#anyway this was a lesbian movie and nothing will convince me otherwise

[alyciajazmin]

Bend It Like Beckham (2002) dir. Gurinder Chadha

[100hearteyes]

Part 2 of Clarke And Lexa Make a Porno, because why the fuck not.

Part 1.

"No. Absolutely not."

Anya's wolfish grin is no good omen. Lexa feels a sense of dread wash over her and tries in vain to assuage her nerves by holding her friend's gaze. Anya wouldn't look this sure if she didn't have some card up her sleeve.

Lexa throws a furtive glance around, checks that her co-workers are still focused on the German porn telenovela. It's only when she's sure that the action on-screen will keep them rooted for a while that she turns back to Anya, trying but failing to meet her eyes.

She overcompensates with another glance around the room and a low hiss. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but am I not too," she licks her lips, gathering the courage, "'vanilla' to do it?"

Anya shrugs like it's a no-brainer; crosses her arms and props her booted feet on Lexa's desk. "That's exactly the point. You're a lesbian Disney princess. Pretty sure if you started singing the whole fucking fauna of Capitola would follow you around."

Lexa levels Anya with a glare and tries to push her feet off the desk, to no avail.

(Seriously, what's it worth being editor if she can't even have her subjects' respect? She wishes this job was less about the headaches and more about the self-indulgent moments of microscopic tyranny.)

The feet might not budge, but Anya will. Lexa is sure of it. She draws herself taller and tucks on her most authoritative scowl. "I won't do it."

Anya plucks an imaginary cigarette from her mouth and throws it away without a care in the world. She reaches behind her and drags forth a heavy wooden box, filled to the brim with—

"My vinyls."

Lexa is in a daze.

She thought she'd lost all her vinyls to time and moving. She mourned each one of them for at least a year, cried many a night away clutching her record player to dear life, lamenting their shared loss.

They had a real connection.

But it turns out her vinyls weren't lost after all, and her tears were for naught. They were safe all along, albeit in different hands, and she'd known nothing of it, like a mother who lets her children wander about without aim nor authority.

How can she ever have kids if she can't even take care of her prized vinyls?

Lexa feels a prick of self-righteous indignation at the betrayal and puffs out her chest. "Why do you have all my vinyls?"

"I think you mean all my vinyls," Anya corrects with a lazy flurry of one hand towards the box.

"You don't even own a record player."

"How the fuck would you know?"

Lexa raises an eyebrow at her friend. "I come over all the time?"

"I could hide it while you're there."

"And then you'd never find it again, because that's what happens every time you try to hide something from me."

Anya shrugs and watches as Lexa picks one of the vinyls and turns it over in her hands, reading the track list on the back with the reverence one would a millennium-old parchment. Then she looks up at Anya with a stern glare.

"Over half of these were stolen from my house."

Anya shrugs again with infuriating nonchalance and Lexa wishes she had a pencil nearby just so she could snap it in two with one hand. Or stab one of Anya's eyes with it.

"Maybe I just rescued them from the actual malefactor," drawls Anya.

"We both know the real culprit sits across from me and has been wearing the same socks for the past three weeks."

Nailed it.

When she looks at her friend, however, all she sees is that same old resting bitch face that never seems to go away.

"Wow, Lexa," Anya deadpans. "Now you've really hurt my feelings."

Sometimes, Lexa wonders if Anya really has a rock where her heart should be. A supernatural, blood-pumping rock, of course, but a rock nonetheless. Or, maybe, Anya is a psychopath. Maybe the blood money theory wasn't so far-fetched after all. That would explain the brazen lack of empathy for everyone else's feelings, most of all Lexa's. What does it say about Lexa that her one true friend is someone who sneezes literally every time Lexa says 'I love you'?

Not that Lexa says it a lot. Only once or twice every few years.

Just enough to have noticed the pattern.

"Are you really trying to blackmail me with vinyls?"

Anya fakes an affronted gasp, laying a hand on her heart. "Would I ever. Think of it as... an incentive."

Lexa really does love Anya, despite her friend's... unique demeanor. Anya helps her come out of her shell — by taking up all the space and forcing her out of her own metaphorical home — and every once in a while she likes to make sure Anya is aware of her gratitude. Sometimes, though, things get really fucking weird.

Lexa would still do anything for her best friend.

"Let's imagine, hypothetically - very hypothetically," she stresses, although Anya's burgeoning smirk tells Lexa she isn't so easily fooled, "that I agreed. What would happen next?"

Anya takes her feet off Lexa's desk and sits up straighter, perhaps aware of the importance of this moment. This, Lexa decides, will determine her answer.

"Well first, I'd have to get you a costar. Then we'd sign some legally binding shit, find a crew, and make the damn movie. Simple as that."

Anya leans forward, looking into her eyes. In Anya's, she sees honesty and a pressing need to reassure. It takes some of the pressure off her shoulders right away.

"Look, Lexa, you can say no. But your name won't be on anything related to the movie and I promise no one in this shitty town will ever find out you did this."

This is why Anya is Lexa's best friend. And it's why Lexa would do anything for her.

Even star in a porno.

"Okay."

Anya's inner smile must be really, really big, because Lexa knows how hard she tries to tamper its outward expression — and still her lips manage to lift into a grotesque grimace. Coming from Anya, it's the equivalent of a blissful grin.

"Okay?"

Lexa nods and closes her eyes, bracing herself for a bone-crushing hug. It never comes. When she opens her eyes, Anya's resting bitch face is back on.

"What, did you want a fucking hug?"

It's a blessing to have her rude friend back, Lexa guesses, because seeing Anya almost smile is fifty shades of unsettling. So she rolls her eyes and rolls with it.

Her next question demands her full focus, lest she makes an even bigger fool of herself than usual.

Lexa breathes in, makes sure all her co-workers are still otherwise entertained, breathes out. Smooths out a non-existent wrinkle in her pants, wets her lips for courage.

"Anyway," she treads with caution, "do you have someone in mind for the other main role?"

It's fitting that Harper McIntyre's hit song One More Betyreyal (one of her less inspired titles, if Lexa may say so) starts playing in that moment, for the look in Anya's eyes speaks of nothing but danger. Lexa wonders how much planning went into this conversation, so Anya could plan all her gut punches in advance.

"Clarke Griffin."

No. No. Anyone but her.

Clarke Griffin is the new recruit, although Lexa hardly understands how there can be someone new considering the station is broke and they’re already overstaffed — and none of them make nearly enough money for how much they laze around all day.

Clarke came from out of town with a fancy degree and was directly hired as an editor. She voices the early afternoon newscasts and Lexa curses the one-hour period during which she's forced to cohabitate with Clarke every day.

Apparently, Clarke had taken a liking to unnerving her, be it by smirking at her every time she catches Lexa staring or by making all sorts of inappropriate comments — to her ear. Lexa hates how much it affects her, but how can she possibly focus on reporting about Lionel "Real Sight" Foster swallowing his own wooden eye or how Jasper Jordan rescued his own private parts from the jaws of two slats of an unassuming park bench if someone keeps doing everything in their power to distract her?

Lexa has a theory (an iron-clad theory, if she may say so herself), and it's that Clarke is trying to get her fired so she can take her shift. It's the best shift of the day. There is no other possible explanation.

"You know what, I take it back. Now you need to convince two people to star in your porno."

"Oh, there's no need." Anya waves her argument away with staggering nonchalance. "Clarke's already said yes."

Wait, what? "But you told me we'd need to get me a costar."

Anya shrugs and Lexa is now seriously considering revisiting her psychopath theory. "I lied."

"You conniving, lying b—"

"Careful," Anya cuts in with a raised eyebrow. "I am under protection of the Capitola Astrologers Union."

"Of which you are president, treasurer, and the only legal member," Lexa reminds her. "And I think any upstanding judge would love to know how exactly every other name on the list has joined said union posthumously."

"I am an astrologer, Lexa. I can communicate with the dead. It's in my job description."

"It scares me that you're not even aware you're describing an entirely different profession."

Lexa sits back, staring at the ceiling (and the chewing gum Murphy glued there a year ago — he could've been an Olympic jumper if he committed to work the way he does to being an asshole), trying to come to terms with a single, harrowing probability: she's going to star in a porno with Clarke Griffin.

"l don't understand why it has to be Clarke."

Anya leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees, expression serious and ready to talk shop. The last time Lexa saw her like this was— actually, Lexa doesn't think she's ever seen Anya like this.

"Look, I've done some market analysis and most girl on girl pairings are a blonde and a brunette." Anya raises both her hands and starts counting off fingers, "Brittana, Petramos, Holstein, Wayhaught, Supercorp, Joanarty, Choni, the inaptly named Shoni, Deanoru, Dana and Alice, Bette and Tina, Catradora, Villaneve, Clexa—"

"What's Clexa?"

"I don't know, some chicks from this fucking terrible CW show."

"Do you like it?"

"Do I like what?"

"Clexa."

"Dude, I don't even know their fucking names!" Anya exclaims, exasperated. As if she's the victim here. "The only Clexa I ship is you and Blondie. Naked. On my porno. Clarke and Lexa. Clexa. Havin' very hot sexa."

"Smart," Lexa deadpans.

"I know."

"Why can't it be Niylah? She's blonde, too."

Anya's smirk is five hundred shades of gross. "I know you'd love to get up close and personal with Niylah's knick-knacks, but no."

Lexa decides to let the comment fly for the sake of her own sanity.

"Why Clarke, though?"

"Because you two have chemistry, you fucking dimwit."

Lexa snorts. Chemistry. Lexa has never heard of something so absurd. She and Clarke have as much chemistry as Harper McIntyre and any semblance of originality.

Which is to say, none at all.

"She makes very inappropriate comments," she argues instead, knowing full well that pressing on the topic of chemistry will only open way for some trademark crass joke from Anya.

"Yeah," her friend agrees, like it's obvious. "Because she knows you love them."

She most certainly does not.

"I most certainly do not."

"You do. Your freakishly tiny ears go red whenever she flirts with you. Your step falters when she makes one of those comments, for fuck's sake," Anya observes, pointing in Lexa's general direction, before leaving forward and laying a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you, my friend, are a walking lesbian cliché."

Lexa takes Anya's hand off her shoulder. "Can you please stop insulting my tragically conspicuous homosexuality?"

"Oh please," Anya scoffs. "I'm bisexual, I can say whatever I want."

"If my step actually faltered - which they don't - it would be because her comments are annoying, off-putting, unprofessional, inopportune, and... and inappropriate", she finishes lamely.

"And you fucking love them."

"I don't."

Anya leans back on her chair with an evil smirk, propping her feet on the table and crossing them at the ankles. Lexa tries to push them off to no avail.

"Legalities aside, it's very simple. Clarke has already said yes. I just recorded you saying yes."

Lexa sputters, "You what--"

"You're both legally bound now." Anya shrugs. "Look at it this way: it will be very educational. You'll finally learn how to make a girl come, and get paid for it. Sort of."

A beat of silence.

"Anya, are you aware that you say something at least vaguely criminal every five sentences? Something that could actually put you in prison?"

Anya clicks her tongue, sinking farther into her chair, and lowers her sunglasses to her eyes.

"I've got friends everywhere, Lex. Let's just say I've dipped more than my fingers in my fair share of pies, if you catch my drift." A second later, she lowers her sunglasses just enough to reveal her eyes. "That means my tongue. My tongue's been in a lot of pies, too."

Lexa doesn't doubt that for a second.

"What I need to know is," Anya adds, taking off her sunglasses and throwing them across the room, "will you dip your fingers in the porn pie?"

Like this conversation hasn't caused enough trauma for thirty lifetimes.

"If I say no, will you still give me back my vinyls?"

"Absolutely fucking not."

Lexa swallows, clenches her jaw, and thinks of all those lonely nights spent in the couch clutching her record player and sharing cookie dough ice cream with it, longing for long-gone times when she'd dance to the mellow voices of the likes Billy Ocean and Ella Fitzgerald.

"My answer is yes."

[libertydevitto]

please tell me... the top five gayest Billy Joel songs. I know it is NOT easy to narrow down and while Allentown is not a gay SONG it has an INCREDIBLY gay video and I think it's fair to take that into account in a ranking.

okay, I had to really think about this, and it became a top 10, sort of, kind of, top 12 I guess. Yes shoutout to Allentown for being the gayest music video of all time. 

Code of Silence. This song was written about someone in the closet and you can’t convince me otherwise. Helps that it was co-written by legend and ally Cyndi Lauper. This is the only song on this list that seems deliberately queer.

“Everybody wants to hear the secrets/that you never told a soul before”

“But you swore to yourself a long time ago/there were some things that people never needed to know/guess there’s one that you keep/that you bury so deep no one can tear it out”

“And you don’t want to lose a friendship/there’s nothing that you have to hide/and a little dirt/couldn’t hurt no one anyway”

“And you still have a rage inside you/that you carry with a certain pride/in the only part of a broken heart/that you could ever save”

“It’s a time honored resolution/because the danger is always near”

The Stranger. All about the secrets we keep and masks we wear around other people.

“Well we all have a face/that we hide away forever/and we take them out and show ourselves/when everyone has gone”

“Well we all fall in love/but we disregard the danger/though we share so many secrets/there are some we never tell”

“You may never understand/how the stranger is inspired/but he isn’t always evil/and he isn’t always wrong/though you drown in good intentions/you will never quench the fire/you’ll give into your desire/when the stranger comes along”

Until the Night. All about a couple who can only come together at night, long after everyone else has gone to sleep.

“I never ask you where you go/after I leave you in the morning/we go our different ways/to separate situations/it’s not that easy anymore”

“Today we’ll be unsure, is this what we believe in/and wonder how can we go on”

“While they’re closing it down/we’re gonna open it up/and while they’re going to sleep/we’ll just be starting to touch"

Everybody Has A Dream. A heartbreakingly beautiful song about a man who can’t be at home with his lover, so he has to imagine being home with them instead.

“Everybody has a dream/and this is my dream, my own/just to be at home/and all alone with you”

“And if a word from you can bring a better day/then all I have are these games that I’ve been playing/to keep my hope from crumbling away”

“And all the fantasies that I have been keeping/will make the empty hours easier to stand”

An Innocent Man. This one is all about the narrator trying to get their lover to open up, let them in, trust them, and that after all the pain they’ve dealt with and all the fear they have, it’ll be okay, they’ll be okay, because he’s an innocent man. Also some rando on Tumblr a few years ago made a post about how the narrator of the song is a dick, and the love interest should be weary, and used male pronouns to refer to both Billy and whoever he was singing to, and I can’t ever forget that.

“Some people live with the fear of a touch/and the anger of having been a fool”

“Some people sleep all alone every night/instead of taking a lover to bed/some people find that it’s easier to hate/than to wait anymore”

“I know you don’t want to hear what I say/I know you’re gonna keep turning away/but I’ve been there and if I can survive/I can keep you alive/I’m not above going through it again/I’m not above being cool for a while/if you’re cruel to me I understand”

“Some people hope for a miracle cure/some people just accept the world as it is/but I’m not willing to lay down and die/because I am an innocent man”

Through The Long Night. Now that shit is just tender as fuck. Also it was very likely written by Billy about a man he really did watch sleep. He’s straight, but it just adds another layer.

“It’s so late/but I’ll wait/through the long night with you/with you”

“The warm tears/the bad dreams/the soft trembling shoulders/the old fears/but I’m here”

“All your past sins/are since past/you should be sleeping/it’s all right/sleep tight/through the long night with me/with me”

“No, I didn’t start it/you’re broken hearted/from a long, long time ago/oh, the way you hold me/is all that I need to know”

Tell Them You’re In Love. THIS IS LITERALLY A SONG ABOUT HIDING A SERIOUS ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP FROM ALL YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS BECAUSE THEY WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU AND YOUR SO HAVE, AND TO JUST TELL THEM “oh yeah, I’m in love, I have a thing going on, it’s cool" (also an unreleased demo, it’s only on YouTube)

“Sometimes it’s nobody else’s affair/and if you want them to leave you alone/just tell them you’re in love”

“When I look/in your eyes/I can see that you’ve gone through your own share of pain/And I hear (hear)/when you cry/there are feelings you have that words could never explain”

“Well between/you and me/it ain’t nobody’s business to know where you’ve been/even so, even though/they mean well/they can never be a part of the world we’re in"

Shameless. A great song all about being shamelessly in love. I mean come on.

“Well I’m shameless/when it comes to loving you”

“And I’m standing here for all the world to see/there ain’t that much left of me/that has very far to fall”

“I have never let anything have this much/control over me/cause I worked too hard to call my life my own/yes I made myself a world/and it worked so perfectly/but it’s your world now/I can’t refuse/I never had so much to lose”

You Can Make Me Free. 

“You can make me free/you can make me rise/you can make me see/so open up my eyes”

“Don’t you know my only real moments/are the ones I spend with you”

“And if I must wait a lonely lifetime/until I am with you, my love/I will wait but you’ll be what I’m dreaming of"

James. Just read the lyrics.

“James, do you like your life?/can you find release?”

“You were so relied upon/everybody knows how hard you tried/hey, look at what a job you’ve done/carrying the weight of family pride”

“James, you’ve been well behaved/you’ve been working so hard/but will you always stay/someone else’s dream of who you are”

“I went on the road/you pursued an education, James/how you gonna know for sure/everything was so well organized/now everything is so secure/and everybody else is satisfied”

Stop in Nevada. This is really just about a lesbian divorcing her husband and movie to liberal California.

“She tried for years to be a good wife/it never quite got off the ground/and all those stories of the good life/convinced her to not to hang around”

“Oh, and now she’s heading out to California/and she doesn’t know what’s comin’ but she sure knows what she’s leaving behind”

“And though she finds it hard to leave him/she knows it would be worse to stay/he wouldn’t understand the reasons/that make a woman run away"

Zanzibar. Now this song really isn’t gay at all, but shout out for having the most homoerotic way someone could have described boxing in a song.

“Ali dances and the audience applauds/though he’s bathed in sweat he hasn’t lost his style"

[meteor752]

So...I just watched The Rise of Skywalker

And it was...a movie

Now, if you don’t want it spoiled, then don’t click keep reading, because I will immediately start after that.

Got it?

Good

Now that that’s out of the way

THERE IS A CANON LESBIAN COUPLE IN STAR WARS AND THEY SHARED A KISS, I AM DEAD

Sorry I just had to get that out of my system

I am not a movie critic, and for the most part I just enjoy a movie unless it bores me. But I have been saying that I will do this review, and I will, so I will just go over important part by important part.

Good?

Good.

The first scene

This is, hands down, my favorite scene in the movie. The way they introduced Palpatine and that we never really see his face in the scene is really menacing, but still oddly hilarious.

I mean, the man is hanging there quoting himself. He later literally said do it!! I’m surprised he didn’t start to tell the story of Darth plagueise the wise.

Plus, the fact that Kylo doesn’t want to join Palpatine and become his apprentice, but just kill him, is really cool to me. It shows a little different side of his character, that he wants to be his own and not just the next Vader.

Also, after Palpatine saying “I created Snoke”, there’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment of a deformed looking Snoke in a cubicle, so that’s that character's backstory. He was a failed clone all along!

Poe, Finn, Chewie & the Spy

The start of this scene is just pure fluff between our dear space husbands and their mom’s, husband's dog.

The revelation of the spy was cool, but I kinda immediately guessed that it would be either Hux or Phasma.

I really liked the chase scene, plus the banter between the characters. Character interaction is a thing I love in franchises, and this movie does a good job with it

Master Leia

I LIVE FOR LEIA TRAINING REY TO BE A JEDI

The Rey training scene though was...unnecessary, dunno why it was there.

Rey’s always been a kinda on-off character for me. I like her when she’s loose and chill instead of a “badass”. In this movie...I mean she has her moments, but for the most part I didn’t want her there

C-3PO, R2-D2 & BB-8

The fact that BB-9e wasn’t in this movie is a crime

I like Threepio, like most other fans, but he’s just like always been...there for me. In this movie though, holy shit did he shine!

To be quite honest, he was probably one of my favorite characters in it, just because he kept that lightheartedness in an otherwise angsty movie, with some occasional fluff.

What I really like about him is that they made this his movie! Artoo and BB-8 were barely in it, and when they were they didn’t do much, so Threepio could really shine! Literally, he’s made of gold. The latest eight movies he’s basically been bullied by every character on screen, no one really seems to like him (Poe did it in this movie, so it’s still a thing) but they gave him a lot of screentime and I like that!

I don’t like BB-8. He’s mostly there to sell toys, and I get that that’s what Star Wars is all about these days, but don’t make it obvious!! Cough, cough PORG!!!!

Artoo was underused as kriff in this movie. He did basically nothing, despite being one of the franchises most popular characters. My favorite moment in the movie however is when Wiped Threepio And Artoo reunite, and he actually sound HURT when Threepio doesn’t recognize him!! He calls him his best friend okay!?!?

Lando

!!!!

His introduction was so fricking cute! Chewie just went to hug him instantly, because that poor fluffy boy has lost enough!!

Threepio going to explain who he is, and Rey just going “We know who he is!” Is so heartwarming, like he’s a war hero! People idolize him that’s so cute!!!

Knights of Ren

Will get more into them in another section, but look really cool but really underused

Stormpilot, Jedipilot, Stormjedi & Stormjedipilot

Let’s get this over with

All three of the first ships are evident in this movie.

Rey and Poe arguing about BB-8 and The Falcon at the start of the movie...is basically all we get for Jedipilot but what’d you expect?

Poe making Finn general, their banter throughout the movie, the little very unnecessary fight they had, the reunion at the end of the movie-

THIS

Rey: So what were you going to tell me?

Finn: We’ll take it later

Poe: What, you mean when Poe’s not here?

YOU JEALOUS BRO???

Finn wanting to tell Rey something was most likely confessing some feeling for her, but then they survived and yeah, and it was fucking dropped?! Did JJ just forget about that???

Plus, I’ve never noticed this before, but Finn yells Rey’s name a lot.

The reunion hug between the three of them at the end of the movie is what kinda made me like Stormjedipilot. Poe and Rey holding their hands over Finn’s back while he buries his head into their shoulders, like yeah I like that.

Chewie’s “death”

I, to be honest, kinda wanted Chewbacca to die a little here. It would have made Kylo’s turn so much more compelling.

So it is my personal headcanon that Kylo did not know that Chewie wasn’t on that ship, and for a few minutes he actually thought that he, Uncle Chewie, had died. Because I couldn’t be the only one who saw a bit of pain on his face.

Kijimi

I first did not like Zorii, mostly because I thought she and Poe would have had a “relationship”.

Though, when Rey held a lightsaber against her throat, and she just impressively said “Not that it matters, but I like you.”

Gal, you GAAAAY

And also that twice, twice, Poe asks if they should kiss and she dismisses both tries, that I like. Good job movie, god job.

During the raid, you can hear female Stormtroopers, and I think that’s really cool. We’re in movie nine and first now does there exist female Stormtroopers that isn’t Phasma!!

Threepio’s wipe is sad and I liked it, but I feel that they made it a little too sad, considering it was afterwards mostly played as a joke and then they gave him his memories back

Hux the spy

Again, Chewie should have remained dead, but whatever.

I have no problem with Hux as the spy, I was just sitting in the theater mumbling ‘Fulcrum’ while my brother was looking at me weirdly, but what I don’t like is what they did with it.

For Hux just to be shot by some General we’ve never met before is just the equivalent of a letdown, especially since so many people like his characters. Including me, he’s one of the best parts of the Sequels!!

Rey Palpatine

Just so everyone knows, I saw this coming. I mean sure, I still liked the Qui’ra theory more, but when Palps started talking about how he knew who the girl was, then I was just like okay she’s a Palpatine.

What I don’t like is how they don’t talk at all of how this came to be. Like, I don’t even know which one of Rey’s parents who’s Palps child. Who the hell did he fuck?!?!

So yeah, whatever twist, bad execution.

Endor’s Stormtroopers

THIS SCENE IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF WHY I DON’T LIKE REY

They often do this in movies. Heroes have to do something, they can’t do anything at that moment so they have to wait, main Hero does it anyways.

IT’S ANNOYING AS HELL

Finn and the Ex Stormtrooper I can't remember the name of’s bonding moment was cute, but I just kept thinking to myself “Are they siblings? Because it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened,”

Finn getting mad at Poe is weird as shit and I don’t like it.

Dark Rey vs Rey

Huge letdown didn’t like it next

Rey vs Kylo, final battle

It was...fine, I guess. I like that Rey fucking stabbed him, that was cool.

Leia dying to redeem Kylo was dumb! I get that they needed to kill her off in a natural way and not just off-screen but come on!

Plus, if you would ask me, Kylo didn’t need a redemption arc. I think he should have died. As a bad guy.

Han Solo And Lightsaber Toss

Han Solo talking to Kylo was cool, though how does it work?? Was it a vision? Luke manipulations the force? Kylo only saw what he wanted to see?

That Kylo just tossed his lightsaber was symbolic and stuff, but a really stupid decision from his part. How are you gonna protect yourself now, huh? THE FORCE?!?!

Rey going into Exile

THIS SCENE WAS FUNNY AS SHIT!!

Just, Rey, thinking that every Jedi goes into exile, when they don’t feel like dealing with it anymore, and she’s fucking right!!! Yoda, Obi-Wan And Luke would be proud!!!!

Luke’s force ghost also has nearly identical hair to Anakin, which is adorable. Dunno how many that noticed that, since the people I’ve talked with about the movie didn’t, but that was literally all I could think about.

Knight Leia

When Rey picked up her lightsaber, my brother beside me was like “That’s Luke’s green one!” And I got mad because that’s not his lightsaber design at all. Know your facts bro!

That Leia was a Jedi is understandable, I mean was Luke not going to train her? But I’ve always seen her that she could use the force, but didn’t use a lightsaber because she’s badass.

I kinda also wanted her blade to be purple? I think it would have fit her much better, as she is probably the most balanced Jedi we’ve had for a while and she’s got a lot of anger that little Skywalker, but blue works fine I guess. Better than green.

Star Wars Endgame

I liked this scene, it was cool, Artoo got something to do, and Finn and Rose riding those horse thingies is an inside joke between those two at this point, convince me otherwise.

Lando And Chewie arriving though, and the First Order stating that they are “just people”, was really beautiful. Cool scene all and all.

Rey and Palpatine

Palps is still quoting himself! He fucking said “Do It” JJ knows what’s up!!

One thing that I’ve been trying to figure out since I saw the movie was what the hell was Palps’ goal? He said for Rey to strike him down (Said the same to Luke, is he suicidal??) and then he would become? Apart? Of her? What?

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Kylo vs Knights of Ren

So these are Kylo’s guys, right? His inquisitors, per say.

Except these used to be Jedi, his clanmates, his friends.

So why the kriff did they all turn against him like that?? AND WHY DID HE JUST FIGHT THEM BLINDLY DUDE THESE WERE YOUR FRIENDS!!

If I could have changed anything in this movie that has nothing to do with ships, then it would be that at least ONE of the knights would have supported Kylo and not just blindly turned against him.

Though I must say, Rey giving Kylo Luke’s lightsaber through their bond, was pretty badass.

Palpatine steals Kylo and Rey’s bond

The. Fuck.

WHAT KIND OF FORCE POWER IS THAT?!?!

IF YOU CAN JUST STEAL A JEDI’S FORCE BOND, WHY DIDN’T YOU DO THAT WITH ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN PALPS?!?!? HUH?!?!?!

But for real, stupid decision, could have gone without it.

Jedi Rey vs Sith Palps

It was cool, a cool moment, I sat excitedly and whispered to my brother all the voices I recognized, I think Ahsoka could be heard??

...

I looked it up and yeah her voice is there, which means that she’s dead R.I.P Snips.

One of the better scenes of the movie, though I think it’s cheating because of nostalgia and love for these characters.

(I LOOKED UP WHICH THE VOICES WERE, AND WE’VE GOT FRICKING AAYLA SECURA, LUMINARA UNDULI, ADI GALLIA AND KANAN JARRUS!!!)

Reylo

*Sigh*

Ya know, I really hoped this wouldn’t happen. I almost wanted to skip this, and really make all the Reylo fans mad.

But I have to talk about this.

This kiss, should not have happened.

Now if you are a Reylo shipper, that’s good for you, I ship way stranger things than that, but to actually make it canon?!?!

Kylo having a crush or something for Rey? Sure, I can understand that’s he’s pretty much obsessed at this point. But for Rey, badass Rey who is pretty lesbian, to have feelings for Kylo? THIS IS NOT A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP PEOPLE!!

And that they made a toxic relationship canon, but not a gay one, really says something about Star Wars doesn’t it.

Death of Kylo

I laughed out loud during this scene. Not joking, people around me were annoyed. And that his clothes didn’t disappear? Is Kylo a naked force ghost? Did he do that for Rey?

Wait

Don’t answer.

Happy Rebels

The Lesbian couple that kissed was obviously queerbaiting, and you should never praise that, but that is probably all we will get Gays, so let’s just take it and cry on the inside.

Is that Stormtrooper gal Lando’s daughter? Because my brother whispered that to me, and I got those vibes too. Or is she way older than what she looks like and we were supposed to see her as a love interest?

The hug was cute.

Rey Skywalker

I will never accept this as canon ever.

To see the moisture farm again was nice, I liked that.

And for Rey to finally have her own lightsaber, and a yellow one too (I read a fanfic where she had a yellow one, was that like pre-seen??).

But the Skywalker thing...eh.

I would have found it cute if she’d said Rey Palpatine, as if she’d embraced her origin and decided that the name Palpatine isn’t just to be afflicted with the emperor, but also with her, the last Jedi.

Also, did she go into exile? Because damn, those Jedi do that a lot!

All in all, I liked this movie! I wasn’t bored a single bit while watching it, as there was always something going on, and I like when that happens. I don’t think that had happened since Empire with a Star Wars movie.

It isn’t in my top three, but it’s up there, and better than The Last Jedi.

Though I must say, they did take some things from Return of the Jedi and put it in this movie, specifically the ending.

Though I must say, and don’t hate me for this, it was better than Return of the Jedi okay bye

[veridium]

spiderwebs

and WE’RE BACK. 

thanks again to everyone for being patient with this hiatus -- but you know we just couldn’t stay away. and to continue on with our halloween party special is just a non-negotiable. now, without further wait, here is the latest installment in the best worst okayest friendship fic ever!

and I just had to title it with a No Doubt track because, well, you’ll see. 

chapter masterpost // previous episode

--

It’s almost too good to be true. The way the stars have aligned to produce a perfect, movie-scene kind of night. So she had convinced herself for every part right up until they actually enter the house. Slowly but surely everything falls apart from there, though. Can’t have a fantasy kind of night without some flames doing as they do best, and bursting -- such is Olivia and Ellinor’s track record. 

Who can blame her, though, for believing in that fantasy? She’s walking up the carved stone steps with Cassandra. She’s living her baby bisexual dream of showing up somewhere with a woman who makes the world go dewy and sparkly and looks fucking hot in trim black clothes and -- okay, well, enough of that shit. 

Olivia has never entered a party with someone -- she’s the type to encounter, kiss, ditch, and tell. You could count on one hand the number of times she’s left accompanied. Historically what happens at the event, stays at the event. So when she shows up with a tall, dark, and gorgeous woman holding her hand, safe to say the skeletons in the closet she burst out of are all but manic. And oh, do the skulls turn. 

Right off the back the two couples diverge, and with good reason. From the moment Olivia invited Cassandra to this she knew there was something she’d have to do: introduce her to the queer corner. More of an anomaly than an institution, there was one at every party: where all the queer people, predominantly women, congregated to drink, gossip, and relay the code red signal whenever someone’s ex showed up.

The place is covered in people which is exactly what she expects and demands. If Olivia hadn’t been already familiarized with House Pavus she would be hard pressed to locate the spot -- the spot within the spot, so to speak. Back living room couches are all that’s on her mind. Well, sorta. 

“What’s a bitch gotta do to get a drink in her hand?!” she exclaims in the foyer, and her wish is the people’s command. A drink from a trusted passerby -- or at least, from the look on Cassandra’s face, they better be -- solves the problem. 

Olivia exhales and takes a swig, sighing with dramatic relief at the taste of whiskey and whatever else. It’ll do perfectly. She goes to offer some to Cassandra but remembers the way she looked when they discussed debauchery over spaghetti, and curbs herself.  “Okay, well, let’s go!” she guides her into the belly of the beast, Cassandra hand holding onto her from behind for dear life.

Every few seconds Liv turns back to look at her, and she looks unphased but also unimpressed. It’s hard to be when everyone is tugging and calling out to her, kissing cheeks and saying ‘how are you?’ with no intention of actually listening. It’s easy in these moments to believe wholeheartedly in how confident Cassandra is, even as her eyes flicker with every movement, every person they move past. She grins, but she doesn’t say anything, even as people stare her down or give her smiles. She’s new, and she’s shiny -- Olivia can remember such a lion’s den. So, her flingers pulse their grip right back every time she tightens her grip.

“It’s gonna be okay, I promise,” she hangs back to whisper into her shoulder. Immediately after, yet another stranger comes around and grabs Olivia by the waist. 

“Liv!” 

a recognizable, smart twang of tone. Olivia’s head twists quick and she sees a bright, chiseled face. Purple baseball cap on backwards, its strap frayed and curled, and a playful expression. 

“How’s my girl?”

“Char!” Olivia chimes, and reaches her free arm around her neck, pulling in for a hug. “Cassandra,” she says once free, “this is Charter. We met volunteering for a local camp one summer!”

Cassandra stands still even as bodies and music quake around them. Her hand lets go of Olivia’s, and she slips it into her back pocket. Okay, then. But she manages to grin wider. 

“Hi there.”

Char’s brows raise higher than a stoner on a ferris wheel. “Cassandra...wait, shit, you’re the Cassandra on the--oh, fuck,” her wrist goes to her mouth as she stifles a laugh on astonishment. “I knew it!”

Olivia inhales sharp, fending the first cringe of the night as Cassandra shakes her head once.

Cassandra’s head twitches to the side. “Knew what?”

“That you were so g--”

“Weeeerreeee so great! Right?” Olivia steps in and gives Char the most fine-tuned side-eye she’s ever given. “We didn’t really ever get a chance to see, since you don’t go out much.”

Char’s throat catches, and she matches Olivia’s curious glare, before putting her red solo cup to her lips. “Ahah, right. Uh, after all, no one can be not...great, with that kinda haircut.”

“Do you know where the rest of the group is? In the back with the couch, like always?” Olivia nudges her, trying to change the subject. She looks back at Cassandra, who seems a bit lost and uncomfortable, but still holding on. Jesus, this is gonna be harder than I thought, if everyone acts like this. 

Out from the ether as if a blessing from the universe, someone wraps around Char and pulls her along. “Dude, come on, Sarah told me someone’s boyfriend is saying how much he loves lesbians every time he meets one!” 

Well, it’s a party, and it wouldn’t be one if there weren’t some weird shit going down. Char tosses her head back and laughs as she is propelled along. Olivia sighs from having her questioned unanswered, but it quickly is dispelled at the sight of Char placing a hand on Cass’s shoulder. 

“Hey, call me when she’s done with you!” followed by a pat on said shoulder, like a ‘tough luck, buddy’ kind of move. 

Fuck. Olivia can only hear pieces with it, but it’s enough. Enough for her degree of utter mortification to surge. Cassandra’s look falls, but she holds off one of her infamous scowls. What a saint. She shrugs the hand off of her, but Char is too euphoric to notice as she departs with her friend. 

Olivia takes a half-second breath and smiles again. No need to compound the embarrassment by acting like it, right? 

“You okay?” 

Cassandra blinks, her brows rounding. “I’m not sure,” she tries her best to be louder than the music. “This place is...really crowded.”

Olivia smiles and takes hold of her hand. “I know, isn’t it great?! Come on, we’re almost to the spot.”

Nothing and no one will stop her from accomplishing this. Not even the sound of Cassandra asking ‘what did she mean by…’ and the rest of it being drowned out by Fall Out Boy from speakers two rooms over. Not that she would want to stop and answer such a question, anyway. 

At last they find the way into what would be a normal person’s living room, but for Dorian’s family is probably known as ‘place to sit your ass and breathe on Saturday afternoons between 2-8pm.’ A sectional couch and coffee table with portraits on the walls and bottles and cups sprinkled throughout the various shelves of smaller family paintings and pictures. Everything’s about image, here. The strobe lights flickering from the main room provide the main source of light in the otherwise dark room full of skulking faces and bodies dressed in denim and flannel.

But for Olivia, it’s anything but dreary.

“Liv!” hands go up in the air from the couch. It’s Josie, thank goodness, dressed in a black leather jumpsuit and boots, winged eyeliner so sharp they could slice open a can. 

“Cat woman, I presume,” Olivia hops from heel to heel as her beloved friend comes in for a hug. “Does this mean Theia is Batwoman?”

“No! I tried to convince her,” Josie stepped back and folded her arms. “She really wanted to work the ‘too cool for a costume’ angle this year.”

“Didn’t she do that--”

“Last year? And the one before? Yes.” She rolls her eyes and bits her lip playfully, before her attention goes to Olivia’s company. “Cassandra! You are here!” she beams even brighter than when she saw Olivia, which is not offensive in the least. 

Cassandra flinches, and leans in closer to Olivia’s side. “Hi, Josie. It’s...good to see you,” she says, easier. She even adds a slight hand wave.

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

“I...I am.” Polite of a response, though not convincing. That’s worrisome. 

Josephine nods. “Is this a costume, or are you on the same ideological boat as my sweet, stubborn lover?”

Cassandra chuckles lightly. “I...am afraid so. I’m not one for costumes.”

“I see. Well, you’ll find no shortage of like-minded peers here. Olivia, Ellinor, and I carry the team, as we always do. Which reminds me, don’t go anywhere, I need you to go up with me when they play Lip Gloss! You owe me!”

Olivia’s mouth goes agape with playful laughter. It occurs to her to worry about not seeing Ellinor, but, Ellinor can handle herself. Hopefully. In theory. There better not be whiskey in the party punch. 

“There she is!” Josie lurches onto her toes as Theia wraps an arm around her waist, bringing her in as she makes her appearance. Dressed in a dark blue button down tucked into jeans, there’s not one ounce of holiday cheer in her. Well, except for the look on her face -- that is actually quite terrifying. 

“Hey Liv,” she selectively nods with a half-smile. “Thought you weren’t coming. You didn’t answer my texts.”

Oh fuck. Shit. Dammit. Olivia winces and puts her manicured nail to her teeth. “Damn, Theia, I’m sorry. I meant to…”

“Nah, don’t worry,” she shrugs cooly. Ugh, she’s in her fuckboy mood. Her discerning, tipsy stare shifts to Olivia’s company, and the purple in her eyes go icy. “I see you had reason to be distracted.”

Olivia glances and sees Cassandra is taking on the standoff readily, shoulders broad as she slips one hand into her own back-pocket. 

“Hello, Theia,” she says with meticulous manners. “How are you?”

“Fantastic,” Theia says as she leans more possessively against the slightly shorter Josephine, “and you?”

“I--”

“Great, glad to hear it. Liv, uh, can I steal you away for a second?”’

Olivia blushes but not the good way: the kind that comes from embarrassment that the person she called her best friend would be so petty. Yet, nothing can really beat Ellinor screaming her head off in an apartment hallway, right? So, she squeezes Cassandra’s hand, exchanging a lot of apologetic cajoling, before she leaves her with Josephine. Something in the way Cassandra frowns but doesn’t stop her almost makes it worse. 

Theia doesn’t waste time taking a dose of whatever’s in her cup -- probably rum of some cola -- before she brings Olivia to the corner of the entryway, and leans up against the decorative enamel.

“You brought her? Dude!” she says mouth leaning into Olivia’s ear. The music is loud, but not that loud. Theia just wants to add to the veneer of exclusive, hush-hush Fight Club aesthetic.

“What the fuck?” Olivia spits back, drink held close. “It’s fine, she wanted to come, and I wanted to bring her. What’s the issue?”

Theia’s head shakes, her eyes wide with cocky disbelief. “What’s the issue? Liv, has that Blonde shampoo soaked into your brain?” as she asks, she thumps Olivia on the side of her head with her finger. Olivia flinches, just enough to see Cassandra look up from whatever conversation she’s having with Josie, and once again the blush appears.

She runs her fingers through her hair to save face and looks back at Theia, who seems all but sorry for the act. Usually their rough-housing dynamic is welcome trouble, but tonight, it’s anything but. 

“Stop acting like it’s the mafia!” she hisses, and looks off to the side to wander her gaze through the crowd aimlessly.

Theia snorts. “Dude, I’m not acting like it.” She takes another gulp of her drink and swallows stiff, cheeks puffed like a dude-bro. She’s really peacocking. “You know how ya’ll act at these parties. Suddenly you show up with tall, dark, and constipated and--”

“Hey,” Olivia nudges her so swiftly it knocks her off the wall she’s leaning on, “don’t talk about her like that. Got it?” It’s a stern tone that even she doesn’t expect, like she’s possessed all of a sudden and looking to battle for dominance of the gay sofa. 

Theia blinks in return for this bold cut against her, one brow shooting up. “Oh, so she whispers sweet things into your ear for a few days and suddenly all is forgotten?” Her hands fall to her sides, and her head tilts in further. “Just because you can, Liv, doesn’t mean your friends have to. Or maybe Ell can, since she’s all cozied up with that ham bone of hers.”

“You don’t have to do anything but be decent. Or is that too hard?” 

Olivia’s glare grows, and she gets ready to go off on her some more. But, as if via divine intervention, a familiar beat echoes through the walls and across the floor. 

Oh fuck, it’s our song. As in, her and Ellinor’s song. That song. The song that defines their friendship. One of them, anyway. There’s a collaborative discography. 

“Nicks, fuck, I have to find Ellinor. Uh…!” she starts fidgeting and bobbing her head to find Cassandra across the heads and shoulders between them, hopping a bit onto her heels. “Shit!”

Theia places a hand on her forearm and stabilizes her, and when they lock eyes, it’s as if the normal Theia -- the good-natured, helpful one -- is back online. “Hey, don’t worry, I got it.”

“What?” 

“I’ll go tell her you had to go dance with Ellinor.”

“But...but I wanted to--” I want her to come with me. Fuck, though, she probably doesn’t dance…

“Liv, come on,” Theia grins, her signature charm as she holds her drink up to her chest. “Don’t make her work harder for it. Just go, you’ll be back before she notices Josie’s checking her star chart.”

It’s not what her gut is agreeing to. In fact, it’s screaming “go get your woman, you idiot, you know better.” Yet, as she looks across and sees Cassandra talking, her hands across her chest like she does when she’s out on the field with her teammates, it’s almost too good to mess up. She looks the most at ease she’s been all night, and if anyone can be trusted to protect that besides herself, it’s Josephine. Josephine and Theia, of course. 

Theia elbows her in the ribs to knock her out of her staring, and Olivia steps back. Stevie has started singing, time is running out. 

“Okay, okay. Hold my drink?” Olivia grins as she passes her cup to her, sliding her fur off of her shoulders. She waves towards Cassandra’s direction before skiddadling down the hall like a woman on a mission. The last thing she sees is Theia tipping her invisible hat toward her before receding back into the lesbian batcave. That was a quick change in mood. 

Everyone’s tall and it’s annoying, but with courage and dangerously pointy shoes she makes her way back to the main hall by the kitchen where shaking and grinding bodies have conspired to make a dance floor. 

The  drunken seas part uniting her with her right-hand-woman, who is fending off some person who has their wig caught in her pauldrons somehow. When Olivia arrives on the scene, it’s to hear the tail end of a “you should really watch where you point those” comment, to which Ellinor gives a deadly side-glare. 

“These meager mortals,” she reviles, “don’t know how much of a gift I am.”

“Yeah, yeah, Kanye, we get it -- the song!”

“The song!” Ellinor grabs her by the hands and starts hopping up and down. People are incorrectly yelling the lyrics around them, and her vitriol is further vindicated. No matter, they’ll be the showstoppers. 

They push and shove their way to the center of the crowd and begin their deluge. Olivia tries her hardest to turn her brain off. This is the best part, after all. Dancing, losing track of time and space, being with the people she loves most. Only the nagging gut feeling hasn’t vanished, and soon enough Ellinor notices just how out-of-sync she is in their quintessential make-it-up-as-they-drink choreography. 

“What’s gotten in your stockings?” she yells into her ear during the ‘WOO, BABY WOO, WOO bridge.’ Olivia has to blink a few times while her brain synthesizes.

“Ugh, nothing! Nothing!” she waves her hands and starts doing some shoulder-shimmy move, but it’s not striking with the same spectacularity as it usually does. 

“You look like a sad parakeet! What is going on?”

Olivia looks off towards the ceiling corner and does her best to keep the show going. Stevie is still preaching the gospel, and Ellinor wants to have a therapy session? Blasphemy!

“Nothing!”

A poke in her ribs knocks her off beat, and she turns around with the little space she has between goth girl no. 43 and grunge boy no. 10. 

“Noth--”

“Sera and Dagna made things super awkward,” Ellinor gripes, cringing as she shakes her hips around. “I’m worried Cullen’s gonna think I’m some succubus.”

Ah. They take hold of each other and Olivia spins Ellinor around in a picture-perfect change, and they switch spots. Turning back around she finds Ellinor’s scowl has only deepened, and it makes her want to join her on the sinking ship.

“Theia is being super weird about me bringing Cass here,” she adds with another side-shuffling move and shoulder dip. “I dunno if I should have left her there in the sapphic corner.”

“You left her in the queer corner?!”

Damn, it has so many names. “Yes?! Was I bad? Is this bad?!”

“--think that’s bad.”

“--Fuck. Do you think you should have left Cull--”

“Fuck no, I’m an--” 

“We’re idiots. What are we--”

“--doing?!”

The final chorus hits, and the crowd gets even more hyped. They join in with the howling and yelling, but it’s mostly out of the need to scream into the void. Then, as is tradition during some point in these parties, someone grabs Olivia from behind and launches her up. Holding her like some statue of liberty, she would usually bring them home with her particular enthusiastic lip-syncing while Ellinor finds the nearest flat surface to hop on. But, as Olivia mouths along with a face of dread and eyes locked on her best friend who looks equally anxious, no one -- not even the Goddess Stevie -- can save this detour. 

[sage-nebula]

I just finished episode fourteen of Good Morning Call and there’s something I need to talk about for a second.

So by this point in the series, Uehara and Nao are officially a couple (which is one refreshing thing about this series, I feel; it’s not will-they-won’t-they until the end, we actually get to see them be a couple for most of the series I think), and things are . . . or should be . . . going fine. The problem is that even though Uehara has confessed his feelings (granted he was tricked into it by Yuri, but nonetheless), and even though Uehara has made it clear that he appreciates her romantic gestures and reciprocates (e.g. he bought all those milk puddings for her in return for her Valentine’s cake because that’s what she told him she’d want), and even though they’ve kissed multiple times, and even though he’s told her time and again that she’s the only person he’s interested in . . . Nao is constantly bogged down by insecurities, and in my eyes it’s really causing a strain on the relationship.

I haven’t ventured too much into the tags or sitewide search for this show yet because I don’t want too many things spoiled for me in advance, and I haven’t read the manga either. But from the little I have seen it seems like most people hate Uehara for “being a jerk” or “not sharing interests with Nao” or whatever else, whereas no one seems to point out the fact that these problems that these two have in their relationship stem from Nao’s own insecurities and the problems that she creates in her own mind. 

Like . . . let’s take the “love triangle” with Yuri, for example.

For the first half of season one, Uehara’s sister-in-law Yuri was a major character. Uehara had romantic feelings for Yuri for a very long time, but she chose to marry his brother instead, and so he moved out as a way of moving on. At no point is it ever in question whether Yuri and Uehara will get together. Even when Yuri starts having troubles in her marriage (due to misunderstandings and a lack of communication), she makes it clear over, and over again that not only does she only see Uehara as a little brother, but also that she supports him and Nao being together. And she tells Nao this! Multiple times! Even if Uehara still had feelings for Yuri, Yuri makes it abundantly clear that she does not have feelings for Uehara. The odds of them getting together a straight nil. There is absolutely no chance of it, ever. Yuri knows this, Uehara knows this . . .

And yet Nao . . . fabricates this love triangle in her own damn mind.

She angsts so much over the fact that Uehara had feelings for Yuri. She gets jealous to the point of wanting to move out when she learns that Uehara let Yuri stay the night, despite the fact that Nao herself had agreed to let Yuri stay the night in previous episodes! Like, I get it, it’s hard knowing that the person you have feelings for had feelings for someone else---but when they and the other person make it clear that there will never be a thing between them, and when the other person tells you over and over again that they support your relationship with the person you like, you have GOT to accept that. Continuing to convince yourself otherwise is doing nothing but hurting you and the other people involved.

And the thing is, Nao keeps doing this. Once Yuri leaves the picture, Kitaura comes in. Kitaura is a lesbian, although to be fair Nao doesn’t know this at first, so that’s number one. But number two is the fact that Nao works herself into a frenzy because other people in the school are saying that Kitaura and Uehara would be a good match (and it’s other girls saying this, which is ??? since you’d think they’d want him to be single like at the start of the series, but whatever), and also Marina---in a rare instance of her forgetting that she’s the only person on this show who is smart---sold Nao on the “enemies to lovers” deal because Kitaura and Uehara were always quarreling. The thing is, Uehara doesn’t show any romantic interest in Kitaura whatsoever. He straight up says he doesn’t remember her even though she has a grudge against him. The most he ever says about her is that she’s a nice person. That’s it. Nao doesn’t ask him directly if he has feelings for Kitaura, but it should be more than obvious that he doesn’t given the fact that he . . . you know . . . doesn’t talk about her, and is pretty blasé about her when asked. But still, Nao frets and worries and feels insecure and jealous, because CLEARLY there’s something going on, or there will be soon, particularly since (GASP!) Kitaura and Uehara have similar tastes in movies. Anyway, this whole thing culminates in Nao deciding that she needs to study up on all of Uehara’s interests and change herself to be less of a disaster and more put together, which leads to Issei (the new secondary love interest for Nao, whom she was ranting to) telling her that both people in a couple should work to change and be better for one another, which is true. Nao is taken aback by this, but it doesn’t seem to have dissuaded her from the idea that she needs to step up her game and change herself. And the thing is . . .

Look.

Are there ways in which Uehara could improve? Sure. Uehara is tsundere to his core. He tends to hide when he feels jealous, and brushes off showing his more vulnerable feelings except for moments when the two of them are completely alone. He’s reserved and aloof by nature, and he’s independent, so he doesn’t mind doing things on his own / having Nao do things on her own, rather than thinking about the two of them doing things as a couple. He also doesn’t seem fond of PDA, which is probably why he doesn’t really hold hands with her in public very often. Uehara could definitely learn to be more open about his feelings, and could make more of an effort to plan dates for the two of them, definitely. Additionally, I of course agree 100% with Issei that it should never be one person in a relationship changing, but two if changes need to happen.

HOWEVER.

Uehara has never once expressed that he thinks Nao should change, or that he wants her to. This idea that she has that she has to learn all about foreign films or that she has to, I don’t know, be more serious all the time? That came entirely from her own mind. Uehara has told her that he has romantic feelings for her. He’s told her that she’s the only person he’s interested in. He’s kissed her, he’s held her, he’s raced back to their apartment during a blackout to be there for her, he took care of her on Christmas Eve when she was sick and brought her the Christmas cake she wanted, he agreed to her Valentine’s Date (even if he wasn’t able to make it), he bought all those milk puddings for her, and so on and so forth. Uehara has made it pretty clear that he likes her as she is, he’s interested in her as she is now. Hell, he even got so jealous over her fake date with Issei that he wanted her to quit her job (because she works at the ramen shop that Issei’s dad owns), which he told her! (ofc she didn’t quit but it was still him feeling jealous, and that’s how she took it, and she was happy about it.) All of this, and yet she still is convinced that she has to change for him, that she’s not good enough for him, even though he’s told her and shown her time and again that she is.

In the most recent episode I watched, they were alone at a hot springs resort together, and they were originally going to share a room. But then Uehara went to sleep in a different one, and she asked him if it was because he didn’t think she was attractive. His response?

“Being with you is really exhausting.”

He then goes on to explain that he wants to be in a different room because he’s super attracted to her and wants to make sure that he doesn’t make a move on her (as in seduce her, not assault her). But that first line? 100% accurate. Because it’s like no matter what he does, Nao continues to be highkey insecure and think that she’s not good enough. It doesn’t matter how many times he says it, how many times he shows it. It’s like she has no object permanence when it comes to how he feels about her. If he’s not showering her with affection 24/7, suddenly she’s unsure whether he likes her at all. And the thing is . . .

That’s not healthy.

Like I’ve seen people criticize this relationship because Uehara is “too mean,” but the thing is, not only is Uehara not actually a cruel person (he’s just tsun), but Nao knew who he was when she decided to start pursuing him, and definitely knew after. These two live together, for godsake. Uehara is reserved, aloof, independent. He’s not very good about showing vulnerable feelings. He’s very blunt and to the point. Nao knew this about him when she decided to date him, she has known it for a while. Yet she keeps picturing him in her fantasies as this guy spinning long romantic, poetic lines, showering her in roses and whatever else. That’s not who Uehara is, and it’s not who he should have to be to make her happy if she truly loves him and not just the way he looks. But even setting that aside, constantly demanding that your partner prove they love you over, and over, and over again . . . it IS exhausting. It IS tiring. Because at the end of the day, it sounds an awful lot like Nao just doesn’t trust Uehara. Sure, this is perhaps partly rooted in her own insecurities about herself, but it’s more like it’s rooted in her insecurities about Uehara’s faithfulness and their relationship despite the fact that he’s never given her a reason to doubt it. And the worst part is, she won’t even ASK him about it, she won’t even TALK to him about it, she just catastrophizes and drags all of her friends into her newest romantic woes and creates an entire shenanigan while he’s standing off to the side wondering just what the hell is going on. (And then, of course, he gets the new secondary love interest yelling at him, which doesn’t help matters when there wasn’t a problem until Nao imagined one out of thin air.)

At the end of the day, what I’m trying to say is . . . if Uehara wanted Nao to change (beyond wanting her to stop catastrophizing problems where they don’t exist), then yeah, I’d say that he should change, too. But he hasn’t expressed that. Instead, he’s made it clear he’s interested in her the way she is. So in that sense, I think the only thing that needs to change is that Nao needs to stop being so insecure. Because to be honest, I’m 100% in agreement with Uehara on this one: It’s exhausting. 

[janiedean]

Hi, lavi. I need to vent about something and I do it here because you're probably the only smart person I know in this place. I've always had straight experience and today I define myself heterosexual. I've never felt sexual attraction toward girls, I'm simply not interested at all. Once, just once in my life I literally fell in love with a girl I couldn't even meet because of distance, I was not even attracted to her physically, I only knew I wanted her in my life because I cared a lot (1)

(2)Our friendship ended because of reasons and I went on with my life. I kept calling myself straight because that’s exactly how I feel, until one day I read here that people like me have internalized homophia. Those comments made me feel like shit, because despite everything I still feel I’m not bisexual or anything. Everytime I try to think of me in that way I feel like I’m offending real bisexual people and all the struggles they face everyday. I’m broken… What’s wrong with me?

I’d say the real question is what is wrong with people’s inability to grasp that that’s not internalized homophobia, but anyway, in order:

people like to pretend it doesn’t exist or it’s outdated, but the kinsey scale is a thing and more people than one might assume can fall in the 1/5 range (ie they’re a 1 rather than a 0 or a 5 rather than a 6), so like….. you could be a one? if your thing for the girl in question was actually physical and not what people on here call platonic because I mean you can have intense relationships with people that don’t imply feeling sexual attraction for them;

if you don’t feel like the bi label applies to you then you don’t *have* to use it - like, a lot of people here have… let’s say questionable opinions on the fact because like…. idk if it’s an outdated term or whatever but *flexibility* (ie being a kinsey one if you’re straight and a five if you’re attracted to the same sex) exists and it doesn’t mean you’re bi;

also, internalized homophobia is denying you might be not straight, not what you just said you are;

ie, I said I was gonna shut up about it but whatever (fair warning to anyone reading this ask: if I get inappropriate questions about this the anon goes immediately off for the weekend): in 2003 I went to watch kill bill volume one. I went in having always been attracted only to men, both real or fictional, I watched that movie, I went out like ‘woah uma thurman is hot’. at that I went like ‘wait a moment does that mean I’m not as straight as I figured I might have been’, mind that I was entirely fine with any result - like if I had realized I actually was also into girls I’d have been down with it. I thought about it for some time and considered stuff and concluded that no, I really didn’t like girls in general and I wasn’t attracted to *women* in general and feminine secondary sexual characteristics did not do that for me whatsoever, so I shrugged and went like ‘okay I guess I have an exception’ and went on with my life. and like… now I know I’m not generally into women and actually 90% of Typical Female Secondary Characteristics for me a turn-off, but if uma thurman (or gwendoline christie’s) double [mind that they’re exactly the same type and none of those two has a hourglass figure, both have fairly flat chests and they’re both way taller than me, so… it’s one type] chats me up at the bar I’d 100% be down with it, but that’s because I have one exception, not because I’m bi. and like…… if I had internalized homophobia I’d try to deny that or try to convince myself I really don’t have that exception, I wouldn’t shrug and accept it;

now, imvho, you’d be offending bi people if you used that label if you’re not. I mean, at least to me, in order to use it I should be generally open to the idea of being into women as well in general, not just if they tick off thirty specific boxes on the list and if even one of those boxes isn’t cleared then it doesn’t work. like, if it was like ‘I’m attracted to women as well but I don’t really like people with dark hair’ then it’d be a preference and that’d be fine, but ‘I’m attracted to people who are THIS SPECIFIC TYPE AND JUST THAT OTHERWISE IT DOESN’T WORK’ (ie uma thurman’s face double with a D cup would not work for me xD) is not imvho enough to work as a *general* assessment and I’d feel like an asshole if I went around saying I’m bi when I’m not and I don’t feel like it’s the right label and when I haven’t faced any struggle bi people face when I know I’m not and I’m not questioning myself, I’ve done that already and I already decided it’s not the right one;

so like…. you had a crush on a girl, it didn’t work out, you also haven’t stated if it was sexual or not but let’s say she was your exception to heterosexuality: if it had worked out maybe you’d have wanted to redefine your label because I suppose saying that you’re straight if you’re in a relationship with someone of the same sex then it would sound fairly weird, but until it happens (and until then it would be your problem, not other people’s) at most you’re straight with exceptions. and if you admit you have them you can’t have internalized homophobia because like…. if you had you’d be denying it to yourself, not accepting it as a thing that might happen;

(that said I mean if you wanted her in your life because you ‘cared’ and not because you were attracted to her that way it might be…. like, really intense feelings but like, if there’s no attraction in that sense it might also be that it wasn’t even **romantic** idk but like if it wasn’t the case you’d still be straight XD)

also: you don’t have to be anything. like, now I’ll sound like an ass but on this website there’s a, uh, certain tendency to attach oneself to anything to avoid falling into the dreaded cishet category, so a lot of people call internalized homophobia anything that might be an exception to being straight or idk I mean apparently according to some people finding women aesthetically beautiful if you’re a girl means you’re lesbian (and like guys no I find dunno amy adams and rose leslie extremely objectively good looking because they have the looks I wish I was born with, not because I find them **attractive**, doesn’t make me attracted to them at all and I know the difference since again I do have an exception it’s just not *that* one XD) because then it means you can say that you’re not straight, but……… like. some people are straight and can objectively appreciate the same sex’s looks or might have one exception or two. if they feel like they’re straight and they have no issue with the idea nor have issues with same-sex relationships themselves then it’s not internalized homophobia and there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s like… normal stuff. if people here want to call everything internalized homophobia, their problem, but… that doesn’t mean that’s how it works.

personally: from what you’re saying it seems to me like you’re straight and you might have one specific exception and that’s it and since you’re having no issues saying that you might have fallen in love with a girl at some point that doesn’t seem like internalized homophobia to me, and actually… sorry but if you’re worried that by calling yourself bi you’re appropriating the label then you’re not offending anyone since you’re actually worrying about being inappropriate doing it. now: no one can tell you to identify as something you know you’re not. if you don’t have any other reason to assume you might be into women (iN GENERAL, not That One Specific Girl) then you’re most likely straight. you can consider the flexible label (which you can do as much as people here like to deny it exists) if you look into it and you decide it’s more fitting, but like… there’s nothing wrong with you for having had one exception and not wanting to define yourself as something you feel you’re not, because if you actually did then you’d be doing exactly what you say you’re not comfortable doing, so… doesn’t sound like the case to me.

tldr: go ahead with your life, there’s nothing wrong with you and everything wrong with tumblr dot com and its obsession to force label on people while at the same time preaching the contrary ie that it’s everyone’s own choice to decide what it is that they are. /two cents

[wildflowerwlw]

someone remind me to put a page break after like the first paragraph it’s 11 pm rn and ima go to sleep remind me in like,,;; a few hours thanks lol

As long as Ella has known Delyth, Delyth has talked about people she’s interested in. It’s not anything new or exciting. But, when she talks about people she is interested in it has always been a certain type of people. Boys. Then one day, she tells Ella about someone else. A girl. As usual, Delyth moved on fairly quickly and eventually ran out of things to say and has left Ella to her thoughts. Ella is sure Delyth considers this to be comfortable silence. It’s not comfortable to Ella who’s found herself overthinking every little thing as of late.Ella is almost convinced she imagined it, but she hasn’t. It was the same stuff she’s said a thousand times about a hundred different boys but with the “he’s” changed to “she’s”. She probably imagined it. It wouldn’t be the first time Ella’s brain has tried to convince her of something like that. So maybe she’s caught Delyth staring in her direction for a few seconds too long on a few occasions, maybe Delyth’s hand finds here’s too many times to seem normal, and maybe they share the bed more often than most friends should. There’s always something to explain it off though, she thanks her brain for that at least. Maybe Delyth is looking at something behind her that she finds particularly interesting, maybe every completely heterosexual teenage girl enjoys physical contact with her best friend that much, and, of course, maybe, as Delyth had suggested to her one night, sleeping in the same bed as someone else makes the nightmares she sometimes gets go away.

This girl who’s found herself the object of Delyth’s affections seems to be the only thing Ella’s brain can’t explain away into a completely normal and completely heterosexual activity.

“Let’s play with the Ouija board,” Delyth says out of nowhere. Ella’s stomach sinks for a different reason now.

“No. Absolutely not,” Ella shuts her down. Ella has always been skittish with the supernatural. It just wasn’t something she wanted to think about or mess with.

Nothing was sacred or off limits when it came to Delyth. She feared nothing and respected no boundaries when it came to being uneasy about dangerous activities. She was reckless with everything she did (which ironically enough has lead to multiple wrecked cars) and pushed Ella to be the same constantly. Usually Ella appreciated this quality in Delyth, it made her have treasured experiences she wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. However, she really did not appreciate it when it came to fucking with demons she didn’t want to have anything to do with.

��Great, we’re doing it,” Deylth says.

And that’s how the girls end up sitting on the floor of Delyth’s bedroom floor, leaning over a scary demon communication board with their fingers dangerously close on a planchette.

“I hate you so much,” Ella whispers to Delyth, as if trying to be quiet so the demons don’t hear her and think she’s talking to them.

Delyth adjusts her sitting position and moves so their thighs are pressed together. Ella contemplates moving so that the space between them returns but realizes that’s stupid. She’s being ridiculous. She’s almost an adult, she can handle being next to a girl without breaking down, even if that girl is her straight  best friend who has no idea of her sexual orientation or pressing romantic feelings towards her. Ella decides to put the thought to the back of her mind and attempts to ignore the butterflies in her stomach. Her feelings for Delyth seem to be scarier to her than the incoming threat of actual demons.

“Wait give me a sec,” Delyth says, taking her fingers off the plancette and moving back to put her curly brown hair into her scrunchie. Ella is almost sad to have Delyth’s leg removed from her’s before she panics.

“Oh my god, Delyth!” She screeches, “You can’t take your hand off the plancette that’s against like half of the rules!” 

Delyth scuffs at her. Actually scuffs. “Its fine the demons want me to look cute for them,” Delyth says as she looks at her reflection in her phone to check her hair.

“You always look cute-” Ella says. Her face goes red but Delyth seems unphased. Straight girls always compliment each other. Delyth doesn’t know that Ella is not a straight girl.

Ella has always meant to tell her. They’ve known each other since they were kids, their mothers always such close friends. Delyth has stuck by her side all through her parents divorce and her father’s remarrying to a evil witch Ella doesn’t want to think about now. Or ever. Delyth knows everything about her, besides anything to do with the lesbianism part, which just happens to include her being desperately in love with her best friend of most of her life. Ella isn’t really sure why she has kept this a secret from Delyth, but she likes to think that it’s because she doesn’t want to ruin the most important friendship she’s ever had. Delyth means everything to her, and she’ll take her in anyway she can get her. It’s so much better to have her as a best friend than not have her at all, and anytime she tries to tell her true feelings that pesky truth return to add to the weight on her shoulders.

Delyth puts her fingers back on the plancette and Ella notices how short her nails are. Ella is sure her nails were longer last time she looked at them. Delyth always kept her nails long, even getting fake ones put on every few weeks. It’s odd to Ella to see Delyth’s nails that short and clear of nail polish, but she kind of likes it.

“Did you cut your nails?” Ella asks, curiosity getting the best of her. She swears she sees Delyth smile out of the corner of her mouth and the butterflies in her stomach flutter a little harder.

“Yeah, long nails are overrated,” Delyth’s voice sounds softer than usual, or maybe Ella’s brain is just loosing oxygen from all of the anxiety squeezing her lungs.

“It’s cute,” Ella blurts. Her face goes red.

“Anything is cute on me,” Delyth says. She’s always had a habit of being cocky and arrogant for show and Ella has always been shamelessly attracted to it.

“Yeah,” Ella doesn’t let herself stress over that response spilling out of her. She doesn’t have time to anyway because, as always, Delyth moves on quickly.

“Let’s get started,” Delyth says, starting to move the planncette in circles around the board.

Never once in Ella’s life as she ever wanted to mess with the paranormal. It’s never tickled her fancy. Meanwhile, Delyth, being the fearless absolute idiot that she is, has always been interested in anything and everything she shouldn’t mess with. It wasn’t just paranormal, it was literally anything that shouldn’t be messed with. Bee hives, particularly climable trees, abandoned buildings, dead rodents-you name it, Delyth has fucked with it. Quite offten Ella, being the sweet and supportive best friend that she is, gets pulled into Delyth’s schemes. Ella’s hair is still recovering from the bangs Delyth insisted on cutting for her last year.

“What are we doing right now?” Ella asks.

“Giving energy,” There’s a pause and the room is silent except for the scraping of wood on wood. “Okay that’s enough.”

“I don’t like giving demons my energy,” Ella says.

“Stop being selfish they deserve it,” Delyth has probably never been serious for more than three seconds consecutively in her entire life.

“Okay demons, is there anyone there?” Delyth asks the void.

The void doesn’t seem to feel like answering because the girls go through every question in the book and then some before deciding that the whole thing is stupid and this board is stupid.

“Don’t call the demons stupid they can hear you,” Ella says.

“I doubt the demons are going to take much offense, Ella dear,” Delyth is teasing when she says it but it still makes Ella’s heart stop.

The girls say goodbye and throw the board back into the depths of Delyth’s closet. Ella vocializes her hopes to never see the thing ever again. Her heart still hasn’t calmed down and she’s scared of glancing at the windows on the off chance that there’s a ghastly face looking back at her.

“Are you saying the night?” Delyth asks. Ella knows that Delyth’s parents wouldn’t mind and also that technically three in the morning isn’t the best time for her to drive home. Especially when there’s too many backroads she’d have to take. Alone. Late at night. While she’s terrified of seeing demons. There was also a cornfield somewhere on one of those streets and Delyth has forced into watching one too many horror movies for that to ever be not traumatizing. She doesn’t even really need to think about it.

“Yes,”

“You look paler than usually, are you okay?” Delyth says, genuine concern in her eyes. Ella feels her heart swell. Delyth may be an actual idiot on the best of days, but she’s always a good person.

“I’m fine, just traumatized,” Ella says with a small smile. Delyth reaches out and pushes some of Ella’s not-quite-bangs out of her face. Ella is convinced she’s going to drop dead right here and now.

“Sorry, t’was bothering me,” Delyth says, pulling back right away as if she just crossed a line she wanted to get back on the right side of as soon as possible. Ella didn’t blame her.

“Okay I’m going to go get ready for bed,” Ella says quickly. She whips around to hide her blush and heads to Delyth’s bathroom.

“Okay, love you!” Delyth calls after her, considerablely too loud when her entire family is asleep in the same house.

“Love you too,” Ella feels her heart break a little more.

.

Ella is standing at her locker after third period, quickly switching her books and trying to keep it at least decently organized. Messy lockers have always annoyed her. Messy anything annoys her. She’s just got done organizing and is in the process of shutting her locker when she feels a hand on her arm. She almost yelps, but she decides to look first. She’s relieved when she sees a familiar brown hand gripping onto her arm but then it starts dragging her into the direction of the girls bathroom nearest to her locker. She holds her books closely to her chest with her free hand.

“Delyth what are you-“ Ella chooses to cut herself off. She knows that reason is pointless with Delyth. Delyth just does things sometimes.

The bathroom is empty. Of course it is. This bathroom just happens to be the most disgusting one in the entire school. There was dirt on the ceiling, how was that even possible?

“Look!” Delyth says excitedly. She lets go of Ella’s arm to use both of her hands to pull up her shirt.

Ella thinks she’s going to vomit from nerves. She’s so caught up in looking at her best friend’s skin that she almost doesn’t notice the reason that skin is being presented to her. Three red scratch marks extend from Delyth’s right hip bone to the left side of her ribs.

“What did you do this time?” Ella asks, forcing her eyes up from Delyth’s stomach before she completely looses her mind.

“I didn’t do anything,” Delyth says. “Don’t you know what three scratches mean?”

“I literally have no idea,” Ella confesses. Delyth let’s her shirt fall down and even though Ella was trying not to look she feels kind of disappointed.

“It’s demons!” Delyth sounds proud. Ella almost has a heart attack.

“Why are you happy about that?!” Ella asks.

Delyth just shrugs in response. She doesn’t seem concerned about it at all. That’s another trait Ella has always admired about Delyth, her ability to not only throw caution to the wind and do whatever she wants whenever she wants but her ability to look at the consequences of her actions (which are usually unfavorable) and smile. However, when it comes to her best friend being attacked by a demon, Ella is uneasy.

“Okay I’m going to class now so you don’t make me late,” Ella says. As she’s leaving she adds something almost like an afterthought, “I love you, call me after school so I know you’re not dead.”

“Okay, I love you!” Delyth calls after her. Ella’s stomach will never get used to Delyth saying that, even after over a decade of hearing it daily.

.

Delyth does call Ella after school, and she does it with fingers shaking and on the verge of tears. Delyth can look at most horrible decisions and be fine. However, facing this partial task seems way more difficult than any bad move she’s ever made. Maybe it’s a good move though, Delyth can’t say for sure just yet. Ella is her best friend, she’ll understand. Ella’s understood when she got her period and ruined her bedsheets in fith grade, she understood when Delyth snapped at her after a hard day at work and she even understood when Delyth called her crying at three in the morning that night after spending hours feeling guilty. Ella is a good friend. Ella is good, period. She’ll understand.

Delyth spends far longer with her finger hovering over the call button on Ella’s contact than she’d care to admit to any human being. No matter how hard she tries, she just can’t seem to jump into the fire and make the call.

Ella is her best friend. Ella knows her better than any human being ever. Ella is the best person Delyth has ever known, and she’s confident in that. She wants to tell her. She just doesn’t know if she’s ready.

Ella will understand. Ella will understand why Delyth couldn’t tell her before, and if Delyth can’t even tell her now, Ella will understand that too.

Delyth takes a deep breath and pushes the call button. Ella picks up after two rings. Delyth knows she’s been expecting this, hell, she asked her to do it. She just doesn’t know what Delyth is about to say. Honestly, Delyth doesn’t even know what she’s about to say.

“I think I’m bisexual, bye!” Delyth hangs up the phone and throws it at her bed and walks out of the room. She’s shaking even more now than she was a few moments ago.

Delyth could have said literally anything. Perhaps gone into a speech about how this won’t change anything and how she loves Ella and how she’s known for a while and it’s not that she doesn’t trust Ella it’s just that it took a while to get the confidence to tell anyone, even her bestest friend in the whole world. But no. Delyth always makes the stupidest choices and is prepared to deal with the consequences. Today, however, she doesn’t think she can. She could loose Ella forever. Well, no, she really can’t at this point. She could tell Ella she’s a serial killer and Ella would be fine with it but regardless, she’s nervous.

When she finally gets the courage to walk back into her room she’s got six missed calls and countless texts from Ella.

Ella (5:56 pm): ???

Ella: (5:56 pm): bitch

Ella (5:57 pm): ily but answer me

Ella (5:57 pm): !

Ella (5:59 pm): Delyth ily with my whole heart and I understand this is a lot for you but you have to answer me I’m a worried grandma

Ella (6:01 pm): I love you call me when you can

Delyth calls her back right away before she can talk herself out of it. Usually Ella is the stressed one who freaks out over nothing and Delyth is the strong one. Delyth has a feeling Ella will be strong for her right now.

“Hi,” Ella says softly.

“Hi,” Delyth repeats. She hopes her smile translates through her voice, but she thinks that’s only how it works in Hollywood movies.

“Can I tell you something?” Ella asks after a minute of silence.

“No never were supposed to be talking about me right now,” Delyth puts so much sarcasm into her voice not even the most dense person would get that she’s joking. Ella isn’t dense though, and Delyth knows that she will get it.

“We could talk about you forever and I’d be happy,”

“Was that your something?” Delyth asks quietly, as if they were telling secrets on the playground at recess again. This feels like a secret.

“Yeah, kinda,” Ella says with a breathy laugh.

“Good, it’s kinda my something too,” Delyth replies.

“Good,”

Nothing has really changed, but both Delyth and Ella feel like it’s a start. The butterflies in the stomachs seem to agree. Maybe the demons agree too, but neither of them mess with them again so they never really know.

[4pondsinabox]

Summer 2018 TV Binge Ranking

I use the term “Binge” lightly, since I’m not used to watching a lot of tv at once. Anyways, starting out this summer I realized the number of my active fandoms had significantly decreased, which I needed to fix asap. Luckily, not only did I have more time than usual to watch some television, but I also had access to a Netflix account for once, so I went right to work. The following shows were picked from various gifsets, edits, fanarts etc. on Tumblr and Instagram, so for those of you I follow who post occasional stuff that don’t pertain to the main fandom I follow you for, you probably had some influence on my list. Because of this, I figured it might be useful for anyone else looking for a new show to watch to have some kind of ranking, though I realize different people have different tastes. You will notice though that none of these shows are long-running, so it’ll be pretty easy to jump right on board any of them. These are ranked purely on my enjoyment of them and how much I looked forward to seeing the next episode, NOT the actual overall quality. 

1. Legends of Tomorrow

“You’ve got to be joking” Nope. No I am not. Ok, the first season is really rough. Like, extremely rough. But the show finds its footing by season 2 and becomes essentially the American version of Doctor Who (aka my favorite show of all time). Time travel? Check. Sentient Time Ship? Check. A good blend of hilarity and touching moments? Check. Badass bisexual queen (who was trained to kill people)? Check. The list goes on. It’s extremely enjoyable, particularly when you need a good laugh, I really looked forward to every episode post-series 1. I would almost recommend skipping the first season altogether but there are a few important backstories for the characters that might make some later moments confusing. You don’t really need to have watched other Arrowverse shows to understand what’s going on and, aside from 2 crossover specials, there’s hardly a connection at all. Legends is also pretty diverse, although it would be nice to add a few more women to balance out the man-heavy team. Otherwise, their “dysfunctional family” dynamic is, quite frankly, hilarious and the overflow of pop-culture references (there’s a whole episode where they have to convince George Lucas to return to the movie industry because of his films’ influence on history) made my geek heart so happy. My biggest critique is the show’s use of the “only white boys are nerds” trope because, while I love these two particular characters, I would really love to find another show where the women aren’t always “sensible and non-geeky.”

2. Black Lightning

I don’t think I can put into words how wonderfully heartwarming this show is. I have seen one too many shows with dysfunctional families, so watching the Pierces grow and work through their issues in a healthy way was just … so important to me. Literally all of them are beautiful, flawed but well rounded characters that I would fight for. Also, Lynn and Jefferson? Freaking adorable and couples goals (Also ironically the names of my aunt and uncle). Anissa was born to be a superhero. She never had a moment of calling like most do because she was already an activist and her reaction to her powers is extremely believable. So is Jennifer’s. She’s 16 and wants nothing more than an average life. I completely relate to their sibling relationship (I, too, frequently borrow my sister’s stuff). It’s a bit darker than Legends but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of light moments to go around. Needless to say, this is another wonderfully diverse show. Aside from focusing on a healthy, black family, the fact that Anissa’s a lesbian isn’t made out to be a big deal. The underlying commentary on black incarceration and other racism issues is very poignant and eye-opening, as someone who’s not a part of that community. I don’t feel like I can say much on the actual superhero aspects of it, since I generally don’t watch DC or Marvel stuff (previous mentioned show aside) because the amount of fighting overwhelms the plot and characters for me, but I thought this show had a good balance of superhero-y moments  and touching character moments. It really did feel like a break through in television.

3. Sense 8

Late to the party, I know, but I knew I’d get here eventually. First off, if you opened a dictionary to find the word “diversity,” this show should be underneath it. Every time I think they couldn’t find another way to integrate another identity into it, they proved me wrong. I particularly loved that they trick the audience into thinking they’re setting up yet another love triangle, then are like “Psyche, threesome.” They know modern audiences too well. The characters are fantastic, I have a particular soft spot for Lito Rodriguez. The concept is unique and the camera work is another level (as someone who’s thinking about heading into the film industry, I appreciated that). What threw me off was how graphic the show was. I tend to keep away from television that has copious amounts of sex and blood, largely out of discomfort, so if that stuff triggers you in any way it would be good to steer away from this particular show. I grew accustomed to it as I kept watching but early on I had to take significant breaks between each episode. Luckily, the characters and storyline was interesting enough to keep me coming back. 

5. Dark Angel

Not from Netflix and technically a two part miniseries instead of a full tv show, but I had to include it. Wow. Just wow. I enjoyed Joanne in Downton Abbey but boy I was not prepared for the stellar performance she gave off as Mary Ann Cotton, Britain’s first female serial killer. This is about as dark as television gets, there was hardly a happy moment in the whole thing and yet I was compelled to keep watching. This is quite the accomplishment for any show or film that doesn’t have at least some humor added in to balance it out. The show depicted the difficulty of Victorian women extremely well, and almost made Mary a sympathetic character. Almost. What I admired about this telling was the writing’s ability to do this without glorifying what she did. You can understand her actions without condoning them. Considering how many people Mary was suspected of killing though, there wasn’t as much death as I expected from a serial killer story. Not that I’m complaining. Probably not one I’ll re-watch anytime soon, but I’m definitely glad to have seen it.

5. A Series of Unfortunate Events

Boy, where do I start. This is the one show I started watching without prompting from social media, simply because I had read the first few books when I was younger. Watching this reminded me why I never picked up the other books in the series. It’s not technically a bad show, I did mostly enjoy the first season, it just became so dark and depressing by the second season, even with the bright and comic-y look to the show. I actually think that was a smart decision on the creators part, to include the over-the-top scenery and clothes, because I can’t imagine how much more depressing it would have been if they’d gone with dark tones. The Lemony Snicket dialogue is also amusing, and I appreciate this show for giving Tumblr more dialogue to play around with. On the downside, I wanted to punch literally every adult onscreen. Shows are a bit difficult to watch when you have that kind of reaction to them. At this point, I can’t say if I’ll watch the third season when it comes out or not, as I do generally like to stick with happier shows.

That concludes my summer show review, I tried not to go super in-depth and spoiler-y I hope these thoughts were helpful or, at the very least, an interesting read.

[hudders-and-hiddles]

Hi, I just wanted to ask you about the MoviePass thing? Apparently I've been living under a rock or something because its the first I've heard of it. I've read a few articles on it, but I was hoping to get some insight from just a customer. Do you think its worth it? Have you had any issues with it? Because it all seems really convenient and that seems too good to be true. Thanks in advance!

Hi! Yes, I’m more than happy to give you some insight into my MoviePass experience. There are definite benefits and drawbacks, but for me personally, I do think it’s been worth it overall, though that could certainly change in the future. Most of the drawbacks for me are potential future issues rather than current ones: I’ve read a lot about where they want to go with all of this, and I could definitely foresee a point at which I might cancel my subscription, but for now I have largely been satisfied with using it in the way that it is currently set up.

I want to give you a really thorough response to your questions here, and in addition to talking about the practicalities of the subscription, it’s going to involve telling you probably more about MoviePass’s business model than you really wanted to know. But you wanted to know if it’s too good to be true or not, and I think that model is largely where the answer lies. I apologize about the length in advance…

Cost and frequency of use

I absolutely love going to the movies, and I typically go alone, which is basically the ideal situation for someone to benefit from a MoviePass subscription. The card can only be used by one person, so if you typically go to the movies with a friend or partner, they would also need their own subscription. At this point, I am going to the movies about once a week, so in an average month I’m going to probably see around 4 movies with my subscription at a total cost of $9.95, which is what the subscription price was when I signed up. (Currently, they’re running a promotion where it’s only $6.95 a month if you pay it as an annual lump sum–it’s $7.95 if you pay per month instead.) As a comparison, during the three months before I got my card in the mail, I saw ten movies at a total cost of $105. Two of those were IMAX showings, which wouldn’t have been eligible for MoviePass, so my total cost if I’d had my subscription then would have been $60.63 (3 months x $9.95, plus $15.39 each for the IMAX showings). Saving 45-ish dollars over the course of those three months wouldn’t have made a huge difference in my wallet obviously, but it’s not nothing either–who wouldn’t take an extra $15 a month if someone handed it to them? 

Most people don’t go to the movies that frequently, however, so the savings may not be that great. MoviePass has actually been around since 2011, at various pricing structures, and they’ve found that frequency of attendance seems to be related to the subscription price, which makes sense. The more you pay, the more you’re going to use it to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. They believe that most subscribers will only see about one movie a month at the current price point, and if that’s true, most people aren’t really losing any money from a subscription, but they aren’t really saving anything either. This also really makes me the kind of subscriber MoviePass doesn’t want–someone paying them less than $10 a month to see 4 or 5 movies–but I’m perfectly happy to take advantage of their pricing structure for my own benefit. The benefit you see is definitely going to relate to how often you go and how sustainable that is, too. Even if you go four times the first month you have it, will that eventually taper off?

Some of the cost benefit also depends on when and where you go to the movies, too, though. Back when I was fresh out of undergrad, I decided I wanted to see a movie a week in theaters for an entire year, and so I did, typically going to Sunday morning matinees each week at a cost of $5 a ticket. If MoviePass had been a thing back then, it probably still would have been worth it (that’s still about 10 bucks a month saved), but if you only go once a month and you typically go to matinees, it may work out to cost you more. With my subscription now, however, I’ve been going to Friday night showings, when tickets are $10.99 at my preferred theater, so even one ticket would cost me more than I’m paying per month. If you live in a bigger city, those tickets may cost even more. You just have to look at the costs for yourself and see how much, if any, you’ll actually save there.

Putting your [MoviePass’s] money to work

Another benefit for me is that I’m also seeing more movies now than I probably would have otherwise. Late winter/early spring is usually a bit slower for me, with less out that I want to see, but since almost everything I see after the first movie each month is essentially free, I can take a chance on things I might have waited to try to catch on Netflix or elsewhere (I’m going to come back around to talk more about how this fits into their business model later). MoviePass has referred to this as essentially being “bad movie insurance.” You can take a chance on something, and if you don’t like it, it’s not a big deal because you didn’t really pay for it. So far I haven’t gone to see anything that I would really have considered a risk as to whether or not I would at least somewhat like it, but I have used it to see things I probably wouldn’t have spent my own money to see in theaters. For instance, I went to see a well-reviewed French film at my local art cinema one night earlier this week that I probably would have just waited to watch at home at some point if I could find it, but since it was free to me, hey why not go check it out? Out of the five movies I’ve seen in the last month, I probably would have only gone to two or three of them without the subscription, so getting to see more movies has definitely been a nice bonus. 

As a diversity-related sidenote here, I think one of the biggest benefits to seeing more movies than I might otherwise is that I can help generate revenue for the kind of films that I want to see more of. Sometimes in the past a film premise didn’t interest me quite enough to spend my own money on it, but I wished I could support the people making it somehow anyway. Now I can use my MoviePass to do that. The five movies I’ve seen so far this month were a big budget Disney film directed by a black woman, a big studio romcom about a gay teenager, a foreign film about gay men, a foreign film about a trans woman, and a sci-fi film where the five main cast members were women, two of whom were women of color, and one of their characters was a lesbian. It was a really nice mix of films. Now obviously every month probably isn’t going to look like that [unfortunately], but I am happy to have the chance to throw MoviePass’s dollars at films created by, starring, and/or about non-white, non-male, non-cis, and non-straight people whenever possible. We need more of that, and the only way to convince the studios to make more of it is to buy tickets.

Speaking of tickets, let me also note here that the theaters are still getting paid the full price of these tickets [right now], so they’re not losing out on that revenue, which is particularly important for supporting your local mom and pop or arthouse theater. Now if you know anything about the way theaters work, you’ll know that little revenue is actually made on ticket sales–most of it is made on concessions which is why those typically cost so much–so your local theater isn’t making a bunch extra off of you using your subscription. But it’s also very much not hurting your local theater if you choose to use your card there. MoviePass isn’t paying them some discounted price for your ticket, so the theater is making the same off of you that they would make off of anyone else. This means you can help to support local business with your subscription the same way you would with your own money, and if you see even more movies there now, in the long run small, local theaters could definitely see a boost from this.

Customer service

Ok, so, cost and frequency and the ability to more generously support some causes I care about make the subscription a win for me personally, but obviously there are also drawbacks. Let’s start with my experience in getting my card, which nearly made me cancel my subscription before I even saw my first movie. 

When you sign up, they tell you it typically takes about two weeks for you to receive your card. Two weeks come and go, and I have no card. I look in the app, and I notice that my address on file is missing my apartment number (which I remember double-checking when I signed up, so I know I entered it). I try updating it in the app, and every time I add my apartment number to it, it deletes it again and leaves just the rest of my street address. Ok, so clearly there’s some kind of glitch in their system and, putting two and two together, I decide this is probably why I haven’t received my card. Not a huge deal–I’ll just reach out to customer service and get another one sent. There’s a chat feature in the app for contacting customer service. I send them a message, 24 hours come and go, and no response. I send them an email through their website instead. 48 hours come and go, and no response. Now I’m really irritated, so I take to publicly shaming them for their poor customer service on Twitter, and within probably 20 minutes, I get a reply telling me to DM them with my issue. Finally got their attention, though it’s sad I had to resort to that tactic, but ok, here we go, I tell them the problem, they update my address manually and say they’ll send me a new card. 

Two more weeks come and go, and of course, I still have no card. I have to DM them twice more on Twitter to get them to respond, at which point I get a different customer service agent who is basically like, sorry, that person didn’t send it when they should have and we’re sending it for real now. Major eye roll. 

At this point I definitely had to stop and consider whether or not the subscription was actually worth it because their customer service was not giving me great confidence. (One saving grace of their subscription model here is that your first month doesn’t actually start until you activate your card, so I wasn’t paying extra subscription fees while I waited for the card to arrive, which is a large part of the reason I decided to stick it out.) Finally, now that it’s been six weeks since I signed up, I get my card in the mail. But of course, the card number showing in the app doesn’t match (it’s probably the first card they sent), so I have to contact customer service yet again to have them update the card number. I email them through the website again just to give that another go, and this time I get a response in just a couple hours, thankfully, and then everything is good to go.

So my initial experience with their customer service team was a bit hairy, but I have had no problems at all using the card and haven’t had to contact them since then. Another part of the reason that I held on instead of cancelling is that all the other people I know who also have a subscription have said that in the rare instances that they’ve had an issue using their card somewhere, they’ve been able to contact customer service and get it taken care of in time to still make the showing they were trying to go to. I haven’t had any problems with the card yet, so I don’t have experience with that part myself, but everyone else I’ve talked to about it only had good things to say about their customer service experiences. My impression from reading around about it is that their customer base has grown more quickly than their customer service capabilities, and it looks like most of their employees and resources must be going toward dealing with pressing issues, like people who are standing at the theater and unable to use their card, rather than things that can wait a little longer, like shipping a new customer their card. That’s my impression at least–I don’t have any solid source to really back that up–but it does seem from anecdotal data that their customer service has been getting better in recent months compared to what it once was (or maybe that’s wishful thinking). I can only hope they keep improving.

Quirks of the service

There are a few other things that could potentially be drawbacks for others, though I find them to be minor inconveniences at worst. Unless you live somewhere that offers e-ticketing through the MoviePass app (there are only three or four theater chains that offer it so far, none of which operate where I live), you cannot buy tickets online in advance. At most, you could go to the theater in the morning and purchase a ticket for a showing that evening, but you would still have to physically go to the theater to do that. And I believe that even if you have an e-ticketing theater, you can still only buy same-day tickets; the difference is just that you can buy them from home before you leave.

The way it works when you want to go to a movie [at a regular, non e-ticketing theater] is that you pull up the app on your phone, find your theater, and check in for the showtime you want to attend. Then MoviePass will load the cost of the ticket onto your card, which is essentially just a regular MasterCard debit card, and you go to the box office and purchase your ticket with it. The finer details of how that works though are that you have to be within 100 yards of the theater before you check in, and you have 30 minutes from the time you check in to purchase your ticket. Therefore, you can’t check in from home and go to the theater whenever–you have to already be there. Checking in also doesn’t reserve you a ticket in any way; it essentially just lets MoviePass know how much money they need to load onto your card, so in theory you could decide to go to a showing and then when you go to buy a ticket, it’s sold out. If that happens, you can easily switch your check-in in the app to a different film or showtime, but it could certainly be annoying to get there and not be able to attend the showing you were planning to go to.

None of this has been a problem at all for me, but I know from reading things online that some people have found it to be inconvenient. Typically, I drive to the theater and check in from my car in the parking lot, and by the time I walk to the box office, the card is loaded and ready to go. I haven’t seen anything yet that I thought might sell out, and I also always get to the theater really early, which cuts down on those kinds of issues. Before I got my subscription, I did usually buy my tickets online in advance, but for most showings it doesn’t really make a difference if I have to wait and buy it the day of. If there’s something that I still feel the need to buy in advance, it’s probably a big event movie like Black Panther, which I saw in IMAX and wouldn’t have been able to use my subscription for anyway. And I personally wouldn’t have a problem paying for that occasional ticket separately even for a showing that would have been covered for my subscription, just for the benefit of knowing that I would for sure have a ticket.

Related to that, you can’t use your card to see any movies that have an upcharge of any sort–no 3D, no IMAX, no Fathom Events, etc. The amount that loads onto your card is just the typical price of a standard ticket for that time of day, so you won’t be able to use it on anything that costs more than that. I do really like to go to Fathom Events showings, so that is sort of a drawback, but I also get why they wouldn’t cover those things in their current model. Case in point: I was thinking about going to go see the Fathom Events screening of Julius Caesar on Thursday, and it was $24 for a ticket. If I were them, I wouldn’t pay for you to go to that either, lol.

The future of MoviePass

All of this brings me around to my last set of points. In terms of doing what it says it does–allowing you to see one standard, 2D movie a day, every single day, for a low monthly cost–I think MoviePass is great. You said in your question that it seems too good to be true, and at the moment I would say that it really and absolutely is that good.

But that’s going to change. 

If everything stayed exactly the way that it is now, this business model would be completely untenable. From all indications, MoviePass is basically bleeding money. They have around 2 million subscribers (projected to grow to 5 million by the end of 2018), and if the majority of them are seeing even just one movie a month with the company paying the theaters the full ticket price on each of those transactions, with some customers like me seeing several more, they’re clearly operating at a loss. They even fully admit that they’re not making money right now. So what is their goal? How do they plan to make money off of this?

First of all, there’s your data. Since everything is done through the app, they’re collecting all kinds of data about when you go to the movies and where and what you see. They know your address, so they know how far you’re willing to drive to see a movie. They know what theaters are closer to you that you pass up in favor of going to the one you prefer. They know how early you arrive before the showing. They know if you’re more likely to see an action movie or a drama or a comedy when you go to a movie on a Tuesday night. They know how long the average subscriber waits after a movie comes out before they go to see it. I’ve seen conflicting reports about their GPS tracking, but they may know where you go directly after you leave the theater, whether that’s back home or to dinner or wherever. They’re getting all kinds of insight into the moviegoing experiences of their subscribers, and you and I both know they’re absolutely selling that data to theater chains, to studios and distributors, to whoever wants to know about putting butts into movie theater seats. Clearly I don’t consider this enough of a drawback for me not to subscribe–basically who isn’t collecting and selling your data at this point?–but if you’re someone much more concerned about that kind of thing, obviously this may be a make or break point for you. 

They’re also going to use that data for their own purposes to promote particular theaters or particular showings or particular movies over others, giving them a couple ways of using that data themselves to make money. First, they have started to co-purchase films. They know what their subscribers like to watch, so they can buy films they know you would want to see, and then they have the means already in place to promote those films directly to you. Earlier I said I’d come back to the idea of seeing movies you otherwise might not see in theaters. This is where that comes in to play for MoviePass’s bottom line. Even if it’s not a movie that you would typically make the effort to see in theaters, they promote it enough that you think, eh why not, it’s basically free. When you check it out, now a portion of the ticket revenue is going right back to MoviePass, which helps to balance out the money they’re losing on other ticket sales. Then if the movie is any good, that improves word of mouth, more non-subscribers go to see it, and even more money goes into MoviePass’s pockets. On top of that, they get a part of the dvd/digital sales, too. 

I think that this is something to keep an eye on–the kinds of things that they purchase and how they go about promoting them, particularly in terms of what’s happened recently with social media, where political influences have been made to extents that we’re really just beginning to comprehend. Now I’m not overly worried about it, and I’m not saying that MoviePass is going to turn into the propaganda arm of a foreign entity–I think it’s ultimately not going to be any more insidious than Netflix or Hulu in terms of promoting its own content over others–but it is obviously still important to look at the types of films they’re buying and/or promoting as they get further involved in that part of their business. As their subscriptions grow, they will have a lot of power to influence what we see and when we see it, both for films they have purchased and films that distributors have paid them to promote, and as consumers, we always need to be critical of the hows and the whys of what anyone is promoting.

The other way they want to make money is from the theaters, and what they want is a discount on tickets and, ideally, a cut of concession sales. As I mentioned earlier, concessions are where theaters make their money, and MoviePass wants a portion of it in return for driving more traffic to their doors. Their subscribers as a whole go to the movies more often and tend to spend more money on concessions as well (if you didn’t really pay for a ticket, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to then drop $5 on a coke or popcorn), so as their customer base grows, they will have more power to bargain with the big theater chains over it. If AMC, for instance, isn’t interested in cutting MoviePass a deal, maybe some of their busier showtimes disappear from the app. Maybe some of their more popular theaters no longer appear. Maybe the card is no longer valid at AMC at all. MoviePass already knows from all that data they’re collecting that there’s a Regal or a Cinemark across town that their subscribers are willing to drive to if they can use their card there instead, so they can choose to withhold their customers’ business from AMC in whatever ways they want. Right now, their customer base is still small enough that this isn’t going to have a huge effect, but if the numbers continue to grow, they’re going to reach a tipping point where they can begin to put that kind of pressure on the theater chains. It’s really just a matter of when that’s going to happen, not if.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, I think that if you typically see more than one movie a month, it’s probably worth giving it a go. You can cancel at any time if you decide it’s no longer worth it (you’re barred from signing up again for 9 months after cancelling, btw, in case that’s a concern). For me, signing up was really a question of why not? Why not give it a try? At the moment, it’s still a free-for-all in terms of where and when you can use your card. That means there are 16 theaters within 15 miles of my flat where I can use the card for any showtime of any standard film, as frequently as once a day. 

I have one theater that I choose to go to on a regular basis, even though it’s not the closest one to where I live, because I like the theater itself–it’s always decently clean, the seats are in good shape, the screens are a nice size even in the smaller theaters, and there’s a bar so I can buy a drink and take it in with me, lol. The only reason I would go to a different theater right now is if there’s something they’re not showing. That’s pretty rare–typically it’s either that something is playing at the art cinema and nowhere else, or on occasion there’s a Fathom Events screening they don’t get but a different theater does. 

But if MoviePass suddenly offered only half the showings I wanted to see there and I couldn’t go at the times I wanted, or perhaps I could no longer use my card there at all, the question becomes, would I switch theaters to keep using my subscription? It’s almost a guarantee that at some point in the not-too-distant future MoviePass is going to ask me to make that choice. They’re going to test the waters with the theaters (and by extension, their subscribers), and some will get on board and some won’t. And the truth is that I don’t yet know my answer. I don’t know yet where I would draw the line between saving money and having a greater choice. 

But until that time comes–and it may be coming sooner rather than later–I am more than happy to use their willingness to hemorrhage money to save some of my own.

Sources

I’ve read a ton about the service both before and since I signed up, so I may have referenced something not linked below. I think these cover most of the businessy points though:

https://www.moviepass.com/

https://www.wired.com/story/moviepass-second-act/

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/how-does-moviepass-make-money

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1704512/how-moviepass-plans-to-make-money-despite-cheap-rates

One final note: there is a competitor to MoviePass called Sinemia. If you typically see a lot of 3D or IMAX showings, or if you typically go with someone else, you might want to check them out. I don’t know a ton about them, but I do know that they allow you to see [at least some] films with upcharges, they offer a couples plan, and I think they allow you to buy tickets in advance. They do, however, limit you to a set number of movies each month depending on how much you pay (I think you can choose between 2 and 3, iirc). It could be something to check out if that suits your viewing habits.

Edited to add: Check to see if your theater of choice has a rewards program and whether or not you can still use it with MoviePass. Some have disallowed it, but not all. Currently, I’m earning rewards points for every movie that I go to with my subscription, which I can then put toward concessions or tickets to the kinds of screenings MoviePass doesn’t cover.

[ambiguityisnoonesfriend]

May the 4th 2018 Letter

Dear Yoda,

I am so excited! I love all the iterations of the characters and relationships I’ve requested, and can’t wait to see what you’ve created for me!

My likes: toppy women and partners who are turned on by toppy women, humor, angst, endings with hope intact, functional relationships, dysfunctional relationships, secret relationships that aren’t really a secret, canon divergence AUs such as what if they got there five minutes sooner, time loops, porn, gen, fluff, friends with benefits, friends with benefits with feelings, interactions with the other characters who would be around at the same time except as specified, mixing and matching prompts (ex: Leia and Hera both having different troubles raising Force-sensitive kids and complaining to each other, or Ahsoka/Sabine go on a double date with Ezra/Luke, or something completely different)

My specific art likes: two or three panel simple line comics, playing card or tarot card type imagery, setting a scene, magic and metaphor

My specific porn likes: failsex including interrupted during or instead of sex, cunnilingus, both slash and het anal (DNW femslash anal), light bondage, sex pollen, aliens make them do it, the Force makes them do it, mental connections during sex, mental connections as a substitute for sex, using the Force during sex including light Force choking, Force ghost sex, toys

My line for enjoying sex pollen/AMTDI/TFMTDI is based on how much trauma the characters feel -- I prefer situations where they aren’t traumatized or upset and use the aliens/Force/pollen as an excuse for what they both/all wanted.

I do not want: noncon (okay with dubcon and sex pollen), scat, watersports, omegaverse, unrequested ships except as listed elsewhere in my sign-up, non-canon AUs such as coffeeshops, DJ, Holdo, Lux

Rey/Kylo: I went into TLJ expecting to get nothing for this pairing except maybe one dream sequence. I came out loving them even more. I love this pairing for all the potential. They are opposites. They are exactly the same. Each is incredibly jealous of the other. They keep being drawn together like two ends of a stretched spring, and the only question is if they’ll fuck, fight to the death, or both. My fondest hope is both. I love all variations of dubcon for these two, from The Force Made Them Do It and Sex Pollen, to Forced To Work Together For Reasons. Force bond sex also very welcome!

Finn/Rey/Kylo: I see Rey as drawn to both of them in a classic triangle: Finn is the pull of the light, and Kylo is the allure of the dark, and Rey is fascinated by both. Maybe Finn is enough to bring both the Jedi to the light. Maybe Kylo seduces them both to the other side. Finn and Kylo carry a lot of baggage with each other. Do they set it aside at Rey’s request, or does it define how they both must deal with her and one another? Kylo defecting and having to be babysat by Rey and Finn! Rey is injured and Kylo and Finn have to have magic Force Sex to save her! Aliens make the three of them do it!

Leia & Ben: The pain and the angst and the love in this broken family is the gift that keeps on tearing my heart out and I love it. I love every piece of heartache, how they got there, what each one thought the other thought. Given all possible futures, what would the final fallout be between Leia and Kylo after TLJ?

Poe & Ben & Jacen: At some point, these three were dragged along to some Rebellion reunion where their parents had fun reminiscing about the old days and the kids were bored. Nothing starts out well when the first words you exchange with someone are "My mother said I have to be nice to you." Knowing that Ben grew up to be a human disaster, and Poe wasn't not a disaster, and Jacen is named after a different human disaster, all I am saying is that something got set on fire by the end of the party, certainly by accident, possibly by the Force. This or any other misadventure the three kids got into would be a wonder and a delight.

Kanan/Hera & Chopper, Hera & Chopper: It's strongly implied that Chopper was Hera's only friend before Kanan came along, and from the finale, it looks like he's the one friend who will never leave her. How did they grow together? How long did it take her to fix him up after she found him, and what kinds of trouble did the two of them get into along the way? What happened when she brought aboard an alcoholic drifter who is suddenly competing with Chopper for her attention? What did Kanan make of a foul-mouthed astromech who may or may not have tried to kill him a few times?

Luke/Leia: I was ready for this ship to be sunk in the movie. I was not expecting to walk out shipping it even harder. I want all the happy times before the family reveal. I want all the angsty history post-ROTJ. Luke Denying his feelings. Leia denying hers. The times denying those feelings failed. Maybe Han knows. Maybe Han joins in. Maybe he doesn't know and that's part of the angst. Pre-TFA snuggling. Post-TLJ Force Ghost snuggling. It's all good.

Ezra/Luke: I love the idea of Ezra and Luke meeting up after the original trilogy and finding someone who understands what it's like to be them. They've both been through things nobody else would understand. Maybe Luke is the one who ends up finding Ezra out in the UR, or Ezra finds his own way back and runs into / is drawn to Luke.

Ahsoka/Sabine, Ahsoka & Sabine: Space lesbians on a quest! Everyone knows the point of a quest story is the journey and the discovery of the characters' own true inner selves, right? I want to know about all their adventures together! Does Ahsoka teach Sabine more badass lightsaber moves? Do they pretend to be married on one planet for reasons? Does Sabine build an awesome Machine that causes them unforseen plot problems? Do they date each other? Do they date other women while being happy for each other? I am okay with any combination of this, and I am happy to see them as a couple, or as dating any other female characters or OFCs except not Sabine/Ursa or Sabine/Hera.

Leia & Hera & Sabine: Capers for the Rebellion! This mission happened. I don’t know if it happened before or after the Battle of Yavin, or even several years after Endor, but it happened. Maybe they have to rescue other team members. Maybe they have to go woo new allies, or pick up supplies from a picky source. Leia and Hera are going to disagree about who is in charge. Sabine’s loyalty on the topic may vary depending on who is annoying her more at that moment. Leia and Sabine may wind up with their very first hangovers, or at a later setting, maybe they’re remembering same. For background pairings, I’d prefer Leia with Han, Luke, or both, and Hera with Kanan. Sabine is my little black femslash dress; I don’t ship her with Hera or Ursa but anyone else is fair game.

Hevy & 99: I rewatched the Domino Squad arc recently and was overcome with clone feelings. It seems like Hevy had talked to and confided in 99 before. Did he see his brother as a mentor? 99 clearly held great affection for all the clones who passed through his life. In the microcosm of his friendship with Hevy, how did he see himself? You can bring in the other clones to the story, but I'd like the primary focus to be on these two. You could take this in a more romantic direction if you like, or keep it platonic and focus on the friendship they built.

Hera/Rex: I could see them forming a FWB arrangement sometime by Hoth. Hera doesn't want to get feelings involved ever again because she doesn't want another broken heart. That doesn't mean she won't get feelings anyway but they're not in her plan. Rex has admired her for years but there are chain of command issues, which could be why he's on the Endor strike team and not directly under her command circa RotJ. They both can have angst because of the dead guy in the room, real ghost or imagined. She can have angst out of wonder if this is the best thing for her heart or her child. He can have angst because he doesn't do relationships and his time is getting shorter by the minute and should he accept this little bit of happy? Maybe they end it after one time. Maybe they knock on each other's door every several months even after the war.

Rex & Luke: The moment Rex figures out who Luke is, he is going to be Luke's number one fountain of information on Anakin Skywalker. How do they both react? Luke kept the Vader thing secret for Leia's sake, but did he ever tell Rex?

Hera & Jacen: My one DNW with this relationship is no character death for either, otherwise I am here with the fluffiest of fluffy kid fics to the most heart-wrenching of angst. Hera playing with the new baby and feeling her heart lighten! Jacen's first flying lesson! Maybe he has the Force, maybe he doesn't, maybe he really does but Hera convinces Sabine and Zeb to lie with her and say he doesn't. Does she spend every day worrying at the going rate for the Black Sun's bounty on any known Force sensitive child? Does she tell him the Good Parts stories about the Ghost family in their heyday, and is he the one she was talking to in the trailer voice over? Does she have to keep his legion of uncles and aunts from spoiling him? Does she take him into space battles with her aboard the ship, knowing they could be blasted into dust? How does the conversation go with Cham when she tells him he's going to be a grandfather? Did he ever attend Jedi Death School and how did the two of them react when they found it how it ended?

Hera/Kanan: All of it and everything. Their first months working together. Missing scenes from the time of the show. That time they banged in Ezra's old comm tower while everyone else was busy during "Flight of the Defender." Those times they banged in the various rooms of the ship. Kanan figuring out this Force Ghost business after the fact the way Qui-Gon did, and hanging out to watch and guide. Were Zeb and Sabine their first attempt at building a crew, or were there others around before, and what happened? He's been smitten with her since the beginning, and she didn't say she loved him until the end, so how did they work around feelings, and not admitting to those feelings despite the fact that everyone around them knew? What was he about to tell her when Rukh attacked? Fix-its! Post-canon angst! Comedy capers where they're just hanging out having fun!

[the-revisionist]

a good fixed star

LTiH, Caroline/Gillian. 

Prompts: “things you said under the stars and in the grass” and “things you said while we were driving.”

Notes: Chapter title quotes are from letters of Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, except for the last chapter, which is from Vita to Virginia. And the longer italicized quotes in text are from Virginia’s letters to Vita. Apologies for any errors of transcription or misattribution; a scholar I am not.

For my dear @farminglesbian, who suggested the prompts.

i. “The whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.” 

Gillian first saw Clash of the Titans with a group of friends at a movie theater in Manchester during the summer of 1981. She was 16 and stoned and—to the delight of her parents—finally growing out the purple streaks in her hair. The previous year—not to the delight of her parents—she’d had an abortion. She was, she thought, done with boys. For a while, anyway. So in spite of the heat she wore a motorcycle leather jacket over her Gang of Four t-shirt and hoped her profuse sweating would repel the idiot sitting next to her, a friend of a friend named Derek who wore a pink Lacoste shirt and whom she barely knew, and who kept trying to convince her to give him a hand job. While she did not appreciate this constant distraction from the smoldering beauty of Harry Hamlin and the troubling voluptuousness of Ursula Andress, eventually she gave in toward the end of the film because he was everyone’s ride home, including hers, and she knew otherwise there was no way she’d get back otherwise. At least he bought her fish and chips afterwards. 

Since then she’s seen this guilty pleasure of a movie so many times that it’s become a family joke; this morning Raff had texted Clash of T on telly 2day but u probs already know. So some 35 years later here she is, watching the same bloody film, ignoring that unsettling summery feeling somewhere between restlessness and lassitude, and thinking that her life is on repeat with only the most pathetic of variations—this time she’s alone, divorced, sprawled on the couch with her head hanging off the cushion so that she’s watching Lawrence Olivier upside down, and wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear because it’s hot as hell outside and she hasn’t the faintest intention of really working today. The sheep are fed, watered, and sheltered; that’s all she cares about. A bottle of lager sweats on the table in front of her and creates a puddle that dams against the mobile, which rings at the crucial moment when Olivier famously intones, “Release the kraken.” 

Cursing and flailing, she reaches for the mobile and falls off the couch in the process. Eyes on the kraken, she swipes the damp edge of the phone against her t-shirt and answers with a grunted “Yeah,” assuming it’s Raff and he needs a babysitter because no one else really calls her unless some sort of favor is required. 

This is true even of Caroline, who messages her regularly and usually about Flora or work or some random bad date she’s had—I loathe women a recurring motif as of late and leave it to Caroline to casually drop the word loathe in a text—so Gillian bobbles the mobile when she actually hears Caroline purring, “Make yourself pretty for me.”

She laughs. In addition to the texting they actually see each other more now than in the past couple years and if Gillian actually trusted anyone other than Caroline for confession, she would swear that to her complete and utter consternation, the woman in question actually flirts with her now. She has a hundred reasons why this cannot be true, but two primary counterarguments suffice: (1) it’s delusional wishful thinking on her part and (2) Caroline doesn’t really mean it and is simply practicing flirting techniques on her—and not doing such a grand job if all her dates are shit, apparently. The situation, such as it is, percolates within her, giving rise to a fluttery feeling at best and, with cheap lager in the mix, outright nauseous terror at worst. Men are easy, women are complicated; this is normally her blanket excuse for why she had never seriously attempted a romantic relationship with a woman. In Gillian’s mind there is a Venn diagram comprised of two circles: one labeled flirting and the other women, and the convex sliver where they deliriously conjoin is marked oh fuck and this maddeningly curvy demimonde is where one Caroline McKenzie Hyphen Fucking Dawson currently resides in her jumbled brain.  

Gillian watches the kraken thrash around onscreen while Lawrence Olivier quietly contemplates a professional nadir. “What’re you on about? Don’t you have a thing today? Work conference?”

“Canceled!”  

“Oh. Why?”

“Outbreak of food poisoning!” Caroline says with unabashed glee. 

“Hurrah for salmonella.” 

“Actually it was staphylococcus. Had dinner with them all last night and everyone put mayonnaise on their chips, I noticed, except for me.”

“You’re like the Sherlock Holmes of bacteria.”  

“So I’m a free woman this afternoon. Let’s do something.”

“Do what? Too bloody hot to do anything.” 

“Which means you’re just sitting around in your underwear drinking beer and watching some shit movie.” 

“Do you have a spycam in my house?” Gillian takes a moment to glare suspiciously at her mobile. “Or are we Skyping by accident?”

  “I cannot tell you how impressed I am that you know what Skype is.”

“Twat.”  

“Come on. We’ll go for a drive somewhere. Didn’t you say you wanted to go to that weird bookstore—the one in the old church?” 

“Caz, that’s like on the other side of Leeds. One of those little villages where they’ve probably filmed a hundred episodes of Miss Marple.”

“So? We’ll make a day of it. Put on pants, I’m five minutes away.” She rings off. 

Gillian stares at the phone. Indeed, the kraken has been released. “Oh fuck.”

She runs upstairs. Her jeans are all in various stages of smelly, filthy, and unwearable, so she throws on a dress—subtly flowered and linen, the only dress she owns that has earned some kind of positive response from Caroline. Distinctly she remembers the time she wore it last summer: family dinner al fresco at the farm, Caroline’s smiling appraisal with head tilt and cool murmur of approval—you look nice—and the resultant blush fire blazing across her face. She could not remember the last time anyone made her cheeks burn like that. She pulls on battered Chuck Taylors, looks in the bedroom mirror and sees all these overlapping iterations of identity, an entire life visible in one weary reflection: punk wannabe, mother and grandmother, survivor, slag, widowed farmer, and, currently, middle-aged idiot smitten with her stepsister.  She groans “oh fuck” one more time and goes downstairs, finds a cooler and dumps some ice in it along with the only bottle of white in the fridge, and then strides outside just as the Jeep Cherokee pulls up to the house.  

Caroline rolls down the window. She wears aviator sunglasses that bring Mad Men’s Don Draper to Gillian’s mind and, no surprise, carries them off just as well as he did. While she may not be as successful with women as Don Draper, she is certainly garnering a lot of attention from the scant lesbian population in the area because lately she’s going out on dates with seemingly random and vaguely energetic young females every other week or so. Gillian knows this because she is always the one assisting with the dismal postmortem every time, nodding sympathetically as Caroline ticked off romantic defects:  She thinks “The Archers” are a boy band. She used the wrong fork for the entrée. She asked if I was interested in rock-climbing. She admitted she drinks wine out of cans. She said I reminded her of her aunt. 

To Gillian’s unbridled delight she once again gets the head tilt and the compliment: “You look nice,” Caroline says. She nods at the cooler. “What have we got here?”

“We’re having a fucking picnic,” Gillian says. She puts the cooler in the back seat and climbs into the Jeep.

“Fantastic. What did you pack?”

“Pinot grigio.” 

“And?”

“Ice.”

Caroline puts the Jeep into drive. “Hell of a picnic.” 

Before they even turn around, however, an argument ensues about the air conditioning: Caroline wants it on, Gillian wants it off. 

“What’s the point of having a summer drive if the windows aren’t open, if we aren’t feeling the breeze?�� Gillian says. 

  Caroline looks at her uncomprehendingly. “My hair will get messed up.” 

“Oh, the vanity.”

“I’m not vain, I just don’t want to look like an escapee from the mental ward.” 

“No one’s going to see you, just me, and maybe a bunch of nerds at a bookstore. And you always look b-b—um, really good anyway.” Gillian folds her arms and glares straight ahead. “And it’s f-freezing in here,” she adds, even as another blush rampages across her face. “It’s not healthy, we’ll get summer colds and I can’t afford to get a cold because—”

“—you’re a farmer and you can’t afford to take off a single day because you’re hard-working salt-of-the-earth-blah-blah-blah—yes, I know, you’ve run that line on me before and yet here you are, abandoning your precious farm on the hottest day of the year.” 

Gillian pouts. 

“It’s the hottest day of the year,” Caroline repeats in the vain hope that reality will weigh in favor of reason and air conditioning.  

Gillian ratchets up the pout into a sulk. 

Caroline sighs and relents: The air conditioning is turned off, all windows glide down. “Right then. We’ll be smelling sheep shit until we hit the M62.”

ii. “But I do adore you—every part of you from heel to head.” 

Women belong to summer. Or so Caroline thinks. In this season of bounty her heightened senses take note of women to delirious distraction: curling hands and lips, swirling dresses around bare legs, swaying hips, swelling cleavage, all of it—sweat and fading perfume commingle sweet as honeysuckle, throaty laughs, rich, wine-soaked voices. She has always attributed her frustratingly inexplicable attraction to Gillian to this summer madness—especially in that fucking dress, oh God—but the fact remains that she has desired this sullen, stubborn sheep farmer clad in any variation of plaid shirts, torn jeans, grotty jumpers, mechanic overalls, and even Elmer Fudd-esque winter caps, all of which render her desperate self-diagnosis null and void. 

On the motorway they’ve gathered speed, creating a roaring hot-air wind tunnel within the Jeep’s interior. When Caroline looks in the rear-view mirror all she sees is the Medusan rage of her hair and barely restrains herself from melodramatic groaning. 

Gillian leans out the window, almost dangerously so—half-perched off the seat, gripping the doorframe, and screaming woo-hoo into the void of the surprisingly sparse M62 traffic. Even as she takes quiet joy at the sight of Gillian—hair wild, squinting into the sun, wind plastering the summer dress against her strong thighs—this hanging out the window like a demented Labrador makes her nervous and she shouts,  “For Christ’s sake, sit down.”

To her surprise Gillian plops into the seat with uncharacteristic obedience, even putting on the seat belt. She looks at Caroline, hair streaked across her tanned face, laughing, and Caroline thinks I will remember you like this always. 

“Sorry,” Gillian hollers into the din. 

“I just don’t want to scrape you off the road.” 

“It’d put a damper on everything, wouldn’t it?”  Still smiling, Gillian leans back and closes her eyes for a moment while pushing hair out of her face. A tendril remains curled along her cheek and across her lips, a bit of ornamentation run amok outside its prescribed patterns. Caroline notices her stereotypical farmer’s tan—bronzed arms, face, and neck in contrast to bare white legs, upper bicep delineating the pale and the tan courtesy of dozens of t-shirts. The edge of her dress flutters tantalizingly around her thighs and Caroline forces herself to look at the road. Her relationship with Gillian has always possessed an inevitability about it—a fantastic, fatalistic entanglement courtesy of their star-crossed parents—but she has never loved anyone or anything so wildly unpredictable as this woman who now sits next to her in so deceivingly still and innocuous a manner that Caroline’s naturally suspicious mind expects that her next move will be to climb onto the roof of the Jeep and start singing “Sempre libera” from La Traviata in homage to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Except that she knows Gillian loves the movie, but hates opera. Nonetheless Caroline’s feelings remain a source of trouble, so much so that not only has she mindlessly thrown herself into dating and then ridiculously rejecting out of hand any woman who shows the least bit of interest in her, but also that at the present moment she misses the correct turnoff from the M62 and they end up meandering around the outskirts of Leeds in search of the tiny Miss Marple-ish village for a good half hour despite the continual hectoring of both the GPS and Gillian. 

“How could you miss the bloody turnoff?” Gillian grumbles again as they pass a sign that says WARNING: OWL SANCTUARY, LOW-FLYING OWLS for the third time. 

Wisely—just like an owl, yep, that’s me, Caroline thinks, who are you kidding, you pathetic numpty?—Caroline declines the option of admitting the truth, which is that she was so distracted by the continuous sensual writhe of the dress around Gillian’s thighs that she would drive around for hours just to witness the play of shadow, sun, and linen upon her skin and imagine how satisfying it would be to remove that dress and— 

“Maybe we should visit the owl sanctuary,” Caroline manages to suggest after loudly clearing her throat. 

Slouching and petulant, Gillian folds her arms. “If they give me sanctuary from your fucking driving, I’m all for it.”

iii. “I try to invent you for myself”

Finally they discover the bookstore—in its former incarnation known as St. Botolph’s, a modest, squat, moss-covered stone church—in a village with a blink-and-you-miss-it name: Marston Something, Offnor, Colward, Fuckward, who knows. So Gillian takes it upon herself to dub the unknown hamlet Owlshitshire: “Say it fast three times,” she dares Caroline. While Caroline parks across the road from bookstore-church and fusses with her hair, Gillian stares at the building with newfound apprehension. “You think we’ll spontaneously combust, entering a church together? The lesbian and the slapper?” 

Caroline adjusts—but does not remove—her sunglasses. “As if the joint force of our sins will merit our ruin? It’s deconsecrated, isn’t it?” 

“Reckon so. I’m just worried this will end up like The Omen.” 

Caroline sighs. “Everything is a bloody movie with you.” 

“Thought that was one of the things you—liked about me.” “There are,” Caroline replies slowly, “many things I—like about you.” With the Jeep at a sweltering standstill, sweat sprouts upon Gillian’s upper lip and falls in a tingling wave along the edge of her scalp. The white noise of her heart becomes clearer as Caroline leans in toward her—one more hundredth of a millimeter, one more sliver of a hairsbreadth and I swear to Christ or whatever pagan deity hanging about that I will kiss you, sweaty lips and all— Inscrutable as an Italian film star from behind those bloody sunglasses, Caroline grins as she hits the button releasing the seat belt, which slithers off her body in perhaps the dorkiest strip tease known to humankind but that, unsurprisingly, still leaves Gillian breathlessly and idiotically aroused. “Alas, my dear, that is not one of them.” The bookstore is second-hand—damp and disorganized, marinating in the sweet reek of old paper, wood polish, and pastoral, Anglican ideals long past. As she happily waltzes through the chaos, Gillian’s eager fingers tap random piles of books as if she is a pianist lazily running through scales and contemplating a piece for performance. Then her hand hovers above a heart-stopping find: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.  Before picking it up, however, she glances around with a stiff furtiveness that would be screamingly obvious to anyone witnessing her blatant, nervous interest in the love letters between two women. But there is no one in the store except an elderly couple and the proprietor behind the cash register, who is chatting up Caroline. Apparently he has discovered that she is a headteacher and is going on at length about the ruin of the education system thanks to political correctness and multiculturalism. Briefly Gillian considers swooping in for a rescue, but she knows damn well that Caroline can decimate this type of bloviate without working up a sweat; indeed, she leans in and murmurs something to him that shuts him up right quick. So Gillian turns her attention to Virginia and Vita, her thumb ruffling musty tea-colored pages while fearful of the dive into words that she suspects will only grant more clarity and substance to the inchoate feelings within her.   I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about—with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second. It’s like standing in church when the bell tower rings and the vibrato rattles your bones and stiffens your spine with a clarifying chill. And I’m in church right now, Gillian thinks, kind of appropriate, I reckon—then Caroline is beside her, so close that her breast brushes against Gillian’s upper arm. Her pale skin is flush with warmth, her fancy sunglasses glint on her head like a hipster crown and she smells good, like sun and sweat and grass and Gillian doesn’t know how she does that, she hasn’t been anywhere near grass unless she rolled around in a field before showing up at the farm, and Gillian’s senses riot and the beautiful words she just read tumble out of her head, the glue of their cohesion melts away. “What’re you looking at?” Caroline asks casually.    “Oh—um.” She tilts her head to look at the cover and Gillian stares at the shade of her jawline, the golden down along her cheek, and the strong lines of her throat because it seems the safer to look at these things rather than the freckled pointillism on her chest leading one astray into cleavage—though I walk through the valley of cleavage, I shall fear no evil, for the thought of wine in the cooler comforts me—or even the bracing blue of her eyes, those dangerous lodestones that, for some unfathomable reason, have always drawn out the deepest measure of truth from Gillian. 

“Interesting.” Caroline nods at the cover. “Do you like her writing? Woolf, I mean?” “What I’ve read, yeah. I mean, I’ve not read much. Just a couple novels,” Gillian mumbles. “They kind of made me aware—” Now Caroline touches her elbow and she devolves further into a stammering, sweating mess. “—of, um, the interior life? Interior lives? How they could, er, work. How the mind kind of works some-sometimes.” She looks around frantically—why is it so bloody hot in here? “Sound like an idiot.”  

“Not at all. Have to admit I haven’t read much of her writing. You can blame John for that. Every time he wanted to prove he was a feminist he would quote from A Room of One’s Own.”    Gillian laughs, and looks down at her ragged old Chuck Taylors. “That would do it. I—I’m sorry he ruined her for you.” “Should probably give her another go, what do you think?” “Yeah.” Gillian gnaws at her lip. On one hand, she wants to sit around and talk about Virginia Woolf and books and everything under the stars and sun with Caroline but on the other hand, she wants to be alone with the book and let it continue speaking to her like an eloquent oracle sans riddles. The latter might be best because right now words for her are scarcer than crow’s teeth. Usually she can turn on the tap and let language run rampant, not give a toss what she was saying to anyone about anything. More often than not, this got her in a fair amount of trouble; this time, she wants to find the right words that will lead into the right kind of trouble. Caroline’s fingers tap playfully against her forearm and Gillian glances at this invisible tattoo, patiently waiting for some intricate design inked in a riotous rainbow to blossom on her skin. “Tell you what—I’m going to dash out and find us proper sustenance for a picnic.” Gillian busts out a nervous, relieved smile. “You bored already?” “Not in the least.” When Caroline replies to her stroppiness with a certain kind of lovely seriousness it always prompts in her innate, immediate trust. Then, predictably, Caroline goes off and sounds the schoolteacher and mum that she is: “But it’s probably not wise for us to consume nothing but a bottle of cheap white wine on a day like this.” Why not? Gillian wants to say, but no—this is not a time when she wants wine rendering her into sloppy foolishness. “Right.” “Be back before you know it.” As she walks away, Gillian experiences such a ridiculous tightening in her throat, her chest, a physical manifestation of an irrational sense of abandonment—even though she knows Caroline is not some stupid toff boy with a fancy car who would leave her stranded in a big city or even, like here, the middle of nowhere—that she cannot prevent herself from blurting out Caroline’s name, even though she stops herself from bleating pathetically, you’re coming back, right?   Caroline stops and turns around expectantly. The precise spin of her heels, the way she pitches forward as if she’s a dandyesque soldier determined to enter a fray she’s entirely unprepared for—the cumulative effect of her movement assuages Gillian, is more than a guarantee of her return. Relieved, Gillian smiles. “I may be cheap,” she says, “but the wine’s not.” Caroline laughs at the easy joke and Gillian then permits herself the lusty luxury of watching her walk away. Alone, she tucks herself into a dusty corner of the bookstore on a faded burgundy settee with the Virginia and Vita book in her greedy hands; when she looks up again the sun slants suspiciously low through a high stain-glass window and casts jeweled baubles on the wall near an aged reproduction of a George Lambert landscape. The bookstore is empty, silent. Cursing herself for entering some kind of literary fugue state, she drops the book on the settee and commences working her way to the front of the church-store, dipping and swaying around so many claustrophobia-inducing shelves and tables and piles of books with such careful, sweaty precision she feels as if she’s performing an elaborate renaissance court dance. At the front of the store sits the bookstore proprietor in all his balding, cranky glory. He squints at her and ruffles the pages of his newspaper, perhaps hoping its scant breeze will somehow propel her away on a powder-puff of air. She stares at the old, heavy doors barring her way and is strangely bereft.    I suppose it is good for the soul to be hurt and perplexed perpetually. I know at least that I miss you damnably: that is a good fixed star. Amused, the owner watches her frowning at the door and then drawls sarcastically, “Oh, don’t worry, love. I’m sure your wife will come back for you.” Gillian laughs. Of course, Caroline must’ve told this tosser they were married when he was bothering her earlier. After the divorce from Robbie came through earlier this year, she firmly declaimed to no one but herself that she was done with marriage; being Caroline’s imaginary wife for a day is, however, a union more satisfactory than reality has ever granted her. “Yeah. Damn right she will,” she says. “Know why?” He shakes his head. She leans heavily against the cash register. “ ’Cause I’ve got the only keys to the sex dungeon in our flat.”

iv. “It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.”

The rush of sunset brings cooler air through the Jeep, which runs parallel to some tributary of the River Aire. Venus glints in a layer of darkening sky above a thinning band of vermillion while Gillian sits with an open bag of brandy snaps in her lap. She’s already eaten half the bag despite Caroline’s admonishments not to spoil her appetite. The weakening sun jabs through the green interlace of tree branches and in those brief outbursts fills her eyes with light. Somewhere along the river they find the right spot, kick off their shoes, and sit on an old blanket retrieved from the boot of the Jeep. They drink cool wine from a bottle blistered with damp and eat bread, cheese, and berries, and Gillian’s tongue loosens enough so that she talks haltingly about To the Lighthouse and of time passing, then she stops abruptly when the wind flutters the hair along Caroline’s serious brow—she listens so intently, Gillian notices, and it’s unnerving—and Caroline’s eyes resonate as a cynosure in the deep blue evening. In that moment everything stirs wild within her and she cannot keep still because she fears what she’ll say next. Barefoot, she walks through the grass to the river, the alternate swish and crunch of grass wet and stiff underneath her gait give way slowly to soft dirt and pebbles that press into the pads and arches of her feet as if pearls desperate to remain embedded in soft sanctuary. All while Caroline yells at her about the dangers of ticks and other hazards such as snails, broken glass, and used condoms. At the edge, she stops. In darker times now past, she thought of drowning herself. Like Virginia Woolf, except without the eloquent note or a death notice in the papers. She doubted anyone would really miss her. Even Raff. Still, she could not, would not, do that to him. Bad enough the millstone of his father’s death hung around his neck; to have both parents labeled as suicides—regardless of the truth—would be too much to bear. She likes to imagine that if she had drowned herself back then, her body would have found its way to the freedom of a sea—silly, she thinks, but largely due to a proverb that always stuck in her mind: The sea refuses no river. She always liked that one. Many of the proverbs and verses she heard in church as a child seemed focused on judgment, control, condemnation, behaving in a certain way. But in the embrace of the land and the water, well, you belong to it—and not the other way around. Its silence carries no censure. Dusk drizzles over thickening clouds and she tastes the heavy humid air. A smattering of stars now attend Venus. The river has led her to this moment—not to drown, but to declare herself. She turns around and glances quickly at Caroline, who is on the old blanket in an elegant sprawl, legs crossed at the ankles, calm demeanor belied by the continual flexing of her calves. “It’s beautiful here,” she says. “You’re beautiful,” Caroline replies. Uneasy, Gillian laughs. She’s been called a lot of things over the years, but beautiful has never been one of them and she’s old enough now that she mistrusts any easy compliment—even from the likes of the unimpeachably honest, unrelentingly forthright Caroline—and she is not to be won over that easily. Or so she thinks.   “Well now. Your game’s gotten strong—all those girls you’ve gone out with lately, eh?” “I’m not interested in games. Or those girls, really.” Caroline sits, draws up her knees, and adds softly: “You must know that.” “Do I? All I know is, here we are, picnic on the river, you saying nice things—” “How dare you,” Caroline says with mock indignation, “I’ve said only one nice thing to you thus far.” “—a woman could get the wrong idea.” “Or the right one, as the case may be.” Gillian frowns, bites her lip. Even in the face of blatant confirmation, her nerve falters spectacularly. Because nothing and no one has mattered so much to her in such a long time, she cannot remember. “Gillian.” “W-what?” “Tell me all the things you have in your head, that won’t ‘stir by day, only by dark on the river.’” The words ring clear and true. She sees them in her mind once again, feels the soft, foxed page at her fingertips. 

Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads—They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come. Caroline pulls the book out of her purse. Of course, she bought it. When earlier she had triumphantly returned from her shopping excursion to the bookstore, she thrust a bag of brandy snaps at Gillian, ordered her to wait outside by the Jeep, and demanded use of the WC from the bookstore owner, who stammered consent in the face of this wild, dungeon-owning lesbian deviant schoolteacher. And here Gillian thought it had taken her so long inside the store because she was doing number two. The grass murmurs protest under Gillian’s feet and she winces when something sharps bites into the ball of her right foot, so as she stands there in front of Caroline she may be bleeding, her foot may become infected and she’ll get gangrene and end up spending the rest of her days gimping around as Yorkshire’s One and Only Peg-Legged Sheep Farmer, but none of that matters now because she can hardly get past stating the obvious. “You bought the book,” she says to Caroline. “Yep.” “You know that—that quote.” “Yep.” As words continue to fail her in a way they never quite did for Virginia Woolf, she kneels upon the blanket, cradles Caroline’s face in her hands, and lays on the kissing equivalent of a Woolf sentence: long, glitteringly complex, sustained and full and magnificent and, in its aftermath, leaving one breathless and lingering sweetly over every fine detail, every bright facet. Everything rushes by in splendid sensate tandem: the light that fades and glows all the same, the whishing of the river, the wine limning her mouth, the corner of the book digging into her knee, her thumb caressing Caroline’s cheek, the star of Venus blessing the entire enterprise.

“God.” Caroline finally manages speaking. “If I’d known you’re going to kiss me like that over one old book, I would have bought out the entire bloody store.” It is nearly dark, it will rain very soon, and Gillian is quite certain that her bare, dirty foot is bleeding. “Don’t need a book for that. In fact, you should know—I’ll kiss you like that anywhere, any time you want, for as long as you want, every day for the rest of your life.” “Go on then,” Caroline says.

[magpiewritingthing]

the hush moment

Story: silent hill: lullaby (working title)

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Summary: The library’s open. There’s no-one else around. They hope.

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Warnings: mentioned/implied attempted sexual assault with a lesbophobic lean, other lesbophobia & homophobia mentioned/implied/referenced (as well as compulsory heterosexuality/heteronormativity), suicide mentioned --- i tried to keep at least most of these implicit rather than explicit (except for the suicide warning, which is more of a hypothetical scenario explicitly stated, but still)

Other notes: A snippet of something I have in the works (read: my brain, not yet on paper or electronic words)

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The fog tastes like a jacuzzi electrical fire’s smoke, like when she was twelve and the neighbours had gone on vacation to the Bahamas or something and had apparently left their outdoor kit running. Mom had panicked like a fluttery bat when she had to call the fire brigade. Now, the taste coats the insides of Lucy’s cheeks, her gums and teeth seemingly slathered with the thickness of it, like she’d walked right up to the fire and stuck her tongue out, all madwoman.

She’s trying to run away from it. Cillian mentioned a library somewhere in town but she's got no fucking clue where it is, hasn’t even got a map, and she’s just running fuelled by pure panic and a will to live, a need to stay sane. (There’s no such thing as monsters, my silly-billy.) No such thing as a man who keeps walking even after setting himself on fire and started to chase her, laughing with outstretched hands and his fly undone. No chants of come back baby, come back baby, come back baby. Pretty girl, birthing hips, find yourself a good man to marry and have lots of little grandchildren for Mommy. Spoil them little bastards rotten, spoil them to death in the crib, spoil them spoil them spoil them while Lucy hangs herself in the attic of the neat little with the pretty little garden with the white picket fence while Husband is at Work, working for the Money. Another housewife dead, how sad.

Lucy’s still running even though it hurts, even though she wants to collapse and cry herself to sleep and wake up at home in Chicago in her and her mom’s apartment and Mom’s coming around to the idea of a lesbian for a daughter instead of a birthing machine to carry on the genetic line. Yeah, she’d like to just take it easy instead of running with lungs short of air, panicking for a library when she has no idea what it looks like.

“LUCY!”

A familiar voice, shouting from her left. A howl turning into a scream from behind (how far behind? safe? going to die?). She trips over her own feet. How so like a shitty horror movie protagonist! Honestly! Her hands are skinned by asphalt, her jeans scuff at the knees. A familiar pale and freckled hand, then arm helps her up, the stinging sudden and unwelcome in her palms and knees. Try not to think about how else it might’ve turned out, but she thinks it anyway, her breath coming in staccato hiccups. Panic.

Cillian looks like he’s been strung and kept together by wire, any muscle lean and spare against his otherwise lanky frame, and his limp in his left leg doesn't help matters either, not when he needs to be able to outpace whatever’s after him (and there is something after him, as there is something after her). Lucy’s still surprised when he’s able to pick her up in a fireman’s carry, and hurries into that godforsaken motherfucking library that she must’ve passed at least twice. Or maybe not at all, because everything in this shithole of a town looks shuttered up and brickworked all the same. And no-one would answer, no doors would yield, everywhere seemingly abandoned under the thick taste of ashy fog. She spits once Cillian slams the doors shut (silly-billy might hear that and kill me and fuck me, we’re dead, oh god, oh god, shut up be quiet, oh god), the taste making her retch.

“Lucy?” His tone is hushed now as he comes near, one hand on the loosely-attached flashlight and walkie-talkie. “Oh god, Lu, you alright?”

She shook her head and swatted at him, still spitting gobbets of what looks like black ash onto the brown-orange tiled floor. He backs off with a sharp inhale, and probably a pinched pair of eyebrows. She wonders if he knows something about this town, and decides an interrogation would do no good -- this town is Hell, she’s sure, and it’d only work to destroy them both if she took a side against her only ally (when did he get downgraded from a friend?). She only pays half of her attention to where Cillian steps away to as she spits out the last of the black and now-inky residue. At least it’s not white. Lucy almost cries at the thought. Cry-laughter, almost, but the panic’s left her numb, left her legs aching from the running.

Cillian returns with a plastic cup full of clear water; she half-remembers the repeated fills-and-empties from what must be a nearby water fountain, and notices that the water appears clear. Thankful for at least the illusion of untouched water, she gulps it down, swishing it around her mouth and teeth and gums.

“Something happened to you down there.” An educated guess barely disguised as a question, Cillian’s tone deflated like a popped balloon. She nods. He doesn’t ask any more, even with his equally burning need to know what the fuck is going on, the same as her own. No, an interrogation would do no good, but sharing what they know might. But only after they’ve recovered some, after Lucy shakes off the tremors and the want to cry and curl up into a fetal position.

“There’s nothing in here.” Right now, he means, because it’s just a matter of time. “And I’ve got a couple things we can use to defend ourselves.” She hopes he’s still got that axe -- all metal, no wood, should stand a chance so long as he doesn’t lose it. “And some more food and water.” He sounds panicked himself -- barely, like it’s fraying the edges of his voice. “And... and...”

When she looks up, finally, she sees that he’s looking at the noticeboard in the foyer where they still are. Or, rather, staring beyond it. Like he’s lost, his mouth seeming to move, but only a clicking coming out.

Her voice is still hoarse, timid. “Cillian?”

Like a broken spell, he comes back, surprise on his face, then irritation at the twinge in his leg because he’s been standing for too long. He plonks back down on one of the foyer’s benches, kneading at the epicentre of the pain in his leg. “I was just trying to think,” he says, as if to assure her that he wasn’t sinking more than he was continuing his thought, “if I had anything else, but my brain’s coming up empty right now.” Then, “Oh, actually -- I saw a girl before.”

“A girl?”

“Yeah, like twelve, I think. Yeah, she said she was nearly thirteen.” A sudden thought seemed to cross his mind, then apparent dismissal; it worries her. “I think she was... her name was Diletta, I think. Dark brown hair, dark-- I think she had dark eyes--”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“No?” Worry is plain and concrete on his face. “She-- she saw something, said the ‘monster’ was trying to get her.”

“She might be OK.” Lucy thinks it might just be another of the town’s puppets. But she might be wrong, and being wrong might cost them both.

“Maybe.” Cillian doesn’t sound convinced.

She needs a little help off the floor, her hands and knees (don’t think about it, but do think about it) still stinging, and he still needs a moment to make sure the pain isn’t going to come back and bite him at the most inopportune moment, and both head towards the computer booths where Cillian’s held the food, water, and weapons. Bread, mostly, and snack bars he must’ve devastated a vending machine for; the all-metal axe, a wooden bat, a heavy-looking wrench, and a police officer’s pistol with additional ammo set aside. She doesn’t ask.

When he slumps down into a seat (it seems the least painful way for him to sit down, instead of ‘taking it easy’), she asks, “Did anything happen to you?” Lucy is starkly aware of her half-looming over him and the table, and takes note of the way he does not look her in the eyes, the way he hesitates then bites into a slice of bread. Avoidance. She understands, but they need to understand what’s at play in this Hell of a town.

“Cillian--”

“Please.” His voice is meek. Begging for his life.

She wonders if it was anything like hers (like William).

[oddlymysteriousphoenix]

#74 (#2) 1:59pm July 14

-October 22 2:56pm Eh, today had been a bit better compared to other days. I realize I’ve been lazy and haven’t been writing much on here. I will promise for now on, it has been pretty rough since last Friday since my sadness hit on of it’s lowest points again. Blegh, this year I’ve lost more than what I’ve gained so far. I don’t plan to live long if the trend continues for the rest of this year and the next. I miss all my close Xbox friends, it’s my fault I’m currently avoiding them. I think they’re happier without me and their happiness is all I care about (for the most part). On the bright side, I’ve managed to get some inspiration to continue my skills on guitar, drawing and ‘’singing’’ (I can’t sing). The motivation came from a reference from an old movie which ‘’predicted’’ October 21 2015. (Back to the Future 2, 1985) The actor who played the crazy scientist recorded a video containing these words: ‘’Great Scott! If my calculations are correct, it is now precisely October 21, 2015. The future has finally arrived. Yes, it is different than we all thought. But don’t worry. It just means your future hasn’t been written yet. No one has. Your future is whatever you make it so make it a good one.’’ His last words probably hit me more than others since I love ‘’Back to the Future’’. It’s one of my favorite movies. I recently watched ‘’Bridge of Spies’’ this past weekend. I thought it was a great movie, especially for not making the Russians the ultimate bad people during the Cold War. (Movie set during the height of it). Asides from movies, I’ve managed to gear from my gf’s voice after weeks of not hearing it. It stuck me to my heart to hear how depressed she was.  Thought the call cut out, I was able to treasure the bitter sweet voice I was able to hear. Like always, she’s my everything. I just hope she can beat her illness… -3:31pm -October 27 7:32pm Today’s the day of my 33rd monthly anniversary with my gf! Plus, today is when Halo 5 is finally out after all these years. I might get it tonight or tomorrow I cant wait to play it. Aside from that I’ve been having a rough week. Ive gotten so much of tests and homework, I’m pretty sure I’m off to a bad start. My depression loves to get the best of me. Sometimes I think my life is useless and Ill never be good enough. Suicidal thoughts? Yes, plenty of them as each minute fades to the past. I’m still waiting if life really does get better, things have been pretty flat with some downs. I still feel numb from the constant bombings of my thoughts. I’m still unhappy with my life, not even improving in my hobbies. I play guitar like a child, I sing like a whale and my drawings would be great to be used as toilet paper on how crappy it is. Ugh, at least all of my friends are doing well. Sosa (basically only school friend) has been doing great since he’s been hanging out with this one girl. She sounds pretty friendly from what I’ve heard of her from him. I’m just concerned things might go wrong between them, resulting them to not to speak to each other (Im sure they wouldn’t have sex, she’s a lesbian, at least for now).  I hope the best for him. He’s a great guy for certain. I don’t know how my other friends are doing, I haven’t talked to them due to my ‘’exodus’’. I hope they’re all okay. Lastly, but for best, I THINK my doing fine. Depressed, still? Yeah. Busy? Yeah. Do I still love her? Always and eternity. Happy 33rd anniversary, my love. My everything… 8:00pm P.S. = Te amo

- November 4 7:12pm Well, this week has been alright. Anyway! I got Halo 5 and beat the campaign on the same day. My opinion for the story: It was alright, I mean, some parts were just great, yet I think the story could’ve been so much better. Cortana… Ugh, I’m speechless, I can’t believe what happened to her. She didn’t seem right when she first appeared. She changed. It pains me to know after what Master Chief tried to do to get Cortana back, he couldn’t. Cortana went off her own path on what she thought was right. Master Chief asks ‘’Where’s Cortana?’’ Spartan Locke replies ‘’She’s gone. He stares at Locke with his broken visor. Then, Cortana causes havoc. More scenes passes by, then the credits. The music plays on only to leaves us guessing what’ll happen soon. (Break) -11:16pm. Well, I forgot to continue, woops. Ill write more soon. I have a lot in mind at the moment. - November 11 6:20pm

Ah, this day had been lonesome. Monday and Tuesday has been alright. Yet, Tuesday after school I realized something. I’m worth nothing. Ugh, I’m basically depressed. On Xbox, Stori has been distant. It’s like she doesn’t like my presence anymore. She’s been hanging out with ‘’Skitz’’ and ‘’G’’ (both Xbox names just shortened) so much. I don’t understand why. I understand G is online all the time and so is Stori, but I guess G has convinced Stori to get away from me. G and I haven’t talked in weeks., he’s a horrible person. If only Stori would notice, it bothers me greatly. I know G wants me dead, he told Seeker and Stori that I should commit suicide. Ugh, he disgusts me. I don’t plan to talk to him, but Ill do it if it prevents me from losing Stori. As of now, my best friends are Seeker, Dj, and Sosa, the school friend. Skitz and G can just be gone, they’re rotten apples to me. Useless and unwanted, I despise them immensely. It’s blatant that G hates me, you can feel the vibe of it. Well, sorta, I’m just exaggerating here. My gf says just to give it time. Which I will, since I can’t be against what makes my friend happy. I just miss Stori and Dj and Seeker being around. Nowadays, it’s just me all alone. Sosa is suicidal, but ‘’his’’ girl should help out a lot. Even though she’s a lesbian, things can change. As for my Erin (GF), she’s doing just fine. I still think she’s fine without me. I still love her. All the time she. She’s my universe. Yeah, she’s happy with me, but I feel I’m not good enough. I never have felt it, I’m nothing. Hell, I haven’t done anything that adds worth to me. Everyone else is just better than me no matter how little they try. I’m invisible, I’m no one and nobody. Suicide has been constant in my mind, but I live for others. Ill keep living until (Break, mom’s here, 7:01pm) 10:43pm They’re all gone from my life and gone from their thoughts. As for now, they’re here and I should enjoy their presence while I can. They’re family. MY family, the one I always wanted… 10:46Pm P.S. I had no school today.

-November 13 6:43pm

Each day of each hour has its sweets and sours. Days and nights where they feel the same. Today is bittersweet. I’ve managed to speak to my Love on Skype. She’s perfect as always, I love her greatly. She’s still largely insecure about our love. She feels like one day Ill send her a breakup text, which will never occur no matter what situation. I love her. Before that, she was talking about her being pregnant with triplets, in her dream. Saying how it went and how our family was there, both friend and biological. She spoiled me with kisses as we  chatted, she’s just perfection. I could never ask for more, only for us to be together soon. T took some screenshots to store the memories for the near future. Yet, as of now, I’m lonely. Erin is off doing something and I’m alone on Xbox as well. A couple of minutes ago I’ve been noticed that France is under terrorist attacks. It’s so interesting to know how everything can change so easily in just one hour. I’m afraid what will happen afterwards especially the refugees. I know most Europeans will be swayed towards anti-Islam thinking gen realizing the enemy and hurting the innocent. I’ve observed many tragedies, I hope this doesn’t lead them to chaos. If it does, time will tell. The choices of the people will determine the future of a country. As for now, I guess I’ll have another lonesome Friday. As my friends have fun, as my love carries on, I’ll be here. Hoping for the best in each of us. 7:05pm

-November 17 10:52pm

Ah, Im here doing homework Ill probably sleep at 12. Quick review of this week from last Friday/ Terrorist attack on France, soon later saw ‘’Forrest Gump’’ for the first time. I loved it. Saturday, I managed to get close to Stori on Xbox. It was just her, Seeker and me. She told me how G was still angry at me from a long ago event. She’s been trying to think otherwise. Plus, she reminded me on how Im still important to her. Oh, before that Seeker and Stori got into a small brawl over her different laughter which he wasn’t used to. Though it kinda killed the party mood, it soon recovered. I just feel bad for Seeker since I’m the only one that knows him seriously. As he said, being a jokester causes people not to take him seriously. He’s a great gut, I just wish he was valued more by people. We all stayed up to around 4 A.M. . It  was great, also my GF called on Skype to 3:11-3:13 to 3:14-28 Am. She mumbled mostly through all. Sunday was all work. This week has been okay besides having a lot of work to do. My Gf and I talked again which made me very happy. She’s perfect. Well, I need to focus on my work now. I’m so sleepy… 11:10pm

-November 24 12:55am

Ah, what a pleasant week it has been Friday. Guitar playing, gaming on Xbox One, talking to my Perfect Love and best friends, as well as drawing. I, for once, feel like I’m making progress in my life. Maybe Ill start writing a song since my mom has been awfully occupied with babysitting. Yet, it leaves the place to me. I don’t mean that as a selfish way, more in a way to be able to express what I love to do. As of now, I’m listening to ‘’FoxBoro HotTubs’’ which is basically ‘’Green Day’’ under another name. As nerdy and childish it sounds, I hope to be as great as them or even more. I love their songs as most would already know. I most certainly would cherish in being in a band and becoming a songwriter along with a couple of hobbies on the side. Even though I contain no pride or self esteem, it’s still something I want to go for. If I’m not able to reach that dream, then I’m not sure what’ll become of my. I’m sure I’ll be married to the girl who I love now, Erin. Skyping her for an hour was fantastic, 11:32pm-12:33pm. She makes me feel complete and I fly with joy knowing she’s beside me at all times. She’s perfection. Aside from that, I’ll update my family. Stori has being doing great compared to her bad things. One of her best friends has come over to visit her for the week. As from latest knowledge, they went to a birthday party. Bubba has been doing just fine, nothing negative that I’ve seen. He’s still trying to get his Canadian girl named Cristina, she’s sweet and happy usually. I wish him luck, even after about one or two years chasing after her. I introduced her to Bubba way back on Xbox, first met her sister then Cristina on GTA V on the Xbox 360. Anyway, Sosa has been doing well, I think. I texted him a bit today, still with his ‘’French’’ girl. Rose is okay, I sadly haven’t talked to her much. I plan to talk to her more, I don’t want to lose her. She means too much to me, she’s part of the family. I’m doing a drawing for her to cheer her up. She’s okay, but not well. I want her to know that I’m still beside her in her hardships. We’ll that’s about it. I’m off to play some Halo 5 or Black Ops 3. I desire for days like this are soon to arrive. 1:45Am

-3:26pm