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harryswatermelonsegment · 4 years

Text

Pool Party

Pairing: Reader/Harry Styles

Rating: R, text book smut

Word Count: 5k 😳

Warnings: Slight sub/dom tones I guess? & alcohol consumption

A/N: Sorry this is late, life somewhat resuming here in the UK so it means I’m back at my job. I managed to fall asleep mid edit folks 😳, this is my entry for the @helladirections Summer Feeling Fic Challenge, with the prompt “pool party” click the link for the masterlist. I’m still writing two more, one for @berrynarrybanana ‘s Sex Bucketlist Challenge but it’s turning out to be a 20k slow burn I wasn’t expecting 😬.Oops. But enjoy this one, I’m proud of her. My one other blatant thirst fic can be found here. Reblogs get free gratitude for the next 5 years 🍉💕

You'd been friends with Jeff since your teens, when his parents (despite their wealth), wanted him to get a job at the restaurant you worked at. In their rightful thinking, they wanted him to learn you had to work from the ground up.

Despite your clearly different class background you found a ton of common interests making the whole thing immaterial. He was a caring, down to earth guy and you were both people who really enjoyed sarcastically taunting each other every shift. You'd got used to visiting his house in the hills even though you'd been scared to get lost at first around his parents large house. Becoming solid friends quickly, you'd managed to keep in touch, as much as adult life would now allow anyway.

You knew his main role was managing a pop star but you'd not caught up in a minute and when you did, you kept your job chat out of the conversation where you could. This is why, as you barge through the kitchen, to the pool outside, you're shocked to nearly knock a stunned Harry Styles onto his behind.

"Fuck, shit I'm so sorry" you clutch your chest looking at the red wine on his tank top and his now empty glass. The soiled garment was tucked into some dressy shorts and partly covered by a loud hawaiian patterned shirt. Oh god what had you done?

You were quite honestly mortified. You'd never actually met the man himself, usually meeting Jeff at his for a few drinks or at a restaurant. You'd heard him mentioned in stories about travelling or how his campaigns were running Jeff into the ground with meetings. So, although you weren't a massive fan of his per se, in the way you didn't ask Jeff for updates or info, the way you'd hope you'd meet the attractive pop star was definitely not this.

He looked down at the offending stain then back up into your eyes, keeping his head angled down and blinking through his lashes. You couldn't read his blank expression and it put you on edge.

Maybe it was the heat trapped in the doorway, but as your eyes stayed locked you suddenly felt a fire spread from your navel up to your cheeks, and then from your center down to your toes. Your lower stomach clenched as you stared back at the guy covered in a good 2007 French rouge.

Fuck me he's pretty, you thought.

A rapid film reel of moments; sweaty bodies, those large biceps holding you against the nearest wall, smacking of lips against skin and moans of release flashed in your brain.

It had definitely been a while since you had got laid in your defense, your mood and pent up sexual frustration getting worse by the day as you tried and failed at the L. A. dating scene. Maybe you were picky, but horny and picky was an awful place to be.

However, the reality of the embarrassing scene you were currently a star of, flipped you back into the present.

Seemingly over the initial incident and hopefully not a mind reader to your thirsty brain, he takes you in and smirks.

Harry knew from the way your breathing hitched looking at his torso that you were at least a bit interested. He had clocked you the second you walked in through the big glass doors. A shirt of a band he liked and a natural beauty he wanted to spend some times with you he pondered. Ideally naked.

Zig zagging across the world promoting the album and had left little time to enjoy another person. Status and obligation to his job making it hard to just go out and meet someone. But here you were, dressed unlike anyone else, looking absolutely adorable in your embarrassment. You must be trustworthy if you're in Jeff's home,he wasn't a "bring your friends too" kind of host with his clients usually around.

This could be a fun evening for you both, he thought. Something unspoken, almost magnetic, drawing you both to one another. Surely that wasn't all his side right?

"I was told it was a good year, but I wasn't planning on consuming it quite this way?" inwardly he rolled his eyes at the barely there quip. But you laughed anyway.

"I am so, so awfully sorry, look, let's see if there's some dish liquid or something, possibly some of my next months rent in there too if I have to replace it" you let out a nervous laugh as you walked towards the kitchen. But in all honesty you weren't kidding.

Harry laughed at your sarcastic remark, impressed by your confidence in owning the situation and getting on with things. He casually watched your hips sway past a few people in to the open plan kitchen with as much subtlety as he could, you were confidentially locating all the parts needed to try and remove the offending stain.

"You seem to know your way around 'ere. I'm er…I'm Harry by the way" awkwardly waving as you mixed some solution in the sink drenching a sponge in it.

"Yeah" you smiled turning from the sink with the damp rag "known Jeff a good while, have definitely spilt red wine here before. I'm Y/N" you giggle. The beam from his own mouth matching.

"Ah! Y/N, of course, I've heard him mention you, didn't you once hide rotting mackerel in a unpleasant guys blazer?" he chuckled

"Heyyyy. Only after he spanked my ass getting him the check. Deserved a hot plate to the crotch too" you shot back.

You weren't sure where to go from here the thought of wetting down the white tank yourself definitely appealed but also seemed far too forward.

"Um…" you began gesturing with the sponge in your hand. You expected him to take it from you to sort himself out but..

"Oh yeah sorry" he replied shimmying his shirt off, dumping it on the back of a bar stool, then, crossing his arms across his stomach and lifting the tank top over his head you were slack jawed and frozen taking in the lean muscles and tattoos littered intermittently across his abdomen. He spread the top across the islands worktop flat, then grabbing the sponge with a simple "thanks" and knitting his eyebrows together in concentration as he tried to rid the dull red mark from it's center.

You still hadn't moved. A pink twinge to your cheeks as you watched his shoulder blades and back muscles scrubbing. Dirty thoughts circling your brain still.

"I would have helped you but I didn't want to start a wet tshirt contest in such a high end establishment yknow?" you thought out loud.

"Oh yeah, good call. I'm fiercely competitive Y/N so would probably be under that fancy waterfall thing by now showing off m'moves in my pants" he wiggles his hips trying to suggestively show you his "moves" but you can't help but smirk at just how endearing this man is. Dammit.

When he's finished with his shirt he drapes it over another barstool before handing you the sponge back.

If anyone asks him if he blatantly and deliberately got naked to gauge if you were into him he'd definitely deny it. But the truth is, he definitely did. Luckily for him, with the way you bite your lip and drag your eyes down his flesh as he brushes past your side to get back to the sink, he's right.

"Speaking of getting in the water in your" you use air quotes "'pants' I'm off to get out of mine" you declare, pushing yourself from the counter and keeping eye contact a second as you stroll back to the sliding doors leading to the pool.

"I… What??"

" The pool Harry?.... What did you think I meant?" you narrow your eyes and press your lips together before shutting the glass door again and turning once more to smirk at the opened mouthed man still by the sink.

--------------------------------

You'd been schmoozing in the water for a few hours now. There were probably only 20 or so people still here and the 3rd frozen marg had got you buzzed. You were in the small hot tub type pool, attached at the top of the main one on a slightly higher level. You hadn't seen Harry for a while but the last few times you caught his eye he'd been surrounded by at least 3 other people fighting for his attention, so you banked your flirtations to soothe your own ego, grabbed another marg and tried to forget about how he had started a tornado inside you, yearning for his hands on your thighs and head peering up at you from where they met in the middle. The strong pull of lust was clearly in your head then. What a shame.

You put it to the back of your mind as you finished catching up with Glenne. Both flushed and giggly as usual, she was the perfect match for Jeff and their chemistry unmatchable. You always enjoyed hanging out with the both of them, if anything, they gave you hope your own match may be out there. She left you in the tub alone, as she went to grab herself another drink and check on her host duties boyfriend.

"Don't you find drinking whilst already in water the weirdest thing?" you look up to find Harry standing over your right shoulder as you sit with your back against the pool wall and your elbows propping you up behind you, drink in one hand. His eyes unsubtley slip down to where your breasts lay pushed together in your halter neck bikini. You definitely weren't imagining it then. Fucking fantastic, you think.

"I mean drowning yourself on the inside from the alcohol and being in more than 4 inches of water really adds a danger element to my life if I'm honest" you reply sipping your drink.

And there goes those dimples again.

He's just in a pair of yellow swimming shorts now which doesn't help the alcohol flush at all. Sitting by your right side, putting his short glass full of amber liquid and ice, on the side of the pool and sliding in to join you. He leaves a small gap, as to not appear a total letch but your smart mouth has him hooked.

Taking a sip of his drink with the water up to his collar bones he hums.

"I do feel incredibly dangerous now, you've got a point"

"I mean if you think that's danger" you edge closer, not drunk but buzzed enough to take your chances you whisper into the shell of his ear. "You should see what thrills are in the guest bathroom. 1st floor on the right? " he chokes on his drink as your suggestive whispers make his dick twitch. He definitely couldn't get out of the pool for a while.

You're gone before you get a verbal reaction. If this all goes badly then you can just hide in there and slip out to an Uber and never see Jeff again right? Right. Cool.

With a soft white towel around you and your heart rate high as you reach the main guest bedroom you enter the room, you notice a large weekend bag in there and freeze. Shit. Someone's staying over, you hadn't factored that in, but a glance to the tag and the embossed H. E. S tells you you're good. Well, if not you'll just be a creep hiding in someone's bathroom but let's not think about it too much. Your faux confidence was working well so far and what other chance was going to arise like this one? Hot celebrities need fun with strangers too right?

Entering the bathroom you rub the towel over you, leaving mostly dry skin. You'd peel away your bikini if you were definite you wouldn't need to peel it back up your limbs should this plan backfire. You move to the mirror to adjust the black flecks from your minimal makeup dispersing under your eye and just as you're about to smooth down the stray baby hairs that humidity has got to around your face, you see Harry appear in the mirror behind you. Your belly flipping over and over with the thrill he'd took the bait.

Wasting no time he smirks and holds your gaze, wrapping his hands around your waist whilst his lips attach to the junction of your neck and collarbone. His tongue drags over your soft skin and he licks and softly sucks swirls onto it with his plush lips.

"Hm. You're right. This is a more fun type of danger" he says between kisses but before he's even finished his sentence you've spun around in his arms.

The bottom of your spine cold against the marble countertop, arms around his neck as you smash your lips into one another's with urgency. Tongues and wet noises as you get to know one another through your bodies alone.

He runs his hands down your back and presses his hard length against your thigh. He's definitely packing you think as you lift up a little rub your pubic bone against his front, panting out a little moan as the sweet friction of your bodies colliding sends you into overdrive. Catching the noise through your parted lips he gently tugs on the bottom one, teeth grazing the supple flesh. This combined with his large palms kneading your ass and pulling you further, tighter, into the roll of his hips. Only two layers of damp clothing separate you,forcing your lips to break from his mouth and fully moan, not caring who may be around. You could not remember the last time a perfect stranger knew your body quite this well.

His own grunts were speeding up when he suddenly grabs the back of your thighs and hoists you up beside the sink, you gasp in shock but it was more the way the lean man thrusted you up there like it was nothing. What else could he do? You expect him to go back to kissing you but instead he pulls back with his rock hard erection outlined in the wet shorts he still has on. Looking at you dead in the eyes both raging with lust and concern. Whilst you try not to worry how you were going to accommodate him inside your tight walls.

"Is this…? I mean, you want this too right?" his hands are resting at either side of your parted thighs. You nod. "Need you to say it Y/N" he steps forward, lips wet and brushes the pad of his thumb across your bottom lip that was now puffy and pink from the earlier biting. He knew you were down to fuck, but now he wanted to test your preferences. What kind of fun you were about to have shall we say. So when you lick his thumb tip, holding his fist still and grazing your wet tongue up and down from knuckle to tip before closing your eyes and humming around the entire digit, he knew you were both in for a good time.

Removing the thumb he whispers a barely audible "fuck me" before smashing your lips back together, tongues massaging together as he peels your underwear to the side with his hand swiftly and presses digit you'd lubricated with your mouth against your clit, moving it fast from side to side with just the right amount of pressure to make your head spin. Gasping, you throw your head back, hands clasped around his neck as you lean back and feel yourself start to leak a little with arousal. The few spots dripping down on to the counter.

You could say it had been a while but really this guy was moving his way round your body in the same way you tune a guitar in key. Calloused fingers applying the right amount of pressure as you felt yourself start to get to the edge already. He was kissing down the front if your chest, between your breasts, not missing a beat when he pushed both triangles of your bikini aside and you moaned loudly as he kissed and sucked hard around your nipple, tentatively pulling it between his teeth firmly, the sound you let out made him clamp a little harder before sucking in the whole nipple again, soothing the skin his tongue. Most likely leaving a mark behind, but you kind of liked the idea of proof he'd been devouring you in all honesty.

You were becoming blissed out from all the stimulation. Clenching and moving your hips around nothing but this magical thumb working your clit up and down hard. You were overcome with this whole situation playing out the way it had. You broke away from his mouth again.

"Oh fuck.. Harry, I'm… FuckFuck I'm going to come, I'm gonna fucking… Ahhh" he pulled back one arm steadying you as your head hit the mirror behind you in your release. He just watched you and slowed his thumb down watching as the liquid cascaded onto the counter.

After you'd come down you open your eyes and shyly smiled before kissing him passionately, his hands moving around your waist tightly. You moved your hand to his shorts, teasingly grazing the outline of his cock between your fingers in hopes of repaying the favour. He does a single throaty laugh and removes your hand, holding himself against his thigh. You look at him in confusion when he splutters,

"Sorry, sorry its just I'm going t'blow my load if you touch me." then he's back on your lips "Too. Fucking. Sexy" he says between wet kisses to your jaw, neck and clavicle. "Wanted to do this since I first set eyes on you" one hand is on the back of his neck twisting nape curls between your fist whilst the other rests behind you, stopping you from hitting your head on the mirror again.

"Oh yeah? Before or after I ruined your clothes?" you laugh teasingly as he slides his hands around your back to finally remove the bikini top properly, lifting it up over your head and tossing it aside somewhere on the floor. He let's a laugh out himself completely entranced still by how natural you are around him, it was often hard to connect with strangers in his position.

"I'd spotted you walking in, was trying to open the door for you m'love" he says before sucking a red mark into your breast and massaging and pulling the other nipple slightly with his hand.

You struggle through sharp intakes of breath for a reply.

"Well….ah...that's what chivalry.. Oh.. Get's you these days I guess" and you're both laughing a little.

"Hmm. Have to try harder with my manners then won't I? I mean, I've got to clear up the mess I've made here" he cups his hand against your pussy rubbing it up and down a little with his palm. You let out a guttural noise at the friction. "Ladies first and all'tha too right?" he giggles again at himself.

You're practically cumming right then, you couldn't remember the last time someone actually went down on you. Your previous boyfriend not particularly into offering you foreplay. A main point of why he didn't stick around too long.

Harry kisses down your abdomen now, soft sloppy, sensual pecks, humming into your skin every so often in appreciation as he works at removing your soaked bikini bottoms with his hands, pushing them down to your knees before you help, letting them fall from the remaining ankle to the ground.

Harry is moving far too slow for you, kissing across each hip down to the top of your slit, breathing over where you desperately need him before paying the other side the same attention. Then he's licking up each crease where your thigh meets your pelvis.

"Y/N, just.. Just turn, that's it and lean back as far as you can there, shuffle forward until can't balance anymore" you shift your ass as forward as possible on the lip of the sink and prop yourself up on your elbows trying to be as flat as possible on the cold counter as you could, your toes behind the sink with one foot the other dangling over the edge. You keep you thighs open as Harry hunches over the counter where you now lay diagonal. He places his arms under your thighs and bends your legs flat out as he can stretch you, you're expecting some more teasing but he just looks down at your pussy licking over his lips and almost whining before burying his tongue inside you immediately. The force of his tongue lapping up your previous climax causes you once again to knock the side of your head against the mirrored wall. You turn and watch the scene almost as a spectator, witnessing yourself bare to this beautiful man, curly brown hair between your fists and making sounds like he's savouring every taste. He catches you watching before taking his mouth off you, immediately, you're whining in protest.

"Watch my eyes not my reflection baby, I'm right here"

His authoritative tone eclipsing every thought you had about the casual nickname, you stared down at the wonderful site of him lapping and suckling on your clit. Pointed tongue and firm laps against the swollen button. He then starts lapping up at your glistening hole,unhooking an arm to spread your lips open between his fingers and licking right from the bottom to the top with all the sloppy wet noises involved. He was feeling you contract as he locked faster and faster over you. His tongue deserved an award never mind his music. You couldn't believe you were on the brink of a second orgasm so quickly but when he sunk his middle finger into you at the same pace his tongue was working at, you were screaming his name into the extractor fan above before you knew it. You felt waves of liquid cascade from your pussy as he gently lapped up the produce of his work from you. You flinched in overstimulation but he cleaned up every last drop tenderly before carefully closing your legs and pivoting you round to your previous sitting up position on the counter. Neither of you had spoken a word since you came but as he leads your arms to drape over your shoulders, holding your fucked out body against his chest whilst peppering your temple with soft pecks . Then he kisses you intensely, letting you taste the sweet juices of yourself on his lips. You hummed in approval of the sweet taste as you came round.

A few minutes of carnal making out and things were heating up again. Your hands cupping his jaw then sliding to graze fingernails up and down his back, digging them in a little harder now and again and causing goosebumps to pierce through the skin rapidly under your touch.

You could feel him swallowing down grunts from the friction he was getting from his shorts covered cock brushing up and down between your slick folds.

He'd made you cum twice. Hard. He always got off of making his partners cum of course, so he was feeling beyond turned on and the slight heat of your glistening folds against his length was almostvsending him over the edge.

"I want you inside me" you whispered against his lips desperately.

No sooner had you said the words, his left hand was frantically searching through the vanities top drawer in hope. Finding a packet, checking the date quickly then tearing it between his teeth, spitting the seal onto the floor and pushing his shorts to his ankles, stepping out of them at speed before kicking them away.

He smirked when he caught your eyes bulge at his cock. He knew it was above average but the reaction was always a further compliment he thought.

Stepping forward he put on a show of putting the condom on, first rubbing the drops of sticky pre cum at the head and down his length keeping his eyes locked to yours as you wriggled on the counter with anticipation. He whined a little as it squeezed him rolling it on, so red and over sensitive from turning you on. So that's why, when you grabbed for it, he stilled your hand. Dimples appearing back in his cheeks as you looked again in confusion. He kisses you, languishing the moment before grabbing you forward from the countertop to the floor again, still keeping your lips attached. He lightly grips at your hips and turns you round to face the mirror once more.

Harry lightly grabs your throat, and the way you whimper and push your ass back against him, makes him mentally bank that idea for later perhaps. He runs his left hand up the column of your neck lightly holding your jaw between his thumb and forefinger, forcing you to look at him with his hand on your face and the other already working up and down your folds.

"I want you to watch us. Want you to watch yourself come apart. Want to watch you cum around my cock yeah? " he whispers in your ear. You noticeably shiver with excitement of what's to come.

"Please Harry, please, need it, need you."

You watch yourself babble and beg for his cock. The pathetic whimper from yourself as you try and circle your ass into his crotch again to encourage it happening. You were never patient and he's driving you insane here.

Bringing two fingers infront of your lips as you watch yourself in the mirror he looks you dead in the eye through the reflection.

"Spit" so you do, "good girl" he says kissing your cheek. His saliva lubed fingers are back rubbing your clit quickly whilst his knee nudges the back of yours to spread your feet wider as he kisses the back of your neck and shoulders. When he pauses next you're not expecting the hard thrust of him entering you entirely, sure you were dripping wet with the result of two orgasms but you cry out in a mix of stretch and pleasure as he pounds into you at a furious pace. His spare hand not on your clit is holding the bottom of your spine down as he keeps up his rhythm. His pace was that of a man desperate for release after watching you fall apart on his fingers and tongue. The build up meant he was already close as you tight walls fluttered around him. He pleads with you to stop tightening your walls around him or he's not going to last he whimpers.

You were already close again, you'd never cum this many times or this quickly in your life but you were ready for another round and by the sounds of him and the stutter his pace kept slipping you knew he was close too.

You quickly removed his hand, sucking your own fingers into your mouth to replace his own at your clit.

"M'gonna cum, but… OhOh fuck.. But need you harder. Deeper" you manage to get out.

He grunts a curse before squeezing your hips at a pressure that will leave marks tomorrow but the delight in the speed he was now able to snap his hips against the swells of your ass, was well worth it. It only took a few more seconds with the fingers that knew you best, for you to gush against his cock. Feeling absolutely exhausted you slump your sweaty chest onto the cold counter.

His orgasm taking him by surprise when you clenched up to milk him dry. He all but shouts your name as his hips stutter and you feel the warmth of his cum fill the one barrier between you.

His lips were back on your sweaty neck for a second whilst he disposed of the used condom. He ran the walk in shower and wordlessly you took his offered hand to join him under the hot spray. You'd never had an encounter end like this before not that you were a seasoned professional but after 3 orgasms the way his hands moved round your body under the water, washing away your antics with sweet strawberry-banana smelling suds on the flannel, left you with a warm floaty feeling the worn off alcohol never had.

He gently wipes your makeup from under your eyes then, smiling at the cute way your nose wrinkles slightly as he rubs at each eyebrow.

"I don't even have words" you finally laugh out blushing, not able to stand his gauge as you say it.

"Oh. So that's how to make that smart mouth o'yours stop is it? " he grins, you gasp in mock offense and go to say something but going under your chin with his thumb with his forefinger to connect your lips under the warm water spray he kisses you when you pull away you can't help but ask.

"So does this make us even on one ruined fancy vest then?"

"Hmmmm" he ponders with both hands on your face looking at the ceiling out if the falling water. " I'm not sure, I mean it was a custom, pretty high going rate those yeah"

"Yeahhhh you're right, you're right. Better factor in the cost of the custom job then hadn't I huh?"

You hurriedly sink to your knees on the tiled floor.

#harry styles #1d #harries #one direction #harry styles fic rec #harry styles imagine #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles smut #harry styles fandom #harry styles fanfic #harry styles fic #summer feeling fic challenge

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sylvanvixen · 3 years

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@dungeonqueering

It’s here and it’s amazing! I cannot overstate how hyped I am for this project! Exalted is a fantastic and beautiful setting and the design for Exalted Essence has been fabulous.

It’s an amazing mythic fantasy world drawing from myths, legends and pop culture from all across the world, actively choosing to focus on world building that diverges heavily from medieval western fantasy. Various stated locations include cultures inspired by mixes of various places and time periods including China, India, Venice, Athens, Baghdad and a heck of a lot more.

The system that we’ve seen so far is an amazing game that runs fast and straightforwardly, rewards cool descriptors, makes convictions and bonds between characters mechanically relevant and gives every character cool magical abilities that enhance their stats and an awesome battle aura that buffs their skills, it’s also not restrictive in it’s powers for the most part, a fighty type character can totally invest in the knowledge skill and all the cool powers associated with it. There’s full social mechanics engaging in romance or rivalry (or both!) and for downtime projects like running a kingdom, navigating a wilderness, crafting and magical rituals.

The design team for this game is awesome, they’ve been incredibly cool and open while talking with fans, they’ve put in deliberate effort to avoid cultural stereotypes in their work, the art for the game includes diverse, multicultural characters, a number of women doing awesome things and several disabled characters. The design team is also majority queer, several of them even run a podcast about queer women speaking about rpgs called Bonus Experience!

The character options for this game are really rad!

Characters play as mortal heroes who've been empowered by one of the major gods or other cosmic beings of the setting who are given the power to perform magical and mythical feats in a diverse fantasy setting. It's got 10 Exalted (basically classes) each with subtypes called Aspects or Castes (basically subclasses).

Solars: Heroes with conviction to change the world powered by the Sun god they're mythic heroes and kings of light and excellence, basically most of the Avengers, Hercules, Adora, classic 'protagonist' dudes.

Lunars: Heroes who stand outside society empowered by the Moon God/ess, they’re shapeshifting warriors, tricksters and witches, think Maui, Loki and Double Trouble, the more wild card characters, explicitly trans validating with a gender fluid patron.

Dragon Blooded: Heroes born of blessed family lines empowered by the elemental dragons, passionate and numerous, basically elemental samurai, think the Avatar, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and most of the She-ra Princesses.

Sidereals: Heroes chosen by Fate, secret agents of heaven trying to create a better future with powers to forsee fate and obscure memory, like spy-thrillers with weird esoteric ninja powers, imagine if sailor moon was a spy/ninja show.

Getimians: Heroes who never were, heaven in Exalted is a bureaucracy and sometimes prophesied heroes end up edited out of destiny, returned by a rogue sidereal these heroes awoke in a world in which they were never born and their great deeds undone, now with funky quantum powers, like It's a Wonderful Life as an anime protagonist.

Alchemicals: Heroes born of metal, found in ancient tombs of the machine-titan, these heroic souls were reborn in bodies of magical metal and made to serve a community, able to incorporate magic item powers into their bodies, basically the Iron Giant meet every awesome sentient robot hero but in a fantasy setting

Liminals: Heroes born from death, resurrection doesn't work in Exalted but when someone tries you get a FMA situation where some new being is born in the body blessed by the OG death goddess with awesome ghost hunting powers and creepy body horror, think Frankenstein or FMA hommunculi, but with psychic powers and the ability to hunt ghosts in order to help protect the veil between life and death.

Abyssals: Heroes brought back from death, empowered by the ghost kings of the underworld these deathknights are empowered to become the lords of the underworld with spooky dark powers, very castlevania, vampire hunter D, and basically any gothic heavy metal album cover, not necessarily villains but it's an option.

Infernals: Heroes beaten down by the world order and empowered by the trapped titans to rebel against the world that hurt them, Punk rock kings of hell with their own final boss demon form and awesome alien powers, totally able to play a lot of villains, totally don't have to be evil, you could easily do Dante from DMC or Bayonetta.

Exigents: The exalted of any number of smaller gods and basically the homebrew Exalt, the example one is the champion of a Field God who gave up his power to empower the Strawmaiden who began cutting down an army of evil fairies like wheat. Has provided rules and guidelines for making your own exalted and their cool own powers, so you could be the champion of a god of rainbows, mice or libraries.

Exalted doesn't have proper 'race' options like D&D, if it's going to say something isn't human than it means it (Elves are called Raksha and they're vampiric chaos spirits given shape by dreams to look beautiful and terrifying for example) but you can totally play a 'mortal' with weird fantastic features; some people are beastmen so you could play a snakeperson or a catboy, some people carry the descent of spirits so you could play a character with the style of a tiefling, aasimar, genasi or weird fey character and some people just hung around faerie realms or sorcerers and were given strange mutations or powers

This game is just so damn cool. Check out the project, you can back it for 5$ and you’ll get access to the full rules text of the game, released in chunks throughout the kickstarter (Basically the full book, just without the editing, formatting and all the art) and if you like it you can bump up the pledge at any point afterwards, including after the project is over. It’s already funded several times over!

#exalted rpg #Exalted game #Exalted Essence #Long post

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bellatrixobsessed1 · 3 years

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The Dragon Egg (Part 2)

Part 2 for @secrettunnelatla

“No, this isn’t good enough!” Azula grits her teeth. It is decent work--as far as sound goes--but it isn’t battle of the bands worthy. Not even close. If they wanted to make it to Audio of Agni their concept would have to be much stronger, much less generic than a silly gimmick. “What kind of lyrics are these? Who came up with this concept?”

Chan, Zirin, and Ruon all point at one another before ultimately jabbing their fingers at Zirin who points to Azula herself.

Azula pinches the bridge of her nose. “Necrophilia, Zirin? That’s what you came up with?”

“You said that you wanted ‘attention grabbing’.” Zirin shrugs.

Azula rubs her hands over her face. “Our talents need to be attention grabbing.” Hers certainly are and she needs lyrics and a concept that will do them good service. “We need something that will highlight and showcase what we can do.” An absurd gimmick will only draw attention away from the aspects that matter the most.

“You got any better ideas?” Zirin grumbles.

Ruon quirks a brow and smirks, “we can try…”

“Don’t say it.” Azula frowns.

“Surf rock.” Chan finishes for him.

“We need something bigger.” Azula declares. “Something that hasn’t been done before.” She wishes that she would have saved their dragon metal concept for a later date. Then again, dragon metal is what had given them the propulsion they needed to break out from under her father’s shadow. The propulsion they needed to get their start.

But now she is at a loss for how to top that. She can’t imagine that there are many things that can top emerging on stage with a full suit of glimmering metal scales and glowing talons. She isn’t sure what can draw attention better than staring down an audience with reptilian contact lenses.

“I heard that steampunk is in.” Chan shrugs.

“Steampunk is overdone.”

“Zombies?” Zirin suggests.

Azula shakes her head. “The Blind Bandits already did that.”

“We can hold a seance on stage.” She tries again.

“Why are you so keen on utilizing dead things?” Azula pinches the bridge of her nose. Though a seance isn’t a particularly terrible idea if, perhaps, they incorporated other elements, such as handing out tickets in the form of tarot cards. “I suppose we might be able to work with that.”

But an evening of phantoms and psychic energy is a rather far leap from dragon metal and she isn’t sure that their style of music would line up neatly with the aesthetics of a supernatural night…

She spares a glance to the clock. “Keep coming up with ideas, we need to practice.”

“We’ve played these songs hundreds of times, shouldn’t we be coming up with some new songs?” Chan asks. “From Ashes To Phoenix, just announced their second new single.”

Azula’s face reddens if only slightly. “Zuzu can release as many new singles as he wants, that won’t make them sound any better than someone chewing on a microphone with feedback for three minutes.”

Chan stifles a laugh.

She should have known then that the rest of practice was going to be a waste. She has known Chan since they were children and she knows how he can be. She isn’t particularly surprised when he makes practice hell, purposely floundering his way through certain guitar riffs and singing off key when he saw most optimal. His screw ups always through Ruon off and eventually Zirin would practically flop over her drum kit with laughter.

As per usual, Azula is the only one not laughing.

As per usual, Azula is the only one with anything real at stake.

She is reminded quite potently of it when her father calls. Chan has thrown Ruon off for the sixth time that night, they already have to take it from the top so Azula steps out into the hallway and swipes to answer.

He starts in on her before she can even put the phone to her ear. “How is it that your brother has already put out two new singles and you haven’t even come up with one?”

“Because I’m trying to come up with something that has some quality.” She has chosen her words carefully but neglected to watch her tone.

She thinks that it would be more befitting of him to simply yell violently at her. But his voice is so slick and smooth that she can’t even hide behind incoherence. “I’m not funding your band for you to disgrace the legacy. I handed you a blazing torch and you are letting the fire die.”

“I’m trying to…” she pauses. “Pick out the best kindling. Something that will burn for a long time. Zuko is just tossing random sticks into the pit and hoping something will catch.”

This seems to satisfy him, though it doesn’t keep him from ending the call with a curt, “there’s a fine line between perfecting a song and stalling.” He doesn’t even know that she hasn’t started working on a song yet.

He doesn’t need to know.

She rubs her hands over her face. The man was pissed when Zuko’s first album flopped and he’d had low expectations to begin with. She vividly recalls childhood music lessons; they’d come so naturally to her. She could pick up a violin or stroke the keys of a piano and it would come out just right after the first few tries.

Her voice, they said, was golden. A gift. A marvel. She had impressive range. She has impressive range.

And Zuko, even with extra lessons and several teachers struggled to make use of even a recorder. His vocals were ‘generic’, ‘nothing special’ and sometimes he would sing off tune. Ozai wasn’t fond of his improv either when lyrics slipped his mind.

He still forgets lyrics.

His own lyrics.

Azula isn’t sure how he hasn’t yet been booed off of a stage. She supposes there are perks in having magazine writers fawning over abs and ‘chiseled faces’.

But she wants more than that. She wants real talent. She wants a voice so sublime and lyrics so powerful that they draw focus away from any other aspect of her. She loathes and dreads the day when they push out cover that fancies her physique over her genius.

She won’t rely on that.

Unlike Zuko, she doesn’t need to.

She has a voice and she can do things with it that so many others can’t. She glares at Chan and Ruon as they cackle to themselves. She joins them once more, whatever aura she emits, their laughter cuts off. “Are you finished?”

They nod and Zirin nods.

“Good.” She says in a low hiss. “Start over. This time lets focus. We’re going to have a new song by the end of the night.”

It will be a lackluster song, but it will pacify her father, at least until she can come up with something better.

By the end of the session the only thing that she has acquired for her troubles is a headache and a sudden resentment of Zirin. Chan at least knows when to bring a terrible and tired joke to an end. Zirin is a collection of relentless crass comments.

Even if she doesn’t mean any harm by them, she doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. Sometimes Azula thinks that Zirin is holding the rest of them back. Sometimes she regrets seeing the potential in her. Sometimes she regrets having vouched for her during music lessons until the teachers saw the same thing that she did.

Sometimes she thinks that she only lets Zirin stay because she is Chan’s girlfriend.

Sometimes she lets it go and carries on with practice as though the comments are only mild annoyances. And most of the time they are.

Tonight she has had her fill of aggravation.

Tonight she has had her fill of letting the woman pound on the drums every time she attempted to speak. She locks her microphone in its stand and without another word or a glance back, she leaves the recording studio.

As the door slams she could hear Zirin remark, “daddy’s little diva.”

She doesn’t know how long they wait for her to come back. But she doesn’t. Not that night. Were it not for her father’s expectations she would be well on her way to finding new bandmates. She can’t afford that yet; she is too pressed for time.

Too awkward and isolated to find anyone else anyhow.

She uses her walk home to come up with excuses as to why practice has been cut so short.

.oOo.

Seicho doesn’t expect a call so soon. Spirits, it would be embarrassing if her work had given Azula an allergic reaction. With the woman’s number flashing across her cellphone screen, she pictures rock ‘n roll legend, Fire Lord Ozai showing up at the shop all muscle and fury to tell her off for ruining his daughter’s flawless skin.

Seicho shudders and grins all at once. She isn’t sure if she would particularly mind getting yelled at by her idol, it would be like one of his concerts, but without the music. She picks up the call before it can go to voicemail.

“If it’s a rash, you should probably call the doctor! I’m sorry for…”

“What are you talking about?” She can see Azula’s half-frown through the phone.

Seicho clears her throat. “Nevermind, I thought that you were someone else.” She lies. “Is everything going okay with your tattoo?”

“So far, yes.”

“Are you cleaning it at least twice daily.”

“I clean it once in the morning, once at noon, and once at night. I’m not calling to talk about my tattoo.”

“What are you calling for then?”

Azula is silent for quite a while.

“I suppose I just want someone to talk to.”

Seicho very nearly asks her why she doesn’t just phone a friend, why she has decided to talk to her of all people. Instead she inquires, “what do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know.” There is a long pause. “Nevermind.” The phone clicks.

.oOo.

She feels foolish hanging up just to call again. But her father is still up and about, she sees his silhouette behind the curtain and she hasn’t come up with an excuse that he’d accept. She could tell him that Chan had to leave early but then he’d ask why she hadn’t continued without him. She could say that the other two refused but then he’d question her lack of control and ask why she didn’t practice alone.

She should just enter and get it over with, it is better if she does. It is the difference between a scolding and a slap.

But today she can’t take any more berating. She hits redial and holds the phone up to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Can we meet somewhere?” She doesn’t bother backtracking to return the greeting.

Seicho draws out her pause for so long that Azula nearly hangs up a second time. “Does the skate park sound good? I’m already there.”

It isn’t her scene. “I’ll be there.” She hangs up before the girl can change her mind.

#Avatar The Last Airbender #Azula #Azula/Background Character #Zuko #Mai #Maiko #Fanfiction

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fyexo · 4 years

Text

200331 EXO's Suho Paints an Intimate 'Self-Portrait' With His New Solo EP

For much of the decade, Kim Jun-myeon has been better known by his stage name Suho. A member and the leader of K-pop boy band EXO, the singer -- whose stage name means "guardian" -- spent his twenties performing across the globe, releasing multiple hits in South Korea and selling millions of copies of albums worldwide since the band's start in 2012.

Now, he’s ready to share more of himself on his first-ever solo album, Self-Portrait.

Out Monday (March 30), the singer turns away from the dance and R&B-oriented sounds typically associated with EXO’s releases, and shows a new side to himself through six original rock-oriented songs in his new EP. Though the album embraces Suho's identity within the group, it also expands upon it, introducing new sonic elements. The 28-year-old, who writes lyrics under his pen name SH20, also shares his world view via the soft and indie rock-imbued sound, leading with the single “Let’s Love.”

With its title inspired by EXO’s catchphrase, the breezy, sweet tune is passionate, as Suho sings about a love he is racing toward but has not quite reached yet. The song is both a romantic pop-rock ballad and a message aimed at EXO’s global fan club, EXO-L.

Prior to its release, Suho spoke with Billboard to discuss what Self-Portrait means to him.

How are you feeling ahead of the release of Self-Portrait?

I’m so nervous [for the release date]. Because it’s my first solo album, and I’m doing it without the members of EXO, I’m somewhat nervous and also very excited -- somewhat like a new start. I hope that this album and the songs are things that many people will like. Not only for Korean fans, but all of my fans globally. I hope that they enjoy it.

The album is very intimate, as it’s called Self-Portrait. What inspired you to put forth this narrative for your first solo EP?

The inspiration was drawn from Vincent van Gogh’s "Self-Portrait." I first saw it in Switzerland and Paris, and for van Gogh, it probably meant a lot to him as a person. Since I’m not a painter, I wanted to paint something in my album as a self-portrait, per se, similar to how it was for van Gogh to share his own view of himself.

Van Gogh painted different self-portraits to reflect different sides to himself and changes to how he saw himself. Do you feel this album similarly does that for you as an artist?

Yeah, that’s right. I think so. Through this album, I’ve been able to explore and show different sides of me, not only what is perceived from the outside, but also what is inside of myself.

I saw the covers were based around four different variants. Do you feel there are four distinct sides to you? Or is it not as specific as that?

To be completely honest, I believe that there are probably more than four sides to me; there are many facets of my personality. With all these various sides that I have, I tried to condense it to an essence where it can be portrayed in four different self-portraits.

Do those four specific facets have any meaning to you?

When I first asked to use this concept, I didn’t have too much significance to show regarding myself, but I wanted to visually depict four different seasons, the four seasons of Suho.

Do you have a favorite season?

Spring.

Along with the four images featured on the album, you made a self-portrait of yourself featuring bunny ears, and that’s become your Twitter emoji. How do you feel about sharing that side of yourself as an extension of Self-Portrait’s promotional concept?

That, a rabbit or bunny, is my nickname from EXO-L, so that’s why it has significance to me. Whenever I’m communicating with fans, talking to EXO-L directly, that’s when the nickname pops up, but for the album, it’s not included because I want this album not only to be meant for the fans, but also for many other people who will listen to this album. So for the bunny ears drawing and emoji, it was more a signal that can be recognized by fans and EXO members.

So the album isn’t solely aimed at fans, but these sort of social media interactions are. So it sounds like it's important to you that the general public will be able to enjoy listening to Self-Portrait, beyond your already loyal EXO-L.

Yes, the songs on this album are composed of band sounds. [Editor's note: In Korean, it is common to say “band” rather than “rock music" when referring to rock-affiliated genres.] That’s a genre that international audiences are very used to, and they really enjoy. I feel like this album is one that the general public will be able to pick up and just listen to comfortably because it doesn’t have the strong beats and basses of the dance music that EXO albums usually have.

You mentioned that this is music you think the general public likes, but is it also the type of music you particularly like?

Of course. I really like Coldplay. Their music has had a big impact on me.

Regarding the single “Let’s Love,” why did you decide to make this the single for Self-Portrait?

This is my favorite song of this album. And the meaning of the title recalls the cheer EXO does before we go on stage: “Let’s Love!” Just generally, we use it as a cheer. It’s also a message I want to tell people, “Let’s love.”

In regards to that, is there a message you would like people to take away when listening to the six tracks of Self-Portrait?

To be honest, there’s not a single message on this album. But the theme that connects all these songs is the idea that everyone has scars, everyone has been hurt. But even so, shouldn’t we still love? So this is an open question I want to ask to the people who are listening to my music.

You were involved in the songwriting process, and are credited as a lyricist. Are there any verses you want people to pay particular attention to?

Track six, “For You Now.” When you live life, there are many times you just miss the opportunity to properly thank someone whenever you feel thankful for them. Sometimes you look back and always regret not being able to say, “Thank you.” So in order to express my thankfulness, even though it’s late, I want to tell them, “Thank you.” And I want people to feel the same way; even if it’s late, it’s never too late to say “Thank you.”

Do you feel you have a lot of those regrets?

Yes, there are many. Many. [Nods thoughtfully.] Sometimes a person just misses the opportunity to thank their parents as well, and so I do have these sorts of regrets.

You worked with Younha on “For You Now.” What brought about that collaboration?

I am not a personal friend of Younha, but I’ve respected and admired her work for a long time. That’s why I reached out to her and asked her if she could collaborate with me. As for the song itself, she is such a great singer. She went above my expectations in regards to how she was able to express the song, musically, lyrically, and through her expressive vocals.

There’s a song “Self-Portrait,” but it’s not the single even though it’s the album’s name. Why did you decide to go with “Let’s Love” versus “Self-Portrait” for the single?

Although it’s the album’s name, when people listened to “Let’s Love,” that’s what people enjoyed the most. The phrase is also meaningful, so I wanted to emphasize that.

Was it important for you to make it clear, through picking this song title for the single, to blend your identity as Suho the soloist and Suho the EXO member on this solo album?

I didn’t try to emphasize my identity as a member of EXO particularly while creating this album, but when I started drawing a self-portrait, EXO has been an important part of me over the past 10 years as a person. So it was very natural for this part of my identity to seep into the lyrics and the album itself.

In general, what was your creative process like when approaching this album and its introspective nature?

For the past three months, I’ve only been listening to [rock] music, whether it’s by Korean artists or international ones, and did not listen to any dance music or R&B and jazz music to get into the mood for this album. I paid a lot of attention not only to the music, but also the way they approached their lyrics.

Also, I spent a lot of time talking to my friends to discuss what sort of story I want to express, what message I want to send across. I found areas where me and my friends would agree upon, or have the same empathetic connection. So all of these combined together went into making this album what it is.

It’s almost like method acting.

[Laughs] Yes.

You said you spoke to your friends to get their opinions on the message, but the album is called Self-Portrait, which as an artistic form doesn't typically take into account outsiders’ point of views. Was there any particular importance for you to discuss your ideas with them?

The reason why I spent time talking to my friends is because you can say that my friends know the side of me that I’m not even aware of myself. And even though it’s a self-portrait and my story, if my friends -- or just people in general -- cannot feel any connection to it, it might feel that it doesn’t have enough impact or significance. So that’s why I spent time talking to friends and others about this project.

You’ve had a lengthy career already. Why did you decide that now is the time to share this side of you with the world?

My career as a member of EXO has been almost 10 years, and I will soon be going into my thirties, so I thought it would be a great time to talk about my life in my twenties.

Earlier, you mentioned that you’re nervous about the album’s release. Is there apprehension specifically in showing these new elements of yourself?

People know me from within EXO, and people remember me and my overall image as a member of EXO. But for this album that I’m releasing, both the fans and the general public might be a little shocked to see a different side to me, a different musical genre. I really like this style of music, and I have confidence in this album’s style, but I hope my fans and the general public take some time to listen to the lyrics on the tracks -- one through six -- and I’m pretty sure that after they listen to them, they will love the songs.

You’ve released solo music before, and other members of EXO have gone on their own to release solo albums. So do you really think that this will be truly shocking to listeners to hear a new side, a new story from you?

When it comes to EXO members, usually our solo projects have revolved around balladry, R&B, or hip-hop. At our concerts, many of the solo stages are primarily those sort of performances. A lot of the members have spoken about how these are their favorite styles of music.

But I never publicly, necessarily, showed that I really like [rock] music. Since I never really shared this side of me, that’s the reason I say I’m nervous. I’ve also done musical theater and released songs exploring other genres of music, but this is the first time I’m sharing this so … I think I’m the first one, among our members, to really show something new like this, so that’s why I think fans and the general public might be shocked.

What would be your ideal reaction to this album?

Even if people don’t know Suho from EXO, I hope that people will like my song and become a fan just by listening to this album. I also would love, whether professional or amateur, bands also would enjoy this album. That would be great.

The album is coming out at the end of March, so imagining the rest of the year, what would you like 2020 to bring your way?

Oh, this is hard. I would like to communicate and connect with everyone, whether it’s my members or EXO-L or the general public. I hope it’s a 2020 where we can have many empathetic connections.

This interview was conducted in English and Korean, and edited for clarity

source: billboard

#exo #suho #t: interview #billboard

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dailyexo · 4 years

Text

[NEWS] Suho - 200331 Billboard: “EXO's Suho Paints an Intimate 'Self-Portrait' With His New Solo EP”

"For much of the decade, Kim Jun-myeon has been better known by his stage name Suho. A member and the leader of K-pop boy band EXO, the singer -- whose stage name means "guardian" -- spent his twenties performing across the globe, releasing multiple hits in South Korea and selling millions of copies of albums worldwide since the band's start in 2012.

Now, he’s ready to share more of himself on his first-ever solo album, Self-Portrait.

Prior to its release, Suho spoke with Billboard to discuss what Self-Portrait means to him.

How are you feeling ahead of the release of Self-Portrait?

The album is very intimate, as it’s called Self-Portrait. What inspired you to put forth this narrative for your first solo EP?

The inspiration was drawn from Vincent van Gogh’s 'Self-Portrait.' I first saw it in Switzerland and Paris, and for van Gogh, it probably meant a lot to him as a person. Since I’m not a painter, I wanted to paint something in my album as a self-portrait, per se, similar to how it was for van Gogh to share his own view of himself.

Van Gogh painted different self-portraits to reflect different sides to himself and changes to how he saw himself. Do you feel this album similarly does that for you as an artist?

Yeah, that’s right. I think so. Through this album, I’ve been able to explore and show different sides of me, not only what is perceived from the outside, but also what is inside of myself.

I saw the covers were based around four different variants. Do you feel there are four distinct sides to you? Or is it not as specific as that?

Do those four specific facets have any meaning to you?

When I first asked to use this concept, I didn’t have too much significance to show regarding myself, but I wanted to visually depict four different seasons, the four seasons of Suho.

Do you have a favorite season?

Spring.

Yes, the songs on this album are composed of band sounds. [Editor's note: In Korean, it is common to say 'band' rather than 'rock music' when referring to rock-affiliated genres.] That’s a genre that international audiences are very used to, and they really enjoy. I feel like this album is one that the general public will be able to pick up and just listen to comfortably because it doesn’t have the strong beats and basses of the dance music that EXO albums usually have.

You mentioned that this is music you think the general public likes, but is it also the type of music you particularly like?

Of course. I really like Coldplay. Their music has had a big impact on me.

Regarding the single 'Let’s Love,' why did you decide to make this the single for Self-Portrait?

This is my favorite song of this album. And the meaning of the title recalls the cheer EXO does before we go on stage: 'Let’s Love!' Just generally, we use it as a cheer. It’s also a message I want to tell people, 'Let’s love.'

In regards to that, is there a message you would like people to take away when listening to the six tracks of Self-Portrait?

You were involved in the songwriting process, and are credited as a lyricist. Are there any verses you want people to pay particular attention to?

Track six, 'For You Now.' When you live life, there are many times you just miss the opportunity to properly thank someone whenever you feel thankful for them. Sometimes you look back and always regret not being able to say, 'Thank you.' So in order to express my thankfulness, even though it’s late, I want to tell them, 'Thank you.' And I want people to feel the same way; even if it’s late, it’s never too late to say 'Thank you.'

Do you feel you have a lot of those regrets?

Yes, there are many. Many. [Nods thoughtfully.] Sometimes a person just misses the opportunity to thank their parents as well, and so I do have these sorts of regrets.

You worked with Younha on 'For You Now.' What brought about that collaboration?

There’s a song 'Self-Portrait,' but it’s not the single even though it’s the album’s name. Why did you decide to go with 'Let’s Love' versus 'Self-Portrait' for the single?

Although it’s the album’s name, when people listened to 'Let’s Love,' that’s what people enjoyed the most. The phrase is also meaningful, so I wanted to emphasize that.

Was it important for you to make it clear, through picking this song title for the single, to blend your identity as Suho the soloist and Suho the EXO member on this solo album?

In general, what was your creative process like when approaching this album and its introspective nature?

It’s almost like method acting.

[Laughs] Yes.

You’ve had a lengthy career already. Why did you decide that now is the time to share this side of you with the world?

My career as a member of EXO has been almost 10 years, and I will soon be going into my thirties, so I thought it would be a great time to talk about my life in my twenties.

Earlier, you mentioned that you’re nervous about the album’s release. Is there apprehension specifically in showing these new elements of yourself?

What would be your ideal reaction to this album?

The album is coming out at the end of March, so imagining the rest of the year, what would you like 2020 to bring your way?

Oh, this is hard. I would like to communicate and connect with everyone, whether it’s my members or EXO-L or the general public. I hope it’s a 2020 where we can have many empathetic connections."

Photo links: 1

Credit: Billboard.

#EXO #EXO K #Suho #200331 #exo im #exo k im #suho im #p:news #t:news #fs:billboard #album:self portrait #comeback:Obsession

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riskeith · 4 years

Note

ooo! how was playing? what do you think about the event? i’m really enjoying it actually... always nice getting new daily things to do hehe.

yeah i think everyone knows The Cover now. i still can’t believe they did that... not complaining tho... oh really? you’re absolutely right and judging by the way they’re taking the story it seems like those two will have a lot more growth to their relationship. who knows maybe we’ll even get a part where bakugou apologizes or even talks about their past etc. one can only wish. YEAH i’ve seen both the movies and i love them!! they’re super fun and such a nice break from everything that happens in the anime sjskjssk kiribaku in the first one was so gay i.... we get it boys y’all in love fhjsjdjfk (THE SIDEWAYS TODOBAKU SMILE... one of my favorite moments ever) i am all caught up now.. waiting for s5... :(

no clue!! it’s just my theory so it might be wrong. the blue one was cute too so was the pink one.... they’re all cute why do we have to pick just one :( HEY you do know how to draw 😡 pretty amazingly too! but i’d love to see that in your style chongyun is so precious.. <3

omg i gotta hustle hard for AR 35 then i already miss him. i’m at 26 now and god.. it’s getting more and more difficult i can’t imagine how it is at like 45... 😭

oooooh!!! honestly barbara healing is godsent if you don’t get him you should consider it (hopefully you do though!!) IVE SEEN VIDEOS OF OCEANID AND HE LOOKS SO SCARY CLUNA.... no thoughts head empty only boy scouts party. looking at others with amazing parties: ok but do you have boy scouts party?

i mostly have sword users! but like i mentioned i’m starting to fall in love with book users (and even bow users) shskfhdkd so i might consider investing in those some day idk they just shoot of attacks and it’s so sexy. no hands dirty. ningguang seems so op 😭 plus geo is so nice!! like an all around element.

HE’S TALL? he has a short person voice...

i’m making a twitter i wanna see some fluff 😭 wait really? even this fandom is shit? why 😭 i sometimes see yt comments and the thing i’m iffy about is how people talk about spending money on it etc but is there more?

i’ve never heard anyone do that that’s so interesting!!!! do you write it down in the same doc and then delete it or do you write it separately?

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS!!! i’ve had so many ideas come to me before bed and i always think that i’m gonna remember them but i never do it makes me so upset. especially if it’s an idea of how to continue a story i’m stuck with... god it’s the worse. writer things 🤪

“stan loona” aka bane of my existence. i don’t usually tell ppl i used to stan because of that reason sksksj. god that was the worst sheesh. anyway. yelling at ALL of these!!! ofc i know daddy issues slowed!!!!!!!!! it’s like one of the most popular slowed songs we’re all just a sad horny bunch loving sexy vibes huh. i listen to slowed songs a lot when i write actually it sets the mood. it doesn’t even have to be anything racy sometimes it’s just calms you down. do you listen to music while you write? also i don’t listen to any of those you mentioned except troye 😭 i’m sorry 😭 but if you’re have recs i’d love to hear them ofc!!

“after school” time that’s so cute. it reminds me of when you’re younger and you run back home and eat a snack and watch cartoon (i say that as both of us still watch cartoons... yee) speaking of crying; would you consider yourself a crybaby? (such a random question hskshdjdfhhd)

before i leave; let me blow your mind with a little something... https://twitter.com/primo_fates/status/1347780975078506496?s=21

hehe... mwah. ;)

it was good!! i tried to get some ominous masks and weathered arrows, but drop rates are always shit lolll. and i think the event is alright! i don’t love it but yeah as you said it’s fun to have something more to do every day.

ikr omg... it’s such a good cover LMAO. omg a bakugou apology 😩😩. what did you think of deku vs kacchan part 2?? i regularly rewatch clips of it and cry LMAOOO god bakugou.. “why did i become the reason for all might’s end?” heart broken wow. NICE!! yeah i remember everyone freaking out over the kiribaku scenes in the first one and honestly,,,, how else do you explain it LMAO. (AND THAT SIDEWAYS SMILE!!! holy shit i watched the movie like the day after i got into todobaku and that scene obliterated me.... absolutely destroyed!) aw nice! but yeah now it’s just the waiting game i guess lol welcome to the club 🤪

IKR??? i saw the “once you pick one the others are gone” and i was just nooooooooooo whyyyy. you can’t give us all these options then don’t actually give us an option 😭 AHAHA thank u but i always joke that i can only draw well like once every 10 tries so... yeahhh we shall see! i have this thing envisioned in my mind but i am unable to execute it fskhfkdsjfs

yeah omg when i reached 45 i was like “wow i’m gonna have to do the ascension quest soon” but it’s taking me so long to reach ar 46??? yikes how am i meant to get the experience with no quests fkhdsfkjsd

i use barbara a lot in the fire domains and with the pyro regisvine!! it’s kinda funny that i’m bringing a level 40 into a level 70+ fight LOL but yeah she’s good! AND YEAHHH OCEANID LEGIT GIVES ME NIGHTMARES I JUST. as soon as i had an actual team that could beat it i grinded it as much as i could before my world level went up and it became impossible again.... but since mine might go up again soon maybe i should grind some more... and maybe i’ll be able to level up both xingqiu and barbara lol. EXACTLY!! can they pls interact in game somehow omg.. we need a bennett story!! and more razor!!!! and chongyun too!! i forgot he hasn’t actually appeared in game hfsdkjfds. and ofc xingqiu <3

fdfjlsjfs are you gonna go from a no long range team to an only long range team ahahah. and you like geo??? omg no... i hate it bc it’s so like. inert FHKDJFSD. but i guess the shields are really nice!

HE’S 172 CM!!!!! he has a baby face too so it’s pretty wild fhskdjds

ooo wdym how they talk about spending money? i don’t really look at youtube comments tbh lol. and i haven’t really seen people talk about spending money much on twitter? tho some content creators i follow open commissions for money for the gacha fhsdfksj. if you do end up joining genshintwt i hope you have fun!!

same doc and then i delete! but sometimes if the plan is really long i’ll make a new doc so i can see both at the same time (but recently i’ve just been opening the same doc again so i can see both that way lol). do your dotpoints go into the same doc as your writing one?

LMAOOO yeah i’m always like “hnghhh okay it’s fine.. i will Remember... trust myself” and then i never do and it’s just like welp goodbye to that amazing idea. but also bc it was thought up at such a weird time maybe it isn’t actually that good after all LOL

oh nice!! yeah slowed songs are soooo good. and i usually do listen to music! it’ll depend on what i’m writing bc i like the songs to have a similar vibe, but sometimes it’s too distracting so i put on lofi or something so there are no words ahaha. oh rippp LOL! hmm well badlands by halsey was my klance/voltron album writing soundtrack for a really long time.. i wrote a few fics with that in the background i think! melanie martinez’ k-12 album has a whole free movie to go with it! if you wanna check that out. bastille’s pompeii was really popular but i also really like flaws and of the night from them.. a lot of these are older bc i don’t listen to new stuff fhsdfkjds. and hmm pentatonix (they’re an acapella group!) do a lot of covers so maybe you can find one of a song you like and check them out that way? ahah that’s a lot feel free to not listen to any!! no stress at all lmao

oh fun fact melanie has a idk what to call it character? and song called ‘crybaby’! so very coincidental you asked. but yeah i think i am? LMAOOO like if i’m alone in my room watching something and it’s sad i Will Not hesitate to cry.. like sometimes you just gotta get it out you know? and sometimes maybe it’s a little boy singing a korean cover of colours of the wind but it’s so ethereal you just burst into tears but that’s fine! FHDSKJFHDSFKJS. how about you?

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH MY GOD!! i legit. my jaw is dropped. i. oh my god 😭😭😭😭😭😭 FHSJFKHSKDJF1!!!! 😭😭😭🥺🥺🥺😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 this is so atmospheric and cosy and warm 😭😭😭 i can go at peace now.. fhskfhdsjf

thank you always!! - c.r. xoxo

#marriage anon #wowclunaanswers #long post

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grimelords · 5 years

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I’ve finished my September playlist, only almost a month later. It’s got everything, The Weeknd, desert psychedelica from Niger, and Australian yodelling from 1941. What more could you want!

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XO / The Host / Initiation - The Weeknd: First of all Trilogy is a masterpiece. The Weeknd is a legend forever for this alone. Back when he was an anonymous character and before he tried to pivot to being a proper pop star and started beliving his own bullshit. This trio of songs for me is one of the highlights of the whole thing because this is where things really take a turn and it serves as a nice flipside to earlier songs like Glass Table Girls (even quoting some of the lyrics from it in a very cool reprise). Where most of the songs from House Of Balloons are about his own descent into this hedonistic life, by the time you get to Echoes Of Silence he lives there comfortably, and he's turned from cool, dark and tormented to coldly evil and calculating. He's the master of the dark palace and he's drawing this woman in. The chorus of XO is straight up cult language 'all we ever do is love, open up your mind you can find the love'. She's broke and addicted trying to escape her life and he offers her this community. Which is where Initation comes in and things get really dark. This song feels like the real truth of those stories you hear of Drake flying instagram models around and it's a masterpiece of the dark underside of the drugs money and models bragging you're used to.

Sociopath (feat. Kash Doll) - Pusha T: Get a load of this new Pusha song where he's got Rodney Dangerfield ghostwriting for him. I got a bitch that'll master your card.. my wife ova hea!! Also the funny gritted teeth way he says it cracks me up. He also says boop bop be boop bop. There's so many good moments in this very silly song from a man that is normally terrifyingly serious.

Ice Cream - Muscles: I suddenly remembered this song the other day and I'm so glad I did. A good example of how you can get so much feeling out of music that has no relation at all to the lyrics. In the right mood this song makes me so emotional and I can't even pin down why. The way he sings 'ice cream is going to save the day' somehow just makes the urban alienation of the verse even more pointed. It's such a silly little dance song and that's what's so strong about it. It's dancing at night and unsuccessfully trying to forget what happened today.

Running - Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx: It’s extremely strange that this remix album ever happened, thinking back on it. Stranger still that a Gil Scott Heron song got remixed by Jamie xx and then remixed again by 40 and turned into a Drake song in I’ll Take Care Of U and all three versions rock. Anyway, this song and this whole album remain fantastic - it still sounds futuristic in a way where nobody else really followed Jamie’s sound, everything else went a different direction so this an In Colour feel more and more unique to me as time goes on.

Boyfriend (Repeat) - Confidence Man: I’m in love with this album. It’s the closest I’ve found so far to the level of absolute fun in dance music since Duck Sauce’s album. I love the the attitude of her lyrics, which carries through the whole album. I love when her Australian accent peeks out for a second on a few words. I love his rebuttals that almost but not quite put it over the edge into a comedy song. I love the big fading out leadup to the drop near the end where a huge throat singing drone just swallows the whole song for a second.

Ever Again (Soulwax Remix) - Robyn: Extremely hot remix alert!! Thankyou to Zan Rowe's Monthly Mixtape playlist for putting my onto this.Sometimes all you need is one ferociously hot bassline to make a life complete.

$50 Million - !!!: !!!’s new album has one of the best covers I’ve seen recently, I advise you to check it out. It’s interesting to be so far into your career (this is their 8th album since 2001) and still be writing songs about selling out, a concept which has largely disappeared from music discourse since musicians started making no money post napster. I vaguely remember the turning point being when Kimya Dawson, after blowing up via the Juno soundtrack, turned down a coke ad for a ludicrous amount and the blogosphere at the time turned on her and said she should have taken the money because she was living in a van at the time. Nobody gives a fuck about selling out anymore because bands make more from tshirts than streams so you’ve got to act like a brand just to make a living. Anyway I’ve gotten off track. This song rocks, especially for the breakdown near the end.

Tipped Hat - The Paper Scissors: A song I haven’t heard in over ten years that suddenly popped into my head the other day. I love the way this guy’s voice sounds, just completely committing to sounding like a hand puppet. I’ve been playing bass a lot more recently and so have developed the worst man habit of becoming more sensitive to and pointing out extremely hot basslines to people, so I’d be derelict in my duty to not share this one.

Heimsdalgate Like A Promethian Curse - of Montreal: I love this song about literally pleading with your brain to come good. Here’s a good quote about this album “I went through this chemical depression, and that's when I was writing a lot of the songs for Hissing Fauna. They're all songs about that experience. And I was experiencing it in the moment that I was writing the songs, and sort of asking myself: What the hell is going on? Why are you all of a sudden totally paranoid and plagued by these anxieties? And why is everything so distorted and confusing and fucked up? My lifestyle hadn't changed that much. And then I realized, well, there's something going on inside of me that I don't have control over, and then you realize how vulnerable you are to these things, these elements that you can't understand, or unless you go on medication and get it under control. It's like you're being betrayed by your body.” Something I really admire about this album is that the lyrics reflect black metal levels of mental anguish, he was absolutely going through it the worst anyone can go through it “I'd gotten to that point where nothing was working. I was borderline suicidal, and my relationship with my girlfriend had totally eroded and she'd gone back to Norway with our daughter and everything was totally fucked, and I was just like, What can I do? "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" is about that.” But the music is one hundred percent committedly twee and I really admire the effect that that split mood gives. “The lyrics tell the story of what was really going on and the music sort of represents this other emotion that I wish existed. The music was really happy because I wanted to make something that would lift my spirits.”

Jesus Rabbit - Guerilla Toss: I love the wobbly weird bass sound in this weirdo UFO cult song. I love the bleepy bloop melody that runs through it and I love how fundamentally unstable the whole song sounds, like it’s made out of paperclips and foil and papier mache.

Suburbia - Press Club: I can’t believe I didn’t know about Press Club for so long. I only found out about them this performance https://youtu.be/bCmtc-T5Unk which I’m shocked to learn has less than 5k views considering it’s one of the very best TV performances I’ve ever seen.

Come For Me - Sunflower Bean: I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this song before and I’m probably going to say the exact same thing but who cares! This song fuckin rocks. I love how assured it is, like “if you’re gonna fuck me then stop fucking around and fuck me already.” It also feels so musically similar to I Can Hardly Make You Mine by Cults to me, which is a great excuse for me to listen to that song every single time I listen to this song.

Thousands - Club Night: This Club Night album is really really good. It's like a really nice middleground between midwest emo and Cymbals Eat Guitars. The way this song blows up halfway through with 'what if we want it!!' is so good. This whole band feels like they're from 2009 but in a good way, the tail end of indie and twee with these prog or postrock structures where the songs just go and go, and you can just get completely lost in it.

Cemetary - Brutus: The first thing you've got to know about Brutus is the drummer is also the singer. Normally who plays what is not really important but in this case I think it's very important because it makes the drums a lead instrument more than they normally would be. When she's not singing my focus is still on the drums because they're linked and I absolutely love it. This song is great and every song I've heard of theirs is just as good, I love Brutus and they're one of the best new bands I've found recently. Someone in the youtube comments said 'there's something really special about hearing a song for the first time and just knowing you're going to listen to it hundreds of times in your life.'

Enter By The Narrow Gates / Spirit Narrative - Circle Takes The Square: I think that I think of Circle Takes The Square as a household name just because they have such an outsized importance in my own life when they're definitely not at all. They're legendary for making The screamo (good kind) album in As The Roots Undo and then taking 8 years to make a followup, which is this album Decompositions, but I don't really know if they're well known outside of like, people who have opinions about what were the hottest music blogspots in 2010. I chose both of these because you can't really have one without the other, the whole album basically runs as one long piece of music and so this just kind of jarringly ends at the end of Spirit Narrative, sorry about that please listen to the entire album. Because of the status As The Roots Undo enjoys I feel like this album was kind of ignored, or overshadowed by the reputation it was trying to live up to, almost exactly like The Avalanches with Since I Left You and Wildflower, when just like Wildflower it's a more expansive, developed take on the original sound that trades some of the rawness for a more polished and considered approach and comes out arguably better than the orginal. I feel like I have so much to say about this album but I don't really know where to begin, just listen to it.

Vitrification Of Blood (Pt. 1) - Blood Incantation: I am by no means a metal scholar, but I know that when the word 'blood' is in both the song title AND the band name that means it's good metal. I love this song, and this whole album is great. It's very 'classic' death metal but there's touches (beyond the extreme length) of psychedelica as well that puts it on another level you can just get lost in. The way the guitar goes to space at 3:40, and again properly into orbit at 6:50 is just magical. The more I listen to this band the more I understand those guys who only listen to metal, there's a whole ecosystem in here and it's really got everything you need.

Out Of Line - Gesaffelstein: This whole song is basically intended as an intro for Pursuit on the album but it’s so powerful just on its own. I love imbuing weirdo lyrics like ‘a bitter sunken love in a bleach blonde submarine’ with such ominous power through the commanding delivery. I love the way the big grunting vocals on the offbeat build to sound like a summoning ritual. I love making a big processed bell the centrepiece of your extremely evil sounding song. It’s sort of a shame that Gessaffelstein has never really gone back to the vision of his first album and has spent his time since diluting it down for guest production on Weeknd songs and the like because it feels like there’s still so much more to get out of this sound. That he hasn’t gone back and dug deeper makes Aleph stand out more and more as a singular masterpiece as time goes on.

Kamane Tarhanin - Mdou Moctar: Turning to Mdou Moctar after the new Tinariwen album kind of disappointed me, with all it’s big name guests nothing really hit me. I love this song though and I think a big part of it is the sort of loping, 6/4 rhythm that combined with the drone gives it this feeling of endlessly tumbling over itself in place, especially as the guitar heats up.

Achabiba - Fatou Seidi Ghali: I know very little about Fatou Seidi Ghali except that I saw she was supporting Sarah Louise at a show. From some googling it turns out that she’s the leader of a Nigerois band called Les Filles de Illeghadad who you can probably look forward to seeing on next month’s playlist. I also learned that the demonym for someone from Niger is Nigerien or to minimise confusion with Nigeria, Nigerois (said in a french way). They play a sort of desert psych in the realm of Mdou Mocter or Tinariwen, but this song (also the only solo song she has on spotify) shows her acoustic side. I love the swirling melody over the drone as the hand percussion keeps it in place and I love the very delicate vocals, but a probably unintentional thing I love a lot about this recording is the unmistakable iphone locking sound near the very start that instantly removes so much of the mystic exoticism that these sorts of artists are often written about with and places it firmly in the same sprawling modern world we all live in.

Floating Rhododendron - Sarah Louise: I love Sarah Louise. She’s a phenomenal guitarist and has such a big love for traditional folk music with her side project House And Land, but unlike everyone else in the genre is also very interested in pushing guitar forward to new and strange places. Her latest album was super experimental layered electric guitars and voice that still managed to maintain the deep connection to nature that runs through all her work. I would also highly recommend following her on instagram because her passion runs over. She’s regularly just out in the woods somewhere explaining how wonderful a particular mushroom is. This song one of the first ones I ever heard from her, and it’s back when she was just doing very beautiful 12 string acoustic work, but she recently added it to spotify and it’s a very nice reminder of where she came from and how far she’s gone in such a short time.

Lark - Angel Olsen: The new Angel Olsen is absolutely great. I love how much she is just completely going for it on this album, absolutely unleashing. Taken against earlier songs of hers I’ve loved like White Fire, where the majesty was in her quiet power and the ability to absolutely command silence with a whisper quiet song, this song feels like the direct inverse, an about-turn into all the gigantic majesty of swirling strings and top of your lungs vocals - going all out and leaving nothing on the table. The way this song blows up about three different times until by the end you’re caught in this gigantic swirling maelstrom of screaming sound is just out of this world.

Door - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek’s brain is huge. When I first heard the chorus of this song I couldn't believe it. Are you allowed to have a chant that runs in a spiral like this be the chorus of your pop song? Is that allowed?

North, South, East And West - The Church: The Church feel like they don't get enough respect. They don't seem to be in the same league as Cold Chisel and The Angels and all the other dad rock Australian bands from that era for some reason. They're very good though and I've been really getting into this whole album and this song specifically lately. Maybe what's working against them is just how much his voice sounds like Bono's in this song but surely that was a boon at the time!

Western Questions - Timber Timbre: This has become one of my new favourite songs to sing. The way the words fit together is my favourite kind of poetics where they just sound incredible, phonetically, and can mean anything you like for large chunks. Like “the gelatinous walls of the seeds that seldom remain / while the bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos / honour the name”. Especially “bulls are browsing needles through computer casinos” is just extremely nice to say. I love the character of this song and am yet to completely understand what it’s saying other than personifying some worldwide blackpilled spirit of nihilist evil. What I love is the experience of all encompassing evil in this song, like a worldwide conspiracy connecting everything together that makes it all make sense. It doesn’t make you happier but it makes it make sense. I also love the finality of the big fill near the end that ushers in the outro riff that ties everything up.

Cold Cold World - Blaze Foley: I got heavily into a country music thing this month and spent a bit of time trying to find ‘real’ country, which of course turns out not to exist at all. The entirety of country music is built on a false nostalgia for an imagined time long past when things were real, some unspecified time in the collective consciousness between cowboy times and coal mine times. I don’t say this to say ‘country music is a fraud’ but that it’s built on a foundation of myth and that’s what’s so good about it. It’s constantly reframing the past as it relates to the present and is energised by the friction between them. Blaze Foley is a good example of this in the modern era because he seems to exist more as a myth than a man. He had three studio albums, the master tapes of which all disappeared through various means (lost, stolen, seized by the DEA) and so the majority of his surviving material is live recordings or long-lost studio recordings that resurfaced decades after his death when his fame and mythology already preceded him. He also thankfully lives up to the myth, he was truly a great artist and it’s a shame more of him hasn’t survived.

Where The Golden Wattle Blooms / Why Did The Blue Skies Turn Grey - Shirley Thoms: Further to what I was saying about country music before, Australian country is a whole other thing. Transferring the myth and the mythmaking to a new location adds another layer of abstraction. Shirley Thoms was the first female solo act to record country music in Australia in 1941 and was most notable for her yodelling of which she is damn fine. This is a great song and a good a starting point as any in trying to trace the origin of country music in Australia. That it's so english in its identity, so evidently imitating an american style (which is in turn imitating a german yodel) is just more good evidence that nothing is 'real' and traditions of the past and future are malleable at all times.

Talkin’ Karate Blues - Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt is widely regarded as a songwriter’s songwriter and one of the best country songwriters to ever live, but like a lot of great country songwriters also has one or two songs like this - strange comedy songs about learning karate and getting your arm ripped off.

Strange Tourist - Gareth Liddiard: This album is a masterpiece on the level of Ys and it feels criminally underlistened in my opinion. Luckily in the last week or so some renegade has done up the wiki article on it to a couple of thousand words so that's a start. Because this is a song I've listened to one million times and love a lot, it's hard for me to write about it in a general way so instead I'm going to talk about something very specific and new that I've only begun to appreciate recently. The way he uses the vowels of the japanese words to create these assonant runs in lines like "Koda Kumi sang a coda pink as sarin gas / I took a trip to Nagasaki in a rented Mitsubishi / Then went camping in the Jukai under Mount Fuji" and "They found him frozen in a hollow in Aokigahara forest where them harakiri weirdos go" is really something, and a nice illustration of the two sides of Liddiard's songwriting: densely technical poetics in a song about living with a housemate who was a real freak.

I Dream A Highway - GIllian Welch: I’m not even going to go into the lyrics of this because it’s such an out of this world perfect song but I’m going to say this: it’s really something that this song goes for nearly 15 minutes, sits on the same three chords the whole time and never ever feels long. This song is longer than Emily by Joanna Newsom but doesn’t feel like an epic of the same scale at all. It’s just a mournful slow ode to change and decay that goes on forever and could keeping going on for twice as long if it wanted to.

Deep Water - The Middle East: The way the vocals in the verses are delivered, trailing off and mumbling bits and pieces is somehow magical, like it’s more interested in communicating the gist and the feeling than the actual words. You can just pick whatever part of it you like. Petrol stations and a copper mine, the kind of place I think I could die. This song also has two minutes of silence at the end for album reasons so enjoy that.

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#playlists

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sapienveneficus · 5 years

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Elsie Fest 2019: A Broadway Music Festival Sans Broadway

Another year, another Elsie Fest. This year marks the Broadway festival's fifth anniversary, and it also happens to be the fourth Elsie Fest I've been able to attend. Coming off a the high of 2018's festival, this year's event had some mighty big shoes to fill. Did it succeed? In a word? No. I had fun last night, don't get me wrong, but I couldn't help but be disappointed by several aspects of the event. Let me break it down for you.

For those who haven't been to Elsie Fest, there's a rhythm to whole thing that's important to explain right at the top. The seating at the venue is, for the most part, general admission so people line up well before the gates open to secure the best spots near the stage. I joined the line about 2 hours before opening and, therefore, managed to snag a pretty good spot. I laid out my blanket, sat down, and took part in the hour-long showtunes sing-a-long lead, once again, by our favorite dynamic duo from Marie's Crisis. This hour of fun was a highlight for me; it always is. But this year especially it proved to be one of the few celebrations of Broadway to be found at this Broadway music festival. More on that later.

As the hour came to a close, and the guys from Marie's Crisis were wrapping things up on stage, I took a look around the venue. I couldn't help but notice that it wasn't as full as it had been the year before (or the year before that). That observation got me thinking, why was attendance down this year? After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with a few potential causes.

First up, timing. Elsie Fest has always been on a Sunday. Since the show moved to Central Park back in 2017, it has specifically been the Sunday smack dab in the middle of Columbus Day Weekend. For any international readers, Columbus Day is a federal holiday (like a bank holiday) here in the US that falls on the second Monday in October. So, for the past two years, Elsie Fest was been held in the middle of a 3 day weekend. Which meant it was generally easy for folks in the tri state area to make the trip into the city. Also, falling on a Sunday evening meant it was easy to get Broadway folks (even those currently in shows) to stop by since most shows only run a matinee on Sundays and typically have Mondays off. By choosing a Saturday this year, the organizers made it harder for some regular attendees to come out (people tend to have things to do on Saturdays plus, for some, it's the Sabbath), and they cut down on their talent pool significantly because they wouldn't be able to get anyone currently working on or off Broadway.

This segues nicely into the second reason for the potential dip in ticket sales, namely the featured performers. There weren't really any big names this year. Last year, for example, we had Sutton Foster, Joshua Henry, Grant Gustin, Matthew Morrison, Alex Newell, Nick Jonas, Zachary Levi, Casey Cott, Rufus Wainwright, Jodi Benson, and performances from Be More Chill and The Prom. This year, up until about a week before, the only big-ish name attached to the show was Gavin Creel. I say a week before because last week they announced Cynthia Erivo. I'm guessing she was added last minute in a desperate attempt to sell tickets. Which sort of worked, the venue wasn't empty, but kinda proves my point. By having this on a Saturday they weren't able to bring in the talent that they had in years past and, without those big names, they weren't able to bring in as many attendees.

Finally, the third reason for the lackluster ticket sales was New York Comic Con. This doesn't require much in the way of explanation. This weekend was New York Comic Con. Lots of the big panels, sales, and cosplay events fall on Saturday, and it's not a stretch to assume that NYCC and Elsie Fest are drawing from similar, if not the same, pools of people. So that probably hurt sales a bit as well. Though I suspect the two other reasons were larger contributing factors.

Okay, back to the show itself. After the sing-a-long, we were shown a quick trailer for High School Musical: The Musical – The Series. (You are not misreading what I wrote, that's the show's actual title) After the trailer, two of the kids came out to sing Breaking Free. Their performance was super cute, and I was reminded of the fact that HSM debuted in early 2006. Which means that all the tweens and teens who grew up with this film series are now fully-fledged adults. And they were out in the audience, in full force, singing along. It was a sweet moment to witness. And, not going to lie, I was singing along as well. I have a soft spot for the series myself. It'll always remind me of my first year of teaching. My students were obsessed HSM, and I was right there with them.

Next, Dyllon Burnside came out and performed an RnB version of Luck Be a Lady from Guys and Dolls. This number was okay. Dyllon's got a great voice and the woman who came up with him to dance as Luck was talented. But the performance had a rocky start because there wasn't an introduction. Someone just said into a mic, here's Dyllon Burnside, and then it started. I remember standing there thinking to myself, “Who's Dyllon Burnside?” I googled him today and found out he's on that Ryan Murphy show, Pose. It might have been a good idea to give that info up front. Anyhow, like I said, his performance was okay. RnB is not my cup of tea, but he had a good voice and a commanding stage presence so I could put up with that style for a single song.

After Dyllon, the composer of The Lightning Thief, Rob Rokicki, took the stage with a few backup singers. He performed Good Kid, The Lightning Thief's opening number. This performance was an example of how the timing of this year's festival hurt its lineup. Rob's a composer with a passable voice, not performer. And this song needs a cast of performers to be done properly. Unfortunately, Rob’s talented cast couldn't be there because it was Saturday night, and they had an evening show to do over at the Longacre. So we, the audience, were stuck with Rob. No offense to Rob, he seemed like a sweet guy, but he's not a performer. He should have been there to introduce his cast, not perform in their place.

After Rob, came the first set of the evening, a series of songs performed by Anais Mitchell, the composer/creator of Hadestown. I should probably begin this paragraph by explaining that I have not drunk the Hadestown kool aid. I have seen show, I did not like the show, but that is a matter for another post. Going into this set, I figured Anais would do a song from Hadestown and then take a few other Broadway tunes and put her folksy spin on them. That is not what happened. She sang 4 songs from Hadestown, and then a medley of songs from her newest album. To put it bluntly, her set was bad. Even if I liked Hadestown, which I do not, I would still have to be honest and say that she really missed the point of the festival. She was there to celebrate Broadway in general, not her show in particular. It'd be like Lin Manuel Miranda showing up and performing a whole bunch of songs from Hamilton. I mean, that'd be AMAZING, but I would have to be honest and admit that he would also have missed the point. What she should have done was a song from Hadestown, probably at the beginning, and then pick other Broadway songs. She could have told stories about showtunes that evoked special memories for her or demonstrated how certain showtunes might have folk elements hidden within them. What we didn't need was an ad for Hadestown/her latest album, but that was what we got. It was a real shame.

After Anais, Ariana DeBose took the stage. Thankfully, they gave her an introduction this time. Ariana's not a name yet, but that may change after Spielberg's West Side Story opens next year. (She's playing Anita) She kicked off her set with an RnB version of Shall We Dance from The King and I. Ariana is one of the artists who's been working on the R&H Goes Pop project on YouTube. Again, RnB is not my genre, but it was a good way to raise the energy there in the venue (as it at plummeted during the previous set) and to showcase her talent. Ariana has great tone, an impressive range, and real stage presence. So while I didn't enjoy the song itself, I was impressed with her performance overall. The next song she did was Invisible by Jason Robert Brown. It's a song off his latest album that he wrote for the Ronald McDonald House. This song was also done in an RnB style and, at this point, I started to worry that her whole set would be like this. Her next number was a medley of pop songs that dealt with cheating. It was fun, high energy, but again, it wasn’t Broadway. She could easily have used this to transition into Cell Block Tango or any other showtune about cheating (there are quite a few), but, alas, that wasn't the case. Instead, she covered Cold Play's Fix You. It was a great cover, don't get me wrong, but still not a Broadway song. At this point, I'd gone from starting to worry to full on worrying. Where were the showtunes? This is Elsie Fest, it's the one music festival for Broadway fans where their music is celebrated. That's why I love it so much and keep coming back year after year. So when her next number started off with All That Jazz from Chicago, I thought, “Finally!” but then she mashed it up with a few other Broadway/pop songs all sung by various “Divas” and my excitement diminished. Despite all of that, I held out hope that she'd close out her set with a song from West Side Story. It only made sense to get the crowd excited for next year's remake, right? Nope! Instead, she mashed up Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby with Beyonce's Naughty Girl and I think an third song I didn't recognize, who knows? At that point, I was just glad to see her leave the stage; what a disappointment.

Gavin Creel was up next. He began his set with a mashup of hits from all the shows he's been a part of. I heard Put on Your Sunday Clothes, What Do I Need With Love, Ilona, Bad Idea, You and Me (But Mostly Me), and a moment of I've Got Life. This was a great way to kick things off; a reminder of all he's accomplished on Broadway thus far. Next, after a joke about always finding your light onstage, he performed Moving Too Fast from The Last Five Years, a personal favorite of mine. Then he did a song he wrote for a showcase he'll be putting on sometime next year. After that, he sat down at the piano to do Something Wonderful from the King and I. He ended his set with The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine In. Now, I knew he'd do something from Hair. I'd been hoping it'd be either Going Down (if you really want to hear someone gush about his version of that song, check out Seth Rudetsky's review on YouTube, it's delightful) or Where Do I Go?, but he chose the closing number instead. Not a bad decision, but it's not a song that can be performed solo. So, as it came time for the female lead's part in the song, I figured Cynthia or Ariana would come out to join him. That's the sort of thing that happens a lot at Elsie Fest. People will pop into each others sets to help out. Last year, famously, Will Roland, Grant Gustin, and Darren Criss teamed up to do Sincerely, Me during Grant's short set. And who could forget Aaron Tveit popping up during Leslie Odom Jr.'s set to duet with him on What You Own? But, for some unknown reason, Gavin tried to do the whole song by himself which just didn't work. So his strong set ended on kind of a sour note. I will say, Gavin's approach to crafting his setlist was perfect. He chose a good variety showtunes (old and new) and gave us a taste of what might be coming next for him. People working on set lists for next year ought to take notes. My only critique would be the lack of a female voice during his last number. Other than that, flawless.

Next, the cast of the upcoming show, Jagged Little Pill, took the stage. I had been looking forward to their performance as the show's been generating quite a bit of buzz since its out of town tryout last summer in Boston. At last year's Elsie Fest, both The Prom and Be More Chill performed two numbers a piece. So, with that blueprint in mind, I figured Jagged Little Pill would do maybe a lesser known Alanis song first and then end with a big hit. They started their set with Forgiven. It was a lesser known song that utilized the entire cast so it made for a strong opening number. I figured they'd end with something more well know like, You Learn or You Oughta Know. So I was genuinely shocked when they left the stage after only performing one song. What happened to their second song? Did they run out of time? Or, if for some reason they were only allowed one number this year, why did they choose such an obscure song? This was their chance to get the audience fired up for their new show, and by only performing Forgiven, they failed to do that. It was such a bizarre choice.

Cynthia Erivo, the lady of the hour, was up next. I'd missed her set at Elsie Fest 2016 so I was all the more eager to see which songs she'd choose to perform this time around. I figured she'd have to do one from The Color Purple, but the rest was anyone's guess. Would she go modern? Classic? A mix of both? There was no way of know, but I was excited to find out. She came out on stage, full of poise and grace, wearing these adorable cat-eye glasses and greeted the audience in such a sweet way. She seemed genuinely thrilled to see us all. She kicked off her set with Elvis's Can't Help Falling in Love. She sang it beautifully, but it was an odd choice. Then she sang Ain't No Way by Aretha Franklin. Again, she sang it flawlessly; this is Cynthia Erivo we're talking about. Everything she sings could be recorded and used as part of a master class in vocal performance. But where were the the showtunes? We were 0 for 2, and I was starting to get that worried feeling again. Then Darren came onstage with his guitar and accompanied her on Miss Celie's Blues by Quincy Jones. Also not a Broadway song, but it was featured in the film version of The Color Purple so it was a sort of nod to Broadway, I suppose. Then she did One Night Only. Finally, a showtune! Not one that I happen to like, but that point, I was desperate for something, anything. Next, she did a slowed down version of I Wanna Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston, and I sighed internally. It's not that I don't like the song, I do, but it was yet another pop song. Clearly, no one had given the night's performers any sort of guidance so they were just singing, whatever. Cynthia followed up the Whitney Houston number with Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. If you're thinking to yourself, that's not a showtune either, you would be correct. The Lauper tune was how she ended her set. Again, like everything she performed, she sang it beautifully. My issue with her set was the overall lack of Broadway. This is Elsie Fest, a celebration of Broadway music. As a Broadway fan, that's what I want to hear. If I wanted to hear nothing but oldies, I'd go to an oldies music festival, if I wanted to hear all rock and roll, I'd go to one of those festivals, and so on and so on. I come to Elsie Fest for the showtunes, both old and new.

The last set before Darren's was Michael Feinstein's. Right off the bat, saving Michael's set for so late in the night was a very bad idea. He should have gone first or very nearly first when the audience was fresh and more forgiving. Michael is a very wealthly older gentleman. I don't know how he made his millions, but he was able to buy and open the cabaret club 54 Below so he's clearly got a few pennies tucked away. Maybe he flashed a few of those pennies to get such a prime timeslot, but that was a mistake. The audience was bored to tears by his set. Standing there while he performed I started to feel like the whole night up to that point had been a bit of a lousy dichotomy. Either listen to pop and RnB sung beautifully when all you want to hear are showtunes, or listen to showtunes sung poorly. I was standing there thinking, “Isn't there an option C? Didn't I pay to attend option C?” Yeah, Michael probably had a lovely voice back in the day, but that day has long since passed. He started his set with A Lot of Living to Do and then gave the audience a lecture on why Bye Bye Birdie is so important to the history of musical theater. Next, he did I Only Have Eyes for You from 42nd Street. He'd lost the crowd at that point. People were BORED. Then, after another lecture, he did the St. Louis Blues, badly. Then he put together I Don't Want to be Lonely Tonight with One Less Bell to Answer. The next song he did cannot, apparently, be googled so it will have to remain a mystery. Finally, at long last, he closed out his set with a Frank Sinatra medley. Darren came out to join him, which woke the audience up (some had literally laid down and gone to sleep). Looking back over his set, all 6 songs (5 too many if you ask me), I can't help but draw the conclusion that he gave the organizers of Elsie Fest an inordinate amount of money for a chance to perform. I hope they spend it wisely next year.

At long last, it was time for Darren's set. He had to go on 20 minutes late so we'll never know which songs he was forced to cut from the lineup. All I do know is that the 7 songs he chose were all winners. He kicked things off with a Glee song, Everybody Wants to Rule the World. It was excellent, pop at its finest. Next, he did Waving Through a Window and the crowd lost their minds. Fear not, I was right there with them; cheering and grinning like an idiot. If the crowed seemed keyed up during the Dear Evan Hansen number, they found a new stratosphere of joy to reach when he next performed Wait for It from Hamilton. It felt like suffering through all the bad sets that night had been worth it, almost. Next he pulled out his guitar and started to perform Wig in a Box and, I kid you not, I almost started crying. It had been a long night, full of disappointments, and Darren's set was pure perfection. He then paused, midway through the song, to bring out Lena Hall. What a treat! She sang her verse powerfully and then, Darren paused again to introduce John Cameron Mitchell, and the three of them brought the song home. I felt so euphoric at that point that I lack the words to properly describe it. What a historic moment! How do you follow something like that up? By taking things back to Hogwarts! First Jamie Lyn Beatty joined Darren on stage to perform Harry from AVPM. Next, Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez performed Granger Danger to riotous applause. Then, for the final number of Elsie Fest 2019, the entire Star Kid crew came out do do Goin' Back to Hogwarts. It was such a special moment; being in that crowd of fans singing along 10 years after the musical blew up online. After team Star Kid took their final bows, Darren thanked us and said he hoped to see us back next year.

Final thoughts, I hope to see him back next year too. But I also hope the organizers of Elsie Fest take a good hard look at how things went this year, and make some changes. First off, the festival needs to be held on a Sunday. To put on a festival, you need attendees and performers, and you're not going to get enough of either on a Saturday, you're just not. Second, they need to start booking talent now. They need names to bring people in. Because, even if fans are available, they're sure as heck not making the trip to see Michael Feinstein, someone who will be in a Spielberg film next year, and a kid from Pose. I'll even leave a few suggestions here: Ben Platt, Jonathan Groff, Lin Manuel Miranda, Jessie Mueller, Alex Brightman, Ethan Slater, Renee Elise Golsberry, Telly Leung, Eva Noblezada, George Salazar, Jenn Colella, etc. Third and finally, they need to have a good long think about what they want Elsie Fest to be. If they want it to remain a celebration of Broadway, then they need to book performers who are committed to that vision. If they want to change the vision, they need to let the audience know ahead of time so they can make an informed decision when buying tickets. To be perfectly honest, I felt a bit duped this year. I had paid for one thing but had gotten something else instead. So, there you are, Elsie Fest organizers. Do those three things between now and next October, and you'll have a successful festival in 2020.

#elsie fest #Darren Criss #HSM #anais mitchell #hadestown #ariana debose #gavin creel #jagged little pill #cynthia erivo #avpm #star kid #broadway #2019 #the lightning thief

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sacredlettersspn · 4 years

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Letter #3: Character (Dead in the Water, 1x03)

Theme: Character

Definition: mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual; the way someone thinks, feels, behaves

Welcome to the Sacred Letters of Supernatural. Today we will be covering episode 1x03, “Dead in the Water” while thinking about the theme of character. When I think of character, my mind goes to the first part of the definition above, the “moral qualities” distinctive to an individual. I am reminded of citizenship awards in elementary school and posters in school hallways with slogans like, “Character is what you do when nobody is watching.” Character has a moral connotation to it with the expectation that I should have “good” character. But that is not the only way to define or think about “character.”

Character is also distinctive qualities of any kind that define a person. Being an avid reader and television show watcher, as a well as a writer of fan fiction, this aspect of the definition is also familiar to me. Creating characters for a story involves building distinctive, compelling individuals that viewers will be invested in. Characters can become so defined that we come to expect certain actions and behaviors from them, and when their actions fall short of our expectations, we label them as “out of character.” In fanfiction, keeping characters “in character” can be a challenge for writers. There is a need to place close attention to the actions, motivations, and philosophies of the people that are being written about. Without these elements, stories can fall apart and readers lose interest. Character is important to a story.

In addition to feeling something is “out of character,” we can have other reactions when a character’s actions surprise us, like when the bad guy finds a cause to be heroic or when the grumpy, standoffish character makes a friend. If these unexpected behaviors are written in a compelling way with clear steps of character growth or appropriate catalysts, we enjoy seeing a character change. Humans can also surprise us in this way. The quiet student can stand up against a bully or a person who has been to jail multiple times can decide to turn their life around.

It seems that most of the time, we enjoy these kinds of stories. But there are limits to the amount of change we can accept, and that limit is different for everyone. There are men who stop being sexist, nazis who leave their ideology, bullies who develop self-awareness and try to make amends. Accepting these changes can be difficult, if not impossible for some. Yet many of us love movie characters like Loki who develop from the “bad guy” into something better and more selfless. There is the real life vs. movie screen distinction to take into account when thinking about why we react differently. We also understand Loki’s past and watch his development, so we can empathize with him. However, it appears that we often like the idea of the bad guy turning good, but we have a hard time accepting it in real life. “Cancel culture” is an example of this challenge to accept change in people or to recognize the diversity of character within one individual.

This is not to argue what we should or should not accept, to put a label on right or wrong when it comes to character growth and how we respond to it, in fiction or real life. There are legitimate reasons for not trusting or accepting a person who has committed horrible acts against other humans, or who have passed our own personal boundaries in terms of what we will accept. This discussion is meant to be an observation, one that I think is worth exploring. The purpose of thinking about this idea is to learn more about yourself and how you view the world. I think we can look at this concept of character growth on a smaller scale and consider how we relate it to relationships in our personal lives, and then we can take it and examine how we approach the bigger issues. To begin digging a little deeper into our personal perspectives on this issue, we can ask ourselves, what side of the “acceptance spectrum” I lie on?

So with that question in mind, let’s summarize the episode.

The episode opens in Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin with the morning routine of the Carlton family. There’s Bill, the father, and his two children, Sophie and Will, who live in a small house by the lake. Sophie is getting ready to go for a swim. The weather and the lake is calm, but once Sophie’s out on the water, the swimmer can’t help but feel that something is underneath the surface. She pauses to look around, sees nothing, but is soon dragged under by an unseen force. She drowns and her body is never recovered.

Sam and Dean enter as federal wildlife officers after seeing an article about Sophie’s drowning. This lake has already claimed a life that year, and several more in the past. The Winchesters talk to the sheriff in town, Jake Devins, and meet his daughter and grandson, Andrea and Lucas. Sam and Dean learn that the daughter’s husband was the first drowning earlier that year, and that the grandson witnessed the event. Lucas won’t speak anymore, he only draws.

Dean attempts to gain Lucas’ trust while he and Sam investigate the lake. They try talking to the Carltons, but Bill shuts them out. Soon after this first conversation, Will dies by drowning in the kitchen sink. Sam and Dean visit a second time and try harder to make Bill talk, but he is almost comatose with depression.

With no other leads, Sam and Dean leave Bill alone and happen to meet Andrea in a park. Dean connects with Lucas and receives a picture from him, a drawing of a house by a church with a boy standing by the fence with his bike. They find this house in town, and Sam and Dean visit the house of an old woman whose son, Peter Sweeney, went missing when he was around ten years old. Sam and Dean realize there’s a connection between this boy and Bill when they see an old photograph in the house.

They visit Bill again, but find him riding his boat out onto the lake. While they try to get his attention, something knocks the boat into the air and Bill falls into the lake and drowns.

The sheriff kicks Sam and Dean out of town after the incident, looking up their ranger numbers and finding out the ID’s are fake. But Dean doesn’t listen, he feels like something is off, so he turns around and visits Andrea and Lucas. Lucas is frantic when he answers the door. His mom is trapped in the bathroom, drowning in the tub. Dean saves her, and she tells him she heard a child’s voice in the water saying, “Come play with me.”

Dean looks through Andrea’s old photo albums while in her home and sees a young Jake Devins with Peter Sweeney. Lucas directs Sam and Dean to a random spot in the yard by the lake, and they dig up an old bike. The sheriff finds them and holds them at gunpoint. Sam and Dean tell him they’ve made a connection. They guess that he and Bill killed Peter Sweeney as kids. The sheriff tries to deny it, but while facing his daughter, he can’t lie. He admits to the killing, stating that he and Bill bullied Peter, but one time it accidentally went too far, and Peter drowned.

The adults argue about whether the missing boy is haunting the lake, with the sheriff calling Sam and Dean crazy. Meanwhile, Lucas goes out to the dock, drops a toy in, and attempts to fish it out. He’s pulled in by a ghostly hand. Sam and Dean jump into the lake to save Lucas. Meanwhile, the sheriff runs to the edge of the lake and sees Peter’s face, pale and dirty, pop up just above the surface. While Sam and Dean search frantically for Lucas, the sheriff sacrifices himself by wading into the water and begging the spirit to take him instead. It listens, pulls the sheriff under, and releases Lucas to Dean.

The character in this episode I want to focus on is Jake Devins because of his involvement with the murder of Peter Sweeney. While Bill Carlton was also a participant, I would argue that the episode focuses more on Devins character and family. We learn that he’s a family man by hearing how he helps out with his grandson after the death of his son-in-law. We see multiple conversations and interactions with his family, so we’re able to get a sense of the kind of man Devins is. He comes across as a hardworking sheriff who cares deeply about his family. He appears to be direct as well, sometimes intense or intimidating in the way he talks with Sam and Dean about the lake. In general, we get an idea that Devins is a honorable, experienced man, so it might come as a shock when he later admits to being involved in the murder of a fellow classmate as a child.

While the audience may or may not have predicted Jake’s confession, his daughter Andrea is completely taken by surprise. She wavers between doubt and wanting her father to admit the truth in the scene where Devins divulges the secret he has kept for three decades. She is shocked by learning the truth, never considering her father capable of murder. But the truth doesn’t appear to change how she thinks about her father. At the end of the episode, she tells Dean that whatever Jake did in his past, Andrea knows him as a good father and grandfather who loved and took care of his family. This version of Jake is what Andrea chooses to remember. I can’t help but wonder if I would have the same capacity as Andrea to ignore something like murder. Would I be able to focus on the good parts of a person’s character after learning of an action like that? And why would I want to do that?

While watching the episode, my own appraisal of Jake Devins’ character fundamentally changes after learning that he frequently bullied Peter Sweeney with Bill and this bullying caused Peter’s death. I wonder how someone can go that far with hurting someone and still call it an “accident.” I wonder what kind of child Devins was growing up and the lack of empathy he would have had to be a bully. I think about the inability he and Bill had to tell the truth, which comes across as cowardice to me. Their actions led to the death of someone’s son, and Peter’s mom never gets any answers. She has to live the rest of her life not knowing what happened to her son.

It’s challenging to reconcile the two parts of Jake’s character that we see, the honorable, family-oriented sheriff, and the bully who killed a classmate. In the end, Devins’ family-oriented side wins when he sacrifices himself to save his daughter and grandson. But I can’t help but feel that doesn’t atone for his actions. Somehow Andrea is able to reconcile these two sides of her father. Maybe it’s because of the family bond they have. I am an outsider watching this happen, but if Jake was my father or my brother, my response might be different.

Character is not absolute, although at times we’d maybe like to think it is. It would make things simple for the bad guy to be all bad, and the good guys to be all good. But humans, and fictional characters, exist in the gray. Every one of us responds to that gray area differently. I extend lots of sympathy to Sam Winchester, for example, who in later seasons makes many questionable choices and endangers many people. But when I think about Sam, I don’t define him by those bad choices. I understand the reason he made the choices, and I believe that makes up for the actual content of the decisions he makes. Jake, however, was a bully. He wasn’t acting questionably for a noble cause, he was doing it to be mean and exert dominance. The intention behind the actions matters to me when I’m judging a character, but it's more challenging to judge a character when two juxtaposing actions exist in the same episode. Jake is both a murderer and a loving father/grandfather, and that makes his character very, very gray.

Again, there’s no right or wrong way to view this issue, but I’m offering my perspective as a point of observation. I think it can be useful to ask ourselves how we judge character, by what standards and to what degree of absoluteness, and consider when we are able to forgive or overlook bad choices. Understanding this can give us insights into how we punish and forgive those in our personal life, what issues we feel passionate enough about to draw a line on, and how we may vote on certain political issues. Learning how we respond to fictional characters can give us insight in how we respond to people and issues in real life.

Lectio Divina

The next segment of this letter is called “Lectio Divina,” which is a Christian spiritual practice for reading scriptures that involves interacting with the text on four different levels. I am following Harry Potter and the Sacred Text’s use of this practice and adapting it the best I can to the visual format. Normally, you pick a scripture or a line of text to analyze. I randomized numbers between 1 and 42 (the amount of minutes in the episode), and picked the first full line after the minute mark I was given.

Line: 5:00, “I’m agent Ford. This is agent Hamill. We’re with the U.S. wildlife service.” -Dean Winchester

Now we analyze this line on the four levels of Lectio Divina : literal (narrative), allegorical (metaphors and symbols), reflection (how do I connect to it), and invitational (what is the text asking of us or teaching us).

Literal: Dean and Sam are knocking on the door of the victim’s family. They’re posing as wildlife agents in order to get information from the family about what happened to the victim. They’re using aliases of actors, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, who are widely known for their roles as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise.

Allegorical/Symbolic: The names that Sam and Dean choose immediately jump out at me. The first thing I think of when I hear these names is Star Wars and then I think of the characters, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. The choice of these character names for Sam and Dean can give us an insight into how Sam and Dean are meant to be portrayed, and how Sam and Dean see themselves since Kripke has stated that Sam and Dean were originally based off of these characters. Perhaps Dean identifies with Han Solo, the rugged smuggler who’s a bit cocky but ends up having a heart of gold. But I’m not sure whether we can say that Sam identifies with Skywalker because we don’t know if he chose that alias. It seems more likely that Dean chose the alias’ in this situation.

Personal: Here, Sam and Dean are lying for a good cause, but their lie seems dangerous. I tend to think lying is a bad thing except for rare cases. Sometimes I might lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, but even the acceptableness of that is arguable. It’s hard for me to imagine posing as federal agents as comfortably as Sam and Dean seem to. I can imagine myself sweating, a knot in my stomach, and stuttering when I attempt to speak, but the fake agent names roll off Dean’s tongue as smooth as his own. In real life, I would argue against people posing as agents, but I’m supportive of what Sam and Dean are doing. Without their ability to pose as agents, their work would be nearly impossible. I can justify the use of their lying, but I don’t often justify lying in real life.

Invitational: I think this line is asking us to compare the characters of Sam and Dean with their alias’ characters, and to see what insights we can gather from this comparison. With these alias’ used so early in the first scene, I can’t help but think their use is significant, not random. And if we can compare the Winchesters with other fictional characters to gain insights into their characters, then I don’t think it’s too far a jump to say we can use fictional characters to gain insights into ourselves. Characters are powerful, just as powerful as the story itself, and I would argue that this ability to compare and relate to fictional characters is what gives power to a story. We can see pieces of ourselves and our own lives in a story, see courage in the face of hardship, and find inspiration to face our own tough choices. So maybe we can ask what Sam and Dean see in these Star Wars characters, and how might they gain inspiration from Han Solo and Luke Skywalker’s stories.

Before I finish this letter, I would like to end with a question for the audience. This question is for personal evaluation or contemplation, but if you would like a chance for your answer to be featured on the blog or to begin a discussion, please send your answers to my Tumblr inbox.

This week’s question:

Who is your favorite fictional “bad-guy-turned-good” character?

And last, but not least, a special thanks to our patrons!

Jamie S.

#dead in the water 1x03 #character #season 1

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mokkoriness · 5 years

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ROCK AND READ BAND 003 A9 Interview

Something will awaken in these "beautiful beasts"?! Let's take another look at A9's origins before their 15th year anniversary!

There will be an "important announcement" 10 days after this magazine is released, on August 10 at Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall. As we look forward to the live show, let's take a look at their 15-year history. The members were frank and open about everything, such as unknown backstories that some members learned about for the first time from before the band formed, discord during the period they were classified as neo Visual-kei, and setbacks at their International Forum Hall A show, which became a turning point for them. That they can be so honest here is surely because they are in a better place now.

A9, who are celebrating their 15th year anniversary this year, first released the 15TH ANNIVERSARY BEST ALBUMS "Kachou no Chou" and "Fuugetsu no Shi", re-recordings of songs chosen by the members, on April 24th. This was something that was kind of expected. The issue is then what came after that.

Show: Yes (laughs). Many things.

Yes. On the first day on the tour on May 4th, you made some very interesting announcements. The tour that you are currently on now (interview took place in mid-June) in conjunction with those albums, "BEST OF A9 TOUR ALIVERSARY" had "A9 LAST ONE MAN TOUR" added to the tour title. Also, the tour final, which will take place on August 10th at Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall, "BEST OF A9 TOUR ALIVERSARY FINAL A9 15TH ANNIVERSARY" also had "A9 LAST ONEMAN" added to the title. On this day, the band will make an "important announcement". On top of that, the live at Hibiya will be your last one man live, but it was announced that at the A9 festival live, "Beautiful Beast Fest.", to take place afterwards on August 24th, for some reason, even though it's A9's festival live, they will be the opening act. Although you are welcoming your 15th year anniversary, we don't know if A9 is in a celebratory mood or not (laughs). Today, while asking about a general outline of these last 15 years, I would also like to ask about the true meaning of these interesting announcements.

All: Sure.

In what aspects do you feel that this is your 15th anniversary year?

Nao: That my stiff shoulders won't go away. I'm joking (laughs). It would be that just looking at the number of songs we have, we have over 100 songs! Personally, it doesn't feel like we have that many songs. But we already have over 100 songs. That's amazing.

Show: We have about 120 songs.

Nao: The fact that the number of songs we have are in the triple digits actually makes it feel like we have been doing this for 15 years. Though saying we have been doing this for 15 years, we have always been doing this, so I don't actually feel the gravity of that. But taking the time to think about it, 15 years is quite some time. It's very long.

It's the length of time it would take for a newborn baby to reach third year in middle school. 15 years.

Nao: That's right. When fans tell me "I first started listening to you when I was in elementary school", it makes me think "Are you serious?!". When I think that those fans who were elementary school students back then are now adults and are full-fledged members of society, it really is a long period of time. It makes me actually feel just how long 15 years is.

Saga: I don't really get that feeling if you tell me a newborn baby would be in third year in middle school, but if I were to compare that length of time to a prison sentence, I do think "That's real long" (laughs).

It was just an example, but still (laughs).

Saga: Mine was a bad example, but putting it in terms of prison sentences makes it feel long.

Tora: That's true!

Saga: Just try imagining "A9 in prison for 15 years". It would make you think that we weren't able to be out in the free world for quite a long time.

Tora: Gahahaha.

On the other side of the fence.

Saga: Right. Don't bands have an element that is detached from the real world, by nature? Although I do think we have to match our feeling to society, when you've been in a band this long, this feeling starts to disalign with that of society, and become different. Lately I've been getting this feeling that when you're not in the free world and on the other side of the fence for 15 years, "Even if we were to go out into the free world now, it would be impossible to live a normal life". I feel that I can no longer live a normal life. In our 15th year anniversary, I get this kind of feeling that even from now on, I'll be living like a lifetime gambler.

Tora: I might not even feel that we are in our 15th year at all. Because our band has had more events than I thought it would.

What do you mean by events?

Tora: We left our management company, and there were many other troubles and accidents (laughs).

And in actuality, you yourself had a big accident (emergency operation due to myocardial infarction) last year.

Tora: Since there were many things that happened, I feel like we were able to do this for 15 years without getting bored.

Hiroto: For me, I feel it at those moments when I get dejavu. Actually having experienced the moment in the past, recently, there's been plenty of times where I was like "I've felt this feeling in this situation before". I get that feeling when I'm with the members, and I've been getting it quite a lot at lives too. Right now, we're on tour for the best of album, and there have been many times where I felt "I don't quite remember it clearly since it was such a long time ago, but I've felt this feeling before". That is where I actually feel that we are in our 15th year.

Show: You might feel that quite a lot recently since we were on tour for "Kachou no Chou", the best of album that covers our early years. Now, we've started touring for "Fuugetsu no Shi", the best of album that covers our years as "Alice Nine". For each tour, we travelled across half of Japan. As for the way we built the setlist for the tours, we say that this particular block is for "Alpha1", and this block is for "VANDALIZE2", and we play 3 - 4 songs from the albums without any talk breaks in between. What I think when we do that kind of tour is...... Hehehe, the ladies in front of us go back to being "young girls". That is what I feel, looking out from the stage. "VANDALIZE" is the last album we released under KING RECORDS, and that was already 10 years ago. When we play songs from "VANDALIZE", those 25-year old ladies go back to being 15 years old. Although we probably can't compare ourselves to the "magic" that happens with bands such as BUCK-TICK, even for bands with a history such as ours, that kind of magic happens too. I really do feel that music transcends time.

In that way, it was a really good thing to have made these best of albums.

Show: That's right. The best of album itself was a project which started without any motivations like "If we released this, then our old fans will come back".

If I remember correctly, the best of albums were made with the goal of the current version of yourselves facing your older songs and drawing out the good qualities of the songs to complete them.

Show: That's right. But when we did that, many fans who we've not seen in a while came to see our live shows. I think that as a project, it was a good that we did that. Re-arranging over 20 songs at once, half-way through it seemed like Saga was going to work himself to death, and I did wonder if he would be okay. Honestly, I was worried about whether or not we would produce the results that corresponded to the efforts put into it, but we are currently on tour feeling that it was a good that we did this, so I'm relieved. Looking at the fans' faces during the live show and thinking that music really does transcend time, through the setlist that is packed with several albums of songs, I feel twice the weight of 15 years.

So, could you please tell us once again the details of how A9 was formed 15 years ago?

Show: If we were to give a proper explanation--

Saga: It's a band formed with members with really bad reputations.

Nao: (Looking at Saga) You didn't have a bad reputation, though?

Saga: Yeah, I didn't.

Nao: Neither did I.

Show & Saga: You did, you did!

Nao: What?! I'm sure I didn't~ (laughs).

Show: To be completely honest, Hiroto, Nao, and myself were invited to be in another band. When I asked Nao "So, are we gonna be in this band?", he was like "Nope, not me".

Nao: Gahahahaha. You're making me out to be the bad guy (laughs).

Show: Before that, Saga and Nao--

Nao: That was at Rokumeikan3, right?

Saga: Right.

Nao: I barged into the place and suddenly said to Saga "Be in my band", and exchanged contact info with him.

Saga: Even though I was still in another band.

Nao: At the time, I thought my life was in a dangerous spot, so I had no time to care about others around me.

Since your band had already disbanded at the time, you were desperate.

Nao: Yes. It was just at the time where the internet was getting more widespread, and after looking at many bands on the internet, I thought "Him. He's good".

Saga: So I was chosen in the same way people choose prostitutes from a webpage (laughs). By Nao.

Show: That's an awful analogy (laughs).

Nao: So when I saw him play live at Rokumeikan, he was exactly as I thought he would be like, so I spared no time to go and convince him to start a band with me.

Show & Hiroto & Tora: Ahh~.

Show: Even though we've been together for 15 years, it's my first time hearing about it in such detail.

Nao: I was in a really dangerous spot back then.

Saga: It was unheard of. He tried to headhunt me even though the other band members were standing right in front of us.

Nao: Hahaha. That is crazy.

Saga: It was that bravery of Nao, who had tried to headhunt me in that situation, that won me over.

Show: Amazing!!

Hiroto: That is amazing.

Saga: It left a strong impression on me.

Show: That's a nice story. It really is my first time hearing that he charged into Rokumeikan.

Hiroto: I've only heard the story from the point in time when these two (Nao and Saga) were together and other other two (Show and Tora) were together. So this is my first time hearing this.

Despite it being your 15th year, you finally discovered the truth!

Hiroto: That's right.

Saga: But I had my own circumstances, and it had only been about half a year since I joined that band. So when Nao came upon me at that time, I said "It's definitely too early to quit". On top of that, I had been added to the band after they formed, so I kept thinking over it quite a lot. I mean, what kind of person would it make me, to quit at that time? But under the pressure of Nao's energy, I thought about joining his band.

Nao: Umm, you might have forgotten, but at that time, Saga had said to me, "I'm in the process of joining another band, and we already have the members finalized".

Saga: Huh? Really? I was invited to join quite a lot of bands.

Nao: That's right.

You were really popular.

Saga: Yes. I was at peak popularity. As a bassist, I'm just right.

Show: Ever since back then, Saga was a bassist that could make a band not doing so well have a "big break", simply because "the bassist is good-looking".

Amazing!!

Hiroto: What do you mean "just right"? You stood out like no one's business. When you looked at the flyers, all you could look at was him. And that "him" was Saga.

Saga: It certainly is true that I was popular among band members. Even though I'm not that social.

You received invitations from everywhere to join their band.

Saga: Right. But even among all that, Nao had left an especially strong impression on me, like "This guy is crazy".

Nao: So with the band Saga was invited to join, the members actually were in the middle of joining a management company.

Saga: That's right.

Show: Were you at the stage where they would treat you to BBQ meat from Jojoen4?

Saga: Right, that's right! I ate BBQ meat and they treated me well. At that time, I had already pulled Nao into this new band.

Nao: And so I was also treated to BBQ meat from Jojoen.

Hiroto: How cunning of him (laughs).

Nao: Yeah! Gahahaha!

Saga: At that time, Show & Tora had contacted Nao about starting a new band.

Show: That's right. I called Nao at about 10 in the morning. What I remember Nao saying to me at the time was just this one phrase: "I'm strict, you know?".

Nao: Puhahahahaha!

Show: His enthusiasm was at another level. Even at that time, Nao said "We're already old men compared to the young kids, so we can't keep starting new bands. My next band will be my last band". It really felt like he was on the edge of a cliff.

Saga: Right. Hearing that about Nao, I also got infected with that feeling, and even I started to get this "Oh crap" feeling. There was no other way about it, and we thought we better make a decision. So we spoke openly to the management company that treated us to BBQ meat, right? If I remember correctly, Nao contacted them.

Nao: Right. When I told them, "To be honest, it's impossible to go in the same direction with these members and be serious about this, so we quit", they were really kind and listened to us, and said "It is what it is". Because of that, Saga and I were able to form a band with Show and Tora.

Hiroto: By the way, I received an invitation to join the band of the president of that company.

Show & Tora: Oh?

Hiroto: But this was after I had met the other four, so I was also honest and said, "There's another band that I want to be in", and they understood, and said to me "Do your best".

Show: Wow. So after myself, Tora, Nao, and Saga got together, the four of us made an assault on the disbandment live of Hiroto's band.

Saga: We sure did.

Hiroto: I think the live the four of you came to was before the disbandment live? Because the band that these two (Nao and Saga) were in also played at the disbandment live.

Nao: Really?

Hiroto: "Really?", he says (laughs).

Show: Even his own memories are getting fuzzy.

Nao: I don't remember.

Saga: Right! It was the band in the management company that treated us to BBQ meat. We were serious about the band, so we played live shows and put in the effort. But Nao was pissed off all the time. To the point I felt sorry for the other members.

Nao: Even though I joined the band later, I had the most complaints. It was after putting in the effort that I had spoke to the company about it being impossible to continue working with these members.

I see. Hearing these stories, it feels like it was Nao's passion and seriousness that led the way to the formation of A9.

Saga: I think it is correct to say that Nao's passion formed the band.

Show: When we joined PS Company, I had even said to the manager at the time "I don't want to stand out, so can you write on Wikipedia that the "Nao formed the band"?".

Really?

Show: Yes. I'm serious. The manager had said to me that being a vocalist is a huge mental strain, so I shouldn't be the leader. So I discussed it with Nao, and ever since joining the company, Nao had taken on the role of leader.

Hiroto & Saga: Oh~.

Nao: All I remember is that the company president said to me "NaoNao, you be the leader".

But to think that it was for the sake of reducing the mental strain on Show.

Nao: What about the mental strain on me (laughs)?

Well, now that you mention it (laughs).

Show: So until the band formed, Nao had been pressing forward and had a lot of enthusiasm, but right after we formed the band, Nao had kind of deflated.

Nao: Nahahahahaha.

Show: He wouldn't show up to rehearsals or would show up late. He did a complete 180 from his serious self.

Saga: There were even times when he didn't show up for interviews.

I can't even imagine it, seeing how he is today.

Show: I know, right? But he went through such times.

Tora: I even answered some interview questions for Nao.

Show: Yeah, you did.

Tora: I randomly wrote answers, like "Q: What is your ideal type of girl? A: Yumi Adachi".

Nao: Ahahahahahahaha!

Show: On top of that, when we were deciding on our band name, only Nao had already gone home. So we had no choice but to decide between the four of us at the restaurant.

Hiroto: It was at a fast-food restaurant. We wrote down band name ideas on the napkins and folded them so you couldn't see the name. Then we opened them one by one, and one of the names was "アリス九5".

Oh. By the way, what were the other potential band names?

Show: "ROSSO", "KORN", and "Ms. Anita".

Tora: Gahahahaha! I remember that.

Show: There were already bands called "ROSSO" and "KORN", and "Ms. Anita" was the name of a foreigner who was in the news headlines at the time, so the only band name that we could use was "アリス九".

Is that so? To go back a little bit, when the five of you got together, for you, Nao, did you get the feeling that this was something you could pour your soul into, as your last band?

Nao: I thought that with these members, we could do something, and I could bet my life on this. I thought it was something I could get serious about.

So what was the reason behind you wanting to join PS Company?

Show: From around our third live show, we suddenly got more people coming to see us. Nao was already a famous bandman, Saga was already famous and more people will show up with just him being in the band, and myself and Tora were also famous, in many ways (laughs). So in the 2 - 3 months after starting the band, one of Hiroto's acquaintances was handling all the calls. For tickets and such. But they said they couldn't sleep because their phone wouldn't stop ringing. So we were at the limit of doing things on our own.

Nao: There were also some livehouses you couldn't rent out if you weren't a corporation. We thought that we couldn't go beyond this, so we started talking about joining a management company.

Hiroto: So we thought if we were going to join a company now, it would be PS Company.

Show: With Nao's connections, we got ourselves a black and white page in SHOXX6 that introduced our band. the GazettE's manager at the time saw it and apparently talked about it in PS Company, like "These kids are going to make it big". So we handed a proposal that outlined the band and a demo tape to the underling of that manager.

So you kind of made presentation material for the band?

Show: That's right. About a month after that, the company president listened to it and contacted us. They apparently decided that if we came late, they wouldn't let us join. At the time, the president told us that because we showed up on time, we were able to join the company.

Hiroto: We went to go meet them at around 11 at night. All of us.

Show: The meeting ended at around 5 in the morning, and after that, we went to one of the member’s houses...... Now that we've come this far, we have to tell the truth (laughs). If we don't, it will be inconsistent.

Saga: To give the true story, we had actually played at a PS Company event once before meeting them. At the time, we were kind of dropping hints to them that we wanted to join the company. If I remember correctly, we also handed them some presentation material directly. At the time, they had told us "Now is not a good time".

Hiroto: Oh yeah! For about a month after that, we really didn't hear anything from them.

Saga: Just when we were about to give up, they contacted us.

Was that around the time when the GazettE had joined PS Company and they were going full steam ahead?

Hiroto: They were. It was also right after MIYAVI and Kagrra, made their major debut.

Saga: People have always said that we were a band that PS Company made. People around us often said to us things like "You're a band that PS Company made just by bringing together good-looking people, right?".

People did say that (laughs).

Saga: That's not the case at all.

Show: It's just as you have read in this interview.

Saga: It's a band that Nao had formed.

So where did the band concept of "blending of Japanese and Western style", which アリス九號. had at the time, come from?

Show: The management company had said to us "Come up with a catchphrase about what your band is about", so it's only just something that was added on.

Hiroto: At the time we joined PS Company, all the bands had a catchphrase that was kind of like a subtitle for them.

Show: It was a phrase added to our name because of the company rule.

Saga: Did we have that subtitle attached to our name?

Hiroto: No. We refused to have it. Right from the beginning, we never did what we were told.

Even though in PS Company, you look most like the honour students, but you actually weren't.

Hiroto: Yeah. We didn't add anything ourselves, because we were like "We can only come up with lame phrases!".

You refused to add a subtitle, but you listened to the company when they told you to put a period at the end of the band name.

Show: That was instructions given to us after the fengshui of the band's name was examined.

Hiroto: As we joined PS Company, they said to us "The number of strokes in your band name isn't good. There's one stroke missing, so change your band name".

Show: So I said "Then I'll just add a dot on the end", and we became "アリス九號.".

At first, your name was "アリス九", right?

Show: Yes. When I was writing down our band's name at Takadanobaba AREA7, the staff there said, "Oh, it's like Sakamoto Kyu (坂本九)". I also thought that "アリス九" didn't have much of an impact, so I just added a "號" to the end. Because it seemed like a strong word. Even I was quite proud of myself, to know such an old word like "號".

Now that you think about it, in 2004, when the band had formed, you had already changed your name twice, from "アリス九" to "アリス九號" to "アリス九號.".

All: Oh!

So in your 5th year, you changed your name from "アリス九號." to "Alice Nine". What were your activities like in the time since joining the company and changing your band name to an English stylisation?

Nao: The feeling was different from what it is now. At the time, just by being able to film music videos and being able to record in a proper studio made me think "Wow, we're like pros. It really feels like we're doing music". I was glad.

Were there any dramatic changes since joining the company?

Tora: At the time, there were lots of magazines, and we pretty much appeared in all of them and more.

"All of them and more"? It was that many?

Hiroto: We even appeared in extra editions of magazines.

Show: We appeared in loads of magazines.

Hiroto: Around our third year, whenever we released an album or single, we would be in all the magazines in the music magazine section at bookstores. On top of that, we were also in idol magazines that other bands weren't in.

You were!

Tora: So the toughest thing was that for about 20 days of the month, we would be doing photoshoots for magazines. Since we also had to go on tour with that kind of schedule, the toughest thing was not having the time for band practice, the most important thing. The band was still not a cohesive one, and from such an early stage, where it wasn't as though we had a song that was killing the charts, we were already rushing forward into that kind of thing. So at any rate, we did photoshoots, to the point where I didn't know if we were a band or models.

Show: Just around our third year, the term "Neo Visual-kei" was coined. The NHK music show "MUSIC JAPAN" held a "Neo Visual-kei Midsummer Party", and that was suddenly the trend at the time. We thought that we had to secure a spot there. It was that kind of time. I think that is also why we were appearing a lot in media. So the phrase "Neo Visual-kei" was coined, and when people wondered "So which bands are Neo Visual-kei?", it was our seniors Plastic Tree and MUCC. But don't you get the feeling that if kids like us were to actually go in there to compete with them, we would get roasted? So that was the trend at the time, and for better or for worse, we were there at around the same time. In the world of entertainment, there are limitations to the things that someone can make by themselves. HYDE had once said to me "The world needs trends too". I think that truly amazing people can read the trends of the time and get on board with that. But for us, we went ahead recklessly, and before we knew it, we found ourselves in that trend.

Without you even knowing it.

Show: Right. To begin with, when we started our band, it was at the time where "Visual-kei" was losing its popularity. So I didn't even imagine that we would be appearing on TV or playing at Nippon Budokan8. It's just that at that time, this was the trend.

Along with the birth of the phrase "Neo Visual-kei", things were stirring up in the world and in the music scene.

Show: Yes. BAROQUE was an early adapter, and bands such as ourselves, SID, the GazettE, and NIGHTMARE were being labelled as "Neo Visual-kei". That era ended fantastically with Golden Bomber. I think they were able to bring a close to the era because they are the real deal, and not just copying our seniors.

I see. Even among the "Neo Visual-kei" bands, was it the company that thought to set you apart from the rest by really putting it out there that in terms of looks, you were like an "idol band" or "princes"?

Show: There was not even a single time where the company could properly control us.

Saga: We had good looks. Compared to other bands. So even if we didn't put it out there, it just appeared that we did. That's all it was. Maybe the company or record label wanted to put our looks at the forefront, but it's not as though we purposely did that kind of thing. So that it appeared that way was only natural.

Show: So from then on, we just owned it, like "Yeah, that's right". For example, it had taken us 14 years to be able to use the "prince" thing of our own volition.

Until at your 14th anniversary live, "ALICE IN CASTLE -Princes from the Stars and the Castle of the Moon", where the five of you played the part of princes.

Show: Yes, that's right.

Nao: But for me, back then, hearing people calling us a good-looking band made me think "Oh, so I'm good-looking too?". It made me so happy I was smirking all the time.

Show: Even back then, Nao was famous for being the good-looking drummer of Fatima. Apart from YOSHIKI, who is in a whole other dimension, there weren't really any other star drummers.

Even if you didn't voluntarily use it to your advantage, between yourselves, were you at least a little bit aware from the beginning that the band was full of good-looking people?

Show: Isn't that something we all instinctively felt? In Saga's previous band, he was so much more cooler than the other members. Even with Tora, when I first saw him, there were only fans on the stage left side, where Tora was. At the time, he was working up the crowd by hopping from side to side though. I was confused by that.

Even though he was cool, you didn't understand the point of doing that.

Tora: Nahahahaha.

Show: But I thought "Wow" (laughs). Hiroto being Hiroto, he was a guitarist that stood even further in front of the vocalist and stood out.

Saga: Even though the vocalist was singing, he would be shouting in an excessively loud voice "Let's go!", and be making gestures.

Wahahaha. So what did you think when you first saw Show?

Tora: He was cool. I remember him singing from a really low position. He was pretty much singing from the ground. I thought "What's with that guy?".

Nao: Really?

Show: I've never talked about this before, but I liked FANATIC♢CRISIS' RYUJI The most. He would spread out his legs really far and play from a low position. So I sang with that kind of style in mind.

Saga: I want to see that. Him singing from really close to the ground.

Tora: But when it's like that, it's Visual-kei but also not Visual-kei. I felt something with Show that I had never felt before, and I thought he was really cool.

Saga: The first impression I got from Show was "his face doesn't match his voice". From his face, I thought he was the cute type, but when I heard his voice, he wasn't like that at all. Since his voice was deep and dark, I thought it was interesting.

Show: I think what Saga and Tora saw was when I was in my very first band. Up until then, I had never been in a Visual-kei band before, let alone seen one play before. I had look at the "looking for members" section in "Rockin f (technical music magazine)", and applied to be in a SlipKnot copyband. That was a band where they said to me "All you have to do is go nuts. Don't worry about the singing"...... Are we even going to be able to talk about our 15th year at this pace?

Tora: That's because you just took us back in time again (laughs).

I do want to ask about those times again. When the five of you came together, what ideas did you have about the kind of musical direction you would take?

Saga: I get the feeling that we didn't do what everyone else at the time was doing. That's why from the very beginning, we had a lot of songs that emphasized the singing.

Tora: I might have even talked about it.

Hiroto: So he took the lead and went to go sell his 7-string guitar. And instead, he went and bought a Clapton model guitar and said "We should play the kind of music you can play with this guitar".

Nao: Wow.

Tora: I thought that this wasn't the kind of band that needed a 7-string guitar.

When did you think that?

Tora: When it was time to stand on stage, everyone was shining brightly. It was at that time. At first, I thought it would be better for me to watch things from the back, so when we formed the band, I used to stand where Saga stands now. My personality is not the type to want to put myself out there, so my approach was "I'll just stand back here, and all of you can go to the front". So when I watched the band from that position, I thought that we didn't need a 7-string guitar. It would be better for us to do upbeat songs.

Is that so? So let's move on from when the band formed. During the band's 5th year, why did you change the band stylization from "アリス九號." to the English stylization "Alice Nine"?

Show: We had intended to change the band stylization to "Alice Nine" in 2005, but at the time, the company was against it. So in 2009, we were finally about to get our way. That's all.

What were activities like after you changed the stylization to "Alice Nine"? You also played at Nippon Budokan for the very first time in 2011.

Show: To be honest, we were not able to play at Budokan when the band was at peak popularity. Our peak popularity was around our 4th year. After that, when we left KING RECORDS, which we had been signed to since the beginning, we took a break and lost many fans. I want to let everyone know that you shouldn't take a break, if possible (laughs). Since 2007, having been dragged to the center stage as a Neo Visual-kei band, we were led by the nose by the adults and changed record labels twice. We even reached the decision to leave our management company, and we suffered quite a lot of hardships.

In terms of public image, it doesn't seem like you are a band that had quite a lot of hardships, though.

Nao: That's certainly true. That's how people tend to think of us. Although I do think it's because when we debuted, we rushed straight ahead without any struggles.

Show: Maybe so. For me, even though I'm a vocalist, I was actually better at things other than singing. Although I think the members accepted me because of the way I carried myself on stage, to be completely honest, I was at the level where I needed to become a professional singer. I was a strategist and a designer, but as a musician, when you looked underneath the surface, I had no self-confidence whatsoever. I had lost the power to express things. Also as a band, the adults had started saying things to us like "Write that kind of song" or "Write this kind of song", or "Get a composer to write you a hit". At the time, Saga had said "No, we'll write it ourselves", and the songs he wrote while giving a big "fuck you" to the adults was "JEWELS" and "RAINBOWS". It was from then that this feeling was born that we're not just pretty faces, and that to a certain extent, we had a kind of spirit as a rock band. But still, singing was very difficult for me. Unless you're a person that has liked singing from a young age, and keeps listening to your own voice, critiquing yourself saying "If I did this, I'll be able to sing better", and do it for a long time, you shouldn't become a professional singer. Because singing really is difficult.

But that said, since quitting the company, you've made leaps and bounds as a vocalist.

Show: Now I know how to practice, but back then, I didn't even know how to practice, and I think my singing was plain awful (awkward smile). But what's amazing about the members is that they never once said to me "It's because of your awful signing that we never made it big".

Wow. That's a nice story. I get the feeling that's another reason why the band was able to keep on doing this for 15 years.

Nao: I don't really compliment people, but I think that Show's voice is one of a kind, and the best. I thought that from the beginning.

Hiroto: I thought the same when the band had formed. Even if there are things like technique and pitch, you cannot change the voice itself.

You must be happy to hear that, Show.

Show: All of the members are wonderful people. I think that that's another reason why the band was able to continue. However, one thing I will mention is that after our first time playing at International Forum Hall A, all Nao had said to me was "Show, let's do our best, okay?" (laughs).

Nao: I didn't mean it like that~! I didn't mean just you, but as a band, we should do our best.

Nao was crying backstage after the show was over. What was behind those tears?

Nao: Up until then, we were doing things without any reservation, and I thought that we were perhaps too flippant about it. Those were tears of me reflecting on ourselves, that we should have put more effort into it.

Show: Forum Hall A painfully lays it bare. The upper floors were pitch black. At the time, only about 2700 people had come to see us (the hall fits 5000 people). Seeing that would want to make anyone want to cry.

Nao: It was simply frustrating.

Tora: I have poor eyesight, so I didn't realize it at all.

Nao: Gahahaha!

Hiroto: I thought that the scene in front of us was reality, and accepted that reality. I thought that this was the result of everything we had done up until then.

Saga: From the beginning, I thought there was no way we would fill up the hall. Despite that, truth be told, we were about to play there for two consecutive days. Looking at it objectively, I thought the people around us were acting strange. I thought "Is filling up the hall such an easy feat?". In time, the two consecutive shows was changed to just one show. It was then that things had stopped for me. The vigour we had since forming the band stopped and we came back to reality. It was there that I felt the sense of danger, that we were in a bad spot.

I see. So how did the band recover from that?

Saga: I thought that all we could do is write proper songs, that we had to draw out the charm of our band more. I saw the reality that we could not get any more fans just by having pretty faces. Even with practice, it's not quite what Show was talking about, but without knowing if what we were doing was right or wrong, we kept practicing. The lesson we took from Forum Hall A was that with practice, it was something that had to be done seriously. That's why I wasn't sad that we didn't fill out the entire hall. It was more like "Well, of course not". It was around here. I was the one to wake up from that dream first. My eyes were wide open.

So that was the fork in the road where Alice Nine awoke as a rock band.

Saga: That's right.

Nao: Because of that exprience, from then on, I practiced like crazy. I was in the studio so often to the point you wondered if I lived in the studio. So I think that empty Forum Hall provided the band with good motivation.

After that, when the band was welcoming its 10th year anniversary, you graduated from your management company and started to do things on your own.

Saga: We were indebted to the company, but when we considered our life from that point onwards, we were no longer able to leave everything to them. When looking at our future, we thought that we had to do this ourselves.

Show: Because we thought that humans don't grow and don't have a future if they don't take on risks. That company had taken good care of us, as if we were family. After leaving, it made me think once again that they are a good company, but at the time, we chose to take on the risks. That we can do activities like this now is the socially correct thing, I think.

After graduating from the company, you changed the band name from "Alice Nine" to "A9", and restarted activities. What do you think about that now?

Show: We didn't want to fight with our previous company, so we proceeded logically and changed our name to "A9". Even now, I think that we made the right choice.

Where did the name "A9" come from?

Saga: The phrase "A9" was already there before we even became A9. I don't remember who said it though.

Hiroto: At first, that's what our Chinese fans called us.

Nao: Oh.

Hiroto: So when it came to changing our band name, we didn't want to change it to something that was competely unrelated, so we settled on "A9".

Even after becoming A9 and going independent, you were faced with many difficulties.

Show: If we were to go into detail about that, it would take another 3 hours (laughs). We had a lot of hardships, but now we are at our best. I also feel very grateful that the media will still cover us, like right now. Because this is a chance for us to present ourselves to the people who watch us from a distance, like "A9 is Alice Nine, right? They're still around?". Since going independent, we had met L'Arc~en~Ciel's Ken, and regarding what we could contribute to society, we started to think again about what our strengths were. From the dilemma that we felt about being called "princes" or an "idol band" when we debuted, we accepted the fact, and we started to think about how we could use this to make people happy, and what we could offer to add flair to the audience's experience. Those are the kind of activities we are doing now.

Among those activities, you showed us many surprising performances, such as going back to your roots of a blending of Eastern and Western styles, setting aside your instruments on stage to dance, and even trying out acting. I get the feeling that through this, it has revitalized the image of the band amongst fans.

Show: There was that. Also, we want to play at event lives, but I think that we became a band where it was difficult for others to invite us to play with them. Since we know what our strengths are and we are using it. That is why we decided to host an event ourselves for our 15th year anniversary. If you are reading this and want to see what we are like, I ask that you do come see us.

The A9 that knows what its strengths are now, and is using it.

Show: Yes, because as a Visual-kei band that was around in the 2000s, we can now do our activities properly considering how we can make the audience happy. Be it at Hibiya or Studio Coast9, I would like for them to come see us.

I think that wanting to make the audience happy is connected to that slogan the band had since the beginning, of "the customer is king". Where did this complete approach of "fans first" come from?

Show: It's not as though we want to flatter them (the fans). I think the true essence of Visual-kei is "entertainment". In a different format to the Visual-kei that YOSHIKI had invented, if our generation were to reinterpret Visual-kei and give it a definition, it would be for us to get to the venue much earlier than normal rock bands to do our makeup and to create and wear non-normal outfits to express a world view for the sake of the audience. By doing so, I think that the attitude of entertaining the audience as a part of show business is an element of Visual-kei that allows it to also compete on the world stage. I think that is perhaps the conclusion we reached after these 15 years.

Finally, let me ask about what is on our minds the most. You added the interesting title of "A9 LAST ONEMAN" to the tour that leads to your show at Hibiya. What is the meaning behind that?

Show: I think that you can pretty much guess what that means from the mood of this interview, where there isn't a single indication that we're going to disband (laughs).

1 Album released in November 2007 under the band name アリス九號. 2 Album released in January 2009 under the band name アリス九號. 3 A livehouse in Meguro, Tokyo. It is known as one of the "holy places" for Visual-kei bands. 4 A relatively expensive bbq meat franchise. 5 Literally translates to "Alice Nine", but stylistically different to the actual band name "アリス九號." 6 A Japanese Visual-kei magazine (no longer in publication). 7 A livehouse in Takadanobaba, Tokyo. It is another "holy place" for Visual-kei bands, and being able to play here is like a milestone for bands. 8 A large indoor arena in Chiyoda, Tokyo. 9 A large concert venue in Shinkiba, Tokyo.

#A9 #Alice Nine #alice nine translation #アリス九號.#rock and read band #A9translation

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jewlwpet · 5 years

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Let’s dissect the titles of each track on Seazer’s upcoming new Utena album!!

(EDIT: IMPORTANT UPDATE: J. A. Seazer made some last-minute changes to the tracklist after I made this post; I discussed those changes here).

1) 青銅製の人形俳優譚オルフェウス洞窟劇場/Chant of Bronze Puppet Actors: Orpheus Grotto Theatre

There was a famous real-life “Grotto of Orpheus” that Seazer is most likely referencing! It doesn’t exist anymore, but you can see a detailed engraving of it here. It was made by Tommasso and Alessandro Francini for Henri IV of France. You can read about it and see another engraving here.

My guess as to what the song will be about: The grotto of Orpheus existed to glorify the prince by showing that he had so much power at his command, he could create a marvel like this. However, the object of wonder was a mechanical illusion: empty movement, so to speak. This was around the same time that some scientists began voicing the idea that perhaps the whole cosmos was like a machine built by God. This suggests the question, though it went unvoiced, of whether we ourselves are merely puppet-actors upon a cosmic stage.

(More under the cut--this will be long).

2) 宇宙卵プロトゴノス ―すなわちアンドロギュヌスのポラリザシオン(分極作用)―/Cosmic Egg Protogonos ―Namely Androgynous Polarization (Polarizing Action)―

This one is actually pretty straightforward if you understand Seazer’s language.

This song makes use of the Orphic creation narrative. Seazer used it before in a now lost version of Absolute Destiny Apocalypse (original source now here). Note: At the time when I posted that translation, I was under the mistaken impression that it was the same as the version on the Ohtori Kuruhi CD (because Seazer frequently does use pronunciation totally different from how something’s written). It is not; that set of lyrics is in fact the one used again more recently in the “complete version” in the Barbara CD.

Protogonos (literally “first-born”), also called Phanes (“bring to light”) ( "You scattered the dark mist that lay before your eyes and, flapping your wings, you whirled about, and throughout this world you brought pure light. For this I call you Phanes.") was described by Damascius as “the first [god] expressible and acceptable to human ears.” They hatched from the primordial Cosmic Egg, generated by Time (Chronos) and sometimes also Inevitability (Ananke).

Another tradition claims that a triad of the first three “intelligible principles” hatched from the egg. “What is this triad, then? The egg; the dyad of the two natures inside it--male and female--[Ouranos... and Gaia... Heaven and Earth], and the plurality of the various seeds between; and thirdly an incorporeal god with golden wings on his shoulders, bulls' heads growing upon his flanks, and on his head a monstrous serpent, presenting the appearance of all kinds of animal forms . . . And the third god of the third triad this theology too celebrates as Protogonos (First-Born).”

Another fact about Protogonos: They were a dying-and-rising god.

Since the title seems to focus on the severance of male from female (androgynous polarization), here are some passages that focus on that (source).

And he [Epicurus] says that the world began in the likeness of an egg, and the Wind [the entwined forms of Khronos (Chronos, Time) and Ananke (Inevitability)] encircling the egg serpent-fashion like a wreath or a belt then began to constrict nature. As it tried to squeeze all the matter with greater force, it divided the world into the two hemispheres, and after that the atoms sorted themselves out, the lighter and finer ones in the universe floating above and becoming the Bright Air [Aither (Aether)] and the most rarefied Wind [probably Khaos (Chaos, Air)], while the heaviest and dirtiest have veered down, become the Earth (Ge) [Gaia], both the dry land and the fluid waters [Pontos the Sea]. And the atoms move by themselves and through themselves within the revolution of the Sky and the Stars, everything still being driven round by the serpentiform wind [of Khronos and Ananke].

Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky were made, in the whole world the countenance of nature was the same, all one, well named Chaos, a raw and undivided mass, naught but a lifeless bulk, with warring seeds of ill-joined elements compressed together.... Though there were land and sea and air, the land no foot could tread, no creature swim the sea, the air was lightless; nothing kept its form, all objects were at odds, since in one mass cold essence fought with hot, and moist with dry, and hard with soft and light with things of weight. This strife a God (Deus) [probably Phanes], with nature's blessing, solved; who severed land from sky and sea from land, and from the denser vapours set apart the ethereal sky; and, each from the blind heap resolved and freed, he fastened in its place appropriate in peace and harmony. The fiery weightless force of heaven's vault flashed up and claimed the topmost citadel; next came the air in lightness and in place; the thicker earth with grosser elements sank burdened by its weight; lowest and last the girdling waters pent the solid globe. So into shape whatever god it was reduced the primal matter and prescribed its several parts.

Incidentally, the repeated severance and rejoining (solve et coagula) of male/female and above/below, was a key component of alchemy (of course, the materials they worked with were inanimate, but the alchemists insisted on gendering and even sexualizing them, always).

Protogonos bears some resemblance to the Gnostic demiurge, (shaper of the material world, creator of humans, associated with severance and procreation). However, the Gnostics denigrated the demiurge, whereas Protogonos was venerated. One could also make

3) ミッシング&ブーピープ ―快楽の園の修道院のイメージ― /Missing and Bo-Peep -Image of the Monastery’s Garden of Earthly Delights-

Okay. Bo-Peep is, of course, a little girl in a nursery rhyme who’s lost her sheep but gets them back, wagging their tails behind them (wagging meant bringing). There’s an extended version where it’s specified that they’d actually lost their tails (but she found those too and reattached them). Before all that, “bo-peep” was used to refer to the children’s game of peekaboo, and in the Middle Ages, it was also a euphemism for being stood in a pillory. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych by Bosch (viewable in detail here--arguably technically safe for work but only because it’s Art [tm]). From Wikipedia:

As so little is known of Bosch's life or intentions, interpretations of his intent have ranged from an admonition of worldly fleshy indulgence, to a dire warning on the perils of life's temptations, to an evocation of ultimate sexual joy. The intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries. Twentieth-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych's central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost.

There’s also speculation that Bosch’s art (as a whole) is based on “esoteric knowledge lost to history.” The ambiguity is perfect for RGU.

I like this interpretation:

According to art historian Virginia Tuttle, the scene is "highly unconventional [and] cannot be identified as any of the events from the Book of Genesis traditionally depicted in Western art". Some of the images contradict the innocence expected in the Garden of Eden. Tuttle and other critics have interpreted the gaze of Adam upon his wife as lustful, and indicative of the Christian belief that humanity was doomed from the beginning... Art historian Charles de Tolnay believed that, through the seductive gaze of Adam, the left panel already shows God's waning influence upon the newly created earth. This view is reinforced by the rendering of God in the outer panels as a tiny figure in comparison to the immensity of the earth. According to Hans Belting, the three inner panels seek to broadly convey the Old Testament notion that, before the Fall, there was no defined boundary between good and evil; humanity in its innocence was unaware of consequence.

This is of course very different from the traditional Christian view of Genesis, which is that before the Fall, there was no sexual desire. In many Gnostic texts, however, “original sin” is something that existed before the creation of the world; thus there was no innocence of any kind in Eden. The “original sinner” in this view was generally said to be Sophia (Wisdom, an Anthylike figure sometimes known as “the Bride,” who was both revered and maligned), an attribute of the Godhead, which was made up of syzygies, complementary pairs of principles, described variously as spouses and/or siblings, who (because they were God) reproduced without lust. But it was this same Sophia who breathed life and spirit into humanity, making them more than just bodies.

In this belief humans were inherently sinful creatures from the very beginning; it was also said that it was wrong for the demiurge to separate Eve from Adam (I believe this was the same text that said “This world is a mistake”--by the way, the demiurge was supposedly brought into existence by Sophia, but they’re enemies).

There’s also this idea that Bosch followed the ideas attributed to a Gnostic sect called the Adamites (unfortunately, the only contemporary sources we have on them are anti-Gnostic propaganda, so we cannot know how much of it is based in reality), which basically advocated freedom from all moral laws; the last image seems to suggest otherwise, but it certainly is, at least, a theme.

Incidentally, this triptych has been used for the covers of at least two books by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, whose works Seazer draws on extensively according to my research.

Anyway, for my attempt at putting the pieces of the title together... However you interpret the triptych, it’s not something you’d expect to see in a monastery. Wikipedia indicates a general consensus that it was probably commissioned by a lay person, not a member of the clergy. So the title suggests a contrast, or a confluence of opposites, rather like that title from his last Utena album, “Monastic Life is a Flesh Apocalypse.”

4) 幾何学とエロス/Geometry and Eros

This is, word-for-word, the title of a 1974 essay by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, whom, as I said before, I have known Seazer to draw from very frequently. It was published in this book, which also contains an essay on the “cosmic egg” concept and an essay on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

I have it from book reviews that “Geometry and Eros” discusses the 18th-century French Neoclassical architext Ledoux and the supposed “spiritual analogy” between his works and those of his contemporaries Fourier and Sade. Now, unfortunately, there are two different “Fourier”s from this time period that are both feasible candidates: the mathematician Joseph Fourier and the utopian socialist philosopher Charles Fourier. I lean towards the latter, however, because Shibusawa had published a translation of his essay “Archibras,” which Seazer drew on for Tsuwabuki’s duel song, Conical Absolute Egg Archibras. I suppose Ledoux would represent “geometry” and the other two “eros,” assuming I have the right Fourier.

Apparently, Shibusawa criticized Emil Kaufmann’s commentary on Ledoux, but I don’t know specifics on that.

5) 少女錬金術師/Girl Alchemist

The main question is whether this is Utena or Anthy, because the meaning would be different in either case. But alchemy is about unifying opposites, and they both do embody opposites, just in different ways. And they are opposites of each other, even though traditionally, in alchemy, the union of opposites is exclusively framed in heterosexual terms--think Angel Androgynous. This heterosexual union--often, incidentally, described as one of brother and sister--is meant to lead to the birth of the “philosophical child,” which can be interpreted as a new self. It’s kind of like Nanami’s Egg, actually, though that did not use the incest metaphor since one of RGU’s themes is how incest inhibits individuation.

Interestingly, while almost(?) all the surviving alchemical texts (at least in the Western tradition, which is what I’ve studied) were written by men, many of them stated that the first alchemist was a woman, and a Jewish woman at that. Unfortunately, all we know of her is from what men wrote about her.

There’s a quotation attributed to her that has an interesting interpretation by Jung, which you can read about here. Alchemy as a metaphor for psychological individuation is something he wrote about extensively, and it definitely makes sense in this context although it’s not, imo, the only meaning alchemy has in RGU. Marie Louise von Franz wrote about it extensively also! The two of them worked closely together as well as individually.

6) 人間人形 ―空想・イン・ザ・架空―/Human Puppet -Fantasy in the Imaginary-

(I’ve got nothing, other than the metaphor of puppets which I already touched on).

7) 絶対天秤卵/Absolute Balance Egg

This is not a new song. It’s taken from 2006 Banyu Inryoku production, Illusion-Flesh Verse Drama “Black in the Dark.” Of course, this is nothing new; even the duel songs were recycled (and this was Ikuhara’s idea, not Seazer’s), so this is just an extension of that. I found its tracklist in this review; it’s described as an “improvised reverberation poem of flesh burning up in the dark,” which must be from a playbill or something because it’s such a Seazer description.

Apparently, the “intro” (written in katakana) to this song was taken directly from “Paint it Black.” I can’t guarantee this will carry into our version, but if you hear anything that sounds suspiciously like The Rolling Stones... I called it.

Actually, I should note: It’s possible that Absolute Balance Egg is from an even older Seazer production and was recycled in both this play and this CD. One can never rule that out.

8) 人間人形 ―空想・イン・ザ・架空―/Philosophical Bread (?) Seed

This sounds like an alchemy thing, and I’m not ruling that out, but the results that I found searching “philosophical bread” showed me it’s a very common metaphor used in many contexts. Generally it refers to “higher learning” of spiritual matters, sometimes specifically “to know the mind of God.” Sometimes it’s treated as the ultimate endeavor, sometimes as pointless. Seeds, I suppose, would be the beginning of that.

Note: "Bread,” in Japanese, is パン (pan) , and the Greek god Pan sometimes has his name written the same way. It’s very possible that パン is actually referring to the god here and shouldn’t be translated as “bread,” but we don’t know at this point. Either is plausible.

9) 法王驢馬寓意画意オペレッタ1 ―その声は人間の鳴き声に似る―/The Pope Ass Allegory Symbolism Operetta 1 -That Voice Is Like the Cry of a Human Being

The Papal Ass or Pope Ass, known from its use in a highly influential pamphlet by Martin Luther and Melanchthon, is often described as a caricature of the Pope. However, it’s not satirical like most modern political cartoons.It’s in fact based on the “monstrous birth” reports that were very popular at the time; this genre was referenced in the Rose Egg Sophia CD. To fully understand what the Papal Ass meant to its original audience, it’s necessary to have some understanding of the genre, so I’ll go into that.

It’s important to understand that such records are not always made-up, although they are frequently exaggerated. For instance, researching the term クシュポデュメー (no, I don’t know how to spell it) from Rose Egg Sophia’s Puchibanshou song (doragon no kodomo, offspring of a dragon) led me to a description of a “dragon” born with two heads, four arms, two legs, and one pelvis, said to have been part of the court of James III of Scotland. As a matter of fact, this bodily description corresponds to contemporary reports of a pair of conjoined twins known as the Scottish brothers, who were part of this king’s court. Many so-called “monsters,” from medieval times up until the xth century, were people. This particular one, however, was an animal, an actual donkey (or ass).

Luther wrote this for an updated 1535 version of the pamphlet:

The Papal Ass is itself a dreadful, ugly, terrifying picture, and the longer one looks at it, the more terrifying it seems. However nothing is so completely terrifying as the fact that God himself made and revealed such a wonder and such a monstrous image. If a human had invented, carved or painted it, one would scorn or laugh at it. However since the highest Majesty himself created and depicted it, the whole world should be dismayed and quake, for from it one fully understands what he thought of and intended.

From Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany by Jennifer Spinks:

I was able to find a book, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany, that goes into great detail on how this was used by the early Protestant movement and has an entire chapter on this pamphlet: “Monstrous births could be viewed in positive and sympathetic terms, as the previous chapters have demonstrated. Yet this 1523 pamphlet by the two most important figures of the Lutheran Reformation forms a decisive shift in attitude, in which interpretation and representation became not only more polemical – and particularly anti-papal – but took on a notably apocalyptic aspect.” Of the Papal Ass and one of its contemporaries, the moon-calf, the author says, “The bodies of the monsters became texts to be read and argumentatively decoded using highly visual language.”

Notably, Luther and his coauthor did not invent the Papal Ass; they only named it. As Jennifer Spinks writes in this book:

The Papal Ass, washed up on the banks of the Tiber in Rome in 1495, made its way to Germany in visual form via an engraving by the Bohemian artist Wenzel von Olmutz, published in the late fifteenth century. Several decades later, and perhaps prompted by his colleague Melanchthon... Luther first became intrigued by the then-nameless monstrous birth and sought to incorporate it into his eschatological world view. He wrote a homiletic epistle that year (on the second Sunday in Advent, concerning Luke 21:25–33) titled ‘A Christian and well-substantiated proof of the Day of Judgement, and of the signs that it cannot now be far off ’. Although they were not referred to in Luke, Luther explicitly added monstrous creatures to his list and framed this addition as an attack on Rome and the papacy.

As for the pamphlet that made the Papal Ass famous, however, the section devoted to the Papal Ass was written by Luther’s coauthor, not Luther himself. Spinks states:

Melanchthon analyses the creature one body part at a time, utilizing biblical references, and conveying a central message about the corruption of the church in Rome as revealed by its bizarre physical structure. He begins his analysis of the Papal Ass with a reference to the Book of Daniel: ‘God has always indicated his grace or wrath by many signs, and in particular He has used such miracles for speaking to the rulers, as we see in Daniel’.

Melanchthon, she writes, “presents God in the guise of an artist who uses his creations to convey visual messages.”

The Papal Ass... has an almost jarring, collage-like combination of sharply delineated but ill-matching body parts. Step by step, Melanchthon describes and interprets these individual elements. He begins with... ‘Firstly, the head of the ass represents the Pope’. The Pope, he indicates... has brought the church into a worldly and physical, rather than spiritual, state. The low state of the ass in the animal kingdom is underscored through a reference to Exodus 13:13, in which first-born children and animals are consecrated to God: ‘but every fi rst-born donkey you will redeem with a lamb or kid; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck’. That is, God does not value donkeys (or asses) as he does other creatures. That the head of the Papal Ass is formed in this way is a true sign of the creature’s low state.

Next, Melanchthon addresses one hand, which ‘like an elephant’s foot rep-resents the spiritual regime of the Pope’. As forcefully as an elephant, the Pope’s ‘regime’ makes its way into and corrupts souls with innumerable and intolerable laws. Melanchthon adds, in a metaphor that it is easy to imagine seizing the imagination of audiences: ‘like the great heavy elephant it tramples and grinds down everything that it comes across’. The human-shaped other hand of the Papal Ass, in turn, represented the Pope’s worldly ‘regiment’; that is, those secular rulers who gave support to the papal office. In Cranach’s woodcut accompanying the text, these hands are neatly displayed one above the other, emphasizing through contrast the peculiarity of the elephant hand. The right foot of the creature, in the form of the foot of an ox, is aligned by Melanchthon with the elephant-shaped right hand. The foot represents the servants of the church: ‘the papal teachers, preachers, priests and confessors, and particularly the scholastic theologians’. That is, it refers to those responsible, in the Pope’s name, for oppressing the ‘poor folk’ (‘arme volck’) with their activities. Identifying papal supporters with the End Times, Melanchthon refers the reader to Matthew 24:4: ‘There will come false Christians and false prophets’. The other foot, in the shape of a claw, is aligned with the human-shaped hand. It represents canons, as worldly servants of the popes. Melanchthon’s language becomes still more physical in the next section, in which the female belly and breasts of the Papal Ass are described: “[these] represent the body of the papacy: that is Cardinals, bishops, clerics, monks, students ... their life is simply guzzling food, boozing, unchaste lechery, and leading the ‘good life’ on earth.”

Melanchthon’s understanding of the belly and breasts as especially potent symbols was to be intensified in a revised 1535 edition of the pamphlet... In this 1523 version, however, he turns fairly rapidly to the arms, legs and back of the creature, with a metaphor that is a little less obvious: the scales on these body parts represent secular rulers, who tolerate the failings of the papal system, effectively protecting it as they cling on to its ‘body’. This passage makes a particularly intriguing visual appeal to the reader or listener. The innocuous scales represented in the woodcut must be imaginatively reconfigured by the reader into a multitude of earthly rulers. Much more anthropomorphic in form are the faces of the old man and dragon (‘trach’) that emerge from the Papal Ass’s backside. The man represents the coming end of the papacy, already growing old; the dragon represents the bulls and books published by popes with the purpose of universally enforcing their will. Melanchthon’s tenth and final point shifts away from the body of the creature and to the location where it was found: Rome... The distinctive shape of the Castel Sant Angelo in Rome is carefully delineated, and for those not familiar with the famous tower, the fluttering flag with the crossed papal keys could inform even the least educated of the connection with Rome and the papacy. The tower to the right is the Tor di nona, used as the papal prison. Dramatically, in his final point, Melanchthon claims that finding the creature dead, ‘confirms that the papacy is coming to an end’.

Also:

In 1535 Melanchthon prepared a new edition of his text on the Papal Ass, still illustrated by the original Cranach image. Melanchthon’s expanded text takes sharper, more polemical aim at the papacy in a number of short new passages, including one on the ass’s head as a demonstration of the foolishness of the Pope, and another on the human hand as a sign the worldly, aggressive ambitions of the Pope. Two particularly substantial new sections dramatically increase the anti-papal and also the apocalyptic import of the Papal Ass. Several new pages on the breasts and belly of the creature emphasize the themes of whoring and sin (and implicitly, perhaps, refer to the whore of Babylon), while the ‘shameless female belly’ (‘vnuerschampt frawen bauch’) represents the Antichrist’s worst excesses.

More from Spinks about what made this method of symbolism unique:

Some pre-Reformation publications had ascribed specific meanings to individual body parts in monstrous births, like the conjoined foreheads of the Worms twins. Yet none had so rigorously and polemically done so as Luther and Melanchthon’s publication. This pamphlet is at the heart of a tangible shift in the representation and interpretation of monstrous births, and one that fitted the aggressively polemical culture of the early Reformation... This period saw the rise of vigorous debates and fundamental shifts in visual culture. The most famous of these developments was the wave of iconoclasm, which saw the destruction of religious images and objects. More moderate ‘reforms’ of imagery included a move to remove any hint of lasciviousness (especially in female figures) in the images on church walls. Martin Luther had a pragmatic attitude towards the use of religious images, and contributed to a culture of visual propaganda that stood on the borderline of the religious and the secular. One of the most important aspects of the visual culture of the Reformation was the vigorous use of printed propaganda, deployed.. with remarkable success. Robert Scribner observed that ‘Luther and other reformers spoke of pious images as masks (larvae) behind which the devil lurked, hoping to lure souls to damnation’. This did not mean that Luther rejected the use of images, and Scribner provided examples of how what he called the ‘semiology of arousal’ (which went well beyond the sensual) could be ‘employed also for its revelatory effect, especially in Reformation propaganda, putting into practice Luther’s notion of the masks of the devil disguising diabolical reality’... Religious imagery nonetheless increasingly moved outside relatively controlled environments like church walls and elite manuscripts, and into the turbulent new world created by the widely available printed image.... Luther’s ideas about visual images are closely bound up with his views on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation – a connection seen in microcosm in the 1523 pamphlet.

The Apocalypse While Albrecht Dürer had created what many regard as the definitive illustrated series of the Apocalypse in 1498, a flood of other versions appeared in the first half of the sixteenth century.74 The increasing popularity of the Book of Revelation as a subject for illustration during the sixteenth century was evidently connected to the growth of an apocalyptic world view... In this environment there was a tangible value in giving shape to apocalyptic imagery, and a ready audience for the new editions that came onto the market. As Bernd Moeller has identified, the End Times (‘Endzeit’) were one of the four most popular subjects for sermons preached in German towns in the early Reformation period.

Another updated version was published in 1549 without Melanchthon’s permission, edited to include past writings of his that he had since renounced in favor of compromise.

Flacius... uses Melanchthon’s text on the Papal Ass... as a springboard to oppose any religious compromise... In an introductory text, Flacius argues that the papacy can be represented in both words and images as worse than the devil or the whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. He maintains the highly visual language used by Luther and Melanchthon, and even concludes by claiming that the arts of geometrical and arithmetical proportions are inadequate for the present times, which demanded instead a ‘new swinish art’ (‘newen Sewkunst’). Later in the pamphlet, Flacius adds additional texts that talk of the disastrous events leading up to the Last Days, specifically identifying the Pope as the Whore of Babylon, holding up her goblet, drunk on the blood of Christ, and seated on the back of the seven-headed beast which represented Rome itself (and also the ‘Roemische Reich’, or Roman Empire) and its support of the papacy. The increasingly voluptuous body of the Papal Ass accords with this emphasis on the Babylonian woman.

After this point, “wonder books,” which “collected together monstrous births and various other wonders and disasters across decades, centuries or even millennia,” became more and more common. Apparently, “negative and also apocalyptic rhetoric about monstrous births became still more deeply entrenched in this genre.” By 1569 (when Catholics started appropriating this trend for their counter-Reformation), “Monstrous births and the apocalyptic Book of Revelation were closely enmeshed, and overwhelmingly presented as such in German Reformation and Counter-Reformation print culture.”

Final note: The way “Pope Ass” is written in the title is nonstandard, which is why I went with the literal translation rather than the more common phrase “Papal Ass.” I did find one search result for this phrase that wasn’t about this album, indicating that it’s used in yet another Shibusawa book, 夢の宇宙誌 (this was also the only pre-Seazerian source I could find for クシュポデュメー).

未来のヒユネロトマキア ―狂恋夢・薔薇物語・愛の秘法伝授―/The Future Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Love in a Dream・The Tale of the Rose・Love’s Secret Initiation -

So... there are many parts to this.

The Future Hypnerotomachia:

That's a reference to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (”The Strife of Love in a Dream” is included at the end of the title in some editions; it’s a translation of hypnerotomachia) and possibly also The Future Eve (referenced in the Rose Egg Sophia CD, specifically in its version of Saionji’s duel song). You can look in my tag on tumblr for my thoughts as to what that book might signify in relation to Utena.

As for The Tale of the Rose, we all know it as the play in episode 34, but there’s another “Tale of the Rose” I think Seazer is referencing here as well. Seazer mentioned “the medieval Tale of the Rose” as one of the inspirations for the Rose Egg Sophia in its liner notes (I’m working on a translation, off and on). It’s this book. The Japanese title is written the same was as the title of the play is written on the tickets in episode 34; it does not have much in common with the play, but you can think of it as “a way duelists look at Anthy.” You can also think of it as something possibly taught uncritically at Ohtori; you can certainly see its worldview reflected in, say, Miki.

The last part of the title isn’t a specific text, as far as I know, but it does have a traceable origin in, once again, Shibusawa, specifically his essay collection 胡桃の中の世界.

Since this title is about the themes of two or three entire books, I think I will make a Separate post for how those texts relate to Utena--and, of course, a new, updated one once we have the actual lyrics. And possibly another one several years from now when I inevitably translate 胡桃の中の世界.

#revolutionary girl utena #shoujo kakumei utena #rgu #sku #j. a. seazer #tatsuhiko shibusawa #this post has been a long time coming

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bbclesmis · 5 years

Audio

Exclusive Track & Interview: 28 Days Later composer John Murphy’s “Les Misérables”

Check out this exclusive premiere of John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from the BBC/PBS's Masterpiece Les Misérables now. This version is very close to Victor Hugo's original novel, and hence is not a musical. The soundtrack will be available May 3.' Murphy also dishes on the challenges of scoring such a huge, epic, and sweeping story (and a lot more) in the interview below.

Exclusive premiere: John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from Masterpiece's Les Misérables Lakeshore Records is set to release the original soundtrack to the critically-acclaimed BBC/PBS Masterpiece mini-series Les Misérables, written by composer John Murphy (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Kick-Ass). Check out our interview with Murphy and the exclusive song directly below this article. Les Mis the album will be released digitally on May 3 with CD and vinyl versions forthcoming.

This Les Mis is NOT a musical; in fact, it is relatively faithful to the source novel. It premiered April 14 on PBS, but all episodes can be watched with PBS Passport.

Les Misérables is a six-part drama adaptation starring Dominic West (The Affair) as Jean Valjean, and David Oyelowo (Selma) as Javert in this landmark take on a classic, timeless, and sweeping story. They are joined by Lily Collins (Rules Don’t Apply), in the role of Fantine.

With a striking intensity and relevance to us today, Victor Hugo's novel is a testimony to the struggles of France’s underclass and how far they must go to survive. The six-part television adaptation of the renowned book vividly and faithfully brings to life the vibrant and engaging characters, the spectacular and authentic imagery and, above all, the incredible yet accessible story that was Hugo’s lifework.

The distinguished British cast includes Adeel Akhtar (The Night Manager) and Academy Award winner Olivia Colman (The Favourite) as Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) as Cosette, Josh O'Connor (The Durrells in Corfu) as Marius and Erin Kellyman (Raised By Wolves) as Éponine.

Liverpool born John Murphy began scoring movies at the age of 25. In 2001, following the success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he moved to Los Angeles.

Since then he has worked with some of the industry's most respected and luminary filmmakers, including Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Stephen Frears, Matthew Vaughn and Michael Mann, producing film scores as prominent and diverse as Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Miami Vice, Snatch, Kick-Ass, and the seminal 28 Days Later.

Murphy's movie trailers include: Captain America: Winter Soldier, Gravity, X-Men: Origins, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, Cowboys and Aliens, Blindness, Ex Machina, Southpaw, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Avatar. His music has been featured in advertising campaigns for Nike, Audi, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Google, and Apple.

After Kick-Ass, Murphy set up the record label Taped Noise and began work on several non-movie projects. BBC/PBS Masterpiece Theatre's Les Misérables is his latest project.

Les Misérables director Tom Shankland wanted John to tell a fresh musical story and to ultimately create a raw and uncompromising score to reflect the trials and misery of "Les Misérables." John describes the scoring process as an "experimental journey."

Initially, Tom wanted a gritty, folk-oriented score, but as they began the process, he and John quickly realized that the story would need a broader musical palette. John ended up incorporating less obvious elements such as bowed electric guitar, analog synths, experimental viola, and backwards loops, with a nod to the classic French romantic scoring of the '60s. Despite mixing instrumentation, the elements fused and the sensibility stayed true throughout.

John described the scoring process further:

"My original idea for the score to Les Mis was '1816 Velvet Underground meets '60s French film music.' While director Tom [Shankland] was thinking 'gnarly, down in the dirt, French folk music.' Producer Chris Carey suggested, 'let's do both, but throw in some vintage analog synths.' I then gleefully tried all of these elements, often at the same time. And we discovered that you can actually mix a hurdy gurdy with a Moog Sub Phatty, and we loved it. And what started out as a musical standoff, became our score for Les Misérables."

Interview: John Murphy

Hello John and welcome!

Hey Wess. Good to talk with you!

Likewise. To start things off, what attracted you to this telling of Les Mis as a project? I really appreciated how it was based on Hugo's novel, and not a musical. The novel, in my opinion, does not get enough praise.

Yeah, sadly the musical has pretty much hijacked this great novel. I read it in my early twenties. I was a session player back then and I spent a lot of time on tour buses, so I got through a lot of reading. Aside from all the ideas and themes, it's a great story – hope, despair, sacrifice, redemption, all the good stuff. I loved it.

I read it when I was in my twenties as well. Such a great novel.

So when the call came in, I did some Skype meetings with the director Tom Shankland and producer Chris Carey, and they were so passionate about it, and so hell-bent on going back to the source, the book I loved. I knew I had to do it.

That's fantastic. I was hoping we could get an idea of your overall creative process on the project. It really is very sweeping in the emotions of the story and the history it covers.

Well I've really only ever done movies so I knew the production process would be different. For example, before they started shooting I had to write a lot of the in-camera music they needed to shoot to; the scene with the band in the pimp's den, Cosette's piano pieces, Gavroche's song when he runs out to collect the bullets, that kind of thing.

Oh wow.

Which was cool because I'd never done that before. And then there was a big break while they filmed and put together the episodes. So rather than sit around and wait, I started sketching out themes and ideas from the script, which is actually way more creative than writing to picture. But having this pot of ideas was a life saver because, when the episodes finally did come, they came thick and fast.

But the actual creative process wasn't too different from scoring a film. I always write the themes first, and I try to write them away from picture. And then I'll work to picture and write the featured cues, the montages, the chases, that kind of thing. And then you're down to the underscore cues and you're just connecting the dots really.

Interesting process John. What were the challenges like?

I think the biggest challenge was time. Even though I had ideas sketched out for most of the themes, there's only so much you can do until they give you locked picture. And when the final locked cuts started coming, I had about 20 days per episode from start to delivery. And this is when I would score everything in, write the underscore, record the soloists, and mix the tracks ready for the dub. There was usually about forty cues and forty minutes of music per episode. So there were a few long nights!

Were there huge differences between Les Mis as a project and working on your more conventional titles like 28 Days Later? You've scored quite a bit in the horror realm.

I've actually only scored a few horror films. They just tend to be the ones people remember!

[Laughs] good point. I was thinking just relative to other composers I've talked to…

Because of the musical, there's kind of a skewed perception of Les Miserables. But a lot of the book is actually very dark. And, for whatever reason, I find it much easier to work with darker material.

I find myself attracted to darker art as well; not just film.

For me, it's just a deeper well to draw from. So even though it's based upon an historic work I never felt like I was writing outside of my own instincts. At the end of the day, whatever the scale, it all comes down to ideas, story and characters.

Absolutely. Any memorable or funny moments that stick out from that behind the scenes process of scoring the series?

There were, but none I could mention! [Laughs]

[Laughs] fair enough. A question I ask most everybody: what scores and films have molded you most as an artist?

I think the first time I became aware that movies used music was in A Fistful of Dollars. I must have been six or seven and it was on TV one night. I remember thinking why is there music playing? Where is it coming from? After that I started listening for it when I watched movies. So, I think my love for [Ennio] Morricone started there. And after that it was the James Bond movies, and the great John Barry themes. Another film composer I love to this day. I was just a kid, but I remember getting hyped up whenever I heard that guitar riff. A few years later, when I started to play a few things, I discovered Bernard Herrmann.

Psycho always stands out for me when I think of a great score. It may be cliché to say but it is true.

I couldn't fathom how he could make music that was so dark and so beautiful at the same time. I'd never heard anything like it and it blew me away. It was like magic.

So, those three made more of an impression on me than any specific movies. Thinking about it now it's probably why I'm so theme-heavy today. Because those guys definitely knew how to write a theme.

That they did. One other big question which is sort of related, what makes a great score?

That's such a difficult question and I don't think there's a definitive answer. But if it truly moves you and takes you somewhere else, then it's doing something right.

Well said. Last, what's next for you?

Well, Les Mis was like doing six movies back to back, so I won't be jumping into another big project just yet! I'm going to mess around with one of my own projects for a few months and then see what's around. Maybe a cool little indie where I get to play everything myself!

https://www.thefourohfive.com/film/article/exclusive-track-interview-28-days-later-composer-john-murphy-s-les-miserables-155

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #soundtrack #audio #Interviews #john murphy

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spartanguard · 6 years

Text

footprints

Just a bit of holiday fluff (with a bit of whump) inspired by “Footprints” by the Barenaked Ladies (awesome song from my favorite holiday album by my favorite band).

I hope you all have/had wonderful holidays with your families, and sending you love and warm wishes for the new year! I love you all!!!

Summary: Killian finds himself on the outside looking in (again) sometime between 4x08 and 4x09. But it’ll be okay. What’s a bit of snow when your heart is missing and the woman you love has been chasing a villain? | rated F for fluff | 2.5k | AO3

One moment, dusk was settling over an unusually quiet Storybrooke—most evenings had been, ever since the Ice Queen’s presence had been made known. Which was probably a good thing, because the next, snow was coming down in droves, almost instantly blanketing the dockside bench Killian had been brooding on.

(Yes, brooding—he was well aware of the immaturity of his present activity, staring out at the graying horizon and sipping from his flask. But what else was one to do when his heart was in the possession of his mortal enemy and his girlfriend—as equally juvenile as that term seemed—was off chasing the villain of the week?)

It took him far too long to notice that his trousers were starting to soak through as the flakes fell on the dark denim and melted, but most sensory things like that had become more and more muted the longer he went without his heart. Perhaps that was a hidden blessing, given the current unpredictable climate.

Despite that, he supposed he should probably seek shelter somewhere—he could easily get to Granny’s before this got any worse. But more importantly, he should make sure Emma had done the same; knowing her, she was still traipsing about town in search of Ingrid.

(She’d invited him along, much to his awful chagrin, and he’d had to come up with some thin excuse to decline the invitation lest, even worse, he be called away by the Crocodile in the middle of things. He was trying not to take Emma’s obvious disappointment personally but, per usual, was failing; thus, the rum.)

Taking one last, long pull of booze in a vain attempt to warm himself—though if it had any affect, he was only faintly aware—he then pocketed the flask and stood, brushing off the snow where it had piled on his shoulders, and headed back toward the town centre.

It seemed as though most people had already been inside when the storm hit as the sidewalks and streets were coated with the smoothest sheet of snow he’d seen since arriving in this realm, completely untouched by humans nor vehicles. Really, his only guiding point in the frozen tempest was the warm, bright light in front of Granny’s, so he followed the beacon until he could decide what to do next.

The decision was made for him when he saw the lone set of footprints leaving the diner: a smallish set of imprints made by treaded boots that he immediately recognized as Emma’s. They’d spent far too much time tracking through snow and mud together; he’d recognize those indentations and that gait anywhere. Judging by how far apart they were, and how sharp, he could tell they were recent—and she’d been in a frustrated hurry.

Given that the fast-falling snow hadn’t yet covered them up, that meant she was likely still outside—and, knowing her, likely trying to find Ingrid. So he headed off, having no choice now but to follow alongside the steps to make sure his stubborn princess wouldn’t freeze to death while likely saving everyone’s arses; she’d already almost done that once.

He quickly fell into step with her, despite her being an unknown distance ahead. Still, were someone to observe just their footprints, his larger ones next to hers, perfectly in sync, they might suppose they’d been side by side. With as close as he was staying to her trail, lest he lose it, there might even be the suggestion of being hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm; they hadn’t been quite so public with their relationship as of yet, but the idea of someday still made him smile.

Until a phantom pain gripped his hollow chest cavity, drawing a sharp gasp and stopping him in his tracks. It happened periodically; he wasn’t sure if the Dark One did it on purpose as a reminder or if it was incidental to his heart jostling around in a coat pocket. Another thing he’d learned to brush off, citing heartburn from Granny’s food (and earning the old wolf’s ire but that could be dealt with later, assuming he survived this ordeal).

The weight of his unknown fate resettled on him as he took off again. Based on his knowledge of the stars, the celestial event Rumpelstiltskin was waiting for was still a few days away, but that was all he knew for sure. Being unable to plan ahead more than an hour at a time and having little control over his life wasn’t a feeling he was remotely comfortable with.

But he could control this—he could ensure Emma was safe and warm, and his own piece of mind at the same time.

The storm raged on as he continued. His gaze was so focused on Emma’s prints that he wasn’t paying attention to the landmarks around him, not until he realized he was on the same street she lived. Sure enough, the steps were leading him to the loft. He let out a grateful sigh and hurried ahead, watching as the echo of her steps ran right to the front door of the building.

Some instinct had him reaching for the door knob once he hit the landing, but he forced himself to stop short; this wasn’t the right time for a social visit, as much as he found himself craving company (which was an equally odd emotion he hadn’t felt in some years; how strange that other feelings dimmed without his heart in place, yet nearly foreign ones managed to resurface).

Instead, he backed away, crossing the empty street and then looking up. A warm glow came from all the windows in the building, but the Charming’s loft seemed to be the brightest—though it might have had something to do with the blonde head he could see in the living room window. He could only see her back where she sat on the sofa, but from the way she was sitting, knew she was likely helping Henry with homework while enjoying her cocoa and cinnamon.

In the next window, he could make out Snow with the young prince held against her chest, her swaying motion suggesting she was lulling him to sleep. And David was no doubt hovering over the entire space, making sure everyone was safe.

He smiled. Emma had denied herself that kind of comfort and happiness for far too long. Though it had been centuries since he’d felt anything similar, he hadn’t forgotten what it felt like—that kind of warm familial love and trust, and he hoped beyond hope that she was no longer taking it for granted.

That deeply buried part of him started to ache the longer he watched the family, much like it had when his lips were cursed and he had to force himself to stay away. (What was with this town’s villains and their obsession with the parts of him used to show affection?) And much like then, he knew his distance was twofold: mainly to keep them safe from any dangerous puppetry that he was unwillingly being conscripted into; but also because he knew it was his own damn fault for being put into such perilous positions and, frankly, he didn’t deserve that kind of peace. But Emma did.

He lost track of how long he was outside watching in, the snow still falling around him and filling in both Emma’s footprints and his own, but he was oblivious to the world outside the small circle illuminated by the street lamp above and the view he had of the Charming home. It wasn’t until he was swaying on his feet, instinctively reaching for the lamppost to maintain balance, that he became aware of encroaching drowsiness.

It was that same sluggish feeling that usually accompanied too much rum and made his blood slow in his veins, even though he thought he was completely sober. But he still found himself unable to remain upright, falling to his knees in the piling drifts and struggling to keep his eyes open.

Was this some other trick of the Crocodile’s? Or was he truly that unaware of how much he’d imbibed? Either way, he somehow managed to prop himself against the post before his eyes shut again. The last thing he remembered seeing was the light coming on in Emma’s bedroom window, and then everything went black—but at least she was okay.

The next thing he knew, he was being brutally shaken awake—at least, it seemed violent; it might have been gentle, but was jarring nonetheless.

“Killian?” a panicked voice called out; it sounded familiar, but he couldn’t get his eyes open to place it. “Killian, answer me!”

He tried to move but it felt like he was frozen in place. Everything was cold and numb.

“Killian, you can’t do this to me again!” The voice sounded so sad; he wanted to help her, but his muscles wouldn’t cooperate.

“God, he’s nearly covered in snow,” a male voice added, and Killian was vaguely aware that he was being jostled, but more mildly this time.

Snow...oh, right, the storm, and...Emma.

Despite the lag in the rest of his body, his eyes shot open when everything came back to him—and the sight before him both broke his missing heart and made it soar, wherever it was.

Emma hovered above him, hands cupping his cheeks and tears brimming her eyes beneath the knit hat she’d hastily thrown on. But she looked radiant—angelic, almost, with the halo of light from the streetlamp glowing on the melted drops of snow on her cap. Flakes landed in her golden hair and glinted like fairy lights. No wonder the Snow Queen was after her; she looked beautifully in her element here, save for the worried furrow of her brow.

“H-hey, beautiful,” he managed to stutter out.

Her face relaxed, but only a bit. “Killian? What are you doing out here?” A tear was dangerously close to falling on that perfect cheek.

“D-don’t cry, Swan,” he stammered, and managed to free a hand to reach for her face, but fell short. “Don’t wanna...f-freeze your eyes shut.” Even frozen solid as he was, deflection was always his preferred front.

She choked on a sob. “Seriously? Your lips are the same color as your eyes and you’re telling me to be careful?” Anger quickly replaced her fear. “What the hell were you thinking, Killian? You should have been inside!”

“H-had to make sure you were okay,” he admitted, not having the energy anymore to lie. “Not off...ch-chasing the witch.”

“That’s no reason to risk your life. You’re freezing; how are you not dead?”

He let out a shallow chuckle at that; he suspected this was truly the lone perk to not having his heart. “Don’t think I c-could right now.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. You’re not as immortal as you think, buddy.” He fatalistically snorted at that. “Come on; we need to get you inside.” She rubbed her mittened hands on his cheeks and then shifted to grab under his arm. David suddenly appeared to take the other one as they hauled him to his feet, thus explaining the male voice he’d heard; odd how such familiar things sound foreign when one’s faculties are out of sorts. It felt like his legs were miles away, but he managed to get them underneath him, and they began the slow trek to the building.

“Next time, just knock, Hook,” David muttered once they reached the door. “No need to play the hero from afar.”

Hero. He wanted to scoff but his muscles wouldn’t cooperate. That was far from a fair description of him, but he didn’t have the drive to protest. So he settled on, “Didn’t want to...intrude.”

“Hey,” Emma told him as they took the stairs. “You’re only intruding if you’re not welcome, and you’re far from that. You’re one of us now; got it?”

If he wasn’t actually half frozen, that statement alone would have done the trick. He supposed he shouldn’t be so shocked, but knowing it and hearing it were two different things. There was still snow caught in his hair and his toes were still numb, but Emma had just done a fair job of warming the gaping hole in his chest. “Aye, love; I do.”

In an echo of a scene not two weeks prior, Killian became the one under blankets in the loft, being doted on by Emma, with Henry being the heroic provider of the space heater as he was forced into residence on the sofa previously occupied the other two.

“I mean it, Killian,” Emma told him as she stroked her fingers through his hair; his scalp (and most of him, really) prickled painfully as sensation returned, but her touch felt too divine to stop her. “We’re here for you. I’m here for you—always.”

And that cozy feeling he’d been missing earlier came roaring back; his cheeks practically burned with blush. He may not have his heart, and may face an unknown fate, but at the very least, it appeared he’d found something of a family again.

The snow was coming down at a fast pace again, but not due to any magical means; just an average winter storm for Maine. Killian watched it fall, this time from the safe, warm perch of the bay window in the home he shared with Emma. Given all that had happened in the few years since they took on the Snow Queen—so many unfathomable highs and lows—it was still a bit hard to believe that this was where he was.

“She’s down, finally,” Emma said softly as she came down the stairs, drawing his attention away from the snowglobe outside. Ethereally beautiful, as always she was, but even more so in the unique light coming from the lit hearth and the lights on the Christmas tree. She sidled up to him and he instinctively wrapped his arm around her. “Whatcha looking at?”

“Nothing important,” he answered, turning his full attention to her. “And nothing so picturesque as what’s in my arms.” Motherhood had softened her features a bit, but had only enhanced her looks as far as he was concerned. How could he be anything but irrevocably in love with the woman who brought into the world the equally magnificent, darling baby girl who was asleep in the nursery upstairs? (Just the most recent item on the list of many, many times she’d rocked his world and saved his life in some way or another.)

“You’re so cheesy,” she teased, but he could see the blush as she leaned into him. Once, he never thought he’d be so lucky to have this—a love, a family (nor such a large, happy one as he had now)—and yet, here he was, living happily ever after with all he could ever need and more. He could still remember the ice in his limbs that one cold night as all his feelings of isolation manifested in that lonely, frozen snow drift, and the almost painful warmth when they brought him inside, physically and metaphorically.

“Thank you, Emma,” he whispered.

“For what?”

“For letting me in.”

She hugged him tighter. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

He placed a tender kiss against her crown as they continued to watch the snow come down, safe and warm—together.

tagging some awesome people: @kat2609 @thesschesthair @optomisticgirl @fergus80 @xpumpkindumplingx @shipsxahoy @selfie-wench @mryddinwilt @cocohook38 @annytecture @wingedlioness @fairytalesandtimetravel @word-bug @pirateherokillian @bleebug @its-imperator-furiosa @queen-mabs-revenge @flipperbrain @sherlockianwhovian @laschatzi @ive-always-been-a-pirate @jscoutfinch @nfbagelperson @stubble-sandwich @killian-whump @lenfaz @phiralovesloki @athenascarlet @kmomof4 @ilovemesomekillianjones @whimsicallyenchantedrose @snowbellewells LOVE YOU ALL!!!!

#cs ff #cs fluff #cs christmas #my ff

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