#too... unsatisfyingly neat

[surgeonquadpaw]

Can't be mad at the Plot Device Child plot device in the Plot Device Child franchise huh....

I guess it's hard to be mad at a Destined by the Force plotline in the Destined by the Force story

[the-hopeful-squid]

One thing about deliberately unsatisfying story endings for the sake of (usually a pretentious/condescending version of) 'realism' that always irks me is that...

If I want unsatisfying reality, I can read the news.

If I want actual, neat-endings-or-satisfying-conclusions-don't-always-exist reality, I can engage with, y'know... reality?

At the end of the day, fictional stories are exactly that: fictional. Made up. Controlled entirely by their authors, who have full power to make their fictional worlds go whatever direction they choose.

If I want something unsatisfyingly grim, I can find plenty of that in reality. As a bonus, then I actually might have a chance to do something that makes the real world I live in a little bit less grim, too.

Stories are a break from reality. Unsatisfying endings in stories are just... unsatisfying. As far as I'm concerned, it's bad writing that tries to justify a lack of authorial creativity with some pretentious appeal to a myopically grim version of 'reality' that I find frankly irritating and boring.

(To be clear: I'm not talking about tragedies here, or low-key 'slice of life' stories, or stories that are well set up from the start to be complex journeys whose endings are neither wholly good nor wholly bad and may leave as many unanswered questions as they started with. I'm talking about stories whose set up doesn't match their ending. Stories where the author wanted the audience to feel 'unsatisfied' with the story itself at the end, not stories intended to leave the audience satisfied with a well executed grimly tragic tale.)

Audiences deserve endings to stories that are satisfying and fun to discover, whether or not those endings are the most 'realistic' outcome.

If it's not a news story or a history book or the like, then it's not reality already.

So maybe an ending which is satisfying & narratively consistent with the fictional story that's been written should be prioritized, instead?

[psychosistr]

SHUSH/FOWL Double Agent “Maravilla”

Art by @thefriendlyfour​ (thanks for the character designs, and thanks to @starlightmoth for help with the dress designs!), full bio below the cut.

Physical Description: A tall and lovely purplish jay with purple feathers across most of her body except for the black feathers on her chest, neck, and most of her head. “Hair” feathers are two-toned with the outside/top being black and the inside being purple. While working for SHUSH, her hair is kept tied up in a bun that only shows the black part of her hair as per protocol to keep it neat, but one long, wavy strand of black bangs always hangs down on the right side of her face. While working for FOWL or off the clock, she figuratively and literally lets her hair down and reveals her true colors in a natural Bolivian-style loose wave with both colors of hair on full display. Beak is purple with black lipstick while in her FOWL outfit.

Outfit: Has two main outfits that she’s seen in- one for SHUSH and one for FOWL.

Her SHUSH outfit is in the standard grey suit-style with a white button-up shirt beneath the traditional grey coat. Skirt ends just above her knees and has pockets below her black leather belt with a circular silver buckle. Accessories are kept simple while working with SHUSH, sticking to black french-heel style back-seam stockings, black loafer-style heels, silver oval-framed glasses, a black neck tie with a white ivory marigold-shaped tie pin, and a matching black hair band with a white marigold-shaped piece on the front to hold up her hair bun.

Her FOWL outfit is a far cry from her SHUSH one, going with a stream-lined but figure-flattering red sleeveless asymmetrical halter-top dress. The bottom of her gown is lined with black down feathers (she’ll never say if they’re real or fake) and the right side has a black marigold-outlined pattern. Her accessories are much flashier than her SHUSH outfit, too, consisting of a gleaming silver chain-link belt that doubles as a hand-wrap for martial arts when necessary, a golden-chained necklace with a black onyx stone carved into a marigold, matching golden bangles and rings with round onyx stones, sheer black thigh-high stockings with black lace garter belts, and shiny black ankle-strap platform heels with tiny silver marigold-shaped buckles.

Gender: Female

Sexual Orientation: Extremely flirtatious lesbian.

Age: 28

Nicknames: Mara, Mari, Marigold, Vi, Ms.Flores.

Real Name: Marisol Flores

Background:

Born in Bolivia, Marisol Flores lived what many would consider an average life. She had a nice family that wasn’t too cold or too forgiving, lived comfortably middle class, and graduated from high school with good enough grades to get into her desired college with a decent amount of grant money.

While her life was comfortable, Marisol never really held any passion for her studies and quietly worried that she was just doing what was expected of her- something that would eventually lead her to an unsatisfying but stable job with an unsatisfyingly mundane future.

On her way to class one day, though, Marisol’s future took a drastic turn: She took a less crowded route to school and stumbled into a battle between a small team of FOWL and SHUSH agents. At first, she was scared of being caught in the crossfire and possibly dying. Soon, however, that fear turned to excited adrenaline and she realized that, for the first time in her life, she felt truly ALIVE.

After surviving the firefight unnoticed and unharmed, Marisol devoted her time to finding out more about the groups she saw that day. It took a few years and a lot of digging to find out who exactly both FOWL and SHUSH were (most of her methods being less than legal), but the thrill of excitement and danger spurred her on.

Finding connections to both organizations in Calisota, she scraped together her meager savings and bought a one-way ticket to America, leaving her hometown, as well as her family, and never looking back.

Marisol impressed both organizations at different times by locating their bases and asking for membership, proving her cunning and her worth by passing the dangerous tests and trials they put her through.

It’s unknown which organization she allied herself with first, but both believe her to be a double agent that they themselves planted within the enemy’s side- neither group knowing her true intentions or where her loyalties, if she has any, really lie.

Current Position:

Within SHUSH, Agent Maravilla is considered their top informant and “enemy information acquisition specialist”, providing them with information on FOWL’s more diabolical plans and less guarded bases/outposts.

Within FOWL, Agent Maravilla is a valuable mole planting viruses in SHUSH’s computer systems, sending copies of their most confidential documents, and tipping FOWL off to any banks currently providing funds to SHUSH so they can “coincidentally” be robbed later.

Personality:

Maravilla is best defined by three traits: She is secretive, a massive flirt, and an adrenaline junky.

Always keeping people around her at arm’s length to avoid them finding out the true nature of her double-agent status and questioning her intentions, many of her fellow agents on both sides view Maravilla as an elusive and secretive enigma who will be there and gone before they can even blink.

Still, despite her natural stance on keeping her work matters a secret and being resistant to letting anyone in, she can never resist the chance to hit on a beautiful woman. She’s charming and smooth in her approaches, able to make more than a few supposedly straight women reconsider their sexual orientation.

For the ones she’s especially fond of, whether romantically or she just finds them fun to flirt/talk with, she’ll leave them a purple or red marigold as a token of affection/calling card with an otherwise anonymous gift of the lady-in-question’s favorite snack.

Delving even further into Maravilla’s psyche after getting past the secretive enigma and the charming flirt, though, lies a more adventurous side that is still, at its core, the reason she joined both organizations- her love of thrilling, life-or-death situations and the danger that comes with both jobs.

The more deadly the situation she’s in, the happier she is with it, often throwing her enemies off because they don’t know how to deal with someone so excited to nearly die.

“Surrender now or we WILL kill you!”

“Ooooh, really?! Come on then, do it!”

“I..uh...huh? What the heck is wrong with this woman..?”

Still, despite her adrenaline-junky nature, she’s not (completely) suicidal and will still take the opportunity to fight back or escape when it presents itself- often doing so at the last possible second to get the maximum danger-high she craves.

Interesting Bonus Facts:

Speaks Spanish and English on a regular basis, but also speaks Portugese and Aymara from time to time, even if it’s mostly to herself or to swear without being understood.

Fighting style involves quick, sharp slaps and hand-chops combined with devastating elbow strikes and sharp kicks/stomps from her deadly heels.

This style would best be described as the martial art of aikido.

Best example would be Anna Williams from the Tekken series.

Bonus note- she’d totally cosplay Anna given the chance.

In addition to her martial arts skills, she’s also known to keep some deadly backups hidden up her literal and metaphorical sleeves in the form of drugged needles hidden in the long-sleeves of her SHUSH uniform that can knock out enemies or make them hallucinate, as well as a few throwing knives strapped to the lacy garter belts of her FOWL clothing.

Has a soft spot for cheesy romance novellas and telenovelas, and will often be found reading/watching some in her free time or while waiting for a meeting.

Is surprisingly good at football since she played it with her siblings growing up.

Do not ever call it soccer around her or she will kick the ball right into your face.

Has deadly aim, even while wearing heels.

Could totally pull THIS off with ease.

Despite knowing it’s likely an unrealistic fantasy with the way she lives her life, Maravilla really DOES want to get a girlfriend (or possibly more than one, she’s not opposed to polyamory if she likes all parties involved) someday.

[mst3kproject]

The Face of Marble

This movie has a zombie dog.  It’s also got John Carradine from The Unearthly and Robert Shayne from Teenage Caveman, and was directed by William Beaudine, who brought us Design for Dreaming.  But honestly, who cares about that when there’s a zombie dog?

On a storm-wracked cliff somewhere live mad scientists Dr. Randolph and Dr. Cochrane, who are trying to raise the dead but aren’t very good at it.  Their first experimental subject, a drowned sailor, promptly dies all over again when lightning strikes the Frankenstein equipment.  This was probably a lucky escape, because subject two, Mrs. Randolph’s dog Brutus, comes back to life as a bulletproof zombie with a thirst for blood and the ability to walk through walls!  They get back to work on improving their technique, and when Mrs. Randolph herself later dies in a tragic matchmaking accident, the two scientists figure she may as well be subject three.  It kinda works, and kinda doesn’t… but not in the way anyone expected, especially me.

I guess I have to explain ‘tragic matchmaking accident’. Elaine Randolph’s ethnic stereotype maid, Maria, wants out of this place and has decided that the best way to bring it about is to have her mistress and Dr. Cochrane fall in love and run off together, taking her with them.  A combination of voodoo and persuasion seems to be on the verge of bringing this about when Dr. Cochrane’s pre-existing fianc��e Linda shows up to surprise him on his birthday.  Maria therefore sets out to murder Linda by releasing toxic smoke into her bedroom, but doesn’t know that Linda and Elaine have switched rooms because Linda freaked out when the ghostly Brutus wandered through hers in the middle of the night. It was much shorter to just say ‘tragic matchmaking accident’.

That probably gave you a pretty good idea of just what a dumb and contrived movie this is.  The print is also pretty terrible, old and scratchy and with poor sound – and yet it’s actually kind of fun to watch.  The Face of Marble is a bit slower than it should be despite being only an hour and a quarter long, and the ending unfortunately makes no sense, but the plot twists managed to surprise me a couple of times.  Nobody here is a great actor but nobody’s really terrible, either. You can tell who’s who and what’s going on.  For something I would watch, it’s a decent film

What I really liked about it, though, was the treatment of the characters.  For all I’ve called them mad scientists, Randolph and Cochrane don’t really fall into that ‘type’.  They’re not trying to create an indestructible army or Show Those Fools or anything, they want to save lives: Randolph talks about people who’ve drowned or asphyxiated, people for whom rescue came just a few minutes too late. Nor do they display the mad scientist’s typical lack of conscience.  Randolph gets so caught up in his work that he euthanizes Brutus the dog, but he’s absolutely sure his process will bring the animal back as good as new.  When this doesn’t work, he feels terrible about it and hides it from Elaine, partly so she won’t be angry but partly because he’s deeply ashamed of himself.

The incident also destroys his confidence in the project. When Elaine dies, it’s Cochrane who talks him into trying to resurrect her, since he has been working on the formula and he now believes it will work.  Randolph almost refuses, saying he’d rather see Elaine actually dead than become some monster like the dog, and Cochrane has to do quite a bit of convincing.  What we see in these two men is a folie à deux – each would be quite reasonable on his own, but when they can play off and encourage each other they end up doing unbelievably awful things.  That’s kind of neat, and makes it more believable that they would try the experiment on Elaine even after their previous failures.

The two men’s relationships with the women in their lives also have some complexity.  The backstory tells us that Randolph saved Elaine’s life by removing a brain tumor, and subsequently fell in love with and married her.  Despite this, he doesn’t seem to spend much time with her, and she appears to be downright intimidated by him.  Elaine is shown to prefer confiding in Cochrane rather than confronting Randolph about her fears, despite the fact that Cochrane’s reaction is invariably condescending.  On the other hand, Cochrane is very tender with his own fiancée, Linda, and actually listens to her when she tells him she doesn’t like Randolph and thinks they both need to get away from this place!

Elaine and Linda are set up, both by the writers and by Maria the sorceress, as romantic rivals for Cochrane.  You’d think this would lead to a lot of petty hostility between them, but the movie avoids that, too.  They are fairly cool towards each other at first meeting, but quickly make peace after Linda’s sighting of the zombie dog.  By the time they’re about to part they’re still not best friends, but they clearly don’t dislike each other.  Linda has figured out that Elaine has a crush on Cochrane but as long as Cochrane isn’t going to act on it she won’t let it worry her.  She could have been a villain in this story, as could Randolph and Cochrane themselves, but the writers avoid taking the easy way out.

Instead, the villain of this story is Maria.  The situation would never have arisen if she hadn’t attempted to murder Linda, and later we see her use both the police and the zombies trying to get herself out of the mess she’s gotten into. Unfortunately, this is where the movie starts to fall apart.

A few days after the undead Brutus leaves the lab by leaping right through the wall, a detective shows up at the house to ask Dr. Randolph about a series of attacks on local livestock.  Randolph identifies the culprit as an animal suffering from ‘hemomania’, or a need to drink blood.  When Elaine comes back from the dead, then, we expect her to do so as a vampire. Everything we’ve seen so far seems to be leading up to that idea.  When she comes to and appears to be tired, but all right, we assume the condition will set in eventually.

It never does.  Instead, Maria is suddenly able to control the undead Elaine and Brutus! Dr. Randolph soon figures out that it was Maria who killed Elaine, and in his anger and grief he considers stabbing her to death until Cochrane talks him out of it.  In order to save herself, Maria has Elaine stab Randolph, then go back to bed and forget it happened.

Where did that come from?  We have never seen the slightest indication that Maria can do this.  Whenever she has been working magic, such as leaving effigies under people’s pillows or preparing potions, we’ve never seen any evidence that she actually has supernatural powers.  The love charms were suggestion and the poison was simple chemistry!  The film-makers had ample opportunity to set something up here, by having her take control of the zombiefied Brutus through similar actual magic, but they didn’t do that. We just see Maria sitting in front of a fire waving her arms… then Brutus comes into Elaine’s room, Elaine rises in a trance, and Maria just hands her a knife and orders her to stab away, as if she has the woman under hypnosis.  Did I miss something?

At the end, the cops get the real story from another servant (I’m tempted to insert a quip about how you can tell it’s fiction because the police listen to a black man, but we’re way beyond that being funny) and show up to arrest Maria, but she’s already committed suicide, and footprints in the sand show that Elaine and Brutus have just wandered off into the ocean. Okay.  Does that mean anything?  Are they gonna drown or just wander around on the bottom and fight sharks like in Zombie 2?  Did Maria make her do it or not?  Is Elaine even aware that there’s anything wrong with her?  Earlier she didn’t seem to be, and nobody told her what happened… she seems to think she was merely ‘taken ill’.

The feeling I get from all this is that the writers didn’t know what to do with Zombie-Elaine.  They were too chicken to have her go around tearing throats out because then she wouldn’t be attractive anymore.  They can’t kill her because they’ve already established that the zombies are bulletproof and they can’t think of any other way to do it.  So they just have her leave, mysteriously and unsatisfyingly, and completely squander several opportunities they’ve set up for themselves.

Elaine wondering what’s wrong with her, unable to help herself even as she’s horrified by her own actions, would easily have been the scariest thing in the movie.  Randolph and Cochrane realizing that what came back isn’t quite Elaine, and having to deal with what they’ve done, would have been the most heart-wrenching.  They could even have had the two of them, formerly unbelievers, go to Maria for magical help – only to have Maria refuse to do anything because she, as previously established in dialogue, really does love her mistress.  The ending could have been really cool, but they just ran out of ideas.

I did enjoy about the first two thirds of The Face of Marble.  By the time Elaine finally dies I was getting a little impatient to see some actual zombies, but the film then went in a totally different direction, in a bad way. The ending doesn’t feel like a plot twist, because a plot twist should be something that makes sense of things we’ve already seen.  It’s doubly disappointing, because the attention paid to the characters and their motivations and relationships really made it look like writers knew what they were doing.

[syd-belcourt]

TASK TWO / STEEL BRIDGE

The weather was beginning to warm up in Lovell. After a few weeks of the mercury uncertainly raising and lowering, it seemed to be content now to drift a little higher than the day before, defrosting the earth and chasing away the chill that had set in over the course of a long winter. Spring, it seemed, was finally on its way.

Sydney celebrated the first day that she didn’t need a jacket by tugging rubber boots on over the pant legs of paint stained coveralls and leaving her beanie behind. With her dark hair secured in a neat braid, headphones in and a sketch pad tucked into the front pocket of her clothes, she trudged out of Perkins, destination unknown and undetermined. The woods, as Frost promised, were lovely, dark and deep— so she veered off of the path that wound through the school towards the lake and darted under the thick cover of ancient trees.

In the forest, the air had a smell of mossy growth and the dampness from the ground made each step slick. Syd’s eyes darted along the path she forged, looking for new growth, hoping to be inspired by the unfurl of tiny, fresh leaves. Her airpods were dead, something she’d realized when it was too far to go back, so her phone sat in her pocket with no purpose and it was only her thoughts that she walked with. Last time she’d been out like this, she’d spent an entire afternoon, ignoring calls and texts, returning only before it grew too dark to put off the trip back home.

Without quite intending it, she found herself at her destination. Dark beams, seemingly immune to rust made up the bridge that spanned across the woods. Beneath it was a valley of earth that was quite walkable, but Sydney liked to imagine a past where water had gorged its hungry way through the centre of the woods, forcing the construction of something so unnatural in the midst of nature to allow for the crossing to the other side.

She’d never made it across, every attempt had been when she was alone, growing too scared when she’d seen the glisten of dew off of the structure that promised a quick fall in a place where no one would think to find her. Instead, she perched on the first beam, dangling long legs in the gap, pulling her sketch book and pencil from her pocket. It was quiet here, a little corner of Lovell that seemed as intimate as a room with a locked door: she was alone but had access to infinite space. A bird flew over the bridge and her head craned to watch it— Sydney felt sad when it came out of view, knowing that there was one less creature to share the moment with her.

In her hand, her pencil formed the images of faces that she hadn’t realized she was thinking about. A young Emmylou Harris, with her dark hair framing the sides of her face, Fiona Apple with her lips half parted to say something. Then, herself— whose gaze she couldn’t get quite right, no amount of eraser marks seemed to capture a feeling she couldn’t name, something that didn’t form easily on the page. She sketched, then resketched until a single page had been rubbed fresh so many times that a hole wore through the fibres of it and exposed a charcoal drawing on the other side. Any easy assumption of what she was trying to capture fled her and Syd ripped the page out, tossing it violently towards the valley that lay just under the stretch of bridge she sat on.

It, like most things formed out of paper, caught wind and flitted up before making a lazy descent, travelling unsatisfyingly to the muddy earth, where it lay, stark and bald. She tried again. Shaking hands etched the sides of her face onto the page, formed the bridge of her nose and the curve of her cheekbones but the result, every time, was something unnatural and uncanny, like a figure formed out of wax. Page after page hurtled to the ground before they collected like pale leaves, carrying themselves out of sight when the wind caught their edges.

A deep unhappiness curled in her chest, as ugly as a scar and she wondered, like a scar, how long it had been there before she had just noticed. Her jaw ached from teeth that had been clenched for too long and her head pounded. Syd tongued at the inside of her cheek, at skin that was ridged and raw— before she ripped out what appeared to be the last page of the book. It felt symbolic then, to be holding the covers of something that had nothing inside. She closed it, the edges tapping together with no paper between to cushion them. Had she of been Marlowe, she’d of turned it into an exhibit all on it’s own, put the sketchbook on a pedestal, called it her most profound piece of work.

Self Portrait, by Sydney Belcourt.

He’d probably call it brilliant, congratulate her for such thoughtfulness. Maybe she’d get her fair share of comments as her professors milled around it, hands behind their backs while they examined the commonplace item. Maybe then she’d get her magazine recognition, her newspaper article. A spread that called her something to watch out for.

The jealousy was short lived and burned itself out, leaving an ache in her chest and a deep shame for the want of greater things, unearned. She looked at the book once more, before tilting her wrist, and letting that too drop between the beams. The result was a kind of emptiness, a hollow feeling she hadn’t known before and had no name for.

On her long walk home, without music and through the trees, she realized what it was.

She was giving up.

[synthient]

poor Duelist Kingdom's like the underappreciated middle child sandwiched in between its two flashier, more popular siblings (s0 and Battle City), even though it has the strongest story arc in the entire series

Battle City introduces a bunch of cool ambitious concepts/threads, drags them out way too long, and then lets most of them fizzle out unsatisfyingly....s0 just wanders around in circles throwing stuff at the walls for 50 chapters....meanwhile Duelist Kingdom ties 3 seperate hero's journeys up in a neat little bow and finds time to finally give ygo an actual overarching plot. where's her respect

[the-knights-who-say-book]

Tower of Ink

Dinah had been printing so long, sometimes she forgot she used to do other things.

Once she’d had a different job, one that was not at the top of this tower, above the smog that lay over the city like foam on waves, always moving. Once she had gone out in that weak gray sunlight. On the ground.

It had been so loud down there. The clicking and rumbling of wagons coming down the streets, the hissing and screeching of the steam that powered them. Bells ringing. Machines clanking. People yelling. So unlike the muffled quiet up here.

What had she been doing on the streets?

She remembers holding another girl’s hand. They had laughed together, dodging around wagons and other pedestrians. And they had sat together, in quiet nooks in the noisy city.

She remembers a smell that wasn’t the oily, grimey stink of the streets. It was hot wet air, bleached clean through copper pipes. They were twined together in the basket formed by twisted pipes against the side of a building. A faded blue dress lay rumpled over her thighs. She remembers their clasped hands in the dip between her knees.

Rema pressed her lips to Dinah’s ear, her cheek, giggled into her hair. “Show me what you’ve written,” she begged. Arms looped together. One girl’s leg over the other’s. Their hands and bodies like puzzle pieces, like interlocking gears.

Dinah slides reams of yellow-white paper into the press. Her pace is brisk. Line them up. Crank the handle. The press comes down with a groan. All her weight on her hands as she stands on tiptoe, pressing the handle down the last few grunting inches. Hair sticks to her damp forehead. Her vision ripples. After years at this job, she knows the telltale sign she needs a break.

She leans against the warm metal of the press, unhooks the flask from her belt and downs water gone unsatisfyingly warm. Swaying less, after a moment she goes back to the handle, begins to crank it up.

Dinah always had stories to show Rema. She wrote them longhand on paper thin and shiny as onion skin. Her handwriting made each letter look like a spindly, twitching, many-armed bug.

She wrote stories about her neighbors, mostly. Sometimes she exaggerated, but mostly they were true. She liked to write about the everyday happenings of the people around her. She liked to make them sound like they were out of a newspaper.

City Shocked By Local Man’s Rejection of Father-in-Law’s Advice

Absent-Minded Woman Has Watered Same Plant Three Times This Morning; Plant’s Reaction Yet Unknown

Unanimous Poll Declares Rema Lockworth Most Beautiful Girl in the Country

Rema laughed and laughed.

The sheets come out thin and flat and covered with thick columns of type, the ink so dark the words seem to bump under her fingers. It smears a little. That’s fine. Her hands are always splotched with ink.

She holds a sheet up to the angled light from the window to check for imperfections in the paper, but her gaze is drawn to her hands instead.

She’d kept her hands clean once. She’d scrubbed off the ink when she was done writing. The idea seems like a strange, distant luxury.

Rema liked stories about fake people, fake things. Dinah would try to write that, sometimes. But her stories weren’t the exuberant fantasies Rema liked to read. Her stories always ended up being about mundane things, even if she wrote them about peculiar people.

“Perhaps,” Rema had said with an almost apologetic smile after Dinah read aloud her story about the Magical Queen Who Presided Over Tax Reform Debates, “you should be a reporter.”

That was right. She had been a petty mechanic.

Dinah stared absentmindedly at the roller that had screeched to a halt, wiping her hands with a rag that only smeared the ink and grease around her hands.

Fetching and carrying parts. Doing the small things that had to be done so grand mechanics could do the big things. Oiling and shining. Not the dainty, precise mastery of a pixie mechanic, crafting tiny toys with spinning wheels and wind-up curiosities. Or the rough, show-offy skill of a grand mechanic servicing steam wagons and ships. Just a grease-stained girl under everyone’s feet, pockets full of screws and cogs.

Rema used to help her scrub her hands and face after work. She would press their noses together with that little smile, eyes closed, and breathe in the lavender-wax scent of soap. Dinah loved that moment. The memory touches her lips and makes them smile.

Her first time using a typewriter had left Dinah breathless. The cool, round keys, subtly concave to fit each finger. The hard, heavy clicks they made beneath her hands. The type bars punching the paper as if they were vexed and in a hurry, dammit. Each little letter precise as the cog in a great machine.

She felt like a grand mechanic.

This roller is particularly prone to complaints. Dinah has taken it apart twice this week. It’s quick work to do it a third time. She refits each piece holding it to the printer, screws them tightly, coaxes them to get along.

The other machines around the tower chug along with their work. Each finished paper slaps against the pile as it slides out. The upbeat rhythm is lost in the clamor of all the machines steaming at once.

Dinah presented her first typed story with pride. It was just two paragraphs about the rescue of a lost dog. She had been slow typing on the borrowed machine.

Rema exclaimed over it appropriately. So professional, with hardly any errors! She could imagine it with a plate-print image of the dog right next to it, with a caption and everything. Just like a real reporter.

Dinah let this go with a smile. She was still a petty mechanic, and no plans to be anything else. She liked the typewriter because it was practical, and because she doted on all machines.

Rema had honey-gold-red hair and her eyes were a deep warm brown. Crooked teeth showed when she smiled. She liked to sit half in Dinah’s lap and gesture expansively with her hands, play with Dinah’s loose curls, tug them out from her cap.

Now, Dinah finds herself touching the curls at the nape of her neck, blinking away the memory of Rema’s bright smile.

Reality taps her shoulder in the form of the pile of papers toppling over. She was fixing the lever. The print run isn’t finished. There is work to do. She shakes her head and gathers up her tools.

They had been together for several years, she remembers now. She should have been moving onto the rigorous training to be a grand mechanic by the time the Rust Ball came around.

The Rust Ball was an exhibition held every five years, and Rema was enchanted by the first one she would be in the city for. New dresses and dancing and eating pastries dusted with sugar and oozing honey! It was all she wanted to talk about.

The great square had been cut off from traffic. Swept, lit with lanterns, swathed in sparkling gold. Baskets of roses hung from every window that overlooked it. Long tables for the exhibits were set up in the middle of every street that branched off the square. Dinah was kept busy day to night helping to prepare. She knew Rema was impatient with her absence, but being at the beck and call of her elders was part of being a petty mechanic.

“So be something else,” Rema said in one of their rare moments together that week. “Apply for a reporter’s job. They get to have lives.”

But that was a fantasy of the mundane kind that Dinah might write but would never live.

She wasn’t going to wear a gown to the ball, and Rema’s fixation on what color, fabric, and style her dress should be ground on her nerves when they did get time together. She started avoiding Rema during her free time. Just until the ball had passed, she told herself. And then they would go back to normal.

The typewriter has been clacking away as Dinah works on other things. When the light through the window reaches the glow of midday, she wipes her hands as clean as possible, stuffs half a sandwich in her mouth, and goes to check on it.

The tentacles are reluctant to show her. They hover around the paper, blocking her view, fussing with the corner of the page.

“Stop that now. Let me see.” She waves the tentacles away — they draw back and curl inwards indignantly. The article she pulls from the typewriter takes up the whole page, headed with: THE THIRTY-FIRST RUST BALL ARRIVES.

Dinah wore her best mechanic suit (black overalls with many neat pockets and no obvious stains over a good black shirt, a black jacket with the sigil of her master mechanic), shoes shined and cap at an angle. Her black curls stuck from one side like the probing arms of a sea anemone.

Rema wore a full-skirted dress of pale pink. Her hair was loose and wavy and her lips were tinted redder than usual. When she threw her arms around Dinah and called her “my handsome mechanic girl,” Dinah blushed and grinned like she’d just won blue ribbon in the exhibition.

But she got frustrated explaining to Rema that she couldn’t leave the table for long, and they both parted a little bitter. When she did finally leave her station — when the ball had gone on into the velvet night and the dancing square was lit with orange lanterns — to find her beautiful tailor girl and get a honey pastry, she saw Rema dancing with a girl in ebony black embroidered with whirls of gold. They spun around and around, and Rema never looked up from her face to notice Dinah standing there, plummeting, frozen, watching them.

When she wandered back to her grand mechanic’s table however long later, mouth sticky with sugar and some amber-colored drink, she got scolded with a snarl and contemptuous anger for taking too long.

Dinah announced quietly that she quit. She left the ball.

“Oh,” Dinah says distantly. “Has it been five years since the last one?”

The tentacles wave and gesture emphatically, but cannot really answer.

The girl in black and gold was named Elliot di’Allo. She was a pixie mechanic. She didn’t write at all, but she read the same kind of books Rema loved. She tinkered bookshelves to bring you the volume you named or described and designed tiny swans that sewed buttons onto fabric with their beaks. The embroidery on her dress had been real metal, meticulously drawn and twisted and shaped and sewn on.

She and Rema got married a few months later. Both brides wore white, with sleeves of silver ribbons crafted to fall like thin lace straps.

Dinah attended the ceremony with her fingers tapping her knees the whole time. She had been practicing her typing. No workshop would take her until she typed fast enough. So she’d drawn a keyboard out on her desk, letter by letter, so she could practice at home.

Letters spun around her head. She typed out phantom stories instinctively whenever her hands were free.

After the ceremony, Dinah bided her time in the corner of the reception until it wouldn’t be astoundingly rude to leave. But when she put her hand on the door, a boy in the black livery of Elliot di’Allo’s family stopped her and requested her presence, with a bow, on behalf of Lady di’Allo.

She wondered, as he led her down a hall, what Elliot could possibly have to say to her, until the boy opened the door to a study and Dinah realized he meant the newly-minted, newly-married, Lady Rema di’Allo.

Dinah scans the article, gaze weary. “Adequate,” she tells the tentacles, which draw back sharply, like the gasp of an offended old woman. She tosses it onto the pile of articles for the next day’s paper. “Do something light. The fashion of the ball. Expected styles. Something about accessories, hair styles, etcetera.” She turns her back and almost lifts her rag to her eyes before remembering it’s filthy.

“I heard you quit the mechanics’ guild.”

“Yeah.” Dinah shoved her hands into her pockets. The suit she wore to the ball was still the nicest thing she owned, so she’d worn it again. “Still doing some freelance work while I interview for jobs, though.”

“I heard—well, Elliot said a friend of hers who owns a printer’s workshop interviewed you. I’m… I’m glad you’re trying to write.”

Dinah stared at her, unwilling to come up with a diplomatic answer.

“I wanted you to have this,” Rema finally says.

This was a typewriter. Old, used, its gilt designs flaking off. The letters on its keys were worn. Some of them were rubbed clean off.

“So you can practice. And write at home.”

“Thank you,” Dinah said flatly. She wasn’t ungrateful. But she wasn’t happy, and she couldn’t fake it.

Rema accompanied her to the door, and the boy carried the typewriter for her, and then she took it, an ungainly, blocky weight in her arms. She didn’t bother glancing back as she descended the two wide steps into the street, clutching the typewriter to her chest.

It took her a few weeks to give the typewriter any attention beyond using it to practice, memorizing the placement of letters and punctuation. She couldn’t waste money on paper until she was getting paid.

But the night she got the entry-level job at a tiny workshop typing up senior writers’ revised articles, she came home to the typewriter, took out her tools and brushes, and began working on it.

She stayed up until the morning hours retouching the letters, the flaking paint and gilt; she fixed sticky keys and the uneven bottom so it would stop wobbling.

Her first solo article was written in that haze of tired bitterness as soon as it was done and dry, on the first ream of paper she set into the machine.

Wedding Between Lady and Tailor Sets Fashion For Future Ceremonies

It was crisp and neutral. Had the writer of this article even attended? Had she known either bride? It was hard to say. She took it with her to work. Her boss decided it was a good filler piece, and said she would take a look at any of her future articles.

It was good job. It was a good life. Even if it Rema wasn’t in it.

At night, Dinah wrote mostly-true stories about real people and real things. And when she got tired of that, she worked on the typewriter.

What Rema had never understood was that the imagination Dina never applied to her writing had always gone into her physical work. Her mind showed her pages of typed articles in elegant fonts, so she carved new letterforms and replaced the old ones. Her thin budget demanded more efficiency, so she took it all apart to modify how much ink it used. And her fancy wondered why she should stop there, so she began to add things. Keys for decorative flourishes, modifications so she could add accents, a lever that when flipped tilted the letter forms to approximate italics.

When her wrists began to ache from the position they held while typing, she began to imagine appendages that would type for her.

Several promotions and a new job later, Dinah wipes her forehead on her sleeve, checks the daylight, and wraps the piles of news in brown paper. Sheets and sheets of her stories, folded into quarters and tucked into each other like two girls slotted together with tangled legs.

It’s a good life, she tells herself. And it almost is.

[leedswarehousemix]

It’s a grey day - a Sunday.      A worn advert has left its pornographic lilt. Its promises of transcendental raspberry sorbet. Trumpet. They have the same books out every time I come in here. Orange and professional covers, self help, dust jackets, size twelve. Excess - stretched to the thousandth leaf. How depressing, I think, it would be to exclusively buy up hardbacks. Their straight spines. Sequences of great ideas. Neat. Embossed. I could never be so on top of things.      Still - I think the same things.      It would be nice, but I can’t be bothered. Not now, anyway.

The sky is greyer against the supermarket linoleum. Lucky I don’t need much - fresher grapes; butter. At home, the sky is kept out by a steadfast, tightly wound rail. Summer clothes I should place away stand guard. The room is closed. Donald Byrd wails, unsatisfyingly because the last unnecessary espresso has knotted every nerve, every synapse sent firing, building point from nothing. Bedrock.      The corners aren’t closing in. That doesn’t happen. They stay, above, fixed, not laughing or touching. Anything resembling Rabelais’ carnival. The birdcage light, humming and doubled in the mirror. Relic, from where, “I worry about you, in that room, on your own,” is said and I only lie. Despite missing the thrum of the washing machine, or the landline bell I never remember until it’s there, I’ll stay away and still think of the absent surfaces, too heavily governed by clean clothes. Mirrors. Overripe fruit. Things like that.      In the kitchen, though, the light is less harsh.

     I also keep the sombre greyscale portrait there, on the brochure, in the same place, where it can draw relative peace to the invisible literary revue, alongside others widely regarded. Urizen, presented for the nonplussed en masse, and decaying. Heaven. And Hell. You can trace the ache, from the collar around the blade, and rest on the small of the back. Fine. Something similar washed over in the tomb of the Basilique de Saint-Denis - heaped stone caskets,  crushed together, gouged out. Completely devoid of Gothic concentricity.  Indistinguishable, from the bricks. Defined in the ground is the cross, as if shone from above.      Above, the prayer candles still have barcodes. The ticket office and the pulpits are open.      What’s Benedictine?

          I remember asking - are you going to the service station?      Yes, if this ----- doesn’t kill me first. As I’m walking back, the traffic lights align, which never happens. In the glazed eyes of motorists, a trance entered while travelling. Unaware of any place but from where you have left, any place but where you will arrive. Any time. The heady warmth, too, produced by poor air conditioning. Unlike the localised heat from the sun on your arm. This goes straight to the dizzy head. To the grotesque motorway, its clockwork. Smooth. Sequential.      There’s the same familiarity, the softness exclusive to older eyes, aware and unwillingly adrift.

                                                                                   I got a girlfriend that’s better than that                                                                                    She has the smoke in her eyes                                                                                    She’s comin’ up, goin’ right thru my heart                                                                                    She’s gonna give me surprise Coffee. Wine. Vegan chilli (more beans, less beef). Mug of tea you could drown in. European cake, vivisected by bare hands. Lemon water, one vase. He kicked hard as he could, watched it leave the atmosphere, and somewhere dies to meet those trailing behind.

[themanicgalaxy]

SPN 4X18 The Monster at the End of This Book

Oh BOY is it time for my Chuck Won Truthers moment

HE DID WIN HE DI[GUNSHOT]

oh and for posterity: Misha showed up at the Oscars, and people were SO surprised to see him he trended on both tumblr and twitter

what IS it with this guy, his life is just batshit insane

IT'S CHUCK!!! FUCK THAT GUY!

THEy'RE LARPING AS THEMSELVES

THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT LARP MEANS

"supernatural" ROLL CREDITS

"...Sam and Dean...?" "that's it!"

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN

THE FUCKING TITLE PAGE

"supernatural by carver Edlund" BECAUSE CHUCK WROTE IT AND CHUCK WO-

"full frontal" HE WASN't EVEN FULL FRONTAL in the SHOW!

THESE ARE ACTUAL TITLES

the last one was the season 3 finale?

Ah I see where the "making fun of the fandom" comes from

At least they make fun of wincest

Samgirls and Deangirls

they make fun of the people criticizing them...kripke?

Dean: please do not publish that book

I AZM WHEZZING

THEIR FUCKING F A C E S

"I'm crying on the inside" WHWPHFASI

THEY GOT QUIZZED ON THEIR OWN LIVES

SAM COULDN'T REMEMBER HIS OWN LSAT SCORE

oH he's writing what's CURRENTLY happening

oh and he doesn't know what's going on

"the last names were never in the books" o p e that's what convinces him

"obviously I'm a god" "You're not a god" GUESS WHAT FUCKE-

All FoR the Sake of Literary Symmetry

THEY MAKE FUN OF BUGS

I liked the ghost ship episode

"to be forced to live bad writing" AIFPSIFP AHAHAHA

although to be fair, the "I'm sorry I'm a shitty god" is INTERESTING where did that come from

Writing is hard gif? THAT'S WHERE THAT CAME FROM

SIAPFS HE WROTE WHAT'S HAPPENING

VONNEGUT!!

the laundromat scene is NEAT

Chuck's SO SHORT

how the hell is the book more invasive,

oh I should write about that

happened in '05 too hm

THE PINK FLOWER BANDAID

"and you drive it like that" SAM SOUNDS SO INSULTED

OH THEY CAN'T LEAVE

ah they try to outsmart prophecy uh oh

Veggie Tofu Burger it looks like it HURT SO BAD

...I can't believe god got them to try actual communication by being a a prophet

heh he likes the..oh no it's the bacon one

YOU CAN'T OUTRUN FATE YALL

oh THE FLICKER AND IT TURNING INTO THE RED MOTEL

ah the demon blood

"unsympathetic" ope

what the HELL is Sam's problem with Dean

ah he sees stars

THE BANDAIDS

"That's cuz I just got hit by a minivan, chuck"

CASTIEL

"he's a prophet of the lord" GUYS HE'S LITERALLY GOD

"i admire your work" wAS HE LOOKING AT DEAN?

oh no he was looking at the book bUT IT WAS CLOSE

M. Night level Douchiness

HE'S NOT A MOUTHPIECE THOUGH

Who's Luke??

wait Did Castiel just make a joke?

and it can't be unwritten

The horror imagery is SCARING me

thE goSpel of WincHesTer

ah he knows

no he's right, Sam is doing the Dark Side thing

ope he's actually praying

boy he sounds desperate

HE'S ASKING CAS FOR HELP HE'S AH

CAS GAVE HIM SNEAKY HELP

AHDIAFHSDPIH

OH MY GOD WAIT

"I didn't write this" FUCK YOU CUZ CAS DID THAT'S WHY

"I've got a Gun in my pocket" PFFT

nice try on the trap bud

HE WAS N O T ALWAYS THE SMART ONE

pfft lilith's angry at the angel for Being There

nono she's right you all self sacrifice like your life depends on it(heh)

well I guess he did warn her

i aM the PropHet Chuc K

Boi I can't believe that worked

Sam Jesus Christ

ZACHARIAH

how is Chuck actually a decent person for now what happened

"We'd only bring you back to life" JESUS

1. Sam. Seriously, I'm starting to see the arrogance here. There has not been ONE episode recently where I go "Sam, that was unnecessarily cruel" and like...Be nice to your brother. He's sacrificed his own innocence like a million times for you, leave him alone. He's slowly going dark side, and we do get to see it, but BOI is it fucked. Sam go get off your high horse. You're smart, but not that much. You're good, but not THAT good.

2. Fate. Ok, the slow way they made the fate tie into everything was NEAT! the slow build to the RED motel, to the minivan, to the stars. Like the instant they try to undo it, you know they won't succeed, but they added a good chunk of stuff so that you slowly figure out HOW it won't happen about concurrently with Dean.

3. Writing=god. That whole thing about how they turned Chuck into hating the "kill your darlings" thing(I'm needlessly cruel to you, why did I do all that to you guys for the sake of literary symmetry, etc) felt a bit...off. Like I'm glad Chuck still has a conscience(he wanted to stop something from happening at the end and Zach said no), but it kinda implies that whoever IS writing it...doesn't? Like God is a malevolent God. ALSO the "If you die, we'll just bring you back from death." Like I don't know what happened from then to present, but that whole thing is a Mess, how is he actually god. Also, they...called themselves bad writers? They painted themselves in a bad way? If God wrote supernatural, and God is cruel and did a bad job...what was the takeaway? is it that the whole THING is meta? that the whole point is that we're always getting a Narrative of Sam and Dean, that the meta is part of the inherent backbone of the show? that the ghostfacers are the only real versions? ??

4. writing-invasive. Ok so the thing I noticed is that the writing felt more invasive than the show. Like could be the way they made him write it for Maximum Funny Points, but it's A LOT more invasive, like there's no part of you that's truly your own. I feel like that might have been the point, but I still wanted to mention it.

5. META! Ok COMPLETELY separate from the actual Meta Plot that may or may not be happening...them reacting to their actual lives being a Series is HILARIOUS! like did they use it to be unashamedly mean to their own fans cuz it wasn't the demographic they wanted? yes. And it was shitty(and it was ALSO shitty when Sherlock did it, wtf guys). But making fun of W*ncest shippers, them getting told they're larping, the quiz on themselves+Sam forgetting the LSAT scores, the showing the tattoo...honestly it's so good, it was really funny. Mixed bag, but gave me HILARIOUS shit.

6. CAS. CAS SNEAKY HELPED DEAN! I JUST!! CAN'T GET OVER THAT SCENE!! "Listen, I'm not allowed to do anything for real, because I'll get in trouble and that would be ... horrible. But so...here's this...interesting piece of info....you may or may not need...might be helpful idk" the lil half smile with "good luck," the attempt at a joke. I think maybe Castiel agrees, that there's something Fucked here. Like we saw what happened with him and Anna and Uriel and how completely fucked it got, and we want him to realize that and help Sam and Dean, and he is, in his sneaky "I don't entirely want to give everything up yet" thing and OH IT WAS SO GOOD

7. Obligatory Chuck Won. Listen. Listen. "the monster at the end of this book." HE's THE MONSTER! if we believe that the MetaPlot is a Part of supernatural(and as time goes on, I think we have to, what with all the adaptations and the actual nods it does). And in that case...yeah it makes sense that the writers did what they did, and it was because Chuck Won. Like seeing this, it makes sense! if THIS is supernatural by carver edlund, and carver edlund is god, then he did...exactly what he wanted when he was the villain and killed both of them unsatisfyingly.

I'm dying on this hill, this is right, chuck won truthers RISE

WHOO