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neil-gaiman · 3 years

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How Did you come up with the first eve in the story about adams wives? I haven’t been able to find anything about her after I read it and I want to know if she’s an actual biblical character or just someone you made

She's from the Midrash. I learned about her as a 12 year old, from my barmitzvah teacher. There was a point in there, long after I'd put her into Sandman, where I was starting to think I'd imagined her, when I ran across her in Robert Graves's Hebrew Myths....

Excerpt from: The Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp 65-69

Chapter 10: Adam's Helpmeets

(a) Having decided to give Adam a helpmeet lest he should be alone of his kind, God put him into a deep sleep, removed one of his ribs, formed it into a woman, and closed up the wound, Adam awoke and said: 'This being shall be named "Woman", because she has been taken out of man. A man and a woman shall be one flesh.' The title he gave her was Eve, 'the Mother of All Living''. [1]

(b) Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world; [2] but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam-being already like a twenty-year-old man-felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: 'Every creature but I has a proper mate', and prayed God would remedy this injustice. [3]

(c) God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam's union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain's sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind. Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon's judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem'. [4]

(d) Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. 'Why must I lie beneath you?' she asked. 'I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.' Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

Adam complained to God: 'I have been deserted by my helpmeet' God at once sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof to fetch Lilith back. They found her beside the Red Sea, a region abounding in lascivious demons, to whom she bore lilim at the rate of more than one hundred a day. 'Return to Adam without delay,' the angels said, `or we will drown you!' Lilith asked: `How can I return to Adam and live like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?? 'It will be death to refuse!' they answered. `How can I die,' Lilith asked again, `when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day. None the less, if ever I see your three names or likenesses displayed in an amulet above a newborn child, I promise to spare it.' To this they agreed; but God punished Lilith by making one hundred of her demon children perish daily; [5] and if she could not destroy a human infant, because of the angelic amulet, she would spitefully turn against her own. [6]

(e) Some say that Lilith ruled as queen in Zmargad, and again in Sheba; and was the demoness who destroyed job's sons. [7] Yet she escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall. Lilith and Naamah not only strangle infants but also seduce dreaming men, any one of whom, sleeping alone, may become their victim. [8]

(f) Undismayed by His failure to give Adam a suitable helpmeet, God tried again, and let him watch while he built up a woman's anatomy: using bones, tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such disgust that even when this woman, the First Eve, stood there in her full beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance. God knew that He had failed once more, and took the First Eve away. Where she went, nobody knows for certain. [9]

(g) God tried a third time, and acted more circumspectly. Having taken a rib from Adam's side in his sleep, He formed it into a woman; then plaited her hair and adorned her, like a bride, with twenty-four pieces of jewellery, before waking him. Adam was entranced. [10]

(h) Some say that God created Eve not from Adam's rib, but from a tail ending in a sting which had been part of his body. God cut this off, and the stump-now a useless coccyx-is still carried by Adam's descendants. [11]

(i) Others say that God's original thought had been to create two human beings, male and female; but instead He designed a single one with a male face looking forward, and a female face looking back. Again He changed His mind, removed Adam's backward-looking face, and built a woman's body for it. [12]

(j) Still others hold that Adam was originally created as an androgyne of male and female bodies joined back to back. Since this posture made locomotion difficult, and conversation awkward, God divided the androgyne and gave each half a new rear. These separate beings He placed in Eden, forbidding them to couple. [13]

Notes on sources:

1. Genesis II. 18-25; III. 20.

2. Genesis I. 26-28.

3. Gen. Rab. 17.4; B. Yebamot 632.

4. Yalqut Reubeni ad. Gen. II. 21; IV. 8.

5. Alpha Beta diBen Sira, 47; Gaster, MGWJ, 29 (1880), 553 ff.

6. Num. Rab. 16.25.

7. Targum ad job 1. 15.

8. B. Shabbat 151b; Ginzberg, LJ, V. 147-48.

9. Gen. Rab. 158, 163-64; Mid. Abkir 133, 135; Abot diR. Nathan 24; B. Sanhedrin 39a.

10. Gen. II. 21-22; Gen. Rab. 161.

11. Gen. Rab. 134; B. Erubin 18a.

12. B. Erubin 18a.

13. Gen. Rab. 55; Lev. Rab. 14.1: Abot diR. Nathan 1.8; B. Berakhot 61a; B. Erubin 18a; Tanhuma Tazri'a 1; Yalchut Gen. 20; Tanh. Buber iii.33; Mid. Tehillim 139, 529.

Authors’ Comments on the Myth:

1. The tradition that man's first sexual intercourse was with animals, not women, may be due to the widely spread practice of bestiality among herdsmen of the Middle East, which is still condoned by custom, although figuring three times in the Pentateuch as a capital crime. In the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu is said to have lived with gazelles and jostled other wild beasts at the watering place, until civilized by Aruru's priestess. Having enjoyed her embraces for six days and seven nights, he wished to rejoin the wild beasts but, to his surprise, they fled from him. Enkidu then knew that he had gained understanding, and the priestess said: 'Thou art wise, Enkidu, like unto a godl'

2. Primeval man was held by the Babylonians to have been androgynous. Thus the Gilgamesh Epic gives Enkidu androgynous features: `the hair of his head like a woman's, with locks that sprout like those of Nisaba, the Grain-goddess.' The Hebrew tradition evidently derives from Greek sources, because both terms used in a Tannaitic midrash to describe the bisexual Adam are Greek: androgynos, 'man-woman', and diprosopon, 'twofaced'. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher and commentator on the Bible, contemporary with Jesus, held that man was at first bisexual; so did the Gnostics. This belief is clearly borrowed from Plato. Yet the myth of two bodies placed back to back may well have been founded on observation of Siamese twins, which are sometimes joined in this awkward manner. The two-faced Adam appears to be a fancy derived from coins or statues of Janus, the Roman New Year god.

3. Divergences between the Creation myths of Genesis r and n, which allow Lilith to be presumed as Adam's first mate, result from a careless weaving together of an early Judaean and a late priestly tradition. The older version contains the rib incident. Lilith typifies the Anath-worshipping Canaanite women, who were permitted pre-nuptial promiscuity. Time after time the prophets denounced Israelite women for following Canaanite practices; at first, apparently, with the priests' approval-since their habit of dedicating to God the fees thus earned is expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy xxIII. I8. Lilith's flight to the Red Sea recalls the ancient Hebrew view that water attracts demons. 'Tortured and rebellious demons' also found safe harbourage in Egypt. Thus Asmodeus, who had strangled Sarah's first six husbands, fled 'to the uttermost parts of Egypt' (Tobit viii. 3), when Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish on their wedding night.

4. Lilith's bargain with the angels has its ritual counterpart in an apotropaic rite once performed in many Jewish communities. To protect the newborn child against Lilith-and especially a male, until he could be permanently safeguarded by circumcision-a ring was drawn with natron, or charcoal, on the wall of the birthroom, and inside it were written the words: 'Adam and Eve. Out, Lilith!' Also the names Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof (meanings uncertain) were inscribed on the door. If Lilith nevertheless succeeded in approaching the child and fondling him, he would laugh in his sleep. To avert danger, it was held wise to strike the sleeping child's lips with one finger-whereupon Lilith would vanish.

5. 'Lilith' is usually derived from the Babylonian-Assyrian word lilitu, ,a female demon, or wind-spirit'-one of a triad mentioned in Babylonian spells. But she appears earlier as 'Lillake' on a 2000 B.G. Sumerian tablet from Ur containing the tale of Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree. There she is a demoness dwelling in the trunk of a willow-tree tended by the Goddess Inanna (Anath) on the banks of the Euphrates. Popular Hebrew etymology seems to have derived 'Lilith' from layil, 'night'; and she therefore often appears as a hairy night-monster, as she also does in Arabian folklore. Solomon suspected the Queen of Sheba of being Lilith, because she had hairy legs. His judgement on the two harlots is recorded in I Kings III. 16 ff. According to Isaiah xxxiv. I4-I5, Lilith dwells among the desolate ruins in the Edomite Desert where satyrs (se'ir), reems, pelicans, owls, jackals, ostriches, arrow-snakes and kites keep her company.

6. Lilith's children are called lilim. In the Targum Yerushalmi, the priestly blessing of Numbers vi. 26 becomes: 'The Lord bless thee in all thy doings, and preserve thee from the Lilim!' The fourth-century A.D. commentator Hieronymus identified Lilith with the Greek Lamia, a Libyan queen deserted by Zeus, whom his wife Hera robbed of her children. She took revenge by robbing other women of theirs.

7. The Lamiae, who seduced sleeping men, sucked their blood and ate their flesh, as Lilith and her fellow-demonesses did, were also known as Empusae, 'forcers-in'; or Mormolyceia, 'frightening wolves'; and described as 'Children of Hecate'. A Hellenistic relief shows a naked Lamia straddling a traveller asleep on his back. It is characteristic of civilizations where women are treated as chattels that they must adopt the recumbent posture during intercourse, which Lilith refused. That Greek witches who worshipped Hecate favoured the superior posture, we know from Apuleius; and it occurs in early Sumerian representations of the sexual act, though not in the Hittite. Malinowski writes that Melanesian girls ridicule what they call `the missionary position', which demands that they should lie passive and recumbent.

8. Naamah, 'pleasant', is explained as meaning that 'the demoness sang pleasant songs to idols'. Zmargad suggest smaragdos, the semi-precious aquamarine; and may therefore be her submarine dwelling. A demon named Smaragos occurs in the Homeric Epigrams.

9. Eve's creation by God from Adam's rib-a myth establishing male supremacy and disguising Eve's divinity-lacks parallels in Mediterranean or early Middle-Eastern myth. The story perhaps derives iconotropically from an ancient relief, or painting, which showed the naked Goddess Anath poised in the air, watching her lover Mot murder his twin Aliyan; Mot (mistaken by the mythographer for Yahweh) was driving a curved dagger under Aliyan's fifth rib, not removing a sixth one. The familiar story is helped by a hidden pun on tsela, the Hebrew for 'rib': Eve, though designed to be Adam's helpmeet, proved to be a tsela, a 'stumbling', or 'misfortune'. Eve's formation from Adam's tail is an even more damaging myth; perhaps suggested by the birth of a child with a vestigial tail instead of a coccyx-a not infrequent occurrence.

10. The story of Lilith's escape to the East and of Adam's subsequent marriage to Eve may, however, record an early historical incident: nomad herdsmen, admitted into Lilith's Canaanite queendom as guests (see 16. 1), suddenly seize power and, when the royal household thereupon flees, occupy a second queendom which owes allegiance to the Hittite Goddess Heba.

The meaning of 'Eve' is disputed. Hawwah is explained in Genesis III. 20 as 'mother of all living'; but this may well be a Hebraicized form of the divine name Heba, Hebat, Khebat or Khiba. This goddess, wife of the Hittite Storm-god, is shown riding a lion in a rock-sculpture at Hattusaswhich equates her with Anath-and appears as a form of Ishtar in Hurrian texts. She was worshipped at Jerusalem (see 27. 6). Her Greek name was Hebe, Heracles's goddess-wife.

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platonic-prompts · 4 years

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Creatures from Folklore: Slavic Region A-D

You ever need different creatures to base things off of, or just want some legends for a setting? Or heck, you ever just want to chuck a creature at someone and say you’ll figure it out? Well, do I have the posts for you. This one will focus on the Slavic Region but I’ll make more at a later date

Ala are considered to be demons of bad weather in several folklore, including that of Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Serbs. Their main purpose is to lead thunderclouds that produce hail towards fields, vineyards, or orchards to either destroy the crops or to loot and take them. They are very voracious and really like to eat children. Though one shouldn’t assume they limit their tastes to Earth, no. They sometimes try to devour the sun and moon which lead to eclipses and if they succeed it means the end of the world. People who encounter one may find their mental and physical health as well as their lives at risk. It is, however, possibly to gain her favor by approaching with trust and respect. These good relationships can be very beneficial since she (the ala) can make those with her favor wealthy and save their lives if they are in danger. Ala can take on many different forms: black wind, giant creatures with no distinct form, a monster either humanlike or snake like witha huge mouth, a female dragon, a raven, various human and animal shapes. Ala can also possess people’s bodies. They live in the clouds or in lakes, springs, hidden remote places as well as caves, inhospitable mountains, forests, or even a huge tree. Usually hostile towards humans, they have powerful enemies capable of defeating them like the dragons.

Alkanost have an incredible voice, capable of making anyone who hears her song might forget everything in their search for paradise. A creature of good who resides in the garden of the gods or whatever version of heaven required, the alkanost has the head and bust of a woman and the rest of the body is that of a bird. Sometimes this creature lays eggs which assist in the changing of winter to spring. Basically she wouldn’t sit on her eggs just dump them into the Ocean-Sea and when they reached the bottom the weather would turn fair. Though i think that takes her out of the running for parenting awards.

Anchutka is a small malevolent spirit, residing most often in water or a swamp. Even without wings, it is capable of flight. One of its nicknames is the one without heels. This is a common theme to look for, as oftentimes evil forces have a limp. Though in some storied this spirit has lost their heels because they got bitten off by a wolf. This spirit is often a sidekick to a water spirit called Vodyanoy, and as such you should never say its name aloud since it will always show up.

Aspid, a type of dragon with a beak and other birdlike elements, resides primarily in the mountains, preferring solitude. When it invades a region, nearly always it caused universal devastation.

Baba Yaga: I’m pretty sure a lot of people know about Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a hut with chicken legs and goes around in a mortar and pestle. She does carry a broom though, but she only uses it to sweep away her tracks.

Bannik is a spirit who rarely does any good for anyone. A mischievous spirit that has the appearance of an old man with long claws, he’s a spirit that inhabits the banya (steamhouse). Whenever people bathed in the banya, they would always leave on the third or fourth session to let Bannik have his privacy. They would leave him offerings of soup and regularly thank him. Bannik had the power to tell the future and if asked a question he would softly touch the askers back if it was a good future or flay it if it was a not so good future. Oh and Bannik, when angry, would claw off the skin of those who annoyed him. The banya was also the place of Russian childbirth, so there were measures taken to keep him from interfering. Part of the midwife’s job was to keep him away. And with good reason. Legends say that he ate or flayed children. So therefore the midwife would dip stones in the water and throw them in the corner to distract the steamhouse spirit.

Bauk hide in dark places and holes and abandoned houses. There they wait to grab, take away, and devour their victims. They have a clumsy gait and can be scared away by light and noise.

Babay, possibly the same thing as the bubak, isn’t often described so children will come up with what is most terrible for them. But despite this, Baby has been described as a black and crooked old man. When he is descibed he tends to have some traits such as muteness, lacking arms, or walking with a limp. He carries with him a bag and a cane. Baby lives in a forest or a swamp or a garden only to come out at night to walk the streets and scoop up the children he meets. He will walk close to windows and watched the children sleep. If they aren’t he’ll scare them with noises. Or sometimes he even hides under kids beds to take them away if they get up.

Błędnica is a forest demoness, who leads people astray before leaving her victims alone in the midst of the forest to die of starvation or be eaten by animals. She is usually described as a young and pretty girl. The only way to chase her away is to use strong spells or to sacrifice something at home or during your hunt.

Blud is a fairy in Slavic mythology. An evil deity who causes disorientation and leads a person around and around aimlessly.

Bukavac lives in lakes and pools, coming out at night to make a loud noise. A six-legged monster with gnarled horns, it would jump people and animals and strangle them.

Bubak is often represented as a scarecrow with a skeleton as frame, which is connected with darkness, it is a type of boogeymen used to scare children. The skeleton often is describes as wearing a heavy black coat where it hides the children it steals.

Cikavac, a mythical creature from Serbian mythology and it kinda feels like a basilisk but way weirder. This thing is a bird that has a long beak and a pelican-like sack. You can acquire one at the low low price of your sanity and clear face. For you see, in order to get one, you need to take an egg from a black hen which a woman now needs to carry under her armpit for 40 days ( is now a good time to note that chicken eggs hatch after 21 days or so) and one cannot confess, cut nails, wash their face, or pray. After that the cikavac would suck the honey from other people’s beehives and suck milk from other peoples cows and then bring it back to their owner. It would fulfill its owner’s wishes and it would allow its owner to understand the animal language.

Chort, a demon or a humanlike spirit in Slavic folk tradition. They are not exactly evil characters. Yes they try to trick people into selling them their souls in exchange for useless gifts. Yes those people are carried off into hell. But they are sometimes tricked into doing such things as building castle walls in a day. Sometimes is depicted as trying to bring evil characters to hell. A small, hairy man with a tail, horns, and one or two hooves. But due to shapeshifting abilities, the chort is able to appear in nicer forms and tries to trick people while in them. Though these transformations aren’t and can’t be complete, so there’s a way to know if one is dealing with a chort whether it be by small horns in curly black hair or a hoofed leg hidden within high boots. Though they share similarities, a chort is not the devil.

Čuma, aka kuga, is a personification of the plague in Serbo-Croation myths. Typically appears as an old woman wearing white, though in some cases has been depicted as a young woman. Direct mention of them were avoided and were usually referred to by godmother or aunty. According to belief, they lived in a far away land where they came from to infect people. Due to their hatred of dirtiness, if they found a dirty household they would be eager to infect it. Due to this, if a plague appeared,every house and its occupants must be thoroughly cleansed. In addition one could make offerings to of food, clean water, basil, and a comb.

Domovoi are household protectors, generally seen as kind spirits though they would harass the family they protect if said family was rude or unclean. This usually took the form of pulling small pranks until the family corrected their behavior. While domovoi are shape shifters, most depictions show them as small, bearded masculine creatures which are reminiscent of hobgoblins. In order to complete his chores and to fulfill his duty of protecting the house, the domovoi would assume the shape of the head of the household, sometimes working in the yard while the real head of household was asleep. (Guess spirits don’t have to worry about identity theft charges). They were also capable of turning into animals, rarely taking the form of a dog or a cat. Another facet of the domovoi was their ability to act as an oracle. Predictions are as follows

Dancing and laughing= Good fortune would come

Rubbed the bristles of a comb= a wedding would happen soon

Extinguished candles= Misfortune would fall upon the household.

Dziwożona, a type of female swamp demon from Slavic mythology, sometimes called Mamuna or Bognika, who lived in the thickets near rivers and streams and lakes. Thought to appear with foul weather around trees and swamps, they are known for being malicious and dangerous, and usually were previously living humans. Several types of people would be at risk of turning into one after death, such as: midwives, old maids, unmarried mothers, pregnant women who die before giving birth, and abandoned children who were born out of wedlock. Some depictions include an ugly, old woman who had a hairy body, long straight hair, and I quote “breasts so huge she uses them to wash her clothes”. I don’t know what that actually means and I don’t want to find out. She also wore a red hat with a fern twig attached. In case she wasn’t weird enough, she’d watch women with their little children. Just chilling around making the kid sick and making schemes to get the mother away from the kid when she’d replace the kid with one of her own, a foundling/changeling.

#i spent 5 hours on this #you better appreciate me lookigng through a bunch of stuff only to find exactly what was on wikipedia #info post #not a prompt #Creatures from folklore vol I #that's what im gonna call this part #part 1 of...idk 3 4 or 5

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rpmemesbyarat · 4 years

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RP meme from Tori Amos quotes

- Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if we have to dig a little to find it.

- I think that people who can't believe in fairies aren't worth knowing.

- I know I'm an acquired taste - I'm anchovies. And not everybody wants those hairy little things.

- Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes.

- I have so many different personalities in me and I still feel lonely.

- The violence between women is unbelievable.

- I'm too wacky for most weirdos. Who am I to judge?

- If they keep crashing stuff into the moon, the moon's gonna get pissed off, and the tides'll change, and all the women'll start PMS-ing together. Then you guys are going to fucking regret it.

- If you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself.

- I don't see myself as weird, I just see myself as honest.

- I see the dream and I see the nightmare, and I believe you can't have the dream without the nightmare.

- Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much.

- Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.

- On some of my darkest days, Lucifer's the one who comes and gives me an ice cream.

- Most people would rather be sheep than stand on their own with antlers on.

- The sense of loss is such a tricky one, because we always feel like our worth is tied up into stuff that we have, not that our worth can grow with things we are willing to lose.

- When you've got the virgin and the whore sitting next to each other, they're likely to judge each other harshly.

- I think you have to know who you are.

- Get to know the monster that lives in your soul.

- Dive deep into your soul and explore it.

- I don’t want to renounce my dark side.

- The truth has always held an enormous interest for me.

- Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, I’m sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.

- This is very simple in the world of chicks; some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be.

- We don't often see our own stories. Good artists are the ones that whisper our own stories back to us.

- Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

- Again, we go back to the power of words and how they can make you feel. They bring liberation or stagnation, they're chains.

- You don't have to apologize for growing and learning and changing your mind.

- Music has an alchemical quality.

- Certain relationships can just wear you down.

- Containment of your opinion is a must if you are going to nurture an artist's development.

- It's a good thing I'm curious, because sometimes I just research how a soccer player kicks a ball and the impact it has on his foot. I haven't used this yet, but I might.

- But over the years you can cultivate hate for the art you love.

- I don’t believe anyone’s story is boring. Every story has value because it belongs only to you.

- Sometimes I fantasize backstage about how people do their laundry. Woolite? Mixed-color loads? Do they fold? Do they press? Do they Shout it out? And the thing that kills me—do their whites come out dingy?

- Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change.

- We like our pain. And we’re packaging it, and we’re selling it.

- Festivals or radio shows can be the heavyweight championships of arrogantly detached clusterfucks.

- People who are addicted to power can live on the same street or attend the same school as us or even play on the world stage.

- None of us are this light and dark fantasy. What's dark to you may be light to me and vice versa.

- I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy.

- Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend.

- All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths.

- The Sídh's historical myth is the source of the bastardized concept of a fairy—as if anyone gives a rat's ass.

- The problem with Christianity is, they think everything is about outside forces, good and evil. There's not a lot of inner work encouraged.

- Over the last few hours I've allowed myself to feel defeated, and just like she said if you allow yourself to feel the way you really feel, maybe you won't be afraid of that feeling anymore.

- I'm the queen of the nerds.

- Don't give up. Don't listen to these foolish critics that are so small minded they don't get it tonight.

- Sometimes listening to music can motivate you.

- I think even in a good marriage, especially if you stay together long enough, there are going to be events that happen.

- An ounce of breast milk is even more potent than the finest tequila.

- Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.

- Many people lock a part of themselves away. It's a bit sacred.

- I've always seen the songs as having a consciousness.

- Our world is a huge mess right now, and not big enough for masses of intolerant people.

- We are all fairies living underneath a leaf of a lily pad.

- That is some funky-fresh, pop lockin' shit.

- If I saw someone destroy a piano I'd fuckin' kill 'em. Wouldn't think twice.

- I experiment with things that are usually an internal experience, because that's just what excites me. And yes, it does sometimes give me visions.

- Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I'll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn't like me. It's like, Why can't I be your friend?

- You might not like my story because I'm not gonna tell you how it ends yet, and you need to travel it with me.

- I just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers.

- You can't control your popularity

- If you can't create physical life, you find a life force. If that's in music, that's in music.

- I started to find this deep, primitive rhythm, and I started to move to it.

-I held hands with sorrow, and I danced with her, and we giggled a bit

- I usually get myself into situations that cause sparks.

- I love feeling alive, I love walking out in the cold in my bare feet and feeling the ice on my toes.

- For the most part, pianos are female to me.

- Anger is natural. It's part of the force. You just have to learn to hang out with it.

- In our minds, love and lust are really separated.

- I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs

- When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

- Guys would sleep with a bicycle if it had the right color lip gloss on. They have no shame. They're like bull elks in a field.

- Your worst enemies are made when you ignore people.

- It's as if the horses have come to take us back, to descend, to find the dark side. By dark I mean what's hidden, not necessarily satanic.

- There's room for everybody on the planet to be creative and conscious if you are your own person. If you're trying to be like somebody else, then there is isn't.

- Sometimes you have to do what you don't like to get to where you want to be.

- You know that saying, bad things don't happen to good people? That's a lie.

- I'm not a habit, I'm a lifestyle.

- There are a lot of hidden nerds.

- People who become the front runners often used to be outcasts or loners.

- Um, don't get me wrong because I love boys, it's just that sometimes we don't need you.

- There are only ten ideas under the sun. What makes the difference is how you spice them.

- So I'm in Virginia, and I had crabs--I keep saying that! I had crab sickness, I had eaten bad crabs in Maryland!

- I'm a winter girl; I like coming out when things are desolate and everybody's ready to slit their wrists.

- You can only be you. A lot of times it's never enough for people.

- I've never played the guitar, except throwing it against the wall cause it was pissed off I couldn't play it.

- Truly, I was a sweetheart when I was little, like the Honeysuckle Faery. Sweet-pea. But sweet-peas are not popular after second grade. Sweet-peas become nerds really fast.

- I really enjoy having a giggle with a friend, but then someone crosses my line, then I don't really take it lightly.

- I sometimes forget I'm not 7'2" and a Viking.

- A boundary was crossed. And maybe I drew a boundary, consciously.

- It was a bit violent, a bit sexual.

- When nothing makes sense, music seems to come and bring me a margarita and sit down with me.

- You don't have to justify everything. Being pissed off is just absolutely okay.

- There is a level of the vampire in me, which is OK.

- It hurts me when a woman doesn't come through for me, more than a man.

- I'm a grown woman. I've earned my experiences, my scars.

- What is an angel but a ghost in drag?

- I'm beginning to accept and love the parts of me, of women that I was trained to hate all my life.

- People can be so vicious toward the imaginary world and it saddens me. You kill a lot of little people's dreams that way.

- Even if you don't read history or you aren't interested in anything that happened before the '60s, there are reasons why we think the way we do.

- That's how the story goes but I don't believe the story.

- I would find myself either the lovey-doveyest-woviest sweet pea, or a mad-woman.

- I believe in eating.

- You can't change what happened. And nobody's asking you to forgive.

- Why be afraid of these cuddly, soft, adorable things?

- I have good days. Like if I get really good coffee ice cream with just the right amount of chocolate syrup.

- A lot of people see themselves as victims, even when you have to stand in line for ice cream.

- It's so difficult to be critical of children because they need to discover themselves. We're always telling them, "No, the tree has green leaves!"

- I'm tired of being a rebel. Now I just want to be me.

- When things get really empty for me, empty in my outer life, in my inner life, the music world, the songs come across galaxies to find me.

- Do you know what it's like to be a girl and have blood running down your legs and think that you're dying, just because no one's told you that's what happens? It's horrible.

- An angel's face is tricky to wear constantly.

- Mess with me and you will not survive.

- I think that happiness is when you can let yourself feel every emotion you want at any time instead of being a lying little fuck.

- I'm not into this dieting thing.

- The cross has been used as a weapon, as it has been used against all women throughout the ages. And that's the greatest evil of all.

- I think you've got to find a giggle somewhere in stuff that would scare the poop outta ya.

- A cornflake girl is Wonderbread whereas a raisin girl is whole wheat bread.

- I would like to think I'm a raisin girl, because in my mind they're more open minded. Cornflake girls are totally self centered, don't care about anything or anybody.

- I like butter and the people who like butter."

- I'm known as that girl who has tea with the Devil.

- I'm not afraid of sadness.

- Everybody has creativity and each person has it in a different way. Some people aren't musical, some musicians can't even think about painting or gardening. There's so many different ways to be creative.

- I wanna be burned, definitely burned, like the witches.

- Give the kids tools, so they can go build their own houses; not the blueprint of what the houses should be.

- Look at me now. I'm breast feeding pigs.

- I wish I had more of a sense of humor.

- I can be so hard on people.

- If somebody's being a jerk, I would like to go wee on their head. And then I do that, mentally.

- The people on the internet know more about what I am doing than I do. Like, they will say that I am going to be in this mall on this day, and sure enough, I am there!

- I'm like a lioness who kills her own prey and no one else has to kill for her. But if some other lioness comes to me and says "I just got a good prey, do you want a piece?" I can say "of course" - and the other way around.

- There are things that I would disagree with Jesus about, and I feel really good about that.

- History has recorded some pretty nasty things that have happened to people. I think we remember. I think it's in our cells and I think it can still hurt sometimes."

- I don't believe in the saying that it all happens for the best, it's just not appropriate.

- Of course I believe in past lives, I mean, three quarters of the human race believes this, it's not like a great new thought here.

- I use innocence in my demeanor like a Venus flytrap.

- I do like to talk about things no one wants to hear at the dinner table.

- I'm not interested in being a really nice person; I want to be a creative, responsible person that's balanced.

- Boys are cute but food is cuter

- Do any of you dream about crocodiles?

-I know I dream about crocodiles. I'm obsessed with them.

- If people can't see things from the other side that's not my problem, it's theirs.

- I think I give equal time in my hatred, right?

- Sometimes I'm mad at some guy, sometimes I'm mad at some girl, and sometimes I'm totally loving some guy, so and sometimes I'm loving some girl.

_ Well, Pele is the volcano goddess and I thought of like, um, sacrificing some of the boys in my life to her but then I decided that that wasn't really a very good idea.

- Anger originates from envy and outrage, not being seen, not being heard.

- We don't know where souls go when they die. We don't know a lot of things. We didn't create the planets. We didn't do this all by ourselves. So, therefore, why wouldn't there be a creative force if it can create humans and planets?

- I've been hanging out with some of the Hell's Angels in England. They're some of the sweetest people I've ever met.

- Real friends have to be understanding of each other, and their faults.

- I think I'm really hard to get to know on a personal level.

- Thailand is calling me.

- People I see laughing all the time, check for razor blades in their anal-force underwear, because it's just a little lie.

- I'm not interested in taking drugs. I do hallucinogens once in a while for journey experiences.

- I hear the wine. It's like a structure. I see it as a piece. I hear it before I taste it. It's calling me. And then I start to hear it when I'm tasting it.

- Not that I use crystal suppositories, I'm not New Age.

- A peach tree says, 'Some of me will be juicy and some of me will be dry I'm not growing for you; I grow because that's what I do.' You always hear some person complain about how dry their peach is and the peach says, 'It's not our fault you have no understanding on the proper use for dry peaches.'

- My theory is that women were the Mona Lisas for a long time and now men are Mona Lisas with little goatees. They are our muses.

- If you're gonna tell a story, you have to grow into the head of the rapist as well as the raped.

- He was a lite sneeze, and not the flu. Most boys would like to think they're the flu, wouldn't they? But they're really just a achoo.

- If you call me an airy-fairy new age hippy waif, I will cut your penis off.

- It's a double-edged sword and if you pretend you don't want it you're a liar and that is going to rip your soul to pieces.

- I'm always dreaming that these bulls are chasing me. Half the time I don't get away - I almost get over the fence, and then they gore me.

- I believe in energy, everything is energy. And therefore sometimes magic can be created if somebody is open to letting energy do what it does, instead of being so cynical, that you miss magic happening.

- I feel like a work really has many sides to it when people have such extreme reactions. When a work is greeted with just, 'Oh, you know, it's nice', then it's not affecting people. So love it or hate it, that's okay.

- I am a real believer in looking at pain and taking it out shopping.

- The music is the magic carpet that other things take naps on.

- I just try to strip myself, peel myself like an onion. At different layers I discover stuff.

- Why is the world where it is? It's so deep-rooted, if we really start looking, and we might not like what we find. But I think we have to, we have to ask the questions.

- I'm beyond the fury of youth.

- I love young women who are angry. They're wild mustangs.

- I didn't want her looking and hearing me and thinking, "Oh my God, that's a scary lady!"

- They felt that it was detrimental material for their children and that it was blasphemous.

- They've decided they kinda' have you figured out.

- My nightmares are so bad, that I mostly reject it when my friends want to take me to a cinema to watch a horror movie. Then I say, "No, thank you. I will dream in a few hours."

- I don't know of anybody who's gonna be fulfilled if they get hit by a bus. You have to surrender to that eternal need to be fulfilled.

- How do you know I'm not having a margarita with Jesus tonight at 10 o'clock?

- Let's be honest, religion has not supported women and men exploring all sorts of their sides, their unconscious. It has not been supportive of, you know, go into the places without shame, without blame, without judgment, and just let yourself really see what's cooking in there.

- I think human beings are so much more capable of what they told us we're capable of.

- Anyone can attend yoga, kabbalah classes, church, lectures by the 'Dalai Lama', yada, yada, yada - but can you be present for your life, and live with the way you treat other people?

- Only a few people should have a "greatest hits". I'm not one of those people.

- I feel like our leaders have hijacked America's personality, and taken her to personality plastic surgery school. And they decided this is who she is.

- The playground is the biggest war-zone in the world.

- You have to read visionaries to have visions.

- They squash the baby bird because their bird got squashed.

- I love reading. I'll read the first sentence and if it makes sense to me I pick it up.

- It's ridiculous saying there's only one true faith, it's like saying there's only one map to get you up the mountain. I want to see those other maps, man.

- I kinda have all the aspects of my personality round one table for spaghetti.

- If it's too loud, turn it up.

- I was doing drugs with a South American shaman, and I really did visit the devil and, well, I had a journey.

- There is no passion without broken crockery.

- You have to ask, how could a nation nearly vote in somebody who isn't qualified for the job?

- We're living in a frightening time and I wish people would wake up and realise they're surrendering their civil liberties.

- Who wouldn't want to shag a queen?

#rp meme #rp memes #rp starters #roleplay memes #roleplay meme #roleplay starters #tori amos #tori amos quotes

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musherum · 3 years

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like its hard to work up the motivation to nair my arms when i need to, because its something has multiple weeks between it before it gets necessary again and stuff, so i cant like just make it into part of a routine to diminish my barrier to starting???

tho tbh im skeptical of making it into a habit anyway... i feel like trans women can get very caught up occasionally into these routines of feminine body maintenance and end up really policing our bodies and stuff. i mean ultimately the societal notion that women should be without noticeable body hair IS a way that men try to control womens bodies. but at the same time trans women i think its fair to say have a whole nother level of distress we have to cope with re gender dysphoria - its easy for a cis woman to say to me "you dont HAVE to nair ur arms u kno" when shes not the one panicking about having it be seen, worrying about people thinking shes male, getting sick and self loathing for looking like a big masculine testosterone monster, looking at her forearms and seeing the limbs of some strange hairy insect instead of her own... etc

i think for me an ideal long term solution would be to get electrolysis to remove some of the darker hairs that are like. "unusual" for a cis woman of my demo to have, and then i wont have to worry about the rest and i can let my body be without being tormented by dysphoria.

but i worry where this leaves women who demographically WOULD generally have darker more noticeable arm hair. like.... as much as i think cis people just kind of Do Not Understand what i mean when i talk about hating my body hair i also worry that encouraging trans people to confront features that make them dysphoric with physical transition might also give some of them permission to hate parts of their bodies that are like... "normal." i worry that it might spur on feelings of dislike towards their own racialized features or even just towards features of theirs that are maybe just unconventional. i worry that this attitude could be used, for lack of a better term, as a straightening rod. i firmly believe that the attitudes you take towards yourself can end up impressing themselves on others, often in unexpected ways. could my own aggressive dislike of my body hair be something that normalizes other peoples dislike of their own bodies??

i dont know. and it makes me worry. and i wish i could find that synthesis between the importance of loving your body, even if parts of it are considered unusual, versus the need to address the parts of yourself that are causing you pain.

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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War of the Gargantuas

I know it’s not fair to go WTF, Japan? Japan has an entire film industry that I am mostly unfamiliar with. They produce spy thrillers and romcoms and historical dramas in far greater numbers than they do weird-ass monster movies, and I really shouldn’t judge other countries’ cinema when I come from the land that produced Phil the Alien and Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. But then I watch something like War of the Gargantuas and I just… WTF, Japan?

In the first three minutes of this movie, a giant octopus with pulsating red eyes attacks a ship, but a shaggy green giant shows up, pounds the mollusk into submission… and then sinks the boat himself because fuck boats, I guess. The Maritime Safety Board call the heavily medicated Dr. Paul Stuart, who had a ‘young gargantua’ in captivity a few years ago. The creature escaped, but Dr. Stuart and his assistant Akemi insist that it was very gentle and tame, and could never have grown into such a monster. Further investigation reveals that there are two gargantuas, the green one living in the sea and a brown one up in the mountains – and that the green one grew, Reptilicus-style, from a scrap of flesh lost by the brown one! This means, sure enough, that if you blow them to bits you’ll end up with a whole army of the things. Fortunately, no movie with more than one kaiju in it has ever ended without the two of them fighting to the death!

Actually, the ending is way stupider than that. The two giants are in the ocean, kicking each other’s asses, when deus ex volcano suddenly erupts underneath them. This sucked in Legend of the Dinosaurs and sure enough, it sucks here, too. It does provide a solution to the thing where any still-living scrap will grow back, but it renders everything the human characters have done ultimately pointless.

That means, yep, this is yet another movie in which the so-called heroes do nothing! Stuart and Akemi definitely get the most screen time. They travel from place to place, looking for clues and having dull conversations, and a couple of times Akemi gets into peril so that Stuart and the brown giant can save her, but they never really do anything. Nick Adams as Stuart looks like he has about as much idea what’s going on as Tom Holland in any given Avengers movie. Judging by the movements of his lips, he’s speaking English while his co-stars’ lines are in Japanese, so it’s entirely possible he really doesn’t know what anybody’s saying. He wanders around and mutters his lines like he’s high as a kite.

The closest Stuart and Akemi come to doing anything important is in flashback, where we get a brief look at them raising the baby gargantua they found somewhere. This creature looks like a cross between bigfoot and one of those Japanese hot spring monkeys, and we’re supposed to infer a special bond between him and Akemi as she teaches him to drink with a straw. In the movie proper, our supposed heroes urge the military not to blow the giants apart, and insist that the brown one is nice and should be allowed to live. They fail, unequivocally, in both of these endeavors. The army just keeps shooting at the giants with or without permission, and the general decides that the brown giant is an acceptable loss if they can kill the green one. It might have worked slightly better if Brown had been saved by chance at the end, but he isn’t – the volcanic eruption consumes them both.

Since Stuart and Akemi don’t do much, the closest thing we have to an arc in this movie is, believe it or not, the two monsters. They represent the two sides of the kaiju coin – green is the monster that destroys humans, brown is the gentle creature that protects them. The dual nature of Godzilla and his brethren was sufficiently well-established by 1966 that this might be an intentional attempt to comment on the genre, and it’s presented far more explicitly than the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ of monsters in a lot of films. Brown is good and leaves humans alone, except when they need his help – then he goes so far out of his way to save Akemi than he actually breaks a leg when a boulder falls on it. Green is evil, and actively seeks out humans to hurt them.

Green’s behaviour is at times quite shocking for a movie of this type. In a lot of Japanese monster movies, particularly the ones in which the monsters become characters rather than mere forces of nature, human deaths are more implied than shown. We may get shots of people running and screaming and debris falling, and that one guy hanging on to the tree in every single movie that ever had Rodan in it. The aftermath may show people in shelters or hospitals, but the monsters fight in empty streets and we’re often told that the cities they’re smashing have been evacuated. Even when people do die, it’s more as a side effect of a giant creature moving around in a restricted environment. The green giant, however, actually picks up humans and eats them, spitting out the bloody clothes when he’s done! More than once we are actually shown somebody screaming in his grip as he raises the unfortunate victim to his mouth!

This dichotomy could provide the monsters with a good reason to fight, with a lot at stake for the humans, but War of the Gartantuas doesn’t make proper use of the idea. We are never given a clear motive for the conflict that develops between the two giants. When we first see them together, Brown is rescuing Green from the humans who want to hurt him, helping him hide from them and cleaning his wounds. This brotherly relationship falls apart immediately once Brown rescues Akemi, but Green was not the one who put Akemi in danger. Perhaps Brown takes exception to Green eating people, but he never sees Green do that, either. Perhaps he’s supposed to be upset that Green has turned the humans against them both, but the scene in which tourists run screaming from a giant, we can’t see well enough to know if it’s Brown or Green. A little more insight into what the two monsters think of each other and how those feelings change could have been quite interesting.

All this means that even though War of the Gargantuas sounds like it should be ridiculous enough to be a good time, it doesn’t really have a lot to offer. On a level of plot and visuals, this one emerges straight from the pits of WTF Japan that gave us Godzilla vs Megalon and Prince of Space. We have two hairy ogre-faced giants and a gratuitous monster octopus! We’ve got laser gun battles and pretty women in peril and plot twists that make no goddamn sense! Unfortunately, we’re never sufficiently interested in any of these characters, even the monsters, to really care, and the stupid ending leaves us wondering what happened to the WTF Japan movie we started with. I cannot decide if the film takes itself too seriously or not seriously enough, but I feel like a slight nudge in either direction might have done wonders.

In This Island Earth the characters were pretty useless but at least their were some nice things to look at. War of the Gargantuas doesn’t even have much by way of spectacle. Some of the mountain scenery is very nice and tehre’s at least one very pretty matte painting, but there’s very little destruction of miniatures outside of one absolutely stellar moment when Green picks up a row of tanks, one by one, and throws them – each one lands squarely on somebody’s house, which is utterly destroyed… because fuck houses too, they’re basically land boats, am I right? Having discovered that the green giant is afraid of light, the army tries to fight it with lasers. The effect for this is okay but not very interesting, and there are a couple of shots in which the giant costume is definitely on fire. I hope the guy inside it was okay.

Insofar as the movie has anything to say, there’s some vestige present of a point about the trouble that develops when wildlife becomes acclimatized to a human presence. At the beginning of the movie, the green gargantua is afraid of light, and so both the army and civilians use light to force him back into the ocean. Later, however, he realizes that light means people and people mean food. This is somewhat similar to what happens when bears, for example, learn that they can get food from campgrounds. The bears leave their natural niches to go for these easier meals, thus putting both themselves and the humans in danger. The situation is magnified in the movie because people are literally what Green eats, although it never tells us how or why he developed a taste for them.

If this were intended, then the movie neuters it just as it neuters the main human characters, by ending in a volcanic eruption. It’s a dumb coincidence that sucks all the impact out of the film like a narrative black hole.

War of the Gargantuas has also got one of the worst musical numbers I’ve ever seen in a movie, including some of the crap that was on MST3K! There’s a gratuitous song performed by a terrible singer (the song itself is not very good, but it’s mostly her) on a restaurant balcony, oblivious to the monster looming up behind her. I can just hear Tom and Crow chanting “eat her! Eat her!” while Jonah tries helplessly to convince them that’s wrong.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #war of the gargantuas #60s #just fuckin weird

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austincitylimitlessworld · 6 years

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Modern Girls 1986: A Fable Retold

Back in 1986, Siskel and Ebert, in their critique synopsis show “At the Movies” gave this movie two thumbs down. When I re-watch their review today, I can’t help but consider that they failed to grasp the subtext. Call it generational blindness, but upon repeat viewings of the film itself, I began to notice a strange undercurrent. It dawned on me during the final scene in which CeCe, after spending an entire night chasing her dream rock and roller, Bruno X, decides not to go with him to Rio, but rather stay in L.A. with her three friends. I propose to you now that “Modern Girls” is the story of “The Wizard of Oz” as retold through 80s glossy neons and a seemingly cavalier group of young women who have nothing to do.

I know this sounds absurd, but stay with me.

The film itself takes place in the same universe of night clubs and burn out as does “Party Monster” nearly two decades later, but it takes place on Los Angeles rather than New York, and in real time rather than as a retrospect written by a real-life sensationalist club kid turned author. The characters here are fictional, and a fraction older than Alig and St. James during their hey-day. Our three initial protagonists, Margo, Kelly, and CeCe work at dead-end McJobs despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that Margo holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature, Kelly is beautiful enough to be a model, and CeCe has an entrepreneurial spirit. Nonetheless, they are relegated—as so many of my generation were—to cold phone calling, working at a pet shop, and selling clothes at a second-rate department store. On the day in question, CeCe, who we’ll find out in a

moment is our Dorothy character, is fired for trying to reach a young shopping crowd by “distressing”* a pair of jeans.

The trio heads home to their bachelorette pad, where they convene on a typical early evening ritual: a few quiet hours on a Friday dusk. CeCe has decided that she desperately needs a night out. She has not divulged to her roommates that she has lost her job and they have no real reason to suspect anything. The department store-- and by extension their plastic-decored apartment—has become her Kansas. Everything is mundane, from her low-end job to their daily routines as roommates; even supposedly thrilling nights out at various night clubs all around town. She craves something else, something to take her out of all this sameness. Eventually the answer comes in the form of a fictionalized one-hit-wonder MTV star named Bruno X. Bruno is, on the surface, sort of an amalgam of Billy Idol, Sid Vicious, and Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode. Within the context of the movie, though, Bruno is the Fortuneteller/Wizard, who both ushers CeCe into a night of wish fulfillment but also forms the catalyst for her realizing that in the end she prefers reality to fantasy.

But I digress.

At the start of the night, the girls’ plan to have a no-holds-barred evening out is thwarted by Kelly, who has taken the car to go after a D.J. boyfriend who treats her abysmally. Fortunately for the Margo and CeCe, Kelly’s would-be date Clifford shows up with a vehicle borrowed from one of his driver’s ed students. Now Kelly is beautiful yet lacks any belief in herself and the journey truly begins with her betrayal; she is a stand-in for the Scarecrow, who is the first character Dorothy comes across in TWOO. Clifford is the Cowardly Lion who seems to have no courage when it comes to either women (he scored this date with Kelly by buying a bird from her and when that doesn’t catch her attention he goes back to buy three more) or the world-at-large (like the women, he works a menial job but in actuality is a bookworm who laments “Nobody reads in L.A.”) In a sense, Kelly and Clifford suffer from the same milieu—they are at odds with the world around them yet cannot initiate any change into their lives on their own.

In contrast, Margo (whom a quiz in Cosmo defines as ten points bitchier than Kelly) and CeCe (six point sexier), seem to have more of an ability to change things; only they don’t recognize it in themselves at the outset. As we’ve already defined CeCe as Dorothy, let’s take a look at Margo.

*Distressing: purposefully ripping clothes during the manufacturing process in order to increase their value. This was a very trendy look in the 80s and is making a comeback in the new millennium.

Margo is the Tin Man. She seemingly has no heart. Her façade is one of cool detachment, yet as CeCe tells Clifford: “When Kelly had no place to live, Margo took her in and took care of her. And me, when I’m broke, Margo just ‘forgets’ to ask me for my share of the rent.” Margo is the most obvious study of character arc in this movie. She is the one who outwardly has the most growth. Yet, unlike CeCe—who starts out as a silly daydreamer and learns to be happy where she is by the end of the film—you know that Margo has it in her the whole time. Out of the three roommates, she is the smartest and savviest. It is she who orchestrates the adventures of the evening, and as we join her and her two companions at their first club, she reveals to Clifford that she has dated nearly every man in the place. When he asks about them, she callously lists their imperfections, ranging from “great body, but hairy shoulders” to “oh he’s so nice…boring”. She seems jaded, and perhaps rightfully so. The city is full of jerks. In the parlance of Oz speak, she has no heart. She has forced herself to become hollow so as to deal with the myriad of freaks and losers she has had to endure.

Speaking of Oz itself, as a place it translates to the succession of clubs they visit during this night’s journey. Although the first one they visit is clearly familiar as indicated by Margo’s knowledge of its regulars, it stands in place of Munchkin land. Downtown L.A. is a veritable concrete sea of yellow-brick-roadness, and Bruno X is the wizard they are all chasing down as a favor to CeCe, who fancies him as the solution to her disillusioned life. Every stop along the way from Sharkey’s Bar, where Kelly, in a misplaced effort of trying to find her strength through a drug haze is abandoned by two sideline characters Ray and Tanya is instead nearly raped to the Goth themed Club Voodoo where Clifford exclaims “Everyone here looks suicidal!” are replacements for different outlying areas of Oz. Sharkey’s is the haunted wood, fraught with danger; Club Voodoo is The Wicked Witch of the West’s castle, where all hope goes to die. By the end of the night, they have heeded their own yellow brick road including the famed Hollywood Walk of Fame and a mural which reads “You are the star”.

As the darkness wears on, Margo becomes more and more frustrated at CeCe’s scatter-brained desires. They have been chased by terrorists after they follow the wrong limo, until they are forced to take cover behind an alley dumpster. A short time later, Margo has broken one of her stilettoes. She and Clifford are lagging half a block behind CeCe, who is still determined to find the savior that will take her away from a life she finds barely tolerable. They pass a bookstore. Clifford stops to scan some of the titles in the street lights. “Nobody reads in L.A.” he laments. It is here that Margo confesses that she was a comparative lit major, and there is a momentary recognition between the two, yet Margo, trying to maintain her Tin Man like exterior quickly covers by quipping “I mostly majored in men”.

“And how were your grades in that subject?” Clifford asks.

“Lousy. But I’m not giving up. I know the perfect guy is out there.”

“What’s perfect? A guy with perfect teeth, big balls and a nice car?”

“Well, so I have my standards.”

“Sure. No reason you should have to settle for a human being.”

She throws her broken shoe at him, and in exasperation responds “Just give me a break, will you?”

“Why don’t you stop looking so hard? I will if you will.”

Her façade breaks and they kiss. The Tin Man curse is lifted.

Meanwhile, Kelly, although still fragile, has found some semblance of self during the night. It will be a work in progress, but one gets the sense that she has also broken a long-held mistaken belief that she is worthless without a man. She is no longer the Scarecrow dancing to please for the jilters and the would-be rapists. Instead, she can rely on her urban family to pull her through as she learns how to stand on her own. Likewise, Clifford has stopped being cowardly and stood up for himself as a man by challenging undoubtedly the most intimidating of the bunch, Margo. The irony here is that, just as Kelly has always been more intelligent than people gave her credit for, and Margo undoubtedly always had a heart, Clifford always had courage.

But what of our Dorothy, you may ask. Well, at dawn they reach the Santa Monica Airport, where CeCe has learned along the way that Bruno will be boarding his private jet for Rio. Rio is CeCe’s Emerald City and Bruno is the Wizard who will grant her the wish she has wanted throughout the course of this movie. The twist here is that while Dorothy knew all along she wanted to return to Kansas, CeCe consciously wanted to leave it. Yet they reach the same conclusion.

As CeCe prepared to leave her friends behind at the saccharine (perhaps sincere) promises of Bruno, something in her sits uneasily in regards to this decision. She finally breaks the spell when Bruno offers to “take care of everything”. It occurs to her that this would mean sacrificing her own will, her independence, and her very life as she knows it. Suddenly the fairy tale doesn’t seem so tantalizing anymore. She wouldn’t be the author of her own story; someone else would. She halts.

“Cecelia, what’s the matter?” her dream man inquires.

“I don’t think I can go with you.”

He becomes visibly perturbed that his self-proclaimed dream girl, whom he has been pursuing all night, has suddenly and inexplicably changed her mind. “One,” he demands, gesturing purposefully, “give me one good reason why not.”

“Because…I don’t want you to take care of everything,” is her answer. This is her proclamation that “There’s no place like home.” She has shed her childish mooning, and moves toward the embrace of her two long-time pals and her new friend “Cliffy” as she calls him.

This was the “A-ha!” moment for me in the movie. I had watched it all the way through, just as I had as a teenager, enjoying it as a mindless romp. But now I had to rethink it entirely from the beginning.

#modern girls 1986 #virginia madsen #daphne zuniga #cynthia gibb #film review #film critique #camp film

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darwin-xf · 6 years

Text

Close through the Dark

Just some pillow talk from circa SOSS. Good clean fun. The rest is at AO3. The middle chapter is filthy fun, but you can skip it just fine. If that’s not your thing. Sorry if you saw this. Penultimate chapter of Vox coming very soon! xo-D

————————————————-

“That was it.” Mulder said, some minutes after they had collapsed to the bed.

They lay side by side in the near dark of his bedroom, his fingers laced behind his neck, his eyes idly following the shifting shadows on the ceiling. She was sprawled on her stomach, close but not touching him, her face half buried in a pillow. She emitted an occasional satiated murmur.

“That was what?” she asked, lazily.

“That was the best sex I’ve ever had. Red hot monkey sex, Scully. That was some primitive bootknocking.”

Her laugh settled into a smirk, her eyes still closed.

“Was it ok when I…”

“More than ok.” In fact, their encounter had been playing behind her eyelids as she drifted next to him. She stole toward him and kissed the underside of his jaw, then rested her head on the landing strip of his chest.

“Good,” he said, circling his arms around her and giving her a squeeze. “I would normally, uh, ask first...”

“That’s not bad as a general rule,” she said. “But I think I set the tone, Mulder. For this particular soirée.”

“I picked up on that,” he said, smiling at her.

“I’m not really sure what came over me...”

He shrugged, complaining the furthest thing from his mind. Also, never good for Scully to overthink. In bed, anyway.

His window was open a sliver, allowing the city’s dusky spring hum to wash over them. Bars coughed patrons back up to the sidewalks as happy hour timed out, more carefree and certainly louder. All over the city clusters of tight blossoms weighed down limbs. A night bird trilled nearby and light from a million bulbs worked its way around the edges of his blinds which swayed and rattled in the breeze. A car alarm blared fruitlessly several blocks away.

“Why do the best words for sex all originate from the French?” he asked, leaning down to kiss her mouth. “Tonight’s...skirmish, you might be interested to know, took over the top spot from the rendezvous we had last Thursday.”

“You have a list? Have you been making reports on me from the beginning, Mulder? Taking your little notes?”

“That water isn’t from the faucet, is it Scully?” he asked, gesturing to the half-empty glass they’d been sharing.

“Jug in the fridge.”

“Good. Nothing for the record. It’s all up here,” he said, tapping his temple.

She lifted her head and looked at him. “What did we…?” A slow smile spread across her face. “Oh yeah. Thursday was nice.”

“Last Thursday beat out our power lunch from three Mondays ago, if you must know, which, at this point, is taking the bronze. Nipped it at the wire,” Mulder said.

She looked at him quizzically. Their physical intimacy had been progressing nicely. Which, if pressed, she might admit was an understatement.

“Lunch is a contemporary English word. Nineteenth Century, I think. Luncheon. Power is Latin in origin maybe? But I’m pretty sure it comes to us via Anglo-Norman French as the verb poeir-to be able to. Why aren’t German words sexy, Scully?”

“I can never decide whether your capacity for remembering literally everything except my birthday is more a curse or a blessing,” she said, dragging her fingers through his shorn hair. “You’re so minky,” she muttered, nipped at his pec.

“Me neither,” he said. “But when it comes to this,” he said, wagging his index finger between them, “It’s all good.”

“Hmmmm,” she agreed.

“I’ll work on the birthday thing.”

She snorted. “I won’t hold my breath.”

“We celebrated this year.”

“You invited me to dinner after you overheard Skinner wish me a Happy Birthday.”

“You noticed that? How does Skinner remember your birthday? Why does he? He never mentions my birthday.”

“I’ve never taken a swing at him.”

“You’ve held a gun on him though. And accused him of treason.”

“I guess he’s the forgiving type.”

“Good thing, or he would have canned me ages ago.”

“That's true.”

“There was that one time. Just before we left for Wisconsin? We sang in the bar?”

“Three years ago? I was dying of cancer, Mulder. Even Bill Junior sent a card.”

“Scully, I…”

“It was nice all the same. You don’t often have occasion to see sparklers in February. I never got to eat my Snowball, though.”

Scully peeled herself away and stood at the end of the bed, pressing her arms skyward with hands clasped in a deep stretch, dark in her hollows, not a stitch on. His eyes went soft, taking her in, as his tongue toyed with the sore spot on his freshly split lip.

“There’s a dirty joke there somewhere, but I’m too distracted to think of it.”

————————————————-

They had pulled on some clothes and were at his dining table eating toast and lentil soup.

“Is this from a can?” Scully said, pointing toward her bowl with her spoon. “It’s good. It tastes like my mom’s.”

“It is your mom’s” he said. “She gave me a quart of it from her freezer at Thanksgiving. She insisted.”

“She probably thinks you’re too skinny. And generally a helpless bachelor.”

“I’ll take what I can get. Besides, I like her. I’ve never met a Scully woman I didn’t like.”

“Remember Aunt Maura, my dad’s spinster sister? She’s kind of a drag.”

“With the lavender hair?”

“That’s her. Mom only invites her out of obligation.”

“She seemed like kind of a sourpuss,” Mulder agreed.

“Who spends all of Thanksgiving dinner with people you might see twice a year complaining about noisy children and the lack of amenities on their recent cruise?”

“I kept wanting to ask her about her hair. But I thought it might be rude.”

“You have good manners, Mulder. But, you've never spent time with my mom as my lover.”

“True. You weren’t putting out in November.”

“Not that you know of.”

“Touché, Scully,” he sad. “But you weren’t, right?”

She just shook her head. He went back to his soup.

“Wait. If memory serves, we engaged in some pretty hot premarital intercourse on my sofa not a half hour before meeting your mother for brunch. This was, like, months ago.”

“We did more than that. There was very little room for the Holy Spirit, as I recall. But she didn’t know that. And what, Monster Boy, do you mean by premarital?”

“You know what I mean. Does she know now? That we’re... going steady?”

“Hints have been dropped. Also, we played some serious footsie at brunch. Not to mention I brought you to brunch. She’s not an idiot.”

“Huh. You know what I think, Scully? I think your mother knew what we were to each other long before we did.”

“Maybe she did.”

“I’m not sure how...”

“Well, I’ve heard stories that you can get…a little...intense when I’m incapacitated.”

“You know how the rumor mill is.”

She laughed. Down in the street, someone yelled “Debbie, don’t do this to me!” the plaintive wail echoing up through the corridors of buildings.

“Maybe we should close the windows,” she said.

“It doesn’t bother me. For once I’m about to curl up with my favorite warm body and someone else is acting like a lunatic and going home alone.”

“It’s nice up here,” she said.

“I couldn’t believe your mom gave me your cross to hold, when you were gone. I was afraid I’d lose it. I wore it for a while.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, well I don’t have a jewelry box.”

She smirked at him.

He looked down and smiled, still shy around her from time to time. “I’m just glad I got the chance to give it back.”

“I still have that football video you gave me that day. Somewhere. Maybe I’ll even watch it one day.”

“I was very suave, wasn’t I? Also, a jackass.”

“To me, you were adorable, all sleepy eyed and meek, drowning in some green grandpa windbreaker. You’ve filled out since then,” she said, running her eyes over his bare chest and arms.

“I was so relieved. And petrified. I wanted to scoop you up and snatch you away to my lair forever. Or else turn on my heel and spare you ever seeing me again. I fought those dueling impulses for years, where you were concerned. I was more like the monster from Beowulf than boyfriend material. Grendel.”

“Who wrote Beowulf?” she asked. I had to read that in AP Lit.”

“Anonymous. The same person who wrote Go Ask Alice, a cautionary tale to warn prim young women of the perils of the fast life.”

“Prolific,” Scully said. “And such range. Too bad the name is lost to history.”

“I’ve always wanted to name a dog Grendel.”

“Not a fish?”

He stood up and made his way toward his fish tank. They flashed and scrummed near the surface as he approached—barefoot and boxered, her favorite look—and darted after the flakes as he tapped them into the tank.

“Grendel was hairy and bipedal. Mammalian. Omnivorous and moody. He lived with his mother. All wrong for a fish.”

It occurred to her that Mulder wanted to honor this Medieval mythical monster like a long dead but fondly remembered great uncle, the story of Grendel more plausible to him than Jonah and the Whale to most Christians.

“I’m glad you didn’t succumb to any of those impulses,” she said. “And I’m glad we seem to have found some middle ground.”

Finish at AO3...

#x files #msr #today in fic #18 plus

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elizadoolittlethings · 6 years

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https://www.room207press.com/2018/01/we-dont-go-back-76-league-of-gentlemen.html

Friday, 19 January 2018

We Don't Go Back #76: The League of Gentlemen (1999-2017)

When

The League of Gentlemen

was first broadcast, I didn't own a TV, and by the time I owned one, I was living with my Beloved, who didn't have any interest in seeing it. Nonetheless, I could tell you a not insignificant amount about the major characters, and reel off catchphrases. I could tell you what it was like. People cared about it. Partly this was because several of my friends adored it, and it entered the referential lexicon of our conversation. But partly it seemed to be present, part of the furniture of our pop culture.

For example, I remember that at the time the university LGB society (the T or the Q were not yet added, which is related to a point I'll pick up later) used pictures of prominent gay and lesbian people on posters for an anti-homophobia campaign and one of them was Mark Gatiss, and I recognised him as the chap from

The League of Gentlemen

. It's fair to say that

The League of Gentlemen

fell firmly into the category of things I'd never seen but which I could take part in a conversation about without getting completely lost.

I never got round to watching

The League of Gentlemen

But now this project is Serious Business, there are some things I can't really get away with leaving out. So I committed myself to watching it. A good friend expressed concern that it might be too late for me to do that. I sort of half understood what he was getting at, but only really got what he was about having worked through it.

The usual caveats about how writing about comedy are the antithesis of funny apply here, by the way (I still think my funniest article was the one about

Planet of the Apes

, but I digress).

Honest town signs.

The League of Gentlemen

are Reese Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson. All four of them write; Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith appear in front of the camera and divide the vast majority of characters, men and women, between them.

It's set in and around the fictional village of Royston Vasey ("You'll never leave!"), in the North of England, where everyone is a grotesque. It's sort of but not entirely sketch comedy.

Some characters appear in most of the episodes: Pauline (Pemberton), who runs a job start course, loves pens and despises the unemployed; Mike (Pemberton), Barry (Gatiss) and their spectacularly messed up mate Geoff (Shearsmith); disappointed musician Les McQueen (Gatiss); Mr Chinnery the vet (Gatiss again), who kills every animal he touches; Hilary Briss the butcher (also Gatiss) who puts something terrible and evil in his delicious sausages; and perhaps the most iconic characters in the show, Edward and Tubbs (Shearsmith and Pemberton), a pair of debased, depraved yokels who run a Local Shop for Local People and who visit unspeakable fates on anyone who comes who isn't Local.

What's all this SHOUTING?

But unlike many sketch shows, the recurring characters' stories progress from episode to episode. So for example, the fate of innocent Benjamin (Shearsmith) at the hands of his finicky aunt Val (Gatiss) and monstrous uncle Harvey (Pemberton) develops and escalates as he realises he might never be able to leave, and begins to formulate a plan of escape. Pauline finds her nemesis in one of her course attendees. Mr Briss's Special Stuff creates an epidemic of nosebleeds.

Many characters appear in no more than a handful of episodes at most, and become the focus of the episodes they're in. The Legz Akimbo theatre company (slogan: "put yourself in a child!") come to visit the local school but their internal tensions destroy the group. A guide leads a party of tourists through the Royston Vasey caves, while replaying a terrible tragedy for which he blames himself. A farmer keeps a man who slept with his wife as a scarecrow in his field. Kenny Harris (Gatiss), owner of the Dog Cinema, engages in a cutthroat business struggle with a rival who's more into cat films.

And then there's Papa Lazarou.

HELLO, DAVE!

Papa Lazarou (Shearsmith) is the single most nightmarish creation of the League of Gentlemen, and along with Tubbs and Edward, is most representative of the show's folk horror elements. He's the owner of the Pandemonium Carnival, which comes to town early in series 2. Papa Lazarou is a nightmare in human form, his scabrous face caked in black-and-white minstrel makeup. He forces his way into people's houses, insisting on calling them "Dave", and intimidating them through an almost supernatural power of domination into giving him their wedding ring, wherein he spirits them away as his slaves, with the phrase, "You're my wife now."

He is genuinely terrifying, and I wonder how that first episode he's in would play if it didn't have a laugh track (only the first two seasons have laugh tracks). And of course he's one of the two places where people most take offence at

The League of Gentlemen.

The most usual objection to Papa Lazarou is that he's in minstrel blackface. But while minstrel makeup is a blot on our culture, it is, it's obvious from the way that Papa Lazarou is framed is that he's supposed to be horrific because he's precisely the sort of person who wears blackface and always wears it.

In his second appearance (the final episode of series 3) there's an insane visual gag revolving around him disguising himself as relatively normal by painting a pale skin tone

over

his blackface makeup, which I found hilarious. But it's also a bit of a problem for a lot of viewers, evidently, because I've read at least two pieces online that interpret the scene as meaning that he's naturally minstrel-toned, which is... Well, I don't know. I'm starting to doubt my own reading a bit, but part of Papa Lazarou's grotesquerie is that you can see how the black and white paint is caked on his face in closeup, and I'm sort of inclined to go with my original reading, partly because it's much less hard to swallow, and mostly because it's a lot funnier.

The League of Gentlemen

is part of a tradition of British comedy and horror alike that deals with grotesque figres: in a show with Geoff, Mr Briss, Pauline, Harvey and, oh God, Edward and Tubbs, Papa Lazarou is just one more of a parade of freaks and monsters. And he is scary, really scary. The episode where Papa Lazarou and his Pandemonium Carnival comes to town (season 2, episode 1) is the point where I moved from a state of "that bit was pretty good" ambivalence to understanding why people consider

The League of Gentlemen

to be an undisputed classic of British TV comedy. Whatever the framing of Papa Lazarou and his freakshow (and notwithstanding the arguments about whether anyone should be making gags about blackface at all, the politics of freakshows is a subject I am simply not equipped to get into), that whole episode is a delirious comic horror and I have seen little to match it.

I can't go to Dorothy Perkins.

The other point where

The League of Gentlemen

gets some flak is in the figure of Babs the transgender cabbie. And the joke with Babs is partly that she's butch and hairy, so that she looks like a bloke in drag (specifically that she resembles the other women characters on the show, only more so), and partly that she's excessively forthcoming about the mechanical details of her transition with her clients. It's complicated by the fact that most of the people of Royston Vasey like her and are supportive of her. No one on the show is ever an open bigot about Babs. She's never deadnamed, for instance. And she's essentially one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. But nonetheless she embodies most of the most enduring transphobic stereotypes, simply by being so grotesque (so much so that we never see her face).

And back in 1999, as I mentioned in passing, we still talked about LGB issues and a lot of us hadn't added the T yet. And it's not as if trans people hadn't been there all along, but trans rights are in the general sphere of discourse now in a way that in the UK they weren't in the 90s. And this doesn't mean that a character like Babs isn't a problem, it means that many of the people who might be aware of the problem now weren't then because it hadn't been pointed out to them. And that isn't an excuse either. It's like all the history that comes back, unresolved, to haunt us.

You could tell that it haunted

The League of Gentlemen

: in the special episodes that aired over the 2017 Christmas season, she's back. She has to be, really: in a lot of ways, Babs acts like a Greek chorus for the unfolding story. So here she is, opening proceedings as ever. Barbara has transitioned successfully now, and she even says that trans people should not be "a source of cheap laughs" just for being who they are, and given that Barbara is a character who has always been framed as having her heart in the right place, as someone you're supposed to sympathise with, it's pretty clear that this is what Dyson, Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith actually think.

But for her to even appear, and it's more or less obligatory that she does, she still has to supply a joke. So now, no longer an Ugly Trans Person, Barbara is an Excessively Touchy Trans Person who seizes on innocuous statements and takes offence to comic effect.

I wonder if Papa Lazarou and Barbara are problems like this because of the way

The League of Gentlemen

engages with its inspirations.

The League of Gentlemen

owes a great deal to classic British TV and cinema of the 60s and 70s, but crucially it engages with that source material in a way that enriches the show. It's instructive here to compare it with

Dr Terrible's House of Horrible

, which is roughly contemporary and which, unlike

The League of Gentlemen

, has not entered the annals of classic comedy. They both get their inspiration from similar places, in fact in several cases the same places – I mentioned

The League of Gentlemen

's odd relationship with sketch comedy, and it's sort of fair to say that it's sketch comedy in the way that an Amicus anthology horror is sketch horror. But where

Dr Horrible

depended on your being familiar with the source material, at least to some extent, to get the gag,

The League of Gentlemen

tells a collection of stories that don't depend on any foreknowledge at all. It's not a parody, and it's not entirely an homage either, although it has parodic elements and homage is threaded through the whole thing.

Rather, it's a comedy that focusses on the absurdity of evil and the equal absurdity of despair and that uses the grammar of classic British horror to tell those stories.

A Beast.

For example, a narrative thread in the fourth episode has workers on a proposed road digging up an inexplicable creature. Mr Chinnery comes to examine it, and proves as incompetent as ever. And while the scene carries a bunch of signifiers that come from Nigel Kneale, echoing

Quatermass

and

Beasts

in particular, and multiplied by the simple fact that Mr Chinnery looks and acts like Tristan Farnham (Peter Davison's character in

All Creatures Great and Small

), the joke doesn't depend on that. It depends on a moment of uncanny horror punctured when the vet's incompetence is revealed once more.

For the joke to land, you don't have to have seen

Baby

Quatermass and the Pit

, and while the whole scene is richer if you imagine Tristan Farnham in a Nigel Kneale script, that's not the joke. No, for the joke to land, you just need to have seen Mr Chinnery in action enough for you to be waiting for the moment when he fails catastrophically.

And throughout

The League of Gentlemen

, this texture is present. Royston Vasey is a vaguely comical, Northern-sounding name. But it is also the real name of legendarily foul-mouthed comedian Roy "Chubby" Brown, who himself appears later in the series as the town's mayor. And the joke with the mayor is that he's got a swearing problem, and that's a simple enough joke that you don't need to know who Roy "Chubby" Brown is, or that he's guesting as mayor of a town named after him to get it. That other stuff helps, but it isn't essential.

But the problem with the way that

The League of Gentlemen

mines classic horror and comedy is that sometimes it homages the things that perhaps should be left behind, so you get characters like Babs and Papa Lazarou, who are both beautifully played and well-written comic characters, but who reference stuff that is difficult to justify beyond nostalgia.

The League of Gentlemen

is important as the first sign of the folk horror renaissance that we've had in the last few years. Rather than saying "look at all these ropey old films! Aren't they terrible?"

The League of Gentlemen

embraces them, but crucially makes new things. It's a comedy, but it's also a horror: Edward and Tubbs reference any number of pagan village conspiracies. "We didn't burn him!" blurts Tubbs to the Scottish policeman who comes looking for poor missing Martin, but not before Edward tells Tubbs that she "did it beautifully." You don't have to know that they're quoting

The Wicker Man

to think they're funny and scary.

There's nothing for

you

here.

The members of

The League of Gentlemen

have taken active part in the rise of folk horror as a recognised genre. Jeremy Dyson scripted the recent film

Ghost Stories.

Shearsmith of course starred in

A Field in England

, and with Pemberton continues to make

Inside No. 9

, an anthology show that combines comedy and drama, and which has had at least a couple of folk horror episodes. The most notable of these is

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

, where Pemberton and Shearsmith play 17th century witch hunters. Just like

The League of Gentlemen

The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge

isn't a spoof or a parody, it's a black comedy that stands on its own merits, even while it draws inspiration from other sources.

And Reese Shearsmith took part in Folk Horror Revival's 2016 event at the British Museum, hearing about which is how I realised that there was a name for the things I liked.

Mark Gatiss is the man who might be credited for extending the name "folk horror" to a genre (Piers Haggard being the first to apply it consciously to his own film). In his 2010 series

History of Horror

, Gatiss popularised the idea of the Unholy Trinity, and talked at length about

Blood on Satan's Claw

, which probably did more to bring about the critical reassessment of that film than anything else. Gatiss also wrote

Crooked House

, which aired on the BBC in 2008, and the 2013 adaptation of

The Tractate Middoth.

Together with Shearsmith, Gatiss has remade

Blood on Satan's Claw

as an audio drama (released January 2018).

You could argue pretty persuasively that without

The League of Gentlemen

, there might not have been a rebirth of interest in folk horror at all. Without them, it would still be an accidental genre. A local genre, for local people.

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Howard Ingham

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lushscreamqueen · 3 years

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HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND on The Schlocky Horror Picture Show

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Hello, good evening, and welcome to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. I'm your host, Nigel Honeybone. Witness tonight, if you dare, a handful of girls enslaved by a diabolical human beast on an island where there is no way out! Watch him strangle his victims with his mammoth claws! One bite from a giant spider turns a man into the world's most hideous monster with a diabolical lust to kill, craving the blood of beautiful women! Shock upon shock, terror upon terror, in the blood-curdling, hair-raising, spine-chilling, Horrors Of Spider Island! And all that just from the poster art... BREAK: Dare to invade the beast's realm and prepare to witness things no human was ever meant to see...then after the ads we can get back to The Horrors Of Spider Island On The Schlocky Horror Picture Show. MIDDLE: Welcome back to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show and, well, I'm not exactly sure where to begin with The Horrors Of Spider Island. From the poor black and white photography, horrendous dubbing, low-grade production values, completely idiotic characters, stock footage padding, Z grade monster effects and sheer schlock factor, this movie is loaded with all the proper ingredients for a true cinematic train wreck. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, I find it not only watchable but strangely, and dare I say disturbingly enthralling as it unfolds. It isn't just the sight of all that female flesh on parade. Sure, a couple of the girls are curvy and cute, but I don't really find them that attractive to look at, and just a few shots of these whiny, complaining broads stomping around the so-called "jungle" will pretty much cure even the worst case of girl trouble. And Babs! Wow, look out! That woman is almost Amazonesque. In some shots she looks beefier than Gary! I could almost hear the cabin creaking and shaking in despair as she clomps around inside. Don't get me wrong, I like a woman with more meat on her bones, but she sometimes looks like it was her that ate the flight crew. A few more days on the island and Spider-Gary might not have been the only one hunting down the survivors. The strange appeal of The Horrors Of Spider Island certainly isn't because of the monster, either. Spider-Gary has got to be one of the silliest monsters, in both execution and origin, to ever grace the silver screen. He looks more like a dog-faced boy than a spider-monster, and the finished product looks like one of those portraits of inbred royalty a few centuries back that were covered in hair from head to toe. It certainly doesn't remind me of a spider. He doesn't climb walls, sprout extra limbs or shoot webs out of his backside and his so-called rampage is about as thrilling and scary as the speed humps in a shopping centre parking lot. The poster artwork for the film really makes it out that once transformed, Gary became a veritable killing machine. Well, what kind of killing machine takes a three and a half-week break between kills? That's not a rampage, that's just an annoyance. Any interest generated by this film is not because of a riveting story with earnest characters. Most of the girls seem like carbon copies of one another and the plot is as about as exciting as an afternoon doing your taxes. Most of the women are portrayed as weak, incompetent, mostly useless and utterly unprepared to survive, while the film makes it clear that all the male characters are the leaders, saviors and clearheaded thinkers. The only problem is, these guys are still morons. Gary walks off by himself and gets bitten. Moron. Bob, knowing full well that there is something dangerous on the island responsible for at least two deaths, be it man or beast, still walks off alone so he can have a private tryst with Gladys. Moron. Joe is the only guy with some semblance of a brain, and naturally the film plays him up as being somewhat inexperienced with the ladies. While we're at it, let's talk about production values, or the complete lack thereof. This film just looks terrible. I don't know if it's because the film print hasn't aged very well, or if it's because the

cinematographer should have been shot for incompetence. Some scenes are entirely too dark, even in the infamous day-for-night shots used in times past, while other shots are almost blindingly bright. Continuity was a word that was evidently not in the vocabulary of the producers. A twin engine plane later has four engines, a dead woman is at first under then above the water level of a pond, and the sun seems to rise and set at the drop of a hat. However, by far the worst continuity error is the Spider-Gary make-up. It's apparent that all the close-ups of Spider-Gary were shot separately. This is evidenced by the fact that in nearly all of them, he is standing in a black void, as if shot in a dark studio. Still, in these close-ups his entire transformation can be seen, fur covered face, dagger-like teeth, hairy hands and long fingernails. Yet in all the location shots, it's obvious that the actor is only wearing the hairy hands and claws, but his head appears as normal as ever. True, this is hidden somewhat by the crappy lighting and use of shadows, but it can still be spotted. Since this was a Yugoslavian/West German production, when the film made it's way to American shores it had to be dubbed into English. Now, who out there honestly say that they have ever seen a foreign-language film with good dubbing? Sure, some films are better than others, but depending on the original language with which the film was shot, and how it differs from English, dub jobs can get pretty bad. Horrors Of Spider Island is no exception. At times it's just okay, while at other times it's horribly bad. Some of the girl's voices are just so bland that I wonder if the same woman provides the voices for all of them, a bit like Sylvia Anderson voicing most of the female parts in Gerry Anderson productions, they all start to sound like Lady Penelope. Still, despite these setbacks, there is an overall sense of unbelievable awe at the hokiness of it all that transcends the crappy building blocks and elevates the film, just ever so barely, to the level of fun bad movie making. In much the same way people stare morbidly at train or traffic accidents, this movie compels the viewer to keep watching, if only to see where the wreck is going to finally stop. Place your bets as we enter the second scarifying part of The Horrors Of Spider Island! CLOSING: Pow! The movie is over. No "The End," no end credits, just bang, like a slap in the face, the viewer is jolted back to reality. Or maybe I watched a badly edited dud copy. Horrors Of Spider Island leaves more unanswered questions than 2001: A Space Odyssey. What happened to the flight crew of the plane? Did they all die on impact or did some survive only to die later? Were there any other passengers other than Gary and the dancers? If so, what became of them? Gary and the gang were afloat in that raft for four days before they found the island. That would be more than enough time to dispose of any extraneous people draining their dwindling water supply. Where did those funky spiders come from, anyway? Were they just some previously unknown species that was native to that island, or did the local uranium deposits have anything to do with their far-out appearance? Enquiring minds want to know! Why didn't the professor turn into a monster when the spider got him? One bite and Gary becomes Spider-monster, but the Professor remains unchanged, other than being quite dead. Maybe he wasn't bitten? Perhaps the Spider just stuck him in the web and the poor old guy died before he could extricate himself. If so, how did that little spider, as big as it is, get a grown man off the floor and into such a perfectly spun web? Or maybe it was a gang of spiders that broke into the Professor's crib and whacked him? What the devil did Spider-Gary do for those twenty-five undocumented days? No one saw or heard a thing from him. He must have eaten something! Maybe he snacked on the Professor's corpse! Still, you'd think that at some point the ladies would have seen or heard something of his presence on the island. On

the other hand, maybe he spent the whole time cooped up in that hollow tree. Yes, that must be it. After being bitten by a funky spider and turning into a Wolfman clone, I'd hide out of sheer embarrassment, too. Still, he did manage to keep his trousers in near-pristine condition all that time. No doubt he dropped his dacks and wiped his backside with something when nature called. Hey, he may be a monster, but he still has standards! Anyway, just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Public Domain I shall return next week with another brain-bursting b-grader, so please join me as I again guide you through an atmosphere-filled excursion to the dark side of The Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Toodles!

by Lushscreamqueen

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ohokimdumb · 7 years

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SONG/IMAGINE/ZEKE

“Die for you...”

I was called to war as a Medical assistant to stay and care for the injured along and within the trenches of the battlefield. I a bit anxious; I had never gone to a war before. The general always ordered me to stay behind and work at the local hospital to put my psychology skills, to the test and try to assist the doctors with their patients.

I had a feeling Zeke despised the idea of them sending me along with him to the front lines. While the general was speaking to me in the meeting room, Zeke wouldn’t take his eyes of me, and they were filled with...what seemed like fear. Sometimes I believed he didn’t I was strong enough...

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Bombs were thrown around the battlefield; loud explosions deafened my ears for seconds at a time. Guns were firing, people were peaking and ducking. I remained down and tended to an injured soldier, trying to wrap up his bullet would as quickly as I could to stop the bleeding.

I looked up and saw the plane above us, knowing Zeke was up there, about to start the assault.

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Zeke’s POV

I kept peeking out the window, trying to spot her from below. I can’t believe the general actually wanted her on the battlefield; to risk losing such an intelligent and important scientist/psychologist, just because we’re low on front line medical help? I growled at the thought. I felt a hand land on my shoulder and I peaked behind me; Reiner.

“You doing alright, Zeke? You seem a bit distracted.” Reiner said worried.

“I’m well, I just...never mind that.” I said annoyed and pushed his hand off my shoulder.

“We’re about to start the assault, and Reiner, I don’t want a mess like last time. It was my fault we almost lost the Armored Titan, but it was also your responsibility to know your limits.” I explained to him as I pulled my goggles over my eyes.

“Open the door and ready the assault!” I yelled over the loud plane propellers.

The large plane door slowly went down and the tied men and women injected with the titan substance we’re slowly ejected from the plane, and I readied myself. I screamed, loud...obnoxiously loud, and within seconds. They all turned into large, man eating monsters. They fell one by one and tore their core apart. I jumped from the airplane and pulled my parachute, slowly falling to my position. I grabbed my knife and cut my hand, activating my titan form and crashing against the floor. Machinery was thrown, destroyed; their weapons we’re useless to us. Reiner was doing exceptionally well this time. Then out of pure luck, I hear a loud screaming order towards the enemy men.

“If we bombard the front lines machinery, we can just focus what’s in the core!” A man yelled as an order, and my yellow eyes widened in horror. S-she was in the front lines, directly in the front! I was slow, but I was faster than normal. I didn’t care if I had left Reiner alone, which was probably a huge mistake from the start, but...it may sound cruel....I’d rather lose Reiner than the love of my life.

I climbed the wall as quickly as I could, but I heard multiple explosions, loud and fast. Once I reached the top of the wall, all of the front trenches we’re nothing but body parts and dust. Though I was stall, my sight was impeccable; I was able to see clearly from very far. I didn’t see her in the front trenches...and I prayed she didn’t get blown up with the other soldiers. In the corner of my eye, I noticed someone slowly crawling along the front trench. They we’re holding their leg tightly. I walked towards them and bent down. It was her. I heard more artillery being fired, I quickly turned my titan and blocked the shots. She looked up at me with a shocked expression and a face covered in blood and dirt.

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Your POV

Z-Zeke? I looked up at his hairy titan form, and he had a slight smirk on his face. His large hand reached for me and he held me in his large hand. From a distance we heard the general.

“Everyone retreat, we’ve busted their defenses! The titans should finish them off!” He yelled and everyone began to run the opposite direction, away from the enemy lines. Zeke slowly walked along with the running men, with me resting in his hand. Fuck, my leg hurt. A bullet managed to hit me when they were rapidly shooting from their well designed machine gun.

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We were back home. Zeke was bandaging my leg after he had stitched it up. He was gentle, but very quiet. He kept his gaze on my leg through his well designed glasses. Zeke pushed up his glasses and stood up.

“It was a mistake for the general to send you to the front lines.” He said lazily as he brought two cups of tea from the kitchen table.

“I don’t think it was. I managed to help around twenty men, that has to count for something.” I said.

“Oh it does, my love. But, you were injured in the process. When I saw them blow the front lines to ash, I thought you we’re gone from my life forever. Tell me, how does a man live when they’re life is taken away?” He asked me and set down the cups of tea on the coffee table in front of the cushioned couch.

“Zeke, come here.” I held out my arms and he showed a weak smile. Zeke wrapped his body around me, held me tightly, rubbing my side.

“No one can stop death, it’s inevitable.” I whispered and took in his sweet sent.

“That is true, but I’d rather be the one to die for you...than you to die for me.” Zeke ended up on top of me and his gaze locked onto mine, he leaned close and pressed his soft lips against mine. His lips were sweet, he quickly pushed his tongue in my mouth and we twisted our tongues together. He intertwined his fingers with mine, he granted me slow and gentle kisses that took me to wonderland.

“I’d die for you...my love.” He whispered into my ear with a sweet voice; almost like a desirable melody.

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I really hope you enjoy this anon ♥

#zeke jaeger #zeke jaeger imagine #aot #attack on titan

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swampgallows · 7 years

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pride month questionnaire just for my own reference

what is your sexuality? biromantic asexual

what do gender do you identify as? cis woman

how long have you been aware of your sexuality/gender? around 16-17 i knew there was some shit wrong w me lmao, i had always just assumed i was straight but if we’re being real i knew from a pretty young age that i was broken and an alien. only ever had a few crushes [on guys] in my life but generally felt the same way about both men and women

do you have any preferences? big

share a positive memory about coming out! none

how do you feel about pride month? is good. isnt really “for me” but i will keep the glow i feel about it on the inside, like when i wear a favorite pair of underwear

do you participate in pride related events? any other events? no, though i was invited a few times it was by very sexual people who also drink alcohol so it wasnt really my kinda deal. much as i love sk i didnt really care for ladykiller’s sets

how do you feel about lgbtq roles in media? more, more written by lgbtqia people, less about dying and more about living ffs. let them be alive. let them be professional but also lgbtqia, let them be three-dimensional fully fleshed out characters who are also lgbtqia instead of being one-note cardboard cut-outs erected for Diversity

do you feel pride in who you are? not yet.

who has been your supportive idols in your self discovery? lmao

tell us about your first crush? despite kissing and being in a relationship with and having sex with a girl it didnt occur to me that i might be a lil gay until years later when i had a crush on undyne and she had a crush on a girl who became her girlfriend, and i was like “holy shit, you can do that? undyne likes girls? she likes a girl???? that means???? she could like me???? i could also.... like girls???? girls can be girlfriends???”

what sort of advice to have you lgbtq teens? i have no idea, im 27 and i still feel like a teen, do not ask me things

have you come out to friends and family? sort of. i tried to tell my siblings and my sister said I just hadnt met the right person yet, to which i asked her “oh well youre bi too, you know, you just havent met the right woman yet” stupid fucking bitch. my brother was silent. so was my mother. my dad doesn’t know, i dont think. he asked me “what does this mean, ‘tracer is gay tracer is gay tracer is gay’?” but the conversation got derailed luckily before i could answer

how do you feel about the term “coming out” ? not really up to me i guess. i only use it because i dont really know another term for it

do you believe there is a “closet” to come out of? sort of, i guess. people dont fucking care about asexuality; they complain that “nobody cares that you’re not having sex, theres no need to talk about it” then when i say something like “well im not really a sexual person” or “i dont like sex” all of a sudden it’s “WHAT WHY ARENT YOU HAVING SEX??? WERE YOU RAPED? YOU SHOULD SEE A THERAPIST. HAVE YOU TRIED SEX TOYS?” - my doctor So like yeah just saying the word “asexual” gets people really fucking riled up, i have to decide whether or not i want to engage in a fucking hour long debate and reveal my traumas and life story if i feel like even saying my orientation so w/e, that’s the closest kind of a closet i can have i guess. granted im not gonna be gunned down in the street for being asexual but i also dont like being incessantly interrogated and armchair pathologized either

any tips on coming out? no. i never really came out to my parents deliberately, my mom just snooped some shit on my facebook and cornered me w a question about it when i was stuck in the car with her

what’s your biggest pet peeve when it comes to lgbtq characterization in media? stop fucking killing them and making them the butt of jokes

what’s your favorite parts of lgbtq characterization in media? “well at least they’re there, i guess”; alternatively, when done well: “that me”

what did your teachers say about the lgbtqa community in school? i have very little recollection. it was mostly about gay men, i dont recall anything on lesbians, and i remember like one time we had a transgender person (calling themselves transsexual, at the time) come and talk to us, but i didn’t even know it was a thing that could be done or even existed so i had no idea what to make of it. but i remember they were there and spoke to us, even now. i basically just remember it happening lol

do you practice safe sex with the same gender? we didnt use dental dams or whatever, and since we didnt use toys we didnt use condoms. i mean i guess it was pretty safe, we were both monogamous and unsexed to all fuck. we washed our hands i guess?

what’s an absolute turn off for you in the opposite/same gender? this is too weird of a question for me to answer. im pretty demi when it comes to romantic shit, i dont feel attraction to people at all really, though i have felt attraction to people i dont know it’s extremely few and far between. like this year i saw two (2) girls i found attractive, not in a sexual way but i thought they were iridescent beings comprised of pure light and couldnt take my eyes off of them. before that i cant even remember the last time somebody stopped me in my tracks or gave me butterflies. i dunno if i have any real active ‘turn-offs’ aside from basic shit (racism, sexism, general shittiness) other than like... sports, i guess. sports and drugs

what’s an absolute turn on for you in the opposite/same gender? big. soft, hug. hairy boys. hairy girls are fine too but it’s more prominently a thing in guys. cool teeth (if you have cool teeth i will remember you)

how do you feel about lgbtq clubs/apps/websites? not for me

how do you feel about the term “queer” ? use it if you like, but respect those that it hurts

how does your country view the lgbtq community? america a fuck

favorite lgbtq actor/actress? fuck dude i dont even have a favorite straight actor or actress

any tips for heterosexual and/or cisgender people on how to handle lgbtq events/news? 1. it’s not for you 2. be proud for them 3. LISTEN TO THEM. SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND JUST LISTEN

what’s the most annoying question you have ever gotten? literally any time i tell a man im ace and he wants to fuck me, like, anything he says after that point is the worst thing

how do you feel about receiving questions about your sexuality/gender im open to answering but i can only speak from my own individual experience, which is a disclaimer i try to give any time anybody asks me shit. im not the best representative for the bi or ace communities or anything lgbtqia in general. i dont like sex and i barely like people. leave me w my monsters

#blathering #lgbtqia

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iamsaha · 7 years

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Sleeping Beauty

A Girl with twilight for hair stared up at the creepy mansion. It was one of those mansions you hear about in many horror stories. An entire house filled with a horrid history and the tormented ghosts that bore them. Everything from the broken windows to the peeling paint told the Girl to stay away. There was even an aura of despair coming out of the front door that felt warm and wet. The Girl told herself that it was humidity that was making her white skin glisten with sweat. She pretended to not notice that she was ankle deep in snow. Instead she pushed her fears to the side, and walked in. Trespassing was quite rude. Rude enough to warrant a night in a jail cell. But the Girl was a hunter of demons, monsters, ghosts, debt collectors, and other fiends. She wasn’t afraid of underpaid and overweight policemen. It even said so on her business card. More or less.

It was quite dark inside. Made sense since the electricity bill hadn’t been paid in god knows how long. The local electric company had probably forgotten the existence of this mansion of misfortune. So the Girl had to rely on her trained eyes to make sure she wouldn’t be attacked. Or make sure she wouldn’t walk straight into a Ravenous Worm like the one she had fought just a few days before. It had settled down next to the bull statue in Wall Street, opened its cavernous mouth, and waited. Being invisible and intangible to normal humans, the worm had lazily feasted on the souls of the unwary traders, investors, and tourists as they walked through it. Until the Girl had showed up that is. After receiving a stab from the Girl’s silver sword, the fiend and the Girl had waged a vicious battle among the crowds of well-dressed men and women. Unfortunately for the Girl, she was quite visible and tangible to the people around her. One businessman had even filmed her and uploaded the video to YouTube. “Crazy Redhead Fights Air” went viral quite quickly and the Girl had received none of the profits.

Pushing her jilted profits to the side, the Girl realized that this mansion was quite empty of things to hunt. She wondered if she had arrived at the wrong one (This had happened before. Four times.) But the wet aura of despair had to be coming from somewhere. That was a textbook sign of a demon infestation. And if there’s one thing the Girl was good at, it was knowing what was in the textbook. So she kept searching, eventually making it to the second floor of the house. On the far end of the landing was a door. It was quite the ordinary door. Made of wood and covered in paint. As proven by its doorknob and hinges, it could obviously be opened. Didn’t even need a key. This very ordinary door was, however, covered in thorny rose vines. That, the Girl astutely observed, was not ordinary. She could also feel that the aura of despair was coming from behind the door. The Girl pulled her silver sword out of its scabbard and slashed the vines away. They withered away, smoke emanating from their stubs. After taking a deep breath, the Girl opened the door and walked in, her sword at the ready.

Vines covered the walls and the floor. They were spaced far apart near the door, but as they crawled to the far wall they grew close together. The wall itself was a dense mass of green and red. The roses were in full bloom and filling the room with a sweet scent. To her surprise, in the middle of the wall, was a man. The rose vines were pinning him to the wall, the thorns soaking themselves with his blood. His arms were outstretched and his head hung limply. The Girl stepped forward to cut him down but she stopped. Suddenly standing in front of her was the demon responsible for the roses.

“Halt!” The demon spoke. It looked human. As the Girl paid more attention to her new foe, she realized the demon looked more like a human with exaggerated features. It was bald and had freakishly long arms. Arms that couldn’t possibly belong to a demon of its short stature. It quite honestly looked like a gorilla with arms like that. Perhaps its legs had decided to stop growing while its torso and arms didn’t get the message. Its nose was big due to the acne and scars. Its smile would’ve been quite nice if it wasn’t for its crooked bottom teeth. And its voice. Why was it so whiny? The Girl grimaced. This was by far the ugliest demon she had ever met. Most demons she had encountered were terrifying looking but they had a malevolent grace about them that had garnered respect. This fat little thing just made her lips curl in disgust.

“Get out of the way, demon.” The Girl spat, pointing her sword at it.

“Don’t point that thing at me.” The demon whined. It actually whined! Was this really the thing responsible for capturing the man on the wall?

“Then move.” The Girl stepped forward.

“No!” The demon squatted and covered its head. The rose vines on the wall grew closer to the man and squeezed tighter. More blood dripped to the floor. The Girl heard him moan. The demon was shaking. Was it scared too? Had she just met the world’s only cowardly demon?

“Are...are you scared?” The Girl asked. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. And she had seen many unbelievable things.

“Wouldn’t you be scared if a strange girl walked into your house and pointed a sword at you?” The demon muttered, still squatting and covering its head. “Speaking of which. Don’t you know how rude it is to trespass?”

“Your house?” The Girl rolled her eyes. “Since when do demons have houses?”

The demon had stopped covering its head. Instead it was staring up at her, clearly annoyed. “I bought it a month ago with my girlfriend. We got it real cheap since its such a fixer upper.”

The Girl could not believe what she was hearing. The fact that the demon had bought a house surprised her but that’s not what she was concerned with. The fat little thing had a girlfriend. Miracles also apparently happened to hellspawn. “Where is she then?” The Girl asked. “Your girlfriend.”

“Why don’t you ask her professor?” The demon grimaced. “The two are on vacation together.” The demon covered its head again, but this time it was to cover its shame. “I gave her everything she ever wanted. And she couldn’t stay with me. Why would she? Look at me. Ugly, pathetic little monster.”

The Girl watched as the demon began to cry. The vines on the wall loosened up and the man’s face was slightly revealed. His nose looked familiar. The Girl looked back to the demon and stepped closer, her hand held up in a gesture of peace. The demon fell back onto its butt and held up its hand in horror.

“Please no don’t hurt me!” It wailed.

“I’m not going to hurt you!” The Girl strained, doing her best to not roll her eyes at the demon’s whine. No wonder his girlfriend had left him. These few moments alone had been miserable. “Look!” She pushed her sword back into its scabbard.

The demon eyed her warily. “What are you playing at?”

“Nothing.” The Girl promised. “I just want to help the man.” She pointed at the wall. The vines lurched and covered the mans face once again, some even closing around his throat.

“Why would you want to help him?” The demon asked, its face in a grimace. “He’s worthless. He also can’t keep a woman around. And don’t get me started on his need for attention...Hey where are you going?” The demon grabbed a hold of her leg as she walked past him. “You’re supposed to be talking to me.”

The Girl kicked his hand away and glared down at him. “Don’t touch me!”

The demon covered its head and curled into a ball. “That’s what she would always say.... waaaaahhhhhhhh.” It was crying. It was actually crying. Pathetic.

“No. Wait...” The Girl knelt down and reached out towards it but hesitated. She really didn’t want to touch it. Its body looked quite hairy and greasy. As she watched it sob, its ugly face squeezed into an even uglier crying face, the Girl realized what kind of demon it was. She sighed and forced herself to touch its arm. “Please don’t cry.”

“Wha...wha...” The demon’s sobbing slowly came to a stop. It still occasionally dry heaved. “Why are you...being nice?”

“I just...I just want to help you.”

“No you don’t.” The demon frowned. “You want to help him.” It pointed a crooked finger at the man on the wall.

“I want to help both of you.” The Girl persisted. “That’s not wrong is it?”

“Yes it is!” The demon slammed its fist onto the floor. “He’s not worth saving. Let him choke.” The vines squeezed around the man’s throat.

“No!” The Girl shouted. “Please don’t! He isn’t as bad as you think.”

“How would you know that?”

“Well he looks about as...” The Girl nearly choked on what she was about to say. “About as handsome as you. He can’t be that bad if he looks that good.”

The demon stopped its tantrum. At the same time the vines stopped squeezing. “Did you say I was handsome?”

“Yes. Yes I did.” The Girl nodded her head multiple times. She didn’t look or sound very convincing. Thankfully the demon was an idiot.

“Really?” The demon smiled a very ugly smile. Only it could have managed to turn something so beautiful as a smile into something ugly. “What do you like about me? Tell me!” The demon moved closer to her. It took all of the Girl’s willpower to not pull away from its musky stench. She clenched her sword hilt in case the demon got too close.

“I..I like your eyes.” The Girl settled on quite the generic compliment.

“My eyes?” The demon turned and waddled over to a side door. It pulled it open and revealed a mirror attached to the door. It stared closely at its reflection. “Yes. You’re right!” The demon grinned. How could teeth be that big? “My eyes are beautiful!”

“Yes. Yes they are.” The Girl smiled. Hers was stunning. “They remind me of warm hot chocolate on a winter night.”

The demon turned to her. Its eyes had become as beautiful as she had said they were. “What else? What else do you like about me?”

As the vines loosened up even more, the Girl frantically thought for another complement. Two more should be enough. Magic usually happened in threes for some reason. It was pretty convenient. “Your hands. They look big and strong. Quite manly.”

The demon stared at its hands in awe. “Yes. You’re right! So manly.” It curled them into fists and uncurled them, clearly falling in love with itself.

The Girl saw in her peripheral that the vines were almost off. One more...one more...

“Tell me more!” The demon clapped its manly hands together. It eagerly sat in front of her, staring up at her with its beautiful chocolate eyes. She saw that its nose didn’t look quite as ugly as before. And while its smile wasn’t perfect, it was warm. And that’s what mattered in a smile. Its warmth.

“Your smile.” She said with no hesitation. “It’s very warm and loving. Like you’re so full of joy that you want to share.”

The demons cheeks grew warm and so did its ears. “Oh. Oh thank you.” It said shyly. “Very kind of you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The girl smiled back. “It’s pretty easy to complement a handsome devil such as yourself.”

The demon laughed. “Oh stop. You’re flattering me.” It smiled widely. She didn’t even notice that its teeth were still big or that its bottom teeth were still crooked. It sighed and waved over at the man. “Well. You can go ahead and cut him down. He’s more handsome and more wonderful than I am. Certainly worth saving.”

“Thank you.” She bowed to the demon. “That’s very nice of you, sir.”

She turned and began slicing at the vines that were still holding the man up. They fell easily to her sword. The roses withered and finally the man crumpled to the floor. The Girl knelt down and cradled his head in her lap, patting his cheek gently to wake him up. He was breathing lightly. His arms and neck were covered in cuts from the thorns but he looked fine.

“Come on....Wake up...” The Girl said frantically when he still didn’t. He was fine. She looked around to ask the demon why the man wasn’t waking up but the demon was gone. “Wake up!”

In her panic she patted him a little to hard, basically slapping him across the face. The man’s eyes shot open immediately. “Huh?! What?! What’s going on?!” He pushed away from her. His brown eyes were filled with panic.

“Oh! Sorry.” The Girl smiled hesitantly. Then spun a quick lie. “I found you lying here unconscious. Was trying to wake you up...”

The man stared at her, rubbing his cheek. She had slapped him very hard. “Why are you in my house in the first place?” He looked around. “And what is up with all these vines? They weren’t here before.”

He could see the vines? Interesting. The Girl just shrugged. She’d feign ignorance for now. “I dunno. I was walking by when I heard a scream. I ran in and found you unconscious.”

“So you slapped me?” The man said dryly.

“I didn’t mean to! I panicked.” The Girl bit her lip and stared at him pleadingly. “Please don’t be mad.”

The man found that he wasn’t mad at her. He sighed. “Yea whatever.” He got up and dusted himself off. “Thank you.” His voice was quiet and soothing.

“You’re welcome.” The Girl smiled and got up. She held her hand out. “I’m Aurora.”

The man wondered why she looked so familiar but decided to wonder about it later. Instead he returned her smile with one of his own and shook her hand. “Nice to meet you Aurora. I’m Philip.”

-Lux

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wellmeaningshutin · 7 years

Text

Short Story #85: Self Serving.

Written: 4/3/2017 Music Week Song Listened to Before Writing: Pop Group - Don’t Call Me Pain

Beatrice had worn, proudly, the label of being a political activist, but, unknown to people outside of her scene, she was generally disliked, since her motivations were anything but political, which could be interpreted from the button she always wore on her black denim jacket, which said: “Right Side of History”. If anyone had asked her for an explanation, she would use it to get on her soapbox about how the left was always on the right side of history, and that nobody could deny that what she was following was a truly just cause, but in reality it just meant that she had sided with what she had felt to be the winning team, just because it seemed to be the winning team, which was something known to plenty of the activist she had talked to, especially an organizer who only went by the name “the Mistress”, mainly due to worry that if anyone had seen news stories about her, they would start leaking all sorts of her personal information, send her threats of rape and/or murder, crudely drawn pictures of her either naked or in the middle of sexual acts, sometimes with animals, or even would, as had happened to a close friend of hers, begin to call the workplaces of her family members, making up all sorts of fabricated claims with the intent of getting the family member fired.

The Mistress was one of the few members of the group who actually interfaced with Beatrice on a regular basis, even if she did, like many others, have to hold back an instinct to slap the frustrating girl, she felt that there was a chance for the self centered activist to actually have their mind in the right place, instead of wanting glory or the opportunity to break things, which many protesters despised. “You can tell that they are not dedicated to the cause,” Beatrice had once explained, as she made sure her garish, platinum blond wig wasn’t askew, “because they decide to stick with bullshit peaceful resistance, which doesn’t work. Think about it: actions speak louder than words. Ever hear that? Of course you have, its a common phrase, its a cliche, and people repeat these kind of things for a reason, you know. They’re common truths. Facts about the way the world is.”

“I think you’re only seeing things the way that you want to see them,” the mistress had tried to explain, looking down at the short girl through her circular, rose-tinted glasses, “I don’t deny that actions speak louder than words, but isn’t that the whole point of a peaceful protest?” Slowly and calmly, hoping that would help get her point across, “Isn’t the crowd that gathers an action within itself? A large crowd voicing their discontent and their desire for change is more than just idle words, and I feel that you are minimizing what the rest of us are trying to accomplish.”

“I think you are minimizing the situation by doing nothing about it! If you are really so upset, why don’t you take real action, instead of the action of inaction? Why don’t you start doing shit that gets people to really pay attention, instead of just inconveniencing some people? Why aren’t you angry?”

“We are angry, we just don’t let our emotions get the best of us. Hate and anger only creates more anger and hate, and it is just a terrible cycle. There is nothing to be gained from fighting and destruction, when there is so much more that can work. We can’t jump to one extreme, just because we are prisoners to our emotions. Don’t you always talk about how hateful the other side is, why stoop to their level? What is there to-”

“Look, doll,” this was a pet name that Beatrice had for the older woman, who became annoyed every time she heard it, “They are hateful, so we have to be hateful too? Don’t you see?” The Mistress sighed. “Look, when the Nazi’s were taking over Germany, did passive resistance do shit to stop them? No! Anyone who thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just sit around and ask nicely for the problem to go away’, was gassed or eaten alive. There is nothing to be gained by sitting on our asses, by-”

“Okay, I have to stop you there, you really have to stop comparing everyone you don’t like to Nazis. We are not in Nazi Germany, it isn’t as bad as you keep making it out to be. Sure, there is a lot of bullshit going on, but it is nowhere near genocide, or even having the bulk of our rights taken away, and there are still checks and balances in place to make sure that the government can’t become that. I agree that things have gotten a little out of hand, but-”

“Here you go again with that, ‘I understand you but I really don’t’, bullshit. Look, these are the end times, doll, and if you can’t see that its because you’ve got your head in the sand. You’ve chosen to play by the rules that they set up for you to stay away from power, they let you do what you do because its all harmless, its a load of horse shit, and you can’t realize it because they-”

“You keep saying ‘they’ like I’m supposed to know who you’re talking about, who the hell is this group that you’re trying to pin everything on?”

“Are you slow or something, the fuckin’ Republicans! They’ve had this countries balls in a vice grip since it was founded, and they’re the ones that call the shots. They wont stop until all the gays have been shot, until-”

“You’re just saying nonsense now,” She was beginning to get red in the face, which didn’t happen very often, “you’re just letting your emotions get the best of you, you’re refusing to look at the situation for how it is, because all you want is to justify yourself and your anger.”

“Look whose talking.”

“Shut up.” Adjusting the olive, military jacket that she kept draped over her shoulders, arms outside of the sleeves, “Just shut up for one minute. Listen, just because people are on a different end of the political spectrum doesn’t mean they’re monsters, doesn’t mean they’re incompetent, that kind of thinking is a load of bullshit. You get angry about they way some of them, not all, some, treat you and spread misinformation? You’re equally bad for doing the same, and, hell, you might even be worse for wanting to smash everything in sight. There are people on the right who are also good, well intentioned people, and they want some of the same things that we do, they just have different ways of achieving those goals. The way you talk only widens the political divide, and if we want to go anywhere in this country it should be hand in hand, not hand in throat. You just refuse to see things this way, because you wan to feel as if you’re right, as if you are smarter or better than them, and in the end your politics,” her voice grew louder and louder, and two of her friends started to walk over to her, to try to cool her down,”are nothing but a way for you to pat yourself on the back, to stroke your ego. Its masturbation. You don’t give a shit about politics, you only care about yourself.”

For several seconds Beatrice was quiet, a little startled since she had never seen the woman blow up in this way, so she only stood there as the Mistress’ friends got her to walk away, trying to get her to cool off. Aroused in a strange way that had made her uncomfortable, Beatrice decided to yell, to the woman who was walking away, “Oh yeah? Well look who the angry one is! Its you!” Hoping that her response would cover up her embarrassment from her body’s reaction, she decided to go somewhere that wasn’t crawling with other activists, somewhere where people didn’t know very much about politics, and Beatrice could heal some of her injured pride.

Ending up in a smoothie shop, Beatrice was talking to a single mother who had been interested in the girl’s appearance, and had asked if it was rude if she “wanted to ask questions about what it was like to be transgender.”

“It is,” Beatrice nodded, seeing the women get embarrassed, “but I will answer anyways since the damage has already been done, and I can be pretty reasonable. What do you want to know?”

“Well, what made you realize that you were, you know? Was that something you wanted to do, or..?”

“I knew from a long time ago that I was a girl inside, so I had decided to just, you know, transition already and now I’m happy.” Beatrice had, actually, never felt that she was a woman, and only decided to hop on the transgender train when she had realized that people were taking her seriously because she had come from an area of “privilege” (a concept she still couldn’t figure out, but said about fifty times a day), so she decided that she could just don a showy wig, give herself a woman’s wig, and then people would have to start taking her more seriously, and if they didn’t she would feel like she was being oppressed (even if it wasn’t in relation to her claiming that she was trans, and was something as simple as accidentally being bumped into, or calling her out on her shit) and would use that anger to give her a reason to talk politics at the people who didn’t want to listen to her.

Awkward, but genuinely curious, “So, what does the transition, how does that work? Do you still have your, um.. Downstairs equipment?”

“Well, everyone’s journey is different, and a lot of people chose to take hormones, or get the sex reassignment surgery, but I didn’t really need to do any of that.” Actually, she had attempted to undergo hormone replacement therapy, but it ended up giving her a nasty case of gender dysphoria after a couple weeks, which made her consider suicide, and was a good reason to flush the estrogen pills and the testosterone blockers down the toilet at the mall. “See, I know that I’m a woman, and I’m confident in the body I have, because even if it is large, hairy, masculine, I still know that its a woman’s body, because my brain is calling all of the shots. Which, let me remind you, is a woman’s brain. If I grow a mustache,” which she was in the process of doing, “that is no sweat off my back, and if you ask me, a lot of other transgirls are way too needy. They think that if you want to be considered a woman, you have to look like a woman, act like a woman, but they’re just, like, falling into all of these stereotypes of what a woman actually is, you know? They fall into this consumerist trap that tells them that they need to smell like flowers, or play with barbies, or wear lipstick, grow tits, have the ‘right’”, said in air quotes, “hormones, but that’s all just something they’ve been force fed. Don’t even get me started on transguys.”

“Wait, there are transguys? Like.. Girls that turn into guys?”

“Yeah, but they’re all a bunch of traitors to women. They’re just opportunists who want to try to be on the winning side, and all of those fuckers-”

“Language!” Covering her kid’s ears, not aware of the fact that her child has said much worse in the company of their small friends, such as “suck my fucking ass” or “shit faced bitch hole”.

This reaction caused Beatrice to scowl at the woman, and she complained that, “You are impeding on my right of free speech! My right to self expression. Fucking snowflake.”

After she had left the store, Beatrice had decided that she should stop by her house in order to prepare for the day’s demonstration. Inside her living room was a large, black velvet painting of Mao Zedong, who she believed to be a great hero, a true revolutionary, a wonderful leader. She also had scattered photographs of Stalin, Castro, and Kim Jong-Il, because she believed that everything that capitalism had said was a lie, and believed that since these figures were generally reviled, they must have actually been heroes. Their propaganda also seemed as if it was enough to convince her. She also had a copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography, right on her coffee table, placed so that everyone could see it, but she hadn’t read very far in, and basically cherry picked quotes that validated her desire to use hate and force for political means, ignoring most of the actual book, especially the last section. Before she was going to head down to the protest at the library, which was hosting a lecture by a white nationalist, mainly because the library believed that anyone should be able to speak if they fill out the proper paper work, no matter what their views may be. Beatrice was hoping that she would be able to smash in the guy’s windshield.

Over at the protest, the Mistress had reluctantly showed up, and was trying to voice her conflicted feelings to a friend of hers, “I don’t know if we should be protesting or not, it seems like we might be strengthening their cause, but it also seems like we would be doing the same by letting them spew those awful ideas.”

“Well,” her friend had replied, “shouldn’t we let everyone know that these people just aren’t welcome?”

“Yeah, but it seems like the more we complain, the more that they point at our complaining and say ‘Hey, these people are trying to silence us, they’re a bunch of fascists who want to police language!’ And then people start to wonder, you know, wonder what people are so upset about. They think the people being protested seem so calm and reasonable, so what’s the issue? Why do they have to have their first amendment’s rights stepped all over?”

“That’s not what the first amendment represents, though. They have their right to voice their ideas, and we have the rights to voice our ideas about their ideas. Isn’t the fact that they want us to stop complaining and let them go on with their terrible views a way to censor us?”

“No, no, see, then you’re just looking at what they’re doing and you want to flip it around on them, you’re trying to do the same thing they’re doing. They have a right to complain about us complaining, just like we have a right to complain about them, and they have to state whatever biased facts they have about immigrants naturally having the impulse to rape women, or whatever it is that they make up. But, they still see us complaining, and they use that to strengthen their point, because it doesn’t matter that we all have the right to complain, since most people don’t look that deeply into it. So they can paint us as trying to step on their rights, just like you tried to paint them as stepping on ours, except they can use that to bring more and more people into their cause, giving them free publicity.”

“But shouldn’t we not allow all of this to go on? Shouldn’t we prove that its not okay for the right to-”

“The far-right.”

“What?”

“Its not the views of the normal right, they’re far-right views, they’re the extreme. Its important to make that distinction, because without it then they seem more normal, and their cause and comments start to become more and more acceptable.”

“So what? They’re still-”

“No, there should be no ‘so what’. Think about it, you know Beatrice and how we all pretty much hate her?”

“Yeah, she’s the worst. Not only is she annoying to be around, but she all makes us look terrible.”

“Exactly, she makes us all look bad. When she does what she does, she becomes an extreme for everyone to focus on, there only needs to be a small amount of people doing something for the rest to get overgeneralized. Same happens with the white nationalists, people like us tend to think that they represent the right, when they’re just as much as a sore as Beatrice is for us. Because, no group is truly homogeneous, nothing is black and white, everything is just fucking grey. See, you and me are talking about this right now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone shares our opinions, thinks or talks like us, has the same views. Our views aren’t the same views as everyone else in our side of the political spectrum, just like the views of Beatrice don’t really represent a lot of others, because she’s an individual. Sure, she may be a transtrender, she may be in politics for all of the wrong reasons, her views may be shitty, but that only reflects her as a person, she does not represent the whole.”

“You’re really focused on her right now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I feel bad for blowing up at her.”

“Didn’t she kind of deserve it though?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Speaking of the point, why did you think that we shouldn’t protest? That was never fully explained.”

“Oh yeah, sorry, and I didn’t say that we shouldn’t protest, I just meant that it was a gray area for me, because people wont look at the gray of what we are doing, they will only look at the most surface level parts. The only people who will listen to our message are the people who already shared the same opinions, while the people who we would need to convince are going to use us to make their cause even stronger. And, I’ve wondered if it would be better to just let them exist, to stop coming out and trying to stop them, just to let them have no opposition and let people smell the bullshit, but that’s how we got here. A lot of those shitty people did get ignored, and their views weren’t challenged, and it gave them enough time to build their causes, and now the bubbles are so thick that they’re too hard to burst.”

“Its like cult members. Their ideas are so reinforced, they have this nonsensical vision of the outside world, and any idea to the contrary just makes them double down on what they’ve already believed. Its what they’ve been conditioned to do, it would be like trying to convince somebody that the moon doesn’t exist.”

“Exactly. And now I feel that, when we protest, they just use it to reinforce their delusions, and now its like actual discussion has become impossible, its just two groups trying to talk over each other about their political views, while they try to convince the other, with no intention to actually change their view points.”

“And not only that, but, like you said earlier, our side isn’t completely clear from this. People like Beatrice-

“People like her have their own bubbles, and then that gives the people in the other bubble, the far-right bubble, somebody to point to and say ‘Hey, look how delusional and out of touch with reality these people are! They’re living in a fucking media bubble, they can’t even understand any other side of the issue, we’re so much better for not being like them!’”

“And the people in the far-left bubble point and do the exact same thing, so they’ve become, like, codependent to reinforce each other’s views.”

“Yeah, and when you add in the whole black and white complex, then they start to see it as more than just far-right or far-left, they star to think that it represents all of the left or all of the right. And now, its just a huge fucking mess, and I think I’m getting tired of all of it.”

“The end times are coming.”

“No, that’s a shitty way to look at things, because this is nowhere near that bad. Its just bad for a moment, we’ve hit a sand trap. We’ll get out eventually, it always happens. A Republican comes into office and fucks things up, and then a Democrat comes in and patches things together, and it just keeps going on like that. After this term or the next, the other side are going to be the ones who are going to be the angriest, and then when they are done we’re going to come in and take their place.”

“Isn’t saying Republicans screw things up an overgeneralization?”

“The Bushes, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Hoover, they were pretty bad. But I guess it looks at the way you view it, because there are people who believe that these were great men, while they may be the sort of people that make us a little agitated. Its all perspective.”

“If its all perspective, then is anybody right?”

“Yes, one side is more right, since neither is perfect, but a lot of people don’t care for that, they just want the side that makes them feel better. Maybe we’re the same way and don’t realize it. We live in a time where people care more about feelings then facts, and everyone thinks they’re exempt, so what changes things if we feel the same way?”

“We just have to make sure to keep our minds open then, we have to be willing to hear the other side out.”

“Yeah, but what if the other side starts saying shit like black people are genetically predisposed to crime, or that immigrants are some of the most violent people in the world, or that we should have a peaceful genocide?”

“Just because we have to be open minded, Mistress, doesn’t mean that we have to accept everything that they say. You can still be open minded and call bullshit whenever it arises. There are two sides to every story, but both sides aren’t valid.”

As the protest was going on, Beatrice had arrived with a large group, all dressed in gray, all of their faces covered, ready to join in on the protest. Without wasting any time, they began smashing car windows, throwing trash cans through store windows, they really like to hear glass break, set trash cans on fire, and generally started breaking everything that they could. People started pulling out their phones to record the chaos that had ensued, and in no time there were reports that the protests had started to become violent, even as the main and original group stayed where they were, continuing to picket and chant.

Eventually the police had intervened, and as the night grew violent, destructive, and chaotic, order was eventually restored, but a few of the violent protesters had been apprehended. One of them was the Mistress, who was cuffed when she was found, hiding from the police (she was actually trying to get away from the tear gas that was deployed, and generally unpleasant to stand in), and another was one of the gray demonstrators, who had claimed that she had a message from her group. She declared that they were anti-fascists who wanted to make it so that fascism could be outlawed, she said she was so angry that she wanted to burn down the white house, she claimed that the current administration should be shot down, she claimed that she was the leader of the group and went on a confused rant that seemed more self serving than anything else. Not only was the Mistress, who declined to say anything to the press, lumped in as an accomplice with Beatrice, but the anarchist group that Beatrice had showed up with was furious that she was caught, even madder at the fact that she got their ideology wrong, while the general protesters where dismayed by how violent everything had suddenly turned, and the speaker they protested (who believed that it would be bad for Syrian refugees to enter the country, because they would eventually enter the gene pool) had raised in popularity.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Politics #Opinion

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