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johnkatsmc5 · 1 month ago

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Volvox "Volvox " 2014 + " Universo Expandido"2018 + Argentina Heavy Prog,Post Rock,Jazz Rock

full spotify

https://open.spotify.com/album/54itRsZxccPTnu1gMkbRl7

https://open.spotify.com/album/5SILRBf1vDlB6Co5UCReXE

Marcelo PIJACHI pianist and composer founed the band in 2007. He wanted to make instrumental music that combines elements of urban music such as jazz and tango as well as contemporary music and rock. He added guitar player Ricardo ROLANDO, Nikolaus KIRSTEIN, drummer from Berlin, Germany and Pablo JIMINEZ on bass from Buenos Aires. Among the influences, we have ASTOR PIAZZOLLA, ROBERT FRIPP, ALBERTO GINASTERA, FRANK ZAPPA and GISMONTI. In 2008, the band recorded a demo and begins to make live shows. After the departure of some members, Cristian Violante PUCHETA is on guitar and Pablo GIMENEZ on drums. Bio by rdtprog....~

Volvox "Volvox " 2014

With big changes from their debut album, Volvox tries to go a new way making Symphonic Progressive Rock with a Hard tinge. In this work, his music is more melodic, but at the same time more complex and dark in certain passages. Sometimes in the vein of Lachesis, other climactic moments such as Autumn Moonlight and also a classic style such as Danae....~

Credits MARCELO PIJACHI - Teclados CRISTIAN VIOLANTE - Guitarra PABLO PUCHETA - Bater��a ALEJANDRO DERENE - Bajo Tracklist Tiempo de cambios 05:39 Tarantino 05:18 La conquista de lo incierto 02:29 Momentum 08:39 Baby's dreams 05:04 Degeneración en generación - Parte II 05:29 Otro día en el infierno 05:17 Escapen 04:59

Volvox "Universo Expandido"2018

The second studio rehearsal of Volvox, a quartet that comes from the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, is extremely enjoyable, never over the top in all the duration of the album. "Universo Expandido" is a totally instrumental work that ranges from symphonic progressive to hard prog up to fusion. As it happens with all instrumental works, the four components have an excellent technical background that is shown in all nine tracks of this cd. The flashes of liveliness and originality are almost entirely due to the guitar work of Cristian Violante who, without ever exceeding in exaggerated virtuosity, manages through many changes of style to make the sound carpet created by the talented Marcelo Pijachi on keyboards more original and colorful. The fifty minutes of "Universo Expandido" represent the ideal length for an exclusively instrumental work. Neither too short, allowing the group to show all their considerable technical skills, nor too long, risking boring a listener who is not too attentive. We remember among all the tracks "Otro dia en el infierno" where jazzy echoes, at times even Gershwinian, mix with a hard rock base, allowing the bass and drums rhythm section to carve out their own moment of glory. "Degeneración en generación - Part II" is perhaps the most canonically progressive moment of the whole work, beautiful melodic lines and beautiful guitar work. "Tiempo de cambios" is the track that opens the work with a nice energy charge and was chosen by the group to create a video clip that can be found on the most important social networks. For some it could be too "pandering" and constructed but the quality still comes out at a distance. In conclusion, we are faced with a group that knows how to play, which is not always obvious and like all those who know their instruments"; Volvox know how to dose well the very fragile relationship between technique as an end in itself and melodies that can be taken for granted. In the end, a more than decent job.....arlequins....~ Credits Bass – Alejandro Derene Drums – Pablo Pucheta Guitar – Cristian Violante Keyboards – Marcelo Pijachi Recorded By, Mastered By – Jero Olivera Tracklist 1 Tiempo De Cambios 5:39 2 Éxodo Caníbal 6:49 3 Tarantino 5:18 4 La Conquista De Lo Incierto 2:29 5 Momentum 8:39 6 Baby's Dreams 5:04 7 Degeneración En Generación Parte II 5:29 8 Otro Día En El Infierno 5:17 9 Escapen! 5:00

Volvox "Volvox " 2014 + " Universo Expandido"2018 + Argentina Heavy Prog,Post Rock,Jazz Rock

https://johnkatsmc5.blogspot.com/2025/05/volvox-volvox-2014-universo.html?view=magazine

https://johnkatsmc5.tumblr.com/post/784814944716816384/volvox-volvox-2014-universo-expandido2018

#Volvox “Universo Expandido”#argentina post rock #argentina heavy progressive

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the-lunar-library · 3 years ago

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How I Spent Years Figuring Out My Book's Cover

I don't have any experience in advertising, and my digital art skills are limited, and every article on self-publishing urges you not to do your own cover, and probably they are right. But I did my own cover, and I thought I'd share some of the process. The figuring out how it should look part, not the technical part.

For a long time, I just practiced playing around with images. These weren't finished products by any means.

This image from early 2019 was one of my favorites. It's supposed to represent my protagonist Yew, reflecting on her ruined village and, by extension, some of her choices. The set up is straightforward – tragic woman gradating into a creepy graveyard. I felt it looked very similar to other covers I'd seen, which is both a good and a bad thing. A cover should clue you in to the tone and genre, so having set symbols and moods is helpful. On the other hand, you don't want your book to look like a million other people's.

Silent-film-era actress Mary Astor is standing in for Yew. The painting is by Caspar David Friedrich. To the best of my knowledge, both images are in the public domain.

For a while, I played with collages. (Pretty much all the stock photos/art is from Pixabay, which I found to be extremely helpful.) I liked the way these gothic windows formed frames, and I wanted to include both protagonists, Eider and Yew. This never made it fully into a test cover, but I did a few versions of this image, both with just photos and also including original art.

(Please admire my stock photo Iron Stag with his candle-antlers. I worked hard affixing each little flame to each little tine.)

The background I used here (Image Source: Freestock.com) is unromantically called “Plastic Chunks” in my files.

I also really like the ceiling paintings of Jules-Edmond-Charles Lachaise, so I experimented using one as a frame.

Above is a Yew cover, and below is an Eider cover.

I can't remember where I picked the asset(s?) for this background, but I suspect it was also Freestock.

I eventually decided on having both heroines front and center, each paired with an antler from one of the two mysterious stags in the story. This focal point would be a hand-drawn piece of art with less obtrusive public domain stock stuff framing it. I wanted the picture to be intricate, feel fairy-taleish, and include different elements from the story – a snake, a diary, flowers, mirror shards, a pear, seeds, antlers, and a hand mirror.

My first sketch had the basic idea down, but it was very long and skinny and with the title as part of the drawing it felt too tattoo-y to me. Though, looking closely, I see I included Pete the mule's head (upside down, just under the word “magic”), and it's sad he didn't make the final cut.

So I made the image more of a circle and worked really hard until I was proud of it.

From there, I just had to decide on which assets to use and what colors to go for. I really liked the combination of dark desaturated reds and blues in this one, along with the very gothic doily frame. However, it also felt somewhat cluttered, maybe a better design for a poster than something that was going to have text on top of it.

There's also a lot I like about this one, the cold colors, the blending of ice and aged iron. (The original title for the novel was The Iron Claws.) But again, that border felt like it would be fighting with any text thrown over it.

I was also concerned whether the central image would look too small and muddled in thumbnail, so I did this very stripped down version. I wasn't a big fan of it, but it's interesting.

(By the way, you may have noticed that none of these share the actual dimensions of my real book cover. I hadn't even done the page layout yet at this point, and this was all very much in the testing stage.)

As it turned out, I was on the right track with the earlier gothic doily cover. Aside from the hand-drawn image, I ended up going with different assets, most notably a smaller frame, deeper colors, and additional borders along the sides. (This image also isn't in the proper scale.) I did this cover over and over again, making little adjustments until I was satisfied.

What do you think? Did I make the right call?

Here’s info on the book itself: THE PRICE AND PREY OF MAGIC

#fairy tale #indieauthor #writers on tumblr #writeblr #fantasy #book design #yew bosse #eider isarna #iron stag #the price and prey of magic #long post

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jess-p-edits · 3 years ago

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OC Superlatives Tag Game

Thanks for the tag @aschlindartroom!!!!!!!!! ❤️❤️❤️ I really liked this one! I’ve been behind on Tumblr a bit, so if you’ve already been tagged, just take this as a “hi!!!!!!”: @bloodlessheirbyjacques, @tc-doherty, @tryingtimi, and @italiangothicwriteblr!

Most arrogant: King Agares Crestwall for sure. Believes that magic is evil and all other world leaders are, at best, naïve to the point of being delusional and leading their people into chaos. He thinks he’s the only “sensible” king left. Despite this arrogance, Crestwall as a land is so behind in terms of magic and progress, he’s a bit of a joke, internationally, if a pretty aggressive one with a well-trained military.

Most humble: Fahad!!! Despite being Salma’s identical twin brother with nearly the same background, education, etc., deep down he thinks she is way more fit for the position they are both striving for, a seat on the New Nobelian council. He makes a lot of jokes about being the “older” brother (by minutes), but he’s got wicked imposter syndrome.

Most charming: Honestly, it’s tied between Godric and Astor Astoria. Godric has more of that effortless charisma and any charming begins and ends with him trying to get you to like him, while Aster, who is very charismatic in his own way, usually has some ulterior motive to charm you.

Most aggressive: Alise Foxglove, but like, politically, not necessarily physically (though she probably wouldn’t be against throwing hands with tax evaders lmao). She’s fixed the world economy after magic suddenly entering the world totally threw shit off balance, and she is NOT going to let you fuck it up!!!!. She gives a Devil Wears Prada style speech where she shuts Krieve down HARD when he implies his kingdom is unaffected by what she does because Crestwall isn’t a part of the Alliance. She also managed to bully an immortal counterfeiter into working for her lmao (Aster, see above).

Least talkative: In a world full of people who never shut up (dialogue is my absolute, hands down favorite thing to write ;A;), Shield Warden Hoff is the voice of reason….when he does speak. Definitely a guy that prefers to listen and observe, but because he is so careful with his words, people tend to be more likely to listen. The classic strong and silent type.

Most relatable: I think this one definitely depends the most on personal preference, but I’m hoping people relate to Jaisse well as her POV chapters tend to be the longest so we are “in her head” the most. She’s a monster hunter for a living, but still has a dry sense of humor about things. Cares deeply for her loved ones, even if she can be a bit socially inept at times, and any political fluency is due to the fact that her mother is the elected queen of Correlaine. But then everything with her mom brings a whole host of insecurities (see immediately below).

Least relatable: The Queen-Elect of Correlaine! Immortal, retired monster hunter turned world leader. Due to a tragedy shortly after the Hour, she’s the last living immortal in Correlaine. She poses a fun writing challenge as I’m deliberately trying to make her feel “out of place” and distant. Being responsible for her kingdom and how it's still being impacted by a magical upheaval that she bore witness to a century ago, she has people’s best interest at heart, but has more and more of a difficult time perceiving them as individuals.

Most ambitious: Salma. While she can be just as full of self-doubt as Fahad, she tries to overcome it by just taking a ton of initiative. Salma is the type to try a bunch of things so she has more successes under her belt (even if those naturally come with a lot of failures!).

Most easy-going: Tempting to put Godric here again, but probably Brawl Warden Noa. She’s very competent in her position as one of the wardens, but personality-wise, she’s definitely not as serious.

Most high-strung: KRIEVE. The man has never left his home kingdom before and the entire plot centers around him leaving it. Even before the story, as the commander of the king’s guard, he’s very exact and meticulous and has probably relaxed maybe three times in his life.

Most pretentious: Minister “Human” Lars Biershire. Has read all the books you haven’t, and could politic in his sleep. (So when Jaisse clowns on him by doing shit like naming her horse after him so she has to call him “Human Lars” he’s always ready to blow a gasket.)

Most cheerful: Godric, Fahad, and Salma AS A COLLECTIVE, during the exchange. They are all having a blast while Jaisse and Krieve are just staring murderously at each other while this exchange plays an integral role in their relationship with their respective sovereigns.

Most patient: Beast Warden Sylus. Probably the nicest warden by far. He trains up all the animals that the Correlaine monster hunters use, but he also trains service animals for civilians as well!

Most diligent: Lots of diligent characters lmao. Lars, Krieve, Salma, Alise are probably tied.

#OC tag game #superlatives #wip: hom #writeblr

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cinema-tv-etc · 3 years ago

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The Gilded Age Timeline Explained: How It Ties To Downton Abbey

The Gilded Age takes place in the same world as Downton Abbey, but is instead set in 1880s New York and features plenty of new characters.

By Erika St. Denis - Jan 18, 2022

Since The Gilded Age is tied to the world of Downton Abbey, an explanation about when it takes place is critical to understanding the overarching timeline Julian Fellowes has created between his two shows. The show itself has been talked about since 2012 when Fellowes was approached to head the series based in 1880s New York. Nearly 10 years after these talks and 7 years since the Downton Abbey show ended, fans are ready to get their Fellowes period-drama fix.

The Gilded Age has been marketed as a sort of prequel to Downton Abbey, but the premise has changed over time. Set during a period of incredible economic growth in United States history, the timeline of the series will certainly set up an interesting foundation that provides deeper context for Downton Abbey. Yet while there is a strong connection between the two series, changes to The Gilded Age’s plot line suggest that the show may be trying to prove that it can stand on its own as a riveting period-drama, just like its predecessor.

The Gilded Age takes place in 1880s New York and exists in the same world as Downton Abbey. While originally the show was meant to portray the courtship of Downton Abbey’s Robert Crawley and Cora Levinson, The Gilded Age appears to be more about the clashing of old versus new money. One storyline viewers seemed to be the most interested in involved the background of the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), yet the younger version of her character appears to be notably absent from the new series.

The Downton Abbey series starts the day after the sinking of the HMS Titanic in April 1912, and tells the story of how the Crawley family navigates the changing times of the early twentieth century, and ends in the year 1926. The majority of the show is set in Yorkshire County in England on the Downton Abbey estate, though there are a few ventures the characters take to London and other parts throughout the United Kingdom. The Gilded Age takes place during the 1880s in New York, and since Cora (Levinson) Crawley was brought to London in 1888 for her first social season, this means she would likely still be in the United States at this time.

The character list for The Gilded Age has very few names that are recognizable from the Downton Abbey series. Originally, the series was going to feature the courtship between Lord and Lady Grantham, and perhaps even a young Dowager Countess. But those plot lines have been seemingly abandoned and replaced with the storylines of peripheral characters from Downton Abbey. The Astors will make an appearance, members of which were referenced in Downton Abbey, season 1, episode 1 that had been on the RMS Titanic. The other connection is to that of the Russell family, which used to own Haxby Park, which Richard Carlisle later bought in Downton Abbey, season 2. However, at this time, it’s hard to say whether the Astors and Russells in The Gilded Age are the same ones referenced in Downton Abbey.

The Gilded Age appears to be set up in a way that will provide fresh stories with new and interesting characters and plot lines. While the show has turned out to be a little different from what the original plan was, this is an exciting opportunity to draw in lesser-known characters from Downton Abbey. While The Gilded Age takes place within the same timeline as Downton Abbey, the new show from Julian Fellowes appears to be expanding the world in which the two period-dramas exist in ways fans hadn’t originally expected.

https://screenrant.com/gilded-age-timeline-downton-abbey-link/

Related: Downton Abbey Timeline Explained: When Is A New Era Set?

#Gilded Age

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gimmeromance · 4 years ago

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GimmeRomance Glossary:

We’ve put this glossary together to give you all definitions for some of the words you’ll see both on this blog and in Romance in general. If you have any questions or think we’re missing a word, please send us an ask!

This glossary is organized alphabetically.

A/B/O: Short for Alpha/Beta/Omega, this is... complicated, but we recommend you take a look here if you don't already know what A/B/O is. * Please don’t use the term A/B/O without the slashes -- Abo is considered a derogatory term for Aboriginal, and we honor the wishes of the Australian Aboriginal peoples who prefer that the term A/B/O not be used without the defining slashes.

Alien Romance: Usually, one MC is human, other(s) are from another planet. May include non-human genitalia and sexual acts.

Alpha: May refer to Alpha from A/B/O 'verse or Alpha of a werewolf/shifter pack. Generally sexually dominant. May also be shorthand for Alpha Hero.

Alpha Hero: One MC (usually the MMC) has a dominant personality.

Ancient World Romance: A Romance which takes place in an ancient civilization: eg. Ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt.

BBW: Big Beautiful Woman. A fat heroine.

Bestiality: Technically illegal on Amazon, but dinosaur erotica somehow still exists. Please don't make us go looking for titles to suggest to you -- though you might see the occasional Tingler on our lists!

Beta: Someone in an A/B/O 'verse or someone in a werewolf/shifter pack who's not the leader, but also not the lowest position in the pack. May also be shorthand for Beta Hero.

Beta Hero: A Beta Hero is the opposite of an Alpha Hero -- generally a man who is not dominant but softer and kinder.

The Black Moment: The moment (often around the 60% mark) where all hope of a happy ending seems lost. Often includes a temporary breakup.

Black Romance: Both (all, if it's polyamorous) main characters are Black.

BMWW: Black Man/White Woman. A specific sub-genre within Interracial Romance.

Bully Romance: One of the MCs bullies another one, usually before the romance begins.

BWWM: Black Woman/White Man. A specific sub-genre within Interracial Romance.

Chick Lit: A subgenre of Women’s Fiction which focuses on the trials and tribulations of a young woman and often includes a romance. Differs from Romance in that the romance is not necessarily the main focus of the story. Differs from Women’s Fiction in that the protagonists are usually younger and there’s often more romance. It's a fine line and some books are hard to precisely categorize, or may be considered to fit into multiple categories.

Clean Romance: We prefer not to use this term, but it can mean either Closed Door or No Sex.

Cliffhanger: A Romance which ends on a dramatic, unresolved issue. Common in contemporary romance trilogies where all books follow the same couple; rarely seen in historicals.

Closed Door: Sex occurs in the course of the story, but is not described.

Contemporary Romance: A Romance that takes place in the modern day.

Courtesan: A historical sex worker, usually on the expensive end of the scale.

Dark Romance: At least one MC who is not a good person. The romance can include such things as kidnapping, stalking, sexual assault, imprisonment, gaslighting, domestic abuse, and a whole slew of other things that are generally frowned upon in western society and might be considered illegal in some places. In the fandom world, stories featuring these themes might have the tags non-con/dub con, dead dove do not eat, and dark themes.

Dystopian Romance: Romance which takes place in a failed-state society where the government or the powers that be are often a totalitarian state and often end up being the antagonists of the series or story. Many of these take place in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, but not all.

Equal Triad: A polyamorous triad where all parties have sex with each other.

Erotica: Sex is the point of the story and often is the plot. Happy endings aren't necessary in this genre, but they do often happen. Not quite a part of Romance but very closely related.

Fade to Black: A method in which sex is often handled in Closed Door stories.

Family Series: A Romance series which follows a family, each book focusing on a different member of the same family finding their love interest. (Like Bridgerton!)

Fantasy Romance: Takes place in another world (not to be confused with Sci-Fi Romance which takes place ON another world). There might be magic, dragons, or other mythical beasts.

F/F: Female/Female

FMF: Female/Male/Female. A polyamorous triad where the two women have sex with the man but not each other.

Gilded Age Romance: American Historical Romance, from about 1870-1900, usually among the wealthy upper classes (e.g. the Astor 400).

The Grovel: The moment where (usually) the MMC is brought to his knees by love and has to apologize to the MFC for all his stuff-ups. We love a good grovel here at GimmeRomance!

Harem Romance: One man/many women. Generally the women do not have sexual contact with each other, only with the man. Some exceptions. * In Manga, Harem Romance involves one man flirting with multiple women but ending up with only one. In Romance, Harem Romance involves one man ending up with multiple women.

HEA: Happily Ever After. A story cannot be a romance without either an HEA or HFN.

Hero: The male love interest of a Romance. Sometimes abbreviated as a capital H.

Heroine: The female love interest of a Romance. Sometimes abbreviated as a lowercase h.

HFN: Happy For Now -- not quite Happily Ever After, but the characters are together and doing OK at the end of the story.

Highlander Romance: Historical sub-genre, takes place in the Scottish Highlands. Can cover an enormous range of dates from ancient world up to early 20th century. The men usually wear kilts.

Historical Romance: A Romance that takes place at least twenty years ago.

Inspirational Romance: Usually explicitly Christian, a Romance that includes religion and/or faith playing a major role. Usually does not include sex, swearing, or a lot of violence.

Interracial Romance: The main characters are of different racial backgrounds to each other. Some people only count Black/white Romances as interracial; we count two people of any races.

Love Triangle: One of the MCs eventually has to choose between two potential love interests.

Mafia/Bratva/Yakuza Romance: The MMC (usually) is a member of an organized crime gang. These often fall into Dark Romance, but not always.

MC: Main Character

MC Romance: Not to be confused with the MC -- this is Motorcycle Club Romance. One protagonist is a member of a Motorcycle Club.

Medieval Romance: Takes place between 500 and 1500 CE.

Meet-Cute: Something cutesy which happens to bring the protagonists together for their first meeting.

MFC: Main Female Character. May sometimes be styled FMC. See also Heroine.

MFF: Male/Female/Female. A polyamorous triad where the two women have sex with each other as well as the man.

MFM: Male/Female/Male. A polyamorous triad where the two men have sex with the woman but not each other.

M/M: Male/Male

MMC: Main Male Character. See also Hero.

MMF: Male/Male/Female. A polyamorous triad where the two men have sex with each other as well as the woman.

New Adult Romance: One or more MCs is 'college age', generally 18-25.

No Sex: There is no sex in the book.

Omega: Usually only used in either A/B/O or werewolf/shifter. Generally either the sexual submissive or the lowest-ranked in the pack.

Open Door: Sex occurs on the page.

Paranormal Romance: A Romance that includes a supernatural element.

Pioneer Romance: 1760-1880, mostly American, sometimes Australian. The Romance version of the Old West.

Plus-Sized Romance: A Romance that includes at least one character (most often the woman) being plus-sized.

Polyamorous Romance: 3 or more persons find their HEA/HFN in a Romance. May include any combination of genders. * If you want to shorten Polyamorous, use Polyam rather than Poly -- Poly is a shorthand for Polynesian, and we honor the wishes of the Polynesian community who have asked that the Polyamorous community use Polyam instead.

Post-Apocalyptic Romance: Romance which takes place after a cataclysmic event that decimates human population and destroys our society as we know it.

Protagonist: A gender-neutral term for a main character.

Pseudo-Incest: Actual incest romance is banned on Amazon. Pseudo means step-siblings, a step-parent or grandparent, uncle/niece (no blood relation), etc.

Rake: A historical fuckboi.

Redemption Arc: The journey of one character who has behaved badly, to understanding what they did was wrong and making amends.

Regency Romance: Romance centered around the period when the future George IV was acting as regent for his father, George III. Technically the Regency was 1810-1820, but the genre includes 1795-1837.

Reverse Harem Romance: One woman/many men. Generally the men do not have sexual contact with each other, only with the woman. Some exceptions. * In Manga, Reverse Harem Romance involves one woman flirting with multiple men but ending up with only one. In Romance, Reverse Harem Romance involves one woman ending up with multiple men.

Rogue: A rogue is a character who misbehaves in some way. This includes characters who drink, gamble, and sleep around -- but also includes pirates and gentleman thieves. Not all rogues are rakes, but all rakes are rogues.

Romance: Stories where the romantic relationship is central and integral to the plot which end in an HEA or HFN. If a book does not end with the couple (or moresome) in a happy relationship, it is not a Romance.

Romantic Comedy: A Romance which makes you laugh. The best ones are especially failboaty. Often features sitcom or slapstick antics but many just feature funny banter. A lot of contemporary Women's Fiction gets classified as Romantic Comedy and at least one of our mods gets very mad about that because having a cute illustrated cover and/or having a cat/dog in it doesn't make it funny

Romantic Suspense: The MCs must face and overcome a serious external threat to life and limb while finding their way to a HEA/HFN. Often overlaps somewhat with Mystery and/or Thriller.

Royal Romance: At least one MC is a member of a (usually fictional) royal family.

Rural Romance: The Australian version of Western Romance. The front cover almost invariably features a woman wearing an Akubra hat.

Science Fiction/Sci-Fi Romance: On another world or in space. MCs are usually human, but this sometimes crosses over with Alien Romance.

Shared World Series: A Romance series where each book is written by a different author, but locations and many characters are shared in common.

Shifter Romance: A Romance that includes a character or characters who can shift into animals. Includes (but is not limited to) werewolves. Sex generally occurs when the couple is in human form, but there may be knotting or other animalistic characteristics.

Small Town Romance: A Romance that takes place in a small town, usually in America but there are some Australian ones out there. Tend toward the very white. Often part of series that include lots of characters from the same town.

Soulmates: Not usually an abstract concept in the Romance world. Regularly seen in Paranormal or Fantasy Romance.

Standalone: A Romance which is not part of a series. Or it may be part of a series, but you do not need to read other books in the series to follow the plot.

Steamy Romance: We prefer not to use this term, but it means Open Door or sometimes Erotica.

Sweet Romance: We prefer not to use this term, but it can mean either Closed Door or No Sex.

Taboo Romance: Pseudo-incest, Teacher/Student, Underage. A romance which may be criminalized or considered unacceptable for other reasons in various jurisdictions.

Time Travel Romance: A Romance where at least one of the characters travels in time (usually to the past). In order to have a happy ending, may end with the present character staying in the past, the past character coming to and staying in the future, reincarnation, or some other solution.

Tudor Romance: 1485-1603, during the reign of the Tudor monarchs (Henry VII, Henry VIII and his three children, to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I). Sometimes Romances that take place during the Stuart period (particularly before the English Civil War) are grouped here.

Uneven Triad: A polyamorous triad where two of the parties do not have sex with each other, but only with the third party.

Unknown: As used by the GimmeRomance Mods, we don’t know how much sex there is in the story. This may be because we have not read the book or it may be because we have read the book but don’t remember how much sex there is.

Urban Fantasy: A subgenre of Fantasy which takes place in a world that’s often somewhat like our own and often includes a romance. Differs from Paranormal Romance in that the romance is not the main focus of the story. It's a fine line and some books are hard to precisely categorize, or may be considered to fit into both.

Victorian Romance: 1837-1901, the reign of Queen Victoria.

Western Romance: Takes place in a Western state, usually rural. There's probably a ranch and horses involved. Someone's wearing a cowboy hat.

Women’s Fiction: A genre which focuses on a woman’s life and may or may not include a romance. Differs from Romance in that the woman’s individual journey is the main focus of the story.

YA: Young Adult. Fiction written for teens with teens as the main characters. May or may not be Romance.

—

This post will be updated as needed.

Last Updated: 06/05/2021

#Mod Post #Glossary #Info Post #romance terms #romancelandia #long post #queue me up

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years ago

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In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still patrician sports, and old money families still summer at Newport. But these are fossil relics of an older class system. The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs.

To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.

Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.

Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history. That’s because, from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.

In living memory, every major city in the United States had its own old money families with their own clubs and their own rituals and their own social and economic networks. Often the money was not very old, going back to a real estate killing or a mining fortune or an oil strike a generation or two before. Even so, the heirs and heiresses set themselves up as a local aristocracy. Like other aristocracies, these urban patricians renewed their bloodlines and bank accounts by admitting new money, once the parvenus had served probation and assimilated the values of the local patriciate.

These regional urban patriciates were similar demographically, at a time when the racial caste system that divided whites from nonwhites was accompanied by an ethnic caste system among whites. Within the white population, Anglo American Protestants, preferably Episcopalian or Presbyterian, were at the top, followed by Anglo Americans belonging to more vulgar denominations like the Methodists and Baptists. German and Scandinavian Americans could be honorary Anglo Americans. But Irish American Catholics, Jews, and Italian and Polish Americans occupied a lower rung. Mexican Americans occupied an ambiguous position. In some areas they were discriminated against as Blacks were, in others they were treated as the equivalent of low-status whites. Black Americans and Asian Americans were excluded.

The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.

Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque. The relics of these transient Europhile fads litter the United States in the form of courthouses and other old public buildings from coast to coast.

In contrast, local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics).

In short, for two centuries there was a double competition among regional American oligarchies. On the one hand, the local notables, particularly those from the newly settled regions, had to prove they were not backward bumpkins, but were just as up-to-date with regard to European fashions as the patricians in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. On the other hand, some of them dreamed that the city they ran, whether it was Atlanta or Milwaukee, would become the Athens or Renaissance Florence of North America, and favored local writers, poets, and artists, as long as their work was in fashionable styles and did not inspire seditious thoughts among the local masses. The subnational blocs of New Englanders, Southerners, and Midwesterners fought to control the federal government in order to promote their regional economic interests.

The status of Harvard and Yale as prestigious national rather than regional universities is relatively recent. A few generations ago, it was assumed that the sons of the local gentry (this was before coeducation began in the 1960s and 1970s) would remain in the area and rise to high office in local and state business, politics, and philanthropy—goals that were best served if they attended a local elite college and joined the right fraternity, rather than being educated in some other part of the country. College was about upper-class socialization, not learning, which is why parochial patricians favored regional colleges and universities. If your family was in the local social register, that was much more important than whether you went to an Ivy League college or a local college or no college at all.

American patricians of earlier generations would have been surprised that rich people, many of them celebrities, would scheme and bribe university officers to get their children into a few top universities. Scheming to get into the right local “society” club—now that would have made sense.

Upper-class women were the chief enforcers of local “society.” Anybody who thinks that women are somehow naturally more generous and egalitarian than men has never encountered a doyenne of high society. Mrs. Astor’s 400 families in New York had their counterparts throughout the United States, from the Mainline elite in Philadelphia to the Highland Park set in Dallas.

As in the novels of Jane Austen, the daughters of the local ruling class had to be married to a young man from a good family, if the dynasty was not to fall into disgrace. Until recently (and to this day, in some circles) a young woman’s debut in society was, if anything, more important than marriage itself, since the debutante ball helped to define her eligibility for a high-status marriage.

When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?

The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family.

The Western frontier was not entirely a myth, to be sure. My great-great-grandfather proposed marriage to my great-great-grandmother by handing her a letter from horseback before riding north on a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, and a distant uncle was murdered by outlaws on the road outside of Austin in the 1880s. But the Wild West or boomtown era everywhere was brief. The first white settlers in a region may have been trappers or small farmers or ranchers or outlaws or pirates, but once Native Americans had been removed to reservations and the railroad was in place, the area was rapidly gentrified. The rich moved in, bought up the good land, built mansions and the local opera house in the current European style and drove the frontiersmen and their families out.

White poverty in the United States today is concentrated in greater Appalachia, because the Scots Irish settlers, often illiterate squatters, were priced out of other areas and ended up in the hills of Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Texas Hill Country. As soon as the affluent discover the scenic views in those areas, they will be forced to move once more, just as old-stock families are already being priced out of the Texas Hill Country by rich refugees from California, bringing with them their cultural heritage of trophy wineries and boutiques, New Age spirituality and organic cuisines.

Because there was no single national American elite, there was never a single Western frontier. New Englanders moved west in a band to the south of the Great Lakes, and then moved eastward and inland from ports on the Pacific Coast. While the Scots Irish followed the hills, the Southern planter class acquired cotton-friendly soil from Virginia along the Gulf of Mexico to central Texas, where the coastal plain collides with the southernmost part of the Great Plains. As the historians David Hackett Fischer and Wilbur Zelinsky have pointed out, these parallel bands of east-to-west settlement brought separate Anglo American cultures, reflected in everything from codes of honor to town layouts (town planners in greater New England laid out village greens with churches and schools, while Southern towns tended to be centered on the courthouse).

In short, a historical narrative which describes a fall from the yeoman democracy of an imagined American past to the plutocracy and technocracy of today is fundamentally wrong. While American society was not formally aristocratic it was hierarchical and class-ridden from the beginning—not to mention racist and ethnically biased. What’s new today is that these highly exclusive local urban patriciates are in the process of being absorbed into the first truly national ruling class in American history—which is a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others.

Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. No longer. Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Immigrants from Africa and South America (as opposed to Mexico and Central America) tend to be from professional class backgrounds and to be better educated and more affluent than white Americans on average—which explains why Harvard uses rich African immigrants to meet its informal Black quota, although the purpose of affirmative action was supposed to be to help the American descendants of slaves (ADOS). According to Pew, the richest groups in the United States by religion are Episcopalian, Jewish, and Hindu (wealthy “seculars” may be disproportionately East Asian American, though the data on this point is not clear).

Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.

Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.

Religion. You may have edited the Yale Law Review, but if you tell interviewers that you recently accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or fondle a rosary during the interview, don’t expect a job at a prestige firm.

Values. This is the trickiest test, because the ruling class is constantly changing its shibboleths—in order to distinguish true members of the inner circle from vulgar impostors who are trying to break into the elite. A decade ago, as a member of the American overclass you could get away with saying, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I strongly support civil unions for gay men and lesbians.” In 2020 you are expected to say, “I strongly support trans rights.” You will flunk the interview if you start going on about civil unions.

More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Mrs. Astor would approve.

#ivy league #history #american history #oligarchy #aristocracy #american culture #bourgeois culture #bourgeoisie #class society #class struggle #class system #overclass #russiagate #virtue signaling #woke culture #wokeness #petite bourgeois #harvard #yale

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skiewrites · 5 years ago

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Thoughts of HW:AOC, Plot

Okay, so I’ve had a quick look through the tags to see what people’s opinions were on the games plot, because even though the game doesn’t come up until Friday, people with hacked switches were able to get a hold of the game early and leak it. Whatever your view on copyrights from a large company like Nintendo is, it got leaked, I watched it, lets move on.

A couple of things to be aware of before we move onto the whole post is that no, I do not have a hacked switch. I have preordered the game, but I will not be playing it until it is released. However, I was able to watch all the cutscenes before Nintendo came and took them down for copyright issues. Please keep in mind that what I say is my own opinion on the story after one watch through, so I might come by and edit it after I’ve played the game, to include my views on the actual gameplay.

And of course, this post will contain major spoilers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, so tread lightly.

This will be part one of a small series, otherwise this post would be incredibly long, so this is part one of ???

So, of course, like everyone expected, the games plot follows the event that lead up to the Great Calamity. At first, I found the order of events to be slightly strange; the idea that Link is Zelda’s knight before its revealed that he is the hero weirded me out somewhat and it was truly the first sign that they were going to deviate from what they had said in botw, where Link had had the Master Sword since he was 12, and he should have had it when they fight the lynal in Zora’s Domain. These inconsistencies are littered throughout, of course. In botw, Revali mentions having wished to have had at least one fight with him before he had died, and in the cutscenes shown they nearly killed each other during their first meeting (something that I am actually pretty excited to play). Then there’s the whole thing with the yiga in the desert (completely disrupting what happened in the memories)

Time travel.

So. The elephant in the room. I thought that I would get this bit over and done with as it’s the bit that everyone seems the most hung up about. Of course, that does make sense, for never has anyone done time travel well in media. There’s always too many ‘what if’s involved with this trope, and it is a trope that has been done to death, especially in the Legend of Zelda series. I now yearn for a game that doesn’t involve time travel in any way, for not only is it repetitive from a gameplay standpoint and a storytelling standpoint, but Nintendo is always going on about the timeline of the Zelda Universe, only to screw it into a ball and throw it away.

As much as I love theory videos and fanfics explaining away why the timeline is the way it, is it too much to ask for at least a couple games that go in a linear fashion so that I don’t have to think of the timeline when coming up with a new fic idea?

There are really two parts of timetravel. The first part, where Terrako (eggy boi) comes back from the ‘bad’ future that leads on to botw. He comes baring information on how the Calamity comes about, the date, the location, the destruction that comes with it. The other characters already know that this was going to happen because of Astor (I’m pretty sure he’s the fortune teller right?), but they then use this knowledge to further prepare themselves. This is the time travel that people kind of expected, especially since the demo, and we were prepared for that.

The timetravel we did not expect however, was when Sidon, Riju, Yunobo and Teba come from the future/alternative timeline and help with the final battle. Don’t get me wrong, I was very confused to see them turn up as much as everyone else was, but does it give some of the best character moments in the game? Absolutely. All of them had bonding moments between each other, but my favourite had to be Sidon and Mipha. Not only did it help that Sidon was the most developed character in botw out of all of them, but adding on with the character interaction at the beginning with the lynal, you can tell that Sidon was finally able to come to terms with his sister’s death in his reality, and Mipha was able to see a glimpse of the zora that Sidon would come to be. I loved every moment that these characters were on the screen, and I cannot wait to play them.

At the end of the day, the time travel does become a closed loop situation (and if you want me to go into detail about that then lmk), and thus, this game, considered canon or not, will not affect botw, nor botw2. Will it create another timeline? I hope not, but that’s up to Nintendo to figure out.

Regardless of the timetravel, I do have to say that the story itself is brilliant. There isn’t a loose thread or a self-contained. Purah talks about teleportation and showing that multiple people teleportation is possible, which then comes to help them in the final act. The scene with Zelda and Rhomn where he lectures her about artefacts comes to save his life later down the line as it turns out to be a shield. Any scene with the Yiga in made me laugh, and the scene at the end, where Calamity Ganon is formed? That is the beast that I wish I fought in botw.

The pacing could be better but these cutscenes aren't really supposed to be viewed back to back like that so they can have that one off. The small background interactions? those scenes will keep me fed for days. The small gags that reference the game, like link being able to eat rocks and using a cucco to jump from the tower? I couldn't stop fucking laughing. I’m not a big fan of zelda/link but those scenes weren't too in my face, which hits the perfect balance for shippers and nonshippers, but I’ll talk more about the characters in the next post.

At the end of the day, if this story had been a fanfiction, people would have lost their minds over it. But if you still don’t like the story, I ask you this. Don’t view it as Link’s story. View it as Zelda’s. even though the name of the game is Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, it is more of a ‘Legend of Zelda’ than the other games. We follow her right until the very end where she unlocks her power and is able to save Hyrule. This is a story exploring the idea that, if the circumstances had been different, if she had just a little more information to give her the final push, she would have been able to unlock her sealing powers and save everyone like she wanted.

That’s it for now, lmk what you guys think of the plot.

#age of calamity #age of calamity spoilers #hyrule warriors age of calamity #hyrule warriors #spoilers #there is more coming #i promise #skie rambles #not writing

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.

Mrs. Astor would approve.

#ivy league #history #american history #read the whole thing #tablet magazine #michael lind #iron law of oligarchy #there are always lords and peasants

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hitchell-mope · 5 years ago

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A new sitcom concept

Set at a university of located in the Dover cliffs. I’m thinking it’d be called Magus University. Main setting is Arcturus House. Main character is Astoroth (nicknamed Astor or Roth) Rymand. A sophomore. He’s a perky goth warlock who’s majoring in necromancy. He’s allergic to most forms or makeup so no eyeliner. He got the smoky eye affect from not sleeping for eight months. He’s been appointed as the parole officer for new student. A forest nymph by the name or Anthea Crimson. She’s in exile for maybe possibly launching a coup against her warmongering father. So you got the aloof fish out of water new girl and earnest innocent guide dynamic who may or may not end up together

Then there’s the dean and his family. Auspice Randall is a direct descendant of Merlin and as such ages backwards. He’s been alive as long as Shakespeare’s been dead but doesn’t look a day over thirty. He was a brilliant magician. But ever since the d-day landings he’s been a bit muddled up. Which means his daughter Winifred has to take up the most of the duties he’d otherwise perform such as orientation and guidance counselling. His mother is still alive but she’s in the final stage of their cycle before second infancy and eventual death. His grandson is a contemporary of Astoroth and Anthea.

There’s an underlying arc of some freshman who has to defeat a dragon to fulfil some family prophecy. But it’s all in the background and doesn’t directly affect the plot until the end when Winifred’s wife turns out to be the dragon said freshman is fated to kill. It all works out in the end though. After a brief but unseen battle that nobody will ever talk about again

Proposed cast:

Mitchell Hope as Astoroth Rymand. Majors in necromancy under the belief that “everyone deserves a second chance”. Perky goth who takes his fashion cue from the likes of the ouat version of the mad hatter, Rumplestiltskin and Burton mad hatter.

China Anne McClain as Anthea Crimson. Exiled princess of the new forest. Her brother sneaked her out after she tried to murder their father for waging war on the Forest of Dean. Still a tad haughty but defrosts over time. Not traumatised. Just pissed off and tired

Dylan Sprouse as Auspice Randall the Dean of Magus University. Part of the Merlinites who’re the direct descendants of the great wizard himself. Has been experiencing memory problems since the d-day landings but still very with it in regards to general attitude

Abigail Spencer as Winifred Randall-Monton-Carlo, Auspice’s daughter. Born around Victoria’s ascension. Nominally the augury professor but she’s slowly had to take over her fathers responsibilities as his conditions worsened

Rose McIver as Elandra Monton-Randall. Winifred’s wife and and Drex’s stepmother. A New Zealand freshwater dragon. Human sized and a runt by her species standards. Unknowingly hunted by the “chosen one”

Abby Ryder Fortson as Marla Randall. Auspice’s mother. The exact same age as Richard the third. Currently in the penultimate state or her life cycle before second infancy and eventual death. Dislikes being treated with kid gloves and has aspirations of being a daredevil

Idris Elba as Finlay Carlo. Winifred’s ex husband. A faun. Professor of Naturae Magicae. Born the day Prince Albert died. Introduced Winifred to Elandra

Keith David as Tainan Randall-Carlo. Finlay and Winifred’s son. Half faun and half Merlinite. In Astoroth’s necromancy class

John Boyega as Solaran Crimson. Anthea’s brother who helped her escape. Crown prince of the new forest royal family. Doesn’t agree with their father plans and is trying to dismantle the system from the inside

Kodi Smit McPhee as Ephraim Rymand. Astoroth’s younger brother. More of a traditional “warlock” type. Huge Merlin nerd. Has emotionally adopted Auspice as his grandfather. Majoring in healing and Naturae Magicae.

Suggested rating is twelve for minor language, every scenes and flashing imagery. No nudity or romance scenes beyond what they get away with on Disney channel. Not every young adult fantasy show has to be like hbo or Netflix Sabrina. Each episode would be about thirty to fifty minutes long with an hour for the premier and finale. Totalling about ten to twelve episodes

#sitcom concept #mitchell hope #china anne mcclain #dylan sprouse #abigail spencer #abby ryder fortson #rose mciver #idris elba #keith david #john boyega #kodi smit mcphee

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bloodline-rpg · 5 years ago

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BLOODLINE, A RECAP brought to your admins

BLOODLINE’S POLITICAL STORY is headlined by three major witch covens. The Devereauxs, the Blacks, and Thierry’s Immortal Coven You should give each of their original coven leaders biographies a read to orient you in the politics of the world:

Celestina Black

Brigid Devereaux

Thierry Astor

Celestina Black has three children, two of which are active participants int he games current politics; Aemilia and Aurora. Aemilia was the well disciplined child, the Black who took leadership seriously and wanted to prove her value as a woman in their patriarchal family. Aurora was the baby, the free spirit who always felt rejected by their father.

Brigid Devereaux has only one daughter. Victoria. Victoria was trained heavily under her mother’s thumb, in a fairly intense and abusive upbringing. She’s incredibly physical and dedicated but unlike her mother, much more compassionate and levelheaded (something that took some time and getting out from under Brigid’s thumb to find out.)

Thierry’s Magic was adapted with the help of a partner, a very smart, inventive holistic witch Lucio Lontoc. HOWEVER to this day no one knows of Lucio’s involvement. Thierry has never told anyone who helped her create immortal magic.

During the early part of the game, the wolf pack hailing from the Devereaux Compound in Massachusetts was lead by Alpha Derrick Falco (you do not need to read Derrick’s bio.) Derrick’s beta was Elias Irving, the son of the previous Alpha who Derrick had appointed to honor the older Alpha’s legacy.

The wolf pack as it originally stod in the game was made almost entirely of new wolves. Stragglers that had been picked up along the way, and the freshly turned. This included Ana who remains with the pack still and several other characters who have since left the game. Pre-existing members of the Devereaux pack didn’t really arrive until a bit later.

At the start of the game, Victoria Devereaux and Aurora Black were entered per their mother’s orders into an arranged marriage with the goal of demonstrating the political alliance between their families. At first they DID NOT get along. But they quickly realized that they were each holding back a lot of trauma, pressure, and insecurity that brought them closer.

Aurora was also hiding a secret; her penchant for clairvoyant dark magic. Since the game began, Aurora’s power has slowly been growing and more people are aware that she can do it. She can visit memories and astral project. Her sister Ameilia can visit people’s minds and witness their fears.

Here are some important conflicts and plot points as relatively in order as I can get them that have happened since the game started that have directed effected the politics or dynamics:

Aurora Black and Thierry Astor slept together, something the Black family and Victoria did not react kindly to.

It was discovered that a wolf named Charlie was actually secretly a human. She was imprisoned. Victoria, seeing that the pack cared for Charlie was afraid that executing her would create a lack of trust between the pack and her family’s leadership so she went over her mother’s head to convince the council to spare and turn Charlie instead. In order for Charlie to be turned, they needed a bonded wolf to do it safely. Derrick and Victoria (who had always bene close allies) decided to bond to one another so that he could safely turn Charlie and because they both cared deeply about the survival of the pack and saw eye to eye. (Charlie is no longer in the game but Derrick and Victoria’s alliance was a massive political shift as well as Victoria’s decision to involve Aurora in going above their parents head to get the council votes. It was the first instance of the younger generation of leaders working against their parents and deeply frustrated Aemilia Black.

Ericka an immortal witch who had previously been tortured and held captive by wolves years ago, accused Presley a super innocent pop start turned wolf who wouldn’t hurt a fly of attacking her. Presley was jailed until an answer was found but it was ultimately proven by Aurora Black’s magic that Erick had been having an intense ptsd related episode and had not in fact been attacked, thus revealing Aurora’s Black magic on a more public scale and absolving Presley.

Aemilia locked Aurora in her room under the guise that it was for protection as a method of controlling her.

Victoria and Ana often struggled to see eye to eye regarding witches and wolves relationships.

Aemilia and Thierry stayed in a constant state of rivalry after Thierry slept with Aurora but all of Thierry’s theatrics were intended to be distractions to keep the other witch families from realizing that she was trying to continue enhancing immortal magic.

Brigid arrived and resumed her intense and violent training with Victoria. This started one night in the rain where she brutalized her and Aurora found out and ended when she tried to use Aurora as a means of teaching Victoria emotional control. Instead, Victoria snapped and nearly killed her mother, stopped by Derrick. BUT the attack lead to the Blacks and Aurora beginning to attempt to overthrow Brigid. It also solidified Victoria and Aurora’s deep care for one another on a public scale.

A group of Devereaux wolves arrived including Beta Elias and his gang of friends: Eden, Kyle, and Ronan. All of them were pretty anti-witch and secretly plotting to overthrow the pack leadership and the Devereauxs. Notorious for antagonizing new wolves and wolves they deemed weaker than them they even started small “fight club” in the woods. Their primary target was Presley (you should read Presley’s bio for more background on the stones and the Devereaux Compound attack). Eventually Eden came to care about Presley, they bonded over their shared trauma and the loss of their families at the attack on the Devereaux Compound and became an item, thus starting Eden on the path of no longer wanting to support Elias.

Elisa eventually called for a new alpha vote and LOST. As such, Derrick was re-appointed Alpha and given the chance to appoint a new Beta. He chose Presley.

Around the same time, the Pack had arrivals from the Washington Branch of the Devereaux Compound. [ You should read Reed Jackson, Noah Niccolai and Ellery Jackson’s bios in that order for important backstory regarding the Jacksons, the Devereauxs, and other soon to be relevant drama. Noah and Reed were not among those arrivals. Lucas Jackson and Ellery were.]

Pissed about the Alpha vote, Elias and Kyle acted on their over throw pla. They Started a fire in the wolf quarters, burning them and the barn to the ground. As the fire was blazing, they used it as a distraction to murder Derrick. Victoria felt Derrick die and knew something was wrong but before she could interfere, she was attacked by Elias. Being that she’s one of the strongest original witches of all time, Elias didn’t stand a chance. Victoria killed him quickly and without holding back. She then ran to her mother to tell Brigid about what had happened but Brigid LOST IT. Because Brigid knew that killing someone would trigger victoria’s secret werewolf gene. Brigid lost it, dragged Victoria away, beat her within an inch of her life and nearly killed her. As soon as Ellery found out what had happened, she grabbed Aurora and ran to Victoria’s rescue just in time. She was stopped only seconds before murdering Brigid by Aemilia Black.

The Blacks finally fully overthrew Brigid as coven leader, locking her up in the cells and replacing her with Victoria. Celestina was NOT thrilled about letting a hybrid witch/wolf be coven leader but lost the vote. She did however try to call off the wedding between Victoria and Aurora. But when Aurora insisted on still marrying Victoria, Celestina kicked her out of the Black coven for good. (Additionaly, Ellery finally filled Victoria in on EVERYTHING and who her real father was and the fact that they were siblings.) In essence Victoria went from heir of the Devereauxs to A wolf, coven leader, and inheriting a whole family all in one day.

The pack rallied together to vote Victoira in as the Alpha to replace Derrick. She appointed Eden as her Beta, seeing Eden as someone who understood what the pack needed and wanted and who could offer her other perspectives as someone from a powerful wolf family.

Around that time, Aemilia Black had slowly begun to come around to Presley. She saw Presley as dutiful, dedicated, and useful and after they got closer she asked Presley to bond with her.

One night about a month later, a body showed up at the door of the Compound. The body was a very sick and mangled Noah Niccolai. They quickly realized Noah had not in fact been killed but held captive by the government this whole time, having had her bond to Ellery severed.

Meanwhile, while grieving the loss of Derrick, Presley and Eden were abducted on sentry duty. The Manor went into uproar trying to figure out how or where they had went. Aemilia Black could feel Presley being tortured and that was all they had to go on.

Victoria planned a rescue mission that was voluntary. All wolves participated. They went together and found Eden and Presley being held by some back woods hunters where Presley had been brutally tortured to try and get Eden to give information on the witches. Neither of them had cracked.

During the rescue mission the wolves found a wolf in wolf form chained in a cage by the hunters, stuck in wolf form. They brought the wolf back with him and when the drug keeping him stuck that way wore off, they learned it was Cash Stone, Presley’s brother who everyone thought was dead.

Victoria and Aurora were married in a small, quiet private ceremony but thrown a surprise reception by their loved ones when the rest of the manor found out about it. Once they were married, Victoria bonded to Aurora. The bond and Victoria’s hybrid nature make her the most powerful person in the manor.

During the rescue mission for Presley and Eden, Aemilia went to Noah and Ellery. She wanted to try and restore Noah’s lost magic so that Ellery and Noah could restore their bond and help with the rescue. They were unsuccessful.

What aemilia did not know is that she caught a magical virus from Noah. later, when she performed Victoria and Aurora’s marriage ceremony, she gave said virus to Aurora. After the wedding in a strange enemies to lovers flirty banter way, thierry and Aemilia slept together. When Aemilia woke terribly sick, she accused Thierry of trying to kill her and locked Thierry in a cell. It was revealed a few days later that Thierry was also sick and thus not the culprit.

All of the witches slowly fell sick to a magic virus that they later figured out was being spread through performing magic. (wildly enough we planned this pre-covid lmao) Any time a host did magic with someone else without realizing they were carrying the poison they gave it to them. All of the witches fell sick and eventually it was discovered by Peyton and Ericka who just happened to be getting freaky that wolf blood was the cure. The wolves quickly came together and cured the witches.

HOWEVER the witch virus killed Augustin Crow (the holistic coven leader), Devon Vaus, and Mika Iwata. (Mika was actually killed by Thierry but Aemilia helped her cover it up).

The witches all realized that this whole thing had been a set up. Noah arriving at their door as a biological attack. She had been the catalyst for the virus. She was cured and her magic returned. She and Ellery are now bonded again. Making them the current third bonded pair in the game. (Not including Victoria and Derrick cuz he’s dead).

LASTLY, very recently Eden went missing on sentry and was later found dead, drained of blood. (This wasn’t in the plan but the player left so here we are). Everyone is grieving currently as she was very close to the pack, Especially Presley. Victoria secretly appointed Ellery as Beta in the interim but no one knows that yet. Victoria proposed putting the entire manor on permanent lockdown, no one in or out until they get the answer. The residents of the manor will soon find out that it was the vampires who are arriving soon. When the vampires arrive, the lockdown spell will be broken and that’s when new characters will be free to arrive.

Other characters you should know about

Ana: Reluctant solider but a good fighter, has been here since day one and has SEEN SOME SHIT and lost some people. Lucas: Ellery’s and Victoria’s brother, Reed’s adopted son. A foster kid with some anger issues who accidentally killed his brother at the ripe age of 8 triggering his wolf curse super young. Isa: Derrick’s sister who was once part of Bran’s pack in WA, however left with Bran’s permission about 5 years ago to become a hired gun for witches to kill hunters and government agents and dispose of their bodies silently. She became a trained assassin, but accidentally killed a family of witches in an explosion and has come to the compound to find atonement. Lou and Theo: Human best friends who have been in the cells since the game started. 100% Theo is secretly in love with Lou. Haven: Chaos baby immortal witch who has since had quite a dark night of the soul and change of heart. She’s starting to turn her shit around and be a better person. Minni: a new holistic witch who only came across her powers recently. But they had been blocked by her father. When she realized Noah’s powers were also being blocked by something they figured out it was the same thing. Now, Minni’s grabbing life by the horns and embracing magic and opportunity. Ronan: The last survivor of Elias’s crew. He was not involved in the plot to kill Derrick and the Devereauxs. But he’s still really sad his friends are dead. Kyle was executed after the fact. He keeps to himself but is a bit of an ass hole. He recently had one (1) moment of vulnerability. Puck: new kid on the block. Holistic witch son of Original witches close to the Deverauxs. He’s fascinated by wolves and wants to develop a cure for lycanthropy. Even if people don’t want that. Alex and Peyton: also fairly new, Best friends who grew up in foster care together. Alex is a vet student and knew exactly what to do to help Peyton when she was bitten and turned by a werewolf. She brought her to Carden but now Peyton’s in gen pop and Alex is part of the human blood supply.

Other important changes of note:

The wolves have recently been given uniforms. When we add you to the GC you’ll see pictures. But they’re fancy and cool.

The wolves now live in the manor with everyone else since the wolf quarters burned down. However they rebuilt a barn to chain up on full moons.

The humans have recently been moved out of the cells and into a bedroom.

THAT SHOULD BE EVERYTHING! If you’re a current player and feel something substantial is missing hit me up. If you’re a new player, thanks for reading this giant post. Obviously we don’t expect you to know EVERYTHING but this will help you understand where things are at now. Everyone is beginning to work together as a unit, there’ a significant amoutn more respect among leaders. The big power players in regard to leadership are Victoria, Aemilia, Thierry, Ellery, and Aurora. Anywaaysss I def didn’t link to everyone’s bios here becuase I didn’t want to overwhelm you so don’t feel obligated. But it def wouldn’t hurt to give some of the ones not linked here a read when you have time.

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halcyonmusings · 5 years ago

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Ship thing for Astor and Gascoigne :^) ? spare astor/gascogine please?

PRE-RELATIONSHIP

How did they first meet?

After Eileen brought her to Yharnam and started training her, Gascoigne showed up in the middle of a sparring lesson. She almost smacked him with her wooden sword and even though she didn’t hit him, she apologized like, 283290 times.

What was their first impression of each other?

Gascoigne thought she was very kind, a little naive, and was wondering why someone like her would want to be a hunter. He immediately had this feeling of wanting to protect her. Astor thought he was intimidating just from his sheer size, but once they talked for a short while, she thought he was intriguing but also thought he looked lonely.

Did any of their friends or family want them to get together?

Everyone wanted them to get together. Well, minus Eileen, but that was mainly her mentor/motherly instinct of looking out for her.

Who felt romantic feelings first?

They both did, but they both thought it was unrequited. They invented yearning/pining.

Did either of them try to resist their feelings?

Gascoigne did when his beast side was beginning to come out more and more and did his best to avoid Astor, but another part of him needed to see her, be around her. Astor didn’t resist her feelings, but she never tried to tell him about them either.

If you had told one of them that the other would be their soulmate, what would they think?

Well, for sure they’d both be really happy about it.

GENERAL

Who initiated the relationship, and how did it go?

After he talked to Henryk and Djura who both told him to get his head out of his ass and make a move, life’s too short, etc. which.... the timing of it all because his beast form was becoming difficult to control, then Djura left to Old Yharnam, and everything was going downhill, so it was too late for him to say anything.

Did they have an official first date? If so, what was it like?

They weren’t dating, but they spent the first time alone together by hunting some beasts and while Astor watched Gascoigne in action, she got hurt so they spent the rest of that time with him tending to her wounds. He carried her home even though she kept telling him she was fine enough to walk.

What was their first kiss like?

After he escorted her back home, Astor quickly gave him a kiss on the cheek and was about to run back inside her house but he called her back out. When she came back, he gave her a proper kiss on the lips and was like “I prefer these sort of kisses” and she got flustered and ran again lmao

Were they each other’s first anything (kiss, relationship, etc.)?

For her, he was her first kiss, love, (almost) relationship.

What’s their height difference? Age difference?

I... have no idea how old Gascoigne, so I’m assuming the age difference is... pretty high. For the height difference, she’s 5′8″ and he’s like 6′9″ ahahaha... :)

What’s their relationship with each other’s families?

Astor’s parents are dead way before she meets Gascoigne, so... but she’s met his daughters who both love her and who she later adopts.

Who takes the lead in social situations?

Astor. A lot of people get intimidated by Gascoigne’s stature lmao

Who gets jealous easier?

Gascoigne................... He’ll see Alfred talking to her and he’s in the background like >:( One time Alfred kissed the back of Astor’s hand and Gascoigne got so angry he broke a table by slamming his fist on it.

LOVE

Who said “I love you” first?

Astor said it as she held Gascoigne while he was dying :)

What are their primary love languages?

Being in tune to the other’s needs/wants. Knowing each other’s body languages when they’re upset. Being there for each other.

How often do they cuddle/engage in PDA?

They do that thing where their hands brush against each other in passing, but that’s as far as they’ll go otherwise they’ll get teased by the other hunters.

What are their favorite things to do together?

Her reading while he’s resting his head on her lap, sparring.

Who’s better at comforting the other?

Astor! She knows to hold his hand when he’s feeling off, or if he’s become more quiet than usual. They’ll sit together in silence and she’ll wait until he starts to feel like himself.

Who’s more protective?

Gascoigne. He goes out of his way to make sure he never transforms in front of her, even on the night of the hunt when he bumped into her before her fight with the Cleric Beast, he ran off once he felt himself becoming unraveled.

Do they prefer verbal or physical affection?

Physical all the way. Astor was never shown any type of affection while growing up, so once Gascoigne brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she was a goner.

What are some songs that apply to their relationship, in-universe or otherwise?

heart skipped a beat by the xx, sweetest kill by broken social scene, pay no mind by beach house

What kind of nicknames do they call each other?

Astor calls him “my love.” Gascoigne calls her “my heart.” 🤧

DOMESTIC LIFE (purely au so let me dream)

If they get married, who proposes?

Gascoigne!!! He places the ring in the music box that he puts on the nightstand for her to find and is giving her hints like “Hmm.. you should play the music box...” and she’s like ??? and he’s like “Yep... would be nice to hear it right now.......” Astor: “Then play it?” Gascoigne: “Yeah but I’d prefer it if you did... :)”

What’s the wedding like? Who attends?

Everyone’s there :) your oc Evie is her maid of honor. Henryk is the ringbearer... manlet rights! I’m kidding he’s the best man most likely. The vault dweller is the one officiating the wedding, thank you. It’s a small ceremony, nothing extravagant.

How many kids do they have, if any? What are they like?

Astor adopts Gascoigne’s two daughters. She tells them she won’t ever replace Viola, and dotes on them as best as she can. They’re both very playful and love to play with Astor and Gascoigne who make time for them whenever they’re able to.

Do they have any pets?

The girls have a bird that they like to let loose in the house. Gascoigne hates the bird because it chirps very loudly when he’s trying to sleep.

Who’s the stricter parent?

Gascoigne. The girls will whine about wanting to stay up a little longer but he’ll be like >:| no until they go 🥺🥺 and Astor will be like “Aww let them stay up for another hour...” He relents but he’s not happy about it.

Who kills the bugs in the house?

They both do, hello. They’ve killed beasts, they will definitely kill bugs no problem.

How do they celebrate holidays?

We’ll say there’s holidays and I’ll say that the girls and Astor decorate the house for every holiday.

Who’s more likely to convince the other to come back to sleep in the morning?

Gascoigne. He’s a big cuddler and is very lazy in the mornings, so when he feels Astor getting up, he’ll reach out to grab her and be like “No... stay in bed a little while longer...” and she’ll be like “I have to make breakfast for the girls” but he’ll crawl over to her to bury his face on her lap and be like “Just for a few minutes, come on.” And she’ll give up and go back to bed. It works every single time.

Who’s the better cook?

Gascoigne. He has two kids okay, he had to learn how to be good at cooking.

#mooonbride #asks #x: sweet blood #thank you for this :)

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queerchoicesblog · 6 years ago

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Lost Without You (SC Titanic, Zetta x Adele)

A bit later than announced but finally here is my Adele POV fanfic mirroring my very first Titanic work Ghost of You. I added some background to Adele’s past and her survival guilt/trama as well but Zetta always finds a way back into our fave suffragette's mind...and heart.

Thank you all once again for the amazing support showed with my previous work: I can’t tell how much it means to me! Hope you will enjoy this one too!

Disclaimers: I quoted some pieces of dialogue from the original book + I won’t mark this ns*w but this fanfic contains references to sexual activity: if it makes you uncomfortable, please skip it! You have been warned!

Word Count: 1988

Zetta x Adele Tag: @marmolady @animus-and-anima @hayley-carter19 @escako @everlastingchoices @andrxrneda @aestheticsayeed @eleanorwaverrley @indescribablechoices @ahrielstuff @lvcley @nazario-sayeed (+ @andi-the-cat as I have a feeling you like fics that coshowing back stories as well as references to our beloved Hileni: ignore it if you’re not interested!)

_______________________________

Adele walked Miss Sansom, a very chatty yet exquisitely nice old lady who was a regular customer of the hat shop, to the door, helping her maid with the pile of boxes containing the lady’s latest purchases. Miss Sansom immediately took a liking for the Carrem girls and always made sure to leave them a generous tip: Adele suspected that their status of “Titanic survivors” somehow influenced the lady’s genuine inclination towards philanthropy.

She lingered on the threshold until the two women disappeared from view, then she walked back to the counter and secured the coins she got in the tip jar beside the cash register. When they hit the bottom, she turn towards the main window and let her eyes wander on the street. A couple was laughing at a silly joke, two men, probably accountants were discussing the latest baseball match, the baker next door was ushering two giggling troublemakers out of his shop. Despite the leaves were now turning red on the trees, life was still blossoming. There were always places to go, things to see and to do in New York. Life was going on, for anyone except for her.

For the first time in her life, she was unable to move on and look ahead…which was ironic considering that she had always been the one encouraging people not to dwell into the past and look and fight for a brighter future. She never rested, she marched in the first row at every protest, she ran fast like an avalanche away from the policemen and whoever could hold her back…now she was stuck, frozen in place. She was haunted by that night, the faces of all those people running and screaming in terror, the lifeless bodies of Gustav and her stewardess floating in the freezing water…Charlie looking at her on the lifeboat, anger and disappointment written all over his face: “I thought you knew me, Adal, but you don’t know me at all” before turning his back to her. He never spoke to her again and Adele knew she had lost a friend.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass: a pale static ghost in complete dissonance with the world on the other side. “How can they go on? How can they go on with their lives as if nothing happened?”. The reason was simple: they didn’t embark on the Titanic so they couldn’t understand what surviving felt like. They would throw an absent look at the newspapers announcing the official investigation over the sinking of the Titanic: in the end, the mighty “Queen of the Sea” truly made headlines. Just not what Mr Andrews, John Jacob Astor and the White Star Line pictured: tragedy and shame instead of shiny glory.

To be honest, though, even some of those who were on the cursed ship seemed to move forward. Matteo seemed to adjust well to his new life in America or so it seemed to her by the few letters he sent her. Hileni was recovering surprisingly well too. She probably tried to conceal it out of respect for her sister’s mourning, but she liked her new life: she immediately befriended the shop owner and his wife, she slowly but consistently started using new terms of the American slang she heard in the street. Adele suspected that she was quite smitten with the new delivery boy as well as starstruck for the motion pictures: they could only afford the ticket once in London and in New York she quickly turned into a regular at the surprisingly cheap nickelodeons. As a proof, a picture of a popular heartthrob of the big screen was now pinned over her bed.

America must have this effect on most, Adele considered.

“Lives, loves, the past – they’re worthless. Throw it all away and remake yourself. That’s the American dream right here”

She grimaced as Zetta’s words echoed in her mind out of the blue. She could still see her smirking at her in her suite on their first meeting, rather proud of her witty apology of the American dream that meant so much to her. She had to build a new self and a new life right from scratch in this country, breaking free from a liar, one of the many men who betrayed her. But now those words acquired a whole new and very painful meaning.

“Lives, loves, the past – they’re worthless. Throw it all away…”

Was she part of that worthless past to Zetta now? She hadn’t heard from her since they reached shore, even though she kept haunting her dreams from time to time. Her words of love, the desperate kiss they shared on the deck of the sinking ship, how she held her tight as she couldn’t stop crying on the lifeboat…she never left her side even on the Carpathia. Then she lost sight of her: she stroke her cheek and said she was going to ask for another blanket as the one Adele had wrapped over her shoulder was damp, sending chills down her spine but she never returned. Was she intercepted by her fiancé or was it a dramatic exit? Adele decided to leave it unanswered: it didn’t matter now, now Zetta was gone.

Undoubtedly, she had been busy with her new life since that day. Her “renaissance” as she called it at the Turkish baths. As the memory of that day resurfaced, Adele turned her back to the window and had to summon all her strength not to shed a tear. She remembered every single moment of that day: Zetta, a vision, a goddess in her silky robe, patting the chair beside her, the heart-breaking grief on her face as she recalled James’s evil scheme, then her smile brightening again: she trusted her, permanently and till the end of time. When she smirked at her, Adele couldn’t help but blush like a schoolgirl and when she shared the true meaning of her renaissance and all the brilliant roles she would have loved to get before she couldn’t act anymore, the Carrem girl felt that she could have listened to her for hours: Zetta was a treasure chest full of wonders when she let her walls down and one of the most interesting and smartest women Adele had ever met, way more than just “a pretty face”. As she brushed a strand of damp hair out of her eye, the urge of kiss those soft lips became almost unbearable.

Adele had never experienced the state of pure bliss that washed over her under Zetta’s touch and kisses. Her moves were filled with desire but also adoration as if she was worshipping the girl in her arms. Adele had never been worshipped by anyone even though she had stolen moments of pleasure in the back alleys of London with her first love and a couple of factory girls. But those encounters were rushed, messy: hands fumbling to reach under the skirts, furtive glances around, the haste to elicit muffled moans before someone might catch you. Instead, even though the risk of being discovered was there, in Zetta’s loving arms she forgot about the world for a moment. She walked back to her cabin humming an old pub song of a poor sailor dreaming the golden hair of his rich lady lover. “Let me drown myself in the bottle of her perfume” she sang changing into her nightgown as Lena noted that she was in surprisingly good spirit that night.

Right now it all felt like…a foolish dream. A beautiful fantasy. The suffragette and the movie star, the factory girl and the first-class lady, two women so different from each other that became closer than they ever thought possible. They were just drawn to each other like magnets and in Zetta’s arms Adele felt safe, despite James’ scheme.

Adele found herself asking herself if in the end, deep down, that was what their romance had been to Zetta: a fantasy, a sweet dream bounded to end as they docked in New York, where she had a career and an enamored fiancé impatiently waiting for her. It was in every magazine, everyone was talking about the upcoming wedding and the movie star who survived the sinking. The other day two ladies came in and asked her a hat “just like the one Zetta Serda wears here”, pointing at a picture of Zetta arm in arm with Richard King in a fancy venue.

Adele tried to remind herself that it wasn’t the first time a woman she loved went down that path, consequently disappearing from her life. She had been there before with sweet Marie, the girl next door who soon became her best friend and eventually more. She could still see her first love tremble as she whispered “Adele” over her lips before claiming them in a shy kiss. After a year, she received a proposal from Jack one of the lads at the factory. “Father suggested it is for the best: Jack is a fine young man, he…likes Jack”, she said, avoiding her gaze. Her father surely didn’t like the Carrem girl, who spoke Turkish and read Mary Wollstonecraft’s books. Adele remembered how she felt her stomach turn at that confession. Eventually, she went to the wedding, where Marie’s parents openly avoided her: she danced with the lads, congratulated Jack and hugged her friend, wishing her all the best for her future. Then, once she closed the door behind her at home, she collapsed to the ground, crying all the tears she had swallowed back: after Mother and Papa, she had lost her only love. Her sobs woke Hileni, who was too young at the time to realize or understand but her little sister wrapped her tiny arms around her, begging her to stop crying because “I am here, Adal”.

Yet that reminder brought no comfort to her this time. It did in the past, but not now, not when it came to losing Zetta.

Adele shook her head: there was no point in dwelling in such thoughts, they would not bring the woman she loved back, they would only make her heart ache more. As if on cue, a new customer walked into the shop, saving her from a grim memory lane: the Carrem girl was silently grateful to the oblivious man asking for a bowler hat.

Later that day, as she was closing up, Tim, the delivery boy stopped by.

"Hey, Miss Adele! Mail for you" he announced chirpily, handing her a letter.

"Just Adele is fine, Tim, remember?" she corrected him, offering a tired smile.

"I wasn't expecting any mail though..." she added, taking the letter into her hands.

"It better be something nice, Adele, cause I didn't go all this way to make you sad" he gallantly commented, tapping his head and winking encouragingly before walking back to his bike. "Have a nice evening!"

Adele looked down at the letter with a mix of confusion and anxiety: could it be bad news? Maybe from Blighty? No, the stamp was American and there was no indication that it could be the police or James...the penmanship looked familiar though: where had she seen it before? Unable to remember, she unsealed it and she found out that it was an invitation to the premiere screening of Zetta's latest film, Surviving the Titanic. So, Zetta didn't forget about me..., Adele though as a familiar warmth spread inside her. Unless it was Sabine's idea -Sabine! That was her writing! - but no, for some reason she couldn't believe that: perhaps this could be a new start, their new start. God, how she missed her...

When she reached to get the two tickets, a slip of paper fell from the folds of the invitation right on the counter. It was handwritten and the penmanship was different. Zetta's?

"Please come, my love. I must see you again. Yours, Zetta"

The last ray of sun illuminated Adele's face. A tear rolled down her cheek as her lips curled into a smile.

Yes, it would have been a new start, their new start.

#storyscape #titanic sc #adele carrem #zetta serda #zetta x adele

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theaurorfileshq · 5 years ago

Photo

A S T E R M ON T E R O / A U R O R C A D E T

AGE: Twenty-Two

BADGE NUMBER: U99C01

BLOODSTATUS: No-Maj Born

GENDER/PRONOUNS: Nonbinary, She/They

IDENTIFYING FEATURES: Long dark hair, short skirts, dark academia chic clothing, red lipstick, two black bands tattooed around each wrist. A gold ring hanging from a chain bearing the Astor-Reyes crest, taken from the Manor House.

STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES:

(+): near expert knowledge of non-humanoid dark creatures, arithmancy, ancient runes.

(-): magically volatile, overly cautious in the field, fear of small spaces.

BACKGROUND:

(tw: child abuse, death)

Sometimes childhood is like a festering wound. Aster’s was. She was cut open somehow, left bleeding and hurt, the kind of damage where infection was bound to set in. There was something wrong with her, something intrinsic that set her apart, a glaringly obvious difference between her and her birth parents. They remain dark and sinister figures in her mind, linger like so many nightmares. They crafted her into a monster with no comparison, a beast of repression and hatred and fear, something dark and parasitic latching on to her very soul. It feeds on her, on the magic that blossomed in her.

The more her inherent magic tries to blossom, the more she pushes it down. She finds a place deep within herself and locks it away, a box with a key and a chain around it. Still. Something grows in her until she’s choking on it, yet she doesn’t fear it. The beast is hers, it lives inside her. The beast will want her alive, until it doesn’t. And it’s better than the monsters who live on the outside, a father with hungry and vicious eyes, a mother too apathetic to care what happens to little Aster.

Little Aster is a magnet for pain. Fear grows and festers until it’s anger. Until she’s so small and so furious that she can’t contain it. It’s when the fury grows that everything changes –– what was once quiet inside bursts out. One moment, Aster is afraid and furious. The next second, her house is half gone, and she feels calmer. Her father has fallen and doesn’t get up anymore, and it seems like in the blink of an eye what remains of their home is flooded with people. Neighbors that are herded away by official looking grown ups.

Abel and Cassandra Montero are the opposite of everything she’s ever known. They’re the Aurors who come and talk to her, look her in the eyes and then share concerned glances with one another. The internal and external battles of her childhood must be written across her for all to see, to be understood within an instant. Abel carries her away from the house in their arms, and she glances her father as they do, the strange markings left on him where he lays, the smokey darkness of the room. She turns her face away, presses it against Abel instead, and lets herself be rescued from the life she knew before.

They take her back to their office and sit her down in a chair in a little room. Abel gives her hot chocolate and talks to her in quiet tones, but she can hear Cassandra on the other side of the door, for a few moments. She’s talking to someone. Arguing with someone. When she comes back in she’s calm and sweet, and she brings someone with her. A strange man in strange clothes, light blue and calming. He asks her questions. He waves his stick. His eyes grew uncertain and a little fearful, because he must see the broken things in her as well as her parents used to. The beast that lives beneath the girl.

She is something strange and unique, they tell her. An obscurial. There really is something dark inside her. But she’s lucky, too. Because she isn’t a lost cause, because it hasn’t taken her completely. There have been so few people like her, but still developments have been made in recent years. They can’t take the monster out of her at this point without killing her. They can’t let it run rampant without killing her. But they can find a middle ground. Her new life begins, and it’s one based on balance. A journey of acceptance, away from the self hatred and fear that festers inside her. Wards and chains around certain parts of her mind and certain parts of her magic.

Abel and Cassandra Montero adopt her, and it is a revelation. Aster has never had parents like them. Kind, and patient, and full of more love than she really knew was possible. They don’t yell. They don’t hurt her. They don’t make her feel the need to hide. It helps her to understand that her old life wasn’t what it should have been –– the so called love there wasn’t really love at all. She’s still a flighty child, skittish eyes and a humminbird quick heartbeat. She still panics when she should settle down instead. She’s oh so very scared that one day, she’ll hurt them, that the thing inside her will stop playing nice. But she rarely feels the choking smoke of the monster that lives inside her.

When you look at things objectively, she grows up as a happy girl. The early years of her life as a Montero are plagued by magical therapy, lessons in control. There will always be things that Aster can’t master –– not with a literal parasite living off of her magic. The most important thing she learns is control. Stay steady, stay calm, keep everything in perfect balance. It would be so dangerous if Aster ever lost control, life and death could hang in the balance. It was a heavy weight to put on the shoulders of a young girl, and she doesn’t think she would have been able to handle it without Able and Cassandra there to guide her. Her new parents.

Abel, in particular, understands exactly the way she must be feeling. They aren’t afflicted in the same ways, but there is an overlap in their struggle. Aster and her problems with the flow of power, how sometimes her magic sputters out completely, fed on too heavily by the beast inside her. How sometimes she has too much of it. How she, in all actuality, might be a ticking time bomb. She’s a lucky one, she knows, because she still has more than they did, because she wasn’t attacked in the same way.

When Aster goes away to school, she writes them a letter every day for the first month. She settles in much quicker than she expected, and all of the professors have been briefed on her situation. Aster is given every opportunity to grow, extra lessons to try and refine her control. She keeps her affliction a secret to all of her peers, because the choice is hers above all else, who she wants to tell. She can count the number of people who know on one hand. Aster wants more than anything to be a normal girl, to have friends and to fit in, not to be the monster at the end of the story.

She’s a good student. She strives to be the very best, the smartest and the fastest. She manages to climb her way to the top of her year and stay there. For a little while, it seems like she’s going to get everything she wants. Aster has a life, and a family who loves her, and she’s holding on to her control with careful fingers. She has a best friend, too –– until she doesn’t. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe it’s the desperate crush she has, maybe it’s the way that everything seems like the end of the world when you’re a teenage girl. They have a fight, and Aster gets so angry that she can practically taste the smoke at the back of her throat, she can feel the bonds that hold her monster tight fraying. She feels ready to explore. So she runs away instead, hides her shaking body in an empty classroom, and realises that she’ll never be a normal girl.

Aster doesn’t think she’ll ever be safe. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be right. Acceptance is so important, to get through something like this, but Aster can’t accept herself. She puts herself on a tighter leash, tries to close off as much as she can. She becomes a colder person, and she doesn’t get attached anymore. She still has friends, but not as many as she did before, and there’s a distance now caused by her much more icy persona. Everyone is held at arm’s length.

Her parents are her heroes. That much hasn’t changed since she was a little girl. She’s always thought they were the bravest, the best people on this earth. Abel and Cassandra make her want to be as good as them. They’re exactly the reason why she wants to become an auror. Maybe that reason is silly, but it’s her reason. Cassandra changes the world every day she goes to work. Abel did the same, until they started to change the world in different ways. Aster knows that she can do the same thing, that despite everything wrong with her, she is a good person.

She does well, at the Academy. She approaches it with the same dark determination that Cassandra did, so many decades ago. With a chip on her shoulder and a fire behind her eyes. Aster doesn’t make many friends, but she doesn’t want to. She wants to make it through and graduate, make it on to a squad, and change the world. Luckily for her, she usually achieves everything she sets her mind to. In her heart of hearts, she had hoped that she could join Central Squad and work beneath her mother. The more logical part of her mind knows why that isn’t possible, and is perfectly content to settle for Pacific.

#auror #aster montero #written by wren

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andidrewrose · 5 years ago

Text

And I drew roses

Andrew Rose

Information

Name : Andrew Cole

Surname : Courtenay Rose

Nickname : Andy, Drew

Title : Earl of Carlisle

Age : 20 years old, coming for his 21st

Nationality: British

Sexual orientation : Bisexual

Activities : Painting, drawing, fencing, horse riding, reading, learning

House : Napoleon

Major : Psychology

Year : 3rd

Story

Andrew was born in England, to a white wealthy earl father and a black British-Caribbean mother.

He has an older sister who is studying politics at Oxford, and a little brother who is still in high school.

He grew up in their family mansion located in a town in the countryside. Until he was height.

He accidentally killed his father in the woods during an archery practice when he was eight years old.

Their neighbours accused his mother for the crime, became very racists towards what was left of this family, forcing the Courtenays to move from town. They ended up in a town called Whitney.

When his father died, they lost most of the family’s incomes and everyone tried to suck money out of them in every way they could. Their status went from very wealthy to high middle class.

His father’s mother didn’t really want to help the daughter-in-law she never liked, but she loved her grandchildren and offered to pay for their education if she could see them regularly.

When going to their grandma’s, which was a whole floor of the castle she ran, Andrew used to take fencing lessons and do some horse riding, along with going to parties. With his grandmother could have a taste of the aristocracy life he missed when he killed his father.

He was desperate to quit England for any other country. With the advice of his mother and grandmother he chose Astor Academy to learn psychology. (full story at the end)

Facts

Due to the big trauma he endured as a child, Andrew has been struggling with mental health his whole life.

He draws and paints since the accident. He also started doing graffiti when he was a teenager. This is one of his way of coping.

His grandmother sells his paintings to her friends and to some amateurs by exposing them in her castle.

One of his recurrent pattern in his paintings are red dots, a vivid image from the accident.

One unhealthy way was drugs, when he was in high school. He finally realized it wasn’t what he needed when coming to Astor Academy.

His real drug is danger, despair, and the adrenaline that comes with it. He realized he only felt alive when he was facing his death.

Psychology is his major because he has a history with psychologist and psychiatrists and he feel like he needs to help other children like him. He wants to specialize in Child Psychology.

He has a british accent.

He took his mother’s name when enlisting for Astor, as a way to let this tragedy and a part of himself behind him.

No one knows that he killed his father. And doesn’t want to tell anybody.

Character

Most of the time, Andrew is pretty chill. He likes to hang out with people, without being too outgoing.

In a group, he won’t be the most talkative one, but he will never miss an opportunity to make a sarcastic comment. As youngsters say, he is “fluent in sarcasm”.

He likes to tease his friends, making them laugh and laughing with them.

He will gladly play along with someone’s prank or act.

He makes sure to always compliment his friends when they do something that needs complimenting, for their work, their outfit, their ideas, their good actions...

He’s not easy to anger, but he can be easily annoyed.

He is very good-mannered and polite. His “posh” vibes are always fighting with his “hooligan” vibes.

He doesn’t want anyone to know he has a title and that he comes from aristocracy. He tells everyone he’s from an average rich family.

When it comes to him, his feelings and his past, he’s very secretive. Which can make him look like he’s being mysterious.

If he is going through a depressed phase, he can be very moody.

If you get him on a topic that he has strong opinions or that he is passionate about, he would gladly talk hours about it.

He takes his studies seriously, and even if he likes to go out, you will often see him in the library or his room studying.

/tw : sh\ Though he doesn’t harm himself anymore, he is drawn to self-harming situations, aka dangerous ones. He will seek a way to make himself pay for what he did.

Interpretation of the character based on the information given on the skeletons (one paragraph):

Made-up confidence. Perfect appearance. Wit and sarcasm. His smile can charm but, no matter how good he is at controlling everything about himself, attempting to reach for the boy he was, his eyes don’t fool anyone. Truth is, Andrew has never really been well since the incident. He has rarely felt alive at all. Seeking comfort in everything he could, alcohol, drugs, sex... Anything that may cover the void. But all of this didn’t do it for him. Numbing himself away from reality never really was the solution, even if he was convinced it was, for a moment back in high school. But the emptiness was still there. No, he realized this was not his cure. In order to feel alive, he had to feel like he was pushing himself to the edge of death. Waking his brain the fuck up. Tricking it into thinking he was going to die, so he could have access to this primitive part of his brain, survival mode, that made him feel so alive. Challenge. Danger. Fear. Adrenaline. Desperate hope. However, one who doesn’t really know him couldn’t guess this side of him. He seems so charming and sweet...

His only healthy way of copying mechanism is art. Painting. Graffiti tags. Leaving a permanent mark. One that cannot be erased so easily. Greater than oneself. At the end, the final result is the history of every line you made. Either if you meant to trace it or not.

History (give your chosen character a brief background):

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. His life. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

He was — is — the son of an English earl. Growing up in a respectable family, in the mansion in this lovely english town, with his sister and brother, his parents, the grandparents and cousins never too far away. It should have been a pretty, happy, privileged life.

Living far from the stress and pollution of the city, in a rich town where you grow up with the same people and create unbreakable bonds that will last forever after you all part ways and when you meet, five, ten years later, the friendship and camaraderie never faded away, and you talk about the good old days and how simple were things before. Getting every luxury you would have feel like wanting to have, affording every trip, every piece of clothing, every jewelry, every unnecessary whim. Getting the best education of the country, with special individual teachers, piano, violin, french, german, horse riding, boxing, fencing lessons. Getting into Eton. Not having to bother to acknowledge the price of anything. Having the possibility to do everything you fucking want because money and status can repay for everything, because money can buy everything, and everyone. Meeting the elite of the nation in splendorous parties and gatherings. Being beautiful, handsome and resplendent. Envied. Desired. Feeling powerful and invincible.

But none of this happened to Andrew. Not to his sister, or his brother. All because of him. He is responsible for so many of his family’s problems. And it has always been a burden he had to carry alone. And a fucking big one.

His father died when he was eight. Colin Courtenay was a British noble and business man. He came from a rich family and intended to make his family even richer. He had ambition. He was well respected amongst his peers. He was at the head of a big fortune and when he unexpectedly died, the mess that came as the aftermath was a nightmare.

Colin’s wife, Andrew’s mother, Sarah Courtenay, was already devastated enough by her loss, but she had to bear the accusations that were made against her. This was a little town, and gossip and rumors are the pillars of its life. People knew that Sarah did not came from a family as rich as her husband’s, quite the contrary even, and family’s friends and others would have heard that the couple wasn’t the happiest at the moment. But this was more than gossip, this was real accusations. People in town would accuse her of commanding the murder of her husband. She hired someone to kill her husband in the woods so she would inherit his fortune and title for her son, Andrew. They would spit it at her, along some racist slur directed at her and her children, especially Andrew. From one day to the other, the all town was revealing its true nature. People they considered as friends were turning against them. The harassment wouldn’t stop. They couldn’t live here anymore. They had to get away. All because of him. The thing is, Andrew was responsible for his father’s death.

They first went to some land that was his father’s. But they had to move from there quickly too when the news got to the villagers’ hears. Colin’s mother was also trying to legally take back all her son’s land and wealth, she never trusted her daughter-in-law. She tried to keep the children with her too, but Sarah would never let go of them.

So they quickly moved into a house in Whitney. Sarah, who graduated from college with a science degree, had to find a job, something she hadn’t done since she married Colin. Colin’s investors and associates were stealing money where they could. They threatened her to frame her for her husband’s murder if she tried to take legal actions against them.

Sarah spent years and years fighting for her and her children’s well-being. She was a single mother that came from a poor family from Saint-Vincent, and her husband wasn’t here anymore to protect her, all the rich vultures were trying to have a piece of this meal.

Andrew had to watch her mother’s life, all of their lives, go to ruins. Because of one thing he did.

Her mother and grand parents fed him lies. It’s not your fault honey, it’s not your fault. Maybe they meant it. Or they were better liars than his siblings. The way his sister looked at him was speaking for itself. She saw everything.

Their father’s mother would eventually help them. Only because she still loved her grandchildren and demanded to see them when she pleased. She would in exchange pay their education and teach them how to run her castle and the domain once she will be gone. Even in his grandmother Andrew could feel resentment towards his person.

The boy just wanted to run away from all this.

He tried building himself a new life in Whitney, new friends, girlfriends, boyfriends. But growing up messed up, biracial and bisexual in a group of uneducated boys, he quickly came to conclusion that nothing will ever be normal again, especially not him.

He sought for a way out. And when he found it, he took it. That’s how he ended up studying psychology in America.

The topic of the change of his last name has been brought many time by him to his mother, so people wouldn’t link them to the drama. She considered it more than once, but never went through. She wanted to claim their belonging to this family and her husband’s memory. However, Andrew made his own decision and took his mother’s name when coming to America. A fresh start.

#astorooc #the despondent #andrew rose #bio

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