#like we made a deal that we would try to kee the kitchen clean and wash the dishes we use | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jeonjeonggukenergy · 4 years

Text

Anti-Hero

summary ~ in search of wine at a party that’s so not your scene, you run into jungkook, the weeb from your film class, and become determined to learn just how much he lives up to his big reputation.

pairing ~ jungkook x reader

genre ~ fluff, smut - college!au

wordcount ~ 8.5k

warnings ~ 18+ only! smut, explicit discussion of kinks/sexual preferences (yay healthy communication), dom/sub undertones during both discussion and sex (dom Jungkook, sub reader), mentions of daddy kink and degradation but both are a no, marking, biting, hair pulling, spanking, they both have a srs pain kink lmao, brief oral (f receiving), penetrative sex, creampie

a/n ~ SO excited to finally have this chapter out for yall! it’s a huge one and i’ve been working on it for quite a while, this includes the first full smut scene for this fic and i would love to know how yall like it or any other feedback. i really enjoyed writing the character development in this chapter too! they’re so cute and whipped for each other already hhhhhh. thank you so much for loving this story so far, i’m really looking forward to writing the rest. hope you enjoy! ❣️

previous: chapter 1 | chapter 2 ~ next: chapter 4 (coming soon!)

~ read on ao3 ~

CHAPTER 3 ~ particular, perfect

You concluded your walk home by ditching your shoes at the door, swinging your bag off your shoulders to the floor, and plopping down onto the couch immediately. Pulling all three nearby blankets over yourself, you realized you still weren't quite comfortable. You looked around for a second, puzzled, until an absentminded clutch of your boobs reminded you why. Triumphantly, you reached into a sleeve to untangle your bra and chucked it across the room with a deep stretch of relief. Okay, time to overthink again.

Jungkook? What the fuck?

Wait. A bag of chips on the kitchen counter caught your eye before you could descend any further into panic. The perfect emotional crutch. You clutched it to your chest like a safeguard against your own internal monologue, anxiously shoving handful after handful into your mouth. After about thirty minutes spent motionless on the couch with one hand shoved in the chip bag and the other distractedly scrolling through Twitter, your eyes suddenly widened and your hand froze, dropping your next bite of chips back into the bag. Fuck. You had just eaten nearly an entire family-size bag of chips before what could end up being your first fuck in over a year. Well, maybe this was part of why you hadn't gotten fucked in over a year. No, don't go there. You shoved down your own insecurity, knowing you'd just been too busy for a relationship and honestly, probably still were. But that wasn't going to stop you today.

You shook the chip dust off of your hands and got up to head to the shower, turning up your trashiest throwback playlist of getting-ready bops and resolving to at least shave your legs. Going in with no expectations was probably the best strategy here, but it never hurt to be prepared.

Having cleaned his apartment in record time, Jungkook was now at the gym. After triple-checking that his roommate Jin would be in rehearsal until 10pm at the earliest, he quickly scanned all the common spaces and his bedroom and realized he didn't actually have that much work to do besides politely closing the door to Jin's still-decent-but-somewhat-messier room. To be honest, Jungkook had mainly bought himself the time after class so he could shave just in case. But then he figured if he had to shower, he might as well hit the gym first. So here he was, burning off an unprecedented amount of nervous energy. Settling comfortably into the leg curl machine, he turned his music up and started on a low weight to put in reps until his thighs burned and his head felt pleasantly empty.

After completing his normal leg day rotation and dutifully stretching, Jungkook prepared to head home. He walked out of the gym feeling more energized and centered, barely even flinching when he switched his AirPods off to say bye to the nice girl at the front desk and the action accidentally blasted "Whistle" by Flo Rida from his phone speaker for the whole lobby to hear. As he walked back into his apartment, the kitchen clock let him know it was only 4:30. He had plenty of time. Jungkook hopped straight into the shower, shampooing his hair, shaving everywhere he normally did, and savoring several extra moments to relax his muscles under the hot stream of water. Finally, he toweled off to wrap up in the black t-shirt and cozy matching sweatpants he'd carefully stacked on the counter. Offhandedly singing to himself in the steamy mirror, he checked the time on his phone, deciding he might as well go ahead and text you before he got nervous again and did something stupid. Like chickening out completely.

hey its jk! im ready when u are :) my apt is 344 glencoe rd #1521 (yes its on the 15th floor sry D: )

His charming old-school smileys lit up your phone while you still had a leg perched on the bathtub's edge.

"Fuck!" you reacted. The hiss resounded, thanks to the too-good acoustics of your cramped bathroom. Your razor clattering to the floor, you paused your max-volume 2000s music to check the message, and then the time. Only 5! That wasn't dinnertime yet. Plugging his address into Google Maps, though, you realized it was a 15- to 20-minute drive from yours on the opposite end of campus. Even if you got ready at light-speed, you would get there closer to 5:30. Which was a bit more reasonable. He was being reasonable! You should be ready by now!

You leaned over to pick up your razor and cursed again as the water stream grazed the blouse you'd left on out of laziness. You'd showered this morning, so there was no need to repeat that with your shave, but now you'd have to change outfits completely. Feeling like an idiot, naked from the waist down but now all the way wet, you peeled the shirt over your head slowly to preserve your good hair day and glanced down at the dilemma you'd been facing. The patch of hair between your legs stared back at you like the final boss of stupid societal beauty standards. You'd only shaved down there once, as an anniversary present for your first boyfriend the summer before college, and it had been a fun, smooth novelty for about two hours and then itchy, red, gross-looking, and miserable for about three weeks. Also, it had kind of made you feel like a little girl, which creeped you out when you thought about why guys would prefer it. You'd been debating whether to try it again for the past fifteen minutes, because if there was ever a right time, this was probably it. But now you didn't have time, if you were going to be respectful and not keep Jungkook waiting. Well, this was the real you. He could take it or leave it.

Slathering a quick coat of lotion over your freshly shaved legs, you prepared to get dressed in a soft pastel sweatshirt and a flattering pair of workout shorts. Wait, should you wear lingerie? Was that too try-hard? You didn't really even need to wear underwear with these lined shorts, which could be a cool-girl move, you supposed. You settled on a cute white sports bra to go with the shorts, not wanting to deal with a real bra and hoping it still appealed to Jungkook's casual, athletic style. You checked yourself in the mirror briefly before grabbing your bag, confirming you looked chill enough but still felt like your best color-coordinated self. Heading out, you shoved a tin of chrysanthemum green tea in your water bottle pocket. Why not?

You whizzed over to Jungkook's apartment, yelling along to "Sex With Me" by Rihanna from your throwback playlist to hype you up in the car. When you knocked on his door after a nerve-wrackingly long elevator ride, Jungkook welcomed you with a "C'mon in!" amidst a mouthful of shrimp chips.

"It's not really dinnertime yet," (yeah, no kidding, you thought) "I went ahead and worked out but it's still kind of early, so I figured we could just have a snack and do the homework first."

"Sounds good," you affirmed. "I'm not really that hungry," (read: there's no way I can eat chips AGAIN right now, I'm going to bloat so badly) "but I brought tea so I can go ahead and make that if you want some too!"

"Oh cool, thanks!" Jungkook accepted. "Are you sure you're not hungry though?"

You almost gave into his sweet pout, but managed to convince him, and soon you both sat at the table with laptops open and twin cups of tea. You had a blast working together for the first time, acting out your "conversation" for the discussion board and pretending to respond spontaneously to each other's points like you hadn't already excitedly rambled back and forth through them in real life. You hit "send" five minutes apart, your idea to not seem too suspicious, and kept raving over Rear Window in between. As the sun lowered outside his living room window, you moved on to making the ramen.

After three offers to help Jungkook, all of which he denied, you simply made another steep of the tea, leaving a mug on the counter for him. Standing at the bar counter sipping yours, you enjoyed all the tiny, cute noises he made while chopping green onions and sprinkling extra garlic in the seasoning, like an anime character who came with his own sound effects. You could tell he made these recipe additions every time, because bulk quantities of the same simple ingredients lined the counters of his cozy kitchen. When he beat two eggs and dropped them into the pot, though, he couldn't seem to find a lid, and eventually settled on trapping the steam with a plate. You both waited on the egg for a silent moment, your foot bouncing under the bar while Jungkook restlessly acquired a slight wiggle. As he took a sip of his tea, a strand of hair fell over his eyes, and he yeeted it out of his face. Your inner language nerd cringed, but there really was no more apt word to describe the action.

You offhandedly said you liked his hair long, and he replied with a smile, "Maybe I'll have to keep it then."

"Do you like it too?" you wondered.

"Honestly no, it's kind of inconvenient."

"Oh, then why would you keep it?" you immediately asked back.

"Well..." he dragged out. "You like it? Maybe I should keep it if it looks better this way."

Your eyes crinkled appreciatively at his thoughtfulness, but then you backtracked. "Wait, no, it's okay! If you don't like it, don't feel like you have to keep it just because of something I said. You can do whatever you want."

"Hm, yeah." A demure smile tugged up the corner of his mouth as he lifted the plate from the ramen pot.

You watched him drag a chopstick through the floating, now-cooked egg to tear it into ribbons, then divide the noodles between two generously-sized bowls. He carefully wiped down the drips of broth from each bowl before sprinkling in his fresh toppings, then walked with you to the table.

Serving you with a pleased smile and a slight nod, he announced, "Dinner!"

"Wow," you mused playfully. "So gourmet."

"I'm really particular about my ramen," he admitted. "I have it down to a perfect routine at this point."

You took your first slurp of his particular, perfect ramen. "Well, it's really good. I'm impressed. And thanks for making me dinner, you didn't have to do all that."

"Oh, come on, it's instant ramen," he laughed. "Nothing special. And you brought the tea, so thanks. And thanks for coming over. And doing the homework with me. And...yeah." Rambling again. Why did he seem so...nervous? You were nervous. He couldn't be nervous. What reason did he have to be? But the twitch of his mouth under his wide eyes, his slightly reddened ears, his hand skittering over his neck—fuck—to ruffle his hair...every action turned another page of his open book. It felt infuriatingly unfair that genetics had assigned someone so sweet and shy and unsure of himself to that fucking body.

While you both ate and talked, you kept catching glimpses of any small flashes of skin you could find, as his long sleeves fell to expose his forearms and the wide neckline of his boxy black shirt gaped around his collarbones. What was wrong with you? Even if this did eventually turn into a dick appointment, the boy still had literally all of his clothes on. You tried to refocus on finishing your noodles, while your brain screamed at itself in shame that you could get this turned on by the sight of someone covered from neck to ankle.

Jungkook ate surprisingly slowly, probably because he kept pausing to excitedly explain his favorite things about the Cowboy Bebop episode you were about to watch together. You smiled into your tea through every out-of-context fun fact and "wait, sorry, that might have been a spoiler!"

Finally, he reached the bottom of his bowl and insisted on both taking your dishes to the sink and leaving them for him to clean later. "You sure you want to start on episode 2? Not 1?"

"Yeah, I remember well enough and your summary helped a lot too!"

"Okay, if you're positive!" he double-checked, grabbing the remote.

Gingerly lowering yourselves to the couch in sync, you avoided looking at each other as you both tried to calculate a comfortable distance between you. His hand looked ready to either hold yours or lower to your thigh, but he retracted at the last second, smoothing it over his own leg anxiously and still clearly itching to make a move. You shuffled closer to him until your thighs barely touched, and he shifted to slink an arm around you, letting your head rest on his well-muscled shoulder. After pressing “play”, he began wiggling slightly again, subconsciously grooving to the old-newspaper-style intro. Spike Spiegel appeared on the screen, his broad shoulders squared into a slouch as he listlessly watched TV. Jungkook kicked one leg over another and stretched his arms out symmetrically to echo the pose. Raising an eyebrow, he waited until you acknowledged him with a faux grimace and a hand to your ear, imitating the old man in a lab who’d just called up Spike for a new mission. You both burst into laughter and settled back into your former arrangement, Jungkook holding you imperceptibly tighter. Though you tried to stay staring straight ahead, wanting to genuinely appreciate the anime, you kept catching his doe eyes in the corner of your sight as you both giggled and gasped your way through the episode.

After avoiding eye contact too many times, you finally tilted your head for a cute sideways view of his face. He leaned toward you too, shyly closing the gap to touch his warm lips to your nose, then lower. You responded immediately, rolling your body with his so your chests met as he pulled you up into a full, deeper kiss. The longer you explored each other's mouths, the more Jungkook punctuated your movements with whimpers. He seemed hesitant to let his hands roam away from your face and neck, but his high, breathy moans made it clear that he was just as into this as you. Your hands had naturally found his taut waist, and at some point you started to bring them back up to his face too—but as your short nails grazed his chest, a particularly sensual, voice-cracking moan interrupted you. You drew back in slight surprise, blinking your eyes open to scan from his face to his body.

He followed your gaze, both slowly settling on the massive tent in his pants. You froze. Your breath grew heavier, confronted with evidence of his physical attraction to you, if nothing else. After regaining his composure, he laid a useless hand over his lap in a delicate attempt to distract you and brought his other hand up to tap your face lightly.

"Is this okay?"

His eyes glittered with equal parts hunger and concern.

"Yes!" you nodded, too quickly, too eagerly. "Yes, this is totally okay. Sorry if I'm being weird, I just...it's been a while." You cringed internally at your own words, but couldn't seem to avoid putting your foot further in your mouth. "I haven't really, like, hooked up like this before—like, I've had sex, but never really outside of a relationship. But don't worry, I get this is more your thing, and I'm totally down if you are. I just don't really know what I'm doing, and you clearly do."

Jungkook blinked at your admission, then his face twisted into something curious, inscrutable. Would he decide you weren't worth the potential for drama? His lips flattened out to a tight line, then pursed to speak, and you looked down at your lap, hoping he wasn't as embarrassed of you as you now were of yourself.

"Well, I've never had sex sober."

Your eyes flashed back up to his. A complex half-smirk offset the furrow in his brow as he exhaled in nervous relief. "So, I don't actually know what I'm doing here either."

You tried to delay your response as you processed the implications. "You mean..." You tilted your head for better eye contact, hoping to convey empathy but not pity while you silently contemplated how to proceed. "Never?"

"Yeah, I've always shown up to parties and the hookups just...happened. Nothing I didn't want, nothing bad like that, but always spontaneous. So I guess we're kind of meeting in the middle, because I've never really had to plan ahead for a situation like this and, uh, figure out what I want. Beyond, yknow, wanting to get laid in the moment, of course." Jungkook laughed off the end of his explanation, but the smile never quite hit his eyes.

"Well, okay, let's pause right there." You sighed. Something in his words didn't sit right with you. "What do you want? I want you to be sure about this, of course, but more than that, even—what do you like?"

"I..." he chuckled, sheepish, shaking his hair over his face again. "What, you want me to just tell you? Like, what I'm into?"

"Yeah," you shrugged, trying to project more confidence than you felt in hopes of encouraging him to keep opening up. "I want you to be able to communicate, I want you to be comfortable. And I want to know what you like, so I can make it as good for you as possible."

With your hands still laid flat on his chest, you felt his heart rate jump a tiny bit, and took the liberty of digging your nails in just slightly deeper. His breath caught him, and then he caught himself. "I don't know, I just want what you want."

Jungkook struggled to appear nonchalant as you rolled your eyes with an "Oh, come on," challenging his avoidance. Every instinct was telling him yes. He could hear his mind screaming at him to be intentional for once and let you take him, if not farther, then deeper than ever before. But he still hesitated, because being intentional in this case required him to be real. He had always been a fairly private person, but something about you made him feel so comfortable so fast that it counterintuitively made him more nervous. Of course Jungkook knew you weren't all innocent at this point, but the risk remained that you wouldn't really be down for everything he secretly wanted to explore. Even worse, though he didn't truly think you would, you could easily turn around and spin anything he revealed into yet another graphic rumor. Especially since you had no skin in the game yourself. He glanced down at your fingers, tensed into his chest, and narrowed his eyes.

"Why don't you tell me what you like first? And then I can tell you where we overlap," he grinned competitively. Your eyes widened as he tossed the challenge back your way. Not backing down, you flattened your hands and steeled yourself to settle the stakes.

"Fine—but only if you promise not to just go along with whatever I say. I'll let you know anything that's a hard no for me, but otherwise I want to hear at least one thing that's not on my list. I really do want what you want, that's how I am too, okay? So..." you paused to slide your fingertips over his collar and drag it down with a light scratch, now directly on his skin. You smiled with your eyes, enjoying the way he naturally responded with a hitch of his breath again. "Surely you can think of something specific."

He nodded quickly, before he could convince himself to back out. "Yeah. Promise."

"Okay," you confirmed, slightly nervous but determined to go through with this, for Jungkook's sake if anything. Seeing his body come alive with each new twist of the situation was building your curiosity, not to mention turning you on beyond belief. You could barely stand the warmth of his skin under your hands, so you drew them back to fold in your lap as you began. "So. Uh. To start. I've never really laid it all out like this either. I really like neck kisses? Like, a lot." Equally unused to this kind of directness, you wrung your hands together nervously, but sucked up the boldness to keep elaborating. "That's definitely, like, a big thing that turns me on...and then getting marked up and everything is really hot to me too. Like you can honestly go really rough with me on that, bite me even. I don't know if this is weird but even though it's annoying to cover up, I love taking off the makeup at the end of the day and seeing all the bruises on myself. Knowing I was walking around all day with that as my little secret." You swallowed shyly before continuing, but Jungkook interrupted the brief silence immediately with a hushed "Fuck."

You turned to face him fully and he didn't even move to meet your stare, eyeing the space above your sweatshirt's wide neckline like he was ready to devour you. Emboldened, your smile grew.

"So...yeah. I like being bitten, marked up. Mostly, uh," you rubbed a slightly trembling hand over your shoulder, "I'm just really into pain in general. Obviously not the bad 'I'm too dry and you're jackhammering me' kind of pain, or like, anal. Anal is a hard no. But things like biting, or hair pulling, or overstimulation. Or, like—I don't really know how to explain this, but...getting held too hard? That deep pain like when you get a massage when you're sore and it hurts but it's good, yknow?"

Jungkook looked like he was about to vibrate out of his skin, breathing shallow and rapid. His eyes flicked up to meet yours, just in time for you to whisper in conclusion:

"I love that feeling."

You suddenly looked away, reticent. A thick silence swelled between you, until he composed himself enough to punctuate it. "Okay. Yeah. Pain. So like, BDSM?"

"I mean, kind of? Sure? I don't have much experience with that and I don't really need the whole power dynamic aspect; I just like the, uh, physical pain. I wouldn't be opposed to trying further, but one thing I do know is I really don't like being degraded. And I'm not into the whole daddy kink thing either. I'm just not gonna call you that, sorry," you laughed, and fortunately he giggled too. "But I know that's not, like, necessary to the rest of BDSM, and the part about giving up control is still...interesting, for sure."

"Wait," Jungkook cocked his head, making a mental note of your last sentence before he went back to the previous one. "What do you mean, being degraded?"

You half-chuckled, half-cringed, never having needed to explain something like this, especially to a guy you hopefully were about to fuck. Cheers to better communication, you supposed.

"You know, how some people when they do dirty talk are like 'yeah, you little slut, you're such a whore.' I don't like being called any of that. Like it's fine that other people like it, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just really uncomfortable for me."

His brows knit together as you explained, and he shook his head so fast it almost looked cartoonish, like a little kid refusing vegetables. "Yeah, no. Don't worry, not really my thing either."

You sighed in relief. "That's nice. I feel like it's, like, weirdly common with guys. Maybe just the kind of thing people learn from porn."

"But you still like it rough, huh? Did you learn that...from porn?" he half-joked, trying to overcome both his shyness and his gritted-teeth arousal.

"No, I don’t like porn. Most of it’s really unethical. I learned from experience," you sassed back. "I don't have a whole lot, but enough to know what I like."

"Well. Hm." He worked his tongue over his teeth, poking one cheek out over his tensed jaw. You couldn't get enough of watching him grow fascinated by your every revelation, and you were preparing to keep pressing further when he beat you to it, posing a question. "Is there anything you haven't tried before, but really want to?"

Your face heated up instantly, tasting your own medicine. You looked back to your hands, breaking his intense eye contact to give yourself the courage to be even more uncomfortably honest. "I...I...um." Your first attempt at disclosing your fantasy came out as a squeak. Swallowing, you set your shoulders and tried again, selfishly reminding yourself Jungkook seemed so eager to please that this was 99% likely to get you exactly what you wanted. "I've always been, uh, really into the idea of, um, getting spanked. I've been, uh, too nervous to ever bring it up, before now obviously, but it's definitely one of the biggest kinks I've always wanted to try. Maybe being tied up too, I think I'd like it if I tried but I haven't thought about that as much. But, yeah...spanking, definitely."

"Fuuuuuuuuck."

A lengthened version of Jungkook's earlier under-breath exclamation made you peer up at him. Your thighs already pressed together from the tension of admitting something totally new, you found yourself needing even more friction just from the sight of Jungkook with his head thrown back on the couch, a veiny hand threaded in his hair to pull the long waves back from his forehead. The full reveal of his sharp eyebrows brought a whole new level of intensity to Jungkook's already beautifully carved features. He glanced over at you, then squeezed his eyes shut with a terse exhale. You couldn't place why, but you felt a deep attraction to the way he expertly restrained himself from acting on the lust written over his face—not under your control, but his own.

"Oh, fuck. What the fuck. How the fuck would you fucking know," he swore more in a single burst than he cumulatively had ever in your presence.

"What?" you toyed, heart rate still high but relaxed enough to enjoy agitating him. "Something ring a bell?"

Jungkook shuddered out a long breath, hand ruffling his hair as his other forearm still tried desperately to subdue his boner.

"Everything," he hissed, more willing to elaborate now that you had done the same, and especially now that he could tell you really did enjoy him being more assertive. "Shit. I...I want...I know you said not to just say this but I really do want everything you want. I can't wait to mark you up. I can't wait to hold you down and bruise your neck. I want it all, I want to make you hurt so good. And then—" Breathless. He looked almost embarrassed. "Then you had to go and somehow guess basically my biggest fucking kink, I can't fucking believe you." Both hands had come up to seize his long locks as he held himself back physically, while finally letting his guard down mentally to declare everything he intended to do to you. Letting out a short laugh, he finally met your eyes. "I wanna spank your ass bright red. Fuck. This is crazy. You're perfect."

Your core throbbed at every bold word. Leaning in close to him, you let your lips approach Jungkook's beautifully sculpted jawline as he panted, his chin tossed up to fully expose his neck. You stopped just short of his skin, in awe of how much you'd been able to work him up and still so tempted to take it to the next level. "Fuck," you echoed. "This is so hot," you murmured almost to yourself. Your eyes closing along with his, you dealt the final blow. "I love that we have so much in common. But come on, you promised. One thing that's not on my list."

Jungkook whined. You could tell he needed to touch you so badly, and no one was stopping him but himself. He had no way of knowing that if he cut the whole discussion and just took you, you wouldn't even try to resist at this point. Staring at his trembling mouth from below, you quickly averted your eyes when he opened his, pretending you hadn't been looking. He inhaled a short hiss, and then spoke.

"Okay..." He paused after just the first word, blowing air through the tiny "o" of his mouth as his eyes bugged slightly from nervousness. He couldn't resist a challenge, though, and his urge to please you overwhelmed his reluctance to peel back one more layer. "So, the pain thing. I think we, uh, feel the same about me giving and you receiving. But...I'm really into it for myself too. I don't know if you'd be comfortable with it, I know you maybe want me to be more dominant and I think I like that more too in general, but you can be as rough with me as you want back. I'd love that." Eyes still open but fluttering, Jungkook's tone grew breathier, heady as he confessed. You almost giggled at how bashfully he worded his desire to dominate you, to rough each other up, but the contrast was so hot you couldn't help sucking your bottom lip between your teeth, eager for him to continue. His voice lowered. "I love being scratched, marked, bitten...hit me, push me back, any kind of pain or any way you can hurt me, I want it." He shivered, but his voice firmed up even further. "I want it so bad."

You fought to stay motionless beside him, unable to even process how much more his honesty had turned you on. You felt helpless in your desire for him, your craving to give him everything he wanted and more. He noticed your charged stillness and shifted toward you, removing a hand from his hair to finally reach for your face. Threading his fingers through your hair instinctively like he had with his own, he tilted your head back to access your neck. Jungkook finally felt confident enough to tease you back as he skimmed his lips over your pulse point, tugging your skin between his teeth for a gentle first taste and grinning when you moaned. Seeing someone so satisfied, for reasons better than just his body or their pride, brought the most incredible rush of blood to his head. And his other head.

"And I get why you want it too," he finished with a whisper in your ear. "So trust me when I say I really, really want to give it to you."

In an instant, your hands yanked his hair down to bring his face up to yours, mouths crashing together. Feverish, restless, you kissed him, hastily attempting to straddle his thick thighs before he threw his body over yours and pinned you to the back of the couch. His hands wandered, intrepid, from your waist to a quick squeeze of your breasts before he spiraled you into his strong arms. Pressing your chest flush with his as your mouths meshed, he ground his hips into you shamelessly, enjoying the way you struggled beneath him to align your core with his rock-hard dick.

"Your room?" You rushed out the words.

Jungkook laughed a little, his tone half whine and half dare. "So we're done talking?"

"Come on," you pleaded back. He finally relented, pulling you up with him and dragging you across the living room and through his door, lips not leaving yours for a second. You backed him into the bed with your arms against his strong chest, and once he was sitting perched on the edge, you laid yourself horizontally over his thighs.

"What are you doing?" he murmured, curling a hand over the dip of your waist to hold you gently.

You angled your head back to make unsteady eye contact with him, flipping your shorts down boldly. His free hand automatically reached to slowly conform to the shape of your ass, so eager to touch you but tentative as he grazed your curves.

"Giving you exactly what you want."

"Fuck. Really? You're sure about this?" Jungkook held careful eye contact as you brought your arms back up, crossing your wrists over your head delicately. You nodded slightly and did your best to meet his gaze with confident invitation, convincing him how much you trusted and wanted him.

He smoothed his warm hand over your ass one more time, then brought it up and watched your thighs tighten at the loss of his touch. Breathing in, still a little shakily, he brought his hand down on your right cheek with a loud but mild smack. A grunt of satisfaction involuntarily left him when he saw your face flinch down into the sheets, subduing a small noise of surprise. He returned his hand to caress the light redness he'd left, checking in with you again. "Is this okay? Let me know if I should stop."

You replied with your face still tucked between your arms, muffled by the bed. "More than okay. Please don't stop."

He spanked you again, moving to your left cheek. This time you felt his dick twitch under you and couldn't help grinding down on him a little bit. "Is that as hard as you can go?" you taunted in low tones, brave enough to egg him on but not quite enough to meet his eyes again.

Jungkook's thighs and core tensed under you, and he squeezed his fingertips tighter, digging into the skin of your ass. "Not at all," he said simply.

Deep breath. A few seconds passed, and his hand came down, harshly. You cried out in shock, the timing unexpected and the sting far sharper, and he gave your other cheek a fourth hard smack before you could even process the third one. "Harder?" he tested. "Tell me."

Another spank. "Mmmf."

"You like this, huh?"

"Yes, I told you," you whimpered back, half-teasing even though you were in no position to do so. Immediately, he cut you off with a stinging hit across both cheeks, and you moaned.

"You really do," he breathed lowly. "Fuck yeah. Take it then."

He spanked you again, and again, then paused, tugging down your shorts all the way to your ankles to expose the crease right above your thighs. Rubbing your already sore bottom, Jungkook cupped the underside of its curve in his big, firm hand. Already anticipating your whine, he drew back his touch and hummed in harmony with you. He continued landing satisfyingly hard smacks, alternating to cover your ass evenly. His dick strained through his pants more and more each time you trembled under his touch. Never hitting you hard enough to do serious damage, he still clearly enjoyed his thorough reddening of your ass, and occasionally took a moment just to caress your skin as it warmed from the spanking. The pain lit your senses up from head to toe. Face burning with deep arousal, you mentally thanked yourself for going out of your comfort zone and unprecedentedly admitting your kinks before even venturing into your first time together. Amidst the thrilling sting of his hand meeting your soft curves, Jungkook eventually noticed your thighs clenching together, craving friction but not really wanting relief from the pleasurable burn.

"You're wet," he marveled, sliding two warm fingers up and down your slit.

"Mhm," you mumbled back as you tilted your hips into his hand. He gave you a light slap right on the folds between your legs, eliciting another soft moan.

"So good for me," Jungkook said softly, pulling you up into his lap by your waist. "You look so pretty like this. I wanna see all of you." He tugged your sweatshirt over your head, followed by your sports bra, thankful that it stretched over your head easily. Suddenly grinning, he wound up and shot it across the room like a rubber band, and you smacked his arm, giggling.

"What was that? You cheeseball," you teased, and he blinked, chuckling lightly back. It occurred to him that he'd never laughed, or made someone laugh, during sex before.

"It was so stretchy! Don't make fun of me," he blushed.

"You're so cute," you said, fingers sliding under his t-shirt hem.

"Cute?" His eyebrows rose in mock disbelief, and he reached around to land another hit to your still-red asscheek.

"Hot," you amended. Raising his shirt and finally getting a full glimpse of his enviable abs, you groaned. "You're extremely hot, and also really cute, and it's kind of ridiculous and I don't really know how to handle all of it at once."

His face scrunching up into a smile at the praise, he fell back onto the bed with his arms behind his head. "You are too, you know. Really cute, of course. But really hot too." As you discarded his shirt and moved on to easing his sweatpants down his hips, you held in a gasp as his erection sprung up from the waistband. He was big, thick, and painfully hard, his tip glistening warm with precum and a lone vein running prominently up his smooth shaft. Although you wouldn't be corroborating them, you had to admit to yourself that all the rumors were true. You instinctively curled a hand around it, barely covering half his length, and he winced at your slightest touch. Pulling off with a single slow stroke, you slid his sweatpants and briefs all the way to the floor and then stood, looking up from his legs to his blown-out eyes to take in the glorious sight of his fully naked body.

"You shave," you said, surprised by the clean skin under his arms and between his legs.

"Yeah," he demurred, self-conscious for some reason. He lowered his arms to fold them over his torso, somehow defining his biceps even more. "I'm on the dance team, and it's nice to feel all smooth for practice and stuff. I don't know, I just like it."

"Oh, that's cool! No worries, I like it too. And you don't mind that..." You looked down at yourself, still just standing naked in front of him. "...I don't? Like, down there at least."

"No, you do you!" he said quickly. With a shy smile, he admitted, "I actually kind of like it on you. I do this for me, anyway, not for anyone else," he playfully noted. Slowly, he was sitting up to take hold of your waist and lower you down to the bed with him. Pausing to kiss the sweet spot under your jaw, he continued. "So don't feel like you have to do anything, or not do anything, either."

Jungkook couldn't quite explain the nature of how his attraction to you had developed. Seeing how open and honest you were with him made it easy for him to be honest with you too, and just to feel comfortable being himself. He admired the way he could still tell you sometimes got nervous like him, but it didn’t stop you from getting real or going bolder. Unable to fully express it in words, he just hoped to ensure you felt as comfortable and respected around him as he did around you. He already knew that he wanted this to be more than just a one-time thing, and while he still hesitated to assume that you felt the same, he intended to leave no doubt by the end of the night.

You moaned as he nipped at the skin of your neck. It was so easy to get swept back up in Jungkook. You could barely handle the friction of his dick rutting against your wet folds from below, craving him inside you. "Ughhh. Wait, one more thing. I'm on the pill, are you clean?"

"Yes," he gasped, barely removing his mouth from your jaw. "Are you?"

"Yeah, so we don't need a condom. If that's cool with you!"

"Yeah! But, you're ready?" He seemed surprised.

"Aren't you?" you whined, beyond holding back. He felt so unbearably hard that his coherence and willpower kind of surprised you too. "Please, I want you so bad."

To your surprise, he lowered his head to the crest of your legs, dotting wet kisses down your torso. Keeping his big brown eyes on you, he teased your entrance with a finger and echoed your immediate groan at the welcome stretch.

"You really are ready," he remarked, awed at the ease with which your wetness sucked the digit in. Frankly, you were in awe as well. It had taken your ex-boyfriend months to figure out how to get you this worked up. Jungkook either had even more experience than you'd heard from the grapevine, or he was a natural. Or maybe you were just really, ridiculously, primally attracted to him. He went on to curve his finger in you and lick a messy swipe up your folds, sucking hard once he reached your sensitive clit. You cried out at the delicious burst of stimulation and he rose up to catch your lips with his.

"I had to do that, just once," he grinned breathlessly. "But—"

"Let me suck you off," you interjected, unbelievably fucking turned on and dying to please him.

"No," he gasped with far more fervency than you'd think anyone could refuse a blowjob. "Please, I was about to say—" he choked out a high-pitched moan as you ran a single finger up his shaft in anticipation, sinking the nails of your other hand into his thigh. "—I think I'm gonna explode if I don't get inside you right this second."

So he did have a breaking point. "Fuck," you muttered, bringing your legs around his to tuck your heels under his tight ass as he lined up. He eased his tip in, keeping heavy eyes on you the whole time, and you could feel the hot, thick tension in his thighs as he struggled to hold himself back from just thrusting into your heat. Slowly, he drew closer into you until he bottomed out with a low moan. You whined at the perfect slight pain of the stretch, and Jungkook squeezed his eyes shut, gripping you by your waist. Watching the veins in his forearms stand out as he drove almost all the way out and back into you, you rocked your hips carefully against his with each smooth stroke, getting used to his fullness. When his balls met your ass again, he shuddered a bit and opened his eyes into yours.

You answered his question before he could even ask it. "Jungkook—you feel so good. You can go faster, it's okay."

A smile hit his eyes before his mouth, and he kissed you once, pressing his chest to yours and intertwining your tongues eagerly. You bit his bottom lip as he slowly drew away, tugging it between your teeth to pull a sweet little whimper from his throat. Grinning, he leaned back in to touch his forehead to yours and simultaneously slid a subtle hand under your ass to curve your hips up with his. The slight leftover sensitivity of your skin amplified his light touch, and Jungkook seemed to realize this, curling his fingers to tease you with the tips of his nails. Instinctively, you ducked to bite his neck, not even registering your move to pass the pain back to him until he choked out a beautifully half-restrained moan and snapped his hips into yours. Gasping, you encouraged him to lose himself in you, dragging your lips up to latch around his earlobe. He hissed and thrust into you sharply again, meeting the time of your movements as you swirled your tongue between each of his hoop earrings. Soon he was pounding you rhythmically, finally letting you feel the full force of his strength but keeping remarkable control over both his body and yours. Both of you had gone silent except for your heavy breaths, lost in the moment, but the flexed shivers of his thighs and twitches of his fingers in your hair told you all you needed to know. Suddenly yanking your strands to pull you back from the additional bruise you'd sucked beneath his ear, he earned a new set of scratches on his back as your hands dragged down the muscular expanse in reply. Jungkook switched places with you to draw dark clouds from your skin, a storm brewing under your jaw. Your face fell into pure bliss, eyes shut and immersed in the barrage of sensation from his hands, mouth, and big dick filling you. Already feeling the familiar tension that preceded an orgasm building through your whole body, you chased him closer to his climax too, grinding back roughly into every thrust and raking your hands over every part of his firm body you could reach.

You had really been fooling yourself when you thought you could try something casual for once. You wanted more of Jungkook, all of Jungkook, nothing but Jungkook ever again. Knowing he'd never even gone back to the same hookup twice sank slight anxiety into your stomach, a kind of future nostalgia for this moment you already feared losing. You knew you weren't anything special compared to the catalogue of gorgeous girls he'd had his turn with, but a deviant voice whispered from the back of your mind that you could be, because it was clear none had bothered to learn him like this. You'd still try your desperate best not to want too much from him, but you resolved to do whatever you could to make him crave more.

Rolling your hips in a smooth circle against him, you clenched around his dick and your hands tightened their fierce hold on his tiny waist. You felt his abs tense within your grasp as he tried not to stutter into you.

"Fuck. No." His voice cracked, but held an undertone of ferocity. "You come first." Jungkook rushed a hand to your clit, adding pressure in small, deft motions with a fingertip as he kept fucking you deep. You sank your teeth into his shoulder in response, drawing your hands up his back to clutch him closer to you, and Jungkook cried out. You left your mouth on his golden skin to stifle your moans as he sped up his fingers, and he tried to let you stay there but eventually couldn't help pulling you off him to see your face. Eyes narrowed and eyebrows turning up sharp at the ends, he watched you like a hawk to track the exact moment when he pushed you over the edge. Your face crumpled and you felt your whole body burn under his gaze as you came, squeezing around him in waves of pleasure while he fucked you through your high, unrelenting. Drinking up the bliss obvious on your features, Jungkook's eyes never left yours and his expression grew more and more fucked out. You marveled at how even as you lost control and energy to fuck him back, your body freezing in orgasm seemed to turn him on further. One last pulse of the tension leaving your core made his dick throb inside you, and you impulsively broke your eye contact to lean in and bite down slow but hard on his neck again. He gasped.

"You're amazing." Murmuring into his skin, you kissed the bite marks gently. Jungkook whimpered at the sweet contradiction and lurched into your hips even harder. You recovered to move with him, squeezing him deeper into you every time he bottomed out, and as his breathless moans escalated in pitch, his whole body shivered with each stroke. Pressing wet, heavy kisses all over his neck, you felt his jaw flutter while his lips hung open. His considerable strength spent, Jungkook shuddered one last hard thrust into you and finally let go, coating your walls from within. His hips lightly rocked against yours as he stayed deep inside you, still hard and savoring the euphoric release he'd held back for so long. You felt so incredibly warm and comfortable around his sensitive dick, relaxed but still holding him tight, and he couldn't help holding you up for a languid kiss before pulling out of you smoothly.

He briefly looked into your eyes, and you saw stars. The sun had continued to set outside, and it peeked between the blinds of his window to wrap you both in a warm, slivered glow. Staring down at his hands on your body, Jungkook took a deep breath and collapsed to your side, holding you close. You settled into him, cupping a hand over his head on your chest. With your fingers laced through his sweaty hair, you stroked his temple with your thumb, worrying for a second whether the gesture seemed too intimate but forgetting your fear when he snuggled up into your touch. You felt the need to say something, to figure out what the fuck was next after this, but stayed silent, not wanting to disturb the comforting weight of his frame. Heartbeat still racing, Jungkook stretched out to breathe a long sigh. As he sank back into you, you stretched under him too, letting his solid, warm body drape over you like a blanket. This couldn't be farther from what you'd expected with him, but you weren't about to make it stop. Surely, eventually, he would.

A minute passed. And then five. And then, before either of you could talk yourselves out of it, you were asleep, intertwined.

#jungkook x reader #jungkook smut #jungkook fluff #jungkook x reader smut #bts smut #bts fic #bts fanfic #college!jungkook #college au!jungkook #bts college au #jungkook #jeon jungkook #bts jungkook #my writing #fic: anti-hero #anti-hero #anti hero

952 notes · View notes

sleepyskunk · 6 years

Text

Deconstructing the 2017 Movie Trailer Mashup

Why deconstructing a mashup? Because these videos are often perceived as a random mess of pretty images from movie trailers. While that’s absolutely true, there’s an opportunity to explore themes and also pay a few obscure tributes to elements that don’t belong in the video itself but that are generally widespread within pop culture. These montages have been going on for a few years now, and it’s hard to edit the footage in a way that won’t feel reminiscent of one of the many great retrospectives put out by other talented editors in years past. I have to say that trying to build a narrative with all that footage has now become more enticing to me than to highlight the moments that made the year in cinema within their proper context. Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Someone on Reddit commented: “starting off with GEOSTORM, that’s a bold move!” and it didn’t even cross my mind. The shot was exactly where I wanted to go right off the bat - a blend of childlike wonder and eerie caution reminiscent of earlier Tim Burton films. The track was composed for a television spot called “A Wonderful Day” from IT and it showcases major Danny Elfman influences. Thus, this was my small tribute to the Burton/Elfman collabs happening under snowfalls like EDWARD SCISSORHANDS or BATMAN RETURNS. I loved the contrast in dialogue from PERSONAL SHOPPER which was such an under-appreciated indie film this year. Every mashup has its horror section, but I am gently sneaking you in by the supernatural door this time around. It’s just innocent enough to deceive those who hate horror.

Childlike wonder flawlessly captured in one shot, from the lens of Matt Reeves. I can’t say I connect emotionally with his APES movies, but the quality control on every frame, CGI or otherwise, it pretty much above and beyond all industry standards. That facial expression is exactly what I needed, you can tell she’s not too sure whether she’s safe or not but without feeling properly scared either. This is like the part in the original POLTERGEIST where kitchen chairs are moving on their own and the family still thinks it’s kind of fun. Kind of.

KING ARTHUR is the best type of release when it comes to trailer mashups because 1) it had a fantasy undertone 2) it was tracking poorly and 3) it went way over budget. Big studios know months in advance if they have a major bomb on their hands, and they have two choices at that point: either stop spending a penny on it and dump it for a quick theatre run and VOD release (more common if the movie didn’t cost that much) or, like in this case, spend extra millions of dollars to sell the shit out of that movie on opening week-end before everyone realizes it’s bad. Those extra millions go towards CGI money shots like the one above, which is really meant to make the marketing more attractive and oh dear lord, did KING ARTHUR have some last minute money shots to offer or what? It was a joy to pick and choose from its nine trailers.

This is where I put my cards on the table, whimsy never happened and I am taking you all to creepytown. That shot from ANNABELLE: CREATION is one of the many that upstages the featured evil doll in that wonderful movie and the film’s cinematographer Maxime Alexandre reached out because he was happy so much of his work was featured. You never know in front of who your videos can end up and industry people are keen on celebrating the year in film, especially if their own works are included. This is just a top notch unsettling shot clearly inspired by THE SHINING (the girl’s dress and the way her arms look lifeless.) On a side note, I always manually add all sounds including that floor cracking. If anyone reading this is starting off editing mashups, I promise you one thing: using professional, isolated, studio-recorded sound effect packages such as BOOM library is much superior to the original trailer track (unless you get a clean sound within the trailer.)

Another random insight (if you’re interested in making your own movie mashups) is to try as much as possible to avoid that one marketing shot everyone recognizes. You can revisit a memorable moment but going straight to the most oversold shot of a film hurts you. While you’re eager to make everyone relive the most epic imagery of the year, some value gets lost when a studio bombarded the same shot over and over and you go for it. Two quick examples: Giant hologram JOI pointing at Ryan Gosling in BLADE RUNNER 2049. I wanted that moment, but the original side-scroller shot was so overused that I went with her from a closer angle (see video thumbnail). Another example is that uncomfortable sniffle from Daniel Kaluuya in GET OUT which I favored over the super overplayed mouth open crying paralyzed shot from every marketing piece. In both cases, I assume you know which shots I am referring to without having to show them. Trying the alternative makes us relive the moment without its obviousness. It gives that other shot they didn’t choose its moment to shine (and more often than not, it’s just as effective.)

Someone’s not getting much sleep. A CURE FOR WELLNESS is a gorgeous-looking film no matter what you think of its bizarre plot points. I spend much of the first segment flirting with the creative key points from IT. One I tried to play around with is the idea of Pennywise as a half-real/half-fiction monster, and how similar to Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET his realm of terror extends. A few winning concepts in both films: 1) He isn’t real but he can really hurt you so you have to stay on your guard at all times and 2) Only a select few have been cursed with having to deal with him, adding a psychological layer to an already spooky premise. Dane Dehaan looks like a kid from Derry, or Elm street if you prefer, whose mental focus seems affected by the fact that he saw something, and his friend saw him too. Meanwhile, I throw in a completely out of context quote from Vanessa Redgrave which ties in that mysterious “sickness” from Verbinski’s film.

A shot from PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN from a trailer edited by Kees van Dijkhuizen Jr. for Annapurna Pictures where he works as an in-house editor now. In 2015, I talked about Gen Ip’s storytelling approach and last year I praised Matt Shapiro’s famously epic crescendos, so this year, let’s talk about Kees a little bit because I find all their influences fascinating. My first observation is how far his much-adored Cinema series has taken him, and that one of the top production houses in the business (if not the top, sorry A24 and Fox Searchlight) hired him so he could bring his own distinct style onto their major features. The whole trailer mashup craze started off only a few years back and so many editors were recruited right off YouTube to turn their passion into a livelihood down in Los Angeles. I can think of at least six editors whose names you’d recognize and who are now living the dream, and I consider this to be really inspiring because none of them initially got into it thinking something like that was ever possible. (side note: I also moved to L.A. and was poached by a trailer house but prefer to keep things on the low-end until it’s been long enough. I wouldn’t want to jinx it.)

The second observation about Kees is how much influence he’s had on every mashup that gets uploaded on a daily basis every December (me included) - I will link his Cinema series below. Instead of pairing clips into a horror bit, an action bit, a laughing and dancing bit, a kissing and crying bit, Kees was always out to create new feelings and nothing ever seemed more important than proper flow. Many shots would pop-up that you would never expect thematically, images of moving objects like a breaking glass transitioned with a girl’s hair waving through the wind (also see the lie detector in the previous shot.) He would connect nature documentaries right along with major superhero blockbusters and the movements flowed so perfectly that nothing ever felt out of place, quite the contrary. He was the best shot curator we’ve ever seen, and the order in which he put them together was beyond logic and predictability. Imagine “One Perfect Shot” but with 275 perfect shots back-to-back. If you want a prime example of what I’m referring to (random objects and flow), check out 2:49 - 2:52 from his Cinema 2011 (links below). Kees set the bar so high that attempting an end-of-year mashup certainly felt foolish at times, but hoping to improve made the editing process all the more inspiring.

CINEMA 2008 | CINEMA 2009 | CINEMA 2010 | CINEMA 2011 | CINEMA 2012

So apparently, they have the internet and flat-screen TV’s in RINGS but landline phones are still a thing. Quite frankly, I haven’t seen RINGS and I bet it’s aggressively ordinary, but how retro horror is that shot? Paired up with the voice of THE SNOWMAN saying “Mister Policeman” it’s a throwback to Nancy being terrorized by Freddy in the original Nightmare of Elm Street (minus the tongue.) I was also pleased with the aesthetic of HAPPY DEATH DAY, clearly the product of horror fans who grew up during the low-budget slasher craze of the early ‘80s. It’s got MY BLOODY VALENTINE written all over it (meanwhile their poster was paying homage to APRIL FOOL’S DAY.) Retro horror, in all its disturbing practical gore glory! Rick Baker, Tom Savini, how much we missed you in our modern times where only a few major productions have enough VFX money to escape the uncanny valley (and even then... *cough* JUSTICE LEAGUE.)

I always tend to edit right on tempo, which means switching shots at the exact moment the music beat tells you to. But over here, I thought this elevator drop from FLATLINERS looked so frenetic and out of control that I started it half a second before as if the beat couldn’t keep up! Like in cartoons when the car accelerates so fast that it takes off but their eyeballs are standing still for a little fraction. This whole mashup sequence is meant to be a little cartoony and tongue-in-cheek. To anyone who found this to be disturbing (and yes, I heard from a few viewers who said it was too much) I must admit that it wasn’t my intention. I won’t apologize for my work, people choose to watch if they want to or not. But if I really tried my best to scare the crap out of you, I can assure you THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE wouldn’t have made the cut.

Now channeling a CHILD’S PLAY vibe thanks to this retro television shot from the highly underrated BRIGSBY BEAR. A kids program works well as an element of fear because it’s supposed to be a safely protected zone of positivity and care, just like a doll or a clown for that matter. Once that turns on its head and begins to attack, you basically have nowhere else to hide. It also makes for great contrast, and Andy Muschietti must have had an absolute blast this year incorporating this component into his remake of IT. The bear costume was one of the many shots that wasn’t from a horror movie and yet I used to great effect in this section. I know there was a new CHILD’S PLAY movie this year but sadly, it didn’t hold a candle to the Hitchcockian original.

“At the end of the day, people are out for themselves.” That’s not true, and only people who are out for themselves could believe that. Because if you’re weighing low on the morality scale at some point in life, you still wanna go to bed thinking you’re a good person. So if you can’t justify what you did, the best logical next step is to convince yourself that human nature is to blame, that everyone else would have done the same as you. Ask people who were charged with insider trading on the stock market, they’ll always say “everybody was doing it.” I could refer to a certain World War to keep hammering that point but instead, I’d like to point out the interesting contrast between this and Part 3. I try to disprove that very statement by showing in the finale that everything we do that matters is for others, and others are the only thing that matters once everything else has come and gone.

The KING ARTHUR studio spending extra millions of dollars to sell the shit out of that movie on opening week-end before everyone realizes it’s bad money shot festival continues. EPIC! In fact, that shot is so gorgeous, you could place it anywhere in any mashup ever and it would probably work.

Having a bit of fun giving a more literal visual cue to IT’s “We all float down here” with Guillermo Del Toro’s hypnotically beautiful THE SHAPE OF WATER. However, it’s not the tudum tssshh, get it? movie connection that works here. It’s the underwater sound effect and the incredible sound mixing by trailer house Buddha Jones so that Georgie’s voice seems to come from the bottom of the ocean. This is likely the best sound work you’ll hear in the entire mashup, and I didn’t mix it, the editors behind that teaser trailer did. In fact, their work was so effective at scaring people that it earned twice the amount of views on YouTube than what Avengers: Infinity War received. A fact Kevin Feige will likely never admit.

That moment when you realize your manic pixie dream girl wears white socks! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I've used vulgarity in the past but not every year, depends whether it brings value. Some of you may remember “Game on, c***suckers” from KICK-ASS 2 in 2013 or “Nap time, motherf***ers” from COOTIES in 2015. Perhaps there’s another guilty pleasure at play here, however, which is that feeling of pure creative freedom. As mentioned earlier, not everyone digged the horror undertone of this year’s Part 1 and that’s okay because it went exactly where I wanted to go and no compromise was made. No client notes. No studio revisions. No censor beeper (which makes it worse because we seek to find out what the word was.) If you get into professional careers that are creative in nature, you’ll find that teamwork, compromise, and not taking anything personally are all essential components for success. But when the movie trailer mashup comes around, I report to no one. And that moment from THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI is one I wanted included as soon as the red band trailer came out.

This shot comes from a small movie you should seek out called MY NAME IS EMILY starring Evanna Lynch (aka Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter movies.) The film was directed by Simon Fitzmaurice who was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease (ALS) a few years ago, the debilitating disease for which the viral ice-bucket challenge was based on. He wrote the screenplay for this movie while his body was entirely paralyzed, and the only way he could communicate with the cast and crew while shooting the film was through eye gaze technology. There was a documentary following his brave journey that played Sundance called IT’S NOT YET DARK. Check it out if you need some real work ethic motivation and want to feel truly inspired about overcoming challenges. Much better than THE DISASTER ARTIST which is a spoof about a millionaire with no talent who mistreated the people who worked on his film. Okay, it’s still very entertaining and James Franco is hilarious but I don’t get a ‘never give up’ vibe from it, more like ‘maybe this isn’t for you.’

With the second segment, I was going for a British Gangster film vibe, hence the music cue Main Offender by The Hives. No movie captured that feeling better than Ben Wheatley’s FREE FIRE this year. I find the criminals in British movies are equally as clever in their quips as they are dangerous and often have the appearance of fair, well-behaved citizens until they have a reason to go mad. Jon Hamm’s performance in BABY DRIVER was also a textbook definition of that archetype, because all the build-up scenes where he acts friendly and discusses music with the titular character only bring an element of surprise at the end of his arc (spoilers: he’s not that nice in the end) I am aware that BABY DRIVER takes place in America but it’s directed by a Brit so it counts!

If Kubrick only knew his famous jump cut from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that connects a flying bone to a space shuttle would lead to this fifty years later. What a shit show jump cuts have become! But they’re fun, and let’s be honest here: 7 minutes of serious quotes about life would get a little heavy. The way you edit jump cuts is the same way to solve a puzzle with over a thousand pieces. Extract dozens of short action clips onto your timeline and try to make them fit with one another over and over until you’re entertained. I mean, the music stays the same in the background, all I am doing here is deciding which projectile this pair of underpants from CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS will become. The answer was a tranquilizer from the underground mall chase sequence in Bong Joon-ho’s excellent OKJA. Maybe we should try one really long domino of jump cuts one day. Should take forever to edit, but how much fun would it be?

Did you know that Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander was a professional ballet dancer before she started acting? Work ethic applies in everything you do. When you hear about successful actors, you often discover people who are world-class at delivering under pressure and dedicating themselves to their craft with an insane amount of work. Acting is hard and yet so many people think they can do it, which makes it even harder. At least ballet puts constraints right off the bat, you need flexibility and a specific body frame. Part 3 is about finding your passion AND putting in the work. Just finding your passion is hard! It’s not always the bottomless pit one could hope for, especially when it becomes a real job with hours upon hours of work. Many people don’t even know what their passion is, they know what they’re good at but don’t love it. “Without your passion, it’s very hard to find our place in the world.” I don’t think you need your income to come from your passion in order to find said place, but I wish everyone that many of the limited hours they have each day goes towards their passion, and not towards something that feels like a waste of time. Wanting to wake up has everything to do with what happens after your first cup of coffee. Put your time towards something meaningful to you, even if it’s only on evenings and week-ends and you’ll never make a penny from it. If you love animals, volunteer at a shelter. If you love to travel, just GO!

But what happens when your family conflicts with your passion? Would you leave them behind to pursue your dreams? We all remember the tragic scene from DEAD POETS SOCIETY where a young scholar gets forced by his father to become a doctor instead of his passion and commits suicide. And then we have this year’s COCO, Pixar’s big comeback, where music is prohibited in Miguel’s family but it’s all he dreams about. But that conundrum doesn’t even have to be confrontational in nature. What if you wanted to work in a low-paying field like online journalism because it’s what you love but your single parent (who always took care of you) became sick and needed you to take care of their treatment. What happens then? What comes first? I humbly try to answer that later in the segment, of course.

We always told you Daniel Radcliffe... you’re special. That’s why you have a scar on your forehead that looks like a bolt... Just kidding, poor guy. I look at Mark Hamill in THE LAST JEDI and keep thinking that if studios are still a private enterprise in 40 years, some new Harry Potter movie will come out in which an old bearded Radcliffe will be teaching at Hogwarts. (PS: he keeps making bold choices, so much so that I am willing to watch anything he’s in.)

A man’s reach... (or woman, btw) should exceed his/her grasp. Words from a poem by Robert Browning, suggesting that, to achieve anything worthwhile, a person should attempt even those things that may turn out to be impossible. The downside with attempting the impossible is two-fold, however. 1) You may spend your life trying and never succeed. 2) If you do get there after so much sacrifice and effort, the world will expect you to do it again, or to keep doing it at the same level or better. If you won a Gold medal at the last Olympics, what are the expectations for the upcoming Olympics? That’s where passions and dreams enter a darker road, one many people choose to avoid altogether. But whatever happens, it’s worth the risk as long as you have the one thing along the way that’s a hundred times more important. And that thing is...

...people who love each other! Look at this guy, he just figured it out!

Kate Mara in MEGAN LEAVEY really seems to be the one thinking out loud in this shot while we hear a quote from THEIR FINEST. I had a blast with the Freddy Krueger references earlier but this is my favorite part. Audiomachine make the best tracks to bring that crescendo to its proper peak. You can say this part of the mashup is more in my comfort zone. And the influences from Kees that I discussed earlier can be felt here. Some shots of objects and landscapes that aren’t thematically connected but keep a nice flow. I also handpicked the best cinematography of the year all at once here. MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS was a damn pretty movie, then SHAPE OF WATER, then THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS, then OKJA. Every shot looks like a million bucks. Notice the use of paper, letters and ink. I want to see you again, a character from EVERYTHING EVERYTHING writes on a sheet.

Family comes first is nice, but along with family comes conflict and distance at times. Things we said that we regret. Times we let each other down, or weren’t there when we needed to. All the papers dropping from the bridge, all the shots that refer to letter writing, that’s where I was going with that. Not always obvious because it moves so damn fast which is why I do this deconstruction blog post every year!

The final big lift from Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST! Also, the first frame I added onto my AVID timeline. This is how I organize my work basically. I pick the right songs, then I identify the exact moments in that song where a big moment should happen - if you use trailer music, it will be crystal clear what those are. And then I try money shots in each of these spots over and over until one really, really fits. Then, I ask myself how did we get here, how can I get to that point? And build around these big moments. The second shot I added into the mashup was the little girl in Part 1 under the bed who points to another version of herself sleeping in her bed and says “Shhh! That’s not me.” I put that in right when the music stopped, it became a big moment, and then I built around it in order to get there. Every editor works differently, but I am just sharing how I personally prefer to do it. Back in 2012, the first clip I added onto the timeline was “I have an army. We have a Hulk.” from THE AVENGERS which means I’ve been editing this way for five straight years.

Those letters of reaching out to people you care about. Apologies or wondering how they’re doing. Flying everywhere around Winston Churchill (that’s my dog’s name, he’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi!) I guess you should always be the one to reach out in difficult situations with important people. The mistake is to not reach out, or convince yourself that they were dragging you down and you’re better off without them. That’s rarely the case, and you’ll never get over them when you know that’s not the case. Maybe they will reply someday, maybe they never will. But you swallowed your ego and you decided to give it one more shot. That’s the bravest thing we can do in this life, and I hope you’ll see it that way if the time comes. Happy New Year! Achieve your passions, take care of the ones you love and make it a wonderful day! (Halle Berry: “Aaaarrh!")

- Sleepy Skunk

#2017movietrailermashup

10 notes · View notes