#that all being said.... :’3 I think I will have a fun first lineup

[turnstileskyline]

The Oral History of Take This To Your Grave – transcription under the cut

The pages that are just photographs, I haven't included. This post is already long enough.

Things that happened in 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California. Teen Vogue published its first issue. The world lost Johnny Cash. Johnny Depp appeared as Captain Jack Sparrow for the first time. A third Lord of the Rings movie arrived. Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, and Andy Hurley released Take This To Your Grave.

"About 21 years ago or so, as I was applying to colleges I would ultimately never go to, Fall Out Boy began as a little pop-punk side project of what we assumed was Pete's more serious band, Arma Angelus," Patrick wrote in a May 2023 social media post.

"We were sloppy and couldn't solidify a lineup, but the three of us (Pete, Joe, and I) were having way too much fun to give up on it."

"We were really rough around the edges. As an example of how rough, one of my favorite teachers pulled me aside after hearing the recording that would eventually become Evening Out With Your Girlfriend and tactfully said, 'What do you think your best instrument is, Patrick? Drums. It's drums. Probably not singing, Patrick.'"

"We went into Smart Studios with the Sean O'Keefe... So, there we were, 3/5 of a band with a singer who'd only been singing a year, no drummer, and one out of two guitarists. But we had the opportunity to record with Sean at Butch Vig's legendary studio.

"Eight or so months later, Fueled by Ramen would give us a contract to record the remaining songs. We'd sleep on floors, eat nothing but peanut butter and jelly, live in a van for the next three years, and somehow despite that, eventually play with Elton John and Taylor Swift and Jay-Z and for President Obama and the NFC championship, and all these other wildly unpredictable things. But none of that would ever come close to happening if Andy hadn't made it to the session and Joe hadn't dragged us kicking and screaming into being a band."

Two decades after its release, Take This To Your Grave sits comfortable in the Top 10 of Rolling Stone's 50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums, edging out landmark records from Buzzcocks, Generation X, Green Day, The Offspring, Blink-182, and The Ramones.

It even ranked higher than Through Being Cool by Saves The Day and Jersey's Best Dancers from Lifetime, two records the guys in Fall Out Boy particularly revere.

Fall Out Boy's proper full-length debut on Fueled by Ramen is a deceptively smart, sugar-sweet, raw, energetic masterpiece owing as much to the bass player's pop culture passions, the singers deep love of R&B and soul, and their shared history in the hardcore scene as any pioneering punk band. Fall Out Boy's creative and commercial heights were still ahead, but Take This To Your Grave kicked it off, a harbinger for the enduring songwriting partnership between Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz, the eclectic contributions from Joe Trohman, and the propulsive powerhouse that is Andy Hurley.

The recordings document a special moment when Fall Out Boy was big in "the scene" but a "secret" from the mainstream. The band (and some of their friends) first sat down for an Oral History (which doubled as an Oral History of their origin story) with their old friend Ryan J. Downey, then Senior Editor for Alternative Press, upon the occasion of the album's 10th anniversary. What follows is an updated, sharper, and expanded version of that story, newly re-edited in 2023. As Patrick eloquently said: "Happy 20th birthday, Take This To Your Grave, you weird brilliant lightning strike accident of a record."

– Ryan J. Downey.

A Weird, Brilliant Lightning Strike Of A Record. The Oral History Of Fall Out Boy's Take This To Your Grave.

As told by:

Patrick Stump

Pete Wentz

Joe Trohman

Andy Hurley

Bob McLynn - Crush Music

Sean O'Keefe - Producer/Mixer

John Janick - Fueled By Ramen

Tim McIlrath - Rise Against

Mani Mostofi - Racetraitor

Chris Gutierrez - Arma Angelus

Mark Rose - Spitalfield

Sean Muttaqi - Uprising Records

Rory Felton - The Militia Group

Richard Reines - Drive-Thru Records

"To Feel No More Bitterness Forever" - From Hardcore to Softcore, 1998-2000

PETE WENTZ: When I got into hardcore, it was about discovering the world beyond yourself. There was a culture of trying to be a better person. That was part of what was so alluring about hardcore and punk for me. But for whatever reason, it shifted. Maybe this was just in Chicago, but it became less about the thought process behind it and more about moshing and breakdowns. There was a close-mindedness that felt very reactive.

TIM MCILRITH: I saw First Born many years ago, which was the first time I saw Pete and met him around then. This was '90s hardcore - p.c., vegan, activist kind of hardcore music. Pete was in many of those bands doing that kind of thing, and I was at many of those shows. The hardcore scene in Chicago was pretty small, so everyone kind of knew each other. I knew Andy Hurley as the drummer in Racetraitor. I was in a band called Baxter, so Pete always called me 'Baxter.' I was just 'Baxter' to a lot of those guys.

JOE TROHMAN: I was a young hardcore kid coming to the shows. The same way we all started doing bands. You're a shitty kid who goes to punk and hardcore shows, and you see the other bands playing, and you want to make friends with those guys because you want to play in bands too. Pete and I had a bit of a connection because we're from the same area. I was the youngest dude at most shows. I would see Extinction, Racetraitor, Burn It Down, and all the bands of that era.

WENTZ: My driver's license was suspended then, so Joe drove me everywhere. We listened to either Metalcore like Shai Hulud or pop-punk stuff like Screeching Weasel.

MCILRITH: I was in a band with Pete called Arma Angelus. I was like their fifth or sixth bass player. I wasn't doing anything musically when they hit me up to play bass, so I said, 'Of course.' I liked everyone in the band. We were rehearsing, playing a few shows here and there, with an ever-revolving cast of characters. We recorded a record together at the time. I even sing on that record, believe it or not, they gave me a vocal part. Around that same time, I began meeting with [bassist] Joe [Principe] about starting what would become Rise Against.

CHRIS GUTIERREZ: Wentz played me the Arma Angelus demo in the car. He said he wanted it to be a mix of Despair, Buried Alive, and Damnation A.D. He told me Tim was leaving to start another band - which ended up being Rise Against - and asked if I wanted to play bass.

TROHMAN: Pete asked me to fill in for a tour when I was 15. Pete had to call my dad to convince him to let me go. He did it, too. It was my first tour, in a shitty cargo van, with those dudes. They hazed the shit out of me. It was the best and worst experience. Best overall, worst at the time.

GUTIERREZ: Enthusiasm was starting to wane in Arma Angelus. Our drummer was really into cock-rock. It wasn't an ironic thing. He loved L.A. Guns, Whitesnake, and Hanoi Rocks. It drove Pete nuts because the scene was about Bleeding Through and Throwdown, not cock rock. He was frustrated that things weren't panning out for the band, and of course, there's a ceiling for how big a metalcore band can get, anyway.

MANI MOSTOFI: Pete had honed this tough guy persona, which I think was a defense mechanism. He had some volatile moments in his childhood. Underneath, he was a pretty sensitive and vulnerable person. After playing in every mosh-metal band in the Midwest and listening exclusively to Earth Crisis, Damnation A.D., Chokehold, and stuff like that for a long time, I think Pete wanted to do something fresh. He had gotten into Lifetime, Saves The Day, The Get Up Kids, and bands like that. Pete was at that moment where the softer side of him needed an outlet, and didn't want to hide behind mosh-machismo. I remember him telling me he wanted to start a band that more girls could listen to.

MCILRATH: Pete was talking about starting a pop-punk band. Bands like New Found Glory and Saves The Day were successful then. The whole pop-punk sound was accessible. Pete was just one of those guys destined for bigger things than screaming for mediocre hardcore bands in Chicago. He's a smart guy, a brilliant guy. All the endeavors he had taken on, even in the microcosm of the 1990s Chicago hardcore world, he put a lot of though into it. You could tell that if he were given a bigger receptacle to put that thought into, it could become something huge. He was always talented: lyrics, imagery, that whole thing. He was ahead of the curve. We were in this hardcore band from Chicago together, but we were both talking about endeavors beyond it.

TROHMAN: The drummer for Arma Angelus was moving. Pete and I talked about doing something different. It was just Pete and me at first. There was this thuggishness happening in the Chicago hardcore scene at that time that wasn't part of our vibe. It was cool, but it wasn't our thing.

MCILRITH: One day at Arma Angelus practice, Pete asked me, 'Are you going to do that thing with Joe?' I was like, 'Yeah, I think so.' He was like, 'You should do that, dude. Don't let this band hold you back. I'll be doing something else, too. We should be doing other things.' He was really ambitious. It was so amazing to me, too, because Pete was a guy who, at the time, was kind of learning how to play the bass. A guy who didn't really play an instrument will do down in history as one of the more brilliant musicians in Chicago. He had everything else in his corner. He knew how to do everything else. He needed to get some guys behind him because he had the rest covered. He had topics, themes, lyrics, artwork, this whole image he wanted to do, and he was uncompromising. He also tapped into something the rest of us were just waking up to: the advent of the internet. I mean, the internet wasn't new, but higher-speed internet was.

MOSTOFI: Joe was excited to be invited by Pete to do a band. Joe was the youngest in our crew by far, and Pete was the 'coolest' in a Fonzie sort of way. Joe deferred to Pete's judgement for years. But eventually, his whole life centered around bossy big-brother Pete. I think doing The Damned Things was for Joe what Fall Out Boy was for Pete, in a way. It was a way to find his own space within the group of friends. Unsurprisingly, Joe now plays a much more significant role in Fall Out Boy's music.

WENTZ: I wanted to do something easy and escapist. When Joe and I started the band, it was the worst band of all time. I feel like people said, 'Oh, yeah, you started Fall Out Boy to get big.' Dude, there was way more of a chance of every other band getting big in my head than Fall Out Boy. It was a side thing that was fun to do. Racetraitor and Extinction were big bands to me. We wanted to do pop-punk because it would be fun and hilarious. It was definitely on a lark. We weren't good. If it was an attempt at selling out, it was a very poor attempt.

MCILRITH: It was such a thing for people to move from hardcore bands to bands called 'emo' or pop-punk, as those bands were starting to get some radio play and signed to major labels. Everyone thought it was easy, but it's not as easy as that. Most guys we knew who tried it never did anything more successful than their hardcore bands. But Pete did it! And if anyone was going to, it was going to be him. He never did anything half-assed. He ended up playing bass in so many bands in Chicago, even though he could barely play the bass then, because simply putting him in your band meant you'd have a better show. He was just more into it. He knew more about dynamics, about getting a crowd to react to what you're doing than most people. Putting Pete in your band put you up a few notches.

"I'm Writing You A Chorus And Here Is Your Verse" - When Pete met Patrick, early 2001.

MARK ROSE: Patrick Stump played drums in this grindcore band called Grinding Process. They had put out a live split cassette tape.

PATRICK STUMP: My ambition always outweighed my ability or actual place in the world. I was a drummer and played in many bands and tried to finagle my way into better ones but never really managed. I was usually outgunned by the same two guys: this guy Rocky Senesce; I'm not sure if he's playing anymore, but he was amazing. And this other guy, De'Mar Hamilton, who is now in Plain White T's. We'd always go out for the same bands. I felt like I was pretty good, but then those guys just mopped the floor with me. I hadn't been playing music for a few months. I think my girlfriend dumped me. I was feeling down. I wasn't really into pop-punk or emo. I think at the time I was into Rhino Records box sets.

TROHMAN: I was at the Borders in Eden's Plaza in Wilmette, Illinois. My friend Arthur was asking me about Neurosis. Patrick just walked up and started talking to me.

STUMP: I was a bit arrogant and cocky, like a lot of young musicians. Joe was talking kind of loudly and I overheard him say something about Neurosis, and I think I came in kind of snotty, kind of correcting whatever they had said.

TROHMAN: We just started talking about music, and my buddy Arthur got shoved out of the conversation. I told him about the band we were starting. Pete was this local hardcore celebrity, which intrigued Patrick.

STUMP: I had similar conversations with any number of kids my age. This conversation didn't feel crazy special. That's one of the things that's real about [Joe and I meeting], and that's honest about it, that's it's not some 'love at first sight' thing where we started talking about music and 'Holy smokes, we're going to have the best band ever!' I had been in a lot of bands up until then. Hardcore was a couple of years away from me at that point. I was over it, but Pete was in real bands; that was interesting. Now I'm curious and I want to do this thing, or at least see what happens. Joe said they needed a drummer, guitar player, or singer, and I kind of bluffed and said I could do any one of those things for a pop-punk band. I'd had a lot of conversations about starting bands where I meet up with somebody and maybe try to figure out some songs and then we'd never see each other again. There were a lot of false starts and I assumed this would be just another one of those, but it would be fun for this one to be with the guy from Racetraitor and Extinction.

TROHMAN: He gave me the link to his MP3.com page. There were a few songs of him just playing acoustic and singing. He was awesome.

WENTZ: Joe told me we were going to this kid's house who would probably be our drummer but could also sing. He sent me a link to Patrick singing some acoustic thing, but the quality was so horrible it was hard to tell what it was. Patrick answered the door in some wild outfit. He looked like an emo kid but from the Endpoint era - dorky and cool. We went into the basement, and he was like, trying to set up his drums.

TROHMAN: Patrick has said many times that he intended to try out on drums. I was pushing for him to sing after hearing his demos. 'Hey! Sing for us!' I asked him to take out his acoustic guitar. He played songs from Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. I think he sang most of the record to us. We were thrilled. We had never been around someone who could sing like that.

WENTZ: I don't think Patrick thought we were cool at all. We were hanging out, and he started playing acoustic guitar. He started singing, and I realized he could sing any Saves The Day song. I was like, 'Wow, that's the way those bands sound! We should just have you sing.' It had to be serendipity because Patrick drumming and Joe singing is not the same band. I never thought about singing. It wasn't the type of thing I could sing. I knew I'd be playing bass. I didn't think it'd even go beyond a few practices. It didn't seem like the thing I was setting myself up to do for the next several years of my life in any way. I was going to college. It was just a fun getaway from the rest of life kind of thing to do.

STUMP: Andy was the first person we asked to play drums. Joe even brought him up in the Borders conversation. But Andy was too busy. He wasn't really interested, either, because we kind of sucked.

WENTZ: I wanted Hurley in the band, I was closest to him at the time, I had known him for a long time. I identified with him in the way that we were the younger dudes in our larger group. I tried to get him, but he was doing another band at the time, or multiple bands. He was Mani's go-to guy to play drums, always. I had asked him a few times. That should clue people into the fact that we weren't that good.

ANDY HURLEY: I knew Joe as 'Number One Fan.' We called him that because he was a huge fan of a band I was in, Kill The Slavemaster. When Fall Out Boy started, I was going to college full-time. I was in the band Project Rocket and I think The Kill Pill then, too.

MOSTOFI: After they got together the first or second time, Pete played me a recording and said, 'This is going to be big.' They had no songs, no name, no drummer. They could barely play their instruments. But Pete knew, and we believed him because we could see his drive and Patrick's potential. Patrick was prodigy. I imagine the first moment Pete heard him sing was probably like when I heard 15-year-old Andy Hurley play drums.

GUTIERREZ: One day at practice, Pete told me he had met some dudes with whom he was starting a pop-punk band. He said it would sound like a cross between New Found Glory and Lifetime. Then the more Fall Out Boy started to practice, the less active Arma Angelus became.

TROHMAN: We got hooked up with a friend named Ben Rose, who became our original drummer. We would practice in his parents' basement. We eventually wrote some pretty bad songs. I don't even have the demo. I have copies of Arma's demo, but I don't have that one.

MOSTOFI: We all knew that hardcore kids write better pop-punk songs than actual pop-punk kids. It had been proven. An experienced hardcore musician could bring a sense of aggression and urgency to the pop hooks in a way that a band like Yellowcard could never achieve. Pete and I had many conversations about this. He jokingly called it 'Softcore,' but that's precisely what it was. It's what he was going for. Take This To Your Grave sounds like Hot Topic, but it feels like CBGBs.

MCILRITH: Many hardcore guys who transitioned into pop-punk bands dumbed it down musically and lyrically. Fall Out Boy found a way to do it that wasn't dumbed down. They wrote music and lyrics that, if you listened closely, you could tell came from people who grew up into hardcore. Pete seemed to approach the song titles and lyrics the same way he attacked hardcore songs. You could see his signature on all of that.

STUMP: We all had very different ideas of what it should sound like. I signed up for Kid Dynamite, Strike Anywhere, or Dillinger Four. Pete was very into Lifetime and Saves The Day. I think both he and Joe were into New Found Glory and Blink-182. I still hadn't heard a lot of stuff. I was arrogant; I was a rock snob. I was over most pop-punk. But then I had this renaissance week where I was like, 'Man, you know what? I really do like The Descendents.' Like, the specific week I met Joe, it just happened to be that I was listening to a lot of Descendents. So, there was a part of me that was tickled by that idea. 'You know what? I'll try a pop-punk band. Why not?'

MOSTOFI: To be clear, they were trying to become a big band. But they did it by elevating radio-friendly pop punk, not debasing themselves for popularity. They were closely studying Drive-Thru Records bands like The Starting Line, who I couldn't stand. But they knew what they were doing. They extracted a few good elements from those bands and combined them with their other influences. Patrick never needed to be auto-tuned. He can sing. Pete never had to contrive this emotional depth. He always had it.

STUMP: The ideas for band names were obnoxious. At some point, Pete and I were arguing over it, and I think our first drummer, Ben Rose, who was in the hardcore band Strength In Numbers, suggested Fall Out Boy. Pete and I were like, 'Well, we don't hate that one. We'll keep it on the list.' But we never voted on a name.

"Fake It Like You Matter" - The Early Shows, 2001

The name Fall Out Boy made their shortlist, but their friends ultimately chose it for them. The line-up at the band's first show was Patrick Stump (sans guitar), Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, drummer Ben Rose, and guitarist John Flamandan in his only FOB appearance.

STUMP: We didn't have a name at our two or three shows. We were basically booked as 'Pete's new band' as he was the most known of any of us. Pete and I were the artsy two.

TROHMAN: The rest of us had no idea what we were doing onstage.

STUMP: We took ourselves very seriously and completely different ideas on what was 'cool.' Pete at the time was somewhere between maybe Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski, and kind of New Romantic and Manchester stuff, so he had that in mind. The band names he suggested were long and verbose, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I was pretty much only into Tom Waits, so I wanted everything to be a reference to Tom Waits. The first show was at DePaul [University] in some cafeteria. The room looked a lot nicer than punk rock shows are supposed to look, like a room where you couldn't jump off the walls. We played with a band called Stillwell. I want to say one of the other bands played Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath in its entirety. We were out of place. We were tossing a few different names around. The singer for Stillwell was in earshot of the conversation so I was like 'Hey, settle this for us,' and told him whatever name it was, which I can't remember. 'What do you think of this name?' He goes, 'It sucks.' And the way he said it, there was this element to it, like, 'You guys probably suck, too, so whatever.' That was our first show. We played first and only had three songs. That was John's only show with us, and I never saw him again. I was just singing without a guitar, and I had never just sung before; that was horrifying. We blazed through those songs.

ROSE: Patrick had this shoulder-length hair. Watching these guys who were known for heavier stuff play pop-punk was strange. Pete was hopping around with the X's on his hands. Spitalfield was similar; we were kids playing another style of music who heard Texas Is The Reason and Get Up Kids and said, 'We have to start a band like this.'

MOSTOFI: The first show was a lot of fun. The musical side wasn't there, but Pete and Patrick's humor and charisma were front and center.

TROHMAN: I remember having a conversation with Mani about stage presence. He was telling me how important it was. Coalesce and The Dillinger Escape Plan would throw mic stands and cabinets. We loved that visual excitement and appeal. Years later, Patrick sang a Fall Out Boy song with Taylor Swift at Giants Stadium. It was such a great show to watch that I was reminded of how wise Mani was to give me that advice back then. Mani was like a mentor for me, honestly. He would always guide me through stuff.

MOSTOFI: Those guys grew up in Chicago, either playing in or seeing Extinction, Racetraitor, Los Crudos, and other bands that liked to talk and talk between songs. Fall Out Boy did that, and it was amazing. Patrick was awkward in a knowing and hilarious way. He'd say something odd, and then Pete would zing him. Or Pete would try to say something too cool, and Patrick would remind him they were nerds. These are very personal memories for me. Millions of people have seen the well-oiled machine, but so few of us saw those guys when they were so carefree.

TROHMAN: We had this goofy, bad first show, but all I can tell you was that I was determined to make this band work, no matter what.

STUMP: I kind of assumed that was the end of that. 'Whatever, on with our lives.' But Joe was very determined. He was going to pick us up for practice and we were going to keep playing shows. He was going to make the band happen whether the rest of us wanted to or not. That's how we got past show number one. John left the band because we only had three songs and he wasn't very interested. In the interim, I filled in on guitar. I didn't consider myself a guitar player. Our second show was a college show in Southern Illinois or something.

MCILRITH: That show was with my other band, The Killing Tree.

STUMP: We showed up late and played before The Killing Tree. There was no one there besides the bands and our friends. I think we had voted on some names. Pete said 'Hey, we're whatever!'; probably something very long. And someone yells out, 'Fuck that, no, you're Fall Out Boy!' Then when The Killing Tree was playing, Tim said, 'I want to thank Fall Out Boy.' Everyone looked up to Tim, so when he forced the name on us, it was fine. I was a diehard Simpsons fan, without question. I go pretty deep on The Simpsons. Joe and I would just rattle off Simpsons quotes. I used to do a lot of Simpsons impressions. Ben was very into Simpsons; he had a whole closet full of Simpsons action figures.

"If Only You Knew I Was Terrified" - The Early Recordings, 2002-2003

Wentz's relationships in the hardcore scene led to Fall Out Boy's first official releases. A convoluted and rarely properly explained chain of events resulted in the Fall Out Boy/Project Rocket split EP and Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend. Both were issued by California's Uprising Records, whose discography included Racetraitor's first album and the debut EP by Burn It Down. The band traveled to Wisconsin to record their first proper demo with engineer Jared Logan, drummer for Uprising's 7 Angels 7 Plagues.

TROHMAN: This isn't to be confused with the demo we did in Ben's basement, which was like a tape demo. This was our first real demo.

STUMP: Between booking the demo and recording it, we lost Ben Rose. He was the greatest guy, but it wasn't working out musically. Pete and Joe decided I should play drums on the demo. But Jared is a sick drummer, so he just did it.

TROHMAN: We had gotten this great singer but went through a series of drummers that didn't work out. I had to be the one who kicked Ben out. Not long after, our friend Brett Bunting played with us. I don't think he really wanted to do it, which was a bummer.

STUMP: I showed up to record that demo, feeling pulled into it. I liked hanging out with the guys, but I was a rock snob who didn't really want to be making that type of music. The first few songs were really rough. We were sloppy. We barely practiced. Pete was in Arma Angelus. Joe was the guy determined to make it happen. We couldn't keep a drummer or guitar player, and I could barely play guitar. I didn't really want to be in Fall Out Boy. We had these crappy songs that kind of happened; it didn't feel like anything. Joe did the guitars. I go in to do the vocals, I put on the headphones, and it starts playing and was kind of not bad! It was pretty good, actually. I was shocked. That was the first time I was like, 'Maybe I am supposed to be in this band.' I enjoyed hearing it back.

SEAN MUTTAQI: Wentz and I were pretty tight. He sent me some demos, and while I didn't know it would get as big as it did, I knew it was special. Wentz had a clear vision. Of all the guys from that scene, he was the most singularly focused on taking things to the next level. He was ahead of the game with promotion and the early days of social media.

STUMP: Arma Angelus had been on Eulogy. We talked to them a bit and spoke to Uprising because they had put out Racetraitor. At some point, the demo got to Sean, and he decided to make it half of a split with Andy's band, Project Rocket. We were pretty happy with that.

HURLEY: It was kind of competitive for me at the time. Project Rocket and Fall Out Boy were both doing pop-punk/pop-rock, I met Patrick through the band. I didn't really know him before Fall Out Boy.

TROHMAN: We got this drummer, Mike Pareskuwicz, who had been in a hardcore band from Central Illinois called Subsist.

STUMP: Uprising wanted us to make an album. We thought that was cool, but we only had those three songs that were on the split. We were still figuring ourselves out. One of the times we were recording with Jared in the studio, for the split or the album, this guy T.J. Kunasch was there. He was like, 'Hey, do you guys need a guitarist?' And he joined.

MUTTAQI: I borrowed some money to get them back in the studio. The songwriting was cool on that record, but it was all rushed. The urgency to get something out led to the recording being subpar. Their new drummer looked the part but couldn't really play. They had already tracked the drums before they realized it didn't sound so hot.

STUMP: The recording experience was not fun. We had two days to do an entire album. Mike was an awesome dude, but he lived crazy far away, in Kanakee, Illinois, so the drive to Milwaukee wasn't easy for him. He had to work or something the next day. So, he did everything in one take and left. He played alone, without a click, so it was a ness to figure out. We had to guess where the guitar was supposed to go. None of us liked the songs because we had slapped them together. We thought it all sucked. But I thought, 'Well, at least it'll be cool to have something out.' Then a lot of time went by. Smaller labels were at the mercy of money, and it was crazy expensive to put out a record back then.

MUTTAQI: Our record was being rushed out to help generate some interest, but that interest was building before we could even get the record out. We were beholden to finances while changing distribution partners and dealing with other delays. The buck stops with me, yes, but I didn't have that much control over the scheduling.

WENTZ: It's not what I would consider the first Fall Out Boy record. Hurley isn't on it and he's an integral part of the Fall Out Boy sound. But it is part of the history, the legacy. NASA didn't go right to the moon. They did test flights in the desert. Those are our test flights in the desert. It's not something I'm ashamed of or have weird feelings about.

STUMP: It's kind of embarrassing to me. Evening Out... isn't representative of the band we became. I liked Sean a lot, so it's nothing against him. If anybody wants to check out the band in that era, I think the split EP is a lot cooler. Plus, Andy is on that one.

TROHMAN: T.J. was the guy who showed up to the show without a guitar. He was the guy that could never get it right, but he was in the band for a while because we wanted a second guitar player. He's a nice dude but wasn't great to be in a band with back then. One day he drove unprompted from Racine to Chicago to pick up some gear. I don't know how he got into my parents' house, but the next thing I knew, he was in my bedroom. I didn't like being woken up and kicked him out of the band from bed.

STUMP: Our friend Brian Bennance asked us to do a split 7" with 504 Plan, which was a big band to us. Brian offered to pay for us to record with Sean O'Keefe, which was also a big deal. Mike couldn't get the time off work to record with us. We asked Andy to play on the songs. He agreed to do it, but only if he could make it in time after recording an entire EP with his band, The Kill Pill, in Chicago, on the same day.

MOSTOFI: Andy and I started The Kill Pill shortly after Racetraitor split up, not long after Fall Out Boy had formed. We played a bunch of local shows together. The minute Andy finished tracking drums for our EP in Chicago, he raced to the other studio in Madison.

STUMP: I'm getting ready to record the drums myself, getting levels and checking the drums, pretty much ready to go. And then in walks Andy Hurley. I was a little bummed because I really wanted to play drums that day. But then Andy goes through it all in like two takes and fucking nailed the entire thing. He just knocked it out of the park. All of us were like, 'That's crazy!'

WENTZ: When Andy came in, It just felt different. It was one of those 'a-ha' moments.

STUMP: Sean leaned over to us and said, 'You need to get this guy in the band.'

SEAN O'KEEFE: We had a blast. We pumped It out. We did it fast and to analog tape. People believe it was very Pro Tools oriented, but it really was done to 24-track tape. Patrick sang his ass off.

STUMP: The songs we had were 'Dead On Arrival,' 'Saturday,' and 'Homesick at Space Camp. There are quite a few songs that ended up on Take This To You Grave where I wrote most of the lyrics but Pete titled them.

WENTZ: 'Space Camp' was a reference to the 1986 movie, SpaceCamp, and the idea of space camp. Space camp wasn't something anyone in my area went to. Maybe they did, but it was never an option for me. It seems like the little kid version of meeting Jay-Z. The idea was also: what if you, like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie, took off to outer space and wanted to get home? 'I made it to space and now I'm just homesick and want to hang out with my friends.' In the greater sense, it's about having it all, but it's still not enough. There's a pop culture reference in 'Saturday' that a lot of people miss. 'Pete and I attack the lost Astoria' was a reference to The Goonies, which was filmed in Astoria, Oregon.

HURLEY: I remember hearing those recordings, especially 'Dead on Arrival,' and Patrick's voice and how well written those songs were, especially relative to anything else I had done - I had a feeling that this could do something.

WENTZ: It seemed like it would stall out if we didn't get a solid drummer in the band soon. That was the link that we couldn't nail down. Patrick was always a big musical presence. He thinks and writes rhythmi-cally, and we couldn't get a drummer to do what he wanted or speak his language. Hurley was the first one that could. It's like hearing two drummers talk together when they really get it. It sounds like a foreign language because it's not something I'm keyed into. Patrick needed someone on a similar musical plane. I wasn't there. Joe was younger and was probably headed there.

HURLEY: When Patrick was doing harmonies, it was like Queen. He's such a brilliant dude. I was always in bands that did a record and then broke up. I felt like this was a band that could tour a lot like the hardcore bands we loved, even if we had to have day jobs, too.

"(Four) Tired Boys And A Broken Down Van" - The Early Tours, 2002-2003

STUMP: We booked a tour with Spitalfield, another Chicago band, who had records out, so they were a big deal to us. We replaced T.J. with a guy named Brandon Hamm. He was never officially in the band. He quit when we were practicing 'Saturday.' He goes, 'I don't like that. I don't want to do this anymore.' Pete talked with guitarist Chris Envy from Showoff, who had just broken up. Chris said, 'Yeah, I'll play in your band.' He came to two practices, then quit like two days before the tour. It was only a two-week tour, but Mike couldn't get the time off work from Best Buy, or maybe it was Blockbuster. We had to lose Mike, which was the hardest member change for me. It was unpleasant.

TROHMAN: We had been trying to get Andy to join the band for a while. Even back at that first Borders conversation, we talked about him, but he was too busy at the time.

STUMP: I borrowed one of Joe's guitars and jumped in the fire. We were in this legendarily shitty used van Pete had gotten. It belonged to some flower shop, so it had this ominously worn-out flower decal outside and no windows [except in the front]. Crappy brakes, no A/C, missing the rearview mirror, no seats in the back, only the driver's seat. About 10 minutes into the tour, we hit something. A tire exploded and slingshot into the passenger side mirror, sending glass flying into the van. We pulled over into some weird animal petting zoo. I remember thinking, 'This is a bad omen for this tour.' Spitalfield was awesome, and we became tight with them. Drew Brown, who was later in Weekend Nachos, was out with them, too. But most of the shows were canceled.

WENTZ: We'd end up in a town, and our show was canceled, or we'd have three days off. 'Let's just get on whatever show we can. Whatever, you can pay us in pizza.'

STUMP: We played in a pizza place. We basically blocked the line of people trying to order pizza, maybe a foot away from the shitty tables. Nobody is trying to watch a band. They're just there to eat pizza. And that was perhaps the biggest show we played on that tour. One of the best moments on the Spitalfied tour was in Lincoln, Nebraska. The local opener wasn't even there - they were at the bar across the street and showed up later with two people. Fall Out Boy played for Spitalfield, and Spitalfield played for Fall Out Boy. Even the sound guy had left. It was basically an empty room. It was miserable.

HURLEY: Even though we played a ton of shows in front of just the other bands, it was awesome. I've known Pete forever and always loved being in bands with him. After that tour, it was pretty much agreed that I would be in the band. I wanted to be in the band.

WENTZ: We would play literally any show in those days for free. We played Chain Reaction in Orange County with a bunch of metalcore bands. I want to say Underoath was one of them. I remember a lot of black shirts and crossed arms at those kinds of shows. STUMP: One thing that gets lost in the annals of history is Fall Out Boy, the discarded hardcore band. We played so many hardcore shows! The audiences were cool, but they were just like, 'This is OK, but we'd really rather be moshing right now.' Which was better than many of the receptions we got from pop-punk kids.

MOSTOFI: Pete made sure there was little division between the band and the audience. In hardcore, kids are encouraged to grab the mic. Pete was very conscious about making the crowd feel like friends. I saw them in Austin, Texas, in front of maybe ten kids. But it was very clear all ten of those kids felt like Pete's best friends. And they were, in a way.

MCILRITH: People started to get into social networking. That kind of thing was all new to us, and they were way ahead. They networked with their fans before any of us.

MOSTOFI: Pete shared a lot about his life online and was intimate as hell. It was a new type of scene. Pete extended the band's community as far as fiber optics let him.

ROSE: Pete was extremely driven. Looking back, I wish I had that killer instinct. During that tour; we played a show in Colorado. On the day of the show, we went to Kinko's to make flyers to hand out to college kids. Pete put ‘members of Saves The Day and Screeching Weasel’ on the flyer. He was just like, 'This will get people in.'

WENTZ: We booked a lot of our early shows through hardcore connections, and to some extent, that carries through to what Fall Out Boy shows are like today. If you come to see us play live, we're basically Slayer compared to everyone else when we play these pop radio shows. Some of that carries back to what you must do to avoid being heckled at hardcore shows. You may not like our music, but you will leave here respecting us. Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to give a shit. But you need to earn a crowd's respect. That was an important way for us to learn that.

MOSTOFI: All those dudes, except Andy, lived in this great apartment with our friend Brett Bunting, who was almost their drummer at one point. The proximity helped them gel.

STUMP: There were a lot of renegade last-minute shows where we'd just call and get added. We somehow ended up on a show with Head Automatica that way.

MCILRITH: At some point early on, they opened for Rise Against in a church basement in Downers Grove. We were doing well then; headlining that place was a big deal. Then Pete's band was coming up right behind us, and you could tell there was a lot of chatter about Fall Out Boy. I remember getting to the show, and there were many people there, many of whom I had never seen in the scene before. A lot of unfamiliar faces. A lot of people that wouldn't have normally found their way to the seedy Fireside Bowl in Chicago. These were young kids, and I was 21 then, so when I say young, I mean really young. Clearly, Fall Out Boy had tapped into something the rest of us had not. People were super excited to see them play and freaked out; there was a lot of enthusiasm at that show. After they finished, their fans bailed. They were dedicated. They wanted to see Fall Out Boy. They didn't necessarily want to see Rise Against play. That was my first clue that, 'Whoa, what Pete told me that day at Arma Angelus rehearsal is coming true. He was right.' Whatever he was doing was working.

"My Insides Are Copper, And I'd Like To Make Them Gold" - The Record Labels Come Calling, 2002

STUMP: The split EP was going to be a three-way split with 504 Plan, August Premier, and us at one point. But then the record just never happened. Brian backed out of putting it out. We asked him if we could do something else with the three songs and he didn't really seem to care. So, we started shopping the three songs as a demo. Pete ended up framing the rejection letters we got from a lot of pop-punk labels. But some were interested.

HURLEY: We wanted to be on Drive-Thru Records so bad. That was the label.

RICHARD REINES: After we started talking to them, I found the demo they had sent us in the office. I played it for my sister. We decided everything together. She liked them but wasn't as crazy about them as I was. We arranged with Pete to see them practice. We had started a new label called Rushmore. Fall Out Boy wasn't the best live band. We weren't thrilled [by the showcase]. But the songs were great. We both had to love a band to sign them, so my sister said, 'If you love them so much, let's sign them to Rushmore, not Drive Thru.'

HURLEY: We did a showcase for Richard and Stephanie Reines. They were just kind of like, 'Yeah, we have this side label thing. We'd be interested in having you on that.' I remember them saying they passed on Saves The Day and wished they would have put out Through Being Cool. But then they [basically] passed on us by offering to put us on Rushmore. We realized we could settle for that, but we knew it wasn't the right thing.

RORY FELTON: Kevin Knight had a website, TheScout, which always featured great new bands. I believe he shared the demo with us. I flew out to Chicago. Joe and Patrick picked me up at the airport. I saw them play at a VFW hall, Patrick drank an entire bottle of hot sauce on a dare at dinner, and then we all went to see the movie The Ring. I slept on the couch in their apartment, the one featured on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. Chad [Pearson], my partner, also flew out to meet with the band.

STUMP: It was a weird time to be a band because it was feast or famine. At first, no one wanted us. Then as soon as one label said, 'Maybe we'll give 'em a shot,' suddenly there's a frenzy of phone calls from record labels. We were getting our shirts printed by Victory Records. One day, we went to pick up shirts, and someone came downstairs and said, 'Um, guys? [Owner] Tony [Brummel] wants to see you.' We were like, 'Did we forget to pay an invoice?' He made us an offer on the spot. We said, 'That's awesome, but we need to think about it.' It was one of those 'now or never' kinds of things. I think we had even left the van running. It was that kind of sudden; we were overwhelmed by it.

HURLEY: They told me Tony said something like, 'You can be with the Nike of the record industry or the Keds of the record industry.'

STUMP: We'd get random calls at the apartment. 'Hey, I'm a manager with so-and-so.' I talked to some boy band manager who said, 'We think you'll be a good fit.'

TROHMAN: The idea of a manager was a ‘big-time' thing. I answered a call one day, and this guy is like, 'I'm the manager for the Butthole Surfers, and I'd really like to work with you guys.' I just said, Yeah, I really like the Butthole Surfers, but I'll have to call you back.' And I do love that band. But I just knew that wasn't the right thing.

STUMP: Not all the archetypes you always read about are true. The label guys aren't all out to get you. Some are total douchebags. But then there are a lot who are sweet and genuine. It's the same thing with managers. I really liked the Militia Group. They told us it was poor form to talk to us without a manager. They recommended Bob McLynn.

FELTON: We knew the guys at Crush from working with Acceptance and The Beautiful Mistake. We thought they'd be great for Fall Out Boy, so we sent the music to their team.

STUMP: They said Crush was their favorite management company and gave us their number. Crush's biggest band at the time was American Hi-Fi. Jonathan Daniels, the guy who started the company, sent a manager to see us. The guy was like, "This band sucks!' But Jonathan liked us and thought someone should do something with us. Bob was his youngest rookie manager. He had never managed anyone, and we had never been managed.

BOB MCLYNN: Someone else from my office who isn't with us anymore had seen them, but I hadn't seen them yet. At the time, we'd tried to manage Brand New; they went elsewhere, and I was bummed. Then we got the Fall Out Boy demo, and I was like, Wow. This sounds even better. This guy can really sing, and these songs are great.' I remember going at it hard after that whole thing. Fall Out Boy was my consolation prize. I don't know if they were talking to other managers or not, but Pete and I clicked.

TROHMAN: In addition to being really creative, Pete is really business savvy. We all have a bullshit detector these days, but Pete already had one back then. We met Bob, and we felt like this dude wouldn't fuck us over.

STUMP: We were the misfit toy that nobody else wanted. Bob really believed in us when nobody else did and when nobody believed in him. What's funny is that all the other managers at Crush were gone within a year. It was just Bob and Jonathan, and now they're partners. Bob was the weird New York Hardcore guy who scared me at the time.

TROHMAN: We felt safe with him. He's a big, hulking dude.

MCLYNN: We tried to make a deal with The Militia Group, but they wouldn't back off on a few things in the agreement. I told them those were deal breakers, opening the door to everyone else. I knew this band needed a shot to do bigger and better things.

TROHMAN: He told us not to sign with the label that recommended him to us. We thought there was something very honest about that.

MCLYNN: They paid all their dues. Those guys worked harder than any band I'd ever seen, and I was all about it. I had been in bands before and had just gotten out. I was getting out of the van just as these guys got into one. They busted their asses.

STUMP: A few labels basically said the same thing: they wanted to hear more. They weren't convinced we could write another song as good as 'Dead On Arrival.' I took that as a challenge. We returned to Sean a few months after those initial three songs, this time at Gravity Studios in Chicago. We recorded ‘Grenade Jumper' and 'Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy' in a night or two. 'Where is Your Boy' was my, 'Fine, you don't think I can write a fucking song? Here's your hit song, jerks!' But I must have pushed Pete pretty hard [arguing about the songs]. One night, as he and I drove with Joe, Pete said, 'Guys, I don't think I want to do this band anymore.' We talked about it for the rest of the ride home. I didn't want to be in the band in the first place! I was like, 'No! That's not fair! Don't leave me with this band! Don't make me kind of like this band, and then leave it! That's bullshit!' Pete didn't stay at the apartment that night. I called him at his parent's house. I told him I wasn't going to do the band without him. He was like, 'Don't break up your band over it.' I said, 'It's not my band. It's a band that you, Joe, and I started.' He was like, 'OK, I'll stick around.' And he came back with a vengeance.

WENTZ: It was maybe the first time we realized we could do these songs titles that didn't have much do with the song from the outside. Grand Theft Auto was such a big pop culture franchise. If you said the phrase back then, everyone recognized it. The play on words was about someone stealing your time in the fall. It was the earliest experimentation with that so it was a little simplistic compared to the stuff we did later. At the time, we'd tell someone the song title, and they'd say, 'You mean "Auto"'?

JOHN JANICK: I saw their name on fliers and thought it was strange. But I remembered it. Then I saw them on a flyer with one of our bands from Chicago, August Premier. I called them and asked about this band whose name I had seen on a few flyers now. They told me they were good and I should check it out. I heard an early version of a song online and instantly fell in love with it. Drive-Thru, The Militia Group, and a few majors tried to sign them. I was the odd man out. But I knew I wanted them right away.

HURLEY: Fueled By Ramen was co-owned by Vinnie [Fiorello] from Less Than Jake. It wasn't necessarily a band I grew up loving, but I had so much respect for them and what they had done and were doing.

JANICK: I randomly cold-called them at the apartment and spoke to Patrick. He told me I had to talk to Pete. I spoke to Pete later that day. We ended up talking on the phone for an hour. It was crazy. I never flew out there. I just got to know them over the phone.

MCLYNN: There were majors [interested], but I didn't want the band on a major right away. I knew they wouldn't understand the band. Rob Stevenson from Island Records knew all the indie labels were trying to sign Fall Out Boy. We did this first-ever incubator sort of deal. I also didn't want to stay on an indie forever; I felt we needed to develop and have a chance to do bigger and better things, but these indies didn't necessarily have radio staff. It was sort of the perfect scenario. Island gave us money to go on Fueled By Ramen, with whom we did a one-off. No one else would offer a one-off on an indie.

STUMP: They were the smallest of the labels involved, with the least 'gloss.' I said, 'I don't know about this, Pete.' Pete was the one who thought it was the smartest move. He pointed out that we could be a big fish in a small pond. So, we rolled the dice.

HURLEY: It was a one-record deal with Fueled By Ramen. We didn't necessarily get signed to Island, but they had the 'right of first refusal' [for the album following Take This To Your Grave]. It was an awesome deal. It was kind of unheard of, maybe, but there was a bunch of money coming from Island that we didn't have to recoup for promo type of things.

JANICK: The company was so focused on making sure we broke Fall Out Boy; any other label probably wouldn't have had that dedication. Pete and I talked for at least an hour every day. Pete and I became so close, so much so that we started Decaydance. It was his thing, but we ended up signing Panic! At The Disco, Gym Class Heroes, Cobra Starship.

GUTIERREZ: Who could predict Pete would A&R all those bands? There's no Panic! At The Disco or Gym Class Heroes without Wentz. He made them into celebrities.

"Turn This Up And I'll Tune You Out" - The Making of Take This To You Grave, 2003

The versions of "Dead on Arrival," "Saturday," and "Homesick at Space Camp" from the first sessions with Andy on drums are what appear on the album. "Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy" and "Grenade Jumper" are the demo versions recorded later in Chicago. O'Keefe recorded the music for the rest of the songs at Smart Studios once again. They knocked out the remaining songs in just nine days. Sean and Patrick snuck into Gravity Studios in the middle of the night to track vocals in the dead of winter. Patrick sang those seven songs from two to five in the morning in those sessions.

STUMP: John Janick basically said, ‘I'll buy those five songs and we'll make them part of the album, and here's some money to go record seven more.'

MCLYNN: It was a true indie deal with Fueled by Ramen. I think we got between $15,000 and $18,000 all-in to make the album. The band slept on the studio floor some nights.

STUMP: From a recording standpoint, it was amazing. It was very pro, we had Sean, all this gear, the fun studio accoutrements were there. It was competitive with anything we did afterward. But meanwhile, we're still four broke idiots.

WENTZ: We fibbed to our parents about what we were doing. I was supposed to be in school. I didn't have access to money or a credit card. I don't think any of us did.

STUMP: I don't think we slept anywhere we could shower, which was horrifying. There was a girl that Andy's girlfriend at the time went to school with who let us sleep on her floor, but we'd be there for maybe four hours at a time. It was crazy.

HURLEY: Once, Patrick thought it would be a good idea to spray this citrus bathroom spray under his arms like deodorant. It just destroyed him because it's not made for that. But it was all an awesome adventure.

WENTZ: We were so green we didn't really know how studios worked. Every day there was soda for the band. We asked, 'Could you take that soda money and buy us peanut butter, jelly, and bread?' which they did. I hear that stuff in some ways when I listen to that album.

HURLEY: Sean pushed us. He was such a perfectionist, which was awesome. I felt like, ‘This is what a real professional band does.' It was our first real studio experience.

WENTZ: Seeing the Nirvana Nevermind plaque on the wall was mind-blowing. They showed us the mic that had been used on that album.

HURLEY: The mic that Kurt Cobain used, that was pretty awesome, crazy, legendary, and cool. But we didn't get to use it.

WENTZ: They said only Shirley Manson] from Garbage could use it.

O'KEEFE: Those dudes were all straight edge at the time. It came up in conversation that I had smoked weed once a few months before. That started this joke that I was this huge stoner, which obviously I wasn't. They'd call me 'Scoobie Snacks O'Keefe' and all these things. When they turned in the art for the record, they thanked me with like ten different stoner nicknames - 'Dimebag O'Keefe' and stuff like that. The record company made Pete take like seven of them out because they said it was excessively ridiculous.

WENTZ: Sean was very helpful. He worked within the budget and took us more seriously than anyone else other than Patrick. There were no cameras around. There was no documentation. There was nothing to indicate this would be some ‘legendary' session. There are 12 songs on the album because those were all the songs we had. There was no pomp or circumstance or anything to suggest it would be an 'important’ record.

STUMP: Pete and I were starting to carve out our niches. When Pete [re-committed himself to the band], it felt like he had a list of things in his head he wanted to do right. Lyrics were on that list. He wasn't playing around anymore. I wrote the majority of the lyrics up to that point - ‘Saturday,' 'Dead on Arrival,' ‘Where's Your Boy?,’ ‘Grenade Jumper,' and ‘Homesick at Space Camp.' I was an artsy-fartsy dude who didn't want to be in a pop-punk band, so I was going really easy on the lyrics. I wasn't taking them seriously. When I look back on it, I did write some alright stuff. But I wasn't trying. Pete doesn't fuck around like that, and he does not take that kindly. When we returned to the studio, he started picking apart every word, every syllable. He started giving me [notes]. I got so exasperated at one point I was like, ‘You just write the fucking lyrics, dude. Just give me your lyrics, and I'll write around them.' Kind of angrily. So, he did. We hadn't quite figured out how to do it, though. I would write a song, scrap my lyrics, and try to fit his into where mine had been. It was exhausting. It was a rough process. It made both of us unhappy.

MCLYNN: I came from the post-hardcore scene in New York and wasn't a big fan of the pop-punk stuff happening. What struck me with these guys was the phenomenal lyrics and Patrick's insane voice. Many guys in these kinds of bands can sing alright, but Patrick was like a real singer. This guy had soul. He'd take these great lyrics Pete wrote and combine it with that soul, and that's what made their unique sound. They both put their hearts on their sleeves when they wrote together.

STUMP: We had a massive fight over 'Chicago is So Two Years Ago.' I didn't even want to record that song. I was being precious with things that were mine. Part of me thought the band wouldn't work out, and I'd go to college and do some music alone. I had a skeletal version of 'Chicago...'. I was playing it to myself in the lobby of the studio. I didn't know anyone was listening. Sean was walking by and wanted to [introduce it to the others]. I kind of lost my song. I was very precious about it. Pete didn't like some of the lyrics, so we fought. We argued over each word, one at a time. 'Tell That Mick...' was also a pretty big fight. Pete ended up throwing out all my words on that one. That was the first song where he wrote the entire set of lyrics. My only change was light that smoke' instead of ‘cigarette' because I didn't have enough syllables to say 'cigarette.' Everything else was verbatim what he handed to me. I realized I must really want to be in this band at this point if I'm willing to put up with this much fuss. The sound was always more important to me - the rhythm of the words, alliteration, syncopation - was all very exciting. Pete didn't care about any of that. He was all meaning. He didn't care how good the words sounded if they weren't amazing when you read them. Man, did we fight about that. We fought for nine days straight while not sleeping and smelling like shit. It was one long argument, but I think some of the best moments resulted from that.

WENTZ: In 'Calm Before the Storm,' Patrick wrote the line, 'There's a song on the radio that says, 'Let's Get This Party Started' which is a direct reference to Pink's 2001 song 'Get the Party Started.' 'Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today' is a line from the movie Rushmore. I thought we'd catch a little more flack for that, but even when we played it in Ireland, there was none of that. It's embraced, more like a shoutout.

STUMP: Pete and I met up on a lot of the same pop culture. He was more into '80s stuff than I was. One of the first things we talked about were Wes Anderson movies.

WENTZ: Another thing driving that song title was the knowledge that our fanbase wouldn't necessarily be familiar with Wes Anderson. It could be something that not only inspired us but something fans could also go check out. People don't ask us about that song so much now, but in that era, we'd answer and tell them to go watch Rushmore. You gotta see this movie. This line is a hilarious part of it.' Hopefully some people did. I encountered Jason Schwartzman at a party once. We didn't get to talk about the movie, but he was the sweetest human, and I was just geeking out. He told me he was writing a film with Wes Anderson about a train trip in India. I wanted to know about the writing process. He was like, 'Well, he's in New York City, I'm in LA. It's crazy because I'm on the phone all the time and my ear gets really hot.' That's the anecdote I got, and I loved it.

O'KEEFE: They're totally different people who approach making music from entirely different angles. It's cool to see them work. Pete would want a certain lyric. Patrick was focused on the phrasing. Pete would say the words were stupid and hand Patrick a revision, and Patrick would say I can't sing those the way I need to sing this. They would go through ten revisions for one song. I thought I would lose my mind with both of them, but then they would find it, and it would be fantastic. When they work together, it lights up. It takes on a life of its own. It's not always happy. There's a lot of push and pull, and each is trying to get their thing. With Take This To Your Grave, we never let anything go until all three of us were happy. Those guys were made to do this together.

WENTZ: A lot of the little things weren't a big deal, but those were things that [felt like] major decisions. I didn't want 'Where Is Your Boy' on Take This To Your Grave.

JANICK: I freaked out. I called Bob and said, 'We must put this song on the album! It's one of the biggest songs.' He agreed. We called Pete and talked about it; he was cool about it and heard us out.

WENTZ: I thought many things were humongous, and they just weren't. They didn't matter one way or another.

"Our Lawyer Made Us Change The (Album Cover)" - That Photo On Take This To Your Grave, 2003

STUMP: The band was rooted in nostalgia from early on. The '80s references were very much Pete's aesthetic. He had an idea for the cover. It ended up being his girlfriend at the time, face down on the bed, exhausted, in his bedroom. That was his bedroom in our apartment. His room was full of toys, '80s cereals. If we ended up with the Abbey Road cover of pop-punk, that original one was Sgt. Pepper's. But we couldn't legally clear any of the stuff in the photo. Darth Vader, Count Chocula…

WENTZ: There's a bunch of junk in there: a Morrissey poster, I think a Cher poster, Edward Scissorhands. We submitted it to Fueled by Ramen, and they were like, 'We can't clear any of this stuff.’ The original album cover did eventually come out on the vinyl version.

STUMP: The photo that ended up being the cover was simply a promo photo for that album cycle. We had to scramble. I was pushing the Blue Note jazz records feel. That's why the CD looks a bit like vinyl and why our names are listed on the front. I wanted a live photo on the cover. Pete liked the Blue Note idea but didn't like the live photo idea. I also made the fateful decision to have my name listed as 'Stump' rather than Stumph.

WENTZ: What we used was initially supposed to be the back cover. I remember someone in the band being pissed about it forever. Not everyone was into having our names on the cover. It was a strange thing to do at the time. But had the original cover been used, it wouldn't have been as iconic as what we ended up with. It wouldn't have been a conversation piece. That stupid futon in our house was busted in the middle. We're sitting close to each other because the futon was broken. The exposed brick wall was because it was the worst apartment ever. It makes me wonder: How many of these are accidental moments? At the time, there was nothing iconic about it. If we had a bigger budget, we probably would have ended up with a goofier cover that no one would have cared about.

STUMP: One of the things I liked about the cover was that it went along with something Pete had always said. I'm sure people will find this ironic, but Pete had always wanted to create a culture with the band where it was about all four guys and not just one guy. He had the foresight to even think about things like that. I didn't think anyone would give a fuck about our band! At the time, it was The Pete Wentz Band to most people. With that album cover, he was trying to reject that and [demonstrate] that all four of us mattered. A lot of people still don't get that, but whatever. I liked that element of the cover. It felt like a team. It felt like Voltron. It wasn't what I like to call 'the flying V photo' where the singer is squarely in the center, the most important, and everyone else is nearest the camera in order of 'importance.' The drummer would be in the very back. Maybe the DJ guy who scratches records was behind the drummer.

"You Need Him. I Could Be Him. Where Is Your Boy Tonight?" - The Dynamics of Punk Pop's Fab 4, 2003

Patrick seemed like something of the anti-frontman, never hogging the spotlight and often shrinking underneath his baseball hat. Wentz was more talkative, more out front on stage and in interviews, in a way that felt unprecedented for a bass player who wasn't also singing. In some ways, Fall Out Boy operated as a two-headed dictatorship. Wentz and Stump are in the car's front seat while Joe and Andy ride in the back.

STUMP: There is a lot of truth to that. Somebody must be in the front seat, no question. But the analogy doesn't really work for us; were more like a Swiss Army knife. You've got all these different attachments, but they are all part of the same thing. When you need one specific tool, the rest go back into the handle. That was how the band functioned and still does in many ways. Pete didn't want anyone to get screwed. Some things we've done might not have been the best business decision but were the right human decision. That was very much Pete's thing. I was 19 and very reactionary. If someone pissed me off, I'd be like, 'Screw them forever!' But Pete was very tactful. He was the business guy. Joe was active on the internet. He wouldn't stop believing in this band. He was the promotions guy. Andy was an honest instrumentalist: ‘I'm a drummer, and I'm going to be the best fucking drummer I can be.' He is very disciplined. None of us were that way aside from him. I was the dictator in the studio. I didn't know what producing was at the time or how it worked, but in retrospect, I've produced a lot of records because I'm an asshole in the studio. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not the nicest guy in the studio. It's a lot easier to know what you don't want. We carved out those roles early. We were very dependent on each other.

MCLYNN: I remember sitting in Japan with those guys. None of them were drinking then, but I was drinking plenty. It was happening there, their first time over, and all the shows were sold out. I remember looking at Pete and Patrick and telling Pete, ‘You're the luckiest guy in the world because you found this guy.' Patrick laughed. Then I turned to Patrick and said the same thing to him. Because really, they're yin and yang. They fit together so perfectly. The fact that Patrick found this guy with this vision, Pete had everything for the band laid out in his mind. Patrick, how he can sing, and what he did with Pete's lyrics - no one else could have done that. We tried it, even with the Black Cards project in 2010. We'd find these vocalists. Pete would write lyrics, and they'd try to form them into songs, but they just couldn't do it the way Patrick could. Pete has notebooks full of stuff that Patrick turns into songs. Not only can he sing like that, but how he turns those into songs is an art unto itself. It's really the combination of those two guys that make Fall Out Boy what it is. They're fortunate they found each other.

"I Could Walk This Fine Line Between Elation And Success. We All Know Which Way I'm Going To Strike The Stake Between My Chest" - Fall Out Boy Hits the Mainstream, 2003

Released on May 6, 2003, Take This To Your Grave massively connected with fans. (Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend arrived in stores less than two months earlier.) While Take This To Your Grave didn't crack the Billboard 200 upon its release, it eventually spent 30 weeks on the charts. From Under the Cork Tree debuted in the Top 10 just two years later, largely on Grave's momentum. 2007's Infinity on High bowed at #1.

WENTZ: I remember noticing it was getting insane when we would do in-stores. We'd still play anywhere. That was our deal. We liked being able to sell our stuff in the stores, too. It would turn into a riot. We played a Hollister at the mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. A lot of these stores were pretty corporate with a lot of rules, but Hollister would let us rip. Our merch guy was wearing board shorts, took this surfboard off the wall, and started crowd-surfing with it during the last song. I remember thinking things had gotten insane right at that moment.

HURLEY: When we toured with Less Than Jake, there were these samplers with two of their songs and two of ours. Giving those out was a surreal moment. To have real promotion for a record... It wasn't just an ad in a 'zine or something. It was awesome.

MCLYNN: They toured with The Reunion Show, Knockout, and Punch-line. One of their first big tours as an opening act was with MEST. There would be sold-out shows with 1,000 kids, and they would be singing along to Fall Out Boy much louder than to MEST. It was like, 'What's going on here?' It was the same deal with Less Than Jake. It really started catching fire months into the album being out. You just knew something was happening. As a headliner, they went from 500-capacity clubs to 1500 - 2000 capacity venues.

WENTZ: We always wanted to play The Metro in Chicago. It got awkward when they started asking us to play after this band or that band. There were bands we grew up with that were now smaller than us. Headlining The Metro was just wild. My parents came.

MCLYNN: There was a week on Warped Tour, and there was some beel because these guys were up-and-comers, and some of the bands that were a little more established weren't too happy. They were getting a little shit on Warped Tour that week, sort of their initiation. They were on this little, shitty stage. So many kids showed up to watch them in Detroit, and the kids rushed the stage, and it collapsed. The PA failed after like three songs. They finished with an acapella, 'Where is Your Boy,’ and the whole crowd sang along.

WENTZ: That's when every show started ending in a riot because it couldn't be contained. We ended up getting banned from a lot of venues because the entire crowd would end up onstage. It was pure energy. We'd be billed on tour as the opening band, and the promoter would tell us we had to close the show or else everyone would leave after we played. We were a good band to have that happen to because there wasn't any ego. We were just like, "Oh, that's weird.' It was just bizarre. When my parents saw it was this wid thing, they said, 'OK, yeah, maybe take a year off from college.' That year is still going on.

MCLYNN: That Warped Tour was when the band's first big magazine cover, by far, hit the stands. I give a lot of credit to Norman Wonderly and Mike Shea at Alternative Press. They saw what was happening with Fall Out Boy and were like, 'We know it's early with you guys, but we want to give you a cover.' It was the biggest thing to happen to any of us. It really helped kick it to another level. It helped stoke the fires that were burning. This is back when bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and No Doubt still sold millions of records left and right. It was a leap of faith for AP to step out on Fall Out Boy the way they did.

STUMP: That was our first big cover. It was crazy. My parents flipped out. That wasn't a small zine. It was a magazine my mom could find in a bookstore and tell her friends. It was a shocking time. It's still like that. Once the surrealism starts, it never ends. I was onstage with Taylor Swift ten years later. That statement just sounds insane. It's fucking crazy. But when I was onstage, I just fell into it. I wasn't thinking about how crazy it was until afterward. It was the same thing with the AP cover. We were so busy that it was just another one of those things we were doing that day. When we left, I was like, 'Holy fuck! We're on the cover of a magazine! One that I read! I have a subscription to that!'

HURLEY: Getting an 'In The Studio' blurb was a big deal. I remember seeing bands 'in the studio' and thinking, Man, I would love to be in that and have people care that we're in the studio.' There were more minor things, but that was our first big cover.

STUMP: One thing I remember about the photo shoot is I was asked to take off my hat. I was forced to take it off and had been wearing that hat for a while. I never wanted to be the lead singer. I always hoped to be a second guitarist with a backup singer role. I lobbied to find someone else to be the proper singer. But here I was, being the lead singer, and I fucking hated it. When I was a drummer, I was always behind something. Somehow the hat thing started. Pete gave me a hat instead of throwing it away - I think it's the one I'm wearing on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. It became like my Linus blanket. I had my hat, and I could permanently hide. You couldn't see my eyes or much of me, and I was very comfortable that way. The AP cover shoot was the first time someone asked me to remove it. My mom has a poster of that cover in her house, and every time I see it, I see the fear on my face - just trying to maintain composure while filled with terror and insecurity. ‘Why is there a camera on me?'

JANICK: We pounded the pavement every week for two years. We believed early on that something great was going to happen. As we moved to 100,000 and 200,000 albums, there were points where everything was tipping. When they were on the cover of Alternative Press. When they did Warped for five days, and the stage collapsed. We went into Christmas with the band selling 2000 to 3000 a week and in the listening stations at Hot Topic. Fueled By Ramen had never had anything like that before.

MOSTOFI: Pete and I used to joke that if he weren't straight edge, he would have likely been sent to prison or worse at some point before Fall Out Boy. Pete has a predisposition to addictive behavior and chemical dependency. This is something we talked about a lot back in the day. Straight Edge helped him avoid some of the traps of adolescence.

WENTZ: I was straight edge at the time. I don't think our band would have been so successful without that. The bands we were touring with were partying like crazy. Straight Edge helped solidify the relationship between the four of us. We were playing for the love of music, not for partying or girls or stuff like that. We liked being little maniacs running around. Hurley and I were kind of the younger brothers of the hardcore kids we were in bands with. This was an attempt to get out of that shadow a little bit. Nobody is going to compare this band to Racetraitor. You know when you don't want to do exactly what your dad or older brother does? There was a little bit of that.

"Take This To Your Grave, And I'll Take It To Mine" - The Legacy of Take This To Your Grave, 2003-2023

Take This To Your Grave represents a time before the paparazzi followed Wentz to Starbucks, before marriages and children, Disney soundtracks, and all the highs and lows of an illustrious career. The album altered the course for everyone involved with its creation. Crush Music added Miley Cyrus, Green Day, and Weezer to their roster. Fueled By Ramen signed Twenty One Pilots, Paramore, A Day To Remember, and All Time Low.

STUMP: I'm so proud of Take This To Your Grave. I had no idea how much people were going to react to it. I didn't know Fall Out Boy was that good of a band. We were this shitty post-hardcore band that decided to do a bunch of pop-punk before I went to college, and Pete went back to opening for Hatebreed. That was the plan. Somehow this record happened. To explain to people now how beautiful and accidental that record was is difficult. It seems like it had to have been planned, but no, we were that shitty band that opened for 25 Ta Life.

HURLEY: We wanted to make a record as perfect as Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. A front-to-back perfect collection of songs. That was our obsession with Take This To Your Grave. We were just trying to make a record that could be compared in any way to that record. There's just something special about when the four of us came together.

WENTZ: It blows my mind when I hear people talking about Take This To Your Grave or see people including it on lists because it was just this tiny personal thing. It was very barebones. That was all we had, and we gave everything we had to it. Maybe that's how these big iconic bands feel about those records, too. Perhaps that's how James Hetfield feels when we talk about Kill 'Em All. That album was probably the last moment many people had of having us as their band that their little brother didn't know about. I have those feelings about certain bands, too. 'This band was mine. That was the last time I could talk about them at school without anyone knowing who the fuck I was talking about.' That was the case with Take This To Your Grave.

TROHMAN: Before Save Rock N' Roll, there was a rumor that we would come back with one new song and then do a Take This To Your Grave tenth-anniversary tour. But we weren't going to do what people thought we would do. We weren't going to [wear out] our old material by just returning from the hiatus with a Take This To Your Grave tour.

WENTZ: We've been asked why we haven't done a Take This To Your Grave tour. In some ways, it's more respectful not to do that. It would feel like we were taking advantage of where that record sits, what it means to people and us.

HURLEY: When Metallica released Death Magnetic, I loved the record, but I feel like Load and Reload were better in a way, because you knew that's what they wanted to do.

TROHMAN: Some people want us to make Grave again, but I'm not 17. It would be hard to do something like that without it being contrived. Were proud of those songs. We know that’s where we came from. We know the album is an important part of our history.

STUMP: There's always going to be a Take This To Your Grave purist fan who wants that forever: But no matter what we do, we cannot give you 2003. It'll never happen again. I know the feeling, because I've lived it with my favorite bands, too. But there's a whole other chunk of our fans who have grown with us and followed this journey we're on. We were this happy accident that somehow came together. It’s tempting to plagarize yourself. But it’s way more satisfying and exciting to surprise yourself.

MCILRITH: Fall Out Boy is an important band for so many reasons. I know people don't expect the singer of Rise Against to say that, but they really are. If nothing else, they created so much dialog and conversation within not just a scene but an international scene. They were smart. They got accused of being this kiddie pop punk band, but they did smart things with their success. I say that, especially as a guy who grew up playing in the same Chicago hardcore bands that would go on and confront be-ing a part of mainstream music. Mainstream music and the mainstream world are machines that can chew your band up if you don't have your head on straight when you get into it. It's a fast-moving river, and you need to know what direction you're going in before you get into it. If you don't and you hesitate, it'll take you for a ride. Knowing those guys, they went into it with a really good idea. That's something that the hardcore instilled in all of us. Knowing where you stand on those things, we cut our teeth on the hardcore scene, and it made us ready for anything that the world could throw at us, including the giant music industry.

#long post #lke. VERY long post #fall out boy #fob #take this to your grave #tttyg #patrick stump #pete wentz #joe trohman #andy hurley #if theres any typos lmk and i'll fix em this. hust took fucking forever to transcribe.

[clovenhoofedjester]

jellicle lineups; part 2/4

MOREEEE !!! MOREEEE !!!

rumpleteazer | 💰 🍹 🃏

PIGTAILS RUMP! PASTEL RUMP. blond rump. that is all. i really love that design. so i use it. the face markings are also meant to look like a stereotypical robber mask. i realized she looks a little fox-like while drawing her, which i didnt mind ! its fun !

her clothing design was already laid out for her so i left it virtually unchanged, asides from the pattern itself. imagine wearing clothes w a print of your best friends hair . that is rumpleteazer

even though 1 of her 3 words are impressionable, i think she is smarter than she lets on. i also think skimbleshanks is her dad. she'd be about 21 in human years

mungojerrie | 💸 🎰 🍾

PIGTAILS JERRIE AS WELL, BITCH ! i saw a jerrie w pigtails after i drew this and i felt so vindicated. i also based his design directly on 2019 mungojerrie because ommgggg transgender calico? trans little calico? i thought he deserved some pearls too. as well as a bell collar! it makes cats sneakier.

his clothing design is left unchanged too, asides from some fluff. he is also wearing a print of his best friends hair . smile 😃

hes just a funny fella. he totally doesnt have a history or anything. hed be 21 in human years

coricopat | 🍷 🔮 ♟

coricopat is pretty close to their replica design—the biggest difference being that the red in their design is warmer/purpler. that and the silver collar! i also had no idea what i was doing with her fit, so expect it to change in the upcoming art i do of him. i just wanted something gothy and flowy

hes also based on thalia, the muse of comedy. to keep the greek mythology theme going, and because i thought it was funny, and because (2x) i like... The Gimmick

i swear to god this cat knows things we dont. hed be like 22 in human years

tantomile | 🎭 🍩 🗝

tantomile is also close to his replica design. she has a gold collar. like i said w/ coricopat, the outfit is subject to change

as she was based on melpomene, the muse of tragedy, i decided to sacrifice identical makeup for the white mark on their muzzle being downturned like the frown of the tragedy mask :] giggle. smile

listen to all advice tantomile gives you. shed be also like 22 in human years

george | 🥏 🧋 🛹

i just had to give this (technical) swing some love. bless this happy background cat and his little :D smile. i decided to give him a simple little fit and made his fur/markings less plain white w some stripes. i think i also based his makeup off a victor costume ??

i think hes pouncival's older brother. hed also be 23 in human years

mr. mistoffelees | 🪄 ☕ 🌬

my silly, my funny. my little guy. i based their general Vibe on his john napier concept art, obc mistoffelees, 1990 paris mistoffelees, 2019 mistoffelees, and like. a fairys kiss of brentoffelees. i wish id have given him a bit of that il sistina style but i already had so many things going on LOL

it was definitely a very fun challenge to balance all of these. i also draw attention to the single white shoe—the cutest detail of timmy scotts misto

i definitely prefer a more visually unnerving, grown misto. and absolutely torn between portraying him as mute or verbal because on one hand... mute misto is so good. on the other hand.... oh my god. timothy scotts voice.jesus christ . i think hed be 23 in human years

the rum tum tugger | 🎤 🍽 🪞

WELCOME TO MY TWISTED WORLD. i really tried to keep tugger as cis guys i really did. but the thrall of a visually transgender tugger was too much to ignore. i already explained a lot of his design choices in my first posted drawing of it but like... blauhh... thigh garter, heart, golden whiskers/lashes. they are there. i also made his makeup a wee more theatrical w/ white on the chin to visually separate him from partridges tugger

i also decided to base his fur more on his obc design. like. terrence mann tugger. platinum blond spotted mane and head fur and such. i think it looks really good

im trying to hit the sweet spot between the goofy/serious/whiny/promiscuous portrayals of the him..... the man contains multitudes, you see. hed also be like 24 in human years and it goes without saying that hes one of deuts sons

AND THATS IT. stay tuned for more !

#cats the musical #cats musical #cats 1998 #character design #chibi #sfw furry #rumpleteazer #mungojerrie #coricopat #tantomile #george #mr. mistoffelees #the rum tum tugger #my art

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I think this is the first time since season 10 that I’ve watched the first episode of a Taskmaster season without writing a liveblogging Tumblr post as I went along (in seasons 11-16, I stuck to varying levels of keeping up the liveblogs for the rest of the season, but I always at least did the first one). If I’m very honest, the main reason why I didn’t do it for this one is it’s the first lineup for which there was only person I was really really excited about. The other four I have varying levels of vague opinions about, from “broadly like based on the one time I saw her on Russell Howard’s show” (Sophie), to “quite strongly dislike based on seeing her promote stalking and harassment on Alan Davies’ show, but I guess it was probably just a joke that came off badly” (Joanne) to “never got into League of Gentlemen because the surreal vibe creeped me out a bit and BBC Sherlock put me off Mark Gatiss so I know almost nothing about him”. Oh, and I do actively like Nick, because I am one of the few people who’s found Mr. Swallow funny on Catsdown, but I didn’t much enjoy his Houdini special and Ted Lasso season 3 was so bad that it put me off everyone who had anything to do with it even though obviously it’s not Nick Mohammed’s fault, so those conflicting opinions balance out into a vague “I guess I like that guy”.

Anyway, I didn’t want to write a post that was meant to be liveblogging the whole Taskmaster episode, and have that post be 90% about John Robins, and lay out just how much John Robins was the only one I was really interested in, and I also didn’t want to try to make myself have more of an opinion about the rest of them than I actually did. So no liveblog post this time, I just watched the episode. Once it gets a couple of episodes in I will have an opinion on the rest of them, and then might start the liveblogs again because I will have a slightly more balanced view.

Having said that. I have now watched it and do have some new opinions:

- Sophie Willan: I expected the charmingly naïve chaos, based on that time she was on Russell Howard’s show, that’s exactly how she came across on there and it’s great. Funny and sweet just great fun to watch. I did not, however, expect this extreme level of incompetence. I find an extreme level of anything funny on Taskmaster, and this is no exception. Love that we’re going to have a good old fashioned disaster contestant and it’s been marked out so early. Love that she appears to have no idea what show she’s on. Obsessed with her decision to paint that actual fence even though she definitely saw the blinds.

- Steve Pemberton: The “old man who is far too well established in comedy to need this show” contestant actually trying in the tasks, that’s always a fun surprise. I mean, I enjoy it either way. Frankie Boyle, Alan Davies, Julian Cleary, Ardal O’Hanlon – all those guys stumbling through the tasks with bemusement is fun. But it’s a nice surprise when you get a Lee Mack, a Dara O’Briain, a thing that Steve Pemberton looks to be – an old man who doesn’t need this but decides to actually put significant effort into doing each task properly. The egg train was impressive. The stumble at the end was funny. The good-natured attitude in the studio is amusing. And John Robins being the competent competitive force I’m hoping for won’t be as much fun if there’s not another good player to challenge him.

- Nick Mohammed: That’s exactly what I wanted from him. It’s almost weird to hear him talk in a normal voice, which doesn’t make sense because it’s not like he was using the Mr. Swallow voice on Ted Lasso, but I think on some level, my brain operated under the assumption the Mr. Swallow voice was his “real voice” and he was just putting on a character for Ted Lasso. It is interesting to see him play himself, where it turns out, he’s not that far off from Mr. Swallow’s quirks, just with a lower-pitched voice. I liked the exchanged he had with Greg in this manner. I liked the pragmatic approach to getting hula hoops out of a river. I liked the dynamic with Steve. I liked it when he threw some bricks around.

Joanne McNally: I dislike her a bit. Which is a lot less than how much I disliked her yesterday. This episode has brought me from disliking her a lot to disliking her a bit. She was entertaining. I wish I hadn’t seen that episode of Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, because it’s sending me into this season with a bias against her that may be too much for her Taskmaster persona, as entertaining as it is, to overcome. I like other comedians who've said worse things than that, because I can put those things in the context of all their other stuff and consider it just one badly judged story. Maybe Taskmaster will give me enough context for McNally to get past it. She was fun. I wanted to be able to enjoy her. But she does still annoy me.

John Robins: Here's an idea. What if I do the opposite of the post this would have been if I'd been liveblogging as I watched and had been honest about where most of my interest was (though that interest broadened out as the episode went along, it only takes a small amount of time at the beginning of a season for me to get to know the unknowns well enough to be interested in them too), and make this a post about everyone except John Robins? I'll just end this post here.

(He crashed a car with an egg and he brought in 19th Century literature and he thought through that live task so strategically and and his drawings were so much better than everyone else's and this is exactly the level of competence I was hoping for and I don't mind waiting a bit for the competitiveness-induced outbursts that I'm sure are coming later, because actually it was equally funny to watch him spend this episode just glaring and biting his tongue (and having his voice crack the way it sometimes does on the radio, it happened right at the beginning of this episode, and you always know we're getting something good out of John Robins when his voice starts cracking) whenever he got annoyed about something going wrong. And is adorable that his buddy Alex got a reference to his big award into the episode, especially in a way that says "You know, technically you're on the level with Steve Pemberton."

(The other reason I didn't do a liveblog this time is I was genuinely embarrassed reading back the one I wrote during s16e01, where I frequently transcribed my internal and/or external monologue verbatim as I was too into the episode to also put an edit between my thoughts and the typed words, and was really into backing Sam Campbell like a sports team and Taskmaster brings out the sports team side of me in general, which is how you had bits of that post with me writing things like "Yes Sammy C coming through" with what I hope any reader would (incorrectly) interpret as irony. It's for the best that I avoided that this time and didn't need to document the number of times the words "Come on Johnny you got this" came out out loud as I was watching him throw hula hoops at things. I have never referred to him by that name before, it's just the automatic sports-ifying of people's names that happens when you watch them like a sports team. I'm pretty sure words in parentheses don't count towards a post, so this one actually ended when I said it did two paragraphs ago.)

#taskmaster spoilers

[msmargaretmurry]

do you think tkachuk/drai/mcdavid (or 2 of the 3) would have been anything if matthew was drafted to edmonton instead of jesse puljujarvi?

hello anon! it says something about how uncaffeinated i was when i first read this ask that at first i thought you meant like, as a line, and i was like "well someone would have to learn to play left wing and it would probably be smarter to spread that firepower out over two lines" and then i had one (1) sip of coffee and was like OOOOooohhh you mean in a hrpf way. (i assume. sorry if you actually wanted lineup analysis.) and then i got briefly distracted thinking about a beautiful world where poor jesse puljujärvi never had to endure the dickings around of the oilers management. and THEN i got briefly distracted thinking about how having all three of them would make the oilers' cap situation even more funny. BUT ANYWAY.

short answer: yes. long answer:

so like, on the mcdavid front, hrpf nation has been exploring the mortifying ordeal of being connor mcdavid since before he was drafted. if matthew was drafted to his team people would be interested by default. if the oilers had him, drai, AND matthew, for marketing purposes they would have packaged those three all together like eberle/hall/nuge 2.0 and people would have loved it. matthew would have been giving nonstop quotes about playing with these special players and learning so much from them and whatever the fuck. matthew cares very very deeply about being a Good Teammate. he would have become connor's guard dog the same way he did for auston matthews in the ntdp. folks absolutely would have latched onto it. plus the added dimension of matthew being a Legacy Kid while connor has had Legacy Thrust Upon him would have been like rpf narrative catnip.

also, in addition to the legacy kid thing making him already a person of interest, if matthew had been drafted to the other side of the battle of alberta he would have been exactly as rambunctious and annoying and divisive and shit-stirring and fun to watch, just on the other side of the battle, and manyof us would have still gotten weird and wild about him. imho!!

i think it's a really interesting thought experiment to ponder how being in the shadow of mcdavid (and doing his shenanigans in what might be perceived as in service of the mcdavid experiment) might have possibly changed perpections/portrayals of him, and also how being drafted to a team where he knew he would never, in the eyes of the hockey zeitgeist, be the best player, might have changed matthew's own approach to his career and developing his game. because he's such a family-oriented guy i do still think he would have gotten homesick in edmonton the same way he got homesick in calgary, but i'm really curious if the concept of Playing With McDavid would have been enough to pressure him into sticking it out in the great white north. also, back to the cap crunch of it all — it feels so unlikely that the oilers would be able to afford to keep all three of them, and i wonder, if matthew was there, if drai would be the one to go. and that would have provided some RICH hrpf narratives.

on the draisaitl front, hrpf nation has been info him since he was drafted being he's hot, lmao. (laying these foundations just because if a guy is on the rpf radar it's much more likely for pairing with him to being a Thing(tm).) if matthew had been drafted to the oilers, mattdrai as we know it would absolutely not exist (and que tragique!!). it just wouldn't have that antagonism! i've always said that if leon and matthew were on the same team from the beginning, they would have been fast friends. they would have had a great time terrorizing people together. the things about matthew that pissed leon off so much wouldn't be pissing him off if they weren't being used against him!! so the dynamic that drew so many people into mattdrai wouldn't be there, and it would definitely be a very different thing, but i do think it would still be a thing.

honestly from what i know about hrpf, i feel like if we lived in the matthew-to-the-oilers universe, connor/matthew would be the big ship, with connor/leon and matthew/leon as rarer pairs on the side (and of course connor/matthew/leon hanging out there too). what a world!! i would read a million versions of the au though.

#ask #this was fun to think about thank you anon! <3 #matthew and leon #the mortifying ordeal of being connor mcdavid #hockey for ts

[feidolzine]

Hello idols! Welcome to the question portion of the event! Are you ready to ready for the fan mail below the undercut! Art chibis were drawn by the lovely @virgichuu !

Q: Will mods have zine formatting done before preoders begin? I think it's important step for ensuring that fulfillment happens in a timely manner! I also think you should include FE# regardless of vote, it seems perfect for the theme of this zine. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes! <3

A: We estimate to finish zine layout be the end of POs! Based on prior zine experience, there tends to be an increase in contributor dropouts nearing final submission. We would like to give adequate to get pinch hitters to complete their pieces with minimal stress, even if it goes a little bit into PO period!

That being said, we are carefully reviewing IC results including write-in merch suggestions to plan a speedy production.

We would love to FE#! You're absolutely right that they are a perfect fit (some even say, the blueprint) for this zine theme. Luckily for us, the majority opinion wanted to include the wide range FE has to offer - including FE#. We hope to have excited applicants apply to create for it as well as all the other non-mainline games we'd love to feature!

Q: How will the representation of the various FE games work? Will the mods ensure less popular FE titles will be represented? Will representation be left up to the contributors who are accepted? A little concerned that the zine will feature only the popular FE games.

A: We would like to represent as many games in the FE franchise as possible! Our current plans include asking our contributor applicants to indicate which games they are interested in creating for so we can have a diverse range - however we cannot represent games if no one applies for them! Help us spread the word to FE fans and suggest guest specializing in our less-loved titles!

Q: Please provide Fates content in this, for both in merch and in the zine!

A: We would love to feature Fates content both in the zine and merch lineup! However, we can only do so if we have excited applicants for the roles - so please be sure to spread the word once our contributor applications open to all the Fates fans you know!

Q: Do you accept 1 times? I had a ton of ideas for this concept and I'd be excited to join you!

A: We would love to accept any first-time applicants to the zine! We do not require any prior zine experience for contributor roles; in our information document, you'll be able to find the contributor application guidelines. We will post on our social medias when contributor apps open, so be sure to keep an eye out.

Q: Tbh this zine makes me anxious because the head mod has a lot of responsibility on this zine or other ongoing or upcoming zines. Is there a is a reason this zine is moving forward now, instead at a later time when the head mod isn't busy with other zines?

A: We are sorry to cause your anxiety! The mod team only hopes to create a cheerful, fun zine experience for all and like to minimize any anxiousness.

The Head Mod like to assure you she is 100% committed to fulfilling this zine on the current schedule! That being said, she asked the rest of mod team to comment on their honest feelings on this question.

Our shipping/org/social media mod had said: "I've worked with the head mod on various zines before this one and know how she works: I know I can my trust in her when working with her in zines. She has been very communicative when working with me regarding getting her work done and telling me when getting it done, and getting them done in a timely manner. With her here I know this zine will be done very well and be completed in a timely manner."

One of our gen/writing mods have said: "In my experience working with Shi I have seen nothing besides good, reliable, and timely work. Shi is a really dedicated mod; she's constantly on top of deadlines and communicative as soon as an issues arise, if it does. I can assure potential supports that the project is in good hands with her!"

We hope these responses has relieved at least some of your anxiety! If not, especially considering recent developments in the FE zine space, the head mod welcomes and additional messages you have her to be directed her DMs (you may contact via Twitter or Discord) with any questions, and she will do her utmost best to answer. Thank you for your interest!~

Q: Love this zine concept I'm obsessed! Good luck with it! This really sounds really fun! :D

A: Thank you so much for your interest, we're obsessed with the concept too! We'll do our absolute best to make it a fun endeavor for everyone~ o(≧▽≦)o

Q: Is this idol concept specific to one type? I personally know more and interested in kpop idol culture rather than j-idol culture.

A: We are open to all types of idol cultures! This includes kpop, jpop, cpop, virtual idols (shout-out to our queen Miku), and animated idols (Love Live, IM @S), etc.! There are many types of idols and we love them all! o(≧▽≦)o

Q: Will you be considering have someone to just do small art assets for decorations for the zine? In case for the people who cannot make it as a page artist.

A: As of the moment, we will likely be not having someone come on only for spot merch! Page and merch artist will have the option to collaborate with a writer, but it is not required.

Q: If someone gets accepted, will they need to stick to their pitches, or can they come up with a new/modify it? Can a person also submit their check-ins before the due dates, and move onto the next stage.

A: Yes, your pitches will be used while assigning spots for the zine! Since our interest check expressed the desire to see the wide range of FE games, we will take in consideration getting a diversity of games via your pitches. There is a way to contribute something other than your assigned pitch, but that's a secret for now...!

Regarding check-in dates, you can check in and submit well in advance if you are finished! There will be final submission folder for you to put your pieces at any time, and public contributor tracker you can check to make sure the mods have correctly marked you off as submitted!

Q: Can I apply for more than one role?

A: You can absolutely apply for more than one role! We already have a couple of applicants already doing so - be sure to submit both (or all three) of the applications for the roles you were interested in. If you have a strong preference for one role over the other (ex. prefer merch over page), please write that in the notes!

#updates

[grandprix-ao3]

first lines

tagged by @drivestraight

Rules: Post the first lines of your last 10 fics posted to AO3. (Sort by date posted.) If you have less than 10 fics posted, post what you have.

this is so fun. i have a love/hate relationship with first lines... like either they come to me easy (it's like this! like, boom!) or i'm thinking about it for like 17 business days. but fun story usually i start writing a fic because i start actually writing it in my head, like with an imaginary google doc and all of that, so i'll only make the actual document when i think i have an idea of what i want to write, not just what i want to happen.

anyways. i will do my ten most recent fics. under the break. this was fun to look at also i haven't given my previous first lines a whole ton of thought lately... very intriguing. some i like better than others tbh

telephone

Every time the words circle back around to Esteban, it's a different story.

like a house on fire

For the nearly three years since Charles first moved into the duplex, his upstairs neighbor has been the same mild-mannered woman.

backseat freestyle

"Do you not think it is a little bit pathetic?"

growing pains

It is easier to make friends in racing when the stakes are lower.

firebug

For the first time since Pierre and Charles started dating—years ago, so far from the present it feels like something they never knew—Charles thinks he actually wants to be mad at his boyfriend.

choking on your alibis

For two weeks of the summer before their last year of university, Charles is meant to stay with his best friend, Esteban.

carlos.jpg

Lando posts pictures of pretty buildings and fast cars.

violent ends

It's disgustingly instinctual.

pressure machine

The lights are out.

the alps

Pierre has the decency to tell Yuki before the announcement goes up.

also i'm gonna do miamis (alt!) because i'm annoying. welcome to: hell, population: me. we win these

piranha

Being teammates with Logan is a fucking lot.

show me how you show off

They're a bit tipsy, hiding in the darkened corner of a bright-lit nightclub.

shark bait

Oscar kind of knew what he was signing up for when he decided to go to school in America, but he doesn't think anything could've prepared him for the email that said his roommate's name was Logan Hunter Sargeant.

your animal side

Oscar presents late.

an itch under my skin

"There's my pretty thing."

contact-drunk

Oscar doesn't know why he even came to this party.

pretty thing

"Come on, open up."

and you know what just for fun here's the first line of my current wip :)

Williams is the only team on the grid with an all-Beta driver lineup.

oh and i tag: @hourcat @dm3rv @alblondo23 @oversteerey to do if they wish. sorry if you were double tagged <3

#fic game #tag game #this was a fun time #we love writing! #tbh sometimes i do read other people's fics and have a moment of like. damn that was a good opener! #i love when that happens #so. always fun to consider #tbh why is the shark bait opener so LONG

[moirtre]

3, 4, and 6 for all the girls

3. what's your worst and best memory from your trainee days?

juniper finishes reading out the question to the girls, glancing between the girls to motivate one to start the group off. sienna mutters, "that's kinda heavy," under her breath, gaining quiet chuckles from the other six.

"um, i'll go," emmy offers with a flip of her hair over her shoulder. "worst memory... learning the wrong version of a song for our famous monthly evaluations. karin was not happy about that. best memory has to be being picked for the letalis lineup."

her cheeks pinken as the girls 'aww' in adoration of her happy memory.

"my worst memory might be getting cussed out by a senior for using their favorite room to practice." naira speaks up, a hint of bitterness in her tone.

melanie peeks her head out to face the older girl excitedly interrupting: "name drop! who was it?" naira shakes her head as the others join in on melanie's exclamation. "never that," naira wags a finger at the blonde.

"my favorite memory was prank calling said senior every night for like two weeks straight with yeeun." juniper reaches over to high-five naira at the memory they both share.

"okay, my best memory is absolutely those prank calls." juniper begins, her voice breaking from the joy in her laugh. "but, uh- worst memory?" she sighs, dropping her excitement. "throwing up —literally, in front of johanna... who's the company chairwoman."

"basically the woman who could kill our careers off in an instant if she really wanted to." sienna adds in, receiving a glare from the group's leader.

"not helping."

"i'll go!" sienna perks up, a bright smile illuminating her features. "best memory was without a doubt seeing mason for the first time." the others react with a mix of belly laughs and playful eyerolls.

"for context, mr. winters is our cfo..." heri speaks up quietly, one of those who had thrown her head back in laughter.

"mr. winters indeed." sienna bites at her bottom lip, getting lost at the thought before juniper cleared her throat, commanding the australian's attention.

"uh, worst memory is probably..." she sucks in a deep breath as the others bow their heads in anticipation of what she would say next. "losing my mum."

after a brief moment of silence, melanie slowly speaks up to continue. "i'll try to make this quick..."

she pauses to think for a moment.

"if you weren't ready, why would you go?" emmy mutters, receiving a shushing from both naryun and juniper.

"worst? when i snapped my ankle messing around in heels with sienna." the two giggle as melanie reaches out to hold the younger girl's hand gently. "best memory was being picked to debut with these girls."

heri clears her throat before beginning cautiously. "worst memory... getting sent back to primary training after i bombed an evaluation." she winces at the memory as several others stifle laughs of their own. "my favorite memory? i think it was getting my makeup done professionally for the first time for screen tests. that was so much fun."

naryun, the last to contribute clasps her hands as she thinks to herself. "my worst memory is kind of stupid?" she makes eye contact with emmy who belly laughs in realization of what naryun was planning to say.

"okay, stick with me here. i went to this restaurant with my ex-boyfriend and he bailed on me," the others join emmy in elation as naryun fights to speak over the collective laughter.

"so i'm sitting there trying to explain to the waiter that i'm a trainee- an unpaid fucking kpop trainee. and his manager refuses to let me leave without paying, so i have to call my dad to come down to the restaurant and pay for me. he was not happy with me." she huffs at the memory, rolling her eyes.

"favorite memory though, when emmy and i chopped our hair the day before screen tests out of rebellion."

4. is there anything you regret abt your trainee days?

"rapid fire?" juniper leads the discussion once more, receiving nods from the other six who take a few moments to come up with their answers.

she then begins: "not talking to more seniors before debut."

melanie speaks up next, "rushing to debut."

heri nods, "not asserting myself."

with a hum naira bounces off of heri's regret: "taking everything too seriously."

"not getting out enough," and "being too critical of myself." are naryun and emmy's regrets.

sienna closes out with a low, "taking my mentors for granted."

6. is there something you think sets you apart from other idols in the industry?

emmy is the one to speak up first, catching the others off guard, "personally, i think the thing that sets us, as a group, apart from other idols is the fact that we know each other so well. i can anticipate anyone's next move- without having to think twice about it."

the others smile to themselves, a gentle silence enveloping the seven.

naira clears her throat as she sits up a little straighter.

"we may not be the best of friends, but i wouldn't choose another group of girls to go through this life with. we're family, shit happens- a lot." a chorus of giggles breaks out between the others at her bluntness.

"but these are my girls."

#‎ ‎ ⋆⠀⠀ʬ.ʬ.⠀⠀٬⠀⠀(⠀⠀&.⠀⠀)⠀...⠀INQUIRY. #sorry for the essay #i can't control myself apparently

[briannacarmel]

📍PINNED POST📍

My name is Brianna Carmel. I'm a 25-yr-old DIY musician -- mainly a vocalist that fucks around on guitar and ukulele -- who is in numerous projects, from Sacramento, CA.

I'd consider my "main" project to be my indie pop/sadcore band @bloomingheads.

We're currently on a hiatus from playing shows to record our debut album, after playing almost constantly for two years straight, lol. The most legit thing we've ever done is open for Crywank, during their Sacramento stop at the Starlet Room on their first US tour. You can see us pictured with Jay, in the photoset seen above.

That being said, show hiatus aside, we did submit an entry to NPR Tiny Desk very recently, featuring our song Axis Access:

My bandmate from Blooming Heads, Josiah, aka @dotknifehead, has had their own project for many years -- which is the whole reason we became friends and eventually started Blooming Heads together -- called Little Tiny Knife, a chiptune folk punk band.

I joined very recently, and we just put out our debut single, Tired of Driving. You can stream it on Spotify, or even download it on Bandcamp, but I think this live video from our most recent show is the most fun way to experience it:

I'm also a solo artist in my spare time, I like to call myself a singer-songwriter with a folk punk soul. My most recent release is a 3 track EP of ukulele songs, called The Building Blocks EP, which is available on Spotify + Bandcamp. But, again, I think live videos are more fun, so here's me playing the first track, Alone Again, at a show:

I'm also also a DIY show promoter, I book DIY shows in Sacramento under the moniker 916 Growth Gigs. My motto is "no genre discrimination" -- I do tend to gravitate towards folk punk acts, because that's where my heart is, but overall, I just appreciate a good eclectic lineup where not all the bands sound the same. I believe one of the best examples of this was last year's 916 PRIDE SHOW 5 -- an annual LGBTQ+ pride show that I try my best to book every year.

Ft. Ash Bricky, @lokeigh, @bloomingheads, Little Tiny Knife, + Zombie Makeout Session

Here are a few flyers from past shows...

...and here are a couple upcoming shows that I'm VERY excited about...

If you're a DIY band touring thru the Sacramento-area, feel free to shoot me a message!! My primary venue connects are The Colony Sacramento, The Library of Musiclandria, and Golden Bear (21+), with the occasional acoustic show at a park when we have good weather, or the occasional house show when the stars align just right.

Even if I can't help you out, I'd love to point you in the direction of someone that can, and I love making new friends.

I think that's about it! Thanks for checking out my blog. 💞

#blooming heads #little tiny knife #crywank #hoity toity #ash bricky #lokeigh #the colony sacramento #the library of musiclandria #indie music #indie band #indie pop #sadcore #indie rock #folk punk #queer band #nonbinary #queer #queer music #npr tiny desk #chiptune #Youtube #spotify #bandcamp #local news legend

[acrossthestage]

MBC Show Champion in Manila

Date: September 3, 2016 | Venue: Mall of Asia Arena

MBC Show Champion was the first concert I've ever been to. It's a music show so many artists were included in the lineup, but I mainly attended to see my first K-pop group, B.A.P. Please be patient with me as I try to recall everything from 8 years ago.

I initially had no plans of going to this event. It was announced around the same time SEVENTEEN had their first show in Manila, where my parents did not let me go because I was too young and had no money to spend on a K-pop event. I expected that they wouldn't let me go to Show Champion either. However, while talking to my friend Shaina, she mentioned that she's going and told me that the general admission ticket only cost around PHP 1,500. I was not aware of this at that time and was extremely surprised. I thought that maybe with that price, my parents might allow me to go.

Since I really wanted to see B.A.P, I asked my mom if she could give me a week's worth of my school allowance in advance so that I could start saving it for the concert. I was so ready to be told no, but my mom surprisingly said yes, especially since I said I'd be going with Shaina. Later on, my mom proposed to hire a car to take us to the venue and back home on d-day.

Shaina and I went to SM Sta. Rosa after school to get our tickets. I believe this was August 19, 2016 based on my facebook post. Now that I think about it, ticketing was pretty chill back then because we were able to secure good seats even after hours since the ticketing started. Can't have that these days lol.

On the day of the concert, I wore my B.A.P hoodie and SVT face mask (SVT wasn't there but of course I had to let everyone know I'm a carat). Shaina and I tried to go freebie hunting and I think we were able to get a few. If I remember correctly, we also met another group's fan (an ELF, I think?) but we eventually separated with her. I saw a lot of BABYz around the arena and they were pretty happy to see me and tried to get me to join their group. But I was too shy to because I wasn't used to meeting my fandom that time. I was also with my friend, so joining other fans was out of the question.

Copy pasting this from my facebook post dated September 3, 2016:

BABYZ!!! 꺄아아아아아ㅏㅏㅏㅏㅏㅏㅏ 😭😭💘💘💘 Sorry kay ate na kumaway sakin at nag-yaya, I can't go with you kasi Baby x Army kami nung dalawang kasama ko hihi. 😁 SUPER DAMI NILA NAKAKALOKA ANG SARAP MAKIPAG FANDOM HUG. NGAYON LANG AKO NAKAKITA NG BABYZ IN PERSON. IT'S SO OVERWHELMING HUHUHU. Dami naming nakausap na Babyz, ang daming may shirt, banner, and headband ng B.A.P. I feel super happy ang daming pumunta to support the boys argh I wanted to talk to all of them soooo bad 😭💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖 THE FEELS MEN. THE FEELS ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ

I can't remember much from the concert itself. All that's left in my head is how B.A.P absolutely blew me away and how I had an emotional breakdown in the middle of their performance. It felt so surreal seeing my teenage heroes in person and hearing my favorite songs live. I also really had fun seeing VIXX and BTS. The latter was actually just getting popular during that time, and the entire arena shook when they performed 'Fire'. It's pretty nice being one of the witnesses of their growth as idols.

MBC Show Champion was a whole new world for sheltered 16-year-old Stephannie. It opened my eyes to how breath-taking concerts are and I just knew there would be many more to come.

#concert

[redwineconversation]

Olympique Lyonnais - Ajax Postgame Thoughts

I hate losing almost as much as I hate the thought of Malard being a regular starter, so this game was not fun in any sense of the term.

Before I get to the cause of my stress and anxiety for the upcoming season (also known as Malard potentially playing 90 mins on a regular basis): what the fuck was up with the state of the pitch? I have never seen in look that horrible, and I've seen them play in torrential rain and the freezing cold. This looked like a pitch of a Division 3 team, not one on Lyon's home grounds. I'm really hoping that was addressed in the postgame interviews but I think OLPlay said those will only be up on Monday. It was absolutely appalling, especially in front of goal.

Speaking of goal, watching Endler today was an emotional rollercoaster. When Endler is on, she's a monster in goal, when she's off, you find yourself staring longingly at your anti-anxiety meds. We got to experience both today. There were nerves from Endler that I am honestly not used to seeing, especially in a relatively low stakes game. Ajax's first goal came off an Endler error when she tried to clear the ball (straight at an Ajax player?). There were other nervy clearances. It's honestly perplexing that she showed more emotional composure in the UWCL semifinal than she did in this game.

But once Lyon came to 1-1, Endler settled down a bit, and came up with some pretty big saves. That was the Endler I am used to seeing. There wasn't really anything she could have done on Ajax's second goal, so I'm giving her a pass on that. Regardless, those nerves have got to be addressed by the time the season actually starts, because as toothless as PSG is right now, I doubt they will be as forgiving as Ajax was.

I've ripped on the academy kids before and will continue to do so. I don't care how much potential you show in practice, the reality is as soon as you're against a pro team, you find yourself being bullied off the ball and making mistakes. Sombath, Marques and Mendy were good and I wouldn't be surprised if they make the bigger team sheets, but otherwise the rest should be but a distance bad memory by the time the big hitters are back.

If Lindsey Horan was a little rusty, Vanessa Gilles was not, and that could just be because Gilles has been back a little longer than Horan. Dabritz was in between the two: there was obvious rust, but you could tell she isn't far away from being back.

M'Bock is slowly coming back. I was a bit surprised when she came on as early as she did (approximately 20 mins remaining) if only because Bompastor had said she might get a "few" minutes depending on whether Lyon was controlling the game. Whilst I wouldn't say the game was out of Lyon's control, they weren't exactly in control either.

Malard is so bad that I will take an academy kid starting every game instead of her playing. As I said to someone privately, Lyon will be deliberately shooting themselves in the foot if they keep her rather than sending her out on loan. The more she finds herself in the starting lineup and playing all 90 minutes, the more it proves that her statistics in the 2021-2022 season was merely a result of being propped up by better players rather than actually being a star player.

Which leads me to what I really want to talk about: the one that got away Leuchter. Lyon had expressed interest in her after her performance at the Euros but Ajax had been unwilling to sell. I'm hoping that her performance today put her back on Lyon's radar, though I question again whether Ajax would be willing to sell especially with the UWCL qualifying rounds coming up. Never say never though I will say it's unlikely. She's an extremely good player, she's fun to watch, and she actually scores goals unlike Malard. Lord knows Lyon could use that.

Whilst I do absolutely hate losing, especially at home (though with the state of the pitch I guess I am allowed to pretend we were playing elsewhere), this loss isn't going to make me toss and turn too much. Ajax was basically at full strength plus or minus a couple of players and Lyon was playing with their low B / borderline C team.

Back in preseason 2021, Lyon got their ass absolutely handed to them by Bayern in a preseason game (Bayern was up 4-0 at HT before Renard scored a couple of goals to make the scoreline less embarrassing) and the 2021-2022 season wasn't a complete disaster. That being said Bompastor wasn't as obsessed with her youth academy experiment back then, so maybe it's not as good a premonition as I like to pretend it is.

Anyway, what did we learn from this game? Nothing that we already didn't know, really. Endler needs a stable defense in front of her to feel confident, @OL midfield feel like pure shit just want you back, @god can we please get our real forwards back ASAP. But we already knew all that.

#all good love stories start in the rain

[lorei-writes]

Behind the Scenes: Bookmarked; Enchanted

Let's get ready for my rambling! This time around, featuring Bookmarked; Enchanted. The idea for it came during the last day of @flash-exchange. Initially it was supposed to be just a short headcanon, scenario-write-down style... But I promised somebody not to strain myself, and so, it waited until I actually had enough energy to write a fic.

Again, none of it would have come to be without @iphigeniainaulis. You always make me think of libraries and art galleries, so even if this attempt was futile... I went into creating this story wanting to create something more intricate, to match you.

Contents:

Story concept and its evolution.

Folklore.

Characterisation choices. [notes]

Story concept and its evolution.

At first the idea was simple: start from Comte's side, leading the reader to believe that MC is a person from within some book's universe; let the twist be the fact that Abel is the fictional one.

However, later I realised that leaving the matter of whether either of them is actually real makes for... maybe not necessarily a more interesting read, but definitely for more fun.

Let me elaborate. The story itself includes three worlds. If we add ours to that, we have 4 separate plains of existence that briefly touch each other. They are, as follows:

The actual reality. [Our world]

Abel's world of origin.

The world in which they meet.

Mitsuki's world of origin.

Now, the entire idea may sound odd. For it to even work I must ask you to suspend your knowledge of what is and isn't real (unless the object is defined as real or fictional, of course; sort of as during Geometry class, when you can clearly see that it's a right-angled triangle, but since it is not stated anywhere and you have not proved it, you cannot use said fact in any way).

The only world defined as clearly fictional is (3), as while within it, they have to follow through with a certain plot, as stated in:

The night is still young, but so is the story – so they rush through the plot as they leap above fires, as they dance and share in songs.

Let's measure Abel and Mitsuki's realness in relation to which world we set as the 'primary' one, with primary meaning either real or default if real is not applicable.

From the perspective of world:

(1), both Abel and Mitsuki are fictional,

(2), Abel seems real, while Mitsuki seems fictional,

The "real" world in this case is exited the moment Abel enters the book. The book is world (3), and was defined as fictional. It was never stated that Abel is aware of the existence of Mitsuki's world of origin -- he may very well not be... And as such, he has no grounds to consider her any realer than other characters within the book. They all have to follow through with the plot.

(3), both seem real,

Now, this begs to ask whether a fictional universe can be even set as a default one... That aside, since reference point is set there, it suggests that that which is fictional is in fact real (within the confines of this universe, at least). Since both Abel and Mitsuki have to obey by the plot, they are not exactly distinguishible from other characters that may be present around them (at least to our current knowledge, based on the fic itself -- they may be some differences, or there may be none, no data was provided on that)... so they may at least seem just as real as the surrounding world.

(4), Abel seems fictional, while Mitsuki seems real.

Reverse of the world (2) example.

In other words, I suppose you can understand their story with either of those lineups. Or, you may go in a different direction, and interpret the story as Comte and Mitsuki's worlds being equally real, while only the book realm is not. (Perhaps a more natural utilisation of suspension of disbelief -- assume the presented world is real unless stated otherwise).

[Of course, there may be errors to my reasoning. Wouldn't be the first time].

Folklore

Ha! Because, of course, I had to! It is not just any night, oh no, no -- it's Kupala's Night, estival solstice! Many of practices then revolved around water and fire. The belief was that they're supposed to bring health and good fortune, a "good beginning".

The first reference to it is made in words: Water and fire – he has b o t h.

The referenced traditions include:

setting flower wreaths to float down the river stream (Abel obtaining Mitsuki's wreath would allow for them to function as a pair),

dancing around the fires,

jumping over bonfires,

searching for the fern flower.

Fern flower was believed to bloom only on that night. It was supposed to posses the ability to gift one strength, wisdom and prosperity. However, it was said to be guarded by demons and other creatures...

They will meet again – there, or in another tale, perhaps on the moon where Twardowski takes his residence, below the hut standing on one leg, or deep within the mountain’s guts… Wherever.

This bit, on the other hand, references other stories they could meet within - the story of Twardowski, Baba Yaga, or... The last one is a fairly generic allusion, but it could mean such things as the legend of knights sleeping below Giewont.

Characterisation

I'd like to focus a little bit on Abel here, since he's not acting exactly like his usual in-game self... But then again, the circumstances are quite different, aren't they?

He may be a count. He may be an immortal vampire. He may possess riches and influence, but in this particular scenario, the one thing he wants will stay outside his reach for as long as he doesn't put in effort to obtain it... And since he cares so much, I believe he'd do anything to actually put in said effort, even if it was to be disruptive to him. He'd shoulder this burden without a word of complaint, because he loves her so, and he cannot imagine living any other way -- not if it would mean living without her.

My understanding of Abel is that he's extremely caring and loving, with some self-sacrificial tendencies. His lifespan as a vampire and corresponding physical prowess may also lead to outcomes we, as humans, would consider rather drastic -- while for him? He may be just utilising the means he has, while involountarily letting his mask of "just a human" slip.

On that note, whether their story is sad or a joyous one may also be dependent on which side one looks at it from. Le Comte may experience time differently from Mitsuki... But what could be seen as optimistic is that she will also "hunt" for books, so that they can meet again. He is not alone in his search.

#behind the scenes

[sugurus-slxt]

Haikyuu Boys Walking In On You Dancing (smexy edition)

Lineup: Tsukishima Kei, Azumane Asahi, Kozume Kenma, Yamamoto Taketora and Oikawa Tōru.

Warning: cursing, one mention of alcohol, and suggestive smexy content

A/Note: So yes two in a day, I was extra motivated y’all don’t question it. It’s probably because it’s been so long. The songs are just what I like to listen to, m sorry.

Tsukishima Kei

♬♩♪♩ Sean Paul – She Doesn’t Mind ♩♪♩♬

Tsukishima was looking for his bluetooth headphones everywhere because he was positive he had left them on the couch, in the living room. However, they seemed to have grown legs and walked elsewhere, he joked to himself. “Y/N! Shorty! Have you seen my headphones?” he called loudly but no response. He walked through the house shouting your name but you were nowhere to be found. Tsukishima glanced at the clock on the wall; it read 4:30PM. He considered maybe you had been outside, possibly reading a book which you often did.

He was right; there you were blanket laid on the grass with the long-forgotten book and you standing up dancing with his headphones. You hadn’t seen him yet and he had considered stopping you but he just couldn’t. Kei stood at the door admiring the way your hips rolled and body moved. He wondered what you were listening to make you dance this way, so beautifully, so erotically. Tsukishima wasn’t much of a dancer but he’d love to be body to body with you right now. He had clearly gotten a bit too excited and the tent in his pants was proof. His cheeks burned red in embarrassment, you still dancing, unaware of his presence.

He quietly crept up behind you gently clasping his hands around your waist. You jumped a bit, immediately lowering the headphones. “I was looking for those you know,” he whispered lowly in your ear. “I- I’m sorry you can have them back now,” you apolgise trying to turn around. He held your body still, pressing his closer to yours. Then you felt it, the hardness pressed against your back, “But I want something else now. Hmmmm. Care to help me with it shortcake?” he asked his hands finding his way below your shirt, caressing your chest and brushing over your nipples. “K- Kei we’re outside. S-someone could see,” you tried reasoning.

“Really… Hmm you didn’t seem to mind a few seconds ago. So unless you want the neighbors to get a perfect view of your body being wrecked which I’m sure they wouldn’t mind get your ass on the bed upstairs right now,” he said biting your ear, eliciting a whimper from you. “I- y-yes sir,” you reply, pulling yourself from his grasp to go upstairs, he followed closely behind.

Azumane Asahi

♬♩♪♩ Bailando – Enrique Iglesias ♩♪♩♬

Asahi was busy at work in his office; with a tight deadline and 3 designs to perfect every waking hour was spent working. But he’s been staring at the blank page for the past 20 minutes with no breakthrough and it’s not because he couldn’t come up with anything, he just couldn’t concentrate. Why? Because right now you were just outside his door in the living room blasting music. It’s not like you meant to disturb him or had forgotten either, he just didn’t tell you.

He knows you’d insist on staying up to ungodly hours with him as he finished his designs so he told you he’d be in bed shortly, he just had some papers to sign. He hoped you would go to sleep but nope. Asahi wanted to leave you to your music he truly did, he knew you were happiest when you’re dancing and enjoying yourself but he wanted to enjoy it with you. The faster he finished the faster he could come and be with you, so he decided to tell you.

“Hey-,” the words died in his throat as his eyes landed on you. Asahi considered retreating to his office right now but he couldn’t move. You hadn’t heard him and he was kind of glad you didn’t. Your hips swayed to the beat, moving in just the right way, his eyes didn’t leave you. Your clothes hugged your body just right even if they were just sleepwear. Was that really what you wore to sleep he thought? If he had noticed all this sooner he was sure your nights would end a much different way. Asahi’s face flushed red; he cursed himself for thinking such inappropriate thoughts.

Your hands trailed up your body that was moving to the music as you finally turned to see him. “Oh! Hey, honey. I didn’t see you there,” you paused the music and walked up to him. “I- I wanted you to turn down the music. I- mean if that’s alright,” he said scratching his neck. “Yeah yeah. I’m sorry honey. Lemme do that and you can get back to your work,” you pulled his hand to your lips placing a kiss on them, and walking back to the speaker. “W-wait could you umm maybe help me with something. It's fine if you can’t,” he waved his hands in front of him. You look down to find a very turned-on Asahi and chuckled, “Mmmm Of course honey. Maybe next time you can join me dancing. I didn’t know you liked it so much.” Asahi hid his face in his hands as he followed you to the bedroom.

Kenma Kozume

♬♩♪♩ LUV – Tory Lanez ♩♪♩♬

Kenma was busy working a TikTok Livestream because his followers and subscribers have been bombarding his inbox with messages to get one. He was currently in the process of making sure everything was in order as people started popping in and saying hi. You were in the bedroom trying to strike up some inspiration but instead, you got so caught up in the music. Meanwhile, Kenma was telling them about his day but the chat was blowing up with questions so he had skipped over to answer them.

About an hour had passed and he was getting a bit hungry so he decided to headed over to the kitchen, phone in hand to get some apple pie from the fridge. Everyone started commenting typical Kodzuken, a couple people suggested that he ask you if you wanted any. His fan base was very familiar with your presence and often asked for ideas where he would interact with you. The community loved seeing the softer side of Kenma that came out when you were around. His phone was turned to face you so everyone could see you when he entered.

Not even five seconds after he opened the door he closed it. “Hey guys, ummm I need to go. I’ll come back later. Kodzuken out,” he quickly ended the stream and turned off his phone. “Hey, baby. Are you ok?” you peeked out from the door one side of your bluetooth earbuds still in. His face was tinted pink as he pushed you into the room, “I- Kitten … umm my fan base just saw… they … well how you were dancing and I-,” you stopped him pulling him to lay his head on your lap. “I’m sorry baby, but it’s nothing special. Was I bad?” You ask while stroking his hair but he sat straight up. “No! I mean no, you weren’t bad. It was just,” he played with his fingers, “It was just really seductive and it's that’s not really for my fan base to see. “

“Oh? Then who is it for then? Hmmm,” you asked in a teasing manner. He was embarrassed but still confidently answered, “For me ok. It’s for me now stop teasing me ok,” he pouted turning away from you. You giggled, “I’m sorry but maybe you want me to continue. For you alone that is?” He thought about it but then his stomach growled, “Ok I do but maybe eat some apple pie with me first?” You nodded and you both headed to the kitchen but don’t think he forgot about your suggestion.

Yamamoto Taketora

♬♩♪♩ Fast Wine – Machel Montano ♩♪♩♬

Today had gone by pretty slow, and you spent it watching movies and just spending time with Yamamoto. But now it was a bit later and you were feeling some creative juices flowing so you decided to put that to use you grabbed your stuff and set it up at the kitchen counter. He decided to up Kenma’s offer to play some games. About two hours had gone by and your shoulder was getting pretty sore. The playlist was pretty upbeat and just as you had gotten up a dance-worthy song had begun to play. You thought maybe it’d be a good warm-up.

You were swaying your body to the beat and getting in the rhythm. Your hips moved freely as you dragged your hand over your body and fit your dancing to the nature of the song. What you didn't know, is as soon as you started to dance Taketora was coming to get some snacks and check up on you. But his plans changed when he saw you dancing, he froze. If he went back now he’d definitely have to take a cold shower and he saw no difference if he stayed. So he decided to enjoy it for a bit. His cheeks were lightly dusted pink and the situation in his pants was only getting harder.

He felt weird just standing there, kind of like he was being a creep so he decided to quickly run to the kitchen and run back as the song came to a close. “H-hey baby. Just getting a snack and heading back,” he said hurriedly. “Oh ok. Did you enjoy the view?” you quirked your eyebrow smirking at him. “W-what? I didn’t see anything just you baby always se- I mean beautiful as ever,” he turned away from you and opened the fridge. You slowly walk up behind him, and start climbing your fingers up his arms, “Really nothing? I guess that’s too bad, I wanted to know what you thought. Guess I just have to assume it was terrible.”

“Wait! Baby your dancing is really amazing and sexy! How could you say it’s bad!” he shouted covering his face in realisation of what he just said. You burst out in a fit of laughter, it was so easy to get him to admit things, “Babe I’m sorry but I’m glad you like it. I didn’t know how much you saw I only caught you down to the end. But I’m glad you like it I but I do see that your little friend down there liked it much more.” You pointed down to his crotch which he covered while flushing bright red. “I’m sorry I- umm I’ll take care of it,” he apologised turning to leave. “How about we both have a shower and I can fix it for you hmm,” you held his hand and whispered in his ear. “Y-yes p-please. Thank you,” he looked down blushing as you led him to the bathroom.

Oikawa Tōru

♬♩♪♩ Hips Don’t Lie – Shakira ♩♪♩♬

Oikawa was gone for practice and you decided it’d be fun to catch up with your friends because it had been a while. You were on a video call and you guys had started talking about music and gotten into a bit of details about dancing. So now you and all your friends were showing their wining and grinding skills. This was a rather normal occurrence because in all honestly things always got wild between you guys. Put the three of you in a club and all eyes would be on you in no time. It was always a surprise how a couple shots could go such a long way.

You were going off to this song, all the seductive movements, hands dragging over the dips of your body and your hips moving at just the right tempo. Tōru had forgotten his water bottle and came back only to find you dancing. Turned on was an understatement but his time in Brazil gave him experience in more than one way and he was going to use that. This man was not shy but he did wait for the right moment to jump in. He came up behind you resting his hands on your waist, guiding your movement with his. “Hey cutie, moving that beautiful body of yours I see,” he whispered in your ear gently biting it. “You startled me,” you smiled still dancing as you put your arms back against his chest and dragged your body down his, slowly coming back up.

He started placing kisses on your neck, “Mmmm m sorry, fuck I’m not gonna make it to practice baby.” He twirled you away from his body only to bring you back and dip you. He smiled and pulled you up for a kiss. Suddenly, whistles and claps erupted, “Shit- I forgot I was talking to them.” He chuckled as they asked where they can find themselves an Oikawa Tōru. “Well ladies there’s only one and I don’t think Y/N-chan is sharing,” giving them a wink.

“Well, I don’t know you cause a lot more problems than fix them,” you joke as he clutched his chest. “How rude Y/N-chan! Maybe I’ll take your friends up on their offer then,” he crossed his arms and pouted childishly. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re all mine mister, and now what’s that about not going to practice. What did you have in mind?” you asked ending the call with your friends. He didn’t reply, just grabbed you by the waist and placed you on his lap, earning a small squeak from you.

Tell me if you'd like to see anyone else for this? Whether it's MHA or Haikyuu, maybe even Jujutsu Kaisen.

If you liked my writing, maybe you’d like to buy me a coffee?

#oikawa haikyuu #yamamoto taketora #oikawa tooru #kenma kozume #asahi azumane #kei tsukishima #haikyuu tsukishima #tsukishima smut #Sar.writes #oikawa smut #kenma smut #haikyuu taketora #yamamoto smut #asahi smut #haikyuu hcs #oikawa hcs #tsukishima headcanons #asahi headcanons #yamamoto headcanons #kenma headcanons #oikawa headcanons #tsukishima hcs #haikyuu smut #haikyuu fluff

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

big dump of random screenshots + things i noticed when replaying dr ch2 yesterday (big spoilers under the cut, obviously. also it’s long)

if you check the sink before you leave for school, you get this “*(It is not yet time to wash your hands.)”, which is new, referencing this chapter’s ending

susie’s surprised sprite, nothing unusual about it i just think it’s hilarious

kris’ room in ralsei’s castle and in their regular house have a lot of similarities! down to the shelves above the bed and the Delta Rune rug on the floor. (isn’t that a holy symbol? lol) except here, the shelves are full and the Delta Rune’s triangles are susie/ralsei/kris colored!

also, there’s stars drawn on the walls in the dark world room, like the glow-in-the-dark stars around asriel’s bed in the normal room. it’s so many similarities you kind of wonder how... ralsei got all those details right

susie seems so surprised when she hears about and then actually sees her room :( like it’s something super new to her

also her rug is rude buster patterned lol

this Time For Adventure lineup. what a crew

ralsei’s angry face shkjshkjsh

in annoying mouse room 3, the one where noelle becomes immune to mice, she’s slowly spelling out ILOVEMOUSE as she jumps on buttons, which is a cute little detail

another spelling puzzle detail! when berdley is remembering the spelling bee, where noelle locked up and couldn’t speak and he won, the word she got frozen on is “DECEMBER.” i didn’t get a screenshot (kind of hard, considering the buttons are broken up over a very wide space) but when you’re walking alone with noelle, and she talks about how she kind of likes scary things and how she feels about the dark world while you both press buttons to lower forcefields for each other, the word she’s slowly spelling out is... DECEMBER. which i think represents that she feels comfortable here/with kris and is sort of getting over her anxiety? idk but it’s another cute detail

i know plenty of games have piano minigames but in my heart this is a reference to the piano secret puzzle from undertale. also what is it with kris and playing the piano lol

:(

this is a joke from chapter 1! right after you get assigned susie as a partner, when you’re sent to get chalk, if you talk to other kids in class temmie will tell you that suie is “very mean” and “said egg... never hatch!!” (because it’s hardboiled.) i guess susie was later like “...but will it?”

all the addisons will say variations of this if you go and talk to them after the spamton fight.

also hey shit how did i not notice before that spamton is like, obviously an addison (or used to be, at least)? general face structure + obsession with advertising and making sales. hhhuh

graffiti on the wall in the dog room

what

that looks like one of the trees from the first dark world, unless i’m mistaken?

huh

the head butler in queen’s mansion (can’t remember his name right now) mentions that people are very jealous of his stylish, monochrome look “with the colored glasses” and some people will “go so far as to impersonate [him] in order to get the...”

i’d bet anything he’s referring to spamton and the emptydisk/neo shell. like, look at them. 

once again, when you cut to susie’s pov for a section, ralsei and kris are talking about something when you come back. it’s almost the exact same dialogue as chapter 1′s jail sequence (”...so that’s why, okay, kris?”)

were they talking about the same thing?

ralsei stop procedurally looping your dialogue it’s gauche

this room is generated from search results so apparently noelle’s looking up fashion just to stare at it? i bet it’s something similar to how susie dresses/more “rebellious” and she either isn’t allowed to wear it bc her mother, or bc she’s too nervous

i believe this exact flavor text, or some variation of it, appears in jevil’s fight as well? the only other similarity these two have is that they’re shadow crystal bosses... so there’s something about shadow crystals, strong/hidden enemies, and “freedom.”

is that what kris is chasing here?

unfamiliar humans make kris nervious for some reason

i didn’t get a screenshot of it but susie never actually calls her parents at the end of the chapter... toriel tells her to after she agrees to stay over, and susie walks over to the phone until toriel leaves and then immediately nopes out of there and jumps on the couch to watch tv

aaaand that’s basically everything i’ve found! except for some dumb details i didn’t feel were interesting enough to include here. all in all... there are a Lot of seeds being planted here, gonna be fun to see what grows :0

#the nemesis speaks #deltarune #deltarune game #deltarune spoilers #deltarune alternate route spoilers #swift plays deltarune #might make a post with a collection of spamton stuff once we get a little further out from release date #but by then people will have probably found way more already lmao

[writingsfromhome]

Water under the Bridge (Josslyn II)

A/N: Okay! Here it is!!!! This was fun and made my heart hurt a little but maybe I’m just being emotional. And can you guys believe it’s been over a year since I posted Josslyn?? Where has the time gone?? I don’t think we’re on the sacred timeline anymore........Anyway thank you anon who suggested this storyline, and hope y’all enjoy! <3

Josslyn (Original)

------

We’re going to have the best weekends evr, Regan texts me even though she’s just in the other room. Schedules were released for our summer semester and Regan and I had managed to get Fridays off. Summer was going to be so fun, and after two years doing college together we were experts at managing our workload to have fun on the weekends--even if that meant sacrificing a few nights’ sleep.

We’ll make summer our bitch, I text back. I hear a chuckle from her room.

Help me pick out a fit? she texts. I want to tell her Adam would love her in whatever, but I head to her room instead and watch her try on a dozen outfits before settling on the second. I tease her about Adam--they were going steady since first year, but she still got so nervous about him sometimes. Adam’s college was a train ride away so he would come down at least one weekend a month.

As for my own love life, there’d been no one steady. I did the whole hooking up and dating scene in first year but I was romantically burnt out by second. Nowadays, I could go home with someone if I chose to, but I also didn’t mind if I didn’t. My active endeavor to find a boyfriend had stopped when I realized I was trying to fill a gap. Instead, I was learning to be happy on my own.

“Are you sure I can’t convince you?” Regan asks. She was taking the train to Adam’s college and staying with him, there was this big start-of-summer party and she’d been trying to convince me for weeks.

“I don’t feel like being a third wheel,” I tell her honestly.

“You don’t have to!” She goes over her one argument again. “Gaelle’s roommate isn’t even back until next week so she has a spare room! She said you should come. Plus,” she ties her hair up, “it’s the weekend before the semester starts so have some fun.”

I make a noise, and she turns to look at me, totally judging me. It makes me laugh. “That’s why my version of fun is to.binge Netflix and-”

“Y/N!” She groans.

“Fine! I’ll go.”

Two words that would change everything.

***

By the time we get to the campus, Regan and I had come up with a dozen things we could potentially do this summer. I’m high on excitement as we meet up with Gaelle, and the three of us head to Adam’s place.

The sun is almost set by the time we leave, most of the sky is dark but a streak of orange stays stubbornly on the horizon. I pause to take pictures before we’re rushing off.

We approach the frat house--if you could call it that. It was half glass with a very modern structure. The greek symbol on the side of the house was the only indicator it wasn’t a millionaire’s summer-house.

“Since when did frat houses get so modern?” I ask. “This is...nice.”

“Wait ‘til you see inside,” Adam says. And he was right, even the drinks were fancier with their own guy behind the bar...although he was taking the occasional shot and getting progressively drunk.

We settle in an area close to the music and get swept up into the party atmosphere. Some people were beyond drunk already and I enjoyed the slight buzz of the drink in my hand. The views from inside with floor-to-ceiling windows were amazing.

Pretty soon, Adam and Regan break off. We move towards the centre of the party where the typical party shenanigans were happening. We tip back our drinks and pretty soon I’m straddling the line between tipsy and drunk. I find a cute boy with blonde hair and deep brown eyes and makeout with him until he gets too handsy.

“Ugh!” I give him one last shove and look for Gaelle but I’d lost her too. I search for a bathroom but they’re either occupied or have a lineup. This was a huge ass house, one of the bedrooms had to have one.

I open the first door to shouting.

“It’s called locking the door!” I shout drunkenly as I close it. The next room actually is locked, and the next one isn’t but I wish it was. “Eugh.”

I climb up to the topmost level, three doors--one was locked with the sound of people inside and the second is a bathroom. I was grateful people hadn’t made it up this far.

As I wash up, and touch up the mascara that was crusting under my eyes the door shakes as someone bangs on it from the other side.

“Dip! What the fuck are you doing in there? Everyone’s waiting for you!”

My heart pounds at the sudden noise and the deep voice demanding me to open up. The rush of adrenaline sobers me for a moment as I rush to open the door, “Sorry I didn’t realise anyone was...waiting.”

My words slow down and freeze altogether as I realise the fist banging on the door belonged to...him. Harry. He seems just as surprised as me, straightening up before a smile slowly inches across his face, it was almost sweet bordering on predatory. “Y/N!”

“Hi,” I say awkwardly. There was a lot of history and also not at all. I was also, I decide, too drunk for this. Act sober, this is not the night to run into this fucker.

“You-you’re the last person I was expecting to--excuse me it’s... good to see you! You look--you look as beautiful as ever!”

The events from high school that created this tense history between Harry and I was one of the worst things possible to happen to teenage Y/N. The thing is though, that I’d totally bounced back after I had decided he could fuck himself. Although it was awkward seeing him every day until graduation, it made me tougher. I credit it for making me so casual about relationships now...I stopped expecting so much of the boys I saw.

But leaving high school behind, my world expanded with college, I realised how childish it had all been: I’d had a fling with a player, and he’d played the field...It wasn’t that deep. But seeing him now, It made me aware in a way I wasn’t for a long time. Maybe what they said about distance had some merit. Or maybe I was just buzzed.

“Thanks...I wasn’t expecting you either.”

“You don’t uh, you don’t go here do you? I’ve never seen you around.”

“No,” I look out to the small hall but there’s no one there. The room that was previously locked is slightly ajar carrying male voices. “Adam goes here, I’m...with Regan.”

“Ah, Regan.” He smiles. “You’re still two peas in a pod?”

“Obviously,” The stiffness eases at the mention of my best friend. “So...can I get out of here?”

“Yeah sorry,” he moves aside so I can step into the hall. “Um, we’re playing video games in here room if you...you’re probably not interested.”

I clear my throat, Harry was playing video games when there was a party downstairs? I was curious, that maybe he changed.

“Oh,” he laughs and the dimples I adored make an appearance. “I’ve still got it! My frat just hosts too many parties for me to keep track.”

I guess I said that out loud, I bite my tongue but it really has a life of it’s own. “Did you jussay you still got it?” Oh my god, I was teasing him already. What about Harry made me absolute putty.

“Yeah,” he looks almost bashful. “Uhm, go easy I’m a little nervous here Y/N.”

I don’t know what to say to that, I bite my lip so nothing stupid comes out.

“So you’re just here for the night?” He carries on.

“Staying over with a friend,”

“A fr-” he cuts himself off, pressing his lips together. I realize I’m staring and look away.

“I should go-”

“Wait I-wait uh, how have you been? I haven’t seen you in years.”

“Yea,” I play with the rings on my fingers. “M’good, great. College’s a lot better than high school.”

“It’s not even comparable,” Harry says as he leans his shoulder against the wall. He looks perfectly placed there, and a tipsy voice flashes inappropriate thoughts into my head. “So...any...boyfriends?”

“Um,” that was direct. “No. No, I’m trying out being single...”

“Did something happen?” His expression is still casual but he holds himself rigid.

“No? A girl can’t be single?”

“Sure but someone like you...I’m just surprised.”

“Whatever that means,” I roll my eyes and head past him to go down but he blocks my way.

“Wait, I didn’t mean to offend you...” his voice dies out as I cross my arms. “I also didn’t mean to block you in.”

He steps aside and it feels painful to me but I take the small steps towards the staircase. One part of me--I blame the tipsy stupid part, wants to kiss him just to see if there was still something there, see if anything’s changed. The other was listing all the reasons this was an awful idea, to top it off he was a proven player, has broken my trust once before, and went to a school almost 2 hours from mine.

“Y/N,” Harry’s gruff voice says from behind me. My feet turn without permission and he’s right behind me. “M’sorry. Let me start over.”

I glance at his lips, damn. I can’t meet his eye suddenly. Oh god, I was still pretty tipsy. My mind short-circuits and all I can do is turn back to walk away, down the two sets of stairs, past sweaty bodies and loose limbs. In a great coincidence I bump into Gaelle in what looks like a game room.

“Harry goes here?” I ask--shout at her immediately. Her eyes widen, something passes over her face. “Was no one going to tell me he was going to be here?”

“I’m sorry!” She shouts. “I forgot you two had history!”

“I just wish I was prepared,” I say and she doesn’t hear, I just shake my head when she asks me to repeat. I needed another drink, and Regan. Maybe she could remind me why I stopped caring about him.

As I set off to find her, I’m reminded again how stupid this all was. High school was an ancient dream, we were all different people. I was a different person.

But even though what happened in high school was petty and juvenile, I remember how Harry made me feel. How it felt when we were together--even if it was a joke for him back then, I couldn’t forget the feeling of being seen. Of having arms to fall into, even if I knew they weren’t permanent.

“Regan!” I find her sitting on the dining table while Adam spoke with someone else. Her eyes alight and she waves me over. “I saw him! He...he goes here!”

“Who?” Confusion strings her brows together.

“Harry! From...you know Harry! He was upstairs! I--I didn’t know how to act.”

“Shit Harry! I forgot he went here!”

“You knew?” I throw my hands up.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal! He’s a dick but that was high school?”

“No I-” I sigh. “You’re supposed to tell me he’s still a dick! I saw him and it just got...complicated.”

Regan slides off the table and pulls me into a side hug, we can also hear each other better. “You’re a big kid now, do whatever you want Y/N. Tell him off, kiss his face, take revenge, who the fuck cares? We’re taking the train two hours home after this anyway!”

She had a point. But still...he couldn’t have changed much from the boy who hurt me.

“Adam hangs out with him sometimes,” Regan continues. “Apparently he’s not as bad as high school. He’s...mellowed out.”

“Unreal,” I roll my eyes. Adam was just covering for his friend. We hear a cheer go up behind us and Regan bulges her eyes as two guys help Adam up on his hands to do a keg stand.

Regan swears and heads back to him. I walk away, somehow feeling more and less confused after talking to Regan--do I go back up and see what this leftover emotion was, or ignore it as a drunken need for comfort?

But it’s like the decision is made for me when a hand wraps around my arm as I move from the dining area to the kitchen. I already know it’s him before I turn.

“Can we talk?” he asks. I nod and his grip loosens, slipping down into my palm. “Upstairs?” He motions to the staircase and we climb up the two flights. This time he leads me into one of the locked doors and although I’ve never been here, I’d been in some version of this room before. It’s familiar.

I ignore the ache when he lets go of my hand once we’re inside. I set my drink down on his desk and perch on the window ledge, it’s not big enough to sit on but has enough space for a few of his books and a speaker. His room’s pretty near, but then again Harry was never messy.

“So what do you want-” I start just as he says “Let me get this off my chest.”

“Go ahead,” I cross my arms before uncrossing them, and then crossing them again. With the way he ruffles his hair and crosses to the door and back, he seems just as nervous.

“You can leave at any time. I just want to say I was an asshole, I still kind of am sometimes. And I’m sorry for what I did to you. I know it’s like what--2 years late but all that with...Josslyn and all that...I’m sorry.”

Hearing her name makes me want to grind my teeth but I let the feeling pass. I reach for my drink instead to give me something to do. “It’s all water under the bridge.”

“Really?” Harry regards me suspiciously. “Because the way you were talking to me out there...”

“You’re just you,” I shrug. “Harry Styles, player and sweet-talker. I was just guarding myself against that.”

“Because of what happened between us?”

“No...maybe. I don’t know. But honestly, I’m not upset with you. It feels like an eternity ago. I guess it’s just self-preservation.”

“I guess,” he echoes. “So where does that leave us? If you’re all self-preserved?”

I eye him but he cracks a smile, he was teasing me. “It doesn’t have to leave us anywhere,” I snort. “We’re water under the bridge Harry...”

“My parents split,” he says suddenly and I’m reeling with the direction he’s taken. I open my mouth, and close it when nothing comes out. “Sorry, I know that’s random it’s just I never really talked to anyone about how they were rarely home and when they were they were always arguing a-and we spoke about it a lot. About our families so I just...”

“I’m sorry to hear that, do they still live in town?” I ask, wanting to put my hand on his or show him I cared but they stay glued to my drink.

“My mom moved into the city, it’s closer to her job and since I’m not living at home anymore it doesn’t really matter...”

“You still go home?” I ask.

“I don’t even know where home is?” He looks at me then, and the look in his eyes chips at the wall I’d been trying to build all night. Things had changed, for him.

“Are you--do you have someone to talk to?”

His laugh is dry, “They split last summer, convinced me to talk to some therapist. I don’t know if it really helped I think I’m actually better off. They’re better off and I just feel...free.”

I don’t know what to say to that so I stay quiet. He looks back up at me then, cracks his knuckles, before perching on his bed. “I’m just--sorry I’m not telling you that so you can feel sorry for me-”

“I don’t I just-”

“No it’s okay I just want to tell you that because you knew about that stuff. But I’m trying to tell you I’m not the same guy. Not completely, I’m just trying to tell you things changed and so have I.”

It echoes the same sentiment I had earlier in his conversation, and I remember Regan said he’s mellowed out. Maybe it was true. It still didn’t mean I was going to get together with him anytime soon but my heart hurts for him. I walk up to where he sits, he watches me with a steady gaze.

In the quiet, I hear the party going on outside the window, three floors below us. If I listen really carefully, I can hear sounds coming from the video game being played next door. In the stillness, I reach for Harry’s hand and he obliges, grasping mine.

“I wish I could...help you with the hurt. Not knowing where to call home is pretty shitty.”

“Don’t worry about me Y/N,” he pastes on his classic smile and I return one for his sake. It was getting heavy in here. “I’m just happy I got to talk to you. And I just found out you don’t hate me so...” he holds our intertwined hands and shakes it. “woo hoo!” I laugh as we let go.

“I guess I should go back to the party.”

“Yeah, okay. I won’t keep you.”

“Okay,” I’m a little stung he doesn’t suggest I stay a little longer. Maybe it was all in my head, maybe his intentions really were to make amends and that’s it. I pick my drink up from his windowsill and move to the door. I glance back before I go, he’s laying on his bed deep in thought, gazing up at the ceiling. I close the door behind me.

***

I wake the next morning, surprisingly well. I can’t say the same for Gaelle who’d passed me her keys at some point and told me she’d be home late. I spent the rest of the party trailing Regan until I decided I should just go crash. Harry hadn’t come out to find me, and I tried to hide the sour feeling, excusing myself early.

“Fuck me,” Gaelle croaks from her bed when I step into her open doorway.

“How about coffee, and pancakes?” I ask, returning the favor of being able to sleep here.

“I’ll take it,” she flops back into bed. I busy myself with measuring coffee and water, my thoughts occupied with everything Harry and I had been through since we last saw each other. I demonized him for so long, humanizing him is harder to swallow.

What he’d done to me was shitty, there was no denying. But had he really changed? And most importantly, why did I care so much? It’s not like he was the one.

My phone rings: Regan. She’s talking so fast I hardly hear her, only really understand that it was a party ritual to gather in the student centre the morning after a big party. Endless coffee and free food seemed to be the general consensus for a party cure.

“I don’t know if I can make it there,” Gaelle says when I tell her. “I was hoping for pancakes at home.”

“I already put the coffee on but I’m hauling your ass there if you’re not up in 5. Our train leaves after noon anyway and it’s closer to the college.”

Slowly but surely Gaelle emerges and we make our way, spotting Regan easily as the bright spot in a sea of college students in PJs and last night’s clothing. She’s the only one fully dressed, with a full face of makeup on.

“I didn’t drink that much,” she shrugs when we settle around her and Adam’s friends. “Unlike some people.” She looks pointedly at Adam who’s slumped where he sits. I remember the kegger and laugh.

Life soon flows back into the group around us as does the coffee and breakfast foods. I’m relaxed in the environment until I look down the tables to where Harry stands, looking back at me. He raises a hand and I do the same until an extremely tall angel--she was literally wearing a halo, probably from last night-walks up to him and wraps her hands around his waist. She says something to him and he tears his gaze away.

I look down at my cup immediately, my cheeks burning with humiliation. I’d been thinking about him all this time, thinking about how it might feel if I kissed him and of course he had a girlfriend. She never came up, but he never said he didn’t either. He didn’t make any moves on me yesterday, if I looked at it he only made an attempt to talk. Sure he was flirty but that was just Harry and I...I was a fool. I was such a fool. Things may have changed for him but he hadn’t. He was still the same Harry who chose Josslyn over me. He would always have a girlfriend, I was just the girl from his past who he could trust. I couldn’t say the same about him.

“What’s wrong,” my best friend nudges me. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I don’t know,” I look into her concerned eyes. “I’m just going to--I’ll be right back.”

I head out and find the closest washroom. The tears are instant and I let myself cry--out of frustration, humiliation, or some twisted sense of betrayal...it was all the same for me. I check the time, I just had to hold myself together and avoid Harry for another 2 hours before we were back on the train home. I would tell Regan everything then.

*** Three weeks later ***

“If Adam’s over later...” Regan trails off. She’s sprawled on my bed while I sit in my desk chair trying to read one more chapter before I close the books for the week.

“I have my earplugs ready and a second place to stay,” I roll my eyes. “I already told Kiara I might crash on her couch.”

“I owe you,” she jumps back up.

“You owe me like, 7 and a half.”

“7 and a half?”

I’m about to answer but a knock on our door has her racing out. I try to ignore the voices, I just had two more pages I had to get through--the joy of summer classes.

“Y/N?: Regan’s voice is a whisper. “We’re going now but...you have a guest. If you want me to kick his ass I totally can though.”

Standing behind her is Harry. I focus on him, yes it really was him. Why was he here?

“Harry?” I sound confused because I am. He’s wearing a plain white t-shirt and jeans, and he’d traveled 2 hours just to get here.

“He wouldn’t leave me alone,” Adam says louder as they leave the room. “I’m sorry Y/N...”

“What is this?” I ask. My feelings are at war with each other, I was still feeling slighted by the last time we saw each other but seeing his face was also an exciting surprise.

“I wanted to see you,” Harry says nervously. He still stays at my bedroom door.

“You can come in...” I stand up and realize I was wearing an oversize t-shirt and the scruffiest PJ shorts I owned. “Phones have cameras now, you didn’t have to come all this way.”

He shrugs, taking one step in. “I liked seeing you in person last time. But I feel like we left it wrong.”

He knows I saw him, what conclusions I must have come to. It wouldn’t be that hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We talked it out.”

He comes to life, “Don’t play dumb Y/N I know you saw me with...I know what you thought and-”

“Did you really come all this way to explain that you had a girlfriend? Like, three weeks later?”

“No that’s the thing-”

“Because that’s kind of dumb. And unnecessary-”

“No listen!” He says a bit louder so I do. “The thing is she wasn’t my girlfriend...we’d hung out a few times but she saw me at the caf and got clingy. We’re not an item honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had a girlfriend-.”

“So why are you here?” My voice is higher than usual. I was confused, and upset, and I wanted him to leave. This was starting to sound like Josslyn part 2.

“You know why I’m here. Y/N I’ve been nothing but a dick to you and I know I don’t deserve you but I really like you. I want to clear the air, and ask you if you can see something here I...”

He trails off when he notices the tears trailing down my cheek. It’s just too much for me, as I finally face the emotions from that weekend. I’d shoved them aside after Regan had gotten onto the train worried her and Adam were headed towards a breakup. I’d put aside what happened and never thought about it. But my heart broke a little that morning. 

I knew what I knew: maybe Harry and I weren’t good for each other but we were good with each other. In an attempt not to get hurt I’ve been distancing myself from romantic connections--I found more of myself in doing this, but a part of me was missing without exploring it.

Harry moved closer until we’re nearly touching. I wipe my tears with my shoulder and we stand still on the hardwood floors of my room. An eternity passes before he reaches out to wipe the tear caught in my lashes. I close my eyes to his touch, scared of how much I wanted it.

“Y/N,” my name is a breath on his lips and it makes my heart stutter. My eyes open in slow motion, seeing him so vulnerable right in front of me, and suddenly things speed up and we’re reaching for each other; two waves crashing until they become one.

***

I don’t know how much time had passed in minutes, Adam and Regan are still out but Harry and I had fallen together and crashed apart so many times that I’m dizzy with it.

“You’re wonderful,” he says as we face each other, our noses just nearly touching. He trails a finger down my cheek. “Just...incredible.”

I feel the flush spread through me, “Great vocab Styles. We’re really using the big words.”

“Words are sort of hard right now,” he grins. “My brain’s all mush.”

I laugh, “Not much different to its usual state!”

“I knew you were going to say that!” he tries to reach for me but I skip off the bed with a laugh. “Come back.”

“I have to pee,” I slip on pants and can’t stop grinning the whole time I’m away. When I come back in, the blissful smile on his face tells me everything I need to know. I climb over him but he stops me in place, a knee on either side of his hips.

“I’m happiest when I’m with you Y/N,” he says, his voice roughened with emotion. “I think I always was. Younger Harry liked to self-sabotage.”

I bend down and my hair slips around us. The way he looks at me makes my insides mush. And even though I have proof of why I shouldn’t trust him, he’s here. In my bed. Miles away from where he would be if he hadn’t traveled all this way to see me. And that means something.

“I’m glad you’ve done some growing,” I say to him quietly.

“I had to,” he says softly. “I couldn’t have you like I do now if I hadn’t.”

“I guess we’ve both grown,” I brush a curl from his forehead.

“I know, old Y/N would have punched me if I showed up unexpectedly.”

“Rightly so,” I grin. He smiles back, brushing my hair behind my ear, back over my shoulder. He props himself on his elbow to kiss the shoulder he’d bared. It’s simple, and sweet, but it’s enough to unravel me all over again. And he knows it.

“When does Regan get home?”

“We might have another half hour,” I grin.

“Let’s not waste it,” he mumbles into my skin.

I agree.

#harry styles #harry styles fanfic #harry styles x reader #series #harry styles series #harry styles fic #harry styles angst #harry styles fluff #harry styles imagine #writingsfromhome #college!harry #I think the idea of growing separately as a young adult #and coming together again as more mature versions of yourself is what #gets me #or maybe I'm emotional because I'm a year older soon #and it's got me thinking about being in your 20s #either way hope this is enjoyable #tag talk out #ps dont mind any inconsistencies i wrote this quick

[ukaiknowsbest]

Review: Tamayomi

[will contain spoilers]

Lately I have been pretty bored with the recent developments in Daiya no A and Oofuri. New Shonen anime stuff just don't appeal to me, so I bit the bullet and watched Tamayomi for at least one episode a day.

Like me, people would normally think "HOW TF ARE THEY GOING TO PLAY BASEBALL? AREN'T THEY WEARING SHORTS??? IS THIS JUST FANSERVICE?? OMYGOD"

But I did it. I watched the whole thing. 12 episodes.

And I enjoyed it.

THE SETUP/PLOT

pretty standard fare

Pitcher Yomi Takeda accidentally reunites with her childhood friend who's actually a nationals-level in middle school catcher when they both end up in the same highschool.

School: former powerhouse located in Saitama, now baseball club is almost non-existent. Yomi and a few other will try to revive the team from scratch.

Basically Shin Koshigaya is a brand new team where they struggle to look for new members and majority are first years.

They have to face other stronger teams even when they have a few members and some decent players.

Demographic is SEINEN (like oofuri, last inning, one outs, etc.)

CHARACTERS

Yomi Takeda as Main character and pitcher- skilled, resilient, funny, hardworking, does a lot of research which enabled her to perfect her form and hone her breaking ball. She keeps improving in a good pace too.

Tamaki Yamazaki former childhood friend of Yomi. Is a decent catcher in middle school. A bit well known. Good communicator.

Yoshino - team manager and coach. srsly she is a boss. She's not infallible but she tries her best.

and other decent players with adequate skill

For a sports anime they have decent cast. This is probably the closest we can currently get of a story where the girls are just focused on the sport, do their own strategizing/planning/training. All of them are cute but also serious about what they do.

There's no boys here so there's no talk about het-crushes and other distractions. It's a clamfest babyyyy.

I've seen a little of Major 2 (the one abt the son and his coed team) and I couldn't stand it because it was just slice of life in sportsy undertones.

There is also decent communication among all the players. It's pretty refreshing to watch. The catcher is well rounded and the pitcher is good. Everyone talk things out and there is not a lot of drama.

FANSERVICE

Wearing shorts to a sport that involves a lot of making contact with the ground is just illogical lmao.

Their school uniform skirt is pretty short

A little bit of their manager prodding the thighs of each person she meets but with good reason (she can tell how much muscle/exercise a person does just by a little prodding). It's a trope thing.

That's all. There are no panty shots, unnecessary locker room nudity, boob action, see through sweaty shirts. Most of the cringy things I've seen in other girls sports anime aren't present.

Eventually I even forget that they're wearing shorts or that it impedes their performance. It seems like it doesn't matter much to the characters so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know if like the hugging or holding hands is considered fanservice. In my experiece we ladies just act like that irl. What they do is nothing out of the ordinary.

REALISM

3/5. They wear shorts and dont tie their hair up. The baseball part seem pretty decent though. The pacing of the story and matches was like watching IRL Koshien. It's all very clinical and straightforward.

Plus they include a lot of interesting baseball stuff which I haven't seen happen in early stages of other shonen anime like: specifically training the pitcher in other positions, showing what fielders yell to each other, letting other relievers start to reserve their ace (ppl can yell DnA did this but remember Tanba was injury boy throughout Act 1).

COMPARISON TO OTHER BASEBALL MANGA

based on technicality Tamayomi is prolly one of the top among baseball anime/manga I have seen.

Last Inning

Oofuri

Tamayomi

Daiya no A

Now don't chase me with pitchforks because of this ranking just yet. The fact that Shin Koshigaya coach's decisions and reasonings for plays and lineups are discussed makes the show at par with Last Inning and Oofuri. (we dont see DnA kataoka talk abt this sht like..ever)

Moreover Tamayomi has similar vibes to Oofuri/Big Windup but less dramatic. I do not think it's good for beginners too (especially with just 12 episodes). You need to have prior baseball knowledge to understand what the characters were doing.

However, this show is probably the most no-fuss baseball anime/manga I have watched. It does not rely on hype like DnA and it also don't have heavy topics like Oofuri and Last Inning. It's not wacky like One Outs and it's not uber slice of life like Cross Game. It's just baseball.

My minor complaint is that they don't give numbers when talking about things like pitching speed tho. It would've been more realistic if actual numbers were dropped XD

ART/ DESIGN/ANIMATION

A.k.a the thing most viewers complain about.

Character design is subpar. Everyone's faces are almost the same. You can tell who's the character not by face but by hair and height. Personally I don't mind this. I don't really look for realism in most things I watch. And I think the hair designs are cool.

Lots of people drop this show because of bad animation. There are shots/scenes where it's like I'm watching fanmade AMV's in nicovideo/youtube from the early 2000's. Pitching motions and Batting motions look like character movements in rpg games.

It's not really a problem for me though. I think it's charming for some reason. I don't mind it. A lot of people do but I'm not them.

CONCLUSION

NGL I wanted more. 12 episodes is too short. I hope a better animation company picks this up. I'm rewatching the whole thing because I enjoyed it a lot. I'll even check out the manga if I have time.

If anyone's interested here's my tamayomi livetweet thread

This is one of the closest thing I could get to what a decent girl sports anime looks like. If the character designs, art, animation and the uniforms were just better this show would have gone pretty far.

Compared to Shonen types of manga this was relaxing to watch, especially before bed. I'd honestly recommend it you wanna watch smth that doesnt involve a lot of feelings and drama but still feel like watching an actual sport.

Girls are fun. Finally.

[personal notes under the cut]

I get that people reading this would think I'm being too optimistic about a show they considered shtty but I kid you not, I dropped Bakuten (boys gymnastic's anime) coz even with it's wonderful animation i thought it was boring af.

I have dropped so many prettily animated shows coz i just cant get into the characters nor the story.

I've also said before in my Two Car review that I am actively avoiding shows with popular VA's. Idk much abt female VA's in anime, therefore watching Tamayomi was the perfect solution for me.

The reason I like tamayomi so much is that it gave me the same feeling of watching Summer Koshien 2021. I just think an anime that made me remember that kind of feeling was cool.

I'll rewatch hanebado next. wish me luck.

#tamayomi #sports anime #baseball anime #girls sports anime #this is prolly the only positive review abt this anime

[uglypastels]

heyy so i lovedd murder on the dancefloor and was just thinking (hoping), since you mentioned you'd want to write more of that au, if you could write a blurb?? reader and tom getting ready for their first live show and her being really nervous so tom tries to calm her down? you'd be the best thank youuuuuu

> aaah yess! i'd love to!! honestly, strictly!au is one of my favs haha and i'm (like i've said) so so happy for the new series to begin!!!!

When the performing order was announced in the morning, all you hoped for was to not to be the first or last that had to dance. Somehow, those two spots felt the heaviest on your chest. To open the very first live show, as well as close it, just seemed to be a bit of too much responsibility.

Luckily, you got to dance as fifth. A pretty reasonable spot in the line-up of 14. Still fairly early, meaning you didn't have to spend the entire night freaking out, and there would still be just enough of others that would need to dance before you.

But there was still a problem. Of course, there was. Turns out, every single position in the lineup is just as terrifying as the others when it comes to Strictly Come Dancing. You were shaking in your dance shoes, the glittery blue dress feeling extremely tight around your body.

The live show would begin any moment now. There were no clocks anywhere around you. Maybe a tactic from the production to make everyone stop focusing on the seconds before the cameras would turn on, but you just felt anxious and restless. It could be a minute or it could be an hour. You had no idea.

"Hey," Tom popped up out of nowhere next to you. His black shirt open almost to the very bottom. He still hadn't decided if he wanted to dance with all the buttons open or leave just a few closed. The purpose of that remained unknown to you, since those two buttons did very little to hide anything, really.

"How are you doing, love?" He was holding a paper cup of coffee. You had wanted to grab a cup too, the caffeine coming in handy when you needed to stay up most of the night for the recordings of the live show and tomorrow's result show, but you were already too jittery. And Tom must have noticed.

"I'm alright," you light, tapping your foot nervously.

"I know you're nervous, y/n," Tom smiled sincerely, "but you really have nothing to worry about. You've trained so hard, and so well, I seriously, and you know I am not making this up, you're the best celeb I've ever danced with."

"That's because I'm the only celeb you've danced with." You rolled your eyes. That was also a thing. You were Tom's first-ever partner on Strictly. You wanted to do him proud, get him to that final, but would you ever even be able to make it past week 2? The thought of standing there, waiting for your name to be called out during the results terrified you. The judges terrified you. Everything terrified you.

"You got this y/n," he took your hand in his.

"I'm just scared," you took a deep breath, swinging your arm from side to side, taking Tom's with you.

"I know it may be scary, but remember, most important thing is that you have fun. If you don't have fun, there's really very little point to it. Besides, there's no elimination this week-"

You opened your eyes at his words. How could you forget there was no elimination in the first week?! You were so busy freaking out over getting kicked off the show that you forgot that the scores of the first two live shows will be combined!

"Oh my god," you felt like you could fall into Tom's arms right there, and so you did. You let your arms drape over his shoulders in an embrace and he didn't hesitate to hug you back (though, carefully, since he still had that hot coffee in his hand).

"You're gonna be brilliant, y/n, I know it." He whispered, the vibrations of his voice coming right up to your ear.

"Thank you," you whispered back. You stayed like that, hugging tightly, for a bit, only releasing when your arms were getting a bit sore from the uncomfortable position (so it didn't take extremely long).

Tom had a big, reassuring smile plastered across his face. He could probably tell that, even though you looked happier, you were still freaking out on the inside.

"So," he took the final sip of his drink and put the cup down on a table, "do you want to do one more run of the routine?"

"How about 3?"

The End

#tom holland #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland x reader #tom holland fluff #tom holland blurb #tom holland au #tom holland fanfic #tom holland imagine #tom holland once shot #tom holland fic #au #strictly!au #dancer!tom #pro dancer!tom