#Fenn's weird thoughts

[floofyflooftheallmighty]

Clown music has started to randomly play in the middle of the night in my neighborhood and I'm unsure how to feel about this

[needleandstory]

✵ Just fuck me up, bebby whoever you wanna.

Send ✵ and my muse will answer the following.  

XANDER/ABBEY

Their first impression of your muse: Weird nun :/

Current impression:   A kind, generous, and delicate soul, handle with care

Are they attracted to your muse?:  Somewhat, yes. Not so much physically, but she really activates his protective instinct, he wants to see her smile and defend her from every bad thing in the world. (But in an abstract way where he acknowledges the impracticality.)

Something they find frightening about your muse: Her nervousness. The thought that he could make a wrong move and scare her and then he'd become one of the bad scary things in her world.

Something they find adorable about your muse:  Her enthusiasm over his teaching.

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  Yes absolutely in a heart beat.

Would my muse go on a date with yours?  platonic/romantic:  Yes definitely. He'd love to see her excited and having fun.

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  Anxious

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Never, not for all the money and fame and power in the world

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: Yes, either, but she would have to initiate in some way. He wouldn't so much as lay a finger on her without her say.

XANDER/ALICE

Their first impression of your muse: Weird little freak. Kind of off-putting. What does Jay see in her? Super anxious too.

Current impression: Gushing and gushing and gushing. Literally the best. Brave and strong and smart and cool and caring and determined and amazing and adorable. Still a little weirdo though. <3

Are they attracted to your muse?:  Oh yeah, big time.

Something they find frightening about your muse: How much about her he doesn't understand. How adamant she was about her own death.

Something they find adorable about your muse:  Her nicknames for people generally and him specifically.

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  He's done it once and he'll do it again.

Would my muse go on a date with yours? romantic:  He would love to.

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  Funny

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Only if needed to snap her out of something.

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: Yes and yes, he's already looking for little excuses to touch her.

CYRUS/ALICE

Their first impression of your muse: Touchy, obnoxious, persistent, immature, rude, holier-than-thou

Current impression: Silly and funny in a way people like. Beloved. Kind. What’s it like to want to die and have so many people come chasing after you?

Are they attracted to your muse?: Not even a little

Something they find frightening about your muse: How much better she is than him. The thought that jay might like her so much that she realizes how shitty he is.

Something they find adorable about your muse: Her enthusiasm for bugs.

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?: Probably not. Probably.

Would my muse go on a date with yours? platonic/romantic: Not unless someone else set them up.

One word my muse would use to describe yours: Fine

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Yeah. Would probably feel kinda good.

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: Don’t touch him.

JEREMY/MADDOX

Their first impression of your muse: Tired and stressed, but cool. Nosy and popular.

Current impression:   He's had some shit happen to him, huh?

Are they attracted to your muse?:  N/A

Something they find frightening about your muse: How much he tries to be cool about everything

Something they find adorable about your muse:  His lamest jokes

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  He might try.

Would my muse go on a date with yours?  platonic/romantic:  No thank you.

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  Thoughtful

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Noooope

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: A hug, maybe? But probably not, maddox doesnt seem like a hugger.

ROWAN/CHESTER

Their first impression of your muse: Uptight and insufferable

Current impression:   Uptight and tormentable. Reliable. Uncomfortably generous.

Are they attracted to your muse?:  It's not a hard no, shockingly? I'm as surprised as you are. I'm pretty sure it's the tormentability.

Something they find frightening about your muse: How much he owes him.

Something they find adorable about your muse:  Kitty <3

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  Could go either way, but probably not.

Would my muse go on a date with yours?  platonic/romantic:  Only if by "date" you mean "go somewhere and judge people"

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Yeah! For fun.

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: No real inclination there. on either of these.

ROWAN/NIL

Their first impression of your muse: The most annoying kind of liar. (Thinks he's being helpful, actually just being a pain.)

Current impression:   Generous, but also overbearing and condescending. Still a liar. At least he's good at his job.

Are they attracted to your muse?:  Not at all.

Something they find frightening about your muse: The power he currently holds over Rowan's life.

Something they find adorable about your muse:  His sewing room

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  No way in hell.

Would my muse go on a date with yours?  platonic/romantic:  Not a chance.

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  Insufferable

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: Gleefully

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: No.

NAT/FENN

Their first impression of your muse: Heheh idiot can't climb a tree

Current impression:   Best friend (for now), rough and adorable <3

Are they attracted to your muse?:  Nat's not picky but Fenn's not generally their type either.

Something they find frightening about your muse: Nothing?

Something they find adorable about your muse:  How flustered she gets when they hold hands <3

Would my muse sacrifice themselves for yours?:  Never

Would my muse go on a date with yours?  platonic/romantic:  Yes! For fun! Plus they'd enjoy seeing Fenn's flirts.

One word my muse would use to describe yours:  Gruff

Would my muse slap yours if they could?: For fun, yeah~

Would my muse hug/kiss yours?: Absolutely.

[souldagger]

hi! i was wondering if you know of any nonbinary sci-fi authors? i'm taking part of a storygraph challenge and one of the challenges is to read a scifi novel by a nonbinary author so i thought maybe you'd have a rec! thank you and hope you have a great day <3 (btw do you still have the link to the doc you had of all the vintage lgbt scifi novels? thanks again!)

DO I!!!! :DDD

Sarah Gailey - The Echo Wife (domestic scifi thriller with gone girl vibes)

Ada Hoffmann - The Outside (cosmic horror)

S. Qiouyi Lu - In The Watchful City (mosaic novella with stories that range from scifi to fantasy)

Ness Brown - The Scourge Between Stars (scifi horror ala Alien, good for some low brainpower horror thrills) CORRECTION: while ness brown goes by they/them pronouns, i don't think they've actually confirmed if they identify as nonbinary, my bad!

Avi Silver - Pluralities (bit hard to categorize but i'd recommend this one if you'd like a weird scifi novella with gender and transness as a main theme!)

Neon Yang - The Genesis of Misery (science fantasy with mechas) (i haven't read it yet, but i'm a huge fan of neon yang's other work!)

Rivers Solomon - An Unkindness of Ghosts (generation ship scifi) (another one i haven't gotten around to yet, but it's by all accounts exceptional - though, note, very heavy from what i've heard - and i really enjoyed the author's fantasy novella The Deep)

and a couple more whose work I haven't read, but who are pretty high on my to-read list:

Emma Mieko Candon - The Archive Undying

Nino Cipri - Finna

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor - So You Want to be a Robot and Other Stories

Xiran Jay Zhao - Iron Widow (tbh i've heard some mixed opinions abt this one, but it is also undeniably the most popular book on this list)

Bogi Takács - The Trans Space Octopus Congregation: Stories, Power to Yield and Other Stories (i also wanna shout out eir reading blog, which has an absolutely incredible list of resources, including the trans and intersex fiction and poetry timeline and the neopronouns in fiction timeline!!!)

as for the vintage LGBT scifi doc: why yes of course. here it is in all its 150+ book glory <3

[jucyfruit]

Catching Up with Lucy Dacus and Fenne Lily

by Lucy Dacus | 11/13/20

Lucy Dacus is a Richmond, Virginia-based singer-songwriter and one-third of the folk supergroup boygenius; Fenne Lily is Bristol, UK-based singer-songwriter whose album BREACH was released in September by Dead Oceans. For this phone call, the two friends set out to dive deep on their recent dreams, and ended up taking in much, much more.

— Annie Fell, Talkhouse Senior Editor

Fenne: Before this call, I was just looking you up. Is that weird?

Lucy: You were listening to my music?

Fenne: Yeah!

Lucy: That’s so funny, I was listening to your music. “I, Nietzsche.”

Fenne: [Laughs.] You actually were one of the many reasons why I broke up with the guy that that song is about.

Lucy: Oh, my god, I didn’t like him at all.

Fenne: Do you remember? It was literally the first time I met you, pretty much, or maybe the second time. I was with him and he tried to pull me out of the conversation because he wanted to go home or something — probably to read Nietzsche. And you were like, “Don’t touch my girl like that.” And I was like, Lucy Dacus just called me her girl, and I need to leave this boy. [Laughs.]

Lucy: I felt quickly defensive of you. We had hardly met, but he was just acting so brutish. It was like, Damn, who is this guy? It was so brutish that I thought maybe you didn’t even know him, but then you were like, “No, I’m actually with him.”

Fenne: Yeah, he’s been inside me. [Laughs.] I mean, you’re someone who makes good decisions, so you’re probably not going to answer this with a yes, but have you ever been with someone that you’re like, “I can’t believe that I gave them my body, and my heart.”

Lucy: Yeah, I am easily disgusted by the idea of some of the people that I used to really have tenderness for. But then I realize, that was not a bad quality, to be able to find good things about a bad person. Even that’s tough, to call someone just a straight up bad person, but someone that I really don’t like now, I try not to be like, I’m such an idiot. That was just a part of growing, realizing that just because they have a couple good qualities doesn’t mean that they have to be my life partner.

Fenne: Yeah, I mean, I like to think of the really bad relationships I’ve been in as, like, an exercise in compassion, to an extent where now retrospectively I can see that they were manipulating me. But at the time, I was so ready to be like, You’re just an injured soul and you need a safe place, and I can be that place. But that should only be for a time. And I think I’ve definitely seen people in those relationships for a long time and it starts wearing away at them, and the way that you see yourself like personally. So as much it’s a practice in being able to see past someone’s bad qualities, I know that there’s a cutoff point for that. But yeah, thanks for protecting me. [Laughs.]

Lucy: Yeah, I think that was actually after I went through my long, drawn out, like, worst relationship. And I think that since then, I’ve been overly defensive probably. Or I just love my friends so much that I feel like nobody deserves them, and I’m just like, and I’m just like, “Go away!” to most people that my friends date. That’s not totally true, but it’s like a recurring feeling. But yeah, I hardly knew you so I was probably overstepping a bound by trying to defend you.

Fenne: It made my heart soar, and I honestly felt safe. But you have that lyric that goes, “You don’t deserve what you don’t respect,” and I always kind of thought that you were singing about yourself, but maybe you’re singing generally about people that you love also.

Lucy: Yeah, I definitely thought it about other people first, because it’s easier to defend other people than yourself. And then I realize, I should take my own advice, but I’m still not so good at that. But I think I’m better at it.

Fenne: Do you ever find yourself writing yourself as a character so that you can make clearer judgments on your own shit? Like, do you ever make yourself the third person so you can be like, “Lucy should do this.”

Lucy: A lot of people I know great as a character, but I have no such self-control. I definitely wish that I could write it as an exercise, but writing often just feels sort of like throwing up. You know what I mean? All of a sudden it’s just there, and you don’t necessarily want it to be there, an inconvenience. And I don’t really know what I’m saying until the song is written. Like, I would really love to be able to say, like, Oh, I’d like to process this event in my life, or this thought, — I will make art about it. But that has never been a skill. I feel like all my songs start as subconscious vomit.

Fenne: I agree. I thought you were going to go the opposite direction, because as a person, you seem like someone who thinks before they speak and considers the weight and the repercussions of what they’re saying. So it’s interesting that your process doesn’t reflect what I see in your character, in that sense.

Lucy: I think it’s easier to talk to other people than to myself. I think that I carry a weight of, like, you know, say-what-you-mean when I’m talking to other people, but I don’t have a practice of talking like that to myself. So it’s just kind of forced upon me sometimes, that I end up talking to myself through writing a song. Is that how you write? Do you actually sit down and say, “I’m going to write about this,” and then you write a song about what you intend to write about?

Fenne: No, I have very little foresight or planning or structure to any part of my life, and it is definitely affecting the way I work. I literally get to the point where I haven’t written in so long that I’m furious at myself for not doing anything. And I sit down, and it is like word vomit. I’m like, Something’s coming out, I’m just going to let it happen, because if I don’t, it might never happen again. And often, I’m writing and I don’t know why I’m writing from the perspective I’m writing from.

At the moment I am in a relationship that I am really comfortable in, and he makes me feel brilliant most of the time, I still feel these inexplicable periods of sadness that almost make me feel guilty, because he obviously sees me going through this and maybe thinks it’s a reflection on him. And often those are the feelings that come out when I’m writing. I think it’s a hangover from being a kid and being unable to talk about how I feel to my family, despite the fact that they’re really emotionally intelligent people and completely up fo talking about feelings, I was almost rebelling against that. So I started writing at that time because I literally couldn’t get out my feelings in any other way. I feel like I still do that, where I’m subconsciously storing up fuel to then speak to myself about songs, rather than having to vocalize it in words. So it’s never a case of being like, I’m gonna write a song about global warming — although now that I’ve said that, maybe I should do that. [Laughs.]

Lucy: I feel like it’s really rare to write about topical things and have it actually be good. I have some family members who are just like, “You should really write a song about everything that’s going on in these uncertain times!” And I’m just like, no. I just feel like my perspective isn’t necessary — just, like, as a white person, I simply don’t need to be taking up space. I’m grateful I have a platform that I can put other voices onto, with the literal easiest thing ever of resharing things.

But yeah, I think it could be useful for you to do a song about global warming, I hope you end up writing one. That’d be awesome. But don’t be tacky — it’s weird to be like, Oh, this is topical. It just it ends up feeling really tacky, I think, as a listener.

Fenne: I think to an extent, everything that I’ve written during this pandemic situation… I haven’t written a lot, I’ve feeling really unconnected to myself, and the world, and feeling really weird. But in a sense, everything that you’re writing is about the fucked up stuff that’s going on, even if it’s not directly preaching. I feel like the way you and I write is naturally diaristic, and doesn’t feel completely separate from the stuff that’s going on. You’re quite a permeable person emotionally, I think, and I definitely am. It’s inescapable that outside stuff is inevitably going to become part of the material, even if you if you don’t say, “Trump” and “Brexit” and the whole thing.

But you’re right. I mean, I’m dreading next year when all these quarantine albums come out, where all the songs are going to be called like, “Masked and Alone,” and “My Wifi’s Too Slow.” Have you been writing a lot during this period, or have you been feeling a bit dead?

Lucy: I actually have been writing a lot because, I think I end up writing to escape the present and to not think about the future. I feel like most of my creative life comes from the past. Thinking about the future is scary and living in the present is scary, and the past is certain, it can’t be changed. It’s static. I journal, so I’ve been rereading my journals and kind of remembering some emotional things that I haven’t really put to rest yet, and so that’s just kind of ending up being what I’m writing about right now. And then I might write about what’s happening in the year 2020 in, like, 2025. Do you ever have a dialogue about where you’re writing about something like many years after?

Fenne: Yeah, 100 percent. This record that I just released, when I first started writing for it, it [was] really important for me to reflect the growth that I feel I’ve experienced since the first album came out. That was kind of my first thing — I was like, I need to almost prove that I changed, if not just to myself, to people that are listening to the music.

And then as I started writing, there was a lot of stuff coming up. I was having these conversations with my mum about why I always feel angry rather than sad as my go-to feeling, and how I always feel panicky very fast. And she was telling me that when I was born, I didn’t have that big intake of breath that normal births provide — I was a cesarean, I just got cut out — and she was like, “For the first year of the life, you were crying if you weren’t held and you were always in pain and your spine was all weird and you just were not comfortable in your skin.” That was so interesting to hear that, because I genuinely feel like I haven’t really changed that much from how I came into the world. I definitely think there’s something to be said for your entrance into the world influencing how you exist in that world. So as much as I’m like, I really want to write about being 21, I feel like I also want to talk about being two again. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but it happened.

But you’re right about the past, it isn’t going to change, and thinking about the future is really scary, especially when — I don’t know how the rules are changing in the states, but especially here, it’s like we’re being run by children. It’s like “You can do what you want! Oh, no, those people died. Well, that’s a shit. Maybe we should stay inside again. Oh, no, that hasn’t worked.” No one knows what’s going on and to even try and get your head around what it’s going to be like in a week or year is impossible. And that makes you feel powerless, and then that makes

Lucy: Have you been having any of weird dreams during lockdown?

Fenne: The first couple of weeks I didn’t have any dreams. I think I was still in a state of shock, where I was like, This doesn’t feel normal. I almost [felt] like when you smoke too much weed, and your waking mind is going crazy, and then when you go to sleep, your body’s like, I literally can’t do it any more crazy anymore.

That was my brain for a while, but then come week three or four, I started having terrifying — like, not even apocalyptic dreams, just dreams when nothing was right. I had those, like. “running on the spot trying to get away from something but I couldn’t,” just really visceral, realistic horror dreams. I don’t know when they stopped, but it was dark for a bit. What about you?

Lucy: I think similarly in the beginning, I wasn’t having a lot of dreams. I did have this one dream about me and a lot of friends touring this big, kind of mansion-like house that was furnished. And they were like, “Oh, look, there’s a room over here, I found a new room!” And we were all just running around, like, laughing and loving this huge house. So I woke up and I was like, You know what, I’m just going to get on Zillow and see if there’s a big place that I could just fit my fantasy into. And there was this place that was listed, like, three days prior, and it looked so similar to the house of my dream. So I called my friends that were in the dream and I was like, “Hey, do you want to move in together? I just had this dream and I found this house and we were all in it together.” And that actually happened in July, like I live in the house with the people that were in the dream

Fenne: Oh, my god, that’s amazing.

Lucy: Did you feel you were psychic ever?

Fenne: Stupid stuff, like I predicted my brother’s birth. I was sitting with my mom on the stairs of old house, and I was, like, one and a half or two. I was like, “It’s going to be a brother, I think,” or something like that. And she was like, “What are you talking about?” And I put my hand on her tummy and said, “It’s going to be a brother, but it’s a sister I had in mind.” And she was like, “That was weird,” and then she went to get a pregnancy test and she was a month pregnant.

Lucy: Oh, wow. I thought you were saying like, “My mom was pregnant, so I predicted that she would have a baby.”

Fenne: No, like straight up, she had no idea.

Lucy: That’s much more impressive.

Fenne: She didn’t tell me for a long time — maybe until I was 15 I didn’t know, because she was like, “I don’t want to give her false power, I don’t want her to think that everything she has a feeling about is going to happen.”

But I think I go through certain areas where I get a bad feeling and try and squash it if I don’t know anything about it, and then it’s proven to me that I was right. I moved into this really spooky house… when I first moved to Bristol I was in shared houses, and then I was like, I really want a place to live with a couple of friends. We were looking somewhere and we, in the process, got kicked out of our existing houses, so we had to rush finding a place. We settled on this house that was enormous and really cheap, and we didn’t know why it was so cheap but we didn’t really think about it.

When we first went to view it, I was like, This feels wrong. Something about the energy of this house is not nice. It doesn’t feel like we’re welcome here. And I told my friend, and he was like, “Well, we don’t really have the chance to be picky right now, and we don’t have any money.” So we moved in, and then a couple of weeks after we moved in I was sitting outside — we signed on for a year, so we couldn’t get out even if we wanted to. I was sitting outside the house and the next door neighbor talking to me, and we were chatting and she was like, “Do you know the story behind the house you just moved into?” I was like, “No, but please tell me because I don’t like it.” And basically, about 10 years ago, maybe less, this family next door, who still lives next door, the dad in the family shot some guy because they were in warring gangs — I live in a really rough bit of Bristol. He shot this guy and tried to hide the body in the basement of the house that we live in now, and then he tried to escape to the States, and his wife bought him the ticket — they both went down for a long time, and the kids were in care. Now the woman’s out of jail and she’s living next door with the kids. So I was like, “There’s been a dead body in my house.” And I feel like I knew that something was wrong and I ignored it, and then ever since that point, I had to live there for another 11 months. And I had all my practice equipment in the basement, I’d made it into a room where we could record, and then it just didn’t feel good from that point on. I didn’t want to go downstairs.

Lucy: If you felt good, I’d be really concerned. [Laughs.] I do feel like people like haunted houses sometimes, like some people really get into that. I don’t understand it. I feel like you can only be into it if you haven’t truly been affected by the haunting of the house.

Fenne: It’s the kind of thing that you want to go into for a trip, but t you don’t want to really live there. I don’t know about you, and I will ask you, but I didn’t really think I was that much of a believer in ghosts for a pretty long time, and then I was listening to this podcast where people tell real stories from their lives — it’s not scripted at all, at least that’s what they say. There’s so many stories of people moving into a house, getting a weird feeling, and then their kid start talking to ghosts. Some of the stories are so visceral and so complicated and so obviously made me see that there is another world that I haven’t personally come into contact with, but why would we not? Have you had ghost experiences?

Lucy: Oh, yeah, more recently. I feel like I’ve heard from friends that the more you open yourself up to it, the more that it comes to you. I feel like I was just kind of closed off for a really long time. Even that podcast, I’d have been like, “Oh, good stories,” like whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t really matter. But having had your own experiences and having friends tell you stories — it’s really hard to refute someone you care about saying like, “This happened,” or something happening in your life. I’ve seen and heard things that I can’t explain, and I don’t know if it’s ghosts, but certainly something has happened that is completely unreasonable and inexplicable.

I do feel like they have sort of an architectural tone — you know, like haunting, need a place for it, and I do feel like there are some places that I’ve had, like, weird experiences that feel kind of supernatural. I think that once I realized, like, Oh, this is real, life is just kind of… The possibility has been there, so more of it has just come into my life. Not really as much right now — like the house we moved into should absolutely be haunted, but I don’t think that it is. There is sort of a weird energy — and anybody should laugh at me for talking about it this way, probably — but like, the energy is benevolent. If this is a haunted house, it’s a chill ghost.

Fenne: I think there’s no reason to not think that the energy of the previous people in a place affect it. Even if you don’t think a ghost is like an actual vision of a person, an exact replica of that exact person, I definitely think some places have bad vibes, some places have good vibes. But you can’t change the feeling in a place. When I moved into my current place, it was trash — the people that lived here before that burned the carpets up and left all their furniture here, and there were scrapes on the walls and stuff, and, like, everything was painted black. It was so weird. And again, I was poor and didn’t have much choice. So I moved in by myself and made it really nice with my best friend, and actually hung a picture of your face on the wall — that’s one of the first things I did, and I think that really helped.

But then I was broken into when I was on tour, and they stole all my merch money, which was a huge blow, and my laptop which had all my demos on it. So I went back to the house and the whole feeling had completely changed. And I worked very hard to not let this be a negative place for me, and I feel like that’s just been completely invaded and disrupted. And I obviously was scared as well, so I just got three of my best friends to live with me for a month, just to reset the feeling. And it worked.

I mean, you know as well as anyone that music isn’t particularly lucrative when you’re in the beginning stages of it, and a grand in cash will see you through two months. And that was not possible because… I don’t know, I hope that it was someone that needed it a lot, because I don’t like thinking it was just some guy that was like, “You know what, I’m pissed and I want stuff.” But I think as a person, I generally kind of revert to running away from stuff that is bad. So I think if I hadn’t really thought about it and wanted to stay in this place, I would have just moved.

Lucy: I don’t know if I told you, but I was robbed in May of this year, during quarantine. So, yeah, I’m really sorry that happened to you. I have a whole new, you know, knowing what it feels like. I was actually in the house, and I woke up at 5AM and heard — but I have such a creative mind, to put it lightly, where often I’ll hear things and be like, Oh, that’s the absolute worst thing that could possibly be. And I think like that all the time, so I know not to let it take hold over my thoughts.

So I woke up at 5 and was like, Oh, it sounds like people are in the kitchen opening the window, and well, they’re probably gone if they are, and probably they aren’t even there in the first place. I’m gonna go back to sleep. But then I went downstairs and someone had taken my wallet and a laptop and all of the booze in the house, and some other trinkets. Luckily nothing so bad — we had guitars around, and the guitars weren’t taken. One time I was robbed and someone stole my journals of three years, like all my journals of my whole college experience before I dropped out, and that’s the worst. That still hurts so much, not having those years documented.

But yeah, I did move. That dream I had about a new house, it was the old house that got broken into, and then we moved to this house. I feel a lot safer, but I definitely felt like, on top of feeling isolated and not leaving the house — like literally not even going onto the porch for a long time — I just dissociated for like a month and a half, basically June and the beginning of July.

I don’t know, I think a lot of people are going through things like that, and the general state of life is so fragile that when negative events come into life, it just feels kind of harder to recover. But I definitely I feel a lot better now. Do you feel any better in your house?

Fenne: I do, although it was a while ago. But yeah, just imagining that feeling — I wasn’t in. I was abroad, so I had to wait like a week to get back. But I can’t imagine knowing. You knew something was up, but you convinced your brain that it was just doing that thing that it does, and being in and being invaded in that way. That’s fucked.

It just hurt me so deeply that you had your journals stolen — that’s like taking a chunk of someone’s whole brain. And they don’t have any use for that stuff. Like the way that I was trying to frame the break in when it happened was like, OK, that’s cash, that’s a laptop. If they need them, those will provide for them in some way. But I was almost like, Why couldn’t they have left my memory stick with my demos on it? Because that wouldn’t benefit them. They took a packet of photographs, which was, like old family photos.

But there is so much bad, life ruining stuff happening at the moment anyway. And granted, it happens always, and I do think that the BLM protests in Bristol came right at the perfect point where everybody was angry about how we are being governed as a country, generally, through the corona stuff. And then the BLM stuff came at a time where everyone was so ready to be unhappy with the way that the world is run.

It was almost like, I’m aware that racism hasn’t just arrived overnight, and everyone was just like, “Oh, no, racism exists.” But it happened at a time when everyone was really open to the possibility that stuff is bad still, and we really need to make an effort as a community to change that.

I mean, this is completely unrelated to the health stuff, but there are so much bad, bad shit going on, and it’s a conscious decision to, daily, allow it to come in in a way that you can process in a positive way. It’s just so easy to doomscroll and be like, Fuck, this is really bad. You need to kind of police yourself as to when you let that stuff in, because it’s so easy to just constantly be tapped into this modern hellscape.

I recently got locked out of Instagram for no real reason, and initially I was like, Damn, that’s where I get all my stuff from. And then I was like, Actually, this is great for me because I can focus on the closest things to me and how to change the things that I can change. And not just think that the big picture is unattainable and so badly ruined that I don’t feel like I have the power to change anything.

Lucy: So maybe just to close, we can each tell a recent dream that we had.

Fenne: Weirdly, when you said that we should talk about dreams for our theme, I just typed in “dreams” in my notes on my phone, and I screenshotted a bunch of them, but two of them are so, so similar that it freaked me out, firstly, and then I realized that they’re exactly a year apart.

Lucy: Woah, that it so weird.

Fenne: The second one was when I was in Chicago recording, and the first one was a year before that.

So the first one, all I’ve written is, “Dream: Breastfeeding on a beach thinking, This would make a beautiful photo. Shiny sticker, little Game Boy, tiny nipples, holding hands while a wave rolls over.” And then the second bit is, “Nana is hosting a Halloween party. Me getting skateboard advice from a kind, kind man.”

I would like to pay the main attention to the breastfeeding part and the Halloween part, because exactly a year later in Chicago — I think around the time I was seeing a guy over there from Tinder, who was a skateboarder, so that’s kind of cool too. So the Chicago dream is, “Mum pregnant, me also pregnant. Letter writing to get better in school. Buying Halloween costumes with tall people and a beautiful woman on a minimum wage budget. Didn’t go for the white outfit.” And then the last line is,”Pour whiskey in my ear to unblock me, please.” [Laughs.]

Lucy: [Laughs.] Do you type these as soon as you wake up?

Fenne: Yeah, so they’re literally just key bits. I like to think I’m quite a stable person who’s got q handle on how they deal with their feelings, but it seems that there’s a lot of breastfeeding, pregnancy, weird kind of mom-daughter problem stuff that maybe I need to work through. And Halloween seems to be something I hold close to my heart, strangely.

What’s your most recent weird one?

Lucy: I almost never have any sort of, like, motherhood type of dreams. I mean, I’m also adopted and have pretty much no desire to ever be pregnant, so I guess I my subconscious just doesn’t complain. Like, Yes, that is true.

I’ve been having a lot of dreams set in Russia, which is a complicated setting because, as I said, I’m adopted, and my parents told me I was Russian when I was growing up. Actually when I turned 18, I got my file and found out that I’m genetically Uzbek, like from Uzbekistan, so not Russia. I took two years of Russian in high school to get connected to that part of myself, and then it’s like, I’m not even Russian.

So I’ve been having all these dreams set in Russia, and I had one a few days ago where the entire staff of Matador was swimming up an icy river and Rennie [Jaffe], who is both of our managers, and everyone that works at Matador was swimming up an icy river — freezing, and like chunks of ice floating by — because we were on our way to a show. We really wanted to see this girl sing.

Only four of us survived: Me, [Matador founder] Chris Lombardi, and Rian Fossett, and Malcolm Donaldson, who all work at Matador. We get to the shore and the promoters are there and they’re like, “Hey, we have blankets for you, thanks for making the trip, we know it’s such a hassle getting here. We have vodka and we have tea and blankets and heaters in this trailer, and we’re so happy you can make it.” And they have this little trailer set up next to this sports stadium where the show is going to be. They bring in the girl who they’re scouting, I guess to sign, and she’s so nervous. I’m trying to talk to her an be like, OK, it’s gonna be OK, you know, I was happy when Matador reached out to me, I think it’ll be fine, you seem really sweet.” We listened to her record, and the first song was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. You know in a dream where you wake up and can’t remember what it was, but you know in the dream the supreme beauty was apparent to you? We all cried and were like, “We’re just honored to be here with you, you’re going to be a star,” everyone was so emotional. And then a couple of songs in, we were still liking it, but towards the end of the record, everyone got really bored and tired. So in, like, 20 minutes, it was just this beautiful, elated feeling to everyone sort of unspokenly getting really tired of her voice, the most beautiful voice in the world. And she noticed, and I noticed, and it was clear that everyone kind of just wanted to go. like when a party has gone on too long. She just started crying, and I just wanted to say, “I don’t know how to explain it, the feeling just left.”

And that was the dream, where I just had to console the best musician in the entire world that everyone just labeled not engaging enough.

Fenne: At the beginning of this dream, I thought the main part of it was — because this is way more detailed than I remember anything, like even real life — when you said that only only a few of you made it, I was like, Is this icy river a metaphor for the long road to being able to do shows again? And that a lot of people that we work with will just die after the market being ruined? But that’s so, so sad!

Lucy: I felt grief when I woke up. I have this problem where I wake up from dreams and I feel so deeply for everyone that I met in the dream. I thought about her the rest of the day, where I really felt bad for her even though she was a figment of my imagination. Like I had such sympathy for her position, and I really couldn’t understand and wanted to understand why we didn’t keep loving her music. I don’t know, it felt like something dark and sad going on there.

Fenne: Oof. I want to meet her. I want to climb in your brain and meet her.

Lucy: I could draw her. I wake up from dreams and I could tell you all of the architecture, I could tell you the fabric on the furniture and what makeup people are wearing, and shoes people are wearing. A lot of info.

Fenne: For a split second when I wake up, it’s like that, but yeah. There’s an artist called [Zdzisław] Beksiński — he trained as an architect and then he became a photographer, and then eventually he became this incredible painter, and his paintings inspired, like, black metal artwork. It’s like a lot of huge, imposing buildings draped in flesh, spiderwebs, and they’re beautiful because of how intricate they are, and they kind of glow. But he said that often he’d have the idea that — it’s not a theme, but it’s actually the picture itself, and then he replicated from this picture in his brain. So maybe you should go into Russian hellscape painting. [Laughs.]

(x)

[engagemythrusters]

here are my thoughts for my take on @darlin-djarin and that anon's Vanlife AU

1: so honestly imo it's Ezra that starts it, just bc chronically online teenager feels he has to share about his life xoxo. like hera is legit just required to be constantly on the move for her job (which is confidential and a great mystery) and this life works best for them. just how it is. so Ezra just literally makes videos about how his life is and then it blew out of proportion bc oH No NoT aNoThEr aBuSiVe VaN LiFe FaMiLy. like its literally the opposite of sticking children in a cramped space for clout. its the kids demanding to go with hera on her travels and then filming about it.

2: the Phantom is a second form of transportation that they haul on the back of the van(like a car or motorcycle? idk yet. each have their own potential.probs a car tbh for the ease of toting everyone to another location w/out having to pack up the van. BUT I CANT SHAKE THE IDEA OF HERA HAVING A MOTORCYCLE ITS SO SEXY). OR IT WAS. before Ezra absolutely crashed it. they got another but by god. by god will viewers never let him live it down.

3: i have no idea how fenn rau fits in but if its anything like canon it would be so funny for it to be like "this is fenn rau the whiteboy we picked up after he accidentally crashed into hera that one time now he's kanan's best friend xoxo". along that line im not sure hondo fits in either. but he's gotta be there. so that he can have his weird uncle moments w ezra.

4: and yeah. those people hitting on hera or kanan or zeb in the comments. ezra finding it funny to go "stop thats my mom/dad." sabine losing her gotdamb mind every time someone hits on zeb. why does she have to see this. keep those thougths to yourselves, people!

5: and still all those ways kanan gets to troll ableists. that lives in my head forever. rent free. he'd get to tear into fake-claming and "natural remedies" (how do you remedy burned-out eyeballs bro. you cant.) and claims of sexism and all that shit like that and it would be hilarious. 10/10 what a great way for me to cope

AND THATS NOT ALL BUT ITS ALL I AM PUTTING ON THIS INITiAL POST. perhaps to be continued later.

[tarisilmarwen]

Rebels Rewatch: "Heroes of Mandalore"

Some familiar TCW faces as we close up the darksaber arc.

Live reaction version.

Sabine's transformation into co-protagonist is nearly complete, as it's the end of her darksaber arc that starts us out this season.

Also, you know, the Season Four trailers framing the whole of Rebels as the story of "A boy who was lost and a girl who was broken".

Not that I minded as it meant that Ezra and Sabine would be spending a lot of screentime together. :D

After not really touching on it in a while, Fenn Rau's courtesy hand on Kanan's shoulder to let him know he's signaled a stop was a nice little way of demonstrating Kanan's blindness and the accommodations other characters make for him.

Ezra finally has that jetpack he's been wanting lol.

I reserve the right to be giddy about the fact that Ezra is literally Sabine's right-hand man. And also that she painted him another Scout Trooper helmet.

Kanan showing off with the Force Leaps there, which Fenn Rau lampshades.

And now we're introduced to Tiber Saxon, Gar's less interesting more fanatical brother.

A+ mid battle banter. I do distinctly remember being delighted by all the playful quipping and snarking back and forth when this first aired, and it's still cute now.

Once again all it takes for Ezra to surrender is someone threatening Sabine. <3

I... I'm sorry, apparently I'm going to be Obnoxious Obsessed Sabezra Shipper for this rewatch, let me attempt not to comment on just them and their stupid faces and every time they interact.

Lol is one of the Kryze Mandos Naruto-running?

That was an awfully quick search of the base there, guys.

"Bo-Katan was made regent by the Jedi before the end of the Clone War." For all of what, one day? Lol.

I do have quibbles about Bo-Katan's characterization here in Rebels, at times it seems like it's assuming more character development than we actually see happen, when we eventually get back around to telling the story of the Siege of Mandalor.

I do find it kind of funny that SO many people were expecting Sabine to have an arc where she becomes Mand'alor when literally the second episode she actually had the darksaber she was immediately like, "Nope it's not me, I'm just holding it for whoever will be the true leader." Course I guess they expected that in this episode she would take up the mantle.

No dice and frankly I am not interested in that kind of plotline unless Ezra gets to be an accessory to it. (I uh... I have a thing about the Royal Maiden/Steadfast Knight dynamic.)

Ezra playing therapist again. <3 Nice to see it go over better than in "Trials of the Darksaber", Sabine is learning to be more open with her thoughts and feelings.

Kanan attempting the playful teasing banter he usually has with Hera (that Ezra and Sabine are suddenly very adept at now, what) but she shuts it down. This is another quibble I have about Season Four, I do not understand Kanan and Hera's sudden awkwardness and Will They/Won't They? when previously it seemed like they had been depicted as already a settled matter. Not really overt but comfortable and resolved. This weird walkback feels like a way to add drama and tension to Kanan's eventual death, and I really don't think it needed that?

The way I usually reconcile it is by headcanoning that Hera conceived Jacen in the three weeks between S3 and S4 and she's been standoffish and cagey about it because she doesn't quite know know yet and she's being anxious and worried and preoccupied and prickly as a result. I headcanon this because it's been my own experience when the husband and I have, ahem, not exactly been careful and had not had more kids in the plans.

Anyway.

Sorry is this not how the scene went? Lol.

Alrich immediately knows it's his baby girl aww.

Huh, I'd forgotten the side pockets on these transports could be used to stick extra troopers. Neat.

This is pretty nicely staged, a lot of fast smooth movement with the jetpacks, Sabine using the bike as cover was a clever touch. The speed of everything is really on display.

Love this hero cue when Kanan ignites his saber and enters the fray. Every character gets a nice little moment of being awesome.

Even Chopper gets to be a flying menace, clonking that one Trooper on the head with a blaster lol.

IF NO SUPPOSED TO SHIP LITERALLY WHAT EVEN IS THIS "SHE'S NOT MY GIRLFRIEND." MOMENT?

And ooop, show just stabbed me with Sabine's frantic worried, "Ezra! Get out of there!" and my brain went straight to the finale you guys really need to stop doing this to me.

<3333333

Little shit even gets in a cheeky, "Was wondering where you were." I love him.

And Kanan and Ezra look so happy for her awww.

Tiya's acting when Sabine realizes her weapon is on the battlefield is very nice. Sabine sounds horrified and heartbroken and scared.

Sabine's theme drawing out in long slow mournful notes here.

I'm actually really glad they didn't kill off Ursa and Tristan. It would have meant basically nothing since neither of them were developed enough characters for us to care and also I really didn't need another How To Train Your Dragon 2 Stoick/Valka gutpunch in my life.

Never kill off your characters unless you can tell more story with them gone than you can with them there.

Sabine's showing more emotion than we've seen out of her since "Trials of the Darksaber" oof.

Sabine getting a little bit distracted in her anger and grief and needing a nudge from Kanan. She's going to struggle with this a bit this episode.

It's cute how Bo-Katan kind of implies that Ezra should fly out with her to take down the TIEs.

This poor boy looks so consternated with all these crazy Mando shenanigans lol.

Yeah no, watching the Dutchess in action does not get any better.

Thrawn being all Villain Admirer of the Spectres again, while also picking at Tiber Saxon's logic here. It's basically the same logic and line of objections he has to the Death Star, that it's a bloated and inefficient waste of resources and will create more Rebels than it can kill. Thrawn is trying to point out, "Yeah so this literally insults the honor of a hot-headed quarrelsome proud warrior race culture how exactly is this supposed to quell them from rebelling again?"

Awww.

Ezra immediately gearing up to fight Bo-Katan to protect Sabine. <3 And then the other Clan Kryze members a minute later. <3

"Down boy."

You know something I haven't commented on is just how washed out Mandalore looks. Like, Lothal is covered with brown plains too but there's so much more life and color in them. Like the difference between Kansas farmlands and a nuclear testing site.

There's some kind of unspoken history here between Rau and Bo-Katan in the way they interact which... intrigues me. They talk like old friends and I would definitely like to know more about how they know each other.

With Bo-Katan's little speech here, I do see how people were expecting Sabine to be set up to be Mand'alor.

Something darkly ironic in Sabine naming a superweapon after a pacifist.

Tiber channeling his best Imperial fanatic here. What an ass.

This shot was apparently a visual shoutout to a similar one in TCW's "The Lawless", with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Not the last time Ezra and Obi-Wan would be paralleled.

Tiber really shouldn't have let Sabine have access to her own weapon, that was a stupid move.

Ooooh there's more on that theme of "We make deals with the Empire to survive." Tiber honey that never works out for anyone.

Sabine modifies the weapon all right, but Tiber's eagerness to use it after she warned him not to is hoist by own petard poetry.

BOY IT SURE IS A GOOD THING SABINE DIDN'T SET THE WEAPON TO FULL POWER OUT OF REVENGE. JUST IMAGINE WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED IF SHE LET HER ANGER DRIVE HER TO DO THAT?

OH WAIT I DON'T HAVE TO IMAGINE, TVTROPES HAS ME COVERED.

THANKS TVTROPES. THANKS FOR THAT BIT OF FRIDGE HORROR.

Sabine does still have a very mean vengeful streak in her even after all her years living with Jedi so it takes a bit of prodding from Bo-Katan (of all people) to talk her down from this wrath moment.

We can count that whole Star Destroyer as Sabine's kill right? Lol, she's catching up to you Chopper, better murder some more capital ships.

"The Empire will send everything they have to crush Mandalore." Haaaaaaaaaaaaa. *cringes in The Mandalorian's account of The Purge*

Honestly I think the reason they had Sabine give Bo-Katan the darksaber was because they didn't want to have to write around Sabine being absent again lolol. Having to stay and be the leader of a whole planet would have definitely taken Sabine away from the front lines of the wider Rebellion and more importantly taken her away from her crew and family and like hell were they going to let the Spectres go back to Lothal without her.

Ngl, I ship it a little bit.

This could have been a little more earned, not gonna lie.

IF NO SUPPOSED TO SHIP LITERALLY WHAT EVEN IS THIS??!!?

I'll be honest I'm not really invested in the Mandalorian side of things in fandom so while a lot of these action sequences were pretty cool visually I didn't have much emotional connection unless characters I already knew and loved were onscreen. I'm at least happy we got the arc done and over with and cleared up the rest of the season for other, more interesting (to me) things.

I've got no real thoughts on Bo-Katan, she's fine in this episode but like I said, inconsistent with her other appearances, I don't mind her being leader and having the darksaber but I would have liked her characterization to have more of a coherent throughline from TCW to Rebels to The Mandalorian.

Let's be honest I'm mostly just here for the Ezra/Sabine bits. <3

Next up, field trip with Crazy Uncle Saw!

[direwolfrules]

Okay, so Star Wars Rebels but Ezra’s got a weird Force ability that makes him see things (like people’s true thoughts) as a musical. Like in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, or like how Rebecca makes sense of the world in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but most like Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.

So Ezra just thinks this is normal. He learned pretty early on not to mention the people singing thing, but he just assumed that it was some sort of social norm that he missed as a small child. “Wear clothes, eat with utensils, don’t mention the singing”. Maybe at some point Kanan finds out about it and tells him, “I have no clue what this is but Sabine would probably call it Jetii Osik, also am I a good singer according to the Force?”

(He is, but that’s not the point Kanan, focus! Your Padawan is apparently able to always tell what people are thinking/feeling through the power of music)

Anyway, song and scene suggestions (as if I’ll ever write this). The only thing I really have so far is a running gag where Hera’s almost always singing “Danger Zone” from the cockpit and Chopper’s beeping out the guitar solo. Listen, it matches the vibes okay?

And going back to my Mandalorian Space Abba nonsense either Bo-Katan or Sabine sing “Me and I” when they’re angsty, though I’m leaning towards Bo-Katan. And Ezra like, doesn’t know what to say? What can he say? “Hey, sorry about that inner struggle of yours. How do I know about that? The magical energy field binding the universe together told me in the form of a musical number”.

Vader absolutely sings Back in Black because the Force recognizes the Skywalker Drama TM. Please just picture Vader speak-singing it as he menacingly approaches, possibly while chopping through Rebel forces.

There’s no way for Ezra to hear this but Maul and Obi-Wan would sing part of “The Confrontation” from Le Mis. Because that’s their vibe.

And truth is this all an elaborate round about way to get Fenn Rau to sing “How We Operate”.

Half of these probably don’t make sense but that’s because I’m bad at this particular song to character matching thing.

[fennecthunderfox]

Figured I should probably life update.

It's been a looooong time since I've posted here. Various factors got in the way of art in general and I figure I need to at least post a text update if nothing else.

Where have you been?

I have been mostly gaming in my free time and lurking on the internet. I didn't realize it, but I guess social media had been chipping away at my mental health without me realizing it. Namely Twitter (it's gonna stay twitter forever to me, I don't care what it's actually called now). I wanna try to get active on tumblr again, but they changed the layout in such a visually suffocating way, I can't do that site right now either.

So I just lurk.

What about your art?

Art has been hard. As I've complained about a lot in the past, I have a full time job and this job has had me on mandatory overtime for 3 years at this point. I also have chronic pain episodes that- while they have improved- still occur on occasion.

So you haven't drawn at all?

I've drawn very little UNDERTALE/DELTARUNE art recently, but I actually HAVE drawn some Zelda-centric art. I just haven't shown it because it's extremely self-indulgent and I am aware that the one canon character I draw the most is one people tend to hate. (Revali. It's Revali. He's a jerk, but I love him and I love inventing Rito characters that both admire and acknowledge his skill- but also knock him down a peg.)

The future of your Undertale/Deltarune comics?!

There should still be a future, yeah. Problem is, it's been so long since the beginning of the comic, I've kinda... gotta figure out what the heck the story even is anymore. Cause I don't really like WD Gaster being a villain? And that's sorta how we framed him to be in the comic, but I don't like that anymore.

"Fenn, Gaster made Ralsei disappear. Or SOMETHING, we still don't know what happened to Ralsei."

Yeah, sorry 'bout that. I've said from the beginning that Ralsei isn't dead, and that's still true. Also if I do change Gaster's motives, the Flowey/Ralsei thing (Flowsei?) will remain the same. So basically what I'm saying is Gaster was framed kinda like a villain in the comic, but he may shift to just a very, VERY morally grey guy, and you'll understand WHY in time.

Aaaaaaaand Vesseltale?

Vesseltale's a weird one cause it's the secondary plot comic and it's still stuck on-hold in the best possible place to be on hold. I might have to write that comic to a point where the biggest twist of the AU is revealed and then just be like: "Okay, here's some bullet points about this AU cause I don't actually think I can make this a full comic."

And then have like... highlight comic series where I just draw out major scenes. Like how Frisk interacts with the altered versions of the characters in this time.

Final thoughts?

I wish I had more time to do art. I really do. It's just difficult to set time aside to do it because of work. It's easier to pick up the Switch to decompress while listening to Let's Plays on Youtube at the moment.

Once the Holidays pass, I think I'm gonna try to carve out time on the weekends specifically for doing art. I'd love to finish Defnodel Chapter 3 before Deltarune Chapters 3 and 4 release.

Also be prepared, I might start posting Rito fanart on DA because I love the Rito. You have no idea how many headcanons I've created for these dumb birds. I love them so much.

[abugwritesstuff]

Prince and Consort Dad/Family Headcanons Pt 1

i had so much fun thinking these up and honestly, several of them are just good material for fluffy little fics i think i'll write at some point. i'm gonna post these in a couple parts since there are a couple other bonus characters i'm writing up ideas for. :)

in this part: guy, lynt, roy, toa, fenn, and rio!

guy

i think they'd either A) wait a few years into being married to have kids, which i can picture being something that would perhaps buck tradition a bit, or B) get knocked up before they tie the knot and then just very rapidly do a big 'ol fancy wedding in avari

i can see him being maybe mildly shocked but then reacting like "yes of course" like it was inevitable that this would happen at some point.

guy on his "you're mine" bullshit as per usual amirite

anyways

he would be basically draconian while she's pregnant but in a way that is both nonsensically paranoid and masking that he's anxious about her wellbeing

like sentencing her to bedrest for literally no reason, making her eat specific foods, etc.

they'd fight about it and eventually he'd ease off somewhat

he would have jasper provide him dossiers of information about pregnancy and whatnot, but despite this...

he would 100% just assume all his kids would be boys and just be flabbergasted when they aren’t.

like he has, like, two daughters and then his son

he’d just go around like “when our son is born” and the mc is like “…uh?”

anyway he is STUNNED for awhile after the birth of their first girl, tho he does warm up to it all 

guy the girl dad is so funny to me

very defensive of anyone who doubts the abilities of his girls (because you KNOW avari is sexist as fuck) and he is just completely inordinately proud of his children even if what they’ve done is just average 

chronically incapable of hearing anything negative about his kids from anyone 

some noble getting glared at by guy because he said something less than entirely flattering about his baby girl 

no she’s perfect shut up 😤

guy probably *should* reflect on his own childhood and consider the expectations that were placed on him, but in all honesty i don’t think he’s that self aware so i don’t think he really parents his kids with any particular thoughtfulness or strategy

he’s also a bit harsher on his son that on his daughters

i feel that he’d be the type to wanna do that vonn-trapp whistle shit but the mc would be like “absolutely not you weirdo”

guy is not as bad at being a dad and his own dad because his dad is like, some kind of fucking weird pirate villain, but he’s still not amazing 

i don’t like guy that much lmao 

sorry 

lynt 

i feel that lynt would start trying to knock up the mc literally immediately after they get married 

just like “well this is what happens next, no?” and just go for it

i don’t think they’d actually have kids especially quickly, i think it’d take a few years of trying, which would be emotionally upsetting for the both of them. but they do eventually get pregnant

i think he'd try to be helpful during pregnancy and birth but i'm not confident he'd be super successful. think he'd be at a bit of a loss for what to do aside from maybe being a pillow

bony ass pillow though

i think growing up as an only child makes lynt want to have at least more than one, so he’s very very pleased when they have their first babies: twin boys

a lot of lynt napping with the babies in the courtyard, sneaking away from prince duties to spend time with them 

family cuddle puddle 

both those boys have rather more serious and less sleepy temperaments than lynt as they grow up, taking a bit more after their mother 

this makes lynt a bit sad but then, when they boys are about seven: they have their third child, a girl

lynt is wrapped around her finger, she’s the absolute apple of his eye

she takes after him in personality and is with him like a little sidekick most of the time 

lynt shows up to events and she’s in his arms or holding his hand the whole time 

at balls they’ll disappear and be found napping in the hallway on a settee

anyways yeah. so fucking cute 

i do feel like lynt would be a tad oblivious to more serious things happening with his kids and might struggle to know how to provide support beyond a hug 

he would absolutely have a protective side, though, if needed

would burn bridges and start all kinds of shit if his kids were threatened 

no more conflict-averse lynt if it’s about his babies lol

i also feel like he’d both unintentionally and intentionally cockblock his own kids when they’re older lmao 

just showing up at the completely wrong times, constantly 

i want a lynt and family sitcom 

roy

he’s one of the princes i can see having a pretty large family, i feel like that suits him

they have like five or six kids in total, i think more boys that girls

they'd have kids maybe like a year or two after marrying. i think they'd plan that shit out meticulously. they don't give me the vibe that they'd be surprised by it, at least not for a first one

that picture-perfect prince thing does get carried into this arena as well, i think in order to soothe any anxiety or worry roy would kinda immerse himself into trying to be the most perfect supportive partner ever and would maybe go a bit overboard initially

but all that said i think roy would be a pretty great dad since by all i’ve seen his dad was pretty great too so he had a good example 

but he does make sure to shelter them from expectations of being perfect, or of having to save/advance the nation, definitely encourages them to be kids 

i feel like they’d do family camping trips and things like that 

he’d teach them how to ride horses also 

they have enough children that when they attend events outside of the country, roy and the mc can be seen counting everyone to make sure no one has wandered off somewhere 

roy walking around with two children under his arms lmao

carrying on some kind of completely perfect diplomatic princely conversation while wrangling a squirming toddler 

lmao i love it 

i think he’d be great with advice and guidance but that his kids would be like “🙄 ugh dad” because he would get a bit preachy with it 

100% that dad that turns a joke into a (well-intentioned) lecture 

roy’s kids like “do not try to show dad a meme he’ll ask you to explain it and ask how you know those people” 

literally like this

altogether a very wholesome family 

toa 

toa may be my actual favorite so this is a longer one

he does not have an especially big family which is almost a shame because i can imagine that he has some BEAUTIFUL children 

girl and a boy, in that order

i do see them having their first very soon after getting married but unintentionally, they got caught up and forgot their birth control potion or spell or whatever it is people do 

i feel that it’s a pretty stressful time given that mc is perceived as avarian, i feel that idina would have it out for her and that the pregnancy would have to be semi-secret for awhile due to various dangers 

toa has an anxious personality so he would be very on edge and protective

get that boy some lexapro STAT

i feel like toa would be at kind of a loss on how to be a father since his own sucks so bad 

like he’d know what he didn’t want to do but wouldn’t know what to do so i think he’d worry a lot and try to make up for it by doting on the mc, very mother hen toa 

i also think that when his kids are born and as they’re growing up, he’d have a lot of moments where he’d be processing his own childhood trauma 

like holding his son as a toddler and being like “i could never let anyone do to him what they did to me” 

like the experience would make him actually start to despise his father rather than just being intimidated 

so much hurt/comfort fic possibility with daddy toa lmao 

anyways 

toa’s pretty gentle with his kids, very calm, has high expectations for them academically but doesn’t really punish the kids for things very often given what he was subjected to, which could cause some issues but mc probably handles discipline so it turns out okay

his daughter takes after him in personality and is extremely magically adept- my suspicion is that since the mc also has ancient magic, any kids she has with a prince will all have ancient magic of some kind, but i think this is a *bit* more of an issue in qelsum than it would be maybe in the other countries

like mc is so out of place as a supposed avarian and toa is so frightened of her ancient magic being manipulated by gilbert that it’s kept very under wraps 

so their daughter comes along and is so magically proficient that it’s kind of shocking 

their son is also extremely magically adept, but not as serious or academic in personality as his sister, but since he’s a boy and expected to have ancient magic he receives more training on it openly when in qelsum 

which is frustrating for their daughter

she has a bit of a complex about it and so toa tries to tutor her privately when he’s able to 

they understand each other well- he sees a lot of himself in her so he can read her fairly easily 

i could go on about these dynamics for awhile, i feel like qelsum and toa and whatever family he’d have would be very complicated not necessarily because of his parenting

i don’t think he’d be the snuggliest warmest kind of dad (i mean more than his own dad but that’s not saying much) but i do think he’d be the kind of dad that just brings them fruit 

was gonna be candy but mc was like “you’re giving them a sugar high all the time please don’t”

so he just send them plates of cut up fruit when they’re studying or whatever 

buys like a ton of whatever his kids say that they like 

i think he shows his love for his kids by doting on them and worrying about them

interrogates his kids on whether or not they’ve been sleeping or eating enough or if they feel sick or if they’ve gotten outside lately and do they need any help with their homework and-

very worrywart toa

i think he’d get his feelings hurt if kids like ever purposefully kept secrets or snuck around 

he wants them to feel like they can come to him with anything and i think sometimes struggles to express those feelings 

anyways 🥺

fenn

like roy he’d also have a larger family but by luxure standards i guess it’d be small lmao 

they’d wanna wait a good couple years before having their kids

no birth control mishaps with them, fenn is too experienced with that shit lmao

however i do think there’d be a possibility that their first kid would be motivated by trying to get kieran to back off 

like we know how he acted in some of fenn’s event routes, i think it’s entirely likely that he’d be trying to figure out how to get rid of MC before she can produce a next heir, yknow? he's a lil smarmy bitch and it feels in character to me

so i think that could be a cause for conflict but inevitably he would give up

my hypothesis: they have maybe like four, five kids?

i see fenn as being like, prone to showing off the mc while pregnant 

like “i did this 😏😌” lmao 

he’d be a fucking anxious wreck anytime the mc is in labor, i don’t think he handles her being in pain well 

just sitting outside the room with violet telling him to get his act together and stop freaking out

i think most of the princes get teary when their kids are born but i think fenn does in particular and it surprises him 

i also don’t think he’d be entirely certain how to be a parent other than just showing up and being around them a lot, which is what he didn’t have as a kid 

similarly to toa, fenn would have some childhood trauma/neglect to process while his kids grew up 

like watching his kids reach the age he was when the eva thing happened and being like 

“oh, i was taken advantage of and preyed on”

similar thing where his relationship with his father sours even more 

i think he’d be very protective of his kids, probably would steer them away from louis at every opportunity as a response

anyways 

i think they’d have a pretty tight knit family as a result of fenn trying his best to like, actually be present and know things about his kids 

i feel like he'd maybe write some stories for them since he's a writer

anyways yeah it’s cute 

mc is the one that puts the cut off at whatever number they end up having, genuinely think fenn would be like “wanna make another? 👀” lmao

also no matter who mc ends up with i have a headcanon that toa’s daughter and fenn’s daughter become bffs because that would be funny 

rio 

oh you know he was MADE for this shit

they have a bajillion kids because of course they do 

most out of all the princes 

they have like eight or nine, just an absolute army, a stampede of kids, voleri children just popping up out of nowhere all the time 

rio attends an meeting between the princes and pulls an expected stowaway child out of his coat

all the princes looking at him like 😐🙄🤔 and he’s like 😄

he’s a super fun engaging kind of dad, their home is full of pillow forts and games and a lot of giggling 

i think they probably start having kids within about a year and people start asking them about kids, like, six months before the wedding even happens 

just the kind of place voleri is 🤷🏻‍♀️ i remember aidan being like “ah, your future wife!!” in an event when rio brought mc to the palace so that’s just what they’re like lmao

rio is fucking SO excited during the mc’s pregnancies but especially the first 

just telling EVERYONE that they’re having a baby!!! 😄 isn’t that great!!! a baby!!!

he'd dote on mc so bad, you just know it

feeds the HELL outta her, rubs her back and her feet, makes her teas, tucks her into bed

a frantic mess at first when she's giving birth

have you ever played the sims? y'know the animation that the dads have when the moms go into labor where they're freaking out? that rio's energy at first. but he gets it in check and then is fairly helpful, just being sweet and encouraging

after it’s born rio is just like

sneaking out of royal duties all the time just to go look at his kid 🥰 

papa rio is just very cute so nobody can really get all that mad at him for his antics, though aidan probably does have to kind of steer his attention back to work

rio keeps a thick book of wallet size pictures of his kids in his pocket at all times and shows them to people, it doesn’t matter if you don’t care or have already seen them, he’s showing you

anyways the palace is big enough that all these kids could have their own rooms but they share a few rooms instead, lots of bunk beds and whatnot

rio and the mc making the rounds through the rooms to tuck everyone in 

very wholesome, 10/10

i think rio would probably still be his oblivious self so more complicated issues might be handled by mc, but rio would be great at comforting his kids 

rio hugging a daughter through her first heartbreak and then bringing her a giant dessert tray lmao 

rio is a dad that cries at weddings 

can you imagine the adorable ass family photos they'd have? i die

that's all i have for this post, but i've got lance, dia, and the valets all done so i'll post those soon as well :)

[onedayimgonnasnap]

Characters Whom I believe that would be that one person “You got games on your phone” if MC brought a working phone with a charger and some how wifi-

PT: 2

Featuring: Dia, Tino, Jasper, Knight, Grayson, Sherry and Violet

Warning: Crack and Cursing

———————————————————————————

Dia: Good luck, he subscribed yourself to a Netflix, Disney +, Crunchy roll, Hulu, Amazon Prime etc. Knowing damn well you don’t have an income to pay for all of those apps-

He also likes learning from social media the differences between both of your worlds. But we’re here for crack so cut out the wholesomeness-

He started rage playing those stupid adds where the player purposely does bad to get you to download and guess what? He did download and now he’s huffing in gas breathing heavily playing it.

So now you have a lot of unnecessary games and Dia is now saying movie references and pretends not to know that it was while your freaking out.

—-

Tino: He goes on Facebook like an old lady and giggles at minion memes, he didn’t even watch Despicable Me on the apps that fucking Dia downloaded and got a membership on 💀

He goes out of his way to show it to you and Lynt and it’s really cute except it’s not funny what so ever

“:0 Look MC they’re little yellow monsters they look cute ☺️ This is so funny.”

That’s the minion meme he showed you. The laugh you pretend to give him was a lot more funny then the meme itself-

He also likes looking at cooking videos. And he saw the Duolingo memes everyone probably knows about the; “Looks like you forgot your Spanish lessons-“ and Tino took it seriously and started freaking out especially when he saw it downloaded and you had a notification on your phone.

He almost through it out a window but luckily Lynt was there to stop him 💀

—-

Jasper: bro made a Tinder and An Omegle account and thought it was a type of place to make friends but the dumbass was then greeted by those weird freaks on there

he also was roasted tf out of by lil ass kids because they said and I quote. “HA LOOK HE HAS GRANNY GLASSES-“ Bro cried.

Bro also likes to listen to rap song and likes rock music, he also saw the Emo style and ran with it. Bro became and edge lord over night.

He also likes to make those horrific IMovie movies. They’re low quality but everyone has fun. He does post it so- Now he’s a meme on the internet

—-

Knight: Good luck your fyp is now full of cat memes, cat videos and your camera roll? Cat pictures.

It’s really cute how he laughs at them.

Also bro download Fortnight- “TOA COME GET YOUR MIDGET-“

He learned so much curses and insults from playing with 5th grades and you can hear the yells from another fucking building- It’s scary how much anger he has locked in. 😦

Another thing is he likes Pokémon Go and animal Jam

—-

Grayson: He doesn’t use it that much but when he does, I like to imagine bro is a fanfiction writer 💀-

The other consorts pay him to write fanfiction about them and you. He has a Wattpad and tumblr account. He also has used your hard earned money for fan art commissions.

He also got disappointed when he found out you don’t have a printer for that monstrosity he’s been paying for 💀-

He also learned how to do TikTok dances and him, Roy and Sherry have all been making tiktoks.

He got addicted to Girls go games 💀

—-

Sherry: She learned instinctively how to use your phone it’s amazing how everyone else was like fucking Dinosaurs.

Also now has a TikTok Cult fan base and has more followers than Charli Damelio it’s amazing-

She also likes to go on Reddit and is now a Reddit user and it’s scary because she no has a high quality sense of humor.

—-

Violet: Immediately made a Tinder account for a date, is sad that they’re from another world. You’re jealous.

She payed Grayson to write fanfiction about you and her

She started giggling, kicking her feet, twirling her hair and while reading it and Fenn walks in to join her on reading “MC x reader” smut.

The look on your face when you got your phone back after one whole day was concerning.

She also likes to look at you camera roll and social media accounts and it all fun and games til she got a notification from one of your relatives with your old baby pictures.-

[yaswb]

Mandalorians! This scene from the original Star Wars Marvel Comic Series was part of a story arc that has a very special place in my childhood memories, as the German “Krieg der Sterne” album series stopped its run mid arc and left us with a cliffhanger (The infamous “Chidho in carbonite” scene). Memories are fuzzy but I think it was only a couple of months away from ROTJ’s release and so the comics became a little less interesting anyway. The story would eventually be picked up later by a rebranded comic album line now named “Star Wars” [sic!] with a lower print run but by that time Star Wars started to fade into obscurity already and I never saw any of these comics at that time and only learned about their existence a couple of ears ago. Back then I had a sense that the comic series was not “canonical” without even knowing what that exactly means but with the lack of multimedia and little access to anything Star Wars, these comics and the action figures were all we had when there was currently no movie to watch in the theater.

Anyhow, this is also the moment after almost a decade, where I finally unpacked these comic packs with Fenn Shysa and Tobbi Dala, to side them with the recent comic colored Boba Fett, and boy what an improvement today’s figures are over the ones from the time of this comic pack. When I bought them a decade ago I thought they were still kind of cool but now they feel just weird and are extremely challenging to pose, let alone have them hold their weapons in a meaningful way. The Boba Fett figure on the other hand is great to pose, which is particularly supported by the improved range of the elbow joints. Lots of figures unpacked today, many figures still left to be unpacked. Stay tuned

[magicjesuscup]

Academy Things

I’ve been thinking about it, and there are some things I wish they’d clear up about the academy:

Spoilers below

When the princes are allowed to go home.

In the second chapter of book 2, Toa says:

“On the surface, one might say we heirs are here to deepen our magical knowledge and improve our leadership kills...(yes, it does say “kills,” though I think this was a typo and it was mean to be “skills.”) While others might call us princes hostages of peace.”

When I read that, I thought they weren’t allowed to go home for any reason, but quickly found that not to be the case. I’ve seen them leave because of

a family member’s request  (Guy's and Lynt's routes in Enchanted and Entwined)

birthdays of immediate relatives (Toa's route in Enchanged and Entwined)

important political/diplomatic matters (Rio's route in Enchanged and Entwined)

major holidays specific to their kingdom (Roy's route in Enchanged and Entwined)

some major Saligian holidays (the Mistletoe and Magic event mentions Holy Night specifically)

important family events (I think it was Fenn's route in the Would-Be Weddings story event where Toa goes home for his parents' wedding anniversary)

the Coldish Cleanse, which only happens once every few years with little to no warning (Magical Acts of Intimacy)

As a bit of  a side note, it also seems like their family is sometimes allowed to go to the Isle of Colde.

Zev shows up as the curator for an Avarian exhibition on Colde (Cursed Jewel of Avari) and to investigate news of a student with creator powers (Princes’ Path).

Idina shows up in Toa’s book 1 and one of the events, but I don’t remember why (I think was because she heard Toa had picked a fight with guy, breaking the oath he made and had a marriage proposal for Toa respectively). She also shows up in the Princes’ Path for the same reason as Zev.

Queen Rahm shows up for a party being thrown at the academy in Guy’s book 1.

Anyway, I’m guessing Lou won’t green light the princes to go home at just any family request. It’s also a little a weird to me that the princes can go home for at least their parents’ birthdays, but not their own. Well, these are just the reasons they can go home that I could find. I’m not sure if it’s an exhaustive list, and that’s what I’m wanting.

Who’s required to live on the Isle of Colde.

In the second chapter of book 2, Rio says:

“Each kingdom’s heirs are required to live on the Isle of Colde. “

But it doesn’t seem like all of the them are. Zev’s not there. Idina’s graduated (I guess), but Toa has two other sisters we’ve never seen. Teto’s not there. Kieran’s not there. Actually, on a bit of another side note, Fenn’s dad has 1,000 wives; I’d assume he’d also have thousands of children. I doubt the academy could take them all, but Fenn can’t be the only one old enough to attend the academy, and he’s not even set to inherit his kingdom’s throne anyway. How are none of Fenn’s siblings there? 

The requirements to graduate.

They never really talk about how the princes can gain permission to leave the Isle of Colde permanently. Do they have to complete the curriculum? Are they just stuck there until they reach a certain age? Do they have to do something like ascend their respective thrones? Idina left when she got married (I think that’s in Toa’s book 1). 

[ashen-crest]

find the word tag

Another one I haven’t done in a while! Thanks for tagging me, @spacetimewraithwrites and @kaiusvnoir. Of your lists, I picked the words silence, speak, shuffle, and sleep.

Tagging in turn, with zero pressure: @inscrutable-shadow, @abalonetea, @talesfromaurea, and @my-writblr. Your words are: shout, whisper, dance, and wake.

All of these are from A Rival Most Vial:

Silence

“Mr. Beake!” Jae’s voice rattled through the chasm, her spiky Fenn accent jarring the morning silence. Ambrose stepped out to greet the gnome. In her swath of patchwork traveling cloaks, she looked like all the other bundles in her wagon, with only her dark face and bright smile poking out of the cloth.

“Jae.” He gave the merchant, then her donkey, a polite nod. “Buttercup. Good morning.”

Speak

“Mr. Beake and Mr. Valenz?” they read from a scrap of paper. “Mayor Rune would like to speak with you both.”

“Both of us?” Ambrose stiffened. “As the more qualified potioneer here, I can assure you that Mayor Rune will want to speak to me first.”

“Actually”—Eli thought fast—“I’ve got an urgent appointment later today, so if the Mayor could fit me in first, I can—”

“You have no such thing,” Ambrose retorted. Eli shot him a glare.

“Oh, like you know my schedule—”

Shuffle

Dawn shuffled out of her workroom, draining a mug of coffee that Eli suspected had been made that morning. “All right!” The coffee brightened her expression, and she clapped her hand against the mug with manic fervor. “Come on, let’s go out!”

Eli clocked the shadows under her eyes and took the mug from her hands. It was stone cold. “Are you sure? Seems like you could do with a quiet night in, if I’m being honest.”

Sleep

“Tell me more about the Driftwood,” Banneker goaded as they wandered back to Rosemond Street, full and sleepy. But the memories of his old haunts kept Eli wide awake.

“Oh, it’s just as weird as you’d think it would be,” he said. “It never happens when you’re looking at it, you know? But you blink once, and boom—the tree in front of you is three feet to the left. The spring you walked past? Not there anymore, there’s a rock over it. And forget about trying to navigate out of there without one of their wisp guides, because—”

[cosmicdreamt]

To Be Beautiful

“UGH honestly it’s kind of embarrassing.”

Her eyes aren’t looking at you but you know you’re who she was talking to. Instead furrowed brows and pursed lips were focused on the image of her on her phone screen that the two of you were just discussing.

Neff never expected pictures of her to end up in recommended page, and while she knows it’s based on who you follow and things like that it was still weird to know that her face was out there for display.

“Fenn, my friend who took these - I’m sure I’ve mentioned him a few times. We went to college together. I went for art and he went for photography. And for some reason I became one of his favorite subjects to photograph.” Her voice is....strange. She’s fighting awkwardness about herself and affection for the person she’s talking about. “He really does have a beautiful eye for the lens. The photos he takes are truly breathtaking. The landscapes and candids are something you never thought you could feel so strongly about. We’d be walking along outside and he’d just go ‘hold on I gotta get this shot’.” Ah, she got more lively imitating him for that, smiling and letting out a soft laugh. “And it didn’t take him long either. A lot of photographers I feel focus on finding the perfect shot. What looks the most aesthetically pleasing. But Fenn? He focused on the moment, on what it made you feel when you looked at something. It’s why we got along so well.”

Finally does she tap on the account to bring up all his other photos, scrolling through to show you what she meant. There were quite a few pictures of her scattered about that made her huff, but she obtains the courage to talk about it.

“He’s told me before that I just have this air about me. That sometimes you know exactly what’s on my mind by looking at me and other times I’m a mystery. That I’m someone hard to ignore when you see me...” She takes a big deep breath and huffs it out, feeling her face get warm as she says that last bit. “I don’t really think I’m beautiful, you know? I used to hate myself but now it’s more like....I think I’m alright but nothing special. I don’t think I’m breathtaking or eye catching or any of those things. But he was determined to make me believe otherwise. In school he’d always ask me to be his mode for assignments, so there’s pics of me with crazy makeup or a very specific type of photoshoot. But after we graduated there were days where he’d just...ask me if we could go out and he take photos of me going about me day. I’d say sure and that’s where a lot of these other ones come from. It’s...weird. To see me in what he describes is my essence. I guess because it’s a bit hard to believe that it’s me. I look at this person and I’m not sure what to feel...but what’s interesting is none of them are bad feelings.”

The phone is taken back, exiting the app and finally looking up at you. She shrugs a single shoulder and smiles awkwardly with a shake of her head.

“I dunno. I guess seeing myself in the same way other people would...shows me how beautiful things could look. Even if it’s me.”

[culttvblog]

Sky (1975) and Some Reflections on Categorising 1970s TV (Seventies TV Season)

The introduction to this series of posts about 1970s TV series can be found here:

Ever since I first started blogging about TV a decade ago I have been more interested in the effect that blogging would have on me than on an audience, and aimed to make blogging watch TV more thoughtfully. It is very pleasing that nonetheless a number of people kindly read my witterings here, but I am really the ultimate amateur and while I try to keep an eye on what everyone else on the blogosphere is saying and say something different, my blog posts are like thoughts which go out into the net without an intended reaction or audience. Once again the act of blogging has proved its main effect to be on the blogger, because writing these posts about 1970s TV shows has made me think something for the first time.

I often divide 1960s TV into the real and the unreal, and in the past I notice that I have tended to divide 1970s TV into the gritty and the non-gritty. But actually looking through 1970s TV shows to choose ones to blog about has given me a bit more of an overview and I have noticed that it is possible to divide 1970s TV into five categories.

1. Shows which draw on the spirit of the age and so come up with a show which is about adventure (The Protectors), sophistication (Jason King), sex (Man About the House), ordinary life (The Fenn Street Gang, Love Thy Neighbour), and so on. These shows also somehow manage often to be very sexy, very racist, or occasionally very distressing because they depict the 1970s as they really were.

2. Shows which draw on the spirit of the age and instead come up with a show which is about Paganism (Children of the Stones), magic (Ace of Wands), ghosts (The Stone Tape), New Age, environmentalism (Sky), science fiction (Sapphire and Steel), folk horror, or the otherwise strange (The Owl Service) and so on. If I'm forced to place it in one category obviously Survivors would have to go here.

You may say, and you would be right, that the line I am drawing is once again between the real and the unreal, but I think I'm seeing a shift in the reality here. I think in the 1970s *both* of these two categories were real: there was a boom in all things occult, new age, spiritual, etc, and the environmental movement was getting into its stride. I can't overstress the point I am making, that I don't think in the 1970s people would necessarily have seen the second category of show as unreal in any way: the Age of Aquarius had started and all things were possible.

Sky (1975) is one of the more classic examples of shows which walked into this world and essentially exploded.

I am going to have to admit here that doing this series of posts is what has made me watch Sky again and actually pay attention to it. I have had a pirated copy on my hard drive for at least eight years and watched through it when I first got it, but not since. It is about a strange boy who appears on earth with a message for us but who has managed to arrive at the wrong time and the earth's 'immune system' tries to reject him. Of course even if you've never seen it you already know without me telling you that the writers wrote for Doctor Who. I'm not going to focus on a single episode because I don't think I can get a whole blog post out of one.

The show manages to include pretty well everything in my second category above, and I can only say it would be a bit mind-blowing if you weren't expecting it. The boy communicates telepathically, there are mystical and environmental issues, it is filmed in the settings of some of Britain's ancient sites: it's like a experiencing what your neighbour who smoked too much weed in the seventies and wrecked his brain, saw. In fact watching it is a very strange experience indeed. It moves at the pace of a very elderly snail, some seriously weird things happen (I'm not even going to try to describe some of the effects). It looks about as old-fashioned as you can get and yet you just know the events couldn't have happened yet. It's virtually impossible to know what on earth is going on.

This show is genuinely like smoking the seventies. In fact I'm delighted to see on a couple or reviews that I'm not the only one who thinks the drugs probably contributed quite a lot to this show, and in fact it is really quite trippy.

They had the genius idea of including 'kids' rather than characters identified as adults, as a foil to sky. They are exactly like the 'kids' in Scooby Doo, old enough to drive, yet young enough to have the youth and resilience to carry on with the mind-expanding events.

I do have a question about whether something else is referenced, which I haven't seen anyone else ask. Sky is looking for the Juganet, which is what will help him get back into the right time. In 1969 ARPANET, the military/government predecessor of our current intervet, became active and I wonder whether Juganet was intended to sound like it. I have no idea whether ARPANET was actually secret at the time or whether the writers could have been confident enough of geeky enough viewers recognising the reference. Even if it isn't deliberately referencing, the name and idea of the Juganet are strikingly close to the sort of net we are now familiar with.

I think if this kind of weird stuff interests you you should watch this show. If I have any criticism it is that I find it utterly confusing and I do wonder what this show would have been like made as a film by people who weren't stoned.

This blog is mirrored at

culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)

Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog

[ravarui]

“My hobbies include knowing and being right.” / from fenne for john

Some meme I reblogged Accepting @alyafae

"Oh, shut up!"

How had Arthur not lost his mind with Fenne accompanying him? The first time John had heard about her was when he had read through the journal that had belonged to Arthur and that the older man had given him before his death. He had dismissed the words about a guardian angel as the weird ramblings of a dying and sick man. Guardian angels, as if they would really exist. That thought had vanished however when Fenne had introduced herself to John shortly after. Apparently she had become his guardian angel, now that Arthur was dead. Not exactly a comforting thought.

She had warned him about taking that bounty hunting job, a warning he had ignored. He needed the money to continue paying of the loan for Beechers Hope and bounty hunting was the easiest way to make money. Ironic, considering that he himself had a still a bounty on his head, even if people seemed to forgotten about him.

"I didn't expect him to hide up in that tree and then jump me while trying to bite my throat open!" He rubbed his neck, glad that he wore a bandana, or else he would have an ugly bitemark there now. Looking back at the bound man on the back of his horse, he delivered a slap to the guys head when he started to stir. The last thing he needed was him causing any more trouble.

"You're really doing a shitty job ya know? I thought your job is watching over me, not laughing at my misery."