Doodle comic based on Sieg and Mari's connection dialogue

It was very funny had to draw them

Hello! I've been reading Sink or Swim, and I am absolutely enthralled in the depth of your writing. Which brings me to my first of several questions... How long have you been writing? I find Pietro's backstory personality very complex. How he presents himself... Handles obstacles... It's intriguing. How long did it take to create Pietro's... well... life? Did you have to do a considerable amount of research? And for my last question, how long does it take you to caption a scene? Are you editing the dialogue right until you post?

HELLO~!

First off thank you for this message! I'm very happy you're enjoying the story!

In regard to your first question: I began writing at a young age. So young, that my earliest memory of writing is sitting on my grandmother's lap and telling her exactly what to write down in Microsoft Word. (I figure these were probably stories about Simba the Lion) Eventually, I told her I wanted to figure out how to use Word on my own and the rest is history. But yeah, I've always been big on writing and reading, there was always a story of some kind in my head. By the time I was ten, I was on FF.Net posting very shitty fanfics. But that's the thing about writing, you know? The more you do it, the more you read, the more you even do something like observe films and shows for the narrative value rather than strictly looking at it as entertainment the better of a writer you become. I also made the decision back in high school to become a journalist (something I don't think I want to be anymore, but I digress) still, having the responsibility of writing about real events, or about real people, definitely influenced my writing, as well. Especially when it comes to the way people speak or may explain something.

Admittedly, writing a story in the mafia genre isn't easy. A lot of research is involved (ranging from reading biographies to just watching films, but I also love the video game Mafia because their worldbuilding is pretty good😂) and I often take mental notes of things so I can understand/apply similar topics with my characters.

In regard to your second question: We've hardly scratched the surface of who Pietro is as a person! I planned to do a few edits of him as a kid as well as a "mini-story" of how he ran away from home at sixteen but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Pietro is a very new oc - he was made this year, so understanding him/developing him has been a push-and-pull process. Before Sink or Swim started, he was originally meant to be way more antagonistic, but then I found myself liking him. I thought of Pietro and Rosie hooking up and the drama that could entail of, but then I thought, "what if this guy cared about her?" And boom, I found myself jotting out a bunch of outlines and concepts.

However, because Pietro isn't born in America...er, Simerica, I've found myself reading about Sicily a lot. Since I view that as the real-world counterpart to Tartosa. The norms, the lives of farmers, the way organized crime functions there because Pietro's family suffered greatly due to the local mob. But that's all I'm saying about that!

In regard to your third question: Captioning a scene can take forever. I'm not sure why because all I do is copy-paste pre-written text. But the time it takes to write out a scene can vary depending on its length, relevancy, and tone. Small talk is horrible to write, just plain horrible. Banter is usually quick. But when you have scenes like Rosie reading Pietro's email - that took forever because not only am I writing out Sheila and Pietro having a serious conversation, I had to write out the details of the email. Similarly, in my last post, when Pietro more or less confesses that he's an affiliate of the mob: that conversation took three rewrites before I felt it was good enough to put on caps. The first conversation draft was rough, I kept zoning out. The second was a little easier, but I found myself rearranging the conversation to better flow. And the third edit was the easiest because it was like I was 'smoothing' things over and ensuring the flow was decent. Sometimes though, once I paste dialogue onto a cap I do slightly tweak it to correspond with the expression the sim has. But again, thank you for all these questions! I enjoyed answering them!

More Than Machine

I spent most of yesterday playing around with ChatGPT since its impact has been making rounds in the headlines. I can’t deny that it does amazing in some specialized tasks like writing SEO copy, and I wanted to know how it would fare in more creative endeavors. 

The assault of machine learning on once thought unassailable institutions of human ingenuity such as writing, art, and music, has presented cracks in some long held beliefs in the uniqueness of humanity. We might scoff and point to one too many fingers as evidence of a machine’s inability to address things that only a human can, but given the exponential development of machine learning, the day in which we can readily identify the “soul” in a work may soon be ending much more quickly than we realize. It is both an exciting and exceedingly frightening time to be in.

I’ve never been one to shy away from technology. Back when I was kid, I used a typewriter, literal imprinting of ink on paper, to write my stories. Today? I use a mix of voice dictation and typing on my iPad with my documents stored on the cloud, so things have changed quite a bit when it comes to my process. AI seemingly looms as the next frontier. While it’s no secret that our capitalist overlords are salivating at the thought of rendering large swaths of the working population obsolete, perhaps we can reclaim some of our autonomy through those very same tools. 

I’ve always dreamed of creating my own anime, and it may not be a pipedream that a single individual can produce the art, design, animation, voice, and music all on their own through machine-learning. Putting aside, of course, the ethical breach of how these datasets are acquired and the deprecation of art, reduced to a mere data point in an array of many.

With all these things in mind, just how sophisticated is ChatGPT today and how worried should I be as a writer that my ass would soon be replaced by a bot? 

I started out my experiments with some simple prompts. I asked it to write me a love story with elements A, B, and C. To my surprise, it was able to write out a self-contained and complete narrative from start to finish. In mere seconds, it managed to accomplish more than 50% of the dreck that adorns the pages of FanFiction.net. 

But that thing we call “soul” was distinctly missing. Now, not to say that anything written by a person is imbued with this nebulous quality, but to put it simply, what ChatGPT wrote was boring, cookie-cutter, and generic. Now detractors will immediately point to this as an abject failure of machine learning, but I decided to change up my approach. The age old adage of how much you get very much applies here. The results are only as good as your prompts. One of the things I wanted to test was its memory.

I established characters, assigning them traits and idiosyncrasies, and then put the characters in situations where these elements would collide. The bot spit out perfectly coherent scenarios with all the variables provided. I was very impressed by the results.

I would ask for dialogue, conversations, monologues, and descriptive passages. On its own, these small snippets wouldn’t be very valuable, but it can serve as building blocks to something greater. I was able to bounce ideas off the bot and it would occasionally provide me with inspiration.

So I continued changing my prompts, keying in on small details, while zooming out and asking for possible overarching themes and ideas. To sum up my conclusion: ChatGPT can be an amazing writing tool. It almost feels like having your very own personal editor. 

Don’t expect it to surprise you, but therein lies its value, because it is a treasure trove of tropes and clichés, and half of being a good writer is knowing what those are and how to use them well. I can easily see myself resorting to this bot if I’m ever stuck on a writer’s block. 

Perhaps its greatest value is in research, figuring details about locations, cultures, and other fields. Say, for instance, you’ve set a story in a different country and you have no idea about its customs, or perhaps one of the characters is in an occupation and you don’t have much clue in what their day-to-day entails. ChatGPT can fill in those gaps. 

While I’m sure that some of the details won’t stand up to scrutiny from true professionals, it would very much pass the smell test for the majority. For the purposes of writing fiction, it is more than enough.  

In regards to FanFiction, ChatGPT is like the ultimate lore master and wiki guide. If there’s something you need to know, you can just ask it and it may reply with startling accuracy. For funsies, I asked it to proofread some badly written stories and it managed to make it readable. This stuff is crazy, yo.

There is one caveat though, ChatGPT is prohibited from giving you anything sexually suggestive, so don’t expect it to be your instant lemon/lime generator. Y’all gonna have to do that the good ol’ fashioned way.

To answer the question, ChatGPT is not creative enough to stand on its own, but can be a huge boon to writers who know how to use it well. Should my ass be worried? It’s hard to tell at the rate machine learning is developing, but I believe my writer’s ass should be good for at least a couple more years. 

Famous last words.

Maybe?

The Most Beautiful Moment in Life <I’M FINE>

     BTS Universe Story Highlights, pt. 1 / 4

» pt. 2

Introduction

BTS Universe Story, a mobile game published by Netmarble, was released on September 24, 2020. While the majority of the app is essentially a sandbox and engine for users to create their own interactive stories, it also includes official and canon BU content. The first eight segments were introduced between the release date and December 2020, gathered under the title The Most Beautiful Moment in Life <I’M FINE>.

“I’m Fine” is half of the I’m Fine/Save Me ambigram introduced in the Love Yourself era. Notably, all of the BU content available in the game so far falls between events of the webtoon Save Me (also called HYYH0 in its logo) and The Notes 1—chronologically, that is, while bearing in mind that time resets to the morning of 11 April Year 22 whenever SeokJin fails to avert a tragedy among his six friends. I want to assure anyone who is unable to play the game that you are not missing any new, major plot beats from the overall BU narrative. Instead, the stories provide more insight into the motivations and consequences of SeokJin’s decisions in the earlier time loops, as well as more depth to individual characters and their circumstances.

The goal of this guide is to summarize each of the eight stories and highlight noteworthy details, especially if they are not yet present in other BU media. Within each story (which I often refer to as an arc, due to their character-focused nature), episodes must be played successively, but the stories themselves can be played in any order. I will present them over a series of posts in the order they are listed under the <I’M FINE> heading. The Prologue and NamJoon’s arc are free to play; the rest are paid content. Please note that due to the app’s Terms & Conditions, I will not include in-game footage here. The images in this guide are sourced from the official trailers/videos and the live action MVs as appropriate.

Content warning: contains references to death, suicide, suicidal ideation, child abuse, domestic violence, blood, homicide, depression, trauma, PTSD

This guide contains major spoilers and includes references to other BU media

Do not repost, copy, or quote without permission

Game Mechanic

Before diving into the summaries, I would like to address the primary mechanic of the game: the user’s control of character choices at designated moments in the stories. It’s a primary marketing point that the player can influence the progression of the narrative, with a frequent in-app tip also declaring, “stories’ endings can vary depending on your choices.” The latter is not strictly true—and it cannot be true due to the structure of the game. Choices are presented within most (not all) episodes, but each episode is an isolated unit: episode 2 provides the same content regardless of what you choose in episode 1. Since the consequences of your decisions are not cumulative, each episode reaches the same ending, and each decision inevitably rejoins the “main” story path (effectively reducing the script size).

So what is the point of this mechanic? While the system is not nearly as complex as what major platform titles are capable of nowadays (I suspect due in large part to the story creation portion of the game), it does foster a sense of interaction with the narrative that isn’t present in static visual media like comics or film. The episodes with choices also have incentive for replay to discover the impact of changing a character’s dialogue or action. Sometimes the differences between the outcomes are inconsequential, but other times you unearth new details, interactions, or memories that are missing in the other path.

I say this partially in reaction to all of the comments and tweets I read for the game trailers and even Smeraldo Book twitter’s choose-your-own-adventure style teasers with The Notes 2 excerpts released last summer. Many users expressed excitement, through words or memes, about finally being able to give the boys the happy ending they deserved. I don’t fault anyone for wanting that happy ending—I wish for it, too. But no matter what the rather overzealous marketing has claimed, I don’t believe that the canon ending of BU is ever meant to be in the audience’s control. But I do feel that this mechanism fits the BU narrative. It echoes the “countless loops” SeokJin has experienced in an effort to save his friends, the choices he must make at every crossroad, and the butterfly effect those actions have on all of their lives. I think it is reasonable to interpret the simple branching paths in the game as alternatives SeokJin has explored across multiple loops in his struggle to find the “right” way forward. I’d love to hear if you have theories of your own!

Prologue

The prologue is a brief episode introducing SeokJin’s repeated struggle and failure to save his friends. He wakes up yet again in his bed on 11 April Year 22, the beginning of the time loop. After reflecting on the tragedies that keep befalling the others, SeokJin realizes that he has only tried to fix the problems he can see. He wonders: “Have I tried to understand the root of my friends’ misfortunes? How much do I really know about my friends? Maybe I was never brave enough to confront their real scars and the worlds they’ve been living in. But I need to do it. Because it may be the key to saving them all.”

How to Offer a Hand

In this story, SeokJin attempts to prevent NamJoon’s arrest after he gets in a fight with a rude customer at Naeri Gas Station, his place of work. The first episode opens on the night of 11 April Year 22 with NamJoon curling his fists, glaring as crumpled bills lie untouched on the pavement. (The money looks similar to the shot from the I Need U MV.) SeokJin reaches for his shoulder, but NamJoon shrugs him off and strides away to punch the customer who deliberately dropped the bills for him to pick up. The gas station owner runs over at the customer’s furious shouts and orders NamJoon to apologize. He refuses, and police officers soon arrive and charge him with assault. No one listens to SeokJin’s protests that the customer started it first. The man sneers as NamJoon enters the police car. “Do you even have money for a settlement? Hey, you’re done for.” NamJoon is sentenced to prison again, and SeokJin hears glass shattering before the loop resets.

Rising from his bed on the morning of 11 April, SeokJin reflects on his failed efforts so far. He has hit the customer’s car, called for NamJoon in the middle of the incident, and stopped the fight himself, the latter of which caused his friends to avoid him later. The fight has even escalated; the details are unspecified, but the audience is provided an ominous shot of SeokJin speaking to a police officer alone at the scene. NamJoon is not the kind of person who would normally respond to that kind of provocation with his fists. SeokJin realizes that he cannot merely stop the fight but must discover and fix the true cause of it.

With this in mind, SeokJin heads to Naeri Gas Station during the day and tries to engage NamJoon. This is their first time meeting since they both returned to Songju, although SeokJin has experienced it in many loops already. “It’s been a while,” he greets (as he does at the end of the Blood Sweat & Tears Japanese version MV). Before SeokJin can dig deeper in their conversation, NamJoon is called away by his boss. SeokJin enters the small employee break room which serves as NamJoon’s living space when he’s not at the container, hoping to find some clues about his friend’s life. SeokJin locates something bundled in newspapers. If the player chooses to open it, he sees a strange shard of glass inside that may belong to a car or motorcycle headlight. He continues on, finding the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan and a notebook. SeokJin hesitates over the invasion of privacy but decides to read it since he needs all the information that he can gather. The journal entries detail NamJoon’s daily life since returning to Songju: his work at the gas station isn’t too bad despite the occasional rude customer; he purchased a book and hopes to get more in the future; he picked up a second job at a wedding hall to help catch up on bills; his brother NamHyeon got in trouble again, leading to more expenses; and his dad’s health has worsened, with hospital bills after an emergency surgery rising to levels that the family cannot afford. SeokJin knew that NamJoon was the de facto head of household due to his father’s illness but was unaware that it was to this degree. He feels sorry for NamJoon yet is also impressed by his maturity, for NamJoon never writes how difficult his situation is.

NamJoon arrives and asks what SeokJin is doing in the room. If the player chooses to answer “reading” instead of “just sitting there,” SeokJin privately observes that the conversation flows more easily when they talk about books. NamJoon says he must leave and declines when SeokJin offers to wait for him there. SeokJin knocks over a pile of books along with money and receipts as he stands. He thinks it is unusual that NamJoon picks up the books before the money. The books seem to be more than a hobby to NamJoon, holding special meaning. Walking to his car, SeokJin wonders if it is pride or determination not to falter that keeps NamJoon from journaling his grievances. He realizes that money is a constant source of frustration and misery to NamJoon, and that’s why he can’t stomach being insulted over the customer’s dropped money. SeokJin’s new plan is to prevent NamJoon from picking up the money. He also calls Palgok County Hospital and offers to pay the patient bill for NamJoon’s father. Anticipating that NamJoon will be angry if he finds out, SeokJin says the payer is Songho Foundation.

That night, SeokJin returns to the gas station with the excuse that he forgot to fill up earlier. The luxury car arrives with a honk, and NamJoon hurries over to assist. He shakes with anger when the customer drops the money on the ground. “Why aren’t you picking it up? You don’t want it? What’s with that look? Pretty arrogant for a part-timer, aren’t you?” goads the customer. SeokJin intervenes. Whether the player chooses to have him advise NamJoon not to pick it up or to order the customer to pick it up himself, the end result is the same. SeokJin asks the customer, “Why are you harassing a pitiful part-timer?” The customer drives away, and something about NamJoon seems off. His face is expressionless, not mad or humiliated. “SeokJin, you…” He stops. “Never mind. Thank you for your help.” The words sound difficult for him to speak.

SeokJin believes that he has saved NamJoon, although this ending feels sloppy. He continues on in the loop to rescue JungKook and later YoonGi, but uneasiness plagues him. Though he meant to help NamJoon with his actions, SeokJin wonders if he hurt him instead. On 5 May Year 22, he returns to the gas station and follows NamJoon when he leaves work early. NamJoon enters a bookstore, and SeokJin sneaks in after him to watch from afar. He overhears employees talking about NamJoon, worrying that he might dirty the pages of the book he’s perusing. NamJoon is too absorbed in the book to notice one of them calling for his attention. SeokJin recalls a memory from their school days when he found NamJoon reading alone in their classroom hideout: he asked why NamJoon read so diligently, and his friend explained that he found it comforting to empty his thoughts of everything else while focused on the book. In the present, SeokJin wonders how he forgot how much books mean to NamJoon. He sacrifices some of his food and transportation budget to afford them, but they enable him “to endure the weight of the world he’s forced to bear on his shoulders.” After realizing this, SeokJin wants to apologize for carelessly sympathizing with the reality that NamJoon has weathered alone.

The next episode is from NamJoon’s perspective, revealing his excitement over being able to purchase a book for the first time in two months. He wants to buy two but can only afford one. The employee at the register sighs and asks why he leafed through a book he wasn’t going to buy. NamJoon apologizes, and she mutters, “So dirty.” He notices his reflection, clothes worn and smelling of gasoline, and realizes she’s talking about him, not the book. He tries to shake off these depressing thoughts, but he is still not accustomed to this treatment despite experiencing it regularly at work. As NamJoon begins to exit the store, the security alarm goes off. The employees demand to check his bag despite his insistence that he didn’t steal anything. Their certainty of his theft angers him. NamJoon allows them to look through his bag, and they are suspicious of the like-new book in it which he brought from home. One begins to call the police until SeokJin appears, vouching for NamJoon by saying he saw everything. The employees accept that the alarm malfunctioned and excuse their suspicions as a mistake.

Outside, SeokJin asks NamJoon if he is all right. NamJoon is thankful but wonders how SeokJin materialized right when he needed him. “How’d you find me here?” he asks aloud. SeokJin explains that he happened to notice him while walking through the neighborhood. NamJoon wonders if it’s because they said goodbye on a weird note last time. He thanks him and turns to leave. SeokJin calls after him. “I’m sorry. I wanted to apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you that day at the gas station. It was a mistake to have called you pitiful. If my rash actions hurt you, I’m really sorry.” NamJoon accepts his apology, believing it to be sincere, and says that things would have turned out a lot worse if SeokJin had not intervened. Thunder rolls overhead, and NamJoon uses the impending rain as his excuse to depart. He declines SeokJin’s offer of a ride and runs home, feeling his friend’s eyes on him.

Before he can settle down to read at home, NamJoon receives a call from his cheerful mother. She thanks him for paying off the entire hospital bill. NamJoon is perplexed and asks what’s on the receipt, since he didn’t pay it. His mother wants to leave it be, but he insists that they investigate so they don’t get in trouble or sued. She reads that the Songho Foundation is credited as the payer. NamJoon calls the hospital, introducing himself as the guardian for Kim YoungMin, but they can’t transfer him to the administrative department at this time. Disappointed, he looks up the foundation’s website, unable to recall why it sounds familiar. He wonders why a scholarship foundation in the city would get involved with him. Spotting photos of a recent launch ceremony on the site, he recognizes a few people: Songju High School’s principal, the familiar-looking face of the foundation’s chairman, and SeokJin. First, NamJoon forces a laugh, and then it’s difficult for him to breathe. He thinks that SeokJin really had pitied him at that moment. The only thing keeping NamJoon going is the idea of getting through life on his own strength. Why does he have to live like this?

The last episode opens on 5 May back in SeokJin’s perspective. He is confident now that he has saved NamJoon, although it occurs to him that a better alternative may have been to simply pick up the money himself instead of stepping forward. (This decision is enacted in a later loop and depicted in the Euphoria MV.) While reflecting on what comes next to save his other friends, he receives a text from NamJoon. “What’s your account number? I’ll pay you back for the hospital bills. I don’t need your help. I’ll handle my concerns on my own.” Heart sinking, SeokJin wonders how he found out. With a sense of foreboding, he tries calling NamJoon, but no one answers. SeokJin texts him back, pretending that he doesn’t understand, and tells NamJoon to call him. SeokJin’s second attempt connects while he’s gathering his car keys to visit the container. “That’s enough. Just send the account number over text,” NamJoon instructs. SeokJin coaxes him to talk for a moment, and NamJoon asks flatly, “Are you going to apologize again?” SeokJin attempts to salvage the situation, but his friend turns cold when he insists that NamJoon is misunderstanding and that he just wanted to help. “So, why? Why are you helping me?! Yeah, you’re always a good person. You’ve done nothing wrong and I’m the one misunderstanding.” SeokJin apologizes again. NamJoon refuses his request to meet in person. “No, I thought maybe there was a reason for everything you did… But I guess I misconstrued it. I’ll pay you back, so I’d prefer if you stopped contacting me.” Long after the call ends, SeokJin stands holding his phone, feeling that the glass is going to break at any moment. He wants to believe that it’s not over, but hope is slipping through his fingertips.

The episode finishes in NamJoon’s perspective. On 8 May and 9 May, he accepts part-time delivery work and reflects on his three jobs. Whenever he thinks he’s at his breaking point, he focuses on his new goal of returning SeokJin’s money. On 10 May, NamJoon wakes up to his buzzing phone and is called in to work. On a scooter, he passes by a bus stop and notices graffiti. (This is the same bus stop, with matching graffiti, that appears in the Highlight Reel.) Mesmerized, he wonders if it’s TaeHyung’s. As soon as NamJoon looks up, the scooter’s brake fails, and he crashes. The shattered glass on the cold pavement reminds him of the headlight shard and the kid who looked like TaeHyung. (So the piece of glass SeokJin saw in April was really a memento NamJoon retrieved from the scene of the crash in the mountain town, where the delivery boy whom he privately called TaeHyung died. This event is described in NamJoon’s 17 December Year 21 entry in The Notes 1.) NamJoon’s vision grows blurry, and the distant sound of an ambulance doesn’t come any closer.

The arc concludes there, but it obviously marks another reset for SeokJin. It is interesting to note that in this failed loop, NamJoon suffers the same fate that he narrowly avoided in the snowy mountain town before returning to Songju.

Please stay tuned for the next Highlights post featuring JungKook and YoonGi!

This is the “author’s note” I found on the amazon pages for the pretty hardcover Night World books.  My memory is that it was just there, the book-blurb at the top by the cover picture, was this. 

Like a bonehead I just copied the text without grabbing a screencap or noting the date.  The amazon page now has the publication date is December 2016 so this bit of optimism was just before Ms. Smith vanished.  Of course we don’t know when it was written or whose idea it was.  Was Strange Fate really finished or was someone just feeling hopeful? 

NIGHT WORLD Dear Readers, It’s hard to tell you how much the re-release of the Night World books means to me. It has allowed me to come full circle, to complete a cycle that began with Secret Vampire. It has allowed me to finish Strange Fate, which grew into an epic that included roles for almost every Night World character. And Strange Fate allowed me to show the origins of the Night World, the apocalypse that threatens to destroy it, and even a possible future in which the evil side of the Night World prevails. I am often asked how I conceived the idea for the Night World series. It began when I wanted to write stand-alone novels that would combine horror and romance. But I wanted more: I wanted to do a series in which this Night World—a vast, secret world that exists within the everyday world—would slowly reveal itself to readers. That’s why the first book is called Secret Vampire: the inhabitants of the Night World, composed of vampires, shapeshifters, witches, and other supernatural creatures I wanted to invent, are hidden from humans. A vampire is necessarily a secret vampire … because of the laws. I also wanted to write about a new kind of forbidden love. That’s not easy—most good forbidden love topics were old by Shakespeare’s time. But with this series, I could create the possibility of forbidden love simply by saying that the laws of the Night World prohibit a Night Person from falling in love with a human. But I still needed one more ingredient. I needed the rise of the soulmate principle to actively force Night People to fall in love with humans, no matter how hard they fought against it. Voilà! Then it was just a matter of making up interesting characters and setting them loose in my head to see what they would do. I often begin like that: sitting in a quiet room and searching for a sparkle in my mind that could become my new heroine. Sometimes it’s easy and a whole character shimmers before me. Sometimes I only get the faintest firefly glimmer of a new girl, and I have to hold my breath and see if that glimmer will materialize into a three-dimensional person. Heroes and anti-heroes are easier. It’s just a matter of picking one that will be a true soulmate for my heroine. I have a whole collection of these characters in my mind, all trying to crash the party. And they’re usually bad boys. The settings and in-depth plot development are another layer of work. But often the characters just run off and do what they want, and I have trouble keeping up with their antics on my keyboard. One thing I always do is look carefully at my characters and plot from all angles to make sure I’m not plagiarizing a book or series that I may have read before. That’s just normal procedure for ethical authors: we make sure our stories aren’t too much like another story we might have read. Of course, there are many ideas that have been around since the Babylonian myths, and many characters that are archetypal. But, really, it’s almost impossible to take many things from the body of another author’s work—say, someone else’s character(s) or plot or story device—without actually intending to do so. I can’t imagine wanting to do that. I wish I could say every author felt the same. Poppy North is a character I examined very carefully. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t too much like Bonnie McCullough, another petite character of mine from The Vampire Diaries. I didn’t even want to plagiarize myself ! But Poppy convinced me that she was a tough little squirt who by high school had already planned out her future, which is very unlike Bonnie. Poppy was going to marry her mysterious friend James—she just hadn’t informed him yet. Also, unlike Bonnie, she had a fatal flaw in her small body. In Secret Vampire, I knew I was dealing with a serious issue: terminal cancer in a high school girl. So I did a lot of research before deciding on a type of cancer that would be truly inoperable and give Poppy only a month or two to live. I went to several hospitals to talk to nurses in oncology wards. I always brought toys for the hospitalized children, but the whole subject was so heartbreaking I was almost afraid to tackle it. Once I did, though, I found that Poppy was even stronger than I had imagined. In the book, she makes the only choice she can to go on living, and she never looks back. Poppy is one of my favorite girls, and she ushers in Ash Redfern, who quickly became one of my favorite bad boys. Ash has a murky past of womanizing and … well, more womanizing. Ash returns in Daughters of Darkness because he has been ordered by the leader of all vampires, Hunter Redfern, to bring his three runaway sisters back to their cloistered vampire island. But when Ash locates his sisters, he runs straight into the human stargazer Mary-Lynnette, and the sparks begin flying—literally. Mary-Lynnette is a character I made up when I was a kid, and I’m always surprised by how many people like her and Ash together. Mary-Lynnette spends most of the time expressing her feelings for Ash by kicking him in the shins, but their dialogues are some of my favorite passages in the whole series. Ash, in turn, escorts Quinn into the series. And Quinn (who does have a first name, though he rarely uses it) is one really scary guy. A vampire since 1639 A.D., Quinn is sharp, cold, humorless, and heartless. Unlike Ash, who is mainly guilty of an incredibly long series of one-night stands, Quinn enters the series as a human slave trader. That is, he provides vampires with young girls, and he doesn’t ask questions about what happens to the girls afterward. This led to a problem: How on earth was I going to redeem this villain enough to make him someone’s soulmate in The Chosen? I really sweated over that. My first task was to make Quinn more sympathetic. The best way to do it seemed to be by telling a bit of Quinn’s own tragic story: how he falls in love with sweet Dove Redfern, and how her vampire father decides to make Quinn his heir. Dove’s father is Hunter Redfern, one of the most important vampire leaders in Night World history. This is the same Hunter Redfern who, nearly half a millennium later, sends Ash to drag his sisters back home. The same Hunter Redfern who sends his daughter, Lily, after Jez in Huntress. The same Hunter Redfern who tries to turn Delos into a merciless killer in Black Dawn. But, as a boy, Quinn doesn’t know anything about the Night World, and he is deeply in love with gentle Dove. When Hunter makes him a vampire by force and then when Quinn can’t save Dove from being killed, Quinn’s heart freezes over. For four hundred years it accumulates ice—until he meets Rashel. That’s another favorite scene of mine: when Rashel, a dedicated vampire hunter since (guess who?) Hunter Redfern killed her mother, encounters Quinn. A group of Rashel’s fellow vampire slayers have captured Quinn and plan to torture him, and Rashel is left alone to guard him. Quinn, feeling old and tired despite his youthful appearance and great power, gives himself up for dead—and is a little glad to do so. Rashel, however, can’t stomach the idea of torture. When Rashel talks to this most-hated vampire and hears his story, she deliberately sets him free. And that astonishes him. But it’s the soulmate principle working its magic. I loved making two such strong-willed enemies succumb to the silver cord that connects them. I especially loved hearing Quinn warning Rashel not to let him go—and then protecting her when her comrades arrive back in time to see that she’s let him loose. I really loved writing about Quinn and Rashel’s soulmate sequences. As Rashel enters Quinn’s mind, she sees “thorny scary parts” but also “rainbow places that were aching to grow” and “other parts that seemed to quiver with light, desperate to be awakened.” She begins to think that people ask so little of themselves. If the mind of a slave trader can look like this, an ordinary person must have the power to become a saint. It is with this revelation (and much penance on Quinn’s part) that Quinn is redeemed. That’s the thread that binds all the novels together: redemption. The possibility of a second chance. Everyone has choices to make, but even the most evil of vampires can choose to atone and be redeemed. It may not necessarily stave off punishment in this world or the next, but redemption is possible. I’ve been asked who my favorite characters are, and the answer always changes because it depends on the book I’m writing. Right now my favorites are three characters from Strange Fate. As for my favorite couples in the published books? Morgead and Jez—I suppose. Who would find themselves at greater odds than a vampire gang leader and his onetime superior, a vampire who finds out she is half human? I learned some cool martial arts moves as a bonus for writing about them. Then there is Keller, one of my all-time favorite heroines, and Iliana, the beautiful Witch Child, and Galen, ruler of the shapeshifters: the love triangle in Witchlight. Keller starts out seeming brusque and businesslike, but the love of Galen and of the unselfish Iliana help to heal her inner wounds. And I can’t forget Thierry and Hannah, and Circle Daybreak. I created Circle Daybreak because the Night World witches had only two clans: Circle Twilight and Circle Midnight. Those, like Thea in Spellbinder, who belong to Circle Twilight are not-so-wicked witches (that is, they don’t want to exterminate all humans like the darkest witches, those who belong to Circle Midnight), but they are still wicked enough. So what was to be done with all these new soulmates, when Night World law said that they must be put to death? Someone had to make a place for them where they would be safe, and I decided it was Thierry, one of the oldest vampires, and Hannah, his Old Soul soulmate, who has lived hundreds of lifetimes without ever reaching the age of seventeen. They are the ones who revive Circle Daybreak, where humans and Night People can forget about past tragedies and concentrate on a brighter future together. Although Thierry is an old vampire, he isn’t the oldest vampire. There is one older, the one who Changed him. She provides another thread that binds the series: the pitiless Maya. Maya is the first vampire, the witch who finds the secret of eternal life—and chooses to use it for evil. But there will be plenty more about her, including a look at the young Maya, her sister Hellewise, and their mother, Hecate Witch-Queen, in the upcoming Strange Fate. And so now I’ve come full circle, back to Strange Fate. But I can’t finish until I add the other joy that the re-release of Night World has brought me. It’s brought me into contact with you by e-mail. Night World fans write so many intelligent, articulate, courteous, exciting e-mails! I love to get messages from “old” fans, who say my works “got them through high school.” Thank you for them! And messages from new fans, who say they have just read all my reissued books—and are impatient for more. Thank you! And the messages that simply demand: “When is Strange Fate coming out?” Thank you, too! With a full heart, all I can say is thank you, thank you, and thank you again! I never thought I would have a chance to write an open letter to all Night World fans, and I can only wish that you knew how grateful I am … for this second chance. Sincerely, (LJ Smith signature image) P.S. I love to get e-mail, letters, and messages. Visit me at ljanesmith.net!

1-3: Turnabout Transfix (2/2)

The article in the paper under the list of missing persons had the wrong name before "Wright, age nine," and a lump formed in Miles's throat.

"That's not his name," he tried to say. It came out as a croak. "We told them his name was Phoenix. I know we did."

Ray, sitting beside him at the dining room table, looked disgusted but defeated. "They added it as a footnote," he pointed out. ""Responds to Phoenix"... Nick's not a dog."

Miles wanted to hunt down every copy of the paper and throw them all into the trash can. His best friend was missing, and people were calling him the wrong name because he wasn't there to stop them. It wasn't fair.

Miles looked to Ray as though he had an answer to right this horrible injustice. Ray looked as tired and frustrated as he felt, chewing on a thumbnail as he thought deeply.

"We can head down and talk to them," he offered, after a long pause.

That was what Father would have done. He would have marched right down to the office where they printed the paper and demanded a retraction. But nobody was going to take a freshman law student and his newly adopted nine year old seriously.

"It's worth a try," Miles responded, because a defense attorney should never give up hope.

⁂

Staying up late to scrutinize the series he already knew by heart for clues of some sort was a mistake, and Miles knew it. His eyes began to droop only partway through the season as Maya snored against his side, and he was vaguely aware he was becoming less and less alert every time he had to pull his head back up from his chest.

It didn't occur to him that he shouldn't be letting himself doze off in the presence of company.

His sleep was never restful. Every night, his subconscious was forcibly yanked back to the day everything changed.

Some nights, he found himself reliving what he was certain was a memory. The dialogue never changed, the action never shifted. A heated argument in the elevator, a foolish bid to stop it, a single gunshot, and that horrid, high-pitched wail of agony that he knew belonged to one of the people he'd lost that day.

Other times, he dreamed not of his father, but of Phoenix.

Those dreams changed, but they remained the same nonetheless. Whether running through the streets with Larry, or through the backyard of his home, or through the hallways of the courthouse, the same thing always happened - Phoenix disappeared. Maybe he ran too far ahead, or lagged too far behind, but Miles's friend was suddenly nowhere to be found, and he felt painfully, crushingly alone.

His subconscious had decided to grace him with the former that night, and when he woke up with "father" on his lips and sweat on his forehead, a rumpled-looking Maya was staring at him in undisguised concern.

"...are you o--"

Miles turned away from her and said nothing, effectively stopping the conversation before it began.

Maya was silent, and when Miles glanced back over, her gaze was fixed on the television, which was still playing through the old episodes of Steel Samurai. She lacked the enthusiasm they both shared for the show, however. She seemed deep in thought.

"...you don't wanna talk about it?" she asked quietly.

He and Uncle Ray never talked after nightmares. One would get up to find the other in the kitchen nursing a cup of tea, and silently join them, knowing the other was thinking of the same thing but not having the courage to voice it aloud. Saying it gave it form, and Miles refused to shed any more tears over something he knew full well was his fault.

"No," Miles responded, sharp and blunt all at once.

"You wanna talk about something else, then?" Maya glanced sideways at him. "I used to talk with Sis after I had nightmares. It helped get my mind off things."

Miles hesitated. "Something else sounds nice," he said quietly.

"How about court today? Prosecutor von Karma was hopping mad, huh?" Maya let a grin stretch across her face as she leaned towards Miles. "She looked like she wanted to tear her hair out. Or maybe yours."

"That woman needs to see a therapist," he muttered.

"I think we all do, My."

"...you've got me there."

⁂

As the trial wore on throughout its second day, Sascha von Karma continued to act stranger and stranger. Before the judge could reprimand her for being far too harsh with the witness, Cody Hackins faltered and lost the confidence Miles had been working hard to build up about his witness account, a terrified look in his eyes. To his surprise, von Karma went ashen and actually stumbled back a little, like she hadn't meant to push a little boy nearly to tears.

Honestly, with her disposition, Miles wouldn't have thought she would care. But here she was, clutching her side, eyes blown wide with something like fear. Something in Miles's stomach turned over. Was he actually feeling sympathetic for this ferocious woman?

But it wasn't just him. Mia beside him (that had been a jolt to his nervous system -- he hadn't been able to see her clearly the last time Maya had summoned her) had her brow furrowed in concern as she stared at the prosecution. "I haven't seen her make a face like that since..."

Miles glanced at her. "Since... what?"

"...don't worry about it. Focus on the trial here and now, Miles." Mia gave him that mysterious smile that meant she was withholding important information from him. He knew it well. He huffed at her, and she huffed back.

Despite Mia's testimony, von Karma had that same look on her face as Vasquez took the stand the next day, wide eyes flicking between the witness and the defense bench. She was strangely silent, not offering a single protest as Miles proceeded with the cross-examination.

But he couldn't afford to wonder about it. Vasquez was clever and tight-lipped, and his attempts to wring her testimony dry and find something to pin her down were fruitless. She and the judge had both gotten irritated at this point, and when Miles hesitated, scrambling to find some point he hadn't pressed, the latter decided he'd had enough.

Miles cursed inwardly as the judge raised his gavel. Vasquez adjusted the pin of her shawl, self-assured in her victory. This was the end. He was prepared to accept defeat.

He couldn't have possibly prepared for what happened next, however.

"OBJECTION!"

Miles jerked his head up. Beside him, Maya gasped in surprise.

Across the room from him, left arm outstretched in a frantic point, was a frazzled, trembling Sascha von Karma.

She stared blankly at her own hand, as though it had moved of its own volition. Then she jumped - actually jumped - when the judge demanded to know the meaning for the interruption.

"Right! Uh. Um. The reason I objected," she babbled, "is because... uhh..."

It was the least composed Miles had ever seen her. He was bewildered. What did she think she was doing?

"...I don't have a reason," she admitted, shoulders slumping.

"Er..." The judge blinked owlishly at her. "Very well. Now--"

"OBJECTION!"

The poor judge looked as baffled as Miles felt. "Miss von Karma?"

"I... I request that the witness testify again!" she blurted out, digging her fingers into the desk. She looked disheveled, stray hairs having slipped out of her ponytail to poke out at a very odd angle. "I, um... I want to hear about... the, uh..."

Vasquez snarled with impatience. "Why are you badgering me? I'm your witness!"

"I'm inclined to agree!" the judge added. "I see little point in making Ms. Vasquez repeat herself..."

Miles looked at Maya. Maya looked at Miles. What?? Maya mouthed at him. Miles shrugged helplessly.

von Karma floundered. "Uh... yeah... great point... ummmmMMM! I want to-- I wish to hear about the body discovery! What happened after you found it?"

That hadn't occurred to Miles. But what could that possibly reveal? And why was von Karma risking sabotaging her own case by asking after it? She practically had the win in the bag, and after Miles had humiliated her so thoroughly after their last clash in court, she had no reason to let this continue.

What was going on?

⁂

The relief of a not guilty verdict and the butterflies of being in such close proximity to Mr. Powers yet again were a powerful combination that filled Miles's mind with fuzz and forced out any less important thoughts, like von Karma's odd behavior or Maya tugging on his coat.

"M-My! Hey! Miles! Kilometers! Little My!"

"H-Hrm?"

Maya pointed to somewhere behind him. "I, um... I think you're in trouble."

Miles turned, and flinched when he found himself nose to nose with a furious prosecutor.

"You," von Karma snarled, "should not be expecting a repeat performance of today! You're lucky I took pity on you! You got that?!"

Her voice raised to a yell as she spoke, and her burning eyes pinned Miles where he stood. He leaned away, but she just leaned forward.

"Don't you dare be expecting a shred of mercy from me from now on! You may be the son of that loathsome excuse of a defense attorney, and the favorite of that voluptuous wretch--"

Now, Miles was not going to sit there and take that. "You should never speak ill of the dead, Miss von Karma," he snapped, straightening his spine and making her flinch away. He met her glare with all the intensity he could muster...

...and then paused.

How curious.

"Wh... What? What is it?" von Karma's hastily plucked brows furrowed as an edge of nervousness worked its way into her voice, and Miles realized he'd spoken aloud.

"Your eyes," he continued hesitantly. They were heterochromatic - one brown, one blue. "They reminded me of someone. An old friend."

von Karma inexplicably blanched. She looked distant for a moment, and her left hand dug into her right side, just below her ribcage. "You... wh..."

Then she shook herself, and that boiling anger was back full force. "Why are you getting all nostalgic on me, you-- ugh! You listen closely, Ed... E-Edge..."

Again, she went pale, looking ill. Miles was starting to worry after her health at this point, despite the fact he was in the middle of being screamed at. "Er..."

"You... you listen closely, Worthless!" She thrusted a finger up towards him, nearly jamming it up his nose with how close she was. "These eyes... you'll see them and know nothing but despair once we meet again, you hear me?! I'm going to crush you, and I'm going to enjoy it!"

Without waiting for a response, she turned on her heel and stomped off, seething.

Maya coughed weakly. "Uh. Wow. What was that all about?"

Miles stared after Sascha von Karma, his gut clenching with inexplicable grief. "I have no earthly idea."

⁂

You failed again.

You can't even blame him this time.

This is all your fault.

Victory was within your grasp.

All that matters to a von Karma is perfection.

And yet you gave him an opening.

A von Karma should be swift and merciless.

You're weak. He's gotten into your head. You can't stop thinking about him.

Even his name makes you sick.

Miles Edgeworth...

...

...why does it feel like you're forgetting something?

Destiny 2 Season of Dawn Funny Dialogue Part 2: Saint - 14

With the return of the greatest Titan to ever fight in for the light, what would he think of what the city has become? 

Saint: You are the one called the Drifter, yes? Drifter: The one and only. Saint: Do not go causing any trouble for the people here. Drifter: No need to be so hostile friend. I'm only here to promote Gambit for spry Guardians such as yourself. Saint: Believe me, this is far from me being hostile. Saint: (Steps closer to Drifter)  Saint: Hostile will be me using you as kindling to stay warm one cold night. Saint: (Glares at Drifter) Saint: I know your kind, but I know you have also helped Guardians. Saint: So this time it is only warning. Next time, it will be promise; "friend".  

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Devrim: So you're the guardian everyone's been clamoring about. Saint:  You must be the Gie Lovos Devrim: Pardon? Saint: Forgive me, it's what I heard the Fallen outside call you. Devrim: You understand that snake hissing? What does it mean? Saint: "Pretend Sniper" Devrim: I most certainly am not!  Saint: They were talking about this human that sits in a tower with a sniper rifle and never fires a shot. Devrim: That's nonsense, I shot some Fallen just this morning. Saint: Really? May I see your rifle then? Devrim: Of course, just handle with care. Saint: (Takes rifle, Inspects it) Saint: I doubt you killed anything with this bolt action. Devrim: It may not be as fancy as your guardian weapons, but old fashion weapons are just as good. Saint: Indeed they are, but I was referring to the fact the chamber has been rusted shut and can not load a round. Devrim: Well this is embarrassing. Saint: No doubt Gie Lovos

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Saint: Ello Ms. Holliday. Holliday: Hey Saint. What can I do for ya? Saint: I would like a sparrow with guns. Holliday: Why would you want one of those? Saint: Yours do not have guns. Holliday: Adding guns is a special order, and I just can't give everyone a custom ride. Saint: Yet you design one to look like christmas sled. Holliday: Well that's just- Saint: And one that has giant animal skull on the front easily the weight of a small child. Holliday: Now hold on now- Saint:  And don't think I forget what you made for Shaxx last solstice. (Both turn to see Shaxx on his tiny Sparrow scooting by) Shaxx: Thank you again Ms. Holliday! Shaxx: Why I haven't felt this much fun since I was kidnapped and made to read Shakespear! Saint: (Shouts after him) You would go faster if redjack pushed you like itty bitty child. Shaxx: (Shouts back) When you finally complete a mission in under three years then you can talk to me about being slow.

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Drifter: Bit odd to hear you being the greatest titan of all time when all you have is one gun. Saint: I am greatest titan of all time because I only need ONE gun.

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Saint: I have been told that you know much of the Vex. Asher: Of course I am you walking time paradox! No one can compare to my knowledge into the depths of the Vex mind. Saint: I would argue that I am just as knowledgeable as I have fought them for many centuries in the depths of the infinite forest. Asher: Do you not see my arm?! (Holds up Vex arm) You dare think you could be my equal? Saint: I notice your other arm is of the awoken, does that mean you are also a master of knowledge with the awoken? Asher: Don't be preposterous- Saint: Then why does being part Vex make you a master of knowledge of the Vex?

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Ikora: When you have some time I'd like you to sit down and tell some of the new guardians your experiences in the infinite forest. Ikora: Your years fighting the Vex would be a great boon for them to learn from. Saint: I....I do not wish to speak of that time. Ikora: I understand. I do not wish to bring up bad memories of the Vex. Saint: It was not just the Vex I fought all those years. Ikora: Meaning? Saint: Osiris could explain it better than me, but time does not work properly in the forest. Saint: A second here becomes a lifetime in there. Saint: When the Vex failed to defeat me, they made Fallen. Saint: When the mound of Fallen dead proved no match for me, the Vex made Cabal. Saint: When the burning wreckage of their war machines lay strewn across the ground, the Vex made Hive. Saint: When I impaled the last of their knights on their own swords they made something far worse than anything I had ever faced before. Ikora: What could possibly be more terrifying to fight then what you slew before? Saint: (Looks at Ikora) Saint: They made guardians......they made you all.

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Zavala: It's good to have you back; the city will need all the guardians it can get its hands on. Saint: Thank you. I have actually been meaning to speak with you for some time now since my return. Zavala: What do you wish to speak of? Saint: I believe you need to leave the city more often. Travel the system, fight foes on different worlds, stretch your wings and fly so to say. Zavala: There isn't a corner of this system I have not fought on nor enemy I have not faced in battle. Saint: I respect that, but that is not what I mean. Since my return I have noticed you are more...what's the word.....obsessive, with the wall. Zavala: Come again? Saint: I have yet to see you anywhere other than atop the wall, and the people I have spoken to have told similar stories. Saint: I must admit it is slightly disturbing that whenever I have seen you it has only been atop of this wall. Zavala: I must remain here and be ever vigilant so something like the Red War never happens again. Saint: Hmm. Were you not atop the wall then as well when it happened? Zavala: (death glares)

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Saint: I've heard you have been selling knock off copies of my helmet. Spider: What can I say? You guardians have a rather interesting sense of fashion. Spider: I take it you're here to claim a piece of the profits? Saint: No, I wish to purchase all of the ones you have left. Spider: Oh? This was certainly unexpected. Spider: When I was told the nightmare of Mercury was coming to pay my humble establishment a visit, I thought the worst. Spider: Pray tell, why the sudden need? Saint: I want to get back at Shaxx for not letting me enter his silly crucible by making sure every guardian he does let in will bare my face. Spider: Now that, is so deliciously evil I'm tempted to offer a discount.

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Saint: So the traveler was damaged? Zavala: It was during the Red War. Saint: But there is more underneath it? Zavala: From what we can tell there is far more. Saint: (claps hands) Saint: So Traveler is like Russian doll! I knew it!

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Saint: I've been meaning to ask you Osiris, but what happened to Mercury? Osiris: The Vex took control of the entire world and changed it. Saint: I meant why is the planet nearly cracked in half? Osiris: Oh. The Red Legion brought a super weapon called "The Almighty" that partly destroyed the planet. Saint: So the weapon is harmless now? Osiris: Not really. There are cabal still on board. Saint: That is concerning. Osiris: Hardly. There's also a Hive Dreadnought floating out by Saturn that's been there for years as well. Saint: That is even more concerning.  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saint: It is good to see you all again. I hope you slew as many foul birds over your break as I did. Holliday: I didn't know you ate turkey. Saint: Why would I eat turkey? Holliday: You just said you slew birds over the break. Saint: Yes. Big ones as huge as a tank with jaws filled with razor sharp teeth. Holliday: Think you may have misunderstood the meaning of the break. Saint: Nonsense. Shaxx explained it to me very clearly. Saint: "Slay more birds than your friends and family, then revel in your victory." Holliday: Wh- Saint: (Holds up hand at seeing Shaxx walking by) One moment. Saint: (Shouts to Shaxx) 38! Shaxx: (Stops and shouts back) 47! Saint: Birds the size of sparrows don't count you rusty showman! Shaxx: They might as well for you you walking museum!

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(Saint leads fireteam through Leviathan Raid and enters Calus throne room) Calus: (Clapping hands while on couch) Calus: Marvelous! Simply Marvelous! Calus: I knew from the mome- Saint: AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Saint: (Starts running and leaps through air at Calus and headbutts him, knocking Calus, Saint, and the couch over) Guardian 1: Wow. Say what you want about him but the man can jump. (Saint 14 stumbling to feet holding Calus head in hand) Saint: FRIENDS LOOK! HE WAS A MACHINE ALL ALONG! Guardian 2 to Guardian 1 in whispered voice: Did he not know that already? Guardian 1: (Shrugs) I don't think he'd have cared either way. Guardian 2: He's going to freak when he sees what's below.

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Shaxx: Ikora told me what you went through in the forest. Shaxx: (rests hand on Saint's shoulder) Shaxx: You truly deserve the title as strongest Titan for your struggles. Saint: Thanks....It...means much to hear you say that. Shaxx: Tell me, did they make copies of me as well? Saint: Plenty. Shaxx: And you defeated them without question? Saint: Indeed. Shaxx: Absurd! What if one of them had been the real me?!? Saint:  I could easily tell none were the real one. Saint: None of them had right smile. Shaxx: (Laughs, pats saint on shoulder and lifts him up) Shaxx: Come! Let us celebrate your victories against my imposter's! Saint: (Stands up and joins him) Saint: You know at first, they made them with two horns. Shaxx: Ha! It is unsurprising they keep failing when they can't even capture my glorious visage properly!

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Ada-1: Greetings guardian. Ada-1: What can I help you with? Saint: I would like a gun. Ada-1: Can you be more specific? Saint: I would like a very big gun.

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Saint: I wonder if I have mail. Postmaster: You have, 3972, messages and, 9086, packages. Saint: Oh boy....

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Saint: Why is everyone worried about the moon once more? Ikora: It has been overrun by nightmares. Saint I fail to see how that is troubling since it already was when I vanished. Ikora: No, I mean nightmares brought back to life in service of the hive. Saint: The hive can be pretty nightmarish in their own right but they go down just the same. Ikora: I think we're speaking of two different nightmares. Saint: Unless it is trying to get Banshee to pay back money he owes me when he was Banshe-34 you do not know the definition of nightmare.

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Saint: Good to see you again Eris. Eris:............. Saint: What is wrong? Saint: You look like you have seen ghost. Eris: (Angry face, storms off) (Surrounding crowd looks awkward) Saint: What? Did I say something wrong?

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Saint: Why do you not let the people out of the city? Zavala: Because the world is still full of dangers. Saint: It was full of dangers long before this wall you love ever went up, but that did not stop people from venturing into the unknown. Zavala: The risks are simply too great. We can not afford to lose any more people. Saint: I understand my friend, but that does not give you the right to turn their home into a prison. Zavala: No, you don't understand. The red war- Saint: Yes, yes, the Red War. That seems to be your justification for many things as of late. Saint: You forget humanity has fought many bloody wars before the red war and that did not shackle our legs from moving forward. Zavala: And each one has nearly brought about the end of our species. I will not risk that again. Saint: Life IS change. The more you fight against that change, the farther you will be left behind by the world around you.  

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@noneofthismakessensetome KHUX is really hard to explain, and I don’t really understand it myself despite watching every update, but the most that I can glean from it is that it’s set in the past in a place called Daybreak Town, right before the Keyblade War. (How far in the past is unknown, not helped by the fact that time travels differently in each World, but it was definitely before Xehanort was born).

There was this guy named the Master of Masters, and he’s supposedly been fighting a war against darkness for a very long time. (No idea if that’s the elemental concept of darkness, or Darkness the character). He’s the person who invented Keyblades (or one of the people. KHUX is extremely vague and likes to throw little doubts in just to make you question everything), and he gathered six apprentices (all named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins). Luxu, aka Xigbar, is one of the six. The only other relevant one is Ava. 

Five of these apprentices (not Luxu) become the Foretellers, leaders of these different Unions of ‘Keykids’ (which I don’t think is an official term, but that’s what the fandom calls them so I will too) who wield Keyblades against the Heartless to collect Lux (which is some sort of light energy). Each of them is also given a Chirithy Spirit created by the Master of Masters. 

The Master of Masters, aka MoM, can see into the future, because he put his ‘eye’ into the Keyblade No Name (Master Xehanort’s Keyblade), as well as other Keyblades like Riku’s Way to the Dawn and Vanitas’s Void Gear (if that is the name of Vanitas’s Keyblade...). Because these ‘eyes’ exist in the future, the MoM is able to ‘see’ into the future, and writes all future events down in the Book of Prophecies. He then gives copies of the Book of Prophecies to the Foretellers (not Luxu), but leaves out a certain page. He then sows distrust through the five by telling them one of them is a traitor.

The Foretellers all mistrust each other, and through a chain of events this leads to the Keyblade War, where all the ‘Keykids’ kill each other and the World is rift apart. The only ones who survive are the Dandelions, a special group of ‘Keykids’ the MoM told Ava to form, who hide in a Data version of Daybreak Town. The Dandelions have their minds wiped of the Keyblade War by the Chirithies and believe they are in the real Daybreak Town, except for the five Union Leaders, who were chosen by the MoM and given Books of Prophecy by Ava (more on that in a second...). 

In the latest KHUX update, the MoM says that it will take multiple lifetimes to defeat darkness (or Darkness), and this is probably why Luxu (Xigbar) has been hopping from body to body for all these years (centuries?). The MoM gave Luxu the Black Box (without telling him what’s inside) and No Name (to be passed down through the generations of Keyblade Wielders and eventually wind up with Xehanort before going back to Luxu). By having No Name be passed down into the future, the MoM can see through its ‘eye’ and write down future events.

So about the Union Leaders of the Dandelions, the ones the MoM told Ava to pick were Ephemer, Skuld, Brain, Lauriam (Marluxia), and Strelitzia. However, (as we saw with the most recent update) a shadowy being named Darkness killed Strelitzia and gave Ventus her copy of the Book of Prophecies instead. Ventus was in some kind of trance or had his memory wiped, and didn’t remember Strelitzia’s death until now. 

Darkness has also been helping Maleficent, because for some reason after her defeat in KH1 she wound up in the past in Data Daybreak Town, and Darkness wants to help her get back to the future (KH2) with a time machine. (The time machine, called the Ark or the Lifeboat in different translations, is the same machine used by Terra-Xehanort to send five-year-old Kairi to Destiny Islands, although in that case she was transported through space, not time). It seems that Darkness wants some of the ‘Keykids’ (Ventus, Lauriam (Marluxia), Elrena (Larxene), and Skuld (who is probably Subject X)) to be transported to the future, and somehow Maleficent will serve as their Waypoint. (I don’t understand how time-travel in KH works, nor why Darkness wants to send the ‘Keykids’ to the future, but that’s the best explanation I can give).

Anyway, the whole murder mystery about ‘who killed Strelitzia?’ has been the biggest fandom mystery in KH for a long time (I’m talking like, three years). And unfortunately, it’s still not solved because it’s still not clear just who/what Darkness is. Some believe that Darkness is Ava, who is actually the ‘traitor’ trying to stop the MoM’s plan, because she believes his plan will end in the destruction of the World (which it kinda did). This is because Darkness takes the form of Ava to speak to Ventus after killing Strelitzia, and tells him that he’s a Union Leader (when really he’s the ‘imposter’). Ava is known to have the power of illusion, which is why some fans think she may have taken the form of Darkness to disguise herself. (Just a note on all this, I can’t remember exactly what all the fan-theories about Ava are, and I may have gotten something wrong here. But the basic gist is that some fans believe Ava is Darkness).

Then there’s the second theory, which unfortunately in my opinion is the more likely of the two. We know from Re:Mind that a being calling itself Darkness is hiding within Ven’s heart, and in KHUX Brain says that Darkness (or darkness) can hide inside people. Combine this with Vanitas’s speech to Ventus in Re:Mind, about how he and Ven ‘aren’t the same like he thinks’ and how he was just ‘hidden inside Ven until Xehanort tore him out’, it seems to imply that Vanitas is actually Darkness (or a piece of Darkness) who was hidden inside of Ven, and not the dark half of Ven’s heart like we’ve believed for the past decade. Basically, if this theory is true, it completely re-writes Vanitas’s entire character, motivations, and origins, while also retroactively making him a child-murderer, and I’m sure you all already know how I feel about that.

Now, literally nothing outside of Re:Mind implies that Vanitas is Darkness, and in fact the scene in the Keyblade Graveyard with Vanitas, Ventus, and Sora right after the scene in Re:Mind seems to contradict this theory, as well as every piece of material on Vanitas released both before and after Re:Mind including his character file, so this all may be just one big misunderstanding, but that doesn’t dissuade the fact that there is literally an entity calling itself Darkness inside Ven’s heart. I can’t even begin to imagine how it got there, unless 1. It’s Vanitas after returning to Ven’s heart after his defeat in BBS or 2. Darkness somehow got into Ven’s heart while he was sleeping in Castle Oblivion. 

This is all pure fan-theory, but since the Vanitas in KH3 is a time traveling version of Vanitas from the past, it could be that the ‘real’ Vanitas is still living inside Ven’s heart (like how Roxas was still inside Sora’s heart), and if the ‘real’ Vanitas is now calling himself Darkness, then it’s possible that Vanitas was either lying about being half of Ventus this entire time or is only now just remembering his memories of being Darkness. Either way, if Vanitas really does turn out to be Darkness, then I can only imagine his entire personality will be overwritten by Darkness’s and Vanitas will basically cease to exist as a character. As in, he won’t just be dead, he’ll have never truly existed in the first place. 

And that, my friends, is why I’ve been in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and depression for the past year, and the reason I haven’t updated A Heart and a Half, because I’m having trouble reconciling the Vanitas from the BBS Novel (an abused, neglected child manipulated from birth to be a weapon) with what is potentially his true identity as Darkness (an ancient, child-murdering demonic entity). Once again, it’s still just a fan-theory... But a very plausible fan-theory.

Anyway, the third theory is that Darkness isn’t secretly some other character, but instead is exactly what it says it is— a sapient amalgamation of the elemental force of darkness. Darkness tells Maleficent that she should think of it as an ‘old friend’, leading some to believe it’s someone Maleficent knows from the future. However, it could be that Darkness ‘knows’ Maleficent because it itself is the embodiment of elemental darkness, and Maleficent is a darkness-user. In that case, it could be said Darkness is a ‘friend’ to all people who use darkness. 

Unfortunately, before anyone says this line of dialogue proves that Vanitas can’t be Darkness because Vanitas never met Maleficent, Vanitas did meet Maleficent... in the BBS Novel. In the BBS Novel, Maleficent asks Vanitas if he’s a ‘friend’ of Xehanort’s. Vanitas hesitantly says yes (because his abuser isn’t exactly a friend to him), simply because he and Xehanort are allies. He then asks Maleficent if she’s ‘friends’ with Xehanort, and she says yes (in the sense that they are allies). In this roundabout way, it could be construed that if Vanitas is Xehanort’s friend, and Maleficent is Xehanort’s friend, then that makes Vanitas Maleficent’s friend, which still fits in with the theory that Vanitas is Darkness if Darkness is Maleficent’s friend.

Even if we ignore the (technically non-canon) BBS Novel scenes of Xehanort kicking twelve-year-old Vanitas in the face and beating him with his Keyblade until he cried and leaving him isolated in a wasteland for weeks on end, and just go off of the games’ canon, the story of Ventus and Vanitas can still be seen as both literal and metaphorical child abuse, with Ven being the part of the victim who represses the trauma and Vanitas being the part of the victim who lashes out. Of course, if Vanitas does turn out to be Darkness, then he will be retconned from a victim into a scheming child-murderer just as evil as his abuser and the demon/abomination/empty creature that Xehanort always said he was! (Maybe that’s why Vanitas had such a mental breakdown in Re:Mind... he realized every horrible thing Xehanort ever told him about himself was true...). Which is why, as you can imagine, this theory causes me a lot of stress! 

Anyway, that’s the story of KHUX and the reason why I turn into a big ball of anxiety every time a new update occurs. I literally wouldn’t care about KHUX at all if Ven wasn’t in it, but he is, and everything that happens to Ven in the past is something that will effect him and Vanitas in the future, whether Vanitas is confirmed to be Darkness or not. We now know that Ven has had even more trauma forced upon him than he’d had with Xehanort, and I now have a suspicion that the reason Ven refused to create the X-Blade by using the darkness in his heart in the BBS flashback scenes was because he remembered what darkness and/or Darkness did to Strelitzia.

I really can’t imagine why Ven is in KHUX other than to connect him to this Darkness character in some way. Some fans still claim that Ven is the one who killed Strelitzia because they think he was ‘possessed’ by Darkness, but it seems pretty clear that Darkness was the culprit while Ven just stood there in a trance. Even so, I suspect that Ven blames himself for what happened anyway, even though it wasn’t his fault. I don’t know how this will play out with the future/current Ven. Is he suddenly going to remember his past and think he killed Strelitzia? Why? For the angst? Is he going to realize that Vanitas is (or is a part of) Darkness and therefore the murderer of some random girl Ven barely knows? Is Darkness just going to pop out of Ven when he’s in the Realm of Darkness with Aqua and Terra and... I don’t even know. Fight him? Gloat? Enact his evil scheme of destroying the World because you see, Vanitas never really wanted his light back, he never really wanted friends (page 378 of the BBS Novel), he was lying the entire time! Yes, he’s totally this evil monster who just wants to kill people because he’s evil~!

...Alright, I’ll stop. But seriously, I don’t know where this story is headed, guys. This update basically had the MoM tell us to stop trying to figure things out or theorize and that we shouldn’t want to know everything that’s going to happen, so who knows. Next update might throw us a curveball and reveal Darkness was secretly... idk Pete the entire time. He’s Maleficent’s friend! Or maybe it’s just Xehanort again, who knows. I just feel... really tired of KH, and I don’t really know where I’m going to go from here. Hopefully this is the last time I rant about this subject, though, because I really feel like I’ve already said all there is to say.

I want to finish A Heart and a Half, but I also feel hampered by everything that might happen with Vanitas. I also feel like managing my Tumblr blogs is causing me too much stress and distracting me from doing other things (including writing my fanfics), so I’ve been thinking of putting them both on a more ‘permanent’ hiatus after their queues run out sometime later this month. I dunno how everyone would feel about that, though, nor how long that hiatus would be. I’d certainly miss talking to everyone, and you guys make me smile whenever I get a comment or a question from you all! But I also feel like I need to focus on my health (both physical and mental) and work on things that don’t involve social media. I guess I just need a little more time to think about it.

Universal Language

Description: You, music and the Avengers

Characters: You, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Bruce Banner, Sam Wilson, Bucky Barnes, Wanda Maximoff, Peter Parker and Pepper Potts because I love her

Warnings: Mentions of PTSD, mentions of little Stevie getting beat up, and mild language. If there is something I missed, please let me know.

Disclaimer: Some are longer than others, some have dialogue, and I couldn’t think of anything for Rhodey (I’m so sorry!) Tell me what you think, I was trying something new for this one. If you want something more in-depth, lemme know :)

Word count: ~ 2.5k

Tony took you in when you were a toddler. He knew jack shit about raising a child, and enlisted the help of a nanny,. That is until Pepper made him realize how much he was missing of his daughter’s life. He didn’t even know you started crawling. However, he knew the only thing that got you to stop crying was music. He also knew that banging on things rhythmically was your favorite pastime. From then on, he knew that he was going to have a little musician on his hands.

Tony

In Tony’s opinion, the only good things your mother gave you were life and your knack for the arts, especially music. Rhodey and Pepper saw it, too. You took to music the way Tony took to mechanics. He loved your adorable pout when you were figuring the notes out, and the way your face brightened the room when you finally played it right.

The first thing he got you was a toy xylophone when you were three. He would watch you try and replicate the music he was playing over his speakers. You’d look up at him with tearful eyes when you couldn’t get it. He would gently take the mallet from your hands and copy the music, then he’d give it back to you so could copy him. Your giggles of glee when he played were something he’d never forget. He used his knowledge of the piano to help you learn music.

You were six when he got back from Afghanistan. Even at that young age, you knew things would be different. Your father had been gone for months. His arm as in a sling and he looked sick. He pushed you away for a few weeks after that, only staying in the lab, not even letting you stay in the child-proof area he had set up all those years ago. You didn’t understand why he was different, you only understand that he was different.

One night, you were playing in the main room. Pepper was done for the day, and Obadiah was far away and wouldn’t be back for a really long time; you were all alone with only JARVIS looking after you. You were trying, and failing, to play Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. You kept hitting the wrong keys and messing up the rhythms. Frustrated, you huffed and crossed your arms.

Unbeknownst to you, your dad was behind you. He smiled softly, walked closer to you, picked you up, set you on his lap and played the phrase you were trying to. You demanded he play the rest. Soon enough, he had a sleeping kid in his lap.

You were eight when you had your first performance with an audience. It was a piano recital in a small auditorium at your school. He sat in the front, unashamedly cheering for you and loving you. He was there whenever you had solos, and he cried for a lot of them, not that he would ever admit that to anyone but you or Pepper. He records all of your performance, e even has videos of your progress from a four-year-old you playing Mary Had a Little Lamb to sixteen-year-old you busting out Beethoven like its nothing.

Now, he asks FRIDAY to play back recordings of you singing or playing. It helps him calm down, knowing he’ll always have a piece of what matters most to him with him at all times.

Steve

You met Steve when you were ten years old. It was the aftermath of the Battle of New York. Steve and the rest of the team, excluding Thor, had moved into the tower. While you were thrilled to see Natalie-Natasha again, you were a shy kid, opting to stay with Pepper or your dad and away from the others. The larger-than-life Captain America intimidated the shit out of you.

It wasn’t until you saw him sketching in the common are you began to consider him an actual human and not a walking action figure. You had been trying your hand at drawing for months, and while you had made considerable progress, your work always looked off for some reason. After watching him draw for weeks, you managed to snatch his sketchbook, flip through it when left to go get something from another room. He cleared his throat, startling you into dropping the book. You picked it up, heat in your cheeks, and sheepishly handed it back to him with a small, almost scared, “Sorry,”

He only smiled at you, ten-year-olds weren’t all that subtle when it came to spying. He sat you down on the couch, and began showing you all of the drawings he felt were appropriate. Some of them were memories of war-ravaged battle fields, and he didn’t want to give you nightmares. There were lots of old-timey Brooklyn, a man named Bucky, a vaguely familiar, but very beautiful woman named Peggy and Steve’s Ma, Sarah.

You pouted and explained that whenever you tried to draw, it never came out right. He nodded, then smiled. “I’ll tell you what, you help me learn Piano, I’ll help you learn to draw.”

Clint

Clint is a vent-dweller and, much like everyone else on the team, he struggles with PTSD. He uses the vents as a safe space, a way to escape the nightmares and the heartache from the past. However, he doesn’t like to feel alone. He often says above the lab to hear Tony’s loud music, snarky banter with his AI’s, and his empty threats to the ‘bots. Other times he’ll stay above the gym if he knows that Steve or Natasha are doing late night workouts. The soft grunts and the sounds of the equipment are sufficient to keep the loneliness at bay. On very rare occasions, he stays above the kitchen to hear Vision mutter to himself while attempting, and generally failing at cooking food.

Soon enough, he found the music room. Well, art floor.

You were up late, practicing a solo that you couldn’t quite get, but weren’t ready to give up on. He paused, getting clear tone with his hearing aids in. He soon found himself up above the floor whenever you were playing late. The music was a nice distraction, and he could feel himself become happy with your progress, small feelings of pride swelling in his chest at your success. One night, he even left a note on the piano asking you to learn and play Clair de Lune for him. The next week, you told him to be there at midnight, and sure enough, the beautiful piano tune floated up to the vents.

Natasha

You’ve known Natasha since she was Natalie. You mostly kept your distance until one day. You were struggling to play something. You fumbled with your instrument, while penciling something onto the sheet music. She watched you for a couple minutes before asking if you  needed help. You huffed out a petulant “No,” before proceeding to struggle for another five minutes. Defeated, you asked for help. She managed to help you figure out the fingerings and the accidentals.

You took up dancing a little later on, and she began helping you after your regular class. With her guidance, you quickly became one of the best dancers in your classes, always rising to the challenge with the work-ethic she helped instill in you.

Even later on, you became her pupil once more when learning to fight. She knocked you on your ass more times than you can count, and still does all the time. But, with her help, you’ve learned how to kick some serious ass.

Thor

It’s no secret that Thor is a big guy. He doesn’t know his own strength,and often breaks things when he wasn’t careful. Out of all the original Avengers, he intimidated you the most.

One day, you saw him holding your violin, examining it like a specimen under a microscope. You panicked, dropped everything and ran to him.  

You demanded he stop, resorting to pulling the bow from his hands. He was confused at the tiny child pulling the interesting midgardian play thing away from him.

“Let it go, Thor! You’ll break it!”

Thor frowned, still holding the violin.

“My apologies, young Stark. I do not know what it is, I was merely trying to find its function.” He says, handing it back to.

You relaxed a little, the initial panic wearing off. “It’s a violin, it makes music.”

“How?”

You got into position, put the bow to the strings and drug across the strings. A note rung put, and everything seemed to click in Thor’s mind.

The next time Thor came to visit, he brought Asgardian instruments for you to learn, try and play. You may or may not have cried out of joy.

Bruce

Bruce is a ball of stress, and that is evident to anyone that’s spent any amount of time with him. He uses music as an outlet, letting the sounds wash over him and makes some amount of stress go away. But there are days that things get too overwhelming, there are days where the headphones and opera don’t work, there are days where he needs something more.

Bruce knows that you play, he knows about your talent, and he’s even gone with Tony to watch you perform. There was a day when he shyly asked if he could watch you practice. You were all for it. You practiced in front of him, and he calmed don a lot more.

It became a routine of sorts, you playing, him offering some constructive criticism when he could and you even taught him a few songs on the piano.

Sam

You took the initiative of catching Steve up with modern music. One day, he sheepishly handed you The List, Working your way down, you finally landed on Marvin Gaye. Steve called his friend Sam in so you both could gush about the icon.

You and Sam ended up screeching singing Ain’t No Mountain High Enough for him, and managed not to scare him off. You called it a successful day.

After that, you had put together a playlist for him, and had your dad create a portable sound system for his wings so he could fly listening to his fave.

Bucky

Bucky came to the tower after his time in Wakanda. Tony was wary, anyone in his situation would be. He wanted you to stay away from the ex-assassin indefinitely, and you didn’t blame him. You knew what Bucky did. However, you tried not to blame Bucky either. Steve explained the situation as best he could to you, and you understood that Bucky had been taken advantage of, used and manipulated.

Now that he was in the tower, Bucky wandered around the tower when he couldn’t sleep which happened to be most nights. One night, he heard something familiar, something that tugged at his chest in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time.

“Somewhere over the rainbow,”

He remembers a warm breezy day, the alley he pulled Stevie out the night before, reaming him for fighting more than usual because of the big day they had coming up. He cleaned him up. He remembers holding a washcloth to a small blond Steve as he tried not to hurt him too bad while he berated him for fighting again that week.

“There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby,”

He remembers walking with Stevie to the theater, paying too much for the tickets and sitting beside his best friend watching color appear on a screen for the first time. Bucky smiles, letting the feeling of nostalgia and the longing for a simpler time linger for a moment longer before heading to another area of the labyrinth to explore.

Wanda

Wanda moved in when you were 13. You were so happy that you had another female in the tower to bond with. When she expressed interest in music, you jumped at the chance to teach her something, anything really. You tried a few things. You started with woodwinds, she couldn’t figure out the embouchure. You moved onto brass, she didn’t like the sounds. You settled on stringed instruments. Her choice was the acoustic guitar, and she was good. She picked it up almost immediately, easily learning the fingerings and chords.  Her favorite thing were duets with you, and you often played together whenever you two had time.

Peter

You saw how good Peter was for your dad. He finally had a mentee to teach. Tony really tried to get you into science, he really did. It didn’t work the way he thought it would, and damaged your relationship for awhile until he back off, letting you do you.

You were jealous, admittedly. You weren’t used to sharing your father’s attention with another person your age.

Then you got to know him. You found out through your dad that he was in marching band, and you needed to know more. You began spending a little time together, swapping band stories and laughing at memes. Soon enough, Peter hung out with you before going to working with Tony in the lab for a few hours. It was fun.

You learned the Mii Theme, the Kahoot theme and even put together a duet of meme music to annoy your dad with together.

Pepper

Pepper is your mother. No, she didn’t birth you, and you didn’t call her mom, but she has been there for you through everything. Through your father’s time in Afghanistan, the battle with Obadiah, your first day of middle school, whenever your dad was busy and you were upset, your first period. It didn’t matter, she was with you. She listened to you when you worked hard on a piece. Hell, she even helped you pick out your first professional grade instrument, despite knowing very little about them.

She encouraged you when were feeling less than, she helped pick you up when you were down, she taught how to act around the business assholes in Galas and events.

Pepper loved you and you loved her.

When the proposal happened, Pepper asked you to sing at the wedding. You took this role very seriously, singing ‘A Thousand years’ by Christina Perri and ‘Future Looks Good’ by OneRepublic.

When Morgan was born, you sang to her whenever you could. When she was old enough, you’d sit her on your lap and let her smash the piano keys like Tony did with you.

Pepper couldn’t think of a better older sister for her baby; she couldn’t think of any better daughters.

Inception: A Fannish Retrospective

For a while now I’ve found myself craving a fic of a particular hard-to-define quality – something with a bit of grit and maturity – not graphic or grim, but perhaps the kind of seedy underworld setting you might find in the better parts of Tarantino or Guy Richie’s oeuvre. The kind of fic that lets me believe that if the author toned down the slash and published it as a mainstream crime or espionage thriller, I’d still be enthused about reading it. Cord Smithee’s work is a particularly good example, for the UNCLE fans out there, but you can only reread those fics so many times, and fic of that quality has been especially sparse in the last few fandoms I’ve drifted through, and so the craving lingered.

Then it hit me: hey, you know what fandom used to be really good for that kind of fic? Inception.

And after all this time in Venom fandom, it was hardly a big jump to more Tom Hardy, so.

Maybe the bigger wonder is that nearly ten years on, most of the fic is still just as good as I remember it being. Mirabella’s Towards Zero remains one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever read in any fandom, and delires’ chav!Eames AU is better than any idea that cracked has any goddamn right to be, and (at least as long as you’re into the juggernaut ship that is Arthur/Eames) you are spoilt for choice ­­for more.

But revisiting a fandom this much later and binging this much fic, you notice things. We’ll start with…

The Film

Still holds up on rewatching today. It will never be nearly as smart a film as I’ve seen some claim: totems, for one, make no fucking sense (they’re objects with details known only to you, but if Cobb can unintentionally bring a carbon copy of his wife into a dream, why not a top that falls over when spun? And why does it keep spinning indefinitely in dreams, anyway?), and for all the exposition on ‘kicks’, why the kicks need to be synchronised to work under sedation is woefully under-explained, to the point I’m always by distracted trying to make sense of it in the middle of the third act. (Do not even get me started on the ‘it’s actually about filmmaking!’ theory – the mental gymnastics required to explain how Yusuf or Mal fits in or why we’re so fixated on the importance of the set designer, of all roles, is laughable. Some of the parallels are moderately entertaining, but don’t try to tell me you’ve unlocked the secret meaning of the film – Inception is not a movie that makes you work that hard to find its main themes.)

But the film works despite its plotholes because it’s not, ultimately, a story driven by its mechanics: the endlessly spinning top may make no sense, but film is a visual medium, and it’s such a good visual gimmick it’s gets a pass. The practical stunts are still as impressive ever, but what really lifts Inception so far beyond your typical action/heist film – for me, at least – are the characters, and the huge emotional payoffs at the end. Fischer’s reconciliation with his father is no less moving for its falseness, “We did grow old together” has gotten a sniffle out of me time and again, and the final “We’ll be young men together” scene is wonderful in so many ways I could only dream there was the Cobb/Saito fic to live up to. It’s not for nothing I’ve got Inception mentally filed in my very short list of humanist action movies along with Mad Max: Fury Road, Terminator II, and precious few others.

And then there’s…

 The Fandom

Film fandoms are always an interesting beast, peaking as they do when the film is still in theatres, when most folks writing fic are working off imperfect memories of having seen an hour or two’s worth of canon maybe once or twice at most. Fanon can go feral in far less conducive environments, is my point here – inevitably, there’ll be the details that get analysed to death or flanderised to the point of parody, and the details that get altogether forgotten. Here’s just one example that hit me on a rewatch: I have lately read god knows how many different theories on just what it means that Arthur knew Eames was in Mombasa – none of them the least bothered by how everything in Cobb’s behaviour in that scene suggests he already knows exactly where he’s going, and may even be right now leaving to catch his flight. We could talk about the artefacts of clunky exposition being shoehorned into the dialogue, or the actual intent of that exchange, but shipper-goggles give you some powerful tunnel-vision (and I say this as someone who ships it like burning).

Binge as much fic as fast as I have in the last few months, and you begin to notice trends. Common themes and popular fanon that have ascended to gospel, and facets of the original film I’d love to see explored that fandom seems to have collectively missed altogether (and the sad lack of decent Cobb/Saito is only one). Below, in no particular order, are some of those observations.

Since most of these come across as critical, I want to emphasise that I have had a ball revisiting the fic in this fandom, and there are probably multiple fics guilty of everything I touch on below which I have loved to bits. It’s only the repetition that really starts to make you sit up and notice.

1.       The Cobb-bashing, oh my god the Cobb-bashing! I had forgotten just how much this fandom hates Cobb. In the film, Cobb’s plan is the only reason Arthur and Eames ever end up in the same room at all – yet in fanfic, Cobb has been recast as the only thing keeping them apart. I’m not kidding there – fic with that exact premise is almost its own genre. In Inception fanon, Cobb is crazy and cares only about himself, and Arthur has wasted years of misplaced loyalty keeping him alive. Fanon!Eames hates Cobb for monopolising Arthur’s attention (in the film, Eames seems underwhelmed to learn Cobb is still working with Arthur at all). Fanon!Eames only works with Cobb at all because it’s an excuse to work with Arthur (in the film, they’re barely capable of having a civil conversation). Fanon!Eames never forgives Cobb for concealing the level of sedation they were under Inception job, and nor does Arthur (in the film, no-one even mentions Cobb’s deception after they leave the first level, and Eames’ main disappointment at the end is that he won’t get to see the Fischers’ big reconciliation, but why let that douse a good hateboner?) Meanwhile, Yusuf’s corresponding betrayal and Arthur’s equally-disastrous research-fail are rarely referenced. It’s not every fic, but the base level of Cobb-hate around these parts is pretty astounding. There’s nothing new about fans bashing the main character for having the gall to take screentime away from their OTP, and I’d be the last to play down Cobb’s real failings. But when one finds oneself tempted to leave enthusiastic comments on decade-old fic, praising the author for giving Cobb a minor scene or two where he gets to be a total bro to Arthur for a change… I promise you, it’s not me, it’s this fandom.

2.       For all that Eames is basically the single biggest reason I’m reading in this fandom, his fanon characterisation leaves something to be desired. I do get the appeal of flirty!Eames or pining!Eames – it’s just that once in a while, you find yourself longing for fic about the guy who was actually in the movie – y’know, the one who’s first response to Arthur’s name was, “Arthur? Are you still working with that stick-in-the-mud?” I am totally down with the idea he was feigning indifference– maybe for Cobb’s benefit, maybe he’s actively in denial himself, whatevs. But fanon!Eames characterisation typically ranges from “hopelessly in love with Arthur from the moment they met” to “a walking sexual harassment lawsuit in action,” and neither of those guys could convincingly feign indifference to save their lives. It’s also a shame we don’t see more of the side of Eames that got so genuinely, unashamedly invested in what they were doing for Fischer – quite beyond the money and the prestige, Eames loves that they get to fix Fischer’s relationship with his father and reveal Browning as the rat that he is, and it’s a wonderfully humanising side to such a shady character. There should be so much scope in there to cast Eames was a guy with a real idealistic streak, or more conscience than he’d usually admit to, or just an abiding love for melodrama – the possibilities go on and on (and if you can’t think of a dozen ways to tie any of those in as fuel for his rivalry with Arthur for bonus shippy fodder, you aren’t even trying). But that part of Eames never does seem to have found a place in the fandom’s collective headcanon, because hell if I can find any exploration of it in fic, le sigh. (Cynically, I have to wonder if it’s because it clashes with the fanon where Eames spent the Inception job furiously hating Cobb and focused on Arthur, but even that seems somewhat lacking as an answer. Who even knows?)

3.       As a corollary to the above, remarkably few fics make any attempt to deal with the fact that Arthur and Eames a) basically hate each other, b) for reasons that do not entirely revolve around how Arthur won’t put out. Obviously, this is a ‘hate’ that covers a much deeper well of underlying respect, but these are two guys who only stop taking potshots at each other when they’re being shot at for real, and to me that is 95% of the fun of the pairing – why does no-one even seem to try to recreate that dynamic in fic? Even 99% of Eames’ infamous ‘flirting’ would be better described as him pulling Arthur’s pigtails. Yet virtually no-one seems to want to tackle their antipathy head-on – even fic that acknowledges it as a past phase of their relationship isn’t set during that phase. I’m all for seeing them eventually end up friendlier, but you’ve got to show me how they get there first – that’s the good bit! Why does everyone skip over it? :((((

4.       This fandom has SUCH a thing for underage!Arthur. Fics will go on and on about how young he looks, or theorise that he was actually underaged when he first got into dreamshare, or at least looked it. Seriously, the idea of Eames having mistaken Arthur for a teen when they first met is, like, the accepted pan-fandom headcanon as to why they don’t get on (unless we’re in military-backstory land, in which case it’s that Arthur had to deal with Eames hitting on him during the time of DADT). Then there are the many (MANY) AUs where Arthur really is a teen, hitting on the much-older Eames – there’s that one semi-parody where even twenty-something!Arthur gets cockblocked by his own looks, and there’s even at least one that flips things so that Eames the one who was underage when they met, just for variety.

It’s a real Thing, and I only wish I understood where it comes from, since (to me) Arthur has always looked like the 29yo man JGL legitimately was back when Inception hit screens – I don’t think he’d even passed as a Hollywood!teen for a solid half a decade at that point. So… are there really that many people who thought JGL looked that young when the film came out, or is this just one of those fannish meme things? I may never know.

5.       No-one (by which I mean almost no-one) gets how limbo works. Fic after fic treats it as basically just a garden-variety coma, and colleagues can spend days or months moving the victim, gathering a team and planning a complex rescue. Rarely is it ever remembered the whole point of limbo is that you can age and die trapped in your own mind in no more than hours in the real world. When Eames talks about being ‘trapped in limbo until our brains turn to scrambled egg’, I think it’s safe to assume he’s being pretty literal. Basically, if you’re not treating limbo as the temporal equivalent of the Total Perspective Vortex, you’re probably doing it wrong.

6.       No-one does anything interesting with Ariadne. This, I have some sympathy for: it’s hard to know where to go with someone who ends the film where she does – her push-pull relationship with the world of illegal dreamshare is not a contradiction that can be easily resolved in a subplot, if at all. But the Ariadne who so quickly had Cobb picked as a loose canon never seems to appear in fic either, and nor does the Ariadne with the guts to sneak into his dream to find answers, or the prodigy whose last-minute moment of inspiration saved the whole job. No, Inception fic is more likely to give you an Ariadne who giggles and drags her teammates out partying than any of that, which is absurd to the point of being genuinely offensive. Seriously, that is some A-grade “all we remembered about her is that she’s female”-bullshit. Even when she’s not saddled with OOC giggle fits, fic!Ariadne also remains frustrating static: years after the film, she’ll still be doing extractions with the Inception team, despite seeming no more at home in their world. Where’s the Ariadne who embraces the underworld wholeheartedly and reaches Arthur or Cobb levels of badassery? The Ariadne whose natural gifts and overconfidence get her into Cobb-levels of trouble? Who takes the Inception job as inspiration to go into therapeutic uses of dreams? Who finds legitimate dream-related work through Miles or Saito, but still lets the old team drag her back into extractions every once in a while (because she’s easily one of the most reliable architects in the whole shady business, and there’s a part of her that still kind of loves it)? WHERE?

The obvious rejoinder to all this is that it’s hardly surprising Ariadne doesn’t get much play when you’re mostly reading Arthur/Eames fic. So (because the land of fic is still terrible at cataloguing character-specific gen) I had a dig through some Arthur/Ariadne fic for comparison – only to run into much the same frustrations all over again. No-one takes her character anywhere very interesting.

So you can imagine my surprised delight when I tried a couple of Arthur/Ariadne/Eames fics on a whim, and almost immediately found not one but two different stories willing to dive headfirst into the questions surrounding Ariadne’s future in the world of illegal dreamshare (plus multiple stories which made a very convincing case that Ariadne should absolutely celebrate their successful Inception by having a threesome with her colleagues, I mean, damn).

I have absolutely no idea what it says about fandom that I had to go looking at threesome fic to find real character development, but at this point, I’ll take it.

7.       So, I get why everyone reads Eames as queer (duh), but having discovered two quite excellent straight!Eames fic (which is to say, fic which utterly sells the idea that Eames considers himself straight or had no experience with men until long after meeting Arthur), the fact no equivalent seems to exist for Arthur baffles me. Sure, there’s one or two stories where one smile from Eames is about all it takes to make him change his mind, and one great kink meme fill that might have been just what I was looking for if it had ever been finished. But otherwise, the idea that Arthur (a guy who snogs Ariadne and is given no other obvious sexuality) -- the same Arthur whom every other fic portrays as seriously emotionally repressed – the idea this guy might not be experienced and comfortable dating men just… doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. Which is so weird.

Is there not enough RL evidence that Tom Hardy can and does make straight guys reconsider their preferences? Is the idea of an Arthur who’s repressed that side of his own sexuality not a juicy enough explanation for the tension between them? How on earth did we wind up with a fandom where Eames is more likely to be the designated “straight” one at the start of the story than Arthur? The mind boggles.

Holy shit, you’re still reading? Damn! Have some more recs as thanks for listening to me ramble at so much length.

Recs!

Here’s those two from the top again, because I really do love them that much

We Can Do This Until We Pass Out by delires Disturbing London, baby, we about to branch out. (The one where Eames is a chav)

Towards Zero by Mirabella Five levels down, and five to dig yourself back out.  Arthur met Eames' projection long before he met Eames.

Where the Dead Live also by Mirabella There's a monster in Arthur's basement.  Maybe he shouldn't have invited it in. It’s the vampire!Apocalypse, and this one is intense. Utterly brilliant, but equally unapologetic about the implications of its premise. So, for a somewhat-lighter take on monster!Eames, I will also throw in:

Cthonical’s demon!Eames verse Unfinished -- arguably never even properly started, just a series of ficlets from a ‘verse that never quite got written, but they are scorching hot and still well worth a look.

That’s a lot of darker fic though, probably time to lighten the mood a little.

Anal [Inception] aka Not Now Cobb We're Doing BGs also by cthonical Arthur and Eames both play WoW. They kick ass at Warsong Gulch, and when they team up they’re nigh on unstoppable.They don’t know they’re playing with each other.

Champion Sound by pyrimidine Prompt: Arthur is a DJ, Eames is a bartender.

London Bridge by sorrynotsorry Arthur loves whiskey, and maybe strippers. 

My two favourite Arthur/Eames/Ariadne fics

How to Cure Insomnia by wonderfulwrites When she called Arthur for advice on how to deal with the unexpected insomnia - okay, fine, on the pretense of asking for advice – she hadn’t expected to have to wade through a sea of bodies to see him. But then, she also hadn’t expected Eames’s cheerful but surprising, Just come, Ariadne. You can sleep when you’re dead.  Or Eames, at all, really. The Wind on the Mountain by Starlingthefool Something in her rebels against this casual, passive seduction. God knows why, but she’s sitting up in the water, taking her foot back from Eames and dislodging Arthur’s hands from her back. She stands, wet underwear clinging ridiculously to her, and says to Arthur, “All right. Your turn.”

Aaand let’s have a few more straight Arthur/Eames to round it out.

Untitled and Untitled, redux by Helenish -- two variants on a theme, and do not let the lack of proper titles put you off, they’re both great.

Unexpected Plot Twist by ethrosdemon Post-Inception -- long and (as promised) twisty, and a very solid read.

Four Corners by Mithrigil In Eames’ line of work, a first impression means nearly everything. It’s always a pity when he doesn’t get off on the right foot.

Kiss With A Fist  by cmonkatiekatie Because apparently, to find real Arthur/Eames antagonism, I have to go looking for hate sex. (Not complaining, this is some amazing hate sex.)

And also basically Everything by Wiltling There’s a darker vibe to their work, but it rarely gets oppressive -- just generally a lot of great fic.

in 1990, madonna was arguably the most popular and consistent pop artist on the planet. at the time, she had already sold millions upon millions of records and amassed an astounding 17 consecutive top 10 singles. sixteen of the singles reached top 5 including 7 number ones on the billboard hot 100. madonna was a decade into her recording career and with the release of a surprise single, she was about to enter another imperial phase of her career.

madonna was still actively promoting her 1989 album “like a prayer” in the spring of 1990. in fact, the album’s fifth and final single, “keep it together” was still in the top 20 of the hot 100 after peaking at #10 in march of 1990. but a chance meeting with luis and jose xtravaganza of the legendary house of xtravaganza would inspire the creation of a song that became one the biggest culture moments of 1990.

released on march 27, 1990, “vogue” quickly became the most successful single of madonna’s career selling 6 million copies worldwide and reaching #1 in over 30 countries, including topping the us hit 100 in may of 1990. jose and luis not only served as lead choreographers, they were prominently featured in the “vogue” music video. it was through madonna’s and producer shep pettibone’s deep house track that the two xtravaganzas provided a glimpse of black and latinx ballroom culture in the accompanying music video that mainstream america had not yet seen.

since it’s release, the black queer and trans created art form of voguing has re-emerged in the mainstream via shows like “rupaul’s drag race,” the vice docu-series “my house” and most notably, the ever popular and critically acclaimed fx show, “pose.” in fact, the 1990 release and cultural impact of madonna’s “vogue” was a story arc across several episodes of the second season of “pose.”

so here we are 30 years after the release of one of pop music’s most commercially and culturally successful songs by one of pop’s most polarizing figures. i can attest to all of this because i was around to witness most of it. i have a clear memory of watching the teasers for “vogue’s” world premiere on mtv. i remember being in awe by the video’s imagery and wondering to myself, “is that a titty?”. i knew i was watching something so queer at a time when all things gay were associated to deviancy, aids and death. i also remember learning the choreography and showing it off to my aunt who quickly responded, “don’t you think those moves are kinda gay?” i didn’t respond but internally i was like, “bitch, duh!”

https://youtu.be/GuJQSAiODqI

so in celebration of the “vogue’s” 30th anniversary, i wanted to ask a few friends around my grown and sexy age what they remember about the song. i asked my good friend, fellow queer historian and longtime madonna fan, juan, peter, who has long history in the philadelphia ballroom including being a member of the house of africa and my former mentor and former father of the house of ferraramo, kwame to share their memories of “vogue.”

louie: do you remember when you first heard “vogue”?

JUAN: i was in 5th or 6th grade when i first heard madonna’s vogue. that song was everywhere but it never really appealed to me. it didn’t really hit me till i was 14 and went to my first gay club, arena in hollywood, ca. the “older guys” i met through that scene – about 18-20 years old but at the time they seemed very adult – showed my friends and i what vogue was. i never really connected to the song till i saw live vogueing at arena. around that age, i also saw the “blonde ambition” tour broadcast on hbo, that whole thing became my obsession and my entry into queer culture. later in high school, a counselor in my lgbt support group showed us “paris is burning” and everything felt complete. being a madonna fan back then, when aids was still at the forefront of the lgbt community, being a madonna fan was code. now that i think about it, the song became a hit at the time that i came out and went to my first gay club.

KWAME: i think it was the world premiere of the video on mtv. if i had heard it before it wasn’t as exciting as waiting to see the visual.

louie: what were your initial thoughts about the song? about the video?

PETER: my initial thoughts about “vogue” when i first heard it, i was in delaware. i was hyped! i like “oh look, its gonna be on tv and there’s gonna be a video.” i was hype because voguing was coming out to the mainstream.

JUAN: i didn’t really care for the song. i still don’t. for some reason, i’ve always known all the lyrics so it definitely made an impression. the video was cool because her dancers were hot, and “fancy,” they were being sexualized in a way that was empowering to their nuanced body language. i would argue that without that specific group of dancers, that era in her career wouldn’t have been as exciting. the mtv awards performance where she lip-synced in marie antoinette drag was way more exciting than the video. when i hear the song, it just doesn’t process or register the way vogue and ball culture does. i was a madonna fanatic for decades, and in some ways still am, but that song isn’t my favorite. it does carry strong memories of coming out to my friends and a type of nostalgic, youthful freedom and for that i appreciate it. i remember when the club kids were on geraldo and they played vogue during an intro and they all gave geraldo shit, like, “we don’t listen to that!” – that’s how i feel about it now.

louie: were you aware of voguing before the song’s release? what was your entry into the world of voguing?

PETER: oh yes, i was well aware of the whole ballroom scene and vogueing long before madonna. and i was already in philadelphia way before that song.

JUAN: my entry to vogue was simultaneous to the first time i went to gay club and i met trans sex workers, and gays in the party scene doing this thing from new york. i remember all the queens talking about new york, looking to new york, walking runways on dancefloors and trying to vogue. the origins of vogue were unknown till a few years later when i was in high school. the song was also powerful in how it gave the working class access to “feel their fantasy.”

KWAME: yes, but I never walked before the song was released. i started walking (the category) later that year.

louie: how would you describe the impact of the song in 1990?

PETER: i think the impact was a lot for mainstream. because mainstream got to see what ballroom and voguing was because it had already existed for decades and it was interesting to see mainstream try to do it. really, really interesting.

KWAME: it (partnered with the release of “paris is burning”) brought visibility to the ballroom scene, and I think it helped create a dialogue that brought ballroom across the US in a big way. it definitely influenced choreography for a few years. although other artists (most notably, Jody Watley) had featured vogueing in some visual format before madonna, “vogue” became the anthem that made the dance a staple movement.

louie: how would you describe the song’s impact over the last 30 years?

JUAN: now we have the language to say she culturally appropriated an entire subculture (her career relied on it), we can say she exploited a whole community. that statement would not be wrong; but with vogue, she also highlighted a space and language that was entirely invisible and needed a lift. people were dying of aids, and tons of scared queer kids found joy in this song. in some ways it was a gift. rupaul’s “supermodel” (1992) could not have existed without vogue. deee-lite before that. underground club culture and dance music got a hand from this awkward single.

KWAME: for me, the power of the song waned as the visibility true ball culture rose. it’s a cute song about a dance, kinda like “the twist”. but i feel the video is ICONIC, and would even say her “live” performances (MTV awards; blond ambition tour) of the song are probably still entertaining. let me see… it’s one of those culture phenom moments, which is to be expected for madonna. and “vogue” is probably one of her three career defining songs!

PETER: i think after 30 years, madonna’s vogue has a small impact because ballroom has changed in the past 30 years, it has evolved. and it’s gone to different places with different songs from around the world, but it has a small part of the history.

there is no debating that “vogue” was a pop-culture moment in 1990 and like most things that are consumed by the american populous, the moment that madonna’s vogue ushered in didn’t last. however, the art form continued to thrive in the ballroom scene. so as we remember the impact of “vogue”, we must honor and raise up the black and brown queer and trans people from the new york ballroom scene who carried the beautiful art of vogueing before, during and after madonna’s cultural moment in 1990.

Some Horror Recommendations For Halloween!

Well, the spookiest day of the year is upon us. Spooky for those of us that hate our doorbells ringing and the associated human contact, anyway. The true fear is entrenched social anxiety. Anyway, a lot of people’s halloween plans include holing up inside, with the curtains closed, in an attempt to spook themselves. In that spirit, I thought I’d list some of my favourite spooky media for you. Mostly games, but I’ll sneak some films and books in at the end.

The Games!

SOMA

Not one you want to play for the jump out and scream scares, SOMA’s fear is more of a slow build. It’s a very human-centric fear; the fear of losing what you are. It brings in uncomfortable questions about the reality of the human mind and whether memories are the basis of who we are. If those memories, and our subsequent personality, are copied into another body, then are they the same as us? What if you found out that your consciousness only kicked in about a week ago?

It’s let down a little by the wibbly-wobbly screen effect as soon as you see a monster, but the questions it raises are more effective. Plus, it has a fantastic underwater setting.

Dead by Daylight

A multiplayer affair that does a great job of emulating the classic slasher flicks of old. While you can get your kicks by playing as the killer, and having fun with a ton of meat hooks, the real fear comes when you play as the survivors. Attempting to fix a generator and then hearing the ominous music signalling the approach of the killer is terrifying. You never know what direction to go in and panicking will just lead the killer to you sooner.

The community is very all over the place from what I’ve heard, so you might experience some of the usual vitriol and obsessively good players, but if you can find a good group then you can have fun and fear for hours.

Oxenfree

For a change of pace, here’s a horror game with genuinely good writing. It tells the story of a group of friends coming together for a party which unfortunately gets crashed by a dimensional rift. That leads the group to experience supernatural phenomena all over the place, as their friendships get pushed to breaking point. It’s very old school horror, with campy kids trying to survive. I love it.

The writing and dialogue is top notch and while it may not be classically scary, it’s absolutely worth playing through at least once.

Outlast 2

Okay, so, I’m not the biggest fan of Outlast 2. But sometimes you just want some stupid horror; to run away from murderers in a panicked frenzy. Outlast 2 gives you that and then some. Drizzle on some fanatical religious horror and you have an exciting game. Fairly gruesome, too, if that’s your cup of tea. Enjoy being nailed to a cross.

It has a good few problems, not least the lack of direction in the chase sequences. You might have to repeat them a few times but for sheer panic, Outlast 2 is second to none.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

It would be remiss of me not to mention one of the most well known horror games. An adventure game with a sadistic twist, Amnesia stars a man named Daniel, who’s (shockingly) lost his memory. He wakes up in a strange castle, with instructions to deal with the man behind everything, Alexander. Daniel has nothing to defend himself with and the castle is filled with hostile creatures.

Amnesia can be credited with popularising the sanity mechanic, for better or for worse. While it’s many copy-cats have begun to grate, Amnesia’s use of it taught us to cling to the light, for fear of what’s out there in the darkness.

Resident Evil 7

Another game that has a host of problems. Regardless of the weird goo monsters that drag down an otherwise amazing game, the true fear of Resident Evil 7 presents itself right at the beginning: Jack Baker. An unkillable man, capable of smashing through walls just to get to you. He’s everywhere, at any time and no matter how many bullets you put into him, he keeps coming back.

It’s worth playing just for him. He may look like a man but he’s far, far worse. And he could be around any corner.

Lust For Darkness

Same sorta issue here too. Horror games rarely skate by on their gameplay and Lust for Darkness has other problems too. While it may not be the best game around, it’s an unashamed look into the world of Lovecraftian horror. It’s worth playing because it doesn’t hold anything back and is a good example of the spiral into madness inherent in these works. The cult at the heart of it has long since ceased to be human and it’s dragging our protagonist down with it.

Just don’t play this one on the family computer, eh?

The Forest

A game that can be as creepy as you make it, as you can turn off all the enemies if fear isn’t your cup of tea. Still, when they’re on it becomes a game where fear is always at the back of your mind. You can make the perfect base, complete with farm and water supply, only for it to echo with the sounds of fists on wood as you get surrounded. Not only that, but eventually you’re going to be caught out at night. Once the bigger lads come out, it becomes genuinely tense at night. At least in the day, you can see them to avoid them.

Definitely one of the better survival games and a good horror game. Mostly because your survival depends on a bit more than finding a handful of berries.

Films

The Invitation

A very slow burner, one for the start of the night I imagine. It revolves around a man, currently going through his own trauma, being invited to a party at an old friends house. Seems fine, until the host busts out a video about a cult he’s become part of. That rather puts a damper on the party. The tension ramps up as the protagonist gets slowly more paranoid about the hosts true intentions for inviting them there.

As I said, a slow burn but one’s that worth sitting through, especially for the chilling ending.

The Ritual

Also a book, which I’ll mention later. This extremely British film is about four guys hiking across the Kungsleden trail in Sweden, in memory of their friend who was killed in a robbery. They get pretty tired of their two-hundred-plus mile journey and instead take a shortcut through a forest, which goes horribly wrong. As they get hopelessly lost, it becomes clear that something is following them, which causes their friendships all to break down.

Well acted and genuinely spooky, well worth a watch.

The Cabin in the Woods

Cabin in the Woods is a definite rarity. A parody horror film that manages to be scary at the same time as funny. It takes the usual trope of a bunch of high school kids going off to a cabin in the woods and then goes out of its way to subvert absolutely everything. The entire thing is orchestrated by a group of scientists, who need everything to be cliched in order to appease an old God.

Of course, it doesn’t quite go as planned and that’s where the fun comes in. Definitely one to watch if you enjoy equal parts horror and comedy.

1408

A lighter one to end the film suggestions. 1408 is an adaption of a Stephen King short story, featuring John Cusack as a paranormal investigator. One of those modern ones, who doesn’t believe a damn thing he writes. The majority of the film takes place in this one hotel room, which I thought was a neat trick. It’s a bit of a roller coaster of scares though, meaning it’s just scare after scare, but that’s kind of the point. It’s the room deliberately messing with its occupant.

I doubt it’ll win any awards but it’s good for a handful of scares.

Books

The Necronomicon

A bit of a cop-out, to be honest, naming a big selection of stories but honestly, you need to read Lovecraft if you’re interested in horror. It’s admittedly hard to do so, given his purple prose and tendency towards racism, but the foundations of his stories still hold up today. If you’re not interested in the Chtulu stuff, then try reading stories like The Colour out of Space. It’s good reading and forms the basis of my favourite kind of horror.

The Ritual

Mentioned up there but it’s worth reading too. Adam Nevill has quite a down to earth writing style, punctuated with well realised internal thoughts. The relationship between the characters is explored in much more depth than the films, which makes what’s happening to them all the more tragic. If you liked the film then definitely read the book, to further explore the characters and setting. While the ending of the book dragged on for a bit too long, the bulk of it stands up just a bit higher than the film.

The Shining

Don’t need to say too much about this one but I’m always torn as to whether I like the book or the film more. While the book does push the supernatural stuff a bit too hard, it’s spookier because it shows the steady decline of Jack Torrance. Nicholson’s portrayal is great but the character seems unhinged right from the get-go. The scary part of the book is seeing this troubled man, who genuinely loves his family, descend to the point where he’s a danger to them.

The Haunting of Hill House

A book that’s resurged in popularity after the Netflix series last year, it’s a great example of a haunted house story. There aren’t any major scares in it, instead it relies on drip feeding in creepy moments in order to come to one big climax. It’s an interesting book, even if it does all start blending together by the end. If you like your supernatural stuff slow building, then give it a read.

There, that should keep you busy for Halloween. If you’re not continually interrupted by kids looking for candy then keep those curtains shut, turn down the lights and put on something spooky. See you in November!

159. Sonic Super Special #15

Welcome to the final Sonic Super Special ever! Here's my opinion on it. Past Super Specials have ranged from okay to amazing, depending on the writer and the subject matter, and their long length has usually, if you ask me, worked in their favor, as it meant more time and space to tell a compelling story. This is not true of this one. Unfortunately, the last super special of the comic is utterly awful, with two stories that do absolutely nothing to grip my attention, one of which ends in a status quo with a net gain of absolutely nothing, and the other of which is cringeworthy and isn't even very clear on when, where or how it takes place. Let's just get this over with, shall we?

Naugus Games

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Many Hands Colors: Josh and Aimeee Ray

This first story is far, far longer than it has any right to be - it really feels like they were trying to find ways to pad it out it to take up the full 48 pages of the special. Furthermore, you might notice some oddities about the credits above. First of all, Aimee's name is misspelled with three E's for both stories for some reason, indicating some lazy copy-and-pasting as well as a lack of care from the editors. Even more frustratingly, no one is actually credited directly for the pencils (or inks), with the art instead just being credited to "many hands." Remember how I said the comic was getting annoyingly bad about properly crediting people? Now, in case you're confused, there's not just some artist out there literally named Many Hands; instead, that's the comic's way of sidestepping actually bothering to credit any individuals for their work. It just means "eh, a lot of people worked on this I guess, but we don't care enough to actually tell you who." Unfortunately, unlike a few issues ago where the art style was immediately recognizable as Steven Butler's, the art style for this story is foreign to me, suggesting they got some people who weren't their usual artists to work on this one, so I can't even take an educated guess here. All I know is that both the art style in general and the quality of the inks are very poor, and as we'll see, the art gets unforgivably lazy at times. Perhaps best of all, this story was later retconned into a much more interesting and concise version of itself at a later date, with better storytelling and artwork to boot. The only reason, then, that I'm covering it at all, is honestly as a demonstration of just how lazy the comic could get at times, as well as due to the fact that this is the first appearance of "Many Hands," who later pencilled one other issue for the comic that was of equally poor quality.

So this story takes place at an unspecified time in the recent past. It seems to be sometime after Eggman's return, judging by some of the lines of dialogue within the story, but the actual timeframe is pretty vague. Sonic has returned to the Southern Tundra to pay his respects to Eddy, recalling how Eddy sacrificed himself when he, Tails, and Nate all fought Naugus here some time ago. He's brought a single rose to lay on the site of the wreckage, but the ground isn't quite stable…

And here we have the first instance of a truly terrible art decision. Sonic falls into a pitch black cave system, but instead of representing this with maybe one page max of blackness or darker lighting, we're treated to nearly four pages straight of nothing but this:

He blindly stumbles around for a while, informing us of this fact through dialogue bubbles because everyone knows that telling is better than showing in fiction, right? He finally hits a wall and sees a glow through a crack in it, so he tunnels his way into the next room only to find it full of glowing rings - apparently, either he, Tails and Naugus somehow didn't use up all the rings when they fought, or these one have just auto-generated themselves somehow down here. Sonic recalls memories of the previous battle when Nate sealed Naugus away with a wish from a ring, and then decides to try to use one to get out of the cave system.

Wonderful! Apparently, a "wish" as defined by the magic of the rings just means that you think of someone's name while touching a ring, and so with a flash, Naugus is back from his imprisonment in the zone that Nate sealed him into! But how is this possible?

That explanation makes… basically no sense, dude. Naugus was definitely sealed away in another zone, he didn't just get turned into a pile of telepathic rings. But whatever. He and Sonic start battling it out, and somehow make it outside, where Naugus conjures up a snowstorm that consistently stays centered on Sonic no matter where he runs. Time for the second awful art choice of the issue - now instead of four pages of pure blackness, we get six whole pages of this:

I think the best thing about this is that the blizzard backgrounds are clearly not even hand drawn like the rest of the comic is - there's only two types of snowflakes up there, and they're consistently just copied and pasted in that same repetitive swirl pattern on every single page. I get that drawing for a big story in a super special like this can be long and tedious work, but this is why you don't try to find a way to artificially elongate a story like this which could easily be told in the span of a normal issue length. It just ends up making the audience feel like their time is being wasted. Anyway, the blizzard finally ends when Sonic pulls out a ring from his jacket and wishes for Naugus to be sealed away in his previous zone once more, and thus, Naugus is out of our hair again, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Man, if it's this easy to defeat people in this universe, why hasn't anyone tried this on Eggman yet?

Sonic then leaves back for home, thinking one last time of Eddy, who is shown looking down on him from the heavens above. And thank god that story is over.

Sonic Spin City

Writer/Pencils: Michael Gallagher Colors: Josh and Aimeee Ray

Michael Gallagher, over the course of the comics, has gone from one of the series' main writers to basically a guest writer who's brought on every once in a while for special occasions. In this case, he even makes his return as a penciller! Unfortunately, his goofy writing style has begun to clash with the much more serious plots of these later issues, and this story is no exception. It's entirely unclear about whether we're supposed to take this story as actual canon, as a story from an alternate zone, or as just a silly joke story that doesn’t mean anything - and while I tend to try to avoid looking at non-canon materials in this review series (I've already skipped a few stories and issues for exactly this reason), the ambiguity of this one forces me to cover it. In addition, I don't even know why Josh and "Aimeee" were credited as colorists for this story, considering the entire thing is black and white with no color to be found.

Much like the first story of StH#52, this story has the flair of an old detective serial. Sonic is wandering the streets on a rainy night when two swatbots ambush him. Of course, two swatbots are no match.

What does a swatbot need matches for? Eh, whatever. Sonic races over to Rusty's, a hangout for abandoned badniks, and orders himself a "chili dog float," which in addition to sounding absolutely disgusting doesn't even seem like something a bar for robots would serve in the first place. As he takes his seat, the lights go out, and… this abomination emerges onto the stage.

Yes. The badniks are going wild for a swatbot with tits dancing seductively on a stage for them. What is she gonna do, plug them into a wall outlet? They even start screaming out for "the stretch," and appear to get even hornier as she massively elongates her legs for them. I mean, just, what? I swear, Michael, if we get one more weird borderline-sex thing like this from you in this comic, my eyes are gonna pop out of my head like Natsuki. A bot grabs the dancer's ankle, and she's thrown off balance and crashes down, with the head popping off to reveal that underneath, it's Bunnie in disguise.

You know, after her claim all those issues back that she's a "sax cymbal," I'm not even gonna contest the idea that she'd do a sexy dance during infiltration for a mission. Hell, I get the impression she'd do one anyway just for fun back in Knothole if she got the chance. You might also notice her arm is the arm from her old design, and that coupled with Sonic's own design seems to indicate that if this took place at all in actual canon, it was before Eggman's return, though I'm immensely skeptical that this is supposed to be canon at all. Sonic and Bunnie take out the rest of Rusty's customer base, and then evacuate before the last swatbot activates its self-destruct chip, blowing the place sky high. Congratulations, nothing important was accomplished in this issue and nobody cares!

It's kinda sad that the final Sonic Super Special turned out to be so low-quality, honestly. However, this marks a bit of a turning point in the comic. For the first time in its entire run, from now on, there are no more special issues, no sister series, no miniseries, nothing. From the next issue, all the way to almost the 200th, with one exception in the form of a Free Comic Book Day issue, there are absolutely no interruptions from issue to issue. While this may not seem too notable at first, since we've just been reading everything in mostly-chronological order anyway, keep in mind that as far as the comic is concerned we're still in the year 2000, with a mere seven years having passed from the beginning of the comic all the way to now over the course of 159 issues. Over the course of the next 106 issues, we're going to blaze through nine years of comic history, meaning that the story is going to flow a lot faster, with more plot points being covered in a shorter amount of time. While this does make the order of issues a lot easier to follow, since there's no questions about which issue fits in where or anything, I am sad to see all the special issues go, as I quite enjoyed how they served to break up the flow of the comic as a whole with special stories and side content. Though we're still in the middle of our current plot era, we're entering into a new era of the comic as a whole, where we've got a straight shot through the next hundred issues. So I say - let's do it to it!

In My Home (Chapter 2)

Series summary: After Wakanda opens its borders, you begin working in Shuri’s lab as part of an all-women STEM program, and you meet a certain White Wolf. What starts out as mutual bonding over science turns into much more than you ever could have anticipated. 

Loosely inspired by Young the Giant’s “In My Home”

Pairing: Bucky x scientist reader

Word Count: 1,960

Warnings: Language, PTSD, sexual thoughts

A/N: WELP Bucky’s internal POV turned out longer than I thought but I pinky promise chapter three is going to be dialogue for dayzzzz

Reader Tags: @staringmoony @noxxia @mikithekiki @just-a-littlebit-of-everything  @galaxy-siren 

Bucky can’t stop thinking about you. He knows he’s in deep because he finds himself replaying conversations and moments together with you over and over in his head, trying to engrave their details into his memory—the sound of your laugh, how you talk with your hands, the glint in your eyes he thinks he’s seen whenever the two of you end up physically close (which seems to be a lot lately)––that goddamn indecipherable look that’s driving him crazy as he mentally weighs the pros and cons of finally acting on what he desperately wants, to finally bring his lips to yours, to feel your body pressed against his while your tongue slips between his teeth and his hands tangle in your hair––

And he keeps trying his best to stop his imagination right there (often failing) because he’s not sure he can trust his mind on this. Because the thought that you could ever reciprocate, could even come close to feeling the way he feels about you, would ever want to be with him in any sense of really being with someone, that had to just be a dream.

But then his brain tugged at him to recall moments that had happened between the two of you that he was pretty damn sure he didn’t imagine. How welcoming you were when he first met you, how you were willing to open up to him about your past so that it might help him in his present. And when he found himself spilling his guts about his uncertainty regarding whether or not Shuri had really fixed him, not knowing what to do with the lingering anxiety and flashbacks and nightmares––you still didn’t treat him like a bomb that was about to go off. You just treated him like a human being.

And it wasn’t like he hadn’t experienced that since Steve snapped him out of his Hydra programming—a lot of people had been kind to him. And he’d done what Shuri asked and hit up a few veteran support group meetings in the city and even livestreamed a few in the States, so he had related to others with similar experiences before meeting you. He just couldn’t explain it, the connection he felt to you, like you both went through life following the same rhythm. As ridiculous and sentimental as it sounded in his head, it was like your souls seemed to be in sync.

You were funny and hopeful and kind and so, so pretty, even in a lab coat and faded band t-shirt. You drew him in without even trying, and the connection he felt with you––that he wondered, hoped, dreamed you could maybe even feel a fraction of––kept growing stronger the more time you spent together. He initially couldn’t even believe you wanted to spend time with him, but he slowly stopped questioning it and tried to just go with it without waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He just tried to enjoy being present with you, whether he was reading your loaned copy of Bill Nye’s Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation while you whirled around the lab, or utterly absorbed in listening to you do your best to catch him up on a highlight reel of humanitarian achievements and pop culture while he told you about 1930s New York City and the inventions that blew his mind (he still was waiting for a flying car, but self-driving cars were still pretty damn impressive) over sambusa and the best lamb and rice dish he was sure he’d ever have, confiding and laughing and flirting all over the city.

He may not have been with a woman in literally decades, but that didn’t mean he didn’t notice signs of seeming attraction and affection, small actions and comments you dropped here and there that made his heart stop and start at the same time. What he did forget was how maddening it could be, the slow burn of glances and touches and before someone finally made a decisive move. Back before everything happened, he never had a problem making that move, but now, the fear of losing someone who already made him the happiest he’d been in years kept him rooted in place.

It was driving him crazy, especially when it came to hints in your touch: your hip gently nudging him to scooch farther down your lab table; your thigh grazing his as you sat side by side on the Maglev train; your palm swatting him on the shoulder as he made another comment that had you shaking your head but chuckling nonetheless. He savored each of these moments, no matter how seemingly insignificant, his longing for even further closeness with you becoming harder to ignore each time. So he experimented to see if maybe he really did have a shot at this, taking your hand in the middle of the crowded street, raising his voice so you could hear him over the chattering crowd and music echoing around the city:

“I’ll get lost otherwise.”

“You’re right,” you called back, smirking as your free hand gestured to the predominantly Wakandan crowd. “How would I ever find you amongst this sea of white men with bionic arms?”

You didn’t let go of his hand, though, and Bucky felt hope rise in his chest along with his heartbeat.

There was the day when you had made him promise to not let you leave the lab no matter what you said until you finished a new round of cross-referencing your updated personal data samples with the 500 something you had collected while getting your doctorate. But then it turned out that there was a music festival happening two blocks away from the lab, and how were you supposed to focus with the booming sounds of drums and the wafting aromas of roasted street fare, but Bucky wanted to mess with you a bit.

And so he stood between you and the door, trying his best to keep a straight face.

“You said, and I quote ‘Bucky do not let me leave this lab, no matter how much I beg, or plead, or––“

You waved your hands.

“That was old Y/N who was bright-eyed and full of caffeine and optimism. This is 7 p.m. current Y/N realizing that I will literally be here until 3 a.m., which I’ve already done twice this week. Current Y/N Y/N just needs to dance and eat some mandazi.”

“A promise is a promise! What if this was the very night when you were destined to be struck by genius with a breakthrough that changes the course of humanity, but I prevented that from happening by breaking my word.” Bucky shrugged, the corner of his mouth turning up. “Not chancing it.”

You sighed in feigned resignation.

“You’re right, you’re right.”

Bucky was thrown off for half a second but your concession, but then you were sprinting past him as best as you could sprint past a genetically enhanced soldier, your cackle turning into profanities choked by laughter as Bucky easily caught you, arms wrapping around your waist.

“Goddammit, Bucky!”

He was barely even holding you, so nervous about hurting you, but it was still enough to keep you locked in place as you struggled, both of you chuckling for a few more seconds before you gave up, going limp in his arms. He could feel the rise and fall of your chest, was close enough to breathe in the bright scent of your perfume.

“Guess I’ll die here.”

Your light tone then turned bitter on a dime, taking Bucky by surprise.

“I lied, I really don’t deserve to get out of here tonight, not when my dumbass has been stuck on the same problem for weeks, and everyone else in that lab has actually been able to do their fucking jobs.”

“Hey, Y/N, that’s not true.” Bucky broke his hold on you, turning you around to face him, watching as you shook your head, chewing at the corner of your lip as you averted your eyes.

“You’re one of the smartest people I know. And I see you, everyone sees you working your ass off in there. Give yourself a break.” He paused for a second before placing his hands on your shoulders, the action prompting you to bring your pained gaze back to meet his.

“You know I’m not actually holding you hostage, right?”

You had mustered a snort of laughter and nodded but still had that defeated look across your face, and Bucky’s instinct to care for you overshadowed his nerves. 

“C’mere.”

And he pulled you toward him and you immediately settled into his embrace, letting out a deep exhale as you burrowed your head in his chest, arms winding around his waist. And as much as he wanted to, he didn’t dare try to kiss you in the midst of your mini crisis, not knowing if you’d misinterpret it as only being given to try to make you feel better as opposed to showing you how deeply he felt about you.

“Thank you.” Your voice was muffled against him and you pulled back, sniffling but smiling. “Sorry I lost my cool there.”

“You don’t need to apologize. Come on, let’s get you some fresh air and some mandazi, you’ll feel better.”

“Good plan.” You both started walking down the hall, and Bucky could feel your stare burning through him, turning and seeing you giving him that look again.

“What?”

“Nothing ... just glad I met you.”

Even with that seemingly picture perfect moment, gnawing fear kept him from showing you right then and there how he really felt, settling instead on words that felt safer instead.

“Feeling’s mutual.”

He’s recalling all of these moments in his head, especially how he’s kicked himself after each one for not making a move. What was wrong with him? How long was he going to let fear dictate his life? The life he had fought for, the one he was still clawing his way out of the past for?

He’s jolted out of his reverie by the rumble of an engine in the distance, and his head snaps up to see trees rustling in the distance.

Even the sheep look startled.

“What the hell?”

And then he sees you come barreling out of the tree line in what looks like a military-grade hummer, except in a rich violet color, wearing sunglasses and a grin, the car’s speakers blaring that one Black Keys (Black Locks? He can never keep all the music you tell him straight) song he’s heard a few times in your lab, and he doesn’t know if he believes in a god, but damn, of all songs to be playing, it’s one hell of a cosmic coincidence that it’s this one.

“Woah, oh oh, I’ve got a love that keeps me hanging. 

I’m a lonely boy, I’m a lonely boy.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Bucky’s heart was beating fast, mind working overtime in a last-ditch attempt to dissuade him from stopping the chess match between you two and taking the chance he wanted to since practically the day you met. He’d been controlled for so long, shoved around with no agency, no say in what he could do.

But this, right here, right now, this was his life. And he didn’t want to waste more of it waiting, waste more of it hanging because of his own hesitation. He had the ability to make choices today, even when it seemed terrifying and vulnerable and could potentially end in disaster. Or, it could end in something fucking great. Something that made him feel happy, feel understood, feel alive.

Isn’t that all he really wanted?

And as you pull up near his hut, he makes a barely noticeable nod to himself. He’s made his decision. Today, instead of choosing fear, he was going to choose you.

Kill la Kill at Sakura-Con 2019

It’s been a few days since Sakura-Con 2019 ended, but I’m back home now—and well rested enough to finally write in detail about my experience there!

The con featured a playable demo of Kill la Kill the Game: IF, and David Vincent (Senketsu) was present as well. I was able to spend quite a bit of time with the game over the weekend, and I also attended one of Vincent’s panels, “BlazBlue/Kill la Kill Voices with David Vincent,” which he hosted on Saturday, April 20th. While the panel revealed very little about the upcoming video game, there were quite a few fun tidbits shared about the Kill la Kill anime and voice acting industry.

Since I played the game first, let me start there!

Kill la Kill the Game: IF

The Kill la Kill the Game: IF demo was available to all attendees of Sakura-Con from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm on Friday and Saturday and from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm on Sunday, but unfortunately, there was very little publicity regarding its appearance at the convention. Sakura-Con itself never advertised the demo; shockingly, Arc System Works is even absent from the Exhibitors list in the official Sakura-Con paper guidebook.

Even someone like me—who has heavily followed any and all news on the game since its announcement and devoted dozens of hours to reporting on it—only discovered a few mere days before the con that I would be able to play!

So, maybe it’s no surprise that I heard, many times over the weekend, some variation of, “I didn’t know there was a Kill la Kill fighting game!” And maybe it’s even less of a surprise that there was practically no line to try the game out while it was available at the Sakura-Con Exhibitors Hall—heck, sometimes, there wasn’t a line at all.

While the small crowd allowed me to easily play numerous matches—the only characters I have yet to try are Houka Inumuta and Ragyo Kiryuin, and I played Ryuko Matoi and Satsuki Kiryuin several times each—I was also sad to see the game not receive the attention it deserves.

As for the game itself, do note that this account is coming from someone who is not a gamer and who’s legitimately struggling to think of any other fighting games besides the Super Smash Bros. and Tekken series that she’s played. (But, y’know, actually, Tekken was my jam back in the day. Anyone else remember playing Devil or Angel in Tekken 2 and just holding down like circle, triangle, and square to shoot lasers outta your eyes and take out practically all of the opponent’s HP bar? Just me?)

So, needless to say, anime fighters are totally new ground for me. I don’t have the background to discuss how Kill la Kill the Game: IF stacks up to similar titles, nor do I have the expertise to talk any technical details, and I won’t pretend that I do. But I will say this: as someone who was already planning on buying the game 2-3 times purely for the story and who had extremely minimal interest in the actual gameplay, I enjoyed playing way more than I thought I would. The combos were flashy and fun, I loved the supers and special attacks, and the whole experience honestly brought me back to the good times I had playing Tekken as a kid. Sitting at the Arc System Works booth, I thought, “Wow, this is fun!”

Regarding the particular demo available at the booth, a few elements stand out to me:

✄ First, the build was not titled in the same way that other builds have been. Whereas the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) 2018 build was titled “EVO2018 Demo Version,” the Anime NYC build was titled “AnimeNYC 2018 Demo Version,” and the EVO Japan 2019 build was titled “EVO Japan 2019,” for example, the Sakura-Con build was simply titled “Demo Version.”

✄ It was previously revealed in ArcLive episode 46 that there will be an online demo of Kill la Kill the Game: IF. It’s likely that the Sakura-Con demo, literally titled “Demo Version,” will be this online demo.

✄ The Sakura-Con demo did not include all of the stages that have been seen in other builds. For instance, the Fiber Castle that was first playable in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) build last month was not present in the Sakura-Con demo.

✄ The Sakura-Con demo did include all of the characters that have been seen in other builds. Ryuko Matoi, Satsuki Kiryuin, Uzu Sanageyama, Ira Gamagoori, Houka Inumuta, Nonon Jakuzure, Ragyo Kiryuin, Nui Harime, and the dual-wielding variations of Ryuko and Satsuki were all available to play (though, printed-out character guides only seemed to be available for Ryuko and Satsuki). This is perhaps interesting because the PQubeGames stream from last week did not have Ragyo, Nui, or the dual-wielding variations of Ryuko and Satsuki available to play.

✄ But speaking of the PQubeGames stream, the build there did offer alternate color options from the character select menu. The colors were “Basic Color,” “ARC Collab Color,” and “Alternate Color.” The Sakura-Con demo, in contrast, did not offer alternate color options from the character select menu. 

✄ At Sakura-Con, the only way to see alternate colors was for both players to choose the same fighter. All alternate colors in the Sakura-Con demo were presumably based off of the evil clone colors from the Kill la Kill episode 25 OVA: characters are grayed out with green eyes and blonde hair. The PQubeGames stream includes a match that features the evil clone colors for Ira, and Alpharad’s GDC video includes a match that features the evil clone colors for Satsuki. 

✄ And, though I do not have any screenshots, I purposely played double-character matches against the computer when there was no line at Sakura-Con just to see the alternate colors. I was able to try Ryuko against Ryuko and Nui against Nui, and they too had the evil clone coloration for their alternate colors. Ryuko is grayed out with blonde hair and green eyes (which Senketsu shares as well), though her red streaks remain intact. Nui is also grayed out with a green eye and a dark pink eyepatch. 

✄ Interestingly, the evil clone colors were not the alternate colors that were originally shown for Ryuko and Satsuki. At EVO 2018 last year, the alternate color for Satsuki was not grayed out and did not have green eyes. The alternate color for Ryuko featured orange hair and a white Senketsu. It was stated in ArcLive episode 46 that there will be more than two color options per character, so perhaps these colors for Ryuko and Satsuki will make a return in the final version of the game.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that Seven Net Shopping is offering Junketsu-colored costumes for the cast as a pre-order bonus, and these costumes could possibly be purchasable later.

✄ There were minor changes to the translation in the Sakura-Con demo. For one example, Senketsu’s “Don’t make me dizzy,” which was the localization as of the GDC build last month, became “You’re making me dizzy.” I also might have been too overwhelmed to pay the most attention to this detail, but I can’t say I recall any mention of “Snippity-Snips.”

✄ It might be another case of being too overwhelmed to pay the most attention to this detail, but I also can’t recall any of the big red “Counter Hit”s and “Guard Break”s that have been in every build thus far in the Sakura-Con demo.

✄ After completing a match, the game simply said, “Thank you!” In the past, such as at Anime NYC last year, there would be a request to complete a survey and share your thoughts. The game may be too far in production now to really incorporate feedback.

For some other general notes on the game and my experience playing it:

✄ Every character has an Instant Kill attack that’s accompanied by an elaborate cutscene (and you can see all Instant Kills that have been featured in gameplay videos in this extensive document). I never managed to score an Instant Kill myself (because I failed at the rock-paper-scissors-styled Bloody Valor like literally every time and definitely got Insta-Killed for it!), but while watching others play, I caught glimpses of the Instant Kills for Uzu and Nui, neither of which I’ve seen in any released gameplay footage thus far. 

Uzu’s Instant Kill involves a lot of “Men! Dou! Kote!”-ing, and Nui’s Instant Kill is rather haunting. The pupil of her one eye shrinks, and she slashes her opponent in a way that’s reminiscent of how she murders Isshin Matoi. When she’s finished, she sticks out her tongue.

✄ I enjoyed playing Ryuko and Satsuki (both versions) the most, and this is probably only partly because they’re my favorite characters on the roster. Both Ryuko and Satsuki are speedy fighters with some really fun, flashy combos and specials. I tend to value speed over power when it comes to gaming, so these two fit my preferences nicely.

✄ Ira was by far my least favorite character to play (sorry, Gama! I still love you!) He’s simply far too slow for my liking. But surprisingly, I enjoyed playing as Nonon more than I thought I would. I like my battles up close and personal, but zoning as Nonon wasn’t really that unappealing at all.

✄ I played against the computer for the double matches, and it was set very easy. I won without breaking a sweat, and I lost to plenty of folks at the con.

✄ And, of course, I love the dialogue. The banter really makes this game 100 times more enjoyable. 

Well, for me, at least. 

I can’t tell anyone else how to play the game, but it definitely hurt a little when folks I played with skipped the cutscenes.

✄ I saw so many lines I hadn’t seen translated before, and I wish I had the memory to recall all of them. But perhaps some of the most amusing lines came from the double-character matches. 

Nui notes that it’s annoying that her copy looks like her, but she haaaates even more that her copy sounds like her. Ryuko, meanwhile, gets very caught up in calling out her copy as a fake, but Senketsu tries to be all analytical about it. He wonders if it’s the Life Fibers that created the clone and tells Ryuko, “Stay calm... there may be more of them.” Ryuko answers, “Fight now, think later!” When you win, Senketsu will say, “We won, but I have so many questions” or wonder about where “she” came from. It was way too loud in the Exhibitors Hall to make out the Japanese here, but I wonder if Senketsu does in fact specify that he’s referring just to the copied Ryuko and is less concerned about the copy of himself, pfff.

Other dialogue things:

✄ Uzu calls Nui “a beast.”

✄ Ryuko essentially pulls a, “You killed my father, prepare to die!” right before fighting Nui, and it is amazing.

✄ Ryuko tells Ragyo, “You’re just like your kid.”

✄ Ryuko’s “ass wipe” comment is included in the PQubeGames stream, but, okay. It’s great. It definitely got some reactions at the con! 

Especially because she was directing it at herself in that case....

tl;dr?

✄ Me, a non-gamer just about 100% interested in this thing for the story, really enjoyed playing the game!

✄ Which sadly did not receive much attention from Sakura-Con.

✄ But it’s a fun game with fun dialogue, and while the Sakura-Con demo didn’t have everything I’ve seen in other builds (such as some stages and the option to use alternate colors), all currently released characters were playable. It seems likely that Sakura-Con’s demo’ll end up being the online demo of the game, and I’d be thrilled to play this build again!

BlazBlue/Kill la Kill Voices with David Vincent

Saturday’s panel was largely an open Q&A session with David Vincent with some voice acting from the crowd in the latter half. Some Kill la Kill-related questions and answers are as follows:

✄ Someone (not me, I swear!) noted that Ryuko and Senketsu have a very close bond in the series and asked if David Vincent (Senketsu) ever recorded with Erica Mendez (Ryuko) in the booth. The answer was no. It’s too difficult to match lip flaps with more than one person in the booth, so in anime dubbing, everyone records alone.

✄ One question asked about the auditioning process for Senketsu. Vincent noted that he wasn’t sure how to voice a jacket, but he understood more as he watched the series. He described the typical auditioning process for voice acting roles, saying that an actor is called in to read for the character and, if they do well, they’ll receive a callback to read for the character again. With every callback, the pool of actors becomes smaller and smaller until one actor finally wins the role. Interestingly, Vincent said that he had to record the first episode of Kill la Kill again because he was told to change the voice he was using. Later in the panel, he further revealed that he had to say the “Sen-i-Soshitsu!” line at the end of the first episode about 25 times because producer Hiroe Tsukamoto was very strict about the pronunciation; for example, she told him the correct way to pronounce “Osaka.”

✄ When asked if Vincent tries to base his performance on the Japanese VAs, he said no. Vincent likes to bring his own take on a character.

✄ In regards to ad-libbing, Vincent said that he often isn’t allowed to. For instance, at the end of Senketsu’s speedy recap for episode 16, he ad-libbed Senketsu taking a deep breath... but this was cut.

✄ Someone spoiled the ending for Kill la Kill and asked how Vincent felt about Senketsu getting “dusted.” Vincent answered that Kill la Kill is a wild, ludicrous show, but Senketsu’s death is quite poignant. The final episode was shown at Sakura-Con 2014, at another panel that Vincent was present for, and he said many people came up to him afterwards and expressed how saddened they were by Senketsu’s passing.

✄ Regarding Senketsu’s death, there was a question asking if Senketsu is “really” dead in the episode 25 OVA. Vincent said that Senketsu is “comic book dead” and coming back.

Can I foolishly hope this means that there’s a “Senketsu Lives” ending in the upcoming video game?

✄ Concerning the game, Vincent said that he had signed contracts and couldn’t say a thing about it... except that he just finished recording, and it’s good.

Given that Kill la Kill the Game: IF releases in North America and Europe on July 26th, it’s likely that we’ll hear a bit more of the English dub—and Vincent reprising his role as Senketsu again—before too long.

hey!! I was just wondering if you could give me tips on how to make notes on your story like you have with The Man Downstairs?

Thanks for the ask!  And sure :D  (Here’s the notes in question, if anyone wants to see and the increasingly massive Gravity Falls fic they refer to.)

It’s all about figuring out what you need to know for your project and keeping a record of it that works well for you.  It might take some time and trial and error to find what helps you the most.  It might be one sentence summaries of each chapter.  It might be a detailed timeline.  it might be drawings and maps.  Or it could be something completely different or some combination of things.    

For me, I take notes on pretty much everything because my memory is non-existent and the purpose of the notes is to give me an easier way of looking at what happened in each chapter without having to reread the whole thing.  The color coding helps me find things faster, like if I know I’m looking for something Dipper said or something to do with Stan.

As for the process, I let each chapter sit for a while after posting to sort of clear it out of my head.  When I reread it, I try to get into the mindset of the audience, to some extent, so I can imagine what parts seemed important from their perspective and write a loose summary based on that.  It’s sort of difficult to turn off knowing what’s in the plans for the future and the answers to questions raised but, that has its advantages since you can add in the bits that you know are important as well.  (And make notes accordingly in your brainstorming/outline document(s) for future chapters).  The detailed summary is a simplification of the chapter broken down into bullet points by actions, events, setting details, and anything else that seems like something I might want to refer back to at some point.  So, instead of a whole dialogue, I can write “They discussed the thing.  He felt this way and she felt that way and mentioned this other thing.”  Or instead of an inner monologue, I can summarize it as “she thought about the thing, felt angry, and decided to talk to X about it.” Or an action scene could be summarized as “X punched Y.  Y kicked X and sprained their ankle.”  

After the detailed summary is written (or sometimes part way through, just because I feel like it ;)), I start color coding each event by the character(s) associated with it so it’s easier to see, at a glance, which characters feature in which chapters and to follow their individual (and intertwined) story arcs.  My mind tends to categorize things by who is involved so it works well for me but the color coding could easily also be sorted by events, locations, plots, and so on.  You may even want more than one copy of your notes so you can use multiple methods.  I do also have a few color codes set for certain plot elements that feature heavily in the overall story so it’s easy to look back and find what I’ve already established about them.  (Plus, Google Docs has a feature where, if you highlight a word and right click, there’s an option to “select all matching text” and it will highlight everything with the same color/highlighting format so it’s easier to see while scrolling through or you can copy it and paste it to its own doc to look at just those parts.)

Anyway, additional tips I can offer are: Think about what’s important to you for your project and focus on it when formatting your notes.  When rereading, look for anything that seems like it could be important later or might even have inadvertently brought up plot elements you hadn’t previously thought about or even shifted the plot.  If you’re going for continuity details, jot down what items were mentioned as being in a room, what the characters were wearing, what time it was etc. You’d be surprised, sometimes, that you need to look twenty chapters back to see if it was raining when something happened or if you mentioned that X character had their scarf on in a certain scene.  You can also leave out details and use your notes as a map to find which scenes happened in what chapter so you can reread it for details, if that works better for you.  Be flexible.  You might get to a point where you’ll realize that you need to start coding things differently or you might have to go back and take notes on something you didn’t think you’d have to.  Mostly, do whatever works best for you.  Maybe it’s handwritten index cards, maybe it’s a Scrivener doc, or maybe it’s no notes at all (looks at younger self who could remember things).  

Hope this helped in some way!