#'and i have to limit them REALLY CAREFULLY so as to keep the narrative tension'

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I’ve read a lot of books featuring various ends of various worlds, but for pure chilling the more you think about it, the worse it gets nightmare value, the destruction of the dragon homeworld in the Heartstriker series might actually take the gold.  It’s a bloodless kind of end of the world, a whimper, as it were, rather than the Leviathan’s bang, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

I think the worst part is that they had an hour.  From the time where they knew something was wrong to the utter, irreparable, indescribably complete obliteration of their entire world, they had one hour.  With all those seers, all that future chained down, literally a fatal surfeit of foresight--even with those incredible advantages, they had one hour, start to finish.

And their end is so complete.  There’s one second of their world left, one infinitesimal moment, between breaths, between the present being over and the future beginning--not even enough space for someone to stand.

[sitp-recs]

(Perfect artwork for Modern Love, by @cambiodipolvere)

Today is the day of one of my favorite people! And I totally resent @tackytigerfic and Starry for almost sharing the same birthday, god the STRESS 😂 Tacky is my first and closest fandom friend. We clicked together so fast and easy that sometimes it feels like I’ve known her all my life, like we’re two dog moms living in the same neighborhood who happen to read fic in their free time. Despite our conflicting time zones and crazy schedules we manage to chat every other day, tagging and sending each other all kinds of stuff, coming together to cry scream about a brilliant fic we’ve just read or shaking our heads in embarrassment at every other unnecessary bullshit post. Tacky’s bright and wise energy uplifts my spirit even on my moody days, and makes me grateful for her friendship and for this fandom life. Okay so this got long and I had to put the rest under the cut:

It’s such a lovely and precious thing, to have someone with whom you can share every single thought that crosses your mind, your scariest, most embarrassing, petty or disturbing idea, without fear of being shamed or judged by it. I trust Tacky with all my heart to hear me out, share a joke or a piece of advice, even on the (rare) occasions when we don’t get the same perspective - that doesn’t happen often when it comes to Drarry, as we are taste twins!

Tacky my darling, you’re such a good person, and such an incredible friend. Thank you for introducing me to this lovely community, for being my safe haven and your unique self, with so many qualities I admire and feel inspired by: kind, witty, earnest, wise, and so very human. I love your humour and empathy, and your chill yet no-nonsense personality; I love your talent and how articulated you are; I love your passion for Drarry, and how you let this emotion inform the way you navigate the fandom and create for it. And god, but you’ve been creating some of the most beautiful content I’ve seen in these recent years! I’m permanently in awe of your ability to write Drarry in any shape, format or length, transforming even the most ordinary moment into an extraordinary and meaningful piece of character or relationship development. You know how you mentioned yesterday that some authors change the way you feel about a ship in a deep, definitive way? Well, you are that author for me. Your works made me fall in love with M-rated contemplative romance, and also allowed me to fall in love with Harry in a way I never thought it was possible before.

Some people - myself included - got to know you through the fun and intriguing A Lick and a Promise, others through the atmospheric and sensitive Modern Love, others through your contemplative and heartbreaking short form. Each story has its merits and purpose, and all of them share a Tacky trademark: the heartkick factor! Your talent has no limits and goes across different genres and tropes, that you explore with a bold twist full of personality and heart. And even more impressive is your consistency at always raising the bar - every new fic of yours becomes an instant fave and makes me think “wow I thought Tacky couldn’t get better yet here we are”. Seeing how your writing evolves as you find your narrative voice is a beautiful and humbling experience, I feel so lucky!

I’m really grateful for being active in the fandom at this moment in time, because that allows me to read and engage with your brilliant work, and to have you as a dear friend. I can’t wait to see what comes out of your beautiful brain next. It was an impossible job choosing a single fic to rec today, so I decided to do a belated Tacky reclist! Naturally these are my personal and biased must-reads, and I urge everyone to go check these beauties right now. Feel free to include your own favorites too, and don’t forget to leave them some appreciation.

Happy happy birthday my darling Tacky! This fandom life wouldn’t be the same without you. I hope you have the amazing day you deserve!

Between the Power Lines (2020, M, 3.2k)

The road trip fic you didn’t know you needed. I got utterly immersed in the heartbreaking quietness of this, feeling like a witness to an ordinary yet poignant love story. Such tender intimacy, such character development, such lovely American aesthetics with barely any dialogue. This is, IMO, the fic that reveals Tacky’s triumph in storytelling.

Even the Night (2020, M, 3.4k)

This fic has a surreal atmosphere, those Midsummer vibes unbelievably sexy and intoxicating linked to the sensorial experience of fumbling together in the night. Masterclass in tension building, a silky and languid dream-like affair.

Aim for my Heart (2021, M, 3.4k) - Harry/Draco/Ron

One of the most sensitive and stunning portraits I’ve ever seen of a poly/triad relationship, this fic packs so much character and longing! It’s a privilege to watch Ron and Draco’s tentative dynamics through the smitten eyes of the one person that loves them like no one else: Harry.

The Long Fall (2021, M, 3.6k)

I can’t even write about this tender domesticity without getting a lump in my throat. Best opening scene I’ve read in years, and a refreshing way to approach both mpreg and parenthood, painfully honest and lovely. This became an immediate comfort read for me, and it’s probably one of the fics I revisit the most.

Mortal Frame (2021, M, 6.6k)

This thrilling, fast-paced spy story left me breathless since the first paragraph, gods what an immersive ride! I’m so here for Drarry on the run, sharp and urgent with danger but mellowed by the silent trust and tender intimacy only Tacky can master. Major bonus points for the brilliant take on the Horcrux hunt plot line!

Last Offices (2020, M, 6.7k)

Oh, this fic 💔 I tend to avoid MCD but there’s something so deeply fascinating about body washing rituals that I caught myself mesmerized by this. I just couldn’t put it down, so emotionally compromised I felt. There’s a sort of strange comfort in the heartbreak of doing one last act of service out of devotion to someone. This fic inspired so many difficult but lovely feelings in me, and one of them was hope. Only Tacky could possibly achieve that!

Our Little Life (2020, M, 7.2k)

Inventive and singular, this story hit me straight on the solar plexus and left me speechless as I saw the (clever, magical and bittersweet) plot unravel. Such a fabulous take on alternate universes and all the angst potential behind it. Come and bask in the yearning melancholia of a short yet intricate and perfectly executed plot.

And One to Play (2019, E, 21k)

What a fun and delightful fic, I can’t have enough of pining Harry losing all sense of propriety when faced with a hot, competent and pragmatic Draco. This has fab dynamics, unhinged protectiveness, even more unhinged attraction between two idiots who can’t keep their hands off each other. A must-read for any Auror partners fan!

A Lick and a Promise (2019, E, 55k)

Hot, BAMF Professors carefully balancing a fuck buddies situation while solving a Hogwarts mystery, do we need anything else? I certainly do not. This fic is so fun and intriguing and immersive, with amazing supportive cast and a delicious get together feat secret shagging and oblivious pining. Love it!

Modern Love (2020, E, 61k)

My favorite read of 2020, this fic is a love letter to Drarry and will always hold a piece of my soul. Sensitive, wistful, tenderly aching and so very romantic, this is a Muggle Draco triumph with a superb Harry, exquisite slow burn and a side of suds comfort. I promise it will be impossible to listen to Bowie again without thinking of this love story.

Bonus: five stunning drabbles!

Something in the Way (2021, T, 119 words)

“Up,” he said, and Draco, sick with love, raised his arms above his head and allowed Potter to slide the jumper on him, big hands stroking it flat over Draco’s stomach until they both shivered.

Stir-Up Sunday (2020, M, 300 words)

“I want you always,” he said, tugging again on the fine curling length of it. “Is it okay to say that?”

Whalebone Arch (2021, M, 722 words)

“Are you still not talking to me?” Draco steered Harry towards the crisps. “Do I have to suck you off in the loo to cheer you up?”

Semiplume (2021, T, 923 words)

“Did you know,” Harry murmured, and he put his arms around Draco, fearless. “I’d be your mate. If you needed a mate, I mean.”

Relic Radiation (2021, M, 927 words)

“You’ll kill me,” Harry said, and Draco turned his face towards the darkened sky, lunar pale, his profile some stupid unearthly thing—a flaring blazar, a supernova—in the light from the kitchen window.

[some-cookie-crumbz]

Can I get some soft huwu? Chillin n bein in love?

Hope you were looking for some sappy, sentimental nonsense because THAT’S WHAT’S ON THE MENU!!!! Also this fic was heavily inspired by the song Honey and Milk by Flower Face, with the lyrics being from Hawks’ point of view, so I would highly recommend it.

Minor Trigger Warning: Mentions/ References to Physical and Emotional Abuse

Hawks the Pro Hero had been known for having his large, ritzy penthouse in the heart of Fukuoka. It took up the entirety of the last floor of the complex building, with large double-pane glass ceilings for a ridiculous amount of natural lighting. The building had top notch security cameras on every floor and an elevator that required a special card key to make it work. He’d held a handful of swanky festivities there to grease some palms and rub elbows at the Commission’s insistence, but he knew the place was really meant to be a glorified cage. 

The security camera and card key elevator were so they could track his movements. Make sure he wasn’t engaging in any salacious indulgences. Sure, he could fly out through the balcony window, but there were cameras and a barrage of questions waiting for him any time he did. The penthouse was luxurious and he should delight in spending his limited free time there, but something about how impersonal the place was felt draining. Everything had been selected for him by his handlers. Almost nothing in that place was something he had selected to be there himself, as if he was too stupid or too lazy to do it himself.  It was stifling to think he was 23 years old and was still monitored like a toddler in their pram. They claimed if he could just buckle down and fully commit to what it was they wanted, there would be no problem.

So, Hawks decided to use that to his advantage. Insist that if they let him keep a “toy” with him, he’d be much better.

Keigo hated having to frame it that way, to try and treat things like they were just something to pass the time and not something he wanted for all of it he had left. But if he didn’t twist things to fit the narrative the Commission had in mind, he wouldn’t be able to have the things he wanted. He learned pretty quick that the only way to win against them was to play their stupid head games the same way they did, and really, he couldn’t put all the blame on himself. After all, this was what they wanted him to be. A perfect little performer, able to flit from side to side on the battlefield to try and gain leverage, try and change the tide as tensions escalated.

But he needed to breathe. He needed something more to keep him motivated now. The idea that he was no longer pushed forward by how useful his handlers considered him had been infuriating for the President. She’d hurled insults and accusations at Hawks, berating him for being made weak and soft, and he’d taken the verbal beatdown without batting an eye. He was used to it from her. She’d said worse things to him, anyway, so there was really no point to getting too ruffled. “I don’t ask for much,” he had drawled, letting his shoulders slump as if relaxed, “so I don’t think this should be too difficult. Give me this one thing and I can promise you’ll get more than what you want.”

Two days later she’d all but tossed the new set of card keys at him, snarling about what an ungrateful little leech he was.

He’d been happy to take the verbal lashing and then the two items to his girlfriend, Todoroki Fuyumi. It had been a chance encounter a few months prior to his promotion to the Number Two slot and collaboration with her father, Endeavor. At the time, he hadn’t even realized who she was, too focused on giving another great performance to really think. It had been some charity event where autographs and pictures were being offered at discounted rates for renovations to a nearby children’s hospital. He hadn’t been expecting much of the event, but he’d seen her amongst the unpaid volunteers and decided to strike up conversation with her. There had been the expected pleasantries - thanking him for his work, thanking him for taking the time out of his day to do this event - and then he expected her to start fluttering her eyelashes and putting the flirt on.

But then she didn’t.

Instead, she got to work, talking to him no different than another organizer, guiding him to his booth and going over how it worked. She milled about and helped with crowd control,  managing the excitable young kids with a gentle and experienced hand. It was interesting to watch, watching frosty blue eyes light up at the looks of glee on the children’s faces as they reacted to whatever it was she said. Heeded up offering to help with clean up afterwards to get another conversation in with her, putting in enough charm to exchange numbers. It wasn’t until their second official date that her family name clicked in his mind. The revelation changed nothing for him, though, and he continued to treat her just as well as he’d done before.

Even then, he was already falling for her fast and hard, he could freely admit.

He groaned as he stepped through the threshold of the apartment, toeing off his kicks and swapping them for the house slippers. He could see Fuyumi’s own carefully tucked away, but he’d already known that she’d be in the apartment that night. He headed to the kitchen and smiled at the covered dishes settled on the table, waiting for him. She’d mentioned wanting to leave him a hearty meal for when he got back in, since he would be off the next day and she felt he deserved it. He chuckled as he reheated each little dish before eating, letting his eyes scan the kitchen.

Just a few short weeks ago, the place had been practically untouched, filled with cooking utensils that had never once been touched. Now, however, the rice cooker sat on the counter instead of the shelf above, clearly having been used recently. For the meal he was reheating, in fact. There was a small pastel pink strawberry-shaped kitchen timer on the counter beside it, but it normally sat nestled at the far end of the bottom row of the now-full spice rack. Matching porcelain dishes sat neatly washed in the drying rack by the sink, these ones more ornate with cherry blossoms decorating them in a blue backdrop as opposed to the militant grey ones he had before, and there were a few splotches of tan and green on the small decorative towels hanging off the oven door. The towels were of an apron-clad mother hen mixing something in a bowl, while a small baby chick chirped at her feet.

The towels were incredibly hokey, but he couldn’t help but love them all the same.

He made quick work of his meal, making sure to take the time and utter a quiet thank you before chowing down. Even if she wouldn’t hear him, he wanted to. Home-cooked things were a rarity in his life, both before and after he became a ward of the government, and even reheated a handful of hours later it was better than any restaurant he could name. before taking the time to wash and dry his own dishes. He paused for a moment before also taking the time to put them all away again, figuring it was the least he could do for the delicious meal.

The short trek from the kitchen to the bedroom for the rest of his pre-bed routine reminded him again of how things were different now. The plush leather couch in the living room now had a plush, pastel yellow throw blanket hanging along the back. The old glass and steel coffee table had been instead replaced with a kotatsu, a small bowl of fresh oranges settled in the center, a small stack of papers and a few colored pens on the far left corner. Pictures now hung in the hallway, in stained birch frames with cleaned glass, depicting moments where he felt the most alive, moments of her own with her mother, brothers or friends, her infectious smile even in a photograph filling him with a warmth he’d never known before.

It was strange but invigorating. How little things could break down the metaphorical bars of his cage and turn it into an actual home. He didn’t dread coming back here on the nights that he knew she was going to be here. He moved carefully through the bedroom to the adjacent bathroom, glancing over at the bed in the center of the room. Even in the dark light, he could see her rumpled white and red speckled hair spread across the pillows, glowing like a halo against the dark burgundy covers around her. The dark coloration of the bedding had been the one point he’d been insistent about, simply because he knew it would retain heat better.

Even if he wasn’t there himself, he wanted to make sure that she was always wrapped in a warm embrace of sorts.

Even as he showered, the evidence that he wasn’t alone was there. His black bath towel hung on the rack beside her blue and white striped one. The bright purple loofah hanging off the shower head. The blackberry scented women’s shaving cream, the pink shaver, and the variety of differently scented body scrubs - one for every special time of year, because she had a fixation with being as coordinated as possible - on the shower rack and their affiliated lotions tucked under the sink until the were needed. The drawer now dedicated to her make-ups and hair accessories, her toothbrush and cinnamon toothpaste - cinnamon because mint would be too on the nose, what with her Quirk - poised beside his and her make-up removing wipes resting just beside his shaving cream and razor. The few smudges of mascara or eyeliner at the edge of the sink, implying she’d dropped one of them while getting ready, all sang the song of an apartment shared by more than one individual.

He was hyper aware of it; partially because of honed instinct and partially by choice. 

Even in his youth, he was alone. His parents were around, sure, but it was clear that he was only to be dragged out when they needed something from him. To make use of him in some way, as either a punching bag or his Quirk for survival. And even with the Commission, his handlers were not affectionate people. He was kept in his room until it was time to do Quirk training, run exercises, practice application of what he was learning through scene plays… And even then, the most he had ever gotten was a gruff, “Acceptable work.” When he’d been given a bit of freedom upon his entrance into Heroics, it had been a breath of fresh air. To mix and mingle, to have an adoring public, it had all been something new and gifted him something that he had craved. The part of him that yearned for meaningful connections with others had been filled by it.

For the first few weeks, anyway.

Far too quickly, however, he realized that the connections he made were not genuine. Not entirely, anyway. The swarms of fans were swarming to Hawks, to the puppet on the Commission’s strings, and not Keigo himself. The other Pros and sidekicks that pleaded for the chance to work with him only wanted to work with him to bask in the bright glow he cast, to gain some of that light to propel their own careers to those same heights. It was never something born out of interest in him, in who he was under the Pro Hero schtick, in the aspects of him that weren’t created by the Commission for the widest array of appeal.

But things were different now, he thought, as he dabbed at his mouth after brushing his teeth. He stared at his own reflection in the mirror for a beat or two. Just a few months ago, he’d been completely miserable with big, dark circles under his eyes that were normally masked using make-up. After all, dark circles wouldn’t play nicely into his Devil-may-care persona, or so claimed the Commissions President. Even now, the bags were still there, but they weren’t as dark and pronounced. Probably because he slept through the night more times than not since Fuyumi started staying regularly. He flashed a small smile to himself before stepping out into the bedroom proper to slip into some sleep pants.

He perked up immediately when he noticed her form sitting up in bed. He could feel her eyes shifting to watch him as he stood in front of the dresser. “Sorry,” he said quietly, "I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She shook her head while stifling a yawn. “Mmm, don’t worry, you didn’t. I was kinda dozing in and out of it for a while,” He nodded before dropping the towel from his waist to shimmy into some boxers. A small huff came from her at the act. “Make sure to hang that towel back up before you come to bed.”

“Of course I will, babe,” he chuckled, already sending two feathers to handle it as he fished out a pair of sweats. He preferred going shirtless at night as it was more comfortable for his wings. Once he was redressed and the feathers had safely returned, their task complete, he made his way over to the bed.

Fuyumi lifted the covers to him as an invitation while she shimmied back down herself. “Did the mackerel reheat well?” she asked, gently patting at her clavicle once he was sitting on the bed.

He was quick to take her up on the offer, swooping down to nuzzle his face into her, breathing in the scent of apple and honey lingering from her shower gel. His arms looped around her waist and her hands found his hair, carefully shifting through the still damp locks. “Mhm. It was delicious. Thank you for the meal,” he murmured against her skin

“It was my pleasure, you know that,” she giggled, pressing a quick peck to his forehead.

He had come to live for the delicate, tender moments with her. The suggestion for her to start moving her things into his apartment had been his, once they’d hit the ten month mark. He knew he was committed, that he’d sooner die than live a day without her. They hadn’t, however, broached the subject with her Father yet. No one knew that they were together, actually, simply because he wanted to keep her protected and respect that she wanted her privacy. He knew her hesitance to outright tell Endeavor came from an ugly place and so didn’t go chasing those battles with her. He knew how it upset her and he didn’t want to force her to confront things she wasn’t ready to. And so, they decided to take the move a step at a time. First, to add personal touches to make the apartment more homey, more like their space, and they’d tell Endeavor the truth once things were a bit more calm. She spent four to five nights a week at the apartment, and at least 80 percent of her things were already moved over, and for now that was enough for them.

The hand in his hair continued its gentle work while her other slid down to caress along his spine. She had learned early on exactly how to relax him best, and her hand made its way to the base of his wings. She took her time massaging at the muscles at the base of each, her touch firm yet still somehow soft. When she massaged them, they would flare out wide and long, to their full height and width, before slumping lax against the pillow top and trilling chirp-like sounds would emanate from his throat to highlight his approval. He remembered a long time ago when he’d feared those noises would startle her away, but she had never found the few avian characteristics he had to be off-putting.

With his wings put to rest, her hand moved from his back to stroke his cheek instead. He shifted his head a bit to chase her fingers, pressing lazy little kisses along each one as they skimmed past his lips, and a small giggle escaped her. “You’re always so beautiful like this,” she breathed, looking at him with such pure adoration. He never got tired of how she watched him, as if he was so much more than he was, the look something that he couldn't put the word to but was certain he knew. Her touch moved to thumb over the mark at the corner of his eye, cool skin soft and soothing. “So relaxed, at ease. Just… Letting yourself drop the Hero moniker. Just breathing and being completely yourself. You never look quite as pretty as you do in these moments.”

His chest tightened at the words and he felt his heart sputter, practically drowning in how head over heels he was falling all over again, suddenly able to place the look. Because he had seen it before, directed at others but never at himself. Something he knew he had looked at others with before, back when bruises and harsh words held the same weight as a kiss or gentle praise. He took in a shuddering breath and burrowed himself back into her, body shaking as he tried to compose himself. He felt overwhelmed but in such a good way, in a way that he'd never known before, and to finally have a word for it filled him so, so much.

It was unconditional love.

“Eh? Keigo? What is it? Did I say something wrong?” Fuyumi fretted, feeling the dampness from his eyes leaking onto her skin and the hem of her nightgown.

He loved her so much but he hated how she'd been conditioned to assume she was always at fault. “No,” he breathed out in a shaky whisper, a shuddering laugh pairing off with it, “no, no. These are good tears, Fuyumi.” It took a moment before she relaxed again and pulled him in closer. Her lips brushed against his hairline, the hand in his hair resuming its work while the other slid to gently rub soothing circles between his shoulder blades. Once he was settled enough, he tilted his head to press a few fleeting kisses along her clavicle. “Didn’t mean to freak you out. Sorry about that.”

“No, it’s okay. You don’t need to apologize for getting emotional,” she said, reaching out to tilt his head up and press a proper kiss to his lips. He hummed and kissed back, letting himself relax into her arms again.

He flashed her a smile when they pulled away. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Keigo,” she hummed, peppering a few kisses along his face. He smiled and leaned into it, basking in the affection of someone who loved him, warts and all.

[queenlokibeth]

Alright don't punch me, i'll start by clarifying that i'm a larrie. I'm not unlarrying. I'm being reasonable and objective and understanding that the boys are real people with real lives; this means that their relationship wouldn't be out of their fairy tale. Now bear with me and read each part:

A) I don't think that neither Camille or Danielle were beards.

B) Freddie is actually Louis's son.

C) Larry is still as real as always.

By now, Walls and Fine Album considered, we can be pretty sure that there was a larry breakup at some point.

If we consider Harry's comment before singing Two Ghosts on Nov 6th 2017 ("I wrote this song about the first time he broke up with me") we can assume that there was more than one break up.

With Harry's newer interview we now know that he wrote Two Ghosts for MITAM originally, so sometime around the beginning of 2015 most likely.

Now onto the facts:

Louis breaks up with Eleanor in march 2015. I do believe that El has always been a beard. If larry broke up, then there's no need for her to keep fulfilling the role.

Louis hooks up with Briana like in april. I have always been partial to Babygate. I've seen pictures of Freddie and he does look like louis. I do think he is his son. Bear with me now pls.

Think about it this way: he just broke up with his long-term partner and tries to move on by finding some rebound and a drunken hook up ends in a baby. Shit happens. Personality-wise this does fit with Louis, as he went through the "party the pain away" phase after Jay's passing, which is a similar reaction.

In november-ish Louis starts seeing Danielle. In my opinion, their relationship looked less stunty and there are pics of them looking content with each other in settings were it doesn't look like they knew were being photographed. This relationship did not resemble elou**r. To add on to that, Louis has kept a selfie with danielle on his instagram, while there are no pics of El.

Queue Jan 2016, Harry is spotted with Kendall on that yacht. Before that there had never been anything actually romantic between them, they were just good friends but I'm sure management tried to exploit it at times. Now back to Jan 2016: imagine a newly single Harry hanging out with his good friend Kendall. I think something might have almost happened there, or maybe there was something really short lived there, but I feel like it did not last past that boat. Friends sometimes try to see if something would work between them, and I think that was the case, but as you could see on the Late Late Show, their dynamic is a lot better as just friends and they probably realised that.

Move to Jan 2017: Louis and Danielle break-up and El immediately reenters the picture. I say Larry reunion. Louis went through Jay's passing and i'm 100% sure that Gentleman Sweetcheeks Harry Styles would be there for him regardless of friend/boyfriend/broken-up/mortal enemy/brother status. This reunion fits with the release of HS1 a few months later with all of the Larry anthems that we know.

But wait! Harry is spotted with Camille in July 2017, conveniently a week after the Heart Rate Monitor interview where he says that he "doesn't know her". We are aware, we KNOW that Harry can't lie for shit. This sounds true. We also know that interviewers are previously told if there are any off-limit topics, and likewise they can be asked to actively bring up others for PR reasons. I think that was the case. C is carefully introduced to the narrative and one week later they're together.

I do think Hamille started as a PR stunt/beard situation. I also do think that at some point during late 2017 Larry broke up again (see nov 2017 comment; more than one break-up) and since Harry was already spending time with C for contractual reasons, that might have sparked something real for a while. I think this fits because even though most lyrics on Fine Line are Larry af, there are a few that don't fit/point at a relationship with an additional person. The one in falling abour blaming "the drink and my wandering hands" is interesting, because we know from several pictures that Harry is a clingy, touchy-feely drunk, so what if that put some tension between larry at this point? This theory also goes with the clothes-sharing with camille (they have been undoubtedly seen wearing at least the same cardigan and pants) which we know he also did/does with Louis.

Eleanor is still in the picture. Their managers realise that even though they broke up before, they got back together, so they decide to keep her just in case. And they're right to do so.

Hamille's fake relationship ended exactly a year after it started (ehem contracts) but their real one probably ended at least a couple of months before that (the whole thing probably didn't last over 6 months), hence why by the time of their "official" breakup C seemed to be already in a fully stable relationship with her new guy. C probably ended things with Harry because she met this guy and Harry was probably still emotionally caught-up on someone.

Larry probably reunited around that time and have been going strong since then. For PR reasons the Hamille angle is still being pushed to promote Fine Line, giving it a lot more importance as to make it seem like it takes up more space on the album than it actually does. After all, that's the same PR team that promoted this album as being full of sex stuff when in reality there is like one (1) line about something sexy and maybe like 2 more if you look really hard for really niche double-entendres.

And that concludes my analysis. It's somewhat realistic, doesn't disrespect anyone, and not a single anti can tell me that i'm reaching because i'm doing the exact opposite. Check-mate.

[flavoracle]

Why I'm Always Suspicious of Limits on Legal Immigration

Here's something of a history lesson that illustrates one of the reasons I am highly skeptical of the justifications that politicians give for immigration laws that limit who is allowed and who isn't based on who they believe the "right kinds of people" are...

As many of you know, I'm a lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (historically known as "Mormon," and since I'll be referencing a period of their early history, that's the term I'll use here.)

All throughout growing up I learned how early settlements of Mormons were persecuted and driven from their homes in Missouri because of religious persecution and bigotry. Eventually it even lead to the "Mormon Extermination Order," which made it legal to drive Mormons from Missouri by deadly force if necessary.

The other side of this history that I've heard is that the people already living in Missouri at that time were opposed to their Mormon neighbors because the incoming Mormons claimed that the land was theirs by divine right, and the citizens of Missouri were afraid that they might be the ones driven off if the Mormons were allowed to gather in large enough numbers.

At this point in my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that I think the truth is a little more subtle than either narrative alone, and requires some historical context to understand.

See, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, there was a lot of tension going on. A lot of people thought that slavery was bad and should be abolished, and a lot of other people (wrongly) thought that slavery should stick around. Despite how strongly the two sides disagreed about this, the majority of people really wanted to avoid fighting a war over it, so there was a lot of effort put into maintaining the status quo.

One of the strategies to keep things stable was to give the impression that the conflict was even on both sides by making sure the number of free states in the Union was equal to the number of slave states. (This was somewhat misleading because the population of citizens in the free states was much higher than the slave states, but I digress.)

That's why there was a period in U.S. history where it seems like states were always added in pairs. Because whenever a new free state was added, a new slave state was also added to maintain the balance, and vice versa. Missouri was one of these newly added states, and it was a slave state.

OK, that brings us back to Missouri and Mormons. Although Missouri was a slave state, it was also a slave state that bordered free states and had a bit more tenuous situation than the firmly established slave states in the deep South. People were nervous about this, and nobody wanted anything to go rocking the boat.

Well, then there's the Mormons. Very anti-slavery and not a high abundance of "chill," if you know what I mean. They were more interested in sticking to their principles and being overt about it than they were with being diplomatic or subtle.

Including being subtle with the idea that there were plenty more Mormons coming, so play nice. That worried the political leaders already in power because if every single Mormon at that time mass immigrated to Missouri, they'd pretty handedly outnumber the existing voter population.

So how do you keep your precariously (and politically sensitive and relevant) slave state from suddenly voting to abolish slavery? By hastily passing laws to stop more Mormons from coming. But what happens if they STILL keep coming?

Violence. Violence is what happened. Mob violence legitimized by an official "extermination order," signed into law by the governor.

And that's what happens when a society passes immigration laws and policies aimed at maintaining the political status quo, or even worse, manipulating the political climate of the future by making sure only the "right kind of people" can move in.

It's my strongly held belief that diversity in political discource is like diversity in a gene pool: IT'S HEALTHY.

Available access to legal immigration and nationalization is a vital part of that healthy diversity. Meanwhile, limiting that access based on birthplace, race, religion, or culture is antithetical to that diversity, and should be rejected by honest people who oppose political manipulation and stacking the deck.

Now I know this is already REALLY long, but there's one more thing I wanted to add. For the majority of people involved in the Missouri conflict, I don't believe they were motivated by politics. The Mormons were just seeking a place to live and congregate without harassment. The mobs of Missouri citizens who terrorized the Mormon settlers justified their behavior with numerous accusations against the Mormons, including blasphemy, conspiracy, fraud, and more.

But when it comes to those in power, the politicians and elected officials who allowed and enabled such mob violence to happen, it seems clear to me that political manipulation and vote suppression was their primary goal. And unfortunately, it worked.

I say all of this because throughout the years, politicians have given excuse after excuse to justify their positions on immigration restrictions. Crime. Disease. Terrorism. Overwhelming social services. Undermining cultural integrity (if that even means anything in the U.S.) The list goes on. But when each of these excuses is examined critically, I believe each of them falls apart.

I'm not trying to change anybody's stance on legal immigration. But what I DO want to encourage everyone to do is challenge the assumptions that are passed around as "common knowledge," when it comes to justifying immigration limitations.

And the next time you hear a politician talking about why immigration needs to be carefully controlled, just ask yourself, "Is this REALLY what they're worried about? Or are they actually concerned with maintaining the status quo?"

[thebeautyofdisorder]

The Undone & The Divine (BBC Dracula) - Chapter 8

A/N: Okay, sorry it’s been like two weeks since I posted the last chapter. I am such a mess. This is a bit shorter, more of a set up than anything, but informative? I have so many ideas for this, that it took me a minute to figure out in sequence what’s going to happen when.

Pairing: Dracula & Agatha/Zoe, off and on Dracula/OFC

Rating: M, for blood, language, and mercenaries with guns.

Chapters 1-2 Here - Chapter 3 Here - Chapter 4 Here - Chapter 5 Here - Chapter 6 Here - Chapter 7 Here

Can be found on AO3 - Right HERE - or enjoy below the cut

Chapter 8

By all accounts he appears as a human man, at varying states of age depending upon how regularly and well he is fed, lingering even at his most satiated at around 45-50 years – presumably the age of his death. His hair is thick and inky black, kept shorter and slicked back when in public view; his nose aquiline and aristocratic; his eyes appear black at a distance but in close quarters and lighting seem to have a dark mossy-brown hue; admirable bone structure, and a mouth that is at times both harsh and jovial depending upon what impression he wishes to put across at the time. His accent is tainted by those of his victims, but always holds a slight thickness and gravel, reminiscent of his native tongue. His teeth, even when not in the state of blood frenzy, still seem longer and sharper than normal, particularly the canines. His fingernails also are long and honed to a point, and seem to be of inhuman durability and sharpness. He is excessively tall and somewhat broad, though of a generally slim build regardless of his bestial strength. No physical deformities upon the rest of his body when in his humanoid state, though his eyes can seem to gleam in the darkness like those of other nocturnal beasts.

When in the presence of human blood, those eyes dilate and become ringed in crimson, and all blunt edges of his teeth sharpen to slight but lethal points. Animalistic tendencies manifest – hissing, snarling, growling, the hunched stance of a predator, etc. Interestingly, he also seems to bare all the normative signs of the common morphine addict – tension, restless movements, irritability, the inability to control his emotions and behavior. He possesses speed the likes of which the human eye can barely detect, but only in small bursts in the midst of attack, by my witness. He was able to manifest a continual fog, as stated earlier in my narrative, and could very well be at fault for the storm swirling in the seas now, as I write. He can deform himself to fit into any small space, one could assume, though I have only seen him do this by defiling the physical forms of other living beings – notably a wolf at the convent, and the late Jonathan Harker, who was also undead at the time. Whether that’s relevant to this ability, I don’t particularly know. He can call wolves and bats to his service, and possibly flies – whether this works with all creatures and he’s merely chosen these for theatrical purposes, or if he’s limited to creatures of darkness and decay, I have yet to discover.

The ‘kiss of the vampire’ is a strong opiate, meaning most victims are often unaware of his bite or the danger they are in until it is too late. He can create and control the dream state in which they enter, often choosing scenarios of an erotic nature. Whether this is for his own amusement or because of the effect it has on the blood, I can only deduce. This method seems to be equally employed through both sexes though I have yet to see any direct indications of intercourse, willing or unwilling. If he possesses a sex drive at all, it is seemingly outranked by his desire to feed.  

He is highly intelligent and possesses a biting wit, which in another context might even be endearing, and his charm is carefully honed to attract potential victims. Though his mental weaknesses are notable, including his arrogance, lack of self-awareness, and dependence on his victims to take in and retain key skills and information. As opposed to learning the language of a new land through study, he merely drains one of its countrymen and absorbs their inherent knowledge. This leads to a flurry of unpredictable behavior and reckless death, and also speaks of his impatience and lack of discipline, which has undoubtedly lessened with age. He was, in life, an excellent ruler and even better general with a skill for strategy currently wasted on petty mind games. If he could ever reach a point of managing his appetite for blood and destruction, he could be an invaluable resource - a first-hand witness to the last four hundred years of European history.

I’m sure you will, dear brother, quickly dismiss this as folly, but however much you would like to categorize him as yet another mindless demon from the pit, I assure you he is anything but. He may fear the cross, but don’t think there is a heavenly power that instilled that fear. It reeks of an entirely human weakness. You would do well to remember that, should you run across him or any of his kind in the future. While his existence seems to have been very luck of the draw, it’s nowhere near as anomalous as Dracula himself would like us to believe. Others could have survived and done what he has done. In fact, I could almost guarantee it.

Zoe read through Agatha’s words again, this particular afterward for maybe the twentieth time since she’d found it. Not for any particular information, more over just marveling at the clarity, simplicity, and dare-she-say fondness with which it was written, in comparison to the information she’d been brought up with. Shockingly, the nun was able to more realistically sum up the vampire than any other Van Helsing before or after her (granted, she had the firsthand experience), and with so much less fire and brimstone, religious nonsense. It was half of why she’d spent so long away from ‘the family business’ as it were, until she’d had to take over the institute. Science had always been the only god she would acknowledge.

Whatever logic Agatha had administered from across the pond however, while well used, had been entirely riddled with her elder brother’s showmanship and particularly Catholic brand of fending off the forces of darkness. Agatha may have seen him as the devil incarnate, but that didn’t stop her from acknowledging his humanity – and in that, Zoe couldn’t help but agree. Dracula was very much still a man, no matter how immortal or powerful, and he still had all of man’s other weaknesses, sans physical vulnerabilities. Minor detail.

She supposed it had made it easier for both the zealot and the scientist to see their subject of animosity as no better than a rabid dog that needed to be analyzed and destroyed. But that had never been the case at all. A self-serving lesson to learn, she had to admit, but an important one. So long as he had retained some of his humanity, there was certainly hope for her.

It was the only thing keeping her sane through the mock trial this experiment had turned into. Every turn she was being questioned and analyzed harder than she had since grad school, and yet still regarded as the antagonistic and dangerous party. It was a contradiction that made her genuinely question the mental capacity of her colleagues.

Yes, let's aggravate the person we're terrified of. Honestly.

Their latest critique, however she loathed to admit it, was actually sound. They needed a control. A 'direct contact' feed to compare to her bottled one, and they all knew there was only one vampire to compare to. Clearly they didn't actually expect him to participate, they only wanted to de-legitimize her process.

But it would make an impact, wouldn't it?

-----

It was just before sunset, traces of red just beginning to seep onto the surface of the sun, and for the first time in a great while, Count Dracula was unenthused. He was beginning to be rather fond of daylight, even if it came with certain disadvantages, as he was beginning to discover. Perhaps vampires were better off as creatures of the night after all.

Most if not all of his preternatural abilities were greatly weakened by the sun, though why he wasn't sure. It made him feel languid and slow, which was perfectly fine for an afternoon on the beach, but highly inconvenient when he got hungry and none of his more willing resources were available. Physical conditioning or a lesser reality of the lore he'd always accepted, who was to say?

Who indeed.

He had given Zoe plenty of space to run her little experiments without interference, aside from keeping an 'eye' out to ensure she wasn't in any immediate danger. But there was only so long that would last, and despite having ample opportunity to create more brides...he felt like he needed more answers before that inevitability occurred.

Agatha had been right, annoyingly, as usual. Lab rats were not something he needed, especially ones who could question him on topics even he didn't fully understand anymore.

If the Van Helsing women were good for anything, aside from healthy competition, it was certainly bluntness and clarity. Being the only thing close to another vampire of any mental capacity to be in his proximity for over 300 years certainly didn't hurt.

Zoe Van Helsing was someone he needed, a concept he could scarcely understand and wasn't entirely fond of, but if he wasn't mistaken, she needed him as well - and hated it even more.

----

"Dr. Helsing, is this really necessary?"

Zoe found herself staring at the younger but far more egotistical doctor through the glass that separated them with an expression not unlike one would give a particularly frustrating insect who refused to die as fast as she wished it would.

"Is what necessary?"

The man, Dr. Connors, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, punctuating his next words with unnecessary flare.

"Well, our sponsor doesn't understand the necessity of this trial, when it cannot possibly prove anything. All of our intel on the 'vampiric condition' states simply that they require blood to sustain life, but also that it's nearly impossible to kill them. Surely your continued …  existence without blood doesn't fully prove or disprove anything. And without anything to compare it to…"

"For now," she interrupted stubbornly, attempting to ignore his tendency to discuss her as though she were a theoretical construct.

"Even so," he continued blandly, "There are surely better uses of our time, in the face of an increasing number of...undead. Preventative measures, protection for the innocent. Unless you can get some sort of control data…"

Their 'sponsor' had sent this idiot to report back on how his precious money was being spent,  and it had become an increasingly infuriating thorn in her side. Or stake in her heart, she was sure he hoped. Zoe had just begun to second guess her tendencies toward homicide, when she felt the tell-tale hairs begin to rise on the back of her neck.

"Oh fuck me," she cursed aloud, completely indifferent to the confused looks of those observing her. They wouldn't be confused for long.

"Careful what you wish for Doctor."

Everyone but Zoe took a startled glance around. She turned around, eyes directly finding the dark ones on the outside of the glass, quirking a stern brow despite the relative chaos of everyone else receding into the corners in panic.

Count Dracula merely flashed her a shit-eating grin in response, relishing her disapproval in equal measure to the human fear beginning to fill the room. Pungent and yet satisfying, she noted, rather unhappily.

"Oh Zoe how the tables have turned," he couldn't resist prodding at her through the encasement, ignoring the guns pointed at his back in favor of taunting her, hands in his pockets. The picture of malicious nonchalance.

She wasn't trapped, as he had been. They'd learned their lesson in that regard at least, but it was a barrier she'd permitted for her own sanity. Watching everyone walk on eggshells around her was grating, and it ruined her focus. Plus, it helped with the sensory overload until she got more accustomed to it.

"And yet you're still the one at gunpoint," Zoe shot back with a hint of a blithe smile.

He turned and directed his overly fond smile towards the tattooed gentleman with the over-sized assault weapon, greeting him like an old friend. The man that Zoe had never seen with a single facial expression looked so dumbstruck that she had to fight down a laugh. This was apparently the last straw for their visiting dictator.

"Count Dracula," came more of a squeak than a shout from the bespectacled doctor's mouth, with such a forced amount of distaste that Zoe was now certain he had lost his mind entirely. "You will not be permitted to attack anyone here."

Shooting Zoe an incredulous look, mostly as she could read translating to ‘Is he serious?’, the vampire watched her answering eye roll very obviously telling him ‘He's an idiot, but reports to the money’.

Dracula finally looked away from their silent exchange, and took out a small pocket flask, not unlike the one he'd left her before, and shook it in the other man's general direction as he passed by him with total indifference.

"Not to worry, I brought my own," he stated, opening it and taking a long swig. It cleared a direct pathway for him easily, bee-lining for Dr. Bloxham who sat at the control panel. She naturally flinched on his approach, despite trying to hide it. He noticed and flashed her a charming smile, to his credit only showing the slightest hint of fang.

"Terribly sorry about the finger," the Count apologized humbly, almost convincingly sincere as he draped a long arm over the back of her chair. "...But would you mind letting me in?"

Bloxham looked somewhat confused. "You want to go in there?" Her eyes shot up to the ceiling. The sun had not completely set. He gave her an encouraging smile with a faint trace of pity.

"I would love to go in there."

Zoe merely rolled her eyes and tapped on the table with relative impatience, as he paced through the parted seas of scientists and interns alike to join her in the completely ineffective glass prison.

"You evil little thing, you didn't tell them," he accused with quiet glee as he approached her from the opposite side of the table.

"If their superstitions help them feel safe, then all the better for me," she excused in a murmur, hoping he hadn't just given the game away completely.

His grin was one of near pride, as he bent his tall form forward to rest his hands on the table. "I can go slit his throat if you want me to. Heaven knows you won't."

She sighed, not trusting herself to answer. "Why are you here?" she asked instead.

"You needed me, didn't you?"

------

Okay, so this could go really amusingly or very terribly - we’ll see what I come up with, eh? Shouldn’t be as long of a wait this time, fingers crossed.

Tag List: @break-free-killer-queen @mephdcosplay @charlesdances @punk-courtesan  @crowley-needs-a-hug @hoefordarkness @bellamortislife @malkaviangirl @imagineandimagine @chelsfic @dracula-s-bride @my-fanfic-library @hyacinth-meadow @mymagicsuitcase @littlemessyjessi @desperatefrenchwriter @ss9slb @crazytxgradstudent @claesbang @mr-kisskiss-bangbang @gettingcrazyforlife @carydorse @dreamerkim @gatissed @alhoyin @girlonfireice @festering-queen @jangleprojet  @guardianbelle @vampiregirl1797

Share with your friends, if anyone else wants tagged let me know!

[illthdar]

11/11/11 Tag

Tagged by @silver-wields-a-pen

1. Who is your favourite oc?

To be honest, I flip-flop a lot on that one. Generally, it is the OC that is being tormented or experiencing the most growth in whatever character arc in the Illthdar series.

2. What themes do you struggle writing?

I struggle with fight scenes and romance. Fight scenes because it calls for a snappier text style that my over-wordy self has a hard time balancing. Romance because I crave a specific brand of romance that isn’t often depicted in fiction - the slow kind that builds very carefully over months/years. The sexual tension, the overdone tropes, associated with romance just kind of make my toes curl or make me want to throw books across the room and scream “you aren’t in love yet!” Writing my own version while still adding those snippets that readers crave - the glances, the fumbling, the derp - is hard for me.

3. What’s been the best thing about writing your wip?

The world exploration and the slow unfolding of events and discovery of life on in the world as a whole. I took to writing Illthdar from the perspective of an immigrant - someone who sees the new place they are living with eyes wide open and with none of the rose-tint that natives would have, as well as that naivete and innocent trust that the people around them mean well. This perspective lends itself greatly to the steady exposure to the evil that can be found under the surface of any world, but is especially compounded in the world of Illthdar.

4. What themes has your favourite story included?

The Illthdar series covers several themes: prejudice, platonic/romantic love, good vs. evil, power and corruption, survival, courage/heroism, and war

5. What time of day do you prefer writing?

I typically write in the evenings, after the kiddo has gone to sleep - which is typically around 8PM - and I normally call a quits at 10PM.

6. What’s your favourite relationship trope to write?

The comrade or friends relationship is my favourite to explore. I feel like I don’t see enough of those outside of the friends-to-lovers trope in fiction and I like to explore as many versions of it as I can.

7. What detail about your ocs has surprised you?

(Warning, these are relating largely to later books in the series) The detail about Date Toshiiro’s fingers was not something I originally thought was so important but later turned into something much bigger. Tundra’s past and his life’s mission also took me by surprise somewhat. Seth’s arc is something I don’t think anyone could have anticipated. Magnilla also takes some interesting turns. Vyxen, for me, is especially heartbreaking. Scyanatha’s progress wasn’t something I really saw coming. The same could be said for Nyima. Abaddon’s arc is hints upon hints upon hints of so much stuff that I think will be really awesome to see when it’s all laid out in the end. Zercey/Lerki/Inari have so far been largely predictable in the writing process, though there have been legitimate times where I’ve wondered about where they’re headed.

That’s just the main cast! There’s a ton of things I found interesting about the secondary characters in the series, but it would take forever to write it.

8. Thoughts on including romance in other genres?

I’m going to be real: the suspension bridge trope that’s seen in horror bothers me. Romance in horror - where X character feels forms a very quick and strong bond with Y character is creepy on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start.

9. Favourite writing snack?

There isn’t any one specific snack I’ll reach for when I write. Normally, I’ll have something before I’ve sat down so I’m not usually nibbling as I go. When I do have something, it’s usually something like a fried egg sandwich with some token bits of salad greens.

10. Favourite villain trope?

The villain in waiting. This person has been there this whole time, they’ve been bugging you forever to the point that you’ve convinced yourself they’re just there for the comedy relief but, surprise! They’re gonna cut you up and they are absolutely not sorry. This is the person who, in hindsight, you should have seen it coming, but was so long in waiting to make their move, the only emotion you have left to give is the desire to have gotten to them first.

11. Best scene you’ve written?

Without getting into spoilers for future books, the best scene is a toss up in Guardians of Las between the scene with Vyxen and Scy emerging from the forest during the battle or Tundra and Nyima’s conversation on the balcony.

Tagged by @bigmoodword

1. using one sentence summaries, can you tell me about your wips?

Illthdar: When everything defies logic and reason, nothing and no one is safe.

2. what inspired them?

A lot of things inspired the Illthdar series: common fantasy book/game tropes, classic literary works (J. R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, H.P. Lovecraft, J. M. Barrie...), my life as an immigrant, society today on a whole.

3. which of your ocs do you most identify with?

While not specifically my OC (she was originally designed by @guardians-of-las-vyxen), I can relate very strongly to the emotions she experiences in the series. When I write, I try to put a little of my own humanity into all of my characters, in terms of qualities, people who know me personally and have read the first book see that that reflected strongest in Zercey.

4. if you’ve ever cried while reading, which book cued the waterworks?

Honestly, nothing will crush a heart more than Pamela Denise Smart’s “Who's Afraid of the Teddy Bear's Picnic?: A Story of Sexual Abuse and Recovery Through Psychotherapy” Massive trigger warnings for anyone who has experienced childhood sexual abuse, however. An added plus to it was that it’s also a coming-out book as the author happens to be a Lesbian.

5. how do you conduct research for your wips and what’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered in said research?

I have a terrible habit of doing things to characters first, then researching the potential outcomes after the fact. Were some of the OCs real, they would not like me at all. I won’t give spoilers, however. That said, I think this is a better way to write a bit of reality into a story: the outcomes are not pre-scripted, just as anyone’s life journey is never linear. Forcing the OCs to “deal with” whatever consequence without the benefit of having an desired outcome in mind, puts character and reader on the edge of their seats, I feel, because the threat is real.

6. thus far, which scene has been the most difficult to write?

Again, without spoilers for the future books, for Guardians of Las the hardest scene would have been the mock-fight between High Elder Culvers and High Elder Trenfal.

7. which of your ocs do you like the least?

Currently, as it does depend on who is feeding my sadism, where I am at in writing the series it I can’t decide if I hate Maraxis or Lord Rhett, the most. Maraxis is every bit the villain that you have to live with in life - which makes him frustrating to an extreme degree. Lord Rhett, on the other hand, is the self-righteous, might-equals-right, stereotypical kind of evil - the cliche villain that we don’t have to look at very hard to recognise.

8. which pov and tense do you prefer to write in?

I like third person limited. It allows me to explore the minds of different characters on a deeply, keep the cards to the plot close to my chest out of open sight to the readers, and help the readers connect to the world without a million I-statements.

9. do you write poetry?

In my late teens, I tried, but ultimately saw the paper fit to use only as kindling.

10. who is your writing role model?

Gosh, I don’t even know. I don’t think I have one. I think the narrative voice of each author has its pros and cons, so it’s hard to point to just one and say “I want to be like that.”

11. if you could give your younger writer self some advice, what would it be?

Revision isn’t a dirty word, nor is the suggestion of it a blemish upon your name. It’s a compliment; the one giving the critique sees in you potential to grow and improve. And that is worth everything.

Tagging: @aslanwrites, @bigmoodword, @english-undergrad, @elizabethsyson, @garrettauthor, @haileyavril, @igotablankpage, @imaghostwriter, @jessawriter, @kobalt-ink, @mvcreates

My questions for you:

 What was the very first story you ever wrote?

What does your ideal writing space look like?

How long do you give yourself to research for your WIP?

What do you think is your greatest weakness as a writer?

What do you think is your greatest strength?

Name one of your bad habits as a writer.

Where do you find inspiration for your OCs?

What OC would like you the most?

What OC would like you the least?

Name something you do that you think no other writer does.

Have you ever done NaNoWriMo?

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘Nesting Instinct’ (S03E22) Analysis

A creepy crawly story layers with trouble at the Institute, and an Archivist who is the absolute worst at handling interpersonal conflict.  Come on in to hear what I think about ‘Nesting Instinct.’

Well, first it’s interesting to really start to get a sense of Elias’ limitations, which are apparently pretty extensive.  I’d suspected for a while that he was overstating his power, comprehension and reach, and this was apparently the week when all that came home to roost.  Because Jon shouting down Elias for his repeated bullshit and his tendency to murder the most potentially useful people was glorious and welcome, and the fact that Elias more or less had to take it (and then take Jon reassuring Melanie that they would deal with Elias just as soon as it was convenient while Elias was standing right there) was really satisfying.    

But there wasn’t much else he could do, is there?  Because Jon is rapidly realizing exactly how little Elias actually knows.  He apparently has no idea what Gertrude figured out about the Unknowing, and his trigger-happiness has hindered progress toward his goals more often than it seems to have helped anything beyond his own raging need to remain in control.  And now Jon is wrenching that control away from him, sick of being the puppet of a man who doesn’t know half of what he insinuates.  Two of the assistants are in outright revolt, only one other is actually doing his job, and despite Elias calling in Peter Lukas, he apparently didn’t manage to do anything helpful in order to retrieve Jon from the Circus.  

Elias likes to think of himself as a master manipulator, but he doesn’t actually seem that great at thinking on his feet or handling real crises.  He likes intricate, carefully thought-out plans.  But when it comes to the day-to-day more often than not he makes decisions that are as poor as Jon’s.  Every time he’s managed to out-maneuver everyone, he’s still had his ability to See acting for him and allowing him to plan ahead.  But the Circus is well-hidden, and without his Sight, Elias is apparently useless.  He can’t even figure out how to make the Archives a livable environment or convince Melanie to stop trying to murder him.  

It does worry me somewhat what he’ll do under all this loss of control, because so far his track record seems to end in violence.  I’m glad that Jon managed to talk Melanie down, at least for now.  I’m fascinated that she’s essentially a much more proactive version of Tim.  While Tim is buried in the despair of being imprisoned by the Beholding, Melanie sees the main hurdle to their freedom as Elias, and is more than willing to roll the dice on his murder in order to get them all free.  Again, her plan is … less than stellar.  She figured a knife would be the best way to go about things?  I mean, sure, but he still knows you’re coming. If Melanie really wanted to be smart, she’d pool her knowledge with Basira, who’s been digging through the library, and Tim, who has probably been contemplating this exact thing for a while, and figure out a way to get to Elias without him seeing them coming.  

I know that Melanie’s driving instinct is to appear competent, but this fear and anger is clearly blinding her to better and more careful planning.  And because she’s the one who keeps flinging herself bodily at the problem that is Elias, I am very worried that she’s the one who’s going to catch it in the neck when he finally snaps.  Because he can’t kill off another one of his archivists so close to the Unknowing, and Melanie is both right there and not necessary to prevent the apocalypse.  I think the only thing protecting her right now is that she is a genuinely good researcher and they need all hands on deck for this Unknowing thing.  Particularly if Tim is still non-cooperative, and Martin can only do so much (and because his performance apparently has an inverse relationship with how worried about Jon he is), and Basira is less assistant and more fairly-chill-prisoner, Melanie is a necessity at the moment. But the second her usefulness dips or the danger she poses to Elias becomes more than he wants to tolerate … I really think Jon needs to be in the office way more than he’s planning to be. Protecting his assistants from a homicidal boss isn’t really possible if you’re halfway around the world chasing down cold leads.

We also learned this week that, if Elias has basically been giving Jon every box Gertrude marked as potentially relevant to the Unknowing, then Elias has no real organization or thought for the information he’s doling out.  So the tape with Michael was given not by Elias and not by Michael, but by Gertrude.  Given what we know about her at this point, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that it was the statement she considered relevant.  Michael himself was never relevant in her eyes, and his interruption and Jon’s realization about his previous position was nothing more than happy accident.

So Elias is playing Jon, but can only do so with Gertrude’s knowledge.  Because Gertrude really was the only one who knew what was going on. Elias may be all-seeing in the moment, but he can’t piece together a puzzle.  He’s a literalist, and so anything metaphorical or complex seems beyond him.

So what he and Jon know about the Unknowing, they know because they’ve pieced it together from Gertrude.  Mostly. They know that Nikola was created specifically for the Unknowing before killing her creator.  We know she requires a whole lot of intact human skin, and at least one very powerful artifact (my money is on the ancient skin and/or Jon’s flayed skin) in order to enact it.

But there’s further information starting to come in, totally separate from what Gertrude knew, and this information will apparently come from Jon himself.  His powers are clearly growing, possibly exponentially.  He’s already making leaps of logic he can’t explain, but which shortly thereafter turned out to be correct.  I think some part of him is starting to perceive the larger world he’s weaving, and through that picture, he’s picking out details and facts that he shouldn’t be able to get to yet.  Through those connections, he realized that that Gerard Kaey was working with Gertrude shortly before his death.  Whether he knew he was dying, or Gertrude helped him die is unclear, though of all people who wouldn’t be fooled by Gertrude, I have to imagine that the son of Mary Kaey would be foremost amongst them.

I’m sure we’ll learn more about what they did together going forward, since Jon is apparently tracking that plot-thread now.  I hope he doesn’t expect to take a trip to New Zealand when everything is heating up so close to home.  Having Jon within the country but distant has been difficult enough for his assistants. Having him be halfway around the world could prove to be disastrous.

At least no matter where he tracks Gertrude and Gerard, he will be able to piece together a coherent narrative.  Apparently while reading statements, all languages are understandable to him. That ability falls apart when it’s not a statement, however, since he couldn’t read a wedding invitation, even if it’s for the wedding of a lonely middle-aged Frenchman to another flavor of the Hive.  So his powers are still very much limited to the story, and the narrative.  Beyond that, well, beyond that Jon needs help.

NOT THAT HE’S GOING TO GET IT IF THAT’S HIS APPROACH TO TALKING TO HIS ASSISTANTS.  Captain Oblivious and Mr Martyr-Complex attempting to have an honest conversation about exactly how bad things had gotten was, on reflection, something I should have never expected to go well.  Jon just asking if Martin was ‘okay’ with recording statements basically means Martin’s going to bury himself in his ‘everything is fine’ defense because he wants to be helpful and make Jon proud of him. And Martin trying to hint at everything falling apart and Jon needing to be there for the others sailed right over Jon’s oblivious head, because unless you slap Jon upside the head with the dead halibut of truth, he will never notice it.  I at least think both of them realized how poorly the conversation went, but I also doubt either of them will be attempting to try again without some serious encouragement.

Yes, it’s perfectly in character, and yes it ratchets up the tension for Jon to remain oblivious to how bad things are getting and Martin to pretend everything’s fine while gazing meaningfully at Jon in some idiotic hope that Jon would recognize the clue bus before it ran him down.  But seriously, my dudes.  One of you needs to be straight-up honest and aware.  Jon’s falling apart and getting more and more powerful without any good anchor to his humanity.  Martin’s falling apart trying to keep the Archives functional with Tim on strike, Melanie homicidal, Basira blissfully checked out, and Daisy being someone Martin would be happy never to see again.  And neither of them has the courage to just admit it and ask for help.

Kudos on Georgie for telling Jon to damn well talk to Martin, but next time she might need to include an instruction manual.

Conclusion

It’s nice to hear from the Filth again for a story, even if it feels fairly unrelated, only tying into Gertrude’s movements before Gerard’s death.  As always when it comes to the Filth, the story was nicely stomach-churning, and the Filth’s worshippers still seem to be the lovelorn folk who are desperate for true affection.  Which is deeply creepy in its own right, considering that they all get consumed by insects and disease.

It’s also interesting to find out that Gertrude and Gerard worked together.  Given that he grew up with his mother and her knowledge, I doubt he would be as taken in by Gertrude as others were.  I’m interested to see not only what their interactions were like, but also what their eventual split was like.  

And finally we have the two most emotionally constipated men in England (if for different reasons) trying to talk to one another in something vaguely resembling a meaningful exchange.  Did it happen?  No. Will there probably be dire consequences because these two idiots can’t talk?  Oh, almost certainly.  Are we still not at all certain how much beyond ‘world-ending-need-to-stop-it’ Jon’s actually told his assistants?  Definitely.

It’s absolutely in character that this conversation would be so disastrously inadequate, but someone smarter—Georgie is the best bet at this point—needs to lock them together in a room until they actually talk through all the shit they’ve both experienced.  Because it’s that, or all that shit comes out while they’re in the middle of the apocalypse/neck deep in mannequins/trapped in an old waxworks together.  And that doesn’t help anyone.

[bai-xue]

While I agree with you on the sexism and misogyny, I do have to say that there is definitely some room for consideration regarding the race of your OC...I'm not sure what the right answer is but there are an awful lot of white folks telling POC narratives and who end up with much more visibility than POC folks telling POC narratives. Just something to keep in mind although it's honestly irrelevant to the original point.

You make a really good point! That was honestly part of my consideration when I started out writing. I definitely don’t want to take any limelight away from POC who have their own stories.

At the same time, I have to admit that my OC (Mint) kind of leapt from my head fully-formed. From the moment I saw her in my mind’s eye, I knew she was mixed race. And the writer in me wanted to be true to that.

I do agree that writing a story about a white man (well, multiple white men) abusing a black girl is definitely treading on a very fine line. With that in mind, I’ve done my best to be respectful of Mint’s (and her mother’s, and the twins’) race. I also wanted to keep her as mixed race, both because it more deeply explores racial subtexts in the film (Joe and the war boys are explicitly meant to be read as a ‘rebirth’ of the destructive white man subjugating everyone else), and because I realised it created additional, interesting tensions in the story. How is Mint, a mixed race girl, going to react to her abuse compared to the twins - who I explicitly wrote as Indigenous Australians? How is she going to react compared to Caucasian characters like Kindest (an OC), Capable, and Angharad? Most importantly, how is she going to react to it compared to her own mother, who is also a mixed-race woman?

Race admittedly wasn’t the foremost consideration in my writing process - I spent more time exploring the dynamics of gender and emotion, as that’s also my academic speciality - but it was something in the back of my mind as I was going into it.

Part of this was something of a hope to add a little more diversity to Miller’s world. Though MMFR already is fairly diverse, it’s still overwhelmingly white. I refuse to believe that the majority of Immortan Joe’s previous wives would be white, especially in Australia, which has such a diverse population. I absolutely believe that there needs to be more diverse representation in media, fan media included, so I hoped to do my part, at least a little bit, by making Mint a three-dimensional character instead of a stereotype. I believe that white writers have a responsibility to write diversely, too, even if it involves writing from a perspective we’ve never experienced.

There have been some claims that “this isn’t my story to tell” as I’m not a black or mixed race woman myself. My question is, then, whose is it? Do I sell the story idea to a WOC? Do I ghost write for her? What I could not do was just sit on it silently - this was a story that, as soon as it popped into my mind, was screaming to be let out. So I let it out, as carefully as I could. In large part, Such Things has been my own exploration of things that happened to me. I definitely was never a sex slave, but the emotional abuse and gaslighting? A lot of that is autobiographical. 

I admit, I’m not perfect. I definitely struggle with inherent racism taught to me by a racist society - as all white people do (or at least should). But I did try to keep a firm line between writing a character who happens to be a WOC, and writing some kind of fandom version of blaxploitation. 

Regarding some of the accusations I’ve been getting, I certainly don’t think that black women’s suffering is my own personal toy. I also certainly don’t “get off” on what I write about in Such Things. Yes, I have a big thing for Immortan Joe, but all my shameless pwp is strictly confined to the limits of my other fic, Roadside Find - whose OC, by the way, is a white girl like myself. Such Things is not about my personal sexual preferences or masturbatory fantasies, even though sex is  a big part of it. Sex, both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of it, is a big part of almost all my writing. It’s a way for me to explore emotion and communication that doesn’t have much parallel anywhere else in human interaction. That certainly does not mean that if I’m writing a sex scene, I am getting off on it.

Ultimately, I 100% agree that, when writing stories about POC, white people need to be careful not to take the spotlight from actual POC. We also need to be respectful, and actually write POC characters as characters, not stereotypes. That’s what I’ve been trying, and I hope succeeding, to do with Mint. But I don’t think that I should necessarily stifle myself if a story is born in my mind and happens to involve a POC character. Of course, this would be a very different story if I were writing about, say, slavery in premodern America. That would be a lot more delicate, because those black women actually existed, and using them to write fiction, even fiction that helps me rid myself of my own demons, would be incredibly selfish. But Mint doesn’t exist. Neither does Immortan Joe, or the Citadel, or the world of Mad Max. Thank God. So I’m very uneasy about dictating what writers can and can’t write based solely on modern identity politics, especially when it comes to fantasy and sci-fi genres. That silences a lot of stories that may have some value, even if the writer is of different demographics than their subjects. 

Anyway, thank you for your respectful criticism - I really appreciate that. You’ve made a wonderful point but managed to do so without being hateful. Thanks again.

[stephenmccull]

Using Stories To Mentally Survive As A COVID-19 Clinician

Dr. Christopher Travis, an intern in obstetrics-gynecology, has cared for patients with COVID-19 and performed surgery on women suspected of having the coronavirus. But the patient who arrived for a routine prenatal visit in two masks and gloves had a problem that wasn’t physiological.

“She told me, ‘I’m terrified I’m going to get this virus that’s spreading all over the world,'” and worried it would hurt her baby, he said of the March encounter.

Travis, who practices at the Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center, told the woman he knew she was scared and tried to assure her she was safe and could trust him.

Asking many questions and carefully listening to the answers, Travis was exercising the craft of narrative medicine, a discipline in which clinicians use the principles of art and literature to better understand and incorporate patients’ stories into their practices.

“How do we do that really difficult work during the pandemic without it consuming us so we can come out ‘whole’ on the other end?” Travis said. Narrative medicine, which he studied at Columbia University, has helped him be aware of his own feelings, reflect more before reacting, and view challenging situations calmly, he said.

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The first graduate program in narrative medicine was created at Columbia University in 2009 by Dr. Rita Charon, and the practice has gained wide influence since, as evidenced by the dozens of narrative medicine essays published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and its sister journals.

Learning to be storytellers also helps clinicians communicate better with non-professionals, said writer and geriatrician Dr. Louise Aronson, who directs the medical humanities program at the University of California-San Francisco. It may be useful to reassure patients — or to motivate them to follow public health recommendations. “Tell them a story about having to intubate a previously healthy 22-year-old who’s going to die and leave behind his first child and new wife, and then you have their attention.”

“At the same time, telling that story can help the health professional process their own trauma and get the support they need to keep going,” she said.

Teaching Storytelling To Doctors

This fall, Keck School of Medicine of USC will offer the country’s second master’s program in narrative medicine, and the subject also will be part of the curriculum in the new Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, which opens its doors July 27 with its first class of 48 students. (KHN, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

Narrative medicine trains physicians to care about patients’ singular, lived experiences — how illness is really affecting them, said Dr. Deepthiman Gowda, assistant dean for medical education at the new Kaiser Permanente school. The training may entail a close group reading of creative works such as poetry or literature, or watching dance or a film, or listening to music.

He said there’s also “real, intrinsic value” for patients because a doctor isn’t only being trained to care about the body and medications.

“Literature in its nature is a dive into the experience of living — the triumphs, the joys, the suffering, the anxieties, the tragedies, the confusions, the guilt, the ecstasies of being human, of being alive,” Gowda said. “This is the training our students need if they wish to care for persons and not diseases.”

Dr. Andre Lijoi, a geriatrician at WellSpan York Hospital in Pennsylvania, recently led a virtual session for 20 front-line nurse practitioners who work in nursing homes. Two volunteers recited Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Wild Geese,” which reads, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.”

Sharing the poet’s words helped the nurses relieve their pent-up tensions, enabling them to express their feelings about life and work under COVID-19, Lijoi said.

One participant wrote, “As the world goes on around me I mourn seeing my aging parents, planning my daughter’s wedding, and missing my great niece’s baptism. I wonder, when will life be ‘normal’ again?”

Processing Fear To Provide Better Care

Dr. Naomi Rosenberg, an emergency room physician at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, studied narrative medicine at Columbia and teaches it at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. The discipline helps her “metabolize” what she takes in while caring for COVID-19 patients, including the fear that comes with having to enter patients’ rooms alone in protective gear, she said.

The training helped her counsel a worried woman who couldn’t visit her sister because the hospital, like others around the country, wasn’t allowing relatives to visit COVID-19-infected patients.

“I’d read stories of Baldwin, Hemingway and Steinbeck about what it feels like to be afraid for someone you love, and recalling those helped me communicate with her with more clarity and compassion,” Rosenberg said. (After a four-day crisis, the sister recovered.)

Dr. Pamela Schaff (right) discusses narrative medicine in the Hoyt Gallery at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, as Chioma Moneme, a student in the class of 2020, looks on. (Credit: Chris Shinn)

Close readings can also help students understand the various ways metaphor is used in the medical profession, for good or ill, said Dr. Pamela Schaff, who directs the Keck School’s new master’s program in narrative medicine.

Recently, Schaff led third-year medical students through a critical examination of a journal article that described medicine as a battlefield. The analysis helped student Andrew Tran understand that describing physicians as “warriors” could “promote unrealistic expectations and even depersonalization of us as human beings,” he said.

Something similar happens in the militarized language used to describe cancer, he added: “We say, ‘You’ve got to fight,’ which implies that if you die, you’re somehow a failure.”

In the real world, doctors are often focused narrowly, devoting most of their attention to a patient’s chief complaint. They listen to patients on average for only 11 seconds before interrupting them, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Narrative medicine seeks to change that.

While listening more carefully may add one more item to a physician’s lengthy “to-do” list, it could also save time in the end, Schaff said.

“If we train physicians to listen well, for metaphor, subtext and more, they can absorb and act on their patients’ stories even if they have limited time,” she said. “Also, we physicians must harness our narrative competence to demand changes in the health care system. Health systems should not mandate 10-minute encounters.”

Telling The Patient’s Whole Story

In practice, narrative medicine has diverse applications. Modern electronic health records, with their templates and prefilled sections, can hamper a doctor’s ability to create meaningful notes, Gowda said. But doctors can counter that by writing notes in language that makes the patient’s struggles come alive, he said.

The school’s curriculum will incorporate a different patient story each week to frame students’ learning. “Instead of, ‘This week, you will learn about stomach cancer,’ we say, ‘This week, we want you to meet Mr. Cardenas,'” Gowda said. “We learn about who he is, his family, his situation, his symptoms, his concerns. We want students to connect medical knowledge with the complexity and sometimes messiness of people’s stories and contexts.”

In preparation for the school’s opening, Gowda and a colleague have been running Friday lunchtime mindfulness and narrative medicine sessions for faculty and staff.

The meetings might include a collective, silent examination of a piece of art, followed by a discussion and shared feelings, said Dr. Marla Law Abrolat, a Permanente Medicine pediatrician in San Bernardino, California, and a faculty director at the new school.

“Young people come to medicine with bright eyes and want to help, then a traditional medical education beats that out of them,” Abrolat said. “We want them to remember patients’ stories that will always be a part of who they are when they leave here.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Using Stories To Mentally Survive As A COVID-19 Clinician published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Using Stories To Mentally Survive As A COVID-19 Clinician

Dr. Christopher Travis, an intern in obstetrics-gynecology, has cared for patients with COVID-19 and performed surgery on women suspected of having the coronavirus. But the patient who arrived for a routine prenatal visit in two masks and gloves had a problem that wasn’t physiological.

“She told me, ‘I’m terrified I’m going to get this virus that’s spreading all over the world,'” and worried it would hurt her baby, he said of the March encounter.

Travis, who practices at the Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center, told the woman he knew she was scared and tried to assure her she was safe and could trust him.

Asking many questions and carefully listening to the answers, Travis was exercising the craft of narrative medicine, a discipline in which clinicians use the principles of art and literature to better understand and incorporate patients’ stories into their practices.

“How do we do that really difficult work during the pandemic without it consuming us so we can come out ‘whole’ on the other end?” Travis said. Narrative medicine, which he studied at Columbia University, has helped him be aware of his own feelings, reflect more before reacting, and view challenging situations calmly, he said.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

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The first graduate program in narrative medicine was created at Columbia University in 2009 by Dr. Rita Charon, and the practice has gained wide influence since, as evidenced by the dozens of narrative medicine essays published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and its sister journals.

Learning to be storytellers also helps clinicians communicate better with non-professionals, said writer and geriatrician Dr. Louise Aronson, who directs the medical humanities program at the University of California-San Francisco. It may be useful to reassure patients — or to motivate them to follow public health recommendations. “Tell them a story about having to intubate a previously healthy 22-year-old who’s going to die and leave behind his first child and new wife, and then you have their attention.”

“At the same time, telling that story can help the health professional process their own trauma and get the support they need to keep going,” she said.

Teaching Storytelling To Doctors

This fall, Keck School of Medicine of USC will offer the country’s second master’s program in narrative medicine, and the subject also will be part of the curriculum in the new Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, which opens its doors July 27 with its first class of 48 students. (KHN, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

Narrative medicine trains physicians to care about patients’ singular, lived experiences — how illness is really affecting them, said Dr. Deepthiman Gowda, assistant dean for medical education at the new Kaiser Permanente school. The training may entail a close group reading of creative works such as poetry or literature, or watching dance or a film, or listening to music.

He said there’s also “real, intrinsic value” for patients because a doctor isn’t only being trained to care about the body and medications.

“Literature in its nature is a dive into the experience of living — the triumphs, the joys, the suffering, the anxieties, the tragedies, the confusions, the guilt, the ecstasies of being human, of being alive,” Gowda said. “This is the training our students need if they wish to care for persons and not diseases.”

Dr. Andre Lijoi, a geriatrician at WellSpan York Hospital in Pennsylvania, recently led a virtual session for 20 front-line nurse practitioners who work in nursing homes. Two volunteers recited Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Wild Geese,” which reads, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.”

Sharing the poet’s words helped the nurses relieve their pent-up tensions, enabling them to express their feelings about life and work under COVID-19, Lijoi said.

One participant wrote, “As the world goes on around me I mourn seeing my aging parents, planning my daughter’s wedding, and missing my great niece’s baptism. I wonder, when will life be ‘normal’ again?”

Processing Fear To Provide Better Care

Dr. Naomi Rosenberg, an emergency room physician at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, studied narrative medicine at Columbia and teaches it at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. The discipline helps her “metabolize” what she takes in while caring for COVID-19 patients, including the fear that comes with having to enter patients’ rooms alone in protective gear, she said.

The training helped her counsel a worried woman who couldn’t visit her sister because the hospital, like others around the country, wasn’t allowing relatives to visit COVID-19-infected patients.

“I’d read stories of Baldwin, Hemingway and Steinbeck about what it feels like to be afraid for someone you love, and recalling those helped me communicate with her with more clarity and compassion,” Rosenberg said. (After a four-day crisis, the sister recovered.)

Dr. Pamela Schaff (right) discusses narrative medicine in the Hoyt Gallery at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, as Chioma Moneme, a student in the class of 2020, looks on. (Credit: Chris Shinn)

Close readings can also help students understand the various ways metaphor is used in the medical profession, for good or ill, said Dr. Pamela Schaff, who directs the Keck School’s new master’s program in narrative medicine.

Recently, Schaff led third-year medical students through a critical examination of a journal article that described medicine as a battlefield. The analysis helped student Andrew Tran understand that describing physicians as “warriors” could “promote unrealistic expectations and even depersonalization of us as human beings,” he said.

Something similar happens in the militarized language used to describe cancer, he added: “We say, ‘You’ve got to fight,’ which implies that if you die, you’re somehow a failure.”

In the real world, doctors are often focused narrowly, devoting most of their attention to a patient’s chief complaint. They listen to patients on average for only 11 seconds before interrupting them, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Narrative medicine seeks to change that.

While listening more carefully may add one more item to a physician’s lengthy “to-do” list, it could also save time in the end, Schaff said.

“If we train physicians to listen well, for metaphor, subtext and more, they can absorb and act on their patients’ stories even if they have limited time,” she said. “Also, we physicians must harness our narrative competence to demand changes in the health care system. Health systems should not mandate 10-minute encounters.”

Telling The Patient’s Whole Story

In practice, narrative medicine has diverse applications. Modern electronic health records, with their templates and prefilled sections, can hamper a doctor’s ability to create meaningful notes, Gowda said. But doctors can counter that by writing notes in language that makes the patient’s struggles come alive, he said.

The school’s curriculum will incorporate a different patient story each week to frame students’ learning. “Instead of, ‘This week, you will learn about stomach cancer,’ we say, ‘This week, we want you to meet Mr. Cardenas,'” Gowda said. “We learn about who he is, his family, his situation, his symptoms, his concerns. We want students to connect medical knowledge with the complexity and sometimes messiness of people’s stories and contexts.”

In preparation for the school’s opening, Gowda and a colleague have been running Friday lunchtime mindfulness and narrative medicine sessions for faculty and staff.

The meetings might include a collective, silent examination of a piece of art, followed by a discussion and shared feelings, said Dr. Marla Law Abrolat, a Permanente Medicine pediatrician in San Bernardino, California, and a faculty director at the new school.

“Young people come to medicine with bright eyes and want to help, then a traditional medical education beats that out of them,” Abrolat said. “We want them to remember patients’ stories that will always be a part of who they are when they leave here.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Using Stories To Mentally Survive As A COVID-19 Clinician published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Using Stories To Mentally Survive As A COVID-19 Clinician

Dr. Christopher Travis, an intern in obstetrics-gynecology, has cared for patients with COVID-19 and performed surgery on women suspected of having the coronavirus. But the patient who arrived for a routine prenatal visit in two masks and gloves had a problem that wasn’t physiological.

“She told me, ‘I’m terrified I’m going to get this virus that’s spreading all over the world,'” and worried it would hurt her baby, he said of the March encounter.

Travis, who practices at the Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center, told the woman he knew she was scared and tried to assure her she was safe and could trust him.

Asking many questions and carefully listening to the answers, Travis was exercising the craft of narrative medicine, a discipline in which clinicians use the principles of art and literature to better understand and incorporate patients’ stories into their practices.

“How do we do that really difficult work during the pandemic without it consuming us so we can come out ‘whole’ on the other end?” Travis said. Narrative medicine, which he studied at Columbia University, has helped him be aware of his own feelings, reflect more before reacting, and view challenging situations calmly, he said.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

The first graduate program in narrative medicine was created at Columbia University in 2009 by Dr. Rita Charon, and the practice has gained wide influence since, as evidenced by the dozens of narrative medicine essays published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and its sister journals.

Learning to be storytellers also helps clinicians communicate better with non-professionals, said writer and geriatrician Dr. Louise Aronson, who directs the medical humanities program at the University of California-San Francisco. It may be useful to reassure patients — or to motivate them to follow public health recommendations. “Tell them a story about having to intubate a previously healthy 22-year-old who’s going to die and leave behind his first child and new wife, and then you have their attention.”

“At the same time, telling that story can help the health professional process their own trauma and get the support they need to keep going,” she said.

Teaching Storytelling To Doctors

This fall, Keck School of Medicine of USC will offer the country’s second master’s program in narrative medicine, and the subject also will be part of the curriculum in the new Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine in Pasadena, which opens its doors July 27 with its first class of 48 students. (KHN, which produces California Healthline, is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

Narrative medicine trains physicians to care about patients’ singular, lived experiences — how illness is really affecting them, said Dr. Deepthiman Gowda, assistant dean for medical education at the new Kaiser Permanente school. The training may entail a close group reading of creative works such as poetry or literature, or watching dance or a film, or listening to music.

He said there’s also “real, intrinsic value” for patients because a doctor isn’t only being trained to care about the body and medications.

“Literature in its nature is a dive into the experience of living — the triumphs, the joys, the suffering, the anxieties, the tragedies, the confusions, the guilt, the ecstasies of being human, of being alive,” Gowda said. “This is the training our students need if they wish to care for persons and not diseases.”

Dr. Andre Lijoi, a geriatrician at WellSpan York Hospital in Pennsylvania, recently led a virtual session for 20 front-line nurse practitioners who work in nursing homes. Two volunteers recited Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Wild Geese,” which reads, “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.”

Sharing the poet’s words helped the nurses relieve their pent-up tensions, enabling them to express their feelings about life and work under COVID-19, Lijoi said.

One participant wrote, “As the world goes on around me I mourn seeing my aging parents, planning my daughter’s wedding, and missing my great niece’s baptism. I wonder, when will life be ‘normal’ again?”

Processing Fear To Provide Better Care

Dr. Naomi Rosenberg, an emergency room physician at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, studied narrative medicine at Columbia and teaches it at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. The discipline helps her “metabolize” what she takes in while caring for COVID-19 patients, including the fear that comes with having to enter patients’ rooms alone in protective gear, she said.

The training helped her counsel a worried woman who couldn’t visit her sister because the hospital, like others around the country, wasn’t allowing relatives to visit COVID-19-infected patients.

“I’d read stories of Baldwin, Hemingway and Steinbeck about what it feels like to be afraid for someone you love, and recalling those helped me communicate with her with more clarity and compassion,” Rosenberg said. (After a four-day crisis, the sister recovered.)

Dr. Pamela Schaff (right) discusses narrative medicine in the Hoyt Gallery at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, as Chioma Moneme, a student in the class of 2020, looks on. (Credit: Chris Shinn)

Close readings can also help students understand the various ways metaphor is used in the medical profession, for good or ill, said Dr. Pamela Schaff, who directs the Keck School’s new master’s program in narrative medicine.

Recently, Schaff led third-year medical students through a critical examination of a journal article that described medicine as a battlefield. The analysis helped student Andrew Tran understand that describing physicians as “warriors” could “promote unrealistic expectations and even depersonalization of us as human beings,” he said.

Something similar happens in the militarized language used to describe cancer, he added: “We say, ‘You’ve got to fight,’ which implies that if you die, you’re somehow a failure.”

In the real world, doctors are often focused narrowly, devoting most of their attention to a patient’s chief complaint. They listen to patients on average for only 11 seconds before interrupting them, according to a 2018 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Narrative medicine seeks to change that.

While listening more carefully may add one more item to a physician’s lengthy “to-do” list, it could also save time in the end, Schaff said.

“If we train physicians to listen well, for metaphor, subtext and more, they can absorb and act on their patients’ stories even if they have limited time,” she said. “Also, we physicians must harness our narrative competence to demand changes in the health care system. Health systems should not mandate 10-minute encounters.”

Telling The Patient’s Whole Story

In practice, narrative medicine has diverse applications. Modern electronic health records, with their templates and prefilled sections, can hamper a doctor’s ability to create meaningful notes, Gowda said. But doctors can counter that by writing notes in language that makes the patient’s struggles come alive, he said.

The school’s curriculum will incorporate a different patient story each week to frame students’ learning. “Instead of, ‘This week, you will learn about stomach cancer,’ we say, ‘This week, we want you to meet Mr. Cardenas,'” Gowda said. “We learn about who he is, his family, his situation, his symptoms, his concerns. We want students to connect medical knowledge with the complexity and sometimes messiness of people’s stories and contexts.”

In preparation for the school’s opening, Gowda and a colleague have been running Friday lunchtime mindfulness and narrative medicine sessions for faculty and staff.

The meetings might include a collective, silent examination of a piece of art, followed by a discussion and shared feelings, said Dr. Marla Law Abrolat, a Permanente Medicine pediatrician in San Bernardino, California, and a faculty director at the new school.

“Young people come to medicine with bright eyes and want to help, then a traditional medical education beats that out of them,” Abrolat said. “We want them to remember patients’ stories that will always be a part of who they are when they leave here.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/using-stories-to-mentally-survive-as-a-covid-19-clinician/

[differentkindapiratemovies-blog]

Narrative Theory Essay

Discussing the perceived oversaturation of narrative archetypes in modern media with reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory.

“As the old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. For fans of movies and TV, that means that every story that can be told already has been. But sometimes, the movies that seem to be retelling a well-known story TOO closely are singled out, accused of being a ripoff, copycat, or unoriginal. There's no more famous (or successful) example than James Cameron’s Avatar: a story of a human being welcomed into a native tribe, who betrays their trust, but eventually saves the day by fighting on the good side in the end. As soon as the movie hit theaters, people dismissed the billion-dollar blockbuster as a ripoff of Fern Gully, or even Pocahontas before it. The truth is... it’s telling the same story told by dozens, even hundreds of famous films. But that’s not a reason to attack it, or any other re-skinned movie myth.”

It’s common to have the notion after coming out of a movie theatre that the experience was strikingly similar to the previous time you went. There is a common thread line throughout all of movie and storytelling history. Since the dawn of man, the human race has used narratives and stories to communicate ideas and emotions with each other - usually either trying to capture a part of history or with the purpose of fictional entertainment value. However, primarily I believe narratives are there for communication, being carefully crafted by storytellers of all different generations. Cave men used to draw on the walls of their caves and their fire would illuminate the images, causing them to flicker back and forth to create the earliest animation and stories recorded. Some of the most prominent fictional stories ever created, including religious texts such as the Bible, are stories we haven’t stopped recreating in two thousand years. I refuse to believe that it is the only formula that works despite being undoubtedly effective. Some might think of it as a stale structure.

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, first theorised in Hero Of A Thousand Faces, and Tzvetan Todorov’s structure of narrative are commonly combined to create a story that seems to resonate with the majority of an audience and seemingly never ceases to fail. Movies such as The Matrix and Star Wars use both these theories in order to make up a successful story. (Although debatably the whole original trilogy acts as the entire journey seeing as Luke Skywalker, the main character, is at his lowest in the finale of the second movie resulting in a pitfall ending). George Lucas, the creator and director of the first Star Wars film, considered Joseph Campbell to be his friend and mentor.

“My last mentor was Joe... who asked a lot of the interesting questions and exposed me to a lot of things that made me very interested, a lot more in the cosmic questions and the mystery… and I've been interested in those all my life but I hadn’t focused it the way I have until I had got to be good friends with Joe.”

George goes on to say he took the mythological and religious ideas behind narratives and simplified them for a modern audience. Perhaps it would be beneficial to drop religion altogether when writing stories for the modern and less religious generation.

The Dragon Quest video game series also follows these rules with the main character literally referred to as “The Hero”. The journey of a character rising up, facing hardships, being at their lowest then being born again for their worlds to be restored to equilibrium is something I think people either feel like they can relate to or, probably closer to the truth, is fantasised about and idealised. Everyone would like to be hero in the story, overcoming their problems and saving the world. Joseph Campbell says this in his book Hero With A Thousand Faces.

“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realisation. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realisation transcending all experiences of form - all symbolisations, all divinities: a realisation of the ineluctable void.”

There’s something gripping about watching this structure play out, and it is engaging for an audience - but they’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times before. As much as I appreciate movies that put a creative spin on the traditional structure of narrative, I really respect and love movies that go against the curve. Obviously this happens quite frequently but probably not at your local Odeon cinema - mainstream media is often streamlined for the purpose of easy consumption. For example, I enjoy films from the Marvel universe, but all too often they all play out in the same format. You could argue that companies have monopolised certain narrative structures and have a tendency to recycle them.

However, films like Richard Linklater’s 1991 day-in-the-life-of debut Slacker go against traditional “hero journeys” and plot point one/plot point two narratives, instead working like a series of loosely connected vignettes; in each scene we spend time with a different character and closely follow events occurring in their lives in real time. There’s no arcs, no beginning, middle or end. No rebirth, just a movie about strange characters hanging out in Austin, Texas, on a sunny day. It’s not an art film or particularly experimental. It’s just that, well, nothing happens. It’s an accurate depiction of reality. It's what real life actually is. I don’t wake up every day and go through a hero’s journey. We may develop as people and these situations can occur, but nine out of ten times life just isn’t like that. We wake up and things stay the same and in life, at moments when the credits are supposed to roll after we’ve achieved something, after we’ve overcome something, it just kind of keeps going. Life moves on and our “arcs” and problems to overcome reset, or new ones appear like a constantly stream of wildly uneventful sequels. New problems come up and sometimes they’re never solved and sometimes people don’t change. In my short film “Campussies!” I was really interested in trying to capture a kind of nothing day and interactions with strange people - not really making anything particularly interesting or high tension. The short was also influenced by Linklaters’ other seminal film Dazed and Confused, however that follows a slightly more traditional take on story telling, depicting a character develop throughout the movie. Jim Jarmusch is another director who often uses abrupt endings and whole scenes that literally stop moving forward. A lot of people say there’s almost an amateurish fine line however I believe this to be completely intentional.

In my narrative-based website I recreated the story of Homer’s Odyssey, a very classic tale that has been recreated and re-skinned many times over many years. Through the website, I make you, the person, interact with the story and go on the hero’s journey by yourself. There is only one correct path however the “reincarnation” implies you are constantly reborn until you get it right. Little is told about the situation in my narrative purposely, so that you can project what you would like onto it. It’s about a person, you, traveling from somewhere dangerous, perhaps enemy territory of some kind, and getting back home safely, set in a nonspecific period of time. However the roads are dangerous - filled with sword wielding enemies and no consistent place to be safe from the elements.

There’s other forms of narratives we’re told in between the lines in media such as what we’re told about certain people; these are pervasive narratives. On television we are exposed to poverty porn, depicting that all low income people are a certain way - intended to give the viewer a sense of superiority. In eighties movies we’re told that punks are ruffians and troublemakers. There’s an endless list of mainstream movies from that period showcasing punks as “bad guys”, such as The Terminator (a movie chock full of visual cues) and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Of course there were movies made with more of a punk rock sensibility, such as Return Of The Living Dead, and exploitation movies of the time in which punks were portrayed as the “good guys”. This was most likely due to the media’s take on punks during the movement in the late seventies. The papers themselves named these angry kids “punks” and they wore it as a badge of honour in response to the criticism - that they were a bunch of violent thugs who held switchblades, beat you up and stole your lunch money. Their anti-establishment ways often had them the basis for dystopian movies. In actuality, it wasn’t really like that at all and personally I would feel safer if I saw a gang of whatever the modern day equivalent of punks are. Although I would agree with the anti-establishment sensibilities, most aren’t true anarchists. They’re not gonna mug you.

Again, another example of pervasive narrative we are consistently exposed to is the connotation between women and make up. Media tells us that it is the norm and it’s heavily tied to what is considered the standard of beauty for women. However, anyone of any gender can choose whether or not to wear make up. In my photography piece “Three Studies of a Woman in the Sun” I photographed my subject both wearing make up and without, one subverting the expectations of a photographed woman in modern media and one showing how she often feels comfortable. I often wonder why women choose to wear make up and why it improves their confidence. Do they truly believe that it makes them feel more in touch with their identity, or perhaps we live in a misinformed society in which it is more acceptable for one gender to present themselves a certain way, when in reality it doesn’t really matter and there’s not much of a difference. John Berger had this to say about the representation of women and their identity in the media.

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

My three portraits as part of my DCMP Photography brief are of my friend and artist Katie. Shot on a Canon, I wanted to capture her identity through three images. The middle image you see in the three panels on my blog is her in a natural environment and utterly neutral. That one is relatively light in tone due to the summers day behind her, however she's looking off and something implies it’s more melancholy than the photo lets on. Perhaps the uplifting summer isn’t enough to hold her inner more negative emotions, or that maybe the summer is no longer a good thing in light of the summer getting hotter and hotter each year. Maybe this isn’t a summer of celebration, but one of the end of the world. The bottom one is a real captured moment of her closing her eyes perhaps to imply her shyness in an industrial area, somewhere I often find comfort due to high containers and is generally aesthetically pleasing to me almost because of how not pleasing it is. The top one is how Katie would usually be and dress in her own environment, the lighting highlighting how she expresses herself through her own image. I like how the darkness is almost bleeding in around the edges of the photograph. I experimented with lighting a lot with this one and took several different photos that were the contender for the third portrait. Here, now she is herself, she seems to project more confidence looking directly into the camera like this time the camera is invading HER space as opposed to the other ones where she’s almost a part of the scenery. Now she’s out of the sun, she is the one who is shining. Notice how she also seems to fill up the frame the more comfortable she gets.

Unseen stories hide in advertising and movie posters. In these places you will find signs that speak to us sub-consciously. The movie posters for most horror movies will always use the colour red. Why? Our brain tells us when we see red that there’s danger and that the film will most likely contain plenty of blood. We understand what genre the movie is without even being told so due to semiotics. This can be seen on the movie poster for Shaun of the Dead where the doors our main character is standing behind are red, with white text to pop and in other iterations red text. You see he is surrounded by zombies, hoarded by them, most likely foreshadowing to what the movie is going entail. This is the same in food advertisements. If you watch a television ad about food the colours and aesthetics used often will tell you about the product. Most of the time, fruits and vegetables will be wet, to make them seem fresh and often whoever is starring in the ad or the dialect of the voiceover is who that product is for. If there is a voiceover speaking in a cockney accent then it’s marketed toward the working class, but it’s all just an illusion using stereotypes to manipulate the sub-conscious and the masses into relating to it. It does this all without ever actually telling us.

I wrote a short science fiction script called “The Great Hydration War” and shot a scene from it. In this scene, I did my best to make every shot tell us something. I played around a lot with power dynamic and it’s constantly changing using nothing but visual clues. When our main character thinks they are in control, the camera angle is low, making them seem large and powerful, but when the villain gets the upper hand you’ll see that they have the power. When they are both pointing guns at each other you’ll see that they’re both at the same level and share the power of the scene because it could go either way. Jazoor, the main character from the script who is from outer space, sees a figure after returning to Earth for the first time in years. Unsure of who it is, we see them in a wide shot, impersonal and unidentified. But when they stand up and Jazoor realises that it’s her twin from back when she grew up on the now ancient Earth. “It’s you!” Jazoor exclaims. With what she knows she gains the power to deal with the situation. She’s got this. However she’s flooded with doubt; “You sure?” Says the Dryborg, an evil futurist cyborg whose one weakness is water. The camera swoops up, leaving the character feeling vulnerable with no idea what kind of situation this is now. Then she brings up her gun, bringing the power back to her. I did this throughout the entire scene and tried my best to make sure I was expressing the characters feelings and positions in the scene through the camera angles even though obviously it’s quite a non-sensical script and a mildly ridiculous scene. I thought about the lighting, as the scene was based on an alternate reality Earth in the past where the sun is blue so I made sure all of the scenery were glowing in this blue light which I managed to do in post-production. The costumes were designed by myself and my friend who played the characters. I wanted something science fiction-esque, but obviously I had no budget and not a lot of time, so I decided to try to take the comedic route and rely on it having more charm than actually trying to make the audience believe what was going on. The scene is a pivotal part of the larger structure and story that I had written, however the storyboards for the scene were in fact drawn before I wrote it.

Even when I wrote the script I realised I sub-consciously loosely followed the hero’s journey, most likely because I take so much inspiration from movies. Even when writing, I instinctually had thoughts like “yes, now this kind of scene has to happen”. It was very condensed but it’s still there. We begin the story introducing our hero Jazoor, she continues to go on a journey across the universe before falling and being at her lowest in the third act before facing off her demon she’s been fearing the whole film. She overcomes the Dryborg but not in the way she probably thought. However, I did forget to film the character limping throughout the scene.

Everything is a journey, our lives are one. They’re not always structured how we want them to be but they’re a journey. Every day when we wake up we begin a new micro journey, a new chapter in a much bigger story that is how we view our lives. Stories are almost telling us how to live and that what we’re doing is okay. In my opinion modern mainstream cinema is stale, and I find it hard to believe that in just over a hundred years of film (and a few thousand for storytelling as a visual medium), storytelling has already dried up of all its originality and that we just keep repeating ourselves. Perhaps it's time we took a look at how we structure and create our characters and stories and try to make something more relevant and authentic. Stories reinforce our sub conscious beliefs behind our morals, between good and bad. People don’t want to be seen and thought of as the bad guy within society, hence why most stories are in fact about what we perceive as the “good guy”, the hero. I always find something to latch on to when enjoying a film, something to reassure me that I have my humanity or reassure me when I feel like I don’t have it - and that it’s okay if I don’t.

I don’t like to talk about the internet or politics in context of any work because I feel like those are things that have tainted some elements of different art forms. The only issue with making movies people can relate to is that also means you don’t want to offend anyone, which almost seems like an impossibility in recent years. Too much is focused on these subjects but perhaps that’s why people like movies. Social and political commentary have made many movies hits throughout all of time, but I believe a lot of the time story and characters are being sacrificed out of fear of offending or not being politically correct. It doesn’t seem to matter which stance you take within media, there will always be people that disagree. The internet has given everyone a loud voice and usually it's used for criticism. In terms of relating to a movie, I don’t think it should be a case of representation of sexual orientation or race, it should be about values and character - although I suppose it is human nature to want to relate to something or something who appears like us. Whatever the case, we need to relate to character as a person, and become engaged in the narrative. I think that is is why Campbells and Tzvetan’s theories and myths are continued to be used to this day, because they work.

I would personally love to see more change and experimentation in mainstream and modern cinema, and not to have to constantly and actively seek it out. Even recent movie posters are directly copying each other with the use of colour and framing, which directly relates to the signs we use to communicate information with an image. It would be refreshing to really open up the limitations and possibly of narratives - or in some cases close them off completely.

Bibliography

The Matrix. (1999). [video] Directed by L. Wachowski and L. Wachowski. United States: Warner Bros.

Star Wars. (1977). [video] Directed by G. Lucas. United States: 20th Century Fox.

Shaun of the Dead. (2004). [DVD] Directed by E. Wright. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.

Slacker. (1991). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Orion Classics.

Dazed and Confused. (1993). [DVD] Directed by R. Linklater. United States: Gramercy Pictures.

The Terminator. (1984). [DVD] Directed by J. Cameron. United States: Orion Pictures.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. (2019). [DVD] Directed by G. Miller. Australia: Warner Bros.

The Return of the Living Dead. (1985). [DVD] Directed by D. O'Bannon. United States: Orion Pictures.

Campbell, J., 1949. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 1st ed. United States: Pantheon Books.

Square Enix. 1986. Dragon Quest. Video Game. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft.

Berger, J., 1972. Ways Of Seeing. 1st ed. United Kingdom. Penguin.

George Lucas. (1999). “George Lucas in Conversation With Bill Moyers”. Bill Moyers. George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career.

Dyce, A.D. 2016. How Every Blockbuster Movie Tells The Same Story. [Online]. [8 July 2019]. Available from: https://screenrant.com/how-all-movies-same-secret-truth/

[albanflandin-blog]

Design Context Essay - Timelines in the stories

FLANDIN Alban

GIRARD Mihajlo

 SPOILER ALERT: Possible spoils about the following movies:

Deadpool, Very Bad Trip, Usual Suspects, The Lord of the Rings, Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Interstellar, Arrival, Following, Memento, Mulholland Drive, Réalité, Sin city, Gone Girl

 Introduction

Most stories have always been told in a linear manner, be it in literature, cinema or storytelling in general. In essence, one way storytelling has always been the most logical choice since immemorial times, even during the first periods of humanity, for example, bards and poets would sing about knights’ stories from their birth to their exploits and finally their end. Stories would follow life’s course, that way they were easy to tell and easy to understand thus making them less confusing for the listeners and more captivating. Nowadays, these patterns are still used in today’s books and films but producers and writers become more and more keen to mixing up their storyline and making use of non-linear timelines to add complexity and originality to their works. Consequently, numerous processes regarding timeline manipulation became more and more popular like flashbacks, time travelling, etc… Certain producers go even further by making timeline manipulation become a major aspect of their stories itself. We will therefore seek to understand how the management of a film’s timeline can become a major aspect in its storyline and enhance the intrigue. In order to do so, we will first explain more in detail why the linear storytelling pattern is the one most widely used still to this day. We will then talk about the most commonly used ways of mixing up the timeline in one’s film and its impact on the story. Finally, we’ll see how some producers make the timeline become the major aspect of their scenario and the pros and cons it has in contrast to the classic way of telling a story.

 I – Classical timelines and chronological development of the storyline

Most films today use linear narration techniques meaning they try to display scenes in a chronological and natural order. They aim for a consistent and understandable experience in which the spectators can relate either to the characters or the action. This process adds a realistic dimension to the story as the characters’ lives are displayed chronologically, just like a normal human’s life would unwind. Aristotle was one of the first people to highlight the importance of a well-constructed story in his dramas, logically, a story must have well-defined beginning, to set-up the main plot, middle, to introduce the action and its climax and finally ending, where the problems faced by the characters are resolved. His theory is expanded upon by Gustave Freytag in 1883 who proposes a new model based on Aristotle’s, called the Freytag Pyramid in which the story generally follows a defined narrative plot comprised of 7 distinctive parts:

-        An Exposition phase, where the characters are introduced along their relations to each other, their motivations, goals as well as the context and environment they live in. Furthermore, the story displays what the main characters have to defend and what they have to loose.

 -        The Inciting Incident, where the main problems the characters are going to face are displayed as well as the beginning of their conflicts against the antagonists, if there are any.

 -        The Rising action, where the story builds up upon the conflicts and problems of the characters and the plot gets more exciting.

 -        The Climax, is the moment that the Rising action builds up too, the most intense part of the story.

 -        The Falling action then represents the events that happen after the climax that lead to the resolution and end of the story.

 -        The Resolution where the main problem or conflict is solved by either the main character or someone else.

 -        Finally, the Dénouement represents the end of the story where all the secrets, questions or mysteries which remained still after the resolution are solved.

 This narrative model implies implicitly a linear narrative approach to telling a story (The resolution of a problem should arise after it is evocated). It is used in most movies where the director doesn’t want his spectators to know more than the characters they are watching. This allows the film to keep the tension going through the whole action phase and captivate its audience with action rather than questioning. Now linear narration doesn’t necessarily mean non-complex story, even though a lot of films nowadays use this kind of pattern to concentrate on other aspects. We can see it very clearly in most blockbusters today where directors trade story complexity in order to focus on making the action scenes look more interesting and impressive with the use of special effects and such ( Yes we are looking at you Michael Bay).  In the end, the linear way seems like the most logical choice for a film producer to tell a story easily. But cinema is not only used as a way to tell a story but make the spectator experience something new and original, even though some producers manage very well to make use of linear narration to produce complex and engaging stories, some take the liberty to apply to their stories more thought out narrative outline to bring the spectators into their own world with their own crafted codes and make Cinema shine artistically.

We will now see the most used means of breaking linearity in Cinema today in the second part of our essay.

  II – The common tools used to make non-linear timelines

One of the retrospective tools most used in Cinema today is the flashback. It allows the film to communicate important information that had not been previously revealed during the story and eventually fill story gaps and questions the viewers could have asked themselves. It can also be used as a mean to make the viewers understand a character’s actions, be it the protagonist or the antagonist, by showing elements of their past that can explain their behavior or emotions. There are mainly two types of flashbacks, the objective flashback that shows something that happened in the past without the characters necessarily mentioning anything about it. It gives the viewers information that even some of the characters may not have themselves, In Gone Girl (David Fincher) a flashback explains why the wife of the main character has disappeared while he himself is ignorant as to the reasons why. Then there is the subjective flashback, which doesn’t really break the story’s course as it is mainly following one of the character’s point of view, it is sometimes used to back-up talk with images, when one of the characters is telling his story for example. There is a good example in the hateful eight, when the character played by Samuel L. Jackson explains to another one how he killed his son.  In this case the flashback is often used by producers to respect one of the main principals of Cinema, the “Show and don’t tell” as a linear dialogue would be way less engaging for the viewers. It is part of one of the cinema’s paradox, to avoid talk shows as much as possible and focus on what can be shown to the viewers and what can be explained to him without too much dialogue. It gives importance to certain aspects of the characters or the story and it lifts a problem we can have with linear narration that makes it hard to give consistency to the story and keep the viewers interested as everything is revealed from the get go. Either way, the flashback in general is a powerful tool to break storyline linearity as it allows some parts of the story to remain untold and create narrative gaps that will keep the viewers questioning until said information is revealed. It gives a realistic feel to the characters’ lives not in regards to how it would unfold but how it would be felt with its proper emotions, memories and marking events. Even though the flashback is a tool used by producers to break storyline linearity and put emphasis on certain aspects of the story, there are also other processes like ellipsis that settle only on focusing on important parts of the plot while keeping its order.

Certain movies resort to flashbacks as the main way to tell their stories:

-        “Deadpool” in essence has a very basic plot in its present form and relies mainly on flashbacks to explain the hero’s story and how he got to the point he is now.

 -        “Very Bad Trip”, where the main goal of the characters is to find out what happened to them the night before their hangover, mainly by flashbacks triggered by videos of themselves or testimonies from people that were there.

 -        “Usual Suspects” makes use of flashbacks to illustrate the testimony of the main character to the police (Even if we learn at the end that what he says didn’t really happen).

The main limit of the flashback process is that you can make the film confusing for the viewers by making them loose the notion of the timeline or story order, thus flashbacks need to be correctly delimited in the story and carefully inserted with the use of special effects and such.

There are other basic tools that are used to make the intrigue less linear, in the same vein as the flashback we have the flash-forward that shows elements of the future that are bound to happen eventually. It can be presented either as a prophetic vision or an alternative future. It can give sense to the character’s actions by showing what they have to aim for or what they have to prevent from happening and display clearly what is at stake for the viewers to see. In “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”, the queen of the elves shows to the main character what will happen if he fails his quest to destroy the ring of Sauron.

Even though these processes break the linearity of the storyline of the movies in which they are used, the movie still keeps its linear construction. So in our third part we will see some examples of movies where the non-linearity of the timeline is one of the major aspects of the plot, which is sometimes even entirely constructed around it.

 III – The timeline as a major part of the scenario

We will now talk about films based around a nonlinear construction. Certain movies choose to show multiple characters evolving in different eras by either by following a linear construction like in “2001, A Space Odyssey” where each story is showed completely before the movie transitions to the next, more recent one. In contrast, in “Cloud Atlas”, the directors tell six different stories in different ages and alternate scenes of each one of the stories. The plot bounces between timelines just like in “The Fountain” (Aronofsky) even though we can imagine that some of the stories are only symbolic and do not really happen, just like the part in the future. This way of telling the story brings dynamism into the movie and draws close to the TV shows’ ways of teasing what will happen next, a lot of scenes just end up on at a point in the story that leaves us wanting to see more (Especially in Cloud Atlas).  To a lesser extent we can also talk about “Sin City” where many different stories are told and even though they happen at the same time, each one is shown separately and the movie goes back in time when a new story begins.

In certain movies, timeline manipulation appears like a consequence of the plot itself. In “Edge of tomorrow”, the main character is thrown into a time loop and comes back to the beginning every time he dies while keeping his memories, desperately trying each time to fix the mistakes that led to his death. By doing this, the movie scrambles the viewer’s expectations as in essence, the main character could end up doing the same things over and over again. This lets the producer try to impress the viewer and renew his experience with the same scenes but with different outcomes.

In “Interstellar” the timeline mainly follows the law of physics, as an example when the main characters arrive on a planet where gravity is really strong, time flies by more “slowly” than the people that had stayed far away from the planet. The most interesting thing we can talk about the timeline of this film is when the character of McConaughey goes into the black hole and becomes able to interact with objects of the past. By doing that, the character transcends time and tries to influence his past self not to become his present one. Here too, the timeline creates a story loop which links the beginning and end of the story, more or less like in “Back to the Future”.

On some other films, there is only one story and nothing in the scenario would justify a non-linear narration in itself. But it’s the producer’s choice to just tell his story in another way, in Arrival, Denis Villeneuve tries to trick his audience by showing what appears to be flashbacks but is in reality flash-forwards revealing that the main character had in reality visions about the future making her face difficult decisions. Sometimes, timeline manipulation is an integral part of the intrigue of the movie, for instance, in “Following” by Nolan, the story of the main character is told originally, scenes from three different periods in his life are mixed up together and put end to end to form a confusing puzzle that the viewer has to resolve. The viewer can differentiate each periods of the character’s life by looking at his face: he first has long hair, then short hair and a beaten up face on the last part. It gives a disconcerting feeling to the viewer during the movie and finally a sense of accomplishment when the pieces of the puzzle are put together. It is also the case for “Memento”, by the same director, it is the story of a guy that lost his short term memory due to a rare condition of amnesia. To bring the character closer to the viewers, the film is constructed upside down, each scene ends where the previous one began. By doing that the viewer, just like the amnesic character, does not know what has happened before. In consequence, the director creates complicity with his viewers and totally changes the classical stakes of the usual movie, here the story begins with the main character killing someone and the whole interest of the movie is to show the steps that led him to doing that. As we said before, using this process can give a feeling of accomplishment to the viewer when he finally solves the puzzle, but this narration can also be used to create a confusing experience where plenty of interpretations are possible, just like in “Mulholland Drive” by David Lynch, where the movie is divided in two parts, one where the character played by Laura Elena Harring (Camilla Rhodes) is with Betty the other where she is with(Played by Naomi Watts) and Diane (Naomi Watts too). Many interpretations are possible about what the signification of each part is. This confusing effect is even more present in “Réalité” by Dupieux: this film tells a story where there is, in the beginning, a big border between two timelines, dream and reality but the more the story goes, the more the border becomes thinner between each timeline, to the point that we can’t distinguish whether the scene is a dream or reality. To conclude, the manipulation of the timeline in an intentional way can really create an original and unique experience for the viewer, furthermore, if the process is well done it can enhance the intrigue.

    Conclusion

 We’ve seen why linear narration has always been so popular being the easiest way to tell a story without losing the viewers and letting the director focus on other part of his film even though it has its limits. To face them, a lot of movies nowadays began using “classic” tools and processes that could allow them to mix up their storyline and timeline such as flashbacks and flash-forwards as we have seen. Finally, some directors decided to produce movies that embraced timeline manipulation fully and make it an integral part of the storyline to add originality to their films and make their viewers experience new emotions and discover a new way of entertainment by trying to decipher the true meaning of the story.

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Design contexts essay

                                              Design contexts Essay

FLANDIN Alban

GIRARD Mihajlo

 SPOILER ALERT: Possible spoils about the following movies:

Deadpool, Very Bad Trip, Usual Suspects, The Lord of the Rings, Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Interstellar, Arrival, Following, Memento, Mulholland Drive, Réalité, Sin city, Gone Girl

 Introduction

Most stories have always been told in a linear manner, be it in literature, cinema or storytelling in general. In essence, one way storytelling has always been the most logical choice since immemorial times, even during the first periods of humanity, for example, bards and poets would sing about knights’ stories from their birth to their exploits and finally their end. Stories would follow life’s course, that way they were easy to tell and easy to understand thus making them less confusing for the listeners and more captivating. Nowadays, these patterns are still used in today’s books and films but producers and writers become more and more keen to mixing up their storyline and making use of non-linear timelines to add complexity and originality to their works. Consequently, numerous processes regarding timeline manipulation became more and more popular like flashbacks, time travelling, etc… Certain producers go even further by making timeline manipulation become a major aspect of their stories itself. We will therefore seek to understand how the management of a film’s timeline can become a major aspect in its storyline and enhance the intrigue. In order to do so, we will first explain more in detail why the linear storytelling pattern is the one most widely used still to this day. We will then talk about the most commonly used ways of mixing up the timeline in one’s film and its impact on the story. Finally, we’ll see how some producers make the timeline become the major aspect of their scenario and the pros and cons it has in contrast to the classic way of telling a story.

 I – Classical timelines and chronological development of the storyline

Most films today use linear narration techniques meaning they try to display scenes in a chronological and natural order. They aim for a consistent and understandable experience in which the spectators can relate either to the characters or the action. This process adds a realistic dimension to the story as the characters’ lives are displayed chronologically, just like a normal human’s life would unwind. Aristotle was one of the first people to highlight the importance of a well-constructed story in his dramas, logically, a story must have well-defined beginning, to set-up the main plot, middle, to introduce the action and its climax and finally ending, where the problems faced by the characters are resolved. His theory is expanded upon by Gustave Freytag in 1883 who proposes a new model based on Aristotle’s, called the Freytag Pyramid in which the story generally follows a defined narrative plot comprised of 7 distinctive parts:

-          An Exposition phase, where the characters are introduced along their relations to each other, their motivations, goals as well as the context and environment they live in. Furthermore, the story displays what the main characters have to defend and what they have to loose.

  -          The Inciting Incident, where the main problems the characters are going to face are displayed as well as the beginning of their conflicts against the antagonists, if there are any.

 -          The Rising action, where the story builds up upon the conflicts and problems of the characters and the plot gets more exciting.

 -          The Climax, is the moment that the Rising action builds up too, the most intense part of the story.

 -          The Falling action then represents the events that happen after the climax that lead to the resolution and end of the story.

 -          The Resolution where the main problem or conflict is solved by either the main character or someone else.

 -          Finally, the Dénouement represents the end of the story where all the secrets, questions or mysteries which remained still after the resolution are solved.

 This narrative model implies implicitly a linear narrative approach to telling a story (The resolution of a problem should arise after it is evocated). It is used in most movies where the director doesn’t want his spectators to know more than the characters they are watching. This allows the film to keep the tension going through the whole action phase and captivate its audience with action rather than questioning. Now linear narration doesn’t necessarily mean non-complex story, even though a lot of films nowadays use this kind of pattern to concentrate on other aspects. We can see it very clearly in most blockbusters today where directors trade story complexity in order to focus on making the action scenes look more interesting and impressive with the use of special effects and such ( Yes we are looking at you Michael Bay).  In the end, the linear way seems like the most logical choice for a film producer to tell a story easily. But cinema is not only used as a way to tell a story but make the spectator experience something new and original, even though some producers manage very well to make use of linear narration to produce complex and engaging stories, some take the liberty to apply to their stories more thought out narrative outline to bring the spectators into their own world with their own crafted codes and make Cinema shine artistically.

We will now see the most used means of breaking linearity in Cinema today in the second part of our essay.

  II – The common tools used to make non-linear timelines

One of the retrospective tools most used in Cinema today is the flashback. It allows the film to communicate important information that had not been previously revealed during the story and eventually fill story gaps and questions the viewers could have asked themselves. It can also be used as a mean to make the viewers understand a character’s actions, be it the protagonist or the antagonist, by showing elements of their past that can explain their behavior or emotions. There are mainly two types of flashbacks, the objective flashback that shows something that happened in the past without the characters necessarily mentioning anything about it. It gives the viewers information that even some of the characters may not have themselves, In Gone Girl (David Fincher) a flashback explains why the wife of the main character has disappeared while he himself is ignorant as to the reasons why. Then there is the subjective flashback, which doesn’t really break the story’s course as it is mainly following one of the character’s point of view, it is sometimes used to back-up talk with images, when one of the characters is telling his story for example. There is a good example in the hateful eight, when the character played by Samuel L. Jackson explains to another one how he killed his son.  In this case the flashback is often used by producers to respect one of the main principals of Cinema, the “Show and don’t tell” as a linear dialogue would be way less engaging for the viewers. It is part of one of the cinema’s paradox, to avoid talk shows as much as possible and focus on what can be shown to the viewers and what can be explained to him without too much dialogue. It gives importance to certain aspects of the characters or the story and it lifts a problem we can have with linear narration that makes it hard to give consistency to the story and keep the viewers interested as everything is revealed from the get go. Either way, the flashback in general is a powerful tool to break storyline linearity as it allows some parts of the story to remain untold and create narrative gaps that will keep the viewers questioning until said information is revealed. It gives a realistic feel to the characters’ lives not in regards to how it would unfold but how it would be felt with its proper emotions, memories and marking events. Even though the flashback is a tool used by producers to break storyline linearity and put emphasis on certain aspects of the story, there are also other processes like ellipsis that settle only on focusing on important parts of the plot while keeping its order.

Certain movies resort to flashbacks as the main way to tell their stories:

-          “Deadpool” in essence has a very basic plot in its present form and relies mainly on flashbacks to explain the hero’s story and how he got to the point he is now.

 -          “Very Bad Trip”, where the main goal of the characters is to find out what happened to them the night before their hangover, mainly by flashbacks triggered by videos of themselves or testimonies from people that were there.

 -          “Usual Suspects” makes use of flashbacks to illustrate the testimony of the main character to the police (Even if we learn at the end that what he says didn’t really happen).

The main limit of the flashback process is that you can make the film confusing for the viewers by making them loose the notion of the timeline or story order, thus flashbacks need to be correctly delimited in the story and carefully inserted with the use of special effects and such.

There are other basic tools that are used to make the intrigue less linear, in the same vein as the flashback we have the flash-forward that shows elements of the future that are bound to happen eventually. It can be presented either as a prophetic vision or an alternative future. It can give sense to the character’s actions by showing what they have to aim for or what they have to prevent from happening and display clearly what is at stake for the viewers to see. In “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”, the queen of the elves shows to the main character what will happen if he fails his quest to destroy the ring of Sauron.

Even though these processes break the linearity of the storyline of the movies in which they are used, the movie still keeps its linear construction. So in our third part we will see some examples of movies where the non-linearity of the timeline is one of the major aspects of the plot, which is sometimes even entirely constructed around it.

 III – The timeline as a major part of the scenario

We will now talk about films based around a nonlinear construction. Certain movies choose to show multiple characters evolving in different eras by either by following a linear construction like in “2001, A Space Odyssey” where each story is showed completely before the movie transitions to the next, more recent one. In contrast, in “Cloud Atlas”, the directors tell six different stories in different ages and alternate scenes of each one of the stories. The plot bounces between timelines just like in “The Fountain” (Aronofsky) even though we can imagine that some of the stories are only symbolic and do not really happen, just like the part in the future. This way of telling the story brings dynamism into the movie and draws close to the TV shows’ ways of teasing what will happen next, a lot of scenes just end up on at a point in the story that leaves us wanting to see more (Especially in Cloud Atlas).  To a lesser extent we can also talk about “Sin City” where many different stories are told and even though they happen at the same time, each one is shown separately and the movie goes back in time when a new story begins.

In certain movies, timeline manipulation appears like a consequence of the plot itself. In “Edge of tomorrow”, the main character is thrown into a time loop and comes back to the beginning every time he dies while keeping his memories, desperately trying each time to fix the mistakes that led to his death. By doing this, the movie scrambles the viewer’s expectations as in essence, the main character could end up doing the same things over and over again. This lets the producer try to impress the viewer and renew his experience with the same scenes but with different outcomes.

In “Interstellar” the timeline mainly follows the law of physics, as an example when the main characters arrive on a planet where gravity is really strong, time flies by more “slowly” than the people that had stayed far away from the planet. The most interesting thing we can talk about the timeline of this film is when the character of McConaughey goes into the black hole and becomes able to interact with objects of the past. By doing that, the character transcends time and tries to influence his past self not to become his present one. Here too, the timeline creates a story loop which links the beginning and end of the story, more or less like in “Back to the Future”.

On some other films, there is only one story and nothing in the scenario would justify a non-linear narration in itself. But it’s the producer’s choice to just tell his story in another way, in Arrival, Denis Villeneuve tries to trick his audience by showing what appears to be flashbacks but is in reality flash-forwards revealing that the main character had in reality visions about the future making her face difficult decisions. Sometimes, timeline manipulation is an integral part of the intrigue of the movie, for instance, in “Following” by Nolan, the story of the main character is told originally, scenes from three different periods in his life are mixed up together and put end to end to form a confusing puzzle that the viewer has to resolve. The viewer can differentiate each periods of the character’s life by looking at his face: he first has long hair, then short hair and a beaten up face on the last part. It gives a disconcerting feeling to the viewer during the movie and finally a sense of accomplishment when the pieces of the puzzle are put together. It is also the case for “Memento”, by the same director, it is the story of a guy that lost his short term memory due to a rare condition of amnesia. To bring the character closer to the viewers, the film is constructed upside down, each scene ends where the previous one began. By doing that the viewer, just like the amnesic character, does not know what has happened before. In consequence, the director creates complicity with his viewers and totally changes the classical stakes of the usual movie, here the story begins with the main character killing someone and the whole interest of the movie is to show the steps that led him to doing that. As we said before, using this process can give a feeling of accomplishment to the viewer when he finally solves the puzzle, but this narration can also be used to create a confusing experience where plenty of interpretations are possible, just like in “Mulholland Drive” by David Lynch, where the movie is divided in two parts, one where the character played by Laura Elena Harring (Camilla Rhodes) is with Betty the other where she is with(Played by Naomi Watts) and Diane (Naomi Watts too). Many interpretations are possible about what the signification of each part is. This confusing effect is even more present in “Réalité” by Dupieux: this film tells a story where there is, in the beginning, a big border between two timelines, dream and reality but the more the story goes, the more the border becomes thinner between each timeline, to the point that we can’t distinguish whether the scene is a dream or reality. To conclude, the manipulation of the timeline in an intentional way can really create an original and unique experience for the viewer, furthermore, if the process is well done it can enhance the intrigue.

    Conclusion

 We’ve seen why linear narration has always been so popular being the easiest way to tell a story without losing the viewers and letting the director focus on other part of his film even though it has its limits. To face them, a lot of movies nowadays began using “classic” tools and processes that could allow them to mix up their storyline and timeline such as flashbacks and flash-forwards as we have seen. Finally, some directors decided to produce movies that embraced timeline manipulation fully and make it an integral part of the storyline to add originality to their films and make their viewers experience new emotions and discover a new way of entertainment by trying to decipher the true meaning of the story.