#if there’s not a culture of safety—you’re just waiting for disaster | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

twilightangel83 · 8 months

Text

October Prompts

There are all sorts of fun prompt lists bouncing around October this year. So I'm gonna, just, pick and choose from all of them. This post is just a combined list for my brain. Feel free to use it if you want. (Alternate Prompts will be listed at the bottom) W-Whumptober AW-AI-Less Whumptober F-Flufftober L-Linktober LS-Linktober Shadow LQ-Linktober Quest

Day: Prompt(List); Prompt(List); etc.

1: “But now this room is spinning while I’m trying just to fill in all the gaps.” | Safety Net | Swooning | “How many fingers am I holding up?”(W); Drugging/Sick/Poisoned(AW); "I've Got You"(F); Merchant(L); Gibdo(LS); Master of Ceremony Zelda(LQ);

3: “Like crying out in empty rooms; with no-one there except the moon.” | Journal | Solitary Confinement | “Make it stop.”(W); Sensory Deprivation | Overstimulation | Isolation(AW); "Wait you love me?" "I always have"(F); Friend/Helper/Companion(L); Twilight(LS); Monster Motif(LQ);

6: “Do or die, you’ll never make me; Because the world will never take my heart.” | Recording | Made to Watch | “It should have been me.”(W); Conditioning | Mind Control | Forced to Hurt Somone Else(AW); Corn Maze(F); Mask(L); Shadow Beast(LS); Cultural Tool(LQ);

9: “Learning everything ain't what it seems, that's the thing about these days.” | Polaroid | Mistaken Identity | “You're a liar.”(W); Scar Reveal | Interrogation | Presumed Dead(AW); (...) at First Sight(F); Deity(L); Wall/Floor Master(LS); Scientific Host(LQ);

19: “I’ll take one final step, all you have to do is make me.” | Floral Bouquet | Psychological | “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”(W); Taken For Granted | Left Behind | "Why wasn't I enough?"(AW); Keeping Someone Safe(F); Zonai(L); Gohma(LS); Potion Vendor(LQ);

24: “I’ve got a head full of chemicals; mouth full of ridicule.” | Goodbye Note | Neglect | “I thought they were with you.”(W); Failed Escape | Hunted Down | Too Tired to Keep Running(AW); (Melting Face Emoji)(F); Korok/Kikwi/Kokiri(L); Lizalfos(LS); Link Joins In(LQ);

28: “We might not make it to the morning; so go on and tell me now.” | Bloody Knife | Sacrifice | “You'll have to go through me.”(W); Whumpee Hair Pulling | Oxygen Deprivation | Sweating(AW); Soothing Touch(F); Light/Sparkle/Bright(L); Gloom/Malice(LS); Clash(LQ);

Alternate Prompts:

Betrayal(W) Aftermath of Failure(W) Brass Knuckles(W) Decoy(W) Body Modification(W) Playing Cards(W) Examination(W) Hunting(W) Drugging(W) Shaking(W) Panic(W) Broken(W) Miscommunication(W) Lab Rat(W) Reluctant Whumper(W)

Bloody Knuckles(AW) Gunshot Wound(AW) Separated from Loved Ones(AW) Drowning(AW) Blackmail(AW) Crying to Sleep(AW) Disowned by Family(AW) Electrocution(AW) Forced Feeding(AW) Bullied(AW) Suffocation(AW) Abandoned(AW) Grief(AW) Human Shield(AW) Self-Defense(AW) Lab Rat(AW) Memory Loss(AW) Misunderstanding(AW) Hypnosis(AW) Mutilation(AW) Mouth Stitched Shut(AW) Nerve Damage(AW) Nervous Breakdown(AW) Words Carved Into Skin(AW) Stalked(AW) Non-Consensual Touching(AW) Paranoia(AW) Peer Pressure(AW) Prison(AW) Silent Treatment(AW) Truth Serum(AW)

Hot Chocolate(F) “You told your parents?”(F) Wearing Each Other's Clothes(F) Candles, Lanterns, Fairy Lights(F) “Oh no, you’re a morning person!”(F) Reverse all the Roles(F) Fairytale Retelling(F) Give your Character a new Occupation(F) Crossover of Two or More Fandoms(F) Have your Characters Share the Last Table at a Cafe(F)

#whumtober #flufftober #linktober #AI-less Whumptober #lists #october prompts

48 notes · View notes

everyonesfavoritelesbowrites · 3 years

Text

RATLD Headcanons pt. 6

Drunk Rayamaari

Just a heads-up, I don't know much about alcohol. I've only taken a few drinks in my life since I'm 18 but don't worry, in my state I am allowed to drink small amounts with adult supervision and permission.

Let's say the drinking age in Kumandra is around 16-18, perhaps it's different in different nations. (Perhaps in Talon, Fang and Spine it's 16 and in Tail it's 17 and Heart it's 18?)

Raya obviously didn't have any time or anywhere safe to even try to drink during her six years

Namaari on the other hand use to spend her free time (at night) drinking, it helps with her anxiety and it's the only way she can sleep without nightmares (besides laying with Raya)

Namaari's drink of choice is Baijiu (I don't know much about alcohol or asian culture but I feel like this is what Namaari would drink, it's often compared to whiskey apparently) Correct me if I'm wrong, but Baijiu is often served with food that contains spice. She also enjoys Rice Wine.

The first time Raya tries alcohol, it's at some sort of get-together with all the nations gathering in Fang. Namaari is drinking Baijiu with her dinner and gets a bit tipsy.

She can handle her alcohol.

Raya mentions she's never had alcohol and Namaari offers her her glass.

"You can try mine if you want, dep la."

"It's always strange the first sip, but just keep going."

Raya does indeed gag at the first drink but after a few more drinks she starts to like Baijiu.

Raya gets drunk fast

On the outside Namaari seems her normal collected sober self but she's actually on her fourth glass, her walls lowered, and brain fuzzy.

Raya on the other hand just started a second drink and it's tripping and slurring, an utter but beautiful disaster.

Sisu utterly confused.

"why is this drink making her crazy?"

Sisu tries it and it has no effect on her and it's just disgusting, she might like rice wine for the taste

Namaari literally giggling when Raya trips on nothing. Sisu loosing her shit that Namaari fucking giggled

Raya slurs over her words.

They both get a bit handsy if you you what I'm saying.

Raya 100% will slap and pinch Namaari's ass because she's just so fine

*slap* "Raya! What the fuck?"

"That is highly inappropri-." *pinches her ass* "Raya! I'm serious!" (she's not)

Raya feeling up Namaari, especially her shoulders and arms.

"Dep la, you're muscles are so attractive..." *pretty much groping her arms* "your strong, sexy muscles...."

*leans up to moan in Namaari's ear to mess with her*

Namaari gets back at her though.

*slips her hand on Raya's thigh under the table* "What's with the blush, dep la?"

*leaning into Rayas ear and speaks in low sexy voice* "What's dripping, dep la?" "me"

*passionate drunk kiss* *leaves Raya against the wall, panting, and flashes her a wink*

Chief Benja and Chief Virana just watching their daughters drunk and being gay

Raya drinking too much the first time because she doesn't know when to stop

She just throws up in the floor in front of everyone

Sisu is so confused and worried

Namaari comforting Raya

"sisu, could you get her some water?"

Benja low-key freaking out cause he's not use to their daughter being an adult and NOW SHES THROWING UP OMFG CHIEF VIRANA WHAT DO I DO IS SHE OKAY DO I GET THE HEALERS?!

Virana comforting Benja saying that her daughter knows what to do

Raya's favorite is Bia (or beer in vietnamese). She hates Rice Wine, she will throw it up if she has to drink it. Luckily Benja doesn't mind if her daughter is seen drinking Bia.

If Namaari drinks at night in the safety of her own room and Raya is there, they may get a bit carried away.

4 times out of 10 they woohoo

Other times they just have stupid conversations or pass out in the middle of making out

"do you think this is poison?" "Alcohol is literally poison but go all out." "Say sike right now."

Raya asks the stupidest questions

"do you think the first person to try alcohol thought they were going to die?"

"Are dragons mammals? They have fur and lay eggs..."

"Raya, you're ruining my buzz."

Raya having only a little bit of a hangover the next morning, waking up at her normal time full for energy.

Namaari hiding in the seats, dreading life and wishing she was dead anD WHY IS THE SUN SO BRIGHT TURN IT OFF BENTURI

Namaari has a major headache

"Namaari, let's spar!" "Fuck off."

"Drank too much, dep la? You're usually up before the sun!" "Shut the fuck up, you're making my headache worse."

Raya taking care for her though but not without lots of teasing

Raya cuddles Namaari, food and water brought to the room while Namaari sobers up so they can go through their day

Virana not even phased seeing them in Namaari's room. "Get her up before noon, Raya."

Benja's unsure what to think. "Uhhhh... Is Namaari okay? Should I get you girls some food and water?"

Sisu not understanding what's wrong with tough Namaari

"Is she dying?"

"Should I go get healers!?"

*pulls the sheets off of Namaari* "what's wrong with you!?" *hissing at the sun trying to get the sheets back* "Sisu, leave her alone!"

"so the strange drink you guys drank last night made Namaari feel horrible but not you?" "Uhh yeah." "That doesn't make sense, you were the one crying because Namaari said she was dating someone and you didn't remember you two were dating." "Wait, I did what now?"

"so you don't remember anything last night?" "No, why?" "No reason at all." *Sisu probably made a stupid deal or dare with Raya or something*

"someone's looking... better." *Namaari drinking coffee or water with a blanket around her shoulders and bags under her eyes* "I don't want to hear it."

Raya finding Namaari utterly adorable when she's grouchy

#ratld headcanons series #ratld #rayamaari #raya and the last dragon #raya #namaari #ratld headcanons #headcanon #headcanons #mine #sisu #chief virana #chief benja

50 notes · View notes

lokiondisneyplus · 3 years

Link

Prior to the pandemic, Frank Patterson would spend most days at the sprawling production facility, formerly known as Pinewood Atlanta Studios, that he runs outside of Atlanta. Then COVID-19 hit, and not even he was able to make his health and safety team's cut of essential on-site personnel.

"They were like, 'Frank, why are you here? You're setting a bad example,' " says the president and CEO of what is now Trilith Studios, the in-demand filming location known for hosting a suite of Marvel projects, including WandaVision and Avengers: Endgame.

Since Patterson took the reins in 2016, he's transformed the place from a set of soundstages to a full-fledged film community. After divesting from the Pinewood Group, Patterson led investments in new technologies and content companies, as well as expanded Trilith's footprint. The result is a 935-acre master development that includes the studio as well as a European-inspired town including homes, restaurants and schools that serve as a live-work community for the many creatives on the lot.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Patterson, 59, opened up about the most challenging aspect of COVID-era production, the studio's biggest concerns and whether he'll mandate vaccines.

You've had multiple projects in production during COVID-19. How has it been going?

We've been very fortunate. We had the first studio feature in the industry back to work in June. I can't say what it is, but they'll be finished soon. It was an intense amount of research and work to put together protocols, recognizing that the disaster version looks like an outbreak. None of that's happened. We've had enormously low numbers of positive tests. And we have a full lot: 3,200 people drove on today.

How much more expensive is it to make a film or show right now?

It's costing about 20 percent more money and 20 percent more time. Things are slower and clunkier and it's taking more space. But the good news is cast and crew are taking safety very seriously. I'm sure you heard the story of Tom Cruise getting upset at the crew for not following protocols [on Mission: Impossible 7]. I don't think that's common. What we have found is with the exception of the day player — they tend to test positive more than the average crewmember — people are taking care of themselves.

A year in, how do you feel you did with the COVID-19 protocols?

They're pretty routine now. We're not just making stuff up like we were in the very beginning.

Which of those do you expect to remain post-pandemic?

The washing hands and standing apart, that's how we keep from spreading these diseases and how we need to work. There's a heightened awareness for cleanliness. People used to drag themselves to work miserably sick because if you missed work, you were letting your team down. Well, that's changed. If you show up and you're sick, they're like, "Get out of here." That'll go forward.

Fellow Georgian Tyler Perry said when he was shooting his shows last summer, there was an elderly actress who didn’t feel comfortable coming on set given the risk, so they had to write her out of the scripts. Have you heard of anything like that happening on any of your productions?

Not leaving a show, but changing of schedules to accommodate people's tolerance for coming back to work. There's an, "OK, let's not shoot this right now because this actor is not quite ready to come back to work." They're pivoting and shooting other stuff first and coming back. That's happening across all the productions.

What are the biggest concerns that you hear from the studios now?

Everyone's overwhelmed with the need to get stuff made, but we aren't returning to the speed that we had and we're spending more dollars per frame captured in just the pure production. And it's not like people don't care because you always care when you're spending more money than you planned, but it’s a way a distant second to: Are we getting this stuff shot?

Are all the studios behind?

Nobody is meeting their goals. Just look at the Disney+ line-up, all the stuff that they want to put in place. Look at what Paramount is doing now with Paramount Plus. If you just look at these pipelines, this is the anxiety that everyone feels right now. And then, by the way, WandaVision's a hit, so you got to feed that beast, right? That’s the tension that you feel every day.

How much of that is not having enough physical space to film? Several production facilities, including yours, are fully booked.

It's not just about space. Yes, of course, we could use some more facilities, and we're putting in five more stages that will be ready by June. But that's only one small part. Even before COVID hit, there weren't enough people — I'm talking about crew, not to mention the storytellers — to meet the demand that Wall Street was pouring into the pipeline. There's a talent drain. With COVID, it's [only gotten worse].

Georgia opened sooner than other states. Did you field a lot of calls?

It was overwhelming. Guys were like, "Hey, we heard you guys figured it out." First of all, we didn't figure it out. We have a version and it's working. But there was a lot of attention on us. And we had the good fortune of not having to worry about what role our government leaders would play because they basically said, "We're going to let the industry figure it out." That's the good news. The bad news: It was on us to figure it out and take responsibility.

Are you getting involved in the vaccine rollout as you did testing?

No, we decided we would just keep our focus on the testing protocols. We have to make certain that we just take it all the way to the end — and we'll let [union, guild and association] leadership decide when that is and when those protocols can change. And then again, as an industry, we're going to have to decide what we want to carry forward and what we don't. That's the next phase, and the rate at which we're vaccinating may advance those conversations faster than I thought. I used to think [the protocols] were going to go into 2022. I don't know if that's the case anymore.

Have you had conversations about mandating the vaccine on sets?

We haven't. We know that when it comes to mandatory protocols, we'll have to work in collaboration with industry leadership. No one goes on our lot without a mask, for example. And that was a political thing. Fortunately, Governor Kemp said, "How can I help?" And we were like, "What would be helpful is if you wear a mask in public," and he said, "OK." So when a crewmember said, "It's my right [not to wear one]" or whatever, of course we can say, "This is private property, sorry," but what our security team said instead was, "Hey, listen, the governor's wearing a mask, and you should wear a mask to protect our industry." It was us taking a stand, but the stand was really only taken because the unions and guilds and associations agreed. We'll have to do the same thing with the vaccination.

You're building out a neighboring town for people to live. Is this the future of production facilities?

I don't think so. In some ways, what we're doing is what Mr. Disney did. The mill town is not a new concept. But if we didn't have a state with a reputation for being so business friendly, for having the tax incentives, for having the most traveled airport in the world, if those things didn't exist right there, believe me, we couldn't do this. I grew up in Hill Country outside of San Antonio, Texas. You cannot do this in San Antonio, Texas.

How many people are buying houses and apartments on the Trilith property?

We have 400 of the apartments built, 260 of them occupied. We’re at almost 300 homes now sold and 500 people in the town. We're working on our next set of 150 homes right now and starting our third micro village. The second micro village filled up like that (snaps fingers). We have 36 people on the waiting list. What’s happening — and this is a global trend — is that COVID has heightened our awareness of the benefits of this approach to working. The distributed workforce and the way for us to collaborate with these electronic tools is causing a lot of people to realize that they don't have to live in the town they thought they have to live in. So I think people thought it was going to be more like a second home, but they're actually staying here.

Every few years it seems there’s some controversial legislation in Georgia that pops up and Hollywood threatens a boycott, whether it’s an anti-LGBT or anti-abortion bill. Do you just assume it's going to pass?

These kinds of ebbs and flows of social discourse and its impact on the industry will never go away. Georgia is not immune to it. The film industry has been this wonderful beacon of possibility, and I do worry, given what's going on in our culture right now, that we as an industry could get caught sideways in this in some way that really dampens our ability to continue to have diverse views on the world.

Georgia's film incentives program has been criticized by some as an irresponsible use of taxpayer money. Do you see it being phased out or pared in the future?

This state is very proud of the fact that seven years in a row now it’s the number one state in the United States to do business. They saw the film industry as a way to really diversify its economy, to bring the creative class into the state. So they wrote this policy that was supported left and right, and that still is the case. I'm not a politician, but I'm on all of these committees, and what I noticed is they were so careful and specific about making it make business sense. It would be very difficult for anyone to turn it around now because it's just good, smart money — and you have both Democrats and Republicans looking at it. But in every session in every state always in the U.S., you will have people come up and write up some kind of legislation, "Let's get rid of tax incentives." It's just not going to happen. I would be really surprised.

But there were some changes to it recently, yes?

There were parts that we needed to improve on around auditing and how we manage the information and our relationship with all the productions. We needed to clean up some of the back of house stuff, so Representative Matt Dollar passed some amendments last session that are now going into effect that really helped clean up the whole process.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

11 notes · View notes

hoochieblues · 3 years

Text

100 Days of Writing: Day 22

Tell us about a scene you’re most looking forward to writing in your current project.

for @the-wip-project

So. many. I feel like I’m in a weird place with this, bc I’m coming back to a couple of projects that have been on hiatus for so, so long, that in some ways it almost feels like I never actually wrote them, just dreamed it. This also means having a lot of ideas I’d shelved, some of which have grown and matured, and some of which have been in stasis. Like me(?)

Putting everything else under a cut bc it’s likely to contain personal yammering (therefore probably cw: abuse/bullhooey) and - if you were interested in my meandering return to fandom - potential spoilers for my Tabris and Handers longfics.

The process of shelving a hobby I loved (along with several other things in my life, like emotional stability, personal safety and a gd roof over my head at one point) was very painful, and I was pushing so hard to focus on commercial work that after a while I ended up not even taking refuge in happy thoughts of ‘ooh, when I finally get back to it, I wanna write...’ because The Guilt of Not Doing The Thing had become all encompassing, and was compounded by so many negative assholes in my life shitting on me for any waking minute that didn’t involve fixing all the problems they caused. (Plus shaming the hobby in the first place, and me for liking something they didn’t, isolation from community, and other boilerplate abusive stuff. Take note, children. If I cannot be a good example, let me be a horrible warning, and all of that.)

So, you’d think I’m currently brimming over with scenes and plans and ideas, and yes... but weirdly I’ve never really outlined or written too many scenes ahead of time, because I like the process of writing to retain freshness. I have an idea of how it’s going to go, but I like to be a little surprised when I’m actually having the enjoyment of writing it out. I do keep a document with things and paragraphs I jot down, but it has mostly lines of dialogue or pieces of description i really like, then many ////////////// to fill in later.

Something I’ve got into as well, which either curbs or exacerbates my bad habit of indecision in scene-anticipation, is writing certain scenes from alternate POVs, which has been stupidly fun and good character development, even if those scenes never leave my hard drive (or even if they become fics in their own right, mwahahaha), bc it’s about the freedom to rediscover the joy of writing what I want to explore.

Anyway, to cease wibbling and actually answer the question for the WIPs currently in redux:

Ephemera: the scene where young!Anders straight up hurls himself off the fucking wharf at Kinloch Hold and goes awol for a week (w/ the scene involving Anders’ First Tavern coming a close second. spoiler: it’s an unmitigated disaster, but one he will remember fondly for years to come.)

Justice in Surrender: can’t say much without spoilers, but there’s a plotline involving the Underground and Hawke’s total “radicalisation” that is crazy fun, and also two scenes where Tobias a) gets some perspective on the limits and failures of his relationship with Leandra (which will come back to bite/psychologically crush him circa All That Remains~ my poor boy~) and b) enters the Gallows with Carver that will be very rewarding to do, plus the ending itself which is... a thing that happens.

Feasting on Dreams: (reduxes) ROAD TRIP SCENES. More canon divergence and character development via small camp scenes etc; (new material) there’s a fight scene with a dragon I’m writing that is super fun, bc it shows how far Meri has come -- and how far she still has to go. Also, I cannot wait to get to the politics. There’s a fun interlude that kicks off the plotline with the Bannorn support which is a great excuse to headcanon more Fereldan culture and customs, and of course - at some point - Meri gets to face off with Eamon. The opportunity to explore that is such motivation.

#100daysofwriting #writeblurble #da fanfic #personal

4 notes · View notes

texastheband · 3 years

Text

Texas V Wu-Tang Clan

Interview by Steven Daly Photography by Peter Robathan Taken from The Face - December 1997

It’s the pop story of ’97, the most unlikely end to a weird year: TEXAS collaborating with the WU-TANG CLAN. First, a Scottish rock band on the verge of slip-sliding away into a tasteful obscurity was reborn via a slew of hit singles and a glut of stylish imagery. Now, in New York, their Brit-cool meets hip hop in a mutually beneficial deal. For everyone concerned, it’s all they need to get on…

Sharleen Spiteri took the call in her front hall. "Yo, Peach," growled a strange voice over transatlantic wires. The gentleman caller was none other than Ol’ Dirty Bastard, court jester of New York hip hop dynasty the Wu-Tang Clan. Apparently Mr Bastard fancied working with Spiteri and her band, Texas. It all started in August, with one of Texas’ managers discussing Land Rovers with someone called Power in New York, who turned out to be the manager of the Clan. A video of Texas’ "Say What You Want" was dispatched, and prodigiously gifted Wu-Tang chieftain RZA signed on to do a re-recording of the single for a prospective single project. Original rapper OI’ Dirty Bastard was replaced by Method Man, the next Clan member with a solo album scheduled.

The hook-up with the Wu-Tang Clan is the perfect climax to a year that’s seen Texas rise from a tumbleweed-strewn grave to grab the pole position in British Pop. A year in which Glasgow’s Sharleen Spiteri has stared out, defiantly remade and remodelled, from every magazine cover and TV show. From a media point-of-view, Texas’ – Spiteri’s – reconfiguring of music and fashion has been the year’s dream ticket. Ever since Bryan Ferry took the innovative step of getting Anthony Proce in to design Roxy Music’s wardrobe in the early seventies, successive phases of pop’s history have thrown up performers who use the fashion photographers, stylists and designers du jour to present The Package. It is these performers who most often capture the youthful mood of their time: that’s why you can see the vulgar glamour of the Seventies in the cut of Ferry’s sleazy lounge-lizard jib; the naive aspiration of the early Eighties in the box-suited and pixie-booted "style" of Spandau Ballet; and the onset of the late-Eighties mixing and matching of different cultures in Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance. When we look back at 1997 we will see in Texas’ sound and vision a new mix, all to do with living the high life but keeping it real. Catwalk and street, the designer and the understated, Prada and Nike; the slick and the cred. Ten years’ gone Scottish guitar outfit and this season’s bright young labels (in both senses). The setting too, has helped. Fashion, again, is big cultural business. Clever pop stars (Goldie! Liam!) want to be seen by the runway and hanging out at fashion parties; young designers yearn to be visible on the stage or the podium (viz. Antonio Berardi’s autumn London show at Brixton Academy). Factor in a paucity of self-motivating, button-pressing, songwriting, photogenic women in British music, and you have a ready-made media phenomenon.

Sharleen Spiteri is holding court at a New York restaurant with a gang of Calvin Klein employees who’ve just accompanied her to the VH-1 Fashion Awards. The annual ceremony is a mutually convenient arrangement, a TV cluster-fuck where the music and fashion industries exchange credibility and cachet. Texas are contemplating just such an exchange themselves, having recently been given the OK by CK. (Tommy Hilfiger has also made overtures.) Spiteri is to have an audience with Klein himself; she’s already been bribed with a trunkful of CK merch, including the streaked black dress – "inspired by [the artist] Brice Marden" – she’s wearing tonight.

Someone suggests that Texas would be perfect for Fashionably Loud, an MTV special where models strut on stage as the hot bands of the moment rock out. "Forget it," quips Spiteri. "there’s only room for one star up where we play." If Spiteri were to join Kate Moss and Christy Turlington on the Calvin Klein payroll it would not, as she sees it, detract from Texas’ music. "Fashion and music have always been connected, and now more than ever," says the singer. "You couldn’t have one without the other. If there’s shit music at a runway show it just doesn’t work."

Meanwhile, there’s the songs. With "White On Blonde", Texas’ fourth album, the music takes care of itself. Radio-friendly unit-shifters abound, helped on their way by producers Mike hedges (manic Street Preachers) and Manchester’s Grand Central. The singles have been, in sequence, nu-soul fresh ("Say What You Want"), springy pop ("Halo"), Motown-sunny ("Black Eyed Boy") and winter warming ("Put Your Arms Around Me"). The B-side remixers have covered all bases in these dance-savvy late Nineties, ranging from of-the-moment talents like the Ballistic Brothers and Trailerman to old stand-bys like Andy Weatherall and 808 State. Texas, patently, lost their dancefloor cherry by cherry-picking the brightest and the best.

Of course, while the singles have all enjoyed heavy airplay and gone top ten, and while "White on Blonde" has sold two million copies (more than its two predecessors put together), the remixes haven’t necessarily helped those sales. As the go-faster stripes of credibility on the solid saloon car, though, they’ve still been essential to The Package; all part of the thoroughly modern mix.

So now, the Wu-Tang Clan. To many, though, this latest development could smack of opportunism. One group are renegade roughnecks who mythologise themselves in epic hip hop anthems; the others are fastidiously tasteful Scots with an eye for perfectly modern consensus-pop. The Wu-Tang Clan are certainly among the aesthetically correct names that Texas always drop in interviews, but can there possibly be a legitimate connection between the two? "A lot of the Wu-Tang backing tracks have the feel of soundtracks, and we’ve always gone for a cinematic sound," says Johnny McElhone, Spiteri’s genial songwriting partner and bass player. "And I’ve always liked Al Green, and they use a lot of Willie Mitchell, Al Green, that whole Hi Records sound, and make it modern. And Marvin Gaye: Method Man, in that duet with Mary J. Blige, used ‘You’re All I Need To Get By."

Having dominated the charts in Europe this year, Texas are now, logically, turning their attention to America: the country that has always inspired them, whether it’s the dusty, pseudo-roots sound of their first three albums, or the iconic-soul and post-soul sounds of Memphis and Staten Island that they give props to now; the place where success has always eluded them. Yet given the commercial momentum of "White on Blonde", their approach to the Wu-Tang Clan is surely not driven by desperation. They are, then, viewing the collaboration with a combination of fan-like wonder and disbelief.

"Method Man is just a wicked, wicked rapper," enthuses Spiteri. "I can’t wait to hear the combination of my vocals and his – I‘m really excited about it. I have a kind of sweet, virginal thing going on, and he’s got this dirty sex vibe. It could be the perfect marriage."

It’s a Saturday night in Manhattan, and ten storeys above Times Square, Sharleen Spiteri sits on the floor of a recording studio, tinkering with her latest high-tech gadget, a Philips computer about the size of a TV remote. Across the street, three ten-foot high electronic ticker-tapes provide testimony to Monday’s stockmarket crash. No matter how much Spiteri plays with her new toy, there’s still that nagging worry: what if the Wu-Tang Clan won’t show? They’re supposed to be on a tour bus returning from a gig in Washington, DC today, but these, after all, are the original masters of disaster. The crew whose normal modus operandi seems to be chaos. The band that recently quit a national tour because only five of the nine members could be relied upon to turn up.

The studio has been booked since six, so Spiteri and McElhone breathe signs of relief when RZA and his posse finally roll in around ten. Among the dozen-strong throng, they’re surprised to see Wu-Tang member Reakwon, a stout fellow with a Mercedes cap and a Fort Knox of gold dental work. Several cigars are hollowed out, their contents replaced with weed; bottles of Cristal champagne and Hennessy are passed around as the air grows thick with smoke.

Half an hour later, method Man makes his entrance. Stooped over, he looks deceptively short – maybe only six-four in his Hilfiger fleece hoodie. "I’m John-John," he tells Sharleen, referring to his alias, Johnny Blaze. Pulling out the big blunt from behind his ear, Method Man considers the job at hand. "She got a nice voice," drawls the laconic giant. "This band not exactly my type of listening material, but they going in the right direction, if you ask me, by fucking with us. I’m waiting for RZA to put down a beat, hear how the vocals sound melded with the track before I come with ideas. I’m one of those guys."

As his friends get on with the serious business of partying, RZA goes to work, feeding a succession of sample-laden discs into a sampler. He has a diffident, genius-at-work charisma about him as he sits with his back to the room, keyboard at side. With a flick of his prodigiously ringed hand he reaches out and conjures up a brutal bassline. The speakers pulse violently. RZA takes a sip of Hennessy. "Record this, right here!" he tells the bewildered-looking engineer.

RZA has decided to dispense with the original master tapes, shipped over from Britain. He wants a completely new version, recorded rough-and-ready without the standard safety net of a time-code. This convention-trashing, wildstyle approach to recording elicits some consternation from the studio’s engineer, a central-casting white guy who warns RZA: "You won’t be able to synch to this, you know." RZA waves him away and turns to Johnny McElhone. "This riff is in E," McElhone tells RZA. "Maybe we should try it in the original key, D." "What are you saying? I understand no keys," says RZA. "You want me to sing the whole song straight through?" asks Spiteri, trying to divine RZA’s intentions. He orders the lights turned down, and offers Sharleen some herbal inspiration. She politely declines and walks to the vocal booth. "What’s her name? Sheree?" asks RZA as Spiteri warms up. The engineer wants to know if he should maybe start recording. "Always record everything!" exclaims RZA. "Ready, get set, go! Play and record, play and record!" Spiteri rattles of a perfect new version of ‘Say What You Want’, grooving along by herself and passionately acting out every word, even the ones borrowed from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing". Now it’s time for Method Man, who at this point is so herbally inspired that he can hardly open his eyes. He jumps up and lopes around the main room, running off his newly written rhymes and clutching a bottle of Crystal. Method walks up to the mic and opens his mouth, and that treacly baritone sets a typically morbid scene: "Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…" The Texas duo just look at each other, shaking their heads in awe.

The hours and the rhymes pass. Around 6am, things are starting to get a little weird. As Method Man snoozes on the sofa, RZA bounces off the walls, dancing like a dervish. "These are the new rhythms," he yells. "These are the new dances from Africa. I learned them when I was there last week!" McElhone and Spiteri crack up. The engineer probably wishes he were in Africa right now; he further draws RZA’s ire by making a mistake as he runs off some rough cassettes. As everyone says goodbye, RZA decides that he’s taking the studio’s sampler – he already has two of the $3,500 items, but at this point it’s all about the wind-up. The engineer, though, having last seen the end of his tether a good few hours ago, has had enough. By the commencement of office hours that morning, the rest of the session will have been cancelled and the band and Clan banned from this studio.

After a few frantic phone calls later that morning, a studio is found that is prepared to let the Wu-Tang Clan through the door. With one precondition: only two of them are allowed in the studio. Now it’s midnight, and four-fifths of Texas watch a trio of RZA-hired session men go through their paces. They shift effortlessly through a handful of soul and funk styles, and the Scots mutter approval. These are the kind of players that are so good they can get away with wearing questionable knitwear.

Soon, another couple of Wus pop in. Then another couple. In the control room RZA orders up a bottle of Hennessy and talks about hearing "Say What You Want" for the first time. "I didn’t fully understand the sound of it," admits the soft-spoken maestro. "It was obviously a popular song, a radio song, and my sound is the total opposite. But I thought that the artist had something, so I thought: "Let’s take her and rock her to my beat."

"Sweet soul, that’s what her stuff sounded like to me. Smooth. It reminded me of the Seventies: in those days, they did songs that would fit anywhere. If you went to a club getting high it would fit; if you was cleaning up your house it would fit. That’s when you’ve got a real great song right there." Whether or not "Say What You Want" is a great song, it’s not quite coming together tonight. Despite the best offers of the studio management, a full complement of Wu posse members ended up in the house. As the night drags on the trio of musicians don’t get with the track, and by eight the following morning there is little in the way of usable material. But everyone stays upbeat. Texas will work on the track in Glasgow, and send it back to RZA to finish, along with a new song based around one of his samples. After vowing to stay in touch, everyone stumbles out into the Manhattan morning light together, the Scots with an American name, and the Clan without a tartan.

From a distance the collaboration will continue. But it’s only a different kind of distance. Culturally, creatively, the gap between the Wu-Tang Clan and the old twang clan is considerable. Yet so it goes, this cross-cultural exchange programme. Whether it’s The Stones copping blues movies, Bowie digging the Philadelphia Sound, Lisa Stansfield getting soulful with Barry White, Sting getting doleful with Puff Daddy… Whether it’s Todd Terry reviving Everything But The Girl or Armand Van Helden making Sneaker Pimps the unwitting jumpstarters of speed garage, naked opportunism and risk-taking innovation have always been confused. Now, with genres blurred and tricknology proceeding apace, anything is possible and everything is permitted. Perhaps it is this, the sheer unlikeliness, that makes the Texas-Wu experiment the most illuminating collaboration of the year. Whether it works or not.

"If you play her stuff in a club, everybody be dancing, but it’s a clear room and you can see everybody’s face," RZA reflects on the departing Sharleen Spiteri. "But if you play mine, the room is smoky." And perhaps it is here, among the clouds and the clarity, between the smoke and the mirrors, where a new sound and vision lies.

Text originally posted on texasindemand.com

#article #whiteonblonde #wob #the face #the faculty #wutangclan #wu-tang clan #saywhatyouwant #texas #texasband #texas band #texastheband #texas the band #sharleenspiteri #sharleen spiteri

16 notes · View notes

birdlord · 3 years

Text

Everything I Watched in 2020

We’ll start with movies. The number in parentheses is the year of release, asterisks denote a re-watch, and titles in bold are my favourite watches of the year. Here’s 2019’s list.

01 Little Women (19)

02 The Post (17)

03 Molly’s Game (17)

04 * Doctor No (62)

05 Groundhog Day (93)

06 *Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (86)

07 Knives Out (19) My last theatre experience (sob)

08 Professor Marston and his Wonder Women (17)

09 Les Miserables (98)

10 Midsommar (19) I’m not sure how *good* it is, but it does stick in the ol’ brain

11 *Manhattan Murder Mystery (93)

12 Marriage Story (19)

13 Kramer vs Kramer (79)

14 Jojo Rabbit (19)

15 J’ai perdu mon corps (19) a cute animated film about a hand detached from its body!

16 1917 (19)

17 Married to the Mob (88)

18 Klaus (19)

19 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (19) If Little Women made me want to wear a scarf criss-crossed around my torso, this one made me want to wear a cloak

20 The Last Black Man in San Francisco (19)

21 *Lawrence of Arabia (62)

22 Gone With the Wind (39)

23 Kiss Me Deadly (55)

24 Dredd (12)

25 Heartburn (86) heard a bunch about this one in the Blank Check series on Nora Ephron, sadly after I’d watched it

26 The Long Shot (19)

27 Out of Africa (85)

28 King Kong (46)

29 *Johnny Mnemonic (95)

30 Knocked Up (07)

31 Collateral (04)

32 Bird on a Wire (90)

33 The Black Dahlia (05)

34 Long Time Running (17)

35 *Magic Mike (12)

36 Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (07)

37 Cold War (18)

38 *Kramer Vs Kramer (79) yes I watched this a few months before! This was a pandemic friend group co-watch.

39 *Burn After Reading (08)

40 Last Holiday (50)

41 Fly Away Home (96)

42 *Moneyball (11) I’m sure I watch this every two years, at most??

43 Last Holiday (06) the Queen Latifah version of the 1950 movie above, lacking, of course, the brutal “poor people don’t deserve anything good” ending

44 *Safe (95)

45 Gimme Shelter (70)

46 The Daytrippers (96)

47 Experiment in Terror (62)

48 Tucker: The Man and His Dream (88)

49 My Brilliant Career (79) one of the salvations of 2020 was watching movies “with” friends. Our usual method was to video chat before the movie, sync our streaming services, and text-chat while the movie was on.

50 Divorce Italian Style (61)

51 *Gosford Park (01) another classic comfort watch, fuck I love a G. Park

52 Hopscotch (80)

53 Brief Encounter (45)

54 Hud (63)

55 Ocean’s 8 (18)

56 *Beverly Hills Cop (84)

57 Blow the Man Down (19)

58 Constantine (05)

59 The Report (19) maddening!! How are people so consistently terrible to one another!

60 Everyday People (04)

61 Anatomy of a Murder (58)

62 Spiderman: Homecoming (17)

63 *To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (95) Of the 90s drag road movies, Priscilla is more visually striking, but this has its moments.

64 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (92)

65 *The Truman Show (98)

66 Mona Lisa (86)

67 The Blob (58)

68 The Guard (11)

69 *Waiting for Guffman (96) RIP Fred Willard

70 Rocketman (19)

71 Outside In (18)

72 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (08) how strange to see a movie that you have known the premise for, but no details of, for over a decade

73 *Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (91)

74 The Reader (08)

75 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (19) This was fine until it VERY MUCH WAS NOT FINE

76 The End of the Affair (99) you try to watch a fun little romp about infidelity during the Blitz, and Graham Greene can’t help but shoehorn in a friggin crisis of religious faith

77 Must Love Dogs (05) barely any dog content, where are the dogs at

78 The Rainmaker (97)

79 *Batman & Robin (97)

80 National Lampoon’s Vacation (83) Never seen any of the non-xmas Vacations, didn’t realize the children are totally different, not just actors but ages! Also, this one is blatantly racist!

81 *Mystic Pizza (88)

82 Funny Girl (68)

83 The Sons of Katie Elder (65)

84 *Knives Out (19) another re-watch within the same year!! How does this keep happening??

85 *Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (10) a real I-just-moved-away-from-Toronto nostalgia watch

86 Canadian Bacon (92) vividly recall this VHS at the video store, but I never saw it til 2020

87 *Blood Simple (85)

88 Brittany Runs a Marathon (19)

89 The Accidental Tourist (88)

90 August Osage County (13) MELO-DRAMA!!

91 Appaloosa (08)

92 The Firm (93) Feeling good about how many iconic 80s/90s video store stalwarts I watched in 2020

93 *Almost Famous (00)

94 Whisper of the Heart (95)

95 Da 5 Bloods (20)

96 Rain Man (88)

97 True Stories (86)

98 *Risky Business (83) It’s not about what you think it’s about! It never was!

99 *The Big Chill (83)

100 The Way We Were (73)

101 Safety Last (23) It’s getting so that I might have to add the first two digits to my dates...not that I watch THAT many movies from the 1920s...

102 Phantasm (79)

103 The Burrowers (08)

104 New Jack City (91)

105 The Vanishing (88)

106 Sisters (72)

107 Puberty Blues (81) Little Aussie cinema theme, here

108 Elevator to the Gallows (58)

109 Les Diaboliques (55)

110 House (77) haha WHAT no really W H A T

111 Death Line (72)

112 Cranes are Flying (57)

113 Holes (03)

114 *Lady Vengeance (05)

115 Long Weekend (78)

116 Body Double (84)

117 The Crazies (73) I love that Romero shows the utter confusion that would no doubt reign in the case of any kind of disaster. Things fall apart.

118 Waterlilies (07)

119 *You’re Next (11)

120 Event Horizon (97)

121 Venom (18) I liked it, guys, way more than most superhero fare. Has a real sense of place and the place ISN’T New York!

122 Under the Silver Lake (18) RIP Night Call

123 *Blade Runner (82)

124 *The Birds (62) interesting to see now that I’ve read the story it came from

125 *28 Days Later (02) hits REAL FUCKIN’ DIFFERENT in a pandemic

126 Life is Sweet (90)

127 *So I Married an Axe Murderer (93) find me a more 90s movie, I dare you (it’s not possible)

128 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (67)

129 The Pelican Brief (93) 90s thrillers continue!

130 Dick Johnston is Dead (20)

131 The Bridges of Madison County (95)

132 Earth Girls are Easy (88) Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum are so hot in this movie, no wonder they got married

133 Better Watch Out (16)

134 Drowning Mona (00) trying for something like the Coen bros and not getting there

135 Au Revoir Les Enfants (87)

136 *Chasing Amy (97) Affleck is the least alluring movie lead...ever? I also think I gave Joey Lauren Adams’ character short shrift in my memory of the movie. It’s not good, but she’s more complicated than I recalled.

137 Blackkklansman (18)

138 Being Frank (19)

139 Kiki’s Delivery Service (89)

140 Uncle Frank (20) why so many FRANKS

141 *National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (89) watching with pals (virtually) made it so much more fun than the usual yearly watch!

142 Half Baked (98) another, more secret Toronto nostalgia pic - RC Harris water filtration plant as a prison!

143 We’re the Millers (13)

144 All is Bright (13)

145 Defending Your Life (91)

146 Christmas Chronicles (18) I maintain that most new xmas movies are terrible, particularly now that Netflix churns them out like eggnog every year.

147 Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse (18)

148 Reindeer Games (00) what did I say about Affleck??!? WHAT DID I SAY

149 Palm Springs (20)

150 Happiest Season (20)

151 *Metropolitan (90) it’s definitely a Christmas movie

152 Black Christmas (74)

THEATRE:HOME - 2:150 (thanks pandemic)

I usually separate out docs and fiction, but I watched almost no documentaries this year (with the exception of Dick Johnston). Reality is real enough.

TV Series

01 - BoJack Horseman (final season) - Pretty damned poignant finish to the show, replete with actual consequences for our reformed bad boy protagonist (which is more than you can say for most antiheroes of Peak TV).

02 - *Hello Ladies - I enjoy the pure awkwardness of seeing Stephen Merchant try to perform being a Regular Person, but ultimately this show tips him too far towards a nasty, Ricky Gervais-lite sort of persona. Perhaps he was always best as a cameo appearance, or lip synching with wild eyes while Chrissy Teigen giggles?

03 - Olive Kittredge - a rough watch by times. I read the book as well, later in the year. Frances Mcdormand was the best, possibly the only, casting option for the flinty lead. One episode tips into thriller territory, which is a shock.

04 - *The Wire S3, S4, S5 - lockdown culture! It was interesting to rewatch this, then a few months later go through an enormous, culture-level reappraisal of cop-centred narratives.

05 - Forever - a Maya Rudolph/Fred Armisen joint that coasts on the charm of its leads. The premise is OK, but I wasn’t left wanting any more at the end.

06 - *Catastrophe - a rewatch when my partner decided he wanted to see it, too!

07 - Red Oak - resolutely “OK” steaming dramedy, relied heavily on some pretty obvious cues to get across its 1980s setting.

08 - Little Fires Everywhere - gulped this one down while in 14-day isolation, delicious! Every 90s suburban mom had that SUV, but not all of them had the requisite **secrets**

09 - The Great - fun historical comedy/drama! Costumes: lush. Actors: amusing. Race-blind casting: refreshing!

10 - The Crown S4 - this is the season everyone lost their everloving shit for, since it’s finally recent enough history that a fair chunk of the viewing audience is liable to recall it happening.

11 - Ted Lasso - we resisted this one for a while (thought I did enjoy the ad campaign for NBC sports (!!) that it was based on). My view is that its best point was the comfort that the men on the show have (or develop, throughout the season) with the acknowledgement and sharing of their own feelings. Masculinity redux.

12 - Moonbase 8 - Goodnatured in a way that makes you certain they will be crushed.

13 - The Good Lord Bird - Ethan Hawke is really aging into the character actor we always hoped he would be!

14 - Hollywood - frothy wish-fulfillment alternate history. I think the show would have been improved immeasurably by skipping the final episode.

9 notes · View notes

mechaspirit · 4 years

Text

Vacation Disaster (Part 1)

Author’s Note: Thanks to @kouryuu16 who provided the prompt in regards to the new location in Dragon Raja involving a cruise ship, I wrote my first DR fic. And it’s a bit AU-ish because I went with a happy ending (yes, I’ve seen spoilers of what happened. And screw canon, I’m changing it). 😤

And as you can tell by the title of the fic and the ending, you can safely assumed there’s going to be part 2 of this fic. And I’m opened to more suggestion in the next part if you like. Either DM or reblog your ideas in the comments. My ask box might not be working, just a fair warning. Also, if you wish to be tagged in my future DR fics, let me know. Same methods. Until then, enjoy! 😆❤️

Disclaimers: I do not own Dragon Raja or its characters. Only my MC (Mika).

Pairings:...none for now.

Summary: The gang received tickets from the Principal of Cassell College on a cruise ship as a reward and a vacation break from their duties. But things did not go according to plan...

Everything appears to be clad in darkness, and although she couldn’t open her eyes, nineteen...almost twenty-year old Mika could hear the sounds of the waves from the sea and the seagulls crying. It wasn’t until she felt something poking her on the side or head that stirred her from her unconsciousness.

...Wait? Poking?

Mika finally opened her light, blue eyes only to blurry, recognizing a familiar reddish, orangish-headed woman with crimson eyes and beautiful pale skin complexion wearing a simple white, summer dress. And with a worry look in her eyes (and slight amusement), she was poking the bluenette with a stick.

“What in the...Erii?” Mika groaned, recognizing the former chief of the Uesugi Clan and slowly sat up, wincing from the pounding, vice grip feeling from her head and taking in her surroundings. Seeing all the sand, palm trees, and the ocean with literally no one else around them, Mika abruptly comes to a conclusion that they’re on an island in the middle of nowhere.

“Oh...oh crap!” The S-Rank female hybrid panicked and stood up, “This is not good! Where is everyone?!”

Before the young woman can start searching around the island, Erii firmly, but gently pulls on Mika’s arm to get her attention. The red-head hybrid pointed to the sandy area across from them, where Mika saw another red-headed woman, similar to Erii only that this woman’s hair takes more of the crimson color. The S-Rank Hybrid recognized her as Chen Motong, or rather “Nono” as most people called her, and quickly went over to wake her up.

“Nono. Nono, wake up!” Mika told her as she shook the crimson head by the shoulder. As the older woman slowly woke up, she recognized Mika and Erii next to her and slowly sat up, rubbing the side of her head.

“Ow. Where in the world are we?” Nono asked the two other women.

“Stuck in the island, unfortunately,” Mika pointed out, “I don’t even know which island we’re exactly at.”

Nono sighed at that, “I supposed this is what happens when we take a vacation on the cruise in the middle of a storm that nobody expects.”

“...You seemed really calm about this.”

“Not really,” The crimson hair shook her head, “I’m still concerned about the situation we’re in and everyone else, but when you’re on a dangerous mission like this, you’ll get used to adapting them. Was anyone else here?

Mika shook her head. Erii responded by writing something on the sand. Which is a bit odd to the other two women since they’re used to seeing Erii writing on her notebook if she wants to say something. But then again, she doesn’t have one with her right now, which is understandable.

“When I woke up, I only saw Mika-chan and Nono-nee san here, unconscious. I don’t even know where Sakura (Luminous) and my brothers are.” The red-orange head wrote, adding a sad face with a single teardrop at the end.

Then it dawned on everyone else what just happened. Long story short with what happened at the beginning, the Cassell Team consisting of Mika, Luminous (Lu Mingfei), Nono, Caesar, Johann, and Fingel received tickets from Principal Anjou to a cruise trip across the Pacific Ocean, with the latter believing that these six students deserve a break from their missions and college exams. Almost everyone in the team was excited to receive those tickets and decided to go on the vacation since it appears to be a one life opportunity. They were only on the cruise ships for a couple of days so far, and within those days, they came across the Gen siblings (consisting of Chisei, Chime, and Erii) whom one of them manages to win a lottery to the same cruise they were on. It turned out to be a mostly friendly reunion after that horrifying, tragic event (and we’ll not speak of it again for few of the people’s sake).

The third day of the trip, the gang went separately to explore more of the ship and do their own things while waiting for their next destination. Luminous was somewhere in the arcade. Fingel probably went around to find gossips and flirt with other women. Caesar would be somewhere holding conversations with other rich people. Johann...don’t know where he’s at. He’s usually silent about it. Chisei is sunbathing outside near the pool (and gathering ideas for his sunscreen brand). Chime would probably be looking at different opera to explore more musical arts coming from different cultures. The three women were the only ones in a group, and were looking at a boutique store to see if they could find any even dresses they could wear to attend one of the dinner parties where Caesar managed to get everyone else invited.

...Well obviously, it turns out that the party isn’t gonna happen anytime soon, because the ship was rocking back and forth rather abnormally and once they managed to take a look outside, a storm hit. Which caused panic to the people around them. And then, being the agents of a secret dragon slayer society, the gang tried to get the passengers to safety on the other boats, only the ship to finally tip over and throw everyone else overboard. And then you can guess what happened to the Cassell gang and the siblings.

Seeing the sad look on Erii’s face, Mika hugged the poor girl while Nono patted her on the head.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find them,” Nono told the other red-head, reassuringly, “Until then, big sis Nono and big sis Mika will take good care of you.”

That got Erii to smile a little bit and drew a happy face with a few hearts on the sand. Just then, the three women heard a familiar scream coming from the middle of the island where the palm trees are at.

“...Was that Luminous?” Mika asked in concern.

“...Yes, that’s definitely Luminous.” The crimson head confirmed. Erii nodded in agreement.

And then the three ran off to find their friends on an unknown island full of mysteries...

To be continued...

#dragon raja #dragon raja mc #mika tsukishima #luminous #lu mingfei #chen montag/nono #caesar gattuso #johann chu #erii uesugi #chisei gen #chime gen #fanfic #fanfic part 1 #fingel von strings

16 notes · View notes

ghostmartyr · 4 years

Text

SnK 128 Thoughts

Pacing, I think, is the single most difficult thing to do correctly when telling a story. Out loud or in text, you have to juggle every cue you’re giving off, keep it all relevant, and make it so when things fall into place, they’re falling to the gravity that the story’s been given.

That’s why we’ve got something of a problem in this arc.

I complain a lot, because it’s easy, and this is hardly a flawless work. Organization has also been one of the regular things this series just has trouble with.

Still, while I really feel that the last few chapters aren’t the best way to tell this story, the story chosen is a monster to keep in line.

[insert amusing pre-cut joke of your choice here]

Conflict is the root of every story. Character vs self. Character vs character. Character vs nature. Pick one, then plant the seed and watch the clash reform the setting. Knowing your protagonist often involves knowing your villain.

Eren has always been the best protagonist for this series. He embodies the fury of humanity in an environment that embraces complacency. He is the voice that shouts for people to do something.

Back in Trost, everyone on his starting squad plans on picking the Survey Corps. Because of his constant, unfettering influence. He’s the one who is always reminding them that there’s a world outside that they’re abandoning. He never lets Jean forget it. He interrupts parties with the vocal equivalent of hammering 99 problems to every door.

Eren is one of the top ten soldiers in the 104th, and he makes sure everyone knows what he’s using his skills for. And before they themselves are confronted with what’s being asked of them to join him, everyone in his social circle is ready to make the same choice.

Moving forward is what Eren does in a world that’s been trapped in stagnation. He is a force of change. He is a force of impotent rage in the face of disaster.

He is every reaction the humans inside the walls don’t have, because as a people, they can’t imagine what there is to be done about their problems. Staying within the safety of the walls and limiting their potential in return for not dying a bloody death seems fair, to them.

They are imprisoned, so Eren, our protagonist, seeks freedom.

Being born free is the linchpin of his first successful transformation.

His first rather disturbing act of violence comes from him murdering slavers.

The wings of freedom are the iconic brand of his chosen military branch.

Subtlety.

That’s all very straightforward and simple to work with.

Then we open up the setting, and things are still rather simple, just in a turn that kicks off one hell of a problem.

The world itself is a cage. Physically, in the form of internment camps, or culturally, in the form of how people think about each other and act. There is no freedom for the citizens of Paradis now that they have broken out of their shell. There is just another prison, and a ticking time bomb.

Naturally, in its most basic form, this would make the world Eren’s enemy, because Eren is the champion of freedom.

Only then, if you stick to the most basic form of the concept, the simple answer is that when everyone else dies, then you will have your freedom.

Eren might be the story’s protagonist, but that’s because he stands at the fulcrum of all the story’s core ideas. He makes the rest of the plot move. He is the focus point. He is why there’s a story, and not a jumble of confused, dying people throwing themselves at the problem of titans.

He’s not everything that’s going on.

The world’s cruelty is not what this story is about.

Eren starts thinking about the outside world because a boy shares his dreams of the ocean.

Mikasa takes the time to salute a little girl on a battlefield.

Sasha fights a titan off with a bow and arrow to save one child’s life. She dies because she won’t kill a little girl.

Levi chooses not to revive Erwin so that Erwin can die without being brutally abused as the rest of mankind’s sacrifice.

Niccolo’s entire concept of what he’s fighting for is disrupted because people like his cooking.

Gabi is protected and treated like a child by the 104th even after they know she pulled the trigger on their friend.

Colt dies because of his insistence on giving his little brother comfort.

Reiner’s still breathing because there’s a few little kids he can do some good for.

Annie just wants to see her dad again.

Humanity, as a general concept, begins in an easily condemnable place in the manga. One of the first things Paradis does is send out a large percentage of its citizens to die so that the rest can live. Meanwhile, the only people who do try to go outside and learn more about the world are smeared even as they’re bringing back corpses.

By the end of Uprising, there’s a crowd of cheering people waiting for the Scouts to succeed.

People are awful.

They can do better.

A lot of Eren’s objection to Jean is highlighted through that. He never gives Connie a hard time for wanting to join the MPs. It’s Jean, who’s vocally joining up just so he can take it easy, that Eren objects to. Jean doesn’t have to be a jackass. It’s a decision he’s making.

Jean decides to do better.

In the beginning, people are willing to settle for ‘good enough.' Slowly, as the arcs go by, we approach a near universal take of people seeing problems and taking preventative action.

Here, with the Yeagerists, we come back to the original sin of Paradis.

As long as this one little island is okay, and no one on it has to worry about death, what does the outside world matter? Especially when that outside world has repeatedly promised to kill them? Killing them all first isn’t a problem, it’s a solution.

Samuel’s there at the start of Trost.

Sasha saves his life.

Connie kills him.

They don’t hate each other. Neither one wants to pull the trigger. But Samuel is willing to see the rest of the world die if it means keeping Paradis safe. Connie isn’t.

Over and over, the cycle plays out the exact same way. People kill each other to free themselves. As long as there’s always an Us vs Them dynamic, the bloodshed continues indefinitely. The Eldian Empire enslaved the world through titans. Marley won its freedom and decided it was okay to do the same thing as long as they only enslaved Eldians.

The methodology is what’s going to fuck everyone over in the end.

During Uprising, it is routinely discussed that it’s possible the royal family and the upper brass do know something that makes a coup a bad idea. It’s possible that overthrowing them will bring Paradis into an even darker landscape.

What it comes down to is that whatever they know, they’re willing to let everyone else die if it saves their own skin.

Since that particular Everyone Else is united, the coup continues, and the island’s given its chance at actual peace.

Now, the Yeagerists are making that same argument.

Meanwhile, before we were dealing with this, we had Zeke. His argument was that seeing as the world would never change, Ymir’s people were all cursed and damned, it is for the best of all of us if we all die.

He’s the ultimate counter to Eren. Eren is fighting for life, while Zeke is only searching for the best death.

Only by all appearances, Eren’s fight has landed him in the exact same place. It’s only the question of which people are dying.

Getting back to Connie and Samuel, if you squint, Connie is betraying his allegiance to his comrades. ...If you squint. I know he feels that way, and I know what the chapter title is, but the Yeagerists are a genocidal cult who bully their way into power and try to kill off their actual Commander, who Connie is still following.

Samuel might not be aware of that, but that’s what we’ve got.

The closest Connie came to betrayal was throwing a Warrior Candidate into his mom’s mouth, and we wrapped up that subplot.

Without squinting, Samuel is betraying the ideals that Connie chose the Survey Corps for. Connie wants to save people. He doesn’t want all this death, regardless of how it benefits him.

So this whole conflict, throughout this entire chapter, is really all about who wants which people dead.

The Warriors are still fighting for Marley. Despite everything, that’s their home, and their base of operations if they ever want a chance at fixing things. Paradis has more friends on it than they like thinking about, but Paradis is not their problem.

Kiyomi and the Hizuru flock are pretty much... she is just so done, and it’s very easy to see why. This is not their war. They were looking for a beneficial partnership. For power and resources, sure, but they were willing to play ball. Now they get to watch as the nation they helped kills off the world and their only allies are rushing them to a basement. Hopefully to do something significant before their country burns.

What’s left of the Scouts who are actually following the legitimate chain of command is, surprisingly, focused on stopping Eren’s genocide.

Then I guess the rest of the world probably has opinions, but they don’t get any pages. But it’s pretty safe to assume Eren’s high on their ‘want dead’ list. If not all of Paradis.

We’ve got one group of people who are actually, actively, doing the anti-genocide thing.

The rest is just fighting over the biggest piece of the pie.

The conflict is that some people think genocide is bad, and some people think genocide is okay, actually.

And, you know, fine.

Only then we have Eren.

Protagonist boy.

We don’t know his conflict, and he has more power than anyone else in the entire cast. Unless we count the primordial ooze as a cast member. He is a giant stegosaurus monster who has threatened the entire world, and as far as anyone with eyes can see, he’s actually going through with it.

Nothing presented anywhere suggests that there is a way to stop him.

At best, if people succeed in killing him, they will have unleashed a bunch of mindless Colossals into the world. If we revisit our volume 1 knowledge, we know this to be a problem.

Making all of this really, really pointless.

Obviously, this is what all these characters would do in this situation.

Obviously, we have some feelings about them being forced to kill their allies while the world falls apart.

Obviously, the author probably being willing to fast-forward through all of this is not necessarily an indication that that is what creates the optimal story.

Obviously, these are important details.

The plot still might as well be a glacier.

There is one person moving pieces around. Everyone else is just scrambling on the board he’s created and rehashing whether or not genocide is a good thing every time they’re considering shooting someone they kind of don’t want to.

All of the tension is literally an ocean away.

As great as the character moments are, there’s nothing to ground them in. There’s just a baseless hope that somehow, there’s a way out of this, and the story doesn’t end with yet another genocide kicking off a rebellion.

Magath flips on his worst hot take immediately. He does that because his country is dying and it’s reorganizing his priorities and beliefs to line up with what he’s actually feeling instead of parroting the world that created him.

Yelena goes from being catatonic to being a nuisance because -- reasons?

Connie almost kills Falco then doesn’t, because he really, honestly, was never going to kill the kid and we all knew that.

The driving force of all these potential conflicts is just too distant. As much work as everyone’s doing, they’re only making progress towards getting to Eren.

When you have a character who can end the world choosing to end the world, it creates problems. When that character is your protagonist, it’s even worse.

In the past, Eren’s absence has spurred characters to action and revealed more of the world’s secrets. Presently, unlike in his various kidnappings, Eren is the one with the secrets. His absence is making people do stuff, but not stuff that has any tangible meaning outside of putting actions to the belief that genocide is bad.

Secrets, and people seeking answers, has been a major player in moving the plot from the beginning.

Here though, we have the issue of no one having the luxury of investigating why this is happening. Mikasa and Armin might be desperate to know, but they have no tools available to them except the airship. Which, again, just puts them in the same place as Eren. It does not give them much more than they had the last time they were in a room with him.

Whatever secrets are in place, they are insignificant next to the fact that the world is ending as they watch.

Only, you know, slowly.

Because the decision has been made that Eren’s perspective is going to be a Reveal. It has to stay private until the moment it’s relevant to the other members of the cast, or otherwise, what was the point of holding off so long?

The result is this. Too much going on in too little time, and all of it technically mattering, but not enough that spending 40 pages on it really changes how the story is progressing.

I’m not sure this is a problem that would be easy to see coming. In the design phase, I mean. I’ve kind of been cautiously whining about these concerns for several months.

But the stage is set like this: Eren pulls the doomsday trigger. Enough time must pass for Paradis to cultivate a new normal and for Eren to reach land with his squad of titans. The goal is gathering our cast and stopping Eren.

There’s a disconnect between what needs to be done and how much time it takes to portray those things.

Connie’s breakdown over feeding Falco to his mom is a character moment that helps to inform his emotions this chapter. That’s probably why it survived. It still drags four named characters off to a village in the middle of nowhere while Floch’s reign is establishing itself.

Magath’s turnabout this chapter is the culmination of a lot of the emotional connections he’s made with Eldians, and the attachment he has to his home, but it comes after driving in the point of why Marley is so fucking awful. He’s spouting rhetoric last chapter, then he’s immediately confronted with the birthplace of that rhetoric being destroyed thanks to events he’s had a part in forging.

Yelena goes from being willing to let Floch shoot her to having an interest in watching things play out. Courtesy of one background dump.

The emotional beats these characters are all due do not match up with what they have to do, and it’s making things come across as really disjointed. It’s a frustrating combination of this needing more pages, but the idea of yet more pages being spent off where the main plot actually is going on is exhausting.

The world is ending, but the world has been ending for months.

We’ve clearly got a checklist of things to get done before we meet up with Eren, but he’s hoarding the plot. Sticking around to watch the list be physically checked is...

To paraphrase some tumblr post from the past few months, it feels like laundry, mostly.

The story wouldn’t survive just jumping to Eren. The more time we’re away from him, the greater the impact when we finally know what’s up. The more time we have with our squad of unlikely, plucky heroes, the more we’re going to want to punch Eren in the face for not listening to them. Again.

It’s not that there’s no value in devoting chapters to all of this planning and reeling. It’s that no matter what happens here, it is not fixing the larger problem of Eren’s genocide campaign.

The plot is across the ocean, and we are months into watching our cast try to reconnect with it.

For me, that makes it a bit dull to read, but it is hard to hold it against the story. Writing the end of the world when you intend to make the audience care about the world -- even though the protagonist is ending it -- that is a lot of plot. Knitting it all together is not a simple task. You can see the seams popping.

Oh well.

One of the things I will stand by is that this manga is a great story told gracelessly. If you read it all linearly, problems are going to be noticed. Stuff be weird. Plus timed terribly.

But there’s a lot of emotion packed into it all. It’s a story that, when you look back in retrospect, free of any time line and observing only through the lens of your knowledge, it holds up and has power.

So I’m glad all of this stuff is being drawn, because one day, when the story’s over, having a fragmented, disjointed thread of progression isn’t going to matter so much.

Some stories survive on how they’re told.

Arguably, that includes this one, because the anime got people through the first few volumes.

This story, primarily, survives on the quality of what it is attempting to lump together.

...Not that I don’t wish it wouldn’t try a little harder to pace itself, but I suppose all that energy is being spent on Eren. You know. Since he’s the only one who has any of the parts of the plot that matter.

Uh.

As far as what actually happened this chapter, yay for Mikasa showing attachment to Kiyomi and crew. Intrigue for the question of where Eren is being such a topic (he’s a fucking giant stegosaurus last I saw figure it out). Sadness for Samuel being on the wrong side after surviving so long (Connie probably remembers Sasha saving his life). Sadness for Reiner trying to spare his friends the pain of what he went through for his cause. Pat on the head for Annie still being impossibly Annie. Pat on the head for Onyankopon just because (sorry about your life yikes).

The absolute funniest part of all of this, to me, is that Daz is now dead.

Beats freezing to death in a blizzard while two teenagers shout about philosophy over your unconscious body?

Anyway, another month goes by.

Much the way waves do in Wind Waker.

#Shingeki no Kyojin #SnK 128 #shingeki no spoilers #SnK spoilers #spoilers #tl;dr #chapter post #it might be worth noting that I spent all of the time writing this post wondering what the hell I was talking about #the nature of how these posts are written means that is now your problem

78 notes · View notes

iwanthermidnightz · 4 years

Link

Welcome to the apocalypse! We’ve been training for this: doomsday prepping, absorbing YA disaster series as if they’re real life, staying in every night while our friends go out, U-Hauling with our new significant other… What I’m describing here is a lesbian, folx. We, as in lesbians, have been training for this. And now that cuffing season has officially turned to lockdown season, this is the time to get yourself a lesbian of your own.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely under quarantine, or at absolute least social distancing (and if you’re not, f*ck you, you’re going to kill us all). Coronavirus is here. It’s closed our borders, our restaurants, our bars. Many 9-5 workers are being asked to work from home. All of this is to say queer women have taken a collective sigh of relief: Isolating is an intrinsic part of the queer experience. You’ve probably heard jokes about queer female couples staying in at night and U-Hauling — the phenomenon in which new lesbian couples get so attached so quickly that they shack up together after the first date. This is what we do. This is where we thrive. Welcome to our culture. I’m actually encouraging you to appropriate it as a means of public safety. For your own good: Get a lesbian, now.

This may seem like a pyramid-scheme-like sales pitch, but it’s actually more of a surgeon general warning: If you want to survive this pandemic, invite a queer woman into your home and let her do her thing. She’ll know what to do. All you have to do is emotionally support her in return. Here’s what getting a lesbian during the apocalypse can do for you:

MacGyvering

Ever heard of a lumberjack lesbian? Now is the time for us to lean into the stereotypes about our people: We are a fuel-efficient, hybrid-driving, roll up your sleeves, flannel-wearing, wood-chopping, elbow-greasing, hunting, gathering, rub some dirt in it, rip that thing out of your lighter with our teeth and build a fire type of people. Your toilet broke and you can’t call a plumber? No problem — you got dental floss? Your lesbian will rig your pipes. Do you need a table built? Don’t even worry about it — your lesbian waited till nightfall and walked barefoot through the streets collecting wood scraps until sunrise. It was no problem — whatever we don’t use can go in the fireplace, babe. (I hacksawed a hole in your wall and built a chimney while you were asleep, hope that’s cool.)

Give You Books

Every queer woman waits a lifetime to be able to gift her favorite books to her partner. It’s our love language. Need fiction recommendations? Tight. Here’s every Pulitzer fiction winner since the ’80s. Have you read Three Women? Have you read any Patti Smith? Have you read The Price of Salt, the book that Carol is based on? Do you want to cuddle and read and my cat can sit between us? Wait, you haven’t read Jane Eyre? *dumps a truckload of books onto your lawn*

Also, we like to recommend things in general. Need movie suggestions? Here are the 100 best lesbian movies ranked and indexed based on yearning and eye contact. Here are 40 must-see Rosalía music videos. Here are TV shows I like solely because a 40- to 50-year-old actress is in it. Have you seen The Outsider? Oh, Julianne Nicholson is great in it. Have you seen the paparazzi photos of her holding hands with Julia Roberts? Should I stop talking? Are you still awake?

Emotional Support

Are you horny and alone? Do you want someone soft and nice, who smells good and washes their face with actual facewash to hold on to? Boy, have I got the thing just for you: a lesbian. Like I said, this is a great time to wear our stereotypes on our sleeves: We are clingy people. If given permission, we will stick to you like a barnacle on a pier. Let us hold and comfort you through the absolute mental health shitstorm that comes with enduring a global crisis. Your lesbian will bring blankets and her fluffiest pillow, a dozen or so self-help books, her favorite meditation app, vegan tissues, bath bombs, and an open communication channel. Need to process? Sweet. Let’s do it for two weeks straight without interruptions. Our tolerance for trauma is way up there. We can take it. Lay it on me.

Hoarding

Nothing goes better with worldwide panic than hoarding. Your lesbian can help you cobble together meals out of old cans in the back of your pantry. You didn’t even know you had that? No problem. Tomato paste can go in almost anything. Plus, I brought a wagon of supplies you didn’t know you needed. What do we have here… Plant-based milks and cheeses, nonperishables, coffee beans and my Chemex for pour-over, New York Times crossword books, batteries, loofahs, candelabras (not needed, but not not needed), a humidifier, essential oils and a diffuser, a weighted blanket, a paper bag to heave into, hers and hers mugs, poems, a dozen extremely comfy sports sweatshirts (and long sleeved t-shirts and sweatpants) from the ’90s…

Sex Toys

I mean, c’mon. Your lesbian’s got you covered.

#jill gutowitz #im dying

43 notes · View notes

tonystarkbingo · 4 years

Text

Tony Stark Bingo Party Prompt Meme

http://generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=25057 -- we took tags from this random generator and then made up more detailed prompts from them. These prompts are open use, even if you’re not participating in the bingo, but please tag us if you write one, we’d LOVE to see what you did with it! nonsense + everyone is gay + denial : Tony+harem - Tony, while an incorrigible flirt, does not believe that anyone actually likes him, let alone as many as do. They come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas to ask him out or at least let him know they like him, while he innocently thinks they're all just such awesome friends superpowers + bodice-ripper + sad Stuckony - something set in the Regency(ish) era but with secret superpowers as an added bonus. Let’s of angst over trying to hide their secret powers, and wanting to save people without revealing themselves and also cause they’re gay. clones + nighttime + wishes Coulson/Strange (StrangeAgent? AgentStrange? DrAgent?) - Coulson ends up spending the night in the NY Sanctum. Some of the artifacts happen to be particularly sensitive to subconscious fantasies... and isn't it lucky that cloning himself happens to be one of Strange's powers? cruising + flashbacks + bad boys Winteriron possible future Stuckony - small warning for drinking mention - Tony is driving around to distract himself so he doesn't get drunk. He gets in an accident because he is not actually in a state to drive. The accident is comparatively harmless, the flashback to his convoy being attacked in Afghanistan is less so. When Tony wakes up in the hospital he learns that the person who dragged him from his car to safety is one James "Bucky" Barnes, resident motorbike riding bad boy heartthrob and friend/visitor of Steve "regular ER customer" Rogers, who's his hospital roommate. room service + lifeguards + sharing Tony is a lifeguard who takes his job very seriously. He's attending a convention-slash-training seminar at a posh uptown hotel, but then there's a knock at the door. He opens it to find two room service carts, both with order slips on them that indicate they're actually destined for another room. Rather than call the obviously harried and beleaguered bellboy back, he pushes them down the hall himself and knocks on the door... which is answered by none other than the hot beefcake fellow-lifeguard that's been distracting Tony all day. They end up sharing the enormous amount of food... and then maybe some more. :wink: overthinking + pity sex + customer service Tony just turned 40, he's been friends with Bucky and Nat for forever, and they'd been each other's marriage backups for the longest time, like, if they weren't married at 40, they'd marry whoever wasn't married either in their little trio. Only, two years prior, Buckynat became husband and wife and so he's having a little pity party on his floor at the Tower, drinking virgin mojitos and seriously consider a particular customer service to cheer himself up in one way or another - might as well get an orgasm, as shitty and sad as it may be, it's his birthday ffs - but then Bucky and Nat appear in his elevator, and they pull him off the couch he's been sprawled on for three hours, and Nat is the first to kiss him, and he's too stunned to react much but when he does question wtf is happening, Bucky shushes him and Tony lets him. The next morning he is evidently convinced it was all just pity sex, or a kink of theirs or whatever.... certainly nothing to do with the fact that they've been courting him forever and got tired of waiting for him to step out of ObliviousStarklandia. Of course not. wolves + romantic friendship + wigs Okay, so, someone has been doing an excellent job of hiding his baldness from someone else, with whom he's been in a long term best-friends-but-in-love not-quite-relationship. He's got an elaborate series of wigs, and over the years he's gradually been replacing them with slightly more grey ones so that someone else doesn't realise. Aaaand then someone gets bitten by a werewolf, and when he shifts for the first time he is completely bald and the secret is out. accidental relationship + butt dialing + warlocks Tony Stark is not happy with today's mission, not like there's an occasion to enjoy dealing with magic. But now he's in a relationship with Bucky, which is not bad, that man is gorgeous, but this is not the way. He's ranting about it to Jarvis and doesn't realize that he sat on his phone nor that he dialed the other supersoldier in the team until he hears a muffled laugh beneath him. He's going to kill that warlock smuggling + fear + road-trip okay, a Star Wars AU. Farmboy Peter is fleeing from stormtroopers who found out his parents were Jedi. He runs into smuggler Tony and they take off in Tony's ship for an extended road trip in space. possession + loving marriage + gardens & gardening Pepperony, Morgan insists there's a spirit possessing the garden because she's seen the plants dancing. Turns out they've accidentally created sentient plants and Tony is like nope, call somebody else, I do mechanical engineering and they call Dr. Cho to fix it. The marriage is in there somewhere I promise idiots in love + bonding + resurrection Ironhawk - Clint tries to get Lucky back after he goes over the rainbow bridge, but he can’t actually read latin and ends up bringing back Tony from the 18th century. And poor Tony gets Clint as his guide to the 21st. Shenanigans and eventual fluffy ending improv + cultural appropriation + shield maidens After the Battle of New York, Tony's interviewing Thor about Asguardian tech and learns that they have all kinds of shielding devices, and gets interested in trying to replicate what Thor describes just in case aliens decide to pay a call on Earth again. Thor, for his part, is kinda shocked that Earth doesn't have any such shields, though on the other hand it is Midguard, so. You know. Tony gives it a shot and a couple weeks later he's launching the satellites into orbit for a preliminary test of the shields. He intends to test them with SI tech developed from seized Chitauri tech, but before he can get the chance an alien army shows up, guns blazing and very mad about something. The shields hold, thankfully, and the aliens send a strongly worded letter informing him that he has infringed upon their religious and cultural traditions by putting the Stark logo on them. Their planet was visited centuries ago by time-travelers that greatly influenced their culture, religion, government, etc. These time travelers carried devices with that same Stark Logo on them. The Stark Logo has become a complex cultural symbol over the centuries, and they don't appreciate him using it on war tech, even if on shields. Eventually, they figure out that the time travelers' tech was Tony's tech, and agree to leave in peace, but only after Tony spends a terrifying couple of days trying to improvise his way through a diplomatic disaster with an alien power. vampire family + slapstick + loss WinterIronWidow: So, Natasha's been a vampire for a long time, and she's lonely, so she decides to take on some mates, enter established relationship WinterIron. She vampirises them, which leads to Tony having fits about GARLIC and my god, I'm ITALIAN, you horrible woman! And Bucky's like "I'm... CATHOLIC?? OM-- I can't even say G-- now??" awkwardness + chatting & messaging + shyness Tony doesn't understand why everytime Bucky comes into the lab, Dum-E tends to drop whatever he's holding and go hide in his charging station. Dum-E's always a bit clumsy and silly but this is more than usual and Tony's worried that Dum-E doesn't like Bucky or something like that. Anyway after much discussion, with JARVIS as translator and go-between, it turns out that Dum-E has developed a bit of a crush on Bucky's fancy robotic arm. Which ends up of course being a hilarious & awkward situation for all involved. candles + explosions + blind date tony gets bullied by pepper to go on a blind date to get out of his funk, she insists that this Matt Murdock character is the perfect date and Tony will like him. reluctantly tony goes to fancy restaurant and meets Matt Murdock and they hit it off instantly the little snarky assholes. they have a nice dinner by candle light and it's all going so well up until dessert when they order some kind of chocolate lava cake which was tragically not cooked properly and ends up exploding on both of them and bam they fall in love and live happily ever after skeleton puns + reincarnation + deus ex machina A snap, that was all it took to snuff out something so bright amidst the rubble of what was once New York City, and, with Tony gone for good, the living seem rather, well…dead. Until, one day, someone they all thought long dead returned to them, a blue cube glowing in his grip and a sweet promise of a new beginning dripping from his lips. But of course, no new beginning comes without a price laundry + tenderness + dialogue “I hate laundry,” Morgan declared after trying to refold her sweatshirt for the seventh time. “Me too kiddo,” Tony whispered back, sneaking a glance over his shoulder to Pepper who was putting clothes into the wash. “But that’s why we do it together. It gets done and we don't have to do it alone.” world domination + paranoia + everything hurts Tony knew what was coming, he knew. He’d seen the future and he knew. The Kree were coming - why would no one believe him? Not his husband, not the team, not even his own son. He kept convincing them they had to suit up and defend the planet and Steve and Peter kept telling him that a engineering professor from Cal Tech can’t do that, that this suit he talks about is only in his delusions. But he’s not paranoid. Or crazy. Or any of those other words. He is Iron Man. He just has to convince everyone else. feels + useless lesbians + Santa's workshop Toni doesn’t think anyone could accuse her of overflowing with Christmas spirit. That hasn’t stopped the rest of the Avengers from turning the “festive cheer” dial up to eleven, and Toni thinks she might just have to spend the whole next month hiding in her workshop. (Hey, she let DUM-E wear a Santa hat – that has to count for something.) Too bad Jamie Barnes – cyborg superassassin extraordinaire, Captain America’s best friend, and Toni’s big gay crush – has gotten the exact same idea. Now the rest of the team thinks they’ve got a “thing,” and Toni can’t decide which is worse: putting up with the Avengers’ not-so-subtle attempts at matchmaking, or spending all her time with the woman she loves and who she is absolutely, 100%, totally certain doesn’t reciprocate. Getting through this holiday season without having her heart broken might just take… a Christmas miracle. shapeshifting + secret organizations + nurses “C. Barton - Orderly.” That’s what his tag said. But only a very few people knew exactly what kind of hospital Saint Natalis actually was, and just how busy they could be during the full moon. kissing games + pirates + book stores Tony always thought that the shop had a mind of its own. The books were one thing, whispering their secrets to patrons who managed to find their way to it. Jarvis always did warn him not to touch any of the artifacts. The "DO NOT TOUCH" signs plastered all over the crates. So maybe it was his fault that he managed to summon 'Buccaneer Barnes' after touching the shiny pirate sword. "Let's play a game. If you win, I'll help you put all those runaway monsters that jumped out of the books. If I win, you owe me a kiss. Whatdaya say Stark?"

#TonyStarkBingo2020 #prompt meme #party games

16 notes · View notes

littlethingwithfeathers · 5 years

Text

I want to talk about HBO’s “Chernobyl.”

I feel like this might ever so quietly be one of the most important and well-made things ever put on screen.

And if there was any word to describe the show in total it’s that.

It’s quiet. Unassuming and understated by comparison to its stablemates on HBO. It’s a profoundly quiet show.

There’s no pitched, panicked screaming in the wake of the explosion. No one was running around Reactor 4 clawing at their skin. There’s no orchestral soundtrack with a thousand violins shrilly announcing the coming of a localized apocalypse. No booming speeches or flashy action sequences.

None of it.

It’s quiet rooms filled with quiet voiced men, who quietly and calmly have bright red faces, that are almost comedic to look at. It’s quiet discussions by scientists about the toll of the accident in numbers too large to comprehend as quickly as they are disseminated. It’s quietly and calmly abandoned streets. It’s the quiet claustrophobia of a hazmat suit. Even the explosion itself is quiet, watched through a window in nearby Pripyat. Just a flash of light and then a shock wave that merely rattles the windows. Startling, but hardly a herald of the terrific tragedy to come. And all to a quiet soundtrack consisting of little more than manipulated field recordings of a working nuclear plant.

Because that’s what radiation is in the end. It’s what it was to these people. It was invisible and quiet. Slow death or quick death, it’s unceremonious in its awfulness.

And it’s quiet.

“Chernobyl” masters the art of this quiet and brings it to bear with expert artistry. Because its writers and directors understood that if you know even the cursory account of what happened in Chernobyl, while watching it, your head will be anything but quiet. It’s like Titanic if it were a five and a half hour horror movie. Because that’s what it is. It’s what Chernobyl was and is. It’s a horror. A real one, that acts like all our worst campfire tales. An irresistible force that we can’t help but name as malevolent, because anything that remorselessly deadly must be.

But that’s where “Chernobyl” as a cultural work stands the tallest. I’ve heard a great deal of criticism levied against the show for being “scaremongering” on the admittedly tenuous subject of nuclear power and its safety. Is it scary? Yes. Nuclear power is something to be respected if we are to use it. It can go wrong and when it does, as evidenced here and in other events, it is incalculably catastrophic.

But in my watching of “Chernobyl” one thing was clear. Nuclear power is not the villain here. The show, I feel, has a far bleaker message than that.

Humanity is the villain we cannot account for. It’s even clearly stated in the series finale.

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we cannot even remember it's there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, the debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies.”

Three Mile Island had already been built, operated, and melted well before the Chernobyl disaster. We knew how to have a worst case nuclear disaster occur in a way that was containable. But sadly, the issue with Chernobyl was not the fault of the power plant itself. A nuclear reactor isn’t some uncontrollable, unpredictable demon waiting to break free. No... the uncontrollable and unpredictable element in Chernobyl, as it is with all things, is human agenda.

Why was there no containment dome over Chernobyl like there were for the reactors in the West? Money. And speed of construction. The Soviet nuclear power system was a point of national pride. It was a race against the West for technical superiority and nationalistic bragging rights.

Why were the tips of the control rods made of something that accelerates nuclear reactivity rather than stabilizes it (which is what control rods do)? Money again. It was just flatly cheaper. And since they were building these things in bulk, cheaper also meant faster.

Why was the test that caused the reactor to explode conducted by the untrained night-shift? Because the plant management had priorities in mind other than safety. Self advancement, covering for shoddy paperwork, and again... national pride.

And then there was the attempted cover-up. If it weren’t for the sheer magnitude and the speed at which the radiation spread, the damage would have been far worse.

And another thing I appreciate about “Chernobyl” is that the show makes these points without beating its Western chest and saying, “See how evil the Soviets are?” No... if you don’t think American capitalists would make these same mistakes, you are provably wrong. So say the entire river of dead fish caused by a hazardous waste spill from a factory that’s less than an hour’s drive from my house. No. We are no better. Do not delude yourself in thinking this.

Human agenda is something one cannot calculate for when designing nuclear reactors. Or anything, for that matter. I help build two and three ton light trusses that hang over stages as part of my job. And they all have ways that you can fuck it up if you’re stupid enough. Or just not paying attention because something you believe is more important that safety has your attention. And if one posits from this that, “Well, then if we aren’t responsible enough, we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” I would say in return that there are a great deal of things we shouldn’t have. Labs with hazardous material. Standing armies. Light trusses. Hell... this is literally the same argument we have about gun control, but I’m not about to open that can of worms. This one is plenty.

I watched “Chernobyl” with my best friend, and he is one of the most level-headed and articulate people I know. And even he looked askance at “Chernobyl’s” understated treatment of the safety of nuclear power. He stated that more could have been said and done and more pointedly so in order to keep the show from feeling like it was anti-nuclear power. And I asked him what he thought they should’ve done? He didn’t really have an answer.

And here comes the larger question. At what point does a narrative have a responsibility beyond what it sets out to do? “Chernobyl” is not about nuclear power. It’s about what happened in Chernobyl, which happened to be a nuclear disaster. It’s not about nuclear safety any more than Titanic is about nautical safety. And no one would say that Titanic scare-mongers about ocean travel. And yet the causes of both disasters are the same. The only difference of course, is scope.

Furthermore, “Chernobyl” is not a documentary. It’s a docu-drama. There are inferences and composite characters and generalizations of events. But to this, I quote the author Victor LaValle, "My idea of fiction is that it’s different from, say, journalism because journalism’s job is to tell you what happened, and fiction to some degree is to make you understand how it felt to go through a certain experience." And “Chernobyl” as a series is about the experience of the event... not just the veracity of it. There are plenty of documentaries about Chernobyl. I’ve never watched one, but I watched this because of the human element. And that’s probably going to have me diving down the Netflix documentary rabbit hole very soon.

“Chernobyl’s” message is bleak, but not without hope. It’s a slim and suitably Soviet sort of black hope. But it is hope nonetheless. A conversation near the end of the finale between Valery Legasov, the scientist leading the investigation, and Boris Shcherbina, a career Communist party member risen to a position as vice-chairman on the council dealing with Chernobyl, highlights the hero to the villain of the situation. Where there are men with twisted agendas, like the plant managers, there are men who set their own aside for the greater good. Men like Shcherbina.

Legasov says, “There are other scientists like me. Any one of them could have done what I did. But you-- Everything we asked for, everything we needed. Men. Material. Lunar rovers? Who else could have done these things? They heard me, but they listened to you. Of all the ministers and all the deputies-- the entire congregation of obedient fools-- they mistakenly sent us the one good man. For god's sake, Boris-- you were the one who mattered the most.”

We have to be the answer to our own villains in the end. Sometimes we can head them off at the pass. Sometimes we must deal with the aftermath of their victories. Either way, it’s the good people who matter. Because it’s just us. Our imperfections are not cause for us to keep ourselves from dreaming big. But in the end, our focus must be on each other. Not merely upwards.

...

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that everyone should go watch “Chernobyl.” It’s great.

@catcmack @cactusowl @lawlessdragon

#chernobyl #hbo chernobyl #nuclear power #review #wow I like to talk #but seriously though #this show is amazing #and everyone should watch it

468 notes · View notes

kaialone · 4 years

Text

Spirit Tracks Translation Comparison: Zelda is Missing

This will be a comparison of the original Japanese version and the US English localized version.

Specifically, this will cover dialogue which occurs after Link recovers from getting knocked out by Byrne.

You can also watch some of this dialogue for yourself in English and Japanese. If you want, you can check out the EU English version, too.

Note that since I’ll cover a lot of optional dialogue in this particular part, not all of it can be seen in those videos.

For the comparison, the usual points apply:

Bolded is the original Japanese text, for the reference.

Bolded and italicized is my translation.

Italicized is the official NOA translation.

A (number) indicates that I have a specific comment to make on that part in the translation notes.

As you read this, please keep in mind that with translations like these, it’s important not to focus on the exact literal wordings, since there is no single “correct answer” when it comes to translations.

Rather than that, consider the actual information that is being conveyed, in which way, and why.

Characters in this part who had their name changed between versions:

“Geezer” = “Teacher”, Cirokuni = Alfonzo

After Link Wakes Up:

Teacher:

おぉ気がついたようじゃの！

Oh, you've come around, I see!

Welcome back, boy.

If Link tries to leave without talking to Teacher:

Teacher:

なんじゃぁ！おぬしはせっかく助けて運んでやったのに礼も無しかいの？

What's this? Not even a word of thanks for going through the trouble of saving and carrying you here?

What's this? I carry you all the way back here and not a word of thanks?

Teacher:

何やら外が騒がしいので行って見たら線路がなくなっておるではないか...

There was some sort of commotion outside, and when I went to investigate, I saw that the train tracks seemed to have disappeared...

I'm glad to see you're finally awake. There was some hubbub outside.

When I went to investigate, people said that the Spirit Tracks were disappearing...

Teacher:

そしておぬしとその横の機関��が城から少し離れたところに倒れておったぞな

And a short distance away from the castle, you and the other engineer were lying on the ground.

At that point, the guards brought you and Alfonzo in from outside.

Teacher:

なあにその機関士もかなり深手を負っておるがしばらくゆっくりしておれば治るぞな

Ah, while he has been wounded quite badly, he should recover if he takes proper rest for a while.

Both of you were out cold, so I've been waiting for you to come to.

Teacher:

しかしいったいどうしたのじゃ？

Still, what in the world happened?

Now tell me, what happened?

Link:

じつは / なんでもない

Actually... / Nothing.

Well... / Nothing.

At this point, Link can deny that something happened, but he has no choice but to reveal the truth when Teacher asks him the second time.

Teacher's reaction to the truth is the same no matter if Link said it right away or not, so I will first go over the dialogue that occurs if Link says nothing happened.

Teacher:

なんでもないか...

Nothing, huh...?

So it was just a rumor.

Teacher:

このジイの目がふしあなじゃと思ったら大間違いぞよ

Well, if you think this old Geezer can't see, you're quite mistaken.

Well, if you think these eyes can't see, you're quite mistaken.

Teacher:

おぬしら機関士が倒れておった！そして線路がなくなってしもうたぞよ

You engineers were passed out! And the tracks have disappeared.

You engineers were passed out! And the tracks have disappeared!

Teacher:

これがなんでもないと申すのか？

Would you call that "nothing"?

Still, you say you made it all up?

Link:

じつは / その...

Actually... / Well...

Teacher:

なに... 実は大臣が魔族の手先でゼルダ姫さまがさらわれたとな〜〜？

So... the minister is actually a minion of demonkind, and he has kidnapped Princess Zelda, you say? (1)

So, what you're saying is...

The chancellor is some kind of monster? And he kidnapped Princess Zelda?

Teacher:

........

...

Hmm...

Teacher:

ほほぉおぬし面白いこというぞよ

Hoho, that's quite the tale, my boy.

My goodness, what a story!

Teacher:

うそじゃろ？

Surely you can't be serious?

You're just pulling my leg though, aren't you?

Link:

うそ / ほんと

I'm not. / It's true.

Yep. / No!

At this point Link is free to claim his story was true or false.

If Link says it was a lie:

Teacher:

なんじゃぁそんなジョーダンぜんぜん面白ないぞよ

Oh, really? You know, a joke like that isn't funny in the slightest.

What's this? Teasing an old man? What a naughty child you are!

Teacher:

そんなウソでこのジイがうろたえると思ったかバカモン！

If you thought you could frighten this old Geezer with a lie like that, you are a fool!

But I'm not the kind of old man to be taken in by those tales.

If Link says it was the truth:

Teacher:

ほほぉほんととな.. ............... ...............

Hoho, so it's true, you say... ... ...

So it's true, you say... Hmm...

Teacher:

ほんとじゃとぉ!!

It's true?!

WHAT?!

Teacher:

ななな...なんとぉ姫さまがさらわれた

O-oh, d-dear me... Her Highness has been kidnapped...

So...what you're saying is...the princess has been kidnapped!

Teacher:

大変じゃぁ大変じゃ！どうすればいいかのぉどうすれば...

そうじゃ姫さまにご報告じゃ！

This is a disaster! Oh, what to do, what to do...

Oh, I know, I must inform the princess!

This is terrible! I must inform the princess at once!

Teacher:

あその姫さまがいないんじゃった

...Ah, right, Her Highness is not here.

...Ah, yes, that's right. She's not here. Well, I'm at a loss as to what to do.

Teacher:

あぁどおすればいいんかのブツブツ....

Ahh... What should I do? Mumble, mumble... (2)

Hmm... What to do... What to do...

Optional dialogue from everyone in the room:

Teacher:

ううむどうしたらいいんじゃのぉ

Err... What should I do...?

What to do, what to do... Oh, dear, what a mess!

Teacher:

まずは姫さまを探すか！とはいってもどこ探すんかのぉ占いでもしたらわかるかのぉ

ブツブツ.....

First, I should find the princess! Oh, but I don't even know where to look... Should I ask a fortune teller...?

Mumble, mumble...

I must find the princess! Oh, but where do I look?

Teacher:

ああぁどうしたらいいんかいのぉ

Ahh... What should I do...?

Oh, what should I do?

Teacher:

大臣に相談してみようか... しかし大臣もおらんしぞなぁ..

Perhaps I should consult with the minister... But he's not here either....

Perhaps I should talk to the chancellor. But he's not here either.

Teacher:

おおぉそもそも大臣が魔族じゃ..

Ahh, and either way, the minister is a demon... (3)

Not to mention...he could very well be a monster.

Teacher:

どうしたもんかいのぉブツブツ...

Oh, whatever am I supposed to do...? Mumble, mumble...

What a terrible mess...

Teacher:

ううむどうしたらいいんじゃ

Err... What should I do...?

Hm... What to do... What to do...

Teacher:

姫さまは昔はおてんばじゃったからよく城を飛び出しておったが

Her Highness used to be rambunctious, so she'd often run away from the castle...

The princess is always flitting in and out of the castle on adventures.

Teacher:

今回もひょっこり帰ってきたりせんかのぉ

うん意外にすぐに帰ってくるかもしれんぞなブツブツ...

Maybe this time, she will just suddenly come home again, too...?

Yes, perhaps she will come back any moment now...? Mumble, mumble...

Perhaps that's what she's doing now. Perhaps she'll be back any moment...

Perhaps...

Alfonzo:

ううぅリンクおまえは無事だったか！

Unngh... Link, you're alright?!

Unngh... My head... Did they hurt you, Link?

Alfonzo:

オレはちょっと動けそうにない！くそオレとしたことがあんなやつに...

姫さまの事が心配だ... リンク！後のことは頼んだぞ

ぐふっ....

I don't think I'll be moving any time soon! Damn it, I really messed up back there...

I'm worried about Her Highness... Link! It's up to you, now.

Urgh...

And what happened to the princess? Did she escape unharmed?

As long as I'm laid up, you're responsible for her safety, Link!

Guard:

わ..わたしは何も聞いてないぞ！

I-I didn't hear anything!

...I really have no idea what you're talking about, little guy!

Guard:

姫さまがさらわれたり大臣がばけものなんて知らないんだからな！

I don't know a thing about the princess getting kidnapped, or the minister being some kinda monster!

And I certainly don't know anything about the princess being kidnapped.

Or, for that matter, the chancellor being a monster! That's just crazy talk!

Translation Notes:

What I translated as “demonkind” here is 魔族/mazoku in Japanese, which can also be translated as “demon tribe”. I will explain this term in more detail in the Comparisons & Thoughts section.

What I translates as “Mumble, mumble” here is ブツブツ/butsu butsu in Japanese, which alternatively can also be translated as “grumble, grumble”. It’s probably a direct reference to the line “GRUMBLE, GRUMBLE...” from the first The Legend of Zelda game, but in this context here it’s mumbling rather than grumbling.

What I translated as “demon” here is the same 魔族/mazoku again in Japanese.

Comparisons & Thoughts:

This part is a bit different, since I’m going over a lot of optional dialogue here. Originally, all of this was supposed to be included with the next part instead, before I realized it ended up being far too long.

But I didn’t want to just cut all of this out, so here we go.

Plus, this gives me a bit of room to explain something sort of complicated but still sort of important that first comes up here in this game.

So I will start with that one.

According to Teacher, Link tells him that Cole was actually “a minion of demonkind “ in the Japanese version.

We will ignore the “minion” part for now, and focus on the word I translated as “demonkind”.

Like, I mentioned above, this term is 魔族/mazoku in Japanese, which is not a term exclusive to the Zelda franchise.

It could be translated literally as “demon tribe” or “demon clan”, or any variation of those. But these “mazoku” are actually a common fantasy trope in modern Japanese media.

Like all generalized fantasy creatures, there’s many different interpretations of them. But as their name implies, their most defining trait is that they are demonic creatures who are connected by some form of bond, usually a familial or cultural one, in contrast to standalone monsters.

But since they’re such a common trope in Japanese, you will usually see “mazoku” be translated as just “demons” or the like, since that feels more natural in English.

Going back to the Zelda franchise, “mazoku” is one of two important terms relating to all things demonic in the Zelda universe. The other is 魔物/mamono, which literally translates to “demonic being”.

A problem with “mazoku” and “mamono” is basically that they aren’t always translated consistently in the English versions of Zelda games, so it can be a bit hard to wrap your mind around them if you are only familiar with those.

So I’m going to try my best to explain how they work in the Zelda universe.

First we have "mamono", literally "demonic being", which thus can be translated as "demon". But in modern Japanese media, this word is generally used in the same way as you would "monster" in English.

As the name implies, this term can refer to any being that is demonic in nature. Almost all enemies in Zelda are this. These "mamono" can be born as such, but most of the ones you will see are former regular animals, plants, inanimate objects, or even people who have been transformed by demonic influence.

English translations of Zelda games will occasionally translate “mamono” as “demons”, but they usually go for “monsters”.

Then we got the term "mazoku", literally "demon tribe", "demon family", "demon people", etc.

In Zelda, "mazoku" are almost exclusively born as such, and have an organized hierarchy, as well as a shared ancestry.

Their ultimate leader is usually a 魔王/maō, meaning "demon king", or a 魔族長/mazoku-chō, meaning “demon tribe chief” or more loosely “demon lord”. If there is no such figure, they will usually attempt to find or resurrect one.

The collective goal of this lineage is to overthrow the gods and dominate the world in their stead.

They emit demonic influence by nature, even unintentionally, and it's this demonic influence that can corrupt non-demonic beings and turn them demonic as well.

This term is a bit less frequent, but the English versions usually gloss over it, or translate it as “monsters”, too. But instances of “demons” being used for it also exist.

These two terms aren't mutually exclusive though, as any "mazoku" would by definition be a "mamono" as well.

And technically, those turned "mamono" later in life could still join the "mazoku" and become members of their kind. Similarly, those born as "mazoku" can desert from them, thus being "mazoku" by blood only, but no longer directly part of their community.

As of Skyward Sword, it has been established that Demise is the progenitor of all things demonic (魔/ma) in the world, with all “mazoku” being directly descended from him, who in turn created all other demonic beings through their corruption.

For the reference, the English version of The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia opted to translate “mamono” as “monsters” and “mazoku” as “demons”.

And that’s the lore in a nutshell here.

A potential issue when translating either of these terms into English is the fact that there aren’t any direct English equivalents.

You can translate both terms as “demons”, but that glosses over the distinction between them.

You could translate “mamono” as “monsters” and “mazoku” as “demons”, but that makes the demonic nature of “mamono” and the organized nature of “mazoku” less apparent.

And lastly you could translate “mamono” as “demons” and “mazoku” as “demon tribe”, or any variation of it, but that will usually result in less natural-sounding dialogue.

After thinking it over, I finally decided that for my translations here, I will translate “mamono” as “monsters”, and “mazoku” as “demons”, with the occasional variation like “demonkind”, if I can make it work in context.

I feel going for something natural-sounding is important, plus I have the freedom to explain any additional details I think are important.

Going back to the actual text here, there are some strange alterations to Teacher’s dialogue when you first talk to him.

The conversation starts off like this:

There was some sort of commotion outside, and when I went to investigate, I saw that the train tracks seemed to have disappeared…

And a short distance away from the castle, you and the other engineer were lying on the ground.

(...) There was some hubbub outside.

When I went to investigate, people said that the Spirit Tracks were disappearing…

At that point, the guards brought you and Alfonzo in from outside.

Here, the English version rewrites Teacher’s dialogue so that he describes the events a bit differently compared to the Japanese version.

For some reason, in English Teacher says that other people described to him how the tracks were disappearing, and then the guards brought in Link and Alfonzo. So Teacher ends up being more passive than he was in Japanese.

I would understand if the English version just mentioned the guards bringing in Link and Alfonzo to flesh out this bit of dialogue, but that directly contradicts Teacher saying he himself carried Link back in another bit .

Teacher also calls Alfonzo by name in English, which I’m guessing was done since it probably would make sense if Teacher knew his name.

Though, Alfonzo was more famous as a swordsman, and isn’t really well-known anymore as an engineer, so either way is plausible.

Also, the line “people said that the Spirit Tracks were disappearing“ is odd.

I think the person or people in charge of translating this bit of text had the wrong impression of how the disappearing of the tracks works in this story, and also didn’t have much context to work with.

This becomes more noticeable when you get to Teacher’s reaction if Link claims nothing happened.

If Link claims nothing happened, Teacher reacts like this in English:

So it was just a rumor.

Well, if you think these eyes can’t see, you’re quite mistaken.

You engineers were passed out! And the tracks have disappeared!

Still, you say you made it all up?

This is very strange in the context of this scene.

Especially the “you made it all up?” part, because at this point, the only thing Link has even said is literally just: “Nothing.”

I’m not certain, but I think the writers of this English text were under the impression that the disappearing of the tracks was a “rumor” at this point, and those tracks that vanished and derailed Link’s train were the first tangible proof of it being a real thing.

But that's not how the game’s story goes. We know for a fact that tracks have been disappearing for a while, to the point that most people are aware of it.

Around Castle Town alone there are various tracks already missing by the start of the game, so the ones leading to the tower are far from the first.

Given all that, I do think there was a misconception like that among the English writers dealing with this specific text here.

I can only assume that this was due to a lack of context when this was translated?

And since players are more likely to tell the truth to Teacher right away, this string of dialogue is more easy to miss during testing, I’m guessing.

Now we return to the line “the minister is actually a minion of demonkind “, which the English version adapted as “The chancellor is some kind of monster?“

It’s interesting that in Japanese, Link apparently described Cole as a “minion” to Teacher.

This might tie into the fact that Cole addresses Byrne as “Master” in Japanese, so it would make sense if that was the impression Link got from this.

Also, as you can see, the English version opted to adapt 魔族/mazoku as “monster” here.

It’s a bit strange they didn’t just go with “demon”, since that term is used a few times in this game? It could be that they didn’t want to use it too often, but who knows.

A minor thing, but when Link claims he was actually lying about Zelda’s kidnapping, Teacher responds like this:

If you thought you could frighten this old Geezer with a lie like that, you are a fool!

But I’m not the kind of old man to be taken in by those tales.

In the Japanese version, Teacher referring to himself as “this old Geezer” makes it slightly more clear that it’s more of a title or nickname people call him by.

The English version translates it literally as “old man”, glossing over the connection with his name.

In the Japanese version, Teacher considers asking a fortune teller to help with finding Zelda, which could be foreshadowing the actual fortune teller encountered later in the game.

The English version omits this.

Next we have a slightly more notable change in Teacher’s optional dialogue:

Her Highness used to be rambunctious, so she’d often run away from the castle…

The princess is always flitting in and out of the castle on adventures.

In the Japanese version, Teacher is saying that Zelda used to act like that, which in turn means she doesn’t anymore.

The English version instead states she is still always running away to go on adventures.

This ties into something I mentioned before, which is that the English version will sometimes make Zelda slightly more “lively”, for the lack of a better term.

In this case, if this wasn’t just an oversight, I’m guessing they wanted Zelda to appear cooler or stronger.

I can understand that line of thinking, but it also doesn’t make much sense with the story as it’s been told so far and what will follow.

In the original, the idea is that yes, Zelda is very adventurous by nature, and thus used to run away a lot. But, in the present day, that nature of hers has been mostly repressed under the stern eye of Cole, who has kept her a prisoner in her own castle, with surveillance so strict that she simply can’t run away on her own anymore.

While this was done under the pretense of safety concerns, by now we know that Cole was only after keeping her body around until he needed it, removing most of her agency to ensure she couldn’t do anything against him.

So, the story Spirit Tracks ends up telling with Zelda is one of a brave and curious girl, who has had her spirit broken by an overly controlling authority figure, but then finally ends up resisting, and slowly rediscovering her true nature while fighting for herself and others.

That’s why it’s kinda significant that her escape with Link would’ve likely been her first escape in many years, as it marks her first true attempt at putting her foot down, even if she still wavers.

Well, long story short, I understand what the English version might have been going for here, if it was a deliberate change, but it sort of conflicts with Zelda’s character arc.

The English version doesn’t include Alfonzo chastising himself for losing against Byrne, which is another minor detail, but one that again shows us how serious he is when it comes to Zelda.

And finally, the guard who overheard Link’s conversation with Teacher seems more worried in Japanese, almost seeming like he’s denying having heard anything out of fear.

In English it sounds more like he just doesn’t believe Link.

And also, the word he says that I translated as “monster” is ばけもの/bakemono in Japanese, which is another Japanese word used for monsters and the like in general.

In this part I mostly focused on dialogue that is optional, and I think you can tell how the localization here feels slightly different than in proper cutscenes.

When it comes to the programming, text like this is mostly stored in different spaces than the text for cutscenes, thus you will usually have less context than usual, among other things.

In the case of this text here, we see some examples of apparent misunderstandings and oversights that can happen as a result of that.

So, overall the localization suffers a bit more here, but the text itself is still well-written for what it is.

There does seem to be a bit more polish on the lines that one is more likely to actually see in a regular playthrough. It’s the more obscure lines that get a tad wonky.

But that’s it for this part, feel free to check out the next one!

< Previous Part | Start | Next Part >

#legend of zelda #the legend of zelda #spirit tracks #tloz #legend of zelda spirit tracks #legend of zelda translations #spirit tracks translations #my translations #spirit tracks comparisons

10 notes · View notes

lovelylogans · 4 years

Note

Do you have any tips on how to write a female character that's majoring in journalism?

oh boy!!!!!! generally, character-wise, people will of course approach things in different ways, so i’m gonna like mention you know said character and the decisions that she’d make better than anyone else, but i’m gonna write about 1. some “character archetypes,” as it were, that comprise a lot of female members of my journalism school, 2. some general advice on personality traits that would likely be useful/realistic for a female journalism character, and 3. what not to aspire to when it comes to writing women in journalism (ie, this section is just gonna be my biggest gripes about how female journalists tend to be portrayed in media.)

let’s get into it!

section one: “character archetypes,” aka the average personality a lot of female members of my journalism school.

a lot of my really great friends are in the journalism school, and their personality types vary greatly. there are so many awesome women in journalism and this isn’t exactly, like, “BE EXACTLY LIKE THIS OR SHE ISN’T A REALISTIC JOURNALIST,” these are just some character traits/personality things that i’ve noticed when it comes to a lot of aspiring female journalists.

curious. always write them as curious. that’s the backbone of being a journalist is being curious and going after the story. they want to know more about the world, they want to know more about their communities, and they want to provide the perspectives for you, or the reader, or the community, so that you can be better informed/make decisions/be aware. journalists, above all, have that curiosity down; journalism majors can rarely stand not knowing things.

(this also means that female journalists, and journalists in general, really, are very tuned into gossip. not even necessarily “he said she said” gossip, though that can be interesting sometimes too, but things like who got what good grades, which professor said this, what internship accepted who? journalists are basically trained to be investigative and dig deep for things; when it comes to, say, two editors being snappy at each other at a meeting, well, you want to know why, in case whatever is affecting them will affect you. again, not necessarily gossipy in a malicious way that can be portrayed sometimes! gossipy in the sense that they’re usually very in tune with their social circle and immediate community, as well as community at large.)

they are also researchers!!! many journalists are prone to the whole “wikipedia rabbit hole” research thing. they dive deep on a lot of subjects, both broad and narrow, and they like discussing these topics with each other, which again, can vary greatly! the biggest mbmbam/taz Stan i know is a female journalism major, and from there she has a very vested interest in dnd, all because it started with a few funny mbmbam clips (okay, guilty, i was one of the two people who mentioned that it would seem like her thing and now she’s way more into it than i am) and on the flip side of that, there are MANY female journalists who have made careers off their interests—film journalists, video gaming journalists, and social media/pop culture reporters all exist for a reason, and it’s likely because they marketed their interest and therefore “expertise” in these subjects and managed to spin a job out of it!

ambitious. so many kids in the j school strive for really great things, which is super crazy awesome, and they work really hard to achieve it. i know people who have netted amazing internship opportunities while they’re in the j school (we’re talking washington post, new york times, cnn, associated press, like, big organization names) and it’s because they have the ambition to achieve it. they dream big, a lot of the time, and tend to have detailed career goals to go with it.

inclined to ethical/moral discussions. there are a lot of ethical questions when it comes to covering news (there’s actually a wyliwf oneshot in the draft talking about one of my least favorite days of the semester that always comes up in class, which focuses on ethical decisions in times of death, major tragedy, or injury, look up “the breakfast test” if you want to learn more about that particular aspect of being a journalism major) but even when it doesn’t come to major disaster coverage, there are still a lot of little ethical questions to analyze in each area of journalism; journalistic ethics is a whole branch of conversation that i (and a lot of my fellow journalism majors!) fall into discussing. it can be things from the disclosing of anonymous sources to what is and isn’t right to photograph and the inclusion of certain sensitive information or ostracizing it and the importance of fact-checking. i think journalistic ethics is a really interesting topic and it’s usually one of my favorite things to discuss; this wikipedia page just scratches the surface, and here is the spj code of etihcs, widely regarded as a base code of principles for most american journalists to follow, but i encourage you to go out and seek other instances of journalistic ethics, because a lot of the time, what is legal for journalists to do isn’t necessarily right.

organized (even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside) or complete disaster

let’s take my friend, who i’ll call a.c. ac has a color-coded planner, frequently works ahead of schedule, plans out her entire day. she is very tidy, very organized, and seems generally put together. we were roommates in the fall semester and she had a tidy room, a set routine when it came to dinners and organizing her stuff, she’s very On Top Of It

and then there is me. ac once looked at me in horror when i was just starting to write a paper the morning it was due and informed me that the way i approach most deadlines is “her worst nightmare on drugs.” i forget assignments a lot and tend to scramble to do things at the last minute, i am a CHRONIC procrastinator, and yet i still make sure i get things done in time. in essence, i know my limits, and the pressure of a deadline tends to be what kickstarts me into starting those limits.

what i’m saying here is that it’s a vast spectrum, but what tends to drive most journalists is deadlines. journalism people are VERY deadline oriented and their approaches definitely vary, but that tends to be what they stick to most. journalists also tend to have perfectionist tendencies, as a sidenote.

stubborn. holy god. like, just look at the way journalists consistently send foia quests alone, for example, this story about journalists using foia to track hospital bed and ventilator availability in illinous (a dive into sunshine laws, aka releasing public records, which is a whole other thing that people very rarely tend to notice as an aspect of journalism but also lead to really big stories, especially if leaked (pentagon papers, anyone?) and just, yeah. check up on the state’s sunshine laws that you’re writing your story in, i think it could provide a real interesting subplot for you.) journalists. are. STUBBORN. i know people who have sat in offices waiting for public officials to come out for the better part of a work day; i know journalists who have sent hundreds of emails to get one interview; i know journalists who have staged stakeout sessions to see how public officials were using their time when they said they were in the office (hey, including me! i stood in a parking garage for three hours in the middle of winter for this exact purpose once.) what i’m saying here is they are stubborn. if there’s a story, they’re gonna dig. it took woodward and bernstein two years from the time of the watergate breakin to nixon’s resignation. most of the time, that stubbornness pays off.

competitive. yeah, remember that whole ambitious thing i mentioned earlier, coupled with the stubbornness above? journalists are competitive. it’s a competitive job market, so that means that many journalism majors tend to strive for those same big name journalism internships. this is definitely part of my j school culture, so i’m not sure if it’s the same at others, but a lot of people tend to examine what internships or job opportunities or professor favoritism or whatever and see what everyone’s doing, because everyone compares everyone to everyone else. this also tends to feed into other things: getting a story, getting good grades, so on. there’s a definite competitive sense to things, i’m not quite sure how to best explain it, but... yeah. journalists are competitive, sometimes. when it comes to women journalists, it can also be interpreted in other ways (”bitchy” is one) but a lot of journalism majors strive for the best.

supportive.

section two: some general advice on personality traits that would likely be useful/realistic for a female journalism character

a lot of these were touched on above, but i’d also just like to add: they probably have an interest in some aspect of “social justice,” as it were. feminism, ecological issues, economical issues, racial issues—most of the time, a lot of journalists see these real world issues and it’s what leads them into the career.

there’s also the whole... ugh... fake news media thing, which i feel like i have to touch on just because: i will say fake news is a meme amongst journalism majors, in that we mutter fake news to each other when our professors are like “this class average is so low y’all need to study more” when it’s their fault for not teaching us i won’t go on that tangent, however, i will also say that this whole idea has contributed to spiking rates of mistreatment and violence against journalists. i’ve been fortunate in that the most tense i’ve ever felt in that situation is taking an uber to a journalism assignment in a white guy’s truck littered with american flags and blaring alex jones on the radio, which i was able to lie and say that i was doing something else and concealing the whole journalism aspect, for my own personal safety, but a lot of other journalism majors i know aren’t so fortunate. i know women who have been yelled at, insulted, and there was a girl who worked around the same time as me who got spit on.

female journalists are usually treated more roughly regardless (when i went out for my first story, my editor sat me down and looked me in the eyes and said “someone might laugh at you because you’re young, and you’re a woman in print journalism, and you know what? fuck ‘em.” which was the first time i’d ever heard her swear and also one of the only times i’d ever heard her swear) so they tend to have to double down and really make sure they know their stuff in case they’re ever quizzed on it in a way that male journalists never really are. this is of course not to say that we’re all mistreated, all the time; it’s just something that female journalists are aware of, the way most women are aware of sexism in general.

section three: realism, and also, hey, maybe don’t do this? just because it’s both unrealistic and like. kinda sexist undertones imo

hoo boy. i’m just gonna take it down the list of some popularized media portrayals of journalists that you might be familiar with and outline why each one is, well..... Not My Favorite?

camille preaker, sharp objects

i do really like gillian flynn’s work, especially gone girl, but camille preaker just rubs me the wrong way? it primarily comes from the ethics involved in her whole situation, and i know they did it for ~drama, but it just... okay, here we go. for starters, you would probably not go out drinking with a source, unless it’s at an event, and you definitely don’t get drunk. you try not to interview people you have personal ties to, because the bias can infiltrate through your work. you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT sleep with your source, especially if he is a member of the police force and a primary source on the murder investigation you’re looking into. just...yeah, those two are the main things?

rita skeeter, harry potter

ugh, the way that rowling painted the daily prophet rubs me the wrong way. like, i understand, and i know that it’s probably more a mention of tabloid culture than like News, but it still just?? it’s the primary news source of the wizarding world?? really?? but yeah, sneaking into places (hospitals especially) to get a story is a massive no-no that would immediately get you arrested.

joan calmezzo, parks and rec

look, i know it’s a comedy, and i know that it’s not realistic, and i know that there is definite semblance for the “alcoholic journalist” thing (an editor i worked for once talked about how her old boss hid a flask in the water fountain in city hall so that he’d be able to get it and drink on the job) and statistically, it does show that journalists turn to sugar/alcohol/caffeine, but i just?? journalists wouldn’t show up to work absolutely blacked out, and if they did they’d definitely get fired.

rory gilmore, gilmore girls

the way rory approaches job hunting makes me cringe down to my very soul. in the original series, from what i’ve seen, she approaches it relatively well (applies everywhere she can, networks, ends up accepting a relatively small job that still provides a massive opportunity to report on a major political figure) but in the revival. who DID that. rory sleeps with a source (WHAT IS IT WITH FEMALE JOURNALISTS ALWAYS SLEEPING WITH SOURCES IN TV SHOWS AND MOVIES?!??!?!!? NO!!!!!!!!!) and falls asleep in the middle of an interview (N O !!!!!) and seems to not understand the concept of freelancing at all (really????? you aren’t working on multiple stories at once??? really????) and also just??? completely disrespects the basic semblance of a job interview??? no matter how impressive your resume is, you still come prepared with ideas and answer questions and no job is OWED to you, especially not with journalism being as competitive as it is, just????

the movie “absence of malice”

i know this one is probably less common, as it’s a movie from the ‘80s, but i still wanna talk about it anyway. sometimes, yes, you write about suspects of murder on the front page of the paper, but federal prosecutor’s don’t usually leak info like That (though rosen is obviously corrupt) and you just?? okay, anyway, carter not revealing her source is good, that’s what a journalist would do, however, teresa perrone disclosing personal information and pleading for her not to include it definitely falls under the realm of an anonymous source. the primary aspect of journalism is “do no harm,” and since disclosing what perrone told her would have harmed her livelihood, carter absolutely either shouldn’t have put it in or made perrone an anonymous source. then we get back to the whole dating sources thing (YOU DON’T DO IT!!!!!!) and then you don’t REVEAL THE SOURCE THAT HURT THIS MAN, OH MY GOD, you still have an obligation to protect your sources!!!! also just generally just!!! this movie does explore a lot of ethical journalistic issues but the sloppy reporting in it just puts me On Edge, ya know?

#Anonymous #ask #not ts #me #journalism

6 notes · View notes

write4tomorrow · 5 years

Text

Say My Name (pt. 5)

Word Count: 2377

Pairing: Quentin Beck x Reader

Summary: You are Fury’s secret weapon. An avenger in your own right, you should be able to handle anything thrown your way. But Quentin Beck? A man from an alternate universe? Your gut tells you one thing while your heart tells you another.

Genre: Romance / angst

A/N: Some violence and dominance towards the end.

PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 PART 4 PART 6 (Complete)

You’re running through the street, barefoot and determined. You didn’t know what was happening throughout London. Panic seemed to be everywhere. You could see Beck flying over the Thames. You saw people running past you, away from the fight. You saw a hybrid elemental tearing the city apart.

You knew better than to trust everything you saw. After learning that Beck was responsible for the elementals, you began to look for any way to escape. Beck was smart, but you were better. He underestimated how well you could hear. As he left, you heard his conversation with Victoria and knew that Beck would be too busy to worry about you. However, you didn’t realize he would be busy destroying London.

Out of the corner of your eye, you could see a fleck of red flying through the air. No, not flying - swinging. You let out a frustrated breath. How could Peter have fallen for Beck’s plans. The kid had a good heart. It’s why Tony had adored Peter, but you knew how impressionable he was. You needed to explain everything to him.

“Pete- Spider Man!” You yelled across the water, hoping no one heard your near slip up.

With a startled turn, Peter saw you standing far below him by the water’s edge. Would he turn you over to Beck? Would Peter tell him that you had escaped before you had the chance to explain that Beck was working against SHIELD? You could only cross your fingers and hope that Peter would listen to you. But what if he didn’t?

Before you could overthink it, Peter was standing before you. It was awkward staring into his masked face. You weren’t sure where his eyes were.

“Y/n,” Peter was panting, “is that really you? ”

“What? Yes, of course. Peter, listen to me-” You came to a startled stop when Peter apprehensively reached out and touched your arm. What in the hell was he doing? You didn’t have time for this!

“You feel real. Y/n, why are you dressed like that? Where have you been?” Peter was staring at your clothes now. You had been running through the street without noticing what happened to your clothes. They were so torn and filthy now. Your feet ached and were bleeding. Your face probably looked worst, though.

“Beck and I, Beck took me. I escaped out of a window after I took a sharp piece of his armor. I broke the lock with it but- Peter, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what he’s told you, but he’s the one responsible for all this-” Peter cut you off again as a pillar of stone collapsed nearby. It must have been older than you were and it must have survived so many disasters... but this? Didn’t Beck care about the history of this city? The cultural importance of this bridge? Of Anything?

“Yeah, I know. I’m trying-”

“Peter!” You were desperate. You needed him to listen. He must have sensed your urgency because he was rigidly still. All his attention was on nothing but you.

“Beck is the bad guy,” was all you could muster. You felt frustrated tears welling in your eyes and the weight of those words settle somewhere in your chest. Peter grabbed your shoulders and you thought he was going to hug you.

“I know,” Peter reliped. “I’m trying to stop him. I couldn’t tell Mr. Fury, Beck found me first. I know he’s lied about everything. His powers, the elementals, the other Earth, his family-”

“His what?” You couldn’t stop the started expression from taking over your face. Did Peter just say, “family”? You felt things around you slow down. The air shifted uneasily and you could tell Peter was confused.

“Yeah,” Peter released you, “he wore a wedding ring and said…” Peter trailed off as you took a step back. Was Beck married? How many people did he tell? Why hadn’t anyone said anything to you? Why hadn’t you seen the ring?

There was another crash from the bridge. Boats were being thrown ashore and the hybrid elemental was going berserk. You could feel things cracking and breaking all around you; perhaps in side for you too.

“Y/n,” Peter was speaking quickly now, “I have to stop him. Go find Mr. Fury.”

“Be careful, Peter.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I fixed my Peter Tingle!” Peter answered with a grin. You had no idea what a Peter Tingle was but it made you smile, nonetheless. You nodded and gave Peter a hug, trying not to think about who it was for. After a brief moment, Peter was swinging away before you could say anything else.

You could hear the bridge groan from the stress of the battle around it. You could hear Beck’s voice calling out the monster. You felt the splinters and broken pieces of glass in your feet. Your fingers were cold and you were sniffling. But above all else, your heart felt like a black hole. Your chest might cave in on itself. The once delicate heart strings felt as though something dense had snipped each one. You wanted to collapse.

You needed to find Fury. Your face hardened and you clench your fist in an attempt to warm your fingers. But you weren’t free- not yet.

You began running. No one was going to sneak up on you. After Beck had removed the drones, all of your senses had returned to normal. You could hear everything, see everything. He couldn’t sneak up on you again, you wouldn’t allow it. So how had he found you? You could hear his steps, his heart beating somewhere close. You knew it was him and you weren’t going to let him catch you.

“Faster, honey,” you heard from somewhere behind you. Beck had to be a block and a half away. He didn’t have to raise his voice for you to hear him. He knew his words would reach you. He knew you would hear him because you were listening. You were waiting to hear from him. You just didn’t expect it to be so soon after leaving his compound.

After running block after block, turning corner after corner, you dared to look over your shoulder. You couldn’t hear his steps behind you. You couldn’t see him either, but it was easy for him to disguise himself with his drones. While you could tell that there weren’t any drones drowning out your sense, you still couldn’t tell how many drones were in the city. Perhaps Beck was too busy with Peter to follow you.

Car tires squealed to a halt on the street beside you. You turned to find Beck climbing out of the back seat. He wore a grey outfit that you hadn’t seen before. His helmet contained cameras and an army of drones were surrounding his car.

Beck smiled at you, showing all of his teeth. His arms were outstretched, waiting for you to run to him.

Not this time, you thought. You turned on your heel and ran down a small alley. You were trying not to limp. You heard the whirring of drones as they followed you and Beck’s laughter as he leisurely strolled into the alley. Running was becoming more and more difficult. Who knew what kind of cuts laced your feet. You didn’t dare look down.

You tried to turn left down a new alley in the direction of the street, but the drones cut you off. You were forced to turn right. Suddenly, you realized that Beck was herding you some place specific. You wouldn’t let him steer you away from safety. Instead, you turned and faced Beck who was still walking toward you as though he were casually walking through the park. His smile remained on his face but his expression was one of faux concern.

“I was wondering what tricks you had up your sleeve,” Beck said with a honeyed, welcoming voice. You wanted to melt into the soothing sound, into his arms. Instead, you took a step back, towards the brick wall behind you. You weren’t going to run, but you needed to keep distance between yourself and Beck.

“No no,” Beck tisked as you moved backwards. “I wouldn’t do that, y/n. You can run wherever you please, but I’ll be able to find you.” He tapped his collar with a menacing grin. You realized then that you were still wearing the fishbowl necklace that he had gifted you.

“The necklace…” You trailed off as you touched the gift from Beck. It had been a tracking device. You began to mentally kick yourself. How had you made his job so easy? He knew the moment you left the compound. He was able to track you down and now, he was only a couple of yards away. As he stood there, you could see his brown irises made nearly gold by the light around you. His movements were slow and predatory. You felt like you were a fly, slowly watching the venus fly trap close around you. Beck kept walking towards you until you felt the wall against your back.

“Gotcha,” Beck whispered through his toothy smile. You made a faint to the left and tried to leave to the right. Beck didn’t move to stop you, rather, he let the drones do the work for him. Before you could react, you heard their buzzing around you. Small green lasers were trained on different parts of your body.

“I won’t kill you,” Beck said with a shrug, “You can relax. I want you to come back with me in one piece, but if you keep up this behavior, I am willing to sacrifice your foot. Maybe even part of your pretty arm.” They way he talked about your body, it sounded possessive. You felt your spine tingle as Beck came even closer. He stood only a few feet in front of you. His gaze traced each of the green lasers over your torso.

You could hear his pulse under his skin. It was beating so fast but he seemed so calm. He was unnervingly still, his arms crossed over his chest. He was waiting for your response. He was waiting for you to make the next move. This was just an exciting game to him.

“Do your worst, Quinten,” You spat. You tried again to get around Beck, but he was too fast. With a dark laugh, Beck caught you around the middle. He pushed you back against the wall hard enough to make your head hit the bricks. You felt a rattling in your skull and didn’t realize Beck was standing in front of you. You reached for the necklace around your neck, it suddenly felt like acid against your skin and you needed to get it off. Beck caught your wrists and roughly forced both of your hands above your head.

“I like it when you say my name,” You felt Quinten’s coo sharp in your ear. You pulled against his grip but he pushed your wrists harder against the bricks. To Beck’s delight, you let out a whimper.

“I am not going back with you. You’d have to kill me.” You were trying so hard to regain any fragment of dignity you could. Beck only laughed again.

“And I thought I was dramatic,” he whispered “I won’t kill you, honey. Everyone else is fair game. Fury, Hill, the kid, everyone.” His eyes were hooded and dark. His smile only sharpened when you realized what he was threatening to do.

“You- you’re bluffing,” you hated how unsteady you sounded.

“Believe what you want, dear, but Peter Parker will die unless you come with me,” he hissed, “I mean you’re going to come with me either way, y/n. I’m curious, though. How many people are you willing to let die before we leave here?” A seeping darkness was beginning to take hold of you. Your mind was reeling but you didn’t know what to do. Quinten Beck wasn’t just smart, he was brilliant. He was determined to win this game.

But you told Peter about Beck. Perhaps… Perhaps if he made it out alive, he could tell Fury and Hill. Maybe they could find you. At the very least they wouldn’t trust Beck.

“Say my name again,” Beck commanded as he tightened his grip on your wrists. His voice was strong and dark. It was like he could tell that you already decided to give in.

“I want to leave, Beck,” you gritted out. Beck pulled your arms away from the brick wall only to slam them against the surface again. You cried out and closed your eyes. You weren’t going to give Beck the satisfaction of seeing you cry.

“Say my name, y/n. I want to hear you say it!” Beck’s voice sounded like an explosion in the alley. You winced at every word. His breath was hot against your skin and you had to stand on tiptoes in an attempt to alleviate some of the pulling pain in your wrists. Your legs wanted to give way. You saw bloody footprints on the ground around you. They must have been yours. You were having trouble feeling the bottom of your feet.

“Quinten Beck, I… I really want to leave,” You said in a voice that sounded distant and weak. Beck’s face softened and he released your wrists. You sank to your knees looking at the bruises already forming on your arms and hands. Your feet felt sticky and your legs throbbed and ached. You almost didn’t notice as Beck pulled you to your feet and picked you up. He cradled you against him as he walked out of the alley.

Quinten had almost everything he wanted. You were with him and - in time - you would be okay. He really felt bad about the state in which he found you. He felt the worst about how beat up your feet were. Of all things, he felt the worst about your feet. He almost laughed at himself when he realized his own feelings.

Things will be okay, Quinten told himself, I will make things okay. He didn’t know if that was a reminder to himself or a silent promise to you.

PART 6 (END)

A/N: Thank you guys and sorry that this chapter took soooooo long to write! Thank you all for keeping up with this story. :)

#mysterio x reader #mysterio imagine #mysterio x you #mysterio x oc #mysterio #quentin beck x reader #quentin beck imagine #quentin beck #quentin beck x you #quentin beck x y/n #spider-man far from home #far from home #jake gyllenhaal

157 notes · View notes