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citizenscreen · 5 years ago

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On September 8, 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, the world was introduced to Blondie Boopadoop, a dizzy blonde flapper created by Murat Bernard ‘Chic’ Young. Blondie debuted in newspapers across the country on that day. She was Chic Young’s fourth strip featuring a young woman, but this was the one to catch fire and eventually become iconic in the world of comics and media at large. It is hard to believe that the blonde hero of blissful domesticity turns 90 and that her stories remain tops with audiences the world over.

Blondie’s early days featured the star popular in dating circles. Her courtships made for several storylines. Blondie’s main squeeze, however, was bumbling playboy Dagwood Bumstead, son of millionaire industrialist, J. Bolling Bumstead. Dagwood introduced Blondie to his ill-natured father in the very first strip announcing their plans to marry. The elder Bumstead was aghast that his son would be interested in a woman of Blondie’s lowly social status.

For the next couple of years, the Blondie comics centered on the couple’s struggles to get the Bumsteads to agree to the pairing. Blondie does everything imaginable to no avail. In the meantime, she also entertains several other admirers – although Dagwood was never far away. With readership dwindling, Chic Young and the comic’s distributer, King Features Syndicate, decided Blondie and Dagwood should finally get married and in February 1933 they did much to the chagrin of the Bumsteads who disowned their son and heir. Mr. and Mrs. Bumstead only grudgingly acknowledged the union because Dagwood went on a hunger strike that lasted over 28 days spotlighted by daily coverage and countdowns that helped circulation. Every day people tuned in to see how Dagwood was doing on the hunger strike. After all, one of his favorite pasttimes has always been eating. One of my favorite Blondie scenes is of Dagwood emerging from his bed after the hunger strike to reveal loads of dishes under the covers.

It was after the marriage of the disinherited blissfully happy Dagwood and the carefree vivacious Blondie took place that audiences truly warmed to their humorous domestic escapades. Blondie and Dagwood became a happy family whose troubles reflected those of the readers’ in many ways. The couple started their married life penniless, as were most during the Depression, which lent itself to many enjoyable scenes. First Dagwood’s need to find work made great stories and eventually so did his relationship with his boss Mister Dithers. However, the charms of Blondie the strip relied on the couple’s home life and its place in the pantheon of all things domestic comedy, which was a revolutionary one at that as Chic Young insisted that the young Bumsteads share a double bed, not the twin beds audiences saw on all other domestic stories in media. (loc.gov) In fact, the Bumsteads did not share a bed in their movie incarnations.

As the strip continued its run, Blondie and Dagwood changed as did their family. Blondie, who started as an airhead of sorts, became the Bumstead voice of reason and Dagwood became the flake to whom all things happen. Part of Dagwood’s charm is he remains a child of sorts, an innocent whose zany antics we cannot get enough of and all because he can’t seem to get things quite right. Except his sandwich, which is a masterpiece every single time.

On April 15, 1934, the couple welcomed their first child, Baby Dumpling (later Alexander) who received almost as much media attention as baby Ricardo on “I Love Lucy” two decades later. Except without the power of television.

In 1941, Blondie and Dagwood welcomed a daughter, Cookie, whose name was chosen by hundreds of thousands of submissions in a contest run by Chic Young. Blondie’s popularity soared when the Bumsteads became a family in earnest in their home in Joplin, Missouri, including Daisy (family dog and Dagwood’s best friend) and the pups. At the height of its popularity, Blondie rivaled Peanuts. No doubt, this creation by Chic Young is one of the all-time greats in the pantheon of comic strips. I would say a masterpiece people have enjoyed for its love conquers all stories and wonderful drawings. It has been one of my favorites for years.

Aside from daily strips and Sunday editions, the Bumsteads have enjoyed comic book popularity as well with seven versions spanning from 1947 to 1976.

As you probably know Blondie’s popularity jumped to screens and the airwaves as well. As far as the movies go, the story is that as the strip’s popularity grew, Columbia Pictures’ boss Harry Cohn decided that the characters had potential for a B-picture or two so he signed a deal with Chic Young. The result was a 28-picture, 12-year run between 1938 and 1950. All twenty-eight movies star Penny Singleton as Blondie and Arthur Lake as Dagwood. The first and best is Frank Strayer’s Blondie. Strayer directed more than a dozen of the Blondie pictures.

Some of the signature gags from the strip made it into the movies such as Dagwood running into the mailman every morning as he is late for work causing the mail to fly all over the place. That happened early in all of the movies welcoming devoted fans to the hijinks of their favorite family. Following Dagwood’s signature,” Blondieeeeee.” Dagwood’s legendary sandwich also made its way into every single one of the movies and into Webster’s New World Dictionary.

The first movie in the series sees the Bumsteads about to celebrate their fifth anniversary, but money troubles ensue. They have money troubles often in their history. In fact, the Bumstead budget, as Blondie mentions in one of the movies, is the pulse of the family. Dagwood asks for a raise from Mr. Dithers (Jonathan Hale), owner of the J. C. Dithers Construction Company, with whom Dagwood is always at odds just like in the strip. Blondie, on the other hand, orders new furniture (from an uncredited Charles Lane) since they just finished paying off other furniture. Her logic is impeccable, a logic inherited by an almost-too-cute Baby Dumpling (Larry Simms). Dagwood loses his job after getting into a jam at work, but makes up for it by wooing a wealthy businessman (Gene Lockhart) into investing with the Dithers Company.

Staying true to the comic strip, Blondie (1938) features several of the same characters throughout the series played by the same actors. Aside from Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake, Larry Simms plays Baby Dumpling in all of the movies. He was so popular in the role that he was credited as “Baby Dumpling” in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) where he plays the Hopper Boy. Marjorie Ann Mutchie (as Marjorie Kent) makes her debut as Cookie Bumstead in Frank Strayer’s It’s a Great Life (1943), the thirteenth movie in the series and one of the few without “Blondie” in the title. More on that later.

Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake as Blondie and Dagwood in the first movie in the Blondie series

Rounding out the regulars that make up the Bumstead family is Daisy, the cocker Spaniel/Poodle/Terrier mix whose real name was Spooks and plays the Bumstead’s trusted pooch with flair. Spooks appeared in a good number of movies in character parts, but is best remembered as Daisy. The prolific Willie Best appears as a porter in the first movie and does what he can with the stereotypical part he is given. Best plays varied roles throughout the series and remains mostly uncredited. Fay Helm appears in several Blondie movies as Mrs. Fuddle, neighbor to the Bumsteads and Blondie’s best friend. Danny Mummert plays her son Alvin, Baby Dumpling’s nemesis.

The Blondie movies are typical B-fare. They are fun, perfect for Saturday mornings, but substance is hard to come by. There are a few hearty laughs like the one in Blondie with the talking scale in the hotel men’s bathroom. It advertises your favorite radio voice will talk to you and when it does, it tells Dagwood he’s a loser.

Probably the best part of the series, however, are the actors that appear throughout. If you are a fan of the great character players you’ll get to see the likes of Donald Meek, John Qualen, Edgar Kennedy, William Frawley, and Mary Wickes to name a few. Many future major Columbia stars also make appearances. I was quite surprised to see Rita Hayworth, for instance, play prominently in Blondie on a Budget (1940). She is an old friend of Dagwood’s who plays right into Blondie’s jealous hands. When Blondie was not trying to finagle the family budget in order to buy something, she spent her time worrying that Dagwood would leave her for another woman.

Larry Simms, Penny Singleton, Arthur Lake and Rita Hayworth in BLONDIE ON A BUDGET

The Blondie movie series ended with Edward Bernds’ Beware of Blondie (1950) where we see Dagwood in charge of the Dithers Construction Company while the boss is on vacation. You can just imagine how well that goes. Adele Jergens plays Miss Clifton, a con woman who takes advantage of Dagwood’s innocence to get to Dithers’ money. Of course, all turns out fine in the end with one important resolution to the series to close out a continuous loop. The mailman (Dick Wessel) decides to end Dagwood running into him finally by delivering the Bumstead mail on his own time at night. No more dirty uniforms. No more bruises. No more scattered mail. Unfortunately, the day he decides to do his first night delivery is tax day and guess who runs out of the house to mail his taxes at the last minute.

By the time Beware of Blondie was made the stories were stretched thin. The familiar Bumstead elements held the movies together as the family survived all sorts of domestic misadventures. According to AFI, Columbia had lost interest in the series after the first fourteen installments. They released two movies without Blondie’s name in the title and stopped producing the series in 1943. However, audiences wanted more and production resumed for another fourteen movies making this series the longest in terms of pictures to date. When the Blondie pictures ceased altogether in 1950, Columbia intended to replace it with another comic strip series, but that fell way short at the box office forcing the studio to reissue all 28 Blondie pictures.

Penny Singleton, Arthur Lake, Larry Simms, and Marjorie Kent in the final picture in the series

America’s love affair with Blondie, Dagwood and the gang was not limited to movies, as we well know. The comic strip continued to strong readership and between 1939 and 1950, Blondie was also heard on radio. Arthur Lake played Dagwood in this version as well with Penny Singleton replaced by Alice White, Patricia Van Cleve and Ann Rutherford at various times. Blondie originally aired on CBS with Camel Cigarettes as its sponsor and later moved to NBC and Super Suds. Lake and Singleton made an appearance as Blondie and Dagwood on The Bob Hope Show following the 1938 release of the first movie, which led to their own show as a summer replacement for The Eddie Cantor Show. They originally aired on Monday evenings at 7:30 and just as the strip helped Depression-era audiences forget their troubles, the radio show helped them through World War II. Enjoy the following episodes of Blondie out of the funnies and into your homes…

From October 1939, “Dagwood Buys a New Suit”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1939-10-30018DagwoodBuysANewSuit.mp3

From April 1940, “The Gypsy Queen”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1940-04-22043TheGypsyQueen.mp3

From March 1944, “Abbott and Costello with Blondie and Dagwood”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1944-03-02AbbottCostelloWBlondieDagwood.mp3

From July 1944, “Plumbin Problems”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1944-07-21PlumbingProblems.mp3

From May 1945, “Socialite Blondie”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1945-05-27SocialiteBlondiesocialAspirations.mp3

From July 1947, “Three Week’s Vacation”

https://ia800201.us.archive.org/13/items/OtrBlondie/Bd1947-07-27ThreeWeeksVacation.mp3

Unlike radio and the movies, attempts to bring Blondie to television proved unsuccessful. Its power were in the mediums already discussed, but it’s at least worth a mention that those in charge thought enough of the characters and their stories to give them several attempts at TV productions. The first such attempt, Blondie, premiered on January 4, 1957 on NBC and ran for one season. Pamela Britton starred as Blondie with Arthur Lake reprising his famous role once again. Stuffy Singer, Florenz Ames, Ann Barnes, and Harold Peary were also in the cast. In 1968, CBS gave Blondie a turn with The New Blondie, which also ran for one season. Patricia Harty and Will Hutchins star as Blondie and Dagwood in this version with real-life married couple Jim and Henny Backus as Mr. and Mrs. Dithers with Pamelyn Ferdin and Peter Robbins playing the Bumstead kids. As you can tell from the short run of both series, neither managed to capture the charm of the Bumsteads the other versions of their stories did.

Chicago native Chic Young drew Blondie seven days a week from 1930 until his death in 1973 producing more than 15,000 strips. His legacy, continued by his son Dean Young, is one of warmth and humor and home. No matter the decades that have passed, people still visit with the Bumsteads – 90 years after meeting them. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for the laughter during difficult times.

Chic Young’s BLONDIE turns 90! On September 8, 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, the world was introduced to Blondie Boopadoop, a dizzy blonde flapper created by Murat Bernard 'Chic' Young.

#Arthur Lake #Blondie movies #Chic Young&039;s Blondie #Penny Singleton

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

City of Celluloid

by Dan H

Sunday, 01 September 2013

Dan has seen the City of Bones movie.

Uh-oh! This is in the Axis of Awful...~

I first reviewed Cassandra Cla(i)re's City of Bones in the halcyon days of 2008.

Today, Kyra and I went to see the movie!

Umm...

Long time readers (or people who read the review I linked to above) may recall that I found the original book of City of Bones so blisteringly incoherent that I was barely able to write about it in any kind of sensible manner.

The movie is worse.

Kyra and I saw this film in the tiny, crappy screen at the Odeon on Magdalen Street, an experience we shared with about a dozen other people, all of whom seemed to be having a similarly terrible experience.

Just as with the original book, I really don't know where to start. Because this film is awful in nearly every conceivable way.

Let's start with the good bits:

Good Bit: The Cast are Actually Pretty Cool

Jamie Campbell-Bower is actually really good as Fanon Draco. In the book, I felt that his constant wisecracking revealed less about the character's emotional turmoil than about the author's desire to show off her ability to write one-liners. Campbell-Bower's delivery, though, actually manages to create the impression that I always felt the book was aiming for but failed to achieve – that Fanon Draco is hiding behind playful or dismissive language in order to avoid confronting his feelings.

Lily Collins is a bit generic as Clary but then, really, what does she have to work with. She's … a girl? She has special powers? She's hot for Fanon Draco?

Robert Sheehan (the guy that plays Immortal Kid in Misfits) does a reasonable turn as Simon, although again there isn't a huge amount to do with the character. He wears glasses (temporarily). He has a raging case of nice-guy-syndrome. Meh. I swear he's taller in this than he is in other stuff.

Perhaps most excitingly (even more excitingly than Jamie Campbell-Bower, and I love Jamie Campbell-Bower), Jonathan Rhys Meyers does a fabulously scenery-chewing turn as Valentine. And boy does he need it, because if he stopped raging around and roaring for ten seconds, you might have to ask yourself what the holy fucking hell is actually supposed to be happening, and then you'd probably have to go and cry.

Incidentally, I think it probably says something about the way things work in Hollywood that the teenage protagonists of this film are played by actors in their mid twenties, while their father is played by an actor in his mid thirties. Clearly Valentine was extraordinarily sexually precocious (even if we ignore the fact that Collins and Campbell-Bower are the best part of a decade older than the characters they portray, Rhys-Meyers' Valentine would still have to have started breeding at nineteen to have two seventeen-year-old kids).

Good Bit: It Is Quite Visually Interesting

Part of the fun of this kind of film is that it lends itself quite well to spectacle, and in the beginning the film-makers do a really good job of establishing a visual style, whether it's the Hogwarts-esque grandeur of the institute, the hundreds of Shadowhunter runes that Clary draws in her sleep, or the grotesque, body-splitting demons.

Some of these images might come from the book. I honestly don't remember. I'm pretty sure that the device of Clary drawing Shadowhunter runes is film-only, and I seem to recall that the entire concept of Demons being able to possess people is contrary to book-canon (where Demons are fairly specifically greebly monsters that eat you).

Having said the film is quite visually interesting, I should backtrack a little and say that the film is quite visually interesting in kind of its first half. After they get to the Institute things just get very, very lazy. Big generic flappy-winged monsters. Generic black-and-red demons who look weirdly like the dudes that the Zin send after you in Saints' Row IV

Although Valentine does make a pentagram out of swords. For which plus ten points for swords, minus six points because the pentagram is such an obvious symbol.

And now the rest:

Bad Bit: What The Fuck Is Going On?

So Clary is drawing runes. Then she meets a guy who only she can see. Then later other people can see him.

Then her mum gets attacked by dudes who are looking for the Mortal Cup, so she drinks some kind of magic coma potion because that is apparently the thing you do in that situation.

Then Clary gets attacked by a demon, and the guy rescues her.

Then they do a lot of running around, and the guy who we saw with her mum earlier said he was only hanging out with her to get the cup.

Then they go to this place called the institute. Some people are vaguely rude to Clary. Others aren't.

Clary works out that Damien from Gossip Girl is both gay and in love with Fanon Draco, despite the fact that he has said one sentence and been on screen for eight seconds.

Then Clary goes to see the Silent Brothers. This is one of the bits that are vaguely visually interesting. She has a vision where she sees the name Bane (well, actually she see a series of dots, but Fanon Draco realises that the dots are really, umm, the spaces around the letters in the word BANE witten in block caps. Because her brain stored the negative image. Apparently).

Then they go to see a Warlock. It is vitally important that before they do this that (a) Clary get dressed up in sexy clothes and (b) everybody including Clary take the time to observe that she looks like a hooker, because while it is important for women to dress sexily, it is also important to remember that women who dress sexily are gigantic whores.

The warlock agrees to help them because he is gay, and therefore fancies Damien from Gossip Girl, because all gay men are instantly attracted to all other gay men. The warlock is not wearing any trousers. I am not making this up.

The Immortal Kid from Misfits is captured by vampires for no clear reason.

Something something werewolves something something.

Then there is a scene in a garden where it is all romantic and you know it is romantic because they kiss, but also because there is an extraordinarily loud and intrusive love song played over the top.

Then I think Clary works out where the Mortal Cup is, because she is drinking tea while reading a book, and suddenly the teacup goes inside the page like a picture.

Then they fight a scary black woman.

Then Clary gets the Mortal Cup. Then the man with the grey hair opens the big water portal and Valentine comes through.

Then there is a really, really long fight scene.

No, I mean, like really, really long.

I mean, like half an hour in a two hour movie.

There is a flamethrower. Why is there a flamethrower?

Clary does magic with her glowing dildo pen to freeze some demons.

Did I mention flamethrower?

Grey hair man is a good guy again?

Valentine is everybody's father.

They win?

More glowing dildo magic?

Clary and Fanon Draco drive away on a motorcycle. At a slow walking pace.

Potentially Hilarious Bit: Deviations From Canon

The thing I find most uplifting about the Mortal Instruments movie is that now not only will there be fanfiction based on a novel series based on fanfiction of a different novel series, but there will now be schisms within that fandom between book fans and movie fans.

I read City of Bones five years ago, so I don't really remember it at all well, but I'm pretty sure there were some pretty big changes from book-canon. I'm almost certain that the final confrontation in the original book doesn't take place in the Institute, and Valentine's motivations in the movie are a lot less morally ambiguous, in that he's fairly explicitly trying to take over the world with an army of demons rather than just wipe out the downworlders (I might also point out that the word “downworlder” only appears once in the entire movie).

At the risk of sounding like a horrible nerd and closeted Cla(i)re fanboy, I was strangely irritated by the fact that Valentine, in the film, is able to summon an army of demons by using sort of generic magic, since in the book of City of Ashes a major plot-point is that he needs the Mortal Sword for exactly that purpose.

Other changes form canon just made sense. For example, in the film, Valentine more or less states outright that he used the same kind of memory magic that Marcus Bane used on Clary in order to make Fanon Draco forget that he was raised by the most famous and reviled person in the history of his people. Now actually I'm pretty sure that this isn't possible under book-canon. Shadowhunter magic is runes and only runes, you'd need a warlock for a memory-block, and there's no way that Valentine would have gone to one. But here the film-makers did basically the best they could with what they had. The alternative would be to just go with what it says in the book, which is that Fanon Draco just completley failed to realise that the man who raised him looked exactly like the man whose picture is all over the Institute.

The film also strongly implied that the man Fanon Draco remembered as his father wore an enormous hood at all times.

On the subject of Fanon Draco's heritage, the film inexplicably chose to keep the nonsensical “M turned upside down” plot point from the book, and translated to a visual medium it has exactly the problem I pointed out in my original article. During the climactic scene, when Fanon Draco is staring at his hand and realising to his horror that what he thought was a W is actually an M, the camera is showing us the ring from the other side as it has more or less consistently throughout the entire movie so we are only just seeing it as a W when for us it has been an M for the rest of the film.

Also, the scene with the ring is also pretty much the first time we learn the surnames of either Valentine or Fanon Draco.

The final change from book-canon is to do with the … umm … incest.

A major plot point in The Mortal Instruments is that Clary and Fanon Draco want to be together but can't because they're brother and sister. At the end of the final book, it turns out that Valentine actually isn't Fanon Draco's father at all, he just did weird angel-blood experiments on him while he was still in the womb.

Now I could be wrong, but I think the film-makers really didn't want two and a half movies in which their male and female leads spent half their time seriously contemplating incestuous sex, so they put the “not his real father” line in before any of the other revelations. So now after Valentine shows up in the Institute, he has a conversation with Hodge, where Hodge says “hey, if you really wanted to screw with those guys you could lie and tell them they were brother and sister.” This somewhat alters the context of everything that happens next, and everything that will happen in the next two films.

So umm, yeah. That's City of Bones: the Movie. It may actually be worse than the book.Themes:

TV & Movies

Cassandra Clare

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http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/

at 14:01 on 2013-09-01Robert Sheehan is in this? I'm really hoping he's destined for better things, so this better not end up derailing his career.

Anyway, I was hoping to see a review of the movie on here so now I can satisfy my curiosity without actually watching it myself. I have to admit some of the clips they released actually looked fairly entertaining, but I guess they're not indicative of the movie itself.

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Dan H

at 15:22 on 2013-09-01I think it depends on what you mean by "indicative". There are certainly a lot of entertaining clips, it's just that there's nothing stringing them together. It's like the film is a two hour long trailer.

This is more or less exactly the same problem that I had with the book. There are quite a lot of cool scenes, but they just sort of happen one after the other with no real throughline or sense of arc.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 15:44 on 2013-09-01I'm kind of morbidly curious about what keeps the Clare train going. It looks like she's making money off her work and everything, but I have to wonder how she feels about the terrible reviews her work gets even from critics who like and praise popular writers like Whedon and Rowling. Something tells me the poor woman isn't just in this for the money.

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Arthur B

at 22:24 on 2013-09-01

Isn't this part of the usual weirdness with American media wanting to cast teenagers in sexually provocative roles but not, for obvious reasons, wanting to show actual (or even simulated) underage action on screen? I literally just started watching

Vampire Diaries

and half my viewing time so far has been spent yelling at the screen WHY ARE YOU STILL IN SCHOOL GET A JOB YOU SLACKERS

(Though to be fair, the fact that all the high schoolers are grown-ass adults makes the whole thing less creepy in some ways.)

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Cressida

at 22:55 on 2013-09-01A video review from The Nostalgia Chick; I'm curious what Ferretbrainers think...

http://blip.tv/nostalgia-chick/the-next-whatever-the-mortal-instruments-and-ya-adaptations-6635563

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Arthur B

at 23:19 on 2013-09-01My thoughts are "Woah, holy shit, a TGWTG reviewer who offers interesting insights and doesn't rely heavily on gimmicks, fake rage and wAcKy ChArAcTeRs, how rare is that?"

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Michal

at 00:56 on 2013-09-02I was actually about to post that video. Needless to say, I find her points to be very good ones.

My thoughts are "Woah, holy shit, a TGWTG reviewer who offers interesting insights and doesn't rely heavily on gimmicks, fake rage and wAcKy ChArAcTeRs, how rare is that?"

The good ones gather at Chez Apocalypse. Kyle Kallgren of

Brows Held High

is also very erudite and worth watching, especially his more recent videos. (Even better, the crossover between Nostalgia Chick and Brows Held High in which they review

Freddy Got Fingered

is truly something to behold)

I'm kind of morbidly curious about what keeps the Clare train going.

There are very few writers who are purely in it for the money, even the bad ones. I can assure you E.L. James probably enjoyed writing

Fifty Shades of Grey

very much and did not think "my

Twilight

fanfic will make millions!" But if there is a sentiment towards material gain behind Clare's work and writing, it can probably be summed up by

this enormous tour bus

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Fishing in the Mud

at 17:04 on 2013-09-02

I can assure you E.L. James probably enjoyed writing Fifty Shades of Grey very much and did not think "my Twilight fanfic will make millions!"

No doubt. But with Clare, I get the sense she doesn't want to write dreck and doesn't want people to think she writes dreck, but may not fully understand how to get better.

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http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/

at 09:10 on 2013-09-03

with Clare, I get the sense she doesn't want to write dreck and doesn't want people to think she writes dreck

Obviously there's a non-trivial number of people who don't think that she writes dreck. She was a massively successful fanfic author, after all, to the extent of getting a professional publishing contract off her fanfic (and despite her books' debt to Harry Potter, unlike E.L. James she hasn't sold her fanfic; she had to write something from scratch and sell that). And I have seen other YA authors rave about her, though it's not clear to me how much of this is liking the books and how much liking her. Either way, she's got a community (and readers) who give her validation, and if the film of her book has been panned it will be pretty easy for her and her fans to take this as the result of adaptation decay rather than a reflection on the source material.

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Dan H

at 13:11 on 2013-09-03To be fair to Cla(i)re, I do think she's improved over the years. City of Bones was a gigantic incoherent mess. City of Ashes was a slightly less incoherent mess, City of Glass and Clockwork Angel were sort of okay. I mean they still had all of the annoying stuff that I'd expected from Clare's writing, but they actually told a story that made some modicum of sense.

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Alice

at 13:52 on 2013-09-03Either way, she's got a community (and readers) who give her validation, and if the film of her book has been panned it will be pretty easy for her and her fans to take this as the result of adaptation decay rather than a reflection on the source material.

This should be taken with a massive pinch of salt and a [citation needed], but the impression I got was that during the film production process, Clare had talked a lot about how closely involved with the film she was, but once it became clear the film was a flop, she backpedalled and began downplaying her involvement.

Then again, she's not in the business of making films, she's in the business of selling books, and she's pretty good at that.

And I have seen other YA authors rave about her, though it's not clear to me how much of this is liking the books and how much liking her.

Wasn't Maureen Johnson accused of being part of a YA Mafia (including Johnson and Clare) who were somehow all in cahoots and conspiring to get each other published? Because there happened to be a bunch of (aspiring/new) YA authors living in NYC at the same time who were friends and liked to hang out and write together, and happened to all get published to varying degrees of success/popularity? It all seemed a bit storm-in-a-teacup-ish to me, because, well, they were all in the same business, in the same city, and about the same age. And once two or three people become friends they're likely to make friends with each other's friends, especially if you're all in the same boat like that. And sure, they might have been able to help each other with getting agents and that sort of thing, but that's not quite the same thing as getting your friend published & on the bestseller list...

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http://alula-auburn.livejournal.com/

at 19:51 on 2013-09-03I've found the commercials amazingly bad, even for the parameters "that type of thing." Like, it's possible I've blocked it out, but I don't recall the Twilight ads looking so badly put together, in terms of picking out lines to quote or images to use.

Of course, I don't quite see how all the people involved in making a film didn't get the difference between something like Harry Potter or Twilight, which for better or worse penetrated the wider culture (even my extremely pop-cultural illiterate dad could identify Harry Potter as something with a school of wizards, and Twilight as vampires) and this--I think if you didn't have at least some sense of what the books were about the commercials would look even more pointless. (Which was kind of how I felt about the other YA fantasy flop? Beautiful Creatures? Southern accents and witches or something? I still don't know.)

I've not read the TMI (lol) books, but I did read the somewhat-annotated Draco trilogy in an overwrought, sleep-deprived unmedicated-for-a-chronic-pain-condition haze, and I can vaguely see how her style could be sort of compelling for the right sort of pretentious youthful mindset. (I didn't know about the plagiarism stuff then--I barely had a sense of fandom; I was a total naif.) But how it's held up to much more than that I don't know. I also don't know anything about TMI fandom--if the books have much if any staying power outside either that brief, pretentious adolescent window (which can almost be endearing in its own way) or the somewhat incestuous-seeming YA reviews. But there are adults, I guess, who find the ponderous self-absorption of the Twilight books (at least, that's the tone I saw in the quoted lines I read) to be good and profound writing.

That said, I find John Green tiresome and the bit of Maureen Johnson I read didn't do much for me. I don't know if I've had bad luck lately in my YA choices (I read Thirteen Reasons Why because I got it for free), but I've seen a lot more of that faux-deep heavy tone, which to me does not indicate a "maturing" of YA. (But I have personal reasons to be snippy about "literary" YA, so.)

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Alice

at 20:44 on 2013-09-04I've found the commercials amazingly bad, even for the parameters "that type of thing."

I don't know that I thought they were that unusually terrible (within the parameters of "that type of thing", at least), but I was confused by the number of English accents on display, particularly Jace's. Is he meant to be/sound English*, or is it just that Jamie Campbell Bower can't do a US accent?

*I don't remember him being pegged as English in the book, but I read that years ago and don't remember the details.

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Cammalot

at 21:42 on 2013-09-04One odd thing -- virtually every review I've read of this film has complained that Jayce is "a thousand years old" or similar and either doesn't act it, or shouldn't be macking on Clary at his age. Is that something that the film made particularly confusing? I don't recall him or any other forefront character being anything like an immortal in the book -- I mainly remember Isabelle being 14 and acting a bit precociously vampy.

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Dan H

at 19:26 on 2013-09-05@Alice

That confused me as well. I don't think I've ever *heard* him do an American accent, but the guy is an actor, surely he can learn? Is it that Valentine has an English accent because he's the villain, and Jace has an English accent because he was raised by Valentine? Or am I giving the film too much credit.

@Cammalot

One odd thing -- virtually every review I've read of this film has complained that Jayce is "a thousand years old" or similar and either doesn't act it, or shouldn't be macking on Clary at his age. Is that something that the film made particularly confusing?

*Everything* in the film is particularly confusing. The film makes no real attempt to explain anything, and there's one line where Jace says something about his people having been doing something "for a thousand years" and the way he says it I can see why somebody who wasn't familiar with Cla(i)re's work might think he was talking from personal experience.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 00:04 on 2013-09-06Fanon Draco must retain his English accent to remain fuckworthy. This point is not negotiable.

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Dan H

at 01:14 on 2013-09-06A tiny part of me is *incredibly* sad that they didn't cast Tom Felton as Jace.

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Cheriola

at 04:31 on 2013-09-06

While I agree that the wish to sexualise teenagers is probably part of the practise of

Dawson Casting

, the reasons for it are also based in labour laws. It's much less of a hassle to work with adults who can work a full day and don't still have to get high school lessons on the side / won't suddenly leave the franchise in order to start college. And you don't run into problems like the Harry Potter movies with teen actors who age faster than their characters or suddenly look a lot different than their characters are supposed to. (e.g. the actor playing Neville became quite handsome.) Plus, even if there is the occasional prodigy, most actors really do need drama school before being anywhere close to good enough to portray actual characters, instead of just being 'cute'.

Clearly Valentine was extraordinarily sexually precocious (even if we ignore the fact that Collins and Campbell-Bower are the best part of a decade older than the characters they portray, Rhys-Meyers' Valentine would still have to have started breeding at nineteen to have two seventeen-year-old kids).

Really? It's considered "precocious" to be a horny 19-year-old egomaniac who doesn't use condoms? Seems in keeping with the power-high invincibility complex and the lack of care for other people's problems that usually characterise a stereotypical villain like that. I mean, it's not him that would have to care the baby, unless he wants to.

Also, the scene with the ring is also pretty much the first time we learn the surnames of either Valentine or Fanon Draco.

I've skim-read the book article to know what you're even talking about, and... Wait, his surname is Morgenstern?! She took a character who was a blatant Hitler metaphor and made him ethnically Jewish? That... Wow.

One can only hope that she simply wanted a German name (because all Germans are Nazis...) and thought it would be cute to use one that doubled as a Lucifer reference (it means "morning star"), and that she simply didn't do any research on German name origins. [It's one of those names that the Jewish population of the Holy Roman Empire chose when they were forced to adopt surnames in the 18th century. Usually it's pretty-sounding compound words not refering to a profession - like Goldblum(e) ("golden flower"), Bernstein ("amber") or Lilienthal ("valley of lilies").]

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Fishing in the Mud

at 11:55 on 2013-09-06I think some reviewer pointed out that the "Morgenstern" thing is one more reason the film won't work for anyone old enough to remember

Rhoda

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Alice

at 14:09 on 2013-09-06I've skim-read the book article to know what you're even talking about, and... Wait, his surname is Morgenstern?! She took a character who was a blatant Hitler metaphor and made him ethnically Jewish? That... Wow.

Well, Cassandra Clare is herself Jewish, so I imagine she was aware of what she was doing when she introduced the Morgenstern reference (along with its cultural/historical baggage). :-)

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Cheriola

at 15:37 on 2013-09-06Really? Huh. Well, it's her right then, I suppose. I just wonder what went through her mind that she thought saying "Yeah, our guys could be just as bad, given half a chance" and feeding into 'zionists want world domination' myths was a good idea.

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Arthur B

at 15:43 on 2013-09-06Is it not possible for Clare to be both Jewish

and

ignorant of the name's history, so she plucked a name which sounded German to her out of thin air without researching it?

I suspect she was going for the "Morgenstern = Morning Star = Lucifer" deal rather than the "Morgenstern = Jew" angle, after all.

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Alice

at 16:14 on 2013-09-06Is it not possible for Clare to be both Jewish and ignorant of the name's history, so she plucked a name which sounded German to her out of thin air without researching it?

I suppose it's possible, but I'd honestly be very surprised if she didn't read Morgenstern as sounding Jewish, even if she didn't know about the historical origins of the name.

I suspect she was going for the "Morgenstern = Morning Star = Lucifer" deal rather than the "Morgenstern = Jew" angle, after all.

Yeah, same. I suppose the thing with Morgenstern is that it's an obvious enough reference that her readers are fairly likely to catch it (and feel all clever and intellectual), while still being a recognisable surname. (She could have used the Greek form if she'd wanted to be more pretentious than usual, but "(h)eosphoros" doesn't really lend itself to turning into a surname that's easily pronounceable in English.)

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Dan H

at 17:53 on 2013-09-06

Really? It's considered "precocious" to be a horny 19-year-old egomaniac who doesn't use condoms?

I was thinking more of the scenario in which he'd started having kids at eleven rather than nineteen (and I'm using "precocious" here in the sense of "premature" rather than "talented"). Although even nineteen doesn't *really* make sense if we look at the way that the history is played up - it's never suggested that Valentine got Jocelyn pregnant accidentally, or that he had kids unusually young.

Valentine is clearly *supposed* to be in his early forties at least, it's just that then he wouldn't be in the narrow window during which Hollywood decrees actors the right age to be sexy.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 23:07 on 2013-09-11

oh my what a shame who could have forseen rhubarb rhubarb

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Fishing in the Mud

at 02:03 on 2013-09-12Yeah, if it hasn't managed to turn a profit in a good three weeks, I don't blame anyone for backing off. The standards for bestselling books are a whole lot lower than for movie blockbusters.

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Dan H

at 16:02 on 2013-09-12

The standards for bestselling books are a whole lot lower than for movie blockbusters.

I assume you mean "the revenues expected from bestselling books are a whole lot lower than the revenues expected from movie blockbusters". Because for most other expectations (plot, characterization, that sort of thing), bestselling books and blockbuster movies are pretty much on par.

Also: I've been poking around the forums on Rotten Tomatoes and some of the discussions are hilarious. I particularly like the people complaining about Jace having a British accent, and the other people saying "No, that makes sense. They grew up in Idris, which is in Europe, so they'd naturally have picked up British accents."

Because all European people have British accents, you guys.

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Cammalot

at 20:11 on 2013-09-12

Because all European people have British accents, you guys.

I've long enjoyed listening to the variety of accents with which Swedish people speak English. (This is a tangent, but not a joke. There was a little honest-to-goodness rivalry in one of my classes between the ones who'd learned with a North American/U.S. accent and the ones who'd learned received pronunciation [capitalize?] -- two of these were siblings on opposite sides -- and they all ganged up on the lone Norwegian.)

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Dan H

at 22:37 on 2013-09-12

This is a tangent, but not a joke.

Three Swedes walk into a schwa?

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Shim

at 23:10 on 2013-09-12

Three Swedes walk into a schwa?

...and say "əw!"?

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Fishing in the Mud

at 01:16 on 2013-09-13

I assume you mean "the revenues expected from bestselling books are a whole lot lower than the revenues expected from movie blockbusters".

Right, sorry about the word salad. Yesterday was a long day.

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http://elsurian.livejournal.com/

at 05:24 on 2013-09-13In the halcyon days of 2008

Jesus Christ, has this franchise really been around for 5 years?

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Cammalot

at 18:13 on 2013-09-13

Three Swedes walk into a schwa?

Hee.

I want to make some sort of vegetable-based pun now, but I got nothin'.

Jesus Christ, has this franchise really been around for 5 years?

And going on what, nine books? (Gotta admire the productivity.)

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Dan H

at 19:05 on 2013-09-13Is anybody else feeling really freaking old right about now?

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Cammalot

at 19:55 on 2013-09-13Yes!

(Although that's partly because at today's freelance gig, I just met a coworker who was born my first year of college.)

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Dan H

at 21:58 on 2013-09-13Ouch.

I'm particularly looking forward to our next couple of GCSE intakes, which will be the point at which I start working with people who were born in the 21st century.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 00:44 on 2013-09-14Yeah, I just found out half the people I report to directly at work are younger than I am.

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#Ferretbrain #Cassandra Clare #The Mortal Instruments #Axis of Awful #Dan H

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handsingsweapon · 8 years ago

Text

come slowly, eden

(the final portion of the witch prompt trilogy from all my halloween silliness. read pt 1 here, pt 2 here - someday i will clean this up and a03 it, someday)

It’s summer when the realization that will ruin Victor’s life hits him. He is fifteen years old, and he’s traveled south for the summer to visit with relatives. There’s another boy in town who’s just about his age, Christophe, and they’ve just gone for a swim to stave off the summer heat. Victor’s beaten him in a race to and from the other bank twice, through no fault of Christophe’s: Victor cuts through waves like he was born for them, has always felt most clearly himself standing on a shoreline or looking into a pool.

If there is magic about Chris, and Victor doesn’t have any reason to believe there is, it doesn’t speak to him in waves and currents and tides. Its secrets are not kept in a beautiful blue grimoire that Victor’s gotten to peruse while his mother watches. It’s a little sad, perhaps; he’ll never know the sacred circle of a coven, and there’s a whole portion of Victor’s life that he’ll never be able to clearly articulate.

For now they are just two boys making mischief, due to head back to the manor, crafting plans to steal pastries from the cook.

Christophe pulls his shirt down from where they’d left most of their clothes, hanging over tree branches, and Victor notices the way his muscles ripple.

The realization is this:

Oh. He’s beautiful.

He blinks and he is nineteen, and he and Christophe are at university together, two knaves unleashed together on London. Victor doesn’t know then that it’s a dangerous place for him, but he should: the water of the Thames is brackish and sick with pollution, and his mother’s letters all warn him to take care, that London is a place where there are good witches, and bad witches, and witches who are somewhat in-between, the way his mother’s mother is, always on the lookout for her own interests. In the end it’s not any of those things that do him harm: it’s alcohol and Christophe’s crooked smile and the gambling tables; it’s liquor and the community of bohemians who meet in the back rooms of pubs near university; it’s the things that happen in the boarding rooms they occupy, when no one is meant to be looking. Christophe is Victor’s first kiss, and the person Victor lets take him to bed, but Christophe has other lovers among the community of artists they dabble with, and what Victor wants is something Christophe can’t offer him.

He is twenty-one when Christophe gets expelled, and he is home for the holidays in time to listen to his Grandmother rant and rave about that terrible rake of a boy. “Make no mistake,” she says, “men who do the kinds of things that Giacometti boy got up to are a disgrace.”

Victor is a water witch. It doesn’t mean he can’t still burn.

By twenty-eight he lives a half-life, stays far away from home, and when his father passes away suddenly and the manor becomes his, he has a blow-up argument with his grandmother in front of his mother that he’ll regret for a very, very long time. Maybe the old woman regrets it, too, but there’s no taking back the kind of hex she spews in the center of their shouting match. There’s an ugliness there that doesn’t easily go back into a bottle.

His mother begs him to reconsider. You could marry anyone, Vitya.

He is twenty nine and he will turn thirty in just a handful of hours. Anyone.

“No,” says Victor, who fixes his Grandmother with a stare that freezes lakes.

He turns thirty. The curse takes him.

The first years are ugly years, years he won’t be proud of later on: Victor haunts his Grandmother from the invisible realm he occupies, does everything he can to make her miserable whenever she dares darken the manor’s doors. He tries to be gentler with his mother, who spends years trying to negotiate the terms of the curse. I can’t break it, Vitya. I can’t -- I --

Shh. Quiet now.

His Grandmother dies and he’s glad of it. His mother dies and he’s miserable. One by one his friends follow. He watches his house change hands again and again and again and then one evening there is a young man with stark, severe features and kind, soft eyes sleeping in his bed. Yakov, thinks Victor. The old man’s gotten one last stab in after all: he hasn’t done what the previous heirs have, and told the newest occupants about the household rules.

Well. At least it’s a novel change. He’s seen the three of them before, at least, visiting Yakov and Lilia in the intervening years. They’re an amusing bunch, a fledgling coven. Magic doesn’t seem to have the same strength in this era; they need guidance, they need the old ways.

He is not a ghost but some days he feels like he might as well be one. He sits down and he writes. They are playing cards together.

Victor’s been teaching his three fledglings bridge. The game’s interrupted by a guest and for a moment he feels a flicker of surprise. Guests! Once, Victor had imagined this house full of them, had let himself picture what it might be like to hold salons of artists and magicians, to create a place of thriving. He hasn’t thought of that in a very long time.

A man storms in, with Yuri hot on his heels. He has dark hair and umber eyes; blue-framed spectacles. He’s in a soft, chunky sweater that’s a little too big for him; Victor’s eyes catch on a sliver of collarbone and he immediately scolds himself. Their guest is lecturing the other three on curses -- curses! He’ll be giving them all a stern writing to, later -- before his attention gets caught on an old portrait Victor’d once sat for in the intervening years between London and the argument.

“Who is that?” the stranger asks, and Victor watches delicate, gentle fingers sweep dust off of the touch of paint that makes up his painting-edition mouth. “He looks ...”

How does he look, Victor wonders, and he gets up without preamble, moves closer. Only distantly does he note Georgi saying his name; he’s studying the way the light from the windowpane catches on the tips of this man’s fingers, the way his eyes swallow and then reflect slivers of daylight. This close, he smells herbs and flowers; he feels braced in a way he’s not sure he’s ever felt. The others are still talking, and the young man, looking at the painting that both is and is not Victor, finally gives his name: “... Yuuri. Yuuri Katsuki.”

“You’re a white witch,” Victor breathes, to a whole household that can’t hear him. Sometimes he does this; he can’t help it. Talking to himself is one way not to disappear. “You’re. You’re.”

He’s perfect, is what he is.

There is no relief for Victor’s latest house-guests after that: at night, he opens Yuri’s laptop and pecks away at the keys. He scribbles on the giant chalkboard Mila has put up in her room. He writes to Georgi in the journal. Together they try and fail to find a way to read Yuuri into the house’s curse, bound up into the inheritance of it. Every time Georgi tries to explain it he trips over his own tongue, knotted up with foul magic that won’t let any of them explain.

He leaves notes on the fridge with the magnets Mila bought. Flowers, thinks Victor. In this situation, people send flowers. Victor picks them based on their meanings and makes Georgi fill the whole house with them. Georgi’s the only one who will do it; he thinks it’s very Romantic.

He learns Magnolias are Yuuri’s favorite. The house will never be empty of them, Victor thinks. He’s manic with this new, fragile thing, the feeling that perhaps finally here is someone who can help him, who can undo the foul thing that has sat on this household for a hundred years.

He goes, perhaps, too far. If there is another way, Victor Nikiforov does not know it.

Y U U R I when / i / look / at / you i / remember / how / hope / feels

The argument this launches in the middle of their kitchen is an excruciating pain, but it teaches Victor something important.

Yuuri has a heart made of glass, too.

He writes. He spends an entire night doing nothing but writing, and six other letters get fed to the trashcan before there’s one Victor can tuck under Georgi’s doorframe for a delivery, feeding it through the slot there with careful, shaking hands.

When Yuuri returns to the house carrying a potted fern and picking at the terrible poetry magnets on the fridge, Victor’s entire being opens up and sings. He has never been so grateful for such an idiot’s invention, and as a notebook gets added to the kitchen, he learns to admire the small, efficient bend of Yuuri’s handwriting. In general, modern script is so careless and ugly compared to the finely trained hands of Victor’s day, but there’s something about the way Yuuri writes that is still, in its own way, objectively lovely.

Victor admits for the forty-seventh time that he is charmed. He likes the way Yuuri picks at the hem of his shirts, the way he cleans his glasses, the earth-smudges that stay on his hands when he shows up at the house after his work. Sometimes Yuuri nibbles on his bottom lip while he thinks and Victor has to actively stomp down the dizzying urge to kiss him, softly and quietly.

There will be no kissing of Yuuri, not like this.

Are you a ghost? Why can’t we meet?

alive /

B U T

in / a / mist

Would you want to meet me, if you could? What a thrill to think of it.

“Yes,” says Yuuri. Yuuri who wears the softest sweaters and who rolls up his jeans and who has the most beautiful ankles. Yuuri who traces a finger over the edge of the mug of his tea when he’s thinking. “Yes,” Yuuri repeats, “and I am going to figure out how to help you.”

Victor takes a cue from Yuri Plisetsky and unapologetically shouts -- practically roars at the old witch, long since dead, from the kitchen. “Take that, you hag!”

He is unprepared for the actual reality of a few nights later, with Yuuri checking into the house with a suitcase in tow, setting up in a guest room facing east that Victor actively forces himself to stay away from. That night, as Georgi and Mila and Yuri prepare their circle -- they’ve started leaving a fourth place for Victor, along with a glass of water, to represent him, and it touches his heart -- he stumbles in with an empty mug of tea and a book tucked under one arm. “S-sorry,” he says, already backing away, and it’s Plisetsky who barks out a change in directive, who surprises sometimes with keen, fickle flashes of insight.

“We’ll move around. Come join us, katsudon.”

“You want me in your circle?”

Yes, Victor thinks. Spirits yes.

Mila draws the chalk, the pentacle, places Yuuri at its apex, fetches a fresh, plain candle from the bookshelves and then snaps her fingers over each wick: green for Georgi, a pale yellow for Yuri, red for herself, white for Yuuri. Victor’s candle is blue and as Mila lights it he catches the puzzled look on Yuuri’s face. Whatever question that sits on Yuuri’s tongue waits as he watches them: Yuri is holding a mason jar with a moth trapped inside, and he opens the lid to release it; Mila lights incense; Georgi passes a bundle of lavender through the heat of his candle and then sets it on an open plate. Victor pauses for a moment, contemplative, and then he dips a finger into the water of the glass that’s been left for him and traces it over the crystal edge of the cup. Yuuri startles and stares, for a long time, at precisely the place where Victor is sitting. Then he frowns to himself and pats down his jacket for a bundle of twine, and Victor watches as he knots it around his own fingers, creating an intricate matrix of thread which glows white as Yuuri activates its magic with a whisper of his own breath. “Come into the center of the circle,” he says, “I want to see you.”

“You can’t,” Victor replies, certain that Yuuri can’t hear him.

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.”

“You heard that?” Victor asks, incredulous, but he’s already on his feet, moving towards the center. “That’s incredible, Yuuri, I ...”

This time, however, Yuuri gives no sign of having noticed, and it gives Victor pause, makes him wonder if perhaps the first time around was just a fluke, a trick. He’s still considering those doubts when Yuuri gets to his feet. Dust, Yuuri says, Georgi, I need --

Georgi keeps fine sand among the components he uses for spell-casting, and he slides it towards the center of the circle, waiting. Yuuri reaches for it, murmurs words of blessing, and unceremoniously throws it over Victor, soiling one of his better suits in the process. Victor holds his breath. Yuuri squints, and then blinks owlishly, and Victor stands impossibly still while he unwinds the string over his hands and then uses it, still glowing, to map out a second circle around their feet.

They’re standing so close. If he were corporeal he could just reach over and tuck one of Yuuri’s curls back behind his ear. Victor thinks about this and that’s when he feels it: Yuuri’s hand, sweeping his bangs aside.

“Your eyes are bluer than your portrait,” Yuuri says, very quietly, like he’s in awe, and Victor immediately chokes on the sob that breaks out of him, like a dam that’s been burst. “Oh, no no no - don’t cry, I didn’t --”

Victor attempts to pull himself together, but he can hardly breathe, much less speak or think. “I apologize,” he manages, after what feels like an eternity. “You must understand that it has been a very long time since anyone has been able to tell me what I look like.”

“You’re beautiful,” breathes Yuuri, who immediately flushes almost as red as Mila’s candle, and Victor’s treacherous heart skips over itself, falls down four flights of stairs. Oh.

Yuri Plisetsky never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and he ruins the moment entirely. “Will someone please tell me,” he hisses, “what the fuck is going on. Can you see him, katsudon?”

“... I couldn’t, before. And -- well, now. Yes. Like this.” Which is inconvenient and impractical, of course; they can’t spend a lifetime standing inside of a magical twine circle standing so close that if Victor breathes deeply there’s a very real chance he’ll accidentally touch some part of Yuuri and won’t that be a thrill come to think of it perhaps they can stand in the magical twine circle forever --

He’s losing himself again.

“Tell me what happened to you,” Yuuri says, and for the first time Victor glances past him, and he sees what Yuuri must be seeing: that beyond the glow of the twine on their floor there are coiling, angry shadows, all of them bent on reclaiming him.

Victor opens his mouth, tests his own tongue. “Many years ago,” he says, “I was cursed by an angry old woman.”

He can say it. He can stand here, and look at Yuuri, and be looked at, be touched, and he can say it.

The shadows circle. Victor is not sure how long this ritual will hold them off.

He makes the most of his freedom now to gently take one of Yuuri’s hands in his own, tracing the precious knuckles and the beautiful fingertips with their blunt fingernails and their work callouses.

He tells the entirety of the sad, sordid tale, start to finish. Yuuri never once takes his hand back.

For a week, Victor watches from a state that is somewhere between euphoria and agony while Yuuri Katsuki devises new ways to battle back the curse. Three times a day they recreate the circle now, and three times a day Yuuri crafts new and inventive spells to try to pull Victor back. It’s thrilling to watch him work, to see the determined gleam in his eye, to realize that all this is being done for him, for Victor. It’s also objectively terrifying: every session ends with Yuuri spent, with Mila wrapping a fresh blanket over his shoulders and Georgi providing a fresh cup of herbal tea.

They’re sitting in the circle within a circle again, cross-legged and facing each other, Victor’s hands resting upwards in Yuuri’s open palms when Yuuri bolts upright from his meditative state. “I’ve got it,” he says, with manic glee.

“Victor. It’s so obvious.” He laughs, suddenly, brittle, nervous; rakes his fingers through his hair, says something Victor Nikiforov has never in his life imagined he’d hear from another man:

“We’ll get married.”

“What?” Says Victor. And Mila. And Georgi.

Yuri helpfully adds: “... the fuck?”

“You have to get married, but your grandmother never specified to who. It’d be inconceivable to her that you could actually marry a man, back then, but now you can, so you don’t have to compromise by -- I mean, you’d have to marry me, or maybe someone --”

“I’ll marry you,” Victor says, and it’s only after they’ve extinguished the circle and he’s alone again in the invisible dark that he stops to think about it: about how Yuuri’s marrying him because of some loophole, some way to trick the hag’s age old-hex. It’s for you, but not because of you, he realizes, and for the first time in many, many years, he doesn’t sleep.

Yuuri comes back a few days later with a hedge witch in tow, an older woman he introduces as Minako who seems to have been talked or perhaps bribed into this entire ordeal. “Can he even sign a marriage license, your invisible Jane Austen house spirit?”

“Of course he can sign one,” grumbles Yuuri, and then he says something that breaks Victor’s heart. “I told you, it’ll be temporary, we’ll figure it out.”

They make the circle again.

Victor doesn’t come forward. He sits in a chair in the corner of the library, resigned to his fate. Perhaps he ought to be looking for ways to do what everyone else he knows has already done: shed the last remnants of his life and move on. Of course, the hex hasn’t granted him that, either.

Yuuri, beautiful, kind-hearted Yuuri, willing to marry himself into a lie just to break Victor out of the dark magic he’s stuck in, looks increasingly agitated. “Victor,” he keeps calling, softly, like he’s confused. “Victor, please. Won’t you come ... Victor, are you still here?”

It’s not until Victor realizes that he’s crying that he comes forward, slowly, conscious of the way the circle at first resists admitting him and then finally bends to allow him through. Yuuri exhales in relief. “I was so worried something had happened to you.”

“Something has happened,” Victor says, carefully, and he resists the urge to wipe away Yuuri’s tears. That’s the sort of thing that someone Yuuri loves should do, not someone he’s trying to save just because he’s a good person, bending himself into the shape of something he can’t possibly want. “You don’t have to do this, Yuuri, you ... I won’t ask you to do something so inauthentic. I can’t.”

“Inauthentic?” Yuuri whispers, bewildered, and something about it makes Victor admit to terrors he hasn’t even fully confessed to himself.

“Marrying me for the sake of marrying me,” he mumbles. “We’re not even sure it would work, and then you’ve gone and done something that’s supposed to be meaningful, and maybe it does work but maybe it’s been so long that the curse just lets time catch up with me and I just disappear or ... it works and you just, what, we annul it, and --”

“You want to annul it? After?”

It’s Victor’s turn to be bewildered. There are fresh tears in Yuuri’s eyes; he’s horrible with crying people, feels inclined to fall apart on his own. “Well, wouldn’t you? We hardly know each other.”

“I know everything about you that I need to know,” says Yuuri, with a certainty that takes Victor’s breath away.

“... What? How?”

“I know that you could have escaped this years ago by marrying some woman you could never love and you decided not to, which tells me you have integrity and you’re principled ... I know that you spent years mourning that choice and you could have become some awful, twisted version of yourself and that in some ways you would’ve had the right to, and you didn’t. I know that instead you chose to warn everyone else -- that you’ve taken care of the people who’ve come after you. I know that you’re clever and that you’re poetic and I know that if the idea of love didn’t matter to you so much you wouldn’t have spent the last hundred years so terribly alone.”

“I’m anachronistic. I’m an artifact. I belong in a museum.”

“I’m anxious and I’m not doing anything spectacular with my life and you’re going to figure it out and want to do something better,” says Yuuri.

“Yuuri, nothing on earth could be better than you.”

“Are you really arguing with him about who wants to get married more?” Yuri Plisetsky asks, from the outer ring of the circle, while Minako stands off to one side, raising an eyebrow.

“I think it’s very romantic,” Georgi says, with a hand over his heart. Mila thumps the back of his head, insults him even, but it’s incredibly fond.

Minako Okukawa conducts her first and only half-invisible marriage, and Victor signs the license that she’s somehow authorized to give them as some sort of city official. He will find out later that it was one of those things that seemed like a good idea to her once, while drunk. He will learn a lot of things later.

He hears a howl and feels the twist and snap of shadows, and they lunge on him, on Yuuri, and intuitively Victor grabs Yuuri and pulls him against his chest, ready to protect him from the old wishes of an evil, selfish woman.

Nothing happens. Yuuri is warm and real against his chest and they both take three heavy, rapid breaths.

The older woman -- Minako -- whistles. “Damn, Yuuri, you might have mentioned that he’s handsome --”

Victor looks around, sees the slightly stunned looks on Yuri, Georgi, and Mila’s faces; they’re all looking at him, eyes following him, and he’s -- he’s ...

He’s free.

He drops to one knee, takes Yuuri’s hand in his. “Yuuri Katsuki,” says Victor Nikiforov, who is going to buy so many magnolias, “... will you court me?”

“Victor,” Yuuri says. “Stand up.”

Puzzled, Victor does.

Yuuri twists his fingers around Victor’s tie and kisses him, so softly, just off-center. Mila whoops behind them.

“That’s what we do at the end of weddings, these days,” Yuuri murmurs, with a shy smile that’s utterly enchanting.

Victor is going to kiss him until everyone else is sick of it. He starts, for now, with one more; drapes his arms over Yuuri’s shoulders, tilts their foreheads together and flashes a mischievous smile, grins, even. He can’t remember the last time he’s grinned, but he’s doing it now, ear-to-ear.

“What else happens at the end of weddings, these days?”

“Victor!”

#prompts!#sim's halloween prompt-a-looza #asksimanything #victuuri #and they lived happily ever after

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