#but a lot of it actually parallels a bunch of my source memories and some of it also matched up with some of 🦋's source trauma
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for some reason our brain apparently decided it was time to have a dream that was basically just being like "you can't be immortal anymore and you feel like shit about it" and like... wow thanks yes I do and now I get to wake up with the weirdest fucking combination of emotions 😒
#personal#thoughts#🍬 post#dream posting#source posting#I have complicated feelings about immortality and our lack thereof and it gets so much worse when we get ill#especially when it's something like covid or the blood infection we had last year#I'm also realising a lot of the rest of that dream felt very weird and nonsensical initially#but a lot of it actually parallels a bunch of my source memories and some of it also matched up with some of 🦋's source trauma#I swear to god if we both have to process a load of source stuff on top of everything else...
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your post about bladelore was really interesting, do you have any thoughts about the designs of the ferronises?
(message from future Van as I edit this -- Beware Ye Of The Unmarked Asspulls in this answer. Also SPOILERS THROUGH THE END OF CHAPTER 7)
Yeah, like, I'm kind of two minds about them? I definitely think the way they take on similar features to a big source of cultural trauma (Faced Mechons for Keves, Sirens for Agnus) of the two kingdoms supports the idea that ether is still a kind of collective memory, the way it was presented in XC2. They're weapons of intimidation, first and foremost, built to bolster the forces and make them more comfortable taking risks and choosing fight over flight, to feel like they've got something dangerous backing them up, but I also feel like they're subtly designed to reinforce the sense of hopelessness that is instrumental to the war working as intended. Z wants everyone to give up, the goal is to make everyone into Moebius and arrive at a kind of heat death of the universe that way.
From a practical perspective, I don't think the Ferronises are a new development in the war.... but I do think the war was probably initially fought without them, with everyone just under the one Big Flame Clock at the Castle. But we now that people do figure the war out, and if everyone was concentrated together, they'd just figure it out quicker, so eventually the amount of people fighting in the war necessitated they get split up and scattered across Aionios to stop them from seeing too much of the big picture to work it out like Alexandria did. So, basically, I'm taking the long way around to say that I think Flame Clocks preceded Ferronises, and Ferronises were conceived as extensions of Levnises, and are probably historically represented as such.
I think there's also a certain amount of incentive for Z to keep growing the scale of the war as more people became Moebius and started requiring Things To Do in the Eternal Now -- a lot of the Consuls in the game are or at least appear to be pretty new to their jobs, or at least have enthusiasm for it, which could be a ramp effect to embracing the true Endless Now of Not Doing Anything Ever Again after they get their petty victory or revenge or whatever it is that drove them to become Moebius in the first place. Maybe Ferronises were initially built to allow the Consuls to spar amongst themselves, and then as they got bored of that, new Consuls would take over.
Which brings me back around to the actual designs of the Ferronises -- lots of animal motifs to go around, but off the top of my head nothing really seems to match up that strongly with its Consul, other than maybe the miko outfit on Mu paralleling I's design. One that really leaps out is R with her fox design placed alongside the very scorpion-y Colony 11. Since there's a limited amount of Consul Titles to go around, if the ramp theory is correct, the Ferronises may be designed to spec by their original Consuls, but as they are now they're more like.... tabletop RPG factions, they all come with their own "playstyle" so to speak. Hell, depending on how circular you want to see the timeloop as, maybe colonies tend to have the same commanders over and over in a cycle, which would bring some periodic consistency to the game of war.
During the events of the game, we may actually be in a lull between campaigns, with a lot of consuls electing to not play, leaving Z to having to pull up a bunch of new Moebius to fill the seats around the gameboard, because if the war cools off too much, the people of the Kingdoms are gonna start asking questions again.
#van's answers#Xenoblade Chronicles 3#What do I even tag this at?#does this fandom have some kind of established Moebius Meta tag?#Xenoblade 3 spoilers#anonymous#long post#man I hope this is even remotely what you wanted to know about lmao#I CAN go into detail about some of the Ferronises if you want!! I promise!!#I just started writing and realised that I've never really talked about The War(tm) before#when it comes to the Ferronises themselves I really wish we'd seen more of them out in the field#I'm still salty that Lambda wasn't a part of the final attack on Origin like c'mon#you're telling me Isurd wouldn't feel like he owes the gang a life-debt. Really. R e a l l y.#Anyway if you want to know my opinions on the VISUAL designs -- I like that Lambda is a tortle :]#Also my friend pointed out that Gamma looks like a moth and I can't unsee it now
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This is an unfinished draft of a long, in depth analysis I’m planning of everything we know about Silksong. The final draft will have detailed analysis of enemies, areas, names, and many, many attempts to draw parallels with Hollow Knight. Without further ado, here’s the draft!
Will Hornet have her memories? Or will the winds of the Wastes have swept them away?
Prequel or sequel? (I’m thinking sequel, based on the implied presence of weavers in the trailer)
Lace fights Hornet (at least) twice, doesn’t call her by name, and knows things. IS SHE A HORNET PARALLEL AND HOW MUCH
What awful thing is going to happen to the flea-collecting village? Will they all die, or will they turn out to be evil? (My money’s on the latter)
Is the bell cult good, bad, or something else?
Who is the main villain?
Is Lace an antagonist or a Hornet parallel?
Lesbians???
Everything in Silksong seems much more vibrant than Hallownest. Instead of muted colors and effectively blank backgrounds, all of the areas we’ve been shown seem to be very saturated, and the design feels like everything is there for a reason. It’s a stark contrast to Hollow Knight’s busy backgrounds and dour themes, and is it possible the story reflects/is intended to reflect this?
Why does that one enemy look so much like steel soul Jinn?
Is Lace void??
Seriously though, she covers almost all of her body and her face is very similar to that of a shade’s. The existence of the shade trap room in the Colosseum of Fools implies the existence of other void creatures, though of course it could simply have been built for THK. We know void creatures are capable of having voices, as evidenced by the Collector, so IS LACE VOID???
That one area has a lovely juxtaposition between the white roses carpeting the ground and the industrial style pipes in the background, and knowing team Cherry, there’s definitely a reason for this.
Who kidnapped a Hornet and why?
Who sent the butterfly that breaks the seal of binding on her cage? Lace knows about Hornet’s imprisonment- could it have been her? Though she admittedly doesn’t seem to have much motivation to keep Hornet alive...
In Hollow Knight, the name of the game is also the name of the final boss. Could this also be true to an extent for Silksong? I doubt the boss would be named that explicitly, but perhaps someone who holds an association to both?
Multiple endings?
Will the final boss actually be the final boss? In Hollow Knight, the Radiance acts as a sort of hidden boss. Will this also be true in Silksong?
Will there be godseekers or the Grimm Troupe?
Will Ghost or THK be mentioned?
Will this focus more on expanding Hallownest’s lore or introducing Pharloom’s?
Points of interest:
1. Hornet appears to be performing a move similar to a great slash or dash slash here, which the enemy appears to be attempting (succeeding?) to deflect with their scissors
2. 2. In Hollow Knight, almost every fence or wall in Hallownest had the repeated motif of the king’s seal. This design looks a lot like a godseeker’s mask, as well as some of the enemies that have been revealed so far.
3. These appear to be at least four massive spools of silk. We know for a fact that there are weavers in Pharloom, and the sheer amount of silk here is more than we ever see in one place in Hallownest. Could it be possible that weaversilk is being farmed somehow?
4. It’s difficult to see, but this appears to be a massive control wheel, like you’d see on a valve. It’s much bigger than any standard bug could take advantage of, but we already know that Silksong is going to have some massive enemies, so it’s possible one of these also acts or acted as an overseer for this area.
5. This wall design heavily reminds me of both the walls in the Resting Grounds and the Birthplace. Are these corpses, or simply made to look like them? Either way, there’s definitely lore attached.
As well as all that, note how thin the support struts are, and how they appear wooden and cobbled together. I propose that what Hornet is climbing on here is the scaffolding around a massive silk related machine of some sort. Maybe an automatic loom?
Points of interest:
1. You’ll note that the enemy is holding a gilded pin, which is the same weapon Lace uses and is described as “the traditional weapon of Pharloom” by Team Cherry. I take this to mean that this bug has probably been in this place for a while.
2. This isn’t big or anything, but it’s very interesting to me that both Hallownest and Pharloom use lumafly lanterns for light. This implies some interesting things either about Hallownest and Pharloom’s proximity or the ubiquity of lumaflies.
3. This is clearly a graveyard. I find it very interesting that the stones seem to be entirely plain of embellishment or text except for the bell symbol. Also, I wonder if the graveyard being here means that we’re close to the Citadel?
4. This appears to be a fallen elevator. I’m not sure what else I could draw from it, but it definitely adds to the dilapidated and abandoned feel of this area.
5. This enemy has three golden straight pins. It’s very possible that you gain the ability to throw three at once after vanquishing one of these enemies. Another interesting thing to note is that the enemy isn’t holding these pins. If you look closely, their hand is at their side. The pins are instead seemingly fastened to their head somehow.
6. This is difficult to see properly, but the design on the fence here appears to be similar to the shape of the fallen elevator. It could also be read as a representation of the Citadel.
A few other things to note are that the colors here are almost identical to those of the resting grounds, including the enemies. This is unusual as far as Silksong goes, as most of the areas are far more intensely saturated.
These enemies appear to be wearing cloaks. It’s difficult to tell whether it’s the shadow of the hood that’s hiding their faces or whether that’s simply what they look like.
Also, Greymoor is a very interesting name and I’d like to explore what precisely a “moor” is, because I think this may give more clues as to the nature of the area.
Moors are defined as highland areas with acidic soil and low vegetation. The fact that moors are specifically highland areas makes me suspect even more that Greymoor connects directly to the Citadel, as Silksong appears to be a game mostly focused on going up, so where better to transition from the ground to the Citadel than highland?
1. We know from the Resting Grounds that this is how Ari draws mummified corpses. The fact that this corpse is walking around definitely implies some shenanigans. It brings to mind the description of Greymoor as “haunted”.
2. The fact that this corpse is lying on the ground makes me wonder if most of these mummified bugs will lie still on the ground until they notice Hornet, which would be an interesting enemy mechanic.
3. This lumafly lantern is tinted green, which I’m pretty sure we never saw in Hollow Knight. (Correct me if I’m wrong) It makes me wonder if something special was done to the lantern to achieve this.
4. Team Cherry has said that Hornet’s silk and soul are “inseparably intertwined”. It’s a very nice design touch to see that healing creates both kinds of particle.
5. See those motes in the air? They look very similar to the spores of the Fungal Wastes, and I suspect they may be the reason moss covers everything here.
What I lined in dark blue is the visible boning beneath the moss, and what I lined in cyan is the places where the moss grows too regularly, implying yet more boning just beneath.
I’m not sure whether this is deliberate or whether the moss grew over already existing structures to cause this, but another thing to note is that the way this moss grows is very reminiscent of moss balls, or marimo balls, an aquatic plant that grows in freshwater lakes.
The reason this interests me isn’t because I think these *are* moss balls, but rather because of how natural grottos form.
Most natural grottos are formed by water eroding soft rock like limestone into large caves. It’s common for them to either be flooded or to flood at high tide, which when combined with the aquatic vegetation in this area, could imply that it will be flooded for part of the game or at intervals. It’s possible Team Cherry would use this to echo the way that the Forgotten Crossroads turn into the Infected Crossroads, or it could be a way of gating the first area behind you until you get more movement capabilities similar to the Howling Cliffs.
Lastly, one of the root words for Grotto is the Latin word for “crypt”. Combined with the mummified corpses here, it makes me wonder.
Points of interest:
1. Confirmation that Hornet can look up! I don’t think anyone was worried about it, but it’s good to know we’ll still be able to do that.
2. You’ll note, first of all, that this is unusually bare for Ari’s backgrounds. The designs are smooth with little shading and there are massive dark areas. This leads me to believe that this isn’t the finished background, nor the one we’ll see in game.
3. The two strange objects at the corners of the screen are difficult to identify. Personally, I think they look like plugs of some sort, though I have no idea what they might be plugging. Maybe magma?
4. What is it with Team Cherry and throwing dead bodies everywhere? That’s litter, it’s illegal. Anyway, what might have killed these bugs?
5. You’ll note the massive misshapen mountain of bones in the background. Where did all of these come from? Also, the fact that they are bones means that this is probably Bonebottom. I’d like to call your attention to the fact that bugs don’t actually have bones, just exoskeletons, which makes the source of these even more dubious.
6. There are several ember particle effects, which I take to mean that there’s a whole bunch of magma nearby.
7. There are a few links of chain attached to each plug. Likely this is to allow them to be dragged open. I’m very curious whether this is just a design detail or whether opening these plugs will be used as a mechanic somehow.
Circled in blue are the (brass?) rings on Shakra’s arms as well as a similar ring on the ground. I’m not sure why one of her arm rings would be on the ground, but maybe it’s similar to Cornifer’s pages?
#meta#silksong#silksong speculation#silksong meta#hk hornet#silksong analysis#I’ll probably have to split the final version into multiple parts#greymoor#mossy grotto#bonebottom#shakra
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The Mask Falling Hints MASTERPOST
Clearly I have wayyy too much time on my hands!
I have compiled a list of information Samantha Shannon has divulged on social media about The Mask Falling, mostly paraphrased from her Tumblr and Twitter. Some of it dates back as far as 2016, so it’s not certain that all of it will happen - I’ve included an asterisk for the tidbits in which Samantha explicitly mentioned that it was pre-editing. I didn’t include a link to the original source because that would be too much work, but if anyone has questions I can probably find it pretty easily! The recent ARC reviews also include some hints, but I haven’t included them because that would be a crap-ton of text. Feel free to add anything I missed! Anyway enjoy the fruits of my obsession!
Hints:
We will find out how badly Warden was affected by Paige’s torture - there’s a lot about the effects of her torture in the book
The non-binary character is a free-world spy, pretending to be French
Paige has issues with drinking water and showering
Paige will make another valiant effort to get Warden to talk about his feelings
Paige’s demisexuality is clarified - she reflects on the way she wants in comparison to the way the allosexual Nick and Eliza do
Paige gets slammed into the wall by someone, but not Terebell (also not Warden, because then she would be very dead)
The grey market storyline continues
Etymological connection of Arcturus meaning bear-guard and Mahoney meaning descendant of the bear is worked into the books
Paige cries
Paige’s PTSD is a thread throughout the book
Paige has mental and physical difficulties following her torture
“The scope of everything gets bigger, there's more focus on the free world and how it interacts with Scion, and you'll find out more about Rephaite history and the origin of clairvoyance.”
You may figure out what happened to Procyon
Warden’s aura type is mentioned*
Paige starts calling Warden Arcturus. They have a discussion about it. But she keeps calling him Warden in front of other people.
The prologue begins about an hour after The Song Rising
Warden asks Paige to teach him Irish
Contains clues as to the big secret at the heart of the series
Warden does a few very sweet things
We’ll find out a reason why Nashira considers Warden a possession rather than a partner*
Paige is at her most fragile
One of the characters eats an orange
There is a distinct Priory parallel in one section of the story
Paige asks Warden if Rephaim can get drunk
We will find out if Rephaim can get physically ill
We’ll get a piece of information that may help us understand the Rephaite logic behind Warden feeding on Paige’s aura
More about the golden cord
Paige’s feelings with her father will be explored
We will find out why it was common knowledge amongst Rephaim that Terebell and Warden were once mated
Warden might tell us what would happen if he tried to eat
More about voyant-amaurotic sex will be explained
We will learn more about the Rephaim’s internal politics and conflicts
We get to see Paige’s birthday
We we’ll find out how Warden knows how to develop Paige’s gift*
Paige and Warden butt heads over right and wrong
We’ll find out why Warden said that Sargas are the only Rephs who choose their mates
We’ll find out more about the half-urge
We’ll find out more about the complicated history between Warden and Terebell
Warden is planning to learn Gaelic (pre-editing)
We’ll find out two of the reasons why Warden hates Nashira so much*
We’ll find out about the promise Warden made to Nashira that she alludes to before the Bicentary
Warden says something with an exclamation mark
Warden will tell us more about the memory of Terebell, and how it was a prelude to one of the defining moments of his existence
Paige visits Warden’s dreamscape a few times, but we only see it once
Paige addresses the author directly
Nick isn’t in the book at all
The plot takes place only in Paris
Paige dies her hair red
A character Samantha did not originally plan to be in TBS4 now is
There’s a big scene in the Sainte-Chapellle in Paris
The book is shaping up to be the darkest book in the series, but also contains the most jokes
Paige feels really ill for most of the book
Samantha starts hinting at the Grand Backstory of the series
Paige is under strict orders to stay inside for a month, but she breaks the rules to explore Paris
The main antagonist was born in “the burning summer of 2019”
We’ll find out about two of Warden’s past relationships
Paige and Warden have to get food deliveries from a guy called Albéric because they’re not allowed to go outside
There’s espionage
Warden uses the super unnecessary word “sennight”
A lot of the book takes place underground
We learn if a non-polyglot could ever learn Gloss
There is a Very Awkward Conversation*
There is a time skip between the fourth and fifth books
Warden smiles a lot… with his eyes
The ending will change everything
Scion must change its public face due to an event that happens at the end
People who liked The Mime Order will love it
TBS4 picks up when Paige is resting.
It will go into more detail about how Rephaim emerge
It marks the beginning of Beautiful Dresses in The Bone Season
It introduces a Rephaite character Samantha absolutely loves, with her favorite Rephaite name
There’s a scene Samantha has wanted to write for years
The ending is very dark
There’s a cute priory reference
There’s a character Samantha loves - “she’s so cool that I don’t know how a nerd like me invented her”
“The relationship between Warden and Paige gets deeper and more complicated in this one, and you get to know Warden a little better.”
“[Paige and Warden] are together a lot in this book, as they’re sharing a safe house in Paris. It’s the first time they’ve spent a significant amount of time with one another since they escaped Sheol I. You’ll actually glimpse the ways they both react to being stuck inside in The Mask Falling, as they’re meant to stay hidden in a safe house for a month so Paige can start to recover from her ordeal.”
“It’s a love song to Paris in the way The Mime Order was a love song to London.”
“[Paige and Warden do have some happy calm moments.] Although there’s a lot of action in the book, there’s also quite a lot of downtime. Paige is still recovering from her ordeal in the Archon, so she can’t always be out in the world kicking ass. She’s resting as well, trying to get her strength back.”
“I won’t lie, The Mask Falling is a book to fear . . . but there are some nice bits. Including some coffee-drinking.”
“[Paige and Warden] do so much in this book. So much.”
“Most of the characters who didn’t go to Paris are absent from TBS4.”
“Paige and Warden do so much in this book, I just couldn’t cram any other storylines in. However, several old friends do turn up in it, as well as a bunch of new characters I hope you’ll love as much as I do.”
“Paige [experiences the messiest-most-intense emotion in TBS4]. She goes through the emotional wringer in this one.”
“The second ‘arc’ has the same main characters and the same antagonist. The difference has more to do with the setting, the scope of the narrative, and the type of battle being fought against Scion. You’ll have a better idea of what I mean when you read the end of TBS4.”
“This book puts both [Paige and Warden] through the emotional wringer, but there are lighter parts as well.” “Nick meets an old friend while he’s in Sweden and Paige and Warden will be staying in central Paris, on Rue Gît-le-Cœur. You can see some of the locations from Book 4 here: [x]”
“TBS4 is basically just a long Hurt/Comfort piece with occasional and reluctant splashes of Action/Adventure”
“THE MASK FALLING leans a little more Adult than the other BONE SEASON books. The whole series is officially classified as Adult, but the first three aren't far off YA in terms of sexual content, violence etc. THE MASK FALLING is . . . maybe a tiny bit sexier.”
“Doing my final reread of THE MASK FALLING and naturally I've noticed a recurring phrase that I have used no less than thirty times in the manuscript.”
“It blows the world of The Bone Season right open. It’s where everything changes. It takes place in a brand-new setting and forms the bridge between the two ‘arcs’ of the series. I hope the ending will show readers get why I really do need seven instalments to tell this story.”
“Books 1-4 is what I call the “Scion arc”, but Scion is still a threat in Books 5-7. Book 4 is kind of in the middle, with more of a focus on Rephaim than there currently is in Book 3.”
“He’s in Book 4, he’s French, he’s voyant, and I’m writing his introduction scene now. I think I love him?”
“The draft is about 140 000 words long – a little shorter than The Mime Order – with a veritable tonne of action, espionage, international politics, eerie catacombs, old enemies, new friends, and messy, intense emotions packed into that word count.”
“This one combines my favourite elements of The Bone Season (Warden and Paige chats), The Mime Order (syndicate weirdness) and The Song Rising (heists and angst)”
“The fourth Bone Season book is well underway, and things are about to take a very dark turn for Paige.”
“It’s mostly focused on Paris, but you’ll find out bits and pieces about what’s happening in both England and Europe.”
“She’s suffering from PTSD and aquaphobia following her water torture in The Song Rising, so she’s pretty much in the ringer for the whole book. There are a few light moments, but she’s under a lot of stress from the start.”
“While I wouldn't call it spy fiction, TBS4 is delving into espionage territory as Warden and Paige, still exhausted from their tremendous efforts against Scion in The Song Rising, attempt to navigate the convoluted political and criminal networks of Scion Paris.”
“Book 4 is a touch more political, laced with subterfuge”
Lists:
Things you’ll see:
The carrières of Paris
A masquerade (ofc)
A mysterious character you haven’t seen in a long while
Arcturus Mesarthim saying ‘hm’ about 18 times
Five words:
Revelations
Politics
Water
Heartache
War
Three adjectives:
Macabre
Emotional
Seismic
There is a lot of:
Warden and Paige
Rain
Classy interior decor
Angst
New characters include:
A spy so fashionable and icy cool I’m unsure of how a nerd like me created her
A tall, irritable Frenchman with a bit of a God complex
A terrifying new Rephaite with an uncomfortably sexy voice
It has:
A Parisian underworld
A demisexual MC
A masquerade ball
Catacombs
Forbidden, angst-stricken desire
Verbal consent
Acknowledgement of periods
I can promise:
Parisian buildings TOURISTS LOVE. Notre-Dame? It's there, there's a masquerade INSIDE IT. Sainte-Chapelle? Oui. Versailles? Naturally. The Eiffel Tower? Oh, we're climbing it
Getting DOWN and DIRTY. (By which I mean literally, down, into the catacombs.)
People who arrive in Paris SPEAKING FRENCH because they have been given a job for which they have the correct SKILLSET *bangs table*
No crêpes (#OhCrepe), but CHAUSSONS AUX POMMES
ROOFTOP PICNIC
Not everyone is STRAIGHT
Chic OUTFITS, all quite filthy by the end
Locations:
The beautiful Sainte-Chapelle, my favourite place on Earth.
Rue Gît-le-Cœur, a major location in the book and previously home to the Beat Hotel.
The famous doorway in the Paris Catacombs. The inscription translates to 'Stop! This is the Empire of Death.'
Rue Montmartre, where we may or may not encounter an old face.
Preview in gifs:
Originally posted by cinemagraphs
Originally posted by queeniegoldtsein
Originally posted by cumlelerinruhu
Snippets:
Out-of-context chapter title: Chapter 3: Gloomy Coffee
Part names*:
1. To Pay Thee Free
2. Turn the Anchor
3. Eurydice
Quotes:
“What the fuck is that?” she whispered to me. “Looks like a frozen rainbow.”
“The horizon was as red as if the fire still burned. I watched the sunrise from the roof. Fog breathed into every nook and alcove of Paris, laced over the dark crests of the river, blanched the skin to the pink of salmon. I was sure the air was still spiced with the tang of smoke.”
“So,” he said, “we are choosing larceny.” “Always so surprised when his criminal friend commits crimes.”
“I wouldn’t usually care who you’re riding at any given time”
“I sensed all of this was very important, but I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about”
“I picked up the floundering ribbons of my dignity and started over”
“His home was in decay, and mine lay in the shadow of the anchor. Scion had made wanderers of us.”
Current opening line (circa Dec 18, 2018): “The sun had been climbing over the cliffs when our ship had pared away from Dover.”
“Someone who had heard of me and whose first response had not been to try to kill me. What a treat.”
“A hollow ache stretched out within me. It started in the chambers of my heart, in a place that reached eternally for Ireland.”
“‘I promised you we would stay together,’ he said. ‘In the absence of other options, I will follow your lead on this matter.’”
“‘I’m fine.’
‘Your attempt to mask the darkness under your eyes serves as compelling evidence of that. As does the full bowl of coffee.’
I cocked my head. ‘Did you just master sarcasm?’
‘Paige.’
‘It’s a cup of coffee. With… no handle.’”
“‘There’s no fireplace,’ I stated.
‘No.’
‘But how are you-‘ A wild laugh was bubbling up. ‘How are you going to cope without one?’
‘Cope,’ Warden repeated.
‘You need one. To stare into, pensively. Did you know,’ I said to him, ‘that you do that a lot?’
He tilted his head, which only set off a fit of silent laughter. My ribs ached in protest.”
‘I mustered all the breath I had left and screamed, until I folded on myself and my voice burned to nothing.’
‘Who can break you now, Black Moth, now there is nothing left to break?’
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Good Omens Fic Rec Masterpost - Part Two
Hello hello I have read MANY MORE fics in this fandom now so it’s time to add on to my previous recs. Part One can be found here: https://flameraven.tumblr.com/post/187742832545/good-omens-fic-recs-masterpost
General info! No fics rated higher than M, and that’s usually for violence not sex. I headcanon the husbands as being in an asexual relationship, so any fics I rec will have no sex, or only have sexy stuff alluded to or briefly mentioned.
The Soft Zone (TM)
all the days - G / darcylindbergh
War of Attrition- G / out_there / 8k - 3 gifts Crowley gives Aziraphale
A Meddling of Houseplants - T/ wingedspirit / 6k - Ophelia (a peace lily) is tired of Crowley and Aziraphale’s hopeless pining, and takes matters into her own leaves.
Sweetest in the Gale - T / wingedspirit / 3.8k - Gabriel can sense Aziraphale’s love for Crowley, and confronts “Aziraphale” about it before his execution
Deck the Halls - G / forthegreatergood / 18k - two idiots attempt to acquire mistletoe for the holidays in order to convey their feelings for the other.
Tartan Wrapping Paper - G / Arej / 2k - Crowley may not have quite gotten the message about the tartan all those years ago
a prize-winning philodendron - G / Elsajeni / <1k - Crowley does look, and sighs heavily. “Angel,” he says, “of all the plants you could have tried keeping, why did you start with something this fussy?”
Silver and Gold - G / asparkofgoodness / 1.5k - Crowley buys a ring.
Futile Devices - G / ticketybye / 3k - Yes, Crowley has imagined. He has craved. But being in Aziraphale’s close proximity has had to be enough. He’s not even sure he deserves that. But this, this feels like it felt to be commissioned the stars. It feels like being entrusted with something precious and fragile.
The Weight of Words Unspoken - G / rattatatosk / 1.8k - Aziraphale has always hinted to Crowley when he needed to leave. After the Apoca-wasn’t, he asks Crowley to stay.
J’Aime (I Love) - G / yourpaceangel - Crowley is searching for what the ‘J’ means.
the other way round - G / darcylindbergh / <1k - Aziraphale gets hair pets for once.
Take My Hand (Take My Whole Life Too) - G / soft_october / 1.5k - Crowley is trying not to go to fast, ends up stalled out completely. Aziraphale decides he will have to get creative.
In Good Hands - G / Sunjinjo / 14k - Aziraphale was created wearing a golden ring. It’s now the last remaining aspect of his original attire.One day, he tries to take it off. The rest follows naturally. (Marriage Proposal)
One Golden Glance (Of What Should Be) - G / Sunjinjo / 8.5k - Crowley takes up painting after the Apocalypse.
Misfit / Safe Haven - G / Mothfluff / 2k - Aziraphale provides a safe space for the Soho queer community to gather
seasons, changes - G / the_pen_is_mightier / 2k - In the autumn Aziraphale and Crowley go out apple picking.
on the necessity of a temptation - M / darcylindbergh / 4.5k - Crowley squinted at him. He said, slowly, as if sounding around the words [...] “But doing things is what we do. Why would—what would be the point of me being here otherwise?”
In Other Words, Baby, Kiss Me - T / mikkimouse / 4.5k - Five times Aziraphale kissed Crowley and one time Crowley (finally) kissed him back.
It's Getting Hard, This Holding Back - T / ZehWulf / 13k - Crowley decides to lure Aziraphale into Explicit Gestures of Romantic Affection. Aziraphale sets a cuddle trap
give you more to hold on to - T / cryptidkidprem / 4k - Crowley nods. "It's..." He looks down at their joined hands, and takes a long, deep breath. “We’re not— We’re not supposed to need this, y’know?” He lifts their joined hands up, lets them fall again. “You and I. Angels, demons. We're not meant to need all this. This touchy-feely stuff, all this affection, this—” a hitch in his breath— “Love.”
two parallel lines -lineffability
don’t let me wake up - acuteangleaziraphale
how to let go - jlmarch
Mornington Crescent -politeanarcy
Wingfic
Symmetry in Favor - G / kedreeva / 8k - Five times Crowley preens Aziraphale's wings, and one time Aziraphale preens Crowley's.
London Calling - G / forthegreatergood / 30k - Come for Crowley’s ridiculous 1970′s bed, stay for Feelings and extensive wing pets.
Hurt/Comfort
Be Ye Therefore Merciful - T / AmberDiceless / 9.5k - Book!Verse. Crowley does something utterly unexpected, and Aziraphale must face an opponent who cannot be thwarted.
Pigeon Girlfriends with a Long Preamble - T / SleepySelfLoathing / 8k - All Crowley wanted was to spend a nice night in with his husband, so of course he ends up summoned by a bunch of cultists instead. Why would he expect anything different....This would probably be a lot easier to deal with if he wasn't wearing Aziraphale's fluffiest bathrobe.
All Creatures that Have the Breath of Life - G / Elsajeni / 4k - Aziraphale fishes a very sodden Crawly out of the water during the Flood.
Touched by an Angel (And it Bloody Hurts) - G /hedgehog-o-brien / 7k - Aziraphale can’t touch Crowley without burning him.
Douse the Fire, Help Me Breathe - G / Arej / 1.5k - Even demons fear fire, when they've watched their world burn.
In a City Under Aerial Bombardment - G / battle_cat / 3k - After the church and the bomb and the books.
Small Mercies - G / rattatatosk / 4k - Crawly gets smited. Aziraphale lends a hand.
Easier Than Air - G / A_Candle_For_Sherlock / 3.5k - The world hasn't ended, and everything is fine. They're fine. It's terrifying.
attachment - T / artenon / 4.5k - Crowley crosses over to open the passenger door for Aziraphale, and Aziraphale’s attention is drawn to Crowley’s uneven gait, the light, too-quick steps and the rocking back and forth on his heels as he holds the door open and waits for Aziraphale to get in.“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, heart sinking, “your feet.”
Hell Freezes Over - M / charliebrown1234 + Turcote / 18k - The year is 2002, and Crowley and Aziraphale are sent to Alaska to investigate a decommissioned entrance to Hell. What could possibly go wrong?
Better The Demon You Know - T / mikkimouse / 1.2k - When Crawly falls out of the sky and into the flood, he gets help from a very unexpected source.
Gently, gently - G / the_pen_is_mightier / 3k - Heaven is cold and lonely. Hell is filthy and crowded. Aziraphale badly needs to be touched; Crowley needs fresh air, and light, and space. They can’t seem to connect on days after they’ve returned from their respective head offices.
Of Firsts and Foremosts - T / kedreeva / 6k - Aziraphale is left vulnerable and injured as his first molt approaches. Crawly comes to the rescue for the first time.
The Brazen Serpent - T / ImprobableDreams900 / 11k - Some other angels come to help Aziraphale at the end of the Isrealites’ 40-year exile in the wilderness, unfortunately for Crawley.
hold my hand tight (we'll make it another night) - G / cryptidkidprem / 3k - The night at Crowley’s flat. He’s having a hard time not panicking.
Harbours of My Own - T / wingedspirit / 30k - Crowley knows that, as a demon, his freedom is limited. He doesn't get to have a home; he doesn't get to love. Aziraphale would very much like to change that, but he, too, is limited in what he can do. It takes the better part of six thousand years, but they'll get there.
crack me open, feel me shatter - T / rattatatosk / 2.5k - Crowley dreams of the Fall. Aziraphale is there to catch him when he wakes.
Angst (w/a Happy Ending)
Where His Angel Dares to Tread - M / PinkPenguinParade / 16k - Crowley is taken by Hell. Aziraphale disguises himself as best he can for the rescue mission. Newt and Anathema help.
Remembrance of Things Past - T / Fyre / 18k - Hell takes Crowley’s memories all the way back to Eden as punishment for his crimes.
Drunk Theology - G / battle_cat / 3k - Aziraphale had been hoping tonight for Giggly Drunk Crowley, which was his favorite drunk Crowley. That didn’t seem to be how things were working out, though.
Like a River Flows - T / kedreeva / 15k - Five times Crowley was not allowed to love Aziraphale, and one time he succeeded.
The Cultivation of New Growth - T / Vitreous_humor / 3k - “I mean,” he said carefully, “if you want a plant, let me give you one of the snake plants or maybe the big coleus. They'd be good for the shop, pretty stalwart in the dark...You don't want this one, it's rotten.” “Actually,” Aziraphale said firmly, “I do want that one.”
The Holy Essence of Experience - T / Dragonsquill / 4k - They know how they feel, but giving it a name would be too dangerous. Ineffable husbands from the beginning to the end of the world, aware and wanting.
AUs/Crossovers
be mine tonight (be mine forever) - T / artenon / 11k - Human!AU. When Aziraphale finds out his coworkers have made a bet that he won’t bring anyone to the company party, he asks his best friend Crowley to go as his date just to spite them. Things quickly spiral out of control.
Siren’s Song - T / kedreeva / 30k+ (WIP) - Siren!AU. Crowley, a lone siren, calls a ship to wreck upon his reef, but finds when he meets pirate captain Aziraphale that sirens are not the only ones able to lure another creature to their heart's desire.
Adopt Don’t Shop - G / lucky_spike / 6k - Cat!AU based on Chekov’s “Good Meowmons” comics.
The Ones Who Walk Away From Nevaeh - T / soft_october / 15k - AU based on “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
The Grinch Who Sold Christmas - T / darcylindbergh / 60k - Human AU / Hallmark Movie AU. Crowley is a big city lawyer sent to seal the deal that will destroy the quaint town of Tadfield forever, right before Christmas... and then he falls in love with the town, and a certain bookshop owner. Ridiculously sappy fluff that hits all the right notes.
The Odd One Out T / RainyDayDecaf / 2k- A meeting of many different Crowleys and Aziraphales.
Beat Again - T / TeaCub90 / 7k - Human AU. Two neighbours keep each other and their respective conditions company in the dead of night
Outsider POV
Ophidiophobia - G / lyricwritesprose / 7.6k - Pepper is afraid of snakes. When this is abruptly revealed in an encounter with Crowley’s serpent form, she immediately goes about trying to cure herself of it.
What’s in a Name? - G / lyricwritesprose / 4k - “You do realize,” Brother Francis said, “that Warlock is just your name, not some sort of, of directive?”
Damaged - G / lyricwritesprose / 6k - Aziraphale is struggling after the Apocalypse. Madam Tracy offers some advice. (Very good spooky/nonhuman Aziraphale in this one.)
Angel’s Favor - T/ PinkPenguinParade / 10k - A hundred years ago, Aziraphale gave one of his feathers to a woman who helped him. In the modern day, her descendant calls in the favor.
Protective Camouflage - G/ politeanarcy/ 2.3k - The Antichrist isn’t the only one with defenses against being noticed.
Disposable - T / lyricwritesprose / 7k - Eric the Disposable Demon attempts to become Crowley’s vassal after the Apoca-wasn’t. Nothing goes the way they expect after that.
on deceiving appearances - G / asideofourown / 2k - The Disposable Demon realizes the truth of Crowley’s deception in Heaven.
Anthony J. Crowley, Retired Demon and Airbnb Superhost - G / TheOldAquarian / 3k - What are you supposed to do when you've been fired from your sweet job in Hell for thwarting the schemes of Satan, you've got a swanky flat in Mayfair, and you're looking for an excuse to spend all your time in someone else's bookshop? Obviously, you turn to the dubious world of short-term vacation rentals.
Other
the best laid schemes - T / asideofourown / 4k - How Crowley got his Rat Army
Incongruous States of Being - T / ZehWulf / 8k - “Who would win: Aziraphale or Crowley.” “Oh!” Aziraphale startles. “Well—such a question. It’s not as though either of us has engaged in so much as fisticuffs in ages, and one does need to keep up practice with these sorts of things.” His fretting dies abruptly when Crowley cuts over him clearly, baldly: “Aziraphale.”
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition - T / WoodsWitch / 12k - The Arrangement is 500 years old, and Crowley and Aziraphale have been having a fine time in Renaissance Florence. Things start to go a bit pear-shaped with the arrival of a Friar Savonarola, so Crowley suggests that they meet up in his favorite refuge from the rest of medieval Europe: Spain. ((Don’t let the title fool you, this is an incredibly in-depth and well-researched historical fic and deserves way more hits than it has.))
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Ok guys...I’ve just written a really long comment...about Robot Trains... on Reddit. In a discussion on r/FanFiction, regarding small/unpopular fandoms. It’s probably cringe. But I want to share it with you guys. Also, spoilers. It’s pretty much my summary of the entire show.
It’s probably nothing I haven’t said before. ...I’m just over here laughing, just embracing how much of a lunatic I sound like, trying to convince these redditors that a children’s train show is a horror story. (They’re probably like “...Are you the same weirdo that was talking about the Marfa lights a while back...?”)
Here it is guys:
“Are you watching season one or season two? Because, season two is COMPLETELY different, and is exactly as babyish as the animation implies.
In the first season, Kay is the leader of Train World, and on the day he tries to open a new intercontinental rail road, Duke literally attempts to murder him (and also declares that he's going to eliminate all the Robot Trains and enslave all the non-robot trains).
A fight ensues between Duke and Kay, and Kay is severely injured, and loses his memory.
Duke gets locked up in isolation in a sort of a medically induced coma for A LONG time.
The fight between Kay and Duke also causes some of the outlying areas to become cut off from their central hub, meaning they can't receive the energy they need to survive. Eventually, they manage to re-establish contact with The Mountain Area (Alf's area) and are surprised to see that he's survived.
It comes to light that he only survived by essentially cannibalizing his friend's engines, which was extremely risky, but preserved them in an unconscious state while giving Alf the energy he needed to maintain the Mountain Area until their rescue.
At one point, Duke regains consciousness, escapes, damages Train World's main energy source and attacks all the Robot Trains. There's one super scary scene where he systematically attacks each of Kay's friends to antagonize him, in the dark, and Kay can hear each of them scream one by one but can't find Duke.
Finally, Duke is subdued and imprisoned again.
THEN (MAJOR SPOILERS)
it comes to light that Duke was innocent THE WHOLE TIME and a computer virus forced him to try to kill HIS BEST FRIEND! Actually...his only friend. And, because Duke was always socially awkward and introverted, he wasn't really close with anyone but Kay. And since Kay had lost his memory, there was no one to defend Duke, and step up and say that it wasn't the sort of thing he would ever do.
So then, they have to go into Duke's consciousness and fight like, a personified version of the computer virus.
After Duke has been cured, there's also an episode where Kay and Duke travel to a parallel universe where Kay had caught the virus instead of Duke. In that universe Kay, alternate universe Kay is still chained up AND HIS ENGINE (established in canon to be equivalent to a vital organ, like his brain) is removed and outside his body.
Also, if you look at that scene closely, Alternate-Universe! Kay is actually DEAD though the episode doesn't draw a lot of attention to that. ...But, with engines that are still living, the red triangle indicator light blinks. And, they do a close up on Kay's engine in that scene, to show that the light is out. So, alternate-universe! Kay was basically executed for his betrayal, and no one in that universe ever found out his behavior was caused by a virus.
Anyhow, later there's a big ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE where the virus generates a bunch of copies of Duke. Initially, Duke winds up taking the blame for one of the first attacks, and gets locked up again (but this time conscious, not in an induced coma).
Then more virus copies show up and run around knocking trains off the tracks (and, it's established in canon that trains cannot survive off the track for very long, because they need a continuous supply of energy).
Then they all manage to evacuate the affected area to an area with an alternate energy source. ALL BUT DUKE
Who is stilled locked up, and witnesses a bunch of copes of HIMSELF going to attack his friends.
Finally, forgotten by everyone except for a dog, he gets free. He goes to the area they've evacuated to (which the zombie clones have also managed to infiltrate) and
(SPOILERS)
Does a self sacrificing maneuver to save everyone! He gets blown to smithereens! And it is like...so much drama and emotion, with Alf shouting "Duuuuuuuuke!!!" Like, in the most sad, pained way.
But then, they do a close up on Duke's engine, and the light is blinking so they realize they can save him! The zombies get defeated and Duke gets rebuilt! :,-D
(And then season two happens and it's an utter travesty)
But ANYHOW apart from the attempted murder, and mind control virus, disembodied organs and ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, nothing dark at all...”
(I know Becky’s not a dog guys, I was just trying to get my point across)
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Square Clamp Enix (Eldritch Knight Fighter)
Fighter but with magic. Ok, go...
Image by sanya on Wikipedia
You’d think this would be easier since the Fighter now has “magic” to adhere to in terms of aesthetics, until one realizes that a bunch of other classes have also been spending their time around the same aesthetic references for the longest time. Is that a martial-heavy Warlock? Perhaps a more properly-dressed up Totem Barbarian? Maybe it’s a Bladesinger!
The initial/casual image search brought me a lot of content but almost nothing to cut across a lot of it with, other than it’s a martial-looking character that seems to know a thing or two about magic by way of casting a spell midway. Still not answering the above concerns.
Out of some stroke of randomness, I decided to look up a mid-90s memory in the form of Clamp’s “magical girl meets mecha within a parallel world” fantasy anime, Magic Knight Rayearth. From what I remember, there were moments in the story that a “modern clothes with fantastical armor” look was sported by the girls (very proto-Powerpuff Girls, but that’s just me).
The girls, images by Solazora on fandom.com
I took a bit of time to take in the visuals, only to realize a possible source of conflict - the schoolgirl clothes that stand for the modern/mundane aspect of their looks. I felt concerned and pretty much decided to move on, thinking the look might be too academic of a reference, at least for now. We are gonna probably explore manga level Ran Online sometime in the future again instead.
Image by Obsy-3
I took an interest in a previous reference - Final Fantasy’s the Red Mage, which was picked up in essence for the Wizard’s Evoker. I mean, why didn’t I? It was quintessential sword mage fantasy anyway; I shouldn’t have gone so far in looking around.
I picked up on this interesting Dutch VOC-inspired pirate look of a rendition to the class and thought this might be a nice spin to at least veer this Fighter subclass design away from looking like the Evoker Wizard from the previous collection (this may or may not come back biting me later on once I do more Rogues, but whatever).
First sketch
First try and it felt ok, really ok, actually. It definitely clicked with the Fighter general aesthetic I was going for (hello, piecemeal shoulder guard), and it would feel like it does have a kind of... mundanity and “someone in the crowd” feel that Fighters would naturally have a narrative of beating and trying to be beyond of. It just felt too Fighter for now and it needed some more reference to magic.
Since I already looked at a previous collection, might as well look at every other finished collection. So I turned my sights to the Rogue’s own approach to magic, the Arcane Trickster and its use of the Wizards’ supposedly standard magic circle by going full logomania and covering one entire half of its design with magic circles.
Second sketch (front)
So it felt like incorporating magic circles was the final ticket, but I don’t think it should be to the same direction that the Rogue went at it; too punk. I decided to keep it cool, and just patch on one circle to the deltoid of the sleeve opposite the shoulder guard. Simple but effective.
Second sketch (back)
I figured I just leave the design as is for now, with a future thought in mind to let it welcome me (and potential clients) with spots and spaces on the garment to incorporate personal effects (heraldic signs and symbols, as mentioned in Fighter references) for customization.
#sewing#sewist#sewn#sew#clothes#clothing#fashion#fashion design#fashion sketches#dnd#dungeons and dragons#dnd 5th edition#dnd 5e#dnd character
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You like Riordanverse? Have you ever considered Batkids demigod au? Or just headcanons? Like each of them having one godly parent? I think Athena could probably claim all of them if she wanted to..
Ironically, my fondness for the Riordanverse is precisely why I’ve never been that tempted to write fic for it and likely never will be. Whether with original fic or fanfic, I pretty much just write the things I want to read….but that don’t exist outside me writing them.
With fanfic, the end result of that is I basically am just inspired to write content where I see like….wasted potential, IMO. Books or comics or shows where there’s enough in the source material to capture my imagination and draw me to particular characters…..but beyond that, the source material is leaving a ton of stuff untouched or making a bunch of narrative choices that I’m just not engaged by.
So the thing about the Riordan books, is I like what’s actually on the page and don’t have any real specific…’gaps’ in the narrative that I feel a need to fill in or change or alter with different takes. They give me what I’m looking for from them so I just enjoy them as a reader rather than being inspired as a content creator. And similarly, like, if I want to read or follow in my head a story using the Riordanverse or its premise…there’s more books to come in the already existing series, so I just don’t really feel that itch with that particular universe. I love mythology stuff in general, so I’d be more likely to write or imagine a fanfic that comes up with my own spin on mixing mythological elements with the Batfam, that I haven’t seen yet (something I actually did a lot of with Teen Wolf content I wrote)….rather than apply an existing mythological premise like Riordan’s to them.
So I just haven’t put much thought into even headcanons along those lines, and am not super likely to, because one other thing is one of the little angles about the Riordan books that I really really liked, was that like…..Percy isn’t the son of who you’d expect the main character of a series of Greek mythology books to be, y’know? Like, if you had to guess at the start who Percy’s dad would turn out to be, having no clues as to which specific god it might be…..most people would be likely to assume Zeus, or maybe Apollo. Poseidon seems like a fairly random choice….and that’s what made it work so well for me. Because it made Percy feel just that much more like a real character who just happened to be the main character of these books, rather than a character who’d been basically engineered to be the ideal protagonist of these books.
My point there being for me personally, it just wouldn’t work to try and make headcanons about which godly parent matches each Batkid most ideally, based on their divine attributes and the Batkid’s characterization. Its counter-intuitive to one of the things that really sucked me in most……so I could totally headcanon that Dick makes sense as a son of Zeus or Apollo or Helios or Hermes, because of his love of all things flying….but that wouldn’t really feel like a Riordan premise to me, y’know?
So if I were to do that ever, it would be more likely that I’d just pick totally random gods to be each Batkid’s divine parent, and then from there headcanon how that affects the Batkid in question and how that ends up working into their existing characterization. Make the character and how this affected them grow out of the choice, rather than make the choice grow out of the character and who would be best/most affected by which god.
*Shrugs* But of course, once I do that, I’m kinda likely to just end up growing a whole story anyway, only it wouldn’t be one I’d ever feel a ton of motivation towards because like….its not really a story I NEED to see play out. Even just thinking about it, I end up diverted by stray thoughts like……okay, just as an example, totally spitballing here, but like, I just randomly tried picking a god to be Dick’s divine parent that would be somewhat different and not the most obvious or preferred choice, and thought okay what if Hephaestus were Dick’s biological father.
Except then my brain does this thing where before I can even START thinking about how that would weave into Dick’s existing characterization or lead to new stories, I’m like okay, but Riordan already did ‘character finds out they’re the son of a god’, what ELSE could I do with a story about Dick and also Hephaestus.
And then I’m off and running with like, okay, so because the Greek gods exist in the DC universe and the Titans because of Donna have even interacted with them a fair amount, what if Hephaestus is murdered and nobody knows by whom, so the Greek gods call upon Donna to recruit her friend, a detective even they respect, to solve the mystery. And so Dick is brought to Olympus to investigate, but in the process of searching through Hephaestus’ forge for clues, he ends up finding this mysterious trinket he feels drawn to and pockets, and in doing so, ends up with Hephaestus’ like, essence kinda imprinting on him….because the Divine Artificer had been the one to craft weapons that could kill even gods like him, so he of all the gods would most certainly be aware of the fact that there are things that could kill even them….making him the most likely to also craft a solution to even that particular problem, and thus design something that could help him cheat death, even if killed by a god-killing weapon. Hence the seemingly innocuous trinket that actually acted as kinda a godly flash drive to download his divinity and memories and self into a new vessel should his old one end up destroyed.
WHICH THEN, instead of exploring how Dick might be affected by having Hephaestus for a biological father or how having some of his divine attributes might explain certain traits or skills of Dick’s or complement them……which is still a story I’ve seen versions of already with Percy and Jason and the other main characters of the Riordan books….this premise lets me explore what if those divine attributes or whatever are instead kinda imposed upon Dick as he already is? What kind of internal struggle would result from that, given Dick’s fierce independence, and what kind of balance could be struck from Hephaestus’ divine nature as a craftsman and artificer like….possibly finding an outlet through Dick’s natural problem-solving instincts and existing detective/investigative talents….and so rather than ending up changing Dick, Dick’s own nature acts as a kind of filter that changes how Hephaestus’ vast array of attributes are focused, and in what ways.
And then plus you also get to have the whole “Dick drawing upon Hephaestus’ memories to try and solve what’s now weirdly in a way his own murder” thing, and that’s always just fun, y’know? LOL.
But yeah, that’s how my brain works and so even though its not what you were looking for, hopefully it was still of interest to you.
Also, just as a throwaway, another reason I’d probably always have trouble headcanoning any of the Batkids as having a godly parent based just on archetypes, is that like….they kinda already do. LOL. Given that Bruce has at many times over the decades been paralleled with Hades, and occupying the same place in the JLA pantheon as Hades occupies within the Olympian pantheon. Much like Clark is kind of Zeus, king of the heavens, and Arthur of course is Poseidon, and the Flashes have always been modeled after Hermes, and the Green Lanterns are Hephaestus and so on. So my mind kinda already flashes to ‘well, Dick’s dad is already like, the dark, brooding god of the Underworld, Judge of Souls and ultimate arbiter of justice, god of wealth and riches, with a helm that lets him vanish into shadows and pass unseen, and also not as dour as the hype would have you believe because he’s all of those things while also still being the kind of dork who would have a dog named Spot Ace the Bathound.
(The joke there is because Cerberus is just the Latinized form of the Greek word Kerberos, one translation of which is believed to possibly be ‘spotted.’ Aka Hades had a monstrous three-headed dog of legend, that actually the giant dork named Spot. Remind you of anyone?)
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ooooh dvd commentary is my fave. I love the entire first chapter of let the sun inside, but how about from “I’m sorry,” he says again, louder." to... wherever you want to stop talking about it. 😂
Hahaha it’s so hard to find a good place to stop, so it’s a little nearer 600 words, but whatever. If you have more questions, ask away, because this story is my baby and I would show you pictures of it smashing a cake all night long. Anyway, it’s here, and thank you 😊
“I’m sorry,” he says again, louder. He can feel his lip starting to tremble and bites down on it. He can’t quite suppress the wave of shame that washes over him, the insults in his father’s voice, every messed up saying he has about crying and real men and showing weakness… He clears his throat again, lets his eyes flicker to hers and back down to his hands, his fingers tapping together. - So okay, Nathaniel is a crier, and he’s cried on or around a lot of people at this point, and continues to act like crying is not a thing he does. I’m also a crier, and imagining my sometimes overwhelmingly anxious brain and overactive tear ducts paired with an upbringing made of distant adults and toxic masculinity is devastating, so this whole thing just… Hurts me. Anyway, he’s already cried a lot today, and this feels very high stakes and it’s just all very near the surface. Rebecca has hurt him a lot of times at this point, and he’s never entirely sure what she wants from him from one minute to the next, and as soon as he can tell he’s definitely going to lose it, he’s trying to figure out what her reaction is going to be while also trying his level best to Get A Grip. This whole thing is about apologising, about resisting the impulse to hide this from her, but, well. That’s terrifying.// “I have been a dick. I’ve been terrible. You were right, Rebecca, I’ve been all the worst parts of me. Nasty and manipulative and scheming and trying to throw money at every problem, but it was never because of you. You don’t bring out the worst in me, you -” His voice gets away from him and he stops abruptly, because he’s reaching the point of no return, and he hasn’t actually made his point yet. “Just a minute,” he murmurs, hand over his face. - The way Nathaniel was written in season 4 is a source of constant low-level irritation for me, and this is… My justification. He’s spiralling, falling back on every shitty behaviour, but now, having had his illusions shattered about how he’s always been cool and in control of himself, he’s doing it minus the polite formality that made him appear at least like a well-mannered dick when we first met him. It’s like he’s talking to that stupid water polo picture again, except he can’t remember quite how to get back there, and the thing he’s been doing has been his best attempt. (So that’s what I was thinking when I was writing it – an added read now is that every other time he’s fallen back on that, he’s been able to genuinely access the idea of that being the best version of himself. He’s lost that illusion now – he doesn’t like that guy at all, he just doesn’t know how to get through any of this as anybody else, so he’s playing more of a dick because he kind of thinks of himself as a dick.) Anyway, he is stubbornly determined to get an entire apology out before the tears make an appearance, because (1) it feels like he’s going to be too much of a mess to talk, and (2) abandonment issues are running high today.
“All the time you need,” she replies, her voice barely above a whisper, and she slides her foot toward him, wedges it under his thigh. For some reason, it’s comforting. - It’s started to feel high stakes for her too – she doesn’t want to spook him, because she can see this is a big deal, and she doesn’t want to not touch him at all because he looks like he needs to be touched. She’s never seen him this emotionally vulnerable, and his explanation makes sense to her, and apologising is clearly difficult for him but he’s doing it, and everything that’s happening here is giving her a little spark of tentative hope that they are having a Real Talk and this might be a step toward having an actually healthy relationship of some kind.
He takes a breath, feels all the places it catches in his chest, and fights it, like he always has. “You,” he says slowly, testing out his voice and finding it holds, “bring out the best in me. It’s not your fault that I’ve been…” He trails off, takes a shaking breath. - He hasn’t heard her say that she thinks she’s a plague in the form of a woman, but hearing her say she was bad for him when he’s so desperate to be the person he was when he was with her was close enough. So he wants to clarify this.
“A dick,” she supplies, but her voice is gently playful, and she wiggles her toes under his leg. - She is liking this emotionally vulnerable Nathaniel. She wants to show him it’s okay. And meet him in the middle a bit. And not stop touching him.
“Yeah,” he breathes, meeting her eyes with a grateful smile. “Rebecca, I don’t want to be bad for you.”// She closes her eyes, shakes her head. “I didn’t mean -” she begins.// “You did,” he insists. “And I know why you said it. But it isn’t inevitable. You’re not bad for me – my total lack of coping strategies and inability to be vulnerable is bad for me.” She raises her eyebrows. Shrugging, he says, “Heather’s smart.” // “Ah. Yeah. Yeah, she is. Sometimes it’s the worst.” - So in my opinion, they definitely had a talk in the car back, and Heather definitely said this almost word for word, and it landed like a shiny dropped penny right in the middle of his brain, and it’s why he’s here.
He shakes his head, amazed at the smile pulling at the corner of his lips, and she takes his hand. He finally relaxes into the sofa, leaning back and angling himself slightly toward her, his thumb absently tracing over and over her knuckles. They sit in silence until he can trust his voice again. - Now they’re basically on the same page (and now they’ve shared this little smile about Heather), they get a little more confident with touch. Which in turn makes him more confident in general, because he is a touch starved baby bird.//“I’ve been unfair,” he says tightly. “I wanted…” He looks around the room and back at her, the soft grey blue of her eyes almost painful to look at in this uncertain, tenuous place. “I wanted us being in love to stop us from being so screwed up. I wanted to pick you up in my arms and fly you to Rome or Hawaii or just anywhere else and make everything okay. I wanted to be able to do that for you, and I thought if you’d just… Cooperate… Then you’d do it for me too.” She winces, and he can’t blame her. - He reads the wince as ‘wow Nathaniel you’re a real mess how could you’; it actually meant ‘I too have tried to use a relationship to paper over my character flaws and that is an uncomfortable memory and an understandable impulse’.//“I’m sorry for putting that on you, Rebecca,” he says, and he has never meant anything more. “I’m sorry for putting your actual recovery behind my screwed up notion we’d fix each other. You deserve better, and I –” he hesitates, feeling for the line. “I want to be better.” - He’s being very careful to make this an apology, not a pitch for a relationship, while also leaving the door open for her to walk through, if she wants to.
Wide eyed, chewing her lip, she looks back at him, clearly processing. Then, nodding slowly, she says, “I almost kissed Darryl today.” - ‘I almost kissed Darryl today’ was the first line I wrote for this – the fact that they’re all on these parallel journeys in that episode just appeals to me so much. Rebecca feels close to Darryl in that moment and realises she needs to be with somebody who can be emotionally vulnerable. Meanwhile, Nathaniel is learning he needs to be emotionally vulnerable if he wants to be close to anyone. Meanwhile, Paula is learning that going all in and 100% committing to the person you want to be is terrifying but worth it. It just feels… Like kind of a waste. For none of them to acknowledge those things with each other. So anyway, she sees the connection between what he just said and her response – he obviously doesn’t.
“You what?” - Nathaniel Plimpton III, eternally surprised by Rebecca Nora No Transitions Bunch.
#pictureofsoph1sticatedgrace#ask meme#aggressively writes fanfiction#let the sun inside#rethaniel#dvd commentary
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“Onision: Proven Honest/Innocent & No One Cares” Part 1
Speaks 4/14/19
This is my reaction to his recent video about Shiloh. Idk how many parts this will be or when I’ll be able to finish it.
The first thing I want to point out is he is trying to convince his audience that every criticism he’s gotten over the years about his relationship with Shiloh is now null because he was telling the truth all along. This video disproves nothing. Everyone knows Shiloh lied about a lot of shit and did fucked up shit during their relationship. That does not mean no one is allowed to criticize him for the fucked up things he did during the relationship.
The second thing I want to point out is he acts like his relationship with Shiloh was the root cause of ALL the criticism/hate he receives online because everyone believed Shiloh’s lies. This is 100% not true. Most people (fans and antis) really, really hated Shiloh at the end of their relationship and for years after they broke up. When they broke up, not very many people took Shiloh’s side. The majority (fans mainly) took Greg’s side and the rest thought they were both shit. Her supporters were virtually non-existent as far as I remember. She ended up deleting her Youtube channels and social media. The comments on her music videos were walls of criticism and hate for years after their break up. It really wasn’t until years later the internet softened up to her, mainly for two reasons. One: Greg continued to obsessively talk about her online for years (case in point: this video), while Shiloh publicly talked about him maybe a handful of times. When she appeared in a Q&A video with her friend she refused to say anything negative about him. It seemed like Shiloh moved on and matured while Greg continued to want to destroy her reputation and maintain some control over her. Two: Billie. The parallels between Billie’s relationship with Greg and Shiloh’s are undeniable. I noticed after his final break up with Billie, many people’s perception of Shiloh changed and the comments on videos about her and her music videos drastically changed. Like before, everyone either took her stories about Greg with a grain of salt or straight up ignored them because she was caught lying so much, but since Billie had a similar story about Greg demanding she shave her head as Shiloh, people started to think maybe she wasn’t lying about everything and maybe she wasn’t as crazy as Greg made her out to be after all.
Ok so the first part of the video he talks to a woman who claims she dated Shiloh while Shiloh was simultaneously with (on and off) Greg and Shiloh’s baby daddy. Supposedly Greg and this woman talked long ago, but Greg didn’t remember who she was. They got into contact again because he mass twitter followed all of his gmail contacts in January. I think it’s weird we’ve never heard about this woman before and Greg somehow managed to keep her a secret (before he “forgot” about her) for all these years since he’s usually quick to use information like this to make people look bad in videos. He’s mentioned countless times Shiloh cheated on him with her baby daddy, but would it have not been beneficial for him to mention she cheated on him with two people?
One of the first thing this woman tells Greg is Shiloh lied about her daughter’s death. It wasn’t a lie. There were a bunch of anti-os who hated Shiloh that continued to follow her and her life after Greg. Some befriended her baby daddy to get dirt on her and they confirmed the baby passed away.
When it comes to Shiloh, I don’t know why Greg (imo) wrecks his credibility by taking the word of random people from the internet as fact to use against her. This woman supposedly was cheated on by Shiloh, broke up with Shiloh because Shiloh got pregnant, stayed close enough to Shiloh months later that Shiloh told her about her daughter’s death, then somehow confirmed Shiloh lied about the death?? Ok look, first of all, how the fuck does someone get away with faking a baby’s death? It doesn’t make any sense. Shiloh has a family, the baby daddy has a family, don’t you think someone would realize the baby was still alive? Where is her daughter now if she lied? This wasn’t an internet hoax. It was real. I remember the the baby daddy announcing the death online. They weren’t together when it happened. He had no reason to lie for her.
Greg goes through some of the stuff we’ve all heard already. Claiming Shiloh threatened to kill herself and make it look like he did it, she told him she has a split personality, blah blah blah. “But you all said I’m lying” - he’s trying to make it seem like this random woman from the internet proved all of his stories about Shiloh true. These are all still unproven claims from Greg as far as I’m concerned, just as the stories Shiloh told about Greg are also unproven claims. That’s how it works. You don’t just get to tell a potentially reputation damaging story about someone with no proof and everyone just believes you because you keep mentioning how “honest” you are. Also, I don’t see how what this woman said proves any of those stories true. I guess to him he’s proving Shiloh was a liar? But we all already knew that.
He continues with DM’s from the woman. She says she found out she was being cheated on because of one of Greg’s videos.
He says everyone made blogs and memes about how evil he was because we all wanted to believe Shiloh. Again, this isn’t true. most antis took neither side and used their platforms to criticize Shiloh just as much as they criticized Greg. He says people wanted what Shiloh said to be true because he had opinions about people we liked and he’s not allowed to have opinions. Wow. I guess it wasn’t the uploading her mental breakdowns to Youtube, or the fact that he left his 5 year marriage to peruse a 17 year old, or that he creepily traveled to a state Shiloh just happened to be to have sex with her legally, or shitting on her for 8 years. Hm wow I guess it wasn’t his own actions that lead to people criticizing his role in the relationship. It was his gosh darn controversial opinions. Wow honesty is such a burden. Poor Greg.
He tells more stories we already know to prove being in a relationship with her was horrible. memory loss, seizures, fire department bringing her back home after she passed out on the sidewalk, calling the cops on her. “You internet folks conclude that she’s actually the rational sane one despite how obvious that is not the fact.” Lmao. Greg no one thinks Shiloh was rational or sane during your relationship. Even most of her die hard supporters admit she went crazy, they blame Greg for causing it.
“I don’t know how you could lie about a baby dying, but she did it apparently.”
He’s so desperate for shit to use against Shiloh he’s using shit from unconfirmed sources and hiding behind “apparently”. Like if he truly believed Shiloh lied about her daughter’s death, don’t you think he could get into contact with someone that could prove her daughter is still alive? That would make a heck of a video. Even if he’s too lazy to do that does he not think it’s weird Shiloh supposedly got away with convincing the internet her child was dead for 7 years?? He won’t look into it because he knows it might not be true and he knows if he repeats it a few times in a video his fans would believe him anyway.
The woman in the DM lists stealing as one of Shiloh’s toxic traits. Greg says he never saw Shiloh steal anything and he would have mentioned it to us. I feel like I should point of a majority of his fan base mix up Shiloh and Skye. he accused Skye of stealing his belongings and his money through alimony, but you’ll see a lot of bananas who bash Shiloh say she stole from Greg.
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A little salt, A lot of Sheith Meta
Alright... So there’s just a lot of things that have been on my mind since the big reveal. (Updated with even more meta!)
Beware there are some s7 spoilers under the cut. (And since I wrote this instead of the prompt for sheith month today I’ll use this as my entry instead @sheithmonth if it is considered appropriate / next)
So as probably most everyone in this fandom knows by now, Shiro has been confirmed gay with the release of the first episode of season seven. As I explained in a previous post, Shiro being confirmed queer has made me beyond excited, simply on the basis of what incredible representation this is.
However, once again I have heard a bunch of people (honestly... probably not actual sheith shippers) yelling “Sheith is dead” because of Shiro’s ex-boyfriend. Well, first of all, it is an ex-boyfriend according to the vld staff. And, while I will admit I have not seen the full episode nor will I seek out any more spoilers, I can still say with full confidence that Sheith is not dead. Which, honestly, I think most Sheith shippers would agree.
(Also, side point: a ship cannot even “die” like... the point of shipping is looking at two characters and thinking they would be interesting together regardless of canon.)
Anyways, I’m just going to go ahead and break down exactly why I actually believe Sheith to be closer to canon than ever before.
I usually never have hope for a canonically queer ship, mostly because I’ve learned to not expect it. Voltron, however, has amazingly made me hope again. And I even dare to hope that the canonically queer ship will also be my otp.
However, my bias aside, there is plenty of evidence pointing to canon sheith. Starting with the entirety of season 6.
Like, don’t get me wrong, I was shipping Sheith from seasons 1-5 too. Keith’s very first scene in the show is his rescuing Shiro, followed by tenderly touching his face while saying his first word of the show: “Shiro?” Following this scene we see how Shiro and Keith have the deepest bond of the group and are consistently looking out for each other. In season two we have Shiro trusting Keith to succeed him as leader and the Blade of Mamora trials with the famous “Your friend desperately wants to see you.” Since then we’ve gotten hugs, tender looks, and promises of: I’ll save you “As many times as it takes.”
Despite all of this I still doubted they would become canon, but then season 6 came along.
First of all this post which is not mine but goes in to all of this a lot, talks about how many of the romantic scenes expected for other ships happened for Sheith instead. Things like: Sheith’s bond being the focus of the season, Keith’s mom picking out Shiro because Keith told her so much about him, backstory, sacrificing themselves for one another, and even an emotional confession of “I love you.” Honestly, if we were looking at any sort of heterosexual ship, they would already be considered a couple by now.
Additionally we have seen some incredible parallels for Sheith as well. Both with Sheith and Keith’s parents and with Zaggar. On one hand we have the very similarly animated rescue scene between Keith’s dad and Krolia vs Keith rescuing Shiro in episode one. On the other hand, we have the very telling jaw-dropped reaction of Shiro with Keith and Zarkon with Honerva.
And now, with the new information from season 7, it adds a whole other layer to Shiro’s reaction. We were joking about his stuttering and complete focus on Keith during that scene was him being a gay disaster. But the truth is he is a confirmed gay disaster. Literally, how else do you explain that scene? Plus, while I know the 2 year jump wasn’t some move by the showrunners to address the “too big of an age gap” claims, I still think it’s an important moment for Shiro. Shiro has never treated Keith like a kid in the series, and they have been shown to be best friends and reliant on each other since the beginning. But I genuinely believe that this moment was when Shiro realized that Keith really has gotten older/more mature/(hotter). “You really have changed,” Shiro said.
And, if we take the parallels a step further (and while some people may call it a stretch, I personally really enjoy this one). We all know how Lauren and Joaquim also worked on Legend of Korra, another show that pushed for lgbt rep and that ended with canon Korrasami The ending scene of which had a very visually similar theme repeated in Voltron. A pillar of light between the two queer characters.
But, regardless of all the observed parallels and incredibly heartfelt moments, we now have an interesting problem(?) on our hands: the introduction of Shiro’s ex-boyfriend Adam. I will reiterate that I have not actually seen the new episode in full (and correct me if I’m wrong), but a lot of the episode’s focus is on pre-Kerberos backstory.
Within this backstory we meet Adam, someone Shiro loves and cares for deeply, to the point that they were practically (if not actually?) fiances. However, as Shiro deals with a chronic illness and pursues his dream of piloting in space anyways, Adam leaves Shiro and tells Shiro that he will not wait for him.
Now, from this information alone I immediately believe that Adam is meant to foil Keith. Where Adam (for whatever reasons, good or bad) could not stand by Shiro through everything, Keith has repeatedly proven he will do anything to protect Shiro and stay by his side.
Additionally, from a narrative standpoint, it really wouldn’t make sense to make Shadam endgame. Now it is true that anything is possible in 26 episodes. It could turn out that Shiro will have his reconciliation with Adam on Earth and they will get back together. In the event that this happens, (and if it happens in a way that is healthy and is good for Shiro), I hope everyone will support the relationship regardless of ships. Because that will still be amazing representation!
However, I doubt that would happen. Simply because we have never heard of Adam before. If the vld staff was shooting for this big queer couple for a while, why only mention him in the last 26 episodes? Especially since a majority of the episodes of season 7 (I assume) will be them just trying to get to Earth, leaving very few to flesh out a Shiro/Adam story. From a story-telling standpoint Shiro should have been talking about or mentioning Adam from the start to more easily introduce this couple to the audience. However, Adam only gets brought up when Shiro has to face the reality that he is making it back to Earth and there is a chance he will see Adam again.
[Edit: Plus, just think of how much has changed since Shiro left. He has been imprisoned for a year by the Galra and forced to fight, had his arm replaced with a robotic prosthetic, been experimented on, has become part of a universe-defending team fighting in an intergalactic war, literally died, spent who knows how long as just a consciousness in a giant robot space cat, and then revived and given the memories of a cloned version of himself. He’s been through a lot. And who knows what Shiro’s gone through better than Keith?
Adam, on the other hand, has most likely had no idea what happened. If I assume this correctly, for this entire time Shiro’s been gone, Adam has believed Shiro to not only be dead, but responsible for the Kerberos mission’s failure. I would assume when the mission was called Pilot Error, Adam would have had his fears confirmed: by taking the Kerberos mission despite being ill, Shiro put his life and the crew’s lives in danger. I honestly cannot even imagine how Adam must have reacted when he heard the news. I honestly can’t wait to see how he reacts to Shiro being alive.
After everything they’ve gone through, will they really be able to rekindle that old flame so easily?]
Additionally, we can argue that season 6 was one of the biggest Sheith seasons of the series. We got that two year age jump with Keith that has Shiro reacting like the disaster gay he is. Plus, Shiro’s reaction to Keith saying “I love you” (while not reacting to the “you’re my brother” line) still sticks with me, along with Keith refusing to let go and accepting to fall to his death with Shiro. We got Keith astral projecting himself by screaming Shiro’s name and then cradling Shiro in his arms in the last five minutes of the season. And to now immediately follow up that season (that was so focused on Shiro and Keith’s bond) with a confirmation that Shiro is gay? I really don’t think that’s a coincidence.
[Edit: Not to mention how I’ve seen multiple posts going around talking about the different dubs. One being the German dub’s ich liebe dich, which is apparently for a stronger/more profound love than ich habe dich lieb. And of course, the Japanese dub’s aishiteru which is also much deeper than the more commonly used daisuki. Like, if you’ve ever watched subbed anime, confession scenes will almost never use aishiteru. Aishiteru is rarely used because it denotes a deeper love akin to saying “I am in love with you from the bottom of my heart.” It is almost exclusively used between romantic partners, and rarely (if ever!) used between family/friends. The choice of aishiteru over suki/daisuki is honestly incredible.]
[Edit: Also, something I wanted to add before but couldn’t find a source at first: I found this article by DenofGeek from this past February very intriguing. It said that quote:
“Montgomery adds, ‘When we set out to make this show we wanted to make one where no one character was solely defined by being in a relationship.’ She’s quick to clarify that the Avatar and Korra characters were of course incredible and fully formed characters themselves but, ‘when we really looked at what was at stake with this show (Voltron) the relationship or romance aspect of it just didn’t feel as important as the work that they were doing to save their universe.’ Both showrunners don’t rule out the possibility of it happening down the line, but only if it happens naturally within the story. ‘We’re not going to try to just put it in there for the sake of needing romance in the story,’ Montgomery explains.”
The parts I bolded were what stood out to me from this article/interview. The showrunners have never wanted the focus to be just on relationships. The focus has, and always will be, on these characters defending the universe together. However, they will include romance if it happens naturally within the story. I really believe that if we were looking for a naturally developing relationship in the show it would be Sheith, and not between Shiro and some brand new guy (or at least new to the audience). In order to truly convince us Shadam is a good ship, the showrunners would have to focus on it a lot in the remaining two seasons. Why go through that effort when they could instead develop the relationship Keith and Shiro already have in the show?]
Not to mention, despite the introduction of Adam in the episode, the episode’s main focus was still on Shiro and Keith. The new episode has yet another Sheith hug, Keith worrying over Shiro in a pod, and many pre-Kerberos scenes (without Adam) that feature Keith and Shiro’s history. (Oh and I just got spoiled this next screenshot, there is apparently a rainbow above Keith and Shiro in one scene?! Also, it’s yet another example of a sunset as a romantic backdrop between them.) In other words, I really believe that Shiro will ultimately have his reconciliation with Adam, but they won’t get back together. Shiro will probably end up having feelings for Keith instead.
Although, I can’t know that for sure and anything could happen. But then, I can’t help but go to stuff outside of the show as well.
The staff have repeatedly shown support for Sheith or at least the bond between them. We have the famous “Shiro Loves you Baby #he’s looking at Keith” from Chris Palmer:
Art supervising director Kihyun Ryu drew this miracle:
And Eugene Lee’s recent Keith he drew on Chris Palmer’s Shiro’s chest like some kind of romance novel:
[Edit: And I almost forgot these two gems (which, while I know voice actor’s don’t have much control of the show’s story, they’re still great): The fact that Josh Keaton (Shiro) at the very beginning of Voltron coined the ship name “Sheith” and Bex Taylor-Klaus’ (Pidge) famous snapchat and quote:]
The staff’s support of the ship, in both fanart and interviews has been incredible. This post has an entire masterlist of the support the staff has given Sheith or their strong bond.
But, anyways. Overall, regardless of where the story heads I will always ship Sheith. If the staff decides that Shadam is the way to go for positive representation I’ll happily take it, but it doesn’t end my love for Sheith.
Honestly though, I think Sheith’s chances of becoming canon are better than ever before and I’m so excited to see how these last two seasons play out.
#voltron#sheith#sheithmonth#sheithmonth2018#shiro#keith#meta#takashi shirogane#vld s7 spoilers#voltron spoilers#adam#shadam
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The forgotten story of Pure Hell, America’s first black punk band
The four-piece lived with the New York Dolls and played with Sid Vicious, but they’ve been largely written out of cultural history
An essential part of learning history is questioning it, asking what has become part of our cultural memory and what might have been left out. When it comes to the history of punk music, there are few bands who have been as overlooked as Pure Hell.
The band’s story began in West Philadelphia in 1974, when four teenagers – lead vocalist Kenny ‘Stinker’ Gordon, bassist Lenny ‘Steel’ Boles, guitarist Preston ‘Chip Wreck’ Morris and drummer Michael ‘Spider’ Sanders, set out to follow in the footsteps of their musical idols. A shared obsession with the sounds of Iggy, Bowie, Cooper, and Hendrix inspired them to create music that was louder, faster and more provocative than even those artists’ most experimental records. Pure Hell’s unique sound led them to New York, where they became characters in a seminal subculture recognised today as punk. As musicians of colour, their contribution to a predominately white underground scene is all the more significant. “We were the first black punk band in the world,” says Boles. “We were the ones who paid the dues for it, we broke the doors down. We were genuinely the first. And we still get no credit for it.”
The title of the ‘first black punk band’ has, in recent years, been informally given to Detroit-based Death, whose music was mostly unheralded at the time but has since been rediscovered and praised for its progressive ideas. But while Death were creating proto-punk music in isolation in the early 1970s, Pure Hell was completely entrenched in the New York City underground scene, living and performing alongside the legends of American punk. Arriving the same month that Patti Smith and Television began their two-month residencies at CBGB and leaving just after Nancy Spungen’s murder, Pure Hell’s active years in the city aligned perfectly with the birth and death of a dynamic chapter of music history. “I don’t want to be remembered just because we were black,” says Kenny Gordon. “I want to be remembered for being a part of the first tier of punk in the 70s.”
Being just 155km from Greenwich Village, Philadelphia was somewhat of a pipeline of New York subculture – Gordon remembers his teenage years at the movie theatre watching John Waters films like Polyester and Pink Flamingos, and hanging out at Artemis, a spot frequented by Philly scenesters like Nancy Spungen and Neon Leon. “I heard (The Rolling Stones’) ‘Satisfaction’ and knew it was the kind of music I wanted to play,” recalls bassist Lenny Boles. “I was too poor to afford instruments, so if someone had one, I would befriend them.”
The quad quickly gained notoriety on their home turf. “Growing up in West Philadelphia, which was all black, we were some of the craziest guys you could have possibly seen walking the streets back then,” says Gordon. “We dressed in drag and wore wigs, basically daring people to bother us. People in the neighbourhood would say, ‘Don’t go into houses with those guys, you may not come out!’”
Pure Hell swan dove into the New York underground scene in 1975, in pursuit of the people, places, and sounds they’d read about for years in the pages of Rock Scene and Cream magazine. The band moved into the Chelsea Hotel, the temporary home of a long list of influential characters, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Smith, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Their first gig in the city was hosted at Frenzy’s thrift, a storefront on St. Marks place, where guitarist Preston Morris “rather memorably caught the amplifier on fire due to a combination of maximum volume and faulty wires”, says Gordon. Drummer Michael Sanders’ friendship with Neon Leon led the band to the New York Dolls, who were acting as mentors for younger artists like Debbie Harry and Richard Hell at the time. Pure Hell was soon invited to perform for the Dolls in their loft.
“Honestly, we were scared to death of them,” Boles says. “When we walked in, they were all dressed up, smoking joints and watching The Untouchables on TV. Fortunately, we played and blew them away.” Gordon adds: “Underneath their outer appearance, they were just a bunch of guys from Queens. We had the same lingo. We were both really street and really genuine. It’s like, they were white but playing black, and we were just the opposite. We were innovative and they definitely appreciated us for it.”
After being kicked out of the Chelsea for not paying rent, Pure Hell moved into the Dolls’ loft. “Everybody hated us at first. We had a bad reputation because of our association with the New York Dolls, who were doing a lot of dope at the time,” says Boles. “The way we looked, everybody thought we were in a gang. Actually, we used to live in gang territory in West Philly, and people were always trying to get us to join. We never did. And with a name like Pure Hell, people thought we were devil worshippers.”
Gordon adds: “This was New York City, this was punk. People don’t realise it was ruthlessly competitive. It was dog eat dog.” Although they felt that few people were on their side, their kinship with Johnny Thunders led to numerous gigs at Andy Warhol’s haunt, Max’s Kansas City, and Mother’s, a Chelsea gay bar turned punk club, where Blondie first performed. The band was featured in a number of publications, namely Warhol’s own Interview magazine, marking their ‘place’ in a scene cultural influencers.
Despite their growing presence in the underground, Pure Hell still didn’t have a manager. After reading a biography of Jimi Hendrix by Curtis Knight, the singer and frontman of Hendrix’s first band The Squires, Lenny Boles chased down the author’s address and arrived on his doorstep. Boles’ bold act of promotion earned them management from the man credited with Hendrix’s discovery. Kathy Knight, Curtis’s then-partner in life and business, recalls her ex-husband’s first impressions of Pure Hell. “He loved them immediately,” she says. “After Lenny knocked on the door, Curtis brought me to one of the clubs where they were performing on Bleecker Street. Stinker (Kenny Gordon) almost landed in my lap when he did a backflip off the stage. We were so blown away that we put everything we had into them at the time.”
Those who saw Pure Hell in action describe their shows similarly. Gordon’s background in gymnastics gave them an unparalleled stage presence, with choreography that he says he performed “crash dummy style”. Pure Hell’s sound was harsher than their peers and predecessors and is today recognised as proto-hardcore. “We were like four Jimi Hendrixes, and Curtis knew it,” Gordon says. “We aimed for impact, just because we could. A lot of people at the time couldn’t play like Chip, doing Hennessy licks and everything. Not everyone could copy that.”
Curtis and Kathy Knight were so enthusiastic about Pure Hell that they sacrificed three months of rent money for studio sessions. Knight organised Pure Hell’s first European tour in 1978, which resulted in their single “These Boots are Made for Walking” reaching number four in the UK alternative charts. Later, they opened for Sid Vicious at Max’s during his New York residency. It would end up being his last public appearance, and Pure Hell found themselves looped into the media circus surrounding Nancy Spungen’s death. “We were on the second page of the majority of the tabloids, like New Musical Express, Sounds,and Melody Maker,” says Gordon.
But beyond their association with Vicious, Pure Hell’s European tour was a major success in part due to Curtis Knight’s strategic marketing campaign, which sensationalised their race. After arriving, Knight created a big poster with an image of the band taken by legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen in front of Buckingham Palace with the slogan: “From the United States of America, the world’s only black punk band”. Boles was angry at the time. “I said to Curtis, ‘Why do you have to call us a black band?’ Of course, that’s what we were, but we really didn’t think in those terms at the time. People in Europe were curious about the band before we even arrived. They were looking at it like a novelty. They didn’t believe we really existed.”
Boles says the band was “plastered by this campaign”, but were able to reap its fruits while touring Holland and the UK. Landing smack dab in the middle of the London punk scene, Pure Hell were welcomed by a parallel movement that had clearer political convictions and more dynamic cross-cultural discourse. “All the punks listened to reggae,” says Boles. “It was about all rebel music.” Gordon adds that “people, incorrectly, view punk as this angry, white, urban, male genre. Black culture is really the source of punk, and a lot of people don’t recognise it – or don’t want to recognise it.”
Although they eventually felt accepted in New York, and even celebrated in Europe, the legacy of Jim Crow still haunted the industry, where genres remained segregated. “We experienced racism, but didn’t know it at the time,” says Lenny Boles. “We were watching all of these bands around us, with far less talent, get signed. It had us second guessing ourselves, thinking we weren’t good enough. Obviously we were. It was a while before we realised we were getting snubbed.” While their white peers were being cut cheques, Pure Hell found themselves courted by a number of record labels, all of whom insisted they change their music in order to align with racial stereotypes. “Everybody was trying to make us do this Motown thing, saying like, ‘You guys are black so you’ve gotta do something that’s danceable,’” Boles adds. “They kept trying to make us more ‘funky’. Everything we liked had nothing to do with dance music. We were not having it. So we opted not to get signed.”
Integrity and profitability don’t often go hand-in-hand, and Pure Hell’s refusal to comply with the industry’s limitations meant they sacrificed career opportunities. After a second European tour in 1979, the band suffered a fall-out with Knight. A messy legal conflict resulted in Knight flying back to the US alone, with the band’s master tapes in tow. Pure Hell remained in Europe without any of the rights, or access, to their recordings, which Kathy Knight salvaged after her husband attempted to destroy them.
Pure Hell eventually finagled their way back to the US, where they settled in Los Angeles. Although they played historic bills at the Masque (LA’s equivalent to CBGB) with iconic groups like the Germs, the Cramps, and the Dead Boys, Pure Hell lost their momentum. With no management, no record deal, and no access to their recorded output, the band felt the flames of Pure Hell die out. “It was all totally over by 1980,” says Kenny Gordon. “Really, punk died with Nancy’s murder. Everyone was burning the candle from both ends. You had to be extreme to be in those kinds of circles.” Bad Brains’ explosion onto the music scene in the early 80s also left Pure Hell feeling robbed of their title of ‘the first black punk band’. “You know, we took the blow for being black, so why didn’t they give it to us in the end?” Boles asks.
As decades passed and history books were written, Pure Hell’s memory faded to legend. But in the early 2000s, Kathy Knight fatefully decided to auction off Pure Hell’s master tapes on eBay. Their unreleased album Noise Addiction was purchased by an enthusiastic Mike Schneider of Welfare Records. “Mike wanted them so badly he came himself to pick them up,” Knight recalls. Pure Hell’s legacy has also been promoted and protected by hardcore legend Henry Rollins of Black Flag, who tracked down the original acetate of the band’s first single and reissued it on his label 2.13.61, in collaboration with In the Red Records, last year. Rollins first learned of the band’s existence in 1979, after seeing their single at Yesterday & Today Records in Rockville, Maryland, with his friend Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. He remained on the lookout for traces of the band for over 30 years.
“At auction time, I was able to secure the record,” Rollins says. “I listened to it and was amazed at how good it sounded. I checked in with Kenny (Gordon) and he confirmed it was the only source for the two songs.” Beyond simply highlighting and celebrating the rare black punk bands of the time, Pure Hell held particular significance to Rollins because their urban myth was real. “The rumour was that they had made an album and that it was sitting in a closet,” he says. “Noise Addiction, released in 2006, decades after it had been recorded, is really great. If the album had come out when they made it, that would have been a game changer. I believe (it) would have had a tremendous impact. It’s one of those missed opportunity stories.”
In addition to Rollins, indie talent rep Gina Parker-Lawton ranks as one of Pure Hell’s greatest advocates. Parker-Lawton met drummer Michael Sanders on Sunset Boulevard in the 80s, and counted him as a friend during their overlapping years in LA. It was after she learned of Sanders’ death in 2003 that Parker-Lawton made contact with the other band members and became their publicist. “They were just kind of overlooked in all of the punk history books,” she says. “After learning their story and what they had actually accomplished, by being the first truly all-black punk band, I wanted to ensure they were remembered.” Parker-Lawton has since been advocating for their deserved place in music history, and recently helped secure their induction into the Smithsonian African American Museum of History and Culture. Their induction will be marked by the donation of Sanders’ leather jacket, which he wore on tour in Europe and around LA.
Pure Hell’s story beckons essential questions about the integrity of our cultural memory, reminding us that “history” is written within the constructs of unjust society. “It’s just so important to me that history be correct,” says Parker-Lawton. “Taking the risks that they took, daring to be so different, they were outlaws and true pioneers. When people are that true to their art and that brave, it has to be recognised.” Although their musical careers didn’t necessarily bring wealth or fame, Boles and Gordon describe their years in Pure Hell as paramount. “I had so much fun, it doesn’t matter that I never saw a penny for it,” he says. “For us, it wasn’t about making money. It was about following our hearts and doing exactly what we wanted to do.”
Images:
Pure Hell courtesy of Pure Hell
Pure Hell courtesy of Pure Hell
Pure Hell with Sid Vicious in Melody Maker magazine. Early punk artists often flirted with Nazi symbolism for shock value.
Pure Hell live at Max’s Kansas City
Pure Hell courtesy of Pure Hell
#pure hell#black punk band#black punk bands#punk band#punk bands#rock music#black rock music#music#black music#dazed magazine#interview#Interviews#punk rock#black punk rock
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lord of the flies | mock trials
hi everyone!! i played jack merridew in my senior year mock trial, and i had a really hard time figuring out how to answer anything because there is literally no sources on the internet to even slightly help jack defend himself. there is a few, yes, but they’re mostly written by sixth graders or the opposition, so i decided to help all the jack merridews and the defence team lawyers of the world by posting everything i wrote, answered and behaved as jack. i should probably announce right away that my team did not win the mock trial, but that was because the character witnesses we had besides me were not prepared to be cross-examined, so this is also a friendly reminder to tell your buddies to pick up their slack!! jack can’t do it by himself.
Direct examination:
1) Summarize your childhood.
I was born to a rich family who often spoiled me with materialistic luxuries, and sent me to a PEDAGOGIC education facility on top of the additive tutoring classes, however, due to my diligence in my work, I did not have a single friend, as a friend would have “tainted the teaching” as my mother used to state- i did not have much of a social life, at least until i became leader of choir.
2) Why did you leave Ralph’s tribe?
I left Ralph’s tribe because his way of leadership wasn’t fun at the time.
(rules (make this! make that! collect fruit!, meetings.)
3) What was it like under Ralph’s leadership?
Ralph was rather drab as he listened to mostly piggy’s ideas. (conch, uhh, rules, uhh, can i get a number 15, burger king foot lettuce
4) What happened on the night of Simon’s death?
At the start we had prepared meat to be eaten. I supplied even Ralph himself with meat. Nobody objected the meal, except probably andrew, and after the feast we did our dance and we saw a dark figure moving in the bushes. Alarmed, we attacked. Afterwards, we found it was Simon.
5) Why did you become chief?
I became chief because the lifestyle I offered was more appealing to the boys than Ralph’s. No prepubescent boy wants to spend his time lugging around materials for huts or picking coconuts off trees.
6) What was it like when you arrived to the island?
It was unUSUAL, like it would be, for any one of the boys. I doubt anyone wanted to crash-land onto some mysterious island. ← this is a really weak answer idk
7) How did you start to feel after spending some time on the island?
I felt better about the situation. It was clear that we needed someone to lead, so I offered to do so.
8) Can you tell us about the events leading up to Piggy’s death?
We had taken piggy’s glasses because we needed them to start a cooking fire to feed the tribe. Afterwards, Ralph’s group came to come get them back. After some heated conversation, Roger got too riled up and triggered the lever that fell onto Piggy and the conch.
9) How did you adjust after you returned back to civilization?
(something along the lines of: when i got back to civilization, the presence of adults and rules led me to return to my civilized self)
I did go to an approved school, after I saw the contrast of myself at home and on the island, which I did continue until I was a young man. After the island, I can safely say that I did return to my old self. (say that without the governing of laws or adults we had all descend into savagery?)
( it helps so so much to memorize your affidavit. )
Affidavit:
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
LONDON, ENGLAND
GREAT BRITAIN )
)
Plaintiff, )
)
vs. )
)
JACK MERRIDEW, )
)
Defendant. )
_____________________)
For a verdict of Innocence
Hello, my name is one I’m sure you’re all familiar with; Jack Merridew. I am the accused of this case, for which brings me to a type of desolation but which I acknowledge fully. For the purpose of the court, I have been asked to prepare a small insight into my life, prior to arriving on the island, and after the incidents that befell upon all of us.
I’ll begin as early as my memory allows; I was a promising child, born to a affluent family. My parents were good to me, and I had a sheltered childhood where I did not have much chance to experience the outside world; they carried me into my adolescence, for which I respect them deeply. I always did well in school, attended tutoring classes to refine my skills, most of which required me to be very focused, which broadened my book smarts, but restricted crucial knowledge of basic human behaviour. And most importantly; I always got high grades in choir, which eventually found me to become the leader of the school choir. I had to order the other boys to do tasks often, which was quite a different experience than I was used to, and I figured I was good at it after some time.
Naturally, when we arrived on the island, due to the fact I had already had experience leading, which Ralph did not, I felt it was necessary to appoint me as the group’s leader. I felt unsettled when I did not originally gain power, because I then believed I had all the traits necessary of a leader. Arguably, when I did obtain leadership, I was a leader of questionable practices. Perhaps this was because I was so used to the laws and order of the society I had been groomed into that I became overwhelmed when I suddenly had to create my own. On the island, we were forced to take actions in our own hands, and make decisions for the group instead of the individual, which sometimes doesn’t parallel with what’s ethical. After my experience on the island, I pleaded my parents to send me to an approved school so I could forget the island in sort of skewed way, to which I attended until I was a young adult. Now I exist as a quiet young teacher, working in the same area I had grown up in-- London, that is-- I teach history and also instruct a single after school music class. As I aged, I felt a growing sense of remorse towards those wronged on the island, but not once did I ever feel as if I was indebted to them nor their families.
In my experience leading the boys of the island, I had to experience many tragedies that I feel sorrowful towards but not liable for... I am mainly being blamed for the situations because of my position of power over the other boys, which I understand. As an eyewitness of the events that came upon the island, I feel responsibility to give my truth to the story.
During my time on the island, I was subjected to many unfamiliar situations. for instance, the death of the child with the mulberry birthmark, the first tragedy to come about. The child died, presumably from the fire that had accidentally devastated a small part of the island while we attempted to make signal fire. This is where my questions arose for the usefulness of the signal fire that Ralph pushed so insistently began.
The second death was Simon’s. Simon’s passing was the result of ignorance on our parts. We believed he was the beast, we had limited vision due to the darkness of night and Simon was crawling through the bush, where we could not possibly see. Simon’s death, although a terrible occurrence, was not murder; we simply had no idea. Finally, the death of Piggy heeds a similar answer; we hadn’t the simplest clue that he was to die, as Roger pulled the lever and Piggy, without his specs, could not spot the boulder in time to move out of the way. Although we had nicked Piggy’s specs, We had no idea that this would have been the cause of his untimely demise, therefore I cannot claim responsibility for something that was not my doing.
Character Sketch:
Parent’s names:
Mother (Anne Taylor Merridew, maiden name Millar)
Father (William Merridew)
School attended prior to the island : Westminster Abbey Choir School (London)
School attended post-island : St Peter’s school (York)
Age on the island: 14
Age now: 24
Past residence: Monck street, house no. 12
Current: Tufton street, house no. 102
I am playing Jack Merridew, a fictional main character from Lord of the Flies. In the novel, Jack is portrayed as a very hard-headed, aggressive young leader with a lot of spite built up in him for Ralph and some of the other boys on the island. He preys on weakness, and dislikes societal order. For my own entertainment purposes, I have distinctly chosen Jack to hide this side of him and have the appearance of a very reasonable, calm man who wants nothing but resolve between himself and the families that feel wronged by him.
I intend to play Jack to have very indifferent behaviour. I’ll make it so that Jack appears to be very analytical and calculating, conscious of his own actions, but on the inside he actually doesn’t care that much for the deaths of the two boys, because they are seen as an irrelevance to him, especially since he doesn’t think their deaths were caused by him. Jack will be quite sure of himself, but not cocky, as he wants to appear as if he’s had a huge humbling from the island, although he perhaps really hasn’t changed that much, aside from being more discreet about his callous ways.
Jack will have some quirks, like blinking when he is faced with a question that he knows he can answer perfectly, and he will have a tendency to smile and stare directly at those prosecuting him to show his confidence, especially if they’re asking him a question he doesn’t think he can answer, so he doesn’t show his nervousness. Jack, deep-down, may have more insecurities than the other boys. He needs reassurance and safety, and without it he feels like he’s walking blind.
pointers:
+ be vague in your answering, but not too vague. the only thing they could object to during my cross-examination was my contempt of court, e.g: dancing around the subject, not answering and adding a bunch of random things to the answer, like; “it was a beautiful day, the sun was out--” i’m a writer so i had to try really hard not to do this.
+ do not show nervousness. it’s really hard to be confident on the stand, but you should try your best. there is usually a reason that the teacher chooses you to be jack!
+ at the end of the day, remember that this is just a class project. i probably had ten million panic attacks the days leading up to the mock trial, and that’s not ok. if you need someone to give you peace of mind, my message box is open!!
#lord of the flies#lotf#jack merridew#lord of the flies mock trial#mock trial#school#education#ralph#simon
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Predictions for the November 2019 LSAT
The November LSAT is just around the corner — once this weekend bends back around into another week, it’ll officially be test day. And that, of course means that our in-house prognosticator (i.e., me) must emerge from his dark and dank LSAT bunker, dust off a discount-bin, ersatz crystal ball, and make some predictions about what will be on the November exam.
Now, my spotty track record at predicting what exactly will be on these exams certainly isn’t strong evidence that I have any special powers of prediction with this exam. But none of you can definitively disprove that I have special powers of prediction, either. So I think it’s safe to assume that me and my crystal ball have at least some predictive power, and that you can trust that what I say about the November LSAT, and basically anything else, is probably true.
I even bought a deck of LSAT tarot cards on eBay to help reinforce this predictive power. After the first shuffle I pulled the Hierophant, the Lichen, the Iguanodon, and the Unrepresentative Survey — but I have no earthly idea what any of those mean. But anyway, gather round my it-would-be-technically-incorrect-to-call-it-a-crystal-ball, November test takers. Let’s talk about what’s likely to appear on this test.
Logical Reasoning
The first thing this nerd sees when he looks into a “crystal” ball are stats and spreadsheets and charts. Based on these visions, here’s how I think the Logical Reasoning questions will be distributed on the November exam, compared to the average frequency of those questions types on the published tests that have appeared since June 2017.
If you don’t feel like doing the math, I’m predicting there will be 51 questions overall. I think Strengthen questions will be the most common, but I’m making a fairly conservative guess there — Strengthen questions are the most common question type on most recent exams. I’ll go out on a slight limb and say that five of those nine Strengthen questions will be of the Strengthen principle variety. You know, the one’s that say, “Which one of the following principles, if true, most help to justify the above reasoning?” Or, “The reasoning above most closely conforms to which one of the following principles?” They say “following principles” in the prompt, basically. These have been a staple of recent exams, showing up five times on September 2019, three times on June 2019 and November 2018, four times on September 2018, and five times on June 2018. I hope I’m right on this prediction; Strengthen Principle questions are among the more anticipatable questions on the LSAT. Just anticipate a principle that says, more or less, “If we have the premise of the argument in this question, then we can reach the conclusion of the argument” and watch the points steadily accrue.
I also have an itch that there’s going to be a lot of conditional reasoning on this exam — at least one Must Be True question that involves making some sort of transitive deduction, at least one diagrammable Parallel and Parallel Flaw question, a couple diagrammable Sufficient questions, and maybe even a Flaw question in which the argument confuses a necessary for a sufficient question. My guess is that there may be as many as twelve questions that conditional reasoning in some way. So it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on the words and phrases that denote conditional statements, and get some practice with commonly diagrammable questions, like Must Be True, Parallel, and Sufficient questions.
You don’t exactly have to be clairvoyant to accurately predict that the logical fallacies will be super important on the two Logical Reasoning sections. Over half of the questions on this exam are easier with the mastery of the common fallacies. I think they’re going to keep it fairly classic with the fallacies on this exam — a lot of causation fallacies, exclusivity fallacies, and equivocation fallacies. To spot those, just check the conclusions of the argument. If that conclusion uses causal language, the argument is probably inferring causation from correlation. If the language is super strong (pay special attention to words like “only,” “entirely,” “solely,” “purely,” and “no”), the argument is probably committing the exclusivity fallacy and overlooking some important options, factors, or considerations. And if the argument introduces something new in the conclusion, the argument is probably guilty of equivocation — the act of assuming that something in the premises is the same as that new thing in the conclusion.
I also think one of the rarer fallacies will appear on this test. Perhaps an instance of circular reasoning? After the circle-game-that-wasn’t-really-a-circle-game on the September test sent everyone into a tizzy, maybe the test writers want to see if any allusion to a circle will freak people out? I also have a feeling that there’s going to be a tricky question with an argument that sounds like it’s committing the ad hominem fallacy, but doesn’t actually commit that fallacy (question 22 in section 3 of the June 2018 exam provides an example of this). If I’m wrong about this one, don’t get too mad at me though. Your issue is with my claim, and I am merely the source of that claim, and not the claim itself.
Is it going to be a difficult or easy set of Logical Reasoning sections? That’s tough to say, because there’s rarely any consensus on whether an LR section is tough or easy or in between. LR sections are roughly the same in their distribution of easy, medium, and tough questions. People tend to have different subjective experiences with the same section based on what kinds of questions and concepts appear most frequently. I might feel great on conditional statements but shaky on necessary assumptions. You might feel the opposite. Therefore, a section that had a ton of questions that featured conditional reasoning, but few Necessary questions, might feel easier for me than you.
Logic Games
After the Logic Games section in the September 2019 exam annoyed everyone, I think the Logic Games section is going to be much, much more straightforward. That’s not to say you should slack off on games in this last week; on the contrary, the ability to quickly do games is largely based on muscle-memory, and you don’t want your brain-muscles to atrophy in this last week. But, I don’t foresee any games as angst-producing as that flower game from September.
Instead, I think there’s going to be a super basic ordering game to kick things off. I think game two will be a little bit more difficult — I’m envisioning an unstable grouping game with three groups of indeterminate size. I think game three will be the most difficult of the bunch — I think there’s going to be a super complicated tiered ordering game. Probably one of those games where you have to keep track of the order of two separate variable sets. And I’m seeing game four as yet another underbooked stable grouping game, which appear to have a permanent seat at the Logic Games table on recent exams.
Above all else, I feel confident that making scenarios on these games will be an extremely helpful tool to utilize. Maybe you won’t need to make scenarios on the hypothetically super basic ordering game, but I’m quite confident that at least three of the games on this exam will be made much, much easier with a solid set of scenarios. I’m willing to say this because of the thirty-two games since the June 2017 exam, I think only the first game (another basic ordering game) on the June 2018 exam was easier without scenarios than with them.
Reading Comprehension
This is the part of the predictions post I’ve been dreading; please don’t take your disappointment out on me or this discount-bin cystal ball. I’m picturing a brutally tough Reading Comprehension section. Most recent exams have featured a pretty tough Reading Comp section. In the last few years of published tests, only September 2019 stands out as having a relatively mild RC section. So … prepare for the worst on this section.
That said, the topics have standardized over the last few years. Since June 2018, pretty much every Reading Comp section has had featured passages about some historical group (usually — and apparently because whoever compiles this section is a historiographic hipster — some obscure, overlooked ancient civilization), a passage about the arts (usually — and apparently because whoever compiles this section is an older snob who looks down upon the philistines taking this test — a somewhat confusing passage about the high arts), a passage about science (usually — and apparently because whoever compiles this section does not respect your B.A. — a complex discussion of biology or the environment or astrophysics), and a passage about the law (usually — and apparently because whoever compiles this section resents you from not already completing law school — a passage that makes at least occasional use of legal jargon). Given that, I’m going to predict that you’ll get a passage about an overlooked historical group, a passage about the high arts, a passage about biology or the environment or astrophysics, and a passage about a specific legal field. I’m not sure what you might do with this information, but there you go.
That said, you don’t need to fret about Reading Comp, even if it is difficult or about obscure topics. Remember to focus on the structure of the arguments being made, and jot down the function of each paragraph on your scratch paper. Remember to underline the words that express the author’s opinion. Remember to highlight important details likely to appear in the questions, like cause and effect relationships, examples, questions and their answers, and categorical items that are listed out. If you nail these things, it really doesn’t matter what the passages are about — you’re going to have a good shot at the questions.
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Finally, let me take off my prognosticator hat for just a moment, and remind you not to take these predictions too seriously. I pay very close attention to this test, but my track record of predictions is … OK at best. Elsewhere, I’m catastrophically wrong about all sorts of things (until I was corrected, I literally thought “cuffing season” referred to those cuffed fisherman beanies people wear in the winter).
Plus, and most importantly, the LSAT always tests the same general concepts and question types. Envision all the concepts as a big sphere of knowledge. Some tests might feature certain concepts within that sphere more prominently and others less. This test might pull out more conditional reasoning and difficult Reading Comprehension passages from that sphere — perhaps making it a bit more ovoid in shape — but the test is pulling from the same sphere of concepts. As long as you feel comfortable with all the concepts within that sphere, there will be no surprises on this test, whatever shape it takes.
While we have no control over what’s on the LSAT, you can control how prepared you are for the LSAT. Whether it be in an in-person class, live online class, private tutoring, or even an on-demand online course, prepping for the LSAT is a given for any exam date. Not sure where to start? Schedule a free consult with our Academic Managers to help walk you through your options!
Predictions for the November 2019 LSAT was originally published on Blueprint LSAT Blog
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why Microsoft redefined the console form factor • Eurogamer.net
Undoubtedly the biggest surprise of The Game Awards back in December 2019 was Microsoft’s decision to reveal Xbox Series X: the name, the branding – and most crucially, the form factor. It was a console quite unlike anything we’d seen before, possibly the most original home console design since Nintendo’s GameCube way back in 2001. During our recent visit to the Microsoft campus in Redmond WA, we had a chance to meet key members of the hardware team that created this remarkable-looking device – and in the process, we gained a much better understanding of why Xbox Series X required a top to bottom revamp of the traditional console form factor.
“When we started thinking about how we would design this, everything was theoretical,” says Chris Kujawski, principal designer at Microsoft. “We didn’t have stuff we could test, we didn’t have measurements we could take, we knew it was going to be powerful and we knew it was going to require a totally different way of thinking about how to design a console.”
The key issue facing the designers came down to power and target performance. The Xbox system architects decided from the get-go that the next generation console had to deliver an absolute minimum of twice the overall graphics performance of the Xbox One X, meaning 12 teraflops of GPU compute, sitting alongside the Zen 2 cores that would deliver a 4x improvement in CPU power. At the same time, the mandate was set that the machine also had to equal the acoustic performance of the Xbox One X – a tall order when system power would be increasing significantly.
The challenge came into focus once the outsize power requirements of the new hardware came into focus. Based on the prototype hardware we saw, Xbox Series X ships with a 315W power supply and in keeping with all of Microsoft’s console designs since Xbox Series S, this would be delivered internally. With the sheer amount of electrical power pumping through the processor, the regulators pump up to 100W per square inch, delivering up to 190A. What made this all coalesce into the form factor we have today is the key decision to move to a split motherboard design: one board houses the high-power components like the Series X processor, the GDDR6 and the power regulators. The other is the Southbridge board, principally handling I/O. The boards sit on either side of a substantial chassis block – a sheer aluminium casting.
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Constructing Xbox Series X – Microsoft and Digital Foundry build the console up from the centre chassis upwards.
“I like to think about our past generations as having a bit of an exoskeleton, so you have a mechanical structure with electrical shielding all on the outside then you have all the guts in the inside,” explains Jim Wahl, director of mechanical engineering for Xbox hardware. “And so what we did in this generation is that we turned that completely inside out… and so this centre chassis essentially forms the spine, the foundation of this system and then we build things out from there.”
“This is actually my favorite part of the console on the inside,” adds Chris Kujawski. “It’s like it’s the coolest part that anybody who actually buys the console will never actually see.” It’s also essential in keeping the thermal demands of the hottest components in check. “It creates what we call a parallel cooling architecture, so you get cool air in – and cool air streams through separate zones of the console,” adds Wahl. “The second thing it does is that it actually distributes the heat sources a bit differently in the console – so those two things together are really effective at cooling a console. And then the third thing it does is… we play this sort of 3D Tetris game, where you’re trying to figure out where the components should go and what’s the best arrangement – and then that starts to establish some of the dimensional aspects.”
While all of this is happening, Chris Kujawski is literally building an Xbox Series X right in front of us using all of these component parts – an exercise we would be carrying out ourselves the following day when it came to producing the video content at the top of this page. The two main boards are of broadly equivalent size, slotting into place on either side of the chassis. I’m reminded more of the old Apple Mac Pro design rather than any kind of console I’d seen before. “So already you can see how these larger components are being Tetrissed together,” says Kujawski. “Already you can tell it’s going to be a very different kind of shaped product than we’ve ever done before.”
Along with the 4K UHD Blu-ray optical drive and the 315W power supply, electrical shielding is added to the construction. There’s a real balancing act to this. Essentially, electromagnetic radiation has to be contained within the machine, but at the same time, Xbox Series X has to dissipate a lot of heat. “What’s interesting is that if you look up previous generations, we always had a very nice piece of metal around [the internals] like a Faraday cage,” says Andres Hernandez, director of electrical engineering for Xbox. “This time, we had to think a little outside the box. We have board-level shields. We have localised shielding, instead of having that huge piece of metal shielding.”
Xbox Series X Xbox One X Xbox One S Dimensions 15.1cm x 15.1cm x 30.1cm 30cm x 24cm x 6cm 29.5cm x 23cm x 6.5cm Total Volume 6.86 litres 4.32 litres 4.41 litres Weight 4.45kg/9.8lbs 3.69kg/8.14kg 2.90kg/6.4lbs Ports: HDMI 2.1 output, 3x USB 3.2, networking port, expanded storage slot, power input HDMI 2.0b output, HDMI 1.4 input, 3x USB 3.2, Toslink audio, IR output, Gigabit Ethernet, power input. HDMI 2.0a output, HDMI 1.4 input, 3x USB 3.2, Toslink audio, IR output, Gigabit Ethernet, power input. Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray 4K UHD Blu-ray 4K UHD Blu-ray
After this, we get a look at the solid-state storage drive – a custom module built for Xbox Series X, which has its own thermal challenges. “What’s really impressive is that this is a 1TB internal module and it runs at 2.4GB/s at up 3.8W, so this is a big challenge for us,” says Hernandez. “When you’re in a 22x30mm [SSD] form factor, that’s really tiny… how do you dissipate all of that heat? So that’s one of the pieces where we had to go and rethink a lot of our thermal strategy, because that’s a lot of bandwidth to go push into such a small form factor.”
PC NVMe SSDs often lose performance simply because they get too hot – and this required some innovative engineering for the new Xbox. “We have these competing set of springs that we call thermal bias springs,” says Jim Wahl. “What that does is that it actually biases the card up against this top thick heatsink, so that the card is transferring heat through its connector into the chassis off to cooling air as it goes through the system… there’s tons of engineering that just sort of sharpens the pencil and gets it right.”
Chris Kujawski continues to construct the Series X and it’s time to bring out one of the largest single components in the entire design – the heat sink. It’s pretty big, relatively speaking, a heavy copper vapour chamber with a lightweight aluminium heat sink attached. It’s big enough to cover the vast majority of the SoC board – but it doesn’t just siphon heat away from the main processor. “We have these very powerful regulators, so one of the challenges is how do we actually cool that much power density? So, we actually ended up using the vapour chamber for a couple of things,” says Andres Hernandez. “The first one is we also heat sink our GDDR6 memory to the vapour chamber. That made a lot of sense because when you’re pushing a lot of bandwidth, those chips are thermally high. And then the second piece is, as I mentioned, the regulators. It’s one of the most power-dense pieces of our box.”
In order to maintain the same kind of acoustic performance seen on Xbox One X, a number of components are required, but it starts with hardware built into the processor itself. Readings from 64 diodes on the SoC are continually monitored, feeding a fan algorithm in the system firmware that keeps the system as quiet as possible, while delivering cooling power when it’s needed. “With all that power, you have to move a lot of air and you want to move it quietly,” says Jim Wahl. “We studied many different ways of doing air movement in a product and a single axial fan was the most efficient, the quietest air mover for our system… we do a bunch of customisations here, so the number of blades, particularly the blade geometry, is highly highly optimised to operate within the confines of our system.
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A video presentation of the Xbox Series X’s specifications and features – and a look at a range of impressive demos showing the key technologies in action.
“There are a bunch of under-the-hood things like the bearing surfaces and the bearing types to keep it very quiet, to make sure that this powerful fan stays quiet across its life,” adds Wahl. “And then there are things that are more subtle, like the curvature on the shroud out to the corners, even those little details improve the efficiency of moving air through the box and out the top.”
Sitting next to the Xbox Series X construction taking shape is the main casing into which all of these parts will be packed. However, what’s immediately obvious is that this device is dense. There’s going to be very little free space within it once the component parts are placed within. It’s a complete antithesis to the concept of airflow as we know it within, say, a PC case. “We also have to have good air in to the enclosure, so you have certain venting and large holes,” explains Jim Wahl. “You have exhaust out the top and we have large venting holes, but the the net effect of putting all of this together, having parallel paths, having this really powerful quiet fan at the top, is that we get 70 per cent more airflow through this console than the past generation and we get 20 per cent more airflow through our heatsink alone than in the past generation.”
And at the most fundamental level, there’s a very basic set of ‘rules’ that define the form factor of Xbox Series X beyond the unprecedented power requirements of the processor, as Chris Kujawski explains: “Jim mentioned how the ODD [optical disc drive] sets one dimension, the volume of the heat sink sets the other dimension, the height is set by airflow and throughout this kind of complex negotiation of figuring out how this stuff comes together, we landed on a square form factor which we love.”
Certain thermal realities also helped to define the look of the box. The large holes on the top of the machine are there by virtue of the need to expel a good amount of hot air. “We decided to really focus on this as the signature surface on the product,” explains Kujawski. “We started off by creating some extra depth by making them each about a centimetre deep. And then carving out this surface, it changes the look of it as you approach it – and as you raise and lower your sight line, you see more or less in there. Then we amped it up by adding that green layer underneath and that’s got its own variable depth, so it’s thicker in the middle and it’s thinner on the edges.”
And with that, the internal structure is essentially complete. Kujawski takes a hold of the construction by the heat sink and slots it into the external casing. And the plastic surround must surely be one of the simpler aspects of the design, right? It’s a rectangular piece of casing, after all. In actual fact, the dimensions of the shell created a whole new series of challenges, mostly owing to its depth. Robots construct Xbox Series X on the production line, with tooling moving in and out of the casing – and at one point, there was simply no give left in the design – the tools couldn’t leave the case, requiring another Eureka moment to make the Series X form factor possible to mass produce.
It’s fair to say that the hardware team didn’t quite expect to see some of the memes that emerged from the Game Awards reveal, but it has been fun to see Microsoft react with humour to some of the more amusing form factor comparisons – to the point where the infamous Series X vs fridge head-to-head made it into Microsoft’s own social media. However, the fact remains that it is a fundamentally different, challenging design and with that in mind, it was sent out to focus testers for their thoughts.
“We presented it to them and said, ‘what do you think, does this work for you? Unplug your Xbox, plug this in. Does it fit in your cabinet? Would you want to show this off to your friends?’ And we were relieved and gratified to find out that the vast majority of people totally loved it,” says Chris Kujawski. “The footprint is really small – when you compare it to a traditional shaped console that’s pretty deep, you’ve actually got a really small footprint so when you plug in all your cables, you can actually put it on a much shallower shelf or put it in a shallower cabinet than you could before. That was pretty magical for us to get that feedback so early on in the program and to get that confidence that this was going to work, that people are going to respond well to this.”
With the Series X constructed, the focus shifts to the revised Xbox controller. For our briefing, the design team put together a presentation board showing all of its joypads from across the years from the original vintage 2001 ‘Duke’ all the way up to recent devices like the Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and Microsoft’s acclaimed Adaptive Controller. Sitting on the top-right of the board is the new pad for Xbox Series X. There’s obviously a journey here of gradual evolution, though obviously the Adaptive Controller is something of a radical departure.
“What was really cool about it is that accessibility and inclusive design is now a baseline part of every product we design,” says Chris Kujawski. “Just like we would talk about performance, specs and reliability, accessibility is is part of that conversation now across all of our hardware and our packaging. That’s been really cool just process-wise for us and I think it’s helped a lot of us grow and become just better product makers, it’s been a really great thing to be part of.”
On the face of it, the new Xbox controller doesn’t look that much different from the pads we’ve seen before with the obvious exception of the share button and a new d-pad that appears to share much in common with the design seen on the Elite series controllers. The number one piece of feedback Microsoft received from its most committed players is that they are happy with the existing design – the key was to extend that level of satisfaction to more users. “Some of the themes that came up, number one was ergonomics,” explains Microsoft senior designer Ryan Whitaker. “Can you make this thing more comfortable? I have small hands. Can you make this fit in my hands better? Connectivity – I have all these new devices, I want to play Xbox games on all these devices, can you make it easier to pair? Sharing – capturing and sharing has become a really big part of the gaming lifestyle.”
Microsoft kept the same basic design, ensuring that existing peripherals like the chat pad would work just fine with the new controller – but went to work in re-sculpting the design. It turned out that small changes could make the pad far more comfortable to use for many, many more users. The existing controller is designed to fit comfortably within the fifth to 95th percentile hand sizes, but small changes could go a long way in accessibility terms. “One of the things we found is that if we can actually reduce the percentiles on the lower end, if we target the third percentile up to the 95th percentile, those two percentile points actually represent hundreds of millions of people,” says Whitaker. “And so just by slightly shrinking some areas of the controller, we found that we can actually reach a lot more people and at the same time make it more comfortable for everyone.”
But this is the next generation Xbox, so why not push on with a more radical design? A look at the presentation board in front of us showing the evolution of the controller demonstrates that the fundamentals haven’t really changed. Behind us on a flipboard, there are photos of how users interact with the existing pad – and let’s just say that there are some strange formations of fingers and hands there. According to Microsoft, the decision to evolve the existing design is essentially born from the fact that users like the current set-up. They’re used to it and happy with it.
“They’ve got a lot of muscle memory in there,” sums up Whitaker. “Some of the ways that we’ve found that we could increase accessibility is by rounding those corners on the bumper. We’ve taken in the opening by a few millimeters and the angle of attack there has changed by a degree. There are things that we knew we didn’t want to change, that includes things like thumbstick heights, we want to make sure that people’s muscle memories still there.”
There are other simple changes that can also help more than you might imagine. “You can see that we have a matte finish on the bumpers and triggers now instead of gloss,” says Ryan Whitaker. “And what that helps us do is – whether you have dry hands or you’re really intense and your fingers are getting kind of sweaty, it actually helps to maintain the same posture, grip, and friction so that your performance doesn’t change over time.” Again, hundreds of thousands of hours of testing are done on new controller designs. “All these angles, heights, textures, they’re finally tuned – we’re talking 0.1mm and people notice the difference,” says Whitaker. “You can actually measure the performance and see how things go up or go down based on how you tune those surfaces.”
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Rich Leadbetter and John Linneman talk about their impressions of the Xbox Series X hardware, inside and out.
An interesting point of discussion is the fact that the Xbox controller still ships with AA batteries as opposed to the kind of built-in rechargeable cells we find in the Dual Shock pad – and that tradition extends to the Series X pad too. Tech influencer Austin Evans (also attending this event) asks whether it’s time to move on, while Digital Foundry’s John Linneman points out how his son needs to instantly get back into the game when the batteries die, while also making the argument that AA battery support means that the controller will still work perfectly many years from now, while internal cells fade and die.
Jason Ronald, partner director of program management at Xbox – aka ‘Xbox Beard Guy’ from the E3 2019 Scarlett trailer – muses that the 50/50 split on opinion in the room almost perfectly reflects customer feedback: “What it comes down to is when actually talking to gamers, it’s kind of polarising and there is a strong camp that really want AAs. So just giving flexibility is the way to please both [sets of] people… You can use a rechargeable battery pack and it works just like it does on the Elite, [but] it is a separate thing.”
We had the chance to use the pad and fundamentally it delivers exactly what the Xbox team says it does. It’s familiar, yet easier to hold, the share button addresses easy access to game clips and screenshots while the extra clicky d-pad feels like a big improvement over the existing pad. Under the hood, the latest Bluetooth radio is integrated for easier connectivity to non-Xbox hardware while the existing wireless interface is refined for lower latency. It’s a software-based revamp on the pad at least, so the Xbox team’s drive to lower input lag will be retrofitted into existing controllers, while the new model pairs to Xbox One too.
Microsoft’s initial Game Awards reveal ended with a look at the Series X console, the new controller resting against it – and this one image effectively summarises the contrasts in approach to the next-gen design. On the one hand, there’s revolution in the form of the console itself, its revamped form factor, double board design and prodigious airflow. And then there’s the controller – an altogether more cautious design perhaps, but with worthwhile new features and an approach to accessibility that opens up the controller to more users, while making it more comfortable for those already used to it.
There’s still plenty of unanswered questions though. Just how much power will the console actually draw from the wall? Is the final retail Series X really going to be as discreet as the Xbox One X under load? We’ve already showcased the form factor up against the X, but how about actual integration into a media cabinet? And finally – the biggest question of all. If there is another Xbox console coming alongside Series X, what’s that going to look like? We can’t wait to find out.
Digital Foundry was invited to Microsoft in Redmond WA during early March to cover the Xbox Series X specs reveal. Microsoft paid for travel and accommodation.
from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/why-microsoft-redefined-the-console-form-factor-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-microsoft-redefined-the-console-form-factor-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net
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Meet filmmaker James Cullen Bressack (2017's Bethany) and actor Mark Rolston (The Shawshank Redemption), of Blood Craft.
I caught up with filmmaker James Cullen Bressack (Bethany, Pernicious) and actor Mark Rolston (The Shawshank Redemption, Aliens, The Shield, The Departed) for two separate interviews on all things film and acting as they relate to their new horror piece, Blood Craft – available On Demand April 9.
Blood Craft is a revenge tale with one hell of a twist: what if you could bring back the spirit of a dead person who viciously wronged and violated you, and then exact your revenge? That is exactly the premise here when two sisters – played by Madeleine Wade (who wrote the picture and added a lot of heart to Blood Craft as a film, made even more extraordinary as it is her writing debut too) and Augie Duke – use witchcraft to resurrect the spirit of their abusive father.
Bressack's directorial approach to Blood Craft is psychologically-penetrating, beautifully-cerebral, highly-surreal, and sublimely-frenetic (as is all great horror) – it keeps you off balance in all the right ways. He is a very much a talent to watch out for when looking for great horror that is not just jump scares, but also highly intelligent. Bressack is at today's vanguard of these trends in the horror indie scene, especially considering what he has shown he can do with relatively small budgets.
Seeing someone with Bressack's filmic vision teamed with such a prolific veteran actor as Mark Rolston is pretty great too. Rolston has 175 credits to his name from 1982 to today on IMDb. He is no stranger to villain roles and the amorality of the associated characters either (something put to good use here in Blood Craft), having played Bogs Diamond in Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption as but one example from his vast catalog – and one we talk about in the interview below.
James Cullen Bressack. Source:The Hollywood Reporter.
Mark Rolston as Sheriff Waters in BLOOD CRAFT.
Enjoy the interviews and check out Blood Craft On Demand now.
Mark Rolston
Hello Mark and welcome to The 405! To begin, what attracted you to Blood Craft and the role of Sheriff Waters?
Hi! I met James Cullen Bressack on the set of an indie film Gangster Land. He mentioned that he had something I might be interested in, and he sent over what was then called "Together". I thought the script was great, and had a relevance in light of the #MeToo movement.
I agree on both counts Mark. What was it like getting into the headspace necessary for the character?
As with all characters, they want something. With Sheriff Waters, he has ulterior motives. Money.
He really does. He reminded me a bit of Orson Welles's Captain Hank Quinlan in 1958's Touch of Evil. What were the challenges like?
Well, time on a indie is always a challenge, and the day we shot on the porch, we were fighting the traffic noise, but James is so clever, we add one line to my dialogue which justified it brilliantly.
[Laughs] that's great. Any funny or memorable moments from the behind the scenes process of filming that stick in your memory?
For me, the funniest moments revolved around James assigning points to crew members for working efficiently. Well, I assumed that actors got points too, so I wanted to be rewarded for takes that I did in one; "One Takes" in film parlance. I am good at that, but was disappointed to learn that actors didn't get points. I made a joke about it with James for my time on set.
[Laughs] interesting. I've never heard of a director using a system like that. Which is an interesting pivot as I have a few questions about some of your bigger roles.
Mark Rolston as Private Drake in 1986’s ALIENS. Source: The After Movie Diner.
I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, Lethal Weapon 2 is 30 this year, any reflections on it?
Wow! I have had a few of those landmarks arrive of late with Aliens, Shawshank, etc. That comes with getting older and having a body of work. The best memory I have of Lethal 2 is working with Director Dick Donner. I loved watching him work, hearing his booming voice, and feeling his enthusiasm and presence.
You have worked with a bunch of fantastic directors. Shawshank is 25 this year and undoubtedly a film that's justifiably cemented a major cultural legacy; and is helmed by another great director: Frank Darabont. What was your experience like playing Bogs Diamond in Darabont's film?
Certainly one of the best of my life. The script by Frank Darabont is quite simply a masterpiece. Bringing Bogs to life was thrilling; it's always good to play the antagonist. I am especially grateful to Frank for including quite a few of my improvisations during rehearsal into the shooting script. Some of my most quoted lines like: "Anyone get to you yet?", "I could be a friend to you", are my creations, and Frank was very kind to credit me in his book of the making of Shawshank.
That's awesome Mark. Speaks to your caliber as an actor and really also of the entire production, in my opinion.
The fact that we rehearsed at all, is one of the reasons the film is so good. Usually, there is very little rehearsal on films, but on Shawshank we rehearsed for nearly three weeks.
Wow. You've also been directed by other big names like James Cameron and Martin Scorsese over your incredible career as an actor. What do you consider the greatest lesson you've learned from them, whether about film or about life more generally?
My favourite director was John Frankenhiemer. He directed me in [George] Wallace starring Gary Sinise and Angelina Jolie. He loved actors and gave us space to do our work. I recall how he would silence the crew with his booming voice, commanding "Quiet! There are actors working here!" Old school and brilliant.
Wow. Absolutely brilliant. Love that.
The greatest lessons were learned long before I made films. The lessons were learned as I trained at The Drama Centre London for three solid years with mentors like John Blatchley, Yat Malmgren, Doreen Cannon and Christopher Fettes. The training I received there is the foundation of my work. The Drama Centre has produced the likes of Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender, and Pierce Brosnan.
Mark Rolston as Bogs Diamond in 1994’s THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Source: CNN.
Quite the mentors list there Mark. You've also been in a lot of TV shows of various stripes since 1980's Ekkusu Bonbâ, '97's Calamity Jane and Zorro, The Shield, TURN: Washington's Spies (TURN is a favorite of mine, being a history nerd), Bosch, and many others. What are the challenges like in playing and developing a film character versus a series character? Do you prefer one over the other?
I like to think of myself as a film guy, but the creative process is the same no matter the medium. Although each has its own challenge; in theatre, the challenge is to be "on" at every moment, in TV the pace of the work is a challenge and you don't have endless takes and time, which is why I prefer film, because it affords you the time to shoot until you get in perfect… one hopes.
Interesting. Time is the most valuable resource, indeed. A question I ask everyone: what makes a great film?
Serendipity. The confluence of a writer's brilliance, the director's guidance, and the actor's creativity.
What other films, directors, and performances have really stuck with and molded you as an artist over the years?
It was my audition for Shawshank that cemented the idea in my head that "just talking", "being in the moment" was the most important thing in film acting. That notion is parallel to being able to bring Shakespeare to life by, as Hamlet implored the players to: "Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had life the town crier spoke my lines."
Well said. Final question: what's next for you?
I will be returning for Season 6 of Bosch as Lt. Thorne. I love working with Amy Aquino. And most importantly, I will be appearing as Admiral Ernest J. King in what should be this year’s blockbuster masterpiece by Roland Emmerich: Midway. The script was amazing, and working with Roland and Woody Harrelson was a complete joy.
Follow Mark on Twitter and like his on Facebook.
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ALIENS (1986) trailer.
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LETHAL WEAPON 2 (1989) trailer.
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THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) trailer.
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THE DEPARTED (2006) trailer.
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BOSCH Season 5 trailer.
__________________________________________________________________________
James Cullen Bressack
Hello and welcome James! Getting right into it. The first question I had, what was it that initially inspired the movie?
So the script was actually originally written by Madeleine. She wrote the first draft and then she had approached me to see if I wanted to direct it. And I was like, "oh well we'd have to change this, this, this, in the script." Because it was a bit more graphic and crazy actually originally, and I just wanted to streamline it and make it a little bit more accessible to moviegoers and audiences. And I think we accomplished that with the story.
Interesting. What were the challenges like?
So the challenge for me was shooting a movie inside of pretty much predominantly one location. Because for me, I wanted to make sure the audience would get bored being in the same place. So I tried to make each room feel and sound different and look different. We have a lot of the time where we spend in the living room, like foyer area. I was trying to make sure that we shot it and lit it a different way, while still keeping the story intact.
So that's why we have a couple hallucinogenic moments. And I think we have some stuff where I tried to really put the audience in the place of what the character was going through mentally through this journey and had the camera work and storytelling kind of evolve with the character's emotional space.
That was another part I really liked was that lighting. It had almost a surreal feel to a lot of it.
Yeah. Which not to give away any spoilers, but I think it ties into the movie.
Madeleine Wade and Augie Duke in this still from BLOOD CRAFT.
Oh, I would say so. But yeah, that and the editing, I thought. It was paced really well and it flowed really well.
Thank you. Yeah, this was the second movie I did with Bobby Richardson, the editor. The movie he did before that with me was Bethany, and I think it had similar themes of childhood trauma and people going in and out of the mind of our main character. And I think we established that with flashbacks as well as really it's driven by this sole performance, surrounded by an ensemble cast. But the story is driven specifically by the emotional state of our lead character.
I need to watch that one yet. Are there any memorable or funny moments that stick out from that process of filming Blood Craft?
Yeah, one of the things that was really funny for us is because it was such like an intense environment when we were filming we joked around a lot between takes. So I think it was just funny because we were being very silly when not filming, like at lunch and stuff like that. Because we all had to kind of shake off some of the stuff that was going on in front of the camera.
That's definitely understandable considering those heavy topics that inform the film's story and really its trajectory. Shifting gears a little bit to a question I like to ask everybody. What directors and films would you consider most influential on you as an artist?
I've always enjoyed this storytelling of Akira Kurosawa. I'm a huge fan of Orson Welles as well as some of these other older filmmakers. But for me it's Park Chan-wook, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez were all idols and heroes of mine.
Fantastic list. The next question is kind of a big one too. What makes a great film and because you've done a lot with horror, what makes great horror?
So a great horror movie, I think, is taking the familiar and turning it on its head. So what we take is what people expect, and then we flip it on them.
You absolutely did. Great definition too. For the last question that I had, what's next for you?
I'm gearing up to do a new movie. I can't really give details on it, but I like to keep busy and I'm trying to do something different with this new one. It's more of like a neo-noir type film.
Follow James on Twitter, Instagram, and like his page on Facebook.
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BETHANY (2017) trailer.
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MY PURE JOY (2012) trailer.
from The 405 http://bit.ly/2OXnt41
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