#but it's basically empty and under a pseudonym

[nyancrimew]

can I add you on linkedin :3

i am not on linkedin, if you found someone claiming to be me on linkedin that either isn't me or i forgot i made one

[kalinara]

The thing about Scott and Nathan that will always be funny to me is that ultimately the whole "losing your child at a young age and not meeting them again until they're adults" is not a terribly rare beat in comics.

It's, in fact, incredibly common. Logan's got that beat with Akihiro. Raven's got it with Kurt. Xavier with David...maybe, to be honest, I've never been sure when Xavier first became aware of David's existence. I'll have to track down those comics.

Hell, Magneto managed to RAISE his kids and only learn they're actually his kids after they reach adulthood. Whereupon they became not his kids. Sort of. But then he got another adult kid. Whatever.

The thing that's funny about Scott though is that he goes through that plot beat, has the requisite angst about not being able to raise his kid and missing out on most of his childhood, and then promptly decides "okay, well, I'm going to keep raising this fifty year old man anyway."

It's subtly different from the other examples, I think. Akihiro was willing to acknowledge Logan as his father, but they were enemies for a long time. And while there is some cautious acceptance now, they're still not really a traditional father-and-son. Kurt acknowledges Raven and even tries to support her at times, but Raven's not the most maternal at the best of times. The less said about Xavier's fuck ups the better.

The hilarious thing about Scott and Nathan is that they actually do act like father and son. And eventually, that starts to make sense. Scott and Jean did, after all, raise Nathan for the first ten years of his life, albeit under pseudonyms and in borrowed bodies. And then, much later, they got to raise him for maybe a year more on Krakoa?

But those are things that get established later on. And Nathan's spent like thirty-to-forty years after that basically on his own. But for whatever reason, he sees this perpetually twenty-something dude insist on acting like his dad, and inviting him to family dinner and giving him Christmas presents and shit like that, and just kind of goes "yeah, okay. You're my dad now."

And it even extends to Rachel and Nate Grey. Because really, Rachel isn't their daughter. She's the daughter of a long dead alternate future version of Scott and Jean. She's under no obligation to go along with Scott's awkward attempts at fatherhood. And he really has no business trying to be a dad to someone who at various times is either his own age (circa X-Factor) or only a few years younger (current interpretation.) But nope, Rachel's their daughter. And she goes along with it, even when she's mad at him during the Emma years.

Nate Grey is even more bizarre, since he's Sinister's test tube baby from a parallel universe where Scott and Jean didn't even meet until adulthood. (Though it did seem like they might be getting somewhere toward the end.) But he's invited to family dinner too. And while he's not specifically named, I think it's important to note that there are THREE rooms in the kids' section of the Summer House. Not two.

Room number 17 is listed as "empty". But Scott's an organized sort of guy, if he built three rooms in the kids' section, then he meant three rooms.

(Also notice that there's an empty room in the brothers' section too. Maybe if Adam-X wasn't busy in the Mojo-verse, he'd have had a place to stay too?)

It's just funny to me. Other characters meet their kids as adults and are like "okay, well, we've missed so much time and opportunity, we'll have to cautiously find our way forward as adults". Scott Summers is like "Okay, well, you're my kids, so dinner's at six, bedtime's at eleven, and we'll talk about your homework later."

[femboycatofmystery]

I Love Raine Whispers

Let me start this post about Raine Whispers by affirming my love of Double Trouble.

Are they a paragon of unproblematic representation? Hell no. Do I adore them? You bet your ass I do, for two reasons: first, despite being a shapeshifting trickster and arguably a villain who inarguably relies on deceit, when they appeared, they were a breath of literally any air in a media landscape which, regardless of whether we're even talking about kids' shows, was basically empty of non-binary representation. This can hardly be overstated: non-binary representation has been so scarce that Double Trouble pretty much literally revealed my non-binary-ness to me, single-handedly. Second, sort of related, for all their sus vibes, Double Trouble absolutely works as a power fantasy for schlubby, inglamorous enbies like yours truly, all while being important to the plot, delivering a necessary if painful vibe check around which the entire next season pivots, and looking absolutely devastating in a jumpsuit. Don't get it twisted: I fucking love Double Trouble and I WILL fight you.

But this is a post about Raine, aka best Owl Houseian.

Raine Whispers is, for one thing, everything Double Trouble wasn't. Unambiguously with the good guys. Unique, interesting powers attained through study and cleverness. Cool Teacher Vibe. Sexy, but absolutely in an aspirational way rather than, uh, y'know, what DT's doing. They are undeniably a core cast member, including, nay, especially in the last, shortened season.

If DT was a breath of literally any air, Raine Whispers is what it felt like when the Fright Zone suddenly turned into a goddamn alpine meadow. They're transcendental. Double Trouble was enjoyable and fun to have around, but Raine… Raine made me feel invested in a way I can hardly express. It's because of them that I am starting to more seriously contemplate really starting to stamp those they/them pronouns on my stationary if you get my drift.

From the minute they're introduced, Raine becomes a chord in the tapestry of the Owl House that we didn't know we'd been missing, and I gotta say, in terms of late-introduced characters, the Owl Crew did an incredible job of making them feel like they'd been there all along, it's just the camera wasn't pointing at them. Lovely. They're introduced along with Bardic Magic, which is itself given a chance to really shine as this weird, bigger-than-it-looks branch of magic that pools up and spills over into the world from everywhere, it's a branch of magic that proves what an ill-fitting straightjacket the Coven system is by just sort of being something that feels like it transcends the divisions artificially erected between things and-- you get it, Bard Magic might not be an intentional metaphor, but it sure does resonate.

Raine is also a double agent, but unlike Double Trouble, the metaphor is way more subtle, and much better for it. Raine is a double agent because the powers that be just assume they're part of the system, and then because they assume they've tamed them. Raine persists, hiding in plain sight because nobody wants to see them. And they don't like it, but they know they can use it.

Raine is also an excellent foil for Eda. They don't dislike Eda's rebelliousness, chaotic impulsiveness, or sass, in fact they love them, but every one of those things are things that Raine exhibits quietly. They rebel under a pseudonym. They plan, but plan craziness. They have the capacity for sass, but deliver it with subtlety and wit, in a way that Eda might be able to do if she wanted to, but probably never will. (This is part of why they fit so perfectly into the ensemble cast: they are a great pair for one of the most important characters in the show.)

I could also yell about how aggressively non-binary the cast gets in season 3, but even knowing what was to come, The Owl House knocked the first one out of the park. Raine Whispers is incredible, and I am changed for having them in my media universe. Just. Bravo, crew. Bravo.

[whoa-its-dani]

Discussing: Everywhere at the End of Time (Part 1)

whoa-its-dani discusses Everywhere at the End of Time.

[ Masterpost ] [ Part 2 ➡ ]

⛔ CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of dementia, illness, death, age and aging, as well as spoilers for Everywhere at the End of Time. ⛔

This post will discuss what Everywhere at the End of Time is, what dementia is, how I came across it, and whether or not you should listen to it yourself. I will discuss each stage individually in sequel posts.

This first post is very long, as I wanted to cover a lot. There’s a lot under the “Keep Reading”.

What is Everywhere at the End of Time?

“Everywhere at the End of Time” (abbreviated as EATEOT for brevity) is a six and a half hour long musical art piece by Leyland Kirby, under the pseudonym The Caretaker, depicting the decline of the memory of someone with dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease. It consists of 6 albums, each getting progressively longer and more distorted. The albums were released 6 months apart, first releasing in 2016 and finishing in 2019.

Each album uses samples from 1920s-1940s ballroom, big band, and jazz music, from old records that Leyland Kirby owns. They loop, degrading and distorting, with a myriad of effects applied to them. Each piece contains little to no lyrical content, aside from one of the final pieces (which I will talk about when I get to it). Some pieces are mere minutes long, others up to ten. The pieces are less music and more ambience or noise, especially in the later stages (which works perfectly to portray dementia). Some pieces may give you headaches, or be annoying to listen to, as they are looping, droning “songs”.

The album uses abstract artwork made by Leyland Kirby’s friend, Ivan Seal, for it’s covers. Seal has made artwork for many of Kirby’s albums, including their alternative covers.

Who is the Caretaker? Who is Leyland Kirby?

Leyland James Kirby is an English musical artist who has released many albums since the 1990s, usually under pseudonyms. One of the pseudonyms he donned was “The Caretaker”. Eventually, however, The Caretaker became a character in a project focused around memory and it’s loss. Albums such as “Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia”, “Additional Amnesiac Memories”, and “Persistent Repetition of Phrases“ focus on amnesia, eventually culminating in a fascination for memory loss over time.

Based on a study regarding people with Alzheimer's being able to remember music they listened to when they were younger, Kirby (as The Caretaker) released “An Empty Bliss Beyond This World”, which follows the mind of a person who tries to remember their life using broken sounds and samples of music. Some songs from this album were modified, sampled, or reused in EATEOT. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World serves as a prequel or proof of concept for what EATEOT would be.

The Caretaker, as a project and a character, was “given dementia” and retired, with EATEOT being one of the last albums Kirby would create using it. The album is meant to be the Caretaker character developing dementia, with the songs being a look into his (the character’s) mind. Leyland Kirby himself does not have dementia or Alzheimer’s at the time this post is being written.

I highly recommend “’The Caretaker’ Iceberg, Explained” by ookiiani for more information on Leyland Kirby, The Caretaker (as a pseudonym and a character), and his work.

There’s a Wikipedia article discussing Everywhere at the End of Time, with lots more info than I can fit here. There’s also a fandom wiki, The Caretaker Wiki, which helped me a lot in gathering info for each stage’s samples! There’s another iceberg video, focused on EATEOT, by Guineax, that’s pretty good, too!

What is Dementia? What is Alzheimer’s Disease?

Dementia is a set of symptoms that manifest in the brain following brain damage, injury, and/or onset of disease. Symptoms include: progressive impairments to memory, thinking, and behavior, which negatively impact a person's ability to function and carry out basic everyday activities; as well as disruption in thought patterns, with the most common symptoms including emotional issues, difficulties with language, and decreased motivation. Dementia is a sort of umbrella term, as there are many causes of it.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause for dementia, with 60-70% of dementia related to it. Symptoms can include problems with language, disorientation (including easily getting lost), mood swings, emotional and behavioral issues, loss of motivation, and self-neglect. Alzheimer’s has no cure, very little effective treatment, and always leads to death.

There’s limited understanding of what causes Alzheimer’s, though some risk factors are known, such as: an allele of APOE, head injuries, and clinical depression. Alzheimer’s tends to affect women more than men, but men have a less favorable survival prognosis than women.

Alzheimer's is believed to occur when abnormal amounts of amyloid beta, (accumulating outside of the cells as amyloid plaques) and tau proteins, (accumulating inside of the cells as neurofibrillary tangles) form in the brain affecting the functioning and connectivity of neurons, resulting in a progressive loss of brain function. Here’s a good Vsauce video discussing it.

Some fans of EATEOT have pointed out that dementia is typically described as having 7 stages, while the album itself only has 6. However, dementia is often described in 4 stages that show a pattern of progressive cognitive and functional impairment. The 7 stage dementia scale comes from the Global Deterioration Scale for Assessment of Primary Degenerative Dementia (GDS or Reisberg Scale). Using the GDS (which more accurately identifies each stage of the disease progression), a more detailed course is described in 7 stages, with stage 7 being the final stage.

Since the first stage of dementia, in any scale, usually doesn’t see any symptoms, the “stage 1″ album could be the original samples used.

How I learned about Everywhere at the End of Time:

I was first introduced to EATEOT in July of 2021, via a Youtube video by That Dane. It was “Disturbing Sounds Iceberg Explained - First Half”. He discusses EATEOT at the 22:43 mark. (I highly doubt he’s actually listened to EATEOT in full (or even half of it), based on what he says about it.)

That Dane’s comments about EATEOT were the only info I had about it. I’d seen it pop up on my Youtube home page, but other than that, I was blissfully unaware. I don’t use Twitter, Istagram, or TikTok, so I completely missed the whole EATEOT trend. (Yeah, I’m aware of the rock I’m living under...)

I put off listening to it, as I thought it was just some pretentious art piece, nothing worth 6 hours of my life. That changed on August 26th, 2021. I was on my way with my sister to get our second COVID shot, when my father (who’s driving us) gets a call from our grandmother. Our great-grandmother, who’s been in a nursing home for the past 2-3 years, wasn’t doing well. We go about our day, a little worried (who wouldn’t be?), planning to visit her the next day. The home said she might not make it to the end of the week.

She died the next day. We got a call that morning that she had declined severely and they didn’t think she’d make it to the end of the day. The family gathered, and we went to see her. Some of us stayed at the home (in the parking lot) and a few hours after we got there, she died. I saw her body after she died, and then we went home, leaving her sons (my uncles) to handle the funeral arrangements.

She had dementia of some sort. I’m not certain of what all she had, I never knew her medical history. But having learned what I have about Alzheimer’s and dementia, I can see she had something similar. All of the symptoms were there. It’s painful to think about. I didn’t visit her often in the home, mostly due to COVID.

The day we first got the news, I listened to EATEOT. I didn’t listen to every song, skipped a few, but I listened nonetheless. It was a bad idea. Of course, during the day, it had no effect on me. Saddening? Yes. Depressing? Absolutely. But it was during that night when it really fucked me up. I had one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had, and I nearly took my own life. Luckily, I was able to get help from my mother, so I’m still here. The week following, I tried anything and everything to get it out of my head. I couldn’t sleep at night. I dreaded the dark. I needed a weighted blanket to sleep at all. It’s mind-boggling to me how it’s affected me, and I’ll eventually write a post focusing specifically on that, after I finish this series. But let’s just say that this is the first time music has ever fucked me up.

Now you may be wondering: if if fucked you up so badly, badly enough to where you couldn’t sleep at night, badly enough to where you almost killed yourself... why are you making a series talking about it???

And that’s a good question!

I don’t fucking know! I guess I just want to explore it more to dismantle the fear inside of me. Expose myself to it now that I have better coping mechanisms in place to deal with it. Education eradicates fear for a lot of things for me, so I’m hoping this will help. Also, just talking about it is good for me.

Trust me, if things get bad again, I’ll stop. I won’t force myself to finish this if it hurts me. But right now, I think I’m ok.

Should YOU listen to it?

It’s ultimately up to you. It’s a long journey, and you might not feel the same impact as I (and others) have. And that’s ok! Not everyone has to like EATEOT.

Earbuds, headphones, and speakers all provide a unique, different listening experience. Depending on the quality of your earbuds/headphones/speakers, the album will sound different. You’ll pick up different things depending on what you use to listen to the albums. I used computer speakers.

⚠ Here are some things to consider before listening to it yourself: ⚠

Don’t listen to it if you’re faint of heart, sensitive, have a fear of age / forgetting / sickness / disease / death, or you’re mentally or emotionally in a bad place.

Don’t listen to it if you have someone currently dying of old age / dementia / Alzheimer’s / etc.

Don’t listen to it all at once, give yourself breaks.

Don’t listen to it in the dark, in the evening, or at night. And don’t listen to it alone.

Don’t listen to it in the same place you sleep. Sleep in a room? Listen to it in the kitchen or living room.

Don’t listen under the influence. Don’t listen to it drunk or high. Do not listen while / after consuming alcohol, while / after smoking weed, while / after taking hallucinogens, or while / after taking any other kind of drug.

Don’t listen while falling asleep or napping.

If you can’t handle it, don’t force yourself. Please.

Well... here’s hoping I’ve covered everything here. If you notice anything funky (or incorrect!), please send me an ask and I’ll try to fix it!

In part 2 of this series, I will discuss, in detail, Stage 1 of the album, as well as share my thoughts and opinions of it. Thank you for reading!

[ Masterpost ] [ Part 2 ➡ ]

[garbagequeer]

Do you have any favourite destiel fanfictions?

i gotta be honest here and make it clear that my attention span has been shot to shit lately so much of what ive read these days ive basically skimmed and jumped aroud different parts and stuff AND im a sucker for domesticity also i havent gone back to check out whatever i have bookmarked from 500 years ago so. that said i really liked:

some thoughts you have while falling (1500 words) literally what it says on the tin. cas centric as in this is just cas’s thoughts but like is it not about a gay little angel falling and thinking about how it is brave to have a human life to age to remember and to go to the grocery store

to change the things we can (2k) 15x18 fix it. what if... you made a deal w the empty and i didnt let it take you... and i did this through the world’s weirdest hug. haha jk..unless

conversations with the living (3500 words) 15x18 fix it dean and sam talk about The Childhood Trauma of it all and dean accepts love 

a love of all things that grow (5k) cas starts a garden and dean builds him shit and cas is like. well he must not like me very much like. girl he MADE you a little bench just big enough for 2 hello?? i love it when it’s busy at the secret underground bunker and the gay angel gets insecure

occursus (5k) dean and cas discuss the handprint and i am so endeared by cas here cause thats just dean girl shit

a real chore (5k) human cas dean has to like. learn not to be overbearing and let people help him out and handle their own lives. may we all project

bron-yr-aur (5k) missing scenes for that time dean and jack went fishing. not dean/cas centric but literally they are coparenting a little guy and it’s the sweetest shit imo

a river leads you home (10k) dean comes back home after the shit w michael w cas’s handprint from 2008 back on his shoulder and his scar from michael on the other. please look away from my personal feelings about dean’s possession arc

cuckoo and nest (10k) established relationship. dean is particular about his space. cas takes it to mean he’s not welcome to stay and dean is afraid he’ll leave cause that’s just what they do theyre just so dumb

under the same sun (14k) finale heaven fix it but dean and charlie get to hang out and talk about cas so dean can begin to get his head out of his ass. cas and dean do household chores in literal actual heaven like. for the hell of it 

the family business (15k) sometimes we must indulge in post finale fix it fics where dean kills his father

crazy diamonds (25k) 2008 dean and 2018 who is in a relationship w cas swap places. wish 2008 cas (who is not taking it well at all obviously) was in this more but otherwise a good time

on drowning (29k) human cas has a near death experience yay

where the weeds take root (30k) THEY ARE LIVING TOGETHER IN SOME FARMHOUSE??? CAS WANTS TO RAISE CHICKENS LIKE. THATS WHAT I THOUGHT YOUD SAY YOU GAY FUCKING ANGEL...

and this your living kiss (57k) i usually hate aus but this is THE au. basically dean used to be a published poet under a pseudonym and cas is a lit professor whose poetry class dean decides to attend (no weird teacher/student dynamics it’s all very normal). draws parallels to dean and cas’s arcs in canon in a great way through teaching and writing tbh and dean’s complicated relationship with his dead piece of shit dad is depicted really well too

im probably forgetting some but well. look at me posting destiel fic recs in 2020 who would’ve thought? not me!

[shemakesmusic-uk]

Hiatus Kaiyote share new song ‘Canopic Jar’

Hiatus Kaiyote share a new single ‘Canopic Jar’ including a hypnotizing 32 second introduction titled ‘Journey To The Crystal Tomb’. ‘Canopic Jar’ is a haunting, cyclical track exploring the descent into the darker corners of the mind. ‘Canopic Jar’ is their first new music since the acclaimed release of the album Mood Valiant in June. Singer Nai Palm is a long-time lover of Halloween inspired music, as she explains in the song’s meaning… “A canopic jar is an ancient artifact from Egypt. When they preserved the body through mummification for the afterlife, the organs were contained in a canopic jar.  I used this image of preserving something in this lifetime to be accessed in another as a metaphor for an unobtainable relationship, to re-appear throughout the ages because circumstances won’t allow it this time around. “I am obsessed with Halloween playlists, and keeping in the vein of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s ‘Feast of the Mau Mau’, and our own ‘Swamp Thing’, we wanted to explore the spooky thematics in how we produced the song. There are real wolves that I recorded after visiting a wolf sanctuary in Upstate New York. Bender added harrowing cello recorded in an empty water tank, Simon went full Phantom of the Opera organ-style, and Perrin's drum tones sound like a werewolf-gorilla hybrid smashing through a cityscape.  We basically like to create tiny sonic movies with each song we make. “Ironically, the person the song was written about is now my partner, and he added the Vincent Price villain laugh at the end of the song under the pseudonym Eddy Knife Hands, which kinda wraps the witchy sonic spell up nicely, haha.”

Hiatus Kaiyote · Canopic Jar

Photo credit: Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore

[fremedon]

It’s almost Yuletide! This will be my 18th Yuletide! My first Yuletide story will be old enough to vote this year and I have some mixed feelings about that! But also I have never missed or defaulted on a Yuletide since, and I have to say I feel pretty proud of that. I am still pretty far down the Les Misérables rabbit hole (speaking of which, it is not too late to propose programming for Barricades!), and unsurprisingly all the fandoms I'm nominating/requesting this year are set in July Monarchy France--Les Mis canon era: Petit-Cénacle RPF, Champavert: Contes Cruelles | Champavert: Immoral Tales - Pétrus Borel, and Les Enfants du Paradis | Children of Paradise. Petit-Cénacle RPF The Petit-Cénacle was a French Romantic salon, slightly younger and considerably more politically radical than the Cénacle centered on Hugo and Dumas; it included painters and sculptors as well as writers and critics, and most of its members at least dabbled in both written and visual arts. Its best-known members today are Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Pétrus Borel (the Lycanthrope)--the last two are thinly fictionalized in Les Misérables as Jean Prouvaire and Bahorel. (It's debatable how much Grantaire owes to Gautier but it's probably a nonzero amount.) The group coalesced around Borel and Nerval as the organizers of the Battle of Hernani--a fight between Romantics and classicists at the premiere of Victor Hugo's play Hernani in 1830. Most theater productions at this time had claques--groups of paid supporters of a show or an actor, who were planted in the audience to drum up applause. For Hernani--the first Romantic work staged at the prestigious Comédie-Français, which broke classical norms so thoroughly that it no longer seems at all transgressive--Hugo and the theater management decided they were going to need more than just a claque. They recruited a few of Hugo's fans--Gautier was so star-struck he had to be physically hauled up the stairs to Hugo's apartment--to stage An Event. The fans recruited their friends. They showed up in cosplay, with the play already memorized and callback lines devised. It was basically the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its day. It almost immediately turned into an actual fight, with fists and projectiles flying. And it made Hernani the hottest ticket in Paris. This is the group's origin story, and they pretty much spent their lives living up to it. They were every bit as extra as you would expect--Nerval allegedly walked a lobster on a leash in the Champs-Elyseés, explaining that "it knows the secrets of the deep, and it does not bark"--but they also stayed friends all their lives, often living together, supporting each other through poverty and mental illness and absurd political upheaval. I'm nominating Pétrus Borel | Le Lycanthrope, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Philothée O’Neddy; you could nominate other people like Jehan Duseigneur, Celestin Nanteuil, or the Deverias, or associates of the group like Dumas and Hugo. The Canon Gautier's History of Romanticism covers the early days of the group and the Battle of Hernani in some detail. (There is also a 2002 French TV movie, La bataille d'Hernani, which is charming and pretty accurate; hit me up if you want a copy.) Other than that--this crowd wrote a lot, and they're all very present in their work--even in their fiction, which is shockingly modern in a ton of ways. For Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin has a lot of genderfeels, surprisingly literal landscape porn, and a fursuit sex scene in chapter two. If you want Nerval's works in English, you might be limited to dead-tree versions, but I highly, highly recommend The Salt Smugglers, a work of metafiction that answers the question, "What if The Princess Bride had been written in 1850 specifically to troll the press censorship laws of Prince President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte?" Borel's experimental short story collection Champavert has a new and very good English translation by Brian Stableford and is also my next fandom :D. Champavert: Contes Immoraux | Champavert: Immoral Tales - Pétrus Borel Last year I requested Borel RPF but I decided this book was unfanficcable. This year, I am going to have a little more faith in the Yuletide community. Champavert, available in ebook and dead tree form, is a weird as hell little book and probably the best thing I read last year. It's an experimental short story collection from 1830. Someone on one of my Les Mis Discords described it as "a collection of gothic creepypasta, but the author is constantly clanging pots and pans together and going 'JUST IN CASE you didn't notice, the real horror was colonialism and misogyny all along and i'm very angry about it!'" And, yeah, pretty much that, with added metafictional weirdness, intense nerding about architecture and regional languages, and the absolute delight that is Borel's righteously ebullient voice. Borel wrote for a couple of years under the name of The Lycanthrope, and though he kills the alter ego in this book, the name stuck, and would continue to be used by friends and enemies alike all his life. Pretty much everyone who met Pétrus agreed that 1) he was just ungodly hot; 2) he was probably a werewolf, sure, that makes sense; and 3) he was definitely older than he claimed to be, possibly by centuries, possibly just immortal, who knows. But, like I said, he kills the alter ego in this book: it begins with an introduction announcing that "Pétrus Borel" has been a pseudonym all along, that the Lycanthrope's real name is Champavert--and that the Lycanthrope is dead and these are his posthumous papers, compiled by an unnamed editor; the papers include some of Borel's actual poems and letters, published under his own name. The final story in the collection is called "Champavert, The Lycanthrope," and is situated as an autobiographical story, following a collection of fictional tales--which share thematic elements and, in the frame of the book, start to look like "Champavert"'s attempts to use fiction to come to terms with events of his own life. And that's probably an oversimplification; this is a dense little book and it's doing a lot. The subtitle is Contes Immoraux. It's part of a genre of "contes cruelles" (and, content note for. Um. A lot), but it's never gratuitously cruel--it's very consciously interrogating the idea of the moral story, and what sort of morality is encoded in fables, and what it means to set a story where people get what they deserve in an unjust world where that's rarely the case. I'm nominating the unnamed editor, Champavert, his friend Jean-Louis from the introduction and the final story, and Flava from the final story; you could also nominate characters from the explicitly fictional stories. Les Enfants du Paradis | Children of Paradise This is a film made between 1943 and 1945 in Vichy and Occupied France and set...somewhere?...around the July Revolution, probably, I'll get into that :D. There's a DVD in print from Criterion and quite possibly available through your local library system. (And it's streaming on Amazon Prime and the Criterion Channel.) It's beautifully filmed, with gorgeous sets and costumes and a truly unbelievable number of extras, and some fantastic pantomime scenes. (On stage and off; there's a scene where a henchman attempts to publicly humiliate a mime, and it goes about as well as you would expect.) "Paradise," in the title, is the equivalent of "the gods" in English--the cheap seats in the topmost tier of a theater. It's set in and around the theaters of the Boulevard du Temple--the area called the Boulevard du Crime, not for the pickpockets outside the theaters but for the content of the melodramas inside them. The story follows a woman called Garance, after the flower (red madder), a grisette turned artists' model turned sideshow girl turned actress turned courtesan, and four men who love her, some of whom she loves, all of whom ultimately fail to connect with her in the way she needs or wants or can live with. This sounds like a setup for some slut-shaming garbage. It's not--Garance is a person, with interiority, and the story never blames her for what other people project onto her. Of those four men, one is a fictional count and the other three are heavily fictionalized real people: the actor Frédérick Lemaître, the mime Baptiste Deburau, and the celebrity criminal Lacenaire. Everyone in this story is performing for an audience, pretty much constantly, onstage or off: reflexively, or deliberately, or compulsively. Garance's survival skill is to reflect back to people what they want to see of themselves. She never lies, but she shows very different parts of herself to different people. We get the impression that there are aspects of herself she doesn't have much access to without someone else to show them to. Frédérick is also a mirror, in a way that makes him and Garance good as friends and terrible as lovers--an empty hall of mirrors. He's always playing a part--the libertine, the artist, the lover--and mining his actual life and emotions for the sake of his art. Baptiste channels his life into his art as well, but without any deliberation or artifice--everything goes into the character, unfiltered. It makes him a better artist than any of the others will ever be, but his lack of self-awareness is terrifying, and his transparency fascinates Garance and Frédérick, who are more themselves with him than with anyone else. Lacenaire, the playwright turned thief and murderer, seems to no self at all, except when other people are watching. Against the performers are the spectators: the gaze of others--fashion, etiquette, and reputation--personified by Count Mornay; and the internal gaze personified in Nathalie, an actress and Baptiste's eventual wife, who hopes that if they observe the forms of devotion for long enough the feeling will follow. The time frame is deliberately vague--it's set an idealized July Monarchy where all these people were simultaneously at the most exciting part of their careers. In the real world, Frédérick turned his performance of Robert Macaire into burlesque in 1823, Baptiste's tragic pantomime Le Marrrchand d’Habits! ("The Old-Clothes Seller") played in 1842, and Lacenaire's final murder, for which he is guillotined, is 1832; these all take place in Act II of the movie within about a week of each other. (Théophile Gautier, mentioned but tragically offstage in the film, was a fan of Baptiste; Le Marrrchand d’Habits! started as Gautier's fanfic--he wrote a fake review of a nonexistent pantomime, and the review became popular enough the Theater des Funambules decided to actually stage it. It only ran for seven performances.) I am nominating Garance, Frédérick Lemaître, Baptiste Deburau, and Pierre François Lacenaire. You could nominate any of the other characters (Count Mornay, Nathalie, the old-clothes seller Jéricho, Baptiste's father, his landlady, Nathalie's father the Funambules manager). Gautier, regrettably, does not actually appear in the film but you can bet that's going to be one of my prompts. So, that's one good movie you definitely have time to watch before signups, several good books you probably have time for and that are probably not like whatever else you're reading right now, and one RPF rabbit hole to go down! Please consider taking up any or all of these so that you can write me fanfic about Romantic shenanigans.

[byeongqueen]

The Racer // TWO

They were now on their way to the location where the races took place today. This information wasn’t really yelled at everyone, you had to know someone that knows someone and etc. Since this wasn’t really legal, it kept the police away, well, most of the time. Youngkyun tried to keep his driving under control, since he had passengers. He could be kind of reckless while driving at night, with the streets empty, being used to drive motorcycles or race cars. Once at the place, he parked and put his mask on, Juho and Taeyang walking a bit behind them.

“Are you sure the police won’t come down?” Taeyang anxiously asked Juho.

“It has never happened before in any of the races I came to see.” Juho reassured him with a pat on the back. “It’ll be fine I promise, try to enjoy yourself okay?”

“I don’t really see the point in that. It looks dangerous, and hospitals are already packed without having people trying to hurt themselves on purpose.” Taeyang growled.

“Come one, don’t judge. Youngkyun is a racer, and I enjoy it okay?”

“Yeah yeah whatever. Why is he wearing a mask, for the police?” Taeyang frowned.

“Damn, stop with your police man, they’re not gonna come!” Juho laughed a little. “But yeah, Youngkyun is fairly known here, and he doesn’t really want his personal life mingled with his racing life. So he wears a mask so people don’t recognize him with us, and he also as a pseudonym.”

“Oh wow, what a dark boy.” Taeyang mocked, with a sly smile.

Juho just rolled his eyes and punched his shoulder. They followed Youngkyun to the garages, and the other participants. Youngkyun high-fived a contestant, and then motioned for his two friends to approach. He didn’t hear a word of Juho and Taeyang’s conversation. Once they scooted closer, he introduced them with a little smile, putting his mask down for a second. He trusted Juyeon with his discretion. The racer greeted both boys before turning back to Youngkyun.

“Hwiyoung, have you hear the news about Joowon?”

“No, what about the bastard?” He clenched his teeth.

“He’s back apparently, and he wants to take you, one on one.” Juyeon said hesitantly.

“Yeah, he can try, the staff will never let it happen.” He scoffed a little. “They have no interests in those little rivalries.”

“Yeah, he thought about that.” Juyeon sighed and showed him phone, on there, a tweet clearly saying that Joowon was going to target Hwiyoung at the next race. “Maybe you shouldn’t participate?”

“Have you gone fucking insane? This is just another reason to go! If he wants to hurt me, he’ll have to catch me first, and we both know it has never happened before.”

Juyeon and Youngkyun laughed a little, and finally, Juyeon had to leave for his race, so Youngkyun took the other two to some nice place, where they could see most of the race from.

“Hey, Kyun, what was he talking about?”

“Oh that? Just some dumb ass dude that thinks he can beat me.” Youngkyun smiled. “Don’t worry, he can’t do anything I won’t have to take a sick leave.”

“Yah, like that’s what I worry about! Just be safe okay, you’re a good friend.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, just as I said, he can’t beat me, he can’t even get second place so.” Youngkyun laughed a little, but then saw Taeyang’s frown. “Is there something wrong with you?”

“I just find it funny how unconscious of danger you are. And on top of that, you take pride in being good in a sport, if I dare call it that, that is illegal and highly dangerous. Do you know how many people die of road accidents in a year?”

“Loosen up alright, no one has ever died in those races.” Youngkyun rolled his eyes. “Not because it’s illegal doesn’t mean there aren’t rules alright? This is basically the same as circuit racing, just we’re not on a circuit. Now, these are amateurs, but come see my race next week, and you’ll see, we’re all perfectly fine.”

Taeyang sighed and looked away, not wanting to face the other. He had faced enough in the emergency room, to know the potential danger of those races. But as a student, he had this strong desire to learn.

“Maybe, we’ll see, I don’t know how long I’ll be staying at Juho’s” He said, without any sympathy in his voice.

“You can stay as long as you want, you should see Youngkyun race, he’s pretty good.”

[jaejinmoon]

⌜ PARK JIMIN, TWENTY FOUR, TRANS MALE ⌝  i just ran into JAEJIN “JJ” MOON in downtown wolvepine! they’ve been living here for EIGHT YEARS and they currently live in PINE PLACE. he is known to be CLEVER and LETHARGIC.

hey guys. aspen here with muse # 2 !  meet jj — or jae, whichever — moon, a 24 y/o writer, cat dad, aaand widower. ( deflated party horn here. )  beneath the cut is his bio, some basic stats, and some hcs. full page coming eventually. checkout my playlist for him though !

 ♡   ┊  playlist.  

trigger warnings: alcoholism, substance abuse, very brief mention of homo/transphobia, death mention, car crashes.

basic stats. 

full name — jaejin xavier moon. nicknames — jae, jj, jaej. current age — 24. date of birth — january 8th. ( capricorn. ) gender — trans male. pronouns — he/him only. sexuality — homosexual. occupation — ghost writer, published author ( under many pseudonyms ), professional alcoholic.

biography.

↬   to be known, as far as jaejin is concerned, is more trouble than it’s worth. it started sometime after he realized he had to pick his own name and then convince the world it belongs to him; a feat easier imagined than executed. 

↬   at some point, you get tired. and maybe that’s just because he’s always been tired, metaphorically and medically, as it would happen.  people saw the name on his documentation and he’d correct them once, but never a second time. ‘ this might as well happen,’ he’d thought then, and he would again, all too often. 

↬  per script, jj stays tired. he watches the tides roll in and doesn’t bother to roll his jeans up no matter how sandy, no matter how wet they get. when he’s sixteen years old, he’s told to get out of his parents house shortly after he tells them who jaejin is, and he thinks again, this might as well happen. it’s nothing mikes hard and some xanax can’t melt away tonight on his best friend’s couch, then tomorrow again if he needs it. and he does. obviously. obviously, he needs it.

↬  when he gets on a greyhound bus and travels across the country with a fake i.d, he doesn’t have a plan. jj lands in a place called wolvepine and thinks little of it, because it’s not home, but it’s a good enough contender for it. this might as well happen.

↬  he stays in shelters, registers for school in wolvepine, and finishes his diploma without a roof over his head. he makes friends with the local cats and feeds them what he doesn’t have to keep for himself. he rolls along, because he’s too tired to do anything else. people are cruel, and it’s a struggle enough to get by, but eventually he makes some friends. a friend, actually. avery. just avery. he’s cis and doesn’t really get it at first, but he’s the first person who lets jj get far enough to tell him about it; to tell him about who jaejin is... and avery loves him. jaejin loves him too.

↬ ��he makes money any way he can, operating for a time after his eighteenth birthday as a sex worker online. this might as well happen, and it might as well get him through college in the few areas that scholarships don’t cover. he isn’t sure if he should consider his intellect a gift, but it’s convenient, that’s for sure. avery offers to pay for college, but jj doesn’t let him; he’s not his burden to bear. ( ‘you’re not a burden.’  ‘ you’re an idiot. keep your money. i love you.’  )

↬  money comes from other avenues eventually, anyways. it starts with him writing papers for others — just a little ‘slide me a 20 and i’ll ghostwrite your thesis' kind of thing. he stopped camming around this time because writing was less effort, something he liked, too; his passion beyond being just his major. he started writing everywhere he went, pages upon pages upon pages in messy little notebooks, and on a whim one day, jj submits a story to a publisher under a pseudonym: taeil. 

↬  it’s a hit. jaejin almost doesn’t know what to do with the royalties as they come rolling in, and he definitely doesn’t know what to do with interview requests other than the immediate, polite decline. on another whim, he submits a story to another publisher, under a name, and it does better than the first. 

↬   he keeps going. he keeps doing it, completely faceless in his successes and comfortable for the first time in his life. he and avery graduate when they’re both 22, and they move into a house too big for either of them in pine place. they get three cats: sushi, dipdot, and penny. avery works IT and jaejin works from home. there’s a ring, then another. they’re married. they’re happy.

↬  when the tides turn, jaejin meets with anger for the first time. at himself, at every doctor who told him there was nothing wrong with him, and childishly, at avery for dying when they get into a car wreck because jaejin fell asleep at the wheel. after the fact, he’s diagnosed with narcolepsy and he’s told he’s probably had it since he was a teenager, perhaps around sixteen. a lot might’ve well have happened, but — not this. this didn’t have to happen.

↬  that was about a year and a half ago. since then, jj’s begun ghostwriting again for cash he doesn’t need, has published dozens of different books under different names, and he’s up to about seven cats. the house is empty, and he thinks about leaving it every single day, but it’s a thought had drunk on his bathroom floor, and it’s a thought that dies with his consciousness when the fade inevitably comes. he’s back to accepting it — this might as well happen.

headcanons.

↬  while reserved, and maybe standoffish, jae really isn’t a shy or mean person. ↬  his seven cats have their own bedroom, and it’s very well kept. their names are: sushi, dipdot, penny, mufasa, stitch, artemis, & merlin. ↬ he owns just about every squishmallow. none of them are named affectionately. ( close friends may discover this is a lie, but only his favorite get nice names. the rest are stinky, ugly, and variants of the such. ) ↬ he is narcoleptic, and it does effect his day to day life. ↬ he likes singing, but only a little bit.  ↬ he doesn’t really have a direction in life anymore, and has more or less become apathetic about it.  ↬ he really enjoys swimming, the beach, video games, and photography.  ↬ horror is his favorite genre to write, but he’s written everything from romance to fantasy to filth to completely nonfictive works.  ↬ he’s a lot lonelier than he lets on, but too prideful to admit it, and too afraid to lose whatever he gains to change that.  ↬ if there’s a cat cafe in town, that’s where he is. ↬ he has a pretty serious drinking problem but doesn’t really wanna talk about it, if pressed. the same can be said for what drugs he takes. ( the drugs are prescribed to him, is the trouble; he needs them, he just over-uses. this is pretty much only known to him, however. ) ↬ he has some chronic health conditions as a result of the car accident he was in; primarily, migraines and a bad leg.  ↬ his sense of humor is really dry and he can be a little mischievous, sarcastic, and pessimistic but he isn’t a malicious person! i promise he’s very sweet.

[soyouareandrewdobson]

There must be something in the water...

This comic by Dobson, is in my opinion one that really serves as one of the biggest self owns in his history, once you know a few things about the quote and are familiar with the work of the person who said it AND Dobson’s output .

See, the quote “My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.“ is alluded to none other than one of America’s greatest writers in the 19th century. Samuel L. Clemens. Or as he is known to many people worldwide, Mark Twain.

Now let me admit, I have not really read much of Clemen’s work in my life, but I have read articles about him, saw quotes of him, read up on his life as well as his social opinions and thanks to popculture osmosis I am aware of the plot outlines of works like “The Prince and the Pauper” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. I say plot outlines, cause lets face it, those movie adaptations we all know and love obviously miss the point of Clemens social satire he either hid well in his work or was as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head about.

Clemens in a way was an anti-Dobson. He came from a privileged upbringing, but took on a rather “low class” job in his youth before becoming famous through his writing. Similar to Dobson he hated racism, was obviously against conservative Christianity and for his time a “woke” fellow. But unlike Dobson, I think he did not just do it for virtue signaling, he genuinely believed in the cause and if he felt he went too far, he also apologized. Like his takes on Christianity certainly became more mellow later on in life (at least as far as I know)

 Additionally, Clemens was funny. He was critical of society and literature (I highly recommend you to read Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences to get just how brilliantly this man could dissect the work of others. Here is a link to it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FenimoreCoopersLiteraryOffences )

Both in a way he would use snark to mock them, but also get a valid point across.

And the water line up there? In a way it is both the greatest ego boost, but also self deprecation he could go for.

See, the line actually goes like this

„My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.“

 The boost comes from the fact that he is essentially saying “everybody reads my books”. Which lets face it, was true. Clemens was read by many people, both scholars and people from the general public. He was legitimately popular, to the point that even 110 years after he died he is still well known. Not only his works, but the person himself has become an iconic figure in our cultural conscious. Or to focus on what was really important: Clemens: I make money through my writing, bitch!

Okay, he wouldn’t have said it like that, but he would have at least acknowledged that making good money through his work was a nice benefit.

But in the same way, the line is a bit of self deprecation and slightly humble. See, he says his books are water. Something basic, something not everyone can afford. While the books of great masters are like wine. Something not everyone can afford, but which is in a way “sophisticated” and will live on too, even in higher regards.

I bet that at times Clemens could be full of himself, but we have to understand, this was a man who could take criticism and give it. A man who understood also something about literature and had certain insights others did not have at his time. A deadpan snarker who when he got a positive review allegedly told one of his first critics something along the line of “You made me as happy as the white slave owner chick who realizes her kid was going to be white after all”.

So what I believe is that he was humble enough to see that there were also people better/more sophisticated than him, which he even looked up too and whose work he compared with wine. People by whom he as a creator was like water in comparison. But thankfully (or rather, fortunately) everyone drinks waters aka “reads” the stuff he writes and therefore guarantees his career.

Which honestly, I consider also something of a truth some content creator should go for. Look, I am not saying that we should stop trying to go for something meaningful when we create art or tell stories, but in a way if Clemens was alive today, he would consider his water statement just further confirmed in the way a lot of popcultur works nowadays. Best example, Marvel movies. Marvel movies, as entertaining as they are, are basically just water (or soda), compared to genuine artistic movies or movies with deeper social issues in them. And yet, those movies make money and seem to connect with people at times better than something more “sophisticated”. Go figure.

 But, back to Dobson for a bit, okay?

See, for Clemens the water line made sense, because again, his works were popular and understandable for everyone, making them as accessible as water. But for Dobson? Oh boy… For starters, if we compare their achievements in life so far Clemens already wins. Cause by the time he was 39 (Dobson’s current age at the time this post is written) Clemens was successful under his pseudonym by writing multiple articles and short stories, including The Innocent Abroad, Roughin It and Tom Sawyer. He was also married and was involved in multiple businesses. Dobson meanwhile had attempted to create the following comic series Patti, Formera, Percy Phillips, Legens/Alex ze Pirate, Danny & Spots, Brentalfloss Comics and they all sunk faster than the Titanic. Okay, not the Brental Floss Comcis, those just ended because Brentalfloss thought it was time to end it, but still.

Four major stories he supposedly wanted to write abandoned because they did not earn him the reputation he wanted and one unpopular out of touch gaming comic strips where the punchline was that a rejected clone of Cubitus with the Marsupilami (go look them up) liked the Wii, while its owner/friend was a hardcore PS3 gamer who obviously always needed to be in the wrong because after all, only troglodytes play non nintento consoles.

All his major books got rejected by the public, because the writing was either not good or the artwork was at best mediocre at worst something people on manag forums could draw better when doing fanart.

And yet here we have Dobson, using another ones famous and funny line claiming “his books are like water. Everybody drinks water” indicating amongst other things “everyone reads my books and they are easily accessible”.

No, that is a freaking lie. No one read your books, most of them are not accessible to anyone because they are either out of print or you could not see them anywhere if you dig up as deep as possible online (see my paywall post earlier this week). And when people read your books common criticisms included how unoriginal and aimless your stories would feel (Formera), how derivative characters were from other fictional characters (Alex ze Pirate is e.g. just Lina from Slayers but with the bitchy temper of a Rumiko Takahashi character) and how unlikable most characters would just be (see everyone in Alex ze Pirate except the Ninja Girl and Sam).

 Or to put it in Clemen’s work when describing the sins of Cooper’s Deerslayer, your works tend to break among other things the following rules:

- … A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

- They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

- They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

- They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.

- They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.

- They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

And now replace the Deerslayer tale with Alex ze Pirate/Formera and tell me those rules are not broken.

I am sorry, I get Dobson just wanted to be more sophisticated and give himself a slight ego boost and trick his readers into thinking he is deeper in his thinking than he really is. But if Dobson’s books are like water, said water is somewhere in the desert in an almost empty well that has also been poisoned. Either it gets detoxed and filtrated for consumption or you are better off drinking your own piss. Which is Clemens code for “write fanfiction”.

[dangermousie]

Ummmm, who are the Seon Ho x Yeon shippers on here?

Because Seon Ho just told that undying jurchen that “my father took away what is most dear to me, so I will take from him as well.”

!!!!!!!!

(And he clearly doesn’t mean his bromance with Hwi since he’s moving forward with his plans regardless of Hwi being back. Boys, you both want the same man dead for very similar reasons, unite your hotness against him!)

Also, I am pleased to note that clearly his being wounded and tortured every five minutes was insufficient torture for Hwi as far as the makers were concerned and they decided to give him a chronic debilitatingly painful condition for all the in-between times buy having that poison basically permanently fuck up his health. Between that, the usual levels of torture he goes through and the fact that they made sure to show us the myriad of scars on his body, I am beginning to wonder if MC is written by one of the tumblr whump blogs under a pseudonym.

Also!!!! Seon Ho is still so pro-Hwi it makes me !!!!! He burned that drawing the witness drew so nobody would know it was him being Robin Hood, he ran over to where he knew Hwi was gonna meet with Daddy Satan to make sure Hwi was gonna be ok and when he found him passed out in the woods he was all “omg what are you doing to yourself” and carried him (!!!!) to the doctor. (We were robbed robbed robbed of seeing the carrying scene but I forgive them because !!!!!) And Hwi has got to know it was Seon Ho because the doc told him the man who brought him in was wearing a government uniform and had empty eyes.

Like, I totally ship that hard!!! Like I said before, it’s a Harry x Draco sageuk AU. (Yes, I also ship Hwi with Hui Jae and Seon Ho with Yeon; I am good at multitasking.)

In conclusion, I nearly died when Seon Ho told the jurchen that what he really regrets is not doing things because he was afraid of the consequences. He clearly means not cheating on the exam/coming up with Hwi being sent away as alternative to death as opposed to telling daddy to fuck it and protecting his friend properly, etc etc etc. Jurchen tells him his friends threw him away after Yeon died to inspire bloodthirstiness and I want to howl wtf!!!!! Hwi was his one friend and he was almost dead and suicidal, not in position to do anything for anyone, wtf. But I think SH realizes that because he is all “whatever I need to take my father down.”

Oh, and did I mention that when Jurchen tells him plain text you will die if you protect Hwi, he is all fuck off about that and just...boys!!! I love them!

Ok, back to incoherent fangirling and binging.

[malcolmbrights-a]

basics

full name:

amada spencer rosewell

nicknames:

ama, mads, spencer

age:

thirty-six

gender:

demi-girl

pronouns:

she/her

date of birth:

august 7

birthplace:

brooklyn, new york

other places lived:

new york, new york

occupation:

romance & crime novelist

education:

masters in english&sociology

biology

face claim:

???

ethnicity:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah depends on her fc

height:

5’8”

body type:

slim, with some muscle

body modifications:

double pierced ears

mental ailments:

depression, but she’s on medication

family

children:

n/a

pets:

a pet dog named cumlord (after the cloud you sickos)

relationships

romantic orientation:

panromantic/pansexual

sexual orientation:

pansexual

relationship status:

single & falling in love with everyone

personality

mbti:

entj

zodiac:

leo

positive traits:

vivacious, courageous, determined, eccentric , loving

negative traits:

stubborn, absentminded, impulsive, indecisive, irresponsible

character headcanons:

1) she has these really popular books out called the “breathless” series that is similar to “the boss by abigail bar/nette” and as popular as 50 Shades of Gray and Twilight 2) she’s a flirt and will flirt with anyone and their mom. 3.) she’s incredibly adventurous and will drag you out of crazy adventures 4.) yet she’s really quiet at times and enjoys relaxing at home and reading books.

character parallel(s):

carrie bradshaw from sex and the city, jane from jane the virgin, hermione granger hp

moral alignment:

chaotic good

deadly sin:

greed

heavenly virtue:

kindness

hogwarts house:

gryffindor

hobbies:

writing, reading, crossword puzzles, mario kart, jogging, clubbing, dancing, baking, cooking

favorites

color:

red

food:

spaghetti

drink:

strawberry margarita

animal:

dog

movie:

girls night

tv show:

sex and the city

song:

dancing queen

book:

charlottes web

app:

instagram

emoji:

upside down emoji

season:

spring

Bio

♥ since the rosewells were unable to conceive a baby, they adopted amada when she was four-years-old. they did not expect to find a child as quickly as they did, but after meeting amada the rosewells immediately fell in love with her and did what was necessary to adopt her. and although amada was a very lively child who talked ridiculously fast and drove her parents up the wall, she was well-behaved and listened when she needed to. the rosewells were patient with her hyperactivity and thought her rambunctious personality was endearing. they frequently made the effort to spend time with her: reading to her every night, doing one-thousand piece puzzles with her, and having nightly talks with her. there was never a time where either parent was negligent, they were always supportive and there for their daughter.

♥ amada fell in love with reading books after her parents read to her “charlotte’s web” when she was seven. she loved the book so much that she asked her mother to read it to her several times, which eventually led to her trying to read it on her own. it was during this time that amada discovered she had dyslexia. her parents hired her a tutor and, due to her determination to read the books she loved so much, she learned how to love reading on her own. after learning the wonders of reading on her own, amada read “charlotte’s web” repeatedly. it was her favorite book, but in order to show her daughter that there were more good books out there, mrs. rosewell brought amada to the library; where she found various books to fall in love with.

♥ amada’s love of reading eventually turned into a love of writing. when she was in middle school her mother would buy her colorful spiral notebooks and amada would write stories in them. amada found mathematics and science difficult, but writing and reading were classes she held near and dear. and while she had friends in middle school who she loved and adored, amada would frequently go to the library to read stories or write. she would continue to do such even in high school where she was heavily involved with cheerleading. even with cheerleading and the social tasks that came with it, amada still made time to read and write.

♥ after graduating high school, amada went on to study english and sociology in college. amada was ecstatic to get to read and write, even though it was for a grade. she ended up reading classics that she grew to love, along with the works of shakespeare for which she grew to adore. it was college where she met her first love – a woman named cecilia – who swept amada off her feet. amada was so surprised by the fact that she fell in love so fast, but everything about cecila made it hard for her not to fall in love with her. cecilia was intelligent and was always teaching her things she thought was boring. on more than one occasion, cecilia would take amada on adventures to art museums and clubs. it was during this amazing relationship that amada made the effort to begin writing her first book. whenever she wasn’t invested in school, her friends, or her girlfriend amada was busy writing away her book. it took her two years to write, but by that time her relationship with cecila ended and left her with a broken heart.

♥ as much as amada tried to put her book out there, several publishing companies rejected her writing and called her whimsical for believing so desperately in love and affection. they saw her romance novel as unrealistic and told her right to her face that no one would read it. just as she was beginning to lose hope, she received a call ‘just reads’ that offered her good pay for her book. and by the time they published it, amada became well-known to the mothers and young women who enjoyed reading saucy romance novels. while amada was happy her book took off, she was still heartbroken, and instead of putting her effort into writing another romantic erotica novel, she wrote a crime novel about a female detective who had all the strengths and weaknesses that the men in crime novels she read had.

♥ her publishing company was hesitant about publishing a crime novel under her name, since her break-out novel was a fairytale fantasy that revolved around love, but one of the workers told her it would be good to use a pseudonym for her new project. amada happily agreed, taking on the name of ‘sky waters’ for her crime novel. after that book, however, amada became depressed – still upset about her lost love and lack of love life – and found it difficult to write. she ended up moving to portland to live with her adoptive sister.

♥ amada had enough money from her two books to live a healthy lifestyle, but she took on a job at a bookstore to keep her mind off of things. amada then came to discover that she missed writing after assisting a young girl who wanted a book similar to “charlotte’s web”. with that little nudge in the right direction, amada sought a psychiatrist who put her on medication for major depression. after seeing her psychiatrist for a year, amada finally found the inspiration to write again. her new story would be another romantic erotica novel about a female boss of a multi-million dollar corporation falling in love with a barista at a coffee shop she frequently visited.

♥ as she wrote the book, amada made the effort to start dating, again – well dating and sleeping around. she thought it would help inspire her work if she tried different experiences with different people. with her new exciting love-life amada discovered that no one had the same sexual or romantic experiences with one person as they did another. this excited amada, but she got a little too carried away and began to date with and sleep with different people while dating and sleeping with different people around the same time. some of her partners grew angry and resentful toward her, but amada still wanted to see what kind of people were out there. in truth, amada was looking for love wherever she could find it, yet failed because she was searching too desperately in the wrong places.

♥ after finishing her third book, amada continued to work for the bookstore she’d been working at when she moved to portland. she enjoyed the warm feeling of being surrounded by books and felt restless staying home for too long. the idea of being away from the bookstore too long made her feel upset, and in a sense, being there was a coping mechanism from her intrusive thoughts. although amada had been dating and sleeping around, she still felt empty. she knew, from advice that she couldn’t rely on love to fix her emptiness, but it was still a nice thought, finding love. instead of finding a romantic partner, however, amada made a few friends with some of the women who visited the bookstore she worked for. while these women did not give her romantic love, they helped her realize she wasn’t living enough and that she needed to more involved with the outside world.

♥ amada has signed up for various night classes at the local community college to keep her busy: a cooking class, a dance class, and a spanish class. learning new skills helped distract her and keep her mind off things. she loved learning new skills, digging her hands into whatever she could touch. she loved getting to show off her new-found skills and will show off to anyone who’s willing to pay attention. in truth she loves loves loves attention, because it makes her feel loved. in a driving class, she learned how to drive a motorcycle and bought one soon after. the freedom she felt with the wind blowing in her hair was almost as good as reading a good book.

♥ recently, she’s learned more about her biological parents – well, her mother, she has no information on her father. she discovered she has a twin sister, but doesn’t really know what to do with that information. amada considers that maybe the empty feeling she’s been feeling has to do with missing someone she never really knows, yet is hesitant about meeting this woman. she doesn’t know what she’d say to her, or know how that experience will affect her.

platonic

amada is extremely vivacious and is the type of person who walks into the room and makes it her main goal to be noticed. she doesn’t like being ignored, so she acts a little extra for the sake of being extra and tends to talk just to hear the sound of her voice. although she’s a chatterbox who enjoys having a good time, amada is the type of friend who listens to your problems and gives input whenever she can. it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, if you’re her friend, she will make time to spend time with you and happily bask in your company. another thing about amada is that she’s a very playful and flirtatious person. she is not shy at all and tends to dive in head first to get what she wants. due to that, she can be a great person to drag to parties and clubs. I kind of want her to have some quiet friends, though. Simply so she can have people to talk to on days when she isn’t feeling very energetic.

romantic

amada writes erotica romance novels for the fun of it. she is a firm believer in all things romantic and loves any form of romantic gestures. she herself is very romantic and will treat her romantic partners with love and devotion. while she is a huge romantic, amada loves sex; it feels good and doesn’t always have to be linked to romance for her. she uses it as a form of stress relief. and, not only that, she uses it as inspiration for her books and blog. amada has exes from all walks of life, along with former quick flings whom she is now friends with.

antagonistic

amada needs enemies, because enemies are fun. she’s wild and dramatic, so some people will not like her. she also doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut when it comes to her opinions. and like, enemy plots are fun to write.

everyone else People who are fans of her books would be AMAZING! Whether they like her for her crime novels, or they like her for her erotica novels, Amada would be beyond ecstatic to give autographs and take pictures. She loves her fans so much and hopes to inspire them to write their own stories. Her book is called ‘Breathless’ and was as popular as 50 Shades of Gray

[marsbaumer]

hello !! the name is cal, pronouns they/them, and i’m in the est timezone. i’m so very excited to bring my kiddo mars to the deja brew !! listed below is going to be some information on the little mess. at the very bottom i’ve listed some possible connections as well that i think would be neat to explore. if you would like to plot feel free to like this and i’ll come to your ims or let me know if you’d prefer to plot over discord. i am very excited and look forward to writing with you all uwu

basics

name: mars baumer job: baker at deja brew & podcast host age: twenty-three gender: nonbinary pronouns: she/they sexuality: bisexual / biromantic birthday: april 2nd zodiac: aries personality type: the entertainer | esfp pinterest board: click here

regular order

large black coffee with a shot of caramel & whipped cream on top

aesthetics

listening to conspiracy podcasts in a deadbeat car in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night

the wafting smell of freshly made blueberry muffins and pockets of sunshine that warm your skin

 skinned knees covered by alien themed band-aids

theme song: boy bye by brockhampton

ring in their ears like a bark always feel left in the dark trauma the price for the patience character shift like an arc move like my shit stay in park don't feel the love or respect grip like a hand on my neck this is the year, place your bets (boy, bye)

positive & negative

brash ( adj ) : self-assertive in a rude, noisy, or overbearing way.

sagacious ( adj ) : having or showing keen mental discernment and good judgment; shrewd.

planetary commentary: updates every thursday @ 3:33am

planetary commentary is a podcast that focuses on all sorts of topics though they primarily tend to center around conspiracy theories, murder mysteries, missing people cases, space, lgbtqa+ subjects, and the occasional book or movie reviews. it could be seen as a bit of a messy podcast, however, it has gained quite the following over the year and a half its been available. ( first premiered may 1st, 2017 )

the chronicles of unknowing: updates every sunday @ 3:33am

a sci-fi, fantasy podcast centered around a boy as he journeys through a strange and mysterious land. he could not recall his name nor how he ended up in such an empty place. he simply woke up one day in a empty house where faceless photos presented themselves on dusty walls. how will he deal with the loneliness this empty town envokes and how will he choose to proceed when there is no clear direction? join the nameless boy as he logs his journey via tape recorder. ( first premiered october 1st, 2019 )

then

mars was born to their mother in the early hours of april second after tiring hours of labour. her mother, anastasia baumer, was over the moon to have her child in her arms after nine long months. it was a lonely celebration, though. no one was there to congratulate her or see her beautiful baby. no, instead, she welcomed mars into the world with just herself as family.

being a working single mother was tough, the money that anastasia’s parents had left her helped in mars’ younger years before they were old enough to go into daycare. things were bound to get more difficult as life went on as the finances were harder to keep up with, especially rent which only increased over the years. still, the child and mother duo were happy and lived life to its fullest. sure, mars couldn’t join any extracurricular sports, but they enjoyed writing and helping their mother with cooking/baking.

of course, life just couldn’t sort itself out for them. no matter how much anastasia gave, the world only took and took and took. it only made sense for the world’s greed to fall on mars as well. on their twelfth birthday, their mother made a choice to go out in the rain to pick up their birthday cake. she never made it home. mars waited up all night until the police came knocking to deliver the news.

( death tw ) a hit and run. she was left to die in the rain alone. that was probably the worst part. the fact that life couldn’t be gentle with her even til the end. mars wanted the hard truth. what was their mother’s last moments like? who left her to die? why would they do such a thing? there were so many questions they had and the police, with much hesitance, answered to the best of their abilities. their mother’s best friend met them at the station. she attempted to stay strong, however even in her righteous anger, tears swept her cheeks. it was a long month that followed.

left alone, mars was placed in foster care. the system was incredibly difficult to move through. they ended up being incredibly difficult to handle between poorly adjusting in school and slipping out of the houses. it took two years of swapping between three foster homes before they found the knox household. the knox’s consisted of cillian and avery knox as well as their son isak. it was a somewhat strange ensemble that mars joined. isak was cillian’s son from a previous marriage before he’d met avery and fell harder than ever before. it was...cute. they gave them space and isak was different from the other kids they ended up staying with previously. for starters, he was only a year younger than them. he complimented their vibe the first time they met and then asked what they thought about aliens. needless to say, their introduction into the knox’s dynamic and to each of them personally was a welcomed change.

fourteen years old, mars finally found a place they could settle down in and mourn their mother while attempting to settle. it was nice, living with avery- living with another person of colour, who encouraged their desire to explore different styles and, later on, pronouns when they started to question their gender. the support of cillian and isak as well encourage their unique interests and desire to learn about their self. the family helped them in ways they could never pay back. 

( cancer tw, death tw ) life never failed to come back to ruin them. they had at least six years of blissful peace before isak began to get sick. it was a terrible time and took a while to catch on to. yet, the diagnosis wasn’t promising. cancer never was. isak held out a while against the leukemia that made him sick. almost a year, in fact, before he ended up passing. the devastation they felt was an echo of the past as they lost their best friend and brother. 

now

two years later found mars living outside the knox household and in a two bedroom apartment with someone they found on craig’s list or something. they liked to introduce them and tell tales about how they ended up rooming together, even going as far as claiming they found them on the side of the road. 

mars has been working at the deja brew for about two years now. after dropping out of school for when isak was sick, they decided not to return. their fathers were disgruntled, but allowed it. after all, they were there on scholarship anyways. they had expected them to return, however, mars has yet to show any interest in continuing their program.

mars can come across as a very detached individual, however, they are in actuality very passionate. get them speaking about something they have an interest in and they seem to do a complete 180 in personality as they talk. 

they enjoy experimenting in the kitchen, whether it be baking or cooking. occasionally, they’ll have their co-workers and some customers try one of their end products to get a gauge on how it turned out. unfortunately, they’re not always good. most of the time they’re stomach-able, though, so that’s good.

they just began a new podcast titled the chronicles of unknowing. they haven’t told anyone, but the main character is based off of their brother. they wanted to remember him and transform their grief into something that could possible help others but also potentially allow for isak to still touch peoples lives.

they publish the podcasts under the pseudonym mercury as they believe it takes the whole act of them creating away from their self and focuses things on the actual content they put out.

[ca1e70-deactivated]

a list of my entirely way too niche headcanons ive actually implemented for everyones imagination:

name options ive used and refuse to retire: david elizabeth strider (sometimes i dont feel like being a douche to others and saying thats not his name), harley davidson strider, and david james strider for the sake of simplicity

im not gonna tell yall the like. oc exes ive given him bc thatll take eighteen years. 

i dont rlly have an explanation on the ghost thing besides the fact he just can? ive occasionally pulled from family ghost stories and experiences bc i somehow got landed with family members who lived in a haunted house for a decade and enjoy scaring me with all the stories (including the time my cousin literally died on the kitchen floor from a bronchial spasm and one of the friends that was over asked my aunt later what was up with the old man she saw in the corner of the room that night - my cousin is fine btw shes just a huge bitch and a third grade teacher and i dont like her)

whether or not hes done drugs is based on absolutely nothing besides how im feeling in that moment. either hes the designated driver and sober friend forever or he got fired from his job after doing a line at work during graveyard with some random customers theres no inbetween (this absolutely happened @ waho. if dave works at waho hes a mess of a person and thats on the diner itself.)

ok look i hc dave w/schizophrenia besides when i was 14 i had a hyperfixation with learning about it and then at 16 was prescribed a medication and had side effects so wack my therapist genuinely thought 14 yr old me was onto something and its a weird way to cope with the idea that lady put in my head that i might “develop it in my twenties” which i turn 20 this year and i havent been able to stop obsessing and panicking over the prospect so PLEASE dont come in my inbox calling me ableist im not out here all harley quinn in suicide squad with the voices ok hes medicated, he goes to therapy, the hard fast delusion that lil cal was nearly sentient and informed bro of every single thing dave did no matter how asinine it was is no longer a debilitatingly affecting him ANYWAYS

i actually use the chicken/egg farming family pretty often just because its hilarious to me to give dave like. an actual mom and dad. hes literally an uncle to like three different kids he just never visits because they make fun of his skinny jeans and he hates one of his (incredibly bare-bones ocs all of them) brothers who threatened to bash his head in with a little league bat after dave broke his star wars lego set apart on accident (but not rlly) so their parents were like “why dont you stay with your brother in the big city for a lil while champ” and then they just never picked him back up? and thats on favoritism 

the other one is that his name is actually david reed and hes the middle child of a family of three who literally live the standard golden retriever white middle class life only they went to disney land or something equally as dumb one year when dave was like 6 and he wandered off so bro literally just went “huh free game” because frankly he was an idiot who thought maybe i should take this kid home because its real dangerous in parking lots and then it was too late to NOT have it seem like a kidnapping and thats why daves never had a summer job, seen his birth certificate, or gone to school. but vaguely remembers what kindergarten was like and having a pet dog and calling someone mom as a kid. 

im not making a bullet point about his sex life headcanons just use your imagination and acknowledge the fact bro essentially worked within the sex industry and i enjoy putting dave through trauma as a catharsis 

i stopped doing this one usually but if he did go to school hes been in percussion since fifth grade and played the drums in his high schools jazz band as well as various edgy teenager garage bands he likes to pretend dont have a youtube presence and that hes absolutely never been shirtless in front of plenty of his classmates because he wore a hoodie to a show like an idiot. idk occasionally ill put him in an actual band he doesnt hate but keeps separate from his lil turntechGodhead internet persona (which i will ALSO touch upon in a sec) until they wind up getting looped into a tour with some bigger named band that has a show in *insert beta kid here*’s city and hes gotta come clean solely so he can visit his online friend. sorry derseasterous thats the one time weve ever run into each other and i made him have a crush on one of his bandmates i was in my anti-daverose phase where i made dave a hoe and also didnt want to admit i still loved the ship all these years later 

i hate it so much but you know the whole vr loli trap voice shit that was popular a while ago? hes fucking baller at it for some reason. he did it as a joke while talking to bro and they both about shat their pants. if im feeling real ambitious, hes got a separate soundcloud solely dedicated to doing dumbass rap covers or making his own but in the voice under the pseudonym elizabeth “beth” davids that he will never admit is his. well, he will, but hes gonna be really fucking embarrassed about it. irony or not.

talking abt seperate soundclouds and stuff ive always had it where turntechGodhead was his like. essentially internet fucking persona facade shit he used because we all had that phase where we wanted memorable urls and stuff but also didnt want to totally ignore the nagging fear of people finding you in real life, until it turned into real life ppl finding you on the internet. so he also has basically an adjacent set of social media under the same name but its just a boring username i havent decided on so everyone he knows irl doesnt mix up with what hes made for himself as TG and the people he knows as TG dont know what highschool he goes to. (this occasionally comes with the territory of ppl on parp being pissed that daves “lying” or “hiding things” from his friends as if he was doing it out of spite instead of just keeping embarrassing tagged photos and videos from football games or when he ate shit at the skatepark from fucking with his “rap career”)

every once in a while i get on a kick where hes just german. like, i just replace houston texas with hamburg germany and have him apply to a university in whatever state is applicable for whoever im chatting with and it goes from there? sometimes he moved when he was little and went through the whole visa thing, sometimes he didnt go through the visa thing, sometimes hes a dual citizen because of family and shit, its all dependent on what suits the situation best. 

one that ive been fucking with for a while but hardly break out (until recently with like 5 roses in the span of one day hell yeah) is that he has a neighbor at the end of the hall who is like a thousand year old witch lady that hes basically adopted as his mother figure in lieu of not having one and shes totally cool with it, especially bc when she kicks the bucket she fully plans on giving dave all her occult stuff so her figure-skating coach and realtor daughter doesnt sell it at a garage sale and lets it all go to waste. she also once brought rose up by name in a conversation without any prompting of her existence which dave didnt realize for days, and then one time cryptically stopped and stared at an empty space in the wall, went “she has potential, you know.” then looked at him sitting on her kitchen counter with a smile “lots of it” and hes thought about that weekly ever since. (it is important to note one of the occult items he leaves her is literally her own personal book of shadows shes been filling out for decades its like a 600 page leatherbound book dave has no idea what its used for but the sheer amount of homemade spells and etc in it is like. gonna murder rose the second this chick gets her hands on it i promise you.)

theres the standard strife shit? im not rlly gonna get into those theyre all basically cookie cutter bullshit. its just standard bro and dave abuse talk. i like to inclulde the whole 24hr live cam up in the apartment that definitely watches dave in every room besides his own and the bathroom, but that quickly delves into the prospect of middle-aged men stalking him online and basically sexually harassing him in his own god damn home by talking about how they can see him just trying to take his shoes off in the living room after getting home and frankly? its not one of my best takes! but once you throw it into the headcanon bin, its there forever. 

he actually really does do something with his photography but not enough to warrant anything exciting, but he has his own branding for it and regularly takes pictures of his friends or anything else he thinks is moderately interesting enough to take pictures of, but those are just thrown into shoeboxes under his bed in favor of posting genuine shots because he wants to keep his image intact and blurry photos of jade smiling in the tree they climbed up together while bec paws at the base of it while whining isnt exactly something he wants the whole world to see.

i also pretty often but him into either paleontology OR i put him down as trying to become a mortician because he thinks handing roadkill once he graduated from museum giftshop specimens to doing his own taxidermy on the side has prepared him enough to perform an occasional autopsy and start embalming real human corpses. (sometimes i put my own desires in and make them his bc i have to project at some point and put him through the same EMT course i dropped out of bc it was one semester and he already has pretty decent first aid skills, but he definitely didnt expect it to be as fucking wild at times as it is, but whats he gonna do? get a job back at waffle house? the company hes working for just offered to pay like half his associates in paramedicine tuition and hes already got all his pre-recs done when he started for paleo. at least its a stable job and hes got the ability to be compassionate in the moment) 

im running out of things that ive done to the poor kid. OH 

hes not a virgin he had a girlfriend all four years of high school (shes also one of his optional and designated exes plz keep up) and their relationship ends in one of two ways: she dies in a car accident a week before their high school graduation, or she stops talking to him entirely a week after their high school graduation until a couple years later she gets into (guess what) a car accident with her current wife/girlfriend and dies which leaves behind their daughter. who just so happens to also be daves daughter. her name is hannah and i love her like my own but no one ever likes her and thats on the conditioning of dirk. does dave end up taking her in? yes. shes awesome and the first time he takes her to the park to like run off some fucking steam she disappears for two minutes and dave is moderately terrified until she comes back holding a dead baby squirrel and thats the moment he realizes huh maybe things really do be genetic.

ok at the bottom of the list im gonna add the couple of times hes been a camboy which usually coincides with the live apartment cam thing and the amount of people in his dms calling him hot or whatever, but typically its more of a started the day he turned 18 and basically dipped around 20 in favor of showing up randomly with no warning to complain about a video game dick in hand because it gives him an outlet that wont annoy his friends bc this is the fifteenth time hes had a lot to say this week about a certain boss battle and also the comments fuel his ego and daddy issues.

the last one wasnt the bottom but literally unless its explicitly proven otherwise every time anyone rps with me there is the underlying fact dave strider was a goalie on his high school lacrosse teams all four years and (shocker another one) definitely had the hots for one of his teammates like major hots like first gay experience hots. like it was painfully obvious that teammate also liked him back hots. like one night at a team sleepover one of the other guys was like can yall just makeout and get it over with were fucking tired and dave really had the balls to be offended and ask what the fuck they were talking about while literally sitting halfway in the mans lap bc for some reason they had to share the same chair. 

he is also guilty until proven innocent of being the worlds biggest loner outside of that sports team and even though hes literally a jock he still opts to eat his lunch alone in the hallway or something like that and has a tendency to leave girls on read, but bc hes got an in with the rest of the jocks hes basically drug around to plenty of parties and since hes conventionally attractive enough and popular in the aloof way that he is, hes got plenty of tagged insta posts and twitter directs and snapchat streaks going. 

THESE WERE ALL NO GAME AND DONT INVOLVE SHIPS BC I LIKE TO KEEP MY OPTIONS OPEN AND THEYRE LITERALLY ALL BASED OFF RPS IVE DONE I HOPE YALL JUDGE ME ACCORDINGLY

[preserving-ferretbrain]

The Precise Moment I Stopping Reading City of Bones

by Wardog

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Wardog is probably a bit patronising.~

Like all inflexible people, I like to think of myself as being relatively open-minded and, therefore, in the spirit of open-mindedness I recently got round to reading (or rather attempting to read) Cassandra Clare's City of Bones. I wanted to like it, no really, I genuinely did. Cassandra Clare, for all those who have been living under an internet stone, is a pseudonym of a pseudonym, but Cassandra Cla(i)re, back in the day, wrote fanfic, the very popular Very Secret Diaries and The Draco Trilogy, which seems to be no longer available on the internet at the request of its author (interesting that, hmm?). Well, when I say no longer available on the internet, what I mean is ... not available unless you spend about five minutes looking, which I might have just done. For the record, said trilogy is beautifully decorated with anime-style Draco Malfoys and black roses. Awww. She also has a hefty set of pages over at the Fandom Wank Wiki (trust me, if anything needs a wiki, it is fandom wank), which are suitably, painfully entertaining in a "for what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" kind of way.

Anyway, background cheapshots and raised plagiarism eyebrows aside, I really have no strong opinions on either fandom or Cassandra Cla(i)re, but I quite liked the idea that a popular, moderately competent fanfic writer managed to break into the publishing world. Fanfic is a difficult beast to comprehend unless you're right there in its mouth but, as far as I see it (and, bear in mind, if you do write fanfic this is probably going to sound like the simplistic flailings of an outsider), there are three possible attitudes, or at the very least a spectrum with some definable stopping points on it:

1) Fanfic is art, man, art and there is ultimately no difference between If You Are Prepared and Bleak House. They're both pretty damn long for starters.

2) Fanfic is like original fiction but not as good, and is basically written by people who can't get their own stuff published

3) Fanfic is entirely different from original fiction

Since the first one is clearly non-viable, and the second is actively rude, I subscribe to the third. Writing for fans and writing for publication is vastly different, and to assume that the one aspires to the other is rather to miss the point (and, arguably, the pleasures) of fanfic. Even so, I would have thought the gulf between fanfic and original fiction to be eminently jumpable. I mean, the ability to string a decent sentence together is a transferable skill, right. Right? Well, evidently not. To be fair, my problems with City of Bones a are not about the sentences (although they are of questionable quality), they goes rather deeper than that.

The truth is I actually couldn't read the damn book. I had to give up. It's not that it was, y'know, bad as such, although it occasionally was, it just didn't - to my mind at least - make the leap from fanfic to original fiction at all successfully. I know attempting to draw a distinction between fanfic and original writing is likely to get me shot at dawn but it's the only hope I have of articulating why City of Bones just doesn't work.

As far as I could tell from the sliver I read, City of Bones is young adult urban fantasy. The heroine, Clary Fray, (and let's not even ask why an author who calls herself Cassandra Clare decided to call her heroine Clary) is exactly the sort of spunky young thing you would expect of a modern heroine. She's out at a nightclub with her best friend Simon when she happens to witness a supernatural murder. Demons yadda yadda vampires yadda yadda Shadowhunters yadda yadda sardonic attractive blonde yadda yadda yadda wise old mentor with bird yadda yadda. Look, truthfully, I don't really have any idea what the plot is because I only made it to page 63.

And this is the exact moment when I snapped.

"In the distance she could hear a faint and delicate noise, like wind chimes shaken by a storm. She set off down the corridor slowly, trailing a hand along the wall. The Victorian-looking wallpaper was faded with age, burgundy and pale grey. Each side of the corridor was lined with closed doors. The sound she was following grew louder. Now she could identify it as the sound of a piano being played with desultory but undeniable skill, though she couldn't identify the tune. Turning the corner, she came to a doorway, the door propped fully open. Peering in she saw what was clearly a music room. A grand piano stood in one corner, and rows of chairs were arranged against the far wall. A covered harp occupied the centre of the room. Jace was seated at the grand piano, his slender hands moving rapidly over the keys. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, his tawny hair ruffled up around his head as if he'd just woken up. Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his hands holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel."

Let's skim all over the things that are awkward about this passage ... wind chimes only make sounds when they're stirred and piano music doesn't sound like that anyway ... how can wallpaper be faded with burgundy ... can a skill be desultory but undeniable ... why does it have to "clearly" be a music room, surely it is just is one ... how many times can you say "hands" in one sentence ... how does she know he's barefoot, he's playing the bloody piano ... and what the fuck is with the rain of silver tinsel...

But, yes, skim all that and riddle me this:

Wouldn't that whole scene be so much better if it turned out be Draco Malfoy sitting at the grand piano?

There's a technical name for what's wrong with this passage. In the industry we call it "blowing your load prematurely" (question is, what industry). Seriously, though, we're on page 63, we've spent all of 20 of them in the company of this character (and, let's face it, he's a pretty, sardonic, wise-cracking faintly angsty type very reminiscent of Cla(i)re's take on a certain slytherin): why the fuck should we be even remotely interested in the sight of him at a grand piano? It's a very senses-heavy scene: we have the sound distant music, the wallpaper beneath Clary's fingertips, and the lovingly detailed description of the ruffle-haired eyecandy sitting at the piano, so there's this self-conscious build up, deliberately (albeit not entirely eptly) evoking something of the fairytale, and what's the pay off? Up until this point the tawny-haired Jace has been a rude and snippy, so it's clear that this little scene is meant to show us a different side of him but character revelation scenes only function when you know the character well enough to experience it as a revelation. This is just ... information, excessively presented. It's like being hit over the head with a neon sign saying: "you should fancy this character now." And for the record, he's a demon hunter, not a concert pianist so there really is no reason to have that scene there except as drool-footage.

Possibly I'd feel differently if I was a teenage girl but I hope I'd have more taste.

What the scene did for me, aside from inducing me to throw the book across the room in disgust, was exemplify the subtle sense of wrongness I'd been getting throughout the previous 62 pages. Essentially City of Bones reads like fanfic - and I don't mean that as kneejerk indicator of poor quality, I mean that it reads like something constructed for a different purpose, functioning on a different ruleset. Leaving aside any criticisms of the actual style, this scene would probably work - for me - if I read it as fanfic. It's visually and linguistically striking - the juxtaposition of scruffy boy and fine old instrument (sorry), the hint at aspects of a character hitherto unknown, the touch of submerged melancholia (playing the grand piano to an empty room is a lonely hobby), all this would be fine if the mysterious pianist turned out to Draco. I mean, playing the grand piano is one of the things that one could potentially imagine Draco being able to do. Well, if you stopped and thought about it for a moment, probably not, because surely wizards have ... like ... magical pianos, or house elves to produce their music for them. But given that Draco is a repressively raised posh kid, it seems to me at least credible his parents made him have piano lessons, even if he hated it. And Draco, being the wizarding equivalent of genetically modified, would probably be reasonably good at it regardless.

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter. And such scenes require no build-up because the reader already knows the characters being written about. Equally, dwelling on the details, and presenting very visual, senusous scenes, seems less purple than it does when you do it in original fiction because it helps to establish a familiar character in what may be an unfamiliar setting: for what's it worth, I can picture Draco Malfoy playing the grand piano very vividly. Pale hair, slender fingers, whatever. Fan fiction, even if you're looking at a 100,000 word AU fic, seems to be all about the establishment of moments, which need not necessarily (and probably don't) exist as part of a continuum of moments.

This is absolutely the opposite to a book.

The scene of Jace/grand piano has utterly no resonance for the reader because, well, partly because it's rubbish and partly because no time has been given to properly establishing the character so it's essentially meaningless, but mainly because it has no real sense of its place in a connected, developing narrative. Although the 63 pages I read did occasionally have moments of genuine mediocrity that made me suspect I should try to be more generous with the text, the whole reading experience felt so ultimately hollow I couldn't bring put myself through it. There's nothing inherently wrong with something reading like fanfic - fanfic reads like fanfic and I quite enjoy the stuff - but City of Bones is a work of original fiction, it's a book that I paid real money for (more fool me) In essence, then, it's original fiction without the necessary underpinnings, and fanfic without any of the characters you like. Worst of all possible worlds.

Comments:

Dan H

at 12:57 on 2008-09-25So I've started reading it now, to pick up where Kyra left off (nearly at good old Page 63).

I actually don't think it reads that much like fanfic (at least not like *good* fanfic). There's way too much exposition (fanfic tends to assume that everybody knows what's going on) including some truly wonderful scenes with people actually saying things like "surely you recognise a girl, your sister, Isabelle, is one" (Isabelle, it should be pointed out, is *right fucking there*).

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink".

What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

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Arthur B

at 15:32 on 2008-09-25It strikes me, actually, that while most of us have a good idea of what "bad" fanfic is like, good fanfic must by its nature vary widely in style, because at least part of the point of fanfic is to produce something that is reminiscent of the source material, so good Lovecraft fanfic will read different from good Firefly fanfic, or good Pratchett fanfic.

(Which would mean that, say, "good" Cecilia Dart-Thornton fanfic is a contradiction in terms: if it's good, it's no longer reminiscent of the source material.)

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Dan H

at 18:38 on 2008-09-25I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

Actually they probably do.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

In further updates on City of Bones I've now got past the point reached by our intrepid editor and have the following to add:

Holy Crap the wise old mentor dude is a lot like Dumbledore. There's a bit where he asks the heroine if she wants anything and I *totally* expected him to offer her a sherbet lemon. And if you don't read "Muggle" for "Mundie" every time you're a better man than I am.

Also, some exposition from earlier in the book which I found particularly awful:

"Demons," drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger, Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, as any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension."

"That's enough, Jace" said the girl.

"Isabelle's right," agreed the taller boy, "nobody here needs a lesson in semantics - or demonology."

As you know, I *almost* applaud the bare faced cheek of it.

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Arthur B

at 00:38 on 2008-09-26

I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

To be fair, there aren't that many recurring characters in Lovecraftian fiction except for the Old Ones themselves, who get reused all the time. And I've lost count of the number of times I've read stories about long-lost offshoots of the Whateley clan or where yet another dozy protagonist realises they come from Innsmouth stock.

I agree, though, that the Lovecraft-tribute scene is pretty unique; I expect this is partly because Lovecraft was one of the first authors who genuinely encouraged people to write stories set in his mythology, to the point of sending them detailed letters showing them how to boost their fanfic to peerfic. Having essentially established the core of his own fandom before he died, that core went on to set the norms for Lovecraft tribute works forevermore.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

Which might explain why City of Bones exists. Once you don't care what the background to what you're reading is, so long as it has shipping and mary sues and whatnot, it becomes easier to accept the idea of fanfic-like work which is fanfic of nothing in particular - nothing, that is, except fanfic itself.

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Montavilla

at 01:55 on 2008-09-28

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter.

Sadly, you made me immediately start wondering what Remus would play in James Potter and the Silver Marauders band. He might, ala George Harrison, play lead guitar. (Sirius would be play rhythm guitar and James would play the bass). Peter, of course, would be on drums. Which might explain why they put up with him all that time. It's hard to find someone who's got their own drum set.

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink". What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

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Dan H

at 12:18 on 2008-09-28

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hee hee.

In all seriousness, though, it's not the comparison to ink that bugged me, it just strikes me as elementary that if you're saying "X was the colour of Y" then unless you're doing a Blackadder style joke "Y" should not include reference to a specific colour. "Her hair was black as ink" "her hair was black, like ink" "her hair was ink-black" would all have been fine. So for that matter would be "her hair was like black ink". "Hair the colour of black ink" is like something out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest: "Her hair was the colour of black ink, her eyes the colour of a blue crayon, and her dress the colour of a dress made out of red silk."

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Wardog

at 14:16 on 2008-09-29

Since we're playing Favourite Lines, my personal shoutout goes to: "He had electric blue dyed hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a startled octopus..." I guess it's just the awkwardness of the construction coupled with that startled octopus...

Arthur: I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

I'm not sure emulating the original work has ever real been the goal, well, not unless there's specific stylistic feature *to* emulate if that makes sense - like Lovecraft. I mean, you want to make your characters sound like the characters they are but ... well ... to indulge a bit of JKR bashing just because that's what we do here, most of the Harry Potter stuff I've read has been stylistically objectively better than the author.

"Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hehe!!!

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Arthur B

at 15:47 on 2008-09-29

I think direct stylistic mimicing is, as you point out, actually rare, especially since a lot of fanfic is written about TV series, so you're translating a visual format into a literary one. But at the same time I think that the aim of a lot of fanfic is to emulate the source work in the sense that the writer's trying to tell a story that is a) reminiscent of the source material, in that it establishes a mood and tells a story which could recognisably fit within the source, and b) features the characters behaving in a manner recognisable from the source (unless the explicit point of the fic is something like "What if Captain Lolcats got possessed by a brain worm?"). At the very least, a lot of fanfic authors seem to want to produce something where the reader would look at it and say "Yes, that's very much how it would have happened on my favourite show if the screenwriters had only had the courage to write an episode where the ship's doctor and the robot owl consummate their love".

I say "a lot of fanfic" because I've seen the occasional piece (generally AU fics) where the premise is so utterly far removed from the source material that I start scratching my head and wondering why the author bothered retaining the link to the source material in the first place. Sure, perhaps the characters retain scraps of their personality, but they're in such an utterly different scenario it becomes a stretch to call them the same characters; to my mind, at least, characters are at least partially defined by context. Being a cheeky black marketeer on Deep Space 9 is a very different proposition from being a cheeky black marketeer in Blitz-era London.

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Wardog

at 16:01 on 2008-09-29

We are now mainly haggling over semantics, dear boy.

So instead I would like to play the "Her hair was" game.

I submit: Her hair was almost precisely the colour of one of those motorola telephones, the ones with that come with a gloss finish not matte."

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Claire E Fitzgerald

at 16:32 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of a grey cat in a room that was totally dark, such that the colour of the cat was indistinguishable from black.

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Arthur B

at 16:59 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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Wardog

at 21:20 on 2008-09-29

Oi! Minus three points from Slytherin for being meta.

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Arthur B

at 00:26 on 2008-09-30

“Minus three hundred points for turning the comments section into Harry Potter fanfiction," muttered Harry, glowering at his Nintendo DS. He was pretty sure he was on the right track in this Phoenix Wright episode, but the game was being evasive about precisely which investigative avenue he should pursue. Harry was not looking forward to the half hour he'd have to spend looking for the plot, but he supposed he couldn't complain: he normally had to doss about for half a year before getting anything done in real life.

"How's my hair looking?" asked Ron, anxious about his big date with Hermione. He had spent the last six hours smearing his skin with Hackiburr's Very Useful Ointment in order to conceal the telltale marks of gingerness, and was now in the process of rubbing the stuff into his scalp. Harry glanced at his bare-torsoed chum and then returned his attention to his game.

"Your hair is all carroty," quipped Harry, "like someone was just sick in it."

Draco giggled and ran his hands through his hair, which was bright yellow like artificial egg yolk.

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Rami

at 12:17 on 2008-09-30

I think these are still worse, but you're getting there ;-)

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Guy

at 04:26 on 2009-07-24

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of light with a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz, and as she moved the angle of its inclination to her scalp seemed to undulate with a regularity that spoke softly to his soul.

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Rami

at 04:41 on 2009-07-24

a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz

I think you got the wavelength and frequency swapped around ;-)

A redhead, eh? Why is it that female protagonists never seem to have violently ginger hair?

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Guy

at 08:34 on 2009-07-24

Oops, so I did. I could pretend that it was a deliberate attempt to further enhance the awfulness of the sentence, but no, I just muddled it up. :)

It would be kind of interesting to see some kind of frequency histogram of female (and male) protagonists and the wavelengths of their hair colours... but I suspect nobody would be mad enough to actually do the work to make such a thing.

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Michal

at 05:29 on 2011-09-29

And I only stumbled on this when I found out Cassandra Clare will be one of the instructors at the 2012 Clarion Writer's Workshop.

Suffice to say, I won't be applying. (Jesus Christ guys, you had Neil Gaiman and Ellen Kushner and Particia C. Wrede and Gene fucking Wolfe as instructors and now you've had budget cuts or what?)

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Arthur B

at 11:25 on 2011-09-29

Well they also had Orson Scott Card.

I guess it's like Hogwarts. Not everyone can be a Griffindor or a Ravenclaw. They also have to recruit Slytherins (Card) and Hufflepuffs (Clare).

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Michal

at 13:30 on 2012-11-18

There's a movie now.

I think I caught a half-second glimpse of Henry VIII at one point.

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Arthur B

at 14:05 on 2012-11-18

Urgh, they actually say "mundanes".

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Ibmiller

at 15:05 on 2012-11-19

It's like they learned nothing from Golden Compass...

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

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Wardog

at 15:36 on 2012-11-19

Oh no, that's Jamie Campbell-Bower. Officially the drippiest boy in Hollywood.

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Arthur B

at 15:44 on 2012-11-19

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

I suspect they are going to mimic Twilight/Potter as closely as copyright will allow. It's got that "clinging to the underbelly of the bandwagon and trying to scrape as much gold as you can out of it" look. (Of course, this is likely to lead to jibbering incoherence due to Potter and Twilight being two different bandwagons...)

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 16:51 on 2012-11-19

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

Hey, at least they got that right.

[ladyruina]

First story on this site

    Three weeks. It had been three weeks since promotion day and to be honest, I had no freaking clue what Promotion Day even was. Apparently once every month the facility selects someone to be “promoted”, the problem is that the people who don’t make the promotion selection get bare minimum notification. Turns out my sector was just informed that I was transferred to a new sector...no one even knew where I went ...explains what happened to Silica. Today, after three weeks, I woke up to a waiting room. Empty seats on every side and beneath my...tush. The same metal box I lived in for the past seventeen years after “recruitment” and would probably die in. The room had the same aesthetic as everywhere else in the facility, stainless steel walls and flooring with well lit bulbs. Couldn’t tell which type of lightbulb though I’d have to gamble fluorescent bulbs with UV integration, cheap, effective and keeps us alive for a little bit longer. Just how the facility likes it. As per my regular protocol when in an unfamiliar space without a commanding officer I entered a status I have titled, “eyes down, nose out of others business”. It’s embarrassing to say that it took a rough fifteen seconds before realizing that the marks of claws against the floor were EVERYWHERE. You adjust to this kind of thing in the facility, there’s always something clawing up the floors, crawling up the walls or eating your friends upper lobe… rest in peace Franklin. My mind defaulted to entity containment training, signs of anomalous activity identified, analyze the signs: three toed claws, they appear to be dexterous and agile similar to species of avians and raptors. Stage four determine if anomalous being has moved from the ar-, that’s when I finally looked up. Three seats down from me stood a humanoid figure, full combat armor with the exact raptorian legs and feet that produced the scratch marks but the entity was calm almost seemed like it was waiting, same as me save for a bit of an impatient air. It swiftly and repetitively tapped its talons against the ground. Naturally my first thought occurred. “Oh god, is promotion just code word for feeding me to an entity.” I scanned the room only to discover many more entities, some looked very similar to the raptorian entity, others were vastly different. Entities with helmets resembling felines moving from one individual to another, entities with creepy masks that were standing on the walls and ceilings to avoid the clutter on the ground, entities that had no eye holes but spikes at the back on the helmet that vaguely reminded me of bats. All were equipped with combat armor and....facility issue weaponry? Aside from that there were few other schmucks in the room that looked a lot like me, scared, panicked and confused. I looked over to the impatient one only to see it staring at me.

“Shit!” it said in a surprisingly human voice “I-uh, sorry about starin’. It���s always just so weird to see one of you in here.”

“One of...me?” I implored.

“Y’know, an unaugmented.” it gestured at all of me. “So… weird after you’ve gone through the process. So, y’know which one you’ll be?”

I hesitated. “What?” 

“Y’know. Like a raptor, a bat, a cat. That sorta thing.” it seemed to be naming things off the top of its head. “I’m a raptor so you could learn the ropes with me if you end up a part of the pack.”

This fascinated me, I had never been allowed to examine or interview an entity that I had no knowledge of. So a part of me was excited despite realizing that at any moment this entity could unhinge it’s non apparent jaws and rip into my throat with it’s horrific unseen maw. Yet the pioneer sense of exploring the unknown just...overcame me.

“So what are raptors?” I asked.

“Well, you’re lookin at one.” it said in a smug tone. “We’re faster and more dexterous than the others. Only downside is that itchy to move sensation you get due to the energy boost they hook you up with and that these masks keep you alive.”

“I’m sorry what?”

“Heh. yeah, that’s what I said. Apparently The Fixer said that our oxygen has been made “inefficient” by the pollution of the modern world so we’re hooked up with some sorta super oxygen. Apparently it’s the kinda stuff dinosaurs used to breath so that’s pretty badass.”

“And that helps?”

“Gives us the energy to bounce off walls, literally.”

“Fascinating… are the other entities safe to converse with?”

“Ent-? Oh, them? Yeah most of em are chill, might get an extreme one or two but they should be reasonable.”

“Right, thank you.”

“Eh, no prob dude.”

I stood up and began to wander over to one of the “bats” who was standing in a group of its own kin. I began to raise my hand to greet it as I approached, a quick “hey” to get it’s attention only to be interrupted.

“Yes?” it said in a high pitched tone, turning to face me before it even should have known I was on my way. Apparently my shock was apparent as it recoiled quickly. “Right, sorry. I forgot unaugmented wouldn’t know about that. I heard you coming, you’d be surprised how easily you are to hear coming.”

“Echolocation?” 

“Indeed! Along with some other traits.” It said “I’m basically omniscient with these mods! I can tell you anything about this room without even looking at it.”

“Hm.” I smirked. “How about this? What color is my shirt?”

It stared at me for a second before giving a light punch. “Cheating asshole.”

“Just wanted to see if you’re capable of processing color.”

“You could’ve asked.” 

the amusement faded from my expression as I began to realize that what I said was quite apparently a sore topic.

“Oh...sorry.” 

“Whatever.”

I began to awkwardly leave the company of the bats before slumping back into my chair. A few minutes go by and I’m bored out of my goddamn mind. Wish they left me a phone to check, or a magazine to read or a pistol to shoot myself with. Between the embarrassment of my slip-up and the boredom I think the lead would be preferable.

“Excuse me.” said a familiar voice. “I couldn’t help but notice multiple strains in your face aligning with stress that may be caused by the process of transferring to a new region. Is it possible that I may alleviate some of your stress through a formal discussion?”

I looked up, it was goddamn impossible. I heard she was transferred and she just never responded to any message from then on, I thought she either ditched me or… the far more likely scenario, eviscerated or incinerated.

 “Silica?” the name of my best friend. “Silica is that you?”

The entity looked confused. “Curious. You have information on my title but records state that you were only stationed here today.” 

“Silica. It’s me.” I said in a shaken tone. “Devin.”

“Devin…” she stared at me blankly, moments passed by. “Ah yes. We used to be close friends, is this information correct?”

“Yes. so you’ve been here this whole time?”

“Affirmative, Devin.”

“What happened? Why didn’t you respond to any messages I sent?”

Another brief silence. “I just checked my message log, I received none of them under the name of “Devin” or any related pseudonym.” 

“Really?” this was...a bit heartbreaking to say the very least. “You had to keep in touch with Evelyn! I remember the day you got Evelyn’s contact address and you were a goddamn mess. Head over heels! Please tell me you kept in touch.”

Another goddamn pause. “Oh yes, Evelyn. I suppose she was very nice and pretty wasn’t she?”

“What are you talking about?!” the other entity’s started staring at me. I was getting loud. “You sound like you don’t care! You goddamn loved her and now she’s an afterthought?!”

“Please calm yourself. You’re becoming exacerbated and it may draw negative connotations towards you in future conversations with the other people residing in this room.”

I began to look over, the entities around me seemed...concerned. “S-sorry. I’m just hurt is all. It feels like you don’t remember...anything from back at Mind’s Edge.”

“Oh! That I can answer! I don’t!” she said so simply. My heart goddamn sank into the Mariana Trench and she said it so easily.

“You..forgot?”

“Don’t take it personally. Cat units have an AI planted into their brain in order to give them in depth data banks of medical procedures as well as a list of information that may be useful. This unfortunately has to replace long term memories which our AI assistants must remind us of. This also can lead to stunted emotional development. Fortunately though the emotional stagnation only caused depression in earlier Cat units. It also allows us to be proper care takers without having to worry about emotional errors such as becoming overly attached to the patient in therapy settings or panicking in active combat treatment scenarios.”

“I...need some time to process all of this.”

“Acknowledged. Please contact me or another Cat unit if you require any further psychological or physiological aid.”

“Y-yeah, got it. You got it.” That’s probably what I said. Can’t remember if it was actually what I said or not, I was in a haze. Every entity in this room was...a person? My best friend had forgotten about me. The whole world around me just faded. My greatest fear though was...what came next. My thoughts were cut short by the distant sound of heavy claws scraping against the cold metal rang out. As it approached, I could hear the sound of cloth being dragged across the ground. A voice spoke, both high and low pitched with a sort of rattle in its tone.

“Routine Procedures completed. Additional Augmentation scheduled.”

The door on the farside of the room opened.

“Devin.” The creature spoke “Devin Hale. Augmentation scheduled. Follow for Augmentation.”