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ggukkieland · 3 years

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📕BTS Fic Reads - 2021 February Pt 1

I tried to make it balanced by revisiting the past and discovering new ones 🤗 This reading list are reblogs and newly read fics

I also realized that some find these lists helpful and if you do like the fics, please do show authors appreciation by reblogging their fics, leaving positive comments, etc.

*fics are not mine. credits go to all the writers. sending them love🥰

🥕 Ongoing - most recent chapter [as of date this list was posted]

🥕 Completed - completed one shots | series

🥕 S - smut | F - fluff | A - angst

🌷 (i sometimes post commentary, if reading reviews help)

🥕[Ongoing Series]

Call Me Baby @smaubts - MYG | smau | Enemies to Lovers AU, Fake Dating AU | F, A ~ [6/?]

Drown for You @vinterjeon - JJK | 21.4k+ | Sci-FI AU, Siren AU, Merman AU | S, F, A ~ [3/12] (reposted or revised by author)

Evolution of a Lover’s Heart @/vinterjeon - JJK | 8.1k | fuckboy AU, bet AU, college AU | A, F ~ [1/?]

Learn to Love @knjoodles - JJK | 13.3k+ | Single Parent AU, Teacher!Jungkook | A, F ~ [4/?]

The Night We Met @leftonraed - KTH | 18.2k+ | Single Dad AU, Bodyguard AU, Idol AU | A, F ~ [6/?]

Together Series @/httpjeon - JJK | 20k+ | established relationship, collection of their “firsts”, Tattooed jungkook, Gamer AU, Fuckboy AU| S, F, A ~ [5/?] (this is not a new series but I did some re-reading and technically it’s still an ongoing series)

🥕[Completed Fics/Series]

Namjoon

Cut @chimchimsauce - drabble | 1.1k | soulmate AU, “Namjoon always hated soulmates” | Heavy Angst

Dichotomy @uhgood-dooghu - two shot | 5.5k | established relationship au, boxer au | S, F, A 🌷

Hell’s Coffee @prolixitae - one shot | 8k | Coffee Shop AU, (poor) yelp review by OC | S (this

The Making of: Love @inkjam-moon - one shot | 12.7k | Actor AU, virgin!OC | F, S 🌷

More Than Anything Else @seokkgenie - two shot | 26k | CEO AU, one night stand AU

01 02

Submerged @myfeelsinink - one shot | 6.2k | dream!namjoon, feat Jimin, lucid dreams AU | F, A 🌷

Seokjin

Dear Ophelia @noir0neko - one shot | 3.6k | Killer!Seokjin, thriller AU | S, A 🌷

Replacement @akinnie75 - one shot | 24.5k | Fantasy AU, idolverse, body swap AU | F

Sweet on You @vminity21 - one shot | 3.1k | baker AU | F

Three Years Later @megahwn - one shot | 2.4k | hurt/comfort fic, established relationship au | F, S

When the Sea Sleeps @taecalikook - one shot | 23.7k | Fake Marriage AU, marriage of convenience, Strangers to Lovers | F, A, S

Yoongi

Intoxicating @versigny - one shot | 6.6k | roommates AU, friends to lovers, pining, drunk texting | F 🌷

Mixtape @jungblue - one shot | 15.6k | college au, podcast AU, radio host | S, F, comedy (reblog) 🌷

No More @gyukult - two shot | 29.7k | college au, (sort of) friends to lovers, unrequited love, secret relationship, tsundere yoongi | A, F, S 🌷

Straight Shooter @snackhobi - one shot | 14.3k | cyberpunk AU, enemies to lovers, hitman yoongi x gunsmith reader | S, F 🌷

Kneel @ot7always - one shot | 3.5k | established relationship, pwp | S 🌷

Pendulum @whatifyoulivelikethat - one shot | 3k | exes AU, recent break up | S, A, F 🌷

Siren by foreverpark [ao3] - one shot | 6.2k | police officer yoongi, pwp | S 🌷

Without the Stars @inktae - one shot | 3.8k | grief of those left behind | Angst 🌷

Hoseok

Hobi Birthday 2021 Reads - fic favorites I reblogged on Feb 18th + new fic releases on his birthday 🌷

Jimin

Theophany @ilikemesometaetaes - one shot | 19.6k | College AU, best friend’s brother AU, dancer!jimin, artist!reader | A, S, F

Ours @jjiimin - one shot | 8k | exes AU, tennis AU | A, S, F

The Unholy Cock-Up @smoochkooks - one shot | 14.5k | newspaper set-up, office AU, editor-in-chief jimin x columnist reader | S, A (reading this fic had me revisiting similar-themed fics like doxology and the kids aren’t alright 👀) 🌷

Eldorado + Hymne a l’amour @/smoochkooks - one shot + special | 43.5k | archeologist!jimin, adventure, gold diggers!au, enemies to lovers, established relationship (for the one shot special) | F, A, S (i just love how author writes Jimin 🥰) 🌷

Twenty-Eight Minutes @/taegularities - drabble | 1.8k | strangers who met on the bus | F 🌷

The Promised Iris @/akinnie75 - two shot | 40k | soulmate au, fantasy au, time loop | A, F 🌷

Test Drive @bratkook - drabble | 1.8k | biker au, deep six universe, pwp | S

Taehyung

Akrasia @nitaescence - one shot | 3k | strangers on the bus, pwp | S (been looking for this and author has another account/fic which I’m also reading so it was a perfect recipe to rediscover this fic 🌟) 🌷

Back to the Start @honeyj00ns - one shot | 4.3k | exes au, college au, seems OC is the only one suffering from breakup | A, F

Consequences @cupofteaguk - one shot | 18k | enemies to lovers, enemies with benefits, fwb au, hogwarts au | S, A, F (so, I actually thought I’ve included this in previous reading lists) 🌷

Deeper @taelaxies - one shot | 2k | bad boy au, sister’s boyfriend is OC’s one night stand months ago | A, F

Heartbeat on the Line @monvante - drabble | 970 | CEO AU, Assistant!Reader, enemies to lovers, office AU, fwb | A, F (this is really nice) 🌷

Obey @jjkfire - one shot | 8k | mafia au, head of security taehyung x worst escort | S, F, kinda funny too (a reblog) 🌷

Page Turner @gukslut - one shot | 13.6k | teacher AU, librarian reader, strangers to lovers, literature appreciation | F, A, S 🌷

Paper Cranes @aquaminwrites - one shot | 18.3k | childhood friends, best friend AU, college AU, slice of life | F, S, A 🌷

Payback’s a Bliss @jinned - one shot | 9.6k | strangers to lovers to friends, office AU, fake dating AU | S, F

Reader @/taelaxies - one shot | 2.6k | smut writer, roommate AU | S

Save Me @njkbangtan - series | 40k | demon au, enemies to lovers, roommate AU (sorta) | F, A,slightly S ~ [15/15]

Stuck with You drabble @jungshookz - bulleted | 1.8k | roommate AU, enemies to lovers, fratboy au, college au, from the Stuck with You universe | F 🌷

Stuck @taegularities - drabble | 940 | fwb au, “stuck together for a long period of time + “You’re lucky you’re cute, because your taste in music is awful.” prompt | F (this is my request and thank you dear author for writing this 🥰) 🌷

When Hearts Collide @taetaesbaebaepsae - drabble | 2.7k | established relationship, broke up for six months and drabble focused on discussion about what they did with other people during the six-month gap | F, A, S

Jungkook

- posted here (had to separate since there were a lot of reblogs and new reads)

Multi

Punctuation Series @/whatifyoulivelikethat - Yoongi x Reader x Jungkook

Series | BDSM, dom!yoongi x sub!reader x dom!jungkook

semicolon exclamation mark period comma question mark

Shameless @imaginethisbts - Jungkook x Reader feat Taehyung 🌷

one shot | 5.1k | not technically threesome, it’s just Jungkook x Reader being exhibitionists and Taehyung POV’s (and sort of helping our OC in the end) | pure filth, pwp (this is a classic)

Sugar & Spice @sunkissedjk - Taehyung x Reader, Jungkook x Reader 🌷

Two shot | 8.6k | “your friends ask you whether you prefer sugar or spice” | S

reposted by author

🥕 posted: 2021 Feb 25

🥕 link to other reading lists

🌹 I love to read so feel free to recommend a fic =)

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lgb-genrefic · 3 years

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Why Genre Fiction?

All fictional renditions of LGB people and same-sex relationships have been suffering in recent years. It's become harder to get excited when authors and screenwriters of any genre promise representation in their upcoming works, because we've seen all too clearly how a lot of that representation turns out: gay and lesbian characters guilted into "accepting" trans characters of the opposite sex by way of accepting them into their beds (while those who don't comply are demonized), gnc lesbians renouncing their own womanhood and distancing themselves from lesbianism while their girlfriends are left to flounder, breathing new life into age-old homophobic refrains like "male and female were designed to go together for reproduction" or "if you're going to date butches why not just date a man?"

These are the tropes that hit all types of fiction equally hard, and are just as likely to rear their heads in our day-to-day lives as well. But at the end of the day, the solace we're able to take is that we are still tethered to reality, and physical, material reality will always be on our side. Homosexuality exists, it's based on one's observable, biological sex, and it's not going anywhere.

Genre fiction then, presents something of a different beast. Here, the laws of reality itself are the will of the writer, and as a lifelong fan of genre fiction, I have witnessed many of the recurring ways that that will makes itself known through worldbuilding and the design of the story's characters.

All too often, especially in recent years, it says the same thing: "I am using my artistic license and control over this fictional world to design my own reality, and this reality of my design is overtly hostile to homosexuality."

How does this play out in practice?

It looks like sci-fi predictions of an "ideal" sexually liberated future where all boundaries and all distinct sexual orientations have been rendered obsolete: no longer are there discrete groups of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual people, rather everyone has become "pansexual" or "omnisexual," or otherwise happily free of labels. Gay and lesbian people have been quietly eliminated from this future, and everyone is open and available to the opposite sex.

It looks like legitimization of the body/soul dichotomy, a well-worn fiction staple that is all but taken for granted in the fantasy genre in particular, but also appears in the form of transhumanist sci-fi, always positing that the true essence of a person is something immaterial and the body is ultimately insignificant. Love stories, by extension, become stories of "hearts not parts," a paradigm where sex-based attraction is viewed as unspeakably superficial and morally indefensible, especially when characters possess the power to alter their bodies and change sex at will.

It looks like the presence of characters, be they gods, elves, aliens, angels, vampires, robots, immortals, or otherwise, that have surpassed humanity in longevity and wisdom, and who in their enlightenment all seem to have arrived at that same "hearts not parts" conclusion. Why limit yourself when you have eternity, right? Or alternately, why succumb to the base impulse of having sex at all? Pansexual or asexual, in either case sex-based attraction is considered so far beneath them as to not even be worth considering.

Genre fiction is the focus of this blog because the current landscape of popular belief about gender/sexuality has monopolized its unique ability to explore impossible/implausible ideas, and turned them explicitly into social commentary on the inevitable obsolescence of gay and lesbian sexuality.

The aim of this blog is to discuss the conventions of genre fiction as they pertain to sexuality in further depth. I am hardly the only same-sex-attracted person who has been alienated by these trends, and it's high time we gained some narrative control back.

Expect here the dissection of tropes, plenty of discussion on existing genre fiction and its fandoms with both good and bad handling of LGB characters, and ideally some perspectives from the other side of the creative process: how do we as LGB creatives turn the worlds of speculative fiction into places where we can belong again?

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aotopmha · 3 years

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Attack on Titan Series Thoughts

I've been mulling over Attack on Titan's ending and how I'd rate the whole story from all kinds of angles and I've reached the conclusion that above all else, the ending is really fucking annoying.

A great or a terrible ending would help me make my mind up much more easily.

If it's great, it's great. If it's terrible it's a good story with a terrible ending.

But instead, it is a mixed bag: there are things about it I like a lot and things about it I don't like.

It is a very common belief that the ending is paramount to a story's quality, but I've found that this is not really true for me. My favourite anime ever pretty much doesn't even have a proper ending. My needs for an ending basically encompass some sort of sense of closure and that's about it.

Especially longer-running series often either make the journey worth it just by being as long as they are (so a pretty generic ending is okay) or fall off in quality long before they are done. But AoT is neither of these for me.

AoT in this sense is complicated for me because I can't decide whether the ending impacted the quality of the story or not depending on which aspect of the ending I focus on.

Some details make it immensely satisfying to me and some details sour it a little bit.

I think right now the good and bad things balance out so in general nothing changes about how I view the story overall.

In basics, I really like the emotional core of Attack on Titan, but I've always found it flawed on the technical level.

I'd give the story a 10 just for how much it emotionally engaged me and made me care. This story is the reason why I started this blog and I became active talking about media in the first place.

For a time I was losing the sense of fun of being a fan: people just became really hostile when discussing stuff.

But this past week or so has been incredible in my inbox, reminding me of the highs of being a fan, with so many wonderful messages.

Other stories have made me more angry, made me cry more or laugh more, but AoT made me feel the biggest spectrum of feelings.

No other story has made me do this, at most I only became a member of various forums as a random member; I didn't create a blog with the aim to talk about one.

From a technical level, I would give it a 6-7 depending on the section of the story.

The foreshadowing for various twists is pretty loose from start to finish, there is a bunch of redundant scenes all over the story and the pacing can be really uneven. It is not nearly as *well-crafted* of a story in my eyes as I see people praise it to be.

The art is a pretty huge mess at points, too.

I think sometimes the fact that this is the author's very first actual long-running story very much shines through. I think only a beginner would dare to employ historical imagery as bluntly as Isayama did, too, for example.

But to me the emotional core is magical.

The average of these two aspects, emotional and technical, would be around 8-8.5.

But at the same time, when I finished that last chapter I felt like I couldn't rate it and this has rarely happened to me.

I've kind of slowly distanced myself from number ratings in general because consuming media is a very emotional and personal thing and exploring it via positives and negatives feels much more apt.

From that perspective, I think the story is incredibly emotionally intelligent and understands humanity really well.

Stemming from that in turn, I think themes are the strongest aspect of the story next to characters. While I think the story faltered in a some instances when it came to characters, I think the themes mostly stood tall all the way through.

I think it ended up giving answers to and looping back to ideas it started with: seeing the good in the cruel world, facing humanity's unending desire for conflict and need to survive, living without regrets, learning to see the world in more complex shades of gray rather than black and whites and learning to do the right thing when needed.

As a mystery box, it does answer pretty much all of the big mysteries of the story and I think I don't really take issue with any of the big answers except maybe one very specific one. The numerous twists throughout the story range from absolutely genius to fairly typical. Again, the foreshadowing gets a lot of praise when it comes to this story, but I think a lot of the story actually isn't planned. Isayama just uses some details in clever ways to make it seem like it was planned.

I think that is a skill in itself that never gets nearly enough credit, but in the end, I think that is the weakest part of the story along with the world itself.

I like the walls themselves and I really like some of the Titan designs, but other than that I never had much interest in the world of AoT on its own. It always has to be connected to characters or themes for me to care. The crystal cave, time sand dunes and certain Titan skeleton are the most interesting settings in the story for me in that sense.

I think it does also fall in the pit of some pretty frustrating dark fantasy tropes, most specifically with a certain blonde female character who had one of the best character arcs in the story that was kind of just thrown under the bus.

It can't quite escape the pitfalls of that genre and it just so happens to be my favourite genre of story, so I constantly see excessive shock value rape, forced pregnancy and gay erasure happen in stories that I think are great otherwise. It's frustrating.

I hoped AoT would be better than that because for so long it was, but it didn't end up being as such.

But at the same time, I think most of its female cast still ended up being pretty great and did some pretty fun archetype-defying stuff. It's a pretty strange dichotomy. It is actually much better than most dark fantasy, but not quite there yet.

This is actually true for the male cast, too, I think. It does some fun playing around with all of the character archetypes.

The story's action scenes are thrilling and some of the action setpieces are really memorable. The final arc really shines in that sense to me. As a horror spectacle it is especially excellent.

Despite sometimes coming across as narmy/unintentionally funny, it still somehow manages to make the Titans a credible threat and this is true throughout the entire story, for different, evolving reasons.

I think the Titans have become iconic for a reason and never lost the luster throughout any of the story.

Along with that, my final point is that it is one of the few stories that sets up a kill 'em all setting that actually kills major characters with substantial focus and commits to it. It also doesn't kill too many characters where no character ever gets to actually develop.

So, considering all of what I listed above, what would my general thoughts be?

I think it still is a story worth checking out.

Personally I obviously love the story as a whole.

But I think any fan of dark fantasy/sci-fi could get a bunch of entertainment out of it: above all I think it is an extremely digestable series.

It's sometimes a very dense read, but I never felt it was a "hard" read. It's a very dark story with a lot of horrible things happening, but I never felt it was difficult to get through even in its darkest of moments.

My favourite characters ended up being Gabi, Reiner, Eren, Pieck, Armin and Annie. Zeke and Hange get a shoutout, too.

My favourite chapters ended up being 71, 82, 100, 122, 131 and 137.

Who are you guys' favourite characters and what are your favourite chapters and why?

Send me an ask explaining why for fun! (Or ask me for my reasonings?)

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anhed-nia · 6 years

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PROFONDO ROSSO/THE APPLE

For some disgusting reason that may never be explained, I recently watched THE APPLE back to back with DEEP RED, and the experience produced a powerful moral outrage that I didn’t even know I had in me. Readers may be aware of the latter-day cult classic THE APPLE, a US-West German nightmare vision from 1980 that was exhumed in recent years by masochistic thrill-seekers and subsequently elevated to appropriate infamy. In fact, nonsensically, THE APPLE may have enjoyed wider visibility in our time than PROFONDO ROSSO, a virtuoso directorial effort from giallo master Dario Argento arriving the year before the more popular SUSPIRIA (not a giallo, by the way). PROFONDO ROSSO was exported under the ironic american title DEEP RED: THE HATCHET MURDERS--ironic because the film was hacked nearly to death, with the fatal amputation of more than twenty minutes of character development, leaving behind a movie that was too confusing and too revolting for foreign audiences then unfamiliar with the italian thriller genre. Happily, the film has enjoyed loving restoration and increased circulation since its 1975 debut, giving one a feeling of justice served. It is hard to feel that same sort of cultural pride in the endurance of THE APPLE, which is similarly impossible to look away from, though for quite opposite reasons.

So the thing is, Dario Argento is an artist who, in spite of his notable misanthropy, has given something to the world. He works in what I would call the most complex artistic medium in human history, and for more than a decade, he consistently lives up to its many intricate challenges. Here you have a guy who wakes up one day and says, "You know, I have something to say. I see the world in a certain way, and I need to tell everyone about it. I'm going to shoot a movie that's really going to make people feel something." And he does. He makes PROFONDO ROSSO, a perfect film. He really cares about it. Every single thing is just so. He takes these absurd miniature tableaus, and photographs them in a way that transforms them into another universe. He makes you feel like you're seeing the color red for the first time. He positions flashy modernity against grave antiquity, and seductive trash against high art, creating juxtapositions that communicate vividly about the dazzling contradictions in the very soul of Rome. This dichotomy is mirrored in his main character, a nervy but vulnerable pianist who has to hide his full artistic sophistication, lest he lose his job playing in seedy dives. This being a giallo, he witnesses a mysterious murder, the key to which is buried in his own memories--he himself becomes the only substantial evidence of the crime, and he is forced to live out his life in an escalating nightmare until he gathers enough context to make meaning out of what he knows. PROFONDO ROSSO is indeed profound and savage, offering reflexive commentary on its own existence as a primal and salacious piece of entertainment that is executed with almost impossible elegance and wisdom. Dario Argento is an artist who recognized the full multifaceted power of cinema, and then with great deliberation, fashioned this gift to the world.

Meanwhile, this same world also contains a guy like Menahem Golan. Golan may be forgivable as the crass commercialist behind the Cannon Group, who shat out a number of dusty-looking vehicles for goons like Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. However, nothing forgives THE APPLE. Nothing even explains it. It appears to be marketed to no one at all, being that no human being who has ever walked the earth could derive pleasure from it. While it may be hard to imagine possessing Argento's talent, it's easy to imagine him contemplating the vast potential of cinema, identifying its prismatic means of expression, and approaching it with both the humility and the courage to make of it something flawless. He does due diligence. He is responsible. He may injure his audience with his brutality, but he’ll never hurt their eyes. It is in no way so easy to even begin to estimate what Menahem Golan was thinking when he dreamed up this grueling fundamentalist christian sci-fi fantasy in which a pair of dopey Adam and Eve-like folk singers tries to save the distant future of 1994 from a literal disco inferno. This dystopian fable, apparently shot in the mass transit hubs of West Berlin, describes a world that has been taken over by a tyrannical music production company-cum-government, Boogalow International Music. The defining characteristic of its rule is enforced disco dancing. The viewer will never find out what is gained by all this disco dancing, or what else this company/government does; there is almost no apparent violence, physical or institutional, and there seem to be no consequences for the disco-averse other than that they are occasionally fined for failing to wear their "BIM marks" (a sort of "mark of the beast" that's obviously just a dead stock skate sticker). BIM's worst crime is trying to turn cherubic hippie chick Bibi into a disco diva, while keeping her apart from her beloved folksy musical partner Alphie. The action culminates with the lovebirds running away to live with a bunch of dirty hippies who leave unattended fires burning all over the public park where they live, and who are presently rescued by a godlike intergalactic being (or just god, but he flies around in outer space, I have no fucking idea) in a white tuxedo, who ferries them all off to another planet in his flying Rolls Royce.

That is how THE APPLE resolves itself. It's almost a feat in and of itself that, in spite of being based so transparently on the story of the Garden of Eden and certain parts of the Book of Revelations, THE APPLE manages to have no clear message whatsoever. There's a tenuous thing about how it's good for people to love each other, but it's impossible to imagine what BIM's point is, why they care whether or not people love each other, why they oppress people, how they oppress people, and what happens if you defy them, other than that you get a ticket and someone chases you out of the civic space that you're vandalizing. Besides that, the movie is simply bad in every single way. The music is the worst you'll ever hear, vacillating between being purely idiotic, and being militantly offensive, as in the case of a reggae number comparing the rule of BIM to the American slavery period. The costumes are beyond ugly, leaving every single character looking like they've been scribbled on and thrown in the garbage by an angry child. At a certain point, THE APPLE seems to be meticulously checking off a list of things that no person would ever wish to see in a movie, from filthy gangs of sack-clad children shrilly repeating nonsense lines, to warty old jewish stereotypes being sexually molested while they spoon-feed unctuous folk singers a greasy-looking stew

The film is so hideous in every dimension that you wouldn't even take a picture of it if it were happening in front of you. It's bad enough that the people who collaborated on this movie actually did any of what you see on the screen even one single time, without someone actually deciding to record the whole thing and distribute it to the world at large. What I'm essentially trying to say is, on the same planet in the same timeline, you can somehow have a person like Dario Argento, considerately and patiently crafting an incomparable work of art that speaks to the artist's economic and historical context--and you can also have someone like Menahem Golan, who can't even figure out how to make meaning out of the fucking Bible, who has the fucking nerve to shoehorn a bunch of degenerates into grimy leotards and make them twirl batons in a world covered in shitty stickers, and he calls that a fucking movie. He charges money for people to see it. It is literally maddening to even try to imagine what would motivate all this wasted motion, the product of which is so aesthetically and emotionally destructive that it is actually evil. It can be evil, to make a bad movie. This is the one and only lesson of THE APPLE.

PS I've seen THE APPLE like a hundred times so I guess I actually love it in some perverted way, I mean I'm not above it. Just, something had to be said.

#blogtober #deep red #the hatchet murders #profondo rosso #dario argento #the apple #men ahem golan #menahem golan #musical #sci-fi #fantasy #religion #giallo #horror #thriller

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readyaiminquire · 4 years

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Hippies, communes, Star Wars, and the future.

While I am duct-taping my life back together after Christmas and New Year - and with a to-do list longer than a Leonard Cohen song - I wanted to do a quick-fire piece to bridge things over while I am completing the next part of my Microchipping series. Enjoy!

I’ve also endeavoured to keep spoilers to a minimum - but read at your own risk all the same.

An old man hangs from a mechanical arm, controlling him like a puppeteer in his underground lair. His eyes are white, faded, clearly dead. Before him, our two heroes lie, burned by the lightning shot out of the Emperor's hands. He cackles at them, as he realises he no longer needs to convert either of them to the dark side - he no longer needs to steal one of their bodies to continue his maniacal reign. No, he announces, with a bond between them so rare and so strong, he can corrupt that power, and fully restore himself. He can circumvent what the mechanical puppet-arm only succeeded to do as pathetic imitation. With such a rarity, he can bend nature to his will.

He will corrupt it.

This is at least how I remember one of the scenes at the climax of Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker. I finally had the opportunity to watch it over Christmas, and it left me with a lot of question - many of which I shan't air here. Nonetheless, after speaking to family and friends about it, one recurring comment (again, among many that I will not mention here) is the perceived absurdity of the story itself. It came across as ridiculous, a rehash, absurd, or as simply uninteresting. A part of me was inclined to agree - where had I seen, read, heard this story in the past? Was it the original trilogy? Probably, after all, several story beats are clearly the same - but there is more to it.

This is when I realised; it was literally a story from a different era. A different time. It was, in many ways, based on the same foundation as the original trilogy, and this foundation was and remains a very particular product of its time. In essence, the story is a conflict between those using technology to as a means of controlling what is around them, to get further from 'Nature' (to ‘transcend’ nature, if you will) and through this control it; and those who seek to use technology and innovation as a means to get closer to nature. The Sith and Jedi very clearly embody this dichotomy, something made clear in the scene I outlined above: machines (implied to be an unnatural and pathetic imitation of life) versus using the very rare, special, and most important ‘natural’ bond between our two heroes as a resource to 'fix' the Emperor's predicament.

The concept of using technology to control, reshape, or otherwise 'change' what we perceive to be the natural order around us is not particularly novel today. However, the idea of using technology - something often imagined as being squarely in the realm of the man-made, and therefore 'unnatural' by definition - might be a bit tougher to grasp. It's important to appreciate that the Jedi and their allies are not Luddites. There's no rejection of technology here - after all the light sabre is still pretty damned advanced. However, structuring the Jedi order and their subsequent duties, aims, rules, and so on as a monastic order is exactly the point. They do not reject technology, as long as it furthers their understanding of what 'becoming one with the Force' means. Summed up by Obi-Wan, when referring to the light sabre, "a more elegant weapon for a more civilised time" - The mass-production and industralisation of conflict surely horrified him.

The original Star Wars trilogy was very much conceived in a time when this particular perspective was not only emergent but was beginning to take deep hold of a particular scene on the West Coast of the US. In his book From Counter Culture to Cyberculture Fred Turner outlines how today's ideas around technology as something fundamentally and inherently liberating, developed - perhaps most clearly seen in what other scholars have called "the Silicon Valley ideology". Perhaps surprising, in the 1960s, the computer (though but a distant great-great-great-something grandfather of what we use today) was understood as something far more oppressive. During the 1960s Berkeley student protests, for example, students wore punch cards around their necks to signify how they were nothing more than a cog in an ever-growing machine, one which forced them to do whatever the wider system demanded. The development of the computer was heralded as a new stage of bureaucratic centralisation, one which struck fear into the hearts of these young students, a new dawn of mechanisation (or digitalisation) that would crush their dreams.

With the emergence of the 1960s and 1970s countercultural movements - in particular, the hippies - an ideology of 'returning to nature' began taking root. The enemy, if you will, remained centralised bureaucratic power. This sparked the founding of many, many communes in what was understood to be untouched land, with the express purpose of reforming society, from scratch. It was among these communalists that the liberating potential of technological innovation first found fertile soil. The use of new structures and materials (famously, the geodesic dome), simple computers (something as basic as calculators), mixed with the ideas and ideals of writers like Buckminster Fuller, systems thinking, and likely a shedload of LSD, all that was needed was something to tie all of this together - the Whole Earth Catalogue. Though I won't go into details of WEC here (it's a really interesting story, though!), suffice it to say that the Catalogue functioned like a proto-social networking tool which mixed all of the above ideas, with ads for buying the latest tech or tool for these communards. It, in effect, tied together the fabric into what can be largely understood as a movement (or network forum; see my text here for more detail).

The point is, these hippies eventually returned to California - and in particular the Bay Area - as these communes failed one by one and brought these ideas back with them. Doing some historical compression, these ideas spread throughout this particular social strata, allowing a whole new positive and liberating view of technology to take hold. Suddenly, computers and the technology of the future would not enslave us under the yoke of technocratic oppression, it would emancipate us in ways we could never even imagine - some even imagined it would usher in a new era of post-humans: humans, but more.

In George Lucas' original Trilogy, it becomes very clear why this Sith-Jedi dichotomy remains so strong: thematically it ties into the whole debate and ideology outlined above. And in 1977 it was still very much a debate, technology was still by our standards deeply rudimentary. After all, the questions remained in the air, and it is clear what side Lucas stood on. After all, one side uses technology to oppress a whole galaxy, committing genocide, and forcefully enslaving just about anything that isn't them. The Empire also drew strongly on Nazi imagery. The Rebels, though no Luddites, use technology as a means of liberation; as a path to awaken the connection between people (of all races, species, etc.), to bring us closer to one another. In Episode VI, with the help of teddy bears in a redwood forest, they not only destroy the Imperial Forces, but they allow the Jedi as an order to reemerge - Isn't this a large signposting for nature reclaiming its central position, signalling to the Empire that it cannot win (and by extension invoking ideas of the ‘”noble savage” is even less surprising)?

The problem with this is, of course, that the world has moved on. As far as technology and innovation goes, the techno-utopian ideology of Silicon Valley has largely won out, and as a result, the concern of technology vis-à-vis nature or society has shifted. We are now more afraid of algorithms tracking our movement or usage, the gathering and sale of personal data, the influence and manipulation that automated systems might mete out. The current top-of-mind concern is not that technology will bring back goose-stepping soldiers in black leather trenchcoats, but that it will oppress us through very different means - and perhaps even oppress us without our noticing, until it is too late (assuming we might realise at all). The popularity of shows like Black Mirror very clearly show an understanding of what within the current popular discourse around technology concerns us.

Instead, Rise of the Skywalker very much returned to the old approach, that of violently oppressive technology versus a more humanising technology. This debate is in many ways dated, it doesn't connect within the current cultural imagination and instead alienates its audience. Good fantasy and sci-fi holds up some sort of mirror to society, critiques it in some way or another (and some more subtly than others) - Rise of the Skywalker and in many ways the rest of the 'new' trilogy holds up a mirror to what society was, and signals to us that it is still very much stuck in 1983.

Selected References

Delfanti, A. 2013. Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, Pluto Press.

Haraway, D. 2014. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Presentation)

Turner, F. 2008. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

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cooperjones2020 · 7 years

Text

Second City, chp. 3

Summary: Sometimes she worries she’s settling — for a smaller job, a smaller city, a smaller life than she’d promised herself — but that was before she found out Jughead Jones lives in Chicago. That was before she found out the final secret of Jason Blossom’s murder.

A/N: As Juggie says, this chapter is a little bit meta. And pretty nerdy. I just have a lot of feelings about books, okay. Also I fudged with canon a little re: Jug’s writing style. So sue me.

ao3-->http://archiveofourown.org/works/11409360/chapters/25755798

Second City one / two

Nobodies Nobody Knows one / two (ao3)

In which Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones drink tequila

When the uber drops her off outside the bar Jughead selected, she buys herself some time by checking her email. She’s already spotted him inside but doesn’t know if he’s seen her, so the email-checking is a precautionary measure.

Though she wouldn’t be surprised if she had any last minutes notes from her boss.

The week thus far has not been kind to her. Cynthia found out she’d twisted the truth about her and Jug’s shared history. Turns out she once dated his agent. Cynthia also loves the idea that she’s the inspiration for Jughead’s heroine and is all over the plaster-Betty’s-picture-on-the-side-of-a-bus idea train.

Betty’s feeling that particularly potent mixture of nauseous because she’s disappointed someone, nervous about seeing Jughead, and migraine-y because she’s been staring at a computer screen all day. The farther the cab had gotten from the Loop, though, the more the nerves had emerged as the heavy favorite for emotion of the night.

She forces herself not to pace as she stares at her phone screen. Public spaces. She feels more comfortable about being around him in public spaces. They’d emailed about maybe doing the interview in either of their apartments, for sake of ease. She’s not ready to see his apartment. Being on the back of his motorcycle had been overwhelming enough. She isn’t ready to saturate herself with even more of him.

The prospect of her apartment is even more terrifying. She is afraid of what he would make of her life, what details and detritus he would weave into a narrative she couldn’t control.

A public space means no home field advantage. And it means an escape hatch, if she needs it.

She can see him inside, sitting in the far corner where the bar top meets the wall. He has his laptop out and a cup of coffee at his elbow, beanie covering his hair but for the one stray curl. If not for the wall of liquor she can see to the right of him, he could be in his booth at Pop’s.

Who drinks coffee at a bar at 8 pm?

Get a hold of yourself, Cooper. If you can’t feel brave, you can at least act like you do.

She goes in.

“Hey — sorry I’m late.”

He arches an eyebrow. “You’re not. And you know it.” Well she’s not early, which is the same thing. She busies herself setting her bag down and getting arranged on the bar stool while she keeps talking.

“How was Riverdale?”

“Great. Weird. They put my book in a special display in the library at Riverdale High. No matter that I didn’t graduate from there.”

“Well, I guess the story does take place there.”

“Yeah. Anyway, JB graduated and no one cried, so gold star for the weekend. I read your piece yesterday.”

His sudden change of topic gives her whiplash, but a sudden puff of warmth smokes in her stomach at his words.

“Oh thanks, you didn’t have to.”

“You know, I actually read it before I saw the byline and I wondered why the voice was so familiar. So which one was your favorite?”

She’s a little bit dazed by the compliment and doesn’t immediately put two and two together for the question.

“Favorite what?”

“Favorite bookstore.”

“Oh, right, duh. Um, Myopic, I think. Though Bookman’s Corner was a close second.”

His eyes crinkle when he smiles. “Good choices. Myopic is one of my favorites too. Did you go into the occult section? They have an armchair in the window in that room on the second floor that overlooks Milwaukee Ave. I wrote a good forty percent of the new book from that spot.”

“No I didn’t see it, I’ll have to go back.”

“You will.” She breaks eye contact when he doesn’t, and turns to the glass of water in front of her.

“Hey, Betts.” He reaches out and touches her hand briefly before retreating. “How about a drink?”

It is by far the least professional thing she’s ever done, but she truly, completely, 100% cross-her-heart-and-hope-to-die does not believe she will make it through this evening without alcohol. As if by magic, or the power of positive thinking, the bartender sets before her something bedecked with cherries and way too colorful to taste like anything other than cough syrup.

She looks at Jughead, wondering if he’d ordered something for her before she came in. But he’s frowning at the glass. The bartender nods to a table past the bar.

“Courtesy a that guy.” They both turn to look, and a man on the far side of room is raising his glass to her. She returns the gesture and, as usual, blushes, before turning her body more fully towards Jughead and crossing her legs. He puts a hand on the back of her chair.

“What a dick. Like he can’t see we’re together. Want me to go talk to him?”

“No, I’m a big girl. I can do it myself.”

“But—”

“No, Jug. I’m not going to let the two of you grunt over me like neanderthals arguing over a piece of meat. If you go over there, he’ll think you’re my boyfriend and that’s why he’ll back off. I don’t want it to be like that. I want him to back off because I say I’m not interested, not because you say so.”

She notices him exhale forcefully.

“Besides, what if he’s my one true love. If I don’t talk to him, I’ll never find out and then I’ll die alone surrounded by cats.”

“Why, Betty Cooper, are you being sarcastic?” An impish sort of mirth springs to his eyes and it makes something ache inside her.

“It’s not like you have the market cornered. I’ll be right back.” She takes her purse to the bathroom, with a pit stop to thank the man, and manages to get away without giving him her number. She’s not sure why—he is cute—but it feels like a betrayal somehow.

When she gets back, the bartender has replaced the frou frou drink with a shot of something clear. Tequila, she thinks, because it’s accompanied by a salt shaker and a wedge of lime resting on a napkin.

“You want to do tequila shots?”

“Liquid courage, Betts,” he says, in an echo of her thoughts from earlier. For a moment she feels guilty, but she’s glad he’s nervous too.

She squints at him and takes the shot, before delicately setting the lime rind back on the napkin. When she turns back, his grin could split his face.

“You’re a bad influence, Jones.”

“Always.”

When the bartender has cleared away the shot glasses in favor of a Goose Island for him and a glass of wine for her, he says, “So we should probably get started?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” She sets up the recorder, thankful it’s a Wednesday and the bar is quiet. He hits the ground running. More verbose that she remembers. Charmingly articulate. She almost wishes they were doing a podcast instead of an article.

“The sequel came as a bit of a surprise. At the end of The Final Fissure, you revealed the murderer. What story is left to tell?”

“I don’t really think of Sweetwater Subtext—that’s the title by the way, nailed down for sure today—Anyway, I don’t think of Sweetwater Subtext as a sequel, though technically it is because some of it takes place later than Final Fissure. I think of them more as companions, separated by genre but connected by story. The Final Fissure is more plot-driven—definitely commercial fiction. Sweetwater Subtext explores more of the motivations of the characters, I’d say it’s more literary.”

“Does that mean it will alienate some of your original readership?”

“I hope not. I don’t think the genre should have anything to do with whether a story is compelling, enjoyable. I think writers—well, more likely critics—tend to underestimate readers. Preferring genre fiction like crime or romance or sci-fi doesn’t say anything about a reader’s abilities, only their interests. Readers have already developed a relationship with these characters, hopefully they care enough about them to want to know more.”

“I was surprised when I first picked up Final Fissure and saw the genre. You gave up on your Philip Marlowe fantasies.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how much hard boiled crime fiction you’ve read, but it usually doesn’t turn out well for the women. You get to college and take one theory course, and all of a sudden all you can see is the male gaze and the forced dichotomy between the ingenue and the femme fatale.

“Besides, you took over the story pretty early on and your voice—sorry, Betsy’s voice—was pretty insistent.”

Her mouth screws up at the mention of her fictional alter ego. “You just had to pick Betsy, didn’t you? Do you remember our third grade teacher called me that all year, no matter how many times me, or you, or Archie corrected her?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I tried to call her every variation of Elizabeth there is. Eliza stuck for a while but I kept writing ‘Betts’ in spite of myself so calling her Betsy saved me a ton of rewriting and annoyed calls from my editor. Though she found other things to latch onto. She thought ‘Betsy’ was ‘too mid-century, not enough millennial.’”

Betty laughs at his air quotes. “I’ve thought that myself more than once. But you withstood the pressure?”

“Never let it be said that I don’t suffer for my art.”

He pops the toothpick that previously held her frou frou drink cherries into his mouth, and she tries hard not to fixate on the tip of his tongue as it rolls the piece of wood from tooth to tooth. Focus, Cooper. What’s next in her notes?

“One of the big changes this time around must be your relationship to your readers. Have you felt the pressure of people waiting for this story, of what they might want to happen next? Has it affected you, either in your work or in your life?”

“Obviously the story starts in your head. But as soon as it’s printed, readers make it their own. It’s a dialogue in which they define the story—and me as the author, by default—as much as by who they are as by who I am. In the case of The Final Fissure, I was just trying to tell the story. Writing it was as much an act of therapy for me as it was a work of literature for everyone else. I wrote it as a teenager and then sat on it for many years, before I had the emotional distance I needed to edit it into a shape that would hold some broader appeal. This time around, it’s a little bit meta. Sweetwater Subtext is the same narrator coming back to a defining event of his life, trying to understand how it’s shaped him. Final Fissure was for me, but Sweetwater Subtext I did write with a specific audience in mind.”

“Not the audience who’s bought and loved it?”

“No, something a bit narrower than that.”

She doesn’t quite know how to follow-up without asking him who the audience is, but that feels too intimate. So she switches gears.

“If you wrote The Final Fissure in high school, and Sweetwater Subtext in the last couple of years, what did you do in the meantime?”

“I wrote a lot of short fiction. Creative writing at a university pretty much runs on the short story workshop.”

“So should we be looking for a short story collection next?”

“Haha, no. I think I subjected my workshop-mates to enough of the torture that was my short fiction. And it definitely overlapped with the world of The Final Fissure and Sweetwater Subtext. Some of it got recycled into the two books. Maybe the story of Jason Blossom’s murder is the only story I have in me. Maybe I’ll be writing about it, who I was—who we were—then, for the rest of my life, in one way or another.”

Betty’s afraid to touch the subtext of that statement with a ten-foot pole. She presses the tip of her tongue against the back of her front teeth and wills herself not to flush. Or, if she does, hopes Jug will attribute it to the alcohol.

“Okay…so if the story is basically the same, how else was the writing experience different this time around?”

“In some ways, I think Sweetwater Subtext might have been harder to write — I’ve read The Final Fissure so many times but I also lived it. I’m not sure how to separate fact from fiction, I’m not sure if I know the difference. Sweetwater Subtext is much more internal, there’s much more room for error, interpretation.”

“Did your routine change? Anything in the physical process of how you wrote?”

“Definitely. Being an established author has conveyed a huge privilege on me. The Final Fissure was written in spare time at school or late nights at the diner. I’m still a nighttime writer. I still can’t write at home, I need people around me to observe. But writing gets to be the focus of my day now. I’ve also gotten better at letting other people see my writing. As a teenager, I was obsessive about making it perfect first.”

“Oh I remember.” They’re both facing ahead, so the recorder has a better angle, but she can see him smiling at her out of the corners of her eyes.

“But now, sometimes it’s just get it on the page and send it off, especially if I’m under a deadline. Still, though, I like some feedback if only to reaffirm my own conviction that I’m headed in the right direction. Actually, Archie looked at a few chapters of Sweetwater Subtext pretty early on.”

“Really? I can’t see him as a particularly dedicated editor.”

Jughead’s laugh is big, his head is thrown back and his shoulders shake. “No, definitely not. But it was more feedback on the content I was looking for, than the style. Whether I was crossing a line with anything.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

“Good.”

She takes a risk. “I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.”

It hurts. She knows it shouldn’t. She knows it makes sense. But it does. Because it sounds like ‘I don’t think about you.’

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.” Way to ruin it, Betty. “On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.”

#bughead fanfiction #riverdale fanfiction #bughead #betty cooper #jughead jones #riverdale #mine #second city

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jennypark-phases · 7 years

Photo

Future Worlds - Week 2 Lecture notes

24.07.17

1. What kind of World?

A fantasy filled with magical creatures? A sci-fi futuristic covered with aliens? Anything is possible! Just start with your desired theme and build from there.

2. Set rules for the World?

If it's a fantasy filled with goblins you cannot have an alien come out and attack the main character! Y

ou need to set laws, like who can and can't do this, where something will always be found, what is taboo and what not.

Consistency is needed. You also need laws of Physics; not just government laws.

Show don’t tell

Not necessarily harsh - protagonist might struggle against humans, technology, or some created system

Explain the rules

But the rules are part of the story - don’t make it exposition

Go for the big picture

Zoom out to see the whole world - countries?

World building is about perspective

Whose perspective do you choose now?

Create believable characters

Characters have something to look forward to - aka desires, and something positive

Do the characters know they are living in a dystopia?

What do they know and believe about the world? They may not

know they are living in the Matrix.

Perhaps they suspect another world or remember their past

Is your character alone?

A survivalist? Easy desolation, but cliche.

Grey skies, grey intentions?

The bad guys don’t think they are bad.

What is the governing rationale - the ideology may be good

the outcomes bad

Impartiality around secondary characters

Your protagonist should be multi-dimensional - not purely

good.

GAME GODS

Richard Bartle says “Virtual world designers can’t add story, they can only add content. Content provides experiences that can be made by those who come through or observe them into story.” Bartle -

players don’t know

According to Robert Pratten “at its most open-ended, the virtual world (or transmedia experience) creates a world with lots of actionable content and choices but no plot?”

But what if players created plot - story - narrative?

ARG - Virtual Worlds

● Bartle denied user generated content - and didn’t foresee ARGs - player create and dynamic narratives

● False dichotomy - the virtual vs. the real

● Real time - real players

● Virtual worlds are not just platforms but

contain platforms

● Virtual worlds can interact with the

Main Character - the World

“Every story in your world is, in a way, a tale of that world no matter who the "real" protagonist is. The events that happen affect the world. They come from the past; they manifest in the present; they define the future.”

Steven Savage, Way with Worlds

Characters: manifestations of the World

“Each character you write is a view on the world – and rarely do they truly know everything, which only serves to enrich the story and make them more believable in their flaws and strivings.”

Steven Savage, Way with Worlds

What if the characters were the players and participants in the narrative - in real time?

#colabfutureworlds #lecture2

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