He reminds me of roadkill

Anywho my first try at an animatic or ig lyric slideshow tbh had fun tho

Song is Emotion in Motion by Naked Eyes

random mfn headcanons i could think of because im bored and currently in pain for unrelated reasons

[warning, its all over the place]

- Gobblette eats when she’s stressed and upset, either munching on her fingers since they’ve still got some salt in the shakers or resorting to any of the puppets. the lonely sun hats you find lying around all have a story.

- the puppets are so bad with sarcasm. they thought gordon was telling them to go jump off down the big hole in the courtyard because of a metaphor and he barely saved those who decided to.

- before they accidentally exposed themselves to the human world through adult television, the puppets thought the scariest thing in the entire world was the company intro that would play before their movies. they had no clue what CGI was so the first time they were exposed to it, Al and a few handlers had to calm them down and reassure them it was fake. they eventually changed it because, yeah, the talking alphabet letters were a little freaky.

- Ray has a soft spot for little kids (human or puppet) and would never hurt them. the most he’ll ever do to a Junebug is gently push her to the side if she’s getting too irritable. the other puppets can catch these hands.

- the little puppet birds used to inhabit the neighborhood set, but they were all corralled into the aviary after the cancellation. they were never given names and aren’t too keen on flying far away, preferring to just stay around the studio. very harmless, as long as you aren’t anti-homeless architecture or Gordon’s truck he just got cleaned.

- junebug and lilianna bring gordon roadkill and leave it on his desk.

- the puppets who didn’t have a spot to sleep like some of the more significant characters (Lenard, Pearl, Arnold, etc) would get in a big puppy pile in the middle of the neighborhood after the studio closed for the night and sleep, maybe even talk to each other for a little.

- nowadays, Ray sleeps in the pipe that leads to his lair. he’s got this flimsy, pathetic excuse for a blanket and an empty soda pack as a pillow. Pearl would lie down on whatever flat surface she could find around stage 4 and Gobblette would just pass out wherever. Arnold doesn’t sleep anymore.

- Gordon is not very touchy, even before the war he was always a little awkward when it came to physical affection with romantic intentions. he’s also bisexual because i say so.

- the unfriendlies are basically just edgy, rebellious teenagers who torment Gordon at any chance they can.

- Pearl’s eyes are bloodshot as a result of seeing horrible things on the tv. she was making the most horrible sounds, having no way of being able to tear her own eyes off so a puppet did it for her, but she couldn’t find a way out of stage 4 and the others didn’t allow her to. she eventually calmed down herself but no one could find her glasses after that.

- Gerzwald is six feet under. The puppets do not know.

- ricky can stretch himself if needed, usually in shots where his lower half can be exposed. according to him, his limit is ‘three floors.’

- the company Gordon worked for will go bankrupt in about 3 years after the true ending.

- do not leave George, Junebug and Lilianna on their lonesome together, it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. Gordon returned from an exhausting trip with Norman and Lenard only to find the studio in an even more chaotic state.

- none of the puppets have ever had the chance to explore the outdoors beyond the studio’s main entrance, the few exceptions when they were away from the studio filming for movies and Lilith, now unfriendly Lilianna, who was taken away from the studio by a few employees for a few days.

- the puppets do feel the need to eat, but it wouldn’t kill them if they went days without food. they can also get sick, but it’s only stupid, unexplained illnesses with even stupider names like puppetpox or the cotton cold.

- while puppets do coexist, all the puppets within the studio are a lot more ‘artificial’ than others you might come across. it isn’t immoral to create puppets by hand, but they were still mass produced solely to entertain little ones and never learned anything besides that, even if it was done with good intentions.

- in-universe there was a lot of controversy surrounding Arnold. parents found him too frightening while half the child audience thought he was the funniest character.

- my hcs for the main five’s handlers : Oksana (George), Martha (Junebug), Fredrick (Lilianna), Claire (Norman), Anthony (Lenard).

- believe it or not, this was not the weirdest thing Gordon has experienced. If he had to rate it, it’d be number 4.

Heyo it's me again! Once again late to the party but here I am lol

For the ask game:

🎀 (Gonna force you to say something nice about your writing cause I think it's amazing <3)

💞

🤍

💌 (only if you feel like it, I guess it goes for all of them lol <3)

(Also writing to let you know that Crying Wolf has forever changed my brain chemestry, I saw a crow heading for a roadkill the other day and my first thougth was 'Oh this is just like how Hobie describes his situation in Crying Wolf!' so yeah I'm still very normal about your fic I would say)

hiya! thanks for the ask, always good to see you around!!

🎀give yourself a compliment about your own writing

mmmmmmaybe i am okay at figurative language sometimes

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

really getting a feel for the characters, especially their emotions. i'm not so much of a visual person, so feeling them out is the best way for me to get to grips with a character. anything can help with that, like the way they react in a certain situation to how they treat one specific person. just helps me to 'get to know' them. definitely better when it's from another character's omniscient too because then i have to sift through the layers of narrative, like a fun little puzzle!

🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?

the last one probably. that's take a bite right out of the sky. it's pretty vague and metaphorical at times, so it's to be expected, but i fully had to break it down in the comments for a couple of confused folks. which is fine! just tells me i need to up my game a bit more

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

well i have about ten or eleven up-and-coming wips at the moment so you take your pick lmao but seriously the thing i'm most excited to be working on right now, i'm collaborating with someone else on!! i've never done this before so i'm a bit nervous (read: so extremely that sometimes i lie in bed and am consumed by terror) but it's good to be pushing out of my comfort zone and the fic premise is one of the most beloved ones i've ever had the pleasure to be working on, so here's hoping that i'm up to scratch

and aaa!! knowing that crying wolf has continued to be in your thoughts is so lovely to hear!!! it's so good to know that i continue to worm my way into other people's brains like a malicious leech <33 hope u had fun thinking about the roadkill

thank you for the ask!! here is the masterpost of them for any interested!

i wish there were a tag i could block to hide every "here is an exhaustive list of the marginalization status of every member of my household, and we are still $9,999 behind on rent! please share to help out all 35 of us who live together and are, of course, queer and disabled and nonwhite" post. buddy i am already giving money to the poor fucked up neurodivergent pronouns-having-ass weirdos i know personally. let me clear out the posts from the gay freaks who aren't in my monkeysphere. i can't afford to care about any more impoverished artists than i currently do. make room for more free posts from people who saw a crow eating roadkill and imagined a metaphor that made their dick (literal or figurative) a kind of hard they clinically cannot keep to themself. please.

Edvard's Supernatural Guide: 2x14 Born under a Bad Sign

Born under a Bad Sign is an average episode. It does nothing fantastic but nothing abysmal either, and the only response I can really summon is to shrug my shoulders and wait for the next episode. This far into series two, I want more of an overall plot but the show is not giving it. It did not bother me so much when I watched the episodes normally without taking a week to write an analysis of each one, but it has begun to plot. Characters spinning their wheels is fine by me, and one negative aspect of the trend towards series being shorter the lack of character moments and fun filler episodes. That said, it has been quite a while since any plot has happened, and it will not be until 2x21 All Hell Breaks Loose Part I that more plot happens. Luckily, Tricia Helfer will be visiting us for 2x16 Roadkill, Ben Edlund will be giving us 2x18 Hollywood Blues, and Jensen is once again going to blow my metaphorical socks off in 2x20 What is and What Should Never Be.

This episode is forgettable. An important character makes an appearance, but this has no bearing on the plot whatsoever and she does not turn up again until 5x10 Abandon All Hope. Sam killing people turns out to have nothing at all to do with Azazel’s taint (stop it!), so it was as good as pointless. The plot of the episode also raises a few questions which are (unless I have forgotten something) never answered. Why was Meg trying to push Dean to kill Sam if Sam is supposed to be Meg’s boss’s favourite? Paula R. Stiles mentioned something about Meg feeling betrayed by Azazel and no longer caring about his plans, but if that is the case, I do not know where this comes from. Did Azazel put Meg on the rack in Hell as punishment for failing?

The only good things to come out of this episode are Dean punching Sam at the end and Jo making her exit for the next two and a half years. Sorry Sam stans and Jo fans, but I am still only here for Dean. It will be another twenty four episodes until another character turns up whom I especially care about, so buckle up. At least Bela will keep us entertained in the interim.

The episode starts with Dean phoning Ellen beneath a road bridge. Sam has been missing for a while and nobody has heard from him. Eventually, Dean gets a call from Sam, and Dean rushes to meet him in a motel. The editing in this cold open is effective at creating anxiety, urgency, and distress with its quick jump cuts and pacing, and Jensen does a top-notch job of conveying Dean’s desperation and worry. He finds Sam in a motel room with somebody else’s blood on his clothes and no memory of the last few days.

One thing which the episode never makes explicit is whether or not Sam appears for anything other than the last scene and a bit. Meg is possessing him the entire time, but demons are shown in other episodes of the show to allow the host consciousness control now and again when convenient. Either Meg was in complete control of Sam’s body the whole time, or she took over at certain points when she wanted to. Paula R. Stiles is of the opinion Meg was calling the shots all episode, but I have not decided either way. Demons do not usually seem that good at mimicking their host, but weirder things have happened.

Sam fears he has killed somebody, but Dean is adamant that there must be another explanation. Even when the trail of clues leads them to the scene of a hunter’s murder and the brothers see video footage of Sam slitting a hunter’s throat, Dean tries his hardest to absolve Sam of blame and find another possible answer. A shapeshifter, for example, would be a reasonable explanation if it were not for the fact the Sam in the video footage did not have the eye flare shapeshifters have.

Readers might be wondering why I have not called Dean out for his hesitance to see what is right in front of him when I waste no time in calling Sam out for not pulling the bloody trigger. My answer is that when Dean thinks there is another explanation, there usually is, such as 2x13 Houses of the Holy when Sam rushed to conclude angels were behind everything while Dean’s skepticism is ultimately proven correct. Dean is Velma or Scully in this situation, and once again is proven right in the end: it was not Sam who killed the hunter, but Meg in Sam’s body.

Sam (or Meg pretending to be Sam, whichever you prefer: art is about interpretation after all) concludes without hesitation that he is responsible, and that what is happening to him is what John warned Dean about. If it is indeed Meg pretending to be Sam while he and Dean deal with the immediate shock of seeing the video footage, she does such a good job that she is almost indistinguishable from Sam. She portrays the depressive aspect of his manic depression irreproachably as s/he goes into depressive scum-of-the-Earth mode. He is convinced he is evil and there is no hope for him, entirely absorbed in his own mire whilst Dean wastes no time activating protective parentalised brother mode and destroys all evidence they were they. All evidence, including smashing the desktop computer’s tower and stamping it to smithereens, whereupon they leave.

On the subject of the hunter’s house, why would the electrics for the alarm be on the outside? That is just asking for trouble. It is not even the electrics to the entire house, as the desktop computer works no problem. I do not understand the logic.

Next follows a scene where either Meg or Sam tries to get Dean to kill him. If this is Meg in control, it is cruel, and it is even more so if it is Sam in control. In case you missed it, in 2x11 Playthings Sam got Dean to promise he would kill him if he turned into a monster. My response to that was that if Sam would rather die than become a monster, he should pull the trigger himself rather than offloading the burden onto his already burdened brother. That response is still valid. Dean of course refused to kill Sam (2x09 Croatoan showed Dean will not kill an innocent unless necessary) and earnt getting clocked with a pistol for it.

By this point in the show, Dean should have severe brain damage after the number of times he has been rendered consciousless by head trauma, but amazingly he is completely unscathed upon awakening some hours later. The motel manager is as much a knave as the guy working in the petrol station was, but this time Dean does not get the five-finger discount on some food for his trouble. Instead, he uses the man’s computer and internet to track the GPS on Sam’s phone by way of lying to the police about his diabetic son Sam who absconded to a Justin Timberlake concert without his insulin.

Sam is in Duluth, Minnesota, or rather Meg in Sam’s body is. It is unquestionably Meg in complete control now. She goes to see Jo, gets creepy, tries raping her, then knocks her unconscious, ties her up, and uses her as bait for Dean, to which I ask: why? If Meg wanted Dean dead and tortured, why not take advantage of the fact he was unconscious and transport him to a shack in the middle of nowhere? What does Jo have to do with anything, and why was the journey to Minnesota necessary? So silly.

Further to the subject of Jo, she was completely useless at the beginning of the series, and she was reduced to a helpless damsel in this one (by a female writer, no less). Not only that, but her inner bitch came roaring to the fore when Dean showed discomfort as she dug the bullet out of his arm. It has been twelve years since her last appearance on the show, and there are still people who ‘wanted Dean to end up with Jo’. Why? She was an annoying try-hard whom the writers tried to make look tough by having Dean treat her with cotton gloves (remember: he did not punch back in 2x02 Everybody Loves a Clown -_- ) and acting like the worst stereotype of an ‘empowered women’.

The only real positive thing Jo does in this episode is patch Dean up after Meg!Sam shoots him and he falls into the water. It is lucky that Dean has such a sturdy mobile phone which survived being in Lake Superior for a few minutes. It was also lucky that Dean actually still had a ringtone for Jo to hear, rather than having his phone on silent or vibrate like mine has been since about 2005. Other than that, Dean and Jo work out that Meg!Sam (who has not yet been revealed to be Meg) is hunting local hunters. The nearest hunter Dean knows is in South Dakota, and he decides that is where Sam is going. Strange that South Dakota is the nearest hunter Dean knows, but at this point in the show he and Sam have not met many hunters. Dean takes his leave of Jo, who finally seems to realise Dean is not interested in dancing the vertical tango with her.

The hunter in South Dakota is Bobby. Sam turns up at his door, but Bobby is not fooled (did the episode specify Dean rang him? It must have done) and gives Sam a beer spiked with holy water. The holy water renders Sam impotent long enough for Bobby to knock him out and tie him to a chair in a devil’s trap. Dean roughs Sam up a bit, and tries to exorcise the demon in him, but the exorcism does not work. Meg has a counter spell (later shown to be the mark on Sam’s arm). After the exorcism fails, Meg recites some Latin which breaks the devil’s trap and sets her loose.

Based on what she says, it is likely Meg was tortured in Hell after Dean sent her back there in 1x22 Devil's Trap, but why Azazel’s second-in-command would be tortured is never explained. Whatever the reason, she wants revenge against Dean as she blamed him specifically for her exorcism. She seems to have completely dismissed the fact Bobby and Sam were there, too, which is interesting considering Sam is supposed to be the protagonist and Dean the sidekick, but whatever. Meg proceeds to beat Dean up and ram her fingers into the wound on his shoulder. Bobby, however, does some quick thinking and burns the mark on Sam’s arm, thereby disabling the magic keeping Meg from being exorcised from Sam’s body.

Other than that, there is nothing to say except another female writer made another joke about male victims of sexual violence and assault. People talk about the show having a problem with misogyny because of the ratio of *significant* female characters to significant male characters who die or are written off, but it was female fans who hated Jo, Bela, and Ruby, and Eugenie Ross-Lemming was one of those responsible for killing off Charlie. It seems like the woman-hating is mostly coming from other women.

Now it is female writers making fun of sexual violence against men (metaphorical or otherwise). Raelle Tucker did it in 2x10 Hunted when she gave Dean the line about Gordon and men being raped in prison showers, and Cathryn Humphris did something similar in this episode. Yes, Sam ‘spent a week with a girl inside him’, but demonic possession in the show is presented as violation akin to sexual violence and abuse. Given a character was almost raped in this episode and Loki/Gabriel will repeatedly rape a man by proxy in the next episode, some more awareness would not have gone amiss.

Overall a dull episode this week which I struggled to squeeze much out of at all. This is probably the shortest analysis I have done for this show so far, second only to 2x07 The Usual Suspects (also written by Cathryn Humphris), but I cannot summon the will to care for 2x14. Later in the series, I will be critical of Jared’s acting abilities ( or rather his decision to stop acting in this show altogether in favour of ‘reading the script and going home’), but at least this early in the show he cared at least a little and displayed what he can do when he cares and tries.

i think i figured it out.

my mom asked me what it is that i look for in people (specifically in reference to partners but i also think this broadly applies to people i enjoy most) and i talked about the intersection of caring, TRUE understanding, and fascination (those last two tend to go pretty hand in hand). i’ve had partners who have cared but could never understand and who held no mystery for me and partners who so deeply understood and fascinated me but just didnt have the space to care as much as they did (care being the quality that makes the thing last on their end while fascination is what makes things last on my end), but what it is exactly about certain people that makes them fascinating to me is hard to pin down. this is partly because i think all people are inherently interesting and have interesting things about them, but dear god do they play up the parts that are unbearably boring (and that in and of itself is kind of fascinating to me). i suppose the specific kind of fascination i look for comes from people who are distinct and who live. my friends back home are like this. my one friend is a painter and lives with her boyfriend in his mom’s apartment and his mom is a fashion designer and will let my friend add on to paintings she made when she was in design school and we’ll get together with our friend who does parkour and works in landscaping and breaks into construction zones and our friend who works in the local deli and is working on his own fashion brand and we smoke and we watch someone play re4 and then go out bowling or get ramen and play with roadkill. my friends from oregon who throw the most oregon-ish house parties and wear vintage suits and listen to prairie home invasion and do archaeology and constantly wanna go on a pilgrimage to any sort of hill and move like fucking cartoon characters and write parody beat poetry are also like this. there is something about them and their commitment to an idea and their capacity to just fucking live and be messy that i don’t find in people here at university and it is exactly what i need from people. i dont care about perfect morality or purity--i want the mess. obviously i think we should all strive to be the best we can and i have my own commitments to ideology, but i hate the need to make everything clean and simple and easy to swallow. i hate this optimized, advertiser-friendly, marketable version of living. i need someone who really fucking struggled but damn it they’re trying. my ex’s favorite book was winesburg ohio and i read it on his birthday after we broke up, but the concept of grotesque that it identifies is exactly it. people who are so fucking committed to some truth (maybe multiple) that it makes them grotesque. a desire to be distinct while still wanting to be a part of something bigger, a desire to be loved, anything. for me, my struggle is with truth itself as something that i believe both does and doesnt exist at least as we understand it. we concern ourselves so much with factual or philosophical or ideological truth, but this is inaccessible to us and maybe isnt even there. perhaps there is truth in wholly sacrificing the self and living through pure sensation, but what’s the value in that if you cant share it? for me, its the human truth that matters. communication isnt perfect and that sensory truth gets lost in translation, but the way we try to capture it and connect with one another and understand is EVERYTHING. story, metaphor, symbol. its EVERYTHING. we have gone so far down the ladder of language that we can no longer agree with one another on what even exists, but if we climb then we can find commonality and meaning in metaphor. obviously its a complicated issue in the modern identity-driven era where we’ve built a society that begs us to kill anything we may have once regarded as god, but i think its necessary to have faith in something yknow? post-structuralism has points and is totally more suited for an era where fluidity is more necessary, but i wonder if its actually attainable. we think in structure. we think in archetypes. we try to abandon or ignore them but they dont go away (and dont get me started on modern retellings of myths that ignore symbolism and turn them into character driven narratives. the death of metaphor makes me want someone dead) and really i think we need to try to understand them again and learn that they themselves are not rigid things and that subverting an existing archetype is meaningful and that they allow for a richness in fluidity. ANYWAY. point being i like people who just are. 

Ever wanted to write a horror piece? 👻

Worry not! We asked some of the #ftr writing team to give you their top writing tips straight from the depths of a horror anthology show!

Ready?

1. For effective horror, you should establish what is familiar and right at the beginning, and then take it away.

2. When in fear, people experience everything at once and times seems to slow down. To imitate that feeling, go into great detailing for even the simplest of experiences.

3. Despite this, the actual threat in the center of the piece should remain a bit of a mystery. People are much better at scaring themselves than anyone else will ever be, so letting the listener fill in the gaps will improve the story.

4. Try to avoid scary adjectives like “horrific, terrifying, awful” etc. If you've written the scary thing well, there’s no need to spell that out!

5. To give the piece that extra fear factor, use unsettling metaphors for the environment description! (scraps of moss hung off the trees like roadkill, the sky was the color of a bruise, etc).

Which tip was your favourite? Do you have any extra tips for us?

we rot, thinkin' lots about nothing

My contribution for Pride Day of @willieappreciationweek!!!

Summary:

Their gender- hm.

It was sort of like gender envy. Except remove the envy part. Because sure, ghosts could have gender. But it wasn’t really the gender he wanted. Stuck with it. Just like they were stuck in the afterlife, if you could call ghosthood an afterlife.

Read it under the cut or on ao3

To be fair, ghosts had never really needed a specific gender.

They still didn’t, at least not by any standards or official rules (spoiler alert; that’s because there were no definitive rules. The closest ones Willie had ever known to be rules were smashed to smithereens by Caleb Covington and Alex's band).

So when Julie asked if they wanted a pride flag or pin, it threw him off. When Julie showed them some pictures of pride flags for different gender identities, it threw them off. Hence the mini-spiral of skateboarding and maybe avoiding a certain band of ghosts and their lead singer.

It wasn’t hiding, per se. Willie Williamson Ortega didn’t hide. There was nothing to hide from, anyways. And yet, here he was, skating the day away, stuck in their own head with a problem that wouldn’t resolve itself.

He never had a label before. They were just a gay skater in the 80’s. He was just Willie, or William, to Caleb.

It didn’t feel quite right anymore.

The thing was, Willie's gender just was. They were a ghost. Couldn’t that be their gender?

(Agender, Flynn had suggested. Not having a particular gender. But that wasn’t quite right. He did have a gender. Probably.)

Willie tried explaining it to Alex, because he was a ghost too, right? Except… not quite in the sense that Willie was. Alex tried, he really did. But seeing the blonde’s encouraging but confused smile, and the way Alex’s eyebrows furrowed with intense concentration sank Willie’s spirits.

Flynn was a little more understanding. But they had found a label, was comfortable calling herself a demigirl lesbian. Demiboy and gay felt- close. Maybe. He hadn’t thought about these things so urgently before, hadn’t been able to find people that could truly get the situation. After seeing his look of distress, and the way their hands repeatedly combed through their hair, Flynn’s face softened. They put down their phone, still keeping a half-casual air. Adjusted their hat (where did Flynn get so many hats?).

“You know,” she paused. Exhaled slowly. “You know, gender is more like a concept. Like- my gender is basically a lesbian, yeah? It doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense to me. Some people call it a performance, but the point is that it shouldn’t define you. If you don’t find a label that you like, who cares, dude? If anyone gives you crap for it, hit them with your skateboard.”

The last line startled a laugh out of Willie, their shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. “I, uh, yeah. I’ll keep that in mind. You’re-you’re pretty great at this stuff.”

Flynn smirked, tilting their head to the side. “I know. Now go get ready for your,” she wiggled her eyebrows a bit, “date with blondie. And I am off to catch my demon of a girlfriend’s dance rehearsal.” Their eyes sparked at the word “girlfriend”, and Willie couldn’t help but grin back.

“Not a date!” he called out. “Not- it’s not a date. It’s just movie night with Alex. And Luke and Reggie and Julie. See? Not a date.” Willie was fumbling with their words, meaning he was probably blushing hard too.

“Mhmm.” Flynn looked bemused, shaking her head a little. “Have fun on your not-a-date-ghost-party-plus-my-best-friend then, skater boy.”

—

Okay, so Flynn had been helpful. That wouldn’t explain why Willie still felt lost, though considerably less so than before.

Their gender- hm.

It was sort of like gender envy. Except remove the envy part. Because sure, ghosts could have gender. But it wasn’t really the gender he wanted. Stuck with it. Just like they were stuck in the afterlife, if you could call ghosthood an afterlife.

So gender envy without the envy. And it was still unclear if “ghost” was a real-enough gender, or if Willie was making it all up. So that took away from the metaphor quite a bit. Gender envy, but without the envy. Oh, and scrap the gender too. Nice metaphor, Ortega. You’re really making progress here.

It’s ok. Everything’s fine. Willie isn’t the least bit concerned. He didn’t need a label, honestly. So why did they feel like they needed one so badly? Nobody was going to care, Julie certainly wouldn’t mind regardless of the answer she got. (If Willie was being honest, it wasn’t really about Julie.)

Didn’t Willie figure this out when they were alive? Skaters didn’t need a gender. Skating was what defined them, not a gender identity label or their sexuality. Skating was the one thing that made them feel free and alive. And then they died, of course. That didn’t mean they couldn’t still skate, though. And yes, maybe he couldn’t really feel the wind in their hair as he rushed down Hollywood Boulevard, and as much fun as phasing straight through lifers was, it did only emphasize the fact that he was a ghost. Not real.

If Willie themself wasn’t real, then why should their gender have to be real? It was barely a significant part of them, anyways.

In all seriousness, he did have an idea of why Julie’s simple question was affecting them so much. Nobody had ever asked them that before. For years, decades, Willie had simply. Been. Willie Williamson Ortega, ghost skater at the Hollywood Ghost Club.

It hadn’t occurred to him just how much they didn’t feel like a person during that time. Skating was wonderful, of course. Their only true escape from the strange hodge-podge of Caleb’s talent show. It was Caleb that was the problem, Caleb that had been leeching off Willie’s being the whole time.

And then, he was alive again. Willie, that was. Not Caleb. Alex brought Willie back to life, and wasn’t that just ironic? Because Willie was so, so alive in ways that they had never been before. And all while he was dead, to top it off.

And the craziest part about it was-

And then their board rammed into someone, sending both parties to the ground in a groaning heap.

“Ah damn, I am so sorry, I- Reggie??” This was great. Another one of the band members that they ran over with a skateboard. Alex was never going to let him live this down. At least they weren’t obsessing more over the board than the person. (Although, Willie had done a quick check of his board, which seemed unharmed.)

“Man, I just wanted to go for a walk, not get turned into roadkill,” Reggie laughed, sitting up cautiously.

“I’m so sorry dude, I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. Honestly, I was kinda having a minor afterlife crisis, as Alex would say.” He doesn’t know why he said that, doesn’t know what it is about Reggie that made them suddenly willing to stick around instead of apologize and skate off.

“Minor afterlife crisis, huh?” Reggie raised their eyebrows, hands propped up on his knees. “I mean, the afterlife is weird. Luke poofed my shirt away the first time we teleported! And Alex still gets wedgies, even though all our clothes are made of air!” Willie glanced at him, checking if he was serious or not. It was hard to tell, with Reggie’s earnest-puppy-dog confused face.

Willie inhaled deeply, sighing as they sat down. “Yeah. You know, I don’t think I’ve felt this alive, with Alex and you guys and Julie, since like, I died. And then Julie was asking about pride, and I can’t quite figure out what my gender identity is. It’s kinda…” His voice trailed off, unsure of what to say.

“Like you just are, but in a different way than everyone else.” Reggie murmured, eyes downcast.

Willie’s eyes snapped to Reggie. “Yeah! Exactly. You know that feeling? Because you just are, but nobody can understand that. I’m alive like I haven’t been in forever, and I can’t. Can’t put a name to myself anymore.”

Reggie nodded enthusiastically. “Luke keeps saying that maybe I’m like him. But I think he’s wrong. I used to wear skirts to our band performances. They were just fun to stomp and jump around on stage with. Nobody asks me, but if they did, I would say my gender’s like that. I’ll do it if it makes me feel good, but not because of labels.”

It was as simple as that. Willie took a breath, felt it sink into his bones and settle there. Simple. As. That. They’d been so busy worrying over finding a proper label. And truly, it wasn’t such a big deal.

Beside them, Reggie was still talking. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re ghosts. We can pretty much do anything. Skating makes you feel more you, right? You say that a lot. Skateboarding, that’s enough to be an identity, gender or not. My sister used to say, when our parents would get mad at me for wearing skirts or makeup, that it didn’t matter. Because I would always be me, you know?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m always going to be me. Thank you, Reggie. I think you solved my minor afterlife crisis for me.” Skateboarding is a part of me. I can be a skater. I can be a ghost. I don’t need any other labels than that.

Except maybe Alex’s boyfriend. Or spouse. No! Stop thinking that much ahead, you haven’t even asked him out yet, Ortega! Focus on right now.

“Nah, it was all you. You knew it, you just needed to hear it again.” They grinned, green eyes sparkling in light of the setting sun. Willie huffed out a laugh, offering a fist. Reggie tapped his fist against Willie’s, not hesitating for a moment.

—

When Alex met Willie’s gaze, all he could see was happiness.

“Everything okay?” He asked, already knowing the answer that would come.

“Yeah. Reggie helped me figure some things out. And I’m still me. Just Willie.” They smiled, reaching out for Alex’s hand.

“Well, Just Willie, I hope you’re ready for Friday movie night. Luke picked A New Hope,” he leaned in and stage whispered, “for the seven hundredth time.”

Luke protested from across the couch, standing up to make his point.

“It’s a good movie, but we’ve all memorized the script at this point, Lucas.” Alex shot back, squeezing Willie’s hand slightly.

Willie leaned back, eyes fond as he took in the scene. Luke and Alex bickering loudly over who had the better movie choices, Julie laughing, exasperated as she bent over to paint Reggie’s nails a pale purple.

Definitely the most alive they had felt in a long time.

Characters: Clockwork, Danny Fenton, Maddie Pairings: None Rating: G

-

“So will it be between seventy and a hundred, or lower?”

“No. Keep working.”

At the heart of Clockwork's lair, Danny stared unseeingly at the math worksheet in front of him. The numbers were starting to blur together. 

Today, Danny was visiting Clockwork after having a fit of homework frustration that was quickly becoming routine. He was lucky to have found a mentor in Clockwork and studied with him as frequently as he could. Danny had quickly found that the ghost was, apparently, scary good with numbers, but there was nothing to be done to make math less mind numbing.

“No, as in it'll be higher?”

“You know perfectly well Danny.”

Danny wanted to know if all his extra study sessions would pay off when it came to Friday's big test, but he knew what Clockwork was getting at. The spirit was concerned that knowing his future test score would make him slack off, either because of an expectation that he would do well regardless, or that he would see no point in studying with failure to come anyway.

He needed to study for now and later exams, Clockwork insisted.

Danny huffed in annoyance and stared harder at the problem that gave him such grief.

It didn't yield.

“Do you want to go over it again?”

Danny hung his head in defeat. “Yeah.”

Clockwork left his terminal and made his way to Danny's side with a spare sheet of paper, half of it covered in a scrawl from earlier.

Halfway there, the spirit paused. Clockwork stared just over Danny's shoulder, as though a thought had just occurred to him.

It wasn't the first time this had happened. Just the other day, while Danny visited, Clockwork had done a similar action. He hadn't given it much thought then, or the ones before. Everyone did it on occasion. In Danny’s case, it usually happened when he walked through a doorway. Most people though, Danny considered, didn't do it this much.

Maybe Clockwork was a little scatterbrained?

-

It was, by now, what Danny recognized and referred to as one of Clockwork's “Moments”.

Danny had come to learn that Clockwork had these frequently.  Clockwork didn't have all knowledge of all things, the spirit had once explained. Clockwork knew of the past, if he cared enough to know it, and knew of the present, but not all of the present. If he wanted, he could learn it all but there were, he said, very many things that were dull and unimportant, and taking the time to see every bit would be a torture unimaginable.

The future was similar to him, in that he didn't endeavor to see every scrap of it, but even if he tried, it wouldn't have the same easy clarity.

The real take-away was that, when it came to the future, all things weren't set in stone, and as Clockwork explained, the ghost often felt that some events got lobbed at his head and he needed a moment to sort out the new information. Danny could understand that. He had trouble grasping the rest of the hour-long, complicated discussion that included half a dozen different metaphors and some math chalked onto the wall, but he could get that at least, and was glad to gain a little more insight on how Clockwork's abilities functioned.

-

“Are you okay?”

Clockwork’s attention snapped to Danny. The intense gaze made him uneasy. Was Clockwork mad? He got the feeling like he might have interrupted something.

“Uh, sorry.”

Immediately Clockwork's eyes widened, “No no, I’m sorry. I just realized something. I need to go-”

“What?” They had barely started!

A wink was sent his way. “It won't even be a moment.”

Oh right. Well, it wasn't like Danny could just forget the last fifteen years of rigid physical laws that applied to his and everyone else's lives. Clockwork would probably only disappear and reappear between blinks.

A thought occurred to him.

“Wait, have you been disappearing on me this whole time?” he asked. He shouldn’t be surprised, it would be so easy to ditch and return without anyone being the wiser. 

“No, just when you’re already engaged in something.” Clockwork admitted.  

So basically, any time Danny wasn’t actually talking to Clockwork.  Which was a lot.

He shouldn’t be bothered by it.  He hadn’t even caught onto it until just now, but still, it sat unwell with him that Danny was someone who was to be put aside for a later date.  Couldn’t it wait until after Danny had left?  It wasn’t like Clockwork couldn’t just go back to whatever time period he pleased.

It would be polite at the very least.

But what was Danny going to do about it? Clockwork was nice enough, and Danny wasn't about to voice his disappointment when it wasn't actually that big of a deal to begin with. It would just have to be another mannerism to add to Clockwork's growing list.

“Uh, okay. So what's got you in such a rush to go?”

Clockwork opened his mouth to answer, but paused for another faraway look to overtake his face. “. . . Well, how do you feel about coming with me to find out?” he finally said.

There was hardly a thought before Danny agreed. “Sure!”

They set off.

-

Clockwork's portal led them to a large, immaculate kitchen.

“Very nice.” Danny said as he stepped out and oggled at the sheer size of the room. The number of cooking ranges and pots suggested that he was at a restaurant. “Do you come here a lot?”

Clockwork gave a distracted noise of affirmation as he walked over to a glowing red stove top and fiddled with the knobs until it was completely turned off. 

Had he just stopped what could have been a fire?

The ghost then grabbed at unsightly cords that littered the countertops and tucked them into less noticeable places.

“Danny, there is a set of knives to your left. Would you please place them in the cupboard?”

The cutlery in question had been loosely kept in a stainless steel container, not very dangerous in his opinion, but he obligingly shut it away.

From Clockwork's direction, Danny could vaguely make out senseless muttering, “-idiot thinks he's a chef . . . ”

Yeah, no kidding. Idiot was an understatement. Who left a stove on?

Danny startled at a sensation that brushed across his ankles.

He looked down to see a purring cat. “Um. Hi.”

It was long haired, and an obviously very well-kept animal. It was incredibly out-of-place for the current location. The cat gave him a lazy, silent meow. 

“I didn't think cats were allowed in restaurants.”

“It isn't a restaurant,” Clockwork clarified. “This is the home of Vlad Masters.”

Danny suddenly snapped alert and floated off the ground in a battle ready stance. His eyes darted around in search of an unwelcome presence. 

“He isn't here right now.” 

Danny immediately relaxed and found his footing again. He regarded the cat and kitchen before him once more. Now it was looking familiar. This wasn't his first jaunt uninvited to Vlad's house, but he had never paused to really look at the rooms he was darting through.

“Okay, so what are we doing here? I mean, I know fire-safety is important and all, but a blazing house and that guy isn't the saddest combination that I can imagine.”

“I understand,” Clockwork said as he made his way to a nearby window and began working its unyielding frame closed. “Masters has done you a great deal many wrongs. He is, what most would determine, unsalvageable. Unforgivable. Unethical and unrepentant.”

“Yeah. All that times a thousand.”

“He is also incredibly unstable.”

“I could have told you that.” Danny wondered where this was heading.

Clockwork ceased his fiddling and picked up the cat that had only been too content to loll on the ground. It wiggled, displeased at the graceless hold. 

“Before you is the crux of all of Masters’ affections.” He lifted the cat further with emphasis, and spoke with sincere solemnity. “The warmth held for you and your family is but a shrinking mote compared to what he has fostered with this animal.”

Shrinking? Anything that lessened Vlad's attention could only be a good thing. “Really? Does that mean he'll leave us alone now?”

Clockwork didn't entirely look him in the eyes when he said, “Not exactly. Masters is the very definition of passion and he can never entirely drop something once he's set upon it.”

“Not in all the timelines?”

“Most of those are currently closed and the few available are too . . .” Danny thought that Clockwork was about to have another Moment, but the spirit soon found his words, “-dreadful. Which is why it is very important that we curtail his fixations, in what ways we can, and direct him to better . . . things. This cat is crucial to that. He's poured all his love into it and should anything happen to it, Amityville will be a flaming crater, and its residents, crumbling charcoal.”

“He'd kill people for a cat?!”

“He'd kill someone for kicking it.”

“Oh my God. I mean, that's a really mean thing to do to a cat, and they deserve something, but the town is innocent. Why would he hurt them?”

“He’s an idiot when he's angry. And a part of him has always wanted to watch the world burn.”

Danny pulled the, now fed-up, cat out of Clockwork's arms and held it with complete reverence. “We have to protect this cat,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“We need to keep it inside and never let it out.”

“I know.”

“Sam can watch it when I can't-”

“Masters will be consumed with rage should it go missing.”

“Right. Okay. Well, it's- it's a cat, and it's been alright so far, right? It should be okay here. It's happy here and Vlad's happy.”

“But there's a problem. It's why I have to come here almost every blasted day. The cat is suicidal.”

“ . . . Is there a therapy for that?”

Clockwork gestured to the room, heedless of Danny, “She keeps trying to kill herself. Last week she was roadkill and the week before, mauled by a pack of dogs. I stop her from eating poisonous plants and she goes right back to them the next second. I keep her from chewing power cords and she tries and tries again- last time she did it while soaking wet from nearly drowning in the toilet. In fact, had we not been here, at this very moment, she would have deep fried herself! I am confident that I have now seen every possible misfortune that can befall an animal and I grow tired of it.”

Danny scrambled to absorb the dire information. “But . . . the deep fryer isn't even on.”

Clockwork glared at the animal pointedly. “And yet.”

Danny looked at the yowling cat in horror. “What can we do?”

“I'm doing all that I can.”

“But isn't there something we can do that is less hands-on? More permanent?”

“I've been scouring the timelines for that very answer and have come up short. Other possible solutions will show themselves eventually, but we're not at the right stage to begin exploring those.”

“Okay, well if we can't do anything with the cat, what about Vlad? Can't we just stop him?”

Clockwork rubbed his face tiredly. “Danny, a future where Masters has that sort of melt-down, and the city regardless saved, is not a future either of us want.”

Danny wished he could fact-check that, but he wasn't the one with foresight. “Are you suuure?” he needled.

“Yes.”

Well, Danny supposed that was that. He didn't entirely believe Clockwork. It was hard to judge when he knew so little of the information as a whole, it could just be that there was something that had been missed. However, he did trust that it was what Clockwork believed.

“Clockwork?”

“Hm?”

“This future you have in mind, is it a really good one?”

“. . . It's not all good, but it has a great deal many good things, yes.”

Something niggled at Danny. It was a thing that had long been bothering him, and it reared its ugly head whenever altering timelines came up, but he had never earnestly voiced it. Mostly because he had yet to see any bad come of it. “Clockwork, I know you can do all these cool things, but do you ever think that maybe you shouldn't be doing all this? Changing the timelines, I mean. I get wanting to have a better future for people, but what if you don't make the right choice? Why not just let it go?”

“Instead, how about you let it go?”

Danny's mouth dropped open in shock at the sheer rudeness, until he realized that Clockwork was pointing at the cat. She writhed in his arms and gave him warning bites to his gloves. 

He guessed Clockwork's answer wasn’t as much a brush-off as it was a diversion then. Fine.

He, gently, released the cat and planned to get right back to the questions at hand, but Clockwork addressed him before he could open his mouth.

“I've let things go a time or two before, Danny.” Clockwork had taken an interest in one of his many watches, his head tucked down so that shadow eclipsed most of his face. “And contrary to what some would have you believe, I have learned that it is better to do something, even if it's not the very best, than nothing at all. Inaction and apathy are things that I have fought hard to stay buried, and to embrace them again would be inexcusable.”

What could have possibly have happened? How bad did it get? Did he really want to know? 

“What-”

“So, will you help me keep this cat alive?”

And Danny did drop it, just like that. Clockwork clearly didn’t want to talk about it. That didn't mean he wasn't still curious. He was. But for today, and probably for a while, he would leave it be.

-

Vlad returned to the center of his current frustrations. He had been trying to recreate an old family recipe, when suddenly, he had been called away on business. It wasn't a long meeting, but he had felt the need to rush. A thought had dogged at him since he left.

Had he left the stove on?

He swung the kitchen door open and immediately calmed at the lack of raging flames and burning stove-tops. 

It seemed he did remember.

There was also a lack of general mess that often accompanied his random acts of cookery. His ingredients were laid out still, as well as a number of random bowls, but the utensils were nowhere to be seen and the deep fryer had been dumped. Curious. He didn't keep his cleaning staff this late, and even if he had, they wouldn't have been so lazy as to not properly clean up a clear mess.

“Who the shit has been in my kitchen?”

-

More

[October 13, 2020]

♡ Mercury retrograde in Scorpio is happening tonight. I can already feel/see it's influence. It also doesn't help matters that my current household is primarily made up of Scorpios or Plutonian individuals (most of my roommates are "essential workers" like EMTs or caretakers). Brad (the most Scorpio of the house) has called for a rare consideration; that there be silence in the living room (communal space) when he comes home. He's never asked for that before. This feels very symbolic of Mercury Retrograde in Scorpio. A moment of silence in our otherwise very talkative household. Besides that, he's coming home right around the time MRX/Scorpio would be officially beginning.

♤ Identifying omens is part of my practice. It's one of my oldest, foundational, cornerstones of how I communicate with the Universe and my guides. When you notice something (really notice it) to the point that it stands out in your mind and you end up thinking on it all day, it is an "omen". A symbolic representation of the message the Universe is sending you. I was given an omen by the Universe yesterday as to the immediate future/Mercury RX in Scorpio. I was outside (smoking) when I saw a hawk soaring in the air, being pursued by two black crows, and navigating around their assaults. The hawk (personally) represents my spiritual vision/focus/accuracy. The two crows, I believe, represented thoughts that attack my focus. I.e. Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory. Although, Huginn and Muninn are technically ravens. Not crows. I still think the message from the Universe is to tame my PTSD/where my mind goes/stay focused on my goals instead of letting my negative thoughts pick at me.

Also kind of reminds me of the qliphothic sphere/inverted sphere of Netzach. Where the "crows" pick at the beauty of Source. Another reminder to keep my inner criticism from attacking my spiritual focus/my ability to see the beauty in my life and self.

Two other people in the household got omens on the same day as me. One person got a vulture eating roadkill on the side of the road, the other got a brown cricket. Since the vulture means rebirth and ressurection through shadow work, I think the household is going through a transitional phase (what affects one person in the house typically touches all of us). I am not certain on the brown cricket, however. Good luck? What struck me the most about it was that my roommate was trying to catch it...and it always knew when to hop away just in the nick of time.

♧ I've been rearranging/unpacking my boxes from Seattle finally. For a long time now, I've just been living out of boxes, and refusing to do much magic. I didn't even set up my altar when I got all my stuff back from [Redacted abuser]. It's taken awhile to even get myself back to directly communicating with my guides...much less the Universe/Source. Anyways, I'm finally going through my boxes, and setting up an official altar area. When I was getting into my old rock and crystal collection (I was into that stuff way back before I realized how harmful the crystal/gemstone trend is for Earth's environment), I found an old piece of Mookaite that I friend gave me. And I shit you not, the thing physically vibrated in my hand when I touched it.

I've been holding it ever since. Have totally and honestly forgotten all the exact properties of the stones I own. It's been such a long time. I was also practicing "crystal/crystal energy psychicism" when I was homeless as a means to survive the streets so...I'm pretty sure my PTSD is blocking a lot of that information out.

I guess it's time to rediscover crystals again? Not buying any new ones. Just utilizing the ones I already have to the best of my ability. I feel like it was wrong that so many of them were taken from the ground to be pretty baubles for people. I might as well make it worth something by using them to help myself/others/incorporate them into my active life so they hold meaning.

Mookaite feels very grounding and soothing already. It feels like a very receptive stone, inviting energy into it much like organic pearls do. I also notice that it has almost a dream/trance-like affect to it's grounding energy. I think maybe I'll take time to meditate with it tomorrow.

◇ Brad pretty much runs the household that I live in. Further details; I live in a BDSM polycule, Brad is one of the doms. One of Brad's relationships was very close to being homeless recently. While normally, being homeless is... [redacted PTSD disassociating moment] being non-binary and homeless during COVID-19 is even worse. So we took them in. Inevitably, we had to make some major adjustments (about space, because technically we're fitting 9 people in a 2 bedroom house). It's been a test of adaptability through chaos for everyone. One of the major areas of contention is that everything inside the house is getting moved, rearranged, or tossed. And some people (mainly [redacted name]) is absolutely 100% terrible at adapting to change, unless someone is literally dying. Also, while I get that none of this can really be helped, I'm also a bit annoyed by the sudden introduction of someone new.

But even if I'm annoyed by it, I wasn't about to say "no" when Brad told us what was going on. I'm not a monster. I was homeless too and Brad helped me get off the streets. This person, while I don't know them well enough to make a judgement, deserves the same chance that I did to get stable in an era where stability is a pipe dream.

I'm actually not the one having the hardest problem. Surprising, it's the spirit of the house that's having the hardest problem. Our house is an old 1950's model built at the corner of a crossroads. Technically the house kinda exists as a liminal space. And there's so much stuffed inside of it that theoretically anything *could exist* in the house. Sometimes weird shit pops up and then disappears. It's very similar to the Seattle house I lived in when I was with [KILL BILL SIRENS] but has less of a metaphorical underworld cave vibe and more of a Howl's Moving Castle vibe. Anyways, the house itself is having a bad time adjusting to all the change/cleaning that the new roommate is doing...because it keeps hiding and moving (specifically) all the stuff that the new roommate has. They're not a stoner. They have a decently good memory. And I know that nobody in the house would do something like that. Plus, they apparently heard disembodied laughter right after discovering something was missing. The genuis locci (house spirit) is fucking with 'em hard.

I've never seen the genius locci do this before. The worst it ever did to me was hide a really expensive Egyptian cotton pillow case once. It eventually spat it back out after cuddling with it, I imagine. Seriously; Egyptian cotton sheets. Get you some.

So after the 100× time today that the new roommate was swearing about their missing things, I suggested that maybe they need to butter up the genius locci with gifts. Kinda romance the house a bit. Give it something so that it builds a relationship with the spirits that live here. They're a (self-professed) baby witch whose background is Jewish. They mostly excel at kitchen witchery (for now) and incorporating the works and wisdom of the Torah into their life. So they weren't too certain on ritualistic offerings to a house spirit. But with some suggestions from me and listening to their own intuition, they were able to put something quick together. It's nice to see people using magic around the house and learning new skills. And to their benefit, I felt the house chill out a bit after the ritual/gift giving was done.

I have been giving the house/my guides a portion of my nightly tea every now and then. It's honestly nothing fancy but I figure small gifts count for something right?

Notes On a Conditional Form- The 1975

(This is my review of Notes, which, obviously, I adore)

People tend to have a fixed idea of what the 1975 are, love or hate them. To some, they���re a plastic pop band who write (great) 80s-influenced songs like “The Sound”. To others, they’re the millennial Radiohead or U2 (pick your comparison depending on how much warmth you feel towards Matty Healy), obsessed with chronicling and holding forth on the State of the Nation, embodied by perhaps their best and most critically lauded song “Love It If We Made It”. The mixed reviews of their fourth album probably stem from the disappointment of both camps above: for the first group, superstar single “If You’re Too Shy (let me know)” is evidence that the band could continue to be great if only they mined this genre more. The second camp desperately searched for proof that Notes... has Something to Say, didn’t really find it, then concluded that it’s a weak or inferior album. In reality, though, 1975 are neither of the ostensibly polar identities above. As they are fond of saying, they create as they consume, and they consume a vast landscape of music constantly: it’s their life’s passion and one that has been apparent since their earliest EPs. Even though their last two albums appear on the surface to be perfect examples of the plastic pop (ILIWYS) and political polemic (ABIIOR), in reality each blends both and throws in some ambient instrumentals and other left field moments for good measure. No one who has heard Matty Healy and George Daniel talk about their creative influences and processes could ever confuse them with any other conveyor belt pop band or be in any doubt about their commitment to their art.

Following up 2018’s critically lauded A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships was always going to be a tall order but the 1975 can always be relied on to do the unexpected. This is a band who by the point of becoming massive had given up on ever actually becoming massive, so made a first album full of songs that they loved, that they now admit they might never have made if they had had any idea that global stardom was beckoning, because it’s just a bit weird. They apply the same kind of logic to Notes...: on the back of huge critical acclaim from A Brief Inquiry...they went inwards and simply made the kinds of music they loved consuming and playing, heedless of expectations. Notes.... has long been spoken of by the band as a metaphorical notebook, a looking back to their roots, collected and recorded around the world on their global tour last year. Originally due in May, then August 2019, then February, then April 2020, it’s been a beneficiary rather than a victim of unimaginable global circumstances, more relevant and strangely prescient than ever now. It turns out it does have something to say, but in lowercase rather than capital letters, and it’s a better album for it. Any capital-lettered statement, after all, could only have appeared completely outdated and irrelevant in the midst of a global pandemic.

Conditional verbs are “if” verbs, used to imagine events in certain conditions, and this is what Notes... is: a collection of songs posing questions and examining sets of circumstances and relationships that make us who we are, for better or worse. It’s an ending to these four albums of sorts (“I just wanted a happy ending,” Matty pleads in “If You’re Too Shy,”) but also an exploration of the impossibility of tidy, definitive endings. The final track of A Brief Inquiry... , the vital and unexpectedly uplifting “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)”, began with the line “I bet you thought your life would change but you’re sat on a train again.” That’s where we are on Notes and why its third track, not the final track, is called “The End”, to underline the point. This instrumental re-works the instrumental track “HNSCC” from the band’s 2013 EP Music for Cars, making it more orchestral. It’s a lovely way to develop this theme: that everything that happens to us is conditional to other events in the past, present or future. It also explores the idea that concepts of linear growth as people are artificial. Notes... embraces the lack of any kind of coherent narrative in life that we can tie our experiences together neatly with, the struggle to know and accept yourself, to be that person that you present to the outside world.

Anais Nin wrote: we do not see things as they are; we see them as we are. A Brief Inquiry.... is a great album but it also captured a moment in time both culturally and for the band, particularly Matty Healy personally. Having derided him for years, there seemed to be a huge will amongst the press to make this album succeed because of everything he had been through with addiction and rehab between 2013-2017. That was the narrative- he’d fucked up, now he was clean, gleaming and healthy in tasteful fitted jumpers and suits, with the haircut of a Mature Man, and they’d made a Political and Important album. The band were apparently finally deserving of the acclaim afforded to serious artists. But there were notes of caution: an interview Matty did where he spoke of being wary of being a poster boy for sobriety because he hadn’t been sober for long enough. I remember worrying about him when listening to all of this- what if he couldn’t hold it together? What then for him and the position in culture that he and the band were now occupying? It was almost a relief when he confessed in a 2019 interview to briefly relapsing: it was honest and it was real.

Notes sees Matty embracing the honest and the real like never before, and it’s apt that the album moves through the idea of Endings to “Frail State... “ “Streaming” and “The Birthday Party”, a hauntingly beautiful song about sobriety, questions of shifting identity, growth and relationships (“We can still be mates because it’s only a picture,” is the narrator’s rejoinder to a friend taking the piss out of him for buying an expensive artwork that the friend can’t relate to). It’s a song that narrates a tale, in the tradition of A Change of Heart, Milk or Paris, that is both humorous and devastating, particularly in its last line: “I depend on my friends to stay clean. As sad as it seems.” Maybe you do need to be knowledgeable about the band’s personal circumstances to understand that “The Birthday Party” isn’t just a dull and over-long tale about being bored at a party, as Rolling Stone appears to have taken it, but to paraphrase “Frail State of Mind”, it seems unlikely. In any case, Notes.... is a deeply honest album, one that paints Matty Healy in as unvarnished a form as he has ever appeared, talking candidly and literally about piss, shit and erections. As he has said, it’s an album without ego.

Appropriately for an album looking back, making notes on all those “if...then”s, Notes... is more eclectic than ever before, a distillation, as the band say, of their previous sounds as well as the music that has inspired their own creativity over the past nearly two decades. The reaction of the album’s detractors to this has been to see it as a jumbled mess of Too Much-ness, which is to completely miss the point. Notes... is deliberately and thoughtfully structured, each track including threads and connections to other songs and iconography of the band’s world, an intertextuality that is sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes poignant and very much underlining that theme of honesty. “I never fucked in a car, I was lying,” opens “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied”, Healy lacerating his ego by referencing Love It If We Made It’s memorable opening line as well as their early song “Sex”, and later “you can’t figure out a heart. You were lying,” undercutting the swagger of 2013’s 80s-maximalist “Heart Out”. More poignantly on “Roadkill”, again recalling the lie of linear growth and maturity, he sings “if you never eat you’ll never grow. Should have learned that quite a while ago,” looking back to one of the band’s most loved and most “apocalyptic adolescent” songs, as they term it, from their debut album, “Robbers”. The intertextuality is there in the music too, from the re-working of instrumental track “HNSCC” in “The End” (a connection missed, unforgivably, by seemingly every critic) to the inclusion of original demo of standout track from A Brief Inquiry... “It’s Not Living (If it’s not with you)” at the start of the surreally titled “Shiny Collarbone”. This is the largely instrumental EDM track sampling Cutty Ranks that for a number of critics seems to represent the fact that the band have lost their way and just started putting out random filler. They haven’t on either count, and the sample is a lovely reminder that even when farming seemingly the furthest reaches of the 1975’s discovered land, the music is always quintessentially theirs.

Perhaps the farming metaphor isn’t the most appropriate though. The band have spoken before about the choice that they have as artists to be “cowboys or farmers”, to keep re-working old ground or move forward and discover new places. To the charge that the songs here are just not as good as their earlier albums, well that depends on your perspective. Even the poor reviews aren’t quibbling with the strength of “If You’re Too Shy...” but truly that’s not the best songwriting on display here. The 1975 can write songs like “Too Shy” while knocking about having a laugh, stoned out of their heads. As they say themselves, it’s not a stretch. They’d rather push themselves, which they do. Regardless of genre, though, any band will stand or fall on whether they can write a catchy tune or not. The 1975 have always been able to write a catchy tune and it says something that over 22 tracks, each one has that catchiness and each one is distinctly itself. “Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)” begins with a pitched up sample of “Just my Imagination” by the Temptations, it’s a love song in the 1975 tradition: bouncy and irresistible major key melody juxtaposed with an emotional sucker punch: “She said they should take this pain and give it a name.” They cleverly subvert the genre, pairing the beauty of the melody with the brutally honest: “Tonight, I think I fucked it royally.” It’s one of the best songs on display here and another perfect example of how the 1975 can take that most over-done of genres, and make it completely their own.

Because of the evolution of the album, seven songs, not including “The 1975” with Greta Thunberg, were already well known before its release. “People”, the first of these after Greta, is fantastic pop punk, a track that has lost none of its impact in the 9 months since its original release. “Nothing Revealed/Everything Denied”, the self-referential track referred to above, is a catchy treatise on the search for meaning in our lives, fusing a soaring choir-sung chorus with Matty’s witty rapping. A trio of tracks explore what some critics have labelled “emo garage”: a thread that begins with the pulsing and affecting “Frail State of Mind” (“Go outside? Seems unlikely,” and is followed through with the standout “I Think There’s Something You Should Know”, surely a future single that would be perfectly at home on Radio 1, and “What Should I Say?” In the instrumental vein, the George Daniel-created masterpiece “Having No Head” transports the listener to another sonic world. There are several throw-backs to the band’s previous emo-indie incarnation Drive Like I Do with “Then Because She Goes” and “Me and You Together Song”. And then there’s a couple of gorgeous ballads: the profound “Jesus Christ 2005...” and the love letter to the band “Guys”. In a way this closing track is almost a microcosm of the band: love them and this is a beautifully turned love letter to friendship and loyalty in the face of life’s challenges. Hate them and it’s a cringeworthy, naive irritation.

Of course, there is no happy ending or neat bow tied round Notes.... at the conclusion of its 22 tracks. We leave Matty still struggling with himself, life and his conflicted desires but with two tracks- the gentle “Don’t Worry”, a Tim Healy- penned song that is performed as a father/son duet, and “Guys”- we are reminded that it’s our relationships that will help us through, the connections we build. We are all conditional forms in this sense.

The vinyl of Notes... is poignantly inscribed with the words 'If this is to be read in the future, please know that this was us trying'. It would be very easy at this stage in their career for the 1975 to put out albums filled with variations on “Chocolate” or “The Sound”, and it might make some fans and critics happy, but they don’t want to. They are triers. Perhaps it’s this very workaholism, their obsession with pushing boundaries and experimentation, speaking up and refusing to stay in their lane that so riles up those ready to sharpen their critical knives. They are those too clever and too keen kids at the front of the class, annoying the fuck out of those who can’t be bothered or just can’t compete. Having spent last year taking political stands on issues ranging from misogyny in music to abortion laws in the US to the treatment of the LGBTQ& community in the UAE and doing their bit for the environment by commanding fans to be quiet and listen to a Greta Thunberg monologue for five minutes at their live shows, selling recycled merchandise and planting trees for every ticket sold, they are still unable to rest in the midst of a global pandemic, engaging with fans through Twitter listening parties and an interactive website called Mindshower where fans can create their own music and artwork and reflecting on what live music might look like in the future when we can finally get out there again. It all sounds a bit like Radiohead in the 2000s, except Radiohead never made an album as sonically beautiful or coherent as Notes... either immediately post-OK Computer or in the 19 years since. The 1975 are many things but they’ll never allow themselves to become stale or apathetic or lazy and for that at least they should be recognised: they simply care too much. And as for that vinyl inscription, in the future they won’t just be remembered for trying but for achieving what most bands never do even in a lifetime of striving.

10 Career Killers

Most writers kill their own writing careers.  Several people asked me to write about some of the ways they do this.  So I’m going to take a moment and just mention a few career killers.

Some writers focus on appealing to the wrong crowd.  Very often new writers will try to gain the approval of literary critics, writing books that become more and more obscure and difficult to read, so that the average reader ends up not liking them.  They try to load their books with (often simplistic and foolish) metaphors.  I call these folks the FRM crowd because they are “fraught with meaning.” Remember: critics don’t buy books.  They get them for free, and their tastes are not necessarily the same as the average person.

Then again there are some writers who try too hard to write to the “common man.” They’re writing what I call LCD fiction—Lowest Common Denominator fiction.  Remember, idiots won’t read your book.  They won’t read any book.  They’ll wait and watch the movie instead, or play videogames.

Many authors can only sing one note.  In other words, they have one tale that they tell with passion, but once they write that novel, they’ve got nothing else to say.  Maybe they crave to write a story about child abuse or drug addiction, but after having dealt with the topic, they can’t move on.  Some of these writers get quite famous—for one book.  Try to develop wide tastes and be passionate about a range of topics.

Fear kills careers.  Some authors are afraid to read in public, afraid to talk to agents or editors or movie producers, afraid to travel, afraid to try new styles or learn how to write in different mediums.  Such authors die a slow and strangled death.

Many authors start out strong to great reviews but decide that they don’t always have to put their best foot forward.  Here’s a simple rule: Never excuse the weaknesses in your own writing.  Yes, we’re all human, but when you spot a weakness, try to figure out how to eradicate it.  If a fan or critic points out a weakness, don’t argue with them: thank them.

Some writers get too rich.  When money does start flowing in quickly, many authors will begin socking it away, and after they have a couple million in the bank, they quit writing.

Other writers get a steady income stream and then act as if it will always be this way.  Every writer, even professionals, will have up- and down-cycles.  Plan on it.  Don’t go out and buy your dream house on your first royalty check.  You’ve heard the advice, “Don’t quit your day job.”  Well, you might be wiser to quit it if your career is taking off, but consider those kinds of moves carefully.  Remember: Invest. Save.

Lack of FH.  Your ability to write is determined by the number of “Focus Hours” you can spend on a project.  Most people can only focus for half a dozen hours per day.  If you spend those hours working at a second job, you will not write.  If you spend them handling family affairs, you will not write.  If you spend them playing videogames or watching television or exercising or chasing folks of the opposite sex, you will not write.  Your Focus Hours—should be held sacred.  You focus on your writing and do other things on the side.  Don’t spend all of your FH promoting your work.  Watch out for fans or business acquaintances who will waste your time.

Poor career management.  Very few writers get any career advice or support from their agents or editors.  We’re left to flounder on our own.  You need to constantly keep your eyes and ears open and learn how to manage your career better—even before you ever begin your career.  So many new authors are like athletes who are all geared up to run the race, but they stumble at the starting block.  Sometimes they stumble so hard that they end up on the ground looking like roadkill.  In short, you need to figure out which books to write, when to write them, and how to market them effectively.  You may need to learn to write screenplays or turn your book into a videogame.  Authors who sit back and expect their publishers to make them rich are fools.  Even if it works for them (and sometimes it does), they’re being foolish.

Poor personal skills.  I’ve known a couple of authors who were so bad at interpersonal skills, their agents “fired” them or their editors couldn’t figure out how to work with them.  As an author, we need to learn to play well with others.  That doesn’t mean that you always demand your way, nor do you always give others exactly what they ask for.  You need to learn to negotiate nicely, to play fair, and to avoid burning bridges. Create opportunities, not obstacles.

***

Sign-ups for my online classes, the Advanced Story Puzzle and Writing Enchanting Prose, are now available at MyStoryDoctor.com. Both classes are $449 each and include weekly conference calls and I will also be giving feedback on your writing. Classes start August 24th which is also the last day to register. Each course will run for 10 weeks.

Blearily, you watched the city lights flicker in the tiny window above your seat. You had to sit really awkwardly to hit the right angle, half-slumped against the wall and your neck craned up to try and catch even the tiniest glimpse. You weren’t tall enough to look directly out the window, not even if you stood on top of the seat, and you weren’t about to subject yourself to such an indignity regardless.

Of course, the only reason you knew it wouldn’t work was because you had already tried it, but no one else needed to know that.

You were preparing yourself for another slow night - and it wasn’t a hardship, by any means. Slow nights or busy ones, they hardly mattered to you. Time passed by the same either way, and either way you got to relax in your little abode. There was really no difference at all.

But then, you felt it -  someone approaching. Just one someone, apparently, which was enough to catch your interest, moving to sit up straight.

Lately, people had only been approaching you in groups, seeming to treat it as some kind of test of courage. Maybe this would be another child, dared by their friends to touch the door, or a stumbling drunk with no recognition of what they were seeing, let alone the significance of it.

Regardless, you would welcome them. If they belonged to this city, they were always welcome.

The footsteps stopped right outside your little wooden box, the newcomer shifting in place slightly, as if unsure of what to do next.

“What am I thinking…” A voice muttered, only seconds later. It was the voice of a young woman, tired in ways that only college students could be. You’d had many, many college students come to you over the years, though not usually for the reason you suspected this girl was here. “This is ridiculous. I’m so dumb.”

She seemed about to continue admonishing herself, but that was where you decided to step in - metaphorically speaking.

“Hello there!” you said brightly. “Welcome, friend. Do you have a request?”

She said nothing. You knew that she was still there, because she had yet to flee in terror as some of your would-be visitors did, but she didn’t say a word.

And then - “Holy shit. There actually is someone in there.”

You chuckled. Yes, that was usually the reaction.

“Indeed,” you said warmly. Oh, you loved the people of this city. Beautiful and erratic and yours.

“Um, well,” she said hesitatingly, and you could hear that she had started pacing in front of the door. “I do have a, uh, request, I suppose.”

“Speak it, then,” you said encouragingly. “You know that I will listen.”

You would always listen to these precious, beloved children.

There was silence for a moment, and you could hear the sound of her gentle breathing on the other side of the wood.

“It’s going to sound bad.”

You smiled, and in that moment you were very glad that your guest could not look through the window to see you - your smile was not, as some would say, pleasant.

“Chickadee, I am the god of all this city is. I am the god of rotten things and false stars, I am the god that never sleeps. There is nothing you could say to disgust me.”

And it was true. Nothing this human or any other had to say would be enough to put you off. You were the god of decaying bodies being lovingly consumed by the earth and this city both, and you were oh so proud of it.

“I… have this professor, at my college,” she said haltingly, stumbling over her words as if she’d never actually had a chance to speak them outloud. “He’s really creepy. And uh, we’ve tried to report him before, but even after we fill out the forms we just… can’t get up the courage. I always thought it was okay, because I figured someone else would do it. But, um, I was just told that he’s retiring at the end of this year, and…”

She fell silent, clearly troubled.

“He’s never, like, touched anyone,” she said, speaking slowly. “At least, not that I know of. He kinda stands too close to you, but I thought that was bearable. I thought that was something that you could, just, suffer through, y’know? But… he makes everyone so uncomfortable, and says these weird, sexist things, and like… I just don’t know what to do.”

You chuckled lightly. “Chickadee, if you came here, then you know exactly what you want to do.”

The pause this time was strained, but lasted only for a moment. She was laughing, breathlessly, a second later, and you heard a soft thud on the other side of your door, like she was leaning forward to rest her forehead against the wood.

“I guess so,” she murmured. “Please, I… I’m worried. At the college, he could be reported. There was a way to do that, easily, and people were still frightened. I was still frightened. After he leaves the school, I have no idea where he’ll go, and if anyone there will think that they have a way to keep themselves safe. I just want there to be a way that I know he won’t hurt anyone.”

“A reasonable request,” you said agreeably. You were her god, and this professor’s god too, but the professor was not the one who had come to pray to you. You were allowed to play favorites.

“Really?” she rushed out, her words jumbled and strung with a terribly desperate sort of hope. “You don’t think I’m overreacting, or, or - “

“Not even a little,” you assured, standing up from your seat almost without notice. You wanted to reach out, you wanted to comfort this child of the city that had spawned you, but you could not.

If you were to leave this confessional, it would rather ruin the mystery, wouldn’t it?

“I will help you,” you said confidently. Like there was ever any doubt.

But it seemed that there was on her end, because she let out a broken sob, leaning more heavily against the door.

“Thank you, thank you, I - when Katy told me about you I wasn’t sure it was legit, but I don’t even care anymore. You’re the only one who’s listened to me.”

And what a shame that is, you thought sadly. You couldn’t be everywhere, you couldn’t even leave your confessional, but you still mourned for the children that didn’t come to you. Even gods, it seemed, were helpless in the end.

But not in this.

“I have no power to arrest him, nor the right to kill him,” you declared, “but there are things that I can do.”

She was waiting, breathless, for your answer, and you smiled that same smile as you gave it to her.

“I can have the crows watch over him, and the alley cats trace his steps. He will never make a single move without my children knowing, and they will tell me. The rest of his time on this earth will be measured, the life he lived in this city will be judged. He will not escape my eyes, nor my punishment. And when the time comes, the worms, too, will enact vengeance for you. Is that satisfactory, Chickadee?”

“Anything,” she said immediately. “Anything is better than letting him go. Thank you.”

This time, when you smiled, it was gentle.

“You’re welcome.”

Many crying people came to pound against your door, and you were not always able to send them off with a smile. But the times like these were your most favorite of all.

She pulled away from your confessional, the wood creaking as she lifted her head from where it had been bent in prayer, and you could sense that she still had a question for you.

“Um, god?” she said, still a bit unsure but sweetened by belief, so heady that it made you let out a grateful sigh. “If you rule over all of these rotten, awful things, why do you help humans?”

You shook your head, amused despite yourself.

“I do not rule over anything,” you corrected gently. “I was born of graveyard dirt and the human heart, and there is nothing awful in that. Vermin and human alike live in this city, and they all belong to me, and each other. Rotten and lying they may be, but there is beauty in that too. Just like the city lights above you, humanity pierces through the fog. What else can I do, but watch in awe?”

“Oh,” she said quietly, like a confession, a realization. Then, you heard the sound of her footsteps walking away.

You hope that she gained something more from this than what she came for. You hope, from this, that she learned more about the value of rats and roadkill and tired college students.

You were the city, and the city was you, and you loved every part of it. Humans, yes, and the dead things too.

But she was not dead, not yet. And neither were you.

What a marvelous thing indeed.

notes:

ahhhh thanks so much to @caffeinewitchcraft ! I love what I came up with here, and I never would’ve actually gotten off my butt and written it if I hadn’t had this challenge to get me moving! hopefully I'll be able to do the other ones this week too, if I can keep producing things like this! until next time! <3

Still Got It

<-- Inspired by @honestlyprettychill's beautiful Fault in Our Stars artwork -->

Title: The Therapy Session in Which I Spoke

Author: AnchoredTether

Rating: T [mild swearing, dark themes]

Pairings: Plance [Lance x Pidge]

Series: Still Got It

Chapter: 1/?

Summary: "Everyone is useful in some shape or form, at some point in their life, to an insurmountable number of people. Everyone's existence affects the fabric of space and time whether they realize it or not, and this reality as we know it is affected by your very existence. So..." I waved a hand dismissively as if I just explained something rather simple. "Like I said... no one is useless."

Lance was dumbstruck for a moment, his jaw slightly slacked and his eyebrows lowered. "Holy crow." Then his bewilderment slowly turned into a wicked grin. "Aren't you something else."

<-- CHAPTER 01 --> 

THE THERAPY SESSION IN WHICH I SPOKE

Late in the winter of my sixteenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, played the same video game over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. But... I did all those things on a regular basis. Mom became pretty adamant that I go to this therapy group, and of course, Dad and Matt jumped all over me saying it would be good for me and that I might even make a friend. It's not like I'm some lonely girl with absolutely no friends. I have Hunk. I just prefer solitude and technology and video games over people. People are exhausting. Probably the only reason I tolerate Hunk and his extroverted nature is because we can talk about tech for hours on end, whereas everyone else in the universe just doesn't get it. It doesn't help that most people give me that pitiful look when they notice my nasal cannula. Oh yeah. I have lung cancer. I'm like a computer with low RAM. Translation: I have a hard time breathing and doing other basic physical functions such as going upstairs. I'm slow when it comes to anything physical and because of that, some people look at me like I'm a kicked puppy. Maybe... just maybe being around people with similar problems will be different. Ten percent of the reason I decided to go was out of sheer curiosity. The remaining ninety percent was to make Matt shut up. Although now that I think about it, Matt never did shut up, he constantly wanted details about each meeting as if he were expecting me to meet my soulmate in a therapy session focused on death. Woe is me. I went, and went, and went, kicking and screaming the whole way. Metaphorically, of course. Although between moody pouting on the car ride to the church and snappy replies when mom reminded me to get ready, I did consider screaming... often. The therapy sessions were depressing as hell. I didn't need to hear about how others survived their chemo or their surgeries or their twelve years of cancer when I already had a perfectly good role model. My dad and brother's colleague and friend, Shiro, was a survivor of osteosarcoma (also known as bone cancer). He lost his entire right arm, but thanks to modern technology he had a decent prosthetic. I will admit, a part of me loves it when he visits so I can examine the tech of his limb at work. Sometimes Matt has to swat at me and remind me to stop drooling over Shiro's literal cancer scar. I'm not much of a talker so I rarely share any stories or thoughts at the group sessions. I try to listen and give a damn to everyone's depressing problems, but usually I'm just thinking about what I'm going to make my character do in Skyrim when I get home. The only reason I've continued attending these sessions after two months is that it keeps mom happy. The last thing I want is to do something that will make her depressed. I'm already depressed, so a little more depression each week can't do me any more damage than what is already done. This week was different. A boy with deep blue eyes kept staring at me. As we went around with introductions, it was my turn before his. While everyone was staring at me because I was speaking, it felt like only the handsome stranger was looking at me and it was causing my face to redden. "I'm Pidge. I'm sixteen, almost seventeen. I had thyroid cancer but it got treated about a year ago and now I just have a satellite in my lungs. I'm doing okay." The words tumbled out so fast I wondered if newbie caught any of it. The regulars continued to introduce themselves but I still felt those blue eyes on me. He didn't stare at me unblinkingly like a creeper for ten minutes straight, but for whatever reason his eyes continued to gravitate towards me in the same way that your eyes kinda drift towards roadkill when you're driving. Although I'm pretty sure he wasn't staring at me because I was a dead animal. That was just a horrible analogy. "The name's Lance." Oh boy was his voice smooth. It rolled like the gentle draw and pull of the ocean's edge and it was pulling me in like the tide. "I'm seventeen and I just survived osteosarcoma about..." He counted on his slender fingers. "Eight weeks ago. I lost my leg, but none of my charm." Automatically my eyes fell to his legs, which was probably the rudest thing I could have done in that moment. He was wearing jeans and high rise boots so I couldn't discern which was flesh and which was metal. What were the odds of meeting someone who survived the exact same cancer as Shiro, and lost a limb because of it? I was itching to see how the tech differed for a leg prosthetic to that of an arm but it was probably rude to ask a stranger if you could examine their fake appendage. I barely noticed what today's subject was until the group session leader, Coran, called out Lance. Everyone else was prattling on about something while I was trying to avoid the fact that osteosarcoma-man continually drew his gaze toward me. Apparently we were talking about fears. "Lance, perhaps you'd like the share your fears with the group." Coran said in his trademark pleasant tone. "My fears?" "Yes." "I fear forsakenness." "Could you elaborate? Is it a religious forsakenness?" "No, not like that. I guess you could also call it abandonment." There was a soberness in his eyes that made me curious as to what kinds of scars he bore. "At times I'm nothing more than a third wheel. Some days it feels like a seventh wheel." He gave off a soft, nervous laugh. "l used to be on the swim team, was pretty good at it too. Now I've lost a leg. I'm useless to the team. I'm currently attending the Garrison and I want to be a pilot but... apparently piloting requires both your legs. I don't know how much longer they'll continue their cancer-kid pity and let me crash the simulations before they officially flunk me out. So yeah... I fear forsakenness. Being taken for granted and disregarded because of your uselessness. I'm already halfway there, so I guess the only thing I ought to fear at this point is fear itself." The room was quiet for a moment and despite the somberness in Lance's tone, he was smiling as if all of this was no big deal. I could see it in his eyes, however. The smile was a facade. I wondered idly how many times he faked such an appearance for the sake of others. "No one is useless." I'm not sure where my voice came from but I spoke up so loud it echoed softly in the vaulted space and Coran had to do a double take. All eyes were on me, again, and I could tell some of them were wider than usual because I rarely ever spoke in these sessions unless Coran yanked it out of me, but yet again I only felt the sincere stare of the boy with eyes the shade of the sky just before the stars came out. "My dad once said..." My voice started to crack but I pushed through it. "That everyone has a purpose. We may not see it or understand it, but everything in the universe is connected, much like the energy that flows through all living things or how everything in a computer is made up of the same series of numbers. You may feel useless to everyone and everything, including yourself, but you are useful to someone. Someone out there has been moved by the words you've said. Someone out there has been inspired by your actions. Someone out there has been cheered up by your spirit. Everyone is useful in some shape or form, at some point in their life, to an insurmountable number of people. Everyone's existence affects the fabric of space and time whether they realize it or not, and this reality as we know it is affected by your very existence. So..." I waved a hand dismissively as if I just explained something rather simple. "Like I said... no one is useless." Lance was dumbstruck for a moment, his jaw slightly slacked and his eyebrows lowered. "Holy crow." Then his bewilderment slowly turned into a wicked grin. "Aren't you something else." I raised my eyebrows at him in a silent question mark. Who said 'holy crow?' Wasn't the more common phrase 'holy cow?' Either way I'm pretty sure I just imploded his brain with my answer, and Coran is also looking a tad surprised as well as pleased. We continue on with the therapy session, neither Lance nor I contributing any more to the discussion. I quickly figured out which of his legs was prosthetic. He had a habitual bouncing of his left thigh, and it was a movement that was far too natural to have done with a recently amputated leg. When the session ended I stood up a bit too quickly and grabbed my oxygen tank to haul myself out of there as fast as I could. I didn't want to talk with anyone. I wanted to run home, hide in my room and play Skyrim on my laptop in the dark and immerse myself in distraction. But before I could leave more than five feet from the ring of chairs, there he was. "You said your name was... Pidge?" Doubt. Nervousness. And was that a bit of judgment? "Yeah." I didn't care to elaborate. I pulled on my oxygen tank and continued towards the door. "Want me to pull that for you?" He asked as he walked alongside me. There was a slight limp in his step. "It's not that heavy, Lance." Why was I being so snappy? Usually I wasn't this rude to strangers. "But it's a tank." "It's a tank of oxygen. It's not that heavy." He still seemed perplexed as he shook his head, but continued following anyway. "I just wanted to uh... thank you, for what you said back there." I wanted to reply quickly with something along the lines of 'it was no big deal' or 'glad I could help' and continue running away, but instead I stopped in my tracks and said nothing. I stared at the floor and felt like I couldn't breathe, which is saying something because ninety percent of the time I have trouble breathing. "Pidge?" His tone was concerned. "Do you want to come over for dinner?" Why did I say that. Why did I say that. "For dinner?" All I did was nod. I think that's all I was capable of, given the situation. I was still trying to calculate why my voice box made the impulsive decision to invite him over to my home. Lance seemed hesitant, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "Well, I won't say no to free food. A-are you sure? You don't need to like… call your parents first and see if it's okay if I come over or anything?" "Nah." I finally gained control over my motor abilities as I grabbed my oxygen tank and started walking again. I was still working on trying to reboot my brain, however. "We always prepare a ton of food in case Hunk or Shiro decide to show up." "Shiro?" Lance's voice went up an octave from surprise. "You mean like Takashi Shirogane Shiro? That Shiro?" "Wait, you know him?" "We had the same cancer! He visited me in the hospital! That guy's my hero!" "Well I'll be…" I whipped out my phone and started texting Matt. "I'm going to see if he can join us for dinner too. Because why not?" When Lance laughed my brain realized why I invited him over. "Yeah, might as well!"

Series: Detroit: Become Human Rating: T Genre: Adventure/Drama/Action (eventual romance) Summary: Before Connor, first of the RK800 line, began his fateful investigation of deviant androids, there was Jacob, the RK700 that preceded him. He failed in his assignment, but he did not go quiet into the night when he was decommissioned. Rather, he became the thing he had once hunted and disappeared into the depths of New York City in search of a new life.

( < Back to part 1 / < Back to part 4 )

Part 5 - Bullets

The bridge leading to Detroit proper stretched out before him, though was becoming shorter by the second as 700 reassessed his self-assigned mission to escape CyberLife.

Technically speaking, he had managed that, though the android was quickly coming to realize that while minutiae had served him well as a machine without free will, the word ‘technically’ was no longer his friend as a fully sentient android on the run.

Time, he thought, to add a few bullet points.

Bullet point one: Physically escape CyberLife tower (check)

This was added below the much larger and more amorphous mission of ‘Escape CyberLife’, which was becoming more complicated by the moment.

Bullet point two: Ditch the stolen car, as it likely had a tracker, and beyond that, was easily recognizable thanks to its flashy coloring and uncommon model.

Bullet point three: Find a disguise that would allow him to blend in with the human population. Clothes would have to be acquired, and his LED would need to be removed.

Here, the fact that he was a model of android unavailable on the open market would serve to help him hide. Yes, being the only RK700 model would make it easy for any direct agents of CyberLife to recognize him, but it also meant that the company couldn’t simply send out a warrant for any unattached androids of a specific model. If they tried to do as much using his image now, not only would it potentially affect their new RK800’s ability to function without interference in public once he was activated, but it would also attract media attention.

The cold and prying eye of the independent press was the dread of businesses everywhere, even ones as big as CyberLife. If journalists caught a whiff of internal strife within the confines of one of America’s biggest companies, they’d be on it like buzzards on yesterday’s roadkill. CyberLife had managed to repress the worst of the news about the deviancy problem thus far, but that wouldn’t last long once the journalistic community got involved.

Bullet point four: Leave Detroit. Where he would flee to was an unknown, though there were many options. Between 700 and that point, however, were a lot of variables even his impressive analytical program couldn’t account for, so he put a metaphorical pin in it for the time being.

Besides, he’d just reached the end of the bridge and he could see six cop cars rocketing straight towards him down the main thoroughfare. This development prompted him to make an addendum to his plan:

Bullet point one (a): Lose the cops.

700 made a sharp turn down a narrow side street and sped through a red light without stopping. One of his regulatory subsystems tried to object to this act, dangerous as it was, but the android simply shoved it down and focused on driving. Every light he came up against was red, and it occurred to him that the police must have had something to do with it, but he didn’t let it slow him down.

An automated semi-truck crossed an intersection in front of him and rather than slam on the brakes, 700 made a hard left to match its direction, making hard use of the accelerator to pull him out of the turn and put him ahead of the other vehicle. He didn’t make it far before more police, likely a second squadron called in for backup considering that the number of cars in the android’s wake hadn’t lessened by much.

Realizing that they must be making use of the CCTV cameras so common on the streets of downtown Detroit to track his movements, 700 changed tactics and jumped onto the first freeway that would take him out into the suburban sprawl where cameras were significantly less common. No doubt the police would soon have the information needed to track the car itself, but it would buy him at least a few minutes, and a few minutes was all he needed to disappear.

On the other hand, he might be able to earn himself more time if he could find some way to fool the tracking system in the vehicle he’d hi-jacked…

The freeway was sparsely populated, and the sports car possessed an engine that could, in human parlance, go like a bat out of hell. 700 opened up the throttle and watched for a moment as the flashing lights of the police quickly dropped away into the distance before turning half his attention to the center console.

He placed one hand on it and accessed its systems in hopes of deactivating the tracker, but was disappointed to find that it was, in a rather clever design move for just such an occasion, an independent unit not directly linked to the rest of the system. Still, it didn’t take the android more than a moment to suss out that said unit was embedded behind the central console; a difficult to reach spot in a hurry.

If you were a human, anyways.

After taking a second to check that the road ahead was still clear, 700 grabbed the lip of the screen with the fingers of one hand and pulled. There was a creak, then a groan, and the electronics all came spilling out into the front seat, a bundle of messy wires and other sundry bits that the android shoved into a heap on the floor of the passenger seat. Left hand still on the steering wheel, 700 reached into the new hole in the dash with his right and rooted around until he found what he was looking for, then took hold of the small, square box and tore that out too.

The wires that dangled from the tracker sparked a few times as the android lowered the driver side window and bided his time until a truck driving in the opposite direction approached. 700 performed a quick trajectory calculation, then threw the black box just in time for it to land in the bed of the oncoming vehicle.

He doubted it’d distract the police for long, but at the very least they wouldn’t be able to directly track his car anymore.

After picking an exit at random, Seven decelerated as he exited so as not to attract attention from the few passerby that lingered on the streets. He turned off into a neighborhood and quick use of his internal gps directed him to a small, isolated park where he finally brought the car to a halt in the shadows of a tree.

He cut the engine and sat back for a moment and considered his options once more before making another addendum to his mission.

Bullet point 2 (a): Search car for potential resources.

Well, the assault rifle would have to stay, useful though it had proven in his escape. There was no easy way to carry it without attracting immediate attention, which ran immediately counter to the rest of his mission statement, so 700 abandoned it in the passenger seat without a second look.

The android got out of the car and went to the passenger door to check the back seat for anything of potential use and found a backpack, a quick perusal of which provided a set of size small women’s gym clothes and a pair of size six running shoes. These were immediately discarded, but there were a few other things within that he decided to keep.

As 700 went around to the trunk, he made a mental list of his newly acquired assets:

- 1 backpack (black) - 1 nail care kit (blue) containing:

1 fingernail clippers

1 nail file

1 set of miniature scissors

1 set of tweezers

- $63.57 USD (2 twenties, 1 ten, 2 fives, 3 ones, 2 quarters, and 2 pennies) - 1 24 oz. reusable plastic water bottle (purple) containing:

17 fl oz. of water

The android’s search of the trunk added further to his resources, all of which he put into the black backpack.

- 1 15” pry bar (gray) - 3 24 oz. bottles of thirium (unopened) - 1 plastic shopping bag (previously containing 3 bottles of thirium)

Satisfied, 700 took a moment to consider the vehicle, double checking for anything he might have missed with a quick scan, then proceeded to strip out of his cyberlife issued gray jacket before stuffing it under the driver’s seat out of sight. That done, he removed his black, patterned tie and folded it neatly and put it away in his stolen backpack which he then shouldered and started off into the night without a backwards glance.

( On to part 6 > )

((Thanks so much for reading, guys! If you enjoyed, make sure to leave a comment letting me know what your favorite part was! Cookie if you reblog, heh. I’ve officially put parts 1-3 together into a single chapter up on AO3 if you’d like to follow there!

If you really enjoyed it, considering buying me a ko-fi?))

It’s been a wild few weeks but surprise! I am back and I am still watching two dudes beat up ghosts and look pretty. It’s Supernatural! 

Alright so here I am on the penultimate disc (thanks Lemony Snicket) of season 2 and at this point in the series we should be ramping up for the season finale. If you look back at this point in season 1, that meant putting the Winchesters under heavy fire (with the one funny episode), but this season it feels like they’re more interested in philosophical, emotional ramping than action ramping (with one funny episode). 

So many FEELINGS!

And you know what? I gotta hand it to Kripke and Co., cuz they figured out what worked in season 1 (brothers and feelings) and they leaned into it this season (brothers + feelings = 15 seasons). It’s a little hit and miss, but the core of season 2 is all about the line between Monsters and Men. I say hit and miss because we have spent a LOT of time on Dean this season but these episodes are all about Sam. And Dean’s arc is very different from Sam’s. Dean’s emotional arc is all about how he’s done with hunting, he’s done with sacrificing, which is WILD if you think about how early in the series this is. And yeah, it does, it does tie in to Sam’s troubles but it just doesn’t feel as clean as it could. Maybe it’s just because they spend much more time on Dean’s feelings? Maybe it’s cuz I personally pay more attention to Dean that I feel this way? But also, consider: the ep where Sam seemingly goes off the rails is all about Dean’s internal struggle with whether or not he can waste his own brother, even if his brother is evil now. We don’t ever see the fallout from Sam’s point of view. Sam was possessed at the time, he didn’t really go darkside, but also, Sam was possessed at the time??? And we don’t see any emotional fallout from that?!?!?

Nah, we’ll just end on this cringy joke about a girl being all up in Sam for a week and deflect away from our problems, nbd.

Kripke has mentioned in interviews that he thought the mythos of this season was muddled and that the psychic children plotline doesn’t really land because we never see Sam struggle with whether he’s good or not. At this point in the season, I definitely agree. They do give dialogue to Sam to remind viewers that he’s struggling with who he is, but they don’t devote enough screen time to it to make it feel like it lands. Dean’s struggle to keep Sam alive hits a lot heavier, but that may have more to do with that face and that g- d- lip quiver. 

Damn you and that lip quiver Jensen Ackles. Oh wait, this show already did!

Now we’re gonna make an abrupt turn into Sam’s emotional arc for the series. See, for the next few episodes we’re gonna follow a bunch of Monsters, right? By surface level definition, they are all text book Monsters, but they aren’t Villains, and that’s a big distinction. Because a lot of these characters are fundamentally good people, but they’re also the thing that the Winchesters have sworn their lives to hunt, so, like...how do we deal with that? 

First up we have “Roadkill”, which I like as a deviation from the regular format. There’s a lot of this tinkering going around this season, or at least, those are the episodes that stand out the most to me. I of course love Tricia Helfer (as a sort-of-but-not-really Battlestar Galactica Fan). This episode straight up brings us back to that key question this season: Are All Monsters Evil? Sam consistently draws a pretty clear distinction between Monster and Bad Guy, Dean consistently does not. Sam makes it clear that he has to believe there’s a line because if #YesAllMonsters are evil, and Sam’s abilities/destiny make him kind of a Monster, the logic follows that he’ll become evil too, or perhaps already is. 

In this ep we see Helfer as Molly, a woman who slowly comes to realize that she is a ghost who has been haunting the same stretch of road once a year for twelve years. I think Helfer totally crushes it. I think Molly as a character is hella interesting. She comes across as a pretty realized person rather than just a caricature. There’s a lot of heart in her and I appreciate that she handles The Truth pretty well, both when Sam and Dean tell her about the hauntings and then later when they reveal that she has been dead for over a decade. She asks good questions, like where DO those ghosts go once they’ve been busted? And she represents our philosophical conundrum - she’s a ghost that they have to bust, but she’s not evil. She’s not even really that bad. She’s just stuck here and can’t figure out how to move on. By the logic of the show, if she sticks around for too much longer she’ll start to get corrupted, but for now she’s just a scared, lost, woman trying to find her husband. She even starts to sympathize with the actual bad guy of the episode, a man she vehicular-manslaughtered but who comes back every year to torture her. 

And in the end, she finds peace! This is the second ghost this season that they actually lay to rest, not just defeat, and it’s nice. I think it’s nice. 

Is it odd that, for an episode that should hit so close to Sam’s internal struggle, the whole story is told from Molly’s POV? Again, I loved it, I love seeing the Winchesters from an external point of view, but it is...interesting...

Then we get “Heart”, which just digs deeper into the themes we got in “Roadkill.” 

This time, our Extra of the Week is another unwitting Monster. Emmanuelle Vaugier plays Madison, a kind of kickass lady who is really getting her shit together. She’s dumped her bad boyfriend, she’s killin’ it at work (lol), she’s out with friends, she’s a homeowner - this chick is LEGIT. And damn if she doesn’t know what she wants. Almost from the minute that Sam steps into her house she is into him, like, into him. She knows exactly what she’s doing when she dumps that basket of panties in front of him to “fold” them. Their chemistry together is good and honestly I was pretty thrilled for both of them when they got down to business. 

Good for you, you crazy kids! Good for you! 

But tragically, Madison is also werewolf. She’s completely oblivious to the fact that she is definitely murdering people on the full moon. When Sam finds out, and then finds out that Madison is not only unable to control her transformations or murders, but also unaware of what’s happening entirely, it’s another blatantly obvious metaphor for what Sam is dealing with - do supernatural powers make me a monster? Does being a monster make me evil? Does it count as evil if I’m not in control of my actions? And I love that this forces Dean to re-evaluate his stance as well. Cuz see Dean (and I love the guy) views things in very black and white terms, rarely asks questions and is 100% ready to kill this girl because she’s a Monster, full stop. Sam throws this back in his face with the line “So me you won’t kill me, but her you’re just gonna blow away?”, reminding us that Dean’s attitude is pretty damn hypocritical. And I say all of this as a Dean stan who loves watching that lip quiver, but also I am much more in agreement with Sam’s line of thinking on this - we can make a distinction between Monster and Evil in this show. I think ultimately, Dean starts to do this too, but just not in this episode. 

To their credit, they do try to save Madison, but failing that, they realize that Madison can’t be saved and so she’ll have to be put down - they can’t save her, so they have to kill her, if you will. It’s a surprisingly emotional climax and got pretty heavy at the end when Sam - who’s trying to figure out if he is worth saving - has to...what do we want to call this, a mercy killing? An execution? I don’t know, it’s mostly just a hell of a gut punch. A well done gut punch, but a gut punch nonetheless. 

The first lady that Sam bones since his fiancé and then you’re just like, and now you KILL her! Damn, show, what is WRONG with you?!?

I have to point out that we end the episode on Dean’s face. Like, I’m not mad about it, I am thrilled that on the list of Things That Work, Kripke and Co. were like, oh yeah, gotta put in as much Sad Dean Face as possible, but also, this was Sam’s episode? So shouldn’t we...get one final shot...of Sam? Like, I’m not crazy, right? They’re really pushing Dean this season, right? Who is this season supposed to be about?!?!?!

This is it! This is the last shot of the episode! This Sam-Centric Episode!

And then after all that heaviness and spiritual questioning, we get our Funny Episode. Meta Episode? Doesn’t matter. 

“Hollywood Babylon” is A+ Great and I love it. I love watching shows about shows, it is my jam. Watching this time, I did wish they’d thrown in more niche? Like, I just felt like the inside jokes could have been more inside, but also, Dean was SO happy in this episode, I didn’t even care. We so rarely see anyone in this show be happy, it’s nice that they get a break sometimes. It’s also weird that Sam seemed to get the most break? As in, he was getting a break from this episode entirely, especially since the last episode was a pretty heavy emotional arc for him? It’s a weird choice, but not something I really noticed because I was distracted by Dean working his way up from PA to Grip in like, a day, and I was just so proud of him. Anyway it was nice. It was NICE!

He’s doing SUCH a good job!

In this episode, our super special Extra of the Week is another lady, the fictional actress Tara Benchley played by Elizabeth Whitmere. I should probably stop using the term extra, by SAG/AFTRA standards she’s (probably?) a Guest Star, but honestly aren’t they all background extras in the lives of the Winchesters? Anyway, I appreciate how they portray Tara. They could very easily have written her to be a real piece of work. She could have been a whiney diva, she could have been a ditz, she could have been any number of Actress Tropes, but she seems pretty even-keeled. She has a certain amount of clout on set, she is friendly with the crew, she’s given a character trait that’s shared by real life actor Jensen Ackles - they really do treat her with a surprising amount of respect for an episode that goes real hard on producers and studios and horror generally. And she doesn’t die! So that’s a plus! But she does sleep with Dean which is...I mean...also a plus? I don’t know. I love Dean but I sometimes wonder how much sex he’s actually had? Like, if you told me it was 75% exaggeration, I’d believe you. Unimportant side head cannon. 

And then our final episode on this disc, “Folsom Prison Blues”. About time those boys went to jail, honestly. 

What can I say? The boy looks good in a coverall.

We get the return of Henricksen in this episode which is fun! We get a pretty kickass public defender, Mara White (Bridget Ann White), who is also fun! And we get Prison Dean, which is maybe the funnest. 

I like the twist with the prison warden - where you think that he’s going to be all aggro and corrupt and it turns out that he’s actually, like...looking out for his charges? In a...In a nice way? I guess? He wants the ghost to stop killing the people in his prison is the only fact that we get in the script, but it leads me to believe that he takes his job seriously and he wants second chances and better lives for all the cons in the yard and that makes me happy. He is also another in a long line of father figures that would have done a better job raising Sam and Dean, but that’s not important. And yeah, some of the cons are probably in here for good reason, but Lucas seems real nice and Tiny literally has a conversation with Dean where he explains that he’s basically just a product of bad parenting + Low Self Esteem, so on a low key level this episode is saying the same thing - just because these prisoners are technically “monsters”, does it mean that they have to die? Does that make the killings in this prison right? Everyone from Dean to the Warden seems to think not. Side note, that story from Tiny sounds eerily like Dean’s own life experiences, so he should probably have paid more attention to it but I guess he was busy getting cardiac arrest from a ghost so whatever. 

If this story wasn’t just RIGHT on the nose. 

Cuz that’s right, we have a psycho lady vigilante ghost! She does not believe in second chances and is killing cons from beyond the grave with her heart attack powers. And if we look at the low key metaphor tie in that the episode might be trying to make here, then you could argue that the show is coming down pretty hard on this one - just because you’re a Bad Guy doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy! Stop shooting first and asking questions later Dean!

It’s not your fault, bb, you were raised by a dumbass. 

And all of this buildup leads to...”What is and What Should Never Be”, possibly one of my fav episodes for Reasons, but guys it’s another SUPER heavy Dean episode, you could even say that Sam, the real Sam, isn’t even in, like 75 - 80% of it before we...get...to...Sam’s season finale? You know what, that’s next week’s problem. 

As much as I’m enjoying the stand alone episodes for this season especially, the mythos/arcs here are kind of a mess. I think the 20 ep seasons are instrumental to why audiences love the show, so I don’t want to take episodes away, but I do feel that a shorter season could have streamlined this season arc better. With fewer episodes, you have to focus your story so much more and sharpen your storytelling that Dean’s Arc and Sam’s Arc would probably feel more connected if they tried telling it in 8 - 12 episodes instead of 22. But then we wouldn’t have gotten the show that lasted 15 seasons, so would the trade off be worth it? Maybe some day we’ll find the alternate universe where Kripke waited 15 years to bring his series to Netflix and we got 5 short seasons of something completely different