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babyboibucky · 3 years

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The Match - Part 5

Pairing: CEO!Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: You find yourself in the middle of a predicament.

Word Count: 2.3k

Warnings: SMUT as always, sort of public sex??? Unprotected sexy times, emotional damage lmao

A/N: Buckle up, babies!!! You’re in for a rollercoaster ride for this chapter ajckjasncjak I apologize in advance and please don’t hate me

AND BTW if you guys haven’t seen, I found the perfect playlist for this series lmao I saw the title and I was like HOLD UP this is perfect https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Eg5ZH6wMq4iocF5fWSesb?si=aff157a6198a4446

The Match Masterlist || MAIN MASTERLIST

Still awake, baby?

Fuck.

You screamed into your pillow upon reading Bucky’s text. It was quarter to midnight and you couldn’t sleep, especially not after Bucky told you that he wanted to make the relationship official.

It’d only been three months and you felt like he was moving too fast. And when he promised that he would find a way to snatch your heart the old-fashioned way? You wanted to explode because obviously, he already did.

But you weren’t going to say that to someone who already had a huge ego (and cock, too).

You composed yourself and typed in your reply, throwing your phone to your side after sending it.

Yeah. Why are you still up tho?

Not even a minute later and your phone began to ring. You sat up on your bed and squeezed your pillow, hating how Bucky had such an effect on you. Jesus, what are you, a high school student?!

You stared at his name on your screen before swiping and accepting the call.

“What’s up?” You answered as calmly as you could.

Bucky’s low chuckle sounded so fucking sexy that you had to bite your lower lip to prevent a moan from escaping.

“Still working. Can’t concentrate though, I keep remembering how you looked like with my cock in your mouth.”

You exhaled through your nose, “Jesus, you’re insatiable.” You said.

“Only for you, baby. You know that.” He said and your heart did a little somersault inside your chest.

“Don’t stay up too late, you have an early meeting tomorrow, right?” You asked, trying to change the topic because if you didn’t, you were sure how things would go.

Bucky let out another chuckle, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll just finish signing some papers and then I’m off to bed.”

You hummed and laid back down on the bed. It was completely silent but it wasn’t awkward. You heard the shuffling of paper on Bucky’s end, followed by the squeaking of a chair.

“You still there?” Bucky asked.

“Mhmm, you done?” You asked back.

“A few more papers left, baby. Can you wait ‘til I finish?”

There was something about talking to Bucky on the phone like this, so casual and so...mundane. It felt natural and comfortable, to think that this was the first phone conversation you had with him. He only sent you texts previously so this was new, but you had to admit, you loved it.

Bucky heard you yawning and let out a soft laugh. He sounded sleepy too when he spoke, “Almost done.” He reassured.

“Let’s have dinner tomorrow.” He added.

“Yeah, okay. As long as it’s not in the same restaurant we went to after my promotion.” You groaned at the memory.

Bucky snorted, “We’re banned there, babe. Even if I wanted to go back there, they wouldn’t allow it.” He said.

“No shit, Sherlock. We got caught in their bathroom, of course they’ll ban us.” You huffed out.

“I was looking forward to dessert, you know.” You pouted.

“I got my dessert though.” You could hear Bucky’s smug smirk through the phone.

“Are you done?” Bucky whispered into your ear as he placed an arm on the back of the booth.

You shivered at his voice and nodded, grabbing your champagne and drinking it in one go.

“I promised you something, didn’t I? That I’ll give you something right before dessert? Meet me in the bathroom in five. Again, don’t be late.”

And with that, Bucky slid out of the booth and adjusted his suit before leaving for the bathroom. You clutched your heart and waved at the waiter who passed by, requesting for a refill and downing it before following Bucky.

You adjusted the black dress that Bucky bought you, you were surprised at how perfect the fit was. The lovely dress though, made you uncomfortable because of its length and the fact that Bucky still had your panties with him was making you feel even more conscious.

You were immediately pulled into the men’s bathroom as soon as you got there. Bucky tugged you into one of the cubicles and wasted no time to bend you over, lifting your skirt up to squeeze your ass.

“I knew I picked the right dress, you look good enough to eat.” Bucky grunted as he unbuckled his belt.

You moaned and pressed your palms against the door, pushing out your ass towards Bucky until you felt him line his tip up to your entrance. In one swift move, Bucky bottomed out and didn’t give you enough time to adjust.

It was fast and violent, the way Bucky fucked you inside that stall. Both of you were too caught up in the pleasure to even hear the commotion happening outside.

“Not gonna last long, Bucky...” you whimpered, feeling your legs tremble.

You’d been on edge the entire time, having been denied your orgasm earlier. And Bucky kept on squeezing your thigh teasingly during dinner, palm always inching higher until it settled close to your bare mound.

Of course, you wouldn’t last long!

“I know, baby.” Bucky said, sucking the skin on your exposed shoulder as he continued to fuck you from behind.

Once done with the sex escapade, the both of you were welcomed by the restaurant’s manager with a disapproving (and scarred) look on his face.

You blushed at the memory, “Let’s not do that again, please?” You said.

Bucky laughed, “Fine, fine. But dinner tomorrow, okay?”

You yawned at the same time you hummed, “Just dinner.”

“Wholesome dinner.” He confirmed. “Alright, I’m done with work. Sleep now, baby.” He cooed and you nodded even though Bucky couldn’t see you.

You heard footsteps and then the sound of the door closing shut.

“Good night, baby.”

“Hmm, good night, Bucky.”

To say you were giddy the next day was an understatement. You were on cloud nine after having a phone conversation with Bucky last night. You even greeted Janet the snitch a very good morning when you shared the elevator with her.

You entered your floor and offered everyone a smile, but you also noticed that they seemed to be preoccupied talking to each other.

“What’s up?” You asked Martha and the other girls who were huddled together.

“Haven’t you heard?” She asked. “Sophia shared an elevator ride with Mister Barnes earlier. He called a flower shop, asked for their most expensive bouquet and then went on to make dinner reservations at an elite restaurant!”

You paled at the discovery and cleared your throat, “And that’s a big deal because?”

Martha snickered, “Girl, we’re talking about James Barnes here, a rich and eligible bachelor. It is a big deal. And ugh, I wonder who the lucky lady is! What I’d do to be her.” Martha dreamily said.

“Do you think it’s an employee here? Fuck, I’d be so envious if that girl happens to be working here!” Sophia added.

“Is that even allowed? Sounds pretty scandalous to me.” Kate chimed in.

“Oh my god. Remember the pantry incident that Janet reported? What if that was Mister Barnes and his girl? Damn, that’s juicy. It’d be horrifying if they get caught.” Kate added.

Your head felt light-headed at all the information that was going on. Hearing their conversations felt like a bucket of iced water was being poured on you. It was like a moment of a major realization.

Shit, what has gotten into you, getting all tangled up in this mess? Damn you, Tinder!

Even if Bucky agreed to take things slow, you realized that it wouldn’t really help. If news got out that you were dating the CEO of your company, you’d still receive some backlash for it.

Maybe making it official wasn’t the right thing to do. At least, not yet.

“Ladies, gossip time is over.” You announced and tried to stay calm. “And speaking of Barnes, I need to submit a report.”

You nervously knocked on Bucky’s door, hoping that he was back from his early morning meeting. You could hear him talking inside and thought that maybe he was busy.

“Come in.” He called before you could even turn around.

Slowly, you opened the door and slipped inside his office. Bucky was on his chair, talking to someone over the phone. When he saw that it was you, he quickly put his phone on mute and smiled.

“Yes, baby? What do you need?” He asked softly.

Goddammit! Bucky was surely getting used to that pet name. Initially, he’d only call you that in the throes of pleasure. But somehow, Bucky began to use it so casually that it made you nervous. What if he slipped and called you that during a meeting, in front of everyone?

You hated how Bucky was becoming soft and gentle around you, well, except maybe when he was in a certain mood. It was confusing the hell out of you. But you also enjoyed being the only one to witness his soft side.

Was his offer to make things official because he truly liked you or was the fucking that good to make him want to commit all of a sudden?

“I uhh, I think I’ll just come back later if you’re busy.” You stammered.

Bucky held up a finger and then unmuted his phone, “Hey, something important came up. I’ll call you again later.” He said and quickly ended the call before turning to you.

“You know I’m never too busy for you.” He said, his eyes the softest you’d ever seen.

There goes your heart.

“I think...” you trailed, not sure how you were going to say it.

Bucky raised his eyebrows at you, urging for you to continue. You heaved out a deep sigh. Your hands balled into fists at your side as you walked closer to his desk.

“Can we raincheck on the dinner tonight?” You asked.

Bucky frowned, “Why?”

You shrugged, “No reason.”

“Lie to me one more time and I’ll have you on my lap for some spanking.”

How the hell does Bucky do that? Become all sweet and soft and then rough and dominating all of a sudden?!

You squeezed your thighs together because the image of Bucky’s hand landing on your ass was doing things to you. You willed yourself not to give in, you came here for a reason.

“There are rumors about you. Someone heard you making dinner reservations and now everyone’s talking about it. I just...” you paused to check Bucky’s reaction but as usual, you couldn’t read his face.

“Maybe making this official isn’t...the right thing to do.”

Bucky pushed himself up from the chair slowly and stalked towards you. Was he mad? Fuck, you hoped he wasn’t. When he reached you, his hand came up to brush your cheek with his knuckles.

“What do you want then?” He asked.

Shit, you never actually thought about it. What do you want? Keep things casual between you and Bucky? Completely stop whatever it was that was going on between the two of you?

“I don’t know.” You shrugged.

“I like you.” Bucky stated and stepped back. “You’re intelligent and you don’t take shit from anyone, myself included. When you said you wanted to take things slow, I agreed to it. Hence, the flowers and dinner. Now that I’m giving it to you, you still don’t want it.”

Bucky’s livid. He was composed but the way his jaw tensed as he spoke was enough proof that he was mad, really mad. It’s his calm demeanor despite being angry that somehow scared you. The calm before the storm. What the storm was going to be? You didn’t know and honestly, you weren’t sure whether it was something that you even want to find out.

Maybe you were being confusing or indecisive but only because things happened too quickly for you to even properly process it. To think that you addressed your concerns last night, you actually that Bucky understood where your feelings were stemming from. However, it seemed to have gone over his head.

“Bucky, I don’t think you’re getting my point here.” You explained, tucking your hair behind your ear.

“If you heard what your employees have been saying about you and your...girl, you’d understand.” You said and placed your hands on your hips.

Bucky made a face, “Then make me understand. What did you hear?” he asked.

“We already talked about this last night! They’d think that the promotion was given to me because we fucked! That’s going to taint my image for the rest of my life.” You huffed out.

Bucky rubbed his face with his hand as he paced back and forth, “They’re idiots if they think of that. What do you want me to do? Give a detailed presentation why I decided to promote you? Go through your evaluation one by one? He sarcastically said.

“Oh my god, Bucky. You really don’t get it, do you?” You let out a humorless laugh.

He shrugged, “You’re confusing the hell out of me. Just tell me what the hell you want to happen.”

“Maybe I just want keep things professional.” You blurted out in the spur of the moment.

You didn’t mean it. You so didn’t mean it. Fuck. You word vomitted and now you were going to regret it.

Something in Bucky ticked, you saw it. He approached you until he was towering over your frame. It was intimidating to say the least, the way Bucky stared down at you with a blank expression on his face.

“What if I don’t want to?” Bucky asked, his eyes looking down at your lips for a quick second before moving back up to your eyes.

“I wasn’t asking for your permission.” you retorted and you’re not sure why.

Bucky exhaled through his nose and this time, you could read his face. He was fuming.

“I told you, you’re mine.” He said through gritted teeth.

The tension in the air was thick. The close proximity was making you dizzy, Bucky was so close that his scent was invading your senses. His jaw was clenched tightly as he looked down at you with piercing eyes and you were so tempted to just grab his face and kiss him and tell him that you liked him too.

But of course, your pride just had to be in the way.

“You don’t own me, Bucky. I am my own person.”

Another word vomit. You were Bucky’s the moment he laid his hands on you and you liked it.

Bucky inhaled and shrugged, loosening up before taking a step back. “So you want to keep it professional, huh?”

No.

“Yes.”

Bucky nodded, “You’re lying. I know you are. But okay then, professional it is. Let’s see how long you can keep lying to yourself.”

You watched Bucky walk back to his desk, sitting down on his chair with his arms crossed over his wide chest. His face was void of any emotion all of a sudden, he didn’t even look angry anymore and you hated how you couldn’t seem to figure him out.

“Anything else you’d like to discuss?” he asked, the professional tone of his voice sending chills down your spine, but not in a good way.

You slightly nodded, placing a folder on top of his desk before backing away. “It’s this month’s report.”

“Okay. You’re dismissed.” He casually said, grabbing the folder and skimming through your report as if you weren’t standing right in front of him.

You felt a pang of pain hit you right in the heart when he looked up at you questioningly, as if he was wondering why the fuck you still haven’t left his office. At that moment, you wanted to take back all the things you said and just give in to your damn feelings.

But would you really let your career nosedive just to be with Bucky? You weren’t sure if you were ready for that.

You straightened up and maintained a calm demeanor, “That’s all. Thanks, Bucky.”

“That’s Mister Barnes for you.”

Everything Bucky Tag List:

@ddowii @jessou893 @stealapizzamyheart @bagelofthelord @mxnt @dontputyourfckingdrinkonmytable @jeeperky @ohladymacbeth @wildflowergubler @supraveng @twinerd14 @buckysmar @bakugouswh0r3 @sweetcoldharmony @wintersfilm @charminivy @amelia-song-pond @iamvalentinaconstanza @mcubqrnes @i’m-squished @tcc-gizmachine @sipsteacasually @prettyintopeerpressure @weloveyasmin @est19xxshit @bloodhon3yx @dressed-in-prada @lizette50 @thatfangirl42 @sunflowerbunny2 @unmagically @okiegirl24 @sugarpunch-princess @enlyume @vvipgotbb @slimeyderp @lyoongx @just-deka @nobody-will @jaziona92 @elisebuitron @dpaccione @suvikamahes98blr @buckybarneshairpullingkink @earthtonav @x-judyjude-x @nani-kenobi @just-here-to-escape-from-reality @belladonnabarnes @iloveangstposts @weenersoldierr @asemistablehundredyearoldman @reidbuck @lizzarooni @girlfriday007 @bonkywobble @lost-in-the-stars03 @its-yasbxtch @whoth3hellisbucky

The Match Special Tags:

@marvelslag @weird-mumbling @propertyofpoeandbucky @lostinthoughtsandfeelings @mostly-marvel-musings @squishybabies @megzdoodle @little-baby-vixen @annathesillyfriend @xhollycowx @sweetkingdomstarlight-blog @5-seconds-of-mendes @gogolucky13 @countonthesun @iloveshawnieboi @learisa @borikenlove @scarlet-natasha89

#bbb writes #the match #bucky barnes #bucky #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky x reader #bucky x you #bucky barnes smut #bucky smut #bucky barnes fluff #bucky fluff #sebastian stan

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northwestofinsanity · 3 years

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I was tagged by @ritchieblackless Thank you!

1. Why did you choose your url?

The “Northwest” comes from “Northwestern”. As far as that part goes, it’s a long, complicated story, involving a character from some original stories I used to write for my younger cousins when they were kids, and my favorite vessel on Deadliest Catch (it used to be a good show). “Insanity” comes from exactly what it sounds like. I’m never fully sane... but majority of the time, I’m not entirely insane, so I played a pun on what became my online name to suggest I’m just a little up the road to the north and west of true insanity.

2. Any side blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

None so far.

3. How long have you been on tumblr?

February 2017... so that’s a little over 4 years as of now.

4. Do you have a queue tag?

No, and I don’t really use the queue. I’m not active enough on Tumblr to have much use for it, and I pretty much just post whenever the mood strikes me, and when I have time to search and focus on what my hyperfixation du jour is.

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place?

The community I was in on DeviantArt (not band-related) was melting down in a really nasty way, and one of my closer friends there became abusive, so once I got everything I was in charge of there handed over, I abandoned my account. I was in some *intense* emotional pain, and I needed distraction, and distance from the fandom. I basically came to Tumblr to hyperfixate on my favorite bands more -it was something I’d considered, but didn’t have the time before that to commit to it.

6. Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

My icon is Jeff Pilson and George Lynch. Dokken was one of the bands I was most hyperfixated on in 2017, and they, along with a friend who is also a fan of them, really were helping me get through that hard time when I made this account. Besides that, Jeff and George have a really wholesome friendship despite the turbulent history of Dokken. As for my pfp, I just chose generic guitars I found on Google Images to create a minimalist background. I have a tight data limit, and I tend to force every ounce of life out of my devices, so I make my own stuff as easy to load as possible, and most likely to function even if an outdated, semi-incompatible browser doesn’t format things quite right.

7. Why did you choose your header?

“Classic Rockhaven” (I assume that’s the header?) comes from my love for classic rock, and the idea of rock and roll being a safe-haven for me at the time. “Rockhaven” also closely resembles the name of a neighborhood a few miles away from my own in my hometown, so I knew it would flow right.

9. How many mutuals do you have?

I have 14 as of now. I’ve lost a few due to some people leaving, or switching accounts

10. How many followers do you have?

429. Some are unfortunately fomer-porn accounts I haven’t had a chance to weed out and block. A good number are just empty, lurker accounts as well, but as long as those followers are enjoying classic rock content, that’s fine by me. I’m grateful for the followers I have who do enjoy and interact with my posts.

11. How many people do you follow?

Officially, 38, but there are a good number of accounts I “unofficially” follow, by visiting blogs every night I have the chance. I’d love to follow more, and am looking to officially follow a few of those, since a few of the people I already follow have gone inactive or left. With my lifestyle, and data limits, I just have a hard time keeping up with my dashboard even with the tiny amount of people I follow, so I like to really get to know blogs first, and then slowly add them to my follow list so I don’t get overwhelmed.

12. Have you ever made a shitpost?

I believe so, depending on where you draw the line on that. (at least in my definition, I have). Do snarky posts about Tumblr’s glitches and that time I drowned my phone at work count? Or the crazy, crack-fic cartoons I drew in quarantine?

13. How often do you use tumblr each day?

On my weekends/off-days, whenever I want and can. On my 12-hour workdays, I check my dash before I leave home, once over data while I’m on my lunch break, and then at least once when I get home. If I’m getting home on time, and not late because the evening ran long, I’ll check on blogs I watch without following yet.

14. Did you ever have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

Not that I’m aware of... I’ve made neutral posts discouraging other blogs from fighting though, because I’ve seen plenty of traumatic things internet fights can lead to in the events leading to me joining here, and I don’t want to see anyone go through that when usually, nobody wins. At best, I think I had someone misunderstand what I said on a post where there was affectionate teasing of a certain 80s guitarist, and I meant to play along with the joke to say “don’t tease him, he’s a nervous wreck” -and added some band history for any watchers who didn’t know the story behind why said guitarist is so nervous... but it didn’t come to anything.

15. How do you feel about "you need to reblog this" posts?

9 times out of 10, I agree with what they’re saying, but I don’t like reblogging these things, because it feels like it’s being crammed down everyone’s throat -I’m much more receptive to things that don’t feel forced, along with plenty others. To begin with, they’re not really what I’m here for. Tumblr is a place I joined for a mental escape from the world’s problems -not a place to ruminate on them. And when I’m seeing them when I’m half-mentally numb in the middle of a 12-hour shift with only 1 gigabyte per month of data to work with, or when I’m home after that day and dead on my feet, it just turns me off.

16. Do you like tag games?

I like doing them when I have the time at home to sit down and do them over Wi-fi. The only thing I’m iffy with is tagging others, because I don’t want to make someone feel pressured into doing it.

17. Do you like ask games?

As long as the questions aren’t about a certain few things I will not share about, I have fun with those. I just have to find one to reblog from someone I follow that comes up at a time I know I’ll have time at home to answer.

18. Which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

I don’t know if anyone truly is, but @mccoys-killer-queen ’s sideblog is pretty well known.

19. Do you have a crush on a mutual?

No, but I do care for a number of my mutuals (including a couple I haven’t officially followed yet) a great deal, and can say I wish nothing but happiness for them, and if they were to leave, I would truly miss them (but also support it if they deemed it best -as I have with a few past mutuals).

20. Tags

Anybody who wants to!

#tagged #tag game

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Truffle Hunter.

As Pig snuffles its way up Letterboxd’s best of 2021 ranks, Mitchell Beaupre hunts down writer-director Michael Sarnoski for a chat about some of the finer creative points of his Nicolas Cage-starring meditation on cookery and grief.

In a time when audiences know too many specific plot details of films months before they’re even released, the idea of a surprise sensation feels like a fleeting memory. Yet that’s exactly how one could describe Pig, the debut feature from director Michael Sarnoski. With minimal pre-release buzz and no flashy festival premiere, Pig is a film whose status has been created through sheer quality alone.

This is a true word-of-mouth smash, hailed by critics as one of the best films of the year, as well as quickly earning itself a high placement on our Top 50 of 2021. Jacob Knight praises the film as “an existential rumination regarding how people find meaning in a mostly meaningless world”, while Muriel declares it “the most unexpectedly wholesome movie I’ve seen in forever”. Not bad for a first feature.

Written by Sarnoski, from a story he developed with co-producer Vanessa Block, Pig opens on Rob (Nicolas Cage), a loner isolated in the woods with his truffle pig. Rob makes his living selling truffles to the eager and ambitious Amir (Alex Wolff), but when two people break into Rob’s home and steal his animal companion, he must do whatever it takes to be reunited with his only friend.

A rough day deserves a decent vin rouge.

While that setup led many to give Sarnoski’s film the moniker “John Wick with a pig” when the trailer dropped, the story ends up charting a course away from genre thrills and towards something else entirely. Pig is an exploration of grief, loneliness and compassion, featuring one of the finest performances of Nicolas Cage’s illustrious career.

Raised in Milwaukee, Sarnoski and co-producer Block met in college before working together on the documentary short The Testimony, which focused on the largest rape tribunal in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That film made it onto the shortlist for the 2016 Oscars, putting the two of them on a path that would lead to their breakthrough opportunity with Pig.

Sarnoski spoke with us about the origins of Pig, the long-term impacts of loss in his own life, the joy of hand-cranked pasta and Bruce Springsteen.

Congratulations on the film! How has it felt seeing this outpouring of love coming for your first feature? Michael Sarnoski: It’s been amazing. Everyone who made this movie felt for themselves that it was special, and we all put a lot of care into it. We also knew that it was a risk, a strange film we figured would hit right for some people, but then plenty of others would think it was boring and weird. We’ve been very pleasantly surprised that it’s a small minority of people who feel that way.

What was the seed of the story that would eventually sprout to become Pig? I had this image in my head of an old man in the woods with his truffle pig. There was something sweet and tragic about that. Then I began asking questions about who this guy is and why he’s out there alone in the woods. What’s his backstory? It all evolved from there.

While the first act inhabits that “John Wick with a pig” space that people were perhaps expecting from the trailer, the story then takes a swerve and becomes a somber, thoughtful character study. Could you speak about navigating that unique arc with your storytelling? We never set out to try and subvert that John Wick sort of genre. We knew that we were playing with that lone-cowboy idea of a film and some of those tropes, but we never wanted to poke fun at that or switch people’s expectations in some sense by choosing Nic to star. We never wanted to “surprise” people by making a quiet Nic Cage movie. It was always just about these characters, what this story is, what we’re trying to explore. I think if we had tried to be subversive it would have come off as hokey.

Silence plays a key part in the film, as so much is being said in those spaces between the dialogue and action. How did you want to utilize the impact of saying more with silence? From early on, we always knew it was going to be a very silent film, and that followed all the way through the edit. Some of us wanted that opening to start out the way it’s done in the movie, where it’s totally silent and the music only comes in at the very end, while others were worried that people would get bored with it. The argument against that was that if they’re going to get bored with that, then they’re going to get bored with the rest of the movie. So, we might as well just lean into it, and let them know what it’s going to be.

From there we gauged how we wanted to approach the silence throughout. There’s some beautiful music in the film that Alexis Grapsas and Philip Klein did an incredible job with that allowed us to bring this beauty and splendor into the scenes. But there were also a lot of really quiet moments where we wanted the audience to be focused on the faces of the characters, and really be feeling the space and letting the sounds of the forest, or wherever we were, come across.

Nicolas Cage, his knife skills, and cinematographer Patrick Scola.

Along with the faces, you focus a lot on hands in the film. Whether it’s in scenes of violence or making food, there’s a real emphasis on what hands are capable of. Where did the inspiration for that come from? Nic was very into the idea of conveying artistry through your hands. He spent a lot of time with local chefs to try and get the vibe of how they moved and how they worked. He was always practicing knife skills in his room. I was constantly waiting for the AD to come up and tell me that we can’t use Nic today because he cut off a finger, but thankfully that never happened. Nic really sold that emphasis on the hands. Those shots could have felt empty if it wasn’t for him. I still am surprised watching some of the little hand choices he made.

I remember there was one shot where we didn’t get it on the day. So, we set it up with his stand-in, and just had him wearing his gloves. We all watched it, and it just wasn’t the same. Nic agreed, and so we reset the entire thing just to get that one shot with his hands in there instead. It was totally worth it. He’s an incredible actor, and it comes through every part of him.

Cage is an actor with an almost otherworldly mythos about him, which allows people to sometimes forget what a tremendous performer he’s always been. What was your experience in building a relationship with him, not just as an actor, but also as a human being? I only have positive things to say. That’s not just a gimmick. From the moment he read the script, he was interested, and he really responded to the character. He was committed to bringing the script to life, and was extremely respectful towards everyone on set. He had no reason to respect me. I’m a first-time director. He could have been a total diva. He could have been whatever he wanted to be, and we still would have paid him and been happy with his performance.

He was very kind, and maybe some of this came from the character, but he was also kind of somber and quiet in general on set. At the same time, he can also be very playful and sweet, even though he was trying to remain in the mood of the character. He set the tone, in a way, for the whole crew. A crew could easily look at a first time director and decide to just slack off and scrape by, because I wouldn’t have even known the difference. The fact that Nic treated me and the material with such respect really trickled down, and was so valuable to the film.

We shot the whole thing in twenty days, so if there had been any weak link with someone not doing their job or not being totally on top of it, we would have been screwed. I credit a lot of that to Nic, and him treating this with an incredible amount of professionalism. I think that’s where a big part of his long career comes from. He’s an incredible actor, but he also takes the art form seriously, treating it as both an artist and as this being his job, knowing that you have to do both in order to get what you need across.

Do you have a favorite Nicolas Cage performance? Other than Pig, of course. There are so many incredible ones. I really love Moonstruck. I saw that a couple of years ago, right before we officially cast him, when I was going through some of his ones that I hadn’t seen. Part of it I think is because I’m half-Italian, and I felt like it was showing me a side of my life that I never realized because my Italian family is on the east coast, and we moved out to Wisconsin when I was very young. I never got to be a part of that kind of thick Italian family, and seeing that on screen gave me a taste of what that would have been like. I loved him in that role. He was the perfect balance of sincere and sentimental, and also over the top when he needed to be.

Grub’s up.

Speaking of being Italian, Pig gets deep into the transformative power of food, and of the right meal. Has food always been an important part of your life? Definitely. I’ve never worked in restaurants. The closest thing was when I worked at a snack bar at a summer camp, which was very fun and also kind of a nightmare in its own way. I think most of the importance of food for me came from when my grandma lived with us. It was after my dad passed away, when I was a little kid, and she became this sort of old Italian cook in the house who was using food as this language of love and also as a sort of control. It had a lot wrapped up in it, this sense that we’re going to have family dinners to prove that everything is fine.

I think any Italian family is that way, but especially in that situation, having that presence come into the house when I was a kid, it made food quite charged for me. It was both a form of bonding and love, but also that control. That was very important to me. As I got older she taught me how to cook some things, and I became interested in that. I had a lot of friends who were great cooks and taught me how to do different things. I’m not an amazing cook, but I love cooking.

I love that act of making something that’s about to disappear. I think if you can be okay with that, and put a lot of time and care into that, it’s kind of a therapeutic thing to do. Accepting transience is a big part of cooking.

What’s your favorite dish to cook? I would say over the pandemic I really got into making lasagne. I had my grandma’s old hand-crank pasta maker, so I was enjoying making my own pasta and lasagne with that. I don’t know if I could pick one favorite dish, but that is definitely one that contributed quite a bit to putting on the Covid pounds.

Rob (Cage) and Amir (Alex Wolff) discuss their business relationship.

There’s a scene in the film where Rob and Amir go to a restaurant and Rob has a conversation with the chef there, who used to work for him, about the idea of losing our sense of identity when we give up on our dreams in order to fill this role that society expects of us. Is that something that you personally connected with? Yeah, people ask me a lot about what I think of the high-end cuisine world, and I have to say that I wasn’t trying to solely express that this world is garbage and phony. I was looking at it as another kind of art form. Any time you have an art form that combines someone’s personal passion with some sort of economy there are going to be conflicts to navigate. Whether you’re a painter, director, writer, whatever, those are going to be things you have to juggle. How true to yourself are you going to stay?

For myself, I’ve definitely found that when I try to focus on doing something that I care about, that’s kind of all I have control over and that’s what I should focus on. Pig was that for me. This isn’t the kind of script that you write where you’re expecting a big payday. It’s this weird movie that for some reason really means something to me.

The scene climaxes with Rob saying the line, “We don’t get a lot of things to really care about”. What about this movie exemplifies the things that you really care about in your life? It’s so many things, and even more things came from going through the process of actually making it and falling in love with Portland. It’s become even more than what it was initially intended to be. I mentioned earlier that my dad passed away when I was a kid, and the most personal aspect of the film for me was exploring that idea of what grief does to us long-term.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been watching how my family members changed the way they interact with the world and built their perception of the world around some aspect of grief. It’s not those immediate effects of shock or sadness. It’s how those things ingrain into your worldview. I became much more conscious of how I was doing that in my own life. That was the deepest, most general thing that I was bringing to it, and that I was exploring personally through the film.

As far as specific things that I care about, I think I have all the classic things. I care about my family, and my friends. I care about the world, which is why this year has been so devastating. I don’t have one single pig. I think we all have a few different pigs in our lives.

Director Michael Sarnoski on the set of ‘Pig’.

Another scene that really stands out is the one in which Rob returns to his old home and sits with this young boy, having a conversation about a persimmon tree that used to be there. Talk to me about the significance of that moment for Rob. One of the things I love about that scene is that it seems so simple, kind of quiet and basic, but it’s getting into a lot of different things. I will say one thing about that scene. That was the first scene that we shot on the first day of filming. That kid was great, but filming with a child on your first day of your first feature was very much a moment of wondering what I had gotten myself into.

That scene does a few things. I won’t get into spoiler territory, but for starters he’s going back to his old house, so it’s his first attempt to really look at his past in the face, and to acknowledge that. I like that in that moment this is also one of the first times that we hear him speak romantically of food, because those things are very tethered to each other.

We get both the sense that there was a past, a personal path that he left behind, but intricately involved in that was how he interacted with food and his art. It’s the first time that we hear him acknowledge who he was in a way that’s okay. He tells the kid his name, and he’s acknowledging his identity that he’s been trying to hide from or ignore. Through doing that, it’s engaging with his passions and how that tethers everything together. I also thought it was cute explaining what persimmons were to a little kid.

I’ve got to ask you about the use of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’ in a very meaningful moment. What made that the perfect song choice for that scene? Obviously, who’s singing it is very meaningful. I liked that song, though, because it’s different from the sappy direction we could have gone with that moment. There’s something very passionate about ‘I’m On Fire’, of course, and it’s a pretty sexual song. It’s really charged, but it also has this kind of ethereal quality to it that’s seductive in a non-sexual way. It washes over you, and it feels very mystical. This sounds so “film talk”-y, but I liked that meeting of that transcendent, abstract feeling with that immediate sense of passion and love and obsession.

Finally, what’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Probably Sam Raimi, his first Spider-Man movie. That was the first time I realized what directors do. I had a very strong association with Spider-Man growing up as a comic-book fan, and I was seeing how someone was filtering their own understanding of this character. Raimi coming from his horror background and being into the nitty gritty filmmaking with practical effects and everything, I got this understanding of how a director touches a film and shapes it.

Related content

Steve’s list of pigs in film

Melissa’s list of films featuring food, chefs, bakers, restaurants, cooking, hospitality, hotels, wineries, grocers

Rachel West discovers Nicolas Cage is her most-watched actor of all time

Letterboxd’s Official Top 50 of 2021—Jack Moulton’s list

Follow Mitchell on Letterboxd

‘Pig’ is currently in US cinemas via NEON, and available to buy/rent on digital.

#nicolas cage #pig #pig film #neon #neonrated #neon rated #nic cage #cooking films #cookery film #films about chefs #truffles #truffle pig #truffle hunter #letterboxd #filmmaker

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arentwelost · 4 years

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reactions to the bnha: heroes rising film

spoilers alert !

(i risked coronavirus to go to the cinema for this but no regrets because we all want to die anyway oof-)

the film was very 1a centred & that’s gr8 and all especially since we got to witness the bond they had between them & just. how incredibly amazing their teamwork is

but i really ,,, miss,,, aizawa (my fave, my tru love)

he had a total of 3 (?) scenes, each of them lasting like less than 10 secs - even toshinori had more scenes than that : (

but you know who even had less screen time (aka none),,, our boy,,, the valid purple son,,,, shinsou hitoshi : (

the person who had the most screen time was this new villain called nine and i really wanna yell begone thot at him because he was like “i want to create a utopia where the powerful rules” and i was like thinking,, yo that shit sounds like capitalism & neoliberalism

his character design was really pretty, but it didn’t make up for his ideology that came outta nowhere with no backstory - so it was really hard to empathise/sympathise

what makes a villain good is 1) sufficient backstory 2) being so damn predictable and familiar that you actually prefer them over every other new villain because better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know

anyway, what really slaps is kacchan’s fuckin character development !!

lil gremlin is still gremlin but ,, he’s working with other kids,, he’s minimising damage done to the area while fighting villains,, there was a scene of him all calm and shit while eavesdropping on izuku and katsuma (which once again proves that most of his anger is just a front he puts up in front of other people rather than a perpetual state, and ya know what, i love that introvertedness that he has),,, him being protective over the bakusquad and not blasting kaminari for teasing him,,, he and izuku fighting together like a hero duo ,,,, eye-

this movie really said bakugo character development hUH

anyway in the beginning when endeavour showed up and dabi and endeavour had this whole showdown with their fire quirks and we got this close up of endeavour’s thicc thighs and i was like : ) we don’t stan for this here but at the same time i was like @ hawks damn ur daddy really be like that, huH

which reminds me of my whole spiel about dabi/hawks and endeavour/hawks : ‘ )

but yea. dabi was unfairly attractive and i just want death to consume me

okay so the plot was like,, the hero commission (aka the dodgy ass institution): how about sending the 1a kids to an island where there are no active heroes ??

so the 1a kids get yeeted off to an island,, and they are having fun helping the locals out !! (this is the wholesome content we all deserve)

jirou and yaomomo asdgjhskgjahkj

kacchan who stays at home the entire day because he’s on ~villain duty~ and there weren’t any villains so he just sits at home and read manga asdfghjkl that’s a hard Mood

kirishima looking like the cutie he is eye-

the bakusquad teasing kacchan by calling him “kacchan of bakugo”

how is maharo & katsuma so damn cute *angery fists*

but izuku really be adopting children left and right hUh

dadmight and dadzawa whomst i only know dadku

ochako & tsuyu are so cute wtf eye-

these villains are overpowered af wtf

wow i love 1a having each other’s backs their teamwork,, was ,,, so good,,, so smooth ,,, (*whispers* poly 1-a anyone ??)

everyone be losing until kacchan comes blasTing in, saving kirishima & kaminari with sheer determination and stubbornness and manages to defeat one (1) villain

not going to lie though i feel like mummy got done dirty like that

but i like the little nod to the provisional exam arc

the inflated izuku mahoro projected was the Cutest

anyway what really clapped was you know,, both izuku and kacchan being the smort cookies they are: “DIDN’T I TELL YOU THAT ONCE I’VE SEEN YOU USE IT, I HAVE A WAY OF COUNTERING IT?!"

like oof

also i love how izuku is established as the image of hope (the saviour) and kacchan is established as the image of victory (the victor) - this whole “win to save” and “save to win” really got laid down really heavily

but we’re all hoes for that i guess

touga in her winter gear !!! eye-

yaomomo delivering the Goods (i.e. the cannons)

a o y a m a : (

the moment i realised that tokoyami was in the cave, i knew the villain there was Done For

i haven’t forgotten our resident eldritch abomination, dark shadow, y’all

i just ?? love ?? mina ???? so much ??????

ngl i didn’t know chimera was literally a chimera until this part i just thought he one big furry

oof

that flashback to endeavour’s advice when shouto was fighting chimera ?? the symBoLisM wow

shouto being able to rationally separate endeavour the hero and endeavour the shitty dad & using the advice endeavour gave him to empower himself -

- wipes tears

sero and ochako getting blasted away really badly by nine,,, and izuocha happens but we’ve all seen that before

it is kacchan,, ,, being protective of sero when he got yeeted,,,,, that is the Point

THE BEST PART ABT THE SECOND LAST FIGHT WAS LITERALLY BKDK BEING SO IN SYNC WITH EACH OTHER’S MOVES THAT THEY WERE FIGHTING LIKE A HERO DUO ??

LIKE IZUKU KICKING THE VILLAIN, REBOUNDING OFF THE SHIELD,, AND THEN FLYING OFF JUST FOR KACCHAN TO GRAB IZUKU’S HAND AND FLING HIM BACK AT THE VILLAIN FOR A SECOND ATTACK

THE WHOLE HANDHOLDING THING IS STARTING TO COME OUT AS A MOTIF

AND I JUST WOW ,,, BKDK,, (platonic or romantic or otherwise) OUT HERE,, HOLDING HANDS AS EQUALS,,, SYMBOLIC OF THEIR CHANGING RELATIONSHIP,,,,

s h o u j i : ( protecting mahoro and katsuma with his body : ( big cuddle boy doesn’t deserve this pain !!!

don’t think i didn’t notice the film using the same bgm as the kamino rescue

it draws such a powerful parallel ?? back then it was kacchan who needed to be ‘saved' but now it’s kacchan doing the saving & the winning - once again, such character development asdfghjkl

this film,, making me appreciate kaminari 10x more

also fellas is it gay to stare at your rival and being able to communicate non-verbally

bkdk detroit smashing the storm together & making a damn fucking hole in the stratosphere like all might,, dispelling the damn storm and letting sunlight filter in ?? that was some really obvious symbolism but regardless,,,, wow

this is the part where the whole twin stars motif really came right in kicking our houses down

kacchan breaking both of his arms because of one for all & all i can think of is ,, izuku,, stop sharing your bone breaking juice with people

i’m just thinking about how people @ izuku: wtf how do you deal with this bone breaking bs all the time

and izuku, pure bean: oh yea haha i thought it was normal ?? like everyone has to get used to their quirks like this ??

a concept: quirkless izuku not understanding how quirks are supposed to feel

anyway, dadmight cradling izuku in his arms only to leave kacchan a metre away ?? favouritism that we’re all here for

izuku : ( apologising : ( for : ( being : ( a : ( bad : ( successor : (

i just want to shake izuku’s shoulders & tell him that he did super well and that he shouldn’t be ashamed of himself and that he deserves everything good in this world

also imagine being so gremlin that all the one for all predecessors were like "nope we’re not dealing with this gremlin child, we prefer the pure broccoli”

disappointed that hawks didn’t get enough screentime

but we got some hawks & tokoyami and ryuukyuu & ochako time

kacchan ~conveniently~ forgetting what happened ?? i smell something fishy

our local crusty boy shows up & ahh yes, there it is - the close up shot that like to remind us that he needs to Moisturise

everytime i see red shoes on shigs i just think about the parallels between shigs and izuku and my heart breaks all over again

the scene where shouto got hugged super uncomfortably by endeavour ?? oof. the entire cinema just simultaneously laughed and heard the shouuuuutooooo

katsuma being like like “i’m going to become a hero like deku & bakugo !” and kacchan’s acting all cool and shit, telling him “you better” while izuku is like “katsuma, you can become a hero !! we’ll wait for you at ua !!” because he saw himself in katsuma and wanted to be the person he wanted someone to be for him when he was young

breaking my own heart like this

imagine the first years in ten years though

they’re just going to be a bunch of teenagers izuku or 1-a saved or adopted

and they’re going to give aizawa so many more grey hairs than the current 1-a

#bnha #boku no hero academia #boku no hero academia: heroes rising #heroes rising spoilers #heroes rising #this got a little long #excuse my language i'm just very excited #it do be like that sometimes #mine #everytime i see 1-a i just think about found family #and we're all hoes for found family

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ofvagabxnds · 4 years

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( RICHARD MADDEN. THIRTY. MALE. HE/HIM. ) in texas, THEODORE MARX is more commonly known as THEO. they’ve been living in newton for FIVE YEARS and currently A LAWYER. some say they are CYNICAL & INVASIVE but i’m more inclined to believe those that say they’re SMOOTH & ADAPTABLE. if you walk by their house, you can sometimes hear SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL by THE ROLLING STONES playing from their window. ( the swish of the last mark of a signature, a smile that knows too much, bargains made at midnight, off key singing while doing cardio. )

BASICS

Full Name: Theodore Grey Marx

Nickname(s): Theo

Age: 30

Date of Birth: October 9, 1989

Zodiac Sign: Libra

Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana

Nationality: American

Gender: Male

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

Romantic Orientation: Heteromantic

Religion: Agnostic

Occupation: Lawyer

Language(s) Spoken: English

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Face Claim: Richard Madden

Hair Color: Dark Red

Eye Color: Blue

Height: 6’1 or 182 cm

Weight: 191 lbs or 77 kg

Build: Athletic

PERSONALITY

Positive Traits: Smooth, Adaptable, Engaged, Perceptive

Negative Traits: Cynical, Invasive, Manipulative, Conceited

Goals/Desires: Theo moved to Texas to run from the scandals his parents were kicking up back home, believing he would be able to finesse the world better than his father, but he’s finding that staying on the right side of the law is not as lucrative or fun as he had originally planned. My goal is to get him involved with the outlaws and watch him fall in love with being a ‘bad boy’.

Fears: Clowns

Hobbies: Running, Playing cards

Quirks: He’s really good at taking things apart and putting them back together, he’s exceptionally nice to servers/get’s ridiculously angry if someone with him isn’t, has a horrible sweet tooth

BIOGRAPHY

Theodore Grey Marx was planned down to his red curly hair (alright, that one was a hope, but his mother was never one to skip an embellishment). His mother, Alanis, was a Trudeau, which meant more in it weight than gold in the quarter, and so she was never fond of not getting her way. That started long before little Theo, though. When she was just sixteen she told her father she would marry Milton Marx, the town sweetheart who led the high school to a state championship in football, and after a few calls and scholarships secured, Milton was headed to LSU with an impending (secret) engagement in his future. Alanis graduated high school, and though she was supposed to wait until she graduated college, she wed Milton before she turned 19.

Theo came soon after, but in the year it took for him to be born, the marriage between the two socialites was already starting to crack. That, of course, was never public knowledge. To the city, the Marx family was solid, wholesome, and as blessed as any southern family could be. Theo was the spitting image of his father with his mother’s connections, and he played football just as well. He didn’t exactly have the same dream of his father to play college football, but attending law school like his old man was in the realm of possibilities. While he was in college, the facade around their name began to crumble.

A lucky photographer caught his mother and her lover leaving a bungalow south of the quarter, and when the vultures tasted blood, they found a mountain more hidden behind the tightly drawn curtains. Sick of the drama, Theo decided to leave the town he loved so that his parents’ mistakes didn’t drag him down, as well. He was hired by a firm in Newton, thanks to a call from one of his professors, and because of Theo’s tenacity, it wasn’t long before he was leading the firm in percentages. His parents never recovered from the invasion into their private life, so Theo has grown used to Texas. In fact, he’s gotten a little too comfortable here. He sees the cracks in the judicial system, and he’s beginning to wonder if there’s an entirely different wealth to be had.

TIDBITS

He’s slightly hyperactive, which is why he still runs every day. Missing his workout is the quickest way to a sour mood for him. While he has a sweet tooth, his favorite sweet is ice cream. He has a very ugly cat that just showed up at his apartment one day. He calls him Quinton/Q. His broad outlook on life allows Theo to see things most people don’t. He’s always working, even if he isn’t working, and would not feel bad about using his charm to get knowledge from people in less than honorable ways. He literally loves dancing. He might tell you his parents are dead after you hear him talk to one of them on the phone.

#cause you know that i can’t trust myself with my 3AM shadow / theo musing #theo; bio

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awesome-timtams · 5 years

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Avengers: Endgame Spoiler Review/Thoughts and shit

(if you want me to add more tags to this, just comment or something and I’ll get on it ASAP)

Alright, so I saw Avengers: Endgame this morning. I guess this is going to be a review of sorts? Mostly just me typing out all my thoughts. So yeah, review, theories (ish?) and other things amongst all that.

I did this last year for Infinity War and it was a huge mess. I decided to actually properly capitalise my words this time so it’s a bit more readable lmao. I’ve sort of had all day (12 hours) to really think about this so hopefully it’s a bit more coherent than my last year’s mindless rambling? I’m already rambling. Welp ;-;

MAJOR SPOILERS UNDERNEATH CUT!! DO NOT PRESS READ MORE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ MORE.

Everybody who doesn’t want spoilers gone? This is your last chance.

Ok, first things first, the movie is fucking amazing. There were so many instances where I cried, or laughed, or just really wanted to fucking scream because holy hell this movie was really intense. Honestly, I thought the humour managed to flow into the dramatic scenes really well. There was never a moment where I felt like a joke fell flat or came in at an inappropriate time.

The feels. THE FEELS. The emotions. I can't. I was already sobbing by the time the first 20 minutes were over. A character appears on screen? Tears. Every single time there was a team shot? Tears. Somebody even opens their mouth to say something? Tears. But yeah, this movie made me an emotional wreck and I can't even.

The movie starting off with Clint, and his family turning into dust? Expected, but still incredibly cruel, and still hurt a lot. Like, damn, I knew Endgame was going to be intense, but being reduced to tears in the first five minutes was incredibly unfair and just goddamned hurtful. Clint's dedication to his family was really sweet and I just garghhhhhhhhhh I loved it.

So yeah. Character deaths. Natasha dying just about ruined my century, so thanks Marvel. I first started panicking when they said they were gonna get the stones, and Clint and Natasha were heading to Vormir. And then it kinda hit me that one of them was gonna have to sacrifice the other for the stone. And then the whole scene with Clint and Natasha trying to beat each other into throwing themselves off the cliff. Dumbasses. Why couldn't they both just live and nobody has to sacrifice anybody? And now I feel depressed again ;-; . On the other hand, I'm sort of happy that Natasha at least died feeling like she'd made amends for her past (she didn't have to she was already amazing :'(( ). Her character arc finished with her sacrifice and wow that's so depressing ;-;;; At least we get to see her in the Black Widow movie one last time? ;-;

And Tony. I honestly didn't really think Marvel was going to go through with Tony's death tbh. I think it was probably one of the most depressing scenes I've had to witness with my own two eyes ever, and I definitely wasn't ready for it to happen. I fucking broke when Peter started crying and calling him 'Tony' because like, have we ever seen him refer to Tony as anything other than Mr Stark? I fucking lost it man. And Tony had Pepper, and he was married to her, and they had a little house by the lake, and a daughter (his daughter is so precious omg). And now he's dead and she'll grow up without her father I just fucking arGHHHHHHH. Honestly I just feel really attacked and hurt and this movie has ruined me. At least he got closure with his father. That was kinda a really sweet scene, and I cried at that too. I cried at fucking everything in this movie ;-;

But yes, depressing scenes aside, can we just. Take a moment to talk about the final battle? Because that scene was absolutely splendid. I loved how every character got a couple seconds to themselves to just have a little hero moment, and how they did the whole girl power thing with the whole squad and they were so badass and I sort of teared up at that part too because they were all so amazing and I just love them so much and the only thing that would've made that scene better would be if Natasha had been with them but she can't because she's fucking dead oh my god.

But when the portals opened up and all the characters stepped out of them. It looked fucking magical. I swear to God I had So Many Chills. It was just so fucking amazing to watch them all step out as one and yanno…”Avengers, Assemble!”. God bless them all. The audience lost their shit at this bit. Screaming and clapping and it was just absolutely breathtaking to see this scene. Like, there's just this energy, yanno? And the group shots. T’Challa leading his kingdom into the fight. Tony and Pepper’s really cute scene in their armour together. And, can we just take a break to talk about our fucking lord and saviour Steve Rogers? I love that boy so much holy shit. When Thor was about to die, and Mjolnir had flown in and hit Thanos, before flying off to the person who had thrown it. And it’s Steve Fucking Rogers, standing there holding Mjolnir? And he starts walking down the battlefield with his half broken shield in one hand and Mjolnir in the other? That was such a powerful image have I mentioned I fucking love Steve Rogers? But yeah, I love how they carried that on from AoU. But then that sort of begs the question: was Steve really able to lift Mjolnir in AoU but didn’t because he didn’t want to draw more attention to himself, or was he just not able to because he hadn’t reached peak worthiness yet?

Also, the whole New York scene was just amazing, fucking hilarious and just amazing. Who knew that all we needed to make a sequence great was to have a 100% necessary focus on Steve's ass? Jokes aside, it was really nostalgic seeing the whole 2012 New York battle again. I especially loved how they let us see parts that actually weren't in the movie, like the whole 'Avengers running into Pierce' thing. And how HYDRA got their hands on the sceptre. Seeing Steve do the whole 'Hail Hydra' thing to blend in kinda gave me chills lol. And Steve's fight with 2012!Steve was also really amazingly done and I fucking loved that sequence. The whole "I can do this all da-" "yeah yeAH I kNow I knOOW" was fucking hilarious tbh. (And also: "That is America's ass…")

Also, can I say that Steve was just really done with everything in this movie lmao. He was a solid fucking mood honestly. (”Are you shitting me??” “...he’s a baby.” “-.-”) And then his scene with Bucky at the end oh my goddd. “Don’t do anything stupid.” “How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.” And honestly I sort of died right there...It’s also this moment I’m realising Bucky probably knew about Steve’s plans, because otherwise they wouldn’t have said goodbye like that if Steve was only going to be gone for a bit. And Bucky wasn’t panicked at all when Steve missed the jump back. So what, does that mean they planned for Steve to have his dramatic ass entrance back into the present by appearing besides the lake? Kind of a funny image lol. Anyway, I’ll stop talking about Steve lmao.

Thor was fucking amazing in this movie tbh. His first scene in the future is hilarious, with the whole drunkard attitude and the beer gut and Korg playing fucking Fortnite Jesus Christ. His scene with Frigga in the movie also made me cry so much. It kinda made me realise he never really managed to get a proper goodbye with his mother before she died, yanno? And now he's finally getting it, and he can go on to the future with the knowledge that his mother is proud of him and believes he's a hero and afilajiopklgskl. Also, the pure joy when he finds out he's still worthy of Mjolnir? Such a sweet happy wholesome character despite all the losses he's gone through ;-; . Although, since he has decided to join the Guardians, does that mean he's going to be in Guardians of the Galaxy 3? And we know how there's been talk of a Thor 4 recently, right? It's probably just code for GOTG3 lol.

And finally, Bruce Banner. It was really funny to see him emerge as a mix of himself and Hulk together, I'm not gonna lie. A lot of people in the audience started laughing when we saw the Hulk emerge in a sweater and jeans or whatever the hell he was wearing. But yeah, Bruce was great. When he volunteered himself to wield the Infinity Gauntlet v2.0? Legendary. But yeah, I honestly don't have much to say about Bruce honestly. Other than the fact that he dabbed at the beginning of the movie. Legendary. And when Scott spilled his tacos so Bruce offered him more with the purest smile on his face? I melted. Legendary.

Anyway, miscellaneous thoughts time. I'm lowkey sort of kinda disappointed Nebula didn't get to kill Thanos? Like, I feel like, if anybody really deserved to kill that asshole, it was Nebula. She's suffered an entire life of torture and abuse from this dickhead, and has been manipulated by him so many times to do his dirty work. And how she still couldn't stop seeing him as a father figure in the end, despite all the terrible shit he's done to her? Actually, that's probably why she didn't get to kill him lol. And also, Sam Wilson is the new fucking Captain America bitches. I really fucking hoped that, if under any circumstances Steve had to give up his shield, it would go to Sam Wilson, because he fucking deserves it. Of course, I wouldn't have minded it going to Bucky, but my poor baby's already been through enough ;-; . Let him rest ;-; (but then, there's the whole Falcon and Winter Soldier show coming up fuck I'm so excited for it lmao).

And also, Valkyrie. Is now. The new Queen of Asgard. I can't even. My baby girl deserves fucking everything :') She deserves the title of Queen so much and I'm so glad that's a new development. Hopefully we get to see more of her in the future and how she fares with the title of leader in Asgard :'D

But yeah, I think that's about it for what I have on characters. So, moving on to theories and sort of plot holes I suppose?

So, have we had any news on what the Loki show is going to focus on? I haven't really been paying enough attention to news on the shows tbh. But if nothing's been confirmed yet, I sort of have a theory. So we know how, when they're trying to get the Space Stone in New York, they fail and Loki gets away with the stone? I'm wondering if the TV show might potentially focus on what he does after he escapes New York with the stone. It's a possibility, I suppose.

And now, finally, one of my biggest…annoyances (? I'm not sure this is the word I want to use but the only other word that's coming to mind is iffs which isn't even a real word so moving on) (edit: issues! I found the right word :D . The word I want to use is issues lol) with the movie is the last scene.

Steggy is a fucking blessed ship, and I love them, don't get me wrong. The plane scene in TFA and the hospital scene in TWS never fail to reduce me to a big sobbing fucking baby. And I'm so fucking happy that they finally got the dance that's been promised to them for so many decades. But the whole thing just doesn't really make sense to me.

So basically, in the earlier parts of the movie, Bruce has already stated that time travel does not work like how we've all been trained to understand from other parts of pop culture. It's not quite travelling to the past, as nothing they do there will affect their future. What I interpreted from that (and I could be wrong, but this is my understanding) is that when they travel to the past, they end up creating a separate branch of events and shit that diverges from the timeline of events that will lead to their present. It doesn't erase their present, but just sort of forms a permanent branch, you feel? So, Steve travelling back to the past in order to live his life with Peggy only to end up in their present again brought in a huge amount of plot holes.

For Steve to have lived a life with Peggy and marry her, that would mean events would change drastically. I doubt they got married in secret, so people must've known 'Steve' was alive and OK. Would that mean the search for the past Steve that's still frozen in the Arctic stop, since they're all assuming he's alive? If that happens, that means the Tesseract would've never been found, and that would've led to a whole bunch of other events that would definitely not allow for grandpa Steve to join up again with the MCU's present timeline, as it would've brought him into a different branch instead.

But, hypothetically, let's say Steve lives with Peggy in secret. They get married in secret, nobody knows he's still alive, they continue with the search, yadda yadda. Now, since Steve is from the future, he would know that SHIELD is being infiltrated by HYDRA, and that Bucky would still be alive and is currently being the Winter Soldier and doing assassin-y shit. And I really, really, highly doubt that Steve would just live a life with Peggy and not interrupt with any of this shit. It's just so against his nature to ignore all of this? So, let's say he does root out HYDRA. That would affect the future. TWS, and everything afterwards would've never happened. So it definitely wouldn't be possible for Steve to return to the MCU's current, present timeline if he lived out his life, as he would've been, once again, on a different, permanently separated branch.

Let's say, hypothetically, he lived with Peggy in secret. Nobody knew he was alive. He knew HYDRA was growing inside SHIELD and didn't do anything. He knew his best friend was being tortured and brainwashed for decades and didn't do anything. Even then, him just living with Peggy and marrying her would've changed all the events and wouldn't have allowed him to just let his branch converge with the present MCU timeline without messing around with some serious science and shit (which is all highly unlikely tbh).

So basically, what I'm trying to say is, the whole last scene is fucked and can't have happened without saying 'fuck-it-all' to the rules established in the movie. But yeah, that was just the one and only glaring issue to me I couldn't stop thinking about. But either way, I loved the way the movie ended with the Steggy scene. It was really beautiful and sweet and just everything we could've wanted for their dance :')) . It was also a really bittersweet sort of tone to end the film on? Absolutely gorgeous.

(edit: wow OK so I made a whole separate post just for this scene because a couple days after I posted this, I realised my thoughts and feelings towards this scene had changed and I had a lot more to say about it. So. Yeah. Here it is.)

But anyway. Shit. That's it. I've spent this whole past year thinking about this movie and waiting for it, and now that I've watched it and it's over, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. This whole day, I've been feeling incredibly empty honestly. I'm still not quite over Natasha and Tony, and I don't think I'll ever be (which, by the way. Marvel, I'll be sending you the bill for all the emotional trauma you've caused.) But this movie was a bloody masterpiece, and I fucking loved it. The trip down memory lane with the time travel was honestly so incredibly implemented. I was really worried when I realised time travel was going to be involved with this movie, because it introduces a device that can retcon everything and just basically takes away the emotional impact of every event that happens because you can just time travel. But the fact that they introduced the mechanic where you can't affect the past by travelling there does close that issue up. Well done. Very clever.

But, yeah. Fuck. It's over. 11 years, and it went out with a bang. I honestly have no idea how Marvel is gonna top this for the next era. It seems almost impossible, honestly. I just really hope they do, because I would hate to have a franchise as amazing as the MCU end up fizzling out because their most impressive movie came years before the end and they end up never being able to top it. But these are probably just irrational worries.

Anyway, final score. 14000605/1. Would definitely watch again. Just not immediately. I still haven't fully digested the movie, and I still feel really empty and full of emotions at the same time even though it's been more than 12 hours since I've seen the movie. So yeah. Imma wait a bit, and then I'll probs rewatch it.

Anyway, rant over. Hope you enjoyed, I guess? I nearly burst into tears so many times trying to write this fucking thing. If you've seen the movie, feel free to DM me. I'm always up to chat with people lol. And if you haven't seen the movie, what the fuck are you doing reading this? Go watch the damned movie. Christ.

I might end up making edits to this if I think up of more things to talk about. Or maybe I'll make a separate post. I'll probs make a separate post. But anyway. Farewell, y'all. Time to go hide under my blankets and cry until Far From Home comes out.

(Also, this thing is 3069 words. Wow. Jesus Christ. If I put this amount of effort into my assignments, I’d be bringing in straight As. Oops.)

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commentaryvorg · 4 years

Text

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.1

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time…

…Kaito went to space. That’s all. He was in space, and he was happy.

Now to start chapter 6, which I am not quite as excited to get into – can’t possibly imagine why. There’s still definitely a lot I want to talk about, though.

We open the chapter with… Makoto. Not the Makoto we knew (he doesn’t exist), but a kid who’s called Makoto nonetheless. That’s almost certainly the most popular thing to name your kid in this universe, even probably for cultures that aren’t Japanese.

We also have some bizarrely cheerful music. Originally my feelings about this was just that it gave a very weird mood whiplash from everything else that had been going on. But now all it makes me think of is this game’s bonus board game/RPG mode that this music is actually taken from, which I may have got rather addicted to played an inordinate amount of one point. Hearing this now just makes me want to roll some dice and optimise my characters’ stat spreads, dammit! (And by “my characters”, obviously I mean Kaede, Shuichi, Kaito and Maki, who else.)

Makoto: “I don’t have any talents or anything. I’m just a regular teenager…”

…

Makoto: “Getting into an elite school like this was just the start of my bad luck.”

The writers (entirely out-universe here, of course) really just wanted to drop all these similarities to Makoto Naegi here just to mess with us and make us wonder if this kid really is him despite looking different, didn’t they.

Makoto: “I want to run away from my daily life… I want to run away and just forget all this…”

This is considerably less like Makoto Naegi, though. He may have been ordinary, and a little daunted at getting into an elite school, but he was ultimately pretty chill with it and didn’t really want anything to change.

Makoto: “But I’m okay! I have a reason to live!”

Remember the Monokuma Theater last chapter where Monokuma said he’d be thrilled if Danganronpa was people’s reason to live? Apparently it really is, for probably way more people than just Makoto here.

Makoto: “I’ve got something to look forward to! That’s why I’m gonna be okay! Thanks for the courage! Thanks for giving me something to get totally obsessed with! Thanks for the strength to keep going!”

This is extremely relatable to me! This is what genuinely loving and caring about a work of fiction looks like! I can’t tell you how many times in my own life I’ve felt like things are going great for me almost entirely because there’s a work of fiction that I absolutely love that makes me happy just to think about.

Makoto: “I’ll keep on rooting for you, so please keep trying your best!”

And look, he cares about the characters! Obviously, somewhere inside him he is hoping to see bad things happen to them, but that’s because he wants to see them overcome those trials! On the level on which he is actually engaging with the characters as if they’re people, by cheering them on like this, he just wants them to succeed.

It’s kind of like the way I’ve been doing this commentary. On the one hand I’ve been very unabashedly appreciating all the horrible suffering everyone’s gone through and the ways in which it’s been emphasised because that’s what makes this fiction so enjoyable. But when I talk about that, I take the more detached, third-person-pronouns approach, like they’re elements in a well-crafted work of art. Whenever I use second-person pronouns as if I’m engaging with the characters myself, imaging that they’re real people I could talk to, I almost never say anything about how I appreciate their suffering. I’m not engaging with them because I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer so that I’ll end up caring about them even more and therefore will want to engage with them more. Which would all still be thoroughly fucked-up if they really were real, but this is how engaging with fiction works.

(I am making a big point to stress all of this about Makoto here because, oh boy, the next time we see the in-universe audience, things are not going to be remotely this way and that is my biggest issue with this chapter.)

Makoto: “And—! One day, I’ll also—!”

…audition for Danganronpa and hopefully probably get myself killed in one, is what he’s about to say.

No, Makoto. You were doing great at being a healthy, wholesome appreciater of fiction (aside from the part where it’s not really fiction and you’re watching real people die) until now. Genuinely wanting to be a part of your favourite works of fiction is usually quite an understandable sentiment… but not when it’s Danganronpa, what the actual hell.

We have suddenly jumped from Makoto being a reasonable example of someone enjoying a work of “fiction”, into him being an example of how utterly fucked-up this outside world actually is. People – specifically, teenagers – will apparently willingly throw their lives away to be on Danganronpa if they don’t think their life has much else going for them. That’s why this Makoto hates his life, to make him someone who’d want to do this. If Danganronpa really is his only reason to live, then it does make some kind of twisted sense that it’d also give him a reason to die.

Something important to note about this scene is simply the fact that we’re seeing it. This is in a context entirely removed from anything happening right now in the Academy and is for our eyes, the out-universe audience, only. So there is no reason to doubt that what we’re seeing here is the truth. This Makoto kid really is watching “Danganronpa V3” unfold like it’s basically a work of fiction and having a great time.

I’ve seen some people propose the idea that sure, the killing game was put on as a “fiction” for people’s entertainment, but only for a shady illegal underground audience of people who should know they’re being shitty, probably hidden away somewhere in the deepest darkest corners of the internet. On some level, I might like to believe that, because it’s nicer and easier to buy than thinking the entire world is this obliviously twisted. But Makoto here is a completely ordinary teenager who would be very unlikely to have any idea how to access something like that, and he doesn’t seem to have any conception of the fact that what he’s watching and enjoying so much is illegal and frowned upon and he needs to keep it secret. So I don’t think that can reasonably be the truth here.

Anyway, back at the Academy, Keebo is busy destroying everything. He’d better leave the training spot alone, though – that place contains precious memories of Kaito and deserves to remain undamaged.

Also bear in mind that this is still the same evening after Kaito’s trial. They are not getting any time to rest here.

Keebo: “Did you call for me? Please keep it brief. I have other matters I must attend to.”

Geez, Keebo. “Keep it brief, because I’m busy getting all of us killed”? Yeah, maybe that’s why they won’t want to keep this brief.

Maki: “What’s with that weapon and the jet pack?”

Keebo: “I obtained this equipment from my lab.”

Maki: “You had equipment like that… in your lab?”

Implicit in Maki’s words here is the sentiment of: then why the fuck didn’t you use it *sooner*? Which, yes. Very much.

Keebo: “I made some modifications to drastically improve their power output and functionality.”

Tsumugi: “Since when have you been able to do that? You didn’t level up or anything, right? Did… something happen?”

The fact that it’s Tsumugi asking him this suggests that he really wasn’t supposed to be able to do that at all. It would be pretty stupid of Team Danganronpa to have someone that potentially dangerous here. Obviously they figured he’d never do anything drastic because his inner voice had him on a leash, but the suggestion from Tsumugi’s words here is that he shouldn’t even have been able to make those modifications, inner voice or not, and he just figured it out himself somehow by being a smarter person than she’d written him to be. Maybe he learned a thing or two from his time with Miu?

Keebo: “I wanted to be treated like a real human. A creature of flesh and blood like you all. But I no longer have the luxury of clinging to that wish anymore!”

You never had that luxury, not while abandoning that wish (and only temporarily, mind you) would have saved your friends’ lives!

The writing is trying to present this like it’s some kind of character development, but there’s been absolutely no build-up to Keebo realising something like this. And there’s no reason that the seven people who’d died before his lab opened up wouldn’t have been enough, such that he somehow needed to see four more deaths before finally making this decision. The only actual change now is the lack of his inner voice – but that never had anything to do with the part of his character that felt awkward about not being human and shouldn’t be making a difference to this supposed character development.

Tsumugi: “If you do something like that… we’ll all die too, y’know!? There’s no oxygen in the outside world… There are no living things…”

Tsumugi would like to remind us all that there is definitely 100% not anyone alive out there, even though Kaito's efforts just proved that there almost certainly somehow is.

Shuichi: “Our hope is… everyone here. Our friends who are still alive.”

Shuichi is good. He’s not going to forget the last thing Kaito said to him!

Keebo: “We simply do not have the power to change the outside world on our own.”

Well that’s very foreshadowy of you, Keebo. He’s only talking about making it less uninhabitable, but.

Keebo: “All we can do now is refuse to submit to despair!”

Shuichi: “And you would be willing to let all of us die to accomplish that?”

Yeah, doesn’t sound very not-despairing, does it, Shuichi? Keebo’s just gunning for a different type of despair right now.

Keebo: “Kaito and Kokichi gave their lives to end this killing game… We should follow their example! We should be willing to give our lives to end this killing game!”

Okay, so to be fair, this might sort of count as following Kokichi’s example, since he wanted to ruin the audience’s experience (even though he went about it in literally the worst way possible by giving them two incredibly entertaining trials). Killing ourselves to give them a boring ending is actually along the lines of what Kokichi at least should have been trying to do, and is in fact what everyone will attempt in the end once they realise what’s going on.

But fuck off with your implication that Kaito would have wanted this, Keebo. Kaito gave his life so that everyone else could survive and escape, not so that they’d all do the same as him! Kaito’s sacrifice was only ever about “ending” the killing game so long as doing so would save everyone!

Maki: “…Is that what your inner voice is telling you to do?”

It’s interesting that Maki considers this possibility. I wonder what she thinks his inner voice is, since she’s pragmatic enough to not believe in hearing voices, especially not for a robot.

Keebo: “We can never submit to despair! Because we are students of Hope’s Peak Academy!”

Keebo may have lost his inner voice, but he’s clearly still very much a thrall to the other kind of brainwashing that’s been going on here.

Shuichi: “Because there might still be hope. There might still be a place to call home.”

Keebo: “And what are you basing that claim on?”

Shuichi: “…Nothing. I just have a feeling.”

Shuichi just has a hunch! He’s doing a Kaito and he knows it and it’s so lovely that he’s able to say that with a smile!

Maki: “Just a feeling…? You sound like that idiot right now.”

Maki knows it just as well, of course. She’s smiling, too! I love how her calling him an idiot has become a thing of affection now. They really are his sidekicks.

(I am going to bring up and be delighted by every single moment in this chapter of them fondly remembering Kaito like this and you can’t stop me.)

Shuichi: “…Kaito said so. […] There can be no killing game without an audience.”

…So actually, Shuichi was basing his claim on something after all and just wanted to act very Kaito about it anyway, and that is adorable. Well, maybe he felt like it was appropriate because this still isn’t very concrete evidence, but.

Look at him being really sure of this argument, though! Kaito gave everything to prove that and he succeeded, and Shuichi is not going to let his efforts go to waste.

Shuichi: “There’s still a possibility!”

Keebo: “True, we cannot say there is absolutely no possibility. But even a mere possibility—”

Shuichi: “That possibility is our hope!”

Finally, someone gets it! The actual meaning of the damn word! They don’t know for sure that it’s true, but so long as they can keep believing that it’s possible there’s a home for them out there, that is hope.

Monokuma finally shows up with his Exisals in tow. (I wonder what Monotaro makes of the small mountain of screwed-up bloodstained toilet paper in the recesses of his cockpit.)

Monokuma: “Huh? Is the robot malfunctioning? He must be – why else would he try to defy me?”

Haha, yeah, Keebo is very much meant to be part of the workings of this killing game and not someone who should try and fight against that, isn’t he?

Goodbye Danganronpa

Wow, geez, that was late for a title card. I forgot we hadn’t even had that yet. Of course, this title is pretty straightforward, yet a lot more literal than anyone would be expecting it to be on their first time through.

Maki: “But why did Monokuma leave a weapon like that in the research lab? He’s… pretty careless, isn’t he?”

Good question! The way Maki’s actively asking this suggests it’s something that actually has an answer, but I’m still not convinced it’s anything but lazy writing.

Maki: “If the outside world is destroyed, then the mastermind must be in this school, right?”

Makiii, Kaito proved to you guys that the outside world probably isn’t as destroyed as it seems! Don’t you believe that too? (I mean, yes, the mastermind is in fact in this school, but there’s no reason to necessarily think that right now.)

…Actually, Maki still buying the lie about the outside world despite Kaito’s efforts to discredit it might be down to her in particular being very subsceptible to the Flashback Light’s manipulation. There’ll be some more indications of that in this chapter.

Tsumugi: “Someone… You mean a Remnant of Despair, right?”

Tsumugi is very quick to keep things on-script and remind everyone that this is definitely about Remnants of Despair.

Maki: “If we can find them and kill them, then this killing game should end.”

Shuichi: “Ah, I don’t know about *killing* them…”

Yes, Maki, listen to Shuichi! Remember that the last time you tried to kill the “mastermind”, you nearly got Kaito killed instead! Kaito risked his life because he didn’t want you to kill anyone else, even if it was the mastermind!

Maki: “…Hope?”

Shuichi: “Our home. Where we’re going to live after this killing game ends. I know there is hope out there. We have to find it before we leave.”

This is what Kaito was talking about when he said Shuichi could find “something beyond the truth” – something beyond that destroyed world they saw at the end of the tunnel. Kaito sacrificed everything for the plan to give them this hope!

(And again since I must nitpick: they wouldn’t be finding the “hope”. The fact that they’re even looking means they already have hope, thanks to Kaito.)

Himiko: “This isn’t some fictional story, so I don’t think things’ll work out that well…”

Hoo boy. We’re in chapter 6 now, all gloves are off, hints are being dropped left and right and they do not care about being subtle.

Shuichi: “But if we look for it, we just might find it. If we don’t try… we’ll never find anything.”

This is also quite Kaito of him! Kaito never specifically said anything with this wording, but he was always advocating the idea that you’ve got to put in the effort to be able to get anywhere.

Maki: “No matter how impossible it seems, we’ll accomplish it.”

Speaking of Kaito! This… is awkward localisation. Maki’s phrasing here is a close match to the Japanese phrasing of Kaito’s “The impossible is possible, all you gotta do is make it so” catchphrase. Evidently, Maki’s localiser is a different one to Kaito’s, and they never got the memo about what Kaito’s catchphrase was changed to in English and just translated this directly.

This is still clearly reminiscent enough of Kaito to get across the point that she’s thinking of him anyway, but Maki is meant to have straight-up said that the impossible is possible, and, awwww! That’s adorable.

Shuichi: (Maki…) “…Yes… that’s right!”

Shuichi agrees! He’s happy for the reminder! They are such good sidekicks.

Hope Searching time, again! This is still an appropriate title, because, like Shuichi just said, they are searching for proof that they have somewhere to return to, and that is hope.

A sudden tremor causes part of the entrance hall’s floor to collapse and reveal a staircase downwards that leads to Kokichi’s lab. Shuichi guesses that this was meant to open with a mysterious item, presumably if things had been proceeding as normal and Monokuma had happily given them their “presents” like at the beginning of any other chapter. But, awkwardly, there was never any mysterious object around here that looked like something that could have opened this. Yet again, anything which is not directly meant for the player to interact with simply doesn’t exist in the game world, even if it’s something that should exist as part of the story.

“Now it is time to test your bonds with your friends!”

DID YOU KNOW THIS DANGANRONPA GAME IS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP.

…Okay, this whole Friendship Power mechanic for this investigation is actually a very thinly-veiled way to force you to investigate places in a completely linear order by restricting where you have access to until you’ve reached a certain point in the story. But since they were going to have to do that one way or another, I love that they flavoured it to be about this.

“So work hard to end this killing game before dawn breaks!”

Oh, boy, this, though. This whole time limit mechanic is really badly-implemented.

The first thing is that it’s not a real-time time limit at all. I’m leaving my game running as I type this and it’s not going to make a difference. The timer just ticks forwards a small amount every time you examine something or talk to someone, as is appropriate for what is after all a visual novel and not an action game. I’ve seen several blind LPers assume it was a real-time time limit (because the game is very vague about it) and get instilled with a sense of urgency because of that, so I guess that was meant to be the point.

What the real, ahem, “challenge” of this time limit is is that you’re supposed to try not to examine anything nonessential. Which is really not an okay way for a mystery visual novel to be! Half the fun of these sorts of games is seeing what kind of silly bonus dialogue you get for checking things that don’t matter, to the point that many people’s approach when investigating a room is to figure out what object will progress the plot when they examine it and then examine that one last. But here, the developers are telling us we’re “failing” at playing the game properly… when we’re trying to play the game as much as possible. That’s quite frankly rude. They went to the trouble of writing a bunch of bonus dialogue for this investigation, and yet they apparently don’t want anyone to see it.

There’s also the fact that, from my experiments, there is extremely little leeway. You can examine at most two or three nonessential things while still remaining within the time limit, and anything more than that causes you to run out of time before the end. Even if someone is actually trying to examine only the essential objects, on a first run through they’re not going to know exactly what’s important, because sometimes the relevant thing is not that intuitive, and they’re almost certainly going to make more than just a few “mistakes”!

And the punishment for “failing”? I’m sure literally everybody has already seen this themselves, but all you get is Shuichi briefly going “Oh no, I took too long!”, a brief cutscene of the Academy exploding… and then it puts you back at the beginning of whatever room you were in with the timer wound back far enough that you can hypothetically finish from here. It’s the most petty of slaps on the wrist, but of course it shouldn’t be any more than that, because having to replay the entire chapter for the crime of not knowing exactly what was important, or, gasp, wanting to see more dialogue, would be incredibly obnoxious. So what’s the point in even having it be possible to fail in the first place?

What they should really do is have the timer tick forward only when you examine something plot-relevant. That way you’d get the illusion of being in a hurry to anyone who’s on a first time and hasn’t realised how it works, but none of the annoyance of meaninglessly “failing” or of it being incredibly inconvenient to actively go looking for bonus dialogue.

…Also. Uh. Turns out I was partially wrong about it not being a real time limit. I assumed that because the timer doesn’t seem to visibly move when you’re standing around, yet you can notice it tick forwards a small chunk whenever you finish examining something. Buuuut, as I left it running while typing this, with Shuichi just standing in the hallway, the timer has progressed a bunch. Some quick science, namely staring at the screen for a while, confirms that it does actually move in incredibly small pixel-by-pixel increments that are hard to notice unless you’re looking for it. So I guess also don’t go leaving your game running during this part either! Geez. …And, turns out it also ticks forward outside of dialogue if you’ve had the Monopad open for a while. It doesn’t even let you pause the game to pause the timer! Rude.

The timer does however completely vanish during actual dialogue, meaning that it is presumably actually paused then. …Yes; I did some more science to confirm this, this time sitting on a dialogue box for probably something like half an hour and seeing the timer still only tick forwards a little bit once I finally clicked through the dialogue. Talking (or thinking) is a free action, apparently, even though standing around without talking or thinking isn’t.

Anyway, here’s the method I used last time I played this chapter to be able to see all optional dialogue anyway while still technically not “failing” because fuck you too, game: Save as soon as you enter a new place. Go nuts examining everything you want to, while noting which ones seem to be necessary to progress and which ones aren’t. Before leaving for the next place, reset back to your save and this time go through the room while only examining the correct things (fastforwarding the dialogue if you want, not that it matters), so that the game thinks you did so in the minimum amount of “time”. Then head to the next place (as quickly as you can, apparently), save as soon as you enter it, and repeat. Doing this last time I played was how I learned that there was so ridiculously little leeway for “mistakes”, because even then I only just barely made it.

And of course I’m going to be doing that again on this playthrough to get all the optional dialogue, because that’s what this commentary is here for, dammit.

---

[Next post]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 6 #deadly life #commentary

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avpdpunpun · 5 years

Text

i disappeared for 3/4ths a year here’s an update?

its been 4 months since my queue ran out and way longer since i wrote an actual post. 8 months about? i think i last posted when i impulse quit a job that was bad for my mental health and just kept getting worse.

sometimes i wonder when ppl who blog about mental illness disappear if they’ve died. there was a big user i used to follow who did, and i still occasionally think about it sometimes, so i figure its nice to post updates sometimes. and being able to look back on posts ive written and reflect on them/what state of mind i was in can be helpful even if it can be embarrassing/dangerous because its so easy to fall back into those thinking habits

after quitting my job i did basically nothing for 6 months haha. at some point i managed to clean out my room which i had done the bare minimum on for years because of depression, took out more built up trash than i thought was possible to fit into my small space. its disgusting but the only thing i struggle to keep up with now at least is vacuuming and putting clothes away so my space is a lot cleaner and it makes me happier. your living space can really have an effect on your mood bless you marie kondo

after my post about having an anxiety attack taking my test i got my drivers license in march. i saw the same lady again after going somewhere else and i think she just let me pass because she felt bad haha. i never finished drivers ed and i still get anxiety about driving unfamiliar routes but my skills and confidence have improved a lot. i managed to drive 2 hours to a big city to visit a friend! i literally didnt have a choice in getting my license, but its still something i can be proud of. like, when i have to explain it to people, it feels extremely shitty that i didnt get it until i was 20, and only about 5 months ago too but... for someone who struggles as much as me, i have to be proud of it my small accomplishments or i’ll have nothing.

at some point something in my brain just snapped and i literally havent been able to cry? for a long time in those 6 months i felt like i was right on the edge of breaking down mentally but never actually crossing that line and it was honestly one of the weirdest things ive experienced. i almost wanted to have a breakdown again just to get rid of the feeling and reach a catharsis like... i used to be a fucking crybaby almost but i. cant. anymore. but i think ive mostly moved away from this point... still feel kinda weird tho.

i didnt end up signing up to a local school fo gen eds. its still on my mind for the vague future because there’s topics i want to learn about (psychology, natural resources, languages...) and maybe try to pursue for a career but really i just wanted a way to get out of my toxic house, even if it meant going into debt to live in a shitty dorm.

in the last 30 days though life has been moving extremely quickly for me. i dont think i couldve lived with myself much longer being a useless adult basically living in my basement bedroom of my parents house, especially with my younger siblings getting nearer to adult milestones, plus my savings were starting to run out.

so literally next weekend, i’m moving out! and i make enough money right now that with the rough budget i have established, if its accurate, i’ll have a decent amount of wiggle room and hopefully wont be ruining my mental health just trying to make ends meet.

it took a long time of searching but i managed to find a job that hasnt made me suicidal and has slightly more than the MIT living wage for my area lol. im a janitor now! we’ll see how long it lasts but a lot of the factors from my last two jobs that contributed to my failing mental health are gone. i rarely have to interact with other people, and if i do its my coworkers, of who i tend to only see for minutes per day, or the other people working in the building i clean who at most i have to say hi and have a nice night to lol. i get to listen to music and podcasts for 8 hours and its very routine heavy. i have to clock out after the 8 hours is up so i literally cant be forced into overtime. a lot of people dont respect cleaning jobs like this but honestly who gives a fuck, its something i can handle mentally and support myself with. its still hard adjusting to 40 hours. i know its the standard, but the standard is rly tough for me, but i think i can do it long term.

all of this has been achieved through sheer self hatred and impulse alone, and im very nervous about moving in with 3 other people even if 1 of them ive known for 8 years, and i dont think its even properly hit me yet. literally cant register that i have to fend 100% for myself but also ill be away from my toxic family! i can bring my cat with me, who before this i got to see at MOST once a week!

a dude ive known online for two or more years is moving to my area too for college and he’s so sweet and kind, i feel better talking to him than i have 99% of people in my life and im so lucky to know him. ive been forced to talk about personal things i was kind of dreading (not his fault, just a result of our relationship going to go from online -> irl and things id have to address beforehand) and honestly i didnt even mind it that much when i just got it over with and talked about it to him! vulnerability is literally the thing i struggle with the most in interpersonal relationships and is a huge block for me in every way and in even the most mundane life situations but like... he’s honestly the best and im getting emotional writing this and its weird af because i straight up dont GET emotional about other people. ive absolutely developed a stupid fucking crush on him recently and i THINK hes been receptive to flirting and i cant tell if he flirts back because we already say i love you and are wholesome af but honestly no clue if he’s into (trans) dudes but honestly? even if it doesnt work out im so happy to be friends with him and im so excited to finally meet him!! i really think knowing him has helped me improve myself

i’ve always thought that if i could literally just achieve the bare minimum in life that things would naturally get better. like i’m still mentally ill and get paranoid about peoples intentions and i think if my boss yelled at me id have an anxiety attack on the spot. im still depressed and hate that i have low energy and that it’s still rly hard doing basic chores.

but like a huge part of my problem was that i felt like i literally couldn’t TRY to connect with people if i couldn’t face having to tell them bare info about myself, like “oh i cant drive” or “i dont have a job” or that i was living with my parents but not even making PROGRESS on getting out. like how could i make friends or go on dates if i literally couldnt contribute shit or admit these things i was so ashamed of? a lot of my self image was shaped by this because my entire life i havent been mentally well enough to do as well as i should have.

but like. i feel like im finally doing these basic things!! i dont have to hate myself so much anymore! i dont look badly on other mentally ill ppl who are less lucky than i/havent been able to do those things yet/might not ever and are still in the same situation i was 2 months ago but the self hatred is strong pls understand.

i dont know yet if i could afford twice yearly drs visits for meds or anything and probably not therapy. i dont even know what my insurance is yet haha. but i’ll see

i need to figure out at what point in my life im going to be able to never contact a single person in my family ever again, considering i’ll be a 20 min drive away and they will know the precise location of where i live, and if i’ll ever feel safe enough in society to start hrt but :^) you know :^) i can at least present more masculinely in the meantime!

i dont rly know how to conclude this... i’m not trying to brag either im just very nervous and excited about where my life might be going for the first time ever? maybe? in my entire life? i have no clue what to pursue after moving out, but i can figure it out. and just... that there’s hope even if youre as fucked up and mentally ill as i am lmao!

#text #update #mostly tagging this for myself to read later if i ever start blogging frequently again

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mcrtiniblues-blog · 5 years

Text

.. let’s just get this over with SDKLFJDKSLDG this one Has to be typed in full so i’m dying already. sadly, you’re gonna have to wait on her stats page, among others sdfjgkldf

( deepika padukone, cisfemale, she/her. ) hey that’s amla jothadi over by the fountain! i wonder if they took a coin out. i heard the thirty-one year old’s been in sovana for two years and they’re known to be pretty apprehensive but also adept. a song that describes their life would be young by vallis alps and neatly-stacked novels, lilacs, freshly baked banana muffins, & bitten pen caps always reminds me of them.

so unlike halle, amla isn’t super developed as she’s a new new muse sdgjksd

so you’re getting the absolute basics i’m afraid !

had lived in london for her entire life and her home life was rather.. standard ??

middle child, only daughter syndrome didn’t hit her too hard bc she was the apple of her father’s eye and was a near-mirror image of her mother, so she had them both wrapped around her finger fsgdkldfgj

her and her brothers got along okay, hair-pulling and exclusion bc of “boys only”/”leave MY friends alone” moments aside, so it really was a rather mundane childhood that she had

p much the crybaby of her graduating class, overly sentimental and sweet so she was at most an annoyance to some

but it did make her a solid target for some of the mean kids bc they could get a reaction out of her pretty easily

nonetheless, she wasn’t the type to hold grudges for it, just dodged them and moved on from it as much as she could bc she figured they’d get bored of seeking her out eventually

all in all a teacher’s pet, friendly to all and just. adorable. slkdfgjdfs

she had an interest in cooking and writing from a young age, but left the former as a hobby and began to build a desire to do the latter as a career

but of course ! nothing is that simple !

at some point she realized that writing probably wouldn’t pay the bills by itself — when she Actually became an adult and would have to do that herself sfgdlk

so upon entering uni, she decided to go for a communications degree, thinking that she could at least start off as a secretary or clerk at a media group before doing Something creative there

.. but years passed after graduating and she was Still but a clerk. handling files and documents, answering calls that shouldn’t even be sent her way at times bc the people around her couldn’t be bothered, having a hard time with putting her foot down so she winds up swamped and stagnant before even hitting her thirties

and that’s not at All how she pictured her life at this age, so she’s disappointed and stressed and SAD af

but she thought she Had to take it bc it seemed like an unspoken rule that you do four years at uni, you do your masters or get out there and lock yourself down to a company/occupation for the next 40 years of your life before living it up at 70 in florida or at your tiny house in the countryside

her passion for writing and some of her hobbies floundered bc of how much the desk jockey life stressed her out, the only thing keeping her from wholly spiralling being her fridays at the pub with her college friends

.. though seeing things work out for them ( for the most part ) where they didn’t for her didn’t alleviate her worries 100%

so come her 29th birthday, she.. had her inevitable quarter life crisis of sorts, cringey rom com plotlines serving as inspo

bc she just. wasn’t Happy with her life at that point, had no real sense of adventure or pure freedom bc she locked herself down to what she thought she’s SUPPOSED to do or focus on

and it was when she was binging.. rom coms KLGJDSFGKL that she figured she should throw caution to the wind and go somewhere Else. some deep diving via google for destinations later and she fell in love with sovana !

she’s been here for two years now, just living life and staying far from her former office life, going at her own pace

she wants to delve into writing as she planned at one point, a now or never kind of thing, and she’s been... getting back into the swing of things ( EDIT: didn't even realize i left this hanging mid-sentence, didn't remember where i was going with it so filling the void looks a tad nonsensical SGFDLK )

cooking classes and baking, reading in the garden near her house, lots of other cute things fill up her days now and she’s having a Great time as a result SGKLDJSD

she’s done a few odd jobs here and there so she can sustain herself financially, though she’s currently working part-time at a café she frequents bc coffee ? treats ?? a chill reading environment ??? sign her up

personality and such

where halle’s often the bane of my existence ( when she’s not a bit of a mood ), amla’s baby

she’s not naive, but she has a relatively gentle soul

wholesome isn’t quite a word i’d use to describe her but she’s just super cute and a simpleton in some respects

the type to spare baby ants and spiders from being crushed by a slipper for being in the house, but to get someone else to take care of the.. creepier insects jskdfh

she’s not a Big risk-taker bc The Unknown scares her, so for her to even do what she did two years ago took a LOT out of her to muster up the nerve

so she’s a bit of an anxious person who at times needs assurance, even from a complete stranger

v big on global issues bc she wants the world to be a more peaceful place, so there’s a side of her that tends to see in black and white rather than grey.... or rose ig sdgklsd

the simple things in life appeal to her a lot, though a luxury or two is welcome if she can put it to good use

the Mom friend in some situations :( a cutie

she’s a romantic, like she has the Vibe even when she tries to play it off like the extent of it is a bit closeted, secretive yknow ??

bc even then.. she has her trepidations bc of the relationships that had flamed out in the past for whatever reason

has a cat named rory, who she Loves and might be projecting her slight baby fever onto for the time being

.. basically she’s your white picket fence fantasist — but make it rustic and less cliché — who’s managing to grip her bearings on the matter, if you couldn’t already tell SLKGJGFSD

yknow how some people get really emotional and quiet in an argument but proceed to snap almost out of fucking nowhere ?? that’s amla

sdlfkgj she’s used to having been a doormat or target in the past, so she tends to let herself take it until she realizes “ hey, i don’t need to be shit on like this, how Dare you — ”

just. love her please FKLFGDJSKLD

#sov.intro #ooc tag tba.#i feel like.. i could've done better considering i had DAYS to properly structure my ideas/muse for her #sad LFKGDSJGKDLF #anyways back to my dms in a bit ! gotta start preparing dinner

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violet-dragongirl · 5 years

Note

pass the happy! 🌻🌈 when you receive this, list 5 things that make you happy and send this to 10 of the last people in your notifications!

I just want to say first of all I do like this (these. I have received more than one at any given time in my life) because there's no curse. No ultimatum, no Or Have Something Bad Happen If You Don't. These are good.

Anywho, I'll rank them because why not.

5. Talking about my OCs

Well yes I do because I created them for one. But also because they're changing with me and it's one of the few things that still keep me connected to my own creativity despite what's going on that's keeping me away from it.

4. Ambient music in games that just make you feel so good inside

Like I could name a whole load of them but one of the most memorable ones is the title music in Hyper Light Drifter.

Like I could sit there and just have that play out and repeat and my mind goes bonkers. The images in my head go from like cute stuff to just really mesmerizing abstract stuff and like it generally puts me in a good mood.

Another example is the Deus Ex Human Evolution Soundtrack, but let's just focus on the Title screen again 😅🤣

That brings in more...like awe and wonder kinds of images??? Like landscape/city scapes with beautiful colors and just all futuristic but also yes has great balance of flits of nature here and there. Or like images of discovery and transcendence but warm and reassuring, than cold and somber.

3. Seeing heavy machinery just...work.

Like okay, the appeal of seeing robots or just machines in general in action astonishes me.

Like there was this one heavy press machine that makes the bottom of the chassis for cars that amazed me because seeing something so massive and loud do something so simple like pressing a metal sheet down...like I could just be around machines, seeing each part move all day and feel good.

2. Friend's/Mutual's Artworks

Simply put, seeing artwork from my friends/mutuals is so heartwarming. Especially if it's outside of my expertise/interests!

There's really nothing else to add because yeah, it's that simply wholesome.

💞🎆🎉 1. Seeing chain mail and posts without ultimatums or curses makes me have faith in humanity! 🎉🎆💞

Like this ask :D

Because there's already enough evil/curses in the world to last for aeons. And why spread that shit around to people who honestly don't even deserve it??? Why? I could probably write an entire book about how entirely fucked it is to see that (for my entire net life I've seen so much that it's just so...

🤢

And the thing is that, no I'm not all into making chain mail and chain posts (my brain thinks it's too much work??? Why...I dunno) So seeing just posts that are like, Happiness Here! Spread Around If You Wish! is something that I find that makes me feel happy.

Thanks for sending the ask @agayworthfightingfor!

As far as sending this to the last 10 people in my activity...ah well I say anyone of my mutuals and friends can!

Ah what the hay, is it alright if I just tag them?

@adrawrable @playingwithroles @itjustfeels @endreal @gay-space-stuff @gendertruckery @yuutfa @trunkten @spaffy-jimble @lessfaiththanimplied

#Xev answers #Asks #Happy chain meme #Thank you for sending this!

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emmerrr · 7 years

Note

Prompt: gansey freaking out about how attractive all his friends are (inspired by a deleted trk scene in which Ronan wears a suit and gansey's like........you do not look appropriate)

what a good prompt, thank you! I don’t have the energy to do this for the whole gangsey but I’ve been in a very ronsey mood lately (in a non-shippy way) so I have at least managed that :) [read on ao3]

(also writing this was the most fun!!)

On Gansey’s eighth attempt, Ronan finally answers the phone with a languid, “I’m very busy and important, this better be good.”

Gansey distantly hopes that Adam gets a better reception when he calls, forgoes any pleasantries and says, urgent, “You haven’t forgotten, have you? Please tell me you haven’t forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?”

Gansey sighs. “Ronan.”

Ronan laughs, short and sharp. “Keep your hair on, Dick, I’m fucking with you. You’ve reminded me several times about your mom’s little fundraiser, I couldn’t forget even if I wanted to. Which I do, matter of fact.”

“Okay, great,” Gansey says. “So you’ll be there then? On time?”

“Ah. See, Gansey, the thing is—”

“Oh what? What is the thing?” Gansey snaps, running a tired hand down his face.

“Parrish has my car. So, short of me showing up on a tractor — which, by the way, I’m fully prepared to do — I’m a little bit stuck.”

Gansey hurriedly pushes the admittedly hilarious image of Ronan rocking up to a political function on a tractor out of his head and sighs again. It’s been that sort of day. “Well, can’t Adam come and pick you up?”

“He could, but he’s at work until like, half an hour before your mom’s thing so he’s barely got time to go back to St. Agnes and change as it is. If he comes to get me, we’ll both be late.” Ronan lets out a long breath like he’s thinking. “Tell you what. I’ll take one for the team and sit this one out. Don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Oh,” Gansey says, and he laughs without any humour. “Oh, no, no. Ronan. No. If I don’t get out of going to this thing then neither do you. I’ll pick you up.”

Ronan’s light and breezy tone immediately changes. “There’s no need to go out of your fucking way, you’ve probably got enough to do.”

“Yes. I do. I really do. So hurry up and get ready because I have an hour and a half window free now and I’m using it to come and get you.”

“Gansey—”

“I’ll be there in 45 minutes and you better be ready,” Gansey says pleasantly and hangs up the phone.

Gansey really hadn’t been kidding about only having a brief pocket of time to work with, so he holds out hope that Ronan will be appropriately dressed and waiting so that he can just hop in the car and they can leave, but he can’t say he’s surprised to pull up outside the Barns to find that’s not the case.

He gets out of the car, heads over to the house and knocks on the front door, letting himself in when there’s no answer.

“Ronan,” he whisper-shouts, loathe to enter someone else’s property without an express invitation, not that Ronan will care. The house is very quiet and Gansey heads straight out back, annoyance seeping further into his bones with every step. He’d asked for one thing — just one thing — and Ronan still couldn’t do it without making things difficult.

He can’t immediately see Ronan but after a moment he spots Chainsaw circling overhead one of the barns and so he makes his way over. He hears voices as he gets closer and realises Ronan’s not in the barn, but behind it instead where if memory serves, there’s a few vegetable patches.

Gansey rounds the corner and there, at last, is Ronan. He’s with Opal who’s in control of a fluorescent yellow wheelbarrow, struggling to push it along as Ronan weighs it down with various veggies ripe for picking, including the biggest carrots Gansey has ever seen.

“Ro—” Gansey starts in irritation, but the rest of Ronan’s name dies in his mouth as Ronan turns around to face him and Gansey’s brain all but short-circuits. “Good Lord,” he manages a stuttering moment later. “What are you wearing?”

Ronan looks down, bemused. “Overalls,” he says with a shrug.

“Overalls!” Gansey scoffs, but it’s a quiet scoff because he’s not sure he’s getting enough air to his lungs. And he’s also pretty sure almost all of the blood in his body has rushed to his ears if the way they’re burning is anything to go by.

Ronan quirks an eyebrow. His outfit is, funnily enough, the kind that Gansey might associate with the Wholesome Farmer™ look, but it’s entirely at odds with Ronan’s usual style, so much so that it still has Gansey stammering for words.

There’s not much to it really. The boots Ronan’s wearing aren’t particularly out of place; they’re his usual stomping shoes. But he’s got a white sleeveless tee on underneath denim overalls that are rolled over at the bottom so that they end halfway down Ronan’s calves.

It’s a good look, to Gansey’s absolute dismay.

“This,” Gansey says, gesturing to Ronan’s attire when he’s finally calmed down enough to string a sentence together, “is not appropriate.”

Opal babbles something to Ronan in Latin that Gansey is too distracted to translate, and he nods at her and she drops the wheelbarrow handles and sprints off towards the house, and Ronan turns back to Gansey.

“What’s wrong with my overalls?” he asks, and then his smile turns sharp. “Parrish loves them.”

“Yes,” Gansey says weakly. “Yes, I bet he does.” He shakes his head. “Look, we don’t have time for this, go. Go get ready and we need to leave in 5.”

Ronan heaves a put-upon sigh and starts marching off to the house, but at the very least he’s moving now. Gansey waits in the car, and seven minutes later, Ronan emerges, now in a suit. His shirt’s untucked, his tie is sticking out of his shirt pocket instead of being actually on, but it’s fine for now; there’s still a couple of hours until they have to be properly ready.

Ronan slams into the car, scowl firmly in place where Gansey feels sure it will remain for the rest of the evening. “Why do you even want me at this stupid thing anyway? Your mom won’t care.”

“Because,” Gansey says as he starts the Pig, “Blue and Adam and Henry will all be there. And it wouldn’t feel right without you.”

Ronan grunts and knocks his forehead against the window, but as Gansey risks a sideglance he notices Ronan’s face has softened somewhat.

As Gansey had to pick him up early, Ronan gets the unenviable job of helping Gansey help Helen and their mother set things up at the school. Ronan’s expression is mutinous but he gets on with it with only limited complaining. Helen has brought Gansey’s suit to the school so he can change here, and when he’s ready, he steps back into the main hall to see Helen fixing Ronan’s tie as he rather pointedly rolls his eyes.

When Helen’s finished with him and hurried off to attend to other last-minute jobs, Ronan immediately hooks a finger in his collar and yanks until his tie’s loosened a sufficient amount. He looks a little unruly, but it’s more Ronan somehow, and Gansey finds himself smiling. Ronan looks good in a suit.

He catches Gansey’s eye. “The things I do for you,” he says.

“Yes, yes. I’m very grateful,” Gansey says agreeably.

Henry had offered to pick up Blue so the two of them arrive together five minutes before the fundraiser is due to start. Gansey smiles at the sight of them; he does love punctuality.

Blue kisses Gansey on the cheek, looks around the room and says cheerfully, “God, this is going to be awful.” Without further comment she makes a beeline for Ronan, and Gansey is struck by the sudden realisation that Blue and Ronan together at an event like this have the potential to be an absolute nightmare. But it’s a little late for that now, as Blue says something under her breath to Ronan whilst eyeing some stuffy old Republican across the room and Ronan honest to god snorts.

Henry drapes an arm around Gansey’s shoulder, following his gaze and correctly deducing his concerns. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“Thank you, Henry.”

Gansey lingers near the doorway to wait on Adam while the others head off to find drinks and a quiet corner in which to judge everyone else at the fundraiser. It’s not long before Adam arrives, and his eyes inevitably seek out Ronan as Gansey sidles up to him.

“He came then,” Adam says, nodding towards the corner that Ronan, Blue and Henry have claimed for the evening. “Thought he might try and weasel out of it.”

“Oh, believe me, there was an attempt,” Gansey says, shaking his head fondly. “Speaking of though, I have to ask. Does…” he trails off awkwardly.

Adam glances at Gansey and frowns before flicking his eyes back to Ronan. Gansey can forgive him — Ronan is very distracting. “Does what?” he asks.

“Ronan’s, uh… farm wear. Does he always wear those—”

“Oh, god, the overalls?” Adam interjects, his full attention back on Gansey, eyes wide and knowing.

“Yes. The overalls, oh my god, Adam!”

“I know,” Adam says. “Believe me, Gans, I know.”

“Right?”

ronan’s outfit is based on this fanart by @aeroplaneblues whose trc fanart consistently brings me infinite joy

#the raven cycle #trc #trc fic #tumblr prompts

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lynchgirl90 · 7 years

Photo

@Variety COVER STORY: Inside the roller-coaster journey to get @DAVID_LYNCH's #TwinPeaks back on TV

A red room. A dream version of Laura Palmer. An older Special Agent Dale Cooper, silent and pensive. The Man From Another Place, speaking cryptically: “That gum you like is going to come back in style.” It was early 1989, and Lynch was hard at work on “Twin Peaks.” He and co-creator Mark Frost were trying to meet the deadlines of ABC, the network that had commissioned a drama about love, pie and murder in a Pacific Northwest town. Lynch was under pressure to create scenes that would allow the pilot to be released as a TV movie in case it didn’t get picked up to series. But the filmmaker didn’t have any ideas for footage that could wrap up the story neatly enough to please a movie audience. Then he walked outside during an early-evening break from editing and folded his arms on the roof of a car. “The roof was so warm, but not too warm,” Lynch says. “It was just a really good feeling — and into my head came the red room in Cooper’s dream. That opened up a portal in the world of ‘Twin Peaks.’” That vision ended up in the third episode — but more importantly, it would lay the groundwork for the highly anticipated revival of the series, which returns May 21 on Showtime. It’s an older Cooper that anchors the series. While countless reboots of numerous series have crashed and burned, it’s safe to say few have been as intensely followed by fans as this one. As Showtime CEO David Nevins put it, “‘Twin Peaks’ as a place is a proper noun, but it’s almost become an adjective.” Since the show’s debut in April 1990, many dramas have tried to create the kind of evocative, twisted atmosphere “Twin Peaks” exuded from the first twanging notes of Angelo Badalamenti’s yearning score. And though intense dramas about murders that reverberate through tight-knit communities are now easy to find on TV, no show has come close to achieving the mix of humor, soapy drama, sincerity and corrupted purity found within the strange confines of “Twin Peaks.”

That’s because much of what’s distinctive about the drama emerges from the most unpredictable corners of Lynch’s mind — like that red room epiphany. “It comes in a burst,” Lynch explains. “An idea comes in, and if you stop and think about it, it has sound, it has image, it has a mood, and it even has an indication of wardrobe, and knowing a character, or the way they speak, the words they say. A whole bunch of things can come in an instant.” Frost describes a case in point: “I remember him calling me to say, ‘Mark, there’s a giant in Cooper’s room,’” he says. “I learned early on that it was always best to be very receptive to whatever might bubble up from David’s subconscious.” The first iteration of “Twin Peaks” lasted only two seasons — 30 episodes in all — but the show left a legacy that would help define auteur TV. “I don’t think anyone who ever saw ‘Twin Peaks’ will ever have it not ingrained in their memory and imagination for the rest of their lives,” says Laura Dern, a frequent Lynch collaborator who plays a mysterious role in the new season. Yet getting the series back on-screen was no easy feat. At one point, the revival almost fell apart before production began. It would take delicate negotiations by all parties to rescue the project. “I was an actual, genuine lover of ‘Twin Peaks’ and the world that [Lynch] created, and I knew his filmography really well,” Nevins notes. “[We said] we would take the ride with him, and that we would treat it well and treat it with the respect that it deserved. I think we did. We bobbed and weaved with him; we were patient when we had to be patient.”

Lynch and Frost began talking about returning to “Twin Peaks” in August 2012, in part because the show’s baked-in time jump was approaching — in that pivotal red room scene, Agent Cooper is 25 years older. The two men shared ideas over meals at Musso & Frank, and after the writing process had begun in earnest, they started to shop the revival around. They settled on Showtime fairly quickly, given their history with the executives. Gary S. Levine, Showtime’s president of programming, has known Frost and Lynch since his days at ABC. Almost three decades ago, he was one of the execs who heard their pitch for the TV show they initially called “Northwest Passage.” (Levine still has the memo that notes the date of the first concept meeting for the pilot — Aug. 25, 1988.) But as with everything Lynch, the agreement for the redux came down to instinct: A final piece of the puzzle, say the execs, was a painting in Nevins’ office of a little girl next to a bookcase that looks like it may fall on her. “I was making the pitch about why he should come here and why we would treat his property right, and he mostly stood there and stared at the painting,” Nevins recalls. (For his part, Lynch says the painting wasn’t the deciding factor, but he smiles at the memory of seeing it.) The deal closed in the fall of 2014, with an order of nine episodes; the following January, Lynch hand-delivered a 400-page document. “It was like the Manhattan phone book,” Frost says. Their plan was to shoot the entire thing — with Lynch at the helm of every episode —and then edit the resulting footage into individual episodes. It’s hard to imagine wrestling that 400-page behemoth into a briefcase, let alone giving notes on it. When talks broke down, however, the conflict wasn’t about the script but rather the project’s budget. In April 2015, the director went public with his growing displeasure, tweeting that “after 1 year and 4 months of negotiations, I left because not enough money was offered to do the script the way I felt it needed to be done.”

Lynch’s threatened departure generated a flurry of commentary, most of which said that a version of the TV show without him would be worse than no “Twin Peaks” at all. “I didn’t want ‘Twin Peaks’ without Lynch either,” Nevins says drily. The Showtime chief says he was out of the country when negotiations hit that difficult patch. Lynch wanted the flexibility to expand the length of the season, but he didn’t know exactly how many episodes he’d end up with. He hoped it would be possible to go longer than the 9 or 13 installments that had been discussed, but he ran into resistance from the network’s business affairs department. “It didn’t fit into the box of how people are used to negotiating these kinds of deals,” Nevins says. “Once I understood what the issues were from the point of view of the filmmaker, I was like, ‘OK, we can figure that out.’ And we did — it turned out not to be very complicated to [resolve].” Nevins and Levine went over to the director’s house. “Gary brought cookies,” Lynch recalls. And over baked goods and coffee, the three men hashed everything out. Lynch, says Nevins, has a history of being responsible. “He said, ‘Give me the money; I will figure out how to apportion it properly.’ And he did,” Nevins says. (Levine says the cost of “Twin Peaks” is comparable to that of Showtime’s other high-end dramas.) Asked for his side of the story, Lynch asks, “What did Showtime say?” Told their version, he signs off: “Basically, that’s it.” He says his relationship with the network ever since the cookie summit has been “solid gold.” (Treats never hurt: When he delivered cuts of the new season, he sent along doughnuts.)

The mystery of the first season of “Twin Peaks” was, famously, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” The mystery of the reboot is, well — nearly everything. None of the 18 episodes will be released in advance to critics, and very few details have leaked out. Though cast members such as Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Cooper), Madchen Amick (Shelly Johnson), Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey Horne) and Ray Wise (Leland Palmer) are returning, others, including Joan Chen, Michael Ontkean and Lara Flynn Boyle, won’t be back. No one will say what characters are being played by new recruits Dern, Ashley Judd, Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and Robert Forster — there’s a roster of more than 200 characters in the new season. Frost’s father, Warren; Catherine Coulson, the Log Lady; and Miguel Ferrer, who played the irascible Albert Rosenfield, all filmed scenes before they died. Nevins lets it slip that Lynch’s character, the hearing-impaired FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, is “pretty prominent” in the new season. “I probably said too much,” he adds. MacLachlan says that Lynch enjoys the world of “Twin Peaks” so much that he couldn’t resist putting himself back in it. But he admits that, for his part, he finds it hard to stay in character when he’s doing scenes with his director. “Unless we’re really both firmly rooted in what we’re doing, we tend to start laughing and messing up,” the actor says. Stopping for a moment, the actor reconsiders: “David, when he works, he’s very committed to Gordon. So when I’m in there with him, he’s able to really hold it. He holds it better than I do, to be honest.” For those expecting a similar structure to the original, which revolved around Laura’s death, Frost issues a warning: “It’s going to be very different this time around.” The scope of the reboot is greater, says Nevins, adding that the new installments of the drama reflect Lynch’s advancement as an artist.

“I think he’s evolved to an even more extreme version of himself, but all of the [Lynch] themes are visible,” Nevins says. “He has certain ideas about the ideal of America. Not to relate it too much to the present, but he has certain ideas about Midwestern American wholesomeness. But I think he’s also incredibly aware of the flip side of it. I think David Lynch is a really relevant voice: What does it mean when we say, ‘Make America great again?’” Given the wider scope, it’s not surprising to hear that, though “Twin Peaks” returned to Snoqualmie, Wash., for some filming, certain storylines in the new season take place outside the Pacific Northwest, and the bulk of the new season was shot in Southern California. “There are different threads in different parts of the U.S.” that eventually converge, Nevins says. “It does not go outside the U.S., but it is in multiple locations in the U.S.” One last clue from Lynch: The film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” he says, is very important to understanding what’s coming May 21.

Even if “Twin Peaks” travels outside its forested Pacific Northwest setting, it’s safe to assume there’s still cherry pie on the menu at the Double R Diner. Lynch and Frost’s collaborative process is also still intact; 25 years later, the two men picked up where they left off. Lynch lives in Los Angeles and Frost resides more than an hour away, so the two men often worked together via Skype. Frost typically writes down what they come up with, and then the two trade notes and talk further to refine the story. “Getting it the way you want it to be, that’s a beautiful high and it’s a high for everybody,” says Lynch of directing. “It’s difficult to go home and go right to sleep. And it’s murder to get up in the morning.” Lynch directed every episode of the drama, which wrapped production a year ago. In a perfect world, he says he would have helmed every installment of the original series. “Not that other directors didn’t do a fine job,” he says. “But when it’s passing through different people, it’s just natural that they would end up with [something] different than what I would do.” The freedom of airing on a premium channel didn’t change his approach, Lynch says. There’s not much in the way of nudity or extreme violence in the finished product. “You don’t think, ‘Oh, I can do this now,’” he says. “The story tells you what’s going to happen.” In fact, despite the show’s reputation for being unsettling, most of what’s dark and dangerous about “Twin Peaks” comes from its mood and soundscape, not necessarily from what’s depicted on-screen. Decades ago, ABC executives were excited about Lynch and Frost’s pitch in part because it was, in many ways, relatively conventional. It fit easily into a number of existing TV categories: the classic nighttime soap, the murder mystery, the high school drama and the small-town saga.

“There certainly weren’t Standards & Practices issues at the time,” Levine says. “[Lynch’s] imagination took you to new places, not to prurient places. That was a good thing in broadcast TV.” But the otherworldly elements that Lynch layered in — an indefinable air of mystery, a surreal quality that evoked swooning, bittersweet loss — were among the factors that made the original “Twin Peaks” a ratings and pop-culture sensation. And despite that the second season was more uneven than the first, the show often effectively blended slapstick humor with dream logic, bittersweet romance, heightened melodrama and hints of violence and degradation. “He’s got both really good craft and storytelling skills, and he also creates his own reality without it violating the reality you’re in,” Levine says. “I think that was one of the great things about the original — it was a really compelling plot, but it also was this acid trip. Somehow those two things coexist beautifully in David Lynch’s world.” Lynch doesn’t question where inspirations like the red room scene come from; he simply wants to capture them with his cameras. And lest anyone think he’s overly precious about his process, Lynch doesn’t consider himself the creator of these visions. “It's like that idea existed before you caught it, so in some strange way, we human beings, we don't really do anything,” he says. “The ideas come along and you just translate them.” What might Lynch’s response be if an actor said, about a line, "That doesn't feel right to me”? “I don't know if I've ever said that to him, actually,” says MacLachlan, stumped by the question. “I mean, I would never change it. It is there for a reason.” In fact, to hear him tell it, the fact that Cooper is an iconic TV character is in many ways a tribute to the writing for the character, especially in Cooper’s debut scene. “I brought my stuff, yeah,” MacLachlan says. “But that’s one of the greatest introductions into a story of any that I've ever had — driving up the mountain, talking into a tape recorder about some of the mundane things in life, just kind of cataloguing it. Immediately, you wonder, ‘Who is this guy and what is he about?’” “When I first started with David in ‘Dune,’ I was full of questions. I would bother him non-stop,” MacLachlan says. “He always had a great deal of patience with me. On ‘Blue Velvet,’ I still [had questions], but less, and then with ‘Twin Peaks,’ even less. I've stopped having to know everything. I’ve just said, ‘OK, I see where we're going.’” “For Kyle and I, we've spoken about this incredible gift that we know what [Lynch] means” when he discusses his vision for a scene or a project, Dern says. “We have gone on this journey with him, so we know his language, or what he's inventing. We don't necessarily need to understand it or need it to be logical, but we see where his brain is taking him and we can follow.”

Dern and MacLachlan both say they relish the opportunity to work with Lynch because his vision is so specific that it gives them a detailed road map to follow — and it makes the set an efficient place. “There’s no wasted time or wasted emotions, tangents, whatever,” MacLachlan notes. “He’s very precise when we talk through the scene, and he tells me what’s going to happen. He has already thought it through, and he sees it.” Dern marvels at the rigor and enigma of Lynch’s process. “David creates these worlds, sometimes all too real and sometimes incredibly absurd, but either way, he places humanity inside them, and his dialogue is so precise, mysterious, unusual and beautiful that you want to dive into that dialogue and hopefully make it soar,” she says. Given Lynch’s penchant for secrecy, just about all Dern can say about her character is that she talks about birds, at least once. “Kyle and I had several scenes, particularly in the car, when we're talking about the robins,” Dern says. “There’s this very beautiful, hopeful poetry amidst this hellish world they've entered.” Rewatching “Twin Peaks” recently, MacLachlan was struck by how the editing of the show helps it create a series of moods, from comedic to tautly suspenseful, from romantic to terrifying. “His timing, his rhythms,” MacLachlansays. “That's what I find so interesting about David Lynch — the way he stretches things or condenses things, or manipulates time to make something either seem more humorous or less.”

Now all that remains to be seen is how the public responds to the new adventures of Agent Cooper, that avatar of square-jawed all-American perseverance. “I believe in intuition,” Lynch says. “I believe in optimism, and energy, and a kind of a Boy Scout attitude, and Cooper’s got all those things.” The most important parallel between Lynch and Cooper is that their belief in their own intuition is matched by a purposeful, almost single-minded intent. What allows Lynch to put deeply felt images from his subconscious on the screen is a tenacious focus — one that’s cloaked in the kind of smiling, friendly optimism that Cooper typically exudes. “His vision is genuine,” Dern says. “He’s not interested in creating something so others will be impacted by it. He just sees a world and has to follow it.” Despite the passionate responses his works have created, Lynch doesn’t necessarily set out to delve into the hearts and minds of his viewers. He’s just an interpreter of something primal — a messenger for the visions that find him. “I guess, like Mel Brooks said, ‘If you don’t laugh while you’re writing the thing, the audience isn’t going to laugh,’” Lynch explains. “If you don’t cry or feel it while you’re doing it, it’s probably not going to translate.” Almost 30 years ago, TV viewers followed Lynch through that portal to the red room. Despite the crowded TV landscape “Twin Peaks” helped create, Nevins thinks audiences will take the journey again. “I think he does have enormous self-confidence as an artist — that what resonates with him won’t resonate with everybody but will resonate with enough people that it’s going to make noise in the world,” Nevins says. And if there is silence, that’s fine too. “If nothing happens, it’s still OK,” Lynch says with a smile. “This whole trip has been enjoyable.”

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#Twin Peaks #Kyle MacLachlan #David Lynch #Laura Dern #Variety #Showtime

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gaiabros · 5 years

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Short on time? Head on over to our ELECTROWEEN Mixes page where we have created an archive for all of our ELECTROWEEN productions. There you will find our latest 2019 mixes to stream and download. If you like what we’ve been creating, please subscribe to GAIA BROS to receive news and announcements about forthcoming projects and articles.

You read that right, ladies and gents. 2019 marks the decisive end to a decade of Halloween-inspired, pop culture infused music productions, which have been in production since the series’ humble beginnings back in Fall 2009. Right off the bat, you may have a question or two popping up. Why is ELECTROWEEN ending on its decade milestone 2019 mix? Will there be more EDM mixes coming in the future?

Grab a beer and find a cozy seat, then come back and join us for the details. Story time, kids!

Setting The Stage: First Mention of the Series’ End

Before jumping into ELECTROWEEN 2019 details, I need to spend a little time establishing some relevant details from a year ago.

Last Fall, shortly after we had released ELECTROWEEN 2018, I flew down to San Diego to visit Matt and his girlfriend Jessica for the weekend of Halloween. We saw the Halloween movie reboot, carved up some pumpkins, dropped by Tatsu Ramen in L.A. for some delicious bowls of noodles, and drove up to Universal Studios Hollywood for their Halloween Horror Nights (in particular, to check out the Stranger Things attraction). We had a wonderful time together.

Pumpkin carvings by Scott, Matt and Jessica

It was during this visit when I announced to Matt that 2019 would mark the final year for the ELECTROWEEN series, ending a solid run of releases spanning our 20s to our early 30s. It has become a cherished tradition… something we’ve always looked forward to with the start of each new calendar year. ELECTROWEEN is Halloween for us, and a token of our years of friendship and love for the arts, electronic dance music, cult video games and films. In short, it is the summation of everything we love, and have come to love. This was bittersweet to talk about, but in the end it’s for the right reasons.

The rationale behind this decision is, for the most part, straight-forward. Since jump starting my DJ hobby back in 2006, I have released over 30 studio production mixes, manned two radio shows ([OuteR HeaveN] and PLURALITY at WSNC Radio), and performed countless live DJ sets at house parties, bars and private events.

In many ways, I’ve exhausted myself from the art form and feel a burning need to start creating my own music, rather than curating the works of others as I’ve done for the majority of my adult years. But also, life has happened, too.

Other Happenings That Have Influenced This Decision

During the same weekend I visited Matt last October, I simultaneously released my second album, Gravitational Waves, for my chillsynth project Gravity Mission. The album took three years to envision, create and release (collaborating remotely for the entire process) after a six year dry spell from our initial 2012 debut Before The Spoken Word. I came to realize the creative process was deeply rewarding and allowed me to evolve artistically in ways I had not previously imagined. In a real sense, it showed me that the barriers to creating music only exist in my head, and that changing course at any time is entirely possible.

Gravity Mission’s Gravitational Waves album (released October 26, 2018)

Lastly, life changes have been a considerable factor, often left out of the picture here on GAIA BROS. Having moved eight times since the release of my initial 2009 mix, I’ve been feeling the need to get more serious about putting down roots, connecting to a single place and getting acquainted with my local community. After my wife and I bought our first home in 2017, I started switching gears and pursuing other interests, including gardening, foraging, craft beer, table top gaming, GM’ing and traveling. It’s been a wonderful past few years, but a lot to handle. Thus I’ve had to make some tough decisions and learn to be more realistic with my time commitments.

“Tell Us About ELECTROWEEN 2019 Already, Please!”

Whew! Thanks for hanging in here for the entire reason why you’re reading this post! Let’s jump right into ELECTROWEEN 2019 — its inception, influences and more.

As the crown jewel in this decade long saga, ELECTROWEEN 2019 needed to be fantastically epic in a way that other mixes couldn’t be. It needed flair, funk and spirit on all levels. But most importantly, it absolutely HAD to be a fun reminder of why we started doing this whole thing in the first place. Returning full circle to our beginnings was key.

Where it all began: ELECTROWEEN 2009 (released October 16, 2009)

I began by looking back on our early mixes and questioning why we fell in love with the concept of merging EDM tracks and jack-o’-lantern heads together. We were creating something different, something bold — a novel form of expression that did not yet exist in the world. Several tracks started to stand out, and they were always the ones that jacked our bodies in ways unlike anything else. That’s when the realization struck: our final mixes for the ELECTROWEEN series needed to be celebratory and sentimental, using tracks with massive swing and vibe that pulse with uplifting energy and emotion.

This led to months of heavy Spotify rotations and research, ultimately pointing to the spiritual successor of the 70s: Nu Disco! A long time fan of Daft Punk, their French house discography was a great starting place for finding similar artists and classics. What originally felt like a monumental undertaking quickly became a super synthesized formula for hot disco beats and flashing synths, and the energy continued to pick up from there!

September Reunion in Portland, Oregon

A few weeks back, Matt flew up to Portland to celebrate the end of the ELECTROWEEN series. We GAIA BROS reunited over glorious moments of food, drink and beats at home, while foraging in the woods for Chanterelles, and driving out to the coast. Matt and I carved up our pumpkin helmets for the last time and fully embraced the defining characteristic of our early mixes.

For the first time in seven years, we embarked on a photoshoot with gold and silver capes in search of Portland’s most aesthetically gratifying street art. Some gloomy weather rolled in, but we ended up working with the rainfall to leverage its luminous quality for the end product. Below is a gallery of the final images processed from the shoot, which we have included within the download files for the 2019 mixes. Continue on after the gallery for liner notes and the final cover art designs created especially for the occasion!

VII’s Decade Celebration Mix Liner Notes

From Scott: My tenth and final mix for the ELECTROWEEN series touches on the things most sentimental to me. It is everything I have to give, and everything I could ever say, in a timeframe just short of an hour and a half. This is the longest production I’ve created to date, and looking back on it, I never wanted a single moment of it to end. The mix embodies the essence of the long and wholesome nights spent with close friends and loved ones… those irreplaceable times that will forever shine in our minds and hearts.

My 2019 mix is divided up into three seamlessly transitioning acts: a soaring and lofty Halloween introduction at-length (VG OST and Synthwave), an all night long celebration (Nu Disco), and finally a sincere and heartfelt closure, painting a pensive mood with vulnerable feelings of love, melancholy and, ultimately, acceptance.

Samples from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night are most prevalently stitched in between tracks. I completely fell in love with this game upon its release this past summer. Matt and I have patiently waited four years for this game, as we were original backers from the April 2015 Kickstarter campaign. It’s clear that Koji Igarashi and Michiru Yamane have put their souls into this beautiful masterwork. I also drew samples from other favorites including Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Game of Thrones, and 300, which all have their own places within the narrative of this work.

Having ventured into the darkness (perhaps a little too long) in years past, I’ve found my way back to the grooves that bring the “feel good” vibes in spades. I should note here that initially I had started working on this mix back in March 2019 in order to get a head start on the final mix concept. With that said, I am extremely satisfied with the end product. The coin design illustration I created for the cover art came together effortlessly based on the passion encompassing this special time. The whole process has been cathartic on a deep level. I’m grateful for these ten years of ELECTROWEEN and will always take them with me into whatever comes next. Special thanks goes to Matt for believing in this project and being a great collaborator, my wife Lindsey for her support and encouragement, and David for listening and being a loyal fan all these years.

Loveless’ Decade Celebration Mix Liner Notes

From Matt: OHHHHH MAN! Has it been a decade already? Where did all the time fly? I was just a wee lad yesterday bumping to Scott’s mixes and now I’m a seasoned vet of the Halloween variety. Tonight I am going to see Lana Del Rey with my girlfriend which will be a great cap on the end of ELECTROWEEN. Lana’s moody and melodic music is of a bygone era. She really evokes the spirit of ELECTROWEEN (side note: thank you to Jessica, my aforementioned girlfriend, for introducing Lana to me). This year I open with an instrumental and a remix of her first big hit, Video Games. A song that reminds me of a few weekends ago when I visited Scott.

We went mushroom foraging and shot the ELECTROWEEN liner photos. We haven’t shot photos like that since 2012 and it was amazing. The rain followed us every spot we went that day, brightening up all the colors. It was a tough shoot, but well worth the results.

We also went to a retro video game bar in Portland. There, we found the Sega Genesis version of TMNT: Hyperstone Heist. I haven’t played that game since I was in grade school and it was an incredible moment to share with Scott. The song “Video Games” evokes a simpler time with a tinge of melancholy. I think I’ll always pair this experience and that song together.

ELECTROWEEN is coming to an end. As I type that, my heart hurts. When Scott and I spoke about it earlier this year, it bothered me. I wasn’t upset with the decision, but ELECTROWEEN has become an integral part of who I am. However, it is important to move on and hone our passions. You cannot be married to every creative thing you do, and ELECTROWEEN has come to a fitting end. I think Scott and I will take everything we learned over the years and make something truly magical and different in 2020.

As for my mix, this year it was more personal. I skipped many of the video game pleasantries that have made up ELECTROWEEN’s previous iterations. I tried to throw in all styles of music we’ve used in the past 10 years and kept the overall mix more funky and positive. Halloween is for mischief after all!

In 2019 Loveless (my DJ persona) is locked away in a mental institution and the key is thrown away. This, of course, is the end of ELECTROWEEN and Loveless’ fate is uncertain, but you always gotta leave the end open for a sequel. Thank you to everyone who has listened to these mixes over the years. It has been a labor of love that I wouldn’t have traded for anything else. From now until the end of time the crisp Autumn air will always feel like ELECTROWEEN to me.

Thanks For Listening and Being A Part of ELECTROWEEN!

We sincerely hope that you enjoy the ELECTROWEEN 2019 mixes while testing out some of your best moves this Halloween season. Whether this is the first mix you’ve listened to of ours or your tenth, we want to thank you for being a part of our community and keeping the spirit of Halloween alive. ELECTROWEEN has been one of the most meaningful projects of our entire lives, and it will always be here, preserved in time. The mixes will continue to be available on GAIA BROS well into the future; feel free to dive back in any time.

The era of ELECTROWEEN officially ends here, and a new one begins. What is to come, no one can know for sure…

—

I’d like to close this significant chapter of our lives with a special quote:

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

Peace, Love, Unity and Respect — forever and always. ❤

VII (Scott Werley) and Loveless (Matt Konop)

The End of an Era: Celebrating 10 Years of ELECTROWEEN Mixes #electroween #halloween #mixes Short on time? Head on over to our ELECTROWEEN Mixes page where we have created an archive for all of our ELECTROWEEN productions.

#2019 #Celebration #ELECTROWEEN #Gaming #Halloween #Mixes #Nu Disco #Synthwave #VG OST

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dillomedia · 6 years

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PRINCESS ROYALE

by Mira Silvers

Music Editor, Mira Silvers, sits down with Princess Nokia to talk poetry, feminism, & 1992.

Strong, unapologetic and beautiful are words that describe Destiny Frasqueri, an independent artist known by her alter-ego Princess Nokia.

A girl playing basketball, soccer, boxing, in gold chains, in a plaid shirt and a white dress. The duality of the feminine imagery is what the viewers encounter as a strong female voice raps through computer speakers.

Hailing from NYC, Princess Nokia has released three mixtapes to date, seamlessly infusing feminine and masculine aspects of her persona into her work along with imagery celebrating feminine beauty, especially that of coloured women. In doing so, Princess Nokia has revived some much needed intellectual and feminist discourse in rap.

In early August I called her up to talk about her third mixtape (1992), sisterhood, creativity and power.

Mira Silvers: Can you start with the inspiration behind the name Princess Nokia?

Princess Nokia: I just wanted to come up with a cool name that was cute and kinda of animated. And, I think I took the inspiration [from] not having a phone or a computer at the time. I was seeing all these music videos and touring plans off of an Obama government phone and I was like, “Well, I’m queen of the trap phone.” It’s really cool, it had so much character [and spoke] to the type of person that I am. So Princess is usually considered very glamorous and, you know, high maintenance. But, I am the anti-princess. I’m the princess of poverty, a little orphan princess. Like the real side of a princess. Just like a young, sweet animated female protagonist who came from the slums and didn’t have much to work with, but who is making something out of something that she has.

MS: Hearing the name Princess Nokia made me think of The Matrix.

PN: There was a lot of Matrix influence going on there.

MS: Oh yeah, are you a big fan of the Matrix trilogy?

PN: Yeah actually, and a lot of it influenced my first album [Metallic Butterfly].

MS: Let’s talk about 1992. What was the process of putting together a mixtape like that?

PN: You know I wanted to take a break from normal competition writing. After I had done my first two mixtapes, Metallic Butterfly and Honeysuckle, I wasn’t really satisfied with what I was making. I wasn’t satisfied with my singing. I wanted to do something different. So I started writing poetry and rhyming again.

When I made 1992, it began with a real clean slate. You know, I spent a couple of months not making any music at all. After I put out Honeysuckle, I took some time to just really think to myself and go ‘What do I want to create? What do I want to say?’ And, I just started writing really, really simple poetry — that’s really what it is. I was just spending a lot of time going around New York putting myself into these writing exercises: every day I would make myself go to Central Park or Jefferson Park in Harlem, and I’d take a journal and just writing everything that kinda came out that I felt was correlated to my childhood, my youth, my identity, my life — everything that had some sort of relevance to every little bit involvin’ me. It was this really, really cathartic awesome experience. There was world music for hours on end, you know, walking around the city, and I formulated 1992. 1992 was like, every song was like a chapter in a book that’s about myself. And it was really fun.

MS: You said that you got back into writing poetry again. Did you take influence from your love of Harlem Renaissance writers?

PN: It always has an influence on what I do, but it wasn’t the big influence. I’m just like… I am kid, I am a growing girl, a growing person, for different years and seasons in my life. I have different moods, different subject matters that I’m writing about. At the time I was writing, it was just really lighthearted and there weren’t any dark tones. So my writing process was very free, very fluid and very wholesome and included so many things [such as] mundane subjects of the heart.

MS: What are your expectations for 1992, if any?

PN: I just wanted to make a really good, classic hip hop album. I started rapping and reteaching myself how to rap, really familiarizing myself with poetry and with the style of hip hop, again. I come from doing experimental [music] like drum & bass, jungle, R&B, and soul music and all that kind of stuff. So, when I started rapping again, I wanted to do it right, and I wanted to do it really respectful. I wanted to come into it with a lot of head-on hip hop, like real warm, old school flavour that really influences me and that I really relate to. That was my main focus.

I didn’t think that it would be successful and I didn’t want to put pressure on myself in hopes that it would be successful. I wasn’t even that kind of artist at that time. I’ve been this kind of anomaly in the music world: an independent artist, self-managed, self-made. I just make music for myself, honestly.

I am a musician, and every year I challenge myself to make a music project that reflects some goodness in myself. The artistic protection that I have, I want to exercise that. So, I really didn’t have too many expectations. This is just a music project and this is what I do. Some people wanna come and see me play. Every year I need to work on a project so that I may sustain my life as an artist, tour and [have] the little opportunities here and there.

MS: Can we talk about the imagery and lyrics in “Tomboy?”

PN: I mean what do you want me to say, darling?

MS: Haha! Whatever you wish. I suppose it’s straightforward.

PN: I mean it’s pretty straightforward. (There’s) a tomboyish masculinity that I exude, both in my style and my personality and in my fluidity. There isn’t much to it: I am a tomboy; I’m a tomboyish kind of girl. “Tomboy” is about the love and the comfort that I had with my style and my sensuality and my beauty, which is considered unconventional and which isn’t always feminine, which is extremely messy and boyish. And I love that and I wanted to celebrate that part of me that had always been who I am and a big part of what I do. An unconventional beauty that is a little dirty and a little gross, but still really sweet and lovely, and still girly at the same time. It all came from an innocent, wholesome place. As a young girl finding her place in the world, there was no better place, feeling really content with just walking outside and knowing that I was happy and healthy by being happy with what I saw in the mirror and however I felt (about it).

The baggy clothes, the backwards cap, the big t-shirts and the dirty sneakers — that has always been my comfort. And it took me a long time to feel comfortable like that. And finally I realized that this is it — this is the best part of me. This is all of me. And it’s something I’m proud of and that makes me beautiful and makes me feel free and fun. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m trying to be anything else that I am not.

MS: To continue on with that imagery of beauty, can you talk about the thought process and imagery of women and sisterhood in “Brujas”?

PN: Well, I like to explore and celebrate the themes of sisterhood, of blackness, of brownness, of divine matriarchy, of urban feminism in my work. I’ve been doing so since Metallic Butterfly.

And you know me, as a female rapper and as a very different artist from most women in my field, I’m inspired by art, high art and the perception of symbolism. So I really enjoy featuring women, beautiful strong examples of women from my community in my work, which I did with “Young Girls,” which I did with “Nokia,” which I did with “Soul Train” and then with “Brujas.” And in “Tomboy” and “Kitana,” you see that it’s a common theme.

The sisterhood between black and brown women is a theme that I’m constantly exploring and celebrating and reinforcing because it’s a theme of beauty and positivity and wellness. And it’s a theme that I want younger girls to see so they feel inspired and understand that their representation matters.

MS: I completely agree with that. You mentioned that you’re very different from the women in your field. Do you think that women in rap are not exploring this concept?

PN: No, it’s not that they aren’t exploring the concept. This doesn’t have to do with other female rappers, this has to do with rappers in hip hop, which is the world of narcissism and megalomania and ego, when we focus only on ourselves, which is not entirely a bad thing. But how many people use other people as their subjects instead of themselves? Do you know what I mean?

MS: Not many.

PN: Yeah! It is a big deal when you feature other beautiful women and say look at them and not look at me as much. This is the story and this is the subject matter and these are the people or the women — these are the real people. Only featuring myself in the storyline or the video would be limiting and under-representing.

MS: True femininity, feminism, and women should be celebrated in hip hop and rap. How do you do it?

PN: Women are over-glorified and overly sexualized. Women are regarded as objects. When it comes to divine aspects, women as subjects become undervalued. So it’s really great that I can influence these themes as an important subject in art, in visualization through hip hop.

MS: How do you feel about being labelled a role model?

PN: I have no problem with that label. I consider myself an eternal big sister, a mother-type, to a lot of people. And I don’t think it’s cumbersome. I think I’m very honest with my fanbase. Don’t glorify me for my image or for a perfect image or perception. You might consider me your role model because you might admire and value and respect my intellect. But you also admire and value my honesty, my thoughts and my mistakes. So, yes, in some way I’m role model to many many people in this world and I happily accept that because that is just life. Young women look up to me because I create inspiring and empowering music. You can’t have one without the other.

Am I bothered by the pressure? No, I think that my fanbase has a lot of respect for me and my values and my flaws and mistakes. I am very lucky to have a very very forgiving and understanding fanbase that values me as a human and values my mistakes and my flaws as well as my accolades. ■

#interview #music #rapper #rap #rap music #princess nokia #fortagency #1992 #journalism #music journalism

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