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beware-of-you-98 · 4 years

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OTP Prompts for Jemily

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Who kills the bugs?

JJ (she grew up in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, she’s not scared of any sort of bug)

Emily doesn’t deal with creatures with more than four legs, so if she sees an insect, or lord forbid, a spider, she’ll immediately climb off the floor and call for her girlfriend

JJ can never find it in herself to purposely kill the insects (she’s also not too keen on having to clean bug guts from her carpet), so she’ll grab a clear plastic cup with whatever book or piece of paper is laying around and use those to put the bug outside

(If it’s a wolf spider, she’ll literally pick it up with her bare hands, much to Emily’s horror)

If the spider is a brown recluse or black widow, she’ll bring the covered arachnid closer and take the time to show her boys and Emily what markings to look out for so that they know to be careful

The only insect she refuses to deal with are stink bugs

When they come around, she and Emily take an emergency trip to the nearby Target and buy enough of the raspberry gel air fresheners for every one of their windows

Yeah, their house smells like a Jolly Rancher for the entire month

But at least they don’t have to deal with the annoying beetles

Who always gets hot? Who always gets cold?

Neither of them gets hot, but Emily is perpetually cold

The rest of the team will be in the field in pants and short sleeves while Emily is bundled in her turtlenecks and jacket

Even in 90°+ weather, Emily can sit comfortably in long sleeve shirts and pants

At first, JJ is surprised by how cold Emily can get

She wakes up one day to find Emily bundled under the covers and shivering

Of course, she’s alarmed and asking what’s wrong, only getting confused when Emily says she’s fine, just cold

“Em, it’s 76° outside.” “That’s practically freezing!”

JJ starts giving Emily her sweaters and sweatshirts for her to wear

Emily loves them so much because they fit her just the way she likes and they smell like her girlfriend

Who’s the big spoon? Who’s the little spoon?

Everyone on the team hands down swears Emily’s the big spoon

It’s not only because she’s taller than JJ, but Penelope says she gives big spoon vibes

(Actually, she says Emily gives huge top vibes and that makes her the big spoon by default)

JJ lets the team think whatever they want because she’s the only one that really knows Emily Prentiss is the ultimate little spoon

She can’t help it!! She loves the feeling of being wrapped up in JJ’s arms

And loves getting her hair played with while she rests her head on JJ’s chest

She’s!! Soft!! When!! It!! Comes!! To!! Jennifer!! Jareau!!

When did they realize they loved each other?

For JJ, she realized in the aftermath of the Tobias Hankel case

She suffered from horrific nightmares for weeks and never got enough sleep

Emily comes over every night for three weeks and holds JJ in her arms and comforts her when she wakes up screaming from her nightmares

JJ realizes she’s in love with Emily one night after she’s calmed down from yet another nightmare

She’s laying there in Emily’s arms, emotionally drained and exhausted and she just peers up at Emily and... knows

No one had ever cared for her like this, no one had ever made her feel so calm, so safe in years.

Emily does.

Emily makes her feel like no one has before, like she’s the only person to ever exist and matter.

JJ feels as if Emily’s arms is where she’s meant to spend her life

She doesn’t know it then, but that was the moment she fell in love with Emily. And she fell hard.

Emily knew almost right away tbh

It’s only a few weeks after she joins the BAU and everyone else had gone home except for herself and JJ

She goes into JJ’s office to keep her company

They spend the next few hours organizing files (Emily insists on helping because JJ looks really stressed and overwhelmed)

They don’t get a lot of work done honestly, they sit and talk with each other over mugs of steaming chamomile tea

Emily looks across the desk at JJ as she finishes a story and is rendered speechless by how beautiful the blonde is and how perfect she is and how everything about her makes Emily feel as if nothing else matters

She’s overwhelmed with her own emtion and just knows, knows, at that moment she’s well and truly fucked because she’s in love

Who said “I love you” first?

Emily does but it’s spontaneous and out of the blue

The whole team is hanging out at Rossi’s house

Everyone is laughing and having a good time

Emily and JJ are attempting to dance to the music playing over the speakers but they’re both hilariously uncoordinated

(They’ve also both had a couple of glasses of wine at this point, making their efforts even more comical)

Spencer and Hotch are playing a game of blackjack

Derek is half paying attention to the game on tv, half swaying to the music and doing weird dances when Penelope looks at him to make her laugh

Penelope is recording different parts of the night for the memories

Rossi sits back and watches over his children with a content smile

JJ stumbles into Emily’s arms with a giggle

Emily laughs and wraps her arms around the her blonde and just goes “God, do I love you.”

You can hear a pin drop with how quiet everyone becomes

Emily opens her mouth to apologize, to weakly defend herself when JJ grins up at her “Do you mean it?”

Emily’s response is a small, shy smile

“Say it again.”

Emily then leans in and gives JJ a light kiss and says more genuinely “I love you.”

JJ beams up at her and repeats the words, wrapping her arms around Emily’s neck and pulls her down for a deep kiss

(The team all give out a celebratory whoop at the couple’s expense and Penelope cries because she’s so happy for her friends)

(She sends the video to the two later on for them to have)

(It’s their most treasured memory)

Who demands cuddles?

When sober? Emily

Emily Prentiss loves a good cuddle

And, hey, after a day of dealing with the horrors they experience daily, a cuddle is what they both need and deserve

Drunk JJ is clingy as hell and will literally pout up at Emily until the older woman cuddles her

It doesn’t matter where they are

If they are in the middle of Wendy’s, drunk JJ will pout to her heart’s desire until she gets her cuddles (and a vanilla frosty, but that’s besides the point)

Drunk JJ actually demands cuddles

Who is more prone to stealing the other’s clothes?

While JJ gives Emily her clothes to wear, she is 100% the one that steals Emily’s clothes

She steals Emily’s hoodies all the time

If she can’t find something to wear for work in her side of the closet, she’ll steal a shirt from Emily’s

She also loves to steal Emily’s pantsuits and wear those to work sometimes

They’re so much more comfortable than skirts

And Emily loves to see her in them, so that’s a bonus

(She also steals Emily’s flannels before they go out for dates)

She just loves wearing Emily’s clothes as much as Emily loves to wear her’s

When do they tell their team/their families about their relationship? What are their reactions?

They decide to tell the team after five months that they’ve been dating

They want them to know because the team is like their secondary family

(And they also want to be able to publically be with each other when the team get together at Rossi’s)

(JJ just wants to hold Emily’s hand and give her girlfriend a kiss whenever she wants god dammit!)

To both of their relief, the team’s response is overwhelmingly positive

No one is surprised when they confirm to the team they’re dating

Hotch and Rossi are just like “we knew it”

Penelope has to remind both of them that she already knew because JJ had given Emily a kiss a few weeks ago during girl’s night (Penelope can keep a secret if she really wants to)

Spencer is confused because “Wait, you mean you guys have only just recently become a thing? You haven’t been dating for the past year and a half?”

Derek is just like “Well it’s about fucking time”

JJ takes Emily with her when she takes a weekend trip to take her boys home to visit her mom

She really wants Emily to formally meet her mom (“I know you already met her, but I want her to meet you as my girlfriend!”)

Though initially slightly surprised by JJ introducing Emily as her girlfriend, the blonde’s mother welcomes Emily with open arms

She’s never seen JJ this happy in years and it warms her heart to see her daughter in good hands

(“And she’s really good with the kids,” JJ’s mother tells her daughter later on in the night as the two watch Emily and the boys out in the backyard)

JJ just smiles warmly in response, relieved by her mother’s response

Ambassador Prentiss comes over to Emily’s apartment unannounced while JJ and the boys are having a family movie night

It’s awkward as hell tbh

Emily’s too formal and on edge

JJ longs to go over and place a hand on Emily’s arm for comfort, but stays put under the Ambassador’s steely gaze

(Michael and Henry are blissfully unaware, sucked too far into the animated universe of Spider-Man)

Finally, the Ambassador turns to Emily and asks if she’s happy

Emily turns back to JJ and the boys with a soft gaze before turning back to her mother and giving a light nod “Yeah. I am.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

All the tension falls from Emily’s shoulders and the biggest breath of relief leaves her lips at that

It’s the most approval she’s gotten from her mother in a long time but it means so much

What is their favorite way to show affection?

Emily likes to wrap her arms around JJ’s waist from behind

She loves to sneak up behind her when she’s cooking and gently grab her waist and press a light kiss against her neck before laying her chin on the blonde’s shoulder and watching her cook

She’ll slide behind JJ on the couch and kiss her temple before they cuddle and watch tv

She’ll randomly stop by and just wrap JJ in a soft, warm hug, gently swaying her from side to side before letting her go and going about her day like normal

JJ loves giving Emily sweet kisses on her forehead or her cheek

She wakes up before Emily and will sometimes be unable to help herself and just lean down and press a series of light kisses on the brunette’s nose or forehead

She’ll sometimes stop by Emily’s office during work and just plant a kiss on the crown of her head before heading back to her reports

When they go on long trips, who drives?

JJ!!

She loves to drive but hardly ever gets to

At work, Emily or one of the boys are the ones driving the SUVs

(And, yeah, maybe she got to drive the SUV when Kate was on the team, but still)

Even running errands like going to the store or picking up the boys, it’s Emily that drives

But Emily hates to drive long distances and often leaves that task to JJ

JJ loves it

Emily will lean her head on her shoulder or place her hand over the blonde’s on the gear shift

It’s so blissfully domestic and soft and makes the drive that much better

Who shows more affection to the other in public?

JJ easily

Emily is a firm believer that she has a hardass reputation to uphold

It takes all of JJ’s will power not to snort

Because, honestly, Emily is really just a big softie

But she’ll let Emily think what she wants

She’s the one that initiates hand holding on the jet when they’re going to a case and cuddles on the way home from one

She just wants to love her girlfriend anywhere and at anytime!

If she wants to give Emily a kiss in the middle of the bullpen (when it’s slow and the atmosphere isn’t as tense or serious as it normally is, of course), she will god dammit!!

(Emily’s light blush never does any good to help uphold her “hardass reputation” but oh well)

Who gives piggy back rides the most?

JJ gives the piggy back rides, Emily always gets them

JJ holds her as if she weighs nothing and it makes her swoon

JJ’s arms? A definite weakness for Emily

(Plus she never got to have piggy back rides as a child and JJ insists on making up for lost time so how can Emily refuse with an offer like that?)

Who proposes first? How and when?

Okay so I’m a firm believer that they’re both spontaneous as hell when it comes to this kind of thing

It’s literally just a matter of who lets their guard down first and let the question slip out first

If it’s JJ, it’s when she comes down one morning to see Emily and the boys making her breakfast

She just stops and leans in the doorway, smiling to herself as her girlfriend instructs her sons what do do

Emily is so patient with them

She helps Michael crack the eggs into a bowl and then kisses his nose, which makes him squeal in delight and her to grin

Henry stirs the batter for waffles and gets flour on his glasses and face

Emily leans over and gently cleans him off, grinning and laughing in surprise when the young boy gets batter on her nose

The three of them are just laughing and genuinely having a good time and, god, it makes JJ’s heart feel so full

When they finally notice JJ in the doorway, the boys run up and give her good morning kisses before going back to cooking breakfast

When JJ and Emily are alone and cleaning up the kitchen, Emily just wraps her arms around JJ’s waist and gives her the softest of kisses

The “marry me?” slips from JJ’s lips without much thought

And Emily, though initially surprised, just beams in response and gives her girlfriend (fiancé?) a deep, passionate kiss and just goes “just let me know the date to reserve, baby”

If it’s Emily, it happens in a very soft, very intimate moment between the two of them

They’ll be laying in bed at midnight, cuddled naked under the covers with no space between them

Emily leans over and brushes her fingers through JJ’s long hair, her heart fluttering wildly when the blonde looks up at her

Her eyes are full of so much love, her expression so soft and adoring, Emily can’t help but to whisper out “marry me?” into the room

She goes to maybe to start a speech about their relationship, how much it means to her and how much she wants to be a part of JJ’s and the boys’ lives but all that comes out is “I just... I really, really love you and want to be a part of your life permanently.”

Just like the first time they admitted they loved each other, JJ beams and leans in, pressing a chaste kiss to Emily’s lips before telling her to say it again

Emily presses a kiss to JJ’s chin and asks again so softly “marry me?”

JJ pulls her in for a long, deep kiss

“I’d marry you as soon as tomorrow if you wanted me to.”

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justforbooks · 3 years

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Fifty Great Classic Novels Under 200 Pages

We are now end of February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. So now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”

A few notes: This list will define “classic” as being originally published before 1970. Yes, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, but one has to draw the line somewhere (though I let myself fudge on translation dates). I did not differentiate between novels and novellas (as Steven Millhauser would tell you, the novella is not a form at all, but merely a length), but let’s be honest with ourselves: “The Dead” is a short story, and so is “The Metamorphosis.” Sorry! I limited myself to one book by each author, valiantly, I should say, because I was tempted to cheat (looking at you Jean Rhys).

Most importantly for our purposes here: lengths vary with editions, sometimes wildly. I did not include a book below unless I could find that it had been published at least once in fewer than 200 pages—which means that some excellent novels, despite coming tantalizingly close to the magic number, had to be left off for want of proof (see Mrs. Dalloway, Black No More, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. etc. etc.). However, your personal edition might not exactly match the number I have listed here. Don’t worry: it’ll still be short.

Finally, as always: “best” lists are subjective, no ranking is definitive, and I’ve certainly forgotten, or never read, or run out of space for plenty of books and writers here. And admittedly, the annoying constraints of this list make it more heavily populated by white and male writers than I would have liked. Therefore, please add on at will in the comments. After all, these days, I’m always looking for something old to read.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, tr. Ruth L.C. Simms, The Invention of Morel (1940) : 103 pages

Both Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz described this novel as perfect, and I admit I can’t find much fault with it either. It is technically about a fugitive whose stay on a mysterious island is disturbed by a gang of tourists, but actually it’s about the nature of reality and our relationship to it, told in the most hypnotizing, surrealist style. A good anti-beach read, if you plan that far ahead.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) : 107 pages

Everybody’s gateway Steinbeck is surprisingly moving, even when you revisit it as an adult. Plus, if nothing else, it has given my household the extremely useful verb “to Lenny.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945) : 112 pages

If we didn’t keep putting it on lists, how would future little children of America learn what an allegory is? This is a public service, you see.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) : 112 pages

A people-pleaser, in more ways than one: Sherlock Holmes, after all, had been dead for years when his creator finally bent to public demand (and more importantly, the demand of his wallet) and brought him back, in this satisfying and much-beloved tale of curses and hell-beasts and, of course, deductions.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1933) : 112 pages

A 20th century classic, and still one of the best, most important, and most interesting crime novels in the canon. Fun fact: Cain had originally wanted to call it Bar-B-Q.

Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) : 122 pages

One of the landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance, about not only race but also gender and class—not to mention self-invention, perception, capitalism, motherhood and friendship—made indelible by what Darryl Pinckney called “a deep fatalism at the core.”

Albert Camus, tr. Matthew Ward, The Stranger (1942) : 123 pages

I had a small obsession with this book as a moody teen, and I still think of it with extreme fondness. Is it the thinking person’s Catcher in the Rye? Who can say. But Camus himself put it this way, writing in 1955: “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

Juan Rulfo, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden, Pedro Páramo (1955) : 128 pages

The strange, fragmented ghost story that famously paved the way for One Hundred Years of Solitude (according to Gabriel García Márquez himself), but is an enigmatic masterpiece in its own right.

Italo Calvino, tr. Archibald Colquhoun, The Cloven Viscount (1959) : 128 pages

This isn’t my favorite Calvino, but you know what they say: all Calvino is good Calvino (also, I forgot him on the contemporary list, so I’m making up for it slightly here). The companion volume to The Nonexistent Knight and The Baron in the Trees concerns a Viscount who is clocked by a cannonball and split into two halves: his good side and his bad side. They end up in a duel over their wife, of course—just like in that episode of Buffy. But turns out that double the Viscounts doesn’t translate to double the pages.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899) : 128 pages

I know, I know, but honestly, this book, which is frequently taught in American schools as an example of early feminist literature, is still kind of edgy—more than 120 years later, and it’s still taboo for a woman to put herself and her own desires above her children. Whom among us has not wanted to smash a symbolic glass vase into the hearth?

Leo Tolstoy, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) : 128 pages

Another classic—Tolstoy can do it all, long and short—particularly beloved by the famously difficult-to-impress Nabokov, who described it as “Tolstoy’s most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement,” and explained the thrust of it this way: “The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life—Life with a capital L.”

Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968) : 138 pages

Brautigan’s wacky post-apocalyptic novel concerns a bunch of people living in a commune called iDEATH. (Which, um, relatable.) The landscape is groovy and the tigers do math, and the titular watermelon sugar seems to be the raw material for everything from homes to clothes. “Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.” It’s all nonsense, of course, but it feels so good.

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) : 140 pages

Another early novel on the subject of passing—originally published in 1912, then again under Johnson’s name in 1927—this one presented as an “autobiography” written by a Black man living as white, but uneasily, considering himself a failure, feeling until the end the grief of giving up his heritage and all the pain and joy that came with it.

Thomas Mann, tr. Michael Henry Heim, Death in Venice (1912) : 142 pages

What it says on the tin—a story as doomed as Venice itself, but also a queer and philosophical mini-masterpiece. The year before the book’s publication, Mann wrote to a friend: “I am in the midst of work: a really strange thing I brought with me from Venice, a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You say, ‘Hum, hum!’ but it is quite respectable.” Indeed.

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) : 146 pages

If you’re reading this space, you probably already know how much we love this book at Literary Hub. After that excellent opening paragraph, it only gets better.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964) : 152 pages

Isherwood’s miniature, jewel-like masterpiece takes place over a single day in the life of a middle-aged English expat (who shares a few qualities with Isherwood himself), a professor living uneasily in California after the unexpected death of his partner. An utterly absorbing and deeply pleasurable novel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Notes from Underground (1864) : 154 pages

Probably the best rant ever passed off as literature. Dostoevsky's first masterpiece has been wildly influential in the development of existential and dystopian storytelling of all kinds, not to mention in the development of my own high school misanthropy. Maybe yours, too? “It was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me . . .” Actually, now I’m thinking that it might be a good book to re-read in pandemic isolation.

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967) : 158 pages

The narrator of this strange and terrifying novel obsessively pursues a young woman through an icy apocalypse. You might call it a fever dream if it didn’t feel so . . . cold. Reading it, wrote Jon Michaud on its 50th anniversary, is “a disorienting and at times emotionally draining experience, not least because, these days, one might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future.” Help.

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923) : 158 pages

Toomer’s experimental, multi-disciplinary novel, now a modernist classic, is presented as a series of vignettes, poems, and swaths of dialogue—but to be honest, all of it reads like poetry. Though its initial reception was uncertain, it has become one of the most iconic and influential works of 1920s American literature.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962) : 158 pages

Only in a Ballard novel can climate change make you actually become insane—and only a Ballard novel could still feel so sticky and hot in my brain, years after I read it in a single afternoon.

Knut Hamsun, tr. Sverre Lyngstad, Hunger (1890) : 158 pages

The Nobel Prize winner’s first novel is, as Hamsun himself put it, “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” An modernist psychological horror novel that is notoriously difficult, despite its length, but also notoriously worth it.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956) : 159 pages

Still my favorite Baldwin, and one of the most convincing love stories of any kind ever written, about which there is too much to say: it is a must-read among must-reads.

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913) : 159 pages

A mythic, proto-feminist frontier novel about a young Swedish immigrant making a home for herself in Nebraska, with an unbearably cool and modern title (in my opinion).

Françoise Sagan, tr. Irene Ash, Bonjour Tristesse (1955) : 160 pages

Sagan’s famously scandalous novel of youthful hedonism, published (also famously) when Sagan was just 19 herself, is much more psychologically nuanced than widely credited. As Rachel Cusk wrote, it is not just a sexy French novel, but also “a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic consequences of different forms of upbringing.” It is a novel concerned not only with morals or their lack, but with the very nature of morality itself.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (1924) : 160 pages

Bartleby may be more iconic (and more fun), but Billy Budd is operating on a grander scale, unfinished as it may be.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) : 160 pages

Everyone’s gateway to Pynchon, and also everyone’s gateway to slapstick postmodernism. Either you love it or you hate it!

Franz Kafka, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Trial (1925) : 160 pages

Required reading for anyone who uses the term “Kafkaesque”—but don’t forget that Kafka himself would burst out laughing when he read bits of the novel out loud to his friends. Do with that what you will.

Kenzaburo Oe, tr. John Nathan, A Personal Matter (1968) : 165 pages

Whew. This book is a lot: absolutely gorgeous and supremely painful, and probably the Nobel Prize winner’s most important.

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936) : 170 pages

In his preface to the first edition, T.S. Eliot praised “the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” It is also a glittering modernist masterpiece, and one of the first novels of the 20th century to explicitly portray a lesbian relationship.

Yasunari Kawabata, tr. Edward G. Seidensticker, Snow Country (1937) : 175 pages

A story of doomed love spun out in a series of indelible, frozen images—both beautiful and essentially suspicious of beauty—by a Nobel Prize winner.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) : 176 pages

This novel, Rhys’s famous riposte to one of the worst love interests in literary history, tells the story of Mr. Rochester from the point of view of the “madwoman in the attic.” See also: Good Morning, Midnight (1939), which is claustrophobic, miserable, pointless, and damn fine reading.

George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861) : 176 pages

Like Middlemarch, Silas Marner is exquisitely written and ecstatically boring. Unlike Middlemarch, it is quite short.

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963) : 176 pages

The girls of Spark’s novel live in the May of Teck Club, disturbed but not destroyed by WWII—both the Club, that is, and the girls. “Their slenderness lies not so much in their means,” Carol Shields wrote in an appreciation of the book, “as in their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world. They are fearless and frightened at the same time, as only the very young can be, and they are as heartless in spirit as they are merry in mode.” Can’t go wrong with Muriel Spark.

Robert Walser, tr. Christopher Middleton, Jakob von Gunten (1969) : 176 pages

Walser is a writer’s writer, a painfully underrated genius; this novel, in which a privileged youth runs off to enroll at a surrealist school for servants, may be his best.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) : 179 pages

Read for proof that Holly Golightly was meant to be a Marilyn.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958) : 181 pages

A powerful, clear-eyed, and haunting novel, which at the time of its publication was transgressive in its centering of African characters in all their humanity and complexity, and which paved the way for thousands of writers all over the world in the years to follow.

Leonard Gardner, Fat City (1969) : 183 pages

Universally acknowledged as the best boxing novel ever written, but so much more than that: at its core, it’s a masterpiece about that secret likelihood of life, if not of literature: never achieving your dreams.

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968) : 185 pages

House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s first novel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and is often credited with ushering in the Native American Renaissance. Intricate, romantic, and lush, it is at its core about the creaking dissonance of two incompatible worlds existing in the same place (both literally and metaphysically) at the same time.

Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) : 186 pages

Himes’ first novel spans four days in the life of a Californian named Bob Jones, whose every step is dogged by racism. Walter Mosely called Himes, who is also renowned for his detective fiction, a “quirky American genius,” and also “one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.” If He Hollers Let Him Go, while not technically a detective story, is “firmly located in the same Los Angeles noir tradition as The Big Sleep and Devil in a Blue Dress,” Nathan Jefferson has written. “Himes takes the familiar mechanics of these novels—drinking, driving from one end of Los Angeles to another in search of answers, a life under constant threats of danger—and filters them through the lens of a black man lacking any agency and control over his own life, producing something darker and more oppressive than the traditional pulp detective’s story.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) : 189 pages

All my life I have wanted to scoff at The Great Gatsby. Usually, things that are universally adored are bad, or at least mediocre. But every time I reread it, I remember: impossibly, annoyingly, it is as good as they say.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957) : 190 pages

Still one of my favorite campus novels, and short enough to read in between classes.

Charles Portis, Norwood (1966) : 190 pages

Portis has gotten a lot of (well-deserved) attention in recent years for True Grit, but his first novel, Norwood, is almost as good, a comic masterpiece about a young man traipsing across a surreal America to lay his hands on $70.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) : 191 pages

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly have more mainstream name recognition (thank you Hollywood) but Ubik is Dick’s masterpiece, filled to the brim with psychics and anti-psis, dead wives half-saved in cold-pac, and disruptions to time and reality that can be countered by an aerosol you get at the drugstore. Sometimes, anyway.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Alison Entrekin, Near to the Wild Heart (1943) : 192 pages

Lispector’s debut novel, first published in Brazil when she was only 19, is still my favorite of hers: fearless, sharp-edged, and brilliant, a window into one of the most interesting narrators in literature.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) : 192 pages

This novel is probably more famous these days for the Kubrick film, but despite the often gruesome content, the original text is worth a read for the language alone.

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) : 193 pages

Comyns is a criminally under-read genius, though she’s been getting at least a small taste of the attention she deserves in recent years due to reissues by NYRB and Dorothy. This one is my favorite, permeated, as Brian Evenson puts it in the introduction of my copy, with marvelousness, “a kind of hybrid of the pastoral and the naturalistic, an idyllic text about what it’s like to grow up next to a river, a text that also just happens to contain some pretty shocking and sad disasters.” Which is putting it rather mildly indeed.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) : 194 pages

In 194 pages, Janie goes through more husbands than most literary heroines can manage in twice as many (and finds herself in equally short order).

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911) : 195 pages

To be honest with you, though it has been variously hailed as a masterpiece, I find Ethan Frome to be lesser Wharton—but even lesser Wharton is better than a lot of people’s best.

Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) : 198 pages

The mood this novel—of disappeared teens and Australian landscape and uncertainty—lingers much longer than the actual reading time.

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967) : 200 pages

“The summer she was fifteen,” Carter’s second novel begins, “Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood.” It is that year that she is uprooted from her home in London to the wilds of America, and it is that year she comes to term with herself. “It is often the magical, fabular aspects of Carter’s stories that people focus on, but in The Magic Toyshop I responded to the way she blended this with a clear-eyed realism about what it was to live in a female body,” Evie Wyld wrote in her ode to this novel. “In a novel so brilliantly conjured from splayed toothbrush heads, mustard-and-cress sandwiches and prawn shells, bread loaves and cutlery, brickwork and yellow household soap, the female body is both one more familiar object and at the same time something strange and troubling.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS

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taleofharrison · 4 years

Text

I’ll Never Give You Away | Ashton Irwin

Summary: No summary because I feel that the warnings give too much away and I don’t want to spoil it more but you need to know it is based on the movie Jersey Girl.

Warnings: Death, crying and agnst at the end. Italics are flashbacks and memories

Prompt: When I take a look at my life and all of my crimes you’re the only thing that I think I got right. - Lover of mine by 5sos

Word Count: 2035

A/N: This is my entry to the writing challenge by @writingfortoomanyfandoms I really hope you like it and it’s my first 5sos fic so I’m a little nervous, feedback is appreciated and I’m not a native English speaker I practice my writing skills by writing fanfcition so any comments and tips on that note are welcome too. Enjoy!

As Y/N made her final touches to her make-up she let her brain wander through the memory lane.

“Ash where are you taking me?” Y/N giggled as she let her boyfriend guide her through an empty beach in Australia.

“Princess we’re back home how many times do we get to run on the beaches we grew up?” he answered taking a quick look over his shoulder to look at girl who looked flustered. Even though they’ve been dating for almost 3 years the nickname princess still gave her butterflies and Ashton knew. He loved it.

“I know but can’t you please let go of my arm” she said with a smile. She knew Ashton didn’t hurt her in purpose he was just nervous about what was about to happen “t’s starting to hurt”

“Sorry I just-“ He had gotten to the place he had planned to be with her “D’you remember when we were younger?”

“Yes, we ran away every time we could to this beach” Y/N smiled at the memory “we used to play with the ocean and you asked me here if I wanted to move to California with you”

“I still can’t believe you said yes” he chuckled looking down at his feet “I mean we weren’t anything yet”

“We were best friends that was more than enough to me” the girl smiled again. Ashton loved that smile he can’t even remember when he fell in love with her.

“This beach saw us grow and was a witness of important moments of our history” Y/N giggled at Ashton’s sudden change to deep thinker. She liked it though “That’s why I brought you here, so it can witness another big milestone in our lives”

“When I take a look at my life and all of my crimes you’re the only thing that I think I got right” When Ashton got down on one knee Y/N couldn’t believe it “So Y/N Y/L would you say yes to another of my crazy ideas?” he had a blue velvet box in his hands with the most beautiful ring Y/N had ever seen.

“Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!” with tears in her eyes Y/N throw herself at Ashton’s arms. In that moment they were the happiest people on Earth.

“What are you thinking?” Ashton voice brought her back to reality.

“Just remembering” she said “when you proposed”

“Another time I couldn’t believe you actually agreed with me to do something” he smirked placing a kiss on the top of her head “You ready to go?”

“Yes, just let me get my purse” Y/N sighed a tone of sadness in her voice. Nobody would’ve notice but Ashton knew her better than he knew himself.

“Now what’s the matter?” he asked again getting a questioning look from you “don’t give me that look what’s up?”

Y/N sighed again before speaking “It’s your first Gammy nomination and I’m going with you seven months pregnant. This isn’t exactly how I visualized this moment for us”

“I think you look stunning” Ashton smiled giving her a small peck on the lips “Besides you know you are my lucky charm. Both of you are”

Y/N smiled he always said the right words to help her feel better “Alright Mr. Grammy Award Winner let’s go. We don’t wanna be late”

“I haven’t won anything yet” he laughed.

“Didn’t you say we are your lucky charm?” Y/N smirked with a hint of fun could be found on her words.

“We are 5 seconds of summer thank you for coming tonight” Luke spoke right after the last song. It was the first concert with an actual audience and Ashton.

“I can’t believe they told me that about two hundred people would be seeing us tonight” he complained once he could get back to his best friends all the 12 people there had gone home “They were like 12”

“Well Ash I was the thirteenth person here in the audience” Y/N laughed at his tone of voice and face.

“Nice now you’re making fun of me” he rolled his eyes punching her shoulder playfully.

“Ash it doesn’t matter if I’m the thirteenth person on the venue or the ten thousand one there. I’ll support you every single time” Y/N assured him holding his hand giving it a squeeze “This was only your first gig and I know you’ll go far”

He slightly smiled at your words “You’re right. I’m just taking this too seriously”

“Now you have to properly introduce me to my replacement” Y/N said dragging Ashton with his bandmates.

“Replacements?” he said a hint sound of fun in his voice.

“Well yeah, aren’t they your new best friends now”

A quiet afternoon had been interrupted by three guys bursting in with gifts in hands for Lea, Ashton and Y/N’s baby girl who was just a month away from making her debut into the world.

“One night” Ashton groaned as he closed the door behind them “one night with my wife is all I’m asking you guys”

The Australian boys ignored his complains as they pushed past him making their way to the living room where Y/N and Ashton had been binge watching Friends.

“We were thinking that maybe baby Lea would need some of these” Calum said showing the couple a big shopping bag.

“Guys the baby shower was months ago” Y/N said. She was tired being 8 months pregnant wasn’t easy. It was taking a big toll on her emotionally and physically “this baby has everything she needs by now”

“You never have too many stuffed animals Y/N” this time it was Luke with a big pout on his face “one of these could be the toy that will be her friend for the rest of her childhood”

Y/N laughed of course they came here just to make her laugh. They hadn’t seen her in a while since she barely left the house so close to the due date and with a babysitter in the house. Whether it be Sierra or Crystal Ashton didn’t want Y/N to be alone or outside the house while he was at the studio.

“And maybe we can help get the nursery ready” Michael pointed.

“The nursery’s been ready for weeks arseholes” Ashton told them

“Well we just missed Y/N we wanted to visit her” Calum shrugged

“That’s so sweet!” Y/N exclaimed “But right now isn’t a good time, rain check?”

The boys nodded being escorted by Ashton to the door.

“I know baby” she softly said to the belly “your uncles are crazy, but they are so excited to meet you. We all are”

The day came. Ashton was with you he had taken a few days off the studio, so he could be with Y/N all the way to the hospital to deliver the baby.

“Ok so the suitcase is in the car. I called the boys they know Lea is coming and we’re ready to go” Ashton was trying really hard to keep his cool a thing Y/N found endearing since she knew that his mind must go to a 1000 miles per hour right now.

He drove as fast as he could to the hospital but of course he was second guessing since his pregnant wife came in the car with him going into labor. At the hospital he was quick to fill the paperwork while some nurses took Y/N in a wheelchair.

Once Ashton could go into the hospital room he never left Y/N’s side. He held her hand and talk about all the things he was planning to do with Lea.

“I’m going to teach her how to play drums” he said excitedly with a gleam in his eyes. A gleam Y/N only had seen the day the got married “I’m so excited this is happening”

About two hours later nurse came in to tell the couple that Y/N was ready to go into the delivery room. This is it. They were going to meet their littler girl.

“Now Y/N one more push okay just one more” the doctor asked. Y/N squeezed Ashton hand one last time. The rest is a blur.

They took the baby away from them to clean her up. Ashton heard her crying and he smiled then he saw how Y/N fell asleep in front of him, he whispered her name before the nurses pushed him away kicking him out of the delivery room that’s when he started screaming his wife’s name.

Ashton waited outside the room sitting on the floor head between his knees waiting for a nurse or a doctor to come out and tell him that everything was okay both mother and daughter were ready to see him again and maybe go home tomorrow morning even earlier if possible.

“Mr. Irwin” the voice came from a doctor. Ashton was quick to pick him up the floor “I’m sorry but we did what we could. Y/N…she’s gone”

Ashton world couldn’t believe what supposed to be one of the happiest days of his life became the most bittersweet day. The doctor kept speaking but he just didn’t listen was he was saying the room around became black while tears came down his eyes.

“…on the other hand, you have a beautiful healthy baby girl waiting to meet you right there” the doctor said in the most neutral tone possible pointing at what was Y/N’s hospital room “One more time I’m so sorry for your lost”

Ashton was again crying on the floor. He wanted more than anything to meet Lea, but he wasn’t ready he just couldn’t see her in that moment and as if on cue three loud Australian boys came in looking for the Irwin family balloons and even more toys in hands.

“Where’s our niece?” Michael asked with a pink bunny balloon in hand. His smiled faded away the moment he saw his friend.

“And my goddaughter?” Luke’s tone changed from happy to dull in less than a second “What? Where?”

“Y/N…she couldn’t-“ Ashton was struggling for the words to came out but his voice kept breaking “the doctor said…Lea’s there and I just can’t pick myself up to see her”

“Hey hey hey Ash it’s okay it’s hard” Calum kneeled to be on eye level with Ash “We know you want to grieve and we have no idea how you must be feeling but right now you’re all that little girl has and we are here” Calum turned to see Luke and Michael tears in their eyes “We will always be here and we will help you with everything you need”

He picked Ashton from the shoulders so he could stand up at the same time “Now go in there and hold Lea we will wait here”

Ashton took a deep breath and pushed the door open and there she was, a beautiful girl sleeping in a pink blanket he just stared down at her “she looks like you” he whispered up to the sky “I’ll do my best with her I promise” he whispered again to the sky.

Lea started to cry. Ashton was quick to pick her up “It’s okay” he whispered against his head “I know you miss mommy I miss her too and when you grow I’ll tell you everything about her but right now it’s just and me against the world”

She kept crying but not as loudly “Do you want me to sing you a song?” he asked even though she couldn’t answer “Your mommy’s favorite was Lover of Mine maybe that’ll work”

He softly hummed the lyrics “I'll never give you away 'cause I've already made that mistake if my name never fell off your lips again I know it'd be such a shame when I take a look at my life

and all of my crimes you're the only thing that I think I got I right I'll never give you away…I’ll never give you away” and his little girl was asleep again.

He understood in that moment that he needed to be strong for her and to support her as best as he could the rest of her life. He opened the door and peaked his head.

“Hey do you want to meet you niece?”

Gif not mine

#courts4kwritingchallenge #5sos #5sos imagine #5sos x reader #5sos blurb #5sos fic #5sos fanfic #ashton irwin x reader #ashton irwin #ashton irwin imagine #ashton irwin blurb #ashton irwin fic #My Writing Corner #5 seconds of summer #5sos agnst

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mrmallard · 3 years

Note

18 and 33

18: rant about your favorite musician

So I was bullied pretty badly as a kid at school and at home, and there was a period of time where I was drowning in a sea of age-appropriate content that felt extremely condescending and fake - it wouldn't ever engage with the idea of being sad or depressed in a serious and nuanced manner outside of the token "you're sad now but things aren't so bad!" message. Most adult media I had access to at the time, mostly shitty early-00's action movies airing on TV, was very vapid and about as thematically hollow as the age appropriate stuff. Nothing really represented me and made me feel heard, nothing validated what I was going through and the negativity I was feeling towards others and myself.

As a 12 year old, I found the media which finally validated the depression, hurt and general violent negativity that existed within me due to all of my negative experiences.

And that media...

was End of Evangelion, an anime movie in which the apocalypse happens in an immeasurably bizarre and fucked up way, where there's a bunch of overt giant robot violence but also very alarming and grounded person-to-person violence, and where the ending is unendingly bleak.

I then found the Mountain Goats through a show called Moral Orel when I was 16, and I lamented the fact that I hadn't found them before I found one of the bleakest anime movies of all time to cope with what I was going through. Because my Evangelion fandom ultimately did me a lot of harm - and while I was a stupid kid at times in how I engaged with the Mountain Goats (sending John stupid asks on Tumblr like a fucking asshole), there was a much more resonant catharsis that came with the music I heard, and it facilitated healing over time rather than escapism and outright nihilism.

I feel like had I found them earlier, I could have negated some of the harm I did to myself - like Tallahassee came out when I was 6, and I was pirating music all the time on LimeWire from 13 onwards. There's a hypothetical past where my music piracy led me to find the Mountain Goats way earlier than I eventually did, and it would have changed my life forever.

The Mountain Goats laid out a template for how I found all of my other favorite bands. There was the initial hook - the prerequisite "No Children" and "Old College Try" from Moral Orel - followed by immense overplay, followed by branching out into their other music. Once the connection has been made to a strong base of starter songs, I then get interested in listening to full albums, which is where I find the second wave of songs to latch on to after the first wave gets overplayed. Rinse and repeat until I've exposed myself to all of their music. TMG was the first band to facilitate this process, and I've done the same thing to every "core" musical act I've listened to since.

What I like about the Mountain Goats is that they're not afraid to broach difficult subjects? The Sunset Tree is a masterpiece in this regard, there's a level of vulnerability on that album that you don't get from most other artists - the closest equivalent I can think of is A Crow Looked At Me by Mt. Eerie, about the singer's wife dying of cancer.

There was a part of me that used to approach The Sunset Tree with a lurid voyeurism, a desire to validate my own pain by engaging with the pain that the album puts out there - but now when I hear songs like Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod, I'm capable of seeing a broader picture and having more than just the desire to be validated by listening to another person's trauma. I would consume media like this to feed an unending hunger, but now I take it in bite sized portions and stay mindful of what it represents outside of my own experience.

One thing I want to talk about is John's early work, because when I started listening to the band I couldn't stand the lo-fi stuff. The whirring sound gave me a headache. But over time I've built up a strong base of his earlier material, even stuff he considers an old shame, that I absolutely adore.

The first "going to" song, to my understanding, is Going to Chino. And if you haven't heard Going to Chino, I recommend it - it's silly, it's overwrought and it's passionate. You'll never hear a more earnest commendation of a town's access to the 60 freeway in any other songs on earth. There's also Minnesota, which to this day might be John Darnielle's most romantic song. He acknowledges that he's a different person than when he started making music and he prefers to move forward as opposed to living in the past, but there's a lot of power in songs like No, I Can't or Yoga, regardless of how far removed he becomes from the self that made them.

My favorite song might be From TG&Y, because it hits on a very personal note - engaging in self-destructive behaviour to cope with a town that's sucking all of the life and goodness out of you. I've only ever drank to excess, but there's something very relatable about feeling how run down you are after a bender, having this awful manky taste in your mouth the whole time as you shift from place to place, and having this impulse of needing to run away and start a new life before this way of living kills you.

There's a lot of myself wrapped up in the Mountain Goats, and whether they're the primary band on my radar at any given moment or not, I can always spare a few words about how they make me feel.

33: what do you think about a lot

I think a lot about queer people in the past and how they've able to live their lives. I'll give you three examples.

Lately, I've had this pet idea about the anime/manga series Ranma 1/2. I haven't seen or read it, but I do know that it's about this young guy named Ranma who is afflicted with a curse or the like that results in him changing gender depending on the temperature of the water that gets dumped on him.

Ranma 1/2, from what I've gleaned, has resulted in a few gender awakenings - if I'm not mistaken, I think Dan Shive was one of those people, who went on to create the webcomic El Goonish Shive which deals with gender in a similar way at the start before taking more of a serious turn as the comic goes on.

But I have this idea in my head about early Ranma 1/2 fans writing stories about Ranma coming to terms with being a woman, and deciding to find a way to break the curse in a way that would leave the character as a woman. I wonder if there's anyone who tapped into their transness back then through their Ranma fandom, and whose journey is documented in their work.

It's like, there's people back then who Get It. Who came into their own in a time where the concept of gender transition was less accepted than it was now. And that's my people - geeky fanfiction writers. I want to know that there are people who found an innate truth to them, and who were able to be happy.

Another example I want to talk about is Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady on the Brady Bunch. I care deeply for Robert Reed. From what information is the most easily accessible about the man, he was apparently a pretty angry guy at times - he wasn't proud of his role on the Brady Bunch, and he'd get into arguments with the producer of the show. He was a closeted gay man playing the most sanitized TV dad in America, and if that news ever came out, it would sink his career and the entire show along with it.

But he was a good man. Notably, the producer of the Brady Bunch would tolerate his outbursts because his instincts would usually turn out to be right. And while he was upset with the material, he was never abusive to his co-stars. A bunch of them speak fondly about him to this day - he'd take the kids on day trips and stuff, and became something of a mentor and father figure to them. You don't hear wholesome stories like that from the 70's any more, but by all accounts Robert Reed seems to have been a decent man.

Robert died of colon cancer, but at the time of his death he had HIV as well. He was an incredibly private person - the only reason we know that he's gay is because he called Florence Henderson a week before he died to let her know and to get her to tell the rest of the cast. Apparently he kept in touch with her for years, and he saw fit to let everyone know before he died.

My understanding is that he had a partner at the time, though I'm not 100% sure. I hope Robert Reed had love throughout his life, y'know. I hope he had people who he loved and was loved by in return. I'm sad that he lived his whole life in the closet, and I hope he was able to find comfort and fulfillment in the relationships he did have in his life.

The last example I want to talk about is David Hyde Pierce - Niles from Frasier and the professor from Treasure Planet. I learned a while back that he had come out as gay in the late 2000's, getting married before Proposition 13 went into effect in California. I saw a topic about him on GameFAQs recently and I wanted to bring up that he was gay and married, but it had been a while so I googled him again to get my facts straight.

Not only is David Hyde Pierce still married, he's been in a relationship with his husband since 1983.

It means so much to me because people break up all the time in Hollywood. Whether it be the stress of the outside world gawking at them all the time, or the vice and excess of the entertainment industry corrupting people over time, or just falling out of love ala Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman - relationships in Hollywood don't last. And you don't hear much about gay celebrities and their love lives unless it becomes a point of controversy, ala Elton John's adoption issues or George Michael getting outed.

But the entire time David Hyde Pierce was on Frasier and doing voiceover - for all intents and purposes, at the top of his career - he was in a relationship with a man he'd already loved for a decade beforehand. And they continued to be together until gay marriage became legal, at which point they married each other, and they're still married to this day.

I'm really happy that they've been able to go the distance. May we all have what they have one day.

#long post

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clumsyclifford · 4 years

Note

Hoooooow about Oh, Calamity for Mashton (or Muke if you got tired of the Mashton content) for the prompts?? Am I doing this right? 😅

ana you did it perfectly here it is sorry not sorry this is really emo that’s what you get for giving me “it’s such a shame that we play strangers” so really this is your fault

Michael sees Ashton for the first time in two years at an after-party, of all places.

It's for an awards show, the Grammys, Michael is pretty sure, but he's not here to be awarded, only to give one out. Michael doesn't know what compelled the Grammys to ask 5 Seconds of Summer to deliver one of the awards, especially since they haven't made a new album in three years, but now it's the after-party and Michael doesn't care. There's free booze, and that's all he needs to know.

He's just pulling away from a conversation with Taylor Swift, during which she'd complimented his new hair color and offered to set him up on a date in successive breaths, to which Michael had replied thanks, but no thanks, he's not really looking to date right now, but he'll keep her in mind if he ever decides to pick it up. Taylor had just smiled at him.

The party is loud; all parties are, which is why Michael tends to steer clear of them. He probably picked the wrong profession, being this sensitive to loud noise, but whatever. At least onstage he feels he has a purpose; onstage, people cheer for him, and he feels important. Here, he just feels like he could be squashed underfoot and nobody would even realize.

It's as he's turning away from Taylor, in search of more alcohol (like that's what he needs), that he spies a familiar head across the room. Familiar in a gut-wrenching way; familiar but also very much not. Familiar in a way that makes Michael want to throw up.

He pulls out his phone, unsure of what his plan is. Maybe he'll text Calum and Luke to warn them. Maybe he'll just call an Uber, pull a dine and dash on this party. He hadn't known Ashton would be here. He wouldn't have come if he had.

But before Michael can decide what he's meant to be doing on his phone, Ashton's turning around. Michael meets his eyes accidentally, and is somewhat disappointed by the fact that Ashton doesn't look surprised.

(Okay, so Michael had literally been onstage during the show, but still. He wishes that Ashton would flinch, like Michael is now.)

Then, to Michael's great dismay, Ashton starts walking towards him. Michael flickers his glance to the person he'd been in conversation with; it's Halsey — Ashley — and she's trailing behind him.

Well, fuck. Michael can't very well ditch with Ashley right there. She'd immediately know something was up, and Michael has done his level best trying to pretend like nothing is up, and like this is fine, and like he doesn't care that Ashton left the band.

(What the fuck is Ashton even doing here? He's not supposed to be in the music industry anymore. That was the whole point.)

Michael stays rooted to the spot until Ashton is within arm's reach.

"Michael," Ashton says. "I wondered if you'd be here."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Michael asks, trying not to sound terse.

Ashton looks a little hurt anyway. "Nothing, I just…nothing."

"Hey, Michael," Ashley greets him. Michael gives her a cursory nod, which might be rude, but he doesn't care. His heart is off-tempo, and he's under imminent threat of having a heart attack, and Ashton's still standing there, closer than he's been in two years but still not close enough.

"I'm surprised you're here," Michael adds, to Ashton. Ashton inclines his head.

"Yeah, ah, Ashley invited me," he says.

Of fucking course she did. Michael wonders if there's something going on between them. Then he hates himself for wondering. Then, because he's drunk, he asks, "As a date?"

"As moral support," Ashley says, arching an eyebrow, which unfortunately does not answer Michael's question. "My boyfriend couldn't come."

Michael wants to shout, so you chose Ashton? Except that does answer his question, subtly, and Michael is pretty sure she knows exactly what she's doing, so he lets it go. Ashley's too clever for anyone's good, and Michael's really drunk.

"I'm gonna go get another drink," Ashley says. "Either of you want anything?"

Literally all of the alcohol in this room, Michael thinks, but they both shake their heads, so Ashley gives them respective nods and then disappears into the throng of people.

Michael looks at Ashton, overwhelmed by the space between them, and waits. After everything Ashton did, he thinks Ashton has earned the privilege of starting any conversation he intends to carry with Michael.

Ashton does, clearing his throat. "So, uh. What are you up to these days?"

He doesn’t say I haven’t seen any new 5SOS music lately, but he might as well. 5SOS isn’t officially on hiatus, although they probably should be. That would be better marketing than “Sorry, we just don’t really know how to find our sound again without our drummer doubling as the heart of the band, and we’ve written hundreds of songs but releasing any of them without Ashton would feel like betrayal.” The band hasn’t had that conversation yet, but Michael knows it’s what they’re all thinking. Nobody wants to be the one to say it, least of all Michael. He knows that Calum and Luke look at him differently now, that they know that he’s taking Ashton’s leaving harder than he should be.

It’s been two years, but standing in front of Ashton it feels like it’s been two weeks, and the bleeding starts anew. Michael’s weak, exposed and vulnerable, prepped and ready for Ashton to sink his claws back into. He hates it. He hates Ashton.

“Nothing much,” is what Michael comes out with. “Just — taking a little break to work on music, and ourselves.” A break you could have been a part of. A break that might have helped you heal. A break that might’ve meant you wouldn’t leave the fucking band.

Ashton makes a jerky motion that might be a nod. “That sounds nice.”

“It is,” Michael says, although it isn’t. “Uh. What about you? What are you up to?”

God, this sucks. This whole conversation sucks. This party sucks. Michael hates that he's standing here, three feet from a man who used to be his best friend, or — his something, something meaningful, and they're playing strangers. No, actually, worse; they are strangers. Michael doesn't even follow Ashton on Instagram anymore. He can't bear to.

(Or maybe he doesn't want to know — if Ashton's happy or sad, if he's found his new purpose in life, if he has a new girlfriend or boyfriend or best friend. There's a very specific brand of hurt that comes from watching someone you loved with your whole heart love someone else.)

Ashton rolls his shoulders, shrugging. "Honestly, a lot of different things. I do a lot of yoga. And I've been working on my cooking skills. I'm thinking about — I don't know." He presses his lips together and shrugs again, more halfheartedly. "I don't know."

"Well," Michael says. "Sounds like you're being very productive with all your new free time."

Ashton's face tightens, and Michael recognizes the simmering flame in his eyes. "Michael, don't," he says.

“Don’t what?”

"I thought we could be civil. It’s been two years."

"I'm civil," Michael says. "I'm not the one who left."

"It's not that simple and you fucking know it," Ashton says angrily. "And I'm not the one who completely cut ties with you."

"What, like I was supposed to keep in touch and update you on the tour life you'd deliberately left behind? Excuse me for thinking you wouldn't be too keen on that."

“You thought I wouldn’t want to stay in touch with my best friends? The people I considered family, really?”

“Good to know you’d leave your family.”

"Jesus, grow up, Michael," Ashton snaps. "Just admit you were immature about it."

Michael fumes. "That's really fucking rich coming from you. You're the one who cut loose the minute it got serious with us!"

There’s a moment of silence, and Michael regrets saying anything. Ashton stares.

"You're not the reason I left," he says, and all of a sudden the fire is gone from his voice. He blinks. "Is that what you really think? Michael, you're the reason I almost stayed."

"Almost," Michael repeats. His chest aches. His heart hurts. "But you didn't stay."

"You would have preferred for me to keep pretending to love a job I had begun to hate? To keep touring when it was physically hurting me? To press on and ignore my own mental health? Really?"

Michael stares at him. "No," he says. "Obviously not." He knows why Ashton left, and he knows that being angry about it makes him an asshole.

(Sometimes he thinks he's like a wounded animal, and he keeps lashing out, keeping the injury fresh on purpose. It would be worse, he's sure, to let it heal, to forget the way he loved so hard, and hurt so bad.)

“We could have talked about it,” Michael says sullenly. “You could have told us something was wrong before you decided to leave. You could have fucking warned us.”

"Look, Michael, I know I hurt you," Ashton says. Michael hates him, the way he sounds so sincerely apologetic. "I wish leaving the band didn't have to mean leaving you."

"It didn't," Michael says. Too late, he realizes it sounds like he's arguing that they can still fix it, when Michael is pretty sure they can't, and regardless he doesn't want Ashton thinking that that's what Michael's after. It's not. It's not.

(Is it?)

"Yes it did," Ashton says. "But I'm still sorry. For hurting you. It's the worst thing I've ever done. I don't think I can ever fix it, but — I never really got to tell you that I'm sorry. So." He spreads his arms. "I'm sorry."

Ashton can't fix it, Michael wants to say. He wants to say fuck you, you arrogant bastard. He wants to go back in time five minutes and call that Uber. There's fire under his fingertips, but he's looking at Ashton and he doesn't know if the fire is fury or desire.

"I've missed you," Ashton adds nervously.

"Don't tell me that," Michael says. "Don’t — you can't miss me. You left."

Ashton looks so profoundly sad at that. "Okay," he says. "I won't tell you."

Michael wishes he hadn’t spoken at all. Every single part of him is in pain. He thinks he's going to wake up with sore arm muscles from all the effort he's putting into keeping his arms by his sides. He wants to believe he'd deck Ashton right there, but it's just as likely he'd grab Ashton's hand and never let go.

"This is hard for me," he admits, curt. "I don't know what to say. You just apologized, so I can't very well be an asshole anymore."

Ashton huffs a nervous laugh. "I know," he says. "I don't know either.” He hesitates. “I like your new hair color. It suits you."

Michael wants to ban Ashton from complimenting him, but he's just banned Ashton from saying he's missed him, and if Michael carries on like this Ashton won't be able to talk before long, and the conversation will end.

(Isn't that what you wanted? Michael's subconscious points out.)

"Thanks," is what Michael says. Then, more idiotically, "I miss you, you know."

"Miss me, present tense?" Ashton asks.

Michael nods once. "I've missed you since you left. I still miss you. I don't even know you."

"I thought that was what you wanted," Ashton says, voice small in the large, loud room.

"It was. But also wasn't. I don't fucking know, Ashton." He throws his hands up, desperate for anyone to try and put his sentences together for him so he doesn't have to. It's late and he's drunk and it's Ashton and Michael has always been awful at expressing himself. He pulls a hand through his hair. "I just don't like that I don't know you. I used to love you and now I don't know you. It sucks, okay? I don't expect you to fucking understand."

"I understand," Ashton says. Michael stares at him. "Kind of."

"What do you mean, kind of?"

"I love you," Ashton says, calmly, like he's not dropping a fucking bombshell at Michael's feet. "Present tense. And it sucks that I don't know you. Anymore."

"You — fuck you." Michael squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. When he opens them back up, those hazel eyes are still just in front of him, matter-of-fact. "You can't fucking love me without knowing me."

"Yeah, you'd think, wouldn't you." Ashton gives a mirthless laugh.

Michael opens his mouth to argue. Then he closes it, because he has no argument. For all the shit he talks, he knows too well what Ashton means. He doesn't really know Ashton, either, and has done a bang-up job pushing down his feelings the last two years, but Ashton's here now and Michael's in love with him, strangers though they are. Michael is in love with Ashton now and forever. He never really stopped.

"Well, why don't you get to know me, then?" he says hesitantly. Ashton blinks.

"What?"

Michael holds out a hand. "I'm Michael Clifford. I'm in a band called 5 Seconds of Summer. I like playing video games and guitar, in that order. You are?"

Ashton blinks again. Michael might be hallucinating — he's had a lot to drink tonight — but Ashton's eyes look glassy, almost…teary. Michael shakes away the thought as Ashton slowly reaches to shake his hand. "I'm Ashton Irwin," he says. "I used to be in a band, but now I'm a session drummer and I spend a lot of time cooking and cleaning. Nice to meet you. Again."

"You sound like a nice guy, Ashton," Michael says. It's been too long to keep holding Ashton's hand, but Michael doesn't want to let go. "I'd like to get to know you better."

Ashton flexes his fingers and his hand falls out of Michael's grasp. "I'd like that," he says. "Do you want to get out of here? I know you don't like parties."

Michael finally realizes what Ashton had meant by I wondered if you'd be here. He tries to bite back his smile, because he still feels the looming sense of danger, but fails. Ashton disarms him, always has.

"Okay," he says. "Sure. I think there's a twenty-four-hour pizza place near here."

Ashton smiles. "Wouldn't expect anything less."

Ashton texts Ashley that he's leaving while Michael calls an Uber, and then they make their way to the exit, and Michael feels like his head and his heart are in temporary harmony. Maybe he'll regret this when he's sober, but probably not. It's Ashton. It's Ashton. This could be a new beginning, and Michael feels lucky to have even had a first beginning.

Against his better judgement, Michael reaches for Ashton's hand in the backseat of the Uber, and Ashton just laces their fingers together and doesn't let go.

(Michael loves him, present tense. And he's pretty sure Ashton knows. It should scare him, because Ashton's hurt him once before for being so vulnerable, but he can't help but fall again and again, every time.)

#god what a fucking LYRIC though #mashton #mashton fic #michael clifford #ashton irwin #5sos fic #fic #my fic #seriously this lyric ripped my throat out #i skipped so many of my ask prompts to post this one #mostly because meghna reminded me of it #but like.....wow what a good fucking prompt ana well fucking done #rebelwith0utacause #ask #answered #5sos

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stevenuniversetanzanite · 4 years

Text

The Angel Among Us (Cordelia X reader) Part 7

Last part for this yay! Honestly thought this chapter would be longer. I’ll work on Venable one again soon but it will be easier with this out of the way. God what am I going to do when this is all done? Another series I guess.

Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5 , Part 6, Part 7

Sequel: Fallen Angel

One the first day light was created, the second, sky. One the third day, dry lands and the sea was created, plants blossomed and grew throughout Pangea. The fourth day - the Sun, Moon and stars were created. Sea and sky animals on the fifth and humans and those of the land the next. The seventh was a day of rest and was made a holy day.

Now you might be asking, how the hell was light created if the sun or stars didn’t exist? The answer is- stop thinking this comes from a book written and translated over 100 times, there is bound to be errors. Also, humans weren’t there until the sixth day, so who the hell knows what happened.

Man was crafted in the likeness of the creator which humans named God. Fashioned out of dust, the first man was made. He and many to follow would return to said state after death. A human woman was crafted out of one of the man’s ribs.

Humans were riddled with sin from their creation. Eve, the woman crafted from the man, Adam’s rib wasn’t the first woman created for the man. Another made from the dust to act as Adam’s wife. She refused to lay beneath Adam during sex or let the man exert dominance over her. This wasn’t in god’s plan. When they couldn’t get the first wife back, that’s when God made Eve. She however, sinned to, stealing an apple from the tree of knowledge.

Ten generations passed, and humankind became more corrupt. The land was purged, a rain poured for forty days and nights and the rest were history.

Not everything was destroyed in the rain. Not all of God’s failures could be erased. The conniving snake that tricked Adam and Eve back in the garden lived on. For he was not a snake but the devilish fallen angel casted out of heaven. Along with the snake was the garden of Eden. Now it was hidden way from the world, saved as a memory of the failures of humanity. Only the truest of heart could find it- that or those who know how to find it.

The Sanctuary, humans last hope. Well it was until you got to it.18 months in a plant covered heaven. Hidden behind a waterfall within a mountain. It was like living in ‘Journey to the Centre of The Earth’. Planted in the middle was the tree containing forbidden fruit. This time there was no snake not that you needed one when you were with the child of hell himself.

“You’ve been a loyal ally,” he said as he looked over your shoulder to the tree. The leaves were a luscious green and the apples were a vibrant green. A trunk sat beside the tree; you knew the boy had it brought here before the two of you entered this life-sized terrarium. An ecosystem that had remained untouched for billions of years and would have remained that way if you both weren’t there to disrespect the space. The blonde man you had accompanied, plucked an apple and handed it to you.

The bombs had gone off leaving this land the only place to be left untouched by the nuclear weapons. Ironically, the first place to exist is and will most likely be the last place to contain life. Satan’s kingdom would be crafted on the foundations he recked for humanity. The ‘Sanctuary’ was the perfect place.

As the story goes, one man and one woman take a bite of the forbidden fruit.

“I know how this story goes,” you said, raising the apple to your lips.

“Then you’ll know it wasn’t the snake that made them pay but their God.” Michael had a point. You’d been with him this long, if he wanted to kill you know it would be a waste. There was no one to condemn you for your sins. “You seek answers but refuse to hear the answers. That fruit in your hands contains all the answers in the universe. Anything you need to know is at your fingertips. It’s up to you choose to accept the gift of clarity.”

“And if it changes my outlook on you or myself?”

“Me? Certainly not. But you? I can’t predict.”

You gazed down at the shiny apple. Gripping it in both hands you rip it in half and handed on half to the man.

“Together,” you said. You both ate your respective part of the apple.

“Now, what did you see?”

~~~

An angel- a spiritual being believed to act as an attendant, agent, or messenger of God, conventionally represented in human form with wings and a long rob. Living humans are only known to have witnessed two of the nine types of angels of which the two lowest forms, guardian and archangels, mingle among man. The others had no purpose among mortals.

Your creation happened long after the creation of earth but before the time of Jesus. You were an archangel, responsible for managing life on Earth, including the creation and facilitation of soul contracts, life paths, the spiritual development of souls, order within the natural world etc. You were lowest out of the level for your reputation as replacement of a former angel, Lucifer.

You didn’t understand the importance of your job, why care for these humans? Let them do it themselves. You never witnessed the years of evil all caused by one fallen angel.

You, the 2.0, crafted in his likeness with the removal of his ill-intent. You knew what you were, they didn’t bother hiding that. You knew him to be pure evil, corrupter of God’s plan.

Free will, something you weren’t allowed to have. We were all meant to be subservient to the Lord. He, the morning star, was the first to be cast out of heaven. He was defiant, not agreeing with god. All he would’ve had to do was simply said “I sinned, I submit, please forgive me,” and the matter would’ve been resolved. But he was too arrogant, feeling too proud to bow down. He used his own logic and blamed God for misguiding him. Why would God give them knowledge if they weren’t meant to use it?

Your life was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was never yours to begin with.

Human’s didn’t belong in the kingdom of heaven; they didn’t belong at all. Why was the Lord so infatuated with his creation? Human’s fascinated you, the ability to come back from sin and earn their place in the holy kingdom. It wasn’t forced but advised. Sin still existed and you could choose to break the 10 commandments. Choice. You wanted to choose your life not be bound to a memory of someone else and forced through the wrongdoings as if it were prophesied.

You could have been good if someone bothered to explain your questions. Always being brush off to the side caused you to rebel. You can’t do this without any explanation as to why. Archangel Michael brought up your status as replacement constantly but if your ‘predecessor’ was here he wouldn’t speak a word.

“I’ll see you at the end times,” were the last words you said to the angel. The man will have a special role in the end times [“For the Lord Himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thessalonians 4:16-1 7)”] Now with knowledge of the end, you didn’t believe that for one second.

“Catch her! Stop Y/N!” The angles that guarded the gates of heaven shouted as you ran through people’s heaven’s gate crashing and accidentally destroying them in the process. You jumped from room to room, hiding amongst people’s belongings to lose the guards chasing you.

The group zoomed past. You sighed before stepping out of your hideaway. The air was musky, you got the sense you weren’t home anymore. Your powers were unhinged, unable to control them was becoming more dangerous than ever.

Accidentally transmuting into an unknown location was never good.

You’ve stepped into the devil’s den.

You wandered, getting your bearings. It was all too new to you, how where you expected to follow along?

You stumbled into him, the man you were designed after.

You resonated with his actions and logic, maybe because you were him in some way. That’s the problem with the likeness, the blurred line between who you are and who you are seen to be. If he betrayed, then, so would you?

He wasn’t like you expected, rude or demeaning. He was cunning, motivated by ill-intent, but who’s to judge if it’s morally good or bad? Those concepts confused you, bad could be good in another’s eyes.

The man knew who you were exactly, rumours of your creation spread fast in the spirit world. “Sister. I didn’t expect to meet you so soon. I would have prepared for your arrival.” He offered his land to you, to help rule his throne. He had bigger plans for the end times than he let on. He fed into your desire, the same confusion he had experienced at the beginning of his rebellion.

He offered you whatever you could have wanted in order to steal you from the grips of your creator. “I want to understand the purpose of all of this. Why are humans so important? Why are expected to follow subserviently?” A life of my own.

“Then go, seek out your own answers and when you get bored or don’t like the answers that you find, there’s a place for you here.”

“How do I get there? I don’t have control-” You’d gotten there by mistake, you couldn’t your powers yet. The angels expected you to which is how the ruckus in heaven began.

The former angel chuckled and explained that earth would be a perfect playing ground for you to learn them for yourself. He kindly answered your question, “Think of suddenly being were you want to go and step forward. You’ll be incognito unless you want to be seen. No angel has had long term exposure to humans, who knows the damages it could cause”.

You found yourself amidst a sandstorm. You knew few things destinations on earth, but you knew one that would be a good starting ground… Eden. Sand flew everywhere. You covered your eyes protecting it from the granules flying everywhere.

Along your journey you find a woman stranded, you called out to her. She sheltered herself with the fabric, she peered up slightly to catch a glimpse at you. Her face was scratched raw in placed due to the environment. You extended your hand out to help her, you noticed the red bloodstain on her clothing. “Are you injured?” you asked. The woman didn’t understand you. Either of you spoke the others language. You sighed, using your index and middle finger and guided her to shut her eyelids. You pulled the woman close before placing a hand on her wound healing her. You sheltered the woman from the storm, extending your wings and wrapping them around her to protect her.

She was your first. Your first living human interaction, friend, lover. It only lasted a couple of weeks before the side effects happened. There was a reason you weren’t meant to be down there for long. Her body broke down in your presence. Each day there was less and less to love. She was your first heartbreak. Your first death.

A day after her death you found Eden. You buried her underneath the tree of knowledge in hopes that her death wasn’t a waste. Countless followed her, all meeting the same fate. You saved women only to cause them more harm. None complained nor blamed you for you had ‘saved them’ in one way or another.

It got to a point you would only show if called upon. You always took a trinket, it could have been the kleptomaniac on you and occasionally, for your favourites, you stole ideas from them, and she ware them when they died. Most of your clothes were from other people including the frame of the glasses you wore at the academy.

Heartbreak, betrayal, lust, Lost. Happiness, unity, fulfilment. Kindness generosity. This is what it’s like to be human. There is no one way to live but through your life, you experience a lot, both positive and negative.

Somehow, in your darkest hour there was light. You managed to befriend a young man; his name long escapes you. He was a descendant of the Salem witches. Up until this point you knew nothing of magic users among the earth. Throughout your years your friendship blossomed. You limited your interactions with the man for his safety. The man became the chancellor (two before Ariel Augustus) as well as taught at the school he attended in his youth. From time to time you haunted the halls. Towards the end of his days, he offered you something to mend your soul.

To truly understand something, you must see it up close, to experience something (by either firsthand or by a secondary source) and to formulate your own ideas on it. You made it clear why you were on earth and though you had understood what it was like, it wasn’t enough.

“To tell you the truth, this may not be the best idea.” A cigarette in hand, you flicked off the ash into a tray nearby. You never said it was going to be the best idea. “You’ve gone in too deep. Someone’s going to get hurt-” You raise your hand cutting him off by their fear of you alone.

“I’d call you a friend,”

“Thank you?”

“I’d hate to see you die too.” You brought your cigarette up to your lips, inhaling the deathly sweet smoke that has and will kill many. “But you treat me as a god and not an equal. I am no different than you. You see, I have to do this. You aren’t the first to confuse me for something better and if I am to truly understand, I must live in your shoes. Submit myself entirely to science.”

“But this can’t be done the way you plan without flaw.”

“So, let there be flaws.” Your friend, the man you’d been with since he was a young man, who dedicated his whole life to you was in disbelief. You were driving yourself into insanity and in turn bring him down with you, for he worshipped you, claiming he had found god reincarnated. But the man was wrong, you were no god.

“And when it’s all done, what of it then?”

“That won’t happen until the end times.”

In your final hours, you sat down with a piece of parchment and a pen. You weren’t sure why he believed they would take you. You gathered he would put in a word with the staff of the establishment that you belonged, whether they believed the man, only time would tell, you thought as you sealed the letter.

An identity spell only lasts until the death of the caster, to ensure it lasts longer as secondary plan was devised. Capsules containing the powered used in the spell could need to be ingested. Once they wear off, related stimuli could jog the memory.

When you awoke from the spell. You stood outside the gates of Miss Robichaux’s, letter in hand anxious for your years to come.

~~~

“Did you get the answers you wanted?”

You got answers you sought. You understood their purpose. Humans were playthings for the Gods. A hobby to waste away at. A game gone wrong. A game you had power over. A game you were breaking all the rules for being down here. You weren’t your brother, you weren’t tossed aside, you shouldn’t be down here. Your friends, all those you forgot about. There were too many. You needed to go back to see them. But you can’t, you ran off.

“So, you’re my nephew? You better not start calling me Aunty, I’m too young for that.”

“It’s good to finally meet you, truly.”

You paused for a moment, thinking about how you felt about all of this. Numb? “Same with you, Mickey.”

“You still going with that?”

“Yes, and now you can’t stop me, I’m your aunt-”

“That’s not how this works.”

“Shut up, I’m your boss now- Kidding.” Michael scowled at your comment. “In all honesty though we should get to work on this place. Torch it?”

“Why the rush? We got a year to waste.”

#cordelia x reader #cordelia foxx x reader #cordelia goode x reader

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bylagunabay · 4 years

Video

youtube

THE ANTICHRIST BY VEN. FULTON J. SHEEN

Ven. Fulton Sheen delivers his prophetic sermon on the Antichrist, the Signs of our Times, the Apocalypse, the coming Chastisement, and exhorts Christians to call on our Blessed Mother and St. Michael for protection.

TRANSCRIPT

God Love You! I want these to be my first words of greeting to you as they will be the concluding words on each broadcast. “God Love You” means God is love; God love you; and you ought to love God in return.

Why is it that so few realize the seriousness of our present crisis? Partly because men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves to measure their times. Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world.

Well may Our Savior say to us what He said to the Sadducees and Pharisees in His time: “When it is evening, you say: It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning: Today there will be a storm, for the sky is red and lowering. You know then how to discern the face of the sky: and can you not know the signs of the times?”.

Do we know the signs of our times? They point to two inescapable truths, the first of which is that we have come to the end of the post – Renaissance Chapter of history which made man the measure of all things.

The three basic dogmas of the modern world are dissolving before our very eyes.

First, we are witnessing the liquidation of the economic man, or the assumption that man who is a highly developed animal has no other function in life than to produce and acquire wealth, and then like the cattle in the pastures, be filled with years and die.

Secondly, we are witnessing the liquidation of the idea of the natural goodness of man who has no need of a God to give Him rights, or a Redeemer to salvage him from guilt, because progress is automatic thanks science, education, and evolution, which will one day make man a kind of a god. We are witnessing also the liquidation of rationalism, or the idea that the purpose of human reason is not to discover the meaning and goal of life, namely the salvation of a soul, but to devise new technical advances to make on this earth a city of man to displace the city of God.

We are witnessing also the liquidation of rationalism, or the idea that the purpose of human reason is not to discover the meaning and goal of life, namely the salvation of a soul, but to devise new technical advances to make on this earth a city of man to displace the city of God. It may very well be that Historical Liberalism of our modern generation is only a transitional era in history between a civilization which once was Christian and one which will be definitely anti-Christian.

The second great truth to which the signs of the times portend is that we are definitely at the end of a nonreligious era of civilization, by that I mean one which regarded religion as an addendum to life, a pious extra, a morale-builder for the individual but of no social relevance, and God is a silent partner whose name was used by the firm to give respectability but who had nothing to say about how the business should be run.

In the new era into which we are entering is what might be called the religious phase of human history. Do not misunderstand me; by religious we do not mean that men will turn to God, but rather that the indifference to the absolute which characterized the liberal phase of civilization will be succeeded by a passion for an absolute.

From now on the struggle will be not for the colonies and national rights, but for the souls of men. The battle lines are being clearly drawn and the basic issues are no longer in doubt. From now on men will divide themselves into two religions understood again as surrender to an absolute. The conflict of the future is between an absolute who is the God-Man and an absolute which is the man-god; between the God Who became man and the man who makes himself god; between brothers in Christ and comrades in anti-Christ.

But, the anti-Christ will not be so called, otherwise he would have no followers. He will wear no red tights, nor vomit sulphur, nor carry a spear nor wave an arrowed tail as the Mephistopheles in Faust. Nowhere in Sacred Scripture do we find warrant for the popular myth of the devil as a buffoon who is dressed like the first “red.” Rather, is he described as a fallen angel, as “the Prince of this world” whose business it is to tell us that there is no other world. His logic is simple: if there is no heaven there is no hell; if there is no hell, there is no sin; if there is no sin, there is no judge, and if there is no judgement then evil is good and good is evil.

But above all these descriptions, Our Lord tells us that he will be so much like Himself, that he would deceive even the elect – and certainly no devil we have ever seen in picture books could deceive the elect.

How will he come in this new age to win followers to his religion?

— He will come disguised as the Great Humanitarian;

— He will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves.

— He will write books on the new idea of God to suit the way people live; induce faith in astrology so as to make not the will but the stars responsible for our sins;

— He will explain guilt away psychologically as repressed sex, make men shrink in shame if their fellowmen say they are not broadminded and liberal;

— He will identify tolerance with indifference to right and wrong;

— He will foster more divorces under the disguise that another partner is “vital”;

— He will increase love for love and decrease love for person;

— He will invoke religion to destroy religion;

— He will even speak of Christ and say that he was the greatest man who ever lived; his mission he will say will be to liberate men from the servitude of superstition and Fascism: which he will never define.

But, in the midst of all his seeming love for humanity and his glib talk of freedom and equality, he will have one great secret which he will tell to no one; He will not believe in God. Because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God, he will deceive even the elect.

He will set up a counter Church which will be the ape of the Church because, he the devil, is the ape of God. It will be the mystical body of the anti-Christ that will in all externals resemble the church as the mystical body of Christ.

In desperate need for God, he will induce modern man in his loneliness and frustration to hunger more and more for membership in his community that will give man enlargement of purpose without any need of personal amendment and without the admission of personal guilt.

These are days in which the devil has been given a particularly long rope. For we must never forget that Our Lord said to Judas and his band: “This is your hour.” God has His day, but evil has its hour when the shepherd shall be struck and the sheep dispersed.

Has the Church made the preparations for just such a dark night in the decree of the Holy Father outlining the conditions on which a Papal Election may now be held outside of the city of Rome? Men who know history have seen these dark days coming. As far back as 1842, 105 years ago, Heine the German poet wrote: “Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy…Wild, gloomy times are roaring toward us, and the prophet wishing to write a new apocalypse would have to invent entirely new beasts – beasts so terrible that St. John’s older animals would be like gentle doves and cupids in comparison. The gods are veiling their faces in pity on the children of men, their long-time charges. The future smells of Russian leather, blood, godlessness, and many whippings.

And, I should advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs. That in 1842.

Well indeed may we be warned. For the first time in history our age has witnessed the persecution of the Old Testament by the Nazis and the persecution of the New Testament by the Communists.

Anyone who has anything to do with God is hated today, whether his vocation was to announce His Divine Son, Jesus Christ, as did the Jew, or to follow Him as the Christian. Because the signs of our times point to a struggle between absolutes we may expect the future to be a time of trial for two reasons: Firstly, to stop disintegration. Godlessness would go on, and on, and on if there were no catastrophes.

What death is to an individual, that catastrophe is to an evil civilization: the interruption life and for the civilization the interruption of its Godlessness. Why did God station an angel with a flaming sword at the Garden of Paradise after the Fall, if it was not to prevent our first parents from entering again and eating of the Tree of Life, which, if they ate they would have immortalized their guilt.

And, God will not allow unrighteousness to become eternal. He permits revolution disintegration, chaos, to come as reminders that our thinking has been wrong, our dreams have been unholy. Moral truth is vindicated by the ruin that follows when it has been repudiated. The chaos of our times is the strongest negative argument that could ever be advanced for Christianity. Catastrophe reveals the evil is self-defeating and that we cannot turn from God as we have without hurting ourselves.

The second reason why a crisis must come is in order to prevent a false identification of the Church and the world. Our Lord intended that those who were His followers should be dierent in spirit from those who were not. But, this line of demarcation has been blotted out. Instead of black and white, there is only a blur.

Mediocrity and compromise characterize the lives of many Christians. They read the same novels as modern pagans, educate their children in the same godless way, listen to the same commentators who have no other standard than judging today by yesterday, and tomorrow by today, allow pagan practices to creep into family life, such as divorce and remarriage; there are not wanting, so-called Catholic labor leaders recommending Communists for Congress, or Catholic writers who accept presidencies in Communist front organizations to instill totalitarian ideas into movies.

There’s no longer the conflict and opposition which ought to characterize us. We are influencing the world less than the world influences us. There is no apartness. We who were sent out to establish a center of health have caught the disease, and therefore have lost the power to heal. And, since the gold is mixed with an alloy, the entirety must be thrust into the furnace that the dross may be burned away.

The value of the trial will be to set us apart. Evil catastrophe must come to reject us, to despise us, to hate us, to persecute us, and then, then we shall we define our loyalties, aim our fidelity and state on whose side we stand. Our quantity indeed will decrease, but our quality will increase. It is not for the Church that we fear, but for the world. We tremble not that God may be dethroned but that barbarism may reign.

And three practical suggestions then for the times as Christians realize that a moment of crisis is not a time of despair, but of opportunity. We were born in crisis, in defeat – the Crucifixion. And, once we recognize that we are under Divine Wrath, we become eligible for Divine Mercy. The very disciplines of God create hope. The thief on the right came to God by a crucifixion.

And secondly Catholics ought to stir up their Faith, hang a crucifix in their home, remind them that they have a cross to carry; gather your family together every night to recite the rosary; go to daily Mass; make the Holy Hour daily in the Presence of our Eucharistic Lord and particularly in parishes where pastors are conscious of the world’s need and therefore conduct services of reparation.

And, finally, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Americans, all of us, must realize that the world is summoning us to heroic efforts at spiritualization. It is not a unity of religion we plead for that is impossible when purchased at the cost of the unity of truth, but a unity of religious people, wherein each marches separately according to the light of his conscience, but strikes together for the moral betterment of the world.

The forces of evil are united; the forces of good are divided. We may not be able to meet in the same pew – would to God we did – but we can meet on our knees. You may be sure that no sordid compromises nor carrying of waters on both shoulders will see you through. Those who have the faith had better keep in the state of grace and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.

Pray to Michael, Michael the Prince of the morning, who conquered Lucifer who would make himself a god. When the world once cracked because of a sneer in heaven, he rose up and dragged down from the seven heavens the pride that would look down on the Most High.

And, pray too, pray to Our Lady, and say to her “It was to thee who was given the power to crush the head of the serpent who lied to men that they would be like unto gods. And mayest thou who didst find Christ when He was lost for three days, find Him again for our world who has lost Him. Give to the senile incontinence of our verbiage the Word. And as thou didst form the Word in thy womb, form Him in our own hearts. Lady of the Blue of Heaven, in these dark days light our lamps. Give back to us the Light of the World that a Light may Shine even in these days of darkness.

God love you.

Ven. Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, 1948

#catholic #prophecy #end times #antichrist #st michael #blessed mother #mother of god #mary #fulton sheen

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hecohansen31 · 4 years

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KINKTOBER (28: Master/Mistress)

Vampire, Crimeboss! MIchael+Vampire! Reader:

SUMMARY: Your jealousy sometimes just gets the best of you

(Also this is inspired by a conversation I had with @dyns33, so thank you, sweetie I hope you’ll like it, and alongside this... I have another idea for them).

Also this is based onto this.

WARNINGS: Bloody (I didn’t have a blood kink before this pairing...), Fingering, Oral Sex (Female Receiving), Squirting, Slightly Dub-Con (Vampire Mind Tricks), Master, Vulgarities, Mention of Drugs.

Your jealousy was something that Michael knew perfectly.

Although you wouldn’t call it jealousy.

It was more than you being extremely possessive on your lover, mostly due to your own insecurities, at first because of being newlyweds (although the honeymoon had been desperately pleasurable).

And then, it was the constant fear of not being enough.

Although having become a vampire had its perks and had given you beauty and grace, you still felt like they didn’t match Michael’s virtue, always feeling like you were a step behind Michael.

Hence when you had met Elizabeth Taylor, during one of your trips during the 70s at one club, you hadn’t been able to be nothing more than jealous and suspicious of the beautiful woman, who looked like Michael’s true mate.

Unlike you.

Just a little mouse, indeed.

You couldn’t help but feel your jealousy grow as Michael and “Liz”, as he called her so affectionately, spent more time together.

You didn’t follow them in many of their adventures, uninterested in any drug humans consumed and feeling like whiskey tasted the same as petrol.

Michael, instead, mixed completely with the chaotic atmosphere of the 70s, not letting anything pass down, brave in his strength and immortality: he seemed made for the chaos of the disco scene.

And you just felt like you were falling down on his mind.

But that night you had drawn the line: you had caught Michael snorting coke from Liz’ stomach, perfectly flat and elegantly uncovered by the sheer top she wore.

You had surprised them when you had gone to join Michael to a party, feeling like you might talk him out of staying at the hotel more, and to travel the world with you, in a second honeymoon.

But the sight had petrified you on the spot.

Although it wasn’t any proof that Michael might cheat on you alone, mixed with all your insecurities and the fact that Michael had pushed you a bit aside, in favor of Elizabeth, you felt like you had enough.

Your first thought was to make Michael feel like you, for a bit.

You discharged yourself from the hotel Cortez, being met with Patrick March, who gentlemanly wished you a good journey, after one last play of poker.

“Have a nice rest of your long life, Mrs Langdon, you are truly a divine creature”.

You had gone to the nearest hotel, mostly because you knew that being separated by your master was impossible, due to the connection you shared for blood and love… at least for you.

But you had wanted your alone time.

And blood.

Since Michael hadn’t been feeding you enough, lately, preferring to stay with Elizabeth and you had to take care of it on your own before you became too feral and lost any ability to control the more animalistic side of your body.

You had lured one of the guests, the first one who had smirked at you as you had put your foot in the lobby.

When the door had closed behind him, he had started talking and you hadn’t cared, immediately grabbing onto his shoulder and pushing yourself as close as you could on his neck.

A few centimeters and you would have gotten some relief, but it hadn’t worked because the door opened again, although you were sure you had locked it.

Michael had appeared behind it, and your suitor attention had shifted onto him.

It was useless to say that a simple smirk from him had been enough for Michael to get rid of the boy who rushed out of the room as if he had seen the devil.

(Not quite).

“What are you doing here?” you had asked, surprised, trying to get your fangs back in your mouth, sitting yourself down the small bed in the room, as you had looked at him with your side-eyes, so you wouldn’t be giving him any attention.

“I should be the one asking that” he had mumbled.

Although he had kept it contained he was definitely angry.

But were more so he could shove it.

“… picture my surprise when Mr March informs me that my wife has just checked out of the hotel, and I know nothing about this, so let me ask, my beauty, what the hell are you doing here?”.

“Getting away from you” you had replied, refusing to back off, still sitting annoyed onto the elegant bed.

“And may I ask why?” his anger showed itself a bit, although you knew it wasn’t directed to you “… in what have I lacked, my beloved to make you search the company of a human”.

“Blood, first of all” you answered him, at the simple mention of the red liquid, your fangs were pushed out of your mouth “… you are supposed to be my master so you should act like it, instead of courting others…”.

You knew you had gone a bit too far, but Michael’s surprised expression was priceless, almost as if he had been truly clueless to Liz’ flirtations.

“… were you jealous, you wretched creature?” he asked, this time he seemed almost teasing and moved closer, just for you to turn your back to him, annoyed.

He moved as quick as a lighting onto the bed and grabbed your chin in his hand, making your head turn to him, but you regarded him with an annoyed glare.

“As if you weren’t jealous of that ‘human’ “you retorted, trying to exit his grip, but he only tightened it, although he was extremely careful not to hurt you.

“… because I don’t like others to tamper with what I think is mine”.

“Well then I don’t think other women should also be tampering with my husband” you shot back.

He raised his eyebrows confused before coming to the final realization.

“You are talking nonsense, little mouse” his voice was a bit of a threat, although you knew he wouldn’t hurt you on purpose.

“Oh, excuse me it must be my mind tricking me into believe that I had seen you and Elizabeth snorting coke off each other’s bellies” your voice was harsh and it took, as many times that day, Michael by surprise, but it seemed this time he was caught red-handed “… that isn’t something that I would ever do to you Michael”.

“Elizabeth is just a friend” Michael stated as if it was just a fact “… there is no need for you to be jealous, little mouse”.

His tone had become a more comforting one, as if you were a wounded animal, but you refused his pity.

“Of course, of course… there is no need to be jealous, why don’t you meet again with ‘your friend’, meanwhile I try to take a quick drink” you replied, with fire in your eyes, wanting to provoke Michael.

You thought Michael would leave you alone, mostly because he knew when you needed some alone time, after your fights, but he instead pushed you onto the bed, crushing you under his weight and ruling out any protest you might have.

“… I don’t want Elizabeth, (Y/N), damn!” you tried to fight him, but it was useless, mostly because he was your master and had he wanted to… he could have taken your life away as easily as he had given it to you “… stop fighting your master, little mouse”.

Your body stilled, although your eyes held the same deep hatred, but you were unable to disobey your master’s words.

“I am sorry for not taking care of you properly” his voice seemed sincere but you still stuck up your nose, to avoid watching him “… it wasn’t my intention to hurt you and make you feel bad”.

“You already did, so there is no need to apologize” you sniffed, feeling strangely on the verge of tears.

He stopped crushing you and retreated slowly, but his legs still kept you pinned to the bed.

He slashed with his fangs his wrist, blood flooding from the wound and you were unable to rush to him and sink your lips in the red liquid immediately suckling on it, and Michael went as far as to try to caress the back of your head, but you just growled at him, almost roaring, and showing your bloody fangs.

And he just backed off, letting you drink till you were satisfied and immediately scurried back onto your bed, putting an healthy distance between you two, your face completely stained with blood: you had been quite the messy eater, some even going in your hair.

But more importantly, it had gotten quite the effect on Michael, a discreet bulge appearing in his pants and hadn’t you been so pissed off by him, you would have gladly taken care of it, mostly because as you were satiated, your found yourself wanting to be satiated in another way…

He hadn’t taken care of you in a long time, so you were missing your husband.

… your cheating, lying husband.

“… I know what you are thinking, little mouse” of course he did, he knew each way of your body and hadn’t it been because of your psychic connection “… I have missed my wife too”.

“I wasn’t the one who run away” you replied, sassily, pushing a hand to your mouth, dirtying it with blood as you rubbed it across your face in a vain attempt to polish it.

“Move closer, little mouse” he ordered you and your legs moved under you, the mattress dipping under your knees and now your faces were in front of each other, but Michael didn’t try to go for a kiss, instead his hands elegantly nestled between your legs, nothing under you little black dress “… let me satiate the needs I haven’t been attentive to, lately”.

And he pushed his hand to meet your tender flesh, looking at any reaction in your eyes, and although you tried to stand his glare, you weren’t able to hide the slight blush which covered your cheeks or the moan that slipped through your mouth, as he his fingers entered you, curling themselves inside you, meanwhile his thumb spread wetness onto your folds.

He used it as lube, to force you to take more and more, meanwhile his gaze never left your face, wanting to take in the beauty of your body struggling against him, and then finally giving in to the pleasure.

“I missed this” he breathed onto your hips, as he hit you particularly deep and your hands went to his, your nails sinking down and pleasure took a deep sit in our deepest part of soul, making you come undone on his hands, intensely enough that some of your release dribbled onto Michael’s hands.

You couldn’t help but be embarrassed, since it had never happened, but Michael simply thrusted his fingers out of your womanhood and in his mouth, licking it clean, but it wasn’t enough.

You barely made it in time to spread your legs that Michael was between them and you immediately felt under the throes of pleasure, unable to feel anything but aroused.

And just when you were tripping over the edge again, Michael raised his head and gently bit down your thighs, to gain your attention, making your climax back down a bit, enough for him to utter, looking at you deep in the eyes.

“Beg for it, like the little mouse you are” this time it wasn’t an order and he didn’t try to abuse of his state, he just wanted truly and deeply to have you begging for him, which you did, but it wasn’t enough “Say master, little pet”.

His fingers dipped into your mouth collecting some of your blood and brushing it against your core in a profane way which got you quite enthralled by the way he gracefully smeared blood onto your cunt.

“C’mon, little mouse, say it” he repeated and with shaky and trembling voice you did.

“Please make me cum, master” you begged, and he moved his head lower, licking the blood off your sweet refuge, but it wasn’t enough.

“Elizabeth couldn’t give me this juicy cunt and your sweet mewls, in a hundred years, never doubt my loyalty, little mouse”

And he let you bridge over the edge, pushing you into a blissful state of satisfaction, that got you to lose yourself in the moment.

You fell onto the bed, feeling like the lack of Michael, who had chosen to stay sit on the mattress by your side, was heavy.

Emotions had you to think whether you should have done something or not in that moment, whether you should have simply waited for him to return to Elizabeth or to invite him to stay.

To hold him desperately.

He made the choice for you, laying himself close to you and you shifted onto your side not wanting to face him, in any way.

Although it pained your heart.

“Little mouse…” his voice was soft, almost naïve “… I am sorry if you felt like I didn’t take care of you, properly, as if I ignored you. It wasn’t what I wanted”.

“I was a neglectful, master, and I am extremely sorry for that. I am here to beg for your sweet forgiveness, although I know it might take a bit” he pushed himself to embrace you and you were too tired to shift away “… but for now, please, just let me hold you in my arms”.

That night jealousy was the last thought in your mind.

---

@emmyrosee @blakewaterxx @lovelylangdonx @1-800-bitchcraft @rocketgirl2410 @ladynuwanda @rosegoldrichie @lathraios @frenchbread4ever @eternalnostalgia @bvbfob @kaetastic @fallenangel4996

#michael langdon #michael langdon reader #michael langdon x reader #michael langdon fic #michael landon imagine #michael langdon smut #michael lnagdon fan fic #michael langdon fanfic #michael langdon oneshot #american horror story #american horror story writing #ahs #ahs apocalypse #ahs 8 #vampire! michael #ahs writing #michael langdon x fem! reader #duncan shepherd

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meggannn · 5 years

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the itsv commentary is so full of great facts and bts info so i wanted to write down all my favorite parts, but i just ended up writing down anything that was interesting, which was honestly most of it. four thousand words later i ended up with their commentary on practically half the movie. i’ve put the interesting or funny bits that i jotted down behind a cut if anyone is interested.

this commentary audio had Phil Lord (co-writer, producer), Chris Miller (producer), Bob Persichetti (co-director), Peter Ramsay (co-director), Rodney Rothman (co-director, co-writer), but it was kind of difficult to tell who was talking most of the time, so i didn’t include names on who said what, unless I knew for certain who was talking.

The first Miles sticker in the film is a “glitch” flashing on the Sony Pictures Animation logo. “Already putting his stamp on the movie.”

RIPeter is meant to be an amalgamation of all the Spider-Man we know, “good and bad” (as the dance happens, someone corrects him:) “Good and GREAT.”

(“I’ve got an excellent theme song, and a... so-so popsicle.”)

“That joke saved the movie.” “The dance move or the popsicle?” “The dance move. I resisted that dance joke and Rodney pushed hard for it (…) It told the audience what movie they were watching.”

“It was Rodney who was really pushing for him to be in this relatable idea of [Miles] not knowing the lyrics to this song but singing along.” “We started animating before the song was finished. It was really easy to not know the words then.”

“There are three very long shots that introduce Miles.” (The shot at home, the shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle, the shot of him entering Visions.) “That was a deliberate choice, to open with a big crazy Spider-Man montage, and then with Miles, start a different pace, long shots, and just watch him and how he is, and don’t get too fancy with it. Although ironically these shots are really fancy.” The shot of him walking past Brooklyn Middle and the one of him walking into Visions are meant to directly contradict each other: his comfort zone vs him out of place in new surroundings. (Megan’s note: My take is that with these shots they might have been trying to represent his home, his past, and his future.)

“Everything [in this scene from color to sound] is meant to go from a very heightened experience with Peter to a very naturalistic experience with Miles.”

For the scene in the car, Shameik and Brian sat in chairs to set up in a car, with microphones and a rearview mirror. “Brian might have even been a little annoyed at Shameik a couple of times, and I think you can feel it in here, in a really wonderful way.”

(Talking about the chromatic aberration) “Sometimes it looks like you’re watching a 3D movie without the glasses on.” “That was on purpose.” “Every frame is supposed to feel like a piece of printed art.”

“On the cover of Great Expectations, there’s an image of Magwitch grabbing Pip’s shoulder in a cemetery.” “Foreshadowing!”

A side character named “Smiley Kid” is in several shots of miscellaneous Visions students. “Because he’s not a real person, I think we can say he is our least favorite person.” “I think he comes around. He’s great, then he’s bad, then he’s great again.” “He’s like the extra in every live action who worms his way to the front of every shot.” “He just almost always looks in the camera.”

Miles’s expression when the teacher calls him out at trying to fail was “completely ripped off of President Barack Obama.”

Benson Avenue was meant to call back to where one of their fathers grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

(“Hypnotize” by Notorious BIG playing on Aaron’s stereo) “Biggie Smalls in an animated Spider-Man movie. In what universe?” “This is the ideal timeline that we’re living in.”

(This comment is said as Miles presses his face on the glass:) “That changed people’s perceptions of the movie. When we had this in, it really lit people up.” (To be honest, I can’t tell if this comment was made in response to Biggie Smalls, or to Miles pressing his face on the glass.)

They all loved Mahershala Ali. “The shoulder touch would work if your voice sounded like Mahershala’s.” Everyone was in awe every time they recorded with him. “He makes you want to be a better person when you’re around him.” “He’s got a high bar.” “Then he goes away and it kinda wears off.”

The subway Aaron brings Miles to was a place he and Jeff used to paint in when they were young, which adds another layer to him talking about/missing Jeff when he mentions it to Miles. The age difference probably means Aaron was younger than Jeff, and now he’s the older one with Miles here.

There’s a bigger history between Jeff and Aaron that’s only hinted at, and part of it is the reason why Miles has his mother’s last name, not his father’s. It’s implied Jeff was worried his bad history would follow Miles if he took his last name. Also because “then he would be named Miles Davis.”

They were excited to depict a spider-man experiencing spider-sense for the first time.

“We did the most expensive thing. In all choices.”

“People ask, How does Miles with a cop and nurse parents afford Jordans? And the answer is, they were a gift from his uncle.”

(On Kingpin’s animation possibilities.) “We always had this idea that he was the living expression of a black hole. The right for him is this floating head on a body that we could scale up and down depending on the shot with hands at the end of arms.” “While creating a black hole, he is a black hole.”

Someone felt very passionate about including the dimensional map showing the other universes the collider was connecting with. “It felt so important to me.”

(Paraphrasing this one) “Once Phil and Lord gave the MO to push convention, the gauntlet had been thrown, we started getting crazy stuff back. And a lot of the time our art direction would just be like, ‘Yeah! COOL!' ‘Do more of that!’”

(Peter rolls his eyes as the Prowler menacingly steps forward) “I like that [RIPeter] is exhausted at the idea of being killed.”

“The Prowler chase sequence was the first sequence that went through the whole pipeline.” (This and the cemetery scene were the first.)

(The burst card of Miles jumping over the subway tracks) Bob Persichetti: “I had such high hopes to do a lot of burst cards, I think that’s the only one I actually did.”

(as Rio comforts Miles in Spanish) “We never translated on screen (…) The idea being, this is the fabric of Miles’s life.” “This was inspired obviously by Brian Michael Bendis” (co-creator of Miles Morales and his longtime writer) “and Miles’ bicultural background. But also Phil Lord grew up in a bilingual house.” “And I took Spanish in high school.”

(Stan Lee cameo) “[Stan is] the only performer in the movie who we went to. Everyone else came into recording studios, but Stan Lee, we dispatched the microphone to him.” “Everybody wanted to animate Stan.” “If you hit pause any time a train goes by, because everyone wanted to animate Stan, he’s in almost every single train.” “He’s an extra in a lot.”

(Miles reading comics before jumping off the building) “If you notice in that comic book, it’s True Life Tales of Spider-Man, and to keep his cover, his name is not Peter Parker. In the comic book, his name is Billy Barker.” “Great.” “Who could ever figure that out, right?”

A bunch of drawings around the grave of Peter Parker’s tombstone were all done by different kids of people on the show.

They mention the cemetery scenes was one of the first ones finalized. When they were still trying to figure out how to bring Miles to life, “you can see that his performance evolved from this [cemetery] scene.” “It’s super expressive.”

There was lots of debate on how much paunch should be on Peter B’s stomach. There are something like 3-5 different body models used throughout the movie.

They all loved the scenes of Peter B in his apartment: the cut to him crying in the shower, to pinned to the bed with his butt out, to his pose on the futon flipping through channels. Someone really liked “[his] little quivering [spidey] eyes on the seahorse shot.”

The comic book page-flipping device was a “late breaking” realization of how to transition between flashbacks and present day.

Chris Miller did the voice of the cop dispatcher on the radio saying the “Child dressed like Spider-Man dragging a homeless corpse behind a train” line. “The role I was born to play.”

In the walk-and-talk scene in the alley, they felt inspired to take a lot of crazy shots. “We were passionate that a Spider-Man movie needed to be shot from their point of view, where every surface can be the ground.”

“Because of questions on the internet, we took of one of Miles’s shoes. Just in case anybody wanted to know why he was sticking.” “Another thing that I was passionate about but nobody cared about but me.”

“One of the big tricks of this sequence and of this relationship was to let you believe that Peter was a good guy even though he was being a real… turkey… to Miles.” (Peter saying “No, does it look like it’s working? No! No, it’s not…”) “This was one of the few moments that we added kind of late just to know that he was a sweet pea underneath it all.” “Finding the right level for his not caring about Miles, and then learning to care about Miles, finding the right level from the beginning all the way through to the end, was something that took a lot of nuance.”

The interrogation/alley and burger scenes probably went through the most amount of reworks and rewriting than any others, because there was so much exposition and “you got tired” watching two heavy information scenes in a row. And given how often they said “this scene went through so many iterations” in this commentary, these two scenes must have been a LOT of rewrites. (Some of the alternate burger scenes can be seen in the film’s trailers and alternate universe cut.)

“I still kind of miss the unfinished version of this shot, where his feet… He had no toes for a really long time for some reason.” “You had to say like fifty times, ‘We’re gonna add toes right?’” “‘We’re gonna get his toes on there, right?’”

“One of the things about Kingpin is that he just magically appears outside of the car. Because there’s no way he could get actually get through the doorway.” “Maybe in the future where you guys are watching this ten years from now, someone will have figured out how to animate that. But in 2018 it’s still impossible.”

(Miles finding Peter in the vents) “These moments were really when you started to feel the relationship between the two of them develop.” “I love that Miles has to fight to occupy the same space and become an equal to Peter.”

(Peter mockingly blah-blahing as Doc Ock explains the danger of the collider, then saying afterward “Oh nevermind, that is bad.”) “For the sake of a laugh, we undercut the stakes, and then immediately had to buy the stakes back.”

“We went through probably 70 different version of what Miles would look like while invisible … and I like how how he comes in and out of invisibility was stylized to some degree.”

They say the Doc Ock/Peter scene was “really really bad at one point” and now it’s “one of the most wonderful surprises.”

Ock’s computer is based off of Phil Lord’s actual desktop. Some files are cut off the edges of the screen because they just dragged things off of the internet.

(Peter glitching in the chair) “I’m remembering all of the conversations that determined that it was funniest if you left Peter’s head unglitched.”

It was Justin Thompson’s idea to use soft robotics for this version of Dock Ock’s tentacles.

Everyone, from animation to the sound team, saw Doc Ock’s tentacles about 3 months before completion, went (exasperated) “Oh THAT’S what they look like? We’ll have to redo X Y Z whole thing…”

You can tell they loved the monitor joke. “Very silly things happening around very cool things.”

The Bagel! text was added last minute. “That was a joke pitch by Justin that was taken seriously.”

“Everyone felt empowered to pitch crazy ideas, and that’s why it felt so rich and deep.”

“It’s no understatement to say that this look in the forest is one of the hardest things in a movie like this. To make something look realistic is something we know how to do pretty well. But to make it look graphic and illustrative is almost impossible.” “Especially when you’re close and far to trees within the same shot at times.” “We had so many conversations with Danny, our V Effects supervisor, like, ‘But, you guys, we’re going to be in a forest, you really don’t want the leaves to rustle in the wind?' ‘No, we’ll be okay!’” (Later, when Peter and Miles swing off together, the leaves rustle:) “See, the leaves can move, guys!” “We just CHOSE for them not to.” “It was an absolute creative choice.”

“This is another moment in the story when we really open this beat up to let Peter and Miles have a victory together and cement their bond, that you really were rooting for their relationship. We breezed through this quickly and you didn’t have the same connection with the two of them.” “One of the things in the screenplay that we discovered really late is that you needed to have a lot of smaller, positive accomplishments throughout the center of the movie to have it work right.” “(…) This middle section of the movie is about Peter and Miles learning to fall for each other, basically.”

(During Gwen’s intro) “We give just enough to hopefully tease you guys into being really into each one of these characters’ origin story.”

“One week of days and nights just passed in that one shot.” “She hit a time anomaly on her way to this dimension.”

“She vibes with Miles after he had been bitten by the spider, and she purposefully bumped into him there, in case you didn’t catch that.”

“We were trying to make Ock such an intelligent and socially awkward person that then turns into this really formidable equal to Kingpin.”

(When Peter thwips May’s doorbell and then exhales with his hands on his hips.) “One of my favorite poses in the movie.” “That pose gets a laugh all by itself.”

“‘You look tired’ is a thing my mom says to me every time I see her.” “It’s accurate.”

“I fought hard to have (May) kick that door open.” “I tried to cut that and then you uncut it, correctly.” “Let’s be honest, she’s not treating her house very well.”

(In the Spidey Lair) “Lots of Easter eggs here.” “We should’ve put an actual Easter egg in this shot.”

They debated for a long time putting the B-team spiders in the picture at all, knowing it would be more work, wanting to make their characters worth being in the picture without taking away from Miles. “Nothing worked in the movie until it had something to do with Miles and his story.”

(On the spider team testing Miles:) This angle was “late-breaking, on the backside”: “This made it feel like they all cared about Miles, even though they maybe didn’t believe in him.” “Just Peter going ‘Cool it.’ For the longest time we didn’t have something like that.”

(Pretty sure this is Peter Ramsay) “When you’re making a movie it’s like you’re building an emotion machine. You’ve gotta have all the parts calibrated the right way, make sure it’s properly oiled, cause if it isn’t, the gears are gonna stick, and you’re not gonna feel right.”

The Prowler Sound™ is not a jaguar or cat, but an elephant. “We only did the dark scenes first cause they were easier to light.” (Some of those scenes they mention are Miles running from the Prowler, the cemetery scene, Miles writing the note in Aaron’s apartment.)

They tried about a million songs for Peni while she makes a new goober. (The song used is not in the soundtrack, but it’s “Want It Here” by Xenia Pax.)

(On Peni’s Heelies) “This shot’s not long enough to get her from the kitchen to the couch.” “Is that why?!” “That’s one hundred percent why. Just put those little wheelies on here!”

In the first draft, there was an idea there RIPeter was a grad student under tutelage of male Doc Ock so that’s how Liv and Ock knew each other.

“The table pushing into Miles. That was something my older brother, when we would fight when we were kids, he would do that to me.”

(When Aaron closes his eyes, refusing to kill Miles:) “That little look. ‘Cause he knows what’s coming.”

(They’re all quiet as Miles carries Aaron to safety, caught up in the scene.) “We’re all kind of gripped.” “We’re supposed to be giving interesting anecdotes here, guys, come on.” “It was so cold that day…”

Prowler’s death was the first session they did with Mahershala. “He’s a method actor, and his death scene, it was like he was really dying.”

“We gave animators the freedom. You can make Miles unattractive. He can ugly cry, because this is raw and it feels so emotional.”

(When Miles throws his sketchbook out the window, only for it to immediately come flying back in:) “It’s a one-shot transition from deep emotion and regret and pain. We said, ‘He’s gonna throw the one thing out that really represents his uncle, yet it’s gonna come flying back in.’ It was hard to make that shot work.” “It’s a great story statement that you can’t lose the things that make up your past.”

When everyone is talking about someone they’ve lost, an alternate line has Ham saying “I lost my uncle. He was electrocuted, and it smelled so good.” It got a lot of laughs, but the team says that from then on, the audience “resisted” Ham because he killed the mood, and it was hard for people to see him as anything other than a goofy cartoon, so they changed the line to “Miles, the hardest part about this job is you can’t always save everyone.” (Megan’s note: I think they probably didn’t bother to re-animate the others’ facial reactions after changing Ham’s line, because judging by the reactions from Peter and Miles in this shot it feels like Ham just said something annoying/out of place lol.)

When Peter says “It wasn’t their decision” (for Miles to stay behind), Miles has a very quick reaction shot where he turns away, bites his lip, and shakes his head. Someone mentions it’s one of their favorite shots of Miles.

(On the scene with Miles and his dad at the door) “When Brian Tyree Henry saw this scene [with a rough performance, just animation], he got the movie. It made such an impression on him. He was very happy to come in and pick any lines up for us and just keep working.” “We were working on the shots on layup for this. The idea of having them be on thirds to start, then coming closer, and finally ending with the final split-screen shot at the end.” “And Jefferson crosses the scene, which I think is really interesting. They start off on opposite sides of the screen. He makes the first move.” “It’s amazing to me to see Miles transformed by his father.” “It feels earned.”

“In an earlier version of that scene, Aunt May gave him a version of that speech, which was nice, but it needed to be Dad.”

(Later on, someone mentions:) “Tom was the first one to say ‘It shouldn’t be Aunt May at the door, it should be Dad.’ And we all sort of slapped our foreheads going ‘That’s absolutely right.’”

“After our premiere, my 9yo son [Luca? Luka?] asked me this. ‘So Papa, you know Miles spray-paints one of those suits and it becomes his suit. Super cool, Papa, but it shouldn’t fit him. It’s way bigger.’” (Laughter) “Did he have to wait a few hours for it to dry?” "We cut out the sequence where Aunt May sewed it tighter and altered it.” “And they had the hair-dryer express drying it. ‘Your friends are in danger.’ ‘Well just let me let it dry first!” “I tell you, spray paint, five minutes and you’re dry.” “She pre-altered it. She knew he was coming. She said, ‘It took you long enough.’ It all happened in advance.”

“The scene of Miles falling and everything slowing down and I always appreciated that Phil called out he was ‘falling and rising’ and the same time.” “It made the movie. A rare thing that goes from the stage directions all the way through production and onto the screen.”

“This sequence used to end with him getting hit by a truck. But really felt like it was time for Miles to get a big victory.” (Megan’s note: This scene is shown in draft stage in the alternate universe cut. Miles makes his leap, free-runs over some trucks and buildings, and his scene is interrupted when he gets hit by a truck and crashes to the ground. There’s a moment where he collects himself, the pushes himself to his feet and runs off into the city to join the others at the collider. I interpret this idea to be their showing how Miles fully embraces the “Get back up” lesson, since Miles’s pose in the sketches imitates the same one in the basement when the spiders are hazing him and he’s on the ground.) “And now people applaud.” “There’s a general attitude with this movie that was like, ‘How can we do things differently?’ That was a case of when we were like, ‘What if we didn’t have the audience feel really good in this moment?” (Laughter) “What if we had them feel really bad? Right at the moment they want to feel good, what if we made them feel terrible?” (Joking) “Let’s poke THEM in the eye.” “I think in early drafts, we just were like, Miles is losing and falling short the whole movie until the very end. And when we put that up, we realized that you needed to see him slowly winning and winning and winning until he won even bigger at the end.”

A set-up that never fully made it in the movie is that Fisk runs charities for Spider-Man and that’s why the dinner was set up like it was.

The bread scene was on the chopping block for a long time. “By adding this interaction, and making it about Peter and MJ and something real, all of a sudden this scene was worth it.” “It’s necessary to know what Peter’s giving up by sacrificing himself.” “It lasts just long enough because we learned that if you stay way from Miles too long--” (They interrupt here to point out two cameo people at dinner, “Danny and Josh,” who I couldn’t get a cap of) “--We lose our connection to the movie in a way. But at this point we care enough about Peter to want him to get back to MJ too.”

“The servers that were holding the movie were moving slow by the end of this shoot. And we had the best computers.” “At a certain point I think we overloaded Imageworks’ server. There was a moment they were afraid the movie was going to break their machine.” “Which was our whole idea. Our whole approach was, how do we break these pipes that make the movie?”

(During the final collider fight sequence, but they don’t specify what idea this was about specifically:) Chris Miller: “One of the only times I can ever remember saying ‘Okay you’ve gone too far.’ There was one brand where I was like, ‘I don’t get this.’ A few of the drawings that were somehow even more insane than this.” “What you’re saying, Chris, is that there’s a version of this scene that’s even crazier than this?” “Literally the only time I can remember going, ‘Okay guys, you’ve done it. You’ve broken it.’”

“I’m sure there’s are filmmakers watching this, so I think this is a learnable lesson from this sequence. Which is if you want to put something super crazy in your movie, wait until the very end when a lot of movie has been spent on your movie and your release date is 3 to 4 months away and they literally cannot stop you or else they have no movie.”

One of them points out Miles webs a turntable to propel himself upward. (Megan’s note: Miles also does this just as his own theme starts playing, which starts off with a record-scratch. I thought that was cool.)

(The moment when Gwen calls Miles “Spider-Man”:) “That choice went through a lot of iterations like “What’s the end of their relationship?” That she calls him Spider-Man instead of giving him a kiss on the cheek? It makes me well up just thinking about it.”

Kingpin breaks the glass of a building and the pieces fly toward Miles. Bob Persichetti calls these “Dorito chips.”

After the train enters a collider steam, there are versions of the interior of the train that flash from all five dimensions. There’s a futuristic Peni version, an old-timey Noir version, there’s a Gwen version… “As it passes through the beam, you get to see five versions of the train existing at once.”

(Vanessa and Richard seeing Kingpin) “This idea of repeating mistakes (for Kingpin). No matter what, he was gong to keep repeating these mistakes.” “He’s still who he is.”

“It was my dream to have Kingpin headbutt Miles and it finally came true.”

Each one of these character is in a black costume, and black surrounds them, and yet you can still see what’s happening.

“I remember people wanting to cut the shoulder-touch at the end.” “Who wanted to cut this?!” (Overlapping chatter) “No names in the screen.” “I remember feeling, oh my god. You’re LUCKY you got the shoulder touch in.” “The fact that you could pay off a set up that wasn’t even a set up…”

(On Miles seeing inside the universe as the collider explodes) “And then this. How long can it be? Let’s make it way too long!”

“The Anvil (that clanks at the end) was in Ham’s pocket?” “In the hammer space.”

(Miles hugs Jefferson) “This was the moment everybody went ‘Oh, YES.’ No matter what, we have to get to the hug, and the disguised voice, and the ‘I love you.’”

Someone describes the ending soundtrack as “Miles’ playlist meets Aaron’s playlist meets a superhero movie.”

They indirectly confirm Peter B and MJ do get back together. “Peter B gets his happy ending.” Another bit someone mentions was a late addition.

“I like that the movie starts and ends with Miles in his bedroom by himself.”

“We could do a whole other commentary saying completely different things.” “Probably four.” “We should do an alternate universe commentary.”

“You’re your own champion, I think that’s the idea. This is a story of empowerment. A champion is not coming from outside of you to come and save you. It’s your job.”

(As the credits roll) “Every name you see right now, we’ve seen them cry.” “We’ve made them cry.” “Every name you see right now has yelled at us.”

(On the post-credits scene) “We thought of this (post-credits scene) two months ago.” (They recorded this commentary in Dec 2018.) “We wanted to get Miguel in there and show the opportunities of where the multiverse could go.”

“I looked this up. This IS the most expensive dumb joke of all time.”

“We didn’t finish cleaning the cell on that close-up of Spider-Man.”

#into the spiderverse #miles morales #peter b parker #spiderverse stuff

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alienaesthetical · 5 years

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Ah, the 90s- a decade of questionable fashion choices, dial-up internet, and shape-shift-enabled teens with depression.

Some of you may remember Animorphs as those wacky adventures with kids who could change into animals. Others might remember it as the series of books featuring kids who watched an alien be cannibalized in front of them, going on to fight a cult, attempt suicide, commit genocide, and attain PTSD.

In all truth, my memories of it were completely vague, with what images I could remember mostly based off of one of the extended universe novels, Andalite Chronicles. Having completed a reread of the series a few months ago, however, I was able to put together my own thoughts.

So, which was it; Tragedy or Comedy? Why do people remember it differently? Let's answer the former question first. Spoiler warning, by the way.

Animorphs was co-written by K.A. Applegate, and her husband, Michael Grant- both of which are still successful writers. The story starts in the spring of 1997, local teens, Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias, exist as a clique in a way- each representing the awkwardness of the 90s in different ways. Jockey Jake has an awful haircut, Gymnast Rachel, initially, is the living embodiment of gender roles enforced in the 90s, Horse Girl Cassie experiences discrimination multiple times throughout the series due to her skin color, Marco is the groups token funny guy who has too much flirting energy, and Tobias, the local victim of literally the entire series. Seriously, this kid does NOT get a break. The entire group is just overtly 90s and it's honestly quite awkward and sometimes humorous how enforced these roles are from the start. Anyways.

The group of friends are heading home from the mall, and decide to take the shortcut through a construction zone- (and yes, I realize how many stories begin with taking sketchy shortcuts.)

As they proceed through the construction zone, a ship descends on them, its doors opening to reveal a dying Andalite named Elfangor. What's an Andalite? Breaking it down to the essentials, a four eyes, blue furred deer with a scorpion tale and a nose that should probably be censored.

Elfangor, who speaks telepathically, tells the kids about the battle for earth- an invasive species known as the Yeerks have already integrated themselves into society, and pose a threat to the entire galaxy. Yeerks are basically slugs that slither into your ear and take over your body- while you remain 100% aware, most likely crying in a corner.

While the kids are skeptical, they don't fight him on it, and agree to help. Elfangor gives them a cube called the Escafil Device- a cube that grants those who possess it the ability to shape-shift into any animal they touch. He warns them, though, that staying in morph for more than two hours will result in being trapped in that body forever. After all six are holding the cube together, more ships arrive.

The kids go to hide as one of the descending ships opens, revealing another Andalite- this one, however, is being controlled by a yeerk named Visser Three- the only yeerk to have ever possessed an Andalite. He proceeds to morph into a creature from another world, and vores Elfangor.

The kids are heard crying by one of the alien guards, and a chase begins- though the kids manage to escape without being seen. They go on to have nightmares about what they just saw. Jake is woken up by Tobias the next day, who claims he managed to turn into his cat. Jake, hearing this, touches his own dog, acquires his DNA, and morphs into him- much to his own surprise.

Later, the group meets up at Cassie's barn, which also acts as a rehabilitation center for animals, thanks to Cassie's parents being vets for a local wildlife amusement park. They discuss what to do, and while trying to forget everything was an option, decide to fight back against the Yeerks. Now knowing the basis of the plot, you can see how this story could be seen as a lighthearted adventure full of shenanigans- but as the books continued to come out, the story grew darker.

Jake's brother, Tom, is revealed to be a high status controller- a person under control of a yeerk. Jake now has a personal stake in this battle, and begins to take it more seriously. Jake goes on to find out that The Sharing, an after-school program dedicated to helping kids fighting loneliness and depression, is actual a cover for the Yeerks, who use the society as a cult that recruits said kids into their ranks- which is how Tom fell into their hands.

Jake and the others decide to infiltrate a yeerk pool- a place where Yeerks go to feed on Kadrona Rays, which is what the sun on their home planet exerted. They find an entrance within their school, and break a handful of people out, only for all but one to be recaptured, or murdered. In addition to this failure, the kids notice that Tobias is also missing.

Tobias would later escape only to inform the group that he had been in hawk morph for a bit too long, and was now stuck in that form forever. All of this happens in the first book alone. Perhaps you're starting to see how it could be interpreted as a darker story, but you're not quite convinced. So, let's talk about what happens it the other sixty four books.

In book three, Tobias attempts suicide, trying to slam himself hard enough into glass that it would kill him. Marco, however, throws a baseball just in time for him to fly safely through the glass.

In book four, Marco discovers that his mother, previously thought to have drowned years ago, is Visser One, the highest commanding yeerk outside the council.

In book five, Elfangors younger brother, Aximili, is discovered, weak, leagues under the ocean, having crashed there the same night Elfangor died.

Still expecting this story to be happy in the end? Gonna kill that delusion right now.

Thanks to having dead parents, Tobias had been physically and emotionally abused by his aunt and uncle for years, the two trading him off to one another throughout the year. However, Tobias discovers his birth mother to still be alive, living with blindness and amnesia. His birth father, however, was Elfangor, making him Ax's nephew.

Closer to the end of the series, the group recruits disabled kids into their ranks, promising them that their wounds and illnesses would heal after their first morph- which, for some, was true. Others would still have to deal with with their disabilities- but not for long, as all seventeen disabled kids were slaughtered, as part of a distraction plan.

In the climax of the last book, Rachel murders Tom, only for her to be killed herself moments after, while Jake commits genocide by releasing a large majority of the earth populace of Yeerks into space, killing them instantly.

The result? The war ends! Yay! Happy ending! Not quite! Jake suffers from PTSD, going on to experience flashbacks in the last half of the book. Tobias escapes life as much as he can, retreating to a natural reserve to live out the last of his days. Rachel, well, Rachel dead. Cassie and Marco live... surprisingly decent lives, both going off to do things close to what they wanted to do. Cassie works in a newly established division of the government that helps relocate aliens, while Marco is essentially a movie star.

So yeah, Animorphs definitely wasn't as lighthearted and happy-go-lucky as some may remember- of course, the story did have huge moments were it screamed "WE'RE KIDS, WE ARE GOOFY 90s KIDDOS," such as the book about Oatmeal being used as a weapon, or that time they convinced Visser Three that the only way to remove the smell of skunk was by bathing in grape juice instead of tomato juice.

To remember the series as either one or the other, however, completely defeats the purpose of the books.

Animorphs, in the end, was a story about kids who were forced to grow up faster than they should have, due to the mistakes of those older than them. Kids who wanted to go skating or eat at McDonald's, but instead had to take a weekend to recover from being entrapped and physically tortured. Kids who thought they knew what right and wrong were, but ended up doing everything they said they never would do, just to win. It's a story about kids- what they should be, against what conflict makes them become.

It's also about how adults like to control kids, even if they think they're free. Elfangor started this by giving them the responsibility of ending a war. It continued with the Elimist, a godlike being who would come in throughout the story to make sure the kids did exactly what they were supposed to do, instead of doing what they wanted to do. Visser One, the yeerk who discovered Earth, gave the responsibility of invading it to Visser Three, instead of handling herself due to personal engagements that happened.

What begins as another nineties adventure of five kids of varying backgrounds, ends as a reminder of what happens when adults put too much pressure on children, and the consequences of forced growth. The kids, once gathering at malls to hang, or attending school, become so separated from their reality that escaping humanism seemed like the happiest possible path (tobias), that letting yourself die was better than returning to a war-less land (rachel), making regrettable choices at such a young age resulting in PTSD, constant flashbacks to times of immense danger and death, a complete separation from the present. (jake)

Leaving children to suffer the consequences of a war not belonging to them resulted in more tragedy than necessary. Forcing kids to make grown up decisions before they've even entered high school only gives them depression, anxiety, and dissociation from reality.

Thinking younger generations can handle the repercussions of your actions, thus making it not your problem, brings the end of youth and innocence.

Millennial humor is often looked on as "dark and depressed," and those Millennials, now in the work force, are accused of bringing the end of many businesses and morals held previously by older generations.

Gen Z is viewed as completely nihilist, having even darker humor, with many having a complete separation from the reality they live in. They're viewed as lazy and brainwashed by entertainment media, when in truth, more happiness can be found in books, games, and television than in their own lives, and it is a daily experience for many of them to wake up in a world that is dull and dystopian compared to the wonders of fictional universes.

These generations are expected by previous ones to pick up what they left for them- to prepare meals with the scraps of meat so carelessly dripping out of their mouths and onto the floor. To end wars they've started. To fix the economies they themselves ruined. To be able to open the Burger King the day after a customer is murdered before them.

Responsibilities created by previous generations that are viewed too troublesome to deal with themselves are being pushed onto our generations, with the belief that our generations can take these responsibilities without so much as a grimace. However, just because one thinks others can handle issues, doesn't mean that they should have to.

Animorphs has an ending. It is not a happy one. It is not an awful one. It is happy for the ones who did not have to endure the war others left for them. If it awful for the ones forced to handle situations pushed on them by adults who thought the problem best be left with the future.

The problem may have been fixed, but an entire generation of people were left to suffer because those in charge refused to handle it themselves, and chose instead to leave it to someone else.

#animorphs #long post #text #jake #marco #tobias #aximilli #cassie #rachel #yeerk

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slaughtergutz · 5 years

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Hi there! I was just wondering what you think makes a good slasher/horror character oc? Thank you :))

Well it depends on what you're aiming for, tbh. Are you doing it for fun or trying to make them fit in universe as much as possible? Are they stand alone or exist in an existing universe?My ocs try to lean towards the latter, personally. Both are valid.

Since you said ‘slasher/horror oc’, im assuming you’re aiming for writing an actual killer character. Although it’s more aimed at design, my slashersona post might be of help.

Like any horror character, I think what’s important is that they have a strong design, and a solid MO. Trying to do something that hasn’t been done before is also helpful. If you wanted a masked stalker, you really gotta go out of your way to make them more interesting than their competition, which in this case would be Michael Myers.

You can have a killer that stalks about camps, but you need to set them apart from Jason Voorhees and the killer from Sleepaway Camp who escapes me bc ive never actually seen it before jahfbajkf

A lot of slasher ‘knockoffs’ (for games and such) fail because there isn’t anything to really make them special. Jason’s pretty plain visually besides his iconic hockey mask (with the exception of certain jasons ofc), so people who want a Jason lookalike will just make him the same but, substitute the mask for something else and put him in a plain t-shirt and jeans. It doesn’t have as good an impact.

For a fan character, I think you really gotta sort of analyze the franchise you’re writing for and work off of that. Sawyers, for example, are more than just crazed hillbilly cannibals. They have their levels of wildness. Nubbins and Chop Top really peak with their feral levels, with Bubba right behind them and Drayton and Grandpa towards the bottom. You have to look at their family dynamics, and figure how the oc would work in. Did they marry in? Are they Sawyer by blood?

Personally I am highkey critical of Sawyer ocs that aren’t cannibals, but you can make it work. (I hc Heather from TC 3D as becoming a vegetarian as a way to avoid eating people meat. She’s still a Sawyer at heart and loves her family, but there’s just some things she won’t do because she wasn’t raised with them.)

For S/O ocs--AND TAKE THIS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT because obviously, what I think has jack shit to do with what you do on your own time, and things done for fun shouldn’t be criticized unless it’s harmful to people--

but i really feel like s/o’s for most slashers really need to match their level. Get their hands dirty. Using Corinne as an example, she is also a zombie hellbent on a single purpose and will kill anyone who gets in her way. The relationship is such a slowburn (it doesn’t even exist in the first fic, which is 13 chapters long), because neither her nor Jason are people who are capable of a relationship in their current states, and they’re at odds a lot of the time.

Because of the way I write Jason--stuck in a loop of his own trauma--the people around him that don’t match up with the things he doesn’t harm (children, animals, mom, himself), they’re going to get hurt. Corinne gets stabbed and cut and choked because sometimes he doesn’t know who she is. But because the story is about growth and overcoming trauma, it like, works out in the end, or some shit.

where was i going with this. right--so like, for example, a good s/o for Bubba in my mind would be someone who’s willing to be a cannibal or is already a cannibal, and will pull their weight around the house. Bubba was sort of put into the role of caregiver of the Sawyer household, so I think that might be a good place for an s/o to take over.

Also kind of not super important but in terms of Michael s/os, I really fucking hate it when people make the s/o a fucking nurse or something, because that just encourages bad practices. Like. People fetishize real life serial killers and suh and think that becoming part of the criminal justice field or working in institutions or prisons, they’re gonna be like fucking Harley Quinn and fall in love and he’ll love only you or whatever the fuck and that’s. Don’t fucking go into these fields just because you want to bang murderers. You’d think this isn’t something that needs to be said but I’ve seen more than one person have fetishes for murderers and slashers and be interested in going into those fields, and I REALLY DON’T TRUST THAT. People need HELP, not your DICK.

Moving on.

uhhh, actually, I think I covered a good amount of bases. If you’re interested in character critique or character creation, hmu because I like to think I know these characters pretty well and am very good at character analysis because ever since I was a kid I’ve been obsessive about making fan characters as immersive in their canons as possible.

same goes for non-fandom ocs too!

#slasher oc #horror oc #creepypasta oc #writing help #writing advice #character creation

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dailyskyferreira · 5 years

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Sky Ferreira Returns With an uncompromising vision and the studio hours to back it up, the enigmatic singer is back with a new single—and a promise that her first album in six years will be worth the wait.

So, what’s Sky Ferreira been doing all this time? Well, for the last 35 minutes or so, she’s been in the bathroom.

“I’m so sorry,” she says when she finally emerges, eyes wet, arms full of winter layers. It’s a late-February afternoon at New York City’s Russian Tea Room, the fabled blini-and-caviar haunt of candy-red banquettes and eternal Christmas ornaments where Madonna once worked the coat check. About a half hour ago, the 26-year-old singer turned up for our afternoon-tea reservation only to disappear in an immediate whorl, as if a czarist vortex sucked her into the basement. What she had thought was an asthmatic flare-up, she now explains, was actually a pretty severe anxiety attack. A panicked twinge remains in her expression, like the distant memory of tasting a lemon. In town from Los Angeles for three days, she tells me, “I’ve been anxious to the point that I haven’t slept at all.”

It’s a nerve-wracking moment for Sky, a pop artist, actor, and model who’s lately been keeping a low profile. This is partly because she seems to find the social contract of the PR exchange stressful, but also because she doesn’t want to suck up all the air before she gets a chance to breathe. “You really can get sick of someone’s face,” she says, as only someone who has loaned their own to Jimmy Choo and Calvin Klein could. “I don’t see the point of doing a bunch of photoshoots or press when I don’t have anything out.”

The fact that she hasn’t had anything out might be the biggest stress of all. Signed to Capitol Records at 15, Sky spent years in teen-pop A&R purgatory—groomed as a naughty-girl-next-door type with mall-Shakira hair and prefabricated singles with names like “Haters Anonymous” and “Sex Rules” (“We are animals/No matter what we deny/Our bodies strong, like magnets” are actual words she sang)—only to have her minders decide she wasn’t worth the trouble and shelve her long-promised full-length debut. Rather than give up, she used money she’d earned modeling and finished the album without their help.

Released in October 2013, Night Time, My Time was a rare major-label triumph of craft over product, a purposeful barrage of seething recriminations coated with ’90s-grunge textures and ’80-pop incandescence. It sounded like “My So-Called Life”’s Angela Chase mainlining John Hughes films and channeling her existential anguish into a record—except Night Time was the vision of a 2010s 21-year-old, and the truths were all hers.

The right people loved it. In the spring of 2015, Sky announced her second record’s name was Masochism and promised its first single that summer. The summer came and went, then the fall, and some winter too. On that New Year’s Eve, she addressed the delay obliquely on Instagram (“I refuse to put out something that isn’t honest”) and promised “in 2016 you will hear it.” In 2016, you did not, and now it’s 2019, and, still, no album. At this point, she can’t post online without some commenters popping up to heckle, “where’s the album sky” or “MASOCHISM!!?” or “still waiting,” like they’re hungry people rage-texting Seamless.

These impatient fans aren’t alone in their enthusiasm. “She’s one of those beautiful, rare people who can probably do anything,” says Debbie Harry, who’s had Sky open for Blondie. “If there’s anybody I would ever be jealous of, it would be her.”

Naturally, all of this—the anticipation, the unfulfilled promises, the time lapsed since her last release—is adding to the pressure she puts on herself. She feels like she has to explain. “It wasn’t by choice.” It wasn’t creative paralysis, nor was it a creative hiatus. “I wasn’t just taking time for myself the last five years.” During that time, she landed a half dozen movie roles, but she says she didn’t decide to focus on acting instead. “I never stepped away from music.” She alludes to vague external hindrances: “I’ve been at the mercy of people the last few years”; “gatekeepers”; “the rug pulled out under me”; a “someone at my label” who undid the generous arrangement she had to work with Kanye West musical director Mike Dean; and the very real issue of a young woman telling men what she wants and not settling for less. Then the labyrinthine nature of her production process is, as you’ll see, akin to playing charades blind-folded while riding a dog, and everyone else guesses with kazoos. Plus, she’s a perfectionist. Obsessive. She’ll do 800 takes. She’ll consider every option—and then she’ll consider it again.

But the primary reason it’s taken so long: Sky doesn’t just want her new songs done, she wants them to be good. By good, she means, executed the way she intended, no matter how long she waited to find the right violinist. Properly mixed so they don’t accidentally sound like pop-punk in the car, because “someone puts some shit on my voice” and she forgot to play them in an Uber. (Sky never learned to drive.) Songs that know their place in the broader pop continuum, not what’s hot on streaming. “I’m not looking for ‘a moment,’” she says. “I’m looking for a career—and real careers, you build them.”

She’s deemed two songs good enough to share with me. The first single, “Downhill Lullaby,” is a five-and-a-half-minute, goth-noir, chamber-pop piece—with strings!—that could have easily closed an episode of the revived “Twin Peaks.” (The association may be deliberate: Sky appeared in the show’s 2017 return, deeply admires its director, David Lynch, and the series’ music supervisor, Dean Hurley, produced the song alongside her.) Another forthcoming track, tentatively titled “Don’t Forget,” is a new wave time warp, a lovely bit of nostalgia therapy for people who were never there—even if it is, according to Sky, “about burning down houses.”

By now we’re settled into a booth, one Sky has selected in the empty part of the restaurant, far away from her manager and publicist, who’ve come along to chaperone. Her natural espresso roots have outrun her hair’s blonde highlights, and her dark T-shirt reads “CHICAGO METAL MANIA.” We’ve managed to order tea by asking the waiter to bring what he likes (a nice, orangey, spicy chai) and then momentarily horrify him when Sky asks if, instead of sending the teeny triangular sandwiches with mayonnaise back to the kitchen (she hasn’t touched them, and mayo makes her gag), we can give them to someone who’s homeless. “I’ll get you the ones without mayonnaise,” the waiter says, taking them away.

“I don’t have a back-up plan,” Sky says. “I never have. I don’t have an education. I don’t know how to, like, play music in the [traditional] sense. I’m socially awkward and stuff—I couldn’t really do a lot of other jobs either,” she says. “Literally, there’s no other option for me. So this has to work.”

There are many Sky Ferreiras. There’s Sky the model, a Hedi Slimane muse who’s walked the runway for Marc Jacobs and perfected a glare so haunted the Bates Motel must be jealous. There’s Sky the actor, who played a key supporting role in director Edgar Wright’s big-studio heist flick Baby Driver, but doesn’t have an agent. There’s Sky the live performer, who battles stage fright, but who also opened a 2014 Miley Cyrus arena tour, fell down an elevator shaft on night three, and still took the stage the next day.

There’s also the Sky here at the Russian Tea Room, whose left dimple comes as a surprise because, come to think of it, you’ve rarely seen photos of her smiling. The Sky who shouldn’t eat gluten because of an autoimmune condition, but doesn’t really tell people about it because it sounds like bullshit. The Sky who’s watched enough “Game of Thrones” to see her pets’ personalities reflected in the show’s characters. (For the record, her cat Egg would be a Lannister, while his brother Squirrel would be from the North.)

This Sky speaks in em dashes. It’s less that she loses her train of thought, and more that her thought train is screeching onto a new track. Sometimes you’re right there with her, but other times you’re watching the conversation from a distance like a detached caboose that just kept going straight. “I know I keep going in circles,” she says, “but my mind kind of always does that—spins.”

You don’t interview this Sky as much as steer her, but first you listen. “I’ve always been really shy,” she says, six minutes in. “I was actually mute for years when I was a kid.”

Little Sky Tonia Ferreira hummed along to the radio before she could talk. Raised around Los Angeles, mostly Venice Beach, her young parents split when she was a baby. Her dad tended bar, sometimes with her in tow, and when his roommates got cable, she devoured MTV. “I always hung out with a lot of adults,” she says. “I was, like, one of those kids.”

Being one of those kids meant she didn’t know how to talk to the kids who knew how to talk with each other. She was bullied constantly. She also had trouble with numbers and spelling—she suspects she’s dyslexic, but never got tested—and for a while, was so unhappy, she stopped talking altogether. “I had really long hair, didn’t speak, and had dark circles around my eyes,” she says, describing herself as a child. “I looked kinda feral.”

As the story goes, Sky’s first-grade classmates didn’t know she could talk until she sang “Over the Rainbow” in school. “As long as I can remember, I’ve felt the most like myself when I was singing,” she says. (Roughly 18 years later, she covered the Wizard of Oz ballad at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, and the director still raves about her version, telling me, “It was incredible. So beautiful.”)

She lived with her grandmother, who worked as a hairdresser. One time when Sky was around 7, she sang for one of her grandmother’s clients. Impressed, the man suggested she join a gospel choir. The man was Michael Jackson. So she did. Jackson also gave a 9-year-old Sky some grown-up advice that’s shaped her approach to art and music ever since: “He was like, ‘Don’t focus on things that are just around you—you need to look back to the history of music.’ And that’s what I did.”

Yes, Sky went to the Neverland Ranch—“a lot.” She also went to Jackson’s other houses. No, she didn’t witness anything untoward. “It wasn’t just because I was a girl,” she tells me, a few days before the controversial HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired. “I was around a lot of kids.”

Yes, she’s grown hesitant to talk about her grandmother’s larger-than-life client—for all the reasons you’d expect, along with a few you might not. Like, that it’s difficult for people to wrap their minds around the fact that the King of Pop could be a formative elder acquaintance in the casually anodyne way of, say, a dancing-school teacher or a little-league coach—someone whose small encouragements could be so big. “I was really quiet, but when someone sees something in you...” she says of Jackson, before abandoning the thought. “I had a connection to him, but I’m not, like, his family.”

Sky has also routinely been asked to account for the bad behavior of men in her orbit. A dominant narrative surrounding Night Time, My Time’s 2013 release was her relationship with indie rock band DIIV’s frontman, Zachary Cole Smith—an ex-boyfriend with whom she was arrested that September. He was the driver of the vehicle in which heroin, ecstasy, and a stolen license plate were found (and someone who’s since publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction). Throughout that album cycle, the arrest became a more delicious red herring than anything Sky had actually done.

“The thing that’s still so fucked up about that: I didn’t have a drug problem, I dated someone who had a drug problem, I was in a car with someone who had a drug problem,” she says. “No one wants to talk about how my charge got dropped.” And the whole Kurt and Courtney star-crossed mythos that dramatized the headlines around the arrest? Spare her. “I was really young; I wasn’t even 21 yet for most of it. That wasn’t my great love story of my life,” she says, adding, “The people that have treated me so much better—they’re the ones who deserve the attention, not that guy.” (Presumably, one of those people is her current partner, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, frontman of the Danish punk band Iceage.)

Those who have followed Sky’s personal life could easily read “Downhill Lullaby” as an extended metaphor about a tumultuous relationship: “I can see that you want me/Going downhill too/Going downhill into a lullaby.” But she’s adamant about distancing her songwriting from the egos of her ex-boyfriends. “That’s the one rule I made,” she says. “The one thing that I’ve always had is my music. If someone treated me badly, they don’t get to have that. I don’t want to drag the weight of what they did around forever.”

For Sky Ferreira, time is not a flat circle, but rather a sticky mass of saltwater taffy. She tends to run late, but once she’s present and engaged, she can summon an Iron Man endurance. At the Russian Tea Room, two hours of conversation easily floats into six-and-a-half, and eventually we’re the last diners to leave. Somewhere in this elasticity, she talks about her refusal to give up on the work. “I’ve literally been using my life savings to do this record.” She is not motivated by money—to her, time isn’t money, but money is a thing to buy more time.

This springy relationship with time can make Sky seem almost anachronistic. In conversation, her offhanded pop-cultural mentions span director Todd Solondz’s 1995 cult indie Welcome to the Dollhouse, Courtney Love, the 1980 Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, the 2018 iteration of A Star Is Born, and the cheerful ’60s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” (which she concedes, “No one my age knows”). Sky’s reference points, like Michael Jackson once advised, exist within a totality, not a blip.

One of her artistic lodestars glows brighter than the others: When Sky was 13, she discovered David Lynch. “He’s the first person who ever saw the world the way I saw it,” she says. “It was the first time anything made sense.” You can see Lynchian dream logic throughout her work. In fact, the staggering, airy title dirge from Night Time, My Time came to her in a dream. “I wrote it in the middle of the night, half-asleep,” she remembers about the album closer, which was built around a line spoken by the doomed girl at the center of the “Twin Peaks” saga. “Then I woke up the next day and I finished it in an hour. I still have the notes; the handwriting’s all fucked up. ” When she finished the song, she knew the album was finally done.

So Sky’s cameo in “Twin Peaks: The Return” had the meta-ness of astral projection. She played Ella, an enigmatic bar patron who talked about a penguin and flaunted a “wicked” armpit rash. “She played that scene so perfectly,” Lynch tells me. “She inhabited that character and made it real from a deep place. When she scratched that rash, you could really feel the itching!”

“Downhill Lullaby” summons the creeping orchestral gloom of “Night Time, My Time.” A sweeping arrangement in five parts, Masochism’s first single begins with a sashay of strings and an interpolation of the unmistakable squee of the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” followed by a murmuring, angered bass. Sky exhales a numb indictment—“You leave me open/When you hit me”—and amid the layers of kettle-drum thunder and keening violins, there’s seduction and revenge, confusion and queasiness, silkiness and elegance. It sounds like the last thing Daniel Day Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock hears before the poison takes hold in Phantom Thread.

This habit of visualizing music—Sky does it too. Except for her, it’s the first step of many in the song creation process: “I see it like it’s projected in a movie theater.” “Downhill Lullaby,” in particular, began with a vision of water in darkness. “Lakes kind of terrify me,” she explains, recalling a childhood memory of feeling lost in a Maryland forest that packs a similar unease. “In a lake, by yourself, you look at the bottom and it’s murky and still and you can’t really see anything or feel anything—and if you do, it’s fucking terrifying. It always feels like something will grab you and pull you under.” The eeriness became the foundation for the song.

She likens the ordeal of making “Downhill Lullaby” to Mickey Mouse’s Fantasia turn as the sorcerer’s apprentice. “You know how all the brooms are making a gigantic mess and the water starts rising and rising and rising and rising?” she says. “It was sort of like that: Magical, but at the same time, ‘What is going on?’ And then cleaning it all up.”

Her technique is more like a collagist—one who both scavenges her raw materials and oversees the fabrication—than a traditional songwriter. Conceptually, she works backwards, starting a song with an imagined outline of the final arrangement, isolating each sound element, and then embarking on the oft-laborious task of identifying studio musicians with the time and patience and willingness to conjure each sound individually, so that once she’s gathered all the pieces, she can begin the meticulous process of putting them all back together.

This unorthodox approach to songwriting has led to recurring logistical difficulties for Masochism. Namely, figuring out how to articulate what she hears so that someone who’s not in her brain can actualize it. “Nobody really understood what I was trying to say or wanted to do on paper,” she says. “It was a really long process.”

Sky never learned how to read music and she’s too self-conscious to use instruments that aren’t her voice in front of others. So if there’s an obvious reference point—like a certain note in a ’90s-radio staple she wants imitated—she’ll play that for her collaborator. But when there’s not, she’s often like a conductor asking to summon a mood.

In the case of Danish violinist Nils Gröndahl, who recorded all the strings on “Downhill Lullaby,” she recalls telling him: “‘Play it as if you’re one of the birds in Snow White, singing underwater, while slowly being suffocated by plastic.’” And you know what? In the end result, it’s easy to hear all that.

Additionally, Sky is even more particular about her final mixes. She will only be satisfied after she’s evaluated her song in seven different listening contexts: a car stereo; a smartphone with “regular” headphones; a smartphone with Apple earbuds; a smartphone’s built-in speaker; on a laptop; through “really bad, bad computer speakers—like the ones that came with Dells back in the early 2000s”; and the lush splendor of the studio, which is a personal luxury because, as she notes, “most people aren’t gonna listen that way.”

And she goes through this convoluted course of action for every song. It’s no wonder Masochism has taken so long. Says Sky, “I’ve accepted this is how I work and stopped feeling bad about it.”

Two Fridays after her insomniac New York trip, Sky is on the line, self-confidence restored, completing a high percentage of her sentences. Earlier in the week, she received the “Downhill Lullaby” master, immediately dropped her phone and shattered its screen, so now she’s on speaker. “I was like, I hope this isn’t a metaphor?” At least she’s laughing.

As for Masochism. She tells me she produced most of it herself, wrote with Los Angeles-based dream-pop artist Tamaryn, and worked with Ariel Pink collaborator Jorge Elbrecht. The proper album is coming, Sky swears, almost positively in 2019. Granted, she said the same thing last year—and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that—but this time, she has finally loosened her grip on some songs.

“Downhill Lullaby” may sound like dying Disney birds and “Don’t Forget” may be electro-pop arson, but Sky promises “more poppy” songs on Masochism too, as well as more “abstract,” orchestral stuff. “It’s very big, but also very violent,” she says, half-chuckling. “But not all the songs are super-dark.” Beyond that—the number of songs, tracklist, other credited collaborators—who can say? Sky can’t yet. She has some songs in mind she’d still like to write.

#sky ferreira #2019

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dcarevu · 5 years

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Batman TAS: Perchance to Dream

“It’s a big hole in the ground, with a big car in it that’s all black. Remember?”

Episode: 30 Robin: No Writers: Joe R Lansdale (teleplay), Laren Bright (story), and Michael Reaves (story). Director: Boyd Kirkland Animator: Dong Yang Airdate: October 19, 1992 Grade: A

This should go without saying, but because of the nature of the episode (and because it was spoiled for me before I ever saw it), I am issuing a MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING. Take this as me telling you that going into this episode blind is highly recommended, and part of the fun of it is the mystery.

Are you ever disappointed to wake up from a dream? For me, it is usually a matter of not having finished the story that was playing out, or forgetting details. I don’t like waking up and causing cliffhangers which go forever unsolved, especially when I can’t even tell people about them. Then there are the dreams that you are so glad you woke up from. Usually these dreams consist of the scariest things we have ever experienced. Isn’t it crazy to think about? For many of us, the scariest moments of our lives never even truly happened in the real world. Batman lives these moments practically every episode. Things like our friend getting half of their body demolished and then turning into a contradicting gangster, or a clown who turns all the fish in the area into smiling, trepidatious frights. These events have very dreamlike qualities. They likely would never happen in real life, and don’t make all that much sense. Ironically, when Batman has what starts out as the best dream of his life, providing an escape from all that we try to avoid at night, he wants nothing to do with it. Because even though our REM thoughts are his conscious ones, and he probably could have lived the rest of his life in bliss, it means nothing to him if it’s not real. Looking the other way is not something that Batman is capable of. This is why he has made the enormous impact he has. Not only did the night at Crime Alley send his life into a gothic cave of despair, it also seemed to cause him to purposely repel any hope of happiness. Happiness to Batman is irresponsibility. Yet he stops at nothing to allow the innocent to live the happy life he is incapable of.

This is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series, even though I never got to experience the unknown. Batman falls into a mysterious trap, but wakes up immediately afterward. Suddenly, his life is completely different. His parents are alive. Selena Kyle is set to become his wife. He is no longer Batman. The weight of responsibility has been removed. He is set to live life as a rich playboy, while someone else swings around the city in a bat-mask. But there is a nagging feeling that none of it is right. There are inconsistencies and problems that prevent him from enjoying. Through a series of events, he ends up at the top of a tower in a cemetery, in a fight against himself, eventually jumping to what seems like his death. He wakes up from a dream that the Mad Hatter set up for him, and apprehends the criminal. What makes this episode so sad is that Bruce so desperately wants the dream to be real. At one point, after talking to Leslie Thompkins, he actually does begin to accept things. He tells us, “The nightmare is over!” Bruce considers his life a nightmare. He hates being Batman, but he is an addict. Right as he is truly about to throw his old life away, he opens up a newspaper and can’t read a word. The text is all jumbled. This is proof that this new life is not real, as he knows that in dreams, it is impossible to read. Cleverly, at the beginning of the episode, there is a sign on a building that is jumbled up, and no one mentions it. A very subtle detail that one can appreciate on a second watch. Another Easter egg is the music that plays immediately as soon as the title card pops up. It’s the Mad Hatter’s theme music, and we have only seen Hatter one time, so one is not likely to recognize it. But if you know it, you know it. Figuring this detail out yourself can give one a sense of accomplishment, and discovering a twist ending on your own rather than a spoiler is incredibly satisfying.

I also noticed that certain characters are nowhere to be seen, most notably being Robin. At first I wasn’t sure how to take this. Does Batman regret inviting Robin into his life? Why is Robin not there? This is supposed to be his desired life. But after talking to Char, I realized that in Batman’s ideal world, Robin’s parents never would have been killed in the first place, and so Robin would have no reason to be living with Bruce. Alfred is here, but his usual warmth seems to have vanished. I think this is less a reflection of Bruce, and more that Alfred never had to become such a fatherly figure. He lived with Bruce’s parents, serving as the butler, and not much more. He is still fairly friendly, but there is not as much between he and Bruce as there typically is at all. Also, I’m not sure if this was an inside-joke, but there is one point where Alfred helps pick out something for Bruce to wear. He selects a brown coat and says, “This should be just the thing for your meeting.” In the DVD commentary, the crew has joked about Bruce’s sense of style, making fun of his typical mustard-yellow and brown combo. The way Alfred says it makes me wonder, but I could be looking way too much into it.

Perchance to Dream is mostly action free until the ending, but Dong Yang still manage to knock it out of the park. Their best work yet, and they especially shine during the climax. There were some incredibly beautiful shots, and other points in the story are great too. There were a couple instances where the animation was massively smooth, reminding me of the pilot The Dark Knight’s First Night. I’m wondering if they blew their budget on this one, and that is why their work on Robin’s Reckoning is so poor (coming soonish). Credit should also go to Boyd Kirkland who’s angles and ideas give us a sense of wonder at every step, even when fairly mundane. The voice cast does the same. I swear the police officer is voiced by the dude that did a bunch of trailers in the 90’s or early 2000’s. Because I am so used to hearing it in that environment, yes, it sounds very out of place in Batman, but in a good way. His delivery is startling, and it acts as icing on top of the dreamlike cake. While we’re on voices, though, it should be noted that Bruce doesn’t talk in his Batman voice for the majority of the story. if this is his natural speaking voice, I think he should have been. I’m sure there’s a way to make it sound happy. They did it in Batman Beyond. At the same time, lines like “I’ve never felt better in my life, sir” have such perfect delivery they make me tear up, and said any differently would not have been as stellar. Oh gosh, and Mad Hatter’s delivery. The anguish made you feel for him, and he is not a character I held any sympathy for previously. I found him to be the ultimate incel. Many people see him as a tragic character, he’s a creepy asshole who carries the dreaded “nice guy syndrome”. Does he mean well? Don’t know, don’t care. But hearing him scream at Batman, explaining that he was willing to give Batman the life he always wanted just to prevent him from being a bother anymore, it’s heart-breaking. He simply wants Batman out of the way, and he decided to do it humanely this time. I find this very interesting, and this Mad Hatter episode dwarfs Mad as a Hatter.

Batman’s wipers come on after his car is coated in gunk. It’s the little details.

Nothing good ever happens on catwalks in this show.

Pictured here is a 13-year-old in the presence of Justin Bieber. Or whoever the kids listen to these days.

Little known fact, the Batcave is very much there. But this is. obviously an episode where it’s located behind the bookshelf, not behind the clock. Silly Bruce! Must have forgotten to read that part of the script.

Well no wonder he always wears that jacket with those options.

I’m wondering what types of things Bruce does with his parents still alive and all. Then again, nothing in this world exists beyond the boundaries of when the dream starts and ends.

Bruce has been wanting Selena practically since her first appearance. But that face says it all. Is this relationship any more genuine than Mat Hatter and Alice’s?

This is the point of the episode where I could really sense the gears in Char’s head working. It’s the point where things go from being wrong to impossible.

Notice the sign.

Love the movement of Batman’s cape.

Some of the unusually smooth animation I mentioned before.

Great takedown. Batman holds the guy and spins down a pole, making him so dizzy that he faints.

These two have the most conflicting colors on...

“Then... The nightmare is over.”

Kinda wish we saw Bruce shed a couple of tears.

Not only is the text all jumbled up, but there also seems to be way more text than what would fit on the paper. Even more strange, we see a smiling Batman.

A look of madness on Bruce that we hardly ever see. it’s a great facial expression.

The text here is also unreadable. Also, we’re getting to the point of the episode where virtually every angle is perfect. So here is a series of shots:

Boyd Kirkland and his team clearly cared a lot.

Batman comes in mysteriously like a kite. It reminds me of when Dorothy was trapped in the tornado.

Bruce gets a taste of what criminals get almost every night.

Seriously, how can a figure with cute little bat-ears be so threatening-looking?

The Mad Hatter’s model isn’t quite as finicky this time around, and while I still feel that it was probably hard to translate to animation, it works a lot better. He looks like he belongs on the show.

Look at that smug face. He is sure that Bruce will never escape. I also like the thought of Bruce reaching a waking point, so even though he’s still asleep, he still picks up conversation going on around him. His subconscious recognizes Jarvis’ voice, and that’s how dream-Bruce was able to reveal the truth. But that’s just my interpretation.

Bruce took a gamble, and you can tell by his expression that he may regret jumping. He truthfully has no idea if this will do the trick or not.

This is weird, but I love the shape of Batman’s eye here.

Char’s grade: A Next time: The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy

Full episode list here!

#perchance to dream #dcau #dc animated universe #batman tas #btas #batman the animated series #mad hatter #spoilers

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ohforficsakelibrary · 6 years

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L’appel du Vide

Chapter 2

Title: L’appel du Vide

Chapters: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4

Pairing: Michael Langdon X OC

Rating: M overall, T this part, for language.

Warnings: Language, eventual smut, a bit of blood, and a fair deal of blasphemy.

Language: English

Chapter Length: 2.3K words

Summary: After learning who Michael really is, Cordelia appeals to an ancient figure for help. Slow-burn seduction ensues. Contains spoilers for AHS: Apocalypse.

Author’s Note: Thank you so much for all of your interest in this and for all of your kind words! As always, unbeta’d, happy to fix any mistakes. Be warned, I’ve definitely taken some liberties with religious mythology here. This chapter (and the first) fits in to the two weeks before Cordelia administers the test of the Seven Wonders, and picks up right where my last chapter left off.

~Miss Robichaux’s Academy~

“Can someone finally tell me what the fuck is going on?” Madison slammed her purse down on Cordelia’s gardening bench, making the terra cotta pots clink against each other.

“What is it? What happened?” Zoe shut the greenhouse door behind her, careful to ensure none of the girls had followed her.

“Who the fuck is that bitch?”

“Have care how you speak Madison,” Myrtle chided. “She’s the first of our kind.”

“Is she a ghost?” Queenie looked to the other girls, but found only a sea of confused faces.

“Oh no, my dear, she is very much alive.”

“How?”

“Wait, I’m lost, who are we talking about?” This from Zoe.

“Lilith,” Cordelia spoke up, looking each girl in the eye as she continued. “The first woman to walk the Earth. Made by the Creator, not of Adam’s rib, but from the very same clay. Adam’s first wife. Man’s equal.”

Cordelia began to pace circles around the group.

“They were both expected to be stewards of the His creation. In order to facilitate that duty, He gave them each a set of gifts. To Lilith he gave the powers of telekinesis, divination, transmutation, concilium, pyrokinesis, and vitalum vitalis.”

Cordelia smiled. “She was the very first witch. The gifts in our blood all started with her. And technically, she was also the very first Supreme.”

“But what about descensum?” Madison seemed genuinely interested.

“There wouldn’t have been a hell for her to go to,” Queenie unfolded her arms and braced her hands on the table.

“That’s right. Descensum, she learned after.”

“After what?” Zoe asked.

“After she was cast out of the Garden of Eden for refusing to lie beneath a man,” Myrtle interrupted. “She refused to submit to Adam, and as such, became the very first feminist, too.”

“That’s partially why, yes. God sent angels to bring Lilith back to the Garden, but she refused. The irony is, He was the one who gave her the free will to make that choice in the first place. Seeing He would get nowhere, He instead created Eve to be Adam’s perfect wife. Woman made of man. Subservient to him.”

“He neglected to give Eve the same free will,” Myrtle added.

“Lilith is officially my new hero,” Madison lit a fresh cigarette.

“You were calling her a bitch two seconds ago,” Queenie scoffed.

“Wait, you said her rebuttal of Adam was ‘partially why’ she was cast out of Eden,” Zoe had taken a seat on a stool, her hazel eyes wide with fascination. “What else happened?”

“She slept with the Archangel Samael.”

“Samael, as in the Devil?” Queenie whispered.

“Now she’s definitely my new hero.”

Cordelia ignored Madison and continued. “Yes. Samael was cast out of heaven some time later. While his exile wasn’t all because of Lilith, Samael sought revenge against God. Mostly for himself, but also in some small part for her.”

“Temptation, apples, snakes, and that whole pesky sin business ensued,” Myrtle gestured dismissively.

“Is that how she learned descensum?” Queenie asked.

“Some witch scholars believed Lilith manifested that power as a way to see her former lover one last time.”

“Ok, but if she was the first Supreme, how are you also the Supreme? How did anyone else become the Supreme without her dying? How is she even still alive? All that Adam and Eve shit was like, five hundred years ago.”

Queenie rolled her eyes hard.

“The timelines are hazy, but our scholars believe that she could be over six thousand years old.”

“Damn, I’ll take some of whatever moisturizer she’s using,” Madison quipped.

“No one’s asked her?” Zoe sat up.

“Darling, you never ask a lady her age. Let alone the first Supreme,” Myrtle cast a pointed look.

“Okay, but Madison still has a point,” Zoe continued. “How is she not the Supreme anymore?”

“Sometime around the fourteenth century, Lilith abdicated her role as Supreme.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Zoe whispered.

Myrtle lit a cigarette of her own. “No one knew. Until she did it. And no one has been able to do it since. By then, she had already been a witch for thousands of years. The texts say that she poured half of her power into a successor, an English woman of Druid descent. This is who we’ve come to know as the first modern Supreme. Lilith may not hold the title any longer, but that doesn’t make her any less powerful than any Supreme to walk the Earth since.”

“Modern Supreme?” Queenie asked.

“Lilith chose never to lead a coven. She feared what society would do to young women even rumored to associate with her, especially those with magical abilities.”

“Is her power what kept her alive?” Zoe chimed in.

“No,” Cordelia spoke up. “The Creator has always been a vengeful being. To punish Lilith for what she had done, God cursed her with a lust for blood, damning her to an existence that would cause pain to so many. And to drive His point home, He gave her everlasting life. So that she could never be free of her suffering—by natural causes or otherwise. Even by her own hand.”

“Wait so, vampires are a real thing now?” Madison’s eyes were wide.

“Girl, you have no idea…” Queenie crossed her arms.

“Well, not exactly. From our understanding, it’s more of a virus that causes a hunger for blood. None of that sunburn or sleeping in coffins nonsense.” Myrtle clarified. “No fangs either.”

“Claws instead…” Madison mumbled, remembering Lilith’s jewelry. Sharp golden talons running through a thick ruff of silver fur.

“And while the virus can give the infected a kind of limited immortality, it’s not what sustains her. God Himself made sure she would never find peace,” Cordelia finished.

“Heaven doesn’t want her, and God definitely ain’t sending her to Hell,” Queenie sighed.

Zoe didn’t realize that tears had slipped down her cheeks. “That’s such a terrible existence.”

“More than we could ever know, Zoe,” the Supreme agreed. “Lilith has been erased from the Bible only to be written into history as some kind of demon. She’s been described as a treacherous seductress who kills babies. A creature of the night who cavorts with dangerous animals. A Jezebel who exists to lead men astray. A selfish, cruel being.”

“If all of that had happened to me, I would be a selfish, cruel being that’s for fucking sure,” Madison magicked her cigarette butt away.

“But she isn’t.” Queenie looked up. “At least she doesn’t seem that way.”

“I don’t think she is either, Queenie. She’s hidden herself away for thousands of years, never making even so much as a ripple of disturbance in the world. But she was clever. She gave the first Supreme the ability to find her in times of crisis. That ability has been passed through succession ever since.”

“So, I guess this is a time of real crisis,” Queenie whispered.

“That boy?” Zoe asked.

“Our prophecies foretell of someone rising to power with abilities unmatched by any other. And among those abilities is the power to raise souls from Hell.”

“Okay, but what’s so bad about that?” Madison asked. “If Lilith is that old I’m sure she could do it too.”

“Lilith’s power was divinely given. It stems from the same light as ours. Even she can’t release souls from places of darkness.” Myrtle answered.

“For centuries, rumors have swirled that only a child of darkness would have that power,” Cordelia clarified.

“So, what are you saying, he’s the Antichrist or something?” Madison sat up.

“That’s what I fear.”

Queenie and Zoe visibly paled at the notion.

Under her breath, Madison whispered, “I still would…”

“A child of darkness would walk the Earth solely with the purpose of bringing about death and destruction on a scale the world has never seen. I fear that is what my vision showed.”

“The Apocalypse,” Myrtle whispered.

“And we sent her to the literal Antichrist because we need his blood?” Queenie sounded incredulous.

“I mean, who better than the OG vampire queen to bring back blood from your ex-boy toy’s demon son? It’s fucked up. I like it.”

“That’s a crude way of putting it, Madison, but I’m afraid the sentiment is the same,” Myrtle extinguished her cigarette in an empty drip tray.

“His father will protect him at any cost,” the Supreme continued. “He won’t let just anyone near the boy. But rumor has it that Lilith still holds sway over him. A soft spot that never quite calcified. He wouldn’t harm her. I’m not even sure if he can.”

“If he’s who we think, why would you agree to administer the test of the Seven Wonders?” Zoe sat up angrily. “And why didn’t you tell her?”

“Because I am the Supreme and I make that choice,” Cordelia locked eyes with Myrtle. “And I suspect she already knows. I have a plan, scared though I might be to carry it out. Lilith isn’t our only hope. But she’s an asset and I’d like to keep her on our side.”

“How do we know she won’t turn on us?” Queenie asked.

“We don’t. But like you said. I don’t think she’s selfish and cruel at all.”

~The Hawthorne School~

“Lilith?” Michael staggered back a step.

She answered in the affirmative without speaking a word.

In the flesh, the Creator’s most perfect mistake.

There’s reverence, sure. And something decidedly more, perverse tugging at the back of his brain. The first woman, created as an equal, who refused to lie beneath a man.

Who bedded his father while he was still an Archangel.

There’s a feeling running through his veins that he’s never quite felt before. He’s not sure how to give words to it, but it makes him want to run his fingers over her skin to see if she’s real. He’s spoken to his father, sure. But he had never been so close to someone so like himself before.

Tangible divinity.

He opted instead to pace slow circles around her, surveying as he dripped golden pools of water onto the marble floor. She’s unfurled the full presence of her power now. No need to hide herself anymore. It washed over him, more cleansing than the bathwater. He couldn’t hold on to a fleeting ounce of shyness or apprehension if he tried.

“I don’t get to speak with my father often,” he moves with purpose now. Gone is the boy who moments ago yearned for the security of woven cotton.

“Textbook absentee.” She quips, standing unafraid with both hands clasped behind her back. Michael smirks as he continues.

“But he comes to me in my dreams sometimes, telling stories of the past. He’s mentioned you. He says you’re strong. Courageous. Jealous. He calls you a woman so beautiful, he couldn’t have created better himself.” Michael stops in front of her and inhales, eyelids unconsciously fluttering shut as he does.

All of that power in the air.

The Devil’s child can’t help but drink it in.

Ask he speaks, she’s charting his every move. The shift in him from sharp, panicked breaths to deep, languid lungfuls. The fear with which he pulled back his hand. The way he’s fighting now to keep from reaching out. He’s two beings. One, a child cast into a new reality. The other a cocksure Cheshire cat.

And yet, he can’t quite figure out what makes him flip.

“He’s not lying about your beauty,” Michael murmurs thickly. “He says mortal men would kneel in worship at the very sight of you.”

“Do you believe everything your father tells you?”

Michael isn’t fully sure what he’s doing as he raises damp fingers to brush her cheek. As if his actions aren’t entirely his own.

Is this what desire feels like?

It burns.

Lilith stands still as a statue under the touch of his fingers, her expression a mixture of amusement and satisfaction.

“No,” he whispers with conviction. “But you,” he breathes her scent in like smoke, “he most certainly was not lying about you. Why are you here?”

She sees it only fit to feed his thoughts back to him.

“Curiosity.”

“I hear curiosity kills.”

“I hear satisfaction resurrects.”

Michael’s full lips split into a smile. “Is that what you want, Lilith? Satisfaction?” He surprises himself as the word spills from his lips.

“Resurrection.”

And just like that, she’s gone. His hand left hanging in empty air.

~Miss Robichaux’s Academy~

Cordelia sat in her greenhouse in the early hours of the morning, flipping through a dusty book for answers she wouldn’t find.

A scratching sound at the door caused her to jump and send her powers outward, searching for a threat. Nothing. She opened the door to empty air and was just about to shut it before she felt something brush against her leg.

A bobcat affectionately wound itself around her ankles before dropping a note at Cordelia’s feet. She bent down to retrieve it and gave the animal a few pats before it became more concerned with a squirrel in the yard and sprinted off.

Cordelia closed the door and returned to her table before unfolding the paper. Elegant cursive curled across the page as fast as her eyes could scan it.

Your suspicions are well founded.

He is still fresh. It’s not yet my time.

Appeal to his naiveté. Trust your instincts.

He may pass the test, but he is no Supreme.

No sooner had she finished reading, than the note burned up in cold blue flame.

Cordelia felt her shoulders sag in relief as a small smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

Chapter 3

#american horror story fanfiction #michael langdon fanfiction #ahs apocalypse fanfiction #american horror story #michael langdon #american horror story apocalypse

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thecinephale · 5 years

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Best Movies of 2018

My favorite movies of the year were rough around the edges. Ambitious, personal works that were messy and real. There were a lot of big films this year that I personally didn't like that much (or at all), but I really love this list of films and I hope you check them out.

Still need to See: Bird Box, Border, Cold War, Custody, Dark River, I Am Not a Witch, On the Basis of Sex, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Summer '93, The Third Murder, Tyrel, Unsane, Where Hands Touch, Where is Kyra?

Films I didn't prioritize because someone involved has behaved in a way that makes me uninterested in their work: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Death of Stalin, The House That Jack Built, A Simple Favor

Really Liked: -Annihilation (dir. Alex Garland) -Blockers (dir. Kay Cannon) -Crazy Rich Asians (dir. Jon Chu) -Destroyer (dir. Karyn Kusama) -Let the Sunshine In (dir. Claire Denis) -Mary Poppins Returns (dir. Rob Marshall) -Mission: Impossible - Fallout (dir. Christopher McQuarrie) -The Rider (dir. Chloé Zhao) -Private Life (dir. Tamara Jenkins) -Skate Kitchen (dir. Crystal Moselle) -We the Animals (dir. Jeremiah Zagar) -You Were Never Really Here (dir. Lynne Ramsay)

Really Really Liked: -Eighth Grade (dir. Bo Burnham) -Happy as Lazzaro (dir. Alice Rohrwacher) -Leave No Trace (dir. Debra Granik) -Love, Simon (dir. Greg Berlanti) -Mary Queen of Scots (dir. Josie Rourke) -Nancy (dir. Christina Choe) -On Body and Soul (dir. Ildikó Enyedi) -Tully (dir. Jason Reitman)

Loved:

10. Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler)

Finally. Proof that Hollywood doesn’t have to choose between style, substance, and entertainment. Black Panther was the biggest film of the year and also one of the best. With stunning cinematography by Rachel Morrison, inspired costumes by Ruth E. Carter, and an album of the year worthy soundtrack by Kendrick Lamar, Ryan Coogler has broken through the Marvel machine to make something truly special. And like all the best superhero movies the supporting cast is incredible, Letitia Wright being the obvious standout, along with moral foils Michael B. Jordan and Lupita Nyong'o. This is everything I want from big budget filmmaking and it's such an exciting relief to be reminded that it's possible.

9. The Tale (dir. Jennifer Fox)

The Hollywood Reporter recently published an article about the 16-year-old girl who inspired Woody Allen's Manhattan. The woman, reflecting on her time with the director and known child molester, is unsure how to frame their time together. She was underage and knowing what she knows now about Allen, their affair feels different. But at the time she was in love. Reading this article, I felt overwhelming gratitude for filmmaker Jennifer Fox and The Tale, a painful and important movie about her own teenage love affair, about her own rape. Fox's vulnerability and skill not only make this a great movie, but a truly life-changing experience. There is one moment in particular that uses cinema in a way I've never seen before. This is by no means an easy film to watch, but it's really worthwhile if you can handle it.

8. Dirty Computer (dir. Janelle Monáe & others)

This "emotion picture" available to watch on YouTube strikes such a moving balance between pure joy, harsh reality, and cautious hope. Its very existence is a sign that its optimism is not misplaced. Musicians have become some of our greatest auteurs with voices and stories Hollywood would otherwise ignore. Janelle Monáe along with Chuck Lightning, Emma Westenberg, Alan Ferguson, and Lacey Duke created a film that is at once a sci-fi epic, a visual album, a public coming out, a celebration of queerness/Blackness/femaleness, and an ode to everybody different. This year was bleak and nothing brought me more comfort than this movie, this album, and obsessing over Monáe and star Tessa Thompson's relationship.

7. Good Manners (dir. Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra)

Come for the lesbian werewolf musical fairy tale genre mashup, stay for the complicated explorations of race, class, and parenthood. This movie is overflowing with so many ideas, cinematically and thematically, it's thrilling to watch it all fit together. It's so rare to watch a movie and have literally no idea where it's going and I will cherish the experience of my first viewing (I literally SCREAMED at one moment in a crowded theatre, seriously) while also hungrily rewatching to unpack everything that's going on. I can't promise it will all work for you, but I can promise you won't be bored.

6. Shirkers (dir. Sandi Tan)

As a teenager Sandi Tan made a feature film with her friends and an enigmatic mentor. Imagined as the start of a Singapore New Wave, their dreams were crushed when the mentor vanished with the film reels. Now decades later, Tan's documentary recalls the experience… with the help of the recovered reels. Part memoir/part mystery/part lost cinema classic, Shirkers is about youthful creativity, exploitation, and so much more. Ultimately this is a portrait of an art form. Within its 95 minutes it encapsulates everything movies can do and everything movies take. It's currently streaming on Netflix and a must-watch for anyone who makes movies or cares about how they're made.

5. Widows (dir. Steve McQueen)

Like a Michael Mann movie if Michael Mann cared about things other than digital cameras, Steve McQueen's cold and stellar heist movie lacks subtlety in all the best ways. Led by Viola Davis this candidate for greatest movie cast ever of all time ever does not disappoint. Everybody is so, so good, and it's thrilling to watch this kind of 1970s American genre film through a point of view that doesn't belong to white men. There's a lot to unpack here, with character, plot, and theme, and I've only seen it once, but that was enough to know that this is a capital G Great movie.

4. The Miseducation of Cameron Post (dir. Desiree Akhavan)

Not every queer person has gone to conversion therapy, but I'd guess most of us have doubted our feelings and our identities. What could have easily been a more serious But I'm a Cheerleader instead finds its own purpose, its own humor, and ultimately exists as a still relevant portrayal of the gaslighting we continue to face for just being ourselves. Chloë Grace Moretz gives one of the best performances of the year as the equal parts cool and vulnerable Cameron and my love for writer/director Desiree Akhavan knows no bounds. NOTE: Sasha Lane plays a character who is disabled and Forrest Goodluck plays a character who is Two-Spirit despite not being so themselves. Considering how good the film is otherwise I dream of a version with a supporting cast who understand the experience of their characters.

3. If Beale Street Could Talk (dir. Barry Jenkins)

Like the masterpiece of a novel it's based on, Barry Jenkins third film is an overwhelming tribute to life in the face of despair. Instead of offering hope, instead of suggesting that being Black in America will someday be easier, Beale Street shows how love, romantic and familial, can provide temporary escape and a reason for being. The entire cast is incredible and gorgeous. Every frame is lush, the score is beautiful, and the moments of joy are as moving as the moments of pain. We are so lucky to be alive while Barry Jenkins is making movies.

2. Shoplifters (dir. Hirokazu Kore-Eda)

I went into Kore-Eda's Palme d'Or winning tribute to chosen family ready to feel grateful for my own chosen family. The friends, mentors, beauticians(!), doctors(!!) who have loved and supported me and made me feel like I wasn't alone these past few years. That happened. But what surprised me was how much it made me appreciate my biological family as well. Like the houses in my favorite TV show of the year, Pose, the makeshift family of Shoplifters ends up being like any other. There are clashing personalities, there are frustrations, there are fights. But more than anything there is care, there is self-sacrifice, there is love. Community is not defined by perfection. Family is not defined by perfection. Kore-Eda has spent much of his career asking the question, "What is family?" and this film provides the least and most satisfying answers.

1. In Between (dir. Maysaloun Hamoud)

I loved my favorite movie of the year so deeply that a one paragraph pitch just won't do. Fortunately, the best site on the entire online, Autostraddle, had me write a gushy review. Read it here or if you're already convinced watch In Between free on Kanopy and then read it: https://www.autostraddle.com/in-between-review-the-super-gay-super-feminist-film-no-ones-talking-about-444114/

Television!

Extremely honorable mentions like how is there so much good TV these all deserve to be in the top ten: BoJack Horseman (S5), High Maintenance (S2), Insecure (S3), Jane the Virgin (S4), Random Acts of Flyness (S1), Sharp Objects, Supergirl (S4), Take My Wife (S2)

10. Killing Eve (S1) 9. Atlanta (S2) 8. The Good Place (S2/3) 7. The Americans (S6) 6. The Bisexual (S1) 5. ACS: The Assassination of Gianni Versace 4. Queen Sugar (S3) 3. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (S3/S4) 2. Vida (S1) 1. Pose (S1)

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