What does damage control even look like at this point?
"Damage control goes like this" He says.
Setting down a small mirror in front of him.
"I've already lost the PR battle. There's nothing now I could do or say that would sway the general public out of Rollyn's favor. Her fans, most lowblood audiences, I've already lost them. I've thought about it every which way, and I'm not going to tarnish her reputation by revealing what she said to me. I can't tell the truth. So that's over. It's done. I have to play the bad guy. I can work with that. I hate to say it but this incident might have even swayed some higher ups in my favor. Having a model girlfriend and not treating her great? Not a dealbreaker for most highbloods I encounter and work with."
He sets down a tiny dracula figurine, continuing to think with his hands.
"...What other trolls in the business wont like is I got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by some random civ. I had a good reason not to attack Sereni back but they don't know that. And also. Before now, the wider public didn't know about my powers and now they will. I'm confident Sereni and Rollyn have already goneto the web or the press about the memory erasing. Suddenly, this card that has been in the mafia's back pocket of having a convienant memory eraser has gone public. Midas will not be happy about this. It'll have people asking questions. Digging around."
"I have to find a way to get tens upon millions of Rollyn's fans, curious onlookers, and rival gangs of my scent."
"At the same time, I've got to retaliate against Sereni in some way that makes my peers respect me again. While at the same time not actually hurting her physically or mentally because she's one of Rollyn's friends and she didn't honestly do anything wrong. She had every reason to suspect me for some kind of abuse and there was nothing I could do to dissuade her."
Sunset stares at the things he's set down, and lets out a long, resigned sigh.
"I'm thinking. I make some social media posts. I get one of my computer people to go back through and make me a nice digital trail of breadcrumbs for Rollyn's fans to 'discover' some kind of fake crime. That I will blame the memory erasing on."
"Something low impact business wise but highly emotional and scandalous enough to captivate the press circuit. It's got to be well hidden enough that I don't look like an idiot, just a very meticulous sociopath, but still open enough to be found in the first place. It's also got to make the gang look good, or at the very least powerful. This is the story we need to sell the press."
"Then, at the same time, I make a different, seperate trail of breadcrumbs for Sereni specifically. That implicate Rollyn in some kind of fake crime she's 'forgotten'. Something Rollyn would realistically back morally but would get her in trouble with the fleet if it went public. I then blackmail Sereni with this, threaten to go to the fleet etc etc, force her into conceding into some kind of smoke and mirrors public defeat at my hand."
Sunset describes to you, like a man who has thought up of a meticulous, smart and well fashioned plan, and is deeply unhappy and unsettled about every single part of it. He could care less about wider alternia. But he cannot describe to you, how much it hurts him to know that Rollyn specifically will likely remember him for the rest of time as one of the worst people imaginable. He is backed so throughly into a corner there could be no choice but doubling down. The kindest thing he thinks he can do for her is to respect her wish not to mourn his loss, and this would certainly leave her not mourning him.
But he can't imagine it would make her happier, imagining him to be some kind of monster. Living a double life like this, it's got to tear a person apart. It stretchs him like a rubber band pulled taut at the best of times. That constant facade. That never ending fear. It's probably at this very moment, that Sunset decides, he can never 'date' again. Most certainly not hold quadrants with anyone he actually cares about. He wanted so badly to live in that fantasy where he meets a cute girl at a pulmonologist and falls in love just like a regular troll. But this world where a relationship between him and Rollyn, away from the prying eyes of the press and coworkers and fear and terror is just that. A fantasy. And it has become what he always knew it to be from the beginning. A liability.
"I don't wanna do it" He says, his voice cracking. "I really fucked up" He wheezes. "How selfish of me. To toss and turn in the grave I dug for myself and not even be able to lie in it. What was I thinking! What was I thinking! I risk my career- my life- my plan- for what? Just to leave Rollyn worse off than she ever was before meeting me? Just to rebreak her heart she can't even remember is broken? I should have never dated her in the first place. I'm smarter than this. I risked it all and for what. To try and ward off some run of the mill loneliness?"
He laughs, bitterly, the way a troll does when trying not to cry.
But the sobs catch up to him anyways. Violently overtaking Sunset's body. He covers his face with his hands, curling up and holding his body close like a young boy well used to weathering this kind of pain.
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What did Andrew Lloyd Webber do to make Patti Lupone upset? Sorry, saw your tags and i was curious
Oh.
Oh honey.
You sweet child.
Anyway, get ready for one of the most infamous showdowns in all musical theatre history, with the guy who writes the straightest musicals on Broadway (derogatory) and the one and only, the matriarch, the queen, two three-time Tony award winner Patti LuPone.
So, Andrew Lloyd Webber was basically kind of a boy genius in his prime - he met his future collaborator Tim Rice when they were 17 and 20 respectively, he wrote his first big hit, Jesus Christ Superstar, at 22, with Tim Rice writing the lyrics. And it was kind of a big deal at the time because the topic was controversial (you know, the Passion with rock music), but also because Broadway wasn't that far off from its golden age and let's just say the music and style were very different from, say, My Fair Lady. Or The Sound of Music. Or Funny Girl. It was basically the Rent/Hamilton of its time. (Yeah, Stephen Sondheim was around at that time, he worked on West Side Story which was revolutionary in of itself, but he's kind of an oddball in this case. You'll understand why later.)
Their real follow up (I'm not counting Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a variety of reasons) was a little musical called Evita, which you might know mainly because of a song called Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Or at least, your mom has probably heard it once at the very least. It's that song that's oversung from a musical while being out of context along with I Dreamed a Dream for Les Misérables. Or Memory from Cats.
Evita tells the story of Eva Peron, the wife of an Argentinian dictator, who basically screws her way to the top and ends up becoming the mistress of Juan Peron and the most beloved woman in her country through guile and deceit. Yes, I know the historical accuracy is very much debated but I know jackshit about Argentina's history except the bare basics so don't come at me. It was first produced in the West End in London, with Elaine Paige in the role, but because of Equity issues, she couldn't reprise her role for the Broadway production. So a Julliard graduate who was mostly starring in David Mamet plays got the part instead, and that was Patti LuPone.
Patti... did not have a good time during Evita, because the part is basically the kind of score where you can tell the composer is used to writing male parts, but most female singers have a two-octave range (yes, you got Julie Andrews who used to have a three-octave range, and many others, but they're exceptions), so she struggled a lot. That being said, if you listen to live recordings of her, you wouldn't be able to tell, and it got a lot easier later on. But she had this to say:
"Evita was the worst experience of my life. I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee."
This is from Patti's autobiography, which she wrote in 2007 - 8 years after shit with ALW went down. With all that said, she won a Tony Award for Evita, and she pretty much became a musical theatre household name from then on. She played Fantine in Les Misérables, Nancy in Oliver!, Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. Meanwhile, ALW's next big hits were Cats (I'm not even kidding, Cats was a hit), and, you guessed it, The Phantom of the Opera, which he wrote in part to showcase his then wife Sarah Brightman's triple threat talents.
So, you need to understand before I continue that ALW, from my perspective, has always had a bit of an inferiority complex. He's basically associated to writing these commercially successful musicals that show a big spectacle but aren't ultimately substantial. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but I do think that if he didn't have Hal Prince, Maria Bjornson, Charles Hart and Gillian Lynne backing him up for Phantom, it would have probably been a Rocky Horror Picture Show knockoff people would have forgotten about pretty quickly. This is what I mean:
Yep, that was Phantom before any of the people I mentioned above (and Michael Crawford) were really involved.
Remember how I said Stephen Sondheim was an oddball? The thing with him is that his musicals weren't always commercially successful, but in general, in part thanks to being Leonard Bernstein's protégé, he was generally pretty well-respected and it was considered that his work was bringing musicals to a whole other level. Without Sondheim, you wouldn't have Jonathan Larson, and you wouldn't have Lin-Manuel Miranda. I am convinced ALW is resentful of that, and when you stop and think about it for more than 10 seconds, it's so obvious he REALLY wants to be Sondheim or at least command the same level of respect, but that's a story for another day.
So, after Phantom, ALW had other musicals that followed that either got a meh reception or outright flopped. Then there was Sunset Boulevard, which is based on the movie of the same name with Gloria Swanson. Despite all of her griefs for Evita, Patti LuPone agreed to partake in the musical as Norma Desmond, for its production in London, with the promise that she would transfer to Broadway once that production would open. And overall, after a string of flops, Sunset was actually doing pretty well.
HOWEVER. One day, while reading the gossip column of a newspaper, Patti found out that contrary to what she was promised, Glenn Close, who was meanwhile starring as Norma in the Los Angeles production, was to play Norma on Broadway. That was a complete surprise for her since no one on the production team had bothered to tell her it was happening - and keep in mind that for the news to come up the way it did in a gossip column, it probably would have necessitated a delay of a few weeks between the producers and the newspaper, which would have given them plenty of time to break the news to Patti. And Patti kind of needed the leg up because she was pretty bitter that a) Madonna was cast in the Evita adaptation instead of her; b) they actually lowered the key to fit Madonna's voice range, and she still had to expand her own to be able to sing the (lowered) score. And trust me, Patti is mad about it to this day.
So of course, she trashed her dressing room, the cast and crew weren't even mad about it because they were as shocked and angered as she was by the news. Patti sued Andrew Lloyd Webber for breach of contract, namely for 1 MILLION DOLLARS (yup, those are the real numbers), won, used the money she got from the lawsuit to get a swimming pool, which she called (and I SHIT YOU NOT) the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool. Since then, Webber is dead to her, to the point rumor has it she had part of a building blocked during an event so she could get out of it without coming across Webber, because she hates him so flipping much she doesn't even want to be in the same building as the guy.
(There's also drama that happened with Faye Dunaway who was supposed to replace Glenn Close after she went from Los Angeles to Broadway, except they abruptly closed the show down after Close left, but that's a story for another day)
So with all the bad press, and with ALW forced to pay 1 million dollars for Patti's lawsuit, that led Sunset's productions to close earlier than expected. ALW has stayed around since, with... mitigated output, so to say. The lowest point for a lot of people is Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom, which some people love, and that's fine, but it didn't do well with either critics nor fans of the original show, which ALW is EXTREMELY BUTTHURT ABOUT. And like, there are so many stories I could tell about LND alone, but I will share my own crack theory about it, since it does relate to the ask.
Anyway, buckle up.
So. There have been jokes going around for years that the Phantom in LND is basically ALW's self-insert, where he displays to the world that he's totally not over Sarah Brightman leaving him (in part because making Phantom kinda ruined their marriage lmao), despite, you know, having married since. (Aaaaaakward.) So LND basically becomes this really uncomfortable therapy session where a man writes a self-insert musical about how his ex-wife made a big mistake of leaving a sensitive artistic soul such as himself. The characters from Phantom who appear in LND are all more or less unrecognizable as a result, and one who gets it worse (in my humble opinion) is Meg Giry, who was basically Christine's sweet and loyal ballerina friend who basically went into the Phantom's lair on her own to save her friend despite the danger. In LND, she's basically a bitter hag (because ALW hates women, guess Patti was right about that), who really likes the swim and even has a stripping vaudeville number about it, written in universe by the Phantom, no less.
For comparison, here's Don Juan Triumphant (the Phantom's opera in the original):
And here's Bathing Beauty (the vaudeville number):
Yeah, so... do you see why people hate LND already?
And that's not the only thing with Meg! She's also pining for the Phantom to pay attention to her and threatens to drown the Phantom and Christine's secret love child when he makes it clear that he's gonna love Christine for EVA AND EVA.
So, with everything we learned today about ALW, would someone like him view someone like Patti LuPone as some sort of crazy, bitter diva who's obsessed with him for whatever reason? Absolutely. Would he be petty enough to insert Patti LuPone into his self-insert musical, which gave us the version of Meg Giry we got in LND? Of course. Why does Meg love to swim so much and why does she drag Gustave out ostensibly for a swim? Is it a dig at Patti's Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool? Maybe.
I kind of hope we find out one day if that theory is true. And maybe start a kickstarter so Patti can add this painting from the 2004 movie in her collection.
Fun fact: during the process of casting for the 2004 movie adaptation of POTO, ALW allegedly suggested Patti LuPone to play Carlotta... only for Joel Schumacher to have to awkwardly remind him that they were not on speaking terms. The idea was therefore promptly dropped.
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Hmm... but how would all of the sets of turtle twins react to being told they actually weren't twins?
2003:
Doctor: You guys actually aren't twins.
2003 Donnie: *just blinks and looks over at Raph*
2003 Raph: *On the verge of angry tears* ...Shut the FU-
2018:
Doctor: You aren't twins.
2018 Leo: Haha, nah, you're wrong.
Doctor: No, literally, it's not pos-
2018 Donnie: *holding techbo menacingly* Don't you dare crush his hopes and dreams I will end u.
2012:
Doctor: You're not-
2012 Mikey: I suggest you don't say that.
Doctor: Why? Would the red one kill me?
2012 Mikey: No, but he'd get very sad and threaten to kill you while sobbing.
Bayverse:
Doctor: You aren't-
Bayverse Donnie: *already crying*
Bayverse Raph: *giving doctor death stare* You have 5 fucking seconds.
Feel free to adjust them, i only really knew what to do with 2 of them lmao-
I love it so much
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