#but there are a lot of v frustrating elements in the way the characters talk to the main cop character (who's a black man)
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god i usually love female characters that are kinda bitchy but the one in this series im watching is GRATING on my fucking nerves jfc...
#it's the way she's been written as a blatant I'm Not Like Other Woman/ Girlboss White Feminism(tm) character#and it's soooo annoying ugh...#btw what im watching is the bbc series wolf cos sacha dhawan is in it and i love him#but there are a lot of v frustrating elements in the way the characters talk to the main cop character (who's a black man)#(there's even a scene where a white guy fucking lectures him on the fact that he shouldnt undermine his female colleague like...#buddy he is a black guy in the police u dont think he gets undermined every fucking day of his life lol?!?!?)#also his gf in the first ep literally lied about her cancer having come back in order to make him feel guilty#about the fact he's still not recovered from his brother disappearing years ago i mean...... excuse me what???#theyve also given him this 'romance' plot with another woman (who's the main one im referring to in this post) and there's just... nothing#like literally making them fuck adds NO interest in the story esp when there is 0 chemistry between them lol#esp when she spends the whole time being like 'oh i dont care about being sincere or respectful because im a Police Woman' or some shit idk#anyway... i will continue watching it cos a) the mystery element is interesting & 2) sacha is amazing#but every time she's on screen im just immediately Annoyed lol...#personal
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Find The Word
I was tagged on this by @k-v-briarwood, thank you for the tag!
My words are: Leak, Beam, Favor, Neglect.
I'll tag @chayscribbles, @n1ghtcrwler, @bones-and-rainbows, if y'all want to, and anyone else who does want to :) Your words are: Blue, Rip, Shine, Blanket.
Since Continuing Education really isn't...written, I'm doing Signature Powers so we'll see if that half-done, swiss cheese manuscript pulls some decent quotes. These are...entirely unedited, but I'll provide limited context when appropriate.
Leak (AKA the two local aromantic enbys learn about queer-platonic relationships)
“We…slept together,” Vandita murmured. "Overnight."
“It…looks that way,” Hikari replied, trying for a chuckle. It came out oddly forced.
“And it doesn’t feel wrong,” Vandi added. They also looked shocked at this turn of events, and that brought Hikari at least a little bit of comfort. Thank the gods that they weren’t the only one out of their element.
“No, it doesn’t.”
Silence stretched for a moment as the morning sun leaked through the window, spilling shadows across the room.
“So, we…should we talk about this?” Vandi asked, sitting up in bed.
“Maybe? Yes. I think we likely should. Maybe you have more experience in this than I do?” Gods, they hoped one of them had experience.
Beam (Exposition, and allusions to me being unable to NOT have a shapeshifting character)
"Niko, if we don't find anything, it'll be fine. You've been helping so the pain isn't as bad, and I haven't shifted in quite some time. I could live like this easily. If we find anything, it'll be amazing, but we don't have to."
"But you SHOULDN'T have to live this way! You shouldn't! Your damn contractor…"
"…is just one of many contractors. I don't have it the worst, trust me. It's just how things are in a lot of places. I should have known better. I asked for power, and I signed a contract stating that that power had a price. Yes, I didn't know about the bone issues, but…I should probably have known. That's just the way it is. Contractors have and will do much worse."
"But it just…! Ugh!" Niko huffed out a frustrated sigh. "Still. If I can help you, I will, so we're going to try. Besides, travel might be nice. You're so used to running around in the woods, hopefully it'll be good for you too."
Rose beamed. "I have missed the woods."
Favor (In which Vandi and Hikari come back, and Vandi's pronouns are inconsistent because they're she/they and honestly I did this whole thing in a month for NaNo lol)
Hikari nodded and gave a sympathetic grimace. “Overprotective father?”
“You could say that.” Thinking of their father, how angry he’d be…how he probably had half the army out searching for his two errant children…it was definitely something. But it was liberating to not be associated with her father for once, to not have to be royal or perfect or even have to worry about it. The only person who might know about their royal background was Gil, and he hadn’t said anything so far. It was probably alright. “Well, I’d better go check on Seri. She’s…having a rough time.”
“She does have a lot on her shoulders, it seems. She’s not really letting any of us in.” Vandita shook her head.
“She doesn’t really trust that easily, and I’m trying to get her to loosen up. But it’s definitely not working.”
“Well, time’ll do it. Go take care of your sister,” Hikari told them with a reassuring smile. Vandita nodded and left Hikari’s chambers in favor of Serilee’s.
Neglect
Apparently I haven't used this word? Ever? I checked like four manuscripts...so either Scrivener hates me or I'm not utilizing that particular brand of angst enough. So I'm throwing in a random excerpt from SP that I Just Felt Like.
Codell turned his attention to his quilt, examining the bright patterns and the intricate detail. Now that he couldn’t hear or speak, he learned that his eye for detail improved markedly, giving him an ability to sew intricate patterns, distinguish between colors and fade one seamlessly into another in a way that seemed almost impossible to achieve with blocks of fabric. Living in silence gave plenty of time to recreate beautiful mountain views in quilted fabric, bringing an art that was once thought to be simply “homey” into an art form of its own. And if people managed to get past the stony exterior and the strangely all-knowing stare, they would have the opportunity to buy a truly resplendent piece of artwork.
Yet few did, so often Codell simply sat, beneath an awning so as not to burn his fair skin, sewing in…well, it was always silence for him. But few tried to talk to him. Today wasn’t an exception, aside from the vision.
Thank you again for the tag!!
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am i too delusional to think that there is a possibility of the twins being “free” (like in saeran’s AE) but in the secret ending??? 😭😭 it’s kind of my favorite timeline but it makes me so sad to imagine that despite everything the twins and mc wouldn’t be able to do ordinary things in public for example
I don't think it's at all delusional to hold out on the chance they could be free in that ending as well. It's important to point out that those endings were the first to be written. As in, Casual and Deep Route! I have the boring answer for everyone and that is simply the fact that anything that isn't talked about before the release of AS wasn't fleshed out because they didn't feel a need to do that. In some ways, it definitely helped them to have those open endings because it gave them the opportunity to build the missing pieces.
It means a lot of the elements they put into those situations needed to be enhanced to make sense or fleshed out later on to allow for more content to be created. Those timelines were considered first and worked out years before Another Story. That means anything that wasn't given to us before the release of Another Story and the Rika Behind Story do not contain as many answers. It was left open to player interpretation in many ways. That means that you would have to decide what would happen after the curtains closed.
There are also things that people would claim or implied to have taken place because of a minor implication in the details, but it was just far too open-ended to give a clear perspective. A great example of that is how many people believed that Unknown was originally the one who killed his own mother (This comes to us from a scene that's in Yoosung's Route). I never thought that's what he was talking about in that situation, but I can see how people could presume it as fact before Another Story revealed otherwise.
But, that's just a part of the situation. When you don't have a lot of information to go off of, you have to make your own conclusion. You have to figure out where it's going to go when they give you so little to figure out.
Before Another Story, there is so much information we were not privy to about the characters. We had no idea who Saejoong Choi was. All you're presented with is that the twins have a high ranking official for a father and he could completely destroy them if he found them. Without the context you get in the other timeline later on, it may be scary to see but it's not as scary as having context. Without the context you need, it's hard to ascertain what would happen in the Post-Secret Ending timeline.
Frankly, in our world, we know that the twins are going to have to continue to hide because their father is a threat, but if you are in that reality and with them, you wouldn't have the complete context for all of that information because it was just never elaborated to you. Saeyoung doesn't get into detail about his father. All you know is that there are just people out there who would readily kill Saeyoung and Saeran for sport. That lack of information can definitely be frustrating because you don't want them to have to live in hiding.
But, that's just the way it is for the time being because the game didn't have the expanded information you get in the other timeline. That's purely because they added on and figured out those elements after the fact. It doesn't mean that Saeran or V have the only reality where the twins are capable of being free, thus making them the "true endings". It simply means the information that is presented to us in Another Story has the luxury of being made after the fact. After the initial story and concept had been done for years. Casual and Deep we're there from the get-go and it took two extra years to Another Story. Whereas the original routes had to have been in development for years well before that fact.
All of this to say that I do think the twins will be able to be free in the secret ending. It's just unfortunate that you as the player have to figure out the best way to make that happen for yourself in your head. You have to make that content for you. You have to decide the best way for them to confront their father. You have to figure out how to make all that work and that's satisfying in some ways because you get to make sure that it works out the way you want it to.
Frankly, I've actually written a conclusion to the Secret Ending that confronts this. Of course, you have to be willing to read a Saeran x Reader to get that. Iris is a story about his former assistant and believer who encounters him after 2 years of being separated but their story isn't over and there's still threats on the horizon. Included in such is the very infamous prime minister.
I don't think they're going to be trapped forever because their father is going to make a point of coming after them. The agency was destroyed in that timeline and that is something he works with closely to get what he wants. It won't be long before he starts looking into what went wrong because the public is well aware of the underground agency and what they are capable of. The government cannot avoid it and who is in the government? Oh, yeah, Saejoong Choi.
So, even though it is not explored in the content that we are given officially, it is most definitely going to happen no matter what. Given the information that we are told about that man, he would do anything to maintain power and it wouldn't surprise me to see him coming after his sons no matter what. It is the small chance of them being a stain on his reputation that forces him to play every card in his hand and destroy them.
It might be a tough situation because it's not going to play out the way it did for Saeran's After Ending. But, it's going to happen eventually, no matter how much everyone tries to avoid it, it's going to happen. Not even Jumin can prevent it and he's one of the people trying to make sure that nobody catches wind of the twins. Can I say how exactly that situation would play out? No, I have my speculation and theories about it, but what I think won't be the same as what the next person thinks.
All this to say that no ending is created better than another, and I hope everybody understands the little intricacies about the situation. None of these things were done intentionally to make one character look better than the other, it's just an unfortunate casualty of the way that things are created that some of the content is more fleshed out than other parts.
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Azure Ekoms
" I'm not sure where you're going with this, but hopefully you know what you're doing... "
Full Name: Azure Lutwidge Ekoms
Japanese Version: アズル ラットウィヂ エコムズ
Romaji: Azuru Rattowiji Ekomuzu
Twisted From: The blue caterpillar
V/A: Ishida Akira(石田 彰)
Age: 19
Birthday: January 2
Horoscope: Aquarius ♒
Species: Elf
Height: 183 cm
Hair Color: Azure
Eye Color: Amber Gold
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Homeland: Queendom of roses
Dormitory: TBA
School Year: 3rd Year
Class: 3-A(Seat no. 27)
Sexuality: Bisexual
Dominant Hand: Left
{ Family:
Unnamed Father
Unnamed Mother
Unnamed younger brother }
Best Class(es): Literature, creative writing, horticulture
Worst Class(es): Physical Education
Club: Literature club
Like(s): Reading, isolation, nature ambience, creative writing, his manuscripts, occasional napping, hard book covers, classical music, bonfires, the look of the sunset, sitting beneath a tree, the winter season
Dislike(s): Loud noises, distractions, falling asleep for too long, smoke, badly written drafts, book spines in bad condition, his emo poetry phase, incorrect spelling, sweating, the heat in general
Hobbies: Writing, reading, napping, listening to classical music, cleaning, having one-sided conversations with animals and plants
Talent(s): Horticulture, creative writing, poetry, spelling, fast typing, research
Flaw(s): Quiet, isolated, ignorant, materialistic, perfectionistic, easily distracted, stubborn
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_________________________________________
Personality:
Most known for his skill in the literary arts, Azure's sought-after by many aspiring writers in RSA.
He preferably goes outside to write his books, as he somewhat enjoys the atmosphere. He will go back inside if it gets too chaotic though. Most notably, Azure is most found sitting under a tree with his laptop or a few books.
As nice as he may be, Azure chooses not to interact with others all that much. He doesn't really have a reason to, but he only really talks when he's tutoring someone. He's like the quiet kid in class-
Since his childhood, Azure found the idea of writing his own book to be so enchanting.
The idea that he could write such expertly written characters and build his own world that goes by rules he implemented… It felt downright euphoric.
It's why he attended RSA for creative literature after all.
Another thing of note is that Azure has a bit of a problem with being easily distracted. He'd never admit it at all, but he'll occasionally get distracted by his food or his book and may or may not run into a wall.
Now, given how nice and relatively patient Azure is with his tutoring, one would not expect him to be so… Strict.
A misspell in his manuscript would frustrate him for weeks on end, and he'll be tempted to throw a fit if someone spills water on his laptop. Not to forget how much he'd want to suffocate the person(including himself) to death if it meant his writing was preserved.
Name Meaning:
Azure: Meaning "Sky blue"
Lutwidge: The placename is composed of the initial Olde English element "lot", identical with the Dutch "loete" and the Low German "lote", meaning a shovel used to remove mud from ditches and canals, and the second Olde English element "wic", an outlying village(taken from surnamedb)
Ekoms: Quite literally is just 'Smoke' in reverse
Trivia
His middle name "Lutwidge" is actually the name of the author for Alice in wonderland: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Not all that salty about not possessing a unique magic... That he knows of
Due to the fact that all his family really cares about is that he's happy, they don't really mind his lack of a friend group
Is greatly annoyed by the fact that he is easily distracted
Typically ties his hair up because his bangs get in the way when he's writing, reading, etc.
Has been recommended to wear a man bun by some people but quietly rejected the offer because he doesn't know what that is
Frequently hangs out with Chenya because he has some convoluted but really interesting ideas for his stories
Has been joked about being "Single and ready to mingle" by Dimitri several times
His throat easily gets dry after running 3 laps
Do not recommend a workout routine, this man is too stubborn to do that
Roya and Saika tried to convince him to take swordsmanship as a hobby, but he politely declined
Give him an essay with so many spelling errors and badly written/executed exposition and he will make it better in a few minutes while ranting about your writing issues
Is childhood friends with Cressida Kelebek
Diana notes that Azure only really excels in describing swordsmanship and not.... Participating in swordsmanship
Has bought too many books for his own good that his room is a library in of itself
Despite his critiques towards it, Azure finds YA romance novels to be a slight guilty pleasure of his
Will eagerly wait for his favorite novel series to get an adaptation. Preferably where no changes have been made
#twisted wonderland oc#twst oc#royal sword academy oc#royal sword academy#twst rsa#rsa oc#dimitri despoina#cressida kelebek#saika alessia#roya callistis#azure ekoms
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even tho i looooove hearing abt harumi, i would LOVE to hear ur thoughts on nyas arc this season and also the way that they brought garmadon back. and if u want ur general thoughts on how the show handles authority? ex: prison arcs, wu, etc. i know that last part is v broad but its a part of the show i have been very much thinking abt.
ohoooo you're in for a long one. I'll mark off each part to make it more comprehensible
nya
so first off, nya's arc. Tbh I mooostly liked it but i feel like it was one of the things that was a little bit rushed in the chaos that was everything they tried to shove into this season.
I think as the perfectionist of the team, it makes sense for her to struggle with the loss of her powers the same way she struggled with realizing her powers. She was forced out of the identity of samurai x, then came to terms with being the water ninja, then someone else took the samurai x mantle, which she became happy with once she realized who did so. This was another disruption of a status quo she had come to accept. She also had accepted the finality of what she was choosing to do by merging with the sea; obviously she sought to come back the moment she realized she could, but it has to be difficult to return to being a powerless human girl after being a literal dragon sea goddess who experienced a kind of ego-death. So I totally vibe with ignoring the obvious ways she can help the others again, and feeling helpless without her water powers.
I do understand why they had her powers slowly returning by the end of the season, but I kind of wish she had still not had them back. It would have played with the ninja also losing their powers better, rather than it feeling like they're trading off situations lol. I would also like to see different effects for her powers returning than kai, since her element seems to have come from a different source than dragons. Maybe her being afraid she would start losing herself to the sea again would be interesting? Those are of course things that could potentially happen in the next season, but who knows.
garmadon
Garmadon's return this season was p good, I think it strikes a good balance between the state we left him in in the oni trilogy, while making him less of a completely unlikeable dick who spits on the good name of og Garm lol. I like the angle that the show is taking particularly, that he is re-learning compassion and that its possible for him to do so, that he is even willing to help people out, but its still frustrating for him to deal with people who are having emotions he simply can't understand from a logical perspective. The fact that this aspect of his character is not being treated as inherintly evil, and that lloyd is in the wrong for claiming that he can't learn or care about things via logical conclusion or learning is wrong, are actually REALLY good takes that the show has been lacking for a long time now.
That being said, I found some of his circular arguments with lloyd to be a bit annoying, and somewhat of a missed opportunity. There were times in the season where I felt like, yeah it makes sense that they would say these things to each other over and over instead of getting anywhere, but for the audiences sake, we didn't really need to hear the same talking points between them like 50 times. I think they could have built up to the compassion conversation in the serpentine library a lot better.
prison arcs
my feeling on the prison stuff is like... mixed. I see what they were going for, clearly lloyd's little speech to ronin while in jail was leading up to the compassion argument, and he was meant to be in the wrong. Still, i feel like they didn't quite hit the nail on the head of why lloyd was wrong in the prison. The show kind of took the route of "yeah the villains are doing villainy, but they can choose to do good things when it comes down to it, so lloyd's assessment of them isn't completely accurate" when really it should have been more like "well people are motivated to do shitty things by shitty circumstances, and also illegality isn't equivalent to morality, a lot of what drives people to crime is simply not having any other choice, the same way you and the ninja were irt nya." They... kind of did that halfway with lloyd's little speech to mcbrag, but i feel like it didn't quite come together in the way that I hoped?
Really I think what's missing from the picture is just like, giving some of the low-level villains more reasonable motivation for what they do. Ronin already kind of had a backstory that explained why he was stealing stuff, but his reasons for continuing to do so after s5 have not been super clear besides "he wants to." UV is still painted as mostly just chaotic and crazy, and basically nothing is given for the rest of the minor villains that show up. Harumi is maybe the only one whose actual motivation is painted in a somewhat sympathetic light despite how awful she's been, but her reasoning for her crimes is already established canon, so I can't say that is part of this season's design.
I dont think ninjago needs to go too overboard with this, I just think characters mentioning like "I steal because its the only way I can make money, nobody wants to hire an ex-criminal for anything except crime" or "I didn't have a home until the SOG gave me one, the ninja certainly weren't helping me with that" something that made all these ppl in prison seem less like they just do fucked up shit on a whim and more like they have just as complex lives as the ninja. Would have added a lot of depth to the overall themes of this season.
Sorry that was less about Authority in ninjago and more about just the prison arc in general. Tbh my thoughts on the way authority is presented in ninjago in general is like "too much respect is often put on authority in ninjago but the show is getting better about that," which i believe is true. Despite my criticisms I think newer seasons have been more willing to question some of the weird idolization of authority and destiny that the series has held onto for so long, and I'm excited to see them hopefully improve even further in future seasons.
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Ok, just throwing this out there and I do not mean this in a bad way
Do you think Thomas is tired of sanders sides?
It feels like this project was supposed to be a fun, quirky, small thing that got too big and now it's ALL he's supposed to do
Dude made small funny videos and you can see that enjoyment shine through when he makes a TikTok/YouTube short you can also see genuine enjoyment and when he works on Roleslaying with Roman
I might be looking too deeply into this but
He does a lot more than Sanders sides and he enjoys being seen for that HOWEVER that's what people know him for and think about and wants him to make
Sanders sides at the start was literally just him standing in front of a camera going 'look I used to made funny short videos but now I have to move to YouTube and I don't know how this is supposed to work so here's some characters I did before.'
It started out as a funny little thing
And now it's huge and every single episode has to matter and every line has to have deep lore implications and there isn't room for error without fans going "What does it mean??"
(side note that is totally fine, over read into everything that's half the fun of fandom just don't go demanding from the Creator)
Not only did he not have some super important deep dramatic plotline from the start, he flat out just doesn't seem to be enjoying it
But there is a story element to it and the story isn't over just so he can't be over it
It's an art project that is taking too long, it's becoming his identity and I can imagine getting quite sick of that
he does something else and people jump on it and talk about how/what/why/where the 'sides' shine through and I can imagine that can get dehumanizing after awhile
So we move forward to present day, fans are getting tired and restless and upset about not getting new content and being told "soon" or "we're working on it" which is a whole other can of worms since it seems that Thomas is trying so hard to make and keep promises that, honestly, would be better if he didn't
These may seem a bit left field but Markiplier has a new high effort project going to be released on April 4th 2022 he is excited, he's let people know when it comes out as soon as he could, things like these are why he started youtube
It will probably have at least one or two bits with 'markiplier egos' in it, not all of them, not even most if them just a couple bigger names and then moving on
His is an artist, and he has the freedom to make whatever he wants, he's allowed to make a video and there isn't people looking and commenting that "looks like x is really taking the spotlight"
He's having fun with it, there is a light in his eyes and an excitement and he's made something and he wants to show it to us because he wants us to have fun with the silly thing he made
Now jump back to Thomas he doesn't seem as excited, he is trying so hard and hanging in by a shoestring to get stuff done that involves Sanders sides, he doesn't like he enjoys it anymore he is burnt out on this project
Which means he should step away from it and do something else refresh and come back to it when he is ready the problem lies in that he can not step away
He can work on something else but people are going to be saying "wow that's a neat thing you did but when are you going to get back to what we are REALLY here for" that probably causes guilt and anger and stress and frustration that tie back to that one thing he is trying to take a break from
You can't get away from something when everyone is talking to you about it reminding you that you have to do more
Sanders sides is a big thing to put together, there are costumes and props and lighting, editing, scripts, makeup, he needs a crew, writers, he's (almost always) the SOLE actor
Who killed Markiplier/ A Date with Markiplier/ Markiplier T V were all projects that were very similar, very fun and entertaining
Both artists, both make fun entertaining content, One of these people seems to actively be excited for what they are making, the other seems less and less interested in it
One of them feels like he can be honest with his fan base and tell them when things are happening and why they are being pushed of, the other is vague, there's isn't that layer of trust or respect for the artist
I wanna hear what other people have to think about this I really do so feel free to reblog or tag or comment or just tag me in your posts about this
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Why people keep telling you to block them if you support Pholo (Penumbra Edition)
Or: why jitterbug-juno really deactivated
I love when people categorize this as fandom wank. Really makes you feel like you’re putting the onus on either side of the conversation.
I’m making this post not because I want to stir up spoiled milk, but because I want it out there that this wasn’t a purity culture war.
The TL;DR version of this is that fans of color tried to tell Rab (prev. jitterbug-juno) not to post her Omegaverse (or A/B/O) fic. And instead of taking the L, she posted it on Ao3 and deactivated.
But, if you want context, well, buckle in. CW for mentions of racism and transphobia.
What did jitterbug-juno do?
Before I get into this I do want it out there that I will not be linking Rab’s fic, but I will show you this screenshot of the summary of it.
[ID: It is a screenshot of a fic, “As You Are” by Pholo.
Summary: Peter can hide his scent glands behind cologne; makeup; concealer pads. He can quash his heats with suppressants. He can divert the urge to nest and fawn.
But he can’t feign another gender’s subvocals. He lacks the anatomical capacity. Mag taught him to distract from his silence with fast, flashy words. For longer heists he relies on social convention. Traumatic mutism is uncommon, but remarked upon by enough war vets and soap operas to be widely recognized. Peter’s marks assume he’s been harmed long before they assume he’s a closeted omega. It would take quite the backwater brute to ask why he doesn’t murmur or chuff or growl.
On the 'Blanche there are the usual furtive glances. Juno makes clear to Peter that should he ever want “to talk about what happened,” he’ll be there to listen. The gesture annoys Peter more than comforts him.
‘Nothing happened,’ he wants to scream. ‘There’s nothing to talk about!’
There are 14 comments, 85 kudos, and 11 bookmarks /end]
You decide what you’re doing with that information, but honestly, I’d rather you don’t give it anymore engagement than it deserves.
There was a period earlier this June (yes, even though it’s only the 10th, at time of writing) when Rab was posting snippets of the aforementioned fic on her blog and tagging it appropriately, putting it in the attention of pretty much the entire Penumbra fandom.
What’s Omegaverse or a/b/o and why is everyone so against Rab for it
If you know what Omegaverse is, I don’t have to tell you why it’s controversial. If you don’t know what Omegaverse is, well, Fanlore said it best:
a kink trope wherein some or all people have defined biological roles based on a hierarchical system, with the terms originating from animal behaviour research. There may be werewolf, knotting, or other animalistic elements involved, or the characters may be otherwise purely human.
The term is generally written with slashes (a/b/o). Many fans, particularly ones from Australia and New Zealand, are uncomfortable seeing the term without slashes because it is also an Australian slur for aboriginal people.
I won’t get into the history or the heaps and tons of other discourses (mostly about fictional male pregnancy, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, etc.) that go on within that. We’re here specifically on Rab v. Penumbra fans of color and we’re staying there.
Anyone who’s been in Penumbra enough to realize that everyone draws the Junoverse characters in a certain way knows that a) Juno is black, b) Nureyev is Asian, and c) as a fan you have to be aware of what you’re subjecting or saying about either of them because of the political repercussions that come with it.
And despite that, Rab proceeded to write Peter Nureyev, a gender nonconforming gay Asian male character that is widely headcanon’d as trans, into a fic using a kink trope that relies heavily on animal behavior.
Unlike most people new to fandom, Rab is aware of what Omegaverse is and is very much white. She is (and if she isn’t, should be) aware of the racist undertones that writing him in would get.
I couldn’t get a screenshot of what snippets Rab was sending out into the ether, seeing as a majority of my friends would rather not have seen any at all (I have all of the usual tags blocked so I wouldn’t have seen it either way), but needless to say, Rab got attention for it. Both positive and negative.
Anne (@hopeless-eccentric) even posted a satirical fic, in the odds that Rab was just writing this thing to be “the first” to write Omegaverse fic in the Penumbra tags.
But, I’m assuming more than one fan of color came into Rab’s inbox and messaged her about it, but someone I know (who would like to remain anonymous) was gracious enough to take a screenshot before he sent his in and let me use it for this post:
[ID: A message to jitterbug-juno about to be sent by a sender whose name is censored with a black bar. His messages says:
“as someone who is a person of color i think the nature of the fic you are writing right now is extremely racist and attributing animal characteristics to lgbt people of color is not at all appropriate, especially when you are someone who is white. i have to ask you to not publish this fic and to reflect as to why you would want to write this in the first place, these tropes are extremely harmful and”
There are 33 characters left to write into the message. /end]
I can’t speak for whoever else sent asks about the fic she was writing. If anyone was actually not-so-gentle with her, well, minorities don’t really owe it to you to be gentle about what they can tell is bigotry-tinged behavior.
But, the message was clear: this is different from your garden variety, lily white straight male character m/m kink fantasy. This is an actual queer Asian character that a lot of queer Asian people feel attached do. Do not post the fic.
What happened next: the beginning of the end
The next morning, I woke up to most of my friends being frustrated by this post on Rab’s account:
[ID: Dated 5 June, a post by jitterbug-juno:
“Gonna leave the fandom for a while. Wishing you all well.”
The tags say the following: not sure if i’ll be back, thank you so much to everybody who’s read my fics, and who’s sent asks or engaged with my art or any of that, you’re amazing and I’m sending love /end]
That... was not what fans of color wanted, but it was definitely an action they took. Some celebrated, as they were very much wary of Rab for having caused much of the same category of drama in fandoms like Voltron: Legendary Defenders and Warrior Cats. This also meant that she was probably not going to post the fic either.
Some, myself included, were relatively pissed, as they’d wanted even just the measly bit of accountability. An apology or an acknowledgement of having been called out in private and that they’ll take time to consider why. But instead we got Rab leaving in the face of fans of color telling her not to post her Omegaverse fic.
Well. The next day...
[ID: Dated 6 June. A post by jitterbug-juno titled, “Well... that was short-lived”
“I gave the situation a lot of thought yesterday. The reaction to my omegaverse previews made me figure I should leave the fandom. It seemed like the safest option.
But you know what?
Hell.
I don’t want to leave. The fic discusses the tropes of omegaverse and I spoke to several POC on Twitter, and I’m going to post it with plenty of tags so people can avoid it if they wish. I’m not going to be chased out of this space.
Thank you to everyone who sent messages yesterday. I shouldn’t have made that post about leaving. It was really reactionary. I’m okay and I appreciate your support so much.
(bolded on the post) To those who are angry and uncomfortable with me: Please block me. If you’re going to talk about this fic on Tumblr and Twitter– and this may sound odd– PLEASE NAME ME as Jitterbug-juno or Pholo. Don’t vague me. That way people who don’t want to see this discourse can add my name to their block lists.“ /end]
That certainly was short-lived, she wasn’t kidding.
This got a lot of outrage. Again, the fic is up on Ao3 and she has not taken it down. A lot of POC were pissed and I didn’t see a single fan of color actively support what she was doing, at least, not in my friend group. Everyone started making those posts to block them if you liked the fic or Rab’s content in general, in accordance to what Rab wanted.
Perseus (@mraudiodrama) noticed/pointed out that Rab deleted the part where she said she spoke to several POC about releasing her fic, as well as the part where she said she refused to be chased out of the fandom. This was an incredibly pointed detail to edit out, according to some.
[ID: A screenshot of jitterbug-juno's last post taken 11:00PM. Much of it is the same except the following bolded words are removed: "The fic discusses the tropes of omegaverse and I spoke to several POC on Twitter, and I’m going to post it with plenty of tags so people can avoid it if they wish. I’m not going to be chased out of this space." /end]
That same day, Rab deleted her blog. I actually caught this one on tape, believe it or not.
[ID: A screen recording taken at 12:01 PM of someone scrolling down jitterbug-juno's account. The posts and asks about Omegaverse and her post about leaving and coming back are conspicuously absent. /end]
Initially, I thought she deleted all mentions of it. I wanted to see firsthand if the rumors about her deleting portions of it were true. If she added things where she was saying that she wanted to write it because she was autistic and wanted Nureyev to be autistic too, regardless of the numerous QPOC telling her not to do it.
Instead, it turned out, she deleted her blog.
And now, we're here. The fic is still up. Her blog is down. Rab's public Twitter account @nataclinn is quiet about this. Her @cushfuddled Twitter account is on private after her run-in with the Warrior Cats fandom, according to a friend. And her Tumblr @cushfuddled account has nothing but memes.
Again, I didn't make this post to stir up drama. I wasn't even obsessively making this post as a call-out because she isn't in the fandom anymore. I just want it out there that this isn't a purity culture thing that got out of hand in a fandom as niche as Penumbra. This was a case of someone being called out and failing to acknowledge it before running away. And I want all that out of the way before I say:
If you are on Rab's side of this debacle, I, a queer person of color, want nothing to do with you either.
#the penumbra fandom#jitterbug-juno#pholo#racism#white drama#im not tagging this as fandom drama or fandom wank because that erases the fact#that this was legitimate criticism of a white person#the penumbra podcast#junoverse#i put it in a readmore so its not gonna clog up much#but if anyone doesnt want me to tag this w the fandom tags i'll remove it#once again though this is the furthest thing from anti/proship discourse
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there's a limit on how much you can be an isekai intellectual...
a bunch of analyses have been popping up before me all day so i wanted to throw my hat into the ring. all love to ppl who are exercising their creative minds + ppl like geoff here who just talk about these things because of fan interest but i feel like there reaches a point where exploring the "types" of isekai is pointless? i've seen ppl list out the different types of villainess revenge isekai or fantasy mmorpg isekai but eh why fit them all into separate boxes like that?
i think it's easier to think of isekai as a "type" (genre) of itself with only two categories: 1) a focus on isekai (lit. another world) 2) tensei (lit. to be reborn). this allows for a variety of applications and thus tropes that ppl see so many trends of!
with isekai - in another world
you see everything from:
pure fantasy (inuyasha, digimon wait maybe not the best example but in my childhood mind i count digimon as pure fantasy, fushigi yugi)
mmorpg inspired fantasy/adventure (.hack//legend of twilight, sao ugh, log horizon, overlord (LOVE OVERLORD!)
otome game-esque worlds >>> this is where it gets complicated with "villainess routes" since i admit there are multiple villainess tropes but this is why it's nice to not think of this as a "sub-type/genre" bc it frees you from those complications! (the saint's magic power is omnipotent, the white cat's revenge as plotted from the dragon king's lap soso cute!, the savior's book cafe in another world, i'm a villainous daughter so i'm going to keep the last boss wait i can't remember if she's reborn in this one lmaooo see this is why rules make everything hard)
with tensei storylines - being reincarnated/reborn in another world as *insert character/role*
you see...
the same tropes!!
pure fantasy (a returner's magic should be special, reminiscence adonis, the lady and the beast, light and shadow, i can't think of a manga off the top of my head for this ah)
mmorpg inspired fantasy/adventure (so i'm a spider so what i stan kumoko so hard, her majesty's swarm, can't name another off the top of my head ah i hate lists shorter than two things...)
self-insert based games/novels (fiance's observation log of a self-proclaimed villainess, who made me a princess, death is the only ending for the villainess, the villainess wants to marry a commoner, honestly games vs novels are different applications but i'm not in the headspace to try to remember a bunch of both lol)
*insert line break to give random ppl a break from scrolling but tl; dr just enjoy things for what they are no need to micro analyze*
similar variations occur in both genres (if ppl want to be super technical i guess i'm arguing that isekai itself is a massive genre that has the "another world" subgenre and "reincarnation" subgenre tl; dr) so i think it's honestly a huge pain to try to separate all these trends into so many different types of stories. for me personally it's easier to not get overwhelmed by this gigantic umbrella of "isekai" that spans light novels, manhwa, manga, and mobile games by just stripping each story down into its trademark tropes (aka character archetypes, story structures) and slapping "oh this is a person going to a world that's not ours" and "this person gets reborn as blank in another world". none of this "omg this power fantasy is such a this kind of isekai moment" or "there are 14 different types of villainess revenge stories and this series fits into this" bc AH labels! limitations! circle-jerks via ppl trying to compartmentalize everything and sound smart for leaving a comment on story analysis instead of ooh-ahhing over a character's face! dividing things into light novel manga vs manga vs korean manhwa ft. female characters!
the last bit is mainly why i feel frustrated by ppl's insistence to group everything?
the video linked at the beginning of the post (honestly good video essay, i enjoyed it, i just kept thinking in my head the whole time "marimo these are tropes do not take the genre talk literally") has a baby comment thread talking about "korean isekai manhwas" as a genre featuring nothing but reincarnated villainess' and i can't.
like i cannot acknowledge that as a genre of any sort. the energy i felt reading through some of those insights takes me back to 2012 when all yt americans discovered k-pop and deemed all korean music k-pop from then on! (ppl still do this now, yes you are seen and don't talk to me pls i don't like you. k-pop is korean pop music and nothing less and nothing more. take a few seconds and try to parse apart aspects of korean culture instead of slamming everything into a monolithic label that has the letter k and a hyphen.) it feels so odd to see a bunch of young ppl on ig and tiktok acknowledge korean media that happens to be in the form of a webtoon as "oh stories all about young girls becoming villains in stories they made/played" bc it feels so reductive u.u
(positionality disclaimer that i'm praying isn't actually necessary: i am a 3rd-generation korean of japanese descent do not fite me i am exhausted irl of ppl asking for validation/verification bc massive shove off.)
breaking news! korean manhwa...is just as multifaceted as japanese manga...bc how can comics as an art-form not have multiple genres...huh such a shocker?!?! same likely applies to media in other parts of the world like chinese manhwa and french comics--not my place to explain either of those i just know those industries exist bc of wakfu and donghua shows by Tencent.
at the end of the day it's not like analyzing any kind of isekai is wrong--absolutely not!! i think it can be super fun to think about how isekai elements complicate a story (MCs trying to go back home, ppl from the og world, reincarnation plot-twists) or maybe even bash a series for including some kind of other world element when they could have just written a super fun fantasy.
insert marimo's brief ramble that hey you can get sick of truck-kun's hitting disillusioned guys who happen to be super duper smart or girls who happen to be master chefs/craftsmen but transporting a fully-grown being into a fantasy setting is the ultimate cheat code for making mundane modern technology seem cool and overpowered, and being reincarnated as a fully grown person in a world with a pre-made story/game set-up completely bypasses the need for an author to slowly flesh out world-building in a natural progression so isekai is actually a really smart writing tool it's just that there are some series where the author didn't use it well at all and it's cheesy or clearly isekai was misused as a vehicle for character/story development and it was pointless *DEEP BREATH OUT*
in this essay i will argue...lol i am such a culture studies major!! if i were an english major i would be talking all about writing but here i am having a side-tangent about world-building via someone being reborn wow i love this for me (don't get me started on when an author has someone reincarnate as a baby and the story is mostly them having warm fluffy moments with their family--typically father figures--and getting lots of powers i could and would and probably will rant about east asian toxicity)
but anyway am i crazy????? like yes for being passionate about the technical use of a word like genre (i am a scorpio rising let me be fussy pls) but i don't think it's a lot to ask for ppl to not unironically see "villainess revenge isekai" as the definition of korean manhwa.
idk as someone who resonates with why japanese isekai is so popular domestically + why a lot of korean manhwa feat. the same tropes (it's not for great reasons lads it's actually depressing tbh) i'm just starting to feel kind of pained by the generalization and need to separate "cute japanese girl in an otome game"/"japanese boy finds a harem in another world" from "korean girl dies and comes back as a villainess" bc they are just! applications to the same story device!!
recommendations for any who makes it this far down below <3
// also gladly recommend any of the examples i've listed in the above rant as i've read/watched all of them and adore them v much! //
save me princess
super refreshing fantasy manhwa ft. a princess and her ex-boyfriend having to save the world!
the beginning after the end
an AMERICAN web novel turned into a comic (but see it being not korean/japanese doesn't really matter when you just consider isekai as a genre...isn't it nice to not overthink it?) ft. a super-powerful wizard king reincarnated into another world and starting from scratch--gives mushoku tensei vibes but huge twists!
the reason why raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion
love love LOVE this story--read the title and you'll learn how this girl reincarnated as the character raeliana in a book gets married to a duke!
trash of the count's family
such a good novel!! a guy gets reborn as a lazy oaf and he takes the hero of the story under his wing...plot twists come up later on!
this time i will definitely be happy!
v good and refreshing for a shorter series! she's been reborn 3 times and remembers every time the hero's stabbed her in the back, and now she just wants to break up with him!
silver diamond
older manga but v good adventure w intrigue! a boy who loves plants get sucked into a desert world with demonic lizards and a mysterious bodyguard by his side. shonen-ai not BL but wonderful vibes nonetheless + great side characters!
the princess imprints a traitor
adore everything in this from the world (not in that way this society makes me so angry) to the machinations at play and the dynamic between the fl and ml
#isekai#mother's basement#inuyasha#digimon#fushigi yugi#.hack//legend of the twilight#log horizon#overlord#the saint's magic power is omnipotent#the white cat's revenge as plotted from the dragon king's lap#a returner's magic should be special#adonis#the lady and the beast#light and shadow#kumo desu ga nani ka#her majesty's swarm#fiance's observation log of a self-proclaimed villainess#death is the only ending for a villainess#the villainess wants to marry a commoner#save me princess#the beginning after the end#the reason why raeliana ended up at the duke's mansion#trash of the count's family#this time i will definitely be happy!#silver diamond#see i normally put the raw titles for everything but the tiny korean/japanese part of my brain is so tired bc my english brain went off#the princess imprints a traitor#manga#manhwa#donghua
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Behind the scenes fic asks - about the HTRYDS series.
16 (and 17) so far?
🐧
Hiya Penguin! Let's see... easiest and hardest scenes to write as of ten chapters into Demon Tales... Man, with almost 400k of material, narrowing that down is a beast, but I can definitely think of a few.
16. What was the easiest scene to write?
There's lots of scenes that flowed for me, but as far as major scenes that surprised me with how they went, one that comes to mind was Erik's introduction in The Eighth Tower ch. 2. Honestly, I went into that scene thinking it was going to be a struggle, because I have never written Erik before, much less him as a fifteen year old, but after watching and reading a bunch of canon scenes with him to get the feel, I hit an epiphany and it sort of erupted out. I have no idea how that happened, to be honest. I did enjoy Erik as a character, but after taking the deep dive into him and writing that scene, he sort of took me by heart and he became one of my favorites. (Erik scenes in general tend to be easier for me, likewise.)
Parts of Twenty Four Hours, particularly in the latter parts of it, also came easily, despite the mystery elements. Like, the nerd squad sequence was just a personal treat for myself.
17. What was the hardest scene to write?
The Jellal v. Ultear fight in Demon Tales Ch. 8 kicked my ass, lemme tell you. I had been looking forward to that scene because of how epic and intricate it would be, but when I got there, it was epic and intricate and complicated, and that meant hell for me. Both of their magics and fighting styles are fast and kinda op, and fights are already a struggle for me, much less a fight between the human embodiment of a falling star and Ms. Time-Go-BRR. Then, while Jellal's brand of anxiety is normally fairly easy for me, that while he was having to gauge Ultear, while I had to figure out how Ultear would outwardly behave and inwardly react, was just... Bleh. I used so much brain juice on that.
Similarly, Anna was pretty hard for me to write, particularly when Anna actually encounters Acnologia. Her logical approach things and lack of strong emotional literacy made it hard for me to balance how freaked out she would be and how she would react to everything accordingly. There was only so much shock value, with her figuring it out in bits before the encounter, but she obviously wouldn't accept it that readily either.
But noooo, the hardest scene is absolutely the one that I never finished/published. Originally, I had planned to write out "the talk" (Acno revealing his history to the kids) that would take place between chapters 12 and 13 of Of Dragons and Fairies, but it kicked my butt so bad, even after draft after draft after draft, I still wasn't happy with it. (None of the drafts were completed, either; I normally got frustrated part way through and tried a different approach, only to have that one fail too.) Everything I wrote either felt not impactful enough or too dramatic, and eventually, I figured that it wasn't really necessary, since the aftermath was both obvious and evident, so I shoved that one under the rug, never to see the light of day.
---
behind-the-scenes ask game
#ask game#htryds#penguin anon#The Talk will continue to haunt me#funnily enough#the small version of the talk with erik was the only version i managed to get in#so erik wins again
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a bit of a break from the normal reading but how did you get the idea for this story? like,, it has so many complicated twists and turns and i just want to see your thought process of going about this story ahdfjn
Oh man, this is gonna be a long one but let me walk you through it hehe, also major spoilers for the original Zemblanity below.
Flashback to June 2nd of 2020, when Kun's Awaken teaser dropped. As soon as I saw that teaser I thought "hm, I can make a fic out of this" so I opened my little outline app thing and started outlining his character and as all the other Awaken teasers dropped I started filling in for the other members. I'll have to dig for it, but I remember making a post about it on the old blog if anyone would be interested in the concept and I got a lot of feedback so I figured sure why not. Back then Zemblanity had a completely different concept, though. I'm not joking when I tell you guys I picked apart those teasers and the MV, I even watched them slowed down to get whatever little details I could about their concept to shove it into the outline somewhere.
My original plan for it was for Sector V to be akin to an asylum, hence the specific disorders I had back then, but then I scratched that idea and instead looked to complexes. For example, I originally planned for Kun to have this sort of God Complex, I planned for Xiaojun to have a Martyr Complex and so on so forth, you can probably catch some of those hints in the original Zemblanity, though. Either way, I originally planned for the big reveal to be that they were never on the moon at all, no, and (Y/N) was one of the asylum's patients. Kun was supposed to be her main doctor, Ten was the patient she shared a room with, and so on so forth. The point of this is that Zemblanity had a dark theme since the outlinings, I just changed the plot significantly as I went around.
Onto when I actually started writing the fic. 2020 wasn't a very happy year for me, for anyone really. And this wasn't even the crux of the fic. I spent about twenty days outlining it then, June 22, 2020, I dropped the first chapter. This first chapter followed my original draft and it got a lot of attention, both good and bad. With all of the asks and replies I got, I started making changes. I went into this fic with the idea of it being strictly thriller, and I came out with some elements of romance, but despite y'all simping in my inbox for certain inmates, I remembered to go back to this fic's roots. Mystery and thriller, I had to keep you all on your toes. Then, as 2020 continued and my mental state, to put it bluntly, plummeted, I turned to Zemblanity to write out my frustrations. I've said it a couple of times before, but writing is sort of like a therapeutic thing for me. Throughout 2020 I was just angry all the time, I was so pissed, I was so lonely, I had all these emotions and no one to talk about it with so I channeled that into a fanfiction and, hey, looks like you guys liked it, haha
In the first run of Zem, I made twists for the heck of it. Xiaojun knowing everything, for example. The locket, for another. Etc, etc. But now, with that original under my belt, I'm fixing up this rewrite so that there's just so much more re-read value, the twists make sense, and the suspicions arise. I made so many huge plot changes and so many huge jumps between the year long run that it just got messy at one point and it was so far from my original outline that the final product was just different. A lot of what happens in my fics and how they end is based on everyone's asks and how they perceived the characters. Sicheng, for example, was supposed to be a much darker character but you all liked him so much so how could I ruin y'all like that? Outlining this story was a real bitch though, let me tell you, and in the end I even strayed super far away from it. All the twists and turns had to be calculated and placed correctly, and in my original plan they were, but as things changed I realized "oh shit I can't use this twist anymore" or "oh man, I might need to establish this now before it's too late" it was all a hodgepodged mess that I'm trying to fix now haha
Either way, a lot of this fic was malleable, it went through so much changes as my own mental state fluctuated all over the damn place. All I knew was that I wanted to make a fic that would be fun to read, one of those fics that you can't put down until you were done with it, and I think I did pretty good for the most part.
#asks#rose 🌱#zemblanity#zemblanity rewrite#zemblanity spoilers#zemblanity rewrite spoilers#spoilers#original zemblanity spoilers
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can i get a director's cut about no regrets coyote xoxoxo
for u bestie? anything. even a longass ramble
literally when i read this series back i'm like wow did someone tell you to write Voicy Fic did someone tell you to enhance the Voice jkhajkkgd
as is my dangerous new tendency i wrote this out of order (every time i admit this im like fuck someone's going to read this and go oh yeah that really tracks kdfhgjkd) so the cokeworth stuff came in pretty late — but one thing i was super excited about with this instalment was opening up the world of the story.
not just in a geographical sense, though that does happen, but in every possible way, i wanted the reality of life tee em to seep in here. like, there's no whirlwind romance (...yet), there are logistics, there's a good deal of guilt like when lily lies to alice. is it REALLY no regrets coyote?? and my favourite avenue to open up was lily's personal life. we already know a little about her ex (and, you'll be so pleased to hear, we will know even more) but i knew digging into her backstory would be so fun and hopefully a little surprising too. maybe it's the nature of this AU or just all jameses, but it's easier for the reader to extrapolate what his life was like pre the start of wtrf than it is for lily (at least, that was the hope).
i wanted her life to be a little less glamorous, HA, partly because we have to believe she'd take the puddlemere job despite very little interest in it (at first). but there's lots of degrees to that. i don't fancy having her wallow in misery for the sake of it, and moreover what i love exploring through these characters isn't, like, backbreakingly sad circumstance but everyday frustration. how pitifully mundane to have parents whose expectations for you are well-meaning but a hefty burden; how ordinary for your squabbles with your sister poke at your insecurities far too often. as much as the reality of lily's childhood was different from (presumed) canon because of this AU, it's also...kind of not. which was so so fun, trying to figure out how growing up around magic with everyone knowing what magic is might still make her feel like an outsider in her home — like she's both a weirdo and someone on a pedestal, and she wants to be neither but but could never just shuck the expectations entirely. (it takes no fine-toothed comb to pick out this element in all my lilys and if you think this is some personal unpacking going on, please refer me to a therapist or don't bring it up at all x)
i feel like this series has thus far been Very James (which is natural because of the setting/premise and also because he has chronic wont shut up disease, and also because i weirdly wrote more from his pov i think which is new for me even tho hes my self insert) and wanted to start to balance that out a little. so keep an eye out for the ways in which canon intersects with lily's life!!!! (i'm dropping hints that sn*pe might come up possibly maybe)
oh that was a fucking digression ok
sidenote everyone knows this is my fundamental thesis of jily: thee partners against the dursleys KJHJKHAJAK
Not only do they bring out the worst in each other, they never play fair. It’s hardly manageable to argue with them when there’s only one of me.
anyway, despite this all being written out of order i wound up pretty happy with the reason why lily kind of loses her head about james the week following her visit to cokeworth. bless her, she's going thru it
oooh so the conversation about the rules tee em (by doja cat dot mp3) was the note on which i started drafting. i know some people were like wow are they really going to talk about it and i deliberated having them put it off for longer, but then i was like no i'm too impatient for that — and realistically speaking, they're at least both responsible enough to know they need to hash it out. (james! responsible!)
and it was v important to me that the conversation was not just a vehicle for james being overwhelmingly james and lily being like well what am i getting into here.......... but also frank and not without its hitches. like, if i had to point to a part of this conversation i think is the most important, it would be right at the start when james is being teasing and lily's like, uh, no, stop that, this is my job. i mean, it's realistic for who she is (and truthfully she hasn't known him long enough to not snap back in that moment) but i as a Person am keenly aware of the power difference between them in terms of leverage with the team, and i think to have them pretend not to realise it would be dishonest.
so much of my favourite parts of james's canon arc have to do with reckoning with privilege, and while not every story has to be That Heavy a necessary angle of the cultural and socioeconomic difference between them (which as i said somewhere else, i actually really like preserving because of the rich, fertile conflict — and opportunity for growth — it affords) is like. unease. i don't think fanfiction has to entirely shy away from big subjects. like, there's certainly a place for Pure Just Smut (which i've written myself hahaha) but i didn't want this to be that (what would all that worldbuilding be for!!!!) and LIFE is uneasy, and life is out here imitating art!!!
and so i wanted to use this opportunity to like. through this device of the team/having to keep things secret reflect back some facets of their personalities both to the reader and to each other. for james that's what he does with power. he's grown up in a way that means he's basically always had it, only he's rarely lorded it over people when not an actual stupid child, and the very humbling experience of having his longest dream stall at age 18 means he's even less likely to do so. this is something lily has to see from him, if she is to trust him.
for lily it's what she does with risk. she's a careful person, she likes plans and control, and when we see her at the start of the story shes basically had both those things chucked out the window. (in short she's at the same point in her arc that james was at when he was 18/post the injury — he's out of the tunnel and she's just in it) it's important for james not just to see that she's not put-together and cold and way, way above him, but also to see when and where she's reckless, and with what. it's like a roundabout way of realising what matters to her (so she'll be careful with it), but also of seeing when she says fuck it because something matters to her too much.
basically for something that is "Not A Relationship" this thing is SOOOOO a test drive for a relationship akjhsjkhjsfgk
another quick point: i was glad to be able to subvert the no-feelings trope, mostly because i didnt think there was anything new i could add to it. (like, they're like no feelings, and then someone catches feelings, duh of course obv [disregard that i just wrote this in something else plz]) there are other rules i am much more excited for them to break >:) im also aware that the like. romantic/sexual/dating politics here are mayyybe suspect for the 70s i think (though i tried not to let too much 21st century thinking seep into me, i have on my to-do to read the ethical slut fOR FANFICTION literally i am a joke) but i hope u guys will forgive me for that xx
oh! ted lasso viewers will also probably have guessed that singer cancelling on charity gala was totally 100% stolen from season 1. it's elton john here just because hes a cool guy <3 and my favourite thing was having literally everyone call him "elton" like theyre all best fucking buds with him, it is HYSTERICAL to me when people do that to celebrities in like a professional capacity.
[obligatory pause in my skim of my own fic to say wow i love sports]
also i caCKLED when i managed to squeeze in that james isn't in the calendar. who out here wa slike wow lilys gonna see his sports illustrated body issue pinup calendar photoshoot lets go only to be suckered by ME
is his non-participation a symptom of the fact that he is not at 100% confidence and yes it is
also i'll own that this, while it's no tripping was for other people, is my single favourite brief instance of my own james characterisation
"...you could live somewhere beautiful and expensive.”
I know my answer, but it takes a moment to figure out how to start it. “My cousin, she can’t sit still. This place is just so her parents know what address she comes back to occasionally. I’ve never been like that. All that time in Italy, I—”
Wanted to come home, I think but do not say. It’s true; I was so homesick I thought I’d physically be sick because of it sometimes. The worst thing was how much it hurt to be back in England in the offseason. Even seeing a Quidditch advert soured my stomach, like spotting an ex who’d moved on too quick. But I didn’t just want to return home, I wanted to be welcomed back. I wanted my resentment gone.
“I couldn’t have gone anywhere else,” I finish lamely.
She props her chin in one hand. Her gaze is still fixed on me, curious but not probing. “Plenty of places would’ve gladly had you.”
I concede this with a nod, but— “I couldn’t.”
I WANTED MY RESENTMENT GONE!!! I DID SOMETHING WITH THAT AND I WILL NOT BE QUIET ABOUT IT!!!!
ahem
hmm ok and then smut happens
more about lily's workplace experiences later, but i also wanted to emphasise not just how cool tee em alice is, but also how important it is for lily to have her approval and respect. lily of course admires the shit out of alice for her composure and her drive, and learning she was a scholarship kid at a fancy magical school sort of reduces the distance between them — she's like, oh, maybe i could be like her!! that's why alice's apology means quite a bit earlier in this chapter even if it's over something fairly minor, and that's why lily feels so bad about lying to her. she's aware of how big it is to have an older female mentor figure (blah blah blah suze ok u denizen of corporate america) at work and she doesn't want to fuck it up...but she's kind of already fucked it up and only digging herself in deeper. Yes there will be consequences
and another thing i like about the episodic bursts of these chapters is that i get to end on WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT bits all the time and don't feel too terrible about it!
i think i've exhausted everything i had to say and it's definitely more than u were expecting xoxo ly
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Interview with Half Shy (the songwriter of “Monster”)
For the last few months, I’ve been collecting information for a second edition of Exploring the Land of Ooo that will also cover the production of Distant Lands. This means that I’ve started to look into the new songs that we have been graced with this year, and this of course includes “Monster,” the beautiful track from the masterpiece that is “Obsidian”. And so I reached out to the song’s writer, Half Shy, who was kind enough to chat with me via email about the songwriting process!
(Photo courtesy of Half Shy)
In many ways, Half Shy is living the creative Adventure Time fan’s dream: She got asked by Adam Muto himself to write a song for “Obsidian” after he heard her music through Bandcamp! (I’ve dabbled in fan music before, and the fact that someone from the show might listen to it just blows my mind.) What an opportunity; I am so excited for her!
Since a second edition of my book won’t be coming out until after all the Distant Lands episodes air, I thought it would be best to share my Half Shy interview now. Read on for the fascinating behind the scenes story of how Half Shy and “Monster” came to be..
GunterFan: What is your origin story? How did you get involved in music, and how did the Half Shy project come to be?
Half Shy: I’ve been making music pretty quietly since I was in high school with a keyboard and guitar. I played one or two shows a year after college when I could find a friend or my brother to get up on stage with me, but I don’t really have that performer gene in me naturally. I get too much in my head and forget what the lyrics are to the song I wrote, or what the next chord is. Total brain freeze. So that whole experience is a bit of a mental drain. It’s something I think I’d like to dig into and figure out, but right now I’m really enjoying the time writing.
Even playing a song for my friends I still get pretty nervous. That’s where the name Half Shy comes from. I’ve always been interested in making things that by their nature draw a bit of a spotlight, but at the same time, I am just really quite nervous about the attention.
I recorded my first songs under my old name Hey V Kay in my bedroom and started putting them up online one at a time. When I got enough I thought about packaging it up into an album, but then got really distracted by learning how to fix up motorcycles and going to automotive tech school. When I eventually got back around to it I named the album Gut Wrenching.
After a few years I realized that I didn’t want the day-in-day-out life of a mechanic, I just wanted to know how to fix cars for myself and to have that knowledge in my back pocket. I got back into making music but grew frustrated at the process of writing and recording songs. I felt like I wasn’t able to capture the ideas I had in my head. Like trying to draw on your computer with a mouse. Doable, but it’s not going to come out like you’d hoped.
So these last couple of years I’ve focused more on learning the technical aspect of it, from the initial ideas and lyrics, to the recording and mixing. During that process I put out Bedroom Visionaries, and while writing I happened upon the name Half Shy in an old Thesaurus which felt instantly right. Learning all of that has been fun, I even went as far as to create my own book to solidify a daily writing routine (lyricworkbook.com). All that has been a bit of a tangent from actually making much music though. I should be getting my books in December from the press so I’m really looking forward to getting back into making more music instead of dealing with printing presses, setting up websites, and sourcing ribbon suppliers.
GF: What is the story behind "Monster"? How did the show get in contact with you?
HS: I keep a log of “Song Starters” with neat things I’ve heard in the world, and I would look through it every now and then and notice just how many came from Adventure Time. Eventually I thought well, I have to make a song about this show that just keeps breaking my heart. It was around the time I was nearly done with the first [Adventure Time-inspired] song “In My Element” that I got an email from Bandcamp saying “someone bought your album (Bedroom Visionaries).”
I get maybe one or two of these a month at most so I love to go in and say hi to the person and say thanks, be curious about who they are, [and] what they’re all about. Turns out it was Adam Muto, the executive producer of the show. (I asked and he has no idea how he happened upon my stuff. He guessed that I must have tagged something #adventuretime and he just happened to see it.) So I sent him an email saying, “Hey wow thanks for checking out my tunes. Also... holy crap you’ve made the best show I have ever seen in my life.” [I] played it real cool like. After finishing up writing my second [Adventure Time-inspired] song “Betty” I couldn’t help but fangirl real hard [and I sent him another message saying], “I’m sorry this is probably awkward, but I really love your show and I wrote these songs about it.” He was incredibly kind and shared them with his Twitter Universe, and a while after that I got a random email from him saying basically, “Hey, I’m working on this thing I can’t talk about, would you be interested?” I was like… well you know I’m pretty busy working at a sign shop so I’m gonna have to pass on this once in a lifetime opportunity (J/K. Obviously I fan-girl squealed and said yes immediately).
We chatted a bit about what the project was going to be and the direction. He mentioned there [would be] two Marceline songs in the special, [and he asked if I] would I be interested in giving the love song a try? Trying real hard to suppress my instant imposter syndrome I was like, “Yea, totally I’d be into giving that a shot!” So I read through the story and loved the idea of the dragon mirrored in Marceline, thinking through how they’ve both built up a protective shell, how she grew tough for a reason, but now she can open up and be vulnerable with PB.
From there I wrote the initial demo with the first two verses mostly intact and we went back and forth a few times editing it down into the final version. I recorded the final parts for the show in my little home studio in Seattle.
GS: When you were writing the song, what emotions, thoughts, or ideas were you channeling? Was there any sort of memory of event that you were trying to artistically "catch" or "recreate" with the lyrics or music?
HS: As far as channeling an emotion, generally I’d say just the experience of existing as a human. It can be so hard to open up and be vulnerable. I can remember that feeling even as a young kid—getting really excited about something and having someone completely trash it or look at you like, “Why are you so interested in that? It’s dumb.” [It causes us to grow] a little more weary to share ourselves because we know that hurt and embarrassment. The pain of being misunderstood is something I think a lot of us can relate to. Then having to decide whether to keep sharing those vulnerable parts of yourself or think, “They’re just not going to get it, I’m going to get hurt, so why bother?” and then stop putting yourself out there. You lose a lot with that thick armor though. You might feel protected, but you’re not feeling a whole lot of anything else other than the weight and chafing of it (I had a whole lot of armor-related metaphors that I didn't end up using.).
I struggle with this in songwriting too. I’m not the bolt-of-lightning type. There are pages and pages of cliches, total garbage, bad jokes, and cheesy lines that I have to get through in order to get to something that I am excited to put out there into the world: “Here I did this thing, I know it’s a little (this or that), but I made it... What do you think?” It’s hard to open yourself up to hearing the other end of that question.
I filled about 5 little pocket notebooks just thinking through the story, ideas, and trying to get this song right. I wanted it to feel familiar and honor the past songs of the show ([e.g.,] using the ukulele and referencing a few of the familiar chords from “I’m Just Your Problem”) but also be pretty open and vulnerable and different for [Marceline]. [I wanted to] show that she’s going through some tough emotions but also figuring herself out and growing.
GF: I feel like “Monster” is, at its core, an ode to the “Bubbline” ship. How do you feel about your song being intimately connected to one of the most famous LGBTQ+ relationships in animation? Do you have any general thoughts on Marcy and PB, Bubbline, etc.?
HS: Oh, I’m a total fan girl of Bubbline. The whole story of how Rebecca Sugar and Muto slowly morphed it into this deeper relationship is just great. As a part of the LGBTQ community myself it really means so much to see the representation of characters like yourself portrayed in an intelligent way. Growing up I was too young to fully understand what was going on but I saw Ellen getting cancelled, and [I] heard people around me saying they’d never watch her show again after she came out. That stuff sinks in as a kid and so to have these characters who are not only intelligent, but funny, complex, and unapologetically strong who also happen to be queer is really great. I love that the story here isn’t about their orientation, but that they’re people struggling with how to be open and vulnerable in a relationship.
It feels like something sci-fi and animated shows do so well—to show that ridiculousness of limiting who a person should and shouldn’t love. Marceline is a 1000+ year old half-demon/vampire and PB was born from the Mothergum of an apocalyptic radioactive world, but you’re going to get hung up on them loving each other? It sort of brings it into perspective in a really interesting way.
GF: Do you have any other thoughts about the experience that you'd like to share?
HS: Just how lucky, thankful, and honored I feel to be a part of my favorite show, writing a song for one of my favorite characters. It’s also incredibly cool how the people on the show are so willing to connect and collaborate with their fandom. Everyone [on the production crew] was very open and a real joy to work with.
I’d like to give a huge “Thank you!” to Half Shy for agreeing to participate in this interview; she really was quite amiable! If you’d like to hear more of her music, check out her website and her Bandcamp. You can also follow her on Instragram here and on Twitter here. And of course, here is Half Shy’s awesome video of “Monster”.
#adventure time#atimers#adventure time distant lands#atdl#half shy#monster#bubbline#marceline#marceline the vampire queen#bubblegum#princess bubblegum#pb#adam muto#interview
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Cats 1986 (and Others) vs. 2016
A post I made a few months ago comparing information gathered from interviews with different Cats casts has come up again recently and I’ve heard even more interviews since, so I want to add on to that a little and elaborate on the things I’ve already said.
CW: Some of the language regarding Demeter’s backstory is a bit darker than I’ve previously mentioned
So, I’ve now heard interviews from US Tours III, IV, and V, spanning from 1986 to 2012. They’re all Broadway-based, and the Broadway Revival went in a very different direction, but the three tours were all very similar to each other.
In both the tours and in 2016, the cast was sat down before rehearsals to hear the “story of Cats”. However, this meant two completely different things. The Tour casts were told the plot of the show, who their characters were and what they were meant to be doing. The 2016 was told the story of how the show Cats was created, how ALW had the idea and made a show out of it. No mention of the story and characters. This means that the Tour casts were given useful information for building their characters, while the 2016 cast got something that was interesting but did nothing to help them do their jobs in the present. More emphasis was put on the show’s legacy than on how to actually perform it. Trevor Nunn did the 2016 explaining, I believe, and it sounds like he was on an ego trip, talking about what he did instead of what the cast was supposed to do. Trevor Nunn is one of the few people who knows how the show works, so this is quite frustrating.
Though the Tour cast was given a whole story, most of them only remembered the perspectives of their own characters. The point of learning the plot was so that they knew what they were doing. It wasn’t supposed to matter to the audience. So, everyone mainly focused on their own jobs. But, everyone knew Demeter’s backstory, because it was the first thing they were told and it caught their attention. It almost became a meme that the first sentence of the plot was “Demeter was raped by Macavity”.
The story begins with Demeter having just escaped from Macavity. He kidnapped and raped her. Though she didn’t want it, she kind of enjoyed the sex, which messed with her head quite a bit. Bomba went through the exact same thing, but because she enjoyed it, she acts like the whole thing was nothing more than an annoyance. The two react to the same situation in different ways.
Jacob Brent was either given a toned down version of the story (he mentions kidnapping, but not rape), or he chose to give a toned down version to avoid the uncomfortable subject.
The 2016 knew that Macavity and Demeter had some sort of backstory, but they weren’t very clear on exactly what happened. They decided that they’d had an abusive relationship, but that the whole thing was consensual and there was no kidnapping, because the only element of this story that the audience can pick up without context is that there was some sort of sexual relationship between Macavity and Demeter, but she’s now afraid of him.
At least one cast member said that Macavity was a rapist, but she didn’t elaborate.
This messed with Demeter’s character far more than anyone expected. The rape element honestly isn’t necessary. Demeter and Macavity had some sort of sex, but it could’ve been consensual, with Demeter enjoying the sex but hating the man. That’s actually what Gillian Lynne seemed to have implied in interviews. However, the kidnapping part of the backstory is important, because it establishes the connection between Demeter and Grizabella. While hiding from Macavity, right before the story begins, Demeter sees Grizabella on the Bad Side of Town. Due to not being a Jellicle before this night, she doesn’t know who she is, and therefore has no bias against her. She just sees this woman living on the streets, humans wondering aloud why she isn’t dead, and felt sympathy for her.
So, when Grizabella appears at the ball and everyone hates her, Demeter wants to intervene, but she doesn’t want to upset her new friends. She came to the Jellicles for protection and is afraid of them rejecting her for siding with their enemy. Still, she tells the tribe what she knows about Griz, possibly trying to convince them to be nicer to her, but it doesn’t work and Demeter just starts following the crowd.
The lyrics Demeter sings, by themselves, are musical exposition that doesn’t imply sympathy. A line like “You’d really have thought she’d ought to be dead” sounds like it could be played as an insult. The words can either mean “I’m surprising the poor thing’s still alive in her condition” or “Why can’t the bitch fuck off and die already?”. Without the context of Demeter’s backstory, Kim Faure picked the latter, when with the context, it’s clearly meant to be the former. So, Demeter’s delivery of her lines in Glamour Cat in 2016 is venomous, almost sadistic.
Later on, towards the end of act one, 2016 Demeter reaches out to Grizabella like she does in most other versions, despite the earlier delivery. What made her change gears? I have no idea.
So, there was a lot of insight on Demeter. She’s the character with the most detailed backstory, making her the closest thing the show has to a protagonist.
Another character that gets a lot of attention, as he demands, is Tugger. Many Tugger actors were interviewed. I think he’s the favorite character of the host of the podcast. Different Tuggers from different eras responded to certain topics differently. Tuggers from the 1980s were unaware that Tugger was commonly interpreted as Not Straight and that Tuggoffelees is a thing. But, the more recent the show their from, the more they’re aware of and interested in the topic. The Tour V Tugger joined very late, during the last few years of the tour. He had access to the internet and could see what the fandom was up to. He played Tugger as ambiguously bi and, though he hadn’t thought of it at the time, liked the idea of the Tuggoffelees pairing. Tyler Hanes, 2016 Tugger, was the only one interviewed who played Tuggoffelees on purpose.
Tyler Hanes was very interesting. He watched the 1998 film while preparing for the role and didn’t seem to like it very much. He wanted his version of Tugger to be his own and avoided taking inspiration from any other version. John Partridge’s Tugger and Hanes’ Tugger being so different from each other might’ve been deliberate.
But, the choreography is what really messed with Tugger’s character. The host of the podcast mentioned Tugger’s pelvic thrusts and Hanes said that he wanted to do that sort of thing, but the new choreography removed all of it. He couldn’t make Tugger as horny or sexy as he wanted to. It was a key part of the character, but the choreography just wouldn’t let it happen. The result is that a bunch of queens fangirl over Tugger, but because Tugger’s defining trait in his number is being vain and obnoxious, the reason why he, of all toms, is considering the sexiest is completely lost. He’s just a dick to everyone (except Misto) and they love him anyway.
Other Tuggers do act like assholes during the number, but it’s not the focus. The lyrics are about Tugger being difficult, but the choreography, often to a comedic degree, isn’t about that. The message of Lynne’s choreography is that DESPITE Tugger being obnoxious, he’s a sex god and that’s what matters to his fans. Blankenbuehlers’s choreography mainly focuses on Tugger being obnoxious, which is a better match to the lyrics, but it makes the character less likable.
Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The two most sexualized numbers are Tugger’s and Macavity’s. Tugger’s number is about a man being sexy. Macavity’s number has two women being sexy. Blankenbuehler redid Tugger’s number, toning down the sexuality, but he left Macavity alone completely, so it’s as sexual as it always is. Male sexuality needs to be toned down, but female sexuality is fine. This is what happens when a woman is replaced with a straight dude. I doubt it was done on purpose, but there was definitely some subconscious bias going on there.
The way the casts talk about the two choreographers is also different. Both of them are treated as the experts on the show, more like how a director is normally treated. But, how well they filled that role varied. Lynne could explain what every single move meant. Those who worked with her knew exactly what they were doing. Nobody has ever described any of Blankenbuehler’s choreography with the same detail. In numbers in 2016 that Blankenbuehler left alone, even without Lynne present at all, everything was clearly explained. Skimble actors, since Skimble’s number wasn’t altered much, describe people who’d worked with Lynne talking them through the choreography. No one talked about Blankenbuehler’s work like that. Every move of Lynne’s Jellicle Ball apparently represented something. Blankenbuehler’s Jellicle Ball looks fine, but there isn’t that level of detail.
The rehearsals of the the choreography were paced differently as well. 2016 was apparently put together in something of a hurry. Most Cats rehearsals begin with several days of the cast studying cats and learning how to move like them. 2016 devoted only a few hours to this. Gillian Lynne reportedly visited a rehearsal and was upset the none of the dancers knew how to move like cats. Cats has unique choreography in a unique cat-like style, but the 2016 team had no time to practice it, so they often come across as a bit too human. They’re talented human dancers, but they’re not very cat-like. Blankenbuehler’s choreography is often in a different, more modern urban style, that doesn’t seem like it was done with cat-like movement in mind.
I don’t hate Blankenbuehler. In behind the scenes stuff, he seems like a nice guy that the team liked working with. But, I don’t think he really understood what his role was. He was a choreographer and he did choreography. This would’ve been fine, even great for any other show, but not Cats.
Most modern musical theatre is based on opera. Characters sing about their feelings and that tells the story. The added element of dance takes the feelings of the song and amplifies them. The actors are emoting with their entire bodies in a larger-than-life way that creates an emotional intensity that audiences can empathize with. The music makes the audience feel what the characters are feeling in a way nothing else really can. Music is kind of magical. You hear a certain melody with certain instruments, and suddenly you’re happy, or sad, or angry.
This, by the way, is why going for realism in musicals is a terrible idea. Musicals don’t exist in physical reality. They exist on an emotional level that realism takes away from.
Cats rarely works like opera. The lyrics are mainly just adaptations of whimsical poems, so they don’t tell you much of anything. Memory, which features original lyrics and no dancing is an exception to this rule. In general, because they’re not dance roles, Grizabella and Old Deuteronomy have to use music and song lyrics to play their parts in the story. Jemima also does this whenever she does something connected to either one of them.
But, Cats is normally more of a ballet than an opera. Ballet tells a story purely through dance. Because the lyrics in Cats matter so rarely, it ends up working like a ballet, because the dance, unrelated to the poems, means something. It’s still a heightened reality where music invokes emotions and actors emote with their whole bodies, like in other musicals, but instead of the dance being an amplifier, it’s the storyteller.
ALW really liked a bunch of poems and wanted to put them to music. The result was a bunch of songs with a similar them but no real connection to each other. That works as a concept album, but Webber wanted a musical, an actual show where people danced to his concept album. He didn’t care about the story and didn’t expect anyone else to.
But, other people cared about the story. No one knew how to make a musical that’s not about something. Trevor Nunn added Memory and the storyline with Grizabella as an emotional centerpiece. There wasn’t a clear plot, but, on an emotional level, it now felt like something was actually happening. Gillian Lynne had no idea how to choreograph a musical about nothing, so she didn’t. She came up with her own interpretations of things and made the show about something. Several somethings, in fact. Victoria is going through puberty and discovering her sexuality. Demeter is recovering from an abusive sexual experience, with Bomba having a different attitude towards being in the same situation. The women in the story were given detailed story arcs that often revolved around their sexuality.
How sexuality is portrayed in Cats could be its own essay.
Anyway, Cats tells its story with a unique style of choreography. Because the choreographer is the story teller, Lynne had a lot of influence over the show. She was the one who knew all the details. Blankenbuehler was brought in to choreograph a show, like a normal job for him, not knowing what that would actually mean. He came in to have dance amplify the emotions in the song lyrics like in any other musical, not knowing that that’s impossible to do with Cats. The role of choreographer meant a level of knowledge and control that would normally belong to the director, composer, and lyricist. He didn’t realize that the show having any story at all depended on him.
So, he did stuff that looked cool, but didn’t tell the story, or that took the story in a direction that it wasn’t supposed to go. Tugger dancing in front of a giant mirror is funny in the moment, but that sort of narcissism, though funny, isn’t likable, and Tugger needs to be likable. He’s a major character and he helps save the day at the end by hyping up Misto. But, 2016 Tugger hypes up Misto because if feels like Misto is the only cat he truly respects. He has the same respect for Old Deuteronomy that the others have, but he doesn’t sound quite as sincere when he sings about him. He spends so much of his number antagonizing Munkustrap in particular that it’s hard to believe that he has any respect for him.
What can be learned from these interviews is that Blankenbuehler didn’t know what his job truly was and was there because someone important thought Cats would be more popular in 2016 if it was more like Hamilton and got the Hamilton guy to give it a make-over. Nunn was so proud of the show’s success that he neglected what made it successful in the first place, and the 2016 cast was rushed through rehearsals without proper instructions. Everyone tried their best, but they were all stuck.
For the most part, I blame whoever decided to have Blankenbuehler rechoreograph the show. Blankenbuehler did what he thought his job was and the cast did their jobs to the best of their ability. What really ruined Cats 2016 was an executive decision to fix something that wasn’t broken, believing if they made the Old Big Show more like the New Big Show, that would make people love it again. But Hamilton is no more like Cats than a cat is like a dog.
#cats 2016#lots of cats tours#really long post#andy blankenbuehler is bad at cats#but it's not his fault#a cat is not a hamilton#gillian lynne#don't let her legacy die with her
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TABBY | SHORT STORY UPDATES #4
In Tabby, a reclusive man who’d rather exist as a phantom than a human notices the neighbours aren’t feeding their cat, and is sucked into a world that breaks the stillness of his own.
Genre: literary fiction, “soft” noir (??)
POV: 1st person present, very observational and detached for most of the narrative
Setting: late 1940s/early 1950s, unnamed US city but implied to be Los Angeles
Atmosphere: a summer that’s sickly, orange juice, the smell of paint, shaky hands, peach skies, sunflowers, blood splatter, a cats purr, the gut feeling that something is very, very wrong
Literal Logline: this cat is my friend and he doesn’t judge me over silly little things like the murder i just committed (also i think he might be god??)
Hi I wrote a story about a cat and got way too into it and accidentally made it about murder and now it might be my favourite thing I’ve written! Lets talk about it! cw for murder and blood imagery!
general taglist ; @kowlazovdi @avi-burton-writing @ryns-ramblings @melpomeny @kitblogsthings @ezrathings @aetherwrites @bookphobe @haldimilks @alicewestwater @bookpacking @shaelinwrites @writingamongthecoloredroses @harehearts @zemnian @onlyganymede @theelectricfactory @write-like-babs @oceancold @notphilosopherstudentblog @veiliza @sidhewrites @wolf-oak @feverdreamwritings @oasis-of-you
This entire story sparked from this photo, which I couldn’t find a specific source for, but is cute and a Mood nonetheless!
My thought process was essentially “man sits on bench with cat...........and also.......murder?” I don’t know why my brain is like this!!!
I imagine this story being set in the late 40s/early 50s, but haven’t pinpointed exactly, in a suburb of Los Angeles (but this also isn’t clear in the story as of now). This used to be my go to setting when I was really into noir, and it was fun to return to that in a non-noir piece! This started out as purely literary, but now I do see some noir elements here. They’re just very subtle - nor was I intentionally trying to capture any - and the story misses some of the fundamental conventions. To me it’s almost like...soft noir? Noir lite?? I feel like it’s inherently noir and inherently not noir at the same time but I love the vibes of it a lot. There’s this “glow” to the story that I can’t exactly put into words, like a very subtle golden hour that is very tranquil and strangely undisturbed by the general chaos going on in the actual story
I took this setting, the vibes, and the idea of a character with an innate connection to this cat, plus a murder chucked somewhere in the middle and ran with it.
I wrote this over the course of a couple days, and it came very naturally! The prose is a little more sparse than my usual writing which made the process much quicker, and I’m really into this style at the moment. A lot of it is also internal thought, which y’all know is right up my alley. I really, really love the voice in this. It starts very unremarkable, but there is an unsettling undercurrent that grows and grows and it’s been very fun to blend the mundane and the creepy. This story really reignited my drive for short fiction because the trend lately has been coming up with an idea I love that just doesn’t translate on paper, but this one despite needing a good deal of work was very smooth!
I’d say this is my first successful attempt at a nameless/faceless character and it’s one of the most interesting experiences of character development I’ve had in a long time?? The only other time I’ve done this is in my story Rinse Cycle, but the narrator never really felt much like a character (which is very unusual for me), whereas the narrator in Tabby feels as fleshed out and nuanced as any of my characters with names or faces. I rarely focus on appearances for short story characters anyway, but I’ve never struggled with finding a name for a character and this narrator just Does Not want to be named. But I think that really fits him! He likes to be invisible and drift through life unnoticed, where he is merely an observer rather than a participant; so when he does get chucked into the middle of a very messy, very chaotic situation he essentially shuts down. I really like the tonal shift this creates where we go from a very detached narrative to very in the moment, very vivid and intense, like we go from 0 to 100 real quick. I don’t want to share a lot of plot details (which makes writing this a little frustrating sigh), but it ends with him committing a murder that, whilst intentional in the moment, is entirely impulsive and practically out of his control. He is not a natural killer and goes from barely being an emotional participant in his life to fully immersed in the moment and absolutely terrified by that. I’m really looking forward to digging deeper into his psychological state as I work on this draft because Boy We Don’t Have Time To Unpack All This. A quick summary of him would be though
people watcher, picks up more than he realises
living in a house he inherited from his dead father
made eye contact with a stranger and it was physically painful
quietly unhinged
doesn’t feel like he’s a person
oh no, now i have to face the consequences of my actions!
I’m trying to limit the amount of excerpts I post when it comes to short stories [because I am always basing the value of my content on prose I share which is! not healthy!], so the only writing I’m going to share is this little description that’s not very plot relevant, but is a good demonstration of this narrator’s funky little voice:
Every morning, at seven sharp, I routinely sit on the swinging bench behind my house to eat over easy eggs and burnt sausages. I still don’t understand how to cook meat. Behind me, cars murmur and sputter into the city, housewives chatter from their separate square gardens and I do not exist in the same reality as them. I am boxed in by off-white picket fence. The fence dividing my neighbours and I – a saffron coloured house with sunflowers bordering the perimeter – is painted pinkish red like an infected tongue. Every morning, I routinely think, that I do not know what’s stranger: how the red jolts the sun house’s otherwise harmonious existence, or the way the job was never finished. It’s not as if the painter died, because if the painter died there would be a corpse; perhaps blood spatter would darken against red wood, perhaps paint would pool out of the dropped can and mimic the presence of an exit wound.
Y’all might be wondering, where does the cat fit in all of this? And the answer is it’s complicated! In terms of form, we bounce between observations/interactions of the cats behaviour and the “main plot” of the story - which is to do with the rather unhinged new neighbours disrupting our neighbours unremarkable life. Thematically, the cat definitely symbolises a lot of things and opens up a lot of conversations that I still haven’t polished because well, we’re on draft one and I was focused on some funky Cat Descriptions. Some fun ideas include the distinction between human and animal, how capitalism is impeding on our chances to live a fulfilled life, and the idea that all humans do is overcomplicate everything. It’s presence also acts as a grounding technique for the narrator, since he so easily detaches himself from the rest of the world. The writing started with a scene of the act killing a mouse and how clean and simple it all is that I’m lowkey obsessed with, and is definitely some non-subtle foreshadowing for what comes later.
I like to joke that the cat is God because sometimes the narrator says some weird shit like, how the Earth stops orbiting the sun when the cat goes to sleep and how the cat doesn’t need to worry about predators because it hasn’t invented any. So the cat is not officially “God” but like,...,,It Might Be
Quickly adding this to the end but! Your girl finally has a (working title) for her collection! I’m not ready to share it yet because I’m still not 100% on it, I feel it matches the stories thematically but not always tonally, however it captures the core idea that I’ve been following so it’s good enough for me. This was a really important step because as much as I tried I could Not Visualise a collection at all without a title, which is v annoying because titling a collection is the worst!!! I was fine just writing short stories and letting them exist but I really wanted to build them as a cohesive collection as I went, and now I really like where it’s going - it’s definitely got a long way to go but I feel like I’ve finally managed to take control of it and steer it into a direction that reflects what I enjoy to write. I spent a lot of months clinging onto the collection I started in late 2018 before The Great Writing Hiatus Of 2019, even though it really didn’t resonate with me anymore, so I’m very happy to feel like I’m now on the right path and I feel the collection really shows my growth as a writer this year! This is definitely not set in stone, but I have a lot of fun imagining the potential order of the stories and right now it looks like:
[Some of these are stories unfinished, and some of them are finished and I just haven’t talked about them because I am the Worst at remembering to write short story updates, but tbh I’m thinking of just talking about them all briefly in a big post about the collection when I write a proper intro for it in the future]
We love to see it! I’m hoping to put a lot of time into this collection in 2021 and get some submissions rolling too (I had the goal of submitting at least one story by the end of this year and I! Don’t know if that’ll happen but January definitely). I’m likely going to be taking most of the year out of uni due to the whole global and mental turmoil rn [also I’d have to apply for writing masters atm and that is NOT happening lmfao], so I’m v v excited to have some extra writing time and see where this all goes!
#atlastracking#am writing#short stories#writeblr#i am once again posting at an odd time when my dash is ~dead~#also playing around w how i format these posts as always
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hello, i just recently read berserk and i am absolutely blown away. im so glad to have found your blog, you have made a lot of in depth analyses on griffguts and honestly i have a lot of trouble comprehending griffith's and gut's relationship and feelings toward each other post-eclipse but i feel like you clarified a lot of things for me and im so grateful! i also wanna ask smth in regards to guts and casca but character limit soon so ill do it in another ask. just wanna say i appreciate you!
idk if its just me being ridiculously biased but i cant rly see the guts/casca ship? like i can tolerate it because i feel like it was written to move the plot in a certain direction/character development and not for the sake of romance but i always feel like guts was just... there. i mean when you compare the way he thinks abt griffith to casca in the golden age arc, he obviously reveres griffith so much, and casca is just... there. i really enjoyed their moments and thought they were cute but
with the sex scene i always just saw it as them coping. i did like it in how it explored guts's sexual trauma and it mostly seemed like guts and casca were friends doing it for the sake of coping rather than out of love and desire for each other. not to mention judeau who kept trying to push them together... but then post-eclipse, it seems like guts is so in love w/ her and thats why hes heartbroken, and not bc they were close friends and that he just cares for her as a fellow hawk member
idk maybe im missing something, i would love to be enlightened bc i rly scratch my head when i see people describing it as an amazing love story and a romantic ship when to me it comes off as less like trying to portray a passionate love b/w two characters and more as, this is necessary for guts's character development and motivation in regards to griffith. esp when i feel like guts and griffith's feelings for each other are just so intense, even if its more "subtle" than an outright sex scene
thank you so much! I'm v glad my blog helped clarify some stuff about the story for you, I appreciate you letting me know <3
well if you want to be enlightened about how Guts and Casca is actually super romantic deep down you've come to the wrong place lol because you've mostly described how I feel about their relationship.
I completely agree that during the Golden Age their relationship felt very much like two friends hooking up. The fact that Judeau had to push them into it seems really telling to me, there are strong indications that they're both rebounding from Griffith, as soon as Griffith re-enters the picture they get weird and jealous, after they have sex Guts calls his sword all there is for him and invites Casca along in as non-committal a way as you can, Guts decides independent of Casca to stay with Griffith instead of leaving with her just as Casca decides the same, I also want to shoehorn in a link to this thing I wrote lol, etc.
And I actually don't see any difference after the Eclipse tbh. I actually wonder which translation you read, because I know at least one of the scanlations out there has Guts talk about how he loves her a few times post-Eclipse while the Dark Horse translation never does.
I think Guts' relationship with Casca after the Eclipse is largely based on obligation. It's actually kind of striking to me how unromantic it is.
Like during the Conviction arc he doesn't stop everything he's doing and decide to save Casca once he realizes she's in danger. He goes to check on her, finds her missing, then sits down in Godo's cave and debates with himself for two chapters before deciding to try to find her. And he only comes to this decision after comparing leaving Casca behind to leaving Griffith behind in the snow, and thinking of her as the last remnant of the Hawks ("this last feeble flame.")
I think to Guts she represents everything he threw away when he left the Hawks, and saving her is essentially a chance to better himself and try to make up for it. I don't think that's Guts' only motivation for saving her and then taking her to Elfhelm, I actually have a post here where I wrote a list of all the reasons I think Guts has if you're interested, but I do think it's the most important one.
And man after he saves her and returns her to Godo's, right before the Hill of Swords?
To me this excellent page - Casca mirroring a child, Griffith looking Like That, Guts' attention torn from Casca because Griffith looks Like That - just screams that Casca is Guts' responsibility while Griffith is Guts' desire. Whether that's revenge or latent attraction or probably both l b r, Griffith is the dude Guts wants to be pursuing and Casca is the person Guts is stuck with.
Even when he sexually assaults her it's all about Griffith lol, it's not even framed as, say, Guts being so attracted to her he can't help it or anything like that, it's framed as "do this and you'll get closer and closer to Griffith."
After learning her mind can be restored he potentially starts thinking about her more romantically, like there's subtext there when he watches Casca with Moonlight Boy on the beach, eg. And even that reads to me as Guts trying to distract himself from his "obsession" with Griffith.
I think Guts wanted to get back together with Casca after getting her sanity back for the same reason he had sex with her the first time - as a distraction from confusing and painful feelings. In the most recent chapters we saw that it didn’t work out and now he’s swinging his sword again, frustrated, wondering what the hell he’s supposed to do now, which in itself shows that he wasn’t trying to selflessly help Casca because he loves her, he mainly just needed something else to focus on while trying to kick his Griffith addiction.
SO yeah, basically ia that their relationship doesn’t seem romantic pre-Eclipse, but I also don’t think there’s much of a romantic element post-Eclipse either. I felt like it was fairly consistent throughout.
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From "The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya V."
Let's talk about Koizumi Itsuki.
(These aren't new thoughts necessarily; I just wanted to expand on my tweets on this subject in one place in my very own unrolled thread.)
In 2020 I finished a rewatch of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya from beginning to end, in blended chronological order. Speaking honestly, and from a relative emotional distance, season two of this show blows. It is especially cruel to watch S2 right after S1, because S1 is so lively and entertaining. There are some unique ways in which the show feels dated, but one thing has always stood out: Haruhi and Kyon have a uniquely (for anime) natural-seeming chemistry with each other. You're never in doubt that these are two people who will keep each other entertained and on their respective toes. Haruhi is, of course, in a line of great charismatic and bulldozey female characters, and there were many such characters that came after her, but she remains a tour de force of design, voice-acting, and writing. She, and Kyon's relationship to her in turn, was magnetic, even if it was a magnet for dislike and frustration, as she became in S2.
But enough of that. In my last rewatch, what really stood out to me is Itsuki. It's a shame that S2 became so frustrating and hard to watch, because the Sigh arc (my absolute LEAST favorite in the show) ends up doing a lot of really interesting character work for Itsuki. In the final Sigh episode, Itsuki brings up a theory that has haunted me for years: that little!Mikuru was created by her organization specifically to appeal to Kyon. As Itsuki points out, she is childlike, clumsy, and submits entirely to Haruhi's bullying. Perhaps, then, when Haruhi says that Mikuru is moe, she doesn't mean it in the abstract--she means that Mikuru is Kyon's moe (or maybe the reverse?! Maybe she is perfectly Kyon's moe because Haruhi considers Mikuru to be the height of moe).
Here's an obvious statement: Itsuki is little!Mikuru's exact opposite. Mikuru poses a target of jealousy for Haruhi, while Itsuki encourages Kyon to express his feelings for Haruhi. Mikuru is unable to explain anything about her organization or what is happening in any given moment; Itsuki overexplains. Mikuru is a pawn given inexplicable missions in her organization; Itsuki may in fact be the leader of his Agency, even though he doesn't advertise it.
By the logic of Itsuki's own theory, that should theoretically mean that Itsuki turns Kyon off. But here is, maybe, the less obvious extrapolation: in being little!Mikuru's opposite, Itsuki is actually exactly like one other character in the show--big!Mikuru. He is adult!Mikuru but in high school boy form: secretive, suave, powerful in ways that little!Mikuru could never be, helpful to Kyon (but maybe not always in the ways that Kyon wants him/them to be), submitting to Haruhi, but in an entirely different way than little!Mikuru. And, just like adult!Mikuru, he is entirely unavailable as an object of attraction, even if he has the same gravitational pull as her.
I think it's no coincidence that Sigh features both Mikuru at her most moe, her sexiest, her most vulnerable, and also Itsuki at his most weirdly queer-coded villain-esque. Though Itsuki cannot actually be presented as an object of attraction, the show lets him do the next best thing: it makes Itsuki put on his most adult!Mikuru cosplay. In Sigh V, he shows up in clothes utterly unfitting for a high school student. He calls Kyon out at night. They go for a walk and they talk about strange hypotheticals involving mysterious organizations, a future and a past that Kyon cannot know about and may not ever know about, all while weird sexy music plays and a couple of drunk adults do... whatever the hell it is they're doing. At the end of it, Kyon is left with no real answers, but is given a simple mission that involves Haruhi. Is this not Bamboo Rhapsody/Disappearance, but with Itsuki in adult!Mikuru's place? When Yuki in Sigh V says that Koizumi Itsuki and Asahina Mikuru's theories can never coexist, she is unintentionally saying something more: that they can never coexist, just like adult!Mikuru and little!Mikuru cannot remain in the same plane.
As Mikuru's counterpart, Itsuki has a dangerous sex appeal, one that unnerves Kyon. Itsuki's presence threatens to destabilize the balance of the Haruhi-Kyon-Mikuru/adult!Mikuru triangle, by being yet another version of the Mikuru type. To keep Itsuki from throwing the whole thing out of whack, he is constantly being nerfed by the story: by being male and thus turning off Kyon, by himself being attracted to Haruhi and thus a potential (though laughable) rival, and finally in Disappearance by simply, elementally, not being himself anymore (no longer useful, no longer a member of the SOS-dan, no longer containing secret knowledge and secret power). Itsuki's appeal to Kyon is so powerful that he, more than any of the other characters in the SOS-dan, even though he's a guy and thus technically out of the running by default, must become an object of disgust and ridicule to Kyon, because the alternative is a closed-space-at-the-end-of-the-Melancholy-arc level catastrophic event.
That is, the same kind of catastrophic event that occured when Haruhi noticed that Kyon was attracted-- to Mikuru.
#the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya#the melancholy of koizumi itsuki#itsuki is from a long line of characters with powerful gay energy#whose energy is so powerful and so gay that the show had to squander their appeal
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