#nice that it was just about harry and not 'are you gay' ALTHOUGH
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So you think he didnt know he was going to be asked that question? To me it looks like both the interviewer and Louis knew what the next question would be about
I don't know and we never will! I tend to automatically bristle a bit at people saying everything is planted planned fake etc because I really just... disagree. So so much of the time. And I don't find it remotely unlikely that an interviewer in LATAM (where like... everyone is a larrie) would ask that and I don't find anything about any of it strange, including that he would be able to answer the question the way he did and without a reaction. But who knows? If they did plant that now I wouldn't find it weird at all (though I don't think they did); however it came about I'm sure they're very interested in taking the temperature of the fanbase around this, seeing what the response is. The fanbase is going through a lot of growth and changes, especially around this stuff! I'd give a lot to know what they're seeing tbh to have that data, it would be truly fascinating.
I will say however that I really do not think they arranged for this to drop at the end of his press tour as I've seen suggested (and I imagine there are still more interviews that haven't dropped yet so it isn't even the end? I'm not keeping track but probably?). It was recorded on the very first day of the junket- and having seen this I would guess that NOT knowing when it was going to drop is why Louis has been so very Online these last days monitoring the progress of his little junket tour, knowing that at some point things were going to blow up with this and checking to see if it was happening yet (especially as he probably thought it was going to drop while he was still face to face interacting with fans every day and he'd certainly want to know when it had dropped for that.)
#god to have access to their data and conclusions WHAT I WOULDN'T GIVE#lets say they did plant it which again I'm not saying I buy into at all I really just don't think they DO that#but IF THEY DID#I bet it would have been with the intention of it dropping while he was still on his little tour and out there#I have been fighting the impulse to call it a rainbow tour for days I'M SORRY ARGENTINIANS#I used to listen the evita soundtrack a lot when I was really young I'm not proud but it is IN THERE😞#also I'm really not saying it was planted or that I think so BUT#either way#nice that it was just about harry and not 'are you gay' ALTHOUGH#telling that he ofc answers the broader question as if that was what was asked#in fact I think in some ways his stock answer that addresses a lot of things that were NOT brought up at all#is evidence it was NOT planned#like to the casual observer who knows nothing... what the heck does his kid have to do with that?#I guess the gP would assume the question is are you gay or straight (only choices) maybe... but they sure wouldn't know#about the kid stuff#and actually if they were going to plant something surely it would be more vague and not so HARRy STYLES#yeah no I REALLY dont think they did any of that
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Are the any new fics (within the last couple months) that are good? I’m in a reading drought and I feel like I’ve read every Larry fic there is :( I got so desperate I even thought about looking into f/m fics..
NOOOOO NOT THE HET FICS. DON’T DO IT. 😆
I think I’m just going to use your ask to post my year-end favorite fics. Hope you don’t mind.
It’s been a tough year for me, and I haven’t gotten to read a ton, but these are all excellent.
Secrets, Santa? By @indiaalphawhiskey (E, 19K) disaster gay Harry in all his bumbling, endearing glory still manages to make his incredibly hot boss (Louis) fall for him. This one has snappy dialogue, great internal monologue, and scorching smut. I’d expect nothing less from this author.
your lips in the low light by etherealbliss / @givesuethemoon (E, 21K) It’s been a long time since I read a Larry Uni AU, and this one checked all the boxes. This author managed to really capture the immaturity and obsessive emotions of university age lovers arguing and breaking up, and making each other jealous, and fucking and fighting some more, and ultimately making up. Harry is bratty and sensitive and Louis is dense and long-suffering and they’re perfect for each other.
Scorpions et Madragores by Stria / @nooradeservedbetter (E, 23K) Read the tags and author’s note on this one because there are some themes that could be triggering. This is a dark fic and Harry is a pretty creepy vampire, but the story is very well told and there’s a happy ending.
2 a.m. texts by everysingleday / @sun-lt (T, 30K) This was very sweet and very funny and had just enough sexiness (although I wouldn’t have minded more. LOL!) Link is to a download.
The Doppel Effect by yeah_alright / @uhoh-but-yeah-alright (T, 6K) the concept for this fic was so original and a really compelling read, I can’t help but hope the author gets inspired to continue this ‘verse.
Danger I Can’t Hide by CelticSky (E, 227K) This one’s got all the tension and drama you’d expect of a World War II story—life and death high stakes, friends and lovers unexpectedly torn apart, battles and heroism, plus the added stakes of classism and homophobia—then add a slow burn, high risk, scorching love affair spanning years. If you want a story that’s complex and fantastically researched, plus lovers to root for, read it. It’s long. But I couldn’t put it down. When I finally did, I picked it right back up and read it twice more. It’s that good.
one conversation by fondleeds (NR, 1K) This really is just a couple of scenes, and the story is open-ended, but, if for no other reason, read it for the beautiful way the sentences flow. My notes on every fic of theirs begin with: “I wish I could write like this.”
Night Shift by banaanipoika (E, 9K) This was incredibly sexy and beautifully written. I loved that there was such a unique setting with so much descriptive language making me feel like I could smell and feel everything in that hospital room.
On The Pull by @homosociallyyours (E, 4K) Short, but really sexy and just the right amount of bittersweet and hopeful. Loved the characterizations and the smooth writing. So few people write canon Larry these days so this was a nice change of pace.
Devil in my brain, whispering my name by @lunarheslwt (E, 9K) i i thought this author struck a great balance between the dirtiness of a demon defiling an angel and the way the angel gave in to his desire to be defiled. Super sexy.
pull you closer (kiss me harder) by @sunshineandthemoonlight (E, 6K) This was absolutely beautiful — just the perfect amount of tension and wistfulness to make me tear up. But then it was sexy and full of hope at the end. I loved how Louis supported Harry and gave him exactly what he needed (and really, H gave Louis what he needed, too).
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“I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch- H.S”
summary: Harry and you argue after his show at Wembley and he gets jealous and pissy. Angst ensues
warnings: arguments, swearing, angst with a happy ending
pairing: harry styles x fem!reader
∘₊✧──────✧₊∘
The door slammed shut behind him, his footsteps heavy, even on the carpeted floor. You sighed, tired and weary. It had been a long night and by the looks of it, it was about to get even longer.
Harry huffed, taking off his shoes with more force than necessary, throwing them in the general direction of his open suitcase. He wasn’t wearing the colourful outfit anymore, looking much more like yours in the black nike shorts and worn-out t-shirt you’ve seen far too many times on him. You stood in the doorway between the ensuite bathroom and the bedroom, watching him quietly as he ran his fingers through his brown hair repeatedly-noting it had get even longer since the last time you saw him.
He looked up at you finally, his eyes stormy and half-lidded. He was mad, furious even and you weren’t totally sure why. You hadn’t seen him for three weeks, the tour taking a toll on your relationship and you had hoped this night would’ve at least be a change to your boring office life, a moment with the man you loved so dearly.
“What is your problem?”, you said demanding, sounding harsher than intended. Your arms were crossed in front of your chest, you yourself still dressed in the outfit you had chosen for tonight’s show. A pink, puffy dress, matching cowboy boots and hat. Hell, you had even put on a boa, going all out.
“My-“, he breathed out, before getting louder, “My problem? What the hell is your problem? We haven’t seen each other in almost a month and you already go around flirting with other guys? At my own damn show nonetheless?” He stood up from where he was sat on the king sized bed, taking a step closer to you.
“What?”, you sputtered unbelievingly. “What the fuck are you even talking about? All I did was talk to your mum and your sister, I haven’t seen either of them since Christmas and you just accuse me of things that didn’t even happen? Fuck you.” Tears gathered in your eyes and he noticed, faltering slightly.
“I saw you”, he started, pointing his finger at you,” Talking to him. I don’t know who he was, I don’t even care. I just know you were laughing pretty hard at his jokes or whatever he was telling you. A little too much to just be friendly.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Ryan-“
He interrupted you before you could even finish. “Oh, Ryan”, he mocked, “Is that his name? Gotta be careful you don’t start moaning his name the next time we fuck.”
He was getting really worked up now, the vain on his forehead popping and you were getting angrier by the minute too. He had always been jealous, even a little possessive, and it was getting on your nerves.
“Ryan is an old friend from school, you asshole. You know him, I invited him to my birthday party two years ago. He’s gay, Harry, so he’s not interested in me and I’m not interested in him. It’s just a coincidence, he told me you were really nice to him when he met you and that he wanted to support you. Although, I don’t expect him to think so highly of you if he knew what you’re throwing at me right now.” You took a deep breath in, the tears finally breaching free. You couldn’t keep them in any longer.
You were exhausted, travelling from home to see him at Wembley, his concert of two hours and then this argument on top of it. The weak and selfish part of you just wanted him to hold you, while the bigger part just wanted to yell at him some more. You missed him and he was treating you so unfairly.
“I missed you”, you whispered, “I just wanted to spend the night with you peacefully, you’re my home, Harry. Why don’t you ever make me feel like I’m yours too?” You let out a sob, slapping your hand over your mouth defeated.
“Oh. Oh, Y/N.” His eyes were soft now, staring at you unnervingly. “Here, sit down, my love. You look like you’ll fall over any minute.” He guided you to a chair nearby, pushing you down gently.
“I’m so sorry”, he whispered, kneeling before you. His face was illuminated by the lights of London outside the big hotel window. “This tour has taken a toll on me, I missed you so much more, Y/N, you have to believe me. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, I just got so upset over the thought of you with someone else. I’m so selfish, I wish I could have you by my side everyday, you know? I love you and I never want to hurt you, not like this. Not over something I have so obviously perceived wrongly.”
You laughed wetly, your make-up probably smudged, making you look like a hot mess. “You know, I’m starting to think that you were right when you sang that you were just an arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit that he’s sorry.” He chuckled quietly, wiping a tear from your cheek.
“I forgive you”, you said, kissing his palm, which was still holding your face gently, “But never say something like this to me again. I’d never cheat on you, not in a million chances. You’re my everything.”
“And you’re mine. We’ve got to figure out a way to see each other more, even when I’m touring and you’re working. I can’t go a day without you, without missing your beautiful face.”
You smiled softly, leaning down and he took the invitation to press a gentle, closed- mouthed kiss to your lips, a promise you understood, you accepted.
∘₊✧──────✧₊∘
lmk what you think<3 haven’t written in a while so i’m a bit rusty! i’m also working on a larger project that should hopefully be up in a few weeks. until then i’ll try my luck with smaller blurbs and one shots. enjoy!<3
#harry styles fanfictio#harry styles#harry styles blurb#harry styles oneshot#harry styles x reader#harry styles x you#harry x you#harry styles fan fiction#harry styles fanfiction rec#harry styles wembley#harry styles concert#harry styles angst#harry styles fluff
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Hey absolutebl, I am a TV writer with a very strong and personal interest in BL series. Living in Thailand for many years, I was asked by a friend Thai actor to give BL series a shot, to see the foreigner perspective on Thai tv dramas/BL stories... and here I am. I have developed 2 series so far, TRUTH & DARE and IMPERFECT MATCH, and written their respective pilot episodes.
I mentioned "personal interest" because, as a gay writer, I find it almost therapeutic to write these stories, although it would be cathartic to see them sold and produced haha!
I'd love to read your opinion on something...
I have read your discussions about language, which I find very interesting. Personally, having lived in Thailand for many years, I am more than used to the language, but not able to write it, so I write these stories in English. I know this will throw off more than one Thai producer, but I believe my stories are universal and should be easily adapted to many different languages without losing their uniqueness. Details of the story, settings, names... can always be changed to localize the series and make them culturally relevant. Do you think this is a valid argument when it comes to explaining to a producer why is the series not presented in Thai? Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Okay, you did come to this blog, so presumably you know what you're in for. But if you want the nice answer, you should stop reading right now.
Still here?
You're not gonna like this, but I think if you're pitching to Thai production the script should be written in Thai.
One of the things i keep running into learning Thai is that linguistically there is a cap on comprehension without the script, not just comprehension of the language but of the way it fits within culture. And you're pitching to a studio house that sits within THAT culture. On a very basic level the burden is on you to meet them in their world, not foist yours upon them. And their world is Thai. It smacks of both western entitlement and farang rudeness to do otherwise. Like not taking your shoes off in an Asian house. You're in their house, honor their culture, that includes the written one.
There's also an artistic component to this on a core linguistic level with regards to comprehension.
How do I put this?
It's like... you can't do an oil painting on watercolor paper, it has to be done on cavas. The art side of language impacts creativity at a root level, especially visually. And all languages are creative because they are living evolving artistic endeavors as well as tools for communication. The way something is written down, the words as pictures, is part of that endeavor. The true bones of your story can't be communicated properly to a team if they're obfuscated by a whole different suite of linguistics.
English, under this context, just feels... wrong. It's a brutal, cumbersome, lumbering beast of a language when compared to Thai. Full of excess words and redundancies, stunted and plain when forced into brevity.
And it will LOOK that way when slapped down on a desk in front of a Thai staffer. It will look ugly, and bloated, and shocking, and unpleasant to the subconscious of a non-English speaker, and when compared with all the Thai scripts they have read before or after it will be judged and found inferior.
Also, I suspect you're young (no offense) but no story is universal. No book appeals to everyone. I, for example, happen to have always (from the get go) been highly indifferent to Harry Potter.
Side tracked.
On a purely business front:
The point of a pitch is to get through barriers and into production.
By pitching in the wrong language, you give yourself an insurmountable barrier.
Remember what studios are looking for, first and foremost, is a reason to say NO. They are always looking for the flaws, always. Not being in Thai is not just a flaw it's a red flag against you personally as someone they want to work with.
You really want my feedback? Put your scripts down, sign up for a three month immersion class and learn the Thai script instead.
In the long run, the thing learning how to write in another language does most for you as a creative writer, is expand your artistic brain in new directions. So your stories will actually come out more inventive, more adaptable, and, yes, more universal as a result. I guarantee it.
See what happens? You come for feedback and I gave you stern words and a homework assignment.
On the other hand, you can wander in with you script in English and see what happens. The worst thing is you get rejected. Or laughed at. Or ignored.
I'm just some scmuck on tumblr. What tf do I know?
#asked and answered#this was a fun one#be nice in the comments you putz they are obviously a baby#i sat on it for a while because I wasn't sure I should answer it#but what the hell
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in depth harry potter spoiler warning. but i wanted to talk about gay!dumbledore. what jkr really does well is the adult backstories. you meet the adult characters from an eleven year old’s perspective. as harry ages (in the last book he’s seventeen) he gradually learns new things about the adults and gains a better understanding of them as full people. but every single one of these adults was already the full person harry understands them as in book 7 all the way back in book 1. a lot of other ya authors try to imitate this and fuck up, either because they get excited and jump the gun, giving us way too much info way too soon, or because it’s blatant that the complexity was added later. dumbledore is a great example. in book 1 when harry first learns who he is (from the back of a candy box trading card with commentary from his friend ron) he’s this highly revered wizard who famously defeated the greatest dark wizard of all time pre-voldemort in a duel. when harry meets him it’s noted that his nose is crooked like it had been broken and never healed correctly. there’s a mirror that shows you your greatest wish and when harry asks what dumbledore sees he says a nice pair of knitted socks. harry can tell he’s lying but doesn’t push because he realizes that was a really personal question, but he doesn’t know dumbledore well enough to know what the truth would be. we get the full backstory drop in book 7. the simple version is: when dumbledore was a young man he was extremely close to another young man, one his brother didn’t like. they wind up in a three way brawl, dumbledore’s sister gets caught in the crossfire and dies. boyfriend up and leaves, brother breaks dumbledore’s nose at the funeral, boyfriend goes on to be the powerful dark wizard that dumbledore battles decades later. so even though harry didn’t know that backstory in book 1, it’s clear looking back it was already a part of him. anyway this is why it drives me bonkers when people say that dumbledore wasn’t gay in the books and jkr just said that after the fact for clout, because it’s an integrated part of his character and arc and has clearly been what jkr had in mind from the get go. no, harry doesn’t get the definition of homosexuality talk but homosexuality is absolutely there (and in more than just how close he and evil wizard were in backstory, in book 7 a homophobic tabloid journalist insinuates dumbledore was molesting harry). people act like him being gay was a retcon when it was just jkr being honest about what she wrote. sorry for the novel but yeah
Don’t be sorry, I’m glad to have this context!! Like I said, I haven’t read or watched HP so I’m completely clueless here and don’t really want to praise or bash Rowling over something I don’t know about. I lean towards praise though because it seems like anyone not caught on the “I hate JKR!” Bandwagon claims that Gay Dumbledore was handled well.
I really like the concept of finding out more about the adults as the child protagonist ages and gains new insight!
Tbh I imagine that this is a similar situation to GO S1: it’s not technically canon because it’s not explicit, and readers/viewers who either don’t want to see homosexuality, or are too entrenched in heteronormativity to think of spotting it, won’t see it. But LGB people and possibly even allies will spot it, because they’re either used to reading between the lines or are willing to see it.
So I don’t think she should be praised for explicit gay representation, which I haven’t seen anyone claiming (although like I said, I haven’t read the books so it’s possible I’d change my mind if I read them). But she’s much different from Neil in that she’s said “yes, it was my intention that he was gay, and there’s clues in the text that point to this and prove my intentions”. Neil has been like “yeah we called him the f slur and made him a gay stereotype for the laughs, but no he’s not gay. He can be literally anything else though”.
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Highway to Pail Bonus #2
[Day 1] [Prev] [Next]
@do-it-with-style-events
Bonus prompt 2: You had me at Merlot.
Keanu Hawke Harrison-Montoya, known to his friends as Halcón or Hal and to his coworkers and customers as Harry, hadn't exactly dreamed of giving wine tours in Sonoma Valley when he was a kid, but it paid okay and you met interesting people. Once some actor from like Ireland or something had been on one of his tours with his wife and oldest kid, and his sister had called him a couple days later to ask if he'd seen them, because the kid was her favorite character on the new Game of Thrones. Not exactly Johnny Depp levels of fame, but they'd been pretty nice and Brit was impressed.
Unfortunately, interesting does not always mean nice. Two of the customers on today's tour were both interesting and irritating as hell. He could tell already that by the time he got home to Pancho, he just was not going to have it in him to do date night, Wednesday or not. Maybe he'd be cool with just cuddling on the couch and watching some dumb reality TV.
The two guys were both middle-age and English and obviously loaded, but otherwise they physically were the opposite of each other in every way, like they'd been designed to be The Odd Couple in a kid's show. One looked like if the Easter Bunny was a gay professor, and the other like the former frontman in a broken-up Clash cover band who hadn't gotten a new personality yet. They argued with each other at the back of the pack like they were either: a) about to get divorced, or b) had never believed in marriage philosophically but nevertheless intended to be in one another's pockets for the next fifty years and die within five minutes of each other so they could continue arguing at the pearly gates. He would not have been surprised if one of them was an anarchist, although based on the boyfriends and girlfriends Pancho's cousins usually brought home, he figured it'd be Easter Bunny rather than Rocker. Every tight-laced looking one talked about the fine points of German philosophy and schemes they had to redistribute wealth to third-world countries and every punk-looking one introduced him to a new "Viking" rune he'd google later and find out was a Nazi symbol. (Desirée was not very good at picking boyfriends.)
It had been more than half an hour since Hal had begun this tour, and despite Easter Bunny saying several times "do be quiet, Crowley" and Rocker saying "shut up and listen, angel" just as often, neither of them had actually stopped talking that entire time. They were quiet, was the worst part, clearly trying to be polite to the other guests by keeping their conversation down, but the whispers were much more distracting than if they'd just talked at a normal conversational level and harder for Hal to call them out on.
His smile was starting to become plastic as they finally hit the first wine break and, hopefully, a break from the English couple's half-heard conversation. He poured the wine for his dozen guests and explained how wine-tasting worked for any newbies. Like he always did, he asked for the guests to first sniff the wine, see if it reminded them of anything. All but one obediently copied him, and most had the look of people who didn't smell anything in particular but didn't want to say so and look stupid; totally normal. Rocker, however, stuck his tongue into the glass, prompting Easter Bunny to nudge him and whisper "do try to act like a human, my dear," and Rocker, at a normal conversational volume, said "Merlot with notes of tea, angel, you'll like it for sure."
"Notes of tea! Very keen nose! That'll be the tannins," Hal said cheerfully, hoping to remind them that there were ten other guests plus him on this tour. "Anyone else smell anything?"
Easter Bunny at least had the grace to look a bit embarrassed. "Thank you, er," he squinted at his nametag, "Harry," presumably on behalf of Rocker, who just smirked and whispered something in what Hal thought was French. Hal assumed it was a Harry Potter joke, because it always was. He ignored them and smiled at the rest of the group.
A round of silent, politely confused faces stared back at him. "Time to taste!" he announced, modeling taking just one sip from his glass. The Englishmen, he noticed, drank their whole sample.
Christ alive. If these two were this annoying sober, he was not going to have fun dealing with them drunk.
Author's note:
I don't know a damn thing about wine, but I do know a bit about being an underpaid tour guide, and Air Conditioning would be the absolute worst. At least they'd tip well. All knowledge of wine comes from the Wikipedia article about Merlot.
Shout out to David, Georgia, and Ty Tennant in paragraph 1. Johnny Depp is mentioned because I read once that the studio had wanted to cast him as Crowley in the never-made movie, and also because he's the most famous person I didn't quite meet while living in a tourist town.
Hal is named after Keanu Reeves and Tony Hawke, and I figured he's probably about my age. Halcón is just Spanish for Hawk. I did Google to make sure it's not accidentally offensive or funny in some dialect like how Concha* can be, and some Mexican reality TV star is being called that because he's got an aquiline nose, so I think we're solid for California at the very least. If it is accidentally funny please let me know! I also liked how you could arguably get Hal from Harrison, via Harrison -> Harry -> misattribution of Harry to Henry -> Hal. Why does Hal come from Henry? Because English is weird.
*Concha means seashell and is a regular woman's name in Spain, a pastry in Mexico, and slang for vagina in Argentina.
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video essay recommendations 23-25
Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism by Jacob Geller
what it's about: modern art, obviously, that's the title.
who might like it: everyone who doesn't "get" modern art, or gets it and wants people to talk about the brilliance of modern art, or people interested in video game discourse
watch or listen: recommended to actually watch it, the editing is quite good, and the creator included a lot of footage
mood: serious!! do not watch if you're looking for something light-hearted
Mamma Mia 2 is an Absurdist Masterpiece by Media Processing
what it's about: 10+ absurd things about the second installment of the beloved jukebox musical series mamma mia
who might like it: people who like abba, people who watched both movies, people who refuse to watch the second movie
watch or listen: watch! the creator is a video editor and shows some example of the video editing used in mamma mia 2
mood: very funny
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling | ContraPoints by ContraPoints
what it's about: dissects the podcast "the witch trials of JKR", intertwines the whole discussion with "anti-gay crusader" anita bryant and talks about the age old question of calm discourse and cancelling. this is the essay i would actually recommend the most, it made me question my previously held and very privileged view that all discourse should be held in a calm and collected way. it actually shouldn't! not when it's about peoples right to live!!!
who might like it: just watch it (former harry potter fans (or current?), people interested in lgbtqia+ history)
watch or listen: you can only listen, although the editing is nice and supports the arguments well, and contrapoints outfits are a-ma-zing
mood: it's a serious topic, but some parts are funny
#jacob geller#whos afraid of red yellow and blue#barnett newman#zoe qinn#whos afraid of modern art#mamma mia 2#mediaprocessing#the witch trials of jk rowling#jkr#boycott jkr#jkr tw#contrapoints#video essay#video essay recommendation#recs
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How do you imagine the Scott Pilgrim characters interacted with the twst characters?
Anon, this is such an interesting but complicated question, and I, as always, took it way too seriously lol Both TWST and Scott Pilgrim have so many iconic characters, but it would be impossible to talk about every possible combination. So you know what, I’ll go through the cast of Scott Pilgrim, since it’s a bit smaller… Although I did ended up missing a bunch of them anyway because I didn’t have anything to say or because I simply forgot about them lol
Also, while the image of the characters in my head is all over the place right now with 3 different versions of the story, I’m mainly thinking about the anime version.
Alright, sooo.
The easiest one to talk about is unsurprisingly Wallace lol We like to joke about him enjoying his time at the Mostro Lounge and being a regular customer there. He is loved by the staff and especially by the Tweels and Azul, because he pays well, knows a lot about cocktails, doesn’t bother anyone (he could’ve if he wanted to, but the place is chill, so he behaves even when he gets drunk… just don’t tell anyone that the Lounge has alcoholic beverages now lol). They love him so much that whenever he visits they prepare his favourite spot at the bar for him. They love him so much that they named a cocktail after him lol They also love to gossip- I mean, exchange information with him (there is a sketch on our ko-fi with Wallace at the Lounge…)
Wallace would also probably enjoy spending time with Lilia, I feel like these two are quite a dangerous mix. Are they going to tease someone together or flirt with each other aggressively and end up having sex for some reason? Both, but the order is unpredictable.
But ironically, when it comes to romance and stuff though, I feel like out of all the twst guys the one that’s closer to Wallace’s type is Trey. Trey is such a Jimmy it hurts.
Now, Scott… I look at him and my mind is blank, I feel like he would just be freaked out by everything that’s going on, because this whole thing is too harry-pottery and weird; I can’t really imagine him befriending someone or someone being interested enough in him to even hang out… but at the same time, I feel like Scott will end up fighting all the housewardens for whatever reason. He’ll have more luck with some of them (Riddle, Kalim who didn’t even want to fight) than with the others (Vil, for example), but ultimately everyone wouldn’t know why this fight is happening. Ramona certainly doesn’t know – she is too busy hanging out with the first years, asking them questions about this world. A part of me wants to say that someone would get a crush on her, but these boys are too gay for that…
Stephen would find himself in the light music club, being bullied by the club members (mostly Lilia). They tease him, they torture him by not telling if his music sucks or not… Playing with them is unusual, because his own band’s energy is quite different, but it’s fun overall. If only they didn’t bully him like that..!
Kim is at the light music club too, quietly wishing to disappear and not witness this clownery. But unfortunately for her, Kalim would try to talk to her and just wouldn’t shut up. He just feels like since she seems so quiet and upset (angry??), maybe he could cheer her up by talking about the drums and stuff. In general, he only makes it worse, but surprisingly talking to someone so genuinely good-natured would be a refreshing change.
Matthew is a theatre kid, so sticking him to the Pomefiore people sounds fair in theory (and he would’ve definitely have a delightful conversation about music theatre with either/both Rook and Vil), but I feel like Kalim would’ve invited him to hang out… which means that Matthew is Jamil’s problem now. At least Jamil expected him to be a problem, but he was actually much less obnoxious that Jamil expected him to be, so it was a nice “huh” moment.
Lucas… he is such a Savannaclaw bro, and yet for the most part I can picture him surrounded by the first years, especially Epel lol Oh how much Epel would love him. He would really want to learn some skateboard tricks, and Ace and Deuce too… But I don’t think Lucas is really interested in teaching them, he just flexes for the most part lol
Oh, Cater skateboards right?? That’s perfect, considering he would also try to hunt Lucas down to take a picture with him, but probably wouldn’t succeed for some reason: Cater isn’t really lucky. Floyd would also be around (because Azul sent him to stalk big celebrity that arrived at their school for some reason) but wouldn’t get all the hype. He would be very into the whole skateboarding thing though, he’ll absolutely try to steal Lucas’ board to try it himself. Which means they’re going to fight and Epel is going to watch in awe…
Todd and Envy would also be stalked by a) Cater (he really wants his damn picture); b) one of the tweels (it’s Jade this time). Cater wouldn’t succeed again, this poor guy, but Jade is just unnoticeable and quiet enough to hang around creepily and learn some info for Azul. He also would invite them to the lounge at some point.
I feel like the only company in the NRC that wouldn’t drive Envy insane would be Vil or Jamil, so anyone who isn’t completely obnoxious and is bitchy enough to complain about petty stuff with. And since Jamil is a bit more secretive about his pettiness, Vil probably works better. Showbiz sucks, and certain annoying people from their lives also suck, so…
Todd would have an absolute journey. He could start by hanging out with Envy and Vil, but then, despite loving him to death and all, Envy would politely ask Todd to please go hang around somewhere else for like 20 minutes. Maybe it’s because Vil wouldn’t be impressed with the vegan talk at all… if only Vil knew the science.
It’s honestly surprising just how difficult it is to think about what Todd could’ve done: Todd works in mysterious ways. He doesn’t casually flex as much as Lucas, but he still might end up having a fight with someone. And knowing Todd’s luck, he might do it with someone who is also good at teleportation, which means… Todd, please don’t be stupid, don’t fight Malleus—This is such a stupid combo but also?? Would Malleus be amused by this foolish man? He might be.
But then at some point he’ll also end up at Mostro Lounge and see Wallace… and Azul would have to think about whether he wants to kick them out (he would’ve if it was anyone other than Wallace) or offer them a nice private room at his dorm. Maybe Azul should consider this as some new business model? Because with these two it worked surprisingly well lol
(Todd would definitely miss the opportunity to show-off his bass-playing skills :( too bad, I would’ve watch him duel both Lilia and Jade)
Julie would fucking hate NRC but at the same time she would instantly figure out who the most important and influential people are in here. So, she’d skip Heartslabyul (after kind of befriending Cater for mutual beneficial reasons), skip Savanaclaw (they have a prince, but he isn’t motivated enough to be useful), befriend the Octa-trio (yay more gossip and bitchiness!), befriend Kalim and probably annoy Jamil by this ‘cause parties, she would try her best to befriend Vil, skip Ignihyde (great, more nerds and virgins) aaand she would really want to get closer to Malleus but couldn’t, but she would still manage to befriend Lilia somehow. This girls works the hardest.
Roxie has nothing to catch at the NRC but at the same time she hangs out with dumb boys with anger issues all the time so maybe this is actually quite natural to her lol but she would still hate it and complain about this stupid place having no girlies. She’ll definitely kick a lot of ass just out of frustration, but then somehow end up befriending someone very random like Jack for example. I guess she would consider him to be the least annoying, but even then it’s not much of a friendship, they just happened to be at the same place.
Or you know what? Get her to Diasomnia, let train with Sebek and Silver. She would be so annoyed with their dynamic, it would be priceless.
The twins would just go straight to Ignihyde and hang out with Ortho. They would really want to see Idia and discuss robo-mechanics with him, but Idia refuses to go out of his room because just hearing that “there are twins who want to see you” is too terrifying...
And Gideon and Azul are almost the same person, so it they would either join forces (while also planning to backstab each other at some point) or compete with each other openly. The first option works better I think lol And unfortunately, they’ll likely learn a lot from each other.
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Kim/Harry for the ask meme? Sorry if someone already asked
Anon. Anon.
PANDORA'S BOX, ANON.
YOU JUST RIPPED THE FUCKING LID OFF.
So, this might be my OTP, so uhhhhhh this one might be longer than the others (somehow lmfao). God, I have so many, this is gonna be hard to pick. More folks can ask for HCs for these guys. Hell, ask me for HCs about them in different AUs!!! I have HCs for days!!!!
1. Harry is the first person to treat Kim like this.
"Like this." That's a broad statement. It's a broad statement for a reason.
Harry is an all-encompassing experience. He assaults the senses from every conceivable angle. Sight, sound, scent - I imagine you can practically taste his sweat from across a room. A warm blanket. A void that swallows the world. You are either consumed Harry Du Bois, or you aren't. There's no in-between.
So, when Kim is the centre of Harry's attention, it's like nothing he's ever experienced. No one has seen Kim like this. But, at the same time, no one has witnessed the raw core of his being and not understood it in such a visceral, primal way.
It's not "you should take those racist comments as a compliment," it's "what's Seol?" It's not "you're one of the good gay people,'' it's "what's homosexuality?"
All Harry knows is how to pick at scabs, tear at stitches, and pull the lifeblood out of people's veins. It's raw. It hurts.
It's beautiful.
Kim has never been put on a pedestal before. He's always been the second, third, even fourth choice. He copes with people implying (or outright stating) that he doesn't belong because of his race (and certainly his sexuality, although we don't encounter that in game). He's a self proclaimed spoilsport - not who the 57th would really want present for a Cop-Off. He's nothing special in his own eyes. Just getting by.
But Harry... Oh, Harry. He wants every part of Kim the way that no one else has. He wants the things that make him angry. The things that make him sad. He wants the parts that Kim hid long, long ago. He wants what hides under the survival instincts and professionalism. He wants to dance in a church.
And, by god, Kim wants to dance, too.
2. Kim was infatuated first, but Harry was in love first.
I think that Kim got butterflies when Harry called him cool on the balcony, but he wasn't completely caught off balance. It was... nice. It was something fun, but it didn't make him fall hard and fast. Attraction is one thing, but I don't think Kim would have fallen first.
Harry, though... Ten days. I think ten days is all it would take for him. I think he's in love the second he asks Kim to join the 41st, but he doesn't have the words to explain it. He just knows that he doesn't want a life without Kim.
Maybe it's the skills trying to protect him (especially having recently experienced the Final Dream), or maybe they're as lost as he is. They just think he's fucking cool. They know he's important. But this is a new kind of deification. With Dora, it was straight forward.
A beautiful woman gives Harry the time of day. Done. Cross your lungs, get on your knees. Easy as 1, 2, 3.
Kim, though? Oh man. He's cool. He knows shit. He can play pinball (cool) but hates it (even cooler). Did you know that there's a very, very slim chance of Kim actually managing to shoot the body out of the tree? BECAUSE IT HAPPENED IN ONE OF MY PLAYTHROUGHS. It blew my mind, and in that instant I was RIGHT with Harry.
Call me Disco "Would Do Anything For Kim" Brainrot. (I mean, call me Misc or Milo, but you know lol).
Regardless - Harry is in love. He's off his rocker, totally, deeply in love way before the word materializes in his broken brain. And as he grapples with everything, Kim preens under his attention. He thinks it's cute. He thinks it's nice to feel wanted.
Still waters run deep, but he's underestimating the depth of Harry's rapids. Welcome to the undertow, boys.
3. Kim can't pronounce Harrier with his accent.
Look. You can't take this from me. If anyone finds the Derierre Du Bois post, please link it b/c I can't find it right now.
But come on. Come on.
Harrier? In the language that decided pronouncing "H" and "R" are optional? I know that his voice actor can say "Harry" and "Harrier." I simply Do Not Care.
It's AH-ree-AH instead of "Harrier." It's AH-ree instead of "Harry."
THAT is why it's "Detective" or "Officer" most of the time. He's fucking embarrassed, but Harry loves the way Kim says his name.
#harrykim#kimharry#what's the ship name ive seen for them?#sunshine parabellum#i think thats it#Disco Elysium Shipping#Disco Shipping#Misc Ask#Ask Game#DE Hot Take
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📖 Book topic.
Hi,
a few weeks ago i posted that i was finishing “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
I did it.
I finished it -although it was actually about two weeks ago on my night train ride, that i did.
I wanted to take some time to think about what the book means to me and also i was quite busy those past two weeks. Studies, uh.
So, someone wants a review? Here it goes, but just a little disclaimer that it will contain spoilers.
The story is very intriguing from the begging. We are welcome with the mystery of seven marriages of the icon actress Evelyn Hugo, who is being “interviewed” by Monique - our second narrator. They are writing a biography. Evelyn takes us on a journey to her past, telling us in details about her life - how did she became popular and what are the costs of that lifestyle.
Each of the husband has its own section in the book as the story unfolds. It makes the book more structured. Also, above each name of each man there are some adjectives describing them, which i think is a nice insight to the story.
What i also think is quite clever are the unspoken words Evelyn says while retrospecting. I caught pretty early on that Harry Cameron is a gay man. I would love to say that it was actually written all over his face, but- well, i’ve never seen him. She did hint he was part of the queer community, though she never said it - and that’s what gave it away for me. That’s also why i kind of expected the queer motive to pop up some more in the book. I wasn’t surprised when she fell in love with Celia or when she found out she was bisexual.
I think those are extremely important parts of the book. Because it shaped her, and we get to know where it came from. Also because at the beginning of the book there is a question stated: “Who was the love of Evelyn Hugo? Which husband did she loved the most? Who was the one for her?” She gladly tells us that the love of her life was no man - it was her wife. This shows us a common misconception about public figures. We might think we know them but we don’t. Every celebrity out there has their own private life we know nothing about. What’s in the paper and on all the photos is a daydream, a fairytale told to sell. It’s all just for the right publicity. She tells us exactly that we might think we know, but we don’t.
I think it’s also very interesting how she talks about her marriages and divorces. I remember that one quote she said while she was taking with Monique. It says:
“Heartbreak is loss, divorce is a piece of paper.”
I think it’s beautiful in its honesty. I loved to see her different takes on marriage and divorce. It made me reflect on my own life, where my parents are, as of exactly today, finally divorced. It made me see the fallout of love in a different perspective. The divorce is essentially a heartbreak. So simple yet it took me a lot of time contemplating to finally feel the weight of those words. It was heartbreaking on its own.
Thinking about it especially in my 20s is a weird sensation. The questions flooding: How to prevent heartbreak from happening? Can we even prevent it? How can we choose our marriages wisely enough so there is less risk of it?
Let’s take an example in Monique. A young journalist, on the verge of divorce. She has so many questions about it, so many thoughts. Talking with Evelyn eventually gives her the courage and awareness to make the right step and divorce her husband. They did not fit. It felt like a failure. But she was still young. She just had to see it. She also had to find herself, as we get to know at the end of the book, it was not an accident for the two of them to meet.
Lets finish this long “review” which is really just what i think about the book tbh.
In summary: i like it. I like how many motives it has, how it makes you rethink how you view the world just a little bit. How it comes to your mind at a random moment, pops a scene in your head then fades away slowly, but just enough, so the thought of it could linger in your mind. And i think what i love about it, but haven’t mentioned it, is how it really shows us a female character and her life. Essentially a woman, but with world expectations around her. How she was twisting and turning to survive, but found her way into this world. She made a mark, created something that will outlive her, and she lived a life, showed in this book.
If you read all the way here,
thank you,
and have a beautiful day <33
-K
#study blog#university#student#student life#wrocław#journal#journaling#books & libraries#books and reading#booklr#book review#books#book quotes#bookblr#the seven husbands of evelyn hugo#taylor jenkins reid#evelyn hugo#marriage#divorce#cat#cats#queer#queer books#female#female characters#woman#mature woman#public exposure#celebrities#public figure
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Random Byler Ficlet Because I Said So--
(shout out to @moonlightmarvey for encouraging/telling me to post this!! 💙💛)
Okay– fuck JK R*wling as we know (I don't think she came up with this scene but still fuck her) – but I was thinking about this scene from the HP films where Harry gets Hermione to dance with him and its this moment where they get to essentially forget about all the chaos and the negativity and dance for a bit…and I was thinking about a similar situation with byler–
Like okay, imagine, they’re both in Mike’s room. And Mike can tell that there’s something off with Will. He can tell he isn’t okay. That he’s in his own head. That he is putting up walls. That he isn’t telling Mike everything anymore. And it’s killing Mike because nothing he’s done so far has helped Will feel better. And maybe this time, Will lashes out a bit. Not because he’s mad at Mike, but more because he’s tense (which is totally understandable to Mike considering Will’s childhood tormentor turned out to be a slimy monster dude who wanted to take over the world). And Mike can’t take seeing Will this agitated and tired and…scared.
He can’t take seeing Will hurt.
So, he stands up and walks towards his cassette box and starts rummaging around. Will only looks at him for a second before looking back down at his lap – probably deep in thought again. Mike thinks about how he’s been doing that more recently. He continues to scan all his tapes until– AHA! His eyes finally land on it. He quickly pops the tape from its case before slotting it into his stereo and clicking play. And the room is suddenly filled with the Crash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The tape’s old…and originally recorded off of the stereo (as a gift from Will because he wanted Mike to hear his favourite song), so it’s a lot of static and is…partially incoherent. But who cares? Mike is working with what he has and he’ll do what he can to get Will to smile right now. Only, Will doesn’t seem to even notice the song playing - let alone what song Mike was play. Which– fine no problem. Mike is gonna get Will’s attention one way or another.
So he does the most stupidest idea he can think of and just starts to dance towards Will, pulling his And he sees Will like trying to hold himself back from enjoying it or like- he’s too in his head to notice the music so Mike starts dancing towards him and grabs his arm, pulling him up. Will looks at Mike confused with a face that just read what are you doing? And Mike just smiles at him – just trust me. So Will decides to play along.
And it starts with these big dance moves. Mike is pulling Will around or twirling himself before twirling Will. But then they start to dance closer – and even though it quite literally doesn’t match the rhythm of the song – they begin to sway a bit (sort of like a slow dance). And there’s that moment. Y’know – that shift. Where it changes ‘oh we’re having fun and laughing’ because then they catch each others eye. And suddenly, they’re so aware of how close they are. Or how theirs legs are almost entangled together. How easily their noses could bump one another. How warm their hands feel intertwined - they fucking fact their hands are literally intertwined.
And they just stare at each other, holding their breathes. Suddenly, it feels like one of them begins to lean, although they don’t know who it was for sure. The gap between them begins to close. And-- the tape cuts.
The song ended.
And they were no longer in that place.
Instead, you have a flustered Will, pulling away as he tries to convince himself not to have hope – ‘he was just being nice. He’s just being a good friend.’ And then, there was Mike. Who just stood there – red in the face, experiencing his most intense gay panic yet as he realises two things a- I almost kissed Will and b- holy fuck. I want to kiss Will.
#and so begins mikes quests to be smooches by will 😌#im not suupppeer happy with the writing#its meh---#but OH WELL IM THROWING IT INTO THE UNIVERSE#byler#byler ficlet#byler fanfic#mike wheeler#will byers#enjoy–
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Understandable
If you believe everything you hear, which Harry didn’t, on principle, Draco Malfoy moved out of the city to live in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Also, if you’d have it, he was now gay (!), dyed his hair pink (!!), made a habit of wearing ridiculously tiny crop-tops (!!!) and picked up sculpting as a hobby.
Utterly ridiculous, of course—it was painting, not sculpting. And you couldn’t really call it a hobby. It was what he did for the better part of every day, in the back shed on Harry’s grounds. Harry said he could do it in the main house, hell, in their bedroom, it wouldn’t bother him at all, in fact it would probably be—but Draco smiled and shook his head. Needed his space, he said. And Harry, who couldn’t always understand him, couldn’t even most of the time, got this.
So Draco painted in the back shed, the smallest of the three. He would come back in the afternoons splattered with paint, in his hair (not bright pink but more Morganite, pale and just as shiny), on his face, on the visible slice of his abdomen. Harry would laugh as he tried to lick it off him (“Potter!”), as he resolved to just licking any part of him he could (“Potter—“), as he pinned him at the kitchen door to kiss him properly, everywhere, everywhere. And Draco would laugh too, would say things like, “you’re impossible”, or “honestly, one would think”, or “P-Potter, fuck, oh, fuck".
They would have a brief lunch, soup and a toast, drink their bucketworth of sweet tea. Some days Draco would come back with Harry to help, or they’d go for a walk around the farm, or down by the stream. It was nice in October, fresh cold air, crisp like the leaves they joyfully jumped on, beautiful like the trees. Forever changing colours—Draco would bring his camera, pause every once in a while to stare at something only he could see. Harry didn’t always understand him, but he got this. Wanting to freeze time, to have this one, perfect moment ingrained forever. When Draco would came back with a hungry look in his eyes, with cold, searching fingers, Harry felt the same way.
If you believed the rumours, Harry Potter was in a committed relationship. He lived in a three-house village in the highlands (!), raised Thestrals for a living (!!), photographed in the nude to raise money for charity (!!!), and spoke Parsletongue in bed. Ridiculous, of course—it only happened once, and by accident. Although Draco didn’t really mind. Harry didn’t always understand him, but he thought he might get that: there was some magic, something brutal and free about it, about letting go. Harry’s been practicing. It was going rather well, if he said so himself.
Rumour had it he was doing all right. But you’re wiser than believing everything you hear, I should hope. He was absolutely, entirely, tremendously, happy.
(Day 22 of @flufftober! Find all previous ficlets here, or on AO3)
#flufftober2022#harry potter#drarry fic#500 words#prompt: “Have you heard?”#fluff#soft#RockingRobin'sflufftober#rockingrobin69
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Follow-up with writer Vanessa Grigoriadis who investigated Meghan Markle and her family in 2018 and published: Meghan Markle’s Family Breakdown: The Untold Story
It's 2023 and Vanessa is revisiting those twenty (20) conversations she had with individuals and groups from Meghan's past. Although she could not have predicted the current events, she says that she knew "this is going to go someplace real strange.” Vanessa believes the 5 (five) Friends People Magazine Article was a public rebuttal to her Vanity Fair Article. "Meghan obviously authorized her friends to speak on her behalf."
Criticism for her Article: Several media outlets refused to print Vanessa's story, but she said "you just wait and see." Vanessa knew that Meghan Markle was a "grasping, striving woman" who had connected herself to a group of people in Toronto who had everything but (still) wanted everything.
There was no outpouring of vitriol from the media towards Meghan Markle, but there was a genuine curiosity. The media was curious about her as an unknown actress involved with Soho House and an actress who might eventually become Harry's wife. She should have been content that people liked her but it wasn't enough. Her singular vision is to be "sainted." She wants the world to see her as an "oprah."
What we now know about her: She has a strange relationship to objective reality. She has a warped reality and she marshals evidence underneath it to support (lies) a thesis that may not be the case. She very much thinks that everyone is too dumb to figure out what she's doing. She tells a lie, then uses image management "PR crisis calm" in an attempt to dupe the public.
From the Suits Cast: MM did not relate well with them. "She's just not somebody you can be friends with...she'll be very nice but you never actually get to know this person. You can't touch her. Someone you can hike with but you can’t get through her glass wall. A large number of people on the set did not jive with MM."
From an anonymous writer (my guess is the CUT) who spent a full day interviewing Meghan Markle in California: MM is a person who does not know how to relate to human beings. She’s not on the level. She is not real.
The Wedding and Family Drama: She could have just invited her own family to be wedding guests but instead she chose to create her own CAST to show that she had people there for her. MM didn’t invite her family bc she couldn’t control what might come out of their mouths. If only she had invited both parents to the UK to meet the royals while she was dating Harry. Unfortunately, a female journalist moved to Mexico and intentionally befriended Thomas Markle. She took advantage of him.
Meghan wanted the world to see her as an "independent woman" but that was not true. There is something a little off with the entire family. Her family is a typical Hollywood weirdo family. She had an imperfect childhood where her dad did what he could but he had to work, and a mom who was chill but not around. Her parents were actually content with their "class," but MM was the strident one. From a young age, her ambition was to be in a higher class.
Middle class but Meghan grew up wanting to be in a different class. (like Jussie Smollett)You wish people could see but there is more evidence against what you think you see
Like Smollett---who was looking to be a national symbol. Moral authority True victims just want justice Jussie wanted to be a martyrThe poster boy for activism, hero for gay people, hero for black people---jussie smollett
Meghan and Harry pretend to hate the press but they are hypocrites who desire to promote their warped vision of reality free from criticism. She sends Harry to the EVIL media to push their victimhood by repeatedly mentioning Diana to make them “untouchable and unmentionable.” All their manipulation is justified because they are the victims fighting the monster. An imaginary monster for MM but in Harry’s mind it is real. It is clearly a lie for MM because she did everything possible to get attention from the press including drinks with Piers Morgan. She was desperate for the press to be interested in her.
The Future: She's playing at membership in the circle of the rich and famous (oprah, bezos) for whom reality doesn't matter and no one would ever say anything negative towards you. Her entire life is a scene where no one is telling you the truth.
Justine Harman (a magazine editor) met Meghan at a women's magazine meet and greet (for b level actresses). During their chat, Justine mentioned to Meghan that she was planning her wedding and Meghan offered to address the wedding invitations. The next time she saw Meghan the first thing she asked was "why didn't you call me to do the calligraphy for your wedding?"
She is a love bomber and likes to give extravagant gifts, but unlike Kim Kardashian, no one would refer to Meghan Markle as an authentic, kind person. Meghan is lovely to meet in-person but she's not authentic. She's extremely canny. "In her heart of hearts, does she know exactly what she’s doing?" She is robotic and does a lot of pop psychology. On a podcast people want to hear from a human being and not an android. She sounds like a robot. There is a gratitude gene missing from her.
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Meghan Markle’s Family Breakdown: The Untold Story | Vanity Fair
NO ROSE WITHOUT A THORN-Inside the Markle Family Breakdown
Meghan Markle, a.k.a. the Duchess of Sussex, has become the darling of the British press and a royal Cinderella story. But her American family presents a more complicated story. Vanessa Grigoriadis digs deep to uncover the untold truths that turned one of the year’s biggest stories into a fractured, Kardashianified royal fairy tale.
BY VANESSA GRIGORIADIS DECEMBER 19, 2018
Meghan Markle will never, in all likelihood, be Queen. But among the many benefits of marrying Prince Harry and becoming Duchess of Sussex is that she and Harry will have their own domain, a special relationship with the 53 Commonwealth countries, in many of which Meghan’s mixed-race American background will be an asset. On her intricately planned 16-day tour of a few of these formerly colonized territories in the South Pacific, her first trip as an H.R.H., she ruled with her characteristic, almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity, exhibiting the type of spontaneous human interaction with which the royals have long struggled. In Sydney, she fell to her knees to greet a wheelchair-bound 98-year-old war widow, and in New Zealand, she directed underlings to distribute petits fours to a passel of children in a town square. In Dubbo, New South Wales, she labored over a baked banana bread, then presented it to a family of fifth-generation farmers. “She said if you go to someone’s house, you always bring something, so she did,” said the farmer’s daughter, overwhelmed by the honor of eating princess bread. “She said she was worried about the bananas, that she’d put too many bananas in it,” except “the Duke said there’s never too many bananas.”
But when Meghan arrived at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, this perfection was pierced. She was on hand to deliver a speech about the importance of funding girls’ education, her clavicle swathed in a ceremonial necklace resembling a dozen calves’ feet sprouting orange and pink peonies, and she proceeded with humanizing detail and flawless diction: “As a university graduate, I know the personal feeling of pride and excitement that comes with attending university,” she explained, her raven tresses gently pulled back from her face. “It was through scholarships, financial-aid programs, and work-study where my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition that I was able to attend university,” she continued. “And, without question, it was worth every effort.”
Within a day, a dissenting voice piped up from a world away, part of what has become Meghan’s own personal chorus: her American family. Her half-sister, Samantha Markle, a 53-year-old blonde with M.S. who is confined to a wheelchair, began tapping out tweets, soon to be converted into headlines. Insisting “Dad paid for her college education,” Samantha added, “I love my sister but this is ridiculous.” She also called Meghan “delusionally absurd.”
And this week, the most important voice in the chorus, Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, went on Piers Morgan’s British morning TV show to complain about his daughter’s “ghosting” of him, and to ask the queen herself to intervene in the family squabble.
Even if she’s not the monarchy’s most important princess—this honor goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton, one day to be queen consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in her way as Princess Di. She is the only female self-made millionaire in the royal family, her fortune coming from her work on Suits and on film; one of the oldest pregnant royals in a century (she’s 37); and the first bi-racial person in a family of people who used to powder their faces to make themselves whiter. As a royal, she’s not allowed to make political statements, but she’s an acknowledged feminist who advocates for gay rights, and for her first charitable endeavor, she collaborated with the mostly Muslim survivors of the Grenfell fire.
This soon-to-be mom to the first (known) bi-racial baby in the history of the monarchy represents the new and modern, all that America has given and will, if our politicians let us, continue to give to the world. She’s like the one percent Gal Gadot. Even her gaffes are merely evidence that she’s shaking up the royal family, which is dedicated to conservatism and self-perpetuation. When she refuses to wear nude-colored stockings to official events, as royals tend to, and goes bare-legged in the summer humidity, we cheer. When she closes her own car door, instead of waiting for a valet, it’s fraught with down-to-earth, woman-of-the-people symbolism. Her public performance has been near-flawless. She came from nowhere, and re-invented the way the British royal family could behave.
But of course Meghan didn’t come from nowhere, exactly. She came from the American hinterland, from an aspirational, peripatetic, and, yes, dysfunctional family, with whom she shares many traits, even if she sometimes seems to want to deny them. Where the British have generations of Plantagenets and Tudors, Americans have Jay Gatsby, a man who loved clothes as much as any princess (“I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before”) and a past he liked to keep hidden. Meghan isn’t Gatsby, exactly—she hasn’t expunged her background. But there’s something of Fitzgerald’s antihero in Meghan’s preternatural American re-invention. She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are touchstones), people who believe that the future doesn’t at all have to be governed by the past. According to a Hollywood source, when her star was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed as a “Sayonara Zara” party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her closet to her guests.
The blowup between Meghan and some of her biological family has been a rare fiasco for the Duchess, aided and abetted by elements that include the British tabloids’ dexterity at fomenting race- and class-based discord, the royal family’s usual resistance to change, and the unbridled loopiness and more than occasional meanness of some Markles (her half-sister has called Meghan “the Duchess of Nonsense”). It has also pointed up an essential difference between our two countries: Brits often can’t escape their families, or even their class, whereas our myth is based on striking out on one’s own.
Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary, emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her tumultuous background. The story of her biological family is a sprawling American epic, both up-by-the-bootstraps and shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves, generations’ worth of new beginnings, of which Meghan’s is the most spectacular. There are appearances by slaves and slave owners, cross-country journeys in pursuit of the American Dream, and the eventual attainment of a middle-class Angeleno life that played out for most of her family like a stoner shaggy-dog tale.
Royal historians have dug deeply through the ancestry of Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, as with anyone newly incorporated into royal lineage, and located her first known ancestor: a slave born in 1830 in Jonesboro, Georgia, the setting for Gone with the Wind, named Richard Ragland (the surname most likely came from the man who enslaved him). A generation later, during Reconstruction, many Raglands lit out for Southern California; in the 1950s, Doria’s parents moved from Ohio to Los Angeles, too. Her father ran an antique store, ‘Twas New.
Doria, gentle and loving, met Meghan’s father, Tom, in L.A., though he had been raised on the East Coast. He was the youngest of three sons in a creative family in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania. One of his older brothers joined the air force and became an international diplomat. The other is the bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America, which is a church that I, as a practicing member of the Eastern Orthodox religion, was surprised never to have heard of before. At one point the church had a few hundred parishioners, though the Association of Religion Data Archives’ listing for the number of today’s flock is blank.
Tom, taciturn but lighthearted, enjoyed making practical jokes and putting on plays. After high school, he moved to the Poconos to work in theater, then to Chicago, eventually becoming a lighting designer. He married for the first time at 19, having two kids—Samantha and her brother, Thomas junior—before divorcing in the early 1970s and setting out for the West Coast, sans famille, to try his luck in Hollywood’s big leagues. When he met Doria, he was working as the lighting director of ABC’s long-running daytime soap General Hospital, on which nurses and doctors have lusty affairs while also performing heroic heart transplants. Doria, 12 years his junior, was a trainee makeup artist for the soap. The groovy couple was married at Sunset Boulevard’s Self-Realization Fellowship, shrine of the Hindu guru Yogananda, located down the street from the compound of the Church of Scientology.
Doria and Tom moved in together a couple of years before Meghan was born, along with Samantha and Thomas junior, who had relocated to L.A. after living with their mom. The teenage siblings were unruly. Samantha was auditioning for film and TV parts, or working the Lancôme counter at the Beverly Center and as an extra on A Different World, Lisa Bonet’s spin-off of The Cosby Show. According to a biography by Andrew Morton, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, Thomas junior spent time smoking weed with his friends at the family home in Woodland Hills, a burb in the Valley. Ragland, who eventually opened a small boutique selling sundresses in a Topanga mall, wasn’t averse to joints, either, according to Samantha. They were a family of the type of low-level creatives who abound in Hollywood, enjoying an offbeat life in the sunshine. When Meghan would pitch a tantrum in her high chair, scattering peas on the floor, her dad would encourage her and even get in on the action himself, throwing more peas. Once, when Thomas junior and his friends were smoking weed in the living room while she cried in her room, Tom senior left to tend to her, then reappeared with a full diaper. He pulled out a spoon and began eating the contents, later revealing that he’d filled the diaper with chocolate pudding.
The startling and sensational descended in Meghan’s life with some regularity, though even as a little girl she was centered and ambitious. Tom and Doria divorced when Meghan was two. (Samantha and Thomas junior were on their way out of the house.) Meghan lived with one parent, then the other, until her adolescence, when she lived with Tom full-time. In what must have been a dissonant experience for Meghan, after her day at an all-girls Catholic school, he would pick her up and bring her along to work with him on the set of Married . . . with Children. Meghan loved girlie things, and had well-honed methods of dealing with the chaos and uncertainty of her dysfunctional family. She kept her closet neat, and even as an adolescent stored her Betsey Johnson shoes in their original boxes, wrapped in tissue paper, until she was ready to wear them next. “I remember busying myself and being the president of every club,” she has said of her schooling. “Not because I actually wanted to, but because I didn’t want to eat alone at lunchtime. This overachiever mask I wore was really just the way I battled feeling displaced.”
It was far from a perfect childhood, but magic always hovered nearby. In Los Angeles, the American Dream isn’t only made by grit, but rather by moments of luck. If there is an altar to which Hollywood bows, it’s the one of serendipity. And in 1990, Tom, who already made a TV salary, reportedly bought a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck not dissimilar to the one required to transform a California girl into a British princess. Meghan attended private school and Northwestern, majoring in international affairs and theater. She was the first person in her family to go to college.
It’s certainly a partial explanation for the current conflict that, while Meghan’s good fortunes only multiplied from her father’s doting, poor investments and family feuds led to a diminishment of Tom’s bank accounts. Samantha maintains that Tom paid Meghan’s tab when she enrolled at Northwestern and that if Meghan worked at all, as Samantha has tweeted, “it was only for extra shoe money and party money.” In 2016, Tom filed for bankruptcy. And Meghan did omit mention in Fiji of Tom’s contribution to her college education—she attended college supported by her parents and also financial aid. Though hardly “delusionally absurd” not to mention them in her Fiji speech, she could have made the choice to include them.
Meghan followed her father back to Hollywood after a short stint working at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires (her diplomat uncle has claimed he set her up), making her way from roles as suitcase girl on Deal or No Deal to guest spots on CSI to a female lead in Suits. Her starter marriage to a fast-talking movie producer broke up soon after it began, partially because the two had to spend months apart when Suits began filming in Toronto. Meghan dated a popular Canadian chef and started the Tig, her lifestyle blog; it was one part Goop and another Martha Stewart, with a consistently eloquent tone and a dollop of social justice before the topic became trendy. The image Meghan created for herself was free-spirited and earthy—but not entirely consistent with who she really was, according to those who know her. “Meghan’s goal was always becoming a household name,” says an acquaintance in the television world. “She’s insanely smart and poised, but very, very guarded. She’s not a person you can actually be friends with. She’s the type of person who is best friends with her stylist.”
In Toronto, Meghan became a regular at Soho House, an exclusive club drawing the city’s film, social, and banking set. She began hanging out with an international crowd, including a power stylist—Jessica Mulroney, best known for styling Justin Trudeau’s fabulous wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau—and Bahrain-born Misha Nonoo, at that time married to Alexander Gilkes, the British founder of online auction house Paddle8 and a close friend of Harry’s. “Meghan was socializing with foreign heiresses—upper-crust, smart, ambitious,” says a friend of Nonoo’s. “They have everything and they want everything.” Meghan also alighted on her fairy godmother: Violet von Westenholz, a British Ralph Lauren public-relations director whose father, an Olympic skier, is besties with Prince Charles. Von Westenholz knew Harry was looking to become serious with the right woman, and passed him Meghan’s contact information.
The trajectory of her family was moving in other directions. They stopped having holidays together and some eventually stopped speaking to each other. Money problems were a near-constant. Samantha filed for bankruptcy in 2003, joined by Thomas junior in 2012. He claimed at the time that he had $10 in cash and $88,000 in debts. After running into problems with a boutique she’d opened in Los Angeles, Doria also filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the royal family’s personal wealth, which encompasses castles and endless swaths of British countryside and crown jewels, including a 530-carat cut diamond, the world’s largest, to squabble over, has been estimated at $85 billion. So it’s no surprise that, to some of her family, Meghan’s ascension was viewed as an opportunity to play the Kardashian game while acquiring their own measure of royal wealth and fame.
“The Kardashians and Anthony Robbins do this sort of thing—why can’t my dad?” says Samantha.
This fall, I sent Samantha a number of messages on Facebook, but she was slow to respond. Reading the tabloids, I realized that she was in Britain doling out interviews to TV talk shows. Her boyfriend—they live together in Bellevue, Florida—also accompanied her to Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where she delivered a handwritten letter for her sister to a bobby in his flat cap. The guard did not open the palace gates. The next set of paparazzi photos depicted Samantha proceeding in her motorized wheelchair to a nearby store, where she checked out a life-size paper mask of Harry’s face with the eyes cut out, stocked as a souvenir. Samantha put the mask to her face and smiled for the camera.
Royalty, to Samantha, may merely be another type of lottery—a hereditary one. It doesn’t seem that she thinks royalty is worthy of a great deal of respect, and certainly doesn’t receive its right to rule from God. Most Brits don’t believe in divine right anymore, either, but many agree that the royals provide a useful societal function. One I spoke with discussed the royals’ dependability in attracting tourists, and quoted the great 19th-century British political writer Walter Bagehot, who defended the monarchy on non-religious grounds. “A royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events,” he explained. “It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government, but they are facts which speak to ‘men’s bosoms’ and employ their thoughts.” Bagehot further believed that to cement the success of the nation the royals had to remain high status. “Our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it,” he wrote. “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
It’s part of Meghan’s patent gift for her current role that she appears to let in daylight—hugging babies and grannies, baking a banana bread for a family of farmers—making it part of her magic, while maintaining her royal reserve. But her family, not so respectfully, calls bullshit.
If the royal family is merely a group of well-dressed celebrities, then Samantha not only doesn’t need to take them seriously, but she has as much right to be a celebrity as they do. Perhaps this point of view, combined with the fact that Samantha’s daughter has claimed Meghan put Samantha in paroxysms of jealousy for many years prior to her engagement to Harry, meant that she didn’t shy away from tabloids’ phone calls when they began to poke around Meghan’s family history. Talking to the British tabloid The Sun, she cast Meghan as a social climber: she said Meghan was shallow and superficial, had always wanted to become a princess, and had “a soft spot for gingers.”
When I got in touch with her, Samantha insisted that she was misquoted, and that the first comment she made about her sister was, “She’s got the eloquence of Condoleezza Rice and the grace of Princess Diana,” but this time line does not hold up. Samantha has also announced that she is writing a book entitled The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister, a strange choice of nomenclature given that “Princess Pushy” is the nickname for Princess Michael of Kent, who, at the luncheon at which Meghan was formally introduced to the royal family, appeared wearing a blackamoor brooch (a type of 17th- and 18th-century jewelry depicting black people wearing turbans or in subservient poses). Samantha later said she was misquoted on her title, and in any case the book’s real title was the still somewhat inappropriate In the Shadows of the Duchess.
Samantha struck me as less a wicked stepsister than a special kind of trickster, a proficient storyteller with deep emotional intelligence who was adept at reading my cues. “This story is about a very normal family thrust into the spotlight,” she said to me a couple of times, seeking to portray herself as a misunderstood mom of three who was provoked by her sister. She spoke delightfully about the moment Meg was born: “She was beautiful and pink, with little teeny fingers that would wrap around my finger,” she said. “For us, it was very humbling because we were teenagers freaking out learning how to be young adults in the world, and adults were doing their career thing outward, but when a baby comes, there’s an inward focus and fascination. I think it really did pull us all together.”
If the sisters lost touch down the line, couldn’t that happen in any family? Samantha says that she planned to support Meghan (“Is London wheelchair friendly? excited!” she tweeted before the wedding), but became angry not only when Meghan didn’t invite her to the wedding, but also because Prince Harry commented to the press that Meghan was enjoying spending time with the royal family because the royal family was “the family she never had.” Says Samantha, “Consistently, my family was being isolated and ignored, like we’re nonexistent.” She adds, “Like the uncle who got her the internship in Buenos Aires. He’s not trailer trash. It got back to me that Meg had said about her uncle, ‘I don’t know him,’ and I’m like, ‘What is this, Joan Crawford speaking?’ ”
The more Samantha talked, the louder the cheering from tabloid reporters on both sides of the pond. The British reporters were excited for Samantha to play the role of the uncivilized, low-class American who was not at all P.L.U., people like us; the American reporters knew their readership would appreciate her most if she was simply wackadoodle, another outrageous semi-celebrity for our outraged era. Samantha learned that a story could be worth $1,500, perhaps $3,000, or even more. Reporters began lobbing devilish questions her way, such as “Do you feel your sister is a humanitarian?” and “How does Meghan compare to Diana?” Invoking the name that Harry and the royals least wanted to come out of her mouth, Samantha answered, “Diana would not isolate family.”
Though Samantha and Tom have what one member of their family calls an enabling and dysfunctional relationship, Tom and Thomas junior, a choleric professional glazer, were estranged. But now Thomas junior wanted in on the celebrity action. Arrested in 2017 for allegedly holding a gun to his fiancée’s head before being released without charge, he began telling increasingly bizarre stories to the tabloids and even agreed to submit to a lie-detector test to prove the truth of a story he told about Tom using the services of a prostitute when Thomas was young. (Tom strongly denied these claims.) He also reportedly gave the paparazzi Tom’s address in Rosarito Beach, a tourist town 15 miles from Tijuana where Tom had retired a few years past. A handful of British paps descended on Tom’s neighborhood, taking up residence in Airbnbs along the road to his modest home and capturing him as he visited a convenience store for cigarettes and a four-pack of Heineken.
Thomas junior’s estranged son also began speaking out, seeming like the rational one in the bunch. Tyler Dooley, a strapping 26-year-old who lives in Grants Pass, Oregon, said that he doesn’t even go by the name “Markle” anymore “for obvious reasons.” His childhood in Los Angeles “wasn’t a fantasy or fairy tale by any means,” he tells me. “Drinking has led to so many problems in my family members’ lives.” He talks about leaving home as a teenager, being broke, not having any water or power in his house, and making his own way in the world. One day in the mid-2000s, he saw a friend of his with a sports car and asked how he got it. “Servicing federal debt” was the answer, and Tyler did that for a couple of years, studying the teachings of Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy to learn how to target customers’ hot points. Having a duchess in the family had commercial virtue, and Tyler never thought that becoming famous himself and hurting Meghan were the same thing: he hasn’t spoken poorly about her in the media, and tells me that the truth is he has few anecdotes to tell about her—he doesn’t remember their relationship much, except she was very nice to him when he was younger, lost, and ready to join the army.
In the past few years, Dooley had a marijuana business in Oregon with his mother, Tracy. He named it Royally Grown and marketed a strain of weed named Markle Sparkle (“sweet, silky, with a hint of blueberry”). Tracy once told a newspaper, “We plan to build a global empire like the Kardashians.” Today, Tyler tells me it’s important to note that he’s moving on to CBD. The weed market is flooded, and it’s no longer a growth crop.
Things didn’t exactly go well for the last American duchess. Wallis Simpson, whose husband, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne when the family shunned her, once said of her royal in-laws, “You are either with them or dead.”
Meghan is adept at walking fine lines, but handling her biological family and her new one—the royals—was an extraordinary balancing job. She considered Samantha and Thomas junior part of her ancient past—she claimed to have seen neither in years, and thought of herself in some ways as an only child—but she does not seem to have wanted to dis her father, whom she wrote about in loving terms on the Tig in 2014. In a post for Father’s Day, she wrote about “our club sandwich and fruit smoothie tradition post my tap & ballet class—classes, which by the way, he religiously took me to on Saturday mornings after working 75+ hours a week as a lighting director.” He put “gas in my car when I went from audition to audition trying to make it as an actress,” she wrote, and “believed in this grand dream of mine well before I could even see it as a possibility.” She lauded “the blood, sweat and tears this man (who came from so little in a small town in Pennsylvania, where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges, and dinners were potatoes and Spam) invested in my future so that I could grow up and have so much.” Tom would later describe her in similarly admiring terms, saying “my daughter has been a princess since the day she was born.”
In the run-up to May’s big royal wedding, though, the relationship hit a major snag. Knowing that a story about vulgar Americans sells papers, the British tabloids built a case by capturing Tom’s quotidian American-retiree life in Rosarito Beach. One day, they photographed him buying a toilet, potatoes, and paper plates at Home Depot and Walmart. Though Tom had been silent on the topic of his daughter for months, Samantha, perhaps feeling her oats as a media mastermind, thought she could change her father’s profile. Working with a paparazzo, Samantha crafted a plan for a pap to capture Tom visiting a tailor to be fitted for a suit, and then casually relaxing reading a book about British landmarks. “The Kardashians and Anthony Robbins do this sort of thing—why can’t my dad?” is the way she sums up her thinking to me. Needless to say, this harebrained scheme backfired when the pictures appeared in The Sun and a pap working for the Daily Mail—who was also following Tom—realized that the outings were a setup.
Tom reportedly received a call from Meghan and Harry explaining that they were confused as to why he had taken such bizarre action, and asking him please not to speak to reporters or participate in any more photographs. Of all the royals, Harry is known to absolutely revile the press for both its role in his mother’s death and the continuing breaches of his privacy when he traipsed the globe in his 20s drinking much too heavily, in part to deal with his unresolved trauma. Tom claims he offered to make an apology, but the couple said an apology would only fuel the story, which was running on a 24/7 loop on British TV. (Sources have raised questions about this account.) Instead, the couple, concerned for Tom’s welfare, directed a press regulator to issue a privacy warning to the papers to back off. Embarrassed, Tom stayed in Mexico and pondered his mistake. Then, four days later, the international news began broadcasting headlines that he’d had a heart attack.
“Throughout the heart attack, I feel my dad was ignored,” says Samantha. “Meg and Harry should have been on a plane, and been there at the hospital, minimum. They should have taken him back on a plane to Kensington, and had him meet Charles, and included him in the big picture.” But that didn’t happen. “I think they might have believed it was a fake heart attack,” says Samantha.
In England, the 92-year-old Queen, whose primary purpose in life has been promoting the longevity of the monarchy, was watching. She had lived through unpopularity, particularly during the saga of Princess Diana and Charles (loneliness, bulimia, Camillagate, Squidgygate, divorce, death by paparazzi). Much magic was lost. But in recent years, via the classic P.R. maneuver of replacing negative stories with new stories—the romance of William and Kate, plus Pippa’s bottom, the addition of Prince George and two spare heirs, and now Meghan and Harry—people fell in love again. Even in America, where today’s rich are decidedly “out”—they reek too much of MAGA—the royals, who embody a faraway fantasy of being rich, are hugely popular. And these days the royal family allows their every step to be photographed and calculated, like the world’s richest reality-show stars. The episodes run until the end of their lives.
The Queen knew that Harry worshipped Meghan, and also that the House of Windsor didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale. “She was very concerned that it [the Markle situation] was spiraling out of control, which it was,” says one observer. “Buckingham Palace wanted to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under strict instructions to sort it out. But Kensington Palace was not singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could handle it on her own.” Both palaces’ aides whispered and planned, to no avail. “There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was stalemate and, you know, neither could move.”
For years, Meghan has publicly declared that she does not read her press, a usual tactic of Hollywood stars to seem above the messiness of image-making. It’s a contention that sophisticated communications folks find laughable. She may not be a press addict, as Diana was—Diana read every page that mentioned her in the tabloids, and exulted or worried over them—but Meghan herself was handling this fracas, or not handling it. “This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move without her,” explains Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former private secretary and author of The Meghan Factor, a book weighing Meghan’s impact on the monarchy. He pauses, then adds, “In talking about Meghan, I wouldn’t say that her advisers are doing a good job or a bad job. It is one of the perks of royalty never to be held responsible for their actions.” Regardless, the observer says, “Meghan and Harry made efforts to make sure Tom was properly kitted out for the day, so that level of care was there, but it wasn’t enough care. He needed an equerry to go out there and take him back to England, put him in Sandringham or Balmoral in a small cottage where no one knew where he was, and where he would have been very happy. That’s what should have happened.”
Meghan did what she could. By refusing to speak publicly about the fracas, or have someone speak on her behalf, Meghan was trying to maintain her famous elegance; her silence meant she was above the fray, plus she was more than a bit busy planning a wedding to be watched by billions. For Harry, and Meghan, the situation was deeply concerning as a security matter. Harry felt that the paparazzi had placed Thomas under extraordinary pressure—and they could destroy another parental relationship.
But at this point Tom seems to have been hurt and frustrated. His sense of himself as a loving and generous patriarch was unpleasantly rattled. He responded by talking to reporters at TMZ and later granting a nine-hour interview to a British tabloid. He called the royals a “cult,” compared them to Scientologists and the Stepford Wives family, and added, “They’re just like a Monty Python sketch. Say a few critical words about the royal family and they put their fingers in their ears, cover their eyes, and pull the blinds down. They don’t want to know about it.” He was annoyed by the way he’d been treated and said a courtier told him to make an apology. “Suddenly I’m being told that I needed help apologizing, as if there’s a special way to apologize to the royal family,” he explained. “Perhaps you do it with gravy and flowers on the side? I was taken aback to be asked if I needed help apologizing, like I was a child.” He also swung from despair —“If Meghan never speaks to me again,” he said, “I don’t know how I can go on without my heart breaking”—to anger, saying, “I’ve about had it with Meghan and the royal family.” He added, “I feel for Meghan, because she does have a difficult family. But it’s still her family.”
This sad and embarrassing incident culminated in Tom missing his daughter’s wedding, which he watched from an Airbnb in Rosarito Beach to escape the paparazzi staking out his home. In his stead, Prince Charles walked the new princess down the aisle, her silk tulle train (in a powerful symbol, she had the official flowers of the 53 Commonwealth nations embroidered on its edges). Doria, now a social worker, was the only family member in attendance, and Meghan paid deep respect to her African-American roots. Before the ceremony, according to the observer, thinking of her father’s absence, she broke down in tears.
At the end of the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” the original rags-to-royals story, Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters accompany her to her wedding, but in revenge, pigeons peck out their eyes. This is not quite what has happened to Samantha, who talked to me about wanting to use her platform to educate people about M.S., but in the past few months, she has disappeared into a netherworld of Twitter wars. There, she does battle with a clan of pro-Meg forces calling themselves Megulators (Samantha’s supporters call themselves “Megexit”). They resent Meghan on the grounds that she “thinks that now since she has a title and a ring on her finger, she can do whatever she wants,” which is “nothing but an insult to all normal people,” if you can follow the logic. After the Megulators harassed Samantha on Twitter in November, she called the F.B.I. and asked agents to investigate death threats, but to me she plays this off like no big deal. “It’s just a small group of people who just want to rattle the cage,” she declares.
For a while, Tom realized that talking to the press was a losing game, one in which he could possibly lose his daughter forever. For now, the observer says that the two aren’t speaking, but Meghan is interested in a probationary period during which he wouldn’t speak publicly, and then perhaps the two would be able to mend their relationship. The real drama is this: Will Meghan insist that Tom cut ties with one daughter, Samantha—who’s been, by far, the most hostile of the Markles, to clear the way to rebuild the relationship with Meghan? Tom is caught between two daughters.
The papers in London are full of new stories about Meghan, not all of them positive. Some are outlandish: Meghan wanted a certain emerald tiara for her wedding and the Queen made her wear Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau, and Meghan asked for air freshener to be sprayed in St. George’s Chapel before her wedding because she thought it smelled musty. Understanding what’s going on behind castle walls is always a game of reading tea leaves, but the posh Brits I spoke with said they’d heard that some stories were correct: Meghan’s staff is annoyed by her waking up at a Californian five A.M. and texting about various initiatives she wants them to pursue, and Meghan is callous toward staff in general. One thought it was “peculiar” that her mother was the only family member at her wedding; another even said she’d heard Meghan was dubbed “Monster Markle” at Kensington Palace. I can’t vouch for any of that, but when papers began reporting that Kate and Meghan had feuded before the wedding, and then Kensington Palace issued a statement denying a feud, I thought about Tina Brown’s comment in The Diana Chronicles, her outstanding biography of the princess: “The palace only bothers to deny something that’s true.”
Still, in fairy tales, magic always hovers in the distance. Far from being snobbish about Meghan’s family and excoriating Harry about the perils of marrying a commoner, Prince Charles, perhaps the most important arbiter of Meghan’s stature in the royal family, is taking her side in the scandal. Of course, Charles gains a benefit from the new spotlight on a younger generation of royals, or the “Fab Four,” as the British have dubbed Meghan-Harry-William-Kate. Their reflected glory makes Charles seem like a man of substance, a patriarch, which is good, because polls show that only a quarter of Britons want him to succeed the Queen, who, at 92, could expire rather soon. But to the less jaundiced observer, there’s another reason he would back Meghan, and that’s because his own upbringing wasn’t exactly the stuff of Hallmark Cards. When his mother, before she was crowned Queen, returned from her own tour of the Commonwealth—similar in shape to the one taken by Meghan and Harry—cameras captured her solemnly patting three-year-old Charles on the shoulder. He knows from difficult families.
“Let her go conquer the world,” says Meghan’s entrepeneurial nephew, Tyler Dooley, when we talked about his feelings toward her. “There’s big stuff in store. I know she can make the world a better place.” Including for Dooley. Today, in addition to getting into CBD, Dooley has taken a role on MTV’s The Royal World, a new spin on the Real Worldformula: one castle and 10 genuine royals, including a baroness, a count, and a royal Instagram influencer nicknamed Zsa Zsa. To those who might think he’s cashing in on his aunt’s name, he said, he sometimes makes as much in a day as MTV paid him for the whole shebang, plus “everybody in the house I lived in, the whole cast, is there because of a family or a connection of some sort.” He added, “At the end of the day, everyone dies. They might die with their titles, but they don’t even get to keep that. You die with no money, no friends, nothing. People are just people in the end.”
Toward the holidays, the chatter among royal correspondents was about Meghan’s mother, Doria, who might be the first non-royal member of the extended royal family invited to Christmas at Sandringham in the history of the monarchy. “Kate did not go to Sandringham before she married William in 2011, and the Middletons are still not invited,” declares etiquette expert William Hanson. “To have a partner’s mother come is a huge seismic shift.” During Christmas, the royals will play charades, particularly those that involve impersonations of world leaders, but the Queen likes to win, so everyone will need to make sure their impersonations aren’t very good. They may play soccer against their maids and butlers. They will eat dinner in black-tie, and they will not go to bed before the Queen decides to go to bed. They are possibly weighed before and after the meal, a royal tradition that was once meant to demonstrate how well they’d been fed, though Meghan, who is fond of light cooking and organic food and also pregnant, probably would rather she didn’t have to do that. The rest of the Markles won’t be there, which is sort of a shame—and makes perfect sense.
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Ooooo another Harry Potter fan hiiii!!!! I'm sending this on anon cause we're kinda hated saldy... Though you probably know who I am cause I just liked a bunch of your posts ehehe (woof!)
May I ask who your favorite characters are and maybe what your house is? :')/nf
I'm just really exited to have found another Harry Potter fan- It's not like we're rare, but I feel like a bunch of us are afraid to show our passion atm-
Have a nice day aaaa 💖
HIHI XDD dw i love when ppl spam and show love!!
my fave movie char is probs luna lovegood (i havent watched the movies since i was like ten or smthin.. dang i rlly need to rewatch em- but i thought she was cool at the time lolol)
my fave howgarts legacy chars are definitely deek and lodgok-while my fave creatures are the graphorn and thestrals >:D
i think my house is most likely ravenclaw based on my personality n such! although i love the warmness of hufflepuff lolol
i know how you feel about showing your passion, but on an older post of mine i sorta said my share:
"I dont support the trans = bad stuff cuz my gender is a mess rn and like bro lemmie just enjoy my silly lil game- also the community itself is very enjoyable and comforting as ive met plenty of gay ppl in there who just dont care about the transphobia stuff cuz harry potter is what they like. tbh for me its what the community is about not the creator, a very large example is mostly warrior cats, tho prob other communities too"
you shouldnt be scared to show your interests and opinions! yes-jk is a bad person and shouldnt be famous, but she was made famous by the community of potterheads! it practically shaped the world as we know it since the wonderful games and the movies probably wouldnt exist without us! its our passion, our thing that we like and nobody should judge what makes us happy. if they do, theres always that delicious block button lolol
#ty for the ask :DD#most of my love of hp comes from hogwarts legacy lolol#i also have 2 ocs that i adore so much bro#fun fact: i havent actually watched fantastic beasts#idk why lolol the beasts are the thing that are so cool to me#newt is a cute name tho#harry potter#wait#is harrys full name harold#HAROLD POTTER???#AH
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Happy happy birthday to @sweet-s0rr0w!
L and I met when I fell in love with such ridiculously good microfics as the seductive, atmospheric Dangerous, and Westbury, which is still one of the most skillful evocations of place and mood I've ever read. I had to go and chat to her, we discovered how wildly similar we are in terms of the things we love (mostly... except for cheese), and the rest was history.
L has both superb taste and a great eye for detail, so it makes sense that her rec lists, such as the brilliantly comprehensive Drarry Round the World series, or her Romance list, are always chock-full of excellent reads. She's also hugely supportive of other creators, both through her sterling alpha work and tiptop Britpicking, and through her Five Favourite Fics series (which is why I'm making her one of her very own today!) Not to mention the fact that she is also sickeningly skillful with her hands, and creates the most gorgeous papercut art.
But I'm really here to talk about her writing - and it's not just me, read this fabulous rec by @sitp-recs, bask in the magnificence of the ficbinding by @a-gay-old-time, and behold the wonder of this art by @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm, among many other recs. Her fics are superb - sharply written, hugely emotional, with all the joy of the breathtaking rush where you know you're hooked right from the start and there's nothing to do but settle in and let yourself get lost in them. I'm going to share my five favourites here, but special mention to Dreaming Skies (Draco x Ron, 20k) which i'm not reccing because we co-wrote it but which was one of the most fun and special fandom experiences I've ever had.
L, thank you for your friendship, for the late nights and early mornings, for the support and the non-screaming, the fics and the photos, the cheese debates, and everything in between. Tell out my soul, the glories of her words!
Read sweet_s0rr0w's fics here on AO3
✨Thameslink, the 07:29 from Luton - G, 1k, Draco in the Muggle world, commuting hell, the coolest premise ever, vibes on max, heartkick factor off the charts, the perfect microfic
Summary: He gets on at Harpenden, you think, although it might have been earlier.
✨National Trust - T, 1k, delicious established relationship with tender Muggle sightseeing.
Summary: Draco and Harry visit the Manor. Things have changed.
✨When the Party's Over - E, 5k, accidental bond, 5 +1, falling in love, a sex scene that makes me get teary-eyed with the tenderness, yes there is a teddy bear (not in the sex though that might not be quite so tender)
Summary: Parties aren't quite so much fun when you're accidentally bonded to your sworn enemy. At least, that's what Harry thinks at first…
✨The One You Feed - T, 10k, werewolves falling in love, getting together, competent Draco like HELLO
Summary: Draco's been a werewolf for almost twenty years now, and he's an expert in helping new werewolves adapt to the change. He's seen it all before - or so he thinks, until his newest client, a recently turned Harry Potter, arrives on his doorstep.
✨Nor All That Glisters - E, 110k, addiction, hurt/comfort, angst with a happy ending, aka the 110k fic that i simply could not put down and that has one of the best OCs I've ever come across in all my years of reading fic.
Summary: Lonely and frustrated on house arrest, with no prospects for the future, Draco begins brewing Felix Felicis in an attempt to improve his lot. Just in the short term, of course. He isn’t a total idiot.
But before long he finds himself with a thriving business, a nice flat, some actual (albeit irritatingly Gryffindor) friends, and a very satisfying sex life. What’s more, no-one is hexing him in the street. And Harry Potter is single, and gorgeous, and giving Draco decidedly interested looks.
Stop taking the Felix? You must be joking…
#drarry fic rec#drarry rec list#five favourite fics#sweet and indeed sorrow#yes i know thameslink is overground#but it's all about the vibes#much like L's fics ya know
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Queer books, day 11/30
I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about these separately, but here we are. The series is three books (I talked about book 2 already), and this is book one. It's a novella, a short second-chance love story between a rejected Kennedy and his math teacher childhood best friend.
It's set in 1959 in Massachusetts, and Sebastian does some pretty interesting stuff with that setting that I think is worth looking at. Of course, the characters experience what she typifies as "period-typical homophobia," which comes down to Tommy having been kicked out of his family when he came out of the closet and Everett wondering if he'll have to get a different job if his relationship with Tommy becomes common knowledge. Tommy's ex-wife, Patricia, is in a relationship with a person named Harry (short for Harriet, although they're very masc-presenting) and is rather unconcerned about how it's perceived, in part because she's rich. But there's also a moment when Tommy's nephew (Peter; now you see how this hooks into the next one) comes to visit (and come out to his uncle) and mentions his gay friend has said that gay people should stick together. Meaning that this book is trying to depict the beginnings of a queer consciousness that...(gestures broadly) is still ongoing.
That's not to say that historically, 1959 is the first time any of that happened. Remember when I mentioned Lawrence Housman and the Order of Chaeronea (which was founded by George Cecil Ives in 1897; I don't know if I implied that Housman founded it, a mistake on my part if so, he just joined). And there were a few other groups before that. But given that in the next ten years we get the Cooper Do-Nuts Riot in 1959 or 1960, the Compton Cafeteria Riot in 1966 and then Stonewall in 1969, this does feel like a pivotal moment for gay rights. A moment at which things that had been bubbling under the surface finally started coalescing. Much as Tommy Cabot's long-denied sexual identity starts bubbling to the surface after years of repression. SEE WHAT I DID THERE?
Anyway. The book contains this quote, which I keep coming back to:
Nobody had told [Tommy] how much of his late thirties would involve lying on floors and crying.
Tommy and Everett are one of my favorite couples in Sebastian's work, and although we see them again in book 3, we don't ever really get to spend more time with them, which is a pity. So many romance novels are about bright young things, and as a not-bright-young-thing myself, it's nice to see people d'un certain age portrayed.
There's sex in this one, but it's not super graphic. This is very much about love and rediscovery and connection. 10/10, go read it.
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