only to Sam who roared with laughter but also Bucky Barnes who chuckled loud enough over the music.

“Very Georgina Sparks of you, yeah.” Bucky said, smiling softly at YN who blushed and looked at her hand.

“Except I don’t /get enough/ to doubt that it’s this guy’s kid.” She nodded to Steve who looked wholly lost. Bucky smiled and shook his head, taking a sip of his drink and nodding towards the couch.

“Sit. I’d offer you a drink, but—“

“Appreciated.” She smiled.

Natasha watched the exchange fondly. Bucky had come a long way in letting people in, and this one was huge. It was something out of the blue, and Steve wasn’t someone who struggled with money anymore. She knew too, that Bucky (still smaller than Steve) still saw Steve as that skinny kid with a medical list of illness longer than a CVS receipt.

Natasha was happy Bucky invited her to sit considering the way Steve was staring at YN like she had turned his world around in the best way. YN’s shimmering red dress was the perfect choice— simple a-line with matching heels. Gold accessories. Her phone in the dress pocket and wallet in Steve’s back pocket.

One of Natasha Romanoff’s best qualities was her ability to micromanage.

_________________________

December 31st, 10:18 / 8th Week

“And, this is Pepper Stark and her daughter Morgan Stark.” Steve introduced, and YN offered a slightly shaking hand. Pepper Potts was known for being a boss and an inspiration to millions of women across the world, so the fact that YN was meeting one of her heroes had her beside herself.

“I’m YN. YN YLN.” She rushed, still shaking her hand. Realising she was shaking it too long, she dropped it and wrung her hands nervously. “I’m sorry for freaking out, but you’re a huge inspiration for me and my friends, Ms. Stark. The things you’ve done with Stark Industries and your own business and the way you speak out without fear but remain so elegant is really awesome.” She rambled, and Peppers smile grew the more she spoke.

“Well, I’m happy to finally meet you, actually. I’ve heard a lot about you from Steve recently and he speaks a lot to your kindness.” She smiled and YN felt faint at her words. “Also, you’ve done wonderfully at keeping him under control. He hasn’t made anyone cry this month which is less of a headache for me.” She joked and Steve coughed awkwardly. YN paid no mind to him and continued to look at Pepper with shining eyes.

“It’s truly an honour to meet you, Ms. Stark.” She continued, trying to cement this moment in her mind for the rest of forever. Maybe she could get the AI to record the conversation and she could tattoo it on her back.

“Pepper.” She replied and YN blinked stupidly.

“Huh?”

“Call me Pepper. You’re family as far as I know, so please call me Pepper.” And YN beamed, grabbing Steve’s hand behind her and squeezing hard enough for him to wince slightly.

“Pepper. I can do that.” She blinked eagerly. She hadn’t even noticed the bundle of golden tulle clutching Peppers leg until it moved behind her slightly. YN looked down into the wide brown eyes of Morgan Stark and without any hesitation, YN squat down to her level and held out her hand.

“Wow,” She started. “I’ve never met a princess, before.”

Morgan hid more behind Peppers leg, and YN remained— her hand held out politely and patiently.

“You know, you remind me so much of Belle. I bet you like reading books, huh?” She asked and Morgans stoic face melted a little, nodding with a breath of a smile.

“What’s your favourite book?” She asked, dropping her hand to her lap as she rolled onto her knees and sat back on her heels. Steve looked down at this beautiful woman below him in wonder. Of course she would be good with shy kids. Of course it made his heart swell three times its usual size.

“I like Narnia.” She mumbled and YN’s face broke out into the widest smile.

“No. Way. Narnia’s my favourite series! My favourite character is Lucy.” She whispered as if it was the worlds best kept secret. Morgan smiled and came out from behind Peppers hip.

“I like Aslan. He’s really smart. And he’s a lion and they’re my favourite animal.” She said, and YN dropped her mouth wide open in surprise.

“Did you know that I’ve held a baby lion before?” She asked Morgan and Morgan’s eyes widened beyond normal size. YN nodded and pulled out her phone flipping through her phone albums and showing Morgan a picture of her with a lion cub she had helped raise when she spent a summer volunteering in Africa as a part of her Anthropology practicum.

“Her name was Malaika, which means ‘Angel’ in Swahili.”

“Do you know what Nala means?” Morgans eyes were wide as she looked up from the picture and to YN. YN’s answer seemed far away from Steve— the words falling deaf on his ears, as he had just been hit hard with a realization.

This was the mother of his child. This was someone who he was going to be spending the rest of his life with and she was on her knees in a dress that cost more than the rent she used to pay just so she could make one fo the most famous children in the world feel comfortable enough to talk about their mutual favourite animal. This was the mother of his children, and God, if he didn’t want to have so many with her so long as they brought the same smile to her face that Morgan Stark was wearing right now.

_________________________

December 31st, 11:56 / 8th Week

“Guys! Four minutes!” Someone cried, and YN’s heart dropped as everyone got up to leave—she had actually been enjoying seeing Steve in his natural environment. He was more animated, talked more with his hands, swore more. It was nice to see that Bucky did actually have a full smile and that Sam couldn’t dance to save his life. It was nice to hear Natasha’s full laugh— something that came out after three dry margaritas.

Steve stood quickly, standing in front of YN and holding his hand out. His smile was soft, but true and she grabbed his hands and stood, letting him lead her to the balcony where everyone else was heading. They found a spot by the rail, and Steve didn’t even hesitate before taking his suit jacket and throwing it over YN’s shoulders.

“You’ll get cold.” She protested and he smiled, Shang his head.

“I run warm. You complain about it in your sleep when we watch Jurassic Park for the third time in a day.” He teased and she rolled her eyes, leaning over the railing and looking over the city lights. “Have you ever seen fireworks from this high up before?”

She shook her head. “No, but I have seen it on the rooftop of Earls three years in a row, so that counts, right?” She joked and he bumped her shoulder.

“Second prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He commented and she blushed under his gaze.

“Cheeseball.”

He hummed and leaned into her, listening to everyone around them start counting down from thirty.

“You know, this time next year, we’re going to have a son.” He whispered into her ear and she smiled— a great beaming thing that took his breath away. He grabbed her chin between two fingers and she looked up to him easily, both still leaning against the railing.

“I’m gonna kiss you.” He whispered and her mouth opened to allow her tongue to moisten her suddenly dry lips. “Say no if you’re not okay with it.”

“I’m not gonna say it.” She replied, and he swallowed thickly.

Ten.

His eyes flickered down to her parted lips.

Nine.

She stood fully, and Steve did too.

Eight.

Her hands slid up from his stomach to his shoulders, her grip gentle, but firm.

Seven.

His hands landed on the curve of her waist under his jacket, thumbing patterns on the smooth fabric and pulling her closer.

Six.

Her hand cupped the back of his neck, scratching the nape of his neck and making his eyes flutter.

Five.

He stepped closer, and the toes of his boots nudged the toes of her heels.

Four.

His eyes were locked on her lips, angled to meet his.

Three.

“Steve,” a whisper as his hand cradled her cheek, anchoring her to him.

Two.

“YN.” He replied, ducking his head and brushing his nose against hers.

One.

His lips moulded to hers, moving slowly, working her own into a soft dough. She stepped closer and pulled his neck closer, kissing him deeper and making his heart stutter. She tilted her head barely, and moved her lips against his a little more passionately and he responded in kind, wrapping his arm tight around her waist and pressing her into him as if he wanted to do nothing else in the world. Her arms wrapped around his neck as her lips parted and his tongue darted out experimentally, slightly braver when he felt her shudder under him. Her tongue met his, tasting in earnest when a moan rumbled low in his chest just for her to hear. All YN could think of was SteveSteveSteveSteve, and she could taste his toothpaste and the champagne he had a few minutes ago, and the warmth of his tongue against hers.

It was only when YN had begun to get lightheaded that she slowed down, eventually pulling away and dropping from the very tips of her toes. Her hands were still clasped behind his back and his hands were still at their place on her waist, still pulling her close. His jacket had fallen to the ground during their kiss but YN felt fully and truly warm for the first time since Halloween.

“That was overdue.” She whispered and he laughed, kissing her through his smile one, twice, three times before rising to his full height.

“Yeah, yeah it was.” He murmured, pressing his forehead against hers again as the boom of fireworks echoed in their chest.

_____________________

Tag List (send me an ask, ONLY. must interact with the fic more than a like): yesfanficsaremylife / notyourtypicalrose / laurxn-robinson / disaster-rose / lille-kattunge / wwecrazed2010 / vxidnik / chewingoffmyfoot / vitamingrant / captainamericasbeard / chrisgalore / songforhema / mmyepic / multifandommandy / tommyhoe / lostdarksoul6 / crist1216 / taeeemin / jaqui-has-a-conspiracy-theory / feelmyroarrrr / teller258316 / mrsdeanwinchester19 / qrangr / mariswritingforfun / nerdypinupcrystal / kittycatlover18

#Steve Rogers #steve rogers au #steve rogers smut #steve rogers soulmate #steve rogers series #Steve Rogers smut #steve rogers fic #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fluff #steve rogers fanfiction #Steve Rogers fic #steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you #steve rogers x y/n #Dad!Steve #dad!steve rogers #steve rogers imagine

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 4 years

Note

Lover is the Queliot Soundtrack!!

this is 100% true and i have hyena yelled about it at length before and continue to think about it really a bizarre amount... i had a lot of weird feelings about lover when it came out ANYWAY because i have a lot of weird feelings about taylor swift which i like to attribute to the fact that we are astrological mirror twins of a kind (cap sun sag stellium vs. sag sun cap stellium) because honestly i am truly powerless to explain through logic why it is that i think about her so often and in such depth given that my reaction to most of her work is pretty muted in either direction. but like, the thing between me and being really into her as a musician had always been this overall hollowness i felt in her writing, like she has from the beginning definitely had her consistent strengths and her moments of total brilliance, but so much of her lyrical material feels like it was made by a martian whose exposure to humanity was watching a bunch of CW dramas, or whatever (which itself also isn’t necessarily like awful but i always bristled more about it because people tended to praise her specifically for her eye for detail and her emotional insight and i was like ??? that’s the part you like? but where... is it?) (this is all also happening in a context where i encounter her first at age 19 so i’m old enough to think teenagers are children but too young to understand that i’m only very barely not a child and way too young to empathize forgivingly with my teenage self much less take that healing and use it to fuel an expansion of empathy for others and a general diminishment of kneejerk reactivity, also my journey of taylor swift opinions is inextricable from the internet contexts of feminist blogging/tumblr pop talk, and the evolving conversations there and my own shifting ideas about them, i hung around in for a long time... anyway.) (CAP SUN SAG STELLIUM VS. SAG SUN CAP STELLIUM I AM DOOMED TO DISPROPORTIONATE FASCINATION)

the thing she tuned into earliest, the subject matter on which she found her voice first, was heartbreak, right, and it never bothered me the way it did some that to public appearances she’d never had a relationship longer than 3 months; you can get your heart broken in 3 months. artists in general tend to be people who experience feelings strongly, i think less because you need to feel things strongly to make art (which i’m not sure is true) than the other way around: people who experience feelings strongly need to find a way to deal with that, and art, making or experiencing it, is one of the more socially acceptable and productive coping mechanisms around. a certain inner grandiosity can be useful for artists, which is why melodrama is a perfect album. (melodrama manages this very neat balancing act of being wry and self-aware enough to let you know it’s on purpose but also being full-throatedly committed to the affective grandeur of being 19 and on fire; i mention that mostly because another shade of my doomed fixation with taylor swift is she’s a proxy for my issues around sincerity & jadedness & shame &, yeah, where the hell into all of that art fits.) i think this is probably especially true for artists working in a form like music, like pop music, that succeeds viscerally or not at all, that can include an intellectual dimension but can’t rest solely on matters of thought, can be analyzed but not wholly appreciated primarily through the analytical mind. music like emotions is a bodily experience and you can’t instruct your body into what may appear a more proportionate response, so there’s relief in watching someone else skywrite commonplace heartbreaks as big as they always feel inside us. megaphone to my chest: broadcast the boom, boom, boom.

it was her descriptions of love that left me colder, and as her career went on there was something to—i don’t really want to get into the question around her celebrity self and a narrative of victimhood, except i think it’s more complicated than people on either side of the issue tend to acknowledge, but it was a difficult narrative to escape, and it did intertwine for me in noticing in her work a certain... i don’t even know what to call it. “lack of introspection” comes to mind, but obviously taylor swift is no stranger to her own thoughts; the way people talked about it tended to hinge on this idea that she never took responsibility in her music, that it’s alway someone else’s fault, which, see above re: it’s complicated. i don’t think that narrative about her music would have taken hold without the narrative about her public persona, and it’s a weird thing where i see resonance in that critique with the thing i’m trying to name but also think that on its own it doesn’t mean much. there are plenty of great break-up songs that take no responsibility. part of the joy for me of pop (used in one of the broader senses) is precisely that because songs exists as 3.5 minute bursts of sensation it’s a realm particularly suited to indulging pleasurably in the less evolved areas of our psyche. the role of the artist is not to meticulous address across their body of work every emotion a human being can have. it’s never bob dylan’s fault either but who wants to hear that song?

i keep talking about the narrative around her persona and again: complicated. i’m not going to detail the factors, because it’s not 2015. but it’s not like at times she didn’t lean in, right? i mean she can be so annoying. and i think what i was reacting to was not so much her insistence on positioning herself as a victim (i mean, after the initial shock i kind of fell in love with look what you made me do, not despite but because of the fact that it’s so dumb and nasty) but simply that the repeated act of self-positioning over time near inevitably invites a certain calcification. there’s a line between shaping your memories into narrative to make use of the meaning you can find there, and attaching to the story of yourself so strongly that you lose sight of your actual self, which is unfixed and fluid and ever-changing. it’s possible to begin scrambling subconsciously to match your self to your story, rather than the other way around. and a public self, a self which exists in lopsided unrelationship with people you will never meet, exacerbates this tendency for all but the most secure in their true identity. there’s spiritual danger in becoming a brand. there were a lot of reasons i deleted my not even very popular personal blog but one of them was this: i had started to worry that i might be ready to outgrow the self i had built there and not be able to see or actualize it. years ago i read a book about the ancient celts and the only thing i remember was the suggestion that the religion of the druids retained a degree of spiritual potency and mysticism lost to the ancient greeks because the druids didn’t write anything down. i don’t know if that’s true but it stuck with me.

anyway. when reputation came out i called new year’s day the first song she’d ever written as an adult specifically because of how it located the self in the verb of loving—don’t read the last page, but i stay—which felt to me like the first true thing she’d said about love. and then after hammering us with the one-two punch of the two most heinous songs of her career, because whatever else taylor swift she also is a dummy with terrible taste, it turned out that lover was after all an album that mostly lived there too. it was an album where she did cop to bad behavior, no winking or cuteness, and more than that where she named regrets in a way that had weight; i still kind of can’t believe taylor swift came out with something as real as “i never grew up / it’s getting so old.” and it was also the album where she first sounded convincingly besotted, uncomplicatedly joyful; the album where she finally learned years after crossing over how to write a pop song that was actually fun. there was an ease to it, a refreshing and novel sense of not having anything to prove. and it just really fucked me up listening to it and thinking inescapably that these might be linked: that it really seemed like what happened, partly, was taylor swift fell in actual love and it let her give up on some of the frantic posturing that was choking her art. that something really good happened and it made space in her head and therefore in her songs for the beauty and the ache, the ugliness and the joy. i recognize that this has long since passed unhinged territory regarding speculation onto the spiritual journey of a famous stranger. i really don’t get like this about anyone else, including any of the many artists i like a lot more. blame it on the stars.

anyway, so that’s all a dementedly long way of saying that even beyond which the fact that nearly every track on this 18-track behemoth is undeniably Queliot Content, i have these preexisting bizarre and unreasonable feelings about the like meta-statement of lover as an album in taylor swift’s body of work, what it means not just as a collection of songs but as this album coming from this artist, which........... are also, now, Queliot Content???? because that’s all the quentin/eliot thing, right: these are two people who are very, very afraid of their own darkness. they latch onto these narratives of self partly to try to escape the parts of themselves they don’t want to look at. and it’s not even that those narratives are totally wrong: quentin really is brave and loyal and caring and all that hero stuff; eliot really is funny and sharp and fond of the finer things in life. (there’s nothing about lover that is not deeply, absolutely a taylor swift album.) but they’re incomplete. they’re archetypes. they don’t have room for the fullness of their hearts and their lives, the bad stuff and the good. they’re so afraid of their flaws and their pain that they can’t see their strengths or feel their joys. quentin in season 1 can’t see that really and truly alice doesn’t give a shit that he’s not as good a magician as she is, and that will only ever be an issue as long as he makes it one. eliot can’t see the depths of his own enormous heart, or trust margo’s love enough to follow up on her emotion-bottles plea to save their friendship. and this sucks for them, and also for the people around them! they do a lot of bad things in their attempts to protect themselves.

and the very lovely thing the show unbelievably seems to have well and truly done by accident and had no interest in exploring but which remains nonetheless delightful to consider rly is this exact idea of, like: together they find something good and it doesn’t fix anything but it makes space for everything. bleep blorp, beauty of all life. the bad and the good. they find something good and it helps them be brave. it helps them let go of who they’re “supposed” to be, not to reject every piece of it out of hand but to pick and choose: what here serves me still? what reflects who i am today? pruning away the defenses you just don’t need anymore. i used to think “i forgot that you existed” felt like a rep-overgrowth taylor mistakenly thought she needed, over-narrativized context-setting for an album that really stood on its own, and, i mean, it is that, a little bit. she’s still taylor; her version of chilling out is still most people’s frighteningly intense. but i like how weightless it is, how sonically it recaptures the kind of quiet elation of that feeling. how “i thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t” is about the strange distance of that past self so convinced she could never let go, which is to say it’s also about healing. about recognizing your own enough-ness so that you can see what it is you really need. quentin and eliot are both constantly asking this question: what is the thing that is going to fill up the space inside of me where i should have something else? is it school, magic, clothes, wine, a girl, a boy, a crown, a quest? and the answer is—it’s not “each other.” the answer is nothing. but their kind of open-hearted love is the thing they need to see that’s true.

#well this got... predictably unhinged #i was talking to someone about nostalgia for 2013 tumblr so this caught me in like #a particular mental place i guess #also it's feed your dad to cannibals day in the middle of quarantine #no apologies for content in either of those circumstances!!!!!#the magicans #kinda

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kierongillen · 5 years

Text

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 43

Spoilers, obv.

Issue 44 comes out tomorrow at the time of writing. As I’m on the west coast of the USA, it will be just after midnight GMT by the time they’re online. So abstractly, this is the first time ever which we come out when the next issue is out. Abstractly. I’d say the day counts as where I am, and doesn’t Comixology come out a little later? We’ll see.

It’s also been so long that I almost wrote notes for issue 44. This is a weird goodbye, this period.

Anyway – Issue 43, wherein we finish explaining all the big stuff we’re going to explain.

I mean, there’s more in issue 44 and 45, but it’s all details, with the denouncement really being based around the characters’ response to this issue. They know the truth. Now what are they going to do about it?

That was the main note I gave in the script to the team – if there’s any really big questions you are confused about, now is the time to say, as this is the best clarification it’ll get. As such, we worked on it a lot to nail what we wanted to say – and what we didn’t. Sometimes this meant actually simplifying a little to avoid repeating huge amounts of stuff and leaving people even more confused. More often it involves sliding in a little nod to something someone would be thinking about.

It’s an interesting issue, I think. It’s where we show a lot of our hand.

It also involved a lot of crunching.

Jamie/Matt Cover

Cassandra finally gets her head cover. Normally a cover relates to a key beat, which isn’t true here – except in the widest possible sense that it’s where Cassandra gets to say I Told You So to everyone, including herself.

Jason Latour Cover One of the fun things about commissioning these covers is getting to see a creator’s process close up. Jason’s process on this was amazingly never-ending – he was always tweaking, and trying things and moving in a different direction. Where he ended was stunning – very him, and very WicDiv too. I remember us and the Jasons semi-jokingly about swapping books for an issue – they do WicDiv for an issue and we do Southern Bastards. This cover absolutely makes me wonder how amazing that hypothetical issue would have looked.

(Our story would have been about a Taylor-Swift-esque-singer/songwriter-before-she-got-big in the town. And probably murder, as it’s Southern Bastards, right?)

IFC

That “Life goes on” still creeps me out.

1-2

Opening vignette that lets us establish what Minerva’s plan is now, as well as re-establish Beth and her crew, and actually let us define their current position, and even give their codenames, which have existed in the Bible document since issue 1, I believe.

(Oddly, calling people “Boss” is one of my verbal ticks. It seemed fun to give it to Beth here.)

As such, Minerva immediately HiveMinding them when they’ve just stated their agency is plain harsh. Jamie’s large panel on page 2 sells it incredibly well – the statues, Minerva walking away from us – it’s all so casual.

It’s also the running theme of the issue – what Mini has been doing all these years. This is just a particularly direct example of it.

Three panels on second page to try and stress the seriousness of what this is (Space = Meaning, remember). Of course, as the issue shows, this isn’t the real part of the issue – but you have to at least believe this is a real gambit. And it is – I mean, it’d be awful if Mini pulled it off. But in people’s guts they’d realise this isn’t how WicDiv goes, right?

Minor glorious Matt Wilson note – the crackle of green in panel 3 is wonderful. Give that guy another Eisner. He deserves a hat trick.

Show time in the showbiz and the “time to show you everything” sense.

Establishing the stakes and situation for the heroes. There’s a draft of the issue I wrote which is a couple more pages long, which would have pulled this out a little more. In the end, we decided it worked better shorter – I’ll tell you why when I get there, and we could use the space elsewhere.

Key thing is showing some response to Cam’s actions at the end of last issue – it’s important to know that they haven’t just walked away, right?

In the first panel, the “identify who is speaking” is a tricky one. The “say the character’s name” is a little brutal move, and I avoid it. We’re not that book. Dio is easy – and Lucifer, bless her, is immediately identifiable by her idiom. Her line also reminds people of what she’s like, which sets up the last page.

Laura’s captions here again, doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

It says so much about this issue that the last two panels are only a half page total. These are big rock and roll images, presented in a tiny space. Jamie’s composition makes it land really well, selling the drama.

Page 5

It says even more that we did all this in a page.

Tara’s move in the original version was basically a page, but looking at it structurally it actually left it even more underwhelmed – a fight kicked off, and then heroes were losing, and then Tara does this cool thing, and they’re winning, before immediately the hive mind kicks in and they’re losing again. This does not sell the joy of Giant Woman.

This works better, not least for sheer audaciousness. I used to have a thing about tableau based storytelling – the idea that you can create a large image which people can explore and juxtapose it with a few captions to create a larger conceptual space. This is very much that.

“People treating people like meat” reminds me for the second time when re-reading this issue of the line from Pratchett: “Sin is treating people like things.” The first time was the puppets bit. I’d agree with Pratchett, clearly.

In the original draft of the script I had a line “You want more? Go re-read Rising Action” which is a bit too cute, so I lost it. It’s not really the sort of thing WicDiv does, anyway.

Yes, Giant Woman is a Steven Universe nod. Putting aside that image of Giant Tara kicking ass which has been in my head forever, there’s so much to love in the image – to pick a small part, how about the Norns blasting in triplicate? We rarely see them act like this.

You can also trace via the colouring which of Beth’s crew have duplicated which God’s powers.

Page 6

There’s been a lot about people copying people’s powers in WicDiv, and trying to find out what someone can and can’t do, and then using it against them. This switches it up. The thing about being creative instead of a straight plagiarist that creative people make up new shit. That’s kind of the point of them.

Once more, Matt showing the dance of the colouring between the Woden green (haunting the series like a ghost now) and the joy of Dio is (er) a joy.

Page 7

Another Matt moment – we step out of the club, and we drop to greys, before building the energy up.

I’m not quite sure how long Robin has wanted to punch Beth for. Or how long I planned to do it, even. I can imagine Robin thinking of this a lot though – she’s the one who takes a long time to snap.

There’s a dual structure here too – there’s two main compare-and-contrast bands in WicDiv. Beth’s and Cass’…

Page 8

And this is a very different kind of band break up.

The problem here is different – I want to give much more space. First draft it seemed that they got talked into it really easily. But it’s all the space we had so what to do? Once more, captions. Silent panel with captions can be timeless, and gives room for our minds to populate it. It’s been so long I can no longer remember if the fact the two almost-silent characters are shouting, but we’re not allowed to hear, because it’s private seems relevant.

Page 9-10

Hard cut made easier with the caption. Captions are great. Trust captions.

The shot of Mini at the edge, just looking back with space either side is great. Just the isolation of it.

The “try to sing” on the page turn seems a meaningful reveal. Can she?

No she can’t. This is another very old beat in the founding documents – it’s hinted at on page 9. Mini says that she gave it up – and she said the same in issue 9. I’m not sure I believe her. When planning it I realised that some people would take it as a comment on Work for hire – don’t get stuck keeping a story alive forever, as it will eventually atrophy your talent. It wasn’t planned, but I’d be fine with it as a reading. When Chrissy read it, she took it as “Don’t get stuck in art management.” which works too. Readings are fun.

Anyway – a performance. That the big thing in the issue is a performance rather than a fight is very much WicDiv turning towards its core concept as we head towards the final straight. Of course we’d do this.

Yeah, Matt and Jamie, killing it on the final panel of the second page – the Persephone-esque tentacles made something else, because she is something else now. The numinous expression of Minerva. Amazing.

Page 11

The borders in this sequence harking back to the Persephone performance in issue 18.

I may actually try to tweak this sequence in the trade and have a different execution of “When I was 14” and all the rest, to work a little more like a LOC CAP rather than a speech. We couldn’t make it work given the time before deadline. That’s the odd thing about our extended issues – just because it’s taking longer doesn’t mean we have more time to do tasks, right? Some things are only possible when the whole thing is together. It works, I think, but part of me wants to push it harder.

Anyway – these two. I loved writing them though. I said it back in the other flashbacks, but how the two of them dance is a delight. Hell, doing them across a lifetime is a delight.

Okay – I’m going to give you a name for Ananke’s sister. It’s the one I used in my notes. It’s no more her name than “Ananke” is really Ananke’s.

It’s Demeter. Ask me about it another time.

Page 12

The “god” in panel 2 is a Proto Norn.

This primal gathering brings to mind issue 9 as well.

Demeter’s expression in the penultimate panel? Love it.

Page 13

The captions are Laura’s style, but changed colouring. That Laura is helping Minerva performs means it comes across in her voice, was our thinking.

Captions are once more useful though – trying to get something that is evocative, but also clear was the battle.

(The Colours here!)

She-in-Thirds is a name-behind-the-name. The Maiden/Mother/Child archetype – the one which Ananke subverted in a few pages time.

Page 14

I find myself thinking whether the return to a close-to-eight panel for much of this is meaningful. This is kind of Bronze Age Phonogram.

Reading this I wish I had capitalised The Rebel – it’s another archetype. Proto-Lucifer. I’ll tweak for the trade.

I forget when the metaphor for a song for the “godhood” in WicDiv came to me, but it feels like the right one. It’s how songs often feel to me.

Page 15

If you go back to issue 34, you’ll see some of the details of this plan are different to the plan that Ananke has put into play there. In fact, the deal that she strikes in issue 34 is akin to what she wants here. It’s mainly for clarity – the reader needs to be reminded of what’s actually going on, as they won’t necessarily remember the details from way back then. I figure this is the plan she wanted to do, then found something else when Demeter wasn’t into it, before swooping around to something closer.

Page 16

“After all my friends were dead” gives a little flex in the timeline.

I do like Ananke’s hat.

“The Great River” being the Nile, and the pantheon we saw back in issue 36.

In terms of lists of things in this issue I was looking forward to write, the first meeting between Ananke and Minerva was certainly one of them. I tried to get something of the oddness here. Jamie and Matt manage to get the mood of issue 34 again too – I really do like this bronze-age western vibe. There’s a project I keep on thinking about doing, and it has some of that too it. Hmm.

Yes, page width panel of character delivering a line remains a key WicDiv tool. There’s so much I love here – the touch from Ananke, whose PoV we’re in. Minerva speaking to herself, speaking to us, etc.

That the knife is just sentimental is a minor beat I’m very fond of.

Page 17

Once more, Captions, as Laura makes sure we all Get It.

One of the debates in WicDiv fandom has always been whether the gods are picked by Ananke (i.e. Anyone could be a god) or whether they’re actually people with a gifts. Of course, the answer is that it’s both.

The thing I least like about WicDiv’s mythology is that the 12 people are people with this gift, for obvious “Ugh Chosen Ones” reasons. There’s some things that mitigate that a little, I hope, and not least that it’s clearly transferable to wherever you are in life. The core of it is “if you find yourself with a gift, be careful with it and use it responsibly.” It’s a book about the power, privilege, dangers and seductions of being an artist and all that. It’s only when writing that sentence do I realise how tired I am. This has been a busy week. Excuse me if the writing is looser than usual.

Anyway, I’m probably over-worrying. If X-men is fine, we probably are too.

So – end of the page is a download of some of the explanations of stuff folk will inevitably be going “Wait – what?”

And then Tara steps up.

When you’re writing a large group scene, with limited space, there’s choices you make of who speaks and who doesn’t. Who’s going to have the strongest counter-argument to something? Who’s going to have the biggest reaction? Them. They’re the one who carries the scene.

Which is Tara. Perhaps you could make an argument for Baal, but Baal is reeling through all these issues – plus if you choose one or the other, you tie-breaker would be who hasn’t had spotlight.

Page 18-21

And the counter is equally inevitably Cassandra (who is also in the process of beating herself up). Being Cass, she puts it harshly. Clearly, this is going to get a response from Tara.. and Cass opens up herself and makes herself vulnerable. Which is a hell of a thing for her, right?

I’ll stop this – I’m just walking through the emotional flow, but I love these two women here.

Which segues into the last formalist style thing of the issue. Once again, we have a space = meaning problem. This is clearly the most important sequence of the issue, but we have so few pages. We turn to one of the core WicDiv moves of black panels in a six panel grid, and loading them up with text. Suddenly we have a sense of ritual, a lot of dialogue produced in a stylistic way and most of all a whole extra page (hence an extra page of weight).

It’s also a complete showcase for Matt. The last godly panel of them is them at their most Godly, this final little iconic burst. A confession, and it’s gone.

I cried when I got the colours for this. I forget which one it was – there’s just some wonderful Jamie expressions in there as well.

Choosing the confessions was definitely tricky. We have space, but too much is too much. Some of them I kept simple, and others needed a little space to explain. The ordering was also one of those processes where you feel out the character, and think how they’d speak. Dio would clearly jump in, then Inanna, then Mimir trying to just piece it together, and all leading to Baal.

I did try and write a Baal caption, but any words were just too small.

And then, of course…

Page 22

You’ve probably seen me talking about year 4 as Solving The Equation. Yes, we knew lots of the key things, but there’s lots of elements of the execution were worked, and rethought and discovered. I may be able to talk a little more about this in the last issue’s notes.

This was a big one. I was chewing over the synopsis and thinking… a battle against Ananke/Minerva is a little underwhelming after everything, right? At this point in the story, Minerva is a busted flush. In reality, Laura (and Demeter) won the intellectual battle against Minerva in Mothering Invention. She’s already beat her. It nagged at me. There was something else.

Then there was the other thing – I knew that Lucifer was going to get her body back, but I wasn’t entirely sure what she’d do when she had it.

The two came together: of course, the final confrontation isn’t between Laura and Minerva. It’s with Lucifer, the person who brought Laura into the world, the person who brought us all into the world. The girl who wanted to be on stage, no matter the cost. That’s the final battle.

And best of all, I had no idea what would happen.

Well – not quite, but suddenly a whole lot of things was up in the air.

Page 23

Song reference, obv. Always connected to something in my head in my early career. If I do writer notes for the playlist, I may actually tell you.

Oh – some people wondered whether all the skulls meant everyone was dead. No – it’s just there’s no god in the slot. I’m not that kind of shithead.

Anyway – issue is out tomorrow. Or maybe today, depending on where you are. It ends the story, with 45 being an epilogue with a somewhat different tone. Clearly, it’s a huge issue, so be a little careful with your tweeting. The last cover is especially a big spoiler.

Thanks for your patience and thanks for reading.

#WicDiv #the wicked and the divine #jason latour #writer notes

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karliesbuzzcut · 4 years

Note

The thing that’s frustrating about Kaylors is they ignore Brandy Carlisle, Janelle Monae, Saint Vincent, King Princess, Frank Ocean, Kevin Abstract, Lil NasX. Tyler, the Creator. Troye Sivan, Sam Smith, Dev Hynes, MUNA and countless other queer artists who are thriving and would ADORE their support, to obsess about a straight singer (who has written so many albums about her boyfriends) and a model who is straight and married a man. Tinhats keep trying make kaylor real. What is the point of it?

Because at the end of the day it’s still a conspiracy theory.

A while ago I was listening to this guy who didn’t consider himself a flat-earther but he was willing to contemplate the idea because it aligned with his ideology. He believes humans have a reason for existing and are essential to the universe. And the earth being flat would confirm it. After all, it would mean it’s only us here, under a massive ceiling beautifully decorated simply for our enjoyment.

All that sounds beautiful, and I kind of wish I could believe it. It’s comforting, I bet.

I can’t help but notice the similarities in the sentiments just mentioned and those ones which move the Kaylor fandom. A lot of people would love Taylor to be gay because they are part of the LGBTQ community themselves, for example. And it’s only human to want to see ourself in our heroes. Know that this talented, beautiful and brave woman has gone through the same struggles we have, but has found love and success too.

But it’s not only about that, is it? Which takes me to what you, anon, were talking about. If people were simply searching for a role model to identify with, they could find one on that list you made.

So while our search for comfort and security is a big factor in what attracts us to conspiracy theories, it isn’t the only thing.

Kaylors constantly talk about how it wouldn’t make sense for Taylor to be straight. That the pieces simply don’t fit. And it’s not a Kaylor exclusive condition to want to know why Taylor worded her lyrics in such a way. And I’d understand that if your personal way of interpreting her songs directs you to certain conclusions, it would be frustrating to find out they don’t match her current lifestyle. And we as a specie hate uncertainty so we not only come up with a million questions but also with answers for them. However we, again, being human can only answer questions in ways that fit our worldview, and it’s almost inevitable that we are going to reach the wrong conclusion. But that’s cool right? We make assumptions all the damn time and then someone tells us why we are wrong. Maybe we are a bit embarrassed at the beginning but we accept it and move on... Unless you are emotionally invested.

That’s where these two first points meet. “Taylor Swift’s songs seem to carry such a gay narrative, but she’s not gay? But she hangs out with this girl so much and she holds her hand? And she never mentions her supposed boyfriend? Things don’t add up for me, and the only way they will add up with the information I have is that she’s gay. Now, I know she just said she’s not a part of the LGBTQ community but I really like the idea of her and Karlie so she must have meant she isn’t part of the Transexual community. Fixed.”

And lastly, they are, after all: THE KAYLORS, their group has a name and everything. Where am I going with this? We freaking love being a part of a community. And I can identify with that. I know I’m still new here, but I love this little group I’ve found here. I get to talk to a bunch of people who have similar interests, beliefs and sense of humour. How can I not find comfort in that?

However, Kaylors are a step above. It’s not any community, you see, it’s a community in constant contact with Taylor. Taylor supposedly, sends coded messages that only they are able to interpret, so she holds them dear. She counts on them for support and her own comfort, making this a symbiotic relationship.

Anyway, the exam is on Thursday, hope you took notes. byeeeee

#kaylor #taylor swift

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freedom-shamrock · 5 years

Text

Bi the Pricking of my Thumbs #4

<< Chapter 3

Cautionary note: This chapter includes a references to and conversations with unsupportive queer-phobic parents, some bigotry, and use of straight nonsense. There is also a dildo for comedic purposes.

Also on AO3. If you’re so inclined, feel free to support me over on Ko-Fi

Chapter 4

Ladybug looked out into the colorful sea of Pride celebrants pouring into Place de la République. The energy was amazing, and she couldn't keep the smile off her face. "Oh gosh, check out those wings!" She slapped at Chat's arm to draw his attention to the wire and sheer-fabric construction heading their way. They sat at the feet of the statue of Marianne, where they could catch a good look at the parade while also keeping an eye out for trouble. They'd already delivered two pickpockets, a lost child, and an obvious full-spectrum queer-phobe to the police. The last one had been the most concerning, given that he had a butane lighter and a soaker style water gun loaded with something that smelled highly flammable.

"Wings?" Chat Noir said, frantically looking into the sky.

"No, silly," she said with a laugh. She tilted his head back to the crowd. " Good wings. Down there."

"I'm kind of surprised people still wear butterfly wings around here," he said, his smile bright as he waved to the shirtless man who had realized his articulated wings had caught the attention of Paris' heroes. "Oh geez, he's hot, too."

Ladybug laughed again. She just felt so full of happiness, surrounded by this celebration, sharing it with her best friend. "He really is. But I get a feeling he'd be more accepting of your advances than mine."

"Pffft." He snorted. The rainbow wings opened to flash paired male symbols in the upper half of the forewing, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the man was wiggling his eyebrows suggestively at Chat..

"Was it hard for you to get away?" she asked. His father had continued to get weirder as the annual Pride festival approached. Likewise, Gabriel had been increasingly strict with Adrien's schedule, and she worried for both of them.

Chat Noir shrugged. "As far as I know, he thinks I'm in my room binging on anime."

She shook her head, disgusted. She'd already approached her parents about letting Adrien move in with them if he found he couldn't stand it with his father any longer. She wondered if it was time to extend the same welcome to Chat Noir. He deserved it just as much.

"What about you?" he asked. "You’re here with friends, right?"

"Yeah." She nodded. "I'm supposed to be marching with my school's Gender and Sexuality Alliance. I started the parade with them." She shrugged. "Fortunately, I have a reputation as a total space cadet, and in this crowd they won't be surprised to have lost me halfway through the parade."

He gawked at her. "Your friends think you're a ditz? Ladybug? The genius behind this operation?" He gestured to the two of them.

She shrugged. "It just reinforces the idea that normal me is nothing like Ladybug. And that's good. Besides, I'm not the only clever one here."

He frowned. "I'm not sure I'm on board with them thinking poorly of you just for a cover. You're amazing, Milady. And I'd bet you're just as amazing in your regular life."

She gave him a hug. "And you're a sweetheart." He melted against her, as he usually did when hugged. "If you need more hugs today, there are some forty and fifty-year olds walking around with shirts that say free mom hugs and free dad hugs." Her parents happened to be part of that group, wearing shirts she'd screen-printed.

"That sounds heavenly." He sat back up. "Eew, cultural appropriation to your right." He shook his head, raising his baton to snap a quick picture. "What do Native American warbonnets have to do with sexuality?"

“Nothing.” Ladybug rolled her eyes. "Like anything, this festival can be used as an excuse to cross some lines that shouldn't be. What are you doing?"

"I'm going to make a post about that kind of thing. Later." His head turned the other way, and his hand came up to cover his mouth. "Holy crap. Look. At. Those. Platforms."

She searched for a moment, eventually finding the person in a fluffy white tutu standing precariously in platform shoes that were easily twelve inches high. "Wow. Those are like… they're nearly as tall as the Chix on Stix stilts were."

"Blister city," Chat said. " Mad respect for them making it through the parade in those."

"I bet Adrien Agreste could handle those," she said, smiling at the thought of Adrien sweeping down the runway in those ridiculous things. He'd grown quite fond of the over-the-top nature of runway, preferring it to the bland studio shoots he did far too many of. And to be fair, he was crazy good at it.

"Really?" Chat grinned at her, then eyed up the person in the platforms again. "I know he's good, Paris' golden boy and all, but those might be out of his league."

Ladybug vehemently shook her head, and opened her bandalore to catch a picture. "He's a god among men when it comes to fashion and presentation."

"You've got that look," he said, arching one eyebrow. "What's going on in that clever brain of yours?"

"I want to challenge Adrien to walk in a pair of those," she said. "It might take me a few days to figure out how to pitch it, but I think he'd enjoy the opportunity to flaunt his skills."

"Keep me in the loop on that," Chat Noir said. "I want to see how that turns out."

"Will do." She tucked her bandalore away.

"Is your sweetheart not coming to Pride?" he asked, as if suddenly realizing that could be a thing. "I'm not keeping you from something important to them, am I?"

She patted his shoulder. "They don't care for crowds, and prefer to watch the parade and big festivities on TV. They're hosting a party with several of our friends tomorrow, because we know some other queer folk who need a lower key event." She wished she could invite Adrien, but he wasn't ready to share his identity with anyone else. He'd scheduled a visit with Luka, though, so she was cautiously optimistic that his future was going to be brighter. Their friend group wasn’t remotely hetero, and she was reasonably sure they could all keep a secret. Alya had come out as pan and poly shortly after her amicable split with Nino at the beginning of Lycee. She was currently in a relationship with both Chloe and Kagami that utterly baffled Marinette, but as long as her friend was happy, it didn’t matter. Nino had been a quieter about his orientation, but he’d casually dated men and women, and she strongly suspected he was holding a torch for his best friend..

Chat Noir reached to point out something of interest, but a sudden blast of pop music that could only be Taylor Swift drowned out the sounds of the parade. He froze, his eyes wide and his tail stiff with alarm.

"Crapity snacks," Ladybug muttered. "Looks like breaktime is over, Kitty." She rose to peer around the statue to see the akuma. He stood on the taller brick corner tower of a building on the corner of Rue du Faubourg du Temple. He was dressed all in blue, carrying a white flag featuring old school male and female symbols holding hands.

"Odds on it being that piece of trash we picked up earlier," Chat suggested.

"It's either him, or someone just like him," she muttered. “So gross.”

"I'm The Oppressed, and I'm sick of being spit on by the heterophobic queers of Paris!" the akuma bellowed in a magically amplified voice. "You degenerates have infected my daughter with your alternative lifestyles, so today we're going to celebrate straight pride!"

"Ugh," Ladybug groaned. "Such straight nonsense."

The Oppressed waved his flag at the closest group of revelers, and a beam of white light washed over them, changing their clothes into conservative blue suits or pink dresses. Those now in pink had long styled hair, full makeup, and jewelry that many would have considered feminine. Those in blue had short hair and broad watches and briefcases.

"Oh hells no!" Ladybug drew back her bandalore, preparing to throw. "We need to get him the fuck out of here. There are people here with significant gender dysphoria, and we are not letting Hawkass do this to them during their festival." She loosed her bandalore, cutting through the sky directly in The Oppressed's view, and landing on the corner tower across the street from him. "You want my earrings, you ugly bigot? Come and get them!" She swished her bi flag cape at him, hoping the taunt was enough to refocus his attention.

"Ladybug!" The Oppressed shouted. "You're the worst offender. Your speeches boasting about your disgusting choice convinced my daughter to come out as pansexual."

"I'm proud of your daughter," Ladybug called back. She felt bad for the girl who had this man as her father. "You'd do better to love her for who she is , than for who you think she should be."

"You know nothing of parenting." The harsh voice carrying over the roof behind The Oppressor gave her chills; for the first time in over a year, Hawk Moth had shown up for one of his own fights. "You're a mere child. And children need guidance from their parents."

She wanted to punch that smug look right off his face.

"Children are suggestible and will make foolish decisions at the encouragement of their stupid friends and… heroes." He sneered the last word.

He was furious, and it was obvious. Could she get him irrational enough to make a mistake? Perhaps today was the day they would finally capture the moth. "Awww. You make it sound so personal," she said, pouting at him, hoping to feed his anger. "Wait-wait-wait. Do you actually have kids?" Now that was a horrifying thought.

He scowled. "If you must know, yes. My naive son is here some where, thanks to you and those idiot friends of his." God his words were so very Gabriel. It was like they used the same conservative parenting guide. "You've made him think there's no harm in exploring--" He was cut off by a sudden roar from the crowd of Pride attendees that rose over the chorus of the pop song How You Get the Girl.

A blast of glitter-filled air rose to the rooftops, plastering both Hawk Moth and The Oppressor in sparkles. She glanced down and saw Chat Noir with a group of people including the butterfly man they'd admired earlier. In a coordinated effort, Chat spun his baton to create a strong enough wind to carry a second pile of glitter up to the villains.

"You take care of Chat Noir!" Hawk Moth snapped, coughing out a cloud of sparkly fragments. "I'll handle the bug."

"I do not consent to your hands being anywhere near me," Ladybug sassed. The very idea creeped her out, but he was the one who introduced hands to the conversation. "Hasn't anyone ever taught you that no means no?" She threw her bandalore up. "Lucky charm!" She caught the spotted item glancing quickly at it, then grinning as she looked across the street at the man who had terrorized Paris for years.

Hawk Moth's confident bearing faltered a moment.

"So tell me Hawky, you wanna get lucky?" She held aloft the sizeable silicone dildo, shaking it enough to make it wiggle and almost giggling as he visibly blanched. "I think my miraculous is suggesting that you need a bit of help getting rid of some tension." She heard chaos below, and suddenly Chat Noir was beside her.

"Milady, I bring you the spoils of war." He knelt, presenting her with the hideous flag.

"Oh Kitty, you always know what I want." She traded the dildo for the flag. "Keep tabs on our dear friend for me. I'd hate for him to go fluttering off." She snapped the thin flagpole in half, ripping the banner for good measure. Once the purified butterfly was released, and the few Parisians who'd been modified by the akuma had been restored, she could focus on the rest of this situation.

"Might I trouble you for one of your ribbons?" Chat Noir asked, watching their long time enemy with a look that could only be described as predatory. "I have an idea."

Hawk Moth's composure was clearly shaken, and he suddenly scrambled to the far edge of the tower, clearly planning to drop to a lower portion of the building's roof in retreat.

Ladybug slipped one of her ribbons free, dropping it into Chat's hand. "I look forward to putting your idea into action. I'll keep Monsieur Hate-Filled-Bigot from straying too far, while you do that." She soared over the gap between the buildings. Early in their tenure as heroes, she'd been responsible for all the ideas. While she'd always managed to come through, it had been terribly stressful. It was such a relief to find that her partner had his share of good plans.

Hawk Moth yanked a sabre out of his cane, training the tip on her. "I will not hesitate to pin you to the roof like an insect in a display box," he snarled.

Close melee with edged weapons was more of Chat's thing, but changing the situation in her own favor, was hers. "I'd love to see you try." Her wrist snapped out, wrapping the line of her bandalore around the thin blade. A quick yank pulled the weapon out of his hand, sending it clattering to the roof behind her.

Hawk Moth let out a screech of rage. It was cut off as Chat Noir launched himself overhead, arcing gracefully to land farther down the roof, trapping their enemy between them.

Chat thumped the bottom of his staff against the roof, and the dildo he'd tied upright on the top jiggled in response. "Mine's better than yours," the cat superhero said proudly. He gestured to his enhanced weapon in case the modification hadn't been immediately clear. He twirled the staff in his hands before lunging and jabbing it at Hawk Moth.

Ladybug grinned, realizing her partner's plan as Hawk Moth apparently forgot all about her in his desire to get away from the spotted silicone dick. With a light tug, her cape came off in her hands. Two quiet steps and she flicked the end out to snap Hawk Moth's cheek.

In a matter of moments, she was able to wrap the man in a tight cocoon of magical pride fabric, only his neck and head free. If Chat's final blow, a slap of the dildo to Hawk Moth's temple, came later than strictly necessary, she wasn't going to mention it. The jerk had ruined a ridiculous number of her plans over the years. She stared at him for a moment, the way she might assess an akuma in search for the object they needed to break.

“Tie tack,” she said, keeping her grip on the villain lest he should escape when they were so close to winning.

Chat reached out and plucked the miraculous from Hawk Moth's collar, and the costume vanished in a wave of purple light, leaving Gabriel Agreste tightly bundled in a bisexual pride flag. The irony was not wasted on Ladybug.

"Oh." Chat said softly. "Well I guess that makes more sense than it doesn't."

Furious that the man who had been terrorizing Paris for most of her teen years was Adrien's asshole father, Ladybug grabbed his lapels and gave a yank. As he lurched forward, she brought up her knee, driving it into his nose.

"You'll pay for that," Gabriel snarled as blood dribbled down his face. "Brutality of a suspect in your custody is a punishable offense."

"Brutality?" Chat asked calmly. "I didn't see anything. You must've gotten your nose broken during the fight." He shrugged. "If only Ladybug hadn't already cured Paris of your akuma's damage… I guess you'll just have to live with it." He shook his head in mock sympathy. "Oh look!" He pointed to a collection of cop cars, their lights flashing as they parked along Rue du Faubourg du Temple. "Your escort has arrived to take you to your new home."

Ladybug helped Chat Noir deliver Gabriel to the police but had to go recharge while they took Chat's statement. By the time she'd gotten far enough from the festival to feed Tikki, retransform, and return, there was no sign of the cavalcade that had appeared to deliver Gabriel to the station. In fact, it took her another ten minutes of searching to find her partner, sitting cross-legged as he watched the parade continue to fill Place de la République. He looked a little sad, maybe wistful.

"Hey Kitty," she said, alighting beside him.

"Welcome back, Bug." He sighed, leaning into her as she slipped an arm around him.

"So that just happened," she said. It didn't quite feel real.

He plucked the tiny miraculous from one of his pockets, holding it out to her. "It definitely did."

"Do you want to hold onto it until we get it to Fu?" she asked.

"That would be inadvisable," he replied. "But thank you for trusting me."

She slipped the miraculous into one of the pockets she'd demanded when she'd re-designed her suit a few years back. "So Hawk Moth's out of the picture, and we always said we'd do a reveal once that was done," she pointed out.

He nodded, but didn't leap on the idea the way she expected him to.

"I'm kind of in a mood to beat the crap out of biphobic fathers," she said, squeezing his shoulder. "So I may as well find out who you are. And if he's a real piece of work, you can come live with me."

He stared at her, slowly blinking. "Really?"

She nodded. “I’m friends with Adrien Agreste. I can tell you that now. And I’ve already gotten permission from my parents for him to take the guest room.” She sighed. “I figured he might need an escape from his father, and that was before I knew he was Hawk Moth.”

“And your parents were just okay with that?” he asked, his eyes wide with shock.

“They love Adrien. They’d adopt him if they could.” She gave him a sad smile.

“I bet he’d let them,” he said softly, oddly choked up.

“I’m sure the same goes for you,” she insisted, already considering logistics. She could take the spare room, giving Adrien and Chat her room to share. “Now are you going to let me know who you are so I can rough up your father, or what?”

He laughed. “You already did, Bug.” He shook his head. “Hawk Moth was my father, and I am totally moving in with you.”

* * * * * * * *

Chapter 5 >>

Inspirations: Articulated Wings Platform Shoes

#Miraculous Ladybug #fanfic #my writing #Pride #Bi Pride #galahadwilder #Bi the Pricking of my Thumbs #Bi-Drien #Bi-Nette #Bi-phobic parent #capes

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