#fawn is big on the actual connection itself– understanding them and seeing who they are as a person

[autumnfangirler]

cyrus, fawn and river are all social people that deal with a different aspect of socialization and i think about that alot

[xiaomomowrites]

act IV

Genshin Impact | TartaLi/ZhongChi

Summary: It was the way Zhongli’s warm amber eyes suddenly were not as warm anymore. The way he looked at him with a piercing look, void of remorse, as he handed his gnosis over willingly to go on a whole tangent about how his “duties were done”. It was the way he turned and treated the precious traveler with the same amount of kindness and gentleness the Childe had received the previous night, with such ease; it was a look he thought was reserved only for him. It was the way he was able to turn back around, stare at Childe with an unreadable gaze, and walk away without so much of a goodbye.

Or, Zhongli and Childe finally have the conversation that was long overdue.

A/N: I’ve been playing genshin for roughly four or five months now, I can’t remember exactly when I started, but boy do I love it. No you don’t understand, I’m obsessed. But these two have been taking up room in my big brain, so I wanted to write for them. It’s been awhile since I wrote for pleasure so hopefully this is satisfactory :,) and tomorrow, I’m back to school, so I thought I’d enjoy my last day of freedom and post this today. Fun fact, I’m minoring in professional writing, so I’m hoping that it’ll improve my writing skills when I write for luxury, too. Anyway, this was a really fun piece for me to write and I hope you share the sentiment.

Also thank you guys for being so patient with our inactivity and just being such a chill audience to write for. Other social media platforms have become so...demanding haha. I appreciate y’all! Feel free to message us or talk to us about whatever :) -u.n.

Find this on AO3!

Spoiler alert: this fic does contain spoilers for the A New Star Approaches arc, so read at your own risk.

—

In Childe’s line of work, he is no stranger to betrayal.

Working as a Fatui Harbinger meant an unhealthy amount of fighting, betraying one person, deceiving another, and then on occasion, getting betrayed himself. It was all in a days’ work. Childe knew he would just have to roll out his neck and move on. He’s done it before, he can do it again. He would think that, after nineteen years of this grueling rinse and repeat, that he’d be able to tolerate a lot in the field. In fact, working with that wretched colleague of his, Scaramouche, and serving the Tsaritsa with a loyalty unmatched explicitly calls for the patience and tolerance of a saint.

Alas, Childe is the furthest thing from a saint. And still, Zhongli’s betrayal stung the most out of anyone else’s, the reason still unbeknownst to him. He tells himself that it’s because he had actually befriended the other man. That, unlike his other missions, he developed more of a friendship with Zhongli than he has with anyone else in the past. Not to mention how he really thought he’d find the gnosis, in all its golden glory, seated deep within the Exuvia, and not within his friend.

Which is why after he watches Zhongli hand over his precious gnosis to Signora of all people, Childe makes haste to return to the inn he had been staying at to furiously pack his things and leave first thing in the morning. Seeing Signora in Liyue so close to Zhongli had triggered a deep seated feeling of possessiveness over him and the city. Liyue was his territory, as far as he was concerned. It was assigned to him by the Tsaritsa and no one else. And yet, despite his unspoken possession over Liyue, its people turned against him and viewed him as the enemy. As if Childe didn’t already know that. As if he hadn’t already grown up with a layered villain complex, subconsciously looking for a fool with a hero complex to match him. Then entered Zhongli, making himself at home in Childe’s life, and he was immediately enamouring the Harbinger.

Screw Liyue.

Screw all their traditions, the stupid glaze lilies, the delicious cuisine, the obvious livelihood that fills the streets in stark contrast to his own icy hometown, screw all those goddamn unnecessary mountains, that fish market with that abhorrent smell he gradually got used to, and screw Rex Lapis. Screw Zhongli, that handsome bastard, for stringing him along like his plaything the entire time.

Childe knows, he gets it, that Zhongli simply did what he had to do because it was best for his people. And what other way for the oldest of the seven to go, if not for a grand finale? And yes, Childe admits, luring out Osial was a stupid move, but it certainly served its purpose for testing the strength of Liyue and its defenders.

Zhongli and Signora knew he would do something stupid and reckless as soon as he caught wind of the Exuvia serving as a decoy. They knew, and they played the game so well, that Childe really thought he was the mastermind puppeteering the whole show.

What a fool he was made out to be.

Childe aggressively shoves blazer after blazer into his travel duffel, angry, pathetic tears pooling at the corners of his eyes without his consent. He sniffs angrily and swipes at his cheek as soon as the first tear falls.

Fuck this, he’s not crying over a god, he still has some dignity.

But still. Pride aside, it hurt. And it wasn’t even necessarily the deceit that hurt the most. He’s dealt with that previously. It was… more personal. More of an internal struggle than an external issue. Childe truly hates those the most. At least he can shove his fist through any external problem, but he can’t exactly do the same with his feelings, or whatever they’re called.

It was the way Zhongli’s warm amber eyes suddenly were not as warm anymore. The way he looked at him with a piercing look, void of remorse, as he handed his gnosis over willingly to go on a whole spiel about how his “duties were done”. It was the way he turned and treated the precious traveler with the same amount of kindness and gentleness the Childe had received the previous night, with such ease; it was a look he thought was reserved only for him. It was the way he was able to turn back around, stare at Childe with an unreadable gaze, and walk away without so much of a goodbye.

The same eyes that gazed at him with such affection and kindness were suddenly replaced with the eyes of a soldier. And it was only then that Childe fully realized the force he was reckoning with. Zhongli was a withered god who lived too long for his own good. A powerful deity that held the ability to shake the ground with a look; he who had been humbled by time and his sharp edges eroded by the millions of faces that passed him. Simply put, Childe was just another one of those faces. And again, he understood. If he lived for six thousand years, he wouldn’t want to be alive after the first hundred.

It was the duality that dug the blade deeper into his already bleeding chest. He felt used.

“I’ve enjoyed the time we’ve spent together, Childe,” Zhongli had said to him on a warm Liyuen night, “a friend of mine, a long time ago, told me that I was… bad at connecting with people. Emotionally stunted, is what she called me. And she is correct, as I have definitely struggled with making connections in the past. But with you… it’s different. It’s easy.

Childe is thankful for the discretion that night provides him; Zhongli would have easily spotted the blush spreading across his pale cheeks had it been daytime.

“So you had trouble making a couple friends, so what?” The ginger shrugs, “I wasn’t the best at making friends, either. My mom always said I was too aggressive. Apparently that’s not such an appealing trait, after all.”

Zhongli chuckles, a beautiful sound. “It was a bit deeper than that, I’m afraid. Understanding the complexity of another’s emotions was always difficult for me, whereas she… she was loved by everyone. Adored by the youngest of fawns to the oldest of horses. It came so naturally to her. I was the opposite. Not that everyone hated me, no, people just had a harder time getting close to me. Which is why, upon meeting you, I was shocked to find that we clicked so well. Befriending you was as easy as breathing air.”

Oh, Archons, help him.

“And,” Zhongli continues, as if he hadn’t already wrecked the man six ways to hell and back, “I must sincerely thank you for indulging me once again.” The deity glances down at the bag full of antique trinkets in his lap. Childe’s lips turn upward into one of his more genuine, rare smiles.

“What’s with you tonight?” Childe responds, and Zhongli looks at him questioningly , “I mean, you never had a problem with me spoiling you rotten before. You’ve never even acknowledged it. Why start now?”

Zhongli tears his gaze away from the Harbinger.

“And,” the ginger continues, “it almost sounds like you’re saying goodbye.”

Zhongli smiles at him then. He wore a kind look on his face, eyes so impossibly warm that it reminded him of his grandmother’s pirozhki. Hot and steaming from the center, melting on his tongue, dissolving deliciously in his mouth and defrosting his entire body. His smile felt like it wrapped itself around his chest and squeezed the best way possible, fitting him back together in places Childe didn’t even realize he had broken.

“What makes you say that?”

Oh, Childe is pissed.

Fuck tomorrow morning, Childe is leaving tonight.

The memories of last night crash over him not unlike a tidal wave and suddenly, he’s drowning. Filled out the brim with a familiar rage burning through his chest and searing his finger tips, his legs, his fucking toes.

He stands abruptly when he realizes he’s been sitting and resumes his packing. It doesn’t take very long after that. A couple toiletries get shoved into the side pockets, his vision is hooked back onto his hip, and his mask is slid into its’ usual spot on his head. He looks at himself in the mirror on the way out and scowls at the way his hair looks more disheveled than usual. Red rims his dulled blue eyes, forcing him to accept that maybe he cried more than he’d like to admit. Whatever.

He swings the door open and-

“Childe,” lo and behold, Zhongli stands in his fucking doorway, “I’d like to talk to you, if that’s alright.” The man looks slightly disheveled. He’s a little out of breath, Childe notices, like he ran up those ridiculous flights of stairs to get to his room- which, by the way, he never disclosed that information with him.

The man in question huffs a laugh. “It’s not.”

He makes a move to brush past him, but is stopped by an unreasonably strong grip around his bicep.

“Tartaglia,” he pleads, “please.”

Childe snatches his arm back and spits, “don’t call me that.”

He retreats back into his room anyway, hearing Zhongli close the door behind him. He dumps the bag back onto his bed and curses himself for not leaving a millisecond earlier.

“You’re angry with me.” Zhongli starts, face as unreadable as ever.

“The sky is blue. Snezhnaya is cold. Are we still stating the obvious here?” He’s too angry to carefully choose his words. Too hurt to slip on his pleasant facade.

“Tartaglia,” he presses, and Childe really hates how his name sounds on his tongue, “I truly am sorry for the way things had to go. It was not in my intentions to… hurt you to the degree in which you feel. I simply was upholding the end of my contract and doing what was best for my people. I implore you to believe that making you feel used was not my main objective.“

Oh god, his apology sounds so robotic.

“So you’re aware that what you did was a little fucked up.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re aware that almost the entirety of Liyue places the blame on me.”

“Yes.”

Well, shit. “Good talk, Zhongli-xiansheng. If you’ll excuse me, I must begin my trip home.”

He stomps toward the door only to be stopped once again. Archons, if Childe had any motivation left, he most certainly would challenge him to a spar. The ginger huffs, and looks to the heavens in a silent plea for patience.

“Tartaglia, please, I’m not finished-“

“Yeah, well I am.” Their eyes lock. Blue meets gold in a hostile hold, refusing to break. “The second you handed your gnosis over, my business here was done. Whatever… relationship we had is done. You were my consultant and was a Harbinger here for business. A Harbinger that you obviously used for your disposal. So now that that’s over and done with, I really need to report to Tsaritsa, lest she have my head on a silver platter-“

“I spoke with Tsaritsa already.” Zhongli cuts in, his grip tightening around Childe’s wrist. “I asked her for more time with you.”

“You what.”

“Surely you are curious about the deal I struck with Tsaritsa. The contract to end all contracts, yes?” Childe’s wild look on his face eggs him to continue, “I struck a deal that granted you more time here in Liyue. With me.”

Childe is silent for a moment. The ex-Archon opens his mouth to continue.

“And I’d like to say I’ve known you long enough to know that you seek freedom. From what that may be, I do not know. But Tsaritsa has agreed to give you a choice, at the very least, a temporary one. An extended vacation or complete retirement is a choice to be made by you.” Zhongli finishes, looking to Tartaglia with hope.

“THAT is worth your fucking gnosis?!” Zhongli’s gnosis. The entire essence of his being. The very thing that makes him divine (thought it certainly isn’t the only thing that makes the man ethereal), was traded for him.

“Yes,” Zhongli replies with such ease it makes Childe’s head spin. “Among other things, of course.” An aggressive why is lodged in the back of Childe’s throat. Why me? A million questions swirl around his head, knocking him off balance. He would have swayed on his feet had Zhongli not been there to hold him upright.

“That’s insane. You’re insane. You…” Childe lets out a tired sigh, “I don’t understand you.” And he doesn’t. Because one minute he’s a cold hearted businessman, and the next he’s at his door, reduced to a mortal, begging him to stay. Granting him freedom. Really, what kind of fucked up game is this? Why didn’t anyone tell him he was a part of it?

Zhongli smiles. He smiles. “You remember our conversation from the night before, yes?”

Childe rolls his ever-blue eyes to the back of his head. “Remind me, Zhongli-sensei,”

“I said,” the deity starts, drawing both of Childe’s calloused hands between his own, “that I struggled to connect with others. Guizhong, the Goddess of Dust, was the one to bring to my attention my emotional constipation. And like I said, she was correct.”

Childe’s anger withers.

“Unfortunately I understand naught of the depth of your feelings of betrayal,” he continues, “but I do wish to understand how deeply humans feel. And in our time together, I’ve begun to understand through you. Despite your… complexities. And I wish to continue to learn. With you.” I wish to feel human is left unsaid, and laced between his words instead.

“What are you saying,” the Harbinger asks weakly.

“Take me with you.”

“What.”

“Take me with you. Wherever you go, I will follow, if you will allow it.”

Well duh, he’d allow it. Zhongli just had to work for it a little more. He can’t just waltz in here after breaking his heart and ruining his trust, demanding his friendship and companionship or whatever, after everything he was put through-

“Okay.”

Very nice ass to mouth filter, Ajax.

Zhongli’s eyes glow impossibly brighter, “Okay?”

Childe tugs his hands back to his side. “Yes, yes, fine. Whatever. But you can’t just. You can’t just use me again in the name of experimentation.”

“Tartaglia, I would never,” he assures him vehemently, “Of the seven, I was always the one most oblivious to emotions. You may ask Barbatos if you want. But I know that what I feel for you is real and I would not trade it for the world.”

Childe’s mind reels. Barbatos? Feelings?

“‘What you feel for me?’”

Zhongli cocks his head in confusion, as if his feelings were the most obvious thing in the world. “Well, yes. And you feel the same, no? It need not be said aloud.”

“It really doesn’t,” Childe affirms, “you can save me the embarrassment.”

“Wonderful,” Zhongli’s face brightens, and it’s only then that Childe is hit with the full realization that Zhongli is free. No longer is he tied to the city and burdened with the weight of the people. No longer does he have to associate himself with the likes of the Tsaritsa. Finally, after centuries and centuries, he is allowed the pleasure to smile so brightly despite feeling pained for finally leaving his people. He is Zhongli, and no longer Rex Lapis. Morax is long gone, too. The man before him is a man reborn, and Childe’s heart aches with happiness for him.

“Okay, well,” he clears his throat when he notices he’s been quiet for too long, “it’s been a long day and I’m tired. I think I’m just gonna take a shower and turn into bed and think about the rest tomorrow. Save it for future Childe, you know?”

He pads over to his hastily packed back and zips it back open, pulling out the toiletries he aggressively shoved in less than an hour ago. He digs his fingers into his neck and sighs at the release of tension. Summoning an angry ocean god took a lot more out of him than he anticipated.

“I agree,” Zhongli says, and begins to strip. “Personally I prefer the left side of the bed.”

Childe gawks at him.

“You-!” Truly an emotionally constipated god, indeed. He sighs and his shoulders droop, the fight leaving his body. “Fine. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be out in a bit.”

“I eagerly await your return,” Zhongli comments passively as he slips under the covers, a book he didn’t even know he was carrying tucked under his arm. Childe sighs for the nth time that night and turns to close the bathroom door behind him.

Future Childe certainly has a lot to deal with in the morning.

[kitkatopinions]

The baby boy himself, Whitley!

(for the ask meme)

Whitley is so my baby, I love my child so much. I’m realizing I say ‘I’m really excited for this one’ for like every character I get for this ask game, but it’s because I’m having so much fun! These take a bit to write, but they are honestly so interesting to me, so as an fyi, if anyone does have any character they want to ask my about, but thinks they might be too late, or I might be uninterested, I’m still totally interested! It just might take me a bit to answer. :)

My top three ships for the character

Whitley/Oscar is my top ship for this in canon currently. It works best if Ozpin could somehow be separated from Oscar (which is theoretically possible I guess,) but yeah. Farm boy vs rich boy, they look cute together, their personalities could vibe, and they’re both snarky, but at heart caring and compassionate. Whitley/Mercury. I mentioned this in my Mercury ask, but I was writing a fic with @why-i-hate-rwby-now where Whitley and Mercury were thrown together and had to work together to escape their abusers, and I just kind of started shipping them while writing it. O.O Also Whitley/Penny is cute as heck and I could totally see her grounding him and also making him loosen up, while Penny thinks he’s funny and interesting.

My three least favorite ships for the character

Whitley/Blake. I don’t understand this ship, Blake just feels like more of an adult atm compared to Whitley - a literal child. (Yes, I realize I ship Whit with Merc, but A. I thought Merc was sixteen while I was writing that fanfiction and he acts kind of on the young side, while Blake has been acting ‘as an adult’ and being treated ‘as an adult’ for two seasons at least while directly talking to Whitley, and has always been more of a mature character for her age anyway.) But on top of that, Blake seems to treat Whitley like an in the way child and is kinda judgey to him, while Whitley barely seems to notice her. Whitley/Henry Marigold just feels bad. And Whitley/Yang. Again, Yang has been written as a nineteen year old demanding to be treated as an adult (though I wanna say she’s less mature than Blake) but also Yang is a hotheaded character and has been acting pushy lately, and that’s fine as a character flaw, but I feel like it just puts me off her for Whitley especially.

My biggest criticism for the character

He’s treated like he’s not a victim??? Like, his abuse and neglect and even his struggles are just... Not really gone into or acknowledged very much, Weiss acts like he has to prove himself before she can show him the slightest bit of sympathy or affection when she’s his big sister, his relationship with Jacques is glossed over and he isn’t given closure there, Willow’s neglect isn’t really acknowledged seriously, Winter seeming totally disinterested in him doesn’t feel like it even matters, Weiss is treated as blameless in her and Whitley’s problems. And the writing kind of frames Whitley as having gotten a redemption, when the worst things he did was be a bit of an asshole while in an abusive situation as like a fourteen-fifteen year old with no aura or glyphs or fighting ability. Emerald and Whitley’s volume 8 arcs should not be comparable! Emerald is a full on murderer and was still willingly working with Cinder to attack people as a nineteen year old woman, and yet she and Whitley are treated very similarly by the narrative (helping one person and then that ‘making up for’ their ‘past mistakes’ and then them just being on the good side and carrying the team’s actions until the pathways arrive and they both go to Vacuo. To be clear, I think this framing was too much for Whitley since he never even needed a redemption at all imo, and not enough for Emerald, the literal murderer of Penny who was just recently willingly helping Cinder try and murder Penny once again.) Whitley should’ve been treated as the child he is, he should’ve been treated as the victim he is.

My favorite thing about the character

His potential dynamics, but specifically with Weiss. He and Weiss both had almost the exact same upbringing, only Weiss actually had more support, but guys... The way the two of them coped had similarities, but were also very different. Weiss hid behind anger and sternness, Whitley hid behind peppiness and smiles. Weiss copied Winter, Whitley copied Jacques. Weiss was always afraid of people putting on acts around her, Whitley was constantly putting on acts as a means of survival. Each of them are plagued by jealousy, pettiness, judgmental behavior, and they both have good qualities that are similar, but they both are too prejudice against each other to see those good qualities and need to learn to understand where the other is coming from. Weiss is a fighter, but a follower, while Whitley seems to have a bit of a ‘fawn’ tendency, but plans and enacts schemes under the table (even if it doesn’t have to be, like with Nora! Whitley’s instincts were to just figure out how to help Nora and then go off and do it alone without telling any of the obviously antsy people with guns what he was doing - after he was spying on them lol.) I just love the possibilities that exist with two characters that are so similar, but so fundamentally different. Also I’d love to see him resentful of Winter and snarky and passive aggressive with her, and Winter not really getting the problem, and Weiss having to mediate between them. Idk, there are so many possibilities of amazing interactions and connections Whitley could have with the others, and he could be a really new, good viewpoint if he was allowed to flourish. And maybe became kind of a ‘guy in the chair’ more permanent part of the team. Like, I know we don’t need more character bloat, but let me dream!

A headcanon I have about them

Before Weiss lost her inheritance, Whitley was sort of tasked with learning everything but being head of the company, like he was learning the financial side of things, the technological side of things, ordering, inventory, scheduling, all about Dust and mine operations... And Whitley’s naturally academic and a fast learner, so he absorbed a lot of it. But yeah, I think Jacques was trying to train Whitley up to be a sort of always available PA of Weiss’s that could handle anything she didn’t want to do / was too busy to do, and that was something Whitley really resented too. His skillset was essentially being crafted around helping Weiss, but never learning how to actually manage the company itself and severely lacking in the social side of things, like he’d never be able to make a proper speech. Also, like pretty much everyone I think he plays piano and writes his own music compositions (which in my headcanons he subconsciously writes to include vocals only for him to then get bothered that even his music seems influenced by Weiss. XD) Also I know this is three headcanons, but if he had been trained to fight, he would’ve used duel pistols and would’ve eventually developed a ‘born out of trauma’ semblance.

What I would change about them if I was making a re-write

I’d just allow his status as a victim to be recognized and for him to have the sympathy I feel his character deserves. I’d have him and Weiss both framed as having contributed to their bad relationship, but Weiss - as the sister four to five years older than him - would be the one who makes the first moves towards repairing it, proving she has changed enough to put aside her pettiness and be there for the brother she does truly love. I’d also get Willow away from him, or at least let Whitley be angry and distant and not have their relationship fixed over the course of an in-universe day. This is why I say there should’ve been another Atlas season, which I think is what I’d do when it boils down to it. With every plot point coming fast and then being pushed on the back burner for the next plot point, there’s no time to focus on any of it or to give the character’s sufficient growth from it. So then things like Willow having her hand glued to Whitley’s shoulder feels very ingenuine, because their ‘growth’ was so rushed. So yeah, I’d really just add an extra season and let Weiss recognize that Whitley is also an abuse victim, make her be the one to start making steps to be there for him, and let things like his relationship with his mother come slower and not be an easy fix. Also I’d have Winter acknowledge that she has a brother more regularly and have her actually care about him, even if she hasn’t shown it well at all.

What I I think of their character allusion and what (if anything) I would change about it

Whitley has no assigned character allusion and his name doesn’t offer very many hints, since it literally just means white meadow/field snow, but it’s easy enough to assume that like Weiss and Jacques - Snow White and Jack Frost - Whitley’s character allusion has something to do with the cold. I agree with the general opinion that he’s connected to ‘the Snow Queen,’ and is likely meant to be Kai, a once kind hearted boy who gets a piece of a magic mirror in his eye that only lets him see the bad in people and gets kidnapped by the snow queen. His best friend Gerda goes on a quest to save him - encountering a land of eternal summer and a talking crow amongst other things - and temporarily forgets him due to an enchantment, but then finds him almost frozen over and saves him by crying on him and through the power of her love that literally makes people and nature bend to her will, Gerda rescues Kai and dislodges the mirror piece from his eye so that he can be cheerful again. Pretty in tune with how the writers wrote things. I don’t mind this, but if Whitley is meant to be Kai and Weiss is meant to be his Gerda, there were two missed opportunities here that could’ve been great. One, Gerda is reminded of her love for Kai whenever she sees red roses, and Ruby and Whitley have a few similar mannerisms and kind of similar coping through their ‘cheery exterior’s’ even f Ruby’s lost all her sass and Whitley’s never had her spazzy, dorky, rough around the edges traits. I think it would’ve been cute and make for a more interesting dynamic if Weiss had mentioned to Ruby in volumes 1-3 that Ruby reminds her of her brother, and if it had made Weiss both harder on Ruby (since she and Whitley are estranged and he does drive her crazy a lot lol) but it also made Ruby all the more endearing to her and is one of the reasons they could be friends fairly fast despite Weiss’s early animosity (since she loves her brother and the traits he shares with Ruby compliment hers.) The next missed opportunity I can think of is that everyone thinks Kai is dead in the Snow Queen for a bit, but Gerda doesn’t believe it and goes looking for him instead. You could easily fit this into a narrative where everyone else has given up Whitley as a lost cause, but Weiss won’t believe that and is determined to help and to get close to Whitley again, which is what I think I’d want to go with. But also, a Whitley death fake out? That could be very good and very emotional. And it’d be easy omg. Weiss could think the Hound has killed him sometime during the fight (even if just for a moment,) but also if Whitley had been the first one to fall in the void instead of going through to Vacuo O.O 

Idk if we’ll ever get his character allusion confirmed, but if it isn’t someone from the Snow Queen, I feel like the whole fandom will say “What?!” at the exact same time. XD 

[jeremys-blogs]

Lumity: A Well-Made Bond

The Owl House has a lot of good things going for it, and I covered a great deal of those things in my last post about it. But there is one aspect about the show that I've come to enjoy possibly more than anything else, and that's the relationship between its central protagonist, Luz Noceda, and supporting character Amity Blight. And before anyone wonders, no, I'm not going to spend this entire thing just fawning over the two and gushing over how adorable I think they are together. But believe me, I am seriously tempted to do exactly that, because hey, just look at that image above. No, as much as all that stuff is true, I truly like this growing bond between the two and how it's developed over the course of the series, with them having started out as being at odds with one another to winding up as so much more. It's been an incredible journey seeing their relationship change in the way that it has, and along the way it's served as an excellent showcase for the character of Amity herself, who is unquestionably one of my favourites in this show's cast. So without further ado, allow me to explain why I feel this relationship is one of the highlights of the show for me.

When Amity is first introduced to us, her very first scene makes us think we know exactly who this girl is going to be for us. She's the typical school bully character. The one who will rival Luz and her friends and push them around whenever they meet. The girl that we'll cheer whenever she faces defeat. Yet despite Amity showing the traits of that character, even in this earliest of moments we see that there's more to her. Yes, she's unkind to Willow, but she's also someone who greatly values hard work, and utterly despises cheaters. And as the episode progresses we may find ourselves siding with her, if only out of principal. Luz and Willow were cheating and lying about what they were doing in order to make the latter look better at her classes than she really was, and no matter how you slice it, Amity losing her spot as top student to someone who only succeed through deception is an unfair thing. Amity's anger was justified, even if we were given nothing else to like about her just now. So while expectations had been set up for her to be an unlikable character, there were already shades of more beneath the surface, and that's something we'd get a lot more of as time went on.

In her next couple of appearances, we started to see Amity outside of the competitive environment of Hexside, and again this brought to light sides of her that wouldn't have been expected. We learn of her ambition to join the Emperor's Coven and her utter glee at the thought of actually succeeding at it. We see her reading to children and actually enjoy doing so, even if she protested at her reasons for doing it. In short, we started to see a great deal of positive traits from her. True, she was still bitter towards Luz, and actions like stepping on King's cupcake certainly weren't called for, but this was definitely the start of her growing out of the bully role she'd been set up for, which is especially interesting considering she'd only had one episode in that spot. Yet her time with Luz in both episodes, Covention and Lost in Language, shows them both growing closer, with Amity acknowledging that there's more to her than just being a cheat in the former, and recognising and appreciating that she herself hadn't been the nicest of people in the latter. The two weren't friends by this point, but it definitely laid the groundwork for them to become such later on.

Then, after the long hiatus of the show, we got Adventures in the Elements, where the connection between Amity and Luz has apparently blossomed into a full-blown friendship. Whatever animosity had been between them had gone by this point, and they were both excited at the prospect of actually going to the same school together. Amity had come to recognise by now that Luz works just as hard as she does when it comes to learning magic, even if she wasn't as far along in her skills as she was, and the fact that they shared common interests, most notably their love for the Azura book series, gave Amity possibly the first genuine friend she's had in a very long time. But there were still bumps in the road for her and Luz, especially then the latter stole her training wand for her own purposes. And on a side note, I understand that Luz was likely frustrated with her own training, but that was still the most disappointed I'd ever been in her by that point. Still, those problems were worked through, and much like with the "library incident" the two worked together to successfully overcome the big danger of the episode, resulting in Luz learning her second spell and Amity looking forward to their time as classmates.

After this, we wouldn't see much of Amity during Luz's early time in Hexside, but her next big inclusion in the story came in one of the season's best episodes, Understanding Willow, where we're given not only another great instance of Amity and Luz working together, but also giving us a full explanation as to why Amity was the way she was towards Willow during their first appearance. It is revealed that Amity distancing herself from her was the result of an apparently abusive household, where the Blight's family status pressured her to associate only with more powerful witches. Her parents even went so far as to threaten to keep Willow out of school should Amity continue to be friends with her. So in the end, it turns out that Amity's cruelty was done so Willow actually had a chance of getting into Hexside in the first place. Now, this is a terrible thing for children to go through, both Willow and Amity, and the latter's parents rightly deserve a good smack for treating their daughter that way. But while Amity's words and actions towards Willow were bad, they became understandable, as they were hiding a greater cruelty behind them. It doesn't excuse Amity for how she was with Willow at the start of the show, but it does put it in a new light. And additionally, I appreciate how this didn't automatically become a renewed friendship with Willow when all was said and done, as such things take time to heal.

And then, we came to the big one. Enchanting Grom Fright. This was it, the big Lumity moment that had the fandom screaming and squealing with joy over finally seeing those two cinnamon rolls get together. And I'd be dishonest if I said I wasn't wearing the biggest smile on my face when I saw that episode play out. Luz and Amity's moments together, especially that now-famous dance sequence, were immediately enjoyable to watch and have likely been re-watched over a dozen times now. But it also served as a pretty definitive marker that Amity's feelings towards Luz had developed far beyond friendship by this point. So much so that her greatest fear was being rejected by her, either in general or for the dance specifically. There had been hints of that liking before this, but this episode confirmed it. And what I love about it is that a lot of groundwork had been established beforehand to make it work. It wasn't just them being friends after the library and then instant crush. Time had been taken to bring us to this point, so that when they finally went together in that incredible dance, it was a moment that the show had fully earned for itself.

Now, before, I go any further with what happens with Amity in the show, I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the point of LGBT representation in this show. Now, I am by no means someone who is qualified to speak on matters like this, but if I'm going to talk about a same-sex relationship like this I feel it's sort of unavoidable. Obviously I'm happy that Disney is doing this, regardless of whether or not it's their first such relationship on-screen. I have no idea if it is, given all the news I've heard of other "firsts" in Disney media. But I think what's especially interesting about this is that it's taking place in a story where the themes and ideas sort of align with those kinds of relationships. Remember, as I mentioned in my last Owl House discussion, one of the big ideas of the Boiling Isles is that it's a society where those who deviate from the norm are looked down on or punished severely, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying that that's a situation that a lot of LGBT people can identify with. So having this relationship take place against that sort of backdrop seems like an ideal match, though I'm not sure if that's a specific idea the writers had for it.

Once we got Grom out of the way, Amity continued to be a good and enjoyable character, but her development, it had to be said, wasn't as profound after the big dance. Outside of learning that she had past regrets from hurting her former grudgby teammates, the only things new with her is that her feelings for Luz have reached such a point that she's driven to an almost blubbering, incoherent state whenever she's close to her. Naturally, this is as hilarious and endearing as you'd expect, and was easily one of the more entertaining aspects of the Wing it Like Witches episode. However, it also showed a rather unfortunate point about this crush she has on Luz, and that's that Luz herself seems oblivious to it. Sure, that's great for comedy, but it does present the worry that Amity's romantic leanings towards her might not be fully reciprocated. As a shipper myself, this is troublesome, but objectively speaking I can't say it's a real problem with the episode or the relationship. Indeed, having it turn out that Luz doesn't feel the same way, and then Amity having to deal with it with the two still maintaining a friendship has the potential for a good episode down the line, so on that note we'll likely just have to wait and see.

When that was over, we reached pretty much the end of Amity's inclusion in season one. Aside from a few cameo appearances showing her recovering from her grudgby injury, she wouldn't make another appearance in the story. Now, as someone who very much likes this character, this was disappointing, but I do understand wanting to downplay her. She had, after all, pretty much dominated the story for the last few episodes, so I can appreciate wanting to ease off her for a while and get back to the main cast. As far as her relationship to Luz is concerned, we'll have to wait until the show's second season to see where it goes, though I can predict some interesting things between them given how the season ended. Luz is now officially an enemy of Emperor Belos, the leader Amity has spent her life trying to enter into the service of, and that, coupled with Luz's likely dislike of the man, with probably lead to some conflicted feelings between the two girls. I truly hope this doesn't sour the connection they've established, but like with a lot of things brought on by the season finale, that's all up in the air right now. I've known the struggle of waiting for new season before, and I can go through it again.

The Owl House has a lot of great things to talk about, and while I may feel differently about it as time goes on, for now I really do enjoy the character of Amity a lot. The way she's written, the way she breaks out of the expectations we might have started out for her, the way she slowly grew closer to the rest of the cast, to finally developing feelings for our main heroine, it was all a delight to watch. I might even go so far as to say that, when it comes to school rival characters, she may be among the best I've ever seen, if only by virtue of how enjoyable she's been. Like with everyone else in this cast, Amity has been a stellar inclusion, and though I worry about how she'll be handled when the Owl House eventually returns to us, for now I'm very satisfied with what we've seen of her thus far. Lumity may not, as I may have indicated earlier, be the objective best thing about this show, but it continues to bring a smile to my face. And I think we can all agree that, in times like this, finding something that makes us feel happy should be treasured as much as possible 🥰

[accidentally-a-writer]

i’ll make you the stars

Last night after some good ol fashioned academics I decided “hey I’m going to write something for my good friend @stegekay to wake up to.” and then as I wrote said thing I spiralled hard, so... she’s already awake but hey I finished it! 

This is another instalment of the Magic AU. 

... 

The first time Washington and Alexander try to do a lesson Washington comes away with bruised ribs and an acute understanding that he has no clue what he’s doing.

It’s amazing that Alexander is even still alive. He speculates it is because the boy has forced away his power for sixteen years, almost completely. If any of his magic trickled out Alex considered it a failure. He did this so proficiently that he somehow pushed away his own destruction too.

So when Washington calls on him to bring forth that power, so that he can begin to learn what being a mage actually is, he cannot control it.

It explodes away from him, unmatched in sheer force, and Washington goes flying into the stone wall. Alexander is terrified, horrified at what he’s done, and he expects a whip, a slap, something to punish him for hurting this man who’s only ever been kind to him.

Washington does no such thing, would never do any such thing. “I’m not hurt, Alexander,” he murmurs, seeing Hamilton’s horror-struck countenance for what it is, “Along with my main discipline I’m well versed in shielding; I didn’t feel a thing.”

It’s a lie. Washington wasn’t expecting that to happen, he had no time to erect a shield. He’s surely cracked a few ribs, but he’ll tell none of this to Alexander.

(It is Alexander now, somehow. He’d become Alexander so quickly, just a few weeks. He’s just a child - Washington’s ward - it is too formal to call the boy by his surname.)

If he were to tell the boy that he’d injured him the fear of doing so again would prevent him from making any new progress. He is too compassionate that way. He believes himself a weapon, a curse, something dangerous. But no, he certainly has the potential to be very, very dangerous, and if he were ever to go dark he would be absolutely fearsome, but that same compassion is exactly what makes Alexander and dark antonyms.

Laurens, one of his most trusted, tends to him privately in his chambers. He is no mage, not yet; his magic is an inherited one, when Henry Laurens passes his magic will pass to his son. It is not usually a painful happening, but it can be an emotional one. The magic Laurens is to inherit is healing and only healing - a white mage - but even without it the boy makes a fine caretaker.

“Do not mention this to Alexander,” Washington intones lowly. “His insecurities with his magic will only worsen, and he will never learn to control it if he cannot trust himself.”

“Yes sir,” Laurens replies, ever dutiful. He kneels beside the general’s chaise and gingerly inspects the wounds, binding them as he goes. “You’ve broken these two, and there are no healers stationed in the camp. They will be sore for a whiles yet, you must be careful.”

Washington grins fondly, Laurens is only twenty-two and yet he chastises Washington in such a way. He will make a fine white mage indeed.

Laurens is startled from his work by Washington’s hand against the back of his neck, a gesture of affection saved only for one’s closest family and friends. Washington in general is softer now, now that he has a ward (son, Laurens knew, just from watching them) to care for.

“Sir?” He looks up. Washington has promised his father that if he is still alive when John inherits the magic that he will guide him through the period of time when he will be overwhelmed by the new sensation, the new world made available to him through the power.

John does not know where this places him in Washington’s affections, but on his staff he is primary aide-de-camp. (His father had wanted to make a congressmen out of him - the horror.)

The hand withdraws and Washington says nothing.

“Your ward fares well,” Laurens starts again, unable to hold the general’s stare for too long. “I sent for the tutor, as you requested. He’s already well-read in three different languages; English, French and Latin. He’ll make a fine student in the subjects you see fit, I’m sure.”

“You may call him Alexander to my face, John,” Washington chuckles, “I know you do to his.”

“Yes sir.” John and Alexander had taken to each other almost immediately, Laurens fosters him under his wing as any big brother should do. The boy grins. “I think we all underestimated Alexander in some regard, Your Excellency, although not purposely. It is a funny thing that, because I by no means thought him lacking in intelligence, nor do I assume you thought him in need of any more power, and yet he still defies expectations.”

Washington grins again, and sits back in his place, taking a short sip of the whisky Laurens had poured before beginning to assist him. “Yes, he does.”

…

Alexander is like a fawn, Washington realizes. Timid, young. He’s been punished his entire life for being who he is.

The next time they enter the training room Alexander trembles, not for fear for himself but rather of himself.

“I don’t think we should- I can’t control it-”

“And you never will, not if we don’t keep trying.” Washington is ill prepared for an apprentice with this magnitude of power, who is also somehow fearful of said power, but Christ he isn’t going to lose this boy to it.

“Every time I try and surface it it tries to hurt you.” Alexander looks at him with widened eyes, worriedly chewing on his lip. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I know, son. It’s not trying to hurt me, if it were I would have felt it by now, you’re a good person. It’s just out of control, not malicious.” Alexander is a child, what do children need that he was denied? (He was denied quite a few things, but there is no time for that here.) “We’ve tried this with you bringing your magic out alone, and it didn’t work. But you’re not alone anymore, this time we try together.”

George has no clue if this will work, or if it is safe for him.

“Let me see your hand, it’ll be alright,” he assures. Alexander looks terrified, but he extends his palm towards his guardian. Washington takes it, gently rubbing his thumb over his palm. “Close your eyes, try to trust me. Do you feel that buzzing sensation? Beating just a little under the skin?”

Alexander nods, not understanding why he is so at ease but welcoming it anyways. “Yes, and… you. I can feel you there too, like a… presence. And there’s an awareness that’s not quite me, like it’s whispering your feelings in my ear with no real words.”

“That presence is called an aura, some can see them, not many. All mages can feel them, the distance at which you can feel someone’s aura depends on how close you are with them; parents can feel their children from worlds away. As for the awareness… I daresay you surprise me again my boy - you’re an empath, you can sense how others feel.”

Alexander lets out a long breath, and George can feel him exploring their small connection. Maybe for the first time Alexander is feeling magic that is both not his own and in-control.

“That beating is how you know someone has magic,” Washington whispers, careful not to break his ward’s calm. “I felt it with you immediately.”

Gently, he adds another hand to their embrace. Hamilton’s fingers now trace along his palm, instead of vice versa, and Washington’s other hand rests softly over top of it. Alexander’s eyes are still closed, his breathing is still calm.

Washington searches for the boy’s magic unobtrusively, finding that buzzing and coaxing it ever-so-gently forward, a little bit at a time. He doesn’t know how long they stand there, it’s long enough that eventually Alexander feels his magic closer than he’s used to and starts away from it. It skitters away back to his core and the boy looks around them with frightened eyes.

“Look at me,” Washington murmurs, cupping the boy’s cheek, “you’re okay. You’re in control. I trust you, and it’s time for you to trust yourself.”

The moment that Alexander lets his magic surface again Washington feels his own snap forward, almost uncontrollably, and for a moment he’s afraid that something’s gone horribly wrong.

And then he realizes, nothing is wrong, it’s the opposite of wrong.

His magic snaps forward and meets Alexander’s where they touch, linked hands and a tender hold of the cheek, and it knots itself together with the boy’s and pulls tight.

Alexander gasps, his knees buckle but Washington is there to catch him. Hands grip at his back and scramble for purchase and he can hear Alexander gasp and maybe sob and he can feel Alexander desperately try and make sense of what’s happening.

“W-what what is this?” Washington lowers them both to the ground, stunned himself. “What’s happening? Why do I feel…?”

Snapping out of his stupor Washington pulls Alexander in close, running a hand through his hair soothingly. “It’s alright,” he hushes, “it’s called a bond. It’s a very sacred thing, your bonded is the closest anyone will ever be to you, it’s a connection unlike any other. Parents and children, husbands and wives, the best of friends and brothers and sisters alike can bond, there’s no connotations to it.”

“I- I feel you, it’s so strong.”

“I know, it’s overwhelming at first. People don’t usually choose who they bond to, some can.”

“H-how are you so… don’t you feel this?” Alexander’s tone is verging on hysterical, he’s scared and overwhelmed and Washington doesn’t blame him. He sends a wave of calm over the boy, who relaxes in his grip.

“I was bonded once before,” Washington murmurs into his ear, “my wife. She got very sick a few years past now, and we were happy together and she was too young, but she was ready to go when she did. We bonded the moment we decided to pursue a courtship, which all but made that day our engagement. Because she was ready the bond faded gently, so even though it was the lowest point of my life it wasn’t not overly painful. If it hadn’t been so I would be in pain even still.”

The severity of Washington’s words startles Hamilton. Sacred he’d said, this bond was sacred. The general was awfully calm for having just entered such a… a… an agreement with his boy ward.

“What does it mean?” He finally asks.

“It means, my dear boy, that you and I are now connected in what some believe to be the soul, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

…

It becomes easier after that to teach Alexander his magic. They start small, manifesting lights.

There’s so much about magic Alexander never dreamt of knowing - it’s an entire world that he’s somehow missed his entire life despite being right in the midst of it.

“There’s three main disciplines of magic,” Washington explains, “Mind, Elemental, Regenerative. Every mage has a natural affinity for one of these disciplines and sometimes that affinity is influenced by what your teacher is.”

“And what are you?” Alexander has become more comfortable as of late, more willing to use that quick mind and sharp tongue of his.

“I’m an Elemental son. When you had accidental releasements what would happen? Would people suddenly obey you or would it be more like some object or another went flying, burst into flame, incidents of that manner?”

Alexander doesn’t like talking about what he now knows are called ‘accidental releasements’ but for Washington he swallows the lump in his throat and answers. “Things flying, catching on fire, growing right next to me.”

“Then you’re naturally an Elemental too,” Washington beams, inexplicably feeling like a proud father. “But we don’t need to worry about that any for a whiles, there’s subdisciplines of magic which any mage can learn to control, save the white mages, who can only use healing powers.”

Sometimes when his guardian talks Alexander feels like he should be taking notes, but even when he forgets things the general has been patient with him, re-explains his point over and over until Alexander remembers.

“Shielding, which I am proficient at,” Washington continues, “everyday magic, which is nonsensical things that we learn to make our everyday tasks a little easier, and illusion magic.”

At this Washington opens his hands and from them thousands of glowing stars explode from them, surrounding the two men and cocooning them in their own little galaxy. Alexander’s mouth parts in amazement, his eyes lighting up with awe at his surroundings.

“They’re beautiful,” he breathes, reaching out tentatively to touch one of them.

“Illusion here does not mean that what you are seeing is false, it just means you are the one to manifest the image.”

Washington watches Alexander examine the lights, and he finds himself filled with a different kind of warmth. Love, he realizes, he loves the boy. The scene before him could make him grin but with that same realization swirling in his mind, he does.

Alexander is an excellent student, Washington knew he would be. It takes time, at first, for the boy to simultaneously keep his magic unlocked and control it, but the more they work the more that will become second nature, as it is for all mages.

Months pass, and Laurens becomes a brother to Alexander, and Lafayette too, and Washington an unspoken father. The lights are still his favourite lesson.

In the evenings and afternoons after his studies Alexander is either off with Laurens and the Marquis or in Washington’s office. When he is in Washington’s office the man allows him to answer a few correspondences for him, but makes it perfectly clear he’ll not be enlisting until he’s eighteen.

Washington finds him in his bedroom sometimes, long past when he should be asleep, reading by the light of a ball of light he’d manifested, and though he has the good manner to appear sheepish it is a common occurrence.

Sometimes too, he enters Washington’s sitting room, and Alex doesn’t say anything but he sits next to the general and Washington feels through their bond whether he’s content and merely seeking company or if he is here to take solace in it.

Either way he pulls the boy closer and dims the lights and he makes the stars for him and they sit like that for hours, Washington gently carding a hand through Alexander’s hair and Alexander listening to Washington’s heartbeat until he’s asleep.

It is the happiest Washington can remember being since before Martha took ill, and he knows she would have loved Alexander too. She would be happy that they’ve bonded, Alexander completes him and without children of his own Washington is happy to let that place be filled by his ward, and even Laurens and Lafayette, who take care of him in ways only brothers can.

It’s a year of bliss.

And then a messenger arrives, bearing news of a captured British mage. They’ll be bringing him here.

[amoralto]

Q: Paul McCartney: An Innocent Man? (October, 1986)

(Note: I’ve posted so many quotes and audio clips from this interview in the past (#interviewer: chris salewicz), I may as well post the entire printed interview as well. Still remains one of my very favourite Paul interviews - candid, emotionally fraught, brimming with preoccupations, and all the more revealing for it.

-

Paul McCartney curls up on the couch and relives the Beatles’ story for the first time since the death of John Lennon. “He was one great guy, but part of his greatness was that he wasn’t a saint.”

by Chris Salewicz

Paul McCartney is 44. He was 20 when his first composition appeared on record. Today he’s just returned from remixing a second single from his new LP Press To Play, his 27th solo or group studio album in 24 years.

He’s sitting on a sofa on the second floor of the building in Central London from which he directs his activities. Outside, on this sunny early afternoon, lie the neatly trimmed lawns of Soho Square; inside a forest of deco mahogany woodwork, a De Kooning on the wall and a chrome and neon-garlanded Wurlitzer jukebox of quite archetypal proportions and splendour. He’s wearing fawn moccasins, yellow socks, and a blue and white striped shirt and trousers and, despite the omnipresent grey hair, he looks in immensely good shape for someone who was still in the studio at three in the morning.

Part of McCartney’s agility as a communicator has been the paradoxical mastery of revealing nothing whatsoever of himself to journalists. This was particularly notable during the interviews he gave for Give My Regards To Broad Street, an almost unprecedented barrage of publicity in which it seemed that the more people he spoke to, the less he said. This was perhaps connected with a comprehension of the transparent unsubstantiality of the work. “Broad Street?” he says now. “You don’t stop things just because they’re not good; if you’ve done a bit of work, you put it out. I mean, if Picasso’s painted a thing…”

Today, however, on this Friday afternoon, Paul McCartney is immensely forthcoming. Possibly this is a reflection of the confidence he feels in his new LP, a work that stands almost on a par with Band On The Run, his finest solo record and one which, in many ways, seems to have a direct conduit to post-Sgt. Pepper Beatles albums.

The interview has a relaxed, conversational tone with no sense of formally structured questions and answers. In the cold light of print, his replies can occasionally take on a tone that seems almost petty in its self-justification, but such an emphasis is completely absent when he’s delivering these words to you in person.

The principle strength of the new LP is the quality of the songs, six of which McCartney co-wrote with Eric Stewart, the former 10cc singer and writer of such classics as ‘I’m Not In Love’, a song that is almost a parody of a McCartney love ballad.

The numbers were written, he says, in the manner in which he would work with John Lennon, sitting side-by-side, watching each other search for appropriate chords.

You’ve been in the studio all night re-mixing tracks from the new album for single release. How do you feel about the new LP?

I like it. I have a lot of trouble saying, ‘I think it’s great.’ I wish I was just a fan and I could genuinely like it without seeming wildly immodest. I can’t be objective yet. It’s going to take me a couple of months. I can listen to McCartney, I can just listen to that. I like that one; it’s growing on me. It’s a touchy subject. You’ve done a thing and there it is, it’s your presentation. You mean to get every bit of it right.

So how do you react to criticism?

When I see bad reviews, it’ll hurt me. I am giving myself a bit easier time in life these days. I’ve gone through so much criticism, and not just from critics. From people like John, over so many things, that like a fool I just stood there and said, ‘Yeah, you must be right.’ All those things I was said to be the cause of, I just accepted that I was to blame. I’m beginning to see it a bit differently now. I’m beginning to see a lot of what they say is their problem, not mine.

John was going through a lot of pain when he said a lot of that stuff, and he felt that we were being vindictive towards him and Yoko. In fact I think we were quite good, looking back on it; many people would’ve just downed tools in a situation like that, would’ve just said: ‘Look man, she’s not sitting on our amps while we’re making a film.’ That wouldn’t be unheard of. Most people just say, ‘We’re not having this person here, don’t care how much you love her.’

But we were actually quite supportive. Not supportive enough, you know; it would have been nice to have been really supportive because then we could look back and say, Weren’t we really terrific? But looking back on it, I think we were OK. We were never really that mean to them, but I think a lot of the time John suspected meanness where it wasn’t really there.

He was presumably fairly paranoid.

I think so. He warned me off Yoko once: ‘Look, this is my chick!’ Just because he knew my reputation. We knew each other rather well. I just said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ But I did feel he ought to have known I wouldn’t. That was John; just a jealous guy. He was a paranoid guy. And he was into drugs … heavy. He was into heroin, the extent of which I hadn’t realised, till just now.

It’s all starting to click a bit in my brain. I just figured, Oh, there’s John, my buddy, and he’s turning on me. He once said to me, ‘Oh, they’re all on the McCartney bandwagon.’ Yet things like that were hurting him, and looking back on it now I just think that it’s a bit sad really.

I saw that thing in The Observer the other week, about the manuscript of the Apple Beatles biography and the vitriolic comments John made in the margins.

I think that shows the sort of pain he was going through. Look, he was a great guy, great sense of humour and I’d do it all again. I’d go through it all again, and have him slagging me off again just because he was so great; those are all the down moments, there was much more pleasure than has really come out. I had a wonderful time, with one of the world’s most talented people. We had all that craziness, but if someone took one of your wedding photos and put ‘funeral’ on it, as he did on that manuscript, you’d tend to feel a bit sorry for the guy. I’ll tell you what, if I’d ever done that to him, he would’ve just hit the roof. But I just sat through it all like mild-mannered Clark Kent.

This was hurting you, presumably.

Not half.

When did you actually get a perspective on it?

I still haven’t. It’s still inside me. John was lucky. He got all his hurt out. I’m a different sort of a personality. There’s still a lot inside me that’s trying to work it out. And that’s why it’s good to see that wedding-funeral bit, because I started to think, ‘Wait a minute, this is someone who’s going over the top. This is paranoia manifesting itself.’ And so my feeling is just like it was at the time, which is like, He’s my buddy, I don’t really want to do anything to hurt him, or his memory, or anything. I don’t want to hurt Yoko. But, at the same time, it doesn’t mean that I understand what went down.

I went at Yoko’s request to New York recently. She said she wanted to see me, I said I was going through New York and so I stopped off and rang her, and she said she couldn’t see me that day. I was 400 yards away from her. I said, ‘Well, I’ll pop over any time today; five minutes, ten minutes, whenever you can squeeze me in.’ She said. ‘It’s going to be very difficult.’ I said, ‘Well, OK, I understand; what is the reason, by the way?’ She said, ‘I was up all night with Sean.’ I said, ‘Well, I understand that. I’ve got four kids, you know. But you’re bound to have a minute today, sometime.’

She asked me to come. I’d flown in specially to see her, and she wouldn’t even see me. So I felt a little humiliated, but I said, ‘OK, 9.30 tomorrow morning, let’s make an appointment.’ She rang up at about 9.00 and said, ‘Could you make it tomorrow morning?’

So that’s the kind of thing. I’m beginning to think it wasn’t all my fault. I’m beginning to let myself off a lot of the guilt. I always felt guilty, but looking back on it I can say OK, let’s try and outline some things. John was hurt; what was he hurt by? What is the single biggest thing that we can find in all our research that hurt John? And the biggest thing that I can find is that I told the world that The Beatles were finished. I don’t think that’s so hurtful.

I’ll tell you what was unfortunate was the method of announcing it all. I said to the guy at the office. Peter Brown, of book fame, I’ve got an album coming out called McCartney. And I don’t really want to see too much press. Can you do me some question-and-answer things?

So he sent all those questions over and I answered them all. We had them printed up and put in the press copies of the album. It wasn’t a number. I see it now and shudder. At the time it was me trying to answer some questions that were being asked and I decided not to fudge those questions.

We didn’t accept Yoko totally, but how many groups do you know who would? It’s a joke, like Spinal Tap. You know, I loved John, I was his best mate for a long time. Then the group started to break up. It was very sad. I got the rap as the guy who broke the group up. It wasn’t actually true.

But legally you had to do that to get out of the contract with Allen Klein, didn’t you?

Yeah, legally I had to. I had to take the other Beatles to court. And I got a lot of guilt off that. But you tell me what you would have done if the entire earnings that you’d made — and it was something like The Beatles’ entire earnings, a big figure, everything we’d ever done up to somewhere round about ‘Hey Jude’ — was about to disappear into someone’s pocket. The guy I’m talking about, Allen Klein, had £5 million the first year he managed The Beatles. So I smelled a rat and thought, £5 million in one year, how long’s it going to take him to get rid of it all?

So I started to resist, and I was given a lot of pressure. The others said, ‘Oh, you’re always stalling’ when I kept refusing to sign Klein’s contract.

But the others suspected you of looking after number one by wanting to bring in your wife’s family as managers.

Obviously everyone worried that because it was my father-in-law, I’d be the one he’d look after. Quite naturally, they said, ‘No, we can’t have him.’ So in the end it turned out to be Klein. And I said, ‘Well, I want out of this. I want to sue this guy Klein.’

They said, ‘You can’t, because he’s not party to any of the agreements.’ So it became clear that I had to sue The Beatles. So obviously I became the baddie. I did take The Beatles to the High Court, which was a highly traumatic period for me, living to front that one out. Imagine, seriously, having to front that one out.

How did you feel through all that?

Crazy, just insane. So insecure. Half the reason I grew the beard.

People often put hair on their faces to hide.

It’s often a cover-up. And I had this big beard and I went to the High Court and actually managed to save the situation. But my whole life was on the line at that point. I felt this was the fire, this was the furnace. It had finally arrived. And we used to get shakes in our voices in court. We used to get the Nixon shakes, something we’d never ever had before. So we went through a lot of those problems. But the nice thing was afterwards each one of them in turn very, very quietly and very briefly said, ‘Oh, thanks for that.’ That was about all I ever heard about it.

But again, John turned it round. He said, ‘But you’re always right, aren’t you?’ See, there was always this thing. I mean, it seemed crazy for me because I thought the idea was to try and get it right, you know. It was quite surprising to find that if you did get it right, people could then turn that one around and say: ‘But you’re always right aren’t you?’ It’s like moving the goal posts.

I mean, it occurred quite a few times because I’m pretty ruthless, ambitious, all that stuff. No more than anyone trying to break into showbiz, but I can be pretty forceful. If we’ve gotta make a record, I’ll actually sit down and write songs. This could be interpreted as being overpowering and forceful.

I’d heard that you were the driving force of The Beatles, but that John would be more interested in doing anything but what The Beatles were supposed to be doing.

Yeah, I remember doing Let It Be and we sat around the table in Apple and I came up with this idea that we should get it on film. I remember John said, ‘Why? What for?’ I explained a bit more. He said, ‘I get it. You want a job!’ Yeah, that’s it! But it seemed strange to me that he didn’t. He seemed quite happy languishing out in St George’s Hill in Weybridge.

I always wanted to make the group great, and even greater. When we made the Let It Be album, and it was a bit crummy, I insisted that we made Abbey Road because I knew what we were capable of. I didn’t think that we’d pulled it off on Let It Be and then with the Phil Spector remix, we kinda walked away from that LP. In fact, the best version of it was before anyone got hold of it: the Glyn Johns early mixes were great but they were very spartan; it would be one of the hippest records going if they brought it out. Before it had all its raw edges off it, that was one of the best Beatles albums because it was a bit avant-garde. I loved it.

So then it was Abbey Road we were doing and I got some grief on that because it took three days to do ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. You know how long Trevor Horn takes to do a mix for Frankie Goes to Hollywood? It takes two days to switch on the Fairlight! I had a group in the other day, spent two days trying to find the ON switch! That’s what we’re into these days, you know.

I’m sure I did piss people off at the time, much as I tried not to. It just seemed to me when we had a session booked it was a cool idea to turn up. Like Sgt. Pepper: George turned up for his number and a couple of other sessions but not for very much else.

George was supposed to have resented you for always getting on his back.

He did resent it. Two examples; one on Abbey Road. I was beginning to get too producery for everyone. George Martin was the actual producer and I was beginning to be too definite, and George and Ringo turned around and said, ‘Look, piss off, we’re grown-ups and we can do it without you fine.’ People like me who don’t realise when they’re being very overbearing, it comes as a great surprise to be told.

So I completely clammed up and backed off: right, ‘OK, they’re right, I’m a turd.’ So a day or so went by and the session started to flag a bit and so eventually Ringo turned round to me and said, ‘Come on… produce’, and so it was like you couldn’t have it both ways. You either had to have me doing what I did, which, let’s face it, I hadn’t done too bad, or I was going to back off and become paranoid myself, which was what happened.

A lot of Wings was to do with that; I’d been told that I was so overbearing. If the guitarists in Wings wanted to play a solo a certain way, I wouldn’t dare tell them that it wasn’t good.

The other example that really pissed George off was when we were making ‘Hey Jude’. To me it had to have a sparse opening and it was going to build. So I started off ‘Hey Jude’ (sings) and George went ‘durnurnawnaww’ (makes guitar noise), and then ‘Don’t make it bad’, and he’d go ‘Derdlederlederdle’ and he was answering every line through the whole song and I just said, ‘No, man, I really don’t want that, it’s my song.’ The rule was whoever’s song it was to say how we did the arrangement for them.

That pissed him off, and I’m sure it pissed Ringo off when he couldn’t quite get the drums to ‘Back In The U.S.S.R.’, and I sat in. I remember sitting for hours thinking, ‘Should I say this thing?’ In the end it always came down to, ‘You should have said something,’ so it’s very hard to balance that. In the end I have to say that sometimes I was overbearing and sometimes they liked it.

Do you have much to do with them now?

I’m just starting to get back with them. It’s all business troubles. If we don’t talk about Apple then we get on like a house on fire. So I’ve just started to see them again. I had a great day the other day when George came down to visit me and for the first time in billions of years we had a really nice time. George was my original mate in The Beatles.

More than John?

He lived near me in Upton Green and I lived in Ardwick Road, and it was like half a mile away, so we took the same bus to the same school — the 500, which was the express — and then we got guitars at about the same time. We went through the Bert Weedon books and learned D and A together and we were quite big buddies then, so that was something I’d missed for all these years. We’d got all professional and Beatles and everything, and you lose that obviously, and he just came down the other day and we didn’t talk about Apple and we didn’t touch an instrument. It was just back as mates, like on the bus. He’s very into trees and planting and horticulture, as I am more now, and so we talked about planting trees. It was great to actually relate as two people and try and get all that crap out the window.

But that seems to be part of the process; he seems to be emerging more now anyway.

We’re all kind of coming to. We all brushed off this whole Beatles episode and sort of said, Well, it’s no big deal. Obviously it’s a big deal… it was a huge deal… if there ever was a big deal, that was it! So I don’t think half of us know what happened to us, really. I can never tell you what year anything was; literally they all go into a haze for me, the years and stuff. I keep seeing pictures of myself shaking hands with Mitzi Gaynor and I think, I didn’t know I met her. It’s that vague. And yet I look as straight as a die in there.

Were you on speed or something?

I don’t think so. I think it was just that life was speeding; you just met Mitzi Gaynor for five minutes and then you’d go and meet Jerry Lewis’s kids. It becomes very difficult after a while to know if you met 50 of them. I keep seeing weird photos of me with people that I didn’t even know I’d met. It’s quite embarrassing. Bowie’s got that problem too; he’s got huge periods of his life where he just does not know what happened.

When the money started to come in, were you aware of that or were you just living your life and you’d hear suddenly you were worth so much?

We used to ask them, ‘Am I a millionaire yet?’ and they used to say cryptic things like ‘On paper you are’ and we’d say, ‘Well, what does that mean? Am I or aren’t I? Are there more than a million of those green things in my bank yet?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, it’s not actually in a bank… we think you are.’ It was actually very difficult to get anything out of these people and the accountants never made you feel successful.

I remember we had the whole top five in America and I decided I wanted to buy a country house. I wasn’t asking for the world. In those days it would have cost about £30,000, top whack, and so I went to the accountants and they said, ‘You’ll have to get a mortgage’ and I said, ‘What do you mean, a mortgage? Aren’t we doing well yet? We’ve got the whole top five in the biggest market in the world! There’s gotta be some money coming in off that!’

They always try and keep you down. So you didn’t actually get much of a feeling of being very rich. The first time I actually saw cheques was when I left Apple, and it wasn’t me that saw them, it was Linda, because we’d co-written a few of our early things.

There are lots of stories about you and money. Miles, once the editor of International Times, who was a friend of yours in the mid-‘60s, told me about finding your MBE and a bunch of £20 notes stuffed into a sock drawer in your bedroom at the Asher house.

Yeah, I’ve heard that story too. I never remember actually having a wad of money like that. Still, it was nice of him not to nick it anyway, wasn’t it? I did know Miles very well. He was my mate. We had many a wondrous stoned evening in his place listening to all sorts of stuff.

That was another of the interesting things. I think that I’ve got a certain personality and if I give charity I don’t like to shout about it. If I get into avant-garde stuff, I don’t particularly shout about that either. I just get on with it. So way before John met Yoko and got avant-garde, I was like the avant-garde London bachelor with Miles in my pad in St. John’s Wood. I was making 8mm movies and showing them to Antonioni. I had all sorts of theories of music — we’d put on a Ravi Shankar record to our home movies and it’d synchronise and John used to come from Weybridge, kind of looking slightly goofy and saying ‘Wow! This is great! We should do more of this!’

I used to sit in a basement in Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco and that Marianne Faithfull-John Dunbar crowd doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello. But it didn’t occur to me in the next NME interview I did to rave about William Burroughs. Maybe it would have been good for me to do that.

It’s like Yoko met me before she met John. She turned up for a charity thing, she wanted manuscripts, any spare lyric sheets you had around. Ours tended to be on the backs of envelopes and to tell you the truth I didn’t want to give her any. They were very precious to me and the cause didn’t seem so great. So I said, ‘Look, my mate might be interested,’ and I gave her John’s address, and I think that’s how they first hooked up, and then she had her exhibition and stuff and then their side of the story started to happen.

I feel as though I have to justify living, you know, which is a bit of a piss-off. I don’t really want to have to sit around and justify myself; it’s a bit humiliating. But there are lots of things that haven’t come out. For instance, when they bust up their marriage, she came through London. He was in LA doing Pussy Cats with Nilsson and having a generally quite crazy time of it all, fighting with photographers and haranguing the Smothers Brothers, all because he genuinely loved Yoko and they had a very, very deep, strong relationship, but they were into all sorts of crazy stuff, stuff I don’t know the half of. A lot of people don’t know the half of that. Hints of it keep coming out in books but you never know if you can believe them.

You mean occultism?

All sorts. I certainly did get a postcard from Yoko saying ‘Go round the world in a South-Easterly direction. It’d be good for you. You’re allowed to stop at four places.’ George Martin got one of those and he sort of said, ‘Would it be alright if I go to Montserrat?’, and she said, ‘No.’ Actually, John did the voyage. John went in a South-Easterly direction around the world, but we all kind of went, ‘Sure, sure, we’ll go round the South-East.’ There are so many memories that come flooding in and it’s like a psycho session, the minute I get on this stuff. I’m on a couch and I’m just trying to purge it all.

Linda and me came over for dinner once and John said, ‘You fancy getting the trepanning tiling done?’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ and he said, ‘Well, you kind of have a hole bored in your skull and it relieves the pressure.’ We’re sitting at dinner and this is seriously being offered! Now this wasn’t a joke, this was like, ‘Let’s go next week, we know a guy who can do it and maybe we could all go together.’ So I said. ‘Look, you go and have it done, and if it works, great. Tell us all about it and we’ll all have it.’

But I’m afraid I’ve always been a little bit cynical about stuff like that — thank God! — because I think that there’s so much crap that you’ve got to be careful of. But John was more open to things like that.

Anyway, I was telling you about the marriage break-up thing. Yoko came through London and visited us, which was very nice. Linda and I were just married and living in this big old house in St John’s Wood. She came by and we started talking, and obviously the important subject for us is: ‘What’s happened? You’ve broken up then? I mean, you’re here and he’s there.’

She was very nice and confided in us but she was being very strong about it. She said, ‘No, he’s got to work his way back.’ I said, ‘Well look, do you still love him?’, and she said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Well, would you think it was an intrusion if I said to him, “Look, man, she loves you and there’s a way to get back”— sounds like a Beatles’ song — and I said ‘Would that be OK?’

She said she didn’t mind and we went out to visit him in L.A. in that house where all the crazy things went on and I took him into the back room and said, ‘This girl of yours, she really still loves you. Do you love her?’ And he said he did but he didn’t know what to do.

So I said, ‘You’re going to have to work your little ass off, man. You have to get back to New York, you have to take a separate flat, you have to send her roses every fucking day, you have to work at it like a bitch! Then you just might get her back.’ And he did. I mean, if you hear it from John’s point of view, it’ll just be that he spoke to Yoko on the phone and she said to him, ‘Come back.’

I always found it interesting that he got married a month after you.

I think we spurred each other into marriage. They were very strong together which left me out of the picture, so then I got together with Linda and we got our own kind of strength. I think again that they were a little bit peeved that we got married first.

Was it the kind of thing where there are two blokes who are good mates and one of them finds a girl and then the friendship breaks up?

‘Wedding Bells’ is what it was. ‘Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.’ We used to sing that song, Gene Vincent did it. It was like an army song and for us the Beatles became the army. We always knew that one day ‘Wedding Bells’ would come true, and that was when it did.

Trouble is, in trying to set the record straight I don’t want to blame John. I did this thing recently with Hunter Davies and they pulled out the one line, ‘John could be a manoeuvring swine.’ Well, I still stick to that, but I’d better not say it to The Sun because I’m just going to get hauled over the coals again.

I’ll tell you exactly why I said that. We had a business meeting to break up The Beatles, one of the famous ones that we’d been having — we’re still having them 17 years later, actually. We all flew in to New York specially. George came off his disastrous tour, Ring of flew in and we were at the Plaza for the big final settlement meeting. John was half a mile away at the Dakota and he sent a balloon over with a note that said ‘Listen to this balloon.’ I mean, you’ve got to be pretty cool to handle that kind of stuff.

George blew his cool and rang him up: ’You fucking maniac!! You take your fucking dark glasses off and come and look at us, man!!’ and gave him a whole load of that shit. Around the same time at another meeting we had it all settled, and John asked for an extra million pounds at the last minute. So of course that meeting blew up in disarray. Later, when we got a bit friendlier — and from time to time there would be these little stepping-stones of friendship in the Apple sea — I asked him why he’d actually wanted that million and he said, I just wanted cards to play with. It’s absolutely standard business practice. He wanted a couple of jacks to up your pair of nines. He was one great guy, but part of his greatness was that he wasn’t a saint.

You got an awful lot of shit for saying “It’s a drag” after he’d been killed.

Yea. I think why some politicians are so successful is that they have a little bleeper box in their heads and before they say something they run things through and they can see it as a headline. If it doesn’t look good they edit it. I have that sometimes, but in moments like that all my bleepers go out the window. I just came out of the place and somebody just stuck the proverbial microphone in the window of the car, which I’m mad enough to have open because, you see, I’m quite outgoing and I was telling the fans ‘Thank you, it’s alright.’ You know. Fab Macca, thumbs aloft, wacky… to me that’s just being nice… that’s just ordinary. I’m not going to carry any can for that kind of shit, for me that was OK… Sticking my thumb up isn’t some armour against the fans, it’s just a perfectly straightforward way of being friendly with people.

But, anyway, I said, ‘It’s a dra-a-ag.’ If I could’ve I might’ve just lengthened that word ‘drag’ for about a thousand years, to get the full meaning. Hunter Davies was on television that night, giving a very reasoned account of John, and all the puppets sprang right up there. I thought it was well tasteless. Jesus Christ, ready with the answers, aren’t we? Aren’t we just ready with a summary? Mind you, Hunter admitted to us years ago that he already had our obituaries written. They’re on file at The Times and they just update them, which is chilling to learn.

The question is, which is the more sensitive: my thing or his thing? He was the one I rang up about ‘manoeuvring swine’ too, so it shows what a buddy he is, he immediately put it in print.

That incident reminded me of John saying ‘We’re bigger than Jesus,’ which was a Maureen Cleave article for the Evening Standard. John and Maureen were good friends and in context it was actually John saying to the church, ‘Hey, wake up! We’re bigger than you.’

But you take it out of context, you send it to Selma, Alabama, you put it on the front page and you’ve got little 11-year-olds thumping on your coach window saying, ‘Blasphemer! Devil Worshipper!’ and I’ll never forget the sight of a little blond kid trying to get to us, and he would have done it, if he’d have got to us. I mean, at 11, what does this kid know of life and religion or anything? He’d just been whipped up.

It’s like Phillip Norman’s book Shout. It’s shameful the way it says that George spent the whole of his career holding a plectrum waiting for a solo. To dismiss George like that is just stupid, nothing less. George was a major influence musically. Trouble is with all these guys, when they come to interview you they come with a clipboard of facts that they’ve got from the files. That’s how Willie Russell wrote his play, John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert. That’s how I’ve become known as the one who broke up the Beatles.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that now the truth is starting to come out, and when I see that wedding changed to funeral, I start to realise that it was John’s problem, not mine.

What was his problem, do you think?

Heroin, a slight problem.

When did you know he was doing heroin?

When he was living in Montagu Square with Yoko after he’d split up with Cynthia. He never actually told us, no one ever actually saw him take it, but we heard. I was very lucky to miss that whole scene. I was the first one on coke in the group, which horrified the whole group, and I just thought, No sweat. The minute I stopped, the whole record industry got into it and has never stopped since.

I knew the time was up when I saw Jim Webb — Up Up And Away! — offering me a toot. I thought, ‘Hello, this is getting way too popular.’

When was this that you were doing it?

In LA, it was Sgt. Pepper time, it was my circle of friends: the William Burroughs, the Robert Frasers, the Rolling Stones crowd, and we’d use it to wake up after the pot. But that was quite shortlived and I hated it. I soon got the message that it was a big downer.

There’s a story that sums up all that drugs thing. When I went out to LA at the time of that Pussy Cats album I was offered angel dust. I said, ‘What is it?’ and they said, ‘It’s an elephant tranquillizer,’ and I said to the guy, ‘Is it fun?’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘No it’s not fun.’ So I said, ‘OK, I won’t have any then.’ That sums it up, you know. You had anything, man, even if it wasn’t fun! You sort of had to do it — peer pressure.

I was given a lot of stick for being the last one to take acid. I wish I’d held out now in a way, Although it was the times. I don’t really regret anything actually. I remember John going on The Old Grey Whistle Test and saying, ‘Paul only took it four times! We all took it twenty times!!’ It was as if you’d scored points…

Real twenty pints a night stuff, isn’t it?

It really is!! That’s it, exactly! Very northern. It’s the same thing. If you get it right with one crowd; of people, it’s wrong with another crowd, so you can’t win, basically. But it was great times and I really don’t regret it. I love a lot of what we did; we had screwed-up moments too, but who doesn’t?

Like Geldof — there’s this guy who does great stuff, but that doesn’t mean that he’s a saint. In fact, it’s often the opposite with these people; it just means that they’ve got Go Power.

I love the story where they finished the USA For Africa record and Geldof is buzzing and Michael Jackson and his family were having a light meal at about three in the morning. They’re all devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and they were all sitting there and Bob walks in and says, ‘You lot fucking disgust me!!’ The jaws just drop.

He didn’t make himself too wildly popular. I think that’s why he got a bit elbowed in the States. They never mention him. It’s the American guy they always mention. I don’t even know what his name is. Ken something. They all thank him. They never say, ‘And by the way, he got the idea off this mad Irish bog bandit.’

How did you feel at Live Aid? The first time you’d been on stage for ages and it all went wrong.

When the mic went? I felt very strange. It was very loosely organised and I turned up not knowing quite what was expected of me, other than that I had to do ‘Let It Be’. So I sat down at the piano, looked around for a cue to go, and there was just one roadie, and I looked at him for a signal. I started and the monitor was off and I thought, No sweat, this is BBC, this is world television, someone’s bound to have a feed, it’s just that my monitor’s off.

Then I wondered if the audience could hear because I knew some of the words of ‘Let It Be’ were kind of relevant to what we were doing. Anyway, I thought, This is OK, they can hear me, they’re singing along. I just had to keep going, so it was very embarrassing. The terrible thing was that in the middle I heard the roadies come through on the monitor, shouting, ’No, this plug doesn’t go here!‘ I thought, Hello, we have problems. The worst moment was watching it on telly later.

The event itself was so great, but it wasn’t for my ego. It was for people who are dying and it raised over £50 million, and so it was like having been at the battle of Agincourt. It’s something you’ll tell your grandchildren about. I know Paul Simon slightly regrets that he didn’t do it. He was asked, but he had other things to do. I very nearly didn’t do it; Bob just badgered me into it.

That’s your mother invoked in ‘Let It Be’, isn’t it?

Yeah, well, I had a lot of bad times in the ‘60s there, and we used to sort of — probably all the drugs — lie in bed and wonder what was going on and feel quite paranoid. I had a dream one night about my mother. She died when I was 14 so I hadn’t really heard from her in quite a while, and it was very good. It gave me some strength. In my darkest hour Mother Mary comes to me. I don’t know whether you’ve got parents that are still living, but if you do… I get dreams with John in, and my Dad. It’s very nice because you meet them again. It’s wondrous, it’s like magic. Of course, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting yourself, or whatever…

What about ‘Lady Madonna’?

Lady Madonna’s all women. How do they do it? — bless ‘em — it’s that one, you know. Baby at your breast, how do they get the time to feed them? Where do you get the money? How do you do this thing that women do?

Was your mother a very strong force in your life?

Well, I loved her, you know, yeah.

Was it very traumatic when she died?

Yeah, but I’m a bit of a cover-up. There are many people like me in the world who don’t find it easy to have public grief. But that was one of the things that brought John and I very close together. We used to actually talk about it, being 16 or 17. We actually used to know, not in a cynical way, but a way that was accepting the reality of the situation, how people felt when they said, ‘How’s your mother?’ And we’d say, ‘Well, she’s dead.’ We almost had a sort of joke, we’d have to say, ‘It’s alright, don’t worry.’ We’d both lost our mothers. It was never really spoken about much; no-one really spoke about anything real. There was a famous expression: ‘Don’t get real on me, man.’

How did you feel about all the stick Linda got?

I feel sorry for her. She got a lot of stick, more than we admit to.

It presumably affected your relationship in some way?

It made us stronger, really; the thing I’m beginning to understand now about Linda was that we were just two people who liked each other and found a lot in common and fell in love, got married and found that we liked it. To the world, of course, she was the girl that Paul McCartney had married, and she was a divorcee, which didn’t seem right. People preferred Jane Asher. Jane Asher fitted. She was a better Fergie.

Linda wasn’t a very good Fergie for me, and people generally tended to disapprove of me marrying a divorcee and an American. That wasn’t too clever. None of that made a blind bit of difference; I actually just liked her, I still do and that’s all it’s to do with.

I mean, we got married in the craziest clothes when I look back on it. We didn’t even bother to buy her a decent outfit. I can see it all now; I can see why people were amazed that I’d put her in the group. At the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual. I even had quotes from Jagger saying, ‘Oh, he’s got his old lady up onstage man.’

A lot of people give her stick for playing with one finger, but as a matter of fact they weren’t polyphonic, the Moogs, in those days. You can only play them with one finger; you can play them with five if you like, but only one’s gonna register, so it’s things like that all added to the picture, and by the time she did the ’76 tour with Wings, she was well good at stuff and actually I was quite surprised, I mean, she was holding down the keyboard job with one of the big bands in the world. From knowing nothing! I mean, the balls of the girl!

But along with the public condemnations, there were always millions of people who liked her. Our shows always did OK, and our records occasionally did OK. Occasionally we’d have a whopper burger that’d suddenly make it worthwhile. Then we’d have our big whopper failures, but as long as you measure them against your successes, it’s alright.

How do you feel about the Wings output?

I was never very happy with the whole thing but I’m actually starting to think that it was a bit churlish of me, because I’m meeting a lot of people now who had a completely different perception of the whole thing. I met a nurse recently who was a Wings fan! I mean, forget me, forget The Beatles, she was an actual die-hard Wings fan. I didn’t think they existed.

A lot of the younger people coming up didn’t really know the Beatles history. There are people who don’t know what Sgt. Pepper was. We find it a bit difficult to understand. It’s like not knowing what War And Peace is.So it’s OK. I was never very pleased with the whole thing, but I’m warming to it now. I’m starting to look at it through my own eyes, and saying, Wait a minute. What did we do? Where did we go wrong? Most people would give their right arm for the Wings career, to have hits as big as ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, ‘My Love’, ‘Band On The Run’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’.

But it came to an end when you were busted in Japan. How did that happen?

It happened because we got some good grass in America and no-one could face putting it down the toilet. It was an absolutely crazy move. We knew we weren’t going to get any in Japan. Anybody else would have given it to their roadies, but I didn’t want them to take the rap. It was lying on top of the bloody suitcase. I’ll never forget the guy’s face as he pulled it out. He almost put it back. He just did not want the embarrassment. But it’s a hysterical subject and I’d prefer to skirt round it these days, because I don’t want any of the pressures that go with it, so I’m telling everyone, stay clean, be cool.

I’m pretty straight. I know what crazy is.

[x0401x]

Okay already.

Y’all are really damn eager for it, so here you have it: the infamous List of Erased Gay, AKA a glimpse of how we could be having it all if KyoAni weren’t doing us so dirty this year, Tsurune edition. The Violet Evergarden edition seems to have left a big impression, so maybe this listing will become a thing.

Then again, along with the canon gay that we lost, we gained a lot of anime-only shippy service that is not only weirdly fixated on Minato alone but also ruins the nature of many characters. KyoAni has been outright baffling this year in how little it understands the novels that it has been adapting, and even more in how proficient it has become in destroying the main relationships of each title. All in all, the personalities and purposes of the main characters have been severely altered, and there has been a disturbing trend (not only in Tsurune, but also in Violet Evergarden and Liz to Aoi Tori) of making the protagonists obsess with someone who apparently does only the minimum for them and being lukewarm with the people that seemingly care more for their wellbeing.

That’s not what any of these novels are about.

But since this post is centered on Tsurune, I’ll only talk about how the aforementioned major flaws apply to it. That boils down to KyoAni erasing most of what Masaki did for Minato and about 85% of the scenes they had together, replacing it with additional scenes without much purpose involving other characters. For whatever incomprehensible reason, KyoAni is hellbent on enhancing Minato’s relationship with everyone except the person he has the strongest bond with in the books, and a lot of you guys seemed to notice this. So, in order to address the cringeworthy disaster that the Tsurune anime has become, I’m naming this one as the List of Erased and Misplaced Gay.

Had to put it under a cut because of how long it got. While we’re at it, please consider reading the novel translations.

I gotta apologize to the Anons for stalling so much with this post. It took me a while to write it down since I had to skim the novel to take notes. By the way, to the people who haven’t finished the anime or don’t plan to read the novel: none of what’s cited here are things that will happen; they’re things that already happened in the canon timeline and didn’t make it into the screen. I’ve put them under a cut because it’s too much stuff. It feels like I just wrote a fanfiction but this is actually how canon goes.

I’m going to sort out the list by character relationship, from the mildest to the most blatant (y’all know which one it is).

Noa and Rika

Noa’s anime counterpart seems pretty meager, but her canon self is far more active, and if her saying “there’s no one in this world greater than Seo” isn’t an indication that she ain’t as straight as her arrows, then maybe her shouting at Nanao to “shut up and go burn in the fires of hell” after his advances might be an indication of it. Telling him that he “should be quiet because Seo’s feelings matter” when he flirts with her might also be one. Or not. Sadly, there’s not enough material in this aspect for the girls in the first volume.

Ryouhei and Nanao

These two are the straightest characters out of the group, but their interactions are always full of implications regarding the other club members. The two of them are often used as a means to translate the exchanges between the boys in a way that sounds suggestive as hell, and Nanao is oddly smug about it, which really doesn’t help.

Here’s a compilation of these dialogues, for convenience’s sake:

Nanao: Seiya doesn’t seem like himself today. Ryouhei: Minato probably turned him down. I already got rejected too. Nanao: I understand he wants everyone to join the the tournament, but aren’t those two too stubborn? That Minato guy is such a calamity, being popular with both boys and girls. I’m only popular with girls on that point.

(Try to convince me that Minato isn’t bi after this one. You shall not succeed.)

Kaito: You guys, don’t just stand there and chat; practice! Nanao: Geez, Kacchan, don’t take your anger out on us just because Seiya left. Kaito: Hah? What’re you saying? Nanao: Don’t you watch Seiya a lot? Kaito: Of course. Archery is about practicing while watching each other’s shooting forms.

Nanao: Kacchan, you really suck at endgames. Kaito: Shut up. I got what I needed, so it’s fine.

Kaito: I don’t wanna do team competitions with half-hearted feelings. Didn’t it seem like that guy had been practicing secretly? And I can’t understand the fact that he knows Masa-san. Since when have they known each other? Nanao: Aren’t you Masa-san’s favorite among his acquaintances? Minato’s a genuine bow geek, so I think he’ll unexpectedly be on the same wavelength as you, Kacchan. Kaito: We’re definitely not the same! And anyways, I don’t like that guy. There’s nothing decent about guys with nice faces, including you.

Seiya and Masaki

This one is in the misplaced gay list. In this case, implying Seiya’s non-existent co-dependency towards Minato. In the novel, Seiya isn’t jealous of Masaki and Minato’s relationship. He’s polite with Masaki all the way and starts calling him “Masa-san” from day one. Seiya also never says that he hates Masaki. Because he doesn’t.

Kaito and Masaki

Another example of misplaced gay. Kaito is very obedient around Masaki and obviously stans him as a good example of successful archer, but not in the exaggerated way that the anime tries to sell. In fact, it feels like the anime tries to get him to Minato’s level of fanboying, but although the two of them are equal when it comes to fawning over archery, they have a different vibe when it comes to Masaki. That’s probably because Minato is much closer to Masaki than Kaito is, and Kaito canonically sees Masaki as the brother he never had, while it’s unclear what exactly Minato sees Masaki as in his life.

For starters, Kaito never tried to keep Masaki for himself. He is jealous of Minato for also knowing Masaki and apparently monopolizing him, and he’s mad as hell that Masaki decided to start teaching archery because of Minato, but he never tried to keep Masaki’s existence itself a secret. The only one who did that was Minato. Kaito never refrained from talking to Nanao about Masaki at all. He also talked to Masaki about Nanao, enough for Masaki to be able to recognize Nanao at first sight.

Masaki jokes around Kaito like he does with everyone else, but Kaito responds to it right away with threats that he doesn’t really mean. Whenever Masaki dares him to actually do it, he meekly recoils. They’re found family through and through.

Daigo and Hiroki

The anime has been doing a piss-poor job at showcasing this ridiculously married duo. There isn’t much about them in the first volume, to be fair, but the little we had was enough to deliver that they’re old friends who complete each other. Hiroki is also the only person who listens to Daigo nerding out embarrassedly about idols without judging him, and the two of them are considered “special goods” of Kirisaki for being so inseparable and well-balanced.

Shuu, Sen and Man

These three aren’t nearly as close in the anime as in the original work. The twins absolutely love Shuu and admit to worshipping him. They’re clearly very jealous of Minato for holding Shuu’s attention, and physically attempt to drag Shuu away from him when they’re talking to each other. They’re also openly aggressive with Minato more than to any other team member of Kazemai.

In Kirisaki, their interactions are also different. The twins normally follow Shuu around and monopolize him, which he doesn’t seem to mind. The author describes Shuu sandwiched on both sides by the twins as “charming in some aspects”.

Shuu gives advice to them when asked, which the twins do often, not only because his shooting is their ideal, but also because they find his explanations easier than the teacher’s. He also defends the twins from the more hot-headed senpais when they’re called out for their rudeness.

Also, the twins’ admiration for Shuu isn’t equal. Senichi is way more serious about it than Manji is. The way this trio is depicted, it feels like Senichi is Shuu’s arranged fiancé who happens to be madly in love with him and has to deal with Shuu being in love with someone else.

Delicious.

Kaito and Minato

The anime keeps trying hella hard to maintain that Kaito and Minato have some sort of hero crush on Masaki and that this is the main connection between the two of them, but the novel begs to differ. It also keeps trying to pretend that Minato is the kind of spineless idiot who would act like Kaito is right in trying not to let him into the club because of his target panic, and who would attempt to gain Kaito’s friendship by catering to his unfair treatment. The novel also begs to differ.

Minato is a serious and assertive character. He acknowledges that he’s in bad condition and tries his best to prove his resolve, but only within realistic standards. He tells Kaito right to his face that entering the club is his own decision and warns that Kaito should back off from speaking on Seiya’s behalf, arguing that Seiya would be displeased with it. He also lectures Kaito on being a little shit to everyone, especially to Nanao, simply because he’s insecure.

After Minato joins, Kaito immediately bares his fangs at him. Albeit not putting up with his shit, Minato asks what he could do to be acknowledged as a comrade because you sort of need camaraderie in a team, and Kaito spits out that such a day would never come.

Kaito is outright displeased having to work together with Minato as kaizoe. Minato also isn’t in high spirits. The two of them comically have the same reaction when finding out they’d have to do it.

Minato decides to strike a conversation after the yawatashi, when he and Kaito are getting changed, mainly because he had noticed that Seiya and Kaito’s relationship wasn’t going well because of him. Kaito barks at Minato that there’s no honor in working with him, and Minato reasons that they should reach a mutual understanding, since they’d be in a team competition. Kaito retorts that he didn’t even want to be in them, but he had to after Minato joined. It only becomes clearer that Minato is ruining Kaito’s prospects one by one.

Despite all the clashing, Minato notices that Kaito’s passion for archery is genuine. Still, there’s a lot of misplaced gay in the anime during the training camp. Minato doesn’t desperately try to win Kaito’s favor, isn’t saved by Kaito from falling into the river, and doesn’t ogle at Kaito’s back when he shoots as the oomae for the first time.

Kaito finally shows a slight sign of warming up to Minato by thanking him for saving Nanao’s hat, which had been a present from him and his sisters. This is destroyed by him finding out that Minato and Seiya had attended Kirisaki for middle school.

After the whole accident with Masaki, Kaito assures Minato that it wasn’t his fault, and then he emphasizes it the next day, saying that Minato wasn’t worth being saved by Masaki if he was still twitching with guilt.

When Minato gets a ganglion on his hand, he tries to hide it from everyone, but Kaito notices something wrong. He forces Minato to have it examined by Tomio. And after Seiya performs first-aid on Minato, the following dialogue goes on:

“Shit, you’re seriously so…” “Sorry that this happened right before an important competition… It was because I was careless that I got hurt.” “Aah, you’re so freaking annoying. It doesn’t look like you get why I’m pissed off.” “You’re angry because I messed up?” “Wrong! This is why I said I wanted to focus on only the individual competitions. You tried to hide that injury from us earlier. You think you can compete in a team like that? In the end, you just don’t acknowledge us. All you do is keep secrets!” “I just didn’t want to worry everyone! What, don’t you have a secret too, Onogi!? You said you want to focus on the individual competitions, even though you actually couldn’t help but want to be in team competitions!” “Wha--no way that’d be true!” “I heard it from Nanao!”

Kaito almost gets back at Nanao for opening his mouth, but Minato put himself nose-to-nose in front of Kaito. This is one more example of closure that the anime doesn’t show.

“Onogi, didn’t you say that I was using target panic as an excuse to run away from archery? But aren’t you running away too? You run, run, and you’re still running away even now.” “What do you say that I’m running away from?” “From your ‘comrades’.” “What the hell are you talking about…” “You’re scared of making comrades. You’re scared that your thoughts and desires won’t be followed by other people. Even though you really longed for it, you didn’t want to disappoint others or yourself, so you decided to seal away that wish and not look at it. You’re the weakest kind of archer with that cowardice of yours.” “What did you saaaaaaaay——?!!”

This is how we get to the fight right before their face-off against Kirisaki, which was showed in the anime, but in a wholly different way. The fight itself is different as well. Kaito grabs Minato by the lapels of his gi, but Minato steps forward without any hesitation, unlike in the anime, where he seemed pretty terrified and just stood in place like a rock.

“Kaito.” “Don’t call me Kaito!” “Then, Kacchan.” “That’s even worse!” “Kaito, call me by my name. Call me Minato. Then we’ll be comrades.” “Haaa!?” “Besides, in the Kazemai High School Archery Club’s male division, everyone is calling each other by their first names, but we’re the only ones calling each other by our last names. It’s embarrassing to feel special, right?” “There’s no special feeling——! It’s normal, average. You’re such an airhead.” “When I learned that you wanted to be in a team competition, Kaito, I was really happy. I felt the same way.” “So what?” “Tommy-sensei didn’t make me the ochi for the evetuality of my target panic starting up. It was to make me feel like I had four comrades in front of my eyes. So, Kaito, you must feel the four of us at your back, right? You aren’t alone. I’ll protect the end of the line so that everyone can follow behind you. I’ll go with you to the very top.” “You were just babbling on. I’m gonna trample you.” “Why would you trample me? We’re going together.”

Yes, they didn’t get to this point by Kaito being hysterical about following Masaki’s teachings or by Minato telling everyone to forget them, because that’s just fucking dumb. If teachings weren’t necessary, there would be no need for taking classes in the first place.

It’s only here that Tomio hands them the headbands. They all put them on and Minato doesn’t need a pep talk from Seiya in order to tie his own. Kaito then finally calls Minato (and only Minato, as he’d already been on a first-name basis with Seiya since the beginning) by his first name for the first time.

Kaito and Seiya

To quote myself from an earlier post:

One of the things I noticed is that not just their relationship but their personalities are different in the anime, and this in turn affects the rest. What I find so good about them is the irony that Seiya is a dog person who acts cat-like and Kaito is a cat person who acts dog-like and you can feel this shit in their exchanges.

There are many details to this relationship that could be considered gems. When Kaito meets Seiya and Minato at Kazemai, he recognizes Seiya right away from their tournament in middle school, but not Minato. As I said before, the two of them refer to themselves by their first names off the bat and Kaito is quick to try to get Seiya into individual competitions with him. He insists that the two of them can “aim for the top together”, and gets extremely frustrated when Seiya refuses. He’s also pretty offended when Seiya claims that Minato is above him when it comes to natural ability.

The day after Seiya and Minato fight in the rain, Seiya catches a cold and is overall very distracted, enough to mistake Kaito’s bow for his own and use it instead. Kaito asks him how he managed the feat because one would normally be able to tell the difference, to which Seiya responds that he “did think it felt sort of tougher”.

I will not turn this into innuendo. I shan’t.

Kaito then notices Seiya looks red and places a hand on his forehead, confirming that he has a fever, like any good shoujo protagonist would do with the heroine. And this is where the author begins to hint that Kaito treats Seiya differently from the other club members. Kaito is overall gentler with him for no given motive. Even though he’s the type to care for everyone, he normally scolds those he looks after and makes clear that they should be able to look after themselves, but he doesn’t do this with Seiya at all. And the best of it is that Seiya responds to his awkward kindness.

When he realizes that Seiya is sick, the first thing he does is tell him that he should take a break because he’s busy with other matters aside from club activities and Seiya brushes him off, but then closes his eyes and says that Kaito’s cold hand feels good against his hot face and goddamn. What a low sweep. Goddamn.

Basically, all Kaito can do is frown and he doesn’t manage to come up with much of a response. By the time Seiya leaves, Kaito is still staring at him, and he gets visibly annoyed when Seiya isn’t there anymore. Again, for no given reason.

Kaito confronts Minato two days later about joining the club, acting as Seiya’s spokesperson on his own accord and telling Minato that he shouldn’t upset Seiya or raise his hopes fruitlessly. He gets angry when Minato argues that Seiya wouldn’t forgive him for butting into their affairs, and maintains that Seiya would be going to the individual competitions with him, not to the team competitions.

Right before the training camp, when Kaito and Seiya are cleaning up the targets together, Kaito finally confronts Seiya about his stance regarding Minato. He calls Seiya out for being like an overprotective father around Minato, and makes observations that even Seiya himself admits to be right:

“About your good point of nicely taking care of everyone, it seems that it’s because you’re following the rules. Like, you go forward at the green light and stop at the red light ‘cause you were taught to do so. Still, you’re different around Narumiya. You do with him what you really wanna do. But I’m not saying that you’re black-hearted. Your good quality is fairness ‘cause you have enough brains and ability to take action to properly make use of what you’ve learned. Many people are relying on you. Your guiding principles were misled ‘cause you, the club president, got too engrossed with one person. I mean, you shouldn’t have forced everyone to go for team competitions this time.”

Seiya is predictably displeased that Kaito hit bull’s-eye, and tells him that he should be focusing more into practice if he has time to be observing him. And sure, I get that he would want to tell Kaito to hop off his shit because this little fucker has a lot of secrets............ but he certainly didn’t have to hold Kaito’s hand while doing it. And he most certainly didn’t have to hold it so tight that the arrow on Kaito’s hand creaked a little.

Kaito says to Seiya’s face that a lot of what he spouts sounds fishy, and Seiya changes the subject by claiming that all he wants is for Minato to draw the bow like he used to once again. Kaito can tell that there’s more to his motives than this, but as Seiya leaves as fast as he can, he’s unable to ask. The arrow that remained on his hand was Seiya’s, and the emphasis on the fact that it was a wornout one probably stems from the long-standing burdens that Seiya has been carrying.

Yeah, this debunkes the anime’s stupid excuse that Seiya is in the archery club because of Minato. He’s depicted in the novel as being his own person and having his own will, so he does have a mind outside of Minato. Even if Minato had never joined the club, Seiya would have stayed in it.

Anyway, fast forward to the day before the training camp, Kaito confronts Seiya about not signing up for the individuals. Seiya ignores him, which pisses him off.

Once Kaito finds out that Seiya and Minato went to Kirisaki in middle school, he bitches to Seiya about keeping it a secret. Seiya argues that he hadn’t told anyone because he didn’t want everybody digging up on them and retorts that Kaito could have simply looked them up if he’d really wanted to know, but after Kaio leaves, Seiya admits that he should have properly talked about it when Kaito had asked. He resigns to the fact that finding out about it way after people of other clubs probably made Kaito feel awful and says he has no right to be the club president. Yet he’s cheered up by Ryouhei and decides to discuss the subject properly with Kaito when he gets a chance.

Kaito is so thrown-off by the fresh frustrations that he loses the improvement he had acquired during the training camp on the spot (no, he didn’t fail because of a stupid obsession with making his bow turn, KyoAni). He actually made it through the first round, but fell short in the second, together with Nanao (yes, he participated), Yuuna and Noa (yes, the girls didn’t fuck up right from the get-go and none of them had zero hits).

Kaito continues acting off during club activities and gets into an argument with the girls and Minato, but he’s immediately shut down by Seiya because this bitch weak.

Later on, in order to help the boys enhance their teamwork and to distract them from the stress of having to face Kirisaki, Tomio bought them sports fishing passes and sent them to a fishing spot. Since fishing alone was forbidden, the five boys split into two groups. Ryouhei and Nanao went with Minato, leaving Kaito to work together with Seiya, who had brought Kuma along. The two of them caught river bugs to serve as bait together and sat at opposite sides of the shore.

I think it’s worth mentioning that Kaito was being his usual sharp self with the others, but with Seiya, he acted completely tame. There wasn’t any trace of his frustration in his attitude.

Seiya went back to Kaito after having caught one salmon, and found that Kaito’s fishing line had become entangled on a tree. After Seiya sent a picture of what he had gotten to Minato and the others, he and Kaito sat down...... really close together under a shaded area. Seiya took a tomato curry bread out of his backpack and shared half of it with Kaito, and after they were done, they chatted idly, with Seiya commenting that Kuma seemed to be showing respect for Kaito. Kaito then stroked him and Kuma sat down next to Kaito as if to nestle close to him.

Once Kaito gets the Kuma Seal of Approval, he and Seiya have the following conversation:

“About the whole deal with Kirisaki’s Shuu, it was wrong of me to keep it all a secret; I’m sorry. I’ll discuss things properly from now on.” “Ah, no, you don’t have to talk about it. There’s nothing you have to apologize for. You had something you didn’t want anyone else to know about, and it was wrong of me to get curious over it. Even if I knew, it doesn’t really mean I could be of help to you guys, either.” “That’s not true. I’m counting on you, Kacchan.” “You…even though I was talking seriously… Can I punch you?” “Well, the competition is over, after all. I think Tommy-sensei gave us this mission not to acquire stamina and patience through fishing, but to make us step away from the bow once in a while and relax. Minato seems to be conscious of Shuu and getting flustered by him too.” “Rather than him, I’m a little worried about you.” “Me? Why?” “Aren’t you fretting over Narumiya’s target panic more than he is? Other than that, how can I put it? Uh… Anyways, you’re also a disappointment.” “I don’t quite get it, but well, I’m thankful that you’re worried about me.” “You’re nice to everyone, and yet you act sassy with me.”

Kaito had actually wanted to ask Seiya if he felt some sort of guilt regarding Minato, but the question was too insensitive even for him. He also acknowledged that he might not be able to find the right words to reply with if Seiya said yes, and didn’t want to seem like he was criticizing Seiya for it. So, instead, he goes with this:

“Seiya, when I first saw you at the information session, I thought that you were a guy who was well-composed and really good at archery. I’d been watching you for a while, and I thought maybe you were similar to me in some way. You have passion, some kind of conviction, don’t you? I want to respect it. I respect you for working hard to earn a calm and collected self.” “You praising me feels unpleasant. Should I say that you should go practice if you have the time to observe me?” “I want to win the prefectural tournament - with all five of us.” “Yeah… that’s right.���

The author then describes the maple trees overhead, and just to put it out there, maple stands for reserve, which might be an allusion to Kaito holding back from digging further into the matter (even though he was right, like he always is about Seiya). They also mean strength and endurance, and that matches Kaito’s comments on Seiya.

A few days later, during a softball tournament of their school, Minato and Seiya’s class was playing against Kaito’s. Seiya teases Kaito when they spot each other about how the soccer field is somewhere else, since Kaito was being recurrently summoned to be part of the soccer team by the school’s soccer club at the beginning of the semester, to which Kaito responds with, “Seiyaaa, not you too”.

When the game begins, Kaito is the first batter and Seiya is the baseman. Kaito gets a hit in the second try, and gives Seiya a “how’s that” look when passing him by.

On the first day of club activities after Masaki was hospitalized, Kaito was the one to announce that everyone should continue practice like normal in order not to waste what they’d been taught. Before doing so, he gazes at Seiya for a brief moment as if to ask for permission to speak on his behalf.

After Kazemai’s tiebreaking match with Kubo high school, while everyone was having lunch, Seiya and Kaito were checking the competition’s program and discussing the formalities for the exiting of the next round, which would be slightly different from the others.

At the tournament, when Seiya diagnoses and treats Minato’s ganglion, Kaito is visibly impressed by the fact he carries first-aid items around with him, and Seiya merely responds that he shouldn’t underestimate a son of orthopedic surgeons who used to play with medical tape instead of building blocks.

Keep on roasting him with care, you four-eyed witch.

In other words, Seiya and Kaito interact a lot. Onogi “hands off my man” Kaito is often on the role of looking out for Seiya, who in turn looks out for everyone. Just like Masaki with Minato, Kaito is always spot-on about Seiya and gets really damn close to finding out his heaviest secret, and prods into Seiya’s business enough to shake even a careful planner like him. Meanwhile, Seiya is sharp as a knife with him, but recognizes he shouldn’t be, and resorts to sassing Kaito when he gets too sappy. He also acts somewhat tsun when Kaito is too gentle, and not-so-subtly starts hanging around Kaito most of the time after he starts acting like a normal best friend to Minato once again.

Seiya and Minato

It all obviously starts right on the first part of the first chapter, because Ayano Kotoko wastes no time. When Minato and Seiya meet during the morning of their high school entrance ceremony, Minato hinted that he might have been getting sick, and Seiya teases him about it. Then he says that if this did end up happening, he would offer to “faithfully nurse” Minato in the special hospital room of his parents’ clinic, to which Minato retorts that he would turn Seiya down because “who knows what you’d do”. Seiya claims he wouldn’t do anything, but the feigned innocence is so evident here that you don’t even have to guess what kind of face he’s making.

When Minato, Seiya and Ryouhei are approached by Tomio, Seiya bluffs that he knows Minato is “carrying his treasure around” and smirks when he falls for it. After Minato fails magnificently at the demonstration shooting and scurries to leave, Seiya says he’d be waiting for him to join the club, holding Minato’s place in the boys’ team for as long as it was necessary.

When Minato comes back home late in his third night visiting Yata no Mori, he finds Seiya waiting for him in front of his house. Seiya already knew that Minato had sneaked out somewhere the previous night, and as he questions Minato about it, he finds one of Fuu’s feathers on his hair. Minato does nothing but give roundabout answers, and then straight-up lies that he was just wandering around on his bike, which Seiya is far from believing but lets slide. This whole moment sort of feels like a father questioning his teenage daughter about sneaking out of home to see her boyfriend.

Seiya then confronts Minato about joining the club, competitions and target panic. He reveals that he doesn’t feel their loss in middle school was only Minato’s fault, since he got caught up with the whole situation and lost control of himself as well. Minato happens to hate this whole talk, and ends up saying he doesn’t want to do archery with Seiya, which isn’t true. He simply doesn’t want to keep causing trouble, but doesn’t know how to convey it. Although Seiya does understand what Minato means, he’s still hurt by his words because Minato being able to rely on him is his anchor. He then responds in the way he always does when he’s upset.

By being a stone-cold bitch.

The anime is trying to paint Seiya as meek and passive, but he’s an icy little fucker when his mood swings for the worse. He stares at Minato as if looking down on him, and this is when he throws the “Actually, would you be able to endure it if I did blame you? Or not? It’s easy to make you cry.” bomb on Minato’s lap. And instead of leaving it as that like he did in the anime, Minato grabs Seiya by the collar and pushes him to the ground, then Seiya pushes him onto a tree.

The following day at school, Minato found himself looking for Seiya during his absence, even though he had been avoiding him before they fought. A day later, Minato leaves a box of Pucky in Seiya’s mailbox as a sign of apology. No, he doesn’t write that he would be waiting for Seiya. He didn’t have to, since novel!Seiya never once doubted his love for archery. What he did was draw a dog on the box, which is something that Seiya used to do to display an intent of reconciliation. Seiya also leaves a box of (premium) Pucky for him as reply.

The next morning, Minato contacts Seiya, who welcomes him to the archery club, and he almost tears up at it.

Misplaced gay ensues in a non-canon scene of the five boys bathing together at the training camp. Nanao’s comment about Seiya’s “love” for Minato never happened in the novel. Seiya also wasn’t around when Minato retrieved Nanao’s hat from the river, so he wasn’t even there to help, although he was worried when he saw Minato coming back all soaked.

During the softball game, Seiya yet again shows exaggerated worry as the pitcher aims at Minato’s left flank. He attempts to get someone else to be the batter even though Minato had dodged the ball and was unharmed.

Even as the game ends, Seiya asks if Minato hadn’t been grazed even a little, and despite being reassured that he hadn’t, Seiya asks if Minato had been going to his yearly check-ups. When Minato answers that he hadn’t, as already four years had passed since the accident, Seiya yells that he shouldn’t neglet his check-ups because his wound still throbs from time to time, loud enough for Minato to flinch. Seiya then comes up with suggestions to motivate Minato to go, like asking his parents to drive Minato there (no, he doesn’t do check-ups with Seiya’s father) or offering to tag along in case Minato feels bored while waiting. Minato feels extremely uncomfortable and declines it all, asking Seiya why he worries so much. Seiya responds that he has the “responsibility to worry for Minato’s health”, and Minato jokes that he sounds like he feels guilty for something. Seiya says nothing back, and when Minato prods for an answer, he replies that it’s part of his responsibility as club president. That isn’t the whole truth and Minato can tell as much. In fact, he had only joked because he had been hoping to hear Seiya ask back “what are you even talking about”.

Minato had felt for a while that Seiya seemed to wish for his improvement at archery even more than his own, as if he were trying to compensate for something. He recognizes that some aspects of Seiya’s worry are unnatural and can’t be explained with the word “meddling”. As Seiya’s sense of guilt became gradually clearer, Minato grew scared.

At this point, in the anime, all of this was replaced with flashbacks from Minato and Seiya’s childhood that never happened in the novel, like the day Minato’s family went to greet Seiya’s, their multiple discussions about entering the archery club when they become middle scholars, Minato saying that he asked Saionji to include Seiya in their class but was denied (yes, he kept it a secret even from Seiya in canon), Minato introducing Seiya to Shuu, Minato saying he didn’t want to do archery anymore after he got hit, and Seiya convincing him to do it.

The next day, when Minato and Seiya come home from school, Minato asks to talk and the two of them go under a nearby tree. He starts off reporting that he booked a check-up, and announces that what he has to discuss is serious talk and that he was bracing himself for it and that he wanted Seiya to answer without teasing him. Seiya asks if he has to talk about it right away, and Minato says that things might end up just like the last tournament of middle school if he doesn’t. Basically, his built-up anxiety over their unresolved matter might cause his target panic to act up again. It’s finally then that Minato asks Seiya why he didn’t go to Kirisaki even though his parents could pay for it and why he kept trying so hard to get Minato back into archery.

This entire conversation was replaced in the anime with the scene of them on the street, and although some things are similar, most of it is wholly different:

“I swore that I would protect you on behalf of your mother. Creating an environment where you can draw a bow is my duty.” “Could it be that you spoke with Mom at the hospital she was transported to? Did you make that promise there?” “No. It was my fault that your mother died. That you suffered a wound that won’t disappear for the rest of your life.” “What are you talking about? That was an accident. An accident where a runaway vehicle ran over people walking on the sidewalk. The police took this conclusion too, and there were lots of witnesses so there was no doubt about it. Why are you saying something like that? Didn’t you just happen to be at the scene by chance?” “Don’t you remember? On that day, you were walking with your mother. I stopped you two to talk on that road. I said goodbye and left, heading in the opposite direction. And then, an awfully fast car passed by me… If I had turned around, if I had turned around… ‘If’…It’s all suppositions now. If, at that time, I hadn’t stopped you, the two of you would have passed that place sooner, and then you wouldn’t have been involved in the accident. I was the one who injured you and snatched your mother away from you. So I swore that I’d fully atone for the sin of hurting you. I will protect you…”

It’s kind of impossible to tell that Seiya sounds exactly like a mom at this point, just like in everything he does for Minato. Minato resents not realizing that Seiya had burdened himself with something so heavy and had been in pain ever since the accident which I think says a lot about the fact that Kaito noticed something was wrong with Seiya in the way he acted around Minato and in the things he would say from the very beginning. Minato feels like the problems resolving around his target panic are dust next to what Seiya was dealing with and that he wants to accept Seiya’s troubles. Seiya had always been protecting him, and now he thinks he wants to protect Seiya in return.

Yeah, he never really said that he had managed to get back into archery because Seiya waited for him, or that it was his turn to wait for Seiya. That’s misplaced gay, and unsurprisingly, it’s watered-down. Their exchange in the novel is actually pretty calm in spite of all the tension that had built up until then:

“I’ve always thought that you were smart, Seiya, but you’re actually surprisingly dumb.” “Huh?” “Am I wrong? It was you who kept me on the earth. Because you stopped us at that time, I only got injured. I’m here thanks to you. Thank you, Seiya. I think I really am a lucky guy.” “Minato… I’m a sneaky person. Maybe I said all that because I knew that you would forgive me, y’know?” “Uh-huh, that’s fine. Even if you become a vicious criminal who shakes up the world, or even if you get a contagious disease without cure that leads to death, I don’t plan on ever stopping to be your friend. Even if it’s at a prison at the farthest ends of the north, even if it’s at an isolation ward, I’ll go see you.” “What’s with all that…? Were you planning on putting up a cool façade by saying all that?” “Of course.”

Seiya then smiles and places his head on Minato’s shoulder without any lame excuses, while Minato thinks about how Seiya can lean on him sometimes, for he won’t collapse. About how he wanted to stand firm on the ground, not too stiffly or too limply, but flexibly. And then Seiya throws in the golden line that the anime shouldn’t have cut out, because doing so ruined his character and painted his obsession as something positive and justified:

“Minato, I just want you to believe this. I love archery too. I’m not drawing the bow for someone else’s sake, but because I love it.”

Catch me stanning this eternal friendship until I die. Yeah, that’s as far as the “gay” goes for them. Of course, they’re still shown together in as many scenes as possible, but the ambiguousness is no longer present as soon as Seiya stops treating Minato like his own child and actually gives him the space any normal friend would. Literally everything that happened in the anime between them beyond this point (and I do mean everything, even just their conversations) is KyoAni’s original content.

Long live these unapologetically healthy best friends. Fuck KyoAni’s fanservicey ass.

Shuu and Minato

The way Shuu is being depicted in the anime is underwhelming at best. He might be quiet and calm on the outside, but on the inside, he’s extremely passionate about archery and about Minato, though not in this clichéd and overused way that the anime is portraying.

Even though Seiya also used to be on their team, Shuu considers Minato his only rival and bow friend. The two of them know each other well and are actually pretty close, since they literally attended the same middle school.

None of this actually shows in the anime at all. One may argue that it’s easy to notice he’s interested in Minato more than anyone else, and it really is, but their rivalry isn’t nearly as fiery and there seems to be no trace of their friendship. Shuu simply keeps spouting been-there-done-that catchphrases that any rival of any sports animanga has said to the protagonist, and that’s it.

In the novel, Shuu is rather obsessed with Minato in different ways. He doesn’t only crave for Minato in competitions, he also craves for him outside of the dojo. He misses him since they’re attending different schools, but ever since they were little, he had always wanted to spend way more time with Minato than he actually had in his hands. He hates having to part ways with Minato when business is over and is unforgiving of anyone who might “steal” Minato from him. KyoAni for some reason has made Seiya hostile towards Masaki, but Shuu is the one who resents Masaki for becoming Minato’s goal rather than himself.

The flashbacks also aren’t helping. When they were kids, they acted... well, like kids, and not like mini versions of how they are now. They were loud, openly competitive, and would fight for Saionji’s side because he had bad hearing, so they had to talk close to his ears. They were also like older brothers to Saionji’s grandson, which the anime didn’t show.

Their first meeting was different. Minato usually came around the dojo to peek at practice, and Saionji took him as pupil along with Shuu because he believed that teaching the two of them was his fate.

Minato had always annoyed Shuu and was always the only one capable of instigating fiery emotions in him, starting with the fact that he made Shuu realize that someone else his age was as talented as himself. Shuu was extremely irritated when Minato suddenly stopped coming to their practice, having no idea that the motive had been the car accident. He was irritated yet again when they met by chance in middle school, and all the while, he keeps thinking, “who do you think you are to irritate me”.

When Hiroki comments that Shuu must be so elegant and skilled with his shooting because he was taught by a former imperial guard, Shuu responds that he’s actually like that because there’s someone whose heart he wants to shoot through. He credits Minato for his own prowess because his desire to be better than Minato is what got him so far. The twins ask if there was someone who managed to charm him that much and if the saying “the greatest hate springs from the greatest love” has anything to do with it. Shuu responds with nothing but a daring smile and an “I wonder”.

Other interactions between them that the anime watered down are their greetings during the beginning of the tournament and Shuu’s words before he left. In the novel, Minato froze at the sight of him and held his breath when he got close. Shuu reminisces to memories of when they were kids, which is why he goes to Minato’s side and whispers into his ear. Then he puts a hand over Minato’s scar and asks if it still hurts, and Minato answers that it doesn’t.

Just a heads-up: everyone is watching this unfold. Kazemai and the twins are staring at this bullshit but everyone feels they can’t get close because the gay atmosphere around them is too intense.

Minato says that he knows Shuu turned his back on him for getting target panic while he got a full score during the individual competitions at the middle school championship (because of the “cold look” that Shuu had given him in after their loss), and claims that he can’t face Shuu at all. Shuu responds that he hadn’t turned his back on Minato even once, and that he had only not comforted or admonished Minato at that time because he didn’t think there were words for Minato’s situation.

He reveals that he had no idea Minato had suddenly stopped coming to their secret practice because of a serious injury, and that he had realized just how eagerly he had been waiting for Minato when they met again in middle school. He had believed that Minato would definitely come back in high school as well, and asked Minato to “show his archery again”. Minato seems a little touched by it, and Shuu comments that Saionji actually never taught anyone personally, and that Saionji apparently believed Shuu and Minato to be the last duty entrusted to him. Shuu believes that their meeting was a “gift from the God of the bow”, and after saying so, he leaves.

Many things didn’t happen, though. Like the two of them meeting after the tournament and at the shrine. Shuu never asks Minato to take responsibility for changing his life, never acts like a total dick with Seiya and never tells Minato that one can’t do archery for someone else’s sake.

The day before the first team competitions, Minato had barely slept because of his meeting with Shuu. He was glad that Shuu hadn’t given up on him and felt strongly that he didn’t want to lose face in front of him. He was extremely impatient after seeing Shuu’s shooting, and their difference in skill was ever so present even in the next days, as he wanted to become the kind of archer who could be a match for Shuu as fast as possible.

During the second phase of the tournament, Minato and Shuu meet again, and the dialogue they have is way different from the anime:

“Minato, it’s been a while. How are you feeling today?” “Not bad at all, Shuu. A lot of cheering squads came for us today, so I’m fired-up.” “I’m surprised to hear you say such a thing. You said before that you weren’t drawing for the sake of other people watching you. You thought spectators were annoying.” “I’m honestly happy to be supported now. Besides, I’ve just always loved doing archery, be it before or now. So why is someone like you drawing a bow, Shuu? Aren’t you doing it for the same reasons as me?”

Instead of replying, Shuu just smiled brightly, and this ticked off the twins, who started attacking Minato and had to be stopped by Shuu. He apologized on their behalf, which yet again spiked jealousy, and left with them.

Right before the tiebreaking match, Minato wondered if Shuu was watching from somewhere. Minato had never participated in one of them before, and it was all thanks to Shuu. Having someone as skilled as him to be the ochi was reassuring, and Minato entrusted him and Seiya with his back in their middle school days. However, unlike how the anime goes, the novel explicitly states that Minato’s state of mind being at ease during competitions was Shuu’s merit, specifically. He knew that Shuu would always hit, and so he could remain calm, knowing that someone could cover up for him if he made any mistakes.

Similar to this scene, right before the final match between Kazemai and Kirisaki, Shuu yet again comes to talk to Minato as he was being bothered by the twins:

“I’m deeply moved to face you in competition again, Minato. Did you hurt your wrist?” “No, it’s already fine. I can’t help but feel happy to take on the strongest member.” “I’m looking forward to it.”

During the duo’s last shot, the clouds opened up, and the grains of dust illuminated by the sunlight formed the shape of wings on their backs. As Shuu misses his last shot, he mouths the word, “congratulations” to Minato while the Kazemai boys are hugging him.

In short, Shuu and Minato’s relationship is originally complex and tridimensional, and the anime is reducing it to something dry, commonplace and boring.

Masaki and Minato

Here comes the bible that you asked for, you heathens.

First off, this duo is ridiculous. Their relationship literally has absolutely no business being as good as it is. You just know that it’s the most important one of the story from the fact that it begins when chapter one ends and appears on the very first illustration (other than the one in the cover).

I’m gonna start from the start: the character relationship chart from the official site. It says that what Minato borders for Masaki is “reverence”. That’s pretty heavy for a high school student.

A number of things ensue right before Masaki and Minato’s first meeting, which the anime didn’t show:

When Minato hears Masaki’s tsurune for the first time, his heart starts racing.

While he’s approaching the dojo, he’s praying in his head for Masaki not to disappear until he gets there. He was already thinking that maybe Masaki might be a ghost that haunted the shrine, but he didn’t care if this was the case.

Minato watched Masaki’s shooting for waaay longer in the novel. He stood hidden behind a fence as Masaki fired six shots and then did the finishing formalities.

While Masaki was collecting the arrows, Minato was sighing heavily, rubbing his sweaty palms against his uniform and wondering if he should go talk to him. But it’s totally not a crush. Totally not.

I hate these two so much.

Just to put it out there, it feels like Yamamura Takuya (the anime’s director) is fanboying over Masaki. Or more like over an ideal version of him. In canon, Masaki is an absolute dork and not nearly as composed and mature as the anime tries to sell him. He’s usually clumsy and vulgar, and jokes around a lot.

That being said, he gets friendly with Minato overly quickly. Although he’s confused as to why a random kid would be in the woods watching him, their first conversation is about anything but that, and suddenly Fuu is the topic. It escalates from Masaki offering to nurse the scratch on Minato’s hand to Minato volunteering to replace the lamps of the shrine’s waiting room, and then to the two of them drinking canned coffee together at the shajo. In-between this, we have Masaki joking about Minato being suspicious of him and that he wouldn’t charge for the medicine, knocking over a drawer and sending the contents flying, throwing unnoticed sarcasm at Minato while he changes the lamps and Minato mistaking the can of coffee for alcohol. Masaki then resumes shooting the rest of the arrows after that and Minato stays as audience. Once he’s done, Minato questions him about his shooting routine, and Masaki answers every question even though they literally just met.

All of this in just one night.

To add up, the novel has a veil of supernatural in it, and Minato and Masaki’s encounters in the shrine are portrayed with an atmosphere of mystery. They feel somewhat fantasious since there’s a lot of symbolism and ellusive language involved, like the shrine is a separate world that belongs just to the two of them, where both Minato and Masaki find not only each other but also themselves, renewing their love for the bow. And this is where I myself started becoming inspired while reading this novel. I, too, felt like praticing archery for once, so that I could point the bow at my head and shoot an arrow right into my face because I can’t take this bullshit.

But I digress.

Minato goes home without asking Masaki’s name, then proceeds to search for information regarding him on the internet like some stalkerish middle school girl. He finds nothing and berates himself for not asking, but also wouldn’t know what to do if he had really asked. 100% not a high school chick flick.

The next evening, Minato visits the shrine again. It’s raining, and when he finds Masaki shooting just like in the previous night, he notices that it feels like Masaki is performing a prayer when he does so. Minato watches hidden behind the fence yet again and wonders what Masaki could be wishing for in a night where the stars aren’t visible, because apparently Masaki’s presence increases Minato’s poetic tendencies by a hundred.

When Masaki spots him, he gives a peace sign and beckons him, but Minato’s brain has bluescreened at that point, so being the little shit he is, Masaki crouches and gestures to Minato as if he’s calling over a dog or a cat. This predictably has Minato flustered, and Masaki jokes that seeing him under the rain in a dark spot is scary. Minato comes to the shajo dripping wet and Masaki lends him a beginner’s uniform, telling him that he doesn’t have to be so formal.

By the time Minato returns, the floor that he had dirtied is completely clean, even though Masaki had asked Minato to mop it once he finished changing. The two of them have canned coffee together again, this time with oyaki. Fuu hadn’t showed up because of the rain, and that’s when Masaki jokes that Minato’s shoulder is the perfect perch for him. While arguing that he isn’t an ornament, Minato asks about the hours of activity in the dojo, and finds out that it was supposed to be used until 9pm but is currently only used during daytime, so the only one who is there at night is Masaki, except for couples that sneak inside occasionally. Minato is taken aback at the fact that couple come to a sacred place to make out and whatnot, and for some godforsaken reason, the author seemed to think it was a good idea for Masaki to retort with, “You don’t seem to have much experience in that area. Shall I teach you the basics?”

*high-pitched screaming*

One might argue that this isn’t as suggestive as it seems, but Minato responds with, “You perverted old man” and Masaki just... freaking grins. And then this bitch hits jackpot when he tries to get Minato to fire an arrow because he can tell that Minato has experience with archery and that he wants to shoot. Minato is exasperated and wants to run away from it, but Masaki coaxes him into opening up, assuring him that not even telephone lines pass through the dojo, so whatever Minato would say would be heard by no one but him. This is when he throws the infamous “I’m not someone who exists in your reality” line, and Minato ends up squeezing out everything that had been burdening him. It’s then that they finally introduce themselves to each other and Minato finds out that Masaki used to have target panic.

The next day, Minato doesn’t attend club activities despite Seiya and Ryouhei’s insistence to get him to join, and goes to visit the shrine again. He finds Masaki dressed in formal hakama instead of kyuudougi for the first time and stops on his tracks unintentionally at the sight of Masaki’s muscles glowing in the evening lights.

This is not homoerotic fanfiction. This is not homoerotic fanfiction. This is n

You kind of can’t ignore at this point that Masaki grins every time he sees Minato. Meanwhile, Minato shudders at the sound of Masaki’s arrows piercing the air, which is unlike any he had heard before, and thinks about how he never gets tired of seeing Masaki shoot. There is joy in the fact that such ideal shots are being executed right in front of him, and cheesy as it may be, this makes him happy to have been born. And since Minato already knows about Masaki’s goal of scoring ten thousand shots, this thirsty motherfucker is already wondering if he’ll ever see him shooting again after he accomplishes it.

Minato is, in fact, just as much of a sports nerd as any sports animanga protagonist. It just so happens that he’s less showy about it, and basically the only one who gets it out of him is Masaki.

Masaki carried out proper practice with Minato, unlike in the anime, where Minato only shoots once. They start with practice at close range, and it’s then that Masaki starts using his ridiculously improper tips, like “push your hips forwards more, like you’re peeing standing up” and “look at my armpit hair”. For better or worse, his advice is easy to grasp and Minato makes the most out of it.

By that point, he’s also already grasped Masaki’s personality. When they’re done, Masaki calls Fuu over while they’re having coffee. He also shares with Minato all the material he had about archery, which ranged from students’ books to exclusive publications to old magazines, and the two of them have a priceless dialogue that the anime cut out:

“It’s amazing that you collected all of these books so thoroughly.” “I didn’t; they were a gift.” “I knew it.” “What do you mean by ‘I knew it’?” “It’s because that kind of detailed work doesn’t suit you, Masa-san.” “Don’t you feel like treating your seniors with even a bit of respect?” “Not at all.” “Good grief, does that mean I have to teach you by praising you?”

Masaki then hands him a rubber mascot and recommends him the muscle training that he learned from his grandfather. The two of them speculate on the reasons why Minato might have gotten target panic and discuss methods to cure it. Then Minato finds out about Masaki’s powder container and the bikini pattern on it, and they have yet another beautiful exchange that KyoAni has ruined:

“What kind of drawing is that?” “Oh, Minato is a healthy young man too, eh?” “No way, this is…” “Yep, it’s a bikini.” “You have some rare items here, old man.” “I’m honored to receive a compliment from you.” “It wasn’t a compliment—!”

Harold, they’re bi.

The following evening, Minato goes to the shrine not realizing that his back had been injured when he and Seiya fought, but Masaki notices it and insists on treating it. This results in Minato taking off his shirt so that Masaki could stick a bandage to it, and honestly, Minato could have been thinking about anything at that moment and I would have been okay with it. He could have thought about Seiya, about the club, about what to have for dinner that night even. Any crap would have sufficed. But nah.

Nah.

He’s thinking about the cold touch of Masaki’s hands on his skin and shivering at it. Because. You know. That’s what straight boys do.

Minato’s shooting is horrible that night and he’s sullen because of the lack of the smell of coffee, since Masaki had brought tea instead. He asks to see Fuu, but Masaki reveals that Fuu had only been with him because he was feeding it and healing its wound, and after it got better, it left his hands. This leads to an exchange that somewhat feels like foreshadowing:

“So it dumped you after you healed it?” “Any problem with that?” “Noooope.”

And it causes Masaki to notice that Minato is feeling anxious, so he tries to confort him, and Minato confides to him about the whole issue with the club and Seiya. Masaki tells him that he’s probably conveying to Seiya he has lingering attachments, and suggests that he takes upon Seiya’s offer. Minato counter-argues that he has no confidence for it, and Masaki asks if he’d be just drawing a bow all alone from that point onward. Minato questions what he means by “all alone”, and it’s only then that Masaki says, “Don’t think that I’ll be here forever. You shouldn’t keep coming to this place.” Minato is confused by his words but doesn’t ask for clarification because they sound like Masaki had grown tired of him. He compares it to something like what a child would say to a stray animal that they’d picked out of pity but then grew bored of.

Masaki is completely unaware of the effect this had on Minato and casually asks him to put away his powder container, tossing it to him. And my God, my sweet lordly goodness gracious, there’s a really odd emphasis on the bikini pattern when Minato catches it. THE DOUBLE ENTENDREE IS TOO STRONG, KIDS. Minato is clearly scared of being dumped by him like he was dumped by Fuu, but it's almost like the author tries to hint that Masaki being into women has something to do with Minato’s insecurity. Y’all may think Minato was actually not that affected by it, but after he left the dojo, he did everything robotically and had a restless night, with the mascot that Masaki gave him appearing in his dreams all the while.

The next afternoon, Minato goes to the shrine to return Masaki’s powder container, which he had accidentally brought home with him, and then the whole misunderstanding about Masaki being dead happens. When Minato returns in the evening, Masaki’s tsurune sounds like a funeral march to him. He finds Masaki in nousha clothing and two shots short of achieving ten thousand, and thinks that the scene as a whole looks just like a skillful stage production. He’s also oddly fixated on Masaki’s “exposed skin” and “fascinating profile”.

It’s here that Minato shows the first signs of selfishness towards Masaki. One would think that being excessively cared for by Seiya would mean that he’d be more of a free-spirited person, and his discomfort at Seiya’s meddling might seem like a sign of that. And indeed, Minato is like that with everyone else, except Masaki.

With Masaki, he’s the greediest little bitch.

He starts begging that the night would never end. He literally wishes that time would stop so that he could be there with Masaki forever. Like, screw his dad, screw Seiya, screw the entire rest of his life; he just wants Masaki to remain there.

Masaki was, of course, oblivious to this. He decides to recreate a scene from Zen in the Art of Archery that he had once mentioned to Minato with his last two shots. He lights up sage and positions it at the target bank, and after he shoots, he thanks Minato and says he has no more regrets. This makes Minato feel like he might disappear at any moment, and that’s when we get the iconic “don’t pass on” scene.

I must point out that one of the things I find really interesting in character dynamics is when a character has set rules of conduct and ideals for themselves but they break all of them willingly for the sake of only one other character, and that’s exactly what happens between these two. This trope is used by the author in a very obviously intentional way, which is even better.

Before Minato runs to Masaki and begs him not to leave, there’s a series of ironies to consider:

Minato dislikes being clingy with people on default.

He doesn’t do things like wishing upon stars, but if he were to, he’d wish for Masaki to stay with him.

The night before, Masaki had told him: “In the future, if you find someone that you like very much and you have to part ways with that person, will you give up without doing anything when that time comes just because you have no confidence? There are things people can’t beat no matter how much they wish to be strong. But if you do meet something that you truly don’t want to lose, it should be able to make you cling to it and shout.” Of course, Masaki had absolutely no idea that this “person” could be himself. Since he was talking about the future, he probably meant a lover.

Minato’s response is that he’d never so something so embarrassing in his life.

Yeah, boi played himself.

When Minato holds onto Masaki and shouts at him not to go anywhere, a lot is different from the anime version. For starters, since Masaki had his sleeve down, Minato basically shoved himself onto his bare chest. He also grabbed Masaki roughly with both hands, only, it’s not said where he grabbed. I............ kinda hope he didn’t grab the same spot as he did in the anime. ‘Cause. Well. Titty out.

Anyway. Minato was half-crying back there, and his words to Masaki during this moment are an absolute treasure and I have no idea why KyoAni would cut so much of it out, so here go his original lines:

“Are you a ghost? No, wait, a zombie? You’re so cold… But I’m never letting you go! You’re still my master, after all. Until the master passes on all his skills to the disciple, he has the responsibility to watch over him. No, wait, you don’t have to be my master. I just want you to stay here, Masa-san. If you’re a ghost, you can possess me; if you’re a vampire, I’ll give you my blood; and if you’re a zombie, huum, well… I’ll try to not mind even if you stink a little!”

Read this again. Digest it. Or at least try, because there’s just too much going on. Sure it’s all really damn funny, but Minato’s possessiveness is peaking here. He’s basically declaring that, supposing Masaki were actually a ghost, Minato wouldn’t let him rest and wouldn’t hand him over to even death itself. At first, Minato tries to argue that there should be still something chaining Masaki to the world of the living, since he hasn’t fulfilled his role as mentor yet. But then he thinks it over and decides that he wouldn’t want Masaki to leave him even after having taught him everything he knows. And the solutions that he comes up with are not only over-the-top but also risky.

“If you’re a ghost, you can possess me.” What the fuck, kid? “If you’re a vampire, I’ll give you my blood.” What the actual everloving fuck, kid?

So, yeah, he’s known Masaki for less than a week and is already willing to give his flesh and blood and overall control of his life for the sake of keeping him at a reachable distance. Bonus for actually picturing Masaki taking possession of his physical form and biting his neck to suck the life out of him.

How very straight.

The fact that Masaki’s jaw drops and he lets his bow fall to the floor is an icing on the cake. After he laughs his ass off once the misunderstanding is solved, he comments how “it’s really true that the sillier the kid is, the cuter” and then teases by asking if Minato was relieved that he wasn’t a ghost. This chapter section is just glorious.

Masaki then asks if Minato hadn’t been showing up because he thought he was a ghost, and Minato answers that he was merely doing as told after Masaki said that he shouldn’t come to the place. As if him being a ghost would stop this relentless little fucker. Masaki reveals that since Fuu had returned to the forest, he believed Minato should return to where he belonged as well. However, Minato had immediately come back to him, and he couldn’t do anything about that.

The two of them then went to collect the arrows and sat next to each other for their usual coffee time. Masaki explains that the powder container was a present from his grandfather, who was also his former master, and tells him the meaning behind his ten thousand shots. Yes, the one he opens up to about his grandfather being a good archer but a shitty teacher is Minato, not Tommy-sensei.

The thing is: his grandfather never asked if he liked archery. He simply thought that Masaki was fooling around because his form was messed up, so Masaki was cast away by him as someone who should be ignored due to apparently not taking archery seriously enough. The truth was that Masaki was actually trying his best, which is why he was so deeply hurt by his grandfather’s attitude that he quit archery and didn’t join the archery club in college. However, he undoubtedly loved it, and had always been thinking of ways of reconciling with his grandfather, but to no avail.

His grandfather was still estranged from him when he passed away, so Masaki came up with the idea of shooting ten thousand arrows in order to communicate with him from the other side. After he overcame target panic and fixed his form, he was able to become the exemplary archer that his grandfather wished he would be, so he set the task upon himself to get rid of his burdens and send his grandfather’s soul to rest.

No, KyoAni, it wasn’t for petty revenge against a dead person, omg.

It’s also clear by this point that Masaki and Minato are parallels of each other. Masaki, too, ended up returning to the forest, to his family’s shrine and to its dojo, and troublesome as it could be, he found himself unable to stop drawing the bow. While he talks about this to Minato, there’s a quick emphasis on the azaleas blooming nearby, and their flower language surely has something to do with the scene. Amongst other things, they mean “remembering your home with fondness or wishing to return to it”, “caring for yourself and your family”, “temperance and emotional evenness”, and “delicate passion”. All of this emphasizes how awesome a character Masaki is, and the way the anime ignores every single one of his best points is just appalling.

When Masaki finishes speaking, Minato decides to shoot at the targets instead of the close-range practice he had been doing until that point. Masaki lets him, and he goes as far as getting dressed up in the uniform in order to do it. He hits for the first time ever since his target panic started acting up, at the edge of the target. Overcome with nostalgia and feeling so happy that he could die, Minato shoots again and manages to hit the center. Minato then realizes how hungry he had been for the bow and realizes that there’s actually still hope for him as an archer. Masaki asks if he had also recovered, and he declares he’ll join the archery club.

After he joins and Masaki comes in as the coach, Seiya sees his reaction and asks Masaki if he owned a pet bird. Masaki is confused and answers no, because he really doesn’t. Minato, on the other hand, wants to run the fuck away because shit, Dad found out who he’d been with all those nights.

Training camp starts shortly after this, and it’s wildly different from the anime. Starting from the fact that the whole servant thing never happened. Masaki never made the boys serve the girls, never tried to coax them into doing his priest work, never wakes them up at 4am, never barges in on them taking a bath and never keeps them from practicing. I’m trying to figure out why KyoAni made him do all of this, not just because it wasn’t in the books, but also because literally none of that made any sense and served no purpose other than for painting Masaki as an irresponsible asshole.

In the novel’s training camp, the boys and the girls share the load. They all do the chores and are made to help around the shrine alongside practicing because they were staying there. They would cook their own meals, and Masaki and Tommy-sensei did them the favor of taking them to hot springs at some point. There was training aside from practice, and the kids would gather in the boys’ room right before sleep time simply to hang out.

Masaki had also done thorough research on the tournament results and tried to get the kids to reach them with a cautious and slow start. All the way up to this point, through the training camp and until the tournament, Masaki coaches the kids properly, giving really helpful tips, fixing their quirks and being overall a good observation example, never casting pressure on them and never poking his nose where he shouldn’t.

This is all very important to everyone, but above them, it is to Minato. He’s by far the one who benefits the most off the training, and Masaki’s careful supervision is everything he needs while his target panic isn’t cured.

There is some misplaced gay in the anime for the two of them in the training camp, though, as the scene of Masaki helping Minato get dressed doesn’t happen. But in the novel, the clothes Minato wore were Masaki’s, not his grandfather’s. And after the yawatashi, Minato comments on how it was an honor to serve as Masaki’s kaizoe.

Ren was introduced differently in the novel as well. In it, he went straight for Minato at first sight, played a prank on him, and then asked if he was “Minato-kun”. Meaning that Masaki gushed so much about Minato to his brother that he already knew exactly who Minato was and what he looked like. Minato almost doesn’t believe that Ren and Masaki are related because Ren seemed like he was mischievous in his younger years.

After Minato falls in the river getting back Nanao’s hat, Masaki lends him his jacket and takes him back to the shrine for a bath. Not because he was “stinking of river”, but because he wanted Minato to warm himself up as fast as possible. Minato argues that Seiya might worry if he doesn’t return soon, and Masaki tells him not to fret about it as he should prioritize his own health.

Once Minato is done, he meets with Masaki in the dining room and Masaki pours him hot coffee. Since he usually only ever saw Masaki in a hakama, Minato thinks it’s refreshing to have a glimpse on his everyday life.

Not just the warm drink but being there with Masaki makes Minato feel relieved and relaxed, and he opens up about maybe being a bother to everyone. Masaki brushes it off, and so, he ends up also venting about Seiya and how he acts like a meddlesome family member. He reveals that Seiya unintentionally pressures him into meeting his expectations, but what Minato thinks wouldn’t worry him often has the opposite effect. Masaki asks when he’d started acting that way, and Minato tells him about his car accident and that Seiya had witnessed it. Masaki suggests that Seiya might have earned his protectiveness from the event, but Minato feels like Seiya harbors some sort of guilt towards him. When he says he feels like repenting for it, and this leads to the two of them being little shits like they usually are around each other:

“‘Repenting’? I’m a Shinto priest, not Christian. I can perform exorcism rites and blessings, though.” “Eeeh, you don’t seem very holy, Masa-san.” “What did you say? Well, then do you want to ask Ren? Unlike me, he has some kind of ability to sense the supernatural, and he has a priest certificate anyway. But there may be surprises, so people with weak hearts should take caution.”

And then these two bastards just look at each other and start laughing.

Minato takes the opportunity to ask about what Masaki had been teaching Kaito and Masaki explains it.......... sort of differently than how he had done with Kaito:

Masa-san held Minato’s arm so lightly that he almost wasn’t touching him at all. His faintly transmitted body temperature was warm. And then, he let go of his arm just as gently as when he touched it. Minato desperately chased after the feeling left on his skin so he wouldn’t forget it.

The last sentence fucks me up immensely, fam. The rest goes on unlike in the anime too:

“Why do you think you’re the ochi for this time’s shooting order?” “To watch over my teammates’ backs?” “You’re on the right track; that’s half-correct. You have to protect Seiya’s back in particular.” “Me, protect Seiya?” “It’s a role that only you can take. I’m also happy to pass on the teachings that my master left to me. I can’t express the feeling of his palm with things like words and pictures. Thank you, Minato.”

This renders Minato speechless, and makes him think that he also can’t help but long for the day to come when he would pass the warmth of Masaki’s hand on to people who will share their wishes and ambitions with him.

After the sports tournament in which Seiya’s protective dad vibes started getting more serious, Minato went to the shrine to pray, wishing to be able to laugh the whole thing off but having no idea who to talk to about the topic. Masaki shows up as if on cue, just in time to also warn him not to lean too much to look into the shrine’s pond, or else he might fall down.

Turns out that Masaki had been taking lessons to improve his knowledge so that he’d be able to coach the kids better, and as he came back from it, he decided to review what he had learned in order not to forget it, and allowed Minato to stay and watch. Some of the material had to do with target panic, and he let Minato in on it as he shot.

Once he’s done, they have their usual canned coffee, since Masaki always has enough for himself and Minato for some reason. While drinking, Minato stares at Masaki’s hand because he’s just as straight as his arrows. He analyzes Masaki’s shooting as something like a forest in a tree, combining strength and generosity, and becomes disheartened at his own lack of skill.

Masaki offers to call Fuu upon hearing Minato sigh, and Minato dismisses it since he had been able to hear Fuu’s cry, and then comments to Masaki that he had seen a karp with an injured eye at the pond. Before Masaki had arrived, Minato had met Ren there and Ren had told him about a creepy legend involving the fish. Minato had heard from Masaki that Ren had more disposition than him to feel the supernatural, so he’s successfully freaked out, but Masaki reveals that the legend is Ren’s own invention as Ren is a writer of children’s literature in addition to being a photographer and illustrator.

Masaki laughs his ass off at the fact Minato actually believed in a scary story made up for little kids, and although Minato is utterly embarrassed, he’s also happy, since it feels like Masaki is laughing his worries away. After Masaki unknowingly serves as emotional support for Minato as always, Minato earns some determination and decides to properly question Seiya on the matter.

Even when he’s facing Seiya and his issues finally come to light, Minato is thinking about Masaki. When Minato opened up to Masaki for the first time, Masaki had commented on how painful it must have been for him. They weren’t words of pity or consolation, but they resonated with Minato because they were truthful which means Shuu has to step up his game and get on that level. To Minato, truthful things were good, and good things were beautiful, just like the tsurune that had captivated him in the forest. Therefore, Minato wanted to convey honest feelings with his own words to Seiya as well.

So, yeah, Masaki grows to be an ideal for Minato even outside of archery.

Along the course of all this, there’s a fair amount of hints of latent bisexuality other things about Minato that the anime hasn’t displayed, which come mostly in the form of narration, thoughts and silent actions. And unsurprisingly, they’re always related to Masaki:

Minato thinks Masaki’s eyes are bewitching.

He’s weak to Masaki’s smile.

He has mixed feelings when Masaki treats him like a child and when he sees Kaito acting familiar with Masaki.

He hates not being able to see Masaki. Above that, he really hates not having alone time with Masaki, specifically.

He often stares at Masaki and observes details in him, like how long his fingers are and how well-built his body is. The moment he started thinking that “those fingers had the ability to produce a beautiful tsurune”, I cry-laughed because this is just too much bullshit.

He actually, non-ironically sees sensuality in older men when they look suspicious of something, and he notices this in Ren. But the first thing he does is compare him to Masaki in that aspect and conclude that Masaki still has some childishness in him and that he’s gentler than Ren.

God help this boy. Ayano Kotoko is merciless.

I don’t even care if he’s never confirmed as bi, but I refuse to believe that Minato is heterosexual. But of course KyoAni isn’t making any of this clear. Of course.

Anyway, moving on. Episode 11 was a disgrace. Literally none of it happens in the novel.

What goes on after Minato settles things up with Seiya is that Masaki takes the boys to an equipment store to buy stuff for the club. There, Masaki and Minato have a talk about Masaki’s grandfather, and Minato finds out that he was actually a famous archer. Minato then becomes convinced of why Masaki was so into archery, as anyone would want to draw a bow having a master that great so near them, but Masaki retorts that he’d been holding a bow before even knowing anything very well (which brings us back to the fact he started archery when he was a toddler). As a matter of course, Masaki asks why Minato started archery, and Minato answers it was because he once watched a competition ten years before with his mother and never forgot it. He also comments that the tsurune of the archer that won and Masaki’s were exactly alike. And that’s where we get the second obvious hint that fate is one of this duo’s main elements.

After they’re done, Seiya and Masaki stay behind at a café to do accounting work and the other four left first. Minato remained outside while the others decided to go into a bookstore, and after a creepy encounter with an injured cat that reminded him of the injured fish, Minato was almost killed in a truck accident. A truck driver lost control of the wheel and the timbers that the truck was carrying flew out. Minato was almost fatally hit but Masaki saved him at the cost of a head injury that sent him straight to the hospital.

Minato and Seiya went with Masaki in the ambulance and waited outside the surgery room for him. Seiya was used to it after having gone through the same thing during Minato’s accident, so he remained calm, but Minato was a ball of nerves. His sense of reality was impaired, and he was asking himself what would happen if Masaki never woke up.

When Ren arrives, Minato apologizes for being the reason why Masaki was in such condition, but Ren dismisses him and tells the boys that they’re free to go home. Minato insists he'd stay, and the boys end up staying as well. Masaki regains consciousness not much after that, and asks about Minato immediately after finding out where he is.

Ren leaves to call a nurse, Seiya leaves to contact Tomio and Minato stays by Masaki’s bedside. Minato doesn’t know what to say; neither how to apologize nor how to thank Masaki. He had gotten nine stitches and seeing the bandage on his head caused Minato to feel pained.

Read this one more time, and then read the in-betweens. Masaki has earned himself a scar. Minato wasn’t taken away by the gods, but now the two of them are “separated from everyone else”.

While Minato is hanging his head in guilt and gripping the bedsheets, this dialogue ensues:

“What’s wrong, Minato? You’re making such an ugly face. I’m perfectly alive.” “Masa-san, if you had died, I’d have followed after you.” “Hey, hey, don’t say such disturbing things.” “I really mean it.” “Good grief.”

And what I love about this is that Minato says the literal most drastic shit that he’s thinking, out of fucking nowhere, for no goddamn reason. Neither thanking nor apologizing was quite right; he just had to declare that not even death can do them part, again.

Because fuck you, that’s why.

Masaki then stretched out his hand (which had an IV in it because why not add more pain to this clusterfuck) and ruffled Minato’s hair. Minato started crying, unable to stop even if he willed it, thinking to himself that he knew the weight of Masaki’s hand, and that it was still warm. He wanted to thank everyone who had helped Masaki survive, but could only keep crying until Ren and Seiya came back.

Next day at school, Minato was approached by a classmate who had heard rumors about the accident. When the boy mentions that Masaki would be publicly acknowledged for his deed and that he became a local hero, Minato glares daggers at him because he hates the idea of Masaki being treated as a martyr at the cost of almost throwing his life away to protect him.

Minato and Seiya were consoled by Tomio when he saw them, and Minato once again felt like crying his eyes out. He knew that Masaki would have laughed at him if he were there, but the tears were welling up in his eyes all the same.

When they all go visit Masaki after school, Masaki wastes no time to give the boys advice. He finishes by giving Minato a pep talk: “Enjoy the state of the draw. If you keep stretching to open left and right from the center line of your body, your arrow will naturally be let go of along with the triggering of your spirit. That’s what the ‘release’ is about. Drive target panic and delayed hold away.”

After that, Masaki told them that they didn’t have to visit him anymore, but Minato refused it and went to visit him every single day.

The day before the tournament, Minato went to the shrine. He saw the surrounding cherry trees without any flowers and thought about how different they were in comparison to when he and Masaki had first met. He then prayed for everyone in the club to to their best at the tournament and for Masaki to get better as fast as possible.

After lunch, Minato went to the lobby of the building by himself, still plagued by his anxiety over not knowing when his target panic could start up again. He then sees coffee in a vending machine and walks towards it “as if drawn to it”. He buys a can, drinks the contents, and when he’s throwng it away, he notices someone standing under the shadow of the pillar behind the vending machine. The person was drinking the same brand of coffee as Minato had drunk, and he got a deja-vu from the sight, so he peeked into the man’s face.

Really feeling the Red String of Fate vibes in this Chili’s once more, and it was, of course, all on purpose. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in this chapter. As Minato’s eyes met with Masaki’s, they have their usual comedy routine:

“Masa-san!?” “S’up, Minato.” “Don’t you ‘s’up’ me!? Why are you here? Today’s not the day you’ll be discharged from the hospital, right?” “I escaped from the hospital. It’d be a bother if Tommy-sensei and the others hear about this, so keep quiet.” “‘Keep quiet’, you say…” “Yeah, yeah, you hide too, Minato.”

Masaki pulls Minato into the shadow of the pillar and explains that Ren helped him flee from the hospital by pretending to be him. On top of that, he was wearing a cap to hide the bandage around his head.

When Masaki expresses his wish to watch his students, Minato argues that they were recording the matches for him, but Masaki shoots back that he can’t see the details on camera and comments that Minato had forgotten to tighten his left pinky during the draw. He clarifies that the rubber dormouse was meant to train his muscles of the hand and help him control them, and asks if Minato had been worrying over something. As always, he hits jackpot, and also as always, Minato doesn’t hide it from him. Masaki then assures him that he’d shot well either way, that it was fine to be nervous and that it was okay not to hit. His attitude is too easygoing for Minato, who asks himself how Masaki can afford to be drinking coffee so carefreely at such a timing. It all makes his worries seem foolish, and he soon starts feeling better. Masaki informs him that he’d leave as soon as the last round ended and leaves Minato to fight back a smile before he goes back to the venue.

This scene is probably the one that makes most obvious how Masaki is always there for Minato, almost like it’s a rule. He’s conveniently placed at a distance where Minato can find him, is able to realize that Minato is distressed, and easily makes him feel better. It’s undebatably intentional from the author’s part.

Fast forward to right before the final round, Tomio gives the boys their headbands. They’re yellowish green, which is Minato’s assigned color, and that’s obviously intentional as well. Tomio calls them “treasure items” and reveals that they’d been “blessed by a certain priest”.

While the boys take on Kirisaki, Masaki is in the audience, wondering if Minato realizes how much he attracts those around him. He reminisces to his 10,000 shots, and how he had decided on that absurd number because he intended to let go of the bow permanently after he was done with them. He found extreme joy in archery, but he was tired of pursuing abstract goals with it, so he had decided to give it up. But on the night he completed the 10,000 shots, Minato had extended his hands to him, and his eyes had told Masaki that he could still draw his bow. Minato is described as the one who sent his smouldering soul into the wind, his “fire-starter”.

This is also valid for Minato, who is, at the very same moment, reflecting on how he wouldn’t have arrived at that place if he hadn’t heard Masaki’s tsurune on that night. He then has a long monologue about life and meetings, both between people and between humans and gods, all related to archery one way or another.

Right upon finishing the formalities, Minato looked at the audience, and found Masaki standing in the wind. As always, his eyes are drawn to him, and also as always, Masaki grins at him when spotted.

Later on, while Kazemai prepared for the regional tournament, Masaki was discharged from the hospital, and the first thing he and Minato do after meeting again is check on each other’s codition. Then, Minato reveals to Masaki that he and the boys had contacted an acquaintace of his grandfather’s and learned the words he had expressed about Masaki before dying. Masaki is confused, and Minato says that his grandfather had regretted becoming estranged from him. When Masaki argues that his grandfather would never say something so admirable, Minato tells him the words directly: “I look forward to Masaki becoming a fine archer”. Masaki almost cried right then, and so, the boys’ practice started. Masaki joined them, and I think it’s very obvious that he was going to shoot the target next to Minato’s.

There were also these sentences in the narration as Masaki holds back tears: “‘Fortune’ might have been a word that referred to all meetings. A gift named coincidence, as though someone had devised it.”

Of course someone fucking deviced it, Ayano. It was fucking fate. We fucking get it, Ayano. Fucking thank you. Unironically.

[dewbond-blog]

The Summer of Love: The English Dub of High School DxD

We will be jumping into the second half of season one next week with a look at the “Raiser Arc” and all it brings to the table, but this week I wanted to steer the Summer of Love into a topic that many people don’t really discuss: The English Dub, and my overall thoughts and feelings on it. There is a good, a lot of good, and some slightly not so good. So join me after the cut as we jump into our next chapter of The Summer of Love, the dub! This is another long one, so be ready!

To discuss the English Dub of High School DxD, it is important to give some backstory about English dubbing of anime in general. If you grew up in my generation, (late 90s, early 2000s)  then you are very familiar with the 4kids of era; a time in which the american company 4kids entertainment pretty much had a stranglehold on the western anime market. Simply put, they called the shots and every anime that was actually on television had to go through the 4kids “Americanizing process.” Needless to say, this was a bad thing.

Cardcaptor Sakura had it’s entire yuri/yaoi subtext removed and whole episodes removed. Dragon Ball censored and omitted world building, Yu-Gi-Oh became a “so bad it’s good” mess of a dub. Vision of Escaflowne became a shadow of it’s former self. Monster Rancher went from a 50+ episodes series to only a handful, and of course what they did to One Piece. The list just goes on and on. The 4kids era of anime was not a good time for the youthful medium, and frankly the wounds inflicted by this era are still fresh in many minds of my generation.

Things have gotten far better since then, with companies like Funimation, Sentai Filmworks and Aniplex taking over the dubbing market and delivering quality dubs of anime that are true to form and (sometimes) even superior to their Japanese counterparts. Yet despite this massive improvement there are still many who refuse to even give an English dub a chance, whether it is loyalty to the “authentic’ Japanese version, or trauma for the scars of the 4kids era.

Now how is this connected to High School DxD? Well not really that much, but I think it is important for readers to understand why people are somewhat hesitant on English dubs, despite a whole new generation growing up with them. There are old wounds that have yet to heal, and in this era where censorship is a hot button issue, I wanted to explain why.

Anyway, let’s get into the dub itself, and let’s start by talking about the cast.

The Cast

The English cast of DxD is frankly very strong, though it has been a cast that has had a few replacements. Akeno has been voiced by two different actress, as has Asia, and the while voice changes are noticeable, they thankfully don’t differ too much to make much of a difference. What I can say is that Asia and Akeno are both voiced excellently, with Asia being played with that cute innocent perfection, and Akeno with a level of sultry seductiveness that, while not on par with her Japanese seiyuu, gets the job done well.

The biggest voice change though has to be Issei himself, who was voiced by both Scott Freeman and later Josh Grelle, and while the change over in season 3 is a rather noticeable change (unlike Akeno’s voice change in the same season), with many people being initially put off by the sudden shift in voices. I can both say that they play an excellent Issei and bring a-

Wait..what’s this?

Fuck…do I have to do this? Do I really have to bring it up? REALLY?

ALRIGHT FINE…FINE..I’LL FUCKING ADDRESS IT.

In 2015. Scott Freeman, the voice actor of Issei and several other Funimation dub roles, was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for the possession of Child Pornography. Funimation rightfully and subsequently cut all ties with him and his roles current and future were replaced with new actors, hence the sudden change to Josh Grelle in season 3 and later 4.

Anyway, Issei’s work in the English dub marks the first, but not the most significant change in the DxD anime. While the script plays him true to form, Issei’s performance in the dub is markedly more “american” compared to his Japanese counterpart. While it is 100% loyal to the authentic story, there is a lot more ‘sex jokes’ and ‘western references’ that peek out from time to time. I’ll get into this when I discuss the script, but I did find it worked quite well for the story, and both voice actors are able to ‘get serious’ when the time comes, especially in season 4 when Josh Grelle gives his best performance as a harem lead, and this guy has MANY to his name.

However the biggest and frankly best change has to be Jad Saxton as Koneko Toujou, who completely re-invents the character for the English dub. In the Japanese version, Koneko is the quiet little kouhai who seems to only have one single emotion, very much in the veins of the Rei-clones that had a stranglehold the industry for years. The English dub however turns this completely on it’s head. Koneko becomes a motor-mouthed little girl who, while still holding true to the character’s spirit, adds far more to the plot and group chemistry than her Japanese counterpart. I just find Jad Saxton’s Koneko to be a far more interesting character, acting as a sort of the reality foil for Issei for many season, and still willing to call him out on his perverseness even after falling in love with him. Frankly, the difference between the two voices is astonishing, just watch this comparison clip.

The rest of the cast do a find job. Jamie Marchi as Rias is an excellent casting choice, and while I prefer the Japanese voice, Marchi’s signature voice is able to play both sides of Rias’ personality well and she only gets better as the seasons roll on. Kiba, Gasper, Xenovia and Rossweise are all again done very well, but it is only really characters listed above who are the real stand outs.

The Script

Remember how I brought up 4kids at the start of this post. Well I did also bring that up, because the English script of High School DxD does feel very much like a bit of a holdover from that era of anime dubs. There is more than a hint of the adapters putting in their own lines and having some fun with the dialogue than compared to other shows. It was clear to me that the writers were having some real fun trying to adapt this show for an English dub, and while some may grumble by only  being a 90% authentic script, the show does give us some great memorable one-liners like:

“I’m gonna make you eat those words like a kid doing the tide-pod challenge!”

“Cunt-tuckey fried chicken over there is in love with you”

“Forgive dat ass, don’t spank it!”

“Her milk-shakes are all over my yard”

Those are just some of the examples of the fun bit of humor that is injected into the series via the English dub and yes, it is not for everyone and yes, it is going to turn some of the purists off. Yet the voice actors give it their all and when the time comes for the show to “get serious” like with the Akeno break down, Asia story-line, the Issei/Rias fight, and more, those actors absolutely step up to the table and deliver excellent performances. So I can forgive them for having just a bit more fun with a show that is, again, about busty big boobed girls fawning over a perverted idiot.

What I do NOT forgive though, is the “president gaffe,” which undermines a vital and important plot point.

See, there is a very clear reason that Issei calls Rias “president throughout most of the anime’s run.” It helps show the class and social difference between the two characters and how, despite Rias falling truly deeply in love with Issei, her social status and his role as a servant make him hesitant to step up. It is only when that issue comes to a head that does Issei finally start calling Rias by her full name, and it is a great moment to cap off four seasons of development.

The dub however ignored that completely for the first four seasons and admitted that they weren’t aware of just how important it is. While they do address it in the season 4 dub, making an offhand comment that “Issei has been calling her President a lot lately” it doesn’t really fix the problem and remains an annoying nitpick for me. Is it a deal breaker? No, but it is a pretty glaring problem when looking at the series as a whole.

Final Thoughts.

Overall, the English Dub of High School DxD is a great one, and I honestly love it to death. As i said in my primer, I would have watched the series dubbed to do this event, but I wanted to be faithful to the Japanese release. The dub is still my go-to way of watching DxD and I suggest anyone to give it a show after watching a bit of the OG Japanese version. It’s not perfect, but it’s made with love and affection and doesn’t stray too far from it’s routes, but when it does what 4kids never could do to anime. It adds something without taking anything away.

[willow-salix]

Mistakes Novice Writers Make - Day 2 Characters

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Hi guys, nice to see you back again my little lovelies.

We’re here for the second part of the mistakes that novice writers make series. These are based on long experience, trial and error from me, wisdom from writing classes and from other readers and writers themselves.

If you didn’t catch the first video on story structure, then check that out later.

Today we’re going to look at character problems. I’ve covered in another video how to create believable characters but today I’m going to focus on how mistakes in the way they are actually written can look amateurish.

Bland characters are something I’ve heard about a lot. Some writers seem to equate secondary with bland. Not so. Secondary characters should be just as alive and fully formed as your mains, especially if, like me, you are creating an entire world with the intention of writing a series of books.

Unfortunately, it’s not just secondary characters who can get the bland treatment, bland friends, love interests, bosses and family are all a thing too. Many novice writers focus so much on their protagonist, the one the whole story revolves around, that they forget to flesh out the rest of the cast.

Imagine your book is a movie, if the main character was the star, a big-name celebrity with all the lines and an awesome wardrobe but everyone else was unknowns who barely got any action or lines it would be boring as hell. And your book will be the same without you meaning it to.

Along with bland characters comes characters who lack purpose. They are either there just to bulk out the background, to make your character look popular and loved, or just as filler.

This can happen in a number of ways, for example:

The random best friend that follows your protagonist around like a lost puppy.

The boyfriend/girlfriend that seems to do nothing but fawn over the main character and make them look good.

The kinda enemy who throws the odd nasty comment at the protagonist, maybe trips them in the corridor but never advances past that.

The neighbour that yells at your main character over the back fence for no apparent reason and nothing ever comes of it.

Characters who lack purpose, whoa re used as filler, are boring and unnecessary. Characters can be used as plot devices, yes, but they shouldn’t be there just for that, your plot should work on its own.

I see characters as fitting into certain levels.

-Your mains, which includes your protagonist, so the person the book focuses on, and those who really feature in the story, so maybe the love interest, a best friend or maybe a child.

- Secondary Characters, so characters that are less important than the mains, but who need more purpose, more details and more personality than our next level, which is background characters. Secondaries are those that have a place in the story, a purpose and interact more with the mains.

-Backgrounds Characters are the ones that are quite literally in the background, they don’t need huge histories and page time, but again, they need a reason to be there.

Think of a movie, if the main character is in a bar and the barmaid serves them a drink they aren’t then going to just stand there, still as a statue, staring at nothing. They will be bustling around serving others, wiping down the bar, cleaning glasses or something like that.

She could go on to serve a table full of rowdy lads who get a bit too handsy as she passes and that is when the main character gets up and punches one of the lads. This turns into a large fight and the main character gets arrested. Or the character could notice her and think that she reminds him of his little sister, which makes him decide to go back home, or maybe his sister died and it still affects him. All from a simple background character, she then has a purpose.

If you don’t intend to do anything like that, and you just want to show your main character as a brooding, drunken anti-hero, then just have him drinking and introspective.

And lastly, we have what I call the abstract character. This would be one that isn’t an active player in your story, is never seen, but is referenced or used in some way. Say your main character became a police officer because someone shot his father in a store robbery and was never caught. Your characters motivation is his father, the lack of conviction, the killer going free. The father was the man he always looked up to and aspired to be like and they frequently recall things about him, and everyone says he looks like him.

The father is an important character, but an abstract one. That doesn’t mean they don’t need history, backstory and a purpose.

Characters who lack story goals are another thing that was mentioned to me a lot, this basically means when you have a protagonist or main character that lacks goals.

Your character has to have something that they are working towards, something that motivates them. This could be a number of things, such as:

-something emotional, family, friends, sexual intimacy etc

- something to do with them as a person, self-esteem, lack of confidence, a personal achievement, a career goal, something related to their safety, the safety of others around them, financial security, health issues or even the safety of home.

These goals can come in many forms, for example:

-the risk of losing their home

-lack of confidence stops them doing anything they aren’t sure about, so they now push themselves to take risks.

- someone at work is actively plotting against them and they must be stopped.

The goal of your story is as important as the story itself.

Now I’m going to touch on weak character voices as I intend to cover this in another video on dialogue, but the lack of clear and distinctive character voices can have a massive impact on your novel.

If all your characters sound the same, or even all sound like your authors voice this results in a story that has a lack of flow and depth, not to mention being harder to follow and to relate to the characters themselves.

The characters are the driving force of your story and if its hard to tell them apart your readers will quickly lose interest, finding it hard to connect with them.

And lastly, character reactions. Over-reactive characters and under-reactive characters are a sure-fire way to show yourself as a novice writer.

Your characters are supposed to be realistic, like people and to react the way that real people do.

Having a character that never reacts is boring, not strong and indifferent as you may be trying to portray them.

Having one that over-reacts all the time can be exhausting and annoying to read. You need a good balance between the two.

Conflict between characters is often used within a story, in fact it’s a very important part of it. Everywhere in life we have conflict and confrontation, we cannot avoid it no matter how hard we try, so why should it be any different for your characters?

The problem occurs when there is either too much, or too little. Conflict between characters is often a driving force of a novel, but it still has to be realistic. A common theme of many romance novels is to have two characters that seem to hate each other, constantly arguing and falling out with each other, who end up admitting that they only do this because they like each other and didn’t know how to act. Ok, I get that, sexual tension can be a pain in the backside at times, but honestly, that isn’t that true to life is it? Would you get in a relationship with someone that you hated? With someone that you couldn’t agree on anything with, someone that was nasty to you and just plain mean? If you said yes to any of this, then I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have problems, because that is not a healthy relationship. I’m going to touch on this more in a forthcoming video, so I won’t go too far in depth with it today.

Now, I understand that in some books this can work, in my third book the two main characters were complete opposites of each other and if they hadn’t of had to work together, they never would have managed to get to know each other enough to realise that they weren’t all that different after all. They argued, they had moments of hating each other, but that was also broken up with times of laughing together, of seeing the lighter side of the other, of realising that they both had reasons for acting the way that they did. It was resolved in a way that worked for everyone.

Characters that are constantly getting into conflict with each other and everyone around them quickly become annoying. This type of character is often augmentative, opinionated, aggressive, egotistical, overconfident and cocky. And honestly, do you like that type of person? They are annoying to be around, impossible to work with and just hard work in general.

When your entire book is full of conflict, petty arguments and shit, all caused by your main character, well that just makes them an arsehole quite honestly. I mean, that’s cool if that’s what you were going for, but most of the time it’s not.

But then we can swing the other way, with a lack of conflict that just makes the book boring to read. Nothing ever goes wrong, nothing is ever hard, nothing is ever working against your characters, in short, it’s got no substance to it. Conflict does not just mean physical or verbal conflict, it can take the form of anything that slows down or tries to stop your protagonist reaching their goal. In the book world we call this dramatic conflict, because any kind of drama is included.

There is a fine line between too much and too little, but if you follow a basic story formula, it should be easy enough to notice when you need it, when the pace of your story is dropping and when its running too fast and needs to hit the brakes.

That’s all I have for today, please pop back tomorrow when I’ll be chatting about common mistakes with POV.

Until then, Blessed Be and happy writing.

[outroshooky]

love yourself world tour - newark, nj (9/29/2018)

Where do I even begin?

Last night was one of the most incredible nights of my life, and it didn’t sink in until I woke up this morning and my first thought was “I saw BTS yesterday”. They’re so real to me now- of course, you see them on interviews and you have their photocards and their bon voyage episodes, but it never really feels like they’re truly human until they’re standing in front of you in the middle of twenty thousand people, grinning from ear to ear. The joy radiated from all of their faces, and believe me when I say I'm not exaggerating that they glowed- in fact, they literally did! MELANIN. MEL-A-FUCKING-NIN, they’re so tan! It's so refreshing to see them not-whitewashed!

The energy on stage last night was insane. The Love Yourself concert was also my first ever concert- I don't get out much, haha- and I don't think I could have asked for a better show to take my concert virginity. The vibes and aura radiated from the crowd back to them and from them to us… seeing and hearing and being a part of the ARMY fanchant is an experience unto itself. When I first found my seat in the arena, the first thing I heard was a few thousand voices singing along to Save Me. Honestly, I almost started crying on the spot. Save Me has always had a special place in my heart as being the song that got me into BTS (along with me identifying with the song as a whole) and I had chills listening to it even from walking around in the lower levels on the way to finding my section. The atmosphere literally buzzed with excitement, but morphed into one of love as the night went on. It was written all over their faces just how much fun they were having… but more on all of these points later.

Pre-concert

I found @starlightaetae about an hour after I arrived at Prudential and we waited in line to take a picture together in front of the massive BTS world tour banner set up in the middle of the merch area. I think one of the most refreshing things about walking around before the concert was seeing all seven members equally represented by fans. So many Namjoon stans, and Jin stans too! A lot of people went to the Line store in NYC before arriving at Prudential, and as a result there were tons and tons of people with Bt21 merch, banners, and the like. I saw a girl walking around in a Koya onesie, and that was super cool!

I have never seen such diversity in the fan base as I have with ARMY. Young, old, gay, straight, black, white, tall, short, everything and everyone in between was there at yesterday’s concert. People I never would have guessed to be fans of BTS were walking around completely decked out in merchandise. While we were waiting in line, I saw a trio of sixty-plus women all wearing tour shirts- one of whom even painted her sneakers to say BTS! There was someone else wearing Hoseok’s iconic yellow sweatshirt/basketball jersey look, and they were wearing a wig dyed the color of his hair at the time!

Some of the most impactful moments of yesterday were standing in the middle of the merch area or on lines and watching all of the people mix and mingle around us. Everybody was introducing themselves, hyping each other up because it's BTS, and how can you not? To see all of these people come out, people I never would have guessed to be stans… it was really heartening. I realized just how many people these seven boys have touched, forgoing language and nationality and gender to reach out to people of all ages around the world. Everyone was a really good sport about things; I didn't hear a single complaint from anybody, even when for example the photobooth was closed. People were polite and respectful; some let us take pictures with their pickets, which had sold out by the time I’d gotten there. Overall, there was this energy that buoyed the thousands of us all crammed into the area around the stadium… it was infectious. Some dancers flash-mobbed an entrance and were dancing not only to BTS songs like Fake Love and Lie, but to other kpop songs. About a hundred people were clustered around them, singing along and cheering them on, and yet again I realized just how many people have been impacted by the boys. And then it sunk in that I was standing outside of the building where these same boys were and I lost my shit.

When I walked into the concert venue, my hands were trembling so bad that the usher couldn't scan my ticket for a few seconds because of the shaking barcode. Then it scanned; I was green lighted to go in and it all hit at once. The fanchant was filtering from up the escalator, the air was smoky with fake fog, my knees started shaking and I think at that point Nicole and I grabbed onto each other and cried a little bit because what else were we gonna do, I mean really. We held each other up for a good few minutes, especially when we stepped into a mezzanine section and got a look at the stage for the first time. I could see my upper level section (211!) from where we were standing, and my vertigo kicked in for a few seconds, and then excitement and nervousness took over (I think I should note here that I was actually so nervous that I didn't eat anything yesterday except for two slices of toast for breakfast. It sunk in during the car ride home that I hadn't eaten anything the entire day and then I was starving haha). Nicole and I went our separate ways here, and we waited about an hour and a half from then until the concert started. In the meantime, we waved our ARMY bombs and found each other across the arena (which was fun since it was mostly empty at the time) and just took it all in. The screens were playing BTS music videos, and I don't think I'll ever forget the sound of several thousand people singing Spring Day as one collective voice. Hearing people’s screams when Boy Meets Evil, Blood Sweat and Tears, and I Need U came on gave me chills.

The two seats next to me were empty, so I had relatively free space to move around, except I managed to dump my water bottle all over my drawstring bag and everything inside of it in the first ten minutes of the show… rip my program book, which is still drying out on the kitchen counter. I did manage to grab an extra Magic Shop sign though since mine was ripped and sopping wet. As the minutes ticked down, the energy in the arena grew even more frenzied, with the entire crowd (and forming ARMY bomb ocean!) screaming and bopping along to the Mic Drop music video. At 6:00pm, the lights shut off and Fake Love played, with the entire audience lit up only by light sticks screaming the lyrics. When the intro VCR started playing, I could see part of the stage open up from where I was sitting and I realized I could see the top of Namjoon’s head as they knelt on the platform. That was fucking surreal. Then the VCR ended, the lights shut off, the opening chords of Idol rang through the arena, and the platform raised up.

IDOL

From where I was sitting, it was difficult to see the individual members when they were on the main stage, but that didn't stop me from screaming my head off when Namjoon appeared on the big screen, looked dead into the camera, and said “You can call me artist, you can call me idol!” At this point, I was so overcome with shock that I don't think I actually waved my ARMY bomb for the first thirty seconds of the song. I just stood there attempting to collect my jaw from the floor because holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck it was them. I remember screaming when Yoongi did his little kick and they did that iconic challenge move. It was so freaking surreal, and sounded so identical to the recorded track that I forgot I was listening to them live. Jimin made my heart stop during Idol; the amount of power and precision in his movements was stunning, and it continued to awe me as the night went on. As each of the members came on the screens, it became real that this was them, and they were actually in front of me, and I kept counting to seven because I could not believe that this was actually them. Idol is enrapturing to see live, and I realized that although you can watch their choreographies online and during interviews and shows, you can never truly understand the feeling until you see one live. It takes your breath away, it really does- especially during high intensity songs like the first three they played. Idol was over faster than it had began, and they took the in between time to introduce themselves properly.

Introductions - between Idol and Save Me

When Idol finished, the camera panned among all of the members (who I was glad to see were sipping water as they were talking to us), and we got a look at all seven together for the first time. Namjoon looked into the camera first and beamed. It switched to Taehyung next, who was looking from section to section and grinning his signature boxy smile. He introduced the group with “Hey guys!” and we all pretty much lost our minds. After Tae introduced himself, Yoongi was next and while casually adjusting his earpieces one by one, coyly cupped his hand around his ear and egged us on to scream louder for him. The entire arena erupted for Seokjin, who blew us a kiss (and we hollered even louder). Jungkook scratched his head and flashed a bunny smile with a wave and a “nice to meet you guys!” When Jimin came onscreen, the audience exploded, and his stage persona faded to this shy smile and a wave. And of course, we couldn't forget about Hoseok, who we fawned over with “I’m your hope, you’re my hope, I’m j...!”, letting the audience scream “HOPE!” Seeing all of the boys during their introductions, as small figures on a massive stage yet with their faces filling two giant screens, was freaking incredible. Them! The seven boys we love and adore, introducing themselves to tens of thousands of fans. Their genuine reactions to our cheers made it all the better.

Save Me/I’m Fine

Okay, so I'm not going to lie, Save Me and I’m Fine I have a very personal connection to. Not only was it the song that got me into BTS, but Save Me was the anthem that summed me up best when I found Bangtan- I was falling apart at the seams; the person I relied on for validation and self-confidence was drifting away from me, and I was losing touch of both of us in the mess. Save Me was my anthem at the time- I needed that person’s hand before I fell, except that hand never came, and I fell hard. When I found out LY: Answer would feature a DnB (drum and bass) track, I was beside myself with excitement (DnB is my favorite genre of EDM), and then when I found out that that same track would be the sequel to Save Me… I was in Europe at the time Answer came out, and I'm Fine was the first song I listened to from the album. I was trying desperately to stream it off of international data while we were driving from Germany to Austria, and when the drop came, I actually burst into tears.

These songs are my story, how I turned Save Me into I’m Fine, and it's because of these seven boys that I was rebuilt and actually focused on myself for once like I deserved to. I thought of so many other people that I forgot what it was like to know myself, and I realized that I can't rely on them one hundred percent. At the end of the day, I only have myself. With all of this in mind, when I saw Jimin walk up the stage while singing the opening line of Save Me, I burst into tears. I actually don't remember the performance- thank god I recorded it- because my vision was completely blurry and filled with tears. The fanchant to Save Me was awesome to hear, as well as us singing the lyrics even louder than they were. Seokjin and Taehyung were so powerful during the live version of Save Me, especially when it was them alone on the stage singing. The entire arena yelled “hey, hope world!” during I’m Fine. Yoongi’s rap cleared my skin, raised my chemistry grades, did my laundry and ran me over with a semi. Holy fucking shit, the entire rap line decimated us all in the first ten minutes, and we hadn’t even gotten to Outro: Tear yet. Save Me/I’m Fine were the most emotional songs of the night for me by far.

ARMY Time

Skip this section if you’d like to be surprised by the song they perform during ARMY time, which came about fifteen minutes into the show.

When we arrived at the venue, each seat had a black banner with a flower design on it hung over the armrest. Hangul was written above and below “magic shop”, and according to the back of the banner, the whole phrase translated to “ARMYS are the flowers that grew in your magic shop”. Needless to say, the boys performed Magic Shop, and to hear tens of thousands of people singing “I’ll show you!” so sweetly back to them was really something else. There was no choreography, just them walking around the stage singing to us, and it felt truly intimate, just us and them in our own little world, created by the people in the same room, united by the same love. They are my magic shop, and we are theirs too. Taehyung and Seokjin again stood out here and showcased their vocal talent- the entire vocal line as a whole touched me deeply. When the cameras panned to show an endless row of signs in the audience, it brought it all together, and I felt connected not only to the boys but to every person around me. It was a moving performance, and certainly a magical moment, with the audience and their signs illuminated by the lights of the ARMY bombs and spotlights.

-VCR 1-

Trivia: Just Dance

All of the trivias blew me away, and each in their own special way. Just Dance was the most energizing performance of the night; it was by far the most impressive live solo dance I have ever seen. Hoseok owns the stage; he was born to be up there, and he stole my heart throughout the entire show, but he did the most during his Trivia. He makes it all look so easy; he interacts with the audience with this natural smile on his face that radiates joy. Our ARMY bombs lit up rainbow and the stage glowed purple, which was a gorgeous backdrop since he was wearing all white. I will never hear the first drop of Just Dance the same way again after the insane choreography that Hobi performed. He was flawless and fluid and natural being up there in front of us, dropping into a one legged split and popping back up like it was nothing. He is beyond charismatic and a literal ray of fucking sunshine, especially when he’s dancing and rapping at the same time. Both make him so happy, and that is written all over his face when he performs.

Around halfway through the song, backup dancers ran up onto the stage seemingly from out of nowhere (they ran up stairs in the pit) and Hoseok actually leapt over them while rapping. Even though he’s a single person in the middle of tens of thousands, your eyes naturally gravitated to him- he explodes with energy and passion and power like no other member of the group. He brings his own talent to the stage and awes us, whether it’s rapping or dancing or singing or even just hyping up the crowd. He really does make Just Dance look easy, even when he’s dropping down practically into a split thirty feet in the air on a raised platform.

Long story short, I love Jung Hoseok. Period.

Euphoria

Jungkook awed me during Euphoria most particularly with his vocals. He, much like Hoseok, was born to perform; between his voice and stage presence and impeccably smooth dancing, the best word to sum it all up is fluid. Euphoria is Jungkook’s song; it felt like he was speaking to us when we collectively sang “You are the cause of my euphoria/when I'm with you I'm in utopia”. I loved the lights (with ARMY bombs glowing bright blue!) and backup dancers in plain black. They were little details that didn’t detract from the whole, but rather drew your attention to the main stage and how utterly talented Jungkook is. Euphoria really is his song.

I Need U

The version of I Need U they played at the concert was a rock version that I actually enjoyed more in a live setting than the original song. Yoongi pointed his mic towards the audience for his intro rap part and let us cover it- with some mixed results (we sorta slurred some parts, but we tried)- but he nodded along with us as we sang. He was proud of us. Rather than doing the choreography, the boys stood on stage and listened to the arena sing. The smiles on their faces said it all. We screamed for Jin when he sang his verses, and you could see the visible change in his demeanor when he heard us. Namjoon and Taehyung faced my section for the final chorus, and Yoongi’s little shouts of “I NEED YOU” made I Need U one of my favorite memories from the night by far.

Run

Run was an absolute blast; I honestly can’t tell you who was more hyped, the audience or the boys. When the first drop came, they doused the fans at the barrier with whole bottles of water, which was really fun to see from up above. I don’t listen to Run on the daily, but last night’s performance changed that. It was energetic and explosive, and the whole arena was electrified.

-VCR 2-

Serendipity

Holy shit.

Just holy fucking shit.

Park Jimin.

Serendipity was another of my favorite performances from the night. I chose not to watch the choreography before I saw it live, and that combined with Jimin’s stage presence solidified Serendipity as my favorite intro. It’s such a beautiful, passionately sung song, and as much as Euphoria fits Jungkook, Serendipity fits Jimin. Onstage, Jimin oozes unadulterated charisma and pure sex appeal. You’re almost forced to watch; he is one hundred percent breathtaking, even if he’s simply walking up the stage. Serendipity live is the perfect mix of sweet and sensual, tender and heartfelt lyrics paired with elegant and sultry dance moves. Speaking of sultry dance moves, I was not expecting him to pull up his shirt for a few seconds, and neither was anybody else judging by the screams that elicited from the audience. He grinned for the quickest of moments after hearing us holler for him, and one of my favorite moments of the night actually happened at the end of the song. Jimin faced the camera and sang “Let me love…”, but a smile broke over his face- a real, genuine smile- and he said in the softest, shyest voice, “...love... you.” The screen went black and the arena erupted in cheers. Even in the last fifteen seconds of his performance, you could see Jimin fighting back the urge to smile, and that really made it so special.

Comparing the Jimin from the WINGS tour to the Jimin that we saw last night is like comparing two different people. Watching Burn The Stage, it was clear that he was struggling at the time, both with self love and perfectionism. Last night was like watching a bird freed from his cage. Jimin was comfortable in his own skin. He was happy. He’s learned how to love himself, and seeing the crowd’s reaction to his performance was enough for him to know he’d done well. That final smile and those nearly-whispered words- “love… you…”- said everything he hadn’t.

I love you, Jimin. I’m so proud of you.

Trivia: Love

I made it a point to scream for Namjoon during his solo song, and he got the loudest shouts of the night for any trivia during this performance. Namjoon’s stage presence is something that can only be described when you’re standing there watching him rap, engaging tens of thousands of people who are chanting the lyrics with him as he sings. You could see his pride and confidence build as the song (and concert as a whole!) went on. Love was absolutely engaging and riveting; Joon is a natural up on stage in his element, he was born to rap like this. Seeing Namjoon’s progression from Burn The Stage to last night was sort of like witnessing Jimin’s growth; he found his confidence with Love and made us all his bitch in the process. I fell even more in love with Joon during Love and fell in love with the vibes he gave off- poised, intelligent, intellectual, engaging. Oh, and did I mention he flipped his jacket off and gave us a shoulder tease?

DNA

The boys performed the choreography of DNA on the diamond stage, and although it was difficult for me to see for the most part, I could focus on the general mood of the audience a little more. We were all into it; it was definitely one of the most action-packed dances of the night since they performed it out in the middle of GA. DNA is definitely a crowd pleaser; we devotedly screamed for all of the boys, especially the second verse that’s pure rap line. It was so awesome to see something so iconic be performed right in front of our eyes.

Boyz with Fun/Attack on Bangtan/Fire/Baepsae/Dope

This mashup was explosive onstage and I think this was one of the most fiery performances of the night. Not only was hearing Jungkook rap live so cool, but seeing them go back to their hip-hop roots- and the roots of one of my favorite albums, Young Forever- was a great nod to their earlier music. The transition between Attack on Bangtan and Fire punted me into a level of Dante’s Inferno, and I was subsequently resurrected by the goddamn ferocity of Namseok’s hip thrusts during Baepsae. The rap line brought the fucking house down during Baepsae, and I think sexiest dance of the night would go to Namseok- Namjoon, for his handless, aggressive hip thrusting, and Hoseok for the thrusting he did while in a squat-crouch low to the ground. Dope was also incredible to see live; our ARMY bombs flashed red and the audience was electrified the most during Dope and Baepsae live. I’m not a big fan of Fire or Dope, but they’re back on my daily playlist after last night.

Airplane Part 2

This song was- oh my god.

Nicole and I are two of the biggest Airplane Part 2 stans you will ever meet, and last night’s performance of it destroyed our biases like nothing else.

The crowd screamed so loud when the chair appeared onstage. I’m pretty sure I actually went temporarily deaf at this point, because there was a ringing in my ears that definitely hadn’t been there earlier.

The boys were absolutely beaming throughout the whole thing. The first verse and bridge where Jimin, Jungkook, Taehyung, Namjoon, and Seokjin are passing the mic back and forth, they were grinning from ear to ear when the transitions happened. Just as Jimin passed the mic to Taehyung, he raised his eyebrows and gave us a little grin. Taehyung was smiling like the goddamn sun during his lines, and we screamed Namjoon’s rap along with him. Jimin is so goddamn powerful, and Jungkook’s little smirk when he sang the second half of the chorus was adorable. Jin even winked at the camera once or twice. You could tell they were having fun and legitimately enjoying themselves.

Jungkook’s high notes in Airplane Part 2 made the song, as did Sope’s verses. It was the most captivating performance of Airplane Part 2 I have ever seen. You can watch performance after performance online, but nothing, nothing tops seeing that song live.

-VCR 3-

Singularity

“I DIED DURING THUS SONG DIDOS OH MY GOD MY MANS WENT FOR IT WITH THEM MASKS OOOOOOOOOOOOOOF” - @starlightaetae

Nicole sums it up as best as possible. Singularity was one of the most riveting performances of the night. Personally, I don’t listen to Singularity very often, but Taehyung’s performance last night made me fall in love with it. His voice was like silk; Singularity is his baby and it made us his bitch. I loved how the mannequin was brought out and the masks (just like in the video!) had such an awesome effect on the whole thing, especially when Tae put one on himself. He gave this cocky little smirk to the camera before putting it on, and I’m pretty sure Nicole hasn’t been the same since. (“No, I haven’t been the same since!” - @starlightaetae)

I actually preferred the live version of Singularity to the recording simply because of the vibes this version gave off. I didn’t like the music video; for me it was too overwhelming, and a little too strange for my liking, but the live performance was completely enthralling. Taehyung commanding the stage during his intro was different to his previous appearances; you could tell that he was in his element here, and that was so freaking cool to see. I love how between Stigma and Singularity, Taehyung has found his sound, and he’s completely relaxed (and undeniably sexy) when he takes the stage alone.

Fake Love

From where I was sitting, I was able to see the boys line up before the main lights came on, and I pretty much lost my shit. Fake Love is one of my favorite songs, and it’s yet another song that you can see performance after performance of online, but there is nothing as captivating as the live performance. It’s also one of my favorite choreographies and I think the most emotion-filled out of all of their choreos.

Last night, the boys performed the Rocking Vibe mix of Fake Love, which was super cool to see live! I really liked how all of their larger hit songs were played as a rock mix version with drums and guitars, and Fake Love was my favorite rock remix. The crowd was beyond hyped for this song. I get chills whenever I rewatch the recording and listen to the fanchant; I’m pretty sure we sang and rapped almost every line. The crowd screamed when Hoseok and Jungkook did their mirror move and when the other six did their sort of marionette dance around Jimin. Seokjin got so much screen time and love from the audience! The loudest yells of the night were caused by Jungkook’s dual ab teases, and he gave this little cocky smirk after each one. The camera actually zoomed in on his second ab tease, thereby decimating tens of thousands of people in the blink of an eye. After the second ab tease, the camera cut to Jimin, and you could see him smirking too at our screams. Seokjin really went hard dance-wise during Fake Love; I’m so proud of him for how far he’s come with his dancing ability! He was incredible last night, and Fake Love all around was an insane performance- definitely one of the best of the night.

-VCR 4-

Trivia: Seesaw

Min Yoongi.

Min.

Fucking.

Yoongi.

Trivia: Seesaw has shamelessly been my favorite trivia off of LY: Answer since the album came out. I have such an emotional connection to this song; I can relate to it in so many different ways and seeing it live almost reduced me to tears. Yoongi is completely breathtaking when he’s alone. He makes the smallest movements look effortless; he commands that you look at and listen to him, and the entire crowd sang the chorus of Seesaw with him. I loved the backup dancers and the choreography, the constant references to that balance and imbalance. He slid down a bench in the middle of the stage and then ran up it in the middle of the second verse! He was so engaging and you could tell he was loving the attention from the crowd. During the last chorus, he pointed the mic at us and let us sing. You could see the smile on his face grow as he heard us, and he looked out as he sang, trying to make eye contact with every section.

I’m so in love with both this song and Min Yoongi. Nicole can attest to the fact that I’ve spent the last day in complete awe that he was right in front of me. I see so much of myself in him; to see his gummy smile beam from right there at us was the best damn thing I could have ever asked for.

Love you, Yoongs. You have no idea how much you mean to me.

Epiphany

Nothing I produce from my mere mortal fingers on a keyboard can accurately describe the impact of hearing Seokjin perform Epiphany. It was the most emotional performance of the night second only to The Truth Untold, which was performed literally directly after Epiphany.

When we realized Epiphany was next, we began chanting Jin’s name. I will never forget the sound of tens of thousands chanting “KIM SEOKJIN! KIM SEOKJIN!” and cheering when that single spotlight shone on him sitting at the piano. We did that for no other member, and I was so proud and happy to see the love and support that we showed Jin last night. You could hear the audience quietly singing along, and the sheer amount of power in everyone raising their voices to sing “I’m the one I should love in this world” as one driving force is something I will never forget. There were two moments when Jin looked directly into the camera, and it felt like time stopped. What felt like minutes at the show, as I’m rewatching the videos, was only seconds… It’s so hard to believe. The screams and cheers for him echoed throughout the whole arena… We yelled like that for no one else. It made me so, so joyful.

Although it didn’t show much in his face at first, his body language and the immense amount of effort he put into his performance said it all. Jin went hard. I’ve never seen him go that hard, ever. He put so much passion into his singing and he made it clear how he feels… Epiphany was one of the most moving performances of the entire show. I’ll never forget him nor the sheer beauty of it all.

Towards the end of Epiphany, Jin walked up on the main stage and turned his back to us, his profile completely illuminated by white light. We chanted his name again and when he hit those high notes, we fucking hollered. Kim Seokjin deserved every single bit of the cheers we gave him last night, ten times over.

Thank you, Jin. I love you.

The Truth Untold

As the final notes of Epiphany finished, the rest of the vocal line joined Seokjin on the raised platform to sing The Truth Untold. It was at this point in the show that I almost started crying for the fourth time, and I’m pretty sure the boys may have been crying too. You could see them looking out at us, taking it all in, listening to our screams that died into us singing along with them. Each of the four screens onstage showed a different member, and watching all four of them react at the same time made my eyes well up. I have chills every time I hear “but I still want you…” as we sang it along with them.

Seokjin, Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook are so, so fucking talented. They work so hard and they made last night’s performance of The Truth Untold something truly special. I will never hear the song the same way again, with thousands of voices singing the same line:

“...but I still want you…”

Outro: Tear

I had fucking whiplash from how fast these boys turned from soft, sentimental, and heartfelt vocals to hard-ass aggressive rap with a bite. Outro: Tear was wild. To sum it up according to Nicole, “It was the littest moment of my life.”

The entire stage and all of our ARMY bombs were lit neon green, plus fire shot up from the main stage during the chorus. I’m not gonna lie when I say Yoongi’s live verse of Tear was one of the hottest things I’ve ever witnessed, especially him singing/chanting those lower parts. Everyone was so hyped for the rap line; there was never a better day to be a rap line hoe. We screamed along with them as they belted out the chorus, especially the lower parts I mentioned before. Hoseok went hard; hell every member did. Namjoon in those shades wrecked my bias like none other.

You can listen to Outro: Tear and hear the power and emotion the rap line sinks into this song, but nothing will ever compare to seeing them take the stage and perform it. They’re in their element when they’re performing Tear; it was unlike any other performance during the night. It was raw, unbridled energy and release.

It was a good day to be a rap line hoe, y’all.

Mic Drop

Mic Drop. Mic Drop.

Mic Drop. That is all.

This song was my favorite group performance of the entire show. It was their last before the intermission, and I wish I’d recorded it because holy shit this performance blew the music video version out of the fucking water.

They performed the original Mic Drop with about a thirty second dance break towards the end, and I'll have you know that said dance break left me in a smoldering pile of ash because seeing seven guys at the forefront of a huge group of backup dancers all body rolling as one whole was hot as hell.

What was awesome was seeing how the crowd reacted to Mic Drop, and I think it was definitely the loudest performance of the night. We fed off of each other’s energy; the crowd was electrified and so were the boys. Our ARMY bombs lit up bright red and it was really a sight to see all around. I’ve never felt more in tune with an audience and a song; to hear everyone around me screaming the backing vocals and doing Seokjin’s little arm wave when he’s in the front during the choreography with tens of thousands of people was something else. It was the most explosive way to end the first part of the show, and certainly the most impressive.

I didn’t listen to Mic Drop regularly for most of this year, but I did when I first started listening to BTS, and I fell in love with Steve Aoki’s remix all over again when it came out on LY: Answer. Between that and their live performance, I’ll have Mic Drop on repeat for god knows how many years now.

Intermission

So What

I didn’t listen to So What actually until the Love Yourself World Tour started and I saw a video of Jungkook doing the chute dance down the middle of the stage. I was having really bad anxiety at the time, and that video was the only thing to make me laugh that night. Ever since I’ve seen the various clips of him doing the dance, it’s made me think of the song completely differently, and last night was no exception.

It was so much fun to see every member completely bopping to So What. The boys were all running around the stage hyping us up, and that first drop was completely unforgettable. White confetti exploded from the stage and rained down on the crowd. It was so much fun, and you could tell that they were also enjoying themselves to no end. It was us and them and singing and dancing simply for the love of music and being together… It was one of my favorite moments from the night, especially seeing Jungkook go insane. I love his headass so much.

Jin, Jimin, and Jungkook did the chute dance right down from the main stage to the diamond, and I have never loved any of them more than I did in that moment. To see Namjoon rapping behind them (looking mildly disappointed) and Jin/Jimin/Jungkook laughing and having the time of their lives was one thing I’ll never forget. Plus, Taehyung and Seokjin flirting with each other and the camera was so damn adorable. So What has such a larger meaning for me now that I’ve seen it live; it has concert vibes written all over it and I'll always remember hearing Jimin and Jungkook’s higher vocals cut through near the end of the song. So What holds so much excitement for me now, and I really hope they do it at every concert in the future, because it was truly unforgettable.

Anpanman

The live performance of Anpanman was fucking incredible.

I actually am not a huge fan of the song; I don’t like the opening line and as a result I’ve never been able to enjoy listening to the full thing. However, the live version changed my mind. The boys practically exploded with excitement when it came on, and the crowd got so hyped. I loved the cartoons that displayed on the screens during the performance, and how excited Yoongi and Hoseok got rapping this song. I loved how the audience screamed along with “super car like Batman!”and “ballin’, ballin’, still Bangtan!”. Jimin in particular looked so happy singing this song. Also, I may or may not have yelled “YOU ARE” when Yoongi rapped “I can be your hero!”

Taehyung and Jungkook hugging while singing “waiting for you Anpanman” was so fucking cute. There are so many good memories and vibes associated with Anpanman now; this is another song that has a whole different meaning for me after seeing it live, and I’ll always remember how happy it made them- and us.

Answer: Love Myself and Goodbyes

Before they sang Answer: Love Myself, the boys said their goodbyes, and their ending speeches were so touching. They had a translator on hand when the boys switched to Korean, and Jin in particular said he never wanted to get rid of the feeling he had at that moment, it was just so good. Jungkook talked about how we are his energy and no matter how many shows they do, we always make him so happy. I realized during the ending speeches just how much love BTS has for us. They love us more than anything, they really do. You see it in their eyes when they look out at the crowd, trying to make eye contact with as many people as possible to take it all in. I looked at Jimin and Namjoon, who faced my section as they were saying their goodbyes, and it was unreal to see two men I hold in the highest esteem possible looking back up at me. We are so privileged to have each other, and they deserve all of the love in the world.

I will never, ever forget hearing an arena of thousands sing “You show me I have reasons I should love myself” collectively as one. You could see it written all over the boys’ faces just how much they were affected. Most importantly, last night I saw an emotion that I didn’t see much in their previous world tour clips (before LY), but was prominent in every performance of the show.

Happiness.

These boys are happy. So, so happy. They’re learning to love themselves, and they’re proud of us for doing the same.

They didn’t want to get off stage last night, lingering as long as possible to say goodbye. Taehyung and Jungkook were the most reluctant to go, Taehyung being the last one off stage, and Jungkook taking one last look into the camera, winking, and dumping his entire bottle of Fuji water all over his head before dashing into the wings.

After the show ended and the lights came back on, I sat on the upper level with my head in my hands just staring at the stage. An ARMY below me took one look as she was leaving and said “Just so you know, you’re my entire mood right now.”

I replied, “What am I going to do with my life?”

She shrugged and said “Wait until their next world tour.”

I have on video that as Jungkook was saying his goodbyes, he said he’d see us back here next year.

Hey, Jeon?

I’m holding you to that.

[mcthieus]

it’s ya girl moose back at it again what’s good ?? as per usual....HMU or LIKE THIS if u wanna plot and i’ll come to u. matty is not as big of a pos as most of my other character so hopefully y’all like him. catch his pinterest HERE. more info under the cut~

( jeremy allen white )? no that’s ( mathieu sauvé ) the ( twenty-four ) year old ( hockey player ). who has been in town ( one year ) and reminds everyone of ( crushed beer cans, freshly sharpened ice skates, and goofy chipped tooth smiles ). maybe it has something to do with the fact the ( cismale ) is always ( self-indulgent & vacuous ) or ( enthusiastic & dependable ). either way ( he/him ) is apart of the town.

goes by matty bc most people can’t say mathieu right. if u call him matthew...........he will be very upset because he is a lil snooty québécois bitch !!!! idk if y’all are or know anything about french canadians but they are indeed snooty (as one of them i can Confirm)

he got a cute lil accent hon hon hon

anyway !!!! he was born and raised in montreal by a single mom, and spent basically his entire childhood playing hockey. if not on skates for the league team, then on the road playing with the other neighbourhood kids.

he had a twin named gabriel & the two of them were......absolute best friends. total inseparable but they were v different and were in totally different crowds in high school ?? his brother was more of a like.....skid i guess asdhkj like wasn’t rly in the good crowd & he was bullied a lot in school and......matty wanted to stick up for him but at the same time didn’t want to like fuck up his own reputation u kno ??  he was kind of a dick

gabe ended up passing away from an overdose after a party when they were 16 and it was rly fucking awful like......that’s was his twin man and suddenly he was gone??? and suddenly he was filled to the brim with guilt and regret for not sticking up for him and helping him out when he had the chance

he was very angry about the whole thing & rly......actually made him better at hockey??? it provided him a rly good outlet to get his frustrations out

and also he partied a LOT

his professional hockey career started when he was 18, right out of high school playing for the ahl toronto marlies and played for them up until last year

he is what the cool kids call a goon........or an enforcer if u wanna be fancy. basically that mean he just.....fights people?? like anyone who does one of the better players or the goalie dirty it’s just his job to fuck them up by checking them v aggressively or just....decking them ( which he prefers tbH he luvs to fight)

so he isn’t really great at the game itself but he is good at what he does and he gets a fuck ton of penalties but that just means he’s doing his job right (kind of shdifjf)

his nickname is the suave scrapper

rn he is a prospect for the arizona coyotes and plays for their ahl affiliate, the tuscon roadrunners. he just played with them for the first time in their 2017-2018 season

and honestly thank god bc he fucking hates toronto with a passion. decided to live in tallow bc it seems like a nice lil place and he doesnt mine the commute.

he......hates the weather tho like ya boi needs the cold to live!!!!! his canadian ass is dying

10000000000% a mama’s boy. he misses his mom so much....prob talks to her on skype or facetime every day. she is his entire world and he loves her sm

probably the dumbest person u will ever meet. he lacks academic smarts as well as just general common sense. ur run of the mill idiot. he’s very like.....me play sport, me punch things. probably just recently learned how to do his own laundry

basically a man child

he loves food and he eats A LOT. but he is an athlete so he needs those carbs goils !!!!!! he rly loves american food like give him a big ol’ cheeseburger and he’s drooling like a dog. also loves breakfast foods like way too much

but other than that he’s generally v healthy bc...he’s gotta be

has had too many concussions to count and has a bunch of fake teeth after having ‘em knocked out or chipped while playing hockey. he won’t tell u which ones tho. but it’s a lot

he was really popular and cool in high school (bc that’s how hockey bois be) and he had a lot of girls that like fawned over him, which rly distorted his own perception of himself and now he thinks he’s like.....rly hot shit and that he’s very charming when really he’s just a big dumb oaf 

but he honestly just........loves girls so much??? he loves everything about them and he’s very open about this. like...not even just banging girls but just generally he thinks that girls are the most wonderful beings to grace the earth and he will worship any girl who even TALKS to him or gives him the time of day. girls are so magically and he has a crush on every girl he meets

he’s definitely the kind of person to have had a lot of girlfriends in the past not bc he’s a player or anything but bc like i said....he has a crush on every girl ??? he just gets so lonely when he isn’t like seeing someone or isn’t like.....flirting with or like doesn’t have a thing with someone i guesS???? he just loves love and has a lot to give

thinks ppl who are just being nice are flirting and thinks ppl who are flirting are just being nice

so he’s like........lowkey a soft boy even tho he is very.......punchy

at the same time tho he is kind of a dick and will be like.....talking to other guys about how many girls he’s fucking and how he’s such a ladies man and whatever but he actually is......a bumbling mess and the worst at flirting but that doesn’t stop him from trying

doesn’t understand that sex doesn’t equal feelings ??? and.....fwb don’t rly work out for him bc he is destined to catch feelings and then be like shook when they aren’t reciprocated

just recently got out of a pretty long relationship?? him & his girlfriend lana tried to make it work long distance bc she didn’t want to leave toronto and it didn’t work out, and she dumped him a few of months ago. he found out that she was cheating on him both before and after he moved away. it was very difficult for him & they dated for a p long time so he is still like....v heart broken but he’s getting back out there

he started smoking because lana did and he wanted her to think he was cool and now he wants to quit but can’t bc.....every cigarette reminds him of her and he’s a big sappy idiot with a broken heart

but he doesn’t do any drugs!!!!! obviously he is a Sports man

he drinks a lot tho. always has and always will love beer with a burning passion. he parties a lot and is basically always hungover but he’s here for a good time not a long time!!!!!!!!!!! just wants to have fun and do this Thing

he is very social and can’t like......stay home alone for long period of time??? like he needs friends and needs to be out doing something or else he goes insane

he is very loyal tho like.......would definitely set himself on fire & fight 7 thousand people for u if ur his friend

very goofy & always joking around. to be quite honest..............he is a walking talking Meme

he is a simple man. not very complicated. he’s honest for the most part and what u see is what u get. a very good listener. u can depend on him and he will b there

probably definitely mostly straight but who knows tbh

ok here’s some connections y’all can...throw at me

workout buddies!!! u know he’s living that Gym life & doesn’t like to be alone so that would b lit

friends!!!! pls he needs...........................so many or else he will Die

hookups !!! fair warning tho he will.....prob fall in love w them

party pals !! ya boy is a party animal and again...he ain’t gonna do it alone!!!

maybe....someone that makes him rly mad & he wants to figHT them

idk to be honest.....anything

more can b found here

[firestarterthorn]

[Intruders]

Thorn wasn't always malicious, there was a time when he enjoyed playing games with Peter and his Lost Boys and tormenting the Pirates basically meant stealing shiny trinkets from them. The fires that took everything away from him scorched deep into his mind, took most of the youthful playfulness that the fairy used to know and replaced it with a deep burning anger towards anyone who does not rightfully belong in Neverland.

That view is how he generally sees all the Lost Boys, the pirates and anyone else who happens to come to the shores isn't one of the natives of island itself. They don't belong there and it's enough to earn his anger over what they might bring with them. He attempts a degree of begrudging  acceptance towards the Lost Boys entirely due to Peter, otherwise he likely wouldn't be as unforgiving of them as he is of Hook and his lot.

He has to content himself with spinning elaborate and ever more terrifying tales of creatures that lurk the hungry nights of the island; delighting in frightening the boys with all manner of terrors he can think up to share with them in the guise of warnings that leave the poor boys with sleepless nights wondering what sort of demons are waiting to snatch them in the darkness.  Most of the stories are exaggerations of course, or reflections of the short of horrors the Smallfolk have faced against the Many Eyes and the vicious insects that hunt them but who knows just what sort of grain of truth there might be in some of his tales.  If nothing else the fear it stirs seems to please Peter, and staying in his favor is the easiest way to stay alive for now. 

Most of the Smallfolk are happy to cause trouble in ways that aren't quite as lasting as Thorn’s efforts, because he truly enjoys the nightmares he causes both to the Lost Boys and directly to the pirates playing with their dreams. There's nothing that can compare to the nightmare of the fires that his home faced so to him it's paying that back in small degrees.

While it is rare that anyone earns that much regard, Thorn is willing to give a degree of respect and even friendship to anyone who can match wits with him. He loves when people try, and more so when they meet his high standards; he’s a bit sarcastic and rough at the edges so most people shy away from him too much, or else they only ever believe the false charm he throws at them.  But there is a warmth to Thorn under the surface that few get to see, until they earn it; doing so is without a doubt something that will grant them his friendship.  And that’s nothing to be scoffed at; Thorn is a very loyal and fierce friend when he’s not only offering false friendship for the sake of getting what he wants. 

Long before Thorn took up trying to destroy the pirates he actually did hold some fascination over them. Like most any of the Smallfolk, he is very curious by nature and the pirates represented something that he couldn’t understand. He could spend time with Peter and the Lost Boys, learning more about them along the way, but the pirates were an entirely different sort of creature. Even more appealing was how forbidden it was to get too close to those mysterious creatures; Peter only ever really allowed in when there was some battle between them and himself and Thorn was too wary to venture into things like that. He did want to learn about them, as with most everything he's always hungry to learn more, but before he could really discover much the devastating loss of his home due to the fires the pirates started turned them from interesting speculation to full out monsters in his eyes. As his anger towards them has barely even begun to tame down he's learned, however, that getting close enough to them to really cause them misery requires more than just an outright attack; Thorn has become very sneaky in his efforts to gain access to both the ship and the people on it. He would love to really cause some damage to them, some terrible loss, but he's learned in time that letting his temper run too hot only ruins his own plans, so he's very careful now, most of the time. It does still get the better of him now and then, but just as much time is spent now trying to lure Hook and his bunch into thinking him harmless as it is working out plans to cause them chaos when he can do so without getting caught.

Thorn’s relationship with Peter is a complicated one, the biggest part of it is due to Tinkerbell and his attempts to stay close to her but more and more as time passes his views of Peter grow darker because he knows that Peter only wants to play games with the pirates and will not allow him to destroy them. The fact that Peter doesn't see how dangerous they are to Neverland and what they ruined by being there is a constant source of frustration to Thorn. He keeps it in check well enough and has accepted, even if he doesn't want to, for the time being he’s stuck holding back because Peter says so and he does offer a degree of protection from the dangers that the remaining fairies are exposed to now that their home is gone. On some equally difficult level for him is the awareness that Peter himself had a part in that loss; his tempting the fools into trying to kill the Many Eyes with the fires was what led to so much destruction. For now he still tells himself that Peter never meant for things to get out of hand so badly but that conviction has become weaker and weaker as the fairy has noticed Peter’s lack of self control. 

Thorn acts very much the part of the loyal supporter to Peter because he knows that the lands are connected to his mood and the happier Peter is the better shape Neverland is in, so he's every bit encouraging of whatever game Pan wants to play, equally supportive of his whims when they turn dark since more often than not those moments weed out some of the strangers who do not rightfully belong on the island in the first place. 

His adoration for Tinkerbell is no secret and never has been, truthfully he still feels that very strongly but some of the shine is beginning to wear off of it while he sees time and again how she would rather side with one of the big folk than her own kind. To Thorn there’s simply something uncomfortable about Tinkerbell’s adoration of Peter, and he is a bit jealous of the attention she gives Pan, yes, but there are time’s he’s also jealous of the attention Peter gives her so he’s never exactly certain what bothers him more about the dynamic between them or his own place within it. He certainly wants to be important to her, he also wants to be important to Peter but the latter so often gets mixed up in head when he feels that twinge of anger towards Pan that it’s very confusing.

He keeps telling himself that Tinkerbell does it to protect all of them and keep and Peter's good graces but that's a lie he’s beginning to believe less and less as time goes by and he watches her fawn over Pan.

Lately one of Thorn’s favorites games has been to try to stir chaos in Peter's ranks and put the boys against each other to see if he can break their ranks . He loves to plant ideas in their heads and make them think it their own, loves to point out little faults and flaws in the things that Peter does to see just how much he can untangle the loyalties all around, so long as he can stay directly out of the blame for it. 

While he would never be bold enough himself to directly challenge Peter, more and more Thorn is beginning to wonder if he can't give a few of the boys a little nudge to see if he can make things dissolve. The notion has crossed his mind on a few occasions that if one of the big folk can have that much sway over Neverland maybe one day there's going to be a way to replace Peter with someone more suitable.  Some of Pan’s new boys aren’t the weak, young ones he used to bring to the island. These new boys are older, some not nearly as powerful as Pan, no, but not powerless either. Peter doesn’t care as much now how the island suffers and Thorn is starting to lose faith in even Tinkerbell’s assurance that the boy is going to keep them all safe. 

Due to a great deal of his magic being based on fire there's always a hint of smokey scent to him, his fingertips hurting usually marred with ashes just as the tips of his wings are. He's quite literally hot blooded, running a few degrees higher in body temperature than most of the other fairies, and he absolutely detests the water. This does put him at odds with the Merfolk but aside from some lighthearted teasing towards them he leaves them alone as he still views them as a natural part of Neverland and thus deserving his respect.  Water can’t really hurt him directly, but it certainly does put him in a horrible mood to get soaked, and his fire-related magic doesn’t tend to work so well until he dries back off. 

Probably the most resounding damage his own magic has done to him, thanks entirely to the fact that he stayed so wrapped up in that anger for too long and let the fire burn too brightly inside him, are his eyes.   Thorn was born with an almost snowy-blue gaze, soft and a vivid hue like most of the Smallfolk show bright colors in their eyes. But as his magic grew stronger as he began to use blood to build the power behind it there was really too much for him to control.  He has a form of heterochromia; his left eye still being his natural blue but the right now an intense golden yellow hue.  It’s something that annoys him a great deal, something of a mark of his own mistakes and lack of control, and while most of the Smallfolk know not to tempt the idea of getting him upset at mentioning it when people do it sparks up that fire in his blood and sets Thorn into a fight of rather verbal irritation. 

Being small is not something Thorn during considers to be a disadvantage; it just means that he can get into spots that other people can't. It also means that he can sneak up on his enemies far easier than they can him. He favors sharp weapons and very quiet ones, knives are all well and good but he’s rather skilled with the bows he makes from time to time as well. He's also taken to trying to craft poisons from blood magic to coat his weapons with when he uses them.

He gathers the most vicious of plants around the island and carefully works to figure out new ways to use their sap for those poisons; often testing them on the Lost Boys if Peter will let him sneak by with doing it, or the pirates if he can get close enough. 

He’s yet to have developed anything strong enough to kill outright but he does have some nasty little concoctions that render people out of their right minds, cause hallucinations or stark fear, or even paralyze them for short amounts of time. 

He keeps his concoctions in what amounts to his new home; a small cavern tucked away between the rocks of a cliff overlooking Mermaid Lagoon. Really the only way to distinguish it from any other spots in the mossy front of the rocks is the edges of burnt foliage around the entrance but it's very difficult to detect it and nearly impossible to reach without the benefit of wings. Living directly above the water was something he thought foolish at first, until he realized that the Merfolk provided a sort of protection from outsiders with their tendency to devour or drown those who wander into their home. 

His home itself is decorated with trinkets he’s stolen from Hook and his crew, things he takes great pride in having taken from them. Plus he’s always loved shiny things and the color of gold and the other rich earthy hues much of what the pirates own have; it’s all the more amusing to watch them scramble trying to locate some beloved object, knowing he’s hidden it away in his own little haven. 

Due to the fact that he’s never left the island, very often when new boys show up the manner of speaking they bring with them is odd to Thorn. While they come without memory of their pasts their language remains intact, something that Thorn has come to see as a very interesting side to them.  As each one brings new slang words and the like so much of it is too new for the fairy and while his natural gifts allow him to understand the words and what they mean some of them are very baffling as to why they mean such things. 

With as often and their language changes he can hardly make sense of how humans keep up with it, but studying the new words that the boys bring with them has become something to occupy his time when he’s not busy otherwise.  And really it only stirs that internal want he has to see the world outside of Neverland but that’s something that has only been granted to Tinkerbell and he can’t imagine that’s going to change. 

The recent winter across Neverland has been extremely difficult for Thorn. Cold weather makes him sluggish and weaker so he has suffered a great deal trying to survive as the island has been frozen, at times only barely managing to do so. During the endless winter much of it he spent asleep, not fully aware and not resting either; just barely alive enough to pull out of that forced hibernation of sorts when the cold began to break. 

It's not really certain one way or another if the intense cold might be enough itself to kill him but it's certainly enough to put in him in a pitiful state of being unable to function if he does get cold enough. Now that winter is finally breaking up he's becoming stronger and getting back to himself but the fear is rooted him that if another frozen spell comes over the island he might not be able to survive it. 

[fapangel]

What are your thoughts regarding Elon Musk?

A great question. Long story short, I alternate between wanting to love Elon Musk as one of the few venture capitalists on Earth with a fucking brain, and wanting to drown him in a scummy pond for being such a fucking West-coast weenie retard. 

Elon’s Genius

Waitbutwhy.com got a series of exclusive interviews with Elon, and while the star-struck explorations of the author might be of questionable objectivity, he did a great job of summarizing how Elon thinks. And the single most important thing about Elon was expressed in a verbatim quote from the man himself:  

Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope—that’s what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering.

Yeah. You’re sitting there saying “no shit, Sherlock, who doesn’t understand that?” But the shit some journalists say will just blow your fucking mind. Yes, this is an actual journalist, in one of the few semi-respectable, mostly-sane publications left on earth (by dint of catering to people who have to make sums add up at the end of the day,) saying that Trump should make space-based solar power satellites a priority. Not talking it up as a nice theoretical tech, not wondering about it, but pushing this as a serious short-term policy priority. 

Incidentally, this is how Elon Musk feels about that bullshit. Yes. Being a sane, intelligent human fucking being, he’s capable of understanding basic opportunity costs, and since he’s aware that hair-brained pie-in-the-literal-sky schemes must be constrained by the actual ability to fucking build this shit (i.e. engineering,) he’s capable of stopping long enough to realize that building and orbiting a vast fleet of satellites designed to blast the Earth with microwave lasers is fucking retarded compared to just building more solar panels right here on Earth. 

This ties into the second massive, massive thing that makes Elon Musk unique - he’s a venture capitalist that knows what the fuck a BUSINESS CASE is. Despite being a save-the-world-I-want-to-build-unicorns idealist, he actually understands the basic principles of economics and markets. To wit, nobody’s going to give him eleventy trillion dollars for free to do decades of R&D to realize his Big Dream, so it has to fund itself, and furthermore, major advances in technology and the human condition don’t spring from individual genius companies, but from entire industries. This nice diagram produced by Waitbutwhy’s eloquently fawning author expresses the same with more colored boxes and less exasperated fucking invective, if that’s your thing. 

What you’re looking at - especially the box at the very bottom that says SUSTAINABLE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL - is the concept that any gormless asshole on the street can grasp (business gotta make money) but the multi-millionaire masters of the universe that gave Juicero ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING MILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A WI-FI ENABLED JUICER COULDN’T FIGURE OUT. 

Yeah. Some of his businesses don’t make money, like Tesla. They release glowing reports that retards eat up, while anyone who worked in the actual 100+ year old auto industry look at these sillicon valley nerds who think they know fucking everything after a few years of research and just wait for the inevitable explosion. (Despite their cheery PR, people who know what they’re looking at see nothing but trouble in their business. To say nothing of how the Ultimate Dream of Everyone Driving Electric is flawed by the basic resource limitations of PLANET FUCKING EARTH. And then there’s shady shit. When they discovered that the established automakers have hundreds of acres and tens of millions of dollars worth of suspension torture-testing facilities for a goddamn reason, instead of repairing their janky suspensions under warranty, they offered to pay half the repair cost if the customer would sign a fucking nondisclosure agreement. Tucker Torpedo this motherfucker ain’t, is all I’m saying.)

But ya know what? I can forgive that, because SpaceX. SpaceX forgives a lot. And there is a business case there - there’s enough rich virtue signalling fuckheads to support a small car company, at the very least - so the premise itself isn’t just pissing up a suspension bridge cable on a bridge to nowhere, like most venture capital bullshit. Even the Hyperloop isn’t that bad, because even though it’s fucking retarded, Elon’s probably only looking at it because of his “Boring Company” project. He looked at the ongoing clusterfucked abortion of a high-speed rail line that California’s doggedly carrying to term, and correctly surmised that digging fucking tunnels the length of a huge earthquake zone would be cheaper, in the long run, than trying to navigate the political clusterfuck of buying contiguous right-of-way for the whole damn length. A tunnel is a tube, and as long as it’s a tube, you may as well use the damn Hyperloop thingy, right? There is thinking, there. A brain, is working. And hey, at one point SpaceX was an idea just like this - the Great Ones of industry often leave a trail of dead and dying projects behind them while the One Great Success just climbs higher and higher. It’s worth it, and it’s why Trump’s “six bankruptcies” don’t mean jack shit compared to his dozens and dozens of successful businesses.

And yet - despite that amazing presence of a god damned brain in his skull - he still manages to go full fucking retard sometimes to a degree that makes me want to catch his tongue with a vise-grip to make the stupid noises stop. 

Elon’s dumb-fuck bullshit

This slashdot article neatly sums up the problem. The short version is that lots of very rich people in Sillicon Valley were going around acting very serious about the possibility that our entire world and universe is just a huge computer simulation and we gotta try to break out of it somehow. 

Billionaires. These people are fucking billionaires. And this is how they spend their time. This quote from Business Insider sums up the reason why: 

The piece doesn’t give any clue as to who those two billionaires are – although it’s easy to hazard a few guesses at who they might be, like Musk himself or Altman’s friend Peter Thiel – but it’s fascinating to see how seriously people are taking this theory. According to Musk, it’s the most popular topic of conversation right now.

“The most popular topic of conversation right now.” If ever you doubted that there’s a vast wealth discrepency in the United States, look no further - not only is the West Coast rolling in economic opportunity for the right people - especially with the right connections - but there’s so many multi-zillionares out there that their entire social circle can consist of nothing but. This is some zany philosophical fad that caught on and percolated around, like memes and fads do, via usual social interaction - except for these people, their friends consist mainly or only of multimillionare tech CEOs. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why obviously intelligent people who’s words can make stock prices in multiple huge companies employing many thousands of people do a damn jig feel no reservations at all about saying things in public that make them sound like fucking idiots. When you contemplate the sheer distance between the world of us ordinary humans and these privileged Coastal Gods, it’s enough to fill you with an almost instinctive rage. As a good seal-clubbing communist-hating rabid frothing conservative bigot bastard from Soviet Mordor, I wouldn’t give a shit if these Masters of Industry at least bore passing resemblance to the Randian ideal. I’d be down with that. Even if their huge underwater cities did spring a leak and a massacre or two, that’s life, you know? 

But this shit? This!? No. I draw the fucking line here, pal. There’s some floof-ass hair-brained bullshit I’m not going to stomach. 

But entirely aside from my impassioned-downtrodden-country-boy-rage-at-the-coasties-grapes-of-ree, there is the simple fact that people idolize, hero-worship and generally LISTEN to this man, and that imparts some level of responsibility on him to not say fucking stupid shit. The reason I’ve resisted making a Paetron for so long (aside from my crippling depression, self-doubt and general talent for self-sabotage) is that it’d impinge, ever so slightly, on my total freedom to say any stupid shit I want, because I’m not beholden to anyone, at all, to sound sane or coherent. (My fiction writing is a testament to this.) So I’m keenly aware of the decorum and care a public speaker ought to have - it relates directly to how big an impact his words are liable to have on people, and for Musk, that’s a lot.

Elon’s latest shtick - which is also popular with all his millionaire friends - is screaming and crying about how AI is going to replace all of us. Well, no, that’s just the luddite screeching of Sillicon Valley in general now, Musk is actually claiming that AI will rise up and fucking kill us or some bullshit. His newest company, OpenAI, has a great business model and all - developing mind-machine interfaces, which is a thing and will be a much bigger thing in short order - but he’s still going around telling everyone that AI is some evil terrible scary thing, and that’s causing actual goddamn harm. It’s all fine and good to loathe “science deniers” if they’re arguing against climate change, food pasteurization, the Health Dangers of GMO Crops and childhood vaccinations, but when it’s bullshit like the health effects of radio waves and the coming AI apocalypse, suddenly these fucking geeks are all ears. And here they have a successful CEO who’s Made Science Things Fly and has half the world sucking him off repeating this chicken-little fear-mongering bullshit. In ten to twenty years the anti-vaccers are gonna be screaming NO AI NO DRIVERLESS WHATEVERS REEEEE AND IT’S GOING TO BE THE FAULT OF PEOPLE LIKE ELON FUCKING MUSK. 

[gokul2181]

‘Sushant and I used to talk about the authors we love’

New Post has been published on https://jordarnews.in/sushant-and-i-used-to-talk-about-the-authors-we-love/

‘Sushant and I used to talk about the authors we love’

Actor Sanjana Sanghi’s Twitter bio reads: “cinema and academia are beautiful things”. A topper in journalism at Delhi University and invested in grassroots education and development in the Capital, the 23-year-old chanced upon acting in films in school. Casting director Mukesh Chhabra had spotted her in a school play and asked her to audition for a supporting role in Rockstar (2011). Then 14, Sanghi quickly realised that the camera does not intimidate her, but the profession was not the end-goal in itself.

As an actor, she wishes to channel fame into enhancing her work in the education sector. “I want to make the country a better place for our youth,” she says, over a phone conversation.

Her interest in academia is what enabled her to instantly connect with her co-actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, who died by suicide in June. The two play terminally-ill characters, Kizie and Manny, in the coming-of-age drama, Dil Bechara, an Indian adaptation of the commercially successful novel and film, The Fault in Our Stars. Rajput’s last film is set for a posthumous release.

“We used to talk about the authors we love. He used to find it exciting that if he mentioned John Berger, I would say Ways of Seeing, or Yuval Noah Harari and I used to say 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, so he really loved that I actually loved those books… It was rare for him to find that [with fellow actors] and I hate that it is rare,” she reminisces.

Teenage favourite

The Fault in Our Stars was among the books Sanghi fawned over as a teenager in high school. “I was that 16-year-old who was obsessed with the novel and bunked school to watch the film,” she recalls. When Chhabra approached her to audition for Dil Bechara, she was excited yet apprehensive of doing justice to a story that has already been told in two mediums. “But the writers have done a good job at culturally adapting it to Jamshedpur,” she informs.

The actor’s interpretation of Kizie, a character battling thyroid cancer, involved going beyond her illness. “Initially, when a person is facing a debilitating disease, that disease defines them,” she observes. “When we did several readings of the script, we realised that the disease cannot define them because there is so much more that they grew up with.” Sanghi arrived at this understanding after spending time with young survivors at the Indian Cancer Society in Mumbai. “I chatted with them and understood their emotional reality, how they go to school with a cylinder and come back and do five blood tests,” she recalls. “Initially, it was debilitating but two years on, you adapt and as humans, we adapt.”

Hurdles and accusations

The actor came onboard the project freshly out of college at 21, and two years on, the film is ready to release on Disney+ Hotstar on July 24. Although shot for the big screen, the pandemic compelled the producers to opt for a direct OTT release. Even before the pandemic, the film faced several hurdles and delays. In 2018, Chhabra, who makes his directorial debut with this film, was accused of sexual misconduct as part of the #MeToo movement. He was suspended as the director but was reinstated reportedly after conducting an inquiry. Allegations of sexual harassment were also made against Rajput, which was dismissed by Sanghi as “baseless”. “That really breaks my heart when I look back at it,” she confides. “The journalism I learnt is one of honesty and objectivity. When I saw things that are so far from reality being written, it affected me… I was so young and inexperienced that it used to really bother me but then I knew our reality.”

The biggest learning for Sanghi with Dil Bechara has been that filmmaking has several variables that can derail a project. “The pandemic and Sushant not being with us in post-production, these are not in my control and I’m struggling to come to terms with [it] but I have to adapt,” she shares.

The actor is in no hurry to sign any new films and prefers “to be choosy” and be known for “quality over quantity” in the long-run. Based in Delhi and invested in the theatre, art, culture and educational landscape of the city, Sanghi says that “stardom doesn’t excite her”, but it’s merely a tool for her to create visibility for the causes she believes in.

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[bffhreprise]

Entry 266

 After a few days, I was more than a little happy to see her leave.  I realized as a member of Best Friend For Hire, I needed to treat everyone well, especially my future mother-in-law, but that woman tried my patience.  She would barely acknowledge Ai and Mai’s accomplishments, treating them as bumbling servants more than as daughters, despite the fact that they were incredible at most things they attempted.

 James seemed to avoid her for the most part, though I doubt she realized he wasn’t just busy.  I saw less of him in the past days than I usually did in a week.  Of course, I knew he didn’t really enjoy being fawned over, and Izumi treated him like royalty, which was understandable when dealing with someone who could legally kill you with a flick by their laws.  I’d have to keep my right to challenge in mind after I was married.  More importantly, I’d have to be wary of others who coveted what I had, though I doubt too many would be crazy enough to go against my backers.

 The twins heard about James’ performance in the arena from Alma.  I wasn’t surprised that he was an intimidating force.  Since his change, he was on a completely different level than most people.  Heck, I was on a completely different level than I had been in high school without some mysterious magical alteration.

 Stepping into his office, I said, “Hey, dude.  You busy?”

 He looked up, seeming to assess me before even recognizing me.  His mind was changing too, but I wasn’t worried.  I had faith that he’d still be James no matter what he went through.

 “Not particularly.  What do you need?” he replied as the monitor seemed to dissolve into his desk.

 Giving him a friendly smile, I told him “Oh, I just need to confirm a little detail.  Would you like to be the best man for my wedding?”

 “Of course!” he exclaimed, grinning.  His effortless smile was a blessing in itself.  He had been too stressed of late.

 “Awesome.  The bachelor party is all on you then.  The wedding’s been set for the nineteenth of next month.”

 James instantly looked nervous.  “You’re not looking for a… well… traditional party, are you?” he asked.

 “All on you, man.  I’ve gotta go tell my parents that I’m engaged and that the wedding’s in a couple weeks.  Full plate for the day.” I replied, knowing I could trust James to come up with something entertaining.

 “Ah.  Yes, but…” he started, pausing and looking thoughtful.  His brow furrowed slightly as if he just found a sour grape.  “Hang on.  Given their soon-to-be in-laws, are you informing them about magic?”

 “Nah.  Nothing abnormal to tell them about.” I replied, hoping James wouldn’t worry too much about silly details and knowing he would.

 “You’re marrying two girls.” he stated bluntly.

 “Sure am!” I happily replied, aware that James knew the truth.  With how closely connected the minds of Ai and Mai were, they couldn’t feel differently about anything for long, not with how even the senses of both bodies were shared.

 “Ignoring that, what if you have children?  They won’t be quite… human.” he stated in concern.

 “Surprise!” I exclaimed, lifting my arms and shaking them enthusiastically.

 “But…” he started, unsure which worry to voice next.

 “Things will work out.” I assured him before he decided.  Waving farewell, I said, “Bachelor party though.  All you.  I’m off to see the folks!”

 I hadn’t even reached the first floor when I was notified that James was checking the guest list, which surprised me.  He really was a very, very busy person, so he was making this a priority already.  I smiled.

 “What did he say?” questioned the one claiming to be Ai today before I was off the last step.

 “Yes, of course.  Did you think he’d turn me down?”

 Today’s Mai frowned at me as she said, “Not about that… About the bachelor party…”

 I sighed dramatically.  “Look, girls.  I know James is awkward about certain things, but I have complete faith that he’ll manage to come up with an entertaining day, weekend, or whatever.”

 Each taking an arm, they told me “You’ll have to give us details afterward.”

 Grinning and tilting my head toward her with her free hand, Mai said, “You know he’s going to be uncomfortable if he tries anything… traditional.”

 Pushing away her sister’s hand, Ai tilted my head toward her.  “We need pictures.”

 “No promises, and you need to get your minds on meeting my parents.  We need to inform them of our big days.”

 Ai sighed.  “You know Okaasama will try something once we’re in Japan.”

 “Maybe you should be more focused on defending yourself.” suggested Mai.

 “Sorry to interrupt, but James is wishing to know who would like Mother.  He suggested the bachelor’s party, since the dates coinciding has been approved.” stated Mila, appearing to be walking alongside us in the mirrors on our right.

 “Thank you, Mila!” exclaimed Mai.

 “We might actually grow to like you.” stated Ai.

 Looking to Mila, I said, “I guess I won that fight.”

 “Mother will be quite excited to join you.  You know how she loves a good party.” replied Mila before vanishing from the mirror.

 “Shouldn’t you be a little worried?” questioned Ai.

 I almost tried to shrug, but their grips on my arms were strong.  “Not really.  She’ll do what she wants no matter what anyone says, so no point worrying about it.  Besides, she’s funny… and brilliant.  Even you two can’t argue against her mind.”

 “Well…” started Mai.

 “We could…” continued Ai.

 “But then we’d just look like idiots.” they finished together.

 We took my ‘stang to see my parents, so Mila could give us the shortest route and handle the actual driving while all of us went over our wedding plans.  The twins were very set on certain aspects, though they blamed Alma for some of it instead of admitting that’s how they wanted it.  Eventually, I hoped they’d get past hiding behind Alma so much.  I was aware that they needed her protection against certain members of their family, just as I was aware that Alma really did care about them, despite how she often acted.  I really didn’t ever want arguments between us to end up involving James and Alma.  We’d quickly become bystanders if those two ever became seriously involved.

 “Jarod!  Girls!  I didn’t know the three of you were visiting.” stated Mom after she answered the door.

 “Isn’t a bad time, is it?” I questioned, knowing we’d be fine.  I had Mila check their schedules the day Izumi arrived, knowing that would push things forward.

 “No, of course not.  Come inside!” she told us, motioning us forward.  “Kurt, Jarod’s here with Ai and Mai.”

 I only waited for my dad to enter the room before delivering the news that I was engaged.  He smiled and congratulated me.  Mom was super excited, though she mixed up the twins despite their differing clothing today.  I was certain they didn’t mind.

[hollypotter-witchingworld]

Holly Potter and the Witching World CHAPTER TWO: The Runaway Lawnmower

"Mum!" Dudley cried. "Mum, come look! Look who's trying to break into the cupboard again!"

Holly gave a huge start and let go of the padlock, which smacked against the cupboard door. The key fell out of her hand and landed soundlessly on the carpet.

Because there in the doorway, glowering at her with the rage and fury of an avenging angel having spotted a particularly nasty sinner, was Aunt Petunia.

"HOLLY POTTER!" she screeched, her voice even more shrill than usual.

"I can explain —" Holly began, and knew that she couldn't. Why had she ever listened to Dudley in the first place?

Aunt Petunia grabbed her hard by the shoulders and pulled her away from the cupboard door. "You little sneak! How many times do I have to tell you that I don't want you snooping around that cupboard?! And now I find you've stolen the key to it?!"

"I — that is, I was just —" Holly tried.

"Look at me!" Aunt Petunia shook her. Not very hard, but hard enough that it was uncomfortable. "There is nothing in that cupboard that has anything to do with you!" she said firmly. "Understand?"

"Yes, Aunt Petunia!"

"Say it."

"Th-there is nothing in that cupboard that has anything to do with me!"

"Good." Aunt Petunia let go. Before Holly could do anything, she crouched down and snatched the key from the floor. "I'll just take this and find a better hiding place for it."

Holly cringed on the inside when she saw the key vanish down into Aunt Petunia's pocked. She had been so close — so close to finally getting into the cupboard under the stairs.

"I told her you didn't want her near the cupboard," said Dudley sanctimoniously. "I warned her that unless she backed off and put the key back, I'd tell you. But she never listens to me! I had to call for you!"

"And it was the right thing to do, poppet!" Aunt Petunia turned around and gave him a hug. Her tone always changed so completely when she spoke to Dudley that it was like hearing a completely different woman. "I am so proud of you. Whatever would I do without you keeping an eye on that cousin of yours?"

Holly looked away, so she wouldn't see Dudley's smug face. That traitor. He'd been the one who'd stolen the key from Aunt Petunia's dresser, and who had given it to Holly. He'd been the one who had encouraged her, downright dared her to open the cupboard.

"Bet there's treasure in there!" he'd said. "Gold and diamonds! Go on, I'll stand guard!"

And like an idiot, she'd taken the bait. She'd thought he'd actually decided to be nice to her for once. She really should have known that it was only another one of his plans to get her into trouble with Aunt Petunia.

But the thought of finally getting to see what was inside the cupboard under the stairs had overridden her common sense for a while.

For as long as Holly Potter could remember, she had been… drawn to the cupboard under the stairs. Like there was some strange connection between her and it that she couldn't quite understand.

On the surface, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cupboard. It looked like a completely normal storage cupboard of the kind you found in all the houses of Privet Drive; the kind of cupboard where people stored umbrellas and winter shoes and things like that.

But Holly had always known there was more to the cupboard than met the eye. Not just because Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were so desperate to keep her away from it that they kept it locked at all times, with a big and heavy padlock, and forbade her and Dudley from ever going near it… although that was a pretty big clue in and of itself.

No… Holly just knew it, deep in her soul, that there was something very special about that cupboard. Something that, despite what Aunt Petunia said, very much had to do with her.

She had no idea what it was. But she knew, as surely as she knew that sickness was bad and water was wet, that beyond that padlocked door was something wonderful. Something that would change her entire life if she just found out what it was.

But it didn't look like her life would change today.

Aunt Petunia had finished fawning over Dudley and turned back towards Holly. Her face was hard and sharp again; not a drop left of the sweetness and love she'd so generously poured over her son.

"As for you," she said. "You just wait until Vernon gets home. For now, you march out in the garden and mow the lawn! That should keep you out of mischief!"

"But…!" For a moment, Holly considered telling Aunt Petunia that Dudley had been the one to steal the key, but she decided against it. Aunt Petunia wouldn't believe a word of it anyway. She instead cast a glance towards the window, where heavy raindrops were still rushing down. "Aunt Petunia, it's raining!" she said. "I can't mow the lawn in the rain!"

"You should have thought of that before you decided to get into steal that key," said Aunt Petunia mercilessly. "And if I catch you so much as looking at that cupboard again, or if you try any more funny business, I'll tan your hide but good. Is that clear?"

Holly nodded, though this particular threat didn't really frighten her. Aunt Petunia was always threatening to give Holly a good spanking, but she had never actually done it. It was always 'next time I'll do it, see if I don't.'

As for waiting until Vernon got home… Holly knew exactly how that would go. Uncle Vernon would turn red in the face and shout at her for a few minutes, and then he'd send her to bed without supper. Holly was used to this, and had long since made certain to keep a secret stash of snacks in her room, "liberated" from the kitchen, or secretly bought for money she had earned by running errands for their next-door neighbour. Biscuits, raisins, cereal bars, chocolates. Not a full substitute for a complete dinner, but it was food that kept for a while, was easy to hide, and was infinitely better than having to go to sleep hungry.

It was far worse that she was being sent out to mow the lawn in the rain.

"Can't I mow the lawn when it's not raining?" she pleaded.

"Listen here, young lady!" Aunt Petunia hissed. "Either you put on your raincoat right now and go out in the garden to mow the lawn, or I lock you out in the garden without your raincoat. The choice is yours!"

Holly reluctantly went to grab her raincoat. That threat sounded a little too much like something her aunt actually would do, and Holly didn't want to find out if she was right.

"And don't you dare come back in before you're done!" said Aunt Petunia. And then, like a regular Doctor-Jekyll-and-Mrs-Hyde, she was all smiles and sweetness again when she spoke to Dudley: "Come on, Dudders, I think you deserve a little reward. Let's see if there's any of that cake left…"

It was the same as always, Holly thought as she slipped on her raincoat and walked up to the garden door. Dudley could do no wrong in Aunt Petunia's eyes; no matter what he said or did he got praise and rewards. While Holly got scoldings and extra chores.

But of course, Dudley was her son, while Holly was only her niece — a miserable orphan that she and Uncle Vernon had been forced to take care of after her irresponsible, good-for-nothing parents had got themselves killed in a car crash.

Which was why Holly Potter had, for almost seven years now, lived with the Dursley family at Number Four, Privet Drive.

Holly must have heard the story a thousand times. She'd only been a year old when her parents died, and so of course Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had done their Duty (Aunt Petunia always pronounced the word with a capital D) and taken her in, even though they already had a son, and had treated her much better than she deserved.

They'd made sure she had enough to eat… when she wasn't being punished for something and had to go hungry to bed, while Dudley ate her portion. They'd seen to it that she had proper clothes… bought second-hand at thrift shops and flea-markets, while Dudley got the newest and most expensive clothes. They'd given her her own room… which doubled as a storage room for Dudley's broken toys.

All the while telling her how much they were sacrificing for her and how ungrateful she was.

The rain was pouring down from the sky, and her boots made wet sloshing sounds against the soaked grass as she trudged through the garden, over to the shed where the lawnmower was kept.

She stopped very briefly outside the shed, having caught the sight of her own faded reflection in the window.

She was a miserable sight. Nearly eight years old, but she looked younger with her tiny frame, her much-too-big raincoat, her bright pink skirt, and her huge round glasses, which were threatening to fog up because of the rain.

There were really only two things she liked about her appearance: The first thing was her hair, which was long, silky, coal-black, and usually done up in two long braids. (None of the Dursleys had black hair, which just made Holly appreciate hers all the more.) The second thing was a curiously-formed scar on her forehead, which looked almost exactly like a lightning bolt. She'd had that scar for as long as she could remember; Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had told her she'd got it in the same car crash that killed her parents. Holly had often thought that if she was going to have a physical reminder of the accident that killed her parents anyway, she was at least lucky that it looked cool. There really weren't a lot of cool things about her otherwise.

At this point, she had to stop to try and wipe her glasses, which only made her vision worse. In the end, she took them off and slipped them into her raincoat pocket before entering the shed to find the lawnmower. Things were a little blurry, but she'd manage.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of just crawl into the shed and wait out the rain instead of starting the hopeless task of mowing the lawn while it was still pouring, but she decided against it. Aunt Petunia would probably look out every now and again to make certain she was actually doing what she had been told.

The lawnmower had of course been stowed away behind rakes and brooms and shovels, but after a few minutes' work, Holly managed to haul it out into the rain. It was a rather big and clunky reel mower that Uncle Vernon had bought a few years ago because he'd heard that manual lawnmowers were healthier for the grass than motorised ones. And if they demanded a bit of extra labour, that wasn't his problem; he wasn't going to mow the lawn when he had Holly to do it for him.

Holly dragged the lawnmower along to the end of the garden, and then set out to mowing.

She hadn't thought the job would be pleasant, but it turned out to be worse. The rain was pouring down even harder, and the lawnmower was uncooperative on the wet grass, which clumped and clogged up the blades, causing the lawnmower to stop and Holly to slip and nearly fall.

She really did try her best. She clenched her teeth and pushed on, stopping three times to pull clogged wet grass off the rotary, all the while the rain was coming down like someone up there had decided to unleash an entire year's worth of rain in one single afternoon.

Then, for the fourth time, the lawnmower stopped and the rotary refused to spin. The uncooperative device was suddenly slid on the grass, and so did Holly; for a split second she was thrusting her arms out and trying to regain her balance, the next she was lying flat on her stomach in the wet grass. The rain pouring over her and the way the grass was soaking her skirt, and her underwear, which clung to her skin in the most uncomfortable way…

And then.

She had no idea how it had happened. Something inside her just felt like it exploded; something hot inside her chest that burst out through her body. It felt almost like being on fire… but weirdly, not in a bad way.

The lawnmower suddenly sprang to life. It began moving on its own, and moving fast. The rotary was suddenly free and spinning again, and the lawnmower raced down the lawn, cutting the wet grass like it was nothing.

Holly sat up on her knees and watched in astonishment. The lawnmower was speeding up and down the lawn, all on its own, leaving strips of perfectly-mowed grass in its wake. It was like it had suddenly decided to become the world's most effective automatic lawnmower; wet grass and pouring rain be damned.

The feeling of being on fire faded, and the lawnmower slowed down, stopping over by the shed; just a couple of feet shy of having mowed the entire lawn. The entire thing had taken perhaps half a minute.

Holly stared. She fished her still-wet glasses back out of her pocket (luckily they hadn't broken after her fall!) and placed them back onto her nose, just in case this would reveal that she had somehow mis-seen what had happened the last thirty seconds.

But then, someone was grabbing her by the arm and hauling her up to her feet. She turned to stare into the face of Aunt Petunia, who in the pouring rain looked pale as a sheet and looking like she didn't know whether she should explode in anger or run away in terror.

"What," she demanded in a high-pitched and shaky voice, "did you just do?"

"Nothing!" Holly said, which was certainly true.

Aunt Petunia let out a small choked noise of what sounded like indignation before she hauled Holly off the ground and dragged her inside. She was so upset and angry that she didn't even care that they were both tracking in mud and wet grass clippings onto the floor, not to mention dripping rainwater everywhere.

Dudley was standing there with cake-crumbs on his shirt and an astonished expression on his face. Clearly seeing his mother this careless with the nice clean floor was a bit upsetting. "Mum!" he said. "What's going on?"

"Dudley." Aunt Petunia was breathing heavily. She was still holding Holly's arm in a firm grip. "Go to your room! I want to have a talk with your cousin!"

"But Mum," Dudley protested. "I want —"

"Go to your room now," Aunt Petunia snapped, with a harshness she usually never displayed to her son, "or I won't buy you that video game you wanted!"

Whether it was the threat or the tone of voice that convinced Dudley that she meant business, was hard to say. But Dudley did get the message, because he was out of the room in a flash, leaving only a few cake-crumbs on the floor as they heard his hurried steps up the stairs.

"Aunt Petunia," said Holly, trying to wiggle out of her aunt's grip. "I didn't do anything! The lawnmower did it all by itself!" Even in her confusion, she could hear just how stupid this sounded.

Aunt Petunia clearly thought so too. "Don't you cheek me!" she snapped. "You did that on purpose!"

"I didn't!" Holly tried again. "I don't know what happened! I fell over, and the lawnmower started moving on its own! It was like magic!"

If Aunt Petunia had been pale before, she now became white as a piece of chalk. "There is no such thing as magic!" she hissed. Then, she took Holly by the raincoat and pulled her backwards, towards the couch. "I warned you what I would do if you got up to anything, didn't I?!"

"What? No!" Holly gasped when she realised what was about to happen. Aunt Petunia had threatened to spank her often enough, but had never actually done it. However, this lucky streak seemed about to be broken now. Aunt Petunia tore off her raincoat and flung it aside with an uncharacteristic lack of concern about keeping the floor tidy.

"Please, Aunt Petunia, I didn't — ah!" Holly struggled to escape, but Aunt Petunia was stronger than her. Though she wriggled and bucked all she could, she found herself pulled down over her aunt's knee, with her wet, grass-stained skirt pulled up over her head. She yelped a protest of fear and embarrassment as her underpants were yanked down to her ankles, but no amount of struggling seemed to help.

"I should have done this years ago!" Aunt Petunia raised her hand to lay down the first smack on Holly's bare bottom.

The doorbell rang.

Aunt Petunia froze. Her hand stopped in mid-air before the first swat could land.

The doorbell rang again, now accompanied by a polite, but insistent knock.

Finally, with a sound that might have been frustration, Aunt Petunia moved. She pulled Holly back up to her feet, letting her skirt fall down and cover her up again. Then she stood up and gave Holly an angry look. "Stay there! Don't you dare move a muscle!" she ordered, before hurrying out to the hallway to answer the door.

Holly stood, stiff as a pole. Her knickers were lying in a crumpled and soggy heap around her ankles, but she didn't dare move to pull them back on. Her heart was beating furiously in her chest after the narrow, if temporary, escape.

She heard her aunt open the door, and then a familiar, friendly-sounding voice sounded: "Good afternoon, Mrs Dursley! Always a pleasure!"

"Oh." Aunt Petunia sounded anything but pleased. "How do you do, Mr Dumbledore."

Holly couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief. Mr Dumbledore was one their nearest, and certainly friendliest, neighbours; a kindly man who lived at Number-Seven-Across-The-Street with his housemate Hagrid, and who unlike most of the inhabitants of Privet Drive, always had a smile and a friendly word for Holly.

"My dear Mrs Dursley, you look soaked," said Mr Dumbledore. "What's happened?"

"Nothing, really." Holly could hear Aunt Petunia's voice raise slightly in pitch, as it always did when other adults asked her questions she really didn't want to answer. "What can I do for you, Mr Dumbledore?"

"Oh, I just stopped by on my way home to return the book I borrowed from your husband last week," said Mr Dumbledore.

"Nicholas Nickleby?" Aunt Petunia had clearly accepted the book from him; she sounded somewhat taken aback with the idea that Uncle Vernon would ever have lent a book to Mr Dumbledore.

""Quite an interesting read," said Mr Dumbledore. "Charles Dickens was a masterful storyteller. Though the way he describes the abuse heaped on children certainly makes you glad that we have child protection laws in this day and age."

"Yes." Aunt Petunia somehow managed to keep her voice under control. "If you'll excuse me, Mr Dumbledore, I'm in the middle of something."

"Oh, please, don't let me intrude," said Mr Dumbledore cheerfully. "I just wanted to deliver the book. Do give your husband my regards, Oh, and say hello to the children as well. I do hope they aren't outside in this rain… it would be a shame if they caught a cold, now that summer is here."

"Indeed, Mr Dumbledore." It was all too easy to imagine the frozen, insincere smile on Aunt Petunia's face.

The door clicked shut.

Moments later, Aunt Petunia came back into the living room, carrying an old copy of Nicholas Nickleby and looking rather taken aback. She seemed to have momentarily forgotten that Holly was there; at least when she lay eyes on the girl still standing there with her knickers around her ankles, she gave a slight start. But then she was glaring at her with the old familiar resentment. "Don't just stand there, you stupid girl," she snapped. "Go to your room and get out of those wet clothes! Now!"

Holly tried to hide her relief at having escaped the spanking. Quick as she could, she pulled her knickers back up and set out for the stairs and her room before Aunt Petunia could change her mind.

"And stay in your room for the rest of the day!" Aunt Petunia called after her. "I don't want to see you downstairs at all until tomorrow, is that clear?"

"Yes, Aunt Petunia!" Holly called back. All in all, she'd been lucky. It did mean no dinner, but she'd just have to dig into her secret food stash a little.

Besides, being confined to her room was just what she needed right now. She certainly had a lot to think about.

What had happened with that lawnmower? And why had she felt so weird when it happened?

That evening, Holly was sitting in her nightdress (a much-too-big pink one that was really made for a twelve-year-old, but had been half-price at the shop), halfway down the stairs. She knew from years of experience that this was a perfect place for catching the voices from the living room… of course she also knew that it wasn't nice to listen in on other people's conversations… but then, how else would she ever get to know anything, especially when the other people were talking about her?

Because while Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon usually liked to pretend she wasn't there whenever they weren't yelling at her, or telling her how ungrateful she was, or giving her extra chores, now they were definitely talking about her.

They were trying to talk in hushed voices, but this was not Uncle Vernon's strong suit. He was a big, beefy man, whose voice was naturally loud, and who would frequently raise his voice to a shout whenever he got excited or angry… which he very often did. (Holly knew that he was the director of a firm called Grunnings, and that his job mainly consisted of yelling at people, so it was probably a habit at this point.)

So she had no problem hearing him, even as he tried keeping his voice down, when exclaiming: " — but I never lent that ruddy poofter any books!"

"Of course you didn't, Vernon, but that's not the point!" Aunt Petunia's voice was harder to make out, but Holly had sharp hearing and didn't have too many problems. "He knew! I was finally going to give the girl the spanking she's had coming to her for years… and he knew! Why else would he have talked about child abuse?"

"What's the world coming to, when honest, decent people can't discipline their children how they see fit, without those kinds of people poking their noses into everything!" Uncle Vernon grouched. "I knew that man was going to be trouble the moment I laid eyes on him! The neighbourhood has gone completely to the dogs since he and that big, hairy fairy of his moved in! And it's all down to that ruddy girl! She's the only reason they're even here!"

Holly frowned in indignation. She was used to Uncle Vernon blaming her for things that weren't her fault, but it seemed pretty unfair of him to blame her for Mr Dumbledore and Hagrid moving to Privet Drive. They'd lived at Number Seven for as long as she could remember, anyway.

Uncle Vernon's tone did soften a little as he went on: "And you're certain that you saw…?"

"The lawnmower was moving on its own! The girl denied having anything to do with it, but of course it was her! And it was only just after she'd tried to break into the cupboard again, too!"

"Petunia," said Uncle Vernon firmly. "You know I will support you in everything, and I never said a word when we had to take in your sister's brat, but I am putting my foot down here and now. If this continues, she is out!"

"I don't like it any more than you do," Aunt Petunia protested. "But we can't just get rid of her! What would the neighbours say? No — if we can just keep her from the cupboard, we still have a chance that it'll go away… there's still a chance she won't turn into one of those… those lesbian freaks!"

Now, Holly blinked, leaning against the railway. Aunt Petunia's voice had been going softer and harder to make out, but she could have sworn her aunt had said 'lesbian freaks.'

"Open your eyes, Pet! She's been one of those freaks since the day she was born," Uncle Vernon shouted. "No matter what we do, she's going to grow up to become one of them! The lawnmower just confirms it! And," he added as he thought of another argument, "have you thought about Dudley in all this? What might she do to him?"

"Perhaps we could… move her into the shed," said Aunt Petunia helplessly. "If we cleared out the gardening tools, we could move her bed in there, and she'd be away from Dudley…. And we could put some extra padlocks on the cupboard, to keep her from breaking in..."

"And that's another thing!" Uncle Vernon was clearly getting worked up. "I'm sick of keeping that… that thing in our cupboard! It's calling out to her somehow! She's not going to give up until she gets her grabby little hands on it! I say we make one more attempt to get rid of it!"

"No!" Aunt Petunia shrieked, and then got control over her voice again. "No, Vernon. You know it won't do any good. We can't destroy it, and we can't throw it away. Remember? Even that time we tried to throw it into the sea, it came back! And now the girl is old enough to know what's going on… no. It stays in the cupboard. At least that way we know where it is."

Uncle Vernon made a noise like "harrumph," but he didn't protest. Instead, after a long pause, he said, in a defeated voice: "I'll see about getting another padlock. Or maybe one of those electronic code locks. And perhaps you're right, perhaps it would be an idea to move her into the shed…"

"We wouldn't have to have her in the house as much," said Aunt Petunia. "She could come in for meals or to use the toilet, and to do her chores… and then the rest of the time she'd be out of our hair! If we locked the garden door at night, that would keep her from sneaking in and trying to get to the cupboard while we were asleep!"

"You're right!" Uncle Vernon seemed to cheer up considerably. "And if we put an electric heater in the shed during the winter, not even that ruddy Dumbledore could complain about child abuse! Children like having their own playhouses, don't they? Even lesbian freak children…"

When Holly slinked back to her bed, she felt more confused than ever.

She wasn't too concerned about the prospect of living in the shed. Sure, the shed was smaller than her current room, but there'd be room for her bed and her dresser, and her few sparse belongings, and she'd get to be by herself a lot more. If she stayed in the shed she could even pretend that she didn't live with the Dursleys at all, but a child living on her own like in the storybooks. It might make her subtle kitchen raids a little more difficult… but she was certain she could manage that.

The rest of her aunt and uncle's conversation had just raised more questions than it answered.

Had Mister Dumbledore really known that Holly was about to be spanked? If so, how could he possibly have known? And what had Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon meant by 'lesbian freaks'? She knew about homosexuality, of course; everybody at Privet Drive knew about Mister Dumbledore and Hagrid, and some of the late-night television shows that the Dursleys didn't want to let her watch would occasionally feature women who liked to kiss other women instead of men (an idea which seemed quite sensible to her; boys were gross!) …but nobody had ever said anything about lesbians having the power to make lawnmowers move on their own. And then there was the mysterious talk about the item that was hidden in the cupboard...

As Holly settled down in her bed and closed her eyes to go to sleep, she knew one thing: Even if she was going to get herself into even more trouble doing it, she was going to find out what was in the cupboard under the stairs.