#but i've been here since the beginning so it'll be the end of an era

[sistervirtue]

GODHEAD DEATH SENTENCE

any followers of this blog for a bit know about ghds (or at least, characters from it, like Lacramioara) and probably about another project of mine, ESCHATON ACADEMY. I've decided to merge the two, so Sister Virtue is here to stay!

What I'm dumping here right now is a variety of assorted thoughts and a basic plot outline for the beginning,. It's by no means all-comprehensive, but I hope it'll help lay things out and make it a little less confusing now that I'm not jugging both.

note: this project is very much intended to be 18+ in subject matter and tone. topics like violence, suicide, and abuse are going to be present.

open with the remaining six archangels reacting to the Archangel Gabriel's untimely demise at the business end of God's Revolver by his own doing. this is quite the pickle they're in. someone has to be the annunciator and furthermore, as god's unspoken-but-well-known favorite, he gets the biggest payout of love out of all of them.

michael and raphael have been responsible for making "born-again's" to pad out michael's legion, because sacrificing born angels especially in the era of humanity pushing back against angel infestations has become a contentious issue.

born-again's are when michael and raphael reshape an existing human soul and grant them angelhood. all so far have been exousiai (soldiers), but theoretically making an archangel should be possible, especially because they still have gabriel's essence.

welcome to the world the new angel gabriel, formerly Rubén Erendirani Cuini Dominguez. [existing character brought over from ea]. it is gradually made clear that he is here out of necessity, and the others aren't too keen on their new "youngest brother", especially because of the privileges offered by status of Annunciator. Michael, as the eldest, is especially bothered™️ about this, but michael's demeanor remains placid and unperturbed.

Gabriel is partnered with an elder cherub (Theophania), because they carry all the necessary knowledge and understanding of the mechanisms of the job. advisor-esque position. previously, Theophania had been on the panel of cherubim that ruled appellate judgements on contested verdicts.

Gabriel slowly begins to endear both himself and humanity to Theophania. aha no aha dont go against your god-designed plan ahahaaa

God's been . quiet. since the gabriel incident. they're still receiving their Love in exchange for Passion, but the other archangels are none too happy about this, especially because, again, their newest baby brother is getting the most favorable payout. a decision is proposed to "downsize" gabriel's domain by reducing the amount of passion he's able to reap with a …mini-rapture. of sorts.

gabriel is like HEY WHAT THE FUCK. WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. he confides in Theophania, distraught that an existence he never asked to have may be responsible for so much death.

Theophania, a being of ultimate Reason and Logic, decides to do the only reasonable and logical thing. They steal the cherubim's relic, the Eye of God (not literal, may change name to avoid confusion), which contains the summation of all knowledge. They slam dunk that shit into their skull. Angels are like little computers that run on Love and Passion for the Father. this one just hooked itself up to the energy equivalent of a nuclear power plant. needless to say, things get messy. michael loses quite a few of his soldiers in the resulting kerfuffle, as well as a handful of angels from other choirs. fearing the compromising of their brood and Viable Spawning Population, the archangels call a truce. but there's going to be some changes for starters, they're withdrawing all unnecessary human assistance. sinners will still be punished, passion will be reaped, but if gabriel and theophania like them so much, they can handle their issues.

theophania will be Felled and trapped within a mortal body, but the condition is added that they cannot die. Dying offers too many loopholes to get out of the main point of the contract, which is: the moment theophania and gabriel decide to give up on humanity, the archangels will proceed with the initial plan.

theophania is to act as gabriel's agent on earth, and gabriel as their patron: aka, his ass is on the platter if they fuck up. theophania is armed with god's revolver and the eye of god, before being unceremoniously tossed down to earth in a new, achier form. welcome to the world, Sister Virtue

from here i think there should be some brief exploration more into the state of the world as it is. im going for a more soul eater/devils candy/etc esque situation where mythological creatures and beings mingle among humans and are more broadly recognized as like, organisms.

then a scene plays out where virtue gets caught up in the high-energy antics of Lacramioara, Leopold, Johnny, and Cross. Johnny Strings is the human contractor of Cross DeVille, a crossroads demon. she has a golden flame-spewing guitar that she rides like a witches broom. I haven't quite worked out cross' abilities yet, but something having to do with lines and intersections for sure.

Lacramioara Strigoi and Leopold Lupei are two of Michael's exousiai. they are also the oldest still-living ones. Lacramioara's weapon of choice is a shepherd's staff, with support from the shadowy tendrils tattooed over his body. Leopold wields a scythe, but his mass and beastly body plan serve as weapons just as well.

While they are not allies of Virtue by any means, they are also not enemies, and she regards them largely as annoying, out of control youngsters, since physically they're about half her age, and spiritually even more so. they think she's pretty cool, but lacramioara can't help herself when it comes to provoking auntie virtue regardless.

virtue gets the situation under control as far as collateral damage, but the two thieves (johnny and cross) get away, frustrating the two mercenaries. thats all i got as far as story/plot is concerned naturally im sure youre curious about the mentions of angel broods. and "born angels" . this is still being tinkered with naturally but brother we are about to get buggy with it. pulls out my whiteboard

by and large with the exception of those directly born of God (the archangels, christ also i guess(?) whatever this isnt about him rn) , angels are a species parasitic to humankind. they feed on Passion, and some of it is always saved and regurgitated back up for heaven-bound angels like the higher choirs and of course, God. in exchange, God gives them Love, which is directly necessary for stimulating things like joy, maintains the cooperative nature of the "hive", and a variety of other functions. they can live without it, but it sucks ass. severely. some efforts are being made on the dl to synthesize it, but these are only successful to varying degrees.

anyways, a large amount of the mythos around angels stems from their rather unusual reproductive cycle. two (or sometimes more) angels will inoculate a human host with their genetic material, forming the putto, a juvenile angel. these angels feed off of the passion for goodness of a virtuous person, and so will encourage their host towards these things when they're old enough to do so, something that has historically been understood as the classic "shoulder angel" or "conscience" or "holy spirit".

furthermore, in areas where angelic choirs are less secure in their territory, adult angels may occasionally keep watch over the new young and protect it, which has been interpreted as "guardian angels" across time. when the host dies, the putto then gorges itself on the lingering Passion and completes itself with dna material copies from the host, allowing them to emerge as a fully formed Angel. for those of the lower choirs, they often resemble the prior host, which is what has historically led to the misconception that human souls become angels when they die. they do not. that is simply an angel that has copied your loved one's face. it is entirely different from the Born Again's for higher choirs, they will continue to collect and harvest Passion before they cocoon themselves and metamorphize into their new form, which is standardized according to their function. this change is induced seemingly by the needs of their current community, and not decided by the choir of the angels that contributed to their initial genetic code continuing with the insect metaphor, you could say heaven serves as the "mother hive", but angels will form smaller outposts in various areas, usually with a seraph or two to serve as an intermediary with heaven. this position is the Bishop

naturally, upon the revelation that angels are just weird parasites, the christian world has been thrown into turmoil. the entire nature of the process isn't known still, and there's been a range of responses from some seeing being chosen for inoculation as the highest honor a believer can receive, to others looking for ways to potentially protect themselves from it. this opportunity has been capitalized upon by demons, since the best way to ensure you won't be a heavenly host is to be lacking in virtue.

angels view this as a betrayal of what they saw as a symbiotic relationship with mankind and the communities that worshipped them and their God, hence the general bitterness towards humanity expressed above. some angels even blame this change for why God went quiet, but no one knows for sure Michael plays a pretty big role, so as for what I have on him and the exousiai: Michael is the eldest archangel, as well as the head of its "army". He is responsible for protecting Eden, and handling the unpleasant jobs involving violence and viscera that angels frequently condemn in mankind, but are necessary for maintaining the grip on believers that allows them to harvest passion so efficiently.

Despite this, he doesn't really come across on a first glance as the military type; he's clean-cut, dresses fairly simply, and has a placid, almost demure manner. even when you're aware he may have less-than-upstanding intentions, it's hard to confront him on anything, because he maintains an air of plausible deniability and respectability that dissuades argument.

The nature of his work is inherently difficult. Driving out the initial dissenters, protecting the most vital parts of the "hive", and overseeing the culling of sinners or otherwise diabolical beings is one that is contradictory to the concept of all-encompassing love and mercy and forgiveness. for this reason, Michael suspects that God has been intentionally withholding Love, and that he, the eldest, is being robbed of what he's owed, but no matter how many times he asks, he never gets a response.

The Born-Again's is Michael's solution to the violent nature of the job and loss of angel life that resulted from it. Angels, by function of only emerging once their human host dies, but needing the host to be alive long enough to feed them enough Passion to properly develop, are very much a "slow-burn". Their lifespans are much longer, but when a legion can be picked off by a rampaging cherub, that sorta becomes irrelevant. And by nature of the job, constantly moving around and constantly in conflict, born exousiai themselves aren't particularly able to reproduce in a way that would help replenish those numbers. It wastes valuable time and energy and leaves them with an obvious point of weakness.

Remaking human souls, while it does take some time and effort, has been much more efficient, and allows him to experiment with different ways of improving that efficiency. The process is done in conjunction with Raphael, the archangel who rules over healing and doctors, because he is better at weaving the physical form.

What he's also found is that the human component also bypasses an issue angels face with such a job: Angels, by nature, are not particularly violent. God's Love induces ecstacy and fuels their passion, but it encourages a placid, communal temperment. While born exousiai would naturally have a stronger impulse towards such activities, they're more reactive to threats or large-scale sins than they are proactive in seeking it out. And all born angels have a natural tether to God that allows them to receive His Love.

Born - Again's, however, are entirely dependent on Michael distributing it to them, and human souls are much easier to train into efficient hunters, especially when they view him as a holy figure. Instead of a traditional army, they work more in function as bounty hunters, with each reaping earning a certain amount of Love, proportional to the worth of the sin. they're typically put into pairs, and those pairs are all incentivized to compete with one another.

And with further testing, Michael has found ways to encourage the lifestyle required for the job by remaking them in certain ways, hence the monstrous appearances of exousiai like leopold and lacramioara. they need to feed on flesh or blood, and ergo, are more likely to choose to go after sinful beings since the idea of eating innocents is inherently upsetting to such pious individuals Sin, by the way, is simply a different form of Passion; focused inward, instead of outward. It needs to be processed before it can be useful to angels, and so Sinful Souls are sent to Hell, where demons will eventually produce Passion as a byproduct. While they often butt heads, the two do come from the same initial place, and they are ultimately integral to the other's existence.

The way Michael selects viable souls to be Born Again often is similar to how Saints are beatified; they must show enough fervor towards God to be more easily persuaded into agreeing to it. Much like the Conception, Michael cannot act on a soul without explicit consent because of the extreme nature of the action. An unconsenting soul will reject the process too violently to produce anything.

In Lacramioara's case, it was the intensity of her love; in Leopold's, it was his devotion to justice. Once agreed upon, the soul is tethered to Michael so they can receive their payout (he will often offer them a symbolic representation of this covenant, such as a collar, or marking, or ring), and then violently reshaped in the image of his design.

Their original, human bodies become Incorruptible (and thus often become pilgrimage sites). After that, they're sorta thrown into the deep end with Michael's oversight, since he finds a good scare followed by positive feedback is the best way to handle the human mind. They'll need less and less oversight as they become more experienced.

Born - Again's are still very human in nature, even if their forms have changed. Vices, obsessions, fears, conditions both mental and physical; all of those remain, because all of those things are what push humans to seek God's Love in the first place. While they'll never technically be declared "sinners" by the functional immunity of their job, the dissatisfaction brought on by the human condition is what Michael relies on to keep them coming back for the next payday. It could be considered cruel, but he sees it as "If they never felt pain, they'd never know what joy feels like".

A lack of God's Love wont kill them, it's just an unbearable misery on top of the small miseries they accumulate every day of every year of every century. That's why he needs to include conditions like the need to eat human flesh: because otherwise, an ascetic like Leopold may just choose to put down his weapon and live a life of miserable peace. Monks love doing that shit.

He needs to make sure walking away isn't an option, and then reward them with something they could never get otherwise. Violence is an art, and he has it down to a science. Especially in a world like the one they live in now, where believers and forces both diabolic and celestial mingle, where the nature of belief is constantly changing, and where the idea of "blasphemy" is no longer enough to provide the passion needed to feed the hive.

It's for reasons like this he does nothing to curb the curse Lacramioara unwittingly left behind after her death: it really bumped those church attendance numbers up

[yurisorcerer]

God.

OK. So, this requires a little context. In a Discord server I'm in, they're groupwatching every KyoAni show. Starting today, they got to Haruhi Suzumiya and are going to be watching an episode per day until we finish it. I'm not gonna write about every single episode of this show---I've seen it several times at this point so while I have a fair bit to say about most episodes it's just a lot of effort for a series I don't think many people here on tumblr specifically care about anymore---I do wanna write about this one

because, like can you fucking IMAGINE opening an anime like this in 2024? It'd be impossible. When an anime in the present day wants to make a big impact it'll go for laser focus, trying to present its absolute best foot forward, or a grandiose overlength premiere like Oshi no Ko or Frieren or something. The idea of opening your anime with *this* is just....I mean, even at the time it was baffling. I watched Haruhi a couple years after it aired and I remember being SO confused. What was this? Why is the first episode of this show---a show that aired deliberately out of order, by the way. I'm calling it the first episode here but if you're going by DVD order it's one of the last---some weird, deliberately bad student film that has a snarky narrator CinemaSins-ing over top of it?

The short answer is just that from the very beginning, the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with its audience. Haruhi herself, as we'll learn in upcoming episodes, is kind of a really unpleasant person before eventually getting better. And I'm not going to claim that this show invented the idea of having your title character be a complete jackoff---it did not---but at the very least, it felt new at the time. (Contrast that to nowadays where every two-bit isekai has a total fuckboy who you're clearly supposed to love from episode 1 anyway.) So the first episode is kind of a....I hate this term, but almost a troll move I guess? More than anything, it's supposed to be *confusing.*

Improbably, this worked, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya became, for both better and worse, one of the defining anime of its era. It's been nearly 20 years and I have no idea how this happened.

Some amount can probably be attributable to the charisma of Haruhi herself---she sucks, but she makes an *impression*---but none of that is really present here since she doesn't show up until the end of the episode for the big mic drop moment, a moment where we get slightly more of an idea of what this show even actually is.

I think honestly the charm of the deliberately bad film might have been a factor. The thing is completely nonsensical; we have Mikuru running around in a bunny outfit doing plugs for random local businesses while vying for the affection of Itsuki. Itskuki himself plays a character best described as "on-screen" and "present." Mikuru's big rival both in love and for the fate of the Earth (?!?!) is Yuki, who wears a fucking awesome witch hat throughout most of the episode. At one point, in scenes that seemed utterly baffling without the context that later episodes would provide, Mikuru's eye appears to actually change color and fire a beam from it, and Shamisen the cat talks like a person. This shit was weird! Even at the time.

Also the bit where she fires a gun and goes "aaaah!" as the recoil gets out of control is still funny to me 16 years later. Many things about me have changed since I first watched this show but apparently my sense of humor isn't one of them.

Haruhi Suzumiya as a series is really important to me in that it was one of the first things I watched that was REALLY OBVIOUSLY "anime." There wasn't the plausible deniability you got with something that aired on Toonami (and thus was visible to anyone with cable TV) or one of the common entry-level access points like Cowboy Bebop or such, which are considered classics not just of their medium but of their *genre* and thus didn't carry the same stigma. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is an anime-ass anime, with its bunnygirl outfits and improbable high school antics and psychic powers and aliens and yadda yadda. When I first started watching the series I was vaguely embarrassed about my interest in Japanese cartoons, by the time I'd finished it, I had an actual fucking SOS Brigade patch on my jacket. No less a figure than Tatsuki Fujimoto said that the series was responsible for turning his generation into otaku, and, anecdotally, he's pretty much right about that; most otaku I know of my age had a Haruhi phase at some point. (That's part of why Aya Hirano playing Makima in the Chainsaw Man stage play was such a big deal. It's not just that she's an incredible actress---although she is---that's fucking Haruhi playing Makima, man.)

Its success is also partly responsible for the light novel adaptation hellscape we now live in, so I'm not going to shy away from criticizing it either. Right off the bat there's a really uncomfortable kind of semi-"ironic" sexualization of Mikuru, helpfully lampshaded by Kyon as the film's narrator. This does not let up at any point throughout the show and is probably the worst thing about the series (although it doesn't reach its nadir for a while, if I recall). I'm not a fan.

Other than that element, I think as far as first episodes go, I wouldn't mind if more shows went back to this approach. There's something to be said for just baffling your audience into submission.

[chronotsr]

No. 4 - D1, Descent into the Depths of the Earth (August 1978)

Author(s): Gary Gygax Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David A. Trampier Level range: Average of 10, preferrably party size 7+ players Theme: Underground exploration Major re-releases: D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth, GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders

Wait, really? This adventure has never gotten an official adaptation after 1e? That feels really weird. Granted Queen of Spiders in particular would absolutely work with 2e, but, wow. Is there a reason for that?

Ahh, 1e cover art. Looks like hot fucking garbage in the best way. Well, at least it's not a trace? You may be aware that early DND had a bit of an art theft problem (mostly stealing off of comic covers), but I don't actually have a list of all the known cases -- finding art credits at all is enough hassle as is without tracking down which paintings are also stolen. The usual suspect is "Greg Bell" and if you want to look this up the word you need to google is "Swipes", not traces. Just, be aware that's a thing going forward.

We start off on a weak footing: a light retcon. The ending of G3 didn't really imply that the drow had an escape route to the underdark in the Hall, at least not going off the map, but the text of D1 does. It didn't really even have a reason to pursue any drow into the, well it's not called the Underdark yet. In fact, it's going to be a hot minute til then, it'll receive that name in '86 from a not particularly liked supplement that got pumped out during the TSR Money Issues era. So for now, it's just The Depths. G1-3 were highly enclosed dungeons, D1 is a wilderness hexcrawl situation. Which is kinda strange, since like the G series, the D series was a tournament module. The answer to this conundrum, is that it isn't a conundrum, because only D2-D3 were used at GenCon XI, as well as an alternate Q1 that never was. Shame! The Lolth egg raid sounds cool.

A big hexcrawl, in fact! It's almost weird to me that D1 is the middle of a sequence at such a high level, rather than the beginning of a sequence at a low level, simply because there's so much stuff? Hexcrawls aren't my jam (admittedly I've only played in one ever, but I have Forever GM syndrome very hard so maybe one day that'll be fixed…) so it's hard to not see something this huge and go "wow this must be totally overwhelming to run". But we will press on dauntlessly!

We get some guidance on how to run this, including to really sell the "spooky cave" vibes. Gary is one again strangely invested in the importance of caving itself, but here it feels a bit more appropriate than it did in G2. Happily, shockingly, excellently: there IS a way to secure the Drow's favor from the word jump! Wiping out the Mind Flayer camp will have a, not 100% but extremely high chance of the drow FINALLY leaving you alone. Yay! And included in the module are some bonus cave battlemaps in case you need to random encounter in a cave. Also yay! Actually, in general in this introductory section Gary is generally sending out good game design vibes, going to great trouble to mention "if they're being careful, don't fuck them over" and "just straight up tell them you can't teleport very far down here" and "make sure you tidy up this framework into a real adventure". All very good signs!

The artwork is, broadly, much cooler than it has been up to this point. Which is good, because we're getting a whole lot of random tables here. They do a nice thing in this section, where they give 'purposes' to a lot of the random encounters, not full-on spark tables but at least knowing that the ghouls serve the drow is a very handy "why are they here?" to know.

The adventure lightly, reasonably, railroads you into your first encounter -- a checkpoint. It's a pretty rote fight, there are two factions but they can't really be posed against one another in any obvious way. The sub boss has a faerie fire grenade, and the big boss has a cloak that lets you turn into a lurker to fly away in a pinch. It's lightly teased that they worship Lolth here. But otherwise it's mostly just "welcome to the underdark motherfucker!"

There's a brief illithid encounter, which is likewise rote. Chop em' up and move on.

Finally, you have your dungeon-dungeon, which is a trog warren. It's mostly just Some Drow and Some Trogs, and it almost feels obligatory? It's got that "bunch of random caves" vibe that I do not like in dungeons. B1 and 2 will both end up doing this. But among the funny things is:

The first appearance of a death lance (drains d4 levels) on some bad motherufcker drow fighter lady

The medal you can negotiate from the drow can also just be looted

A lich is just, kind of taking a nap. the cheeky little fucker has put a magic mouth on basically everything everywhere, so you're flooded with magic aura if you think you're going to see shit coming. He's got some really neat shit, like a portable hole, but unfortunately his non-magic valuables are extremely cursed. Figures.

Sometimes I forget that ghouls and ghasts are sentient and intelligent, since I have had it so trained in my mind that ghouls are essentially smart zombies rather than people in any meaningful sense, but not so in ADND land! These ghouls are trying to ditch the drow they serve, which, understandable.

Thing I only learned now: ADND had many, many sphinxes. Andro (big tough and good), crio (smaller, dumber), gyno (smaller, a little meaner, classical sphinx behaviors including riddles), and hieraco (evil, vicious, and animalbrained). Ours here is the hieracosphinx, which is a pet of some drow lady.

Hopefully we can agree that old timey bugbears were silly little guys. I don't buy that they're evil, they're too silly! And yawn the usual lady monster / child monster dilemma is here, how droll. Your party picked a side 30 sessions ago and now it's just procedural.

Apparently the dark elves and trogdolytes practice mutual aid with one another, though Gary specifies it's coercive so not like that put your flag down. I do think it'd be pretty funny to reveal that the trogs are Actually Really Good and have a lot to teach others about societal organization. There's not really much to say about it as-written, it's just more of that mothers/child dilemma tripe.

At the end, an actually cute little trick that I cannot fathom the party ever working out without the Drow Merchant just straight telling them: There is a room with a magical pool in it. The pool is surrounded by a ton of small gem, which if removed, magically reduce any nearby gems in size and value. But, if you toss gems into the pool, they increase in size and value. Neat! Infinite money machine!

The adventure ends with the unveiling of a new monster-people: the Jermlaine, which are basically just mean little guys who sneak around and cause trouble. Not really a threat, just extremely annoying. Your guys will wanna chop them up for being assholes, but really they're just like the most petty guy at your job. It's a weird addition, but not unwelcome. On the whole, D1 is some lovely and mildly ambitious connective tissue bridging the D series together, and I'm actually kind of fond of it now. Maybe my players will visit The Depths soon…

The adventure ends on an illustration of ya bois taking care of some trolls and shit. Thanks Dave!

[cpmhew]

tagged by the wonderful @awildwickedslip ✨ tagging (no pressure) @r-dtoblack @spiders-hth-is-an-outlier @bredalot @bripops @highkingpenny @thegingergal @buckthefutcher and anyone else who'd like to share!

last song - Night by Bruce Springsteen 🎶 with your faith in your machine off you scream into the night / and you're in love with all the wonder it brings 🎶

currently reading - I've been reading a bunch of romance novels about people falling in love while filming reality tv shows lol. I have bad brain fog and fatigue right now so I can only handle things where if I miss out on some of the depth/complexity I can still follow well enough. I am a romance novel enjoyer anyway but I am appreciating them extra lately for their predictable structures and reliably happy endings!

currently watching - BBC Merlin and Twelfth Doctor era DW. I don't really like these seasons very much but I'm rewatching all of new who and it's been fun to revisit episodes I haven't seen in years. can't wait to get back to Thirteen though!! and soon on to Ncuti 😍😍

current obsession - two Bruce Springsteen albums: The Wild, the Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle and Born to Run. I never listened to his music til this summer when I finally decided it was time to give it a try and holy hell. I listened to Wild/Innocent almost every day from the beginning of July, usually more than once, and finallllllly took a break from it last week to try BtR and now I've listened to that at least twice a day since then. I don't usually get obsessed with albums like this so it's kinda a fun novel experience. I want to listen to more of his music but it'll probably be at least a couple weeks til I can tear myself away from BtR to try a new album!! part of me keeps saying "I can't believe I've been missing out on this my whole life!" but also I think now was just the right time for me to start listening to him. I think this music speaks to me now in a way it wouldn't have a few years ago! I would have liked it, but I don't think it would have resonated as much as it does. I'm just looking around me going "oh my god, are you guys hearing this?? hello???" and meanwhile everyone HAS actually been hearing it. for fifty years. lol. the first time I heard Rosalita, I literally burst into tears because I just *liked it so much*. I don't think a song has ever done that to me before. I immediately listened to it like four more times then googled it and discovered... yes. everyone loves this song. but that's really fun to me! I feel late to the party but it's a fun party and I'm thrilled to be here.

[difeisheng]

Twenty Questions for Fic Writers

Tagged by @extraordinarilyextreme, 谢谢

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

On my current account, 25! (not counting everything from my old account I deleted in 2020)

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

On said current account, 53,972

What fandoms do you write for?

As of right now the brainrot has taken me to MLC, and if I ever get my motivation back, then also DMBJ

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. The War Is Over, And We Are Beginning - Jiang Cheng & Jin Ling, 7.6k, Post-Canon

2. all of this mess (is just my attempt) - Chengning, 2.6k, Cloud Recesses

3. hold the world to its best - Jiang Cheng, 859, Long After Canon

4. won't run away (we're here to stay) - Chengning, 3.5k, Post-Canon

5. welcome to the storm - Jiang Cheng, 1.6k, Fall of Lotus Pier

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to, but god help the ADHD. I read and cherish every one I get though, I promise!!

What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

It's either didn't want us to burn out, which was canon timeline Chengxuan, or come back and haunt me, which was canon timeline Sangyu. I think I'll go with the latter. It had more tragedy about identity and memory, I think

(There's also one Hamlet fic I'm proud of, but that was a one-off I wrote. You can go find it if you want)

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Oh boy, uhhhhhhh. Out of the stuff currently associated with me, it'll be one of the Chengning fics, I think, or my aro!Wei Wuxian Ningxian fic. Not gonna lie it's slim pickings for happy endings around here haha

Do you get hate on fics?

No, thank god. I was always too much of a small fic writer for that.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Hahaha, not really. I'll do handwavey and fade to black but that's about it. Might get there one day though!

Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Nope, not a crossover person unfortunately unless you want to count the sins on my old laptop from my superwholock era (I don't)

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Ehhhhh..... as of recently, ideas yes but actual written fics, not that I'm aware of

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! A couple of my MDZS fics and one MCU fic back in the day got translated into Russian

What's your all-time favorite ship?

Bestie I live in multishipper hell you can't make me decide

What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

Basically every DMBJ wip at this point in time, but particularly the one I'm furthest along on that I do not have a working title for other than 'horrible huaxie backstory'. My relationship with DMBJ has changed a LOT since getting into it this year and now my hyperfixation is somewhere else, so who knows what'll happen *shrugs*

What are your writing strengths?

I've been told my narration has a distinctive voice to it, and I think that's what people tend to compliment most? Dialogue is also something I've tried to consciously work on over the years, and I don't know that it stands out as a strength necessarily but it's almost something I find easy to write these days if I'm in the swing of it

What are your writing weaknesses?

Action and smut. Basically don't make me mentally choreograph complex stuff

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Now that my Mandarin has improved after two years of study, I think writing bilingual fic could be fun. There's definitely dialogue I've thought up in Mandarin for C-Drama characters that just won't have the same impact in English, and it's a shame I can't just casually drop it into a fic untranslated and be done with it

First fandom you wrote for?

First fics I ever wrote were for Star Wars and they were written longhand into a horrid little hipster notebook from Indigo. The first fics I posted on Ao3 were for the MCU though

Favorite fic you've written?

Nah I'm not choosing on this, I have no idea <3

Tagging @nutcasewithaknife, @eirenical, and @ilgaksu (only if you want to and apologies if you've already done this 😅)

[petricakegames]

Devlog: General

Well, I've spent the last several hours smooshing my face against javascript and CSS in Twine trying to get it to do something that seems quite simple and yet it refuses to cooperate--so I'm taking a break to chatter here. The problem is: I know just enough code and syntax to break everything and not enough to fix it 😂

As the above implies, I've started some UI work for a new project! It's been two weeks since the game jam version of "Another Round" got published, and it's gotten some lovely reviews 🥰 and I still love it to bits. (You should play it, if you haven't. Or if you have. I've played it for fun a few times myself) I've been noodling around the edits I want to do--nothing major, some smoothing out, a bit of polish, another round (hah) of typo extermination. I'd like to have the final version done by the end of the year.

I am very new to Twine. I started poking it a year-ish ago but didn't get far beyond the basics of moving between passages. I've been taking it more seriously the last few months and (because I'm a Libra) spent most of my skill points in aesthetics. Designing a pretty UI has been more important than, oh, I don't know, actually making it a game. "Variables? Who needs variables when the vibes are good?"

Me. Turns out, it's me that needs variables.

Since the best way to learn is by playing, the only way to win is by learning and the only way to begin is by beginning, my next project is here to teach! Me..to teach me--I'm not making an educational game.

As part of the Alphabet Superset challenge, every week (ish) for the next six months I'll be posting an update to this game. Each "episode" will vary in length (b/n 500-5000 words) and focus on a theme from the spec fic section of tvtropes.org. Think 90s-era, monster-of-the-week style television with a surprising amount of heart and an unsurprising amount of camp.

You are an agent of [AGENCY NAME REDACTED]--a covert branch of the US Department of the Interior, tasked with the investigation and conservation of paranormal entities, objects and forces found within the United States. Folks, welcome to...

The scope of each "episode" will be small--only a few scenes, typically--which gives me something tangible to work on while I learn how to use Twine better. Six months is a daunting amount of time to commit to this, but my goal is to both grow my Twine skills and establish a supported routine around my creative process so, hey, the time is going to pass anyway. I may as well try, right?

Anyway, that's all for now. First episode will go up next Friday. But I figure it'll take a bit to build some steam. I've got to stop fixating on the damn UI...

okay, I'm gonna take a break and try to smooch a hot tiefling

[skinzchoerim]

instinct pt.1 and instinct pt.2 stOryline analysis

I've spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about these two albums. I found it curious that the first three songs mention women, skinz says gender doesn't matter and the rest of the songs are gender neutral while the MVs are gay. Since today is instinct pt.2's first anniversary and it's an album that changed my life, here's the story I've come up with (based purely on the lyrics and descriptions, not the MVs).

We can safely assume that the bOy wearing cOmme des garçOns, our main character in this series, is meant to be bisexual. From what I've gathered, it's common for bisexual people to realise their attraction to the opposite gender first (since it's already expected and easier to explore) and get the full picture of their sexuality later. libidO is about exploration and experimentation, and I always thought the line "girl, I just wanna know" was referring to exactly that - experimenting and starting with the "safer" option first, but still being aware of your blooming queerness in the back of your mind, accepting and understanding your libido as a whole through this first experience.

Next is yOu can tOuch it if yOu can't feel it. In libidO, he wasn’t acting on his desires yet, it was all an internal monologue about things he feels and wishes to take further. The longer he didn’t act on it, the stronger and more uncontrollable it became. After accepting his libido as an internal thing, in instinct he explores it further, no longer questioning and thinking, but acting on it with another person. I really like the line "Why the hell were you drawn to my wandering?" because it highlights that this is just the beginning of his journey of self discovery. He found someone he's attracted to and he doesn't question that, but he's also aware in the back of his mind that it's not the end, he's still lost and has more questions than answers. For now, though, he chooses to focus on this moment and this person.

Another line I find interesting is "I don't want your love tonight because it hurts." A lot of OOO's pre-instinct era songs' messages give me the impression that in order to have a full, satisfying, healthy relationship, the subject needs to grow up, understand and accept himself. Even in relationships with women, he can't just suppress and not think about his queerness, because in the long run, it'll become poison to the relationship. It's a vital part of his nature and not exploring it at all is doing himself injustice and stopping his growth as a person. I'm not here to say whether this is true or not, but it makes sense to me with some of their songs.

Moving onto byredO - since it's his first relationship and "the emotion of love of the boy, who is yet to become a grown-up, is quite impulsive and fickle", it turns unhealthy and obsessive. The interesting this is, hOly week is the previous track, not the next like one might expect. It's because he's been slowly turning away from god and he turns his worship elsewhere, letting his desires consume him. He doesn’t see his lover for the person she is, only focusing on the physical aspect of their relationship and putting it above anything else, her scent his new god.

tear Of gOd is repentance for following his impulses. He feels the promised paradise slipping away as he realises he can no longer reach it, both because of how he acted in the relationship and because of the constant awareness of his attraction to men. He begs for forgiveness and tries to feel closer to god again, but it's not the same anymore. His indulgence in pleasure already put distance between his faith and himself, and going back just causes him to feel more guilty, so he takes a different approach.

I called it yOu but it was actually me is a curious phrase that's been torturing me since I first saw it. The description says:

Confession is a word with both a religious and secular meaning, and the “low-lying voice” always makes me imagine him on his knees in a church. However, the phrase itself is very "call me by your name"-esque, which relates to the idea of being two halves of a whole, seeing yourself reflected in another person and seeing them in yourself. It's not physical, but emotional and intellectual. So, perhaps, after confessing his sins and not getting a response, he comes to the conclusion that people are closer to him than god. He used to believe he was created in god's image, but “i called it you but it was actually me” indicates a realization of inherent connection between god’s creations, people finding their reflections in each other instead. The boy stops seeing other people as separate from himself and starts looking into their shared humanity, hence, under the_ comes next.

"Emotion beneath innate nature" suggests more focus on the inner feelings, letting go of the fear that love will hurt and opening up to an emotional connection. For all that I know, instinct pt.2 makes no mention of the boy, but it's safe to assume he's still our POV character. In this album, I'll refer to his lover as "he", because although all the songs are gender neutral and the idea of the album is that gender doesn't matter, there's an implied "maleness" in suit dance and gaslighting (with Nine and Kyubin's lines responding to each other) and it makes sense within the larger narrative.

The songs on instinct pt.2 all correspond with a song on pt.1. skinz, like libidO, is an internal monologue of acceptance. He understands that gender doesn't matter to him and he should stop looking only skin-deep. He now knows that in order for a relationship to work, he needs to look beneath the physical and see the person inside. It's desperate and slightly aggressive because he's still young and impulsive, and there's this whole new side of him he's been suppressing that's just waiting to get out.

I haven’t read the book this title comes from, but from what I’ve seen other lyOns say, la nausee relates to the idea of individual choices and how they create a person. The description shows that there's someone new in his life that he’s beginning to have feelings for.

suit dance is, in a way, encouraging someone to come to the same conclusions he did. It focuses on physical aspects and wanting the other to act on his instincts, but there's also an element of helping him find identity and freedom in it (“time to cut loose yourself”, "focus a bit more on yourself"). It explores similar ideas as instinct, following someone with his eyes and wanting to be close to them so they can both act on their desires.

Now, the line "What do your eyes in the mirror want?" makes me think of “I called it you but it was actually me”. I'm a bit confused by who is who exactly in this song, it might be a translation issue, but it's hard to tell apart the "me" and "you" sometimes. They seem to blend together and I think it's part of the idea. They're both wearing suits and admiring themselves in the mirror, but also see a reflection of themselves when looking at each other.

gaslighting, just like byredO, is deeply toxic as he gets addicted to his lover and wants to be controlled. In a way, it's kind of religious as it shows a deep and unhealthy devotion one should not have towards another human being as it also reduces their humanity. He still feels the need to put someone on the pedestal, which, although not from the boy's story, goes back to angel. Growing up religious made him feel that there needs to be someone above him, someone more holy than him he can answer to, and once he steps away from religion, he fills the god-shaped hole (sorry, I find that phrase hilarious) with other people.

snapchat honestly baffles me a little, but the description says:

Perhaps the idea is that they're realising the instability of their relationship, that they're continually missing each other and they don't know how to communicate properly. All they have is small moments that become good memories, but even they disappear without a trace.

ultimate bliss is a rejection of all that was influenced by religion in the boy's life. He still dreams of paradise, but this time he wants to build one for himself and his lover. He's ready to let go of the ideas he'd been brought up believing in and there's catharsis in leaving it all behind. He accepts the things he's done wrong and doesn't blame himself for them, doesn't apologise to god anymore.

"Are we being punished, or are we dreaming" confuses me a bit. Dreaming in general is used a lot in OOO's songs, it's a pleasant state and an escape from reality, which, if you indulge in too much, stunts your growth. I think in this case, it means that it's hard to tell whether this love they have is good or bad. He's conflicted because it's both painful and pleasurable, and religious people really like to force black and white thinking. The boy is just beginning to learn that some things are morally neutral, not everything that hurts is punishment, not everything that feels good is a beautiful dream.

"Would you come with me?" means that it's not just him, but his lover as well who has to let go of these things. If we interpret this song and gaslighting as being about the same person, perhaps the lover's religious upbringing also made him feel that he needs to be more controlling. Since their relationship is forbidden, he needed to feel like there's some aspect of it that's up to him in the face of the great unknown and placed himself as the god. As a side note, my grandparents were once reading me something about god filling people with light if they put their trust in him and I was reminded of this line in gaslighting:

If we see it like that, ultimate bliss would then show that there's still hope for the two of them if they get rid of all these messed up ideas and stop feeling like there needs to be a higher power involved in their relationship. Neither of them is god and neither is the follower, they're both Adam and Eve who made their choice to bite the forbidden fruit and leave.

As a sort of epilogue/glue to the next project, there's undergrOund idOl #0 with the description:

It reminds me of the description under be free:

Both of these are about overcoming hardship as long as they can rely on each other. It also reminds me of angel and Mill's line "to me you are faith, sometimes hope", while in skinz he had the line "belief is toxic to me" (and the word used for belief in Korean also refers to belief in god). This just reiterates that they're letting go of the idea that they need to put someone on a pedestal.

And lastly, we have re-bidO. I'm not sure if it means that if he were exploring his sexuality again, he wouldn't make the same mistakes? It's normal to look back on your journey and wish you'd done things differently, but these words imply a lot of regret. Maybe he's not fully content with where he ended up, maybe he's imagining a version of his life which is better, easier. Maybe it shows that his journey isn't over just because the album has ended and he still has a lot of guilt, so he's back to square one - accepting the natural parts of himself. It's a bittersweet ending and that makes it feel more real. The road was rocky and just like at the end there's catharsis, there's also reflection.

[astralfern]

as Saturn gets ready for his next voyage...

Saturn highway by @/taudalpoi on IG. All of their work is exquisite

Everything feels like it'll be exponentially wired. Like an avalanche of karma has been inquired in us to understand our purpose.

Saturn entering Aquarius March of 2020:

We saw an exponential growth of occult interest and people becoming more spiritually aware. Psychic awareness kicked up to speed for the collective conscious and we have been isolated but online. Whether people were aware or not, we were entering a mental conditioning of becoming more self aware with ourselves, or the problems that have been silent for too long.

I downloaded TikTok (I felt like everyone did also), and that made connecting with others on a social media platform viable than any other platforms. This was also the beginning stage of changing how we think, in ways we think of how we get our news. People like to rely on Tik Tok for "real" news, as public news does not address what we are really needing to take care of in our society. News does play repetitive stories and I end up listening in a lil' anyways because my parents blast it in the living room. Mostly by my father. But the news is sadistic to say the least. But we can't ignore the fact that 'doom-scrolling' has its place on the app, and that it changes our outlook on ourselves and the way we go about things through trends that come and go quick. An example of this coming-and-going are the articles saying how much TikTok decreases your attention span.

Fast forward to 2022-now, we now see how social media has effected us. Sayings such as "chronically online" or my fave "touch some grass" have been going around, subjecting to the fact that some people have not gotten out of the habit of consoling the internet for every situation to play out in the way they have seen it through the screens. People have been reaching so hard to find a problem where there isn't, and it can be annoying. But it is the internet, we can thank the fact that everything is accessible now. Everyone's opinion feels like a righteous one, and people batter at the cages.

And a big honorable mention to the most riveting example of Saturn in Aquarius issssssssssss:

online classes! remotely working from home! and creating a generation of children who will have to deal with the beginning of a new era in technological changes! such as VR and AI (Pluto will have so much fun with this)

As Saturn goes into Pisces on March 7th 2023:

We are forced mentally to console with ourselves. take it as a spiritual incubation. We are still free to go outside of ourselves and create relationships, but mentally we will be swimming in these unconscious waters where we will see the repercussions of the actions we have taken. For ourselves, and others, we haven't been able to take the time to see who we are. WHY are we here?

WHAT WAS THE REASONNJNJN

I've had Cardi B saying this in my head since pisces season started, and I want to talk more about that in my next post about the season of pisces.

Saturn is the antithesis of letting you go short handed. It wants you to know the karma of your actions, and performs it from the people around you. Relationships will be a real kicker during this transit, we'll see why we keep holding on to certain people for god knows why (oh thank you Saturn for revealing that to me in a certain situation, now I'll just go figure myself out during this transit so I don't waste time crying over people that lacked care for me).

This will seem like a ruthless, scary, and what feels like a punishing time at first, but it's really not. I feel like this is more of a time to relinquish towards a womb-like state, and to fully master ourselves before trying to figure out everyone else. When was the lat time we thought for ourselves? Sure, there's work to be done and bills to pay. But what is happening is far greater than us and we will be seeing that through our creativity. What is something you've been wanting to manifest for a while? Whether you've thought it to be a silly nothing, or your ideal life, there is a reason for such a thought to be instilled. Perhaps before you were born, a soul transcendence took place to reach a higher plan to take the place of the last journey. Never give up on your dreams ✨♓️🪐

[ohmysparkle]

Spellbound is my upcoming piece for the Strange Devotion collab hosted by @bearseungmin. I've been working on this piece since around march... and I don't want to overpromise but I think It'll be around 100K across a few teaser scenes, and three of four chapters. I've spent months researching and editing and writing, and it's been very fun! I'm also accompanying the series with a lot of visual media, such as maps, newspapers, and other elements (which I have created myself) that can help you immerse yourselves in the lore. I would immensely appreciate feedback and comments.

🌙✨Tag List: @xviternity @straykisz

Here is the first little bite of this project.

✧･ﾟ: *✧ ` . *: ･ﾟ : * ･ﾟ✧ * : ･ﾟ✧ *.✧

Pairing: Hyunjin (Stray Kids) x Reader

Genre: Dark Fantasy AU, Mystery, smut.

Teaser Length: 1.6K

Warnings: None in this chapter. For the series overall, smut, gore, witchcraft, religious themes, and I hope it gets scary too!

Enjoy!

✧･ﾟ: *✧ ` . *: ･ﾟ : * ･ﾟ✧ * : ･ﾟ✧ *.✧

The woman in front of you is beautiful. She must have been the most beautiful woman that many people had ever seen in as many lifetimes.

You hold her face in your hands and it’s hard to the touch, firm and polished like stone - the skin does not drag as you run a finger over it, inspecting her features. She is not cold, not warm; the same temperature of the room, in fact. Her eyes are perfectly still, looking beyond you and never at you; unflinching, unfocused. They seem to hold a thousand colors of amber and earth in them and they are so still they seem like glass. Her skin lacks its luster, only temporarily, but its olive and brown hues still show beneath the pallor. You imagine how it must have shone among the sun of the land from which she came, and how it would feel in that warmth from that ancient time.

You see the gash at her neck, poorly mended who knows how long ago. That must have been what killed her, you think. She must have been near fourty when she died, an age that in her beauty still seemed only the ripening of a flower, and not as many would think, its wilting. You wonder if you too would grow beautiful in such a way… or would you simply age?

She doesn’t blink as she doesn’t breathe. She has no need to move and if she so desires she could stay still for years on end and awaken in another era feeling only that she has overslept. It is only when you call her name that she does answer.

“Berenice.” You call her. It sounds very foreign in this small town where the two of you have met, just as yours does. But she doesn’t call you by your name. She only calls you Doctor, as everyone else does, it would seem far too strange to give her your name - it’s too foreign, too different, and above all; too revealing.

As you wonder, her features flick with animation, her eyes widen and adjust, her head turns to yours, her lips part and she exhales the stagnant breath that she had held within her for several days now.

“Yes, Doctor.” She answers. She speaks with that same placeless accent that you have heard in others of her age, who have ventured in different lands and times and tongues, speaking in a way that is so mixed and mended that it seems to come from no place at all. It’s an alien way of speaking, and you hope it’s not what unmasks her.

“How do you feel?” you ask her, still pressing the pads of your fingers into her flesh as it softens, almost mimicking the texture of the living. Good… that’s good. So long as it continues to soften, it is good.

“Alert, weakened.” She explains. “Lesser.”

“Lesser?” you question.

“Than I was.” She hums, thinking of the words, archaic and unintelligible ones most likely occupying the beginnings of her train of thought before she can describe her thoughts to you. “Yes - less. Like half a person, or an empty person.” She clasps her hands, balls them into fists. The change in sense and strength is always so unsettling to them, you always see the same reaction.

“It will be expected for the first few weeks, but you’ll feel better as your diet progresses and you begin to sleep normally. The sun may make you ache and irritate your eyes, but it won’t harm you as much anymore. You can begin to acclimate at your discretion. Slowly you’ll feel like you gain strength, but it is completely different. You won’t be able to do the same things, so be… careful.”

“Will I feel hunger?” She questions.

“Yes, but not the same appetite, not quite. You will be able to resist. One day you may even begin to crave what you call ‘human’ food.” You chuckle. She does technically eat human food.

“So I will not eat and drink from man?”

“You always could, but it won’t give you the same satisfaction. It won’t sate your appetite. There will be no more bloodlust, as you had before, and like I said, you might even enjoy human food.”

“And am I human?”

“I would say you always have been… you are just sick.”

“Your kind do not think so.”

“Pffft! Nonsense… many do. And well, I’ve proven it to be an illness, haven’t I? And you are on the path to recovery.” You scoff, “‘your kind’, ‘my kind’, it's a pointless label. Here, there, wherever, it’ll be different.”

“Still they confuse us with the other blood drinkers.” She argues. Those of her age aren't usually quite expressive, but you hear a sadness in those words.

“Aaah yes, the nightcrawlers. Creepy crawlies! They are not like you, they can’t walk in the sun because they have sold their soul and God can burn them in His light, like witches! Your kind, the sick, can. Daywalkers and Nightcrawlers. Different names depending on where you are, but still that’s about it. Step in the sun and they won’t confuse you.” You say after tapping the tip of her nose. She is hundreds of years old and seems confused by the gesture, so perhaps that approach should be exclusive to your child patients.

“God, you believe in Him?” This one was quite inquisitive - curious of the world. You wonder how she has lived, if it’s been in seclusion, away from the times, away from the world.

“One way or another, ‘He’ is there. Or She. A long time ago I had a… group of sorts that I worked with. Everyone had their own creed, and we’d all share blessings and icons from these faiths indiscriminately. Be it wrong or right, any belief can be a channel for us to make the distinctions that protect us, that we have faith in. There is us, the good, and the other, mostly bad. If you believe or not, there is a need for this sort of scheme and these figures. The names, the chants, the rituals. They all have a purpose when it comes to fighting certain things. You need to know what to call things, what belongs where, what is good and what isn’t… So you can pick and choose your doctrine to work with - fundamentally, that’s it I guess.”

“Hmm… I have known many gods in my time then.”

“And have you ever known them to be true?”

“Like you say, it does not matter if we believe it or not, but I have seen things and men need to give them names.”

“Straightforward I think, in the end we all seem to speak of the same things.”

“Then can you be straightforward once more and tell me when I will be human again?”

“As I’ve said. You always have been.” You sigh before answering, “as you begin to… acclimate, and follow the instructions I’ve given you, you’ll feel more like your old self. After a year or so the symptoms may have almost entirely disappeared, and you will also take on the detriments of mortal health without any enhancements, if we may call them that. Your senses will dull, as will your strength, you will weaken and become less resilient.”

You pause to look at her, before deciding to confess. “I think it may be impossible to completely eliminate the toxins left in your body, I’ve only been doing this for some years so it’s difficult to say what the long term results will be. If you are ever compelled, by your own will, or some shocking external factor, to begin to drink regularly once more, then you will feed your body the same es en es needed for the illness to grow within you once more.”

“I see. So I must be wary, forever.”

“Not forever anymore.”

“Not anymore.”

The woman stands and walks as if she were floating, still such minuscule precision in her movements. You watch the beauty in awe as she prepares to leave, as she wordlessly says farewell with a kiss to each of your hands and cheeks - another ancient gesture. You’ve warned her to be cautious of unfriendly eyes on her journey home, as you have warned all incoming and outgoing patients who come and go so secretly and illicitly. You expect that she will remain unseen - simply another person in the crowds.

You could only hope that the newly added eyes of one monster hunter Hyunjin Hwang would not target her on her way out, or those who have yet to arrive.

Because what would you do if they were?

What would he do if he discovered you?

And more importantly… what would you do to him?

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[itsadamcole]

bet pt. 2

fem!reader x adam cole

Reader and Adam come face to face after six months apart at Survivor Series ... “please, forgive me”

word count: 3.4k+

warnings: smut, angst, a lil bit fluffy

— hey hey, here’s part 2 of the short adam cole series .... on a side note, i’ve really been in the holiday spirit so i’ve started writing some christmas / fluffmas imagines ... the first two are scheduled to be posted december 1st and 2nd —

masterlist || part 1 || request an imagine here

~ 18+ content below - read at your own risk ~

Survivor Series. The day you've been dreading for six months since you left Adam.

Six months ago, you walked out on the best and the worst thing that's ever happened to you. Six months ago, you lost a piece of yourself and turned to sleeping with your best friend, Tyler Breeze, just to fill that void.

But it's not filled. It'll never be filled. So you stopped about a month ago, and Tyler now has a girlfriend so nothing's weird between you two.

You've never gone back to Adam. It's taken everything in you to stay away from him. You've barely spoken to him in six months, but since he's NXT Champion and you're Raw Women's Champion, you both have matches at Survivor Series.

You sit in your dressing room, scared to leave. Scared to run into Adam or one of the Undisputed Era boys. It's your worst nightmare.

"Y/N! You're on in five minutes!" someone calls through your door.

Sighing, you get up and grab your title, throwing it over your shoulder. With your anxiety rising, you leave the room.

You don't know what you'll do if you see Adam. It's been so long and he's probably moved on. You haven't, but you've tried.

Once backstage, you stretch out. Your opponents, Smackdown Women's Champion Sasha Banks and NXT Women's Champion Io Shirai, into the small room.

"Hey, girlie," Sasha says. "You have an audience in catering."

You sigh and say, "If it's Adam then I don't care."

Sasha says, "Y/N, come on. I've told you before. That man is head over heels for you. Maybe the beginning was a lie or a bet or whatever it was but he truly loved you. I saw it. We all did."

Your music hits and you say, "I can't talk about this right now, Sasha. I have a match to focus on."

You make your entrance, forcing a smile onto your face as you step into the ring.

****

Adam's POV

She looks beautiful in her dark red gear. It's my favorite ring gear that she owns. It sparkles but is dark at the same time. Definitely her two personalities mixing together.

I miss her like hell. I haven't been able to move on from her. It's been six months and I'm still infatuated with her. I love her. I've loved her for so long. It pains me to see her. Rumor has it that she's seeing her friend, Tyler.

I stand in catering to watch her as the match begins. My match is next and I know they'll call me back any minute and I'll come face-to-face with her when she walks through those curtains.

She's distracted by something. Her footing is off and she's not selling moves like she usually does. Maybe Sasha told her she saw me in catering. I told her I was going to watch Y/N here on the TV.

"Yo, Cole," Kyle says, clapping me on the back. "Your match with Drew and Roman is next. Let's head backstage."

I say, "Yeah, okay." I leave the TV and walk backstage with Kyle, Roddy, and Bobby.

We get backstage and I see there is a TV. I watch it.

Roderick says, "Talk to her after your match. I know that you've been wanting to talk to her."

I sigh and say, "She doesn't want to talk to me. She doesn't even want to see me, Roddy. There's no point."

Bobby says, "You should still try instead of sulking."

I look over at Bobby and say, "She left me, Bobby. If she wanted to talk to me then she would have already." I'm starting to get heated.

Kyle says, "Adam, bro, calm down."

"You want me to calm down? Seriously?" I say, my voice rising. "You three are the reason I'm in this mess. You three came up with the bet and I accepted it because I was drunk and secretly was crushing on Y/N. I never should have accepted it because I fell in love with her and now she's fucking gone! I can't live without her, and the only reason I'm still in this damn company is because of the title around my waist. There's nothing else for me here because she's gone!"

What I didn't know was that Y/N's match ended and she came through the curtains in the backstage area with Sasha and Io. The guys were all looking behind me and that's when I realized she was standing right behind me, listening to every word.

****

Your POV

As you walk backstage, you can hear someone shouting.

"... I was drunk and secretly was crushing on Y/N. I never should have accepted it because I fell in love with her and now she's fucking gone! I can't live without her, and the only reason I'm still in this damn company is because of the title around my waist. There's nothing else for me here because she's gone!"

The voice is Adam's. He's shouting at the guys. You've never once heard him raise his voice at anyone, not unless it was important or serious.

You stand backstage with Sasha when Adam turns around and he sees you. His title is secured around his waist and he's wearing his black and gold gear with his Undisputed Era t-shirt.

There's nothing else for me here because she's gone. Those words stuck with you. If it wasn't for that title around his waist, he probably would have left WWE and gone to work with Ring of Honor again or maybe even AEW.

Drew McIntyre and Roman Reigns come backstage at this moment. The tension between everyone in the room is thick. Drew and Roman realize this and ask to make their entrances first.

Right before Adam makes his entrance, you rush out of the backstage room. Sasha right on your heels.

Tears have started running down your cheeks. You get to your locker room and throw your title on the couch.

Your win tonight means nothing anymore. It doesn't matter that you won. Your happiness was swept away when you heard Adam ranting to the guys about you. Six months later and he's still trying to defend his lies.

He'd have left WWE if it wasn't for that title he's managed to hold for two and a half years. It's the only reason he's still in WWE.

You start to throw things around the locker room. You're upset, you're angry, and most of all, you're frustrated. Even after finding out about the bet and after he lied to get you to sleep with him, you still love him. Six months later you still love him. After everything, you'd go back to him.

Sasha grabs your wrists and says, "Y/N. Y/N, stop it. Please. Before you hurt yourself or break something super expensive."

You look at your best friend and cry, "Why do I still love him even after he lied to me? Why would I drop everything and go back to him if he asked me to? Why would I take him back?"

"Because deep down you know that he never lied to you," Sasha says. "You know that he actually loves you and it wasn't for some stupid bet he made with his friends. Love is crazy and makes us do crazy things."

You sniff and wipe away your tears. "Can we get out of here? I don't want to be here when his match is done because I know he'll want to come looking for me," you ask.

Sasha nods and says, "Of course. Get changed and we'll head back to the hotel."

You nod and change out of your ring gear and into your street clothes. You let Sasha borrow some extra clothes you had so the two of you can leave as soon as you're changed.

****

Back in the safety of your hotel room, you order room service and watch Grey's Anatomy on Netflix as you lay in bed.

There's a knock on your door at around midnight. You think it's Sasha coming to return the clothes she borrowed earlier so you answer the door.

It's not Sasha at your door. It's Adam Cole.

"What?" you ask. "It's late."

Adam says, "I looked for you after my match. I wanted to talk about what you heard."

You say, "I don't blame you for wanting to leave WWE since I left. I'd want to do the same thing if I was you."

He says, "I tried to leave the company. A few weeks after you left, I went to Regal and Triple H to get them to let me go. I was ready to drop my title just to leave the company but they convinced me to stay."

You look at Adam as he talks. This is going to be a long conversation so once he's done talking, you say, "Come inside, Adam. We can keep talking inside." You move to the side and he walks inside.

Closing the door, Adam says, "I get why you left. I lied to you a few times at the start but within two weeks, I called off the bet."

"Adam," you say.

He shakes his head and he says, "Let me explain."

You sit on the bed and look at him. "So explain," you say.

Adam walks and stands in front of you. He says, "The night of the bet, the four of us got drunk. We drank a lot and we started talking about relationships. I mentioned to them that I had a little thing for you and that's when Bobby came up with the bet. He said that there was no way that I'd be able to get you into bed. Kyle and Roddy joined his side. I accepted the bet because I was drunk and liked you for some time. I was the only single guy in the Undisputed Era. But, like the dumbass I am, I took it a step further and started a relationship. Two weeks after the relationship started, I completely called off the bet because you meant so much more to me than a stupid bet."

You say, "Being drunk doesn't excuse you from accepting it. It won't work on me."

He says, "I'm not done yet. After the bet ended, I told myself that I'd never tell you about it because of this happening with us. You getting mad and leaving. I'd never choose my career over you because I know in the long run, you'd always be there for me. Wrestling is something I'll do until I'm fifty or so but there's nothing for me after that until I met you. Then I messed everything up. You're even seeing someone else right now so I don't expect you to come back to me."

You sit and listen to every word. Once he's done talking, you say something. "I'm not seeing anyone right now. I've been single for the past six months, But if I asked you to retire right now, you'd do it?" you ask, testing him.

Adam nods and says, "Yes, I would. You mean more to me than a bet or than wrestling. I love you, even after all this time. Please, forgive me."

You sigh, "I have forgiven you, Adam. For the most part. I just can't forget what happened and what you said to me that day. You lied to me just to get me in bed. You lied to start a relationship with me. All you had to do was say, 'hey, Y/N. I like you and I'd like to take you out on a date' because I would have said yes. I liked you for so long, Adam. All you had to do ask me out."

He looks down at you and he says, "You don't have to forget because we can both grow from what happened. I'm a dumbass, I know. I was just nervous and in a way, the bet made me talk to you. I just want to make it up to you, Y/N. Let me make it up to you. Let me take you on that date. A real first date."

You look up at Adam and say, "I don't know. I don't fully trust you, Adam."

Adam tucks a piece of loose hair behind your ear and he says, "I can make it up to you, Y/N. Let me at least try. I've learned from this and I want to show you that I've learned from this."

Your heart pounds in your chest as he touches you for the first time in six months. Without knowing it, you lean into his touch and close your eyes.

His hands rest on your cheeks for a second before he pulls you up so you're standing in front of him. You look up at Adam. "I'll think about it," you say, finally reply to what he said.

You feel Adam's hands leave your cheeks and slide to your waist. He pulls you closer to him. You're eye level with his chest before you look up at him with your eyes, meeting his pretty blue orbs.

"Can I start right now?" Adam asks as he starts to lean into you. You grab a fistful of his shirt, not knowing if you should back away or not.

Your lips brush against Adam's and you say, "I still need some time."

His lips move down to your neck and you gasp softly, tilting your head back a bit. Adam mumbles, "I need to make it up to you, Y/N." He starts to kiss your neck gently. Your hands slide into his hair as he picks you up by your thighs. You wrap your legs around his waist.

Sighing as he kisses your neck, you give in and say, "God, make it up to me, Adam. Make it up to me all night if you want to. I need you."

You look down at Adam and he looks up at you, pulling away from your neck. He kisses you hungrily. Your lips move feverishly against his, both of you letting out soft moans into the kiss.

He lays you down on the bed and hovers over you, not breaking the kiss. He grinds his bulge against your clothed core. You moan into the kiss, reaching down and pulling Adam's shirt up over his head. That breaks the kiss momentarily but your lips connect again like magnets right after.

The passionate kiss becomes more intense when Adam slips his tongue into your mouth. His fingers dip into the waistband of your sweatpants, rubbing you slightly over your panties. You moan against his lips.

Adam's hands run up your body, slipping under the shirt you're wearing. He pushes up the shirt until his hands are on your breasts, massaging them. You gasp and moan, pulling back from the kiss. You lift your arms above your head so Adam can pull off your shirt. You never put on a bra when you got changed earlier.

He pushes up your shirt, kissing and sucking on your breasts. Your eyes close and you smile.

"You're so beautiful," Adam mumbles against the sensitive skin on your breasts. "I am so in love with you."

You sigh, "Less talking, Cole. More fucking."

Adam smirks and says, "With pleasure."

Within seconds, both your pants and Adam's pants are off with both your underwear. Adam hovers on top of you between your legs.

His lips are on yours, moving feverishly against yours. Your hands are on Adam's back, holding him close to you.

The tip of Adam's erect member runs through your wet folds, making you moan into the passionate kiss.

"Adam, baby," you mumble against his lips. "If you don't stop teasing me instead of fucking me, I'll walk out the door. I swear to God-" You're interrupted by Adam thrusting hard into you, making you cry out in pain and pleasure. Your fingernails dig into his back.

He has a smirk on his lips and says, "You were saying?"

You stare up at him and move your hips so he's completely inside of you. "You gonna do something or are you just gonna lay there?" you ask.

Adam positions himself above you so he thrusts into you. Slowly but deeply. His hips are already flush against yours as he pushes your legs up so they rest against his arms.

He's kissing your neck as he thrusts his hips into you. Every few seconds, his thrusts get faster and harder. Your fingers slide down his back, definitely leaving scratch marks.

The room is filled with your moans and the sound of skin slapping together. A layer of sweat has appeared on both your bodies. It's a little warm in the room.

Your moans get louder the harder he moves. Your hands eventually make their way into his hair, gripping it a little bit as he moves.

Adam lets out soft groans as he thrusts harder and deeper into you than he ever has. You throw your head back and pant, "God, I love you so much. I love this so much."

He smiles and starts to kiss your neck. His thumb rubs your very sensitive clit, making you almost scream out his name. "Fuck, Adam. Just like that," you cry out.

The bed begins to creak and hit the wall a bit when Adam picks up speed again. Your legs begin to shake and your walls clench around Adam.

Adam realizes how close you are and he says in your ear, "Come for me, baby. I want you to come around me like you always do."

You don't wait anymore. You release around Adam, crying out his name. He pulls out right before he comes, releasing his seed all over your core and stomach. His fingers help you ride out your high.

Adam collapses beside you, grabbing his shirt and wiping you down. You pant and stare up at the ceiling.

You think about the day you left and you close your eyes.

Maybe you overreacted a little bit by leaving. You never heard the whole story, until today. You never let him fully explain.

You let out a sigh and ask, "Do you really love me? Even after six months apart?" Your eyes open and you look over at Adam.

Adam looks over at you and says, "I was ready to love you forever. Of course I love you after six months apart."

"Do you have any other secrets you need to tell me?" you ask.

He shakes his head and says, "I'm a completely open book to you now. No more secrets, I promise."

You lean over and press a lingering kiss to his lips. After a few seconds, you answer the question he asked you six months ago right before you walked out the door.

"Then yes," you say, not pulling back very far from the kiss.

He tilts his head and asks, "Yes, what?"

You smile and say, "I'm answering the question you asked me six months ago before I left. Yes."

Adam thinks for a second before he finally gets it. He smiles wide and puts his hands on your cheeks, pulling you down for another kiss. You giggle against his lips.

He rolls onto you then gets off the bed. He fetches his jeans, pulling something out. "I've carried this with me everyday for six months, hoping that one day you'll accept it," Adam says, coming back to the bed.

In his hand is the same velvet black box that he held out to you six months ago and inside, the same diamond oval engagement ring he presented to you.

You smile as he pulls out the ring, sliding it onto your left ring finger.

Adam lightly kisses you and says, "That's my promise that I will not keep another secret from you, unless it's a secret to surprise you in a good way."

You giggle and look at your ex-boyfriend turned fiancé before you say, "The guys and Sasha will be so confused when I show up with a ring on my finger."

"Let's worry about that tomorrow," Adam says. "I still have a lot to make up for and it might take all night."

And with that, you spend all night having the best make up sex with Adam. You don't fall asleep until the sun has begun to rise.

[galacticlamps]

If you don’t mind; shuffle the Two/Jamie playlist and say the first five (or however many songs) that play please!

lol not at all, since it's 5 I'll put my reasoning for adding each of them under the cut

1- What I Saw In You - the Proclaimers

2- My Lagan Love - the Chieftains & Lisa Hannigan

3- You Can't Hurry Love - the Supremes

4- Impossible - Nat King Cole

5- Tin Soldier - Small Faces

1- it's about falling in love all over again within a long-term established relationship! if you hc that they got together early on, I suppose it could fit in after/during Evil of the Daleks, but personally I think of it as much later on as 6b - either Jamie getting his memories back and remembering their relationship, or even him meeting future Doctors like Six and eventually managing to see them as the same person he fell in love with to begin with: "I couldn't see what I once saw in your lovely face, once your lovely face became common place. And the eyes that I liked seemed to lose their shine as they passed through time til they looked like mine. But then last night, I heard your voice, I rubbed my eyes and there and then, that fine baby with an arrow, stupid cupid, struck again. I'd forgotten, every reason why I said, "I do" but now I see what I saw in you."

2- an Irish folk song, so I've seen the pronouns & genders shift depending on who's performing it, but the speaker compares their love for their partner to the mythical leannan sidhe - a rare solitary and arguably benign fairy, who falls in love with a mortal. If the love isn't reciprocated, the fairy becomes the mortal's slave, but if it is, the mortal can never escape from them, and is destined to live a fulfilling but ultimately short life, usually one full of inspiration (some say the leannan sidhe acts as a muse, and the human they fall in love with must be some kind of artist or poet). There have been a few references in both canon & fanon to Jamie thinking the Doctor might be one of the fae, and from a shipping standpoint I think a leannan sidhe is probably the one of the ones Jamie's more likely to think of him as. "And like a love-sick leannan sidhe, she has my heart in thrall. No life I owe, nor liberty, for love is lord of all."

3- they probably could hurry love, but here's a song for when they're pining idiots waiting it out instead - the song is also from 1966, and in my head fits the vibe of their early travels with Ben & Polly, post-realizing they have feelings for each other but pre-acting on them, when they're probably embarrassing themselves a bit but not making a move yet in the hopes it'll work itself out

4- "If they had ever told me how sweet a kiss could be, I would have said 'impossible, impossible, for me'" - could go for either of them really, but I tend to think of it as the Doctor's POV, falling in love with a human for the first time and experiencing what I imagine to be a very different kind of love & relationship than he might've had on his home world. Plus, the ending "I would have said 'impossible,' but now at last I see that nothing is impossible, if you are here with me" reminds me very strongly of Two's era as a whole, how it begins with the format of the Doctor intentionally traveling with companions and aiming to help people and fight evils already established (at least by The Moonbase) and then ends with a number of failed attempts to run away from the Time Lords and continue that existence. I guess that casts it in a sadder light - some things are still impossible, even with his friends, and it's naivety to let the good times they've had together convince him they're unstoppable - but since we don't find out about Gallifrey & the threat of the Time Lords until the very end of season 6, I look at Two's whole era as one of traveling very hopefully, with the Doctor believing he can enjoy himself and be free to get as involved as he likes for the first time in his life, even if eventually that turns out to be too good to be true.

5- I actually think I've mentioned this one before, but I don't know that I ever explained it. It's another one from 1966, and the lyrics do feel very early days Jamie-y to me, with him being awed & excited by the things that he sees and sort of wanting to be whatever he needs to be to help his friends, deserve his place on the team, and I suppose, from a shipping perspective, probably catch the Doctor's eye a bit too: "I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire. You are a look in your eye, a dream passing by in the sky. I don't understand, all I need is treat me like a man 'cause I ain't no child, take me like I am. I got to know that I belong to you. Do anything that you want to do. Sing any song that you want me to sing to you."

[chromium7sky]

The Devil wears Armani | chapter 8

A/n: lol resume the fashionista au yay. By the way, it was actually after this part https://xaphrin.tumblr.com/post/189956299511/chromium7sky-asked-for-some-smut-for-her-fic-the by @xaphrin

Please follow #damirae , #devil wears Armani , and #fashionista au tag and enjoy!! ❤️❤️

It's been a while Jon haven't seen his best friend since hes working at daily planet at metropolis. He did send message with him but he seem so busy.

Then what puzzled him is Damian in a sudden asked him how to woo a girl. Woo? Who the hell use that word in this era? Jon chuckled. Ohh, Damian has found a girl!

It's lunch time and he already told to his superior that he's going back early. He use this free time to pay a visit to Damian for a talk. 'Oh, What a good friend he is.' He compliment himself.

As he walk into the building, he walk towards the receptionist. "Hi, Is Mr Wayne in his office?"

"Mr. Wayne currently having meeting but I think it would be over soon." The receptionist answered him.

"Oh? It's okay, I'll just go up there and wait for him." Jon smiled as he went to the elevator.

"But sir... He-" before the receptionist finish her words Jon has already step into the elevator. He press the button that lead to the top floor, to Damian's office.

-------

Raven were tidy up the sample of colors including her tools on wooden desk. She straight up her blouse and jacket, try not to look obvious including her braid.

As she's busying herself, Damian with shirts without his blazer stood behind her and kiss her nape which makes she gasped.

"Damian..." She eyed on him as his hand rested on her waist, facing her.

"What?" He smirked. "Don't tell me you want another?"

Heat start to creep on her cheeks as she remember what happen before. She looked away and nervously tug her loosen hair behind her ear. "Well, I should probably going."

"Ah..." Damian smiled then caress her cheek. He gives is a quick kiss on it then her lips. "Don't get lost, alright?" He teasing her.

Raven blushed then realise his word, she puffed her cheeks. " I'm not a kid, Wayne."

Damian scoffed. " I know." Then he kissed her forehead.

Raven take one last look at him then she walked out from his office.

As she walked out, Damian sighed, feeling full and stupidly happy humming towards his desk to continue his As he looked at the file beside his computer, he saw something.

Her necklace. Must be she forget about it. Damian close his eyes and smiled. "Guess I have to see her again."

---

Raven walked down the alley toward the elevator then she suddenly stop. She realise Her neck felt lighter than before, so she put her hand where it used to be.

Her necklace wasn't with her. She begin to panic and tried to find it in her tool bag.

"Who knows it was so good that you tend to forgot your necklace?"

Raven turn around as she heard a voice.

Damian smirked as he stood behind her with her necklace in his hand.

Raven sighed in relief then walk towards him. " I thought I've lost it." She bit her lips.

"Come here. Let me put it on you."Damian beckon her to come closer. She followed.

As Raven stand closer to him, Damian open the lock of the necklace and put it around her neck.

"Thank you." Raven sheepishly gratitude as her cheek stained with rosy tint.

"Don't I have a reward?"

"Reward?" She absent minded repeat his word.

"For returning your necklace?" He got closer.

Raven bit her lips as she thinking.

Damian smiled as his hand touched her waist bringing them closer.

Raven slowly reached his face with her hands and chastely brushes her lips with his. "Dinner."

"Oh?"

"After I finished your suit, we'll have dinner at my place." She wet her lips.

Damian stared at her then give a quick peck on her lips. " Deal."

----

He can't believe what his saw. Jon was at hidden corner besides the elevator. He witness his grumpy best friend just having a moment with a girl!

Last time he remember when Dami talk about girl is when they were in the same dorm at university. He said that, he might not see her again as soon as he went to the Middle East.

Jon did advice him to find the girl, ask her out , let her know his feeling at least before it's too late but the last thing remember as he send Dami to airport, Dami has her notebook at the lecture hall. He looks solemn though he tries to deny it.

After he got accepted into Daily Planet, a place where both his parents used to work, he started to keep in touch with Wayne Enterprise community project by constantly interview Damian which always end up with no comment whenever he tried to ask about finding new girl.

On a certain occassion, he's in fashion section as he cover one of his colleague who went on maternal leave.

Jon protest at first because it's not his in his 'field' to write fashion inspire but editor said it's for his experience. Jon of course has to accept it to broaden his style in writing.

At some point he has been invited to a fashion competition to write an article about the latest issue about how fashion inspired by innovation based on common problem.

Lenore collection clothline gained his interest as it involved with winter season apparels. Coincidence, the collection has gaining favors from the judges and won the award and Jon were eager to write about it.

By that time, He meet the mysterious designer, Raven, as she collaborate with a newly establish company, AMZ.

Shortly after he wrote about the winning winter apparel collection, Damian contact him about the article.

"Hey, Dami! Haven't heard you since I've interview about Wayne's community project! How are you?" Jon excited as he answer his call.

"Miserable as always."

"About being in middle east?"

"About mother always asking who's the one drawing me on the notebook." Jon can hear Dami's heavy sigh.

"You should be lucky to have secret admirer who has same talent as yours."

"There's a sketch of me, nude on the page."

"... Well, she tried." Jon tried to hold his laughed.

"Anyway, since I'm reading your article about the winner for Fashion award, do you have any information about Raven?"

"As far as I know, she has associate with the company called AMZ." As Jon read his interview before.

"A newly operated company."

"Yeah." As Jon skimming the article. " You are interested in the clothing apparel design right? Perhaps thought for a collab?" His voice slightly higher as he excited.

"It's for the refugee and besides, it's someone from the same class with me."

"Let me guess, fashion drawing?"

It was along pause but Damian make a "hm" confirmation noise.

"Was it that girl?"

Another silent on the phone.

"I knew it!!!" Jon shouted.

"You're not helping, Jon." Damian grumbled.

"And I fucking hate you."

Jon making sound of victory as he figured out Damian's mysterious girl during their study time.

"Don't EVER tell Maya and Colin about this." Damian give a fair warning.

"I don't know, maybe it'll spill accidentally." Jon teasing him.

"I swear I --" the line cut off. Jon looked at the screen then shrugged.

Now, he has seen the girl and he recognise her. Rachel Roth, The head of AMZ company also speculated to be the mysterious rising star designer, Raven.

[thesaucepack-blog]

Hey y'all first post on here I absolutely love the prequel era and the clones and as awesome as The Clone Wars is I've always wished we got to see more of them in live action on the big screen so I've been working on a movie pitch about Commander Cody and his life and legacy after Order 66, especially since he's an awesome character with not a lot of real canon closure. Here's what I've got:

Basic Synopsis: Commander Cody, now in charge of stormtrooper training on Kamino after the fall of the Republic, along with Stormtrooper Boil find an old message from Captain Rex, informing them of his findings concerning the inhibitor chips in their heads. It leads them on a path to the realization of the true evil of the Empire and their role in serving that evil.

_______________________

Plot Basics:

Cody is the head of the training facilities at Kamino. He is in charge of preparing all new human recruits for the Stormtrooper Imperial Army now that the cloning program has stopped. The movie opens with a scene of the men training in a hardcore simulation. They fail, and Cody complains to superiors that the human recruits are inferior to his clone brothers.

After being shut down and scolded/threatened, he walks away from the holocaster angry and a flashback fades in. A Clone War battle. Clones bravely attacking multiple battle droids at once as blaster fire erupts through the sky. He jolts from his sleep suddenly as the flashback ends. Cue monotonous day by day training and rain walks and general sucky position.

Cody and ARC Stormtrooper Boil (not entirely sure if arc troopers were still a thing after the clone wars but my idea is that he was promoted to an ARC trooper near the end of the war and remained that rank as a stormtrooper), who is back from an assignment to help finish training of a new group of ready to go soldiers, talk in a mess hall. Cody is frustrated with the lack of loyalty and patriotism and sheer skill these men possess. Boil agrees and tells him of several men he lost in the last assignment including a few of his last clone brothers because of their badness. Cody knows he lacks a certain amount of loyalty and respect from his men but doesn't care. In his opinion they haven't earned any reason for him to treat them well.

Cody and one of the few remaining ARC Stormtrooper Clones, Boil, launch on a quest to discover the control chips in their brains. It's triggered when Cody stumbles upon a message from Rex after he discovers the secret about the chips himself. The sudden shock of the situation triggers feelings of bitterness in Cody towards the growing Empire and resentment of his actions in taking down the Republic. He eventually convinces Boil of this as well and the two do their best to uncover the full extent of the conspiracy. "Don't you see Boil?! We were used! We were manufactured in a labratory for a war that was over from the beginning and we didn't even know it. The Separatists may have lost the war but look at us now. Look at The Empire. The Republic lost too. We're fighting for a cause that no longer exists."

They manage to sneak into a medical facility and remove their chips. Immediately after removing them all of Cody's feelings towards his old Jedi general come flooding back. He collapses to the floor overwhelmed with grief.

_______________________

The movie will follow along two plotlines, Cody and Boils search for the truth about the Empire and the clones part in it's creation, and several flashbacks showing different parts of Cody's life; his training with ARC Trooper 17, Rex, and other clone commanders, where he first met Obi-Wan and their bond was born; the battle where he gained his scar; and several of him on a specially recruited task force of clones to help Vader hunt down remaining Jedi. It'll show his initial reactions after ordering the death of Kenobi and how him and other clones are no longer haunted by the nightmares of the potential future like Tup and Fives (which I believe are nightmares of order 66 caused by the chips in their heads), but nightmares of what's happened, and the deaths and betrayals that have occurred by their hands. Meanwhile in the present Cody and Boil discover the true nature of everything that has occurred and what they've done, who they've killed, the terrible things they've been forced to do, and immediately begin to plan revenge. They sabotage the base and provide a way for the rebels to launch their attack on Kamino that's been pictured in video games before. They're discovered whole doing so, and Boil gives his life defending Cody from the men they trained together so Cody can pull the last switch and give the rebellion a way in. As the building around him comes crashing down, Cody surveys the scene calmly, at peace for the first time in his life. "For the Republic. For the General. For my brothers."

Roll credits

[skriaki]

TOP 10 NINTENDO SWITCH GAMES 2019 - my arbitrary list!

Sometimes it's good to be proven wrong. I was pretty sceptical when the Switch was first announced, as it didn't seem too different from the Wii U's gamepad. Then I spent two years watching Nintendo enjoy a complete reversal of fortune, to the point of potentially amassing a more compelling library than Sony's or Microsoft's consoles. So that's how I quite suddenly found myself buying a Switch in October 2019, after having resisted the PS4 and Xbone for five whole years, and my free time has since been dominated by this little machine that defied the odds.

Some of Nintendo's business decisions can still seem inexplicable, but releasing a powerful handheld console that can also be docked with a TV at a moment's notice has proved to be an inspired idea, rather than the gimmick the Wii U's gamepad mostly turned out to be. And along with Nintendo's dependable series of top-notch exclusives, the Switch has enjoyed much better third-party support, which is how I ended up buying Dark Souls for the fourth bloody time just because the option to play it portably was too tempting to resist.

The Switch is the first console I've bought since the PS3 and for all Nintendo's quirks, there's a reason the Switch has dominated Christmas wishlists for three years running. Games like Super Mario Odyssey feel like full-size adventures that just happen to have a portable option, as opposed to handheld games you can also play on the big screen. This is the first year in a long while that I've actually played enough topical titles to justify a "games of the year" list, even if my recent Nintendo bias is pretty blatant.

So with that caveat in mind, and in no particular order, here's my entirely subjective list of the best Nintendo Switch games of 2019.

Luigi's Mansion 3

This is a franchise I'd always been curious about and can finally have an opinion on. The process of going from floor to floor of the hotel hoovering up ghosts and solving puzzles is pretty straightforward, but Luigi's Mansion 3 has so much polish and personality crammed into the cartridge. Luigi is immediately lovable as a determined coward, and each level has a wildly different theme that's realised with extravagant audio and visual flair, so progress always feels rewarding. Though this isn't true horror by any means, there can be an unsettling atmosphere and some of the bosses are pretty freaky. I officially love this oddball franchise and am desperate for a chance to play the story again in co-op. Unquestionably a first-class exclusive.

Doom (Switch port)

Not to be confused with the impressive Switch version of Doom 2016, this is the iconic Doom made cheap and accessible. While purists may take issue with some minor technical deviations, this is the first time I've got most of the way through Doom because the portability and *glorious* true dual-stick control makes this easily my favourite version. There's even a cheat menu for when I just want to mindlessly punch hell beasts. The main thing that ages Doom is its maze-like structure, but playing it casually experience alleviates that frustration somewhat. At a grand total of four pounds, this is a BFB (big fucking bargain).

Untitled Goose Game

You know a game is good when the only asterisk I put on my recommendation is that it *may* be overpriced. Untitled Goose Game took the internet by storm this year because it's the quintessential indie game: cute, simple and with anti-authoritarian undertones. As a horrible goose, it's your mission to cause havoc in an unsuspecting English village, interacting with people and objects to cause chain reactions of chaos. Some of the puzzle solutions are maybe a bit obscure, but 90% of the time just messing around with everything in the area will lead to a solution. Untitled Goose Game makes up for its brevity with sheer comedic charm, feeling much better-designed than a "lul so random" affair like Goat Simulator. A honking good time.

Terraria (Switch port)

I have spent literally hundreds of hours on the PC version of Terraria, so when I was broke after buying my Switch the new Terraria port was an obvious cost-effective choice. While the controls aren't as precise, the amount of time spent mining and sorting through loot makes this a great handheld experience. I can't comment on the multiplayer options but few games represent such a sheer value for money, as there's always a new cave to explore or a new boss to overcome. Time has been kind to this 2011 classic, grind notwithstanding.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

While I personally enjoyed the original Yooka-Laylee, it was definitely flawed and I never seriously expected to see a sequel. But Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair launched quite abruptly and did a pretty spectacular job of upstaging its predecessor. All the previous game's half-baked feel has been replaced with clever design touches, like the equippable tonics which grant helpful abilities at the cost of a currency penalty. The titular Lair is actually the final level and available to throw yourself at right from the beginning, but beating it without first obtaining more hitpoints by completing other stages is incredibly hard, which is a great way to incentivize progress without denying more confident players the option of beating the game earlier if they can meet the challenge. Impossible Lair might be this year's biggest surprise, and despite a modest budget I think it's worthy of comparison to excellent 2D platformers like Rayman Legends. Just don't expect to defeat Capital B on your first attempt.

A Hat In Time (Switch port)

I recently reviewed A Hat In Time but at the risk of repeating myself, it's one of the most charming games of the last few years and an incredibly impressive crowdfunded achievement. Mario's offerings may be a grander technical feat, but A Hat In Time is a fast and fabulous journey through a series of weird and wonderful worlds that all feel distinct in content and tone. It's very openly inspired by GameCube-era platformers like Mario Sunshine and Psychonauts and it easily scratches that itch. Simply one of the best original platformers of this generation, and I defy you not to love Hat Kid's cheeky antics.

Spyro Reignited Trilogy (Switch port)

As someone who thinks the original Spyro trilogy holds up better than most early 3D games, I'd have actually preferred a simple port rather than a full remake, but The Reignited Trilogy is honestly impeccable. The updated visuals are gorgeous while maintaining the general style of those old, jaggy models, and very little of the gameplay or content has changed except for sensible updates like the ability to immediately warp between every level you've visited. Having full dual-analogue control is also an absolute godsend even for a PS1 veteran like me. Though Spyro may seem a bit basic these days when faced with modern platformer marvels, the Reignited Trilogy makes these old favourites accessible again at a generous price point.

Ring Fit Adventure

Yes, I have a Wii kicking around in a box somewhere. No, Wii Fit never held my attention as anything more than a curiosity. Ring Fit Adventure, meanwhile, is limited only by my cholesterol-encrusted heart and dislike of excessive showering. This is an honest-to-goodness attempt at making an RPG out of a workout toy, and the amount of polish put into the game's presentation and hardware implementation is pretty remarkable. Levels involve jogging on the spot and squeezing the ring accessory to collect goodies and overcome obstacles, and periodically you'll engage in turn-based combat where you use a custom selection of exercise moves to deal damage. It's a fantastic idea pulled off much more elegantly than it sounds. The ring accessory unfortunately makes this quite an expensive game, so it'll take a lot of regular use to get your money's worth, but I can honestly (and surprisingly) say that exercise suddenly becomes more compelling when it's presented as a light RPG adventure with anthropomorphic gym equipment encouraging you to take breaks and drink plenty of water.

Pokémon Sword/Shield

Disclaimer: I can only give my impressions from 25 hours of playing Pokémon Shield, so this is DEFINITELY not a full review. That being said, this is still an easy recommendation to existing Pokemaniacs and a good starting point for any new acolytes. While the core formula hasn't evolved (har har) much since the very first Pokemon, Sword and Shield still has a number of modern quality of life improvements that make previous generations show their age. I've had so much fun building a core crew of cute and/or badass 'mons in a weird Nintendo version of Britain, and the online features combine with a VASTLY improved random encounter system to make grinding far less of a concern. The wild area takes some getting used to, but it's satisfying to come back and capture the huge Onyx you had to run away from a few hours before. Even if Pokémon Sword/Shield has some technical blemishes and could have pushed the series further in some regards, it's still easy to see why this franchise has maintained such a beloved status for so long.

Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-mars-tered (Switch port)

Along with Dark Souls, Red Faction was a game I never even knew I needed on the go, but now I've got it I can't imagine ever going back. A cult classic due to its amazing destruction physics, Red Faction sees you leading a proletariat revolution on Mars, literally tearing down corporate monuments to free the working class from systematic oppression. The open world is a bit claustrophobic and the shooting isn't exactly mind-blowing, but there's a reason I've beaten Red Faction every couple of years ever since its original 2009 release. The Switch port does the game justice and if you set the difficulty to easy then this is one of the best rage-venting experiences money can buy. So yes, I recommend getting your ass to Mars.

[cloudiness]

If I go back to 2010, the first few things that I've ever posted on here were Supernatural related, my god, one of the mainly reasons why I joined Tumblr was to follow the fandom that was moving here from LJ. It's been 9 years, I don't watch the show anymore, haven't watched it probably since 2013, I still follow the cast and all the cons always bring lots of joy and lovely posts on my dashboard. I still read fanfictions whenever I feel like it and, somehow, I can still follow the storyline without even watching it because, you know, on tumblr SPN is everywhere.

Since the beginning of my 'internet days' SPN has always been present in one way or another and I have to say that this really feels like the end of an era.

To all of you that have been there since the very begging, to those who, like me, stopped watching but still hold it dear to their heart and also to the ones who are now celebrating shamelessly that the show has come to an end because "it was supposed to end 10 seasons ago" but used to love it, I want to say: thank you; you all filled, and still fill, this site and others with gifs, fanarts, fanfics, fanvideos, recording of hours of panels, tons of edits and other amazing stuff, so much talent and creativity expressed in infinite ways! You, along with the show, filled hours and hours of my teenage years with joy, it's been great and I have a feeling it'll still be for many years to come.