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lonely-lost-soul · 3 years

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A Pirate's Life for Me

Cover Art Done By: @fridaydev-draws and @friday-dsv (Dreamsmp x reader) Pirate Au! Love Interests: C!Wilbur, C!Techno, C!Dream, C!Sapnap, C!Quackity, and C!Schlatt

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Salt burned your lungs as you tossed open your window with a loud bang, the seagulls perching on your flower boxes screeched in protest and flew from your window. “Fucking sky rats get the fuck out of here you heathens!” You snarled out the window shaking your fist at the bothersome birds, the sounds of the ocean crashing on the shore filled your ears as well as the chatter of the dock workers. You let the breeze blow back your hair and you heard someone calling your name from down below.

“Good morning (Y/n)!” You glanced below you and grinned,

“Morning Eret!” They waved back enthusiastically their dress spilling around their ankles, a basket of fruit was balanced on his hip. “Opening early today? I'm sure your patrons would be happy to start their drunken stupor early,” She held a hand to his mouth snickering and you shot them a look.

“If that gets more money in my pocket then so be it, I won't complain too much.” You shrugged, “Will I still see you later tonight?”

“Always do dove, how can I resist a drink from my favorite bartender.”

“You can’t it’s my charm.”

“Will the both of you shut the fuck up!” Another man’s voice growled from another open window, “It’s too early for your bullshit.” You saw Eret click his tongue but smiled up at you despite the man's protests,

“I’m heading to the market anyway. These fruits won’t sell themselves, I'll see you later.”

“See you soon!” You closed your windows once more, but not before urging your daisies to grow one last time. You tossed open the curtains allowing light to spill into your cozy home, a small carpet was in the middle of your room. It was a deep red and the pattern was made of gold yarn, aside from that everything in your residency was made of dark wood. Your shelves were littered with books and empty cups, and your old worn journal sat open on your desk. It was filled with childhood memories and you continued to write in it to this day, it was easier then, things were simple and everything was innocent and new to you. Now your days were filled with sea fairing idiots who liked to drink themselves stupid, but you could handle yourself, you always kept your father's dagger on your thigh at all times. Those who were frequent customers knew not to mess with you and those who were new learned their lesson within the first ten minutes of meeting you. You inherited the bar from your father, a kindhearted man who died a few years before today, leaving you with the bar and the dagger you had on your hip. You fished through your closet pulling out your clothes for the day, your dress was a gorgeous light coffee color and came down to your ankles. The bottom was flared and had dark brown panels on the sides, it faded inward to a light green then back to the coffee color. The corset around your waist was a dark brown with light green trim, you tied it tight with a small huff making sure your waist was sinched perfectly. The sleeves came down to your elbows allowing you to move your arms freely while making drinks. The top of the dress ended just below your collarbone, you strapped your dagger to your thigh before lacing up your knee-high black boots.

You thought back to your tavern downstairs, you were fortunate enough that you weren’t running this entire operation yourself. You ended up hiring help and they were like family and you knew they saw you as such as well. Most of the girls didn’t have a family of their own so you gave them room and board, also money, of course, you weren’t a terrible boss! You opened the door to your room, you watched Cecil, the tavern’s mascot trot out of Juniper’s room. The border collie liked to switch up which rooms he stayed in protecting every one of your girls when you couldn’t be there for them.

The first of your girls was Adelaide or Addie, she was one of the first to fall under your care. She was around your age, a motherly type, sheep hybrid, who cared for the girls, and always gave the drunk patrons with mommy issues a shoulder to cry on. Her long brown hair always hung down her back, she typically worked tables, served food and drinks, and always got a generous tip from patrons.

The next girl was Judas, a squid-enderman hybrid who was taller than you could ever wish to be, although intimidating you couldn’t meet a kinder woman. A jack of all trades the woman helped out wherever she could, black-ish purple hair curled around her shoulders and some people came specifically to hear her sing. Her voice was like rich velvet and lured men and women in like a siren.

Juniper was after Judas, a demon hybrid who was naive but you’d be a fool to underestimate her. She worked beside you at the bar, she can make some mean fruity drinks, Eret always preferred her drinks over yours. Freckles adorned her face and shoulders, her light brown hair curled down to her middle back, purple horns sprouted from the top of her head. You wanted to adorn it with gold jewelry and you were saving up to gift some to her.

Yeti was a human woman like yourself, she didn’t bother with those who were rude or obnoxious. She kept to herself only really talking when she was spoken to or when there was an opportunity to crack a rare joke. She typically stayed on the sidelines, out of the scenes and Yeti liked to help Judas decorate her sets.

Zig was a kind young adult, they got along with everyone who came inside the tavern. Soft emerald eyes drew people in, and they tried to make sure tensions within the bar didn’t rise and start a fight. There would always be one or two that’s just natural, but one look at Zig and his magic words and they seemed to disperse, not wanting to hurt the kid’s feelings.

Vendetta was the tallest member of the group you had taken in, she was stunningly beautiful and didn't take shit from anybody. She was a guard dog if you will, making sure no one fucked with any of the girls in your tavern. While Zig did their best to keep people under control sometimes they couldn’t win. That’s when Ven would step in and ‘kindly’ escort them off the premises with or without force.

The youngest member here was Luvena. She was a moo-bloom hybrid with soft brown hair that sprouted flowers, her cow ears would twitch when she was excited and followed Addie around like she was her daughter. Addie took her under her wing and was training her to be a perfect little waitress, absolutely warming customers’ hearts. Luvena also loved to give out flowers, she was a fan favorite bringing new life into the tavern.

Cecil barked seeing his mama and scampered over to you, you poured food into his bowl as Juniper wandered into the hallway. Her head rested on the doorframe as she gave you a tried wave, “Morning (Y/n).”

“Morning Juni, We’re opening a little early today. Take your time I’m not expecting a big rush of bar patrons this early.” You assured her and she gave a sleepy nod,

“I’ll be down as soon as Ven’s out of the shower.” She yawned, “This beauty doesn’t come naturally.”

“Hardly darling you’re gorgeous just the way you are.” You reassured with a wink, Juniper flushed a little, happily laughing beside you.

“Just go wake the others will you, you flirt!”

Tossing your head back you gave a happy laugh heading down the hallway to make sure everyone was awake and ready to go for later. Addie and Luvena shared a room so she was in charge of waking up the youngest member of the tavern. Judas was already awake making breakfast for everyone when you headed downstairs, Zig was sitting on the counter beside her, they were the designated taste tester.

“Good morning Miss (Y/n)!” Zig chirped, the young adult hummed fondly, “Sleep okay?”

“Absolutely. What about you both? Thank you for making breakfast Judas.” You hummed fondly and Judas had a shy smile on her face.

“I slept well thank you.” Judas hummed softly, “Also it’s my pleasure. Want to make sure everyone’s healthy and alright.” She let out a little squeak as you wrapped your arms around her body, you barely came up to her chest,

“Judas please marry me,” You complained, “Your breakfast is always heavenly and you care for everyone. Please be my wife.”

“(Y/n)! Please.” She sputtered face turning a dark purple, Zig made a noise of protest and held his hand in the air.

“If she won’t marry you I will!”

“Zig! I’d be honored!”

Their entire face lit up with excitement and they hopped off the table to hug you tightly, you hugged them back and pressed a fond kiss to the top of their head. “I got to open up the tavern, you mind setting the table for me Zig?”

“Sure Miss!”

You sent Judas a kiss in the air which her face burned at, quickly going back to her cooking. You smiled eagerly and unlocked the door to the tavern, you shoved a bucket in front of the door to keep it open. The salty ocean air wafted through your nostrils and your eyes sparkled wondrously.

Today is going to be a good day.

Almost immediately a particular bastard caught your eye,

“You’re here early.” You mused raising an eyebrow,

“Heard you were opening early today sweetcheeks,” His voice was a low baritone, rough from years of smoking and drinking. Horns curled around his fluffy ears that stood out against his gruff exterior, he was a ram hybrid at its finest. “Figured I’d take the opportunity to get a special drink from my special girl,” He mused looking you up and down drinking in your figure. You scoffed at the retired man, he dressed like he was cosplaying captain jack sparrow, the gun’s in his belt just added to his costume and so did his large ruffled shirt, he was never one to forget his gold jewelry.

“Where’s Quackity?” You ignored him sitting him at his usual table, he frowned but you knew he was taking it as an opportunity to stare at your ass. He slid into the stool and put his feet up on the table, his boots were muddy but you could only control him so much. He was too much of a regular to get scared off by your threats and scolding.

“He’ll be in at his normal time. He’s not much of a day drinker, although can’t say I’m complaining. Having all your attention on me and all, considering I’m the only one in here. That being said, I’ll have my usual sweetcheeks.”

“Stop calling me that,” You scolded with a certain fondness that was reserved for the man. “You’re lucky you’re my favorite regular Schlatt,” you gave his ears a fond pinch and he bleated. He sent you a scalding look as you walked away, although the look soon fell as he got a good look at your ass once again.

“I’m your only regular sugar tits!”

“Schlatt feet off the table.” Addie criticized whacking his boots with a rolled-up menu, he rolled his eyes but dropped his feet to the floor. “You should know this by now, we go through this every day.”

“Yeah, yeah little lamb I’m on it. Judas here?”

“She’s always here,” She huffed spreading the menu down on the table. “Do you want your usual or something different? Should I get Quackity’s drink ready too?”

“Nah just stick with mine, for now, tell Judas I’d like to see her.”

Addie clicked her tongue and placed her hand on her hip, “fine. But if you’re just going to grossly flirt with her as you do with (y/n), then keep it to yourself.”

“You’re not the boss of me. Just because you look like an old hag-” The way she glared at him sent a chill down his spine, “shit babe take a joke will you.”

Eventually, people began to file into the tavern, as the morning faded into the afternoon and then into the evening. The tavern was bustling with life, Judas’s elegant voice traveled through the crowds and her voices seemed to float above the voices. Quackity joined Schlatt by his side seemingly irritated by a conversation they were having, Schlatt was about five drinks in at this point, which was much less than his usual, and Quackity on his second.

“What are they talking about?” Luvena asked swinging her legs as she sat on the bar beside you. Her moobloom ears twitching every so often as she tried to eavesdrop on their conversation,

“Vena it’s impolite to eavesdrop.” You scolded bopping her on the head lightly, she whined and rubbed the top of her head.

“I wasn’t!” She argued as you rolled your eyes, you looked over at the two men to find Quackity looking over at you. His hand was raised in the air, one finger was up summoning you to get him another drink.

“I’ll be back, why don’t you talk to Ven while I’m gone. She’ll keep an eye on you.”

“I don’t need a babysitter!”

“Good thing she doesn’t want to babysit your ass either, now shoo.” You motioned her to hop off the bar and she did so with a long, dramatic sigh. You looked over at Ven who gave you a silent nod, letting you know she’d watch out for the youngest member of your band of misfits. Meanwhile, you grabbed Quackity another drink and walked over to the two men at the table, “Someone order a drink?”

“Aye! Mamacita! Fancy seeing you here.” Quackity purred a bright smile spreading across his face seeing that you were the one to deliver his drink,

“Hey Big Q,” You greeted placing the drink in front of him, “You doing okay?”

“Better now that an angel walked into my sight,” He flirted and you rolled your eyes. “What? It’s true! You always brighten my day you know? Ow!” Schlatt hit his ex-first mate over the head,

“Take a breath lover boy. Thanks for the drink sugar tits.”

“You’re welcome, what were the both of you talking about if I may ask.” You hummed grabbing some of Schlatt’s empty glasses, an uncharacteristic frown came over both their faces. “Oh? Touchy subject?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Just dishing out some old problems, most of which are better left unsaid.” He aimed that statement at Quackity, his jaw seemed clenched and Quackity’s brow furrowed in annoyance.

“Well I just want to remind the both of you,” You passed the tray of empty glasses over to Addie as she walked by, she took them swiftly. You grabbed the side of both their heads and pressed them against your chest, not that you knew but both men’s flushed to the tips of their ears. “No physical fights are allowed in this tavern. If one starts I won’t hesitate to kick your fucking asses. Got it?” They looked over your chest and locked eyes with one another, after years on the sea they could read one another’s facial expressions rather easily and at that moment they shared the same thought,

‘They should fight more often.’

“I said, got it?”

“Yes ma’am,” The repeated simultaneously as you pulled away,

“That’s what I like to hear-”

“(Y/n)!” Vendetta’s velvety voice called out from behind you, you turned and saw a group of newcomers file into your bar. Your body tensed momentarily,

Pirates.

Schlatt turned his head to follow your gaze and he tensed from behind you, “fuck me.” He growled and Quackity raised an eyebrow at his captain, he turned to look over his shoulder and his face lit up.

“Sapnap!”

The pirate who had a white bandana tied around his forehead glanced over at him and a smile lit up across his features. “Quackity? Is that you?”

“My man!” He stood up from his chair heading over to wrap the man in a hug, “I haven’t seen you in years, man.” You zoned out of their conversation eyes locking with a few of the other pirates who walked into the tavern. Vendetta and Addie both greeted them, but everyone who was under your care knew to keep their guard up around pirates. From what you could gather there seemed to be two crews, a crew of what only seemed to be two, Sapnap was included. The fire demon was still talking with Quackity, while the other man took in the view of the tavern, he had shaggy blonde hair, and had a few scars across his face. A porcelain mask sat on top of his head, a forest green cloak was around his shoulders, his hood was lowered around his neck. A sword was strapped tight against his hip and there was another dagger that seemed to be tucked against his side. His eyes gazed towards you and he winked teasingly with a coy smile, you scoffed looking over at Addie.

“Seat those two gentlemen yeah? Be careful, I’ll tell Ven and Yeti to keep an eye.” Addie looked at you, concern written on her soft features but she nodded. While Addie departed, you noticed Ven talking with the other group. Luvena was hiding behind Vendetta’s long legs, although a tall blonde boy seemed very keen on talking to her. You smoothed out your dress and moved towards the group of three, you eyed them up casually. The blonde looked to be around Luvena’s age, he had a shit-eating grin on his face and his uniform matched that of the second tallest in the group. The second tallest was clad in a light blue jacket with large golden buttons on the red collar. He had a cream-frilled shirt underneath and a black belt holding up his brown slacks, those were tucked into black boots. On his back seemed to be a guitar and was the only one of them not holding a weapon, but you knew better than to assume with pirates. His curly brown hair seemed to bounce every time he talked, he seemed to be the ringleader but there was no doubt that the real ringleader was the hybrid standing beside him. He was taller, on par with Vendetta in height, he had long pink hair that was tied in a ponytail on top of his head. A few pieces framed his face elegantly, there was no doubt he was the captain of the little crew that was in your tavern. He had a white shirt on with a deep low cut ‘V’ it showed off a good portion of his scared chest, around his shoulders sat a deep red jacket but his arms were outside of it and crossed over his chest. He seemed content on letting his second in command do all the talking, his red eyes were the only ones to meet yours. His head tilted upwards and before Vendetta could stop him he walked over towards you,

“You own the tavern?” His voice was a low monotone and it sent an array of pleasant chills up your spine.

“I do,” You raised an eyebrow crossing your arms over your chest, “Names (Y/n). You are?”

“Captain Technoblade of the ship Odyssey, I was hoping you had a few rooms and a table available. My brothers and I are pretty exhausted, we’ve been sailing all night.”

Brothers, they certainly didn’t all look alike, but then again you certainly had a mix of girls in your care. Your tongue swiped against the top row of your teeth, “Why don’t you and your brothers take a seat at the bar for now. Juniper will be happy to serve you, I’ll see if we have some free rooms available.”

“Thank you, once you return I’ll introduce them to you if you’d like,” Technoblade bowed his head before turning back to get his brother’s attention.

“I’d like that thank you.” You gave a nod motioning for Vendetta to follow you as you slid behind the bar with Juniper, Judas had also taken a spot sitting on the bar. You figured you’d let her know as well, considering she was another adult figure in the group. You knew either Juniper or Judas would fill in Addie considering the three were close. “Ven, can they be trusted?”

“Not too sure about the masked man, the one Quackity seems to be familiar with seems decent enough. He’s a fire demon though, could smell him from miles away, we all just need to be cautious.”

“Agreed,” Juniper added tapping her finger on her chin. “We should just try to curb all fighting if at all possible, what did the captain of the other group ask you?”

“They want a room, I’m about to check to see if we have availability. Thoughts on that?”

Judas let out a low hum her eyes followed both sets of pirate groups around the tavern, “I say if we have availability let them stay. They seem harmless so long as we don’t mess with them, which we’d never do.”

“Plus I can always stay awake to keep an eye on them.” Vendetta tapped her nails against the table,

“You sure.”

“As if I’d let anything happen to any of you, you’re my family.”

You all smiled softly, and you noticed Judas’s eyes widen, “Zig! Get that out of your mouth this instant!” She shot up from her spot and over to the person in question. The three of you laughed fondly at the nonsense, meanwhile, Juniper saw the three brothers sit at her bar. She moved away from you to greet them, you immediately could tell she was taken with the second eldest brother.

He seemed to be an absolute lady killer.

Vendetta ruffled your hair before going back to stand at her place by the door to keep the peace. You headed up the stairs to the rafters to check on the extra rooms you had, “Excuse me?” You tensed visibly turning around to face the man in all green. His eyes were mesmerizing, a fierce jade green to contrast his cloak, “Do you happen to have two rooms available?” The man held up two fingers to clarify his request,

“Do you usually start introductions with a blatant request like that?”

He chuckled a smile spreading across his lips, “I’m Dream and you gorgeous?”

“(Y/n), it’s your lucky day I’m about to check and see if any are available. My tavern is a hot commodity tonight.”

“Well, I can see why,” he spoke and you raised an eyebrow and tilted your head to the side.

“Oh?”

“It has the hottest owner around. Word spreads fast.”

You couldn’t believe this man was making your cheeks burn, he chuckled softly taking a step towards your figure. “Oh really, word spreads that fast on the open sea, Captian?” It was his turn to turn light pink, but he covered it up quickly with a chuckle.

“Touché.”

“I’ll get on that room for you and your friend. Take a seat, for now, this part is for guests and staff only you know?”

“So I have you all to myself?” He cheekily mused, he stepped towards you and before you knew it you were pinned against a wall. His hand suddenly brushed against your cheek, it was cold in comparison to your warm cheek. You felt Dream’s thumb brush against your cheek slowly, “You know...being on the open sea alone does something to a person.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” You mused pushing your forehead back against Dream’s, “All alone with only your crew with you.” Taking his other hand within your own you slid it up to your hip, you saw his entire face turn red as he stared down at your chest. “You’re probably missing a little love in your life, aren’t you Dreamy?” He nodded dumbly, his eyes still not leaving your chest,

Perfect. You weren’t going to let some pirate boy get the better of you.

He let out a grunt of pain as you spun him around and pressed his head into the wall with your elbow, your other hand has his pinned behind his back. “This hallway is for staff and guests only,” You purred in his ear before letting him go and swinging your hips before heading up the stairs fully. From behind you, Dream’s face was a deep, dark red and he had to clear his throat. Dream wasn’t going to let you go after that, I mean look at you, tough and able to hold your own, it awakened something inside him.

After checking up on the rooms you headed back down into the main hall, three-room keys in your hand. Glancing over at the scene in front of you, you saw Juniper dancing in the middle of the tavern the flirtatious brother at her side. Judas was sitting beside Schatt and Quackity at the bar, Addie was tending to Technoblade and the blonde at their little table. Dream and Sapnap were whispering to one another in the corner but still seemed to be enjoying the show. Vendetta was smiling softly by the door, beside her were Luvena and Zig both playing various instruments. You noticed Eret was also amongst the crowd, she had a brilliant grin on his face, it was flushed pink with alcohol and you smiled to yourself.

It was peaceful, and for a moment you forget half the patrons were scoundrels or pirates.

That was until the man dancing with Juniper locked eyes with you, his eyes lit up and he spun Juniper off into Addie’s arms. She giggled snuggling into the mother sheep’s arms, you heard a distressed “Juni! I’m holding glasses!” Before your vision was overtaken by the handsome flirt.

“Hello love,” He hummed, “May I offer you a dance?”

You were about to refuse but you saw Yeti, who finally made her appearance as it was getting closer to Judas’s set, giving you a big thumbs up “I’d be honored.” You responded taking his hand within your own, he pulled you out onto the dance floor and you felt his other hand politely hover on the small of your back. He allowed you to lean into his touch as he began to elegantly spin you around the dance floor, you were almost embarrassed to say felt like a princess. “Maybe I could get your name?” You asked above the music, “Since it seems you’re my dance partner this evening?”

“Wilbur Soot my love.” He hummed proudly, “The first mate of the ship Odysseus at your service. Plus I play music on the side.”

“Well now you need to play for us,” Wilbur twirled you around in a circle,

“Maybe one day. If you give me your name?”

“(Y/n) (L/n).”

“Beautiful name for a beautiful woman.”

“I was right.” You commented biting the bottom of your lip trying not to smile,

“About what?”

“You.”

“Ah? Already talking about me I see? Is my manliness and gentlemanly qualities that renowned?”

“Not exactly.” He picked you up slightly and pulled you into a low dip, “I was right in thinking you a nothing but a flirty playboy.” Wilbur almost dropped you, you squawked grabbing onto his neck. He began to laugh as you clung to his chest,

“Alright love. You caught me red-handed.”

Wilbur set you on your feet hands on your lower back, you were pulled close to his chest. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“I get them for free hon. I own the place.”

“Oh...oh.” He paled a little, “I didn’t fuck up our chances of getting a room did I?”

“Nah lucky for you and your brothers, I have you covered, same with your buddies over there.” You motioned to Dream and Quackity’s friend, Wilbur’s face paled as he felt the chilled room key get placed in his palm. “What’s your little brother’s name?”

“Tommy.”

“Tell them both we serve breakfast free from 7 am to 10 am.” He nodded as you walked past, Wilbur meanwhile turned to look at Technoblade. It seemed he had his red eyes on the couple the entire time they were dancing. He held up a room key, it was labeled 205; Technoblade nodded his head before leaning back and talking to Addie once more. “Dream!” You called throwing a hand up into the air, instead of Dream, Sapnap looked up he nudged Dream with his elbow. The man was now wearing his mask, but at least you could tell he was looking at you,

“Well hello, darlin’ you must be (Y/n). Name's Sapnap. Dream told me about you, so you have good news for us I hope?”

“Pleasure, I'm sure he told you all about me,” He nodded, his eyes taking in your body especially your ass. “Got you both a room key, your neighbors. Across from the other crew of pirates. Just don’t fight and we won’t have any problems.”

“You mean those jackasses are staying?” Sapnap complained loudly, looking over your shoulder at the other crew members.

“You both didn’t think you were the only patrons, did you? This is a business after all.” You, tossed the keys their way, Dream caught it with ease and Sapnap fumbled it only a little bit. After they were in their hands, you waved them off with a flutter of your palm you turned around to go speak with Judas about her set but before you could take a step you saw Schlatt stumbling up from his seat. “Ah shit,” You knew what was about to happen, you weren’t paying attention to the ram hybrid so who knew how many drinks in he was. You felt responsible, for a while you and Judas had been trying to help Schlatt with his addiction. You couldn’t help but wonder what exactly set him off for him to get this drunk, Quackity caught him in his arms with a grumble. The man was a drunken mess, and as you approached you could hear his slurred speech and could practically smell the alcohol on his breath. “Schlatt,” You spoke carefully and as soon as you got close Schlatt detached himself from Quackity and lunged at you. His head was buried in his chest, he almost purred like he was very happy to be there, you rolled your eyes and ran your fingers through his hair. You were mindful of his horns but he seemed pretty eager for you to touch them,

“(Y/n).” He whined although it was muffled against your ample chest, “Why do pirates have to fuck everything up?”

“What are you on about Schlatt? No one likes pirates.”

“They’re gonna take you away from me, sugar. You’re my safe space, this tavern is my safe space.” You sighed listening to his drunken ramblings, you grabbed his horns and pulled him away from your chest.

“This is my life Schlatt, I’m not going anywhere trust me. Plus my family is here, they need me. So try not to worry okay?” You slicked back the hair on his forehead before planting a fond kiss there, everyone in the tavern narrowed their eyes at the scene. Even your girls were green with envy, at the sight of their lovely boss kissing someone who wasn’t them. He leaned against your lips eyes fluttering closed,

“Well, well, well if it isn’t Captian Schlatt? Or ex-captain if I remember correctly.”

“What?”

You turned your head and felt Schlatt’s arms wrap around your waist and held you close to his chest. The touch was protective and you felt your heart skip a beat, why was he protecting you, and why did you actually feel protected?

“Has the drinking finally caught up to you? Or was it the fact that you lost your so-”

Was that Dream's voice?

“Shut the fuck up.” He snarled and you were shoved behind him into Quackity’s arms, you felt less protected. “I’m not that person anymore and you fucking know that,” Vendetta came to stand beside the both of you a hand was placed on your shoulder protectively. You knew she was desperately wanted to step in and you held up a hand to stop her.

“This isn’t good…” Quackity murmured, “They’re going to fight. Schlatt’s going to get himself fucking killed.”

“Calm yourself. We won’t let it get that far.” Ven grumbled eyeing you waiting for your signal. But you were lost in the conversation or argument, the two were having, you couldn’t believe Schlatt was a pirate. He was so...he just didn’t...he was a drunk okay? That didn’t exactly shout feared pirate to you!

“Oh, are you sure? I remember that look, that’s the look you’d get before you stomped someone’s lights out. No wonder your son disappeared under mysterious circumstances-” Dream was shoved against one of the poles holding up the building. He grunted and Schlatt’s arm was pulled back ready to punch, but his arm was stopped by smaller hands,

“Pardon me Mr. Schlatt but you know how we feel about fighting in our tavern.” Addie bubbled, she had a smile on her face but it wasn’t kind, it was full of warning.

“Get the fuck off me, sheepie. This doesn’t fucking concern you.” Schlatt shoved her away and as soon as his skin made contact with her body he made a sound of distress.

“(Y/n)...” Addie murmured quietly, your father’s dagger was embedded in Schlatt’s arm,

“Fucking hell you bitch!” He snarled baring his teeth, you glared at him twisting the dagger he yelled in agony.

“Touch one of my girls again and next time this dagger is going right into your back.” You ripped the dagger out, splattering the floor with blood. He grabbed his arm tightly and looked at you with slight betrayal in his yellow eyes. “I mean it Schlatt, Quackity take him home.” The man nodded looking at you longingly, he muttered a quiet ‘Sorry’ before escorting him out of your tavern. “You,” You glared harshly over at Dream, “Go to your room.”

“You’re not my mother.”

“Then find another play to stay.” You spat, he turned away and you looked over at Addie, “Are you alright?” Your voice turned tender as you cupped her cheeks. She nuzzled against your palms and nodded her head,

“I’m fine. You didn’t need to-”

“Yes, I did. No one messes with you. With any of you on my watch.”

The sheep hybrid made a little sound as her bottom lip trembled, she wrapped you in a tight hug which you accepted without hesitance. Judas walked over next and wrapped you both in her arms, pretty soon you were surrounded by your girls and Zig.

All of them had the same mindset: comforting both you and Addie.

It was good to be loved.

Wilbur watched the scene curiously and glanced over at Technoblade who stood up from his chair.

“I think that’s our cue to leave for the night.” He looked over at his first mate, Wilbur nodded in agreement grabbing his guitar from the chair beside Technoblade.

“They...Techno were they talking about Tubbo.” Tommy whispered to his brother, his brow furrowing in concern as they all climbed the steps up to their room, “You don’t think-”

“It just might be Tommy.” Technoblade tilted his head to the side, “Guess that’ll be something we ask him when we get back to the ship tomorrow.”

“Well, this trip is going to be way more fun than I thought.” Wilbur snickered lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag, before letting the smoke curl out of his mouth and up into the rafters. ~~~

Tag List: @v01dw4lk3rz, @jam-bombs, @abovenyx, @glitterydigitalart, @phoenixaesthetic19, @luluwinchester, @boiled-onionrings, @pastelmoonwitche, @roxy3457, @alovestruck-fool, @victory-is-here, @mack4676, @fiorenc, @theoneandonlyyeti, @bloodrose0723, @sandyy-woo,

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himbodemon · 3 years

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HC: The brothers as KPop Stans

I have an itch to scratch.

Purely self-indulgent headcanons that sprung from the thought of Asmo dancing to HyunA like yes king serve it up

DISCLAIMER: All are fully fluffy/SFW except for Satan’s which is mildly suggestive.

LUCIFER:

Not a fan AT ALL. Finds it too loud and flashy & cannot understand why so many humans are infatuated by it

Gets wee woo by pristin stuck in his head and is FURIOUS about it

You’ll be hanging around in his room while he works, scrolling through your D.D.D when you hear him breathe out a deep little “we are pristin...” followed by a painfully disgruntled groan of annoyance. You try so hard not to laugh and fail.

Might end up occasionally listening to acoustic / orchestral covers and arrangements of some of your favourite songs so he can try and connect with you / understand your interests.

If you forced him to pick, Fave singers / groups would be AKMU, IU and Hwasa (The instrumentals aren’t really his style but he finds her singing style / voice soothing and also she’s... gorgeous wow...)

MAMMON:

Yeah the music’s fine and all but people are paying $50 for Photocards!?!?!?

One of those people that buys like, 200 albums to get into a fansign, only to sell off the fansign ticket for an extortionate price

I fully believe that Mammon would like to visit MC’s room whenever he’s stressed out or overwhelmed, and they’d just sit and listen to music together - maybe subtly dancing along with their shoulders or tapping their feet but mostly just silently enjoying each other’s presence

You’re doing that one day when he tells you to play “That one song he likes”. You immediately know it’s ‘HYLT’ by Blackpink

Probably in love with the flashy MV’s, every time he sees a new model of car in the background he wants to buy one for himself

Fave groups would be BLACKPINK, BTS and EXO

LEVIATHAN:

100% in love with cutesy girlgroups

Will listen to Twice’s ‘candy pop’ on a loop for 12 hours straight because it’s so precious and bubbly and the girls are so cute??? plus he can pretend they’re still 2D waifus that way

Walks into your room to show you the new lightstick he just ordered, only to see you practicing the choreography to ‘cheer up’. Immediately flares up in a blush and BOLTS out at record speed

Please don’t dance around him his little weeb heart can’t take it

Every time he gets into a new group, it only takes him about a week before he’s fully memorised their online profiles and knows every single fanchant

Might get a little upset if you compliment an idols looks/visuals/talents because he’ll start comparing himself to them, says things like “W-Why would you be interested in me?? I’m not exactly Jungkook now am I???”. He knows it’s hypocritical with how overly invested he gets in idols but he is the avatar of envy after all, it can’t really be helped

Fave groups would be TWICE, K/DA (not his music style but pretty 2D catgirl makes his brain go brrrr) and Weeekly

SATAN:

You’re sat in the living room watching KPop MV’s, he walks past you and just so happens to see the AOA ‘Like a Cat’ MV on your D.D.D

You’ve successfully piqued his interest

Would ask you lots of questions about the industry, different groups, what you like about it etc..

Would do a lot of research into significant figures of the genre and probably knows every single detail about KPop Slave Contracts, if he’s feeling argumentative might ask how you can enjoy a form of media that treats its artists so badly

Any group with a jazz / sultry aspect is immediately going in his playlist. I know a lot of people put Satan down as a metal-lover and while I fully agree, I could also see him appreciating some nice brass music now and then.

Will never stop pestering you to dance to ‘Like A Cat’. From the first glance all he could imagine was you dancing to it in their stage outfits and... wow.

Fave groups would be AOA, Mamamoo and EXID

ASMODEUS:

Absolutely 100% a KPop stan. He finds the experimental fashion, showy choreography and grandeur aesthetics so enticing and it’s 100% his style.

I HC Asmo as a big big dance fan, I think he’d adore how it can be dainty, strong or elusive fully depending on the way you perform it. He probably already knows tango, salsa, pole dancing and ballet and spends a bunch of his free time learning his favourite choreographies (the main ones being Chungha’s ‘gotta go’, EXO’s ‘Love shot’, Red Velvet’s ‘bad boy’ and HyunA’s ‘how’s this’ or ‘Lip & Hip’)

Diavolo decides to hold a Devildom talent show at the end of the semester to celebrate the exchange program going well. Asmo IMMEDIATELY calls you asking you to perform ‘Naughty’ by Irene & Seulgi with him. You both rehearse it in secret and fully tear up the stage when the talent show rolls around. You win, which he fully expected, and leave the brothers in a mix of confusion, adoration and embarrassment.

Thirsts over the idols as if his life depends on it. The prettiest idols for him to look at and fantasize about are BTS’ V, Weki Meki’s Doyeon (Only in the stuff she performed as an adult post-IOI), EXO’s Suho, (G)I-DLE’S Soojin and SNSD’s Tiffany

Fave groups would be: Every Single SM Group he’s such a whipped SM Stan

Red Velvet are all beautiful, SHINee’s vocals are delicious, EXO’s discography is... the perfect level of lewd for him, F(x)’s unique style is beautiful and WOW Luna’s solo work is just his style, but his most most loved SM group is Girl’s Generation and he will NOT hesitate to bust into a fully rehearsed performance as soon as he hears ‘the boys’ on your playlist.

BEELZEBUB:

Has never heard of KPop before you introduce it to him. You were both cuddling together in his room while he snacked on the gummies you’d bought him, listening to you excitedly ramble about this new KPop group that you thought he’d like!

A die-hard metalhead, can’t enjoy any music that doesn’t hurt his ears a little bit, so he’s already mentally preparing how he’ll pretend to like it and is just grateful that you were thinking of him, when suddenly his eyes are met with Dreamcatcher’s ‘Chase Me’ MV

And wow. Wow. This isn’t what he was expecting at all. Electric guitar? drums?... NOT bubblegum pop?

Doesn’t become a major fan but definitely adds a lot of the heavier songs from their discography to his gym playlist, still happily listens to your excited ramblings and talks about other groups, but will probably pay a bit more attention if you mention a Dreamcatcher comeback.

Fave groups: Exclusively Dreamcatcher, but also likes ‘Clap’ by seventeen as an exception since he finds the guitar riff mixed into the instrumental cool.

BELPHEGOR:

Not interested. Similarly to Lucifer finds it too loud, too bright and too in-your-face

Not a huge music lover in general, but can tolerate some easy-on-the-ears gentle songs. Has a soft spot for Melanie Martinez & Lo-Fi.

You can try all you want to convince him to enjoy it, show him whatever cutesy MV’s you want, as many live stages or variety shows as possible, even the sweetest most gentle kdrama OST, he’s not interested.

You send him ‘ZZZ’ by LimeSoda jokingly and tell him it’s his theme-song, he’s not amused.

Fave groups: None.

Songs he’ll tolerate if you’re listening to them: Pporappippam - Sunmi, Why So Lonely - Wonder Girls, Butterfly - LOONA, Night Rather Than Day - EXID, Kazino - BiBi

#obey me #obeyme #obey me shall we date #swd #obey me mammon #obey me lucifer #obey me leviathan #obey me stan #obey me beelzebub #obey me asmodeus #obey me belphegor #obey me headcanons #kpop #KittyPosts

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iz-a-simp · 3 years

Text

I WAITED (Todoroki Shoto)

This is my first ever fan fiction posted in here. I hope you all enjoy it :)

You could feel the right side of the bed losing its weight causing your eyes to flutter open from the sudden emptiness you feel only to see the radiating light being blocked by the thick curtain you have in your beloved room. The red and white curtain, first ever décor that has been bought for the room because you thought it would match the looks of your lovely husband, Todoroki Shoto. A soft smile was carved in your face knowing that those faint footsteps belonged to the man you tied your life with.

I’ll Wait…

“Good morning, Shoto” you greeted. “Good morning to you too, Y/N.” Despite the hollowness his voice hold, your beam never failed to leave your lips. His very presence in the mornings was your daily dose of vitamins, it’s what keeps you alive and positive about this relationship.

“What would you want for breakfast?” it took him long to say it but in the back of your mind you already knew what it was “Cold soba” you both say at the same time. His giggle always has this big impact on you making you madly blush. He was never the one to show his emotions after all.

You crawled out of your bed. Stretching every inch of your stiff body as you make your way to the kitchen to prepare your husband’s meal while he refresh himself with a bath. It didn’t took long making his favorite food just the right time to be served as he finished dressing himself up.

“Where you off to today?” Seeing that your wearing your hero costume?” you asked setting down the bowl in your hand “My father’s company, he mentioned something like a villain attack near their location so I was called. You?” he answered.

“I see. Classes at U.A. are suspended so I’m thinking of doing a patrol this afternoon. Are you coming home for dinner? ” You eyed him anticipating for his answer “I’m sorry, I may not be able to come home for dinner” and with that he left leaving only his empty bowl.

Empty…Alone

It was one of the hundred times he did this and you still weren’t getting used to it. He left you at the dining table without even a single good bye, a kiss, a hug, nothing. It’s not like your expecting one anyways, but still it wouldn’t be wrong to desire his attention right?

I’ll wait…

You let this pass by again, setting those unsettling thoughts and emotions aside. You didn’t want to ruin the “special” day ahead of you, supposedly.

“Special”? Was it really a thing for this marriage?

5 years, for this 5 damn years you’ve endured everything, you try your best to understand him, you were so considerate. You never nag, you always flash him the warmest smile you could give, you cook him the best meal, you never let him do the chores because he’s tired, you shower him with attention. You poured out everything just to be the best wife but even a single affection he couldn’t give.

I’ll wait…

----FLASHBACK---

Your back was facing him, sitting at the end of your shared bed.

“Don’t you think we should end this Shoto?” You could hear your poor heart tearing with every word that came out of your mouth. You tried to hold back the tears that threatened to fall.

“Y/N please don’t decide on things that quickly” he objected grabbing me by the shoulder.

“That’s why I’m asking you. Should we end this marriage we were forced into?” his head hanged low.

Silence.

You gently brushed off his grasp on your shoulder and weakly stood up but a sudden force pulled you down and you found yourself wrapped in his warmth.

“Give me time. Please, don’t leave me...”

“Please wait for me…”

The tears you were holding back one by one trickled on your cheeks. Your cries filled the noiseless space.

You were mad at yourself for being swayed.

You were crazy for falling in love with him, but you didn’t care.

You hated how easy you have become for him, how easy it is for him to shatter the walls you have worked hard to build between you two.

You hated how willing you were to waste a hundred years for him.

You couldn’t shut him down. You couldn’t.

Your heart was yearning for him. You were thrilled to receive more than just a hug from him.

That’s why when he pleaded, you complied.

----PRESENT TIME----

Hours, minutes, seconds passed. In your palm laid the velvet box that has the jewellery you found perfect for him. A gift for your 5th anniversary.

You started to feel the burning sensation in your back for sitting so long. The smoke floating on top of the food you’ve made vanished. The candles that gave life to the atmosphere melted staining the silky white table cloth with its red hue. The speaker that blasted romantic songs hushed leaving you with the ticking sounds of the grandfather clock you owned.

You spammed him with messages, it was already past 11. You put your phone down releasing a heavy sigh. You tapped a contact on your phone.

*RING* *RING* *RING*

“Hello my daughter? What makes you call at this hour?” his voice always makes you tremble. “Endeav- Ohhh I mean father I was just wondering if Shoto’s okay, he hasn’t replied to any of my messages yet and I’m just worried” you answered.

“Shoto? He excused himself this afternoon, so I let him be, he may be preparing something for your anniversary.” He said teasingly but still I could feel his stoic self. “Happy anniversary to the both of you!”

“Ohh Thank you father. I think I shall end this call now” sadness was evident in your voice as you pressed the red button. There was silence once again.

“Endeavor greeted me before his son did. Endeavor remembered what day is today yet his son, forget it.” You whispered to the air.

I’ll wait…

*ding*

Just as you opened the notification the door also opened revealing your husband still in his hero suit. You turned it off, you made the sweetest smile you could possibly do. But...

The surprised look on his face hurt you. Reality slapped you real hard that you didn’t notice the tears flowing down.

“Silly me to think you’ll remember” I said chuckling.

“Y/N-“he moved closer.

“No, no, please” you backed away a step or few. It was the first time to see you not wanting his touch, his kiss, his warmth. Most especially, you didn’t want his sorry. You were tired of that word leaving from his lips over and over again.

“Y/N please let me explain-“

“I said NO! I don’t need you sorry nor your explanation. You know what I need? For this stupid marriage to end!” His eyes went wide not for the fact that you didn’t let him explain it was because this was the first you had raised your voice at him.

“I’m tired Shoto! I’m tired of loving you, of understanding you, of pretending to be okay even if I’m not! Just how many sorry should I receive? Just how many explanations do I have to listen to? Answer me honestly; is there something left for me to wait on? Cause I lost too much. My freedom, my happiness, my days that could be meaningful, my time. I lost too much love that I could not give one to myself. I gave them all to you! I gave them all and yet here I am still waiting, still begging for the love of a husband for his perfect wife! I don’t think I could do this anymore. I’m sorry but I waited too much. Let’s just put an end to this” your eyes was on the ground, you could not face him it will just widen the wound you were carrying.

You watched as the ring on your finger slowly slipped off.

*thud*

How long has it been since you find yourself engulfed in his arms? How long has it been since you tasted those soft lips?

5 years? 2 years?

Here he was giving you hopes, making you think that he cares, that his trying when he’s really not.

“I love you Y/N”

Stupid! You’re just lonely, you just pity me because after all it was your father who pushed me to fall in this situation, you thought. You have no family to go back to and he knew that. That’s why you were certain on why he was holding on to you.

There was only one in the world and it was him. You needed him and you keep pushing yourself to him but he was getting farther and farther away from you.

You wanted to hug him back, to stay by his side, to hold his hand, to continue loving him, to build a future with him. But you were tired.

You released yourself from him and looked into his eyes for the last time. You sneaked in the velvet box and your phone in his hands.

As he opened it, it showed the necklace you ought to give him and the ring that bounds you two together and sees a picture of him with an unfamiliar lass.

*Smile*

“No you don’t Shoto.”

It was your turn to leave him there. You were truly sorry, you were but you have finally gotten out of the endless pit.

“Please don’t forget that I waited.”

#todoroki shōto #shoto #todoroki x you #todoroki angst #enji todoroki #todoroki x y/n #todoroki x reader #todoroki family #boku no hero x y/n #boku no hero x reader #boku no hero x you #boku no hero #angst #oneshot #my hero academia fan fic #my hero academia #arrange marriage

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sanstropfremir · 3 years

Text

it’s the episode 8 review!!! how many episodes is this show supposed to even be?

the stages from the episode feel like such a grab bag.... i still don’t understand why they didn’t put all the skill stages together, and then did the normal two episodes of the third round. i guess it makes sense that they didn’t want to have six stages in one episode and then three in the other two, but eh.

feeling kinda average on these as a whole, there’s a lot of good elements going on here but probably because of my own preferences (i don’t listen to ballads or blackpink) none of them really hit all the buttons. hopefully this will be a shorter review because i'm only going to do a quick rundown of the vocal stages; i dont really have that much to say about them because they are (intentionally) not very stage picture focused. i'll do the normal stage breakdowns for the other two though, even though i won’t rank them because we still need to see the other four!

vocal stages

sf9 + tbz + ikon

not much to say here other than wow, that’s RED. glad to see some more specific use of spotlighting and i always love when they light things on fire. i do wish they had fill lit with a brighter amber so we could actually get a bit more detail on their faces, especially because there’s six of them. i appreciated the simple blocking and only using one of the ‘stages,’ this stage didn’t need to be anything complicated and it wasn’t. i don’t love spinning camera shots because they make me a bit ill, and i'll forgive the constant cutting because it's a vocal stage and there isn’t any other real movement that we should be paying attention to. not my favourite of the two, i found it visually a bit too repetitive and complex at the same time. always love a crushed velvet suit though, so bonus points for that.

atz + skz + btob

i was braced for the worst and i dont know what kind of miracle happened but it was listenable! like i said, not a ballad fan but i could listen to eunkwang all day. i love a good plinth for a ballad stage, they’re one of my favourite devices in kpop design and i especially love it with a good groundlevel fog. glad they kept it black and white for the first half of the stage, it was in line with the blooming flower projections, and it made a very clear colour arc. they kept the visuals clean and simple with very little blocking at all, a very smart choice for this stage. not sure why they decided it would be the chanel time stage, which i disapprove of because i don’t like chanel, but i do love eunkwang’s shirt with the cameo buttons and the massive turnback cuffs, very 17th and also 19th century. i know they never do it because they dont read on stage normally but yes absolutely more thin chain pendant chokers on men, thank you! i also liked that there was emphasis on a more traditional lighting scheme, there weren't any crazy concert effects, just some good directional beam spotlights and the rear stacks in the climax.

third round stages

ikon

costume

the first look for them is definitely my fabourite of theirs so far. there’s enough variation in the jackets that the base layer of tshirt and jeans don’t look too repetitive. and i do love a good statement jacket. my favourite is probably donghyuk’s because i'm a sucker for fringe always.

i don’t like the backup dancers costumes, but given the way i’ve reacted to every other all black outfit for this entire show i don’t think anyone was surprised about that. these ones particularly irk me because they’re very matte; there's pretty much no texture or pattern differentials to define the shape of the limb, which makes them disappear when theyre all grouped together (mostly on the women). i think they probably were intending to make a statement/emphasis on the hands because of the sleeve cutoff point, but there were so many arm movements that were just totally missed because the costumes were just black voids. most egregious parts are here, with the female dancers up center. i can barely tell what the movements are unless i’m paying specific attention to them because there's so many black shapes. maybe it was the point for it to be an indiscernable writhing mass, but it wasn’t my vibe.

don’t love this styling on lisa. i hate peeptoe shoes in general but peeptoe boots are the worst offenders. they make you look like you have duck feet, no matter who you are. especially with a flat cutout like that. a universally unflattering shoe, and i would know, i worked in a shoe store for two years. this whole look is just pg-13 rihanna cfda awards 2014 and really nobody should try to run up against rihanna.

also i have to mention this because it’s actually really bothering me, but lisa’s backup dancers are serving very allgemeine ss looks and i do not like it. generally when we see ‘military’ uniforms in kpop theyre usually modelled off older styles (pre wwii) of western uniforms that usually aren’t in circulation, and they’re usually non-matching and embellished in ways that are deliberately not military. i know logically that it's a budget constraint+they’re backup dancers+current trend thing but the clean lines with only button detailing and the all black and that specific harness shape? it hit my brain the wrong way. i mean, technically those uniforms are designer because hugo boss did them, but the uh..... girlboss move didn’t land for me.

this is my PERSONAL OPINION please for the love of all that is holy do not come yelling at me about this. it’s all under a cut, you chose to read the post.

set

very glad to see some busy kitschy sets! this is a massive build, since there’s essentially three full sets here: the temple, the jungle, and the first tiny room. and all of them are very heavily decorated.

the starting room is just five walls on casters (wheels), that have been set into place with the cameraman and ikon inside at the start, and then once they exit the walls can be easily struck and rolled off set. simple, smart, and convenient!

i missed it the first couple times around but glitching out the projections in the temple for a split second was a neat little trick.

the silver and polygonal nature of the tiger/panther/cat(?) head is a bit disconnected from the gold and the aesthetic of the rest of the stage for me. the difference between the original room set and the jungle tracks, but the cat head isnt able to make the same leap for me. i'm also not a fan of mixing metals so maybe that’s why.

the tiger/panther/cat(?) head is a fun physical transitional device; i'm a big fan of tunnels and small transitory spaces like that and if they’re well dressed like this one they do so much for establishing place and mood.

i'm very sure i’ve seen this style of polygonal animal head with laser eyes before....i cannot for the life of me remember where or for what. i know wang yibo did a panther stage for sdc3 that had a human formation panther with green laser eyes, i wonder if i'm just crossing wires.

OH nevermind it’s because it looks like the witcher medallion. wires were definitely crossed.

lighting

using purple/teal lighting for the jungle was a smart choice because purple is the direct compliment to the gold and also is much more flattering on humans than green. green is one of the colours that humans can see the most variations in, so when something is green when it's not supposed to be (like human skin), we register that very quickly and associate it with unease and sickness. you know how old fluorescent lights have that greenish tinge that kinda makes you feel ill? it's your cone cells and your brain recognizing that you’re looking at things that are not supposed to be green.

very clean colour arc, i love to see it.

sound

it’s.....fine? i don’t listen to blackpink and have no opinions on their music other than it's not my type. i dont really know what the thematic connection to the visuals is, which is not strictly necessary in a lot of cases, but i don’t particularly care for the conflation of ‘savage’ and a (presumably) precolonial religion that’s assembled from stereotypes of real colonized cultures. you can come at me about how ‘it's not that deep’ all you want but i am here specifically doing an in depth analysis, and i gotta point it out. i'm not here to pass judgement on you if you didn’t realize or don’t care or whatever, i'm just saying that it's important to consume content with a critical eye. what you do with that information is your own personal choice, but you should be aware of it at least.

staging

they took a big risk eating popcorn right before singing, and we definitely got some residual mouth noises of them trying to clean out their teeth. eating on stage is difficult in general because you have to make sure it's not going to dry out the performers mouths, because they dont have access to water and it takes WAY longer to chew and swallow something than you would expect. there’s a LOT of testing that goes into making stage food and guaranteed it’s not made out of what it looks like or what its supposed to be; i worked on a production of amadeus were we did literal weeks of testing amalgams of different desserts to make sure that salieri could actually eat the ones onstage without totally drying him out, because fun fact about that show, salieri doesnt leave stage like, at all, so there was no way to get him water. poor bloke.

i thought the blocking of this was really smart. the long take from the ‘normal’ room and transition into the jungle was super slick, even if that weird circle the camera did while pointed up at the ceiling was unnecessary and pointless.

bobby’s ‘acting’ was extremely funny and that’s the only way people are allowed to act surprised now. edvard munsch scream style only.

the pacing is a bit off and this time it wasn’t mnet’s editing that fucked it up. as fun as it is to have a feature, clearly she wasn’t allowed within proximity of the rest of them for covid or other yg related reasons, but it made for some extremely long transitions, especially the one out of her verse. it kills the momentum of the stage in that beat, even though they manage to pick it up after.

this is a very simple little narrative arc that’s easy to follow and doesn’t require any extra explaining. which is exactly the kind of arc that groups should be doing at this stage in the game. this is a good formic step up for ikon!

i thought the turning off of the monitor at the end was fun and a good callback to them watching the videos at the beginning of the stage. a nice clean way to make it circular.

skz

costume

FINALLY something different on the skz boys! these were mostly fun eboy looks for them, and i like it on the basis that it's not the same as the last set of costumes.

bang chan out there with his thigh OUT and a (fake) bridge piercing? LOVE to see it. great work.

(copy-paste every thing i’ve said about backup dancers wearing all black)

the backup dancers that were dressed as bystanders/extras were great! they should have kept that with all of them because it would have given a little more shape to the choreography and establishing what function the backup dancers were supposed to have.

set

that is meant to be a giant rice cooker on stage, right? i think so because it's a god’s menu mashup? if that's not a rice cooker i have NO idea what its supposed to be

there’s only two large setpieces here, which was a smart way to go. i LOVE the subway car doubling as the truck, even if the truck itself makes no narrative sense. what a fun way to double the use of a single big piece. you’ll be able to see the way it moves in the full cam but it splits down the centre and there entrance doors at the back with attached stairs that bang chan and the dancers use to climb up.

lighting

not a whole lot happening here. i like the cool white leds in the subway car and the contrast with the more warm tones of the outside, which is good atmospheric establishment, but i can't discern a visible arc.

not a fan of these projections; they’re in line with what we’ve seen from skz so far, which is: extremely literal. i dont think they’re that distracting, but they’re not to my personal taste. they really should have kept the comic panel theme that they did for changbin’s first verse, because that was inventive and fun to watch! and a great atmospheric indicator! i would love to see a bit more experimental projection use but it's hard when they don’t have a lot of time to build these stages and the lighting team is definitely working remotely.

sound

i love that they made the choice to do some actual talking, it’s a good gimmick and it works for the deadpool/comic book/fourth wall break theme, but australian accents take me the fuck out i am so sorry i cannot listen to either felix or bang chan speak english without laughing uncontrollably.

i don’t like this arrangement but i'm not surprised about that, given my predilections. i'm also tired of skz shouting STRAY KIDS in every performance they do. i know on music shows it's probably more relevant and yea producers tags are a thing but we’ve been watching this show for nearly two months at this point. we know who you are, you can stop yelling. be more creative with it!

staging

my biggest issue with this stage is that it doesn’t have a payoff. there is an arc here: they’re stealing the truck, but why are they stealing the truck? who are they stealing it from? who are they fighting against? it's kind of important in a stage where the theme is stealing and fighting someone that you tell us who that is. in both of ateez’s previous stages were they were both stealing (rhythm ta) and fighting (wonderland), they made sure to show us who the villain was. there needs to be tension for a big blowup climax to actually pay off. whether it be against a a balloon arm kraken or a fascist government. this stage could have reached that next step if they’d just done a little bit more exposition.

there were a lot of fun choreo moments here, and this is probably my favourite choreo of theirs so far. i thought the whole first bit in the subway car was excellent and a very fun play on those viral videos that we used to see roll around every so often of dancers doing routines in subway cars.

did it need the guns? not in the slightest. more on this point later. i could talk more about weapons and weight here, but i’ve done that several times already.

like with the tbz game of thrones stages, theyre relying a little too much on the audience's preconceptions of the source material in order to carry the theme. the guns are there because deadpool likes guns, but they don’t actually use the guns for anything? the most we get of the stealing segment is felix and the safe, which admittedly is a great bit with him leaping over and under the ‘laser’ lines (theyre likely led strips). because comic books are by nature procedural and deeply tied to narrative, it's unsatisfying when there’s no tension and no payoff.

HOW did we manage to get two stages that are blackpink covers with remote/tv static gimmick and durags? i know the slot machine of kpop tropes is not very big but surely the probability of hitting triple sevens on this one was pretty low. i’m pretty meh on both of these stages overall. skz was unsatisfying but i loved the choreo in the subway bit so that bumped it up a little ahead of ikon’s in my personal preferences, but i'm reserving my actual rankings for next week. assuming we get the other four stages next week and they dont do something stupid and only show two. which they very well might. i’ve stopped trying to understand why mnet does things the way that they do.

as always the ask box is open, drop your comments/questions/personal opinions, i love to hear ‘em! but don’t be rude just because some of this is touchier subject material.

#kingdom #ateez #btob #ikon #sf9 #the boyz #stray kids #military uniforms are a weird one and i always find it a bit....(squiggly face emoji) when they get used in kpop stages #everybody is one of the exceptions because its used as a direct critique #but this is a very personal opinion as someone who has done a lot of historical research on military uniforms in particular #so im hyperaware of that kind of thing #be cool about this one people please and thank you!#im so glad this came in under 3k #kingdom review #kpop analysis #text #ive had to write a lot of deeply critical art practice analysis in the last week and i would like to sleep

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feverinfeveroutfic · 3 years

Text

chapter thirty three: glass caskets

On Christmas morning, Sam received a phone call from both of her parents as well as a couple of gifts from them, sent from different addresses no less. Even if her senior project would only carry on for a short time, she knew that the whole thing between them would drag on for so long. Joey also called her right after to invite her to a New Year's party with just the two of them plus Marla and Belinda if they so wished. Not only was it to be her last Christmas with Joey nearby, but her final New Year's Eve with him. Sam thought about the time that Belinda had given him too much to drink, but she had faith that he had long passed that point. He would have to serve something more at the party, something more musical than something such as that.

Another thing that she received in the mail was a Christmas card from Testament as well as Anthrax, Metallica, and the Cherry Suicides; and Dan Lilker and Scott both sent her and Marla, as well as Belinda card on top of that. Dan's was a straight postcard with a photograph of him seated cross legged next to a fiery red Christmas tree and with his head propped up in one hand.

“Mr. Blue Eyes,” Marla remarked as she perched his card on the shelf on the side of the room, right in the midst of the silver and pink garlands they had hung up in the mere two days before then. Scott and his bride to be sat at a small black table with glasses of egg nog in either hand; right behind them stood a small Christmas tree with white twinkling lights. Next to it on the shelf, strong and high like one of the skyscrapers in the heart of New York City, was a lit menorah. The golden flames from the candles shone over the room; even with a Polaroid camera at their helm, the room around them still managed to have a dark feeling all around.

“So moody and morose,” Belinda remarked. “I love it, though. I can see them doing that without the flash of the camera, too.”

“Yeah, I can, too,” Sam added as she picked up the next Christmas card. Meanwhile, the Cherry Suicides had a photograph of the four of them in cherry red bikinis and with Santa hats, each of which had the Star of David embroidered on the fronts, atop their heads; Zelda and Rosita both had knives holstered to their hips while Morgan and Minerva had knives holstered to their ankles and fake blood splattered across their legs and their stomachs. Zelda also held a black and red sugar skull in one hand with a snowflake imprinted at the crown.

Metallica on the other hand dressed in Santa outfits: James and Kirk both had put on pairs of black sunglasses while Lars stuck out his tongue to the camera and Jason stood there with his arms folded across his chest.

“Hey, you know, at least the girls have the Star of David on their hats,” Sam pointed out to Marla and Belinda.

“I know, right?” said the former. “And Scott and his girl have the menorah behind them. How 'bout Anthrax and Testament?”

Belinda picked up Anthrax's Christmas card, which had nothing more than the four of them bunched underneath a Christmas tree on the ceiling. Charlie and Frank had their backs to the wall while Dan hunkered down in front of them: it took Sam a few seconds to realize that they were imitating a family of three carrying in a tree. She turned it over and burst out laughing at Joey's black and white picture, of him standing there with his arms folded across his chest and with a nonchalant expression on his face. She laughed even harder at the “Merry Christmas from Anthrax” printed on the side of the card as well.

“I actually like that one,” Marla chuckled.

“I do, too!” Belinda laughed with them. “Now how 'bout our five boys from California?”

Sam picked up the final Christmas card, the one that looked as though there had been more effort put into it and not a mere Polaroid photograph plastered on a piece of cardstock of the same size. Chuck sat in a big comfy looking chair at the center of it all with his bare brown legs out for them to see, and a pair of feathers which dangled from either side of his head. Next to him was Greg and Eric, the former with no shirt on and a gift wrapped present nestled right in between his cross legs, while the latter adjusted his dark red velvet Santa hat, which appeared to be too small for his head. Louie posed at the back with a big golden star held up above his head as if he had just found buried treasure. Alex meanwhile sat off to the side with his black hair tousled over his shoulder and a wreath of holly upon the crown of his head.

Sam took a second look to find that right in the midst of that holly was his yarmulke.

She turned it over to find, written in slender scarlet red ink, the words “Seasons Greetings from Testament. Love, Chuck, Eric, Alex, Greg, and Louie.”

“That's actually a really cute picture of them,” Belinda remarked as Sam turned it back over.

“Wait, what was that other thing back there?” Marla stopped them right in their tracks. Sam turned it back over and indeed, there was a little note at the bottom of the cardstock, one written in graphite.

“What's it say?” Marla asked her.

“'Meet us up in Ithaca New Year's Eve for dinner. Eric.'”

“Again?” Belinda was stunned.

“Apparently so?” Sam shrugged her shoulders at that. “I haven't heard anything from the fan club about anything, though.”

“Which means we're probably gonna have to leave here like early in the morning,” Marla pointed out. “Four hour drive to Ithaca from here.”

“Not necessarily, Mar,” Belinda pointed out. “We can leave here like the middle of the afternoon, meet up with them for dinner and then bounce on down to Joey's place for the party.”

“Does it at least say what time?” Marla asked Sam.

“No, it just says meet them for dinner. Yeah, I'm thinking we should leave at like two o'clock here.”

Sam kept this on her mind over the final week of quite the hectic and intense year before the time finally came for them to leave for upstate New York once again, the second year in a row they did. She wondered what Testament had in store for them as she and Belinda climbed in Marla's car, wrapped in heavy winter coats and their big boots. Joey called that morning and told them that the lake effect snow had already begun to fall.

Before she started up the car, Marla set a black velvet beret atop her head, much to Sam's surprise.

“Whoa, where'd you get that?” she asked her.

“Rosita sent me this,” Marla replied, “it came in the mail the day after Christmas. I forgot to tell you.”

“Oh, it's alright. I dig it.”

“I do, too!” Belinda chimed in.

They reached the highway in no time and before they left Hell's Kitchen, the first snowflakes began to fall over them. Within no time, the sides of the road would be utterly blanketed with pure fresh white snow. Another thing that Sam was going to miss while out in California: the New York snows, even with how seemingly unforgiving they were; their memory and the feeling of it all etched its way into the very fabric of her mind. She thought back to when she first met Charlie and she told him and the barista about the snow in Carson City. She thought for sure that the snow in Carson City was unique, and yet New York had shown her another ballpark for it. Something haunting and beautiful about the skyline against the incoming blizzards, and then there stood the forests in the upstate area, especially as they were when at night.

Four hours, and by the time they reached the turn off for Ithaca, the lake effect took hold all around them. The sky overhead had been gray up to that point, but the white glare of the snows had brightened everything above them. Sam peered out the windshield to the pure white sky as flakes the size of silver dollars pelted the rooftop and the road before them.

“I hope we can actually get there,” Marla confessed at one point: it didn't help matters that it was getting late and the pure white soon gave way to dark gray again as well as cavernous royal blue. But lucky for them, Sam soon recognized the outskirts of the whole Finger Lakes area, even against the snow and the incoming darkness. The outside of Ithaca soon followed, as did that familiar narrow piece of road that led back to the hole in the wall. Right there across the street, at that restaurant, she spotted Eric and Chuck congregated outside the front door, underneath the awning away from the snow and under the golden lights as well: Sam recognized them even in the darkness.

“The men of the hour, I see,” Belinda remarked, and Marla took the parking spot right in front of them. Eric nodded at Sam and she gave him a pretty little wave. She climbed out first and Chuck turned around and greeted her with a big sweet smile.

“Hey! There are our girls!”

Belinda climbed out from behind her and, careful not to slip on the fresh layer of snow on the blacktop, the two of them hurried up to Chuck, who held both of them close to him at the same time. Sam then embraced Eric, who seemed warmer and softer than she initially remembered, and Belinda followed suit.

“Thank you for that Christmas card, by the way,” Sam told them.

“Nothin' to it, Sammich,” Chuck said as he put his arm around Marla.

“And you should've seen Exodus' Christmas card, though,” Eric assured her. “We got nothin' on them.”

“So what'd you guys want while we're here?” Belinda asked him.

“Oh, nothing,” Eric said with a shake of his head. “We just wanted to have dinner with you girls.”

“I also wanted you girls to meet someone, too,” Chuck added with a little smile on his face. Eric held the door for them: no one else in there except for Alex, Greg, Louie, and a blonde woman at the booth on the far side of the room. The three of them stood before the table and Chuck beheld the woman as if she was a bit of unearthed treasure, with her golden blonde hair, her bright eyes, and smooth skin.

“Sam, Belinda, Marla—this is my girlfriend Tiffany,” he introduced.

“The infamous girls,” she declared as she took each of their hands. “Or am I confusing you ladies with the punk band?”

“The Cherry Suicides? Maybe,” Sam replied, and that coaxed a laugh out of Louie.

“Alright, kids, let's eat,” Eric coaxed them; Sam and Belinda took their spots next to Alex, while Marla sat down next to Chuck and Tiffany.

The sun had gone down which gave the otherwise vacant restaurant a much more homey feeling to it. Their waitress showed up with cups of coffee, and a cup of hot chocolate for Alex.

“I just want you guys to know that the heater's been acting up lately,” she told them at one point.

“Huddle in like a bunch of penguins,” Greg joked, and they did just that right as a grating sound overhead caught their attention. A gust of warm air billowed out of the vent before it dissipated, and their corner of the room fell cool again. The fact the place was empty only added to the feeling.

“Man, remember how crowded it was in here last year?” Belinda asked her in a low voice. “When you and I were here with Joey?”

“Oh, yeah, I know, right?” Sam agreed with her; they had to shout across the table to each other. This time around, a whisper could carry over to the other side.

“I like you with black hair, by the way, Marla,” Greg spoke at one point.

“I like the little streak at the front, too,” Alex remarked with a gesture to his brow.

“It was Sam's idea, actually,” she explained to them. “She had been wanting me to dye my hair a whole bunch of colors but I told her that would've been too much work. I like the single stripe myself.”

“Imagine if Alex dyed those grays bright blue himself,” Chuck joked.

“Or if they changed colors, babe,” Tiffany chimed in.

“Ooh, yeah! They changed colors like during one of his solos.”

“Song changes tempo,” Eric cracked before he took a sip of his coffee.

“Or when Louie pulls a Zelda,” Chuck added. Sam and Louie himself both burst out laughing at that, while Alex paid more attention to his cup of cocoa, which was piping hot even when their food came to their table.

“I kinda like doing this,” Marla confessed at one point as she held a French fry close to her mouth. “Spending New Year's together.”

“Sam's ahead of the curb, though,” Louie told her with a nod of his head, “she and Belinda spent the last one with us, too.”

“It was mainly her, though,” Belinda pointed out.

Just the bunch of them there in that little corner of the restaurant where no one could bother them, except for the waitress who brought them refills and even offered them dessert of key lime pie or a hot fudge sundae.

“Wanna split a piece of pie with me and Bel, Alex?” Sam offered him.

“I dunno—I've barely touched my cocoa,” he confessed.

“Trying to watch his girlish figure,” Chuck laughed and at that point Alex bowed his head and laughed himself.

At one point, Chuck, Tiffany, and Marla all stood out of the way for Eric, who bowed out of there and into the darkness.

“Where's he going?” Marla asked them, even though Chuck and Tiffany didn't sit back down.

“Something important across the way,” he answered with a twinkle in his eye.

“I'll help pitch in,” Sam told them.

“Oh, no, we got it, Sam sweetie,” Tiffany promised her. The front door opened again and Eric poked his head into the restaurant.

“Hey, Chuck!”

“That's my name, don't wear it out.”

Belinda giggled at that.

“Louie, too—you two fellers in particular—better get your asses across the street quick. It's hella important.”

“Oh, shit—” Louie drank down the rest of his water and then he slid out from the hard booth seats.

“Want me to warm up the van?” Greg called out to him.

“Yes!”

Eric bowed back out to the darkness while Tiffany to the register at the front of the restaurant. Louie slipped on his jacket as he ducked out of there after him. Greg soon followed suit with the keys to the van jingling in his jeans pocket.

“I'll warm up the car, too,” Marla told Chuck.

“Oh, yeah, definitely—go get warm.” Belinda then stood to her feet and followed Marla to the front door. That left Sam and Alex there in the corner.

“We'll leave you kids here alone so you can finish your cocoa,” Chuck told them with a wink and a nod, and then he followed Marla and Belinda to the front door. The rest of the cafe had fallen quiet in their wake; and Sam turned her attention to Alex, who had taken off his coat and showed off a little bit of his chest from under those little pearl buttons. The thin black fabric hugged his lanky little body: nineteen years old, and he still had that stubborn little tummy on him, but she could tell he had slimmed down a bit over the last few months. He gave his black hair a toss back and he showed her a quaint little smile.

“Hey you,” she greeted him.

“Gonna be you and me for a little bit,” he remarked as he set his left hand down by the cup of hot chocolate.

“Just like last year,” she recalled; she glanced down at his mug. “That's got to have cooled down by this point. It's been over thirty minutes.”

“Kinda. It's one of those real heavy mugs where the heat gets trapped in it. That, and it was scalding hot when the waitress brought it. Glad I didn't take a drink yet.” He set his hand on the side and then shrugged his shoulders.

“So I hear you're heading out to California soon?” he said with those sharp eyebrows raised a bit, to which she nodded her head.

“Yeah. It's for school, but yeah—I'm going out there with my counselor the last day of July.”

“Wow.” He knitted his eyebrows together at that. “Well—and you heard this from me, too—and I think Eric and Chuck'll both agree with me on this, come to think of it—but Testament will be making our new album at the crack of New Year's Day, exactly the same as this past year with our debut. No exaggeration, we looked at our contract just two days ago and went 'shit, we gotta make another one?' I guess we're going to be at the same place as before.”

“The hole in the wall?” Sam recalled, stunned.

“Yeah. That's according to the text. I don't know if we'll be there by the time you leave—July, you said?”

“Yeah.”

Alex pursed his lips. “Yeah, I have no clue if we'll still be there by the time you go out there. I hope not because we know what we've got ourselves into at this point after the first time. We record, release it into the world, and then we go out on tour to promote it.”

“Like no time to rest,” Sam remarked.

“Not really, no. I will say this, though, it does get me out of my parents' house.”

“I hope you guys don't have to go all the way to New York just to start putting together an album, though,” she confessed.

“Yeah, that's probably the one drag with that,” he said as he rubbed the tip of his nose, “is we have to go far just to lay down tracks and whatnot. I do like New York, though—you know, my parents hail from here so I feel weirdly at peace whenever we go down to the main city. I hope we can do more back home in California to be honest. I can hope all I want to, but I haven't heard anything from Aurora, though.”

He leaned back in his seat and rested his hand back upon the surface of the table, right next to his cup of hot chocolate. Sam gazed on at the side of his face and the stoic expression there. He then cleared his throat and turned his attention to her.

“Have you—spoken to Aurora at all?” he asked her in a low voice. “Because I know the two of you are friends and all.” Sam shook her head.

“I haven't spoken to her since your birthday,” she told him.

“Oh, wow.” He was taken aback by that. “Oh, man, that sucks.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and rolled her eyes a bit. “But Belinda saw her recently, though, and she and Emile were shopping for baby clothes. That was a couple of months ago, like October. You know what I can't believe is how she made your day all about herself. I didn't think she could be so selfish.”

“Were you able to do anything about that?” he asked her, and she shook her head. It was there she hoped that Osegueda had been the one to do the trick on Aurora; maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't have been so egotistical on the day that was supposed to be about Alex. At least she had a laugh about that.

Alex himself meanwhile tilted his head to the side a bit; Sam followed his gaze to the other side of the room, but she had no clue as to what he looked at over there.

“What's up?” she inquired right into his ear, and he turned his attention back to her. He flicked his head a bit so his fine black bangs covered part of his eyes.

“You got any spare change on you?” he asked her.

“Yeah.” She opened her purse and took out her wallet from the bottom there. Then she paused. “Why? Do you need any change?”

“There's a payphone right over there,” he stated and he pointed to across the room; indeed, there stood a white and silver payphone on the wall right next to the front door. “Go call her.”

“Right now?” she asked him, stunned.

“Yeah. Samantha, it may be the last time you ever get to talk to her. She's gonna be a mom soon and you're gonna go out in the wilderness for who knows how long.”

She frowned at that.

“Besides, it's Christmas and she's—she's—fucking growing a baby.” He almost grimaced when he said those last few words. “She's probably not doing anything right now.”

“Except growing a baby,” Sam joked.

“Except growing a baby, right!” That brought a laugh out of him. She let out a long low whistle and then she took out a pair of quarters from her wallet, and she climbed to her feet. Alex took a sip from his hot chocolate as she made her way over to the other side of the room to the phone. She picked the receiver off of the wall and she slipped in both quarters into the slot. She dialed their number and waited a few seconds. She expected Aurora to answer it given she was always so assertive herself—she helped organize full on tours for three bands after all.

“Hello?” She was greeted by a man's voice instead.

“Hi, Emile—it's Sam.”

“Oh, Miss Shelley!” he proclaimed. “I was just thinkin' about you and Aurora and I were gonna send you a Christmas card.”

“Aw—oh my god, that's so kind of you,” Sam sputtered out at that, and then she caught herself. “Um—is Aurora around at all?”

“Yeah, she's right here. Only three months along and she's already showing!”

Sam sighed as Emile handed the phone over to Aurora.

“Sam I am! I haven't heard from you in so long! How's it going?”

It was right then, by the mere sound of her voice, that the Aurora Young who answered the phone there was not the Aurora Young whom Sam met the first week in New York City. This Aurora Young had a high grating whine to her voice and, by the sound it, no sense of logistics at all. Her sense of culture gone and the soft gentle tone to her voice now given away to a loud rattling shriek of sorts. Locked away in her new home, her new nest, for a great length of time and Sam could tell that she had lost her mind.

“Um—things are going,” Sam sputtered out. “How about all of you? I mean, the two of you?”

“Oh, my god, things are just wonderful, Sam! Emile and I have the room set up for the baby and we're making everything for kids now. You know, I didn't think I would have kids some day, but I just love it, though! He and I are planning on having at least two more after this first one. I love it. I love every minute of it.”

Sam closed her eyes and bowed her head a bit. Her best friend had become someone else.

“Is everything okay?” Aurora asked out of the blue. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” said Sam as she raised her head. “I want—to talk to you—about something.” She cleared her throat.

“Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead—” In the background, Emile echoed that in song, much to Sam's grimacing.

“I wanted to tell you that—you know when you announced you were pregnant, it was during Alex's birthday party?”

“Yeah?” Aurora had a bit of reluctance to her voice.

“Well,” Sam tried to keep herself calm all the while, “—it was during Alex's birthday party.”

“And?”

“It was during Alex's birthday party,” Sam repeated. “Well, it was supposed to be about him.” She clenched her free fist down by her side and she let out a shuddered sigh. She could feel herself quivering and quaking at the very notion of Aurora being so dense right then. It was so unlike her, and she knew that Aurora was so much smarter than that, and yet it felt as though she had grown dumb within a matter of a quick flash and a whir. Her best friend, now a different person altogether. If only she could see what Sam saw through her eyes. If only she could understand what she was trying to tell her.

“Sam, what're you—”

“How could you have been so selfish, Aurora?” Sam interrupted her, furious. “That day was supposed to be about him!”

“Sam—I wanted to surprise everyone there.”

“Do you even understand what I'm trying to tell you?” Sam demanded, heated. “That day, the twenty ninth of September, was the day Alex Skolnick came forth on the earth's surface with a guitar in one hand. It was supposed to be about him and you made it all about yourself.” She trembled a bit from the feeling. “I can't believe you did that, Aurora. That was just—that—that—fucking—” She could hardly talk.

“Sam, be happy that I'm going to be a mommy soon,” Aurora scoffed. “We're supposed to be due—let's see, I'm three months along—what's it in six months?”

Something inside of Sam snapped right then. Her best friend, once open and diligent and humble and smart, had become a complete husk of herself. Add to this, she still made it about herself.

“No, stop!” she said in a loud voice, such that it shut Aurora up. Her hands shook and her heart pounded inside of her chest, but she persisted especially with the silence that surrounded her. “No, Aurora. I can't be ever happy for you and Emile when all you do is make every last little thing about yourself. You also didn't even thank me and Alex for being in your wedding, either, for god's sake! When you got knocked up, your brain did, too, apparently. Jesus, what the hell happened to you, Aurora? You are supposed to be my best friend, for crying out loud! You and I were inseparable even when I lived in the Bronx and you in Brooklyn. But no, instead you get married and you left your own best friend at the curb because apparently she's not as willing as you are to spread your legs to the next guy who smiles at you. Whatever. Have your baby. Have a million babies and let your uterus fall out, I don't care. When you bleed out of control, think of me. Merry fucking Christmas.” She slammed the phone down and turned away from the wall with a flushed feeling in her face. Her heart hammered in her chest all the while she strode on back to Alex.

He looked on at her with the cup of cocoa still right next to his hand.

“Congratulations, you're the thousandth person to say I was born with a guitar in one hand,” he said with a straight face once she came into earshot.

“Wait.” She hesitated right before the table. “You heard me?”

“Heard the whole thing,” he told her, and he giggled like a little boy. And then he straightened himself up. “But—damn. I can't believe she actually wasn't willing to listen to you and talk things out.”

Sam shook her head and she returned to her spot right next to him at the table. She wanted to cry but no tears came forth in her eyes. She also couldn't bear the thought of crying before a boy she didn't know too well, either. Instead, she just propped her chin up in the palm of her hand.

“I don't know what happened to her, Alex,” she confessed; she glanced over at him, and she brought her attention to his waist, still slightly full, and then the rest of his body. Even sitting there, he looked graceful. “She's—completely different person from when I first met her. I almost don't even recognize her anymore. I remember, it wasn't even that long ago, we were sitting in this Vietnamese restaurant eating pho together and she was telling me about her Korean heritage, all the little rituals they do and everything. Come to think of it, that was the last time she and I had a genuine intelligent conversation with each other.”

Alex shook his head at that. Sam sighed through her nose and she leaned back in the seat next to him. His long lanky fingers twitched a little bit on the surface of the table. A guitar player with too much energy.

Indeed, he brought his hand closer to his face and he pulsated his fingers a bit.

“You alright?” she asked him.

“I get cramps in my hand sometimes. 'No pain, no game' as it's often referred to as.”

He then picked up his hot cocoa and, after he blew on the surface a little bit, he took a sip of it. She glanced down at his body again.

“You look really good, by the way,” she complimented him.

“You think so?” he said as he set the cup down.

“Yeah. Your tummy's not poking out so much. Within time, you'll be all willowy and thin as a rail.”

“I've lost a little weight,” he said with a gentle little pat of his stomach, “not much—like, seven or eight pounds, but I do feel it. I remember it wasn't even like a year ago, I had this roll on my waist and it hung over my jeans. It's just that I like to eat, though.”

“Don't we all?” she laughed.

“I kinda want to be the type of musician who's real thin but there's something graceful about him, though. Like how Cliff was—he was like this classically educated musician and so thin and elegant. Or like David Bowie about ten years ago—minus the whole 'thin white duke' thing of course. Something radically different from your typical coke nosed rock star, you know?” He then cleared his throat. “You said you and Aurora had pho together. You know, I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole entire life and I've never eaten pho before. There's a whole Asian sector up there, too. Can you believe that?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I always wanted to try it, though, just because it looks yummy. There's so much I wanna try out, too.”

“So much to eat and so much to do. All the world's a stage, after all.”

“Right?” He had a twinkle in his eye when she said that, the first time she had seen a twinkle in his eye.

“The only drawback is I imagine getting very fat because of all the tasty food you're eating.”

“Watch, I'll have this big round Buddha belly on me by the time I'm my dad's age—like around fifty.”

“You can rub it for good luck,” she joked, “seeing as you'll be like Buddha.”

“Yeah, I'll be like 'hey, want a bit of good luck? Come rub my belly'.” And she burst out laughing at that. Without another word, Alex downed the rest of his hot cocoa, which apparently had plenty cooled off enough at that point. Indeed, she pictured him a little bit on the round side, and his handsome face made even more lovely with some extra pounds. Joey had the round face himself, and there was something so precious about it as well, except Alex had that milky soft skin just like the full moon at night. Soft and round, just like the full moon.

Sam then climbed to her feet so she could let him stand up and put on his coat once more: tall and growing slim, made even slimmer and more graceful with that dark peacoat wrapped around his body. He lifted his hair out from underneath his coat collar so it all sprawled out over his shoulders.

She led him out of there and into the cold darkness that fell over Ithaca: the sole lights out there came from the tail lights on Testament's van that awaited him at the curb. Right up the block stood Marla's car, ready to take Sam to see Joey down in Camillus for the New Year. She turned to Alex as he rubbed his hands together to better keep in the warmth.

“I will say this,” he started again as he adjusted the lapels of his coat, “seeing as you'll be closer to us, if and when you come out to California, we should see each other more.”

“You wanna take me out on a date?” she teased him with a giddy little chuckle.

“No, no, no,” he said with a lopsided grin on his face. “I mean, when the dust eventually settles on our end, like when we can finally take a little bit of time off and get the chance to breathe, you and I should hang out together.” He glanced off to the side. “If I'm honest, Samantha, I kinda like hanging out with you.”

As soon as the words left his lips, the first flurries from the lake effect fell over their heads. He glanced up to the sky: the little tuft of gray over his brow resembled to one of those few little snowflakes around them. The darkness that enveloped around them meanwhile made him resemble to a ghost.

“You know what?” she stated as she tucked her hands into her coat pockets. “I like hanging out with you. You're easy to talk to.”

“Well, I dunno 'bout that,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders and a slight roll of his eyes, “I'm still trying to figure out as to how to interact with people on tour. I just come to you because you're familiar to me. I recognize you as Samantha Shelley, the girl whom Cliff dated for a bit before he was killed, and also the first member of our fan club. You're familiar so I can admit that I am at the very least, a little comfortable with you.”

“You're also aware of other people, too,” she added, “like—you don't make things about yourself. At least not in that way.”

“Growing up with parents who studied social science for literal decades will do that to a guy,” he said with another shrug of his shoulders. More flurries floated down from the pitch black sky and he gazed up once more: the shadows accentuated the depth of his eyes such that he in fact resembled to a creature from another world. Indeed, therein lay something ancient and shadowy about Alex, as if he was a time traveler from the distant future who had come to guide her, or a dark prince. The touch of gray upon his head only added to the feeling.

“Sam!” Belinda called out from the backseat of the car.

“I gotta go,” she told him.

“I do, too.”

“Um—will I see you soon?” she asked him.

“I hope we can see each other again soon,” he said with a thoughtful expression on his face, “in the mean time, you take care of yourself.”

“You, too—and Happy New Year, too.”

“And Happy New Year to you, too!”

They parted ways, and Sam bowed into the front seat next to Marla, who had switched on the heater full blast. More time with Alex and she could finally uncover yet another glimmer from beneath the cool demeanor. There was a young boy in there: she had to coax him out somehow.

The darkness had fallen over upstate New York, but Marla had hope that they would reach Camillus in no time. Granted, the snow forced her to slow down a great deal but the lights of the Syracuse skyline glowed through the low clouds all around them. Sam thought about that little encounter she had had with Alex back there, and she couldn't stop thinking about it.

“Not the first time I've had to do this,” she assured Sam and Belinda; the former thought back to when she, Frank, and Charlie had to rescue Joey from the side of the road. And now she was going to see him again, that time for the real stroke of midnight for the New Year.

Indeed, they finally reached Joey's place a block away from the art shop, closed up for the night; Sam thought about the stained glass window she wanted to make of Joey, and she wondered if Belinda had finally used her powers of recommendation and convincing to snag her a spot in the realm of art glass for the next quarter. At that point, however, it was almost nine o'clock at night, which meant the party would be starting late.

The warmth from the heater and sitting close to Alex that whole time had left Sam feeling all manner of cozy. By the time they made their way into Joey's apartment, she already could feel her eyelids sinking low. But she had to stay awake for him. She had to be next to him at the stroke of another brand new year there in upstate New York.

She opened her eyes at one point, and she found herself seated upright on his couch. Joey took his seat right next to her, while Marla and Belinda giggled about something in the next room.

“Joey,” she breathed out, and her voice broke. She cleared her throat. “What time is it?”

“About five minutes to midnight,” he told her with a glimpse down at his wristwatch. “I've just been waitin' for you to wake up for the past two hours.”

“I don't even remember falling asleep,” she admitted with a shake of her head.

“You just walked in through the front door and collapsed on the floor. Marla and I put you here because we knew you would wake up. Just when was the only question about it.”

He then cleared his throat, and his brown eyes wandered over to the kitchen doorway behind them.

“I like watching you,” he confessed in a low voice. “You look so soft. I wish you could see in you what I see in you.”

“You know, it's funny, I—feel the same about you. I wish you could see in you what I see in you.”

He ran his tongue along his dark lips. Their last New Year together. Not a shred of mistletoe for Christmas but the feeling of her leaving in a few months time served to be enough for them.

“Two minutes now, Bel!” Marla proclaimed from the kitchen.

Sam lifted her head from the top of the couch. If she was going to be closer to Testament from that point onward, she had to give Joey the one thing he so desired. She had to give to him what she couldn't give to Cliff when he was alive not even the year before.

“Shall we?” Joey offered her as he lingered closer to her.

“Sixty seconds now.”

Sam sighed through her nose and she brought her face closer to him. That soft soapy musk on the side of his neck. The even softer aroma embedded in the roots of his black curls. The softness and smoothness of his skin. She left it all for him, and now she was about to leave him come the summer time.

She lingered closer to his face.

“Thirty seconds.”

Joey ran his tongue along his dark lips again. He put his arm around her: and she realized that Chuck had put his arm about Marla but not her at the restaurant.

“Let's make this count,” Sam told him as she gazed into his brown eyes, as dark as the snowy night outside there.

“Every last part of it,” Joey added, and his soft expression hardened. She had been sitting next to Alex for the better part of an hour, but she needed him to be present.

“Fifteen.”

She closed her eyes. Like waiting for Christmas itself to come.

“Ten—nine—eight—”

She relaxed every inch of her body and the mysterious man in her dreams burst into mind, albeit for a fleeting few seconds.

“—four—” Marla joined in with Belinda. “—three—two—one!”

Joey pressed his lips onto hers almost immediately, and Marla and Belinda clapped in the brand new year. A brand new year of brand new adventures, especially for Sam as she drank down some more of Joey's venom. Something to take along with her out to California and put on display for all the world to see for itself.

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bananaofswifts · 5 years

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IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

#taylor swift #vogue #article

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twiceblackvelvet · 4 years

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Dreams

pt. i. pt.ii. pt.iii. pt.iv.

April 15th, 2022. 13:42 AM. Los Angeles.

California sunshine, there’s nothing like it. Sure, it all beams down from the same star no matter where you are in the world. But there’s something different about the atmosphere. People don’t care here if you’re parading around in a cropped shirt that shows off more skin than you’d usually be comfortable with. They are too wrapped up in their own socially driven lives to bother you in passing unless they recognize you. Then it’s time to whip out the phone to selfie mode in hopes it gains them a few extra likes than usual. Wendy doesn’t mind, it’s only happened twice, but she’s accepted it as part of the package.

When people say Los Angeles is the city of dreams, they mean it. That’s mainly why she finds herself strolling down the busy street with boutique clothing stores galore and people riding around on skateboards, enjoying their lives however they wish to do so. The freedom to explore your dreams in the place that either makes you or breaks you being all too tempting. But, Wendy is determined to be one of the few souls that soar and reach the goal they set out to achieve when they arrived here, rather than let the city suck her dry and toss her aside as it has done to many others.

It’s been eight months since she packed up her things and moved here. Many of her friends back in Korea told her she’d regret it or that she’d be better off staying and never trying to break into the music scene in the US, but Wendy has always been a free spirit, unable to follow what could be the safe path and instead aiming for what she truly wants. That’s how she ended up in Red Velvet. She could have stayed in Canada all of those years ago, become a doctor or a lawyer, but she knew it wouldn’t have fulfilled her.

Singing just comes naturally. Without music, she’d be a shell of a person and definitely not in the position she finds herself in today.

After working non-stop for what feels like forever, sleeping in the studio rather than her fancy apartment she paid more for than she’d like to admit, and refusing to acknowledge the outside world, today is the day. Today, the world has been invited to listen to her first full album. Some last-minute changes to cater to Yeri suddenly backing out of appearing as a song-writer and producer were a little stressful to deal with, but luckily her team eventually agreed to remove the song. Though, if you ask them, being subjected to the torture of a grumpy Wendy who they’d grown used to being bright and fun is something no one should have to deal with, ever.

Before every release with Red Velvet, all the girls would have their own individual ways of preparing for it and calming their nerves. However, being alone now means Wendy can no longer practice hers, which was to focus on everyone else to distract herself from her own thoughts. Thus, the impromptu walk through the blistering streets and people watching is the only thing that feels appropriate. It also stops her from worrying about no one buying it and her hard work going to waste.

She misses four faces specifically whilst wandering.

“Oh my god, Wendy?” A shrill voice yells from behind her but before she’s even turned a full 180 degrees, arms are around her neck and wrapping her up into a crushing hug. “It is you, it’s been so long!”

Had it been anyone else or had she been unable to recognize the voice, it’s very possible that the random strangers passing by would have been instructed to call the police immediately. Thankfully, it’s not someone trying to attack her, well, unless you count affection as an attack, Wendy doesn’t.

“Tiffany, hey! It’s been forever.” She chokes out, arms still around her throat, making it difficult to speak.

No one bats an eyelid at the two girls admiring each other mere inches away from each other, though it feels like someone should be there to capture the moment, at least for fans to gush about. Wendy takes a moment to look at Tiffany. Her skin appears to be glowing more than the last time she’d caught up with her. She looks healthy… happy. It’s a breath of fresh air to see someone from her world here alongside her and not seemingly a broken shell of a person.

“You look amazing, wow! What are you doing here?” Tiffany asks, her voice still far too loud for a conversation in the middle of a busy street, not that Wendy minds.

“I live here now.” She replies bluntly, though, her conscious reminds her for a split second that even though neither of them is in Korea anymore, Tiffany is still a senior to her. Her tone softens naturally before continuing. “I came here after… well, you know.”

Tiffany nods in understanding, though her eyes show sadness for a split second. There’s no need for either of them to discuss the split of her group, Tiffany herself understands what it’s like to be apart from the very people you spent a huge portion of your life alongside.

“So, what are you up to?” The lack of words between them both makes Wendy blurt out, also, so Tiffany can stop looking at her so pitifully. “I’m on my way to grab a coffee if you want to join me? Catch-up?”

Though it was presented as a question and is a heat of the moment change of plans from what she was doing which was nothing, in particular, Wendy is grateful for this distraction that Tiffany has given her without knowing she has.

In the blink of an eye, Tiffany has linked their arms together and is dragging her halfway down the street to what she assures her is by far the best place for something way better than coffee.

When they arrive outside of an organic pop-up store that only serves vegan food and uses all non-dairy products, Wendy isn’t surprised. She’s read reviews about this kind of place lately, though she’s never ventured to any of them, deciding that the hype about buckwheat tea and the likes can’t be real. However, she’s been roped into this now and has no choice but to try something once they reach the counter.

“I’ve never been here before, what do you recommend?” She aims toward Tiffany, however, it gains the attention of the young woman stood near the till waiting patiently to take their order.

“The watermelon lemonade is popular, miss.” The girl whose nametag reads Olivia responds.

Her face is trying its best to put on a smile, though, Wendy summarizes quickly that Olivia does not have an accent that sounds like she’s from California originally, likely moved here to be an actress and just never received an opportunity to do so. Thus, she’s stuck putting on a different act, pretending to be enthusiastic about serving drinks to people that will “cleanse” them. To put politely.

“I guess I’ll go for that then.” Both Wendy and Tiffany offer her a smile before she darts off to prepare their drinks.

Tiffany tries to pay. Wendy won’t let her. They both try their best to be stubborn about it, however, Wendy somehow wins this round and thanks the heavens that Olivia is a lot better at her job than she expected as no sooner does she leave to make their order, she returns with two recyclable cups in tow. They sit outside and drink what Wendy reluctantly admits is a delicious watermelon lemonade whilst getting re-acquainted with one another.

Small talk is all that they engage in at first. Politely asking about each other’s families, if they’ve been up to anything special lately. Wendy doesn’t mention the album release, she’s not sure why. Tiffany tells her about how she will be on tour soon and how Wendy should come to one of her shows so they can sing together. Wendy agrees. The mood turns rather solemn when they reminisce on how young they both were when they first began their careers and everything they’ve been through in the music industry.

“Do you like it here?” Tiffany’s voice is soft and her face serious, something that Wendy is unsure she’s ever seen from her before.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s nothing like what I’m used to but that’s a good thing,” Wendy answers, surprised by her own honesty. “It’s nice to not feel judged and that it’s okay if I make a mistake. If I mess up something here, people don’t seem to mind so long as I’m willing to learn from it. It’s not like that… there.” Wendy wants to say home, but she’s not sure if she can call it home for either of them anymore.

“I know what you mean. There’s a lot more freedom out here.”

A comfortable silence falls between them, both pondering all the times they’d gotten on the bad side of people for whatever reason, big or small. Both being grateful that they still made it here, whilst some others are less fortunate.

Tiffany pulls out her phone to check the time, standing to place her cup in the recycling bin before turning back to Wendy, a lopsided smile on her face.

“Give me your number, I have somewhere I need to be but we should hang out again soon.”

Wendy obliges, it’d be nice to have a friend here. Someone who understands her. She finishes typing in her number and hands the device back to Tiffany who has pulled sunglasses with a huge frame out of thin air seemingly to place on her face.

“Hey, I know that things may seem a lot better here, and… they can be. But just keep your guard up. The music business is shady everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you are.” Tiffany gently rubs a hand down Wendy’s arm as she speaks. It's not as comforting as she probably believes it is. Whilst she doesn’t say whether she’s speaking from personal experience, Wendy assumes so and appreciates the advice.

"I will, thank you. Let's meet up soon!"

Tiffany turns on her heels to strut back down the street they walked down to get the juice that Wendy realizes now has made her nausea even worse. She watches her for a few steps before she turns back in place to holler in her booming voice that is way more fitting than the serious one just seconds ago.

“Congratulations on the album too.”

Wendy is stuck in place, jaw agape with confusion. Though she's happy that they didn't end up talking about it, she's slightly worried about how Tiffany knows about it without her mentioning it at all during their catch-up.

“How did y-” Wendy tries to ask but is cut off by an already leaving Tiffany who throws her a response over her shoulder.

“Check the charts, Seungwan.”

to be continued; here

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12loona-archived · 4 years

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[ARTICLE] A Girl Group That Took 2 Years Just to Debut, Recognized in the U.S. First: Interview with Loona — Hallyu Story

“Girl groups such as Blackpink, Twice, and Momoland are highly popular abroad. Loona is also a group that is well known in the US. At this point Loona could still be called a rookie group, just a year and four months since their debut last August. “Loona is a large-scale rookie girl group, who took two years just to debut. That debut was a massive project involving 9.9 billion won. Beginning in October 2016, they underwent a distinctive debut promotion under the concept of ‘We meet a new girl each month’, revealing a total of twelve members (Heejin, Hyunjin, Haseul, Vivi, Yeojin, Kim Lip, Jinsoul, Choerry, Yves, Chuu, Go Won, Olivia Hye) in order. “Even before their formal debut, each member’s music video surpassed one million views. It's quite uncommon for music videos of members’ solo singles to gain over one million views, and it serves as proof that Loona garnered heated attention from the public. “Loona is designed such that they reach full power when the terrestrial (Loona 1/3), the celestial (yyxy), the space between (Odd Eye Circle) and Yeojin combine. From the beginning, Loona were created with three independent team structures within one world. That is to say, it’s not that one team splits into three units, but three teams create one world instead.” The rest of the introduction portion of the Hallyu Story webzine article is under the cut, all translated by Litell_Johnn. For the question and answer portion, you can view the remainder of the article on Reddit.

“Loona debuted as a full group on August 20, 2018, with a debut mini album + + containing six tracks. Even before, they had promoted with solo or unit activities. They’d also appeared in variety shows and web dramas. The strongest suit of the mini album with all 12 members is sophistication. Among the songs, lead single ‘favOriTe’ and debut single ‘Hi High’ represent their identity well. Both are in the dance pop genre. “‘favOriTe’ masks the vocals somewhat with a powerful beat, charisma and swag, while ‘Hi High’ shows off upbeat freshness, liveliness, and sexiness as the vocals do show through well. They showed off diverse charms in this manner by handling contrasting images. “Twelve girls, neatly dressed in a school look of white shirts and gray skirts in the ‘favOriTe’ music video, strutted a powerful and girl-crush charm with extraordinary choreography. It goes without saying that they exponentially increased their fans both domestic and abroad with it. Debut track ‘Hi High’ radiated a bright energy, showing us imagery of climbing to the top. An addictive melody singing ‘Hi High’ plays repeatedly. The part where main vocal Chuu sings ‘Show me yourself’ in high notes left a strong impression as well. “At the time, the writer asked the members what Loona's strengths and distinguishing features were. “In response, Jinsoul said ‘We have more diverse genres than the average girl group. We’re not limited to one thing. We use beats that aren’t often attempted. You have to be perfect in order to handle contrasting concepts, and I'm confident that we have that.’ Yves answered, ‘We have different members featuring in each song with a diverse concept. Each member has songs that fits her well.’ Olivia Hye said, ‘We don’t want to follow the trend like other groups, but we want to create trends.’ Haseul added that ‘I want to earn the descriptor of “monster rookies”’. “What’s special about Loona is the huge reactions they’ve garnered abroad. They received praise from the UK’s Dazed as a distinctive and unique girl group, and were selected as a ‘girl group to watch in 2018′ by Billboard as they placed 10th in the Billboard World Album Chart. Well-known foreign outlets such as Hong Kong’s Hypebeast, the US’s Pitchfork, Spin, and Stereogum, and the UK’s NME covered the collaboration between Loona and global artist Grimes, proving their status as world class. “That’s not the end. In 2019, Loona topped the overall album charts on iTunes, showing themselves to be a global phenomenon. Industry officials called it a reverse charting of historic levels. “On October 17, 2019 (US time), Loona’s repackage album X X reversed the charts to hit #1 on iTunes’ overall genres, K-pop genre, and pop genre charts. They were the third Korean girl group to top the overall album chart, behind Red Velvet and Twice. This #1 was made even more meaningful by the fact that Loona stood shoulder to shoulder with global pop artists Taylor Swift and Post Malone. “When X X released this past February, the album had already climbed to fourth place on the U.S. Billboard chart, while hitting #1 in the iTunes pop album charts of 26 countries including the U.S., Austria, Spain, and France, and earning the #2 spot in the iTunes US top album chart. “That reverse-charting was a breakthrough earned nine months after the release of X X, and is considered proof of Loona's recognition as a global phenomenal idol rather than just a global rookie as the group surpassed its own limits. In particular, the music video of ‘Butterfly’ became a much-discussed topic due to scenes of the members dancing across multiple countries and locations as they broke boundaries and took flight. Foreign observers also commented on the video's portrayal of a solidarity that transcends borders and races. Not only this, but Loona's full-group and unit albums charted in at #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, and #9 on the iTunes US K-pop album chart, in a rare display of chart line-up. “At that time, well-known Billboard columnist Jeff Benjamin reported on the news live by writing on social media that ‘several albums and songs by Loona are currently shooting up US iTunes. The Kpop girl group currently has the No. 1 album’. In August 2019, the group also participated in KCON 2019 LA, an event that brings together K-culture with a K-pop concert, drawing the excitement of numerous fans. “The group plans to target even more countries in 2020. Loona is a ‘big group’ that needs a single fifteen-seater van or three seven-seater vans to move around. We met with them at the Blockberry Creative offices, located next to Seonjeongneung in Gangnam, for an entertaining interview.”

#loona #ot12 #t:info #t:article #t:translation #era: sharp #200109 #this is SUCH a long article but it’s also an incredible read #i really recommend reading the full thing if you can!!

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ana0072 · 4 years

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I DARE EVERYONE TO RANT ABOUT THEIR

@bootyful-seventeen @bruhwheresthekpop @quitehopeful @the-likesofus @aliensrenn @eternal-carat @fyeahsoonhoon @freshbling @jinjinmyworld @junvenescence @joshoooji @jjoshuas @luvhannie @loonalovelace @lilithpooped @my-woozi-happiness @minghowdareu-blog @seventeens-diamond @uwillneverknowwho @wonwuism @yeahmacs

JOURNEY WITH KPOP, I'LL START

My history with kpop started when I was like, 8 and it was, (as of any other 8 year old during that time) because of Exo. But alas, we did not have the luxury of technology and a hand phone back then so I never really got to memorize what they look like, let alone their names. I "liked" them because of my cousin and you know how kids are with people they admire, I wanted my cousin to like me so bad.

Then I didn't see my cousin for a while and generally forgot about Exo because of my short attention span. Then years later, as BTS rose in popularity. I had the displeasure of witnessing a more than unfriendly banter on socials between two different fandoms and I realized how toxic some fandoms are, swore off of kpop. I actually despised it for a while because I hated being a basic bitch that thirsted over some korean guys.

Now I really hate how I was back then.

Then, the day it happened. The year? 2018. My sister introduced me to Seventeen. I reacted negatively to them at first of course, cause I claimed myself an anti towards the general clusterfuck of the kpop industry. But shit the first song she made me listen to just had to be Clap. And the moment my eyes landed on these 13 boys I instantly felt something tug at my heart because 'holy shit how are these guys so pretty?'

I then worked at memorizing their names.

I struggled at first. Obviously.( I couldn't memorize my classmates names and I see them on a daily basis, how the hell am I supposed to know the names of 13 people I've never met before in my life?) The solution was served to me on a silver platter when one day, I stumbled across a seventeen being crackheads video. It was perfect. With these videos, I got to understand these 13 boys better not from an idol perspective, but from a 'they are still humans' one.

For a good few months, I only liked Seventeen. I became a little crazed over them but it was still not crazy enough that I fell in love with them in a romantic sense or anything, I still had a brain mind you. Of course I knew nothing was ever going to happen and I was never going to meet them, least of all marry them. What am I? A sasaeng?

But, it was still only them. I still was aware of the other groups out there. Mostly that one that starts with a B that everyone at my school keeps obsessing over and I frankly find them slightly overrated, but I digress. I started exploring a bit. Expanding my horizon if you will. ONEUS was the next group I found but at the time they still had just debuted and I lost interest in them fairly quickly to my disappointment. (DON'T WORRY THOUGH IM A HARDCORE TO MOON NOW OKAT HWANWOONG THE BADDEZT BITCH) Back to exploring.

Of course if you love Seventeen you would have to know of their husbands, Monsta X. I tell you IM is very good at convincing me. Got7 was next. Fell in love with BamBam. Quickly realized I had a thing for rappers and the second youngest when choosing my bias because, Vernon and Jooheon could not have been a mere coincidence.

Seventeen, MonstaX, Got7, Exo, Kard, Astro, Blackpink, Twice, Red Velvet, Mamamoo, Ateez, TXT, Ikon, Super Junior, Stray Kids. I memorized all of them just for the kicks of it. Quickly became obsessed with all of them fairly quickly too.(Btw mamamoo made me realize I was Bi which was quite an interesting journey.) I even took a liking to the solo artists, like Eric Nam, Kim Samuel, Sunmi all that jazz. Even the actual kpop bands, Onewe, Day6, The Rose, N.flying.

All this, in the span of three years. I still do stay away from the big BTS, I'm just not quite interested in them no matter how much you try to convince me. Nothing against them though, they are quiet nice, I like their music, (but in terms of their faces I onky know what RM looks like) I just really dislike the amount of toxics there are in their fandom.

This year though, I decided to take on the biggest memorizing game of my life, that is the ever growing Neo Culture Technology.

I knew they had many members, I just didn't expect it to be THAT many. I am still struggling though. With Dream mostly. Doesn't mean I don't have problems with the rest. I already have no problem with 127. U is still confusing but I manage. WayV is.....um....

ANYWAYS thats my journey with kpop. I know, this was fucking long but I enjoyed it. I am still at work, memorizing some members and am currently trying to add The Boyz into my never ending list of pretty Korean, Chinese, Japanese, American and Australian men and women. Seventeen are still my number one group though. But stanning them makes me have slightly higher standards for choreos and synchronozations. Oops.

Now, as a multi, I feed off of, (live for essentially), the idols interactions with other groups. Which seriously makes me wish some fandoms would stop fighting cause it is literally helping no one when they fight. Because at the end of the day, these idols work night and day to please us, trained endlessly to get to where they are. And some of them are strapped down by contract to some soul sucking ent. company that sometimes would refuse to give them the tools to further their careers.

By fighting, it wards off potential fans because they think, if the fandom is this bad, what kind of people are the idols? Most of the negativity though is the ones against their idols dating. To which I say, who the fuck cares? Why can't you stand the people you admire be happy? (LIKE HYUNA AND EDAWN AND HEECHUL AND MOMO ARE THE FUCKING CUTEST OKAY) Because lets face it, they aren't going to date you. They never will. That's just reality. Can't you see how miserable they are? So many idols kill themselves due to depression and pressures from fans, how sad is that?

Have you seen Super Junior? Most of them are nearing their fucking 40s and they still aren't married. Thats so fucking depressing. Atrocious doesn't even begin to tell you how I feel about fans fighting for their so called oppas dating. Its irrational. Its insane.

It's apparently my journey with kpop.

#I LITERALLY DARE EVERYONE WHO FOLLOWS ME TO TELL ME THEIR STORY #do it ya cowards #kpop #kpop game #kpopidol

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punkcupcakestyles · 5 years

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Love Song

Whatever was happening, I could only describe it as an out-of-body experience, almost as if I were looking at myself from the other side of the room, mocking me for my own awkwardness. Or maybe I was just starstruck.

I couldn't look away from him. His lopsided smile grew bigger, and he cocked his head slightly to the side, staring at me as if there was nothing else that could possibly interest him in that room. A new feeling, the small, warm flutter that started at the pit of my stomach, maybe it was just my heart that was starting to race in my chest.

Time had stopped, it had to, as there was no way I had spent so much time looking at him, and standing awkwardly in the middle of a room, while other two people witnessed my stupidity. I wasn't used to it, not to the rushing heart that was thumping in my chest, or to the hollow pit in my stomach that made it difficult to breathe. I wasn't used to not know what to do with my hands, or how to smile, or how to think.

"I'm sorry, am I boring you?"

Funny enough, that's never a concerned question. It's always asked with certain annoyance and in a stern tone that commands attention, almost as if the person asking didn't really care about the status of your entertainment.

I looked up at her, her piercing and steely blue eyes staring at me while her red nails drummed on the table impatiently. She was wearing a black dress, without a jacket, as the sunny day in L.A. was hot enough to make you feel like going to the beach and having a couple of beers. Could you even swim in L.A.? Maybe in Corona del Mar, certainly not in Santa Monica. Never by the pier. Jesus, I was bored.

But even then, the thought of answering sincerely didn't really cross my mind.

"Of course not," I smiled meekly at Midge, hoping the gesture would calm her down. "I'm sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night. What were you saying?"

And oh, she didn't buy my excuse, never really did. Her eyes rolled back, just a little bit, enough to let me know she thought I was a fucking pest, but that still, she was a professional. Without saying a word, she went back to look through the magazine on her Ipad, flipping the page to stare carefully at the page-wide photo. I looked at it and felt that familiar pang of anxiety, the certainty that I was way in over my head. That someday, somehow, this dream or nightmare was going to end, and I was going to wake up back home, clad in sweat, to go back to wait tables at the dinner. Go back to fighting for a way out.

Midge kept staring at the photo, with a clinical eye that only years and years of experience could grant. I wondered if she thought the same as I did; if the person staring back from the glossy page of the Vogue magazine was as much of a stranger to her as she was to me. Sure, she had my lips, red and pillowy from the makeup, and her hair looked as disheveled in the long braid as mine usually did, but still, she wasn't me. She couldn't be. She looked powerful and peaceful, two feelings I wasn't too familiar with, as she sat on a huge red velvet throne with her feet hanging in the air. Her hand was resting awkwardly above her head, and the dress, beautiful as it was, with its gauze and its pearls and its flowers, wasn't the most striking part of the picture, but her eyes. They were fierce and piercing and demanded to be looked at.

She wanted to be seen. She demanded it. She was in Vogue and wanted everyone to know there was a new star in town.

"This is a nice picture." Midge pointed at it. "Nice work."

"Thanks," I replied, scrambling to look away from her as soon as she went back to inspect the rest of the magazine.

Midge's office was almost as impressive as she was. Her main wall was covered with photos of her clients, with people wearing their finest clothes and posing as if it was nothing; like their lives were normal and the rest of us just needed to catch up. There was Sandra Bullock in InStyle Magazine, Jennifer Lawrence on Time, and Taylor Swift on Elle. A picture of Midge and Elle and Dakota Fanning in some party was right in the middle of the mix, and I gulped, wondering when would she finally tell me to fuck off. She didn't need me. She would do just fine after I disappeared into thin air.

And I needed her so badly.

I looked back at her to inspect her further, even when I had done that thousands of times before. She was wearing a simple black drape tunic that fell a little above her knees, and a pair of Alexander Mcqueen's sandals, with a leather bow around her ankle. Everything about her screamed boss, and I was adequately scared of her.

"We need more photos," She said, without raising her voice, which made me think she wasn't even talking to me. "We want you everywhere during award season."

"I will make sure I am seen everywhere," I offered, but I was received with a dismissing wave of her hand, right before she got up to serve herself some water, or at least what I hoped was water.

"Don't worry. We'll take care of it. I have...something in the works already." She turned, offering me an odd smile that made me shift on my chair. I picked up an ambiguity in her tone, like even that tiny bit of information was already saying too much, and I gulped nervously, looking at her as she walked calmly back to her chair. I debated whether I should ask her about it, or just nod, to put myself on her bad side or just let her do her job. On one side, she was fucking good at it and I thanked all of my stars to have her. On the other side, "something in the works" is never enough information, much less when you're the one on the receiving end.

"Midge, can I ask..."

"Don't worry about it, honey." She smiled condescendingly. "I'll tell you when it's all ready. Until then, let's focus on getting you as many nominations as we can. We're going after an Oscar, let's not forget that."

The Oscar, the only thing being talked about around me even before the movie came out. If anything, I was incredibly happy I had the chance to play make-believe, dress fancy and run around talking with a British accent. To work along well-established actors, and to have their grace and support, it was more than I ever expected. Much more than I could ever dream of.

Also, my performance had been buzzed about before, raved between critics and peers, and not even that had gotten me a nomination.

Even a sliver of hope seemed too risky at this point. And I knew it, knew the heartache that was coming my way if I wasn't on the list of nominees. But even then, I couldn't help it, couldn't help but wish for it, imagine myself crying as I hugged my mother when they called for my name, and the words I would say as I held the golden bald man in my trembling hand: "Thank you, God. Thanks, mom..."

"Do you think I can get it? That I can get an award?" I asked her, holding my breath as I waited for her answer. Maybe she had picked up the doubt in my voice, or the fact that it quivered a little at the end. I felt small, almost expecting a laugh and a resounding no, but Midge smiled instead, turning to look at me with a soft expression I didn't know she was capable of.

"I think you're incredibly talented, honey. I wouldn't be representing you if you weren't." She said. "I think you can get it, and that you deserve it, and I'm just gonna push you in the right direction, so I need you to trust me, yes?"

Anything she wanted, everything she needed.

"Yes."

Well, not everything.

Or maybe yes.

I still hadn't decided.

***

The meeting went on for about 15 more minutes, during which, Midge seemed to grow more distracted until she finally dismissed me. I tried not to jump up from the chair and run out of that office but left pretty quickly anyway, rushing through the corridors jammed with cubicles, and trying to ignore the head peeking out of the white cardboard separators.

The rush of a dream, a grand one, was making my heart beat faster, and my smile grow bigger as I head to the lobby. I tried to calm myself down, to not give in to the fantasy, but my mind kept rushing with the images of the balls, and the dresses, and how beautiful the statuettes would look in my living room.

"Hey!"

My heart came to a sudden stop, as I turned around to see him. He was sitting on the black couch in front of the receptionist counter, and was looking at me with a mix of bewilderment and amusement. Sam was wearing all black, and his curly hair was starting to get too long to behave, so it just flopped on his forehead. I smiled at him as he started to get up and let him take my bag out of my hands for him to carry.

"You didn't have to wait for me, y'know?

"Well, you promised sushi." He shrugged off, smiling widely as I bumped my shoulder against his in protest.

"So, let's get sushi," I agreed, following behind him as he started to make his way out of the building. The day was incredibly shiny, and the air was crispy and I felt giddy, walking to his car as if I was on a cloud.

Sam had this thing about him, something that made everything easier when he was next to me. His smile could light up a room, like a burden had lifted off my shoulders, and his company made me feel safe, maybe from how many times he had saved me before.

"So, how did it go with Midge?" He asked while he got ready to turn on the engine to leave. He pronounced her name with an edge, just like he did since she had asked us to keep our friendship from the public eye. We appreciate your privacy, Sam. Hanging out so much with Sofia will only get you trouble.

But Sam only saw me as his friend. I should know, I wish he didn't.

"It went well, she said she has something in the works for me."

"Like what?

"I don't know...I'm a bit scared if I’m being honest.”

“Well, you should be,” He said. Sam was considering his next words, I could see by the way his eyebrows scrunched up right in the middle, and by the chewing of his bottom lip. He looked at me, with his big hazel eyes, and his mouth twitched a little. “Are you sure you don’t want to be a teacher? It seems easier”

“An actress, Sam,” I smiled. “I’ll make enough money, so we’ll never have to go back.”

“You won’t ever have to go back. I’ll never let you.”

I believed him. I could still remember the smell of his drenched jacket when he started his car before we drove away.

"I know," I replied simply. "But, it's also fun, isn't it?"

"If you say so."

***

- Info you need to know -

Name of the show: The Late Late Show with James Corden.

Host: James Kimberley Corden (Do not call him Kimberley).

Time slot: 12:37am/11:37pm c

Banned subjects: Kardashians/Kanye; Trump; how much you hated 'Love Actually'; how Grey's Anatomy needs to end.

Encouraged conversations: Your movie (the Oscar one, not The Kissing List), your love life (we'll feed you cues), how hot you think Rihanna is. How much you love John Mulaney.

1. You'll be wearing a short dress. Be sure to sit like a lady.

2. Tell James you love his British accent. Laugh at his joke.

3. Mention your little sister.

4. Mention your multiple scars from falling everywhere.

5. Don't sing even if he asks you to. Or maybe do. We'll revisit this.

6. Come by my office at 8:15.

***

I was late for Diana's meeting. I didn't know what it was about, or why it had to be so early in the morning, all I knew was that I was late and that she was probably going to chew my head off.

By the time I got to her office, it was already 8:35, and I was sweaty and panting, breathless from running the flights of stairs to the 8th floor, as it was almost impossible to get into an elevator at that hour. A light layer of sweat was forming over my forehead, and the fishtail braid I had begged my little sister to do was falling apart. It wasn't my best look, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Hi, Diana, I'm so sorry I'm late. Cat missed the school bus and I had to take her. Yes, I know, you don't care...

I expected to find Diana fuming, with her arms crossed on her chest and a carefully threaded eyebrow raised almost to her scalp. I expected her to be so angry at my tardiness, that she refused to see me for an hour or two, even if there was nothing else on her calendar, just to teach me a lesson. I was ready for it, actually.

So, when I pushed the door open, and I found her laughing, it was almost disappointing.

The chirpy blonde (Midge's second best agent!!!) did not notice my arrival, nor did the two guys that were chatting with her. It wasn't until I closed the door behind me that they turned to look at me. The conversation died down, and an awkward silence took over the room while everyone's eyes fell on me.

The guy to the right was about D's age, 34 or 35 years old, tall and handsome. He was wearing a simple gray peacoat and a pair of black jeans and was holding a bunch of papers in his hands. He nodded, almost in recognition, and I offered him a small smile in return.

The guy to the left, well, I recognized him. It would be almost impossible not to.

"Hi," I heard myself mumble, looking at him as he stared back at me.

"Hi, I'm Harry," He said as his lips twitched into half a smile. I noticed that he was wearing a black knit sweater, and was trying to jam his fingers into the pocket of his black jeans, however, the heavy looking rings on his fingers didn't allow him to do so.

"I, I know," I replied.

Whatever was happening, I could only describe it as an out-of-body experience, almost as if I were looking at myself from the other side of the room, mocking me for my own awkwardness.

Or maybe I was just starstruck.

"So..." Diana was looking at us, her green eyes dancing from one to the other while a coy smile started to form on her lips. "Can we continue?"

She was mocking me, of that I was certain. Her eyes followed me until I took a seat next to the other guy, whose name I had totally missed, and smirked when I finally looked at her. My cheeks felt hot, and my heart seemed to barely be recovering from a marathon.

"Ok," She continued, recovering her serious face as she turned to face us all. "Here's the thing: We have an offer to make, which we think might benefit all of us. Our client is an up-and-coming Hollywood star, and as you may, or may not, know, we're pushing for her to be an Oscar nominee this award season. We almost have the Golden Globes nomination in the bag, and we're being as careful as possible with her overall image and fame."

I almost felt like I wasn't in the room, as if Diana wasn't talking about me. It was all too clinical, too impersonal, and I felt far away from it. I peered to my side and saw the guy next to me shifting awkwardly in his seat, just like if he knew what was coming, and regretted it deeply. As if he was waiting for a train to crash, and all he could do was stand there and let it happen.

"The movie she was in was very particular." Diana smiled, looking at me for the first time since she started. "And she was wonderful in it. We're certain she'll have no problem creating buzz for herself, but...we'd like to help."

"Help how?" I asked.

"Jeff, would you like to continue?"

The guy next to me, whose name was Jeff, didn't seem like he wanted to continue. He didn't seem like he wanted to be there actually, but he stood up and leaned against Diana's desk to look at us.

"First," He started. "I owe Midge a favor."

"That's reassuring." I heard Harry mock under his breath.

"We want to spread a rumor, and not deny it, about you two." He ignored Harry, and looked at me, as if I was an easier audience that would understand what was wanted of me. "We want you to hang out, and act like a couple, a romantic one." But the fact that I wasn't protesting, or even talking, was not because I agreed with whatever he was saying, but rather, because I had no fucking idea of what was happening. Instead, I just stared at him dumbfounded. "We think it might give you an edge. Your movie is about to hit theaters, and it might push people to go and check it out, just to see who's that girl Harry's dating. That and the buzz you already got during the festivals' screenings, you might have a great chance next year."

"Also," Diana interjected. "It might tip the balance in your favor in the Josh and Hazel's Guide to not Dating's casting. People don't really see you as a romantic lead."

"And, for you, Harry." Jeff was rather cautious as he continued. "We think it might give you exposure to a broader audience, and..."

"I don't need exposure," Harry shook his head.

"You do. You're nothing without it, and that's exactly what you don't want to be," Diana explained in a rather cold tone. More like the Diana I knew and feared. "We also think you'll be a really good Josh. If this all works out, who knows, maybe you'll even lead the movie. That's something people would love to see."

She smiled at him, despite the fact that there was a deep set frown in his forehead, and that his face was not very friendly at that very moment. I still couldn't quite shake the feeling that this was happening to someone else, not to me. It couldn't be happening to me.

"We'll let you two talk, I'm gonna get the papers ready," she said, taking Jeff’s hand to pull him out of the room to leave us alone.

"I can act romantic," I mumbled as soon as she closed the door.

"What?"

"Nothing." I let my hand ran through my hair before looking at him. He was already staring at me, with that same intensity as when I first entered the room. He looked tired, and his eyes were puffy like he had barely gotten any sleep the night before. He switched on his seat until he was fully facing me, with his feet dangling from the arm-chair while he leaned back to the wall to make himself comfortable. The colorful planets on his black sweater made me smile, and before I could blush under his gaze, I looked down to my lap, not uttering a word as I felt his eyes on me.

"I like your movies." I heard him say.

My eyes rose to his, which was definitely a mistake. It was easier not to look at him, not to see the way his pink mouth twitched when he was deep in thought and the anchor tattoo that was peeking under his black sweater. He was prettier by the minute, and I could feel a strange pull in my tummy, one I had never felt before, and I still couldn't decide if it was a good or a bad feeling.

"Thank you. My little sister really likes your music."

"You don't?" He asked in amusement.

"I, I like Fireproof."

"That's a 1D song."

"I still like it." I shrugged off, feeling elated as his sweet smile spread on his lips, showing off his bunny teeth and the dimples on his cheek. "And Woman, I like Woman."

The fluttering in my stomach seemed to be growing, and I had to wonder if I was going to explode at any second now. He leaned forward, as if he was ready to tell me some big secret, and bit the corner of his lip as he got ready to say his next words.

"Do you want to do this?" He finally said.

I did. I didn't. I had no idea.

"Do you think it'll work?" My voice didn't sound like my own. It was laced with doubt and something else that I couldn't quite describe yet.

"People will believe whatever they want." He shrugged, returning my gesture in an effortless way.

"You're right...I just, I never seem to know how far I want this to go."

"As far as you can go without losing yourself."

"How do you know you're not losing yourself?" I asked in response, looking at him as his expression turned just a little bit darker. For a person so private, his face said too much.

"You never really do," Harry whispered. "I guess, you have to go with your gut."

My gut. My gut was untrusting and anxious, ready to flee at any second. It had done it before, now it was just waiting for a new opportunity to do it again, really.

"I'll do it." The words came out of my words even before I had processed. So easy, it almost hid the fact that I was an anxious-ridden mess on the inside. "If...If you want to."

I couldn't tell if he actually liked my answer. All of the sudden he got serious as if he had just realized what he was getting himself into, and he sighed, standing up from his chair to perch himself on Diana's desk in front of me. He was towering over me, which made me shift uncomfortably in my seat. When he noticed, he sat up straight, giving me some space to breathe better.

"We'll do it then," He whispered. There was a tiny hint of disappointment, that grew from my chest and spread to my stomach at the tone of his voice as if this was an irritating chore.

"You don't have to do it. You don't know me after all."

"I guess I'll have time to do that." He softened a little, looking at me with a small smile as I leaned back on my chair and crossed my arms around my chest in a protective way. "Do you have a boyfriend?"

Sam.

"I don't. Do you?"

"A boyfriend, no," He mocked, smirking as my eyes blew wide in embarrassment.

"I didn't...uh, I wasn't...I didn't mean a boyfriend. I was, I was asking for a girlfriend, but if you do have a boyfriend, I mean..."

"I don't have a girlfriend either." He finally put an end to my misery. "It makes things easier."

I didn't know what he meant and I decided against asking him about it. Instead, I chose to focus on the fact that he was single, which definitely gave me something to dream about. Even if I knew nothing was going to happen. Even if I knew this whole thing was nothing but an inconvenience for him.

That didn't stop the fluttering in my stomach. Probably nothing would.

I was about to say something when the door opened, and Diana entered the room with Jeff. They were holding a bunch of papers each, which she set over her desk before throwing a triumphant smile at us.

"I think this is all we need." She said. "Let's go through them before you take them to your team. Oh, and there's a party tonight, I want you both there. We need to set things in motion."

After that, there was nothing much to say, or do. Jeff and Diana took over the conversation, arranging little details that I couldn't even begin to imagine. It was all a blur, of contracts and NDAs and rules that I was supposed to follow, but couldn't even remember. By the time they left, my head was spinning and I had to close my eyes tightly to stop myself from getting dizzy.

Diana had about a billion things more to discuss with me, ranging from the interview with James Corden, to new scripts, to the outfits I should wear to drop Cat at school, AKA something that didn't make me look like a crazy person walking through the streets of L.A. But there was too much in my head already, excitement, fear, numbling anxiety, and I could barely keep up with her, as she continued to check things from her to-do list. It was already 19:30 when was finally done, and I had about 1 hour to get ready for the party Diana wanted me to go.

I was so tired. I just wanted to go home.

"Ok, you can go now."

"Thanks. Di, can I just...take a raincheck on that party?"

"No, you can't. Harry's coming to get you at 9:15."

"But, D..."

"Have fun, sweets." She didn't let me finish. "He's sooooo hot, try and behave."

He was, that was exactly the problem.

***

What Diana had forgotten to tell me was that Harry was not going to pick me up himself. Rather, his driver showed up to my front door, waiting patiently for me for about 20 more minutes until I was ready.

I was surprised when we got to the venue, as there were not as many paparazzi as I had thought there would be. Actually, there was none. There was only a couple of people by the door, and they all looked at me with surprised expressions as I walked by them, followed by Harry's driver.

It was never a good idea for me to go out. I got hugged and pulled and stared at. But here, everyone was calm, probably used to hanging out with people a lot more famous than me. I sucked in a deep breath, smiling at the people that waved at me and sometimes stopping to greet the people that I actually knew. As a result, it took me around 15 minutes to get to Harry's group.

He was leaning against the wall, holding a glass in his hand while he listened attentively to the girl that was standing in front of him. She was gorgeous, with her long hair layered in loose curls, and a red tight dress fitted like a glove to her absolutely drool-worthy body. She leaned over as if to tell him a secret, and he cocked his head to the side to allow her to do so. I could hear her flirty giggles, and I stopped where I was, suddenly realizing that I did not belong there.

What was I doing? This wasn't me.

I turned around before anyone could see me, and started my way back to the door. If I called an uber, I would be at home in around 30 minutes, and maybe Sam would go and watch movies with me. He could even bring his girlfriend! I was used to it.

I stood by the bar, leaning on it as I pulled out my phone from my clutch. I was glad I hadn't wasted a whole lot of time in my outfit, and that I had decided to wear a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt tucked in, with red heels and a black blazer, that way I didn't feel so disappointed, or embarrassed for the thousands of situations I had pictured in my head.

"Would you like something to drink?" I heard someone shout at me, which made me turn around to smile to the bartender.

"N...A shot of tequila, please." I found myself saying, to the bartender's pleasure. He winked at me and nodded solemnly as if mine was a great choice of alcohol.

"Coming right up!"

And he was right, as about a second later there was a short glass in front of me, dripping from tequila. He offered me salt and a wedge of lime, and I gladly took them before gulping down the shot. The dry liquor burned my throat on its way down, and I winced at the taste, slamming the glass on the table for him to refill.

But before I could grab the new shot he was offering me, someone else took it. I whirled around, ready to tell someone off, but instead, saw Harry as he tipped the glass and chugged it down, wincing as soon as he had finished. The salt and the lime the bartender had offered me were left unattended on the bar.

"Hey, that was mine!!"

"Sorry," He said. The bar was a little quieter than the rest of the bar, so I noticed that his voice was a little hoarser than I remembered it from the morning. "Saw you drinking one on my way here. What are you doing here?"

I could feel we were being watched closely by about a hundred people. I could feel their eyes, burning hole on my back as Harry leaned closer to me. He smelled of alcohol and a little bit of mint, and I struggled to stay still where I was, starting to recognize the signs of the strange feeling that had taken over me in the morning.

"I was about to leave," I told him. "But was offered alcohol, so I ummm...got distracted for a bit."

"Why were you leaving?" Harry was pulling out his wallet, and before I could do anything about it, he handed the barman his credit card, signaling for two more shots to come.

"I, uh, I saw you back there, with the cute girl! I don't want to impose, Harry, and you're definitely gonna score with her, so I just...I can't mess with that!"

"I'm gonna score?" He seemed amused by my affirmation, but I still nodded vigorously, taking the new shot I was being offered and downing it. It burned a little more and made my head a little more fuzzy than it was after the first one.

"You totally are, and she's hot," I said, with my tongue feeling a little heavy as I talked.

Harry smirked like he knew I was right, and the girl was probably a goddess put on earth so we could all feel a little ashamed of ourselves. Kind of a reality check in the body of a breathtaking model.

He took his shot and drank it in one gulp, just like I had done seconds before. He winced, scrunching up his nose and smiling like a little kid as he slammed the glass down.

"Fuck, you couldn't choose another drink?"

"I like tequila," I shrugged, leaning to him to bump my shoulder against his. I stayed there, close to him as I smelled his faint cologne and the bitter alcohol in his breath. "Listen, I'm gonna go. You go get the girl, and we try this another day, yeah?"

"What if I don't want to?"

"Of course you do! That girl was hot as fuck, and it's not like I'm gonna give it to you..." I stopped, growing hotter in embarrassment as I looked at him amused face. "I should shut up."

His hands were warm and soft and they made my skin tingle as one of them slid carefully to the back of my neck. I stopped breathing, only able to look at him as he pulled me closer to his chest until his breath was fanning over my skin and I could almost taste the bittersweetness of his lips. I took a deep breath, noticing the little smile that played on his lips before he pressed our lips together.

The kiss wasn't soft, nor was it rough either. It was uncertain and eager as if we wanted to learn as much about each other as we possibly could. His fingers curled around my neck, as he brought me closer to him, and one of my hands tangled in the soft hairs that rested on the nape of his neck. He tasted like peppermint and tequila, and a sweetness I could not describe. My lips parted slightly, and I sighed into the kiss as he took command of it. Our lips were made for each other, of that I was sure, and I allowed myself to mold to him, while time around us stopped and rushed by at the same time. I leaned to him when he broke the kiss apart, looking for the warmth of his body even though he was right next by my side.

"There's a lot of cameras pointing at us." He whispered while his fingertips brushed down my neck, keeping me still close to him.

"Oh".

He smiled, dissipating the heaviness that had set in my tummy at his words. "And I really wanted to kiss you since this morning. You should stay.""

"Ask me really nicely, I'll think about it," I whispered, almost against his lips, already dreaming about the taste of them.

He was definitely trouble.

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makistar2018 · 5 years

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

youtube

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

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keepeacer · 5 years

Text

Let me collect dust.

more gyjo! a chaptered slow burn this time :)

Chapter 1 - Lady Grinning soul

Words: ~5673

Rating: M (for future chapters)

Content Warnings: drinking, getting hit in the head with shoes

Summary: It’s the summer of 1977, and Gyro Zeppeli is the bassist in a band. He does the singing, too. After getting a late start to a show day, he meets someone in a bar that he has the feeling he’ll be seeing a lot of in the future.

Ao3 Link

Full chapter under the cut

The Sunset Strip has been, historically, a breeding ground for talent. Some artists rose through the ranks of the clubs like Aphrodite from the froth of the Mediterranean, and others suffered a fate akin to Icarus— melting and collapsing under the weight of their own excess. It was, and still is, a veritable neon mausoleum.

Legions of would-be rock stars and pin-ups flocked to these musical establishments like flies to rotting meat, drowning themselves nightly in swathes of glitter and narcotic cocktails made up of ingredients they couldn’t begin to pronounce. It was a fairly common occurrence to see people dragged out on stretchers from a bad high, or simply knocked out cold on various surfaces and left there until some good Samaritan hauled them over their shoulder and took them home... wherever that was.

The overarching theme was that most of these lost souls didn’t exactly have a home to return to.

Diego Brando was not one of these lost souls.

No, Diego Brando had himself a stuffy little apartment in the Hollywood Hills, with a balcony on one side facing that horrid white lettered sign, to boot. In this apartment he had installed a rather large conversation pit with red upholstery, upon which was perched a grey miniature poodle with the name tag “Silver”. Silver was currently chewing happily on a pair of cherry red Doc Martens.

The owner of these boots lay splayed across one section of the couch with one arm covering his face and the other dangling towards the floor, a pea green sheet haphazardly thrown onto his otherwise nude form. His snores were thunderous and his sleep was deep, deep enough that he didn’t register the indignant shout from across the room, or the half-eaten boot that was flung at his head until it had been picked up and he had been slapped with it again, a bit more insistently this time.

He twitched as he stirred from his sleep, a long yawn escaping his lips, which he smacked after the fact. A wince; his breath tasted absolutely rancid.

It suddenly registered in his mind that he had been attacked in his sleep. He hoisted himself up on his elbows and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. His assailant had gathered Silver into robed arms, a violent expression raging in pointed turquoise eyes.

Despite his diminutive form, Diego Brando managed to be the exact kind of disheveled morning-after-terrifying that caused Gyro Zeppeli to physically recoil, pulling his sheet over more of his person as if it would serve as some sort of protection.

Gyro did not know what he did to warrant such venom, but it wasn’t like this was the first time he’d been woken up in such a way. He smiled sheepishly, hoping that he’d calm the other man down with his trademark disarming grin. “Good mornin’, sunshine.”

It did not work. “What do you think you’re doing?!”

“Uh… sleeping?”

Diego all but growled as he stomped into the pit, leaning over slightly and picking up the victimized boot with the hand that wasn’t cradling Silver. He advanced toward Gyro, waving the boot in the air. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yeah, that’s a bo— Huh?! ” Gyro spluttered, eyes widening at the realization that those were, in fact, his prized cherry Docs . His gaze shot from the boots to the poodle in Diego’s arms, a poodle that looked almost smug . It knew what it had done. “The fuck happened to my boots?!”

Diego threw Silver’s newest chew toy at Gyro, connecting with his chest with a dull thud and an “Ow!”. He ran his hand over the tuft of hair on Silver’s head, cooing down at his pet.

“I’m sorry this oaf tried to poison you, darling,” Diego purred, scratching under Silver’s chin.

Gyro looked at him incredulously. “How? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your boots.”

“And?”

“You left them where my sweet angel could have choked on them.”

Gyro scoffed in utter disbelief. He had half a mind to jump up and start yelling, but he remembered his physical state and decided that, what with the wide-open windows, Diego’s neighbors didn’t deserve that kind of performance this early in the morning. He instead contented himself with sitting upright completely and angrily gripping his boot. His poor, poor boot.

“Your angel?!” Gyro scoffed, pointing an accusatory finger at the doe-eyed Silver. “That little rat that chewed the absolute fuck out of my fucking boots? That’s real goddamn leather!”

This was met with an eye-roll. “Oh, please. They cost you what, 20 dollars at most?”

“20 dollars at most,” he mocked, putting on the most obnoxiously fake English accent he could muster. Gyro gestured around angrily to the opulent apartment he’d regrettably become a guest in for the night. “ Just 20 dollars . You know, you were so much nicer last night. Weren’t beating me with my own damn things, for one.”

“You endangered the life of my pet, you brute!”

“You owe me new boots.”

“I don’t owe you a bloody thing!”

Gyro threw his hands up into the air and dragged them down over his face in exasperation. He’d made several unwise decisions in his life and going home with a psychotic Englishman was proving to have been one of the worst. He drummed his fingers on his cheeks, wondering where it had all gone wrong.

The previous night had been spent on the Strip, because where else would it have been?

Club Asphodel was much like its namesake, in that its patrons tended to wander aimlessly around the venue indefinitely on any given night; at least, until something interesting pushed its way through the peeling velvet-lined doors. That night’s attraction had been a locally established outfit by the name of The Clergy; its members donned themselves in dark, cult-like attire and played gloomy tunes that dealt with occultism and blasphemy. As for what the actual genre was, it was up in the air, but the members described it as “an unholy cross between blues and plainchants”.

Gyro had taken his usual spot by the bar, leaning against the counter and tucking into a bottle of Hamm’s. The standard procedure for a night out.

Gyro was a very big fan of people-watching. Not for any sort of creepy purposes, but moreso because he simply got a kick out of observing people as they went about their lives. He liked seeing the desperate teenagers plead with the bouncer for passage into the club; he was intrigued by sudden breakups on the dancefloor when one lover noticed the other’s gaze lingering too long on someone else. Got a good laugh out of overzealous drunkards that had their beers slapped into their faces by the unlucky recipient of their harassment. If someone he saw interested him, he’d go over and talk to them. It was a simple enough game that had made him plenty of friends in the clubbing scene, as well as the inevitable enemy or two. Or three. He’d long lost count.

The Clergy had begun playing, and they were stellar, as usual. It was a wonder that they hadn’t been signed yet, though there were whispers in the crowd that night that scouts from Elektra were prowling the Strip, and that a couple could very well be in Asphodel.

Gyro loved The Clergy— he really did. It’s just that he found it incredibly hard to focus on their music while sticking his tongue down a pretty blond’s throat. All it had taken was a hand down his pants and the feeling of hot breath against his neck and he’d made his plans for the night. One speedy trip in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle and he’d found himself pushed into a conversation pit, only to awaken with that same pretty blond from the night before beating him over the head with the docs he’d slaved away an entire summer over a deep fryer for. Only now, they’d been chewed up by his shitheaded dog.

His boots. His fucking boots. Why did it have to be his boots?!

Diego had set down Silver and was now ambling around the pit and picking up Gyro’s clothing, throwing them at him as he went. Gyro held up his hands to shield himself, but to no avail; he was hit square in the face with his own underwear, as God would have it.

“Hey, c’mon, I can pick up my own clothes,” Gyro whined, grabbing his underwear off of his face and setting it down next to him. “You don’t h—”

“I want you out.” Diego was fuming, eyes alight with a fury that Gyro considered wholly unsuited for the situation. And especially in his eyes. If anything, he should be the angry one; that’s not to say that he wasn’t angry, but it was more of a ‘now I have to buy new fucking boots’ than an ‘I will unleash the gates of hell upon thee’ type of rage.

“I still want new—”

“Get dressed and piss off before I call building security on you.”

And that was how Gyro found himself wearing his shirt on backwards and missing his socks on the corner of Hollywood and Highland, waving down a cab. Diego had hardly given him enough time to dress himself before practically shoving him down the staircase, throwing a bag of coins after him (which he’d caught, thanks.)

He had intended on walking the entire way home before he’d noticed the time on a clock attached to a lamppost. It then dawned on him that it was in fact, Saturday, and he’d spent the better part of his morning ambling around the Hollywood Hills in an attempt to make his way out of the labyrinth of ostentatious housing and unnaturally green lawns.

Upon seeing the time he’d gone into panic mode—he had to get back to his apartment and he’d have to do it in record time. It was currently 11 AM, and he had to be somewhere by 11:30 AM.

But he’d have to get his bass first.

It wouldn’t have been so awful to miss practice for a day, if it weren’t for the fact that him and his motley crew of idiots had somehow managed to book themselves a gig. And of course, it was slated for that very night.

A two-toned green and cream Checker Taxicab pulled up next to him and unlocked the doors, Gyro smiling gratefully as he slid into the back seat. “Corner of Vine and Romaine, please.”

The driver grunted in acknowledgement, reaching into his glove compartment and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Newports. Fun guy. He held it towards Gyro, who muttered a small thanks and took a couple into his hands. Can save these for later , he thought as he deposited them into the pocket of his jacket. The driver then held out a lighter, shrugging when Gyro declined. He smacked the button on top of the taxi meter and shifted the gears out of park, the axles of the vehicle squeaking dangerously as it sped off down the street.

Anxiety and hunger bubbled in his stomach as he sunk into the leather seat, lazily observing the morning bustle of the Hollywood streets through the dusty window. His mouth watered at the sight of the first Burger King they drove past; it registered in Gyro’s mind that the last thing he’d ingested since the previous afternoon was alcohol. Copious amounts of alcohol. Alcohol that could do to be sponged up with a nice, gooey Yumbo.

He felt surprisingly put together for how much beer he’d consumed. It was possible that he’d simply developed an iron stomach and was thus immune to the adverse effects of intoxication. Maybe getting smacked with a saliva-covered boot was the ultimate hangover cure.

Gyro glanced at the clock installed in the car; 11:08 AM. He then looked to the street signs they were passing up; they were on Sunset, just about to pass Highland. Almost. He chewed on his lip anxiously; his bandmates wouldn’t let him hear the end of it if he ended up being late on such a big day. Any other day, they wouldn’t have cared, but gig days were of the utmost importance.

The next few minutes stuck in morning traffic were absolutely agonizing, but ultimately they prevailed, with the driver depositing Gyro on Romaine at approximately 11:13 AM. Gyro gave a hurried thank you and tossed the man a couple dollars before hoofing it in the direction of his apartment.

He ignored the greetings of his neighbors as he ascended the stairs, fishing out his spare key from under the doormat. Gyro practically slammed the door open after rapidly turning the key in the lock, making a beeline towards the stand where he kept his bass. He stopped in front of it, smiling fondly as he knelt before the case.

The case itself was a simple, faux-leather thing, beaten and worn around the edges. A few stickers had been slapped onto the surface; some of bands that he hadn’t even heard of and others of silly teddy bear drawings. Just for peace of mind, he unhitched the clasps holding it closed and slowly opened the case, smile widening to a grin as he took in its contents.

His baby was a monochrome Gibson EB-3 that he’d affectionately dubbed Valkyrie. The neck was a sweet-smelling black mahogany that contrasted with the white walnut body. The pickups and pickguard were black as well, though in another life they’d been a deep, wine-red color. While he’d slaved away over a grill for his Docs—as well as much of the rest of his clothing—Gyro actually won Valkyrie through a fistfight with the bassist of another local band, Wekapipo from Ataxia. Bastard got what he deserved.

Satisfied, Gyro closed the case and secured the latches, picking it up as he stood. He gave his apartment a quick once-over before shrugging and heading out the door, grabbing his keys before locking the door.

He gave an apologetic wave to his previously rebuffed neighbor as he headed down the stairs again, half-jogging on his way to his car. That was nothing special; it was simply a ’65 Mustang with chipped baby blue paint and fucked suspension that he couldn’t afford to fix yet. Sometimes the starter relay would straight up fail, and he’d have to play mechanic on the side of the road until he fixed it himself by some stroke of dumb luck. Either that, or until another driver took pity on him and gave him a hand.

Today was one of the Mustang’s good days, and so it started without a hitch. Didn’t even make a loud churning noise when he sped up on the 101 in an effort to make it to his bandmate’s place in time. In fact, it was so well-behaved that it didn’t start sputtering and dying until it pulled in front of the building, whining obnoxiously before Gyro shut the engine off.

Exhaling, he exited the car and grabbed his bass, nervously stepping through the gate to the house. He was definitely late, and he was definitely going to hear about it. Gyro was two seconds from knocking on the door before it swung open, a silently seething Sandman on the other side of the screen door.

“You’re late,” Sandman said simply, opening the screen and allowing Gyro to waddle in. Predictable .

Gyro smiled sheepishly, setting his case down next to the rest of the band’s equipment. He held his hands up innocently, trying not to falter under the intense gaze of the man before him. “I’m sorry! I got, uh, caught up…”

“Heads up!”

There was barely any time to react as a small styrofoam clamshell went flying at Gyro’s head. He managed to catch it between open palms, the container squeaking slightly as it bent inwards. Poco grinned from the doorway, a half-eaten cheeseburger in hand. “Glad you finally made it.”

He stuck his tongue out, opening the clamshell to reveal a slightly jostled Big Mac. His stomach gurgled in anticipation, though it proved to be in vain. Gyro had only taken a single bite before recoiling, making a face. “It’s cold.”

“Get here on time, then,” Sandman deadpanned, taking a long, obnoxiously loud slurp out of his cup of soda. Gyro scowled and took a seat on the couch.

“Not my fault you two live all the way in goddamn Echo Park.”

“It isn’t our fault you live in Hollywood.”

“Fuck you. Rent’s cheap on my street.”

“Sure. You owe me 65 cents for that, by the way.” Sandman pointed at his burger.

Poco held up a hand to silence the two, chewing thoughtfully on his cheeseburger before swallowing. “Who was it this time, Gyro?”

“Huh?” Gyro was mid-chew himself, trying his best to stomach this achingly cold pile of mushy bread and meat that they dared call a Big Mac.

Poco walked over and poked Gyro on the neck. His hands went up to cover his exposed skin, flushing in embarrassment at the knowledge of what decorated that particular stretch. He shot Poco a look, which dealt absolutely zero damage to the knowing grin plastered on his bandmate’s face.

“What was her name?”

“ His ,” Gyro grumbled, “name was Diego. Prissy rich ‘Hills type. Bottle blond. Nice ass.”

Gyro listed all of the above information willingly because Poco (and more subtly, Sandman) would hound him for it endlessly if he didn’t. The two were very preoccupied with who he slept with; they claimed it was because they were looking out for him, but he personally thought it was because they were both perverts.

It was Sandman who spoke first.

“…Diego? Diego who?”

“Uh… Brando. Why?”

Poco spluttered. “Did you just say Diego Brando?”

“…Yeah? What, you know ‘im?”

Poco and Sandman both stared at him like he was stupid. He even felt offended for a split second. Did he do something wrong? Was Diego Brando Poco’s long lost brother, or even Sandman’s? He spoke up again when neither of them answered his question. “Guys?”

Poco shook his head and walked away from Gyro, exiting the room. Gyro turned to face Sandman, who rolled his eyes and stood up. He, too, walked away and exited the room, but returned shortly after with a stack of what appeared to be tens of Star magazines. These were dropped unceremoniously at his feet, with Sandman sitting next to Gyro and scooping up the one at the top of the pile.

“Do you see this?” Sandman pointed to the cover of the magazine, which featured none other than… Diego. He was sitting on the floor against a rocking horse in classical jockey apparel, tongue sticking out of plump lips between two fingers. A bit risqué. The issue was relatively recent, too; April 1977.

Gyro blinked. He didn’t know Diego was famous. “Um, yeah. ‘BRITISH ROCK SENSATION TELLS ALL’…? He a singer?”

The corner of Sandman’s mouth twitched. “Do all Italian expats live under a rock?”

“What? I just know the metal and punk shit from there. Not any of that obscure crap.”

“It’s not obscure. Or ‘crap’. Be respectful.”

“Whatever…,” Gyro muttered, scanning over the other captions on the cover. “’What really happened to Joe Kid?’ Who? What?”

“Oh, that is unforgivable !” Poco yelled from the other room. Sandman shot Gyro a disapproving look, grabbing the magazine out of his hands and setting it back on the pile.

“You’re really so ignorant.”

“What the fuck? Why am I supposed to know all these people?! They’re obviously only big in uh... not-Italy.”

“Whatever. Get your stuff set up so we can practice. Hopefully you won’t be late to your own show, too.”

Sandman didn’t seem to notice Gyro flipping him off as he moved himself over to his drumkit. He twirled a stick around and tapped a cymbal, the crash echoing throughout the house. “Poco!”

There was a shuffling noise from the other room before Poco’s head emerged in the doorway. “On it!”

Gyro set down his burger, still muttering under his breath as he set up his bass and cab. He didn’t know why his bandmates expected him to know about everything that crawled out of the British Isles. Sure, Diego was very clearly loaded, but he figured that big time rockstars had better things to do than peruse seedy dive bars in the dark corners of Sunset. Like, go to stuffy wine tastings, or whatever.

It wasn’t like Gyro was totally ignorant of popular culture as a whole. It was just that growing up, his parents didn’t allow him to do anything fun. If it didn’t relate to preparing for medical school, he wasn’t permitted to participate. That included listening to fun music, watching television, hell, even playing outside with the local kids. As a result, Gyro didn’t get a taste of any type of music aside from jazz until he was late in his teens, and that was only for what was prevalent in Italy. He knew big names like AC/DC, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, sure; but anything that hadn’t made a considerable dent in the Italian musical market, he was unfamiliar with prior to arriving in Los Angeles.

It was a sensitive spot for him, but he knew enough local bands to earn him at least a little bit of respect in the LA scene. At least, as much respect as could possibly be afforded to a newcomer, and a foreigner, at that. People early on hadn’t really taken him very seriously, so it was by chance that Gyro bumped into Poco and Sandman, who’d been looking for a bass player to jam with. They’d all hit it off, and Vertigo had been formed practically overnight.

Their band was one of misfits, as was typical of any other non-glam band that popped up in the vicinity of the strip. They shared more traits with the burgeoning punk scene than anything else, yet they were finding that the sound shared by their peers just wasn’t… enough. Didn’t have the right crunch, wasn’t as intense, as demanding. Their music ached for something more.

He thumbed at the strings of his bass in thought. They needed more… gravel.

“Alright,” Poco chirped, plugging the amp chord into his guitar. “I think we oughtta, uh… practice the shit on the setlist.”

“What setlist? We agreed on a setlist ?”

“Christ,” Sandman sighed.

Poco pointed at a piece of paper taped to the floor before Gyro. He squinted below him. Sure enough, 8 of their songs were scribbled onto it in black marker. He winced at a few of the choices; Poco seemed to have gone out of his way to pick what’d make their fingers bleed the most. Which was pretty hardcore, so he couldn’t complain… much. Still, he’d have liked to have had some sort of say, since he’d be the one singing them. Or shouting, more like. More heavy that way.

Practice went as it normally did, which was to say that it was incredibly flawed, but charmingly so. Sandman’s snare only fell off of its stand twice, and the amp managed to not cut out at all. Hopefully, it’d be about the same for their set later that night. Gyro had mastered the technique of yelling without fucking his throat up too bad, so sucking on a lozenge would be more than enough in the hours between practice and the actual show.

It was funny, the anxiousness that festered within him. It wasn’t as if he’d never played at Señor Rosado’s. He’d had a slew of awful shows there, actually, but the audience (and the band) was often too drunk to really care; fast and loud music didn’t need to be good when combined with alcohol. The chaos of the pit was fun to watch from the stage, and it was even more fun when he got to set his bass down and dive into it at the conclusion of the show.

After lingering at Poco and Sandman’s house for a while longer after practice, he packed his stuff together and headed home for a quick shower. He still smelled like sweat and Hamm’s. And Diego, he thought with a wrinkle of his nose.

He didn’t spend too long in the shower and spent even less time on his outfit, throwing on a raggedy pair of jeans and an equally ratty old Stones shirt. He frowned at his chewed-up boots but decided to put them on in favor of his Chucks, deciding they added character. Saliva coated character.

The car ride to Señor Rosado’s wasn’t anything of note, and neither was the club itself from the outside. The inside? Also unremarkable.

The real appealing part of Rosado’s was not the interior decorations, nor was it the obnoxiously large neon sign with a racially insensitive vaquero displayed above the front entrance. It most definitely was not the restrooms, which, even when ‘clean’, had an odor akin to rotting pig shit on a sweltering July afternoon.

No, the thing that drew the local miscreants and rock n’ roll weirdoes to Rosado’s was something known as ‘The Carnage’. The Carnage was the utter chaos that drove the underground scene in Los Angeles. It was the way of being, the ideology, the look. It was a lot of things, and one way it could visualized was by a chick in a mullet snuffing out her cigarette on a bloodied bonehead’s chrome dome amidst a particularly disastrous barfight. The Carnage manifested only in certain spaces, and Señor Rosado’s was one of them… much to the chagrin of its owners.

One of whom was approaching Gyro as he lugged his bass cab towards the stage to set up.

The incredibly skeevy co-owner, Devo, sneered as he took in Gyro’s appearance, lighting a cigarette. “Peavey? Really, Zeppeli?”

“Good enough for Van Halen then it’s good enough for me.”

“Who?”

Now it was Gyro’s turn to scoff. He ignored Devo as he set down the cab, fumbling with the wires behind the rig. It was in that moment that he was endlessly grateful for gaff tape.

He waved in greeting to his bandmates, smirking when they realized that he’d actually arrived before they did. For once. Gyro looked to Sandman for any sort of emotion on his face and, of course, was given nothing but a resentful glare. But what was Sandman if not a little venomous?

It didn’t take too long for them to get completely set up. Their opener hadn’t even arrived yet; why would they? The bar wouldn’t permit its patrons to enter for another couple of hours.

Poco and Gyro took to entertaining themselves by playing darts in the green room, with Sandman acting as a half-hearted referee as he buried his nose in a thick textbook. Gyro understood partially; though he himself was a med-school dropout, he was no stranger to taking any possible moment to cram knowledge into his noggin in preparation for tests. He’d understand completely if it weren’t for the fact that Sandman didn’t go to college.

Eventually Gyro had grown bored of absolutely demolishing Poco in every aspect of the game, so he took to laying down on the hole-infested couch that Devo had deigned to plant in the room. He closed his eyes for what he thought was a little bit before peeking one open, trying to read out what the dusty clock on the opposite wall read. If it was right, it meant that the bar had already opened its doors for the evening.

He figured it was as good a time as any to get a good soundcheck in. For the sake of the openers; testing acoustics and all that jazz. Gyro honestly had no clue who the people playing before them even were. Not that he hadn’t heard of them... it was just that Devo literally didn’t tell them. Likely to be some other local shitshow that was even more obscure than Vertigo. He supposed it didn’t matter, so long as they were loud.

Gyro pushed a dozing Poco off of his legs and stood up, grabbing his bass and mumbling to Sandman that he’d be back. He received a disinterested hum in response.

A few patrons milled about the club already, some sitting on the chairs provided closer to the bar. Gyro couldn’t say that he recognized many, if any of them, but they were all probably locals. He sincerely doubted anyone from like, Montana had flown in just to see his little band of talking mice.

He found that the openers had already set up their own equipment, but were currently absent from the stage. There’d probably be time to actually meet them sometime between sets. He picked up a stray cord from the floor and plugged it into Valkyrie, giving a test strum before going back to fiddle with the cab knobs.

Once he was satisfied he took his place by the front mic, adjusting it for his height. The current setting was a bit short, and it wasn’t really going to cut it for a lanky guy like him.

“Blegh!” he gurgled into the microphone, pleased to hear his voice echo through the room. A few giggles came from customers in the non-visible vicinity. With the way the lights glared in the direction of the stage, and the general dimness of Rosado’s itself, it was hard to really see anyone.

He experimentally strummed on his bass, a few isolated chords before they melded together in his standard soundcheck song. Gyro was aware that he was likely totally butchering the genius of Geezer Butler, but he bassically had it down.

Gyro leaned into the mic, laughing softly as a random man in the back of the bar whooped loudly.

“Some people say, that my love can’t be true…”

He grinned at the girl that sat on the stage near him a few more lines in, adding a wheezy rasp to his voice as he progressed. It had devolved into a straight shriek as he got to the “My name is Lucifer” line, cackling maniacally as he suddenly ended off the song there. The girl stayed even after he went back into the green room to drop off his bass and reemerged; perhaps she was expecting something out of him. She wouldn’t be getting it.

Gyro decided that he was absolutely parched, and that the swill Devo left a cooler of in the room wouldn’t cut it. He hopped off of the stage and into the pit, swaggering over to the bar.

And that was when he saw him.

Peeking out from under a red fiddler cap were a pair of azure eyes, eyes that stared him down as their owner took a sip from some syrupy green cocktail. They were the type that demanded the completely undivided attention of those around him. His face, framed by feathers of blond, was set in a pout, though it didn’t seem like a particularly affected one. It was the kind that rested.

He was dressed a bit stuffily for the location, though his outfit seemed worn around the edges. A white cotton button-up shirt was accented by a soft yellow tie that had seen better days, his crimson high-waisted pants hugging his hips a bit more snugly than was probably standard.

The barstool next to him was invitingly open. Gyro took it.

“You the one that was singing just now?”

His voice was quiet, tinged with a subtle splash of sadness and what sounded like those ‘Southern country’ accents Gyro heard on TV now and then.

Gyro nodded, a slight grimace on his features. “Yup. How bad is it, doc?”

The young man gave a huff through his nose that Gyro thought was supposed to be laughter, though his lips did not show any sign of curling upwards. In the dim bar light, he idly registered a dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose.

“Not bad’t all. Pretty damn good, actually.”

“Hey, thanks. Means a lot.”

“No problem. You the one from uh...Vertigo, right?”

Gyro’s eyes lit up. Being recognized was a relatively new thing, and it somehow felt even better coming from this person. “Yeah! Yeah, I am. Bassist and lead shrieker.”

There was a hum from his conversation partner, who took another sip of his cocktail. Gyro didn’t know what exactly was in it, but judging from the smell it was some pretty strong stuff. He flagged down the bartender and ordered a whiskey on the rocks, catching it as it slid across the table towards him.

“We’ve been trying to sound heavier lately,” Gyro found himself blurting out, earning a cocked eyebrow from the fellow across from him. “I dunno if I gotta start yelling about blood and guts, or play faster, or what, but—ah, fuck. Sorry, didn’t mean to start rambling at you.”

“You try downtuning? Pedals?” The young man didn’t seem bothered by Gyro’s verbal diarrhea at all, swirling around the cherry in his cocktail.

“Hm? No, I—”

“Try out E. No drop tuning. As for pedals, Boss’s Overdrive crap might work for what you’re talkin’ about.”

The way he delivered this information, he’d seemed almost bored, but there was a notable glint in his eye that wasn’t there before.

“I dunno why I didn’t think of that,” Gyro mused, taking a swig of his whiskey. He looked behind himself to the stage, where he noticed Poco trying to wave him over.

Gyro frowned. Figures, when he finally finds someone that was actually interesting to talk to he’d be summoned by his bandmates. They’d barely gotten any real words in; Gyro didn’t even get the chance to ask him his name yet. He groaned and finished off his whiskey, slamming it down onto the counter and earning a glare from the bartender.

Gyro swiveled around to face him again. “Hey, I got— oh?”

The boy in the red hat was gone.

#gyjo #gyrojo #johnny joestar #gyro zeppeli #jjba #steel ball run #jojo's bizarre adventure #fanfiction #my writing

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hearyourheart · 5 years

Text

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

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simplelinesunfashiond · 5 years

Text

Highway to Hellsite

Because @abalonetea low-key encouraged me to finish an AU scene despite not knowing what it was, and @idreamonpaper and @drabbleitout actually encouraged this weirdness at one point, and I have no willpower when it comes to both spoiling and embarassing the hell out of Jackson Alistair Lewis. A short non-magical AU about blogging and your obvious crush on a celebrity going viral.

Jackson Alistair woke to the sound of his phone obsessively buzzing in his ear. He moved, stretched, felt something pop in his back and slowly lowered himself back onto the pillow, blinking at the ceiling for far longer than he supposed he really needed to. He had some things to consider, though nothing so much to worry about, he thought. He had survived the gala, uploaded a decent number of shots, and, overall, not completely flopped at his first press event. Good. It all faded out, a little, in comparison to the real reason he was even invited. Being the administrator of the first known DawnShadow fan page wasn’t much for a marketing resume, but damn if it wasn’t good for getting in close with DawnShadow’s marketing team when the band reformed and started catching on. So, maybe his interests hadn’t been one hundred percent professional.

The event certainly had been, at any rate. A fundraiser, a big deal. He hadn’t actually known much about the organization up front, just that it was run by the founder of a network of medical facilities. He knew who that man was, though. And he knew who that man’s second-in-command on his medical staff was. And if there was one thing that was bound to get Nathaniel Ettonridge out into the world, it was his crazy-genious daughter. Even if the band hadn’t been contracted to perform at the more public part of the event (which, thank whatever powers, they had), Nat would be sure to make an appearance. And what an appearance it had been, though the tailored coat was nothing compared to the guitar god on his arm. There had always been rumors, but this was…Well, whatever it was, it felt important. Maybe just because he'd spent so long looking at ancient pictures and wondering, but...maybe not that, really.

The phone buzzed again, and he finally bothered to look at it. A lot of new notifications, more honestly than he’d expected – in fact, suspiciously many. And a few messages from Sydney, who hadn’t dragged herself clear across the country just to watch him snap pictures at an event she wasn’t actually invited to. Understandable. The messages were about what he expected. How was the event, was it exciting meeting everyone, how did he end up getting on stage? And then, a little bit of a different one.

“Did you bring anyone back with you? ;)”

Of course not, and what sort of strange question was that? He asked her as much.

“I’m just teasing. But we’ve talked about this. You can tell me anything. I did figure it was probably a joke, though…” A joke? What was a joke? After a minute of him not answering, another alert snapped him back. “…” And then another. “You haven’t seen it yet?”

He flipped on instinct back to the notifications. A lot of new traffic, likes, reblogs, retweets, notes from all over the series of pages he’d been maintaining across their different platforms. And then, before all that, the ominous truth of the matter.

“Kim ‘at’ed me in something?” he asked, out loud, and then paused to consider the odd sensation of trying to say “@” out loud. What was more, it was a post from another blog, someone he had met the night before. He paused, thought about it before he even attempted to open it, and couldn’t recall anything that had occurred between him and Sarra being interesting enough to go viral. Finally, he went to her account, and stared for a long moment at the odd gradients that served as placeholders for what must have been a completely unreasonable amount of pictures. He glanced over his shoulder to his laptop, and wondered if it was worth another attempt to connect to the hotel’s terrible wifi. Finally, after far too long, the images began to materialize. He scrolled around a little, not looking, just moving the screen up and down, and wondered in an aggravatingly sincere confusion how someone else’s hellsite post had managed to send that much attention to him not just on said hellsite, but across the board.

He scrolled back to the top.

It had only one line of explanation. “The most interesting thing that happened all night.” And the first picture under that wasn’t one she had taken. It was a screenshot of one of his. And so were a few of the ones after that. And there were a few of her pictures, of him, usually of him taking pictures, of…Well, until he saw them all in one place, he hadn’t realized just how many pictures he had taken of the same person. The first large swath of reblogs were all Sarra, adding more pictures to the string.

People, at first. It was just a very striking image, one he couldn’t possibly pass up. The fact that Dr. Orion Lourandera’s other main celebrity contacts were royalty in the fashion industry, and his own siblings, was too good to be true. At first glance, the twins were almost indistinguishable from each other. Jackson wasn’t totally sure if the garments they were wearing would be considered gowns or coats, but the long gauzy material, all blue and green and teal with glints of gold, trailed to the floor like peacocks’ feathers. The sister was the one with her hair swept up and pinned, the one who never took her sunglasses off. The other, with short hair swept back and impractically high heels, was the brother. At some point, his outermost layer – apparently some sort of jacket – was discarded, to reveal that the rest of whatever sort of couture clothing item that was, was open down most of the back. Intricate scrolling tattoos of very small text ran from the base of his neck down his spine to the small of his back, and Jackson remembered wondering just how close one would have to get to actually be able to read it. He did not, on the other hand, remember just how many pictures he'd tried to get of it. Or how long he'd actually stared while wondering, though that was apparently long enough for Sarra to notice and snap a few pictures of Jackson frozen like a statue with his camera half forgotten as the rest of the guests moved around him. It was a decently long exposure, if the motion blurs on everyone else were anything to judge by.

He finally managed to scroll past the vast swath of his pictures of Anderson Lourandera, with its handful of pictures of himself, before the next section started. This one was all pictures of Jackson, posted by an instagram account he'd never heard of before. Something private maybe? The first one had managed to clearly catch the moment the doorman had IDed him, and how much taller everyone else around him was, and was simply captioned, “Whose baby is this??? Why is he here alone???” with a teary-eyed emoji and a random selection of hearts. The one after was Jackson, as well as a few other camera-wielders, and based on the small lock of blonde hair in the corner of the image, this was a picture that Anderson had discreetly taken over his own shoulder while leaning dramatically on the bar. “These media boys think I'm posing for them. They must never learn the truth. #too drunk for these heels #i will literally fall over #no srsly #someone #stop ogling and help me #dammit."

The captions weren't all exactly coherent, but there were…Well, there were a lot of pictures of Jackson. Including a very zoomed in one of him showing his ID to the bartender. His info had, thankfully, been blurred out, but based on the small excited-looking key smash, whatever had been seen was exciting. Oh, Jackson realized, thinking back to the first picture, the fact that this man had thought he was a child, my age I guess.

And then, there was one of him talking to Sarra, who was pointedly side-eyeing the camera. “Askfbsi I've been caught,” and then a very distraught little emoji.

Then, there were the concert shots. A couple of Jackson in the crowd, looking particularly giddy, and captions pointing it out. Then, a few posts with no pictures, just black, with very over-excited and unspecific captions. And finally, the part where he ended up on stage, himself.

Jackson still remembered the feeling of awe, like a coronation, when the strap of the PRS was lowered over his head, the feeling of the strings under his finger, the mother-of-pearl inlays glinting under the stage lights. Nix, with the same ancient red Fender, cluing him in on the set, testing his knowledge on a couple things. No problem. That's why Jackson was here – he was the guy who knew it all.

It was only screenshots but it was clearly a series of videos. When he got to tear into his favorite solo. The moment of shock he'd hoped nobody had noticed when Nathaniel hit that note in Firebird. Nathaniel daring Jackson to do the vocals for Twilight Angel. People cheered, good-natured but egging him on, until he agreed. Sarra had interjected in the next post to add the link to the full video, with a struck-through comment of “no but for real he was amazing go watch it.”

And, in glorious conclusion, a picture Sarra had taken herself, a panoramic view of the scene, of the over-dramatic rapturous look, head tossed back, laughing out loud, of Jackson killing the last solo in the outro of Visions of Midnight on one edge of the image, and, on the other side, Anderson Lourandera, gaze locked on the stage, skin tinted with a faint alcohol-induced blush. One shining with energy, and with the aid of stagelights, the other a vibrant beacon standing out of a sea of dark suits and satin and velvet winter dresses. It was, Jackson concluded, a very odd scene, and it suggested that people had shown up with the image of a more political event in their minds. That seemed like it should have been important, but he couldn't place why. Couldn't quite care. Found himself forgetting, failing to notice, a little more every time he looked back at the picture. He did manage to notice that the artistry of it put every one of his shots to shame.

A few other comments came up under that, a lot of people gushing about various aspects, and a few repeating the demand to know who this kid was. And then, the conclusion, which had been reblogged back to Sarra's page as well. A screenshot of a select few of the posts from Jackson's “house of light" tag, which had existed long before the gala but which now included a couple of last night's pictures, and a screenshot of part of the House of Light's official blog, including a couple of shots of Jackson walking out in a long-hemmed vintage velvet coat that, now that he thought about it, was actually from HoL. The tags underneath included the phrase “#if you see this #call us.” And that was where the “@” appeared. Kim's commentary read, “Admins for @visionsofdawnshadow and @houseoflight-courtofshadow need to quit being horny on main.”

Jackson stared at it for a long moment, then took a screenshot of the whole thing and, after another minute if hesitation, sent it to Sydney.

“Is this what you meant?” he asked.

“Don't freak out,” Sydney answered. “Besides, like I said, I was already pretty sure nothing happened…”

“Why?”

“Well, I know who you are so…I called? The west coast shop. Mostly talked to Eva. (Cuuute accents, by the way).”

Jackson's brain failed to formulate more than “…,” so that was what he sent her.

“It's no secret they work a lot with the band, so he's heading back east with them.”

…

“Aaand it wouldn't hurt to have an assistant/photographer/model/killer musician on board for that kind of project?”

. . .

“…We sort of figured…you might want the job. She thought maybe you could meet with them before you leave? If you don't want to I can totally call her back!”

Jackson switched back to the page of Sarra and Kim's pictures, stared at that panorama for a minute. Saved it. Looked again. Reblogged it to his own page, added a relevantly embarrassed-looking gif. Wrote back to Sydney, “Just tell me where to go.” Then, a second later, “Also, I love you.”

#tsp au #characters: jackson #not gonna lie #this is a weird one

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