#Dominic Corleone
Text
Did you know that i have your heart in the garden?
Chapter two: can't take my eyes off of you/ ao3
Song: can't take my eyes off you - engelbert humperdinck
Warnings: Violent descriptions and suggestive acts.
Words: 7.6K
dedicated to my beloved @yezzyyae ♡
A few days before his arrival, Michael and Nina face their own forbidden desires. A look at Nina's engagement. And small encounters.
Read masterlist for summary and playlist <3
Don Tommasino’s house remained relatively silent, even with all the soldiers hanging around. What he could always hear was the melody that the little radio, in the kitchen, was playing. Some italian ballads with romantic tones that set the mood for silent afternoons. Sometimes, when he came down unexpectedly, he dared to think that you were there in the kitchen, dancing slowly to the music, feeling the notes in your being.
As every Saturday he had planned an outing to Palermo, in the company of his bodyguards. It wasn’t like they could defend him. The reality was that they served as witnesses and backup for anything that happened in Sicily. He didn’t know much, but they told him things were tense between The Families. New businesses with new faces arrived. Men deported from the United States who managed to establish themselves as new mafiosi. Prostitution, drugs and corruption already invaded Sicily. But these men appeared more aggressive, and that was bad to the Don. Because he was an old–fashioned man, his domain didn’t contemplate things beyond the management of territories and alliances with the wealthiest men in town. His power within those large spaces attracted the attention of the new mafiosi, causing their protection to be weakened.
The Quintana family had control of drug trafficking in Corleone, especially heroin, which is why they had the power to intimidate the new mafiosi. By having a large hectares of crops and a lot of men in production, they dominated that business. Like the new mafiosi, the Quintanas also wanted to own the lands that Don Tommasino managed, as well as his contacts with the elite and politics. Don Tommasino didn’t mix with the new forms of extortion, having the police on his side and Lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta, he was protected from any ambush.
That’s why the war didn’t end. Men died from side to side but no one gave in. Don Tommasino wasn’t going to, much less Guido Quintana. But time has passed and the Dons, even without retiring, have granted opinions from their heirs. Simone supported his father in maintaining the land and promoted new perspectives on the trafficking business. And Leandro, for his part, had an alliance in mind, because, according to him, the De Rosas and the Quintanas could be much stronger if they were united. Of course, that meeting ended in an altercation where Don Tommasino profoundly refused to involve you. Leandro promised that it would be his only attempt to mediate peace, since he didn’t intend to be soft on his enemies. For Don Tommasino that was final, but he didn’t count on Leandro finding you in Paris while you were studying. His plan was almost perfect. Court you, fall in love, get married and inevitably become part of the De Rosas, you being a Quintana. It would be something irreparable for the clan.
Sadly for him, your soul was too indomitable to fall for a man thirsty for your father’s power. You knew it the third or fourth time he spoke to you, but you still couldn’t walk away. Leandro appeared in many places, persuading you with presents, pretty words and smiles. When that didn’t work he was honest with you. He admitted that he would hurt your father, even though he didn't want to because that meant hurting you. For him there were two ways to get what he wanted, and there was a good way and a bad way. You had to decide.
Although you never wanted to get involved in your father’s business, you were aware of it and supportive of his decisions regarding what the family meant. You met politicians, greeted their wives, talked to their daughters while your father made deals in his office. You knew how it worked and your father wouldn’t lie to you if you asked. At the end of the day you understood the value of his work, and you loved him so much that you didn’t have to think twice. Leandro wasn’t a bad man, he didn’t treat you badly, he didn't threaten you directly, and he never tried to do anything to you. For you, he was just asking you to help, and how could you not do it if it meant your father’s safety.
When your brothers found out they swore death to the Quintanas. Even Guido didn’t agree to form such a bond. But you got stubborn. Leandro was capable of murdering your entire family in order to ascend and dominate all of Corleone. He was hungry for power and your family was just an obstacle that, for better or worse, he had to deal with. The Quintanas were known for being bloodthirsty and cruel. They had no mercy with women, children or babies. They had killed entire families, including pets. They left no trace of anything after stealing it all.
You took it as a duty. Something you could do and live with. Leandro was attractive and educated. He could be a good man if he put his mind to it. You wouldn’t be the first woman to marry for convenience. And even though your father never wanted that fate for you, it seemed that the world chose to reduce your life like that. It was ultimate. You agreed to get married with the promise that your family would be fine, like a guarantee of the mafia. Leandro didn’t plan to disappoint you, with the commitment to marry you, Don Tommasino granted some land that would only be given with the birth of the firstborn Quintana–De Rosa.
You hadn’t thought about being a mother yet. But you knew that Leandro had it in mind and wanted to get you pregnant as soon as possible. Therefore, your wedding would be in a week. Planned in less than a month. A month that you left college, abandoning your artistic dreams in the name of your family. You could still write and publish, you have been doing it for a while. Also teach literature at a local school. But your great aspirations were already a thing of the past. Travel the world, learn, live your experiences deeply. You planned to be free, with the power that being your father’s daughter gave you. For a moment you seemed to escape the fate of every woman in the Sicilian mafia. But time came to you with the face of a man whom you will have to tolerate your entire life. That’s your destiny.
So Michael was a surprise to you. The obvious attraction was clear, and maybe in another world you would have tried something. But it was impossible, Michael seemed to be an inaccessible man in his own tumult of problems. You had your own. So, no matter how hard it was, avoiding him was the best, because in his presence you seemed to talk more, and flirt, and be who you were before Leandro appeared.
You knew that that Saturday he would go out to Palermo with his guards. That’s why you stayed in the kitchen helping your mother with lunch. He wouldn’t eat at home, preferring to take a couple of sandwiches for the road. As an irony of life, your mother asked you to debone the chickens that he would take. So now, with the ballad playing in the background, you shook your hips gently while you sank your fingers into the oily flesh. Behind you your mother was talking about the decorations that would arrive tomorrow. But you couldn’t pay attention, because you heard those footsteps approaching.
At the entrance to the kitchen he appears with his hair combed carelessly, wearing all dark, pants and dress shirt under a large coat, and he stands there with his gloved hands crossed, waiting to be noticed.
He’s behind you, you know it by the tingle that runs down your spine, it feels warm like drinking coffee on a cold day. His perfume and the smell of soap, that only visitors use, impregnated your senses with his essence, a delight that you took with your eyes closed.
“Good morning, Michele. Ready to go, I see” Your mother said cheerfully.
You looked over your shoulder as he approached and leaned on the counter. For a second he looked at you in the eyes, but you turned around avoiding him.
“Buongiorno Signora De Rosa… Buongiorno Nina (Good morning Mrs. De Rosa… Good morning Nina)” The way he curled his tongue saying your name almost gave you a shiver, so slow it seemed like he was savoring naming you.
“Nina, saluta il ragazzo… Dio, questa ragazza è tra le nuvole (Nina, greet the boy… God, this girl is in the clouds)” You turned around looking briefly at your mother. You blushed a little at the embarrassment you felt, if Michael noticed it he made no attempt to show it.
“Buongiorno Michele, sarai a Palermo tutto il pomeriggio? (Good morning Michael, will you be in Palermo all afternoon?)” You asked, going to wash your hands from the chicken grease.
You were wearing a long skirt that swayed with every step you took. Michael couldn’t help but look at your hips, as the fabric hugged your curves for a few precious seconds before releasing them.
“Starò lì per qualche ora… (I’ll be there for a couple of hours)” He answered.
You turned and took the plate with the chicken to the counter. Your mother had already cut the bread, so your job was to fill it and wrap it. Under his watchful gaze, you began to prepare his food.
“Well… Nina has to try on her dress. Oh! Michele, is very very pretty” Your mother said, making gestures in the air, imitating the fabric falling from the veil.
“Oh really? When is the wedding?” His eyes seemed to pierce your being. You didn’t know what he was thinking, but you wondered why he looked at you that way.
“Next Saturday! Oh mi Dio! sarà bello bello (Oh my God! It will be beautiful beautiful)” Your mother exclaimed enthusiastically “You are gonna be there, don’t you Michele?”.
“I don’t think so. I’m not invited” His passive tone of voice failed to demonstrate the clear intention of questioning you. For your part, you could only look at him with a raised eyebrow, not quite understanding what he wanted from you.
“Oh but of course you are invited! It’s a big celebration”.
“Mama, I don’t think is a good idea” You interrupted “Michele needs to go unnoticed. Leandro’s entire family and ours will be hanging around the house. I don’t think it will be good for him… for you” You finished saying with your eyes fixed on him.
He just shrugged his shoulders and stood up, no longer leaning on the counter in front of you. You were finishing making the sandwiches when he stole a piece of chicken from you and put it in his mouth. You don’t know exactly what it was, but his intense gaze, the way he left his fingers suspended against his lips and the soft way he chewed enthralled you. The last thing was his tongue passing over his lips, tasting the tips of his fingers. It was in the almost smile that he formed, the small vestige of what he noticed that provoked you. You couldn’t understand what happened until your mother held you by the shoulders.
“It’s ready, Nina. Can you go out and call your brother?” Your mother’s request brought you out of trance. You didn’t look at him again, you didn’t want to know what face he had.
Michael watched you leave. He followed you with his eyes until he stopped in your absence. Even so the kitchen kept your perfume, he would recognize it anywhere after carrying it in his pocket for days. Your handkerchief folded in the left pocket of his coat, just above his chest. If he concentrated he could feel the folds and the light weight pressing against him. He thought if maybe he would be able to imagine your hand in the place of that handkerchief.
You, leaning on the door frame, gestured for Calogero to come in. That day only your brother and mother were in the house for lunchtime. Your father had to make many agreements with the Quintanas. Agreements in which you didn’t actively participate, at the request of your fiancé. Your father promised you that everything was going well, that’s why you didn’t worry when you knew that he was sharing with people that, for a long time, he called enemies.
Calogero told you he would be in in a second, so you decided to come back to the kitchen. Thinking about seeing Michael caused a strange feeling, a childish emotion that exploded in your chest with the desire to giggle for nothing. It made you want to run or jump in order to expend this ball of excitement that made no sense to you. It was dangerous, a break in your perfectly planned scheme that involved no one but Leandro. A part of you wants to feel the same emotions for your fiancé, it would be much easier that way. But there were so many differences, and you didn’t even understand where that attraction, that seemed to push you towards him, came from.
You thought about going to your room. Pretending that you had to do something. To wait for him to leave so you could walk freely around your house. You didn’t even think that he was looking for you, that he was stealthily watching you from behind, with your handkerchief pressed to his nose. He admired your silhouette still near the half-open door. The cold made your skin crawl, and for a second you felt a tug in your stomach that served as a warning, as if you were an animal, you felt the presence on your back, and you turned around so quickly that you hit his hand, the one holding the handkerchief, throwing it down.
“Oh! Che spavento (Oh! What a scare)... I’m so sorry Michele, I didn’t see you” You made to bend down to pick it up but he stopped you.
“Don’t worry, it was my fault” He said as he put one of his knees on the ground to pick it up. His head stayed close to your hip and as he looked up you admired his bruised face in the pale winter light.
“You should let a doctor look at that injury” You didn’t control yourself. You raised your hand to gently run your fingertips over his jaw. You felt his rough skin against yours, a warmth that you didn’t expect to receive.
Michael avoided closing his eyes when he felt you caress him. He slowly took your wrist and moved it away from his face. He rose until he was standing, still holding you. When he noticed this he let go, and tried not to focus on the warmth he still felt from having touched you.
“Don’t worry” He said without adding more.
You watched him put your handkerchief in his pocket and then adjust his coat. With a paper bag with his food ready, he was going to ask you to move out the door. At that moment Calogero entered.
“Buon pomeriggio Michele, goditi Palermo! (Good afternoon Michael, enjoy Palermo!)” He said as he grabbed you by the shoulders, almost carrying you along with him “Ho fame, sorella, mangiamo! (I'm hungry, sister, let’s eat!)” He almost didn’t wait for you to go to the dining room.
Behind you Michael had already left and was talking to Calo and Fabrizio. Without looking at him again, you followed your brother. Michael briefly watched you leave. He asked one of his guards to close the door and began walking, thinking about the fresh air he would have in Palermo.
**
“Raccontaci qualcosa di New York (Tell us something about New York)” Said Fabrizio while eating.
The three men were sitting on the dry grass. That particular day it wasn’t so cold and the humidity had decreased.
“Sai che sono di New York? (How do you know I’m from New York?)” asked Michael.
“Noi ascoltiamo. Qualcuno ci ha detto che eri importante – a big-a shot (We heard. Somebody told us you were real important)” responded Fabrizio. Calo, next to him, nodded.
“I’m the son of a big shot” That made both men curious.
“L’America è ricca come dicono? (Is America as rich as they say?)” Fabrizio asked again, Michael noticed his interest in his country. Calo rolled his eyes and sighed.
“Smettila di seccarmi con queste cose sull’America rica!! (Stop bothering me with this rich America stuff!!)” Fabrizio just laughed while Calo grunted in boredom.
“Hey, take me to the America! If you need a good lupara in America” Fabrizio says while palming his gun “Take me, I’ll be the best man you can get!” He ends by saying with genuine enthusiasm.
“I’ll think about it” Michael said, looking around. Fabrizio applauded at his response “What’s going on there?”.
In the distance, in a small straw house, an altercation was taking place between four men. One of them, an old man, was on his knees praying with his palms together. Michael could see the difference between them, the standing men carried rifles similar to those of Fabrizio and Calo, they were talking to each other stiffly while they pointed at the house and the old man. Suddenly one of them kicks the man in the chin making him scream in pain. Another of the men points the gun and shoots into the man’s back, causing the other two to fire a burst of bullets at high speed.
“Merda! Andiamo! Andiamo! (Shit! Let’s go! Let’s go!)” Fabrizio exclaimed, taking his lupara and sliding through the grass until he reached the street. Michael and Calo followed him.
“What’s happening?” Michael asked somewhat crouched, the three of them moved downwards.
“A punizione” Calo said.
When they were further away they stopped. Michael looked back waiting for one of the men to appear but there was no one.
“What’s a punizione?” Michael asked.
“Some men rob these shacks that serve as shelter for soldiers… The owners, the clan, punish with death” Fabrizio said, passing his hand over his forehead, he looked nervous.
“That old man robbed that house?” He asked incredulously.
“Probably not. But they surely saw him nearby and he didn’t have backup to defend him” Michael looked at him intently, as if he didn’t fully understand what he was saying “Look, there are rules here that you don’t know. That’s why we walk with you wherever. Anyone could accuse you of something and kill you instantly”.
“Morto morto (Dead dead)” Calo whispered, Michael ignored him.
“Don’t worry. You just have to go unnoticed. Do not go to places with many people, especially with people from other clans” Fabrizio warned.
“The Quintana family will come to the wedding” Calo mentioned, Fabrizio nodded to it.
“Devi essere atento… Careful (You have to be careful)” Michael nodded, starting to talk down the hill “A wedding!” Fabrizio suddenly exclaimed.
“Un matrimonio (A wedding)” Calo followed.
“Quella bella donna si sposa, è così carina (That pretty woman is getting married, so pretty)” Fabrizio said, bringing his hands to his chest.
“Pretty pretty” Calo said.
“Cosa darei per una donna così. È instruita… e ha un corpo! (What would I give for a woman like that. She is educated… and has a body!” He made the faint of your hips with his hands and grunted in ecstasy.
“Un bel corpo, ben formato (A good body, well formed)” Continued Calo.
Michael remained silent.
“What a pity that she’s going to marry a Quintana” Fabrizio proclaimed sadly.
“Pensa che Nina lo guarderebbe! (He thinks Nina would look at him!)” Calo said mockingly. He elbowed Michael to make him laugh.
“Why it’s a shame that she marries Quintana?”.
“Why?! That man is the devil” Fabrizio exclaimed, Calo next to him nodded “L’hai visto con il vecchio? (Did you see that with the old man?)” Michael nodded “Ha fatto lo stesso con un bambino (Did the same with a kid)”.
“Lo sapevano tutti, aveva lasciato il corpo per strada (Everyone knew, he left the body in the street)” Said Calo.
“And she knows that?” Michael couldn’t imagine that, knowing that information, you would marry him.
“No no, that girl doesn’t know anything” Fabrizio hit his forehead in a mocking gesture “According to what they say, she returned from Paris with the man on her arm”.
“The Don wasn’t happy, no no” Calo added.
“True! But the wedding will happen anyway, it’s a surprise”.
“Why?�� Michael asked again.
“Guardalo, che curiosità (Look at him, so curious)” Calo giggled, Michael ignored him.
“Quintana e De Rosa are enemies” Fabrizio commented, approaching a tree to rest “They have fought over Corleone for years. Don Guido hates Don Tommasino. Some say they have a personal conflict” Calo nodded at that and pointed to Fabrizio.
“They say Don Tommasino had an affair with Don Guido’s wife” Fabrizio laughed.
“No no, that isn’t true. But whatever, they hate each other, so they never agreed on anything. So, when his daughter appeared with Leandro Quintana proclaiming they are going to marry everyone was shocked”.
“Shocked!” Calo repeated.
“And no one knows how that happened?” Michael asked. Calo looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
“So curious for girl Nina, eh?” Michael rolled his eyes and sat down.
“I just have questions… That guy, Leandro, is he really bad?” Fabrizio sighed and adjusted his lupara.
“Yes, he first killed when he was twelve years old. He killed his dog because it barked so loud. We all knew he hated the De Rosa family, he wanted to have it all in Corleone. Maybe he loves her, we don’t know, but that man is crazy” Fabrizio said.
They were silent for a moment, which Michael appreciated because his mind was full of you. Leandro didn’t seem like a particularly aggressive man when he met him. He remembers the handshake, the cordial smile and the soft kiss he left on your cheek, which continues to surprise him. For a Sicilian he was quite daring with his fiancee. But what he still keeps in his mind was your downcast gaze and the lack of reciprocity with him. He knew there were parts he still didn’t understand, but you seemed to be indecipherable even in your transparency.
He wanted to know why you looked at him that way. Why did he feel that you asked something from him every time he saw those beautiful eyes. He would give you whatever you wanted if his soul was weak, but he knows his limits. And even though his desires went beyond being nice to you, he couldn’t allow himself to be a man to you. If Leandro really was who they said he was, it was better for Michael to stay aside and just have the joy of looking at you for these months that he had left in Sicily.
**
The day seemed calm. After lunch the only thing left to do was do nothing, since you didn’t have things scheduled. The wedding was approaching and the preparations were ready, the only thing left to do was say “I do” and be a Quintana. It still seems like a dream when you think about it. Marrying Leandro and starting a family. He had already confessed to you that he wanted at least five children, something that left you silent, causing him to laugh. In your mind there was barely the possibility of having one, you didn’t want to think beyond that, but five babies, you were already tired of just imagining it. Even so you accepted, the only thing you asked him was that you wouldn’t be involved in his business.
For your father the business was a man’s job, which didn’t involve women or children. Being a little soft to you, he let you know a few things when you were curious. But it was a curiosity fueled by concern. Seeing your father tired or angry made you alert and controlling, you wanted to know what was happening and what to do. There was very little you could do, but you could try to understand, give him an ear for his angry babbling, be someone he can trust.
You were spoiled, you had always been a daddy’s girl, no one could blame you if he was around and your brothers were the same. But that would end, you knew it when you saw your father’s disappointed eyes. Being Leandro’s wife would distance you from him, it would put you in a position in which he couldn’t intervene. His sadness was so big that he cried when he found out that you were getting married, that even with his greatest efforts he could not keep you away from danger. Leandro promised to never hurt you and, although it was difficult for him to admit it, he actually believed him. But that wasn’t the problem, it was what that marriage meant. A contract between families that would make them partners for life, unbreakable the moment the heir is born. What will happen when Leandro wants his son to be the Don of both families? Death, death between cousins and brothers like the old royalty.
Protecting the family condemned it in the future. But you only thought about the present, that your father’s health was becoming more and more compromised, that Simone has not yet married or formed his own life to take on a power. If you could guarantee that Leandro wouldn’t murder anyone and would be prudent in his decisions with your family, then there was nothing to fear and nothing else mattered.
Now, sitting against the trunk of your favorite tree, you were reading Felicia Hemans.
“Lonely she stood:–in her mournful eyes // Lay the clear midnight of southern skies, //And the drooping fringe of their lashes low, //Half veil'd a depth of unfathom'd wo. //Stately she stood–tho' her fragile frame //Seem'd struck with the blight of some inward flame, //And her proud pale brow had a shade of scorn, //Under the waves of her dark hair worn” You murmured following a beaten rhythm.
“... She had been torn from her home away, // With her long locks crown'd for her bridal day, // And brought to die of the burning dreams //That haunt the exile by foreign streams.” You stopped and caressed the pages of the book. The Sicilian captive, how ironic, you thought as you sighed.
You closed the book and stretched out on the grass, you spread your legs letting your skirt rise slightly, you felt the strands of grass touch your shins and you giggled involuntarily at the tickling.
You felt suddenly liberated, with the clear sky above you like a light blanket. The time seemed eternal. You were in a pause that calmed your soul until it left you drowsy. You almost closed your eyes, but the pale blue was too beautiful to ignore it. You wanted to paint the sky. You raised your hands and moved your fingers in the air, simulating invented faces that little by little coincided with already known lines. Round and big eyes with a roman nose that fell at its tip to the cupid’s bow, there its fleshy shape delighted you.
What greater beauty was that hidden among forbidden pleasures?
Michael seemed to completely invade you without doing anything at all. He had bewitched you and now you swarmed to desire him and ignore him. Why wasn’t he the one who found you in Paris? You could imagine him with his clean and smiling face, being just a college student. Has he ever been like that? Free, as you once were? He was a man of war, he was a man of the mafia, but would he be a free man? Could he be the one you would draw in your dreams? Your eternal dreams where life didn’t imprison you in this reality. You dared to think that in another world it would be different. But what would you know? You didn’t even know if he left any woman in New York, if so you would have the excuse to not fantasize about him anymore, he would be a forbidden man, as forbidden as you were.
Life hasn’t smiled on you for a few months now, and now you only have to wait for what destiny has in store for you, because there was not much else to do. You deeply believed that Michael’s arrival could mean something. Your spiritual impulse wanted you to believe that you saw signs, but you couldn’t fall for those things. You were already sunk to believe that there was an escape in the form of a beautiful man.
Now a little annoyed with yourself, you got up to go home, picked up the book in a huff and adjusted your skirt. Your hair retained traces of grass and leaves, tangled in a bun at the nape of your neck, with thin hairs contouring your face.
Without wanting to be in your own body, you left your place to cross the stream, with stones placed by yourself, you crossed your improvised bridge and walked to the fence. Your used and folded book dangled from your hand as you climbed and threw yourself to the other side. You landed on your feet. When you saw that none of your father’s men paid attention to you, you walked to the back entrance.
When you entered you suddenly ran into Michael. He was wearing a simple dress shirt with his black pants and suspenders. He quickly noticed your disheveled appearance and, without showing it, he found himself shocked when he felt the pressure of your body with his.
You pulled away quickly, your red cheeks, whether from how annoyed you were or how embarrassed you felt, gave you an adorable touch that almost made him smile. He could feel his own warmth on his face, the blood pumping rapidly through his veins.
“I’m sorry” You spoke quietly, not looking him in the eyes because you knew you couldn’t escape his gaze.
“Hi Nina, Where were you?” Michael asked as he removed a leaf from your hair, surprised you looked at him.
“Mmm I was in my place, reading” You showed him your book which he took while looking at the cover.
“Who is she?” He pointed his thumb at the face of Felicia Hemans.
“Felicia Hemans, she was a great poet, one of the most read in the english language” Michael still held the book, his long fingers monopolizing the cover, leaving your fingers with almost no space.
“What’s your favorite?” You looked at him a little confused, Michael noticed the tilt of your head and your inquisitive look “Poem, your favorite poem”.
“Oh! The Sicilian captive, that’s my favorite one” He raised his eyebrows a little, almost imperceptible, but you noticed it “A woman who sings about her homeland and how she must die far from it”.
“That’s sad, why do you like that?” Michael didn’t let go of the book, instead he changed the position of his wrist making your fingers brush against the back of his hand.
“It’s beautiful, her pained song due to the abandonment of Sicily, the love for her home makes the poem fall into a wonderful melancholy. The feeling of distance is necessary when you aren’t where you belong” Your words pierced him in the utmost sincerity. His eyes with a softer touch, almost rounded on the edge of a tenderness, gave you a new facet of him.
“Can I borrow it?” You looked at him delighted and nodded effusively. You dropped the book, losing his touch, but quickly took his hands with enthusiasm.
“Yes, yes, you can read it in its entirety and then we can comment on it!”.
Since you left college you haven't shared your readings with anyone. There wasn't any interest in your family, and only Dr. Taza read but you didn’t see him enough to talk as you would like. That Michael wanted to read one of your favorite poems took away any trace of annoyance, and you even forgot that you wanted to get away from him as much as possible. Now you just wanted to share this with him.
“I’m not a skilled reader, don’t expect much from me” You shook your head as you let go.
Michael could feel the waning touch of your hands against his, he wanted to squeeze them in order to keep your warmth.
“Read it. I have more books in my library, maybe I can lend you others later, so you don’t get bored while being here” Michael nodded in agreement.
You wanted to go further into the house, to show him some of the things you had. You were enthralled by the idea of showing him one of your passions. He followed you from behind, watching as your walk moved your disordered clothes in a fluttering swat that he tried to ignore.
“Do you know any writers? Anyone you would like to read? I have many americans in my books” You didn’t notice his gaze on you, so focused on showing him your great collection.
“Poe, I think, I read him in school” Michael said.
You walked down the right hallway opening a door where a large library was located. Michael admired the large shelves and long sofas that were in the center. You approached a corner, put your index finger on the spine of the books and began to read the titles, looking for a specific one. You moved your head from side to side following the letters with your back leaning forward.
Michael could observe the depth of your hips. Round, somewhat pompous, with a softness that, he imagined, must be pleasurable. Your innocently suggestive posture provoked him enough to feel the tension of his body under the clothes. For being in winter his insides felt genuinely hot, almost feverish. He attributed it to being inside the house where the temperature remained warm. Even so, his tense neck had the impulse to turn to continue looking at the room. But impossibly enthralled, your body attracted him enough to surpass his thoughts. For no reason, he compared that curve with his well-known Kay, and for a moment he urgently needed to drink water.
“Here it is!” You said, taking one of the books. You turned around and noticed his stare, a little flustered, you showed him the book “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams” You recited.
“Annabel Lee” Michael responded with the title of the poem, he took the book in his hands. It had a dark and thick spine, it looked old “Is it inherited?”.
“Yes! It was my grandfather’s. Most of these books belong to the family” You couldn’t help but keep talking “I used to spend a lot of time here when I was a kid. My brothers called me a mouse for hiding and hunched over in this corner” You pointed to your favorite spot, a little armchair.
“I was like that too. Quieter than my brothers” You felt a little tingle knowing that you shared something.
“How many brothers do you have?” You asked, sitting down. Michael sat down too, not too close to you, but close enough to feel his weight on the couch.
“Three and a sister” You looked at him attentively, something he took to continue talking “She… She got married recently”.
“How was it? I guess american weddings are different” Michael shook his head slowly, leaning on his side with his leg bent over the cushion and his arm dangling from the backrest. His entire posture directed at you.
“Most of them were italian. I think all of them, except my companion” That caught your attention. Resting your elbow on the backrest and turning to look at him completely. Both of you looked comfortable on the couch.
“Companion? Your girlfriend?” You asked.
“You could call her that” His somewhat evasive tone made you frown.
“Something happened?” That brought out another shine in his eyes.
“No, nothing happened”.
“And how did she take it?” Michael gestured for you to explain “The fact that you are here, without knowing when you will return”.
“She understands” His passivity made you want to believe him.
“Will you marry her?” That question took him by surprise.
“I don’t know, maybe I should” Even though you asked, you didn’t like his answer and that made you a hypocrite, you knew it.
“Would you do an american wedding? Considering that she is one”.
“No, I don’t think so. Maybe at another time in my life I would have said yes, but I have the need to follow my… Desires” His intense stare made you blush slightly.
“And what are those desires?” You swallowed, you felt nervous even though you didn’t understand why.
“You would like to know”.
Before you could answer, a knock on the side of the door frame announced your mother at the entrance to the library. She looked at you carefully for a second, and then sighed.
“I have dinner ready. Michele, my husband wants to see you” At this Michael nodded and stood up. He didn’t look at you again before disappearing through the door. Your mother looked at you and crossed her arms.
“Cosa fai? Non puoi restare da solo con Michele. Leandro si arrabbierebbe se lo sapesse (What are you doing? You can’t be alone with Michele like that. Leandro would be angry if he knew)” You stood up and rolled your eyes at your mother.
“Non lo saprà (He won’t know)” In response to her silence you added “Non lo saprebbe, vero? Dato che stavo solo chiacchierando, non è che io sia invisibile (He’s not going to know, right? Because I was just chatting, it’s not like I turned invisible)”.
“Dovresti essere invisibile se sei fidanzata con un uomo del genere (You should be invisible if you’re engaged to a man like that)” Your mom hit your shoulder, you whined a little and rubbed yourself.
“Non pensare cose che non sono, e non dire niente a Leandro, sono affari miei cosa gli succede (Don’t think things that aren’t, and don’t say anything to Leandro, it’s my business what happens with him)” Your mother just looked at you disapprovingly.
“Non fare cosa che non dovresti. Ricorda, buone azioni, buoni risultati (Don’t do things you shouldn’t. Remember, good deeds, good results)” You walked away from your mother to go to the dinner room.
“Non preoccuparti, non farò nulla (Don’t worry, I won’t do anything)”.
**
In Don Tommasino’s office, Armando and Andrea were both sitting while the Don was talking to Michael.
“... It has these beautiful peach trees. I’m sure you would like to see them, I can arrange for you to go next week” Said Don Tommasino while drinking.
“I would like that… Isn’t the wedding next week?” Michael asked, that made Armando look at him.
“Oh! Don’t tell me. Yes, it will be held here at the house. All those Quintanas here as if nothing had happened” His voice showed annoyance, he slammed the glass down on the table and made a gesture at Armando “Where is that bastard?”.
“Leandro? Taking care of a few things, he sent flowers to Nina yesterday” Don Tommasino laughed mockingly, and Andrea smirked knowing that he would say.
“That ugly shit! I saw them last night. They were orange. Damn orange! Doesn’t he know that his fiancee hates orange?” Armando covered his mouth to laugh and gestured to Michael before speaking.
“Nina doesn’t hate orange, he does” He says pointing his chin at his Don “You’re just overprotective of your kid, but remember Nina is old now”.
“No man would keep up with my daughter. There isn’t a man on the face of the earth capable of being equal to her” He suddenly looked at Michael “Your father must have felt the same about your sister”.
“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there when the whole engagement happened”.
“You will understand when you have a daughter, I swear” Michael nodded at the glass that Armando offered him.
“If you don’t mind me asking. What’s the problem with Leandro?” That prompted Don Tommasino to sigh deeply as he passed his hand over his forehead.
“The Quintanas have been a problem for years, ever since they wanted to dominate Corleone, fleeing from Giuliano like rats. At first I didn’t think it would be a problem, we don’t have the same businesses. But they want to have things that I have and that has caused many deaths. Now, Leandro is another problem, a much more dangerous one now that my daughter is marrying him” Michael put the glass on the table and leaned back in the chair.
“Why is she marrying him, then?” Armando served another glass to Don Tommasino, Andrea remained silent.
“My daughter is a martyr, Michele. She has always been like that, when she was little she cried for killing spiders and when she was an adolescent she dared to challenge me for Calogero. Seek the good for all… And unfortunately Leandro knew what to do. Did you know that I sent her to Paris? to France, so that she could study and become an educated woman. That fucking bastard found her, I don’t know exactly what he said to her, but when she returned I could feel that something had changed. She had that look she’s always had when she does something that will make me angry. She is equally altruistic and stubborn” He sighed again angrily.
“Don’t be so angry, Nina knows what she’s doing even when you don’t believe it” Armando responded, he offered another glass to Michael but he denied.
“I don’t bless that marriage” He grumbled.
“Anyways… Will Michael be able to attend that wedding?” Armando asked.
“I don’t want to lock you, it’s not natural. But a lot of people will be here and I don’t trust those idiots. I could take you to Doctor Taza” Michael thought about it before denying.
“I would like to be here, I have never been to a genuinely italian wedding” He lied “Don’t worry, I’ve introduced myself under a different name and won’t be in the spotlight”.
“Okay… Just be careful, please”.
**
At night Michael seemed to have no rest, he looked at the ceiling without a hint of sleep, even when it was already after one in the morning. He was used to sleeping early, but since he arrived in Sicily he only seemed to have insomnia. Among the recurring images in his head he couldn’t stop thinking about you. Even with all the worries locked in the back of his mind, the first thing that came up was the question of what to do. What to do with this interest that seemed to grow every time he saw you. He didn’t know what caused him to desire to possess you.
If he was honest with himself the last thing that mattered to him was your engagement, even though he refused the idea because your fiancé, soon to be husband, was a man whom he shouldn’t confront, not while being hidden under the protection of Don Tommasino. It was too risky to even think about you, and he didn’t understand why with every second that passed he felt like he was infatuated with you.
He remembered the afternoon where he dared to look at your body, and imagined beyond what was allowed. He wanted to know if your skin had the same tone on the curve of your thighs, the curiosity of feeling the soft texture under his fingers, caressing the inside with the slowness of a tickle. Would you be ticklish? Maybe you would giggle amidst the moans that he would gladly listen to. His imagination flew to what you would be like then, if your face would light up with the lust of his touch, if your eyes would mist through those long lashes. He could imagine your long neck stretched out, perfect for him to bite and mark, for your husband to see and know that there was a man pleasuring you, that that man was Michael.
He doesn’t remember if a bold idea had ever excited him so much. Something forbidden. Maybe that made his interest rise, the fact that you were someone outside his limits. And wouldn’t you know it, Michael has been discreet as he should be, but what would happen if he let you know? If perhaps you would dare to be a disloyal woman, even if it means danger. For a second he allowed himself to be selfish, forgetting anything, he just thought that in that same library, in that same couch, you would be there for him, as he wanted and he would do whatever thing he imagined. Curious to know what you would be like blows his mind in a multitude of scenarios. You bent over, stretched out and ready for anything.
In his ecstasy the exhaustion came in a sudden explosion. His dry and surprising orgasm made him gasp in surprise. He lifted his sheets and looked down with his eyebrows furrowed. Like a fucking teenager, he couldn’t remember the last time his imagination was real enough to provoke him. Knowing that he was already a lost cause, he got up to go to the bathroom. The last thing on his mind was berating himself for having crossed a line that would now lead to more.
CHAPTER THREE
#the godfather#al pacino#michael corleone#michael corleone x oc#michael corleone au#michael corleone x reader#the godfather au#michael corleone fanfic#fanfic#ao3#chicoca
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would u care to rank some of Al Pacino’s characters based on how submissive they would be in bed and how often you think they’d do it?? it would be funny LMAOOO
Why the hell not?! 😂🤭 From Bobby Axel to Vincent Hanna, this is my list of submissiveness. 😏
Number 1... 💀❤️ Sonny Wortzig is definitely the most submissive. That's not a bad thing whatsoever. 😂 But I feel like he would do it all the time, no problem!!
2. Francis Lionel Delbuchi. 👀💓 He's actually my beloved and I can definitely see him being submissive in bed to tease and please his partner soooo... Mhmm. 🥰 And we love that!
3. Steve Burns. Enough said. 😂🤣 I mean I think a remember in scene in the film where he was just laying there where homegirl was going to town on him, lower and lower... 😶😳 He definitely enjoys it and would do it as often as his partner would like!
4. Ivan Travalian. 🤭 The DILF of all DILFs, everybody's baby daddy. 🤣 More than half of the time I can definitely see him being submissive in bed!
5. Arthur Kirkland. 😏 He won't submit in the courts but he'll definitely submit to you in bed so as long as you ask!
6. Bobby Deerfield! 🤪 I definitely see him as more of the loving, teasing and pleasing kind of man. I think it's all about submissiveness automatically until things are switched up. Get on top of that man! 🥵
7. Bobby Axel. 😌 Now I feel like Bobby would only be submissive here and there, enjoying a good ride if you know what I mean... 🥴
8. Carlito Brigante. 🥴 I see him as the last-ish of Al's characters who would be like to be submissive maybe at least half of the time. I feel like he honestly doesn't care, because he's having good sex anyway and it's just hot.
9. Frank Serpico. 👀 I don't really see him as very submissive at all in bed, but he seems like he would every now and then but not too often!
10. Tony Montana!! 🥵 I definitely feel like he would love for his gal to put on a good show and submit to her teasing and pleasing but definitely just to a point where he then takes control after all that arousal and sexual tension is built up lmao.
11. Vincent Hanna. 🤭 I don't even think the poor man has time to be submissive because his ass is always at work. Maybe very rarely, here and there but not too much at all. I see him as dominant in bed all year round.
12. Last but not least, the LEAST submissive man of all time in my list... The Michael Corleone. 💀💀 The word "submissive" doesn't exist to this man, let alone in bed lmfao. Hell no, it's not his thing. The Don is dominant and in power. It'll be a cold day in hell when Michael's submissive in bed. 😭
That's it, that's my list!! 😂😂 Definitely how I see it if I had to rank them all in order!
#al pacino#bobby axel#michael corleone#frank serpico#sonny wortzig#bobby deerfield#arthur kirkland#ivan travalian#tony montana#steve burns#vincent hanna#carlito brigante#francis lionel delbuchi
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Bruised Fruit Chapter 8 (Michael Corleone x OC)
Summary: The sound of no longer distant wedding bells loom in the air as the reality of Gloria's new life with Michael closes in on her.
Note: Pre-Cana is a retreat or series of courses that couples getting married in the Catholic Church attend (it varies by parish or diocese). It’s basically pre-marriage counseling from a Catholic perspective. Also, the novel doesn’t specify which battle Michael was wounded in, just that Life magazine ran the article on him at some point in 1944 and he was discharged in early 1945 after Vito bribed a military doctor to say Michael was too badly wounded for him to return to combat. With this in mind, I’m going with Peleliu, which would make the most sense considering the vague canon timeline and its high wounded and casualty rates.
Warnings: Descriptions of pregnancy symptoms, mainly morning sickness.
Chapter 7 | AO3 Link | Masterlist
Do not interact if you're under 18, terf or radfem, or post thinspo/ED content. I will block you.
The moka pot on the stovetop hissed at Gloria while she was looking at the showtimes for Rio Bravo listed in that morning’s issue of Newsday. Grabbing a pen, she circled a few evening showings to present to Michael. If they got out of Pre-Cana early enough, they could catch a screening of it on the way to pick up the kids from her parents’ house.
Her elbow knocked against the espresso glasses she’d set out on the counter as she moved the moka pot off of the flame and onto a free burner. One of them nearly rolled onto the floor, but she managed to catch it just in time.
The espresso glasses were a brand new crystal set she’d bought at Lord & Taylor not long after they’d moved into the Long Beach house, making the drive upshore to Manhasset with Sandra. They were technically shot glasses, but the shop assistant in the housewares department enthusiastically assured her the glasses could withstand hotter temperatures. So far, they’d held up to the three or four small pots of espresso being made in the Corleone household each day.
Michael always drank some in the morning and then in the afternoons, usually an hour or two after lunch. Al took his with sambuca, as did Connie. Sandra drank hers black and piping hot, and Tom sometimes drank his cortado, though he didn’t drink espresso after 11am, claiming the caffeine would keep him up all night otherwise. Ciro drank his with lemon, and Dominic, Al’s protegee and another newer face around the house, would drink his straight, unless Al was around, and he’d add sambuca, too. Anthony had even started drinking espresso, acquiring a taste for it at her parents’ house and shocking her and Michael one morning when he asked for some.
Making espresso for everyone was one of the few ways Gloria was actually helpful in the kitchen, otherwise leaving the cooking to one of the Corleones or their maid, Margaret. The older woman had patiently taught Gloria how to cook Michael’s preferred breakfast of poached eggs and toast so she could make it when Margaret was off on the weekends.
Al Neri had let himself in, quietly, as he normally did, though his near silent arrival didn’t startle Gloria anymore.
“Morning, Al. Michael hasn’t come down yet. Espresso’s fresh, though. Help yourself.”
Al nodded. “Thanks, Gloria.”
“Have you eaten? I’m gonna make eggs when Michael comes down, and I think we have some leftovers from last night in the fridge.”
She’d already had a plate of cold ziti for breakfast herself.
Gloria couldn’t concentrate on cooking for long enough to get any good at it, finding each step of the process mind-numbingly boring and would get distracted if she felt like something was taking too long to chop or boil or whatever she was supposed to do with the ingredients. One of the benefits of working with the casino’s restaurant in Vegas was getting free meals from the kitchen, usually extra food or untouched meals the picky patrons had sent back. Except to make coffee or heat up leftovers from work, she rarely ventured into her kitchen when living on her own.
Espresso took only a few minutes to brew, though, and she could multitask while keeping an eye on the pot.
He shook his head. “I got a sandwich from that deli by my place on the way here.”
Al had bought a house in Lynbrook with the move, only a twenty minute drive from them, less if traffic wasn’t too bad. His place turned out to be about ten minutes from her parents’ house in Rosedale, which made Michael feel better about letting the kids spend the night there sometimes. Gloria liked Long Beach, though, especially since summer was rapidly approaching and some of the seasonal places were starting to open up.
“Do you go to the movies?” she asked, eyes flicking back to the showtimes in the paper on the counter.
“Not in a long time,” he said.
“I was thinking of asking Michael to take me.”
“Ask me to take you where?” Michael asked, walking into the kitchen and giving Gloria a kiss on the cheek. “Morning, Al.”
“To the movies. We should go see Rio Bravo.”
“Isn’t that a Western? You don’t like Westerns.”
“I like Ricky Nelson,” she said. “We haven’t been to the movies since we saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last year.”
He conceded more easily than she expected. “Alright, darling. How about after Pre-Cana? We can get dinner and then go to the movies since your parents are watching the kids today.”
“Great! Oh, let me get your breakfast ready. Are you sure you’re not hungry, Al?” she asked.
He shook his head, opting for his espresso.
Michael poured himself some, and Gloria got to work on making his breakfast. The toast was easy enough, but she always felt like she could do a little better on the poached eggs. Though if Michael thought so, he never said anything to her.
Gloria wasn’t sure what to expect from Pre-Cana. Michael hadn’t taken it with Kay since they didn’t have a Catholic wedding, and the concept was brand new when Jackie and Vivian had gotten married. The church secretary at St. Catherine’s said it wasn’t exactly a requirement, but strongly encouraged, which meant that if they wanted to keep their late August wedding date, they better go.
As soon as she scooped the poached eggs from the boiling water, the scent hit her nose in an unfamiliar, nauseating way, and she clumsily dropped the egg on top of the slice of toast, gagging as she did so.
Michael and Al shared a perplexed look as Gloria ran past them into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind her.
She could hardly look at the contents of the toilet, promptly flushing it. A knock at the door startled her, though she should have expected Michael to check on her when she made such a scene.
“Gloria? Are you alright?”
“Yeah I—just give me a minute.” She clumsily grabbed a bottle of mouthwash beneath the sink, filling her mouth with the burning mint taste and spitting it out into the sink. She washed her hands, accidentally splashing the mirror with water when Michael abruptly opened the bathroom door.
“What made you sick?” he asked, concern evident in his features as he took in the burst blood vessels in her face, leaving the skin splotchy and her usual eyebags even darker.
“Maybe someone left the milk out too long,” she said, avoiding his gaze as she dried her hands. “I put it in my coffee earlier, and it smelled a little weird.”
Michael was silent, staring at her for a moment before seemingly accepting her explanation. “Should I call the parish and ask them to reschedule our Pre-Cana?”
She shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I’m just gonna sit outside. Get some air.” Because the mere thought of being in the room as those fucking eggs nearly made her gag again.
She knew Michael was watching her from the window as she made her way to one of the patio chairs next to the vegetable garden. It had been his late father’s hobby in his retirement. Everyone who lived there since had kept it up in one way or another, all friends of the family, Michael had told her. As the house had never gone to strangers, they tended to the garden in Vito’s honor. Tom’s wife Theresa usually busied herself with it. Gloria helped once in a while, though she could tell Theresa didn’t care much for her and only made polite conversation whenever she was around. Perhaps Gloria’s presence served as a reminder of her husband’s infidelity with her own sister-in-law, unless Theresa really didn’t know, and disliked Gloria on the principle of her having been Michael’s mistress. Regardless, Gloria certainly wasn’t one to snitch on such a situation, and she had no qualms about keeping whatever secrets she needed to from whichever Corleone she needed to.
Gloria kept secrets from Michael even after he told her about Apollonia. Hers was about his other ex-wife, the one who he probably wished were dead. Instead, Kay was back in New England, just outside of Hartford, to be exact. Gloria had gotten the address from Connie, who’d been keeping in touch with her former sister-in-law. Using her parents’ house as the return address, Gloria had sent Kay the colorful crafts Anthony and Mary had made in school for Mother’s Day earlier that month.
Trying to hide an almost certain pregnancy from him was becoming a near impossible task. She looked at the tomatoes growing in their vines, green in the late spring and soon to be ripe and red in the coming weeks. Michael would be glad she was pregnant, she had no doubt about that. It was exactly what he wanted, and just what she dreaded.
She brought her fingers to her temples in an attempt to massage out the dull headache that emerged. The screen door opened, and she didn’t bother to see who’d come outside. Michael stood next to her, his shadow shielding her from the sunlight that exacerbated her headache.
He handed her a glass of water. “Your head must be killing you.”
Gloria downed the water, cool droplets spilling from the corners of her mouth but paying it to mind. She set the glass down, wiping her face with the back of her hand, acutely aware of the way Michael was staring at her, deep in thought as he took in the state of her again.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I called the parish anyway, the secretary said there’s one we can go to next weekend. Think you’re up for a movie?” he asked.
She smiled. “I think I can manage that.”
“I checked the paper, we can go to the screening at two, get an early dinner, and then go to your parents’.”
“Alright, I’m gonna take a nap, then. Wake me by one if I’m not up?”
He nodded, taking her hand and kissing the top of it. “Get some rest, darling.”
The first thing Gloria did when she got to the master suite was brush her teeth, avoiding her reflection. How long would it be before she began losing teeth? She knew plenty of women who’d experienced that or hair loss or brittle bones, all a result of the baby leeching nutrients from its host.
When she got into bed, she buried her face in her pillow and screamed. So much had changed already, and the moment Michael caught wind she was pregnant, her life as she knew it would be his. There was no more hiding it, though, no possible way when there were eyes on her at all times. Every one of her soon-to-be in-laws were undyingly loyal to him in addition to the men he had at his disposal. Hell, he probably already knew.
Michael couldn’t have woken her up to go to the movies soon enough. Not that she figured she’s gotten any sleep anyway, too caught up in her thoughts to actually rest. But she needed to get out of the house and go somewhere. Maybe it’d be easier to tell him if they were in public, and she had to keep her composure.
In the theater, she focused on the movie, tried to enjoy herself despite Ricky Nelson not singing nearly as much as she’d hoped and her not caring much for Westerns to begin with. Michael had taken the time to go with her, though, and was trying to salvage the day so it wasn’t totally lost. His devotion, his attention was overwhelming at times, especially when so much of it belonged to her.
“I still don’t like Westerns, but I like that song Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson did,” she said as they walked out of the movie theater.
Michael nodded. “Dean Martin’s always good.”
“Did you get a chance to see him when he did that show with Jerry Lewis at the casino? What was it, four years ago now? It was a riot.”
“I did. Kay and I went.”
Right. Gloria hadn’t been scheduled to work the three days Michael and Kay were there. She didn’t see him for nearly a month after that and figured their affair of nearly a year was over, surprised it had even gone on that long. No hard feelings, no love lost, fun while it lasted. Then he returned to Las Vegas on business, something Fredo had avoided telling her in what he perceived as an attempt to spare her feelings. She was friendly when she and Michael crossed paths in the casino’s lounge. Less than an hour after she was off the clock, they were up in that hotel room again.
Thinking about Las Vegas felt like watching a movie itself, as though it were someone else’s life entirely. She still longed for it from her invisible cage of domesticity and privately mourned for it as if it were the greatest love of her life. Maybe it was.
“Anywhere specific you wanna eat?” Michael asked.
Gloria cleared her throat. “Maybe we could try that restaurant up the street, the one with the seashell on the sign? I’ve never been, but Janine was saying it’s good.”
“Who’s Janine?”
“Michael, she lives two houses down from us.”
“The Avon lady?”
Among their neighbors, Gloria liked Janine the most. She didn’t mind Gloria hanging out at her house a few days a week and was pretty good company. Her house wasn’t pristinely tidy, and she’d sometimes get tipsy on sherry by 3pm and end up ordering Chinese takeout or making TV dinners for her family. Or maybe it had something to do with Gloria buying something every time a new Avon catalog came out.
Gloria laughed. “Yeah, her. Mary’s going to her daughter Diana’s birthday party next month. She and my mom already picked out a gift.”
“Alright, let’s try it.”
“She said they have good Salisbury steak.”
“Salisbury steak? You must be feeling better from this morning.”
“I’m starving, actually.”
The few handfuls of popcorn she had in the theater certainly wasn’t enough to make up for two missed meals. Her stomach rumbled as they neared the restaurant, the smell of its kitchen mixed with the nearby sea breeze oddly enough to smell delicious in the moment. It wasn’t crowded for four in the afternoon on a Saturday. They were seated in a booth by a window that had a decent view of the beach.
“I’ll have a club soda, and she’ll have a rum and coke,” Michael said to the waiter.
Gloria shook her head. “Just a Coke for me, actually.”
Michael’s eyes shot over to his fiance, Gloria avoiding his gaze and playing with the corner of the tablecloth. The waiter took the hint to leave the couple alone, mumbling about giving them more time to look over the menu.
By the time Gloria let out a shaky breath, she knew he’d put two and two together, probably had since that morning. It wasn’t any easier for her to say it. “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Are you sure? Have you seen a doctor?” he asked.
“My period’s a few weeks late.”
“You’re scared,” he observed softly.
“I’ve never done this before,” she half-joked.
He reached over the table, taking one of her hands firmly in his. “You and our son will want for nothing. The best doctors are a phone call away.” When he noticed this didn’t seem to assuage her nerves, he added, “I’ll be with you through all of it.”
“I know you will.”
“Then you have no reason to worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You’ve known for a while, haven’t you?”
“I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Monday morning I want you to make an appointment to be sure.”
“I sure feel like I can eat for two,” Gloria said.
Michael smiled. “Then go ahead and order for two.”
The waiter returned with their drinks, seeming to wait until the intense discussion was over. He gave them another few minutes to look at the menu, and suddenly, Gloria wanted to order everything. Even asking Michael what he was getting, a grilled pork chop with green beans, didn’t help narrow down her options.
Gloria’s Salisbury steak came with two sides, and she chose mashed potatoes and creamed spinach after some internal debate. Before the waiter could walk back to the kitchen, she ordered a plate of grilled scallops, too. One of the things she had missed about living in New York when she was in Vegas was the fresh seafood.
“What do you think of Ciro looking after you?” Michael asked as he cut into his grilled pork chop. “Just whenever you leave the house, to be safe.”
“I like Ciro,” she said. “He’s nice. Kept a close eye on us during the bachelorette party.”
“Good. I trust him,” he said. “How are the scallops?”
She nodded her approval, sliding the plate toward him while chewing a chunk of steak she’d shoved in her mouth. As far as she was concerned, Salisbury steak and hamburger steak were the same thing, but for some reason, it felt like the greatest meal she’d ever eaten. Some of it was relief from not trying to hide her pregnancy from Michael anymore, even though she dreaded the thought of what the following eight months would involve.
She glanced over at Michael. For all the rotten luck or poor decision-making in the world, he chose the one Sicilian girl without a maternal bone in her body. Then again, he always saw something in her no one else seemed to, and it even left her at a loss sometimes. For his sake, she hoped the baby was a boy, but personally had no preference and was already thinking of how often she could pass child-rearing responsibilities onto her mother. At least buying stuff for the kid and redecorating one of the spare bedrooms into a nursery would be fun.
“I should get decaf, shouldn’t I?” Gloria mused aloud when they finished their meals, ready to order coffee.
Michael nodded. “Wouldn’t hurt.”
“That stuff’s awful.”
“It’s only a few months.”
“God, and I won’t even be able to drink at the wedding,” she lamented.
“Don’t worry, most of our guests will drink more than enough for the both of us.”
“How crazy is it gonna be?”
“I’d be surprised if there were less than two hundred people there.”
“Jesus,” Gloria whispered. “Is that including family?”
“Yours and mine, and then some acquaintances and business associates as well. I figured since we’re having the reception at the house, it wouldn’t hurt to invite the neighbors.”
“Really?”
“Like you said when we first moved in, they’ll notice if we’re antisocial. Just remember to keep them at arms’ length.”
The drive from the restaurant to her parents’ house felt oddly long for a weekend, but it gave her a chance to actually think about the wedding for the first time in a while. Connie and Sandra had taken on most of the wedding planning duties of their own volition, with Gloria in charge of picking out her dress, the cake, and a band to play at the reception. The latter was a task she took seriously, wanting to find a group that could play music to her tastes and also to that of the plethora of old school Sicilians who’d expect to hear a tarantella or two at some point during the celebration.
Gloria was relieved to see Vivian’s car in her parents’ driveway when Michael pulled up. Having Jackie and Vivian around always lowered the tension between her parents and Michael. Vivian liked him well enough, even though they’d butt heads at times. Jackie and Michael carried on friendly conversations on their own. Gloria wasn’t sure what she’d have done if Jackie disliked her fiance the way their father did.
“Hey Mike,” Jackie said, shaking Michael’s hand when they walked inside.
Michael smiled. “Good to see you, Jackie.”
“Hi Michael,” Jack said. “The kids are upstairs painting with Julia.”
“I’ll go see what they’re up to,” Michael said. “The kids love that craft room.”
Jack smiled. “Good, we’re glad to have them over any time.”
Michael disappeared upstairs, and Gloria followed her family into the living room, declining Vivian’s offer for coffee. Might as well try to be responsible, though if she’d known the shot of espresso she drank earlier that morning would be her last for the better part of a year, she would have savored it more. Or at least tried harder not to throw it up.
“How was Pre-Cana?” Jack asked.
“I got sick this morning, so we’re gonna go next weekend.”
“Again?” Julia asked as she made her way downstairs.
“It was some spoiled milk. I’m fine. We’re going next weekend, wedding’s still on, nothing to be concerned about,” Gloria said.
“We just got the invitation in the mail. You can mark us as a definite yes,” Vivian said. “How many people are going to be there?”
“The guest list was a little over two hundred fifty people long, last I heard.”
“Two hundred fifty,” Julia repeated. “Jack, did you hear that? I don’t think we had more than thirty at ours, both our families combined.”
“That’s because theirs isn’t gonna be all family,” Jack said. “Your fiance’s business associates, I’m sure.”
“Dad, c’mon,” Vivian scolded, trying to keep the heat off Gloria.
“Oh, Gloria, that’s shameful if he uses your wedding day as a front for all of that,” Julia objected.
Jack scoffed. “What else is it for? A cover for all of those people slinking about for their debts and favors. Just watch, you’ll be surprised at who shows up for his generosity .”
“You two are ridiculous,” Gloria said. “That’s not what it’s going to be like at all.”
She actually didn’t know what the hell the wedding was going to be like, and it wouldn’t surprise her if Michael’s work did keep him away for some of the reception. Because there were things pertinent to running an olive oil importing company that required him to step away from family events for hours at a time. Even if he spent the day glued to her side, she was sure her parents would find something to pick apart.
Frustrated, she headed outside and couldn’t light a cigarette fast enough. Jackie followed her, though he kept his distance, standing closer to the back door than she was.
“Hey,” Jackie said. “Everything alright?”
“Just mom and dad being jerks about Michael and the wedding.”
“They’ll come around. He’s not a bad guy.”
“You really like him?”
“I don’t know what he does for a living, and I don’t really care. All I know is, this guy got transferred to my company after he got wounded on Peleliu. That article came out just before Christmas in ‘44. We got the magazines with these shitty rock-hard cookies that had nuts in them. But he said Michael was a good captain, saved his life. Some guys said it was a real shame he got discharged before Okinawa. They really admired him.”
Gloria took a long drag from her cigarette, letting out a shaky exhale. In nearly fifteen years, that was the most Jackie had said to her about his time overseas. All she knew was that he was with the First Marines and didn’t write many letters home, but when he did, it seemed like he was always on a different island and had less and less to say. After he returned to New York, he’d answer her questions with one-word responses or pretend he didn’t hear her at all.
She learned not to take his avoidance of the topic personally, though it took a while. The only person who knew the most about what Jackie experienced, besides the men he fought with–few of whom he kept in touch with over the years–was Vivian. In that case, Gloria didn’t pry, not wanting to pressure her sister-in-law to betray her brother’s confidence.
“Why is this the first time you’re telling me about it?”
“It wasn’t exactly a fucking vacation, Gloria.”
“I know that. Michael’s told me enough about it to have a clue. That’s why I talked to him in the first place five years ago, and that’s how I ended up back here. Because I wanted to understand what happened to you, but you shut me out.”
“What was I supposed to say to you back then? You were a thirteen-year-old kid!”
“I don’t know! Just…something. I missed you so much, Jackie, and it was like you left and never came back.”
“I didn’t. That’s what you have to understand, Gloria. Alright? Michael–he got fucking shot and came out of it better than most guys I know. Whatever the hell he does, he’s good at it. It’s like he can put his emotions in a box and leave them there. That’s why he’s good for you.”
“Compartmentalize.”
“What?”
“The emotions in a box thing. He compartmentalizes.”
“There you go.”
Gloria stubbed out her cigarette on her heel. “I’m glad you like him. I don’t think mom and dad ever will, though.”
“All that mob stuff’s true, huh?”
“He doesn’t tell me a lot, but probably.”
“I bet the cops are gonna be all over the wedding.”
“Oh, I can just see dad telling them all the details now.”
Jackie snickered. “It’ll be fine.”
“With two hundred fifty people there? Fat chance.”
#michael corleone x oc#michael corleone x ofc#the godfather#michael corleone#the godfather x oc#the godfather fanfic#michael corleone fanfic#the godfather part ii#bruised fruit fic
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Secret’s of the Night
Micheal Corleone x Female Reader
Synopsis: Running a criminal organization is a great task to handle. Who’s to say Micheal doesn’t deserve some kind of distraction? Luckily for him a certain maid would handle that task easily.
After his father's death, after losing half his family due to the mafia war, Michael's sweeter side was slowly but surely dying. It was no wonder why Kay was no longer dazzled by her husband, why their relationship was slowly but surely breaking apart.
The fact that Michael seemed to be entirely into the business now, determined to grow more and more powerful every passing day, didn't help either.
And so, as Y/N drew a distance between Michael and her, Michael's attention was drawn to someone else altogether.
Y/N.
The gorgeous young maid had started working for his family about a year before, and from the get-go, Michael had been dazzled by her gorgeous smile, her sensual body, and those big eyes, always so filled with a sort of cheeky allure.
There was no question Y/N was somewhat of a troublemaker. She enjoyed teasing her boss even before they began their affair, and the skirts seemed to get shorter and shorter as time went by. The way she swayed her hips whenever she caught him staring had Michael aching for the stunning maid even though his wife and young children were usually in the house.
Their first kiss had been a moment Michael would never be able to get off his mind. Her lips were so soft, so sweet, so inviting, and she allowed him to wrap his arms around her lithe body, pulling her close against his chest.
There was something so sexy about Michael to Y/N. Perhaps it was the power and confidence he exuded. Perhaps it was the dichotomy of his personality: How brutal and sweet he could be at the same time.
She found him intoxicating, and though in the beginning their affair had simply been motivated by lust, in time, something else grew between them. Something deep and intense, something that threatened to burn them alive.
As Michael's life became harder and harder outside his home, attempting to make dealings with other Families and the Vatican itself, as his relationship with his wife got worse and worse, his affair only seemed to grow stronger, his encounters with Y/N more frequent.
He could hardly keep his hands off her whenever she cleaned the room he was in. And Y/N didn't make it any easier for him! Not with the way she swayed her hips from side to side so enticingly, winking his way, licking her lips, and oh, how she touched him, how she kissed him, inviting him to push her much further than Kay would ever allow him to.
The little vixen seemed to grow deeply aroused whenever she could tease him, whenever she could mess with his head. Showing off her ass or giving him a smothering look while others were around but not looking her way became all too common. This meant Michael was almost painfully aroused during important meetings or even while drinking with his associates and friends.
"Do you need me to clean your desk, Michael?" Y/N purr as she stepped into his office when the young Don was attempting to focus on the Corleone family's dealings.
He'd look up at her, trying his best to control his urges, his impulses. Sometimes he failed at once, and his arms were soon around her gorgeous body, pulling Y/N onto his lap as his hands rolled up and down those incredible curves.
Others, he'd shake his head, grinning longingly at the teasing young woman.
"I can't, Y/N. I'm too busy,"
But she never listened to reason. Y/N enjoyed messing with her boss too much, and even more so, being punished for disobeying. So she'd go on cleaning anyways, making sure to bend over so he could either stare at her round, firm ass or at her alluring cleavage.
Her tits were a work of art, Michael could not deny it, and her buttocks were round, firm, and apple-shaped. Everything about Y/N seemed to scream sex, and she ached to be dominated by the powerful Don every single day.
Perhaps that was one of the main reasons she kept on working for Michael. As his lover, she could have received a handsome allowance and an apartment in the city, one he could come in and fuck her whenever he felt like it. But doing that would mean he'd only go to her when he was aching for a good fuck. Y/N needed to see Michael every waking moment and make sure she remained in the front of his mind.
Men like him could easily find new lovers, and then what? She wasn't after his money; she wanted him, all of him.
Y/N knew Michael was unlikely to leave Kay, and she was fine being the other woman, but she'd be damned if she had to compete with other lovers for his attention!
In the end, her teasing ways and sensual flirtation always managed to entice Michael, even if it earned her a spanking for being such a naughty, seductive little vixen.
And to Y/N, that was what she'd call a win-win situation. She loved it when Michael was a bit rough on her when he showed his dominant side and made sure she understood what her place was.
Since they were at his home whenever they fucked, whenever he spanked and disciplined her, Y/N had to learn to muffle her moans, her gasps, her whimpers.
It would not do for his wife to walk in on them. Of course, it was unlikely, given that a bodyguard or two were always out in the hallway, but if Y/N got loud enough, Kay would know something was amiss. The woman had learned to turn a blind eye to her husband's dealings, but she wasn't stupid either, and she was quickly getting tired of playing dumb.
Though Y/N wanted Michael to be with her, to admit his love for her in front of the entire world, she didn't want to ruin his life either, and she certainly didn't want him to lose his children, Mary and Anthony.
So, for the time being, she was quiet whenever they were alone together. The only one who could hear her muffled, quivering moans was her lover, and she knew how much he enjoyed them.
As their hidden relationship turned more and more passionate, more intoxicating, Y/N grew bolder and bolder as well.
"Take the bottle of whiskey and four glasses into the boss's office," One of Michael's underlings ordered Y/N late one night. Kay was gone for the week, having argued with her husband yet again. She had taken their two children along with her.
Things were more than slightly tense between them. Though few people in the family knew about it, Michael had confided on his lover as they cuddled together in bed, in one of the house's many guestrooms.
"I thought Kay had suffered a miscarriage. I was heartbroken for both of us, but it was nothing of the sort, Y/N," He said with frustration. He was clearly angry, disappointed, and hurt, and though Y/N usually teased and poked him sensually, that time she just listened quietly, tenderly rolling her fingers over his chest, trying to comfort him. No matter how much she loved taunting him, she loved Michael all the more.
"That's not what happened?" She asked, frowning quietly as he shook his head.
"No, not at all. Last night she told me the truth. She had an abortion! She told me she didn't want to bring another child of mine into this world, not with how badly I've messed up, not after everything I've done! How could she have killed one of my babies!"
Y/N held Michael tenderly in her arms, soothing his broken heart, and cementing their relationship even further. Though they were lovers, having an affair behind his family's back, there was something real growing between them both, and it couldn't be denied any longer.
That had been almost a week ago, and Y/N knew it was high time to tease her lover once more, push him to be as passionate as she loved him being.
So when she stepped into the office, where a few of Michael's associates were discussing business, she served every last one of them, except for her boss.
"What do we say when we want something to drink?" She whispered teasingly, winking his way as she leaned forward, revealing her sensual cleavage to him in front of all those men.
"Y/N, not not." He grunted, glaring her way, but she wasn't intimidated.
"What's the magic word, then? The sooner you say it, the sooner you get your drink," She cooed hotly, and his glare was so dangerous most other people in the house would have immediately freaked out, but Y/N knew him better than that. He appreciated loyalty, and Y/N was loyal to a fault. He wouldn't hurt someone -not more than needed anyway- just because they were a bit bratty or impertinent. And they both knew what kind of game she was playing.
"Out, all of you," He grunted, standing up and forcing her to take a step back so he could get on his feet. "I need to have a talk with Y/N, alone."
The other four men nodded gravely and stepped out onto the corridor, closing the door behind them.
"You impertinent little vixen," He grunted, and though there was anger in those dark eyes of him, what she saw in his gaze was arousal and the desire to teach her one of the lessons she enjoyed so much.
Michael grabbed Y/N by her long, silky hair, tugging at it just hard enough to make her moan and whimper out loud at the same time.
"Take off your clothes right now, I want to teach you a lesson," He grunted, tugging even harder for just an instant before he let go of her, and took a seat, staring demandingly her way.
She smiled seductively his way as she slowly but surely allowed the maid uniform to slide down onto the floor. Underneath she was wearing a sensual lingerie set, black and semi-sheer, one of the numbers he had gifted her over the past few months.
Her nipples were already hard enough to be noticeable through the silky fabric. His dark gaze rolled down her body, taking in her curves, enjoying the way she caressed her own skin with long, limber fingers.
Y/N wiggled her breasts sensually, as she unhooked the bra from the front instead of the back. A sexy little detail he adored.
"Stop smiling like a little brat, this is a punishment," He hissed, though the smirk tugging at the corners of his lips told Y/N otherwise.
As he stared openly at her sexy little striptease, the bra fell heavily on the ground, joining the maid uniform. Her nipples were pink, small, and wonderfully erect, and he ached to stretch out his hand and pinch one of those perfect little buttons.
And finally, Abigail leaned down, bending at her hips instead of at her knees, making her position even more sensual and enticing. She threw the panties his way, licking her lips tantalizingly as he grabbed them and beckoning her to move closer.
She swayed her hips toward him, moving them from side to side hotly, and when she was within reach, Michael grabbed her by the hips hard. His free hand rolled down her naked, sensual body, enjoying every last inch.
Her tits were firm and round, and they rested hotly against the palm of his hands as he squeezed one and then the other. She tilted her head back, moaning and panting as he pinched her nipples hard and rough, the mixture of pain and pleasure taking over her mind.
"Oh, Michael!" She hissed, and that was when he pushed her forward, prompting the beautiful Y/N to fall onto his lap.
She yelped, gasping as she was forced to bend over, her firm ass sticking up into the air.
"You're going to get punished for your naughty attitude, you impertinent girl," He grunted hard. "You're such a disobeying little slut, aren't you?"
She nodded, wiggling her ass for him to smack already. She loved it when he spanked her, over and over again, until her ass was red and sore.
"Count every last spank until I say it's over, Y/N," He ordered, and she nodded at once.
"One!" She squealed, as his hand hissed loomingly through the air and finally landed on her firm ass, making it wiggle gently. He didn't give her any time to recover, and instead, his hand kept on crashing against her skin over and over, making it look so red within only a few moments! As he continued to spank her over and over again, she counted out loud: "Two, three, four, five! Ohhhh, six, six!"
Minutes slipped by, and he kept on swatting her ass time and time again. Her round, firm ass got increasingly red and sore, her entire body quivering with a mix of arousal and humiliation.
She loved submitting to him, crawling onto his lap and letting him spank her over and over again until she was quivering all over, aching to be fucked.
He rubbed her ass when he got to twenty, and hotly asked her:
"Have you learned your lesson?"
She nodded, somewhere between whimpering and moaning as she replied:
"Yes, yes, I've been such a bad girl." She purred, looking at him over her shoulder, her skin as flushed as her ass was red.
Michael tugged at her long hair, pulling her back onto her feet, caressing her ass tenderly as he did so.
"You're forgiven, you little brat," He teased her warmly. "Tell me the truth, did you enjoy it?"
"I did, you know I did!" She replied, and he wrapped his arms around her with the dominance and determination that characterized Michael.
They kissed passionately, her naked body pressed against him, his hands rolling down her skin hotly.
"I need to fuck you tonight," He grunted against her lips, making Y/N smile at once! "Get on your knees and show me how badly you want to feel me inside you!"
Without hesitating, Y/N dropped onto her knees, unzipping his pants and hooking out his cock with such eagerness that her fingers trembled slightly.
And as quickly as she got it out, her lips were on it. Peppering his girth with kisses, rolling her tongue over his cock. She made it nice and slick with her drool before opening the mouth wide and letting it slide deep inside her.
As Y/N wrapped her lips tightly around his shaft, she began bobbing her head up and down his shaft, taking in every last inch hotly.
She loved the way it was so erect, its scent so musky. It throbbed wonderfully against her tongue and lips.
He placed his hand on the back of her head and guided Y/N to move faster, fucking her face roughly as the need to use her mouth as some kind of suction force.
He went deeper and deeper inside her mouth until his bulbous head reached and slid down her throat. She gagged once or twice but managed to take him in.
Y/N’s tongue rolled all over his girth, coating it with her drool, tasting his precum.
When he was a moment away from cumming hard, Michael thrust away from her greedy mouth and whipped off a drop of precum from the corner of her mouth.
Michael guided her toward the table only a few feet away from where she had been kneeling only a moment before. Helping her bend over so that her tits were pressed against the smooth wooden surface.
She wiggled her sexy, round ass up in the air, and he didn't waste a single instant, plunging deep inside her soaked cunt, fucking her like his life depended on it.
Their bodies rocked back and forth in perfect unison, as she rolled her hips back every time he thrust into her. Her breasts rubbed against the desk over and over again, stimulating Y/N even further.
She had to bite her lip to avoid a series of loud, passionate moans from filling the room. Though Michael's wife wasn't in the house, they didn't want his whole staff and underlings to know exactly what was going on in there.
The two lovers made love for what felt like an eternity until his thrusts became rougher and faster until they were driven to the edge. It was then that she embraced her orgasm, her cuny clenching powerfully around his cock, and prompting Michael to join the explosion of pleasure.
As Y/N climaxed hard, her pussy squeezed his cock even further, the massages having his own orgasm grow fierce, so much so that his entire body was quivering by the time it reached its peak.
Michael filled Y/N with his seed, his cock throbbing hard inside her before they exhaustedly collapsed onto the desk. He peppered her neck with tiny, soft kisses before helping her get back onto her feet.
"Since Kay's not here tonight, why don't you come upstairs and sleep with me? I want to wrap my arms around you and fall asleep to your sweet scent?" He suggested, and Y/N immediately agreed. The two whisking away in slumber for the rest of the night.
But though Michael expected Kay to return in the following weeks, she never did. They exchanged calls, and the relationship grew colder and colder until the inevitable divorce proceedings started.
It was then, with the ink still wet from his separation, that Michael finally decided he could not live without Y/N in his life.
"I have something to ask you," He whispered one night, just before bed. By then, Y/N had been sleeping with him in his marital bed for over three months, and they were happier than ever before.
Y/N gasped as she saw the powerful Don get down on one knee for her, pulling out a tiny box containing a massive diamond ring.
"Y/N, my love... will you marry me?" He whispered, and she couldn't help but squeal as she jumped into his arms, kissing him like she had never kissed him before.
"Yes, yes, yes! A million times yes!" The former maid squealed happily, feeling her heart beating so fast in her chest she was certain the whole neighborhood could hear it drumming away. "I love you, Michael, nothing in the world would make me happier!"
"I love you too, Y/N" He whispered, placing the ring on her finger, before standing up. His arms were tightly wrapped around her, and he picked up his new fiancee bridal-style, carrying her to their bed, ready to make love to the love of his life.
#the godfather#michael corleone#female reader#smut#I can’t stress how bad of a crush I had on Michael when I saw part 1 and 2#part 3 don’t exist to me. But whenever I saw him oh boy the tingles were on point#something about his authority and how he was rushed into this criminal business was a view#and how much he changed completely#this is like my second story I wrote since the first one was done like 2 years ago or 1 year ago#fanfiction#mafia
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✨Let's Flesh-Out Strahd: Part 4✨
This post on LFOS we're doing a deep dive into Strahd's Myers Briggs (INTJ-A) and Enneagram (8w9) to explore what makes his personality tick!
(Special thanks to @mochizuke-createss for doing the research on this. I'm just the scribe for their genius tonight!)
My lovely player and Ravenloft DM colleague, Mochi, typed out Strahd as an INTJ-A with an 8 wing 9 enneagram. This is (imo) the best fitting framework of Strahd's personality type, and the one we will be using going forward!
INTJ Brief Overview: INTJs are known as the "mastermind" personality for good reason. Introverts which favor logic and analytical reasoning over emotion, INTJs are almost fanatical planners with sweeping imaginations. This is a deadly combination for any villain, as it means they're creative enough to think far outside the box, but decisive and determined enough to "make these dreams come true". The biggest stumbling block of many INTJs is their tendency to steamroll emotion in favor of logic and achieving their goals. In an unhealthy INTJ (like Strahd) this can lead to almost sociopathic tendencies as the emotions of others are chucked out the proverbial window, but we'll get into that more later. {For more info on INTJs, check out these links since I don't have the space to go into detail in this post -> overview, vengeance, coping with trauma}
8w9 Brief Overview: The Enneagram is another personality inventory which focuses primarily on what motivates a person and the root of a personality. Strahd is an extremely unhealthy 8 wing 9, AKA "the bear". The deepest fear of 8w9s is being betrayed or hurt and their deepest desire is to feel secure and powerful. This generally stems out of a 'rejection of childhood,' where an individual was forced to grow up quickly and found that showing vulnerability would lead to hurt, rejection, or betrayal from a young age. Again, sound familiar? The reason Strahd is typed as a 9 wing as opposed to a 7 wing (wings being the secondary personality trait) is because he's generally more introverted, level headed, and calculating. 8w9s in a healthy place tend to be extremely protective of themselves and the handful of people they care for, everyone else can go kick rocks as far as they're concerned. {For more info on 8w9s, check out these links since I don't have the space to go into detail in this post -> 8w9 Guide}
Examples of INTJ-A 8w9 characters: Silco (Arcane), Maleficent (Maleficent), Yennifer of Vengerberg (The Witcher), Magneto (X-Men), Roose Bolton (Game of Thrones), Dracula (From Stoker’s actual book), Michael Corleone (The Godfather), the person writing this post (only found out after doing Strahd's eval and yes, I'm just as horrified as you are).
Alright let's get to the good stuff! I.e., why the heck this even matters. If you've been a good noodle and read some of those links, you should have a decent grasp on what we're about to dive into. So this is a highly unusual personality cocktail, because you have a naturally very reclusive, introverted person that somehow got fused with a very domineering and leadership driven creature to form a Frankenstein's monster of contradictory personality traits. It's probably why the man is so damn irritable all the time: he's naturally predisposed to wanting to hole up in a library and speak to no one, but he's too traumatized and controlling to ever stay out of the office for long. He's a creature grappling with an analytical and imaginative mind that is constantly pit against an internal drive to take control of everything and shoulder all burdens on his own. There's a general, underlying irritation with the world in characters of this personality type. They're absolutely exhausted by their internal drive into traditionally extraverted positions, which is only exacerbated by a general lack of traditional empathy and social tact.
INTJs have little patience with "normal" people, and even less when it comes to time-wasting niceties. Unfortunately for the world, time-wasting niceties can be categorized as anything from social graces, to rules, to showing "unnecessary" emotion. Saying good morning without a purpose is pointless to the extreme INTJ, as is crying over your dead cat. The cat is dead, you cannot fix it. Move on.
If you do a google search for fictional INTJ characters, you're going to come up with an overwhelming number of villains. Why are they nearly always villains in fiction? It's simple: they're logical, independent, and pragmatic to an extreme. INTJs want to figure out the world for themselves, and don't tend to "take your word for it". This is a philosophy which can extend to things such as morality. INTJs in fiction are generally lawful evil aligned because INTJs do have moral codes, and strict ones at that! Unfortunately, they've generally cobbled said moral codes together themselves out of what is the most logical based on their life experiences, not on what the world declares is "right" or "wrong". Strahd is a lovely example of an INTJ who was brought up in a very warped environment, one which fostered a warped sense of morality as it was (quite literally) the only way to function when actively at war. Unfortunately, just like any coping mechanism, the second you take it out of the traumatic environment? It turns from a shield to a chainsaw. Worse still, INTJs are incredibly stubborn. They put a hell of a lot of work into forming their opinions, often backed up with a great deal of thought, research, and life experience. For Strahd? Well, he's put too much time into this moral code, and he's not changing because he's spent centuries like this, it works well, and he's doing just fine as a monster thank you very much. And that's the scary thing about characters like Strahd: there is absolutely a method to the madness, and a pretty damn logical one at that. Lay out his childhood trauma, the circumstances of his rule, and the demands of his position- and you have a very logical reason for why he's such an asshole. Unfortunately logic is only half the picture and unhealthy INTJs (like Strahd) throw emotion out the window.
But what about his enneagram? Aside from making him a convoluted, irritable jackass- his enneagram drives nearly every aspect of Strahd's deepest motives. This is a person who was forced to hit the ground running as an adult around the age of 7 or 8. This is a person who was shown from a young age that emotion will get you and everyone around you killed. This is a person who was quite literally forced to carry the burden of a nation from childhood. So! That gives you an enneagram 8, right off the bat. He has to be a leader, he has to be driven, and he has to be the one in control because everything will fall apart if he isn't. Leading is the cornerstone of what gives his life purpose- it is what he was born to do, it is what he was raised to do, and it is what he was supposed to die for. But unlike 8w7s who tend to be domineering, shorter tempered, gregarious go-getters, 8w9s are much more reserved, calculating, and introverted. Strahd very well could have been a 7 wing… if he wasn't an INTJ, and an extreme one at that. He's too analytical, too emotionally reserved, and too introverted to entertain such frivolities. Does he have a temper? Oh yes, yes yes yes he does… but he's good at containing it, at channeling it, and fueling it into being a very calculating, vindictive bitch. Because that's the other fun thing about INTJs and 8w9s that goes hand in hand: being vindictive. Betray an INTJ or fuck up their plans? And you will find yourself on a very short list of people they very much want to tear to shreds. Betray an 8w9 (or their loved ones) and you have a creature with a brewing temper that is about to explode rather violently in your face. 8w9s try oh so hard to play nice, they really do. But when you poke a bear, that bear will bite your head off. Especially if that bear is a 400 year old vampire with clinical depression and the chronic desire to fist fight god.
But now lets take a step back and make this an even scarier picture of this already scary man's personality. Because while type 8 enneagrams can have issues with reigning in their temper, at sitting back and taking things slow… INTJs do not. 8w9s are a type 8 enneagram with a very small, dainty leash. It isn't much, but it's something. INTJ 8w9s are a type 8 with a choke collar. Yes the volatility will always come out at some point, but Strahd can generally chose when, where, and how thanks to being an INTJ and having a 9 wing, which evens out his temper, makes him vaguely more able to pretend he's social, and lets him plot his revenge. Depending on where he is in his life (i.e. when a campaign is set and what events have impacted him) he'll be more or less competent in this area. Younger, more newly undead, volatile Strahd has a much harder time channeling his rage than older, more experienced Strahd.
Every personality has some sliding scales of functionality and these scales do shift depending on circumstance and life events. In the healthiest possible place, Strahd could be a very imaginative person with a knack for soft spoken leadership and an almost nurturing side when it comes to caring for his family. In the unhealthiest places, however, Strahd could become detached, dismissive of emotions to the point of sociopathy, vindictive to an extreme, self-isolating, and obsessive. Personally, I don't think we've ever seen him slide to either extreme in cannon 2e content. The closest he's come to a wholly corrupted INTJ/8w9 is with the wedding ™ and the years following this disastrous event. But even then, he vaguely managed to reign in the pitfalls of delusional egomania in favor of being a reclusive, clinically depressed, petty bitch. And that's where mental health and life experiences really come into play. Personality and action doesn't just happen in a vacuum. His Myers Briggs and enneagram aren't the end all be all guide to Strahd; just as his psych eval or his cannon material aren't. Every NPC is a puzzle. A puzzle you cannot solve without all its pieces. This is just another piece for my fellow DMs and Ravenloft enthusiasts.
(DISCLAIMER: As usual, I am not an expert or professional in psychology! But I'm in training to be one! Also, this post speaks to UNHEALTHY INTJs/8w9s in a very Strahd centric context. No, not all INTJ/8w9s are monsters, but disclaimering that every three lines in a post like this isn't feasible or fun to read. Don't let this sour you to us INTJ 8w9s (yes us, I'm a foul little monster too). In a healthy place we can be vaguely charming and intriguing people. In an unhealthy place we are Silco, Strahd, and Rose Bolton. Please do your own research on this topic! This is just a starting point for DMs and enthusiasts wanting to dive in deeper to this NPC. So please, go forth and learn my children!)
#I’m back with another essay#curse of strahd#ravenloft#dnd#strahd von zarovich#strahd#dungeons and dungeons#dungeon master#dnd npc#NPC analysis#LFOS#ravenloft2e
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REAL!! Diversity win this awful and miserable straight man is trans!! What you said about him proving his masculinity to everyone around him also applies to his army career and his relationship with Kay, trying so hard to be normal and prove himself as a man...his struggle to be decent and respectful versus the roles imposed on him which eventually bring out his uglier side....also can you imagine the absolutely awful childhood trauma jfc..Mike next to his brothers and Connie..his parents... Realizing that there is no way that he can live a normal life the way he is and giving in to his environment and continuing the cycle of violence and misery...thinking about it!!!!!!!!
YOU SEE THE VISION diversity LOSS this TRANSGENDER fucjing SUCKS! theres a looot about michael that just screams ‘queer in some way’ & i think its easiest to apply it to closeted bi michael but also trans guy michael… many thiughts head full… the godfather is a LOTTT about how toxic/strict masculinity ties directly into misogyny & patriarchy so michael sees it as either 1) staying in the closet as a miserable victim or 2a) coming out & being a miserable outsider to his family 2b) coming out & being forced in the family’s role of an oppressor. he tries to fit into outside societys role of a man (army man, good christian girl as a wife, respectable) OR his families role of a man (leader, dominating over his wife, cold & calculating) & it rqlly emphasises his whole moral struggle of trying to be a good person & a good corleone… hi eveyrone
#me.txt#correspondence#the godfather#you & mean streets religious sadomasochism anon are the only people allowed to talk to me anymore
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succession stan twitter is being insufferable about brian cox lead nomination— like. no way he was supporting?? it's more about character hierarchy than literal screentime..... (someone already brought up the example of who do you think is a lead actor role, vito corleone or fredo?) logan dominated this season in life and in death and while that does not necessarily translate to "his actor should win" (i personally am rooting for mr culkin :3 but strong would also be well deserved) it does matter when deciding who's lead....... genuinely don't get all the whining
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“Aren’t you so adorable and cute as a button~? C’mere, let’s have a chat together!”
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
Name: Archie Corleone
Japanese: アーチー・コルレオーネ
Dorm: Ramshackle 🎩
Birthday: February 6th (Aquarius)
Age: ???
Height: 159 cm (719 cm in real form)
Dominant Hand: Ambidextrous
Homeland: ???
Family: None
Voiced by: Ayumu Murase
Nicknames/Aliases: Monsieur Dollmaker (Rook), ??? (Floyd)
Grade: Junior
Class: 3-D (no. 13)
Club: NRC Newspaper Club
Best Subject: N/A
Hobby: Making dolls
Favorite Food: Everything with chocolate
Least Favorite Food: Fish
Pet Peeves: Cats
Talent: N/A
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
Appearence: Archie is a young individual with cream colored hair, pink right eye, black button left eye, petite body and pale skin.
In their “school uniform”, they wear a blue beanie (sometimes they wear a white one), a white tank top, a black jacket, a pair of black jeans with a golden stripe on each side facing outwards and a pair of white sneakers with white shoelace.
Personality: They seem usually polite, cheerful and a bit childish. Although they sound like you don’t want to mess with them sometimes...
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
Unique Magic: “Hollow World”
It allows them to create a gate to their world where they can shape it to the people’s desire. They mainly shape it to be the exact same as the peoples’ world though...
[x] + Gacha Life 2
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
Fun Facts:
They are actually nonbinary, but they have a masculine appearence. (He/they)
They have a habit of giving others a doll of themselves. Like giving Riddle a doll of himself.
They seem awfully protective of the dolls they give...
They are NOT a human, they are [REDACTED]
They are protective of Yuu/MC.
No matter how many times other Ramshackle residents cleans their room, it always seems to be dusty and covered in cobwebs.
They enjoy going to the beach, but they can’t swim... That’s why they collect shiny things!
They seem to be fond of birds.
[more information is yet to come, stay tuned!]
Their true form under the cut.
(t/w: spider and needles.)
Design notes + more “fun” facts:
Unlike Beldam’s true form, Archie retains at least some flesh... On their face and some parts on their body it is. Also, it’s meant to look like a mix of spider and skeleton!
Their main reason to dislike cats is that a cat took their eye before and they had to replace it with a button one because they were unable to regenerate it themselves...
In their true form, they produce a lot of cobwebs and it may look messy sometimes... They are trying to hide the webs though!
They also have several cracks on their body because they were getting injured a lot of times by the humans they met before... The humans were hostile though... They always attacked them, but they kept giving them a second chance to change. (The townspeople never did.)
They give others dolls as a token of friendship, yes, but they do it to watch over their friends. They want them to be safe and they worry about their friends... sometimes...
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Renegada♱
Taglist: @707otto @juxt4p0siti0n (If you want to be added in this fic, just tell me in reply )
Pairings: Amado Carrillo Fuentes x f!reader(Latina Reader) x Walt Breslin [From Narcos: Mexico TV Series]
Content Rating : Mature 18+ Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warning (AT YOUR OWN RISK)
Synopsis : You were utterly surprised when you discovered that the incoming call was from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the man who is the primary target of yours.
AN : I will ask you the same question Amado asked, "Do you miss me?" I know I've been absent, but I won't abandon this fanfic, Because I have already finished writing this story (in the Thai language). but the translation takes a considerable amount of time, coupled with busy work, which made me disappear for a while. But don't worry, I assure you I will continue translating until it's completed. And I will create a Masterlist soon, so you can follow each chapter more conveniently.
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𝙍𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙜𝙖𝙙𝙖♱ 𝙈𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩
➡ Previous : Next
[3]ᅳ 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐫 ✟
Once upon a time, Steve Murphy, a DEA agent from Colombia, was the mastermind behind the takedown of Pablo Escobar. He had likened drug traffickers to cockroaches—filthy, hard-to-kill, and constantly multiplying. But in your eyes, you believed that these drug dealers were akin to Hydra, the mythical Greek monster. Whenever Hercules would cut off one of its heads, two new ones would sprout in its place, symbolizing the endless cycle of the drug trade in Mexico.
It's true that Amado Carrillo Fuentes still holds the number one spot at the moment, but that doesn't mean that other drug lord groups are powerless. When the main head that controlled everything was eliminated from the equation, such as Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, it only made these drug lords more influential and crazed, ready to do anything to maintain their authority and expand their dominance as far as possible.
The war on drugs continued unabated, and whenever someone stood out, they became an inevitable target. This was what was happening to Amado, because it wasn't just DEA agents who wanted to bring him down; other rival drug cartels also desired to witness his downfall.
"The Arellano family is making their move," Julio says, pointing to a picture of a family pinned amidst a wealth of information on a large board in the conference room of Mexico's Police Office. "We've received reports of an attempt to assassinate Amado at a restaurant in Juarez. Additionally, there have been reports of burning and destruction at El Chapo's warehouse in Sinaloa."
Bill hastily raised his hand with enthusiasm, and when the leader nodded, he immediately expressed his opinion: "I think they're struggling desperately at the last straw. Maybe they're causing some disturbances for others to stumble upon, but they can't do much more than that.'
Bill spoke accurately. The Arellano family's power has been declining significantly. They used to be much grander, much like the Corleone family in 'The Godfather. Drug trafficking is the business of this prominent family, led by the eldest brother, Benjamin Arellano, accompanied by numerous brothers and sisters. However, the most striking and notorious person in the Mexican underworld would be Ramón Arellano, the youngest brother of the family, who stands out as a truly bloodthirsty and insane
Ramón Arellano often received assignments from his older siblings involving violent tasks, and it was certain that he had a hand in the assassination attempts on Amado.
"But I don't think the Arellanos initiated this," you countered, causing all eyes in the conference room to turn towards you.
"Why do you think that way, officer?" Julio asked, inquisitive.
"The agreement between Amado and the Cali Cartel is directly related to the cocaine issue. This is because all drug dealers in Mexico are merely intermediaries. They don't produce cocaine themselves. What Amado did to Colombia almost entirely severed their control over the cocaine trade in Mexico. That's the reason Arellano is struggling to maintain their position." You presented your thoughts, supported by the information you had personally researched over the past few days. " What's still keeping Arellano from collapsing is the territory they possess. Baja California is a borderland adjacent to two crucial states in America. We know it's the easiest route to smuggle drugs into the U.S. Whoever wants to traffic drugs on that side has to pay a toll to Arellano. However, Amado chose to transport cocaine by plane instead, and El Chapo believed that Arellano had lost power, so he refused to pay the toll. This angered them and led to a decision to retaliate. It's also to send a message to other gangs not to mess with Arellano."
Up to this point, your gaze had grown more serious than before. "Prepare yourselves, gentlemen, because the drug war is going to be much more intense than ever before."
It was a sign of change, much like the shifting weather in Mexico, and indicative of the many other changes to come in the future.
On a scorching Tuesday afternoon, you opened the door and hurriedly jumped out of the taxi after paying the fare. The street was lined with parked police cars, and right in front of you were two familiar men. Bill and Walt seemed to have arrived on the scene earlier than you. They were both standing, arms crossed, staring up at the hanging bridge above them. Their faces struggled to cope with what was up there.
It was the bodies of three men, wrapped and hanging by their necks from the suspension bridge.
"I hope you've had breakfast because you probably won't eat anything for the rest of the day," Bill commented with a slight smile. You managed a half-smile in return, not wanting to reveal to him that you'd only had coffee from yesterday's midday until now.
"We've checked. These three are part of the Arellano gang, the same group that attempted to kill Amado a few days ago." Walt turned to lock eyes with you, exhaling a long breath. "You hit the nail on the head."
You averted his eyes briefly before raising your hand to rub your temple. feeling the rising wave of nausea from your stomach to your throat. It had nothing to do with the gruesome sight you've just witnessed. When your profession forces you to encounter horror regularly, that sensation has already faded away. But the unease you feel now is due to having only slept for three hours last night. And considering the events of today, it seemed like tonight would be same as well
"Are you alright?" Walt was the first to notice the abnormality. He quickly stepped closer and grabbed your arm. "I'll take you in my car. I'll drop you off at the apartment."
"I'm fine, really. It's just a bit too sunny," you declined, knowing well that Walt wouldn't believe your words. But he didn't push further.
You, along with the other two DEA agents, continued to watch the Mexican police slowly lower the bodies from the bridge in a rush. A small crowd had gathered around the area; some glanced curiously, but most just passed by in silence, unfazed, without a hint of alarm, shock, or fear on their faces.
For the locals, this was just another routine day in Mexico.
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The loud ringing of a mobile phone repeatedly woke you up from your deep sleep. You found yourself sprawled on a blood-red couch that wasn't your own, and the overall state of the room differed drastically from your familiar living space. You observed the cleanliness and order, realizing that this was Walt's apartment. He lived in the same apartment complex as you but on a different floor. Walt had invited you over for dinner at his place to discuss and plan ahead. Due to the accumulated fatigue and the substantial meal you had just eaten, following a day fueled by nothing but coffee, you dozed off before you could even engage in a work conversation with Walt.
Your bleary eyes shifted towards the open window and saw that the sky had darkened. You couldn't spot any signs of the room's owner. You assumed he might be out for some errands or working outside, deliberately choosing not to disturb you. Shifting your weight, you propped yourself up from the couch, sitting up once again. A yawn erupted while you reached for the phone on the table, picking it up and placing it against your ear without paying much attention to see who was calling.
The voice that came through the line brushed away the remaining drowsiness that clung to you.
"I hope I'm not bothering you." No introduction, no greeting But you knew very well who was on the line. You quickly roused yourself from the couch. "Amado?"
"Glad you remember," Amado chuckled. "I thought you might have forgotten about me."
Not a chance; how could you forget the man who was your main target?
You searched urgently for a notepad and pen, one hand keeping the phone pressed to your ear. "I assumed you might have forgotten me instead, since you never got back to me."
That night in Cuba was not just a casual conversation. You knew things were getting serious when Amado requested your phone number. You decided to give him a backup phone number without telling anyone, not yet sure about his intentions
You hoped he would call. You also hoped he wouldn't call.
But in the end, he did call, and you were fine with it.
"Did you miss me?" Amado's voice sounded strangely teasing.
You stayed quiet for a moment, weighing your words carefully before responding, "I've been more worried about you."
He didn't reply immediately, seeming lost in his own thoughts just as you were. You heard a long exhale at the other end of the line. "You're the first person to say you're worried about me."
It wasn't an exaggeration, not in the slightest. Anyone else would want this man dead, and as a CIA agent, you knew that well. However, it was still odd and surreal to hear these words spoken directly from the weary voice on the line.
Was it pity or empathy you were feeling? You couldn't quite determine it either.
"Are you okay?" you asked, a natural question, not prying too much.
"Be blunt. It can't be worse than this," he replied evenly. "But this is my choice; I've decided."
You muttered, your mouth running ahead of you, "But can't it change?"
"What do you mean?"
"I change my mind every day. I think we don't have just one choice in life."
It was oddly profound that the CIA was now giving advice to a criminal like this.
You weren't sure exactly what you were doing, whether you were trying to comfort him or convince him to turn back to the good side. Of course, that was an impossibility.
Nevertheless, you chose to let the silence work, imagining how he was dealing with all of this. To be scared, to be angry, or to just see it as another day in Mexico like any other person in this country.
But you were wrong about all of that.
Turning points in many people's lives often start with something. And in this case, that assassination was the turning point in Amado's life.
And when you uttered the words "change," it made him realize the reality of his situation.
Miguel and Pablo, the two biggest drug lords of this century, had reached the peak of their lives, only to meet a disgraceful end—either death or prison. That was the destiny for anyone who dabbled in the dark business.
Their grand mistake was believing they had so much power and time that they never thought about the ending.
All of this made Amado different from both of them.
He was at his peak, creating his own glorious era, driven by the yearning to create something grand. And now he knew that an end had to come someday. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day. Or years from now.
He knew. And he had decided to prepare himself to face it.
Which had become a turning point in your life as well.
"Camila, there's something I want to ask you."
For a moment, your heart skipped a beat. He used that tone as if he was about to break some bad news you didn't want to hear. But sometimes, this might be the best for everyone. And that was what you thought after hearing his next sentence.
"I want you to come with me."
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#narcos: mexico#amado carrillo fuentes#narcos mexico netflix#narcos x reader#amado carrillo fuentes x reader#amado carrillo fuentes x you#narcos fic#narcos mexico fanfic#narcos mexico fanfiction#narcos: mexico tv series#walt breslin#walt breslin x you#walt breslin x reader#jose maria yazpik#scoot mcnairy#Renegada♱
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Every Frame a Painting — The Godfather
The film “The Godfather” opens with a close-up of Bonasera’s face. He dominates the frame while the surroundings remain dark. A desk lamp casts intricate shadows across his features, emphasizing the gravity of his expression. His face is a mix of sorrow, desperation, and perhaps a trace of resignation. He addresses Don Corleone, who is unseen off-screen. Bonasera recounts the injustice inflicted upon his daughter. The strategic use of lighting is pivotal in setting the scene’s tone and mood. The gentle, warm illumination from the lamp fosters an aura of intimacy, drawing the viewer’s attention to Bonasera’s visage and the emotions it conveys. The interplay between light and shadow enhances the depth and complexity of the shot, amplifying its visual impact. Bonasera’s face fills the frame, isolating him from his surroundings and accentuating the emotional weight of his plea. This deliberate framing intensifies the audience’s connection with his character, underscoring the significance of his appeal. This opening shot serves as an exposition, laying the groundwork for the film’s central conflict and thematic elements of justice, honor, and power. Bonasera’s impassioned plea propels the narrative forward and establishes Don Corleone as a formidable figure in the criminal underworld. Moreover, it foreshadows the moral ambiguity and intricate ethical dilemmas unfolding throughout the story.
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In November 2015, Matt Singer announced “the age of the legacyquel.” It has been an interesting seven years, to say the least.
Conceptually, the “legacyquel” is a particular brand of Hollywood franchise extension. The idea is that a late addition to a given film franchise incorporates both old existing characters to appeal to nostalgic fans and a new cast to attract a younger audience. Ideally, the legacyquel serves to pass the torch from one generation to the next, effectively serving as an acknowledgement of what came before while celebrating what lies ahead.
Of course, legacyquels were not entirely new inventions. There had already been a number of franchises that had run long enough for that torch to be passed. Star Trek gave way to Star Trek: The Next Generation. In The Color of Money, pool hustler Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) from The Hustler trained young hotshot Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise). Even The Godfather Part III featured Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) passing control of the family to his nephew, Vincent (Andy Garcia).
However, legacyquels came to prominence in the middle of the 2010s because the nostalgia-driven franchise age had been running long enough that many of the cornerstones of these franchises were reaching retirement age. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull introduced Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) as a potential successor to Henry Jones Jr. (Harrison Ford). Creed saw Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) training Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) to fight in the ring.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is perhaps the most famous and successful example, featuring all three leads from the original Star Wars showing up to pass the saga to a new generation of characters including Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), and Poe (Oscar Isaac). If Hollywood was going to be dominated by these never-ending franchises, this seemed like a sustainable model. It allowed for the inevitable passage of time and the possibility of renewal or reinvention.
What has been noteworthy about the past couple of years is the extent to which Hollywood has rejected this model of legacyquel in favor of something much more pandering and a lot less sustainable. Increasingly, it seems like blockbusters are content to tease the possibility of an older generation giving way to younger characters, only to yank the possibility away at the last minute in favor of chasing nostalgic fantasy. There is a reason this is the golden age of the aging movie star.
Increasingly, these films will introduce new characters who have potentially interesting stories to tell within the framework of these larger franchises, only to quickly overwhelm them with older returning characters from early installments who receive much greater narrative focus and attention. Instead of being stories about how the old inevitably gives way to the young, these become narratives about how the older generation is never going to die or fade away.
Top Gun: Maverick is a prime example of this. There had long been rumors of a potential sequel to Top Gun. When the project really began to gain momentum in October 2010, actor Tom Cruise was in the midst of a career slump that involved Paramount attempting to sever all ties to him. Early rumors about the sequel suggested that Cruise would play “a smaller role” in the sequel, although this was officially denied by Cruise’s long-term creative collaborator Christopher McQuarrie.
It’s easy to believe that Paramount wanted Cruise to hand over Top Gun to a new generation. After all, by his own account, actor Jeremy Renner was being positioned “to potentially take over” the Mission: Impossible franchise from Cruise in Ghost Protocol, which was primed for a 2011 release. However, at the last minute, Cruise simply refused to shoot a scene in which his superspy Ethan Hunt would receive a career-ending knee injury, walking off set declaring, “I ain’t going nowhere.”
Cruise has been vindicated. Ghost Protocol was the fourth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and Cruise is currently set to headline both the seventh and eighth entries in the series. He can furthermore block Paramount from other exploitations of the intellectual property. Top Gun: Maverick is also a star vehicle for Cruise, built around his star persona. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is not just a mentor to the younger characters, but he flies lead for them on the climactic mission.
This is like imagining a version of Creed where Rocky trains Adonis for most of the movie, but then decides to go into the ring himself at the climax. It is akin to a version of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek where Spock-Prime (Leonard Nimoy) single-handedly rescues the younger Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) from the clutches of Nero (Eric Bana). In Maverick, the young pilot Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller) exists largely to validate and vindicate the older mentor figure.
There is something similar at play in Thor: Love and Thunder. In that movie, Thor Odinson (Chris Hemsworth) discovers that his ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) has become worthy of his hammer Mjolnir and has claimed the title of the Mighty Thor. The film takes a lot of its cues from writer Jason Aaron’s seven-year run on the Thor titles, during which the Odinson was deemed “Unworthy” and Jane took up the mantle in his stead as part of Marvel’s “All-New, All-Different” line.
Aaron’s run was popular, and Jane’s title sold well. However, while Jane got to headline two separate ongoing series as the Mighty Thor, she has to fight for space in Love and Thunder. The movie completely drops the comics plot concerning the Odinson’s “unworthiness,” allowing the character to casually pick up Mjolnir. However, Jane is not even given a single movie to headline as the title character. Instead, she is just one subplot in an overstuffed two-hour spectacle.
The problem is compounded by how Love and Thunder resolves Jane’s plot. Jane dies of cancer in Thor’s arms. While Thor boasts a couple of times about having “another classic Thor adventure,” Jane only gets to have one such adventure. More than that, her death is treated as a motivating factor for Thor, reaffirming the importance and value of his heroism rather than serving as any statement on her potential. Jane shakes Thor out of his midlife crisis.
To be fair, Natalie Portman is an Oscar-winning actor. Indeed, she had previously announced that she was “done” with the Thor franchise and had a cameo in Avengers: Endgame via recycled footage and a snippet of newly recorded voiceover. She was unlikely to stick around and commit to a franchise like this. In contrast, Hemsworth has given interviews about how he wants to become the longest-serving superhero actor. Still, it’s a frustrating illustration of a larger trend in these movies.
This is an acceleration of a trend that can be traced back to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, with franchise veterans like Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) leapfrogging the nominal leads of the sequel trilogy like Poe Dameron or Kylo Ren. Increasingly, it seems like these films are not about introducing or establishing new characters, but instead about affirming the primacy and value of the established generation using these new characters.
Characters who had previously departed franchises are often brought back. Jurassic World featured none of the leads from the original Jurassic Park, but Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum are all effectively co-leads of Jurassic World Dominion, crowding out the younger cast. Harrison Ford headlines a new Indiana Jones movie at the age of 79. Where actors can’t be brought back, characters are; six of the nine leads on Strange New Worlds are pre-existing Star Trek characters.
Even movies that feature ostensibly smaller appearances from these older characters are still dominated by this logic. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson only appear briefly in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but the film is haunted by Egon Spengler, with deceased actor Harold Ramis even appearing via computer-generated imagery. Tellingly, the film doesn’t end staying with new characters like Phoebe (McKenna Grace), but follows the older characters back to New York.
There is something disheartening in all of this, particularly given the vocal harassment that many of these new actors have faced in these franchises. Daisy Ridley, Kelly Marie Tran, and Moses Ingram have all faced targeted harassment from self-described Star Wars fans. Studies recorded vocal “sexist” and “bigoted” responses to the news that Natalie Portman would play the Mighty Thor. It is weird that the mere inclusion of women and people of color has become part of a culture war.
More fundamentally, it illustrates the extent to which modern pop culture is overdosing on the sugar rush of nostalgia that it has been mainlining for decades. It used to be enough to bring back these old and familiar characters for “one last adventure,” but now it is impossible to imagine that these characters might ever have to leave. As the Star Wars franchise has demonstrated, perhaps they don’t have to; faces and voices can be recreated as digital files, trapped in an uncanny limbo.
There is a stagnation to all of this, one that prevents these sorts of properties from evolving in the way that they must to survive in the long term. It’s a rotten and ticking time bomb. Pop culture has spent decades reassuring audiences that nothing ever needs to end, that their favorite stories will continue indefinitely. In the past couple of years, this argument has taken a particularly unsettling turn, reassuring viewers that nothing need ever change either.
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Mhmm Victoria telling Michael to knock her up, breed her, put a baby in her ASAP as she is so so broody after little James and wants more with her sexy husband
Oh, you mean something smutty and intimate but sweet and short to the point like this? 😏🥵
“I want more,” you breathe hotly against the outline of Michael’s law, keeping both hands laced with his and pressed onto the bed as you hover over top of him. “More. Again.”
“C’mere, baby.” Michael gazes up at you with lazy, lust filled eyes as he tilts his head to the side and catches a kiss over your lips.
“More,” you whine, angling your hips down against Michael’s cock. “Fuck me, fuck me again.”
“Four rounds and you’re still in that needy little mood,” Michael cups your face with one hand, giving you a full-mouthed, wet kiss.
“Mm,” kissing your husband back, a teasing smirk forms over your lips. “Baby fever, maybe.”
“Maybe?” Michael looks up at you in disbelief, letting his hands roam down to your hips. “For certain but on your safe day you’ve had me cum in you four times.”
“Tired?” You ask back teasingly.
“Just getting started, darling.” Michael pumps his still erect cock with his free hand, positioning it towards your entrance. “Didn’t know you wanted a fifth addition to the family so soon.”
“You have no idea.” You whimper, eagerly beginning to take Michael’s cock in you one inch at a time. “Fuck…”
“Broody, whiny and pouty.” Michael’s eyes flicker over your naked body as he thrusts up into your soaked pussy. “Now begging to get knocked up again after being so careful after we had James.”
“Not that you’ve ever had a problem breeding me before, Don Corleone.” You lick over your lips, letting your pussy slosh over Michael’s cock in a steady rhythm. “When I want more, I always get it.”
“That’s because you know—” a quiet moan escapes Michael’s mouth as he watches you bounce over his cock, “I can’t say no to you.”
“You want it as badly as me,” your breath hitches as you squeeze your eyes shut. “Ohhhhh, fuck. Put a baby in me already. I wanna keep you in here all day with me just to feel you—fucking—me—over—and—uhhh!”
Much to your excitement and surprise, you feel Michael’s firm hand gripping over your throat before he flips you down on the bed, taking over dominance.
“I’ll make you cum over and over again before I do,” Michael gives your face a little shake, holding up your thigh over his waist with his other hand. “Since you want to be fucked so bad.”
Your hands tug over Michael’s dark, silky hair as you gladly give into him—hot skin on skin as you two embrace one another as Michael continues to slam in and out of you.
“Go ahead,” you let out a lazy giggle only to moan out again from feeling Michael’s thrusts beginning to quicken and get rougher. “Y-you’d be doing me a favour, baby. Mmm, fuck! More!”
#godfather au#Michael corleone#Michael corleone fanfic#moth to flame fic#michael corleone x reader#godfather x reader#godfather fanfic#michael corleone x reader smut#smut prompts
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Loonatics KR Update: New Characters Part 2
Happy Halloween / All Saints Day everyone I'm back for Loonatics Unleashed content with Loonatics KR. Sorry, I got bust because of the face-to-face classes but now it's time to bring part 2 of my character of Loonatics KR.
Please do not fanart, use, or draw my characters without my permission to me. I like to stay my characters safe, clean, and nothing weird or stupid.
Caren (Loonatics R Character adopted by me from @purpleluckystar and drawn by DarthCraftus)
For those who don't this character, this was written by @purpleluckystar from Chapter 2 which is Lexi's chapter, and the similar jealous cheerleader from Episode 6 Comet Cometh.
This is one of the characters that I adopted for those who have read my update here
For those who read it, we all know that she is responsible for kicking Lexi out of the cheerleading squad and not much else in the chapter. But I may plan to give her a bio and character perspective or put her in future chapters or spinoffs for different characters to add her on
Cane Lupo (Blond Wolfdog), Cane Lupo (Brown Italian Wolf) & Tiger Leaps (Red Tiger) (Loonatics KR OC Character written by me and drawn by @pink-chameleon13n13 )
Now I show you my 3 new OCs joining Loonatics KR. To explain each of my 3 new characters without any spoilers here is some detail and some trivia inspiration.
Rage Shards - is a Wolfdog who escaped from prison after being framed for a crime he did not commit and after many long times in prison, he became unstable. After the meteor hit him giving dark powers to escape and lay low. I took inspiration from WWE Immortals Dean Ambrose as Back Alley Brawler and Lunatic Fringe
Cane Lupo - is the youngest godfather who leads his own mafia group called The TriColores alongside his allied mafia group Colonie de Rats. After the meteor strike, he has the ability to turn any part of his body into ebony steel making his melee takedowns more brutal than ever before. I took inspiration from the Godfather video games but only two protagonist characters. Aldro Trapani (Godfather) & Dominic Corleone (Godfather 2)
Tiger Leaps - is a student character who schools the same place as Lexi but in a different class. Despite his secret past he starts to have his new life in a new school with adventures to explore and what life can throw at him. He has no effect on the meteor and has no powers. But he can fight against bullies, play sports on his own, and loves to make fireworks. I took inspiration from Jimmy Hopkins from the game called Bully.
Don't forget to follow me though including Wattpad for more updates of my stories coming soon. Or just post fanart
And donate me to PayPal if you want. So I may use commission money for comics and characters in the future
#loonatics unleashed#loonatics oc#loonatics kr update#loonatics r#loonatics kr#loonatics revamp#fanart#oc#canary#loonatics kr caren#character sheet#reference sheet#character bio#adopted oc#loonatics kr rage shards#loonatics kr cane lupo#loonatics tiger leaps#tiger#wolfdog#italian wolf#wolf
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4.11.23
As today is my day off, I thought I would share another fanfiction character. This is still my husband's SWTOR character. He has given me permission to write for him.
question provided by @oc-a-day.
What’s your OC’s immediately family like and their dynamic? Who do they get along with most? Least?
Adaki has the following immediate family:
Aatana - Daughter
Cynthia Prescost - Wife
Ellese - Daughter - in - Law
Gor'en - Son
Kymor - Son
Zhorrid - Daughter
The Godfather and the real-life Borgias inspired the Arturis family. Like both Vito Corleone and Rodrigo Borgia settled in a foreign country, Adaki Arturis, later known as Darth Noktis, settled in on a foreign planet where he needed to settle and raise his three children: Aatana, Gor'en, and Zhorrid.
Adaki created his power-center in Kaas City on Dromund Kaas and had a host of homes and apartments. Rodrigo and Vito centered their power centers around the Vatican and New York.
Below, I go into depth on what inspired each of the children.
AATANA ARTURIS
When designing Aatana’s personality, I wanted someone who could be used as a political pawn by her father. Aatana would have several failed engagements as Noktis dominated his eldest daughter’s life. Her first engagement was to a useless and abusive Sith lord, who would betray the Arturis family, much like Giovanni Sforza had done to Alexander VI. Aatana, herself, would murder this Sith.
Aatana was in a brief relationship with the bounty hunter: Channas. This fizzled out as she became tired of sneaking around. It is no wonder why Aatana spied on Adaki for her mother, Farina.
GOR'EN ARTURIS
Like Kymor, Gor’en was inspired by Michael Coreleon. While he was at odds with his father most of the time, he would help his family out of obligation, protecting his siblings. Gor’en wants nothing to do with the Force, as he describes it as “putting on a wet sock” when he used the Force to stabilize Ellese’s life until he and Aric Jorgan could get her to a kolto tank after Noktis attacked them on Ord Mantell.
All that changed when Cynthia, Ellese, and the four-year-old Kymor came for his help on Risha. They needed his help to rescue his father. He didn’t show it, but he was overcome with emotion and pledged to help Ellese and his younger brother. He did not desire to lead the family, leaving that to Kymor, but he wanted to join the fight.
Noktis gets along least with Gor'en. He views him as a shameful secret, someone who deserted the Sith academy, and, therefore, deserves death.
KYMOR ARTURIS
Kymor is inspired by Michael Corleone and Cesare Borgia. As soon as Darth Noktis and Cynthia disappear together on Oricon, Kymor takes over the family. It is during this time that it is revealed that he is a true leader. He is very intelligent, inheriting that from both of his parents. Kymor shows no emotions, except to Romina, and shares no secrets with anyone. He is always one step ahead of his enemies. He is one of the only children that Noktis is proud of.
ZHORRID
My interpretation of Zhorrid was inspired somewhat by Lucrezia Borgia. Until Cynthia and Noktis conceived Kymor, she was the youngest member of the Arturis Family. She is the youngest daughter. Unlike Aatana, Noktis did not use her as a political pawn.
Until she became a Sith Lord, Zhorrid was the apple of her father’s eye. He would hire a tutor, so she could have singing lessons. He would set up an event in Kaas City for her only. Her singing would make all in attendance cry. Noktis would commission several paintings of Zhorrid.
Much like with Aatana, Gor’en, and Kymor, Noktis’ parenting changed when Zhorrid was admitted into the Sith Academy. He became more critical of her and the damage that she would do to his legacy.
All of his children needed to pass a “Rite of Courage.” Noktis truly believes in the survival of the fittest, but he watches over his children who are in the Academy, hoping to embolden those children. He’s teaching his children to be strong Sith. None save Kymor realizes this.
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Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
January 22, 2024
From Marie Antoinette to Priscilla Presley, Coppola’s protagonists enjoy enormous privilege but little autonomy.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker
Wshen Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
There are plenty of distinguished bloodlines in the history of Hollywood—the Selznicks and the Mayers, the Warners, the Hustons, the Bergman-Rossellinis, the Fondas—but very few, like the Coppolas, in which one famous director has spawned another. After an early life spent in front of the camera, Sofia Coppola made a career behind it, becoming one of the most influential and visually distinctive filmmakers of her generation, with eight features to her name. Her second, “Lost in Translation,” from 2003, earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a nomination for Best Director, making her the first American woman recognized in that category. Her career, of course, has been bolstered by an unusual wealth of resources. Francis’s company, American Zoetrope, has been a producer on all her movies. When she made her début, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1999, she was able to cast an established star, Kathleen Turner, with whom she’d appeared as a teen-ager in her father’s movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” She got permission to shoot “Somewhere,” her fourth film, inside the clubby Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont because in her youth she was a regular there, and even had a private key to the hotel pool. Still, no director can get a project green-lighted at a snap of the fingers, especially in today’s franchise-glutted Hollywood, and especially as a female director in an industry that remains dominated by men. Coppola is self-aware enough to know that it would be bad manners for someone in her position to complain. But she told me, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
When we first met, in the fall of 2021, for breakfast near her home in the West Village, Coppola had spent the previous two years at work on her most ambitious venture to date, a miniseries, for Apple TV+, based on the Edith Wharton novel “The Custom of the Country,” from 1913. Coppola had adapted the book into five episodes and cast Florence Pugh in the lead role of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern arriviste on a desperate quest to infiltrate Gilded Age Manhattan society. Coppola, like Wharton, is known for her gimlet-eyed portrayals of a rarefied milieu, and for her insight into female characters who enjoy enormous privilege but little autonomy. “Marie Antoinette,” her most expensive movie, had a budget of forty million dollars, still modest by Hollywood standards; for “Custom,” she was planning for, as she put it, “five ‘Marie Antoinettes.’ ”
At breakfast, though, she told me, “Apple just pulled out. They pulled our funding.” Her voice was quiet, and her face—high cheekbones, Roman nose—was placid. “It’s a real drag,” she said. “I thought they had endless resources.” During the project’s development, she’d gone back and forth with executives (“mostly dudes”) on everything from the budget to the script. “They didn’t get the character of Undine,” she recalled. “She’s so ‘unlikable.’ But so is Tony Soprano!” She added, “It was like a relationship that you know you probably should’ve gotten out of a while ago.” (Apple did not respond to request for comment.)
Coppola grew up watching Francis do battle with movie studios. The success of the “Godfather” films hardly assured him funding equal to his ambitions, and he often went to harrowing lengths to get his projects made independently, driving himself to the brink of bankruptcy or nervous breakdown. “Hearts of Darkness,” a documentary co-directed by Eleanor about the notoriously tortured production of “Apocalypse Now,” is subtitled, only a bit hyperbolically, “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” (At the age of eighty-four, Francis is financing a new film, “Megalopolis,” with a hundred and twenty million dollars of his own money, freed up by the sale of a portion of the family’s wine business.) Coppola absorbed from her father the ethos that it was never worth it to cave to the creative demands of executives. In 2014, she agreed to make a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” for Universal Studios, but amid disputes during development (including, she said at the time, an executive asking her, “What’s gonna get the thirty-five-year-old man in the audience?”) she walked away from the job. “I don’t actually want a hundred million dollars to make a movie,” she told me, of studio deals with strings attached. “I learned it’s better to do your own thing.” She refuses to take on projects unless she is guaranteed the right to choose her creative team and control the final cut.
In January of 2022, after trying in vain to secure alternative funding for “Custom,” Coppola moved on to a new project, an independent film adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me.” Presley’s relationship with Elvis began when she was just fourteen. Like Marie Antoinette, she found herself unhappily married to a King. Paging through the book while in bed with a case of covid, Coppola had begun to see the picture unfolding in her mind. “I just thought about her sitting on that shag carpet all day,” she recalled. She wrote a draft of the script quickly and told her longtime producer, Youree Henley, that she wanted to be done shooting by the end of the year. She was undeterred by the coming release of Baz Luhrmann’s eighty-five-million-dollar film “Elvis,” which was due out in a few months. A rhinestoned frenzy of a bio-pic, Luhrmann’s movie portrayed Priscilla as a marginal character and a happy helpmate. Coppola called Presley and said, “That’s not how I see you at all,” and after hearing Coppola’s vision Presley signed on as a producer.
“Marie Antoinette” was filmed inside the real Versailles, a cinematic coup. For “Priscilla,” the Elvis Presley estate, wary of a film told from Priscilla’s perspective, denied Coppola access to Graceland. Coppola’s production team instead constructed the façade and the interiors of Elvis’s Memphis mansion on a soundstage outside Toronto. I visited one afternoon in November of 2022, as the shoot was under way. Off set, Coppola, who is fifty-two, dresses with understated elegance—Chanel slingbacks, collared blouses. Now she was wearing her only slightly less polished “set uniform,” gray New Balances and a black Carhartt fleece over a Charvet button-down. She led me through the hangarlike space and into the ersatz Presley home. The entrance was flanked by two large lion statues. In the gaudy living room, she pointed to a floral arrangement. “Those are real orchids,” she said. “It surprised me, with our budget. How extravagant.”
Coppola’s team had budgeted for forty days of shooting, already a squeeze, but at the last minute a piece of financing had fallen through, and she’d had to slash the story to be filmed in just a month, for less than twenty million dollars. Much of the movie is set in the Memphis summer, but they were filming as winter approached, which was cheaper, so Coppola had to coach her cast, shivering through outdoor scenes in their bathing suits, to “act warm.” Instead of filming two long shots she’d wanted in Los Angeles, of Priscilla driving a convertible down a palm-lined street and swan-diving into a pool, Coppola saved money by borrowing footage from a Cartier commercial she’d shot in 2018, with an actress who kind of looks like “Priscilla” ’s lead, Cailee Spaeny, at least from behind.
Whether set in a luxury hotel in Tokyo, like “Lost in Translation,” or in suburban Michigan, like “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola’s films are sumptuous but also slightly clinical. One of her œuvre’s visual hallmarks is a protagonist gazing out a window, sealed off from the world beyond. “You know I can’t resist a trapped woman,” she said. Yet, even when her female characters are confined, they achieve a degree of self-definition through adventures in style. No filmmaker has so astutely depicted the cloistered atmosphere of teen-age girlhood or the expressive power of its trappings. She is a master of the messy-bedroom mise en scène: piles of clothing and impractical shoes, poster-plastered walls, vanities cluttered with perfume bottles and porcelain figurines. The director Chloé Zhao, who won Best Director at the 2021 Oscars for her film “Nomadland,” told me that she admires Coppola for “world-building that isn’t just based on facts but on emotions.” She added, “There’s a receptivity to her work. To have a commitment to that kind of femininity is hard.” The director Jane Campion, who counts “The Virgin Suicides” among her favorite films, told me that Coppola’s light touch with actors and her attention to surfaces can be deceptive. “Her work is very powerful to me, because it’s got deep roots,” she said. But Coppola’s films have sometimes struck critics as longer on style than on substance, and too close to the privileges they depict to effectively critique them. A few months ago, Coppola sent me an e-mail, unprompted, in which she took issue with a notion that has resurfaced throughout her twenty-five-year career: “I don’t understand why looking at superficiality makes you superficial?!”
Coppola told me she could see herself, in an alternative life, as the editor of a magazine, “like Diana Vreeland,” who commanded Vogue in the sixties. Coppola is an avid curator of images and looks; Campion recalled that once, when they were both judges at Cannes, Coppola offered to help style her, and the next day two huge boxes from the luxury fashion brand Celine arrived at Campion’s hotel. Coppola begins every film project by gathering visual inspiration. In her makeshift office on the soundstage, she had covered a large bulletin board with imagery including the Presleys’ wedding photographs, a glamour shot of Priscilla as a teen-ager, and several William Eggleston pictures of an empty Graceland. There is a famous Bruce Weber photo of Coppola’s stylishly bestrewn home office at the time of “The Virgin Suicides,” and this workspace bore some resemblance. On her desk were pink Post-it notes, a Fujifilm Instax camera, and a half-burned Diptyque candle; on the floor lay wine bottles from the Coppola vineyard (which also makes a “Sofia” champagne that comes in tiny pink cans with individual straws). The director Quentin Tarantino, whom Coppola dated in the two-thousands, recalled her once showing him the look book for “Marie Antoinette.” “It was exquisitely put together, yet you could still tell it was handmade,” he said, “by the loving hands of a fine artist.” He went on, “She had a page of donuts with a pink glaze. I asked her, ‘What’s with the donuts?’ She said, ‘I like that shade of pink, and I want her sofa to have that quality.’ And when I saw the film, sure enough, I wanted to eat the goddamn furniture.”
When conceiving a film about Priscilla Presley’s unhappy marriage to Elvis, Coppola says, “I just thought about her sitting on that shag carpet all day.”Photograph by Kate Cunningham / Courtesy MACK
Coppola led me down a hallway to a room where the film’s costume designer, Stacey Battat, was floofing out Priscilla’s wedding gown, which Coppola had asked the fashion house Chanel to design for the movie as a favor. The dress, with a high-necked lacy bib, closely resembles the original, but among Coppola’s assets as a filmmaker is a preternatural aesthetic assurance, even when it comes to taking liberties with her source material. “I’ve always known what I like,” she told me. The opening shot of the film is a closeup of Priscilla’s feet stepping across a fuzzy expanse of shag carpet, which she made a rosy hue, though in the real Graceland there was no such rug. “In my mind, it was pink,” she told me. She hadn’t visited Graceland to prepare for the film, but a friend had taken a tour and had sent her a picture of poodle-print wallpaper. Coppola decided to re-create it for a shot in which Priscilla languishes in the tub, waiting for Elvis to return.
“It probably wasn’t in a bathroom in Graceland,” Coppola said. “But whatever.”
The lighting on set was dim. A playlist of songs, selected daily by Coppola to “set a vibe,” played over the sound system—Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, and the French indie-rock band Phoenix, which is fronted by Coppola’s husband, Thomas Mars, who is also a music supervisor for her films. In one corner, crew members were playing pickleball on a court that Coppola had insisted on installing during the first week of shooting. She had played in the crew’s tournament, and her team, the Smashers, won. “Pickleball paddles are so ugly,” she commented. “Maybe I’ll design a new line of them.”
Coppola told me that she learned from her father how to create “a warm set,” and borrowed from him a ritual he picked up in drama school: to kick off every production, stand with the cast and crew in a circle, hold hands, and recite the nonsense word “puwaba” three times. But the elder Coppola has what Eleanor, who has been married to him for sixty years, described to me as “an Italian approach—very theatrical, throwing stuff up in the air and screaming.” Sofia said that she finds such flourishes “so unnecessary.” The protagonists in her films tend to observe more than they speak, and Sofia comports herself in much the same way. The people who’ve worked with her, however, describe an impressive resolve beneath the diffidence. The actress Elle Fanning, who starred in “Somewhere” and “The Beguiled,” told me, “She doesn’t freak out, ever. She’s not going to scream at you across the room. But she’s unwavering.” Bill Murray, a star of “Lost in Translation” and “On the Rocks,” gave Coppola the nickname “the velvet hammer,” for her subtle stubbornness about getting her way.
Henley, the producer, who was sitting in a director’s chair near a video monitor, recalled a day when he and Coppola were scouting ice rinks for “Somewhere.” Coppola said of one, “This is great—um, where should we have lunch?” Afterward, Henley mentioned a few more possible rinks to visit, and Coppola looked puzzled; she’d already chosen. Henley told me, “I wasn’t able to read her softness as well as I can now.”
Coppola and her team were rehearsing a scene in the Presleys’ bedroom, where a large mirror hung behind the bed. Jacob Elordi, the actor playing Elvis, took his place on the King-size mattress, his six-foot-five frame nearly dangling over the edge. Spaeny, who was twenty-four but petite enough to pass for a teen-ager, hovered in the doorframe. The scene takes place shortly after Priscilla’s arrival at Graceland. She has gone shopping and bought a dress, but returns it after Elvis deems it unflattering. “Once again I’d compromised my own taste,” Presley writes of that moment in the memoir, which in Coppola’s world is the worst kind of fate.
Kathleen Turner told me, of working with Coppola on “The Virgin Suicides,” “She would never tell an actor what she wanted specifically, and, boy, that can be very tough.” She added, “Francis is a bulldozer, a very good bulldozer who knows what he wants. Sofia lets you do, and then lets you know if that’s what she wanted.” Elordi, who is twenty-six, told me he interpreted Coppola’s lack of instruction as a sign of trust. She cast him after meeting him just once. “Sofia never checked in before we were filming. She never texted or called about the voice or the look or the walk,” he said. When he arrived on set, excited to show Coppola the Elvis accent he’d been working on for months, she said, “Wow, you really look and talk like him,” and left it at that.
Coppola called, “Action!,” and Elordi looked at Spaeny: “What is that dress? It does nothin’ for your figure.” He glanced toward Coppola, who was standing with her cinematographer. “Was that all right, Sofia?” he drawled, remaining in character. “Should I be laughing at her? I don’t want to be too dramatic.”
“It was not too much,” Coppola replied. She paused and placed her hand on her chin. “It might have been a little Elvis-y.”
Francis’s life as a director was peripatetic, and he did not believe in leaving his family behind for more than ten days at a time. So the rest of the nuclear unit—Eleanor, Sofia, and her brothers, Roman and Gian-Carlo, or Gio—lived away from their home in Northern California for months, and sometimes years. One of Sofia’s first memories is of riding in a helicopter in the Philippines during the filming of “Apocalypse Now.” During the making of “One from the Heart,” when she was in the fourth and fifth grade, they relocated to L.A. After that, for “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish,” they went to Tulsa, Oklahoma. “We were circus people, basically,” she said. “I kind of mark my childhood by the movies.”
Coppola never excelled academically, in part because of all the moving around. She left one school before learning multiplication, and by the time she enrolled in a new one she’d missed the same unit. Coppola recalled, “I never really learned math, and I’m what they call a ‘challenged’ reader.” Anahid Nazarian, a researcher and producer who has worked with Francis for forty years, remembers a time when Coppola didn’t turn in a paper: “Her teacher said she had the best excuse, which was ‘I left it on the plane coming back from the Oscars.’ ” On matters of taste, though, Coppola was precociously fluent. She gave herself the nickname Domino and insisted that she be credited as such in several of her father’s pictures. While on the set of “One from the Heart,” she created her own publication, The Dingbat News, to distribute among the cast and crew. She collected photography and decorated her walls with pictures from foreign magazines. “I was the only girl in Napa Valley with a subscription to French Vogue,” she said. Francis described her as having “very, very big opinions” even as a little girl, adding, “It was never difficult to know what she preferred and what she didn’t prefer.” Francis’s best-known films took place in hypermasculine precincts—the Army, the Mob. Coppola was drawn to high-femme self-expression. At her parents’ dinner parties, she was always more interested in the “wives and girlfriends,” she said. “They had the best Bakelite jewelry.”
Francis recalled that he and Eleanor maintained a home base outside of Hollywood to create a semblance of normality for the kids. Nonetheless, many of the stories Coppola told me about her childhood took place in the world of famous adults: Richard Gere, a star of Francis’s “The Cotton Club,” swam in the family’s pool; George Lucas was “Uncle George”; Anjelica Huston assured Coppola that she would grow into her nose. One afternoon last year, during a visit to an L.A. bookstore, Coppola showed me a volume called “Height of Fashion,” a collection of notable people’s most stylish snapshots. Coppola had submitted a picture of herself at fourteen—gawky and beaming, with an asymmetrical haircut—sitting at the tony Parisian restaurant Davé next to the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. “He was a friend of a friend of my parents,” she said.
“Marie Antoinette” sharply divided critics. Some dismissed it as an ahistorical powder puff. Others thought it was a masterpiece.Photograph by Andrew Durham / Courtesy MACK
There is an old-world flavor to the Coppolas’ relationship to the family business: just as cobblers beget cobblers, movie people beget movie people. Roman, Sofia’s brother and frequent collaborator, is a filmmaker and has written screenplays with Wes Anderson. Talia Shire, who starred in the “Godfather” movies and the “Rocky” franchise, is her aunt. Her niece Gia has directed two features. Her first cousins include the actors Jason Schwartzman, whom she cast as a dweeby Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette,” and Nicolas Cage. Other Coppolas coach actors, write screenplays, make music, and produce or distribute films. Sofia ascribes the field’s popularity within the family to Francis’s contagious passion. “My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” she said. Even Francis’s father, a composer, ended up working on scores for his films, winning an Oscar (with Nino Rota) for “The Godfather: Part II.”
One member of the family who struggled to find her way in the business was Eleanor. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she has written, she described meeting Francis on the set of his début feature, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend, and Francis, as Eleanor put it to me, “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother.” She writes in “Notes” of a feeling of living in waiting—“waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct . . . waiting to go on location, waiting to go home.” (“At that point, I didn’t even know I could have a career, much less whether my wife would,” Francis said, by e-mail, adding, “I knew she was creative and from day one I always provided full time childcare and a studio for Ellie’s artwork.”) Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis is preparing to go on tour, while Priscilla will stay with their daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor told her, “I’ve been there.” Eleanor recalled to me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy,’ that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ Not one single person said to me, ‘You are a creative person.’ ”
With his daughter, however, Francis made a point of offering creative encouragement, including by exposing her, along with her brothers, to the technical aspects of filmmaking. “There’s a traditional Italian thing with women, but I wasn’t raised like that,” Coppola said. “I was raised the same as the boys.” She and her mother didn’t discuss the gap in their experiences at the time, and Coppola isn’t inclined to analyze the themes that she explores in her work. Roman told me, “I’ve never heard Sofia say, ‘I want to show this isolation through this thing.’ ” Francis has always advised her that filmmaking should be close to the bone—as he told me, “the more personal, the better.” But, when I asked about the personal element of her movies, Coppola often fell back on abstractions or let her sentences trail off mid-thought. (Other writers have speculated about whether her style of communication is cannily evasive or simply a natural product of valuing the visual over the verbal. “I think sometimes she gives people enough rope to hang themselves with just by not responding,” Fiona Handyside, a British film scholar and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood,” has said.) When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”
One morning last July, I met Coppola in the lobby of the Ritz Paris, where she was staying before a meeting about an upcoming line of garments she’d designed for the Scottish knitwear brand Barrie, which is owned by Chanel. (She told me that her dad, who has earned much of his fortune through wine and hotels, “taught us how to make money doing other things, so that you don’t have to count on the movies for that.”) Coppola and Mars spend part of the year in Paris, and she could have just stayed in her apartment across town. But the Ritz was closer to Barrie’s offices, near the Place Vendôme, and she relished the opportunity to hole up there by herself. “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere” portray hotels as sites of both listless suspension and electric potential. “I love an in-between place,” she said.
When Coppola was fifteen, in 1986, Francis arranged a summer internship for her at Chanel. A month before she was supposed to leave for Paris, Gio, her oldest brother, was killed in an accident. He was twenty-two and had been assisting his father on the film “Gardens of Stone,” set at Arlington Cemetery, and on a day off had gone boating with one of the film’s co-stars, Griffin O’Neal. While driving between two other boats, O’Neal drove into a towline that struck Gio. (O’Neal was replaced in the film and later charged with manslaughter, but was ultimately acquitted.) Francis’s producers offered to shut down the film shoot, but he wanted to press on. In her memoirs, Eleanor recalls his hope that keeping busy “would prevent the torturous reality of Gio’s loss from pervading every moment.” Roman, then a film student at N.Y.U., cancelled his summer plans to step into Gio’s job on the film, but Coppola’s parents decided that she should still go abroad. Eleanor told me, “She was right at that age where she was trying to pull away from me, and so I thought she needed to get away from home, and all the things that surrounded the aftermath, and, frankly, me as a mom.”
There is an old-world flavor to the Coppolas’ relationship to the family business: just as cobblers beget cobblers, movie people beget movie people. Roman, Sofia’s brother and frequent collaborator, is a filmmaker and has written screenplays with Wes Anderson. Talia Shire, who starred in the “Godfather” movies and the “Rocky” franchise, is her aunt. Her niece Gia has directed two features. Her first cousins include the actors Jason Schwartzman, whom she cast as a dweeby Louis XVI in “Marie Antoinette,” and Nicolas Cage. Other Coppolas coach actors, write screenplays, make music, and produce or distribute films. Sofia ascribes the field’s popularity within the family to Francis’s contagious passion. “My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” she said. Even Francis’s father, a composer, ended up working on scores for his films, winning an Oscar (with Nino Rota) for “The Godfather: Part II.”
One member of the family who struggled to find her way in the business was Eleanor. In “Notes,” the first of two memoirs she has written, she described meeting Francis on the set of his début feature, the horror film “Dementia 13,” in 1962. He was the director, she was the assistant art director, and she thought that they might work on films together for years to come. Instead, within a few months she found out she was pregnant with Gio. She and Francis were married the following weekend, and Francis, as Eleanor put it to me, “made it very clear that my role was to be the wife and the mother.” She writes in “Notes” of a feeling of living in waiting—“waiting for Francis to get a chance to direct . . . waiting to go on location, waiting to go home.” (“At that point, I didn’t even know I could have a career, much less whether my wife would,” Francis said, by e-mail, adding, “I knew she was creative and from day one I always provided full time childcare and a studio for Ellie’s artwork.”) Sofia described a time when her mother visited the set of “Priscilla” and observed a scene in which Elvis is preparing to go on tour, while Priscilla will stay with their daughter, Lisa Marie. Eleanor told her, “I’ve been there.” Eleanor recalled to me, “When Elvis said to Priscilla, ‘You have everything you need to be happy,’ that’s exactly what I was feeling at the time. I went to the psychiatrist and said, ‘Why am I unhappy?’ Not one single person said to me, ‘You are a creative person.’ ”
With his daughter, however, Francis made a point of offering creative encouragement, including by exposing her, along with her brothers, to the technical aspects of filmmaking. “There’s a traditional Italian thing with women, but I wasn’t raised like that,” Coppola said. “I was raised the same as the boys.” She and her mother didn’t discuss the gap in their experiences at the time, and Coppola isn’t inclined to analyze the themes that she explores in her work. Roman told me, “I’ve never heard Sofia say, ‘I want to show this isolation through this thing.’ ” Francis has always advised her that filmmaking should be close to the bone—as he told me, “the more personal, the better.” But, when I asked about the personal element of her movies, Coppola often fell back on abstractions or let her sentences trail off mid-thought. (Other writers have speculated about whether her style of communication is cannily evasive or simply a natural product of valuing the visual over the verbal. “I think sometimes she gives people enough rope to hang themselves with just by not responding,” Fiona Handyside, a British film scholar and the author of “Sofia Coppola: Cinema of Girlhood,” has said.) When I told Coppola about the feelings of stuckness that Eleanor had shared with me, and that seemed to percolate through Coppola’s films, she said, “I think so many people can relate to that, especially women.” Then she added, of her mom, “I’m sure seeing my first impression of womanhood as a woman who felt trapped, and her sadness, is related to the women in my films, more than to a side of myself.”
One morning last July, I met Coppola in the lobby of the Ritz Paris, where she was staying before a meeting about an upcoming line of garments she’d designed for the Scottish knitwear brand Barrie, which is owned by Chanel. (She told me that her dad, who has earned much of his fortune through wine and hotels, “taught us how to make money doing other things, so that you don’t have to count on the movies for that.”) Coppola and Mars spend part of the year in Paris, and she could have just stayed in her apartment across town. But the Ritz was closer to Barrie’s offices, near the Place Vendôme, and she relished the opportunity to hole up there by herself. “Lost in Translation” and “Somewhere” portray hotels as sites of both listless suspension and electric potential. “I love an in-between place,” she said.
When Coppola was fifteen, in 1986, Francis arranged a summer internship for her at Chanel. A month before she was supposed to leave for Paris, Gio, her oldest brother, was killed in an accident. He was twenty-two and had been assisting his father on the film “Gardens of Stone,” set at Arlington Cemetery, and on a day off had gone boating with one of the film’s co-stars, Griffin O’Neal. While driving between two other boats, O’Neal drove into a towline that struck Gio. (O’Neal was replaced in the film and later charged with manslaughter, but was ultimately acquitted.) Francis’s producers offered to shut down the film shoot, but he wanted to press on. In her memoirs, Eleanor recalls his hope that keeping busy “would prevent the torturous reality of Gio’s loss from pervading every moment.” Roman, then a film student at N.Y.U., cancelled his summer plans to step into Gio’s job on the film, but Coppola’s parents decided that she should still go abroad. Eleanor told me, “She was right at that age where she was trying to pull away from me, and so I thought she needed to get away from home, and all the things that surrounded the aftermath, and, frankly, me as a mom.”
Coppola’s book “Archive” includes behind-the-scenes photos from her films, including this one of her with her first daughter, Romy, on the set of “Somewhere.”Photograph by Andrew Durham / Courtesy MACK
When the film came out, Eleanor’s fears proved founded. In 1991, Coppola won two Razzie awards, for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star. Entertainment Weekly ran a cover story with the teaser line “Is she terrific, or so terrible she wrecked her dad’s new epic?” Whatever one thought of Coppola’s performance (Pauline Kael appreciated her “unusual presence”), the fracas lent a metatextual poignancy to Coppola’s final moment in the film, when, just before she crumples on the theatre steps, Mary looks at Michael and utters a disbelieving “Dad?” Francis later admitted to the Times, “The daughter took the bullet for Michael Corleone—my daughter took the bullet for me.” Sofia absorbed the bad press with characteristic sangfroid. “It was embarrassing to be so publicly criticized for ruining my dad’s movie,” she said, but “I wasn’t devastated, because acting wasn’t my dream.” She went on, “I think that the experience helped me as a director. I know how vulnerable it feels to be in front of a camera.” Kirsten Dunst, who starred in “The Virgin Suicides” at the age of sixteen, and later in “Marie Antoinette” and “The Beguiled,” recalled, of first working with Coppola, “I remember her telling me how much she loved my teeth. I thought I had crooked teeth, but she was, like, ‘They are so cute.’ She gave me confidence about things I didn’t necessarily have, and I’ve carried that with me.”
In the following years, Coppola had the kind of aimless early adulthood particular to the offspring of the Hollywood élite. She enrolled in ArtCenter College of Design to study oil painting but dropped out after a teacher told her she was “no painter.” She audited a course with the photographer Paul Jasmin, whom Coppola cites as “the first person outside my family who told me I had any taste.” She became something of an L.A. It Girl, making cameos in music videos and being featured in newspaper style sections. In interviews, she made blithe pronouncements. (Likes: Karl Lagerfeld, hot rods. Dislikes: bras, Twelve Steppers.) At twenty-three, she bought herself a black Cadillac Seville and dubbed it her “Mafia princess car.” She spent a lot of time floating around the pool at the Chateau Marmont, making use of her private key. In 1994, she launched a fashion line called Milkfed, which produced ironic items like a baby tee printed with the phrase “I ♥ Booze.” That same year, she and her friend Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of the director John Cassavetes and the actress Gena Rowlands, hosted a Comedy Central series called “Hi Octane.” (When I asked Coppola if she has any friends who don’t have celebrities for parents, she said, somewhat vaguely, “It’s definitely not, like, a through line with all of my friendships,” but acknowledged a special affinity for others who have “big macho powerful artist dads.”) The series, in which the pair undertook stunty adventures and interviewed their famous acquaintances, was cancelled after a few episodes. Francis recalled that Sofia once asked him, “Dad, am I going to be a dilettante forever?”
A breakthrough came when Coppola wrote a short film, called “Lick the Star,” about a clique of teen-age girls who revere, and then violently ostracize, their queen bee. Her cast featured some of her father’s associates, including Peter Bogdanovich as a school principal. The finished film, released in 1998, runs only thirteen minutes and is shot in black-and-white, but it contains the seeds of Coppola’s lush cinematic vocabulary. She told me, “I knew a little bit about photography, a little bit about clothing design, and a little bit about music. I was annoyed that I could never pick one thing. And then, when I made my short film, I realized it was a way to work with all of it.”
In New York, Coppola lives with Mars and their two teen-age daughters in a red brick town house whose narrow façade makes it look deceptively humble from the outside. One morning last March, she met me at the entranceway with the family’s golden retriever, Gnocchi, and guided me into a wide, white-walled living room. Coppola’s home décor, like her fashion sense, is classic with a whimsical feminine touch. The mantel over a gray marble fireplace held a large porcelain chinoiserie vase filled with an architectural array of pink roses and anemones. (They were high-end fakes.) A floor-to-ceiling bookcase was organized into sections on fashion, New York, photography, and French history. In between books she had wedged framed art works, including a drawing made by the director Mike Mills for the poster of “The Virgin Suicides” and a Polaroid of Princess Caroline of Hanover taken by Andy Warhol.
Coppola told me that her least favorite film to make was “The Bling Ring,” her fifth feature, because the world in which it’s set was out of synch with her own sense of taste. The movie—based on the true story of a group of L.A. high schoolers who robbed the homes of the rich and famous—was shot partly inside Paris Hilton’s mansion, where the camera gawks at throw pillows emblazoned with images of Hilton’s face and a “night-club room” equipped with a dancer’s pole. The film is a note-perfect millennial period piece, channelling the haywire intersection of celebrity worship and consumerism at the dawn of social media. But Coppola said, of its milieu of Ugg-boot-wearing teens and the reality stars they worship, “I wouldn’t call it hideous—that sounds snobby—but a big part of my motivation is making beauty.” To her chagrin, “The Bling Ring” is her daughters’ favorite among her movies. “They think it’s really glamorous and cool,” she said, then added, with a shudder, “They’ve started asking me for boot-cut jeans.”
She did not show me the girls’ bedrooms, but she later told me that she’s begun photographing their messes for posterity. “It’s like set dressing for one of my movies,” she said. The girls are forbidden to have public social-media accounts until they’re eighteen, but Romy, the older child, had a rogue viral moment last year, when—sounding, many observers noted, a bit like one of Coppola’s restless protagonists—she posted a plucky TikTok video saying that she’d been grounded for attempting to charter a helicopter with her dad’s credit card “because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend.” Coppola, who values privacy and the mystery it can afford, called the video “the best way to rebel against me.” (She seemed excited, though, to confirm that Romy had filmed a small speaking role in Francis’s upcoming movie.)
Coppola considers “Lost in Translation,” her second film, to be her most personal.Photograph courtesy Sofia Coppola / Courtesy MACK
Coppola had set out scalloped shortbread cookies on a dainty plate (“I love Italian fancy-lady dishes”) and a floppy stack of paper, the manuscript of a coffee-table book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” which she released last fall. The finished volume, as thick and pink as a slice of princess cake, is a scrapbook of Coppola’s career, with short, elliptical introductions to each film followed by a cascade of Polaroids, hand-written notes, contact sheets, script marginalia, costume sketches, and other ephemera.
The first chapter opens with a behind-the-scenes image of Dunst smiling in the grass of a football field. Coppola was in her early twenties when she read Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Virgin Suicides,” from 1993, about five adolescent sisters in nineteen-seventies Michigan, who languish under the strictures of their ultraconservative parents and all die by suicide in a single year. Coppola said that when she read the book she thought, I hope whoever makes this into a movie doesn’t ruin it. Then she realized that maybe she could be the one to do it.
Coppola had started writing the script before she learned that a pair of producers had already bought the rights to the book and were working with a male writer-director. “I could hear my dad saying, ‘Don’t ever try to adapt something you don’t have the rights to,’ ” she recalled. “He told me to move on to something else.” Instead, Coppola sent her script to the producers and asked them to consider her for the directing job should the current arrangement fall through. A year later, she got the call. “I was young and naïve and didn’t really know what I was getting into,” she told me, “but I was, like, ‘Shit, O.K., now I have to figure it out.’ ”
“Virgin,” filmed over a month in the summer of 1998, for a budget of four million dollars, was a remarkably assured début, from its opening shot: Dunst lingering on the hot street eating a cherry Popsicle, like a latter-day Lolita, as the synthy sounds of the band Air kick in. From there the film unfolds at an unhurried pace. The sisters’ sadness is scarcely externalized, but the creeping ooze of their despair pervades every frame, including a striking shot of a wooden crucifix with a pink lacy bra slung across it to dry. Eugenides formulated the story as a hazy memory, narrated by a chorus of neighborhood boys who idolize the sisters but know nothing of their inner lives. Coppola’s script used a single narrator and allowed the camera to peek into the private spaces where the boys could never go. “Archive” reproduces an e-mail she received from Eugenides in 1998, expressing concerns that the script lacked “the necessary support around that story, which of course means the boys, the passage of time, the disjunctive narrative, and the right tone.” (She also includes a recent message that Eugenides wrote in response to her request to print the letter, in which he says, “What a whiny little bitch I was in those days.”) The film premièred at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, but, according to Coppola, her American distributor, Paramount Classics, did little to promote it. “They thought teen-age girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it,” she said, adding, “It barely came out here.”
Coppola told me that every film she makes is a reaction to the one before. After “Virgin,” she wanted to work from an original story. She considers “Lost in Translation,” her next film, to be her most personal. She chose Japan as its setting based on trips she’d taken to promote her Milkfed line, and came up with the story of a twentysomething American woman, Charlotte, who bonds with a famous older actor named Bob at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. She wrote the script with Bill Murray in mind as Bob, then spent a year trying to track him down. (The actress Rashida Jones, a friend and collaborator of Coppola’s, recalled, “She had an assistant whose job it was to hold her phone and tell her if Bill Murray called.”) Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is smart but lacking direction. She tells Bob, “I tried taking pictures, but they’re so mediocre.” She is married to a hot-shot music photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), and she sits bored at the hotel bar as he schmoozes with Hollywood types.
At the time, Coppola was married to the director Spike Jonze, whom she’d met in the early nineties through her friends Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, of the band Sonic Youth. But the two were in the process of separating. Jonze released his own feature directorial début, “Being John Malkovich,” the same year that “The Virgin Suicides” premièred, and while Coppola’s film had a modest return his became an indie sensation. She recalled feeling, in their relationship, an echo of her mother’s experiences. Jonze and a few of his friends had discussed launching a directors’ collective, and, according to Coppola, they didn’t even invite her to join. “I don’t want to embarrass Spike and those guys,” she said. “I think it’s just about understanding the dynamic there, which was a very nineties, dudes’-club dynamic. I was going around with Spike to promote his films, and I was just kind of the wife.” (Jonze could not be reached for comment.)
She was surprised when “Lost in Translation” became a runaway hit, not only winning her an Oscar but earning more than a hundred million dollars worldwide on a four-million-dollar budget. “I thought I was writing this really indulgent piece,” she recalled. “I mean, who cares about some rich girl trying to find herself?” But audiences connected to the film’s fuzzed-out mood of dislocation and the tragicomic pleasures of two lost people finding each other for a moment in time. At the end of the film, Bob and Charlotte share a kiss, and he whispers something inaudible into her ear. “I never even wrote that line,” Coppola said. “Bill always said that it was something that should stay between them.”
There is an adage in Hollywood that actors want to win awards to boost their egos, whereas directors want to win awards to boost their budgets. After “Lost in Translation,” Coppola found herself courted by the major studios. The producer Amy Pascal, who was a top executive at Sony Pictures at the time, told me, “I was desperate to work with her.” When they met, in 2004, she asked Coppola what project she dreamed of making. Coppola answered immediately: “Marie Antoinette.”
Not long after the release of “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola had read an advance copy of a biography of the French queen, by the British historian Antonia Fraser, and had written to Fraser asking to option it. “I know I will be able to express how a girl experiences the grandeur of a palace, the clothes, parties, rivals, and ultimately having to grow up,” she wrote. “I can identify with her role of coming from a strong family and fighting for her own identity.” At first, Coppola endeavored to make her script biographically comprehensive, covering Marie Antoinette’s life all the way up to the guillotine. Fraser, writing later in Vanity Fair, recalled telling Coppola that the script seemed to lose energy in its final act, as if Coppola had been uninterested in “the mature woman’s tragic fate.” Fraser went on, “When she asked me lightly, ‘Would it matter if I leave out the politics?,’ I replied with absolute honesty, ‘Marie Antoinette would have adored that.’ ”
Coppola’s film, released in 2006, tells the story of the profligate, unfeeling monarch from the history textbooks as an intimate coming of age, following her from the time she was shipped to Versailles from her home in Austria as a fourteen-year-old peace offering between nations to her departure from the palace, nineteen years later, as the French Revolution set in. Coppola told me that she wanted to capture the idea of “the kids taking over the kingdom.” She allowed Dunst to retain her American accent and filled the film with anachronistic music and energetic montages, including a feverish shopping scene set to a remix of “I Want Candy.” (Roman, her brother, who shot most of the film’s closeups, planted a pair of Converse sneakers among the rococo mules.) When an angry mob grumbles about the queen’s infamous (and likely apocryphal) line “Let them eat cake,” Dunst tells her girlfriends, “That’s such nonsense, I would never say that!” The movie is almost obscenely beautiful; every shot has the composed lusciousness of a box of petits fours. The bracing opening sequence—Coppola has never missed on an opening shot—was inspired by a Guy Bourdin photograph of a model in repose: lounging in a petticoat, with an attendant massaging her feet, Dunst’s Marie swipes her finger through the frosting of a layer cake and then delivers the camera an insolent stare. When Coppola showed her father an early cut of the film, he advised her to give Louis XVI more lines. Like Eugenides, he was missing the male perspective. “I was, like, ‘Um, Dad, no,’ ” Coppola remembered, adding, “I honestly don’t care about anyone else’s point of view. Just hers.”
Coppola and Mars began dating during the film’s making. Mars, who was born and raised in the town of Versailles, recalled, “It’s like living in a museum. You can’t disturb anything. It’s not welcome.” With “Marie,” there was excitement in seeing Versailles “embrace something new.” But not all French people appreciated the result. At a press screening at Cannes, some viewers booed. Many critics dismissed the movie as an ahistorical powder puff, an impudent exercise in vibes-first filmmaking. Others thought it was a masterpiece. The response was so divided that the Times made an unorthodox decision to publish duelling reviews from its two chief movie critics. Manohla Dargis, in the “anti” camp, wrote, “The princess lived in a bubble, and it’s from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story.” For some, though, the film’s reception only reinforced Coppola’s claim to its thematic substance, as a woman who knows a thing or two about the distorting effects of public exposure. (One of her close friends, the fashion designer Marc Jacobs, told me, “It’s so easy to throw around these titles like ‘nepo baby.’ What do you do, kill yourself because you come from a good family? Do you just not make art?”) Roger Ebert saw the movie’s slim perspective as a strength: “Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.”
How one feels about Coppola’s narrow approach to storytelling might depend, in part, on where one stands in relation to her field of vision. When “Lost in Translation” came out, some Asian and Asian American critics took issue with the film’s depiction of Japanese culture through the eyes of Western visitors. Accented English was played in the movie for laughs. Tokyo establishments were portrayed as “superficial, inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible,” as Homay King, a film-studies professor at Bryn Mawr, wrote in Film Quarterly. King wondered what level of awareness Coppola had brought to this portrayal: Did the tone of bewildered Orientalism belong to her characters or to her? Coppola defended her depiction to the Los Angeles Times by saying, “My story is about Americans in Tokyo. After all, that’s all I know.” But she didn’t seem to reckon with the inherent sensitivities of depicting another culture from a distance. “I did wonder if all the ‘r’ and ‘l’ switching would be offensive,” she said back then. “But my crew thought it was funny.” (“It was a different time,” she told me. “I haven’t thought about how I would approach it now, but probably not in the same way.”)
“My father is just so into filmmaking that he thinks everyone should be doing it,” Coppola says.Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker
Coppola confronted a similar backlash more recently, to a movie set on American soil. “The Beguiled,” from 2017, is a remake of a 1971 movie that takes place during the Civil War, about a group of white Confederate women who are driven into an erotic fervor when a wounded Union soldier arrives at their boarding school in an isolated mansion. Both the original film and the novel on which it is based also feature an enslaved Black woman who works in the house. Coppola, fearful of perpetuating stereotypes, decided to omit the character altogether, and explained away the absence with dialogue at the beginning of the film: it was nearing the end of the war, and “the slaves left.” In the U.S., the release was dominated by discourse about the character’s erasure; at Slate, the writer Corey Atad lambasted the film for its “whitewashing of slavery.”
The fallout forced Coppola to consider that there are hazards to writing only what you know, or “leaving out the politics,” if doing so means waving away inconvenient complexities. The critic Angelica Jade Bastién, of New York and Vulture, told me, “What Coppola does best is also her greatest weakness: she creates fables about modern white femininity.” She went on, “Art is political whether the artist wants it to be or not. Coppola is someone studying whiteness, but who doesn’t perhaps understand her own whiteness very well. It is because of that contradiction that her work doesn’t get deeper.” Coppola told me, “I admit it was probably stupid to do something on the Civil War.” But she also suggested that her “creative license” with the source material had been “misinterpreted as insulting.” She’d been interested in portraying the unravelling of a group of cossetted women when there were no men around or slaves left to tend to them. “It’s the kind of world I like, really claustrophobic,” she said, adding, “They were so used to being taken care of, and they didn’t know how to do anything for themselves.”
During one conversation, Coppola confessed, “Sometimes I feel like I make the same film over and over, and I’m probably becoming a cliché of myself.” In some ways, “Priscilla” resembles her previous movies, but in contrast to a film like “Marie Antoinette,” with its baubles and brocades, the new film is strikingly joyless in its depiction of life inside a gilded cage. In part because Coppola was denied the rights to Elvis’s music, the exuberance of rock and roll is all but absent from the film. Priscilla interacts with Elvis mostly at home, where he’s dressed down, needy, and sporadically abusive. Through the murmurings of tertiary characters, Coppola laces the film with reminders of Priscilla’s tender age, which was troubling even if you believe, as Presley claimed in her book, that she and Elvis did not consummate their relationship until they were married, when she was twenty-one. One of the film’s strongest sequences shows Spaeny trying to occupy herself in Graceland while Elvis is away. She ambles around in a doll-like white dress and too-big matching heels. She tries out various seats in the living room and plunks a single key on Elvis’s baby grand. She is less a kid taking over the kingdom than a child left home alone.
Just as Coppola rarely concerns herself with events beyond her characters’ sequestered worlds, she doesn’t show what happens to the ones who escape the waiting room of their lives. The final shot of “Priscilla” shows Spaeny driving out of the gates of Graceland. We hear Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” both mournful and triumphant. Coppola has hinted at a desire to, as she put it in one interview, “grow up and do other subject matter,” beyond adolescence, but she gave me little sense of what that might look like, besides, perhaps, teaming up again with Dunst, who is now in her early forties. Coppola’s past films have romanticized the bonds between famous older men and younger women, but she told me that her attitude about such connections has shifted with the times. Her project before “Priscilla,” “On the Rocks,” from 2020, centered on a fortyish writer, Laura (Rashida Jones, who is the daughter of the music producer Quincy Jones), and her big-time art-dealer dad, Felix (Bill Murray). The character of Felix, whom Coppola said she based on her “dada and his buddies,” is a gregarious man of style, who wears silk scarves and considers caviar a road snack. He is also an attention hog prone to errant flirting and chauvinist soliloquies. “Somewhere” was tinged with nostalgic sweetness about fathers and daughters: Coppola had the film’s protagonists—the divorcé movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his eleven-year-old, Cleo (Elle Fanning)—order every flavor of gelato from room service, “which is just the sort of thing my dad would do,” and enlisted the Chateau Marmont’s late “singing waiter” Romulo Laki to serenade Cleo with Elvis’s “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” the same song that Laki used to sing to Sofia when she was young. “On the Rocks,” by contrast, is both funnier and pricklier, charting Laura’s struggle to define herself outside of her dad’s overwhelming orbit. Drinking a Martini at Bemelmans, Felix tells Laura that he is going deaf to the frequency of female voices. Laura yells at the end of the film, “You have daughters and granddaughters, so you’d better start figuring out how to hear them!”
Eleanor has often shot behind-the-scenes footage on Sofia’s films, as she did for Francis. She has eighty hours from the making of “Marie Antoinette,” which Sofia told me she’s helping turn into a documentary. In 2016, at the age of eighty, Eleanor also released her first feature, a comedy called “Paris Can Wait,” becoming the oldest American woman to make a directorial début. But lately Eleanor has been ill, and the family has been shuttling back and forth to her bedside in California. On Sofia’s birthday last year, which coincided with Mother’s Day, the two “sat in the hospital and ate tuna sandwiches,” Eleanor told me. Last October, “Priscilla” had its American première at the New York Film Festival. The strikes in Hollywood meant that there were almost no actors on the red carpets, but, because “Priscilla” involved no major-studio funding, Coppola was among the few directors given special dispensation to have her film’s stars do promotion. Elordi and Spaeny were at the première, but Coppola herself was missing. Henley, her producer, read a statement in her stead: “I’m so sorry to not be there with you, but I’m with my mother, to whom this film is dedicated.”
One recent evening, hundreds of Coppola fans lined up at a Barnes & Noble in central L.A. for an “Archive” book signing. Coppola is, as her daughters recently informed her, “big on TikTok,” and some Gen Z fans have taken to calling her “Mother,” an influencer to the influencers. (One viral video shows a young woman ranting about cleaning her room: “When a boy’s room is messy, it’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s filthy,’ ” she says, adding, “When a girl’s room is messy? It’s Sofia Coppola.”) At the bookstore, the crowd was largely made up of teen-agers, many of whom had donned costumes: gossamer pink tutus and oversized hair bows that evoked Marie Antoinette’s style; chokers with heart pendants like one Spaeny wears in the “Priscilla” trailer. One wore a vintage T-shirt by Milkfed, Coppola’s fashion line, which she sold years ago but which has, in recent years, become a cult brand among a new generation of fans, including the pop star Olivia Rodrigo.
A young woman wearing a skirt custom-printed with a still from “The Virgin Suicides” reached the front of the line and held her hand to her chest. “You literally invented ‘aesthetic,’ ” she said to Coppola, using slang for the kind of exquisitely curated look that teens strive for on social media. There was an amusing mismatch between the fans’ gushing and Coppola’s low-key energy. She did not say much more than a warm “oh, thank you” or “that’s so sweet” as she received their compliments.
Leaving the bookstore, at dusk, Coppola said that she was looking forward to ordering room service at the Beverly Hills Hotel, whose menu she knew from childhood breakfasts spent talking filmmaking there with her father. (The eggs Benedict is apparently first-rate.) We walked together toward a black car waiting for her at the curb. After the harsh fluorescent lighting in the bookstore, the L.A. streets looked pleasingly subdued. I pointed at the sunset, which was a shade of powdery pink.
“Oh, yeah,” Coppola said, her eyes moving lackadaisically toward the sky. “It’s a little like I directed it.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Jacob Elordi’s height and the year Sofia Coppola and Amy Pascal met.Published in the print edition of the January 29, 2024, issue, with the headline “Crème de la Crème.”
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