#i have exist in the physical world for maybe 60% of the time since i was 11

[ligbi]

"oh hey i see this term around sometimes, let's google what it means!" me about to look up the definition for the weeb term for what i've been doing for 20 years

#no one google denpa #i have exist in the physical world for maybe 60% of the time since i was 11 #for... obvious reasons *gestures at life history the state of the world and my general personality*

[revserrayyu]

2.1 Penacony thoughts [part4]

**BOSS FIGHT SPOILERS** Going to be rambling about the battle itself and the two cut-scenes that follow right after, but not quite the whole story’s ending yet. That will be the next post. If by any chance you haven’t beaten the boss yet and are still gazing upon this post then I urge you to come back later because I would never wanna ruin the experience for you.

I’m glad Himeko questioned the number of murders because I also sat there for a good minute wondering who the third death might’ve been, only to realize how stupid I was upon clicking forward to hear Aventurine’s response.

I still wish his hat & glasses were part of his usual attire. I’m glad he pulls the hat out of nowhere whenever he launches his follow up attack, but the glasses would’ve been real snazzy if he permanently wore them. It was nice seeing us wield the lance instead of the bat for once too.

So, the fight itself.. was a bit irritating, mostly due to the gambling. I believe I tried a total of four times until I beat him. The first three attempts I simply switched around different team members, using those who could easily score big against his dice and win those gambles. His first phase went fine no matter which team setup I had. It was that second phase that kept knocking me out, mainly because my healer and support units could never manage to roll higher or on par with Aventurine’s number seeing how they could only attack a single target at a time. It also didn’t help that I had no ice or physical characters properly leveled up to assist Serval in weakness breaking.. until I remembered destruction Trailblazer existed. So, after struggling with different teams for a good hour, I decided to do some relic farming (which basically resulted in me taking the first gold pieces I could get) while also getting materials to level up traces and a random light cone because I have literally not switched back to this path since we first acquired the flaming lance. Half hour later and my destruction Trailblazer was ready to come out of retirement with a hasty, last minute build.

Of course the stats are not the greatest thing in the world (all relics, traces and lc not even maxed out) and I wasn’t confident that I would do any better than my previous attempts against Aventurine, where the lowest I managed to bring him down to in his second phase was about 60% before biting the dust. After activating a pair of consumables and fighting through the first phase as usual, I would like to think everything was going rather smoothly with how well I was keeping everyone alive at least.

The team wide gambles during the second phase went as well as I imagined; Serval and Stelle would manage to score high with their AoE while Huohuo and Bronya would typically suffer and take a hit. They might’ve tied once or twice but the odds were certainly not in my favor whenever those two would roll the dice. By some strange stroke of luck though, I finally managed to beat the fancy gambler! Thank god too because if this team failed, I would’ve been all out of ideas.

The following cutscene is good and I wish I had taken more screenshots but I was caught up in enjoying it. Aventurine’s really out here acting like a Meowth using Pay Day twenty times in a row.

I do feel bad for Acheron, walking a path she doesn’t even want to tread on and endlessly looking for someone. Haven’t a clue on who she might’ve been talking to though.

Himeko and Welt protecting the kids like the good parents they are! We’re certainly going to have some crazy stories for Dan Heng once we return to the Express. Dude is probably just chilling in the archives, maybe having some snacks with Pom-Pom while we’re over here fighting for our lives.

Another moment where I was so invested in watching Acheron that the idea of screenshots left my mind completely, but ohhh boy, the extent of her power is grand indeed. It’s a bit similar to what was shown in her character trailer but seeing her ultimate like this in game is truly an experience.

Big fan of the brief moment where she’s shown to sheath her sword again..

..and the way it goes from the monochrome world to reality and it starts raining hard is so very nice. Can’t help but think back to what Aventurine’s sister said about rain though at this time.

Finally getting that confirmation of her path even though it was no secret to us.

I really hope so because the longer we linger here the more worried for Aventurine I become.

This gives me little hope that Robin might be alive? If whomever is behind this just wanted to cover up the truth about Penacony and its recent happenings, then simply taking away their ability to speak should be effective enough. Death seems a bit too extreme but perhaps that was merely an accident. Or at least I hope so. I want her alive if you couldn’t tell.

So Aventurine had this all planned out? Putting himself and Acheron on opposing sides so she would have to draw her blade against him, all to nullify that strange Harmony magic that Sunday placed upon him? This man is out here playing 3d chess.

And like a fool I feel for his bluff about wanting to make our stellaron explode. But if his stone is broken, does that mean he never planned to make it out of this fight alive in the first place? I know his future was grim due to the conditions Sunday placed upon him, regardless if Aventurine managed to solve Robin’s case or not, but I still don’t like the sound of this!

Yes, please, wake up pretty boy. In reality and alive, preferably. Also, I wonder how much longer we’ll need to wait until we can finally get an explanation behind the red text. I have my guesses, but wish to know for sure.

Both of them asking and giving such real answers.. ahh. Life and death truly are such frightening things.

I would like to know the meaning behind your words, ma’am. Why must you do this? Are you even aware of it? What if I uno reverse card you and give you anxiety instead huh??

I’m thankful Acheron reminded him of Ratio’s parting gift and that Aventurine still held onto it even now, but with how this whole scene ends.. I can’t be certain if our gambler decided to use it or not.

Oooohhh my heart.. here comes the pain.

I’m sorry sir, but you can’t just give us these real handsome and gentle smiles and seemingly disappear into a void afterwards?? I don’t wanna accept this!

AVENTURINE!! You better be walking your pretty boy butt back into reality somehow, I swear! If you’re still choosing to end yourself despite Acheron’s words and Ratio’s help I will SOB!

I seriously do not like the sound of this.. I know Aventurine hasn’t had the best kind of life by any means, but as poetic as this all sounds, I want the dice to keep rolling!

No doubt Aventurine assumed that he would be cut off from obtaining outside help at some point during this scheme, so leaving behind pieces of his stone to convey a message about whether or not his companions can proceed was clever.. but still upsets me because I really don’t wanna accept a “death” from him. I wonder how Topaz truly feels about this, like is it fine because his actions were towards the mission or is there any genuine concern? I know their phone call back during Belobog was a bit rough between them but at least Topaz spoke relatively highly of him when we saw her in the reality hotel.

So this is the achievement I read about last time with its connection to the “Sibyl, What Do You Want?” achievement.. and after witnessing everything that happened, it hurts even more.

Aaahh, my poor man. He deserved better and I truly hope he can return. This upsets me more than Firefly’s “death.” And speaking of which.. I got the whole ending to chat about next hm?

(originally written on 3/29)

#honkai star rail #aventurine #acheron #gameplay #revs rambles

[audreydoeskaren]

Hi I LOVE your blog!!!

Idk if this is a personal question but I was curious as to why you decided to focus on Ming/Qing/early-mid 20th century fashion. Ik that specializing in specific periods instead of like, everything, is a more effective way of studying/researching stuff. I was just curious why you chose those specific periods to study! (Sorry for any bad english,,,)

Hi and thank you! No worries your English is fine. Um there are multiple reasons for this and my interest for each era developed one after another, sorry that this turned out pretty long.

When I discovered the hanfu community, I was only really interested in Ming Dynasty fashion and not anything else because I’ve only had previous exposure to Ming history. Maybe this is purely personal and I can’t pinpoint an exact reason why, but I was never interested in Chinese history prior to the Ming, like, at all. It’s not that I think it’s bad or boring or anything, it just doesn’t speak to me. This was extended to fashion history as well. To me at the time, Ming fashion looked visibly different to stereotypical expectations of historical Chinese dress fostered by period dramas and such, so I found it very refreshing (obviously the other eras also look nothing like stereotypical guzhuang, but to the untrained eye the Ming is just so wildly different it can’t be missed). I’m also generally a big fan of brocade fabrics and the drape of Ming clothes. At the time I was so obsessed with Ming style hanfu content because it looked so gorgeous and posh and not like anything historic Chinese I’ve seen before, it was novel and exciting.

I got into Republican era fashion a bit later. I forgot the exact reason why, but it was probably just me seeing those iconic 1930s advertisement posters with cheongsam wearing women and deciding to look into it further because why not, it’s connected to my existing interest. I’m generally more well versed with late 19th and early 20th century history since that’s most of what I learned in school and uni, so I had a bit more social context to work with. Also, primary sources like artworks, descriptions and physical artifacts are exponentially more abundant the more recent a time period is, and I realized Republican era fashion was a lot easier to research than Ming fashion, so I decided to focus on that for a while. I’m hooked to this era by the avant-garde designs that were inspired by modernist art, since I have a taste for “degenerate” and weird modern art in general, so that was right up my alley. Aside from that, I think 20th century fashion is especially relevant to understanding the state of Chinese fashion and its discourse today, since we’re inevitably more influenced by what transpired in the 20th century than anything prior to that. It’s like I get a better understanding of my place in the world by looking at this era.

Then I became really frustrated with the lack of English language information about Chinese historical fashion and started this blog. I was writing the series of posts on early 20th century fashion and decided to wrap it up at the 1950s and 60s since I wanted to include the iconic Hong Kong style cheongsam of the midcentury, but thought it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t say anything about the mainland of the same time. I had a lot of deep seated misconceptions about fashion in the early PRC like everybody else, but the more research I did for the post the more I came to realize they were not true, and I had to reevaluate my perception of the period. I had so many existential crises writing that series (and in the subsequent maintenance of this blog, and I’m sure there are more to come) because putting every bit of knowledge I had at the time into a cohesive timeline exposed many structural and historiographical issues with discourses around Chinese fashion history i.e. the way it’s usually written, and I had to unpack them one by one. Watching movies from the midcentury that were not period dramas or propagandistic in nature was a really shocking experience for me, since they showed people in such gorgeous and nicely tailored clothes I did not expect to see in the Mao era. There were also many sophisticated designs from the midcentury that combined Chinese silhouettes and elements with contemporary Western tailoring (and I think 1950s Western tailoring is *chef’s kiss* perfection) which would definitely be popular nowadays as historical inspired street wear. It’s just so pretty and to contemporary taste. After reshuffling my worldview I developed an obsession with the 1950s as well.

My interest in the Qing came last, mostly because there are so many colonial and nationalist narratives around it and everybody seems to have a negative perception of it that it’s intimidating to start. At this point I had a vague idea about most fashion styles in the Ming and early 20th century, so now the problem for me became one of filling in the gaps. Like, yes I know what fashion at the end of the Ming looked like, I know what fashion at the beginning of the Republican era looked like, what about the stuff in between? So I begrudgingly started looking at Qing fashion, and after the most preliminary research I realized most information out there about Qing fashion is bullshit and incorrect. The 17th and 18th centuries are so poorly researched if researched at all (and not mislabeled as Ming), and Internet and scholarship alike are completely flooded with stereotypical 19th century dress and early 20th century Manchu fashion (which isn’t even in the Qing but that’s never stopped anybody). It sort of became a rush to unearth the truth.

A part of my interest in these time periods at this point is spite, like, I want to see bigoted narratives obliterated and people appreciating historical fashion without being coerced into feeling certain ways. It’s also highly rewarding after unlearning years of conditioning that gave me internalized racism by unpacking some of the narratives I came across in fashion history. It’s nice to finally be able to look at fashion in these eras without a white male colonizer voice telling me what to think in the back of my head…

#rant #? #personal

[princepaddy]

‘I wanted all eyes on me’ – The OA and Shadow and Bone star Patrick Gibson on his acting pedigree

After the Netflix series that gave Patrick Gibson his break-out role was cancelled, it was no doubt tempting to jump at the next thing that came along. But the Dubliner — who has been acting since age eight — has chosen his roles carefully to forge a long-term career. It helps that he’s had his thespian parents, Lenny Abrahamson, and a clown professor to guide him.

A solidarity exists among those who survived hotel quarantine during the pandemic. On encountering a fellow detainee in the free world, an immediate bond forms over a shared experience in enforced confinement, and occasionally, so does a dynamic of oneupmanship.

“A fortnight without an open window,” I’ve smugly responded of my own quarantine episode, to those who underwent a mere week to 10 days with a terrace. “It was tough, yet strangely cathartic, and actually quite spiritual in some ways,” I then deliver with a martyred air.

Consequently, I feel completely diminished by Patrick Gibson’s multiple bouts with room-serviced captivity. “I think I did it five times,” the actor casually estimates, scratching a whiskered chin. “Once in Australia, once in America and a couple of times while going back and forth between the UK and Belgium.”

He’s unsure how long in total, something I chalk up to a coping mechanism from the residual trauma. “Maybe,” he agrees. “I mean, the days blended into each other. I did keep a video diary as a way not to lose my mind, but I’m too terrified to look back at it now. And I had it easy compared to some of my friends who’re actors. A couple I know were in and out of quarantine once a month.”

With each stint in confinement preceding an acting job, Gibson explains that all delivered the perfect duration in which to learn lines; to find a character’s motivation, and even workshop with a clown professor. Yes, you read that right — a clown professor.

“I was quarantining in Brisbane to work on a film I was shooting in Australia called The Portable Door which has a lot of physical comedy in the script, something I’ve never done. I’ve never done comedy — there’s actually nothing scarier than doing comedy because the reaction is so much more immediate. You know if you do something and people don’t laugh, you’re in trouble. It’s not as nuanced as drama.

“So I did workshops on Zoom with a clown professor. He’s an amazing movement coach teaching in one of the best drama schools in Australia. And it was about facing the fear of falling on your face, which is at the core of clowning; getting comfortable with that, not giving a shit if you make an idiot of yourself. It was actually way more philosophical than I expected. The theory of clowning is so fascinating.”

I’m disappointed with the distinct lack of clown tropes in his account of the experience: no red squeaky nose, no water-squirting flower. There must have been some slapstick involved.

“There was a physical [slapstick]. He would get a chair, give himself a simple task to unfold the chair and do a 60-minute routine, which was hilarious. And I learned from that, just doing simple things and allowing myself to flow with it. He’d have me waving my arm around, and then he’d click his fingers, and I’d be waving the other one, or my leg, or some other crazy action. Jumping up and down. Using my whole body.

“If I was being monitored [during quarantine], they’d have thought I was losing it in there.”

It’s Friday evening in Los Angeles. Gibson (27) who found fame with the Netflix cryptic fantasy series The OA, talks to me from his hotel room. “At least this one I can come and go from,” he laughs with a drawn-out titter.

He periodically repositions the camera during our video call, often at an upward angle, which for most of us would manufacture a furl of unfortunate chins, but only serves to enhance his pale, cinematic features.

The Dubliner, raised in Stillorgan and schooled at Gonzaga College in Ranelagh, is on a flying visit to meet his agents, Dar Rollins and Andrew Kurland at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who between them represent and negotiate for screen luminaries such as Michael Keaton, Samuel L Jackson and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

I’m imagining the agency as an open-plan office, with blinding white furnishings, floor-to-ceiling views of the Hollywood sign, and skittish assistants clumsily clutching scripts and offering green juices. “Well no, not quite,” Gibson smiles.“ But we went for a coffee on a roof of some fancy hotel, which was still very LA.”

Since a breakout role as a disaffected delinquent in The OA — a supernatural, sometimes baffling series, circling near-death experiences and alternate universes — Gibson has ricocheted from sumptuous costume saga in The Spanish Queen; to Gen Z romcom In A Relationship, alongside Emma Roberts; and a West End stage debut in Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning Sweat.​

Meanwhile, the fruits of his quarantine labour are set for imminent release, including a second season of Channel 4 crime series Before We Die; independent teen drama, Good Girl Jane, lauded at the recent Tribeca Film Festival and a central role in the next run of Netflix mega-hit Shadow and Bone.

As a rule, agents largely guide and counsel an actor towards success, while sometimes inadvertently steering them into failure. Does Gibson feel comfortable placing his full faith in his LA-based representatives?

“Good agents, who you feel completely at ease with, who understand your goals and what’s right for you, they will have your back. And [my agents] have my back. Right now, there’s so much content being made with all the streaming platforms, it’s important to know the next thing you’re going into is right for you. Because once you’re in, it’s a big commitment.

“Shadow and Bone, that’s six months of the year. That’s a massive project to sign on for, so it’s important to have a team of people to discuss with, feel it out. Some have their own motivations and will encourage you to work on something that serves the immediate, rather than the long-term plan. A good agent will encourage you to say no if you need to.”

At just 27 and still in the infancy of his career, is saying no to work frightening? “Saying no is scarier than saying yes but it shouldn’t be. Also, if you say no to something, people can then assume you’re not working but I don’t think it’s good to make decisions over what others might think of you.”

For Gibson, performance is in the DNA. His parents, Irish mum Kate and his dad, Richard, who was born in Uganda and raised in the UK, met and fell in love as actors on London’s West End. “One of them was doing a Noël Coward play I think, I can’t remember what the other was [doing].”

While Kate walked away from acting, ultimately transitioning into marketing, Richard continued his career on stage and screen, notably doing a 10-year stint as Nazi buffoon Herr Flick in the iconic BBC sitcom ’Allo ’Allo!.

During summer breaks from school, young Patrick and his older brother Billy played backstage during Richard’s touring stage productions, mingling with cast and crew. For Patrick, a seed was planted. “The costumes, the transformative atmosphere, the creativity — it captured my imagination.”

Gibson tagged along to his father’s theatrical agency in Dublin, communicating his desire to act. Aged eight, he landed his first commercial for Vodafone and enrolled in afterschool drama classes, the latter a futile exercise.

“I remember briefly doing Betty Ann Norton, Billie Barry [stage schools], and my parents being told, ‘This kid is not designed to be in this environment, he’s too mental’. I imagine I was incredibly annoying to teach; must have been a nightmare. I had no interest in group collaboration. I wanted all eyes on me.”

This unapologetic self-interest proved rewarding on the local audition circuit, with Gibson and his brother cast as Liam Cunningham’s sons in a 2007 RTÉ production of Maeve Binchy’s Anner House. Shot in Cape Town, it’s the only time Gibson has travelled to the African continent. While far removed from his father’s childhood home in Uganda, it gave Richard the opportunity to introduce his children to a taste of his African upbringing.

“Dad left Africa when he was 10, moved to London when his father was working there and he had a mad transition. Uganda was all he knew, and he’s told us how wonderful it was to grow up there and then he moved to the UK where it was grey and miserable. So being able to revisit Africa with us as kids was significant for him. He brought us to Kruger National Park, which isn’t in Uganda but he had been there as a child and it was a special trip for all of us.”

By the time Gibson attended Gonzaga, he had appeared in a couple of episodes of The Tudors and was a ‘lost boy’ in Neverland, Sky’s expansive adaptation of Peter Pan. “That’s where the penny dropped. That’s when I realised, ‘Yeah, I really want to do this’.”

Disappointment came with an audition for Game of Thrones’ adolescent despot Joffrey Baratheon, a role which ultimately went to Cork’s Jack Gleeson. “I was 15, maybe 16 and I know I got close. Not final two, but I got really close. But Jack was Joffrey. There’s a DNA in every part that casting directors are looking to match that up with. When you see it, it’s undeniable. I’ve had parts I don’t get because no matter how hard I work on that character, there’s somebody who matches up [more than I do].”

A successful casting for Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did as an impressionable young sidekick to Jack Reynor’s titular anti-hero heightened his profile and fostered an enduring relationship with the Oscar-nominated director. Abrahamson was directly instrumental in Gibson studying philosophy at Trinity College.

“I was thinking about doing philosophy, and at the same time talking about drama school and Lenny gave me the nudge. He said: ‘If you want to be an actor for the rest of your life, do something now that’s different. And if you’re going to act for the rest of your life, philosophy demands you look at everything from every angle.’ It encourages you to analyse and assess beyond a linear point of view.”

However, Gibson struggled to balance work and college. “I missed classes, tutorials. I missed my exams two years running,” and after landing The OA in 2015 and relocating to New York for five months, his studies had to be ultimately sacrificed. “I will go back, some day,” he promises with a cackle.

The OA was a complex learning experience for Gibson. Conceived by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the creative duo behind indie efforts The East and Sound Of My Voice, the series was a psychedelic blend of comic-book fantasy and murky mystery, and hailed as being both brilliant and baffling. One critic called it, “bonkers with a vengeance,” while another dismissed it as “gripping but annoying”.

With Marling taking centre stage as a blind woman missing for seven years who reappears with her vision restored, a mysterious carving on her back and a flat-out refusal to disclose where she had been, the show amassed a keen audience who were left bereft after the shock cancellation in 2019, leaving the storyline on a cliffhanger.

Some were so disappointed they raised funds for a ‘Save The OA’ digital billboard in New York’s Times Square, with one devotee going on hunger strike outside of Netflix’s LA offices.

Gibson was deflated by the cancellation. “I got a call from Brit and Zal when I was coming back from a music festival, which was a slight buzzkill. And they said, ‘We have some sad news’. From their side, while everything in that show had been a challenging thing to make, I found the whole journey was so bizarre and magical. And it didn’t feel that out of the ordinary the way it ended. With something like Shadow and Bone, that would surprise me if it was cancelled that way but, with The OA, it felt right in a strange way.”

Shadow and Bone is Gibson’s second punt with the Netflix machine. Joining the hugely successful show in its second season, after the debut series drew in 55 million viewers in its first 28 days, long-term success appears a more likely outcome.

Adapted from a series of popular fantasy novels by Leigh Bardugo, the glossy saga boasts a central band of heroes and cads with varying degrees of magical capabilities. Starring Chronicles Of Narnia’s Ben Barnes, British-American actor Zoë Wanamaker and Irish newcomer Danielle Galligan, audiences were gripped by an interspersing, sweeping narrative framed against the battle for Ravka, a fictional realm heavily influenced by Imperialist Russia and the reign of the Tzars.

Joining the conflict is Gibson’s Nikolai Lantsov, a prince of Ravka masquerading as a pirate — a duality the actor relished. “He’s a prince and a pauper, an alter ego in disguise and he brings this massive bravado; a pirate who has this massive ship, has got this massive swagger. Kind of like Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man, he gets on people’s nerves but he’s also hard to hate. Underneath, he’s vulnerable, not given a chance by his family. It was fascinating to be able to explore both sides of that person.”

With Lantzov a standout fan favourite of the book series, the actor is keenly aware of a pressure to please with his take on the character. Unusually for an actor in his 20s, Gibson employs a veteran’s perspective to quieten such anxieties.

“With movies and TV shows, everything is talked about like it’s life and death, and it can often feel like it is, but at the end of the day, it’s not. Other people’s jobs are — some literally.”

He tells me his brother Billy — now a father of two, who works as a cardiologist in a Dublin hospital — is a massive inspiration. ​

“Working a 24-hour shift, then taking his kids to the pool, has a few hours off, then goes straight on to another night shift. And the stakes he’s dealing with, the health and well-being of people, their actual lives — it always puts it in perspective for me.”

Quite the effective reality touchstone, I remark. But does it always work?

“You hear actors complaining all the time. We’re the number one for it. But you know what, it’s absolutely unwarranted because to get to do this as a job is the most fortunate thing in the world. It really is. And I won’t take that for granted.”

#patrick gibson #paddy gibson #patrick gibson interview #paddy gibson interview #shadow and bone #shadow and bone cast #shadow and bone netflix #s&b #grishaverse #the oa #the oa cast #nikolai lantsov

[peachyblkdemonslayer]

The more that I sit here and think about the whole DC / Warner Brothers situation the more I think about how much they're fumbling the bag. Because we obviously know like the video I've shared on my account that they're trying to " focus on their primary" which is basically cis het white men, excluding anyone who isn't part of that group. Which basically includes women, disabled people, neurodivergent people,BIPOC etc etc. And yes one of the biggest reasons they probably are targeting white straight men is because they have the most disposable income. But it seems like DC and Warner Brothers and you can even say the whole Western comic book mainstream are underestimating one big thing. The internet

Cuz let's think about it this way one piece one of the biggest not only mangas that come from Japan but just biggest comic books in the world has already all out sold both Spider-Man and batman. One Piece has only existed for about 25 years and it's already out so Spider-Man who was created 60 years ago. And Batman who was created 83 years ago, these two most recognizable characters have been outsold by something that has not even existed for a quarter of their lifetimes. And given enough time it might even outsell Superman at some point in its future. And that's only amongst one piece who was part of the big three from the early 2000s we're not even talking about the numbers that new Gen shonen manga have been doing. Demon Slayer which time it was being serialized from 2016 to 2020 has already sold 150 million copies, jjk which has only been being serialized since 2017 has already sold 60 million copies. Along with that Tokyo Revengers which has also only been around since 2017 has already sold 50 million copies since then to now. All these manga series have only existed within the 5 to 4-year Mark and they've already sold extraordinarily well.

And in the case of Demon Slayer at literally pulled out is publisher from bankruptcy. And one of the biggest reasons that the series sell so well is one because people enjoy these. And two because they're easy to get into unlike their Western counterparts. When it comes to the big two which is DC and Marvel is very hard for anyone to get into these Comics because a lot of these characters have a very long and complicated history. A lot of these characters have been passed hand to hand when it comes to both writers and artists, which makes it difficult to see which stuff is canon in which stuff isn't Canon. Now obviously some stuff has stayed with these characters since they're creation but other times a lot of stuff gets lost over the years because of people wanting to do a lot of different and new things with these characters. And when we have characters that are new to the comic book scenes they either maybe have a short comic book run or they might be featured in a mainstream characters book but we either never see them again or to get very little time on the panels. And this is just us talking about the traditional media of published books were not even talking about what online Comics have to offer.

In the last few years especially since the pandemic hit a lot of people have been spending more time online more than ever. And in doing so we have seen a huge boom of webcomics becoming very successful for example Lore Olympus from webtoons. Some of these Comics have even gotten animated counterparts even DC as of recently has had four different Comics published on the platform, which has shown to be a huge success. And that's just on these bigger platforms the amount of times I have seen independent comic creators be able to fund the publish the physical copies of their books and record time is amazing.

And I feel as though this along with some other stuff such as business choices from the CEOs of these companies goes to show how out of touch some people are when it comes to the modern world consumption of comics. That's why I feel at this point since DC is clearly regressing when it comes to what they're willing to push and publish is better for most people if they went the Indie route for comics. Since in the comics also have the same benefits of manga since these characters also have not existed for as long as some of the DC and Marvel characters have. But that's just a few thoughts for me about the situation.

#me talking #dc comics #marvel comics #web comics #comics #manga #batman #spiderman #superman #jjk #demon slayer

[servin-up-surveys]

survey #142

Ever been to a bonfire party? Yeah.

Have you ever been in a lighthouse? No, but that'd be very cool.

What do you enjoy most about your life? The people in it.

Have you ever said anything to the last person you kissed that you regret? There's one occasion I can think of, where I snapped at him when I could've pointed out something that bothered me in a nicer way. I did basically immediately apologize for it, being completely unwilling for my impulsive mouth to take part in any argument we may ever have, but still.

How many people with the name Taylor do you know? Girt's very close friend that currently lives with him is named Taylor. I know there has to be a couple more that I know of, but idk.

Do you care about what others think of your physical appearance? Yes. Way too much, specifically about my weight.

Have you ever stripped for someone? No, that'd be way too awkward for me. I'm too self-conscious of my body for someone's attention to be fully on it, and even in high school when I wasn't nearly as bad, I still don't think I would've been able to.

Have you ever wanted to believe in something, but couldn’t? Yes, the most obvious in my life being religion. Even as a child, I just had so many doubts, so much didn't make sense, but I'd shut myself up whenever I let myself wonder about it in fear that I would abandon religion and go to "Hell." Christianity is such fucking fear-mongering and I can't stand it.

Do you know how old your dad is? Exactly 60 now I think; I actually thought he was 60 already, but he mentioned being that number at his birthday lunch, so. I'm regularly one or two years off with my parents' ages.

Were you sad that Panic! at the Disco broke up? I've never listened to them a whole lot, but yeah, they're still a band I enjoyed and knew since what, being a pre-teen or maybe younger? I completely and entirely respect Brendon's decision to prioritize his wife and oncoming child, though.

Did you cry when you watched The Notebook? I have at least teared up at the end every single time I've watched it.

Have you ever attempted to beat box? lol no

When was the last time you saw your “first love”? The beginning of February 2017.

Who’s the smartest person you know personally? Girt, he is super intelligent.

You can’t feel pain for an entire day. What would you do? Hm, if I had the appropriate funds, probably get this really big and detailed tattoo I want on my upper left arm/shoulder area. It's probably gonna be the most expensive shit I ever get done and will certainly take a majorly long time, so it'd be great to not feel it, haha.

Who makes you the happiest? Girt.

Do you think that deep down, everyone is good at heart? Uh, no. I think we've seen enough proof of that in the world.

How many people have you kissed? Four.

How many of those people are you still friends with? Just one, Girt, and we're still dating.

Where did you go, the last time you left your house? My county's medical complex, where I do physical therapy.

Did you ever see the movie Good Burger when it came out? Not when it came out, but I have seen it and love it.

Say something nice about someone you really don’t care for: He loves his kids a lot. But Mom and I both see that he treats Aubree (not his biological daughter) somewhat differently, which is absolutely not okay. Like yeah, he's decent enough/definitely not awful, but there is absolutely a difference in how he treats her versus Ryder and Emerson.

Would you say that you’re popular? lol no

Would you say that you’ve been in love with someone? I know I have twice.

What do you consider to be the most profound of emotions? Complete, genuine love. Both romantic and not.

What brand of deodorant do you wear? Secret.

Do you believe that love isn’t right for everyone? Uh yes, aromantic people exist. Not everyone wants a romantic relationship, and that is perfectly okay.

If you could only love one person, would you choose yourself? Ugh... I realistically don't think I would. I should, but I know myself.

What’re your brothers/sisters like? If you don’t have any, do you wish you did? Nicole: extremely independent, ambitious, and determined, and pretty damn fearless. She is a very hard worker and a legend of a children's social worker, a literal hero, and she's entirely open about who she is and you're either gonna take it or leave it. She's the person that'll say things you're too afraid to, and she has a strong moral compass. I look up to her a lot. Ashley: I barely even know what's really her anymore tbfh, Mom and I (and probably Nicole, I cannot see how she couldn't) have both seen her change so much since her marriage, and not in a good way. She's a very dedicated mother, but has become a submissive follower of whatever her husband and in-laws want. She's constantly stressed out and just not the person I knew growing up. I worry about her. Katie: she's the sibling I'm most like. We're introverts and both deal with bipolarity (but I'm pretty sure hers is bipolar 1, if I remember right), and have bad mental health histories. She's a brilliant cake decorator. I wish I got to see her more; that goes for the next two, too. Misty: she's a firecracker that changes for absolutely nobody and wears her beliefs and what she loves on her sleeve. She's a Harry Potter addict and a MASSIVE reader, like her dream is to own a big library. She's also very into witchy stuff and considers herself one. She has some WILD beliefs (I'm not attaching that to her considering herself a witch, this is a completely independent thing), some that are very problematic and straight-up ignorant, and she often makes me roll my eyes on social media with some of the bonkers shit she posts, but I mean I still love her. Bobby: just a straight-up good man. He's very intelligent with a fantastic heart and values, and he is probably the best dad I have ever met in my entire life, and a fantastic husband. He loves being outside and partakes in a lot of running events and jogs and hikes regularly.

Do you consider pets family? If you don't, you don't deserve pets, like at all.

Have you lost a family member recently? No, thank fuck.

Is there anyone you would take a bullet for? If so, who? I'm not going to list them all, because it's honestly a very big number.

What job does your significant other have? He works at a tire factory.

What’s the largest animal you’ve ever had as a pet? A boxer mix named Cali.

How long has it been since you moved out of the house you grew up in? Oh I have no idea, a very long time.

The last time you ate leftovers, what was it that you were eating? Pasta with normal marinara sauce.

What are 5-10 things you love about being you? The people in my life, my love for animals and nature as a whole, I try my best to be a good person that encourages love, I'm creative, and uhhhhh... I'm empathetic and like to comfort people.

What is your favorite board that you've made on Pinterest? it's just a collection of Rammstein pics y'all 😭

What is your favorite apple-flavored treat? Uh... maybe an apple cobbler. I really enjoy apple-flavored lollipops, too.

Have you ever met anyone named Eden? No, but that's a beautiful name.

What is your favorite type of tree? Wisterias, weeping willows, and sequoias/redwoods (I know they're different, I'm just grouping them together cuz I can't tell the difference lol). Cherry blossoms are also noteworthy.

Have you ever had a spaniel for a pet? Yes; Teddy's mother was a cocker spaniel (he got like, zero traits from her lol), and supposedly Dale was part cocker spaniel too, but he looked more like a goldendoodle to me.

Do you any of your family members have birthdays on a holiday, and if so, which one(s)? Yes; my oldest half-sister was born on the 4th of July, my brother was born on Earth Day, and Nicole's birthday sometimes falls on Easter.

Which medication(s) do you feel have helped you the most, and why? Latuda with Lamictal used as a catalyst very literally saved my life. It's the reason I've healed this much from the breakup and found hope. I only ever stopped it because my body stopped responding to Latuda after some years, but thankfully I've never returned to the low that I constantly was prior to it. Intense therapy at the same time also helped without a doubt.

Is your current doctor a male or female? My primary care physician is a man, which I dislike, but he's a fine guy. My psychiatrist and therapist are both women.

What type of soda do you drink most regularly? Mountain Dew.

Do you like the band Seether? I do.

Do you have asthma? I suspected it my entire life, and fucking finally I'm supposedly getting some test for it the next time I see my PCP. It's way fuckin overdue, but I don't think even my mom knew there was a legit test for it until it was a topic brought up in physical therapy.

Have you ever performed on stage? What did you do? Yes, I danced for a very long time.

What is your favorite video game? Silent Hill 2, there are no words for how much I adore that game and the emotional journey it takes you on.

What’s your screen name? In the vast majority of places, it's Ozzkat, but not all.

When did you graduate from high school? 2014.

Are you planning to have a family? When? Not kids, no. Just lots of pets, so long as we can properly provide for each one.

What is the one thing people say about you the most? Uh... probably that I'm quiet, at least in real life.

What have you done that you’re particularly proud of? Healed as much as I think is possible from a very traumatic breakup.

How many televisions do you have in your house? Three, but one (it's very small) isn't up at all times.

Do you use your hand when you speak? YES, I am an extreme hand-talker; I do it without realizing it, but know I absolutely do.

What is your dream car? I don't care, odds are I'll never drive anyway.

Have you lived around here long? I've lived in this general area/county my entire life.

What do you do to pull yourself out of a bad mood? Talk to Girt, Mom, or Mazzy and Tez, watch something funny on YouTube, sometimes naps are a good "reset" on my mood if I'm down for no real reason, and often a Tumblr scroll will help, haha. Doing something productive is also helpful, but often when I'm really down, I don't have the strength to do it.

Why do girls follow each other to the restroom? Safety.

Who do you talk to most on the phone? My mom.

Are you pregnant? I can assure you I'm not.

Do you like poetry? Write poetry? I love poetry; I've written a lot of it and want to do more, as well as read more.

Do you know anyone who has any STDs? I'm aware of one person who has one, but I'm 100% positive I know more than just her without being aware of it. They're more common than people tend to think.

Have you ever taken a shower with someone that is not a family member? Only as a little girl, with a best friend. I have zero interest in doing this as an adult.

First type of porn you have ever watched? (ie. lesbian, hentai, threesome) I've never watched it and have a negative amount of interest in doing so.

Has any of your partners had sex with someone else? Not while we('ve) dated, no, but both serious partners have done so before we dated.

#survey #surveys #random questions #personal questions

[naruhearts]

I’m done keeping my composure.

Sorry, this will be a LOADED post! (And I’ll be repeating the points others have made)

for real, to everyone being nasty and telling heartbroken fans that “Dean was always supposed to die get a grip you’re just butthurt etcetera etcetera—” F you royally.

How dare you police the brutal feelings that’s been embroiling us since the Finale That Must Not Be Named aired. 

The show you think you all watched, the show you all believe was the same SPN from Season 1-4, changed at some point. Kripke wrote his original vision, put it to screen, saw it through in S5 as he intended, and closed the door on that era.

In 2008, Supernatural was adopted and inherited. As you know, there was a supreme paradigm shift post-Kripke era. The show FLOURISHED (we won’t talk about Gamble thanks). It evolved, transformed, grew beyond trauma-induced self-worthlessness and toxic masculinity and endless death and hegemonic social ideals and conservatism and repressive anti-revolutionary ideas. Castiel, the iconic favourite and beloved staple of the series portrayed by Misha Collins, was introduced in Season 4 as the core lead character, and he ushered in a brand new era of Christian mythos that SPN took advantage of. Longevity SKYROCKETED. Audiences were INTERESTED. SPN amassed an incredibly groundbreaking fanbase infused by non-nuclear principles. A massive subversive wave began, fighting the Status Quo of the times since 2008. It’s precisely why such an abysmal ending to a show of extensive Freud-Jungian metanarratively meta META complex stature and social POWER will render us totally and unbearably broken for years to come.

Point is, DEAN WINCHESTER NO LONGER WANTED TO DIE. HE WANTED TO LIVE. HE WANTED TO SIT ON THE BEACH, PLUNGE HIS TOES IN THE SAND, AND SIP UMBRELLA DRINKS WITH HIS BROTHER AND HIS BEST FRIEND. He said this in Season 13. And then, a season later, he told the ghost of his long-deceased father — the source of his deep-running trauma and the figure of self-reductive authoritarianism permeating his arc since Season 1 — after being questioned why he didn’t pursue the Nuclear Fam, that he already has his own: his brother Sam, his adopted child Jack, and Cas.

Dean’s best friend Cas. Oh god, Cas, who made his inevitably permanent mark on Dean’s soul beyond allyship. Castiel, renamed to Cas, God’s -iel removed by Dean. Dean, the human spark that lit the fire of pre-existing autonomy in the inherently rebellious angel who was, this entire time, the catalyst for free will in God The Writer’s puppet show. Their friendship set on goddamn fire. I can also write paragraph upon paragraph about my love for Cas while devastated tears stream down my face, but I digress—

Cas’ romantic love for Dean pushed our main Heart of SPN to love himself. Love is free will. Free will is also love. Of note, Cas’ love confession in 15x18 was supposed to offset something so vastly important and fundamental...to maybe (read: most likely) pull the trigger on SELF-TRUTHS in conjunction with free will. And The Great Anticipated Follow-Up to the episode penned by the passionate Berens should have included (read: seemed like it was going to be) Dean, closeted trauma survivor in love with his best friend, being given the opportunity to do it right: to SPEAK HIS TRUTH, and then that very singular opportunity was STOLEN so grossly. After poring over it for days, I refuse to believe we made their years-long story up out of thin air, spun it out of fantastical-delusional dream cotton candy, because we DIDN’T. IT WAS REAL.

As I said in another post: “I’ve just been feeling physically ill for the past >40 something hours with the terrible knowledge that 19/20 undid years of vital progression towards healthy interdependence, autonomy, and a positive endgame, where Sam, Dean and Cas close the ring of found family in final empowering self-fulfillment...where Dean, no longer repressed and set free, is able to use his words and speak his truth as a queercoded trauma survivor, henceforth confirming and self-affirming his own bisexuality since S1 by reciprocating — by telling Cas that he always loved him, too, loved him endlessly, which would have altogether divested Supernatural of its cult status and catapulted it into global worldwide significance as the longest running sci-fi genre show in American broadcasting history that actually dared to defy and, by proxy, empower LGBTQ2IA+ everywhere who found profound personal meaning in Destiel through VALIDATION,” — found themselves mirrored in Dean and Cas’ respective character journeys individually and as each other’s queer love interests.

THIS IS WHY DEAN WASN’T MEANT TO DIE.

THEY WERE SO ESSENTIAL, NOT JUST TO THE OVERARCHING STORY AND HEALTHY INTERPERSONAL THEMATICS OF MODERN SPN, BUT ALSO TO THE SOULS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ACROSS THE WORLD WHO FOLLOWED THEIR JOURNEYS, HOPED FOR THEM, ASPIRED TO BE LIKE THEM, TREASURED THEM, WEEPED FOR THEM, AND FOUGHT FOR THEM, LIKE YOU AND ME.

Heck, how could anyone think Sam Winchester had a well-deserved characteristic ending? He didn’t. Dean’s brother was shafted so badly. He stopped hunting when seasons ago, he had canonically accepted that he no longer wanted an apple pie life. He simply...turned the lights off in a resoundingly empty bunker and left — abandoning his dead brother’s room — never to return (he did return later to get the Impala, family photos etc, I mean this symbolically)...as if — dare I say it — Supernatural itself eerily told us, in the negative-spaced pitch blackness, that the organic show and the wonderfully complex, matured characters we’ve grown to love weren’t going to survive or be revisited...that it was all going to perish, and that they no longer gave a single shit about their own show, which, to me, is the worst cardinal sin, because how dare they throw Team Free Will, an immovable and indomitable and passionate found family they built from the ground up, a found family CHOCK FULL TO THE BRIM OF LOVE AND LIFE RAGING AGAINST THE AUTHORITARIAN MACHINE IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE FREE WILL, under the bus no matter who is to blame. Growth was stomped on.

Then Sam married a faceless wife who wasn’t his textually established (and deaf) love interest Eileen, named his son Dean Jr., and grew old miserably, still mourning the passing of his older brother, shaken and sombre. Back to square one. IT WAS ALL ANTITHETICAL, even OUTSIDE a shipping context, and I ripped my hair out at this point in sheer disbelief.

This 15x20 ending would have fit somewhere between S4-7. Now? IT DOESN’T FIT. IT’S A JAGGED PUZZLE PIECE THAT DOESN’T BELONG ANYWHERE. IT’S THE FOREBODING UNKNOWN STRANGER IN ITS OWN LAND, BOTH LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY. This kind of ending was basically an illogical, unsound cluster of metastasized cells that, to me, ruined the viability of previous seasons to sustain bold praise and respect and dignity and rewatches and classic nostalgia in such insidious ways.

Dean Humanity Winchester and Cas, after everything they’ve been through, were silenced and lost in death, ripped apart from each other, unable to love each other the way they deserved, because of disappointing, vile incompetency and homophobia. The greatest love story ever told, again obliterated in less than 60 hollow minutes.

You know what this tells your audience, CW SPN? Death without self-growth is the way to go, and no one is allowed to forge their own path to freedom.

HOW INSULTINGLY HARMFUL IS THAT?

I don’t think I’ll ever stop grieving.

We all deserve answers.

#fuck #my stuff #spn s15 #15x20 #sorry this was so long winded but i’m so #I think I finally wrote out all my frustration in this??? #i’m still broken but I do hope it gets better #ily all #my meta #fuck cw #fuck spn #deancas #destiel #excuse me for any sloppy grammar and weirdness and shit #I’m still emotionally wilding lol #the greatest love story ever told #narrative #character development #narrative cyclism #supernatural #destiel deserved better #jensen and misha deserved better #at the same time this all seems cathartic anyway :P #I sorta snapped because wtf WE AREN’T WATCHING THE SAME SHOW IF YOU BELIEVE DEATH IS THE ANSWER 😭 #I respect your opinion only if you’re respectful towards ours #but I’ve literally seen so many nasties out there #I’d rather have queue #long post for ts #I’M TEARING UP AGAIN #I’m ill

[nox-artemis]

Kentaro Miura

It took me awhile to get my thoughts in order. Honestly, as well intentioned as they are, a constant stream of fan tributes on Twitter and Tumblr more-or-less telling me how to process “The End” of Berserk with Miura’s death didn’t do a lot to console me, so I had to take some huge steps away from social media and only conversed my feelings with my other close Berserk fan-friends.

It was very surreal waking up yesterday morning to a friend messaging me simply saying, “did you hear the news?” When shit like that happens, I go onto my Google stories app and scroll through. I didn’t find anything really worth getting too upset over (maybe a bit sad that Queen Elizabeth II’s doggo died?) so it hit me to check my Twitter feed instead.

And that’s when I saw it.

We all know death is inevitable, and life is pretty much spent prolonging the point to that inevitability as well as preparing ourselves for when it happens to us or someone close to us. Being part of the Berserk fandom was the only time we all collectively had this on our mind not only for someone else but for someone we never met or really knew that much about. We only knew Miura through his magnum opus – and that was good enough for us. And no matter how much we discussed the worst-case scenario – pondering how the story would continue and how WE would continue – it still wasn’t enough to prepare us for this amount of shock. Hearing Miura had died and that the Berserk we know and love under his direct supervision is over truly felt like losing a long-lost friend.

It wasn’t just that the Berserk we know of is “over”, but that Miura didn’t have to die. He was only 54: not a young age, but not an old age either, especially by today’s standards. He could have seen the end to his magnum opus the way he envisioned it, yet he died of something so avoidable but is only brought about by a great deal of stress (from what I’ve read). It was always a morbid open rumor that so many of Miura’s infamous hiatuses were actually mental and/or physical health breaks, so the older or more conscious of us fans, while always eager and anxious for a new chapter, learned to not take them so personally. Miura was a spellbinding artist and storyteller, but he was also a human with his own life and conflicts that he was entitled to address at his own pace. This isn’t meant to blame anyone (at the very least, maybe to address some societal/industry issues), but it’s troubling enough to remind everyone – as the story of Berserk has demonstrated – that you need to take care of yourself physically and mentally, and while everyone struggles in life, you don’t have to struggle alone.

I always despised this weird cult of youth that insinuates that life isn’t worth pursuing once you hit your mid-thirties, and how some people so engulfed in their youth insist that they wouldn’t mind dying by the age of 50 or 60. It’s a shame when people live by that because there’s so much to live for beyond your youth – as I’ve learned, I only started buckling down when I transitioned into my thirties. Miura could have had a longer life ahead of him, going beyond Berserk and into his other endeavors, professional and personal, but that will unfortunately never happen now.

Everyone knows I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on Berserk. Most of you found out about me through my blogging several years ago, and I’m pretty proud that I was never the sort of fan that groveled at Miura’s feet and treated Berserk as some untouchable holy book: there were things I disliked about Berserk and things that disappointed me about Miura’s writing, but there were SO MANY MORE THINGS that I loved about Berserk and was proud of Miura for, and I wished him to continue his advancement in narrative growth. He did so and we watched it happened.

And, by meeting so many friends and acquaintances through the fandom, we saw a lot in ourselves change too. It’s surreal how we always joked that it would be one of us fans who would die before Berserk ended or the worst-case scenario of Miura dying; maybe some of us secretly preferred for that happen. But when we weren’t waiting around for another chapter… look at how much we’ve done with our lives! We graduated high school, undergrad, grad school, started and advanced our careers, traveled the world, got together, popped out a kid or two!... And while we experienced a lot of downfalls and tragedies that coincide, can you believe how much we have accomplished together?

We were all personally inspired, motivated, persuaded by Berserk in different ways: a lot of us were inspired for the better and admittedly, some for the not-as-good (if spending countless hours on Tumblr has taught me, there were definitely some toxic fan takeaways that had to be confronted). I’m not going to go to the point of saying that I now live my life by Berserk’s philosophy to a T or live as a reflection of certain characters (because I’m pretty sure that Miura was trying to tell us to NOT live your life like some particular characters) but it certainly helped to brings some aspects of life and existence into perspective, through the lenses of so many characters. Berserk also inspired me to write more, an already favorite pastime of mine, and how I should go about writing and planning a story, taking cues from Berserk on how to and how NOT to write and approach things in my own way, which I think is for the best in the long run. I can only dream that I’ll be published someday – which doesn’t have to be a pipe dream because it’s still much more possible than impossible. And so many other have done the same, creating our own stories and works.

And OF COURSE Berserk inspired me to be a little bit badass from time to time in moments of frivolity and seriousness – but it reminds us all that being badass and being a kinder person who tries to become the best version of themselves are not mutually exclusive. We definitely need more of that in today’s world.

We all made our own little bonfires of dreams happen, and because of Berserk existing, there will be a lot more beginnings than endings, and I don’t see a lot of bonfires being extinguished anytime soon. Miura poured his heart and soul into Berserk and its characters, and while he has passed on, his characters and lessons will live on through us and everything we create and how we live our lives (hopefully for the better).

I was happy to share all of my thoughts with you all – and I’ll continue to do so, since the mythos of Berserk has been a major backdrop of my creative mind for over fifteen years now and there is still so much to dissect and speculate. Personally, I don’t see Berserk ending just yet, if only because I’d be surprised that Miura or his publisher didn’t have some Operation London Bridge type plan in place in the event that this happened (Berserk is, after all, a major title that most likely brings Young Animal a lot of revenue). Again, I never treated Miura or Berserk as divine untouchables, so if there are plans in place to continue Berserk without Miura (BUT with his permission) or just on how to wrap up the story to give it a fulfilling conclusion, I personally would be okay with it (as a friend of mine put it, it’d be more of a tribute than an imitation). Going beyond our lifetimes, works will continue to be interpreted and reinterpreted as they have since time immemorial; perhaps Berserk will reach that point someday.

Honestly, and many have thought so too, Berserk was also meant to be cosmic level in both scale and concept. The plot is so grand and Byzantine that, even under Miura’s direct supervision, I always had a hard time envisioning how a story of this scale would conclude. As much as we love to hate him, a final showdown between Guts and Griffith seems too simple, too “good vs. evil”-esque for Berserk. Maybe having a low-key, vague but optimistic and bittersweet wrap up is what is best for Guts, Casca, and their new-found family. But that’s just another one of my fan speculations.

Regardless or what is to become of Berserk now, I think it’s safe to give adulations. We all came across Berserk at different times in our lives and stuck with the story for different reasons. For some of us, it was just another series that our friend from the campus anime club recommended to us; for others, we were drawn in from a morbid curiosity of its dark notoriety in anime circles. A few of us read for the gratuitous violence and the clout (because we all know you’re so deep and hardcore [/sar]), but a lot more of us read for the journey and the characters that we became a part of. The heaviness of Berserk made us confront a lot of trauma and even relive our own. For some of us, understandably, it was not a good idea to dive deeper (and maybe somethings could have been handled better); for the rest of us, it helped us cope, if not entirely through the story itself, than through the support network we made for ourselves in this fandom and its many realms (some realms, I argue, are more caring and nurturing than others).

From time to time, I always wonder if I would ever “grow out” of Berserk. There were indeed several times I took a step away from fandom and have tried to reduce my exposure to the story - but I always came back in some way, because the essence of Berserk has never left me and never will. Humorously I envisioned myself actually forgetting about Berserk for several decades, decades in which I work at my career, raise my family, mourn my elders, but continue living my life, only to go on the future internet in my mid-50s to find out… Miura is STILL working on that ending, sitting at his desk in the same pose as that famous monochrome capture of him, only he’s grayed and wrinkled, like the great Miyazaki.

The possibility of that future is over, but there are so many others.

#berserk #berserk stuff #kentaro miura #rip kentaro miura

[the-bau-quinjet]

How could you do this babe?

In Breakable Heaven chapter one! Here we go!

Summary: Reader’s ready to celebrate her anniversary with her boyfriend, but things don’t go as planned. 

Warnings: Cheating, swearing, drunk people

Word Count: ~2100

“…leave a message at the beep.”

You couldn’t help but be disappointed that he didn’t answer, but didn’t mind leaving a message. “Hey babe, I was able to close the bookstore early! I should be to yours in the next few minutes if you want to celebrate early. I know you like to have ample time to get ready, so I guess I just wanted to warn you. Anyway, I love you. See you soon.” You left the voicemail as you walked to your car. Tonight you are celebrating your three-year anniversary. You even changed into your brand new lingerie to surprise him, wearing a long coat to hide it in public. It felt a little bit wrong not wearing real clothes, but you were determined to make this the best anniversary celebration yet.

 The drive to his apartment was relatively uneventful. A light rain started about halfway through the five-minute drive. As you pull up to his apartment building, you notice the lights on in his room. “Good, he’s home” you think to yourself as you open the door, shuffling inside from the muggy DC weather. As you approach the apartment door, you can hear the soft music of the playlist you made last month featuring all of Taylor Swifts most romantic love songs. Your heart flutters as you think of the kind gesture. Of course, he would be thoughtful enough to put on music as you arrived at his apartment. Unlocking the door and untying your coat at the same time proved to more difficult than anticipated, but you managed to nudge the door open whispering “happy anniversary baby” in the sultriest tone you could.

 As you took in the rest of the apartment, your heart burst. There were roses everywhere. Candles lit a path to the bedroom. Maybe he did know how to be a romantic. Dropping your things on the counter and sliding your coat off the rest of the way, you tip toed into the bedroom to surprise him since he clearly did not get your message. The next sixty seconds felt as though time stopped. Or, more accurately, you froze and everything else in the world took on an impossible speed.

As you pushed open the bedroom door, three things caught your attention. First, you felt a surprising amount of resistant as you pushed the door over a bundle of clothes you didn’t recognize. Second, you heard the bed bouncing against the wall. Third, you saw streaks of auburn hair running through you’re boyfriend’s hands as he mercilessly pounded into a woman you didn’t recognize.

 Apparently, your entrance was too quiet for either of them to be interrupted. All you could manage was to slowly retreat into the living room, closing the door, but knocking into a side table.  You could hear them as they stopped moving, running to the door to investigate the noise. All you wanted was to get out of there though. Throwing your coat back over your lingerie, you grabbed your purse and keys, slamming the door shut. You didn’t even turn around when you heard him opening the door and calling your name. Whatever he had to say was not worth your time anymore.

 You couldn’t get the image of the two of them in bed together out of your head. You were feeling absolutely everything at once. You felt betrayed. You felt sad. A small part of you was actually glad you had a reason to end it. It had never felt like the kind of relationship that would move on. But still, you thought you were happy with him.

 But mostly, you were pissed. Rightfully so, but you had no idea where to go or what to do. Your blind adrenaline carried you to the car, and you wound up at a bar. You don’t even remember starting the car, much less driving, but you knew you needed something to drink. You ran inside, ordering tequila shots to drown the sadness, and sat at the bar. As you sat at the bar, contemplating your existence, a man walked up to sit next to you. You had your fair share of practice with this scenario. You had mastered the right mix “fuck off” and “sorry, I’m taken” to get men like this guy to back off with just a single look. But right now, all you could manage was a halfhearted grin that very clearly said “you do not want to deal with my emotional baggage right now.” It was all in the crazed look in your eyes, you were sure of it.

 Nobody else came up to you while you were there. You couldn’t help but think over the past three years with him for signs that he was unfaithful. You couldn’t come up with any, the cheating bastard. He must have been pretty good at hiding the secret phone calls and date nights. But then again, you had your own secrets. Not that they would have made him feel like you do right now.

 After sitting long enough to consume four shots of tequila, two vodka sodas, and one dark and stormy, reality set in. All you wanted was to curl up in a ball and scream. Or cry. You were obviously not returning to his apartment, but you couldn’t go back to your own either. There was too much there that reminded you of him. The idea of walking in there to see his sweatshirt on your couch made you feel sick. You were teetering on the edge of a full breakdown when the idea struck you. Penelope.

 Penelope Garcia is your best friend. You met her at a Doctor Who convention the same day you met he who must not be named. She was there with Kevin, but they broke up a while ago. The realization that you could go to Penny’s couldn’t have come at a better time. Ha. Penny. You only call her that when you’re drunk. She’ll know what to do. You opened your phone, barely able to call up the Lyft to take you to her apartment. It’s honestly shocking you didn’t fall asleep on the seven minute drive there. Whatever, all you needed now was to get inside and forget about him.

 After entering the building, you tried the elevator. Of course it was broken. It took you about thirty six minutes to hobble your way up two flights of stairs to Penny’s floor. With each step, you considered texting her to come get you, but you knew the second you saw her you would break down. You absolutely did not want to start sobbing on these stairs. Too many people could see you. Finally arriving to her door, you were exhausted. Mentally and physically drained. Knock knock knock “Penny?” Knock knock knock “Penny?” Knock knock knock “Penny?” you imitated the Big Bang Theory, knowing the small joke would make you smile, even if just for a second. When the door finally opened, you vaulted in for a hug, not even opening your eyes.

 As you squeezed Penny, you finally broke out into a fit of sobs. Whisper yelling, you told her as much of the story as you could remember. “Penny, thank god. I left wo-ork early to surprise Dr-Dr-Drew for our anniversary – hiccup – but he was having s-s-se-sex with someone else…” you let out a strangled sob, not noticing how stiff Penny felt in your embrace. You buried your head into her as you continued “So I got very drunk and came here. Was he cheating on me this whole time?” You asked as your tears turned back to rage. “I even went out and bought this stupid, uncomfortable underwear to surprise him” you shout as your coat had begun to fall open again. After what felt like an hour of crying, but in reality amounted to no more than 60 seconds, you finally noticed something was odd. Two things lead you to a simple conclusion that was somehow difficult to comprehend in your drunk state.

 First, Penny felt taller. Second, she was wearing converse. Upon noticing these two facts, your hands traveled up the body you were hugging until you found shoulders. Turning your head up, your eyes followed the path your hands had just taken. This series of events lead to the obvious fact that whomever you were hugging was absolutely not Penelope Garcia. Penelope was in fact not even in the foyer, but rather a very attractive, tall man with slightly curly brown hair and eyes like honey was staring back at you. And you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

 --

Reid’s POV

 Spencer hadn’t actually had anything to drink since arriving at Garcia’s. No, he just drank prior to that point. Normally, he didn’t drink at all when his team got together, but this was just worth celebrating. Another serial killer was behind bars for life because of the work the team did today. Hell, even Hotch and Rossi stayed for a few hours before they left. As part of the “young crowd” on the team, he had stayed at the bar longer than the two older men before the group of you retreated to Garcia’s. Hers was the closest apartment, and everyone else wanted to keep the party going. Spencer couldn’t help but join them, not wanting to return to his empty apartment after the long day they all spent testifying.

 Finishing his second glass of water, he began to get up to get more and maybe some for the group when everyone heard the knocking. The group laughed as three consecutive “Penny’s” came from the door. “Reid, can you get that since you’re already up?” Garcia asked, motioning toward the door. “It must be Y/N. She always calls me Penny when she’s drunk.” He obliged. He obviously remembered Garcia mentioning Y/N before, but he had never met her. He swung the door open, expecting a drunk friend of Garcia’s. He was not prepared, however, for said drunk friend to throw herself at him, grasp him in an alarmingly tight hug, and start sobbing. He could barely make out what you were saying through the sobs hearing “surprise Drew”, “anniversary”, “sex”, and “drunk” before you practically screamed “I even went out and bought this stupid, uncomfortable underwear to surprise him.”

 It was clear you meant to be pouring her heart out to Garcia, but you hadn’t yet realized who answered the door. For the first time in his life, Dr. Spencer Reid couldn’t think of words to say as you ran your hands up his body to his shoulders. You were clearly taking in the information required to come to the conclusion that he is not in fact Penelope Garcia. As your eyes met his, all he could do was stare. He made every effort to keep his eyes level with yours, but one glace was all it took to be ingrained in his memory forever. He wouldn’t have looked, but the movement of your coat caught his eye as it revealed the exact type of surprise you had planned for whoever Drew was.

 The two of you were frozen, unsure of how to proceed. You looked just like he did- a deer in the headlights. Neither of you could move. Neither of you could speak. You could both hear Garcia’s voice as she stumbled down the hallway, but it sounded distant. It wasn’t until the mystery woman broke eye contact that he backed away. Trying desperately to control the blush he were sure had made its way to his cheeks.

 --

 Y/N’s POV

 The moment was broken as you felt Penny turn you towards her. The flush on your cheeks only grew as you kept your eyes on the tall man as he retreated into the living room, not having said a word. “Y/N… Y/N? Y/N!” Penny had to yell slightly to get your attention. “What happened? What are you doing here? I thought you were celebrating tonight?” She asked rapid fire. You could tell she was also a little bit drunk.

 You told her everything. The words practically falling out of you as you started crying again. “Oh babe, I’m so sorry. Here, let’s get you inside.” Penny started to guide you into the living room, but you froze “Wait! Can I borrow some clothes before I go in there? I don’t need to flash anyone else right now.” You whispered. Penny laughed, “Of course! Who did you fla- ohhh. Reid.” She said, trying to hold back the giggles.

 “Yes. If that is the very tall man with the perfect eyes and the completely tuggable hair.” You responded, not quite filtering your thoughts, as you were still very drunk.

 “I’ll be back in a jiffy!” Penny replied, not knowing how else to respond to the fact that you are very clearly attracted to the young doctor, but also going through shit right now. She would just file away this information for later.

taglist:

@mac99martin​ 

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid angst #Criminal Minds #criminal minds x reader

[avengerscompound]

Small Gods: Spring Thaw - 2

Spring Thaw:  A Bucky Barnes Fanfic

Spring Thaw Masterlist | More Small Gods PREVIOUS //

Buy me a ☕ Character Pairing:  Bucky Barnes x F!Reader

Rating: E

Word Count:  2046

Warnings: nothing this chapter.

Synopsis: Bucky Barnes hates winter.  He always looks for the first signs of the ice thawing and new life growing.  When that desire for the end of winter brings to him the god of the spring thaw, he discovers a brand new reason to get through winter.

Chapter 2

Bucky arrived at the movies twenty minutes before he had arranged to meet you and then proceeded to mentally curse himself out the entire time because of how eager it made him look.  He was just considering leaving and coming back again so he could maybe come off as fashionably late when you appeared behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.

He jumped and spun around, instantly going into fight mode, and when he saw your slightly bemused expression, he instantly relaxed.  You were wearing another warm winter coat that looked impossibly spring-like.  This one was sky blue with daisies printed on it as if they were polka dots.  Your hat, scarf, and gloves were in a darker shade of blue, and on the side of your beanie was a crochet daisy that matched the ones on your coat.  “Hey, you’re early,” he said.

“So are you,” you said.

Bucky smiled sheepishly and ran his hand through the back of his hair.  “Yeah.  It’s been a while and I didn’t want to be late.”  He held out a bouquet of different colored tulips for you.  “I got you these.”

“Oh my,” you said, taking them and inhaling deeply.  “These are so out of season.  They must have cost a fortune.”

Bucky shrugged.  The bouquet did cost significantly more money than when he’d last bought a girl flowers, but as that was in 1943, he didn’t think it was fair to compare.  “It wasn’t so bad.  And I knew you’d like them.”

You leaned up and kissed his cheek.  Another first for this new life he had.  It felt like a static shock and he flinched a little, and then hoped to god you didn’t notice because he wanted there to be more of that.  He wanted that kind of physical affection that had been withheld for so long.  “I love them,” you said.  “Thank you.”

Bucky turned back toward the cinema and then debated what his next move should be.  He had the tickets.  Did he offer you his arm or just start walking?  There were so many new rules about dating and he realized he didn’t know any of them.  Did you hold doors and pull out chairs anymore?  Who paid for things?

While he was thinking, you slipped your hand into his and pulled him toward the cinema.  “Come on, slowpoke,” you said.

The warmth from your skin seemed to radiate out from you so that he could feel it through both his and your gloves.

“Do we need to buy tickets?”  You asked when you entered the building.

“I’ve got them,” he said.

You took off your gloves and shoved them in your coat and looked up at him.  “Then let me buy the candy.”

“Now that hardly seems fair,” Bucky said.  “The tickets were cheap.  You’ll have to mortgage your house for candy.”

You snorted.  It was an adorable sound but you quickly covered your face in embarrassment.  “Oh my god,” you mumbled.

Bucky laughed and rubbed your arm.  “That was cute, don’t worry.”

You shook your head.  “I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that,” you said.  “So now I’m gonna buy candy so I can pretend it never happened.”

He chuckled and followed you to the counter as you bought popcorn, jolly ranchers, and a couple of sodas before the two of you headed into the theater.  It was strange how familiar it felt to be on a movie date.  Like muscle memory.  He sat down in the assigned seat and you put your coat on your lap with the popcorn sitting in his.  There was the awkward start where you aren’t sure if you should be touching or not - not that there was much choice in such a confined space.  There was an accidental hand touch when both of you went for popcorn at the same time.  Then you snuggled into him during the sappy parts and even though having you pressed against him felt alien to him.  It felt familiar and comfortable and he put his arm around your shoulders and held you in a casual way he hadn’t done to anyone since before he was sent off to war.

It was dark when you both came out of the theater with your arm tucked in the crook of his.  “Do you want to get a bite to eat?”  He asked.

“I would love it.  Just something simple though,” you said.

He nodded and the two of you began walking down the street together.  “Thank you for this, Bucky,” you said as the two of you walked along.  “I never do this.”

“I’m pretty out of practice too,” Bucky admitted.

“Why is that?”  You asked.  “You seem like a natural.  Not to mention - you’re very handsome.”

Bucky looked at you, once again not sure if you were being completely honest with him or not.  Not just about not recognizing him, but about any of it really.  Questioning his reality had become second nature.  He was used to being lied to and used.  He was used to things being taken from him.  “You really don’t know who I am?”  He asked.

You stopped walking, a little startled, and looked him up and down.  “I don’t meet too many people, I know we haven’t met.”

“No,” Bucky said, shaking his head.  “I’m the winter soldier?”

“Winter…?”  You said, furrowing your brow.  “You control winter?”

Bucky laughed.  “No.  What?”

“Oh,” you said, relaxing a little.  “I don’t know what you're talking about.”

“Captain America’s friend?”  He asked, only to be met with the same look of confusion.  “The Avengers?”

“I’m so sorry,” you said.  “I don’t keep up with current popular culture.”

“You don’t know about the people disappearing and then the fight and them showing up five years later?”  Bucky asked.

“I mean… I know they all went away and came back, but I wasn’t…” you trailed off.

“Captain America?  Iron Man?  Thor?”

Finally, a glimmer of recognition reached your eyes and you smiled.  “You know Thor?”

“I mean, a little.  He’s a nice guy,” Bucky said.

“I know,” you said.  “He’s really funny.  Likes to fight a lot though.”

“Wait…” Bucky said.  “Do you know Thor?  Like you’ve met him?”

“Yes!  I’ve met him.  It was a long, long time ago,” you said, nodding enthusiastically.  “Are the gods… are we showing ourselves again?”

Bucky blinked at you.  “What do you mean ‘we’?”

You looked around and took his hand tugging him along.  “We should go somewhere to talk.”

He walked with you until you found a diner and the two of you ducked inside and slipped into a booth by the window.  You put your coat with your flowers beside you on the seat and neither of you said anything until the orders had been placed.

“It was easier back before,” you said as you began to play with the little tubs of half-and-half on the table.

“What was?”  Bucky asked.  “I don’t know what’s going on right now?”

“I’m a god, Bucky,” you said.

Bucky laughed.  He wasn’t even sure why because he knew a god.  He knew and had experienced far stranger things than gods.  But here, sitting in a diner with you, the thought just struck him as absurd.  “What?”

“Back before, when people were primitive and didn’t understand how things worked, we just walked with the mortals,” you said, answering a question he never asked as you looked out the window.  You turned your attention back to him and lay your palms flat on the table.  “I don’t know how to start the story.”

Bucky shook his head.  “The beginning?”

“That goes back to before I even was,” you said.  “And I don’t have all the story.  From what I understand, when the universe was born, the worlds were formed from a central point where all matter was one.  And then it exploded out in a mess of matter and energy.  Some of that energy you and I would call magic.  Some words, like Asgard and Olympus, were drenched in it…”

“Woah, hold up,” Bucky said.  “Olympus is real?”

“You’ve met Thor but you doubt the existence of the Greek Gods?”  You asked with your eyebrow raised.

“Right, okay,” Bucky said.  “Go on.”

“The magic on Earth is weaker and so the gods here are also weaker.  We came to be when people pray for us, even if that’s just a muttered hope, like “oh god let me pass this test,” you explained.

“So you’re telling me that there might be a god for the red light changing?”  Bucky asked.

You nodded.  “Oh yeah, they’re doing quite well for themselves.”

“That's…”  Bucky said and shook his head as he tried to absorb it.  “Not the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,” he settled on.  “So what are you?”

“The spring thaw,” you said.

“What?  Like Persephone?”  Bucky asked.

“Well, no,” you said.  “For starters, she lives on Olympus and she’s way more powerful than I am.  And she covers all over Spring.  I’m just the part where the ice melts.  I was way stronger back before industrial farming.  People prayed to see the ice receding.  Now, it still happens but not with as much need.  Oh and also, when Persephone isn’t doing her thing, she has somewhere she goes.”

“What?  What does that mean?”  Bucky asked.  “Where do you go?”

You shrug. “I’m just not.”

“Not what?”

“Not anything,” you said.  “I’m here when people start wishing for the end of winter, and I’m gone when they stop.”

Bucky furrowed his brow and nodded.  “Would you believe me if I said I know how that feels?”

“Really?”  You asked.  “How?”

The waiter came over and placed their orders in front of them.  Bucky took a drink of his black coffee and wished it was something a little harder.  Not that alcohol would actually do anything.  “I guess I better start from the beginning too.”

As the two of you ate your meals, Bucky unloaded everything.  From when he was born, to going to war, to being captured by HYDRA and experimented on, not just once but twice.  About how they brainwashed him and had him commit unspeakable acts, and when they weren’t getting him to do these heinous things, they would freeze him, so that every time he woke he had no idea who he was or where he was or even what year it was.  How he’d broken out of it and had to adjust to life on the run 60 years after the last time he had control of his body.  How that had ended up going to shit and he’d opted to go on ice again because even that was better than living with what he had in his head.  How they managed to get HYDRA out and he was just settling into life again when Thanos happened and he’d just stopped existing.

The food was gone by the time he was done with the story and he was on his third cup of coffee.  He’d worry about staying up, but the caffeine would pass out of his system soon enough and besides, he didn’t sleep that great anyway.

You had listened intently, never interrupting, but the expression on your face told him how horrified and sad the story made you.  “... and then the Avengers stopped being a thing and I tried to cancel out some of my bad with a friend and then I moved here.”

You reached over and took his hand.  “I’m so sorry all that happened to you,” you said earnestly.  “And I can see why we were drawn to each other.”

“Why is that?”  Bucky asked.

“I bet you aren’t a big fan of the cold, huh?”  You asked.

He smiled and shook his head.  “No, you could say that.”

“Were you hoping for some sign of the thaw?”  You asked.  He smiled and nodded.  “And there I was.  I probably felt it too.”

“I’m glad you did,” he said.

“I’d like to see you again,” you said.  “Would that be alright?”

“How will that work if you’re only going to be here for such a short time?”  Bucky asked.

“Well,” you said thoughtfully. “I guess we’ll have to enjoy the brief time we have?”

// NEXT

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #the winter soldier #the winter soldier fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #reader insert #small gods #spring thaw

[mermaidsirennikita]

bridgerton--the good, the bad, the ugly

The short of it: Bridgerton excellently captures the tone of Regency romance novels and offers a lot of escapism and great sex scenes, but could definitely use some serious work in terms of how it depicts race and it should have made some further alterations to the dated and flawed source material.  Definitely loved a lot of it and am hotly anticipating the second season, but I want to see more work done and I HOPE that this encourages the adaptation of better (and less inherently flawed) romance novels.

Now for the longer take.

The Good

Bridgerton depicted sex and romance in a way that is totally different from anything I’ve seen in period dramas, for sure, but possibly different from anything I’ve seen on TV.  The romance of it all was woven into almost every aspect of the show. There is the handsome and seemingly severe but extravagantly wealthy and sexually adept duke sweeping into town.  The (multiple) rakes who just want to have fun while also being hot messes.  The awakening of female sexuality and the copious use of the female gaze.  (Note the pretty modest and minimal focus on female nudity, while we get plenty of lingering shots on Simon.).  People want love!  There is pretty minimal violence and perhaps the most physically violent scene involves Simon beating a man up because HE IMPEACHED DAPHNE’S HONOR~.

The sex scenes themselves focused on Daphne’s pleasure for the most part, and were probably among the best I’ve seen since Outlander in terms of chemistry, in terms of the visuals, in terms of focus on sex as an act of emotional connection and FUN. Yes, there was some Unlikely Vaginal Orgasming, but we also saw Simon tell Daphne about masturbation.  On the wedding night, he was pretty clearly touching her to help her enjoy it.  He ate her out... a good bit.  

And aside from that, we got all of the grand speeches, the stolen glances and touches, an excellent buildup of sexual tension that led to some pretty hilarious moments.  

I also really enjoyed many of the performances on this show.  Rege-Jean and Phoebe had great chemistry and excellent back and forth.  Jonathan was a GREAT Anthony.  I would argue that as lackluster as I found his relationship with Siena (more on that in a minute) it largely existed as a way to set him up for his romance with Kate.  He now has even more of a reason to be down with love, as opposed to solely relying on a kind of flimsy tragic backstory.  Additionally, his overprotectiveness of Daphne added tension to the story and made him a source of comedic relief for me?  I loved it.  Give me disaster Anthony all day; can’t wait until he falls to the enemies to lovers trope just like Simon fell to his FLAW-FREE fake dating plan.

A lot of the changes I found were really good.  Obviously, it was important that the show incorporated greater diversity (though they need way more).  Benedict was INFINITELY more fun and interesting than he was in the novels, and acted as another standout for me.  As much as I hate Portia Featherington, I think that the elevation of her to a proper villainess is probably necessary and Polly Walker excels at those types of roles, though they need to maybe have her be less like, actively racist.  I adored the addition of Queen Charlotte; she was excellent comic relief.  Lady Danbury’s expanded role and relationship to Simon was one of the best moves they made.  It touched my entire soul.

Buuuut....

The Bad

The show needs to work on casting more men that are frankly on Rege-Jean’s level.  It feels a bit awkward to see a guy that is by most people’s standards kind of stunning and then.... Colin looks twelve.  Lord Philip is like... a farm guy.  Get rid of the sideburns, we’re in romance novel territory.

In the same note, the girl who played Siena wasn’t a great actress and wasn’t super stunning, so even though I’m fine with her being a placeholder....  Eh.  Go for better casting.  The woman playing Madame Delacroix would’ve played that role so much better and I really enjoyed her dynamic with Benedict because she was just fun.

Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck they’re going to do to make me want to watch Penelope and Colin fall in love.  Their book was already a bit basic--fun, but far from revolutionary.  I don’t really get why they would receive attention similar to that of Kate and Anthony, basically.  The issue is that Colin, again, looks and sound rather young and twerpy.  It obviously wasn’t great for him to be tricked into raising another man’s child, but.... For fuck’s sake, how much would that have affected his life on a practical level.  He’d never know unless he was told, thanks to the lack of DNA tests.  He was marrying far out of his league in terms of attractiveness.  He’s a rich white guy in England with a supportive family.  

I really disliked the fact that Colin told Marina in his huffy little tantrum that he would have married her anyway--because would you have, buddy?  Really?  The thing is that Marina had no way of knowing that and her entire life (and the reputations of her cousins) was on the line.  She didn’t know if she could trust Colin to keep her secret.  They barely knew each other.  He basically came off as a whiny child and I’m fine with him staying in Greece if that’s the plan.

Penelope was just... psychotic.  And that was really disappointing, because I love Nicola and would love to have loved to see the fat girl get her sexy love story.  But first off, lol, it wouldn’t have been sexy because Colin was miscast.  Second, she basically tried to destroy Marina’s life and that of her sisters?  And herself?  Because Colin?  Because Colin, a guy who hasn’t even shown any amount of attraction to her at this point?  Her tears, her whining, it was all too much.  Penelope was dealing with a crush and Marina was dealing with the real Grown Woman issues of a child out of wedlock and as it turned out a dead lover and they were not on equal footing.

I mean, Penelope could very well make a great villainess at this point, and if done well I’d embrace it.  But I do not know how the fuck they can make me interested in her love story.  And the idea of her basically being launched into villainy because she was this chubby white girl obsessively jealous of a beautiful black woman...... not a great look.

The show definitely needs to explore diversity in terms of sexuality too--I don’t think it’s correct to read Benedict as straight because he still seems to be open to exploring.  Once he has more screentime, I think he could totally end up being bisexual, and it’s possible that the writers were trying to feel the audience out in terms of their receptiveness to taking a straight character who has a big straight love story in the books and making him LGBT+.  Eloise could also easily be a lesbian, and I’d be thrilled to see that happen.  They need to do something to expand the world, and if there are 8 Bridgerton kids, all of them being straight as an arrow seems SO unlikely.

The Ugly

Obviously, the rape scene was bad and should have been written out.  Simon could have gotten caught up in the moment and blown up at Daphne after he accidentally didn’t pull out in time.  Men.... accidentally don’t pull out in time... a lot.  That’s how babies happen.  It would’ve been believable, and due to our sympathies being with Simon largely, I don’t think he would have become irredeemable if he was more at fault than Daphne.  

As it was, I will say that the scene was somewhat better than it played in the books because Simon was conscious and totally sober, and it was a bit?  Confusing?  That he didn’t just roll Daphne over and pull out?  Because she wasn’t really clearly trying as hard as she was in the book to wrap her legs around him and hold him tight.  But it remained a rape scene.  The show also did a better job, I think, of establishing how fucked up it was that Simon took advantage of Daphne’s lack of knowledge.  Whatever he said about thinking she knew what was up--he knew she didn’t even know about masturbation.  He had to know she wouldn’t understand what pulling out meant.  He did very clearly mislead her to think that he was sterile and therefore denied Daphne her ability to give informed consent.  Did that justify what Daphne did?  Nope.  Two wrongs don’t make a right.  But both of them did a fucked up thing and I think that we honestly could’ve stopped at Simon’s misleading.

The issue too is that this leads into a bigger problem the show had.  It wanted to include diversity (yay!) but did not consider the total implications of what was happening (not yay).  Daphne and Simon’s dynamic is inevitably influenced by the fact that she’s a white woman and he’s a black man, regardless of whatever handwaves happened.  This influences the sexual assault and makes it even more messy.

Speaking of mess, I’m not sure what exactly would have fixed the “we don’t want this to be a colorblind casting” issue... but the explanation they came up with wasn’t good.  Never mind that this makes everything SUPER confusing (racism is over like..... maybe 50 years MAX after Queen Charlotte’s marriage if we assume she was a teen when she married and is in her 60s now?) but Lady Danbury’s dialogue explaining this was HORRENDOUS.  “One of them fell in love with one of us”.  The implications are awful.  I don’t know if perhaps setting back the integration of society centuries earlier would have helped?  But this wasn’t it.

Additionally, the writers and casting directors didn’t seem to get that diversity is all well and good, but what about the fact that almost every black character has a light skin tone?  Why are there so few black female characters?  Why is Marina, the most prominent woc on the show, given the “pregnant and desperately trying to trick a man into marrying her until her jealous white cousin fucks her life up and she is humiliated into settling for a loveless match” plot?  I desperately hope we see her next season, falling in love with Sir Phillip or perhaps having experienced a plot twist that gives her someone else...  And she better not die. Eloise can find someone else if Marina really ends up with Sir Philip.

Ultimately, again, I really loved the show.  But it needs to work on some things.  I think that a lot of its issues can be addressed and fixed in a future season, and I HOPE they do that.

#bridgerton #but fuck polin for life lol

[brazenautomaton]

Fixing Afterlives: The Maw, First Visit

So our Shadowlands journey starts with the Maw. You know what? People hate this scenario now because you can’t skip it and have to go through it on every character, but the first time through, this is actually really good. You’re kicking in the gates of Hell with a platoon of Death Knights and then everything goes tits-up and you don’t have a beachhead and you’re lost and wandering and there are awful, awful things everywhere and you’re hiding and isolated and need to learn how to escape. You just need the option to skip it on your alts.

Plus the aesthetics of the Maw are great. They sell what it is -- the hostile architecture, sinister crystal formations, the way everything seems swept and shaped by a windstream of souls. We’ve seen plenty of environments that look like a Hell of flames. This is a Hell of pure suffering. Pain is what lives here. Pain is all that enters and pain is all that is produced. It’s only after you went farming Stygia for a while that the pain gets inflicted on you.

So we assemble the crew, get the exposition while we put together the Helm of Domination, get given a portal stone to establish a beachhead, and we bust in to find the four captives: Anduin, Jaina, Baine, Thrall. We rally the Death Knights into enough of a formation to make it in and find the evidence of Jaina, and I like that, I like how you track her by the huge formations of ice -- it shows you her power and the mark she leaves. Finding her is mostly the same although her dialogue is less generic and content-free (from now on assume I apply this caveat to all dialogue). She’s more confused and disoriented and even though she’s fighting it’s with a resignation that she knows it won’t work and she’s starting to think she’s only hurting herself by trying. She acts like she has been there for years. But you say you and the DKs are here to save her and she follows against her better judgment and agrees to try and find Thrall, who she struggles to remember, but seems to be trying very hard to be able to remember.

Then the Mawsworn Kyrian show up and laugh about her hopelessness, and you fight them. And they kill the shit out of you. 

More and more and more of them keep coming and they’re level 60 when you’re level 50 and if you do some bullshit to survive eventually one of them will grab you by the neck to Silence you, lift you into the air, and do the ol’ Val’Kyr Special and fatally drop you. You unavoidably die.

This is necessary early to establish what dying in the Shadowlands means. Play a special graphic effect when the player dies, something more drawn out and grasping. Play a sound effect appropriate to race/gender of the PC of them struggling against great pain and gasping. Then you appear next to a Spirit Healer (yes normally in the Maw you just respawn alive so you have to pick up your Stygia like in Dark Souls, we’ll explain the discrepancy later), a Mawsworn Spirit Healer, who says “No. Your suffering will not end. The Maw claims you.” and then starts to chase you the fuck down with a bunch of shades. You need to run, as a ghost, to claw your way back into your body. Obviously, if the shades catch you, you get dragged back to the start and the Spirit Healer fucks with you a bit. 

Your body has been dragged over to the area where Jaina and the rest are hiding; they fled while you were being merced. Jaina sees you stir. And she says “I’m sorry, champion. Death is no respite here. It is so hard to fight the pull… I struggle to even remember my body when I try to return.”

Jaina has been brutally killed over a dozen times. This is not her first rodeo. This is not her first escape attempt. This is not the first time she’s killed that particular Mawsworn tormenter whose name I don’t recall. It doesn’t end. It never ends. She doesn’t know why she tries any more, when she knows it will fail and she will die and suffer and claw her way back to her flesh and every time it gets harder and harder. All it buys her is the ability to offer futile resistance and maybe that isn’t even worth it.

Mood: established.

From there it goes mostly the same. You try to pump the shades for info about how to escape and they don’t know, they can’t know, they can’t even want to escape. The info you get is a memory of spitefully hating someone who fled to the waystone. You rescue your buddies. You see the Jailer fuck up Baine, only instead of giving him a spirit poison, he fucking snaps the dude like a Kit-Kat and drops his lifeless corpse, and you drag it to safety. You don’t need to find a poison dagger to counteract the spirit poison; you need to keep him safe and clear a path for his spirit to flee back to his body. Thus reinforcing what the danger here is and how it’s different and what they fear.

And while you do this, at some point, you run into Sylvanas. Maybe she just walks up to you while you’re all collected around Baine trying to help him revive. Since the Jailer won’t be saying “it’s not like you won anything b-b-baka, it was just a temporary setback,” you need to establish that feeling that he views your victories as completely meaningless. Sylvanas knows you’re here saving Baine. So does the Jailer. It does not matter. You cannot accomplish anything. 

Thrall kills her dead. She just gets back up. She has an escort for her soul to go back to her body. “How many times are you going to try that before you learn it’s futile? Come now, Thrall. I know you’re smarter than this. I know you respected me more than this.”

And then stuff like “How could you do this, Sylvanas? How could you betray the Horde?” Thrall is incredibly angry and offended at her. He thought he knew her. “Neither of us had any illusions you were not a monster, Banshee Queen. But I trusted you anyway because I knew you wanted what was best for your people. You were a monster, but a loyal one. How can you now turn your back on what little principle you had?” Sylvanas is hurt by this, but she doesn’t linger on it.

Jaina, however, is desperately trying to flatter her. Do this to sell the kind of impact this has had on Jaina, and what this suffering drives her to. “Please, Sylvanas. I know you were my enemy but you were an honorable one. It isn’t too late. Someone as cunning as you must know that this will end in ruin. I promise… I promise… I will surrender if you let me return. Kul Tiras will become servants of the Forsaken. Just, just let them live… please, you could rule our world, not slaughter it…”

Jaina breaks down in tears. Yes, she just tried to surrender her people to the enemy for mercy. Jaina is breaking. All of them will. The Maw is a Bad Place and makes them give up hope. That’s how we sell the threat. Not by making the enemies bigger or spikier, showing how they have broken these heroes. Less screaming anger. More pain.

Sylvanas scoffs at her offer. “It doesn’t matter where your people’s loyalty lies, Lord Admiral.” And then she says the phrase that will become a motif: “Nobody escapes the Maw.” She leaves. She doesn’t care what you do. It doesn’t matter.

But you have to still hold on to that sliver of hope that maybe the waystone is a way out. So you get Baine up and you sneak past this big-ass Maw army that can fuck 31 flavors of your day up. The jailer notices you and sends out a force to stop you at the waystone, and he repeats the phrase when he sends out the order: “Nobody escapes the Maw.”

So there’s the event, you fight off the army while the waystone charges, the army gets bigger and bigger, the charge meter gets stuck at 90%, you go to kick it and it teleports you to Oribos.

The mob descends on the other captives. Sylvanas and the Jailer look completely unconcerned with your escape. After having clearly seen you physically leave the Maw, Sylvanas brushes it off with “Nobody escapes the Maw.” Dun-DUNNN! Cutscene end.

You appear in Oribos. The Protectors stop you because you stink like the Maw and what the hell dude, yada yada. This is when you get a tour of the city, here’s the profession trainers, the bank, the transmog. Only secondary details need to be changed here. One, this is an instanced version of the city where no other players exist (you are the first one there, nobody else is). Two, Lich King Bolvar (hashtag #notmylichking) arrives from Azeroth and says SOMETHING to justify other players coming from the Maw but being less important than you. Something like, he saw what you did, there are other adventurers from Azeroth still in the Maw, his DKs are hunkering down in defensive positions and will try to make their way to the Waystone once it cools off because you already activated it, since you are the more special one, and there might be a chance that a couple others might have an echo of your power because they have had similar adventures. You are the True Maw Walker, and the context of the massively multiplayer element is “for your story, all those other guys have shitty Maw Walker powers that only work once you opened the pickle jar for them.” They can’t bring passengers, either.

Third, not the most importantly but yes the most importantly, if you are Forsaken or a Death Knight or Mechagnome or whatever you get a special dialogue where you say “Why do you keep calling me a ‘living mortal’? I’m not alive. I’m undead / a machine / maybe something else like maybe I missed the fact that vulpera are made of rocks and string.”

So Tal-Inara or whoever can be like “Oh, THAT’S what that is. Something was odd about you, mortal, that I couldn’t quite place. I call you ‘living’ because your soul is still tethered to a body. To us in the Shadowlands, to be bound in a vessel like this is far more important than the nature of the vessel itself.” That’s why people keep calling you “living”, to them you’re easy to mistake for one.

Kyrian in the Maw is disturbing news, and also WEIRD, because as Tal-Inara reminds us, “Nobody escapes the Maw.” Why would the Kyrian go down there when they can’t come back? It is terrible but not unheard of for mortals to try and speak to the Jailer but they never GO there because they can’t get out. And yet Sylvanas just walked in there? And he is mustering armies? Better go to Bastion and find out what is up. Let’s crank open this gateway, and...

#World of Warcraft #my fiction #fixing stories #wow

[melisa-may-taylor72]

QUEEN BEFORE QUEEN

THE 1960s RECORDINGS

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

PART 1:

BRIAN MAY, 1984 & THE LEFT HANDED MARRIAGE

JOHN S. STUART AND ANDY DAVIS DIG DEEP TO UNCOVER THE PREVIOUSLY UNDOCUMENTED AUDIO LEGACY OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST CHERISHED BANDS.

This month the beginning and end of Queen come together like the cosy ending of a contrived Hollywood drama. While fans wait with bated breath for the band’s final album, “Made In Heaven" — completed by Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor with the aid of Freddie Mercury’s last demos — author Mark Hodkinson launches a new book in which, in greater detail than has ever been attempted before, delves into the pre-fame histories of Queen’s musical antecedents.

With previously unpublished photographs of Roger Taylor's the Reaction, John Deacon’s the Opposítion and even more impressively, Freddie Mercury’s Sour Milk Sea, ‘Queen The Early Years’ is a treat fans have waited too long to read. Coincidentally, six months ago, we commissioned Queen historian, John S. Stuart, to research the definitive article on the band’s pre-fame recordings, and as you’ll see, the results complement Hodkinson’s broader picture with hitherto undocumented details of Queen's 60s recordings.

We've touched on Larry Lurex and Smile before, of course, but the vinyl output of those two acts barely scratches the surface, so to speak: literally hours and hours of privately- recorded material of Freddie, Brian, John and Roger survive to this day — as evidenced by the recent discovery of the Reaction’s ‘In The Midnight Hour’ acetate ( see RC 191). So, while the rest of the world comes to terms with the fact that Queen’s recording career is effectively at an end, we unravel the untold history of four individuals' first tentative steps in front of the microphone, beginning with the 1960′s exploits of Brian May. Next month, we’ll embrace Smile, and John, Roger and Freddie's hidden amateur recordings; but first, 1984 and the Left Handed Marriage.

1984

Around late August, or early September 1963, as the Beatles celebrated the birth of Beatlemania with sessions for their “With The Beatles” LP at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in North London, another rock legend was developing just around the geographical corner. In a semi-detached house in Feltham, Middlesex, electronics engineer Harold May began an 18-month task, helping his sixteen-year-...[ ]

[ ]...old son, Brian, to construct the world's most famous home-made guitar, the ‘Red Special'. In the mean time, Brian would have to be con­tent with thrashing away at the small Spanish acoustic his parents had bought him for his seventh birthday. (Brian evidently mislaid this childhood guitar shortly afterwards; and didn't see it again until 1991, when at a ‘reunion’ of former members of 1984, his schoolfriend and first musical collaborator, Dave Dilloway, returned it to him. Brian was so thrilled, that he featured the guitar in the video for Queen’s “Headlong" single).

By 1964, Brian and Dave Dilloway were already recording amateur duets together, and by linking up their two reel-to-reel tape docks, they discovered that they could lay down guitars on one machine, and perhaps bass, percussion and sometimes vocals on the other. Although the technique was crude, and despite the occasional disaster, the effect was often surprisingly good. One of the earliest tapes from these primitive recording sessions survives to this day, and features Brian belting out Bo Diddley’s eponymous R&B standard, "Bo Diddley".

“This is a mono quarter-inch, reel-to-reel I found buried among various other oddments from the era”,  recalls Dave Dilloway. “It certanly dates from before the formation of 1984. It was recorded in Brian’s back room in Feltham, with Brian on lead vocals and guitar, and myself on bass and drums. The track is basic, but Brian’s vocals are clear and recognisable. The guitar playing is fairly basic as well, but competent, without any real solos as such”.

“ This is the only tape in my collection of those double-track recordings. I’m unsure whether Brian himself has retained the tapes we made at the time, but I believe he usually ended up with the finished versions, so he may still heve them somewhere.”

 The duo also recorded four-track instru­mental cover versions of several Shadows tunes — “Apache”, “FBI”, "Wonderful Land” and "The Rise  And Fall Of Fingel Blunt” — as well as “Rambunkshush”, which they learned from the Shadows’ American counterparts, The Ventures.  Also on the same tape is their reading of Chet Atkins' “Windy And Warm".

 Yet another reel reveals an attempt at Cliff Richard’s "Bachelor Boy", on which Brian, once again, takes the lead vocal. Dave Dilloway's theory is probably correctt; May is known to have a meticulously catalogued personal collection of Queen (and pre-Queen) recordings and memorabilia, which almost certanlly contains unfathomable reels of similar early material.

In the autumn of 1964, Brian and Dave formed a rapidly-evolving band, through which many schoolmates passed, but which eventually settled with a line-up of bassist John 'Jag' Garnham, drummer Richard Thompson, and harmonica-playing vocalist Tim Staffell. After rejecting names such as the Mind Boggles and Bob Chappy & the Beetles, the quintet named themselves after George Orwell’s futuristic novel ‘1984’. Their look was far from sci-fi, however, and they happily adopted the classic, clean-cut beat- group look of the day: jackets, or in Brian's case a cardigan, and narrow trousers; and beat boots. Tim Staffell even acquired that year’s fashion accessory, a pork-pie hat.

The band rehearsed regularly at Chase Bridge Primary School Hall in Twickenham (located next to the rugby ground), and on the 28th October 1964, gave their first public performance at the nearby St. Mary’s Church Hall. It is believed that either one of the rehearsals, or the gig itself, was recorded, but unfortunately, no tape of this debut, perform­ance has survived the years. Although 1984 recorded almost all of their live concerts for their own critical appraisal, to save on the expense of new tape they often wiped over old reels once they’d listened to them. Nevertheless, evidence of Brian May playing live does survive from this period, and the earliest example dates from an unknown gig (Shepperton Rowing Club is the favoured consensus), recorded in late 1965. This wasn’t a 1984 performance, but rather an ad-hoc trio comprising Brian May on bass and vocals, Pete ‘Woolly’ Hammerton (a school friend of Brian’s) on guitar and vocals, and 1984's Richard Thompson on drums. The tape reveals the trio turning in versions of Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Street", the Beatles' “Eight Days A Week”, “I’m Taking Her Home” — a song by the group Woolly later joined, the Others — and a brave attempt at the Who’s "My Generation".

The Others comprised older boys from Hampton School, who in October 1964 had issued a single of their abrasive reading of Bo Diddley’s “Oh Yeah", backed by “I’m Taking Her Home", on Fontana (TF 501). “That was good!" claims singer, Tim Staffell. “I’ve still got that record buried somewhere deep in my mind — I remember the singer, Paul Stewart's voice and the quality of the guitar sound. The Others were a pretty significant influence. Maybe not in terms of the music, more in the sense that they were already doing it, which proved it was possible."

As evidenced by the photograph included in this feature, the Others clearly had attitude, something which 1984, or Tim Staffell at least, could only aspire to “If I had tried to push 1984 in any direction," reveals Tim, “then that would have been it. Without hearing any of these tapes of our band — and I didn't even know they existed! — l’d say we probably sounded a lot safer than the Others. Mind you, they were different to us. Their guitar style was very much inspired by American R&B, whereas Brian’s never was. Brian was a unique guitar player: he was able to extemporise a much more original way than most guitar players could. I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so, but I never perceived him as having the dangerous image which was necessary at the time — the cardigan says it all!.

LIGHTWEIGHT

“In retrospect, 1984 was lightweight, a bit fluffy”  concedes Tim. “It was impossible not to be naively ambitious — that was part and parcel of it — and the primary motivation to do it was what we saw in the media as the end results of success. But I guess we were realistic about it — we were at school, after all. Also there was a good deal of pressure in the 60s from our parents, and the conser­vative generation, to conform."

Although a version of “I’m Taking Her Home” by 1984 was captured live on the Shepperton tape, and Brian occasionally guested with the Others on stage, it's worth stating once and for all that — despite the persistent rumours — he definitely doesn’t feature on "Oh Yeah".  In fact, Pete ‘Woolly' Hammerton doesn't even play on the record — he only joined the band formally later on.

In the autumn of 1965, leaving Hampton Grammar with no fewer than four 'A' Levels and ten ‘O’ levels, Brian enrolled at Imperial College in Kensington, London, to read physics and infra-red astronomy. Before breaking up for the Christmas holidays that year, he played the first in a series of gigs with 1984 at the college, a tradition he continued later with Smile, and in their formative days with Queen. Although the exact date of the event has long since been forgotten, a very poor- quality tape still exists of 1984‘s college debut. The set was a typical one, comprising the group’s broad blend of pop, R&B and soul covers, and included the following songs: “Cool Jerk" (originally by the Capitols), ‘Respect" (Otis Redding), "My Girl" (the Temptations), “Shake" (Sam Cooke), “Stepping Stone" (the Monkees), “You Keep Me Hanging On" (the Supremes), “Whatcha Gonna Do Ahout it" ( Small Faces), “Substitute” (the Who), “How Can It Be” (the B-side of the Birds’ final single, “No Good Without You Baby”), “Danc­ing In The Street", “Dream" (Everly Brothers) and the Small Faces’ "Sha La La La Lee".

“Our repertoire was a little too eclectic to have developed into any particular style” reckons Tim Staffell. “But the Small Faces were quite influential. When we were at school, the songs were dredged from all sorts of areas. I’d always liked rhythm’n’blues. Brian’s input would have been Beatles-orientated, Dave’s as well. Richard Thompson would have been more into R&B, and Jag didn't really have an agenda as far as songs were concerned. Because of the nature of the material we covered, our approach to the gigs was almost schoollboy cabaret. 1984 was not a dangerous, moody rock band! Which may have something to do with the way Queen evolved."

1984 oponed 1966 with a couple of gigs at the Thames Rowing CIub in Putney; and once again, a tape recorder was set up to document the group’s progress. Two reels from January that year exist: the first is dated the 15th, and features “Im A Loser” (the Beatles), “I Wish You Would" ( the Yardbirds), “I Feel Fine" (the Beatles), “Little Egypt" (the Coasters), "Lucille” (Little Richard), “Too Much Monkey Business" (Chuck Berry), "I Got My Mojo Working” (Muddy Waters), "WalkingThe Dog” ( Rufus Thomas) and “Heart Full Of Soul" (the Yardbirds).

The second, dated two weeks later (29th January), demonstrates the great variety and confidence of a band which consistently renewed its repertoire. The show began with Jimmy Reed’s  “Bright Lights, Big City", moving into the Cookies' “Chains" (popularised by the Beatles), “Walking The Dog", “Lucille", “Our Little Rendezvous" (Chuck Berry), “Jack O’ Diamonds" (Blind Lemon... (cont)

(cont) Jefferson, popularised by Lonnie Donegan), “I’ve Got My Mojo Working”, “Little Egypt" and Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man”. The band’s finale was a versión of Sonny Boy Williamson’s "Bye Bye Bird".

For an amateur band with little real pretension towards stardom, or even a serious attempt at securing a recording contract, a staggering amount of live 1984 material has been preserved on tape. Dave Dilloway, for instance, is the guardian of a seven-inch reel-to-reel, which he says reveals either a very long performance or a compilation of various unknown dates.

Either way, the tape is divided into five distinct sections, which might make tedious reading, but is an invaluable reference: 1) “Route 66", (unknown instrumental), “I’m Taking Her Home", “Too Much Monkey Business’, “Yesterday" (featuring Brian May on lead vocals), “Walking The Dog", and “ Lucille"; 2) “Little Rendezvous", "Keep On Running”, “I Feel Fine”, “Walking The Dog”, “Jack O’ Diamonds", “High Heeled Sneakers", “I Want To Hold Your Hand", “I Got My Mojo Working*, and “I Should Have Known Better”; 3) “Little Rendezvous", “Jump Back Baby Jump Back", “I Feel Fine”, “Bye Bye Bird", “Little Egypt", “Crazy House". “Lucille”, “Oh Yeah”, “Heatwave”, “Too Much Monkey Business", “I Should Have Known Better", and “I Got My Mojo Working"; 4) “My Generation", “Little Egypt", “Dancing In The Street", “Whatcha Gonna Do About It", “I’m A Man", “Heatwave", “Lucille", and “Bye Bye Bird"; and 5) “Heart Full Of Soul", “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Something’s Got A Hold On Me", “Keep On Running", “My Generation", "Tired Of Waiting", “Bright Lights. Big City" and “Happy Hendrick’s Polka".

“These are all domestic quality, single microphone recordings of early-era 1984", reveals Dave Dilloway. “It's mostly bluesy material, with some soul and Beatles songs. While the quality is basic, the sound is intelligible, although there isn’t a large amount of identifiable Brian guitarwork. That came later in the band's history, when we included covers of Crearn and Hendrix. Brian's solo vocals on 'Yesterday' (on the first segment) are quite clear, however."

For much of 1966, the band carried on in a similar vein — Brian's and the others' college work permitting, of course. For Brian May and his unsigned, Twickenham-based covers band, the highlight of the following year, 1967, was undoubtedly the gig he secured via through his contacts at the college — supporting Jimi Hendrix at Imperial. The date was 13th May, the day after the release of Hendrix's debut, “Are You Experienced". Brian May idolised Hendrix to such an extent that he'd been nicknamed “Brimi" — a combination of the two guitarists' names—so although 1984 had seen him perform before, it goes without saying they were thrilled when backstage, they actually bumped into the ascending star as they filed past his dressing-room. It’s a familar story, but it's one worth repeating: Jimi enquired memorably, “Which way’s the stage, man?*.

BLOSSOMED

1984's act had certainly blossomed by this point. Their attire was now obligatory Swinging London — or Swinging Middlesex — fare: frilly shirts, Regency jackets, striped hipsters secured with a white belt, and hairtyles extending inexorably over the ears, and indeed the eyes. “Somewhere along the line, there was an external influence there", says Tim Staffell. “There was someone calling the shots. I don’t think all that was self-motivated. It’s something I’ve never been comfortable with, which explains why I split away from it early on — certainly from Smile onwards — because it was going that way; as indeed it ended up with Queen. It's fair enough, but that sort of flamboyance is just not me. I look fairly uncomfortable in the picture of the band from that period. My idea of a rock musician is one with hair down his back, a dirty pair of Levi's on, looking at the floor, thoroughly unconcerned with the visual and external trappings, playing the most extraordinary virtuoso guitar. That was my attitude."

Back in February 1967, Brian’s local paper, the ‘Middlesex Chronicle’ caught up with the band, and captured Tim Staffell in an equally decisive mood; although here, he was more enthusiastic about the latest trend. "Psychodelic music is certainly here to stay”~he claimed. "It makes more of music than mere sound, it makes it a whole and complete art form." Dave Dilloway, who also handled the group's light show, added: “We use everything in our act, including things like shaving foam, and plastic bricks we throw around”.

The ‘Chronicle’ was obviously impressed, and its reporter had this to say about a per­formance by what it called “one of the most foward-looking groups today". “Standards, like ‘Heatwave' receive a very original treatment, mostly due to the sounds that Brian coaxes out of his guitar. Jazz chords and electronic sounds add feeling and nuance to numbers that are often churned out wholesale. Using two bass drums for a fuller sound, Richard's drumming, combined with the full bass riffs of Dave and the steady (rhythm guitar) work of John, provides a firm basis for experiments in sound — an opportunity which is not wasted."

“To be quite honest with you, there’s more substance in the literary content there, than in the musical," laughs Tim Staffell. "If some­one genuinely thought that, then I'm surprised! Brian might have used a fuzz-box. but generally, it was au naturel. I remember in the Smile days, somebody wrote about ‘humming chords of wonder’, referring to my bass playing. The reality of it was that sometimes I did try and play chords on the bass guitar, which might have come out as a deep-throated roar, but actually sounded like a load of crap!"

“We did use to tickle about with a few lights, suggests Dave Dilloway, “but being a local band, money was tight and there wasn’t a fortune to spend on the band." As to 1984's psychodelic sound, Dave adds: “Brian did use a bit of fuzz, yes, and Pink Floyd influences and a bit of screaming guitar. He’d actually built a fuzz box into his guitar, which was fairly unique for the day, but typical Brian. If you look carefully at recent pictures of his “Red Special” you can see the fuzz switch taped over."

In September 1967, no doubt boosted by their praise — sincere or not — in the local press, the continuing evidence of their per­formance tapes and their recent Hendrix support slot, 1984 entered the local beats of a battle-of-the-bands competition at the Top...[ ]

...[ ] Rank Club in Croydon, just south of London. Effectively a promotion for Scotch tape, en­trance to the contest could only be secured via a demo recorded on a Scotch reel. 1984’s effort duly arrived in the form of a two-track master, featuring covers of Marvin Gaye's “Ain’t That Peculiar?" and the Everly Brothers’ “Crying ln The Rain" (on stage, both tracks were usually enhanced by characteristic Brian May guitar solos, but conservatism prevailed, and they were absent in this instance). A copy of this recording still survives, carefully guarded by the custodian of the 1984 archive. “This tape is a quarter-inch, mono reel-to-reel," re­calIs Dave Dilloway. “Tim took lead vocals on 'Ain't That Peculiar?’, and Tim and Brian duetted on ’Crying ln The Rain’. Brian's vocal style and tone can be clearly discerned, if one knows his voice. The songs were recorded in single takes, using a single microphone fed directly to the recorder. There was no mix facility so it has a ‘live' feel, a very good clean sound”. 

The mix was achieved using the old fashioned technique of microphone position and relative volume levels of the amplified Instruments. “As far as I am aware, only the one (master) copy of this tape exists.”

As has been well-documented, after two sets at the competition (one of which saw Brian, Dave, John Garnham and drummer Richard Thompson acting as the back-up band for a singer called Lisa Perez), 1984 won the contest, and walked away with a reel of blank tape (Scotch, of course) and an album each on the CBS label. (Tim took the top prize, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds Of Silence", Brian had to make do with a Barbra Streisand LP, and Dave Dilloway became the proud owner of an album by Irish bandleader Tommy Makem!). More importantly, their demo tape was forwarded to the CBS A&R department for the national showdown, although, clearly, they didn’t win.

True to form, 1984's performance that evening was committed to tape — for an unpublished review by ‘Melody’ Maker, no less — but was probably erased shortly afterwards. The twenty-minute set consisted of the Everlys’ "So Sad", Hendrix’s “Stone Free”, Buddy Knox’s “She’s Gone" and Eddie Floyd's “Knock On Wood". After the gig, the band were invited by a visiting promotor to participate in the all-night gala event which has since gone down as one of the key gigs of the London underground scene: Christmas On Earth Continued, at London's Olympia Theatre, on December 23rd 1967. 1984 was the lowest pro­file act at this decidedly high-profile event, and after Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Pink Floyd, the Herd, and Tyrannosaurus Rex had all taken to the stage, they only got to perform their humble set of covers at 5 o’clock in the morning. When Brian finally plugged in his ‘Red Special’, 1984 played a thirty-minute set to a very small, and less than enthusiastic, audience.

Also from 1967, and of far more interest, is 1984′s professionally-recorded Thames Television demo tape. During his first-year of study at Twickenham Technical College, Dave Dilloway had made friends with a number of technicians, or trainee technicians, at the Teddington-based ITV company which served the London area. The station had recently invested in new recording equipment, and rather than hire professional musicians at the usual union rate, in a set up similar to the first Queen sessions at the De Lane Lea studios, 1984 were let loose in the studio to record at their leisure. Dave Dilloway's carefully preserved tape still plays perfectly, and includes the following songs: "Hold On I’m Corning", “Knock On Wood“, “NSU", *How Can It Be”, two early run-throughs of the original May/ Staffell composition “Step On Me” (which eventually became the B- side to Smile's “Earth"), “Purple Haze", “Our Love Is Driftin* ”, and medleys of “Remember”/”Sweet Wine" and “Get Out My Life Woman”/ ”Satisfaction". The session ended with a run-through of "My Girl”.

AMALGAM

"What an extraordinary amalgam!" declares Tim Staffell today. “There’s Tamla, Cream, Hendrix, Lee Dorsey . . ‘Our Love Is Driftin' we’d have heard by Paul Butterfield. I’d forgotten there was such a large soul component in 1984!".

Dave Dilloway has the technical details: “This tape is the most re­cent, best and most representative of 1984 that I'm aware of. It is mono, but since it was made on good quality TV studio equipment and was carried out along the lines of a proper studio recording, with separately-mixed microphones for each source, it is remarkably good quality for its age. The material, except for ‘Step On Me', is aII cover versions, but as it dates from the late 1984 era, Brian’s playing is more prominent and effective, with his own style starting to show through. All the performances are competent — particularly Tim’s vocals and Brian's guitar; although the mix is a little heavy on John's rhythm guitar for some reason, probably the ‘ear’ of the recording engineer at the time. All tracks were laid down in one take, i.e., no overdubbing at all, so the sound is predominantly simple, as per our live versions."

And that was 1984′s swansong. In the spring of 1968, shortly afler the Thames recording, mainly due to the pressures of infrequent meetings and university studies — coupled with increasing musical differences — 1984 scaled down their operations drastically. Brian May left the band, and Tim Staffell took over on lead guitar for a while. A little later, Tim himself quit, leaving Dave Dilloway, John Garnham and Richard Thompson to rebuild the group, which soldiered on into the 70′s, content merely to play for fun. They all conceded that 1984 had been a good, solid, and popular local band, but that it didn’t have the necessary spark or originality to transform into a great one.

The Left Handed Marriage

ln the summer of 1965, in another corner of Hampton Grammar School, Brian May’s old friend Bill Richards (who had been a fleeting, early member of 1984 before it acquired its futuristic name), and his colleagues Jenny Hill (née Rusbridge), Henry Deval and Terry Goulds, formed a folk-rock band called the Left-Handed Marriage, named after an archaic form of marrying beneath oneself. By January 1967, the quartet had progressed to the point where they had issued their own privately-pressed album, “On The Right Side Of The Left Handed Marriage", which ran to just fifty copies (and, incidentally, has since acquired cult status among collectors, with a £600 price tag to match).

Although naturally familiar with the al­bum, Brian May as yet had not been involved with the band. That changed in March 1967, after Bill signed a twelve-month contract with EMI's music publishing company Ardmore & Beechwood — a deal secured through the efforts of Brian Henderson, a former member of Edinburgh beat outfit the Mark Five, and more recently, the bassist in Patrick Campbell- Lyons' 60′s psychodelic band, Nirvana. Bill approached Brian to help him create a “fuller" sound for the Left Handed Marriage, with a request to provide guitar and backing vocals on some recording sessions.

On the understanding that the project wouldn’t interfere with his commitment to 1984, Brian agreed. On 4th April 1967, he joined Jenny, Henry, Terry and Bill in AMC Sound, an amateur studio in Manor Road, Twickenham, to record four songs: “Give Me Time” (later changed to “I Need Time"), "She Was Once My Friend", “Sugar Lump Girl” and “Yours Sincerely” (which was basically “Give Me Time" backwards, with new lyrics pinched from the Russian author Pushkin).

The songs were all cleanly-recorded, melodic atempts at 1967 pop (despite the Left Handed Marriage's later classification, there's little actual folk music in evidence). “She Was Once My Friend" is the pick of the bunch, thanks to its Kinks-like structure — complete with Bill Richard's/ Ray Davies-soundalike vocal and, albeit way down in the mix, flashes of that distinctive Brian May 'Red Special’ guitar sound. Acetates of the AMC EP were cut, and the idea had been to release the songs as a commercial EP.  Instead, the set merely became the Left Handed Marriage’s first demo for their publishers, although it did lead to the offer to record at a more professional session — at EMI’s prestigious Abbey Road studios.

The Abbey Road session took place on 28th June 1967, when Left Handed Marriage were joined by Brian and 1984′s Dave Dilloway, who was drafted in to play bass. Two further tracks were cut: the reworked “I Need Time",...[ ]

...[ ] and a new song called “Appointment". At this stage, there was more talk of issuing a record, this time a single, and a release date of August was even discussed. This never materialised either, and again 7″ acetates are all that remain.

Although Ardmore & Beechwood were pleased with the results, they still thought the Left Handed Marriage could improve their sound even further, and on 31st July 1967, they booked the band into another studio, this time Regent Sound in central London. As Dave Dilloway was not available, another friend, John Frankel, was called upon to play bass and piano. The eight-track Regent Sound ma­chine was something of a technological marvel, and the session was flawlessly recorded, resulting in new versions of “I Need Time”, “She Was Once My Friend" (which also remixed and edited for the abandoned single), and "Appointment".

Despite the studio quality of the tape, Ardmore & Beechwood failed to place the songs with a record label, and like so many groups before and since, the Left Handed Marriage quietly disappeared from view. It was left to frontman Bill Richards belatedly to issue the fruits of this last session, when in February 1993, he tagged the three Regent Sound recordings — the final mix of “I Need Time”, the abridged version of “She Was Once A Friend Of Mine” and the final mix of “Appointment” — onto the end of “Crazy Chain”, a CD recorded by the reformed Left Handed Marriage, which itself was prompted by collector's interest in the group’s original 1967 LP,  “The Right Hand Side Of...” . Most of the master tapes for the LHM recordings featuring Brian May have Iong since disappeared along with the Regent Sound studio, and (with the exception of "She Was Once My Friend") the Richards/May collaborations on the CD were digitally remastered from acetates.

RECORD COLLECTOR Nº 195, NOVEMBER 1995

➡NEXT: ROGER TAYLOR’S REACTION 

@natromanxoff, @mephisto92, @moviestorian,  @39-brian,  @an-abyss-called-life, @his-majesty-king-mercury, @x5vale  @onegoldenglance  @i-live-for-queen, @brian-39-may, @toomuchlove-willkillyou, @brimaymay, @sail-away-sweet-sister, @briianmaay,  @inui-mycroft @brianmayislongaway, @balticlover, @astrophysicist-guitar-god, @miez-lakatz, @brianmayoucease, @jesus-in-a-life-boat, @drummerqueenrmt, @iminlovewithrogscar @roger-taylors-car, @crosmopolitan​ @silapril, @sherrifanciesfriskyfreddie @tenderbri, @brianmydear, @thosequeenboys, @millionairewaltz-carpediem, @painandpleasure86, @bribrifrenchfry, @xlucylennonx, @a-night-at-the-abbey-road, @inthedayswhenlandswerefew, @madformeddowstaylor, @drowseoftaylor @queenrogertaylorfan, @let-roger-get-a-lunch, @queen-for-life, @rethought​, @mymakeupmaybeflaking​, @old-but-still-a-child​, @let-roger-get-a-lunch​, @warriorteam1924​, @funnydressesweirdhairanddance​, @painkiller80​, @thefanhuman13​, @yourtieddownmother​, @hgmercury39​, @brimi-stardust​, @thefairyfellermercury​,  @retroromantics​, @sailawaysweetbrimi​, @sophiaintheskywithdiamonds​, @deacytits​@rhysjoejoshtomfarisblog​, @holybrianmaywritingbear​, @lydiannode​, @39-yellow-daffodils​ , @ure-gonna-loveme-when-u-seeme​, @kaykaybeachgirl​, @foxmonkey​, @saik-ava​, @deakysgurl​, @redspecialandclogsandcurls​, @briansrainbowsocks​, @delilahmay39​, @ohmybribri​, @bless-the-queen​, @infunitehearbeat​, @sketchiesscketches​,  @everythingaboutfreddie​, @doitforthevine67​, @recordsoftheseventies​, @tenementfunsterwithpurpleshoes​, @drummah-in-a-rocknroll-band​, @beatlegirl1968​, @maylorsqueen​, @shearrehartatacc​, @gralto​, @alittlepeoplemagic​, @rainbowsockbrian​, @frejudy​, @drivenbybri​, @yourlocalmusicalprostitute​, @omb-xx​, @sassymaylor​, @somekindofroger​, @starlightmay​, @rhysjoejoshtomfarisblog, @freddiemercuryismylife​, @sunshine112​, @chrysochromulina​ @glitteryloveravenue​, @deakyislife51​, @0-primejive-0​, @just-a-skinny-lad​, @drivenbybrianmay​

#Queen Before Queen #Pre-Queen Series #Brian May #Tim Staffell #1984 #The Left Handed Marriage #🎤🎵🎸👑⭐

[johannstutt413]

How’s the queue lookin, boss?

1. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Blemishine/Nian (working on this one now)

2. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Tails Club II: Fluffier than Ever

3. (requested by calligomiles) Gavial/Zima II, Tomimi’s Reaction

4. (requested by calligomiles) ShiraYuki/Scavenger II, The Date

5. (requested by anonymous) Doc/Whislash

6. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Blemishine x Eunectes

7. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Blemishine x Chiave, Blemishine calls Whislash auntie one time too many

8. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Shining andor Nightingale doting on Blemishine

9. (requested by mathmaticalknight) The Doctor talks to Blemishine about the fact she is the only person at Rhodes Island willing to attack sleeping enemies, and that she considers it mercy.

10. (requested by calligomiles) Platinum/Nearl/Gravel

11. (requested by anonymous) Just after Maria Nearl, the Kazimierz Media’s hatchet job...and a little more besides

12. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Aosta/Bibeak

13. (requested by greenone170b7) Shining and Liz cheer on their wife while she kicks ass to save her sister

14. (requested by greenone170b7) Maria and Platinum start dating (and Margaret is suffering because of it)

15. (requested by greenone170b7) Zofia is lamenting her single status in the bar when she gets swept off her feet by a gorgeous fem!Doc

16. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Broca/Click

17. (requested by anonymous) Ifrit joins Reunion...and Saria and Silence have to stop her [GODDAMNIT SADFIC ANON]

18. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Blaze x Saria

19. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Surtr and her talking sword

20. (requested by anonymous) Mudrock/Fem!Doc

21. (requested by anonymous) Hung is a dudebrochadmyguy

22. (requested by calligomiles) Zima/Leto in this timeline

23. (requested by calligomiles) Rosa/Istina in this timeline

24. (requested by calligomiles) Jackie/Grani/Absinthe Poly-cop-ule

25. (requested by anonymous) Doctor/Gavial during Great Chief, Tomimi no likey

26. (requested by calligomiles) Jackie/Swire (OkaKoro!)

27. (requested by calligomiles) Mudrock/FrostNova

28. (requested by calligomiles; continuing from this) Mudrock/Gummy/BP

29. (requested by calligomiles) Mudrock/Rosa

30. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Nian/Whisperain [I see what you’re doing here]

31. (requested by calligomiles) Zima/Glaucus

32. (requested by calligomiles) Istina/Deepcolor

33. (requested by calligomiles) Rosa/BP

34. (requested by calligomiles) Leto/Specter

35. (requested by calligomiles) Gummy/Skadi...V? Likely with all of these Abyss/USGG couples coming together at a meeting or some’n

36. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Warfarin, Pramanix, Conviction, and Ansel learn to helidrop

37. (requested by anonymous) Specter/Doc

38. (requested by calligomiles) Rosa/Gavial 2

39. (requested by mathmaticalknight) ChenPipe 5ish (Ch’en working Command Center accidentally brings Bagpipe and Reed into contact)

40. (requested by anonymous) Jaye/Utage, Resting Terror Faces come together

41. (requested by calligomiles) Utage/Zima

42. (requested by calligomiles) Utage/Gummy II

43. (requested by calligomiles) Flint/Zima

44. (requested by calligomiles) Flint/Leto

45. (requested by emburbaguette) Doctor/Rangers

46. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Angelina/Utage II

47. (requested by calligomiles) Absinthe/Zima

48. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Doctor gets TP’d to G&K

49. (requested by calligomiles) Rosa and Talulah, bonding over shared rejection of nobility

50. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Saria/Nian 5, meet the family (Dusk)

51. (requested by calligomiles) Swire/Rosa III

52. (requested by calligomiles) BP/Andreana

53. (requested by anonymous) Blue Poison/Astesia

54. (requested by calligomiles) Saga/Archetto

55. (requested by calligomiles) Saga/Absinthe

56. (requested by calligomiles) Dusk/Deepcolor (“I’m not worried about collateral damage”)

57. (requested by calligomiles) Ifrit/Rosmontis/Eyjafjalla

58. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Ceobe walks Dusk’s paintings freely

59. (requested by calligomiles) Skadi/Gummy 6: Someone’s Gonna Die From Sugar Overload

60. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Dusk burns Nian’s movie collection, Shaw is the most upset

61. (requested by mathmaticalknight; continuing from this) Archetto joins the group

62. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Franka gets Liskarm to help with her biggest prank ever

63. (requested by calligomiles; continuing from this) Rhine Labs Sandwich

64. (requested by calligomiles; prequel to this) Mayer and Magallan’s Meeting

65. (requested by lonewanderer2033) Operation: Nine-Tailed Frog [Suzuran gets Blue Poison an outfit similar to hers]

66. (requested by mathmaticalknight) “Hey Dusk…Why don’t you fight like you did during your event?”

67. (requested by calligomiles) Rosa/Nearl III

68. (requested by calligomiles) Beeswax/Mint

69. (requested by mathmaticalknight) One of the gang [from Dusk’s event] learns Dusk has the worst physical results of any non-robot Operator

70. (requested by anonymous) Surtr vs Platinum – Who Wins the Doctor’s Heart?

71. (requested by anonymous) Ch’en/Doc post Chap. 8

72. (requested by calligomiles) Horsebucket II: It’s All Coming Together

73. (requested by anonymous) Skadi/Suzuran/(maybe Specter too)

74. (requested by wealmostaneckbeard) Tachanka becomes the USSGG’s surrogate dad

75. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Utage becomes the Great Chief

76. (requested by calligomiles) Swire/Rosa IV: Sweet as Honey

77. (requested by calligomiles) Swire/Talulah (in a world where Koschei doesn’t exist that fucking prick)

78. (requested by anonymous) Blue Poison and/or Platinum in the Arknights equivalent of this scene [Mr. Incredible’s part at least…anon feel free to clarify, it’s been a while since I’ve seen this movie]

79. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Someone starts worshipping Dusk or Nian (…probably the Doctor honestly)

80. (requested by calligomiles) FrostNova/Alina/Talulah, in an idyllic setting (similar world setup as Talulah/Swire imo)

81. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Ceobe and Saga, maybe a couple, maybe just being hungry doggos together, we’ll figure it out when we get there

82. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Iris returns something to Whisperain from before her last reset

83. (requested by mathmaticalknight) Dusk/Whisperain

84. (requested by mathmaticalknight) What If…Nian made Chen’s sword?

Yes that is 80+ fics deep. No that is not intimidating. *shivering*

#the queue

[letterboxd]

Siren Song.

Undine writer-director Christian Petzold talks to Reyzando Nawara about modern-day mermaids, Tinder culture and finding the magic in life.

“Love stories always change. A kiss in Berlin 1933, for example, is not gonna be the same kiss in Berlin today, right?” —Christian Petzold

“If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you.” Undine’s threat to her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend Johannes, after he has told her that he has met someone else, seems at first like an over-the-top reaction to the breakup. But it is a curse that Undine must fulfill, for she will become human only when she falls in love with a man who is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her.

From Splash to Ponyo to The Lure to Song of the Sea, mythical water spirits, usually female, sometimes horse, have powered many film plots. The sixteenth-century European myth of Undine, in particular, lies behind many screen adaptations of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, though the Danish writer was not the first to popularize the fairytale in his century. Decades earlier, around 1811, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué of Germany had produced his romantic novella, Undine.

And it is to Germany—specifically modern-day Berlin—that writer-director (and fellow German) Christian Petzold transports Undine in his contemporary magical-realist take on the myth. There, she does not take the form of a mermaid or siren, but a beautiful young woman (played by Paula Beer), who works as a historian at a museum, where she guides tours of Berlin’s architecture and its reconstruction. The breathtaking cinematography, by regular Petzold collaborator Hans Fromm, crystallizes both the romance and the beauty of Berlin, while Petzold’s leads root every scene in reality, even as aquariums explode and giant catfish drift past.

Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski fire up the streets of Berlin in ‘Undine’.

Water may be the dominant element in Undine, but Beer and her co-star Franz Rogowski bring fire to their scenes together. Where Beer brings charisma and intensity to the titular role, Rogowski, as Undine’s new love interest, an industrial diver named Christoph, offers charm and sweetness.

In the frenzy of Parasite’s world domination, it is easy to forget that Petzold’s previous feature, Transit, appeared in two of our 2019 Year in Review lists—the 50 highest-rated films and the highest-rated international films—and was one of the top romance films of the 2010s. His riveting Phoenix is still his highest-rated film on the platform—one of many to center a complex female character in search of love at a time of personal and/or political crisis. In Undine, Petzold does it again, a welcome departure from other adaptations, including the Colin Farrell-starring Irish romantic drama Ondine (2009), that have mostly told the myth from the perspective of its male characters. Petzold also revises the fairytale, by giving Undine a chance to try to emancipate herself from her curse.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Petzold about his fascination with water, the magic of Berlin history, modern dating and of course, his ongoing collaboration with Beer and Rogowski.

Spoiler warning: this conversation contains plot details regarding the ending of Petzold’s film ‘Transit’ (2018).

Your movie is inspired by the myth of Undine, but you reinvent it by giving it some modern twists. How did the main narrative for the film come about? Christian Petzold: I think the idea of the story first came to me around twenty years ago when I had a project in Germany. It was together with Claire Denis and also Kathryn Bigelow, and everybody had to make a ten-minute short film for a project based on the museum near the Rhine River. I had written a little dialogue—oh, by the way, Steve McQueen was also part of the project—and it was the scene that we can see in the movie in the first few minutes where Undine’s boyfriend, Johannes, said that he doesn’t love her anymore and that he wants to leave her and she said to him, “If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you.” Then she goes back to work, and later when she comes back to try to find him again, he isn’t there—so she knows that she has to kill him now.

Then when I made Transit with Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, I told them after a very lucky and happy time of shooting, that I had written a short story and wanted to make a 90-minute feature movie out of it together with them. I wanted to keep working and making movies with them because we’ve had an amazing experience together in Transit. This was basically the start of how the movie and my collaboration with these two actors came about.

Paula and Franz are actors who didn’t come from the basic German acting school; their backgrounds are dance and theater. But they both have so much curiosity about cinema—when I met Paula for the first time, for example, she told me that she had bought 50 movies by Alfred Hitchcock and wanted to see all of them, and to me, this is the best kind of school to learn about cinema.

So to some extent, Undine is a spiritual sequel to Transit? Yes, you’re right. It has so many things to do with Transit. Marie, Paula’s character in Transit, finds her own death in the sea—she’s drowned. And Franz’s character, he’s waiting at the land, hoping that she may come back from the land of the dead. So I said to them, “Okay, the next movie is gonna be about a woman coming out of the sea and going to the land to search for love and also about this young man who is a diver, who is going underwater, to find love as well.” So to some degree, it’s a sequel, you’re right.

Beer and Ragowski in ‘Transit’ (2018).

You mentioned earlier that you had a great experience working with Paula and Franz in Transit. Can you tell us what it was about these two actors that you thought would capture the story you wanted to tell in Undine? Paula is a very young actor—she was 23 when we started Transit, and she was around 24 when we made Undine—but when you’re filming her, she has this ability to make her characters much more mature beyond her real age. In one second, she’s 45 years old, with a whole experience of someone who’s had a hard life and has gone through so many bad things, then one second later, she’s thirteen and innocent. And to have that kind of ability—to go from one point to another—is just really fascinating to me. I’ve never seen other actors do this before in my life.

Franz was a dancer, and if I remember correctly, I think he was also in a clown school for a circus, so he can do everything with his body. It’s unbelievable what he can do. He has this amazing physicality that I admire and haven’t seen before in other German actors. When they’re together sharing a scene, they dance with each other. And this is the thing that I like so much about them and the thing I need in Undine, because I need actors who can float from one scene to another as if they’re dancing underwater.

In literature and pop culture, the myth of Undine has been mostly told from the male perspective. You reframe the narrative, to give Undine the opportunity to maybe emancipate herself from both the male figure in her life and the curse. Tell me more about that choice. Two or three years ago, I had a retrospective in New York, and I had the chance to see some of my previous movies again—[laughing] I’ve actually never done it before, revisiting my own movies. And at that time, I realized that I’ve always tried to rewrite the stories centering on women, which were made by men in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, from another perspective: the perspective of the women.

When I was in Venice for the first time, Claude Chabrol [was] in the same hotel as me, and he had a Q&A. I wanted to say hi and tell him how great he was but I couldn’t do it because I was very young and too shy for those things. I heard what he said when asked why in his movies, the women are always the main characters. His answer was, “Men are living, women are surviving. And cinema is about surviving.” It was such a fantastic answer.

All the movies I [have] made, including Undine, are about surviving. Undine wanted to survive her curse—she tries to, every time, since centuries ago. In so many iterations of the myth, Undine always has to go back into the lake and to the life the curse has set for her. I really wanted to zoom in on that, to liberate the character of Undine from the myth and the curse.

In the movie, Undine works as an historian at a museum, and in her tours, she talks about Berlin’s architecture and its reconstruction throughout the years. How is this related to the romantic aspect of the movie? Everybody says you can take a love story and put it in the sixteenth century or the nineteenth century, and it’s always gonna be the same kind of love story. But I think that’s not entirely right. Love stories always change. A kiss in Berlin 1933, for example, is not gonna be the same kiss in Berlin today, right? Therefore I want to take the historical aspect of Berlin architecture and its reconstruction to tell the story of two young people in Berlin nowadays, to see the evolution of both this love story and the myth of Undine itself.

What’s the significance of all the buildings Undine mentions in the movie? The buildings serve a very important role in the movie because Berlin is between two rivers on an island, and the city is built on dried-out swamps, so the element that Undine is coming from, which is the water, is destroyed in Berlin. It doesn’t exist anymore. And therefore Undine doesn’t have any habitats, so she has no choice but to adapt and to live on the land.

In some way, I always think that the modernization in Berlin erases history, and when there’s no history, there’s no magic, which means magical creatures like Undine won’t exist. That was the main idea of the architectural elements in the movie.

Is that also the reason why there are two locations in the movie: Berlin, and the small town where Franz’s character, Christoph, works and lives, which is still full of swamps? To show that in this small town, magic still exists? That’s a good question. The romance and the myth of Undine is a part of German and European history. It’s a unique enchantment. But in Berlin, where modernization and civilization keep growing and changing, there’s no enchantment anymore. So I want to show how in this small town where everything is still kept as closely natural as possible, the enchantment and the charm of Germany are still there.

There’s a beautiful and romantic poem by Joseph Eichendorff that says, “You must find the right world, so everything can sync again.” To me, that line encourages us to find the magic of the world back. We live in this world surrounded by retro buildings and retro behavior and retro music, but it’s all actually just an illusion of magic. The real magic, that’s something that we have to find—either by movies or camera positions or poems or even by preserving the naturality of a city. And the Undine myth actually has a lot to do with this.

Another thing that fascinates me about the movie is how the dynamic between Undine and Johannes, in some way, reflects the state of modern dating. Is this something that you also wanted to capture when you wrote the script? [Laughing] Funny story, when Paula read the script for the first time, she told me that she liked it so much because the story reminded her of Tinder and modern dating. And on some level, it’s true; part of Undine is about modern dating. I always think that in the era of dating apps, everything gets much simpler—you meet someone, you have sex (or perhaps not), and if you feel like this someone is not handsome or beautiful enough for you, you can keep scrolling until you find someone new. So, dating right now is like going to the supermarket.

Johannes leaving Undine to be with another woman, who for him is better-looking than Undine, reflects the culture of Tinder. And the line I mentioned earlier, “If you leave me, then I’ll have to kill you,” is the opposite of that kind of dating life. And Paula, who hates Tinder, loves that line a lot. Some of the actors are on Tinder, I’m sure, and that’s understandable. Actors are sometimes very lonely because for six to eight weeks, they are deep inside of a character, and when they’re on break, they’re in some sort of “black hole of loneliness”.

Writer-director Christian Petzold.

Undine being a water nymph, of course, makes the water element very important in this movie. But water has actually been heavily featured in some of your previous features as well, like in Yella, Barbara and Transit. Can you tell us why you find water fascinating? I’ve seen a documentary by Agnès Varda, and in [it] she said, “The place where one element is touching one another is the place where cinema builds its stories.” That’s why she loved the beach, because on the beach, there’s water and there’s the earth and there’s also wind, and they’re touching each other. So to her, the beach is the perfect place where you can tell a story.

For me, however, the reason I like featuring water or the other elements in most of my movies is because it has something to do with seeing my characters coming from one element then going to the other elements; to see them act and react in a new and sometimes uncomfortable place. Also, when you see pictures or paintings, so many of them are about people looking deep into the sea. I always feel like that kind of painting is actually about a desire. And most of my movies, at [their] core, are about desire. That’s why water is so important to me. Deep under the water, there’s the place of desire.

What’s the first movie that made you want to become a filmmaker? The first movie I loved very much as a kid was The Jungle Book, but the first movie that made me want to become a filmmaker was by Alfred Hitchcock, The 39 Steps. I was fourteen or fifteen years old when I saw the movie for the first time, and I loved it from the first moment. The movie is about a man and a woman who are bound by handcuffs, and they don’t like each other, but because they’re on the run, they have to communicate and come to an understanding. And the love story starts because of that communication, not because of looks, and I love the movie so much for that reason.

If you could program a double feature with Undine, what movie would you pick? Good question. I would say The Night of the Hunter. Also maybe Creature from the Black Lagoon or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or The Son’s Room by Nanni Moretti. These are the movies that I would recommend for a double feature with Undine.

Related content

More ‘Little Mermaid’ adaptations: a list by Katherine

Paula Beer strolling around towns cinematic universe

Diogo’s mega-list of Mermaids in Film

Horror’s History with Scary Mermaids: a Bloody Disgusting list

Follow Reyzando on Letterboxd

‘Undine’ is in theaters and available on VOD in the US now.

#christian petzold #paula beer #transit film #undine #undine myth #ondine #water nymph #mermaids #mermaid film #german film #german director #german screenwriter #german cinema #cinema germany #romance #romance films #Reyzando Nawara #franz rogowski #letterboxd #filmmaker #letterboxd interview

[utterlyinevitable]

I want them all for E&O but will settle for 4-7 from each category for E&O please 🙏

Aaa you’re too sweet! Thank you for asking 💕

> ship questions <

PRE-RELATIONSHIP

4. Who felt romantic feelings first?

Ethan. Like in canon, Miami is when he started to see her as more than just an attractive, brilliant intern. She retreated back to her room amicably for the evening before Ethan could even kiss her. Of which he’s thankful because he respects her and her career too much to have a moment of lustful weakness. 

5. Did either of them try to resist their feelings?

They both did. Ethan got good at it for the most part, but once they started spending time together outside of work related things after the Louise thing, he couldn’t help but be soft in the name of friendship. But idk any friends that would buy be a $2k keyboard 👀

Ode caught feelings after the Louise thing too. She has a better poker face though and with their weird boss/friend/mentor dynamic she couldn’t wrap her head around losing all of that because of fleeting romantic feelings. 

6. If you had told one of them that the other would be their soulmate, what would they think?

Ode would laugh and says she knows - he’s her medical hero and their brains work similarly. If anyone was going to be her soulmate it would be him. Though she means it absolutely platonically. 

Ethan would just shake his head and say such notions don’t exist. Though if you told him this after his 40th he’d be silent on the matter, while everything inside him would be inclined to agree. 

7. What would their lives be like if they had never met?

ooooo this is interesting! 

If Ethan never ever met Ode I think he’d continue his jaded, mostly celibate lifestyle. He’s devoted to his work and it would take a truly magnificent person to change him - and that can really only be done by a soulmate...😏 He and Harper would fall back into their back and forth companionable coexistence. It’s not perfect but it’s something to make him feel like he’s a living man and not a machine. 

So for Ode... if she never stumbled upon Ethan’s research that completely turned her world around, she would be studying to become a dentist maybe? She always leaves music for the greater good of medicine, idk what she’d go into if it wasn’t diagnostics. 

 GENERAL

4. Were they each other’s first anything (kiss, relationship, etc.)?

I think they’re each others first real and true love. Ethan certainly didn’t love Harper or any of his other past partners since he doesn’t believe in the concept. And Odette... she has only had 2 other relationships and they never really stuck long enough to move past the initial infatuation.  

5. What’s their height difference? Age difference?

Ethan is 6′6 and Odette is 5′8 so nearly a foot lol. They’re also 10 years and 4 months apart. 

6. What’s their relationship with each other’s families?

Odette and Alan adore one another. Alan’s crashed enough of the pair’s study and dinner not-a-dates enough times to forge a bond. It’s become quite a joke between the small family that Ode just comes by in hopes of running into Naveen and talking about classic rock and what growing up in the 60s and 70s was like. (for a girl who’s quite poised and refined in her clothing she is really drawn to the 70s billow and floral aesthetic). At the start Ode really didn’t want to get involved with Ethan’s parents because that’s his business - Alan made it really hard to stick to that. And by the time Louise turned up they already had a little bond on top of her hating the broken look on Ethan’s face. 

Odette is an inherently private person. Her parents know about Ethan and their mentor/friendship. They don’t find out that they’re dating until she goes home to visit ~9 months into their relationship and tells them she’s bringing someone. She has never ever introduced them to a boy before and they’re over the moon that she’s found happiness. Just from this alone they know Ethan is special. When they get there things are very awkward - Ethan’s not good at this and Ode doesn’t like how attending her parents are being. Long story short, things go great and when they’re sipping beers while the ladies clean up, her dad gives Ethan a small photo album of his favorite pictures of Odette through the years. It’s Ethan’s most prized possession to date.  

7. Who takes the lead in social situations?

Odette, for obvious reasons. She’s able to schmooze a lot better than he can. She’s also able to diffuse situations with such elegance and grace he has never seen in his lifetime. She gets him out of a lot of things with a smile and swapping business cards. 

LOVE

4. How often do they cuddle/engage in PDA?

Cuddling is their favorite downtime activity. She rests her head against his shoulder or his chest as their sat on the couch, or throws her feet over his lap. 

They’re not big on PDA. Sometimes they hold hands when they’re around close friends. More often than not you’ll find Ethan with his hand on or forearm wrapped around her lower back. Kisses are short and only happen when they’re certain no one they know is around and if there are people around, no one is paying them any mind. For them intimacies really belong in the privacy of their homes. 

5. Who initiates kisses?

Ethan for the most part. Physical touch is one of his love languages and he needs that sort of contact in the relationship. Ode never denies him, she always sighs into him. 

6. Who’s the big and little spoon?

Ethan’s obviously big spoon because he’s like double her size. He also prefers to have his arms wrapped around her when they’re asleep.  

7. What are their favorite things to do together?

Running. Their thing is long jogs and then brunch right after. Odette hates running but took it up because it was the only thing that could get Ethan out of his head and talking enough during the Louise thing. Now running has a place in her heart because it’s more or less where they started falling in love with each other as people and not as just doctors. 

Opera. Farmers Markets. And of course they both just love being in one anothers company. Ethan also adores listening to her play. A lot of the time she hides away but he can still hear it through the door and walls of the apartment. When they get their big house she’s more comfortable with him in her creative space - their piano is the focal point of the indoor/outdoor sitting room. He likes to sit on the patio with the bi-folding doors open while she’s at her grand playing away. The music cascading through their home and out to their beachfront property. 

DOMESTIC LIFE

4. Do they have any pets?

No, they don’t. They keep talking about getting a dog or a cat. They look at rescue websites and discuss which ones they should go meet. But really they both know they’re much too busy to give a pet the attention they deserve. 

5. Who’s the stricter parent?

They don’t have kids. If they did it would probably be Ethan. 

6. Who worries the most?

They both do but in different ways. They both worry about work and the future. As director and only child, Ethan worries about bigger life things. Whereas Odette is quite secular in her worries - she takes them one at a time as they come. 

7. Who kills the bugs in the house?

Ethan. Odette is not touching that nope nah ah ah 

#ethan x odette #odette hall #ethan ramsey #open heart #ethan x mc #Anonymous #asked #I could totally do the whole list if you really really want 👀