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creativestalkerrs · 2 years

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the first ten pages

I posted this on my Substack blog as well, subscribe to that for more content. Apart of creativestalkerr’s writing lessons.

notes are taken from Kevin Kawa’s Skillshare class ‘The First Ten Pages,”

writing your first ten pages of your screenplay and making them the most important pages to write.

This lesson is more about the format of screenwriting and screenplays. The first ten pages are by far the most important to your script and should have extra care put into them. The reason why the first ten pages are crucial to your script is for time.

If you send a script, agents, producers, and even casual consumers want to be hooked on your ten pages so they want to read the rest of your story. Rejection is a huge part of the film industry, so you want to pull them in.

Executives Read Because:

Marketability: Is this going to grab the attention of viewers?

Castability: Would people want to audition for this project?

Genre: What type of story is this? How can it be made?

Budget: How much would this cost to produce?

Often, executives don’t need to read the whole script to know of its for them or not. The first ten pages can make or break it.

Five Major Rules: We’ll go into detail for each rule and how you can reveal them in your first 10 pages, but the five rules include;

Establish your genre

Introduce the main character(s) and possibly other major characters

Clarify the world and the status quo

Indicate the theme or the message

Set up the dramatic situation

Establish Genre: Genre is the easiest to reveal, however, it’s also overlooked. You want a good understanding of film genre and sub-genre to help meet your consumer's expectations. There are seven major film genres that you find in film and that being;

Seven Major Genres:

Action and Adventure

Comedy

Drama

Horror

Mystery and Suspense

Romance

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Before even writing, you want to know what genre your story and or screenplay is. When you do know what genre you’ll be writing in, make sure it is stated and clear. Know the convention of the genre you choose both visually as well as the story elements.

Explore your genre and play around with it. If you love your genre, it can make everything else so much easier to write. Write what you know and love, but don’t let it limit you. Play around with it!

Introduce Your Characters: The first character you want to think about introducing in your first ten pages is your protagonist. Although they don’t have to be the very first character that we see, we should see them within those first ten pages. While doing this think about introducing characters that are severe to the story--that are also important overall.

What is an Active Protagonist?: When creating your protagonist, you want to have a goal they have in your story. They should be able to work on that very goal. However, you also want to think of obstacles for them to overcome so they can finally obtain their goal and has the opportunity to do so.

Create a protagonist that meets those key points and the story will actively unfold because of them and their action and not because something is happening to them. Make them an active part of your story instead of them standing outside of it.

You want your protagonist to be an unforgettable character.

Tips for the First Ten Pages:

When writing in your protagonist, you want your consumer to truly care about them, they hope that they obtain their goals but fear they might fall short of them.

When writing, depending on how you have written your main character, your consumer should feel empathetic or sympathetic for them. But keep in mind that not every character deserves this, at least not yet. An example of this is an anti-hero. But you still want to be a little empathetic to them and their plight while writing.

Know everything about your main character. Know internally and externally, know their wants and their needs. These details can help your consumer relate to them and their cause.

Your main character cannot exist without conflict. You need enough for them to overcome it.

Creative weakness for your character. Your consumer can fear that they might not reach their goal because of it

Even better if they might not know/are oblivious to their own weakness or identical about it.

NOTE: Weaknesses and flaws need to be evident within the first ten pages. Later on, you understand your ability to emotionally engage your consumer.

While writing your character at their weakest point, you want to poke at them. Force them to reveal things they would normally be unwilling to share. A truly good character can be able to shine.

When writing, don’t allow your main character to see the full breadth of the theme at the beginning it’ll be too easy for them.

All characters need to change and grow.

Clarify the World and the Status Quo: When you start writing the first ten pages, it needs to give the consumer a taste of the world they’re about to enter. Ask yourself what makes it special. You want to show, not tell. Include a taste of the rules of this world, even if you don’t include much of it.

Details help consumers get sucked into the world and help make them believe it's real. Show off your voice as a storyteller as well as your creativity and originality.

The first ten pages should give your consumer enough. It’s important to know where your characters fit in the world you have built and how they affect it. How the world affects them as they move towards their goals.

You want to set up your status quo in these first ten pages alongside the rules that may follow your world status quo will move along as your story progresses but your rules should never.

Ask Questions About Your World:

Where is my story set?

What time period is it?

What is the culture and demographic of the story?

You want your status quo to relate to your character(s), you want this in order for it to change and for the story to begin. Your world should be a living breathing entity.

Indicate the Theme: This is the root of your screenplay, it’s what you’re writing about and your reason. This is a launching point for your writing.

Common Themes:

Good vs. Evil

Love Conquers All

Triumph Over Adversity

Individual vs. Society

The Battle

Death is Part of Life

Revenge

Loss of Innocence

Person vs. Themselves

Person vs. Nature

This is more about how the story is told and not the actual theming behind it, but it drives the element.

3 Key Points:

Why do we want to tell this story?

Guiding factors and questions behind the theme.

Exploration of the characters is crucial to the theme.

In the script you’ll find a conflict within the character--theme and conflict are linked.

Screenwriters can show them through their characters in a number of ways.

The theme always springs from the characters' main goals.

NOTE: Each script had to be about something to tackle some great human struggle regardless of what genre it is

Set Up the Dramatic Situation: By the tenth page, your consumer should know what your story is truly about and where it will go from there. They should understand what the story's genre, world, character, and theme are.

On page ten, your main character's world should flip its head. There should be an inciting incident that unfolds (the main complication or problem) This should push your character out of the status quo.

An immediate source of conflict should make your protagonist want to take action. You want to make that transition from a want/need to a desire and soon satisfy that said desire.

NOTE: Inciting incidents should appear around the ten percent mark--around the 10th page.

Project Details: Here is some writing exercise to help you know and flush out your ten pages. Write one to three loglines before writing your ten pages, This gives a brief summary of what your screenplay is all about.

This can help with feedback and help you out with your screenplay. Loglines can help with the first ten pages when you do begin to write them. Also, make sure you give yourself feedback as well. This can help with your own project overall.

Loglines Should Get Across:

The Protagonist: use a description rather than a name, but using one is necessary.

The Goal of the Protagonist: a second act turning point, the status quo to goal.

The Antagonist or Obstacle: how are they stopping the protagonist?

Loglines should show those three pieces and they can show your theme as well.

Example: When [inciding incident] occurs a [your protatonist] must [objective] or else [the stake]

After writing your logline and understanding it, you should be able to continue writing your first ten pages.

Outlining Your Script: The biggest rule to any storytelling, but especially with screenwriting, is to never write without a plan. Depending on what kind of writer you are, have a system to help to outline as it can help the flow of your writing process.

Some writers will outline everything while some will just pinpoint the main scenes. Find a way to outline that works for you, but always plan ahead.

Make a habit of writing ideas down, whether that’s action or dialogue, even if you don’t end up using it, you might come back to it to further projects.

Using Dan Harmon’s story circle is a great way to visualize and get a general idea of what your overall story might look like.

Story Breakdown:

Act One, Sequence One: Status Quo and Inciting Incident (what we’re looking for in those ten pages)

Sequence Two: Predicament and Lock-in

Sequence Three: Obstacle and Raising the Stakes

Act Two, Sequence Four: First Culmination and the Mid-point.

Sequence Five: Subplot and Rasing Action

Sequence Six: Main Culmination and the end of Act Two

Act Three, Sequence Seven: New Tention and a Twist

Sequence Eight: The Resolution (the ending)

Five Major Plot Points:

Inciting Incident

Lock-in

First Culmination

Main Culmination

Third Act Twist

Outline either the eight sequences or just your five major plot points. Writing these things down will make the writing process so much easier.

Formatting Your Script: I don’t want to get too personal here, but I really dislike manually formatting in the screenplay format. For me, it takes away time that I can be used to actually write, however, it is important to know and understand how to format manually, especially if you don’t have a program to help with that aspect yet.

Font: Courier New

Size: 14

Songlines: Around 1.5 inches

Dialogue: 3 tabs

Names: 5 tabs

Indents Dialogue Around 5.5

Cuts/Fades Ins: On the Right Side

Programs like Final Draft are extremely helpful, but if you can’t afford Final Draft, here are some alternative screenwriting programs;

Beat (Mac IOS) - Free (I personally use this for my scripts)

Arc Studio - Free, Paid Plan (70-100 dollars a year)

Trelby (Windows) - Free

WriterDuet - Free (Only 3 Scripts), Paid Plan

Highland 2 (Mac IOS) - Free

There are other programs out there, find one that works best for you and your writing style.

Good Writing Habits: Try things out and ask yourself what works and what doesn’t. Most writers have a driving reason to write. So ask yourself; what's your reason?

The best thing you can do is learn your craft, understanding how to write things you might be unsure about. Ask questions and ask for feedback. Being a part of writers' communities can be such a helpful tool as well.

Read other people's work, and see what works and what doesn't. Get inspired by others' work and try to channel that into your own writing.

You want to try and write regularly. Set goals for yourself and get those goals done.

Giving and Receiving Feedback: Feedback should never be overlooked especially from other screenwriters. Bad takeaways are always good to give a new perspective you might have seen beforehand.

Feedback isn’t meant as a personal attack.

Not every piece of feedback is valid in your situation. Pick and choose what make scents to you and your situation--but don’t disregard it. Not everyone will completely understand your story, genre, or them, however, if you notice many people not understanding, ask yourself what can be fixed and or changed.

As a writer, you put a lot of love into your work and feedback might not feel good but it’s important to always treat your consumers and comments with respect--they are usually wanting to help you and your story.

Lastly, respond to the feedback. Have a conversation about your work so you can improve it.

~Vocabulary~

Screenwriting: the activity or process of writing screenplays.

Screenplay: the script of a movie, including acting instructions and scene directions.

Crucial: of great importance.

Agent: a person who acts on behalf of another person or group.

Audition: an interview for a particular role or job as a singer, actor, dancer, or musician, consisting of a practical demonstration of the candidate's suitability and skill.

Produce: make (something) using creative or mental skills.

Genre: a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.

Status Quo: the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues.

Indicate: suggest as a desirable or necessary course of action OR point out; show.

Theme: the subject of a talk, a piece of writing, a person's thoughts, or an exhibition; a topic.

Convention: a way in which something is usually done, especially within a particular area or activity.

Obstacles: a thing that blocks one's way or prevents or hinders progress.

Empathetic: showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Sympathetic: (of a person) attracting the liking of others.

Plight: a dangerous, difficult, or otherwise unfortunate situation.

Culture: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social groups.

Demographic: relating to the structure of populations.

Entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence.

Element: a part or aspect of something abstract, especially one that is essential or characteristic.

Inciting Incident: the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative.

Immediate: nearest in time, relationship, or rank.

Transition: the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another.

Loglines: a brief summary of a television program, film, or book that states the central conflict of the story.

Outline: a general description or plan giving the essential features of something but not the detail.

Predicament: a difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation.

Lock-in: an arrangement according to which a person or company is obliged to deal only with a specific company.

Culmination: the highest or climactic point of something, especially as attained after a long time.

Mid-point: a point somewhere in the middle.

Communities: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.

Channel: emulate or seem to be inspired by.

Valid: (of an argument or point) having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.

Disregard: pay no attention to; ignore.

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chivemouth0 · 2 years

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The Very Best Horror Films of All Time

You've probably become aware of the genre, but what are the best scary films? Here are five movies that have influenced scary films. Psycho, The Important Things, Genetic, Alien, and Anguish are among the best. You may want to check them out if you haven't. If you're new to scary films, you might be curious about the history and category of these films. There are numerous terrific horror movies that you might find yourself getting lost in the category! Psycho A psycho horror film is one that challenges the audience's capability to compare fact and fiction. These movies frequently include supernatural and fear-inducing creatures, totalitarian authorities, and puppets with working minds. In a lot of cases, the motion picture's ending is unanticipated, and the audience might find it difficult to understand the storyline. However, mental horror movies can also check out crucial social problems. Here are some examples of psycho scary movies: The very first Psycho film, from 1959, is based upon the unique by Robert Bloch. The novel portrays the perverted and twisted side of the man next door. This makes Norman Bates among the 10 most popular psychopaths in film history. The film also motivated a series of follows up. While there are some creepy minutes in Psycho, none are particularly unforgettable. One scene, in particular, is a traditional in horror cinema, but there are some areas of the movie that deserve further study. Another key scene in Psycho is the iconic shower scene. This series translates the anxiety a viewer feels at a violent disruption into cinematic language. As such, it is necessary to note that Hitchcock uses ninety breaks in 45 seconds to produce a scene that is both eerie and frightening. This subversion of visual grammar, along with its narrative implications, is maybe Psycho's crucial contribution to movie theater. Its influence on cinema is undeniable. The Thing The Thing is an extraterrestrial shapeshifter. In this 2011 horror film, the titular animal can take the kind of human beings and other animals. In fact, the title translates to "shapeshifter." It is the sort of monster you might expect from a movie based upon the initial book. In this motion picture, John Carpenter weaves traditional themes from both genres into one frightening story. The important things is an excellent example of a monster from scary movie history. The Thing is among Carpenter's earliest films, and was made before CGI was common. Hawks and Nyby's initial movie was an early example of this type of cinematography, and it was only with the release of home video and cable tv that the film was valued for what it was. This film embodies the terrifying forces of nature and is a satire of modern society. The important things's presence exhibits the existential fear of guy and mankind, but it does not always make its intentions clear. It's a complex, unknowable entity that can destroy humankind if it selects to. The important things's dark score by Ennio Morricone is another reason that this film stays among the best-known scary films. Regardless of the absence of female characters, the cast of The important things is rather interesting and includes an extreme realism to each efficiency. And despite the fact that the film's ending was controversial, it still stays an excellent horror film. It's one of the few that does not include a female protagonist. Genetic Genetic is a painful brand-new scary motion picture that builds on the scary films of the past while crossing a number of lines. It draws motivation from classic scary films and current flicks like Poltergeist, however its director, Ari Aster, does not lose time citing his impacts. Instead, he digs into the eerie information and draws back the cam to provide a cathedral-like image. The movie opens with a destructive disaster: the death of Annie's precious matriarch. Annie's regret over the loss of her mom is deep. stream attempts to get in touch with the dead, but to no avail. She then participates in a desperate seance with the ghost of Ann Dowd, a strange, psychopathic lady who is obsessed with the family. As the harrowing nightmare unfolds, Annie's mind is consumed by regret and misery. Genetic is among the most troubling scary motion pictures of current years. Regardless of its absence of dive frightens, it handles to preserve a scary environment throughout. While the movie might contain a few scenes of gore, its storyline is really intricate and weird. You'll feel totally awful throughout the movie. Nevertheless, you'll also take pleasure in the movie's remarkably uplifting ending. Alien Nearly everyone has their favorite categories, and Alien is no exception. This 1979 sci-fi film combines both science fiction and scary to develop a twisted, unnerving experience. The film starred Sigourney Weaver, who was then just 29 years old, and Tom Skerritt, who played Captain Dallas. The film also stars John Hurt and Ian Holm. John Hurt was 39 years old when he starred in the movie. The Xenomorph, an arachnid-like area creature, was influenced by human worries of being ripped apart and immolated. In spite of the film being embeded in area, the aliens mimic the imagery of wasps, which lay their eggs in their victim and erupt as soon as they have gestated. In fact, the very first Alien victim is male, which plays on masculine fears of rape. The aliens' presence also indicates undesirable pregnancy in females. When it comes to the follows up to Alien, The Thing and Signs share the very same underlying storyline. Both films feature ensemble casts and a lovecraftian scary setting. While the film is a bit similar to the initial film, it's much darker. Both films include Scarlett Johansson as an alien, and both movies have disturbing scenes. If you're trying to find a new horror film, make certain to have a look at these five movies. The Birds A real-life event is the inspiration for the Birds scary movie. In 1961, a toxic substance in anchovies and squid poisoned thousands of seagulls, consisting of lots of that assaulted humans. In this motion picture, a real-life occurrence shows the effectiveness of The Birds' contaminant. However how do the birds eliminate individuals? Whether the birds are eliminated by their own claws or by pecking at people's windows or doors, the bird attacks are enough to send shivers down any viewer's spinal column. In The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock explains a similar event in Monterey Bay as the inspiration for the movie. Seabirds were wrecked by a toxin caused by algae in their diet plans, triggering them to lose their memory, suffer seizures, and crash into houses. The humans were surprised because these birds were a threat and they were causing harm to individuals and animals. They were at risk of extinction, and the movie uses this truth as a plot hook. A real-life incident inspired the Birds film. The Birds is loosely based on a narrative by Daphne du Maurier released in 1952. The movie has actually affected numerous disaster movies based upon "vengeance of nature" catastrophes. In the film, Melanie Daniels, a young San Francisco socialite, follows a lawyer named Mitch Brenner to Bodega Bay. She fulfills Brenner in the bird store, however before she can return house she is attacked by a seagull. Hitchcock's Psycho Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is one of his most popular movies It's based upon a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, and is one of the most thrilling thrillers of perpetuity. Alfred Hitchcock meant ball game to be jazzy, but rather recruited a string orchestra, and the outcome was among the greatest film ratings in history. The movie's renowned piece of music, "The Murder," has actually ended up being a classic piece of movie music, as does the broad psychology of murder and the Oedipus complex. Hitchcock's film had a complicated production history. Although Paramount executives initially balked at the film's subject, they backed the director's vision and funded the movie with his own money, and eventually consented to disperse the movie for a portion of its gross. While Hitchcock had actually been disappointed by the results, the movie turned into one of Hitchcock's most popular films, and he is credited with rewriting cinematic history. While Psycho was a commercial success, it also broke much of Hollywood's guidelines. Hitchcock flouted the Production Code, which forbade nudity, sex, or violence on the screen. For example, the "shower scene" is one example of this censor-defying. The filmmaker never ever shows a knife cutting flesh, and rather utilizes liberal dosages of thriller, shrieking violins, and other non-traditional techniques. Slasher movies. Slasher films have a rich history, dating back to the '50s. These films include photogenic young adults or teens who are cut off from civilization and aid. These movies usually start with a female victim's ruthless murder, and end with a female survivor. The film category has likewise been influenced by other categories, consisting of giallo movies, which became popular in the '60s. The slasher subgenre of horror movies is anchored by a few notable examples. The most popular one is Prom Night (1980 ), which stars Jamie Lee Curtis. While this film treads the ground of cliches much better than others, it still uses adequate character advancement and decent chase and death series. The movie was met with high expectations when it initially came out, and a lot of critics considered it a frustration. The appeal of slasher movies has actually waned throughout the years, and filmmakers are now looking for new methods to frighten audiences. Critics of these films have argued that they rely too greatly on gore, nudity, and graphic violence. Filmmakers have actually come to realize that a good scary film must not be overly graphic. This is why the structure of the movie is vital, and structure thriller and stress is important to an excellent scary movie.

#night of the living dead #watch night of the living dead #stream night of the living dead #night of the living dead movie #watch night of the living dead movie #stream night of the living dead movie

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fullscoreshenanigans · 2 years

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The first half of S1e05, which covers chapters 13 and 14 of the manga, is one of the most prominent sequences where many people feel the removal of flashbacks and internal monologues hit the hardest in the series, and I can’t say I disagree with them. Jairus Taylor of ANN contends this decision doomed all future seasons even if TPN Committee’s decision to cut their losses on the IP and drastically truncate the rest of the adaption hadn’t occurred:

The anime's approach to the Grace Field arc is chock full of tension, with clever camera angles to create the idea that the kids are constantly being watched. Moments of almost complete silence give an extra sense of dread, and the twisted fairy tale aesthetic series artist Posuka Demizu gave the manga was swapped for photorealistic backgrounds that make the area of the Grace Field House look significantly more real and grounded. In keeping with that focus on realism, Kanbe even stated in an interview that he intentionally cut down on nearly all of the monologuing from the manga in order to create a bigger feeling of suspense, and to keep the intentions of characters like Isabella and Krone shrouded in mystery. While this approach had its shortcomings, (changing most of Krone's internal monologues into her talking to a creepy doll just made her look unhinged rather than smart, and amplified her already yikes design even further) it made for a pretty solid season of television that was compelling enough to leave the audience curious where the story would be headed next.

The problem here though is that TPN was never really a mystery thriller in the way its earliest chapters suggested. It's a horror fantasy, and one that leans a little closer towards being a more linear version of Hunter x Hunter than the second coming of Death Note. In a similar vein to how Yoshihiro Togashi shifts the tone and genre of Hunter x Hunter with any given arc, The Promised Neverland also effectively changed genres to better support the needs of the narrative. The mystery thriller elements were vital to the Grace Field arc and filling in the blanks on the main trio's lack of information about the outside world; as that world expanded and the scope of the story grew more complex, Shirai tossed most of the mystery elements out the window. Instead, the post-Grace Field story shifts towards more literal strategic battles (with guns) and an ever-deepening dive into more fantastical elements, which range from the kids having to stave off sentient trees to Emma and Ray navigating a time-space cube in order to bargain with an Elder God that also doubles as a maniacal wish genie.

It's not exactly hard to see how a lot of that clashes with the relatively grounded tone of the anime. That grounded approach worked well enough with the needs of the Grace Field arc, but it resulted in an anime adaption that was ill-equipped to handle the story beyond the orphanage. The anime did a pretty good job delivering on suspense, but turning that into its main focus came at the expense of other elements that were vital to TPN's larger ambitions.

Aside from the aforementioned changes to the visual aesthetic of the series, a lot of the worldbuilding elements that helped to set up those later arcs took a pretty big hit. Some were cut out entirely, while others trimmed down so much that they feel more like exposition rather than explicit foreshadowing or major turning points in the story. Having all of the internal monologues cut had the unfortunate side effect of diminishing the characterization of figures like Isabella and Krone, whose motivations and deference to the sacrificial nature of the farm system is more directly contrasted to whether or not Emma will make a similar choice in abandoning the other kids. The fracture mother-daughter relationship between Emma and Isabella in particular (which Shirai stated as his reason for wanting the series to have a female protagonist in the first place) is given emotional context in the manga that is otherwise lost.

While we do have three other scenes of a younger Ray in episodes 1, 10, and 12, the flashback presented in chapter 14 that isn’t adapted visually is the first one that’s being relayed from one character to another with the intention of manipulation and misdirection of both the character and the audience. Ray feigns an air of nonchalance and indifference during his first retelling of his meeting with Isabella by the wall, keeping as much emotion out of it as possible as he frames it strictly as a business deal,

though subsequent recountings of the meeting we’re privy to confirm how devastating it was for him to have his suspicions confirmed. By doing so, he’s purposefully trying to push Norman’s buttons to simultaneously get him to agree to his plan of tricking Emma into leaving with just the five of them (really four) and really start pushing them away emotionally so that when he commits suicide, it hopefully won’t hurt them as much (this fails spectacularly, but A for effort lol). By portraying him with this level of detachment, it makes the audience second guess his true level of emotional investment in the trio’s relationship: is he prioritizing Emma and Norman’s lives out of true friendship and love, or is it because they have the best chances of helping him survive outside the walls?

Other visual evidence is presented to support the former. In chapter 13, Norman notes how “it wouldn’t have been hard to fool Conny” into parting with Little Bunny:

The wording here could be taken subconsciously to mean this was a malicious and potentially misanthropic act of subterfuge, especially since we don’t have the additional nod to his guilt over doing nothing to save her from her intended fate in chapter 19 when we see her smiling face in this single panel, along with the note to Isabella relaying the false location of the rope (another thing the anime doesn’t particularly convey well since it seems like Ray is apologizing just for lying and yelling at Don and Gilda. He is sorry about that, yes, but he’s also remorseful for doing nothing for his late siblings and how ready he was to turn Norman against Don because he wouldn’t be dealing with the suffering caused by that fallout.)

But we don’t see an overtly malevolent Ray sneakily hiding Little Bunny away as a distraught Conny sobs that she’ll have to leave the house without her beloved stuffed animal. We don’t see what Ray says to her, if anything, to prompt her to hand over Little Bunny, but she does so willingly and with a smile on her face after her older brother has gently patted them both, though he later states that he “tricked Conny, who didn’t know better.” More language steeped in negative connotations to corroborate how Norman described the act earlier so he’ll, hopefully, continue to think distastefully of Ray and be more willingly to abandon him later on. (It helps that it comes naturally from all the guilt that’s been fermenting within him over the years.) The anime omits this in favor of emphasizing Ray’s declaration that everything he’s done was to prepare for the escape they’re planning, choosing to have Norman focus on Ray specifically indicating all of this was just to make sure he and Emma don’t die during his revelation rather than him going over each point Ray told him, weighing his options, and aspiring to be more like Emma, the lattermost being the most lamentable loss.

This is when “Existence of an Insider” begins to play.

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It’s mix of sorrowful strings, distorted cracklings, and techno beats intermingling to embody the conflict of sorting out just where Ray’s loyalties lie and what his existence as the insider means as dialogue ceases for an entire minute with only the sound effects to accompany the tune.

I’m not going to deny that while I enjoy this sequence, I also find it disproportionally comical, like a lot of the scenes in this series, largely because when I step back from the narrative that has thoroughly pulled me in, I’m reminded that all of this would be occurring between two eleven-year-old boys with no musical accompaniment and can essentially be summarized as Ray coming out of that exchange thinking he’s the hottest shit, slowly comprehending exactly what he said to a born genius, and then finally realizing everything he gave away with just a single sentence.

On top of the world to "shitshitshit FUCK I fucked up. I fucked up so fucking bad" in the span of seventeen seconds. Absolutely amazing, and yet while this presentation is amusing on a meta level, in-universe it never undermines the seriousness of the events playing out onscreen.

Meanwhile, Norman reaching the same conclusion is one of humbling, relief, and grief. Since Krone first arrived at the house, he suspected Ray was the traitor. He hated himself for it, but that didn’t change the conclusion he drew, and he spent two weeks stewing around in those negative, vindictive thoughts. This is the only time I believe Norman ever truly hated Ray as a person. His being aloof and withdrawn might have been annoying and frustrating when they were younger, but he still accepted Ray as he was and didn’t hate him. This development, however, was infuriating. Norman would have been willing to sacrifice Ray, like Ray tells him he should have done, if he hadn’t talked to Emma in the flashback from the manga that instead plays out chronologically here. It isn’t stated by him directly how he aspires to be like her, but it does cause him to pause, reevaluate, and take a step back from adhering to his more rigid sense of morality.

And then he realizes Ray’s true motivation and is humbled even further. In the final seconds of the song, the distorted crackling cuts out, and we’re left with the last rueful notes of the string instrument as the camera zooms in on a single child’s drawing, one that we know is Eugene’s based on the chapter 31 extra of the Grace Field House art gallery:

Eugene is a background character, they couldn’t even afford to give him eyes, so him being the artist of this drawing is ultimately inconsequential to the larger narrative, but I still have to applaud Mamoru Kanbe for pulling this out of the source material to more naturally and subtly symbolize this conclusion as opposed to using an actual doodle of the trio that we see in the chapter 37 cover art:

It looks like it’s from Yvette’s sketchbook based on the unplucked fringes, yet based on the skill she displays in the art gallery extra, it doesn’t seem like she was the one to draw it. (As a sidenote, how precious is it that the trio’s bond is so strong even the youngest of the children of art-producing age can pick up on it and want to draw it, as well as how heartbreaking it is that their separation will be so profoundly felt throughout the entire house).

There wouldn’t be a way to naturally incorporate that into the scene, and it would be even more on the nose, so the creative staff poured through the material they had available to them at the time of production and incorporated the gallery a second time in addition to the original chilling confrontation between Emma and Isabella in episode 2. A good use of resources to convey to the viewer the same affirmation Ray had given to Norman: whatever his machinations might entail, his motivation has always, always been his two most precious friends.

There’s relief in that realization: Ray isn’t out to maliciously harm them, but there’s also grief in how Ray doesn’t see himself as worth saving. A very humbling experience when just a few hours ago Norman had been so willing to throw Ray away like he wanted.

While Ray never blatantly states his intentions like he does in the final page of chapter 14:

I would argue that a similar telegraphing to this scene is presented in the opening page of the chapter thanks to the simple, subtle, and masterful layout:

Reading from right to left and top to bottom, the very first image we see is of the trio at the gate. There are some smaller text bubbles of dialogue between the trio at the time, but the largest one on the page is a repeat of the one we left off with at the end of chapter 13. Finally, we end on a resolved Ray in the bottom right corner who will do everything within his capabilities to ensure those two will make it past the wall, even if it means hurting the one who sits before him by pushing him away. An excellent central, diagonal main flow to open with.

In light of all this, is the anime’s handling of these chapters the inferior way to experience them? I would say it depends on what you prioritize when experiencing a work. Is it a worthwhile way to experience? For me, I can genuinely say yes thanks to the alterations the production staff chose, even if those choice would not have carried over well to the rest of the narrative. They kept me so thoroughly engaged with the story I binged it all in a single day and subsequently prompted me to continue on and finish the manga over the course of the next three. I haven’t had that kind of drive for a new media property in a while, so it was appreciated.

Also as a bonus, the Grace Field House daily schedule featured in chapter 17 is also included in this scene:

As well as downstairs in the dining hall:

Obviously we don’t have as richly detailed of an interior as what Demizu provides us in the manga, and yet I repeatedly come back to season 1 and marvel at all the care and little subtleties it has while utilizing the advantages of the medium it’s been transferred to.

#The Promised Neverland #Yakusoku no Neverland #TPN #YnN #Full Score Trio #TPN Ray #TPN Norman #YnN Ray #YnN Norman #TPN S1 #TPN S1e05 #Escape Arc #Norman #Ray #Eugene #TPN 013 #TPN 014 #Long Post #Read More #FSS Chatter #this article was the first piece that made me comfortable with a hypothetical TPN: Siblinghood remake #I've seen the idea tossed around multiple times‚ but it always made me sad thinking of how S1 would be redone #because I consider it a masterpiece even with its flaws #but having it presented like this made me more optimistic about it #though it still kills me thinking about how this hypothetical remake would most likely have a new score and new VAs due to copyright #probably selfish of me to want the original to still evoke the same feelings it did in me in subsequent generations #when new generations are entitled to their own unique media and media experiences #and yet I still find myself being sentimental over it because I hadn’t taken to a newer IP so strongly in a while #there was a lot of love and care put into it I hate to think of it being forgotten and labelled as irrelevant like I see with FM@03

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thesolferino · 3 years

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⤷ note: apologies for losing your request, anon, but thank you for requesting! this is my first time writing a full fic in second person, so bear with me, and i hope this is what you were looking for <3

The Great American Bake Off

pairing: corpse husband x gn!reader

word count: 3.6k

genre: fluff

summary: you’ve been jealous of rae and her closeness with your boyfriend since the dawn of time, but things change and friendships are made once she comes over for one hell of a cooking video.

Corpse, among many other things, was a man many wished to have.

It’s the truth; even if he didn’t have a YouTube channel through which millions kept up with everything from horror stories to Among Us gameplays, people would still turn heads and whisper whenever he spoke - that attention more than multiplied when he started blowing up and his social media presence grew.

With growth come numbers, and there are always people behind said numbers. Through them, Corpse makes wonderful friends - through them, you had met him, too. All the way back, during his horror narration days, you had grown to like him - really, who wouldn’t?

A DM you once sent after a few drinks, when you claimed to your friends you’d get the “deep-voiced man of your dreams” you often talked about and they, in turn, challenged you to message him, was nothing short of a joke and the idea of him responding was merely a pipe dream. What you hadn’t expected, however, was a response, which wrecked your brain at noon the next day, where your head throbbed with embarrassment, guilt, pride, happiness, a melt of hatred and gratefulness for your friends, panic and the remains of alcohol that tugged at every part of your skull.

It had turned out to be more than a great idea, though, because for the next few weeks you were constantly talking. You learned so much more than he let on in videos, and during late night calls you found out everything from his favorite clothing brand to his favorite color to his thoughts about his own mortality and then back to his favorite cereal. Audio calls and short voice messages turned into hours long FaceTimes that led you from friends to something more. And after a year or so of dating, you packed your bags and made it to sunny San Diego, ready to lay in his arms and sweat bullets.

Safe to say Corpse’s social media presence had its good sides. However, with all good things come bad things too, and you weren’t sure if the bad things were bad at all or you were simply too jealous.

Corpse made wonderful friends thanks to his YouTube channel. He met people he could confide in, meet, people he could talk to about his worst problems, people who would listen - he met people he could have fun with, with who he could forget all about the real world and his own issues, and simply laugh his heart away, play games until the late hours of the night.

If he had to name his closest ones, they would have to be Dave, Loey, maybe Mykie, possibly Jack, and Rae. And that is exactly where the root of the problem stood.

Rae is beautiful, and everyone who denies it must be either dumb or blind. She’s drop dead gorgeous, and funny, and kind, and smart, in a way that made you want to rip your hair out. You wanted to hate her so bad, because the jealousy ate away at you like a damn disease, but you couldn’t, because she was perfect Rae, and as much as you hated the fact she seemed to be perfect inside out, you just couldn’t hate her as her. It was impossible, you concluded.

You convinced yourself you weren’t jealous every time you heard him yelling or laughing at her from his office room - or at least you attempted to do so. Your lunch would turn sour and end up forgotten because you’d be way too focused on listening in on what he was doing and trying to make out what she was saying to even eat at the same pace you previously were. Jealousy ate away at you, no matter if you admitted it to yourself or not.

It didn’t go unnoticed by Corpse, of course. On one late night when you couldn’t sleep and neither could he, as per usual, you turned on a random comedy that you half-heartedly paid attention to, his fingers combing through the knots in your hair peacefully and the slow pace of the movie lulling you to sleep slowly. That is, before his phone rang and lit the mostly dark room. You managed to sneak a glance at the notification before he had, and the familiar bitterness seeped between your ribs as always upon seeing the name displayed at the top of the message, more than awake now.

You visibly stiffened when he laughed at the message and typed something back, shifting your head in his lap as some subconscious attempt at getting him to pay attention to you instead. He put his phone down and you huffed, eyes locked on the TV screen as you pretended to be extremely absorbed in the movie even though you weren’t quite sure of the difference between the protagonist and antagonist anymore. His hands didn’t return to your hair, and that somehow made you even more annoyed.

“What’s up?” Corpse quietly spoke up, barely over the volume over the already quiet movie.

“Nothing.” You said, quicker than you wanted to, and you bit your tongue in cringe when you realised it was an awful lie. Corpse seemed to think the same.

“That’s bullshit. Seriously, what’s wrong?” He asked, and was met with pure silence. In reality, you were hoping he’d simply never realise you were somewhat jealous, because you knew you were being stupid and unreasonable, but you couldn’t help wanting him all to yourself. Admitting it out loud made it so much more real, and so much more embarrassing that you would rather bury yourself alive than admit to being jealous of Rae, of all people.

After a few seconds of silence, save the laughter of characters on screen, he spoke again.

“Are you jealous?” The hint of a teasing tone in his voice made you want to rip your hair out of your skull. Was it really that damn hard to believe that yes, you were jealous of an extremely close friend of his? Was it a crime?

The clenching of your jaw seemed to give Corpse enough of a response, and his hands returned to running themselves through your hair as he giggled to himself.

“What’s so damn funny?” You borderline spat, causing his movements to halt for a second before continuing with even louder laughter.

“I don’t know, just the idea of you being jealous of Rae is so funny. I’ve noticed the way you roll your eyes whenever I text her in front of you. You’re not exactly sneaky, you know?” His words made blood rush straight to your face, cheeks heating up in embarrassment. How long has he known this for?

“Sorry. I don’t…” you exhaled and attempted to smile. “I don’t know what’s up with me. I’m so jealous nowadays. I don’t even know why.”

“There’s enough of me to share with everyone, no worries baby.” he replied, teasing tone still yet to dissipate as you slap his knee in mock offense and he starts wheezing.

“Absolutely not! Fucking excuse you, I’m not sharing with anyone!” you gaped at him as he kept laughing.

That was the end of it - or at least Corpse thought so. Needless to say, he was wrong.

Your mood would instantly turn sour whenever he’d laugh at one of her messages, and you attempted to push down every eye roll whenever he’d sit on his phone, between your legs, back turned to you so you could see everything, and open Rae’s DMs again. Sometimes you managed, sometimes you couldn’t help it, but you did your best to do it whenever he wasn’t looking. Because you truly knew you were being unreasonable, especially whenever you have to relay situations like how he had to postpone a date one time because Rae asked him to play Rust for a bit longer and you almost ripped all your hair out of your skull in frustration back to your best friend who just turned Rae and Corpse into the villains in the situation because that’s what best friends are supposed to do.

Not like he was going out of his way to talk to her a concerning amount, they mostly talked in groupchats and on streams and that was only a few times weekly, but it did absolutely nothing to calm the green monster growing stronger in you every day, fed by every laugh she got out of him.

The green monster fucking loved it when Corpse excitedly announced to you that he’s finally meeting his friends for the first time, and by friends meaning Rae, Sykkuno and Karl. You, however… were far from impressed.

He paced around the room in excitement, a mix of obvious anxiety and joy evident on his face, and he fiddled with the strings of his hoodie with shaky hands as he very proudly announced that he would be the second tallest person in the room through a blinding, pearly grin, and seeing him so electrified couldn’t help but make you shut your jealous thoughts up, even if just for a little bit, and mirror his grin back to him.

What did, however, make you as anxious as him was when he announced they’d a) be coming to your shared apartment and b) making a cooking video - it sent you into a panicked mom mode as you dusted every corner of every room and vacuumed everything from the kitchen to the balcony and Corpse did nothing but record you as you anxiously rambled and laugh at you from his place on your bed.

When the dreaded Saturday finally came, and the first person to arrive, Sykkuno, rang your doorbell, you squeezed Corpse’s hand to stop him from nervously toying with his rings and opened the door, and you greeted the man like he was your own brother and not a person you’d seen probably a total of three times through the computer screen and someone who’s seen you maybe two times, from the pictures Corpse sent him, in your best attempt to make both of them more comfortable. It actually kind of worked - turns out Sykkuno is a pretty affectionate guy, too, and a conversation started as soon as he stepped in. Corpse gave you a look when you pulled away from Sykkuno’s half-hug, and you almost laughed out loud at the irony when his phone lit up with a notification from Rae announcing she was almost there at that exact moment.

She had kept true to her word; ten minutes or so later, another ring was heard and you gestured to Corpse to open it this time as you gave Sykkuno his cup of water and resisted any and every urge to roll your eyes or do something otherwise bitchy and stupid. Corpse did as told, and you watched them hug and listened to Rae squeal in excitement through the open door of the living room and decided to plaster a smile on your face for as long as you could muster before you remove yourself from the situation when they start filming.

Unfortunately for you, the first person she locked eyes with was exactly you, and they lit up an even prettier brown (if that was even possible) as she beelined to you and you barely got a greeting out before she engulfed you in a large hug, arms wrapping around your neck as she swayed both of you side to side.

“Oh my God, you must be Y/N! I’ve heard so much about you, it’s so nice to finally meet you!” Rae cheered into your ear before she finally pulled back, before shooting an infectious grin at you that you couldn’t help but return back.

“All good things, I hope.” you chuckled as she moved to greeting Sykkuno, and nodded her head with an enthusiastic giggle of her own. You eyed Corpse for a second who simply leaned against the door frame, watching the whole thing unfold with somewhat of a proud smile on his face, before Rae turned back to you and your attention was on her again.

“Of course! Corpse is very much a simp for you, you know that?” She said and both you and Corpse laughed, especially him, who nodded his head in agreement as she sat back down, still beaming at you.

“Well, I’m happy to hear that.” you respond before turning back to Corpse. “Where’s Karl at?”

“He’ll be here in half an hour or so, he only landed recently.” he said. You nodded and moved to sit on a nearby chair to leave space for the guests on the couch.

Karl ended up arriving in twenty minutes and apprised everyone of the information that “his taxi driver is a psycho that, apparently, doesn’t fear stop signs or the police” before setting up the camera in your kitchen and tried his best to attach lapel mics on everybody (admittedly, it took way longer than it should’ve, but he eventually managed and that counted as a win in his book). You reluctantly agreed to be the judge of the finished product when they’re done cooking, and Karl was there for the purposes of being a cameraman and making jokes off screen so he agreed too, albeit way more enthusiastically than you.

The two of you sat behind the camera as the three of them lined up, Corpse wearing a mask and his signature eyepatch (that he didn’t really need, but those two did their job in preserving his privacy) and introduced what they were doing. Corpse was obviously very anxious, hands fidgeting constantly and shivering like a dog after a bath despite the hoodie he was wearing in 100 degree weather because of the shower of sweat that was now drying on his body, and that was partly why you were there, supportive smiles, encouraging cheers and all.

They were making Mexican ground beef tacos, and despite knowing Corpse can barely make a sandwich without setting at least two dishes on fire, you still cheered him on proudly and repeated he was part Mexican himself roughly 5 times a minute, claiming he was going to kill it.

“Kill it? More like kill one of us- CORPSE watch what you’re doing with that fucking knife! You’re proving my point!” Rae yelled at him as he giggled in delight, watching the woman gape at him in pure horror and Sykkuno watch his movements completely entranced as he played with the knife in his hands.

“You’re just mad that he’s going to make tacos fifty times better than you.” you said to Rae, chewing down on some M&Ms that Karl and you shared (both of you decided on a genius plan - you’re going to eat the whole bag before they’re done with cooking so you can claim you’re full and therefore can’t eat the atrocity that will most likely be the tacos).

“Don’t gas me up like that, Y/N, you are well aware I’m shit at cooking. Expect absolutely nothing from me.” he replied over the sizzling of the meat on the pan, throwing a whole spoonful of chili powder into it, earning loud yelling and scolding from your side and loud laughter from Rae.

“HALF A TEASPOON! Half a teaspoon, how have you not remembered this already?! We’ve made tacos a million times now, oh my God, you’re actually stupid.” you yelled at him, arms flailing in the direction of the seasoning to emphasise your ‘half a teaspoon’ point as Rae doubled over in laughter and Sykkuno looked into the pan with a concerned and somewhat afraid look. Just as he peeked in, the overwhelming smell of chili powder started biting away at his eyes, and he jumped away with a yelp.

“Jesus, Corpse!” he exclaimed, rubbing his eyes with his forearm as the whole room burst into laughter and Corpse suspiciously inspected his beef.

“What were you saying about your ‘Mexican king’, Y/N?” Rae asked, pulling out a few tortillas and putting them on the table. You huffed, grabbing another handful of M&Ms.

“Giving him up to God. He’s the only one who can help, at this point.” you said. She giggled in response and Corpse let out some sort of protesting sound and waved his knife around in complaint. “I don’t know who this man is. He broke into my kitchen and now I’m here.”

“Hey, I pay half of your rent!” he said, and you were about to reply but Rae dropped her meat into a pan full of overheated oil, and a loud hiss and some sort of a scream overtook the room as a cloud of steam shot into the air and she frantically looked around for the wooden spoon so the meat wouldn’t stick to the pan. You simply sat and laughed, eating the candy like it was popcorn and you were watching a shitty cooking show - it wasn’t that far from reality, really.

“Um, I just realised I don’t make many tacos, actually.” she said as she helplessly stirred the meat, turning to you with pleading eyes. “What seasoning even goes into this? Y/N, will you help me? Let’s team up against Corpse!”

You tilted your head in thought, but before you could even speak, Corpse spoke up.

“That’s not fucking fair, that’s-that’s against the rules.” he turned to you. “You won’t betray me, right?”

You laughed at him, adjusting in your seat. “I gave up on you ever since you added, like, 3 kilos of seasoning into the meat for no reason.” then you turned to Rae. “Sure, let’s do it, babe.”

Their loud yelling immediately started mixing, Rae’s cheers contrasting Corpse’s protesting. She stuck her tongue out at him meanwhile Corpse shot her the middle finger, and she turned back to you with a grin.

“Alright, what do I put in?”

Roughly twenty unnecessary and extremely long minutes later, the tacos were done, two each for each of them. Rae’s looked the best - probably because you guided her through the whole thing - next to Sykkuno’s, whose you were genuinely intrigued to try. While Corpse was arguing with Rae, he burned roughly half of his already ruined beef, and Karl made the very nice observation that it looked like a bird shat in a tortilla, which you proclaimed as the highlight of the video.

Since you and Karl claimed you were full, the three of them simply swapped tacos between each other as to be unbiased, and the two of you watched in amused suspense. You were actually quite interested to see what the end results were - you were first anxious and quite annoyed you even had to participate in the first place, because it meant losing your mind from jealousy, watching Corpse and Rae giggle and act all domestic while cooking, but jealousy simply dissipated somewhere half through the video as you watched the three argue if cheddar cheese belonged on tacos or not and Rae laugh at every stupid joke you cracked. Now, you sat, fully immersed as you stared at Sykkuno’s face; the poor guy ended up with the misfortune of having to try Corpse’s taco first.

“Zoom in, zoom in!” you whispered into Karl’s ear who complied and zoomed into Sykkuno’s face. He bit into the taco, chewing for a second before his face twisted in disgust and you began wheezing when he grabbed a tissue and spit it out, immediately grabbing his glass of water. Rae laughed at him as well, mouth full of his one, which she claimed she actually liked but it wasn’t as good as the “Y/NRae-co” as she proudly called it. Corpse silently ate Rae’s taco and refused to give a review on it because he was upset he got defeated, but the fact that he scarfed down the whole thing in a minute or so was enough of a review.

“Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad.” Corpse exclaimed when he saw Sykkuno’s bite in the tissue, grabbing the second taco he made and biting down on it. The whole room burst into laughter when he roughly swallowed, tears obvious in the one eye that showed, because of the overly spicy beef.

“What are you motherfuckers laughing at? It’s not that bad, I stand by tacorpse.”

“Tacorpse is actually genius. The one good thing you came up with during the entirety of this video.” Rae said and Corpse mumbled a fuck you in response.

“Well, I think we can all agree that me and Y/N’s taco was clearly the best.” she said, clasping her hands together.

“I actually think mine was better.” Sykkuno said, to which she pushed his plate out of the frame.

“Nobody asked you anything.”

“Don’t bully Sykkuno, I’ll fucking kick you out.”

“Oh yeah? I’m pretty sure Y/N would kick you out before they’d let you kick me!” Rae said, accusingly pointing her taco in Corpse’s direction.

“Alright, let’s wrap up the video.” Karl laughed behind the camera, and the three of them all turned to properly face it and end the video.

“Thank you all so much for watching, this has been an… interesting video, to say the least. Uh, thank you to Karl for filming this whole disaster, thank you to Corpse,” Rae gestured in his direction, “for lending us his kitchen, thank you to Sykkuno for probably getting us more views on this video, and also a big thank you to Y/N, Corpse’s better half for making this video way more interesting and helping me make probably, like, the best taco I’ve ever made.” she grinned and you shoved a peace sign in front of the camera.

“If you liked this video, check out Sykkuno and Corpse’s channels, they will be linked down below, and please click like and subscribe to support the channel! Again, thank you all for watching, see you later, bye!” she finished, and with that, Karl turned the camera off.

Silence engulfed the room. You sighed.

“Alright, who’s gonna clean this shit up?”

#corpse husband x reader #corpse husband x y/n #corpse husband x you #corpse husband x female reader #corpse husband fanfic #corpse husband imagine #corpse husband fluff

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blind-rats · 3 years

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The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself.

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement.

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.

#Joss Whedon #Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Ray Fisher #Charisma Carpenter #Feminist

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pocketsizedquasar · 3 years

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it’s been a bit now so. misc 200/end of mag in general thoughts? under a cut because this is a bit long, and i will preface this to say that i mostly enjoyed the episode but this is going to be mostly my criticisms, bc i feel like the good parts have already been well covered by people other than me. so yeah just a warning this is mostly crit

- it’s Still very hard for me to parse how i feel about this episode, but i think after sitting on it for a bit, i’ve come to the general conclusion that i am very satisfied plot-wise (in terms of tragedy/the structure of tragedies, the open-endedness of our ending, the general Writing TM), but not so much satisfied character-wise (in terms of arc and relationship resolution). I think we deserved more resolution on wtgfs -- i wanted more with them! more with melanie and jon; more with the melanie and georgie and basira’s side of the plan. more than that really small tidbit that we got at the end! and... honestly? a little bit more emphasis on the weight of Jon actually dooming other worlds in the end, and what that means for Jon and for wtgfs/basira. Especially with the context of the consequences re: the Web...won. no caveats or complications, the Web got. Exactly what it wanted.

- on that note, From a uh. Critique against capitalism standpoint I’m not sure how I feel about the ending? And I don’t really want to. Read too much into what isn’t there? But I mean mag has long been a pretty explicit anticapitalist narrative so...? Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the implications of WTGFs and basira basically just being treated as narratively right in terms of letting the eldritch evil stand-in for capitalism have whatever it wanted and feeding it and doing exactly what it asked them to do. and having Little consequence as a result of that. Obviously they’ll still face loads of hardship, but that comes from the apocalypse, not from, like,.,, doing the direct bidding of the Capitalist Monster/System/etc to be clear, i’m not like...mad they made the “wrong” decision; there was no wrong or right decision here. but I am a little upset that for all they spent 199 discussing the various consequences of each choice, we got to see very little of that actual consequence playing out...none of the survivors seem to really be carrying the guilt or even the full understanding of what they did, because they never saw the suffering they could create as anything more than a hypothetical. i feel like we could have spent just a bit more time with them dealing with that. a bit more time even with jon dealing with that, a bit more time spent on jon changing his mind. other people have said as much better than me but. yeah

- i feel like there was a lot of character stuff brought up in s5 and especially act iii that i would’ve loved to have seen more resolution of. why have that whole thing about Georgie telling jon to give melanie his last words himself, if Jon was going to come back but then never bring that up again (full disclosure this is smthn that @pronouncingitwang brought up!)? Why have Jon say he was “going to go apologize to [his] boyfriend”/Jon tell Martin multiple times that they were going to talk about their fight “later” and then not have that happen on screen? Why did we have two whole episodes of cultist interactions if they were just going to be removed off screen? Why have martin’s “I’ll get jon to destroy me like the others” decision if that doesn’t really come up? what about salesa!! why tell us melanie hating jon is a projection of her self hatred and then not bring that up again? why give annabelle all those juicy interactions with martin and then turn her into a monster when jon shows up, why give her so much character and backstory and then so thoroughly remove her agency? why have all these really cool parallels between jon and annabelle if annabelle is just going to be this monstrous and agency-less plot device with no follow-up? what happened to her!

- on that note...annabelle. They... really took this character who is a Black woman and who had so many parallels to Jon and who they could’ve like. very easily Actually made into a protagonist of color (because we only got one!! and she’s a cop!!!!) (or if not protagonist, at least smthn more sympathetic), (which wouldn’t have negated previous racial problems w tma, but would’ve shown growth from them) and made her a scary monster who just Serves her capitalist entity overlord without personal agency and then bows out when she’s no longer needed...you can have whatever diagetic/watsonian explanations you want for how 197 went, like sure she was just ~being dramatic~ and putting on a show for jon, but all that is still something the writers Decided to do in the real world, and the racial implications of her character arc are just. not great. and her character had So much more narrative potential. idk i will forever be salty about annabelle

- i Still Don’t Like the web being sentient!! i said this after 197 and i’m sayin it again! i think it makes it less frightening and less interesting! with the End being aware of its own, well, end, I actually thought that worked, and i really liked the corpse routes ep, but for some reason I didn’t with the Web? which seems hypocritical of me, I know, but, look: The embodiment of the fear of dying being aware of and welcoming its own dying emphasizes the inevitability and the truth of that fear. Which is why it works for the End. It’s still not recognizably /human/, because it is inexorable and certain, in a way nothing human can be. So its awareness of its own end DOESNT feel like flattening the worldbuilding. And using my own logic, I guess sure you could say the embodiment of the fear of manipulation and schemes being capable of scheming does the same thing but it. It rly doesn’t feel the same to me? Bc that’s rly a fear borne of human sentience & behavior. and so to give it that sentience makes it feel more human, and less interesting within the context of the horror. this is definitely just a personal taste thing as far as how i like horror and eldritch deities and such but yeah.

- i liked the statement a lot like, as a little self contained story? it was really nice to have jon give us one last story before the end. I thought that was sweet and i liked how the statement was written! on the same note though, i could’ve also gone without knowing like. the entire cosmology of how the fears came into being. again, just a personal thing, i don’t like my horror to be known, even at the end of it all when it doesn’t matter what we’re still scared of anymore. I just. I want my fears to be frightening and beyond comprehension and unknowable. it just leads me to have more questions than i really need at the Final episode? i would love to keep the jon giving us one final statement thing, and you know what? i would've loved: statement of the archivist, regarding jonathan sims. no idea what you’d do with that but it sounds cool in my head.

- very minor and very specific-to-me thing but i Don’t Like that basira got to be the Last Words...sorry y’all I just don’t like basira i can’t get behind trying to make me feel sympathetic for a cop who stood by and let people get murdered by the state for years and only felt bad about it bc fearpocalypse i just can’t. i don’t like her never have never will and also melanie and georgie are right there why didn’t they get to have the last words it would have been so much better ... why not have the person who loved jon and Knew very deeply his tendency to self-sacrifice say something or why not the person who is in-canon very similar to Jon and self-admittedly projecting her self hatred onto him say some sort of her own attempt at peace why not either of these two ahhhh

- i uhhhh. really liked jon killing jonah. jon for once getting to be angry for himself. that felt really nice. no ceaseless watcher nonsense either, just him and a knife and beating the shit out of this guy who even now continues to underestimate and belittle him. and i liked jon doing what he did in general -- i actually changed my mind on this; i really didn’t like it at first but i do now. i’m sad that it came at the expense of his promise to martin, but it makes sense and...i don’t want to say jon was right, because i again don’t think any of the decisions were right per se, but in terms of like... not doing what the “elder fear deity who wants to feed on fear and pain for literal eternity” wanted... yeah. i get it. he would never have been able to go along with that willingly. and he really shouldn’t have been, considering all that he went through being a puppet for said elder fear deity. and from a tragedy standpoint too, i actually think it’s a really really well written end for him. considering how my favorite tragedies are structured and how the way out has to be presented to us, but the tragic hero Ultimately will always fall back on their faults, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. hamlet is granted a way out and he doesn’t take it; he always always hesitates. captain ahab is granted the chance to turn and leave his chase and love instead, and he doesn’t take it. orpheus turns around. etc etc. I think it was also really lovely that jon got a twist on that, that in the end he did change, for just a moment, and chose love instead. even in the face of all the horror that that might mean. i really like that he and martin are together, wherever or however they are. that martin is allowed to feel (rightly) furious and betrayed and still so, so unconditionally in love.

idk i have more thoughts probably but again they’re very hard to parse and mostly just getting into the super specific realm which i don’t think is particularly helpful

i have a lot of feelings for jon and martin and their ending i think it was the best possible ending we could’ve gotten for those two and i Am really. I just have a lot of feelings.

#mag 200 #tma #the magnus archives #jon sims #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #melanie king #basira hussain #annabelle cane #georgie barker #tma crit #the magnus archives crit #tma spoilers #the magnus archives spoilers #quasartalks #yeah i don't know lots of mixed feelings!!#i think for me i'd go about it one of two ways:#first if i'm just redoing 200 to my own taste and not anything else #i think i'd really go for the martin kills jonah and is forced to be killed by jon somehow? or something along those lines #i really wanted a callback to his decision in his own domain #i'd likely still have them die together? idk most of their stuff felt pretty good i'd just spend more time with them AND the girls #but i think if i really had my way i'd go back to 197 #remove the web's sentience and have it be just another desperate guess of a human trying to understand their patron's wants #(which i've talked abt before so i won't rehash here)#annabelle jon team up please let's go #and then ASIDE from that i can have my own completely happy ending au in addition lmao #but i do like me some tragedy #also tbc i don't mean to imply that like. 'things that i would've done differently' and 'things that are bad' are the same thing #they're not! just bc i wouldn't have made a writing decision doesn't mean it is bad. i just wanted to get these thoughts out.

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cctinsleybaxter · 2 years

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2021 in Books

When I first started doing this as a teenager it was because my mom always makes an end-of-year top ten list and I wanted to try too, but I could never quite make it to ten (read plenty, but always seemed to hate 2/3 of what I picked up or have positive opinions later sour.) I’ve gotten much better about this in my 20s, slowly rediscovering what I want to read outside of perceived social pressure + very real academic pressure, and this year was the best so far. I went by cover art, summaries, personal recommendations, things that I either had an interest in or wanted to learn, and it worked; I read 47 books and struck a pretty good balance between the things I liked and the things I didn’t.

I decided on eight winners and eight honorable mentions; some of my decisions on what made the cut are tenuous, so you’re welcome to take this as a full ‘Top 16.’ I’ve also eschewed my usual compilation of the worst of the year. They were there and I have THOUGHTS don’t get me wrong, but there were also fewer than usual and I want to celebrate that. Let’s make this a real recommendation list for once; it’s 2022 we’re going to need it.

[Note: I read a lot of horror and nonfiction that deals with difficult topics, so while I’m happy to give trigger warnings on request keep in mind that many of these have some nasty aspects to them.]

My Lunches with Orson by Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, ed. Peter Biskind

I will never be tired of this book; read it the first week of January and spent the rest of the year re-reading it. It’s a compilation of informal interviews between Welles and his director friend Jaglom that were recorded and transcribed in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as Welles was nearing the end of life and unknowingly creating a retrospective. The titular lunches are funny and scandalous, everything he says is so incredible that even the lies are worth sharing, and in-between are hard truths about the mental and physical state he lived in (the California of it all.)

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix

I expected this to just be an art book and instead learned so much about the publishing industry! For example, ‘serial killer’ didn’t really become a household term until 1981 with the publication of the Hannibal franchise, which was so successful it had UK and US authors begging their editors to change the marketing of their books from horror to thriller. And adding fuel to the fire in the US? Monopolization of publishing houses and the decline of independent magazines under the Reagan administration. Intersection of some of my biggest interests, incredible art, what more could I ask for.

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, trans. Anna Moschovakis

I let [it happen] for reasons that were corrupt, because of thoughts that arrived fully formed, too well-dressed to be honest.

I feel so lucky anytime I get into a weirdly specific horror subgenre and then find more of it; we are back in WWI with the psychical and psychological torment combo. After his brother is killed in No Man’s Land protagonist Alfa Ndiaye undertakes a revenge ritual so grim that his infantry begins to question his humanity, and so does he. His clipped, self-assured narration struck me similarly to how The Book Thief did when I was a kid, conveying old trauma in a way that feels brand-new. I have mixed-to-negative feelings about the direction the story ultimately takes, but even then it deserves a spot on the list.

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If there had been an angel in the mouth of the blue tunnel, instead of my father, I might have skipped right in.

Of all the novels I read this year I keep finding myself drawn back to this one. A lot of its themes and ideas are in better books (hell, they’re in better Vonnegut books), but it’s like if Jurassic Park replaced all the technical jargon with jokes and then turned itself into a poem. I can’t stop thinking about the weight of decisions, especially the decision that led our narrator to his role in the story in the first place. The perfect combination of bitingly sad and softly miraculous Vonnegut was so gifted at.

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

I love how unapologetically bonkers this book is!!!! The blurb said it was about a closeted Republican congressman and an 1800s English taxidermist whose two stories are somehow connected and I thought ‘cool, can’t wait to see how they’re connected.’ They are the same story, they have absolutely nothing in common, hope that clears things up.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Required reading. Compiles case studies that should alter the way Americans view our history and roles in day-to-day life, especially amidst the rise of radical feminist movements in the 2020s. It’s technically a textbook but I found it very accessible; the sections are well-edited (which is not the case for most sociopolitical writing) and Jones-Rogers argues her points clearly and fairly. Things like legal processes that I’ve had trouble parsing in other texts were not abstractly important but thoroughly engaging.

Radical feminists will argue that white women have always been empowered and then flip to arguing that white women have always been disenfranchised, but they cannot have it both ways. As a nation we excitedly proclaim that our women have historically been gifted at the same jobs and skills afforded to men, but what were those jobs and skills? If there were #girlboss archivists and writers in the 1800s what records were they keeping? White women have never had any less power than their male counterparts; they just wield it differently.

AMOUNGUS A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

Marsh establishes character archetypes we know but then makes something richer out of them. The way she writes everyday occurrences like adults interacting with children, navigating a marriage or a business partnership, having a crush, all within the framework of a murder mystery dinner party, is so charming and so winning. Inspector Alleyn reminds me more of Ellie Miller from Broadchurch than his 1930s detective brethren, quirky in a way that’s not just a gimmick, the kind of guy that can trick you into thinking cops deserve rights. I have enough thoughts on the entire stack Alleyn books I read that they could be their own list, but if I had to recommend any it’s this one.

In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain by Tom Vitale

I’m not an Anthony Bourdain fan. Didn’t watch any of his work aside from what few episodes of his (second) Travel Channel show I caught as a kid, I like his politics but don’t like his personality, it all comes out in the wash. I picked this up only because I’d recently been learning more about his work and the wait was short for such a big-name library preorder; I’m very glad I did.

Writing a memoir centered entirely around someone else is a bit of a fool’s errand since memoirs are, by nature, a story about you, but boy does Vitale know that. He openly grapples with it on the page, playing it like the documentarian he is with questions of ethics and human perception, explaining that he wrote as a way to unpack a relationship rather than address a mythical figure. He’d been working with Bourdain for almost twenty years, starting in his early 20s as a crew member and climbing to the position of director of No Reservations, so his sudden death made for a complicated form of grief. Like all good documentarians Vitale paints a lush picture and then leaves it to the reader/viewer to look for answers, admitting that he still has none for himself. What opinions I did form of Bourdain left a bitter, sad taste in my mouth.

Honorable Mentions

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

I don’t have much to add to the conversation surrounding this one; it’s a soon-to-be-classic and I’m glad it’s out in the world. Machado unpacks an abusive relationship through what I’m sure critics are calling ‘fantastical literary tropes’ but are really just different forms of personal introspection (she has an MFA in creative writing; she thinks like someone who has an MFA in creative writing), and knocks it out of the park. How do you make a story out of something that isn’t a story at all?

The One by John Marrs

This book is absolute trash but I had so much fun reading it that I can’t not say anything. You remember when people were pitching Game of Thrones as ‘fantasy for people who don’t like fantasy?’ This is Love Actually for people who hate Love Actually; this is to Love Actually what Riverdale is to the Archie comics. I can’t believe the Netflix adaptation was so boring because I felt like I was watching the most insane show ever made, it was making me want to mix drinks, the tory undertones you wouldn’t spot if you weren’t a minority only adding to the mayhem.

Christ I haven’t even said what it’s about; in the future you can get DNA matched with your soulmate, and this leads into all kinds of trouble for six different characters (who are all white British people.) I keep wanting to summarize every storyline at length to friends and then get worried I’ll forget some details because of how unhinged they all are. The simplest one is a serial killer that’s soulmates with a cop.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

When it comes to world politics ‘underdeveloped’ is a verb, not an adjective, and Rodney does a hell of a job arguing that thesis statement. He was an interesting guy to say the least, and a lot of his claims didn’t get the chance to mature and develop past the 1970s (those asides about the Korean War.. inhaling air through my teeth), which is a shame because his work hasn’t become any less relevant. My biggest takeaway is that regardless of background and education level we are still, in 2022, conflating imperialism with colonialism. Switzerland didn’t have the same role Belgium did in stripping central Africa of its infrastructure, but their banks are littered across its surface.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

Nature is the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

I wasn’t as taken by this as I was Kurlansky’s later work on the world history of salt (still one of my all-timers), but it’s a good book and a perfect case study of the intersections between imperialism and ecology. The claim that John Adams is, quote, “America’s most underrated founding father” made me lol, but most of the anecdotes he shares are fascinating. Also includes a bunch of codfish recipes if that’s your thing.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

I think most 80s homages in movies and TV are made with far more ease and far less heart than people make them out to be (e.g- Stranger Things lifting scenes directly from E.T. or The Thing, two films that are still very much a part of pop culture.) This book is what I want from late 80s nostalgia and especially a nostalgia for late 80s horror; evoking ideas and images while doing something wholly original instead of just pointing and saying ‘hey, remember that?’ It took me right back to the pulpy genre fiction a generation of teenagers before me grew up with, not only in terms of the insane and nasty scares but the insane and nasty social aspects. I felt the same indignant outrage at parents and other kids for not helping and understanding the heroine as I did when I read YA books at fourteen, the way they’re meant to be read.

Died in the Wool by Ngaio Marsh

Okay I’m including another Inspector Alleyn book, because while A Man Lay Dead is one of the best this made me the craziest. There’s a short period in the 36-book series where Alleyn’s in New Zealand as a WWII British intelligence agent and it’s not… great. Marsh obviously likes having him out there because it’s her home turf, and her descriptions of flora and landscapes are gorgeous, but she gets into prickly territory with nationalism and especially NZ’s treatment of the Maori people. I’d make a direct comparison to ‘liberal’ American media depictions of Native Americans beginning around the same time period- a deep fascination and newfound sympathy, but still totally uncomprehending and offensive.

Anyway, all that stuff about how this was not a good time for the Alleyn books? Throw it away, this is the exception. The title is a silly pun about a socialite being killed in a wool press and her corpse left to rot unnoticed for a week. Alleyn gets to interview a much smaller cast of characters than usual, and while you’d think it would make the culprit more obvious it only makes the mystery more intriguing. Oh yeah, and you’re left wondering whether espionage is a red herring right up until the last page when a man explodes??? I normally avoid spoiling anything in these reviews, but if you can figure out how we end up with ‘a man explodes’ before it happens I’ll be impressed.

In the Woods by Tana French

My dear friend Kaitlyn and my immediate family have raved about French’s work to me for years (the Irish agenda smh), and I went in skeptical but this first book really works as a thriller. It has the social elements needed for all good genre fiction, the environments are rich, the mystery well-paced, and the biggest, strangest point in its favor is that our narrator is not just morally grey as intended but low key unbearable. I hated this guy, and the writing is good enough that I liked being in the head of someone I didn’t like. Everything felt very human, even at its most deranged.

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

@actuary-tattoo recommended this one and it’s the kind of haunted house book I have always wanted, like something you’d see on TCM: r/nosleep edition. Being both set and written in the 1970s American South means it’s definitely less than PC (building that makes you a sodomite yes! yes!!!) But the writing style, pacing, and plot are spectacular. Colquitt Kennedy is the perfect horror protagonist; a 30-something suburban businesswoman would normally be the star of a romcom and here she is given a real personality and then forced to contend with an evil fucking house. The part where she interrupts a neighbor telling her something creepy with “don’t tell me this,” in the same way a child would clap their hands over their ears during a scary story is a personal favorite- gave me chills.

#2021 #books #long post/#if yout hit 'keep reading' this WILL take up your entire screen for a hot minute so beware #will probably put it into a google doc as well but whatever #(in loose order of when read)

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aye-write · 3 years

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An aye-write Guide to Inciting Incidents!

Ah, the good old inciting incident. The proverbial snowball, the catalyst, the call to action, whatever you want to call it, the inciting incident has a simple function: to change the status quo

In other words, the inciting incident is what sets your story in motion. It’s an event that forces your main character(s) on the journey that will occupy them for the rest of the story. A status quo is essentially the “normal life” for your main character before things change.

.-.-.

Let’s consider some questions about the inciting incident. These were all things that I, at one point or another, struggled with when it came to writing.

Is the inciting incident the same as the hook? Not generally! Exceptions exist of course - some inciting incidents technically happen before the book even starts, and some start as early as the first page, but generally they’re different things. The hook is your attention grabber, something that immediately engages you right at the beginning of the story, usually your first line or first paragraph.

The inciting incident isn’t usually what draws your reader into the novel, the inciting incident is the point where the reader decides not to put down your novel. Or as my partner says, the hook is what pulls you into the room, the inciting incident locks the door behind you.

.-.-.

Is the inciting incident done TO or done BY the protagonist? Both happen, but external force is the most common kind of inciting incident: the mysterious letter arrives, the stranger appears, the murder is commited, the partner leaves suddenly, the job ends, the aliens descend, the King dies, the treasure is stolen, etc.

But as above, this isn't always the case! Some inciting incidents are definitely character driven.

.-.-.

Must the inciting incident be a negative event? Nope! As long as the event changes the status quo, it's still an inciting incident! It can be as much a positive event - winning the lottery, achieving something, gaining superpowers, having a first kiss - as a negative one.

.-.-.

Does the inciting incident have to be a BIG event? Not at all! Many people choose the inciting incident to be quite an eventful thing: Hagrid telling Harry he’s a wizard, Lucy discovering Narnia in the wardrobe, Katniss volunteering for the Hunger Games, etc., but this is not always the case. It will depend very much on the genre and tone of your story, but as long as your inciting incident signals change, it does not have to be a massive event.

.-.-.

Should the inciting incident happen in the first chapter? Nope, it doesn’t have to! It can - but you’ve got lots of options! One thing worth keeping in mind, especially with short chapters, is that because an inciting incident deals with the change of status quo, doing it in chapter one can be tricky. A change may not mean as much if we aren’t invested in the characters.

.-.-.

So when SHOULD it happen? There are two answers here! One short answer is that an inciting incident usually falls between 10-15% of the book. However, the longer answer is simply that... it depends! Genre, pacing, and tone will influence when your inciting incidents happen.

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Benefits of Earlier Inciting Incidents

Quicker overall pacing

Quick immersion into the plot

Benefits of Later Inciting Incidents

Helps readers acclimatise to worlds (good for fantasy and sci-fi)

Helps us get to know characters more (good for multi POV/large casts)

A slow build up can build tension (good for suspense/horror)

As with everything in writing, there are traditions and expected conventions, and any deviation from the “norm” can be very effective! Remember every writing guideline can be broken or bent :) As long as your inciting incident signals a change in some way and propels your MC into action, you should be good no matter where you choose to place it!

.-.-.

So what should an inciting incident achieve?

Change the status quo The inciting incident should signal change, upset something, unbalance something, propel a character into motion/action.

Create questions for the reader The inciting incident should introduce the central problem of the story. What will happen to your characters because of this inciting incident? What adventures/mysteries will come to attention because of it?

Generate some sense of urgency The inciting incident should introduce some jeopardy, some stakes, the ticking clock in response to the event. Remember – the inciting incident is the call to adventure, not the adventure itself. It is a signal that things are about to change.

.-.-.

Cool! Can It Do Anything Else?

Illustrate key aspects of character(s) How your character reacts to the inciting event gives us an idea of their personality, their values, goals, strengths and weaknesses.

Set the tone for your story You can use the inciting incident to indicate things like mood and atmosphere which you will follow up over the course of the story.

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Inciting Incident and the Link to Story’s End Another handy-dandy thing an inciting incident can do is refer forwards to the story’s end. Knowing how your story will end, climax or conclude is very important to an effective inciting incident, as the two must be related in some way.

For example:

Status Quo: Maria is in love with Lucille.

Inciting Incident: Maria believes Lucille is going to ask her out, but instead, she asks out Maria’s best friend - Emily. Maria now has to try to navigate her friendship with Emily - all the while still being in love with Lucille.

Story’s End: The conclusion of the character is signposted to us to be about all three of these characters, indicating perhaps a confrontation? Maybe a love triangle? Or perhaps a polyamory relationship? It could be anything - but the important thing to note is this: whatever interrupts our protagonist enough to change the status quo must keep a permanent impact. Don’t decieve your readers by making the inciting incident and ending unrelated.

Obviously, this is a very simplified explanation and storyline, but the essence remains the same. A strong inciting incident will be made all the stronger by knowing, and referring to, your climax/conclusion.

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Inciting Incident Checklist

Does it change the status quo?

Does it generate questions?

Does it create urgency?

Does it tell you anything about the characters?

Does it tell you anything about the tone of the story?

Does it tip its hat to the story’s conclusion?

#writing advice #writing tips #inciting incidents #writing help #writing toolbox #writer advive #writing #writers #aye write guide to writing #long post #very long post #I hope it's useful to you!

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nileqt87 · 3 years

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Ramblings about Lucifer referencing Bones, “Close your eyes.” and shows influencing each other

That was never just a Bones reference being made and the season finale admitted it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv_1dJk5yEM

David Boreanaz played the ironically-named Angel on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. His character has *so many* parallels with Lucifer (far more than Booth outside of the law enforcement/crime procedural connection).

Angel's spinoff also has noir crime drama aspects mixed with the supernatural starring an immortal protagonist with a dark past and infamously villainous reputation fighting evil as a supernatural private detective in the City of Angels (a city known for its dark underbelly juxtaposed with fame and glamor, broken dreams and chasing eternal youth) and navigating human law (including the LAPD and evil lawyers) while not legally existing.

Angel also fell in love with a blonde human heroine (Buffy Summers) after lifetimes of self-destructive, not-so-heroic behaviors (getting his soul back did *not* make Angel a hero and human Liam was a lecherous drunk with unfulfilled ambitions and father issues) who inspired him to become a better man and make human connections.

AtS made heavy use of sprawling nighttime Downtown L.A. cityscape shots, which Lucifer also shared an abundance of.

During both of their first cases, they failed to save the troubled blonde girl they were trying to help (Tina and Delilah, respectively). They also have a connection inside the LAPD through a blonde cop who also takes their identity secrets pretty badly (Kate Lockley in Angel's case).

Note that Buffy not only screamed (twice, given it repeated during her memory loss in Halloween), but also came after Angel with a crossbow when she thought he'd attacked her mother (it was Darla), so Chloe taking the Devil face reveal (Monster Reveals are iconic old horror imagery) poorly to the point of considering poisoning is par for the course. However, it only took Buffy seven episodes instead of three seasons to get the identity reveal via seeing the horrific second face (arguably also an accident on Angel's part).

They are metaphorically or literally Hell's angels. They also had long stays in Hell or a hell dimension.

Lucifer and Angel are also both Prodigal Sons with long-held grudges against their long-absent fathers (patricide in Liam/Angel(us)'s case) and they're later faced with a situation where they have unexpected, thought-impossible offspring who show up as adults (neither got to raise their miracle child) wanting revenge. Yup, major Connor/Rory parallel there.

Angel is also in a constant struggle with the Powers that Be manipulating his fate and free will (like Lucifer, he's a champion of free will no matter the cost) and making him prophecy's bitch.

Bones famously got jokes about how Booth is Angel getting his Shanshu (made human), since the character is given constant Angel-isms like references to a dark past having killed people (Booth is also named after a historical murderer, in addition to having been a sniper), both being Catholics full of Catholic guilt (note that the Buffyverse is most accurately polytheistic, though Angel does face off against a take on the antichrist--Angel has constant biblical imagery/themes and not just because of vampire iconography), kicking down doors (just not off their entire frames--LOL), turning on a dime and threatening people up against walls, constant wink-wink references to the Buffyverse (familiar casting, references to the Hyperion Hotel, etc...), etc...

The Lucifer finale used the words "Close your eyes." right before Lucifer is sent to Hell. This is literally the BtVS season 2 finale where Buffy kisses Angel and sends him to hell for a century with a stab to the gut (see the season 5 finale, not to mention Lucifer giving up his life for Chloe's à la I Will Remember You).

Note that D.B. Woodside was on BtVS (playing Robin Wood, whose Slayer mother Nikki Wood was killed by Spike). Aimee Garcia was in both episodes of AtS (Birthday--she's older than she looks!) and Bones. See her also playing a cross-wearing religious girl on Supernatural who was slaughtered in a police precinct by Lilith. Kevin Alejandro was also in an episode of Bones.

Tricia Helfer was in an episode of Supernatural playing a ghost who reenacts the night of her death every year. BtVS also had an episode along those lines, but with Buffy and Angelus possessed (not to mention Phantom Dennis!). Lucifer having Dan as a ghost is yet another thing they all have in common (ditto referencing Ghost, Patrick Swayze and/or Unchained Melody--Vincent Schiavelli a.k.a. Ghost's subway ghost was Jenny's uncle Enyos, whom Angelus killed).

Lucifer name-checked Castiel and Supernatural referenced Lucifer using their Lucifer (crime-fighting angel in L.A. made it a double-reference whammy). Supernatural returned the favor again by having Castiel forced to sing in Enochian. Lucifer's reference to his singing voice was already a zing about Misha Collins having to put on that monotone gravel voice and Enochian being far from melodious.

Russell T Davies was quite heavily inspired by the Buffyverse when he revived Doctor Who and spun off Torchwood, so there are absolute tons of Buffy, Angel and Spike respectively in Rose Tyler, the 9th/10th Doctors, Captain Jack Harkness and Captain John Hart (right down to the actor). School Reunion is the episode where the Buffyverse inspiration is most on the nose, complete with Anthony Stewart Head saying "shooty dog thing" in a school setting and a Mayor/Angel-esque speech about the curse of immortality. The Time War gave the Doctor a huge genocide-level guilt complex. Note that the creator of DC comics' version of Lucifer, Neil Gaiman, has also written for Doctor Who and is also the co-creator of Good Omens (the show is brimming with Doctor Who Easter eggs thanks to David Tennant). A barely-recognizable Tom Ellis played Martha Jones' ex-fiancé Tom Milligan during the Year that Never Was, as well.

A lot of shows take inspiration from the Buffyverse and you've probably seen some of them. It isn't just the copycat vampire romance stories either.

Angel's forerunners in turn were a mix of guilt-stricken, rat-eating Louis de Pointe du Lac (his Jekyll/Hyde-esque alter-ego Angelus is closer to the pre-retcon, fully-evil Lestat de Lioncourt, who got woobified into an antihero rocker not unlike Spike--the entire Fanged Four mirror Anne Rice's character lineup), sword-wielding, immortality trope-influencers Connor/Duncan MacLeod of Highlander fighting for the Prize of humanity (akin to Pinocchio becoming a "real boy"--see also Barnabas Collins of Dark Shadows, though he was before vampires became antihero superheroes, not just sympathetic antivillains) and Nick Knight of Forever Knight (vampire detective).

Additionally, Tom Welling was famously the longest-serving Clark Kent of them all (Smallville) on the old WB (there's that DC comics connection, too), so it's not just a Fox shows thing (though Fox, not just Warner Brothers, did indeed own the Buffyverse). One of the least-known things about Clark is that he also has an immortality problem where he wouldn't age parallel to Lois (they wouldn't be able to have kids either) without a workaround. The Kryptonite line directed at Cain/Pierce by Lucifer was quite on the nose! Lucifer and Smallville sort of crossed over even further in Crisis on Infinite Earths, so Tom is canonically the face of both Clark and Cain in parallel universes of the DC multiverse.

Supernatural had quite recently had their own takes on Cain (played by Timothy Omundson, who also played God Johnson) and the Mark of Cain when Lucifer did it. Dan's killer Le Mec was, of course, Rob Benedict, who was God a.k.a. Chuck Shurley, the ultimate villain of Supernatural. Richard Speight, Jr., who was archangel Gabriel/Loki the Trickster, directed a lot of Lucifer's later episodes in addition to being a prolific Supernatural director.

Supernatural and Lucifer use the exact same font for their titles (Supernatural Knight).

The X-Files (which Supernatural referenced constantly) and Supernatural also had stories about nephilim (see the apocryphal Book of Enoch). Lucifer ultimately had two nephilim (forbidden interspecies offspring of angels and humans), even if not saying so as a known concept. Connor can also be compared to the vampire equivalent of being something like a dhampir, though he's not quite that (mostly-but-not-quite-human offspring of two vampires instead of a human/vampire hybrid--see Blade for an actual dhampir). Supernatural has also covered the even rarer cambion species (human/demon hybrid).

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nicelytousled · 3 years

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As we're on the topic of a potential sequel explaining the immortality of the old guard, despite agreeing that it is probably better left alone since they would only have like 2 hours and I want Quyhn to have time to shine, I'm gonna play devil's advocate because I've been sitting on some Thoughts™ about it. What if their healing is not simply regenerative but rather reversal, a kind of time travel?

warning: this post contains body horror pls proceed with caution

I think it would be cool if their bodies were their own unique contained alternative timelines and healing was sort of like recalling a memory. When you remember an event you're not remembering the initial event itself but rather the last time you remembered it. Healing and coming back to life would mean rewinding to the last time they were healthy/alive. I think that could explain basic things like why their hair grows back the same way, why they have scars or piercing holes from before their first death, etc.

To explain what I mean in more depth let's use Nicky's spleen as an example. Let's say Dr. Kozak removes Nicky's spleen, puts it in a jar, and sets it aside. That spleen now exists in two different timelines: the timeline of the external world where it's in the jar and the timeline of Nicky's body after it reverses to the last time he had a spleen. That would also mean there's nothing remarkable about their DNA, something an anon bought up in an ask to @wickedpact which I thought was interesting. Dr. Kozak's samples would be effectively useless, just ordinary organs and tissue samples that abide by different rules of time only within the context of their bodies.

It could also explain how their bodies reject bullets and how they would be immune to disease. If their bodies are their own contained alternative timelines and all their atoms abide by different physical laws then anything that entered that differing timeline would be reversed and rejected. For example, when Nile stabs Andy if Andy hadn't pulled the knife out then eventually her body would have pushed it out by itself. I think this would also make very traumatic injuries like being beheaded easier to explain. Instead of growing an entirely new head from nothing they would instead revert back to the last time they had a head.

To explain what I mean further, if I place my hand flat against a wall then my hand and that wall are made of the same essential stuff, it's all just atoms buzzing around together in different combinations abiding by the same laws of physics. If Nile with her newfound immortality put her hand flat against a wall it would be different. Her hand and the wall would not be made of the same essential stuff because her atoms are buzzing away to a totally different tune than the wall she's touching. They can interact but they are fundamentally different because Nile's body is its own unique dimension with different rules about how time works.

Off the top of my head, I think this is interesting in regard to the story of The Old Guard for these reasons:

It might be interesting to explore exactly what results in someone transitioning from the timeline the rest of the world operates in into their own embodied dimension. We don't yet know the circumstances of Quyhn or Lykon's first deaths, but going by Andy, Nile, Booker, Joe, and Nicky they probably all share the setting of war and the experience of very intense emotion, for example, betrayal, hatred, and fear. What is it about war specifically? What is it about those emotions? What do the characters think about these shared similarities? They could dig a lot deeper than destiny and misery loves company.

It could also add some depth to how they dream of one another before they meet. The dreams are from an outside perspective, which on my last rewatch I thought was odd. It's not like you're in someone else's head when you dream of them, rather you're being shown their face from some non-existent perspective. It's like they're being orbited by something, as if they're each the centre of a different plane of reality.

It would explain how Quyhn could be awake for long enough that Nile could dream about her in such detail. Her body would be constantly returning to the point where she took her last breath, reverting to when it last had oxygen. I think that's more terrifying than the idea that she's simply regenerating, to have been submerged for hundreds of years but to have your body constantly reverting to the state it was in the last moment you had above the surface.

^ side note on the above points but The Old Guard has the potential to be a kind of cosmic horror story I think, especially from Quyhn's perspective. Her body constantly turns back time but her present remains the same and there's no escape and no way of knowing why. I might make a separate post some time about The Old Guard in relation to the fear of the unknown and the discovery of incomprehensible truths. Much to think about there.

I also think this version of immortality is interesting because it's such a contrast to how healing works for ordinary people, and how emotional healing works specifically. Healing is never about returning to the place you once were before you were hurt, something that's often impossible to achieve and distorted by memory, but rather about building yourself back up while accepting that hurt as a part of you. Both Andy and Booker are carrying around unprocessed grief, and I think it's interesting how their bodies could be so out of sync with how humans heal emotionally. That must wear on them psychologically and that could be interesting to explore.

On a much lighter note, if they are their own contained alternative timelines then maybe Joe and Nicky are perfectly in sync. Not to quote Bronte wildly out of context but I'm talking "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" kind of stuff. I'm talking when @emjee wrote "They’re a binary star system, Joe thinks. Two bodies, one single point of light.” Maybe they're perfectly mirrored, orbiting one another. Maybe because of that they're guaranteed to stop being immortal together too, I think that would be nice.

Really, I do agree with Greg that a sequel should be focused on characters and relationships rather than exploring the how's and why's of their immortality. In 2 hours it would be better to dedicate time to incorporating something like flashbacks like Greg says, maybe to show the tension between past and present with Andy and Quyhn.

I think my more general point is that if a potential sequel did explore the how's and why's of immortality, I think there might be a sweet spot where they could give us more information about how it works without revealing everything (like they did with Copley's big board of stuff). Sometimes information like that can ask more questions than it answers, and it can strengthen character arcs when interpreted by the protagonists, and I think that can be great for storytelling. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing that in a third film.

#the old guard #the old guard meta #long post #bird makes stuff #tw body horror #i use the word interesting far far too much #its almost midnight forgive me #does this even make any sense? who knows #why does a post need to make sense is it not enough to read a collection of words next to each other

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fandom-collective-writers · 3 years

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Vampire in a Bottle (Le Comte de Saint-Germain x MC)

Fandom: Ikemen Vampire

Pairing: Le Comte de Saint-Germain x MC

Prompt: cursed object

Warning: Smut!!

Intended Audience: Female Audience

Word Count: 7,251

Requested by: anonymous

Written by: @lordsister/@lordsisterxotome (Click here to support me on ko-fi!<3)

Disclaimer: I do not own Ikemen Vampire or any of its characters. All of that goodness is the property of Cybird. I do, however, own the plot of this fanfic. Please do not repost this on any other website.

Other notes: I legit expected this to be 5 maybe 6 pages long. Was not expecting it to end up being 15 whole ass pages long.

She’d heard stories about creatures tied to objects, bound to them my wizards or witches or priests. Everyone had. The djinni of the lamp, silkies and their skin, even myths of demons lending their bloodlust to legendary swords.

The vampire stuck in the wine bottle though, now that was a first.

It had come as a surprise when MC had first stumbled upon the mansion on one of her hikes outside the city. She must’ve hiked the same path a hundred times and never had she caught so much as a glimpse of the sprawling estate, even if it was only a shell of its obvious former glory now. Had she taken a wrong path somewhere? Drifted away in her thoughts too much and unintentionally wandered away into the bushes? Looking back the way she’d come, she realized that no, she hadn’t veered in any way from her usual path, which made the sudden appearance of the mansion especially strange.

It was quite the complex, all graceful arches and columns, reds and whites. A massive fountain topped with a headless statue centered an overgrown path, and even from her vantage point still a ways away from the building, she could tell that what was once a manicured garden lay behind the mansion. It was like something out of a fairy tail; she wondered about it’s story, who lived here and what events had taken place within its walls. Now, the place was positively decrepit, still somewhat majestic, but old and creepy nonetheless.

So, doing what any normal person would do, MC thought, ‘Very old and creepy,’ and turned back the way she’d come. There was no way in hell she was going to wander in like some airheaded protagonist out of a horror movie and get pestered or possessed or who knows what else. Nope. She was going to choose life today.

It seemed her fears about the place being somewhat supernatural were true though, because a few minutes later, when she was sure she was about to step back onto a more familiar leg of the path, she emerged right on the same cliff overlooking the estate as before. The mansion sat there expectantly and she almost imagined it was saying, “Oh, you’re back.”

Blinking, she stared for a moment before scoffing and shaking her head, soft mutters of “no, no, no, no, no,” falling from her lips as she turned away and rubbed her eyes. Her heart was beating a little faster now, sweat forming on the back of her neck. This was too strange. She’d hiked this path a hundred times and there had never, ever been a mansion here before. Furthermore, there was no way she was going around in circles. She knew the area and its trails well enough to have been able to find her way even if she did get lost.

Pulling out her phone, MC tried and failed to find her location on the google maps, cursing as the words ‘No Signal’ replaced the usual friendly bars in the left-hand corner. Shoving the device back into her pocket, she sighed and stomped back down the path. This time she paid attention to familiar landmarks, carefully retracing her steps. For a second, she thought for sure she was in the clear, that she would come out on the path and walk away to forget this ever happened as some strange hallucination.

Apparently that was not to be the case today though as, lo and behold, when she ducked beneath a low-hanging branch, there she was again, the mansion laid out and waiting before her. She could practically feel it rolling its eyes at her this time.

Collapsing on the leaves and pine needles, she laughed breathlessly. No way was this happening. Why today of all days? Why couldn’t the universe just let her keep having her normal days without throwing in a mansion that appeared and disappeared like a ghost ship too? She felt like she was going crazy.

After a few minutes of deep breathing and burying her face in her knees, trying to rub the image of the mansion away, she rose to her feet. This place wanted her to...do something? Fine. She had a feeling it would just keep making her walk in circles until she came inside. Best case scenario it really was just an old mansion and she would find another way back to the trail after having searched the property. Worst case scenario? She was dragged to the underworld by whatever vengeful ghosts might inhabit the place. No problem, right?

Her legs felt weak as she picked her way down the cliffside, slowly getting closer and closer to the hulking abode. The grass on the vast lawn was so overgrown she had a hard time making her way across it, nearly tripping a couple of times when it got caught around her calves and ankles. As she got closer, she started to realize just how massive the place really was. So similar to most of the castles and palaces and royal mansions she’d visited on trips, whoever had built this place and lived here had gone for extravagance, a show of wealth, but something about it was quiet in a way that made it seem like it was meant to be tucked away back here. It would have been beautiful if the situation were different and she wasn’t so freaked out.

On the bright side, at least the weather wasn’t cloudy like these kinds of places usually were in books and movies, and she didn’t have the feeling anyone was watching her. It was a sunny day, the sky blue and dotted here and there with the occasional cloud. It was a small comfort, but comfort nonetheless as she faced the beast.

Taking a minute, MC just stood there in front of the mansion, staring up at broken windows and ivy covered columns and weeds poking up through the stones. “What do you want from me?” she grumbled to herself before shaking her head and taking a deep breath.

Heavy iron rings hung on the wooden doors, their white paint peeled away to reveal the brown wood beneath. Her hand looked tiny in comparison to the ring as she grasped it, cold and dark against her skin, and pulled the door open. It grated against the floor as it opened, and she paused, tensed and waiting for something to jump out at her, for a swarm of bats or something. But nothing came and after a minute, she peered inside. Part of the roof had fallen in, allowing shafts of daylight to pierce the gloom and illuminate the grand receiving hall. Her shoes padded softly against the marble floor as she took a few steps inside, careful of the debris. A grand staircase of white stone led up to a second story and as she turned in a circle to fully take in the room MC saw more signs of wealth: giant paintings, moth-eaten tapestries, silver candlesticks nearly too tarnished to recognize.

A gentle breeze blew in from the open door behind her, stirring leaves across the floor and up the stairs. After another quick glance around, she crept up the staircase, brushing her fingers across the cold, stone banister as she did. Choosing to turn to her left once she was at the top of the stairs, she followed a long hallway in what she guessed was the west wing. More paintings and golden sconces decorated the walls, curtains made of dusty velvet framing smashed windows. The mansion had yet to make its next move, to give her any indication of what it wanted her to do, where it wanted her to go. It was hard to tell because everything was so old and nature had long since started reclaiming the place, but she thought she saw signs of a struggle, irregularly torn canvases and tables knocked over, their vintage contents spilled all over the floor.

She startled, gasping, when a door at the end of the hall creaked open, a strong breeze whistling down the corridor and urging her along. MC could feel the mansion’s impatience pushing in at her from all sides, tugging at her hair and pushing at her back. Balling her fists, she gulped and creeped towards the indicated entryway, trying to mentally prepare herself for whatever she might find.

Her breath stuck in her throat as she took a careful look inside, surprised at the luxury and opulence that met her gaze. The chamber was so large and gilded it had to be the master bedroom. The walls and ceiling were framed in gold, the ceiling painted with some scene that belonged in a cathedral. The canopied bed had long since succumbed to moths and the forces of nature, but the size of it could have rivaled any king size bed, and the rugs, once richly colored, still retained some of their ancient plushness as she stepped into the room. Reaching out, she ran her fingers along the carved edge of a table, tracing the intricate whorls and flowers. The same signs of a struggle were here too, a sharp gash taken out of the leg of the table and old books and shattered glass lying on the floor.

A strong gust of wind blew in from the broken window, disturbing the heavy velvet curtains and knocking an old wine bottle off the small table in front of the broken pane. She winced as the bottle hit the floor, expecting it to shatter, but instead it bounced, rolling until it stopped against her foot.

MC blinked and bent down to pick it up, noting the strange weight inside it. There wasn’t a label and she tipped it back and forth in her palm, weighing its contents. The red glass was too dark to see whatever was inside, but it didn’t feel like liquid sloshing around, that was for sure. Idly tapping a nail against the cool surface as she went to put it back on the table, she nearly screamed when something tapped back.

Letting go of the bottle and skittering back, she tripped over a chair, sending her falling on her ass. The bottle didn’t bounce this time, shattering instead with a sound like thunder that shook the mansion. A whirlwind filled the room, sending debris flying as it exploded outwards. Crouching and covering her head with her arms, MC waited, eyes squeezed shut and heart pounding, for whatever was happening to stop. It could’ve been seconds or minutes; she barely knew which as the gale settled, ending as quickly as it had begun. Uncovering her head, she peeked, shaking, around the room. Anything that had been in contact certainly wasn’t now, nothing but shafts of wood and scraps of fabric remaining. But the furniture held the least of her attention right now, not with the sudden appearance of the room’s other occupant.

He was on his knees, heaving and gasping. She couldn’t see his face from her place behind the chair, only locks of yellow hair. His clothes - a long coat of burnished gold, brown trousers, and soft leather boots - were all embroidered in gold thread, rich and quietly vibrant.

She didn’t understand who he was or where he had come from. It refused to click in her mind that he had actually been stuck in that wine bottle, tapping back to her. People didn’t come from inside bottles. That kind of thing only happened in myths and fairy tales - things that were only stories.

Rising to her feet on legs still shaky, she kept her gaze on the man as she slid a foot back, thinking to make a quiet exit, unnoticed. Of course, with so much debris scattered about the room, something like a quiet escape was absolutely impossible. Before the edge of her shoe had moved even a few inches, it disturbed a shard of wood with enough force to send it scittering a few inches over the stone floor, breaking the silence only broken by his heavy breathing.

Piercing yellow eyes snapped to her and she gasped at the intensity within their depths, frozen, a deer in headlights. He turned, stumbling to his feet, eyes still locked with hers, and dear god, she believed in fairy tales looking at him. His face was unnaturally beautiful, something someone had dreamed up rather than someone born. It spoke of marble sculptures carved in his image, of candlelight on silk sheets, and there was a depth to his eyes, something she couldn’t fathom, something that marked him as...inhuman.

MC hadn’t realized that her jaw had dropped and she swallowed, opening her mouth to say something and choking on air. Before she could manage her way through anything even vaguely coherent, he surged forward, barely a centimeter in front of her in the blink of an eye. Yelping, she tried to jump back, but his arms were already around her, dragging her against his chest. She struggled fruitlessly in his grip as he buried his face in the crook of her neck, lips and nose nuzzling against the soft skin as he breathed deep of her scent.

“W-What are you-? S-Stop!” she demanded weakly, the panic rising in her chest choking her pleas.

“Smells so good,” the stranger breathed, his voice hoarse from disuse, and pulled back just enough that he could peer into her wide eyes. He looked absolutely wild now, ravenous and uncontrollable. “I’m sorry, but I need your help, mademoiselle.”

The hand around her shoulders grabbed a handful of her hair, gently moving it away from her neck. Her fingers clawed into his lapels as she stared at him, fearful and confused, prey in the arms of a predator. His face lowered to her neck once again and she shivered as his breath fanned against her skin. What was he doing?

“Try to relax, ma cherie.”

The unexpected pain of two fangs sinking into her made her scream, bucking in his unyielding hold as he took long drawls of her blood.

It was physical pain as well as mental pain, the pain of confusion and everything she’d thought she’d known about the realistic world cracking. Pain. And then pleasure. Pleasure unlike any she had ever experienced before, setting her entire body alight and turning her mind white.

And that was how she met him, Le Comte de Saint-Germain, a starving vampire trapped inside a wine bottle for 100 years.

She’d woken later with her head in his lap, the ghost of his touch on her cheek stirring her. The ceiling spun above her and MC groaned, turning into him and covering her eyes with an arm.

“Shh, you’re okay, ma cherie. It’ll pass soon.”

Her eyes flew open, met with an abundance of gold and yellow, and she shot upwards, falling on her side as the world spun again. Hands reached to steady her out of the corner of her vision, but she flinched away from them, remembering the strange pain and pleasure his bite had brought.

“Stop!” she bit out, and he did, hovering a few feet away from her. “Who are you and what did you do to me?!”

He blinked at her, seeming to think for a second before answering with a gentle smile, “I am Le Comte de Saint-Germain, and...moments ago I was starving for your blood.”

“Starving for my-” She shook her head, still confused and afraid. “What?”

“I’m not human, as you might have guessed.” His tone was polite, but warm, friendly as he spoke to her. “I’m a creature out of your myths and folklore, a vampire.”

And her day officially couldn’t get any weirder!

There, sitting on the cold, stone floor and shredded rugs, Le Comte had told her his story, that he was an immortal vampire trapped inside a wine bottle by another of his kind who he’d once considered a friend. He had been the one to build the mansion and live in it, assimilating into human high society and traveling between countries for centuries until the event of his capture.

When MC had asked him about how the mansion had appeared and disappeared, he’d answered that it was part of the curse placed on him, that none should have been able to find and release him. Even he didn’t know how she had managed to stumble upon it.

She believed him, choosing to trust the earnestness in his gaze when he’d apologized for biting her in a fit of starvation, but it was still a lot to take in, and they just sat there like that, blinking at each other, for a good minute or so. He seemed just as curious of her as she was of him, a little disoriented too, but she guessed that was to be expected after being trapped in a wine bottle for a hundred years. Finally, she said, “So what happens now? What are you going to do now that you’re free?” What was she going to do? She couldn’t just walk away from this place like it had never happened, right?

He hummed, chuckling as he gazed around at the ruin of his home. “Rebuild, I suppose; catch up on what I’ve missed in the past hundred years.”

MC blinked, biting her lip as she contemplated the impact of what she was about to say. An hour ago, all she had wanted to do was get away from this place, to forget it and never see it again, but now her heart felt strangely heavy at the thought. If she left this place behind now, she would regret it, she could feel it in her bones. Could she be blamed for wanting to live out whatever fairy tale this was, just for a little longer?

“I…” Those yellow eyes met hers again, and her fate was sealed. “I might be able to help you with that.”

Thus began her relationship with an immortal vampire, visiting him every day with new technology and books on the modern age for him to catch up with. More than once, he returned to the city with her, eager and capable of exploring for himself. He adjusted surprisingly easily to the new time period and all the technological advances that came with it, but she guessed that was part of being immortal, having to adapt quickly to the change of time.

She didn’t know what magic he possessed, but every day the mansion looked a little better, damaged furnishings either replaced or repaired, broken windows whole again, even the hole in the ceiling of the entry was miraculously fixed when she came one day. The lawn and garden still needed a great deal of attention, but those could definitely wait, especially since Le Comte was still weak after his long entrapment.

“Le Comte?” MC called as she pushed the door open. The mansion welcomed her like an old friend now, warmth and the faint smell of sandalwood wrapping around her as she stepped into the entryway. She’d come to look forward to these daily meetings, noticeably out of it to her friends and colleagues when work or bad weather kept her from making the trip.

“Here, ma cherie,” she heard him call from somewhere up the staircase. He could’ve been anywhere in this massive place and she still would have heard his call - another magical feature of the mansion and its connection with its owner.

It was weird. It had been months since she had found the mansion and Le Comte, but already she could barely remember what her life was like before. Her happiest moments were spent here, with him, her days filled with the smell of chamomile that she’d come to know as Le Comte’s, and easing the tension in her shoulders from the stress of modern life.

But it was more than that too, so much more.

She wasn’t dense. She knew what it meant for her heart to flutter the way it did at the mere thought of him. Truly, she’d had no intent of pursuing anything more than friendship when she started helping him. What more could there be between a human and a vampire? It had all seemed like a fairy tale, the beautiful mansion and the equally beautiful man in the bottle, waiting for her to find them, but this story would not end in romance, she was sure of it...or at least she had been.

She’d tried to reason with herself at first, that it was just the allure of something new and strange and magical in her ordinary life, that it was just the natural attraction of a vampiric predator to his human prey, but when had reason ever convinced a love-struck heart? He wasn’t going to hurt her, she was sure of that, and there were plenty of nice men in her normal life that she could have chosen from if she wanted a change of pace. No, she was in love with Le Comte and there was nothing she could do about it, no forwards or backwards, no place for her love to go, so it bloomed quietly in her chest, growing with each affectionate smile he sent her way.

MC found him hanging a painting in the hallway, a landscape she remembered him asking her opinion on last week when they went into town together. It made her cheeks warm a little, remembering his approving nod when she’d told him she liked it. The long, pale yellow coat he’d adopted lay across the back of a nearby chair, and the sleeves of his white button-up were rolled up, exposing pale forearms. It shouldn’t have made her blush, but to her shame it did, the sight of her crush’s bared skin making her feel like some pervert, excited by the least bit of exposed skin.

“What do you think?” Stepping away from the painting, he dusted his hands off and she did her best to keep her eyes away from the elegant flex of his fingers.

“Looks nice,” she answered simply, turning her gaze to the painting and anywhere other than him. She could feel him looking at her, and she wondered what he was thinking, what was going on inside his head.

He hummed, pleased. “I bought it with you in mind.”

“W-Why?” She didn’t know what to say. Lately, it was like each word he said to her was intended to make her heart pound.

“I thought there should be something of you here.”

Her cheeks were as good as on fire now, and she resisted the urge to reach up and press her cool palms against the heated skin. “I-I see.” She kept her gaze glued to the painting, staring but not seeing the whorls and colors that made up the bodies of two lovers entwined and hidden within the painting, not daring to look at him. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

He didn’t respond, and the atmosphere suddenly felt too heavy, too many implications in his gaze, in buying this particular painting. Clearing her throat, she turned on her heel even as she spoke, “I’m going to go finish the cleaning I started in the kitchen yesterday.” MC cursed the way her voice swooped and dove, unwilling to settle on a tone and octave.

He chuckled and the sound warmed her to her bones. “Okay.”

Her legs felt shaky as she made her way back down the steps and to the kitchen, blowing out a long breath as soon as she deemed herself far enough away from him. Mechanically, she pulled out the cutlery she’d been polishing the day before, her mind drifting as she did. Her heart felt shaky in her chest, fluttering and pounding and ready to run back up the stairs and throw itself into the hands of the vampire it belonged to. But she would do her best not to let it.

Falling in love with him was one thing. Starting a relationship with him was another. She couldn’t fully fathom what it would mean to be a vampire’s mate, what impact it would have on her human life, but she knew the cost would be immense. Besides, there was no telling if he even returned her feelings. He cared for her as any friend would - she knew that at least - and the affection he displayed was undeniable, but she refused to see it as anything more than platonic. Le Comte had already lived so much longer than her, and probably loved more than her too. Making assumptions would only lead to pain on both their parts.

MC jumped, a noise of pain and surprise passing her lips, when her fingers slipped on the steak knife she’d been polishing, the sharp edge slicing the skin of her thumb. In seconds, a line of blood rose to the surface, gathering to drip down her skin in small drops. Hissing in pain, she turned to the sink, about to clean the wound, but she jumped when her attention caught on the sudden figure in the doorway. She hadn’t heard Le Comte approach, hadn’t even felt his presence, and how still he stood as he hovered in the doorway was immediately unsettling.

“I wasn’t paying attention,” she tried to fill the silence, “I cut myself on one of the knives.”

Still nothing from him, his gaze locked on her bleeding thumb.

“Le Comte?”

He seemed to startle out of whatever trance he’d fallen into, a shudder passing through him as he glanced up at her face before looking away entirely. His usual poise and grace was replaced by something hard, something sad. “You should leave,” he murmured, eyes shaded by his golden hair as he turned away from her, his movements stiff.

She blinked. “What? Why? I-”

��Leave.” His voice was harder now, resonating with something that gripped her soul with icy claws. “Now.”

So she did, helpless to disobey. Holding her bleeding hand, she ducked past him and hurried down the hall, through the door and down the path before her mind started to catch up. It hurt to be pushed away so cruelly by the one she loved, but she knew why he had done it, the memory of his fangs plunging into her neck months ago still a fresh reminder. He’d promised never to hurt her again, but he was still a vampire, surviving on blood. One slip up and...why didn’t the idea of him biting her bring her fear anymore?

Her steps were small and slow as MC walked to the mansion the next day, tripping and stumbling more than once over roots and rocks she had always avoided easily before. She hadn’t slept well the night before, tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling. Every time she closed her eyes, those golden eyes were there, inviting her closer. She had considered not even coming today, but she’d eventually decided otherwise after spending all day unable to focus and watching the sun near the horizon from her bedroom window. Something restless in her heart wouldn’t let her avoid him.

“Comte?” she called, too softly, when she opened the door. The newly polished wood and iron gave way easily under her touch. No answer, but she knew he could sense her, just as the mansion could.

The mansion at night made her want to curl up in front of a fire, preferably in the arms of her loved one. The candles in their newly restored candleholders cast warm, golden light on the richly colored walls and paintings, and she tried to ignore the burst of heat in her chest as she passed the painting Le Comte had gotten for her. The lovers within the frame became especially apparent in the romantic light, hands and lips on naked flesh.

She continued to Le Comte’s bedroom, taking a deep breath as she lifted a fist to knock. Still no answer, and her brow furrowed, but just as she was about to grasp the knob she heard something shatter from inside the room.

“Comte?” A pained moan and her heart jumped into her throat. “I’m sorry, but I’m coming in!”

The glass shards lying across the floor were the least of her worries as she barged in, her attention falling on the man bent on the rug. A sense of deja vu settled over her, but before she’d taken even a few steps towards him one of his hands shot up, stopping her in place.

“Why’d you come?” he grunted, his voice choked and dry. He didn’t give her any time to answer, continuing, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I came because I was worried,” she admitted softly, soothingly. “Comte, are you starving again?”

“No!” The harsh edge to his tone made her jump, but she held her ground, digging her nails into her palm as she took another couple of steps towards him. He turned on her from his place on the floor, baring long, sharp fangs in a snarl. “Don’t come any closer!”

Maybe she should have, but MC felt no fear as she knelt in front of him, warm palm meeting his cool cheek. He stared at her, eyes shining with astonishment and hunger, sadness and longing. “Why didn’t you tell me you were starving?” she questioned, giving him a heartbroken smile. “Why didn’t you ask me for help? Do you not trust me enough for this?”

Heartbeats passed as he stared at her, and for a second she wondered if he had heard her through his ravenous haze, if he was already too far gone in his bloodlust. Finally, his lips parted and he whispered, “It’s not that.” He closed his eyes, drooping into her touch. “It’s not that.”

Without a word, she reached up, undoing a couple of buttons on her blouse. His eyes still closed, Le Comte let her guide him to the crook of her neck, but as soon as the warmth of her skin pressed against his cheek, he jolted, tearing out of her hold and dragging himself back along the rug, away from her.

“You know nothing!” he hissed through clenched teeth. “You have no idea what I want to do to you!”

“Then tell me!” she pleaded, hands fisting in her skirt. “Let me help you!”

“I want to bite you!” he cried, anguished that she didn’t understand even as his eyes glinted with a feral light. “I want to sink my fangs into you and fuck you until all of you is mine! Until you’re filled with me!”

MC stared, frozen at his omission. Maybe she hadn’t known the extent of his hunger for her, what it fully entailed, but she would happily let him have everything he wanted of her depending on his answer to her next question.

“Is it just because you’re starving?” she asked quietly. “Could anyone satisfy you right now?”

His gaze locked with hers, weighing the question. He knew exactly what she was asking. “No,” he admitted, his voice hushed, and the tension in the room reached a climax. “Only you. I starve for your blood, your body, and yours alone.”

“Then I don’t care,” she laughed breathlessly. Her heart felt like it was ready to beat out of her chest, and she couldn’t restrain her relieved smile as she met his wide-eyed expression. “Bite me...fuck me...and I’ll still love you.”

A heartbeat later, she was lifted off the floor, weightless, and tossed onto the bed. She bounced on the mattress, sinking into the luscious pillows and blankets, before a solid weight settled over her. Grabbing her hands, Le Comte pinned them above her head, hot tongue leaving a wet trail against her neck. His hips settled between her legs, pinning her to the mattress as he teased the sensitive spot on the side of her throat with the tips of his fangs.

“Oh…” She writhed under him, skirt slipping up her thighs as she wrapped a leg around his waist. Her body still remembered how it felt to be bitten by him, the overwhelming pleasure, the heat. “Please…!”

“Abel,” he whispered in her ear, making her still for a moment. “I want you calling me by my real name as I claim you.” His fangs slipped so suddenly into her neck, she barely registered the pain before pleasure claimed her unprepared body, nerve endings set alight with sudden arousal. Her vision blurred and she might’ve screamed, but she didn’t know, too focused on the way his body was pressing into her suddenly oversensitive one as her blood flowed into his mouth. It was more powerful this time, whether made so by the sudden confession between them or his increased need for her, she didn’t know and didn’t care. All she could think of was the mournful emptiness in her core and the rush of release that ruined her panties as he continued to drink from her.

When MC came to, she was naked, bare to him in the firelight. Her heart was pounding and her inner thighs were wet, slick with her cum. Le Comte...Abel...wasn’t on top of her anymore, his hands on her calves holding her legs apart as he knelt by her feet. She gasped silently, eyes widening, when she realized he was equally bare, every inch of him more gorgeous than she could have ever imagined as the firelight danced across his skin.

“So beautiful,” he purred, kissing up the inside of her leg from her ankle to her thigh. “You were sent here just for me, weren’t you? Sent to free me, all for me to love.” She couldn’t answer, squeezing her eyes shut and digging her fingers into the sheets as he neared the apex of her thighs. “Mmm, you smell positively delectable, mon amour.”

She yelped, fingers flying to his hair as his fangs burrowed into the soft skin of her thigh. It was more painful in a spot so vulnerable, but the pleasure after the pain was more intense too, making her writhe in his grip as another wave of release soaked her thighs. She mewled and panted as he took greedy gulps from her, laving his tongue lovingly across the bloodied skin when he’d had his fill. Her body shuddered with the aftershocks of a second orgasm, and she whimpered, too sensitive to his touch. Such rapture shouldn’t have been humanly possible, wasn’t humanly possible.

“You’re the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted,” Abel moaned, eyes half-lidded as he peered up at her from between her legs. His hands ran up and down her legs, bending them at the knees as he crawled closer, hot breath fanning against her wet pussy. He took her in so greedily, so hungrily, she had to resist the urge to close her legs around him, to hide away from the intensity of his gaze. Never had anyone looked at her like that before, starving for her.

MC gasped his name breathlessly when his tongue licked a stripe along her slit, and he groaned at the taste of her arousal. “Absolutely soaked,” he purred, licking his lips. “I don’t believe I even need to prepare you for me.”

She trembled as he licked her again, yelping and bucking her hips into his face when his mouth wrapped around her clit. His grip on her hips held her still as his tongue delved inside of her, chin shining with her wetness as he slurped and moaned. Though she had never admitted it, this was what she had wanted for so long, her love reciprocated to the utmost. And as much as she wanted him to continue, she was already oversensitive from the intensity of her previous two climaxes. She wouldn’t be able to take much more without it becoming painful soon and she wanted him inside of her, filling and stretching and claiming her.

“A-Abel,” she managed to say, her vision blurred with pleasured tears. “T-Too much. Too sensitive.”

That’s what she said, but she still nearly cried when his tongue left her, biting her lip and squeezing her eyes shut to keep herself from shoving his head back between her legs. His warmth fell over her as he moved on top of her, soft lips kissing the corners of her eyes and trailing over her cheeks. She mewled when his hardened cock brushed her throbbing core, unintentionally teasing her. Even just brushing against her, she could tell he was huge, bigger than any human male could ever be.

“Are you okay?” he murmured softly, and she nodded.

Opening her eyes, MC cupped his cheek, leaning up to kiss him with as much love and need as she could muster. “Please,” she whispered against his lips, “Make me yours?”

Even though she’d already confessed so much to him tonight, Abel still looked at her with such amazement in his eyes, as if he couldn’t believe she was actually real and here with him. Placing his hand over hers, he closed his eyes, smiling into her palm. “I don’t deserve to...but it would be my honor.” He didn’t say anything more, but he didn’t need to; the weight of mutual love and adoration that filled the space between them and his overjoyed smile against her skin said enough.

Without wasting another moment, he reached between them and gently guided himself into her, hazy, lust-focused golden eyes peering into hers as a shudder wracked their joined forms. Her nails dug into his back, core squeezing around the pulsing length burrowing inside of her.

“Relax, mon amour,” he whispered, nuzzling the soft spot below her ear. Taking a few deep, shuddering breaths, she tried to relax the clenching in her lower stomach, gradually adjusting to the stretch.

“Please,” she whined, planting kisses across his chin and jaw. “Move.”

The world she knew fell away, nonexistent. All there was was him and her and this place, wrapped up with velvet and warm firelight as her vampire made love to her.

His thrusts into her were slow and forceful, the pleasure it brought rolling over her in spine-tingling waves. Her back arched, head thrown back to expose her neck to his hungry lips, as he held her against him.

“Perfect,” he moaned against her skin, his breath raising goosebumps on her flesh. “Absolutely perfect.”

Her toes curled as he lifted her hips, changing the angle and hitting spots deep inside of her that made her see stars. Her arms laced around him, vice-like as she held onto him desperately. Each powerful stroke into her teased the edge of her climax, igniting her nerves, and the feeling of his mouth closing around the nipple of one bouncing breast made her scream.

She writhed, helplessly grinding her hips to meet his thrusts as he sucked the hardened bud, teasing it with his fangs. His other hand pinched and rolled its twin, his thrusts turning harder as he fucked her into the mattress. He let go of her breast with a wet pop, leaving a trail of wet kisses in his wake as he moved up her chest, nipping at her collarbone for good measure.

“Does it feel good?” he purred in her ear, honeyed voice dripping with sin. “Do you like the way it feels, my fangs in your throat and my cock in your cunt?”

“Yes!” she cried, desperate. She wanted so badly to cum again, to reach her climax for the third time tonight. It was already so, so close. “Please - anhg! - Don’t stop!”

He chuckled, warm breath fanning against her skin. “I don’t intend to.” His cock slammed into the sensitive spot inside of her, his hand reaching between her legs to find her clit. “Not until your body knows me and me alone.”

She could feel the coil deep in her stomach starting to tighten, signaling her impending climax. “Haa...A-Abel! I’m - I’m close! Ah...more! Feels...ha...so good! I need more!”

Something changed in him at her words, whatever control he had recovered after drinking her blood vanishing. Grunting, he grabbed the backs of her knees and pushed them against her chest. “Cum around my cock,” he coaxed, face alight with feral desire. The expression was unfamiliar on his gentlemanly face, but it still shot a pulse of heat straight to her core, making her squeeze around him. “Make me cum inside of you.”

MC screamed, coating him in her release as he rammed into her, the new position sending her over the edge and into her climax. She sobbed, fluttering around his piercing cock as the blunt head pummeled her cervix, the slight pain making her orgasm all the more ravaging.

He groaned, thrusts turning sloppy as her core milked him, and with another few deep thrusts inside of her, he came, growling into her neck as he pulsed. She trembled at the feeling of his cum filling her, hot and thick and pooling somewhere deep inside of her as her eyes closed and her body turned weightless.

She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until her eyes fluttered open, finding herself tucked under the covers and cuddled against a warm, bare chest.

“You’re awake,” Le Comte’s voice rumbled against her cheek, and she tilted her head to peer up at him as his fingers carded soothingly through her hair. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She blushed, noting the soreness and lingering warmth between her thighs. “It was just...intense.” The corner of his lips twitched in the beginnings of a smirk, and she kept talking before he could tease her. “Do you not sleep?” she said softly, reaching to tuck her arms around him in turn.

“I do,” he chuckled with a raised brow, relaxing into her embrace.

“Then why don’t you?”

“...I’m almost afraid to sleep,” he admitted wryly. “Maybe this...meeting you...has all been a dream and I’m still stuck in that bottle.”

Her grip on him tightened, snuggling him closer. She hadn’t known he’d felt this way, scarred by his time trapped and alone, but of course he would. He felt and processed experiences just as she did. Leaning up, she kissed him softly, feeling his arms pull her closer. “I’m real,” she murmured, holding his gaze, those brilliant golden eyes she had originally fallen so deeply in love with. “This is real, and I love you. I still don’t know how I was able to find this place, but I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“What did I do for God to send you to me?” His breathing stuttered and he said on a shaky exhale, “I’ve done things, things that pervert the rules of nature, things that I never want to tell you. How can I possibly deserve you?”

“Hmm, do you love me?” She smiled, her heart feeling full enough to burst from her chest.

“Madly,” he answered, without missing a beat.

“Then we’ll work our way up from there. Just know that I can’t remember ever being happier than I have been here with you these past months.” Leaning up for a last kiss, she felt him smile against her lips. “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

There was still much to discuss, a whole dynamic to work out between them, but it could wait until morning. For now, they could sleep in each other’s arms, blissfully in love and ready to face the challenges that would come with each tomorrow.

They had all the time in the world, after all.

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