#fatal love era was so long ago

[bearseokie]

i just saw the fatal love series and i’m excited 🤩 i had something of the sort in mind ages ago, but i was one too nervous to do it and two never really watched half the stories so i scratched the idea. i can’t wait to read these! 🧡

yoooo this is sick omg... hi

yeah i hesitated for so long on even posting the masterlist since I'm working fic by fic. mainly because the commitment of writing a story per member is A LOT. it's insane

this is so cool coming from you because you're a super cool monsta x writer!!! I've been saving your stuff lately to add to my recs blog when i get time & when i can actually dive into reading your works. like I'm stunned that you sent me this ask LMAO

[sarah-yyy]

what: period cdrama // 40 eps, roughly 45 mins each (we’re on ep 29 atm, paid subscription required for vip eps) where: iqiyi (you can also dl the app) // youtube // (ps - usual disclaimer that i do not use eng subs so i don’t speak to the quality of subs) why: do you enjoy jianghu mysteries?? double/hidden-identities??? the shifu-complex trope??? enemies to friends (with a v Divorced-Exes vibe)?? this is the show for you. would enjoy if you enjoyed the blood of youth.

meet Li Lianhua, a somewhat famous jianghu doctor who is rumoured to be able to bring back the dead. this chill but odd man lives in a super cool caravan he built himself! spends his free time gardening and learning how to cook! he's got a cute pet dog as a companion! he is in his Zen Era, everything is going great for him*.

but i promised y'all hidden identities so, surprise surprise!! Li Lianhua is also known as Li Xiangyi, presumed dead master of the Top Jianghu Sect who has been MIA for the past decade

Li Xiangyi was poisoned + seriously injured in battle ten years ago, and for a variety of reasons, decided to retreat from jianghu to live his life in relative peace (while also searching for the remains of his shixiong). the poison he suffers from is fatal, it is emphasised he doesn't have long to live. (*except for the dying bit)

ANYWAY. while going about his day to day, Li Lianhua meets:

Fang Duobing, wannabe jianghu detective. this boy has a++ martial arts skills!! he's (relatively) smart!! he would make a good detective!! but his attempts to do so have been foiled by his Super Influential™ parents who do not want him in harm's way. all my boy wants to do is to successfully enrol in jianghu detective academy and travel the lands!! solve crimes!! he eventually weasels his way into a probationary position by telling the masters of the academy that his shifu is Li Xiangyi

cue extremely fun exchanges like:

FBD: if my shifu li xiangyi could see me now- LLH: your who???????????

these two have a funny strangers to jokingly enemies (LLH made a fool out of FBD and like drugged him the first time they met) to begrudging partners solving crimes to friends dynamic going on, absolutely a+++. FBD goes from 😤 at LLH to must protect this weak man i have decided is my best friend really quickly. i love one (1) boy.

there is also another key character in this, which really just. is the cherry on top of everything that the show has given us so far.

meet Di Feisheng. "villain" extraordinaire. has one (1) goal in life - beat LXY. "killed" LXY in battle ten years ago, but suffered severe injuries himself, so he's been recuperating for the past ten years.

imagine his goddamn surprise when he fucking meets LLH who he thought he defeated ten years ago. (side note: LLH is supposed to look nothing like LXY, but DFS recognised him p much instantly!!) he also learns that LXY was poisoned all those years ago, and was not in his best condition during their battle.

cue DFS going absolutely obsessed with curing LLH of his fatal poisoning so that they can go at it again, this time without any handicaps :)

SO ANYWAY these three go around solving cases together, while LLH/DFS also look into the inconsistencies of certain things that happened ten years ago. all the while the three of them are bickering the entire time.

tl;dr - this is the dynamic we've got going on:

FDB: this is LLH my boyfriend (but he doesn't know it yet) who is also my shifu (but i don't know it yet), and this is his extremely annoying ex-husband DFS who hangs around us and i absolutely HATE (and low-key want to throw in jianghu prison) because they are obviously hiding something from me, but also i would probably die for these two

if you need more convincing:

the cases have all been fun so far - the pacing of the show is quite good, and the cases don't really tend to drag on

the fight scenes are really cool - again, if you liked what they did in the blood of youth, you'll probably like this as well

frail and sickly Cheng Yi, always a bonus

i am going to, at some point, write fic about dfs railing fbd quiet while llh watches, someone hold me to this

[spookypanda04]

What if Hylia was a villain? Imagine, her hero, her love, killed at the hands of Demise. She tried to gain vengeance by shedding her form for something more physical. She will kill him for the death of her hero.

Taking a mortal form had unexpected consequences and she loses her memory at first. Born as Zelda, she eventually unlocks her power and regains her memory. She realizes her hero has come back to her. She swears they will not be separated again, only confusing him. He does not know of their shared past. That's okay, he will learn. They have millennia after all.

Eventually they face Demise a second time and he laid down a curse with his final breath. Feeling her hero's soul slip from her grasp once more, she screams burning his essence into ash.

The remains were sealed in Fi. She would be able to contain his malice. She lived a full life with her hero and when he passed, she screamed her rage to the heavens, burning the last of her mortal form away. There wasn't much left at that point anyways.

Different incarnations of her hero came and went through the ages and she plotted and schemed ways to bring him back to her side once and for all.

Each time she came close to burning the mortality from him, letting him endure trials beyond hylian endurance. But each time he slipped from her once more.

She never notices how the stress is slowly fracturing the hero's spirit. Ending in the death of the hero of the Wild. But the mortals that worshiped her broke the laws of death and brought him back. This proved to be the final straw though, the cracks too wide to be stitched back into the original. Foreign magic pulsed, filling the cracks, making him other. Her hero was gone.

Her grief shattered reality. Down through the ages, cracks in time started appearing and different versions of her beloved met. She was ecstatic! Maybe by having them together she could bring him back! Unfortunately the cracks in time started spilling monsters from different eras, corrupted by the void in-between.

Her heroes banded together and tracked the cracks down to the original, sealing them as they went.

Their little adventure ended eventually and she showed herself to them.

She explained her plan, how she just had to use their lives and bring back her beloved.

The heros stared in horror, realizing the goddess was unhinged, driven mad by grief over the eras.

Finally she came to the end and the heros braced themselves for a fight. They refused to go down without a fight.

Hylia saw their dissent and was furious! How dare they disobey her, their Goddess! They would have to be brought to heel first before she could continue her plan.

The heros fought with everything they had, falling one by one. The final remained, begging the goddess what had happened to the one he loved oh so long ago.

The skychild, powered by grief for his first love, for his brothers laying injured behind him, by the countless lives lost across the eras to a mad Goddess's schemes, struck a fatal blow against her, living up to his title of Godslayer.

The goddess fell, but the hero paid no interest, choosing to help his brothers. They eventually healed enough to move and they soon found out they were in the era of Time.

They made their way back to the ranch, settling down. There were many tears of grief shared, some for lost loves, some for friends, for family, and more were shed when they realized there was no way back to their homes. The cracks had been sealed and the goddess of time was dead.

Eventually several additional rooms were added to the ranch, none willing to leave and they lived as brothers till the end.

[sanctus-ingenium]

Been binge reading TVM and I LOVE IT. Bowman was already my favorite character but this story has already skyrocketed for me just how much I adore him. Though Felix is a very close second just cause of how he is with Carmen. I’d also love to know more about the Rangers.

1. Did you draw from any particular real world inspiration for them?

2. What’s the backstory behind how the Rangers came to be? Any little stories of particularly notable members you’ve thought up?

Yay awesome.. it's definitely the bowman book so I'm glad the focus on him is working hehe

1. Yes! The rangers are almost entirely a play on the Fianna, a band of heroes and hunters from Irish mythology. I strongly recommend you check out their stories because they're some of the greatest stories you'll ever read - start with the salmon of knowledge and then try diarmaid and gráinne. Fun fact, in older drafts of my books I call the rangers The Fianna but I found it messy.

As for real world inspiration, there's actual irl rangers as well, stewards of national parks and rare habitats. The rangers in Inver do not fight faeries so much as they manage the Ruad and ensure it is safe, and in Pascal's time (the far off distant future of 2017) rangers have become more ecologists than anything else, as their deep knowledge of the region and huge archives of faery activity over the centuries lends itself wonderfully to monitoring habitat health. So many of the ecologists I know were also used as inspiration hehe

2. The rangers of the Ruad (not the Greys) were founded by Finbarr Ó Casaide as part of the war that founded the state of Inver. He and the first rangers built the main Spikes barracks because (if you check the habitat map you'll see) there's a broad stretch of ancient yew wood north of the Lough, ideal for making bow staves. So Finbarr was a Spikes ranger. He and the others engaged in guerilla warfare against the werewolves led by the first D'Ouilly traitor, in particular the Tanet sect.

This is a short book I do want to write (it's on the table!!) eventually but you can find out more about Finbarr and his mortal enemy Olivier by searching the names on my blog. I'm stuck on mobile for the time being but I did write a pretty long summary of the pair of them and their relationship dynamic a few months ago.

Notable rangers include Finbarr himself but also Bowman André, who was the ranger who drafted the treaty between ranger organisations and the new werewolf monarchy, enshrining the terms of their operations in the Ruad into law. Although Finbarr's side lost their war, André's negotiations led to the current state of the ranger barracks as both gender neutral and independent of royal law, self-governing and so on. These wins came from the fact that any time the monarchy tried to employ its own army into the Ruad to protect trade or fight faeries or whatever, the soldiers would inevitably desert, or start pissing and moaning about it and why can't we just get the rangers to do the work instead. The flip side ofc was that most rangers are convicts who joined or were pressed into the service, because so few people willingly join an organisation that forces you to spend months at a time in the most dangerous habitat known to man, with no-one but other rangers for company.

Another notable ranger is Sharps Captain Torben, he's extremely famous and well-liked in the Régian [victorian] era due to his notoriously kind and gentle touch, as well as his good decision making skills meaning that there were almost no civilian fatalities under his watch for years at a time.

Finally another famous ranger is Hooks Captain Celeste, in 1969 she anticipated the disaster that almost swept Cánamac town away and ordered an evacuation before the tidal wave struck the town. I've written about that disaster on my sideblog @ranticore ;)

[maidenofmice]

The slender acacia would not shake

One long milk-bloom on the tree;

The white lake-blossom fell into the lake,

As the pimpernel dozed on the lea;

But the rose was awake all night for your sake,

Knowing your promise to me;

The lilies and roses were all awake.

They sigh'd for the dawn and thee.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate;

The red rose cries, *She is near, she is near;'

And the white rose weeps, 'She is late;'

The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear;'

And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'

She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Were it ever so airy a tread.

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

[excerpt from Lord Tennyson‘s Maud I, XXII.]

So i was briefly exposed to this poem in an art history seminar on the Victorian Era a few months ago, and because I am totally normal, all I could think about was how well it fit Aki on at least two layers. One: the entire linking of Maud with flowers, especially the rose, for obvious reasons works so so well. Especially the title „Queen Rose of the Rosebud Garde of Girls“ makes so much sense. And the second layer is a little deeper but also totally supported by my own confirmation bias. Maud is described to be deceptively beautiful but incredibly cold looking, with a stern expression and a complexion that makes her appear almost dead. I haven‘t read the entire poem down to detail but from what I could gather, the lyrical protagonist falls in love with her (and grows increasingly obsessed) after a disagreement between their fathers lead to his father‘s death, so at the beginning he tries to get back at Maud‘s father through her, but ends up being bewitched by her in the process, eventually dueling and killing her brother etc. etc. it‘s all very Victorian. Maud is mostly passive in this, never actively described to do anything and yet she is said to be both the best thing in the lyrical protagonist‘s life while at the same time being his demise.

Retrospectively one could assume that both of these things are not inherent to her character and just qualities assigned to her by the men in her life. In the Victorian era there was almost a popular belief that there were two opposing kinds of women: femmes fragiles and femme fatales, the first kind being dependent and almost sickly but on the other hand sweet and kind and docile, while the femme fatale as in popular media today is independent yet violent and oftentimes promiscuous.

It‘s an interesting duality that I see in Aki in a way (helped by the image of roses, y‘know, they‘re beautiful flowers with delicate blossoms but also piercing thorns which the show uses actively to characterize this duality in Aki) , but in a way where it has always been decided for her instead of by her. She‘s violent at the start because that is the side of hers that is fostered by Divine and towards the end of the show her caring nature shines through instead. Interestingly enough though, she is less independent when in her „femme fatale“ stage, which is really just her anger and pain towards abandonment as a young teen not being dealt with properly. She was never a true femme fatale to begin with and neither has she ever been and will ever be a femme fragile. She‘s just Aki, with both all the hurt she‘s had to experience but just as much all the times she got to experience genuine happiness, a lot of which comes from being taking care of by and caring for her friends.

There are a lot more thoughts in my brain about how women were characterized in literature throughout the decades, using the image of the rose — a sort of de-humanization of the woman and at the same time a personification of nature as woman. We talked about this extensively in another seminar on nature songs but that would exceed ALL limits on this post.

So instead just take this little drawing I made of my Queen Rose. She enables me to do things in my art I never knew I could do.

[gloriousmonsters]

Thuvia scraps >:3

Also Leave No Trace?

Alright! For those who don't know, I am a semi-conflicted fan of the Barsoom series, a pulp sci-fi/planetary romance in the 1910s ->. It has some fascinating/fun ideas and characters I love, but especially as the series goes onward it varies wildly in quality.

One of the greatest victims of quality dips is the first novel not focused on the original main characters--Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Thuvia was a side character with a fascinating premise--she'd been a slave in Barsoom's 'heaven' (actually a multi-era religious scam run by Therns--white supremacists, because you can't even escape those on Mars) for thirtyish years, and clearly had a ton of trauma and knowledge banked up from that, so a book focused on her should have slapped... but aside from a few moments, she's just turned into a bland copy of the original FMC for the duration of her book.

One of my most 'idk if this will ever happen in significant capacity, but I will THINK about it' projects is just. rewriting/writing novels spinning off the ideas of the Barsoom series, and Thuvia's novel is the only one I've written bits of so far. I have a huge fondness for her, and she's such an interesting character to examine religious/emotional/sexual trauma through. speaking of

It's Him, in the shadows.

It can't be. She knows it, but that doesn't banish the specter--no matter how many times she replays the memory in her head, wearing it as thin as old silk. The twitch of the gun in her hand, the twitch of her finger that had depressed the button. His mouth open to say something else, something that she'd never know. The crack of the explosion, the hole it had ripped in His face. The convulsive shudder that worked its way through her body, emerging as the word that had hissed from her mouth. Beast.

Not a god. Gods didn't bleed. Gods didn't die.

But in a way He hadn't died, had He? He was still with her. Every man whose face she couldn't see. Every hand that touched her unexpectedly. Every shout from far away enough to become distorted to her ears. The bed that was too soft, because the nights she shared His bed had been worse than the nights she slept on the floor. The way certain men saw her now--saw her and knew, somehow, or that was how it seemed. The apathy and fear that alternately bound and hobbled her--that bound her now, frozen to the spot, merely staring at the stealthy motion in the shadows. Not screaming, not backing away.

Simply watching for the gleam of yellow hair, the flash of a gem.

leave no trace under the cut because this is long enough already :P

goddd i love this one even though it hasn't quite taken shape enough to devote my attention to. rough blurb

--

It follows Luz Schreiber, a new Girl Scout troop leader who's driving some of her new troop to an event in another state when her car hits some spikes in the middle of the woods, then is fully disabled when she turns her back. There's no reception and nothing around for miles... except, she realizes, an summer camp site that's been abandoned since some lunatic beheaded a kid there decades ago. Still, it's the only shelter available, so they head there to hole up as they try and plan how to outsmart their unseen enemy, which the girls whole-heartedly believe is the killer from the camp, back for revenge.

Luz has enough to deal with, trying to keep them safe as they encounter more traps and near-fatal attacks. She doesn't know how to tell them, or if she should tell them something that might make them scatter, put them all in danger--that she knows their theory is wrong. That she was the lunatic who beheaded someone at camp decades ago.

--

If you're familiar with Sleepaway Camp, yes, this is inspired by Sleepaway Camp, although my Angela-derived character only committed one, semi-accidental murder. If you don't know Sleepaway Camp, the villain is a quiet weird girl named Angela who's revealed to be trans at the end of the movie for shock value, after getting naked with a boy she then kills, presumably, we're supposed to assume, for reacting badly.

The one scene I've written so far, which I'd post except it's 2 pages and i can't excerpt any part neatly lol, is Luz reflecting on her version of that incident--wherein the boy she revealed herself as trans to attempted to drown her in the lake, and she wound up killing him in self-defense. I absolutely love the gimmick I did with it, which is that Luz has his life flash before her eyes as she's drowning instead of her own--as in, she sees how events will unfold, how he'll get away even without jail time and get married and have a good life while she's completely erased from history, and it's deciding no, fuck that that gives her the strength to fight back.

[fullscoreshenanigans]

Do you have an ao3 account?

I do! Same url as here.

The goal is to actually post something on it lol

I currently have three ideas that I feel are within the realm of my current writing capabilities for a one- or two-shot:

• Don and Gilda sharing a moment with each member of the full score trio pre-Cuvitidala timeskip. I'm still not a hundred percent sure what their moment with Norman would be, but for Emma it would be going over Norman's letter and finalizing their escape plan (with them asking is it really okay to leave Ray on his own until January), and for Ray it would be him approaching them after he returns from Goldy Pond but before Emma wakes up from her coma to apologize for not being all there after Norman was shipped out and to thank them for being there for their family when he couldn't be. • Memory Keeper Ray AU set during the search for the Seven Walls. • Mostly canon-compliant, Cuvitidala-era one/two-shot where Ray pushes Emma out of the way of a demon ambush (which may or may not have been necessary) during one of the times where they’re on the way back to the bunker that winds up with him getting sick. While not a repeat of "The Day Emma Cried" story from the first light novel since Ray isn't fatally ill like they believed Norman was that summer, she can't help but notice the similarities in the situation as she goes off to find a solution to help speed up his recovery. Meanwhile, Ray's fevered dreams drift to his mother and eventually the missing member of their trio. This story was born from the desire of wanting RE to discuss Emma's dream from chapter 93 and as part of a set-up for endgame REN that leaves them off at a reasonable place for where I see them on that front: Emma always unconsciously gravitating and finding solace with the boys but not understanding the totality of those feelings (because Emma loves all of her family dearly; it's an immutable truth of the universe. So what makes them different) so there's some secrets unwittingly being kept on her side of things. Ray, in contrast, accepted that he loved Emma and Norman long ago, back when he first locked up his heart in order to maintain the mental fortitude needed to carry out his escape plan. While he also doesn't comprehend the full magnitude of those feelings (though this is a very poignant declaration),

he can consciously put a name to them, but he's intentionally holding back for a variety of reasons on this front (not wanting it to seem like there's an expectation of reciprocity, still dealing with the grief of Norman's apparent death, but the big one being they're still trying to find a way out of the demon world) and wrestling with the idea of revealing his connection to Isabella, what that connection says about him given the choices he's made, and potentially hearing someone else say things he's been telling himself for years.

[saint-starflicker]

Riding on the coattails of this on-point post about how Peter and Jason mirror Romeo and Juliet in that they were flawed teenagers that should have been allowed to have their romance run its course without...you know...fatality...

I agree but the first thing that got me about how this is a good show is that the central characters' flaws and dynamic mean they have actual personalities.

One era-typical effort to alleviate homophobia was to try to show in fiction that a gay boy was innocuous, nice, and (what with it being entertainment media) conventionally attractive. Rantasmo, a video essayist, called it "the problem with Maxxie" (because Maxwell Oliver from the television show Skins was one case study: Maxxie is there to be gay and show that it's not bad to be gay. And he's not allowed to be anything except good-looking, and nice, and gay...or else he'll become a bad person to somebody and then that would be bad for real-life gay people everywhere.) (At least if Maxxie's that bland and somebody still doesn't like him, then you know that dislike is only because of homophobia. We don't do gray area or complications in storytelling media, because everything is pure propaganda and audiences cannot think for ourselves or think different things from each other.)

I think that's very similar to the observation I read somewhere else that girl protagonists in Young Adult literature are written to please everyone, which probably comes from the intention to alleviate misogyny, and probably even has impact in favor of that end. As a result, though, these characters are not there to make a connection with. They're a calculation.

This all implies that until homophobia and misogyny ease up in real-life culture, the people living at those intersections of oppression absolutely must be bland and perfectly inoffensive.

I think that's the peril of "the united front". If you're a demographic that everybody has prejudices against, then you aren't allowed to be a whole entire person even by those on your side. The priority is carving out some breathing room in the mainstream culture, so being all of the rest of who you are becomes a detriment to every cause and community that you'll be in.

And somehow that results in that if you are a whole entire person with complications and flaws who responds to an imperfect world in an imperfect way, then that's your fault that your cause will fail.

Bare was so refreshing because it explored contradictions and gray areas that do make complacent people uncomfortable. Peter is as sincere in his Catholic faith as he is in his love for another boy—How is that a thing?!?? The Catholic church is so homophobic, shouldn't he have picked a side a long time ago? He's a hypocrite both ways if he doesn't, no he's not allowed to be a confused high schooler doing his best to reconcile all the equally-real parts of himself. He has to be attractive and nice and gay and inoffensive and easy to file into a box! His religious community has to be portrayed as completely bad, or else it won't know that it's being criticized! What is this? And how are we supposed to believe that Jason means that big song number when he's obviously not a Gold Star Gay? What even happened there?

Then there's Jason shoving Peter to the ground right before Ever After, and shout-singing at him when it's his verse. It's easy to say, "This means that Jason is a violent person and an abusive partner," and if somebody watches that and discusses how much bad behavior you'd put up with from a partner of any gender or orientation, and decide that is too much bad behavior...then, good. I wouldn't want a boy like that dating my son, either, if I had a son.

That should also coexist with the idea that homophobia in society scares Jason so deeply that he would hurt somebody he loves. In anything similar to his situation, would any of us really be better?

And even that does not mean that it's all the fault of the system, or that homophobia against boys is the only problem.

Ivy wasn't suffering a stigmatized medical condition that she's severely limited in treating on account of that stigma, because the priest impregnated her. No, Jason did that impregnating. That doesn't mean Jason is the real villain and the priest isn't. Saying that Jason did that because he was confused and oppressed doesn't mean that his actions don't have consequences. It certainly doesn't mean that Ivy can't be angry that she's in this terrible situation because of Jason's confusion and dishonesty and what he did about it...to her.

Ivy has no reason to decide that the priest is the real problem, even though what the priest represents is her main problem too. The priest himself is a product of his conditioning and limitations: he has all this social power, but he isn't subversive because...Again, in his exact situation, would any of us be better?

That's not a rhetorical question to imply that we can't be better than our conditioning, worldview, emotions, intersections of privilege, intersections of oppression, or what we're immediately responding to will "allow" us to be.

Sometimes we can imagine ways to be better, and from a work like Bare I think that's the main point: What if No Voice didn't have to be the end? It didn't have to end that way. Think of the possibilities. Be better. Also sometimes, the pressure is too much on all sides and there isn't a better way, and we might try to sympathize with that too: Ivy shouldn't be blamed for having never "learned to stop at just a kiss" when we know from her Portrait song that she was only doing more than kissing to feel recognized for who she is instead of what she is, so there's another systemic problem that strikes right in the personal. Everybody's in this mess of systemic problems. It's complicated.

[adultswim2021]

The Boondocks #21: “Attack of the Killer Kung-Fu Wolf-Bitch” | November 19, 2007 - 11:30PM | S02E06

In this episode, Granddad winds up on a blind internet date with a beautiful woman voiced by Aisha Tyler. What a wonderful turn of events for him; especially because he’s been on a string of dates with some DISHONEST WOMEN, who have shown up to dates not looking like their significantly more wankable myspace profile photograph. Could it be too good to be true?

Yes, it could. It turns out that the woman, Luna, is a deadly kung-fu martial artist with an affinity for wolves (hence the title). She spooks the entire family so bad that they feign an emergency trip out of town in order to ghost her. When she finds out she reacts poorly, mostly because of her bitchy-sounding friend who eggs her on to do some Kill Bill shit to them over the phone.

This is sort of a goofier one. Not really much hard-hitting satire to speak of, just a wacky plot about love gone wrong. There’s flashbacks to the woman’s past, including her time at a kumite, the underground tournament to the death from the motion picture Bloodsport. She won, in scenes that resemble the high video game Mortal Kombat. But will she bestow a Mortal Kombat 2 style “Friendship” on the Freeman family?

The goofiness of the episode is really essential. The main problem one might have with this episode is the way the family reacts to Luna’s confession that she is a deadly fighter. There doesn’t seem to be much of a downside to just accepting her and her past, especially since the alternative to that plays out so poorly for our favorite non-yellow family. The fact that this confrontation results in her undoing (spoilers: she dies at the end) is bothersome, because she’s a pretty likable character. She’s misguided in a way that shouldn’t be fatal, and yet she is. But the goofy tone sorta does away with that. I was genuinely curious if this episode was particularly disliked for this reason, but it gets fairly above average marks on IMDB, so I guess they succeeded. Speaking of yellow families, this almost works as a companion piece to “Homer’s Enemy” (aka the Frank Grimes episode). It’s comparable! I’ve compared the two, goddamn it.

I’m just glad this one didn’t have a bunch of rap references to read up on. Thank you, Boondocks.

EPHEMERA CORNER

MAIL BAG

I started my post two nights ago (sorry for missing a night I GOT UNEXPECTEDLY BUSY YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE ME) by telling you about my gastrointestinal distress. I am going to use this space to tell you that today I brought a bottle of astroglide to work with me because I did not shit all day yesterday, and I could tell that it was going to be an ordeal. I lubed my canal while in a clandestine public bathroom on my workroute. I let out an enormously long one, very sturdy I’m pleased to say. But then I dumped so much mud on top of it that it crested the surface of the water in the toilet. When I looked down, the solid log was laying across the hole, and the mud dump on top caused the resulting mess to look uncannily like a banana split. I’m pleased to say there was no strawberry sauce. I had to flush three times to get it all down.

Speaking of shit, here’s some letters I got reacting to yesterday’s Tim & Eric post:

90s SNL is just as bad as any other era of SNL. Mike Meyers and Rob Schneider just did straight up retarded shit every week, it just had cooler bands.

Oh, I think the SNL renaissance is real. But the quality is more negligible than most people realize. Watching full episodes of all but a few episodes of the show is a chore, always.

The John Landis remark on your absolutely scathing takedown of Vacation is astounding. I've seen nitpicking but that's a nit no one can scratch. Also theres like 20 incidents of that kind of pull way in Tom Goes To The Mayor.

Tom Goes to the Mayor is an inferior product compared to Awesome Show, and deserves a more critical eye. Especially since season one of Awesome Show dazzled this TV-obsessed Weldon.

yer vacation thing is nuts. some real hater/cinema sins shit. raz is funny!

I think I ultimately like the episode, I am pretty disappointed that the wraparound bits weren’t as strong. Season premiere, guys. Look alive. I yelled at a woman for you (one of the people who came over was a sexually active woman!)

[ascuteascherryblossom]

I really wanna know if any long term ED sufferers feel the same way as me.

I developed my ED 7 years ago at just 12 years old and am now 19 and still here. I have barely any recollection of life before 12 so it really feels like my life is only my ED as it's all I've really known tbh... my whole puberty and all of time I can remember. Because of this, I cannot even imagine my life without an ED. I cannot imagine myself any other way than how I am at this moment.

I feel envy for those who've had EDs for shorter periods or from older ages and can recall a life without this disorder and imagine what a life without it in the future could be like even if they don't want to make the move towards it.

I don't fear my ED, I'm not scared of it nor is it something I dislike. It doesn't feel like hell because it's all my life has ever been. It's just normal... I feel weird when I have my small faux recovery periods of time and even uncomfortable, not in a 'cant let go of my ED' way but in a wtf is this way of living and why am I supposed to be this way?

Doesn't help that my faux recovery months are always because my depression hits new extremes and my suicidal, self loathing, world hating feelings become so overwhelming I become bed ridden, mindlessly scrolling tiktok AITA videos just to pass time because everything is tiresome and I hate everyone and everything. But I eat fine as food is the only positive thing cause it tastes good (don't cook though).

But ED periods I shower, brush my teeth, dress nicely, put an effort into myself and I actually do things, I can finally enjoy dancing again without it being exhausting to stand. It's like bringing life back into me so I love it...

Plus I love how I look physically when I'm thinner no matter my mindset over my current weight at the time. So it all combines to feeling good plus it's my usual, I've spent more days like this than that faux recovery crap and I feel like an actual human.

I'm always happier when I'm actively participating in my ED, it's better than the other state I feel. It's one or the other. I can't imagine a third.

And honestly... I don't want to. I'm comfortable here. I'm in therapy but I haven't even spoken to her for over a month because I don't feel the need. In my depression eras I NEED therapy just to vent and function, have a person I can say just how badly I wish I could punch s hole in my chest and rip my besting heart out until it stops beating and everything can be over...

But when I'm like I am now I don't feel that. I don't feel I wanna live long either, never have done, even as a kid. But I do feel like I have a goal in life.

My goal is to step on that scale and see that number that traumatised little 12 year old me until now. Finally reach 39.7kg and tell my inner child 'see, you made it, you didn't become fat and die from obesity at 30, you didn't become unattractive and unloveable. You made it just as you said you would. And now we can die, or live in peace, a chapter closed forever. You made it'

And before u say anything about that weight being 172cm, I have no plans to maintain it, I want to maintain between 43-48kgs, om the way down I'll see what I look like at all them weights and choose the range I prefer and go back up and stick there. I look way better at 50kgs than 55 anyways so like I know I'll look amazing then too.

Anyways I needed this rant and wanted to know if I'm the only one who feels like their ED is basically a part of them now especially after so long.

I'm mentally prepared to become that one older lady with an ED people look at with sad eyes on the street as their old and skeletal figures walk to the store. I've seen them, I know how people react and I'm not afraid to become her. Even if I'm not THAT skeletal. It doesn't scare me...

And if it kills me before then well whatever, I could die tomorrow anyways from a fatal accident anyways. I don't care for life nor death anymore, whatever happens, happens idgaf. Life's good but crap at the same time so staying is good and crap and leaving is good and equally crap so who gives a shit.

Anyways see u bye

take care

[sleepyzenpanda]

Bio Post

I’m a shy panda so it took me forever to decide if I wanted to do a bio. Finally got around to making one though. Post was kind of long so more under the cut

Name: Sleepy or Panda

Age: Over 30

Pronouns: She/Her

INFP-T

Queer Ace on the aromantic spectrum. I mainly identify as asexual but I started using queer for myself because, if I were to experience romantic attraction, I don’t think I would have any strong feelings regarding gender

Neurodivergent (Dyslexia, ADHD, Bipolar, Depression, Anxiety, Dyscalculia) I’m still still getting used to using the term neurodivergent for myself since it’s only recently that the term has started being used for other dx outside of autism. I’ve recently accepted that I may be on the autism spectrum as well, but I haven’t been tested and don’t know if I will pursue testing at this point

Invisible ♿️ : Officially I’m not considered physically disabled. However, I’ve had major spinal fusion surgery for scoliosis, which along with causing physical limitations, results in chronic back pain. I’ve also had two herniated disks, one of which required surgery as it was pinching my nerves to the point I lost feeling in one of my legs. I’ve started getting ablations but I’m still pretty much always in someone degree of pain. I occasionally use a cane if the pain is especially bad

Political Leftist. I know tumblr gets up in arms about about the distinction between leftist and liberals, but I still use the term liberal for myself. Growing up as a transplant to the South™ anyone left of center was considered a liberal. I claimed the term to spite conservatives who used it as a derogatory insult. So you can pry the term liberal from my cold dead hands

Likes: sleeping, cats, pandas, sweets, anime/manga, reading fanfic, watching video game playthroughs (I’m terrible at gaming lol) Favorites games include: the Fatal Frame/Project Zero franchise, RE 4 / RE 4 (2023) and RE Village. I’ll occasionally stream playthroughs of the Nancy Drew PC games from HeR Interactive for nostalgias sake.

Fandoms: Netflix’s Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows (currently reading Crooked Kingdom) and Hazbin Hotel Note: Volunteer for the Netflix Shadow and Bone/the Six of Crows spinoff renewal campaign: Diversity Team/Media Squad/Tweeting party Question Creator! Fandoms taking a back seat to my current hyperfixation: Stranger Things, MDZS, SK8 the Infinity.

Favorite anime manga: Inuyasha, Ranma 1/2, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Fushigi Yuugi, Wedding Peach, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic, MDZS, Sk8 the Infinity, Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!, Yuki Yuna Is a Hero

I’ve been part of one fandom or another for almost 2 decades. Many moons ago I wrote fanfiction (pre Ao3 era), but I no longer possess the time or energy to do so. I previously had fandom specific sideblogs but I don’t have the energy to keep up with that anymore either

Mostly reblogs but I’m slowly working on some original content. Guilty of frequent post liking sprees with the intention of reblogging later once I have the mental energy. Please don’t be offended if you follow me and I don’t follow you back. It’s nothing personal, it’s hard to keep up with everyone who follows.

Special Note about politics: Due to working at a State university I have to be especially careful about what I post/reblog regarding certain issues. I hope you will understand that while I am aware of what going on in the world and have opinions about it I cannot always express those opinions on social media.

Not sure what else to put. Post may occasionally be updated in the future

[lunapaper]

Album Review: 'HOLY FVCK' - Demi Lovato

Holy fvck really is the perfect way to describe the past few years for Demi Lovato.  

In 2018, the singer suffered a near-fatal overdose, which left her legally blind. She came out as non-binary, preferring to go by she/they pronouns. She became the ambassador for a conspiracy theory website. She revisited past trauma on 2021’s Dancing with the Devil... The Art of Starting Over. She had beef with that frozen yoghurt store, which drew criticism from fans and critics alike. 

Lovato now channels all their fear, longing and fury into big, chugging, metal-inspired riffs and snarling pop punk on her eighth album. But while everyone and their mother seems to be jumping on the bandwagon, trying to score a collab with Travis Barker in the hopes of becoming the next Olivia Rodrigo, Lovato’s love of rock, metal and emo is true. Not too long ago, they recounted the time she crowdsurfed at Norwegian black metal band Dimmur Borgir’s show as a teenager in an attempt to evade the moshpit. 

And Lovato wears her influences proudly on her sleeve. 

First single ‘SKIN OF MY TEETH’ is a formidable tribute to Hole’s ‘Celebrity Skin.’ ‘Demi leaves rehab again/When is this shit gonna end?’ Lovato drawls as she longs to be free of her much-publicised demons (‘but I can’t ‘cos it’s a fuckin’ disease’). ‘SUBSTANCE’ owes a lot to Jimmy Eat World’s ‘The Middle,’ the singer searching for meaning in an increasingly shallow and fragmented world. Though it’s kinda ironic that Lovato would decry a lack of substance in the world while choosing to align herself with a platform that pushes misinformation… 

‘EAT ME’ is vicious and ragged, with Royal and the Serpent’s Ryan Santiago providing the sickly-sweet yin to Lovato’s raspy yang. It wouldn’t have looked too out of place on Poppy’s I Disagree, at the same time maintaining a Muse-like grind. The title track has a slinky groove and dirty, filthy bass akin to The Pretty Reckless, with riffs like flames licking at the walls and Lovato revelling in the leather-clad melodrama. Standout ‘BONES’ has ‘Trouble’s Coming’-era Royal Blood in its blood, an underrated cut of salacious disco punk that has the singer wanting to jump a lover’s bones (natch). 

HOLY FVCK is as preoccupied with the sexual as it is the sacramental, Lovato making her desires known while burning down the toxic purity cult that Disney kept her imprisoned in for so many years. 

‘HEAVEN’ is a dizzy, wailing ode to self-love channelling Marilyn Manson’s ‘Beautiful People,’ with Lovato trying to reconcile the deeply-held Catholic beliefs of their family with masturbation, inspired by Matthew 5:30 (‘If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, because it’s better to lose one part of your body than your entire body to hell’). She plans on christening every square inch of LA in every position possible on SUM 41-style filthfest, ‘CITY OF ANGELS.’   

’29,’ however, is a much, much darker.  

‘Thought it was a teenage dream, just a fantasy/But was it yours or was it mine?’ Lovato spits back, allegedly at their ex, Wilmer Valderrama, a grimy, gasoline rainbow of a rock banger that’s since become an empowering catch-cry for hundreds of women on TikTok who’ve also been preyed on by older men. The singer doesn’t hold back, offering up skin-crawling lines such as ‘Just five years a bleeder, student and a teacher/Far from innocent, what the fuck's consent?’ But it’s definitely among the most cathartic of HOLY FVCK’s tracks, its chorus thrashing like a wild animal that’s burst out of its cage. 

The crux of the album, though, lies with ‘HAPPY ENDING.’  

‘Am I gonna die trying to find my happy ending?’ Lovato wonders, ‘And will I ever know what it's like.’ It paints a brutal portrait of the realities of addiction, never truly free of her demons. It also has a lot in common with her 2018 track, ‘Sober,’ released after suffering a relapse, but this time, Lovato seeks to turn hopelessness into something hopeful. ‘The feeling I hope that people take away from listening to this song is that I hope they don’t feel alone,’ she told fans via her website. ‘In this song, it’s talking about feeling so hopeless but I want my fans to know they’re never alone and someone has felt this way before and made it out of it.’ 

Then we reach the halfway mark, and the album’s tension begins to wane, Lovato soon retreating into the inoffensive Disney pop rock of years past (bar ‘DEAD FRIENDS,’ of course). The scuzzy sleaze rock of ‘HELP ME’ (featuring Emily Armstrong of LA rock trio Dead Sara), however, is a bright spot, taunting and swaggering back at the listener ‘thanks for your useless information’ and shoving their pointless opinions back in their faces. 

If you’re gonna go full rock and metal, complete with the metal-style V in the album title and the bondage and crucifix imagery to match, then commit. Why hold a ‘funeral’ for your pop music if you’re just gonna end up getting cold feet halfway through and end up resurrecting its corpse? 

HOLY FVCK is a long overdue burst of anger from Lovato. Rather than wallow in her pain, she revels in it, entices it and grabs it by the fucking throat – at least for the first half of the record.  

It could also do with a little subtlety: For every stark confession, there’s a cliched platitude or goofy lyric. Lovato’s boasts of being ‘ungodly but heaven-sent' can also come off as trying too hard at times. 

Still, ‘[y]ou can’t have light without dark,’ Lovato recently told the LA Times. ‘The dichotomy was really important to me, and I had to take my anger out of the shadows in order to heal. I am owning my dark side, and it doesn’t have to take me down.’  

And by doing so, she’s never sounded better. Hopefully Lovato keeps fvcking things up like this… 

- Bianca B. 

[lizzygrantarchives]

Billboard, August 22, 2019

With her new album, 'Norman Fucking Rockwell,' the singer makes her most adventurous and candid music yet -- and leads Billboard's list of the 38 most-anticipated things about music this fall.

YOU’VE GOT TO CLIMB THE HILL BEHIND the Chateau Marmont to get to the office where I’m meeting Lana Del Rey, which feels appropriately on the nose on this early-August day: The hotel is Hollywood’s ultimate nexus of glamour and doom, the keeper of 90 years of celebrity secrets that touch everyone from Bette Davis to Britney Spears. It shows up in the homemade visuals for Del Rey’s breakout single “Video Games” and in the lyrics of songs like “Off to the Races.” She lived here while writing her Paradise EP in 2012. Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski lived here, too, in Room 54, before moving to Cielo Drive where — exactly 50 years ago, as of midnight tonight — the Manson Family arrived.

But these kinds of connections are standard in the Lana Del Rey multiverse, where nods to Bob Dylan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elton John and Henry Miller can coexist in a single chorus and not feel overdone. (No, seriously: Play her 2017 duet with Sean Ono Lennon, “Tomorrow Never Came.”) And if the Lana of five years ago radiated significant Sharon Tate circa Valley of the Dolls energy, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter has more of a Summer of Love thing going on now. The songs she has previewed from her fifth album, the exquisitely titled Norman Fucking Rockwell, are far more Newport Folk Festival than femme fatale — meandering psych-rock jam sessions and slippery piano ballads that shout out Sylvia Plath. The narrative thread throughout all of this can lead listeners down an endless rabbit hole of references, but you can sum it up like so: The music Lana Del Rey makes could only be made by Lana Del Rey.

That means songs like the nearly 10-minute-long “Venice Bitch,” the most psychedelic tune in her catalog, or the title track, a ballad rich with one-liner gems like, “Your poetry’s bad, and you blame the news” — songs that represent the best writing in her career yet have almost zero chance of radio play. Norman Fucking Rockwell, out Aug. 30, is a “mood record,” as Del Rey describes it while perched barefoot on a velvet couch in the new office of her longtime management company, an airy pad way up in the Hollywood Hills with platinum plaques scattered about that no one has gotten around to hanging up yet. There are no big bangers, just songs you can jam out to during beach walks and long drives. This is not exactly a surprise: Del Rey’s only top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 was a raving Cedric Gervais remix of her song “Summertime Sadness.” But in the streaming era, when success often means getting easily digestible singles on the right playlists, making an album that’s meant to be wallowed in for 70 minutes isn’t just inspired — it’s defiant.

Yet it’s an approach that has worked for Del Rey: Her songs, even the long, weird ones, easily rack up tens of millions of streams, and overall they have amassed a solid 3.9 billion on-demand streams in the United States, according to Nielsen Music. Collectively, her catalog of albums has sold 3.2 million copies in the United States, and all of her full-length major-label studio albums have debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 1 or No. 2. The first of those, 2012’s Born to Die, is one of only three titles by a woman to spend over 300 weeks on the Billboard 200. (The other two: Adele’s 21 and Carole King’s Tapestry.) Born to Die also has spent 142 weeks on Billboard’s Vinyl Albums chart — more than Prince’s Purple Rain, tied with Michael Jackson’s Thriller and just behind Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. It’s an indication that, as broad as her fan base is, it also runs deep, with a ratio of hardcore devotees to casual ones that even stars with inescapable radio hits might envy.

Credit Del Rey’s strong aesthetic and singular throwback sound that, as it has moved away from its initial pop and hip-hop influences, has kept young fans interested and allowed them to grow up with her. “When we sign [an artist], it’s not necessarily what everyone was listening to, but they had real vision,” says Interscope chairman/CEO John Janick. “Lana’s at ground zero of that. There have been so many other people who’ve been inspired by Lana. She’s massive, she has sold millions of albums, but it always has been on her terms.”

This has been Del Rey’s deal from the jump. “Some people really are trying to get in the mix of the zeitgeist, and that is just not my MO — never cared,” says Del Rey, cradling a coffee with sky blue-painted fingertips. “My little heart’s path has such a distinct road that it’s almost taking me along for the ride. Like, ‘I guess we’re following this muse, and it wants to be in the woods. OK, I guess we’re packing up the truck!’ It’s truly ethereal, and it’s a huge pain in the ass.”

Del Rey’s instincts are what led Interscope to sign her to an international joint-venture deal with U.K. label Polydor in 2011 and what compelled her managers Ed Millett and Ben Mawson to create their company, TaP Music, with Del Rey as their first client in 2009. “It was at that moment of peak piracy when no one in the music business was making money, so labels just weren’t taking risks,” recalls Millett. “You’d play one of her songs at an A&R meeting, and they’d be like, ‘You know what’s selling at the moment? Kesha.’ But we were lucky with Lana because she knew exactly who she was. Our job was about making sure everybody understood that.”

That battle for understanding has followed Del Rey for much of her career. “People just couldn’t believe she could be so impactful without some svengalis behind her. I still think there’s a tinge of misogyny behind all that,” says Millett, referencing the endless debates about Del Rey’s creative autonomy. “She realized very quickly, being at the center of that storm, you’re not going to win.” So she went deeper into her own weird world, and somewhere between her third and fourth records — the haunted jazz of 2015’s Honeymoon and the new-age folk of 2017’s Lust for Life — it felt like people finally got it. Or, at least, the people who were meant to get it got it. After all, Del Rey never had intended to make popular music, even if she now headlines festivals. It just kind of happened that way: a poet disguised as a pop star.

In many ways, Norman Fucking Rockwell feels like a fulfillment of the groundwork she has spent nearly a decade laying: She is now free to be Lana, no questions asked. “People want to embrace her lack of formula,” says Millett. “And now she can do whatever the hell she wants because people have accepted that, well, she’s brilliant.” Though she has sold out arenas in the past, the North American leg of her upcoming fall tour has her playing amphitheaters and outdoor venues that feel especially suited to the style of her music. And if her songs feel lighter, it’s because Del Rey does, too.

“I mean, God, I have never taken a shortcut — and I think that’s going to stop now,” she says, feet kicked up on the coffee table. “It hasn’t really served me well to go by every instinct. It’s the longer, more arduous road. But it does get you to the point where, when everyone is just copying each other, you’re like, ‘I know myself well enough that I don’t want to go to that foam rave in a crop top.’ ”

Although that does sound kind of dope, now that she’s thinking about it. “Yeah, never mind,” she says, laughing. “Google ‘nearest foam rave.’ ”

IN PERSON, DEL REY’S VIBE isn’t noir heroine or folk troubadour so much as friend from college who now lives in the suburbs. Her jean shorts, white T-shirt and gray cardigan could’ve easily been snatched off a mannequin at the nearest American Eagle Outfitters. A couple of times in our conversation, she lets out a “Gee whiz!” like a side character in a Popeye cartoon. Between the tour announcements and Gucci campaign shoots, her Instagram consists mostly of screenshot poetry and Easter brunch pics with her girlfriends. For the most distinctive popular songwriter of the past decade, she appears disarmingly basic.

“Oh, I am! I’m actually only that,” agrees Del Rey, eyes gleaming. “I’ve got a more eccentric side when it comes to the muse of writing, but I feel very much that writing is not my thing: I’m writing’s thing. When the writing has got me, I’m on its schedule. But when it leaves me alone, I’m just at Starbucks, talking shit all day.” Starting in 2011, when her nearly drumless, practically hookless breakthrough single “Video Games” blew up, the suddenly polarizing singer found it hard to move through the real world unbothered. But something changed a few years back; she’s not sure if she chilled out or if everyone else did. In any case, she’s happiest among the people, whether that’s lingering in Silverlake coffee shops or dipping out to Newport to rollerblade. “I’ve got my ear to the ground,” she says with a conspiratorial wink. “Actually, that’s my main goal.”

Somehow this only makes Del Rey weirder and cooler: the high priestess of sad pop who now smiles on album covers and posts Instagram stories inviting you to check out her homegirl’s fitness event in Hermosa Beach. You could feel the shift on Lust for Life, which enlisted everyone from A$AP Rocky to Stevie Nicks and traded the interiority of her early songwriting for anthems about women’s rights and the state of the world. She even seemed down to play the pop game a bit, though by her own rules: She worked with superproducer Max Martin on the title track, even as it quoted ’60s girl groups and cast R&B juggernaut The Weeknd as the long-lost Beach Boy.

Among those entering Del Rey’s creative fold on Norman Fucking Rockwell is Jack Antonoff, the four-time Grammy Award-winning producer who has become a go-to collaborator on synth-pop heavy hitters for the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift. Enlisting Big Pop’s most in-demand producer doesn’t seem like a very Lana Del Rey move, and she knows it.

“I wasn’t in the mood to write,” she admits. “He wanted me to meet him in some random diner, and I was like, ‘You already worked with everyone else; I don’t know where there’s room for me.’ ” But when Antonoff played her 10 minutes of weird, atmospheric riffs, Del Rey could immediately picture her new album: “A folk record with a little surf twist.” In the end, Antonoff wound up co-producing almost the whole project, alongside longtime collaborator Rick Nowels and Del Rey herself.

Most of Norman Fucking Rockwell follows similar whims — or, as Del Rey puts it, “Divine timing.” Though artists like Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande have taken the creation of pop music to a more informal and impulsive place — Eilish recorded her debut album with her producer brother Finneas O’Connell in his childhood bedroom, while Grande wrote most of Thank U, Next in a weeklong blitz — Del Rey’s approach seems even more casual. “She doesn’t follow any kind of plan beyond what she feels is right, and it works every time,” says Millett.

That includes the cover of Sublime’s sleazy 1996 hit “Doin’ Time” — essentially the “Summertime Sadness” of the Long Beach, Calif., ska band’s discography — recorded out of pure fandom, yet somehow a perfect complement to the album’s beach bum vibe. “We were involved in executive-producing the [recent] Sublime documentary because their catalog is through Interscope, and Lana was talking about how big a fan she was,” says Janick. As it happened, her earliest producer was David Kahne, who had worked with Sublime in the ’90s. “So she ended up doing that cover, which turned out amazing. But then she felt like it fit the aesthetic of the album.”

The album title was just something she came up with when she randomly harmonized the name of the American illustrator while recording “Venice Bitch,” though she recognizes that she and Rockwell — an idealist whose cozy depictions of Boy Scouts and Thanksgiving turkeys graced magazine covers for half the 20th century — have both explored big questions about the American dream in their work. And then there’s the artwork she has been using for the record’s singles: bizarrely casual iPhone photos that feel a bit tossed-off because, well, they are.

“Every time my managers write me, ‘Album art?,’ I’m just like, send!” she cackles, pantomiming taking a selfie. “And they just send the middle-finger emoji back to me.”

THE WEEK OF OUR INTERVIEW, JUST a few days after two consecutive mass shootings took place in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Del Rey recorded a song called “Looking for America.” She hadn’t planned to write it, but the shootings affected her on a “cellular level,” as she phrased it in an Instagram preview, which also included a sharp disclaimer: “Now I know I’m not a politician and I’m not trying to be so excuse me for having an opinion.” Over Antonoff’s acoustic guitar, she sings softly, “I’m still looking for my own version of America/One without the gun, where the flag can freely fly.”

The quiet protest song is a move you can hardly imagine her making five years ago. It wasn’t until Lust for Life, she acknowledges, that she felt brave enough to have an overt political opinion. “It is quite a critical world, where people are like, ‘Stick to singing!’ ” she says. “They don’t say that to everyone, but I heard that a lot.”

With that sense of permission has come a kind of peace and an acceptance that evaded Del Rey in her early career; she has never indulged her critics, but it’s nice to be understood. “Sometimes with women, there was so much criticism if you weren’t just one way that was easily metabolized and decipherable — you were a crazy person,” she marvels, noting a shift in the perception of female pop stars that happened only recently (one catalyzed in large part by her own career arc). She recently recorded a song for the soundtrack to the upcoming Charlie’s Angels reboot with Grande and Miley Cyrus — stars who also have faced criticism for the ways in which they don’t conform to the expectations of women in the spotlight.

Her newest songs are some of her most personal, particularly the album closer, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but i have it” (a title only Del Rey could pull off). It also hovers anxiously on the margins of the #MeToo movement, though never in such broad strokes. “It was staggered with references from living in Hollywood and seeing so many things that didn’t look right to me, things that I never thought I’d have permission to talk about, because everyone knew and no one ever said anything,” she says in a tangle of sentences as knotty as the lyrics themselves. “The culture only changed in the last two years as to whether people would believe you. And I’ve been in this business now for 15 years!

“So I was writing a song to myself.” She exhales deeply, sinking back into the sofa. “Hope truly is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have, because I know so much.” Del Rey pauses. “But I have it.”

Del Rey has been thinking a lot about hope and faith lately. She has been going to church every Wednesday and Sunday with a group of her girlfriends; they get coffee beforehand, and it has become something to look forward to. She likes the idea of a network of people you can talk to about wanting something bigger — just another extension of her fondness for pondering the mysteries of the universe. (Fittingly, she studied metaphysics and philosophy at Fordham University in New York.) “I genuinely think the thing that has transformed my life the most is knowing that there’s magic in the concept of two heads are better than one,” she says.

That has crept into her music, too. Del Rey says she hadn’t realized until recently how isolating her creative process had been for so long. These days, studio sessions feel more like cozy jam sessions, according to Laura Sisk, the Grammy-winning engineer who worked closely on the record with Del Rey and Antonoff. “Something I love about Norman is how much of the energy of the room we’re able to record,” says Sisk. “We often don’t use a vocal booth, so we’re sitting in a room together recording, usually right after the song was written and the feeling is still heavy in the room.”

Even the cover of Norman Fucking Rockwell, Del Rey says, was designed to cultivate a sense of community. For the first time in her discography, she’s not pictured by herself. She’s on a boat at sea, one arm wrapped around actor Duke Nicholson (a family friend and grandson of Jack), the other reaching out to pull the viewer aboard. As she explains the idea, Del Rey rifles through her sizable mental rolodex of quotations and offers this one from Humphrey Bogart by way of Ernest Hemingway: “ ‘The sea is the last free place on earth.’ ” A place, in other words, where you can finally just be you.

Del Rey says her album covers tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies — whatever energy she puts out tends to shape the next chapter of her life. She’s eager to see how this one, with its open arms and sense of adventure, manifests itself. “We’re going somewhere,” she says with a mysterious grin. “I don’t know where we’re going. But wherever it is, my feet are going to be on the ground.”

Originally published on billboard.com with the headline Lana Del Rey on Finding Her Voice and Following Her Muse: ‘I Have Never Taken a Shortcut’, and in the August 24, 2019 issue of Billboard with the headline Lana Del Rey Speaks Her Mind.

[rafeny]

Can I Tell You...about my Fall / Winter 2023 Collection.

Rafé New York Takes Us To A Dazzling Reimagining Of Studio 54

By Chelsea Sarabia for Vogue Philippines

Rafe Totengco on his Fall / Winter 2023 Campaign and the sweet homecoming of Filipino creatives that went on behind the scenes.

In setting out to design any collection, Rafe Totengco prefers to work off a feeling.

With his brand Rafé New York, the designer has carved out a niche in the clutches and evening bags sect of fashion. He attributes its global acclaim to one sentiment: anyone can carry a Rafé bag. Over an illustrious two-decade-long career, he notes a sizeable shift in the landscape that mirrors this attitude, with trends that transcend any one type of person—so long as it fits their tastes.

“With social media, we’ve become a very small world. Everyone sees everything instantaneously, and they also see what other people are wearing,” he says. “Ultimately, that’s also what I love about handbags: it’s a very democratic piece of fashion. You can be young, you can be old. It’s not size-specific, it’s not age-specific.” 

For his Fall/Winter 2023 collection, Totengco doesn’t design with a particular muse in mind but a mood; he paints a picture of a radiant hour in a bar in Bushwick, tapping into the sparkling glamour and the freeing sense of style of eras past. 

The designer expands, “I’m hoping that with one of these bags from the next season, [wearers] get a sense of confidence, independence, and strength, and a kind of boldness [that says] ‘I want to stand out from the crowd. I don’t want to be like everybody else. I’m going to walk in and turn heads. Yes, I’m going to own the space.’”

Inspired by Studio 54 and Helmut Newton’s photographs of the Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking suit, Totengco wanted to shoot in a location that captured the vibrancy of New York City at night. It seemed nearly impossible to find within the city’s cluster of crowded streets and the time demanded of shooting a full-blown campaign; that was, until his team found the perfect spot: a Brooklyn bar with the makings of what could have been a stylish speakeasy from the 1920s. 

“The bar provided us with so many vignettes that I was super happy with because it kind of gave you the feeling that ‘She’s inside…somewhere,’” he muses. “You don’t necessarily see her friends, but it doesn’t matter. It’s almost like she’s there [just arriving]. There’s this anticipation of, like, ‘Something fun is about to happen.’ And you can just imagine the rest.” 

Styled in Marcel waves and ‘70s-reminiscent jumpsuits, Rafé’s femme fatale lounges over black leather booths, carrying an array of evening bags in malleable rhinestone mesh and sequins that spill over her fingertips.

“We have [them in] magenta, gold, and silver—you know, classic rhinestone colors, [and they’re] all individually done by hand in India,” he says of the collection. “They’re fun evening bags, party bags. When you see them, they evoke that sense of frivolity and ‘Ooh, look at this sparkly thing!’ I always believe a little sparkle never hurt anybody.”

For his campaign, Totengco worked with New York City-based Filipino creatives whom he shares he met through serendipitous encounters. In New York City, it seems, most Filipinos are distanced by only “two degrees of separation.”

He met photographer Selwyn Tungol after he had taken a picture of one of his bags during a Fashion Week years ago and the multi-disciplinary creative Lorenz Namalata at the recent opening of the Silverlens Galleries in Manhattan. Following what the designer calls a “trail of connectivity,” he finds that the bar Namalata scouted for him was Filipino co-owned, too. 

“It was just funny. We had a whole crew of other people who were assisting who all came from Manila, all based here now, and it just became this thing. All of a sudden, we were talking in Tagalog in Sleepwalk, a bar in Bushwick, and we were like, oh my God, wait, where are we? What are we doing?” he laughs. “It’s also, in a way, representative of New York now. It really is a melting pot, and I love that—that a new generation of creatives is coming up.”

For Totengco, a predominantly Filipino crew was a refreshing departure from where he first started in the industry. He says, “It was kind of this moment of solidarity where it was like, ‘Well, I didn’t have this before.’ Without even realizing it, it’s happening, and, really, it’s a nice feeling. You feel at home. You feel like you’re a part of something.”

[historyherstory]

You obviously put a lot of research in to your fic - it definitely shows - and you come across as pretty well read on the ww2 era. What are some of your favorite books dealing with the time period? I just finished reading "Traitor King" by Andrew Lownie, about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson's shenanigans post-abdication, and I'm still pretty floored about what the ramifications would've been if that flagrant nazi sympathizer had stayed on the British throne.

Thank you very much for this lovely comment! I feel (and I suspect the same is true for many people!) that I could live 3 lifetimes and still not have enough time to read all of the books I'd like to read, and learn about all the things I know I want to know more about (and all the things I haven't discovered yet that future me will want to learn of!) 😅

Before I answer, a bit of an offshoot: I really struggle with how homogenous the storytellers are of WWII history. It's only really been in the last ten years or so that we see some serious proliferation of whose stories get told (and who is telling the stories). Clearly (*gestures at blog, at fanfic that is consuming my brain*) I adore those people and those histories so this isn't a slight on them - but I have always struggled with how little we hear in nonfiction about women, people of color, and other minorities. (And to be fair: this is not just a WWII history problem, this is a "the field of history has been dominated by white men for a really long time and that has created a hegemony that we're still struggling with".)

So! Disclaimer (? rant??? something??) aside:

Our Mothers' War by Emily Yellin is one that I really enjoy. I read it a few years ago and ended up buying a copy because I kept wanting to come back to it. Some of the author's commentary as she was researching the book really played into the creation of HHS.

It used to be a bit difficult to find (a big actor is named in a project based off the book so I think it's gotten more popular) but The War Magician (David Fisher) was really fascinating to me!

Fatal Crossroads deals with the Malmedy Massacre (Danny Parker) which I had never learned much about in school and I honestly tend to recommend it to anyone who is interested in WWII - it's easy to link to what people know (battle of the bulge) but involves a part of it that generally doesn't get a whole lot of attention.

Sisters in the Resistance has some first-hand recountings of women in the French Resistance and I think it's a good foil for people who may not underestimate just how much the French populace fought back (and how many women were involved, and exactly how significant their contributions were).

I have not read Traitor King - would you recommend? That said, I'm reasonably familiar with some of the attitudes espoused and 😬 can you imagine?? It's such a juxtaposition to what we recall as the royal family being during war (for example, future queen E's service with the ATS). I wonder how much more will come out in the next decade or two about Edward. I feel like oftentimes, it can take that long (or longer, tbh) for people to start sharing the (now, family heirlooms) artifacts like letters, conversations, that happened but were kept quiet/secret for decorum's sake for so many years.

[scuopsie]

HI!!! it’s been too long. i’ve missed chatting with you! i’m doing alright. i moved into a new apartment (i’m not liking it as much now that i live in it sadly) and started grad school. my head is spinning a bit, but i’m staying positive (mostly lol)

how are you??

i’ve never watched an idol survival show. i’ve definitely heard lots of positives and negatives about them, mostly negatives though when it comes to comments about the experiences of groups i’m a fan of now.

i can understand that. i got into monsta x in 2020, and i remember feeling less of a connection when i really dug back into their discography. fatal love is what solidified me being a monbebe along with tracks like destroyer.

that’s so valid omg. i’m definitely curious about how that time was when wonho was still part of mx. reading your tags was so enlightening for me because suddenly things started making sense. i remember watching so many funny moment compilation videos three summers ago and being a bit confused because i couldn’t find similar content that was recent. i’m glad i was able to enjoy vlive content before its end, but what i did see was totally different from what you described from years ago… so formal. i’m not surprised that shifts happened in the fandom too, and it sucks that we lost the ability to enjoy the authenticity older lives provided. (i remember melting over the kihyun cooking moments ☹️ the man he is. i could talk about him all day) no doubt that enhances the fan experience

also, who is mira? i may follow them, but not sure >.< i want to follow all the monbebes

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It has🥺 ive missed chatting with you too!!! Ahhh moving is always hard even if ur new place is perfect ;;;; congrats!!! Looks like we're both doing kinda similarly jdjfkf i dont think ive mentioned this on my blog before but i also got into grad school and am currently anxiously waiting for my student visa so i can move my ass across the globe...

Yeah 0/10 dont recommend kdkfkd like i totally get the appeal of being with a group from the beginning and seeing their struggles and watching them grow can make the bond stronger but in my case ive always gotten to groups who are already well established and the members are older. Freshly debuting idols are pretty young (especially nowadays) and that is just not for me...

I got a small glimpse of ot7 in 2018🥺 I watched a bunch of mx ray and a lot of interviews and stuff from their promotion era (another thing ive noticed nowadays is the lack of interviews... like weekly idol and similar shows where promoting idols would go to and do a bunch of fun activities and occasionally get mistreated by asshole MCs🤡) and i cherish those memories very dearly. And shoot out was such a good era to experience...