#just got to dig up some more old school stories on the subject

[see-arcane]

Your 'Ghouls are Deaths hunting dogs' idea reminds me of the one guy who, when accused of being a werewolf, said that werewolves were the hounds of God who battled witches and demons. Anne Rice (yes, she of vampire fame) wrote at least two books with a similar premise (wolven shapeshifters that can smell evil and hunt only the wicked. The books are called 'The Wolf Gift' and 'The Wolves of Midwinter' BTW.)

Vampires VS Werewolves has always been a tasty concept. I could especially see a grudge happening in the Dracula canon, considering how happy the Count is to make slavering puppets of ordinary wolves and muscle them into danger and violence against their will. I've seen it done well in tons of monster mashing media, but it's kind of lost its flavor to me as a 'gimme' of supernatural horror.

But it'd be very fun to abuse the werewolf foe assumption based on 1) A lupine profile in the head and 2) Being seen munching on a corpse...

Only for the observer to realize that's a canine (even jackal or hyena-ish) head on those misshapen shoulders and that corpse it's ripping apart isn't a fresh kill. It's full of maggots. Or worse.

Dead, but not done being sentient.

Rest in pieces, Count de Ville. 🍽

[rhondafromhr]

So I started writing that Max and Steph roleswap AU and I wanted to post this little snippet I have so far and hear everyone’s thoughts because I’m not 100% happy with it yet…idk i feel like it might be too exposition heavy if that makes sense?? Like the backstory is important but idk I feel like I just kind of dumped it and maybe could weave it throughout the story better?? Lmk if you have any thoughts :)

Also Max and Richie’s relationship is going to be platonic in this (bc once again I’m weak for aroace Richie and the power of friendship being treated with the same narrative weight as romantic relationships).

Finally shoutout to tumblr user @idk-imrambling-idk who said in the tags of the original post that Max and Steph give sibling vibes in this au because I was like you know what, I love that, yes they do!! And it really inspired their dynamic and relationship in this

Here it is :)

Stephanie learned what it meant to be powerless at the ripe old age of nine. She sat next to her father in the crowd, watching the blindingly bright spotlight shine down upon her mother and beaming with pride as she was crowned Honey Queen. The applause was uproarious, every last townsperson’s gaze fixed solely on her. She’d always known her mom was the sweetest woman in Hatchetfield, but now it was official. Now she had the beautiful, ornate crown upon her head to prove it. As her mother was whisked away to what she assumed was some sort of super special, secret ceremony, her father insisted over her protests that no, they couldn’t go with her, she needed to go home and get to bed. It was a school night, after all, and she’d see her mother soon enough. She didn’t. Her mother never came home that night and with each passing day, Stephanie’s hope that she ever would dwindled even further.

Every woman who’s ever won that pageant has left Hatchetfield and never looked back, but back then, she didn’t know that. She just knew that one day, her mom was there to fawn over her drawings and point out all the little details she liked and put her spelling test up on the fridge and say how proud she was that Steph worked so hard and got more words right than last time and the next day, she wasn’t and there was nothing Stephanie could do about it. She wondered what she did wrong that her mom was so eager to get away from her. To this day, Stephanie doesn’t know where she ended up. She went through a brief phase where she spent hours a day fervently researching online and following every crumb of information she could find, desperate for any answers, but the very few flimsy leads she was able to find turned out to be dead ends. Not long after her twelfth birthday, Solomon told her she really ought to stop digging, because she wasn’t going to find the answers she was looking for and if she did, she wouldn’t be able to handle them. She rolled her eyes at his usual weird, cryptic nonsense, but for once, she didn’t argue with him. She never did figure out how he knew what she was doing. She only did her sleuthing when she was home alone and always made sure to use incognito mode.

As she got older, the list of things she had to do and wasn’t allowed to do and people she couldn’t hang out with grew exponentially. Everything always came back to the next election and how her behavior might reflect on her father. There was to be no hanging out with the smoke club kids, because he didn’t want the public thinking she was some kind of drug fiend (as if they were doing actual drugs. They were seventh graders. They may have upgraded to the real stuff now, but back then, Stephanie’s confident their vices of choice were, in fact, cloves and oregano, whether or not they were aware of it). If there was an option for honors or AP in a given subject, she had to take it, regardless of her interest or aptitude. He didn’t want her looking like some kind of slacker. Ironically, she credits that with how she became one. It was embarrassing trying so hard, only to still struggle to understand the material and receive abysmal grades in return, but it was equally embarrassing to admit to this and ask for help, so she figured the easiest route would be to stop trying. She made sure to keep her grades just barely high enough to keep her dad off of her case, but refused to do anything more. These days, she doesn’t have to sweat it. If she’s really in a pinch, she can just threaten some nerd into doing her homework for her.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the summer before Freshman year, one Greg Jägerman followed in his wife’s footsteps and vanished without a trace. That in itself was nothing out of the ordinary, but it did raise the question of what to do with the son he left behind. Solomon wasn’t doing so hot in the polls and Miss Tessburger decided that taking in the guy’s now-orphaned kid would make Solomon look kind and charitable, two of the last descriptors most voters would apply to him. Of course, nobody asked Steph her opinion. She was just stuck with this annoying pseudo-adopted brother one day and expected to be cool with it. Well, more accurately, nobody cared whether she was cool with it or not. The worst part was that he totally bought into this stupid fake family thing. He still won’t stop calling her sis.

What really infuriates her is that he gets the freedom she’s long been denied. Solomon truly couldn't care less what he does as long as he stays out of major trouble, doesn’t completely flunk his classes and shows up for all the public appearances and family photo ops. To this day, he still calls Solomon Dad as if he has any right to, as if Solomon sees him as anything more than an unfortunate consequence of a bold PR stunt, as if he’s had to put up with a fraction of what Stephanie’s endured from him. Solomon is not his dad and he is not a Lauter, no matter how many people mistakenly call him that. Solomon even praised him once. He came home from his latest lacrosse match and proudly said that they’d creamed Sycamore or whoever. Solomon, nose-deep in the latest poll and survey results Miss Tessburger had sent him, absently said, “that’s nice, son,” and waved him off. Sure, it was insincere. Sure, it was dismissive. But it was still far more than Stephanie had gotten since she was literally nine years old and more than she’s gotten since. It made her blood boil. She’d been jumping through hoops like some kind of goddamn show dog for her father for years and never got so much as one half-hearted compliment. It was just expected of her.

Still, she continued to jump through those hoops. It wasn’t like she had much of a choice and at this point, it was all she really knew, anyway. Unsurprisingly, Solomon still demanded more and just before she went into high school, he decided she was going to do sports. If there’s one defining trait that all of his constituents in town share, it’s their bizarre obsession with high school football, so this was a surefire way to impress them.

“Why do I have to?” she’d protested “Max already plays volleyball and lacrosse, doesn’t that satisfy the sports kid requirement?”

“Stephanie, I’d like to have an intelligent conversation with you. In other words, shut up. You know as well as I do that nobody cares about either of those sports. Clivesdale doesn’t even have a lacrosse or volleyball team and beating them is all these simple-minded hicks seem to care about. If you refuse to bring up your mediocre grades or put your time into any useful extracurriculars or bettering yourself in any way, the least you can do is join the cheer squad. How hard can it be to jump around and do some silly little chants?”

Max was there, too. Of course he was. On the increasingly rare occasions where Solomon was actually home, he was sure to be right there at his side, telling him about his day as if he fucking cared. Calling him Dad as if he had any fucking right to. She didn’t miss the way his face fell ever so slightly when Solomon said that nobody cared about his stupid sports and she couldn’t help but feel smug about it.

“Ha, yeah,” she said with a smirk “volleyball and lacrosse are dumb.”

The brief satisfaction was quickly overshadowed by a more pressing matter. Hell no, she was not going to join cheer. Pep, enthusiasm and silly dance routines aren’t really her style. She wasn’t sure she could do it if she wanted to and she really, really didn’t.

“Well, figure it out,” Solomon told her, looking at her with the usual disdain “it’s either that or football.” He may have said it mockingly, but she decided to take it as a challenge. She breached her own “no putting in more effort than necessary” policy and spent hours a day on the empty football field practicing plays. She’d usually drag Max along with her if he didn’t have practice for whichever one of his unimportant non-sports was in season.

“Hey,” he said during one of these practice sessions as he threw an admittedly decent spiral, his signature dumb, goofy grin on his face “I’ve been thinking about trying out, too. It might be kinda fun to be on the team together.”

She scowled. “No,” was her only response “just shut up and throw the ball, okay?” This was going to be her thing, damnit. He wasn’t going to invade it like he did everything else in her life. He did as she asked and never brought it up again.

She spent hours more at the gym, doing hard cardio until she was as sweat-soaked as that annoying weeb kid she saw around school sometimes and pushing herself to her limits strength training. It all paid off when the day of tryouts arrived and she blew everyone away with her athletic prowess, earning the position of star quarterback. That alone would have been great publicity and the fact that she was a freshman and the first girl ever to make the team in any position were the cherry on top. It spoke volumes that Solomon didn’t have anything negative to say, although he didn’t offer any praise, either.

If nobody could stand up to her before, they really couldn’t now. She wasn’t just the mayor’s daughter anymore. She was the star football player and with every victory she helped them score, especially against Clivesdale, the teachers and the principal became less and less likely to discipline her if anyone complained of her so-called bullying. It wasn’t as if they could do much before, but now they didn’t even care to try. With that, her iron grip over the school was secured and she’s thoroughly enjoyed it ever since. She still can’t do anything about her mom walking away or her dad treating her like some kind of accessory whose only use is to make him look good to potential voters or her stupid not-brother encroaching on her life and taking everything that’s rightfully hers, but she can maintain the delicate balance that is the high school hierarchy she’s created and bring order to Hatchetfield High. Really, she’s doing them all a favor. They don’t know what’s good for them and without her, it would descend into chaos.

Max slides into his seat in AP Calc with seconds to spare before the bell rings. He’s slammed two of those vile tasting sugar free energy drinks and he’s praying they’ll kick in soon.

“Alright, we’re going to have a pop quiz today. Hope you’ve been hitting the books, Mr. Lauter,” Miss Mulberry says. He doesn’t bother correcting her. Maybe if he could wear his letterman that has “Jägerman” embroidered on it, people wouldn’t make that mistake so often, but he’s not allowed to. The letterman jacket is Steph’s signature look. Not even Kyle and Jason get to wear theirs unless it’s a game day and they’re her closest friends. Max doesn’t even get that privilege, so he settled for a navy blue flannel with a tiny nighthawk patch poorly sewn into the pocket and his letterman hangs untouched in his closet. Sometimes, he doesn’t mind being called Max Lauter, even if it sounds a little off. Sometimes, he wants to believe that’s what he is. Other times, he wishes people would get it right. That’s the least of his worries right now, though. His chest feels so, so tight and a wave of nausea overtakes him and makes him wonder if ingesting so much caffeine and chemicals was a wise idea. He’s screwed. He can barely pass a test in this class when he has time to prepare and sacrifices several nights’ worth of sleep to study. He shouldn’t even be here. He knows he’s kind of dumb. Stephanie gleefully reminds him on a regular basis. Solomon doesn’t vocalize it, but sometimes Max will say something to him and he’ll just give him this look as if he’s just uttered the stupidest, most incomprehensible words ever spoken, then shake his head and go back to ignoring him. He’s always had a lot of trouble in most subjects, but math is by far the worst. Realistically, remedial algebra would be more his speed, but it wouldn’t be very becoming of a sort-of Lauter. Solomon took him in when he had nowhere else to go. He’s been a lot nicer to him than his own father ever was. He figured the least he could do is make him proud, but so far, that plan has backfired tremendously. Nobody’s going to be impressed with the D plus that he’s clinging to for dear life and can still feel slipping through his grasp.

He glances to his left and sees his neighbor calmly reach into his backpack and pull out his pen and calculator. The sheen of sweat on his forehead would suggest that he’s almost as nervous as Max is, but his demeanor radiates confidence and excitement. Max wonders why that guy wears so many layers if he’s always so sweaty. They’ve been in classes together since the first grade, but they’ve hardly spoken two words to each other. Max has, however, watched his hand eagerly shoot up whenever Miss Mulberry asks a question. He has watched him answer every equation with ease, solving them without fail, even when it all looks like gibberish to Max. If anyone can help Max out of this jam, it’s this guy. He has no real reason to, but Max supposes it can’t hurt to ask. What’s the worst that could happen?

“Hey,” he whispers “Shitlips, right?” He immediately winces. Fuck, he did not mean to say that. That’s how Steph and her friends always refer to him and he let it slip without thinking. Richie turns to glare at Max, clearly not amused.

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly “I meant Lipschitz. Richie Lipschitz, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, still a little irritated “what is it? We’re about to take a test.”

“It’s just that, uh, we’ve been in school together for, like, ages and I just realized I’ve never introduced myself. I’m Max.”

“Yeah, I know, Max Jägerman. The mayor’s kid. Stephanie Lauter’s brother.”

“She doesn’t like me reminding people, but yeah,” Max replies with a self-deprecating chuckle “I feel kinda bad now. I called you Shitlips and you got my name right on the first try. A lot of people think it’s Lauter.”

This gets Richie to crack a faint smile. “Yeah, I always remembered it because it sounds like Eren Yeager.”

“So, you ready for this test?” says Max with a sheepish grin “‘Cause I’m really, really not. Like, nothing in this class makes even a little bit of sense to me. I’m one hundred percent going to fail. Unless you help a bro out.”

“Oh, we’re bros now?” Richie says with a raised eyebrow.

“Sure,” Max says “we’re Nighthawks, right? We gotta stick together.”

“But won’t we get in trouble?”

“Not if we don’t get caught,” Max says “rules were made to be broken.”

“Fine,” says Richie “I’m willing to tilt my paper slightly so you can see it better. Try to keep up, though, I’m not waiting to turn in my test so you can finish copying. That’ll look suspicious.” That much is true. Richie’s always the first person to turn in his test in this class, usually by a substantial amount of time. “And don’t be super obvious about it,” he adds.

“Really?” Max says, his face lighting up in a way that he rarely allows it to “thanks, dude, I owe you one!”

[mosneakers]

Nadia: [Concerned] Colonization has already set in. We are all literally doomed.

Erwin: Now don't panic, that doesn't necessarily mean—

Jeremy: Don't you have a lot of friends in Shady Acres, Erwin? We know what aliens could do to a person's memory, and they've been known to shapeshift...You trust all of them?

Erwin: Well, yeah. Tycho's my best friend; he would never. He's got family who married aliens and stuff, but he's one of us. Plus, he was away all summer, so the frequencies couldn't be coming from him. Coni used to live over there, but she lives with me now, so it's not her. That leaves Sage Darling... No. I know the Darlings. They're a little strange, but Sage is Seymour's kid. They're not aliens. And Alice, we've been friends since high school. I highly doubt it could be her.

Kayla: Doesn't sound like you have the strongest case there, bud. I'd keep an eye on them. Jeremy: I have my suspicions about the mayor... Kayla: Ohhh, the Roswells!? Maybe it could be M.I.R.A.? Erwin: I'll do some more digging. Mabel, where did you find that scientific study? The mysterious anonymous one from Strangetown? I imagine it's nowhere to be found online. Mabel: Nope. I asked the librarian. If you catch Ms. Davis and ask her for it, she'll hook you up for sure.

Erwin: K... I uh... I'm cutting this meeting short. Kayla, go off about the jackalopes or whatever.

Erwin: Ah, just the young lady I was looking for, Ms. Davis...

The librarian fidgets anxiously with her nametag and smiles up at Erwin. Ms. Davis: Oh... well hello, sweetheart... What can I help you with?

Erwin: Actually, I'm looking for some archives? Ms. Davis: ...Okay, and? Erwin: ...And I was told you can help me? I'm looking for some old science studies done in Strangetown. Really anything from Strangetown can help.

Ms. Davis peeks over the top of her glasses convincingly.

Ms. Davis: Erwin, you're not chasing alien stories still, are you? Like those crazy Salas supporters out there?

Erwin: No! Ms. Davis, of course not... I'm just curious.

Ms. Davis: Erwin...

Erwin: Well... between you and me...

Ms. Davis: Oh, sweetheart... Ms. Davis stands up from her chair, and silently walks over to Erwin.

Ms. Davis: Erwin, honey... I want you to drop the subject. Erwin chuckles, confused. Erwin: What? Ms. Davis: You heard me. The alien stuff. Drop it. It's not safe, Erwin.

Ms. Davis takes a step closer to Erwin, limiting the personal space between them; Erwin defensively takes a step back. Erwin: Ms. Davis? Ms. Davis: [Stern gaze] You're getting yourself into trouble, and you're not going to be able to come back from it. Now, there will be no more talk of aliens in my library. And if you've got any sense, you'll stop chasing them. Do I make myself clear?

Erwin is at loss for words, and nods silently with his eyes narrowed. Erwin: I... I should go. Ms. Davis: [Bobs her head in agreement] I think that'd be for the best. Go straight home, and do something useful with your time.

Erwin: I'll make sure to do that. Oh, Ms. Davis? Ms. Davis: Yes, Erwin? Erwin: You know, Ms. Davis, I find it amusing. For all the years I've been coming to this library, ever since I've known you, we had this little thing. I'd call you "Ms. Davis," and you'd always respond with "Call me Mildred, honey!" without fail. Funny how you just... forgot that today. Have a nice day.

part 2/2

[zyrafowe-sny]

Thanks for the tag, @grey-automa!

EDIT: I think @violet-prism-creatively also tagged me in this a very long time ago (had to do some digging in my Tumblr notifications).

were you named/named yourself after anyone?

My middle name is my maternal grandmother's first name. All of her children (my uncle included) had her first name as their middle name, and a good chunk of her grandkids do too.

when was the last time you cried?

A few months back when I was visiting a place I knew I wouldn't return to again in a while - I was a combination of extremely overheated, hormonal, frustrated with people with me, nostalgic, and overcome by the passage of time. I don't think I cry all that often, but enough happened to stack at once that it came out as tears.

do you have kids?

I have roommates who are significantly shorter and younger than me.

do you use sarcasm a lot?

Never ever

what's the first thing you notice about people?

This feels like a question Spencer Tracy asked Katharine Hepburn in Desk Set.

Uhh... rough relative height/age? whether they are trying to actively engage with me or are just going about their day?

what's your eye colour?

dark brown

any special talents?

I can read non-technical English with solid comprehension faster than most people I've encountered (back in high school, I could read the same short story twice in the time we were given in class to read it once, and I always need to wait for my partner to catch up when we're reading the same thing).

scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings, I guess? Not a big fan of scary movies.

where were you born?

about an hour from where my parents lived because they were paranoid and wanted a bigger hospital (my mom was considered old for a first-time mom at *gasp* 30 and they had trouble getting pregnant)

what are your hobbies?

I got back into writing fanfic after a long hiatus (thanks to Thanks to Them). I also sing in a community choir. There was a stretch when I was a little more outdoorsy (though never hardcore), but that's scaled back substantially.

have any pets?

Don't feel up for the responsibility right now. Maybe someday - my living situation is more pet friendly than it used to be - but I'm already drowning in home stuff and don't think a pet would help.

I did have a dog as a kid, but he passed away fairly young when I was in middle school.

what sport do you play/have you played?

I did marching band all through high school, if that counts. I like to ski but it's expensive and a 3-5 hour drive in reasonable weather. I don't ice skate nearly as much as I probably could/should (not sure where my skates are). My partner and I took some sea kayaking lessons once upon a time and I'd like to try that again, but it's not cheap and would be hard to fit in our schedules.

how tall are you?

5'7"

favourite subject at school?

That all depends so much on the teacher and exact class. I really enjoyed my high school physics/AP Physics teacher and even considered a major in physics/astro along with a social science major (am a hopeless generalist), but really didn't like my professors or classmates in college. (I have any regrets that I didn't push through because I like the notion of more women in STEM, but oh well.)

My favorite class as an undergrad was probably anthro of food - it had interesting readings and I got to interview people for a research paper (probably my favorite college assignment).

In grad school, I took a great class on human rights that's colored how I see many policy issues.

dream job?

I wish I knew.

I like: being useful, asking questions, figuring out answers to questions/analyzing things, figuring out how to best communicate answers to things, switching between more quantitative and qualitative work, being able to be just the right amount of stimulated between the work itself and/or any background media, being able to body double (I do well with cubicles/shared offices and less well when I'm in a room by myself), working more on deliverables than project/people management and presenting, and getting several-hour blocks when I'm allowed to just focus and only be interrupted by the most urgent fires.

I might have burned out badly in a past job when also going through some other personal stuff.

I'll be job hunting for the first time in a while probably inside the next year, and am dreading it.

no pressure tagging: @abstract-moth @thegrimshapeofyoursmile @enigma-the-mysterious/@sir-ballister-boldheart @childlikegoblinqueen @sercezgazety

And of course anyone else who wants to.

I turned off reblogs because some of this information approaches personally identifying, but feel free to copy-paste the questions into your own post!

[animehouse-moe]

Don't Call It Mystery Omnibus Volume 1: The Mystery That Isn't Mysterious

I'll cut to the chase (and completely ignore my terribly bad subtitle for this post), I think this is definitely a story that a lot of people will be interested in. Of course, there's reasons for that, but if you find the concept of a mystery series intriguing, you're bound to enjoy this unique rendition of it from the expert mangaka Yumi Tamura. So, allow me to walk you why, in a spoiler free fashion (spoilers: it's because it's so good you shouldn't read spoilers until you've read it).

So, Yumi Tamura isn't exactly a household name in English, especially in this day and age. But I can pretty comfortably say, within the Shoujosei community, they're very high up there as an accomplished and successful mangaka. They've several highly regarded series underneath their belt that includes the focus of this post, alongside Basara and 7 Seeds. Basara was published in English a long time ago, but has long since been out of print, so in this current day and age this is the only accessible Yumi Tamura manga, so people should absolutely be getting on it while they can.

Anyways, why is Don't Call It Mystery good? Well, I'll start with the art. I'll say it flat out, the paneling isn't something out of this world. It's not, and hoping for a dialogue heavy mystery manga like this to have some creative flow or anything is probably asking a little much. The art on the other hand? It's got that classic styling to it. The very old school and sort of wispy and sketchy approach that has characters with very unique and intriguing proportions. It's a style that's undoubtedly aged, but has done so like fine wine.

So what about the story then? In short, nothing less than incredibly interesting and highly engaging. Being so dialogue heavy and rather slow paced, it's very easy to find a story boring or disinteresting, but the format of Don't Call It Mystery keeps those feelings at bay. The whole idea is to follow our lead character, Totonou Kunou, as he gets roped into mystery after mystery, and how those cases come to a head. You could say it's like Sherlock Holmes, if he was arrested on suspect of murder, or was directly involved/subject to the crimes he was attempting to solve. And I think that's what makes it so interesting.

It flips mystery on its head

Rather than from the outside looking in, trying to put the pieces together to form the how, Don't Call It Mystery places the readers and Totonou in the hot seat, as we break apart the mystery from the inside out. If you want, you have the answers to each of the crimes and curiosities very early on, but that's not the focus. Rather than the how of the mystery, we look at the why alongside Totonou. And I think that's such a fun spin on the concept. You get placed in front of the murderers and sociopaths and social rejects, and are encouraged to piece together their worlds alongside Totonou.

And because of that, the focus shifts from the world to the characters. It's quite literally a world of difference, and I find it to be a really great idea. It turns solving a mystery into exploring one. You probe the minds of each characters as Totonou slips into guidance counselor mode (even though he's just a university student), and the conversations that arise from it speak to a desire to dig deeper into the existence of the person behind the conversation. Why is a serial killer doing what they're doing, what does a person think of death or killing, how do they view themselves and the world around them. It's a host of questions an curiosities that strikes at the core of each person and their insecurities.

Now, speaking about characters, you can't have a good character-centric story without good characters. And there's plenty of them through this first omnibus. More than anything, a lot of them come off playful, which I found interesting. You wouldn't think a tense murder plot would have room for flippant behavior, but it's there, and it works. It cuts the tension of the interactions very comfortably, and makes for a more relaxing read than you might expect. The levity really helps shift readers away from the gravity of violence and killing, and towards the curiosity and interest in exploring another person.

But let's talk specifics, specifically Totonou-kun. I really enjoy their character, for a lot of reasons. Namely, their perceived passivity of the world. It's as a way to pass time, or out of boredom, hardly ever is the mystery something that Totonou has express interest in. It's a bold strategy, but nonetheless one that certainly pays off. When faced with his interest in curry, or making it to an art exhibit on time, Totonou's disinterest in the dire situations and challenges he's faced with makes for an exciting approach. More than that though, it's the perfect personality to use as your vehicle for the exploration of the people around them. Without much a reason to, the unbiased prodding of those unfortunate enough to end up around him produces incredibly interesting results.

But I think I've rambled on long enough at this point. You want a mystery? This has got it. You want interesting theories and ideas? This has it. You want a refreshing take on the genre? It's right in front of you. Don't Call It Mystery checks so many boxes in regards to its experience that there's certainly far more people out there that would enjoy it than there is people that wouldn't. So, what's the hold up on it then? Grab a volume and get started on reading this oddly obvious mystery manga.

[practically-an-x-man]

I'm back with more asks :3

Your characters are asked to teach one full semester of a course at a university/college for a substantial amount of money. It can be on any topic of their choosing, but they need to be able to fill the entire semester with material in order to get paid. What topics do they choose? Who has a subject ready to go? Who makes up something on the spot just for the paycheque?

Oooooh very good question!! Thank you!

Rae: Since she already teaches languages for the X-Mansion sometimes, she sets up a language course at this university too.

Robin: Vocal performance, history of music, something like that

Madison: Struggles for a while - she never went to college, technically she never even finished high school - but eventually manages to set up a course on identifying the native plants and animals in the area.

Ophelia: Would actually have a lot of fun with it: she'd end up teaching Intro to Engineering to undergrads, and her students would love her for how passionate she is about the craft and how she's willing to take more of a "no-rules" approach to it (y'know she's got the textbook but she also tells stories about how she's built things with techniques that technically shouldn't be done)

Jasper: Honestly... they're swamped. They don't have time to come up with a full lesson plan. They end up digging out one of their old college notebooks from whatever class they least hated, and reverse-engineering that class to teach.

Kestrel: Actually gets really involved in planning this lesson on zoology and wildlife science, it's really their passion... and then gets fired from teaching for bringing in a live owl one day without warning the university about it. (the owl was Kestrel, there was no danger, but obviously they couldn't explain that they're a shapeshifter)

Katherine: Hm... I feel like she'd end up turning it into more of a studio space - just enough of a lesson plan to still qualify as a class, but that in practicality acts more as a space for students to recharge and express a little creativity. She tosses in a few fun stories about her passions, art and ancient history and what have you, but the tests are all super easy and the grades are really just technicalities

Quinn: Turns it into a game - how much total bullshit can she make up on the spot and get away with? She actually spends more effort on her fake lesson plan than most teachers do on her real lesson plan, just to make things completely airtight. She makes it through the semester and even cashes in that nice check before the university is like "wait what the fuck"

Eris: You might guess that they wouldn't even show up - why do they need money? But actually, I think they'd have an absolute ball teaching history from their perspective. The first few classes would be a bit of a drag, but by the end of the semester they're bringing in their old weapons as demonstrations, they're holding reenactments out in the courtyard, they're teaching the students swears in dead languages... they end up being most students' favorite professor, just because they don't give a shit about anything except having fun

(Now I'm imagining Rick popping in some days to bring them coffee or whatever, and Eris is... Eris, y'know, about the most affectionate they'll ever get, and the students end up developing a whole running narrative about who this Rick guy is that's so close to their immortal war-obsessed professor here)

Nikoletta: She's running on a high school education and fifteen years of federal imprisonment, but she really needs that paycheck. She ends up giving a lesson on metahumans, at first sticking to standard lessons about Superman and the Flash and the others everyone knows about, but eventually manages to corral her buddies from the Suicide Squad into giving demonstrations. She even demonstrates her own power (though she's careful to save that for the end of the semester, just so none of her students panic)

[booksandchainmail]

Pale 7.8 extra

Interesting, I think this is the first extra material we've had that is just normal text? (ie not in-universe writings, not multimedia)

Very interested to get to see more of Lucy's mom. So far we have her meeting Avery's parents... I wonder if Verona's dad was invited? Also curious if this is just a general getting to know child's friend's parents meeting, or if they want to talk over specific concerns

We were friends, before, as much because of the girls putting us in close proximity as anything.

I hadn't thought of Verona's mother as being friends with Lucy's, it's never come up before. Though I know my parents didn't remain close to any people they spent time with because I was friends with their children as a kid

“Don’t even get me started on work schedules,” Brett told her.

Taken by itself, nothing Verona's dad is saying would necessarily be a red flag, but combined with everything we've already seen of him it bothers me. Immediately going into complaining about work when asked what he does, the grousing about Verona that doesn't seem lighthearted to me...

“Is she getting along with either of the two more?” Connor asked.  He looked at Kelsey, who frowned.

don't dig for information like that! If there was something going on, let her tell you in her own time. Also, if Avery was dating one of the others, and they weren't out either, this would be a great way to tip off their parents.

It’s like her skin crawls if she’s in my company for more than five seconds, she runs off to her room or leaves the house at the next opportunity.

now this one is a red flag

“This was weeks of moments,” Brett said.  “I was looking things up and thinking about oppositional defiant disorder.”

of course you were

I can’t talk to her about my work, basic household needs, school and homework…

notably absent from this is her own interests. Why would your work be the first thing you think about talking with your child about?

So clever in many ways that she outsmarted her way out of doing well in school.

I consider this a valid strategy, if sometimes self-sabotaging

"She took up habitual lying…” “It’s that imagination,” Jasmine said.  “She had no outlet.  She stopped art, and she had nothing, so she started telling stories.”

...hmmm. Well obviously she can't do this now, and doesn't seem to need it, but I'm curious what was going on with that, if it was really just an over-active imagination.

Also, man but everything Brett says about Verona is framed in a negative light

Except, I suppose I’m lucky she’s slow to develop. She’s the most kid-like of the three, I think. A late bloomer.

hahahahahaha

“When she and Lucy were old enough to know how to navigate the web but young enough to not know about internet history, let’s just say the searches I saw raised a few eyebrows.  Only when Verona was there.”

yeah that tracks. Both for Verona's character and for that age range

“I thought about one of those wilderness survival retreats.  You know those?  Send the kid out into the woods to rough it, disconnect from technology and outside influences, make them build their own fires, teach them self-reliance and discipline, respect for authority?”

oh hate that. And I liked camping as a kid! But why the fuck are you bringing "respect for authority" into perfectly good outside time

He said that as much as I or Lucy might want to look at this as a resolution, a release, it isn’t. All of that stress and worry and lack of resolution is still there. It’s not fixed or better. She’s certainly not happier or healthier in the wake of it.

:( I'd like to think she got some closure from it... but she certainly isn't less stressed, though there are obviously extenuating circumstances

“I wanted to ask about Julie Hardy,” Connor said. “Going back to the subject of influences-”

...and this would be the catch with Avery's dad. And also the reason why Ms. Hardy's been so careful about interacting with her.

I was awkward and struggled and I tried on a lot of different hats and explored a lot of different identities as a way of diagnosing and trying to fix what was wrong with me.  When it was just regular puberty.

:|

“Avery has expressed some concerns to her mom.  I was hoping to get a clear picture about why, but… Brett’s take is only half a picture, isn’t it?”

good that they're talking about this, and not taking him at face value

Verona takes in stuff and digests it privately, and her mom’s similar to her in that. The thought processes behind the scenes can be impenetrable sometimes.

hmm. Not sure what I have to say here, but I want to leave a not for myself about similarities between Verona and her mother. Wonder if that's making things with her dad worse?

“I just-” Jasmine started, stopped, shook her head.  “If she’s going to be pushed to take action, I want it to be later.  When she’s equipped, educated, grounded and secure in herself.  Change the world, you know?”

I have some bad news for you about what's going on this summer

“And if you don’t have those things, that grounding, education, preparation, what happens?  Another Paul incident.”

or considerably worse

OH! New section! Lore section! Murderer section! Going to analyze this excruciatingly:

Non-italics likes John, which narrows it down to the Kennet Others (no one else knows him). "Everything falls into place" so there's more than just power at stake? Both Kennet and "the rest of us" are taken care of (wording seems to imply once italics takes the seat). Who is that? The rest of the Kennet Others? There's not all that many of them.

Hmm! “The girls. Miss picked some scarily good ones." This would imply to me that Miss was not part of their group. I'd already been leaning towards her not being involved, but this is further confirmation.

italics doesn't want to kill them. General antipathy to violence (would be weird for someone aiming for a war seat) or good feelings to them in particular?

italics was also opposed to the school. OH! finally answer to something someone asked me way back when I was speculating about why Miss picked the girls: if she was trying to keep them controlled, why give them access to the school. Well besides the fact that I'm less suspicious of Miss now, going to the school gives them access to knowledge and power that isn't routed through the murder suspects.

"playing our parts"... kinda makes me think Fae, but that's a tenuous connection. And "we all"... so there's more than just these two.

Very ominous all over!

[sarrie]

Ok fuck it I'm in a Music Mood and I'm going to include youtube links to all of my favorite Depeche Mode songs per album so this post is probably going to load like ass I apologize. Why am I doing this?? idk man growing up my dad listened to a ton of Depeche Mode and as a teenager I would lay in bed with headphones on listening to all my dad's old Depeche Mode CDs they've kind of just been present my whole life.

(i wish we could make our own customized Keep Reading text à la livejournal dot com)

From Greatest Hits (1987) because, listen, the amount of singles and single round-ups they have is wild so we're just going to start here since it includes a majority of what i like pre-1987 onward. Also I wish I could just share the entire album lmAO but i'm trying to keep the lists like. top top favorites.

I feel like Shake the Disease is this very bare bones version of Depeche Mode. Like, it's the staples. All the things that make up their future songs are there, but they haven't quite gotten comfortable in their style yet. It's such a good starting point for their sound, to me.

(tw referenced self harm in lyrics) Was I like 16 listening to this song and crying? MAYBE. The heavy industrial pushing this moody synth. Uuggghh IT'S SO GOOD. Surface level this song is good, and then you're going through some hard shit in high school and it becomes something that helps keep you together.

(cw flashing/strobing images at 1:06 to 1:17, and 1:54 to 2:02) The fucking dancing. The peppy "You treat me like a dog, get me down on my knees. :D" The superimposed dancing. It is, indeed, just A lot.

Another classic tbh. I love the train sounds at the beginning of the song. "Metropolis has nothing on this You're breathing in fumes, I taste when we kiss" I'm feral the imagery in this song is so so good. This is also a song where I feel like Dave's vocals really shine. And again got me weak with the Dave + Martin combo at the interlude.

Music For The Masses (1987)

Never Let Me Down Again is like. idk. one of those high ranking songs for me. The lack of separation between homoerotic subtext and the glaring drug addiction in the lyrics is so good. (I know it's about the drug addiction more than anything, but the vibes are there.) Soundscape-wise I LOVE how big this song feels. Depeche Mode is so good at that, though. I don't know how to explain it better, but it's like even if you're listening through headphones their music just fills the room.

Is it a list without Strangelove?? I give in to sin Because you have to make this life livable But when you think I've had enough from your sea of love I'll take more than another riverful Like y'all come on lmao.

I remember not particularly liking this song and then getting to the vocals/lyrics. The harmonizing between Dave and Martin's voices is so good. There is a comment on genius for the lyrics of this song that just says: The song is obviously about sexual submission, a subject in which Martin Gore is very interested. Which. Ok mood, Martin. But, I DUNNO MAN I feel like you can never be that face value with their music like that. That being said, good for him.

Did some digging on song meanings and one thing I got for this one was a younger man and an older woman in a relationship, with the narrator explaining to the younger guy what the older woman got out of the relationship which is. Interesting?? You get into the lyrics and it definitely fits. And then at like 2:04 it breaks into this tone shift and then the piano at 2:25 the whole thing becomes very serious. It's one of those songs that just kinda tells a story.

[gendertroublemaker]

Hello

My thoughts on Ethel Cain and what artists own us in general, a lot of this message is her old tumblr Q&A where she wasn’t shit posting (she did a lot of that)

Anonymous said:

i'm so SO excited to see how golden age and inbred will bleed into this trilogy you've been talking about. it feels like i've seen ethel cains back story, her deepest fears, her emotions and feelings. but i don't know whats actually happened to her yet, or will happen to her. but i know i connect with her, but i need to see what ride she's taking me on.

She answered:

I always say Golden Age and Inbred don't fit into the trilogy but they honestly do in a way. Ethel Cain isn't me but she is in a way. Those EPs are just my experiences from when I was younger so they're hers in a way too. Everything moving forward will have an actual story that's tied together but those two EPs do fit in in a way.

This stuck out to me in a way it’s someone processing their abuse and that could be the incest they were subjected too She has said before that she hates when people make her too much of a persona that she writes about real, traumatic experiences that shouldn’t be romanticized. lot of people get off on their abuse and I know that makes people angry because it doesn’t give off “perfect victim mentality” but some victims want to read more into it, write about and sing about it to have some form of control.

Anonymous said:

Mother what was your thought process while writing your song inbred? I know it tells a story and it's so wonderfully written. I think it's something some people couldn't handle listening to because it's SO intense. It resonates with my trauma.

She answered:

i was stuck inside my house because of how bad the winter was here and i was really angry at everything around me and i just wanted to make something that i could just scream out in frustration. i made it out of anger towards a lot of different people who have wronged me lol. i love when other artists do that so i wanted to try it myself

I don’t think Ethel owns people any kind of explanation of what she has gone through but she flags it with hints and off hand comments that shouldn’t be ignored (I will explain further down)

Something a tumblr user posted before that I think of: you mean the artists who write about the rotten and the wretched and the unhealthy and the abusive enjoy digging into fictional relationships that are just that

This sums up a lot of what I want to say but to actually explain my point: She shipped Wincest in high school that’s just one of the posts other than the clearly sarcastic one you posted as evidence. I tried to find anything else but couldn’t. Again, artists who write about fucked up shit have for sure read or were interested in it. I think people want clean and in-your-face explanations for everything in art, but we’re not owed that, and most of the time it feels like they are hand-holding. To be disgusted by art and say that it makes you uncomfortable, unhappy, upset, or angry is one thing, but saying the artist is a bad person because of it is just weird and controlling of media. To step on the freedom of artists—how they express their feelings because you don’t agree with their method, because YOU have been through it and it doesn’t align with the way you think it should be expressed, is not an excuse. You are not owed anything from artists or anyone for that matter. Personally, I have also been a victim of this kind of abuse, but I am the opposite. I delved more into it and got obsessed only in a fictional way because everyone has the right to process what they’ve gone through in their own way, and they don’t have to be clear and clean about it; they can be messy and scream and make you feel sick if they want. And even if they aren’t victims themselves I still enjoy it if it’s done well and not fetishized (THEIR ART not the art they consumed) which you didn’t think her music was until you decided shes “not a victim” you said before that you loved or liked it so I’m guessing you found the way she touched the subject to be tasteful before deciding she’s actually fucked up for mentioning a movie about incest or a ship. Did you expect someone who writes about those things not to watch or read about it?? Not everything has to be personally related to be talked about, fictional incest has always been around and it’s one of the oldest forms of storytelling; that should say something by itself. Although you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written about. Artists don’t have to condemn everything they do; you should be able to pick up on that from the text. This applies to many other stories like “Lolita,” “120 Days of Sodom.” Richard Silken was intrigued by toxic, unhealthy, possessive relationships and that’s fine because art and stories aren’t always there to make you feel comfortable or good or pure. They can be unsettling and not personally affected, but that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize it. (You aren’t criticizing the art, you are hating on the artist.)

For example, “A Little Life” has a lot of themes of abuse and violence but mostly seemed like trauma porn that wasn’t well-written. I was glad the main character died by the end because it’s not well-written or tasteful story, It was like watching someone fall down a mountain with no meaning behind it. I see that as more fetishizing of trauma than any of the artists I mentioned. Ethel didn’t just have themes of incest but a lot more (abusive families and relationships) and now is she fetishizing it because she didn’t say “hey I been through this” ? to be clear i think artist should be freaks and weirdos without begin accused of supporting what they make, if anything it produces a lot of complex discussions and ideas and emotions it makes a lot of people feel seen and understood

Please think of this as a fruit for thought and not an attack, reminding anonymous because I don’t want to be yelled at lol

U rlly sent me all that….. Jesus fuckin Christ 🤦‍♂️ stop being a condescending little cunt and fuck off. U bitches rlly need to stop sending me asks abt this OH MY GOD. Literally I am a victim of incest so shut ur mouth

[rwprincess]

Head Over Feet (Brian Johnson x Fem!Reader)

Masterlist

Word Count: 4.8k

Synopsis: What’s that sound? It’s another anachronistic Brian Johnson songfic! (Based on Alanis Morissette’s Head Over Feet) You’re one of Bender’s trash-punk friends and things change drastically when he brings the scrawny brain from detention with him to meet you all. Set up in snippets, your relationship develops with Brian, even if you weren’t really looking for a relationship.

CW: Teenage smoking (including reader), swearing, parental abuse (being being kicked out), sexism, angst and fluff

“This is Johnson,” Bender indicated the boy he brought along to your group’s spot under the bleachers.

“Brian, please.” The kid corrected. You eyed the gangly youth from top to bottom; in his sweater over a crisply-ironed collared shirt and khakis, he definitely didn’t fit in here with you all. You’d be called grungy punks at best. You didn’t think any of you even owned an iron and crisp definitely wasn’t your style. You blew out a puff of smoke, exhaling the nicotine from your lungs and shifted your gaze to Bender, wondering what he was at with this. He wasn’t the best guy, but pranking this preppy little nerd by bringing him down to your hangout? That seemed beneath him.

“You, uh, running some kinda charity here, Bender? We’re not exactly Make-A-Wish material, kid.” Scorch told the blonde dweeb and you snorted at the thought.

“Shut the fuck up,” was all Bender said in response. The rest of the twenty minutes of Brian Johnson standing there was of course, incredibly awkward and it was clear to everyone that he didn’t fit in. But that didn’t stop him from coming back a week later. And again a few days after that. And again and again until, well, that dork had grown on the lot of you. While he didn’t partake in cigarette smoking like most of you, he did take Bender up on his weed on several occasions and was actually really funny while high. He did weirdly spot-on impressions and had a sense of humor that none of your group had anticipated.

And, as much as you would vehemently deny it, you liked him when he was sober, too. He was incredibly smart and helpful and while his jokes were different without marijuana in his system, he could be amusing. That first awkward encounter was back in March, maybe April. But now you spent time with him without the convenience of school pulling you together. Now it was June and you sought to spend time with him, even without the group. Tonight, you were laying in a field not far from the high school, just the two of you. You liked to listen to him ramble on about the constellations and the myths about why they were named as they were. You remembered liking that as a kid, but you didn’t remember most of the stories. You knew you could ask him questions about the actual stars, too. Like, the science of it, and he would know. But you’d rather let him ramble and tackle one subject at a time. Even though he focused more on science and math, he was a pretty good storyteller, and right now that provided you with more of an escape than talking about the chemical composition of a star. When he finished his retelling of Ursa Minor’s story, however, he remained silent and didn’t start up a new piece of lore. After a moment, you looked at him to see what the hold up was, but you just caught his eye as his gaze was already fixed on you. Your heart started pounding in your chest because you knew what was coming.

“You know, we could go on an actual date some time.” Brian suggested, breaking the silence. You closed your eyes, almost wincing at the words. He was generally more subtle than this, but the same idea had been brought up before. It wasn’t that you didn’t like Brian. In general, you did, and in the honest depths of your soul, it was as more than a friend. But, every time it came down to this subject, you panicked. You had never been serious with anyone and the thought of dating was completely foreign to you. You had messed around with some guys before but you never had feelings for them. You didn’t know how to depend on another person, to have an actual relationship with them.

I had no choice but to hear you

You stated your case time and again

I thought about it

You sighed, your eyes still closed. You didn’t know what to tell him. Before, he always left it as more of a hint and it was easier to dodge. Now he was just coming out and saying it. Basically asking you out, so you would actually have to turn him down this time. The terrible thing was, you didn’t really want to. The conscious side of you wanted to agree and go out with him, on a proper date. But your subconscious kicked you into fight or flight mode and if you weren’t in the middle of a field, you might have picked flight and walked away. But that didn’t seem to be an option.

“Look, Johnson. It’s not that easy. Just...don’t waste your time on me.”

“I’m already wasting my time on you.” He pointed out, but when you took a peek at him, he didn’t seem upset about it. He was actually grinning about it. “We’re already wasting our time out here. Or at the library, or under the bleachers… So why not like, a movie theater or dinner, or my house?”

“Oh yeah, your mom would love having me around.” You joked, humorlessly. The smattering of times you had met Brian’s mother hadn’t gone swimmingly. You could read the derision in her voice and knew she did not approve of her good little baby hanging out with a ne’er-do-well like you.

“She’d come around. You’re different once someone actually gets to know you.” He meant it as a compliment, but you took it as your out.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” You leapt up, indignantly and he just gaped at you like a fish out of water.

“I didn’t mean anything bad by it, I swear!” He put his hands up defensively as you looked down at him. “Forget it, I’m sorry.” You had victory, he dropped the subject and your friendship could last another night and you could try to pretend like he wasn’t right, that you two weren’t meant to be something more.

*~~~~*

You treat me like I'm a princess

I'm not used to liking that

You ask how my day was

For the most part, working at Bert’s auto shop felt worthwhile and valuable. Other days, it chewed you up and spit you out. It was hard being in such a masculine environment and not fitting into that type. Customers (mostly men, but even the women too) thought that you were less knowledgeable and handy than your cohorts. Bender’s teasing didn’t help that image, either.

Now you slid into the booth at Gino’s pizzeria utterly deflated and defeated. Of course, Brian took notice right away. “Rough day?” He inquired, pushing a menu towards you even though he knew you ordered the same thing every time.

“That’s not even the half of it. Why does Bender hafta be such a dick all the time?!” You asked, incredulously but sincerely, diving right into your problem.

“I don’t know. I think he thinks it’s part of his charm? Maybe it is. I mean, we’re still friends with him.” You nodded at his point, but clenched your fists just the same.

“I just wish he knew when to back off sometimes. Like, he never realizes he’s taking it too far and digging you further into a shithole.”

“What did he do this time?” Brian’s gaze on you was unbroken; it made you feel important, like your opinion, your story, was the only thing that mattered.

“So we got this old guy in the shop today. Beautiful car, so of course he was hesitant with me touching it.” You began and his eyebrows furrowed, already not liking the direction this was going. “And I’m trying to prove myself worthy to work on this car, even though I would just be doing an oil change, which isn’t like a big deal anyway, right? Simple stuff.” You looked to him to get acknowledgement to move forward.

“I mean, I guess. I don’t really know about oil changes or anything about cars. But I know you do.”

“Right, so Bender has to go and make a crack to the old guy about how they won’t let me near it and I’m just the secretary for the shop or whatever. Just a total dick move. But of course the guy believed him and laughed with him and sent me to go get him a cup of coffee? I mean, what the hell is that?”

“That’s not right. And you wear a mechanic’s uniform at work, why would he think--?”

“Because macho man Bender told him I was! He was more believable than me.” You sank back and put a hand up to brace your forehead as the waitress approached the table. You prepared to order your drink when she set down exactly what you would have ordered in front of you and walked away, promising to come back in a few minutes. You blinked at the cup as if it magically had appeared.

“I uh, figured you’d get the usual and you’d need it when you got here, so I ordered for you. I hope that’s okay.” Brian said and then looked away, suddenly embarrassed by the idea. Since he wasn’t looking at you anyway, you allowed your lips to twitch up into a smile threatening to break out on your face...but only for a moment.

“Yeah, whatever. So anyway, Bender…” you carried on, pretending nothing happened, but secretly cataloguing his gesture in your memory.

*~~~~*

The only thing worse than arguing with Brian or him pissing you off was him making you laugh. There were times that you would go home with sore sides and itchy eyes from the tears that formed while laughing so hard. Then you would always, always reflect on the hours you just spent together, feeling the warmth and butterflies tickle your insides and a nervous heat would prickle your skin as you thought about how happy Brian made you. He never pushed you to do anything; he liked you the way you were. Sure, he would drop hints here and there about how you should stop smoking or give you advice when you had a particularly bad argument with one of your friends, but overall, he just accepted you. And you knew how hard that was to find.

You had never been popular and when junior high rolled around, you accepted that you never would be. You found your own little group of outcasts who understood what it was like to be kicked down time and again, and now he had somehow joined that group too. You knew he understood how it felt. Even though he looked different and came from a very different social circle, he had been looked down upon by his peers all his life. You were guilty of judging him the same way when you first met him, but now you couldn’t imagine life without him. He was cut of the same cloth and you could see yourself in him, which is why you just clicked. And he was so kind and so patient with you. You tried to push him away dozens of times, to put up the barriers and the walls that worked so well for everyone that came before him; you couldn’t be hurt if you never got attached. Where most people gave up and only saw the cold, distant bitch you gave them, Brian always saw something more. He didn’t give up in breaking down those walls, and even accepted just being your friend. That made you love him even more.

Shit, wait. Did you just think about loving Brian? A crush is one thing. Having a buddy to fool around with is one thing. Being in love was quite another.

You've already won me over in spite of me

Don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet

Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are

I couldn't help it

It's all your fault

*~~~~*

Mercedes Johnson was all about keeping up appearances, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t hear her arguing with Brian on the other side of the door, about you. Again. You had known from the second you met her that she didn’t like you. She was instantly worried about the influence you’d have on her son; it was a common reaction from parents based on the way you looked and the company you kept. You would think you’d be used to it by now.

However, it truthfully bothered you more because this was Brian’s mother. You were hoping that she would be different and see the person underneath like her son had, or at the very least, that she would eventually warm up to you. You had no luck with either.

“I’m not comfortable with having her over at the house right now.” You could hear her tell Brian.

“She’s my friend, ma. Of course she’s going to come over--”

“I’m aware of that but you know I wish she weren’t. I would prefer that you keep the company of other friends.” The formality of her sentences while she was still cruelly putting you both down made you cringe.

“You don’t know her because you won’t give her a chance. She’s not that different from my other friends.”

“You have friends in the Physics Club, from Knowledge Bowl, Honor Students. You don’t need the association with a hoodlum like that or John Bender and I don’t know why you keep insisting on bringing them into my home when I have repeatedly told you no. I don’t want them around your sister, or even you!”

“Fine. Then we’ll leave.” You heard the door swing open harshly and Brian was motioning for you to follow him out of the house.

“Brian Ralph Johnson!” You heard his mother cry after the two of you. Brian held open the front door for you and you looked at him cautiously before rushing out. You knew you weren’t wanted there, but you were worried that he wouldn’t come with you. You were even more worried that he would. “You are not leaving this house.” Mercedes put on the most intimidating tone you had witnessed her use.

“No, I am. We are. I’ll see you later.”

“Don’t bother coming back tonight if you walk out of this house!” She was now pink-faced and losing all of the reserved, polished look you had seen her have. She had never been so...uncomposed.

“Don’t worry. I won’t.” Brian said and grabbed you by the elbow as he escorted you down the driveway to your car. He immediately got into the passenger seat and as you sunk behind the steering wheel, you glanced at him.

“Brian, this is stupid. You don’t have to---you shouldn’t do this.” The whole situation reminded you of the many times you had been kicked out of your house. This was just another home you weren’t welcome in.

He clenched his jaw in response. “Let’s just go. I’ll figure it out later. Please, just drive.”

Your love is thick and it swallowed me whole

You're so much braver than I gave you credit for

That's not lip service

“Your mom gave you a choice, you know. It’s not like she told you to get out. She actually told you not to leave.” You said as you both sat on the trunk of your car, looking out across the field that was slowly turning to a golden hue, both from the afternoon sun and the change into autumn. Neither of your houses were really an option to go to, so you just chose the empty field that you would look at stars in during the summer.

“It’s not like it was really a choice though, was it? I’m tired of her trying to control every part of my life. I need to start thinking for myself, doing things for myself. She needs to understand that I’m going to do what I want, and like who I want to like.” He looked at you meaningfully for a moment, but you looked away quickly. It was too heavy for you to process right now.

“That’s a big step. I’m really impressed with you for standing up for yourself.” You told him, and he gave you an appreciative, heart-stopping smile in return that caused your cheeks to flush. Your parents had shouted at you to leave so many times before, any time you were ‘inconvenient’ for them, that it was hard to relate to someone who chose not to stay. But you wanted to support him and you did feel proud of him today. You thought back to the most recent event in which you had been dismissed from your family, and how you had tried to take it out on Brian:

You slammed your locker and watched him almost jump out of his skin. “I don’t want to talk about this.” You growled at Brian.

“I understand that, but you need to. You can’t just--”

“Just what?”

“You can’t just act like nothing happened or run away from it...run away from here.” You had been disciplined at school yet again and your parents had had enough. You had a big fight with them the night prior and did not sleep in your own bed. The tiredness racked your body today and you were stiff from sleeping in your car. If it weren’t for the social aspect, you wouldn’t have bothered coming to school. But you quickly realized you weren’t in the mood to talk to anyone, and you were only making the situation worse.

“Like hell I can’t.” You stated, quickly turning to walk away.

“Y/N, don’t. Come on, talk to me. Tell me what happened. We can figure it out together.”

“There’s nothing to figure out, bucko. I’ll be fine. I’ll do this on my own. I’m used to that anyway.”

“But you don’t have to be alone, Y/N. That’s what I’m saying! That’s my whole point: I’m here for you!”

“I didn’t ask you to be, Brian.”

“No, because friends don’t have to ask.” His words scared you. Nobody had so adamantly offered to be a safety net to you before.

“Yeah,” you scoffed, “we’re great friends. We’ve bonded so much in the, what, four months you’ve known me?” You rolled your eyes, trying to make him feel uncomfortable, to drive a wedge between you. You only knew how to put up walls, how to run.

“You know we are.”

“Yeah, sure, right. Friends. Not like you want to sleep with me or anything.” You tried to drive another knife into him, to play it off like he was following you only because he had a crush on you, one you tried to pretend wasn’t reciprocated. “It’s not going to happen, Brian. So just accept that we’re not friends.”

He let you get about three steps away before you heard him say, “No. I know what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work. Sure, part of me wants something more, but...I care about you, Y/N. And if we can just be friends, I am happy with that, I swear. But don’t do this to me. Don’t try to shut me out or walk away or act like you’re fine. I know you well enough to know you’re not.” When you turned around, you could see that he had tears rimming his eyes, threatening to fall, which made your own tears spring up as well. “I am your friend. I’m not going to just let you go and do something stupid. You are going to talk about this. If not to me, then someone else. But you can’t just run away or sleep in your car or, or…”

“Okay.” You said, softly.

“Okay?”

“Fine, let’s talk about it. I screwed up again and my parents kicked me out. So what do I do?”

“Y/N, I’m so sorry. I...we’ll think of something.” He began to tell you, but you bit your lip and drowned him out in your own sobs. Everything crashed in on you at once; you hadn’t escaped in time. You slid down your locker wall and sat on the floor. Brian joined you and put his arm around you tentatively.

You are the bearer of unconditional things

You held your breath and the door for me

Thanks for your patience

After that day, you knew he wouldn’t let you go. You tried your best to brush him off, to hurt him, to land irreparable blows. But it was all in vain; he stuck by you. You admired how he stood up for you, for your relationship, whatever that meant. He didn’t back down, even though you knew he genuinely cared what you thought. He was willing to put everything on the line just to be with you, in whatever capacity you would allot him. And today, he had chosen you again. He had picked a fight with his mother and chosen you. He placed you above being safe and comfortable and at home right now.

“I’m sorry, this must seem so stupid to be complaining about. I know I don’t have it that bad, it’s just that--”

“No, your problems are valid, too. Your mom sucks.” You told him and he laughed, “But I would be lying if I said it wasn’t...weird to have someone be given the choice to stay instead of being yelled at to get out and that you’re worthless and---I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make this about me.” You said softly, looking down at your hands.

“No, I get it. It’s gotta be on your mind a lot, the uncertainty. Plus, I don’t mind talking about you.” He nudged your shoulder with his own, trying to be playful but you knew he meant that. He always put you first. You couldn’t help your next impulse as your hand shot up to cup his face and you leaned in and kissed him roughly. You weren’t entirely sure why you had done it. It would probably change everything and you couldn’t tell if you were doing it selfishly to feel like someone cared or to keep him around or because you truly wanted to. Of course, he kissed you back, and the feeling it gave you pushed a lot of those doubts from your mind.

You're the best listener that I've ever met

You're my best friend

Best friend with benefits

What took me so long?

*~~~~*

The kiss in the field still didn’t mean you were “together.” Realistically, it complicated things for a while. You avoided Brian for a couple of days and didn’t discuss it when you finally caved in to your desire to see him. He didn’t bring it up either, even though there were many times he would look at your lips like he wanted to make a move again, but you never talked about it. Things began to look “normal” after about two weeks. You spent time at the record shop, or under the bleachers with your friends or in the library with his friends. He nagged you about giving up smoking and you finally listened, much to his surprise.

“What made you finally decide to quit?” He asked, looking at the nicotine patch on your arm. You shrugged, not wanting to tell him the truth.

“I guess I just finally got tired of you being a broken record, mother hen.” You teased him, but he just smiled because he was happy with your choice. The truth of the matter was, you had done it for him. While you weren’t with him, you wanted to be. You didn’t want to keep doing something that bothered him so much, but you also knew that eventually, your habit of smoking would cost time with him and you didn’t want that. You lied to yourself that you didn’t want a relationship and weren’t thinking about a future with Brian, but you were. Every time he helped you study or encouraged you to do your best, the time your parents were out of town so he had made you his “specialty” of spaghetti in your kitchen, when you drove him around singing songs together on the radio...you thought about doing those things with him forever and instead of the fear you used to feel at such a thought, you felt happiness. You anticipated a future with him, something to look forward to.

I've never felt this healthy before

I've never wanted something rational

I am aware now

I am aware now

*~~~~*

“It’s kind of weird, yeah. But they’re cute together, I guess.” You had just returned from a movie with Bender and Claire. You were surprised at how long their relationship had lasted, especially since you had hated Claire at first. You assumed she was dating Bender as a statement, but it had been over six months and they were still together and it just seemed to work.

“It must be nice to have someone like that. Even if they don’t make sense, they care about each other. It just must be a nice thing to have a relationship like that.” Brian looked at you for a moment before backpedaling, realizing he must have made it sound like he was guilt-tripping you. “Don’t worry, I won’t ask you out again. I really just was complimenting them--”

“Well, maybe you should.” You cut him off.

You realized how rare a find like Brian truly was. He always put you before himself; he listened to all of your problems and knew when to offer solutions and when to just listen. He was endlessly supportive, and kind. He kept taking giant risks just to be with you, to show you that you mattered to him. You knew, without him saying it, that he loved you. Why else would someone go to the lengths he did, just to make you happy? You had tried everything to shake him, to get rid of him so neither one of you would be in too deep to get hurt. But he stayed, and now, you wouldn’t want him to go anyway. It was too late; you were both already in too deep.

He just blinked at you, sure he had heard incorrectly. “Wh-what?”

“I said, maybe you should. Ask me out again.”

“Y/N, do you want to go out with me?” He asked, unsure. It felt like a setup, but he knew you wouldn’t do something so cruel to him.

“Yes.” You replied, softly.

“Why?” He asked with furrowed eyebrows.

“I don’t know. I guess you won me over.” You chuckled, but he failed to see the humor in it, so you changed to a more serious tone. “Brian, I thought that these feelings would go away, that you would go away. Lord knows how hard I’ve tried to push you. But...you didn’t and the feelings didn’t. I-I love you. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep loving you, I don’t want to waste my time with anyone else. And...And I think that you love me.”

“I do.” He breathed quietly, with zero hesitation.

“So, why fight it any more? I was afraid that I would hurt you, but I think I’ve already done that and you’ve stuck around.” He nodded in confirmation of that fact. “And I was scared that I would get hurt but...but I’ve realized that you won’t do that to me, either.”

You've already won me over in spite of me

Don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet

And don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are

I couldn't help it

It's all your fault

He took your hands in his, “You’re serious? You really want this? Because, you know how I feel. How I’ve always felt.” You nodded in response, tears quickly filling your eyes, which was a rarity for you. He leaned in towards you to kiss you, for the first time since your conversation in the field over a month ago. He waited for you to be ready in every aspect of your relationship and you had never known so much love and respect before. It took some adjusting to, but he had pulled you in and made you fall for him again and again.

Just gonna tag my buddy...

@90sinequity

[canmom]

‘Toku’ Tuesday 30 - you know what? let’s do the Matrix!

it’It’s Tuesday! And I hear there’s a new Matrix film out dir. Lana ‘please be less racist I’m begging you’ Wachowski - which seems a rather unnecessary affair all round and is apparently not especially novel or interesting. But whatever - it seems to be something of a 2000score week so let’s go down this particular memory lane to the land of green-tinted, half-cg wire fu.

The Matrix probably doesn’t need a lot of introductions in these circles - alongside LotR and Shrek, it was one of the first movies to ride the wave of the nascent internet meme ecosystem - but I think it would be interesting to approach it with 30-year-old eyes rather than primary school ones and dig up a few production anecdotes. (Here is a Bryn anecdote: I once printed out various stills from the movie on printer paper and taped them to the inside of my locker at school.)

The Matrix is essentially a big tribute to the tradition of Hong Kong martial arts movies, by way of a scifi spin on Baudrillard. Such martial arts movies are something I definitely treat in depth at some point, but definitely too big a subject to tackle tonight; suffice to say that the movie industry in Hong Kong built a highly refined cinematographic language to tell stories about people beating each other up, performed by many charismatic martial artist stars like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and Donnie Yen. . And indeed, The Matrix features the work of Yuen Woo-Ping as a choreographer - but more on that in a little bit.

At the outset of their careers, the Wachowskis - already doing basically everything together - were comics writers who decided to try their hand at selling a script to the movies. Their first script featured cannibals eating rich people, but this was, while good, apparently a little too on the nose for studio executives; instead, they managed to sell the script to a movie called Assassins (1994) to Warner Bros, only to see it almost completely rewritten, an experience that led them to decide to become directors (apparently you can just do that) working on the scripts they sold in the Assassins deal.

Their first project as directors was an explicit, noir-y heist movie called Bound (1996) about a lesbian couple conspiring to steal money from the mafia. This was fairly successful, so The Matrix was greenlit, although the high budget (for the time) and ‘philosophical themes’ gave the studio pause. This changed after the Wachowskis pulled in some comicfriends for a detailed storyboard:

The Wachowskis therefore hired underground comic book artists Geof Darrow and Steve Skroce to draw a 600-page, shot-by-shot storyboard for the entire film.[35] The storyboard eventually earned the studio's approval, and it was decided to film in Australia to make the most of the budget.[33] 

And at the same time, they approached Will Smith to play the main character Neo; he elected to instead go for Wild Wild West. Instead, they recruited the now familiar group of...

Keanu Reeves took Smith’s place as hacker turned anti-robot revolutionary [and also trans allegory] Neo. Very well known guy now; at the time he was best known at the time for being one of the time-travelling stoners Bill and Ted, but also had recently started appearing in sci-fi action movies like Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Chain Reaction (1996)

Laurence Fishburne became the mentor-figure and spaceship pilot Morpheus. At this point he’d recently come off of sci-fi horror film Event Horizon (1997), and was in the 90s starring in a pretty wide range of films - dramas like Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Higher Learning (1995), noir movies like King of New York (1990), biopics like What’s Love Got to Do With It (1993) and indeed doing a shakespeare with Othello (1995)

Carrie-Anne Moss got to be Trinity, one of Morpheus’s main operatives and Neo’s love interest; at the time she was pretty much only appearing in B-movies, of which The Secret Life of Algernon (1997) is one of the only to merit a wiki article.

Hugo Weaving had not yet been Elrond, and at the time would have been perhaps known for playing one of the two main characters in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) about two drag queens, one of them a trans woman, going on a road trip across Australia. His most recent role was then The Interview (1998) in which he played a suspected serial killer in police custody. He got to take his very severe persona to be ‘Agent Smith’, an AI program tasked with maintaining the Matrix who manifests as a suited human.

The Wachowskis at this point were still reasonably crazy in an interesting way rather than a rich person way, so they put these actors through an intense training regime to try and both school them on the philosophical themes allegedly underlying the films, and also train them for Hong Kong style wire-fu stunts at Yuen’s standard...

The cast were required to be able to understand and explain The Matrix.[33] French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was required reading for most of the principal cast and crew.[38] In early 1997, the Wachowskis had Reeves read Simulacra and Simulation, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, and [former Lacanian psychoanalyst] Dylan Evans's ideas on evolutionary psychology even before they opened up the script,[16] and eventually he was able to explain all the philosophical nuances involved.[33] Moss commented that she had difficulty with this process.[16]

The directors had long been admirers of Hong Kong action cinema, so they decided to hire the Chinese martial arts choreographer and film director Yuen Woo-ping to work on fight scenes. To prepare for the wire fu, the actors had to train hard for several months.[33] The Wachowskis first scheduled four months for training, beginning in October 1997.[39] Yuen was optimistic but then began to worry when he realized how unfit the actors were.[25]

Baudrillard, for his part, was not impressed by the film’s interpretation of his body of theory.

Which other figure to mention? Of course it would be John Gaeta, who did the visual effects (c.f. when we watched Speed Racer). He’s the one who figured out how to achieve the vague description of a slow motion scene with a moving camera:

When John Gaeta read the script, he pleaded with an effects producer at Mass.Illusion to let him work on the project, and created a prototype that led to him becoming the film's visual effects supervisor.[73]

This became known as ‘bullet time’, created at the time by firing precisely timed still cameras to create the appearance of fast camera motion in slow motion. (Nowadays, high speed cameras are more common, so such elaborate rigs are less likely to be necessary).

Gaeta’s success here would propel him to even more elaborate production techniques like we discussed on Speed Racer, ambitiously reinventing the whole visual language of film to draw on ‘animetism’... which mostly just led the path to the Marvel movie. Road to hell etc. etc. [The Matrix, also, took heavy inspiration from anime, especially Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (Animation Night 39).]

The enormous success of the Matrix - a pretty tight action film, for all that some of its fundamental premise (humans as batteries) is kind of ridiculous - led to two the immediate filming of more sequels in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Resurrections, and no doubt inspired a whole generation’s obsession with leather trenchcoats. These movies were a lot more convulted narratively and more CGI driven, and generally regarded much less well, but they have some striking images. Juno Reactor were brought on to provide the music, and there’s a whole extended rave scene, which is probably suggestive of what the Wachowskis might have been getting up to.

Meanwhile, they were flush with money to send over to Japan, recruiting a large group of anime directors and studios to create a group of side stories for The Matrix in the form of The Animatrix. This features some of my absolute favourite short animated films, such as Shinya Ohira’s astonishing work in Kid’s Story. It also includes the second and last outing of Square Pictures, whose Final Fantasy: Spirits Within we watched last week (Animation Night 85), who created a striptease sword fight in Final Flight of the Osiris; the legendary Takeshi Koike, later to create Redline, rose to a high profile with the short film World Record; Mahiro Maeda fleshed out the backstory with the beautifully ridiculous Second Renaissance pair; Koji Morimoto deployed his usual stylistic flair on a story about kids encountering an anomaly in a ruined house; they even managed to track down Peter Chung to basically do a Matrixed-up episode of Aeon Flux (see Animation Night 52). To me, the Animatrix is definitely the highlight of the whole franchise and I’m looking forward to seeing that again!

Alongside this came a variety of other side projects, including an MMO which is apparently still considered part of the main story because the Wachowskis are the Wachowskis. Morpheus dies in it? Fucked up, I don’t know much about it.

Anyway, OK, that’s the rundown of anecdotes, and we’re running of time. What to say about the Wachowskis? They’re... tricky figures; subculturally a lot closer to Us Lot than most people in the movies (they’re trans, they go to bdsm clubs, they read scifi comics and they’re huge weebs) but also heavily insulated by their wealth and severely afflicted by rich-personitis. They like a lot of the things that I like, but they tend to fumble it when they follow that inspiration. So... I guess we tend to be obliged to pay attention to what they do, and yet it’s hard not to be a little ‘oh, not again’ when they put their foot in it once more, usually with racism (it’s just vital, and not utterly deranged, to film Cloud Atlas with yellowface. No other way they could adapt that book.) I tend to receive a lot of what they do as fascinatingly misguided, sometimes endearingly chuunibyou, but I would understand if your feeling is instead mostly frustration that such people get to be the trans girls who make it, or with the lack of inspiration in some of their later works.

And now, years later, after a variety of distinctive - usually terribly flawed, often still interesting - projects, we have The Matrix Resurrections, which brings Neo and Trinity back, now much older. I’ve avoided learning too much about this film, though from my friends I’ve heard it’s dropped the ball on being novel and interesting and weird, which seems the worst betrayal of what made The Matrix worthwhile - far better to make a janky bad film that does something fucked up and new than make it just another franchise, but I guess the nostalgia window has stepped into the 2000s. Instead, the biggest tech flex seems to be the real-time photorealistic VR tech demo The Matrix Awakens, which - for all that it really does look pretty convincingly photoreal - could be called a desperate attempt to justify the ongoing production of new games consoles and graphics cards. (Like pay attention to the actual gameplay. It’s QTEs and shooting.)

Well, whatever, the demon fascination of movie-making lives yet in my head - and it has been a very, very long time since I saw any of The Matrix. So tonight we’re staying up late to watch all five filmic parts of the series back to back (I will try to mix in the Animatrix between movies as appropriate). Will it hold up? Will I appreciate whatever the hell the sequels were doing a bit more this time around? Will it just feel painfully orientalist? Will the action sequences still feel impressive after so many more years of CGI dev? Let’s find out; They-Wish-It-Was-Toku Tuesday 30 will be starting shortly at https://twitch.tv/canmom

[teacupcollector]

The Undead Kind of Love: Part 1

Main Masterlist Series Masterlist

Pairing: Vampire Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: When Y/N’s art project lands her in Romania she is met with very peculiar circumstances. Such as a weird old man speaking mythical nonsense, murders of both people and animals, an oncoming threat to her life, as well as her mysterious yet very hot next door neighbor with a weird obsession with beetroot juice.

You came to the Romanian capital for your college class. Your major was in Art History and you found that throughout your class you enjoyed different types of Folk Art and you enjoyed Romanian Folk Art the most. So you decided to sign a slip to study abroad to a country of your choosing and so you chose Romania. You were tasked to study the art and make your own as well as write an essay on the culture you encountered on your trip. So here you are, in Bucharest sitting at a small park bench, food in hand which had a beautiful view of ‘The Arch of Triumph’ You had your small notepad that you use to take notes on what you see for your essay but as of right now you are doodling with the infamous arch way as the sole subject. As you finished your food you begin to pack up and put your pencil and notebook away then stand up. Your next stop was the “Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum” It is about a seven minute walk from where you are now so you begin your journey.

With your backpack over your shoulder you begin your seven minute trek when something caught your ear. It was coming from ahead of you as you make your way to the entrance of the museum. “Pleacă de aici (Go away!)” A man cried. He seemed out of his mind! He was yelling and touching patrons in an effort to diverge them away from somewhere. “trebuie să pleci acum (You must leave now!)” You weren’t sure of what to do so you just stood there staring. That was your first mistake. He immediately made eye contact with you and charged in your direction. He was spitting nonsense and you couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Părăsi! Părăsi! (Leave! Leave!)” You understand that word so as you go through your imaginary index cards you have for the Romanian language you ask “De ce? (Why?)” The man seemed confused at what you were asking. “Mort! (Dead!)” You look at him even more confused and he sighs angrily “Vampire! Here Vampire!” You look shocked. You knew this man was crazy but not this crazy! He begins to grab on to your arm in a firm grip when he is suddenly ripped off of you. “Destul! (Enough!)” You see a pair of what looked like officers pulling the man away from you. “Atenție! ( Be careful!)” The man cries. “nu ieși noaptea! (Don’t go out at night!)” The police officers are taking him away in the direction of the main road. “Morții merg pe timp de noapte (The dead walk at night!) That was the last words you heard until he was out of ear shot. A wave of strangeness incased your entire body. You felt uncomfortable so you decided to leave. ‘I’ll come here some other time...’ You think to yourself as you find yourself walking back toward the main road and away from the museum and the woods that surrounded it.

Your walk home was unnerving. You wouldn’t say you were a paranoid person or even a believer in the paranormal but the man did strike a fear in you. You use to love vampires when you were a kid. You dressed up as one for three years straight for Halloween. You went through that weird Twilight phase of putting dots of sharpie on your neck and drinking red Kool-Aid in middle school. To say you weren’t a vampire fan would be a lie but that man seemed to know more. I mean you are in Romania so it is to be expected? You sigh as you get closer and closer to your apartment complex. Your backpack seems to be getting heavier with each step you took up the stairs. You enter an outdoor hallway that is connected to the stairs you just went up and look back to the world behind you. As the chill of the Autumn air sets in and you shiver. You turn to your door and take out your keys that were provided for you by the school. 

As you jiggle the lock you hear a door open next to you. You look to your left and see a man step out. He is wearing a brownish leather jacket and a red shirt underneath. He has a cap on top of his head as his umber brown hair surrounds his face. His side profile was a chefs kiss. He had a well defined jawline accompanied with just the right amount of facial hair from what you could see his face stood stern and unmoving until they landed on you. He had equally stern baby blue eyes as he stared into you (E/C) ones. His eyes seem to have a storm behind them. He had an intimidating look to him and the air around him was intense. You felt like you couldn’t breath. His eyes were like a black hole and they were sucking you in but you weren’t sure if you wanted to escape. That brief moment felt like a life time as you are swallowed by those broken eyes. He just looks at you and walks away.

When you got inside you decided to do a little research. Your roommate has yet to return so you decided to use their computer. You go to the local online news paper and begin to look at some articles. You go to the settings in the corner of the screen and hit the translate button. As the site reloads you begin to read. Multiple headlines flash across the screen as you scroll until a specific one catches your eye. “Local Farmer Finds Cattle Slaughtered” You scroll down to see pictures of said cattle. They are strangely skinny and their eyes are sunken in, there is a chunk of meat missing on a few parts of its body -mainly around the neck area- Scrolling down more you see the museum you were suppose to go to. There was a picture of the man you encountered holding onto somebody. Looking closely you can see that it is you! You didn’t realize that you were being photographed. Luckily it was of the back of your head so no one saw your face, but it would be a cool story to tell to your friend later. As you continue to stare at the man you decide to do even more digging. You decide to look up vampires and the influence they have in this culture. What you found was interesting but you weren’t sure if it was accurate. Then again how can something mythical be accurate? You decided to write down the name of a library that is close to your apartment complex and head there tomorrow. You decide to exit and shut off the computer putting it back on the coffee table where it belongs. You get up and decide to see what you have in the fridge. Turns out there was a whole lot of nothing. ‘I really need to go to the market tomorrow...’ You think to yourself as you reach for your phone looking at different take out places. You choose the type of food you wish to eat and made sure to write down the pronunciation of each items on the menu so you can be sure to say it correctly to the best of your abilities. By the time you are done ordering your roommate walks in and gives you a small wave. You wave back to them before continuing to wait for your food. You look out the sliding door of your balcony to see the sky is pitch black. You feel a shiver go up your spine and make your way to the sliding door and shutting the blinds. You take a few steps back and calm your breathing. You don’t know why you feel so worked up over nothing but you guess that your paranoia is getting the best of you. You walk to your roommates room and knock on the door. You hear a quiet ‘come in’ so you open the door. “Hey I just wanted to let you know that I got us some food and it will be here soon.” They smile and nod and you exit the room shutting it behind you. You don’t know how long it has been but you started dozing off on the couch when you heard a knock on the door. You quickly get your wallet and approach the door opening it. You expected your food to be here. What you didn’t expect is the person holding your food in their hands. “Oh it’s you!” You exclaim making the man you saw earlier today flinch. You blush red in embarrassment. “Sorry Uh-” You begin to try and speak some Romanian but the man cuts you off. “Your food got delivered to my place...” You look even more shocked. “Oh right. I’m so sorry!” You pop your head around the corner of the door way looking for the delivery person. “Where did they go?” You ask looking up at him. “They left...” He murmurs. “They wouldn’t have left without payment... Did you pay for my food?” You ask suddenly feeling guilty. He nods. “Why don’t you come i-” “No it’s fine.” He says holding out the bag of food to you. You look between him and the food. As you look closely you can see his hand. His hands look tough, fingernails are well kept with veins protruding and leading up his arm, but the thing that caught your eye the most was how his fingertips and some of his hand was stained red. “Is that your blood!? Are you okay? Did you hurt you hand?” You ask taking the food in which he takes his hand and wipes it on his jeans even though there is no liquid on it. What ever it was you hoped it wasn’t blood because it must have been there for a while to have stained it. “No I didn’t hurt my hand. I spilled some beet root juice.” He says quietly. “Oh... Okay...” You say slightly weirded out. “Well good night.” He says before walking away. You are stood there for a moment before you call out “Good night! How do I-” You hear the sound of his apartment door slamming shut. You were debating on going over there to say something but your thoughts were interrupted by your roommate calling out to you. “Hey what are you doing with the door wide open? Is the food here?” She asks and you sigh “Yeah I’m coming in.” You say as you step back into the apartment and shut the door. A/N: I used Google Translate for the Romanian So I’m sorry if it is off. A/N: This story is for a writing challenge hosted by @lokithealligator A/N: The bolded words is number 46 in a prompt list made by @pitaparka​         -Please check both of them out they are amazing!

[stina-is-a-punk-rocker]

jacqueline wilson’s ‘love lessons’

tw: abuse, pedophilia, characters making Bad Decisions, long unnecessary spiel about my childhood like I’m running a recipe blog

It’s funny how loads of the authors who helped shaped me into the vaguely humanoid being I am today have names beginning with the letter ‘J’; Judy Blume, Jeff Kinney, John Green, J.K. Rowling (yikes, I know) … and Jacqueline Wilson.

I’ve never owned a Jacqueline Wilson book of my own; they were always borrowed from a friend, or from a friend of a friend, or from a friend of a cousin- you get the gist. Her books, for me, come with an entire aesthetic: something reminiscent of yard sales, and reading under the covers with a flashlight, and being lulled into a false sense of security by the deceptively innocent Nick Sharratt illustration on the cover until someone’s best friend gets mowed over.

So I knew what I was getting into when I picked up Love Lessons. I knew this was going to be Fucked Up; and boy, was I right.

(Here’s the part where I warn you about spoilers.)

From an abusive dad to creepy child predator teachers to slut-shaming and victim blaming, this book has it all.

The main character is Prudence ‘Prue’ King, who is homeschooled at the beginning of the book, along with her sister, Grace. Their parents remain rooted in the early twentieth century, and are very strict about- well, everything. No TV, no computers, not a single mobile phone in the house; their clothing worse than the orphans’ from Annie; and their father remains distinctly distrustful of modern institutions like the school and the hospital; and so on, and so forth.

Daddy King suffers a stroke, and has to be taken to the hospital. Meanwhile, Mrs. King (a floppy, spineless woman who lives in fear and awe of her, frankly horrid, husband) sends the girls to school, behind the then invalid Mr. King’s back. Cue Prue and Grace being the freakshows of the school, with their strange clothing and overbearing mother.

Grace manages to make friends, but Prue remains alone. The kids are dicks, the teachers are dicks… well, all of them but one. And that’s the art teacher, Mr. Raxberry (I just couldn’t get over that name; it seems like something you’d name a mythical plant from Pixie Hollow or some shit. I’m assuming it isn’t an actual name, since the spelling & grammar check on my computer doesn’t seem to recognize it), or Rax, as he’s called.

Oh, yeah; Prudence’s favorite subject in school is art, and she’s a whiz at it. This is relevant, because reasons.

And here’s where stuff gets murky. Prue develops a crush on Rax- which is perfectly normal. I’m definitely no stranger to it; I’ve had crushes on my teachers, my mum admitted she used to think one of her professors was cute. And yeah, as I grew older, I grew out of those crushes and now have a markedly more refined taste in men (unless he’s 5’ 7’’, born in ’97 and named Bang Chan, I don’t want him); and my mum married my dad, so I’m assuming she did, too. Admittedly, now that my dad teaches at a university, it’s icky to think that there might be students who have crushes on him- but I digress.

My point is, loads of us have liked our teachers. But I doubt the majority of us have acted on it.

And Prue actively showing her interest in Rax isn’t the worst part. That’s a spot reserved for Rax reciprocating her feelings.

Guess Ezra Fitz and Ms. Grundy (yes, I watched Riverdale; please don’t cancel me) have a new addition to the Creep Club.

The age of consent in the UK is 16, if I’m not mistaken. Prue is 14. She’s just barely become a teenager, and she’s being preyed upon.

Because that is what Rax is. He’s a predator; he preys upon this vulnerable girl who’s never been in a relationship before- hell, she’s never even had friends- her father’s abusive, so she obviously doesn’t have the best experience when it comes to men- she’s unpopular at school, with the students and staff alike- and he lures her in. I don’t care how bloody nice he is to Sarah, or what a good dad he is (well, he’s really not, seeing as he cheated on the mother of his children WITH A BLOODY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD CHILD)- the guy’s a fucking pedophile.

I was staunchly stuck at a yellow light with him; like, sure, maybe Prue thinks he’s flirting with her- maybe she’s looking at this all wrong, she doesn’t know how relationships work- see, he drew a picture of Sarah, too, in his secret notebook- Prue’s just reading into this too much- up until he says he loves her.

Dude. Humbert fucking Humbert. She’s fourteen, for Christ’s sake, and you’re married. You have two children. She’s a child. She’s probably closer to your son’s age than she is to yours.

(This is the part where I bury my head in my pillow. And scream. Extensively, and with passion.)

The book does make some genuinely good commentary on slut-shaming and victim blaming and abusive parenting. And on one hand, I can see why so many people find issue with the romanticization of the when I kissed the teacher trope- but I can defend it, too.

The book is in Prue’s perspective. She thinks she’s in love with Rax, so obviously, she’s not going to throw in some valuable moral at the end- because she’s too young and inexperienced to think otherwise. And sadly, there are loads of instances of child abuse that go unreported because the victims just don’t know better.

What I have issue with is how the school dealt with it, ultimately. Prudence, a child, has to deal with the consequences of the actions of a literal child predator. Sure, Rax ‘clears his name’ by cooking up some bullshit story about how it was only a crush and he didn’t encourage it, but you’d think other adults would know better and, oh, I dunno- dig deeper into it, instead of blaming it on a child?

“She says you told Mr. Raxberry you loved him and he held you in his arms and fondled you.”

Which Prudence denies, because, again, she doesn’t know better. She then goes on to say that they did nothing wrong. To which the adult speaking to her, in this case, the principal, Miss Wilmott, goes on to say:

“I’m not sure that’s entirely true… I feel that there are some aspects of your friendship that could be considered inappropriate.”

FYI, lady, he kissed her- multiple times (not that kissing her once makes him any more redeemable), and told her he loved her, and admitted to fantasizing about running away with her and leaving his family behind. Fun fact: do you know Prudence is underage?

You’d think that Miss Wilmott would maybe give this whole fiasco a favorable ending, but it turns out she listens to school gossip;

“I haven’t been at all happy with your attitude. You don’t seem to understand how to behave in school. I’ve heard tales of unsuitable underwear and then a silly romance with one of the boys in your class. I feel that in the space of a few short weeks you’ve made rather a bad name for yourself… I don’t know whether you intend to be deliberately insolent but you certainly come across as an unpleasantly opinionated and arrogant girl… I can’t help feeling that you’ll be much better off elsewhere. I shall try hard to engineer a suitable transfer to another school.”

And then she comes out with this gem:

“If you won’t leave, then I shall have to ensure that Mr. Raxberry finds another position.”

“No, you can’t do that! He’s a brilliant teacher.”

“You should have thought of that before you started acting in this ridiculous and precocious manner. If I were another kind of headteacher, I would have Mr. Raxberry instantly suspended. There could even be a court case. He would not only lose his job, he could find himself in very serious trouble. Did you ever stop to think about that?”

Girlboss, gaslight and gatekeep. The fucking trifecta.

Also, by ‘another kind of headteacher’, does she mean the kind of headteacher WHO DOESN’T LET CHILD PREDATORS ROAM FREELY WITHIN THEIR HALLS?

This bitch is out here blaming a child, a literal child, for the crimes of an adult man.

The only time Prue seems aware of the fact that Mr. Raxberry is actually a very shit person is her immediate thoughts that follow after she tells Miss Wilmott she’ll take the fall;

I so wanted to save darling Rax- and yet why hadn’t he wanted to save me? Had he told Miss Wilmott it was all my fault, that I’d got a ridiculous crush on him, that I’d made ludicrous advances to him? … I wanted to tell this horrible, patronizing woman how hungrily he’d kissed me, but I couldn’t do it. I loved him. I had to help him.

NO, SWEETHEART; YOU MOST DEFINITELY DO NOT.

And maybe I’m going overboard with all these excerpts, but here’s what Rax has to tell Prue, after school, following her expulsion:

“I let her think the worst of you, the best of me, just to save my skin. I said it was ridiculous talking about a love affair between us. I said you simply had a crush on me, and that I was just trying to be kind… You were brave enough to stand up to me and force me to acknowledge the truth… I love you… That’s why I had to take a risk and see you this one last time. I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care… Every night when I close my eyes, I’ll think of us together in this car and how badly I wanted to drive off with you. I’ll imagine us walking hand in hand at the water’s edge… I wish I wasn’t such a coward.”

(I burrow into the pillow further. I’m trying to suffocate myself.)

And that’s where I think Wilson went wrong. Sure, Prudence getting expelled for something that was completely out of her hands is unfair, and horrible, but it’s real. That shit can happen.

What’s bad is showing Rax in a positive light after all that. If only Wilson had written Rax to not be the Romeo he thinks he is. Make him ignore Prudence, throw her under the bus in front of her face, instead of this star-crossed lovers bullshit it’s made out to be. Show your younger audience that Rax is not a good man. I’ve got a little over two weeks left for my twentieth; I can see why this is unacceptable. But I was a little younger than Prue when I watched Pretty Little Liars, and my only gripe with Aria dating Ezra was that Noel Kahn was so much cuter.

It shows when you scroll down the Goodreads reviews; you’ve got adults giving it one or two stars, and teenagers giving it four or five, with their biggest complaints being, “but Toby was cuter!!!”

Other non-pedophilia related complaints regarding the book include: Prudence being unlikable- which I didn’t really notice, considering she reacted to some people way better than I would’ve, even at 19 (which probably says a lot more about me than it does about Prue, but oh well). Still, Prudence obviously isn’t the most prudent of people- and again, she’s fourteen. Look me in eye and tell me you weren’t an arsehole at that age (unless you’re fourteen now, in which case, I assure you that you’ll look back on yourself someday and go ‘wtf was I thinking’). Bringing up Toby’s dyslexia in an argument was low, though.

There were people who thought the Kings’ almost-Amish lifestyle was exaggerated and unrealistic, but I assure you, it may very well be real. There are 8 billion people on the world- it’s fair to assume that several of them are complete weirdos.

Grace was a sweet character, and I adored her with every fiber of my being. As were her friends Iggy and Figgy. Honestly, I would’ve loved a book about Iggy, Figgy and Piggy’s (mis)adventures too.

[voiceless-terror]

would you consider writing me some precanon jongeorgie angst. bc i imagine they probably bonded over their interest in the supernatural but never. you know. actually talked about their personal experiences/trauma. just give me a little of both of them handling that trauma very badly while never admitting their closest brush with the supernatural. or something. idk.

Hello anon! I haven’t written Jon/Georgie yet, but this prompt was too good to pass up. Hope you like!

Being with Georgie was easy. It shouldn’t have been, not for him.

But it was.

She carried herself with the utmost surety: of her opinions, of her feelings, of her place in the world. It wasn’t arrogance, more like confidence and something else Jon couldn’t quite put his finger on. There was a blankness in her eyes sometimes. Not an absence of feeling but an absence of...understanding, maybe. Of empathy. Georgie saw the world in black and white; she knew exactly what was right and what was wrong. She was blunt. She bulldozed over others in conversations, pointed out flaws that polite society knew to overlook and not name. Jon admired it, as much as it made him cringe.

But it was complemented by her fierce capacity for loving, her clever, teasing words, the way her fingers ran through his hair when he was stressed. That black and white view could quiet his mind like no other- ‘yes, Jon’, ‘no, Jon.’  She listened to his incessant rambling, nodding in the right places and adding her own commentary. She filled out the crosswords in the morning, her brow furrowed in concentration, colorful nails tapping at the table. She never wanted help, stubborn to a fault. Her dark skin ethereal in the morning light, the way her voice was low and croaky before her coffee. The ease with which she said ‘I love you.’ 

He remembered the day she first approached him, all ripped-tights and smudged, smoky eyeshadow. Just leaned against the wall on that chilly fall night and snatched the cigarette right from his hand, an eyebrow flicked upward as she took a drag. He couldn’t get a word out, just silently took her phone when she offered it and typed in a number with shaking hands. A year later and she was still that same girl, though he’d seen her stash of manga and her weird cat memorabilia. She was whole, real. It was comfortable.

“I’m not really sure if I should go.” They’re curled up on the couch, Jon leaning into the warm bulk of her. “All of the others are going, though.”

“It’s not like you’re close, right?” Jon’s petting the Admiral, the new addition to the household fitting in seamlessly. “I’m sure she won’t take it as an insult. You can always say you’re busy. Who was it, again? Her father?”

“Yeah.” Georgie’s shifting against him, clearly uncomfortable with the topic. It’s odd- she’s not usually so awkward about these things. If there’s something she doesn’t want to talk about, she shuts it down right away. This seems...different. “And no, not close. But everyone else is going- they want to show their support, I guess. It would be awkward if I didn’t.”

Perhaps Georgie didn’t like funerals. You’re not supposed to, of course. Maybe it was a phobia, a perfectly valid one. Plenty of people don’t like to see the reminder of death laid out before them. Jon’s been to a few in his lifetime- for his Gran’s friend, for a distant cousin.

For his parents.

He doesn’t remember his father’s, he might not have even gone. He was only two at the time. He distantly remembers his mother’s; it wasn’t well attended, he sat in the front row with his Gran. He doesn’t even remember crying, if he even realized the thing in the box was his mother, dead and gone.

Needless to say, he understands Georgie’s sentiments. “You don’t have to go, not if...not if you don’t like it. Plenty of people are uncomfortable with death-” This was the wrong thing to say, for Georgie tensed instantly, leaning away from him.

“That’s not it at all,” she says, snatching her legs out from where Jon’s leaning comfortable against them. “It’s- it’s the performance of it all. All those people standing around a body, sniffling and moaning-”

Jon tried for levity, bristling at her tone. “People grieve, they need closure-”

Georgie snorted, this time shoving him away on the couch, the Admiral jumping from Jon’s lap at the movement. Her words became impassioned, as if Jon needed to know, needed to understand. “Cremate them, then! Say a few words, scatter the ashes, whatever. But having the body on display like that?” She gets up, starts to pace. Jon’s never seen her like this. “Paint the corpse, dress it up, pretend it’s a person still but it’s not, and everyone’s just standing there around it, praying over it and watching it like it’s not just rotting meat you put lipstick on-”

“Georgie!”

“I can’t stand it.” She stops in front of him, chest heaving and eyes aflame. “What’s so monumental about it? We live, we die- and her father was old, it was bound to happen sometime. No need to make such a to-do. It’s- it’s just disgusting, is what it is.” She didn’t continue, and an awkward silence permeated the room. 

Georgie got worked up about things on occasion. But the wild look in her eye, the total sense of incomprehension was...disconcerting. He agreed with her on certain points, of course, but the vehemence behind them- something wasn’t right. But it didn’t feel right to pry, either, and Georgie surely wouldn’t appreciate it.

“You could just say you’re busy, you don’t have to go,” he tries tentatively. She seems to deflate where she stands, looking uncharacteristically vulnerable. So he stands up, taking her hand in his. She lets him, but doesn’t meet his eyes. “But if you do, I can come with you. If you’d like.”

They stand in the very back row of the church after awkwardly greeting her grieving coworker. Georgie’s nails dig painfully into his arm, but he says nothing. They leave after ten minutes and stop at an Indian buffet on the way home. He silently watches her dig into a curry, his own untouched.

___________

When she first met Jon, she thought he was utterly out of her league.

It was her first semester back at school, she was an absolute fucking mess- drinking at all hours, barely present in her classes. She was out at the bar with a few new friends, most of whom she’d already forgotten the names of, and saw him standing there under a single flickering lamp, a cigarette dangling from long, slender fingers, raven hair back in a messy bun. Not many people could pull that off but he looked almost effortlessly cool (a thing she’d later find laughable for ever thinking) in his dingy leather jacket, his eyes far away and shadowed. She wondered what made him lose sleep. He had an odd, crooked little smile on his face and she was filled with liquid courage. The look he gave her when she took that cigarette out of his hand made her knees weak, and he took the proffered phone like he was only a little impressed. She sent a text to his phone and left, so embarrassed she went straight home.

He never did text her. To be fair, she never expected him to.

But she found him not two days later, hunched over a table in the campus library. She did a double take- surely this couldn’t be him, her impossibly handsome, silent figure who she surely dreamed up. But there was no mistaking that hair, those eyes. He was smaller, somehow diminished in his baggy jumper and wire-rimmed glasses, tapping a pencil against his textbook in irritation. Before she knew it she found herself picking up her phone, sending a text to the number with no name. And sure enough, his phone buzzed.

They went out on their first date a day later.

Jon was a ball of nerves, awkward and not at all like the man she thought she met that night. Somehow, the real Jon was better. She liked the way he blushed and stammered, the way a touch of her hand left him flustered and unable to speak. The way he could talk for hours about nothing at all, making even the most dull of subjects seem interesting with that voice of his- a voice surely meant for radio or T.V., something Jon himself endlessly scoffed at whenever she brought it up. They would sit in front of the telly for hours, marathoning ridiculous ghost hunting shows and pointing out the obvious fakes. Jon had a weakness for ghost stories, just like she did. “Most of them are absolute drivel, of course,” he said.

Most of them. 

They found comfort in each other, their small island of two, had no need for other company. Georgie had never been able to relate to someone so well, not since Alex, and Jon was never fond of crowds. Three months in he tried to break up with her, saying he could never give her what ‘she needed’ but she stopped that in its tracks- Georgie would be the one who decided what she did and didn’t need, thank you very much. She liked the way he leaned into her on movie nights, like her touch was the only thing that mattered. The sincerity in his eyes whenever he complimented her in that earnest, awkward way of his. He challenged her when he thought she was wrong, sometimes their fights lasted days. But they always came back to one another, each knowing they had no one else who understood them. Was it healthy? Georgie couldn’t answer that, she didn’t know herself. Jon probably didn’t either. But she loved him, in her way. 

That night they have a few glasses of wine, and Jon’s regaling her with some ridiculous story from his youth- apparently he was somewhat of a delinquent, wandering about at all hours. She laughs in delight, imagining a small, serious Jon climbing fences and evading the law. But suddenly Jon stops, his eyes going wide and his face growing ashen as he stares unblinking at the table.

It’s a spider- a tiny thing, really. Georgie’s been seeing a lot of them lately, and she really should be better about dusting the place. But Jon- Jon looks absolutely terrified, like the thing’s bound to leap out and kill him. She opens her mouth to tease, an instinctive reaction, but is instead startled by the loud smack of a hand against the table. Jon had smashed it certainly, but he lifts his hand and stares at it in wide-eyed horror, as if whatever he sees is nine times worse than the original thing.

“Jon-”

The chair hits the ground as he stumbles to her bathroom with heavy, labored breathing. She gets up slowly, approaching as quietly as possible to find him hyperventilating against the sink, the faucet on full blast as he washes his hand- scratches it, really. He’s mumbling frantically under his breath.

“...so many legs, get off, get off-”

She makes her presence known as not to startle him, approaching from the side and gently wrapping a hand around his arm once she sees him drawing blood. He starts anyway, his movements jerky and frenzied as he rips his arm away like her touch burns.

“It’s just a spider Jon,” she says softly, lifting her hands to show she means no harm. “It’s okay, you got it, it’s dead now-”

“But what if it isn’t!” He spits, slamming his hands on the marble rim of the sink and leaving bloody prints in his wake. He’s breathing so fast she thinks he might pass out. “What if it isn’t?”

She has no answer to that.

It takes about two hours, a hot shower and a stiff drink for him to calm down. They lay on the couch, watching something stupid, mind-numbing. She runs her fingers through his hair. He always liked that. She doesn’t say a word, he’s exhausted, and she knows from experience that pushing him will just lead to another fit like before. The next day, he brings her Hungarian by way of apology. They eat in a more comfortable silence, Jon gradually warming up as the evening goes on. Still, she doesn’t ask.

She spends the weekend cleaning her flat, standing on a chair and vacuuming at the cobwebs.

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28440474

[themonsterblog]

The Beast of Bray Road

Dating back to 1936, citizens of Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in Walworth county as well as Racine and Jefferson counties have been witnessing a beast.

Reported to be 6ft tall, with grey and brown fur, the Beast is said to have a wolf-like face, shiny yellow eyes, pointed ears, and run and walk on all fours or hind legs as well as kneel like a man. I am reticent to call it a werewolf as shapeshifters are rather outrageous even for the cryptozoology community, but that is the imagery that comes to mind.

The first reported sighting was in 1936. 30-something Mark Shackleman was the night watchman for the St Coletta School For Exceptional Children outside Jefferson. The school had extensive grounds that included wide, open fields that held several preserved Native American burial mounds. Crossing the fields one night when doing his rounds, Shackleman saw a shadow digging into one of the mounds, much like a canine would. The Beast then stood to six feet tall and looked at him, it’s large body covered in dark fur and smelled of rotting meet. Shackleman took a step back, startled, and the beast abruptly turned and ran off into the woods. Shackleman reported seeing it again the next night, but never again.

Due to some what conflicting descriptions of the beast, some cryptozoology enthusiasts believe the beast to be a misidentification of some other cryptid, such as “Eddy” or “The Bluff Monster,” a Bigfoot like creature in Wisconsin. Others suggest a Waheela, or “bear dog;” as well as a Shunka Warakin. Some have even suggested due to the similarities and proximity that The Beast Of Bray Road and The Michigan Dogman are the same animal.

The Beast has been reported to act aggressively, but not outright violent and hasn’t reported to have physically harmed anyone. It had also been reported to charge vehicles, even chase people, but breaking off the chase before catching anyone, suggesting the theory that some have that it is territorial or guarding something, which could also explain the reason that many sightings are concentrated on a 2 mile stretch of farm road.

In 1991, 18 year old, Doris Gibson, reported driving down Bray Road during a storm when she felt her tire hit something. Thinking she had hit a small animal, she got out of her car to investigate only to find nothing. She looked to the side of the road, saw the form of the Beast and rushed back to her car. As she sped away, she said the Beast jumped on the trunk of her car but slid off in the heavy rain.

In the fall of 1989, Lori Endrizzi was driving down Bray Road on her way home from her job as a bar manager, when she saw a hunched figure in the road eating road kill. She flipped on her high beams to see it clearer and realized that whatever it was, knelt like a man and held the carcass in its hands like it had human-like elbows. The creature then stood and started towards her vehicle that had stalled out as Lori panicked and struggled to get it to start. When the engine successfully rolled over, she floored it to her mother’s house. “I didn’t sleep that night very well,” she said in her interview with Monsters and Mysteries in America.

The town of Elkhorn has supposedly had so many sightings of the Beast from the 80’s and 90’s that the Elkhorn Animal Control is rumored to have a file on the creature. The vast uptick in sightings is what had the now defunct Walworth Week assign junior reporter, Linda Godfrey, to investigate and report on the sightings. Linda published her article “Tracking down ‘The Beast of Bray Road’” on December 29th, 1991 and would then go on to write “The Beast Of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf” and become the foremost expert on the subject.

One story Godfrey tells regarding the Beast is about a group of boys heading home from sledding, that was told to her by a friend of her son’s that experienced it first-hand. On their way home, the boys saw a large furry creature drinking water from a creek, thinking that it was a dog, they decided to go pet it. When they approached the creature, it stood, snarled, and took chase after the boys, breaking off after they cleared the tree line. Which, while terrifying, is in line with many reports.

Steve Krueger has told a consistent story on both Monster Quest and Monsters and Mysteries in America. Myself being a natural skeptic, once recognizing him on M&M from Monster Quest, made sure to track down his MQ episode, initially thinking that I could rule him out as a credible eye witness if his story changed. It hadn’t in the 4 years between episode airings, which lent more to his credibility in my eyes, albeit the story being more sensational on M&M due to the nature of that show. In November 2006, Krueger, a DNR worker had removed a the carcass of an 85lb doe from a road in Holy Hill, Wisconsin. As Krueger sat in the cab of his truck filling out the required paper work for the removal, he felt his truck shake, thinking it was simply the wind, he ignored it. A second harder shake caught his attention and he looked out the back window of his truck to see a shadowy figure standing at the tailgate of his truck. Krueger shined his flashlight through the back window to get a better look and saw a 6ft tall animal with a wolf-like face, reaching into the bed for the deer carcass he had just removed from the road. Startled, Krueger threw the truck in drive and sped away allowing the Beast to drag the doe off the back of his truck.

Wolf Biologist Peggy Callahan believes all of these sightings can be explained as simple misidentification. “People could definitely misidentify a wolf jumping up on its hind legs,” she tells Monster Quest, in a 2010 interview. Callahan believes that folklore and superstition combined with misidentification has created the tale of the Beast and influenced sightings. “As for the traditional werewolf, I’m going to tell you it doesn’t exist.”

Linda Godfrey on the other hand, does not believe this is a simple case of misidentification and advocates for witnesses saying “I really believe that all of these witnesses have seen what they say they saw. [...] Anybody who drives around much in Wisconsin has seen so many deer, and so many bear, and these other creatures that they would have a hard time mistaking something like that for a completely unknown animal.”

Sightings over the years have dwindled in frequency but recent sightings have been reported to MyRacineCounty.com with Danny Morgan’s January 2018 account of seeing the Beast while driving home from Lake Geneva, accompanied with the cell phone photo that heads this post; and Ron Rice’s 2020 account of seeing the Beast in the town of Lyons while delivering fertilizer.

If you are interested in learning more about upright, Wolf-like hominids, I highly recommend sifting through Linda Godfreys blog at Lindagodfrey.com. She has compiled sightings on there since 2009, but has been inactive since May of 2020.

Sources:

Milwaukeemag.com

Legendsofamerica.com

Lindagodfrey.com

MyRacineCounty.com

History Channel’s Monster Quest

Travel Channel’s Monsters and Mysteries in America

Cryptidz.fandom.com

[theworldinclines]

Title: any old tuesday Pairing: Pang/Wave Ao3 link Excerpt: He doesn’t want to wonder the malintentions behind someone’s kindness the way he used to; he doesn’t want to constantly worry that he’ll be left without warning. Like a wise — and infuriating — boy had said a while ago, the other shoe doesn’t even exist, and waiting for it to drop only serves as a waste of Wave’s time. He knows that, theoretically. And up until two weeks ago, Wave had had a real grip on that as his reality.

     Wave’s parents die on a Tuesday.

     He’s got his English notebook open for the quiet-work portion of the class as he follows the assignment, to print any passage from Charlotte’s Web by hand. Nothing had spoken to Wave in particular; the book was rather bittersweet and at this point, because he has to, he’s chosen a page at random to copy down lest he run out of time.

These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter… 

     He takes his time because even if the quote doesn’t necessarily mean much to him, he can at least be sure that his handwriting is neat. The headmaster appears in the doorway, beckoning their teacher toward her, but Wave doesn’t spare them much attention as he goes on with his careful work.

     …the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours —

     “Wasuthorn.”

     He’s asked to speak with the headmaster in her office, and the walk there is strange for a reason he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t think he’s done anything to warrant a scolding; for him to have somehow gotten in trouble when there’s only an hour left of the school-day would be unbelievably irritating.

     His hands flex with nerves as he tries to keep in mind that he’s really only ever minded his business and done his best in class. Unless someone’s made up a story about him, or there’s been some sort of rumour, Wave can’t imagine what he might’ve done.

     His certainty falters when their arrival at the office shows Wave’s grandparents already waiting there.

     Wave can’t help questioning, “Did I do something?” as Headmaster Weerawatnodom ushers him inside. His grandmother’s flushed cheeks give her a look of perpetual discomfort, the buttons of his grandfather’s overshirt have one done incorrectly, like he had been in a rush. “Are you okay?” he asks them.

     They’re perfectly fine, they assure him. Wave is whisked away to his grandparents’ house in a flurry of confusion as they refuse to tell him exactly what’s going on until he is planted on their familiar sofa.

     As it turns out, his grandparents are fine, but Teep and Wipha Worachotmethee aren’t. Wave’s parents had been shot that morning in their duty as officers, Wave is told. The fact is spoken in such a tone that implies even a 12 year old mind should understand that this sort of death is more meaningful or less of a complete waste than another. He’s a smart boy and in a way he does understand, but that doesn’t prevent him from shutting down.

     His interest in class dwindles to half, if that, of what it had been, and if it weren’t for his natural intelligence he would likely be out of luck. What little luck he retains is drained when his grandparents pull him from school into another, public instead of private and therefore more affordable for their lifestyle. Wave didn’t dare ask them to reconsider, not when they’d already sold their own house to move into Wave’s. His parents’ will had made such a request so that Wave, should he lose them, wouldn’t be uprooted from the house he’d grown up in.

     With that sacrifice on his guardians’ end, Wave does what he can to stay out of the way and as quiet as possible. However, the change in schools does nothing to help Wave’s attentiveness in class, and his new teacher is judgmental and prickly, completely infuriated by what she takes as Wave’s disregard for her teaching. His parents only passed a year ago — 11 months and three days — and he’d transferred here less than four months ago. Did she never get the memo that maybe Wave’s inattention in maths doesn’t stem from rudeness, but from simply struggling to function as normal in a world he doesn’t see his place in at all, let alone something so dreadfully easy as maths?

     He’s made to transfer for a second time after the Incident occurs. The woman responsible is fired from her position but Wave can’t possibly stay at this school, where the rumours about him have spread like a forest fire. It doesn’t matter that they’re all total falsehoods; if anything, the lack of clarity around the subject spurs their need to fill the gaps. So he moves again.

     More than ever, Wave hides in his bedroom, and when he’s alone he often can’t help thinking of how the grandparents he’d known for so many years had seemingly died with his parents. He wasn’t their grandson anymore — he was the burden they’d had to sell their own years-loved home for, he was the troublemaking child whose every move was suddenly their responsibility for a lifetime instead of the occasional weekend visit. Wave came to recognise stress and disinterest toward him in place of where had once been hands helping him to stir pots and arms lifting him onto a bicycle.

     He’s resentful, is what it comes down to. Still, after so long, he’s resentful, even though he knows it isn’t fair to them. But with so much of Wave’s recent life reminding him again and again just how unfair things actually are, he found it difficult to tamper that resentment. Why had losing his parents meant losing his grandma and grandpa too? Why did he have to hide away in his bedroom to avoid the fact that neither of them could really look at him anymore? They’re disjointed, a caricature of anything resembling a family, his grandparents at one end of the house and Wave tucked away in the other.

     As though his final year of high school isn’t hard enough, his grandfather dies the week before the semester is set to end.

     He knows how he’s supposed to feel, but it’s been nearly a fortnight since the elder’s passing and the feeling itself has remained elusive to Wave. His grandmother hasn’t cried so much as she’s been quiet, quieter than ever. After the death of his parents, her quiet had become something more resigned than calming, and he’d grown used to that too. She’s again in shift, and allowing her space to grieve is nothing new to Wave. Unwilling to be seen or heard, he’d spent years doing what he could to remain separate from nearly everyone, and up to becoming Gifted he had been content to remain so. Maybe content isn’t the word; it’s more likely that he’d been resigned as well.

     With his grandfather’s passing, Wave thinks of the ways in which his grandparents had had a fair hand in cultivating his negative thoughts, even if they hadn’t been aware of it, and he just… can’t find it in himself to cry.

     In the absence of tears arrives an all too familiar voice in his head, sounding remarkably similar to his grandfather, to inform Wave that the reason he hasn’t cried is because he’s self-centered, that Wave’s care for the world starts and ends with himself. In a correlated sense, those who claim to care for Wave don’t, when it comes down to it, because how could anyone care for someone so self-obsessed?

     Wave knows that can’t be true, because how could it possibly be? But outward logic does nothing to help, and his final semester of high school’s arguably sour end finds Wave in a similar state to a friendless, bitter self he thought he’d left by the wayside ages prior. If not completely discarded, he’d maybe hoped that that part of who he’d been was buried deep enough down to never resurface, but like that incessant voice, Wave can’t seem to shake him.

     He doesn’t want to wonder the malintentions behind someone’s kindness the way he used to; he doesn’t want to constantly worry that he’ll be left without warning. Like a wise — and infuriating — boy had said a while ago, the other shoe doesn’t even exist, and waiting for it to drop only serves as a waste of Wave’s time. He knows that, theoretically. And up until two weeks ago, Wave had had a real grip on that as his reality.

     He’s been staring at his black laptop screen for the past hour. The battery bit the dust a while ago but he hadn’t had it in him to grab the charger from the floor. There’s an incredible tightness to his chest and he also feels like his head is wrapped in fish netting, so although he’s likely conscious, in no way would he bet his life on it.

     Wave can’t sit here anymore. He walks right down the stairs and onto the street, stopping only a few steps off their property. He doesn’t have anywhere to go. He would go to the rooftop but the school is closed to students for holiday — besides which, he’s no longer a student, and that’s an entirely separate headache for another time. He just goes on walking, paying no attention to wherever it is his brain is leading his feet. It doesn’t matter anyway, really.

     He trudges onto a grassy path and however long later comes to a stop in front of his parents’ grave-markers. Their photos smile up at Wave from their place right beside his grandfather’s.

     He hadn’t looked at the newest addition to their family plot, hadn’t even lifted his eyes from the ground when he’d come with his grandmother. But there it is, a shot of him and his grandparents, Wave kept snugly between them as though he belongs, some fantasy world where neither of them had slapped Wave to bruising for lying or made him feel like an outsider in his own home. A sweeping nausea hits Wave and he turns around, unable to look anymore.

     He presses his forehead and hands onto a nearby tree to steady himself, the bark digging hard into his skin. He knows he’s crying when he pushes weakly off the tree to rub at his tired eyes, only to have the palms of his hands sting from the tears. He shakes his head and sets off for somewhere else.

     It’d been another hour of wandering around until he had to accept that walking all over the city can’t change the final destination. The surprise comes when he sees a certain someone with their back to the wall by Wave’s house, eyes on the sky. He’d even brought his dog, for whatever reason. Wave removes his glasses to wipe them down, quietly and ineffectually preparing himself for whatever this is going to be.

     Even with Wave trying to be noiseless, Pang’s attention falls to Wave within seconds of his approach. Wave would ask what he’s doing here, but he doesn’t have to. They’d promised months passed that they would always reply to one another’s messages, even if that message was two or three words, so that the other wouldn’t worry. But Wave’s not responded to Pang in a week, his negative spiral not allowing him room to honour their agreement. He’d even silenced his phone because he knew that hearing his phone beep with any message from Pang would have cracked him, and Wave hadn’t wanted to allow that.

     He knows the system is especially for situations like this, when either isn’t able to communicate like usual, but now that Pang is standing here looking all concerned, Wave has to wonder if they might need to entertain a Plan B.

     Wave doesn’t want to see Pang though. Actually, he does. It’s just that the idea of facing him after six days of radio silence leaves a heavy anxiety in Wave’s gut that he doesn’t want to face right now. He isn’t sure that he’ll be able to handle the sympathy in his eyes, or how he’ll be extra careful in dealing with Wave. Always Wave with FRAGILE stamped across his forehead in blocky red ink.

     He doesn’t try to walk past Pang. He just stands there some distance away, useless, while Pang holds tight to Dip’s leash to keep him close.

     “It’s past midnight,” is the first thing Pang says. Wave gives a slow, meaningless nod. “You left your window open so I tossed a rock through, but… you didn’t answer.”

     “What’s up?” Wave manages. It’s vastly inadequate a question, all things considered.

     “I wanted to see you,” because he’s always been forthright and transparent when it comes to Wave.

     “Well, you’ve seen me,” Wave says, because he’s notoriously dismissive and unable to let himself be vulnerable.

     This mood Wave has found himself in is one that they’ve seen less and less, but if Pang is taken aback, he doesn’t allow it to colour his words.

     “Ohm invited us to some karaoke thing tonight but I said we have plans already,” he says. Wave shifts where he stands and Pang is quick to assure him, “It was just an excuse to get us out of Claire’s typical solo and double encore.”

     Wave sits on the ground. He’s tired and remaining on his feet feels pointless right now. Pang follows suit without hesitation, still talking as he rubs Dip’s head.

     “I had to say I forgot Dip’s after-dinner walk just to get out of the house. Mae thinks he’s taking an extra long bathroom break. Not sure how much time I can buy with that one before she wants to call up the vet. And then Prae wanted to come so I had to promise a whole cake or whatever it is from that French bakery just to shut her up. I can’t even pronounce the name but of course the six-year-old has the menu memorised — ”

     “Are you done?” Wave interjects. “It’s one in the morning, Pang.”

     Pang nods slowly. He releases Dip’s leash and Dip scampers over to Wave, leftover excitement at seeing him for the first time in a week coming back fast. Reflexively, Wave runs a hand down Dip’s head to his back and the dog wags his tail. Prae loves that bakery. She’d become obsessed with France after a school lesson and already asks when their family can visit the country. Prae’s the one who’d convinced her parents to get Dip, so Wave has no doubt she’ll wear them down into Paris. She always includes him in that too, like they couldn’t possibly go on holiday if Wave isn’t going with them.

     It’s dark enough that Wave doesn’t bother wiping at his damp cheeks. He’s a pretty quiet crier, so he just sits it out, Dip in his lap and Pang across the way.

     “I’m sorry,” Wave murmurs after some time.

     “I know. You were caught up again? With the bad thoughts?”

     “I haven’t… I’m not doing well,” Wave says. There’s so much more he needs to say, but the words won’t come out. As it is, he’s speaking through partially gritted teeth.

     His grandpa is gone, and the best memory of him is from before Wave had turned 13. His grandma is a living ghost, his parents are long dead. It’s all too easy for Wave to think that he has absolutely no one left to care whether he’s here at all.

     It’s taken two weeks to cry at his grandfather’s passing and half the tears aren’t even for him. The remaining can be attributed to so many miscellaneous bits and pieces that Wave can’t begin to think about them, at least today. He just focuses on how soft Dip’s ears are.

     “Since the funeral?”

     “Mm.” Wave inhales. “I hear him, and the usual — and before I know it — ” Wave doesn’t go on.

     “Will I sound like an asshole if I say you’ve been doing so good?” Pang asks a few moments later. “I thought — I hoped since it wasn’t happening as often, it might’ve meant — ”

     “I know,” Wave says quietly. An afterthought, though he means it, “You’re not an asshole.”

     “Wave, I… I love you, you know? I just love you and I — God, I hate how mean your brain is to you. Like, you’re supposed to be on the same team and it’s…” 

     “Yeah,” Wave scoffs, “you’d think so.” He sighs a little and shakes his head, eyes on the dark sky. “You came all the way here because I can’t answer a LINE.”

     “It doesn’t matter,” Pang says immediately. “You should know by now I’d run cross-country to meet you; a couple blocks’ walk is nothing. And you are a pain in the ass, but I like that.” They both cringe and Pang says, “So that didn’t come out — ”

     “Let it go.”

     “Letting it go.”

     Wave gets to his feet and adds, “I cried.”

     “Yeah.”

     “I mean, I didn’t… cry at the funeral.” Pang knows this, as he’d been there too. “And I hadn’t up until earlier, and here, just now. Is that… Do you think that’s, like… weird?”

     “Why would it be weird?” Because of course everything is that simple with Pang. “I didn’t cry when my parents told me my grandma died, and I lost it at her funeral. Cried the whole time and looked like a baby in front of my entire family. Brains are weird.”

     Pang takes the hand that goes to relinquish Dip’s leash, giving Wave time to decline the hug, but Wave lets Pang hold him close instead. He always feels like precious cargo in Pang’s arms, but rather than feeling humiliated as he’d feared, Wave feels embarrassed but touched by Pang’s sweet disposition. How he’s still constantly surprised after years of living around it, Wave doesn’t know.

     “Are you alright to go back in on your own?” Pang asks.

     “It’s whatever,” because there really isn’t much else to say.

     “We’re going to have our own place, you know.”

     “Huh?”

     “When we’re at uni,” Pang clarifies. “Like, I just think about how we’ll have a dorm-room to share, the two of us. And then we can get an apartment, if we want to.”

     It isn’t shocking to hear that Pang has ideas for their future, seeing as they’ve spoken about it, but the same as it always does to hear it said aloud warms a place inside Wave, the furnace Pang started up when they met.

     “I’ll be there when you need me and I won’t let you be lonely,” Pang goes on. “You can tell me to fuck off when you have to though; I won’t be mad.”

     “I won’t tell you to fuck off,” Wave says, even if he very well might.

     “Maybe we can have a precaution for whenever you can’t answer messages,” Pang says. “You were too stressed this time to message me but not messaging me added to the stress. We’ll come up with something to help.”

     Wave nods a little against him. Satisfied, Pang gently ruffles Wave’s hair as they pull apart.

     “I’ll get going,” he says. “Mae’s probably got the vet on hold by now. But I’ll call you.”

     “Mm.”

     “Sleep, okay? At least 10 hours.”

     Wave rolls his eyes but nods. “Yeah, sure. You too.” Pang grins and tugs Dip along on the street with a hand raised in goodbye.

     In bed that night, Wave takes his phone off silent. He catches the most recent messages from Pang, before Wave had been responding, but he tries not to look at them and focuses on the present.

let’s take Prae to the bakery tomorrow.

she already loves you more than me, stop this! but i love you more than *anyone so i get it

ugh gn love you

i love you too

     He’ll be fine, even when he inevitably falls apart again. He’ll be fine.

     God, if only he could bet on it.