#incidentally the name of the project i'm developing

[thelaurenshippen]

today in "things I learned while doing writing research", I hadn't realized that the word scuttlebutt came from the ship's equivalent of a water cooler. I just knew it meant gossip. human beings just love gathering around a water source and talking shit. god bless.

[1800titz]

The one where Y/N and Harry are neighbors in an apartment complex, he's got a bunny called Snuggles, he makes softcore porn spanking people (it's a REALLY LOUD HOBBY), and Y/N has definitely called the police for a domestic disturbance next door.

HI FRIENDS. The council has spoken, so here is the first part of the lovingly-dubbed spanko fic. This series will be early access, so— parts go up on patreon first, then they come to tumblr 3-ish weeks later (but if you wanna get ahead, the second part is already up on patreon). Reader insert, emotionally a slowburn, and basically a garbage fire I'm pouring my deepest, darkest desire into as a coping mechanism :p If you liked TDIAG, you'll probably rock with this one. As always, feedback/reblogs massively appreciated <3 WEEEEEEEE okay bye

ᴄʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀᴛʀᴇᴏɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ : ᴍᴀɪɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ

CONTENT/WARNINGS: miss girl misconstruing consensual kink for domestic violence (oops)

WC: 7.8K

Harry’s face is the reason average men have developed a phenomenon called personality. 

Historically, it was faces like his, at the very least, that ignited adaptation— this wasn’t an overnight implementation, after all. Men don’t move that fast. There’s a long-lasting, brutally destructive record there, and a tale as old as time itself. Before charisma had to be manufactured in the absence of a devastating jawline, there was the high-cheekbone aristocracy, and its counterpart, what’s known today as the “he’s actually really nice” faction. The beauty privilege inventors; the bedroom-eye monarchy; the symmetrical syndicate of a resting smolder— 

And the rest of everyone else. 

Rumor has it that the first comedian was a man who watched another guy, who had eyes like wet chrysocolla and really broad shoulders, turn a casual glance into an entire bloodline’s origin story. Maybe the first poet sat next to a man wearing the skin of divine nepotism— and the only defense strategy was to pick up a hobby that spoke less in pretty, heart-shaped lips and more in words like love’s trembling hand doth trace its name upon thy skin. New seduction ritual: implemented.

Basically, the survival mechanism goes like this: if you’re competing with bone structure sculpted by an empyrean chisel, a mouth worthy of oil paintings and crumpled love letters, and the kinds of dimples that were engineered for the sole purpose of emotional damage (Cupid’s attempt; two, little exit wounds, the perfect pair of injustices parenthesizing his smile)…

And you’re lingering in the shadow of those attributes? Operating on a deficit? Well, then. There’s a little more work left to be put in. 

If you’re lucky, you’re tall, or you’re well endowed in the basement, or both. If you’re none of those things, you’re banking on a gift with a musical instrument, or you’re coping with the weight of your wallet. You’re getting into niche, esoteric interests you will impress upon every woman that steps foot into your orbit to stand out, or you’re polishing up your comedic abilities. The thing is, society has evolved to the point where this compensation is the foundation to procreation. The foundation to function. And the kind of men with faces like Harry, who got in line not once, but twice when God was handing out genetic privilege (the overachieved extra credit projects), just get to sit back and let the world unravel at their feet.

Men like Harry don’t need personalities because they already look interesting enough. When you’re the kind of pretty that inspires love songs and ill-advised tattoos, you don’t need wit, or pockets lined with green. It opens doors (and legs) with such minimal effort that it may as well be as simple as breathing. The quiet space in a room bends around you when you become the focal point by existing, incidentally magnetic. 

It’s pretty unfair, to say the very least.

Y/N only really registers it passing— in fleeting, peripheral moments when the space bends around him and her eyes glue, almost like an accident. A brief sighting here and there, like a rare animal caught between the trees— seen but not acknowledged, because staring starts to feel like stepping into something too raw, too deliberate.

He’s always moving. In motion, slipping past. Glimpses of wide shoulders cutting through the communal pool, water slicking over musculature in a smooth tide and then rivulets, droplets sticking against sun-warmed skin. A silhouette in the elevator at the end of the hall, head bowed. Sorting through crinkled envelopes between his massive hands with a ruckle between his brows.

He’s got the kind of face that suggests he should be gently perched on the edge of a marble fountain, carved in alabaster. A cherubic thing. Rosy-mouthed, haloed by damp curls that tuck around his ears in perfect, artistic disarray. The kind of beauty that feels vaguely mythological, like he should either be blessing crops or luring unbeknownst sailors to their deaths. A visage that belongs on domed Renaissance ceilings.

Y/N breathes. Her pulse feels like it’s rattling a little. It makes her head feel a little gooey when he’s stood in front of her. 

And here he is, holding a package in one hand, water still beading at his collarbone from a morning shower, damp curls dripping onto the fabric of a lived-in, vintage T-shirt. The tragic failure of modern existence is that a man like this— who should, by all logic, be strumming a lyre on the edge of a celestial fountain— has instead been doomed to wander the mundanities of the human condition. To swipe through his mail. To stand in front of her door and say things like “Think they swapped our mail again” in that perfectly unassuming, relaxed tone, like his very existence isn’t actively offensive to the concept of mediocrity.

His singular flaw? That one, teeny thing?

He’s a horrific neighbor. 

Abysmally inconsiderate, in fact. Maybe, one of the worst people Y/N has ever had the pleasure of sharing a paper-thin wall with.

The thing is, under all normal circumstances, eye candy is a desirable next door tenant, to catch those scarce glimpses of and swoon over. But Harry? He’s dangerous. An illusion gilded in beauty that sits in this achingly so, lazy way. It’s an excellent cover for someone who (based on volume alone) should be legally required to sublet a soundproof chamber instead of an apartment. Beauty privilege, remember?

Instead of spending his days spreading divine harmony and whispering sweet nothings into the ears of poets, her tragically beautiful neighbor has chosen a different calling. One that involves subjecting Y/N to an auditory experience that can only be described as an unholy, unprovoked act of sonic terrorism against anyone who possesses functioning ears.

While he may look like the patron saint of soft lighting and tasteful nudity, he lives like a man who has never once considered the presence of neighbors. Evidently, the universe operates on imbalance. 

It’s not surprising that he fucks. Nor is the frequency, given— everything. It would be more surprising if he didn’t, which, statistically, seems impossible. It is the sheer volume at which he fucks and the blatant disregard for customary noise ordinances.

Y/N has had the great misfortune of gaining intimate knowledge of Harry’s extracurricular activities through nothing but flagrantly inconspicuous, unsolicited proximity. She is now, against her will, deeply familiar with the sound of his bed frame against the wall. With the low, gravel-thick groan that spills out of him before everything goes quiet, the sharp gasp from whoever is tangled up in the sheets beneath him. The pornographic chainlink of yes, yes, yes, as if to lyricize the tempo of a wrought iron headboard ramming against hollow drywall. She’s a victim to secondhand moaning; a hostage to the unchecked libido of a man she’s not even screwing.

The young woman isn’t sure who he’s sleeping with, but based on the sounds, they either really, really like whatever feat of Olympian-endurance he’s performing on the other side of the wall, or they’re being held at gunpoint and doing an exceptional job of faking it. It’s loud. A predictable regularity. Enough to make her consider downloading white noise apps and investing in a stronger liquor cabinet.

And every morning, after nights filled with thumping and gypsum-dulled dirty talk— horny monologue hour, hardly softened by an overworked, underpaid layer of rental-grade plaster— and the occasional bass-heavy indie rock soundtrack, he leaves his apartment looking criminally rested. Peaceful. Unbothered by the absolute railing he has just put someone (and the walls) through.

For all his divine aesthetics, Harry fucks like he’s trying to earn a standing ovation. With the kind of dedication to performance that suggests he thinks there’s an awards committee waiting outside in the hallway to hand him a trophy when he’s done.

Y/N doesn’t know what’s worse— the rhythmic, wall-shaking thump of his bed frame, the low, muzzled stream of just incomprehensible enough to stay offensive murmurs, or the fact that he has the audacity to look well-rested when she sees him the next morning, while she lurches past him like a woman who’s been spiritually waterboarded by the full-scale resonance of his sex life.

Y/N has tried— earnestly tried— to ignore it. To mentally downgrade him from disruptively attractive to something more manageable, like guy-next-door cute. But Harry is simply too loud to be ignored.

And not just in volume— though, yes, he operates at a decibel that insinuates he believes “inside voice” is an urban legend. It's everything. The way he takes up space. The way he stretches his arms over his head and his shirt rides up, exposing a sliver of toned stomach like some kind of aesthetic oversight. The way his lips pull into a smirk when he's amused, a single dimple pressing into the smooth skin of his cheek.

The worst part? He doesn’t weaponize it. Just… exists, as if he entirely lacks self-awareness for the unrelenting power he yields with pure aesthetics. 

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than his unregulated evolutionary favoritism is the lack of object permanence it causes. Inspires. Because at the end of the day, despite how polite, how deeply-gnarled in neighborly niceties, The Incident from last month still exists, but miraculously manages to melt into her every time she’s face to face with him. Like a static buzz settling into the way her composure thaws away.

His most notable sound pollution, to date, spilled in the form of audible rejection on a rain-drenched afternoon, dripping through the drywall in a dissent-rusted chain. Stop. No. Please. It was a voice she didn’t recognize. A voice trying to be firm but not entirely expecting to be listened to. It sounded so defeated, like a cry and then a high, sharp whine in response to whatever distinctly lower-pitched murmurs the insulation muzzled. All velvet-dipped tones swallowed by the structural integrity of a shoebox apartment.

Y/N is the last person to dig into others’ preferential depravities, nor does she have the mental bandwidth to file through the archives of a borderline stranger’s hedonisms, but her stomach had twisted up like one of those coiled, abstract sculptures that fits on a bookshelf, and she ended up on the couch with her cellphone tucked to her ear. 

Because it wasn’t just the kind of sound that prickled at her nape, but curdled deep in the belly of her, heavy and rotting. 

(“Um, hi, I think my neighbor is— hurting someone.”)

But the thing is, standing with her door cracked now, Y/N thinks there needs to be at least one, obnoxiously visible character flaw to remind her and offset the audacity of his aesthetics, because up close, it’s so much worse. 

Anything— an overinflated ego, a questionable tattoo, a personality cultivated exclusively from Joe Rogan podcasts. But no. Harry is polite— painfully so, armed with the clean-shaven jawline of a man who has never known an awkward phase and the kind of infuriatingly natural charm that makes all rationale and reason puddle off into awed oblivion. 

“Hey,” he says, cradling the package in one palm, curls wet, one rogue lock clinging to the crest of his cheekbone in a way that would look deeply artificial on anyone else. “Think they swapped our mail again.”

The level of allurement at which he functions should come with a warning label, so it’s a little tough to keep The Incident afloat when he just… waterlogs it with simple, blissfully unaware presence. In these types of situations, all that buoys is the vague, internal monologue reminding her that she’s been gawking wordlessly too long to be considered socially acceptable. 

Her taller neighbor (significantly taller; really, Y/N thinks— it’s as if he collected hallmarks like they were on conveniently timed clearance) blinks. He’s still holding the package out. Y/N blinks back. Batting her lashes shakes something, as if warding off gnats off in a plume of smoke. Slowly, she accepts the misdelivered offering, and unease creeps into the soft spot between her rib bones and her organs. 

Despite the way the man has embedded his existence so deeply into her thoughts— honestly, so much so that he may as well be paying rent (she should be getting compensated for the unpaid mental labor)— Y/N doesn’t actually know Harry.

She knows his name is Harry. H-A-R-R-y, always inscribed in all capitals, besides the cacographic tail end of the lowercase, curving Y. She’s given up on trying to understand why whoever the post office sends insists on treating their mailboxes like interchangeable suggestions rather than fixed addresses. She knows that their mail, through some act of bureaucratic sabotage, somehow manages to interchange between 9B and 9C with unsettling regularity.

She knows he fucks. A lot. So regularly that at this point, it’s practically a statistical impossibility that his celibacy record stands longer than a sparse handful of days. She knows that he wears the face of a misplaced effigy, with a halo’s worth of plausible deniability— the kind that should be mounted to an Italian plaza centerpiece, or live frescoed, immortalized on a high ceiling between Corinthian columns. She knows she called the police on him last month, so she needs to ball her resolve in her arms when it spills apart like unrolled toilet paper—

There is one truth Y/N must latch on and cling to in these tragically catastrophic stand-offs (probably… entirely one-sided, given that the opponent to her poor mettle and overactive nervous system is just… standing there, breathing, entirely oblivious of his innate talent to dilate pupils and cause momentary amnesia), and that truth is this: no superficially aesthetic veneer of deception can shell-up reality. 

And the reality is that Y/N does not know this man, and so no cherubic façade, neighborly niceties, or feigned self-unawareness can suppress that he may as well be an entirely different person behind closed doors. 

It’s months down the line that the irony will hit her— that yes, undeniably, Harry is almost a direct, walking contradiction behind the assumed sanctity of a closed door— that no pleasantries or seraphic, unassuming dimples can soften the obscenity of his pastimes. Hobbies include: vinyl collecting, long walks, and ensuring that an attitude adjustment sticks. But that’s months down the line, and right now?

Right now he’s just her obnoxiously loud neighbor that, according to probable cause (and the recording of the phone call she made to the emergency hotline, stored somewhere in the 911 archives), may or may not take no for an answer. Which is the biggest tragedy of all, in her opinion.

“Thanks.” There’s a little bite there to the word, there. Enough for him to clock it— for something to flicker along that lazily charming smile, like a gossamer-thin, bewildered film over the surface of his expression. 

Harry pauses, almost like he wants to say something (probably to acknowledge the awkwardly apparent dissonance going on), but then he just… doesn’t.

“Okay,” as the man breathes, the breadth of his shoulders swells up, thick muscle rising up under the cotton fabric (not quite pulled taut— not anywhere besides the span of his shoulders— but enough for the shape of his pebbled nipples to poke through the material). Y/N chews into the gummy-smooth skin along the inside of her cheek. Honestly, it’s unfairly disarming; his low voice, his stupid face, his hard nipples prodding through the tee. With his dewy meadow eyes glued onto her, her resolve wobbles like a flimsy stilt house on the coast in a hurricane. “Have a good one.”

He ducks his chin (a subtle period on the uncomfortable pause, a formal seal on his exit) at the young woman, still holding the parchment-wrapped package she’s been awarded as if solidified into a stone-encasement of the position. Y/N blinks. Harry turns. 

With a final glance toward his retreating back, the girl closes the door. As her fingers tighten around the package, her knuckles bleach from the strain. It’s either that or punch drywall, and quite frankly, she’s been paying too much in rent to consider remodeling and too many fees in the form of involuntary eavesdropping to afford a fracture in the (poorly constructed) noise barrier. She tucks the chainlink back onto its track as the door clicks shut and resigns herself to another unfortunate truth: Harry is so dangerously attractive that not only is she almost certainly going to think about this moment later, but she will be reminded, every time she’s shepherded into close proximity with him, that when God packages something up in 6 feet of limited-edition facial topography and artfully tousled curls, no amount of unsought aural pornography and creeping suspicion can stop a cosmic nepotism baby from dismantling her concentration. 

The last thing Harry expects from a disgruntled herd of bleary-eyed, sock-shuffling renters— a crowd caught somewhere between sleep-deprived and half-dead— is small talk. 

Half these people have a look that suggests they contemplated burning alive before choosing to evacuate, and the other half probably wish they decided to wear real pants to bed. Tonight, Harry falls into both categories. With the fire alarm still shrieking from the guts of the complex and the blinking glow of blue and red in the corner of a tar-black night, the briefs hitching high on his meaty thighs is almost… poetic. Cinematic, at the very least. Like a scene from an experimental indie film focused on the gradual dissolution of dignity.

The downy rabbit nestled in his arms, coiled more like a floccose ball than a living animal, is the sartorial maraschino cherry— it pulls the look together. Emergency Evacuation chic. He looks about as disheveled as the rest of the congregation; bedhead, sleep still dusting at his half-mast gaze, keyring slipped over his middle finger and his phone cradled in the same hand (though, Harry thinks wryly, no building-wide emergency couture quite tops the tighty-whitey socks-and-sandals combo that the guy up ahead of him is rocking). There’s sparse chatter going on all around him, a kind of background drone that fades into the wail, but he doesn’t have any intention to engage. Despite the unplanned slumber party and the potential opportunity to trauma-bond, he can’t really find it in him to start ice-breaking and sharing life stories. There’s a time and place to build community with your neighbors— half-dressed in a parking lot at three AM isn’t one of them. 

Instead, he stands in the midst of the mass, dead-silent as if still calibrating. It takes him a while to notice the young woman a few feet ahead of him— long enough that the cool air has settled over him in a coat. Her bathrobe wraps tight around her, cinched pink terry-cloth. He doesn’t recognize that she’s a familiar face until she turns enough for him to see her side profile, her phone screen casting light and painting shadows in the crease of her furrowed brow as she sniffs. Thumbing over the device, Y/N turns back over her shoulder. 

The longer he stands there, creaking into a more-awake rendition of himself as the faint chill cuts through the grogginess in his skull, the more the silence marinates into impatient restlessness. Stretching like old gum. She lingers in his periphery, shifting from foot to foot as if nursing the same restive itch. Once again, his neighbor twists to the side, rocking onto the balls of her feet and then back down onto her heels. A huff spills from her lips as she turns her phone off and tucks it up under her upper arm, crossing them. It’s not cold enough for the air to bloom with her breath, but the exasperation in it is audible. Maybe because he’s managed to seep closer. 

“—Wonder if someone just pulled it.”

At first, Y/N doesn’t acknowledge the statement, as if she doesn’t recognize the remark is directed at her. And then, the presence behind her— not pressing uncomfortably close, just distant enough to notice— has Y/N turning her head over her shoulder. She double-takes.

Harry’s in a new light. Still abysmal to her train of thought, already weak on its tracks given that the drowsiness from being rudely awoken in the middle of the night still has her lingering in a dull, cotton-wrapped awareness. But now, he’s a fraying shape; sleepy and half-nakedly soft. Hair a masterpiece of sleep deprivation— the typically styled ringlets on his head sit mussed; whatever shape (she assumes the usual— somewhere between windswept and enticingly intentional) existed yesterday has gone rogue, erased by his pillow. What’s left is a tousled disarray. He’s in another tee, once again pulled snugly over his shoulders, and he’s cradling what could be a live, fuzzy animal, but more resembles a balled fur stole, its potential face tucked into the nook between his muscly upper arm and his chest. Despite the ridiculous assortment of this particular wardrobe showcase, that’s not what catches her eye most. Y/N sucks in a breath. 

Considering a fair share of the evacuees around them teeter on the brink of public-indecency, it shouldn’t throw her guard off as much as it does, but all she can manage in such close proximity with Harry’s thighs is to blink wordlessly. It’s not necessarily his thighs so much as the way they’re denuded— not the way his trousers sit on them so much as their entire lack thereof. It’s the way his lower region is only covered up by a pair of jet-black briefs, clinging like a second skin, riding ridiculously high and ridiculously low. High enough that the only place her eyes can focus is the (chewy) musculature, slightly sun-bathed from all those hours spent in the residential pool, dusted with hair. Low enough that a sliver of skin peeks from between the waistband and hem of his shirt, hitched up just a touch on one side. Enough to hint at a sharp dip of a mostly concealed V, where muscle sinks in a hard line along bone. A tease of whatever workout routine he’s committed to. Beside the rigid line chiseled in there, an inked, leafy stem climbs (a set of mirrored layers that she’d observed on him, supine on a pool chaise). 

Basically, it’s the type of thing that should legally classify him as a walking thirst trap.

With the crowd sporting bedtime fashion, some covered only in the most legally vague sense of the word, it leaves Y/N wondering: if most of the people decided to haphazardly vacate their apartments by only tossing on the most minimal attire— if opting to add to their garb in any way— what did Harry add? Did he wear the cream-toned tee to bed? Just the Calvins? Both? Or was he entirely bare, only sloppily throwing on whatever was left discarded by the side of the bed? Does he sleep naked? 

With all these sordid thoughts clouding up the forefront of her mind like a thick plume of fog, she can’t find words through alphabet soup and the vague mental images of Harry’s bare skin tangled by sheets. To make it better, he’s just staring at her, like he’s expectantly waiting for her to respond. What was the question?

Y/N blinks again. “What?”

“The—“ Harry bobs his head towards the cluster of emergency vehicles, olive eyes oscillating to the apartment complex and back onto her, “fire alarm. I wonder if someone just pulled it.” 

If ever the universe was to humble Harry from a breathing renaissance painting, half-clothed and half-asleep would be the time. He could be knocked down to whatever status a man up front is bearing, clad in a questionably classy fusion of tragic, high-cut cotton underwear, socks, and suede, open-toed sandals. Somehow, though, it’s worse that his bedhead, for the most part, still leaves the tendrils curling in lazy, untamed waves. That his nakedly-beguiling thighs, strong and sculpted with muscle, look like they’re meant to pry knees wide. It’s mortifying—

“Then, they’d be an asshole,” she murmurs, her own gaze raking out and lingering on the building. The words come out clipped with exhaustion, and then that pause lingers again. 

Harry hums. She chances another glance at the furball curled to his chest. 

“Snuggles,” Harry supplies, raising one arm a tad from where it’s caged to support the animal. The motion is enough to jostle the thing, and it tucks its face out, twitching its nose. With careful precision, the man moves one hand out from the cradle— the one not clutching his keys and his phone (by the way, casually dwarfed by the sheer size of his palm and cupped, lengthy fingers) to skim his pointer along the Holland lop’s dangling ear. “He’s a bit delicate and has some strong opinions on sudden, loud noises. Not a fan of fire alarms, as it turns out.”

The young woman hums noncommittally, eyes snaking back off to the polychrome strobe. 

The last thing Harry expects from his neighbors during a mandatory, middle-of-the-night evacuation order are pleasantries. Between the slouched postures, the collective, dead-eyed aura of suffering, the general degree of resentment perfuming the air, and the visible internal debates over whether a hypothetical fire is worth enduring the cold, it’s safe to assume morale is at an all time low. Which brings him to his next point— there is, Harry suspects, something about him that fundamentally offends his neighbor.

Not inherently because she’s not talking to him. Naturally, the theory has no relevance to her lack of enthusiasm at the moment. 

There’s a clause to life that he learned as a little kid, an absolute truth that the motto “water off your back” was created around, and this clause is that not everyone will like you. There’s really no gentle way to chew on that one, but it’s a fact Harry has long come to terms with. Jealousy, misery, even a simple case of personalities repelling like mismatched magnets— all things that can cause someone to decide you’re just not their cup of tea. Incompatibility could very easily leave your existence grating someone down to the molecular level. And you can never please everyone— that’s another piece of that truth he had to gnaw on before he decided that he was going to spend the rest of his life marching to the beat of his own drum. 

Apparently, something about this tempo scrapes at some highly-sensitive nerve of hers like a dull knife on a chalkboard. 

It’s an intuition thing, really. There hasn’t so much been a sharp, substantial instance so much as there’s been instances. Little, creeping things; the way her eyes ward when he’s close, despite the way they hover; the tone she seems to reserve for him, not outwardly rude, but suspiciously close to some awkward admixture between tolerating jury duty and being held at gunpoint. There’s more, among those, too— the suspiciously long pauses that sit like preludes to every response she gives him. The way her gaze flickers off avoidantly. 

And those last two aren’t flustered mechanisms. 

Harry knows he is, according to conventional, societal standards, attractive. He’s no stranger to reflective surfaces, nor is he unaware of the way actual strangers look at him. Ogle. Gawk. 

It was a burgeoning metamorphosis he became acutely aware of between awkward kidhood and the place he’s at now. First, all lanky angles of uncertainty, only half-grown into his features, when his bones had made up their mind but the muscle and skin over them hadn’t quite decided what they wanted to be yet. Then, it was almost overnight. Everything began stretching into place and ubiquitously working in his favor. Eyes lingered, heads turned…

It’s safe to say he knows nervous girls. Boys. The lack of eye contact, or on the polar opposite hand, the blanking, empty stares and the silent beat as their response time glitches and their mouth tries (and fails) to keep up with a short-circuiting nervous system. Not everybody is able to stay the most suave version of themselves interacting with someone they find sexually attractive— his firsthand experience involves not only being on the receiving end, but on the giving end, as well. Granted, the aesthetics boost had given him a sense of confidence that buried his inhibitions down, so it’s been a long while since the last time he tripped over himself in front of someone that made his dick sit up and pay attention, but—

The thing is, Y/N doesn’t glance away like staring at him rapidly dissolves her thoughts in a static haze. She doesn’t take long pauses because she’s floundering over the next word. She doesn’t even look at him in a way that insinuates she’s worried he’ll nip her or something, she’s just so utterly…

Closed off. Disinterested. Like his presence is a jury duty evaluation and she’s wriggling in her seat, waiting to talk about her views on jury nullification. 

In fairness, it could very well be a me-not-you thing— the awkward shuffle through their interactions, the severe deficit of enthusiasm. Those communication patterns could very well be sound across the board… in another universe. There are footprints that lead him to the massive elephant in the room, and those footprints spell the vague shape of it didn’t used to be this way. 

Sure, Harry contemplates, if she was a miserably unpleasant person that holed up in her apartment with no interest in corresponding with another human being, he’d get it. If she’d given him the idea that something about him rattled her down to atoms the first time he ever said hello to her, he’d get it. But she used to smile. Coyly, almost, he’d go as far to say— one finger away from twirling a lock of hair around her pointer as she talked to him. The kind of simper that accompanies a giggle from a barista handing his drink over across the counter, eyes honed. She used to lean onto her door frame when he handed off a stack of envelopes that got misplaced into his mailbox, or hung back with her eyes wet and lively as she stood at his doorway and handed off a package. 

What’s more is that his history is marked by drawing more people in after he opens his mouth, than turning them away. He’s arguably likeable— not in an arrogantly self-absorbed way, but strictly based on track record. He’s befriended too many older ladies (who sparked up chatter with him in grocery stores unprompted, mostly), and gotten slipped too many drinks (on the house) from bartenders to believe otherwise. Generally, his existence tends to fall into the category of charming rather than grating.

When he considers all of this, his analysis only leads him to one conclusion— there is something about him that suddenly, fundamentally offends his neighbor. 

And it’s with this hypothesis that Harry clears his throat, hesitates, and prods, with just a moment of lull after she’s turned back away from him, “If I’m misreading this, feel free to tell me to piss off, but— did I do something?”

The young woman pivots back over her shoulder, blinking, almost as if she’d forgotten he was behind her at all. 

“…What?”

Harry shrugs. The motion coaxes Snuggles to lift his head again. “I don't expect us to be friends, but I also don't want to be the person you actively avoid in the hallway. If I've done something to make things weird, l'd rather fix it than pretend I don't notice." 

For a long second, Y/N doesn’t say anything. Just batting her lashes up at him, features lax, like she’s processing the earnest directness behind his words and letting them settle. And then her face twists. 

Ooh— okay. Ruckling brow bone, lips tugging down, the nearly incredulous burst of air she expels as she turns her prickling face away—

She scoffs, muttering something strangely close to, “can’t be serious,” under her breath, and Harry’s eyes pensively narrow just a smidge. Enough to be entirely imperceptible as he drinks in her body language. That’s an indicator, if Harry’s ever seen one. 

“You know what, Harry,” she says after a moment (now her arms are caging defensively, that’s an interesting touch), “…I just don’t really …appreciate how you treat women, to be honest.”

Of all the responses Harry had been anticipating, curiously honed on every word, that was— not the one. His dark canopy of lashes sweeps over his eyes as the admission lands and… knocks him off kilter, just a bit. His brows relax, then furrow up as he mulls the statement over, buffering. 

He sounds a little bewildered when he says, voice much more soft-spoken, “…Sorry?”

“You should be,” his neighbor tells him pointedly, her arms still crossed like a defensive barrier across her chest, “Hitting women is wrong. Very illegal for a reason, actually.”

At the mention, his head bobbles back a bit like he’s dodging a smack between the brows with the context-lacking declaration. He’s not quite sure he’s heard her right, eyebrows climbing and eyes widening almost comically. Right, okay. This is… a gross misunderstanding, he decides. When the realization hits him, truly hits him, his knee-jerk response is an incredulous laugh, which he muscles down. Instead, his appalled amusement trickles out like a little huff, corners of his strawberry mouth tugging up. Unfortunately, the reaction only seems to irritate her further, and her forehead crinkles up as her own eyebrows ascend in stunned disbelief. 

“You think there’s something funny about hitting a woman?” Y/N presses, eyes steeling into slits, her priorly indoor-voice rising a decibel. 

The volume of her statement (and the misleading content) has his otherwise mirthy expression falling into something far more serious. Full of comically flat, grievous denial, like a kid being scolded for spray-painting a concrete wall after being caught with the can in its hand.

“—No,” Harry shakes his head slowly, side to side, “Not at all.”

Cautiously, his gaze slips off to the corner, where a few tenants have turned over their shoulder to gauge the commotion. As the young woman’s head swivels to tail where his eye contact has meandered, Harry realizes that backpedaling is only going to become a feat of incredible verbal athleticism from here. Upon catching the other glimpses from the crowd, slowly turning back to their own conversations, Y/N makes a deadpan sound of amusement before she turns back to face him.

“Oh, what? You’re ashamed now that you’re being called out for it? Good,” she bites, shoulders teetering as she leans toward him and unfolds her arms, pointing her index finger into his direction scathingly, “You should be ashamed. It’s absolutely disgusting to put your hands on a woman.”

This is tragically weighed against Harry’s favor. Here he was, just a half-asleep evacuee, holding his rabbit, clad in only a pair of hardly decent briefs, contemplating whether he should Uber Eats tacos as soon as the emergency exit fiasco were to clear up (might as well, since he’s already awake). Somehow, he’s managed to morph from an unassuming extra to the perceived antagonist. 

No, Harry thinks— this wouldn’t be a disaster film; it’s a full blown, poorly-contrived drama with a plot twist even the supposed villain is caught off guard by. The curly-headed brunette chances another glance to the other side now, where more people have not only glimpsed over in brief acknowledgement, but have fully twisted their shoulders to observe the apparent scandal. As much as Harry wholeheartedly marches to the beat of his own drum, at this moment in time, his reputation is shaking in its boots and he’s reached a mental checkpoint called time for damage control.

Weaving sincerity into his tone and shaking his head placatingly as he steps forward— a subconscious attempt to coax her into lowering her volume— Harry tells her, “I don’t put my hands on anybody that doesn’t consent to it first.”

Her face scrunches up.

“I think,” his pink tongue slinks out to wet his lips, “maybe, there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“No, I really, really do,” Harry counters, ducking his chin into a nod. 

Instead of hearing him out, however, his neighbor, as if fueled by the internal calling to manually dismantle misogyny, one assumed violent criminal at a time, only raises her volume a little more. Exceeding the normal range, definitely steeping in public-humiliation-ritual territory. 

“I’m not misunderstanding,” Y/N bites, brows pinched like he’s personally offended her by even insinuating as much, “I have ears, just so you know, and I’ve heard a woman saying no, and please, and stop. So you can drop your good boy act, okay—“

Harry blinks. If not for the character defamation going on and the way Socks-and-Sandals raises his phone out of seemingly nowhere, pointing it into their direction as if there isn’t a potential fire to be filmed instead of all things, Harry would laugh. But there is, and the flash is on, weak along his peripheral edge—

“I know guys like you, I know your type,” Y/N declares, jabbing her finger against him again, this time so close to grazing the area along his chest, right between the tops of his pectorals, just over Snuggles, “and it’s gross that you think because you’re attractive you can walk all over everyone and do things like that to people, and you know what, next time maybe the cops won’t be so nice—”

Ah, nice. Another mystery resolved; one which involved a pair of men with guns in their holsters at his door performing a wellness check and an excruciatingly awkward clarification on impact play, consensual sadomasochism, and safewords. For weeks Harry wondered what had inspired a legal inquiry into his pastimes. Now, staring at the culprit— case dismissed— he can only blink before his brows wrinkle up. 

“You’re the one who called the police?” Harry murmurs, a note of soft incredulity soaking the phrase.  

“Any sane woman would call the police when she heard another woman being abused—“

“Abused?”

“Yes! Abused! And— and— honestly—“

Before Y/N can launch into another ruthlessly-curated, virtue-plated diatribe, Harry resituates the animal in his grip, unlocking his phone to the homescreen. Then, Safari. He thumbs over it with a careful determination seeding along his downturned, sculpted expression.

“I don’t know what form of assault would be worse,” Y/N chimes, hands climbing up in an exaggerated, universal symbol of exasperation before they fall back to her sides (as if she hadn’t even noticed his attention has been redirected to his phone), “but when someone says no, it means no.”

It only takes a second for her to register that his focus has been rerouted elsewhere, though. Her tone dips indignantly.

“Excuse me. I’m talking to you. And also, while we’re at it, you’re unbearably loud and an unmannerly neighbor—“

Harry turns his phone around. His expression is impressively flat, all things considered. Y/N pauses. 

“Typically,” Harry states as her eyes rake over the glowing screen, “I like to be wined and dined before I give a crash course on my preferences, but.”

The image stretched across the illuminated LED sits over her tired gaze as she absorbs it, pupils jittering as she reads, but through the lens of his own profile mirrored back, he can see the moment her righteously fueled demeanor chips. 

“I do, like, a… softcore porn type thing,” he admits. 

Still, her brows are kinked. Only now, in stupefied doubt. “I— what?”

It’s with a rotting sense of dread curdling in the pit of her tummy that it suddenly dawns on Y/N— the mortified realization that she has succumbed to a horrible misunderstanding. 

The website the tab is set on almost looks archaic, like a kitsch relic— repository archives of a porn blog from the early 2000s. Spankinggram. The page is set onto a profile, something called Rings&Paddles, and the squared image of an avatar slices through the garishly orange palette of the site’s logo. Her gaze sweeps over the vista; a man sitting down on an armless chair, thighs splayed, palm curled over a …hairbrush. 

The profile picture sunders off at the neck. It’s a faceless silhouette, but the miscellany of sketches cascading across a forearm and the distinctly chunky medley of rings are… enough—

“Consensually,” Harry— Rings&Paddles, Y/N recognizes, molten heat dripping along the crests of her cheekbones— adds, “No one is being abused.”

In retrospect, the only feasible option to survive this, Y/N decides, is to change her name and move to another state. 

Probably something short and vaguely melancholic, one of those names that would look intriguing in all lowercase. A quiet town. Somewhere coastal, maybe. West. No— north. As far north as geographically possible. Perhaps she could get a dog. An older, ratty boy from a shelter. Drive an old car that’s too big with a busted radio. She’ll pretend it’s a benefit, rather than an inconvenience, because she’ll be the fabricated kind of mystique that insufferably enjoys the quiet calm (and rainstorms). A rebranded, movie-clichè hipster, but not unbearable in real life—

“But I understand the concern,” her neighbor says, cutting through the haze as she contemplates what brand of cigarettes she’ll be taking up as a trait of her pseudo-identity. Against all odds, his tone is calm in an all-too-merciful kind of way, “You can look into… domestic discipline, if you’d like. If you wanted to understand a bit better. There’s loads of really good information on the internet.”

For a moment, Y/N deliberates burning alive. If there isn’t a fire licking up her department store drapes, she’s going to set one to avoid bearing the weight of this shame for the rest of her life. Granted, the heat sizzling at her face feels like a flame, enough, both at the way she’s just publicly kinkshamed an innocent man and at the mention of …domestic discipline.

She’s going to cry. 

They would be Virginia Slims.

“You— …what?”

The garbled confusion drenching her tone is almost laughable. She sounds it, too; voice pinched and deceptively close to trembling off into a sob. Y/N stares straight ahead, body locked in a fugue state of humiliation as the realization calcifies in real-time. Her shoulders have gone stiff and her spine rigid, posture squeezed somewhere between standing and catatonic. The scale of her miscalculation worms into her skull like a parasite that’ll chew her awake in the middle of the night, years down the line.

For the last month, Y/N has spent every interaction with Harry evasively toeing over eggshells. Floundering over the way his face was sculpted, rather than compromising the integral structure of their acquaintanceship. Somehow, a sleep cycle cut short and the ambiguous suggestion that he had picked up on her avoidant habits was all it had taken to not only slander his (apparently not safe for work) extracurriculars, but probably assure her foreseeable Amazon packages suddenly start going missing.

Now, with a semi-public declaration of his profile pressed out to her face and his name no longer being audibly smeared with accusations, Harry can appreciate the quiet sense of revelation. 

His neighbor, on the other hand, looks visibly wrecked. Her entire stance is pulled in tight, like she’s actively trying to make herself smaller, but it’s her face that really gives her away— the way it twists, fluctuating between wide-eyed horror and the dawning realization that she’s just detonated a social landmine at point-blank range. All heat-tinged and shame-doused, the young woman blinks up at him, doe-eyes rounded in apologetic appall and lips parted slightly like she’s still buffering. The combination of words that just left his mouth— softcore porn, domestic discipline, consensual— seem to be wrestling in her brain like tangled Christmas lights, none of them quite fitting together in a way that makes sense and glinters.

“I am sorry about the noise,” he tells her, shutting the phone off and nestling his arm back up under his pet, “I’ll make sure to keep it to a minimum from now on.”

Y/N wilts. With the phone no longer held out into her direction, the way she stays glued to the same spot on the cement— as if mortified into a motionless piece of stone— is ridiculous enough for him to gnaw into his cheek to chew back a bark of laughter. Despite all trials and tribulations, his coping mechanisms never fail. 

“You— oh my God,” Y/N whispers. She makes a sound that could be a vaguely pained noise or the byproduct of her soul seeping out of her body. “Oh my God.”

Harry blinks. 

“I called the police on you,” she tells him, utter dismay lacing the words together. 

“You did, yeah.”

Harry still remembers the blank expression varnished along the officer’s face— the kind of emotionally vacant stare reserved for department store mannequins. The echo of the distant, metaphysical NOPE that definitely rode along his brainstem the moment the curly-haired brunette mentioned “it’s a kink thing,” and the way his partner, hands allocated to his holster belt, started very obviously examining his own shoes. 

“I thought—“ Y/N stutters, her wobbling voice sounding squeezed from her trachea, “I thought—“

“You thought you were living next door to a criminal,” Harry supplies. When he tilts his head, a rogue curl flops over his forehead.  

Finally, the young woman moves, burying her face in her hands. This will haunt her, she thinks. Forever. 

From the corner of his eye, the man can tell that most of the tenants have gone back to their regularly scheduled repertoires of stalled misery. And despite the absolute PR mess her blunder has induced— his eyes wander over her, the way she’s cupping her face like she wants to melt into her own hands and seep off into the pavement— he feels oddly… bad. Not secondhand embarrassed (firsthand, definitely firsthand), but Y/N looks like she’s going to combust. It’s tragic, really. The kind of pitiful that makes him purse his mouth and stare down at her in contemplation.

“Honestly,” his voice cuts through the haze in her throbbing, hot skull, all even-toned sincerity (which is worse, so much worse), “if I was in your position, yeah? I’d do the same thing.”

The admission coaxes her into a horrified peer through the wedges between her fingers. The warmth pressed to her palms feels borderline pyrexic. 

“And if that were the case, you’d be the neighborhood hero. So.” He raises a shoulder nonchalantly.

Y/N doesn’t immediately respond. Instead, she soaks in the crime scene, doused in the blinking blue and red. 

“I’m not sure neighborhood hero is how I’ll be remembered,” the young woman finally answers, groaning through her hands, and then pressing her fingertips into her temples. 

Harry hums. Then, he sighs. “No, you’re right. I’d say misguided vigilante. I reckon it’s a bit better than violent felon, though.”

Y/N makes another sound. This one sounds a little more wounded.

Next part here

[mavilez]

oc asks are neat! 8 and 13 for issac and diana, either both for both or one for each

woo ty for asking!

8. what is the origin of their personality? And let's be honest - how much of it is projecting?

oh boy this is a great question! i'm really really going to try to make it brief cause there is a lot of background story and i am a rambler. (spoilers: i failed)

(for context isaac is also part of a collective story i created with friends. isaac and diana are both mine, but everyone else (namely rio) belong to friends)

isaac: initially he was supposed to be cocky and arrogant, your classic jerk with a heart of gold, and maybe in some other lifetime he was, but as i developed him more his personality eventually molded into what it needed to be for his story - and specially his relationship with rio- to work.

i think the traits that remained from his original concept but in a more enhanced way were his fierce devotion and loyalty. at his core he is a guy who cares deeply for those he considers family. a protector. that is his main motivation and what drives him to do the things he does. that's why he is sooo torn and so plagued by guilt after he changes sides, both for betraying his clan and for the part he played in rio's pain, someone he comes to care about tremendously. and it's what drives his character for a long while.

do i project on him??? absolutely yes. mostly his massive crush on rio cause i have a massive crush on rio. when my friends and i started developing our characters i was already shipping them (and so was my friend) so in a way isaac was made that way for, by, and because of rio. he became what rio needed him to be, narratively. someone kind, selfless, dependable. loving. forgiving.

(incidentally he is someone i wish i had in my own life. so yeah. maybe i do project in other ways)

diana: oh diana... at first she was just a filler character to serve a specific purpose in isaac's narrative and she wasn't very developed beyond being isaac's familiy member and having a revenge wish, which was the catalyst for everything happening the way it did. she needed to be someone close and important to isaac, but different enough from him in order for her to go down the wrong path and drag isaac along with her. so although they grew up together, diana was raised with higher expectations, so she became much harder on herself, and this and some lack of trauma processing is ultimately what causes her to make some bad choices. she can be cold and standoffish, but isaac is the one person who can soften her rough edges, and she would do anything for him.

i don't know that i project onto diana other than the way she aggressively cares for isaac. i have two brothers so i kinda channel that feeling of. i will kill for you but i am not above fighting you if you annoy me. i think im also a bit cold and standoffish myself. and ok maybe i too am hard on myself.

13. do you have a voice claim for the character? What do you imagine the character sounds like?

ive spent considerable time looking for voice claims for my characters but can never find the right ones... but ill give an approximate to what i imagine... isaac: something like jonah scott's natural voice but perhaps just the teeniest bit less deep...

diana: maybe this kind of vibe..??

[acornerofnowhere]

Have finished the first Witcher game and realised that systemic RPGs give me anxiety.

More thoughts below the cut (spoilers ahoy):

1. It's taken until this moment for my opinion on the matter to fully crystallise but I just can't with systemic games. People look at me as if I've grown a second head whenever I say I prefer JRPGs but the appeal is very simple: A-to-B, straight line, emotional teen, magical airship adventure, kill god, bish bash bosh and you're done. I'm a doctrinaire completionist, I want to absorb everything a piece of media has to offer, complete every quest, trigger every cutscene, max every relationship, and my trouble with systemic games is that this mindset guarantees an utterly miserable time. You're supposed to go with your gut, let the chips land where they may and reconcile yourself with the game's circadian rhythms, and I'm just not built like that, it gives me anxiety that I'm missing content if I don't have a walkthrough next to me at all times, spoiling myself on every twist just to make sure I reach the point where there even is a twist.

2. There are very occasional glimmers of brilliance in the game's writing that make its frequent atonal clangers all the more inexcusable, like a drunken conversation between Geralt, Dandelion and Zoltan about what the witcher really wants out of a relationship with some genuine humour and pathos sandwiched between fetch quests that are constantly about to fall apart at the coding level. Line delivery is universally flat but that may just be the translation, and you're never sure whether the moments of levity are genuine or the result of engine limitations whacking all gravity out of a scene with a lump of plywood. You can just about spy the potential buried under layers of stitch work and technical compromise but the team's bizarre priorities make them very hard to extract.

3. I haven't investigated how involved Sapkowski was in the development of this game. I got the impression from the famous bad blood between him and CD Projekt Red that he signed off the name and pretty much left them to it, but there's various elements from the game that crop up five years later in his follow-up Witcher book Season of Storms (like the Golden Oriole elixir, the prophet Lebioda, the vodyanoi, even the ongoing sorcerer project to create "superhumans" that Sapkowski proceeds to take the piss out of), which suggests he either was involved and contributed ideas, that CD Projekt Red had access to his notes, or that Sapkowski had played the game much like everyone else and felt entitled to filch whatever he pleased as the whole shebang was ultimately his idea. We may never know.

4. The sexual escapades that Geralt IF/THEN logic puzzle's into are about as titillating as a cheese grater and I kinda love how awful they are? While he does get around a bit in the books he isn't nearly as big a man-whore as the game makes him out to be. But a larger incongruity between book!Geralt and game!Geralt is the inevitable product of being assigned the protagonist role in a tale where his decisions shape the world around him in major ways while in the books he is much more a passive observer of human behaviour and a point-of-view character for the real protagonist of the Witcher saga, Ciri. Incidentally, Yennefer and Ciri are completely absent from this game, and Triss (if you so choose) seems to take advantage of Geralt's amnesia to insert herself as the love of his life. One hopes future games will explore this tension but for now the mere existence of a personality beneath Triss's polygonal exterior requires layering a whole lot of book knowledge atop a very skeletal collection of jittering animations.

Onto The Witcher 2!

[katsona-the-katsequel]

Akihiko Sanada the Impregnable Legend

Next in the list of P3 Club Book mini-stories is Akihiko. Here we go!

___________________________________________

Late one night, here in a certain room in Gekkoukan High's Iwatodai dormitory, a terrifying and disgusting plot was gradually beginning to take shape.

"I can't forgive you... I will never forgive you, Sanada-san. No, Akihiko Sanada!"

"J-Junpei. There's no need to get so angry..."

"You're too naive, Fuuka! I agree with Junpei. The hatred that comes from eating is terrifying... We need to teach Sanada-senpai a lesson right to his very core!"

"I'm not particularly fond of sweets, but... they looked delicious. They were a special souvenir pudding, limited to 100 per day."

"Woof!"

"Even Koromaru-san says that eating 10 is too many for one person."

“I don’t know if you were tired from training or what, but would you normally eat it all? We’re friends, right? You’d think about saving some for everyone, right!?”

"Ah, ah. Leader, are you sure you don't need to stop everyone? Eh?... It doesn't really matter? Uuuuuh..."

It didn't seem particularly scary or gruesome, but here's where it gets terrifying.

"All right! Then, by unanimous consent, we declare the start of the 'Plan to make Sanada-senpai so sorry that he will no longer be able to spit his guts out', or in short, the Triple G Project!"

"Yeeeaah!"

This lack of naming sense was frightening.

In any case, the membere of SEES were about to bring down the hammer of anger on Sanada's head, stemming from his naivety - or rather his insensitivity. But they soon came to realize that Akihiko Sanada's naivety was also of the highest order, just like his boxing skills...

Phase 1 Junpei Iori & Fuuka Yamagishi

"My weapon is... this."

Saying this, Junpei took out a white cylindrical bottle with a straw, the kind normally used to hold sports drinks.

"It's a special energy drink for seniors who are tired from training."

"Hey... what are you going to do by sending salt to your enemy?"

In response to Yukari's words, Junpei shook his finger and announced a frightening truth.

"This is... Fuuka's... handmade drink."

"That's right. I worked hard on it."

The mood in the room dropped and a murmur of shock spread throughout the room.

"N-No way...Junpei. You don't have to do anything so cruel...!"

"This may even be in violation of the Washington Naval Treaty!"

"Kyuuuun..."

"Junpei...are you serious...? What a frightening man..."

Everyone in the room turned pale, expecting the tragedy that this liquid would bring. Incidentally, Fuuka, who was in charge of weapons development, or rather cooking, was deeply hurt by the evaluations of the others and was sobbing beside the wall.

"Oh! Here he comes!"

Just as Junpei had said, Sanada appeared at the entrance to the dormitory on his way home from morning training. Junpei immediately approached him with a towel and a bottle in hand.

"Senpai! Good work! How about a special drink after your workout?"

"Oh, Junpei. Thank you, I was just getting thirsty."

"Great! Here you go! It's nicely chilled and ready to drink!"

Without the slightest suspicion, Sanada took the bottle from Junpei, put his mouth to the straw, and sucked up the liquid inside with great force.

An unpleasant, viscous sound echoed around the room... and then Sanada opened his mouth and shouted.

"Delicious! This is great!"

"…Uh?"

Junpei was stunned by Sanada's words, which went against his expectations.

At that moment, Mitsuru Kirijo appeared, hearing Sanada's cheers and looking puzzled.

"What's the matter, Akihiko?"

"Well, the special drink Junpei made for me was pretty tasty. Would you like to have some, Mitsuru?"

Naturally, Sanada handed the bottle to Mitsuru, and naturally, Mitsuru also put the straw in her mouth. The two had been together for a long time, and were mentally mature, so they didn't mind an indirect kiss. If she had done so, Junpei would have been able to stop him in time, and the tragedy that followed could have been prevented.

Seemingly having difficulty drinking, Mitsuru put force into her cheek to suck up the liquid, and the next moment...

Without changing her expression, a putrid, swamp-colored liquid spurted out from Mitsuru's nostrils.

"Ki-Kirijo-senpai!"

Mitsuru's complexion changed rapidly from ochre to purple, and then from orange to green. Finally, her eyes rolled up and she collapsed with such force that it was as if a pole had fallen.

"S-Senpaaaaaai!"

Junpei's anguished cry echoed around the room. It sounded like a premature death cry, foreshadowing Mitsuru's retaliation that was sure to come soon...

Phase 2 Yukari Takeba

"Well, I underestimated Sanada-senpai's taste, eating beef bowl with protein chazuke. Therefore, I would like to take an approach other than appetite.”

"What happened to Junpei?"

"He will take another half day to thaw. Also, Fuuka has holed herself up in her room and is out of the fight."

Their fighting power had already been drastically reduced in the first phase of the plan. What's worse, they had even dragged Mitsuru, a well-meaning third party, into the mix, and they were in a situation where failure was no longer an option.

"So, um... Yukari-san, what's the plan this time?"

As he said this, Amada continued to move suspiciously, glancing from Yukari to the leader, then back again. However, this was not surprising.

"That's it! I'll seduce him with my sex appeal!"

Yukari made this bold declaration by wearing a tight, super-mini one-piece dress in the style of bondage. Rather than being clothing, it was more like several pieces of rubber fabric roughly tied together with string, with an extremely revealing design. Her chest, back, and both sides showed off her dazzling white bare skin. On Yukari, who boasts well-proportioned figures trained in the archery club every day, it didn't look bad at all. Even Amada, who was at an age where it was unclear whether he had yet to go through puberty, was blushing at her exuding a sensuality that was enough to make him dazzle.

"With this, I'll make Sanada-senpai fall head over heels for me, toy with him, and then dump him. It's a perfect plan that will make you feel frightened of my ruthlessness! My makeup is perfect, and my hairstyle is great too!"

"There are no problems with the additional chest armor either."

"Aigis, that's an exaggeration!"

By the way, the place where they were now was the middle of the Paulownia Mall in broad daylight. Sanada was talking with Officer Kurosawa inside the Tatsumi East Police Station. They planned to start their operation when he came out.

"Oh, they're here, they're here. Well then, everyone. I'm off!"

Yukari saw Sanada approaching without knowing what's going on, and slowly approached him. When he got within about two meters of her, Sanada finally noticed her, and their eyes met. She immediately twisted her body and assumed a gravure idol-style pose, showing off her thighs, which had just the right amount of elasticity.

"..."

...Sanada completely ignored her. "Huh!?"

Even if she lacked a little sex appeal, ignoring her junior, Yukari... Her pride was hurt, and her feminine stubbornness was awakened.

She dashed past Sanada who was about to leave, then spun around to face him, blocking his path. Sanada, as expected, stopped walking. Then, right in front of Sanada, Yukari leaned forward and squeezed her breasts tightly in the center with both arms. Her breasts, pushed together and raised at the bottom, were pressed even further together to form ample twin mounds. And then...

"SENPAI~ ♡"

Sanada remained motionless in silence. Just as Yukari was pumping her fist in her mind, thinking, "This is great!", Sanada spoke to her.

"Ah... are you a student at Gekkoukan? Sorry, I don't remember. But I think you have to wear a uniform on weekdays, right? You should go back and get changed before the school counselors find you. See you then."

Sanada again completely ignored her and walked away, leaving Yukari behind. It felt like a gust of wind had blown. It was a complete defeat, or rather a crushing defeat, it wasn't even a contest. All that Yukari had done was change her hairstyle a little, put on some makeup, and wear different clothes than usual, and Sanada couldn't even recognize her as an acquaintance. Older men often say that young girls all look the same, but this was even worse. It was a display of Sanada's simple-mindedness that went way beyond expectations.

"S-senpai... it's already been six months since we last met... and yet you just toyed with me! That's so mean!"

Sanada's innocent and brilliant counter attack left Yukari feeling defeated to the point that it nearly destroyed her spirit. It seemed like it would take a while for her to recover...

Phase 3 Aigis & Koromaru

"Are you really okay?"

The remaining three fighting forces, Amada, Aigis, and Koromaru, were holding a strategy meeting while following Sanada from afar as he went for an evening run.

"It'll be fine. With Koromaru and me, I think we'll be perfectly fine."

This time the plan was simple: she would get Koromaru to attack Sanada, rip the seat of his trousers and give him a sad, tragic experience.

"Well then, let's go, Aigis!"

Aigis tightly gripped the leash tied around Koromaru's neck and began to run. As expected, Aigis's athletic ability was high, and she steadily approached Sanada while Amada watched over her.

20 meters to go. 10 meters. 5 meters. 4, 3, 2, 1... she easily passed him.

A drop of sweat trickled down Amada's forehead as he watched. Meanwhile, Aigis and Koromaru kept running. It seemed that Koromaru was so happy to be in an open space for the first time in a while that he had lost sight of his goal and started sprinting. Aigis, who had carefully wrapped the leash around her hand, was pulled so hard that she nearly fell forward, unable to shake it off or stop.

And just like that, they were gone.

"...ah."

All Amada could do was watch as the clouds of sand kicked up by the robot and the dog disappeared into the distance over the horizon with the setting sun.

Final Phase: All-Out Attack

"Let's do it the right way."

With a sigh, Amada made a suggestion to the group, all of whom were exhausted and beaten down for their own reasons.

"It's no good... I don't think we can win..."

"At least he remembers my voice, regardless of appearance..."

"Phew, peep (satisfied after a walk)"

"We are completely worn out..." Morale in the troops was low, whether they liked it or not.

.

By the way, the field leader with the long bangs went to eat ramen at Hagakure with his classmate Tomochika, whom he bumped into around the beginning of Phase 2, and hadn't come back yet. It was a mess.

In the dormitory lounge where everyone had gathered, a heavy, oppressive atmosphere settled over the place. And then...

"Hey, everyone. You seem a bit sick. What's wrong? Do you have a cold? Food poisoning?"

The target of the attack, Akihiko Sanada, appeared. Someone let out a traumatic scream.

Just how on earth could they fight...how could they win...? How could they compete with this monster who couldn't feel pain (and not much else)...? Maybe they should just ask a revenge agency website for help...

At that moment, everyone there was overcome with despair and their hearts were beginning to be consumed by darkness.

"Hey, hey, Aki!"

"Hmm? What's the matter Shinji?"

Shinjiro Aragaki had been out somewhere since that morning. He had returned to the dorm at some point, coming down from the second floor with a thud. Then, a sharp voice echoed through the lounge.

"You ate all of the limited edition pudding that Mitsuru bought for us yesterday, didn't you?"

"Oh, sorry. But it tasted just like regular pudding. It tasted of milk, eggs, and sugar. I'll just buy a replacement at the convenience store next time--"

It was the same as when Junpei and the others questioned him. It seemed like he was apologizing, but it wasn't really an apology at all; instead, it was just a string of insensitive words that rubbed the victim the wrong way. Yesterday, they had complained at length about Sanada's attitude, but Sanada just couldn't understand why anyone could get upset over "just a pudding," and he didn't get across their anger until the very end. Aragaki was also furious at Sanada's unreflective attitude... but he didn't express it. Rather, he looked dumbfounded, saying, "Here we go again." And then...

"Hey, Aki. You need to apologize properly..."

What words did Aragaki say to Sanada, who seemed to have no idea what he was being scolded for?

"We're no longer friends."

"I'm sorry!"

Sanada's reaction was also quick.

"Then stop eating other people's portions."

"Oh, yeah, I get it."

"Go buy more for what you ate, okay?"

"Of course!"

Everyone in the lounge was stunned to see what was happening.

"Was that okay...?"

"From now on... let's ask Aragaki-senpai for help."

"I support that plan..."

Then, exhausted, the juniors collapsed onto the sofa, and sobs began to leak out from there. The sobs continued until Sanada, who had been waiting in line since the next morning, bought limited edition puddings for everyone.

___________________________________________

Tag List: @kerto-p

[elkian]

Hey, all, I'm working on a little project: trying to draw and discuss my OCs by creation timeline. It's ambitious and going to be messy! Here we go.

Glow the Hedgehog is an interesting place to start this project, because Glow, technically, is not my first OC, or even my first Sonic OC. My first OCs are lost to time, crafted during my hours in proabably preschool, kindergarten and first grade and so on. Glow is the first Sonic OC whose name, design, and general deal is memorable enough to touch on.

Around 1996, I was one of many kids who desired a Nintendo 64, and had parents who could not discern the difference between consoles. (My sympathies to the modern kiddo crowd; at least we had wildly different machines by different developers and not three different Xboxes to try to tell apart.) So instead I got a Sega Genesis and handful of Sonic games that Christmas, and despite it not being what I had wanted, I fell in love with the Sonic series pretty instantly.

My earliest OCs were vague critters shoehorned into a series that, at the time, didn't really have much in the way of lore. We didn't have cable TV and I didn't own any of the comics for a good 5+ years onward, so the games and the Sonic Movie (which I copied off of the Blockbuster VHS, I loved it so much) were the bulk of any kind of storyline.

Fast forward to the release of the Sonic Adventure games, and particularly Sonic Adventure 2: Director's Cut. I was absolutely captivated, particularly with Shadow. It's probably for the best that I didn't get my own copy for years; having to borrow the game meant I couldn't play it constantly, just a lot.

Glow was initially designed as an "opposite" to Shadow - inverted color scheme, a girl instead of a boy, and so on. I kind of set her up as a romantic interest to Shadow, but it never really went anywhere; you can sort of see my first real pokings at queerness and gender stuff around this time frame, though it would be years yet before I really Realized anything about myself.

Revisiting Glow for this project made me think about her for the first time in years, and even as I started working on this timeline, I began revising. Design is iterative (a thought that popped up when I incidentally gave Glow that Rudolph nose while sketching for this very post!) and a lot has changed.

In working through my own narrative thoughts and character design, Glow underwent a transformation; Glow, now, has started as someone with a crush on Shadow, which then became a one-sided rivalry, until a good friend finally sat Glow down and explained the concept of gender envy. Glow initially was solely transmasc before becoming more comfortable as bigender, and having more fun with his own experiences. There's something very freeing about playing with one of my oldest character concepts in this way, bringing in experiences and concepts that are relatively new for me and blending them into something nostalgic.

On the more general character design basis, one of my few strong memories of playing around with Glow was with her hanging out in a waterfall, so I've decided she's also an inverse to Sonic's strengths - that is, slow on land but a fast swimmer! This lead to the idea of Rescue Diver Glow - one of the doodles shows him rescuing Sonic, and I think I'm happier leaving Glow out of the main game crowd at this point, if not completely divorced from them. Also, can you imagine helping someone at work and thinking they look like a celebrity only for all of their celebrity friends to turn up and prove you right? Glow is having a time.

'Rival' Glow was pretty wound up, but having a Genderpiphany and working through the resulting conclusions and taking charge of her own experiences more actively has made him chill a lot more. She still feels a little embarrassed about the whole thing, to be honest.

Carmen the Turtle there came up when I tried sketching out Glow's Gender Moment - initially it was Amy Rose, but by the time I started sketching I had vague ideas of Glow's more personal social circle. Most of them are still very vague, but as I worked on this project, Carmen took on a bit of life. I already had an idea for Glow having a (fake) turtle shell backpack, which in retrospect is a bit of a weird affectation for a Mobien; so Carmen not only gives him a pass, but allows for me to double the joke back. In the doodle page, Carmen is wearing a fake cat/hedgehog-ear headband to match Glow's turtle-pack.

(Above: the first piece I did for this project and possibly the first time I've ever drawn Glow. This was roughly "Shadow rant -> Carmen asks Glow if maybe she just has beef with traits she reads as masculine -> Glow tries to respond -> Glow Buffers -> Genderpiphany Moment". Honestly, it's probably funnier without the dialogue.)

I don't have a lot for Glow at the moment; as mentioned, it's been a long while and I haven't put much energy into catching up on the comics, but I had fun working on him and this project, and look forward to the rest.

And as you can see above, Glow is passing the baton to Crystal, but there's one more thing to address... ( Next )

Posted on pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/5856924

Posted on pixiv: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/126577471

[cobra-creampuff]

tell me more about angel wn pls

Angel's character arc is, thematically speaking, primarily about grief. Grief for the community he was denied, grief for the relationship he couldn't have with his maternal figure, grief for Dido/his relationship with Dido, grief over his own failures, grief for the relationship he couldn't have with his children, grief over the potential futures that the past has killed.

His arc basically follows, vaguely, the 5 stages of grief, as well as (even more vaguely) the 12 steps of recovery. (Eddie's arc is similar, but is more about recovery than grief.) The bulk of Angel's story is Denial.

He also is a representative of grief in the other characters' arcs. For Eddie, Angel's narrative presence (but in-universe absence) in Curse The Messenger is used to illustrate her grieving for her lack of childhood as well as her more literal grief for her parents and her guilt and regret over people she perceives herself to have failed to save. For Fred, Angel in CTM also illustrates xyr grief for a lost childhood, as well as xyr grief-driven fear of abandonment.

He's not in Gilded Verdict at all. Incidentally, the main characters in that one either don't have anything they grieve (Evan) or project their feelings externally to such a pathological degree that they don't feel grief so much as things like resentment or unfulfilled entitlement (Lily). A character is a symbol just as much as any blue curtain.

In The Vanishing Point, Angel has only negative character development, spiraling deeper and deeper into avoidance. He can't bear to acknowledge his losses or his mistakes, and makes them immeasurably worse by obsessively denying them. This is the bulk of his on-page character arc, really, and it is entirely in the Denial stage of grief and well out of reach of the "admitting he has a problem" stage of recovery. He ends the book at the lowest low achievable in the witch noir universe, the ultimate and rockiest of rock bottoms.

For Dido in TVP, Angel represents her grief over the life she thought she'd have before her schizophrenia onset. She continues to grieve herself in other ways, with Angel as the narrative proxy for her feelings (just romantic lead things) throughout the book. At the end [SPOILER] more literally, thus making Angel also the proxy for [SPOILER].

In a slightly more literal sense, every single character who interacts with Angel will lose him. Every single relationship he ever has ends.

Then at last in Latchkey Craft, Angel gets to have his own POV. LC is basically Angel speedrunning the 5 stages (because he is still firmly in Denial even at the beginning of this book, 13 years after hitting his rock bottom). There are three other characters in LC that aren't in the rest of the series at all because [SPOILER], and each of them represents a different direction Angel could go from here.

Clara is the possibility of Angel stubbornly - and now consciously, purposely - staying in Denial and never admitting he has a problem, and the consequences thereof, repeating the same mistakes in the same way forever.

Kapua is - er, actually I'm looking at the 12 steps right now and fuck's sake these bitches be Christian as hell lol, we are ignoring like 8 of these steps because they're fucking irrelevant and also frankly antithetical to the other ones?? anyway-

So Kapua is steps 1 (admitting there's a problem), 4 (naming the problem and facing it directly), two thirds of 5 (saying it out loud), and 10 (committing to face up to relapses and other problems in the future). He also to some degree is Bargaining and Depression. As you can see here, there's a reason why he and Wapo are a package deal.

Wapo is steps 3 (deciding to make a change) and 8 (making amends), as well as stages Anger and Acceptance. Where Kapua is a more internal and less outwardly responsible path for Angel, Wapo represents Angel becoming more diligent and proactive in his life.

Clara, Kapua, and Wapo are all [SPOILER], and my goal is to leave it up to reader interpretation whether or not they are [SPOILER]. For this reason, and because the plot is so Man vs Self, I think LC will be the hardest book of the series to write.

witch noir taglist: @haectemporasunt @jezifster @blackhannetandco @fearofahumanplanet @godsleftarmpit @littlehastyhoneydew @rainbowabomination @antihell @isherwoodj @marrowwife @ashen-crest @wildswrites @ceph-the-ghost-writer @garthcelyn @muddshadow @cohldhands @unrealistic-android

Sign up here to be tagged when I post about this project.

[shkspr]

hi. on your post where you may or may not have ended on 'moffat is either your angel or your devil' did you have maybe an elaboration on that somewhere that i could possibly hear about. i'm very much a capaldi era stan and i've never tried to defend the matt smith era even though it had delightful moments sometimes so i wonder where that puts me. i'd love to hear your perspective on moffat as a person with your political perspective. -nicole

hi ok sorry i took so long to respond to this but i dont think you know how LOADED this question is for me but i am so happy to elaborate on that for you. first a few grains of salt to flavor your understanding of the whole situation: a. im unfairly biased against moffat bc im a davies stan and a tennant stan; b. i still very much enjoy and appreciate moffat era who for many reasons; and c. i hate moffat on a personal level far more than i could ever hate his work.

the thing is that its all always gonna be a bit mixed up bc i have to say a bunch of seemingly contradictory things in a row. for instance, a few moffat episodes are some of my absolute favorites of the rtd era, AND the show went way downhill when moffat took over, AND the really good episodes he wrote during the rtd era contained the seeds of his destruction.

like i made that post about the empty child/the doctor dances and it holds true for blink and thats about it bc the girl in the fireplace and silence in the library/forest of the dead are good but not nearly on the same level, and despite the fact that i like them at least nominally, they are also great examples of everything i hate about moffat and how he approached dw as a whole.

basically. doctor who is about people. there are many things about moffats tenure as showrunner that i think are a step up from rtd era who! actual gay people, for one! but i think that can likely be attributed mostly to an evolving Society as opposed to something inherent to him and his work, seeing as rtd is literally gay, and the existence of queer characters in moffats work doesnt mean the existence of good queer characters (ill give him bill but thats it!)

i have a few Primary Grievances with moffat and how he ran dw. all of them are things that got better with capaldi, but didnt go away. they are as follows:

moffat projects his own god complex onto the doctor

rtd era who had a doctor with a god complex. you cant ever be the doctor and not have a god complex. the problem with moffats era specifically is that the god complex was constant and unrepentant and was seen as a fundamental personality trait of the doctor rather than a demon he has to fight. he has the Momence where you feel bad for him, the Momence where he shows his humility or whatever and youre reminded that he doesnt want to be the lonely god, but those are just. moments. in a story where the doctor thinks hes the main character. rtd era doctor was aware that he wasnt the main character. he had to be an authority sometimes and he had to be the loner and he had to be sad about it, but he ultimately understood that he was expendable in a narrative sense.

this is how you get lines like “were the thin fat gay married anglican marines, why would we need names as well?” from the same show that gave you the gut punch moment at the end of midnight when they realize that nobody asked the hostess for her name. and on the one hand, thats a small sticking point, but on the other hand, its just one small example of the simple disregard that moffat has for humanity.

incidentally, this is a huge part of why sherlock sucked so bad: moffats main characters are special bc theyre so much bigger and better than all the normal people, and thats his downfall as a showrunner. he thinks that his audience wants fucking sheldon cooper when what they want is people.

like, ok. think of how many fantastic rtd era eps are based in the scenario “what if the doctor wasnt there? what if he was just out of commission for a bit?” and how those eps are the heart of the show!! bc theyre about people being people!! the thing is that all of the rtd era companions would have died for the doctor but he understood and the story understood that it wasnt about him.

this is like. nine sending rose home to save her life and sacrifice his own vs clara literally metaphysically entwining her existence w the doctor. ten also sending rose with her family to save her life vs river being raised from infancy to be obsessed w the doctor and then falling in love w him. martha leaving bc she values herself enough to make that decision vs amy being treated like a piece of meat.

and this is simultaneously a great callback to when i said that moffats episodes during the rtd era sometimes had the same problems as his show running (bc girl in the fireplace reeks of this), and a great segue into the next grievance.

moffat hates women

he hates women so fucking much. g-d, does steven moffat ever hate women. holy shit, he hates women. especially normal human women who prioritize their normal human lives on an equal or higher level than the doctor. moffat hated rose bc she wasnt special by his standards. the empty child/the doctor dances is the nicest he ever treated her, and she really didnt do much in those eps beyond a fuck ton of flirting.

girl in the fireplace is another shining example of this. youve got rose (who once again has another man to keep her busy, bc moffat doesnt think shes good enough for the doctor) sidelined for no reason only to be saved by the doctor at the last second or whatever. and then youve got reinette, who is pretty and powerful and special!

its just. moffat thinks that the doctor is as shallow and selfish as he is. thats why he thinks the doctor would stay in one place with reinette and not with rose. bc moffat is shallow and sees himself in the doctor and doesnt think he should have to settle for someone boring and normal.

not to mention rose met the doctor as an adult and chose to stay with him whereas reinette is. hm. introduced to the doctor as a child and grows up obsessed with him.

does that sound familiar? it should! bc it is also true of amy and river. and all of them are treated as viable romantic pairings. bc the only women who deserve the doctor are the ones whose entire existence revolves around him. which includes clara as well.

genuinely i think that at least on some level, not even necessarily consciously, that bill was a lesbian in part bc capaldi was too old to appeal to mainstream shippers. like twelve/clara is still a thing but not as universally appealing as eleven/clara but i am just spitballing. but i think they weighed the pros and cons of appealing to the woke crowd over the het shippers and found that gay companion was more profitable. anyway the point is to segue into the next point, which is that moffat hates permanent consequences.

moffat hates permanent consequences

steven moffat does not know how to kill a character. honestly it feels like hes doing it on purpose after a certain point, like he knows he has this habit and hes trying to riff on it to meme his own shit, but it doesnt work. it isnt funny and it isnt harmless, its bad writing.

the end of the doctor dances is so poignant and so meaningful and so fucking good bc its just this once! everybody lives, just this once! and then he does p much the same thing in forest of the dead - this one i could forgive, bc i do think that preserving those peoples consciousnesses did something for the doctor as a character, it wasnt completely meaningless. but everything after that kinda was.

rory died so many times its like. get a hobby lol. amy died at least once iirc but it was all a dream or something. clara died and was erased from the doctors memory. river was in prison and also died. bill? died. all of them sugarcoated or undone or ignored by the narrative to the point of having effectively no impact on the story. the point of a major character death is that its supposed to have a point. and you could argue that a piece of art could be making a point with a pointless death, ie. to put perspective on it and remind you that bad shit just happens, but with moffat the underlying message is always “i can do whatever i want, nothing is permanent or has lasting impact ever.”

basically, with moffat, tragedy exists to be undone. and this was a really brilliant, really wonderful thing in the doctor dances specifically bc it was the doctor clearly having seen his fair share of tragedy that couldnt be helped, now looking on his One Win with pride and delight bc he doesnt get wins like this! and then moffat proceeded to give him the same win over and over and over and over. nobody is ever dead. nobody is ever unable to be saved. and if they are, really truly dead and/or gone, then thats okay bc moffat has decided that [insert mitigating factor here]*

*the mitigating factor is usually some sort of computerized database of souls.

i can hear the moffat stans falling over themselves to remind me that amy and rory definitely died, and they did - after a long and happy life together, they died of old age. i dont consider that a character death any more than any other character choosing to permanently leave the tardis.

and its not just character deaths either, its like, everything. the destruction of gallifrey? never mind lol! character development? scrapped! the same episode four times? lets give it a fifth try and hope nobody notices. bc he doesnt know how to not make the doctor either an omnipotent savior or a self-pitying failure.

it is in nature of doctor who, i believe, for the doctor to win most of the time. like, it wouldnt be a very good show if he didnt win most of the time. but it also wouldnt be a very good show if he won all of the time. my point is that moffats doctor wins too often, and when he doesnt win, it feels empty and hollow rather than genuinely humbling, and you know hes not gonna grow from it pretty much at all.

so like. again, i like all of doctor who i enjoy all of it very much. i just think that steven moffat is a bad show runner and a decent writer at times. and it is frustrating. and im not here to convince or convert anyone im just living my truth. thank you for listening.

[deafmangoes]

An Album of Christmas Carols - 4

This time I'm going to cover the, I assume, lesser-known musical adaptation of the classic story, the 2004 A Christmas Carol based on the 1994 stage musical by Alan Menken.

"A Christmas Carol" (2004, Kelsey Grammer)

To be honest, the whole vibe of the film really betrays that it began as a stage show - sometimes it's endearing but in other places the stage directions don't translate to the film format that well.

We open not in Scrooge's counting house but the Royal Exchange, where a conspicuously underdressed Cratchit (feat. influenza) runs around after his employer and a definitely-not-Cratchit expy asks for a loan extension for himself and Tiny Tina.

I mean look at her. Girl has a withering scowl that could peel paint. She is apparently "Grace Smythe" in the credits but the only time she's named is kinda muffled by the singing.

In this opening monument to raw, Victorian capitalism, I admit I do enjoy the lines:

"Thank the Lord our profits have been huge / Thank the Lord we're not in debt to Scrooge".

Anyway! On to the...

Ghosts? Ghosts!

In an unusual twist we're introduced to the Ghosts before Marley - Past is a lamplighter, Present is a ticket hawker for a charity pageant, and Yet to Come is a blind beggar woman (Incidentally portrayed here by Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine!).

Marley himself appears in theatrical manner not through the door but popping out of the wall. This Marley has a jovial tone, genuinely happy to see Scrooge, and seems more resigned to his fate than lamenting it. He (and some of his and Scrooge's former business partners) perform "Link by Link" with a mix of moral haunting and... just being very extra.

Christmas Past... awkwardly appears as an attractive younger woman poledsncing on the end of Scrooge's bed. I suspect in the original stage show they had a professional dancer for this and the actress tries but doesn't quite nail the graceful movements. Rather than whisk Scrooge from his bed, she shoves his astral projection into a photo album.

This version gives us the "Scrooge's dad went to debtor prison" excuse, which I'm neutral about. Comes up in a few adaptations, and it works but I'm just not fond of Freudian excuses.

The Fezziwigs (here a banking firm) dance, romance occurs, blossoms, we see Scrooge and Marley set up their business and become increasingly more ruthless.

Now I just want to comment on one specific bit that really falls flat, in my opinion. Fezziwig comes to the pair for a loan to save his failing business. Scrooge refuses on the basis that it won't prevent the bankruptcy, merely postpone it.

Then both Fezziwigs turn on the emotional manipulation - "I helped you both get started", "he treated you like a son", etc. I hate this. It cheapens both Fezziwigs as characters and actually Scrooge is right to refuse the loan. But we're meant to see this as him becoming hard and uncaring. Ruins a core moment of character development.

Anyway - engagement breaks off, Marley dies of a heart attack, yadda yadda, Past leaves in a puff of smoke.

Christmas Present puts on an agonisingly long stage show and... comes off a bit like a pimp, with the staging and the chorus girls. And the cane. And the fur-lined robe. It's not great. We see more of Tiny Tina because Tiny Tim had supernatural scheduling conflicts or something.

The Cratchits have their deep emotional song about shoes and counting your blessings. I'm normally not a fan of these bits but... Actually I'm okay with this one. There's a big medley of people celebrating across London, and I think it does a way better job than "Abundance and Charity". Nephew Fred's party segues in at the pre-finale lull - and incidentally this is the only version I know of where Fred has a kid. He gets one line, in which he's a snotty-nosed brat. We return to the Cratchits, then close out on a brief Ignorance and Want looking... I'm not gonna lie, they look like they're completely out of it.

It's time for some real trippy haunting.

Christmas Yet To Come transforms from the blind beggar woman into a white/grey banshee figure who takes Scrooge into another musical number a confused amalgam of visions. I really like this! I know it's being done for practicality, but it helps get across this idea of the future as being shadows, shifting and changing, still malleable.

Also the song's a bop.

Another small detail I like is the undertakers attacking and robbing Mrs Dilber Mrs Mops for pennies after they've hawked Scrooge's belongings to Old Joe. It's quite visceral in the middle of the song, and each time I see it, it reminds me how women like Mrs Dilber may be easy to judge, but in Victorian society they really had a very fragile existence. Nobody cared for the widows and elderly. After all, are there no prisons? No workhouses?

Scrooge's redemption is indicated by a much softer and happier round-up song in which he sees a vision of his departed mother and sister. Aww.

We close out on Scrooge temporarily kidnapping a child, finally making Tiny Tina crack a smile, passing the three ghosts in Incognito Mode, trolling Bob and going to Fred's for dinner. Then it snows on cue.

Highlights & Humbugs

The film's not one of my top favourites but it's still in my rewatch cycle. The songs are catchy, as you'd expect from Disney veteran Menken, with some clever reprises. Marley's "Link by Link" is good fun, but the Ghost of Christmas Present's "Abundance and Charity" really overstays its welcome, especially since the song immediately after it does a better job at getting the point across.

I think I've already commented on what I think works and doesn't work in this version, but I have yet to mention the most haunting image of all.

Kelsey Grammer's hairy chest. Be glad I couldn't find a higher quality snap.

Overall, a jolly musical with some flat notes, but a pretty good jab at the story. 6 out of 10 Humbugs.

[bopinion]

Album of the month / 2021 / 08 August

I love listening to music - gladly, all the time, everywhere. That's why I would like to share which music (or which album, after all I'm still from the vinyl generation ;-) I enjoy, accompanies me, slides up my playlists again and again...

The Beatles & George Martin

LOVE

Rock-Remix / 2006 / Parlophone, Apple, EMI (Universal Music Group)

When you hear the term "remix," it's usually a DJ putting a danceable techno beat under a pop or rock song. And often enough, this leaves the original performer or composer turning in his grave to the same frantic beat. But there are also exceptions. And one of them this time is my album of the month.

34 years ago in Québec I visited a kind of circus performance that was new to me. There were no animals, but excellent artistry. The whole thing was embedded in an almost psychedelic production of sounds and music and light effects and projections. Although individual acts, the whole was dramaturgically staged like an opera or a musical in one piece. The name of the circus was "Cirque du Soleil". A concept that in the following years and decades went from French Canada around the world and celebrated legendary successes everywhere - including artists in residence in Las Vegas. The visionary founder Guy Laliberté also became known worldwide as an impresario and, incidentally, a billionaire.

There are bands I really regret never having seen live. For example, The Queen with Freddie Mercury, although at least I met the latter once in a club in Munich - well, we were in the same room for a few hours. But there is also the opposite, for example The Beatles. As much as I appreciate these musical titans, a concert seems rather witless to me: film footage shows four musicians on stage, initially even dressed alike, operating their instruments without notable movements or show effects and trying to permanently drown out screaming young ladies. But maybe I only comfort myself with this assessment, because I was and am simply too young to be able to experience John, Paul, George and Ringo in their active time on stage. Anyway.

Guy Laliberté and George Harrison were friends. And at some point - I imagine the two of them over a cup of yogi tea after meditative yoga, one handing the other the joint "You, I have an idea..." - the idea was born to bring together the two cultural phenomena Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles. As a composition for all senses, new and timeless, ecstatic and colorful. After all, it was Harrison who was always eager to experiment. He converted to Hinduism in the 60s, gained experience with psychedelics and transcendental meditation and introduced oriental instruments, first and foremost the sitar, into Western music and is thus considered one of the most important pioneers of world music. A development that goes hand in hand with my personal taste: the longer their hair got, the more I liked their music.

It was only after Harrison's death that Laliberté was able to close the deal with the rights holders of the music (Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), which can thus probably be considered a kind of Harrison's legacy. For the show was not to simply put together a soundtrack of the old familiar hits, nor were the compositions to be reinterpreted by other musicians. No, the original multi-track recordings were to be used to create new adaptations of the original songs. And who would be better qualified for this than George Martin, who had already produced groundbreaking albums with the Beatles themselves. In the process, he advanced from mere producer to arranger and idea generator, who also revolutionized recording technology by using overdubbing, for example. It's hardly surprising that he is often referred to as the "fifth Beatle".

In general, Sir George Henry Martin, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is a man of musical superlatives. He is recorded as the producer of 4,836 titles, but one assumes considerably more. And that includes not only The Beatles, but also a wide variety of works for Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, Little River Band, Ultravox and many more. His 30th number one hit was "Candle in the Wind" by Elton John. Martin founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with McCartney, was one of a handful of producers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received the BRIT Award for "Best British Producer of the Past 25 Years" in 1977, among countless other honors.

So George Martin went into the studio with his son Giles Martin, who had produced INXS and Kate Bush, among others, following in his father's footsteps. And not just any studio - of course it had to be Abbey Road Studios (again). With the original recordings, the team not only created new variations of the original pieces, as they could have been created alternatively with the Beatles themselves. For example, they enriched the acoustic version of "While my Guitar gently weeps" with an orchestral accompaniment and combined the rhythm of "Tomorrow never knows" with the vocals of "Within You without You". Thus, a soundtrack project for a circus stage show ultimately became a new album by the Beatles. No wonder that Sir Paul himself described "Love" like this: "This album puts The Beatles back together again. It's kind of magical." And Ringo added "George and Giles did such a great job combining these tracks. It's really powerful for me and I even heard things I'd forgotten we'd recorded."

The documentary "All together now - A Documentary Film" by Adrian Wills (director) and Heidi Haines (screenplay), which won a Grammy in the category "Best long form Music Video", also fits the project's ambition. It tells the entire story of LOVE's creation, from the first meetings of the creative team around Martin and Laliberté to interviews with, among others, McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono, John Lennon's widow, and Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime road manager and event technician, to the first rehearsals of the stage show in Montréal.

LOVE is more than a medley of hits by the mushroom heads, but rather a kind of rock opera that is a first-class listening experience even without the accompanying show. Says George Martin: "The Beatles always looked for other ways of expressing themselves and this is another step forward for them." And father and son succeeded with remarkable creativity. The new version of "Because" is still directly harmless, since it uses the birdsong of "Across the Universe" as well as the final chord of "A Day in the Life" played backwards. "Glass Onion," on the other hand, became a grandiose collage with elements of the songs "Things We Said Today," "Hello, Goodbye" (background vocals), "I Am the Walrus" (background vocals), "Penny Lane" (flute), "A Day in the Life" (orchestra), "Magical Mystery Tour" (effects) and "Only a Northern Song" (effects). State-of-the-art technology in digitization, mixing and mastering also ensure the finest sound quality.

Speaking of sound quality: a show that relies so heavily on music must of course also rely on a perfect acoustic performance. Created by French designer Jean Rabasse, the LOVE theater at The Mirage / Las Vegas houses 2,013 seats set around a central stage. Each seat is fitted with three speakers, which sums up to a spectacular sound system with 6,351 speakers designed by Jonathan Deans. The stage includes 11 lifts, 4 traps, and 13 automated tracks and trolleys. The theater features 32 digital projectors creating very large high definition digital 100' wide panoramic images, even on four translucent screens that can be unfurled to divide the auditorium. That's what I call "being in the middle of the action".

Reportedly, the theater cost more than $100 million - which doesn't even include the development of the show. And unfortunately, it also means LOVE can never go on tour. So I won't be able to avoid traveling to Las Vegas one day for that reason alone. Which I trust will be on the event calendar for a few more years to recoup its costs. And so the circle closes: Decades later, I would once again enjoy Cirque du Soleil in North America - and thus also experience The Beatles live in a somewhat different way.

Here's a trailer for the Las Vegas Show LOVE from the Cirque du Soleil:

https://youtu.be/hIJZAfyRlD4

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

the knitting oc has resurfaced!

my largest knitting project to date (a stuffed dog which I still have and treasure), apart from what I'm knitting right now, created an entire story, not one bit of it which has ever been set on paper. knitting regularly again has made it resurface in my mind, bit by bit, until I do believe I remember the story as clearly as ever it was. surprisingly well developed. honestly a mad outlier in my writing for that age. the main character was a CHARACTER. she had CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. startlingly well plotted and planned, I could literally write it out and it would be fine to hold up as a thing I'd written. and I plotted this years ago.

incidentally her name is Patience and I'd never heard anything about autism in my entire life up til then (I remember clearly the day I first heard about it, idk why) and it is shocking how exactly every line of that character falls in neat diagnosable traits even though I literally thought her up without knowing anything about that-