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steve0discusses · 3 years

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S5 Ep6: Joey Wheeler is on Fire, Yet Again

Came down with a little sickness-not the biggie, just a little sly guy. But I took some meds, I’m a little floaty, I’ve only been listening to baroque music all morning for some reason? And I hate baroque music usually? But I’ll leave it to bro to tell me if this is fluid enough.

Just so you know, these caps were kind of a hot mess for a while and some of them read like that Garfield in of hot eat the food comic until...today. So pls don’t judge me, Judge my damn DMV where no one was following Covid regulations because I’m pretty sure that’s where I got this damn cold.

We start off with Roland getting more attention than he ever has in his entire life. Like honestly, I don’t know what Roland’s job really is...but he’s got a very diverse set of very useless skills. One of which, is knowing how to announce sports games that aren’t really a sport, while those games he’s announcing slowly fall into chaos.

Anyway, Roland’s taking so long cherishing his sweet time before everything goes to hell, that he’s boring Joey, who’s kinda turned into a ball of stress in the waiting room.

A lot of this episode is us watching them watching Joey having a break down moment by moment, TBH.

(read more under the cut)

Yugi telling Joey to study his cards and straight up--what?

Like at this point they know what’s on the cards, right? Like there comes a point where even Yugioh cards have a finite amount of words and I’m just going to assume that like...Joey probably knows them all in his own deck, right?

(bro note: they have no limit on what they will put on a card)

Then again, maybe Yugi doesn’t know what “study” means?

Also, appreciate how some artist crosshatched the hell on Joey’s nose there and I zoomed out and ruined it.

Now for some reason every duelist is hanging out in the duel lodge, including our current arch-villain guy who’s brought a book. I want to know what book this guy even reads so no one could suspect he’s actually a hacker who uses computers. He’s reading romance, right? And I don’t think he’d even be into Twilight, I think he’s straight up into hard core Mom romance like a lame ass Nicholas Sparks over there reading “Dear John” for the millionth time because he is completely un-phased by anything else happening in this room.

Joey, our hero, just out there being an asshole for no reason.

After Tea is pushed into a locker or something screaming about her need for female friends (which she screamed in earshot of Rebecca again, who I figured was on friends terms with her after last episode...but I guess not) Leon hops up to remind us that we should be caring about the fact that his character exists.

And like, I love Leon’s hair color--that’s a good choice, and legit that is the color I tried to dye my hair at the beginning of the epidemic (it didn’t work PS, my hair cannot take dye for the life of it) but also like...he just kinda feels like a weak Rebecca as far as characters go. He’s young, he’s good at cards...I think he goes to a private school? That’s all I can think of about Leon.

He mostly just reminds us that the big prize of this tourney is to duel Yugi, who anyone could have dueled at any point even without the tournament.

On the way out of the...duel room? lounge? Area? Joey decides to like...make peace with Zigfried, and I gotta tell you, I kinda have to side with Zigfried, because Joey spent the last ten minutes being a freak in the dressing room/lounge/bathroom and at one point looked like he was going to hold the entire locker room in a stranglehold.

I would also want some space from Joey Wheeler, is what I’m saying.

After insulting Joey’s style (which honestly, Joey...has a style? He pops his collar, that’s his entire style.) Zigfried assures us that Joey’s gonna lose and like...

...probably, right? Just looking at the plausible direction this season will go.

Anyway, Joey is such a mess (which is the theme of the episode, that Joey needs to learn to chill in order to win at card games) that Rebecca is like “I understand if all of you leave me to go help our poor baby Joey.” And no one felt bad for her.

Mokuba comes over to tell everyone all of the Kaiba family secrets because Mokuba has no filter.

Seto has devoted himself to staring at a computer screen for the rest of this episode. I guess he’ll put their names into Google, realize that social media hasn’t been invented yet, and then just lie his head down on the desk and take a power nap until the tournament is over. Much like I did after taking Dayquil this afternoon.

I like how Seto dressed for success and then locked himself in the server room for most of this arc so far. Maybe he’s just...really tired, I dunno. I don’t really blame the guy, he’s had a hard time.

And then Yugi was like “DAMN IT MOKUBA, JUST ONCE CAN YOU NOT INVITE THE ILLUMINATI???”

And we had a weird scene where Yugi just started talking to the ghost and it was while he was talking to everyone else, and the show didn’t treat it like that’s a weird thing to do...but it was a weird thing to do.

This show does that sometimes, where I guess they imply that Yugi’s Pharaoh conversations are split second conversations but...they’re not, right?

Also this chick ain’t gone yet, and Mokuba is just failing at his entire job for not zeroing in on vibes coming off this chick like stinky cheeseman.

So listen.

Did the Kaibas make like 3 types of Blue Eyes Caboose to one up Noah? Because Noah made one choo choo dragon, and then Mokuba and Seto were like “how dare” and then made sure that everyone ride every single version of the blue eyes caboose just to see how proud of them they were.

How many months of troubleshooting was the train? Like how long in development did Seto and Mokuba spend on these? A lot right? Like most of the time?

I did not check the subs to see if Roland said Jumping or Champion but I like to believe that Roland thought it was a cool new name he gave him.

Then these guys all showed up.

Hey so...can we talk seating arrangements?

Tea decided not to sit next to Yugi after complaining about not spending time with him for like how many episodes? Or was it too awkward to sit on top of what was probably Pharaoh?

Or did Mokuba go like “please, Tea, I cannot sit next to the others because I’m pretty sure one is a mole that is about to go cray” and was Tea like “Good, I need female friends, these ones are driving me crazy!” and then was Mokuba like peering desperately over the edge of his self made dragon train prison realizing he has to listen to Tea complain about boys for the rest of his ride across molten lava?

Headcanons abound about this weird seating arrangement that the animators drew for the reasons they did...but reasons I cannot fully understand. That and the Dayquil is making me overfixate on random stuff.

And also, Tea is kind of the Kaiba’s security’s understudy. Just there to always protect Mokuba with her ass because she’s the strongest woman alive.

PS I missed the tumblr wars because at the time I was trying to like...run a proper business on blogger. When Blogger died and I jumped over here it was like a weird ruin where everyone was like “tumblr is the most toxic place alive” and...I’ve had a really nice time here, actually. Completely missed that civil war period and I have no regrets.

Now I was there for the Petz wars (warz, I guess) where people were very militant about Petz abuse (abuze?) where apparently people were using the spray bottle on their catz too much and people were very, very upset about it to the point that they were like campaigning about it on their angelfire websites with the most bizarre grassroots campaigns that I still recall, to this day because they were like...well they looked like this:

PLAPA. Not only am I 100% positive that only this one guy ever called this movement PLAPA, but I’m 100% positive that not only are Catz not real people, but also this wasn’t actually happening and we never had any proof that it was. Either way, if people knew or suspected that you hadn’t deleted the spray bottle from your game (which at the time I had no idea how to do because I was a wee child) they would basically assume you were on a one way road to being a mass murderer in real life.

In real life we were 7 years old so like...thanks?

But that’s the closest I got to toxicity and at the time I was too young to make an email account and actually converse with these people. I was just there to download their Petz hexes, and I already made a post about how wonderful and incredible Petz Hexing was.

And y’all, I heard, just now after a little deep dive into the Petz Abuse debacle (which yes, is on the wiki), that apparently, like gardening, Petz Hexing came back in a big way during the epidemic--and I have found an active Petz forum in this the year 2021. The only problem is that I no longer remember how to use old timey forums...and I think I’m locked out of seeing most of these threads (and like this forum is so old I think I have to send them a letter in the physical mail to apply). But, I’m pretty sure they’re hosting a picture contest for who’s dogz poses the best. And I’m pretty sure someone created a hexxed Pickle Rick. Or it’s a photoshop that was made to look like a hexxed Pickle Rick.

Dammit why did it have to be Pickle Rick? That’s not worth re-installing Petz and getting it to run on Windows 10...

Guys is this the Dayquil? Is this really happening? I feel like I’m losing my mind for so many reasons...

Anyway, speaking about useless hexing it’s about time that our villain did something that was actually dangerous, so Zigfried decided to install a new virus that does more than turn off the lights. (it still turns off lights)

the Spreadsheet Virus!

Confounded by the spreadsheet software, it...um...it does this:

Straight up how does Excel make a volcano erupt? Is that why I have to pay for Microsoft office now?

All this because Joey made fun of Zigfried’s naturally pink hair? Which is the most normal hair on this series outside of like...Tristan?

Hey guys...Joey’s fine, right? Like how many times has Joey been on fire? And once in an iron cage next to like...a Fire Golem?

Joey’s fine.

MAN I miss Fire Golem. He had a good mug.

And then we just kinda watch chaos go across the park, chaos that includes: Too many ghosts in the haunted mansion (which honestly--you’ll get your money’s worth, sounds great!), the Ferris wheel goes kinda fast and thus might accidentally be fun, the lights turn off at some concert stage that only had 2 people on it (so it might just be motion detector lights and not even a virus), and um...literal fire and magma are going to set Joey Wheeler on fire.

Just...one of these events does not seem like the others. In fact most of these things sound like good improvements to the park and they should just hire Zigfried at this point.

Roland puts down his microphone and jogs across the stage, about a mile through the audience bleachers, and into the staff lounge, to go and bother Seto Kaiba, who is in a room that has a hi-def classical painting copy-pasted on the wall and I can’t look away from it.

I almost did a Google search on this painting but then thought better about it. There’s like...a billion classical paintings that look exactly like this, and they wouldn’t use like a Monet, they would have to do something that’s harder to catch to avoid copyright issues (because yes, even old ass paintings have copyright issues, but no one tell NFT’s which are going to be so freakin screwed and was such a bad idea, that I can’t even start).

Anyway, I have no idea who it is and it is legitimately driving me up a wall, but I’m on too much meds to do the effort of putting it in a reverse google image search.

Plus, a reverse google image search would only pull up Seto Kaiba.

So Kaiba takes us on a little flashback to his weird ass past, a weird ass past that just...doesn’t follow any of the established timelines, but I assume was shortly after adoption but before Seto got into a phase where he wore his school outfit everywhere and tried to shove his MMO off onto his Dad as a business model.

Seto is like 8 for some reason. I don’t know why, they kinda drew him younger this season anyway, like maybe they got a lot of fan mail and realized “Hey I think we made the 16 yo boy too sexy?” And they just toned Seto the hell down. That, and it’s a different animation team, and maybe they looked at Seto’s character design and were like “we don’t get paid enough to draw this well.” So...since Seto actually looks like a teen again, I guess his 12 year old self has to look like he’s in Elementary school.

Also, I only recognized this, because at some point in S3 as I was roasting Noah Kaiba’s weird fashion:

I remember distinctly roasting that little bow tie. I don’t remember when I wrote it, I think there was a version of this outfit that was in color...but I don’t remember where.

Anyway, it’s not the same jacket...but man that’s kind of awkward, ya? Like the maid who dressed Mokuba deffo got fired?

He um.

Turned the lights off a little bit.

Guys this villain is like...

...why does he think lights are scary? Like look at little Seto here. The boy is already bored. Seto duels on the edges of cliffs...he doesn’t care about the freakin dark.

We had a guy who killed everyone on the planet last season, and this season we have a little fashion gremlin standing in the corner and flicking the light switch going “wooooo you never catch me!” and it’s like...

...I’m starting to think this guy isn’t a witch.

Like we’re at Episode 6, there’s still time for this guy to be a witch...but I really am starting to think this guy is just...straight up not a witch. It’s everything Seto wanted, a rival who isn’t a freakin magic person...and sets Joey only fake on fire instead literally on fire like last time...

and Seto is just completely unhinged by it.

Anyway, I’m off to go drink a bowl of soup and pass out. If you’re new here, this is a link to read these in chrono order.

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

#yugioh #yu gi oh #ygo #S5 #Ep6 #Yugi Muto #Seto Kaiba #Joey Wheeler #Tea Gardner #Tristan Taylor #Mokuba Kaiba #zigfried von schroeder #rebecca hawkins #I talked about catz again #leon #but not the kings of leon guy #I mean he could be

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sky-squido · 3 years

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16, 21, 30, or 34? ALSO HAPPY BORTH YOU WONDERFUL PERSON 'yeets a cake at you'

*gets cake yeeted at me*

MORPH ILY

it's really funny thought cuz my parents actually got squido WRITTEN ON THE CAKE AAH

anyway *coughs*

here's where you can find the answer to 16! ^^

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

all of these are gonna be platonic cuz ew romance ((post was made by the probably aroace gang)) and FOUND FAMILY IS THE BEST

okay so i write a LOT of downfall duo,,, like a LOT. it might be my favorite pairing, but it feels a little too easy sometimes. i'm a total sucker for rarepairs like sky&legend, four&legend, wind&legend twi&legend—I'M A SHAMELESS LEGEND STAN OKAY

oh hyrule&sky is fire, too

okay but in all seriousness i ADORE writing twi-sky parent gang and wind&twilight also gives me SO MUCH LIFE. my favorites are legend, sky, and wind, and i feel like the latter two especially are just really underutilized. the most fun i have in my fics is like, yes there's a storyline and Serious Things Are Happening but they're still a buncha kiddos going on an adventure together and i feel like the more banter and rarepairs a fic has, the more real it all feels

enough rambling okay YES i love downfall duo with my whole heart but also i think the beauty of LU is the diversity of interactions you can play with and anything with a soft legend or a badass wind and/or sky in it is a recipe for a VERY happy squido. just,, sky and wind, and twi, too, i feel, are often the "recessive" characters in an interaction, if you will. it feels like they're usually not the main characters and tend to be a vehicle for the plot of whoever's talking to them so when THEY'RE stepping up and taking a role, it just makes me so happy! ^^

as i mentioned here, they're all the main characters of their own games so watching them all step up and take charge, especially the traditionally timid ones is just YES

okay enough rambling what was the other one? ah yes

30. Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

yes.

no i’m kidding.

well only sort of.

the way i see it, angst and fluff, hurt and comfort, they’re like push and pull. it’s a dance, my friends, a dance of hurt and healing and you need both to feel satisfied. fluff fics are nice, but they’re not food. angst fics are great, but i always leave them feeling sort of empty. but both, the angst sets up the conflicts and the fluff resolves it. i think you really do need both to have balance in a fic. obviously fics don’t have to show you the whole picture and authors can write whatever they’re comfy with and sometimes you want a fluffy comfort fic and sometime you just want pain—i’m by no means trying to say that my way is the only, or even the best, way to write a fic. it’s just my personal preference and that intertidal zone between the soft yet stagnant sands of fluff and the roaring, turbulent waves of angst is where i make my home. the tides come and go, waves crash and pull, but life flourishes in the cracks in the rocks and the burrows in the sand and sjghsfjghfldkgsehfjgsd i really just went off didn’t i

tl;dr:

yes

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

ohh this one's hard.

i had a big ramble here before i remembered two excepts that just take the cake and these are probably my favorite things i've ever posted on ao3

this one’s from Burns:

“Tell me, do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls?” The man said that like it was somehow supposed to explain something. Like it meant something.

Wind thought for a moment. “No, I can’t say that I do. Sunset… it’s beautiful.” Wind smiled despite himself, gesticulating excitedly. “The sky lights up a million colors and the ocean turns to molten gold. The sea stays warm even as the wind grows chilled and the first stars begin to blink into the sky, a welcome sight to any navigator. Sure it’s sad that the day ends, but the night is beautiful in its own way. I welcome them both. Two sides of the same coin, you know?”

The man remained in silence for a moment. “But what about the twilight? That time when the world hangs precariously between the two, balanced on the coin’s edge. What about that time?”

Wind felt his brow furrow in confusion, but he indulged him nonetheless.

“Yeah, it’s nice. That time when the first star blinks into the sky, the bravest and the brightest, a beacon of hope guiding sailors on their journeys. It’s like the dawn, but not quite as still. It’s like… it’s as if the day is an inhale and the night is an exhale and twilight is that little time in the middle when the world holds its breath. Is that what you mean?”

The man’s gaze shifted to the ground, a bittersweet smile on his face and his eyes suspiciously wet.

“Yeah. That is what I mean.”

Wind opened his mouth, but was interrupted by the man saying: “call me Twilight.”

This is from What Hyrule Hadn't Seen chapter 10 and it’s both spoilers and kinda long and i don’t want this post to be five miles so

“Wind, we need to get you out here. You can barely stand.”

“Bullsh*t! I’m not leaving you behind!”

“I’ll manage,” came his reply, the blade of his spin attack passing above Wind’s crouched head.

“No you f*cking won’t! I’m not going to leave you out here to die!”

“So you’d rather we both died instead?!”

“You admit that this is a suicide mission, then!”

“Stop wasting time and get out of here!”

“NO!”

“WIND! As your commanding officer, I am ordering you to get to safety!”

Wind finally rose to his feet, his right leg bleeding and clearly supporting none of his weight, his sword unwavering in his determined arms.

“The day I submit to your authority when you're being an ass is the day I f*cking die.”

Warriors let out a small whine, a sound Wind never could have imagined the captain making. He spoke in a low, slicing tone, his eyes like his blade—cold, steely, and far too wet—as he faced the sailor.

“I’ve stood over far too many corpses. Don’t let yours be one of them.”

Wind straightened his posture and said nothing, pulling his bow from his back, his gaze like fire—hungry and bursting with life—and wordlessly turned his back to the captain, knocking an arrow, brilliant luminescence collecting on its head as he aimed into the blackened forest that seethed with darkness.

“Come on, tactics man, use your head. If you fall here, the town won’t be safe. Nowhere will be.”

He smiled a smile that had no right to cover the face of a child.

“If we’re gonna die, we might as well do it together.”

Warriors’ shoulders heaved in a silent sob, but he quickly quelled it, regaining his composure as best he could, brow furrowed and sword quivering in his hands.

“I just can’t f*cking win with you.”

“No, but you can lose with me one last time.”

"So be it."

Warriors said nothing more, diving into battle once again.

Wind fired his arrow.

A halo of light burst through the forest, shattering shadows into dust.

And a sword slipped past the captain’s wavering guard.

read it here uwu: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25993870/chapters/68195218

#squido rants #this got so long i'm so sorry #(not really but sssh)#people have been liking and not reblogging these anyway so they probably won't be on your dash 15 times

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travllingbunny · 4 years

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The 100 rewatch: season 4 and the greyest morality ever

While I was trying to write a rewatch review of episode 4x12 The Chosen, it turned out I had too many thoughts on the complicated moral issues and lack of obvious right and wrong stance – so I’ve decided to put them in a separate post.

I don’t think the show has ever achieved this level of moral ambiguity as in these last episodes of season 4. Yes, there are many situations in the show where all options are bad in one way or another, but this is maybe the only time in the entire show where I really can’t say that there is a right or wrong choice. It’s probably the most horrible thing the characters have had to do – leave a number of people to die a horrible death just because there’s not enough place.

And all of them have to do it, whichever side they’re taking. There is no option here where everyone is saved*. Twilight’s Last Gleaming was the episode where the show first showed me how bold it was – but this time, unlike in that episode, things aren’t made easier by having everyone volunteer to be killed.

*Or rather, there was an option where everyone – or at least the majority of people in the area – could have been saved. But pretty much everyone has forgotten about it. As we’ll find out in the next episode, the Nightblood solution works. If they had tested Clarke, they would have probably known that. If they had tested Emori, they also would have probably known that. In the end, Clarke’s heroic choice to inject herself with Nightblood and volunteer to be tested – ended up saving only her.

It’s interesting that, even now when it’s really in fashion to hate Abby for all sorts of things, no one seems to blame her for basically blowing up the chance to save hundreds – maybe thousands – of people from Praimfaya, which could have also spared them from the horror of the bunker. Abby herself feels so much guilt that she wants to die because she was being utilitarian and willing to test people in a radiation chamber order to find a way to save everyone, which made her feel she was becoming an “evil scientist” – and not because she blew that chance in the end. That’s probably because people generally feel that prioritizing your child over everything else and not being able to risk their life for the human race is completely understandable and not something people (especially mothers) should be blamed for. (…Except when it comes to Clarke in season 5. Hmm. I guess that’s different because people see Clarke’s fear of the Flame as irrational. While Abby’s fear was based on the fact that the radiation could kill Clarke and she had just seen a man die a horrible death that way… but wait, it was also based on a vision she had. Never mind.

Season 4 in particular revolves about the question, which is more moral, thinking about the “big picture”, saving as many people as you can, or saving concrete people that you know and love, or even just people who are in trouble right there in front of you? It’s not a question with a definite answer, and characters have been blamed by others or felt guilty both when they were willing to potentially sacrifice concrete individuals for the salvation of the human race, and when they decided to save people right there and then, risking the fate of the collective in the future.

I used to hate Jaha when I watched seasons 1-3 for the first time, but by season 4, I found myself understanding him better and appreciating him as a character (this was the first time he made my Top 10 characters list!), even if I don’t agree with him most of the time. I get where he’s coming from – and I was with him in 4x10 when he pointed out that the Final Conclave was an idiotic way to resolve the issue of the survival of human race. Someone had to say it. But his reasoning is all wrapped up in the fact that he sees himself as the leader of the Arkers, “his people” – as a group, and prioritizes them over others (like the Grounders), but at the same time, has always been willing to sacrifice any individual person for it, which made his care for “his people” feel not just tribalistic (just as much as any of the Grounder leaders who wanted the bunker just for their clan), but also very cold and impersonal. I certainly didn’t care for him trying to guilt-trip Bellamy by telling him he condemned 314 people to death by opening the bunker. If he hadn’t opened the bunker, he would have been condemning 800 people to death! And if it’s all about “your people”, who’s “your people” more than your family, people you love? Jaha seemed unable to understand that (which is why he didn’t predict what Abby would do to save Kane), since he had already lost the people he loved the most and sort of sacrificed his own son – which never stopped haunted him, but seems to have convinced him that his role of the savior of “his people” is something everyone should be able to sacrifice their loved ones for.

I’ve always mostly leaned to the view that opening the bunker was a better choice than leaving it closed – because it saved a greater number of people (1200 as opposed to 400+). Now, after seeing seasons 5 and 6, I’m starting to question that to an extent, because the bunker turned out to be such a horror show, and now, after the bunker and the gorge, only about 400 people from it survived. However, saving just a little over 400 people in the bunker would have been too few, and others still may have died in and after the bunker, so I still think saving 800 people at the expense of 300 other people was the right choice. This made it a good “Head” choice, as long as Bellamy was right that Octavia could prevent the Grounders from trying to kill Arkers (and ruin their own chances of survival, since they had no clue how to operate any of the devices necessary for producing or recycling air, water and food). And some of the arguments brought up by rebellious Arkers in this episode don’t hold water: “Jaha found the bunker” ignores the fact that he could have never found it without Gaia’s and Indra’s help (and Kane’s and Monty’s – and both of them were also going to be left out of the bunker to die); as for the idea that Arkers deserve more places in the bunker because they’re the ones who are necessary for everyone’s survival for their skills in operating the machines etc. – well, not all of them are necessary for that, and most of the people in Arkadia didn’t like that kind of reasoning back when they learned about the list, did they? If they thought it was wrong when applied to their lives, it’s also wrong when applied to the lives of Grounders.

However, there’s one other line of reasoning that had never crossed my mind before I heard it from a YouTube reactor I like. He thought that it was right that each “clan” got 100 people, because the surviving humans should reflect the diversity of cultures, without any of them dying out. Ironically, that’s IMO the first strong argument why the Arkers maybe should have gotten a lot more than 100 places in the bunker. His argument assumed that all of the 12 Grounder clans have very different cultures. But does what we’ve seen on the show support that? The only genuinely different Grounder lifestyles we’ve seen were from non-warriors like Luna’s Boat people (all dead anyway) and the Shallow Valley community that Madi was from (all died in Praimfaya – we don’t know who the 100 people from their clan in the bunker were), but other than that, it’s hard to see any cultural or other difference between Azgeda, Trikru, Trishanakru etc. except for minor things like the type of warpaint. It’s the same language, religion, social structure, same prioritization of warriors. While Arkers are distinctly culturally different (and even different in their origin – since it was from 12 different world nations, rather than just USA and maybe Canada) from Grounders, but, thanks to the decision to become the “13rd clan”, are now all but extinct – with maybe 30-40 people surviving to season 6, and all but absorbed in the Grounder-dominated culture of Wonkru. In spite of the fact that Grounders have never won any battles against Arkers, while the latter defeated the Mountain Men, Grounders have always been able to dominate the Arkers by the sheer fact that there was just that many more of them. And the fact is that Grounders did try to screw over Arkers by coming up with the Final Conclave (they were all trying to screw each other and leave all other clans outside, of course, but making survival dependent on being able to win in a Grounder-style fight seemed like a sure way to leave Arkers to die – again), while refusing to share the bunker – and then, when “Skygirl” Octavia won that tournament against the odds, they were happy with her decision to share the bunker. (When you think of it, no one in that Conclave fought to have all the Arkers survive.)

So I kind of get the Arkers’ anger. But whatever the case may be, what was definitely not a good choice was starting another war less than a day before Praimfaya. I guess it was time for Arkers to do that, too, after we’ve seen similar with Grounders before the Final Conclave when they were insisting on fighting a war between each other. Because that kind of thing is a general people problem.

In terms of the “Heart”, of course Bellamy was not going to agree to sacrifice his sister, and Abby was not going to agree to sacrifice her lover. No one should be asked to definitely sacrifice their loved ones for the “greater good”. This kind of choice would leave one feeling like they’ve killed their own heart. I generally think that people really exaggerate Clarke’s “Head” role – which certainly doesn’t mean she doesn’t often act on emotion – but I think that season 4 is when she was being “Head” the most, in the sense that she was doing her best to focus on the big picture and save the human race. Bu that ended up making her feel like she had grown cold and turned into one of the people on the Council… or specifically, that she’s turned into Chancellor Jaha, someone she used to see as everything she hated. But there were always limits to how far she could go in prioritizing the big picture. If Bellamy and Abby haven’t been in the bunker, I don’t believe Clarke would have stolen it and kept it closed, either. But the fact that she was ready to leave her friends like Raven, Octavia, Monty to die (just like the earlier fact she hadn’t put some of her closest friends on the list) made her feel deeply guilty. She’s not proud of being able to make those tough choices to sacrifice people close to her for the wellbeing of the collective. But her willingness to do that has always hit a brick wall when it comes to Bellamy: the list, letting Roan blackmail her into giving Azgeda 50 seats, and finally, not being able to shoot him when she thought that would ensure the survival of the human race. (We luckily never learned if she would have given ALIE the password if her initial plan of torturing Bellamy had materialized.) Of course she was never going to be able to shoot him – but the very fact she thought, for a moment, that she could, shows how much she had tried to suppress her emotions in order to achieve the goal of saving the human race.

This is one of the reasons why Bellamy, in a way, is Clarke’s heart: she needed to get back in touch with that part of herself, back to who she used to be. It’s also why her final mission in these last two episode of season 4 is not to save the human race, but to save the people she loves; why she goes with Bellamy to save Raven, and then stays behind and does everything to save her friends, even when she thinks she’s practically already dead.

And it was Bellamy – the “Heart”, the one whose season 4 arc was all about saving individual people, not just those he loved by saving who we can today – whose season 4 arc ended with him having to make the heartbreaking decision to leave behind Clarke, one of the most important people in his life, because it was the only reasonable decision in the circumstances and the only way to save others.

#the 100 #the 100 season 4 #the chosen #the 100 4x12 #the 100 rewatch #praimfaya #clarke griffin #bellamy blake #thelonius jaha

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unnursvanablog · 3 years

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All the books I read in 2020 / part 2.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker: ☆☆☆☆☆

Loved how these myths and legends were used within this story. It is a beautiful tale of immigration and friendship and how Wecker conveyed that was just beautiful. The text did drag its feet in some places, but this story is also so character driven; their experience with the world, and their longings, so I understand that slow pace. Everything about it felt really sincere and it truly is a book that leaves you with something. I have never read anything like this before and I felt like it bridges the gap between historical history and fantasy well.

Naturally Tan - Tan France: ☆☆☆

I listened to this book in one sitting as I drove from the capital area and all the way home to the countryside. And I really enjoyed it because I really like Tan France and he narrated the audiobook himself. The text, the chapters and therefor the book itself goes a bit all over the place and it feels a bit vapid at times. It was about everything and nothing, really.

The Silence of Bones - June Hur: ☆☆☆

I am not so much for these types of mystery novels, so it was not something that drew me forward, but I did find the atmosphere that Hur created within the story and the historical elements really great and made the story quite enjoyable. I felt like learning a little more about certain parts of Korean history that I did not know before, and I really enjoyed that.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes - Marie Brennan: ☆☆☆

The world that Brennan has created continues to wow me. It is complex and it’s so much fun to travel around it. I love getting to know these characters at different stages of their lives and it just makes you like them even more. The story often runs into the same problem for me and that is that I find the first parts of the story so exciting, it is an adventure, but then it loses me a little towards the end.

The Will to Battle - Ada Palmer: ☆☆

After the amazing storyline of the second book, this book really lacked any excitement within the plot to propel you further and instead we got a lot of philosophical lessons and musings. In the previous books I felt like Palmer managed to strike a balance between those things, but not here. So little was going on. This story is deep, beautifully written, and complex and all that, but the text is often so long and dense, and my dyslexia just wants to skip these walls of texts that often just feel like statements about something philosophical but not real conversations or reflections from the characters.

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - H.G. Parry: ☆☆☆☆

I was hoping for a 'grown up version' of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, and although that was not quite what I got, I really enjoyed this. I thought the world was well thought out, and the idea of the readers interpretation of the characters and even literary criticism can affect how they would appear in our world was a cool concept. In some places I felt that the story was a bit stunted or towards the end I was starting to predict where it was going, and there was a lot of misunderstanding between the characters so the story could continue, which got on my nerves. But for the majority of the time, it was a really fun read.

Midnight Sun - Stephenie Meyer: ☆

You can judge me for this. I judge myself too. It was strange to fall back into the Twilight world after completely falling out of it after reading the last Twilight book. But out of sheer curiosity, I decided to give this one a try. But wow… this was not fun and added almost nothing to the original story and Edward is just so damn boring and having to spend time in his mind was just kind of a torment.

The Absolute Sandman, vol 1 & 2 - Neil Gaiman: ☆☆, ☆

I was going to listen to the whole thing via the new and shiny audible version of the Sandman comics, but I could sit through more than the first two volumes. I could not tolerate the violence against the female and queer characters. Oh my god! You do not have to go that far to make your story edgy, or create a complex, dark world. Nothing that happened seemed to move me or make me want to keep listening to this story. It does not really seem to revolve around anything. Or maybe I am just too annoyed to pay attention to the story. Fortunately, Gaiman seems to have improved as a writer since.

Radio Silence - Alice Oseman: ☆☆☆☆

Listened to this and although contemporary YA is is usually not something that hooks me or interest me in any way, Oseman manages to make the story so genuine and down to earth despite all the teenage drama, and the character felt so real that it just draws you in. The daily problems of teenagers often seem too dramatic or unreal to me in books like this, but that was not here. The text is not to flowery, but not too simple either. The story just as a really good pace going on. Everything just flowed together.

Wicked Fox - Kat Cho: ☆☆☆

The story did sound like a kdrama to me and I was hoping it would be that. Just fun and cute and fluffy with some loveable characters and sprinkle of myths and legends. It was fun, it didn't go into too much depth with most things within the story. It kinda brushes over a lot of things. For me the book started of well, but then towards the middle of the book things start to happen to fast and there was not enough time spent on bulding things up, so in the end the story kinda went nowhere for me. The little bits of the Gumiho legend, at least how the legend was presented in this book, inbetween the chapters was my favorite bit.

The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien: ☆☆☆☆

You can tell that worldbuilding and just spending time making things up for this magical world that he crated was one of the things Tolkien enjoyed the most when it came to writing. The stories about Middle Earth, even the backstories, are so rich and lushus. I do struggle with the writing style, it does feel a bit dry to me at times, and it does feel like short stories set in the world of Middle Earth and not at tightly knit story which isn't always my cup of tea so it did take me a while to get into it.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London - Garth Nix: ☆☆☆

The story really throws you straight into the action and you just have to find your bearings as best as you can while the story goes on. It was really fast paced and the story never really stops for too long to give you a breather. It was light and funny, a little weird and the character were whimsical, which I enjoyed. Sometimes I felt like I was in a Doctor Who episode, except with magic and not aliens. I just wish it would have let the story breath a little more for me to really enjoy the world that Nix had crafted and such things.

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik: ☆☆

I do not know what happened here, but wow, this was so not Novik at her best. Neither the characters or the worldbuilding that I am used to getting from Novik was in this book and for the most part there wasn't a whole lot going on in this books. I can deal with a slow burning book and really just enjoy a good fantasy world but there was very little interesting things here to explore. I can deal with a unlikeable main character, but this one didn't grow at all during the book, she just kept on reminding us why she was cranky all the time and how much she delighted in it. There was a whole lot of telling about this magical school and the diverse world outside of it, but very little showing so it all seems rather empty and after a while I just started to skim over the text. And there was really no story there that kept me going and I could not see the purpose for anything that happened.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V.E. Schwab: ☆☆☆☆☆

Oh, wow. The feeling that this book created inside me and the sincerity within the text just grabbed me and would not let me go. I made me feel a lot of things, and I love when a books do that. There are so many emotions behind it and you can really feel them. The atmosphere that Schwab creates in the story is great and it hooks you in, but it is the character and their stories that make you stay. I don't usually enjoy timejumps, but Schwab did them so well and they do explain the story and the motivations for each of the characters really well, although it get's a bit repetitive at times, especially towards the end.

The Moomins: The Exploits of Moominpappa, Moominsummer Madness, Moominland Midwinter - Tove Jansson: ☆☆☆☆

I love the Moomins, but there's just something so cozy about these stories and characters. They are part of my childhood, they are so light, whimiscal and funny, yet have depth to them, which is a balance that is difficult to achieve in my opinion. My journey through this book took me almost a year, as I only occasionally picked it up to enjoy the text and my stay in this small, strange world that Jansson created. I was savoring it.

Shine - Jessica Jung: ☆☆☆

SNSD, the band that Jesscia Jung was in, is my favorite kpop band since I started listening to kpop more than 10 years ago and their music is one of the main reasons why I got into kpop to begin with. So of course I was intrigued! The story here is something that I think could be inspired Jessica experiences within the kpop industry, or that thought never left me as I read it even if there were lot of unbelievable things going on within these pages. But it's definitely overdramatized at times. But how she talks about gender discrimination between female singers and male singer, from other people in the business and from the fans and the expectations that people have towards these singers and such. That felt really authentic to me. For all the glamor and the dazzle of the kpop world within this book the plot and the characters are a bit dull, and some of the more unbelievable events (like all of those trips and secret cafes) often pulled me out of the story. And I did not find the clichéd YA romance fun to read at all.

#book reviews #book review

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sad-sweet-cowboah · 5 years

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My Little Secret part 2

Summary: Something happened last night, and your brain is foggy on the details. You run into someone familiar when taking a fun little trip to Saint Denis.

Warnings: Alcohol mention and use, mention and use of weed (well, vaping)

With the sun shining through the blinds of your bedroom window, you woke up from a sound sleep. Although, you couldn’t remember exactly when you got home and how, it felt more like a dream anything. Did you hit your head or something?

Thinking back, you vaguely remembered getting into your car…being helped, actually. Someone had helped you, though your brain was too fogged to remember who exactly.

Either way, you’d gotten home without any issues.

The bright and sunny sky showed promise, a beautiful Saturday to enjoy. That is until you saw the mountain of textbooks resting upon your desk, and you groaned. Guess the day would be spent doing homework.

You spent a couple of hours around the house, cooking yourself breakfast and cleaning up the miniscule space you had in your apartment. You showered, treating yourself to a personal spa day. Eventually you’d run out of tasks to do, and you eventually had to turn to those textbooks.

It wasn’t exactly hard, yet there was a vast amount. Grad school for pharmacology, you read drug names a hundred times over. You knew human anatomy like the back of your hand, all of the effects and contraindications of different drugs. With all the information you’d crammed into your head for these past five years, it was a miracle your brain hadn’t shut down by now.

As an hour passed, your focus began to wander back to last night. Nothing seemed to add up, and you couldn’t remember why you needed help. Maybe you’d passed out somehow? You could recall leaving the building, and then between that and the car…nothing.

You thought harder, trying to fight past the fog that clouded your memory. You could recall…a voice…

The sound of your phone ringing snapped you from your train of thought. Grabbing it, the caller ID flashed with your friend’s name.

“Hello?” you answered.

“Hey girl!” your friend, Sam, responded. “What’re you doing at this moment?”

“Eh, homework,” you sighed. “Feels like I barely made a dent.”

Sam made a noise of sympathy. “Well, you wanna take a break? Some of us are heading to Saint Denis today.”

“What for?” you asked.

“To have fun, of course!” Sam exclaimed. “Do a little shopping in the daytime, bar hop at night!”

Tempting. You thought about it for a moment, but you had to at least finish your homework. “I don’t know, Sam. This homework isn’t gonna finish itself.”

“Do it tomorrow,” she answered quickly. “Come on, it’s been a while since we all got to enjoy ourselves. And Saint Denis is the perfect place to do so!”

She had a point. The last time you’d truly had a fun night out was after midterms, in celebration of you passing all of them. Plus, you did like Saint Denis. The French charm that laced the city never got old. “Alright, you.ve convinced me.” You finally gave in.

You could practically see the grin on her face on the other end of the line. “Sweet. We’ll swing by and get you then.”

—-

You’d been ready to go within the hour, your friends swinging by in a large SUV to pick you up. Within two hours, you were in the intricate city of Saint Denis. You’d stopped at a diner for some lunch before hitting the streets to have a little bit of fun.

Saint Denis was a beautiful city with its French inspired architecture and culture. You’ve only been here a few times, yet you were always lost in its grandeur. High end restaurants and clubs lined the busier streets, while cute boutiques and hobby shops were confined to smaller streets and alleyways. Theaters and galleries were popular amongst natives and tourists alike.

You’d wandered in and out of smaller shops, collecting a couple of souvenirs as you went. Munching on snacks here and there, or just viewing items you wish you had the money to spend on. Clothes that would take a week’s worth of pay to purchase.

There was always something for you to do here, and each visit unveiled a new experience for you. This time your group had gone into a new museum of local history that had opened, a small building on the corner towards the center of the city.

Being a history buff, it definitely interested you more than your friends did. You spent a little more time than you’d like to admit while going through the exhibits, learning about how the city seemed to be a hot spot for outlaws in the late 19th century, even displaying a gun of a fallen gang member from a huge bank heist.

After your friends bugging you to leave, you wandered back out into the humid air. The sun was fairly low in the sky by then, a late afternoon beginning to be touched by twilight in the horizon. The need for alcohol was becoming apparent, and the daygoers were soon returning to their homes as the young night owls were appearing.

Your group eventually came across an old bar that wasn’t very packed yet. It was saloon style, a different setting from the club that you worked at. It wasn’t crowded yet, though a good amount of people moved amongst the space. Music played overhead, the clank of pool balls slamming together occasionally rang out from the corner.

With the first round of drinks, your group sat at a table, drinking happily and chatting about everything you hadn’t covered earlier today. As time wore on and the sky outside darkened, and more patrons entered. The music slowly began to pick up the pace, and a few bodies were beginning to dance.

At some point you’d moved over to the pool table, dividing yourselves into two teams of three. It started out fun, giggling at the awkward taps and misses and cheering whenever someone got a ball into one of the holes. Over time though you began to get bored, your idle eyes slowly scanning the ever growing crowd as you sipped on another drink.

It was more diverse than the club back at home, at least for a Saturday night. Sure, there were many people around your age, as well as older patrons swarming around the bar and buying pitchers of beer.

The sky had completed darkened now, from what you’ve noticed as the door occasionally opened, bringing a gust of humidity amongst the crowd. Gazing aimlessly, lost in a small daze as your friends continued the pool game.

But wait-

You looked toward a shadowed spot again. Towards the back of the bar, a figure stood, casually leaning against the wall with his arms folded. His head was tilted down, hidden behind what looked like a cowboy hat.

The brim lifted, immediately uncovering a pair of intense blue eyes. Somehow, they seemed familiar…

“Y/N!” Sam called to you. “Your turn!”

You blinked and turned towards the table again, noting the expectant looks on your friends’ faces. You sighed and grabbed a cue, lining up your shot for the eight ball.

---

Some time had passed after finishing the pool game, and you wandered back over to the bar for another drink. Squeezing in between others to reach the slightly sticky surface, you placed your empty glass upon it and waited for the bartender to get your attention. It always felt slightly strange to be on the paying side of the bar, knowing you could easily make your own drinks if you were that determined.

Both of the bartenders were busy dealing with others on the far side, not that you minded. You understood that rush all too well. Zoning out once again, you didn’t notice when another person took the empty spot beside you.

It wasn’t until his arm accidentally brushed against yours did you snap out of your daydream. Skin as cold as ice, you glanced toward him. The man from earlier.

It only now occurred where you’d seen him before: the previous night at your own bar. The guy who had a weird, predatory gaze but promised he wouldn’t act as such anymore. And somehow, you remembered him helping you to your car…

“You sure have a thing for starin’, don’t ya?” his voice startled you, not realizing you’d gave him a look longer than just a fraction of a second.

You bit on your bottom lip as you shied away from his gaze. Damn it, he caught you again. This time it wasn’t even intentional. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to remember where I saw you. You were at the club I worked at last night.”

“Yeah, I know I got an ugly mug. Easy to remember.”

Your head snapped up to look at him again. In no way was this guy ugly. From his piercing blue eyes to the built cheekbones and his strong jaw that had a decent amount of stubble, decorated with faint wrinkles and…scars? A rugged sense of handsomeness that touched his features. You never really looked at men much older than you were, yet you had to appreciate this one. “You…aren’t ugly, if that’s why you think I was staring again,” you said with a slight hint of bewilderment. “But…I think…didn’t you help me…or something? Unless I was dreaming.”

“Ah,” he sat up straight. “You tripped n’ fell at some point. Hit your head against them trash cans. I was nearby when I heard it. Came on over wonderin’ if there was a scuffle or somethin’. Saw you layin’, I waited till you came to, then made sure you were okay enough to go home.”

Tripping and hitting your head? You certainly didn’t remember that, yet it would explain the fogginess on what else had happened that night. “Well, I appreciate it, Mr…”

“Arthur,” he finished for you, giving you a small smile. “It’s not a problem, Miss Y/N.”

Wait. “How’d you know my name?” you asked suspiciously.

“You told me, I asked you some questions as you were gettin’ up.” Arthur explained.

Another memory that seemed to have slipped your mind. Maybe you hit your head harder than you’d realized. “Well…good thing you were there to save the day.”

“Or night.” He added.

You half smiled at his response. “So, isn’t it a little odd that we run into each other twice in a row? Saint Denis is a bit of a drive from Rhodes.”

“’Spose you could say that,” Arthur shrugged lightly. “But I came here for some business. Hate the city really, but this bar just happens to be a favorite of mine.”

“Why is that?”

Before answering, Arthur gazed up at the ceiling, staring into the dimness past the low golden lights. “The charm…I guess. This is the oldest bar in Saint Denis, and ain’t much changed. At least so I’ve heard.”

“I thought you said you don’t drink,” you pointed out. “What’s the point of coming here?”

“Fond memories.” His answer was short and quick.

“So, are you from here?” you asked.

Arthur shook his head, his nose wrinkling in slight disgust. “Nah, just have a lot o’ history here, personally. No matter how much I try to escape, somethin’ always drags me back.”

“Sounds like you put yourself in that cycle, Arthur.” you pointed out with slight amusement.

He shrugged again. “Don’t matter that much. Gotta work somehow.”

You hummed a response, understanding that plight all too well. You remembered the job you had in your first years of college. Wasn’t ideal, set in a place that you’d never want to step foot in again. “So what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

His focus shifted to you again. “I’m an outlaw. I go around robbin’ banks and killin’ folk that need killin’.”

You stared at him. With his nonchalant tone, you weren’t sure if he were joking or not. After a few seconds of silence of contemplating, you snorted into laughter. “Sounds like one hell of a job!” you giggled, and he chuckled himself.

Before you could do anything else, you heard your name being called once again. Turning around, Sam was standing just a few feet away. She held up a vape pen, raising her eyebrows in invitation. You nodded in understanding, and turned toward Arthur again.

And then you realized you forgot to grab another drink. “Shoot, I wanted to order something else.”

“Go on with your friend, I’ll order for ya.” He said.

You frowned slightly, giving him an odd look. You hardly knew him, yet he was offering you to buy a drink?

“Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna spike it,” He said earnestly. “Just think of it as a gift for a nice conversation.”

This guy was strange, yet had a charm to him that you couldn’t place. “Okay, but if you try anything, my friends will gang up on you.” You warned, adding in your drink order and moving through the crowd to join Sam.

---

“Who’s that man you were talking to, Y/N?” Sam asked, her voice rough after taking a drag from the pen and handing it to you.

You two stood outside the bar, off from the main crowd as they entered and existed the building. Taking a drag yourself, you exhaled, coughing slightly at the end before responding. “Some guy I met at my bar last night. Helped me out after I hurt myself.”

“You hurt yourself?” Sam repeated, her eyes wide.

“Yeah, don’t really remember it. He said I fell and hit my head.” You explained.

“Jesus, Y/N,” Sam exasperated. “You’re gonna be a pharmacologist, you can’t go off killing all your brain cells!”

“As if this doesn’t?” you joked, gesturing to the pen.

“Hey, I was high during most of midterms. I passed just fine.” Sam responded as-a-matter-of-factly, swiping it back.

“And I suppose copying my notes had nothing to do with it?” you lightly shot back, unable to hide the grin on your face.

Sam coughed a “shut up” in mid-exhale, leaving both of you giggling to yourselves. As the amusement died down, someone had approached you.

It was Arthur, sidling up to you with a drink in his hand. You blinked in surprise, realizing he was absolutely serious about that drink.

“Here ya are,” he said, holding the glass out to you. “Unspiked n’ all.”

You took it. “Thanks, Arthur,” you glanced at Sam staring at you expectantly. “Oh, Sam, this is Arthur. The guy I just told you about.”

“Ma’am.” Arthur greeted, tilting his head to her.

“Hi! Thanks for helping out Y/N, she told me of your heroic act,” Sam responded, and leaned closer to peer at him from under the hat. “Hey…you look familiar, do you work in Gaskill Hall?”

Arthur stepped back slightly, but shook his head. “Sorry, got me confused with someone else.”

“You’re too high,” You stated with a laugh. “Sorry, Arthur. Sam can be…over the top sometimes.”

Arthur waved the statement off. “That’s alright, I’ve met quite a few like her over the years. Anyway, I’ll leave ya to it, then. I’ll be headin’ off. Enjoy your night, ladies.”

You bid your goodbyes to him, and once again thanked him for the drink. As he sauntered off, you peered into the glass. The fruity smell of the juice masked the stronger smell of the alcohol, the straw bobbing slightly with your movement. It puzzled you as to why he offered to buy your drink..

“Ya know, he’s pretty handsome,” Sam mentioned, breaking your train of thought. “In like a hot professor type of way.”

“What, you think he teaches at the school? Is that why he seems familiar to you?” You asked.

Sam shrugged before taking a short drag of her pen. “I dunno, but I think I’ve seen him before…somewhere. Just can’t really place it.”

You didn’t respond, idly sipping the drink. It tasted just as you expected, nothing gave off an indication that he might have altered it. You had to give him the benefit of the doubt, though. He seemed genuinely kind, giving a different air than any other guy you’d met.

Maybe you’ll run into him again at some point.

#Arthur Morgan #Arthur Morgan x reader #vampire au

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darklingichor · 4 years

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Carry On by Rainbow Rowell *Major Spoilers*

I wrote a little about this book last month, but I want to write more. This is one of those books that has been lingering in my brain so what follows will be long and rambling.

Now, I haven't read Fangirl I've been pulled more toward action adventure and humor in my fiction, for a while now. Hmm, I wonder what could have happened a few years back that would cause a Pacific Northwest liberal to feel the need for escape? Just one of those things, I suppose.

I need to read it, if only because I wrote Harry Potter fanfic for years and sort of lost myself in it right after high school.

Anyway.

I've heard people calling Carry On an HP knock off. I don't get this. Simon Snow is obviously Fangirl's Harry Potter. That makes Carry On more of a tongue in cheek homage to HP and stories like it as well as something of a love letter to fanfic writers.

A lot of the main characters start out as your standard for this type of story. "The Hero", "The Mentor", "The Damsel", "The Enemy", "The Unspeakable Evil."

Through the book it becomes clear that our hero is well meaning but ill-suited for the role that his mentor thinks he place him in. The mentor is shown to be unhinged. The damsel is sick of screaming and doesn't want to be in the story at all. The enemy is love sick for the hero and dealing with the puberty from hell. The unspeakable evil, isn't. Its just an unforeseen byproduct of the mentor's plan, in which, the hero, is a pawn.

The book plays with archetypes and I read some of them as being fairly meta about their expected place in the story.

Agetha, especially, seems to know her role and resent it. She's who is saved by the hero, whether she likes it or not.

Baz is so certain of his role as "The Enemy" that until his role flips, he's sure his destiny is to be killed by the person he's in love with.

Simon knows his role so well, he's on auto pilot as a defence mechanism. He's either going to die, or he'll get a stock Happily Ever After. He doesn't even allow himself to think too much about what really matters to him, because he knows his life isn't really his.

I would have loved this book because of everything I wrote above, but add to it the nods to fan contribution? It was enough to make me remember my old ff.n login!

I don't know if Rainbow Rowell researched fan fiction but I figure she must have.

I mean, the things I saw played with and reshaped in Carry On, are fanfic tropes. Rowell took things that grew out of fans having fun with their favorite characters and made them canon.

Main character going out with an exchange student, pop culture references, evil good guy, and:

Four words: Draco is a vampire.

Sure, not every fic that used these were the best, but so what? Many were sincere.

What better way to go to Hogwarts as a person raised outside the UK than to live though an OC in an exchange program?

It was weird that no one in the wizard world listened to muggle music, watched movies or TV. Even the muggleborns? I'm sorry, but I was in the same age range as the characters. In fact, if Harry were real, he would be three years older than me. You can't convince me that there were not at least a couple of muggleborns who were sending an owl a week to remind their parents to tape Friends or My So-Called Life.

There were a fair few stories where Dumbledore or even Harry turned out to be evil. Even before we found out Dumbledore wasn't a saint. It can be fun to play with expectations and Dumbledore was too perfect for too long.

The vampire thing? I mean, why not? Either Draco or Snape. It fits enough for a fic, and you can get some fun stuff out of it. Besides Hogwarts allowed a warewolf, why not a vampire?

The point is, this book reminds me of some goofy fics I read but also reminds me of some that I sometimes have to remind myself aren't canon, because fan fiction can be amazing.

Example: It has been years but I still remember a great fic that someone wrote about Uric The Oddball's years at Hogwarts. I don't remember much about it off hand but I do know that if I re-read HP, when Uric is mentioned, I think of this story like it is something that is actually in the history of the series. (Dude, I googled "Uric the Oddball fan fiction" on a whim. Popped right up: Uric the Oddball and the Wild Hunt by Ariana Deralte. Guess I shouldn't be surprised! Maybe I should read it again to see if it's still as good as I remember).

So yeah, Carry On is so not an HP knock off and has a number of things that I think make me like it more.

The first one is diversity. It is very nice to have it explicitly said in the text that characters are of different ethnicities, sexualities, and abilities. Watford is a far better representation of a population than Hogwarts is, outside of fanfic (It wasn't there, people wrote it in).

Then there is magic itself, it comes from somewhere it's in the environment, it has to do with celestial alignment, people give words power to channel that energy.

That brings me to something that made me adore the world building here.

The actuality of Simon Snow's universe is that Mages cannot exist independently without the Normals. Without the Normals giving weight and meaning to turns of phrase, rhyme and songs, the Mages couldn't do what they do. Add to that, this means that magic is ever evolving and the Mages must learn about and be a part of, to some extent, the Normal world. This makes Mages who look down on Normals seem even more ridiculous.

I also think this book handled romance better than Harry Potter. I don't know what it was but the relationships seemed awkward and strained in HP. Maybe it was because most of it was shoved into one book, like Hogwarts's water supply was spiked with hormones? I don't know.

What I do know is that even though Simon and Agetha are going through the motions of being together in this book, they still feel like two people who have been dating for a long time.

We don't get a lot about Penny and her boyfriend, but the way she is described talking about him reminds me of how my best friend would talk about her boyfriends when she was visiting me. The way she would go on, you'd think that he was on the moon instead of 90 miles away. I bought that Penny and her boyfriend enjoy each other's company.

And the biggie. Simon and Baz

I almost didn't read this book for two reasons. First: Vampire main character. I love vampires, but I lived through the deluge of Twilight, True Blood, and Vampire Diaries, not to mention that every other book seemed to be about vampires. Even though I didn't watch or read all of them, I just got vampired out.

Second: I have never been one for the whole "enemies to love interest" thing. The Harry/Draco pairing never spoke to me. Not that I never read fics that managed that ship well, it was just not my favorite, probably because I just never liked Draco. I tend to prefer romances that are built on friendship (Remus and Sirius dated each other at some point, and nothing can convince me otherwise).

All that being said, I like the Simon/Baz pairing.

I like that Baz freely admits to the reader that a lot of his tormenting of Simon is pigtail pulling.

I like that Simon is more or less: "I like a guy? A guy who was my nemisis? That's new, let's go for it."

There's none of that "Hate turns to love" shit that I personally can't stand. None of the "I am evil, yet his light draws me" or "His darkness is so seductive"

Baz isn't a villain needing to rethink his position. He's a slightly snobby guy with a lot of family pressure, who is in love with a dude who has been set up as opposition, by the adults in his life.

Simon isn't a good guy wanting to be bad. He's a guy who is following the path set out for him without giving context to his feelings with thought, because he doesn't think. So, when Baz doesn't show up at the first of the year, Simon knows 3 things for sure:

Baz is his enemy

His enemy is not there

He feels very uneasy about it.

Why?

See numbers 1 & 2

This equals out to "plotting" in Simon's mind because that's what enemies do.

It doesn't dawn on him that he was actually missing Baz and that he has romantic feelings for him until later

I also like the interaction between them. Again, I buy that they like each other. The simpler moments, like sharing food, or being flirty. It also makes sense that Baz is so nervous and guarded about the relationship. It fits that they would bicker and argue while trying to figure every thing out.

The relationships feel authentic.

In fact all of the relationships between the characters feel authentic. The sibling relationships between Ebb and Nicky, I know siblings that close. The interaction between Baz and his little sister, I know people like them too. The Friendships; in my opinion, too few friends in fiction are depicted messing with each other or being lovingly annoyed by each other.

I've known my two best friends most of my life. Not a day goes by where one of us doesn't say something that if it was said by anyone else, it would lead to a fight. Said by us, it's funny, or at least something we can't argue with.

So I related when Baz's friend complained that he had wasted his childhood hating Simon now that Simon and Baz were no longer enemies and Baz said: "What else were you going to do with your childhood?"

I spent my 20's with my friends seemingly taking turns crashing at my apartment. I spent most of my time ossulating between wishing they would go home and being glad they were there.

So at the beginning of the book, when Penny won't leave Simon's room? I saw myself in the way Simon felt about it.

That authentic and relatable quality was what I really liked about the quiet - if not Happily Ever After - then the Attempting Normal For Now ending each character got.

Well, as normal as you can get with a story involving mages, vampires and powerful Elton John songs.

I am a dodecahedron of geekdom, btw and the classic rock side jumped up and down clapping hands at all of the music references (and giggled when Carry On was fallowed by Wayward Son which will be followed by Anyway The Wind Blows).

And now we come to the reason I have not read the sequel even though it is sitting in a bag with the rest of this year's Powell's haul.

From what I have read, Wayward Son is, at least in part, about what happens after Happily Ever After and ends on a cliffhanger.

After Happily Ever After with a cliffhanger and no release date... Yeah, that will drive me crazy. I haven't even read the second book and I'm already thinking about the third. Aw man! Who dies? Who breaks up? Who becomes evil?

So, even though road trip stories are right up there with time travel stories as one of my favorites, even though I love the idea of showing a character battling depression, even though I love these characters, period; Wayward Son will stay unread until I run out of new books to read, or the next book's release date is close. Whichever comes first, because I want to think of the characters in their quiet ending ending for a little while.

#Carry On #Books #book #rainbow rowell #spoilers #four #book blogging 2020

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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I Worked for Alex Jones. I Regret It. https://nyti.ms/2PiTeFr

This piece by former InfoWars "video reporter" (?) Josh Owens reveals all the insanity you'd expect but also the pathetic sadness of those who continue to enable, peddle, and profit from his malicious lies.

Confession is good for the soul, but I'm trying to get my head around the fact that the author continued to work for Alex Jones for several YEARS after the latter made his vile claims about Sandy Hook.

Josh Owens was drawn to #InfoWars while "vulnerable, angry & searching for direction"; after 4 years w/Alex Jones, he saw "virulent nature of his world." Read if you can stomach Jones' deeply disturbing behavior. This model has infected right-wing media.

Josh Owens is a seriously good writer. Too bad he didn't make the subject of this piece himself. Why was he angry, why did he stay with Jones so long, how did he feel as he did his work? These unexamined questions are the heart of the story, not how disturbed a plainly disturbed man Jones is.

"Owens admits that his personal mental and emotional issues led him to Jones. We should be glad for him, that he found the strength to recognize it, address it, and walk away from a bad situation. Owens shouldn't be vilified for his past mistakes, but celebrated for his return. Prodigal son, no? But forgiveness does not imply absolution."

"This can't be the end of the road. As he is responsible for a lot of anguish and grief. Is he even an accessory to murder? The pain that he enabled will live on in families for decades and become part of our national fabric. How does he intend to make amends? This written catharsis is a good first step, but it's only a first step. Is he the little girl in the airplane, seeing the world for the first time? What does he intend to do with this revelation, and fix the damage he has done?"

"At 23, Josh Owens quit film school to work as a video editor for Alex Jones. This is his account of the years he spent within the Infowars empire." /1

"At first, he found it easy to brush off Alex Jones’s fever dreams as eccentricities and excesses. But he eventually found that he had his limits." /2

"Once, at a private ranch, Owens said, Alex Jones picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in the writer’s direction. The bullet hit the ground about 10 feet away from him, he recalled. Jones claimed he had intentionally fired the gun as a joke, he said."/3

“Over time, I came to learn that keeping Jones from getting angry was a big part of the job, though it was impossible to predict his outbursts,” he writes."/4

“There was a time when I shared his anger. In fact, I was still angry. But this is where we differed: I wasn’t angry with others; I was angry with myself. And once I realized that, it was easier to walk away”/5

I WORKED FOR ALEX JONES. I REGRET IT.

I dropped out of film school to edit video for the conspiracy theorist because I believed in his worldview. Then I saw what it did to people.

By Josh Owens | Published Dec. 5, 2019 | New York Times Magazine | Posted December 6, 2019 |

On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.

Four years earlier, Jones — wanting to expand his website, Infowars, into a full-blown guerrilla news operation and hoping to scout new hires from his growing fan base — held an online contest. At 23, I was vulnerable, angry and searching for direction, so I decided to give it a shot. Out of what Infowars said were hundreds of submissions, my video — a half-witted, conspiratorial glance at the creation and function of the Federal Reserve — made it to the final round.

Unconvinced I could cut it as a reporter, Jones offered me a full-time position as a video editor. I quit film school and moved nearly a thousand miles to Austin, Tex., fully invested in propagating his worldview. By the time I found myself seated next to Jones speeding down the highway, I had seen enough of the inner workings of Infowars to know better.

Before we left the office, Jones instructed me to title the video “Alex Jones Denied Right to Vote” when uploading to YouTube. He knew before we left that they wouldn’t let us walk into a polling location with our cameras rolling. I don’t think Jones even intended to vote. Rather, he hoped to turn this into a spectacle, an insult to him personally, another opportunity to play the self-aggrandizing victim.

“Look at this great city shot,” he said pointing out the window at Austin’s skyline. As soon as I pulled the camera off him, he reached for the white Dixie cup. Is this really how I’m going to die? I thought to myself, imagining the scene: Jones veering too close to the guardrail, ranting about George Soros and Hillary Clinton. Sirens echoing in the distance, flashing lights reflecting off oil-soaked pavement as he grabs the camera and utters his final words, “Hillary ... rigged ... the car.” His listeners would have believed it. Years earlier, I would have believed it.

Fortunately, there were no sirens or flashing lights, and I was relieved when “Vote Here” signs began to appear. A line stretched out the door of the polling place, in a local strip mall, by the time we arrived. As I expected, Jones was told multiple times that he couldn’t film at a polling place, and he decided to leave. Walking back to the car, still taking sips from his white cup, he began noticeably slurring his words. A friend of Jones’s who tagged along — for “security purposes” — offered to give me a ride back to the office. Jones revved his engine, tires squealing as he sped out of the parking lot.

I began listening to Jones’s radio show — the flagship program of what is now a conspiracist media empire with an audience that until recently surpassed a million people — in the last days of George W. Bush’s presidency. The American public had been sold a war through outright fabrications; the economy was in free fall thanks to Wall Street greed and the failure of Washington regulators. Most of the mainstream media was caught flat-footed by these developments, but Jones seemed to have an explanation for everything. He railed against government corruption and secrecy, the militarization of police. He confronted those in power, traipsed through the California redwoods to expose the secretive all-male meeting of elites at Bohemian Grove and even appeared in two Richard Linklater films as himself, screaming into a megaphone.

But it wasn’t the politics that initially drew me in. Jones had a way of imbuing the world with mystery, adding a layer of cinematic verisimilitude that caught my attention. Suddenly, I was no longer a bored kid attending an overpriced art school. I was Fox Mulder combing through the X-Files, Rod Serling opening a door to the Twilight Zone, even Rosemary Woodhouse convinced that the neighbors were members of a ritualistic cult. I believed that the world was strategically run by a shadowy, organized cabal, and that Jones was a hero for exposing it.

I had my limits. I can’t say I ever believed his avowed theory that Sandy Hook was a staged event to push for gun control; to Jones, everything was a “false flag.” I didn’t believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama smelled like sulfur because of their proximity to hell or that Planned Parenthood was run by “Nazi baby killers.” But it was easy to brush off these fever dreams as eccentricities and excesses — not the heart of the Alex Jones operation but mere diversions.

Once I started working there, however, it became obvious that one was impossible to separate one from the other. Soon after I was hired, Jones’s Infowars-branded store — which sells emergency-survival foods, water filters, body armor and much more — introduced an iodine supplement, initially marketed as a “shield” against nuclear fallout. Still learning the ropes, I was tasked with creating video advertisements for the supplement, which he ran on his online TV show. One of these ads started with a shot of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as it exploded. I doubled the sound of the explosion, adding a glitch filter and sirens in the background for dramatic effect. Jones stood over my shoulder as I edited. “This is great,” he said. “See if you can find flyover footage of Chernobyl as well.”

Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing.

Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background. One of the producers told me they had never seen him so angry.

We scrambled to find something, anything we could report on. We tested freshly caught crab from a dock in Crescent City, Calif., and traveled to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in Avila Beach, asking fishermen if we could test the small croakers they caught off a nearby pier. We even tried to locate a small nuclear-waste facility just so we could capture the Geiger counter displaying a high number. But we couldn’t find what Jones wanted, and after two weeks of traveling from San Diego to Portland, we flew back to Texas as failures, bracing for Jones’s rage. (Jones did not respond to detailed queries sent before publication by The Times Magazine.)

Over time, I came to learn that keeping Jones from getting angry was a big part of the job, though it was impossible to predict his outbursts. Stories abounded among my co-workers: The blinds stuck, so he ripped them off the wall. A water cooler had mold in it, so he grabbed a large knife, stabbed the plastic base wildly and smashed it on the ground. Headlines weren’t strong enough; the news wasn’t being covered the way he wanted; reporters didn’t know how to dress properly. Once a co-worker stopped by the office with a pet fish he was taking home to his niece. It swam in circles in a small, transparent bag. When Jones saw the bag balanced upright on a desk in the conference room, he emptied it into a garbage can. On one occasion, he threatened to send out a memo banning laughter in the office. “We’re in a war,” he said, and he wanted people to act accordingly.

I also saw Jones give an employee the Rolex off his own wrist, simply because he thought the employee was mad at him. “Now, would a bad guy do that?” Jones asked as he handed over the watch. Once, when I went to interview a frequent guest of Jones’s, I was sent with a check to cover a potentially lifesaving cancer treatment. A few times I came close to quitting, and like clockwork, just before I pulled the plug, I received a bonus or significant raise. I hadn’t discussed my discontent with Jones, but he seemed to sense it.

Jones often told his employees that working for him would leave a black mark on our records. To him, it was the price that must be paid for boldly confronting those in power — what he called the New World Order or, later, the deep state. Once my beliefs began to shift, I saw the virulent nature of his world, the emptiness and loathing in many of those impassioned claims. But I was certain that after four years working for Jones, I would never be able to get another job — banished into poverty as penance for my transgressions, and rightly so.

When Jones wanted to blow off steam, we would travel to a private ranch outside Austin to shoot guns. Among other firearms, we would bring the two Barrett .50-caliber rifles he kept stashed in the office. Because we never missed an opportunity to create more content, we also brought along cameras to turn whatever happened into a segment for his show.

I remember one trip in particular. It was the summer of 2014, and I rode to the ranch in the back of a co-worker’s truck, surrounded by semiautomatic rifles, boxes of ammunition and Tannerite, an explosive rifle target. A few of us left early in the morning, arriving before Jones to film B-roll and load magazines; he had no patience for preparation. When he came hours later, after eating a few handfuls of jalapeño chips, he picked up an AR-15 and accidentally fired it in my direction.

The bullet hit the ground about 10 feet away from me. One employee, who was already uncomfortable around firearms, lost it, accusing Jones of being careless and flippant. This was one of the few times I saw someone call Jones out and the only time he didn’t get angry in response. He claimed he had intentionally fired the gun as a joke — as if this were any better.

I stood by silently, considering what might have happened if the gun had been pointed a little to the right. After a while the upset employee let it go, and no one brought it up again. We cracked open a few more beers, filled an old television with Tannerite and blew it up.

One weekend, a few people from the office went hunting at a game reserve. On the following Monday, I was handed a hard drive full of video files and told to edit them for Jones to air on his show later in the week. “There are clips in here that are pretty bad, things we don’t want to get out, so let me take a look at this before we upload it,” one of my managers said.

The first video I clicked on came from a cellphone. The camera pans across a blood-covered floor in what looked like a garage. Dead animals were scattered about: eyes lifeless, tongues hanging from their mouths, crimson streaks splashed on their fur.

In another video, a bison grazed quietly in the shade of a large tree; it reminded me of a tableau at the American Museum of Natural History. Then the camera panned over to Jones, maybe 20 yards away, holding what looked like a handgun. Jones began firing at the bison, tufts of hair flying with every hit. The animal remained standing as Jones shot round after round. Finally, the hunting guide yelled at Jones to stop and handed him a high-caliber rifle. Jones took a moment to make sure the cameras were still recording and fired a few more rounds as the animal finally collapsed.

I shared a large room with three other employees, and Jones often walked into our office after he wrapped for the day. His first question was always “How was the show?” If anyone said it was great — someone, if not everyone, always said it was great — his response was the same. “Really?” he would say, moving over to their side of the room. “Did you really think it was great? What did you like about it?”

Working for Jones was a balancing act. You had to determine where he was emotionally and match his tone quickly. If he was angry, then you had better get angry. If he was joking around, then you could relax, sort of, always looking out of the corner of your eye for his mood to turn at any moment.

Late one night, after an extended live broadcast, Jones walked into my office shirtless. This was normal; he removed his shirt frequently around us. He pulled out a bottle of Grey Goose from a storage cabinet and filled his cup. He stumbled into his private restroom, changed into a clean black polo shirt and stepped back into our office. “Hit me,” he said to an employee in the room. When the employee refused, Jones got louder, his face redder. “Hit me!” He kept saying it, getting closer each time. Finally, knowing Jones would never relent, the employee gave him a weak tap on the shoulder.

“Oh, come on,” he said, “hit me harder!”

The employee punched him hard in the shoulder. Jones grunted on impact, seeming to enjoy the pain. Then, it was his turn. Smirking, he planted his feet, reared back and lunged his body weight forward as his fist connected with the man’s arm. I could hear the dull thud of impact, then a wincing sigh. They traded a few more punches, each time seeming less playful. Jones became wild-eyed, spit flying from his clenched teeth as he exhaled. On his last hit, the sound was different. Wet. I thought I could hear the meat split open in the employee’s arm. Jones roared as he punched a cabinet, denting the door in. A few weeks later, I heard that Jones had broken a video editor’s ribs after playing the same game in a downtown bar.

Having aligned himself with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race, Jones might now be considered a version of a conservative, but his perspective is much more complicated than that. Infowars was like a lot of digital-media outlets, in that we reported on the things our top editor thought would go viral. But because our boss was Alex Jones, this was a peculiar process. Assignments were often handed down live on the air during his show. We were to have it playing throughout the office, always listening for directives. Ideas for stories mostly came from what other news outlets reported. Jones wanted us to “hijack” the mainstream media’s coverage and use it to our advantage. If it fit into the Infowars narrative, it played.

When I wasn’t at the office, I spent much of my time traveling for Jones. I inhaled the tear gas in Ferguson, Mo., during the Black Lives Matter protests, retching as I hid with protesters, corralled by cops in riot gear. I stood next to armed cowboys and ranch hands as they faced off against the Bureau of Land Management to retrieve Cliven Bundy’s cattle in Nevada. I had dinner with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, at his home in Phoenix and spent a weekend at the compound of Jim Bakker, the televangelist who spent time in prison for fraud. Jones’s instinctual desire to distance himself from the mainstream led us to unusual and sometimes dark places.

In December 2015, the day before Jones interviewed Donald Trump, still a candidate at the time, on his radio show, I made my way to upstate New York on assignment, along with a reporter and second cameraman. We were sent to visit Muslim-majority communities throughout the United States to investigate what Jones instructed us to call “the American Caliphate.” After the California Geiger-counter debacle, we had meetings with Jones before trips in order to ascertain exactly what he wanted. If we “hit some home runs,” he said, we would get significant bonuses.

We landed in Newark at 12:30 p.m. on Dec. 1, 2015. The first stop was Islamberg, a Muslim community three hours north of Manhattan. It was founded in the 1980s by mostly African-American followers of a Pakistani cleric named Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, who encouraged devotees of his conservative brand of Sufi Islam to establish small settlements across the rural United States. Gilani was suspected of association with the organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which was briefly designated as a terrorist group by the State Department in the 1990s; Gilani has denied any connection to the group. His followers in Islamberg had no record of violence, and some of them had denounced the Islamic State in an interview with Reuters earlier that year, saying they didn’t believe Islamic State members to be real Muslims. But unfounded rumors circulated around far-right corners of the internet that this community was a potential terrorist-training center. Jones, who thought the media consistently ingratiated themselves with Islamic extremists, believed them.

We pulled in, unannounced, to a dirt drive leading to the community, stopping at a flimsy cattle gate guarded by two men. The reporter, wearing a hidden camera, approached the entrance as we filmed the interaction from the vehicle. The men were calm and polite, if a little suspicious — reasonable given the circumstances. They denied our entry into Islamberg but took our number and told us we could return after they verified who we were.

It was only later, after listening to the audio from the reporter’s hidden camera, that I heard what he told the two men guarding the gate. “Basically, what we do is, we go around, and we do videos debunking claims of stuff,” the reporter said. “The word is, people say this is some kind of training camp, so we wanted to come in and get some footage and kind of put that whole rumor to rest.”

He gave them his real name — a name that, with a quick Google search, would lead back to Infowars, with its headlines like “Inside Sources: Bin Laden’s Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade,” “Special Report: Why Obama Brought Ebola to U.S. Exposed” and “VIDEO: ‘Demon’ Caught on Camera During Obama Visit?” Those headlines could be described by many words, but none of them would be “debunking.”

Because of the conspiracy theories about the place, Islamberg was a constant target of right-wing extremists. That April, a Tennessee man was arrested and later convicted of plotting to raise a militia to burn Islamberg’s mosque to the ground. Only days before we arrived, the F.B.I. issued an alert to law enforcement to be on the lookout for a man named Jon Ritzheimer, the leader of an anti-Muslim movement in Arizona who posted a video threatening violence against Muslims less than two weeks earlier. In the video, he brandished a handgun, saying: “I’m urging all Americans across the U.S. everywhere in public, start carrying a slung rifle with you, everywhere. Don’t be a victim in your own country.”

So the phone call we received later that night from a law-enforcement agent shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The officer who contacted us said he simply wanted to verify who we were after receiving a concerned call from someone in Islamberg. We told Jones about it, and he chose to believe the call was a veiled threat, an attempt to intimidate us into silence. To him, this verified that we were onto something. He even went so far as to include Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, in the purported conspiracy, claiming he wanted to abolish the Second Amendment — and that somehow intimidating us would achieve that.

Jones told us to file a story that accused the police of harassment, lending credence to the theory that this community contained dangerous, potential terrorists. I knew this wasn’t the case according to the information we had. We all did. Days before, we spoke to the sheriff and the mayor of Deposit, N.Y., a nearby municipality. They both told us the people in Islamberg were kind, generous neighbors who welcomed the surrounding community into their homes, even celebrating holidays together.

The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones’s audience. We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context to fit our narrative, posting headlines like:

Drone Investigates Islamic Training Center

Shariah Law Zones Confirmed in America

Infowars Reporters Stalked by Terrorism Task Force

Report: Obama’s Terror Cells in the U.S.

The Rumors Are True: Shariah Law Is Here!

Our next stop was Hamtramck, a Muslim-majority city embedded within Detroit that alarmists in neighboring communities called Shariahville. As we headed west, my phone vibrated, and a news alert appeared on the screen. There were reports that a mass shooting that week in San Bernardino, Calif., had been perpetrated by Islamic extremists, making it at the time the deadliest Islamic attack in the United States since Sept. 11.

I knew that when the details emerged, they would substantiate the lies we pushed to Jones’s audience. It didn’t matter if the attack took place on the other side of the country or if the people in Islamberg had no connection to the perpetrators in San Bernardino. Jones’s listeners would draw imaginary lines between the two, and we were helping them do it.

I quit working for Jones on April 7, 2017. When offered another job, an introductory position with a 75 percent pay cut, I jumped at the opportunity. Instead of giving two weeks’ notice, I left in three hours. Jones had gone home for the day, so I didn’t speak with him in person. I said goodbye to co-workers and managers, handed over my company credit card and hoped that would be the end of it. Two nights later, I received a call from Jones: “Let me tell you a little secret,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I don’t like it anymore, either.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t want to do it anymore,” he said, “and I got all these people working for me, and you know, then I feel guilty. I don’t want to do it. You think I want to keep doing this? I haven’t wanted to do this for five years, man.” I sensed that he was pandering, but I couldn’t help thinking that for the first time since I started this job, Jones and I finally had something in common. Sure, there was a time when I shared his anger. In fact, I was still angry. But this is where we differed: I wasn’t angry with others; I was angry with myself. And once I realized that, it was easier to walk away. When I left, I tried to put myself in his shoes, to figure out why he said and did the things he did. At times I saw a different side to Jones, one that was vulnerable, desiring validation and acceptance. Then he would say something so vile and callous it became impossible to look past it.

Even though I was no longer beholden to Jones for financial security, I couldn’t be honest about how I felt. I was to blame for my actions, unequivocally, and yet I resented Jones for creating an environment of rage, fear and confusion that diminished discernment, increased self-doubt and left me feeling as if my brain had short-circuited. I wanted to say these things to Jones, but I didn’t.

He offered to double my pay, suggested I work remotely and even proposed funding a feature-length film of my own. I said it wasn’t about money and turned him down. To this day, I still don’t know why he wanted to keep me around. He said it was because he cared about me, but if I had to guess, I would say his main concern was losing control.

The next morning, he called numerous times, and then again that evening. I let the calls go to voice mail.

There wasn’t a single moment that persuaded me to leave, but there was a turning point: a moment that stuck with me long after it happened. I thought of it as I sat next to Jones speeding recklessly down the highway on Election Day, when I walked out of the office for the last time and when I decided to sit down and write this article.

It was early morning, and we were headed back to Austin after the trip that began in Islamberg. As we boarded our flight, I took my window seat close to the rear of the plane. An older woman wearing a hijab sat next to me. With her was a young girl, giddy with excitement, who bounced in the middle seat, holding a bag of pretzels. The woman leaned over and asked if I would let the girl sit by the window. “This is her first time on a plane,” she said. I agreed and moved my bag from under the seat.

I thought of the children who lived in Islamberg: how afraid their families must have felt when their communities were threatened and strangers appeared asking questions; how we chose to look past these people as individuals and impose on them more of the same unfair suspicions they already had to endure. And for what? Clickbait headlines, YouTube views?

As I sat on the aisle, the plane now lifting up into the pale blue sky, I glanced over at the little girl staring out the window in wonder, her face glowing from the light reflecting off the clouds. She was amazed, joyful, innocent, carefree and completely unaware of the world beneath her.

Josh Owens is a writer living in Texas. This is his first article for the magazine.

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purplesurveys · 4 years

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686

1. What previews did you see at the last movie you saw in theaters? I don’t even remember dude. I do remember the last movie I saw in the cinema was Knives Out, but we were too late to see the previews and arrived exactly when the movie started. The movie I saw before that wasssssss Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but that was so long ago I definitely don’t remember the previews that showed beforehand – or if there were any, at all. 2. Have you ever washed your hair with mayonnaise? Ok I love mayonnaise, but that shit goes in my mouth and not anywhere else in my body lmao. 3. How many things are you a fan of on Facebook? I stupidly liked so many pages when I was 14 and new to Facebook...it must be in the hundreds. I think I still like most of them, but I’m just too lazy to unlike each of them. 4. Do you have more friends on Myspace or Facebook? Facebook is a sure winner here because I don’t even have a Myspace.

5. What generation iPod do you have? I don’t know...it’s an iPod from 2008, though. The really thin one that comes with games, and the screen is already colored.

6. What celebrities share your birthday? James McAvoy and Queen Elizabeth II are the biggest names I think. I Googled to confirm anyway and it turns out I share a birthday with Iggy Pop too. Pretty diverse group lmao. 7. What's your first and last name spelled backwards? Nybor, and that’s all you’re getting now. 8. What song is playing at the moment? No song, just two electric fans whirring loudly here in the first floor, and my sister watching a playthrough of some game she’s into on YouTube. 9. Do you clench your teeth when you're angry? Ugh no. I hate the feeling/texture/sound of grinding my teeth. I find it a little disturbing and I wince when I hear someone doing it in their sleep :/ 10. Have you ever been to a movie that sold out? Yeah, Killing of A Sacred Deer was surprisingly sold out when we watched it. Then again we were in the part of the city where people are more likely to watch films like that, so maybe it’s not that surprising after all. Other movies I remember being sold out was the entire Twilight Saga HAHAHA. I went to 4/5 midnight screenings and the cinema was packed every time.

11. Have you ever been to a midnight movie? ^ Just mentioned it. 12. It's 2010; are you gonna say oh-ten, twenty ten, or two thousand ten? I always say twenty-ten. 13. How many of your classes change next quarter? Next semester? I graduate next semester...hopefully. This virus is really ruining my life plans for 2020, especially as a graduating student who was expecting to graduate by June and get a job by like, September. 14. Do you believe in the paranormal? Only ghosts. 15. How old are the shoes you're wearing? I’m barefoot at the moment. I haven’t been outside in a WHILE, so I haven’t had to wear shoes in a while as well. 16. What's your state's weather usually like this time of year? The Philippines is a relatively tiny country so our weather from the northernmost to southernmost tips are uniform. That being said, March to June is our summer season so the *country’s weather is very humid and excruciatingly hot for now. Temperature usually plays around 34-37C, but the heat index can reach 42C. 17. Do you get those leg cramps in the middle of the night? I used to get them quite often as a kid - it would wake me up at 4 AM and I’d usually be crying by the end; I couldn’t scream because I never wanted to wake everyone up, so I’d just cry until it was over. 18. What movie last made you too scared to go to sleep? Midsommar didn’t make me too scared to sleep, but for a short time it made me terrified of flowers and the color white. 19. Do you have a Twitter account? Sure. 20. Did Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded? Oh he won it? That’s pretty cool. I dunno enough about his presidency other than he seems to be ~hipper than all the other US presidents and is generally more well-loved, but I don’t want to make a stand so hastily. 21. Is your cell phone a qwerty (full keyboard) or no? Yeah, touchscreen qwerty. 22. What was the last website you logged onto (besides the one you're on)? WWE Network!!! Just today they announced that they were gonna give free access to the Network, which means thousands of hours’ worth of pay-per-views, shows, and documentaries. I made a WWE account just for it and I’ve already downed two documentaries this morning. 23. What's your home page? It’s a Google Chrome extension called Momentum. I’m too lazy to describe the features so I’ll just show you what it looks like when I open Chrome/a new tab.

24. Put a line from the song you're listening to right now: I’m not listening to a song rn but I do have everything i wanted by Billie Eilish stuck in my head for a few minutes now. A lyric goes: I had a dream / I got everything I wanted / Not what you’d think / And if I’m being honest, it might’ve been a nightmare / To anyone who might care.

25. Music artists you listen to: Are they a little or a lot older than you? They’re typically close to my age, like maybe 4-10 years older than me. The oldest artist I listen to is probably Beyoncé? 26. What always has to be in the refrigerator? For us, eggs. 27. What was your favorite movie of 2009? The Proposal. 28. What do you want for Christmas? That’s sort of a long way from now, dude. By that time I’d have grown a bit and will probably ask for a vacuum cleaner lmaaaaao. 29. If you could go to three places in the world right now: UPTC, Feliz, and a Starbucks. I just want to be out of my actual village – I don’t even want to go anywhere far after this. 30. How many days until your birthday? I was too lazy to do math but Google says it’s 28 days away. 31. Who are you crushing on right now? (Famous or not, it's your call.) Gabie, Kristen Stewart, and Lee Joo Youngggggg. 32. Do you squish bugs or put them in a glass and let them outside? I squish them especially if they’re being annoying, soz. 33. Do you have split ends? I recently got my hair done, so no.

34. Isn't it ridiculous that movie theaters sell hot dogs and nachos? It is pretty stupid considering they’re messy food and you’ll have to eat them in a really dark room. Where I’m from they allow any kind of food in the theatres, so we aren’t restricted to hotdogs and nachos. My go-to food is Potato Corner french fries, since they’re easy to pick up and would never have a strong smell, or make a noise or a mess. 35. What school subject do you absolutely fail at? I don’t think I ever got past an 85 in chemistry in high school. 36. When you're on a laptop, do you hook up a mouse or use the touchpad? I have a touchpad. I’ve never owned a mouse. 37. When's the next day(s) off you'll get at school? Literally right now until April 14th. It’s a lockdown, dude. 38. If you're learning a language, what year are you in? I’m not. My curriculum doesn’t require me to take language electives. I did take Spanish and Korean in Duolingo in the past out of boredom/curiosity, though. I lasted a few levels into Spanish because of its similarities with Filipino, but they have like a million verb tenses and that’s when it got too much for me. Korean was pretty difficult right from the start. 39. Do you think you're done growing or will you grow a couple more inches? Nah, this is it I think. 40. What's your mom's mom's name? Agnes. 41. Do you replace "and" with an ampersand (&)? No, it looks so informal to me. 42. What do you usually get at school for lunch? I don’t have a usual lunch; it depends on what we have at home, because I typically just bring food from home to school. 43. Have you ever encountered a creepy neighbor? I don’t think so. If I did, my brain probably blocked the memory already. 44. How many texts can your phone's inbox hold before it's too full? As far as I know it doesn’t have a limit and just depends on my phone’s overall capacity. 45. Do you like the foam soap or the liquidy soap? I use a liquidy one, so I’ll go with that. 46. Do you like the automatic sinks or the ones with hot and cold handles? Lmao, first of all our country’s not even rich enough for this question. We just have a basic sink. We get whatever temperature is available and we need to turn a knob to have the water running. 47. What day did/does your birthday fall on this year? It’ll fall on a Tuesday, which suckssss because it’s a weekday and I have weekly Tuesday meetings for this semester. It’s also the first week out of the coronavirus lockdown, and I doubt people will even be paying attention to birthdays by then. 48. Do you tend to lean towards bright colors or more subtle colors? Subtle ones. 49. Do you use British spelling even though you're not British? No. 50. Name the farthest/weirdest/most unique place you've ever been: Farthest: Bali, Indonesia Weirdest: There was this park in Palawan that just didn’t fit with the city’s atmosphere at all lmao. Let me look it up... Baker’s Hill. It had tons of vibrantly-colored figurines, decorations peppered with cheesy pick-up lines, and Valentine’s decor (hearts, streamers, etc) spread all over the place. I couldn’t understand what it was supposed to be and it was a surreal experience overall lol. Most unique: Sagada. It didn’t feel like I was in the Philippines for the 3 days I was there.

#survey #surveys

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taurusnoir · 5 years

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taste of a twilight fruit (chapter 2)

Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug

Pairing: Adrien/Marinette

Rating: M

Summary: In which Adrien falls in love with a girl he met at a bar, Marinette is just trying to prove to Alya she can have a one night stand, and Nino desperately needs a drink.

ao3

Marinette is sorting beads when Gabriel Agreste calls her into his office. Or rather, when Natalie does. Out of all the jobs the interns do, sorting beads is her least favorite, and her head begins to roll to the side in boredom induced exhaustion. She tries to fight it, but it feels like a useless pursuit. Natalie, Gabriel’s- secretary? Assistant? Enters the room, and the interns conversations immediately end. Marinette quickly snaps herself back up, ferociously resumes sorting, and hopes Natlie hasn’t noticed. The woman briskly walks up to Marinette’s desk, and looks at her, evidently unimpressed with what she sees before her.

“Mr. Agreste would like to see you,” Natalie says sharply, and Marinette’s stomach drops and shatters across the floor. Her boss has barely spoken to her beyond a very rushed and insincere welcome when she first began her internship, when all she was was another body in a cluster of gawking university students. She’s been successful at avoiding getting on his bad side, carefully curating a balance of assertive but respectful and avoiding the man all together. Working at this company often feels like defusing a bomb with how careful and precise she has to be, and Marinette is terrified she’s accidentally set one off.

“Please follow me, Ms. Cheng.” Feeling the other intern’s eyes glued to her, Marinette gets up from her station, jaw clenching at Natalie’s comment. She hasn’t been in the industry for long, but there’s a nasty habit people have picked up when they address her, choosing one of her last names over the other. She guesses she can’t blame the industry, it began before she even started working for Gabriel, even well meaning customers in the bakery have taken to calling her “Ms. Dupain” or “Ms. Cheng.” Her last name is across the building’s entrance, and people still couldn’t take the consideration to get it right.

“Ms. Dupain” comes with a horse blinders, as if the speaker can hide her Chinese side by just pretending they don’t see it. They can act like she’s white as long as they don't address the slant of her eyes and the pigment of her skin. As these things are a part of her, it makes her feel unwhole, as if someone had ripped out the pages of her and pasted what they want on a sterile white piece of paper. And there’s something specific in the way people in the industry say Cheng ever so subtly. The way Natalie says it, the connotation of other very evident in her tone. It’s always something- a company or a colleague wants to promote her exoticness, taking pride in their so called diversity, excitedly screaming Hey everybody I have a Chinese friend! But Marinette clings deeply to both Dupain and Cheng. She’s mixed, deeply proud of her French and Chinese tradition.She shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other. She grapples with the decision of correcting her employer, but she chooses against it. She’s already in enough trouble. As soon as Marinette steps out into the hallway, she can hear the teetering whispering begin behind her.

Her frustration is slightly offset by her anxiety; she has no idea what is going to meet her once she steps foot in her boss’s office. Gabriel Agreste is notorious for his harshness, and many of Marinette’s work friends have become just friends after being called in to speak with him. As she walks down the hallway to his office she tries to rack her brain, think of what she could have possibly done to upset him. Did she accidentally use too much copier ink? Misplace a button? Or God forbid, gotten someone the wrong coffee?

Natalie opens the door, a large, heavy white block of plexiglass, and ushers her in. The fashion mogul sits at his desk, focused on the tablet in front of him, tapping away at something she can’t see.

“Mr. Agreste, Ms. Cheng is here to see you,” Natalie says.

Marinette winces, “It’s Dupain-Cheng, Ma’am.”

Both Gabriel and Natalie stare at her. Before Marinette can say anything else Gabriel speaks, “Natalie, could you please give Ms. Dupain-Cheng and I some privacy?”

Natalie nods and leaves. The sound of the door closing rings around the room. Marinette feels like a racehorse with a broken leg.

“Thank you sir, I didn’t mean to offend-”

Gabriel speaks over her, “Is it true that you frequent the café located downstairs during your lunch breaks?”

Marinette nods. “Yes, sir. I quite enjoy their espressos. They make them the Italian way, I’m sure you’re aware.” She tries to add some lightness to her tone, a pillow to soften whatever blow the man might throw at her.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Gabriel says, and Marinette wants to put her foot in her mouth and also kick him with it. She should’ve guessed to add “‘doesn’t drink coffee’ to the long list of superiority complexes the man has.

“I was down there having a meeting with one of my model scouts and came across a napkin, left upon the table,” He picks up a piece of paper from his desk and shows Marinette. She had been sketching during her lunch break, quick thoughtless ideas for a collection. She had been needed by one of the beaders and had to leave quickly, and her designs had been left behind.

“I thought it was incredibly rude that someone had left a mess at a table where other patrons might be sitting.”

Marinette’s mouth drops open. The possibility that she could be getting scolded over leaving behind a napkin , rattles around in her chest. She stays silent.

“That is, until I saw the designs on it. Simple, quick things, I’m sure. But there is still an impressive attention to detail and obvious evidence of forward thinking, two qualities I have noticed-,” He removes his gaze from the napkin in his hand and looks up at her.

“-one my interns just so happens to possess. She is always on time, meticulous with her work, and cultivates a deep passion for her work. I have to say I was not surprised when I saw your name signed on the bottom,” Gabriel says, as if he hasn’t completely pulled the rug from underneath her feet. Marinette feels her hands shaking against the fabric of her pant legs.

“I would like to hire you to be a member of our full-time staff. You have quite a bit of potential.”

Marinette is convinced she’s dreaming, and in one moment she’s going to wake up with her hands in the bead pile. Or Gabriel is about to jump up on his desk, yell sike! and fire her for littering. All she can do is stare at her boss in shock.

“You will be making patterns, you don’t need to be familiar with making them on the computer as you know we prefer to do them the old fashion way,” His voice lilts a little at the pun, and Marientte’s shock is increased that her boss showing a sense of humor.

“You will also be training under and helping the embroiders. I noticed the designs on your napkin-sketch, I thought you might be a good addition to my embroidery department once you get trained.”

He puts the napkin down and begins arranging things on his desk. He checks his watch. Marinette stays silent, still frozen in her stupor.

“A simple thank you will suffice, Ms. Dupain-Cheng,” Gabriel’s words push her out of her reverie.

“Thank you, sir. Really- It’s an absolute honor-”

“My son will be here in a moment to meet you. You will also be helping him with fittings, and I prefer to introduce him to the new hires. As you have seen he is my muse, alongside my late wife. Those who work here must get as comfortable seeing him as often as they see me. Ever since he was born, he has been in in everything I do,” Gabriel says.

Marinette has seen the younger Agreste in passing, occasionally walking past her in the café as they both buy their morning coffees. Interns had been lectured and threatened with expulsion (and death) if they spoke to him, and Marinette was more than happy to follow her employer’s rules to avoid embarrassing herself in front of him. She has seen the boy before, however back then it was on her bedroom walls, back when she was a teenager, and he had had a brief stint as a teenage actor. She had been obsessed with him, along with the rest of Paris. He was the city’s golden boy, a teenage heartthrob that actually warranted the attention. His reputation was immaculate, causing Paris’ resident press and teenage girl population to fall head over heels. He was polite, charming, and so so kind. Marientte used to buy the gossip magazines not only to see who he was rumored to be dating, but to also see the charity work he was doing. He stopped acting after a few teen rom-coms, and began to focus solely on his modeling career.

As Marinette had gotten older, and life began to swirl around her, she wasn’t able to follow his career as closely as she once had. She thinks she remembers hearing he recently joined an indie band. However the crush that molded her teenage years hadn’t entirely gone away. Marinette pushes down the heat that threatens to rise to her cheeks at the thought of meeting him in a more personal way. Her fifteen year old self would be screaming.

“It will be nice to meet him, Mr. Agreste. You seem very proud of him,” Marinette has seen him with his son, always a proud hand on his shoulder, or telling one of his peers of Adrien’s achievements. In the public eye, they seem to have a very good relationship, but Marinette has never seen him leave his father’s office appearing anything less than sullen and tired.

It is in that moment Natalie choses to appear, bringing the head designer’s son in tow.

“Yes, very proud. I’m sure he will be pleased to welcome you to the company,” Gabriel diverts, and Marinette wonders why he can only appreciate his son while not in his presence. The older man introduces her to him, and Marinette curses the butterflies that play kamikaze in her stomach. She should be over this.

As he’s gotten older, he’s only gotten prettier. His eyes are still breathtaking, forest green and alluring. That stare has sold many, many things. It has been the star of many a cologne ad, sweater catalogues, even a one-time Verizon commercial. Marinette once told Alya he had the “Lauren Bacall’s voice of eyes” and her best friend just stared at her and told her she was crazy. In person, they’re just as striking, but there’s a softness to them. They’re tender and sad all at once, and it makes Marinette want to kiss him under a blanket fort. She’s a damn cliche, and completely aware enough to be ashamed of it. He says something to her, and Marinette has to rip herself out of her daydream to respond.

It’s pleasantries, it’s awkward, and Adrien must sense her discomfort. The past hour has been an absolute rollercoaster, and Marinette needs to go home and press her face into Tikki’s belly and have a large glass of wine.

He tells her to call him Adrien. Marinette hears it in his voice, the importance of the name- something casual, personal. Maybe it’s his small way of separating himself from his father. It’s something she understands. She calls him Adrien. He smiles.

____________________________________________________________________________

When Marinette has her weekly dinner with Alya, she tells her about the boy whose cat is allergic to women.

“Girl, you’re joking ,” Alya says, hand over her mouth and staring at Marinette with wide eyes. The fashion designer takes a sip of her Mascato and rests her head against the back of her sofa.

“He was so cute. He was like, tall, with blonde hair and he had the prettiest fucking eyes. He plays the bass, Alya,” She wraps her arms around her head, careful not to spill her wine. She takes recreation in the thought of him, how lovely his mouth looked around the rim of his glass, his hands gliding across the frets of his guitar, the choked off moan he made when she leaned in close. How he just short of sprinted away from her. Marinette squeezes her eyes shut and groans. The memory of the boy basically tripping over himself to get away from her makes her cringe, wounded.

“I may have came on too strong,” She laments.

“You think?” Alya laughs at her. “When I told you to try to be more confident, I wasn’t expecting you to go all femme fatale on me. I can’t believe he ran away from you.”

Coming out from under her hiding spot behind her arms, Marinette winces, “I grabbed the drink right out of his hand.”

Alya puts a hand over her mouth. “Please tell me you did not drink it, Marinette. Tell me right now..”

Marinette groans, “I drank it.” Her best friend curses and covers her face with her hands.

“I feel so bad, Alya. I was just trying to do what you told me to do,” Marinette says, resting her head on her shoulder. The other girl pushes her off.

“Don’t blame me! I didn’t tell you to go up to men and say,” Alya pitches her voice down and places her hands on her hips, in an attempt to mock her. “‘Oh Mr. Cat, let me undress you with my eyes and peg you on the bartop, then steal your drink that cost 7 euro!’”

“Alya!” Marinette screams, face heating, and she starts to hit her best friend with a couch pillow. “I did not do that!”

Alya laughs at her and throws her arms up in defense. Marinette points an accusatory finger at her. “You told me I couldn’t have a one night stand.”

Alya scoffs, “Evidently I was right.” Frowning, Marinette hits her with the pillow.

“I remember someone telling me I wasn’t confident enough!”

“I said you needed to act a little more in charge! There’s nothing wrong with not being the type of person who fucks and ducks, Mari. You’re emotional, you care about people,” She pitches her voice, reaches up and cups Marinette’s face, squeezing her cheeks together to make a fish face.

“It’s one of the things I appreciate about you,” Alya sing-songs. Marinette makes a noise of protest and stands to get away from her.

“I can do it. I know I can. I just need to practice… seducing people.”

“Go back to the bar this Friday and try to find another guy. Or go and see if he’s there and try again,” Her best friend suggests, taking a sip of the red wine in her hand and resting against the couch. “He did say he wanted to sleep with you.”

“Yes, and then he ran away from me,” Marinette quips. “In case you forgot that part.”

“Men are weird, Girl. They think they don’t want what they want, and they think they want what they don’t want.” Marinette gives her an exasperated look. Alya rolls her eyes. “He’ll be back there. I have a feeling.”

Marinette walks to the kitchen of her small apartment, Tikki weaving in between her legs. Tikki’s incredibly consistent, always in the kitchen exactly when it’s time for her to get her meal. Marinette is worried the cat is getting a little too fat, but the girl can’t help but spoil her pet. Besides Alya, she’s Marinette’s best friend.

She takes the kibble she’s put in a plastic cereal container and pours it into Tikki’s bowl. “Here you go, 猫, dinner just for you.” The chestnut colored cat purrs and rubs her face against Marinette’s leg. The cat’s owner smiles, Tikki is a thankful and considerate companion and Marinette would kill a grown man for her. Marinette gives Tikki a pat on the head and lets her eat, moving over to the fridge to look for another bottle of wine. Alya only likes red and Marinette prefers white, so both of their homes are stocked with both.

“Other than the disaster at the bar, how was your week?” Alya calls from the living room.

“I’ve got my head in the fridge, I can’t hear you!”

Marinette hears Alya grunt in annoyance and make her way to the kitchen, carrying their empty wine glasses. She puts them on the island in front of her friend and starts digging around in the candy bowl Marinette leaves there for guests.

Hearing the tell-tale sound of candy wrappers crinkling she talks over her shoulder, “There’s no truffles in there, you ate the last one when you came in.” Alya ignores her and continues searching.

“I asked you how your week was,” She says, making due with a Hershey’s kiss and popping it in her mouth.

Head in the fridge, Marinette says nonchalantly, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you some small news,” She hums, and pauses for optimal dramatic effect. “I got hired by Gabriel Agreste.”

Alya blinks. “What?”

Finally picking a bottle, Marinette turns and begins pouring the other girl a glass.

“I start on Monday,” she states. Alya screams.

“Shut the fuck up! Screw the idiot at the bar, why didn’t you start with that- Oh my god- Marinette!” Alya all but dives over the island and hugs her. Dropping the act, Marientte hugs her back and the two squeeze each other fiercely. There’s tears in Alya’s brown eyes when she lets go.

“Marinette- your dream job- I’m-” She clasps her hands together and puts them over her mouth. “I cannot tell you how excited I am for you!”

There’s tears threatening to hijack Marinette’s eyes, so she giggles and wipes her friend’s tears from her face. “Stop that. You’re gonna fog up your glasses.”

Alya just tells her to shut up and hugs her again. The two girls stand in the kitchen, swaying, arms wrapped around each other’s backs. It’s the kind of hug that's ongoing, never ending. It began once as children and continues on, just with life breaks in between.

“I couldn’t have done it without you, You’re the one who forced me to apply for the internship in the first place.” If couple tears fall from her eyes, Alya doesn’t comment. It’s amazing how they’ve ended up here. Marinette met Alya her first year at college, and they’ve stayed friends through graduating University. This isn’t the first time celebrations like this have occured, the two also screaming and hugging with joy at each of their graduations, Marinette’s internship, Alya’s apprenticeship with a photographer for TIME .

Marinette lets go and pours Alya her glass. Smiling and teary-eyed, they toast to the future. Alya’s friendship is one of the constants in Marientte‘s life, like Tikki’s dinner schedule. She’s the Ursa Major to her Ursa Minor, and Marinette can always find her on dark nights. She feels a surge of gratefulness at the gift of being able to celebrate, and to have someone to celebrate with. Adrien Agreste flutters through her mind, how he always leaves his father’s office quiet and alone.

She makes a tornado in her wine glass as her mind wanders, and she watches the liquid slide along the side, how it concaves in the middle. Wine has always fascinated her, ever since she was a little girl; she used to watch how the liquid moved as it was poured for dinner, and her mother used to let her take sips when her father wasn’t looking. Sometimes Marinette wonders if the romance of Paris will ever become lost to her, if she will ever grow tired of baguettes, the architecture, the wine. At 23, Marinette has had her fair share of drinks, enjoys many of them thoroughly, but her shitty wine from Paris will always be her favorite. An American tourist once told her Parisian wine was the most romantic; and she remembers Alya’s huffing laugh, but quietly, Marinette couldn’t help but agree.

“I met Adrien Agreste today,” She says, bringing her drink to her mouth. She feels the sweetness of peach and orange sleepily extend itself across her palette.

“Really?” Alya replies, gauging the look on Marinette’s face.

The smaller girl smiles, “He’s very nice.” Marinette had not gotten the opportunity to talk to him beyond the first meeting, but the moment they shared still replays in her mind. Yearning is like metal, the longer it sits out on the air the rougher it gets. Marinette’s has grown red with rust. Marinette had always been the kind girl, the one her friends would rush to find if someone was crying in the bathroom, or needed a pep talk on a rough day. But there was a part of her that aches at missing out on the breathless, hands desperate, foolish love her friends had. Marinette has been too kind to start anything, out of fear of breaking someone’s heart, and in the end ended up only breaking her own. She traces her pointer finger along the side of the foot of her wine glass.

Alya must see the pain of her teenage loneliness splash across her face because she takes Marinette’s hand off her glass and squeezes.

“Just think about that guitar player, girl. That boy wanted you. And you have your dream job now. Boys are overrated,” she whispers, bumping Marinette with her shoulder. She adds, mockingly, “Anyway, Adrien Agreste is like, so 2012.” Marinette laughs at her friend. She’s right. It’s time to move on from sad boys with ridiculously floppy hair. And anyways, tomorrow’s Friday.

____________________________________________________________________________

The first time Marinette saw him at the bar, she left before he could even get off the stage. It wasn’t something she was proud of, but who could blame her? It had been the night after Alya had told her she was “too emotional” for a one night stand, and she kept her bruised pride safe in her pocket, ready to take it out and say See? See? I can do it too! (Well, hypothetical pocket. The dress she was wearing was too tight to have any, an injustice she swore she would never repeat in her own career.) Marinette had been sitting at the bar, already three drinks deep, desperately trying to quell her anxiety, when the boy in the cat mask sauntered on stage. He had that damned bass guitar in his hands, and Marinette had almost moaned just at the sight of it. It was a black cutaway, sleek and glossy, with electric green accents. You didn’t have to be a musician to see how obviously expensive it was. And as gorgeous as the guitar was, the boy holding it took the cake.

He was tall and lithe, light on his feet. Marinette wanted to laugh at the idea of describing him as ‘floating’, but there really was no other word for it. He moved with the effortless grace of a dancer, every movement looking purposeful and specific. She watched him plug his amp cable into his guitar, take a pick out of the pocket of his jeans, and glide it across the strings to check his tuning. Not satisfied, he placed the pick in between his teeth and fiddled with the tuning pegs. The bar was loud, so Marinette couldn’t hear anything, but he must’ve found the right notes because he began to play around with some chords. Another boy, with glasses and a dark complexion took the stage, microphone in hand, and said something to the blonde. He laughed, shoulders shaking. His teeth were white and perfect, and his smile took up half his face. But of course, in like, a sexy way.

The singer, Marinette guessed, turned his microphone on to address the crowd. A hush took over the bar, everyone waiting for the music to play. Marinette didn’t catch the name of the band, too enthralled in the way the guitarist ran his hand through the front of his hair, making the blonde tufts stick up around his head. The boy in front counted the band in, and the blonde boy conjured up a bassline that hits Marinette where she lives. All she could do was watch him, how he lost himself in the music, bit his lip as he moved his fingers lower and lower down the fretboard. He was electrifying. And somehow, he showed off more and more of his talent with each song. Marinette took a sip of her drink in an effort to cool herself down, and his masked eyes caught hers. She shivers at the memory of it. There was a moment, and she froze, but Alya’s words echoed in the back of her mind. She could do it, she just had to go for it. She winked at him, and she swore she saw his fingers falter for a moment and miss a single beat before he went back to playing. It might have been the lights, but Marinette swore there was a pink dusting across his cheeks.

The song ended, as all songs do, and the frontman thanked the bar for having them. Marinette watched the blonde boy look at her once more before he turned to put his guitar in its case. Fear gripped her stomach. The anxious thoughts came hurtling toward her like a train- he was going to walk over to her, realize she’s offered more than she has, and find another girl. Someone who’s a lot cooler than she is, anyway. It hurt, but in that moment he was too much. She paid her tab and left.

Alya tore her a new one when she told her during Thursday dinner, and Marinette left for the bar once again, this time with a best friend approved plan. Act like she’s in charge. She could do that. Alya told her she must act confident even if she doesn't feel confident, and that Friday Marinette entered the room with her disguised head high and heels even higher. She played Alya’s “inspirational pep-talk” which consisted of yous is a badass bitch, you are a goddamn treasure in her head, just for an extra bit of motivation. She looked around, trying to find someone to talk to, when she saw the blonde boy in the back of the bar, nursing a drink. His hair was as messy as ever, and he still wore the mask from the week before. She couldn’t believe he had come back, and he seemed to be searching the room for someone. A small part of her hoped that it’s her, and Marinette had no way of preparing herself for the disaster of an interaction that came next.

“Looking for someone?,” She said, her sultriest smile (the one she practiced in the mirror in her apartment like a weirdo) painted on her face. He turned at the sound of her voice, and she went in for the kill.

____________________________________________________________________________

Marinette bites the bullet and finds herself at Clyde’s again, another Friday after her disastrous attempt at getting laid. Even with Alya’s encouragement, she couldn’t bring herself to go the week after out of fear of seeing the boy in the mask and be confronted with her own idiocy. Even so, after a week of feeling sorry for herself and getting acclimated to her new job, she goes, looking for him, this time in an attempt to apologize. After her talk with her best friend, guilt had been burrowing into her brain like termites, and she wanted to express regret for her actions. She’s wearing jeans this time too, in an attempt to come across a little more put together. Homely. What outfit says hey I’m sorry I took out my domineering side out on you in an attempt to validate my ability to sleep with strangers. She figures a graphic tank tucked into black skinny jeans will work.

The mask theme continues, and Marinette doesn’t know why she feels the need to wear it, maybe to protect her pride when she apologizes for being an idiot. She’s been using the masks from her design collection, just to try them out and see how they function in the real world. Marinette respects fashion, it’s her great love, but she wishes the high fashion part of the industry appreciated things that were practical. Sometimes things didn’t need to shock, they needed to be worn.

The bartender hands her the cold beer she’s ordered and as she turns she slams into a body. Her elbow jams itself into something soft, and the blonde boy with the psychologically defective cat bends over and groans in pain. She’s completely elbowed him in the stomach, hard.

Marinette reaches out to steady him. “Oh my God- I’m so sorry-”

He takes a deep breath, wincing. He’s still slightly hunched over when he looks at her, face slightly twisted in pain when he says, “Looking for someone?”

Marinette laughs and helps him straighten up. He’s still tall and beautiful, and wearing the costume shop cat mask. A piece of duct tape now adornes the side that was once held together with Scotch. The sleeves of his plum colored dress shirt are rolled up halfway, exposing his toned forearms.

“I am so sorry, I didn't mean to try to kill you.”

He sniggers, “Yeah no, apparently this week the plan is to beat me up and then kill me.” He leans against the side of the bar, one hand clutching his stomach, and groans dramatically. Marinette reaches to steady him, but he just giggles and breaks out into a smile. She playfully punches him in the arm at his theatrics.

“Stop it! That’s actually... why I’m here. I wanted to apologize.” Marinette’s face gets hot, and she’s sure it’s red to match. She cringes, “It was inappropriate of me to corner you like that, my best friend gave me some advice I took the wrong way, I didn’t mean-”

An incredulous look has found its way onto his face and Marinette stops talking. He looks adorable with his eyebrows drawn together, she notes. Taking a long drag of her beer, she leans against the countertop beside him. She can feel her shoulders shrinking in in an attempt to shroud herself. She looks away from him, ashamed.

“I really am sorry.” Her voice sounds pathetic, she resigns herself to the fact he must think she’s an absolute freak. The boy reaches out and pulls out the stool next to her, and sits himself on it. He waves down the bartender and orders what she has. It seems to be a beer night for the two of them.

“My best friend likes to make fun of me because I have a tendency to make an absolute buffoon of myself around strong, confident women,” He almost puurs, absentmindedly playing with the peg game on the bar. His voice has dropped deeper, and he stares into her eyes. Her brain supplies the memory of Alya mocking her, Oh Mr. Cat, let me undress you with my eyes and peg you on the bartop-’ and it’s not helpful. Marinette looks at him, eyes wide. He clears his throat. “The last thing you need to do is apologize to me. I’m sorry I acted like a whole ass fucking idiot.”

Marinette smiles. “Maybe not a whole ass idiot. Just a half ass one.”

He groans and laughs at the same time, and rubs a hand over his face. “At least I’ve got some sort of ass.” The comment makes her laugh, and soon it putters out into silence. He keeps looking at her, like he means to say something.

“How was work?” She asks, trying to spare both of them from the awkward eternity of sitting with their foolishness. He gives her a confused look.

“You said you had to work the next day. When you left.” She says it softly, like one would to not spook a deer. Neither of them want to be reminded of his exit. He smiles at her, surprised.

“It was fine. I work with my father, and he schedules things at fuck o’clock in the morning for literally no reason,” He says, exhaused slipping into his words. He catches himself and resumes the smooth, low, calculated tone of his voice, “I really didn’t mean to run out on you though.”

“It’s okay-,” Marinette starts, and he cuts her off.

“No, really. You are sexy, and brilliant, and absolutely hysterical. It wasn’t you. I don’t want you to think you weren’t good enough.”

His drink comes. She takes a long swig of hers to hide the blush fighting its way to her cheeks.

“Thank you,” She says, gently, looking down at the pattern of tiles that make up the bartop and then sighs. She might as well tell him. They’ve already embarrassed themselves, Marinette might as well add one more thing.

“My best friend told me that I was ‘too emotional’ to have a one night stand,” picking at the dried grout in between the tiles. “I was trying to prove her wrong. I kind of… went all in.”

The bartender drops a beer in front of the boy beside her. She watches a droplet of condensation make its way down to the counter where it pools. He lifts the bottle and Marinette traces the movement of his adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows, lips tight around the rim. She feels her palms start to get sweaty. Placing the bottle down, he licks his lips and picks at the label.

“So you decided to corner the most submissive looking guy in the bar and tease him until he came home with you, right? That was your plan?” His voice is as rough as sandpaper.

Marinette flushes. “No! No. I didn’t- I don’t know what came over me.”

The green eyed boy takes a deep breath and he smirks at her.

“I didn’t mind. Like I told you, it was hot.”

Marinette looks at him, and there’s a moment where their eyes meet and everything stops. He lets a breath pass his lips, and she looks down at where it’s exited. She leans in.

“You don’t have to pretend to want to sleep with me”

“What?”

Leaning back, Marinette waves her hand at him.”You’re so sweet. It’s so nice of you to try to spare my feelings, but really. I was in the wrong. You don’t have to do the whole ‘try to seduce me back’ thing.”

He shakes his head and sputters, “No, really-”

Marinette grabs his shoulder and squeezes. “Do you think we could be friends? I really would like to move past this. I hate to make you feel like you owe me something.”

His eye twitches. Marinette feels a surge of guilt. She really messed up, didn’t she? He probably didn’t even want to be friends with her. Who would, after seeing the evidence that she completely disregards boundaries. He probably didn’t even think her behavior had been hot, he’s probably been scared-

“Ladybug, it would be an absolute honor to be friends with you,” He says, giving her that smile, the one that takes up two thirds of his face. He lifts up his beer bottle and invites her to toast, “To friendship.”

“To friendship,” She cheers, and if his hand clenches around the neck of his bottle, she doesn’t notice.

#taste of a twilight fruit #chapter 2 #miraculous ladybug #ml fanfic

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gonewiddershins · 5 years

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Romancelandia you don’t have to ask I’m just gonna say it anyway~

Original Post Here

Barbara Cartland: Favourite author?

Courtney Milan.

Alisha Rai: Favorite era? (i.e. when they were written, not when set)

Current! I’m ecstatic to see how much more punk the romance novel genre has become lately- so many authors explicitly talking about race and class and gender and mental health and neurodivergence in so many interesting ways. Independent publishing opening up entirely new avenues which were not recommended for traditional publications. It’s exciting and wonderful.

Eve Dangerfield: Favourite setting for historicals?

Not sure if my opinion matters here because I have read books from very few eras? I think my preferences have moved to mid-to-late Victorian era for England-based books, but what I really want more of is historicals on other (non North American) continents. I badly want to do a romance in Historical India that is not about Englishmen, for example. Like a Muslim and Hindu falling in love during the Aurangazeb era, maybe.

Anne Mather: Favourite contemporary setting/sub-genre

Again, I haven’t really read enough to form a nuanced opinion- when I look for contemporaries, my first priority used to be “does this make me laugh?” Which is um- a relic of a bygone era, because that used to be the only thing I wanted from contemporaries.

Right now, I try to get read more of diverse romance in contemporary eras. Again, including non-American/English nationalities.

Georgette Heyer: Third or first person tense?

Either will do. It’s not really a factor in how much I enjoy a story.

Lisa Kleypas: Hero/ine you’d most like to date & Jane Austen: Hero/ine you’d most like to be friends with

Same answer to both of the above categories. I’ll take anyone who I think is a rational person who forgives misunderstandings ans does not try to actively make them. I’m not really that picky.

Amanda Quick: Hero/ine you most relate to

At the time when I first read it as a dramatic early twenties person, Minerva Lane from Courtney Milan’s The Duchess War spoke to me. There was a lot in there about fear and having to push yourself down fro the sake of survival that was similar to my life back then. I cried a lot when I read that book.

More recently, I really wanted to snuggle up to Verity Plum from Cat Sebastian’s A duke in Disguise because her feelings of independence and placing it above pretty much everything else her life is... yeah. A lot of what Verity says sounds intimately familiar.

Julie Anne Long: Historical or contemporary?

Historical. Given a choice between two books which are similarly positioned in terms of tropes I like and hate, I’ll pick a historical every time.

Mariana Zapata: Open or closed door sex scenes? & Anne Hampson: Erotic or clean romances?

Ninety percent of the time I’m thoroughly disinterested in the sex scenes, and sometimes I am actively annoyed at the many pages of boning happening while the protagonists barely have an emotional connection. That said, there are plenty books which have no sex scenes where I am reduced to gross sobbing because GODDAMMIT THERE IS TOO MUCH SEXUAL TENSION IN THE AIR GIVE ME BONING.

I am still thirsty about Jo Beverley’s The Unwilling Bride. There was so much sexual tension and growth and Lucien was hot as hell but there was no sex scene. //grumbles

Elizabeth Hoyt: Paranormal or science fiction?

I haven’t read that much SF romance, but I’m going to pick it anyway because the usual tropes associated with Werewolves/Vampires bug the crap out of me.

Nalini Singh: Favourite tropes

Both the protagonists have problems with stakes, and one is not there to manic pixie the other. Protagonists have relationships (non-romantic) outside of the romance. Subversions and reversions of gender norms. Banter and Snark. Character tries very very hard to not be emotionally vulnerable, but goddammit there are these stupid feelings.

Alyssa Cole: Least favourite tropes

Prolonged Miscommunication. Slut shaming, especially when coupled with I Have Had So Much Sex and I am So Experienced hypocrisy. Gratuitous sex with no emotional connection. Protagonists immediately throwing over all other friends/family/loved ones for the sake of their new romantic interest. False competence in female characters which immediately get thrown to the wind when the romantic interest comes on scene (Ahem. Never Judge a lady By Her Cover.)

Rose Lerner: Favourite / Least favourite series

Nope.

Sandra Marton: Favourite romantic non-romance or love story

Unspoken Trilogy, by Sarah Rees Brennan. It is in part a fascinating exploration of privacy in a relationship- most of the rest of it is about friendships and platonic relationships. There is also a cult of sorcerers trying to take over the world via human sacrifice but I continue to insist that’s mostly just setting information.

Skye Warren: Any problematic faves?

I have a depressingly large soft spot for anything funny, and I will forgive a lot of despised tropes if a book makes me laugh. I’m easy.

Specific examples: Until You (Judith McNaught), Dragon Shifter Series (Katie MacCalister).

Ainsley Booth: Position on HEAs

I’m cool with those.

Abby Green: Position on HFNs

I like these better than HEAs, because the characters I like tend to be difficult and also fighting various difficult scenarios so it’s far more likely that more problems will pop up in their lives than not.

Kristen Ashley: Position on the “romance novels are feminist” discourse

Conflicted. I think many romances are feminist, but there are an equal number or more which are patently not. Like all other genres, it has to be judged on a book by book basis, not for the genre as a whole.

Carla Kelly: Position on the “calling romance novels trashy is problematic” discourse

Yes. Outright dismissal of an entire genre is just dumb.

Diana Palmer: Position on the “are romance novels porn” discourse

Ha, no. Porn is porn.

Johanna Lindsey: Position on the “romance novels represent the female gaze” discourse

Yes, I guess? In many romances the way men are portrayed is markedly different from the way they are seen in other genres. Again, this is not a universal constant- all romances do not show men in the exact same way.

Also, it is hard to find any other genre with a larger proportion of characters, viewpoints and conflicts centered around women so there’s that.

Mary Jo Putney: Position on the “calling romances without sex ‘clean’ or ‘sweet’ is implicitly slut shaming romances with sex” discourse?

Yes. Just call them romances without sex. What are we, the moral police?

Cara McKenna: What’s your hot take on the “forced seduction” trope?

I understand the time and place where there scenes were popular, and the social norms which prompted them. I’m still uncomfortable with them and there are may things I’d rather read about so I avoid them.

Abigail Barnette: Opinion of Fifty Shades of Grey

Never read it, don’t plan to. Like I said, sex is not really my thing.

Tessa Bailey: Opinion of Twilight

I gobbled these books like a maniac when I first read them and there is a lot of pure entertainment in there and there is so much emotion. That said, they are not quite as interesting on re-reads. :(

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss: Opinion of Pride & Prejudice

I’m not comfortable with the prose, which means i prefer to watch/read adaptations. Most notably the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Lynne Graham: Opinion of Harlequin Mills & Boon

Meh.

Tessa Dare: Opinion of bodice rippers

I mean, I would be fine if there wasn’t so much of people causing their own problems by refusing to talk to each other.

Sylvia Day: Opinion of Fabio

I did not even know he was a real person till like- recently.

Roni Loren: Opinion of male romance authors

Yes please. Particularly if they are writing under female pseudonyms. With this, we are getting the exact same thing that female authors did and have to go through- a forced perspective from people oft he other gender. That can only lead to more nuance and acceptance and I am all about that.

Courtney Milan: All-time favourite romance novel & Jana Aston: Favourite contemporary romance & Judith McNaught: Favourite historical romance

Nope.

Alexa Riley: Physical or digital books?

Digital. I tend to make a lot of highlights and notes and that holds up much better with ebooks.

E.L. James: Internal drama or external drama

Characters who are not getting together/along because they can’t communicate with each other are better off not being with each other in the first place. So if that’s what internal drama is then I prefer the external type.

Sarah MacLean: Favourite heroine/s & Maya Rodale: Least favourite heroine/s & Penny Reid: Favourite hero/s & Megan Hart: Least favourite hero/s & Stephenie Meyer: Favourite and least favourite couple/s

I have types rather than specific examples. Most of it has already been detailed out in the tropes questions.

Beverly Jenkins: First romance novel you ever read

Almost Heaven, by Judith McNaught.

Sabrina Jeffries: How long have you been reading romance novels?

14 years or thereabouts.

Loretta Chase: Last romance novel you read

A Duke in Disguise by Cat Sebastian. I’m currently reading An Unconditional Freedom (Alyussa Cole) and Earthrise (MCA Hogarth).

Christina Lauren: Do you need to start a series from the beginning, or can you just dive in anywhere?

Anywhere is fine.

Chuck Tingle: How strong does your HEA have to be?

Not much. See the HFN answer.

Julia Quinn: Underrated author/s & Mary Balogh: Most overrated author/s & Violet Winspear: Most overrated book/s & Sara Craven: Most underrated book/s & Susan Elizabeth Phillips: Best romance by a debut author? & Madison Faye: Favourite romance by a non-romance author

Error Report: Cannot Compute, not enough data.

Nora Roberts: Least favourite hero and heroine archetypes

Eloisa James: What are you reading when you’re not reading romance?

Fantasy, Science Fiction, YA, Comics, Mysteries, Fanfiction, Nonfiction. I’ll read anything.

Teresa Medeiros: Other media property you wish was a romance novel

Idk what this means?

Laura Lee Guhrke: Last romance novel you DNFed

I think it was Elizabeth Kingston’s A Fallen Lady? Which was actually a GOOD book and I skipped ahead to scenes I really wanted to see and those scenes made me cry but also... there was not much about the romance itself that I was really interested in. I loved the heroine to death though.

Cat Sebastian: Alpha, Gamma, or Beta heroes?

Depends on how they are written, but I confess an Alpha is so easily made into an irredeemable dipshit.

Jeannie Lin: Ideal hero and heroine archetypes

Family-minded hero stressed out about taking care of his family. Independent, business minded heroine.

Helen Hoang: Sexually experienced or inexperienced heroines? & Lucy Monroe: Sexually experienced or inexperienced heroes?

Experienced heroines and inexperienced heroes. Play against the type!

Lorraine Heath: When you choose a book do you look for tropes, plots or authors?

Authors, then Tropes. I barely pay attention to plots.

C.D. Reiss: Puns in titles: 👍 or 👎?

YES. I have picked up books purely because of punny titles.

Emily Bronte: Favourite cover designs/illustrations & Maya Banks: Least favourite cover design

I suck a remembering covers so this question is going to get skipped~

Penny Jordan: What would you like to see more of in romance novels?

Diversity and cliche subversions.

Lauren Blakey: What would you like to see less of in romance novels?

Overplayed cliches played in the same way again and again. Relationships based entirely on sex.

Betty Neels: What do you think are the high and low points of the genre?

Highs: Romancelandia is probably the most intelligent and nuanced fandom I have ever been a part of and I have been a part of many fandoms. The genre is very, very diverse and there are so many experiments going on in the fringes. Questions and stories about the emotional components of relationships can never get old because there are too many permutations to explore in a few lifetimes.

Lows: The core of the romance novel industry is still trying desperately to hold on to tropes and themes of older days, many of which are regressive.

Jill Shalvis: Finish this sentence: “Romance novels are__________”

complex social commentaries.

#ask meme #romance novels

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transfemmbeatrice · 6 years

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Where should I start listening to Friends at the Table?

A short novella by me

Friends at the Table is one of the best actual play podcasts out there and you should listen to it because they tell amazing stories with both diverse characters and a diverse cast (the GM is a queer black man and almost everyone at the table is some flavor of queer). They put character development and good storytelling at the forefront while creating incredible and complex worlds to play in. They make you laugh, cry, and laugh so hard you cry (and also give you chills on occasion) and I genuinely cannot recommend them highly enough. Whether you like a good story, characters to fall in love with, learning new ttrpg mechanics, or listening to friends have a good time together, FatT is for you.

FatT also has an enormous backlog that can make it hard to dive in so here is a handy guide for when you want to listen don’t know where tf to begin.

The Friends have provided some resources for this: there is a flowchart that gives you the quick and dirty deets (though it hasn’t been updated to reflect their current season) and also Austin made a 20 minute ep of him explaining the show and stuff and put it at the beginning of the podcast feed which could also be helpful (which I haven’t actually listened to bc they put it out after I was already deep into the show)...but this is my over detailed take.

There are currently 4 seasons of FatT. In order: Autumn in Hieron, Counter/Weight, Marielda/Winter in Hieron, and Twilight Mirage. Marielda is a mini season that takes place in the Hieron universe but before the Hieron seasons; Counterweight and Twilight Mirage are both standalone but do take place in the same universe, tens or hundreds of thousands of years apart.

Twilight Mirage is approaching its endpoint and will be followed by Spring in Hieron which should be the last Hieron season. There are pros and cons for starting with any of these seasons so depending on your taste and preferences you can take your pick!

(Also, each new season begins with an Episode 00 which is just the friends discussing the setting and pitching characters. It’s not required listening and they’re pretty long so you can skip them if you want but for people like me who live for worldbuilding and behind the scenes, they’re great prefaces to each season!)

Autumn in Hieron: The very beginning! This is where I started because I’m a hardcore chronological completionist. There is definitely something very fun and satisfying about watching them develop over the past 4 years, in confidence and skill and in production quality! They’ve been amazing since the beginning but it only gets better.

However, because it’s early, the audio quality is not great, so if that’s an issue for you, this probably isn’t your best starting point. Some extremely good shit goes down in this game and I highly recommend listening to it if you can parse the bad audio. Also, starting at episode 5, they split into two smaller groups and the audio improves, so if you want to start here but find the sound unbearable at the start, you can try skipping to here to see if it works better for you! The first few episodes are just a mini quest and it’s definitely fun but not deeply plot relevant so you’ll be fine to skip it. This is also a season potentially worth returning to even if you don’t start here because as I said, it’s good, and the bad audio might be more listenable once you know the players’ voices better. But if you absolutely can’t, no worries! They recap this season at the beginning of Winter in Hieron so if you don’t listen to it you won’t be lost as the story continues!

Hieron is a high fantasy setting in what Austin describes as the post-post-apocalypse. It’s been long enough that they’re past just surviving and have rebuilt tons but it’s still a wild world out there, and no one alive really remembers what apocalyptic event happened, but they all know something bad went down. Over the two (and a half, counting Marielda) seasons they’ve done they have really built out the world. It explores a lot about the concepts of divinity and entropy and so much more. I think Hieron is a great place to start because fantasy is the usual setting for actual play podcasts so it’s a familiar touchstone. And also just, really fucking good.

Counter/Weight: Welcome to SPACE. The second season of FatT is a good starting point because it’s self contained--it’s longer than the Hieron seasons but when you reach the finale, you’ve gotten the whole story. It starts off a little slow as they adjust to a new system and new characters for the first time...but there are some hilarious bits in those first couple of missions that I love. Then they switch systems again to something that fits more what they are doing and things pick up from there.

The “ground” game (the majority of the episodes with characters going on adventures as usual) is interspersed with the “faction” game--Austin and two other players not in the other half of the game zoom out and use mechanics and roleplaying to decide what the big factions/corporations/etc are doing around the sector, and eventually we see these events trickle down to effect the player characters in the other half of the game. These are a bit slow, especially when they first start, but I recommend listening to them because it’s cool to see how things are moving around on a more macro scale than one little crew of fixers, and it really informs the world they’re operating in. It’s not strictly necessary if you really find these episodes untenable, but you’ll definitely be able to follow along better if you’ve heard them. Also, around the 3rd or so faction game session, they cut down the number of factions significantly so it goes a lot smoother. I’ll also put in here that Counterweight is probably my favorite season of the show at least thus far even though I wasn’t sure I would like it at all when I first started it, for what that’s worth.

Counter/Weight is a cyberpunk/scifi setting somewhere in the Milky Way. It is set less than a decade after a war in which two rival powers united in an uneasy alliance to drive back an Empire. They succeeded, but now things have settled into a good old fashioned cold war. There are lots of robots and mechs and they use the cyberpunk genre to explore labor and capitalism and feeling small and helpless in the face of such massive, powerful corruption. Or, sadness and robots in space. (Also, literally none of the PCs ended up being cishet.)

Marielda: Marielda is a mini season they did right before Winter in Hieron. Set in Hieron before the events of the other seasons, it provides some context to the world. It’s also fucking delightful. This is probably the most recommended starting point for FatT because it’s short, has high production quality, and some of their best work. It really encapsulates what this show is so if you’re unsure if this is the podcast for you, this is a great starting point.

Since it takes place long before Autumn in Hieron, you don’t need to have listened to it to follow along; but I do find it somewhat helpful because there are callbacks to the events of that season as they show how some of the things they encountered then came to be in the first place. Marielda (and Winter in Hieron) were made with new listeners in mind, so Autumn definitely isn’t required.

Marielda is of course also high fantasy, but it has a tinge of steampunk too because this island has more technology for....reasons that will be revealed as you listen. The only train in Hieron is there, and the crew stages a heist on it, and it’s amazing. Marielda has two parts--the first couple episodes are some of the players playing The Quiet Year, a collaborative mapdrawing game, to build this city. Then the other players played a few missions in Blades in the Dark as scoundrels who steal information to sell to the highest bidder. Their shenanigans are hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking and I’ve relistened to it so many times.

Winter in Hieron: Hieron season two of three! Winter begins with two episodes recapping the events of Autumn in Hieron, so if you skipped Autumn you can listen to them and be good to go, and if you didn’t...you can skip the recaps! (Unless maybe you listened to Counterweight in between and you need a refresher). There are two new PCs in Winter because Andi and Janine joined between Autumn and this season, and they only make Hieron better.

This season is a little heavier than Autumn because it’s Winter and...Winter is usually darker than Autumn. I’m in the middle of relistening to it now, though, and it’s still incredible the second time through and a great starting point. I would not recommend starting with Winter without listening to Marielda first, partly because Marielda is so good, but also because Marielda informs so much of what happens in Winter.

Since Twilight Mirage is getting close to finishing up (as of writing this, anyway) if being Current In The Fandom is something that’s important to you, I’d start with Hieron (whether that be Autumn or Marielda/Winter). After Twilight Mirage wraps up, they are reportedly planning to return to Hieron for its final season--Spring, so if you start catching up now you can be ready! I don’t know for sure yet but so much has happened at this point that I find it hard to imagine that they’ll do a recap before Spring that lets you jump in there very easily. I could be proven wrong but even if I am....I don’t recommend it. You’ll miss too much Seasons of Hieron is a joy to listen to.

Twilight Mirage: The current season! Usually I say to start here if you find the backlog intimidating--it’s current and you can jump in to what’s happening now and get to the rest when you feel ready. And that’s still somewhat true, but Twilight Mirage has gotten pretty long so it’s potentially still intimidating? And they have said they’re nearing the endgame, but I have no idea if that means weeks or months. But regardless, it’s still less to get through than starting further back, and it is a standalone season so it’s a great starting place!

Twilight Mirage is another game in space. It is set in the same universe as Counterweight, and there are some callbacks to it, but it’s set far in the future from the events of that season and was intentionally made so that people who hadn’t heard Counterweight could listen fine. It’s more like easter eggs than important backstory.

The premise is a dying utopia: a massive fleet that has slowly been whittled down, still home to millions of people, but they’re starting to look for somewhere to hopefully colonize. This game does a great job of questioning what a utopia would look like--what does prison look like in a utopia? how do we treat synthetic beings?--and exploring the themes of self/identity and colonization and so much more. It’s the most philosophical FatT season to date but the narrative is also great and stands on its own--you can engage at whatever level you want. (I, for instance, don’t get a lot of the philosophy referenced, but I’m still deeply enjoying it because it’s a great story and I love all the characters!) So much shit happens to alter the original premise and it’s fascinating to see the characters have to adapt to all these evolving circumstances and question their values as they themselves also change. Also, lots of robots and mechs and aliens and shit. One of the PCs is just a cat person. One of the PCs is a downloadable hitman who is losing their memory every time they die and get downloaded into a new body. It’s A Good Season, they friends are extra af (more than usual, even) and it’s a Delight.

And that’s my answer to the age old question, where do I start listening to Friends at the Table?, answered in more detail than anyone ever wanted. If you have any questions or anything feel free to shoot me an ask or a message, I’m literally always here to talk about FatT!

#friends at the table #fatt #f@tt

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Paramount+ Streaming Service: Launch Date, Price, Shows, and Movies

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One day the streaming wars will slow down, but alas that day is not here yet. On Feb. 24, ViacomCBS confirmed all the details of its upcoming all-encompassing streaming service: Paramount+.

This new streaming service will replace ViacomCBS’s existing option, CBS All Access, and is designed to keep the major media conglomerate competitive with its peers like WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, and Disney’s Disney+

“In today’s entertainment landscape, ViacomCBS stands aprt as the only media company to fully embrace every segment of the streaming universe across free, premium and pay,” said Bob Bakish, President and Chief Executive Officer, ViacomCBS. “The launch of Paramount+ supercharges our strategy with a broad pay service that will be home to everything consumers love, all in one place: live sports, breaking news and a mountain of entertainment, at scale.”

Here is everything you need to know about Paramount+.

Paramount+ Launch Date

Paramount+ is set to launch on March 4 in the U.S., Canada, and 18 Latin American countries. Nordic countries will receive Paramount+ on March 25 as will Australia (thought the service will be called “10 All Access”). There is no announced U.K. launch date yet but ViacomCBS notes that additional markets are planned.

Paramount+: How is It Different From CBS All Access?

To keep things simple off the top: Paramount+ is CBS All Access, just rebranded and expanded. If you currently have a CBS All Access subscription, it should automatically convert into a Paramount+ subscription during the March 4 release date. That sounds simple enough, but as HBO users who went through the HBO Max transition know, there could be some complications. Be sure to check out Paramount+’s website should any issues arise on launch day.

But why is CBS All Access rebranding to Paramount+? Well the name of the game in the streaming world at the moment is consolidation. Major media companies own many different channels of distribution and are seeking to consolidate them all onto one platform. CBS All Access was always more of an “extra” CBS. But the recently combined conglomerate ViacomCBS owns and operates many other sources of entertainment, including: CBS, Paramount Pictures, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and more. Paramount+ will incorporate ViacomCBS content from all of these channels and more, rather than just CBS

Why exactly did ViacomCBS settle on “Paramount” as the brand to incorporate its many subsidiaries? That’s anyone’s guess. WarnerMedia ultimately decided that “HBO” was the most recognizable brand for its streaming service. ViacomCBS, whose demographic usually skews older, perhaps thought its viewers would be most emotionally attached to the iconic Paramount mountain logo.

Many other ViacomCBS properties had their own streaming service like MTV Hits and Comedy Central Now. Those will be sunsetted and existing content will be incorporated into Paramount+. The SHOWTIME streaming service, however, will continue and be offered as a separate add-on to Paramount+ in the U.S. It will come included internationally.

Paramount+ Price

Paramount+ will feature two different price points but only one will be available at launch. The first pricing tier is Premium at $9.99 and will include complete access to all Paramount+ content, except for the Showtime add-on. The premium tier will also feature live sports, news programs, and access to a live feed of CBS.

The other pricing tier will be available in June and is $4.99. This will include much of the same content but will also feature advertisements. In case you’re wondering what kind of ads you might experience in the second pricing tier, ViacomCBS has announced that its lead sponsors will be General Motors, Expedia, and Procter & Gamble.

Paramount+ Shows

Paramount+’s plans for television series are extensive. Like other similar streaming services, Paramount+ will play host to existing TV series on ViacomCBS channels, while also producing its own original content.

During the ViacomCBS Streaming event presentation, the company revealed that it plans to launch at least 50 new original series over the next two years, with 36 arriving in 2021. Here is a list of all the announced original series, with descriptions from ViacomCBS:

Drama

Criminal Minds – top rated series in broadcast and streaming returns with a new scripted series that brings the team back together to investigate a single, fascinating case over 10 episodes.

Flashdance – a young woman struggles to make her mark in the ballet world while navigating romance, money, art, friendship, and how to love herself. Award-winning Mad Men writer Tracy McMillan is writing and executive producing the drama series which will pick up from where the story left off, but in present-day. True Blood’s Angela Robinson will direct and executive produce the series with Lynda Obst.

Halo – based on the iconic Xbox® franchise, Halo’s epic universe and cast of characters come to life in this new original drama series. In the new television adaptation, Halo will take place in the universe that first came to be in 2001, dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant. Halo will weave deeply drawn personal stories with action, adventure and a richly imagined vision of the future.

Land Man – set in the proverbial boomtowns of West Texas, Land Man is a modern-day tale of fortune seeking in the world of oil rigs. The series is an upstairs/downstairs story of roughnecks and wildcat billionaires fueling a boom so big, it’s reshaping our climate, our economy and our geopolitics.

Love Story – Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the executive producers of Gossip Girl, The O.C., and Looking for Alaska, are bringing to Paramount+ a series based on the award-winning perennial film, Love Story.

Mayor of Kingstown – follows the McLusky family, power brokers in Kingstown, Michigan, where the business of incarceration is the only thriving industry. Tackling themes of systemic racism, corruption and inequality, the series provides a stark look at their attempt to bring order and justice to a town that has neither.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – the next installment of the popular Star Trek franchise is based on the years Captain Christopher Pike manned the helm of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The series will follow Captain Pike, Science Officer Spock and Number One in the decade before Captain Kirk boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The Italian Job – when the grandchildren of the legendary Charlie Croker inherit his old safety deposit box, the quest for the infamous Italian bullion is reignited. The series, from Paramount Television Studios, is executive produced and written by Matt Wheeler (Hawaii Five-0), and produced by Donald De Line.

The Man Who Fell To Earth – starring Oscar-nominee and BAFTA-winner Chiwetel Ejiofor, is based on the Walter Tevis novel of the same name and the iconic film starring David Bowie. The series will follow a new alien character who arrives on Earth at a turning point in human evolution, and must confront his own past to determine our future.

The Offer – a scripted limited event series from Paramount Television Studios, based on Oscar-winning producer Al Ruddy’s extraordinary, never-revealed experiences of making The Godfather. The 10-episode event series is written and executive produced by Michael Tolkin (Escape at Dannemora, The Player). Ruddy will also serve as executive producer, alongside showrunner Nikki Toscano (Hunters), and Emmy® Award-winning producer Leslie Greif (Hatfields & McCoys).

The Parallax View – a scripted series from Paramount Television Studios, based on the iconic film. The series will be executive produced by Paula Wagner.

Y:1883 – follows the Dutton family as they embark on a journey west through the Great Plains toward the last bastion of untamed America. It is a stark retelling of Western expansion, and an intense study of one.

Yellowstone Spinoff, 6666 (Working Title) – founded when Comanches still ruled West Texas, no ranch in America is more steeped in the history of the West than the 6666. Still operating as it did two centuries before, and encompassing an entire county, the 6666 is where the rule of law and the laws of nature merge in a place where the most dangerous thing one does is the next thing… The 6666 is synonymous with the merciless endeavor to raise the finest horses and livestock in the world, and ultimately where world class cowboys are born and made.

Comedy

Frasier – Frasier’s back – and he’s more exactly the same than ever. Kelsey Grammer reprises his role as the Dr. Frasier Crane.

Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies – with both classic and new songs, and a diverse cast, the series is a prequel to the unforgettable musical film, Grease, and tells the story of how Frenchy’s older sister, Jane, founded the Pink Ladies. The series, from Paramount Television Studios, is executive produced by Annabel Oakes (Atypical, Transparent), Marty Bowen (Twilight) and Erik Feig (La La Land).

Guilty Party – a dark comedy starring Kate Beckinsale as a discredited journalist who finds herself in over her head when she latches onto the story of a young mother sentenced to life in jail for murdering her husband – a crime she claims she didn’t commit.

Inside Amy Schumer – the Peabody, Emmy® and Writers Guild Award-winning franchise returns with five specials starring Amy Schumer, one of the entertainment industry’s leading forces as a stand-up comedian, actress, writer, producer and director.

Reno 911! The Hunt For QAnon – a super-sized event based off the long-running hit, critically-acclaimed Comedy Central series. Most recently, Reno 911! received two 2020 Emmy® Award nominations for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series and for Outstanding Actress in A Short Form Comedy or Drama Series (Kerri Kenney-Silver). In 2021, the show is nominated for a Critics Choice Award.

The Game – the popular BET sitcom returns with a mix of original cast and new players, and will offer a modern-day examination of Black culture through the prism of pro football.

The Harper House – an animated family comedy that follows an overconfident female head of a household as she struggles to regain a higher status for herself and for her family of oddballs after losing her job and moving from the rich side to the poor side of an Arkansas small town.

The Weekly Show with Trevor Noah (Working Title) – Trevor Noah will star in and produce an initial six episode series looking at stories across the societal landscape and talk with the people behind the headlines: people you know; people you don’t know; and people you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Younger – Darren Star’s critically acclaimed smash-hit, Younger, follows Liza Miller (Sutton Foster), a talented editor navigating the highly competitive world of publishing — while juggling the complications of mixing business with pleasure and facing the lie she created about her age to land her dream job.

Untitled Beavis & Butt-head Movie – Emmy® Award-winning Mike Judge reimagines MTV’s seminal, Gen X-defining Beavis and Butt-Head who return for another movie adventure to kick-off the new series.

Workaholics Movie – made-for-streaming movie based off the popular long-running Comedy Central series starring Blake Anderson, Adam DeVine, Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck.

Kids and Family

Avatar – Nickelodeon’s new animation studio division dedicated entirely to creating content based on the wildly popular world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. Led by the series’ original creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, in partnership with the Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Avatar Studios will produce for Paramount+ a wide-range of Avatar-inspired content, ranging from spinoffs and theatricals to short form.

Dora the Explorer – a new live-action series based on the iconic character, designed for an older audience of kids 6-11 and their families.

iCarly – a new chapter for the most successful kids’ sitcom of all time, where original cast members Miranda Cosgrove, Nathan Kress and Jerry Trainor join new friends for a look at these characters’ present-day lives, adventures and comedic mishaps.

Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years – the first-ever spinoff of SpongeBob SquarePants, Kamp Koral is a CG animated original series that takes viewers back to when the iconic characters of Bikini Bottom met for the very first time, in a summer camp like no other.

Rugrats – an all-new series featuring Nick’s iconic babies, back together with the original voice cast in new CG animation.

Star Trek: Prodigy – the first-ever Star Trek for the kids and family audience, combining the Nickelodeon sensibility with the action and adventure hallmarks of the Star Trek franchise.

The Fairly OddParents – a live-action take on one of Nick’s longest running and most successful animated hits.

Reality

Big Brother Live Feeds – offers an in-depth, exclusive pass to the show where fans have the opportunity to watch all the action inside the Big Brother house.

Dating Naked – the most vulnerable social experiment returns to bring dating back to its most honest, unguarded and naked form. Can these modern daters strip back their preconceived notions, carefully curated images AND their clothes to reveal their true selves and find love?

Ink Master – the tattoo competition reality series where some of the nation’s top tattoo artists battle it out in various tattoo challenges that not only test the artists’ technical skills, but also their on-the-spot creativity for the title of Ink Master.

Love Island on Paramount+ – an extension of the popular CBS reality series that takes subscribers beyond the boundaries of what’s shown in the broadcast with exclusive content and live visits to the Villa.

Queen of the Universe – in a singing competition like no other, drag queens from all around the world compete to see who is Queen of the Universe. High heels, high octaves, high competition – this drag queen singing competition will blow your wig off. From Emmy® Award-winning production company, World of Wonder.

Road Rules – back with a new roster of Road Warriors. These strangers will be abandoned in a far-flung location and stripped of their modern-day luxuries by boarding a restricted life in an RV, traveling from location to location. They will be guided by a set of clues, odd jobs and missions for money. If they last to the end of the trip, they walk away with the life changing prize.

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars – the best of the best from the Emmy® Award-winning RuPaul’s Drag Race return to compete for $100,000 and a coveted spot in the Drag Race Hall of Fame. In each episode, legendary queens will battle it out until only one drag queen is crowned the winner.

The Challenge: All Stars – twenty-two of the most iconic, boldest, and fiercest Challenge All Stars from the original Real World and Road Rules have been selected to return for a second chance at the ultimate competition. All have history, but when relationships are the key to survival, will these legends be able to form new bonds or will their past lead to their demise? With $500,0000 and their legacies on the line, which of these All Stars will prove they are still the best of the best?

The Real World: Homecoming: New York – almost 30 years later, the original “seven strangers” that paved the way for modern reality TV are moving back into the New York loft where it all began. Viewers will be reunited with the cast from the very first season of The Real World in a brand new multi-episode docuseries to find out, once again, what happens when they stop being polite… and start getting real. Series begins streaming on Thursday, March 4th.

Music

Behind the Music – Behind the Music is back! The groundbreaking and prolific music documentary series returns with several new episodes and the best of the vault remastered and updated for today’s audiences with artist interviews, a creative refresh and reimagined visual style.

From Cradle to Stage – this new six-part, unscripted television series from Director Dave Grohl was inspired by his mother, Virginia Hanlon Grohl, and based on her critically-acclaimed book, From Cradle to Stage: Stories from the Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars. The series is a dynamic personal exploration of the special relationship between successful musicians and their moms. Each episode features a famous performer and their mom as well as Dave and Virginia.

Unplugged – MTV’s most iconic musical performance franchise will come to Paramount+ several times a year as special intimate MTV Unplugged events featuring some of the world’s biggest artists.

Yo! MTV Raps – MTV is bringing back its most storied hip-hop series and music franchise Yo! MTV Raps for Paramount+. The return of Yo! MTV Raps will include hosted segments, live performances, cyphers and lifestyle content, and will serve as a comprehensive deep dive into the current state of hip-hop. After its debut 33 years ago on August 6, 1988, Yo! MTV Raps became the premiere destination for all things hip-hop. The advent of the series was crucial to the rise of rap music worldwide, creating a global passion for the genre and greater hip-hop culture, which has since become the most dominant force in mainstream music and pop culture worldwide.

CBS All Access Originals (Which Will Continue as Paramount+ Originals)

No Activity – a half-hour police comedy, starring Patrick Brammall and Tim Meadows, which was previously a live-action series, will be completely animated for season four.

Star Trek: Discovery – the series, starring Sonequa Martin-Green, follows the voyages of Starfleet on their missions to discover new worlds and new life forms, and one Starfleet officer who must learn that to truly understand all things alien, you must first understand yourself.

Star Trek: Lower Decks – a half-hour animated comedy series, focuses on the support crew on one of Starfleet’s least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, in 2380. Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford and Tendi have to keep up with their duties and their social lives, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies.

Star Trek: Picard – features Patrick Stewart reprising his iconic role as Jean-Luc Picard, which he played for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The series follows this iconic character into the next chapter of his life.

Stephen Colbert Presents Tooning Out the News – a daily news satire series featuring a cast of animated characters, led by anchor James Smartwood, lampooning real-world news stories and interviewing live-action guests.

The Good Fight – the critically acclaimed drama starring Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart follows her next chapter at one of Chicago’s preeminent African-American law firms. The wide-ranging topicality of the series captures the current sociopolitical era as the firm confronts real life issues of today.

Why Women Kill – a dark comedy created by Marc Cherry, is an anthology series that examines how the roles of women have changed over the decades, but how their reaction to betrayal… has not.

Documentaries

76 Days – a look at life in the earliest days of the COVID-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, the Oscar Shortlisted 76 Days focuses on frontline hospital workers and their patients, bearing witness to the human resilience that persists in times of profound tragedy.

Black Gold – from Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa and Emmy® Award-winning Time Studios, this is a true-life conspiracy thriller about a decades-long campaign to trade our planet for profit.

For Heaven’s Sake – blends comedy and crime documentary formats for a unique take on uncovering the truth. The series follows the search for Harold Heaven, who mysteriously disappeared from his remote cabin in Ontario, Canada, in the winter of 1934.

The Real Criminal Minds – a true crime docu series, featuring a former real FBI profiler. The series will examine real cases, and real criminal behavior, illustrated by clips fans will remember from the fictional series.

Watergate – from MTV Entertainment Studios, this series will illuminate a moment in our history that parallels so much of what’s happening now.

Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In – tells the story of the legendary manager of Manchester United, and one of the most memorable figures in European football.

Stories from the Beautiful Game – an original soccer documentary series produced by Pete Radovich, the award-winning coordinating producer of CBS Sports’ UEFA coverage. Paramount+ will release several soccer documentaries every year, starting later in 2021.

Paramount+ Movies

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the future of movie theaters is in question…particularly with major entertainment entities launching their own in-house streaming options. ViacomCBS, however, will not be releasing its entire theatrical slate exclusively to streaming like WarnerMedia has with HBO Max.

Paramount Pictures films will still continue to receive theatrical releases, and then be made available on Paramount+ 30-45 days after the initial release window. Upcoming major Paramount films that will eventually arrive to Paramount+ include: A Quiet Place Part II, PAW PATROL: The Movie, and Mission: Impossible 7. Other recently released Paramount films will be available on Paramount+ at launch such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Rocketman, Bumblebee, and more.

Over time, however, ViacomCBS will produce some films exclusively for Paramount+. The first of which will be The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Sponge on the Run, which is set to arrive at launch. Another announced Paramount+-exclusive titles include new versions of Paranormal Activity and Pet Sematary.

Paramount+ Sports

Access to live sports was always a major draw for CBS All Access and Paramount+ will continue that tradition and expand upon it. ViacomCBS reports that Paramount+ will feature at least 1,000 live sporting events per year. These include:

THE NFL ON CBS

The Masters

NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship

PGA TOUR

SEC ON CBS

The PGA Championship

National Women’s Soccer League

UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Europa Conference League

Concacaf

Liga Profesional de Fútbol

Campeonato Brasileiro Série A

Paramount+ Apps

Paramount+ will be accessible at ParamountPlus.com and will also receive an app for both iOS and Android devices. Of course, a big issue that many new streaming services have run into is a lack of availability at launch on major smart TVs and OTT providers like Amazon Fire, and Roku. While WarnerMedia eventually cut a deal with Roku to host HBO sometime after its release, it was still a traumatic few months for HBO Roku-users.

And wouldn’t you know it – references to Samsung, Amazon Fire, Roku, and major gaming consoles like Xbox and PlayStation are noticeably absent from ViacomCBS’s Paramount+ announcement. The company only notes that Paramount+ will be available “across a wide number of platforms, including smart TVs, connected-TV devices, online, mobile, gaming consoles, and leading OTT providers.”

The good news, however, is that CBS All Access is currently available on Roku, Amazon Fire, and all other major OTT providers. Perhaps it will be a smooth transition for smart TV owners and Roku-users then, but who knows when it comes to streaming!

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jim-reid · 6 years

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Chain Reaction

David Sprague / Music Express 1989

Edition #142 Charles Grodin, an actor and a cynic, recently finished his memoirs, entitled It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here. Chuck and I have never been , you know, like this, so I'm not entirely sure what the heck the title's supposed to mean either. But I do know that it's a shame he picked such precise wording - wording that's tailor-made for the someday-to-be-published Jesus and Mary Chain story. It's all too easy to peg an off-kilter artist as "living in his own world" - which is, usually, codified music-biz slang for "his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top." But Jim and William Reid, the perfectly sane brothers who (for all intents and purposes) are The Jesus and Mary Chain, dream of doing just that. Trouble is, their East Kilbride bedroom fantasies - the one about being in a pop band, that is - came to fruition all too quickly. It's one thing, as the odd Twilight Zone/Night Gallery episode'll illustrate, to dream of ruling the world. To actually ascend the throne, however, is another thing altogether. "To be totally honest, I don't think we have all that much fun anymore," sighs Jim Reid, on a break from the filming of the Mary Chain's Blues From A Gun video. "I don't think anything can live up to the image of what you think it's going to be like. Or even to the first few months of playing. That was just the best time for us." of course, those first few months (now over five years gone) saw The Jesus and Mary Chain revered/reviled like no band since Malcolm McLaren's clerks got together in that combo called... what was it again? But where that other band gained notoriety with a spray of unfocused attitude, a few well-torn bits of haute-couture and a Ramones songbook, The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing something really threatening. They were messing with the music (man). "At the beginning, people were always talkin' about the 15-minute sets we did," says Jim, who is surprisingly soft-spoken. "But sometimes we didn't make it to seven minutes. It was all down to the type of sound we had. Plus we'd only written about five songs. We were just doing what came naturally." But the seismograph-sensitive British press thought they'd seen either the future - a future in which rock'n'roll would be obsolete (which Jim once claimed the Chain was intended to do) - or else, well... Mick Farren, who no longer writes frequently enough about rock music, insisted, "There's been considerable confusion on the part of the audience as to whether the band was tuning, playing or experiencing technical difficulties." By creating some of the most pristine, crystalline-pure Beach Boys/Velvets (circa third LP)/Phil Spector pop songs, then forcing their heads into vats of poisoned feedback, the Mary Chain created something - a pastiche, sure, but one that touched a nerve in anyone who cared anything about pop music as more than just a temporary diversion. Psychocandy, the 1985 debut LP, distilled this mixture perfectly. But after the raves had abated, most everyone was left wondering what The Jesus and Mary Chain would do for an encore. And this number doubtlessly included the Reids themselves. After all, the brothers (along with sole other constant Douglas Hart) talked ceaselessly of Psychocandy's place as the greatest record of all time - or, when feeling modest, of the past 20 years. How to top it? "Well, at the time we made it, Psychocandy was the best possible record anyone could've made," Jim confirms. "And we had to top that. At the same time, when we made Darklands, we knew it had to be different. We felt suffocated by the kind of press we were getting. It seemed that the guitar sound and the goings on onstage were getting more attention than the songs. So we deliberately set out to make a record that no one could talk about without talking about the songs first. But this time, we just set out to make a great album." This time, they have. Automatic, the new Jesus and Mary Chain album, captures a band two years further down the road, but the Reids haven't lost one iota of the emotional starkness that marked their previous releases. Alternating between the hopeless, spider-webbed love songs they've all but perfected (Halfway To Crazy, Head On) and the menacing, space-age Spector threats they've churned out frighteningly easily (the Sidewwalking-like Gimme Hell, Her Way Of Praying), Automatic sounds as if they've spent the whole 24 months toiling over it. Jim Reid wouldn't argue with that. "People expect a lot from the Mary Chain," he confirms. "That's why we take so long making a record. We're not lazy. But I think if you're making music and you find the process easy, you're doing something wrong. It's the kind of thing where you have to keep tryin' and tryin' until you get as close as you can to what you consider perfection." The past couple of years, Jim reckons, have been the toughest in the band's history. Having fired Alan McGee, the man many called the JAMC's Svengali, Jim and William spent a good bit of time trying to act as managers themselves. McGee's departure, perhaps coincidentally, saw a switch in the band's public face - a desire for more acceptance, maybe? "Not really," Jim muses. "We managed ourselves for a year-and-a-half, which was probably the most depressing time we've been through. You can't get away from it, really, 'cause every minute of every day, someone from the record company is phoning you up and asking you about things you'd rather not think about. "These days, though, we try to have as little to do with the business end as possible. We may sound different now, or play longer or more professionally. But it's merely because we want to. We have definite ideas as to what the Mary Chain should be doing right now, and we're acting on them." Does the record company have the same ideas? "Not usually." How do you differ? "We got quite a lot of resistance from the record company [when it came to] releasing Blues From A Gun as the single," Jim replies evenly. "More or less, they thought we were insane. I can see their point, but we think our reasoning is quite good. We've been away for a year-and-a-half with no records out [Barbed Wire Kisses, a collection of B-sides, was released early last year], and we felt that to come back with something really poppy, like Halfway Crazy, would be a bit too... obvious." Both Jim and William Reid have spoken in hushed tones about what they'd do if The Jesus and Mary Chain became superstars. In a sense, the master plan seems incongruous when one considers their oft-professed disdain for the music business in general. Were there unlimited capital in the JAMC coffers, the Reids would start a record label of their own. Something, Jim says, to enable him to release his own records only when he felt like it. "We do set extremely high standards for ourselves," he explains, continuing a theme that's apparently very important to him. "I don't understand why groups feel they have to put out a record every year, when doing that means you have albums that are mostly filler." It's odd, in a way, that a band so self-contained - so introverted (Jim grunts affirmatively at the adjective) - should have such devoted fans. Does the adulation please the Reids? "I don't like it when people get too fanatical about it," he whispers. "When someone can't see the flaws in someone else - that kind of attitude is totally wrong. You get somebody followin' you around who thinks you're God Almighty and you've just got to feel sorry for them." In a sense, this shows rather readily when The Jesus and Mary Chain are onstage. From their well-documented early gigs, which were basically, formless, 15-minute feedback fests, through their first North American gigs (which weren't much longer), Messrs. Reid, Reid and Hart kept their backs turned to the audience until their set inevitably collapsed into Jesus Suck, and equipment went flying. Even on recent tours, with the band fleshed out with a second guitarist, Bobby Gillespie's old galley-slave kettle-drum set-up replaced by a professional looking skinsman and sets constructed with consideration of not only the music, but of the ebb and flow needed to keep an hour-long show afloat, Jim (and especially William) seemed as though they'd much rather be somewhere else. "I think the way we are live confuses a lot of people," agrees Jim. "See, none of us are really show people. We consider ourselves musicians, not entertainers, and I guess we sometimes come across as cold because we don't have any conversations with the audience. But really, the only way I can describe it is to say that I don't have anything to say to them. Anything I did say would be totally false and we'll never do anything false. After all this time, Jim Reid still insists that The Jesus and Mary Chain are, in a sense, an Immaculate Conception. In other words, no forethought has apparently gone into their seemingly well-sculpted image of leather and shades, smoke and slhouette, rock myth and anti-rock myth-busting all in one neat package. And he genuinely seems to believe it when he insists their only contrivance was to "become the greatest band in the world." To be fair, he does give credit to the band's obvious antecedents - to cult legends the Fire Engines for braving 15-minute sets in 1980, and to Lee Hazelwood, whose eerie mid-'60s compositions (like Some Velvet Morning) the Mary Chain have electrified. But he's often been just as quick to lambaste folks as diverse as Lou Reed, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, without whom, it might be argued, the Mary Chain might be just another British pop band. It could be suggested that some of the bombast is for effect - to simply piss people off. "It depends," Jim chuckles. "I suppose we do that. But a lot of people have pissed me off, so why shouldn't I do the same? Well, sometimes the Mary Chain seem to have picked the wrong targets... "I quite often do stupid things when I'm drunk," mutters the singer. "Probably all the stupid things I've done in my life have happened when I've been drinking too much. Sometimes I can't control my drinking habits, and though I'm not a drunk, I do tend to get a bit mouthy." So that's what was behind the incident in Toronto during the last tour (Jim, apparently well-oiled, responded to a group of hecklers shouting "Boring!" by attacking them; first with a mike stand, later with a bottle. He ended up spending the night in a jail and eventually received an unconditional discharge). He responds to the very mention of the city with a groan. "Yes, I remember. I feel totally responsible," he sighs, a note of genuine sincerity in his voice. "I've got to take all the blame for that. It was just one of those nights when I played too drunk and behaved really stupidly. That's one of the nights I regret the most in the band's history." While quite willing to talk openly about drink (giving him the advantage over, say, Shane MacGowan), Jim Reid is mum when talk turns to... harder substances. There've always been rumors of abundant drug use in the Reid camp (which the brothers have always denied). And JAMC songs, from day one, have had not-so-sly drug references you don't have to be a rock critic to notice. Automatic, f'instance, leads off with Here Comes Alice, a jaunty tune that wraps love addiction in Waiting For The Man lingo, while Coast To Coast whispers of "junk gun fever," "senses strung out" and the like. There's more, but Jim doesn't want to discuss it. Matter of fact, he doesn't like discussing lyrics at all, insisting that it's William who writes all of them anyway (a mild exaggeration, from what I've been led to believe). he then adds that their highly obsessive themes, like the oral sex overkill of early songs The Living End, Just Like Honey and Taste Of Cindy (and, for the extremely literal, who might be ready to accuse them of prurience, Head and Suck) and more recently, the insanity and/or suicide that dominated Darklands and Automatic, aren't particularly meaningful. "To be quite honest with you," he laughs, "and I know this doesn't sound terribly convincing, it's just coincidence. Pure coincidence. "I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with that, anyway. It would only become repetitive if we continued on album after album the same way. Sometimes you just want to write words that sound good. It's as simple as that - a selection of words that you think belong together. I've said it before, but that's what I love about Syd Barrett's lyrics. They don't mean [anything], but they don't have to. They sound good." Is writing a pop song easy, then? "The hardest thing in the world." Does it help you deal with your emotions? "That," he laughs softly, "is the second hardest thing in the world."

#interview

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purple-spring · 7 years

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Where it ends, where it begins - a BH one-shot

Author’s note: This is my first Bughead fic, inspired by this prompt from @raptorlily. Thank you once again to the incomparable @jandjsalmon, whose input, support and friendship have been invaluable in the making of this fic, and to @theladylabyrinth, whose feedback and encouragement have helped me so much.

Summary: Closing night at the Drive-In. Jughead contemplates endings as he prepares to say goodbye to his beloved Twilight. Then Betty Cooper shows up at his door. [One-shot. Canon addition/Episode 4 coda.]

“It was then that Jughead knew, with a certainty that overshadowed everything else that was ambiguous and unsure in his own life, that one day, he would kiss Betty Cooper. Not tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow. But he made a quiet vow of it, promising himself that he would give himself the chance to write himself into her story.”

Fic under the cut, or read on my Ao3. I LOVE hearing from my readers, so please feel free to drop by my asks.

…

At midnight, finally, the last of the stragglers made their way out of the Twilight Drive-In, leaving tire tracks, unfinished popcorn and rubbish in their wake.

Well, there you have it, folks, Jughead narrated bitterly in his mind, the last tatters of this town as we know it.

As he opened the movie projector and lifted out the final reel of Rebel Without A Cause, he had to stop and gave a bitter, hollow chuckle at the irony of it all - screening a film about the failure of the American dream on the last night of the drive-in, which, as far as he was concerned, was Riverdale’s funeral. Sure, the shooting of Jason Blossom was the death-knell for the innocence of this “town with pep”, but this night - in all its unabashed celebration of nostalgia - was its true farewell.

A lot of people had turned out, which was nice. But disappointingly (and predictably), besides everyone ooh-ing and aah-ing over young James Dean, no-one had picked up or appreciated the film choice. Everyone was entertained, sure, but in between all the high school kids making out in their cars and the Southside Serpents hollering at the screen, it was just like any other crappy night at the drive-in.

Betty, he thought. Betty would’ve appreciated it. It was her pick, after all, and the memory of it still enthralled him, made him smile. At the diner, when she’d half-jokingly suggested it, he’d given her no more than a nod and a smile. On the inside, he was screaming.

He shook his head in an attempt to shrug off these thoughts, which were disturbingly becoming more prevalent in the past few weeks. He’d never really paid heed to Betty Cooper that way growing up, because everyone and their dog just assumed that Archie and Betty were destined for one another. It didn’t matter how many other girls Archie hooked up with along the way - these were all momentary diversions in their long march towards Cooper-Andrews endgame. Betty would wait, ever-steadfast, until Archie eventually came around to his senses. They would get married, have three beautiful children and live in a charming house bordered by white picket fences. A true Riverdale fairytale.

Except… Jughead always thought that Betty was better than that. That she deserved more than just to be the final, decisive footnote in Archie’s romantic chronicles. It’s true that they’d become more distant as they grew up, but he still counted her as one of his closest friends. Jughead had been around her his whole life, and knew her well enough to see that one day she’d transcend the depressingly small dreams Riverdale held for her. She was strong, whip-smart, fiery and compassionate. When she got that literary internship, he rejoiced for her. She deserved it. Sure, he listened and empathised with Archie in bemoaning the loss of their friend over the summer, but privately, he was thrilled that she was getting out of Riverdale, even for a little while. Because she needed to know that there was more beyond the borders of their little town, and that perhaps she deserved a little better than what she - and everyone else - expected for herself.

Jughead had known all this, yet still managed to keep a friendly, platonic distance throughout their teenage years. So he couldn’t fully explain this sudden, recent spark in his consciousness of her. Why he was suddenly more aware of his body and the way his face moved whenever she was around. Or why a throwaway movie suggestion over milkshakes echoed more deeply than it should have. Maybe it was her extended absence that summer. Maybe it was even Jason’s murder, which had cast a cold, gloomy pall over Riverdale that made him and so many others want to reach for the warmth and inherent goodness of someone like Betty Cooper. All he knew was that when he saw her for the first time again after summer and she turned around in that booth at Pop’s, he looked and saw things that he hadn’t seen before.

For instance, he saw that Betty Cooper had grown up.

He saw that she held herself with a new steadiness, a steely confidence that caught him off guard. And that her hair looked really pretty in its careful curl and neat ponytail, but that it would also be interesting to see what it looked like when it was out and loose (perhaps when she woke up in the morning?).

More importantly, he saw that her eyes - greener and more arresting than he remembered - took an unusual trajectory away from Archie as they walked into the diner. For as long as Jughead had known Betty, her gaze always rested on Archie by default, whether she was listening to him intently, willing him to look at her, or upbraiding him for something he had done. This time, her eyes looked past Archie and at him. It was a small change, but it startled him, alerting him to a shift in the atmosphere. In his mind, he saw a weathervane turning, signalling the changing wind.

He was not silly or naive enough to think that he completely fell for Betty Cooper that day at Pop’s. He wasn’t even sure that he was there yet, that he could define whatever he felt about her in certain, concrete terms. All he knew was that he was far more aware of her than he had ever been his entire life. And with Riverdale’s slow descent into darkness (and his family’s own descent into brokenness) raging in the background of his life, she was a pinpoint of light that he was in no hurry to look away from.

…

A knock on the door startled him.

He tensed. Anyone knocking on the door of the drive-in’s projector room past midnight was bad news. He glanced around wildly, looking for a weapon, anything heavy he could defend himself with.

“Jug? You there? It’s Betty.”

Shit. He almost wished for the hostile intruder. This was decidedly worse. What the hell is she doing here?

Jughead opened the door. He felt his chest tighten. It was ridiculous and wildly unfair that she stood there, right where the light hit her best. Her beauty made him ache. Then he noticed a faint smudge on her cheek, a slight twitch in her jaw. She’d been crying.

She smiled wanly and held up an empty rubbish bag. “I figured you needed help cleaning up.”

“Hey. Betts.” He stepped outside and quickly closed the door behind him, aware that if she caught a glimpse of his bed and belongings, she wouldn’t let up until he told her the truth about his living situation. “Is everything okay?”

She gave a shaky, nervous laugh. “Um, yeah. It’s been… an eventful night.” His eyes searched her, silently willing her to elaborate. “Is it okay if I take my time talking about it? I’m still a little shaken up.”

“Sure, of course.” He indicated the rubbish bag. “So… this is…?”

“An excuse.” He smiled at her honesty. “A distraction, really. After tonight, I just felt the need to come out and do something helpful. And to pay tribute, of course.” Her arm waved out vaguely towards the screen, now blank, white, empty of imagery.

He couldn’t help but scoff good-naturedly at that. “So, you decided to distract yourself by coming out and cleaning up the drive-in that’s closing down? Polish the brass on the Titanic?”

She laughed. “Really? You’re making a Tyler Durden reference?”

Jughead leaned against the doorframe and cocked an eyebrow at her. “The girl knows her Fight Club quotes, I’m impressed.”

“It’s only one of my favourite movies.”

He smiled and gave her a skeptical look. “Fight Club? Really?”

“Yeah, well, when it’s contraband in your household and you have to sneak it into your room to watch it on your laptop, you kind of develop an odd little affinity with it.” She shook the rubbish bag at him, a little more certain and purposeful. “Anyway, come on, the Titanic’s not polishing its own brass.”

Jughead laughed. “Alright then, but we’re going to need some snacks.”

…

Jughead raided the leftovers from the drive-in snack bar. The kid who was manning it was supposed to have cleared it out by the end of the night, but clearly he thought it would be pointless, given that the drive-in was closing. Jughead grabbed a bag of popcorn, some chocolate bars and a couple of trash pickers for him and Betty.

They agreed to start at one end of the drive-in and walk across together to try and cover the grounds. With all of its lights still on and the signage still buzzing above their heads, the drive-in looked hauntingly beautiful in its neon-lit emptiness.

Betty turned to Jughead as she ripped a Snickers open. “How did tonight go, Jug? I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it. My mom sort of hijacked my plans.”

“It’s okay,” he said. And it really was. Alice Cooper was a piece of work. “It was bittersweet, to be honest. The whole town was there - Serpents included, but you know, still, it was great.” He sighed. “I just wish it didn’t have to take the drive-in closing down to get everyone here.”

Betty glanced at him. “You know the town cares about the drive-in, Jug. We all had great memories here. I did - I watched my very first movie here. I’m pretty sure we all did.”

“What did you watch?” he asked out of curiosity.

“It was a rerun of the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet.”

Jughead laughed. “Wow, seriously?”

“Seriously.” She laughed at the memory. “I was 6, and… well, you know my mom. She had grand plans for me and my sister to become cultured. Polly was bored and ended up reading a book, but I actually ended up enjoying it.”

Jughead imagined it - six-year-old Betty Cooper, precocious and already smart beyond her years, her blonde head resting on her little hands as Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting declared their love for each other on the play’s infamous balcony. It was, he had to admit, adorable. “Little morbid for a six-year-old, don’t you think?”

“It definitely was, but I was more into the love story. The deaths and the gang warfare completely went over my head.”

“Are you kidding? That’s sort of the whole point of the story, Betts.”

“Was it really, though? The title of the play WAS Romeo and Juliet.”

“Yeah, but then it starts with this morbid prologue that basically spoils the love story for you. ‘Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene…”

Betty smiled and joined him, their voices echoing the over the empty grounds of the Twilight. “From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean –”

“See?” Jughead broke off. “‘Civil blood makes civil hands unclean.’ It’s obvious, isn’t it? Shakespeare’s trying to tell us that that’s where the story’s at. The lovers are just a plot device to teach you the real lesson of the play, which is that senseless hatred is a vile force that can disrupt even the purest, most honest love.”

“Or,” Betty countered, “that even the briefest flicker of love, which lasted all of three days, can be enough to bury an ancient grudge. Remember, the Capulets and the Montagues actually made up in the end. And you didn’t even get to the good part of that prologue - ‘doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.’”

Jughead smiled. This was the kind of literary banter that he could only have with Betty. Archie was his best friend, but the last book they discussed was a Spiderman comic. “Alright, I can concede that point. But you’re an eternal optimist, Betty. I’m a cynic.”

“Cynics don’t fight tooth and nail to keep an old-fashioned drive-in open, Juggie,” she said. Juggie. Her childhood nickname for him. It made him unreasonably giddy. “Or write novels in tribute to their hometown. Face it, you’re a romantic soul.”

Jughead rolled his eyes. “It’s not romantic to mourn endings, Betty. It’s just… human.”

Betty’s face fell. Jughead immediately regretted his scornful tone. Which was odd. He never usually cared how people reacted to his rougher edges. But seeing Betty’s vulnerability at his doorstep earlier opened something fierce and protective in him. He bent his head to catch her eye. “I’m sorry. That was a bit sour.”

“Oh, no, don’t be. I mean, you’re absolutely right - spot on, in fact,” she said. She smiled at him. “And don’t apologise for your sourness. I think I can handle some trademark Jughead Jones sourness.” She playfully poked at his beanie.

Jughead froze internally. She wasn’t normally this casually tactile with him; that was reserved for Archie. Come to think of it, how the hell was Archie still walking around when he’d been touched, so often and so tenderly, by Betty Cooper? The spot on his head where she’d poked him felt electrified.

Betty continued. “But like I said, you’re right. I am an optimist, but there’s still something about tonight that makes me feel like… I should be grieving. Grieving what, I don’t know.” She sighed and sat down on the grass. “Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

Jughead sat down next to her. They passed a few moments in companionable silence before he turned to her. “What happened tonight, Betty?”

In detail, she told him about what had transpired in the Music Room at school with Miss Grundy (or Jennifer Gibson, rather), Archie, Mr. Andrews and her mom. She withheld nothing. He raised his eyebrows when she mentioned breaking into Grundy’s car, was incredulous when she told him about the gun and the ID (he was borderline spluttering when she mentioned that she’d taken the gun home - how could she be so reckless?). She went over the fiery exchange between her mom and the Andrews men, and her subsequent threat to publicly rescind her story on Grundy and paint her mother as the villain. By the time she got to the part where Grundy announced that she’d skip town, Jughead was floored. The girl had guts.

“That’s one hell of a night, Betts. I can’t believe you actually got Grundy to leave town.”

“I didn’t - that was her choice. Admittedly a choice made under duress from my mother, the ultimate bad cop.”

Jughead laughed at that. “Still. You pursued the lead, you found the evidence, and you prevented Archie from getting caught up in a sadder, more tragic version of The Graduate. That’s brilliant.”

“Thanks.” She smiled at him - a small, hesitant smile. “It was pretty good, I’ll admit.”

They both fell quiet. He sensed that her heart wasn’t in that self-congratulatory admission. He nudged her knee with his. “So what’s bugging you?”

“Ah. I don’t know, Jug.” She wrung her hands. “I know I did the right thing but… it doesn’t feel good, you know? It’s not something I want to celebrate.”

“Well, let’s analyse. Why did you actually do it? Why’d you go after Grundy?”

“I did it because… I guess, because I wanted to protect Archie. I thought Grundy had him under some sexual spell that prevented him from seeing reason. I thought that he was incapable of thinking for himself because he was blinded by her. But…” She paused and looked out over the Twilight, deep in thought. “What I saw at the Music Room wasn’t some child who couldn’t reason for himself. What I saw was our friend Archie who we’ve known our whole lives, fully aware, making his own decisions, seeing how stupid and dangerous and reckless they are, and continuing to make them anyway.”

Jughead was quiet. It was odd hearing any sort of Archie criticism from Betty. Sure, she’d tell him off for chewing with his mouth open, or not studying for a quiz, but there was never anything like this - a full critique of his character and the decisions he made.

“I didn’t know who that Archie was, Juggie. I felt so distant from him. I felt betrayed, but not by him. I felt betrayed by this illusion of him that I’ve held onto for so long. And it made me realize that maybe what I felt for him was an illusion, too.”

Jughead felt the air go still. As if Riverdale itself was holding its breath. As if the town couldn’t believe that the dream it had concocted of its two golden children was disintegrating .

Betty sighed. “And tonight, this whole Grundy thing, just felt like a sign. That maybe it’s time to let that illusion go.”

Jughead’s felt his chest tighten. His mind was a mess. He couldn’t process what he was hearing. It felt unreal, like it should’ve been playing on the blank screen in front of them rather than right here, in a conversation with a girl that he could not stop thinking about. She was saying words that he’d never imagined her saying, and in turn, he was feeling things that he’d never thought he’d ever feel for her. He felt like he was floating out of his body.

“Jug?” She interrupted his reverie. “Come on, say something. I feel terrible that I’m sitting here saying all this to his best friend.”

Jughead was stumped. What the hell was he supposed to say to that? His mind went blank - blank as the screen before him.

The screen. In a flash, it came to him.

“Betts, you know I’m not great at talking about that stuff. But… I do know movies. And I know endings. Heck, I’m living through one right now.”

Damn it, why was she looking at him so intently? How was he supposed to concentrate on what he was saying? He looked away from her, determined to say what he needed to say.

“You know what I used to love about the drive-in? I loved that me, my dad, my mom and Jellybean could come in here, no matter how crappy it was at home, and suspend reality for two hours. Pretend that there was a better story than the one we were living. Pretend that we were this happy family, that dad wasn’t drinking or screwing up our lives.”

Betty looked at him in sympathy, and reached out to put her hand on his. If he’d been jolted by a simple poke to the head earlier, this felt like an assault on the senses. He tried to ignore it as he went on.

“But then the movie would end. And I’d hate it, because then the fantasy would stop, and we had to go home. I think that’s why I decided to work here. I wanted to preserve that feeling. I wanted my own illusions, too.”

Betty smiled in appreciation of how he neatly turned her own words into his.

“Tonight, I feel like that illusion ended. And you know, it does piss me off, but now I’m free of it. Now I don’t have to stick around and pretend that my life is better than it is. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, but that’s depressing, Jug.”

“Hell yeah, it is. But it’s real.”

She was quiet and thoughtful, seeming to turn that over in her mind.

“I guess my point is, sometimes the illusions can just be that - all smoke and mirrors. And sure, they look and feel good, but they stop you from engaging with reality. That reality sucks sometimes, but I need to deal with it at some point, right?”

“Yeah. Right.” Betty nodded, seeming to concede his point. “Maybe we both needed our illusions to end. Maybe now, we can go out there and make our own reality. A better one.”

He smiled. Hearing her say that gave him a sense of peace about the Twilight and about his living situation. He’d figure this out. He always did.

Suddenly he was struck with a flash of inspiration. He got up quickly. She looked at him with puzzlement. “Jug?”

“Come on. I’ve got an idea.”

…

They stood in front of the main circuit box of the Twilight. As the lone worker in the drive-in, Jughead was in charge of turning off the main switch after every show. In his mind, he had already seen himself playing something symbolic over the speakers (“Closing Time” by Semisonic, or maybe something more vintage and defiant, like “My Way” by Sinatra), while turning off the switch and watching the lights go out one last time.

But then he looked down at Betty - his very own Hitchcock blonde and by far the most interesting plot twist in his life - and he knew that he wanted her to be a part of that. Because something was ending for her, too. And she needed to mourn it and mark it as much as he needed to say goodbye to the Twilight.

She looked at the main circuit and understood immediately. “Jug, this is – I mean, you should be –”

“Betts, this place means something to you. Maybe more than you realize.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “You spoke of illusions earlier, didn’t you? Well, maybe this is where they began, at the Twilight, with Romeo and Juliet. Maybe, like you said, it’s time to shut that illusion down.”

“Yeah, but…” Betty smiled and looked off into the distance, as if envisioning her future. “Just because Archie didn’t fulfill that illusion doesn’t mean it wasn’t good.” She exhaled a long breath that she seemed to have been holding in for some time, then fixed her eyes on his. “It’s still a good story, Jug. And I still choose to believe it. Maybe Archie wasn’t meant to be Romeo, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to be Juliet.”

It was then that Jughead knew, with a certainty that overshadowed everything else that was ambiguous and unsure in his own life, that one day, he would kiss Betty Cooper. Not tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow. But he made a quiet vow of it, promising himself that he would give himself the chance to write himself into her story. Not just as a friend, or a childhood memory. But as Romeo.

“Juggie?”

He snapped back into the moment. “Yeah?”

“We’ll do this together, you and me,” she said, indicating the switch. “It’s only right.”

Jughead could have fallen in love with her just for that. He was more than halfway there. He nodded and put his hand on the rusty handle. She brought her own hand up, her eyes jumping to his, suddenly conscious. Did he imagine it? A brief flash of awkwardness then her hand covered his - warm, soft, home.

“To endings?” she said, her voice small but assured, hopeful.

He paused, and thought of everything that was ending or had ended in Riverdale. Jason Blossom. The Twilight. The town’s false patina of innocence. His own stability.

And then he looked at her hand covering his, and all of that dissolved into the background, like the final frame of a movie fading to black.

“No,” he said. “To beginnings.”

#bughead #bughead fanfiction #bughead fanfic #riverdale

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