A two show Caturday in Taichung City, Taiwan for Asia Tour 2022-2023 (15 July 2023).
We finally get a Griddlebone photo from the tour of Francesca Benton-Stace.
Il mio amore è importante 🤍.
Francesca as provides me with some Jellydots with Amy Louise Whittle as Jennyanydots.
We are not done with Jelly quite yet, with a nice mirror photo of Francesca.
Francesca also manages to sneak in with Katie Hutton as Rumpleteazer and Taryn Donna as Cassandra and their usual photo! Katie is back as Rumpleteazer after a two day break.
Gabrielle Parker covered Victoria both shows today, with Oliver Ramsdale as Admetus performing the lift.
A throwback to South Korea with Lydia Gerrard covering Grizabella and Quinlan Kelly covering Old Deuteronomy.
on the topic of Perfect Knuckles being sealed away
one of them being willing to be sealed with him. one of them being willing to be there if he’s ever released. one of them sacrificing themselves to live forever within the confines of the Master Emerald as their friends live and die and their descendants hear tales about their bravery and the kind hearted soul who became a monster not by choice.
Silver finding the Master Emerald and accidentally enforcing the cycle to happen again
Ok, so, on a mostly unrelated post the topic of good vampire ladies came up, and @bisexualdaikaiju suggested/challenged me to do a top 10 vampire women list. As a self-professed lover of vampire women, it felt like a challenge I couldn't back down from. But it is kind of challenging, for two kind of contradictory reasons.
First, while there are MANY female vampires in fiction, most of them feel like afterthoughts, getting far less characterization than their male counterparts, who more often than not are the star villains of the show. When these supporting lady vampires do get something to do, it's generally the same role: make their human lovers sad when they rise from the dead as a monster that has to be killed, an emotional beat that is often undercut by a lot of these vampire women not getting much characterization to endear them to us before they died. Everyone wants to have the Lucy Westerna plot beat from Dracula but they don't want to do the work that Bram did to make Lucy lovable. The lady vamps who get to step out of Lucy's shadow are rare - but that just makes them all the more wonderful.
The second problem is that, since this is an obsession of mine that few seem to share (there are lots of vampire fans, but man do the boy vamps get to hog the spotlight among them), I've done a lot of scattered thinking about it and I just know I'm bound to forget at least one excellent lady vampire character that should be here. And whittling it down to ten, and trying to rank them? That's too hard! My thoughts are too mercurial to do that reliably in a way I don't forget!
So instead here's a list of, like, a dozen or so lady vampires that I think are just fucking stellar, many of which I think break the mold of what pop culture makes us expect lady vampires to be. It is not ranked - I love all these characters more or less equally, and think it's a lot more interesting to see how they take their archetype in different directions than to figure out which one is "best" of the lot.
Carmilla Karnstein
I'm going to start with the most famous literary female vampire, Mircalla Karnstein from Carmilla. I think she might be the first vampire to have an unhealthy obsession with using anagrams of her real name as aliases, though I'm sure now that I've typed that someone will find an earlier example to school me. She's also the one who popularized the idea of lady vampires being extremely sapphic, with an arguably genuine romantic affection for her female victims. She's got well-deserved clout, basically, and like Dracula has been adapted countless times and reinterpreted in some excellent ways. My favorite screen Carmilla is Ingrid Pitt's take, which captures her fierceness, passion, and tragic nature so well.
2. Amy from Fright Night
Ok, we're having one Lucy Westerna knockoff on this list, but as Lucy knockoffs go, Amy is one of the best. It actually helps that she spends 90% of her movie as a human, because we get to know and love her so much before she turns monstrous. And once she does...
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It is pants-shittingly terrifying. I will never stop raving about the vampire designs in this movie - they made their "game faces" so fucking monstrous and I feel like in a better world this would be the standard ever since, especially since they still gave the vampires pathos while making them so ghastly when they've got their feeding faces on.
3. Drusilla
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a bunch of vampire characters, and to its credit they did a decent job of making the ladies just as distinct as the gents. Harmony and Darla could both have made this list, but my favorite was always Drusilla, who was so traumatized before she became a vampire that it kind of overwhelms the demon spirit inside her. Like, bare minimum thing to make a lady vampire more interesting than 90% of other female vampires in fiction: give her at least one personality trait, preferably an interesting one, outside of being a vampire. Drusilla's fun, and she survives the entire series after dumping her boyfriend to be a single female vampire. Good for her.
4. Ruby from Scary Godmother
Ok look I am a fake Scary Godmother fan but kudos to the artist of the books for making a lady vampire who's very clearly of the nosferatu mold and is also explicitly benign and sweet. A+ vampire lady character design. I hope it doesn't awaken anything in me.
5. Nadja
What We Do in the Shadows is excellent at finding new takes on vampires in general - it even made me actually like Psychic Vampires as a concept, a feat I thought was impossible - but goddamn do I love Nadja specifically. She's got a distinct personality as vampire ladies go, being very confident and self-assured while also being a complete fucking goober (it is a comedy, after all). She's perfectly capable of being terrifying AND hilarious, often at the same time. A vampire girl failure, in the parlance of our site. I love her.
6. Lady Dimitrescu
I know that she's apparently only in a fourth of the game, but it's still pretty great that Resident Evil 8 decided its mascot villain - its equivalent of the Tyrant, G, Nemesis, etc. - would be the hottest woman I've ever seen a milf an 8 foot tall lady vampire. She's not dainty and willowy like most lady vamps in fiction - not an ambush hunter - but rather HUGE and capable of tossing a human around like a rag doll. She's a physical powerhouse and she looks fine feminine while doing it. Despite being an unabashed blood-sucking monster, she still has enough depth and complexity to have important relationships (like a genuine love for her "giant mass of hive mind flies" daughters), and also she gets to have an awesome transformation into a fungal vampire dragon, which is rad as hell. Also goddamn, her fashion sense is immaculate.
7. Hecate from Hellboy
"Hey, she's not a vampire! She's a goddess! That doesn't count!" Fuck you, my list, my rules. Hecate posits herself as the progenitor and mother of vampires, she drinks blood, and her main form in the comic is as a sicknasty lamia version of the iron maiden used by Elizabeth fucking Bathory, if she doesn't count as a vampire, nothing should. She is the concept of a vampire amped up to maximum capacity, a major mythological figure and an awesome villain.
...also I lowkey shipped her and Hellboy when I was a teenager. They could have made it work!
8 - 12. Carmilla and her girl squad from Castlevania
I suppose I could have counted Castlevania's Carmilla as an adaptation of Miss Karnstein - they're both basted out of Styria, both sapphic, and it's clear she's meant to be an adaptation of the former, just as the Dracula of this show is meant to be a take on Bram's famous vampire. But ultimately they're VERY different characters in the grand scheme of things - Castlevania's Carmilla has none of the tenderness and vulnerability of her literary counterpart, instead being full of barely restrained fury. She is an excellent villain, complex enough to be interesting but thoroughly despicable enough to make it VERY satisfying when she bites it.
I also love her girl posse... in concept, at least. They've all got great designs and the groundwork of interesting characters, but of the the three, only Lenore, the waifish redhead, gets to do much of note. The two on the edges kind of just show up for a few scenes and then bail before the plot catches up to them, doing very little of note - though at least the big hunky one gets one of the coolest fight scenes in the whole show.
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Back to Lenore though - she gets a really nice character arc, and manages to become one of the few sympathetic vampires in the series (while still doing a lot of monstrous shit - she is not a defanged vampire by any stretch). I think her death scene is one of the most moving moments in the series finale.
13. Seras Victoria
A good female vampire has at least one non-vampire part of her personality, right? Ok, so, Seras is:
the muscle in almost every scene she is, which is to say, the one absolutely beating the shit out of people while her allies run for cover
the perky henchman/morality pet of one of history's greatest monsters
the sole ray of sunshine in cast of edgy, cigar-chomping grizzled mercnaries and antiheroes she's been pressganged into fighting alongside
the victim of some HIDEOUS trauma even before her vampirization
the protege of a wise master who gets a full hero's journey arc, taking up his mantle at the end of the series
Like, I love her. She's the secret protagonist of Hellsing. She's got layers like an onion. The scene where she killed Zora Blitz reminded me why I love anime.
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(yeah it's the TFS version fuck you)
14. Youko Shiragami
My Monster Secret is not a horror manga. It is a romantic comedy about a bunch of idiots trying to keep painfully obvious secrets hidden and succeeding only because almost everyone around them is as dumb as they are, just in very different ways. It is a manga where an entire chapter can be summarized as "all the characters race to get the last McRib, using their various supernatural abilities to try and cheat their way to the front of the pack." It is one of the funniest and most heart-warming stories I have ever read, one of my favorite romances of all time, and an excellent piece of long form story-telling.
One of the two main characters is Youko Shiragami, a vampire girl who can't let anyone know she's a vampire or else her dad will pull her out of school. She desperately wants to have a normal life with friends and, like, school shenanigans, but her fear of people uncovering her secret and hating her is so immense that she's been isolating herself from everyone, accidentally torturing herself by being close to what she wants but unable to actually have it.
At least, until Kuromine, the other main character of the story, discovers her secret while trying to ask her out on a date. He ends up promising to keep her secret, and the two of them form a real friendship that blossoms into a very sweet romance, where Youko gets to display all her incongruous personality traits that go against what you'd expect of vampires - namely, that she's kind of a ditz, with an unrefined style of speech and a complete inability to be suave and seductive. She's a sweet, flaky goofball with a big heart, who just happens to drink blood and tan really quickly in the sunlight. There is no other vampire like her, and the world is richer for her being in it.
15. Marceline, the Vampire Queen
This list isn't ranked, but if it was, I'd put Marceline at the top. I think she is not only the most unique and deeply characterized lady vampire in fiction, but ranks right up there with Dracula in how she redefines the idea of what a vampire can be. Like, look at the forms she takes!
There are DOZENS of different monstrous shapes Marceline takes during Adventure Time's 9+ seasons of television, and any one of them would be a superb and memorable vampire on its own. And she's ALL of them. Just on a design standpoint, she is a standout. I think only Dracula himself could compete.
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But she also explores what the concept of what a vampire is in ways no other vampire in fiction can, in part because of the unique nature of Adventure Time's setting. In a world where humans are an extreme minority and most people are weird monsters, a vampire isn't that odd, so we get to explore what being a vampire means divorced from the comparison to "normal" human beings. There's the expected tragedy to Marceline, of course - she's a 16 year old who has been stuck in that adolescent state for hundreds of years, and much of her character arc over the show (including the magnificent vampire-centric storyline, "Stakes") focuses on the horror of being stuck in that transitional state, not quite a child but not quite an adult. Marceline struggles to mature, to understand herself and others, and her vampirism both keeps her distant from reaching those goals but also gives her a lot of time to figure out how to approach them when the opportunity arirves. Marceline goes from one of the most immature and selfish characters in the show to perhaps the most emotionally intelligent, blossoming into a sensitive and thoughtful person she could never have been without first becoming a creature that seems so inherently opposed to ever having those traits.
And she did it all in a children's show where she was rarely if ever allowed to actually drink blood - a problem the writers got around by having her suck the red color out of things, which is right up there with the Joker Venom from BTAS in terms of genius ideas spawned by children's show censorship.
While taking Amy to several peaceful locations, the Eleventh Doctor's trip to a museum takes turn for the worse: his interest is caught by a painting of a church by Vincent van Gogh. What troubles the Doctor is that there's a face in the church's window; it's not a nice face, it's a curious, shadowed, creepy face with a beak and nasty eyes. The Doctor knows evil when he sees it and this face is definitely evil; it may pose a threat to the one who painted it. Only one thing will calm the Doctor's nerves: a trip in the TARDIS to 1890 so he can find out from the artist himself.
Propaganda no propaganda submitted
The Five Doctors
Synopsis
I am being diminished, whittled away piece by piece. A man is the sum of his memories you know, a Time Lord even more so...
Okay got tagged by @xxcalicofemmexx to do a poll thing with five of my fav characters, so let's do this!
It was not easy to do whittle this down because the list kept getting longer the more I thought it over. So instead I tried to just pick five from different media and genres to keep it fresh. This is not a definitive list by any means.
I can also tag other people to see if they wanna join in on the fun, so let's doooo...
Hi!! Love your ocs a ton! I saw the post that said ask questions so questions I will ask. What are tge 3s hobbies? Who would they each main in smash? Who would their favorite sonic character be?
Ok that's all love you byereeeeee 💥💥💥
waaah thanks!! hmm ok let me see here
hobbies: check has a lot of hobbies! he's very crafty and enjoys cosplay a lot. additionally, he's made at least one fursuit (his fursona is a rabbit). he also likes games and puzzles a lot, his longest game-based hobby being chess.* lucy has fewer hobbies but enjoys cooking and carving/whittling (though they're not that great at the latter). they mostly do these as a form of stress relief. m8 is still figuring out things that they enjoy, but they tend to draw and read a lot. he doesn't sleep, so this is how they spend most of their nights.
smash brothers: ok these are all based on vibes because i have played smash literally once in my whole life. check plays as olimar. lucy plays as ridley. m8 plays as bayonetta
fav sonic characters: check likes tails a lot :] lucy likes sonic because that's the only sonic character they know. m8 would be a big amy fan!
When you rewatch most childhood movies, the cult classics, the nostalgia rides, I realize how sexist and problematic they were and I was secretly hoping Veer Zaara wasn't one of them(I watched it when I was like 10 so I don't remember). This movie surprised me.
Veer Zaara features strong, resilient female characters. Be it our protagonist Zaara played by Preity Zinta or the catalysts of the love story Saamiya (Rani Mukherjee) and Shabbo (Divya Dutta) or even Zaara’s mother (Kirron Kher) and her Bebe (Zohra Sehgal).
Zaara Hayaat Khan is a feminist, one who is against the societal norms laid for a woman. It's refreshing to see this in her introductory song "Hum to bhai jese hai wese rahengey" sung beautifully by Lata ji, but as this 3 hour musical drama progresses it gets disappointing to see Zaara whittle herself away to the same norms she was against in the first place.
Everyone around her constantly tells her it's her responsibility to be a good wife and a good mother and to guard the respect of their families. Zaara crosses the border to fulfill a final wish of her ‘BeBe’(grandmother) all by herself.
In the midst of a rescue operation, she demands her things be lifted off along with her all while hanging on to an Air Force professional in his uniform.
She pushes the crowded men away and speaks with authority "I have a ticket and I need to get on this bus". In all these instances Zaara is scared yet heroic. She phones her mother and tells her that all her life she didn't do anything and probably won't in the future too and will probably end up being just like her mother - a good wife and a good mother, so she wants to do this one thing so she can respect herself. This is what irked me. I understand she's from an orthodox family but she can still have dreams and ambitions. From the start of the movie, she is portrayed as a rebel, one who doesn't comply with societal norms and laughs in the face of stereotypes. I can only imagine how curious she would have been as a child. That alone is enough to give her some dreams.
She fearlessly tells Amitabh's character what he is doing is unfair to the girls. If I went to someone’s house for a day especially someone I barely knew I wouldn't even dare to question their acts. Zaara does and she makes him spellbound. She doesn't go “I'm just here for one day so I’ll just mind my own business and leave”. She questions the injustice. "Imagine what girls could do if they were given the right education. Some of them might even surpass Veer".
I loved Zaara in all these scenes. She fearlessly stands up against mistreatment and calls them out no matter who the other person is. All this makes you root for her until it doesn't.
In a scene where Saamiya visits Veer's (Shahrukh Khan) hometown and finds Zaara there, she says to Shabbo "Yeh kis sadi ke log hai… ?" (transl. “Which century are these people from?”)
That's exactly how I felt too. “Kon hai ye log? Kahan se aate hai?”( transl. Who are these people? Where do they come from?) Spending their whole lives in the name of the person they never got to be with. Sacrificing everything and working to fulfill someone else’s dream. Zaara has always been that kind of person. She crosses borders to fulfill her bebe's wish and gives all her life to fulfill Veer and his Tau’s wish. She keeps doing everything for others. She spends her life making others’ dreams come true. She lives her life in the memory of her lover. This also reminded me of Sita aka Princess Noor Jahan from Sitaramam (also maybe Madarasipattinam's Amy).
If Saamiya saw these women she'd again say "Kon hai ye log?"
Even after decades of releasing love stories on-screen this "sacrificing" trope hasn't changed and remains to be a classic which I am not a big fan of. Why do these characters not have any characterization of their own? (Zaara) even if they do, it all changes when a man comes into her life (Sita/Noor Jahan). Ultimately the heroin has to either die or spend her whole life in the memory of her Romeo. (Remember what Mr. Dashwood says to Jo in 2019’s Little Women?)
Maybe I don't understand love stories. Maybe I don't understand love? I don't know. But I think in real life none of us are that insane to write our whole life in someone else’s name and live and breathe just reminiscing our lost lovers, at least I am not. Maybe that is why these movies will remain classics because they are too insane to happen in real life.
Last Time On Total Drama Cruise Control: No Golden Buzzer for These Contestants!
CHALLENGE 5: - LAS VEGAS, NV
"Alright! This challenge is......a talent show! Now, I get it. I get it. I am aware of the unbalanced teams. Sooooo...I've decided for this challenge everyone will go, but only one will count for your team. You will have to vote for the best performance. You better pick wisely, because you will be preforming for all the lovely tourists and locals!"
Brick left before the challenge even started! He ran away from it all...to become an Elvis impersonator?! Thankfully he returned just in time to perform "Heartbreak Hotel." Being the most voted for the Tapirs, he goes up against most voted Beaver contestant Alejandro and his balancing act!
It's BRICK VS ALEJANDRO! The audience holds their breath... Who will come out on top?
"Alejandro's breathtaking performance...He wowed the crowd with his amazing tightrope abilities! And juggling? Talk about talented!"
"...aannnndddd Brick! Coming in fashionably late, the disgraced Soggy Sargent was able to clutch out a unique performance!"
"It's time for the viewer's vote, because that's the one that matters!"
The audience decides that ultimately, Alejandro deserves the win! A rare win for the Beavers!
All Participating Contestants and their Talents:
Beavers
Ripper - Playing the Butt Trumpet
Harold - Beatboxing
Alejandro- Juggling on a Tightrope
Julia- Making Money
MK- Card Tricks
Amy and Sammy- Cheerleading
ELIMINATION: Sadie was voted out on today's episode! However, it turns out...
"I AINT SADIE… IM SUGAR!"
Sugar fooled the cast pretending to be Sadie, flaunting her "acting skills."
Because Sadie was eliminated and not Sugar, Chris has chosen to keep her in the game!
With free flights to Vegas from where the ship is docked, the contestants had 10 days to run around the strip!
The love square reunites after Brick's "moving" performance! And... they all hotbox a hotel room.
It's almost a must to get a hotel room when there isn't a port nearby. Alejandro, Wayne, Raj, and Ripper (Now deemed the "Sea Tails,") destroy a VHS tape in a room together, containing dialogue between Noah and Cody. Alejandro was mentioned, and he didn't appreciate the fact the tape claims he dated Noah at some point. (Which did not happen.)
Jo, at some point, gets crossfaded with Amy and Alejandro!
Brick also admits his love for Jo when she returns to their room. She does not remember this happening the next day at all.
Because of this, Brick goes to the mall and cries in a bathroom while Lightning comforts him.
Jo also visits the aquarium with Harold and they argue about sea creatures. Jo also bonds with Raj over their shared trauma from the show.
Speaking of trauma, after an outing with the Sea Tails, Raj is faced with an abundance of pigeons. Birds are secretly his greatest fear, and Ripper manages to catch one and bring it over to the group.
Ripper and Julia have a small fight in the gift shop! Ripper almost slips up and says something rude. Julia says she needs to think about their relationship...
After Harold brought it up once, everyone appears to be entirely fascinated by seahorse birth.
With the love square repaired, will the beavers even have a fighting chance at the next challenge?
Find out next time on TOTAL! DRAMA! CRUUUIISE CONTROL!
After a day off due to a typhoon passing through Taipei, Taiwan, Asia Tour 2022-2023 was back in action again today (04 August 2023).
Jennyanydots, played by Amy Louise Whittle, shows off the love of her life, Bustopher Jones, played by Ian Jon Bourg.
A pair of backstage photos featuring Saverio Pescucci as Alonzo, Johnny Randall as Mistoffelees, Katie Hutton as Rumpleteazer, and Taryn Donna as Cassandra.
Petra Ilse Dam is keeping busy in the Booth! The Bombalurina performer will likely stay there for the remainder of dates due to an injury.
The Nobel-winning poet was pitiless to herself, yet fiercely generous toward her students.
By Amy X. Wang The New York Times
She stood barely five feet tall — slight, unassuming, you had to stoop low to kiss her cheek — but whenever Louise Glück stepped into a classroom, she shot a current through it. Students stiffened their spines, though what they feared was not wrath but her searing rigor: Even in her late 70s, after she won the Pulitzer and the National Humanities Medal and the Nobel, she always spoke to young writers with complete seriousness, as if they were her equals. “My first poem, she ripped apart,” says Sun Paik, who took Glück’s poetry class as a Stanford undergraduate. “She’s the first person whom I ever received such a brutal critique from.” Mark Doty, a National Book Award-winning poet who studied under Glück in the 1970s at Goddard College, felt that she “represented total authenticity and complete honesty.” This, he recalls, “pretty much scared me half to death.”
Spare, merciless, laser-precise: Glück’s signature style as a writer. It was there from an early age. Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child, was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, “Firstborn”: “Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.”) In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely.
So she took, in 1971, a teaching job at Goddard College. To her astonishment, being a teacher unwrapped the world — it bloomed anew with possibility. “The minute I started teaching — the minute I had obligations in the world — I started to write again,” Glück would confess in a 2014 interview. Working with young minds quickly became a sort of nourishment. “She was profoundly interested in people,” says Anita Sokolsky, a friend and colleague from Williams College, where Glück began teaching in 1984. “She had a vivid and unstinting interest in others’ lives that teaching helped focus for her. Teaching was very generative to her writing, but it was also a kind of counter to the intensity and isolation of her writing.”
Glück’s own poems became funnier and more colloquial, marrying the control she earlier perfected with a new, unexpected levity (in her 1996 poem “Parable of the Hostages”: “What if war/is just a male version of dressing up”), and it is her later books, like the lauded “The Wild Iris” from 1992, that made her a landmark literary figure. Teaching also coaxed out a new facet in Glück herself: that of a devoutly unselfish mentor, a tutor of unbridled kindness.
A less fastidious writer and thinker may have made their teaching duties rote — proffering uniformly encouraging feedback or reheating a syllabus year after year. Glück, though, threw herself into guiding pupils with the same care and intimacy she gave to her own verses. “There was just this voraciousness, this generosity,” says Sally Ball, who met Glück while studying with her at Williams and remained close with her for the three decades until her death. “Every time I moved, she put me in touch with people in that new place. She enjoyed bringing people to know each other and sharing the things she loved.” And as a teacher, Ball says, “Louise was really clear that you have to make yourself change. You can’t just keep doing the same things over and over again.” In that spirit of boundless self-advancement, Glück also taught herself to love cooking and eating. She once hand-annotated a Marcella Hazan recipe and mailed it to Ball, with sprawling commentary on how best to prepare rosemary. “She’s very beautiful and elegant, right,” Ball says, but “we’d go to Chez Panisse and sit down and she eats with gusto. It’s messy, she’s mopping her hands around on the plate.”
Paik recalls spending hours each week decoding Glück’s dense, cursive comments on her work. “I was 19 or 20,” she says, “writing these scrappy, honestly pretty bad poems, and to have them be received with such care and detail — it pushed me to become a better writer because it set a standard of respect.”
“She was 78, and whenever she talked about poetry, it felt like the first time she’d encountered poetry,” says Shangyang Fang, who met Glück when he was at Stanford on a writing fellowship. Glück offered to edit his first poetry collection, and the pair became close friends. “She would talk about a single word in my poem for 10 minutes with me,” Fang says. Evenings would go late. They cooked for each other sometimes, spending hours talking vegetables and spices, poetry and idle gossip. “By the end, I couldn’t thank her enough, and she said: ‘Stop thanking me! I am a predator, feeding on your brain!’”
it is time to choose a new favourite companion, and whittle 166 contestants down to just one. There will be 16 polls posted every day except Friday, until there are too few contestants to achieve that (and slightly more in the group stage)
the submission form for contestant propaganda is still open, you can find it here
so without further ado, how far will your favourite make it?
I mean, I gotta say props to the Undersiders and Travellers for making their attacks whittle the Nine down, makes their ultimate victory more believable when it comes, but still. I mean...
Parts feel very contrived, parts feel like they... aren't even going anywhere until suddenly everything goes everywhere? Like, at this point, I'm starting to wonder if I'm just looking for reasons to bitch and critique, sort of operating in bad faith, but...
like, yes, a story where all these disparate pieces come together right at the end is great, and that's sort of what he has going with this, and I know some of the stuff he has feeds into deeper long term themes and stuff but...
It doesn't feel like it really works for me. It feels like he keeps dropping plot threads and then picking them back up a bit later without really weaving them together right. Hard to articulate, and I don't... I feel like re-reading again and taking the time to articulate it. I am trying to get this done for better reasons than just 'reading' it.
Arc 13 isn't quite as annoying as Arc 12, perhaps because the protagonists start to push back and actually succeed at shit, but still. It's just...
and we have another arc of this.
And also, jesus christ, I need more Amy in this damnit.