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valyrfia · 2 months

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no actually ur so right. as someone who have been in primarily mlm fandom spaces as an afab person the rampant feminization that goes on with charles especially is crazy. ive been pretty public on my dislike of this characterization if charles because of like exactly what you said (which is excluding my own experience being feminized and treated poorly because of my more masculine gender expression). it makes me pretty uncomfortable to see this in specifically fandom spaces and incredibly uncomfortable so see outside if those places.

just to add, im not against feminization (i actually enjoy it a lot when its like niche kink stuff) but the way it is in formula 1 rpf is unlike anything else ive seen in other fandoms.

I agree, it is CRAZY to see how this has somehow become the default characterisation. I agree with your not being against feminisation as an entire concept and when done well it's fun but rather just....why does it seem to be the default? It's bizarre. On a note that I'm sure is entirely unrelated, someone pointed out to me the other day that (although a small valiant group of us are trying to change it) F/M genderbend is far more common than F/F genderbend in F1 RPF....I'm just going to leave that stat there and you can make your own conclusions but considering I got this anon when I posted only F/F Lestappen stuff for a couple of days like two months ago....

Yeah, it's a little disheartening and is part of the reason why I think I'm so anti the feminisation of Charles as a default characterisation. Fanfiction can be whatever you want it to be, but it has always been a queer space but I've seen it time and time again that when a queer ship becomes popular, people are more desperate to consume it within a hetnorm structure. I haven't just seen it with F1 RPF, there's been a big rise of this over the past half a decade or so which I think is due to the consumption of mlm content becoming widely accepted amongst gen z, but in a way that almost straightwashes queer relationships. I remember when RWRB came out and I watched it when I was home for a bit in the summer with a group of girls I knew from high school as part of an effort to be social, and it was so bizarre. Not only did I witness first hand them obsessively rewinding to watch the kiss and the sex scenes, while exclaiming "that's so hot", but they were obsessed with trying to guess which of them would top and which of them would bottom, and for me most damningly, I made a throwaway comment about Uma Thurman in a suit being very hot (tame compared to what they were saying) and I was met with silence and weird sideways looks or a retort of "Alex in a suit is so hot!". It was a little bit of a humbling experience, to see them root for LGBT acceptance for the hot characters on the screen but be blatantly uncomfortable by actual queer expression in their presence.

I'll be honest I've experienced similar things when I talk about F1, and I think that that's because F1 as a fandom space has really exploded in growth in the past couple of years and thus the newer mlm ships within it, especially the popular ones like Carlando and Lestappen, have been subject to this straightwashing more strongly than other older fandom spaces.

As you said I have zero issue with it when it's a conscious choice on the behalf of the creator, but when it becomes the 'norm' within fanon and people complain when roles are reversed, well, it really rubs me the wrong way. I'm interested to hear your continued thoughts if you have them!

#asks #anon #i don't think it's coincidence that the more popular ships have this structure #i think it's why landoscar hasn't managed to match the pace of lestappen yet despite having all the hallmarks of a very successful mlm ship #i think it's harder to feminise one of either oscar or lando in relation to the other #i've often described landoscar as the current dyke ship of choice and i stand by that because a lot of fic FEELS queer #anyway #might get slaughtered for this #don't really care this has been on my mind for a while

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nekropsii · 2 years

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yeah this whole situation is such a fucking mess. ive always been an arg truther but that doesnt mean i think its handled well at all

i think the biggest problem is that everything is anonymous so its super hard to piece stuff together, and its so easy for other people to jump in and lie

this f33ls like babys first arg, and if it is then. welp. it kinda shows jdbsksnms

Alternate Reality Games are an art form. They’ve been a thing for a pretty long time now in modern terms, but in practical terms are actually quite a young method of storytelling- the first proper ARG, to my finite knowledge, was made in the late 1980’s.

There was an explosion in the concept’s popularity in around the year 2000, and its influence and power as a storytelling method has only increased as widespread accessibility to the Internet grew. ARGs have now become kind of an iconic pillar of online storytelling, and a good amount of creatives these days have had the thought of making one cross their mind at least once, fleetingly or not.

I love to see ambition. I love amateur art. I love people getting weird with art forms. I think everyone should entertain their wildest of whims with creation. Art is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But, unfortunately, inexperience can, at times, lead to some bizarre shit happening, and sometimes one simply doesn’t make the best choice in platforms.

I think this is what’s happening: Sometimes, when making your first project in the realms of involving heavy Creator-Audience interaction, such as an ARG or an ARE, you forget that some people aren’t going to play nicely, and some are going to attempt to impersonate you. The Player Indignation has happened to me- it happens to everyone who’s played as a GM- but I was lucky enough to have the ARG played out through public accounts, so Impersonation wasn’t particularly an issue for me. The GM for Hostilestuck isn’t so lucky in that department.

If you don’t know how to keep control of the crowd, you’re going to lose your grip on who has the most power in this exchange. What we’re seeing right now is inevitability. I wish the creator well, because this part of working an ARG/ARE is fucking rough, and they’re really getting drafted onto the worst playing field possible. Personally, I’m praying they don’t experience the same loss of sanity that I did.

It’s the perfect breeding grounds for new kinds of brain worms to spring forth, and for old ones you thought you’d gotten over to not only come out of hibernation, but strengthen. Especially if you’re unequipped to handle it, and your audience isn’t great.

#speaking from painful painful personal experience #my feelings on this are so conflicted… :(#homestuck #hostilestuck #arg #alternate reality #alternate reality game #hostilestuck.pdf #nekro.pdf #nekro.sms

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azurevi · 4 years

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3 halloween tales (cater, jade & vil)

This is really random, but the ssr cards for the halloween show have given me many au ideas, so here are my self-indulgent stories inspired by them. The Cater one is especially long because I got a lot of ideas about it. For the Vil one.. it's pretty disappointing how it turned out, but I hope it's not too bad. PLEASE READ THE WARNINGS!

WARNINGS : death (all), mild mention of gore (cater), war + mild possessiveness + violence (jade) [let me know if there're more!]

the heart and its eternal weight

Cater is a cemetery caretaker. It isn't that he really loves it, but his father was one. He feels like it is only right to take after his steps.

He isn't into superstitions. Some people find distaste in his job, but it's something crucial for Cater. People, even after they're dead, should still be honored, and so deserve a hospitable place to rest.

Everyday is a routine for him. Sometimes, though, the families of the passed talk to him about their stories and their emptiness once their loved ones are gone. Cater finds the beauty and softness in humans by hearing these stories, and it makes him even more dedicated to his job.

It's natural to him, dying. His father was killed in an unintended accident, and sometimes it seems like his death could have been avoidable just as much as it was inevitable. He just wishes that he had had more time with him.

One of the lessons his father taught him about graveyard caretaking is to beware of ghosts. Those who recently died are more visible and intimate with the world of the living, and so they might appear before humans. Some are inhostile, of course, but there are malevolent ones.

Lore has it that some ghosts prey on hearts. It is said that the heart is the most important part of a human, as it is accountable for life, death and emotions. People believe that ghosts can be revived with a fresh, still-beating heart, and as a result the human giving up their heart will die in place of the ghost. Basically, the heart can also create ripples in the fabric of space-time.

Because of his job, he isn't all that popular among others, and he only has a few life-long close friends, his mother and sisters by him. So even if he has a crush on the most admirable person he's ever seen, he still won't make it known in fear of rejection. He figures that he still has time to figure it out.

And he's wrong. News about your tragic death spread around quickly like wildfire, and he's devastated. It feels wrong to even feel so, because he has never been acquainted with you in the first place.

Your body is buried in his cemetery, and a lot of people come to your funeral that day. Some of your family members are so heartbroken and pitiable, and so Cater offered to be their listener.

All he can hear is about the great work you've done, the care you put into everyone you met, the warmth that radiated off you while you were still alive. It breaks Cater how he's never had the privilege to know you, to experience all your graces with his own perspective.

One night, the moon is lit and hung up high in the sky, so close that it seems to be prying on Earth and the people roaming on it. Cater is patrolling with his lawnmower when he hears quiet and uncertain sobs.

He is creeped out, yes, but he's also curious. He's never seen a ghost before, and it could be a human for all he knows.

He's proved wrong once again, as he discovers your opaque body behind a giant tree. You are hugging their legs close to your chest, and a rotting hole's visible where your heart should be.

There's no way you can be hostile, and you certainly won't kill him for his heart, so Cater decides to approach you gently, tentatively, like you're smoke that will disperse the moment he intrudes.

To his surprise, you can hear him clearly, and even invite him to sit down with him. It's so bizarre -- a ghost asking for a conversation! But Cater doesn't mind as he pops down beside you. He notices how although you were no longer solid, it still feels like tense when his hand passes through you. Certainly it's because you've been dead not for long.

And so the two of you indulge in heartful conversations, and Cater finds himself regretting even more about how he never gathered the courage to go up to you. Mid-conversation you tell him about all the things that you wish you could've done and all the ideas you wished to spread.

Cater probably shouldn't have, but he is so absorbed in your ambitions and kindness that he offers to carry out all these great things for you. After numerous confirmations, you agree too to let him carry out your thoughts.

And so Cater works in his neighbourhood, sharing campaigns and donating, taking care of lost pets and cats and partaking in environment improvement. He's never felt so fulfilled before, and it's the first time he feels like he's genuinely making a difference in the world.

In times he's not representing you, he brings you up on the little hill behind the cemetery where the moon and stars are so close and vibrant, where they all dance in the dark ballroom and pulse in excitement of being seen. He wishes he could show you more hidden gems, but your spectral spirit cannot be too far away from your body.

But it's enough.

A month passes and Cater notices subtle change in your behaviour as well as appearance, like how you're responding with less enthusiasm and how the hole in your chest is growing bigger. When he finally asks about it, he's told that ghosts generally only stay in the world of the living for 49 days, and their heart will rot away in this period. After that, they will have to go to the underworld, never be back again.

Cater is certainly shocked that the lore is more than a children's makeup story. He is well aware of the significance of the heart in relation to the soul and life.

He asks if you'd like to have his heart instead, so bluntly and casually. You seem to return to their original intimate self when you refuse.

"I'm already gone. It's you, the living, who should be making changes,"

So he pretends that you're not getting more and more unresponsive and less and less generous. He turns a blind eye against your wavering figure and how you can't be seen at all in the sun. He plays dumb when in reality, you're slipping away before his very own eyes, heart rotting away like nothing more than a fruit.

It hurts finally knowing and understanding someone and having to lose them.

On the 48th day, you are already but a still, soulless shadow, leaning beside your gravestone and fresh, white flowers. Cater can still see you. Sometimes he thinks that you chose to be seen.

And he can't bear to see you go. To see your dreams go into flames, to watch such a pretty soul just - vanish.

So he gives you his heart. Alive and beating and sentimental. It doesn't even hurt a bit.

You wake up immediately, your eyes glowing and body solidifying.

"What have you done?"

"What I can do to make a change,"

Time is starting to rewrite itself. Cater is going to die in your place. The space around you was warping and folding into itself, softly and rightly like a lullaby.

Just before you slip into darkness, you gather up a whole bunch of rose petals and desperately stuff them into the hole in Cater's chest, as if they can give him life in lieu of a heart, and you are sobbing and clinging onto his still warm arm, never wanting to let go.

It's all Cater wants, to save a wasted soul and to make a difference.

And so he cradles your face, and leans in the moment everything goes black. When he wakes up again, he's weightless in the cemetery, where a bunch of well arranged roses lie on his buried body.

a melancholy specimen

To Jade, beauty needs to be preserved to be constant. It's just like flowers. They die away without proper care.

Just when he thinks he's seen all the beauties of the world and is getting bored of it, he meets you. A blooming flower sparkling in the bland, old boring world around it. He's immediately captivated - how a person can still manage to flourish in such a rotten world where everything is depressing and all man is for themselves!

You're the most elegant piece of art he's seen, and that's something considering that he owns a museum. Innocence lies in your eyes and bravery sings itself between your lips.

You find him just equally amusing -- gentlemanly, insightful and just a touch of flirtation. The two of you fall in love like Alice down the rabbit hole - amused and unstoppable, fascinated by the wonders evolving about.

But the world doesn't give a damn about love, nor do they understand your dreams of a bright future where everything is close to hearts. They call you both madness and nonsense.

"Their souls are tainted with war and sorrow. They are beyond the point of rescue. Victory and glory are all that can feed their ego,"

Jade is disappointed. War has gouged people's eyes out and filled them with wails and ash.

The two of you are the only stars in the night sky, still fighting for salvation, yearning for a better future where trees grow and flowers yearn for the sun. You promote and do your best to lift the veil of darkness off the world.

But the sun doesn't understand either. War keeps going on and on, and people never have the time for aesthetic relaxations. It refuses to shed light on its pitiable humans.

"We should evacuate, Jade. They say a bomb is dropping tomorrow,"

Jade doesn't care and can't care. The most paramount thing is to open his eyes to the beauty of this world. He doesn't want to become one of those barbarous men, tasting dirt and blood on their tongue while they glorify violence and brutalness.

He stays behind while his neighbourhood dies away. You are the only ones yet to leave.

"Please don't leave me, Y/N. You're the only light in my life,"

You can't bear to leave him, and so you stay. The bomb is dropped, and it's too close. Too hot. Too cruel, too inhumane. It ravages everything in its way, burning all the darkened things to the ash and bringing the only beauty left in this world with it.

Jade wails. Broken cries are engulfed by nearby explosions and the cackling of flames. Your soulless body lies amidst the destruction, just another wilted flower in the slit of a rock, deprived of water and sunlight.

He finally understands. Nothing can save the world anymore. It's gone way too far, and it will never recover from malevolence. All he can feel is pity for his world as his heart ache with spite.

Bandages around his hands, he wraps your corpse up completely, preserved underneath the layers. You will be his reminder that there was once a flower in this drought, an anchor keeping him from becoming one of those barbarians.

lifeless silhouette in the dark night

You can never recognize directions. You find yourself stumbling upon a seemingly inhabited mansion in the middle of the woods. Cold and bruised, you knock on its door.

Welcoming you is a tall man with blonde and lilac hair called Vil. His skin is unnaturally white, and his eyes seem to glow like orbs that eat your souls. But you are too tired to make notice of all these details, and he's kind enough to let you stay for the night.

He treats you with ravishing cuisine and a grand bedroom that was as grotesque as the rest of the house. Afterwards, he leaves you to rest, but not before warning you not to get out of the room post midnight.

You oblige- for the first half hour. Then you start to hear wails and footsteps that amplify and disappear. It's impossible to sleep.

The next morning, you confront Vil about it. He refuses to face the questions as he ushers you to get going, and so off you go.

You spend another day lost in the woods, then somehow come face to face with the mansion again. Vil is beyond shocked to see you, but then he breaks into a deep smile.

"It's almost as if you belong here,"

Weirdly enough, you could agree, There seemed to be an invisible force pulling you towards Vil. After dinner, he orders you not to leave the room again before making his leave.

Broken wails. Recurring footsteps. You can't bear it any longer, and you also wonder if Vil is aware of this. He properly is, and thus tells you to stay safe inside the room.

But dumb curiosity gets the best of you, and you open the door and step into the endless corridors.

The wails come from the host's room, where Vil is supposed to be. You're closing in when its door is suddenly flung open, and out runs a panting Vil.

"Vil? What are-"

His eyes are bloodshot and there's red stain in the corner of his mouth. Sweat dots his forehead. He looks disheveled and the complete opposite of how he was during dinner.

"You shouldn't be here. Get back - get back in!"

His voice booms in your skull, and you're running back to your room before you notice.

It's another sleepless night.

To your luck, Vil doesn't wait for you to bring the incident up.

"Don't be creeped ou by it, please."

He seems very uneasy about it, but he's obstinate to give you an explanation.

Turns out that he is a vampire. One that has lived for 500 years and is waiting for his eventual death. He's seen everything in this world and lived through the best and worst of humanity. He understands people's fear about vampires, and so he resides in the remote part of the wood. He only ever drinks the blood of small animals that he hunt, and never has he once killed a man.

He knew nothing about what'd happen to him when he became a vampire. If he'd known about the repercussions, he'd never have become one in exchange of eternal beauty. Now he has to turn someone else into a vampire to end his immortality. It is only a cycle.

Every night the moon rises and spills into his room, and he has to fight his urge to go out and taste the sweet blood of humans.

There are times when he slips and loses control, but he always manages to get back to his senses. But it seems that your presence here in the mansion is awaking his desire to suck you dry.

You're bewildered to say the least, and frankly horrified. But at the same time you feel pity for him, for he is just a man who can't ever do anything as atrocious as hurting people.

And so you offer to end his suffering. Of course Vil disagrees. He just talked about how he never wanted to take a life, and now you're offering yourself to him? He'd never allow it.

But you're even more persistent. You keep staying in his mansion, and his sanity slips a little more every night. And you know that he's contemplating too, for he never tries to kick you out of his mansion.

"You deserve a rest, Vil. For your love and selflessness. For all the unspoken kindness you bestow on others. It is only fair that you get to rest,"

Vil has lived a life. He's but a mere walking corpse now, and a rest -- a sleep -- sounds just like what he needs.

And so he rests. Vil falls into a deep, serene sleep while you endure each and every dark night.

#twst x reader #twst headcanons #twisted wonderland #cater diamond #jade leech #vil schoenheit #sie writes #twisted wonderland imagines

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dduane · 4 years

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How do you handle societal stuff in your books? It's been made very clear to me on Tumblr that I'm not to speak over relevant, actual people who suffer from classism (b/c that intersects with racism; I don't suffer from that so much). I'm trying to replot a fantasy novel I wrote that depicts classism, a revolution (in the background; I'm not suggesting my protag fixes anything, although they support education + plot events) and positive reform. Protag finds a comfortable life. Is that insulting?

I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you about this: I’ve been pondering possible responses. A few general notes, and then down to the meat of it.

The first response that comes up for me, most emphatically, is that people on Tumblr do not get to tell you what to write, or when, or how. No matter how well-meaning they may be, people on Tumblr are just as capable of completely misunderstanding what you’re getting at (or trying to get at) -- and of being utterly, shatteringly, tragically wrong about all kinds of things -- as anyone else who’s human. (Including me, lest there be any doubt on the subject.) You have the unalienable right to select what sources of advice you’ll accept... regarding life in general and writing in particular.

Also, pertinent to this, there’s a saying that’s been floating around for a while: “The advice is worth what you’ve paid for it.” The world is full of people willing to advise you, in detail and at length, when it’ll be no skin off their noses if you take their advice and bad things come of it. The advice of those without both commitment to an issue generally, and to you specifically, is to be regarded with (at the VERY least) caution.

(This gets long, so: continued under the break)

Now, if you’ve asked people (here, or elsewhere) for advice, that’s one thing. You look over what’s offered to you, examine it on its merits, see if there seems to be anything true or pertinent about it, and decide if (after analysis) it recommends itself to you. Then you act on the data accordingly. But if you’ve been offered advice without you first requesting it, you are privileged to examine it for usefulness in your own sweet time and reject it out of hand if you like -- kicking it to the curb and as far past it as suits you.

I mention all the above because it’s hard at one remove to get any sense of whether you’ve actually been requesting advice on this from the people who’ve apparently been giving it to you. “Speaking over” is one of those formations that can be dreadfully loaded, especially when used by people trying to shut you up. Blaming/shaming you for daring to have and/or voice your own opinion that’s not as informed or virtuous as other people’s is a popular pastime in some quarters, so one has to beware of it. (An old friend used to say, “The distance between holiness and assholiness is both a lot broader and a lot narrower than some people seem to think...”)

All the above having been said: moving on to the writing issues. Without reservation, I claim the right to share my experience of life and the world in my writing... and so should you. My personal, lived experience of the world is as valid as anyone else’s... and so is yours. If you have experienced classism in your life, you have a right to write about that experience if you damn well feel like it. Its intersectionality with other -isms, in this particular context, in my opinion doesn’t matter in the slightest. The concept that there are more “actual, relevant” people than you who have more of a right than you to talk about something that’s part of your own lived experience is... I’ll just try to be polite here and say “bizarre.”

For my part, the effects of my own experiences with racism, classism, sexism, and various other -isms, are to be found all through my work for the reader capable of realizing what they’re looking at. And there’s no way to stop that process, because those experiences are now part of who I am and they get into things. ...Sometimes, of course, very much on purpose. The entire Middle Kingdoms universe, for example, is the product of my reaction to the sexism/homophobia axis: that reaction (I desperately hope) having become more detailed and nuanced over time. (I guess it’s possible to consider it a set of fix-it fics for an entire planetary culture. I remember thinking, again and again while starting to build that world, “Instead of this thing, which is obviously cruel/evil/wrong -- what if, instead, we had this thing, which could work better?”)

The broad spectrum of human experience being what it is, yes, there are some people who’ve apparently found the whole set of concepts insulting. (And sweet Thoth but how I wish there was video of the guy who stormed into that bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard with the copy of The Door Into Fire that he’d bought and ripped it to shreds in front of the manager, yelling “You didn’t tell me this was filth!”*). But generally my mailbag on the series over forty years has been pretty positive, and a lot of people have said that these books contained the first LGBTQ representation they’d ever seen in a fantasy novel; that they helped them feel seen, and gave them hope. So there’s that.

I think you’re going to find, as you write (or rewrite), that your lived experience is already settling into either the worldbuilding, or the characters, or the voice of the work. And at this level, that’s as things should be. (This may sound like it veers close to the issues some people have about self-insertion. But if you get me started I’ll inevitably retort that all novel writing, indeed all fiction writing, unavoidably involves various degrees of self-insertion: what the hell good would it be otherwise? What kind of book doesn’t contain the voice and self of its writer? ...That riff goes on for a while, so I’ll just step away from that now. ) :)

Meanwhile, let other people write their own novels. You write yours -- or replot it if you feel the need -- to your specs, not theirs. Naturally, look inside yourself to consider what’s the best way to write your story responsibly. (And do this again at intervals. It’s usually wise to revisit the topic as a whole every now and then, to see if any course correction’s required.) But your project as described doesn’t sound insulting to me in the least. You have your own storytelling imperatives in place here, it sounds like, and your own moral/ethical ones. So go serve them! And meanwhile, dismiss the (literal) naysayers from your reckoning. You have work to do.

HTH. And thanks for asking.

*Sudden afterthought: bearing in mind the very naked lady on the cover of the original edition, I have to wonder if what he was complaining about was that he found he’d bought the wrong kind of filth. :)))))

#writing #writing advice #q&a

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the-bejeesus · 3 years

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To Those Who Say “I’m not gonna catch up on One Piece until it’s finished. Why would I watch/read 1000+ episodes/chapters when I don’t even get to know how the story ends?”

Now for the past few years, when I came across somebody who said this, my rebute would be something like “Well the series is great already. It doesn’t really matter if I don’t know how it ends, because the journey itself is enjoyable.” or “Man if that’s your excuse, who you gonna explain why you read/watch stuff like Berserk, Hunter X Hunter, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and My Hero Academia? Newsflash, they aren’t done yet.” But it came across my mind that I can now apply a completely different approach:

“If you start watching/reading at this pace right now, it will be over by the time you catch up.”

If you’re a fan of the series, you’ll know that for awhile now Oda has been saying that he plans to end the series in just 5-4 years. Now he’s made lots of claims in the past that turned out to be ridiculous. However, many One Piece researchers have compiled his claims and found out that they only get more accurate as time goes on, with the most ridiculous claims being found to be myths. And with the most recent claims of ending the series in less than 5 years, even his editors who are usually skeptical have started to trust that he can do this. After all, he has officially set there to be only one more saga (which isn’t necessarily one arc, but it’s either going to be 1-2 major arcs or an anthology of 5-6 shorter arcs). And now that we can trust this claim, we can essentially extrapolate how many chapters/episodes are left and what pace we have to binge to catch up at just the right time.

If you plan to read the manga (black and white):

The manga in black in white is a perfectly fine way to enjoy One Piece. It’s what Oda draws, it’s how he intends it to be viewed, and best of all, it will be the first version of publication to finish.

Out of the 1223 weeks since the first chapter published in July 19, 1997, 1000 chapters have published, meaning on average he publishes 42 chapters per year, or in other words, there are only 10 hiatuses per year (including holidays where WSJ does not publish). Now if I wanted to be more accurate, I’d only look at the chapters published this year, to exclude outliers like how he had no hiatuses for the first 200 chapters, or how he had a 4-week hiatus during the timeskip, but 2020 has been a bit crazy, so we’re not doing that for this or any of the others.

Going off of this, the final chapter would be chapter 1212 in December 28, 2025 (yes, the 28th would be a Sunday again.) So here’s how you’d calculate the pace in which you need to read One Piece, and really this is how we’ll calculate it for every version)

Now I know math is boring, but the reason I’m showing this to you is because the amount of weeks until One Piece ends will vary based on when you start this binge. Chances are you aren’t going to start the day you see this post, and there’s an even greater chance you won’t see this post the day it’s posted. For every example I’m going to assume you started binging on December 28, 2020. Now let’s try to use it for this example.

And there’s your answer, just read 4-5 chapters per week. By the end, One Piece should be nearly over or have very recently ended. To put that into a different perspective, you could purchase and read just two volumes per month and you’ll be at prime pace. Or you could read one chapter every day, but only on weekdays. If you want to, you can see this calculation in action in graph form.

While this is a very rudimentary graph, it’s a basic visualization of what we’re calculating here. We’re calculating what speed we need to binge to catch up at exactly the right moment. I say exact, but ultimately no one can predict how many chapters there will be exactly, nor how many hiatuses Oda will go on during it. It will be important, as you’re nearing the end, to find a spoiler-free way to keep up on how close One Piece is to ending. To know whether you ought to speed up or slow down.

If you plan to watch the anime (subtitled):

For years now people have hated on the anime “terrible animation!” “terrible pacing” but at the end of the day, it’s the more popular version. Or the more viewed version I should say. And personally, I think that once you acknowledge its problems and learn how to deal with them, it’s a perfectly fine experience. There’s enough good voice acting and enough good storytelling that you’re easily able to ignore the problems. Plus, the animation has substantially improved since Wano.

Now for this we’re going to have to change a lot of variables to get this right. We’re going to have to adjust when publication started, and recalculate when One Piece will end by looking at how slowly the anime adapts the manga, and how behind it is. The anime aired on October 20, 1999, and has aired 956 episodes since then. This means on average they air 44.9 episodes per year, meaning there is pretty much only 7 breaks the entire year. With these 956 episodes, they have adapted 955 chapters, making the pace almost exactly one chapter per episode. However this is really inaccurate, considering all the better-paced arcs earlier on in the story. Looking solely at episodes 2012 and onwards, the anime adapts at a pace of 0.65 chapters/episode.

Knowing that there are roughly 212 chapters left, and Toei adapts at 0.65 chapters per episode, we can assume that there are going to be roughly 324 episodes left. That sounds like too many, but keep in mind that there will be several, several instances where the manga will be on hiatus whereas the anime will keep on airing. Knowing there are approximately 324 episodes left, and that the anime only takes about 7 breaks a year, we can assume that it will take 7 years, or 374.49 weeks before the anime will end. So now we have the information we need to do the math again.

x = 1280/374.49

x = 3.417 episodes/week.

It may seem like a more relaxed binge, since you get a whole 2 extra years to binge, and you only have to do 3-4 episodes per week, compared to the 4-5 chapters. But keep in mind that these episodes are 24 minutes each. Still not at all bad, but you will be spending more time on it overall.

If you plan to watch One Pace:

One Pace is a fan project that edits the anime so that filler and padding is cut, other edits will be made to make the anime more manga-accurate, such as reorganizing scenes, or adding title cards where absent. Originally only used by a niche number of One Piece fans, One Pace has grown in popularity, and has tried to improve its quality to accommodate more fans, such as making their episodes Dual Audio (meaning you can switch between the dub and original Japanese audio tracks), and including Spanish subtitles.

You’d think we’d have to adjust for when One Pace began, how slowly One Pace catches up, and the works, but there’s not much to calculate. Fortunately for us, no matter how far behind One Pace is on editing the current arc, they always like to wrap things up just a few weeks within when an arc ended, if not the very same week. So really all we have to calculate is how many One Pace episodes there will be by the end of all this, so that we know how many you’ll need to watch per week.

Looking solely at what they’ve covered so far, One Pace has taken 573 episodes and condensed it down to 259 episodes. That’s a pace of 2.21 anime episodes/ paced episode. Earlier we calculated that there would be 324 episodes of the anime left, making for 1280 episodes total. This would mean that there would be around 578 One Pace episodes by the end. And One Pace would probably wrap up in, let’s say 376 weeks, because as I said, they’ll probably finish editing the final arc a week or two after the last episode airs.

x = 578/376

x = 1.53 episodes per week

Now that’s a relaxed pace. 1-2 episodes per week? That’s so slow, I’m not even sure if I’ll remember what I watched last week next time I watch some episodes. The only problem is some of the pre-timeskip still haven’t been edited. They’ll probably be done by the time they finish the final arc, but that’s not gonna work out fast enough. You’ll hit your first roadblock about 7 weeks in when you need to watch the Baratie arc and it’s not done. And don’t even get me started on how many arcs aren’t done in dub or Spanish sub yet. Hopefully you could just switch to the anime or manga when you hit these arcs, readjusting how many episodes/chapters you need to watch/read when you do. But that’s a bit of an excessive amount of math for something that’s supposed to be fun. So yeah, if you’re still convinced you shouldn’t get into One Piece until it’s ended, maybe this is the option for you.

If you plan to read the manga (Colored):

Since 2012, Shueisha has made a colorization of One Piece. It’s not a fan coloring, it’s as official as it gets. Many consider the color schemes portrayed in this version as the most canon, as the majority are pulled straight from whatever colored illustrations of Oda’s they can find. And quite frankly it makes the manga at least 10 times more beautiful. It’s especially great if you have trouble interpreting dense, small black and white panels.

This one is a doozy. You’d think all I gotta do is calculate how far behind the colored manga usually and just adjust from there, right? Wrong. Because how far behind the colored manga is, or how frequently they release volumes in full color, is one of the most inconsistent things I have ever seen. You wanna see what I’m talking about? This is how they’ve chosen to release each volume since 2012:

Volume 1-12: July 15, 2012

Volume 13-23: September 28, 2012

Volume 24-63: December 4, 2012

Volume 64-65: April 4, 2013

Volume 66-68: December 20, 2013

Volume 69-70: August 25, 2014

Volume 71-72: September 16, 2015

Volume 73-75: October 4, 2016

Volume 76: December 2, 2016

Volume 77: March 3, 2017

Volume 78: July 2, 2017

Volume 79: September 4, 2017

Volume 80: December 4, 2017

Volume 81-82: March 3, 2018

Volume 83: October 4, 2018

Volume 84-86: August 2, 2019

Volume 87-92: September 16, 2020

How I am supposed to find out how long it will take for Shueisha to colorize the final volume of One Piece is beyond me. I guess the first step would be to look at how far behind the manga each release was on average, but I’m going to ignore all the ones before 2013, because those were clearly just Shueisha catching up really fast cause they just started and didn’t want to be dozens of volumes behind forever. So of the 14 publications between 2013 and now, on average the last chapter of the last volume they colored was 97.78 weeks after that chapter had published in Weekly Shonen Jump. This means that if the final chapter of One Piece is chapter 1212 on December 28, 2025, then you can expect the final colored volume to publish November 14, 2027.

x = 1212/359

x = 3.37 chapters/week

So if you prefer the manga but don’t want to read 5 chapters every week for 5 years, this might be a better option for ya. But yea, I have no doubt my prediction is at least a little off for this one.

If you plan to watch the anime (dubbed):

Unlike the 4KidsTV and Odex dubs of One Piece, the FUNimation dub is a perfect way to enjoy One Piece. The DVDs come with enjoyable commentary and a marathon mode, great for binging.

FUNimation’s releases of the dub are inconsistent, although not nearly as erratic as the colored manga release. However, there was recently a 2-year hiatus we only just got out of. Since Episode 1′s dub in May 27, 2008, the dub has gotten as far as Episode 614. But that’s only looking at the DVD releases. If you’re willing to stream on FUNimationnow, the dub is as far as 641, and if you’re willing to digitally purchase it from an e-shop such as the Microsoft store, it goes all the way to Episode 654. With that being said, that would mean that on average, FUNimation dubs 1.004 episodes per week. Although if we go back to before the two-year hiatus so as to exclude it from the average, it’s actually 1.10 episodes per week. Not a huge difference, actually. And then if we look solely after the two-year hiatus, it’s actually 2.25 episodes per week, which is insanely faster. It’s hard to tell what the future of the dub will be. I can’t assume they’ll go this fast forever, so I’m just going to take the average of all 3 and say it’s 1.45 episodes per week. Don’t know if that’s the best mathematical approach, but the number seems about right.

So knowing that the dub is at Episode 654 and looking at our previous guesstimation that the anime will be 1280 episodes long, we can predict that it will take 431 weeks before the dub catches up and ends. That would be in 2029! Sounds quick at first until you notice it’s 4 years behind!

x = 1280/431

x = 2.96 episodes per week

Looks like it’s almost exactly 3 episodes per week. Not as much less of a workload as I expected, compared to catching up to the sub. You know, I figured those 4 extra years would make you binge a lot slower.

Final Thoughts:

There’s a lot of my math that was estimation, approximations, extrapolations. Feel free to correct me or fact check me, especially if you plan on using this. I figured this would be a fun thought excercise. There’s also a lot of smaller variables I simply didn’t want to take into account because of how long this is already. For example, reading the black and white manga. The calculation can vary slightly depending on if you read it the day it’s published (which I assume would have to be a fanscan unless you can read Japanese), reading the weekly publication legally on Viz.com, waiting for the physical volume release. The dub can also vary depending on whether you buy from Microsoft, wait for the FUNimationnow release, wait for the DVDs, or wait for the Collection sets. So feel free to take this into account.

#One Piece #OP #ワンピース #Wan Pīsu #anime #manga #FUNimation #dub #One Pace

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red-sector-rivendell · 3 years

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media reccs? 👀 since apparently you are a man of good taste?

Wow thank you 😏 I have a masterlist of movies that have changed me I often recommend to people, I'll just copy and paste here with quick synopses lol, it's kinda long. I'm not super great at writing synopses tho so bear with me

Dead Poets Society (1989)

One of my favorite movies of all time and a total classic. It's about a group of boys at a strict boarding school who are inspired by their new English teacher (played by Robin Williams) to think for themselves and chase their dreams. This movie literally changed my life lol

Quadrophenia (1979)

This movie is based off of the story behind the concept album by The Who of the same name. It follow the life of a young man named Jimmy who is in a gang called the Mods. Theres this huge gang war between them and the Rockers (I think that's their name, it's been a while since i watched it) and Jimmy questions his beliefs about coming-of-age and his values in life throughout the film

Cabaret (1972)

Based off of the Broadway musical of the same name, this movie is about a British man who moves to Germany during the beginning of the rise of Nazis. He meets a woman who basically turns his world upside down, and it follows their love affair and sexuality and anti-semitism, and it's hilarious and heart wrenching and a beautiful movie

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

This is a super trippy romance film. Basically in the universe of this movie, theres a technology that is developed that can delete memories of an entire person from your mind while you are in a dream-like state, and the main character of this movie (played by Jim Carrey) decides to undergo the procedure after a bad breakup. Its soooo good I highly recommend this movie

It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

This is an animated film about a man named Bill who is going through brain cancer. Its told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator essentially communicating everything Bill sees, hears, and experiences. This is the movie that got me into film and it is still a complete masterpiece and one of the most beautiful movies I've ever seen

The Dirties (2013)

Loved this one a lot back in high school, it's been a while since I watched it. This is a film made in Canada about a high schooler named Matt Johnson and his friend Owen who decide to make a short film for their class about them killing the gang at their school that bullies them, and things take a dark turn. It's a hilarious movie and hits pretty close to home for me in a lot of ways haha

Logan's Run (1976)

Great movie, pretty cheesy though so be warned. This is based off a book with the same name, and it takes place in the future where most of humanity is wiped out except for a small society that lives under a domed structure. No one is allowed to leave the dome, and to control overpopulation, no one is allowed to live past the age of 30. It's really bizarre but I love this movie

Donnie Darko (2001)

Pretty sure this was Jake Gyllenhaal's first big hit when he was super young (I think he was like 19 in this movie but I'm not sure) basically about this kid, Donnie Darko, who is somewhat schizophrenic and has a habit of sleepwalking. After one particular incident he has a near-death experience and starts seeing a man in a bunny costume everywhere who makes him do weird stuff. Another pretty trippy movie with a crazy ending

American Psycho (2000)

Honestly I'm sure a few on this list you've probably seen (most likely this one included) but I didnt wanna leave any out because they're all so good. If you haven't seen this, it's about a Wall Street executive named Patrick Bateman who is a materialistic phony by day and a serial killer by night. I tried to read the book but the inner dialogue was really hard to get through lmao. Awesome movie though huge recommend.

Clockwork Orange (1971)

Yet another trippy one. And fuck it's been a long time since I've seen it so I might get some stuff wrong here. But it's basically about this serial rapist guy who hangs out with this group of goons and they all like to go beat up homeless people and shit, but the main character gets captured and has to go through reformation therapy to make him a better person. It's an extremely bizarre movie but soooo good and kind of hilarious lol

Creep (2014)

Of course this is on my list haha. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a horror movie about this freelance film guy who answers an ad on craigslist to help a man with cancer film a movie for his unborn son. And shit gets weird real fast. One of my favorite horror movies ever, I wouldnt say it's super scary but it's fun as fuck

Hereditary (2018)

If I'm being honest, I don't like a lot of big movies made in super recent years and especially not horror movies (mostly because they're all cheap cash grabs with no substance) but this one is an exception for me. Hereditary is fucking masterful in my opinion, legitimately creepy as hell and well-produced and well written. To put the plot as vaguely as possible without spoiling anything, it's about a family (mostly the mother) who go through some crazy fucked up shit. That's literally all I can say without giving anything away. Super good flick, big recommend

Gattaca (1997)

This list isn't in any particular order, and I love all these movies to death, but if I had to rank them this would probably be on the lower end. It's not a bad movie, it's still great but it's just not as life-changing as the other ones lmao. This takes place in the future where genetic modifications have progressed to a point where you can modify your unborn child's DNA to have the perfect baby. This has led to, essentially racial bias against those who never had that procedure when they were born. The main character was not one of these "special" children, but he wants an extremely prestigious job which requires that of the employee. Through the film, he is trying to fake his identity and fool the company into thinking he is one of these perfect people. Still a great film

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Johnny Depp, man, he is something else. I LOVE this movie. Based off a true story and a book written by the man who lived it, Hunter S. Thompson, this follows the adventure of the writer and his attorney as they go on a drugged-out, psychedelic romp through Las Vegas with the original intention being to cover a story on a motorcycle race, but things go off the rails as they both terrorize the entire city in a way. Just a fun ride the whole way, a great movie

The Truman Show (1998)

God I'm realizing this list is long as fuck. Don't watch all of these movies, it might take you a lifetime lmao. Anyway, this is a classic Jim Carrey movie and another one you've probably seen. But again, if you haven't, this movie is about a man whose entire life has been fabricated and shot for television without him knowing. Super great, super moving, fantastic film 10 outta 10 I gotta wrap this shit up

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

A lesser known Keanu Reeves movie, but fuck I wish more people have seen this. This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it's based off a book which is just as amazing. This movie takes place in the near future, where facial recognition technology has progressed wayyy too far, and drugs have gotten to the point of no return. The plot follows a detective who is undercover in a junkie house trying to figure out who is the top of the drug dealing totem pole, but ends up wrapped in the junkie lifestyle a little too deeply. Seriously, I recommend this movie to everyone who asks, it's so damn good

Fight Club (1999)

Another popular one. If you havent seen it, it's based off a book by Chuck Palahniuk following the story of a man (the main character actually doesnt have a name lol) who meets a guy named Tyler Durden who changes his entire perspective on how the world works. They start an underground boxing club together to help themselves and other men blow off steam and get away from the capitalist consumer-centric lifestyle they are forced into. Big twist at the end, great movie five stars on yelp

Harold and Maude (1971)

This is a weird one. Gotta say. It's about a guy in his 20s who meets an old woman at a funeral and falls in love with her. Sounds pretty ok at face value but theres a lot of really strange subplots and a huuuuge twist at the end (one of the subplots being the guy compulsively fakes his suicide to get his mother's attention) big recommend

Polyester (1981)

This one I cant even explain u just have to watch it its fucking bizarre

Fargo (1996)

Ok lightning round on the synopses, this movie is about a man who wants to commit fraud by hiring guys to kidnap his wife so her father can pay them ransom and instead the husband gets the money but everything goes wrong it's really good

Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

Another modern movie I actually like, last time I watched this I was on shrooms and it was crazy but it's about this hotel right on the border of california and (Nevada I think?) And all these weird people are staying at it and there are twists at every turn and chris hemsworth is a cult leader in it its great

Memento (2000)

GREAT MOVIE GOD PLEASE WATCH THIS ONE it's about a man who develops short term memory loss after witnessing the rape and murder of his wife AND WHEN I SAY THERE ARE TWISTS LIKE EVERY TEN MINUTES I MEAN IT. The film is chronologically backwards, in that the first scene takes place at the end of the story and works back from there in increments of like 5 minutes. Basically each scene is a segment of time that this guy remembers before his memory loss kicks in and he forgets and FUCK it's so good please god watch it

Almost Famous (2000)

This is another one that would probably be low on my ranking but still a great and fun movie, it's about this kid that wants to write articles about rock stars for the rolling stone (based off a true story btw) and he ends up running away to go ride on a tour bus with some band and gets into all types of shenanigans and its great and sad

Parasite (2019)

Another modern movie I love, fuck this is getting too long lmao. Poor family wants to make money and they hatch a scheme to pretend to be bougie and work for this rich family but shit gets weird and everything goes wrong and it's so good (also literally the only film ever that made me speechless afterwards)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pretty much lives up to the hype, I totally forgot the plot but it's pretty damn good I remember that lmao

The Warriors (1979)

Fun movie, theres a bunch of teen gangs in New York and the leader of all of em is like "hey we should rally all the gangs together and fuck up the cops so we can rule this city" but then he gets shot by someone in the crowd and the gang The Warriors gets blamed so the whole movie is them running from all the other gangs so they can get back to home base and it's just an all around fun time movie

12 Monkeys (1995)

THIS MOVJE IS CRAZY it takes place in the future where a virus has almost completely wiped humans off the face of the earth so these scientists send this guy back in time to figure out where it came from so they can stop it from ever happening but obviously everything goes wrong and yadda yadda yadda it's amazing

Waking Life (2001)

Gonna preface this by saying this film is definitely not for entertainment, it's kind of an arthouse-type flick. It's the type of movie you have to think really really hard about to watch. The basic plot is the main character is stuck inside his own lucid dream, and is walking around listening to all these characters in his dream talk to him about, idk like the meaning of life and consciousness and shit. It's really good if you're in the mood for that type of thing.

Okay I'm finally done, you probably didnt expect this but I've been meaning to put my movie recommendations on this blog anyway haha. I deleted some just cause it was getting wayyyy too long. If u want a shorter list I can just give u like a top 5 in DMs but there u go have at it, every movie on that list is a banger I swear

#long post #movies #film #cinema #cinephile #ask #movie recommendations #you have no obligation to read all that #really shows how bored i am that i wrote out this whole fuckin thing on my phone lmao #youre welcome?

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twentiethcenturymoviesandtv · 4 years

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A Creepy Christmas Cultural Conundrum: The Lasting Legacy of The Nightmare Before Christmas

A request by @lcvcdbyhim.

If you traveled back in time to the year 1993 and told someone that Tim Burton’s new stop-motion animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, was going to be the biggest holiday movie in for the next twenty years, they wouldn’t believe me. They just wouldn’t.

Of all of the holiday films of the 90s, Christmas or Halloween, nothing comes close to the cultural giant that is The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even family favorites like The Santa Clause or Home Alone don’t get nearly the attention and praise that this film has. Every year, from Halloween through Christmas, stores are packed with shirts, wallets, keychains, sneakers, backpacks, banks, toys, clocks, jewelry, decorations and more, all covered with images of Jack Skellington, Sally, Oogie Boogie, Zero, and other characters and images from the film. Even outside of the holiday months, the more merchandise-driven stores still dedicate an entire section to The Nightmare Before Christmas, putting it on the same level as franchises like Star Wars or the various superhero films.

The question is, why?

Why has The Nightmare Before Christmas’s imagery become nearly as recognizable as images of classic monsters like Dracula and the Frankenstein monster? How is this oddball little movie fast approaching How The Grinch Stole Christmas and other classic Christmas specials in terms of popularity?

There has to be a larger reason that simply being available to be marketed for two holidays instead of one.

Today, we’re going to be taking a look at The Nightmare Before Christmas in an attempt to figure out where all the hype came from, and more specifically, why it’s still so popular.

But first, we need a little background.

When The Nightmare Before Christmas was first released in 1993, it received modest critical acclaim and a decent opening. Right in the middle of Disney’s Renaissance period, a throwback to stop-motion wasn’t really thought of as being quite on the same level as animated films like Aladdin and The Lion King. As a result, the movie did okay, but just….okay.

So what happened?

Very simply, The Nightmare Before Christmas gained a cult following. Very quickly.

In the years that followed, The Nightmare Before Christmas started being praised as one of the greats in the animated film category. People started watching it for part of their holiday tradition, around both Halloween and Christmas, and the further we are away from that mediocre opening, it seems the more people laud it as a work of art. Stores like Hot Topic started selling so much Nightmare merchandise that now the imagery from The Nightmare Before Christmas seems to be the face of a new goth/emo trend. In fact, since the film’s release, the movie has been put on a rather bizarre pedestal, with some fans lavishing enormous amounts of praise on this movie. In a way, it seems like disliking it is unheard of.

To return to our earlier question, why? It doesn’t seem like anything special. There have been other ‘weird’ stop-motion films, such as Corpse Bride or Coraline. The characters and story are simplistic, almost childish at times. The music is good, sure, but with all the hype around it, the movie can very much seem….overrated.

Once again: Why?

It all boils down to uniqueness.

In 1993, Tim Burton was still relatively new to audiences. Directing since 1985, his biggest hits had been the likes of horror-comedy Beetlejuice, superhero blockbuster Batman, and drama flick Edward Scissorhands. In other words, the world was still being introduced to the styles that we are currently familiar with: use of Johnny Depp, score by Danny Elfman, stripes, German Expressionism, and pale-skinned, dark haired, sunken-eyed outcast protagonists. Thanks to the sheer number of Signature Style Burton-esque films, The Nightmare Before Christmas no longer seems like anything all that special in terms of style of film, but at the time, it was something very new, distinct, and different.

The same goes for the stop-motion aspect.

The stop-motion ‘weird’ films that we are the most familiar with: (Corpse Bride, James and the Giant Peach, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman) have all come after The Nightmare Before Christmas. Before Nightmare, stop-motion’s biggest claim to fame were the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials. The Nightmare Before Christmas revolutionized and reawakened the style of filmmaking and started a new form of animation that is being used since. Once again, it all comes down to that uniqueness of the time, especially when it applies to the story.

The story of The Nightmare Before Christmas, despite its aforementioned simplicity, is a rather unique one. The idea came to Burton while watching Halloween decorations come down at the same time Christmas decorations were being put up, and the movie is really all about the juxtaposition between the holidays. Jack Skellington, the king of Halloweentown, is dissatisfied with the ‘same old thing’ and decides to try something new. The ‘new thing’ that captivates his interest turns out to be another huge holiday: Christmas. Full of excitement at this strange new holiday, Jack decides to get the person in charge of Christmas out of the way (Santa Claus) and take Christmas for himself, assigning the denizens of Halloweentown the tasks necessary to bring about the festive holiday.

Being from Halloweentown, of course, Jack doesn’t fully understand Christmas, despite his frantic attempts to do so, and in the end, Christmas is a disaster, thanks to his botched interpretation of what makes the holiday. In the end, Jack learns not to meddle with things he doesn’t understand, and the movie ends at around 75 minutes.

As basic as it is, the idea of one holiday trying to do another is pretty creative, as is the way it is done. The concept of holiday worlds, based on the special day is extremely interesting, and it’s executed well. In fact, when looking at the film for what and when it was, The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually very creative in everything, characters, the visual look, the way it was done, story, even the music by Danny Elfman is very fitting to the story and characters, and it’s all very catchy.

When contextualized into the time period it was made in, The Nightmare Before Christmas, for all it may seem stale and overdone now, was fresh and unique, noteworthy for being something audiences haven’t seen before.

There’s more to the intense popularity of this film than quirkiness, though.

What I said earlier about the film being basic? That is actually a point in its favor.

One of the remarkable things about The Nightmare Before Christmas is that, for having a reasonably complex concept, it’s execution is very simple. The story never makes itself more complicated than it has to be. It’s very straightforward, with no plot twists or surprises for the audience. The direction the story takes is predictable, but that’s by no means bad. Not only is the story uncomplicated, but the meaning is as well.

It isn’t hard for people to understand Jack’s predicament, nor is it difficult for even the youngest kid to know that his endeavors to make Christmas are doomed to failure, because they pick up that Jack does not understand what he is trying to do. He has the feeling right, but he has no constructive direction to take it, and with a lack of understanding, ends up creating a mess.

Jack’s enthusiasm is for the holiday spirit, and it’s contagious, no matter which holiday you consider. By never trying to ‘explain’ the good feelings of the holidays and just letting them be, The Nightmare Before Christmas actually continues a trend that one wouldn’t think it has much to do with at all.

In my opinion, the hype behind The Nightmare Before Christmas, especially in the up-and-coming generations, is much the same reason that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is still talked about by the older generations. The holiday feeling.

Jack experiences the joy of Christmas without knowing why. Despite his best efforts, he cannot decipher the whys and wherefores of it, he just accepts that ‘just because I cannot see it doesn’t mean I can’t believe it!’. This tone, this viewpoint towards the holiday of simply enjoying it, is reminiscent of Christmas specials like How the Grinch Stole Christmas or the Rankin/Bass stop-motion productions. It evokes nostalgic feelings for the holiday. The Nightmare Before Christmas is to the post 90s generation what the other animated Christmas specials were to the ones before it: the traditional, good-feelings, familiar celebration of the holiday.

Most importantly though, it’s a film that people enjoy watching.

With a unique concept, design, and execution, nostalgic feelings and holiday warmth, and it just being a generally fun, charming movie, it’s not really a true wonder why The Nightmare Before Christmas got as popular as it did.

Is it overhyped? Yes.

Does that make the movie itself any worse? No. It just means that audience expectations are affected by the culture around it, some for the better, some for the worse.

Of course, it’s not a movie for everybody. Some will like it more than others. Some might love it, some might hate it, and some might just be okay with it. But that goes for any film.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a cultural juggernaut, that’s for certain, and I doubt we’ll be seeing any fewer Oogie Boogie coin banks in the near future, but that’s more a reflection on the commercialism of film since 1977 (Thanks, George Lucas!) and how much people are willing to buy to reflect their tastes in film. My point is, the movie is still popular enough that people buy stuff connected to it because they like it.

And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good movie, remarkably simple, but smart enough to hold up years later and continue to emotionally resonate with audiences. It was something that no one had ever seen before at the time, and is packed full of enough distinctive style and imagery that it is still instantly recognizable as being from The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s an immensely popular film for a reason, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Thank you all so much for reading! If you have any thoughts, questions, comments, suggestions, or just want to say hi, feel free to leave them in the ask box, I’d love to hear from you. I hope you guys enjoyed this article, and I hope to see you in the next one.

#Movies #Film #Request #90s #1993 #The Nightmare Before Christmas #The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993

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listdepot · 4 years

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Top 10 Indie Games of the Decade (5 - 1)

5. Celeste

I don’t find difficult games fun. I can understand and appreciate people who enjoy the challenge and I’m not afraid to dive into something hard as long as its balanced right but more often than not, I find it purely frustrating and the result often gives me a headache. Celeste is... a hard video game. There are moments in the game where I had to put my controller down, take a breath, and pick it up again before dying a bunch more times on a single screen. But never once did I feel frustrated as I often do with games that are difficult. Because that’s what Celeste is about.

Madeline, the protagonist, is just coming off of what’s implied to be a big mental breakdown and her bad brains and anxiety-riddled feelings feel the best way to defeat it is to climb Celeste Mountain. Despite warnings from others, and offers of help from fellow climbers, Madeline is determined to make it on her own. She has to do it by herself. And soon her determination is taunted by her own internal monologue, manifested on his mysterious mountain by a spectre-like mirror vision of herself.

But Madeline never stops. And despite my occasionally need to put the game down, neither did I. The game at no point pulls a dirty trick, even during the vastly more difficult B-side challenges it provides. Its pure pattern recognition. So every so often I would put my controller down, take a breath, and pick it up again. Because I was as determined to control my frustration as Madeline was to conquer her fears. The headaches I often get with hard games never manifested. Sure, my hands hurt after every level from gripping the controller but, in the end, I had felt satisfied, even proud, to have scaled Celeste Mountain along with Madeline. Even if well... take a look

16 hours and 3000 deaths and it was fully worth it.

4. Cuphead

I remember it fairly vividly. A quick cut of indie games for the Xbox One back in 2013 at E3. Just a sizzle reel of the games coming and I saw Cuphead. I believe my exact reaction on Twitter was “HEY WAIT WHAT WAS THAT HOLD ON” or something similar.

As someone passionate about animation history, it stood out strong for all the reasons everyone loved it. The bouncing rubber hose animation (fully hand drawn and digitized), the echoes of Fleischer Studios and extremely early Warner Bros, the intensely jazzy soundtrack full of washed out audio. But what made Cuphead really unique to me was it wasn’t just a tribute to one old form of media.

Sure, of course, the 30s animation style was my big draw, but as more stuff came out about it, I noticed it was essentially just Gunstar Heroes, Treasure’s incredible frantic run and gunner for the Sega Genesis. With that element, Cuphead transformed for me from a game that looks pretty and has a fun concept to a game I knew I would love. And, despite waiting 6 years for it to come out on a platform I could actually play it on, I absolutely did love it.

Unlike Celeste, I did eventually put down the punishingly difficult ode to old school cartoons, but I know its there waiting for me to pick it up again and marvel at every focused enemy encounter and every lushly animated boss fights and stages.

3. What Remains of Edith Finch

Annapurna Films came out swinging hard in 2017 with their game publishing branch Annapurna Interactive by releasing Unfinished Swan creator Giant Sparrow’s follow up game, a simple “walking simulator” focused on familial lineage.

Edith Finch returns to her old family home located off the coast of Washington. A large estate full of locked doors full of rooms frozen in time, preserved as shrines. You see, the Finches are, in a way, unfortunately cursed, forever plagued with dying in often odd circumstances. As you explore this home and Edith’s narration guides the player. Each room lets you experience a minigame of sorts, a vignette of that very death, told often from the perspective of that very Finch, each one interpreted in its own way.

As morose as that sounds, and there are plenty of sad moments (you play as a damn baby who drowns in a bathtub for crying out loud), its a game who’s whimsy and gallows humor is proudly worn on its sleeve. One story has you playing as a hermit Finch who lives in the home’s basement, desperate to avoid the curse, as you open cans of food over the years. That’s it. That’s the gameplay. And as soon as that Finch feels confident to have survived the curse, he walks out through a hole in his bunker, only to find himself on the railroad tracks with a train approaching.

And in a lot of ways, that’s what Edith Finch is about. Its a game that exists to be about the absurdity and peculiarities of death, what makes it sad, what makes it often funny and how it affects those who love those who have died. Edith Finch is like playing an interactive eulogy to a family that never existed and there are multiple moments that gave me a good laugh and plenty that made me tear up.

2. Undertale

I don’t have anything to say about Undertale. Its an insanely popular video game and for good reason. A story full of heart and a weird sense of humor, a game that subverts traditional RPG mechanics by not only letting you whether to fight or spare your enemies but turns an enemy’s attack into an always cool bullet hell sequence.

Its a game who’s characters are well known, its lines are repeated often, its soundtrack has been turned into memes and is intensely beautiful constantly.

I have nothing to say about Undertale because Undertale speaks for itself. It is an independent underdog game that blasted into the stratosphere of video games. Its good. Play it sometime.

1. Frog Fractions

I wish I could even begin to describe what Frog Fractions is but I can’t begin to express my love for this free weird browser game. Ostensibly a parody of edutainment games, you play as a frog eating bugs to keep them away from fruit and those fruits you collect go toward upgrades. Its fairly simple until, uh... it isn’t.

The ultimate joke of the game is that this fraction game about frogs is barely about frogs and, of course, never about fractions. The only fractions that you actually see are the weird points you gain when eating the bugs. And then that edutainment game becomes a shoot-em-up, which becomes a maze, which becomes a text adventure, then a DDR-like, then it just keeps going on like this until it just suddenly ends. Frog Fractions just kinda never stops until it very quickly does.

What makes Frog Fractions incredible to me is there aren’t many other games that came out this decade that, despite the vast connection between people that now exists with social media and chat platforms like Skype and Discord, elicited such a strong “Hey you gotta check this thing out” reaction as Frog Fraction did in my circle. I remember there being a lot of talk about both not spoiling what happens in it and helping each other try to solve that goddamn text adventure section where you’re fixing a spaceship.

Frog Fractions, for its pure word of mouth weirdness, managed to create enough buzz to even make a sequel, one that came out years after the first one that was slowly revealed with an insane ARG that included hidden images in other indie games (Firewatch included) and eventually launched inside ANOTHER game that you had to dig deep to find. And as fun and weird as Frog Fractions 2, it only has its progenitor to thank for the pure weirdness that it. A game that exists to be “Check this out”, especially in an era of social media, and a game that is just so fantastically bizarre that sends you on a journey through Bug Mars and beyond. That’s the best indie game of the decade.

#lists #games of the decade #indie games

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 4 years

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Lover is the Queliot Soundtrack!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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fatehbaz · 5 years

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Wait, what's the anthropomorphism debate? If you'd prefer not to answer dw! I can look more into it online

Apologies in advance for this long post! I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so take what I say here with a grain of salt; I am not “an authority.” I’m going to hijack the ask to summarize “the ontological turn in anthropology.”

So: the ontological turn in anthropology from 2008-2012, and the debate about anthropomorphism

I’m sorry that I did not answer this sooner. I’m also sorry that this is going to be a very long post. You might know all this stuff already, so please feel free to disregard all this text! A recap for viewers who missed the previous episode:

This question was - I’m assuming - in response to me being a silly-billy and making a meme of a distressed, sweaty person awaking from a nightmare, to illustrate the anxiety that confronted me when I noticed that there has been some recent Tumblr discourse replicating the heated academic anthropology debate about anthropomorphism from around 2008-2012. I was at relatively progressive university, focused on ethnoecology at the time (a field of anthropology right at the heart of the discourse), so I was forced to participate!

Basically, the 2008-2012-ish period saw the relative “mainstreaming” of a movement to “decolonize anthropology and conservation/ecology” and uplift Indigenous/non-Western worldviews as an alternative to Western views of the natural world, and this movement was basically referred to as “the ontological turn in anthropology.” It sought to acknowledge that Indigenous cosmologies were legitimate - as in, Indigenous/traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is very sophisticated, and therefore the cosmologies that maintained this knowledge ought to be given more credit. A major, if not the central, issue in this dialogue was how to prevent “intellectual colonization” by respecting the utility/validity of specific Indigenous worldviews like Buen Vivir, animism, totemism, etc. Thus, one of the most frequent and intense focal points of discussion and argument was “anthropomorphism” and animal emotion. Technical scientists were still uncomfortable accepting the environmental knowledge of non-Western cultures that believed in things similar to literal animism. The discourse was also deeply concerned with “the Anthropocene” and the climate/ecological crisis, and sought to uplift Indigenous relationships with ecology as examples of alternatives to capitalist resource extraction economies.

At the time, I fried my brain out while reading hot-take after hot-take about anthropomorphism - but I’m not all that great with ontology and theory, so this subject might not be as overwhelming to other readers!

The discourse was extensive; and some Tumblr discourse I’ve seen lately seems to be asking similar questions that the 2008-2012 discourse also grappled with.

Many Latin American scholars - and Indigenous people - had been actively writing about Indigenous cosmology’s importance to anthropology/ecology/conservation for decades but especially since at least the late 1980s and early 1990s (especially Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, an anthropologist working in Latin America and since dubbed the leading scholar of “Amazonianist” thinking promoting the knowledge of Andean/Amazonian peoples). However, this movement begun to be taken much more seriously in American academia around 2008-2010, led by the influential writing of ecology-adjacent anthropologists and theorists like Bruno Latour, Phillipe Descola, and Isabelle Stengers.

This discourse and its mainstreaming coincided with the rise of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) - headed by Graham Harman, who was given more attention partially because of the rising popularity of his friend Mark Fisher, at this time. OOO played a major part in some of these discussions, since it basically (don’t quote me on this) allows for statements like “all other living things - and perhaps non-living things, but that’s more complicated - probably experience some strange alien form of subjectivity, and are therefore are potentially sentient at their own scale depending on how you want to define sentience.” Timothy Morton (who coined the term “dark ecology” - after which my blog was named) is/was a close colleague of Graham Harman’s. Morton sort of “bridged the gap” between the anthropology/ecology enthusiasts and the more space-y OOO theoretical stuff.

Anthropomorphism?

A sort of conclusion to this discourse, which was eventually acknowledged by many anthropologists and ecologists, is similar to Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “cosmopolitics”: Animals and plants have unique experiences and perspectives, probably very bizarre and strange to the human observer. Humans and other living things engage in “world-building” and may have an “interiority” that isn’t always going to match definitions of sentience or consciousness, and therefore it can be difficult to “translate” the experience of other living things in a way that humans can understand or relate. However, it is still worthwhile to attempt to translate the experience of other living things, partially by acknowledging that we live in a strange community of living things and therefore should value the biosphere as a community.

But I think Adrian Ivakhiv, an environmental scientist at University of Vermont, better summarizes this view of anthropomorphism which is gaining popularity. You can read the summary here, from December 2010.

You might recognize these themes from Tumblr discourse about animism/anthropomorphism. This is a discussion of how various human cultures conceive of other living things, and how living things, whether “sentient” or not, still “subjectivate,” and therefore participate in their own “world-building” at some scale.

“On animism, multinaturalism, & cosmopolitics.” December 2010/Janurary 2011. Adrian Ivakhiv.

Excerpts:

Either most existing entities are supposed to share a similar interiority whilst being different in body, and we have animism, as found among peoples of the Amazonian basin, the Northern reaches of North America and Siberia and some parts of Southern Asia and Melanesia. Or humans alone experience the privilege of interiority whilst being connected to the non-human continuum by their materiality and we have naturalism – Europe from the classical age. Or some humans and non-humans share, within a given framework, the same physical and moral properties generated by a prototype, whilst being wholly distinguishable from other classes of the same type and we have totemism – chiefly to be found among Australia’s Aborigines. Or all the world’s elements are ontologically distinct from one another, thence the necessity to find stable correspondences between them and we have analogism –China, Renaissance Europe, West Africa, the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Central-America [6]. [“Who owns nature,” 2008]

These ontological options can be portrayed as follows:

This would be a world that demands an ontological politics, or a cosmopolitics, by which the choices open to us with respect to the different ways we can entangle ourselves with places, non-humans, technologies, and the material world as a whole, become ethically inflected open questions. […]

In her multivolume work Cosmopolitiques (1996–97) and publications that followed it, Isabelle Stengers (2005) forwards a “cosmopolitical proposal” that, unlike most forms of cosmopolitanism, does not presume the existence or even the possibility of a “good common world,” an ecumenically peaceable cosmopolis. On the contrary, her proposal is intended to “slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ��good’” (2005:994). The “cosmos” of her cosmopolitics “refers to the unknown constituted by [the] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (2005:994). Such a cosmopolitics does not pre-assume what will count as “common,” whether it is “human nature,” “cultural differences,” or the laws and discoveries of science; or, on the other hand, gods, souls, spirits, or anything else that anyone might bring to the table.

Stengers’s call is echoed by Latour (2004b), Mol (1999), and Law (2004), who argue on behalf of a politics for building, enacting, or co-producing shared or common worlds — not worlds that posit “nature” as the “unique author of a single account” (Law 2004:123) propping up a “reality that is independent, prior, singular, and definite,” but worlds in which “everything takes effort, continuing effort” (Law 2004:131–132). Such methods and modes of knowledge-making recognize their own complicities in the worlds they enact; and they are political in the sense that they raise questions about how the world of associations — the society of humans and other entities — is to be organized. Seeing ourselves as cosmopolitically entwined with each other and the other others of the world means seeing ourselves as actively practicing ways of “worlding” or “world-making” (Wilson and Connery 2007).

More importantly, if world-building is something that all entities are involved in, then all are carving up, in their own way, what will qualify as subject and what will qualify as object. (…)

A balanced processual perspective, however, would be one that argues that all things participate in subjectivity — all things subjectivate — in their own different ways, which may be more or less like ours depending on the specificity of those things; and that all things participate in objectivity — all things objectivate, becoming objective, material, bodily data for other things — also in their own different ways, which are also more or less like ours depending on the specificity of the things.(…)

Sorry again for the wall of text.

Thanks for the ask!

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petroglifs · 5 years

Text

Grayshaw

*Enjoy!

Science Fiction Book Club

Interview with Bruce Sterling October 2018

Bruce Sterling is a prominent science fiction writer and a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre. Novels like Heavy Weather (1994), Islands in the Net (1988), Schismatrix (1985), The Artificial Kid (1980) earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. Apart from his writings, Bruce Sterling is also a professor of internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School. He has contributed to several projects within the scheme of futurist theory, founded an environmental aesthetic movement, edited anthologies and he still continues to write for several magazines including Wired, Discover, Architectural Record and The Atlantic.

David Stuckey: Have you considered a return to the world of "The Difference Engine" for stories or another novel?

*That won’t happen.

David Stuckey: If you were going to write "Involution Ocean" today, what would you change or do differently?

*Well, alien planet adventures are a really dated form of space opera. On the other hand, they’re great when you’re 20 years old. If I were doing a project like that today I might make it a comic book. Or a webcomic. It might make a nice anime cartoon.

Richard Whyte: In the 2018 'State of the World' conversation on the Well, you said you were in Ibiza working on a novel. Are you able to tell us anything about it yet?

*I dunno if I’m ever gonna finish this epic novel about the history of the city of Turin, but I seem to get a lot of work done on it when I’m in Ibiza. It’s about Turin, but when I’m actually in Turin I tend to work on weird technology art projects and goofy design schemes.

*Also, look at this palace. I’m supposed to work on my novel in the attic of this villa. That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? This villa was built in the same era as the book I’m working on, which has the working title “The Starry Messengers.” Like this villa, it’s big and baroque and complicated.

https://fenicerinnovata.tumblr.com

Andrzej Wieckowski: We read 'Sacred Cow' for one of our short story reads a few months' ago. Were themes such as Bolton's historic connection to the Indian cotton industry and immigration to this country deliberate or unconscious? And as it's my home town - did you visit? :)

*There aren’t any towns in Britain without some historic connection to India. As it happens I’m flying to India day after tomorrow to meet with some Indian science fiction writers.

*I used to hang out in Great Britain rather a lot. Brexitania I don’t much care for. It’s a hostile, troubled place.

Gary Denton: You were active in the Viridian sustainable design movement that many readers may not know about. Do you think that major corporations have taken that over and it is less fringe now?

*I tend to do activist stuff. Also, you get more done if you don’t ask for any credit. I’ve come to understand that a lot of my most influential writing was stuff that I never got paid for. Some of it never got published.

*I was just at the Whole Earth 50th reunion about a week ago. They’re a good example of a “movement” that was super-influential and somehow a dreadful failure at the same time.

*As far as major corporations, meaning large public enterprises with a lot of shareholders, I don’t worry about them any more. It’s actually moguls and oligarchs who are the big problem nowadays.

Gary Denton: Do you also see a change in the major polluters now compared to 25 years ago?

*They’re a lot more violent. Blood for oil, killing off opponents in sinister ways, not a problem for them any more. They’re quite grim and red-handed. They used to be engineers, but now they know that they are culprits.

Gary Denton: You once said that the cyberpunks were the most realistic science fiction writers in the 80's. Who do you think are the most realistic science fiction writers now?

*Could be the Chinese.

Richard Whyte: Whenever someone here asks about the angriest SF work ever, I always seem to end up recommending your fine short story 'Spook'. Do you think of it as an angry story?

*Well, not really. It’s a rather severely disaffected story from the point of view of a person who’s not human and knows it. “We See Things Differently” is rather an angry story; it’s about a terrorist assassin with a righteous grudge.

Eva Sable: What is the experience of collaborating with another author like for you? Especially when working with someone who, like yourself, is rather an individual. (Never met William Gibson, but he strikes me as someone who would be more comfortable working on his own)

*I tend to collaborate rather a lot. It helps if the two of you are combining forces in order to learn something together. Gibson and I agreed that we couldn’t possibly write a work like DIFFERENCE ENGINE alone. We used to urge each other to do it, but eventually we just had to have a lot of long, abstruse discussions of what a book like that ought to do.

*If you read the stories I wrote with Rudy Rucker you can see that a lot of those texts are basically him and me discussing weird ideas. We’ve got a reason to write those stories – a high-concept, and then there are pages of bizarre hugger-mugger where we push the concept as hard as we can. Then we give up.

*Nowadays I spend a lot of time negotiating or collaborating with artists, designers, architects. I don’t get jealous about the origins of good ideas.

Richard Whyte: Your 1980s SF criticism seemed very much in favour of 'Radical Hard SF'. To what extent do you think your own fiction 'takes its inspiration from science, and uses the language of science in a creative way'?

*I wrote a lot of that in the 1980s. Nowadays I tend to write speculative work that’s more influenced by industrial design rather than by science.

Richard Whyte: In the early 1980s I believe you were associated with a group of like-minded SF writers known as 'The Movement', who were subsequently renamed as 'cyberpunks'. Overall, do you think this name change was a good or a bad thing?

*If people notice you, you’re gonna get a public slang name anyway, so it’s good if you can cheerfully put up with it. As for forming like-minded groups, that’s a valuable life-skill.

John Grayshaw: Who are your favorite science fiction writers? And how have they influenced your work?

*Well, those favorites change with time. In different decades of my own life I’ve had different ambitions for my own science fiction. I tend to write pastiches. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of “science fiction” that’s heavily influenced by Italian fantascienza, or, really, Italian fantasy generally.

*I’m a long-time Juies Verne fan. I wouldn’t describe Jules as a personal “favorite,” but I recognize him as a titan of my genre. Knowing the personal details of the guy’s career as a working creative has been of a lot of help to me.

*I had a couple of professional SF writers who I regarded as my literary mentors. They’re both dead now: Harlan Ellison and Brian Aldiss.

John Grayshaw: I heard that you are currently dividing your time between Belgrade and Turin, do you miss living in Texas? Or America in general?

*I’m back often enough that I don’t really “miss it.” I find that if I stay in one place too long, I tend to miss travelling. I roam a lot. If I get too old and tired to lift a suitcase and I settle somewhere, it probably won’t be Austin, Belgrade or Turin.

John Grayshaw: I recommend everyone read your essay "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/interzone.txt) to understand that Cyberpunk was a movement and can't be removed from its time and place...But a Cyberpunk aesthetic has emerged over the years and that is what writers like Neal Stephenson or Richard K. Morgan are emulating. Was this aesthetic conscious at the time?

*Well, we spent plenty of time fussing about it. A lot of that conceptual work doesn’t really show on the surface. Aesthetics interest me a lot. For instance, I’m the Art Director of the Share Festival in Turin, which is an Italian technology-art fair. Italians are good at fussing about how stuff looks.

John Grayshaw: Did "Mirrorshades" have a theme? What directions or guidance did you give the writers?

*It didn’t have a set theme. Mostly I was trying to pick work from colleagues I respected, that I thought put them in a good light.

John Grayshaw: Other than writing what are your interests/hobbies?

*I like design and technology art. Also I travel a lot. I spend a lot of time in arcane online research.

John Grayshaw: Why do you think Steampunk has become a popular subgenre/aesthetic in the last 30 years?

*I think it’s about the craft aspects of steampunk. Hobbyist people like the costumes and the gadgets. It’s like traditional historical recreation groups, but with an alluring fantasy aspect.

John Grayshaw: Can you explain why you have said that Artificial Intelligence is a bad metaphor?

*I think the AI metaphor gets in the way of actual progress in the field, with actual hardware and software. Rodney Brooks explains the problem a lot better than I can, and nobody can understand his explanations either. That’s not exactly fair – actually I get what Rodney’s saying enough to more or less agree with him. He’s an expert, so I’d refer you to him.

*”Deep Learner” and “neural net” are kinda better metaphors than “Artificial Intelligence,” but they’re still metaphors. We haven’t created sharp, focused words for what these odd devices really do. “Intelligence” is not what they’re doing.

John Grayshaw: Cyberpunk was a dark look at the future. Do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

*People always ask that. People in Russia never thought that cyberpunk was “dark.” Also, whenever you get to “the future,” no matter how scared or happy you are about some particular historical episode, there’s always more future on the way. Eventually people are dead, so if you ask if I’m optimistic or pessimistic about the 20th century, the whole idea sounds silly. The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet.

John Grayshaw: In cyberpunk technology often contributes to society’s ills. What lesson do we take from this? That we must learn how to live with tech or that we should reject it and live like the Amish?

*Kevin Kelly kinda likes the idea of living like the Amish. Kevin’s an interesting guy. If I myself wanted to “live like the Amish” I’d probably move to Christiania in Denmark, where at least they have reggae music.

John Grayshaw: Do you keep up with the latest technologies? Or do you stay "off the grid?"

*I do both, actually. I’m generally so “off the grid” that I’m not even in its time-zone. I don’t have a business card, there’s no settled mailing address, I’m never on Facebook, and no one knows my phone number. Like they say in the world of electronic privacy, “I have nothing to hide, but I have nothing I want to show you, either.”

John Grayshaw: Do you think people will have "immersive" VR type experiences on the internet in the next 20 years?

*They have it already.

John Grayshaw: What do you feel is your legacy?

*Hard to say. It’s like asking a Beatnik writer what “his legacy” is. The Beats wrote a lot of more-or-less memorable stuff, but there’s also the existence proof that somebody was able to live like that, and that is their legacy. I lived in a different historical period than the Beat writiers, but a lot of the stuff that entertained and engaged me is also quite archaic nowadays. I don’t thing people aspire to emulate Bruce Sterling, but they do like the idea of operating in the same cultural spaces that I do. That something lively can exist between “science” and “fiction,” or between “cyber” and “punk,” that’s a valuable thing to know.

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courtingstars · 5 years

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Notes for The Vanishing Prince, Chapter Two

Yes, it’s the second chapter, finally! I’m so happy to be posting this. My notes are on the shorter side, but I do want to cover a few things that were hinted in this chapter, especially as it relates to Oreshi and Bokushi. Hopefully it will help clarify which parts of their story in the fic were directly inspired by canon, and which were inspired by some of the experiences of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

(Cut for notes about Oreshi and Bokushi’s relationship, timelines, chess, stuff about given names in Japanese, and so on…)

On Oreshi’s Relationship to Bokushi

These are just some of my observations regarding the connection between Oreshi and Bokushi. (Especially my interpretation of what happens after the Winter Cup but before the events of the KnB movie, Last Game.)

So first off, we don’t know for sure if Bokushi ever fronts during this time or not. (The idea of “fronting” is associated with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and it refers to which alter is actively presenting themselves to the world around them. Bokushi is fronting whenever Akashi has differently colored eyes, for example.) The canon seems to imply that he doesn’t interact with the Generation of Miracles during this time, at the very least… Since Oreshi seems worried in the Extra Game manga about what the other Miracles will think if Bokushi appears. So my headcanon for my fics, based on that and some other things in the manga, is that Bokushi hasn’t interacted with the outside world since the Winter Cup.

On that note, some lines in the manga imply that Oreshi and Bokushi are often co-conscious, even when they switch and the other alter is fronting... Meaning they’re both aware of what’s happening in the outside world, even when they aren’t currently the one “in control.” This is something that people can and do experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder. The co-consciousness can happen on its own/originally, or it can be developed and encouraged over the course of therapy.

Interestingly, Oreshi seems to believe (at least to some extent) that he willingly chooses when they switch… It’s pretty vague, but there are lines in the manga about how he could have taken over for Bokushi at any point during their last two years at Teikou. So, in my fic, Oreshi believes he is always aware of when Bokushi takes over for him, and that it only happens when they both allow it. However, for people with D.I.D. in real life, they may not always remember switching with their alters, and can lose time as a result. Also, they might not feel like they were in control (either completely or partially) of the switch—especially since trauma and any triggers associated with it can prompt different alters to front. (I’ll try to go into more details about this later, but as I’ve mentioned before, I recommend this site for more information about D.I.D. This page in particular covers alters switching, and how it can vary and is often much more subtle than is portrayed in fiction.)

So in The Vanishing Prince, I wanted to complicate what Oreshi seems to believe about his relationship with Bokushi. He thinks he always knows when Bokushi is fronting, and that he has to allow it when it happens… But starting in Chapter Two, it seems the truth of the situation may be different.

Alter Mannerisms

This is another general note about something that’s pretty common, from what I understand, but might not be 100% clear in Akashi’s case… The alters of people with D.I.D. can be very different from one another. They can have different ages and names, and even different appearances or genders.

And along those lines, alters may have different mannerisms and tones of voice when fronting. Those differences can be subtle. Overall, Oreshi and Bokushi are pretty similar to each other. They go by the same name, and their way of interacting with most people is similar. (To the point that, according to the manga, most of Akashi’s peers and teachers at Teikou couldn’t tell the difference.)

However, one way that the KnB canon differentiates between the two of them is through their expressions. Bokushi is especially recognizable for his wide-eyed smile. (You know which one, I’m sure!) Meanwhile, in the moment when Oreshi returns during the Winter Cup, he has a very distinctive smile as well, that we never see from Bokushi. (I noticed it more in the manga, whereas it was pretty subtle in the anime.)

So in The Vanishing Prince, I took this idea a little farther, and tried to convey some more subtle differences between them in posture and tone. Basically, it was meant to be a reference to the fact that this can happen with alters in real life, as well.

Chess

I’m definitely not an expert on chess… I’ve played it since I was about four or five, but I have zero grasp of actual strategy. //laughs To try to convey Bokushi’s mastery of the game, I consulted some online resources, especially for the most popular opening moves. Here are a few good articles I found that include some of the fancy names from the chapter!

(There is also this incredibly detailed database that covers so many opening moves, many of which have bizarre names like “Fried Liver Attack” and I swear I’m not making that up. XD It does give you some idea of just how thoroughly this particular game has been played and studied throughout history!)

Akashi’s Given Name

This note is kind of random, but I thought it might be interesting to explain this part of Furihata’s narration a bit:

But that name also belonged to both of his selves. Plus, it was kind of a mouthful.

“Seijuurou.”

It was a really nice name, though. Long and elegant, with that extra ‘u’ sound in the middle. Honestly, Furihata thought it fit the Akashi he knew better. It sounded just like him. Kind of graceful, and sophisticated, and… perfect.

So in English, we tend to say “Seijuurou” as having three syllables. But in Japanese, it’s actually six! I won’t go into the whole explanation here, but it has to do with how the Japanese language is syllable-based, instead of using an alphabet. So his name breaks down something like this: Se-i-ju-u-ro-u

It’s a long, fancy-pants name, basically. XD Which is not surprising because, well, it’s Akashi. (My favorite time that the KnB anime says the main cast’s full names is actually in the blurb right before the first Season 3 opening song… The narrator’s delivery really helps you hear the length of the syllables in each of their names, and it just sounds super cool to me…? Random, I know. //laughs)

Anyway, it’s probably worth mentioning that in Japan, even close friends and couples might not call each other by their given names. It’s a choice, and definitely depends a lot on the people involved. But either way, it shows a lot of familiarity with someone… So it’s not surprising that the idea of using Akashi’s given name makes Furihata flustered! //laughs Especially since the characters in KnB tend to use family names, in general.

Japanese Drugstore Candy

This is another random note just to mention that the line about Furihata’s “favorite gummy candies” was meant to be my personal nod to Hi-Chews. XD My sister was kind of obsessed with them when she lived in Japan, where they’re available at every conbini (convenience store). They’re cheap, so giving them to your friends is pretty much the equivalent of buying them a pack of gum at a 7-11? So it was funny to me (and to Furihata!) that Akashi would consider that a touching gesture. //laughs

Earlier Fic References

On the subject of the train station, I did include some things in this chapter that were meant to build on scenes from earlier in this series… Of course, Tokyo Station and the Kyoto shinkansen train were pretty important in the first story. Also, Furihata’s brief thought about how Akashi always drinks amazing tea was meant to be a reference to Fast Train as well, specifically the second chapter. And there were definitely some nods to events in Storming the Castle too! I always enjoy including scenes that mirror things that happened earlier in the series… I feel like it helps to show how the relationship between the characters has progressed. <3

Well, that’s it for Chapter Two! I really hope everyone enjoyed the next chapter in the fic. (And at least it didn’t end on such an extreme cliffhanger this time? XD) I’ve been hard at work on the next part of the story, and can’t wait to share it with all of you as soon as possible. <3

#the vanishing prince #kat writes fanfic #kat writes about basketball dorks #akafuri #YAY IT'S POSTED #and now nobody has to deal with that awful cliffhanger XD #seriously it was mean and I knew it #also I loooooved writing Furi and Bokushi's first scene together oh my goodness #Bokushi is so salty hahaha #and then Oreshi was precious as always #oh Furi you must be so disoriented #also I live for chess master Akashi in general #meanwhile GOOD JOB FURI YOU FINALLY SAID CRUSH #TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH #these kids I swear #Oreshi is still hopeless though #Bokushi is the only one with half a clue haha #long post #text post

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hellyeahomeland · 5 years

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This hiatus is just so blissful and uneventful that I’ve been able to catch up and discover so many new TV shows.

But today, I’m not telling you about a conventional TV show. Today I want to talk about the Bon Appétit YouTube channel.

I try to cook a real meal at least 2x week (thanks, Blue Apron! #notsponsored) and I genuinely love food but let me tell you that neither having experience cooking real food nor really enjoying it are required to fall in love with the cast of characters at the Bon Appétit YouTube channel (though I’m sure it helps a little).

What this channel gets so incredibly right (and, I imagine, why it’s so much more successful than other food channels on YouTube, not that I watch them, but again here’s why) is that it recognizes that people watch TV--whether on their TV boxes or their computers or phones or wherever-- for the people. That’s why you keep coming back. And the BA channel has assembled a true cast of characters in its main test kitchen chefs. Together, they’ve gathered a near-cultish following.

First, there is Claire, BA’s resident Baking Queen. I need to say this: I LOVE CLAIRE. She may be my favorite Claire at the moment. Are you understanding what I’m saying?? Claire’s main series is a show called “Gourmet Makes, where she attempts to create the “gourmet” version of popular junk foods like Doritos, Twinkies, Kit-Kats, and the like. It is as addictive as the junk foods themselves. I binged about 10 episodes when I first discovered it, which is how I fell down this k-hole to begin with.

Claire is ... perfect. Everything she does is perfect. She is brainy and witty and loves to get super scientific, though in an approachable way. She is a perfectionist, and watching her struggle to recreate these extremely specific foods on Gourmet Makes is such a delight, in an “oh my god she’s really struggling can I give her a hug” sort of way.

As she’s talking you through why she’s doing X or Y to make her version of a Dorito (which I won’t ever even eat!) I find myself thinking “God, she’s so fucking smart.”

Claire’s most chronicled relationship in these videos is with Brad. Depending on your deal, you either ship them romantically (apparently there is fic?? which is cringe), think they’re an old married couple, or are like sparring brother and sister. I fall into the last of those camps, but their dynamic is so charming and fun to watch.

Brad’s main series on the BA channel is a show called “It’s Alive,” where he makes all kind of stuff that is, literally, alive! Like yogurt. Or sourdough. Or kombucha. The production on It’s Alive is really fantastic and leans into Brad’s totally bizarre persona and habit of saying the word “water” like “wourder.” Basically Brad is like Ron Swanson if Ron Swanson ABSOLUTELY LOVED HIS JOB AND CO-WORKERS.

Our next test kitchen cook is Carla, who is the food director at BA. Her main series is “Back-to-Back Chef,” where she attempts to instruct a famous person (take your pick! From Troye Sivan to Elizabeth Olsen to Natalie Portman to Al Roker) how to cook a dish with only verbal instruction (they are literally back-to-back and Carla just talks through the recipe as they both make it). This is actually my favorite concept for a food show because it highlights just how challenging cooking can be but also how amazing a good teacher is. They make pretty involved stuff but Carla’s instruction is so perfect. Even if it’s not always technically correct ( “so, my sauce looks like it’s doing bubbly stuff, does yours look like that too”) she perfectly captures the exact way we viewers actually cook and talk about recipes.

Carla has frequent interactions with Molly, who is my favorite chef after Claire. Again, if we’re going back to Parks & Rec analogies, Molly is like a perfect amalgamation of Leslie, Ann, and April. My favorite thing about Molly is that she abbreviates everything. But not in a cutesy or annoying way. “Casear salad,” which is her favorite food, is “Cae Sal.” You get the dealio. Anyhoozles, I love Molly both for her love of made-up words and also for her fun, yet also endearingly serious demeanor in the kitchen. You can tell she just LOVES food. And she has OPINIONS and HERE THEY ARE. We stan.

I’m going to describe the last of the main test kitchen chefs together because they have similar personalities: Chris and Andy. They frequently hang in the back of other people’s videos, specifically Claire’s, and are known to give very good and very honest opinions about whatever she’s cooking up, usually with a side of comical commentary. Chris is well-known to have a perfect palate and Andy is a type A personality whom I believe really shines when he has to deal with the likes of (decidedly type B) Brad.

(There are other personalities you’ll see regularly, like Alex or Gaby or even BA EIC Adam Rapoport (they call him “Rapo”). They are all lovely and wonderful.)

I individually love all of them, especially the ladies (duh), but my true adoration and stanning reached a new level when they all came together, Avengers-style, for the most epic crossover of all time in a new series called “Making Perfect,” where they attempted to make the perfect pizza. I am being 100% serious when I say it was genuinely thrilling to watch this true mix of personalities (and chefs!) come together for this quest. I’m not even a huge pizza person and I found myself watching a FIFTY MINUTE VIDEO WHERE CARLA AND MOLLY MAKE CHEESE. GIVE THIS SHIT AN EMMY. IT WAS ICONIC.

Beyond that, what I love so much about the BA channel is just how... fun it seems to work there. The channel has all the familiar elements of a workplace reality show (oh, in case it wasn’t clear by now I desperately want a reality show starring these people. If the New York Times can get a show on Hulu WHY CAN’T THEY??? Get on it Condé Nast) while also being genuinely funny and charming and quasi-educational. I’ve yet to actually make anything featured on a video but I can wholeheartedly tell you that I enjoyed every second watching them make it.

How to watch: this shiz is free. The channel is here.

P.S. My basic hard and fast rule is to NEVER read the YouTube comments of anything but the comment section on their videos is where the true BA fandom/memes come together and I love reading them. *CHEF’S KISS*

#something that won't ruin your life #we stan claire saffitz and we stan molly baz end of story #their instagrams are also amazing not that that needed clarification #*#by: sara #if you watch please talk to me about it

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elves-n-angels · 6 years

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Sebastian Stan’s Musings on Life in August Man Malaysia Issue 115

APRIL 18, 2018

Sebastian Stan is a humble man. Humble to a fault. One couldn’t imagine a superhero from the Marvel Cinematic Universe played by such a down-to-earth, unassuming man. But since 2010, Stan has played Captain Bucky Barnes, who had his big break as a leading character in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Maybe that’s how Marvel and Disney trick us into seeing these movies: they hire nuanced, thoughtful actors and not just action stars. Resistance is futile.

This year is shaping up to be a big one for Sebastian Stan, with new roles where he gets to show his acting chops, such as his turn in I, Tonya, where he plays the scheming husband of the title character, and a lead role opposite Nicole Kidman in Destroyer. Although he lives in New York, Stan frequently travels to Los Angeles for work, and it is during one of his westward treks that we caught up with him, in the penthouse of the Shangri-La, a luxurious beachfront Santa Monica hotel.

You’re originally from Romania. It’s a country sometimes viewed as the Latin country of Eastern Europe. Do you have a bit of Latin/romantic in you? Yes. I was born there and I left when I was eight. Then I lived in Austria for four years and then I came to the US in 1995.

I’m originally from France. Romanian is also a Latin language, like French. Romanian is a little bit closer to Spanish and Italian, with some Slavic stuff added. I’d say the filmmaking there is seemingly close to French style. It’s sort of deep. Tragic stories about suffering! (Laughs) It’s like the real life. I’m a fan. I love a lot of foreign movies. I’m trying to reeducate myself of what’s going on there, and I’ve watched more Romanian movies lately.

Are they offering you parts over there? No. I’m actually going back. First time I’m going back since 2004. It has been 14 years. I still speak the language fluently, although I have an accent. I’d like to find something one day potentially to reconnect. That’s the plan. I’m going back for their film festival. It’s nice to haveI, Tonya screened there. It’s a good reason to go. One of my goals is to meet with these filmmakers, get to know them. You never know. We’ll start a conversation.

I read your mum is a pianist. Did that play a part in you choosing an artistic path for your career? I don’t know. When we were in Austria for a little bit of time, in her mind she had always seen me as a creative type. She was pushing me a little bit towards acting, taking me to some open calls. She used to get a kick seeing me imitating people. I didn’t like it. I was in this tiny series when I was in Vienna, very briefly. I hated it. I hated the fact you had to be on the spot, you had to wait around to work. I was like “back off, leave me alone”. I rediscovered it on my own when I was a teenager in New York. I’m glad I did it later. I think she wanted me to discover it by myself.

What was it like to arrive in New York at 12 years old? It was very weird. A lot of my childhood was kind of chaotic, moving around. But this is what life is – the life of an actor. You’re always moving, four months there, 10 months there. I’m kind of used to change; I crave it. I like relocating and going to a place I’ve never been and restart, get to know it. All that stuff is fun for me, when doing my job.

I think the first time you got some mainstream visibility was when you did the TV show Gossip Girl, right? I did some things before that, but Gossip Girl, I think it was such a popular show; it was an unbelievable show. It was an amazing opportunity for me. First of all I was living in New York and it was shot in New York. I never thought my character would reoccur. Also one of my best friends was in it, Chace Crawford, so it was nice to reconnect with him. We were hanging out anyway, so it was like “let’s just go to work at the same time!”. I guess that was the first time that, here and there, someone was recognising me. I don’t think in the industry I was recognised for anything. But the show was so popular.

It was huge! I forgot how popular it was. I think it was setting trends.

You’ve been playing Bucky Barnes for close to a decade now. How has playing the role of Captain Bucky Barnes changed your life? Oh my God! I guess 2010 is when I started. It’s bizarre. It’s kind of strange! It’s certainly brought me a lot of exposure. I’m recognised here and there. It changed my life in many ways. From the perspective of having a lot of fans too. So many people coming up to you feeling they have a special bond to the character. It led to a lot of work opportunities as well, because of the exposure these movies have. It really catapulted me into the public eye, in a different way than I was used to. But in a nice way. I’ve been really grateful and lucky to come back and revisit that character over time. It’s even kind of strange to imagine what would life be without that character and without the people I’m playing with. It’s a giant family, Marvel, in a way. So you’re always looking forward to reconnecting with people, in a way. And you just hope it keeps going. I think to the outside world, it looks like they have a huge solution figured out: every movie’s a hit, every movie’s reviewed so well. But it’s really hard. I think every movie is created like it’s its first and last. That’s why it’s good. They’ve always come from a place of “let’s see what we can do with those characters”. It’s a big part of my life.

Was there anything that you wish you could have done differently for the role of Bucky Barnes, now that you know the character better? No, I’m really ok with the way things went. I felt that at the time, I did the most I could do with what they gave me. The knowledge that I had was the potential of certain things, but not knowing 100% if it was going to happen. I have hope and I’m excited about the future of the character, but then again, that’s not up to me.

Do you think any of the aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe relate to real-world events? Like reflection about the role of government? Or is it true fantasy? Look, I think it varies movie by movie, but there’s something to be said that these movies sometimes penetrate the real pulse of what’s going on. You can see it with Black Panther. It was not only a story that needed to be told, but it was something people wanted to see, needed to see. And there was a lot of themes that are prevalent to what’s going on today. So I think Marvel’s very smart with that kind of stuff, always finding a fine line between keeping you entertained and keeping you grounded so that you will be thinking of certain things. It’s an interesting time to have these movies now because they serve a lot of purposes. It’s almost like we really need heroes. We need leaders. There’s something subconscious there about the idea of feeling protected, feeling safe. Maybe these movies tap into something subconscious, into people’s desires, because we live in a scary world, it’s really terrifying out there. You turn your phone on and you’re shocked with all kinds of stuff, there’s another shooting, another attack, etc. I always think about one or two decades from now, when people will look back, how will they be looking at these movies and the pop culture of the time.

Are you surprised a movie like Captain America, which has very patriotic, “proud to be American” themes is doing so well overseas? I think Captain America’s been sort of updated. He’s more relatable than people initially thought. He’s a man lost in time. He’s actually a very sad character. He’s trying to find his way. The ideals he grew up with and made him do the things he wanted to do are no longer applied the same way in the modern world. It goes to show that there’s something about these movies that transcends stereotypes and perspectives. Especially in Asia, in China, these movies are huge.

How has your relationship with all the other actors in the Marvel Cinematic Universeevolved over the past decade? Are you friends with some of them? Oh yeah, for sure. I would say Chris Evans and Andy Mackie are probably the closest to me. Everybody gets along. I got to know different people this time around. I spent much more time with Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson. You said it’s been almost 10 years. You almost grow with those people. Some get married, some get divorced, some have kids, some moved houses. It feels like we come together, and a lot of things have happened since we’ve been in each other’s lives. It does feel like a family.

How do you think you would feel after the Marvel Cinematic Universe finally ends? Is it even going to end one day? I don’t know. Everything ends and begins one way, but I don’t know. These movies are still bringing people to the theatre. Why go to the movie theatre when you have a nice plasma TV at home? You can watch it there. But I feel these movies are still serving that experience visually. You can watch on IMAX, with advanced sound technology. And a big part of this is that technology right now is so great to help those stories to be told. Ten to 20 years from now, you may be able to pick your favourite character and make him do whatever you want. Netflix may own a country at that point!

In I, Tonya, you play Tonya’s husband Jeff. Was it quite a departure? How did you get into character? Did the moustache help? (Laughs) Anytime you have a moustache, it’s going to do something. People look at you, people look at it. It was just a great opportunity to do something different. It was fascinating because it was real people, they existed, they’re still alive. It was a wild story that always has some kind of weird mystique to it. You never know if that’s the truth. Or is there more? We may never know. But from an actor’s perspective, it was a great experience with an unbelievable cast, a really great director that I respected and taught me a lot. It was nice to lose yourself in the character. I enjoy being challenged and this was very scary for a lot of reasons, because he’s a live person and I’ve never played a live person before. He was a very controversial person. To this day I don’t really know the truth. Because based on her side of the story, he was loving at times, and then extremely abusive at others.

In the movie, he’s not really a villain… No and that‘s the problem. I think in that movie, the villain is the American dream, in a way.

I thought the reason people liked that movie in the US is that even though the protagonists did some terrible things, in the end they wanted to win, and there’s nothing more American than this desire to win at all costs. Exactly. And you see it with who is in office in the White House right now! That was very prevalent in our movie. And the winning aspect was exactly what you said. Everybody was obsessed with this idea of not being good enough, not having enough, got to do more, got to do this. And then something happened, and nobody knew how to react to it, nobody was prepared. These were the people that grew up very poor, they didn’t have a great understanding of money, they didn’t have a great understanding of fame. But they wanted it. It’s also about abuse. Abuse happens early on, you learn, and keeps being repeated. And the people who are victims of abuse unfortunately grow used to the idea that there is some love attached to it, and continue to seek it later on. It’s about the message you’re telling your kids early on.

This fascination probably explains why the movie was named I, Tonya and not I, Nancy… The title I, Tonya was inspired by the book I, Claudius, which is about the Roman emperor Claudius. It’s in our nature as people to be driven, to want to succeed. All these things are part of who we are. But what do we do with it? That’s ingrained. You could say, “How are we like that?” But go tell this to four generations back. Blame them! We’re still living very much in a time that’s been put in place decades ago.

I wonder if there has ever been an actor who did this to another actor to get a part they were both auditioning for… (Laughs) Don’t put it out there! I’m sure there are people capable of it!

Are there any actors or directors whom you haven’t worked with and that you would like to work with in the future? Of course. Andrew Garland is a director I was just talking about the other day. He’s incredible. Quentin Tarantino. I’d work with Sir Ridley Scott again in a second. I’d love to get a chance to work with Darren Aronofsky. Who wouldn’t work with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg? Sometimes I’m worried about what’s going to happen when these guys are no longer around!

Can you tell me about the TV show you did a couple of years ago called I’m Dying Up Here? It was a fun experience, it was a director I liked very much. It was based on a book about the Comedy Store in Hollywood. It was the ‘70s, guys like Jay Leno, Robin Williams – a world I knew nothing about. It wasn’t that comedic, it had some dark undertones. I love comedy. I’m still trying to figure out how I’m funny, how I’m not funny. It’s still a work in progress. But I’d love to be in a comedy one day. That would be amazing.

It seems your relationship with celebrity is somewhat ambivalent. Do you even want to be more famous? I talked to Justin Theroux last year and he is known for avoiding fame. I’m definitely not seeking it. I like walking on the streets. I don’t know what it would be like to be someone who can’t walk on the streets. I have no idea what it would be like. I’d love to continue doing what I’m doing. Sometimes one is a by-product of the other. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, sometimes. I see it more of a responsibility than anything else.

There’s pressure? Of course there’s pressure. But what are you doing with being famous? Who are you helping? Bring attention with you to certain causes? That’s how I think of it. Otherwise it’s just self-oriented.

Can you tell us about your other movies that will be released this year? There’s one that I have just finished, which I was really happy about. It’s called Destroyer. That was a great experience that I was really happy with. Then there’s We Live in a Castle , which I filmed two years ago. It was a really nice experience, but a tricky film with a tricky story. In Destroyer, you can expect Nicole Kidman as you’ve never seen her before. I’ve never seen her play a part like this. She was unrecognisable in some scenes. It’s a really well-written script that was a bit twisted. It is set in Los Angeles and the city is a big part of it. The movie is about control and how we struggle with that. We all want control. Sometimes it’s also about who we present ourselves to be and who we really are. It’s a very interesting movie and I’m also excited because of the director, Karyn Kusama. She’s really talented.

Could you describe your own personal style? You’re a firm believer in letting your wardrobe do the work. I try to not wear anything that has a log on it. Seemingly I like a lot of black, I like a lot of velvet. I like leather. I always seem to wear boots! I’m always learning about fashion. Especially this year. I got to wear Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Tom Ford – I was really lucky to wear some really cool brands. But I never discriminate between labels. It could be Hugo Boss or Coach. I’m much more of a visual person. If I see something that makes sense, I go for it.

Do you go to fashion week? I did last year. It was great. I went to Tom Ford, Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein. They were all very different and unique. But it was cool, I liked it.

Is it easy to fit into the clothes after all the Marvel superhero training? (Laughs) No, I’m not sure if I train as hard as I used to! Maybe it’s become part of my regular lie and I don’t not ice it anymore. Sometimes you have to lose weight, sometimes you have to gain weight. You just go with the job; the job just takes over.

You have millions of followers on Instagram. How did you develop your fanbase? It’s always a learning lesson for me on social media. A lot of it happened with Marvel, obviously. I got on Instagram when the Winter Soldier movie came out, it was in 2014. It was strange. But now it’s become a really interesting way to be able to communicate with the fans. Sometimes a lot of people reach out and ask me questions or advice. And that’s always very fulfilling.

What made you change your mind on social media? You used to not be on it. I wasn’t on it because I didn’t think I was going to be good at it. I’m still trying to figure it out, in a way. I’ve figured out how to enjoy it, though. I have just realised it was a necessity, in a way. It was part of the way the world was going. When someone really explained it to me that it was a way to keep in touch with your fans, vice versa, that really opened it up for me. Before I thought, “What am I going to say?” At least now we have a connection.

How much do the fans mean to you? Well none of this would happen without the fans. They’re the ones that go to the movies, they’re the ones that spend the money, they’re the ones that connect with those characters and relate to them. A lot of them put their hearts out and become vocal. I’ve had a lot of fans come up to me and tell me how much they relate to these characters, to the Winter Soldier, and how much he means to them. You need that support. That’s the feedback you’re looking for. Acting, to me, is an amazing experience. For me, personally, it’s gratifying. There’s a sense of release, a peace I get. But in the end, it’s a way to communicate something with somebody. That’s how I’ve always seen it. Here’s a character that’s going through this, maybe you’re related, maybe he’ll make you think about your life, make you question some of your decisions. How would you have acted in that scenario? It’s life on the screen!

#sebastian stan #august man #article #photoshoot #sebstanedit #long post

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aeondeug · 5 years

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So @thedrunkenminstrel did this so I might as well too. Let’s get an Aon’s Top Ten Ships list running! I will say right now that this list is honestly a very shaky thing. A lot of is something that is subject to heavy shifting around, and some of the things that are on it currently probably wouldn’t be if you asked me another day. The top three I can more genuinely state are like Actual Factual Top Three Material and wouldn’t shift much at all. But the rest are up to heavy degrees of change.

10. Naruto/Hinata from Naruto We’ve got to start this list off right and to do that let’s put one of my weirdly enduring baby ships in the ten spot. This was honestly kind of tied with three other ships that I’ll mention later as honorable mentions, but Naruhina gets to win out its spot for its bizarre personal significance to me. Namely the ship is weirdly instrumental in my realizing I was trans, by way of an AU I worked on where Hinata was a transman. And the entire thing was very heavily focused on that woe and also romance with Naruto who tried to teach Hinata the ropes of being a dude. Which sounds like a beautifully terrible trainwreck now, honestly, given that it’d probably involve him showing Hinata the local pornshop and being like YES. THE HEIGHT OF MANHOOD. titty mags. Stepping away from that weird personal significance that no one else save me holds for it though...Naruhina is one of those early ships I clung to really, really hard because I heavily related to one half of the ship and saw, in the other person, traits I found admirable. Like, yes, Naruto’s an irritating jackass who fails all his classes but he’s loud and out there and keeps trying even though he basically always fails up until the point when the plot deems him Ninja Jesus. All traits a nervous kid desperately wished he had and ones that I found endearing or attractive. Even if so much of the rest of him is so grating. Also this sets up the major theme of this list, namely that if you’re earning my undying shipper love chances are I relate to one half and have a crush on the other half. 9. Saria/Malon from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time This is really low on the list, but it’s here for one very important reason. And that reason is is that it is the crackship that will not die. Years have past since a little kid went ‘but what if the cute farm girl and the fairy girl were a couple!’ and the ship’s stuck. It’s also evolved over the years. Evolved into something that by its very nature is doomed to tragedy. Because really if you think about it there’s no real way it could be anything but. Saria dies in the end and is also a weird eternal child type deal. Malon’s going to grow up and move on from her first dumb little kid crush. It’s not really a ship I like am actively, emotionally obsessed with but it is one that I repeatedly go back to and just toy with the idea of every so often. Like it’s just an idea I find compelling to toy with. Early childhood love that by its very nature must die between a human and what amounts to a fairy. 8. Satoko/Rika from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Alright now we’re back to something I am like deeply and emotionally invested in. As someone with an abusive family seeing Satoko’s story in Higurashi was a harrowing experience as a kid. Especially as a kid who has outright lied to CPS before to avoid further abuse. It was also a comforting one in a fashion. Since even before saving Satoko, Rika and her friends are always there to at least try and save her. Satoko’s a horrible brat and a horrible brat that I relate to. Rika’s...weird meanwhile. She’s someone who’s technically a child but due to magical fuckery is actually mentally matured past that. She’s also been pretty scarred by the trauma of what she’s gone through and it’s left her not entirely ‘human’. So much so she needs to eventually go through an arc just to realize that, no, it’s time to give up being a witch and to just...try and find what’s normal. Even though everything about that sounds wrong or even impossible. And that in itself is also relatable. But even then she’s still Satoko’s best friend and Satoko is her best friend. They stick by each other and I’d imagine they would later on in life. But even later on in life there’d still likely be mental disconnect there for a good chunk of time. And one also has to keep in mind that while Rika’s mentally lived for at least one hundred years she’s still not an adult. She’s just a child that was forced to grow up too fast and that’s eventually going to bite her I think, when she realizes that in itself isn’t adulthood. That’s an interesting thing to think of an toy with, I think. 7. Porrim/Aranea from Homestuck An entirely unsurprising pick from me if you know anything about me from my Homestuck days. Which are like my normal days, honestly, but the fervor’s kind of died down. Give it a bit though and we’ll get right back to Hamsteaking. Porrim is just...a very one-note little joke. In all honesty. But she’s one that provides like a vast sea of unexplored potential. Porrim is, like so much of Homestuck, a perfect Barbie doll to play makebelieve with. She is also a vampire. This nets her like 50,000 bonus points immediately. Then there’s Aranea. Aranea is a bad person. Let’s make no bones about that. She is a bad person. But she’s cute in a way, when she’s not being awful. She’s also someone that reminds me somewhat of the person my current boyfriend used to be, while also having troubles that I myself find relatable. And the most important part of the ship is that they canonically broke up. Which sounds like a weird ass reason to ship a thing I suppose, but the breaking up is what makes the ship interesting to me. It’s basically a tragedy in action. It can’t work out in the main timelines, though it might in alternates. And I like exploring what led up to it not working out. 6. Chise/Elias from The Ancient Magus Bride This is sadly not in the top ten yet as I don’t quite feel comfortable putting it there when I’m not caught up. But given where I currently am in the manga I have to say that this is one of the most disgustingly me romances I’ve seen in a bit. We’ve got a spooky monster man, an awkward abused girl...He calls her puppy and gives her head pats and they nuzzle each other like dogs. He kind of wants to eat her and he’s kind of a creepy weirdo to her at times, but she’s also not seeming like someone that is just going to bow down and eternally accept that and... And they’re both learning how to people. They both are. Neither of them really knows how to do this whole human thing that well. They’re both emotionally fucked and dysfunctional in their own ways. And they’re learning from each other. In such a fashion that I legitimately cried while reading my comics. Which is a bit hard to manage. Given proper time and catching up they may well travel up this list. 5. Malus/Carrie from Castlevania 64/Legacy of Darkness Alright. Back to childhood ships. Also more monsters. Also these were kind of awful ass games and neither Carrie nor Malus really have much personality at all. Carrie’s personality is mostly relegated to material in the manual, which paints her as an incredibly angry and distrusting child that hates adults and also God for failing her repeatedly. But that’s all just stuff in like a summary. And Malus’ personality is NYEHEHEHE I WAS EVIL THIS WHOLE TIME. So what, pray tell, is the appeal of this besides my obvious vampire fetish. The answer is that like...the bad end of the game has Carrie promising to marry Malus. Malus asking her to marry him presumably so he can like make use of the Belnades bloodline’s magic. Also Malus is Dracula. Dracula and human women do not have a good track record. Both in terms of him being able to resist the rare strong willed woman willing to put him in his place and in terms of keeping those women not murdered for witchcraft. Malus and Carrie is a ship of potential. Potential that plays into one of the central themes of Castlevania’s storyline which is that Drac really just wishes people would stop killing his girlfriends. I may or may not have also had an OC who was their kid who is also kind of basically another character on this list. 4. Glinda/Elphaba from Wicked Listen to What is this Feeling. Now listen to it again. Listen to Popular. Now listen to it again. NOW LISTEN TO DEFYING GRAVITY. NOW LISTEN TO IT AGAIN. We’ve got a green woman who is kind of hideous and who thinks she’s ugly! She’s also angry at the world and wants to change shit! She’s also tragically fucked! In the book at least. How is that not a me character? And Glinda. Gods. Glinda. She’s not stupid. She seems it in the book a lot of the time and Elphaba assumes she is right away but...Glinda’s not stupid. She’s actually very smart and putting on a front. Also she basically annoys Elphaba’s tsundere ass into being her bff. And if there is anything I love in my ships it is one half having to be annoyed into friendship by another happier character who is weirdly trusting and accepting of this horrible monster. Why? Who cares! But they are! Now listen to What is this Feeling. Please. 3. Zero/Fiethsing from Force of Will And now we are finally in the top three. We have also reached the part of the list where we have a character with alarming similarities to my weird kidfic OC from Castlevania. So Zero. She’s cranky and serious. Kind of nervous. Really nervous honestly. She’s also pretty cynical and at her worst points actively gives up on trying to save the world and attempts to destroy it or is like on the brink of giving up again. She’s also got abandonment issues, self hate problems, and uncompromising sense of justice that can be reasonably connected to the self hate problems and shit’s just not a good time for Zero. Also she’s a vampire. And then there’s Fieth. Her Most Important Partner. Lovely, stupid, irritating Fieth. Fieth who adores freedom above all else and who is seemingly full of endless optimism and hope and who is a cocky bitch and who lies and sleeps and is basically a cat become an elf. More importantly though there’s what they are. We don’t get to see Zero and Fieth becoming friends. We meet them when they’re friends already and have years of established history with one another. And shortly after we meet them they adopt a child. Or, rather, Fieth declares she’s going to raise the baby into her apprentice and Zero declares that she refuses to let Fieth raise a baby on her own. And then...they become a family. Just. A family. A pretty happy one at that. It’s eventually torn asunder by death and war but before that they’re just two mothers and their daughter. They are in a sort of quantum gay state like poor Nanofate despite their whole deal, but to me they do unquestionably read as a couple. One with problems. A laundry list of them. But a couple with a kid and, in a weird sort of way, a future. 2. Jame/Tori from The Chronicles of the Kencyrath I adore this ship. It is hard to quantify how much I adore it. But it’s quite a lot. It’s dysfunctional. It’s got issues. It’s incest and that shockingly isn’t one of the issues. And that’s why I love it. Because Hodgell has managed to take fantasy characters and mythic archetypes and humanize them with some of the most starkly real depictions of mental illness I’ve ever seen. Hands down. Tori’s a nervous wreck. He’s an asshole with problems from trauma and Jame doesn’t just take his shit. She actually does the exact opposite and tells him to fuck off. That’s important. Tori not just getting the girl despite being a human disaster is very important. The fact that his very behavior is why the girl does not want to get with him even though she really, truly wants to deep down is very, very important. Jame/Tori is the awkward and rough tale of two people having to recover from frankly atrocious abuse. Two people who are deeply drawn to one another but who also fear and kind of hate the other. Two people who can barely stand being in the same room as one another currently. It’s a bumpy road. It’s a road we’re not even sure they can make it down. But that’s why it means things to me as someone whose undiagnosed BPD almost destroyed his relationship. 1. Sakuya/Remilia from Touhou This just barely beat out Jame/Tori and the sole reason it beats out Jame/Tori is I have shipped this fucking shit for literally almost half my life. And I’m still not through with it or tired of it. It’s been years and years and it is still one of my most favoritest ships ever. So I feel pretty confident saying it is my One True Pairing. It’s also got a vampire. Wow. It’s got a human partner who is bad at humaning too! Double wow! And what it’s got in particular is exceptional flexibility. Like all the Touhous Remilia and Sakuya are kind of just left up to the mercy of the fandom. There’s canonical traits they have and we have seen them interact together and with others, but in a far more limited degree than what is seen in a lot of other works. And the fandom is what basically runs Touhou. It is a self perpetuating machine and Sakuremi is still chugging along years later and with a bunch of variety in it, even if it’s got some tropes I am really tired of seeing at this point. But why is this the Touhou ship to end all Touhou ships? Besides the obvious answer of ‘Duh, it’s a vampire and her maid. What the fuck else do you NEED?’ we have the ever important identification and wish fulfillment aspects. Which breaks into my own personal conception of the characters and their relationship with one another. So Remilia’s like...a kid. Forever. She was turned very young so even after five hundred years she still looks like she’s ten at best. She’s also kind of a brat and at times fairly naive in the way a kid might be. But we do see that she puts on airs. She’s TRYING to be this intimidating, sophisticated vampire lady and she takes pride in the fact that people ‘respect’ her. But that respect is more fear of the fact that she’s a vampire and vampires are stupidly powerful in her world. And as someone who had an extended childhood forced on him by his family and who is trying to learn what it is to be an adult and never being treated like an adult or not being able to handle it when he is...That’s just. Something very ripe for playing with. Especially when you mix it with Sakuya. Who’s an outcast among her own kind and who gave up on bothering with them for it. She’s someone who might have been a vampire hunter than failed to kill Remilia. She takes care of her and chides her like a child, but she also is most definitely subservient to her. And she’s said that she’ll always be together with her as long as she lives. Always. Sakuya’s like this weird mix of a sweet, caring goofball of a woman and a hate filled, mopey edgelord that really only could get along with monsters. So like, I like to think, that they’ve basically ended up finding what exactly the other needs. Remilia gets someone who sincerely respects her authority and takes her seriously, but who also will not entirely put up with her bullshit. Sakuya gets someone who...cares. At all. Someone to give her a name and talk to her and not chase her away for being monstrous. And perhaps more than any of these ships freedom to fuck around is there. It’s what I want to make it. Honorable Mentions We have three of these. Nanoha/Fate from the Nanoha franchise, Usagi/Ami from Sailor Moon and Shimako/Sei from Maria-sama ga Miteru. They were all just barely beaten out by Naruhina, hence their inclusion here.

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