#they have a cat her name is shelley
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Ma Xiuying from the Radiant Emperor duology!
Design/research notes under the cut
The characters read 馬秀英 (Pinyin: mǎ xiù yīng), her personal name, and 孝慈高皇后 (xiào cí gāo huáng hòu), her name as Empress.
There's certainly no dearth of material on Chinese clothing history out there. That is, if you can read Chinese, which I can't, so everything I have is from secondary and tertiary sources and/or relies on translation software. Fortunately, we're dealing with historical fantasy here, so some anachronisms are not only allowed but encouraged.
While Shelley Parker-Chan takes many liberties, the books are still set in a very specific time period, which is both a blessing and a curse. Most readily accessible resources will tell you about dynasties, which can span hundreds of years, and the duology takes place in a transitional period. So how to dress a Semu girl from the Yuan dynasty who lives with Nanren rebels wanting to revive the Song dynasty and who later becomes the first Ming empress?
Let's go through them one by one. The best resource was this book which is on the Internet Archive. I disregarded Mongol and Semu influences for the design since clothing is very much political and a way to either stand out or fit in with the surrounding society, see for example Wang Baoxiang wearing a topknot in Khanbaliq. Ma, I imagine, would want to fit in with the Nanren around her, so she's pretty much wearing the attire of Han women under Yuan rule. For the hair I went for something that looks youthful while being plausible, though I found very little on hair in this period, so who's to say.
The next one is from a specific scene in the book, so there is some description to go on: red, long sleeves with gold embroidery, high hair, red and gold ribbons. Since this is the scene where Ma declares herself queen and future empress in front of the Red Turban, it has to be a very deliberate dress. It therefore takes inspiration from Song aristocrats' broad-sleeved gowns as well as from 翟衣 (dí yī), the highest ceremonial gown of both Song and Ming empresses. (Some examples for 翟衣 are in this post, which also features the bird shaped crown I just had to include, and this post.) Her hair still has the loops, but it's much more sculpted.
Finally, Empress Ma! This is mainly based on the two actual portraits I could find of the historical figure that Ma is based on, with elements taken from other portraits and paintings. It includes 凤冠 (fèng guān), the phoenix crown, 霞帔 (xiá pèi), the sash, and 禁步 (jīn bù), the jade belt. This video shows how Ming dynasty layers are worn, but it refers to a much later period so it's not quite the same as Ma's.
(Some additional, historically irrelevant notes: I realized too late that a right-to-left timeline might be more appropriate. Oh well! Also, how the colours photograph frustrates me, I swear I did not make her this deathly pale. And finally, some of the characters look a bit smudged because my cat spilled water on them. I did what I could to save them.)
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Assorted Batkid Headcanons
During the middle days of Damian being Dick’s Robin, he was still figuring out how to show affection in a nonviolent way, so he just kept getting Dick fish. His logic was ‘Grayson has issues taking care of himself, so I will get him a pet that even he will find easy to care for’.
As a result Dick has an entire tank of various fish, all named Jim after Jim Gordon.
Dick finds this hilarious. Babs finds this hilarious. She’ll casually mention something ‘Jim’ did in conversation with her dad and watch as he bluescreens.
Tim has the pallet of a five year old. All he likes are exceedingly sugary sweet foods everyone else wants to puke while eating.
As a result, all he drinks are those stupidly sugary energy drinks that leave you seeing god after a few minutes. Is this unhealthy? No, it’s a liquid, therefor water, therefor good - Tim Drake.
Duke has purposefully broken his wrist to see if he would light up like a glowstick before. It didn’t work.
Cass shows her affection through objects, so a Batkid will often walk into their residence to find something like a metal bottle cap or a feather neatly placed on their table, without any security triggered or any other indication anyone was ever here. They all know to treasure these, no matter what they are.
Jason, given he’s built like a tank, will often hold things out of reach from people just to Be An Asshole. He loves it.
Damian used the same method of affection on Steph when she was his Batgirl, but had a bit more faith in her ability to not let something die, so he kept getting her small rodents, like hamsters and rats. She named them all after characters from Supernatural.
Stephanie had a huge Supernatural phase when she was 13 and never really grew out of it. She’s tried out summoning rituals from the show before.
Every single Batkid had a Warriors phase. Every. Single. One.
Dick was SO FUCKING HAPPY when Duke showed up because he finally had a brother who would happily give him a hug without having a panic attack due to TouchFuckery.
Steph has referred to the Batfam as “Furry Touchfucked McNuggets” before. No one questions it because she’s right.
Babs has designated snacks for every occasion. Program Taking Too Long To Load is Cheetos. Bruce Being a Bitchass On the Comms is popcorn. Done With This Bullshit For Good, I Swear is Twix.
Tim’s Notes app on this phone is entirely filled with sleep deprived 4am rants about why Star Trek is the superior franchise. He’s very passionate about it.
One time Bart was bored so decided to raid the pantry and he found Damian crouched on one of the top shelves, hissing like a cat and clutching a box of Weetabix. He took a picture and now it’s the YJ discord group icon.
Not exactly Batfam but the YJ Core Four + Cissie have a discord group chat and Tim’s the mod.
Damian loves Weetabix. Idk if anyone else knows what that is but that shit was my fucking childhood so he loves it.
Duke has tried and is currently trying to unionize all the kid sidekicks. They’re getting there.
Jason’s favorite authors are Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice is his comfort book that he often reads after patrolling as way to wind down. He fucking hates Edgar Allan Poe with a passion for reasons he refuses to explain.
Cass will sometimes teach some dance moves to little kids while on patrol. Sure, she knows it’s not stopping violence, but when she sees another little girl with scars on her palms and wary eyes light up as she twirls in the air and laugh as she leaps, she thinks it’s worth it. More than worth it.
Jason’s found her doing this sometimes. Neither of them say anything.
The Batkids all love Jon. Yeah, move over Damian, don’t keep him all to yourself. They may have their own supers/alien besties, but Jon is just adorable, and they all want to smoosh the cheeks of a kid who won’t attempt to stab them for it. Look, he’s so cute. The day anyone bullies Jon beware, because the entirety of Gotham’s vigilante force will be there to wreak havoc upon you.
#batfamily#batfam#dc#dc comics#dick grayson#barbara gordon#tim drake#jason todd#cassandra cain#stephanie brown#duke thomas#damian wayne#yj#jon kent#headcanons#weetabix#glowsticks#idek man#here we are ig#random bullshit#headcanon#batfam headcanons
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MAG Thoughts on ep 93-103 (kinda just the beginning of 103 tho)
Obviously this contains spoilers for the Magnus archives. This is all Just my random thoughts of episodes 93 up to the beginning of 103 enjoy if you wish
THERE'S A CAT
John's hand still hurts from the cult of the flame
There's also a missing calliope? I think thats how you spell it
The institute is a death trap.
Both John and Elias are vessels of “The Eye” and can make people spill their guts Gertrude was also one up until Elias killed her. So that's fun
GORGEY MIGHT KNOW/BE A PART OF ANOTHR GOD?!?!?!
LAST WORDS OF A CORPSE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN GORGEY?
Gorgeys not ok
Nor is Marten
I quite like the new girl shes funny
Is anyone in mag alive lol
Well idk John why dose Elias do anything.
ITS THE THING GIRL DOLL PLASTIC THING OMG
(I have no idea what i was trying to type here^)
Tim and Marten are not okay especially marten
Spooky doll thing changed her mind apparently
And Michael (the spooky one) used to be an assistant of Gertrude funnnn
Ep 100 time baby :3) No one in the institute knows how to interview people except John and I'm pretty sure that's because of “the eye”
The spiders are back. The spiders are weird
Why is this woman so calm about a ghost woman who's on fire burning her (poor marten he's very confused)
Tim is speaking to a maniac
Melanie (I think it's her) is speaking to a man who keeps getting side tracked
THE FUCK YOU MEAN YOU GOT OUT OF THE SPIRAL AND WENT TO DINNER
The poor detective
SPOOKY MAN NAMED PETER JUST APPEARED FROM NO WERE AND I THINK HE'S FROM THE UNKNOWN?!??
SPOOKY DOLL WOMEN!
THE COFFINS BACK
“Sarah wanted to use nails but I talked her out of it because I'm a good friend!” YOUR A MANNEQUIN (I love that line so much lol)
Oh wax love that
Mmm skin
Don't skin John please
ARE YOU GOING TO MOISTURIZED JOHN AND THEN SKIN HIM?
MICHAEL HOLY SHIT HE'S BACK
oh he's going to kill John
Revenge?
Oh
Oh dear he doesn't want to be Michael
MICHAEL BECAME THE DELUSION
Oh he's making a statement
MICHAEL SHELY
Oh god Gertrude
Unrelated but my cat has decided to try and kill me
PETER LUCAS IS ALSO THERE
Oh god Michael Shelley is very dumb
Only just know getting scared? What the fuck
Doors. fun
I can't even spell whatever that is
THE SPIRAL
Of course she didn't care
Just don't trust Gertrud
The Worker of clay?
His laugh is silly
Oh oh dear
Oh dear the doors not working
OH JESUS
HELEN
MICHAEL BECAME HELEN
HELENS GOING TO HELP?
HELENS THE DISTORTION NOW
So I guess the distortion only wants what that person wanted
Why does Elias just agree with the person who's trying to kill him
I think this man has bugs in his skin
He does
John can suddenly read French and then can't
I LOVE MARTIN
Melanie keeps trying to kill people
(People being Elias)
Pig episode (like actual pigs not the police)
#hello tumblr#i love my dead gay son#:3#the magnus archives podcast#tma podcast#tma#the magnus archives#yippee#paper says stuff
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November 2023 Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe
I post my reviews throughout the month on Storygraph and Goodreads, and do roundups here and on patreon. Reviews below the cut.
Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson read by John Sackville and Perdita Weeks
This book has three different story lines, one of which is much stronger than the other two, which is making it hard for me to figure out how I want to rate the book. The opening story line, and my favorite, is about Mary Shelley during the period in which she wrote Frankenstein. These scenes especially in the audiobook are beautifully read and atmospheric, damp, melancholy, introspective, with engaging characterizations of Byron, Percy Shelley, and the other guests of the house. The second story line is about Ry Shelley, a trans doctor living in post-Brexit Britain who becomes entangled romantically and criminally with Victor Stein, a researcher focused on AI, cryogenic preservation and reanimation, and training robots to detect human diseases. Ry is fairly genderfluid, and is often described as both a man and a woman, or a boy who is a girl who is a boy. I appreciated having a trans POV character in this book, but wished Ry had more of his own ambitions and plot- he seemed to exist primarily to have conversations and sex with Victor, who insisted over and over that he wasn't gay even after falling for and sleeping with Ry. Ry also interviews and then is repeatedly misgendered by Ron Lord, a Welsh entrepreneur in the sex robot industry- there is a lot in this book about sex bots, including huge chunks of uninterrupted dialogue by Ron Lord that got fairly repetitive in audio. Ry is also the victim of a bathroom sexual assault near the end of the book that felt thematically unnecessary and punishing. I can imagine a different version of this book where Ry was the one conducting the research that Victor does in this book, and his love interest is a modern version of Percy, which might have interested me more. There's also a third partial story line about Mary Shelley meeting a man named Victor Frankenstein who claims to be the character from her book; these didn't add anything for me. Would I recommend this? Hard to say. It's a complicated queer remix of Frankenstein and I was engaged while listening to the majority of it but there were also pieces that fell short of my expectations.
The Hills of Estrella Roja by Ashley Robin Franklin
High school senior Mari is woken from a nightmare about voices calling to her from a pit in a cave to learn that her grandmother is dead. Mari, her mom, and her little sister drive back to Estrella Roja, their small mysterious Texas hometown. Meanwhile, Kat, a college freshman who runs a podcast about the paranormal with her best friend, receives an anonymous email tip about the "devil lights" of Estrella Roja and decides to solo road trip to investigate it over her spring break. Kat can't find anyone in town willing to to talk to her... except Mari, who is both sad and bored, and can't seem to connect with any of her close-mouthed relatives. The two stumble across something in the desert that was spooky enough to make me wonder if I should be reading the book before bedtime. This story weaves a queer meet-cute with a dark family history into a very effective YA horror tale. The inking and coloring are absolutely gorgeous. Scary, but not too scary for me, a known scaredy cat!
The Dyslexic Advantage by Brock L Eide and Fernette F Eide
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has dyslexia, is parenting a young person with dyslexia, works in education at any level or is just in general interested in how differing brain structures effect things such as working memory, 3D visualization, problem solving, and other areas of cognition. I've known I was dyslexic since I was about 8 years old, but I had never picked up a book on the topic. I found this very interesting and very easy to read (its printed in a san-serif font with large page margins, and also short well-structured chapters). It contains many real-life stories of people with dyslexia rising to the very pinnacle of their chosen fields as well as a good section of layperson's neuroscience of brain structure and some of the latest research on memory formation. The authors do an excellent job highlighting how so many of the things that are cast as weaknesses or drawbacks in dyslexic students' early education are often reshaped into strengths later in life. Multiple times the authors emphasized that while dyslexic students should receive extra instruction in reading in early childhood, that they probably won't catch up their peers until later in life, often in high school or beyond and that one of the most important things is never letting the dyslexic student give up on their own ability to learn, thrive, and succeed. Most dyslexics are late bloomers, but as the book says, "time is on your side."
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross read by Alex Wingfield and Rebecca Norfolk
Set in a kind of fantasy WWI, this story follows Iris, a young woman who had to drop out of high school after her brother enlisted and her only other relative, her mother, fell into depression and alcoholism and lost her job. Iris begins working at a newspaper, vying for a regular columnist position against her office rival, handsome and wealthy Roman Kitt. Iris has a magical typewriter, and she writes letters to her brother regularly, even though she's never received one back from him. She slips these letters under the door of her wardrobe and in the morning they are gone. What she doesn't know is that the letters are making their way into the bedroom of Roman, who also has a magic typewriter. They begin a correspondence and a budding friendship. But a series of misfortunes befall Iris and she decides to enlist at the front as a wartime journalist. Will Roman follow the woman he's beginning to fall for? Will he ever tell Iris than he is her penpal confidant? This story was fast paced and interesting throughout, but at the end I was left with some critiques. Primarily, the way the book simplifies war by making the cause of war a divine conflict outside of mortal responsibility. It felt like an extremely watered down version of a wartime romance, with none of the political questions that would have plagued the characters had the book been set in actual WWI or WWII. The book also has a cliffhanger ending, and sets up a plot twist that will probably delight some readers but which unfortunately falls into one of my LEAST fantasy favorite romance tropes. So I will not be reading the second one unless someone else reads it first and spoils some of the plot for me!
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang read by Eunice Wong
What a delicious book, in many senses of that word! The unnamed main character is a Chinese-American chef from Los Angeles who is stranded in London by natural disaster. A toxic gray smog envelopes the majority of the world, killing most crops and animals. Countries close their borders as their populations being to starve. The chef is offered an unbelievable job in a billionaire's small private country, a mountaintop in Italy which still has access to some sunlight and caters to a set of unbelievably wealthy residents who bought their way in. The chef lies on her resume, padding it out a fictional degree from a French culinary school and experience at closed Micheline start restaurant. The chef is granted access to the country for a probation period and re-encounters a lush array of ingredients she thought were extinct from the world: fresh berries and greens, rich cream and butter, unpreserved meats and fish. Under the cold eye of her cruel employer and his charismatic and ambitious daughter the chef tries to prove she can cook dishes that will astonish the 1%. Little does she know she was hired as much for her skill in lying as her ability to cook well. This book had more queerness, more speculative elements, and more hope for a world destroyed by human greed than I was expecting. The descriptions of food, flavors, textures, and the intersection of appetite with pleasure are rich, powerful and evocative. I really enjoyed this and I particularly recommend the audiobook.
The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht
Watterson's first offering in many years is a strange little picture book. This fable opens with a kingdom surrounded by a deep dark forest. The people are fearful of mysteries which live in the forest, so the king sends his knights into the forest to capture a mystery. Most return empty handed, or do not return at all. One knight captures a mystery and it is not what the people expected. The art is quite elegant, black and white photographs of dolls posed in blurry but evocative settings. The story is very slight, and I'm not sure it delivered on the depth it seemed to be reaching for. Maybe check this one out from the library rather than buying it.
Everything is Beautiful and I Am Not Afraid by Yao Xiao
I've been following Yao Xiao's work online for several years and I'm really glad I finally made time to read the collection! The brightly colored pages are full of small, poem-like comics that circle and return to multiple themes: self-esteem, coming out as queer, being a Chinese American immigrant living in the US, trust, taking up space, trusting in one's own strength and the love of friends and community. The artist draws themself as a small character with orange hair and a black elf hat and moves like a spite through urban landscapes, clouds, dreams, gardens, hopes, fears and other elements of the unconscious. There's no overarching narrative, but the many small experiences add up to a greater sum than their parts.
Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb read by Nick Taylor
This book begins 15 years after the end of the Farseer trilogy. Fitz, the bastard son of royalty, trained as an assassin, who survived torture, a war, a coup, multiple attempts on his life, a long dangerous journey, deadly magic, and the death of his king and close friend, has retired to a small cottage near the sea. He lives a small peaceful life there with his old wolf, Nighteyes, his adopted son Hap, a pony, some chickens, and a garden. He's working on his memoirs. Then the world turns up at his door again, demanding as much of himself as he has to give, again. Kettricken's son, the Farseer heir, is missing and no one knows if he was kidnapped or ran away or something more sinister.
This story was EVERYTHING I WANTED AND MORE! One of the best books I've read this year, a rich, emotional, satisfying return to the Farseer world. I love how this book deepened and complicated Fitz's relationships from the previous book: with Chade, Starling, Nighteyes and most especially with the Fool who is once again living at court in a completely new guise. Every character in this series feels so real, so grounded, so impacted by the events of the world, and the consequences of their own choices. I've been disappointed by a lot of the fantasy I've read this year, but this one not only met but exceeded my expectations- especially because I read this book once before, when I was 16, and didn't love it then. Now I am obsessed with it. I think I just wasn't ready to read a book about adults and the uncaring passage of time as a teenager. Literally thirty minutes after finished the audiobook of this book I started the sequel because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next!
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So while writing the next two chapters I’ve realized there’s a lot of extra info I haven’t added so I’m gonna make this a second info page for Juno, broken down into sections!
Basics:
- Juno Marsh is the daughter of Sharon and Randy Marsh, and twin sister of Stanley Marsh, younger sister of Shelley Marsh. She is the youngest in the family.
- She lives in South Park Colorado next door to the Broflovski’s
- She had mid length raven black hair, and deep blue eyes.
- She owns a dog named Sparky.
- She is friends with her brothers friends, though her closest friend is Kenny McCormick.
- She is a junior at South Park High.
Friends:
Kenny McCormick - lead guitarist in the band Crimson Dawn. Best friends with Juno Marsh since preschool. Was turned mortal in 5th grade after a mission to defeat his curse set out by him and Juno, where they broke him of his curse. Big pothead, but not to the point where it’s a problem. Dumb on the outside, but is actually really smart. Works a job to provide mostly for his little sister. Karen adores Juno. Kevin McCormick and Shelly Marsh have been dating for 3 years, and were set up by Kenny and Juno.
Stan Marsh - lead singer in the band Crimson Dawn. Still best friends with Kyle. Short tempered, but actually very sensitive. Hates his family lovingly. Has depression, takes anti-depressants. Has an alcohol problem, though he’s trying very hard to fix it. Refuses to take off his hat, Juno had to get him to wash his hair more. Not as greasy as it was when they were kids, but not the best.
Kyle Broflovski - Has been in love with Juno Marsh since the 4th grade. He fell first she fell harder. The smartest in the class. Is on the varsity basketball team, number 19 (Juno’s bday). Still wears his hat all the time, hates his hair but has warmed up to it more. Hates anything to do with alcohol or drugs. Designated driver always. Helps his brother with homework. Babysits Ike with Juno frequently. An awkward teenage boy, though a lot of girls have crushes on him (including Juno).
Eric Cartman - Still an asshole. Is trying his best. Has chilled down a lot since 4th grade. Was put on medication and sent to therapy after being diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder, with the help of Juno. Almost flunked out of high school, Juno tutored him which led to discovering his mental illness. Is surprisingly a lot better after starting medication. He pretends not to tolerate anyone but actually has a soft spot for his friends. Is slowly working his way up to being forgiven, even by Kyle. Forgets to take his meds and can be insufferable when Liane doesn’t remind him.
Butters - still the sweetest boy alive. Was diagnosed with autism, with Juno’s help. Brought both Juno and Kenny to Hawaii, they’re his favorite people. Juno is the only one allowed to call him Leo. He’s softened up a lot after discovering that he isn’t crazy his mind is just a little different. Owns a cat named Oatmeal, she’s basically his service cat.
Craig Tucker - Cousins with the Marsh family (Laura is Randy’s sister). Very close with Juno, has a fake rivalry with Stan. Smoking buddies with Juno and Kenny.
Tweek Tweak - works for tweak bros with his family. Juno and Craig convinced him to form a new recipe for coffee, and has slowly derailed him from his meth addiction. He still has raging anxiety but is getting healthier. Tweek and Craig have been together since 4th grade.
Wendy Testaburger - Has been dating Stan off and on since 4th grade. Good friends with Juno Marsh, even if her and Stan are on a break.
Stick of truth:
Story will come later!
Juno is known as Princess Juno of the Nine Realms, Princess Juno for short. She is “married” to the elf prince Kyle, which United their kingdoms and made them king and queen.
Fractured But Whole:
Story will come later!
Juno is known as The Gemini.
Her abilities are cloning, power replication (can temporarily take the powers of an individual), yin and Yang ( damages all enemies but strengthens all teammates), and water manipulation. She had started her own super hero team against Coon and Friends titled Supers of Terrific Dare (STDs) with members; The Gemini (Juno), Mysterion (Kenny), Call Girl (Wendy), SheWolf (Annie), FashionMonger (Bebe), Barbaria (Red),
Nightshade (Nichole), Henrietta, Michael, Pete, Super Craig, Wonder Tweek. (Yes she gained girl and goth alliance, making her the strongest group)
More of the girls superhero’s I came up with come later in a character chart!
#south park x reader#kyle broflovski x reader#kyle broflovski#stan marsh#stan marsh x reader#kenny mccormick x reader#stan marsh x sister reader
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I have a question about rie. I know she has a lot of alternate names/aliases, but I’m not really sure on who uses what name, if that makes sense? Like, do specific people call her certain things? Oh! And does L have any cute nicknames for her?
-🎲
Aliases ╾ Rie
YIPPEE!!!!?!!
Any excuse to drag Rie onto main 🩷 and to procrastinate on my other drafts...
★━━─・‥…━━━☆
I'll organise by the basic rule: the main reason she has so many aliases is to help blend in – depending on the country. It won't work everywhere, of course. So, country - names - about the name - nicknames - about the nicknames.
╾ JAPAN
please note: the kanji in brackets are ordered last name - first name, as is typical in Japanese names. So Rie is not 高村 but rather 理恵.
Rie Takamura (高村理恵). I picked this because Rie is a fairly common name for girls meaning "reason". As for Takamura, it's like most common Japanese surnames in that it's somewhat geographical. Specifically, it means "high up village."
Hina Suzuki (鈴木陽菜). I actually don't know the exact meaning, but I didn't pick it for that: Hina and Suzuki are incredibly common names (think John Smith). It has the anonymity of Jane Doe.
Nicknames: Riri (by me; maybe by Matsuda and/or Misa). Miss Rie-san (by L. two honorifics...). Rie Pie (by "Matty Beef Patty" and "Mello Jello," because they got cross at her and decided to give her a taste of her own medicine. She's soooo pissed off that it doesn't rhyme).
╾ USA, UK, CANADA, AUSTRALIA etc...
Rue Dixon. I'm not sure if I ought to add a middle name. Rue I picked simply because it sounded similar to Rie (I didn't pick her real name, or even that she was French, until later. That probably sounds weird, but my creative process is too I guess..) and – come on. The meaning is so cool. Later, I learned BB uses it as an alias, which I'm just going to play into MWAHAHA (sobs). As for Dixon, it's after Elizabeth née Dixon, mother of Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley.
Nicknames: um, Rue... (by Naomi. The "um" is a permanent fixture/hj). This is her name throughout Another Note.
╾ FRANCE
Reinette Rose Descôteaux (real name. how dramatic are her parents (me)). I struggled picking this name. I speak English (unbelievably) and I've been studying Japanese for a long time, but I've never really touched French up until developing Rie. I just picked something that sounded nice and didn't have an objectionable meaning for her first name. I kind of stomped over the fact middle names are uncommon in France and patched it up with the fact some kids have, like, dual first names (I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm thinking of things like Marie-Belle). As for Descôteaux, HOPEFULLY, it means something to do with gardens.
Aurélie Rousseau. I don't have any plans to use this one in RieCanon so far – perhaps in proLogue: 1429. Same process as above with the first name. Rousseau came up in my sociology class along with a couple of other white dead guys, and I thought the name sounded nice and Rie-ish.
Nicknames: Reine-Rose (L. He pronounces it wrong, pretty much just to annoy her. "Rainy rose" instead of "rehn rose"). Rosey (by L, about twice a year, when he feels cutesy). Pétalette (by her parents. I'm still figuring out Rie's childhood).
╾ INTERNATIONAL
1429 (fourteen twenty-nine). This is a real alias Rie goes by, even though it's not a name, and it's her main title throughout my fan made prequel arc. I don't remember how exactly I picked the number, but I like it.
Nicknames: Cat (by L, strictly once. She calls him mouse for a good while).
╾ OTHER
Rie goes by "L" a lot too. It's an agency more than a person. I feel like I read that somewhere, but there's an equal chance I made it up... Anyway, she does most of the PR stuff, and takes over if L gets sick or if she knocks him out to get some rest.
I'm trying to figure out if she went to Wammy's, or if there was time for her to meet the kids between 1429 and LABB, or something else. If she went, she'd go by Q or maybe X. I think different kids left at different times, so different letters opened up at different times. It's the simplest explanation I can think of, though I must admit it still doesn't answer everything. What is that again? Occam's razor?
#im giggling im so happy you asked#🎲 anon#desunorie#death note#l lawliet#dn#lei writes#death note headcanons#wammys house#lei's death note#lei chats#asks#anons#oc#original character#death note oc#oc x canon
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Wanted Man ~ Chapter One
A/N: Before I stumbled into the Tolkien fandom, I wrote Marvel fanfic and while I wrote fanfic before I knew that was what it was called, this is the very first fic I'd written knowing it actually had a name/genre. This was the first of four fics in this series, and I did 3 spin off fics as well, which I may or may not post, depending on whether or not anyone has any interest in them.
Anyway, here it is... The first chapter of the first story... I hope you don't hate it. :)
Summary: A price on his head, Loki of Asgard finds himself stranded on Earth and in need of one woman's help in order to free himself from the bounty and try to reclaim what he sees as his rightful throne in Asgard.
McKenna Carlin just wanted to put a horrible day behind her. She had no idea that things would get worse before they get better…
Pairings: Loki Laufeyson x ofc McKenna Carlin
Characters: McKenna, Loki
Warnings: None
Rating: T
Word Count: 1.5k
Tag List:@fizzyxcustard @court-jobi @guardianofrivendell
If you’d like to be added (or removed) to the tag list, please just let me know!
Previous chapters can be found here!
Someday, I’ll learn never to ask what else could go wrong.
All McKenna Carlin wanted was to go home, stand under the hot shower, until she forgot all about the day from hell. Maybe then, she’d stop obsessing over why she asked questions she really didn’t want to know the answers to. Maybe.
She leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. Some days were bad, this one put them all to shame. If it could go wrong, it did. After that hot shower, a glass of wine was a must.
Opening her eyes again, she tried to ignore the sense of weariness creeping into her as she peered around the small apartment that she had, until only that morning, shared with Joe. Now, the pale eggshell white walls were missing pictures she’d grown accustomed to looking at, and the closet to her left would no doubt have a lot more room in it now.
It was for the best. Things had gone sour months earlier, only neither one of them had the stones to admit it. True, there were better ways to find out he’d already moved on than by seeing a text never meant for her eyes, but at least now she knew.
He had Shelley and she had outlines on the walls where photographs used to hang.
With a heavy sigh, she pushed up from the door and bracing one foot against the back of the other, kicked off her left sneaker, and then her right. She thought the run might help. Might clear her head, but it didn’t. Her thoughts were just as heavy as they had been before her run. Only now she was hot and sweaty on top of it.
She padded down the short, narrow hallway to her room, where Cinder, her chubby gray and white cat, lay curled up in his usual ball, sound asleep. His eyes didn’t open, but his motor kicked over as she stretched to scratch him under the chin. Bit by bit, his neck stretched, and then his eyes opened, amber and sleepy. He yawned. He stretched.
He promptly went back to sleep.
Her bathroom adjoined her room, and as she crossed to it, she peeled off her sweaty running clothes. Lightweight jacket. Tank top. All-important sports bra.
She had to shimmy out of the Lycra pants. And did the usual one-footed hop across to the threshold of the bathroom before she wrestled herself free. Everything lay where it fell. She’d get it on her return trip.
The tub, like the rest of the building, was old. But like the rest of the building, it had a wonderful charm that managed to offset the hassle of sometimes not having enough hot water. It was clawfooted and beautiful, and sometimes after a long day, she loved to just sit in it with a glass of wine, a good book, and enough bubbles to make every drain in the building fizz.
But tonight was a shower night, so she turned on the spray full blast and hoped for the best. As the water warmed, she smiled. No one was using their dishwasher just now. Perfect.
The shower was just the right temperature to ease the ache in her leg muscles. She hadn’t run a lot, less than two miles, but in the heat of a late June night, two miles felt like ten and she scrubbed harder than usual to get rid of the sweaty film. She shampooed twice. Conditioned once. And cursed like a sailor when she reached out toward the toilet, only to find she hadn’t taken a towel from the neatly folded pile on the organizer.
The memory foam bathmat soaked up more water than it should’ve, and she winced at the squishiness as she stretched to grab the wayward towel. She was just wrapping it about herself when the entire building lurched and something boomed overhead.
“Thunderstorm,” she muttered, grabbing a second towel to wrap about her hair. That godawful pixie cut she’d impulsively gotten just before Christmas had finally—finally—grown out. It was to her shoulders now, and freshly highlighted to get rid of any telltale white hairs that liked to show up every now and then to remind her she wasn’t twenty-five any longer, and the towel grew damp as she wrapped it turban-style and pulled open the door.
There were no A/C vents in the bathroom, so the blast of cold air made her yelp. She shivered, almost dancing over to her dresser, where she pulled out a pair of cotton pj bottoms and a her favorite tee shirt from her pj drawer. She unwound her turban and squeezed as much water as she could from her hair, then tossed the towel in the laundry basket on her way out to the kitchen
“Weird. Thunder, but no lightning,” she muttered, the hardwood floor cool beneath her feet. She’d had the floors redone the previous summer and they’d been sanded and polished to a golden maple finish, probably more beautiful than they’d been when the building was first built.
The kitchen was halfway down the hallway, with another full bath on the left and a spare bedroom (if it could be called that. It was a bedroom only in the sense that a twin bed would fit, but would leave precious little room for any other furniture) that she’d turned into a reading room of sorts. She was halfway between bedroom and kitchen when the second crash shook the building hard enough that she lost her footing and banged up against the wall.
“What the—?” She righted herself as Cinder let out a howl and darted between her feet to disappear into the spare room. “Cinder, you—”
Whatever the cat was remained unspoken as the living room came into sight and any and all words up and died on McKenna’s lips. She still had no idea what shook the building so badly, but she was fairly sure that when she’d gone into the bathroom, a man was not lying on the area rug just inside the door, where she’d have to have stepped over him to come completely into her apartment.
She stared first at the man lying motionless on the cheerful multicolor rug she’d picked up at a craft fair years earlier. Was he wearing… leather? Black and green leather, no less. And from the looks of him, the leather made him sweat the exact same way running in this sticky summer weather made her sweat.
Cinder hopped up onto the halfway separating the kitchen from the dining area portion of the living room, puffed to twice his normal size. Considering he weighed in at nearly twenty pounds, it was an impressive sight, but one McKenna only barely glanced at as she swallowed hard at the sight of this stranger—in leather, no less—lying unconscious on her floor.
“How the hell…” The whisper died on her lips as she glanced about for something to use as a weapon. Weapon. What the hell did she have that was even remotely weapon-like? The closest thing she had was an aluminum baseball bat, and that was currently in the backseat of her car, three floors down. Fat lot of good that would do.
The man groaned and she took another, very quick, step back.
Cinder hissed, then growled low in the back of his throat.
McKenna looked from the cat to the man. From the man to the cat. Which one would move first?
The man moved.
“Where…” His voice was deep, but faint. He tried to sit up, but just as quickly sank back, both hands coming to rest on his chest. Another low groan rose, but he remained still.
McKenna cleared her throat. “Who are you and how the hell did you get in here?”
“Quiet.”
The brusqueness of his voice caught her off-guard and she stared at him, even though he stared straight up at the ceiling. “I beg your pardon?”
“You should. What realm is this?”
“Realm?” The cordless phone sat on the counter next to Cinder. Gingerly, she stepped toward it. “You’ve got about five minutes before I’ve got the town’s finest here to haul your ass out of my apartment, mister.”
“What realm is this?”
“What are you talking about?” If she stretched, she could just put her fingers on the phone. She leaned to her left.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The phone slid further out of reach, bumping up against the puffy cat, who yowled and practically flew off the counter. “What the hell—?”
This time, when the man attempted to sit, he didn’t sink back. Instead, he glared at her through eyes of the coldest pale blue she’d ever seen. “I am Loki of Asgard and what realm is this?”
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amis & co pet headcanons:
enjolras and combeferre's place:
enjolras has a black cat named antoine that he adopted at a shelter. he picked him because he was scheduled to be put down soon and he last-minute offered to foster him instead. we all know how fostering cats goes sometimes, so long story short, enjolras ended up with a cat. combeferre has a mutt dog that he found on the side of the road and nursed back to health. her name is laika, and ironically she spends most of her time bothering enjolras.
courfeyrac and marius's place:
courfeyrac is allergic to everything with fur, pretty much, and so he and marius keep fish and give them funny names. so far they've had fish of varying degrees of strangeness named after several US politicians.
feuilly and bahorel's place:
feuilly can't afford/doesn't have time for a pet of his own, so he just mooches off bahorel's dogs. bahorel has two dogs, a massive pit bull rescue named baxter, and a tiny shih-tzu named mitch. the amis suspect that he named them those things so he could call them "bastard" and "bitch", which he neither confirms nor denies.
joly, bossuet, and musichetta's place:
bossuet bonded with a pigeon and now it's basically a house pet. he named it homer, because get it? homing pigeon? but also a classics reference? IT'S A PUN! joly was terrified of it at first but calmed down once he learned that pigeons are unlikely to carry diseases that are transmittable to humans. musichetta wants a cat but joly's allergic, so she feeds the local strays instead.
jehan and grantaire's place:
jehan has a big snake. it's a ball python named percy, named after the mythological hero perseus but also percy shelley. they've had it ever since they were a kid, because those snakes live fucking forever. bahorel is secretly terrified of it, especially when the freeze dried rats are involved. grantaire has a cat that he calls trash can (I saw this in a fic once and it stuck). the snake and the cat have a pact of mutual non-aggression.
cosette's place:
cosette rescues guinea pigs. her father always kept them when she was a little kid, and she has a fondness for them. she always makes sure to have at least two at once, because she read that they get lonely otherwise. this means she's caught in an endless cycle of guinea pigs, but she doesn't mind.
eponine, azelma, and gavroche's place:
they have a scrawny little cat named rat. well, it's technically gavroche's cat, but you know how kids are with taking care of their pets. the story behind the cat is that gavroche found it on the street being ganged up on by about a half dozen rats, so he "rescued" it. and then named it "rat" in a fit of irony. nobody knows if rat is a boy or a girl, and even the vet couldn't tell for sure.
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It's Fictional Throwdown Friday: Movie Night!
A side version of FTF that's hosted and presented much like Death Battle, where two characters I like give an overview of the combatants and I provide you with a fully written fight scene.
This Week's Fighters...
The Distortion vs SCP-106
As Presented By:
Wiz and Boomstick!
Rules and Conditions:
No Restrictions
Introduction:
Boomstick: Michael Shelley, the archival assistant of The Magnus Archives who turned into the monsterous Avatar of the Spiral known as the Distortion.
Wiz: And Dr. Robert Scranton, the once brilliant scientist of the SCP Foundation who became one of the very same monsters he helped to contain, SCP-106.
Wiz: There are countless organizations in fiction dedicated to studying, containing, and archiving the supernatural. But in this profession, one must always be careful to not become the very thing you research.
Boomstick: Like these two former humans. Once dorky researchers who, after a quick trip to a hellish pocket reality, became some of the nastiest nightmares their institutes would have encounter.
Boomstick: He's Wiz and I'm Boomstick!
Wiz: And we'll be analyzing their weapons, powers, and skills to find out who would win... A Death Battle!
Analysis: "Michael"
Wiz: Fear. One of the main motivators of the human mind. It's the emotion that keeps us safe, contextualizes the dangerous world around us-
Boomstick: And, sometimes helps us to feed the Eldritch fear gods that govern our reality!
Wiz: Such is the case in the world of The Magnus Archives. In a world where all our fears literally come to life and the supernatural is provably real and dangerous, it would make sense for there to be an institute dedicated to cataloging and studying it. Such is the goal of the Magnus Institute, which Archives people's encounters with the supernatural in order to better understand the phenomenon. You go to the Institute, let the Head Archivist record your statement... and then that's it. You go home.
Boomstick: Boring. For one Head Archivist in particular, studying the supernatural and listening to people's problems all day wasn't enough. She had to make these bastards pay for every broken sob story that came to her. The myth, the legend, the Archivist, Gertrude Robinson.
Wiz: That might sound like the name of someone's eighty year old grandmother, but in the supernatural community, Gertrude Robinson was a bogeyman's nightmare. She's saved the world countless times, personally killed all manner of superhuman monsters, and has resisted the pull of several gods of fear trying to claim her soul.
Boomstick: She's like if John Wick and Doomguy fused into an angry librarian. The god of fire and pain killed her cat and she's never stopped making the supernatural community pay for it. This is the woman who, when confronted by a man made of candle wax, fire, and human misery that wanted to burn her alive, did something so indescribably awful to him that it terrified all of his cultist buddies. No wonder the entire supernatural community was terrified of her. No one who touches Mr. Whiskers shall live.
Wiz: And then there was her assistant, Michael Shelley. Joining up with the Magnus Institute to investigate the disappearance of his childhood friend Ryan, Michael was deliberately kept in the dark about the Institute's inner workings by both his fellow assistants and Gertrude herself. This resulted in a naive, timid assistant whom Gertrude could freely use as a disposable pawn.
Boomstick: Case in point, when Gertrude caught wind of yet another ritual to end the world, she took Michael with her to Sannikov Land for "protection". Sannikov Land, for reference, does not exist. They were there. They walked around on the island. But it doesn't exist. Don't.... don't question it. Things are gonna get real mindfucky real quick.
Wiz: At the place that doesn't exist, they found the ritual being conducted by The Distortion. An eldritch being as old as time itself that is both a massive pocket reality and the physical embodiment of delusion. The Throat of Delusion Incarnate, as its called, was attempting to summon its master, The Spiral, into reality, to conquer the world and condemn mankind to an eternity of madness. So, Gertrude interrupted the ritual... by tricking Michael into feeding himself to The Distortion.
Boomstick: That's cold, Wiz. Now with a bad case on indigestion, the ritual fell apart and the Distortion fell in on itself. Once Michael found the center of The Distortion, everything fell apart, and the thing that emerged from the remains wasn't like either of them. It wasn't Michael Shelley or The Distortion. Not really. It was just... Michael.
Wiz: Michael emerged as an Avatar of The Spiral. Let me explain. Avatars are physical beings, be they animal or human, who have been touched and permanently altered by one of the Fourteen Fears that rule over reality. Basically, there's Fourteen different Fear gods who each embodie a specific school of fear. These fears manifest in all sentient things, both humans and animals, and new Fears can manifest as more things become feared. The End is the Fear of Death, for example, and the Eye is the Fear of being watched.
Boomstick: Me personally, I've always leaned towards The Slaughter. It appreciates my directness with guns and explosives.
Wiz: The fear of war and random violence? Please. An intelligent man like myself much prefers the patronage of The Web. The fear of manipulation, loss of control, and centuries old plans. The ideal ally for any aspiring supervillain out for world domination.
Boomstick: Ugh. Spiders? Really? I would've at least assumed the Eye given your browser history.
Wiz: Hey, I'm a scientist, not a voyeur!
*The screen behind them crackles and Jocelyn appears on it.*
Jocelyn: Desolation all the way!
Boomstick: Ugh. Should've guessed she'd go for the arsonist edgelords....
Wiz: Anyways! The Spiral in particular is the Fear of madness, delusion, gaslighting, and paranoia. In order to survive, the thing now calling itself Michael had to spread and feed on this fear in its victims. This the curse of being an Avatar.
Boomstick: "Thing" is the right description for it. He's freakishly tall now at over six feet. All the bones in his body got relocated into his hands! And that laughter gives me a headache...
Wiz: Yeah, the Michael "body" isn't so much a physical thing as it is a.... concept. That's why it can reach right through a person's shoulder and pull out a worm an inch thick with surgical precision, without even breaking the skin. Michael doesn't even think of itself as a person, it's just a.... "hand" to something much, much bigger.
Boomstick: That "something bigger" would be its stomach, if you would. The pocket reality that used to be the Distortion's only body can be accessed with a door that Michael manifests. The door is the mouth and the corridors behind it are the stomach.
Wiz: And you're not getting out of there once you're in there. The corridors are a literally endless, illogical maze of twisting hallways and rooms. Corridors that spiral in on right turns forever and mirrors the break to reveal more hallways. It's a giant intestinal track that drives you further into madness the longer you're in it that the Distortion itself can reshape and manipulate freely. And if you're in there for too long.
Boomstick: Poof! All gone! Completely digested like you never even existed. The only way you're leaving alive is if Michael lets you out.
Wiz: And if you thought you were safe just by avoiding the door, think again.
Boomstick: Those freaky fingers of his can turn into razor sharp claws in an instant and Michael can fuck with your sense of reality. Causing hallucinations, inducing insomnia, and making you think that you don't even exist! If you don't go through the door yourself in all the chaos, Michael will drag you in kicking and screaming!
Wiz: Even with his penchant for gaslighting and manipulation, Michael is one of the most powerful Avatars out there. The Distortion is capable of easily killing Jonathan Sims even as late as Season 4, at which point he's capable of completely erasing people from existence.
Boomstick: Feats performed by Helen-Distortion and Michael-Distortion should carry over to each other. They have the exact same powers and... are, kinda, the same thing. But we'll get to that.
Wiz: The Distortion is capable of entraping, and likely digesting, Manuela Dominguez, a powerful Avatar of the Dark. Dark Avatars of a similar caliber, such as the Still and Lightless Beast and Maxwell Rayner, are shown to be capable of killing Avatars of the Hunt.
Boomstick: And those guys hunt their fellow Avatars for fun all the time. So killing one of them, nevermind ripping one apart like these guys can, is a big deal.
Wiz: We've got a bit of a scaling chain here, so buckle in. Avatars of the Hunt are described as being one of the few beings capable of threatening and killing an Avatar of the End. This would make them stronger than Avatars of the Desolation, who csn completely reduce human beings to nothing but charred skeletons.
Boomstick: That takes exactly 60,187 grams of TNT to do! That's why I carry exactly 60,187 grams of TNT on my person at all times. Just. In. Case.
Source:
Wiz: And The Distortion is several times more powerful than than that. Basically, Desolation Avatars can output that much energy, Hunt Avatars are stronger than them, Maxwell Rayner's group can rip them apart with ease, and The Distortion can digest them with ease. That's a hell of a scaling chain back him.
Boomstick: And that's with the superhuman speed Avatars already have. Like Oliver Banks, who can react to a satellite falling at 200 mph. That's 89.408 meters per second! And that's before Oliver was even a full Avatar yet. Imagine what the Distortion could do!
Wiz: Yet, for all the Distortion's incomprehensible power, it was still shackled to the identity of Michael, whose human emotions conflicted with his status as an eldritch horror.
Boomstick: Michael really wanted revenge on Gertrude for killing him, but she was a bit too... dead, for that. So he went after the current Head Archivist instead, Jonathan Sims.
Wiz: But, Michael also wanted Jon to know exactly why he was being killed, which conflicted with his new nature as a creature of madness and fear. So the Distortion rectified the contradiction by deleting Michael abd replacing him with one of its victims, Helen Richardson, as the human part of its personality. Making Michael completely disposable to both the people he's "worked" for.
Boomstick: And the worst part is that Michael didn't even have to in the first place. The Distortion's ritual wouldn't have worked even without feeding Michael to it, because the Fears are all interconnected to the point that they can't enter reality without bringing the rest with them. Making both of Michael's deaths utterly pointless.
Wiz: Poor disposable Michael. Both his lives and both his deaths were cruel jokes told by a god of fear, madness, and lies.
End clip:
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Analysis: The Old Man
Wiz: Cryptids living among us. Ghosts and monsters haunting our dreams from just out of sight. Eldritch terrors that the wider world does not and should not know about. It's common in fiction for there to be a hidden world of magic and monsters coexisting with our own, just out of sight, and every story has its own explanation for why the general public is completely unaware.
Boomstick: That's where these guys come in. The SCP Foundation! Secure. Contain. Protect. Tasked with hiding the supernatural and preserving normality by containing the anomalous, this secret organization employees scientific geniuses from all over the world to protect humanity in secret.
Wiz: Such is the case with the one of the Foundation's brightest researchers, Dr. Robert Scranton. Robert made his name at the Foundation with a miraculous device that could nullify the powers of gods. The Scranton Reality Anchor allowed the Foundation to contain otherwise unstoppable reality warpers by forcibly maintaining, or "anchoring" baseline reality. It's honestly a fascinating piece of technology that I've been meaning to disect for awhile now. You see, it works by-
Boomstick: Magic generator thing stops reality warping from happening. Got it.
Wiz: Awww....
Boomstick: But building a machine that could contain Gods wasn't enough for this ambitious researcher. The Reality Anchor was really just a prototype for what Scranton really wanted to build. So, he and his wife, Anna Lang got to work building an even better contraption. The Lang-Scranton Stabilizer was intended to be a follow up piece that made his original design obsolete. Buuuuuuut, then an Earthquake happened while he was fiddling with it and Scranton was.... broken across time and space by his contraption.
Wiz: More accurately, the LSS malfunctioned and teleported both itself and Dr. Scranton into a completely different reality. This "Red Reality", better known as SCP-3001, was nothing but an endless void, with not a speck of stimuli to be found within it.
Boomstick: For those of you unfamiliar with mad science experiments, this is what we in the industry call a "bad result".
Wiz: "We in the industry"?
Boomstick: Hey, being a guinea pig counts!
Wiz: Anyways, the reason for this reality's bizarre and unusual properties is because it technically didn't.... exist. It had an incredibly weak Hume Field. Let me explain. Hume Theory dictates that a Hume is a unit of measurement that dictates the amount of reality in any given being or object. The more Humes you have, the more real you are, and the more Humes in your environment, the more that environment matches baseline reality.
Boomstick: But that pocket reality had basically no Humes at all. Meaning it and, by extension, he, didn't really exist at all. He couldn't age, couldn't die, couldn't even really move because there was just... nowhere to move to. It was an endless empty nightmare, until the nothingness just couldn't sustain itself anymore and collapsed on top of him, completely obliterating the man.
Wiz: What should've been the end of a slow, brutal, gruesome end for poor Dr. Scranton was instead the beginning of something much worse. 3001's collapse did not just kill him, it mutilated him. Mutilated his existence. And transformed him into something that could no longer be considered human. SCP-106 aka The Old Man.
Boomstick: Gone was the once kindhearted Doctor and loving husband that the Foundation had come to know. In his place was a sadistic melting corpse that just.... drips all over everything.... oh god that's disgusting.
Wiz: Disgusting and highly dangerous. That gross black mucus that 106 secretes is sticky and dangerously corrosive, quickly melting through steel doors and human flesh within seconds. Leaving his victims looking just a mutilated as he is.
Boomstick: Oh, god stop talking about it.
Wiz: SCP-106 uses this material to mutilate targeted areas of his victims in order to incapacitate them, so that he may drag them into his pocket dimension and torment them for weeks on end.
Boomstick: Oh, yeah, and once he has his sights on you, he's not letting you get away. He can stick to any flat surface he touches, to the point of even standing upside down on the ceiling, and he can walk right through any wall or door in his way.
Wiz: While thicker materials can slow down his ability to walk through walls, he will get through them eventually. He can even turn his corrosive substance into a portal directly to his pocket reality should he need to.
Boomstick: And once you're in there, you're not getting out. 106 has completely control over his little pocket reality. From its physical appearance to the laws of space and time. You're not dying in there until he wants you dead.
Wiz: While all of this applies to every canon's version of SCP-106, some variations have specific powers and abilities that would contradict the backstory we've established thus far.
Boomstick: See, SCP continuity is kinda.... nonexistent. The only continuity is what you personally consider canon. In some stories, 106 is Dr. Scranton and in some others he's, like, a World War 1 soldier or a humsn subspecies or whatever. For the sake of argument, we'll be letting 106 use stuff he gets even from versions that contradict the Dr. Scranton story.
Wiz: Like the time he killed another member of his species despite their own Intangibility. Or the time he regenerated from SCP-173 snapping his neck over and over again.
Boomstick: Oh, yeah. 106 can go toe to toe with its fellow SCPs, like SCP-076. Or Able for short. And he's strong enough to punch through titanium doors with an energy equivalent to 158,454 grams of tnt.
Source:
Wiz: Able is also fast enough to effortlessly dodge automatic fire from assault rifles, easily evading projectiles that move at 715 meters per second. As Able and the Old Man are consistently depicted as comparable, to the point of frequently keeping up with the exact same enemies, 106 should scale to this.
Boomstick: As you might've guessed, the guy who went from being one the Foundation's best scientists to one of its most dangerous contained anomalies isn't exactly all there anymore. No version of him is.
Wiz: Yes indeed, 106 is at best an incredibly intelligent predator capable of setting elaborate traps to catch its prey offguard, only to get done in by its own sadism. At his worse, however, he's Dr. Robert Scranton. A desperate, broken shell of a man stuck lookina for a wife he doesn't realize he's already murdered.
Boomstick: Like a cruel joke, with no one left to laugh.
End clip:
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Introduction:
Wiz: Alright, the combatants are set. We've run the data through all possibilities.
Boomstick: It's time for a DEATH BATTLEEEEEEEE!
Fight Music:
youtube
Fight:
Anna Lang huffed and puffed as she ran down the sterile corridors of the Foundation, the containment breach alarm blaring in her ears threatened to deafen her with each step. She needed to get out of here. Before he found her again.
Anna flicked her key card through the vip emergency exit access panel, but got a rejection bleep in response. She furrowed her brows and swiped her card again. She knew she had the right clearance. The red light flashed again. Rejected.
Even over the alarms, she could hear the sound of gunfire and screams not far from here. Anna swiped her card through the scanner three more times in quick succession. The light flashed red three times to match. An ear piercing, headache enducing, all encompassing laugh split through the noise around her, echoing off the walls of the narrow corridor.
"Having trouble, Doctor?" An unfamiliar voice asked. Anna spun around with a pistol she'd grabbed off a dead guard and craned her aim up to reach the face of the man who had suprised her. The anomaly that grinned back at her wasn't one she recognized. An inhumanly tall, distorted man with long, curly blonde hair and massive boney hands. He towered over her like a statue, his proportions making him look like some kind of funhouse mirror reflection.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
"Who is a question for people, Doctor. That is something that I am not. As for what, I believe I'll be helping myself to a family meal. Or perhaps not. Either way it is amusing!"
"Wh... what?"
"I believe you humans would call it a 'sport'."
Anna couldn't afford to try the door again. Not when this creature could so easily lunge at her. Her shaking aim stilled and her blood ran cold as another scream rang out not far from them. The thing's smile widened as the cries turned to desperate gurgles for air.
"You need...."
A yellow wooden door with chipping paint appeared beside the entity. The door opened by itself and the figure gestured her in
"....A door."
Anna glanced between the unknown entity and the end of the long hallway the screaming had come from. Her eyes widened as she saw the shambling monster causing the carnage she'd overheard. A limping corpse who gasped at her through cut open, rotting lungs. "...An...na...."
Without a second thought, the researcher burst through the yellow door at a full sprint. Better to risk it than face a guaranteed death at the hands of SCP-106. The door slammed shut and disappeared behind her, before Michael turned to face this new anomaly.
The two looked each other over, prominent sadistic smiles still spread across the faces even as curiosity shined in their eyes. "You do not belong to any Power that I recognize...." Michael began, shifting his long fingers into sharp claws. "....but your delusions smell delicious all the same~"
106 marched forward with an outstretched hand, before being stopped dead by Michael's claws piercing its chest. Their matching smiles curled into winces, with 106 clearly taken aback by Michael's strength. Michael pulled his hand free and watched with a mixture of curiosity and concern as the tar like substance are away at its fingers. "...Fascinating."
While Michael was distracted, a tar puddle appeared beneath his feet. Its legs quickly sinking into it like quicksand. Michael slashed 106 back in a quick stroke before dashing back into his corridors. The yellow door disappeared where Michael had once stood and again his laughter echoed throughout the building.
The Old Man glanced around in irritation. So this is how it felt. No matter. He had played both sides of this game before. Both predator and prey. It would find this interloper and reclaim his Anna from its jaws. There was nowhere in this building he could not reach.
"Does your rotting form suggest that you serve the Corruption? Or has the Stranger found away to disguise itself even from me?" Michael's voice echoed. Perhaps from the ceiling, the Old Man thought, or somewhere inside a vent. "Or do you serve a Fear that is much more... overt?"
106 heard a creaking door open behind him and disappeared into a puddle of rot on the floor before those claws could pierce his skin again. Michael tracked the Old Man downwards, only to get pulled upwards by the length of his hair. 106's liquid had pooled on the ceiling, giving him the perfect vantage from which to ambush its prey. The corpse slammed the twisted man into the ceiling by his roots, before tossing him to the ground. 106 could've dragged Michael into his home reality immediately, but he wanted to toy with the intruder first. Teach it how a real monster hunts.
106 lunged to the floor where Michael's crumpled body lay, looking to have his hand melt into its ribs before he could recover.
For a split second, 106 wasn't lunging at Michael. For a split second before he landed, could swear he was puncing at a terrified, screaming Anna.
The suprise caused it to tumble the landing, crashing through the floor as a result of its attempted course correction. 106 fell deeper into the site, into the sub basements that held up the building's foundation, but Michael did not. As 106 pulled itself free of the rubble, it was as if Michael had never been there at all.
Teleportation? Or use of that blasted door again?
"No, you don't seem to be of the Corruption at all. That wretched hive would give you too many friends to ever fall for that trick."
Trick. An illusionist then? A reality bender What did the twisted man mean by "friends"? What was he?
Perhaps an escalation was in order. The Old Man dragged his hands along the walls of the corridor, melting them as he went. If he couldn't find this creature, he'd simply bring the site down on top of it. The mocking laughter the echoed around him all this time disappeared in a shocked yelp and the blaring alarm fizzed off. The entire floor above collapsed in an avalanche of rubble and concrete, with 106 disappearing at the last possible chance to avoid being entombed.
As the dust settled, a cracked door with an adjar handle lay in a pile or rocks, with a familiar boney hand stick out of the mound beneath it. The Old Man emerged from its home with a look of smug satisfaction on its face, watching Michael's body sink into a portal of muck he created beneath him. With that wretched creature now his to torment, 106 could now reclaim his Anna.
"Robert... Roooooooobeeeeeeeert~"
Dr. Scranton's voice hitched in his gnarled up throat. It had been so long since his wife had called his name. He turned the door's hanging knob carefully. He failed to notice how the door's frame seemed to sprout hungry teeth.
What waited behind the door was not his Anna. Towering over him with the same stretched out features Michael wore was a distorted creature in the approximate shape of Robert's dear wife. It reached out with massive, boney hands and pulled Dr. Scranton inside.
Robert screamed for the first time in years, his mangled body finding life and energy that simply beyond it in its mutilated state. No one would hear it. The door slammed shut behind him too quick. Anna's laughter echoed through the Site's ruins with the same inflection as Michael's spiraling, distorted laugh.
And then the door disappeared.
KO!
Explanation:
Boomstick: ...Wiz, I'm gonna be honest, that wet old man cannot taste good. "Throat of Delusion Incarnate" or not.
Wiz: This was a fairly interesting matchup with a few complex factors involved. While Michael did have a significant, if incalculable, strength advantage thanks to his Desolation scaling chain, 106 was a whooping seven times faster than him. That, when taken in conjunction with 106's ability to hurt intangible enemies, as well as his corrosive liquids to melt him on contact, made the Old Man a significant threat to Michael.
Boomstick: That's about where it all starts swinging the other way though. For starters, The Distortion has been around since the very dawn of time, making it much older and more experienced than even the oldest versions of 106 and it's ability to fuck with the mind. If it can potentially make 106 believe that he doesn't even exist, then a lot of 106's clever planning and smarts goes out the window.
Wiz: Dr. Scranton's mental health took a massive toll from his time in the Red Reality, to the point where he actually fell in love with the LSS due to it being his only company, making him particularly vulnerable to Michael's games. And even non-Scranton versions of 106 have a sadistic streak as their consistently exploitable weakness, giving Michael a character flaw he could leverage.
Boomstick: And then there's Rob's biggest oppstical. He has no way of actually destroying the Distortion. Could he kill Michael or destroy the door if he gets either inside his pocket reality? Absolutely, but both of those things can be replaced. "Michael" is just the hand to a much larger Distortion entity. And there's no way the Old Man can squeeze all of those corridors into his little world.
Wiz: Neither is it possible he could destroy the corridors from within. They're consistently described as endless. Even Jared Hopworth, an Avatar of the Flesh that was so mutated and inhuman that the Distortion found him completely indigestible, had no way of escaping or hurting the corridors from within until he was let out. No matter how many mirrors or walls were broken.
Boomstick: The only thing that could destroy the corridors from within was The Archivist by the time of Season 5, and at that point, he was basically the Anti-Christ. Most 106 could do with his little puddles at that point in give Michael indigestion.
Wiz: SCP-106 may be one of the most nightmarish monsters in the Foundation's library, but he couldn't stand up to the Distortion's madness, size, and sheer eldritch power.
Boomstick: Unfortunately for Scranton, this one just Spiraled out of his control.
This Throwdown's Winner is...
The Distortion!
#fictional throwdown fridays#movie night#the magnus archives#michael shelley#michael distortion#scp foundation#scp 106#robert scranton#death battle#wiz#boomstick
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26, 31, 42 for the ask game:D<3
hiii pixie pix pixs <333 thank you for your ask 💐
26. Favorite fanfiction(s).
This is my moment to praise and tell everyone about @leolingo 's writing !!! (bravehearteds on ao3). I love love love their writing, their fics make my heart very happy. I'd recommend these (all of them are great, just some suggestions): "fully formed, ready to run" (I cried, also discovered one of my new favorite poems), "idle worship" (I love how they narrate scenes, makes you feel very immersed, and TOP NOTCH characterization), "sweet dream of me" (probably my favorite so far, has had me at the edge of my fucking seat) <3
31. What lore/arc you enjoyed the most.
They call me a Roier fan the way I am a Roier fan etc etc, so to no one's shock I love the betrayal, the opening of Casualonas, the Rescue-Engagement-Abueloier's Death-Festa Junina-Reconciliation for spiderbit and the current Ratoier-Doied arc!!! of course.
Apart from Roier, though. I will say that Bagi and Cellbit's "I am looking for my brother" arc has a special place on my heart. The clues, the missing posters, the fact that Bagi spend YEARS looking for him, never giving up, the cat, the diaries. What it stirred up in him and her, that arc left none unharmed, I love how they both changed as characters from it. The confrontation at the castle, the childhood home, the fucking roleplaying !!! A favorite arc and storyline for me.
42. Name a character and what they remind you of (ex. Color, season, food, scent, anything!!!).
q!Cellbit
"I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe" (From Marry Shelley's Frankenstein) and the poem "carnivore" by Ninamarie Ochoa has so many parts that remind me of him but specially the line "it takes a carnivore to protect what we grow".
(+bonus: i am not ready to die yet by Aracelis Girmay for Atardecer)
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Hi there! Welcome!
I am a level 21 category she/her human ��💞
This is a secondary blog. so if i respond to comments itll be with a different acc (@cupidthewriter but I'll let you know. )
Writing Masterlist
This is a blog dedicated to the anime Bungo Stray Dogs and the OCs I’ve made for it. Expect a lot of Kunikida content- I like him.
Here’s a guide to Mary for now. I’ll add to this post as I work on more ocs.
Note: I’m aware there’s already technically a Mary Shelley in the world of BSD but there’s barely anything on her and I didn’t know that until after I’d done a ton of oc work so it’s too late now lemme introduce you to Mary Godwin enjoy
Here's a short guide, its from my other blog
Mary Godwin (she/her)(reference to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein). She is the cousin of Dr. Wollstonecraft.
Age: 22 (Birthday is Aug. 30)
Height: 5’0 ft (152.4 cm), with her platforms it’s 5’5
Personality: a little hard-headed and bold. She tries to be as independent as possible, and is very devoted to those she loves. She’s goth. Very private.
Ability: “Modern Prometheus”- the ability to animate non living things (this includes severed limbs and dead bodies, but also inanimate objects such as lamps). This power has a range of 20 meters. It’s purple.
Affiliation: Europle(previous), The Armed Detective Agency (current). She works as a forensic biologist.
Family: Victor Godwin (son), Dr. Wollstonecraft (cousin) Mr. Godwin (father)
Pets: They have 2 cats. Their names are Beans and Toast.
Friends: The ADA, Kunikida Doppo (private romantic partner), Dazai Osamu, Yosano Akiko, Dr.W.
Hobbies: watching thriller movies, experimenting with her ability, just hanging out with her kid, bug taxidermy
Victor Godwin (he/him)(a reference to Victor Frankenstein)
Age: 3 or 4 (Birthday is March 30th )
Height:
Personality: A very bright little boy who's a little too curious. Loves math.(COMING SOON)
Ability: Reuse. He is able to drain people's strength and put it out towards other objects. this is temporary.
Affiliation: the ADA, although only through his mother. I haven’t yet explored his future.
Family: Mary Godwin (mother), Percy Shelley (biological father, has never met him), Mr. Godwin (grandfather, has also never met him), Dr. Wollstonecraft (cousin once removed)
Pets: Frank, a rat he kept that used to be a class pet in pre-k but his teacher gave him away. Every time Frank dies, they get a new pet Frank.
Friends: Children from daycare, he believes his mother’s adult friends are his friends (this includes Kunikida Doppo and Dazai Osamu)
Hobbies: Junior Mathletes, “designing experiments”, trying to teach Frank tricks
Percy Shelley (they/he)(reference to Percy Shelley, romantic poet)
Age: about 27 (birthday is August 4th)
Height: 5'6
Personality: Loyal, flirtatious, fragile mental state. Bold only when it comes to protecting the ones who matter.
Ability: "Mont Blanc," they can grow plants out of their body or the environment, but it comes out far too strong and it drains Percy of their strength. It has resulted in something close to chronic illness.
Affiliation: Decay of Angels, specifically under Fyodor. kind of Fyodor's lapdog. Will follow any order given to him by Fyodor out of loyalty and wanting to be useful, even if it will hurt themself or other people.
This will be expanded as I develop them more!
#bungou stray dogs#bsd#bsd oc#bsd original character#bsd ocs#kunikida doppo#kunikida x oc#armed detective agency#anime#new blog#oc blog#bungo stray dogs
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🖊? I'm curious about your OCs
ok given that you and I usually discuss bungo stray dogs im going to talk about my bungo ocs here
for anyone curious my bsd blog is @marygodwin-bsd <3 and there are mini bios for some of the ocs there
My verion of Mary Shelley is Mary Godwin, a forensic biologist at the ADA with a past she really doesn't like to talk about. She's very, very intelligent, but more book-wise. She once worked at Europle, but was relocated for reasons she refuses to talk about. Before Dazai joins the agency, she and Kunikida were commonly paired up together for jobs. She has 2 cats named Beans and Toast.
Victor Godwin is her young son, who doesn't know his dad. Victor has an incredible aptitude for math. He's just kind of an average 3 or 4 year old (at the time of the show) thats really, really book smart. He has a rat named Frank. Pretty much everyone at the Agency likes this kid.
Percy Shelley is an underling of Fyodor's, both as a rat and when the Decay of Angels gets involved. Their job is basically to gather information from places Fyodor can't be bothered to go, using their looks and other manipulation tactics to get what they want. Percy themselves doesn't have a bad heart-- but they'll do anything for Fyodor, and so Percy does bad things. I plan to expand on the reason why they're like this in future passages.
#my oc stuff#bungo stray dogs#bsd oc#bsd fyodor#bsd kunikida#mary shelley#percy shelley#bungou stray dogs#my oc shit#oc#bsd ocs
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Ok so since the "get to know me" posts about my main ocs were mostly jokes (they wrote them themselves, you know😞), I'm making a more legit one with, you know, actually correct information this time. Actually, Ferdinand and Paola's intros were correct (though Paola is very talkative). Blue and Lux's were straight up shit posts (these guys are unreliable😔). So here it is:
Ferdinand Le Gall
Born September 15th 2010 (currently 13).
He's about 5'1 and weighs 90 lbs. He's still a little baby.
He's noidea's bassist. He started playing it when he was about 5.
He does competitive swimming.
He has 3 cats: Keith, Shelley and Moz.
His mom is Russian-Ukrainian and Czech, while his dad is Russian-French. He has 5 siblings: an older sister, two younger sisters and two younger brothers.
His favorite food is strawberries and his favorite drink is apple juice.
He likes Franz Ferdinand (because his name's in it).
Paola Julinha Ferreira Álvarez
Born March 7th 2009 (currently 14)
She's around 5'2 and 100lbs. She stopped growing when she was 12, much to her dismay. She still hopes she'll hit a growth spurt at some point, but it's not gonna happen.
She's noidea's vocalist and guitarist. She started singing when she was very little and picked up the guitar when she was about 10, due to her dad's encouragement.
She plays volleyball.
She has a German shepherd named Ponyo (named after her favorite Ghibli movie).
Both her parents are Portuguese. She has 3 older brothers.
Her favorite food is chocolate, especially chocolate muffins, and her favorite drink is coffee.
She likes Blink 182 because her older brother introduced her to their music when she was little.
Blue (his real name is actually Noël Sébastien Morvan, but he absolutely hates it and will kill anyone who calls him that.)
Born March 5th 2008 (currently 15)
He's around 5'6 and 130lbs. He's always been on the shorter side, but he believes he'll grow taller eventually. Sorry buddy, but you stop growing now. That's it. You've reached your adult height.
He's noidea's guitarist and keyboardist. He picked up the piano on his own when his grandma gifted him a keyboard for his 11th birthday. Then, Lux helped him learn the guitar.
He's a very ambitious stoner.
He doesn't have any pets, but he vibes with the spiders in his room. He calls them Norbert.
His father is French (Breton to be precise) and his biological mother is Filipino (but he's never met her). He has an older brother.
His favorite food is galette saucisse and his favorite drink is monster, which he can't stop drinking.
He likes Operation Ivy because that was his brother's favorite band.
Luxander Gaëtan Martial Hartmann (yes, Luxander is his real government name. What were his parents thinking??)
Born June 30th 2007 (currently 16)
He's around 6'1 and 115lbs. He was always a tall kid and the doctor told him he'd probably grow to be 7 feet tall, but he was severely underweight which might've stunted his development, so he stopped growing at like 14. He's not short by any stretch of the term, but he could've been way taller. He doesn't actually like being that tall due to the attention it brings him.
He's noidea's drummer. His aunt gave him piano lessons when he was little. He can also play the guitar. He decided to start playing the drums during lockdown in 2020 and ended up really liking it.
He likes drawing and writing little comics.
He has a pet ladybug named Maurice. He must've had 100s of Maurices throughout his life.
His father is Swiss and his mother is Vietnamese, but he was raised by his aunt. He's an only child, but he has two cousins he's close to.
His favorite food is bread and his favorite drink is water. He's a very picky eater.
He likes Parasitic Ejaculation (yes, it's a real band, look it up).
#ferdinand🐟#paola🦇#blue🐍#luxander🦈#noidea#tunaz#oc#original character#sketchbook#traditionalart#artist of tumblr#traditional artist#oc art#oc artwork#art#artwork#illustration#oc profile#oc ref sheet#oc reference#artist#musician#band#oc band#band oc#franz ferdinand#blink 182#operation ivy#parasitic ejaculation#my children
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POOR THINGS (2023)
Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba, Hanna Schygulla, Vicki Pepperdine, Wayne Brett, Tom Stourton, Carminho, Jerskin Fendrix, Jack Barton, Charlie Hiscock, Attila Dobai, Emma Hindle, Anders Grundberg and Kecskeméthy Attila.
Screenplay by Tony McNamara.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Distributed by Searchlight Pictures. 141 minutes. Rated R.
Sometimes a movie is so willfully different, so determinedly off the wall, that there are pretty much only two ways to react. You can appreciate the fertile imagination which led to the film, or you can just determine that it is just really odd.
Poor Things is beautifully shot. It has some terrific acting. It is often surprisingly funny. The cinematography was intriguing – going from black and white to vibrant color and often shooting scenes through a disorienting fish-eye lens. It was certainly arresting storytelling, at no moment in the film is the viewer not rapt.
Yet, all in all, Poor Things was just too fucking weird for me to say that I actually liked it. Respected it, perhaps. Impressed by the craft? Definitely. But did I enjoy the experience of watching the film? Not so much.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos refers to his film as a fairy tale, and in many ways, it is indeed that – in the dark, violent, original versions of the Grimm fairytales way. Hell, in case you didn’t pick up on the fairytale connection, Emma Stone’s wardrobe, hair and makeup have her looking like a redheaded Alice in Wonderland through most of the film. However, the old-fashioned tale that Poor Things most resembles is a more sexual variation on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In this telling of Frankenstein, the mad scientists come out almost being sympathetic, while the “normal” men circling the orbit of the creature turn out to be the actual monsters.
The “creature” here is Bella Baxter (played by Stone). She is the creation of a horribly scarred and absolutely insane (and yet, somewhat empathetic) Victorian scientist named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who actually thinks so much of himself that he shortens his first name to simply God. God was for years the subject of his father’s odd, painful experiments in biology and medicine. Now he has taken over the family “business” – living in a mansion surrounded by many of his strange experiments – ducks with dog’s heads, or cats with the heads of geese, and the like.
God finds the opportunity for his ultimate creation by chance one day when he is lingering under a bridge when a pregnant woman throws herself off of it. He knows he could probably save her life, but obviously if she was trying to commit suicide that may not be what she wants. He could try to save her baby, but then it would be an orphan and possibly not survive. So what God does is much more insidious – he takes the brain of the baby and puts it in the skull of the mother, turning her into an infant in a grown woman’s body.
Without giving up too much, we basically watch her grow into her body, going from a blank slate and becoming a smarter, more empathetic and much more sexual being. (Fair warning for people for whom this is a concern: There is a lot of sex and nudity in Poor Things.)
I must say, Poor Things is often extremely funny, and it is just as often cringeworthy and disturbing. Which, of course, is exactly what it is trying to do. So, mission accomplished, I suppose.
Poor Things is the epitome of “you either get it or you don’t” filmmaking. There was a lot of hearty laughter at the screening I was at, so apparently some people did see where they were going with this. I wish I could say I did.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2023 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: December 7, 2023.
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Romanticizing Lord Byron
Lord Byron was the original Don Juan. Coincidentally, he also wrote a satirical poem about Don Juan. I suspect that it was because he felt a kinship with the Don Juan character and wanted to, "set the record straight" for all "sexually charged humans".
My discovery of Lord Byron came about because of my interest in gothic or "penny dreadful" tales. In a single youth-filled summer I read, Vampyre by John William Polidori, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Carmilla by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, and Dracula by Bram Stoker.
My copy of Vampyre came from a local thrift store. Inside the book was a folded printout (that I have since lost) of information akin to the following:
In June of 1816, an eclectic group gathered at the summer residence of famed poet Lord Byron in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The group consisted of Byron’s mistress Jane Clairmont, her step-sister Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They joined Byron and John Polidori, a doctor, who were already present, for a nice summer holiday. The weather was uncharacteristically bad, however, and, unable to enjoy outdoors activities, the group began reading German ghost stories. A crowd with such literary minds could not be constrained to simply read such stories, and a challenge was raised amongst the group to write their own supernatural tales. Clairmont and Shelley didn’t finish anything; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, eventually to become Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein. Lord Byron wrote a fragment known as Augustus Darvell. John Polidori produced the nightmarish short story The Vampyre. - skullsinthestars
It made me curious who this Lord Byron was. He was indirectly responsible for two pieces of literature that left an impression on me. Also, it could be argued that without the book Vampyre, neither Carmilla or Dracula would have been written.
I digress, after some research, I found that he was this gloriously eccentric, club-footed, damaged human being. His words bespoke romance, but the man behind it was all madness.
Apparently, I have a taste for madness.
He drank his wine from a human skull. He swam the Turkish Hellspont -- a four mile stretch of water now called the Dardanelles. His father went by the name "Mad Jack" and Byron liked to tell people that his father died by slitting his own throat. He had a coffin in his dining room. He used his ancestor's bones as flower pots and his daughter was the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace.
While studying at Cambridge, Lord Byron learned that he could not have his dog Smut (yes, that was his dog's name) stay in his dorm. Infuriated with the Cambridge rule on canines, he acquired a bear and proceeded to walk it around campus. There was of course no rule against bears. He even tried to get the bear enrolled as a student.
In a letter, a friend wrote about time he spent with Byron;
Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes. - Wikipedia
I am not saying that I romanticize the poet. I just think he bucked at convention. I romanticize the idea that he built his own path, and perhaps, I believe we all could be a little more like him in that way. With a bit less human bones of course.
#poetry#romanticism#romantic academia#romantic#lord byron#weird history#eccentric#eccentric history#fun history#dark academia
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been a while! been busy irl and also not in the best headstate but. A short writeup of what i've been reading/watching/doing.
Watching: Our Flag Means Death, assorted horror movies, Adventure time.
OFMD season 2 has been tons of fun so far! I've been watching with a friend at my place and we get to harass the orange cat while we watch. He loves attention so he doesn't mind (much). Can we talk abt the bell scene, though? hot damn. awakened things in me.
Horror movies watched have been: Barbarian (spooky but I think more disgusting/sad/pathetic than truly scary), Pet Sematary (halfway through, p spooky!), Jennifer's Body (not scary, very fun), IT (rewatch, still a solid time), Malignant (partway through, a fun time), Repo! (fun! very fun!), and probably more? there have been a Lot of horror movies between weekly streams with internet friends and dinner+drink+horror nights with housemates
Somehow I missed the Adventure Time craze as a teen, but i've been enjoying catching up! a fun show to watch when i dont want to think abt anything. The art style seems very uhhhhh inconsistent though? a bit disorienting
Reading: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. Hoooly fuck. This book is driving me insane in the absolute best way. I tried reading it last year and fizzled out around the gorge scene even though I was really enjoying it. I've been on a bunch of long bus rides lately, so I picked it up again and truly losing my mind. All of the POVs are so distinct and well-done, the opening scene of the girl stealing her brother's name and the way Zhu Chongba goes on to claim her destiny as well! The gender fuckery! The woman disguised as a male monk meeting the eunuch general! The rage and horror and disgust present in Ouyang's narration, the razorwire cunning and determination of Zhu Chongba's, the complexities of Esen's court!!! And the main romance is absolutely fucking insane. A woman who wants the world at her feet and a wife just trying to survive. Screaming, crying, etc etc etc.
There have been multiple times in the book where I had to pause and lose my mind silently for a few seconds like. WOW. Dearly looking forward to finishing this book and reading He Who Drowned the World. Pictured below, one of my favorite passages.
Other things I've been reading (wip fics):
Tarnished Gold, Scum Villain fic. Absolutely engrossing fic where Shen Yuan transmigrates into Gongyi Xiao instead of Shen Qingqiu. The characterization is beyond top-notch, it's honestly aspirational. The POV is a Luo Binghe fresh from the Abyss and hellbent on causing Gongyi Xiao's complete and utter disgrace. The slow shift from plotting and scheming to a completely in-character Binghe obsession to (eventually) romance? Delightful. So crunchy to read.
Tasting the Outer Road: the Outlaw's Guide to Good Gunsmoke Eating, Trigun Maximum fic. I'm obsessed with everything this author puts out tbh, but a post-Trimax canon fic featuring Knives as a food reviewer and examining consumption, the twins' place in the world, and the harm wrought by Knives is everything I've ever wanted.
Welcome! Everything is Fine. IDW Transformers fic. A Good Place x Transformers mashup... kind of. It's fun! It'll make you laugh! It's got Starscream/Minimus aka the transformers ship of all time!
Listening to: So much. It's been a lot of Hozier lately (concert is less than two weeks away!!), but there was a man at the farmer's market this week singing the Decemberists and that reminded me how much I love them so. shrugs. let's just say i've been rolling around in indie albums.
Working on: Classwork. VW bangfic. I've been busy and I'm very much at the stage in the fic where I'm hating everything I write. But that's fine, the important thing is that it gets written (I say as I contemplate my wip which hasn't had meaningful progress being added for a While now i am so very stuck). My arm's been positively fucked these past few weeks, so I haven't had the opportunity to draw much. Hopefully eventually! I want to do gift art for VWBB friends still, but I'm running out of time.
I've applied to be an officer at a club, curious to see if I get the position. Fingers crossed, I guess? I haven't done IRL leadership stuff in a while, it would be nice to get back into it.
I've been journaling a lot lately, giving it another go after it just made me spiral hard during the early pandemic era. Not sure if it's been helping, but it's definitely better than losing my mind in public on social media? Baby steps.
Final note, very important: Please appreciate the orange cat being harassed.
#asterposting#general apologies to anyone trying to contact me lately i've been going Through It a bit#and also trying very hard to break my socmed addiction haha#been running mostly off of queue for a while now
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