#2014 lin was something else | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

Tumblr Inc. has $15.1M in annual revenue.

#2014 lin was something else

kylesvariouslistsandstuff · 2 days

Text

Recent Disney Animation "announcement" to "release date" movie timeline, a scorecard of sorts... Similar to the one I just did for DreamWorks... I'll begin with RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON, which came out in 2021. I started at 2021 for DreamWorks as well... (That post here.)

WDAS had done things a little differently from DreamWorks, in that they'll often announce or let it slip that a director is attached to something. An untitled project, which they reveal the title of until they feel it's ready. For example, MOANA was talked about as far back as 2012 as an untitled Ron Clements and John Musker film. The title and premise was officially revealed in fall 2014, and the movie came out in Thanksgiving 2016.

DreamWorks by contrast will usually announce what the movie is upfront, not as "Untitled [Insert Director Here] Film".

So with that...

RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON: Announced October 2018 as an untitled film from directors Paul Briggs and Dean Wellins. Released March 2021. A little over two years before release. Rumblings of Briggs and Wellins directing a film together at WDAS had gotten out earlier than that (around 2015), but little else. The title was revealed August 2019. Wellins was later removed from the film, and Briggs demoted to "co-director". Worth noting that RAYA was originally slated for Thanksgiving 2020, but got pushed to March 2021 due to COVID-19.

ENCANTO: Announced in November 2016 as an untitled musical from ZOOTOPIA director Byron Howard with music from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Released November 2021. Five years before release. The title and various other information was officially revealed as ENCANTO in December 2020.

STRANGE WORLD: Announced in December 2021. Released November 2022. Less than a year before release. Scooper sites beat Disney to this one by about a few months, but erroneously referred to the movie as SEARCHER CLADE. The Venture airship appeared as an Easter Egg in ENCANTO's end credits a month earlier before announcement.

WISH: Announced as a film being written by Jennifer Lee in January 2022. Released November 2023. Almost two years before release. The title WISH and other details were officially revealed in September 2022.

MOANA 2: Announced as a MOANA series for Disney+ in December 2020. Releasing November 2024. Nearly four years before release. Disney officially revealed that the MOANA series got retooled as a movie in February 2024.

ZOOTOPIA 2: Announced in February 2023. Releasing November 2025. Over two and a half years before release. There were rumblings of a ZOOTOPIA sequel well before the initial announcement.

FROZEN III: Announced in February 2023. Releasing some time in 2026. As of now, roughly three years before release. WDAS has a Thanksgiving 2026 slot locked for a feature film of theirs, it presumably will go to FROZEN III.

UNTITLED SUZI YOONESSI FILM: Announced in November 2019. Status unknown.

UNTITLED JOSIE TRINIDAD FILM: Announced in November 2019. Status unknown. There are some uncorroborated rumors that Trinidad is directing on ZOOTOPIA 2. If true, it doesn't apply here. This announcement from late 2019 concerned an original story of hers.

UNTITLED MARC SMITH FILM: Announced in November 2019. Status unknown.

FROZEN IV: Announced in November 2023. Status unknown.

UNTITLED CARLOS LOPEZ ESTRADA FILM: Announced in November 2019. Cancelled after Lopez Estrada left Disney in April 2022. Was rumored to be titled FOSTER.

2 notes · View notes

buzzkillzine · 2 years

Text

14/8/22

So my girlfriend and I gave been going out for 10 years. It's been a great 10 years.

But over the last few months things have been on thin ice. And it's my own fault.

It started with a Grudge. Specifically the Grudge from 2004 starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

So for pretty much our entire 10 year relationship my girlfriend and I love showing each other movies. I love gorey horror movies, Sci fi, Dumb comedies etc and she loves 00s films with white covers and pink writing, Australian films and rom coms. Obviously that's a very narrow snapshot of our tastes but enough of an idea of where we're starting from.

When we started watching movies together we'd pick stuff that the other hadn't seen in an attempt to show them our favourite movies. She hated horror movies and didn't watch any and I had a big blind spot for her stuff.

Little by little we eased each other into our respective tastes and along the way we opened our minds to each a la Kuato from Total Recall (a film I picked and she enjoyed).

We both realised that it's great to watch stuff out of our comfort zone and we even found some stuff that became rewatchable favourites.

She enjoyed the ridiculous campness and hyper-masculine-to-the-point-of-homoerorotic of stuff like Predator, the parody and hidden in plain sight satire of Robocop and the ridiculous fun of Dredd. In turn I enjoyed the great writing of Mean Girls, the relatability of Booksmart and the sheer joy of Romy and Michele's Highschool Reunion and Josie and the Pussycats.

The 'your pick, my pick' rotation of films worked great. Until a few months ago.

We had watched The Ring (2002) pretty early on in our relationship and enjoyed it. One day in around May this year I realised that there were some other remakes of Asian horror that she hadn't seen.

Now I had watched the Grudge around the time it came out in 2014. I was in highschool and remember it being an eerie ghost tale with some effective scares and a great story. Plus it stars Sarah Michelle-Gellar who is great in Buffy (a show which my girlfriend loves), what could possibly go wrong?

So, with my pick chosen, we sat down to watch a film from my teens years that had cemented my taste in horror movies and would surely be a fun little trip down memory lane.

But... it stunk!

I was puzzled, baffled and shocked. What had happened to the tension, the strong female lead, the creepy atmosphere and the heart in the story? None of it was there.

We got about 3/4 of the way through and first the first time since Freddy Got Fingered (my pick) we called it a dud and turned it off. (Part of our rules are if you're reeeeeeaaallly not digging a partners pick you can tap out. She tapped out. However FGF is a stone cold classic and I stand by it)

I apologised and we watched something else that we both enjoyed.

But I was still puzzled. What went wrong? Why did I get nothing from the film? Like admittedly the CGI looked awful now and it was miss-cast and SMG is normally great, like in Scooby Doo (her pick) or I Know What You Did Last Summer (my pick) but the film was just a real fizzer and didn't live up to my memories and her expectations.

So a few days pass and it's back to my pick. The whole Grudge situation is getting to me. I need to fix this.

Then I see that The Grudge (2020) is streaming and Lin Shaye is in it. Awesome! Hollywood realised that they mucked up the OG remake and decided to update it and fix the problems by making it creepy, updating the CGI and putting Lin Shaye in it. We both love Lin Shaye from the Insidious films (my pick but we both love them) and this will surely make up for my dud pick and we'll get to see a good remake of the story.

But.... it also stinks.

The same traps. Nobodies fault but it just didn't land with either of us. I'd picked 2 duds in a row and they were both the same film.

I was way off my game.

The curse of the dud Grudge followed me over the next couple of months.

I either picked stuff we both didn't enjoy of stuff that she flat out hated. Her picks kept coming through strong but mine were consistently bad. My radar of what I thought we'd both enjoy had been damaged.

I couldn't, for the life of me pick a film that was campy fun, silly fun, gross fun or even fun fun. Pick after pick I failed. The pressure of trying to find something we'd both enjoy was getting to me.

Then it happened.

We watched Black Phone in the cinema (my pick, I liked it. She didn't) then watched 'X' (my pick, I liked it, she really didn't) and then she dropped the bombshell.

'Maybe you should take a break from picking for a couple of movies?'

I knew she was right. I'd fucked up and kept fucking up. I needed to take a break and take stock of what I was doing.

So she has picked the last couple of films, Not Okay (both loved it) and Amélie (what a classic) and I have attempted to make a list of films with all the right ingredients to finally break my streak and get back on the good film buddy/great boyfriend podium.

I have my picks locked and loaded and will report back next week on how I've done.

I think I've picked something suitably ridiculous, fun and over the top to win back her trust.

Wish me luck and I'll let you know how I go.

(Just to be clear, she's great and this is all just fun but I take watching movies together seriously)

Also my car broke down but it fixed now.

#movies #journal #writers on tumblr #writing #watchingmovies

6 notes · View notes

thlias · 2 years

Text

Not everyone can say they’ve been to the Big Apple, but THALIA LIN, a 28 year-old CIS FEMALE has lived in BROOKLYN for HER WHOLE LIFE. This is the city of dreams and SHE knows it, because they came to NYC to be an ACTRESS. Well, that and as a FORMER COSTAR / ONE NIGHT STAND to SHERRI LOWE. Living in the city means they meet all kinds of people, but everyone always seems to think they look like CHLOE BENNET. They even got away with free cab fare once because of it! [ caro, 24, she/her, est, n/a ]

BASICS.

full name : thalia emerson lin

known professionally as : thalia emerson

birthdate : july 28, 1993

birthplace : brooklyn, new york

age : twenty8

occupation : actress, singer

sexual orientation : homosexual

pronouns : she/her/hers

gender : cis female

current residence : brooklyn

voice claim : barrett wilbert weed

THE STORY SO FAR.

trigger warnings — mentions of death.

born and raised in brooklyn, new york with her seven brothers ( who are a dearly wanted connection that i will be getting sent in soon ) thalia grew up pretty comfortable somewhere in the middle class spectrum. her mom was a nurse and her father a stockbroker, so all the kids got involved in Something to help keep them out of the house and out of trouble — for thalia, it was theater. she did community theater programs after school and during the summers, even managed to snag auditions in off-broadway productions with her friends as young as 8. she loved being on a stage and entertaining people but she always saw it more as a hobby, not necessarily what she wanted to do for the rest of her life

she and her friend group were Those Kind of People who spent their time after school writing songs and making short films that were laughably terrible or doing shit reenactments of their fave scenes / plays that they’d upload online just for the thrill of it. she did school plays n things but again, was more of a hobby?? she was in a family with people who had “real careers” so for her she never thought of theater or performing as a viable career path. thalia had new york city in her blood and veins and could not imagine doing anything else, so she applied for nyu and ended up getting in to her greatest dismay

and then her dad suffered from a sudden heart attack and passed away which threw her for a total loop and she had no idea wtf to do, but being super family oriented she decided that college could wait and that she wanted to be able to help her mom with the financial and ease some of that burden, so thalia turned down her nyu acceptance and decided to jump straight into work, bartending and working other odd jobs to help out. she occasionally went to auditions that were within driving distance or in her backyard, but she knew she couldn’t commit to the riskiness of a broadway show as a basic nobody with the financial responsibility she placed on her own shoulders, so she stuck to film/tv. she was of the firm mindset that she was doing it for Fun, she didn’t really anticipate to book anything? was just a nice way to keep working those muscles

but she ended up booking an mtv film called ‘sundaze’ and objectively speaking, it was Horrendous, but it got her in the door and it came with a nice paycheck so there were no complaints. she then did a reading for the same casting director for an upcoming tv show on the cw called ‘mount olympus’ and ended up booking one of the main roles? show ran from 2013-2018 and it was one of Those shows that you remember watching back in high school or college along with pretty little liars and teen wolf and awkward, that p much exploded bc of the great coming of social media n shit. she was like a fuckin lucy hale or some shit, was everywhere, got a lot of random lil roles on shows like svu and grey’s and did a few equally shitty movies during that time

homegirl is a R A G I N G lesbian !! she was one of the few people in her social sphere that was publicly out when she came out in 2014 ( which was bc she and a costar were constantly being rumored of being together and it made the costar uncomfortable so thalia was like i got u but also i’m gay so two birds, one stone ) so again, more attention on her be it good or bad

once her show wrapped, thalia decided she was gonna come back to new york so that she could help her mom transition into retirement now that all the kids were out of the house, put her up in a new house, spend time w her, all that stuff. one of her friends had gotten onto the broadway scene and was involved in the revival of rodgers & hammerstein’s cinderella and was like “you should audition!” and she was like “sure anything for u friend!” and was Not expecting to get it, but she did and she got the lead and she was just so floored and excited and living her lil childhood dreams

but she had that One Costar who made everything infinitely more complicated and despite extending her contract for another year, thalia finally hit her breaking point w her, confronted her the minute she was no longer contractually obligated to play nice and it ended up with them hooking up :) happy day :) and then thalia got ghosted :) which was hard for thalia’s confrontational nature and general wanting for things to go smoothly if she could help it and also it felt like a lil blow to her boundaries since she felt a lil taken advantage and didn’t rlly like the thought of someone trying to figure out their own shit at her expense??? which she couldn’t find out if that was the case bc her number got Blocked

it turned out to work out in her favor bc playing ella meant her vocal abilities were now kind of out there and available to be exploited by the industry!! she started doing more music-y things, writing songs and featuring on one (1) single pop song released to the public i envision what i need by miss hayley kiyoko whom i feel thalia is an incarnation of in some ways?? but that’s just me and ended up auditioning for the adaptation for daisy jones in the six, landed the role of daisy

she was out of town from september to april of 2022 filming and she like just got back a month or so ago???? so she’s just kinda biding her time til the release later this year, doing auditions, shit like that

OOC.

i’m caro and i am so excited to be bringing u all my lil lesbian jesus ! me and thali are up for all the things (seriously, the sky is the limit) so please do not hesitate to hit me up here or on discord blondsey#0330 if you want to plot things or if you want threads with us. srsly, we want to love you down, pls let us

check HERE for all of my wanted connections :~)

ONCE AGAIN I AM SO PUMPED TO BE HERE WRITING W YOU ALL thank u for attending my tedtalk

#❪ 🍯 ❫ ─── INTRO .#enyc.intro

4 notes · View notes

adamwatchesmovies · 5 months

Text

Grace: The Possession (2014)

If you look hard, you’ll find that Grace: The Possession (titled simple Grace in some markets) isn’t completely without merit. It’s trying something new - which is always praiseworthy - and there are a couple of moments during its big scene that are clever. Before you get excited, know that it’s hardly worth sitting through the film to see them. This is a predictable, poorly-written horror film.

Grace (Alexia Fast) has finally mustered the courage to leave her grandmother’s home and go to college. Unfortunately, the 18-year-old devout Catholic is ill-suited for the culture shock that awaits her. Things get worse when she begins experiencing nightmares and terrifying hallucinations. Is it mental illness, or the same dark force grandma (Lin Shaye) claims caused Grace’s mom’s death?

Grace: The Possession is almost entirely shot from a first-person point of view, which is a neat idea. This cinematic technique allows us to simulate the terrifying loss of control you would feel while something else takes over your body. As the possession gets worse, Grace hallucinates some skin-crawling or perplexing stuff that might be scary to see from the usual point of view but is even more unsettling from her's. This does mean that those who couldn’t handle the shakiness of “found footage” horror will have a difficult time watching the film, but director Jeff Chan (who co-wrote the story with Chris Pare) must've been aware. Instead of compromising, he made a bold choice and chose to stick with it all the way through.

It’s a shame the film has nothing going on outside of its vantage point. Grace has no personality. Her grandmother is a domineering bully and nothing more. Every single college student reaches for a bottle of alcohol the second they get up, party all night with the help of drugs and cares more about sex than their classes. Seriously, it’s the first day of school and Grace’s roommate, Jessica (Alexis Knapp), is partying like graduation is happening tomorrow. It’s a cartoon.

In theory, three questions will keep you engaged. “What’s happening to Grace?”, “What happened to Grace’s mother?" and "Who is Grace's father?” with the title and premise giving the first question away, you hope the second and third questions will be harder to decipher. They aren’t. The second Grace comes home and meets Father John (Alan Dale) and Deacon Luke (Joel David Moore), you know EXACTLY what’s going on. The film constantly features little things that cinematically rub you the wrong way. Clues about Grace's father are conveniently left out in the open (why hadn’t she found them earlier?). At school, Grace only hangs out with people you know she would never be friends with. For that matter, if she’s so religious and her grandmother is too, why didn’t she apply to a Christian college? it makes no sense.

The film’s conclusion contains several head-scratchers between the unintentionally funny moments. To no one’s surprise, Father John is Grace’s father. It was pretty clear from his introduction that he was up to no good. When the exorcism he attempts fails, Grace goes full demonic and then murders him, saying he’s got to pay for raping Grace’s mom (we see it happen in a scene so ill-conceived I'm stunned someone at the studio didn’t speak up and get it thrown in the trash). The murder just doesn’t seem right. If Grace had given herself to Satan or made a pack with a demon, I'd understand, but why would an evil entity kill someone evil, even if they were a priest? Shouldn’t the possessor try to make humanity suffer more by keeping him alive? Or did the sinister force know Deacon Luke would then invite it into his body to save Grace? It leads to a "scary" twist, where we see the possessed Deacon hosting mass. It's supposed to unsettle but only raises more questions. How does he perform the ceremony when touching holy water makes his skin sizzle? See what I mean about this being poorly thought-out? Things happen not because they make sense; they happen so the movie can have “scares”.

The one new thing Grace: The Possession has to offer isn’t nearly enough to offset the writing. You’ve seen everything this movie has to offer - except for the camerawork - before, done better elsewhere. It’s an awful horror film that borders on the offensive. (July 25, 2021)

#Grace: The Possession #Grace #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Lyn Shaye #2014 movies #2014 films #Jeff Chan #Chris Pare #Peter Huang #Alexia Fast #Alan Dale #Alexis Knapp

1 note · View note

the-letter-horror-lover · 2 years

Text

A Black Ghost! by Ghosthunt Kat

Anime » Ghost Hunt Rated: T, English, Supernatural & Romance, Words: 498, Favs: 9, Follows: 11, Published: Jun 13, 2014

Black Butler

"Sebastian" Ciel called

"Yes, Master?" Sebastian answered back

"Save me now!" Ciel yelled, and with that, Sebastian saved Ciel again from a guy wanting money, willing to kill Ciel

Ghost Hunt

"Mai! Tea!" Called Naru, when she walked in through the door

"Im on it!" Mai yelled, and headed for the kitchen to make Narus tea, when she finished she gave it to Naru, and waited there

"What do you want?" he asked

"Say thank you" Mai said, Naru just looked away from Mai and back to his work

"You know a thank you wouldn't hurt anything!" She yelled, when a client came in, a girl

"Are you S.P.R?" she asked

"Yes" Mai answered, and then the girl came and sat down on the couch

"Well, I-I have a case" she said, and Naru looked up from what he was doing

"Ok, tell us" Naru said

"Well my name is Suki, and weird things have been happening at my house" Suki said

"What kind of things?" Naru asked

"Well like, every now and then objects will be fine, then the next secound they will be floating, and then be thrown, and never found" Suki started "Also we will hear banging, and doors slamming" Suki finished

Naru sat their thinking for a little bit then said "We will take it, prepare us rooms" Naru said, then stood up and went into his office, then Suki turned to Mai

"Thank you, ill see you there!" Suki said and ran out

Mais POV, THE NEXT DAY

We get to the house, and prepare to get started, I set up cameras everywhere, with Yasu's help, and Masako goes around the house to see if she can sense anything, whill John, Monk, and Ayako Help set up the Base.

"Did you finish?" Naru asks me when Yasu and I walk in

"Yes" I say, and sit down, when Masako comes in

"Their is something here, but i can't read what it is" she says, and stands by Naru

"ok" he says, and continues to look at the TV's

After about an hour of research, and questioning its time to go to bed, we are all in are beds when I see a Blue light, in the middle of the floor

"Hey Masako, do you see that?" I ask

"Yes" she answers when Naru, Lin, John, Yasu, and Monk come running in

"What is that?!" Monk asks

"I never seen anything like it" Naru says studying it

"Me either" Yasu says and studies it as well, we sit in silence for awhile starring at it, when it expands, when it does it looks bigger then Lin!

"What the...!" Monk yells, then a bright light shines from it, and everything goes black.

Black Butler, Mai's POV

When my vision comes through, its day, I look around im in a total diffrent room! I see that nobody else is in this room either, then I hear the door open

"Welcome to the Phantomhive Manner"

The Butler: Variety by bleachfreaknumba1

Anime » Kuroshitsuji Rated: K+, English, Humor & Angst, Ciel P., Sebastian M., Words: 493, Favs: 18, Follows: 16, Published: Sep 1, 2012 Updated: Jun 22, 2017

AN: First Black Butler Drabble! XD Plz Review!

He was falling. Falling into a dark abyss of despair, grief, and sadness. A single sound echoed in the darkness. A pained and desperate sound, crying out for help. Help that would never come. Lost in the darkness, a light that could never be reached. That, was the meaning of such a vengeful existence.

The morning sun shone brightly through the open window.

"Bocchan," Sebastian's voice intoned softly," it's time for you to wake up."

Groaning softly, Ciel slowly lifted his tired body off the bed and opened his half shut eyes.

"It's a nice day today," Sebastian commented, proceeding to dress the groggy young master.

"There's no need for needless comments Sebastian," Ciel murmured in a commanding sort of voice. Bowing his head, Sebastian said," As you wish."

An awkward silence followed, and soon, Ciel was ready for the day. Standing up, Sebastian excused himself, leaving Ciel to his own devices. For the rest of the day, there was no more voice interaction between the two.

Everything was communicated by glares and grunts, words were unnecessary.

Soon, night was approaching quickly once more, the last rays of sunshine giving off a feeble glow. Ciel wouldn't admit it, but sleep terrified him. Haunting nightmares and horrible memories invaded every night's dreams.

It was an endless and vicious cycle, one that tormented him to no end. That fateful smoke covered night, brought to the forefront of his mind. The horror and realization of what had happened. The demon…. approaching him, offering his undying loyalty in exchange for his soul. The deal that day had sealed his fate. The right path was lost, the darkness swallowing what was left of him.

As these dark thoughts crossed his mind, Sebastian entered the bedroom.

"Young master," he said, a slight questioning tone in his voice.

"Sebastian," Ciel said firmly, covering up any troubled traces on his face," I was beginning to think you would never come." Ignoring the last comment, Sebastian asked," Is something wrong bocchan? Such a troubled face does not suit the young master."

"Nothing is wrong," Ciel said stubbornly, his facial features sharpening in the warm glow of the lamp. Nodding his head in acknowledgement, Sebastian muttered," Good night then young master."

Placing the lamp on the desk next to the bed, he blew the light out. Walking towards the door, he heard a small and timid voice call out to him. "Sebastian," Ciel's voice commanded, his voice shaking with shame and helplessness," stay with me until I'm asleep."

Smiling to himself in the blank darkness Sebastian replied," If this is what the bocchan wants, I have no choice but to comply." Ciel sighed softly, his mind giving in to sleep. That night, there were no nightmares and no horrible memories. For the first time in a long time, Ciel felt something other than pain.

He felt tranquility.

Review

Black Butler Return: Black Butler's Lady by Kuroshoujo

Anime » Kuroshitsuji Rated: T, Indonesian, Romance & Drama, Sebastian M., Words: 28k+, Favs: 13, Follows: 17, Published: Sep 9, 2013 Updated: Jul 26, 2019

38Chapter 1: Beginning

Whoa! I'm done with my first chapter! Actually this is the second fanfiction in FKI. But the first fanfiction I deleted. Because? One reason: UGLY. Levie looks more like Alois Trancy. I can't imagine Sebastian wanting to serve an employer like that. Brrr.. *sudden goosebumps*.

In this fanfiction , I made a SebastianXOC pair *sorry for fans of SebastianXCiel pair .. I hope you guys like this fanfiction * because I like it. It's not that I hate YAOI or Shonen-Ai.. I like it. I passed it on to my friend. Eehh.. even your friend asked me to help me find the Rated M. So collect it *oops, open the disgrace*. It's just.. I'm more comfortable when Sebastian pairs with a GIRL . A real girl, of course.. Ciel just 'looks like' a pretty girl *gets hit by Ciel*. For those who want to read, please... Review? Please.. Favorite? Wow.. please! Monggo, monggo..! *Really* want to bash?*silent...* yes, yes... but just PM me, I don't want any fuss.

Oops, why is it so long, huh? Yes, just check it out right away!

Black Butler Return!: Black Butler's Lady

Rated: T (maybe in next chapter M? Who knows? Lol)

Genre: Romance, Drama

Cast: Sebastian M.

Disclaimer: Yana Toboso (just for Sebastian Michaelis for this chapter)

Chapter 1: Beginning

The hands touched the girl roughly. The girl struggled. squirm. Shout with all your might. But nothing stopped. Her tears were the size of corn kernels incessantly. The girl was panting from exhaustion from screaming since this afternoon. The girl kept on praying to God. To be given a savior to save him. But..

-NOBODY COMES-

The girl gasped. Who said that?

-NOBODY COMES. THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST-

The girl sighed loudly. The hands were still touching his body. But they did it rudely. He still didn't stop praying to God.

-NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU. ASK ME HELP-

The girl's eyes were getting dull and weak. His breathing is irregular. He continued to pray to God. Looking forward to the help that will come to him.

-STAY WHAT YOU REQUEST. I WILL ACCEPT-

The girl gasped. An old man pulled out a knife that gleamed in the moonlight peeking through the window. The old geezer smirked at the frightened girl. 'What? What are they going to do?!'

-STAY YOUR REQUEST!-

The knife was getting closer to him. And..

JREB!

"AAAAAARRGGGHHHH!" The girl screamed in pain. ' Why? Why is all this happening to me?'

-COME ON, SAY IT..-

"I..." The girl said weakly. "Want to be free."

-ONE MORE TIME-

"I!" said the girl. "WANT TO BE FREE! Free me from the hands of these damn people!"

-GOOD-

A second later, a black shadow suddenly appeared above the girl who was lying down. The people who had touched it were both amazed and frightened to see the shadow.

"He's coming!" cried the man who stabbed the knife at the girl. "I have summoned you! Grant my wish! Grant me wealth and eternal life!"

-YOU CALLED ME, BUT I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOU-

"Eh?" the man asked. Everyone is silent.

-I WANT THIS GIRL-

The girl trembled. He could see blood red eyes staring at him intently. He looked very scared.

-YOU ALREADY MADE YOUR REQUEST. DO YOU REGRET NOW? NO WAY BACK-

The girl swallowed. In his heart he justifies the word 'something'. He closed his eyes then slowly he opened them and showed his dark black eyeballs and said firmly.

"I won't go back on my word anymore. I want to be free. Kill these people."

Everyone who was there suddenly screamed hysterically. One of them said shakily. "Anyone! Stop that girl!"

-OK, BEFORE I HAVE TO MARK BOTH OF OUR CONTRACTS-

"Just put it down!"

-ANYWHERE?-

"Anywhere!" said the girl.

-OK.. BECAUSE YOU ARE A GIRL.. I WILL MARK ONLY ONE GIRL HAVING THEM-

"You mean..AAAKKKHHHH!" the girl screamed in pain. Signing the contract was very, very painful. More than the stab wound the old man had given him.

-IT'S FINISHED. IT'S TIME TO COMPLETE YOUR APPLICATION Ms.. WHAT'S YOUR NAME?-

"Levie.. Levie Rodrickfille.." the girl replied weakly.

-LEVIE? BEAUTIFUL NAME.. MY LADY..-

"Now.. Hurry! Kill them!"

Suddenly a man in an all-black tailcoat fell from the huge black shadow. Her dark black hair was straight and parted in the middle slowly falling beside her face. His handsome face was decorated with a mysterious smile. His irises were blood red. And now it's starting to turn purple and light up. Slowly he answered his new Lady's orders.. "Yes, My Lady.."

The sun seemed to be trying to infiltrate through the slits of Levie's eyes. Levi squirmed. Then open his eyes. He is now lying on a bed. The bed in the room in his apartment. He felt very dizzy now. It's like drinking a lot of alcohol.

"Good morning." Said a deep and..sexy (?) voice *well, that's what i imagine about :P i think he has a sexy voice. Kyaa~!*

"Morning." Levi replied. While getting up from his bed and holding his head which still hurts. But.. wait. He thought he was alone in this apartment. Well, he broke up with his ex a month ago and isn't dating anymore. There's no way his ex would come here again. Who is it, then..

"How are you, Miss?"

Levie froze to see a tall, well-built man wearing an all-black tailcoat that wrapped his well-proportioned body. His face was handsome, he knew even though he was currently closing his eyes and smiling sweetly at him.

"Did you sleep well?" asked the man again.

"Y-yes.." Levie answered half consciously.

"I've prepared breakfast for today. Sorry, I can only prepare toast with Miss's favorite blueberry jam . For the drink I prepared Chamomile tea. "

Levie shook his head vigorously. "N-nothing. Toast is enough."

"Good. I'll go shopping for extra food for lunch and dinner later."

"I-iya."

"Oh, I have something to say, Miss. Since I feel that Miss is still not well, I presumptuously asked permission from Harry Accounting where Miss works. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. No.. Nothing.."

"Okay. Do you want to take a warm bath? I think it's good to recover your strength a bit."

"Warm water.. Not a bad idea.." said Levie still feeling airy. He was still feeling dizzy, so he didn't want to think about complicated things right now.

"Okay. I'll get it ready soon."

Levi nodded resignedly. Then the man left the room. Levie felt his soul was still floating somewhere. He was still thinking about last night.

Last night.. he.. felt like he couldn't sleep on a soft bed like this. That place.. Louder. No, very hard. Like wood maybe? And... it's dark all around. Only the light from the torches around him illuminated him. There was a strange symbol... Like a ritual symbol he had seen in a book of fortune-telling that he accidentally found in the state library.

Then.. there are people who wear masks and smile strangely at him..

"Miss, the warm water is ready." Said the man, who had suddenly entered his room.

"O-okay. Thank you."

Levie got up from his bed and headed for the bathroom. It's true what the man said, the warm water is ready..

"Are you feeling better, Miss?" asked the man who was now standing next to Levie who was sitting at the table eating toast with blueberry jam .

Levi nodded. Then sip the tea. After that he put down his cup and sighed.

"Enak."

"That's good then. Miss want to rest again?"

Levi nodded.

"Okay. Let's go to Miss's room.."

"Wait!" cut Levi.

"Yes? What's the matter, Miss?"

"There's something I want to ask you."

"Please ask anything, Miss."

Levi was silent for a moment. He stared intently at the handsome man in front of him.

"Who are you?"

Silence for a moment. The man still didn't answer. The man was still staring at his master flatly. While Levie was still looking at the man expectantly, waiting for an answer from him.

Finally the man replied, "I'm just a butler ."

"But I don't feel like having a butler ." Levi said.

The man smiled. "Maybe you forgot because you were too shocked by what happened yesterday."

"Yesterday? What happened?" Levie furrowed his brows, confused.

"Where's the earth?"

Levie tried to remember. but finally he nodded his head "I guess so.."

The man smirked. "Try to remember again."

Levi frowned. Trying to remember. yes, he's starting to remember.. Masked guys.. sticking out their hands to Levie. Levi shouted. The hands did not stop touching Levie's body. They grinned in satisfaction while Levie wept and drenched in sweat.

Then, one of them, an old man, took out a knife. Then.. Stabbed him.. He screamed in pain. But they just laughed seeing him helpless. Levie screamed for help. Then.. he made a wish. And.. The black shadow came. Make a contract.. Then.. Kill them all..

"You..." Levi said. His eyes widened in disbelief.

"Yes, that's right. I'm the demon you asked for your favor."

"I-devil?" Levie's lips trembled as he spoke. The handsome creature in front of him is a demon?!

"Ya, benar."

"Impossible.."

"Impossible?" man..no, the demon raised his eyebrows. "You called me without knowing who I really am?"

"How would I know? Baka! At that time.. I just thought, anyone is fine.. As long as they can save me.."

The handsome devil chuckled.

"Why are you laughing?!" Levi protested.

"Then it's fine, Miss." The demon said while putting on an annoying look. "You said, 'anyone's fine', didn't you?"

Levie looked at him blankly. "You are right."

"Are you sorry?" asked the devil.

Levie looked at him for a moment. "No.. Not anymore.."

"Very well then. Well, now please rest, Miss."

"Oh wait, demon." chirp Levie.

"Ya?"

"What's your name?"

The devil smiled. "Anyone you want."

"Emm.." Levie seemed to think for a moment. "What if.. Sebastian.. Sebastian Michaelis..?"

The demon who had been given the name Sebastian Michaelis positioned his hands on his chest and squatted down with one knee touching the floor. His body is positioned slightly bent. He grabbed his master's hand with his white glove covered hand and kissed his master's hand.

"Fine. From now on, my name is Sebastian Michaelis."

Levie withdrew his hand with a straight face. "Yeah.. By the way. I've had enough rest. I want to get out and get some fresh air."

"But your condition is still..."

"This is an order." Levi said.

Sebastian didn't object. "Yes, my lady."

Bonus story: Towards the name 'Sebastian Michaelis'.

"Anyone you want." The devil smiled.

"Emm.." Levie berpikir. "Amy?"

"Er.. I thought it was a girl's name."

"You're right. Donald Duck?"

"Anda yakin?"

"No, no. I'm kidding. I don't want to have a butler named duck. David Beckam? Obama? Charles? Liverpool? Aming? Ponari? Joko Bodo?"

"Uh.. You don't have to decide now.."

"Aahh! Shut up! I don't want to summon 'devil, devil' for the rest of my life!" Levie looked around him. Trying to find inspiration. Then his attention was drawn to his can of blueberry jam . The branded 'DanisH'.

"This is it! I've decided.. Sebastian Michaelis! Yes, that's your name, Sebastian Michaelis!"

What exactly does it have to do with it.. Well never mind..., thought the demon, letting out a resigned sigh.

Ch 1 of 12 Next »

Review

2: Love is Sick

Hello, hello~ I'm back! At the beginning of the appearance of this fanfiction , I already received.. ONE review! Oh My God! I'm so happy! Thanks to Kagamine Micha! Er.. By the way, for your review answer.. I will explain here. And also.. sorry if there is an M rating even though at a glance *grins lewdly* kekekeke... that's okay, rather than a lot of cursing, capcuss~!

Black Butler Return!: Black Butler's Lady

Rated: T (maybe in next chapter M? Who knows? Lol)

Genre: Romance, Drama

Cast: Sebastian M., Levie Rodrickfille

Disclaimer: Yana Toboso (just for Sebastian Michaelis for this chapter)

Chapter 2: Love is Sick

"Are you sure you want to go now?" Sebastian asked when they were in the car.

"Do I have to repeat myself again, Sebastian?!" cursed Levi.

Sebastian bowed his head. " My Apologized ."

"Hn." Levi mumbled. Then threw his face out the car window.

"Where are we going now, Young Mistress ?"

Levie menyipitkan mata pada Sebastian. "Young Mistress? Am i younger than you?"

"I can't say no, Miss."

Levie memutar bola matanya. Dasar iblis. "Whatever. Bring me wherever you want me to go."

"How about to go to hell, young mistress?" Goda Sebastian, yang dibalas delikan mata Levie.

"No kidding!"

Sebastian smirked. "I'm not kidding, Miss. You'd better be more careful in giving orders."

Levi snorted. "I want to go somewhere quiet, and cool," he said.

"Yes, My Lady."

"Ini.."

"The grassy fields are the inspiration for the famous painting, 'Lembayung Twilight', Miss." Sebastian said.

Levi was amazed. What Sebastian said was true. There are indeed a lot of weeds in this field... weeds of course, but this place is beautiful. Very beautiful. It's hard to describe in words, but Levie really admits this place is very beautiful indeed.

"Miss, do you want to rest here?" Sebastian asked.

"Okay.." Levie said as he prepared to sit down.

"Ah, wait, Miss!" stop Sebastian. Levie frowned with a questioning look at him. But that view was answered by Sebastian who suddenly took out a cloth for the seat and spread it next to Levie..

"How did you..."

"A butler must prepare everything well. I have also prepared provisions." Sebastian said while showing the picnic basket that had appeared out of nowhere.

"Are we going on a picnic?" said Levie sarcastically. Then sat down on the cloth, followed by Sebastian, who was now sitting next to him.

Levie looked at the scene that was now right in front of him in disbelief.

' Agreement with the devil? Can it be trusted? But that's how I am now. Make a pact with the devil. And the contract is marked on my chest. Yes, my CHEST. I just found out in the shower earlier. Turns out he's a perverted demon too. And at the end of the contract , my soul will be eaten by him.'

Suddenly Levie remembered something. He then turned his gaze to Sebastian.

"Sebastian." Call Levi.

"Yes, Young Mistress?"

"We made a contract, didn't we? What exactly... Our contract? Explain it to me. I really don't remember it."

"Oh, about that." Sebastian said. "I remember you asking me two things. One, you want to be free. Two, I must fulfill all your orders until you voluntarily let me take your soul."

"I see.. But.. It might take you a long time, Sebastian. Humans are greedy, won't be satisfied with a mere wish or two."

Sebastian smiled. A (obviously) smile made. "Maybe to Oujou-sama — no , human, it feels long. But to me it's just a blink of an eye."

Levi smiled sarcastically. "Very well, then I shall satisfy myself with the wishes which I shall give you later."

" Yes , young mistress.. Please give orders and I will always be by your side forever."

"Error." Sergah Levie. "Until my soul is eaten by you."

"I think it's better to call it 'till the end'."

"Whatever. I'm going to bed." Levie said as he lay down on the mat. Sebastian quickly tucked a pillow under Levie's head before he lay down.

"Rather than a butler , you are more suitable for me to name Doraemon." Levi said.

"Doraemon? Apa itu?"

"The future cat robot that can take out sophisticated tools from its thin pouch. He came from the future to help the human child who is always careless named Nobita. He came to change his future." Levie explained while still lying down and looking at Sebastian 's ruby .

"So funny. Change the future? That's impossible. What a stupid cartoon."

"But I like it. Is that stupid?"

Sebastian looked at Levie for a moment then answered with his usual smile. "Of course not, miss."

Levi snorted. "What a sweet word. I thought I should give you one more order."

"Apa itu, Nona?"

"Never lie to me. It's enough for humans to lie to me, no need to add demons. Troublesome."

Sebastian chuckled. "Yes, my lady."

"I've prepared Chicken Alfredo for dinner with Blueberry Creamy Milk Pudding for dessert ."

Levie muttered before starting to eat the food.

"Nice." His comment after eating one mouthful.

"Thank you." Sebastian bowed his head.

"You're not eating?" asked Levi.

"I don't need to eat, Miss." Sebastian replied with his characteristic smile.

"I shouldn't have asked."

Sebastian didn't answer. He was still standing next to Levie until Levie finished his meal. After that, Sebastian took the dirty dishes from the food to the sink and washed them.

Levie watched Sebastian who was still washing. He saw the body behind him had a proportional and well-built posture. It fits his..(Levie a bit hard to admit) handsome face. Levie was willing to bet, if he applied for a job in Hollywood. He will immediately be given a job as the main character of a film.

"Hey Sebastian." Call Levi.

Sebastian stopped his washing for a moment then turned to his young mistress . "Yes?"

"Is.. the figure I see now is your true form?"

Sebastian rolled his eyes for a moment. Then smiled faintly. "Of course not, miss."

Levi nodded. "I already guessed."

"What's wrong, young mistress ?" Sebastian asked who had finished washing and was now walking towards his young mistress .

"No.. I was just thinking.. Your appearance is fake.."

"Then?" Sebastian leaned his face into Levie's. His face was so close that Levie could feel his breath. "Does that weigh you down? Or do you prefer the 'real' me?"

Levie smiled while still looking at Sebastian's face. " Yeah , it's better this way."

"Good. I can't imagine your expression when you see my 'real' figure." Sebastian chuckled.

"You demon." Levie took his eyes off Sebastian and took a sip of the tea in the cup in front of him.

"But, Miss." Levi turned. Sebastian brought his lips to Levie's ear. "Even though it's fake, but I can give 'happiness' to a lady like you, just like a real man."

Levie smiled meaningfully. "Happiness in what?"

Sebastian blinked an eye as he put his index finger to his lips. "Do you want me to explain it as well as 'practice' it?"

"Tch." Levi smirked. "You perverted demon."

Sebastian smiled sweetly. "I'm just a butler , miss."

"Ya, ya.. Whatever."

Levi's cell phone rings. He groped his pants pocket and took out his cellphone. He saw the name on the screen. Katherine William Jr. Levi gulped. His cellphone never picked up. He just stared at his cell phone which never stopped ringing.

"Why didn't you pick it up, Miss?" Sebastian asked.

Levi didn't answer. He hesitated whether to answer or not. But if not answered..

"Hello?" Levie finally answered the phone. There was a sigh of relief from the other side.

"Finally you picked it up. I thought you were fine. You're all right, aren't you, Vie?"

"No.. I'm fine." Levi said coldly.

There was a heavy sigh from Katherine. "Do you still hate me?"

"Who said I hated it?" Levie said in an even tone.

"Oh, come on." Katherine sulked. "I've been with you since birth. I know you more than anyone. Even more than our mothers. Come on, explain your problem."

"Kath, I'm not in the mood to talk about this right now. I suddenly don't feel well."

"Really? Then I'll be there with William.."

"I said no!" cut Levi. " Please, Kath. I don't want to argue with you. Please listen to me just this once."

Katherine was silent for a moment before saying in a hoarse voice. "Okay.. If you need me. Just call, and I'll immediately go there ."

"Hmm." Levi mumbled. Phone disconnected. By Katherine.

Levie threw his cellphone carelessly on the dining table. He then got up from the chair and threw himself on the sofa. Then covered his eyes with his left arm. Her body trembled as if she was crying, but without a sound.

Sebastian paused for a moment looking at his master. Then he walked to the closet and took a blanket and brought it to Levie.

"You can catch a cold if you sleep here." Sebastian said as he covered Levie.

Levi didn't budge. She's still crying.

"Finally you cry too." Sebastian said. It made Levie turn to him with his eyes wet with tears that had not yet dried.

"Maksudmu?"

"Well.. Once you realize you've made a contract with me.. Normally humans would cry first out of a little regret. Strangely, you only cried after being contacted by—your brother." Sebastian said.

Levie looked away from Sebastian. "Why should I cry over that? After all, I have agreed to a contract with you."

"Then why are you crying—because of your brother?"

"Why should I explain it to you?" said Levie hoarsely.

"Because I feel you need to explain. So that your stifling feelings that have been piling up are a little less." Sebastian replied calmly.

Levie turned his body towards Sebastian who was kneeling next to him. "This might be a little boring and cliché..."

Sebastian looked deeply into Levie's brown eyes . "I'll listen until you're done talking."

"Well..." Levie sighed. "It all started, maybe, when we were both born. Born almost at the same time. And she was given a name that was longer than mine. Katherine Cordelia Rodrickfille. As for me, Levie Ethel Rodrickfille. Even though we were twins, we were different. Kath had mom's blue eyes and daddy's blonde hair. My mother's jet black hair and father's brown eyes are the complete opposite, even though our facial lines are similar.

Everyone, love Kath more. But I don't care. I was like, 'It's okay. After all, what to pay attention to? Better be alone. I can be free!' But that thought fell apart since William came in. He changed my world. And sadly, Kath's world too. Even though I was the first to meet William.. First I realized my feelings for William were love.. But I was also the first one.. Who knew, William liked Kath. And to this day, I still love William and hate Kath."

Levi was silent for a moment. His eyes wandered. Sebastian was still seriously watching him. His hand wrapped in his white glove now gripped Levie's right hand gently.

"I'm stupid, aren't I? Liking someone like that.. The one who's obviously going to like Kath. Turns out love is painful, I'm.. will never be loved." Levi's eyes filled with tears.

"Miss is right." Sebastian said.

The tears that were stuck in the corners of his eyes seemed to evaporate. "What do you mean?"

"Miss is right that love is painful. No love has a happy ending. Nothing. Everything has to end painfully."

Levi's eyes narrowed. Then smiled weakly. "You are right."

"So." Sebastian wiped Levie's tears from the corners of Levie's eyes with his finger. "Don't cry over stupid things about love like this again. You have to be strong. Because you.."

Sebastian kissed Levie's hand. "Is my employer." he continued.

Levie smiled once more. "You're right, Sebastian. No doubt about it."

Sebastian smiled back at his master. "Do you want to sleep here or in the room? I see you are very sleepy."

"Here, please." Levie said as he stretched out on the sofa.

"Well." Sebastian stood up and bowed to Levie. "Good evening Miss."

Levie's voice was slightly weak. "Good evening, Sebastian."

. 3: Charming Butler

Flash update! Yaa~! I'm coming again! Although the review is a bit.. I continue to update. Hehehe.. after all, I'm not looking for reviews, I made this story to make my imagination explode about Sebastian who is well, soooo charming! Kyaaa~~! I love him!

Erm, well, before you read this story, I want to explain about the background change. In chapter 1, I explained in this fanfiction , Levie lives in an apartment. But considering it feels like the setting doesn't fit this chapter . So I changed the background to a pith house! Uh, plot, deng! Hehe.. of course, I will edit the first chapter later. I just want to explain to readers who (probably) have been following this story from the first unedited chapter .

Oh yes, there is another addition from me. It's true, this FF is really semi-M.. But I still don't feel comfortable with M. I don't have any intention of making a scene with Sebastian and Levie who... err.. if you know what I mean . Unfortunately, there is no TM rate, right? If there is, I'll use that one. Hehe..

Yaa~ Anyway , thank you for those who have reviewed this fanfiction , whoever you are, and wherever you are, don't forget whenever and however you read this fanfiction . I will try to keep fighting to finish this fanfiction until the end! Happy reading !

^Rhaa^

Black Butler Return!: Black Butler's Lady

Rated: T (maybe in next chapter M? Who knows? Lol)

Genre: Romance, Drama

Cast: Sebastian M., Levie Rodrickfille

Disclaimer: Yana Toboso (just for Sebastian Michaelis for this chapter)

Warning: OOC, typo, Not Clear (GeJe :P), Location Not Real

Chapter 3: Charming Butler

" Morning, young mistress. Today is a sunny day. Perfect for those of you who are going back to work today." Sebastian said, pouring Blueberry Tea into Levie's cup.

"Hmm." Levie muttered seriously looking at his cell phone , reading the news over the internet. Levie rarely read the newspaper. He then took a sip of his tea slowly.

"I called Harry Accounting and told him you could start work today."

"Hmm." Levie muttered again. Still looking at his cell phone

"Since I think your condition is still not recovered, today I will take you to pick you up."

"Hm." Gumam Levie. Lagi.

Sebastian frowned at his master. Then he smiled and said, "Once upon a time there was a kind old man. He..."

"What do you mean, Sebastian?" cut Levi. He frowned at Sebastian in confusion.

"Ah .. It turns out you listened to me, Miss."

Levi sighed. "Of course I'm listening to you. I'm just.. Lazy to talk."

Sebastian smiled his trademark smile. "Then are you ready to go, Miss?"

"Yes.. Let's go." Levie put down his cup and got up from the chair.

Sebastian crossed his right arm over his chest and bowed. "Yes, my lady."

"It's here, Miss. I'll pick you up at .."

"Three. Just pick me up at three."

Sebastian nodded. "Well."

Levie got out of the car and entered his office. After confirming his employer had entered the office, Sebastian immediately launched his car into the shopping area of Savannah Ally. Bought some groceries for lunch and dinner later.

Arriving at Savannah Ally, Sebastian parked the car and took the notebook Levie had given him this morning and checked the groceries he wanted to buy. He examined one by one line containing the names of food ingredients. Every now and then he crossed out or changed the ingredients for the food that Levie wrote because he thought they were unnecessary or not needed at this time.

Sebastian continued to research until at the end of the line he saw Levie's handwriting which read,

Menswear.

Sebastian frowned. Since when did Miss want to wear men's clothes? Then he saw the additional sentence beside the sentence.

Buy clothes for yourself. The clothes of the century. Don't buy that kind of tailcoat. But a tuxedo is fine too.

Sebastian smiled. He then took Levie's old type of cellphone that was given to him this morning (even though Sebastian initially refused. After all, Sebastian would come if Levie called him). He then dialed the only number in his phone book. Levi's number.

"Hello?" Levie's voice came from the other side.

"You're so kind." Sebastian said, matter-of-factly.

"I've always been good." Levie PD said.

"Really? Then, thank you, young mistress . I will give you a present in return."

"Gift? What gift?" asked Levie curiously.

"Something special and secret." Sebastian said in a perverted tone.

"Ck. It's up to you. As long as it's not a gift related to your lewd nature, lewd devil." Levie sneered.

Sebastian tertawa kecil. "As you wish, young mistress."

" Good . Bye, Sebastian." Levie hung up the phone.

"Now." Sebastian got out of the car. He smoothed his tailcoat. " Time to shop. "

"Sebastian.. What is this?" asked Levie, in front of his office. He had been picked up by Sebastian who was already wearing the "clothes of the century". A black Levi's t-shirt and jacket complete with black skinny jeans with a black glove on his left hand to cover the contract.

Sebastian rolled his eyes. Acting plain. "What is it, Miss?"

"That's..." Levie pointed to a car full of plastic bags filled with fruit, cooking ingredients, and several bags of clothes that filled the back seat.

"What did you pay for it?! I'm not sure the money I gave you would be enough to buy all this!" Cerocos Levie.

"Ah, take it easy, Miss." Sebastian smiled sweetly. "The money that Miss gave is still a lot left, really."

"Then? Where did all this stuff come from? Don't tell me you.." Levie immediately imagined a fierce, grumpy demon and asked the shops for goods.

Sebastian laughed at Levie's expression. "No, no, Miss. I didn't even do anything."

"Huh? How come?"

"Well.. The owners of the shops who gave me these items initially called me. And when I turned and smiled at them, they immediately gave these items to me." Sebastian said casually.

Levie gaped at that. From the story, it was clear they gave the items because they were fascinated by him. Maybe this includes the crime of blackmail too, in another sense..

"Miss.. Can we go home now? I think it's getting crowded here."

Levie looked around and was surprised. Sebastian was right. People who were mostly women surrounded Levie and Sebastian. There's no need to guess why they got together. Levie faintly heard someone say "Is he an artist? So handsome.." ( well, if I met Sebastian on a city street like that, I'd say that too.. LOL. xD)

Levie flinched when someone touched his shoulder. And when he turned his head, he found a mischievous grin from Merry, his co-worker and several other co-workers. Joe, Vicky, Rose, and Edward.

"Who is he? Your boyfriend? Why didn't you tell us, huh?" Merry cerocos straight away.

"Eh.. No.. You're wrong.. It's not what you think.." Levie tried to explain.

"Wow, congratulations, Levie." Joe said.

"Aiihh.. he's so damn sexy! How dare you to not tell me 'bout this sexy guy, Levie!" jerit Vicky, yang memang menyukai "sejenis"nya.

"Rose didn't expect you to have a new boyfriend, Levie.. Rose is so happy." Rose said. With a faint smile that could hardly be called a smile.

Edward menyahut dengan cengiran mesum. "So, what have you done with that guy, huh?"

Levi 's speechless . Don't know what to say. Suddenly Sebastian grabbed his arm and pulled him into the car.

"Sebas.."

"Let's go home, Miss." Sebastian smiled. "Later, the tea I have prepared will be cold, young mistress ."

"Tch." Levi snorted. So what is he worried about tea? Devil bastard.

"So how is it, Miss?" Sebastian asked as he poured tea into Levie's cup who was enjoying Sebastian's 'gift'. Sebastian's Special Gateau Chocolate .

"What do you mean by that?" Levie glanced at Sebastian.

"Well.. About our relationship. How would you explain it."

Levi clicked his tongue. He's right. It cannot be hidden forever. There was no way he would stay silent and run away constantly if asked such a question.

"I don't know. I don't know what to tell them either." Levie massaged his now throbbing head.

"Miss.." Sebastian said in his soft and deep voice. "I have an idea."

Sebastian approached Levie from behind. His hand touched Levie's shoulder gently. He brought his face close to Levi's head. Levie's warm breath was clearly felt. His hand slowly stroked Levie's shoulder and moved to Levie's cheek and rubbed it gently. He then brought his lips to Levi's ear.

"How about you say we're really lovers?" whispered Sebastian.

Levi gulped. Unlucky. Man.. Uh, this devil..

"Not a bad idea. But, no, thanks. "

" I see ." Sebastian said while still not distancing himself from Levie. In fact he was now wrapping his arm around Levie's neck.

"Sebastian.." Levie asked hoarsely.

"Yes?" Sebastian sighed.

"Can you not get rid of that perverted nature of yours? It's disgusting. " Levie said flatly.

Sebastian then took his hands and face away from Levie. "I'm sorry, Miss." He bent down.

"Remember." Levie turned to Sebastian and signaled him to come closer. He then brought his right hand to Sebastian's forehead and flicked his white forehead. Sebastian widened his eyes, looking at Levie who looked at him coldly. "You're just a butler . Don't do that again. This is an order!"

Sebastian bowed with an unreadable face. "Yes, my lady."

Levie clasped his hands looking at Sebastian who was washing the dishes after his dinner. The burly body was being so seriously washed that he (probably) didn't notice Levie staring at him almost unblinkingly.

Levie thought, after he had flicked her earlier, Sebastian never spoke to him when he didn't have to. Well , that's actually good. Considering he was only a butler , but Levie felt strange about this silence. And that's kind of weird for him, considering he's actually used to... silence.

His eyes wandered for a moment as his brain suddenly recalled the silence. Then he glanced at the laundry and saw that Sebastian was no longer there.

W-so fast.. Levie thought.

Levie then looked around and couldn't find the tall, sturdy figure anywhere.

"Sebastian." Call Levi. He didn't come. Not even answering.

"Sebastian!" called Levie again, louder. Okay, now he's starting to panic. Was the demon mad at him? Which means.. He's going to eat his soul right now?! Hell no, he still doesn't want to die!

"Sebastian!" Levie got up from his dining table chair and walked out of the dining room into the living room. There isn't any. Maybe on the second floor!

Levie rushed up the stairs and headed straight for Sebastian's room which was next to his. He opened the door.. Uh, the door is locked?

"Damn it. At this time why is the door locked?!" Levie remembered when Sebastian had told him not to enter his room carelessly. But he's the master and the owner of this house. Can't you enter the room?

Feeling his efforts were in vain, Levie chose to leave. Who knew he was out there? Levie rushed to the front door and opened it. And he found the figure he was looking for was standing with his back to him wearing a thick black jacket. His hands were tucked into his jacket pockets. Her straight black hair swayed in the night breeze. His cold smile as cold as the night adds to its own charm.

Levie felt his heart pounding. Why? Even though he had been able to handle Sebastian's charm and responded coldly. Why..

"Se.." Levie tried to call Sebastian. For some reason his breath hitched. The words stuck in his throat. His heart was still beating for some reason. He froze in place. He looked at Sebastian who was still standing as if enjoying the night breeze.

Sebastian suddenly glanced to his right and ran towards it. Levi flinched. Then chase Sebastian who is now in the right corner of the garden of his house. And then Sebastian...

"You are very beautiful." Sebastian said. "Your beautiful and slender body also looks lithe it really amazes me. How can there be a creature as beautiful as you?"

Levi was silent. Gaze.

"Ooh.. Let me hug your beautiful body. Let me touch every inch of your body."

"Se-Sebastian..?" tanya Levie gugup. "I.. tu.. KUCING, kan?"

But Sebastian didn't seem to hear. He still continued to praise the cat he was hugging. "Smooth fur, sharp and beautiful claws. Shining eyes. Ooh.. Beautiful you."

Levie's legs felt weak. She was completely speechless to Sebastian now. He didn't know what to do.

"Ah, young mistress . Why are you sitting there?" Sebastian asked. Who finally noticed Levie's presence.

"You... like cats?" Levie asked weakly, pointing at the cat.

"Oh, this?" Sebastian said as he looked at the cat in his arms. "Yes. I love it. This beautiful creature.." Sebastian's face turned red. Levie stared at him even more. Sebastian.. blushing in front of the cat?

Levie was getting weaker. While the white cat with brown and black patterns looks a little confused.

"Nona.."

"Hmm?" mumbled Levie unenthusiastically.

"Can I bring him in? He seems cold.

Levie looked at Sebastian for a moment. Then he took a deep breath. " Whatever . Oh yeah, I called you. Why didn't you come, or at least answer my call?"

"Oh that. Because I don't think Miss is in a pinch." Sebastian smiled calmly.

Levie's facial muscles tightened. He glared at Sebastian. Then he snorted. "Tsk, never mind, I want to sleep." Levie said as he tried to stand up, but because he was still weak, he fell.

"Miss!" Sebastian walked over to Levie. The cat was still in his arms.

"I'm fine." Levi said. Unlucky. I worried about him earlier.. No, my life. But he even said not to insist and even made out with the cat? And why am I so weak?

Sebastian held Levie's hand, helping him to his feet. He felt Levie's hand that was already very cold.

"Please hold this cat first." Sebastian said as he handed the cat over to Levie who was already standing. Then he took off his jacket and put it on Levie. "You're cold. Come on in. I'll make you some hot tea. Oh yes, where's the cat. Let me bring it."

Levie looked at Sebastian for a moment. Then stepped ahead of Sebastian while still holding the cat.

"I don't want to. Leave me alone. This cat looks cold. Even though it's cold, I'm still warmer than you, Sebastian."

Sebastian's eyes narrowed. He then laughed a little. " As you wish, young mistress ." He then walked after Levie.

Arriving at the front door..

"But just so you know. I can give you warmth too. like a human."

"It's enough, there's no need to continue your words. I already know where your words are going." Levie said bluntly, leading Sebastian into the house.

"Come on, Miss. Don't be like that." Seduce Sebastian.

"Enough, enough! Don't talk like that again! You perverted demon!"

"I'm just a butler, Miss."

"Arrrgghh!" cried Levie in annoyance.

"Nona? Ada apa?"

"Alright, just close the door!"

"Baik, Nona."

The door is closed.

. ~₰~

Oh my gosh.. Sebastian is such a pervert, isn't he? I'm the one who made it until I'm just the same person. But still love it~! Oh, yes, thank you to Kagamine MiCha, for being the first reader to make this FF a Favorite! (I just found out, when I was about to finish this chapter .

For Hwang Mayumi, the rating is M... I'll think about it first, because if I write the rating M, the reader will be disappointed if there is no "something" scene. *plaque.

For Najla, what do you want to see the M rate looks like, hayo? There are many kinds of M rating, some say M rating because the language is a bit 'deep', some because there are many violent scenes, some are.. well, "that's it" *grins lewdly*

Then lastly.. Nana-chan Love Naruto, I also want to be entertained Sebas-chan's eyeballs immediately form love* here's the update!

For the reviews that I discuss here, only the reviews I received until this chapter was updated . Thanks to everyone who reads and likes this fanfiction ! See you in the next chapter ! (^v^)/

^Rhaa^

4: Kurousagi

Wow! Record! Record! Two chapters completed in less than twenty-four hours! Consider it a bonus, yes reader! Wait for one chapter, get two! Hehe..

Is anyone waiting for the new chapter ? Ohh.. Of course there is, right? Yes no? *Ge-eR Mode: On*

In this chapter , the story progress begins. Yes.. Levie can't just continue to be a princess who is served by a perverted butler like Sebastian. Hehehe.. You have to give an opponent or a target! let's have fun! There were punches, stabs, gunfire, bombs... from car bombs to bombs in the river *plakk* Kekekeke.. Well.. obviously, I've been trying to finish this chapter . Pray for this fanfiction to continue, OK?

Well, anyway, as usual, I'm no good at small talk. So .. happy reading!

Black Butler Return!: Black Butler's Lady

#black butler fanfiction

0 notes

bloodbenderz · 3 years

Note

humaniterations (dot) net/2014/10/13/an-anarchist-perspective-on-the-red-lotus/ this article from oct 2014 is very dense — truly, a lot to unpack here, but I feel like you would find this piece interesting. I would love it if you shared your thoughts on the points that stood out to you, whether you agree or disagree. you obv don’t have to respond to it tho, but I’m sending it as an ask jic you feel like penning (and sharing) a magnificent essay, as is your wont 💕

article

i know this took me forever 2 answer SORRY but i just checked off all the things on my to do list for the first time in days today so. Essay incoming ladies!

ok im SO glad u sent me this bc it’s so so good. it’s a genuinely thoughtful criticism of the politics in legend of korra (altho i think its sometimes a little mean to korra unnecessarily like there’s no reason to call her a “petulant brat” or say that she throws tantrums but i do understand their point about her being an immature and reactionary hero, which i’ll get back to) and i think the author has a good balance between acknowledging like Yeah the lok writers were american liberals and wrote their show accordingly and Also writing a thorough analysis of lok’s politics that felt relevant and interesting without throwing their hands up and saying this is all useless liberal bullshit (which i will admit that i tend to do).

this article essentially argues that the red lotus antagonists of s3 were right. And that’s not an uncommon opinion i think but this gives it serious weight. Like, everything that zaheer’s gang did was, in context, fully understandable. of course the red lotus would be invested in making sure that the physically and spiritually and politically most powerful person in the world ISNT raised by world leaders and a secret society of elites that’s completely unaccountable to the people! of course the red lotus wants to bring down tyrannical governments and allow communities to form and self govern organically! and the writers dismiss all of that out of hand by 1. consistently framing the red lotus as insane and murderous (korra never actually gives zaheer’s ideas a chance or truly considers integrating them into her own approach) 2. representing the death of the earth queen as not just something that’s not necessarily popular (what was with mako’s bootlicker grandma, i’d love to know) but as something that causes unbelievable violence and chaos in ba sing se (which, like, a lot of history and research will tell you that people in disasters tend towards prosocial behaviors). so the way the story frames each of these characters and ideologies is fascinating because like. if you wanted to write season 3 of legend of korra with zaheer as the protagonist and korra as the antagonist, you wouldn’t actually have to change the sequence of events at all, really. these writers in particular and liberal writers in general LOVE writing morally-gray-but-ultimately-sympathetic characters (like, almost EVERY SINGLE fire nation character in the first series, who were full on violent colonizers but all to a degree were rehabilitated in the eyes of the viewer) but instead of framing the red lotus as good people who are devoted to justice and freedom and sometimes behave cruelly to get where theyre trying to go, they frame them as psychopaths and murderers who have good intentions don’t really understand how to make the world a better place.

and the interesting thing about all this, about the fact that the red lotus acted in most cases exactly as it should have in context and the only reason its relegated to villain status is bc the show is written by liberals, is that the red lotus actually points out really glaring sociopolitical issues in universe! like, watching the show, u think well why the fuck HASN’T korra done anything about the earth queen oppressing her subjects? why DOESN’T korra do anything about the worse than useless republic president? why the hell are so many people living in poverty while our mains live cushy well fed lives? how come earth kingdom land only seems to belong to various monarchs and settler colonists, instead of the people who are actually indigenous to it? the show does not want to answer these questions, because american liberal capitalism literally survives on the reality of oppressive governments and worse than useless presidents and people living in poverty while the middle/upper class eats and indigenous land being stolen. if the show were to answer these questions honestly, the answer would be that the status quo in real life (and the one on the show that mirrors real life) Has To Change.

So they avoid answering these questions honestly in order for the thesis statement to be that the status quo is good. and the only way for the show to escape answering these questions is for them to individualize all these broad social problems down into Good people and Bad people. so while we have obvious bad ones like the earth queen we also have all these capitalists and monarchs and politicians who are actually very nice and lovely people who would never hurt anyone! which is just such an absurd take and it’s liberal propaganda at its best. holding a position of incredible political/economic power in an unjust society is inherently unethical and maintaining that position of power requires violence against the people you have power over. which is literally social justice 101. but there’s literally no normal, average, not-politically-powerful person on the show. so when leftist anarchism is presented and says that destroying systems that enforce extreme power differentials is the only way to bring peace and freedom to all, the show has already set us up to think, hey, fuck you, top cop lin beifong and ford motor ceo asami sato are good people and good people like them exist! and all we have to do to move forward and progress as a society is to make sure we have enough good individuals in enough powerful positions (like zuko as the fire lord ending the war, or wu as the earth king ending the monarchy)! which is of course complete fiction. liberal reform doesn’t work. but by pretending that it could work by saying that the SYSTEM isnt rotten it’s just that the people running it suck and we just need to replace those people, it automatically delegitimizes any radical movements that actually seek to change things.

and that’s the most interesting thing about this article to me is that it posits that the avatar...might actually be a negative presence in the world. the avatar is the exact same thing: it’s a position of immense political and physical power bestowed completely randomly, and depending on the moral character and various actions of who fills that position at any given time, millions of people will or won’t suffer. like kyoshi, who created the fascist dai li, like roku, who refused to remove a genocidal dictator from power, like aang, who facilitated the establishment of a settler colonial state on earth kingdom land. like korra! she’s an incredibly immature avatar and a generally reactionary lead. i’ve talked about this at length before but she never actually gets in touch with the needs of the people. she’s constantly running in elite circles, exposed only to the needs and squabbles of the upper class! how the hell is she supposed to understand the complexities of oppression and privilege when she was raised by a chess club with inordinate amounts of power and associates almost exclusively with politicians and billionaires?? from day 1 we see that she tends to see things in very black and white ways which is FINE if you’re a privileged 17 yr old girl seeing the world for the first time but NOT FINE if you’re the single most powerful person in the world! Yeah, korra thinks the world is probably mostly fine and just needs a little whipping into shape every couple years, because all she has ever known is a mostly fine world! in s1 when mako mentions that he as a homeless impoverished teenager worked for a gang (which is. Not weird. Impoverished people of every background are ALWAYS more likely to resort to socially unacceptable ways of making money) korra is like “you guys are criminals?????!!!!!” she was raised in perfect luxury by a conservative institution and just never developed beyond that. So sure, if the red lotus raised her anarchist, probably a lot would’ve been different/better, but....they didn’t. and korra ended up being a reactionary and conservative avatar who protected monarchs and colonialist politicians. The avatar as a position is completely subject to the whims of whoever is currently the avatar. and not only does that suck for everyone who is not the avatar, not only is it totally unfair to whatever kid who grows up knowing the fate of the world is squarely on their shoulders, but it as a concept is a highly individualist product of the authors’ own western liberal ideas of progress! the idea that one good leader can fix the world (or should even try) based on their own inherent superiority to everyone else is unbelievably flawed and ignores the fact that all real progress is brought about as a result of COMMUNITY work, as a result of normal people working for themselves and their neighbors!

the broader analysis of bending was really interesting to me too, but im honestly not sure i Totally agree with it. the article pretty much accepts the show’s assertion that bending is a privilege (and frankly backs it up much better than the original show did, but whatever), and i don’t think that’s NECESSARILY untrue since it is, like, a physical advantage (the author compares it to, for example, the fact that some people are born athletically gifted and others are born with extreme physical limitations), but i DO think that it discounts the in universe racialization of bending. in any sequel to atla that made sense, bending as a race making fact would have been explored ALONGSIDE the physical advantages it bestows on people. colonialism and its aftermath is generally ignored in this article which is its major weakness i think, especially in conjunction with bending. you can bring up the ideas the author did about individual vs community oriented progress in the avatar universe while safely ignoring the colonialism, but you can’t not bring up race and colonialism when you discuss bending. especially once you get to thinking about how water/earth/airbenders were imprisoned and killed specifically because bending was a physical advantage, and that physical advantage was something that would have given colonized populations a means of resistance and that the fire nation wanted to keep to itself.

i think that’s the best lens thru which to analyze bending tbh! like in the avatar universe bending is a tool that different ethnic groups tend to use in different ways. at its best, bending actually doesn’t represent social power differences (despite representing a physical power difference) because it’s used to represent/maintain community solidarity. like, take the water tribe. katara being the last waterbender, in some way, makes her the last of a part of swt CULTURE. the implication is that when there were a lot of waterbenders in the south, they dedicated their talents to building community and helping their neighbors, because this was something incredibly culturally important and important to the water tribe as a community. the swt as a COLLECTIVE values bending for what it can do for the entire tribe, which counts for basically every other talent a person can have (strength, creativity, etc). the fire nation, by contrast, distorts the community value of bending by racializing it: anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is inherently NOT fire nation (and therefore inherently inferior) and, because of the physical power that bending confers, anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is a threat to fire nation hegemony. and in THAT framework of bending, it’s something that intrinsically assigns worth and reifies race in a way that’s conveniently beneficial to the oppressor.

it IS worth talking about how using Element as a way to categorize people reifies nations, borders, and race in a way that is VERY characteristic of white american liberals. i tried to be conscious of that (and the way that elements/bending can act in DIFFERENT ways, depending on cultural context) but i think it’s pretty clear that the writers did intend for element to unequivocally signify nation (and, by extension, race), which is part of why they screwed up mixed families so bad in lok. when they’ve locked themselves into this idea that element=nation=race, they end up with sets of siblings like mako and bolin or kya tenzin and bumi, who all “take” after only one parent based on the element that they bend. which is just completely stupid but very indicative of how the writers actually INTENDED element/bending to be a race making process. and its both fucked up and interesting that the writers display the same framework of race analysis that the canonical antagonists of atla do.

anyway that’s a few thoughts! thank u again for sending the article i really loved it and i had a lot of fun writing this <3

#this is 2.1k words LMFAOO #asks #analysis #do i have an analysis tag?#crit #lok crit

184 notes · View notes

oneweekoneband · 3 years

Text

i didn’t though

youtube

When I was twenty and tractable I listened to “Treacherous” and I believed Taylor Swift was telling me something, because “I’ll do anything you say / If you say it with your hands”, is not content meant for straight people, even though legally they, too, are allowed to hear it, and they do generally have hands. When Taylor Swift drank beers with Karlie Kloss at a Knicks game in 2014, I believed she was telling me something even more forcefully, because, really, why be at Knicks game if not just to kill time politely before fucking whoever you’re there with. When reputation was released and it contained “Dress”, a song about buying a certain item of clothing to look good for a person you love specifically not “like a best friend” so that after “all the pining and anticipation” they can remove it from your body and you can drink wine together in the bath, I believed Taylor was screaming a confession at me, and I was more than ready to receive it. When I heard from multiple sources just last year, amidst the aggressive rainbow-deluge of the Lover promo cycle, an ultimately false rumor that said Taylor was going to come out in a Rolling Stone cover story I, somehow, incredibly, brain as smooth as a baby’s ass, believed that too.

I have believed a lot of things. And it’s a nice diversion, to believe like that. But, more recently, I’ve found that the detective in me has turned away from this one. The only facts I’ll ever know about Taylor Swift are those she wishes to share, and speculating about what secrets she may or may not be hiding is a distraction from the real, joyful work of appreciating all these already literally, unequivocally, very gay songs. I’ve found, well, that I just don’t care anymore, which sucks, as I detest the squirmy idea that I might be growing as a person. But the truth is one really can write extremely, objectively homoerotic love songs yet be, for all intents and purposes, terminally straight. And like that poignant tweet about Lin Manuel Miranda tells us, you can seem gay, because of, like, your whole deal, and then it turns out you’re just annoying. You can even have a torrid love affair with your one-time supermodel best friend and in the end just want to marry some guy from The Favourite (Allegedly from The Favourite. I have seen that film three times and could not pick that man out of a lineup if my life depended on it.) and maybe there’s nothing to announce to anybody about it at all. Sexuality is complex and personal, and Taylor’s own sexuality doesn’t much matter to me, outside of how I always think it’s nice to know there’s yet another bisexual white woman out here in the world being even more irritating than me. (I say this strictly in terms of labeling; it ought to go without saying that Taylor’s various psychosexual obsessions with things like Amy from Gone Girl, and The Kennedys, and her house in Rhode Island matter to me immensely.) It doesn’t matter because it has no bearing on the fact that she keeps dropping queer classics.

Anyway, yeah, most good Taylor Swift songs are gay, just like most good things, generally, and there’s a number of viable picks on folklore, except not “betty”, no matter what the collective banshee’s wail of the Internet tells you. The gayest thing about “betty” is that it’s Taylor putting herself in the mind of a skateboarding teenage boy, which, yes, admittedly, is a big homo vibe, but nowhere in or around this song are any people of the same gender identity smashing bathing suit parts together, or even thinking about doing so, and when there are so many better options available, I feel it is prudent that we have just the barest hint of standards. As queerness itself is malleable, wonderfully, painfully individual, and comes in no one standard format, so too is determining which song on a Taylor Swift album is the most gay a singular, complicated calculus we all must do for ourselves within our own hearts, and, of course, there are no wrong answers, unless it so happens that your answer is not “the 1”.

“the 1” made me lose my grip for a moment. A cool lament, calmly wrenching, right off it was sucking out my bone marrow and I wasn’t able to name why. (Well, except, obviously, that the twin unit of, “You know the greatest films of all time were never made,” and “You know the greatest loves of all time are over now,” is pure, not from concentrate, peak embarrassing & devastating & all the more embarrassing for being so devastating Swiftian lyricism.) Finally, weeks after the release, out walking the streets of Los Angeles midday, masked and fractious, lower back sticky, brain a little mean, buying a soda at the gas station just to talk to someone, it came to me that “the 1” is a spiritual sequel to Red’s drum-heavy forever banger “Holy Ground”. The Taylor of “Holy Ground” reminisces frantically about a lost love, some near-miss from youth. That drumbeat is a racing heart. The animating nervousness of “Holy Ground”, the way you can almost hear the narrator’s limbs flapping wildly against her body when she says that she’s dancing, has from the beginning marked this song to me as a story of looking back on some sort of formless and magical teenaged queer encounter. “Holy Ground” is looking at a precious memory like it’s a firefly in cupped hands—small and special and easy to lose—being not entirely certain what the memory means, since whatever it was that happened back then, you never really talked it out. “Holy Ground” is about a love that for all its vitality did not work out, but it is appreciative rather than sad. “But sometimes I wonder how you think about it now,” Taylor sings, “and I see your face in every crowd.”

“But we were something, don’t you think so?” asks “the 1”, imploring an ex to confirm her version of events, to agree that she’s remembering it right. Taylor has not ever struggled in her work with place and the self and matching the two against one another on the wriggling timeline of the human life. I was there I was there I was there. The question here is something else. Not was it real, but was it real to you, and do you remember now what that was like. Do you remember who I was then? What we were? The truth as it pertains to the heart of another is guesswork at best, and a troublesome kind. Memories break and bend, or weren’t even recorded right to begin with, every brain a dirty liar, and for two separate, imperfect creatures to share the responsibility of preserving one history together is a disaster. The hard facts then are grounding. Essential. “I thought I saw you at the bus stop / I didn’t though”. Everyone has past romances that they still ask questions about, yes—I am not practicing my virulent heterophobia today—but none of my queer friends are without at least one were-we-or-weren’t-we in their past, a clinch with another that was incandescent and unnameable, long over but dangling forever there loose outside the neat boxes of friend or lover. To be a queer person is to exist already beyond and without the organizing structures of heterosexuality, and this can be difficult, dangerous, but in liminality there is freedom, and in years of painstakingly debating whether I wanted to be or bang so many various somebodys I have, along the way, put the pieces of myself in the order they fit best. So then there are loves where you aren’t sure if that’s technically what it was, if it’s what they’d call it, too. Or loves that were undeniably real, only we were too busy back then with trying to turn into ourselves to keep it. And loves from the very start, from walking together on colt legs, exuberant and unprepared, and the memory is a blessing, and the memory is guilt.

“the 1”, to the ear, is softer and slinkier than “Holy Ground”, but the lyrics are dismantling. “Holy Ground” says, “And darling, it was good / Never looking down”. Full of longing, but cheerful and sure. “the 1” is older, resigned. On “the 1” Taylor mourns a love not only because it has ended, but because she can sense, from the safety of time’s remove, that it was a love which deserved better, could have been better, if things had been only a little different, if they’d felt brave enough to try just a little more. In this version of nostalgia, the golden haze of “Holy Ground” is ribboned by a vaporous shame, a regret. The song relates a story of a love that is farther out of reach and meant more than what the little girl of “Holy Ground” could have dreamt. “In my defense I have none / for digging up the grave another time / but it would’ve been fun / if you would’ve been the one”.

#taylor swift #folklore

41 notes · View notes

sanstropfremir · 3 years

Note

I absolutely LOVED reading your kingdom review. You gave me such an insight in things I never even considered, especially since our rankings are so different from each other. The Boyz was my favorite, the narrative was about RTK. How they felt bad for having to compete against their friends but eventually the groups only lifted each other up and it helped TBZ grow into the group they are now through the hardships and mental dilemma, falling into the next challenge right after they reached the top. It should have been more obvious though, I agree, it wasn't really visible for anyone who didn't know. I was wondering how you felt about the dancing in general? my reason for not ranking BTOB high was lack of choreo (and Peniel's verse), same goes for SF9. Mostly because I don't feel the hype when watching, it doesn't keep my focus on the stage. As a baby-performer myself, my goal is to make the viewer curious about what's next. is that the wrong way to look at it? that's what I've always been told, building the tension up and down to create focus. would love to hear your feedback on that! thank you so much for sharing, we need more reviews of people who actually know what they're talking about.

i'm glad that you got some insight from it! like i answered in the previous ask im here to hopefully bring some more depth and understanding for people that care and are curious!

you unintentionally proved my point about tbz’s performance: that is way too complicated! even the most talented solo dancers i can think of would have trouble distilling that down to something readable in 100 seconds, much less a group of like, a dozen people! the introductory stages are meant to show us the character of the group and their abilities in the most concise way possible, it's not the stage to do deep philosophical and emotional introspection. for a full stage? absolutely, go hog wild! but for this stage it was too ambitious and ultimately was ineffective to anyone that isn't a fan of them specifically.

by dancing in general do you mean like, every group? i put most of my opinions on the dancing where i had them in each of the individual rankings but honestly? unless there is something that really stands out positively or negatively, a lot of ‘average’ kpop dance looks the same to me. i know it’s not, obviously, and if pressed i probably could do a more serious breakdown, but dance is only one element of performance. it has equal weight with all the others in my mind, and therefore i notice when it is either

very good

does something unique

very bad, or

interferes with another element

which is the same as how i evaluate every element, if that makes sense.

hmmmm. i thought about this a lot in the shower and turns out i had more opinions that i expected so i'll put them under a cut.

firstly, i don't think lack of choreo should be penalized or considered an ‘incomplete’ performance. at the end of the day, these are bands, and a part of their brand/product they sell is the music. complex choreo does not need to be attached to that to make it a successful performance. also, btob did have choreo. any movement on stage is technically choreography. but this terminology can cause confusion so usually non-dance choreo is referred to as ‘blocking.’ but they also did include the song’s original point choreo at 1.41. the blocking in their performance was well thought out and suited the arrangement, by placing spatial emphasis on each part of the song that needed it. obviously it comes down to personal taste if the performance is ultimately ‘successful,’ because all art is subjective, but just because something isn't as visually complex as something else doesn’t mean it doesn't have the same level of thought. think of it like this: one is a super clean-lined post-post-modern grey/white living room, and the other is a kitsch goth basement. both share interior design principles and have obvious care put into the space, but they are vastly different styles that appeal to different tastes.

part of the job of production designer/AD is to decide what gets emphasis. a question you're always asking yourself is ‘is this important to the story that we’re trying to tell?’ and btob/their AD made a very smart choice with their introductory stage because it says a lot about them and their abilities in a short amount of time. that stage said ‘our foundation is strong, we have the training and experience and confidence to be up here and not rely on visual tricks.’ because they know they physically cannot do the things the 4th gen groups can; they're a decade older and they only have four members, it's just not feasible. something you learn with experience is the power that specific and pointed emphasis holds, which segues into my answer to your last question. i don't necessarily think that ‘building hype’ is the wrong way to perform something, but i do think it is a flawed way to approach creating a performance.

i think that ‘hype’ is flawed concept at its core, and one that focuses on the idea that there’s always being something more, something next, beyond the work itself. now there’s nothing wrong with playing with tension within the internal structure of a piece, that's exactly how constructing a narrative happens. however, the flaws come once we extrapolate beyond the boundaries of that individual work. the idea of ‘whats next’ implies that you have to constantly be promoting, have a sequel coming, building hype etc so people will keep engaged with your work. which is deeply capitalistic in nature and operates on the assumption that art exists purely as a product to be sold. and in order to keep selling you need to keep making a bigger and better and more spectacular product. and this is not the case at all. marketability is not the essence of art, it merely a factor of creating it under this insufferable system. kpop in particular suffers from this because the industry is specifically fabricated to produce capitol. we can have discussions all day about idols and their artistic integrity but at the end of that day, they are all cogs working with a system that was specifically made up by essentially one person to be culturally exported and to just print buckets of money. so in following that train of thought, there is a constant attitude of bigger and better because shock value (whether positive or negative) gets social media attention and therefore it sells. and it has become exponentially easier (and also seemingly required) to make things that are bigger and better than ever before. i remember being blown away by the projection floor at the sochi 2014 olympics because something of that scale and complexity would never have been possible without literally having the funding of the olympics. now that technology is easily accessible to anyone with an amazon account and the time to learn how isadora works. in comparison, it took 2400 YEARS for just the job of a ‘theatre designer’ to be even become a job at all.

because of kpop’s fan culture it is especially prone to ‘hype’ behaviour. in general with the accessibility of the internet and social media, everything has turned into a competition, and who can generate the most buzz ‘wins’. but ultimately that has taken away the general public’s ability to recognize that you can enjoy something quietly and you can enjoy something slowly. that the enjoyment of something doesn’t need to be all exclamation marks and keysmashes and trending hashtags on twitter. there is value in a work engaging in an emotion within you that is not just excitement. most of the artists and companies that i consume the work of i don’t do so because their work makes me excited, i do so because i liked the experience of engaging with that work. several years ago i saw the eternal tides by legend lin dance theatre, which you can watch a really short clip of here. that is not slow motion, that is actually how slow the dancers are moving. and 90% of the show is performed like that. and its two hours long. and it was one of the most incredible performances i've ever seen. if i ever get the chance I will go see another one of their shows again, not because i care about how they can top that experience i had, but because i know they can produce that experience, and that is enough to make me want to seek them out again. the speed of the internet has also loosened the general public’s understanding of just exactly how long creating a performance work can take. the lead dancer in the eternal tides was with the company for eight years before she and the piece were ready enough to be performed. large scale operas, musicals, and plays often have a year or more of pre-production before they even get to rehearsal. smaller theatre companies workshop new pieces for years at a time. performance is hard and it takes time. you can eliminate some of that with sheer amounts of money and people, which is what the kpop industry has done, but it speeds up the cycle of consumption to a degree that is not sustainable, especially for companies and creators who do not have that kind of access. performers and performance makers often don't put enough trust in their audiences. if they like what they see, they will come back. they dont need to be constantly bombarded with content at all times.

now that i’ve said a bit about why i think hype is a flawed concept, let's bring it back to kingdom. sf9 did something very interesting with their stage in that they actively chose to limit their dance time. and this plays very well off the performance film stage that taeyang did a couple of weeks ago. taeyang is talented and confident (for good reason), and his solo was incredible. but when it came to the intro stage, instead of trying to one-up the solo stage, the group instead said ‘well people are going to be looking at us because taeyang is insanely talented, so let's show them that we ALL have the confidence and the attitude to be up here.’ no need for flashy theatrics, they had the foresight to do something that would make them stand out from the rest of the groups. even if i was just casually watching the stages without doing any analysis on them (like i did for rtk), i would still be able to distinguish them because they had the stones to stand around for half their stage time. now i recognize them and would like to see what else they can do. same principle as what btob and also what ikon did. there is a fine line between anticipation and hype that gets equated in media consumption nowadays, but the two are not the same.

i think the tldr on this is that you dont need to ‘build hype’ or ‘go all out’ to make an interesting work. just focus on telling the narrative that you want to tell, and the people that recognize that will come. i could have a lot more things to say about peoples shrinking attention spans and the constant stream of information that we consume on a daily basis that devalues the labour done by artists in the eyes of the public and promotes hustle culture that is burning out and damaging creators at a rate that is both exponential and frightening, but that’s probably for another time, because this is SO LONG

#kingdom #kpop questions #this was a very interesting ask thank you anon!#the consumption and production of art is fascinating and also as an artist it gives me a fucking headache #many thoughts head too full #i hope this provided you with some more insight anon #none of your opinions are wrong i just have different ones and thats ok! i love discussions like this #Anonymous #kpop analysis #text #general design questions #kingdom review responses #answers #kingdom asks

3 notes · View notes

ourimpavidheroine · 4 years

Text

I got two different Asks about my headcanons for Wu and one of them was from like a week and a half ago, sorry about that, Anon! It’s been A Week. I’ll just answer this way, it’s easier than trying to cobble together two separate asks.

In any case, yes, I can give a sort of quick and dirty reference to Wu as I’ve written him in my fanfic. I don’t generally like doing this kind of thing but I get that people don’t want to dive in without at least a little bit of a clue as to how I see him. But I want to note that my first fic, Please Excuse My Penmanship, was written right after the show’s final episode in December of 2014 (I sat on it for two months before publishing it) and because of that it is not comic-compliant nor does it reference any sort of Word of God things that Bryke said after the show ended/on the DVD commentary.

I’ve been writing this utter behemoth of collected fics for over five years now and have done so.much.research. (Some of the history from Imperial China, for example, was so juicy that I wholeheartedly stole it and worked it into my fic.) My fic has fluff, it has angst, it has found family, it has slowly revealed backstory, it has politics, queer characters, neurodiverse characters, disabled characters, oh and a good half of it is focused on the Beifong family, so there’s them, too.

What my fic isn’t, however, is a crackship. I take it seriously; probably too seriously for someone who just wants a quick fun read on their phone between classes. So that’s good to know before diving in.

Also, much of it is written in first person via Wu’s diaries. Some of you will probably just scroll right past this entire post now because of that but I’ll say this much: I’ve gotten, over the years, a great deal of comments from people telling me they normally loathe first person but loved Wu’s. So. It’s probably worth a try. In my not so humble author’s opinion.

With all that said - here he is!

Wu was born in the autumn of 156 (making him 4 years younger than Mako). His paternal grandfather was King Kuei’s son by his queen (making him a full-blood younger brother to Wu’s great-aunt). His paternal grandmother was a kitchen maid who was given consort status after her son was born. Both of Wu’s grandparents died before he was born. Wu’s father was the only royal of his generation to make it to adulthood and he was assassinated when Wu was five years old. Wu saw very little of him and has very few memories of him.

Wu’s mother was a very high-ranking nobleman’s daughter whose estate was near Gaoling. She had much older parents and was an only child. (Through her Wu is very distantly related to the Beifongs and also to the Northern Water Tribe’s royal family. The premise being here is that all of the nobility around the world is related if you go far back enough.) She dies two days after Wu is born. She was very, very wealthy (like Bezos level wealthy) and Queen Hou-Ting sees to it that all of that wealth is taken care of in trust for Wu and it is still his even after the fall of Ba Sing Se.

Wu is Hou-Ting’s only direct heir and is raised in the Palace at Ba Sing Se. He has an extremely strict childhood (he never leaves the Upper Ring and only very rarely leaves the palace itself) and while he is extremely well-educated has very little contact with the outside world, much as his great-grandfather Kuei did.

When Hou-Ting is assassinated by the Red Lotus Wu is fifteen; he is rushed out of Ba Sing Se to the safety of Republic City, where he is mostly left on his own and goes to utter and complete pieces. He goes through several bodyguards before he is assigned Mako; by that time he is sixteen, has cut of his traditional queue, only wears modern suits, spends money like water, and watches every single mover/reads every single cheap novel/listens to the radio non-stop - which is where he learns all of that slang. He has zero social skills that do not involve him ruling a nation (which he is terrified to do). His weirdass behavior during Season 4 of TLOK is explained by his not having the first clue as to how real people live and thinking that he can learn by watching movers and reading romance novels. (We all know how that goes for him.)

He is an extremely self-centered person but not a selfish one; he also has a terrific crush on Mako that he has absolutely no idea how to handle due to inexperience.

NOTE: I have not written homophobia into my version of this universe and so there is no coming out angst for any of my characters, canon or OC. There are no coming out stories at all, in fact. Many of my characters (canon and OC) are queer and I am very matter of fact about it; gay marriage is legal, polyamory is legal (although not necessarily practiced everywhere), trans people openly exist and it is simply par for the course.

By the time Wu leaves for Ba Sing Se to dismantle the monarchy he is just about to turn nineteen; it will take him two years to put provincial governments in place with an entire cadre of advisors and abdicate. He dislikes Ba Sing Se and recognizes that if he stays he will be under constant pressure to rule in one form or another, so he relocates to Republic City for good. (Mako does have something to do with where he relocates, but Wu wasn’t planning on sticking around regardless.) Many, many people are unhappy with him dismantling the monarchy and there’s a lot of political stuff in my fic regarding the Royalists.

Wu and Mako do get married. Eventually they will have four children together and Wu will have another spouse. (This is common among nobility in the former Earth Kingdom and is expected; it is not illegal in Republic City but isn’t the norm among the natives.) He buys Toph Beifong’s old mansion from Lin (her parents built it for Toph when she was pregnant with Lin but it has been sitting empty since Toph left Republic City) and remodels it and that’s where they live.

In my fic Wu has very curly hair that he pomades within an inch of its life (I’ve been loving all the fanart going around now where his hair curls!!) and he whines about it a lot. He is a very finicky eater and never really gets over bossing people around. He does a lot of charity work and is on all of The Best Committees. He’s an extrovert who loves parties and hosts a lot of them. He has ADHD and suffers from PTSD and writes and publishes very popular romance novels under a penname for several years before his family finds out about it. He will make an effort to cut the slang out of his speech and will eventually go back to sounding like a very well educated royal. He gets real pissy if people refer to him as “your Majesty” instead of “Your Highness” since he abdicated. He has zero idea how money works (and never will) but is known to bribe the fuck out of people to get what he wants (something that will give his husband gray hair). He does not hold himself accountable to anyone or anything and that will never really change for him. He mostly gets away with it because he does have a lot of charm for a dude who believes that he’s above everyone else.

He is a fairly unreliable narrator, bless his skinny little ass.

His best friend is Huan Beifong, and you’ll just have to read the fic to find out about that.

My pissy Wu can best be summed up by this gif of Prince:

#prince wu #since both of you anons asked so nicely #I don't know if you'll want to read the fic or not #after this #but here it is anyhow #long post

16 notes · View notes

alediazpizarro · 3 years

Text

Senior Soundtrack

Music is a love language. Lo he tuiteado, lo he dicho, y —con ustedes— lo he vivido. Parte de mis 7 años en ASF ha sido la música que he compartido: canciones que son intereses en común, recomendaciones, o hasta tracks de obras de teatro que nunca voy a borrar de mi memoria. After all, de eso se trata la música en parte: de acordarse. Y sepan que cada vez que oiga una de las canciones en esta lista, va junto con su recuerdo. A todos ustedes, de todo corazón, gracias. No sé que sería de mi vida sin ustedes.

Les dejo la playlist que construyeron conmigo, whether you knew it or not, de 2014 para acá.

PS: si no aparece su nombre en esta lista de canciones, lo único que quiere decir es que we have yet to share a song. Los adoro a todos.

Abarca

Burn · Lin Manuel Miranda You have the voice of an angel, and every time I think of this song I no longer hear it in Philippa Soo’s voice, but in yours.

Tuyo · Rodrigo Amarante Dancing Kermit.

Alexander

"Eungenio” Salvador Dalí · Mecano We love the music, hate the lyrics.

Na Na Na · My Chemical Romance Debate bus trips. Blasting it from the backseat, with Nesquik and cold pasta at hand.

I’m Not Okay · My Chemical Romance “¿Estos son los Rolling Stones?”

Being Alive · Stephen Sondheim Life’s dream: be Bobby. Not literally. That would suck.

If I Could Tell Her · Benj Pasek & Justin Paul You once said this is the song you would dedicate to me. Though I think we’ve grown past that, I will always remember how warm it made me feel when you said it.

Ana

Isle of Flightless Birds · Twenty One Pilots Ya sé que me odias, pero DARARAAAARAAA

I’m Low on Gas and You Need a Jacket · Pierce The Veil El concierto que más he disfrutado en mi vida (and that’s saying a lot), y parte de por qué fue porque fui contigo. Lloramos en esta canción y en el video que grabé con mi horrible teléfono se oye lo feo que cantamos.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea · Neutral Milk Hotel De un Tiktok (de miles) que me mandaste pero de los pocos que sí abrí.

Numb · Linkin Park WAWAWAWAWAWA

Anna

Fashionista · Jimmy James Really obscure pre-middle school memory, pero every time it gets stuck in my head me acuerdo de ver el lyrics video en el ballet y la miss Celia regañándonos.

Ari

Life Itself · Glass Animals It slaps. Plus, concert.

Remember When · Wallows My favorite song in my “Drive” playlist, cada vez que sale I remember sitting in the backseat of your dad’s car and you turning the volume up so we could drive over the Reforma speed limit with this blasting.

The Cave of Two Lovers · That LSD guy from Avatar SECRET TUNNEL!!!!!!!! SECRET TUNNEL!!!! THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN!!!! SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET TUNNEEEEEEEL!!!! (No Spotify version, so here’s the surf rock cover.)

Covarrubias

Toxic · A Static Lullaby Flashbacks a clase de Ms. Miranda en 7º.

Back to Black · Amy Winehouse No puedo oír esta canción sin acordarme de tu audición para Grease. Rizzo could-have-been?

Diana

The Adults Are Talking · The Strokes Es chill yet vaguely nostalgic Diana vibes to the max.

Stuck on the Puzzle · Alex Turner Thank you for liking Alex Turner. :`)

Dark Red · Steve Lacy Memorias de una tarde que pasamos armando Repentinos con una mini guillotina y pláticas de Dinamarca.

Diego

Thinking of a Place · The War on Drugs La primera que me recomendaste, y la mejor para manejar de noche.

Vissi d’Arte · Giacomo Puccini No creo que hubiera visto Tosca si no me la hubieras recomendado. Qué bueno que lo hiciste, porque esta aria se volvió de mis favoritas.

Money · Pink Floyd Alguna vez jugamos music trivia en el salón de Stearns y me acuerdo de que yo todavía no la ubicaba pero tú la adivinaste sin problema. Years later, eres la persona que sé que le gusta Pink Floyd tanto como a mí. Lástima de Roger. :(

Layla · Derek & The Dominoes Este año tuve un classic rock renaissance que empezó, you guessed it, cuando me recomendaste esta. Clapton no falla.

Klavierkonzert Nr. 21, No. 2 “Andante” · Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart También me hiciste escuchar mucha más música clásica de la que conocía, y aprendí a disfrutarla. Esta sigue siendo mi favorita.

Sara · Fleetwood Mac De las pocas de Fleetwood Mac que no conocía pero que me recomendaste en uno de esos exchanges a las 12 am y que oí con audífonos in the dark.

Resguardum Ether · León Larregui También de las pocas de este cuate que nunca había oído pero que se volvió de mis favoritas.

Fer

Good Life · OneRepublic Buenas vibes.

Can’t Fight This Feeling · REO Speedwagon Horton --> improvised conciertos en el baño.

What the Heck I Gotta Do · Lin Manuel Miranda Más conciertos de regadera/vestidor en lo que nos arreglamos juntas.

Beth · KISS El club Glee y el karaoke en el Wii.

Miss Jackson · Panic! At The Disco No lo vas a admitir, pero te gusta mi música y lo sabes. Anytime que dudas, sólo es cuestión de ponerte esta.

The Man · The Killers Nada como nuestros buenos trips manejando de noche.

Fernando

The Bad Touch · Bloodhound Gang You and me, baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals...

EugeRiq

This Life · Vampire Weekend Siempre que la oigo pienso en ti.

I Wear Glasses · Mating Ritual Me la recomendaste en alguna de mis countless Close Friends stories.

Jose

I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) · The Proclaimers Picture it: a gaggle of eight or so kids marching around Cumbres de Santa Fe loudly screaming this in a terrible Scottish accent after watching a horror movie.

Somebody Else · Clones of Clones A bop!

Ocean Man · Ween I will only say four words: Lord of the Flies.

Lauro

Desencuentro · Residente ft. Soko Clases de Domínguez contigo were always lovely. Plus, who could forget the iconic “NO HAY SEÑAL”?

I Don’t Know How to Love · The Drums Otra de cuando we were still developing our own music tastes.

Luz

Papaoutai · Stromae De cuando estábamos haciendo Haiti research and really wanted to get into the francophone mindset.

Moonlight Sonata · Ludwig Van Beethoven Those Knowledge Bowl kids never saw it coming.

Beware of the Boys (Mundian To Bach Ke) · Panjabi MC Memoria tangible de Vancouver: cuando pusiste esta en el restaurante indio al que fuimos.

Madison

I Know Things Now · Stephen Sondheim No sé cuántas veces me ayudaste a ensayar esta canción. Me ayudaste muchísimo todo Into the Woods, y desde ahí en 6º sé que te tengo como amiga.

Mare

Rumour Has It · Adele ¿Te acuerdas del proyecto que hicimos de Mr. Kamm en 7º estilo “fleas on rats”? Literal después de que usamos esta canción ya no puedo cantar las lyrics de la original.

Mariana

Bitter Sweet Symphony · The Verve La oíamos dizque “para concentrarnos” en el salón de Austin.

Pas de Quatre from Swan Lake · Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky De cuando te fui a ver bailar ballet con Fran. :)

Tú y Yo Somos Uno Mismo · Timbiriche EL SOL

Manu

Fly Away · Laid Back The moment you played this at Montero’s party you literally made everyone be vibing. It’s like the Fairy Godmother of Chill. That was also the day you stopped being “Manu from TEDx” and were just “Manu” there on. Probably ‘cause you appreciated my ability to drive a stick. :`)

MDRH

Choke · I Don’t Know How But They Found Me I wouldn’t like this Dallon spinoff as much as I do without you. It’s like emo, but evolved, mature— like you. In a good, compliment-y way.

Oceans · Frank Iero Remember when we were gonna see him in concert? :( Thanks for being the only person with whom I can enjoy weird throaty emo screamy shit. At least the guitar is good.

House of Wolves · My Chemical Romance Something about the aggressive guitar and fast pace of this song has always reminded me of you.

Mich

Tear in my Heart · Twenty One Pilots Your Koreaboo initiation before you even knew it.

The Kids Aren’t Alright · Fall Out Boy Remember the lyrics from this I wrote as a dedication in your eighth grade yearbook? I meant them.

I Write Sins Not Tragedies · Panic! At The Disco I CHIME IN—

She’s My Winona · Fall Out Boy Something about Folie à Deux, and especially about this song, always carries a you vibe.

Perfect · Simple Plan From when you got angsty and Montes called you out on it. Then it became a bit of a joke.

One of THOSE Nights · The Cab Back in seventh grade, this was the most ambitious crossover ever attempted.

Montse

I Want To Hold Your Hand · The Beatles De cuando saturamos la rockola del Johnny Rocket’s con 15 canciones y pensaron que no servía. But we knew. Plus, a really fun Snapchat video de nosotras bajando las escaleras a tambos y aplausos con esta canción.

Something · The Beatles Too bad Eric Clapton stole George Harrison’s wife.

I Am the Walrus · The Beatles Want to feel what it’s like to do acid without actually doing it? Play this song on Rock Band!

Don’t You (Forget About Me) · Simple Minds De la única pijamada que me han dejado hacer, donde vimos tu película favorita. An unforgettable night with an unforgettable person.

Pato

Hit the Back · King Princess The best experience of my life was one I’m glad I shared with you. Still want to murder those Rock Lobster loiterers though— blocked us from KP. >:(

Just the Same · Bruno Major I had never heard of him, but to be next to you enjoying him, with our KP t-shirts in my bag and just-refilled water bottles, was one of the highlights of my night.

The Louvre · Lorde Remember when we played Melodrama in your bedroom? This is the song that I feel best captivates that: shoes on the floor, laying softly on the bed, sunlight streaming in through the window, the vinyl spinning, and a general feeling of levity.

No You Girls · Franz Ferdinand Friendly reminder of literally the worst physical experience of our lives. :))))

The Other Side of Paradise · Glass Animals The first GA song I ever showed you, which is a nice chain thing because it’s the first GA song I ever listened to that Jordan showed me. And a birthday vinyl we played in your room.

Romina

The Only Thing · Sufjan Stevens This entire album is your personality. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Futile Devices · Sufjan Stevens Same as above. It’s not your fault you’re a Sufjan Suf-stan. But every time I listen to Sufjan I remember you playing him at the Open Mic. That’s a very nice feeling.

Mama · My Chemical Romance Indisputably goes HARD and hey what are mommy issues without a little angst/general gender confusion?

Sam

Goodie Bag · Still Woozy El día del college fair que estuvimos juntas al principio y conocimos a la USC rep que nos cagó traías tu camisa de Still Woozy. Since then, el grupo me recuerda a ti.

Vale

Heart of Glass · Miley Cyrus Tú viviste esta out-of-body transcendental experience al mismo tiempo que yo, el día de mi cena.

Don’t Stop · Fleetwood Mac Espero que ya te guste Rumours completo. :)

Yuhis

Chiquitita · ABBA I didn’t know you could sing. After listening to you sing this one (and almost crying), I wondered why you didn’t do it more often.

Beauty School Dropout · Frankie Avalon I am sorry pero literal I can only think of this song in your voice. Iconic!

Gracias por todo. Los quiero. Los voy a extrañar.

0 notes

jgroffdaily · 4 years

Link

Jonathan Groff decides we should take advantage of what might be New York’s last suitable night for al fresco dining in 2019. He sits down at one of a dozen empty tables outside the otherwise packed Hell’s Kitchen bistro and announces, in a tone suggesting more mischief than regret, that he must first make a call.

"Hello," he says, iPhone now at his ear. "Joel Grey?"

Groff is starring in a limited revival of Little Shop of Horrors, and it is a very hot ticket. The Broadway legend on the other end of the line has apparently thrown a Hail Mary in hopes of scoring seats to the night’s sold-out performance. Hamming up this exchange for my amusement, Groff is game to play broker for the Tony and Oscar winner who originated the role of Cabaret’s tuxedoed emcee — and, maybe, anybody else who has his number.

"This is basically my part-time job," says Groff of fielding requests, jotting down credit card information and negotiating pickup times and locations for friends both famous and civilian. "It was the same thing when I was doing Hamilton," he adds of his year playing King George III in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history lesson. "But I was really only onstage for nine minutes during that show, so the tickets were probably full-time."

The 34-year-old actor seems eager to please, not unlike current alter ego Seymour. Little Shop’s nebbish, sweet and ultimately doomed florist nurtures a manipulative plant even as the pet’s homicidal tendencies grow more and more apparent. Those familiar with the campy musical comedy know that it suffers no shortage of blood, but it’s a nursery rhyme compared with Groff’s recent work on truecrime thriller Mindhunter. Playing a curious FBI agent in David Fincher’s Netflix series has perhaps done more for his ascendant profile than anything yet. But two seasons on the drama have meant two nine-month stints in Pittsburgh, filming interrogation scenes with character actors who bear uncanny resemblances to famous serial killers.

So even on a two-show day like this late- October Saturday, the rigors of theater are easy work for Groff. Over a couple of hot toddies, in between humoring three smitten waiters at the restaurant at which he’s been a regular since Little Shop went into previews down the block, the actor appears to be in his element. "Theater is such a communal, familial medium and interactive experience," notes Groff, who says he recognizes faces in the crowd during most performances. "Mindhunter, for me at least, is a very private experience."

Groff plays against type on Mindhunter. Wide-eyed with an almost perpetual grin, his is a mug you wouldn’t be surprised to find in an illustrated Merriam-Webster — cozied up to the entry for "baby face." Much of his previous acting career leaned into this, starting with his breakout. The Pennsylvania native came to New York at 19 and landed the lead in the musical Spring Awakening by the time he was 21. "I was just auditioning for the ensemble of Broadway shows," says Groff. "I hadn’t really developed the taste to appreciate something like Spring Awakening until I was in it."

New York’s "It" Broadway show of the aughts, the rock opera about sexual discovery among 19th century German teenagers earned Groff his first Tony nomination. He spent two years in the production before leaving in 2008, at the same time as friend and co-star Lea Michele, to pursue film and television. The work that immediately followed — Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, a recurring spin on Michele’s Fox hit Glee, a supporting role in the second season of Kelsey Grammer’s cult drama Boss, voicework in Disney $1.3 billion smash Frozen (he’ll reprise his role as Kristoff in Frozen 2, out Nov. 22) — got him on the radar for vehicles of his own. When HBO began casting Looking, its 2014 dramedy about a group of gay friends navigating an evolving San Francisco, Groff was soon tapped to front the series.

"He will search for the best version of every scene and will work until everyone drops," says Looking executive producer Andrew Haigh, who cast him as Patrick — boy-nextdoor- ish, like the actor, but privileged and problematically fickle. "He is also wholly unafraid to be vulnerable onscreen."

Looking lasted for only two seasons and a wrap-up movie, and its premature demise allowed Groff to do Hamilton, which he joined while the show was off-Broadway in early 2015, and then made the jump to Broadway. His supporting part as the aforementioned royal — with interstitial lamentations for the seceding Colonies, sung like a lovelorn (and supremely pissed) Davy Jones — earned Groff his second Tony nomination. But Groff wasn’t long for Hamilton, either. He was circling his next TV project, a moody prestige procedural about the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, based on the 1995 memoir Mindhunter by criminal profiler John E. Douglas.

"I’m not naturally a true-crime person. So reading the book, I was like … 'oh, fuck,' "says Groff of John E. Douglas’ memoir 'Mindhunter.'

Mindhunter, the book and the series, delves into the morbid minutiae of notorious murder cases with an emphasis on interviews between law enforcement and criminals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Groff was in contention for the role of FBI agent Holden Ford, based loosely on Douglas. First, he had to prove to director and executive producer Fincher — a filmmaker long admired by Groff, who says he has "a boner for his brain" — that a jovial Broadway star most widely known for singing with a reindeer in a Disney cartoon could have the upper hand with serial killers.

It was not Groff’s first audition for Fincher. Seven years earlier, he was in the running to play Napster co-founder Sean Parker in The Social Network. "My agents said, 'You have an audition in L.A. with David and Aaron Sorkin,' " Groff recalls. "If you get it, you start rehearsal the next day, so pack your suitcase for two months. They really like your tape, but they’re also considering Justin Timberlake." The part went to Timberlake.

"I did not feel then — and still don’t — that he had the inherent venality for that role," Fincher says of Groff. "He is as decent and sensitive as anyone I’ve ever met."

If venality is off the table for Groff, darkness is not. And though casting the song-anddance man was a source of curiosity for some in Hollywood before Mindhunter’s 2017 debut, the finished product didn’t elicit any skepticism from critics. Over the first season, Groff’s character goes from eager, milkdrinking company boy to a shell of the man introduced in the first episode. He alarms colleagues with the way he mirrors serial killers, until he has a panic attack after getting a bear hug from a necrophile. The second run, equally well reviewed after its August debut, saw a somewhat recovered Holden sit down with Charles Manson and, for the dramatic fulcrum of the season, investigate the Atlanta child murders of 1979-81.

"It is so impossibly bleak that I don’t think about it while I’m doing it," says Groff, who confesses he finds watching the show more affecting than making it. "All due respect to people who feel like the character is inside of them or whatever, but I don’t have that. I would leave set, listen to Beyoncé, and that was it."

After an hour and a half in his company, Groff reveals himself as a Lucille Ball historian, an avid bike rider, a devout New Yorker and someone who doesn’t seem easily bummed out — except when the conversation turns to success. His excitement over landing Mindhunter, he says, was immediately diluted by a pang of sadness. "Whenever something really great happens, it makes me feel a little bit depressed," he says. "It’s like, this is never going to get better than this moment right now. I’m sitting in David Fincher’s office and he’s giving me this role."

Talk of a third season of Mindhunter is on hold while Fincher focuses on his next feature. But the director did take a recent break from Mank, a biopic on Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, to attend Groff’s first Little Shop matinee with wife and fellow Mindhunter executive producer Céan Chaffin. It was a surprise appearance, but only because Groff hadn’t been checking his text messages. "I’m not good at my phone," he admits.

Groff has not looked at his phone since that one call — which, while polite, now has him in danger of running late for curtain. He breaks the bad news of his immediate departure to one particularly adoring waiter, and we walk to the stand where his bike is locked. There, he pulls from his bag a cobalt helmet that could double as Tron cosplay. Bars of blinding LED lights on both its front and back, his headgear tells cabs to get the hell out of the way and signals to everybody else that this is a man who values safety over subtlety.

"Yeah, I do really love riding my bike in the city … I’m just not that hard-core," Groff says of the helmet before encasing his tousle of sandy chestnut hair for the one-block ride to the theater and an expectant Joel Grey. "My mom bought this for me."

#jonathan groff #interview

31 notes · View notes

writemarcus · 4 years

Text

Watch This Space: Playwrights Train for All Media

As dramatists begin to write for all media, the nation’s playwriting programs are starting to teach beyond the stage.

BY MARCUS SCOTT

In 2018, a record 495 original scripted series were released across cable, online, and broadcast platforms, according to a report by FX Networks. And with the growing popularity of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon (not to mention new players like Disney and Apple), a whopping 146 more shows are up and running on various platforms now than were on air in 2013. So how does peak TV relate to theatre?

Once a way for financially strapped playwrights to land stable income and adequate health insurance, television has since emerged as a rewarding venue for ambitious dramatists looking to forge lifetime careers as working writers. Playwright Tanya Saracho is the current showrunner for “Vida” on Starz. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is the series developer of “Riverdale” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Sheila Callaghan is executive producer of the long-running black comedy “Shameless.” Sarah Treem, co-creator and showrunner of “The Affair,” recently concluded the Rashomon-esque psychological drama in November.

To satiate demand for more content, showrunners have sought to recruit emerging playwrights to fill their writers’ rooms. It’s now common practice for them to read plays or spec scripts penned prior to a writer’s graduation.

Many aspiring playwrights have caught on, enrolling in drama school intent on flirting with virtually every medium under the umbrella of the performing arts. Several institutions around the country have become gatekeepers for the hopeful—post-graduate MFA boot camps bestowing scribes with the Aristotelian wisdom of plot, character, thought, diction, and spectacle before they’re dropped into the school of hard knocks that is the modern American writers’ room. Indeed, since our culture has emerged from the chrysalis of peak TV, playwriting programs have begun training students for a career that includes not only the stage but multiple mediums, including the screen.

Playwright Zayd Dohrn, who has served as both chair of Northwestern University’s radio/TV/film department and director of the MFA in writing for screen and stage since 2016, said versatility is the strongest tool in the kit of the program’s students.

“We offer classes in playwriting, screenwriting and TV writing, as well as podcasts, video games, interactive media, stand-up, improv, and much more,” he explained. “There’s no one way to approach the craft, and we offer world-class faculty with diverse backgrounds, professional experiences, and perspectives, so students can be exposed to the full range of professional and artistic practice.”

Dominic Taylor, vice chair of graduate studies at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in California, also agrees that multiplicity is the key to the survival of a working writer. “In the industries today, whether one is breaking a story in a writers’ room or writing coverage as an assistant, the ability to recognize and manipulate structure is paramount,” Taylor said. “The primary skill, aside from honing excellent social skills, would be to continue to study the forms as they emerge. Read scripts and note differences and strengths of form to the individual’s skill set. For example, the multi-cam network comedy is very different from the single-cam comedy—‘The Conners’ versus ‘Modern Family,’ let’s say. It’s not just the technology; it is the pace of the comedy.”

Taylor, a distinguished multi-hyphenate theatre artist working on both coasts, said that schools like UCLA offer a lot more than classes, including one with Phyllis Nagy (screenwriter of Carol). UCLA’s program also partners with its film school, and hires professional directors to work with playwrights to develop graduate student plays for productions at UCLA’s one-act festival, ONES, or its New Play Festival. Taylor also teaches four separate classes on Black theatre, giving students the opportunity to study the likes of Alice Childress, Marita Bonner, and Angelina Weld Grimké in a university setting (a rarity outside of historically Black colleges and universities).

Dohrn, a prominent playwright who is currently developing a feature film for Netflix and has TV shows in development at Showtime, BBC America, and NBC/Universal, said that television, like theatre, needs people who can create interesting characters and tell compelling stories, who have singular, unique voices—all of which are emphasized in playwriting training.

“Playwrights are not just good at writing dialogue—they are world creators who bring a unique vision to the stories they tell,” Dohrn emphasized. “More than anything else, a writer needs to develop his/her/their unique voice. Craft can be taught, but talent and creativity are the most important thing for a young writer.”

For playwright David Henry Hwang, who joined the faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts as head of the playwriting MFA program in 2014, success should be a byproduct, not a destination. “As a playwright, I don’t believe it’s possible to ‘game’ the system—i.e., to try and figure out how to write something ‘successful,’” he said. “The finished play is your reward for taking that journey. The thing that makes you different, and uniquely you, is your superpower as a dramatist, because it is the key to writing the play only you can write. Ironically, by focusing not on success but on what you really care about, you are more likely to find success.”

Since arriving at Columbia, one of Hwang’s top priorities was to expand the range of TV writing classes. This led to the creation of separate TV sub-department “concentrations,” housed in both the theatre and film programs. All playwriting students are required to take some television classes.

“We are at a rather anomalous moment in playwriting history, where the ability to write plays is actually a monetizable skill,” said Hwang, whose TV credits include Treem’s “The Affair.” “Playwrights have become increasingly valuable to TV because it has traditionally been a dialogue-driven medium (though shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ push into more cinematic storytelling language), and playwrights are comfortable being in production (unlike screenwriters, some of whom never go to set). Once TV discovered playwrights, we became more valuable for feature films as well.”

Playwrights aren’t the only generative theatremakers moving to the screen. Masi Asare is an assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Communication, which teaches music theatre history, music theatre writing and composition, and vocal performance. The award-winning composer-lyricist, who recently saw her one-act Mirror of Most Value: A Ms. Marvel Play published by Marvel/Samuel French, said that the world of musical theatre is not all that different either; it’s experiencing a resurgence in both cinema and the small screen: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Justin Hurwitz, and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have all written songs that were nominated for or won Oscars. The growth of YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have offered new ways for musical theatre graduates to market and monetize their songs and build an audience.

“The feeling that a song has to ‘work’ behind a microphone in order to be a good song is really having an impact on young writers,” said Asare. “The song must sound and look good in this encapsulated video that will be posted on the songwriters’ website and circulated via social media.” She noted that in this case, the medium of video is also changing the medium of musical theatre itself. “Certainly it may lead to different kinds of musicals—who knows? New experimentation can be exciting, but I think there is a perception that all you have to have is a series of good video clips to be a songwriter for the musical theatre, a musical storyteller. I think that does something of a disservice to rising composers and lyricists.”

Some playwriting students, of course, are not interested in learning about how to write for television. But many who spoke for this story agreed that learning about the different ways of storytelling can be beneficial. One program in particular that has its eyes on the multiplicity of storytelling mediums is the Writing for Performance program at the California Institute of the Arts. Founded by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in 2001 as a synergy of immersive environments, visual art installation, screenplay, and the traditional stage play, the program has helped students and visiting artists alike transcend theatrical conventions. Though Parks is no longer on the CalArts faculty, her spirit still infuses the program. As Amanda Shank, assistant dean of the CalArts School of Theater, puts it, “Every time she came to the page, there was a real fidelity to the impulse of what she was trying to communicate with the play, and the form followed that. It’s not her trying to write a ‘correct’ kind of play or to lay things bare in a certain prescribed way.”

That instinct is in the life fiber of CalArts’s Special Topics in Writing, a peer-to-peer incubator for the development of new projects that grants students from across various departments the opportunity to develop and produce writing-based projects. Shank defines the vaguely titled yearlong class, which she began, as a “hybrid of a writing workshop and a dramaturgical project development space.” A playwright and dramaturg, Shank said her class was born of her experience as an MFA candidate; she attended the program between 2010 and 2013, and then noticed her fellow students’ lack of ability to fully shepherd their projects.

“I was finding a lot of students that would have an idea, bring in a few pages or even bring in a full draft, but then they would kind of abandon it,” said Shank. “I wanted a space [that would] marry generative creativity, a place of accountability, but also a place that was working that muscle of really developing a project. Because I think often as artists we look to other institutions, other people to usher our work along. Yes, you need collaborators, yes, you need organizations of supporters—but you have to some degree know how to do those things yourself.”

Program alum Virginia Grise agrees. Grise has been a working artist since her play blu won the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award. She conceived her latest play, rasgos asiaticos, while still attending CalArts. Inspired by her Chicana-Chinese family, the play has evolved into a walk-around theatrical experience with some dialogue pressed into phonograph records that accompany her great uncle’s 1920s-era Chinese opera records. After developing the production over a period of years, with the help of CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP), Grise will premiere rasgos asiaticos in downtown Los Angeles in March 2020, boasting a predominantly female cast, a Black female director, and a design team entirely composed of women of color. Her multidisciplinary work is emblematic of the direction CalArts is hoping to steer the field, with training that is responsive to a growingly diverse body of students who may not want to create theatre in the Western European tradition.

“You cannot recruit students of color into a training program and continue to train actors, writers, and directors in the same way you have trained them prior to recruiting them,” said Grise. “I feel like training programs should look at the diversity of aesthetics, the diversity of storytelling—what are the different ways in which we make performance, and how is that indicative of who we are, and where we are coming from, and who we are speaking to?”

As an educator whose work deals with Asian American identity, including the play M. Butterfly and the high-concept musical Soft Power, Hwang said that one of his goals as an educator is to train a diverse body of students and teach them how to write from a perspective that is uniquely theirs.

“If we assume that people like to see themselves onstage, this requires a range of diverse bodies as well as diverse stories in our theatres,” Hwang said. “Institutions like Columbia have a huge responsibility to address this issue, since we are helping to produce artists of the future. Our program takes diversity as our first core value—not only in terms of aesthetics, but also by trying to cultivate artists and stories which encompass the fullest range of communities, nationalities, races, genders, sexualities, differences, and identities.”

The film business could use similar cultivation. In March 2019, the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE), a self-organized syndicate of working television writers, published “Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writing,” a research-driven survey funded by the Pop Culture Collaborative. Data from that report observed hiring, writer advancement, workplace harassment, and bias among diverse writers, examining 282 working Hollywood writers who identify as women or nonbinary, LGBTQ, people of color, and/or people with disabilities, analyzing how they fare within the writers’ room. In positions that range from staff writer to executive story editor, a nearly two thirds majority of this surveyed group reported troubling instances of bias, discrimination, and/or harassment by members of their individual writing staff. Also, 58 percent of them said they experienced pushback when pitching a non-stereotypical diverse character or storyline; 58 percent later experienced micro-aggressions in-house. The biggest slap in the face: When it comes to in-house pitches, 53 percent of this group’s ideas were rejected, only to have white writers pitch exactly the same idea a few minutes later and get accepted. Other key findings from the report: 58 percent say their agents pitch them to shows by highlighting their “otherness,” and 15 percent reported they took a demotion just to get a staff job.

But there was more: 65 percent of people of color in the survey reported being the only one in their writers’ room, and 34 percent of the women and nonbinary writers reported being the only woman or nonbinary member of their writing staff; 38 percent of writers with disabilities reported being the only one, and 68 percent of LGBTQ writers reported being the only one.

For Dominic Taylor, the lack of diversity and inclusion in TV writers’ rooms can be fought in part by opening up the curriculum on college campuses, which he has expanded since joining the faculty at UCLA. “Students need a comprehensive education,” Taylor pointed out. He noted the importance of prospective playwrights being as familiar with Migdalia Cruz, Maria Irene Fornés, James Yoshimura, Julia Cho, and William Yellow Robe as they are with William Shakespeare, and looking at traditions as vast as the Gelede Festival, the Egungun Festival, Shang theatre of China, as well as the Passion Plays of Ancient Egypt.

“All of these modes of performance predate the Greek theatre, which is the starting point for much of theatre history,” explained Taylor. “It is part of my mandate as an educator to complete the education of my students. Inclusion is crucial to that education.”

After all, with the growing variety of platforms for story and expression, why shouldn’t there also be diversity of forms and voices? Whatever the medium of delivery, these are trends worth keeping an eye on.

Marcus Scott is a New York City-based playwright, musical writer, and journalist. He’s written for Elle, Essence, Out, and Playbill, among other publications.

2 notes · View notes

fiery-assassin-arc · 5 years

Note

📖(for both my boys)

Send 📖 and I will share an entry in my muse’s journal/diary! || still accepting

Feel free to specify a certain topic, person, date, or anything else you’d like to see!

Sub-Zero:

Location: Arctika, China Earthrealm.

March 15, 2014. A few months since joining the Lin Kuei.

Dear Journal,

I feel I royally fucked up, today. It was lunch, and we all sat in the dining hall to eat, the smell of fatty chicken and parsley strong. Grandmaster Sub-Zero gave us curt nods of acknowledgment, and he asked how I was adjusting, I guess since I’m still “new” to the clan… and then I said:

“I’m fine, Dad.” in the most casual way.

Silence. Cutlery stops clinking against plates. There is breathing now. And the Grandmaster looks startled. I get up, food knocked off the plate, and run straight out to come in my room and write in these pages. How could I explain the humiliation, the raging flame that scarred my entire face? I called him ‘DAD,’ as if he were my own father, in the most casual way. Dad. Dad. Dad.

How could I have done this? What made me do this? A subconscious slip? It was my own reaction whenever my father asks me about my day. My father is dead somewhere, and here I go, throwing the name out to the Grandmaster. Maybe … it’s because I miss mine?

I miss the days where my father would sit beside me, and occasionally hand me a cup of tea or he hugs me tight, just because he knew I wanted something my words fail to say. How we talk late in the midnight hours, eating leftovers off the same plate, laughter inside the empty palace. How he thought the one way to make me feel better was making fire puppets. Said it always worked when I was a kid, and still did.

Shit there’s tears on the page..

Maybe it was because I saw parts of him… in Sub-Zero. Mainly the determination, the urge to protect, how he shows he cares for the clan, only difference is that my father smiles. Grandmaster … he aims to. God, maybe I’m just missing my dad… I do, every day of my life.

I have to give them a proper–Grandmaster wants to talk about my abrupt leaving at lunch. Talk to you soon.

Iris.

🔥🔥🔥🔥

Scorpion

Location: Articka, China, Earthrealm.

September 14, 2019.

So, Grandmaster Hasashi, AKA Scorpion, is at the Lin Kuei Temple for a few days. And what better way for me to introduce myself is get scared and have a pile of snow on my head? I really aced Top 10 Introductions to Grandmasters. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this because 1) He’s different than Sub-Zero. 2) He has fire powers, just like me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Sub-Zero’s training, but fire is so … unpredictable, not easy to tame and control unlike ice and cold. It’s why I practice my abilities by myself, when others go to bed.

I guess it won’t be that bad with him here. He seems like a very nice guy, guess we’ll find out more about him later. We might train today.

-Iris.

#kathexismania #𝔚𝔥𝔞𝔱'𝔰 𝔬𝔫 𝔶𝔬𝔲𝔯 𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔡? (𝔦𝔫𝔮𝔲𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔰)#{{ Sorry the one with scorpy is a lil short #{{ Iris will be more open on him as they itneract more... speaking of i gotta reply to that

2 notes · View notes

ashtoncreative · 5 years

Text

Reflective journaling - COF

Cards for Play, what an interesting project this was. I’m sure everyone could tell you that Cards for Play was not only the most time-consuming project but also the most exciting project we’ve had so far. Cards for Play required us to get into groups and then create, design, and produce a deck of cards which would encourage and facilitate play. We had to choose a target audience and then gain knowledge to ‘understood’ them, helping us to design something they can enjoy through our card experience. Everyone in Creative Technologies was required to work on the Cards for Play project almost instantly, which was a huge surprise to me. I assumed we wouldn’t start any assignments until the second week, but I was completely wrong - it was the third and fourth day that we were paired up into groups to start working on our card experience. We had to be finished with this entire project by the 19th of March.

Two and a half weeks, in my opinion, was not enough time, we struggled immensely to finish our task on schedule, which resulted in an incomplete product. If we were able to have at least a week longer, my group would have been able to create a product that was good enough to be on the market. The individuals that I worked with were Patrick Pabustan, Ethan Lin, Bel Mallari, Gohanne Turtal, Anwell Siena, Chris Webb Speight and Kent Jones. Something my group and I had to learn was how to work effectively and be collaborative. On average, every other group had around six people, but we had eight - this meant that being collaborative was an obstacle that we had to face in order to be as productive as possible. Group work, in both educational and business environments, is necessary as it encourages collaboration and efficiency (Šerić & Praničević 2018). In Creative Technologies, group work was applied to the ‘Cards for Play’ assignment. This involved working with one another not only to complete the assignment but also to share each other's individual skills. Learning in this way, and building knowledge from each other, is a part of human instinct, and is a very important part in human evolution (Race 2017). There is scientific evidence that group work is beneficial in all areas of learning. Chiriac (2014) lists many benefits of group learning, several of which stood out to me:

- Social skills

- Motivation to succeed

- Collaboration

The last one was especially important to our group because of how big it was. Collaboration involves not only interacting with one another but also taking advantage of everyone’s different skills which they bring to the table. Burke (2011) talks about the importance of collaboration in a group project as “two heads are better than one”. This stands out to me, as being a creative technologist includes having various strengths. When I think back to my group I can clearly assess that all of our strengths were different and we brought these forth to help achieve our final product. We each had different backgrounds, skills, and experiences that helped us grow as a group which I believe was very important in ‘Cards for Play’.

In order to start prototyping with our card experience, we needed to consider different play aesthetics and functions. This was so we could discover what kind of experience we were aiming to achieve for our target audience. At first, I thought this was pointless - I just wanted to begin brainstorming project ideas, and then once one was selected we would be able to tell what kind of aesthetics we were aiming to achieve. I’ve always had the mindset that just doing is better than planning. I felt that if we started thinking of card experiences first, then we may have been able to work more productively. Unfortunately, we got told to not think of ideas before we had our aesthetics. It worked out in the end but my opinion still hasn’t changed, I believe for this specific experience picking aesthetics actually held us back and constricted us, we were no longer creatively free once we had chosen our aesthetics - our group felt trapped and that was made obvious given the time it took us to brainstorm new ideas. After lots of discussions, we were able to agree that the main aesthetics that we wanted to focus on was Fellowship and Challenge. Through these play aesthetics, we were able to create our team’s purpose, to bring fellowship among people and grow relationships by making them go through a challenge together. We planned on achieving this by creating a card experience which heavily involved communication and teamwork. We wanted our users to end the experience with potential new friends and opportunities. Since this project was at the start of the year, we must’ve gravitated towards a card experience which would help people discover new friends because we ourselves were all new to AUT and also wanted to achieve this. Something we kept saying was that “this game is for new university students”, thinking back this is ironic since we WERE new university students. We essentially made ‘The Decktator’ (our game) for ourselves without even realizing.

When we first started, we had an idea for a card experience which was loved by all of us and we would always come back to it to try and make it work (even though we had been told to ‘kill the baby’). My group and I took much more time than we should’ve to try to make this idea work, rather than killing it and starting fresh with new ideas. At the time we all thought that it was the greatest idea ever and there was no way we would think of anything better, but we were totally wrong. Once we killed the baby (the idea) all of us started to think of more options, which would produce much better results in achieving our purpose statement. This gave us the ability to have a greater number of projects to choose from. Our decision to only focus on this one idea, and not expand to others, resulted in us wasting hours of our time working on something pointless when we could’ve used this time to think of more efficient ideas that would produce a better Cards for Play experience. I learnt so much more from this experience than I expected. No matter how great you think an idea may be, there is always, and I mean ALWAYS, a better idea waiting to be discovered. The only way to discover that new fresh idea is to push your current one away.

Something else which I observed throughout this entire process is that our group spent so much time discussing rather than doing, this ended up being our biggest obstacle which we constantly struggled to overcome. Alternatively, we could have been producing quick prototypes with our new ideas. Prototyping allows the production of new knowledge and communication, essentially generating improved ideas and identifying flaws (Berglund & Leifer 2013). If we spent more time prototyping rather than discussing, then we would have sped up our designing process. We would constantly be debating new rules and why they would or wouldn’t work instead of trying these rules out. I think it’s possible there are rules we dismissed which could’ve been better than the rules we chose, but we never tested them. This was a mistake, I believe we could have halved the time that we spent contemplating rules if we playtested them immediately after thinking of them.

Now, when I look back at the Cards for Play project, I see that all of these points are things we should have executed differently. Additionally, my observation is that we should not have remained in our huge group throughout the entire process. I think with certain tasks if we were to split in half into two groups, we could have achieved so much more than we did. For future CT experiences, I would make smaller teams inside the group which have specific tasks/goals they need to complete. In my opinion, doing this will not only increase the amount of work that is produced, but also speeds the process up so there is more time to focus on perfecting the project. References

Berglund, A., & Leifer, L. (2013). Why we prototype! An international comparison of the linkage between embedded knowledge and objective learning. Engineering Education, 8(1), 2-15.

Burke, A. (2011). Group work: How to use groups effectively. Journal of Effective Teaching, 11(2), 87-95.

Hammar Chiriac, E. (2014). Group work as an incentive for learning–students’ experiences of group work. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 558.

Race, P. (2007). The Lecturer’s Toolkit; A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.

Šerić, M., & Garbin Praničević, D. (2018). Managing group work in the classroom: An international study on perceived benefits and risks based on students’ cultural background and gender. Management: journal of contemporary management issues, 23(1), 139-156.

#ctec502

1 note · View note

10thstellium · 5 years

Note

Hey ! I hope you're doing fine, happy new year ~ I wanted to know what are some popular movies/movies with good reviews that are, in your opinion, "overrated" ? Movies you think are bad (a waste of time !) & movies that weren't that bad, had interesting points, but weren't as good as you expected and you wouldn't watch again ?

You always have the best questions for me regarding films. Happy New Year to you too sorry I’m getting to this question so late. Alright well, the keyword is opinion so to anyone else reading this please bear that in mind. I don’t read nearly as many reviews as I should because I watch movies kind of late anyway. That’s in reference to in-depth reviews, not the basic ones from critics that are promoted during the commercial. I try to attend/watch a movie unbiased from reactions so I don’t become hyperfocused on highlights or sore spots. You didn’t really give me a timeline or specific era to work with. So to give myself a limitation I’ll focus on films made in the past 4 years. Popular films from 2014-2018

Mild Waste of Time — these are basically films you’d leave playing in the background or even get up in the middle in just to do something more interesting.

The Interview dir. Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg ( it was only really popular because of the controversy but still worth noting ) 2014

Godzilla dir. Garreth Edwards 2014

Transformers: Age of Extinction dir. Michael Bay ( I saw this movie 1 to many times and wondered how I ended back in the theatre. This is more for big transformer fans if anything) 2014

Non-Stop dir. Jaume Collet-Serra 2014

Lucy dir. Luc Besson 2014

‘71 dir. Yann Demange 2014

Edge of Tomorrow dir. Doug Liman 2014

Jupiter Ascending dir. Wachowski Brothers 2015

Knock Knock dir. Eli Roth 2015

The Age of Adaline dir. Lee Toland Krieger 2015

Terminator: Age of Genisys dir. Alan Taylor 2015

10 Cloverfield Lane dir. Dan Trachtenberg 2016

Sausage Party dir. Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan 2016

Warcraft dir. Duncan Jones 2016

Gods of Egypt dir Alex Poryas 2016

Now You See Me 2 dir. Jon M. Chu 2016

Baby Driver dir. Edgar Wright 2017

John Wick 2 dir. Chad Stahelski 2017

Upgrade dir. Leigh Whannell 2018

The Meg dir. Jon Turteltaub 2018

Halloween dir. David Gordon Green 2018

Overrated — everything in this category was hyped or talked to a point of misleading viewers or just general inflation due to big names or some element that didn’t quiet measure up.

The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies dir. Peter Jackson ( I can rant forever an a day about this bc I’m definitely a LOTR fan and I was just pretty disappointed with this hobbit series ) 2014

Inherent Vice dir. Paul Thomas Anderson 2014

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. dir. Guy Ritchie 2015

Batman v. Superman dir. Zack Snyder 2016

Suicide Squad dir. David Ayer 2016

Star Trek Beyond dir. Justin Lin 2016

The Magnificent Seven dir. Antoine Fuqua 2016

Passengers dir. Morten Tyldum 2016

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them dir. David Yates 2016

Call Me By Your Name dir. Luca Guadagnino 2017

Atomic Blonde dir. David Leitch 2017

Kong: Skull Island dir. Jordan Vogt-Roberts 2017

Ready Player One dir. Steven Spielberg 2018

A Simple Favor dir. Paul Feig 2018

Skyscraper dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber 2018

Solo dir. Ron Howard 2018

Overlooked — everything in this category probably has an underappreciated tone/cast/storyline/cinematographic shots/score/costume/timing/ just eclipsed by other films to be appreciated

The Drop dir. Michaël R. Roskam 2014

Ex-Machina dir. Alex Garland 2014

It Follows dir. David Robert Mitchell 2014

Whiplash dir. Damien Chazelle 2014

Boyhood dir. Richard Linklater 2014

Foxcatcher dir. Bennett Miller 2014

Black Mass dir. Scott Cooper 2015

South Paw dir. Antoine Fuqua 2015

Crimson Peak dir. Guillermo Del Toro 2015

The Lobster dir. Yorgos Lanthimos 2015

The Handmaiden dir. Park Chan Wook 2016

Don’t Breathe dir. Fede Álvarez 2016

Hail, Caesar! dir. The Cohen Brothers 2016

Kubo and the Two Strings dir. Travis Knight 2016

The Big Sick dir. Michael Showalter 2017

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing. Missouri dir. Martin McDonagh 2017

Wonder dir. Stephen Chbosky 2017

Mother! dir. Darren Aronofsky 2017

Molly’s Game dir. Aaron Sorkin 2017

Ladybird dir. Greta Gerwig 2017

Widows dir. Steve McQueen 2018

Game Night dir. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein 2018

Annihilation dir. Alex Garland 2018

Venom dir. Ruben Fleischer 2018

Isle of Dogs dir. Wes Anderson 2018

Can You Ever Forgive Me? dir. Marielle Heller 2018

Eighth Grade dir. Bo Burnham 2018

*There are films in all these categories that I do still enjoy but I feel they are some aspects catered to my liking specifically. I also left the very big names out because I feel they didn’t fit any of the categories.

#film recs #a #heliosdom

3 notes · View notes

Last Seen Blogs

i-dont-want-forever

swiftyangx12

Agent 14|Yoru|ヨル| 夜

bnhaheadcansandfanfiction

Bnha head canons and fanfiction

bri-in-ur-attic

LONG LIVE ROCK N' ROLL

arriakin