#I feel like it’s kind of similar to how I saw ink in bad buddy somehow
Note
Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.
That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.
But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)
Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.
This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:
There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.
This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.
I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW
I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.
Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.
If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.
I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom
There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.
Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.
(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)
Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.
(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the dancing penises sketch in person. She’s hilarious.)
Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.
From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!
In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]
I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime
From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).
There was already bad feeling about this. There were years of bad feeling about this.
I.c. Where are the historians?
Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with Textual Poachers and Enterprising Women. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics themselves have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but to this day I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.
There were years of bad feeling about this as well.
I.d. What kind of fan was I?
Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!
More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.
I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M
Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.
Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.
Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.
Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.
Shousetsu Bang*Bang was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.
In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.
While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.
II. AO3 Early Adopters
AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”
I literally could not give away the invitations I had. No one wanted them.
So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.
The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…
But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”
At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.
Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.
III. History of AO3’s Policy
I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.
I was overruled.
Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.
I was pissed. I had been pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain why.
(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)
I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not normal fanfic.”
So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.
I was furious. The entire point of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.
If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.
I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like anthropomorfic.
Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.
That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it.
Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.
Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was damned if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)
After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.
This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.
IV. What Were They So Afraid Of Anyway?
So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?
Not exactly.
I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:
I just don’t get why it would be allowed. It never was in my fannish spaces.
Most of our members don’t want this.
Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.
AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.
Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.
If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.
If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.
These arguments all make perfect sense in context.
Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.
The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.
OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.
AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.
The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans actually behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.
The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.
AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.
As for fan art… OTW has failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.
OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.
But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.
BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.
Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.
V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?
Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.
But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?
It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:
Schema 1
Fanfic - based on someone else’s IP
Original Work - the opposite
Schema 2
Non-Fannish Work - School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher
Fannish Work Type 1 - based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) Type 2 - based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)
Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.
VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time
So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.
On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:
Big US TV fandoms in English
Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.
Americans
On the other side:
Anime fandom
“Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere
People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.
People upset about US-centrism in fandom
Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.
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ARMY ZIP drabbles
JOURNEY
you and joon have been pretty close friends since you first came to this new highschool. your family has been moving around a lot, so you never stayed long in any schools, until this one.
your mom eventually got to know namjoon’s mother and they became friends as well.
there were always some activities for your class, and one day it was a trip for the whole day, where teachers took all of you to the place that was very similar to some kind of jungle.
it was no surprise to find this type of surroundings in australia, so nobody was really super stoked by it.
but the exciting part was, that your main partner for the day was joon, and together you’d get lost, just enjoying each other’s company.
to avoid punishment, joon took the situation under his control and called the teacher in charge, bluntly lying about the fact that you two have gone home already. you two didn’t mind spending more time together, especially in this beautiful scenery.
after all you’d find your way out of there and joon would walk you home from the bus station, because it already got dark, and he would give you his grey jacket, because you said under your breath a silent, “how much colder can it be..”
your mom was waiting for you on the porch already - pretty mad - and joon took all the blame on himself, apologising and saying that you two got lost because of him.. she actually forgave the both of you and even invited joon to stay for a cup of tea.
the whole time beside the dinner table you couldn’t take your eyes off him, and he did the same, captivating your eyes with his..
in the hall you were just simply talking about how much fun the whole day was and you both ended up in a warm hug towards the end of your conversation.
since you’re both still underage, your mom makes a firm statement that she will drive namjoon to his own home and as you waved him goodbye you were smiling, because.. damn, he forgot to take his jacket back from you. and you couldn’t help yourself but realise that it smelled just exactly like him.. like home.
PERFECT
yoongi was this perfect friend. you didn’t know him for too long, but it didn’t matter. your personalities clicked and you started to spend a lot of time together.
he was the best baseball player in the whole school and you were fortunate enough to always be by his side, whenever some victory happened.
but what you missed on - in the early stages of your friendship - were the losses, the bad things that happened.
one day you were just passing by the slightly opened door of the changing rooms, when you heard a slight whimper.
you immediately stopped and carefully peeked through the crack, trying to inspect who’s inside.
you saw light hair and a small posture, crouched on the floor near the lockers, shuddering their shoulders, with arms wrapped around their knees, as they desperately tried to hide the sounds that sometimes escaped their lips.
it didn’t take you long to realise who it was..
“yoongi?..” you called, softly, opening the door further and making your way inside.
“i fucked it up.. i fucked it all up,” was all he said, burying his head even tighter to his knees.
so he wasn’t perfect, after all, huh? everyone kept painting yoongi as this cold and professional kid, but they just never got to see the more emotional and vulnerable side of him.
perhaps he didn’t let them see it.
didn’t want them to see it.
but he let you. and when you dropped down on the floor next to him, consoling him and patting his hair, he let you.
when you leaned towards him, he started to cry even harder, letting his emotions out, and finally felt how it was to be truly supported by someone.
that’s what true friends do, right? being here for each other in good and bad times.
ZOMBIE
it was the end of it all. the world has gone insane since last week, when a massive zombie virus broke out... somehow.. to the whole world.
Nobody knows exactly what or how it happened, but even though everyone was fairly “educated” on the apocalypse matter from all the movies and books, loads of people were still getting turned on a daily basis.
in other words, it was terrifying, and not as adventurous as in the fiction.
you were fortunate enough to find yourself, after days on the road, in the abandoned house, still filled with some leftover foods around.
you just did your evening routine and came back to your “room”, where you stood by a small window, looking out and trying to concentrate your attention on the lightest of sounds.
and you finally heard it. a zombie was approaching from the hallway, their grunting clear as day for your careful hearing.
you had no weapon, no help around..
you didn’t know exactly what was your plan, but.. something will have to do.
you grabbed the nearest brick into your palm and squeezed hard, getting nervous.
the undead person already came into the view, feeling your presence and moving in your direction.
when there were only a few meters between the two of you, the gunshot blazed through the air.
the body fell to the floor and you saw a man standing in the hallway, rifle in his strong hands.
“hey.. you okay?” a man said, fixing his freshly dyed purple hair.
“yeah..”
“good. i think you could use a friend in this apocalypse,” a man smirked and gave you a bag with some food, by this making a peace pact between you.
STREET
hoseok was an international student from korea, who was studying art and dancing majors.
you were friends for some time already, but both of you never had time to actually hang out outside of the school grounds.
you were into filmmaking and your study hours were crazy, to say the least.
but finally, summer holidays were approaching. you didn’t make any plans, because most of your friends went travelling, and your buddies from the dorms were supposed to leave to go back to their lovely families.. you just didn’t have that.
one of the final days of the semester before the big break, you were just wandering around the campus, finally having nothing to do, after months of hard work..
and suddenly your phone rang. it startled you, on the screen showing “hoseok” with his number underneath it.
you picked it up, of course.
“hey, are you in town?” you heard an exciting tone on the other end.
“yes, actually..”
“wanna hang out? come to that park near the school, in 20 minutes?”
and it was settled. when you dragged your ass over there, you came perfectly on time and hoseok was already waiting for you, sitting on top of the many big cans that were laying around here.
he simply handed you the graffiti colour. you couldn’t help yourself but to make a surprised expression, but took the paint anyways.
“let’s create something!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet and started to dance around, filling the walls with some slogans and pictures of all sorts.
he noticed you hesitating at first, and gently put his elegant hand on your back.
“heyy, don’t be afraid, it’s my first time with this kind of medium too! i just figured we could do something for the first time together and not worry about the result that much, most important thing is just having fun, isnt it?” he smiled at you warmly, and you just couldn’t help it and put your arm towards the wall, spraying his name on it.
YOUNG
it was one of those days, when everything seems quiet, slow and kind of lazy.. it was just another weekend in your small city, far far away from all the excitement of the bigger metropolis.
you were fortunate enough to meet one of the closest people in your life here, though.
you came over to jimin’s place, as you have previously agreed on.
he made you some tea. kettle boiled in the silence of his apartment and you smiled at each other, when he picked your favourite kind.
you knew each other well. and jimin knew even better about your current struggles, as of the problem that you’re trying to become a tattoo artist, but it wasn’t quite working out yet.
he was always trying to help and make things better.
so when you ended up in his room, he took out a marker from his pencil-case and showed it to you, excitedly.
“what should i do with it?” you chuckled, but sadness still prevailed on your face.
“draw on me,” he simply said and put the tool firmly into your hand, “imagine i’m the canvas and you’re about to ink my skin.”
“okay..” it seemed a little weird and embarrassing at first, but after a while you both got fully into it and your passion literally blossomed in front of his eyes and reflected there as beautiful sparkles.
“youth?..” he asked, looking at his arm, with a genuine warm smile.
“youth. let’s never forget about this. when we’re still young, you know?” you smiled and then jimin started laughing with his angelic voice.
“i like it! write more, please..”
you ended up writing things like “i me”, “happy song :)” and a big “nevermind” in some really rough, but pretty font on his ribs.
“i really like this one..” jimin said, truly amazed.
and a few years later, after you’ve finally made it out of the small town and owned your own tattoo studio, jimin came with a request of nevermind on his ribs.
MAFIA
it was really risky to try and accomplish this mission and you knew it.
there were literally myths and stories going around this mafia, especially their leader.
nobody never described how he looked, just that he was ruthless and never spared their enemies.
all the other heads of gangs had exceptions for some people, but not him.
and when you were caught, illegally transporting some dangerous.. “items” by one of his people, you were immediately captured. this wasn’t supposed to happen and now you knew your fate.
you were held hostage for some days, but now you’re finally on the way to meet the master head behind all of this.
you were pushed into this luxurious room, doors closing loudly behind you. but it was empty..
after the uncomfortable silence the backdoor of this strange place opened and you saw him come in.
his expression was grim and intimidating, but changed in a heartbeat when your eyes met.
“taehyung?..” your voice cracked in between the pronunciation of his name and you were just.. astounded.
you were close friends until last two years, because you suddenly lost contact with each other.
“are you okay?” he immediately rushed to you, uncuffed your hands and wrapped you in a warm hug, dropping his stern facade this instant. in that second all your memories from when you were younger and just having fun together popped up in your head and you couldn’t help but only hug him tighter.
when you pulled away after a while, you cupped his cheeks with your hands and stared into his eyes, “how the fuck did you get into all of this mess?”
you just wanted him to stay this innocent and pure boy you always knew..
“i should ask you the same thing then,” he frowned his brows and pouted.
“i guess we’ll have to figure it out somehow..” you turned your head towards the doors, that slowly clicked as someone was clearly ears dropping you.
“now it’s only you and me, partner.”
MESSENGER
you were just an ice cream truck worker, giving out yet another frozen treat to a happy family in front of your face.
ugh. you didn’t like your job one bit. but what can you do in summer, when you don’t have enough money from your usual income like drawing or writing articles, right?
next second you look up from your phone and another customer is standing there.
“can i get some ice, please? just ice,” he says firmly and tries to keep up a smile, but it breaks a few times, because the man looks genuinely injured on the side of his head.
“are you sure? you should call a doctor for that-“
you can’t even finish your sentence when he just pulls his hand into the ice-cubes container himself and pushes it against his temple, part of the ice melting and some of it falling down.
suddenly he’s checking his phone and then frantically looks around, not loosing his cool image.
then his eyes dart back at you and he says,
“do you think i can hide behind the truck? you’d still stand there so its not suspicious that the truck is here by itself?”
he really seemed to be in a hurry, so you just nodded your head yes and he was already crouching next to you, in a still position.
soon a group of bulky men appeared, coming to you and asking if you havent seen a younger guy with longer brown hair, tattoos and piercings. you have, and he has been hiding just next to your legs.
“no, i’m sorry,” you said with an innocent smile and eventually they went away.
when the air was clear, the man finally stepped away and most adorable smile appeared on his face. he was holding a small transparent package, full of white crystals.
from all the happiness he kissed the package and then patted you a little awkwardly on the shoulder.
“thank you so much for covering me. i’m jeongguk, by the way,” he stretched his tattooed arm towards you and you shook hands.
“can i get an ice cream now?” he said, a little bit embarrassed, as he stood in front of the truck now, like a normal customer.
#namjoon x reader#seokjin x reader#yoongi x reader#hoseok x reader#jimin x reader#taehyung x reader#jungkook x reader#bts x reader#bts fanfic#bts fanfiction#bts army zip#army zip#army zip 2020#bts drabble
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Lunch Buddy: Chapter Seven
Masterlist
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Overall Story Facts:
Fandom: MCU Captain America/Avengers
Story Summary: Steve Rogers makes a friend. A prickly, generally people-averse friend, but they’ll both take what they can get.
Quick Facts: Friendship (/Eventual Romance) – Steve Rogers & Reader (leading to Steve Rogers/Reader) – Female Reader
Story Warnings: Reader-insert that verges on OFC, written in 1st person past tense
Chapter 7: Bi Association
Chapter Summary: An accidental assumption leads to an emotional conversation. Being disasters is both a good and terrible thing to have in common.
Chapter Warnings: Talk of coming out, mentions of homophobia, mentions of past Steve/Bucky and past Steve/Peggy
Chapter Word Count: 3669
A/N: So at the beginning of the story I warned Reader/OFC is very definitely bisexual and that really comes into play here. I think this chapter was one of the ones that pushed me to keep OFC as an option for this story because coming out (or not) is a really personal thing. ‘Not all bi folk’ and whatnot. Otherwise, please enjoy these two doofs being terrible with real actual Emotions.
Job hunting was annoying, but surprisingly fruitful.
“Are you sure everything’s all right?” Steve asked.
“Yeah. Why?” I asked and looked at him.
“Your playlists are a little…” He gave the next word a lot of thought. “…Heavy. Lately.”
Poor sweet summer child, I thought. Apparently Lamb of God had taught him nothing. “You said you like Rise Against.”
“I do.”
“So we’re branching out,” I said and went back to my doodling. “Slowly but surely, we’ll get you to branch out even more.”
“I guess– wait. ‘Slowly?’”
“How about you?” I asked, focused on my crummy little tree. “You’ve been a little out of it this week.”
I thought he’d brush me off. Instead I got silence. I lifted my head again and did a double-take at the way he stared at…well, nothing that I could see. After a few seconds he shook it off– literally. “It’s nothing. I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t you have to go soon?”
I frowned at him. “If you don’t want to talk about it it’s okay; you don’t have to–” I caught sight of my phone and the clock numbers thereon. I jumped up. “Fuck!”
“I’m just trying to help,” he said calmly, and he held onto the rickety table while I threw my shit together. “It seems like you’re more reluctant to go back to work these days.”
Of course he noticed. But then, it was hard to be subtle when I dreaded ever seeing my boss in fear of him asking about how ‘It’ was going. I sighed, slung my bag on my shoulder, and faced Steve. “Work is…work. It gets like this sometimes.” I shrugged like it was nothing. “So if you’re ever looking for someone willing to be chucked at an evil alien or something…”
“I have your number,” he said, smiling at me, and I saluted and ran out.
~
There wasn’t much smiling over the next few days. For either of us. On at least two of those days I was setting up follow-ups and moping about being rejected from the perfect job. And on a day after that I went through most of my lunch break before I noticed that I had hardly spoken to Steve at all.
I then noticed that he was abnormally silent. He sat with his back even closer to the wall and had his sketchbook tilted up so that he was ensconced in his own little world. I watched him for a while. He ignored me and showed an unnerving lack of emotion. No concentrated frown or unhappy scowl, just…nothing.
“Hey,” I said gently. His hand slowed to a stop and after a deep breath he looked at me. Under such a dead stare I almost floundered– was it really my business?– but I managed to spit out, “Are you…okay?”
I should have asked him how he was but that was a mistake I realized too late. “Yes. I’m fine,” he said and went back to his dead-faced drawing.
I didn’t know how to follow up and it was very blatant that he didn’t want me to, so I went to put my second earbud in.
“But…thanks for asking.”
I hesitated but Steve showed no physical sign of having said anything. But just the words, even flat as they were, made me breathe a sigh of relief as I put my headphones in. Something was better than nothing.
~
We went through the same routine for the next several days. The next time I came in after that, though, he was sitting with a book, his sketchpad shut and sitting next to him, and at least an inch between his back and the wall.
Still, I was wary. “Hey,” I said as I sat down.
“Hi.”
He sounded…not normal, but not bad. Not exactly. Distant, sort of, in a way that I didn’t know if talking to him would be bothering him. But then his eyes flicked up and I tried to think of something to say. An apology for staring would have been nice, but a coherent string of non-creepy words didn’t make it from my brain to my mouth.
“I, um…” I held back a sigh and tried to think, damn it. It took me a bit but Steve waited patiently for me to spit it out. “I know I keep asking how you’re doing, and I-I don’t want to be annoying, so I’m– I’m fine to keep asking, if that’s okay with you, but…but it’s okay if you don’t want me to keep asking. I won’t be offended.”
He gave that some thought. “Is it selfish that I like being asked even though I don’t really want to answer?” he said at last.
“Personally I don’t think so,” I said. “But I also don’t think it’s bad to be a little selfish sometimes.” If he did, I didn’t know why in the world he ever associated with me.
His smile was small and sad. “I’m more selfish than most people want to believe.”
“Everyone is,” I said. “I know it might not be comforting, but…at least you're not alone?”
“In some ways,” he said, staring at his sketchbook. He rested his hand on it, slightly curved and gentle fingertips moving over it with short, light, absent strokes.
I was curious but I didn’t want to ask. Well, not directly. “Are you working on a project?”
He glanced at me and then looked back down at it. And kept looking.
“If you want to tell me to butt out–”
“I don’t.”
I shut up. Steve looked around the shop like he was checking for lurkers and eavesdroppers, but there was no one even close that I could see. He beckoned me to come closer so I hopped over to the chair next to him and scooted in.
He opened up his book to a portrait that was downright breathtaking. A man’s face was lovingly rendered in a mix of pencil and ink, and while the style was similar to Steve’s other drawings, it was so incredibly different just in the obvious amount of time and care spent on it.
“James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve murmured, moving his hand to rest right next to the sly smile and fondly shining eyes. “Bucky. He was…my best friend; he was…”
The thing was– I was not completely ignorant of Steve’s past. He had been a very important figure in history: medical miracle, war hero, and walking tragedy. He had never caught my attention because the textbooks always made him sound so noble and red-blooded American male and boring. But I’d had a classmate-kind-of-friend who had been obsessed with him for a period of time and so I knew some things just by osmosis.
I had thought that, at least, but I really should have considered the source that information had come from. Anything school had fed me had gone in one ear and out the other but my sorta-friend had, at one point, gotten my attention with an aside about Steve likely being involved with his ‘best friend’ Bucky. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time beyond ‘good for him’ but years of being (lurking) in certain communities on the internet had really made it seem like a true-but-generally-unspoken thing. That, and the fact that he had said nothing because he was too busy stroking the drawing, made it pretty damn clear to me.
So I thought nothing of it when I tried to fill in the blank with, “Your boyfriend?”
It was…the absolute wrong thing to say.
Steve’s head snapped up and his face changed through expressions almost too fast to name– shock was one, anger was another, then–
“What did you say?”
His voice was not stern, or scolding, or panicked. It was…chilling. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, but it scared me. I couldn’t even swallow, my mouth was so dry. “I–I’m sorry; I didn’t–”
He leaned in close. I leaned back, but I could only go so far. “Where did you hear that?” he said low and glanced around the room.
I became vaguely aware of the world around us and, thankfully, we were completely unnoticed. I breathed a sigh of relief but I still felt shaky. The guy could give a death stare like no one’s business. “It’s okay, no one heard–”
“Where?!”
I didn’t know how to answer that, though I scrambled to try, only to be cut off by the buzzing alarm on my phone. I cringed and tried to shut it up. I’d rather be late for my crappy job than leave things like this. “I– S-so I–”
“Go.”
Steve’s voice was dispassionate and calm and he sat back in his seat. He kept his eyes on the table and his hand lay flat on the sketchbook’s cover. I was frozen, stunned by his coldness, but he ignored me. I packed up, feeling sick and miserable, but before I left I stopped and tried to apologize. He glared at me with eyes that looked full of hurt, so I tucked my tail between my legs and ran.
~
It was evening and I was just settling in to be sad and pathetic and rue the day I ever spoke to anyone ever when my phone alerted me to a message. Only one person texted me without calling first, and after going through my work day in a state of constant near-tears while I replayed that moment over and over in my head, I was too fucking tired to deal with him just yet.
My phone buzzed again though. And again. On the way off-chance that it was my boss with a work emergency, I reached out from the Blanket Pit of Misery to grab my phone from the coffee table. I almost wished it was my boss when I saw Steve’s name.
However.
Steve: This is going to sound forward
Steve: But can I come over?
Steve: Or can you come to my place
I raised both eyebrows. Thankfully, the next parts came quick.
Steve: I’m sorry for today
Steve: And this conversation shouldn’t happen in text
Steve: Or public
I sat up and stared at the screen. On one hand: ‘I’m sorry’. On the other hand: an in-person conversation. Ugh.
Me: I don’t want to fight
His response was immediate and came in a flood.
Steve: We won’t
Steve: I promise
Steve: I didn’t mean it; I panicked
Steve: And I’m sure you already figured out why
Steve: But I need to explain it
Steve: Please
I was really tired. But I knew that panic.
Me: How the hell do you text so fast
I sent him my address and spent his travel time trying not to freak out. When he knocked, I started to freak out about the mess. I shoved the blankets to the corner of the couch and grabbed empty cups to dump in the kitchen sink on my way to the door. I then stood there for a second to give myself a once-over– lounging clothes, but clean, and I was mostly decent, so I opened the door before I could chicken out. Steve’s eyes were cast down and he was hunched over into his usual brown leather jacket. He lifted his head in my general direction but didn’t really look at me but for occasional glances. He looked about how I felt.
“I guess misery doesn’t love company,” he said lightly.
I rolled my eyes and stepped back so he could step in. “You're not nearly sadistic enough to know,” I said and shut the door behind him. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No thanks. I think I’m going to throw up.”
I had been going to the fridge but at that I stopped and turned to face him. Steve was still hunched and seemed to be shrinking more with every second. I took a step forward and stopped when he flinched. “Hey,” I said gently. “It’s not the 40’s anymore; I’m not going to turn you in.”
“Don’t joke about that,” he muttered.
“I’m not!”
I hadn’t meant to be so loud– even Steve looked surprised enough to have a spark of life again. But he was standing up and I had his attention, so I ran with it. “I wasn’t making a joke of it before and I’m not making a joke of it now,” I said, because I had to make him understand. Somehow.
“I know you weren't joking before.” He fell back onto the couch, which creaked. “It made it…worse.”
I opened my mouth but he held up his hand. I waited, but when he took longer to compose himself I slowly walked over and perched on the edge of the other end of the couch. I felt so stiff I probably would have been more comfortable if I had remained standing, but the silence was so absolute that getting up would be too disruptive.
“Some people knew,” he said, so softly that I leaned in closer on instinct. He raised his voice a little. “Nobody talked about it. Ever. We were…as careful as you possibly could be when you love someone that much.”
He didn’t look at me. I didn’t move. I wanted to…reach out, put an arm around him, do something, but I didn’t know if we were quite there yet. Or if he was okay with being touched at all.
“Peggy definitely knew,” Steve said, staring at the floor but obviously not staring at the floor. “And after Bucky…fell…she–”
Steve turned his face away and wiped it. I scooted closer and put my hand on his arm. He didn’t pull away, so I stayed, but I was stock-still, afraid that if I moved an inch in either direction he’d push or pull or run.
He faced forward again with a dry face and his throat pulsed with his swallow. “I loved her too,” Steve said. “I could have– if I had made it out, we could have been happy, you know?” His smile was sad and wistful and his eyes shone just a little too bright. “I like to think so, anyway. Peggy was never disturbed by it. Sometimes even made some comments that, I think, if we had all made it out…”
He shook his head and got to his feet. “Bisexual,” he blurted out. He kept his back to me and barely glanced back. “I like that; it– it suits me. I think.” He turned to face me. “But I’m not…out. Obviously.”
I nodded. My heart was racing and the more he stared at me the harder it hit my chest, the harder it was to say something. But he took a slow step back, said, “Sorry, I shouldn’t have–” and then he stared to leave and I couldn’t, I couldn’t leave that there. No matter what it meant for me.
“I’m not out either!”
He stopped right at the door. I was almost not breathing when he looked at me sharply, but apparently having very obvious heart failure attested to my earnestness, because his eyes widened and his hand slipped from the knob. I swallowed and sympathized with how he’d had such a hard time with it. I felt like I was swallowing an egg-sized rock. But then he was utterly silent, so I asked, “Well? Does misery love company now?”
He flinched. “That’s not something to be miserable about.”
I shrugged, because that was easy to say, wasn’t it? He shifted from one foot to the other and looked extremely uncomfortable. It took me a moment to realize why that might be. “Yes,” I said and he nearly jumped. “We can be closeted bi besties.”
“I didn’t…mean to make you come out. I just–” He ran his hands over his face and through his hair. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess right now.”
“Just right now?” I asked. He actually made a sound that was kind of like a laugh. I sighed. I felt almost completely drained, but at least the hard part was done and over. “Take off your jacket and sit down,” I said and went to the fridge. “I don’t want you to break down in a cab or something.”
“I drove.” But Steve shrugged off his jacket and threw it on the coffee table as he sat back on the couch. “Motorcycle.”
“Even worse.” I brought back two water bottles and set one in front of him before I dropped onto the cushion right next to him. “I’m not gonna be the last person to see you before you wrap yourself around a pole.”
“I’d survive it.”
That was way too flippant and I couldn’t be trusted to touch it without also getting darker than I felt comfortable with. “Well, I’m sure you have a nice bike that doesn’t deserve that.”
We both sat in awkward silence. He picked at the paper wrapping and I chewed on the bottle rim, occasionally consuming some water by accident just because the damn thing was so full. “I’m sorry,” Steve said quietly. “That could have gone better.”
I put the bottle down. “Coming out is always awkward.”
“Even for you?” he asked and lowered his voice for, “Even now?”
“There’s always going to be someone, always,” I said. “And some that do it because, uh…they care, and they think it’s safer if you just… But– the times I’ve come out, I don’t regret it. Even when it blew up in my face. I never– I just don’t trust people, and sometimes I’m scared of what that makes me, of how detached I get, in the interest of keeping myself safe. I’m glad that, sometimes, even I can still trust people. Even if it’s just a little bit.”
I didn’t really expect anything, but of everything, I really didn’t expect Steve to turn his body and hug me so suddenly I went “oof!” He didn’t hold tight though, so I crossed my arm over to my shoulder to pat his hands awkwardly. And then, because he was hugging from my side and I couldn’t really return the gesture, I slipped my other arm around his back.
“Me too,” he said and let me go. “I’m…glad you can trust me with that.”
“Same,” I said. “Even if it was unintentional. I’m sorry; even if I was right I shouldn’t have said it like that. I know how that heart attack feels, so– I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” he said. He still sounded utterly miserable though.
I nudged him. “I promise I won’t say anything. It’s no one’s fucking business, right?”
He breathed. “In theory,” he said. He lifted his head and stared at nothing. “I’m going to have to make it be, though.”
Considering the guy couldn’t come out to defenseless old ‘tries not to talk to anyone else ever’ me without freaking the fuck out, coming out to the world seemed like a leap. “Why?”
He didn’t answer at first; he just sat there clenching his jaw so hard I was afraid he’d break his teeth. Then he stood up and paced, but from the marching motions it didn’t look like it helped much. Granted, my apartment was only so big and he couldn’t get a good stomp going, but still.
“I wasn’t going to,” he said and stopped. “I thought I could get around it, brush off interview questions and just act stupid. But then…” The muscles in his neck rippled with his swallow. “I was talking to this kid one week. They were so sweet, and they had a– a rainbow flag pin on their bag. I wanted to compliment it, but they saw me looking and covered it up. Then they made some excuse and left.”
He just stood there, but when I tugged at his shirt he plopped right down next to me. “They didn’t want to know,” I said softly, because as much as it sucked for him, I could really sympathize with that kid.
“And I hate it,” Steve spat like he was full of bile. “I hate trying to skirt those questions, I hate that the people who would have beaten me to death before the war look at me like they think I’m on their side; I hate that anybody like me is afraid to ask anything other than ‘are you okay that I exist.’” He sighed. “Most of all, I hate that I’m such a fucking coward I haven’t just said it yet. I need to, for my own sanity, but it’s…terrifying.”
I wished there was something I could say, something smart, or comforting, or even just kind. However I had a big load of nothing, so I just kept my arm around him and hoped it was enough that I was there. I hoped that he knew I understood.
He sat there, silent, but he didn’t leave, and eventually I got an idea. “Hey,” I said and got up. “Since you’re here, come on; I’m gonna show you how to play a video game.”
He didn’t protest, and even let me tug and shove him around until he was sitting on the edge of my bed and holding the controller in his ridiculous bear paws. “Fuck, your hands are big,” I said and eyed them. Maybe this was a bad idea. “You’ve got a gentle touch, right?”
He looked at me and made his lips a flat line. “You’ve seen me use tablets and phones.”
“Okay, point,” I said and settled in as the system loaded.
“I mean, I broke a half dozen of each before I got the hang of it, but I’m sure it won’t take me that many this time.”
I glared at him and he smirked, the little shit. As the starting screen came up I sat back. “Well,” I said. “At least if you break my controller you won’t have to worry about that pesky ‘coming out’ bullshit.”
He laughed.
It was probably good that he thought I was joking.
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#steve rogers x reader#steve rogers & reader#captain america fanfic#avengers fanfic#reader insert#lunch buddy
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If you still have writing prompts open can you please write one about Boris and Henry's first actual reaction to one another and the time they spent together right before Ch.3 starts? Did they freak out? Were they chill? How did they first reach the Safehouse? That kind of thing.
Sorry this took so long. I really did like this idea.
Henry’s first thought upon encountering Boris was ‘thank god, someone sane’. Boris, even in the cartoons, wasn’t a violent character. He was the straight man for Bendy’s antics, the more grounded, yet slightly oblivious, foil. They’d always joked that Boris was a big puppy. Boris had always been Henry’s favorite character. He loved all his creations, they were like his children, but he loved working on Boris. He loved drawing the wolf, thinking of storylines. He’d compared Boris to himself as well. Boris and Bendy had a similar relationship to Henry and Joey after all. Joey and Bendy were the ones who came up with all these ideas, while Boris and Henry simply followed along. This Boris looked very friendly, with a big smile on his face. Boris’ face lit up when he saw Henry, and he swept the man up in a big hug, swinging him around before putting him down.
“You’re a lot nicer than the others I’ve met.” Henry laughed, patting Boris’ head. It was a little hard, given how tiny Henry was and how tall Boris was. Boris didn’t have a tail to wag, but if he did Henry imagined it would be wagging. God, it was so good to see another friendly face. After Sammy, Henry had almost given up hope he’d see anyone remotely normal. A living, breathing cartoon wasn’t normal, but it was better than a crazed cultist.
“Were you looking for me, buddy?” Henry asked. Boris nodded. Henry smiled slightly. So he had one ally in this. At this point, he wasn’t even surprised at seeing a living, breathing Boris. He’d seen a dead one upstairs after all. Boris gently took his arm and started tugging at it.
“Do you want to show me something?”
Boris nodded, beginning to tug a little harder. He whined slightly, making puppy eyes. Henry smiled and shook his head.
“Alright, show me.”
Boris led Henry down a hallway that was surprisingly clean. There were no cobwebs and very few ink puddles. It looked as though someone had been cleaning.
“Do you live down here?” Henry asked, gently wrenching his hand Boris’ grasp. The wolf nodded, glancing back at Henry with a goofy grin.
“Can you talk?”
Boris shook his head. Alright, so this was going to be a bit of a one-sided conversation for a while. Well, it wouldn’t be any different from his normal conversations with Boris. Henry talked to his cartoons while drawing, something the other members of the studio found a little odd. Henry shook his head quickly to put the thought from his mind. It had been pretty embarrassing when his coworkers had walked in on him literally talking to himself.
“Hey, where are we going, buddy?” Henry asked as they descended some stairs.
“Safe.” Boris turned for a moment and quickly signed the world. Henry was floored. The wolf knew sign language somehow?
“So…Someplace safe?”
Boris nodded, starting to walk again. So they went down a few flights of stairs, coming out in what was probably the bowels of the studio. How the Hell had Joey made the studio this freaking big? The two stopped outside a large mechanical looking door.
“So this is the safe place?”
Boris nodded and pushed the door open, ushering Henry inside. Once they were in, Boris closed the door, removing a level to the side which opened the door. The safehouse, that was what Henry was calling it now, was…cozy. There was a table pushed to the side, covered in cards, right next to a wood burning stove. He could see a little bathroom further in and could hear the telltale ticking of a clock.
“Safe here.” Boris said. “With me.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Henry smiled and patted Boris’ back.
.
They spent a few days just staying in the safe house. Henry collapsed onto a cot Boris had set up in his little bedroom and slept for at least a day. He needed to recover after all the shit he’d gone through. Boris, not needing to sleep, let Henry rest for as long as he needed. When Henry woke up, Boris had bacon soup and a card game waiting for him. Henry, of course, loved bacon soup and was all too glad to eat the provided soup. Playing cards with Boris was somehow familiar. It reminded him of the few time Wally had roped him into playing cards with him.
“You’re not too bad at this.” Henry said, putting down his cards and marking down Boris’ victory. They were fairly evenly matched. Boris just smiled and shuffled the cards.
“You too.” He said, dealing another hand.
“Y’know, this kind of reminds me of being back in the studio.” Henry picked up his cards and looked them over. Boris tilted his head to the side. Henry laughed.
“The janitor, Wally, he used to drag me into playing games with him whenever I was working too hard.” Henry explained, laying down a card. “He was a bit of a goofball, but I think he really cared about everyone here. He wanted us all to be happy. Always tried to cheer us up when we were feeling down. I…I hope he’s alright.” Boris’ expression turned almost mournful.
“What’s wrong, big guy?” Henry forced himself to smile. “You didn’t see Wally down here, did you?” Boris shook his head, beginning to scribble something on a piece of paper, which he then held up,
“He hasn’t been here in a long time.” Then Boris threw the paper into the fire, hunkering down behind his cards. Henry frowned slightly. Well, that had been strange. He glanced back at the door. He was going to have to leave here at some point. He needed to get out of here. He needed to get home. And he was bringing Boris with him.
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Hey I saw your analysis on why John might have been closeted even with loving queer friends and I think your reasoning is the only thing I've seen that actually makes sense!! Everyone else seems to rely on "john obviously has internalized homophobia due to his upbringing or surroundings" but obvs that's not the case... have you thought at all about how meeting and interacting with dad Crocker might affect john?
started out meta then I gave up and ficced it. I hope you get what I’m spinning here. This hasn’t really been proofread, it was a quickie because I just wanted to get the feelings in cyber-ink.
John disappeared shortly after the cake was cut. Jane and Roxy flew their new mutual wife to the top of a ten-foot tiered cake to slice the inaugural piece and he was standing next to me, then as press and party-goers surged forward in a mad rush for sugar he slipped away. I felt the tail end of a cold breeze flit from the crowd and I only barely caught the direction it flew in as it disappeared. John wasn’t a subtle guy, I could tell something was off at the beginning of the ceremony. The biggest surprise was that it took him this long to escape.
This left me with a dilemma. Go chase my date into the hall, or stay out here until he was ready to rejoin the party. I wondered for a half-second if maybe he didn’t want to be followed, but that line of thought was quickly discarded. John was a straightforward guy about everything but his feelings, he wasn’t the type to play passive aggressive games. Or, he was, but not this particular type of passive aggressive game.
I turned in the direction I’d felt the wisp of air fly and I closed my eyes to concentrate. This was a ridiculously huge wedding. I guess 3 creators getting married was kind of a big deal, there were guests of every race, species and blood color in every direction, all churning in a big mosh pit around the cake. The derspitians in particular were getting antsy as they were starting on sugar highs, and most everyone else was half drunk on free wedding booze. It was cacophonous to a ridiculous extent, and I thought I sniffed a whiff of the glittery death-lollipop of Calliope’s. I suppressed a shiver and tried harder to focus. Around me in the peripheral mind of my eye, I could see the souls of the people around me pop up.
Each one flickered like a flame, but held a solid shape that was only mobile at the edges. Each of the few hundred people in this room had one, but they all sort of melded into a pile of nondescript souls I didn’t care about. I reached out further. There was Jane, Roxy, Calliope, all the happy brides, each with a bright, robust flame. I smiled a little, then pushed my radius a little further, past the ballroom. I caught the feeling of John’s soul wandering the south hallway. It was a little dim compared to the firework display of emotion going on in here. I frowned at that, and opened my eyes.
I skirted the edges of the room to find an exit into the hallway. The ballroom was in the very middle of the venue with a long hallway that encircled it and lead to other rooms on the edges of the building. Cool air rushed over me as I stepped into the dark hallway. The AC was cranked to combat the sheer number of bodies in the ballroom, making the hallway freezing. It was welcome, much better than the hot, heavy atmosphere in the other room. Maybe that was why John had left? I rounded a corner and saw him leaning against a wall, picking at a piece of cake on a plate. His expression was melancholy as he pushed the cake around the plate.
It hit me, his dad. That had been his whole fatherly schtick, baking cakes and things like that. Here was Jane getting married, maybe John was just missing his dad? Regretting the experiences they’d never have together? I really didn’t have a lot of my own experience to cross-reference here. I stepped forward, deliberately stepping hard so John heard me coming and looked up.
“Oh, Dirk, hey.” His eyes weren’t wet. His expression was actually just more thoughtful than sad, now that he was looking at me. I walked over and joined him on the wall.
“Sup?”
“Nothing much. Cake.” He gestured to the pile of mush on his plate. He scooped a forkful of mostly frosting and stuck it in his mouth casually. “It’s pretty good.”
“Glad you got a piece. You split pretty fast after the girls cut it.” He shrugged.
“It was just getting hot in there. I figured Jane wouldn’t miss me for the moment if I stepped out.” I nodded, he nodded.
Neither of us said anymore, and we both just stood for a few minutes in silence. I grappled with the idea of asking something, I didn’t wanna pry. It’s not like John and I were much more than fuck buddies currently. The moniker was there, relation statuses set to [OCCUPIED] on various facets of social media, but conversations between us always lapsed into this same silence lately. Somewhere between comfortable and awkward, where we both simultaneously wanted to talk and say nothing at all. Right then, however, I wanted to talk. I mean, fuck, that’s what boyfriends did, wasn’t it? I cleared my throat. John looked at me expectantly.
“Is it your dad?” I forced my eyes at his chin, that was close to eye contact right?
“What?” I couldn’t read from his tone whether he was mad or not. But I was already dedicated to this trainwreck I was gonna see it through.
“I just thought, the cake, Jane gettin’ married, maybe it was stirrin’ up…” I struggled for a word and John cut me off.
“Have you tried the cake?”
“What?” Now it was my turn for confusion. John twisted the fork to spear another chunk of cake and held it to me.
“Try it.” I was a grown-ass man and for some reason that made cheeks go hot for a quick second. I hesitated briefly, then leaned forward and took the bite from his fork. It was oddly intimate for something as simple as a bite. The cake honestly was delicious. It was moist and hearty and the frosty was light and creamy.
“It’s really good.” I said honestly. John nodded in agreement.
“Jane’s dad made it. You know, he helped plan like, ninety percent of the wedding? Jane told me she wanted to hire a team of professional wedding planners with ten years experience each in arranging flowers and hanging drapes, but her dad insisted on taking charge.” I whistled low, John looked about as impressed as I felt.
“That’s a shit ton to do, there’s basically half the planet here.”
“Right? He’s so excited and so supportive of her, it’s almost stupid.” He chuckled and shook his head. “It’s weird. He’s my dad, but absolutely not my dad, yanno?” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway. John went on, “The similarities are just uncanny, and so many times I have to remind myself that he’s not the man I grew up with. But he basically is, he’s just got different horrible jokes and likes a different brand of shaving cream.” He looked down at the cake. “And he’s put hours and hours and days of effort into making sure his daughter can marry her wives, and he’s just tickled to death about it.”
It clicked, suddenly. I’d been close, but I’d been missing a piece.
“In what universe would your dad, voted thrice to be “Dad of the year” by Gentlemen’s Biweekly, not be tickled pink to make a cake for your gay wedding?” I nudged his ribs and elicited a small smile.
“I think I always knew that, that’s what everyone told me, assured me. But it’s not like I could ever be sure. I was 13 when he died, I had no clue, and it’s not like it ever came up around the house. We watched Will and Grace together, that was the extent of gay media I had growing up.” His jaw shifted. “I couldn’t ever be sure. I’ve spent, god,” he reached behind his glasses to wipe his eyes with the palm of his hand, “ever since we got out of the game I’ve been trying to emulate that standard of what being a man meant, trying to keep his memory alive in me, live how he would have wanted me to. And It never quite fit, and it took me so long to figure out that I was never going to have the two and a half kids and a dog that I thought he wanted me to have. I was so sure I was letting him down.” He wiped his eyes again and laughed, a raw half-laugh half-sob of relief.
I took the cake from his other hand and set it on the ground. As I straightened my hands hovered around his shoulders, unsure of what to do. Thankfully that’s all John needed to know the invitation was open, and he grasped me in a hug, holding me tightly as if to anchor himself. He was taller than me so I had to reach up to wrap my arms around his neck, but we fit together, if a little awkwardly. He wasn’t sobbing but I could feel him cry onto my shoulder and I held him even harder. There in that hall, without words, we connected in an intangible way that only two men like us could.
“He woulda made so many cakes for any weddin’ you had.” I whispered against his neck.
After a long pregnant pause John collected himself and we pulled away from each other. Caught up in the moment I pulled my glasses off my nose and slipped them into my breast pocket, realizing a half second too late how corny that was. John met my eyes and smiled. Maybe corny wasn’t too bad.
“We can stay out here, if you want.” I offered. “I think Callie whipped out the sucker, and somehow it just continues to prove a disappointing experience each and every time I try it. I just don’t think I have that knack.” John bent down and took the plate of cake I’d left at our feet.
“I at least want to finish this before we head back in there. Wanna help?” He offered me another bite.
“Sure.” I took the fork from him this time and put it into my own mouth, chewing as I scooped another bite and offered it to John. John took the bite without taking the fork, and he really seemed to enjoy this bite. He smiled as he swallowed.
“I think that’s exactly how my dad would have wanted his cake’s to be enjoyed.”
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How Jimmy Buffet Accidentally Charted a Course From Margaritaville to Corona to LandShark Lager
Jimmy Buffett’s entry to the beer world happened quite accidentally, as you’d expect most things do in Buffett’s life. It was 1984 and the laid-back rocker was sitting in the office of his manager, Howard Kaufman. As Kaufman spoke on the phone with Corona’s marketing team, trying to get them to be the beer sponsor for another client, The Eagles, on their upcoming tour, Buffett interjected:
“Hey, I’d like Corona to be my sponsor, too,” he said.
It was a curious choice because, at the time, most American consumers saw Corona as more of a Mexican workingman’s beer; not some cut-loose, sand-in-your-toes, party pounder. But, upon inking a deal with Buffett, Corona quickly started incorporating the Margaritaville beach lifestyle aesthetic into its ads and promotional materials. According to Forbes, “Corona hired him to flog its Mexican brew to young, cash-fat consumers,” spending more than $2 million on a radio campaign starting in 1984.
In turn, Buffett’s fans, known as Parrotheads, committed themselves almost exclusively to the light cerveza at shows, where, during the song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” a sign would illuminate on stage showing Corona bottles with limes wedged in their necks.
“Go to a Jimmy concert today, look around, and you’ll say, ‘Wow, this is all Corona imagery,” says John Cohlan, the longtime CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, LLC, in Palm Beach, Fla. “But, you have to remember, it wasn’t always like that.”
Realizing that it had inadvertently stumbled upon lightning in a bottle, Corona went so far as to co-opt the title of Buffett’s seminal 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” for a subsequent campaign. “Change your whole latitude” was the motto in commercials and on billboards all across the country by 1992. Corona trademarked that line without even informing Buffett.
“That ended up being the most successful Corona ad ever,” explains Cohlan, who still isn’t sure whether Buffett is aware of what the beer brand had done.
Corona’s “Change your whole latitude” campaign co-opted the title of Buffett’s seminal 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.”
Corona’s sales had been declining as recently as 1991, but once it adopted the “latitude” tagline, in 1992, business was booming. “The sponsorship of Jimmy Buffett … helped create a fun-in-the-sun image for the brand,” AdAge wrote in 1998 as Corona had just ousted Heineken to become America’s top imported beer.
By 1999, when Corona finally scrapped the Buffett-based tagline, it was the nation’s 10th best-selling beer, seen as the quintessential “vacation in a bottle.” Today, it’s one of the only macro beers still trending upward in sales.
“And it was all based on this IP that came directly from Jimmy’s tour,” Cohlan says. “That made us start thinking … maybe we should quit Corona and do our own thing.”
Room for more than one ‘Vacation in a bottle’
“Woodstock for people who like to drink heavily.”
That’s what Cohlan jokingly calls the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It was there, in 1998, where he first met Buffett. At the time Cohlan worked with Triarc, a holding company that held shares in brands like Arby’s and RC Cola. Triarc had moved its operations to Florida in the early 1990s, and Northeast-raised Cohlan still wasn’t thrilled about it. But, as he watched Buffett perform for the first time, he had a revelation.
“I looked out and I saw all these people dressed up,” Cohlan says of Parrotheads’ signature, tropical-splattered beachwear, “and I said to myself, ‘This is more of a brand than the brands that we actually own.’ Buffett was their entire way of life.”
At the time, Buffett operated just three small Margaritaville restaurants in Key West, Fla., and Jamaica and didn’t seem that interested in expanding, especially after one foray into New Orleans had flopped. But, upon creating his role as CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, Cohlan brokered a deal with Seagram Spirits & Wine Group (which also owned Buffett’s label at the time, MCA) to license the name Margaritaville to a 20,000-square-foot space at the entrance to Universal Studios’ new Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando.
When it opened, in May 1999, it was a massive success. The empire began rapidly expanding, with Margaritaville restaurants popping up all across the country.
Capitalizing on that success and, after angering Cohlan by releasing a sounds-a-little-too-similar Parrot Bay Rum, Seagram quickly issued a line of Margaritaville Tequila in 2000.
Buffett’s tour, meanwhile, was still sponsored by Corona. In 2006, as the 8th annual Orlando Beer Fest (held at Universal CityWalk) approached, Cohlan realized it was finally time to make a move. It was time for Buffett and Margaritaville to have their own proprietary beer for the restaurant chain and, perhaps, the world. (“Let’s take our beach back,” he recalls Buffett saying.)
Cohlan initially approached Corona about contract-brewing their beer, but, as he recalls, they told him, “No thanks. We already have a ‘Corona.’” They moved onto sponsoring Kenny Chesney.
So Cohlan called up his buddy Dave Peacock, then-president of Anheuser-Busch. Conveniently, they had been looking for a “Corona killer” for years, having already failed with two previous challengers, Azteca in the late-1990s and Tequiza, a tequila-flavored beverage that was about to be discontinued.
“Thankfully, [Peacock] said, ‘There’s room in America for more than one “vacation in a bottle,”’” Cohlan says.
No one wants to drink a ‘Lone’
Parrotheads were both angered he’d dumped Corona, then a little confused by who was making his new beer, but, ultimately, they fell hard for LandShark Lager, which burst onto the scene at Buffett’s Feb. 10, 2007 Tallahassee concert.
Initially, the brand had called it Lone Palm Lager — based on the name of a song from Buffett’s “Fruitcakes” album and the outdoor seaplane bar near Margaritaville — but the name just wasn’t resonating. As Cohlan explains:
“When we did consumer research, people would say “I don’t want to drink a ‘Lone.’”
Calling it Margaritaville Lager would have been a little confusing, too. So they started thinking about some of his other songs. Then, just like now, one of Buffett’s most popular concert performances was for “Fins.” It’s about a woman at a beach bar who feels like prey to all the men trying to aggressively pick her up. Before each live performance, audience members place their hands in the shape of a fin on top of their heads and start swaying back and forth while Buffett would call out: “The LandSharks are coming!”
They were already selling concert merch with LandShark logos on it — a fin with squiggly waves underneath it, palm trees in the background— and it wouldn’t be too hard to adapt that for a beer. It would come in a clear bottle, just like a Corona, and be an inoffensive and easy-drinking “island lager.” Its slogan, written on the spur of the moment by Buffett, was “Let the fin begin!”
Even in this highly skeptical era, when most people still don’t realize what “crafty” beers are owned by multinational conglomerates, folks were onto LandShark Lager right from the get-go.
The first-ever review of Landshark Lager on BeerAdvocate, in January of 2007, reads, “Looks very much like [Anheuser-Busch]’s version of Corona, right down to the bottle and marketing.” Another early review notes: “[Anheuser-Busch]’s latest attempt to bite into the Corona market in the sunshine state. It’s got the pee yellow color, snappy name, and clear bottle.” By March, The Palm Beach Post was reporting that “Buffett’s new beer masquerades as microbrew,” explaining:
“At first glance, LandShark looks like a microbrew that’s produced by Buffett himself. After all, the name alludes to the Buffett song Fins, the product is displayed prominently on Buffett’s Web site and the bottle says the lager is made by Margaritaville Brewing Co. of Jacksonville. But LandShark is brewed by Anheuser-Busch Cos. of St. Louis, although the nation’s largest brewer seeks a stealth role.”
(Cohlan claims Margaritaville simply licenses its name out to the brewery.)
Reviews of the beer’s quality were even more dismissive.
“Like a bad Corona,” wrote one online review. “Could maybe see drinking this on a dive boat in Mexico … And it would have to be 95 degrees, with the beer temp just above freezing.” Doug Blackburn, Tallahassee Democrat’s online beer columnist, wrote. “LandShark Lager lacks taste and flavor. At best, it qualifies as a lawn mower beer, a post-workout thirst quencher.”
Almost since the beginning, it has scored a pathetic 1 (out of 100) on RateBeer.com.
Yet, none of this seemed to matter to Parrotheads who quickly began switching their allegiances. “You dont even need a lime to make it better to drink. (sic)” wrote one fan on an early beer forum.
Thanks to Buffett’s devoted fan base, despite its dismal reviews Landshark Lager sells close to 4 million cases a year in America, which makes it a better seller at retail than Guinness. Credit: Landsharklager.com
Initially it was only available at Margaritaville restaurants, Buffett concerts, and in Florida, but it quickly expanded nationwide, sitting on store shelves and in gas station coolers right next to Corona. By the 2009 NFL season, the Miami Dolphins were even playing in LandShark Stadium, a move the football team thought would make game day a more “multi-entertainment experience” for fans. It looked like LandShark Lager had a real shot to become the “Corona killer.”
But then … it never really did.
In fact, I literally thought the beer was no longer on the market when I began reporting this story, but that’s not true whatsoever. It may have never taken down Corona, but it still became a pretty big player in macro beer, all in a bit of a weird, “Florida man” kind of way. That’s why, if you’re a guy like me, who mainly goes to craft beer bars in urban environments, you aren’t really going to ever see it.
Yet Landshark Lager sells close to 4 million cases a year in America, which makes it a better seller at retail than Guinness. (Though, not as good as Corona, which reportedly sold 65 million cases in 2017 and is today the fifth best-selling beer in America.) It also sells well in Canada and numerous spots in the Caribbean. It’s not just boomer Parrotheads buying it, either — there’s a college ambassador program that has led the brand to pick up steam among our nation’s newest beer guzzlers.
(And all this without a single TV commercial. In fact, Cohlan claims they spend less than $1 million a year on marketing, compared to the over $100 million per year Corona spends on advertising.)
There are also currently 12 LandShark Bar & Grills (in such far-flung places as Branson, Mo., and Tulsa, Okla.), not to mention LandShark bars on six different Norwegian Cruise Line ships. LandShark Stadium relinquished the naming rights after just one year — it’s called Hard Rock Stadium today — though a rewritten version of “Fins” still does play occasionally after touchdowns, while the concession stands serve plenty of the lager. The beer is not going away any time soon and Cohlan thinks it still has room to grow to 10 million cases per year.
You could argue this was the first real celebrity beer, way ahead of its time compared to today’s era when Metallica is now partnering with Stone, or the Grateful Dead with Dogfish Head. LandShark Lager does a helluva lot better than all those beers, too, and will almost certainly still be around when they are not. That’s the power of Buffett, as a musician, businessman, and beerman.
“It ultimately works because Jimmy created one of few true lifestyle brands in this country,” Cohlan says. “It’s not a celebrity beer. It’s not called Jimmy Buffett Beer, and that’s intentional. That’s to his credit. His art form created an entire lifestyle around his lyrics. About working hard, but being able to still escape and enjoy yourself. A person’s name is not a lifestyle, but a person’s art can be. That’s why LandShark Lager works. You look at other celebrity beers, and he dwarfed the curve.”
Meanwhile, even if LandShark Lager didn’t win the initial race, Buffett, the indefatigable businessman, is still looking for ways to beat Corona. In September of last year he announced plans for his own marijuana line. It will be called Coral Reefer.
The article How Jimmy Buffet Accidentally Charted a Course From Margaritaville to Corona to LandShark Lager appeared first on VinePair.
source https://vinepair.com/articles/jimmy-buffet-corona-landshark-lager/
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Prompt fill time!
Hey, guys, sorry this one’s late. My dad is on a business trip for a few months, so I wanted to hang out with him yesterday before he left. The fill’s all done though, and here it is!
"Excuse me?"
It's a quieter voice, attached to a young guy with an overlarge, dark hoodie and circles around his eyes that match the smoke-gray hoodie almost perfectly. He is holding his elbows, arms crossed over his chest, and is half-hiding behind the waves of mouse brown hair tumbling down to his shoulders.
His eyes are bright blue-green, like the Paraiba tourmaline displayed proudly in the window of the jewelry store a few blocks down from my small parlor, and those are what strike me the most when I first look over at him. Every inch of him screams 'I'm not here, don't mind me,' but those eyes shine a bit too bright to hide.
"What can I do for you?" I give him a soft smile, leaning against the counter.
"I'm looking to get one of your special tattoos," he tells me plainly. "I was told to come to you by a buddy of mine on the local police force."
I remember the cop he is talking about. I rarely got names from people purchasing those tats, but I remember his face, and the sight-boosting eagle I'd inked onto his back.
"How's he doing," I ask, more to be polite than a real desire to know. The guy had referred someone, which was rare for me.
"He's doing good," the guy across the counter says. "He's being really responsible with it, which is more than some would be."
"That's good to hear," I return, and mean it. "We could use more like him."
The guy smiles, though it's still a little nervous, which I suppose I can understand given the circumstance.
"Ever gotten a tattoo before," I ask, getting to business.
"No," he replies. "Never been able to afford one until now."
"Well, they are art," I chuckle. "They can get a bit pricey."
The man smiles again, and I pull a piece of paper and pencil toward me. "Anything specific you're looking for?"
"I want to heal people," he says.
I nod and scribble it down. "Sickness and injuries?"
"Yeah," he agrees. "I want to be able to help people, but I don't have the funds to go to med school, and the bank won't give me a loan with my credit."
"Bad investments?" I joke.
"Toxic relationship."
I wince. "Man, I feel you there. My uncle used to take all the cash I earned. Who you finally kick to the curb?"
"My boy –" he swallows. "Ex-boyfriend," he corrects, picking at a loose thread on the arm of his hoodie. "And it was more like he kicked me out when I cut him off. I was leaving anyway, but it still hurt."
"Oof," I huff sympathetically. "That's rough, man."
"Do you have any recommendations on design," he asks, eager to change the subject.
"There's lots," I say. "Medicinal herbs, if that's your kind of thing. I'm really good at a sort of ancient Chinese style, and they had tons of symbols for cures and healing."
"Do you think you could do a phoenix," he asks, leaning against the counter himself. He's starting to relax a bit. "Or a dragon?"
"I could do both," I offer, "though dragons more symbolize water and luck. Plus the phoenix is way cooler. Can dragons burst into flame and be reborn?"
"No," he chuckles. "And the whole rebirth thing would fit better. Coming back stronger after hardships, and all that."
His name is Stephen, and even after I'd inked the phoenix onto his skin, he kept coming back, offering coffee and stories about people he'd helped since his last visit. At first, I wasn't sure if he was just waiting around to see if the tattoo's powers were only temporary, or to make a show of not skipping town while he was making the three monthly payments we'd agreed on. But after the first few visits, it became clear that he was just looking for conversation.
The days he came in were slow days, and I didn't mind the company, so after we talked about Stephen's 'patients,' we would just shoot the breeze for a while. We had similar interests, liked the same kinds of games.
Stephen was nice.
About half a year after the tattoo, his ex-boyfriend came to the store looking for him. Luckily, Stephen had seen him coming from down the road. He hid in the storage room while his ex pretended to be interested in getting a tat for a few minutes until he thought Stephen wasn't around.
My flatmate had moved out a week before, so I offered Stephen the empty room. It gave him a place to stay where his ex wouldn't find him, but it had the unforeseen benefit of having someone around the house who actually knew how to cook more than ramen and toast.
Of course, when Stephen managed to save up enough money to fly out to a doctor's convention, I cheered him on. There was a doctor who Stephen met at the convention that recognized some of my work from his brother's 'healing factor' tattoo and offered to sponsor Stephen. He headed off to medical school.
I missed him more than I thought I would, but a few years later saw Stephen back in my parlor, two coffees and a request for another tattoo. Stephen wanted something that could help him communicate with patients who couldn't speak so he could best help them. It was a sound wave, just to the left of his phoenix, of a bird's song.
Stephen started a small practice in town, and I got an offer to date him. I think I was the one who got the better deal, but Stephen's happy, and that's what matters.
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How Jimmy Buffet Accidentally Charted a Course From Margaritaville to Corona to LandShark Lager
Jimmy Buffett’s entry to the beer world happened quite accidentally, as you’d expect most things do in Buffett’s life. It was 1984 and the laid-back rocker was sitting in the office of his manager, Howard Kaufman. As Kaufman spoke on the phone with Corona’s marketing team, trying to get them to be the beer sponsor for another client, The Eagles, on their upcoming tour, Buffett interjected:
“Hey, I’d like Corona to be my sponsor, too,” he said.
It was a curious choice because, at the time, most American consumers saw Corona as more of a Mexican workingman’s beer; not some cut-loose, sand-in-your-toes, party pounder. But, upon inking a deal with Buffett, Corona quickly started incorporating the Margaritaville beach lifestyle aesthetic into its ads and promotional materials. According to Forbes, “Corona hired him to flog its Mexican brew to young, cash-fat consumers,” spending more than $2 million on a radio campaign starting in 1984.
In turn, Buffett’s fans, known as Parrotheads, committed themselves almost exclusively to the light cerveza at shows, where, during the song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” a sign would illuminate on stage showing Corona bottles with limes wedged in their necks.
“Go to a Jimmy concert today, look around, and you’ll say, ‘Wow, this is all Corona imagery,” says John Cohlan, the longtime CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, LLC, in Palm Beach, Fla. “But, you have to remember, it wasn’t always like that.”
Realizing that it had inadvertently stumbled upon lightning in a bottle, Corona went so far as to co-opt the title of Buffett’s seminal 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” for a subsequent campaign. “Change your whole latitude” was the motto in commercials and on billboards all across the country by 1992. Corona trademarked that line without even informing Buffett.
“That ended up being the most successful Corona ad ever,” explains Cohlan, who still isn’t sure whether Buffett is aware of what the beer brand had done.
Corona’s “Change your whole latitude” campaign co-opted the title of Buffett’s seminal 1977 album, “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.”
Corona’s sales had been declining as recently as 1991, but once it adopted the “latitude” tagline, in 1992, business was booming. “The sponsorship of Jimmy Buffett … helped create a fun-in-the-sun image for the brand,” AdAge wrote in 1998 as Corona had just ousted Heineken to become America’s top imported beer.
By 1999, when Corona finally scrapped the Buffett-based tagline, it was the nation’s 10th best-selling beer, seen as the quintessential “vacation in a bottle.” Today, it’s one of the only macro beers still trending upward in sales.
“And it was all based on this IP that came directly from Jimmy’s tour,” Cohlan says. “That made us start thinking … maybe we should quit Corona and do our own thing.”
Room for more than one ‘Vacation in a bottle’
“Woodstock for people who like to drink heavily.”
That’s what Cohlan jokingly calls the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It was there, in 1998, where he first met Buffett. At the time Cohlan worked with Triarc, a holding company that held shares in brands like Arby’s and RC Cola. Triarc had moved its operations to Florida in the early 1990s, and Northeast-raised Cohlan still wasn’t thrilled about it. But, as he watched Buffett perform for the first time, he had a revelation.
“I looked out and I saw all these people dressed up,” Cohlan says of Parrotheads’ signature, tropical-splattered beachwear, “and I said to myself, ‘This is more of a brand than the brands that we actually own.’ Buffett was their entire way of life.”
At the time, Buffett operated just three small Margaritaville restaurants in Key West, Fla., and Jamaica and didn’t seem that interested in expanding, especially after one foray into New Orleans had flopped. But, upon creating his role as CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, Cohlan brokered a deal with Seagram Spirits & Wine Group (which also owned Buffett’s label at the time, MCA) to license the name Margaritaville to a 20,000-square-foot space at the entrance to Universal Studios’ new Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando.
When it opened, in May 1999, it was a massive success. The empire began rapidly expanding, with Margaritaville restaurants popping up all across the country.
Capitalizing on that success and, after angering Cohlan by releasing a sounds-a-little-too-similar Parrot Bay Rum, Seagram quickly issued a line of Margaritaville Tequila in 2000.
Buffett’s tour, meanwhile, was still sponsored by Corona. In 2006, as the 8th annual Orlando Beer Fest (held at Universal CityWalk) approached, Cohlan realized it was finally time to make a move. It was time for Buffett and Margaritaville to have their own proprietary beer for the restaurant chain and, perhaps, the world. (“Let’s take our beach back,” he recalls Buffett saying.)
Cohlan initially approached Corona about contract-brewing their beer, but, as he recalls, they told him, “No thanks. We already have a ‘Corona.’” They moved onto sponsoring Kenny Chesney.
So Cohlan called up his buddy Dave Peacock, then-president of Anheuser-Busch. Conveniently, they had been looking for a “Corona killer” for years, having already failed with two previous challengers, Azteca in the late-1990s and Tequiza, a tequila-flavored beverage that was about to be discontinued.
“Thankfully, [Peacock] said, ‘There’s room in America for more than one “vacation in a bottle,”’” Cohlan says.
No one wants to drink a ‘Lone’
Parrotheads were both angered he’d dumped Corona, then a little confused by who was making his new beer, but, ultimately, they fell hard for LandShark Lager, which burst onto the scene at Buffett’s Feb. 10, 2007 Tallahassee concert.
Initially, the brand had called it Lone Palm Lager — based on the name of a song from Buffett’s “Fruitcakes” album and the outdoor seaplane bar near Margaritaville — but the name just wasn’t resonating. As Cohlan explains:
“When we did consumer research, people would say “I don’t want to drink a ‘Lone.’”
Calling it Margaritaville Lager would have been a little confusing, too. So they started thinking about some of his other songs. Then, just like now, one of Buffett’s most popular concert performances was for “Fins.” It’s about a woman at a beach bar who feels like prey to all the men trying to aggressively pick her up. Before each live performance, audience members place their hands in the shape of a fin on top of their heads and start swaying back and forth while Buffett would call out: “The LandSharks are coming!”
They were already selling concert merch with LandShark logos on it — a fin with squiggly waves underneath it, palm trees in the background— and it wouldn’t be too hard to adapt that for a beer. It would come in a clear bottle, just like a Corona, and be an inoffensive and easy-drinking “island lager.” Its slogan, written on the spur of the moment by Buffett, was “Let the fin begin!”
Even in this highly skeptical era, when most people still don’t realize what “crafty” beers are owned by multinational conglomerates, folks were onto LandShark Lager right from the get-go.
The first-ever review of Landshark Lager on BeerAdvocate, in January of 2007, reads, “Looks very much like [Anheuser-Busch]’s version of Corona, right down to the bottle and marketing.” Another early review notes: “[Anheuser-Busch]’s latest attempt to bite into the Corona market in the sunshine state. It’s got the pee yellow color, snappy name, and clear bottle.” By March, The Palm Beach Post was reporting that “Buffett’s new beer masquerades as microbrew,” explaining:
“At first glance, LandShark looks like a microbrew that’s produced by Buffett himself. After all, the name alludes to the Buffett song Fins, the product is displayed prominently on Buffett’s Web site and the bottle says the lager is made by Margaritaville Brewing Co. of Jacksonville. But LandShark is brewed by Anheuser-Busch Cos. of St. Louis, although the nation’s largest brewer seeks a stealth role.”
(Cohlan claims Margaritaville simply licenses its name out to the brewery.)
Reviews of the beer’s quality were even more dismissive.
“Like a bad Corona,” wrote one online review. “Could maybe see drinking this on a dive boat in Mexico … And it would have to be 95 degrees, with the beer temp just above freezing.” Doug Blackburn, Tallahassee Democrat’s online beer columnist, wrote. “LandShark Lager lacks taste and flavor. At best, it qualifies as a lawn mower beer, a post-workout thirst quencher.”
Almost since the beginning, it has scored a pathetic 1 (out of 100) on RateBeer.com.
Yet, none of this seemed to matter to Parrotheads who quickly began switching their allegiances. “You dont even need a lime to make it better to drink. (sic)” wrote one fan on an early beer forum.
Thanks to Buffett’s devoted fan base, despite its dismal reviews Landshark Lager sells close to 4 million cases a year in America, which makes it a better seller at retail than Guinness. Credit: Landsharklager.com
Initially it was only available at Margaritaville restaurants, Buffett concerts, and in Florida, but it quickly expanded nationwide, sitting on store shelves and in gas station coolers right next to Corona. By the 2009 NFL season, the Miami Dolphins were even playing in LandShark Stadium, a move the football team thought would make game day a more “multi-entertainment experience” for fans. It looked like LandShark Lager had a real shot to become the “Corona killer.”
But then … it never really did.
In fact, I literally thought the beer was no longer on the market when I began reporting this story, but that’s not true whatsoever. It may have never taken down Corona, but it still became a pretty big player in macro beer, all in a bit of a weird, “Florida man” kind of way. That’s why, if you’re a guy like me, who mainly goes to craft beer bars in urban environments, you aren’t really going to ever see it.
Yet Landshark Lager sells close to 4 million cases a year in America, which makes it a better seller at retail than Guinness. (Though, not as good as Corona, which reportedly sold 65 million cases in 2017 and is today the fifth best-selling beer in America.) It also sells well in Canada and numerous spots in the Caribbean. It’s not just boomer Parrotheads buying it, either — there’s a college ambassador program that has led the brand to pick up steam among our nation’s newest beer guzzlers.
(And all this without a single TV commercial. In fact, Cohlan claims they spend less than $1 million a year on marketing, compared to the over $100 million per year Corona spends on advertising.)
There are also currently 12 LandShark Bar & Grills (in such far-flung places as Branson, Mo., and Tulsa, Okla.), not to mention LandShark bars on six different Norwegian Cruise Line ships. LandShark Stadium relinquished the naming rights after just one year — it’s called Hard Rock Stadium today — though a rewritten version of “Fins” still does play occasionally after touchdowns, while the concession stands serve plenty of the lager. The beer is not going away any time soon and Cohlan thinks it still has room to grow to 10 million cases per year.
You could argue this was the first real celebrity beer, way ahead of its time compared to today’s era when Metallica is now partnering with Stone, or the Grateful Dead with Dogfish Head. LandShark Lager does a helluva lot better than all those beers, too, and will almost certainly still be around when they are not. That’s the power of Buffett, as a musician, businessman, and beerman.
“It ultimately works because Jimmy created one of few true lifestyle brands in this country,” Cohlan says. “It’s not a celebrity beer. It’s not called Jimmy Buffett Beer, and that’s intentional. That’s to his credit. His art form created an entire lifestyle around his lyrics. About working hard, but being able to still escape and enjoy yourself. A person’s name is not a lifestyle, but a person’s art can be. That’s why LandShark Lager works. You look at other celebrity beers, and he dwarfed the curve.”
Meanwhile, even if LandShark Lager didn’t win the initial race, Buffett, the indefatigable businessman, is still looking for ways to beat Corona. In September of last year he announced plans for his own marijuana line. It will be called Coral Reefer.
The article How Jimmy Buffet Accidentally Charted a Course From Margaritaville to Corona to LandShark Lager appeared first on VinePair.
source https://vinepair.com/articles/jimmy-buffet-corona-landshark-lager/
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