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billxharry · 4 years

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The Day Before You Came should have been Harry’s song, not Donna’s: A Rant

You know, I very much wish they hadn’t included The Day Before You Came on the HWGA soundtrack. Not that Meryl’s version isn’t lovely, it absolutely is, and I listen to it often, savouring the much too minimal amount of Meryl’s Donna we got for this film, but knowing they never wrote any sort of context for her singing it, and never even had a plan to do so, because it was always just going to be on the soundtrack is a let down, especially when there was a certain character who could have benefited from being given the song.

If a song is included on the soundtrack, especially for a musical, where every song tells the story, I like to think it should fit somewhere in the film, but I just don’t think it works contextually for Donna in this film, and even more importantly, I personally don’t feel it fits Donna’s character in general. This movie is focused on young Donna particularly. Exuberant, passionate, bold and living her life with only the occasional and fleeting doubt. This song certainly doesn’t fit her at all at this stage of her life, before Sam. Her heartbreak over him, while justified, is at least somewhat eased in this movie by the arrival of Tanya and Rosie, then by Bill showing up and whisking her away, (I like to believe Harry arrived later as well, as I refuse to believe they were just that lazy as to not get the order from the journal correct, so Harry arrived at the island after Bill, they just didn’t show it, end of story. That would also help bridge where I feel HWGA! went terribly wrong in portraying young Harry and Donna’s encounter, as I have the hardest time believing the fondness shown in the first movie would exist between them based on that singular encounter alone, especially on Donna’s part. Perhaps another ramble about that at another time.) The most impactful of anything though, for Donna, was giving birth to Sophie.

Emotionally, for me, this song would have only have had a chance to fit in the first movie when we actually see the emotional hurt Donna has struggled with the years after Sam left, not in prequel sense, when what we see is Donna moving on as best she can, and knowing in the future her and Sam later wed and were happy. (For much too short of time. I will never stop being mad at this.) Even if they had put this song in the musical/first film, it still wouldn’t have fit, character wise for me, though. The Winner Takes It All was a much more fitting choice to convey those emotions.

What Sam put her through affected her greatly, and continues to do so, we do see that in the first movie, but both movies also make it a point to make it clear Donna pushes on, somewhat because she has no choice when she finds out she’s pregnant, but also because she’s Donna. She’s strong and independent, she doesn’t conform to the things others would think to do, and even when we see how these events have weighed on her as the years progressed, we also see at heart she will always remain Donna Sheridan, life and soul of the party, and how that spirit has always remained. What fight and determination she always had, she devoted use for raising Sophie, to giving her everything she needed in absence of a father, and I would certainly not label that a listless and aimless life of routine. In fact, with raising a child on her own, while also managing the inn by herself, we see the opposite is in fact true. She’s overworked and her life is a crazy rush of every possible job and ever changing responsibilities.

(An aside, I am aware that there’s a long standing thought that in the original ABBA song, the you the song is directed to may actually be Death, and yes Donna (unfortunately) did die (WHY.) So technically, it could be looked at that way as to why Donna would be singing it in the second film. That works even less, though, since the type of life that is sung about is especially not the type of life Donna would be telling Death she was living after the first movie where she got her (much too short lived 😡) happy ending. If Sam wasn’t the you Donna was singing to, and it was indeed a deathly entity, that’s an absurd notion to me. She would literally be saying her life was lonely and dull and without aim before she died? And had been for a very long time? Despite the first film showing us was that was never true? We’d also have to be ignoring the prominence that was placed on Sophie and Donna’s bond, her bond with Tanya and Rosie, the fact that Sam and Donna wed and we can assume were happy during the time before she got ill and passed away... No, be it if the the “you” is referring to Sam or Death, neither scenario works for Donna in my opinion.)

The Day Before You Came describes a life that runs on almost a precise schedule, without anything unexpected happening. Always being able to follow an exact schedule, always being able to have time to watch tv, read, get to bed for a lot of rest... It’s painful in how excruciatingly bland the existence of the life of the singer is. Unchanged, day in, day out. The singer is going through the motions of life, but not living it. They are lonely, alone. As I mentioned, Donna’s work life is anything but on an exact schedule, but even more importantly, emotionally that’s not life for Donna raising her daughter. Sophie means everything to her. While the romance with Sam coming to fruition at the end of the first movie is extremely fulfilling and what you want for Donna, the movie also makes it a point to show the true heart of the movie is the relationship between Donna and her best friends, but even more than that the most pivotal relationship Donna will ever have is the one she has with Sophie. She was not romantically fulfilled, that’s unarguably true, and she was absolutely overworked and overwhelmed, but she had Sophie and that meant everything to her, made everything worth it. The second movie, with My Love, My Life once again hammered that point home. Donna’s life was never what The Day Before You Came describes, and the biggest reason why was Sophie. I mentioned the Winner Takes It All being a much more apt choice, and it is. It’s very easy to see the romantic and emotional context to that song, and it’s definitely a song sung to a lover who you were hurt by. The Day Before You Came is... about a lot more than just the romantic side of things.

Give Donna/Meryl material, absolutely YES, but couldn’t it have been relevant? And seeing as we had to suffer through the terribly unnecessary death story-line, I would have loved had she got some truly joyous material, as we see her at the end of the first film, the type of material she deserved...

Ol Parker talking about this song, saying it was never going to be in the film, just on the album because “It’s so specific and I couldn’t find a way to make it work.” is incredibly disappointing for me, because no, you couldn’t find a way to make it work for Donna because it didn’t fit her, her character, or the life she had lead. However, there absolutely was one character who absolutely could have sung that song and it absolutely would have worked. Hmmmm, who could it be, who could it be, this is such an impossible connection to make apparently... a rather seemingly by the book character, who is living an unfulfilling life, alone, going to dull job, going home to an empty house and repeating it every day... hmmm. HMMM.

Honestly though, go and listen to the song or read the lyrics, and tell me that song would not have absolutely have been perfect for Harry. I can’t understand having a character it fits so incredibly well, but saying “it’s too specific, can’t possibly put it in the film.” Especially when you created two characters for the *sole* purpose of making Cher being able to sing Fernando work, but you can’t make a song work that fits a pre-existing character like a glove. Granted, Ol made it apparent he didn’t actually understand or care all that much about the “older dads” (the older cast in general was treated very poorly in this film as I have said 1000 times.) They absolutely should have had more to do acting wise, but singing wise as well. The first movie was successful because of the cast it had. Yes. Some of the singing was panned by people. A lot of people. But the success of the film was still indisputable, so I see absolutely no reason for including so little of what made it work to begin with. Colin especially could have pulled this song off vocally. They had a chance to really enhance the source material, expand on the characters we loved, and instead we got regressions of the the worst sort.

I obviously would want this song to be about Bill from Harry’s perspective, because Bill absolutely had every means to remedy all of this for Harry. Who better to give him adventures, spontaneity, love, ... and how easy it would have been. (Heck, it could have even have been sung about Sophie changing his life so thoroughly. I would of course prefer it be about Bill, because like Donna, Sophie means the world to Harry, but also like Donna, Harry deserves romantic fulfillment as well. I just want just Harry to have someone who has the ability to help him out of that life... The first film knew where the faults were in Harry’s life, and by the end of the movie they were on the path of trying to remedy that. No, I will never say Petros was the answer, but at least they tried, and more than that he unarguably had Sophie at the end. A daughter he so wanted. Harry’s life should have changed, at least in some way. By no means should we have ended up with him right back where he was, being unhappy and unfulfilled. This song, had it been given to Harry, would have felt like they were acknowledging this character, this life, and I would hope the “you” in the song would be enough to show that his life was able to move beyond that.

In all this, I don’t mean to say this is a happy song, of course not. There’s a sadness in the lyrics, a melancholia, especially with the slowed tempo and beautiful accompaniment by Benny that they gave the song for the HWGA soundtrack. That particular version really amps up that feeling, and that is why, as much as I dislike the fact that Harry is right back to being miserable, this song still could have worked with that story line. Take for example- In Bill, Harry had found someone who really made him evaluate the life he had been living, seeing it for what it really was and just how unhappy he had been, but now he has been given the potential to change that. Traveling with Bill has changed everything. For him. However, perhaps as far as he is aware, that feeling of finding someone who could change your life so thoroughly was one-sided, that this particular love was unrequited, and the things that they did together that meant everything to him, didn’t have the same impact on Bill, at least to his knowledge. Cue The Day Before You Came, a quiet but impactful reveal of the depth of Harry’s feelings, and the push Bill needs to work up his own courage to show Harry has changed his life just as much. Ideally, Bill would sing a short reprise of the song with lyrics written to convey what was missing in his life before Harry came into it, and finally they would both be in total understanding. Is this absolutely cliche and fanfic worthy? Oh, no doubt. It’s not the most deep or profound working of the song, I am aware. However, it is Mamma Mia! and I feel that’s allowed.

Having Harry sing this song would have been acknowledgement of a sort, that yes, this is back where this beloved character is at, and this is why, but there is something, someone, in his life that can help him out of it, and he can have his happy ending. I just feel that is a lot more meaningful than what we got, which is just... nonchalance about the whole thing. “Yep, there was supposed to be an awakening of sorts for Harry at the end of the first movie, but that doesn’t really matter, he’s miserable and unhappy, alone, still, right back in that lifestyle he was so unhappy in, five years later. It’s not actually worth the time to acknowledge any of this or try to remedy it, though, it’s not important. He’s going to end the movie in the same unhappy and lonely fashion, but hey, Fernando!” And we are stuck with a song, though absolutely beautifully sung, by a character it doesn’t fit, as a throw away soundtrack inclusion, nothing more, and a missed and extremely easy to see opportunity to give it to a character who really could have used it...

#Harry Bright #Donna Sheridan #Mamma Mia!#Mamma Mia! Here we go again!#I haven't posted a rambling rant in so long #so this feels good #I have actually been sitting on this one for a little bit though #It's so long #I would say I am sorry but i am not #I have a lot of Mamma Mia! feelings #whoops didn't tag #Bill Anderson/Harry Bright #but of course it is #typos abound I am sure #I am actually sorry about that though

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thegreencircleone · 4 years

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A Belated 10/10 Story

The Girl from Out of Town.

((Eloni gets hit on/hits on someone.))

October 10th, 9 pm. Officially 1010’s 6th birthday.

It was between a few big events; but honestly from looking at Eloni, the green Android, one could not tell. October 10th was a big night for 1010, but it was one of Eloni’s favorite nights in general (apart from maybe new-years)... Even now he wandered to-and-fro speaking with guests, introducing himself, even pairing people off with other dancers.

A robot’s job was never truly done, but Eloni lived for this! 1010 loved to party, but Eloni in particular loved THIS party. He loved the formal wear, the excuse to get gussied up, the copious amounts of booze and alcohol, the exorbitant amount of food (though he couldn’t enjoy it). Right now he was waiting primarily for the game of croquembouche jenda- but as he did so he scanned the room for any negative or alarming emotions.

… And that is exactly what he found.

Bar.

Eloni slowly maneuvered his way in between throngs of party-goers toward the bar; his vision of the emotions causing the disturbance to his radar began to ping more completely. Anger was brewing loudly at the bar, though the cause remained a mystery. There was no fight, no arguing that he could detect; it seemed like the barely contained rage was simply stewing there on it’s own…

And then it’s source came into view.

At the bar sat a woman with vibrant yellow skin, brownish hair with streaks of medium blond curled into a loose, low, and messy bun at her neck. Her jewelry was simple and ornate, but hung close to her body aside from her sequined headband and row of pearls that hung in a knot all the way down to her navel, and her dress was an old-fashioned tabard-style dress of white and sequined gold and copper. She looked less like a party-goer, and more like a run-away or jilted bride.

She was stunning, even if you didn’t have a thing for the art-deco look… Or her pretty, pissy face as she slowly sipped whatever drink she had in that martini glass. This mystery woman also did not look like she was a typical party-guest for the 1010 crowd.

Eloni needed to intervene.

And that’s just what he was going to do.

Eloni slid up to the bar-stool right beside her. “You know;” he began with an earnest grin. “I thought the Captain turned off the time-machine before the party.”

The mystery woman stopped, looked up at him and gave him a dubious scowl. For a moment they stared at each other in mutual silence as the heartbeat of the EDM around them did some of the talking for them.

She locked eyes with her as she took a pointed sip from her glass as he started to continue.

“Hey. Name’s Elo-” but the Android stopped his sentence half-way through as he realized something much more interesting to talk about. “Oh wow. Your eyes are pretty.”

The woman continued to sip her drink, this time her brows knit in confusion. Beneath fluttering, heavily eye-lined lashes and golden eye-shadowed lids lay a set of perfectly vibrant emerald eyes- with a ring of ultra-light purple around her pupils.

Finally, she spoke. “That’s it?” she asked. “... I thought y’were some sorta robo-casanova. You pick up most skirts like this?”

Eloni was flabbergasted.

“I mean- I…” he blinked as he tried to unpack what all the heck she just said. “Oh. OH, no. I’m not- I’m not a lady-killer. That’s uh- that’d be my brother. He’s… Uh…” Eloni felt his shoulders ride up in awkward embarrassment as he gestured elsewhere. “I just… Uh. I didn’t greet you as you came in and you seemed really mad, and I thought I’d come over to… You know?”

“Shoot the shit?”

“... Help?” Eloni offered, smiling. “What are you drinking? Where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

From where he sat the woman’s ire retreated noticeably. She was still angry, but now she was more… Uncomfortable than angry. Well… No. Mostly angry… She just wasn’t the rage-filled time-bomb waiting to go off.

She looked back to Eloni, who by now was leaning halfway over the bar, trying his best to be suave. He thought for a moment that her anger retreated entirely-- and then the rage was back.

She let out an audible noise, crossed her legs the opposite direction from him and returned to her drink. “One; if this is your attempt to get me to say by boozin’ me up; don’t bother. It’s lemonade, sugar. Two; you just insulted my dress. Why the heck’d I’d tell ya where I’m from?”

Eloni sat up. “What? Nooo. I didn’t- I didn’t mean to insult your-” he gave her a once-over again. 1010 wasn’t really programmed to oggle fans, at least not discriminate, but Eloni still found her sense of style utterly different and definitely worth looking at. The dress, be it old-fashioned definitely fit her pretty well, and upon closer inspection it wasn’t white; but a very pale yellow. She looked and talked like a gangsters wife from some of those old mob movies.

“My eyes are up here, birthday boy.”

“Sorry!” he said on instinct.

The mystery woman turned around in her seat and finally looked at him again. “Don’t’cha have some fan to flirt with?” she asked. “Doubtless this is comfortable for you.”

Eloni smiled a little more. “Try me! My prime directive is to make sure all our fans have a good time at our birthday party!... Annnnd you seem dead-set on being pissed.”

The woman gave him a disbelieving look and crossed her arms, letting her drink sit on the counter empty. “Butter my scotch n’ call me in the mornin’, you ain’t gunna give up on this, are ya?”

“I’m programmed to make people smile!” Eloni insisted, sitting up straight and giving a little, informal salute. “Noooo frowns on my birthday!”

“Uh-huh…”

Eloni relaxed and leaned a little closer to her. “So, seriously baby. If I’m bothering you; I can always get one of my brothers. I’m not the popular one, but you say the word! All I want is a smile from you, and it’d be the best birthday gift.”

“Ppft,” the woman dismissed, but then she got a little quiet. “... No offense…” she said quietly. “... I’m flattered, but, seriously. You should go try to flirt with one of your fans, okay?” she asked. “It’s sweet you’re trying to make me feel better, but it’s not going to do much for me.”

“SiiiiSTER!” came a bombastic voice from right behind them. “Sister, I have procured the caviar and blinnies! You are correct! They are-” Eloni turned around to see a man with long, straight blond hair with stripes of green, but the strangest thing about this man was not his hair- but the goggles worn on his face.

The moment that Eloni saw the man seemed to be the moment the man saw him in return. There he stood, knees slightly bent with two plates filled with the aforementioned hors d'oeuvres on little plastic plates.

“OH. A 1010!... I will- uhh… I’ll just.”

“Zeebs, it’s fine…” the woman said, turning around and sliding off. “We were just going anyway.”

Eloni spun to follow her with his eyes. He should have just dropped it- everything in his code should have told him to stop his pursuit of this faraway, foul-mouthed, foreigner… But it was his birthday, dang it.

“You know; it’s rude to come to the party and ignore the birthday-boy!”

The pair stopped. The man with the goggles; (Zeebs wasn’t it?) turned around and let out a low and singular laugh. “It’s rude to harass a troubled woman! You don’t see her complaining!”

The woman held up her hand to her companion, then glared back at Eloni. “Well, kill me softly with his song- for an NSR goon ya don’t give up, do ya?”

Oh! That was a musical reference… Actually it was two. The comment on being an NSR goon was a bit befuddling for a moment, but figured it had been because she plainly was not from Vinyl city.

Eloni saw her irritation flare, but all he could do was smile. By now their interaction had proven to become interesting to the people around them. “1010 never surrenders,” he recited.

The two unknown party guests stopped and seemed to survey the situation. Zeebs glanced around a little more frantically than his sister whose interesting gaze settled back onto the green android after a moment. “Oh my goood… What. Do. You. WANT from me? A smile?” she asked, not at all afraid to show she was still mad. “‘Cause I’ll have y’know: I have a reason why I’m absolutely livid!”

“Sister… Ix-nay on the Ad-may…”

“Fuggit. We’re already here,” the woman said back at him. “Go on, birthday boy. What’ll it take for you to let me skip town in peace?”

Eloni stood up, stretching out to his ten foot height. “If you weren’t here for my birthday; you should have made an appointment!” he chided, watching the face of this mystery-woman’s flinch with embarrassment. “Tonight’s my night! A night to pAaRrTty~” he hummed musically. “What sort of party would it be without dancing?”

The woman paused, her face still scrunched in disbelief before she turned to her brother. “... Hold my purse,” she instructed softly, turning back to Eloni with a little stomp. “Alright, soldier-boy,” she said lifting a finger up at his face… From allllll the way down there. At least five feet down. “You get ONE. Dance. After that, and I’m gone. No ifs, ands, or buts.”

Eloni studied her emotions for a moment. She was still… Mad, but she was almost acting comically pissy. To liken it to something easier to explain- if red was anger and yellow was happiness, then her emotions teetered on a pale orange. She was just as happy to be pursued as she was angry it was him.

Eloni leaned down. “Sure, baby. I can make one dance count.”

There came a tart snort from the woman below him. “Oh,” she laughed… Then slowly her anger receded a little more. “Oh. I’m gunna fucking run you into the ground, you sentient lamp-post.”

It was a threat. It was playful. It was a challenge… It tickled him.

Eloni let out an equally incredulous laugh. “Can you even… Dance in that thing?” he asked, taking in the nearly floor-length gown.

But surprisingly the woman forced a smile, grabbed Eloni by his suit jacket and started dragging him off to the dance floor. “Quit talkin’. Move ya gams.”

Eloni let out another chuckle as he watched the woman drag him out to the dance floor. The anger was practically no longer there. Only tracings remained; but emotions didn’t necessarily just stop because you had moved on: they lingered. This stranger had some fight back in her, but it seemed she was enjoying this more than not.

“So aggressive, baby~”

The woman looked back up at him. “Don’t call me ‘baby’, sugar.”

“Don’t call me ‘sugar’, doll.”

“Don’t call me ‘doll’, either.” By the time Eloni was dragged back into the dancing fray the woman had turned around and snapped to, heels he hadn’t had the chance to see snapping to as she readied herself. “You swing, darling?”

Oh. Oh he didn’t entirely know how to respond to that.

“... I’ll take that as a-”

“I’ll match whatever you put out, ma’am,” he finally pushed out.

The woman finally seemed to regard him for a second, before shrugging, not looking at him straight in the face. “Mm. We’ll work on it,” she said, stepping close. “Ever dance with a partner?.... And I don’t suppose you can use your super robot powers to play a good swing number?”

Eloni…Wasn’t entirely sure what happened after that. All he did was look up towards the DJ booth where Subatomic was playing his fair share of music and sent in a request, message hurried and likely missing a few vowels. He didn’t care.

“... So, uh,” Eloni started. “Uh, I’m sorry. I’m not normally this brave…” he said. “Or. Uh this pushy…”

The woman cocked her hips and shimmied a bit closer. “It’s your birthday,” she excused. “... And it was kinda rude of me to stop and not say hi, at least, so. Two-fer-two, darling.”

Eloni blinked again as DJ came through- birthday boy requests were high on the chain of command. Soon the sound of electric-pumped ragtimey-toons pounded through the air… That’s when it was all a blur.

1010 was designed to dance, yeah, but new dances took a lot of concentration and coding on the part of the Droids AI. Eloni and his brothers were great with their dance routines, but sometimes their personal dancing skills were hit-or-miss… Even then Eloni liked to think his long legs would hit those swing-high kicks; but he was nothing on this woman. Sheer fabric and high-heels were competing with him faster than he had ever seen…It wasn’t a quarter into the dance that his lead was entirely taken over by her.

It was a situation he had no idea was coming; a woman half his size beating him at dancing. A HUMAN woman practically running him into the ground… It was a lot, it was an endless barrage of legs and shimmies…

It was pretty great.

Just as soon as the song had started; it had ended, Eloni was practically bent over and the mystery woman was done. Off she trotted in her high-heels to re-join her worried looking brother with a completely enraptured Eloni to follow her.

“W-wait. What’s your-” but before Eloni could finish the question or even grab her attention- he felt his hydraulic knee buckle- and land him square onto a nearby table.

Plasticware and plates flew to the floor and Eloni struggled to keep his holographic head above a pool of spilled rose and champagne. When people rushed him to see what was wrong he gazed around.

The Mystery Woman and her brother were gone.... Well. At least he made her smile!

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dolcetters · 4 years

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THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; mun & muse - meme.

TAGGED BY: @hyaciiintho ( ;-; AAA THANK!!! )

TAGGING (don’t feel obligated to do it!): @forsakenflora , @avadite , @yinseal , @inseparabilum , @reigningsniper , @tsume-awase , @canisfuria & YOU if you wanna!

FILL OUT & REPOST ♥ this meme definitely favors canons more, but i hope oc’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. multi-muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

----------------------------------------------------

MY MUSE IS: CANON / OC / AU / CANON-DIVERGENT / FANDOMLESS

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK (he’s fetishized a lot; thanks, i hate it)

Is your character considered strong in the fandom? YES / NO / IDK (i’d lean more toward no)

Are they underrated? YES / NO

Were they relevant for the main story? YES / NO / MAYBE (stares into the abyss)

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO / MAYBE

How’s their reputation? GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL (true neutral, my boy)

HOW STRICTLY DO YOU FOLLOW CANON? ♠ || i have an ongoing joke that “canon is a slab of meat that we slow-roast at 475 degrees and carve for the juicy bits” but at the same time it’s not a joke at all, i’m being perfectly serious. i’m definitely a lot less strict than when i started for writing canon characters way back yonder, but i also DO like to keep within an array of canon boundaries because i’m not writing for an OC in this instance, i’m writing for an established character. ...it also doesn’t help that my character’s handled differently in the 4 types of media he shows up in but. i grew up reading DC comics and writing for beast boy, so i’m kind of used to “multiple takes existing for singular character”.

that being said, my take on dol is clearly canon divergent (since... he’s alive and my default verse takes place after the nest raid) but it pulls primarily from brotherhood/manga with a couple dashes of 2k3 series (since that’s the only media that gives us a length of time that he was in the labs). but given that i follow along with just about every scrap of information provided in the manga on this clown, i’d say i follow canon fairly strictly... but there ain’t a lot to go off of, so my reins are pretty loose no matter how you look at it. my city now.

SELL YOUR MUSE! AKA TRY TO LIST EVERYTHING, WHICH MAKES YOUR MUSE INTERESTING IN YOUR OPINION TO MAKE THEM SPICY FOR YOUR MUTUALS. ♠ || (*￣3￣)╭ well, hello, there. aware of dog? yes. this is he: dolcetto mcgrouchyboots, and he is not happy to be here at all. he is traumatized, sassy, wants to throw hands with teenagers, has no sense of self worth, and will absolutely use himself as a meat shield in order to protect any and everyone he cares about. he is spliced with: dog. his favorite weapon: sword. if you listen carefully, you might hear dog-song rising on the east wind as he approaches (don’t tell him axel taped a cassette player to his back). he comes from a found family of complete and utter morons with a lot of damage, they live in a partially underground bar, work as information brokers, and are all DEFINITELY fully functioning adult people. they say gay and trans rights. if you like angry boys with a sense of humor semi-on-par with griffin mcelroy, this is the boy for YOU!!!

NOW THE OPPOSITE, LIST EVERYTHING WHY YOUR MUSE COULD NOT BE SO INTERESTING (EVEN IF YOU MAY NOT AGREE, WHAT DOES THE FANDOM PERHAPS THINK?). ♠ || he’s only featured in a handful of episodes/chapters across all media, doesn’t have a significant amount of dialogue, and we only ever see him lose to the protagonist(s) despite that he seems more than capable of fighting anyone else. easy to brush off as a “aw he died and that’s sad but we didn’t really know him, moving on”. from what i’ve seen in my years, people are more interested in him being a cog in the machine of “greed is sad” and less interested in... HIM. which is fair, i guess, but hhhhhh

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO RP YOUR MUSE? ♠ || i don’t know if i can pin-point any ONE thing, but i’ve always been drawn to characters with some sort of connection or bond with animals (example, once again, being beast boy from teen titans). i also have an IMMENSE weakness for the found-family dynamic. so when the devil’s nest appeared during my first watch through of brotherhood, i was pretty much... hooked. immediately. and devastated. immediately. as for what drew me to writing dol, specifically... probably his loyalty, his drive, the fact that he WOULDN’T FUCKING STAY DOWN no matter how many times someone knocked him flat on his face. i vibe with that. grew up very much in the mentality of “fall down 7 times, get up 8″. also, he had a sword... which always beats guns on coolness factor. and i loved his fire. ...and that he was a complete fucking idiot who’s really bad at kidnapping i mean HOLY SHIT THAT’S HOW YOU TRIED TO GET HIM TO COME WITH YOU, DOLCETTO, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING--

WHAT KEEPS YOUR INSPIRATION GOING? ♠ || dol has always been a great source of ...venting for me? <xD ever since i started writing him, i’ve always found his muse--specifically--to be extremely cathartic and comforting. i dunno if it’s because he lets the more... jaded side of me come out, even when we’re both trying to be optimistic?

because i’ve been in 2 emotionally abusive friendships. i definitely have some left over hurt, pent up anger that hasn’t been given closure, a hell of a lot of underlying bitterness that i never got the opportunity to confront those people, BUT i still try to be. y’know. welcoming, friendly, supportive, despite a voice in the back of my head being paranoid?? i think dol continues to give me outlets to expressing that. somehow. not that i use him as an excuse to do it, more so i have more opportunities to do it when i’m writing him as opposed to writing someone like beast boy, who’s usually more on board with keeping the peace than picking a fight. i’ve also invested SO MUCH TIME and ENERGY into his background and headcanons and things that i kind of can’t quit him now, nor do i want to.

... and aside from that i just want him to have a happy ending god, fucking damnit.

SOME MORE PERSONAL QUESTIONS FOR THE MUN.

give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice? YES / NO ( or i certainly hope so )

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO

Do you sometimes write drabbles? YES / NO

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO

Are you confident in your writing? YES / NO ( definitely have moments but eh! )

Are you a sensitive person? YES / NO ( kind of... varies. i’d say i’m more hyper aware)

DO YOU ACCEPT CRITICISM WELL ABOUT YOUR PORTRAYAL? ♠ || i definitely like to think i do when it comes to pre-established things in canon. but when it comes to what i’ve built on my own over my years of writing for dol (and the nest members as a whole), it’s kind of my sandbox and i’d appreciate you not stomp around in it.

unless i need to be learned a thing, like... one of the nest members, vi, is a trans-woman. i’m a cis-woman and i try to do as much research as i can and educate myself, but if i ever fuck something up please tell me, i’m doing my best but i’m more than willing to listen. i want to grow.

DO YOU LIKE QUESTIONS, WHICH HELP YOU EXPLORE YOUR CHARACTER? ♠ || pretty sure everyone does! >xD but yeah! i FUCKING love it. especially since i’m writing for a minor character. =//o//= it shows people are interested in him despite his overall lack of content.

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES TO A HEADCANON OF YOURS, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? ♠ || i’d definitely be curious as to why but i doubt i’d be offended or take ... any personal harm from it--y’know? it’d be more of a “let me hear your perspective and maybe it’ll expand my own understanding, or i might not agree after the explanation and that’s cool”!

an exception would be for an obviously shitty one that’s shitty for no reason, like... acTUALlY, he’s TOtaLLY hom///o///pho//bic, to which i’d be like “bitch, no, get away from me; no one in this bar is straight, die mad”.

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES WITH YOUR PORTRAYAL, HOW WOULD YOU TAKE IT? ♠ || again, it’s cool! there’s not a lot of canon material so you can take his portrayal a variety of places. if we don’t jive, it’s pretty whatever.

my one exception to this is probably people who, in the past, have told me i write him being “too mean”. which will never cease to confuse me. because even after al straight told dolcetto he was 14, dol was still like “I REALLY WANNA SMACK HIM but i’d just hurt my hand so you’re off the hook”, he’s angry like 85% of his dialogue in the manga... i’m just confused. where are you seeing the “uwu pupper~” persona. you can write it, that’s fine, i don’t care, just don’t get irritable when i don’t write him like a cute puppy. because here he is. suggesting we just kill izumi because she’s being troublesome. yeet. ...he’s an asshole.

IF SOMEONE REALLY HATES YOUR CHARACTER, HOW DO YOU TAKE IT? ♠ || whatever, just don’t be a dick or speak badly about me or him in my presence because, flawed as he is and while i won’t make excuses for him, i’ll stand up for him. go somewhere else, my dude. i, personally, don’t have the energy for your negativity. nor do i have the patience.

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PEOPLE POINTING OUT YOUR GRAMMATICAL ERRORS? ♠ || i’m more okay with people correcting my spelling (gently). because of the way i taught myself to read, i’d be FUCKED if auto-correct or spell-check didn’t exist. i also google correct spellings constantly. so spelling, yeah, i already know that i’m terrible at it so feel free to correct type-os or spelling mishaps, it ain’t no thang.

grammar i’m a bit... pickier about. because sometimes i’ll purposely do a “grammatical error” because the punctuation or otherwise further drives the pacing or mood i’m trying to give my writing. i may not know ALL the rules but i break them from time to time... FOR THE ART.

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE EASY GOING AS A MUN? ♠ || i wanna say i am?? while i definitely do want to seriously explore and flesh out and grow dol as a muse and character, i’m “not above” goofing around, poking fun at him, or just being plain silly on the dash. RPing is escapism for me and i strive to keep my blog a peaceful safe haven on the dashboard, both for myself and my followers.

i try to communicate to the best of my ability and despite my anxieties, and while i may not be able to follow or RP with EVERYONE (for obvious reasons) i’m open to interacting with ... pretty much anyone who throws me a bone. i’ll speak up if i’m not down for a plot or interested in a certain relationship or interaction, but i’m certainly not going to be rude or dismissive about it. i know what that feels like. i’d say yeah, though! i think i’m pretty chill. e-e you tell me.

#♦: ooc answer .#[ ;0; THIS WAS FUN ]

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twokinkybeans · 4 years

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Tempio Di Pietro Chapter 1: Tensione

A Jar Of Dirt Spin-Off Peter x Tony (x MJ)

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Hi everyone! Thank you so much for reading this! This is a short spin-off series to Jar Of Dirt. You can read this as a standalone but there might be hints missing. We definitely recommend you to read Jar Of Dirt first! x Lien & Kim

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Chapter 1: Tensione

Peter takes another bite from the chocolate-chip cookie and smiles happily. Yesterday was so much fun. He’d never baked cookies with Tony before, well, Tony had never, in his entire life, baked cookies before. He was adorable, white patches of flour staining his Black Sabbath hoodie while looking into the oven every thirty seconds to see if they were ready. Tony in the kitchen will always be a heartwarming sight for Peter.

Peter grins when he hears the ping of the elevator, doors sliding open. Good. Tony’s done early today. “Daddy, I missed you today!” Peter turns around, feeling the blood drain from his face when he sees MJ standing in the elevator. A smug smile playing on her lips. “Oh wow, now that’s a warm welcome!” “Oh! MJ! I… I didn’t- It’s not what it sounds-” Peter stammers but MJ interrupts his weak excuse with a chuckle and a small wave. “Sure thing, Pete.” Peter’s cheeks are burning at his mistake. God. He knows MJ has her subs call her daddy and now he called her daddy- fuck, fuck, fuck. The girl snorts at his awkwardness and walks over to him. “Dude, it’s no big deal. Kinda figured Tony would get off on being called that. C’mere, missed you.” Peter lets MJ pull him into a tight hug, her soft and warm embrace soothing his embarrassment. Yeah, the timing was unfortunate, but he knows she doesn’t judge him.

“Speaking of your daddy, where is he?” She saunters over to the kitchen, moving around ever so swiftly. Peter loves how she doesn’t mind that this is Tony Stark’s penthouse. Most people are afraid to touch anything. MJ made this her second home the first time she set foot in here. Peter had been afraid Tony would think her to be a little too confident, but no, he adores MJ. Loves the endless discussions he can have with her, without her ever holding back her opinion. Loves the dark, sarcastic jokes. Loves how good of a friend she is for Peter, helping him crawl out of his shell after the MIT incident. “Oh, he’s uh, in the lab,” Peter stammers. Working on our Stark Industries sex toy because I broke it last night. MJ cocks an eyebrow at him, sipping on her water. She just knows there’s more to the story and she’s using her silence to spur him on, wanting to know every little detail. Peter just grins, shaking his head and waving her off.

“Believe me, you don’t even want to know this story.” Somehow, discussing his sex life with the girl had become so casual over time. He’s no longer too flushed talking about it. Yet, telling her that Tony made him his own personalized sex toy might be… Too much. “Try me?” She refills her glass and walks over to the couch, slumping down against the backrest and kicking off her sneakers. Peter groans as he follows her to the touch, sitting down next to her. She pats her own legs, inviting him to pop his feet in her lap as he always does. There’s no way she’d let the topic slide now. One day, he asked her why she was so curious about his sex life. She’d been honest, admitting she liked seeing him enjoy himself after… Well, Beck. Plus, she giggled, she liked having inside knowledge on the sexual preferences of the richest man in the world.

“I uh, broke our sex toy last night? It’s… Stark Tech and Tony’s fixing it now.” “Peter Benjamin Parker, are you telling me Tony made you a sex toy?” She shakes her head in disbelief, grinning widely. “What does it do?” “Oh, you know, it changes shapes. It’s either a plug, a dildo, a vibrator…” Peter grins, wiggling his eyebrows. If he’s going to tell the story he’d better own it. “Anything Tony wants it to be.” “Kinky.” “Definitely. This one time he-” Peter shuts up the second the elevator pings. This time, it actually is Tony who comes walking in with, of course, the black cube in his hands. Peter grins at him sheepishly and the man looks between him and MJ, greeting her with a little nod. “Well, now you two are making me wonder what I interrupted?” “Oh, it’s n-nothing, honestly!” Peter rushes out at the same time as MJ’s nonchalant, “-talking about your sex life, why?” Tony laughs at Peter’s mortified face. “Didn’t know you were that much of a tattletale?” Tony smirks and cocks an eyebrow. “Oh,” MJ chuckles. “He really is.” “Yeah? What’d the boy tell you about me?” Tony puts the sex toy on the countertop and heads for the chair opposite them, a curious sparkle in his eyes as he waits for MJ to continue. Peter flushes. Oh, God. He knows that face. He quickly chips in before the conversation gets out of hand. “Really, Mr. Stark-” he mentally curses at himself for the slip up of his name. “-it’s nothing. I just-” He can’t even finish his sentence as MJ puts her hand on his ankle and interrupts him. “Oh, just the usual stuff. The other time he told me how you guys like to have sneaky sex at parties - though, I don’t quite believe the ‘sneaky’ part.” She leans back against the couch, completely in her element. “But also how he calls you daddy and breaks sex toys.” “Toy. Singular.” “Now we’re talking.”

Tony eyes Peter quickly, checking up on him. Peter knows his face is flushed, part embarrassment, part… something else. Tony’s lips curl up when he sees exactly what’s going on and the man shifts in his seat to get more comfortable - ready to take this conversation to the next level. Peter gets off on embarrassment, on being portrayed as a needy little boy. Even more so when publicly. He’s a little afraid they’re crossing a line here, but they’re all seemingly very into the direction of this conversation. “Well, if we’re talking anyways,” Tony starts. “Why don’t you tell her how you broke the toy?” “Oh God,” Peter stutters, eyes widening as he stares at his boyfriend. He knew Tony was going to push further but he hadn’t expected this. He swallows, glancing sideways at MJ. The girl grins.

“Please, do tell, Pete.” Peter takes a shaky breath, mentally cursing at the slight tingling in his groin. “I… Was uhm-...” He looks at Tony once more. The man nods in encouragement. “I was sucking on it, and uh, Tony slammed into my G-, uh, prostate, and I just accidentally bit down too hard. Y’know, Spidey strength,” he stammers. MJ looks rather impressed. “Sucking on a toy, uh? Now that’s one I should try with my subbies next time. You got any more good ideas, Tony?” Peter shifts and tries to pull his legs up, but MJ’s thumb brushes past the skin of his exposed ankle so gently it has him shiver. He decides it can’t hurt being so close to her just a little longer. “Depends,” Tony replies slyly. “What kind of Domme are you? Gentle? Rough? Mean?" “Hmmm, Gentle Femdom big time. I like giving my subs physical pleasure while degrading the fuck outta them at every chance I get.”

“Oh, in that case, you ever tried making them wear a plug, or any toy for that matter, and go shopping?” Tony grins. Peter blushes as he remembers the time he and Tony did exactly that and he actually moans at the memory. “Seems you liked that, Peter?” MJ whispers softly. Peter’s breath hitches and he’s not sure what to answer. So he simply nods, shifting in an attempt to cover his half-hard cock. MJ smirks and bites her lip. “I’ve never actually worn one up my ass, so I don’t really know what it’s like.” Oh, no. “What’s it like, Pete?” “It’s, ehm…” Peter presses his lips on top of each other and looks at Tony. The mischievous glimmer in the man’s eyes already says enough, but he nods for good measure. “Feels good,” Peter breathes out. “Makes you feel so full and- and it moves.” He swallows and stares at his half-eaten cookie on the table, not daring to look either other participants of this conversation in the eye. “With every step you take.” MJ nods with an approving look on her face.

“Sounds nice. Anything to add?” Peter’s mouth is dry. There are a hundred more things he could add. A hundred more things he could say, but this… This feels so weird. Terribly wrong but… So right. “Sometimes da- Tony makes it buzz.” “Oooh,” MJ sing songs. “That must hit you in all the good places, right?” Peter hates how casual MJ is. Hates Tony’s intense stare. But he loves it. He loves it so much. Peter nods, maybe a little too frantically and he sucks in a breath. “Speak, honeybunch,” Tony orders and Peter automatically nods again. “Yeah- yeah, feels amazing. I couldn’t walk at some point, -was too much.”

MJ smiles and suddenly changes the subject. “Honeybunch!” She exclaims. “I almost forgot about that. I wonder what else you call him, Tones.” “Oh, you know, the usual. Sweetness… Sweet thing, baby, good boy... “ Tony shows Peter an endearing smile and is obviously pretending all those words don’t go straight to Peter’s cock. “All the things to make him soft and pliant.” “That means there’s more.” MJ grins. “Oh…” Tony’s expression grows darker and Peter shudders at the sight. “Definitely.” He pauses for dramatic effect and Peter squeezes his eyes shut, anticipating the rush of arousal that will shoot through him soon. “When things get a little rougher on the bed he’s my slut.” Peter’s dick twitches and he licks his lips. “My sweet, little cockslut.” Peter lets his head fall back over the armrest and can’t contain himself anymore. His breathing has turned to soft whimpers and MJ’s constant rubbing of her thumb over his calf is doing things to him he would never dare to admit. But they’re all seeing it. There’s no denying that Peter is a horny mess on the couch and he jolts upright when he feels MJ lean over his legs that are still resting on her lap.

He relaxes slightly when he notices she reaches for something on the table, but his pleasure contorted face turns into a pout when he realizes what MJ is going for. His cookie. She comes back up to sit comfortably again and maintains eye contact with Peter as she asserts her dominance by taking a bite of his half-eaten cookie. “Oh,” she says quietly after swallowing. “This was yours, wasn’t it, sweetness?” she grins and leans forward to hand it to Peter. He doesn’t even raise his hands anymore, he just leans in and opens his mouth, wrapping his lips around the cookie as he closes his eyes. He moans softly as the sweet treat melts on his tongue, but then he realizes what’s happening and his eyes fly open. He pulls back, cookie still in his mouth and MJ cocks an eyebrow at him. She rubs the fingers of her hand together to get rid of the crumbles and then looks at the tips before locking gazes with Peter again. She slowly brings her hand up and wraps her lips around her index finger, then her thumb and then her middle finger. “Tastes good,” she says softly. Peter swallows his cookie and gasps for air. His cock is achingly hard right now and it’s extremely visible in his sweats.

It’s quiet for a second. All three people in the room are weighed down by the sexual tension in the air. It’s only when Peter manages to move to wipe his fingers on his shirt that MJ suddenly pats her hand on his legs and pushes him off her to stand up. “Alright, losers-” she says with a grin. “I’m off.” She walks past Peter’s face, putting in a little more effort to sway her hips and Peter goes pale when he smells it. When he smells her. MJ is so turned on that Peter can smell her. Fuck. Peter jolts when her hand suddenly rests on top of his curls and he looks up at her with big eyes. She smiles down at him and then sneaks a glance at Tony. “I’ll leave you two to it.” She tugs at his hair slightly before making her way to the elevator and Peter can’t stop staring at her. At the shape of her body, the lines of her curves. Her ass. When she steps into the elevator she twirls with an evil grin on her face. Her mouth is half-opened and her head is slightly angled up when she seductively moans.

“Go be a good boy for daddy.”

The second the elevator doors close, Peter’s head whips around to stare at Tony wide-eyed. The man simply cocks an eyebrow and nods at his crotch. “You heard her.” Peter looks at Tony’s hard cock pressing through the fabric of his dark jeans and his mouth salivates at the sight. The boy slowly pushes himself off the couch. He’s too focussed on Tony to realize he could have stood up to walk. Instead, he crawls. His own hardness grazing past his loose sweats. Tony can’t help but smirk as he pushes his jeans down his butt and Peter nearly drools when his daddy casually cups his shaft through his underwear. Peter slowly moves up, curling his fingers around the hem of Tony’s pants aiming to pull them off completely. Once they’re discarded, he shifts to sit between Tony’s legs on the floor. He looks up at Tony, who leans forward to take Peter’s face in both his hands. “D-daddy,” Peter whimpers. His eyes flutter and his nostrils flare when he breathes in Tony’s cologne. “Oh, sweetness. You look so pretty when you’re all hot and bothered.” Peter shuts his eyes, relishing in the sensation of Tony’s warm hands covering his cheeks. Peter lets himself be guided as Tony pulls him closer to his crotch. The man’s hands move back on Peter’s head, tugging at his hair. Peter moans and hips buck against the chair.

“Go on then,” Tony whispers with a smile. Peter doesn’t wait. Now that daddy has given permission he’s going to go all in. He opens his mouth wide and licks one long stripe over Tony’s dick through the fabric of his underwear. “Oh, that’s right, right there, boy-” Tony is so hard. Peter can barely believe that Tony got turned on watching Peter get… Dominated. By MJ. The younger man growls and teethes at the hem of Tony’s underwear. “O-off,” he moans. “Need you-” “Oh, sweetness,” Tony coos, complying with his sub’s wishes. “So eager to please.” Peter nods, squeezing his eyes shut as he laps at the skin of Tony’s now exposed cock. The older man gasps when Peter suddenly takes the man’s shaft in his mouth, without warning. He scoffs a laugh. “Very eager, aren’t you?” All Peter can do is moan. He brings up his hands to help jerk Tony off while his tongue swirls around the head. He hollows his cheeks and sucks ever so gently. Tony’s muscles relax as his eyes roll back and he sinks into the cushions of the armchair. “Oh, Peter, you feel so good on me, o-oh.” “Love you,” Peter whispers before he wraps his lips around Tony again and the man can’t help but smile. “I love you too, caro mio-”

It’s not long before Tony sits up straight to tug at Peter’s head a bit more aggressively, urging the boy off his cock. “Undress yourself for me, Petey, I want to take you to the bedroom.” Peter gasps at the word but frowns slightly at the implications. “But- your back-” “Uh-uh, don’t you dare ruin the moment, kid. I know how much you weigh, I deadlift half of that every week. Off with those clothes. Want you to sit down on top of me, want to fill you up.” Peter grins while he undresses. “Daddy’s overselling himself,” he says cheekily and Tony huffs. “Thought MJ told you to be a good boy for me, Pete.” Peter halts his movements, shirt half over his head and he realizes Tony could literally see his cock throb at the sentence. When he finishes taking off his shirt he’s met with Tony’s shit-eating grin. The man knows exactly what he’s doing to Peter and honestly… Peter loves every second of it. Tony is still lazily stroking his cock while staring at Peter’s. The boy climbs on top of his daddy and angles himself so Tony can push in. Peter jolts when Tony suddenly grabs his cock to halt him from sitting down.

“Shouldn’t I open you up first, baby boy?” Peter smiles and leans down to press a kiss on the corner of Tony’s mouth. He then licks across the man’s lips and pulls back slightly, only to whisper: “Fingered myself after lunch, so I’d be ready for you.” “Lunch was a while back.” “Need you, daddy, please.” Tony pushes his face towards Peter to bring him in for a hungry kiss. They moan into each other’s mouths as Tony’s hands crawl up to Peter’s hips, only to lower him slowly. Too slowly for Peter’s taste. He’d rather slam down immediately. Feel his daddy fill him up so well- hit him right where he wants him to. “Easy, boy…” Tony mumbles against Peter’s chin before pushing his tongue back into the boy’s mouth, tasting the cookie Peter and MJ ate earlier.

Peter gasps when the tip of Tony’s cock probes his entrance. “That’s it, sweetness,” Tony whispers. “Let me in…” Peter’s body shakes as he lets Tony guide himself further and further down on his cock. He’s doing everything he can to unclench as fast as possible and when Tony bottoms out they come together in an embrace. They stay seated like that for a while, not moving, just taking in each other’s presence, feeling the stretch. Tony’s face is pressed flush against Peter’s chest and after a little bit, he starts pressing soft kisses on Peter’s skin, causing goosebumps to spread over the younger man’s body. Peter desperately holds onto Tony and presses his lips on top of Tony’s head. “Bedroom?” he asks quietly, causing Tony to chuckle. “Needy little thing,” the man sighs, taking Peter’s nipple in his mouth and swirling his tongue around it. Peter clenches his jaw, stifling a moan. Tony looks up at Peter, his irises dark with lust, pupils blown wide and he grins. “Let’s go.”

Peter yelps surprised when Tony swiftly stands up, hands on the boy’s ass. Peter’s response, not just audible but also physical has Tony chuckle. “You’re getting a little sticky, Pete.” Peter slowly wraps his legs around Tony’s waist. The movement of Tony’s cock in his body causes him to groan softly. “Don’t want you to drop me,” he scoffs with a soft laugh. Tony squeezes Peter’s butt. “You’re a mean spider, Pete.” Tony starts walking towards the bathroom with Peter’s chest still flush against his face. “Self-preservation, daddy.” Tony arches his back slightly so he can pull back and look Peter in the eye with raised eyebrows. “Do you want to come?” Peter immediately scrambles to hold onto Tony regularly and he ceases his sticking. “That’s what I thought.”

Soon enough Tony manages to carry the boy to the bedroom. Peter smiles up at him as the man gently lowers him onto the soft sheets, hovering over him, kissing him passionately. Tony’s being so gentle with him it makes his heart flutter in his chest. “Daddy…” he whispers, grabbing onto the man’s shoulders, trying to pull him in even closer. He wants to feel Tony everywhere. The weight pressing down on him, the man’s hands exploring his tingling body, wants to hear Tony’s voice whisper sweet praise in his ears. “You want me to fuck you, amore?” Tony whispers against his lips and Peter nods breathlessly, clenching around Tony’s cock inside him. “Please, please move,” he whispers and gasps. His eyes widen when Tony rolls his hips into him, the drag inside him sparking pleasure throughout his entire body. “Like that?” “More, daddy, please, please.” Peter knows he’s a wreck in the very best sense of the word. He’s floating already, his mind easy and calm and fuck, he feels so loved. Tony complies with his wish, picking up speed, rutting into his sweet little submissive with a grin on his face and lowering his lips towards Peter’s ear.

“Did MJ turn you on, sweetness?” Peter jolts at the sudden embarrassment and he lets out a high-pitched moan. Oh, God. Tony’s doing it again, isn’t he? He’s going to whisper the sweetest filth into his ear, stirring up fantasies in his mind. Just as he did with Bucky all these months ago. Peter loves it. Loves him. He nods frantically. "You want to fuck her, don't you? Feel your hard cock slide into her slick, dripping pussy- suck at her tits until they’re sore. Make her feel so good, just cause you want to do that for her. Oh, Peter, how I would love to see who could come more often in a row. Think you can beat a seasoned domme like her? I'd like to see you try.” Peter whimpers at the thought. He wants it. Badly.

"You want to bury your face between her slick thighs? Smell her scent again? ‘Cause I saw it hit you, honeybunch. You liked it didn't you?" “S-Smelled so good, she was horny, daddy, I-” Tony growls into his ears, sneaking his hand between their bodies to jerk Peter off. Hard and fast. Peter cries out when the little sparks just build and build and build. He wants to come so bad. Wants his daddy to fill him. Fill him up like the sweet slut he is. God. He really is. Tony sucks on the skin just below Peter’s ear, harshly, marking him up, claiming him - yet, teasing him with another sweet fantasy.

“Know what it sounds like, fucking a girl, Pete? I do- oh, I do, sweetness. The sound,” Tony gasps, losing himself in the rhythm of slamming into his boy. “It’s disgustingly filthy. The wetter, the better. You can hear it in the back of your head, can you? Can you hear her moaning your name, order you to come?” “Y-Yes, yes, yes,” Peter chokes out, he can hear it; MJ’s soft voice, demandingly sweet. “And you would come for her, Peter, because she told you so. You’d fill her up- mix your cum.” Tony’s voice is breathy and shaky and rough and Peter doesn’t know how to handle the pleasure coursing through him. It’s too much. He’s so close. So close. “T-tell me more, daddy, please.” Peter’s clawing on Tony’s back, fingers digging into the strong muscles he finds there. Tony moans as Peter’s nails press into his skin. His free hand moves up to tug on the boy’s soft curls. “Oh baby, she’d force that sweet little mouth of yours back down on her pussy- make you eat her out. But this time you can taste your own cum too. You’d like that, fuck Pete, you’d like tasting yourself inside her. Like making her cum over and over again until her legs are trembling all around you.” “F-Fuck, daddy, yes, yes!” Peter gasps, panting, pushing his head back into his pillow harshly when Tony flicks his thumb over the tip. Again, and again, and again, and- “Go on then, sweetness, be a slut for her. Come for her.”

Peter cries out when Tony’s words tip him over the edge. His hips buck into the man’s grip wildly, white hot spurts sticking between their bodies. He’s trembling all over. Tony’s low grunts are hot against his neck. “Good boy, fuck, Peter baby, you- Oh yes.” Tony’s voice trails off and a loud, disgustingly filthy groan escapes his throat. Peter feels Tony’s balls against his ass as the man buries himself deep inside of him, filling him up. Peter just takes it all, relishing in the short pants leaving the man’s mouth and feeling Tony’s rapid heartbeat as he collapses on top of him. Peter lets out a shaky breath, wrapping his arms around Tony’s neck and holding him close while the man rides out his orgasm. “Peter…” “Daddy, that was- fuck.” “S-so hot.” Peter nods, pressing a gentle kiss on top of Tony’s hair. He can’t help the amazed chuckle falling from his lips. He never thought they’d do something like this again. And fuck- he’d loved it. “I love you, Tony,” Peter breathes softly. Tony lets out a satisfied noise and buries his face in the crook of the boy’s neck. “I love you too, baby. Blanket?” “Blanket,” Peter replies with a happy smile, tugging on the sheets and wrapping the both of them into the soft, warm fabric. They hold each other until they doze off.

Tony growls and slams his laptop shut. He can’t see another e-mail, another article, another stupid fucking document, even if his life depended on it. Peter’s head shoots up from the other side of the desk, looking up from his Electrodynamics textbook alarmed. “You okay?” Tony doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t want to snap at his boy - which fuck - he would if he would open his mouth now. He takes a deep breath, holding it for a couple of seconds before letting the air escape his tight chest. He sniffs, his foot tapping on the floor restlessly. This is getting out of hand. He loves his job, doesn’t usually have a problem with the neverending pile of stuff he has to go through. However, lately he hasn’t been able to handle it very well. He’s so stressed. So burned out. So on edge that Bruce had already carefully suggested maybe he should take a couple of days off. But how could he? There were deadlines and meetings and surely he couldn’t just cancel those because his brain couldn’t keep up with it. “No,” his croaks, eyes gazing at the floor. “-I don’t think I am.”

Peter carefully closes his book and walks over to his boyfriend, hugging him from behind. Tony sighs into the embrace, hands reaching up to hold Peter’s wrists, pressing him closer. “Tell me what’s going on, Tony.” Tony sniffs, waving at the work in front of them. “I just… Can’t deal with this shit right now.” He bites his lips realizing how inadequate that sounds. It’s just work. The same old things he’s been doing for years already. “I’m just being stupid, Pete, don’t mind me. It’ll be fine.” Peter shakes his head gently. “You’re not stupid.” He sighs, kisses the top of the man’s hair. Tony melts into the touch. “I am, though. It’s easy stuff, just some editing and basic meetings.” “Tony, stop it. Just because it’s ‘easy stuff’ doesn’t mean it’s easy. You’ve been working so much the past weeks, if your brain needs a little break, take one.” Tony huffs. Peter makes it sound so simple. The man shakes his head. “Peter, I ju-” “Alright, that’s it. We’re leaving this office for the rest of today and don’t you dare protest against it.” Peter pulls Tony’s chair backward to create space between him and the desk. “Wha-” “Hush. Just come with me.” Peter doesn’t give Tony the time to even try and tell him off, grabbing his hand, helping him to stand up. Peter guides both of them outside the office and locks the door, stuffing the key inside his pocket. “I have a meeting with the chemistry team this afternoon, Pete.” “Fri? Please notify the chemistry team the meeting’s canceled.” Tony stares at Peter in astonishment. “You did not just do that.” “Oh, I sure did. Any other meetings I should know about?” Tony feels his face flush. He feels so called out and a weird part of his brain likes it. He simply shakes his head. “Good.”

Soon, Tony finds himself seated on the couch with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and Peter half-asleep against his side, his head resting on Tony’s shoulder. Peter had taken good care of him; made him a grilled cheese sandwich and made sure Tony didn’t check his work emails as he ate. He’s so glad Peter cut through him. Forced him to put his work down. Maybe he did need this after all. Needed Peter to be strict. He looks down at the bunch of curls and smiles, pressing a gentle kiss on top of it. He hums their Italian tune - ‘Ti Amo by Umberto Tozzi -, the lyrics echoing in his head.

Dammi il tuo vino leggero, che hai fatto quando non c'ero, e le lenzuola di lino. Dammi il sonno di un bambino.

He freezes when it suddenly hits him. Give me your light wine you made while I was away, and the linen sheets give me the sleep of a child. The lyrics take him right back to the spa. How he knelt in front of Peter, how he made him feel good; fed him the grapes, massaged the warm oil into his God’s body. He needs that again. Craves the submission. Peter’s gentle but demanding touch. He needs to give up control.

He needs to give up control.

“Peter?” His voice is shakier than he’d like it to be. Peter shifts, mumbling a soft “Yes?” as his eyes flutter open. “I- would… Would you be my Cupido today?” Peter whips his head up, to stare at Tony. Tony’s throat feels so dry, his heart thumping in his chest as he waits for Peter to answer. He knows Peter loved their little roleplay, but he has no clue if he’d want to do it again. “Did you just ask what I think you asked me?” “Well, yes? But only if you want to, of course.” “I- I can try, but I don't know if I can?” Peter replies slowly, sitting up straight. “I’m not a natural dominant like you, Tony.” Peter stares at the look that flashes across the man’s eyes and he smiles. “But I can’t say no to a sweet servant like you, why don’t you get down on your knees?” Peter whispers. He’s not sure how this will turn out. He doesn’t feel anything near the God he’d been in Italy. The environment of the penthouse just feels… off. Tony fucked him nearly everywhere in this place; domming him. He does want to try it though. Tony carefully puts the blanket away, kneeling in front of Peter. “My lord,” he whispers. “-you have taken such good care of me today.”

Peter looks at Tony, smiling. He carefully reaches out for the man’s face, dragging the tip of his finger across Tony’s bottom lip. The man’s eyes flutter shut at the gentle touch. Tony looks beautiful like this. Peter wants to dom him. Wants to take him apart. He just… Can’t. Not here. He pulls his hand back. “Tony, I-I’m sorry. Yellow.” The man’s eyes open wide and he scrambles up quickly, sitting down next to Peter again. Peter swallows, biting his lips. “Don’t get me wrong, I want to do this with you, Tony. It’s just…” Peter waves at their surroundings. “In here, it doesn’t feel right. I’m just Peter. Peter’s not a dom.” Tony shakes his head, taking Peter’s hands in his. “It’s okay. I… Guess it feels off for me too.” Peter groans. He doesn’t want to disappoint the man. Tony barely asks for something as specific as this and now it seems like it’s not working out. Peter feels bad about it. If only they were at the spa. The lush greenery surrounding them. The luxurious marble baths. Peter feels his body tingle at the thought, a hint of Cupido shining through. What if…

“F.R.I.D.A.Y.?” “Yes, Peter?” The boy can’t help but grin at the confused expression on Tony’s face. “Can you please book the Italian Spa for two this weekend. Friday till Monday.” Peter leans back on the couch, actually feeling in his element right now. Tony shakes his head. “I can’t-” “And cancel all of Tony’s appointments.” “I have canceled the appointments, are we taking this from your account, Peter?" F.R.I.D.A.Y. asks. Peter intently stares at Tony and Tony stares back. They both know Peter can’t afford this. They both know how much Tony likes it when Peter shamelessly spends the billionaire’s money. So Peter grins when he licks his lips and answers. “Tony’s.”

Peter squeals startled when Tony attacks him with a hot kiss. His warm, soft lips sweet on his own. “Fuck, Pete- Telling me straight-faced you can’t dom me in the tower and yet you pull shit like that?” “Daddy-” Peter whimpers, melting in the man’s demanding embrace. Tony’s lips graze past his cheekbones, up to his ear while leaving featherlight kisses. Occasionally giving a gentle suck on the sensitive skin. Peter loves it. Relishes in it. “Kid, you’re gonna be the death of me.” Read More: Chapter 2 (yet to be posted) Masterpost

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peonybane · 5 years

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My main groups

Oh boy. Thanks for the ask, I’ll try to go as in-depth as possible. Get ready for me to just fucking gush.

So I have two main groups: VIXX and BTS.

Please read below the break because this is long as hell. This is also a repost as Tumblr is a dumb dumb.

VIXX:

Voice, Visuals, Values in Excelsis (I know doesn’t make sense but that’s what the boys names themselves). They are the Concept Kings for a reason: Space Vampires, Voodoo Dolls, Cyborgs/Androids, Time, the Greek God trilogy, Perfumes, Duality (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and so many others.

I consider myself to be a STARLIGHT in terms of kpop first before anything else other than just enjoying all of it. VIXX will always be my number one group because they helped me out of a really dark place in my life and because of that, I can’t really replace them with anyone else. With that being said, I look at them as if they are my older brothers, which makes looking at them in a sexual way almost impossible for me (despite one of the fancams later, I just think that fancam is so interesting). So I am very, very soft towards them. I almost cried at a concert for Ravi because I was so moved at being able to meet someone I very much look up to.

So even though I was technically introduced to kpop via either BigBang (with Fantastic Baby) or BTS (with DNA), it wasn’t until VIXX that I really got into them.

My first song with VIXX was Error. I had never seen anything like Error before and it fascinated me, I was really hooked by that video. My sister and I watched that video about… 20 times in a row. And I never looked back.

My bias is Ravi. For those who don’t: he is the Rapper of the group as well as one of the main dancers. He has a deep ass voice, he looks rather scary, but he is probably one of the purest human beings on the planet. He’s a workaholic, he’s the best dog dad, he’s a shy, sweet mess (he’s best friends with Jimin of BTS and Kai of EXO, if that don’t explain much, nothing will). I saw him in concert this past May and it was just… I was in awe. He’s very down to earth and tall as fuuuuuuuuck (all of them are, the shortest is 5′11). He recently left Jellyfish Entertainment (Jelpi) to start his own production agency, GROOVL1N. The most fascinating thing about this for me is that he left on good terms with Jelpi and is still part of VIXX. No entertainment company is perfect, but I think is pretty damn close. They give their artists artistic freedom, they protect their privacy fiercely (STARLIGHTS not particularly invasive, but no one really knows anything about their private lives), and they don’t force their artists to do things that would be bad for them (I can’t find the footage, but there have been instances where instead of telling Leo not to eat, they try to make him eat, I’ll talk about that more later). What Jelpi lacks is promoting and caring about international fans. I’m pretty sure that’s why Ravi left because even though they are on good terms, that is what Jelpi lacks and Ravi really makes the international STARLIGHTS (I mean they all do, but Ravi especially) feel like they are loved.

Favorite song is kinda hard. For Title Tracks, G.R.8.U., On and On, and Fantasy are definitely tied for first place. For non-title tracks, Trigger and Light Me Up (little bit of a cheat, this is one of my favorite performances and this the Rock version) fuck me up and get me hyped. My favorite Japanese Track is Depend on Me which is basically the exact opposite of Chained Up. Because they love their STARLIGHTS so much, they have a song dedicated to us on each album, so my favorite STARLIGHT song is Milky Way.

My bias wrecker (lord help me) is Hyuk. Hyuk is the maknae of the group. He started out of the pipsqueak of the group and now dominates his hyung. He clocks in at about 6′4 and is a fucking wall. He looks like a Samoyed. He’s got a lovely voice. He sounds like Onew of SHINee. He’s incredibly manly and is weird AF. He recently made his solo debut this last winter with the ballad, Boy with a Star.

So my favorite Era was… the Conception Era. This is sort of a cheat as it encompasses a concept trilogy. It’s based on three greek gods of masculine traits which tell a love story conceptually: Zelos (god of rivalry, zeal, and jealousy) with Dynamite, Hades (god of wealth, the afterlife, and desire) Fantasy, which I think is a retelling of the Orpheus myth, and finally Kratos (god of strength and rule) with the Closer. It’s just a beautiful interconnected era.

My favorite fancams…

This Chained Up Ravi Focus (gird your loins)

This “Manager Kim” Concert video

This “(Im)perfect Boyfriends to Order” Concert video

Hyukspatch

Toy Story Fantasy Performance (if you watch nothing else, watch this)

There’s certainly more but this is what came to mind immediately.

Little tidbits otherwise, I’ll never get to BTS:

Hongbin is my icon. He’s the visual of the group, the sub rapper, he’s a gamer (has his own twitch, don’t know how to get to it since I don’t have twitch), and he’s probably the most under appreciated. Enjoy his Cool Love collab with Hyungwon of Monsta X.

N, Mr. Cha Hakyeon, is the leader of the group and he’s your favorite whether or not you believe it to be. He is currently doing his military service. We all though we would not see or hear from while he’s doing his service… I see his face everyday on my dash and I love his egg head. He was in the Children of Nobody and he’s an amazing dancer.

Ken is the would be maknae of the group and I would say that’s he’s got not only the best voice in the group, but also the best eyebrows. He’s all about acting cutesy. He is a stage actor and is absolutely amazing. I want to see one of his plays one of these days.

Now, before you come for me with your pitchforks, I love all of them, just some of them piss me off more than others, but I wouldn’t get this mad if I didn’t care. Leo pisses me the hell off. He needs someone to take care of him because he’s sacrificing his mental and physical health to satisfy people who don’t actually care about him. At roughly 6 feet tall, he weighs between 130 to 145 pounds. He’s talked about some behavior that is incredibly unhealthy and it breaks my heart (he talked about how he once binge ate then worked out until he practically passed out). He’s talked about how he’s absolutely drained after a practice for his solo and… his choreography is incredibly simple. I hate that he feels like he has to be impossibly skinny for people to love him.

Moving on from the angry stuff, VIXX is one of the nation’s prides. The president of Korea is a known fan of VIXX and the last time I checked, N is STILL one of the promotional images on the president’s website.

If you have any questions for me about VIXX, please let me know and I’d love to talk about it.

BTS:

I’m going to be a little more brief with BTS, since the majority of people know them.

So as mentioned before my first song with BTS is DNA. It didn’t leave a big impression on me. It was simply something I’d play in the background while I was finishing up work for the evening at my old job. Dope is the song that really pulled me in. I don’t know what it is about it, but it just really pulled me in.

I am *sigh* double biased, something that @ropeseok has made me come to terms with. My ideal is Namjoon. I really like his voice, I think he’s adorable with his hard exterior and ooeygooey center. It also helps that he’s, well, kinda like me in that he’s a brain. My other bias is Taehyung. He is probably the more realistic type of person to me. I like the idea of Namjoon. But Tae… Tae is more of the person that I need. He’s very touchy, he’s emotional, he’s true, he’s sweet, a bit child like, he’s very intelligent, but keeps it on the down low. If that makes sense.

My favorite title track is Boy in Luv. I can listen to it forever. For non-title tracks it would be First Love, Magic Shop, and Persona. My favorite Japanese Track is Crystal Snow.

Since Tae had been my bias wrecker for a while, I don’t really think I have one BUT because of someone’s influence… probably Jin. Fine, I’ll admit it, I’m a Kim line heaux.

My favorite era…. it really depends on each boy. Like for Namjoon, I love the Danger and Not Today eras. For Jin, it would have to be, ironically enough, anytime of the early eras cuz he looks lovely as hell with eyeliner and I just think he’s got this hidden bad boy energy that was able to come out during this time. For Yoongi is would be MIC DROP. He was in his fucking element. Plain and simple. For Hoseok, it was Blood, Sweat, and Tears, BST was probably one of their best eras overall, but Hoseok just fucking made it his bitch. For Jimin it was BST as well but also any of the early eras. Like Jin, he’s got this hidden ferocity that I feel like is being kept hidden behind a closely guarded wall. I also just like his hair black and when he wasn’t necessarily starving himself. For Tae… Fake Love. I think he really found his element with the ballads like Singularity and darker themes, especially now that he’s all grown up and doesn’t look like a child. For Jungkook… Dope. There was something about the uniform and the energy that really just fit him.

I’m not going to do favorite famcams as the moment I start collecting videos, I’m going to be overwhelmed with different versions and this is already ridiculously long.

Tidbits:

I really like their darker works. I really wish they’d go back to those.

I don’t want anymore collaborations with Western artists. I think it would be really cool if they collabed with another Korean group or artist. I would like to see Jimin and Ravi work together. I think their different voices would work amazingly together.

I am probably the most similar to Jimin. Everyone’s who’s ever known me and knows Kpop often compares me to Jimin.

Yeontan, along with Ravi’s dog, Butt, are my fashion icons.

Once again, I love them all, but if I had to name my least favorites, it would have to be Jimin and Jungkook. Jimin because, he’s incredibly hard for me to write. I get extremely frustrated writing about him. I work best when there’s a certain amount of emotional/psychological distance between me and the person I’m writing about because then I can comfortably extrapolate. He and I are way too close, which makes it hard for me to really describe him as someone else if that makes sense. As for Jungkook, I have a very hard time understanding him. I know that a lot of people love mysterious people, but I find them to be incredibly frustrating. I think he’s incredibly talented and nice, but I’m frustrated by the fact that’s impossible for me to get an idea of what he’s like beyond that surface layer.

So that is that.

I hope you got your answer sweet Anon. I am so sorry that is was so freaking long.

-UwU~

250 followers ask game

#bts #vixx #250 follower #uwu galore #its long as hell #im sorry #but y'all asked for it

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suga-kookiemonster · 5 years

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BTS Tag Game

this is so late bc i’ve been busy all week 😭 but i was tagged by @bang-tan-fan!! thanks for thinking of me, babe 😘

1. First BTS song?

baepsae 😭 youtube said pssst. hey. don’t you wanna look at this kpop dance practice video?? and i said i mean. i guess?🤔 and now here we are today, YA GIRL WAS SET UP 😤

2. First bias?

namjoon...my april may joon...my joonbug 😭😍😍

3. Current bias?

...do i even have to answer this question LMAO it’s taehyung and lowkey still namjoon

4. Put the members in order of you bias list.

↳ Taehyung

↳ Namjoon

↳ Jimin/Yoongi

↳ everybody else bc we don’t play favorites in this house, unless taehyung is an option, in which case taehyung is always my favorite 💁🏽‍♀️

5. Favorite BTS Song?

i honestly can’t pick one, omg. i want to say baepsae, but that’s not the complete truth--the answer is also let me know, and also spring day, and also 2! 3!, and also sea, and also go go, and lowkey mic drop, and also the entirety of ly: tear (a true masterpiece 😩)

6. Favorite BTS song that is underrated?

134340 or tomorrow, i will literally fight all of you!!!! 👊🏾💪🏾😤

7. Favorite song of Wings?

2! 3!; i honestly tear up every time lmaoooo, screaming in my car like GWAECHANHA, JA HANA DUL SET HAMYEON IJEOOOO~😭

8. Favorite song of LY Her, Tear and Answer?

chileeeeee

her: either go go or her, they’re both BOPS tear: THIS ONE’S SO HARD uhhhhh...either ms. singularity or anpanman or outro: tear biiiiiitch 😭 answer: answer is just a compilation album, so looking at the original tracks, i think i’ll have to go with idol. or mic drop (full length with dance breaks), god bless

9. Favorite music video?

this is wayyyyy too hard omg. but i’m gonna say not today, because that’s when i realized that taehyung was not fucking around and was ready to claim my heart and my p*ssy 😷 very closely followed by mic drop and ms. singularity, omg

10. Favorite dancer?

jimin 😭😭😭😭😭😭 i could honest to god watch jimin dance all day, he’s just so fluid and graceful and it’s like he tells a story, guys, i love jimin, i wanna date him but i’m scared 😭😭😭

11. Favorite vocalist?

taehyung, and i’m right to think so, 🗣NEXT QUESTION🗣

12. Favorite rapper?

ok, i literally can’t answer this 🤷🏽‍♀️ it honestly depends on the mood i’m in. am i trying to get lit? HOSEOK. do i want to be an intellectual and dig deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the meaning of the lyrics? NAMJOON. do i just want to be speechless and stomped on by pure technical skill? YOONGI.

13. Favorite hair color for each member?

YIKES ok, let’s try this 😰

↳ Jungkook: black, no question. he looks best with dark hair 💁🏽‍♀️ so dark brown can also work but...black 🤤

↳ Taehyung: idk, tae rocks literally whatever he does. i do kind of favor him with lighter color hair tho, because it brings out the melanin in his skin 😩so i guess i’ll say ash blond/light brown. but platinum blond and red are really something, huh 🤢

↳ Jimin: BLACK. sorry, i don’t think you heard me: 🗣🗣🗣BLACK🗣🗣🗣 black-haired chim is peak chim and can have literally whatever he wants from me, he DANGEROUS

↳ Namjoon: i personally really like silver joon, lord have mercy 😭

↳ Hoseok: uhhhhhhh...RED

↳ Yoongi: MINT GREEN, thank u for coming to my ted talk 😌i’m also partial to platinum blond. but yoongi can literally pull off whatever he wants, there must be something in that daegu water

↳ Jin: i like black-haired jin, but blond jin is A Lot

14. Favorite choreography?

baepsae, fire, or not today!!

15. Favorite ships?

i don’t ship lol. but my favorite platonic situations are definitely:

vmin (CAN YOU SAY FRIENDSHIP GOALS?? SOULMATES???? 😭😭😭 i have no friends omg)

vmon (they are so cute, they really understand and respect each other, i’m not crying, you’re crying 😭)

sope (opposites attract??? FUCK YEAH, bring yoongi out of his shell, chill hoseok out!!)

16. next?

uhhhhh i’m gonna tag @bendthekneetobangtan, @underthejoon, @jungxk, @gimmesumsuga, @hobiwonder, @cherrynochu and whoever else wants to do this!! only if you want to, babes 💖

#tag game #mine

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flakandforay · 5 years

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Map of the Soul: Persona; Overview

overview: this starts the new series of bangtan as they completed the love yourself trilogy series. now, they delve deeper into the meaning of persona, discovering yourself as you start to love yourself and embrace your flaws. later on, I will talk about the upcoming next few albums that as seen from Namjoon’s Intro: Persona MV, shadow and ego are next and based on the book, ‘Jung’s Map of the Soul’; these are the next two album names of the Map of the Soul series.

do support my ko-fi if you can~

⇝ masterlist

intro: persona: the sampled beat from intro: skool luv affair has proven that the boys are exploring a more old school beat, old hip hop even and you could tell in the way that Namjoon structured his rap. also, the way he does it coupled with how long this intro is, certainly a feet to be acknowledged. he shows his diversity in rapping throughout the song as the song develops but goes back to his flow. definitely something to applaud him for as he did so well in full out rapping this intro.

boy with luv (ft. halsey): the new title track and for the first time, it’s featuring someone!!!! usually when the boys collab, they do not feature in a song but to note that they started with the collabs only later on in the love yourself: her series with steve aoki and chainsmokers for the truth untold and best of me. so, having someone to feature in a song, is definitely taking these collabs to the next level. love how the song sound a bit retro but yet modernized if you know what I mean. The featuring of halsey was subtly done in terms of the chorus only which was interesting considering most featurings would take a verse by themselves before the bridge. However, it is refreshing to see halsey being part of this in the chorus, not overpowering the boys and the boys not really overpowering them either, they worked well together.

mikrokosmos: at first listen, I was not that fond of the beat, it’s too synthesized for my own liking but I must say that whiplash sound really does get your attention. Also, the build up to Hoseok’s part and throughout the song is what gives the song its distinct points. The chorus I must say wasn’t what I expected it to be. It just wasn’t the kind of sound I was expecting but I must say it’s kind of refreshing, the whole ‘I got you, you got me’, got me thinking of toy story and the sudden ‘oh oh’ made it more british pop sound like. Also, how the raps are placed in this song, is not as obvious and I really appreciate it.

make it right: definitely my most fav song out of the whole album? Honestly the beat already getd to you right from the beginning with the synthesized trumpet kind of sound, and it’s so laidback but not to the extent of singularity. Definitely something, honestly the beat is so sexy and sensual that it could easily just be a bed song. It’ just so well done, I love how the chorus is just never right at your face, it’s actually pretty constant except for maybe a few changes in the beats but the same synth is being played throughout the song, much like the saxophone in dope of bts. Love this song. Lord knows, I love ed Sheeran for writing this song. The beat is the one.

home: this is where it hits home, mostly because of how this song is meant to be for armys, coupled with yoongi’s lyrics that he wrote in reference in ‘we are bulletproof pt.2’ made me realize the boys have always stayed the same as they are, truly they are the same boys that they are 6 years ago and id be damned if I don’t be there till the very end. also, home has the same beat that could literally be in relation to dimple and love maze, the kind of more modernized synths literally. This is the trinity.

Jamais Vu: interesting to see how they are using a phrase that is opposite from one many of us know which is déjà vu. I will talk more about this later on. But anyway, this seems to be one of the first subunit songs that we would get as based on the version 2 concept photos, well at least that’s what people were speculating but we are then proved to be boo boo the fools because well it didn’t follow exactly. So apart from this, it seems as though the next 2 albums of the series would also contain subunit songs. But anyway, love how they made use of hoseok in a way, utuilising both his rap and vocal abilities. Hoseok is commonly known to be part of the underlying vocals for many of the bangtan songs including spring day and make it right etc. also, this song has a really nice contrast especially towards the end, making use of hoseok but in a more subtle whisper, it sounds more muffled. Also the pleading in both jinkook’s voices is important to note.

dionysus: this song literally is the one that could be on par with rock songs such as fall out boy and panic at this disco, they have the same energy. I am just simply fascinated as to why this really all hype song is at the end of the album, especially considering they do not have an outro for this. It sounds as though in this song, they are definitely pushing the whole persona in which the lyrics in Dionysus mainly talk about acting like a Dionysus, drinking etc, I will explain more about this in the individual song analysis. Definitely a hype song, without a doubt, I love how it remained pretty consistent in terms of the chorus and if you think the song couldn’t get any harder well the last chorus would prove you wrong. Also, seokjin’s rock vaosl are definitely something to take note, it’s so good, it’s on par with his crystal snow and epiphany vocals.

last thoughts: definitely an interesting flow of how the songs are arranged, usually most of their songs over the years have been going to a whole end of the story kind of chapter but maybe because there is no outro so the album ends incomplete? I am still intrigued that they ended the album with Dionysus so I can’t wait to see how they transition this into their other upcoming albums.

[Photo Source] Bighit Entertainment Credits: maxine ☕️ DO NOT REPOST ©

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violetsystems · 3 years

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#personal

I watched most of the inauguration through Lady Gaga on Wednesday. Regardless what you think about politics in America, we can all admit the moment changed decisively. Or at least the side of us that don’t storm capitols with guns or anything. My landlord stutters to find words for me other than “good” when I deliver the rent check early. So by now, these kind of winds of change solidify something about me at least. Regardless what you’ve heard about me people talk nonetheless. Just like they talk shit about the president whoever it happens to be at the time. America has always been extremely tribal. You don’t have to watch Gangs of New York to figure that one out. I live in a city with a well defined Sanctuary culture. I’ve walked the walk and talked the talk the last four years. Living under Trump with that kind of pressure and fear daily starts to turn neighborhoods into pressure cookers. Everyone is on edge. Nobody knows how to be nice. Wednesday I decided to put my best foot forward in this new era and shovel the snow on the block. It didn’t go unnoticed. I definitely got some dirty looks which is something I’m used to by now trying to put some good in the world. One of the gang members on the block came up to me later that day to thank me at least. They don’t live here on this block but they also shovel the snow. They’re named after a chess piece. I’ve already told the story about footwork dj’s bragging they used to come over here and beat the crap out of them. The savagery I’ve seen and heard about over the years doesn’t shock me. Rich people have been pitting poor people against each other out here for years. Some might call it the “Daley Way.” Others might look to scandals surrounding machine politicians who’ve held offices for years on end. Trump couldn’t get enough of calling us a corrupt city. But generally he got away with a lot of dirty tricks on the ground here without much consequence. Anyone with half a brain and street sense these days doesn’t trust much authority at all. And yet I voted in this election pretty clearly for the current candidate. So I do pay attention to the presidency a little more intently these days. While watching some executive orders get signed the subject came up about the damage of what happened to people like myself. It was a word I hadn’t heard. The word was dignity. Through the last six months, I seemingly lost it all. My job, my entire friend network, the last twenty years of professional connections. It vaporized as if it was never there in the first place. Dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake, and to be treated ethically. When I think about dignity it makes me cry. Because it’s the thing I never had. Most of us do not have it in this current climate even though we kid ourselves we do. We don’t even bother to treat each other with dignity because we’re so busy looking out for ourselves. Communities lose trust. People become isolated and edgy. Hope dies with the days that don’t change. It is just me out here. Or is it just us? In that six month void of watching ancient history peel away and forget you even existed, I thought a lot. I struggled and became something more resilient. And I saw the same old problems staring back at me from a different vantage point I call home. I kept my dignity intact paying the bills and keeping my mouth shut. And yet things have not gotten much better other than my finances and my muscle tone. I’m humble about everything by default because I’m still deeply hurt it was all taken away. The dignity for others is pretty much linked to self respect. Some people don’t know how to treat themselves better. Some people don’t know how to be good because we reward absolute vapidity, selfishness and greed.

I will always strive to be good. I’ve written here on my “vent blog” week after week to report that. Only to have it joked about, ignored, copied, and dismissed by some people. You can’t stop good connecting to the source. If you stay focused and in the proverbial light you will some day make it through. My birthday is next month. A third birthday in a row where nobody other than my parents and the internet reach out. One year I flew to New York during fashion week and spent the entire trip alone. Of all the fourteen trips to Korea, none of them were with anyone but myself. I’ve only had myself to rely on through all of this at times. And yet through the process of trying to be better I’ve met better people. Maybe through all this I’ve learned how to be a better person for people as well. But for the most part I’m still just as invisible as I was. Neglected and disrespected for years by people I trusted. And whatever happened was a sort of forced letting go. I was a black hole on a balance sheet during a pandemic. My pension was a liability. Friends that I still talk to now feel comfortable acknowledging that I was done dirty. But that’s it. No resolution. No opportunities. A period of intense exile. Like I was being taught a lesson. And the opposite happened. As dumbfounding as it is to go through the entire process, I’ve found hope in bettering myself in small ways. I didn’t close off or shut down. I managed intense feelings of sadness and anger by pacing myself. I wrote about what I felt week after week. I made small corrections. I added up my spending. I tried to live my life without friends or company other than my cat. A neighborhood exists around me that is persistent with characters of all backgrounds. My mother is getting vaccinated next week. Others will follow shortly after. Chicago for the most part has adjusted to the hardships of the new normal. We just keep pushing on like the song. And yet people become callous, elite, and separate. Two sides of a city. The rich and the people who live and walk the streets here. If you’ve held it down this long most people appreciate when you are still around. And yet people around here are still deeply motivated by fear and scarcity. America is the same way. It judges people’s worth not on their singular talents but by comparison and control. It’s nervous when you have the confidence to go it alone and embarrassed to admit it did so out of neglect. America is worse. Much like the army, it tries to break down your uniqueness for the benefit of the whole. Herd you into groups that can be managed instead of celebrating the individual will. The mediocrity that is celebrated is the celling in which you threaten to crash. Everybody would rather sabotage your plans than see you succeed without them taking a cut. Everybody would rather have a judgement to hang over your head when you creep past them in a race fair and square. And when things start to get less dirty and the air clears, the history remains. People still lie. People still try to tarnish everything you have done out of a deep hatred. A hatred that they couldn’t rub you out. That you remind them how worthless they really are. Being good gets you targeted time and time again by jealousy and lawlessness. And I don’t want to be anything but good.

Lies and truth have their own infrastructure. Blockchain as a technology is based on trust. We keep secrets possibly because no one knows what we risk at the end of the day. We tell lies instead of saying nothing at all because we feel pressured to be transparent. Everyone wants to know every little thing for both good and bad reasons. Being able to stand up to the lies and speak the truth can be subjective in a post truth era. After all the things I’ve lost, I have no real time for games that are set up against me. I play enough Hearthstone for that. But communities are often to blame for proliferation of disinformation. Sometimes people get manipulated. Sometimes entire histories on a person get buried accidentally. Sometimes people tell other people behind your back never to talk to you. I’ve lived this. I have never felt so isolated in my life. As if the real intention was to break down my dignity to manipulate me further. And largely that is what happened whether you want to process that or not. I’m reminded when I deal with how fucked up my health insurance is that nobody really gives a shit. But there’s a reason it persists. And there’s no consequence to the lies that people uphold in the face of a fairly inconvenient truth. We make a choice to support or ignore. We make a choice to acknowledge the dignity of somebody being alive and in pain. And I’ve seen people just walk away. I’ve also seen people in my life grow closer in a way I cannot explain. When I feel that feeling. When I feel that love, I try to put more love back into the world. I try to create a little bubble around me that protects all the good in my life I still have. To make a place for us to all live with dignity regardless of what we believe, who we fuck or what kpop band we ship on the internet. I literally fucking tried every day and then some. And I literally have faced the worst kind of loneliness you could ever face. Uselessness. That whatever I do doesn’t matter much compared to what I used to be. I used to be a slave. A revenue generator for an investment scam maybe. A body to manipulate for information. A person to spy on all over the world without my consent. I’ve lived all these situations in such damaging ways for years with no recourse and nobody to listen other than here. Week after week on my vent blog people joke about behind my back. No one really knowing that this is about the truest I could ever be with anyone. And knowing after all the hell I’ve been through, that it matters. What I say and what I write. Because it’s the truth. I am a good person. I do try to be in the face of the worst kind of attack on my freedom. They tried to take away my dignity. They can lie about it all they want. It doesn’t mean they’ll get anywhere further with me. It’s already behind me. That’s how you keep your dignity here in America. By proving them wrong. <3 Tim

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fictionadventurer · 7 years

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Father Brown Reread: The Flying Stars

“The most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.

This flips the regular detective story in multiple ways. The focus is on the criminal, rather than the detective. We’re trying to find out why he repented, rather than how he got brought to justice.

In one sentence, we see Flambeau showing some shocking character development. Not only does he stop committing crimes--he becomes “highly moral.”

Once again, if we know what Flambeau was like in his old age, when are the Father Brown stories supposed to take place? Given that Chesterton later mentions some “old Victorian chandeliers”, and that he often discusses “modern” political and philosophical fads, I think he’s engaging in a bit of literary time travel, where the stories take place in the “present day” but give us glimpses of the characters’ futures. (Sayers sometimes does something similar in the Peter Wimsey stories).

This is a strong contender for my favorite Father Brown story. I’ve read it at least six times. (It’s been a Boxing Day tradition for a few years. I’m listening to Christmas music right now to get me in the spirit.) As such, I may have a lot to say. I’ll try to restrain myself.

It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group.

Flambeau, here’s a hint: most criminals don’t care about the aesthetics of their crimes. You’re not a thief. You’re an artist. Your trouble is that you create your works of art using other people and their possessions.

Did Flambeau ever really need the money? Or was he just carried away by the romantic idea of being a trickster and creating those types of tales in real life? Brown’s speech at the end suggests he used the latter to justify the former. (“I’m not a criminal. I’m an artist.”)

I really think my imitation of Dickens’ style was dextrous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.

So Old Flambeau has repented of his crimes in a moral sense, but he still appreciates them on artistic terms. He’s reformed, but he hasn’t lost that flair for the overdramatic, or that arrogant self-confidence.

I’m suddenly struck by the desire to see Flambeau meet Lord Peter Wimsey. They’d be two obnoxiously self-confident artistic snobs who’d end up getting drunk on the good wine and doing ridiculous acrobatics to break into someone’s house.

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it.

Why does the stranger have to study it from the outside? We heard the first part of the story from Flambeau. I want the rest of Flambeau’s version!

Not that I dislike this version, of course. It’s too much fun to wish for any change, and we do need to keep some aspect of the mystery intact.

Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure. “Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”

I believe my first suspicion was that this person was Flambeau--he would do just that sort of acrobatic nonsense. The suspicion’s quickly squashed, but it’s a nice little misdirect.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize that Chesterton was trying to mislead us by naming one of the suspects “Crook”.

This is also a parallel to Father Brown’s conversation with Flambeau at the end of the story.

“I think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.”

Even if Mr. Crook’s not literally Flambeau, he’s certainly a symbolic parallel. This is the sort of philosophy that Flambeau uses to justify his crimes. Perhaps Flambeau was a bit like this before he became a thief--which makes it more meaningful that he reforms at the end of this story.

With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.

I can only imagine Flambeau’s dismay at discovering this priest showing up yet again. (I doubt that he knew about this family habit beforehand). After making such elaborate preparations for the heist, he couldn’t just abandon it on the fear that Brown would recognize him.

Did this make it more fun--a chance to finally pull one over on the priest? Or did it make it more awkward--the guy did convince him to repent last time, after all.

“I’ll put ‘em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. “I had to be careful of ‘em coming down. They’re the three great African diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them.

What made you think these would be a good present for your goddaughter? Just what every girl wants--three diamonds that’ll draw every big-name criminal to her house.

Also, why put them back in the tailcoat? I imagine the house has a safe, if he thought they could keep the present. Unless they plan to put them in a bank later?

... What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?” “A saint,” said Father Brown. “I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”[...] “A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.” “But who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

I’ve always loved this bit. Father Brown shows that religion doesn’t necessarily line up with any political fashions.

The major philosophical tension in this story is the question of property--who has it, who deserves or doesn’t deserve it, how we should distribute it. Crook supports redistributing property and attacking policemen in theoretical terms. Flambeau takes the initiative to do so in practical terms.

"Why couldn’t we have a proper old English pantomime--clown, columbine, and so on.

As in “The Blue Cross”, Flambeau’s artistry is his downfall. He could have stolen the jewels by sleight-of-hand at any moment and been gone long before the policeman arrived. Instead, he decides that a much better plan is to throw together a pantomime.

But no matter how insane the plan is, I have to respect how well he pulls it off. He gets the whole household in on the plan in a matter of minutes, and no one thinks to question him about this “actor friend”.

I adore this whole section. The wild energy of their slap-dash little play is infectious, and very Christmassy.

The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals. In fact he would have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.

I know Flambeau would have adored smashing that chandelier (and I love the image of him trying to do it) but he really lucked out that Ruby had some paste jewels. If he’d smashed those chandeliers, I doubt her father would have been in a mood to let the pantomime go on.

He was supposed to be the clown, but he was really almost everything else, the author (so far as there was an author), the prompter, the scene-painter, and, above all, the orchestra. At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.

I’m surprised at how much Crook gets into this. He’s almost as enthusiastic as “Blount” is.

The fantastic @isfjmel-phleg has located recordings or sheet music of all the songs mentioned in this story. Definitely a post worth checking out.

The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a policeman.

How did Flambeau explain the lack of policeman during the rehearsal? Everyone was okay with the explanation of “He’ll show up in the middle of the show”? For that matter, how did they open the doors just when he showed up? There’s no mention of him knocking.

“Wife!” replied the staring soldier, “she died this year two months. Her brother James arrived just a week too late to see her.”

Flambeau knew that Fischer had the diamonds two months in advance? And ingratiated himself to the family that long ago? Talk about elaborate planning. Was there really no other moment he could he could have retrieved the diamonds? I suppose the day of gift-giving would be when they were most vulnerable.

“Chloroform,” he said as he rose; “I only guessed it just now.”

Apparently Flambeau carries chloroform on him at all times. Nothing like being prepared, I suppose.

Father Brown’s detective style is the opposite of Sherlock Holmes’. It’s truly deductive reasoning--starting with the “big picture” and finding details to support it. So far, we haven’t really seen Father Brown collect clues. He’s just living life, quietly observing, until he gets a sudden flash of inspiration. Only then can he pick out the little details to support his theory and show how the crime was done.

There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south. The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible.

Here Chesterton shifts from past tense to present tense for a page. There’s no explanation. Sayers does these kinds of shifts sometimes, too. Were writing rules different back then, or is this a failure of editing?

The present tense does give it a bit of a “stage show” feel, paralleling the dramatics of a moment before.

“Well, Flambeau,” says the voice, “you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last.”

Does Father Brown practice these one-liners?

Flambeau’s disguise must have been pretty good if Father Brown didn’t recognize him until now. But once Brown understood the crime, it must have been easy to figure out the criminal’s identity. Who else would do something so overelaborately artistic?

You were going to steal the jewels quietly [...] You already had the clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellry. Now you saw that if the dress were a harlequin’s the appearance of a policeman would be quite in keeping.

The stage jewellry can’t already have been a part of Flambeau’s plan, not if he planned to steal them quietly.

However, just before he got his letter, he was ready to applaud Ruby’s idea of a little show. Perhaps Brown meant that this gave him the idea to use a Christmas show to hide the jewels, and he got the idea for a pantomime a moment later when he heard about the policeman?

“I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade.”

Father Brown already got Flambeau to repent and return his stolen goods once before. This time he has to be more specific. It’s not good enough to just give back the goods. He has to give up this life entirely.

Flambeau may be the criminal, but there’s an innocence about him. Father Brown, for all his cloistered lifestyle, has a much grittier and more realistic view of the world. Yet another example of how these stories invert the typical detective story tropes.

“...I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare.” [...] “Your downward steps have begun. You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight. You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him. But you will do meaner things than that before you die.”

This page is one of the best monologues in fiction. This entire speech gives me chills, but the ending is especially powerful.

The restoration of the gems (accidentally picked up by Father Brown, of all people) ended the evening in uproarious triumph; and Sir Leopold, in his height of good humor, even told the priest that though he himself had broader views, he could respect those whose creed required them to be cloistered and ignorant of the world.

Chesterton loves highlighting this bit of irony. It’s also a nice bookend to “The Blue Cross” where this irony was the turning-point of the whole story.

After the chilling dramatics of the garden, it’s nice to end on this lively, cheery, Christmassy atmosphere.

I wonder how Flambeau first got back in touch with Father Brown. The next time we see him, he and Brown are already good friends. It must have been an awkward, dramatic, and epic moment when a fully repentant Flambeau reapproaches the man who convinced him to reform.

#father brown reread #father brown #the flying stars #g.k. chesterton #flambeau

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rhysie-cakes314 · 6 years

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Day 18- Cryptid

This chapter makes a reference to the chapter "Revenge."

I love Tony and Clint together. I think their banter is hilarious, and my running headcanon that they are hyper-competitive and prank each other keeps me going sometimes. So, I decided they needed some alone time. Also 'Tony Talks' are now a part of my avengers family. Take that as you will.

Warnings for vague discussion of alcohol abuse, and mentions of child abuse.

Summary:

Phil Coulson had never seen two grown men this into a debate about Bigfoot. That's right, Bigfoot. He watched from his perch in the corner of the room while Tony and Clint argued back and forth about the existence of the furry beast. They were both drunk, and somewhere between giggly and screaming. Phil wasn't sure he even needed to watch movies anymore when he had entertainment like this right at home.

The story of how Tony and Clint went camping, just to try and find Bigfoot, and came back a little closer.

“There is no way in Hell that he exists and I haven’t seen him,” Clint insisted. “I’ve been all over North America and hunted in every forest. If Bigfoot was real, I would have seen him, and probably shot him. I’m Hawkeye for god’s sake!”

Tony clicked on another blurry video of the supposed cryptid. “You of all people, Clint,” he shook his head. “I thought if anyone would be a believer-”

“Me!? I can’t believe you of all people think he could exist! You’re the genius scientist! Why would there be one singular example of a species that has lived all this time, never been caught, or even caught in a clear picture? With modern cameras? You basically have to try to make a picture or video with that bad of quality,” the archer gestured wildly at the screen, spilling some of his drink.

Tony jumped to his feet and staggered over to the bar. He was pouring more liquor. This had been his first night off in weeks, and damn, he had needed this. The glass slid away from him as he recorked the bourbon. Tony stared at the spot it had been, confused. Tilting his head and reaching forward to investigate, he suddenly noticed the figure in his periphery he somehow hadn’t noticed. Maybe he should stop.

Phil watched the debacle, amused. It took the genius and embarrassingly long amount of time to notice him sitting there at the bar. “I think you’ve had enough,” he commented, and Tony was looking at him blankly. Then it all must have clicked into place, because Tony was laughing and slapping Phil’s shoulder.

“Whatever you say, Agent no-fun, I’m a-okay!” Tony spun on his heel, making to head back towards the couch where Clint was engrossed in yet another video. The two had somehow ended up on the topic of Bigfoot towards the end of movie night, and had been arguing about it since. The world spun just a bit further than he expected, and Tony stumbled, landing half standing, half in Phil’s arms against his lap. He looked up and met the agent’s gaze and winked. “You come here often?” he dropped his voice down to a sultry tone.

Taking everything in stride as usual, Phil just raised an eyebrow, looking down at his inebriated friend. Tony saw the way his lips twitched, though, and he grinned, victorious. An almost smile! That was basically the equivalent of a guffaw from Phil Coulson.

“Hey! Get off my man!” Clint called from the couch. That seemed to remind Tony of their debate. He pushed off Phil, flirtation forgotten, and jumped onto the couch, sticking his socks in Clint’s face. The squawk he let it out was totally worth the ensuing wrestling match that ended up with Tony pinned on the ground.

“Uncle!” Clint let up and Tony rolled over, deciding the floor was fine anyway. “Seriously, though, we’ve been to the Savage Lands! We’ve met monsters galore, plus he could just be a mutant, only one explained. Boom.” He threw up a fist in victory.

“You’re cracked. Oh, Steve!” Clint noticed the man enter the room first. Everyone besides the three of them had left the room a long time ago, and Steve was in pajamas now. “Tell your boy-toy that Bigfoot is a myth.”

Steve and Phil shared amused expressions across the room. It was nice to see Tony unwinding, though why he was on the floor was a mystery. The brunette propped himself up on his elbows, waiting expectantly for Steve’s input. “Well…”

“Keep in mind that I can withhold sex,” Tony interrupted.

“That’s not fair!”

Steve chuckled. “As if you could resist me, Tony. I’d have to say I think he might be real. Buck had a cousin who definitely saw him once.”

“A friend of a friend? How cliché,” Clint scoffed over Tony’s loud ‘ha!’

“You know what? I’m gonna prove it.” Tony sat up, pointing an accusatory finger at his adversary. “You, me, we’re going camping for the weekend. JARVIS, calculate which forest will be most likely to have Bigfoot.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Steve reached out a hand until Tony took it to stand up. “Come on, Tony, you hate camping. Remember the spider-bite?” That had been a terrible adventure.

“I hate allowing Clint to think he’s won more,” he replied very seriously. “Plus this time we’ll actually have a way to call for help if we need it.”

“According to the most believable sightings and the climates which would best suit the creature in October, I suggest you camp in Sierra National Forest of California.” JARVIS said.

“Wait, don’t I get a say in this?” Clint asked. Tony crossed his arms with a smirk, knowing Clint wasn’t going to pass up the chance to embarrass Tony with a bet. “Okay, you’re right. You’re on, winner gets to choose loser’s songs for the next karaoke night.”

“Perfect. We’ll leave tomorrow and come back on Monday.” Steve crossed his arms, pursing his lips in annoyance until Tony added, “As long as Cap’s alright with it, that is.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “But don’t forget how cold it is at night this time of year.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Yeah, mom.”

…

One of Tony’s jets was parked outside the western edge of the forest. Grabbing their packs, Tony and Clint began their hike to find a good campsite near coordinates JARVIS gave them where they were most likely to encounter Bigfoot. “How are we going to entertain ourselves for three days?” Clint asked, mostly thinking aloud as they walked.

Tony thought about that, realizing he had never spent this much time with just Clint before. What if they got sick of each other? What did Clint like to do? Tony assumed he probably enjoyed shooting things, knew he enjoyed video games but that wasn’t really possible out here… “Good question. We could play games or something, maybe you could teach me to shoot with a bow.”

The way the archer’s head whipped around with a wide grin was a little scary. “You’d really want to learn? I could show you so many tricks!”

Tony held up his hands, “Whoa there, Robin Hood, don’t get ahead of yourself. I’ve never even shot a regular target with your primitive weaponry.”

Clint got that mischievous glint to his eyes that Tony had learned to be wary of. “You’ll regret calling my weaponry primitive by the end of this weekend, mark my words.”

Tony smirked. “I doubt it. I was a weapons designer, remember? A handgun seems a bit primitive to me.”

The archer raised both eyebrows in disbelief, the hint of laughter there. “We’ll see.” He turned as they continued walking and scanning for a good spot to set up camp. “Anyway, I’d actually enjoy teaching you to shoot, I think. Nobody is ever really interested in it.”

“Yeah, it could be fun,” Tony replied warmly. “I like learning new skills.” They came upon a small clearing that seemed as good a spot as any and wordlessly agreed to set up camp. That finished, Clint’s stomach decided it was the perfect time to rumble. “Let’s save the lessons for later though, you sound hungry. You hunt I’ll make a fire?”

“Sounds good to me. I bet I can have an animal ready to be cooked before you finish setting up the fire,” Clint prodded, wiggling his eyebrows. It was a stupid look.

“Oh, you’re on.” They both took off in opposite directions in a rush, Clint with his bow, and Tony to gather wood. Clint may be a perfect shot, but he was crazy if he thought he’d win this one. He had to find an animal, kill it, lug it back, skin it, and butcher it. All Tony had to do was gather wood, use some rocks to border a pit, and get some tinder. It’d be a piece of cake.

The last log of Tony’s little log cabin pyramid set up he had going and stepped back to admire his work. If Tony Stark was going to build a fire, it was going to be the best fire you’ve ever seen. He wondered idly if the two of them were capable of not competing. Looking back, everything they did tended to take on at least a slightly competitive quality. The curiosity as to why, now that he’d noticed it, was going to eat him up until he figured it out. Maybe Clint would have a good idea about it.

The tinder on top of the base, surrounded by the other logs above and beside, was not lighting the way it should. Clint had already dragged back a mule deer and was nearly finished skinning the giant buck, and Tony’s perfect setup wouldn’t light. He had read plenty on camping, used to do it with JARVIS even, Tony knew how to start a fire, damnit. The problem was that everything was damp. He hadn’t noticed it on the hike here, but it must’ve rained recently. That damn hawkeyed archer had probably noticed it and that’s why he was so confident in the bet. Tony narrowed his eyes in concentration, Clint was forgetting that he was a genius. He’d solve this.

“Having trouble over there?” Clint asked smugly.

“No, you?” Tony shot back.

“Nope! Almost finished.”

“Good for you,” Tony muttered. Remembering an accident that happened once in the lab, he suddenly had an idea. The flurry of movement caught Clint off guard, and he watched with interest as Tony pulled out his cell phone and quickly disassembled it, holding up the battery in triumph. “You lose, Barton!” Clint gaped in a mixture of awe and horror as Tony reached up his shirt and pulled out the arc reactor. Tony’s face only showed a small twitch that indicated Tony feeling a thing. Tony took the wire that connected the reactor to the electromagnet, and touched it to the uncovered metal of his phone’s lithium ion battery. The resulting sparks were numerous, and hotter than what someone can get with banging rocks together or twirling sticks by hand. Despite the dampness, the kindling burst into flame, and the fire continued to burn steadily after that. Tony yanked his hands back, only catching a few sparks on his skin. “Agh! Youch, that’s hot.” He hissed. Sitting back from his crouch and recasing the reactor, Tony met Clint’s stare with a satisfied grin.

Tony Stark was a madman. Clint couldn’t believe he was only just now finding out. They had lived together and worked together for years, but he had never imagined how mad the genius was. “What the actual fuck?” he blurted out.

Not the reaction he had been expecting, Tony studied Clint’s horrified expression. “What do you mean?” He gestured to the fire he had created with his genius, “Fire lit, I win.”

“You took out the thing that keeps you alive and destroyed your cell phone just to win a stupid contest against me!?” Clint’s voice rose a few octaves. He was kind of feeling off-kilter. Maybe going to the woods alone with a mad-scientist wasn’t a great idea. At least for his mental health.

Somehow, Tony looked even more confused. “It’s not like I die if it’s only out for a few seconds, chill. Plus I’m a billionaire, maybe trillionaire I don’t remember, Pepper would know, but the point is I can replace my phone battery no problem. You’re just salty I won.” Tony crossed his arms with a smugness the situation surely did not warrant. “C’mon, get the food finished, I’m hungry.”

The archer shook his head in disbelief, returning to his work. When Tony put it that way, it seemed almost logical, but Tony always managed to make crazy things sound logical. The man had burned himself with sparks from a device he needed to live like the risk was a non-factor. He was bringing this up next time Cap or Phil tried to harass him for being reckless. Tony made him look like the most cautious man alive. He decided to put the image of Tony pulling out the reactor out of his head. It was playing over and over in his mind, and Clint wouldn’t have thought he’d be so affected by a simple action like that, but to him it had looked akin to someone stabbing themselves or something. And that was his friend, his family member. All of the Avengers probably subconsciously equated the blue light in Tony’s chest with him being alive.

By the time they were done eating and packing away the leftovers in bear-proof, freshness-preserving containers of Tony’s design for dinner, it was somewhere in the late afternoon. “So,” Clint ventured. “How are we going to find your mythical creature?”

“Possibly mythical,” Tony corrected automatically. “I thought about the spread of sightings and decided that Bigfoot is most likely a species and not just one creature, but it probably doesn’t live in packs, given that no one has ever seen multiple together.”

Clint rolled his eyes. He couldn’t believe Tony believed this stuff. “Or that I’ve never seen any,” he muttered.

“Hush. You asked for the plan. Anyway, I think we can stay within this one general area, because each Bigfoot probably stays within their territory that they mark, probably with urine. It’d be much harder to find one in three days if we were going on the assumption of only one in the entirety of this forest. JARVIS and I agree that the species is probably nocturnal, so I thought you and I could take shifts at night a little ways away to see if we can spot him, since he probably wouldn’t approach the campsite.” Tony rummaged around in the tent behind him, pulling out his bag. “I brought us night-vision goggles!” he held them up in excitement.

Clint snatched one, examining it closely. “You thought this through more than I expected,” he admitted finally.

“Well duh, I think everything through,” Tony scoffed. Given the myriad of instances Clint could cite where that was clearly not the case, he decided it was a pointless debate. He would never win it without one of the others to back him up.

“We’ve got lots of daylight left, then, wanna learn to shoot?”

Tony shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

They practiced for hours. Tony was surprisingly promising for a novice, but he struggled to hold the arrow back without shaking, which made aim difficult. “I’m trying to be still, but it’s so hard to pull back!” he whined. Clint laughed but with no malice. He could still remember what building up the muscles for this was like, and Tony probably never needed to use his trapezius, deltoid, and triceps with his fighting style. The man was lean and strong, had to be to pilot the suit, but his upper back was not his strong suit. “I’m going to be so sore tomorrow,” Tony sighed, letting loose another shaky arrow.

“You’re a natural though,” Clint encouraged. Tony scowled like he didn’t believe it. “What, would I be the one to lie to make you feel better?”

“You’ve got a point, bird-brain.” They got dinner and decided Clint would take the first shift of the night, since Tony’s body was more worn out from their archery lessons. Clint decided to talk Tony into something more relaxing tomorrow.

…

The night had been uneventful and boring as hell. Clint nearly fell asleep on his branch a couple times purely out of boredom. Tony reported a similar experience, but was still confident in his endeavor to prove the existence to Clint. Plus, the weekend was going to be a success for him either way.

“We should go swimming today,” Clint decided halfway through their late morning meal. It was nice to have no schedule to keep, and he was actually shocked that Tony had come up with the idea given this was usually his crazy work month. Whatever was motivating the change, Clint enjoyed a less manic Tony. The genius could get too high strung.

Tony spluttered a little, coughing before drinking some more to calm down. Clint hadn’t even noticed that he was drinking from a flask, and not his water bottle. He frowned. “Perhaps not,” Tony finally managed. When no further explanation came, Clint pressed it.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to,” Tony snapped. He looked surprised himself at the harsh reaction. “Sorry, I just, I don’t like swimming.” The discomfort was obvious.

This wasn’t their thing, Tony and Clint didn’t talk feelings, they goofed around and teased each other. Everyone on the team had had at least one of their ‘Tony Talks’ as they had been deemed, everyone except Clint. Clint heard about them only in hearsay, but a Tony Talk was apparently always eye-opening for both parties. Tony kept things close to his chest for the most part, Clint did too, so whenever a Tony Talk did happen, whether it was because the two people got really drunk, or because a duo mission got unexpectedly serious and adrenaline pushed truths out of the closet, it was a big deal.

Clint never took it personally, their relationship was fine as it was. Friendly rivalry and casual fun defined most of it, but they both knew they’d do anything for each other. And if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure he wanted a Tony Talk. There’s no way he would escape without revealing himself as well, and there was a reason only Nat and Phil really knew him. Giving people your trust was a very dangerous game. Whenever he thought about trying to be more open, Barney’s face haunted his dreams to remind him that even your brother can turn on you.

But Tony and he were gonna be here all weekend. Maybe this was finally the time to let their relationship grow, even if only a little. Plus, Tony had chosen to take a break in his busy schedule to go on a trip with him. There had to be something more to that than just Bigfoot, right? Tony hated camping. He felt like he owed it to the genius a little to try to be there, not just shrug off the man’s discomfort.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked quietly. Tony looked over, surprised, then quickly averted his eyes.

“I mean, it’s not a big deal,” he muttered.

And Clint could leave it at that. But this was so uncharacteristic of Tony. He was usually all bravado and deflection, this seemed unsure. The man who practically lead the Avengers as much as Cap made it clear when you weren’t allowed to broach a subject. This was only a half-hearted deflection; Clint took the leap that he wanted it pushed.

“Tony, look at me.” Tony looked like it pained him to do so, but he also looked grateful when he saw that Clint was taking this seriously. “It clearly is something, and you need to know you can tell me anything. I know we fool around a lot, but I would never make fun of you for anything real. You know that, right?”

Tony nodded. He bit his lip, unsure. “I know, it just always sounds stupid when I say it out loud.” He shifted into a more comfortable decision. “I don’t like it when people see my chest,” he admitted with a blush.

That… was not at all where Clint had thought this was going. He kind of thought they were going to get into a PTSD talk about the torture in Afghanistan, which Tony’s file was vague on but Clint knew it involved semi-drowning. The bastards hadn’t even waterboarded Tony, no, they literally held him down in barrels. The risk of actually drowning was real. But no, now that he thought about it, Clint had never seen Tony shirtless. He’d seen pictures of course, anyone with the internet could, but they were all from before the arc reactor. Clint wondered if all the women Tony had still had one night stands with after had seen him, or if he’d just kept his shirt on during sex. “I don’t have any glowing parts, but I’ll show you my scars if you show me yours?” he tried to keep it light, let Tony know it was okay if he didn’t want to, but toe the line so the man didn’t think he was being mocked.

Tony studied his friend’s face. And they were friends, he knew that, but he also knew that he and Clint had never really talked about serious stuff. There was sort of an unspoken agreement that if one of them came to the other upset, it was to escape talking about it, to escape everything and just get drunk and be stupid. This was new territory, but Clint didn’t show any hint of this being a game. “You first.” he eventually broke the yawning silence between them.

Clint didn’t say anything, just took off his t-shirt and placed it in his lap. He had never been self-conscious about his body before, but being studied made him feel a little like squirming.

“Tell me what they’re from, please,” Tony said quietly. It was so strangely intimate, but it also didn’t feel weird like it should. This was his drinking buddy, but also the guy who had to have his back on the battlefield. If he could let Tony hold his life in his hands, which he definitely has before, then he can talk about scars.

So he did. “This one here was from my dad, where the belt buckle caught me just right,” Tony just nodded, face blank. “Um, this one was me getting caught on a barbed wire fence while robbing a mansion, that was in my Circus of Crime days. These two are both stab wounds from pocket knives in different bar fights. The one over here is from Barney.” Clint swallowed. Tony gave him a small smile; it said ‘I understand.’ “And this one was a sniper shot in Budapest. I can’t really remember the smaller ones.” He shrugged. There were so many scars over the years, it wasn’t really possible to keep track.

Tony scrubbed his hands over his face, looking his age for once. It was easy to forget that he was older than most of them, well, older than all the naturally aging people. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to do that, this is so weird, I’m being stupid.”

“No, you’re not,” Clint cut him off. “And it’s okay. Sometimes things have to be a little weird to feel safe. We’re family. If talking about scars makes you feel okay about yours, then I have no problems with it.”

Tony looked so lost for a moment, eyes glassy, but he blinked and he was fine. Clint could almost believe he had imagined it if Tony didn’t take a long drag from the flask he brought. “Right. Yeah. Um,” he paused, “oh fuck it.” He pulled off his t-shirt and it all made a little more sense.

Sure, Clint had a lot of scars, like anyone in the hero business that didn’t have special healing factors, but Tony’s scars weren’t normal. The skin around the arc reactor was all scar tissue, jagged and pink, with longer scars here and there jutting out like hands on a clock. It had never really occurred to Clint before just how much of Tony’s chest must be missing. A lot of the sternum was probably gone, which meant the ribs there were probably a little more free floating than they should be. That or wedged against the metal. There’s no way his heart and lungs weren’t being pushed out of the way by it, misplaced. He knew how big the reactor was, how had he never thought about this?

The rest of Tony’s obvious scars were ones Clint knew about, things that had happened since the Avengers Initiative began.There were other smaller ones, but they might as well be invisible next to the chest piece. Clint realized he had been staring, and looked up to see Tony watching him nervously. “I don’t really need to tell you what they’re from, do I?” he asked, sarcastic smile plastered on his face in an attempt to hide the fear. This is when Tony always expected people to run screaming.

Clint allowed his own lips to form a lopsided smile. “No, I suppose you don’t. Thank you, for trusting me.”

Tony gave a jerky nod. “Let’s just get it out of the way, because I know you’re thinking about it. Ask whatever questions you want then we can go swimming and stop being mushy.”

The bluntness surprised a laugh out of Clint. “That’s fair, I am curious. Does it affect your breathing?”

“My lung capacity is diminished by about 40%, a little more on my left than on the right since my heart’s being shoved over that way.”

“Do you feel it?”

“Everyday. I forget about it sometimes, but it’s still that cold, hard, knot in my chest making it harder to breathe. It took a long time to get used to.”

“Does the casing ever burn you?”

Tony actually chuckled, and it seemed like this was getting easier. “Well I can’t go suntanning anymore. Actually, the bigger problem is in the cold, the metal gets colder quicker, and it kind of saps the heat away from its surrounding. So I get hypothermia a lot easier. I think the scar tissue is the only reason I haven’t gotten frostbite from it.”

“I can’t believe you built that in a cave,” Clint admitted. It was probably the one thing that had always impressed him the most about Tony.

“It’s not like I wasn’t surrounded by tech to scavenge from,” Tony shrugged it off. “They gave me whatever I asked for, thought I was building a bomb.”

“Just take the compliment, shellhead. Let’s go swimming.”

…

Somehow a relaxing swim in the stream turned into another contest. Tony decided that they should race. When that ended predictably (hadn’t they just talked about Tony’s lack of lung capacity?) Tony suggested they see who can catch a fish with their bare hands first. Clint almost felt bad when he won that too, the way Tony slumped in defeat for a moment, but it was quickly shrugged off. Overall they had a good time.

They decided to stick with the same schedule for watch that night. Tony was confident that this was the night. Bigfoot was gonna show. Clint nestled into another tree with his night-vision goggles on, bow on his back. He scanned the forest, seeing the occasional fox and hearing some coyotes in the distance. The wind chill was worse up in the trees, so he hugged his arms around himself to keep warm. It seemed a little unbelievable if he let himself think to hard about the fact that he was sitting in a tree in California in the middle of the night all because Thor had asked about the ‘Midgardian Bigfoot’ he had heard about on the ‘internets.’

Tony was ready. It hadn’t been part of the plan to have a heart to heart that day, but it definitely worked in his favor. Clint’s guard was down more than usual. He seemed slightly less hypervigilant than usual around Tony, and it had to be a subconscious trust thing. Granted, slightly less hypervigilant from the great Hawkeye still meant very hypervigilant, but this was Tony’s best chance for revenge. Tony was going to break Clint’s winning streak in their scream contest this year if it killed him. Well, not literally. Probably.

Natasha had been helping him learn to sneak better. He was already naturally light on his feet, plus he had the advantage of being light, but no one was better suited to sneaking than Black widow. Tony liked to think he had gotten pretty good. The tent made no sound as he exited, and he carefully avoided every leaf or twig as he approached the tree Clint was in. He looked up, studying his best chance, calculating lengths from one branch to another compared to his arm’s reach, as well as which branches could most likely hold his weight. Plan mapped out, he silently began the climb up the tree behind Clint’s. The archer wasn’t even scanning in the direction of the tent since they assumed that’s not where Bigfoot would be.

The slight rustle in the leaves above Clint only happened during a breeze, so he thought nothing of it. Just once, he heard a sudden rustling noise, but when he looked up, a bird was flying away into the night. There was no reason to expect anyone out here. It was an impromptu trip. So when the branch just behind him made a cracking noise, he moved on instinct, decades of training taking over in an instant.

Of course the last fucking branch was Tony’s only miscalculation. It must have already been structurally compromised on the underside, because it was definitely big enough to hold his weight with no sound this close to the tree trunk. The cracking sound gave him away, so it was now or never. “Boo!” he yelled as loud as possible just as Clint screamed and suddenly he was falling backward.

The archer watched helplessly while Tony fell to the ground below, the thump of his body landing in dead leaves and rolling a little making him wince. How had he thought sneaking up on a trained SHIELD agent was a good plan? Clint had efficiently flipped the assailant over, knocking each hand roughly to disarm him in case, and let go to watch them fall. There was no way he could’ve known it was Tony until it was too late. Everything had happened so fast, plus with the night vision goggles on, Tony looked kind of like a blurry bright blob, details like his goatee disappearing in the resolution of the lenses. Clint took the goggles off and strapped them to his belt, quickly climbing down after Tony. His natural night vision was better anyway.

“Tony! Oh my god, please be alive.”

Tony was still lying on the ground, but Clint could see he was moving as he neared the bottom. He groaned. “I win!” he taunted, raising his head to look at Clint before dropping it back to the ground. “Ow.”

Clint knelt down beside him, doing a cursory once over. “You are not seriously talking about the damn scream contest right now, are you?” This solidified Clint’s theory from the day before. Tony was an actual mad man.

“But I finally beat you,” Tony actually whined. Clint kind of wanted to slap him.

“Where are you hurt?” he asked instead.

Tony went to sit up, hissing when he moved his left arm. Clint let him use his shoulder to grip with the uninjured arm and helped the man sit up. “Not sure.” Tony wiggled different parts of his body, occasional hisses and yelps. “Definitely left shoulder and arm, right ankle, and possibly a couple ribs. I must’ve done something to my ankle on the branch when you ninja-flipped me, and landed on my left side, although better than my neck I suppose,” he added as an afterthought.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Clint let his anger out, now that he knew Tony wasn’t dying or something. “You know I’m a trained combatant, that sneaking up on me in the dark, in a tree no less, is a terrible idea! Probably the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, and honestly? I thought you were supposed to be a genius and I let it go when you pulled out your reactor just to start a fire faster but seriously, what is wrong with you!?”

Tony was staring at him petulantly, and Clint was reminded of a toddler in trouble. “Can I answer now or do you need to let off more steam?” he had the gall to be sarcastic and raise an unimpressed eyebrow at Clint. He was so tempted to punch the man in the nose and honestly? He’d probably do it if Steve wouldn’t kill him for it.

“That’s it, I’m leaving you here on your own. You can figure out how to hop on one leg back to camp because I can’t handle you right now.” He stood up and began to walk away.

He couldn’t actually be walking away, right? He was joking, he had to be. “Wait! No, I’ll shut up just help me get to the tent at least.”

Clint closed his eyes and counted to ten. How Steve dealt with this all the time was a mystery for the ages. He walked back and silently helped the smaller man up, to lean on him. Tony kept his mouth shut, limping back to camp, where Clint unceremoniously dropped him outside the tent. The fire was still slightly burning embers, so he scooted over, shivering. Clint watched him curl up, one arm cradled awkwardly to his chest, the other wrapped around his knees, and his injured ankle gingerly placed on the ground while he just stared into the glowing embers with a thousand-yard-stare.

The sight made Tony look so small. The anger bled out of Clint, leaving behind exhaustion and pity. He sighed, setting about to rekindle the flames. When he settled down on the other side of the fire, Tony still hadn’t looked away from the flames. “Look,” Clint said tiredly, but Tony didn’t react. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle,” he tried.

Tony shook his head slightly, almost imperceptible. His lips barely moved as he murmured, “Don’t apologize, I deserved it.”

This was going nowhere. He was clearly in one of his Stark-patented sulks. “I guess we’ll leave in the morning?” Tony made a movement that might have been a one armed shrug, but it was hard to tell. Clint thought he caught a mumbled ‘yeah, whatever’ but his hearing aids could only do so much. “Tony, please, talk to me.”

His eyes slid up, meeting Clint’s, but he otherwise remained unmoved. “What.”

God, it was like pulling teeth. Clint growled in frustration, tugging at his hair for a moment. “Can you just, I don’t know, explain it to me?”

“Explain what? I’m really not sure why you’re mad at me,” Tony finally reacted, shifting to face Clint more fully. He looked stricken. “I thought we were having a fun weekend, and then I find out you’ve been, I don’t know, sitting on something about the arc reactor instead of just telling me you were upset, and I don’t know what to think! I can get it if you hate me, it would make sense, but this up and down where one minute you’re telling me about your scars so I’ll feel better and the next you’re yelling at me like a child, I just don’t know what you want.”

The sudden, overwhelming desire to laugh took hold of Clint for a moment, but he thankfully stifled it. There’s no way Tony would take that well. “I’m not really sure how we got to this point either, to be honest. I think,” but Tony stopped him with a finger in a ‘wait a minute’ gesture.

“If we’re about to really get into this, I need to get comfortable,” he started trying to scoot himself over toward the tent with one leg, on his butt, and only the opposite arm to balance. It was stupid. Clint jumped up and was over to the tent in minutes.

“For god’s sake, Tony, just ask me to get something for you.”

“Fine.” And he didn’t need to look so offended at being helped. “Can you grab me my hoodie jacket with the flask?”

Clint watched Tony take a long drag of his liquor while he settled himself back on the ground. Tony motioned with his hand for Clint to continue from before, placing the hoodie on his lap like a blanket. “Okay, that for one. Why do you have a flask this weekend? Do you always have one?”

Tony stared at the container in his hand. “Old habits, I guess. My dear old dad gave me my first one when I was a kid. Always having it with me kind of made me feel like we had something in common.” The bitterness laced through his words. It did give them something in common, Tony knew it. He probably drank too much. But he never piloted the armour drunk, didn’t put others at risk, and that was good enough for him.

“Scratch that, that’s a can of worms we can save for another time.” Tony grimaced but said nothing. “I think there’s been some undercurrent to our interactions lately that I’m not sure what it is, but there’s a tension. Like none of our games are just games anymore, maybe.”

Tony thought about that. “You might be onto something. I admit I’ve been even more averse to losing than usual.”

“I’ll take some of the blame for that, too.” Clint admitted. “I compete with everyone, but I definitely feel more invested when it’s you.”

Tony nodded, like that rang true for him as well. “You’re my only competition,” he said.

That stopped Clint’s line of thought short. “What? Why?”

Tony unscrewed the flask, thought better of it, and screwed it shut again. “Well think about it. Out of the official team, Coulson not included because he helps more in the background, you’re the only other normal human. You and I don’t have anything but our natural skills and tech.”

A lot of little things began to click into place for Clint. “This is about belonging on the Avengers, isn’t it,” it wasn’t a question. Tony nodded, expression twisted in a self-deprecating smile. “I can relate to that. We both have to work harder to keep up with the others. I always thought that’s why we worked so well together, we have to hold each other up to the standards of all the powered ups. I don’t want it to be a competition where one of us belongs and the other doesn’t, I would lose.” He let out his own self-deprecating chuckle.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, you win at everything! My only thing is my genius, and you’re plenty intelligent yourself, so where does that leave me? Sure, I’ve got the money, but I’ll keep funding everyone even after I die. And I’m not going to be able to do this forever, I’m getting older, what if I get alzheimer's or something?” There was a frantic note to his tone.

“And what if I go blind or get a permanent injury? Tony, any one of us could be permanently benched for a number of reasons, except maybe Thor. Even Bruce sometimes can’t control the Hulk, and that makes him a liability. Steve and Nat are hardly invulnerable. That’s the business, everything is fluid and tentative.”

Fuck it. Tony took another couple swallows from the flask. “What are we supposed to do with ourselves when we’re done with the Avengers?”

Clint shrugged. It was something he had definitely thought about, but he preferred to deal with problems as they came. Tony was the one always stuck in the possible futures. “We’ll always be a family.”

“Yeah I guess you’re right.” They sat in companionable silence for a while, just listening to the crackle of burning wood. “Oh!” Clint startled from his thoughts, glancing up. “Where are your night vision goggles?”

“Uh, I think I left them on the ground when you fell.”

Tony tossed his over. “Here, take mine and go get them.”

Clint groaned. “Do I have to? It’s not like you can’t afford new ones.”

“Quit your griping, birdbrain. I built cameras into them so we could catch Bigfoot on film! What if he showed up while we were gone?” Tony grinned in excitement.

“You’ve got to be kidding me! I was starting to think maybe this was all a ploy just for the sneaking up on me, but no, you really think there’s a cryptid out there.”

Tony looked personally affronted. “Of course I do. Cryptids are everywhere, you sad, sad, nonbeliever.”

The walk back the next morning was slow. Tony had to take a few breaks, but these injuries were child’s play for them. They were still able to joke around and have fun while they walked. “I can’t believe I finally got a Tony Talk,” Clint thought aloud as they neared the jet.

“A what?” Tony shot him an amused look.

“Oh my god, you don’t know?” They settled into their seats after Clint packed everything in.

“Know what!” Tony exclaimed impatiently.

Clint laughed. “They’re a legend. Everyone on the team had had a Tony Talk but me. It’s like a rare look at the real you that’s supposed to always be life altering.”

Tony scoffed. “That’s ridiculous, you’re making this up. Sounds like a Ted Talk.”

Clint just shook his head, smiling knowingly. “Don’t believe me? Ask the others.”

…

The Avengers had been gathered into the movie room to watch whatever Tony was demanding they watch. Everyone had already finished scolding the man for coming back from simple camping all banged up. The previous evening’s dinner had consisted of a series of lectures, followed by a hilariously flustered Tony finding out that yes, Tony Talks were a thing. He had fled the scene then, spending the night in his lab reviewing footage from their night vision goggles.

“Alright, what is this all about?” Steve asked.

“JARVIS queue up the segment we talked about. Lady and gentleman, I present to you, Bigfoot!”

Clint jumped forward off the couch, watching the footage carefully. It was clearly from his goggles on the second night, the angle odd from their spot on the ground. Sure enough, an unnaturally large humanoid figure strutted across the scene, slowed down to a frame by frame. Showed again at normal speed, the furry figure was a blur across the screen. Whatever it was was fast. Unfortunately, because it was night vision footage, Clint couldn’t make out the fine details, but even he had to admit it looked like a Bigfoot. “I can’t believe it,” he whispered as Tony cackled maniacally.

#thearkoctoberchallenge2018 #marvel #fanfic #fanfiction #tony stark #clint barton #avengers #avengers as a family #bigfoot

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americanahighways · 5 years

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photos by Glenn Cook

James McMurtry was one of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school. Having arrived in Boston, fresh from the revelatory oasis of my UC Berkeley undergraduate years, I was pretty certain the world had shown me what it could. Intellectual prowess, philosophical abandon, and mindful debauchery had been fused into a fledgling, yet purposeful, identity.

Boston was cold and dreary, classes were grey and unforgiving, a startling contrast to the communal spirit and raised consciousness housed on Ward street. We cooked vegetarian, loved freely, and protested fully; Donald Trump’s America was an Orwellian fable, a cautionary tale of hyperbolic proportion, its malignant intent foreshadowed but not yet fathomed in the relative predictability of the Bush years.

Too Long in the Wasteland, James McMurtry’s brilliant inaugural album (1989), rooted in a geography far removed from the rarefied and fractured Fenway landscape I now called home, was a courting gift that Dan, soon to be my graduate school boyfriend, offered as a way to cheer me up. He was determined to posit the existence of a quieter more authentic world outside both heady idealism and acerbic academia. Along with Peter Taylor’s rich stories of everyday life in the South and Charles Wright’s bucolic meditations, Dan proffered James McMurty’s genius, channeled through rich guitar riffs and carefully crafted wry observations of American experience, as his proofs.

I have been an unabashed devotee of James McMurty ever since. He is one of what I call my DNA musicians, referring to the small group of artists who help me through and lift me up, and provide at times perspective and vision. If neither happens to be within my reach, at least McMurtry suggests the certainty that someone somewhere is playing a mean 12-string guitar, and without pomp or circumstance, speaking “the truth.”

Both backstory and full disclosure, the above acknowledges what I brought to The Birchmere Thursday night for James McMurtry’s solo performance. Unpretentious, not a bell or a whistle within spitting distance, The Birchmere is my favorite DC area venue in which to see McMurtry. He just makes sense there, with his dry humor and no bullshit demeanor, surrounded by his die-hard fans,who—and I will stand by this statement until I am proven wrong—are a damn special group of people.

“How’s everyone doing,?” McMurtry asks, and without further adieu, we are off. His opener, the stunning “Saint Mary of the Woods” (2002), from his sixth album of the same name, reaffirms what was famously stated by suspense writer, Stephen King, and is understood by everyone lucky enough to be in attendance Thursday night: “The simple fact is that James McMurtry may be the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.”

Saint Mary is typical of those about whom McMurtry writes. But it is not enough to say that his characters are “sad” or “down on their luck.” His particular genius is in capturing incarnate a certain quality that speaks to what it means to be human. His ability to create the ineffable, existential, and, ultimately, inescapable space we all are destined to occupy, no matter how great are our efforts to anesthetize and/or flee.

Perhaps��McMurtry’s did learn a thing or two from his Pulitzer Prize winning father, the writer, Larry McMurtry, as is evident in the song’s exquisite imagery:

Sunrise off the lake shining in your eyes Shining on the wasted and the wise All you hear ringing in your ears are Boldfaced lies That scream like the gulls in that smoke stained amber sky

And, several lines later, in typical McMurtury songwriting fashion, a small detail regarding Saint Mary’s stance emerges to suggest an almost palpable despair:

Where you goin’ Brandy on your breath Bottle’s open spilled across the desk Snifter’s broken, smashed against the wall Just the way you’re standin’ says it all

A crowd favorite, “Red Dress,” came next which highlights the humor McMurtry often weaves into his narratives:

Yes I’m drunk but damn you’re ugly Tell you one thing yes I will Tomorrow morning I’ll be sober You’ll be just as ugly still

Recalling an insult, which may or may not have been used by Winston Churchill (depends on which source you believe) against a female politician, who accused him of being “disgustingly drunk” at a party, McMurtry makes the sentiment his own in this jilted lover’s tale of suspicion and reprisal.

Because James McMurtry’s songwriting puts him in the company of such greats as Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, and Bob Dylan (yes, Bob Dylan), his accomplished guitar playing at times does not get the attention it deserves. Seeing him solo, even while recognizing the rocking greatness that the Heartless Bastards bring to his shows, allows the sheer force of his guitar playing talent to take center stage. Mostly self-taught, he played first a 6-string guitar and then a 12-string Thursday night, both with a virtuosity and speed that produced so dense a sound it seemed as if there were two other guitars behind him.

A soul searing guitar solo during the heartbreak of “Rachel’s Song,” another startling track from Saint Mary of the Woods, illuminates the collective impact of McMurtry’s talent. A “lyrically perfect song….one of my favorite things anybody has ever written,” as Jason Isbell has commented on Twitter– sung through the signature clenched delivery of his voice–and combined with his alternate tuning techniques and a partial capo, create that singular sound that is James McMurtry’s.

Another pleasant fact of Thursday night’s performance was Bonnie Whitmore, the confident in your face vocal dynamite that opened for McMurtry. I had never listened to Whitmore’s music before and found her stage presence and candor to be a fitting warm-up for what was to follow.

“I have 45 minutes to make you like or hate me.” Whitmore quipped before her first song. “I am not going to be gentle. Here’s a little song about masochism.” “Wash It Away,” from her 2016 album, F*@k with Sad Girls, began her set and pretty much set the tone for both the songs she would play and the banter she would deliver.

Originally Whitmore, who hails from one of Americana music’s second homes, Austin, Texas, rocked a country vibe, but lately, with titles like, “She’s a Hurricane” and “F*@k with Sad Girls,” punctuated with cathartic wails and melodic rage, her genre defies a simple definition. “She reminds me of Hole’s Courtney Love,” one member of our group suggested, and I could see what he meant.

Bluesy, Jazzy, and current, Whitmore’s music is imbued with an intelligence and fierceness that complements the lovely range and pitch of her voice. Her presence struck me as the opposite of James Mcmurtry on that stage. I remember thinking that she offered the audience a glimpse of what an antidote to the anxiety and resignation some of James McMurtry’s characters exhibit; I also remember thinking that in many ways Bonnie Whitmore exudes the entire package of power, beauty, talent, and presence.

Finally, a highlight of Thursday night’s show was when James McMurtry played one of my favorite songs, Hurricane Party, from his album, Just Us Kids (2008). The quiet nostalgia of its lines might be typical of McMurtry, but the visceral longing he conveys is what gets me right in the gut:

My one great love, my God, I can feel her still She ran off to California and now she’s living in those Hollywood hills With some bullfrog prince, I’ve not seen her since Though she calls when he’s out of town

There’s just no one to talk to when the lines go down

Open up your back screen door Let me in your space once more I was looking for an easy score But it just don’t work that way

Perhaps the reason I identify so strongly with such nostalgic desire can be understood through how I was introduced to McMurtry’s music in the first place. My relationship with Dan ended after about two years, but not before I had fully digested the things I would learn from him. Dan’s quiet persistence and self-assuredness in showing me a way of being in the world that was more honest and more sustainable than I had allowed myself in the past proved just as important as the graduate degree I would earn while we were together.

As did, of course, the take-aways, one of which became an almost 30 year love affair with the music of James McMurtry. http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/

Show Review: James McMurtry and Bonnie Whitmore @jamesmcmurtry @bonniewhitmore @conqueroo1 @thebirchmere @leannetankel #americanamusic #JamesMcMurtry photos by Glenn Cook James McMurtry was one of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school.

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national-theatre-scotland-blog · 7 years

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Circles of tragedy and How To Act

Clare Finburgh, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent, responds to How To Act.

A circle. Anthony Nicholl, the “successful theatre director in his fifties” invited in Graham Eatough’s How to Act to give an acting masterclass, asks members of the audience to remove their shoes, which he then places centre-stage to form a circle. Nicholl marks out the circular space in which his participant, the young female actor Promise, will do improvisation exercises based on her own past.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy (1872), tragedy pulls “a living wall … around itself to close itself off entirely from the real world and maintain its ideal ground and its poetic freedom”.

[1]

Since its ancient Greek origins, tragedy has demarcated itself clearly as an art form distinct from the lives of the audience members watching it, a feature that the circle in How to Act recreates. In this, and in other respects, How to Act returns to the vast scope of the Classics. At the same time, How to Act expands classical tragedy in order to speak eloquently both to theatre today, and to politics today.In a number of respects How to Act, like the “prize-winning tragedians of ancient Athens” to which Nicholl refers, foregrounds its own status as art. Like a classical tragedy, How to Act features a chorus. The chorus self-consciously draws attention to the fact that what the audience is watching, is a piece of theatre. In addition, according to the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes, the chorus constitutes the very definition of tragedy, since it draws attention to the tragic dimension of the play by remarking on it.

[2]

How to Act differs, though, in that the members of an ancient chorus tend to pass judgement on the proceedings in the play, whereas Eatough’s chorus involves clapping and movement, which are performed in the circle. But in the extent to which ancient plays themselves featured song and dance,

How to Act does inherit from classical tragedy.Predating Nietzsche by over two millennia, the first theorisation of tragedy in theatre was provided by Aristotle, whose Poetics stated that the central tenet of tragedy must be one single, unified, clearly defined plot – what Nicholl in How to Act describes as “Proposition – dilemma – response. The fundamental building blocks of drama.” The circular space in which a tragedy is performed becomes a kind of boxing ring, a scene of combat in which conflicts are battled out until their final dénouement. Within the circle, the two conflicting worlds of Nicholl and Promise – male and female, European and African, older and younger, coloniser and colonised – clash. However, the plot in How to Act is far from straightforward. Eatough introduces a play-within-a-play device, where Promise, following Nicholl’s instructions, enters the circle and conducts drama exercises in which she enacts scenes from her childhood in her native Nigeria. When Promise reveals that Nicholl, who had formerly travelled to Nigeria to conduct research for his theatre practice, had no doubt had a brief affair with her mother, it is not clear if she is enacting a fiction, or whether she has actually come in search of the man who might be the father she never knew. Like the French author Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947), where two maids play at being a maid and her mistress; or indeed the most famous play-within-a-play of all, The Mousetrap in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599?), levels and layers of fiction in How to Act become entangled, as it is never quite certain on whose behalf the doubled characters speak. Like Shakespeare before them, generations of playwrights have abandoned the unity of an Aristotelian tragic plot in favour of multiple interweaving narratives. Indeed, the mid-twentieth-century German playwright, director and theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht, to whom I come presently, argues that today’s world is far too complex to be encapsulated in a singular dramatic plot:

Petroleum resists the five-act form; today’s catastrophes do not progress in a straight line but in cyclical crises; the ‘heroes’ change with the different phases, are interchangeable, etc.; the graph of people’s actions is complicated by abortive actions; fate is no longer a single coherent power; rather there are fields of force which can be seen radiating in opposite directions.[3]

“The truth is that theatre is dying and we all know it”, declares Nicholl in How to Act.

Whereas Nietzsche entitled his major work The Birth of Tragedy, George Steiner in the twentieth century announced The Death of Tragedy (1961) – the name of his important study. Steiner argues, “tragic drama tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance”.

[4]

For Steiner and other Marxist theorists and theatre-makers, notably Brecht, the incontrovertible fate in tragedy is incompatible with a political commitment to the radical transformation of society: tragedy in art is anti-progressist because it reinforces political fatalism in life. It is important to note that Aritotle’s Poetics does not in actual fact mention fate, although ancient tragedies do often submit tragic heroes to their destiny. Sophocles’s Oedipus is the classic example: before his birth it was predicted that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother; and despite his and his parents’ lifelong efforts, this is precisely what takes place. The circle in Eatough’s How to Act thus denotes the inescapable circularity of fate.

The Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, many of whose works were written during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62), named his tetralogy of tragedies, which was inspired by Aeschylus’sThe Oresteia, the Circle of Reprisals (1950s). In this series of plays, as in Aeschylus’s House of Atreus in the Oresteia, a closed circuit of violence, an ancestral cult of violence, reprisals, revenge, fatality and failure, become inevitabilities for all of Algeria’s population. Kateb writes:

For me, tragedy is driven by a circular movement and does not open out or uncoil except at an unexpected point in the spiral, like a spring. […] But this apparently closed circularity that starts and ends nowhere, is the exact image of every universe, poetic or real. […] Tragedy is created precisely to show where there is no way out, how we fight and play against the rules and the principles of “what should happen”, against conventions and appearances.[5]

This resignation to a doctrine of circular fate is illustrated when Promise in How to Act says:

It’s all been written for us hasn’t it? Sometime in the past. Before we met anyway. Before you met my mother even. None of it could have been any other way. You thought you could make a difference. Control things. Control the story. But it’s not yours to tell. You’re just a part of it. Like we all are. You’re just in it. Subject to it. It’s all been decided. Who we are. What we mean to each other. How this turns out. I was always going to find you. Come back to you. Like a curse. Show you who you really are. A liar. That’s how this ends. There’s no escape.

It is precisely this belief in the circle of fate and the absence of a possibility for escape from this circle, that has been rejected by Marxist playwrights and directors like Brecht.

Instead of submitting to a destiny of suffering, for Brecht, characters – and the audience – must seek to understand the reasons for suffering, and to redress the social and economic injustices that cause that suffering. Marxist cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, Brecht’s contemporary, explains how Brecht’s politics distinguish between simplicity and transparency. Simplicity denotes the defeatist acceptance of misery and resists challenge to the status quo: “That’s just the way it’s always been”; transparency, on the other hand, rejects the mystifications that lead society to believe that suffering is universal and eternal. Erwin Piscator, a Marxist dramaturg who was also contemporary to Brecht, summarizes how tragedy is the result not simply of fate, but of political and socio-economic circumstances:

What are the forces of destiny in our own epoch? What does this generation recognize as the fate which it accepts at its peril, which it must conquer if it is to survive? Economics and politics are our fate, and the result of both is society, the social fabric. And only by taking these three factors into account, either by affirming them or by fighting against them, will we bring our lives into contact with the “historical” aspect of the twentieth century.[6]

In How to Act, the causes of suffering on the African continent, notably in Nigeria, are given clear explanations by Promise. As Brecht highlights in the quotation to which I have already referred, “petroleum” is one of today’s most pressing and complex problems. Promise explains how, in spite of Nigeria’s vast oil wealth, it has been crippled by “debt to western governments and the World Bank.” In addition, she describes how “western oil companies” such as “Shell, Exon, Chevron and Total” have not only made many billions of dollars of profits out of Nigerian oil and gas and massively expanded the west’s consumption of energy and goods while their employees live on “less than a dollar a day”. In addition, these oil companies have committed human rights abuses by encouraging the Nigerian government to execute activists campaigning for social and environmental justice. These perspectives provided by the play engage directly with current geopolitics, since in June 2017 the widows of four of the nine activists extrajudicially executed in 1995 by the Nigerian government for campaigning against environmental damage caused by oil extraction in the Ogoni region of Nigeria, launched a civil case against Shell, accusing them of being complicit in the torture and killings of their husbands.[7] While inheriting from classical tragedy, How to Act conducts, in parallel, a typically Marxist analysis that seeks out the causes for suffering, rather than submitting to them. “[Y]our having everything depends on us having nothing.”, admonishes Promise.

In Theatre & Ethics, Nicholas Ridout defines ethics by posing the question, ‘Can we create a system according to which we will all know how to act?’

[8]

By admitting to the reasons for social, economic, gender and environmental injustices, we can strive towards an ethics of “how to act”, as the title of Eatough’s play suggests.

In some respects How to Act could be described as a postcolonial play, or at least a play that examines and exposes the afterburns of British colonial occupation in Nigeria. The Nigerian playwright and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, rather than dismissing tragedy outright, argues for the “socio-political question of the viability of a tragic view in a contemporary world”. For him, as he demonstrates in some of his great tragedies, notably Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), the theosophical school which would accept suffering and death as the natural order of things, and the Marxist school which insists that the historical reasons for human suffering must be explored, understood, and rectified, can indeed be encapsulated in the same play (1976: 48). Graham Eatough demonstrates, as Kateb Yacine and Wole Soyinka have done before him, and as authors such as the Lebanese-born Quebecan playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad continue to do today, that tragedy is an enduring form that can not only affirm the inevitability of suffering and injustice, but can also candidly expose the reversible reasons for that suffering. There are economic, social and political reasons for tragic suffering which must be comprehended and apprehended, in order to effect change. These artists replace circles with spirals, and spirals have an end.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London: Penguin, 1993, 37-8.

[2] Roland Barthes, “Pouvoirs de la tragédie antique” [1953], in Ecrits sur le théâtre, Paris: Seuil, 2002, p. 44.

[3] Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett, London: Methuen, 2001, p. 30.

[4] Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. London: Faber & Faber, 1961, p. 88.

[5] Kateb Yacine, “Brecht, le théâtre vietnamien : 1958”, Le Poète comme un boxeur : Entretiens 1958-1989, Paris: Seuil, 1994, p. 158, my translation.

[6] Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre [1929], trans. Hugh Rorrison, London: Methuen, 1980, p. 188.

[7] Rebecca Ratcliffe, Ogoni widows file civil writ accusing Shell of complicity in Nigeria killings, The Guardian, 29 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/jun/29/ogoni-widows-file-civil-writ-accusing-shell-of-complicity-in-nigeria-killings.

[8] Nicholas Ridout, Theatre & Ethics, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009, p. 12.

HOW TO ACT Written and directed by Graham Eatough.

Internationally-renowned theatre director Anthony Nicholl has travelled the globe on a life-long quest to discover the true essence of theatre. Today he gives a masterclass. Promise, an aspiring actress, has been hand-picked to participate. What unfolds between them forces Nicholl to question all of his assumptions about his life and art.

https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=home_How%20To%20Act

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