#like the whole thing felt so uniquely abstract-- while also just being about very human emotion and fear and rage and sadness

[maliro-t]

just going on the record that the last scene with pelor and asmodeus last night where ayden finally drops away into his divine form is like. top 10 scenes in any actual play show ever for me. whew

[not-goldy]

1. Pretty sure Jimin said he wanna keep on performing so that doesn't change because he became 30

2. Jimin also said he'll be if he got chance to just sit on a chair and sing for fans when he's not able to perform anymore

3. If he's queer who wants kids.. realistically there's no other option except dumping Jk, marry a woman and have kids.

4. I thought everyone who's approaching 30 feels the same way. Joon had it, jm already started talking about it... so it's surprising to see Tae who's the exact same age being so unbothered about it and living his carefree life

🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

What has same age got to do with anything?

Yes Jimin has said all that- he's also said he's lonely in while surrounded by family and loved ones.

Vmin said they want to grow old together- yet here they are. Couldn't even do the buddy service together🥲

Jungkook has always wanted to be a singer- didn't stop him from trying to yeet himself from the group to pursue dance🥲

BTS knew they wanted to sing and dance and be part of the group- didn't stop them from considering disbanding even though music is what they all dream of making till the end.

Ever bought something you wanted so bad and felt a few seconds later you shouldn't have bought it? Even though you know it's something you've always wanted and something you'll probably always want?

Humans are complex multilayered beings with complex thoughts feelings and ideas.

Life, dreams, goals- our desire for them can be so fluid sometimes and Introspection is a common human phenomenon that accompanies these fluid moments of choice making.

Jimin is just being introspective at this point in his life is all we are saying.

There's nothing too complex about that that it should be confusing. A person can want something or someone and still express fears and doubts uncertainty and anxiety about that same thing.

It's right there in his songs when he sings about how it's begun, that he is in his prime time. I think it's out of such honest introspection that he's able to spit out those beautiful lyrics he pens. His past, his future, he's in the in between. Transitioning, becoming🤭

We act like the concept of 30 thirty is difficult phenomenon to comprehend when 30 is even the age limit for Korean men to serve. If you can't relate to turning 30 think of how idols have to put their careers on hold for 2 years how they have to shift their life goals and plans to factor in serving by 30.

Vmin are same age yes and OF COURSE they both have to worry about serving before 30. Every Korean Male worries about this at the barest minimum if not anything at all. I don't know why people can't seem to comprehend this.

Like you said, the hyungs went through a similar phase- unlike the hyungs, the maknaes don't get to sit with it. They have to do a lot of thinking at base and we can't tell them cheer up, we can't reassure them, we can't give them a unique perspective- we are on different sides of the wall.

Rather than construe the whole turning 30 phenomenon as some abstract Far fetched phenomenon- perhaps let's not. It's not that complicated 💀

These things are very natural and very common among us humans but especially for people who have a culture where turning 30 is a major rite of passage- Besides, late 20's and early 30's is when lots of people's brains fully mature biologically speaking- or so I hear so it makes sense why people would suddenly start being hyper introspective around that age.

To some it's a myth but to some they do very much enter this hyper introspective phase when they reach that point in their life. If you frame the discourse as one of introspection as you should then you'll find it as preposterous as I do the idea that Tae isn't introspecting about turning 30.

Unbothered????

Youve never heard him talk about how he doesn't look as handsome every now and then?

I recall him complaining about Covid and how it's stealing their youth and how frustrating that was for him. I recall him talking about children and how he would love to see each member's kid.

Of course he thinks about his life, marriage, kids, his career and even his changing facial features. Joon tries to shut him up when he talks about these things but he does. For someone who worries about these on a regular a particular age turn perhaps may not make much of a difference don't you think?

Tae can be very introspective as well. It may not be a seasonal thing for him like it seems to be for Jimin and others but rather more part of who he is.

He doesn't say much during his lives but he can be in his feels too- at the most random times too.

They are all human

Aside- do you know you give off "your colleagues are getting married what are you doing with your life" vibes?

It's giving Indian parents, Nigerian moms🤣

"You are the same age as that person why are you depressed when they're happy with their life" 💀

The concept of individuality seems lost on you

[grandhotelabyss]

Wait wasn't logo allways against Nietsche? What makes this rant unique? (Don't use twitter anymore so cant check it for myself) Still, I kinda get his position, there is that very anti-human bend of modern "nietschians", that allways have this misanthropic and mechanistic outlook, with everyone being just stupid and evil, which justifies their cruelty to them. And, because I am simmilar to logo, with being at the same time very emotioanl/moralistic while ironically being very logical, I just take the spite out in doing the whole "yes, and" thing from standup and turning the logic of nietsche back on the nietschieans - Aren't they the real last men? Just crying about the loss of traditions they only care for some abstract pragmatic value, allways whinning about the hypocrisy of the true alpha predator of the gendergoblin class of real overmen who actually are beyond morals - using them actually cynically to enforce their will of power - basically what I mean is that "the cold truth" is what exposes the absurdity of nietschianism - the aphex predator, the strong or better said "fit" isnt some homo-erotic ayan fantasy, some Aragorn photoshoped with blond hair blue eyes and sonnenrad on his shield, but the same "cockroaches" that they despise - as they are the only once surviving meteors and nuclear blasts that kills both the mighty dinosaurs and caesars, so are the "dysgenic woketards" the once that seize the day, the once that live like they would if they had to live again (cause thats the most optimised way to get power lol) Anyways, prolly should just put this all in my comic as a heavy handed illustrated didactic parabell, but till I get till that, this will do (or due? idk I cant spell in my mother tongue so english - no chance) Ofcourse, I know this is more than a vulgar way of making a charicature of nietsche, but maybe that is not so bad - cause that lets one get, what one means when they say "Nietsche is bad/stupid/midwit/propoganda". Still I will apreciate Nietsche for shitting on universitys, cause I felt so "validated" feeling the same while studying, one could really see how I was some loser with a tumblr account who writes questions anonomyosly on the off chance somebody will track this down lol

Yes, Nietzsche has to be read against himself, because all the biological stuff about eugenics that's in e.g. Twilight of the Idols is at odds with the other material about the shaping power of language in discourse and art (in "Truth and Lie" or The Birth of Tragedy), with the two strains confronting each other directly in The Genealogy of Morals, which I've recommended reading exactly backwards, so that the Jews and Christians are its heroes. Then there's also the very different Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which seems to me to lead to spiritual discipline and something like Jungian psychology. He's a suggestive, poetic writer interestingly and poignantly at war with himself, not a guide to life to be swallowed whole. His greatest legacy is the major modern writers he inspired. This is why I suggest thinking about him in a literary rather than philosophical lineage, alongside Goethe and Emerson and Joyce. But even he shrewdly warned his readers against going around calling themselves supermen and denouncing everybody else as last men in Zarathustra. He predicted how his own work would become for a certain type of alienated male its own bible of ressentiment.

Logo probably was always anti-Nietzschean, because, if I recall his "lore" properly, he's been under the influence of Groys and Kojève since his undergraduate days. Those men, however, are/were capable of confronting the heat-death of post-historical culture with a beatific bodhisattva smile. They would even be the types to welcome Nietzsche as the needed negative moment in the historical dialectic they so calmly diagnose and submit themselves to. I think. But I don't really care enough about philosophy to know for sure.

[mothmanhamlet]

Feelings are Fatal

I’ve decided to put all my fics here on tumblr, so here we go I guess

Logan is decidedly against love, but the very feeling he hates may just be his downfall.

Logince, 4231 words, Hanahaki au/High school au

Warnings: Major character death! Blood! Kinda swearing idk

Hanahaki Disease. It was just another fact of Logan’s life, the almost magical sickness that caused flowers to bloom in ones lungs as a result of unrequited love. He had to write a paper about it once, about when humans discovered it and how it affects humanity. He got a good grade on that paper, even though he didn’t understand it. Yes he understood the phenomenon, but how anyone could feel that deeply simply evaded him.

He used to pride himself on that, the fact that he always put logic and reason above emotion. It let him get good grades in every class he took, it made sure he focused, and it helped him get through high school without a hitch.

Well almost. Before he could glide through school into an Ivy League, he met Roman Prince.  

Roman Prince was the resident drama star and popular kid. He was conventionally attractive, with his curly brown hair, unblemished skin, and light brown eyes. A hopeless romantic, he was dramatic and confident. He and Logan shared Literature and World History together for almost two years.  

He could remember the day they first met, 2nd period English Literature. It was a rather bright room with handwritten posters plastered anywhere there was room. A giant messy whiteboard was at the front near the door with a square of desks facing it. The desks seemed to be one for every two people, an odd choice for a teacher but a completely average choice for that particular one. He remembers taking half of one in the front corner.

Once the bell rang to start class, the teacher, Mr. Picani, emerged rather ceremoniously from behind the desk. Immediately, he introduced himself and scribbled “Romeo and Juliet” on the board. From there, the class launched into a conversation about the story, most of them having already read it, which soon turned into a debate.

“It’s just so tragic, they were in love and had to die because of it, what could be sadder?” Roman announced, standing up and waving his hands around to accentuate his point.  

“They knew each other for a month at best and then killed themselves, how is that a tragic love story?” Logan said with a scoff.  

“How could you just say something like that about one of the greatest love stories of all time?” Roman gasped, turning his attention fully to Logan.

“Juliet was thirteen, she didn’t know what love was.”

“Oh and you would know better?”

“Actually-”  

They continued their debate for almost all of class, ending with both of them literally out of their seats and yelling at each other. It was intense and probably not the best first impression. It also caused their suddenly pacifist teacher to switch around their seating, so they ended up right next to each other in a swift move Mr. Picani called the “Get-along-desk”.

For the first few months, it was a hell-scape. Their interactions were explosive, they always had different opinions and neither were willing to compromise. For a while, they just refused to talk to each other, after all it did seem like the logical move at the time. That didn’t last long, as being desk-mates meant being project partners and projects meant communication. If not for Logan’s refusal to disrupt his own learning, they probably would have been kicked out of class. Even in History they weren’t safe, somehow always ending up partnered together. Logan found it infuriating. Roman thought with his emotions, he relied on abstractions and was too stubborn to let go of them. Not to mention, arguing with him was like arguing with the personification of the Uno reverse card. Roman would say that he was the stubborn one, focusing on facts and figures exclusively. Four whole months went by and no one thought they were capable of getting along.

That was until Roman’s twin brother transferred into their class. Remus was everything Logan despised, doing everything thoughtlessly. He would place nightmarish takes on their reading, placing what ifs where they had no business being. Logan was sure he lacked the capability to take anything seriously. Roman could barely stand him too, Remus being the antithesis of him despite the fact that they shared DNA. If Logan hated Roman, he despised Remus.  

So of course, when it was time to do team debates, Mr. Picani made the mistake of pairing them against Remus’ group. It didn’t matter how they felt about each other before, they were against a common enemy and needed to best him.

As rivals they were strong. As allies, they were damn near unstoppable. Every issue they had was put aside as they worked on an argument about the feminism of Pride and Prejudice. They used every second of class, discussing evidence and building upon ideas. They even went out of their way to work after class. Logan was finally able to see Roman’s strengths, how passionate he was, how driven he could be, and the creativity he had in every aspect. Sure enough, they got the highest grade in the class, and a friendship was formed. Albeit, it was uneasy and reluctant, but it was a friendship nonetheless.

Soon, unease and reluctance grew to respect. Respect grew to appreciation. After a few months, lo and behold, the get-along-desk had worked. They were not true friends, but they were doing better. They started to acknowledge points they made, even adding in some occasions. They made small talk too, Roman talking about his rehearsals or telling about another person he just had to meet (but ultimately never would). Logan would start to ramble about something he learned. It was little things like that that made their friendship.

It was mid-March when Logan noticed it. Everything had seemingly calmed down since Remus had gotten expelled for performing the macarena during an assembly for the 15th time, and he and Roman were slowly becoming at least acquaintances. They were in history class at the time, when Roman turned to him while they were working.

“European society really did peak in, like, the 1300’s huh,” Roman said nonchalantly, pointing to a knight’s uniform. Of course, Logan was annoyed with him. Somehow, he managed to forget the black plague, despite it being the focus of most of the unit. But it was a different kind of annoyance, more amusement than anything else. And of course Roman    wanted to be a knight, he already had the chivalry and honor down to a tee. But he was thinking about that too much.

It was a weird sensation Logan didn’t entirely understand. He probably should have thought about it, as that would be the logical thing to do, however Roman had told him continuously that emotions were illogical and that same weird part of him wanted to listen to Roman. So instead, he ignored the feeling and lectured him on the black plague. It was easy enough to ignore.

He felt it again in English the next day, while he was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. They weren’t required, he simply wanted to. He remembered Dorian reminding him of Roman. A little narcissistic, a bit vain, beautiful. Beautiful. His brain got stuck on that word for a while. He thought Roman was beautiful. But emotions were illogical, so he ignored it. It was easy to ignore.

It continued to be easy to ignore. Sure moments like that would pop up, more and more frequently as time went on, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter the bursts of unexplainable happiness that Logan felt when he saw Roman. It didn’t matter the times Logan lost the ability to articulate in his presence. It didn’t matter that Logan could see just how nice and charming and unique Roman was. It didn’t matter, because he could ignore it.

By the end of the year, he could safely say it was harder to ignore. What was once subtle, was now strong and demanding in his head. That was also the time Logan realized it was hopeless to even want what he now knew he wanted. Over the year, he learned that Roman was in fact, a hopeless romantic. However, the endless string of people Roman fell for had a few things in common. From what he heard, they were all emotional, dramatic, popular, and perfect. Just like Roman.

So, when the year ended, Logan did what he did best when it came to his feelings about Roman. He ignored them.

The summer passed as the summer always did. Logan did mathematics camps, biology camps, astronomy camps, anything that kept him busy and learning. It was almost boring, how routine it was. The only thing that kept nagging at him was his ‘crush’ (the others at camp had taught him the term) on Roman. It never went away as he had hoped, yet he still continued to neglect it. Unfortunately, like a wound left unattended, it would begin to fester.

The school year began, and Logan could almost remember the happiness he felt when it started again. Classes were where he found his confidence, where he was listened to and respected. He was good at school, because it let him use logic and reason generally without complication.

There was, of course, one minor problem. He was waiting in his new English class, coming off of the high that was impressing his orchestra class, as he sat down at an empty table. This teacher seemed much like his previous one, bubbly and energetic. There were more technicolor posters adorning the walls, but everything was less cartoonish. In addition to the spectacled teacher who insisted they call him by his first name, this class seemed to have a TA, a dark shadowy man who must have been a college student. Logan had to have been distracted while taking everything in, as he failed to notice someone sitting next to him.  

“Hey Microsoft Nerd, ready to win English again?” Logan turned to see a smiling Roman facing him. Besides simply being startled, Logan jumped at seeing Roman again. He didn’t think Roman would actively seek him out like that.

“Roman, you cannot win English as a class, or a language for that matter, it is not a competition,” Logan said, adjusting his glasses. He forgot how pretty Roman was. It seemed his brain was at it again with this inconvenience.

“Au contraire, Pocket Protector, we can and we shall,” Roman said with a grin, his eyes lit up like candles.

So Logan had to be with Roman for another year, which was fine except for the fact that his feelings came back swifter and stronger. It was like his brain couldn’t stop noticing Roman and his smile and how he talked about the things he loved and how good he was.

He did fine, keeping it in the back of his mind, till around mid-October. That’s when he first noticed it.  

He was in his bedroom, at the clean white desk doing his homework. He had a cup of tea next to him, his books in front of him, and everything in order. Standard studying procedure. He remembered taking a sip of tea and coughing violently, his lungs burning like a wildfire inside his chest. Coughing and sputtering, he remembered thinking it was the tea, that he attempted to breathe while drinking it. It wasn’t until the burning died down and he felt something soft between his teeth did he understand. Removing it, he could see how bright red it was, a thick petal with uniform teeth marks pressed into it. It had to be a poppy. Coughing again, he feels another, more curly petal. A red carnation. They looked striking on his desk, in a room of mostly neutrals and deep blues, they added color. They popped so strangely it almost hurt to look at. They were objectively beautiful, plump and bright, but what they symbolized horrified Logan. He had really fallen for him, there was no turning back, not now. There wasn't much he could do now.

Well.  

Seeing as it was hopeless anyways, no one else needed to know. It was his secret, his mistake to be hidden. So, instead of telling anyone or getting a doctor or doing anything, he swept the red abominations into a little blue trash bin.

He remembered the next month at school being pretty easy, all things considered. He would go about his day as normal, minus the new addition of a water bottle for him to place the horrible beautiful petals. Roman would look at him or smile at him and his chest would ache, but he was sure it would get easier to ignore. He was very good at ignoring.

Harder than that, was explaining how his trash bin became full of scarlet, slightly damp, flower petals. It didn't completely sell him out though. No, that was a few weeks later, when he was in the middle of dinner. They sat rather quietly as usual, when Logan felt the recognizable burning in his chest, however this time was worse, feeling like lit kerosene all the way up his throat. He realized in that moment he was unprepared, no way to hide what would inevitably fall from his mouth. After a minute of wheezing, Logan looked to his plate to find a full, slightly bloodied, red carnation.  

His parents stared at him with wide eyes, flitting between the plate and him. It was as if they couldn’t process what had happened. He didn’t want to tell them like this, but it was too late for that now.

“Logan, I think we should schedule a doctor’s appointment,” Logan’s dad said, clearing his throat. It was a simple announcement, one that ended the conversation as they went back into silence.

One week of mild suffering later, Logan was sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for the doctor to come back with the results of his blood test. He didn’t know how it worked, or why they needed a blood test to determine if he had flowers in his lungs, but he decided not to question it.  

The doctor came in with a serious face, as if he was about to deliver bad news and they didn’t already know the answer. He gave his parents a brochure, one with all the options they had, although there weren’t many. There were pills he could take, but they were new, expensive, and had a nasty habit of giving people cancer. There was the tried and true method of explaining your feelings in the hopes it wasn’t actually unrequited and you just thought it was. Then there was the option most people chose, the surgery. It was generally reliable and probably the safest option. It did remove your ability to feel most emotions, but to people with this kind of problem that was kind of a bonus. A security that it won’t happen again.

In the car ride back, Logan already knew what would happen. Sure, a confession would be easy, but even worse than his mild fear of humiliation was his parents’ strong fear of him getting a boyfriend. Or any romantic attachments for that matter. They were of the opinion that school and work came first and anything besides that was a distraction. He himself prided himself on a similar outlook.

“Logan, I think you should get the surgery, it may not seem ideal, but I promise    you it will pay off in the end,” Logan’s mom said from the front seat of their car. It was nothing Logan didn’t expect, so he simply sat there looking out the window at the trail of cars around them.

“Ok.”

The next day of school, he was filled with a sort of relief. He would be rid of these emotions that had been annoying him for months and trying to kill him for weeks. He was more relaxed. Unfortunately, because no good thing goes unpunished, he forgot his water bottle in orchestra. Which meant, he wouldn’t have it till after his next class, which just so happened to be English.

He did alright, all things considered, until they were allowed to research for their essays. He felt a burn in the back of his throat that meant flowers were coming. He started to cough, attracting the attention of the others at his table, a blonde girl, a redhead boy, and of course Roman. The emo TA also started to look at him, which was one more step to explaining his… Condition to the class.

A solid minute of wheezing later, two bright red and bloody flowers appeared in his hand, a carnation and poppy each with some stray petals. That drew a little more attention. The teacher gave him a concerned glance, but after Logan shook his head at him, he retreated. A few straggling eyes were suddenly on him, but the ones he was focusing on were the ones sitting right next to him.  

“So you do have a heart Lo,” Roman said, reaching out to touch a petal. He had to be dreaming. Roman couldn’t know. Roman wasn’t allowed to know. And Roman had many nicknames for him, but they were never his name. It was as if it were too personal. “I’m very sorry about whoever this is, and I would fight them anytime.”

Logan put on a brave face and straightened the blue tie he tended to wear. “Don’t feel too bad, I’m getting the surgery for it in a month or two.” Maybe if he didn’t look at Roman he would be better at talking about it.

“Oh, good luck then,” Roman said with a smile as Logan looked at him. He could have sworn he heard the slightest bit of sadness in his voice, but Logan was never very good with emotions.  

Three weeks came and went without much notice, except for the occasional brave soul asking about his illness. Logan remembered the answers he gave to be extremely clinical, using a lot of logic for a emotions based affliction.

He sat in the doctor’s office, a cold and sterile room, waiting for the doctor to come back with his X-rays, just so they could make sure the surgery would go on as usual. His mother, sat next to him in a light colored chair, squeezed his hand.

“They’re going to fix you, don’t worry,” His mother whispered. Moments later, the doctor came back into the room, clearly trying not to look distraught.

“I’m afraid we ran into a complication,” the doctor said, looking at his mother, “Your son is extremely far along in the disease, and the roots of the flowers grew in an unfortunate place in your son’s lungs. Trying to remove them would cause extreme scarring that would inevitably lead to pulmonary fibrosis, as well as cause severe damage to the blood vessels. Not to mention the fact that his brain is still developing, which means that the alterations to his limbic system could result in abnormal developments. What this means is that your son does not have a high chance of survival, should this surgery go through. I apologize that we were not able to identify these things beforehand, and you still technically can go through with it, though I would not recommend it.”

His mother’s face fell. Logan himself could barely acknowledge what had happened, the words refusing to run through his brain. The pure cleanliness of the room became all the more oppressive, the walls were beginning to close in on him. This, Logan would remember as the beginning of the end.

The next week of school was weighted and dull. His parents started to fight about whether or not he should go on with the surgery, and every day he continued to cough more and more. His parents announced that the next week would be his last at school. It was the march of his last year at high school, it should have been the home stretch for him. In many ways it was.

His last week at school was possibly the most difficult part. He had to explain to his teachers that he would be leaving, he had to watch their faces drop as they realized why he might not come back. His English teacher, Patton as he insisted they call him, cried when he told him. He thought Logan couldn’t see him, but he was able to see the small drops of water in his eyes. Even Virgil-the-TA was a little sadder. He decided no one else would know, if he could help it. Except Roman. As much as he hated the thought of telling him, Roman was his friend, technically his only friend. He deserved to know, Logan decided. He deserved to know everything, or at least a shortened version of it.

Soon, it was Friday. His last day of school went without much fanfare, besides his teachers becoming sentimental. He had also neglected to tell Roman, effectively waiting until the last possible moment. It neared the end of English class, and Logan was prepared. When they were allowed to talk, he turned to face Roman.

“Roman, I’m going to be away from school for a while and do not know when I’ll be back, or even if I will return,” Logan said in his usual directness. It was… Odd talking about his likely death. “So if this is the last time we ever speak, I just wanted to tell you that I-” No. He couldn’t do it. Roman would blame himself for it, and Logan refused to put that on him. Roman didn’t deserve to blame himself for this. For him. “I always thought of you as a friend. A best friend I suppose.”

Roman looked at him with a mixture of shock and sadness. “Logan I li-” Roman said quickly before pausing, letting out a sigh. “Logan, I’m glad I could be your friend. A best friend.”

And that was it. Logan got on with the rest of his day, and went home.

That lead Logan to where he was now, around three weeks later. He was sat in the chair in his room, as usual, reading a book. It was Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, and he had read it hundreds of times. He always wanted to study space. The pristine whites and grays of his bedroom were tinged red from coughing fits in the middle of the day. Flowers could be spotted in the corners of his room, the only mess in his neat space. It used to feel comfortably organized, now feeling distant and damaged. Nevertheless, he essentially lived in his room, no reason to go outside when he was going to die anyways. No reason to leave his room when his parents were always fighting about him. They were still considering surgery, or at least his father was.

He felt another cough rise in his lungs. He had almost gotten used to the pain. Slowly stumbling up and to the trash can, he choked through the pain. He could feel the warmth claw its way up his throat, burning.  Moments later, he could see two blood-soaked flowers, a poppy and carnation perfectly intact, stem and all. But they didn’t stop. A stream of blood followed, nearly filling his mouth, staining his lips and teeth red. In that moment, he realized just how little time he had left.

He turned over to the light switch, turning it off, then closing the drapes to his window. In the darkness he walked over to his perfectly made bed, and lied down. He could stare at the childish glow-in-the-dark stars he had placed up there, simply because they looked nice. He simply laid in the silence, staring at his own stars.

They say that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. But a flash was the wrong word. No, Logan felt every moment leading up to this wash over him in a wave. Every mistake, every choice. He wondered if things could have been different. Maybe if he had never argued that first day, if he had never talked to Roman Prince, maybe he could have avoided all of this. He could have been on his way to a college, then to a job, and to a life. But it was too late for that. It was too late for him. It was almost over and he had lost.

Logan stared at the stars in thought. Soon, he lost track of time. He didn’t know how long he waited there before his vision started to blur. His vision started to fade, going darker and darker till he was staring into the face of the void. He felt his body lose the warmth it once contained, his energy dissolving. Despite it all, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest, fighting for his life. Soon, it too gave up, slowing and stilling. He felt a soft pain surrounding his body, dulling his senses to numbness. Through the ache in his chest his breathing slowed. He gave out a small cough and a sharp breath in. As he released the breath, he felt himself let go. He released himself to the icy nothingness moving in on his brain. He couldn’t hear or see or feel anymore. He was still and detached and nothing anymore. He was finally gone.

[badbadmovies-blog1]

The Magic of Mika Penniman

Or, why you should watch Stasera Casa Mika

If you don’t currently live in western Europe or eastern Asia, you’ve likely never heard of Mika. You’d be forgiven for this. Despite being a household name in Italian and French speaking countries and a serious force in Korea, China and Japan, Mika is a virtual unknown in the English speaking world. This is a real shame. Mika is a pop star with a message and a countenance and a fandom distinct from any other. His greatest work is his 2 season Italian primetime variety extravaganza, Stasera Casa Mika, but it’s truly impossible to understand the show or its importance without an understanding of the man and the people who love him.

Mika is a man of many places and many languages. He was born in Lebanon, raised in Paris and London, is a fixture of television in France and Italy and keeps homes in Paris, Milan, London and Miami. One of his most immediately impressive talents is his ability to rapidly switch between speaking 3 or 4 languages across just a few sentences. On top of his native French and English and fluent Italian, he also speaks Spanish (moderately) some Arabic, and some Chinese. Search for him on YouTube and you‘ll find hundreds of videos of the man meeting his fans; it’s not uncommon to see him speak to 3 different people in 3 different languages, switching to respond in any language without so much as pausing. He’s tall and certainly handsome, albeit the latter in a non-traditional sense. His hair is curly and voluminous and sometimes completely out of control. His eyes are golden brown with hints of green, his jawline is sharp; yet still he describes his own face as “odd”. The chiseled handsomeness is offset by plump, often flushed cheeks and deep dimples. His smile is wide and bright and his front teeth are crooked. His appearance truly depends on his expression: when neutral or serious he’s solidly what anyone would call sexy. But he’s giggly and good natured, he smiles easily and often, and as soon as he does he shifts from sexy to simply adorable. With the crooked front teeth and plump pink cheeks he sometimes looks something like a bunny or a chipmunk. But still, a beautiful chipmunk.

Mika, serious

Mika, goofy

Even with his beauty it’s his personality that’s earned him so many fans. He’s bubbly and energetic on television and onstage, and while that’s 100% genuine, it’s more one of his moods than an accurate representation of his personality as a whole. There’s another side to him, equally entertaining but very different. Mika was snarky and loud when he first rose to fame at the age of 23 but as he’s aged he’s mellowed and calmed quite a bit. It’s an absolutely lovely transformation to witness if you’ve been following him for some time. Young Mika was hilarious and good hearted but sometimes brash and rude (to be fair, always entertainingly, endearingly, sassily so). The man he is now is pure and gentle. He’s soft-spoken and exceptionally kind. Watching him interact with his fans is like watching the human version of a cup of hot tea.  The man also seems to have stunning talent for feeling a room. He picks up on his fan’s emotions without a word being said. One of the best “Mika picking up on people’s feelings” stories involves him noticing a woman in his audience of thousands crying, and pulling her onstage mostly to hug her. Another fantastic tale tells of him going out of his way to ensure one of his fans felt included in a conversation when another person seemed to be getting all the attention. He told a fan on an airplane that he would meet her at the destination airport baggage claim to take a picture with her, and not only did he make good on that promise, the fan discovered he had no luggage of his own and went to baggage claim exclusively to wait for her. He’s got 2 dogs he dotes on and a penchant for sweater wearing. There’s something about him that just seems inherently huggable.

Mika’s claim to fame is his one of a kind brand of dark bubblegum pop. He pairs cheery, poppy music with dark, sometimes disturbing lyrics. Between the beat and the brisk singing, it’s easy to miss the lyrics entirely and get wrapped up in dancing around; this is the key to the success of formula. You may be thinking that cheerful music and dark lyrics are not unique, but this isn’t Melanie Martinez. Mika doesn’t lean on the darkness of his lyrics, singing to the camera with dramatic pauses to make sure you get it. He just sings, and trusts that his audience is smart enough to understand the point on their own. It’s on you to notice that the cheery song about teenage freedom you’re singing gleefully to on a summer afternoon contains the words “Left here on my own/ I’m gonna hurt myself”.

Mika’s first two albums, Life in Cartoon Motion and The Boy Who Knew Too Much, are about his childhood and adolescence viewed through an abstract lens. Most of the songs are vignettes about imaginary characters in metaphorical and absurd situations, but all of what might first seem like nonsense has meaning. It’s a distanced way to talk about real things, and Mika has plenty of real things to work with. His family was evacuated from Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War in 1983 and his father was held as a hostage in the Gulf War for 8 months when Mika was just 8 years old. Mika suffered badly from dyslexia, did poorly in school (not helped by cruel teachers), and was mercilessly bullied to point of going mute for a while. His music draws on all this inner pain and a talent for empathy to write darkness in a way that feels authentic. It never feels like just an emo aesthetic. His third album, The Origin of Love, diverges from theme for an airier sound and more cheerful lyrics. It’s an album about love in forms both positive and negative, and it feels much warmer and more optimistic than the work that came before. His 4th (and as of this writing, most recent) album, No Place in Heaven, is another departure from his previous work. If Life in Cartoon Motion and The Boy Who Knew Too Much discuss Mika’s life and problems in metaphor and simile, No Place in Heaven is the clear, plain English version, without the euphemistic wordplay. The album discusses Mika’s anxieties, from the trivial to the existential, with detail and without fear. No Place in Heaven is the modern English facing page translation to Life in Cartoon Motion and The Boy Who Knew Too Much’s Shakespearean stanzas. “Good Wife” is about the pain of a gay man in love with his straight friend and speaks his thoughts that he would be a much better partner than his friend’s unkind wife; “All She Wants” is an unflinching description of Mika’s fears that he’s a disappointment to his mother. “L’amour Fait ce Qu’il Veut” is an uncomplicated love song which manages to simultaneously remain unpolitical and make a clear statement by simply using the grammatical gendering system of the French language to assign male pronouns to the entity of love. The musical sound itself is different from his previous music. It’s more singer-songwriter, more guitar-heavy, and less electronic, but the whole thing is still recognizably Mika. This album feels like a catharsis for him. It’s not that he ever seemed sad or depressed, but post No Place in Heaven Mika seems like a new man. He looks healthier and happier than he ever has before. It’s as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders.

Mika’s honest lyrics and cheerful music have attracted a large, exceptionally dedicated and tight-knit fan base. Mika’s fans aren’t fans simply because they enjoy his music. They’re fans because they find comfort in his lyrics and his philosophy. You’ll always find at least some people in any fandom who feel this way, but for Mika fans it’s the rule. Ask any of them why they love Mika or how they discovered him and they’ll tell you a story that describes Mika or his music being there for them at a point in their life when it was most needed.

Mika is deeply important to people. Celebrities have fans, Mika has a flock. His fandom, largely (though not entirely) young and mostly (though not entirely) female, flourishes predominately on Twitter, Instagram, and a dedicated fan forum, where they communicate with each other across time zones and language barriers, often learning parts of languages they otherwise don’t speak. There’s a warmth here, a deep love and concern for each other. These people, most of whom are in some form of school, are spending their spare time learning languages by choice only to understand each other, and Mika, better. Due to Mika’s aforementioned cross-language popularity and success, to be a Mika fan is to be at least partly bi- or tri-lingual.  A short venture into #mikainstagram on Instagram (Mika and his fans have dedicated their own tag based on his Instagram handle, as #Mika is flooded with posts about a coincidentally named anime character) will show you thousands of affectionate posts about Mika, common for any fandom, but they talk about him in the kind of elevated language people normally use to discuss royalty. Even the absolute briefest interactions with his fans prompt deeply emotional responses. Even a smile matters. And it’s sincere - there’s no sarcasm here, no snark, absolutely no “too cool for it” artificial lack of concern. The people who speak about how Mika’s smile changed their life aren’t kidding in the slightest. He genuinely has that power and that kind of energy; it’s unique and almost impossible to understand without being inside it. When he’s part of Q&A sessions (he tends to do at least one a year), he doesn’t get asked nearly as many questions about himself and his music as he gets asked for general life advice. When given the opportunity, Mika’s fans literally bring him their problems, as if to the world’s coolest advice columnist.

All this information is necessary because what Casa Mika is and the effect it has is hard enough to explain on paper alone, and becomes completely impossible to explain without all the context (watching the show, however, will provide all this context pretty immediately whether you’ve ever heard of Mika or not; he really is magic and you’ll pick up on his energy immediately). Mika is a source of wisdom and a protective presence to his fans. He’s trusted and relied on in a way that celebrities rarely are, and he therefore finds himself in a position of power to influence many young people’s lives for the better.

Being a judge on the Italian version of The X Factor launched Mika into household name status in Italy as people who discovered him through his television appearances then discovered his music. Italy has become his strongest market since his time on X factor. Italy also has a long tradition of primetime variety television shows, and 2016 they were ripe for a new one. Mika’s creative wheels happened to be turning, and so Stasera Casa Mika was born.

Casa Mika (almost always referred to in this way, the “Stasera” is generally left off) is a very hard thing to put into words simply due to it being…really hard to put into words, but “variety show” still comes the closest to a concise description. The concept is fairly simple: Mika is your host, inviting you into his home. “Stasera Casa Mika” translates roughly into “Tonight at Mika’s house” in Italian. There are skits, comedy segments, and many musical performances, some starring Mika and some not. In between all this Mika talks to the camera and undergoes a breathtaking number of outfit changes. The first episode opens with Mika driving the tiniest car imaginable and singing to his dogs, and it really only gets warmer and softer from there. He’s got a co-presenter in both seasons. The first, Anglo-Italian actress Sarah Felberbaum, has a presence and warmth that mixes perfectly with Mika’s. They make fantastic presentation partners. Sarah is replaced in the second season by Luciana Littizzetto, who’s a pure gem and brings a whole lot of love and light with her. It works extremely well in the context of the second season.

There’s a whole genre of media that I adore but find it hard to put a name to. For lack of a better term, call it “self-confident”. It’s art that doesn’t care if it’s objectively good or if it has wide appeal. It’s only concerned with being whatever it’s going to be, and trusts that the right audience will find it. Sometimes it turns out objectively good and sometimes it doesn’t, but’s always interesting. Within this genre you’ll find the shamelessly and unabashedly joyful and pure things. Joyful and pure are not en vogue. Media was forcefully sugar coated and inaccurate to real life for so long that a collective decision was made that everything has to be realistic and gritty, that we’ve got no time left for fearless joy. But every now and then you find a movie or show that’s just good and pure and has no qualms about being so.

My personal benchmark for this genre is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. If you’re a child of anywhere between the early 70s and the late 2000s and you spent time watching American public television, you probably at least occasionally watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Hosted by Fred Rogers, a man who can only be accurately described as an angel walking on the face of this undeserving earth, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a slow paced and kind children’s show which discussed very real and serious problems and current events in grounded and intelligent ways that children could understand. Yet between the much needed and challenging social commentary was a lovely, caring show that wanted nothing from you. It protected you. Fred Rogers ended every episode with a lovely song about how he loves and cares for you, he’s just happy you’re alive. Mister Rogers and his show hold a very special place in the hearts of the people who grew up with them. For those people mere mention of it is bound to start them crying. It stuck with people, and it does to this day.

Casa Mika, to me, feels like a version of Mister Rogers for adults. It manages to be joyful without ignoring problems in life and in the world. Old media was joyful as it pretended that life was always perfect and nothing was ever thorny. Casa Mika is joyful despite the thorniness of general existence. It doesn’t shy away from problems or politics; it just takes them in its joyful stride. It’s sort of like an uplifting emotional movie. You’ll cry but it will still bring you up in the end. Mika talks about human and civil rights, about poverty, about crime, about prisons, and you still come out the other side feeling a whole lot better than you did before.

Most episodes of Casa Mika follow a similar format: Mika opens the show with a pre-filmed skit that leads into the opening number of the show, a large and energetic performance of the show’s theme song. The show itself is a mishmash, with any number of live and pre-filmed skits and performances. Common segments include: Mika driving a taxi, learning how to do a job from someone, traveling Italy meeting talented musicians from unlikely places, musical performances by Mika and others, and interviews with celebrities. Mika ends every episode by climbing into an oversized bed while wearing pajamas, gently bidding goodnight to the audience, and shutting off the studio lights. It’s important to know this show originally went off at 11:30 PM – people really were going to bed; he’s truly bidding his audience goodnight.

Stasera Casa Mika promo photos

The cheerful opening, the calm come-down ending, and the clearly defined structure brings to mind children’s night time television. It brings to mind children’s television in general; it brings to mind Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. And somehow that’s exactly what it is, simply aimed at a very different audience. Casa Mika is Mister Rogers for the 2018 young adult or teenager. It’s darker and slightly cracked. It’s facing the real problems of the world but it’s facing them led by this lovely, protective figure of a man. He’s even got the sweater and sneakers at one point. It’s as if Mister Rogers was painted by Picasso.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the two seasons of Casa Mika. They’re two seasons of the same show but they’re still separate entities in a lot of ways. They’re both uplifting but season one is more purely joyful while season 2 deals more consistently with harder topics. Season 2 introduces Gregory, a large monster who looks like he jumped straight out of Where the Wild Things Are. Gregory is introduced as Mika’s close friend, and It’s made clear in unambiguous language that Gregory suffers from crippling, chronic depression. If you started watching Casa Mika to forget all your problems this show has other plans for you. Mika’s more or less taking care of Gregory, and he explains that he does this because sometimes you have to, and that sometimes the best way to help people is to simply be present. Gregory gets a whole lot of screen time over the course of the season, and every moment he’s on screen is taken as a moment to provide some simple but effective comfort for everyone watching who’s going through a mental illness of some kind or other.

The first season of Casa Mika is free, joyful, loud and pure. The skits and performances are hilarious and uplifting. It’s all one giant party, bringing as much energy as it can straight to your heart. It lifts you out of your problems enough that you feel strong enough to look them in the eye. The second season of Casa Mika gently guides you through those problems, in the kind of way that makes you weep, but it’s a good weeping. It’s a cathartic, detoxifying weeping. Casa Mika came right on the heels of Mika’s newfound lightness after No Place in Heaven, so watching the series feels a bit like joining him on a journey, an emotional experience you’re on together. Much like you, the viewer, Mika takes a season to be truly free and the next to face problems, some of which are quite clearly his own. If you watch the show, the whole show, all 8 episodes, in order, you’ll be taken on a teary eyed trip through Mika’s mind and your own, and all the dark corners of both.

If you go into this show with a feeling that no one cares about you and no idea who Mika is, you’ll come out the other side feeling slightly better because now you know there’s a guy named Mika who cares about you. And like Mika’s music, this somehow manages to feel truly authentic. While there have been a million people and a million celebrities who speak and post and tweet encouragement to mental illness sufferers, Mika is easier to believe. I tend to think it’s in his presentation. His message is less of a blithely optimistic (and often annoying) “THINGS WILL GET BETTER” and more of a soft hug from a friend telling you that yes, things will eventually get better but even more importantly that they still love you while things AREN’T better. Mika focuses on the normalcy and okay-ness of sadness and depression, that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in your struggles. He’s got so many of his own (it’s heavily implied that Gregory is not only a fictional character but an anthropomorphization of Mika’s own mental health struggles) that he’s able to talk about mental health from the perspective of someone who’s not only been there but has developed a philosophy that holds optimism and realism in just the right balance to be comforting but not infuriatingly positive. Like a really good therapist, Mika makes you feel better about the future without making you want to punch him.

It’s all written and presented in such a way that it will only really affect you if you too suffer – if you have no struggles, Casa Mika’s discussion of them won’t bring you down. The show remains uplifting and energetic throughout, and if you take it on without needing any particular catharsis it will simply be one of the best and most entertaining things you’ve ever watched. Mika is like human sunlight, an actual joy on your television. But let’s face it: that’s not the case for most of us. Something about the present is just hard for everyone, and most of us are struggling with something. Maybe you, reader, don’t. And that is FANTASTIC! Now go find a TV and watch Casa Mika, because it will only make you happier. But perhaps you DO suffer from something. Many things. Maybe you’re a little sad or a little afraid. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe you’re reading this in a bed you don’t feel like you have the energy to get out of. If that’s the case, here is my advice. Join mikafanclub.com . It’s free and easy and all they want is an email. Joining will give you access to their thread of English subtitles. As Casa Mika’s broadcast language is Italian, you’ll probably want them. From that thread you can find watch links for all 8 episodes of Stasera Casa Mika. Watch them. Watch them all, in order. They’re about 3 hours each, so it’s a solid 24 hours of television. I recommend a pace of about half an episode a day. There’s a lot going on and there’s so few of them, so it’s best both to give yourself time to absorb each half episode and to stretch them out as long as you can. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry a lot.

To be clear, I’m not claiming or suggesting that 24 hours of Italian television will cure your depression. But it will put you through something. You’ll be made happier and more introspective in turn. And in the end, the very end, the part where I always end up grossly sobbing, you’ll probably be grossly sobbing too. And it’ll feel like crying out emotional toxins. Like a really intense therapy session, emotionally exhausting but purifying. Sometimes the cure we all need is a little bit of snot running down our faces.

Written by Savannah

Find me on Instagram Twitter Mika Fan Club

Useful links:

Mika Fan Club (site with English subtitles for Casa Mika available after free registration)

Stasera Casa Mika on Rai 2 Season 1 Season 2 (watch for free,no registration required, no strings attached)

Casa Mika season 1 trailer

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (documentary film about Mister Rogers) trailer if you aren’t familiar with Mister Rogers

[comicteaparty]

May 13th-May 19th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from May 13th, 2019 to May 19th, 2019.  The chat focused on Damsels Don’t Wear Glasses by J Alice Bown.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Damsels Don’t Wear Glasses by J Alice Bown~! (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PDT), so keep checking back for more! You have until May 19th to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. In so far, what aspect of the world-building catches your interest the most? Why is that so? Also, what theories do you have in regards to differences between places like Persephone and Hestia?

Delphina

For serious scenes, I think I gotta go with the big swordy magic scene where she saves Jake from being crushed by the statue (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=202) because the lighting effects are gorgeous and seeing Lave doing big magic stuff with her sword was really really cool. For silly scenes, the one that always sticks with me is Lave trying to be a host and failing miserably. (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=123)

keii4ii

2) I really liked this page. http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/index.php?comic=20180423 How she just asks a random person on the street for a magic shortcut and gets an answer right away. While it's always been clear that magic is an ordinary thing, this kind of little details really shows exactly how ordinary.

Capitania do Azar

I really like the prologue, particularly the part where they climb the lamppost. There's just so much character into the entire scene, and the exchanges are really cool. It's a very strong beginning for a story too, imo!!

2) http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/index.php?comic=20130423 I really think this part has a lot to show about world building like, here's this weird magical event going on, but everyone is just "I was just trying to show you something cool urg" and "well this ain't it"

duskglass

for the worldbuilding, i especially love the variety of creatures/nonhumans we've seen so far, and how well integrated they are with the setting! it's got a classic urban fantasy vibe while also being very fresh and unique

RebelVampire

QUESTION 3. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 4. What do you think Lave’s backstory is? Do you think she got all her scars from her job, or might some of them predate her job somehow? How do you think Jake will change the way Lave handles and deals with her life?

ClauseArt

heeey I just saw this! This is my comic! Thanks for taking the time to read it! c8

RebelVampire

1) i definitely gotta go with the scene where jake is in dream world like place with aishe. I really love how this scene just suddenly adds 1000 layers of mystery. Plus, i really just love the change in color scheme. It really gives it this other worldly feel that gives me goosebumps. Plus, I also just like Aishe's design. 2) I've really been enjoying the differences in magic. Like, for example, how most zombies actually suck cause ya know...theyre dead. I feel this adds such a great twist what we expect, cause every change I feel fits a more logical setup for what the magic does. Again, like how the zombie thing makes 1000% sense cause dead bodies are not the sturdiest. I am curious about why Lave had such a reaction to Hestia magic schools, but I don't have any theories outside of magic must be viewed very differently in places.

3) Kestrel because he's such a precious failure at life. Like...he just cannot catch a break and for some reason that makes him super endearing to me. Plus now hes got the whole aishe connection thing going on so that makes him double interesting. But mostly I want to boop him for all his failures. 4) I would think some of her scares would have to predate her job. Cause she's...she's got a lot of them. And considering she mentioned having been in jail, I'm kind of struck with the idea that maybe she ran with a gang or something. She super gives me the impression of someone who mostly raised herself and didnt have a huge loving family involved in teaching her how to deal with life. I think Jake will be a good influence on her though and teach her to be more careful. Cause she seems very fun loving and reckless, and while that can work when youre solo, its not great when you have other ppl. Like i think the Kestrel thing was a good example cause I felt Lave perhaps was too loose cannon with it, which semi resulted in Kestrel almost kicking the bucket. And Jake is like 1000 times more fragile, and I think it'll force Lave to see that she cant protect anybody if she goes around without a plan.

ClauseArt

@Capitania do Azar that scene with Kest and lave interacting around the lamp-post was actually the moment I decided Kest worked well as a main character. He was honestly going to die in the original draft. @keii4ii thanks! I super love just....the mundane feeling of everyday magic. @Delphina Honestly Lave just being a f--k up is probably my fav part of writing her character, especially for comedic effect XD Next to drawing glowy magic scenes of course.(edited)

@RebelVampire Oh wow this is a lot. Thank you! ;-; dammit I really can't respond to these kind of questions cus spoilers. But I'm glad you noticed a lot of my characters having...well a habit of messing up (and Lave did not handle that first chap well cough) XD Also Aishe is my fav character to draw, because Kest is my fav character to draw only its + because glowy effects. I do really like when more real world logic is put in fantasy, like corpses making for bad heavy hitters unless they're in a swarm. So I'm super glad you liked that!

Capitania do Azar

4. If Lave's style has always been what we've seen so far, then all those scars don't surprise me at all! They'd be the natural consequence of past encounters, work related or otherwise. It just kinda feels that everything ends with someone getting punched around her

3. I've really liked pretty much everyone, but I think Lave's my favorite cuz she's sturdy but messy and I feel there's a lot to be learned about her aha

And also she prolly also has a lot to learn

RebelVampire

QUESTION 5. What has been your favorite illustration in the comic so far? What specifically about it do you like?

QUESTION 6. Why do you think Jake is in Persephone with no guardian? What theories do you have on Jake’s hatred of non-humans? Will Jake be able to overcome his prejudice?

Capitania do Azar

6. Jake feels a lot like is somebody important's family but important could mean a lot of things. And has for his discomfort, I think it mostly stems from not knowing/being used to all this magic, which gives me the idea that some of these cities are less magical than others

5. Not an illustration, but I really love how in the last pages, as the sun rises, the colors become brighter and the sky becomes pink!!

It really helps bringing home the feeling that the night is over and the quietness of early morning, which is kinda fitting since they also stopped fighting

Delphina

I think I gotta go with Lave as my favorite character too because competent + ridiculous + magical +swordy is my entire jam so she's sorta the best of all worlds. Gena holds a special place in my heart too because she's clearly trying to keep a lot of things together.

Illustration-wise, I love how things like Jake's anxiety (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=198) or Chirovision (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=237) or Aisheland (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=225) traveling through magic spaces (http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/index.php?comic=20170501) make the palette and rendering different depending on the mood. Really good use of a more abstract style to convey tone and worldbuilding.

(Now I want there to be a DDWG theme park where there's weird places like Aisheland)

varethane

Lave is my fave!!!! I love her goofy attitude paired with how much butt she kicks when it's necessary. I love seeing people underestimate her and then get surprised, haha.(edited)

My favourite illustration is.... hard to pick, but probably this page: http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/?comic_id=206

Capitania do Azar

oh yeah, I really love the color work for those scenes, it carries out the emotions very well

RebelVampire

QUESTION 7. Which characters do you enjoy seeing interact the most? What about their dynamic interests you?

QUESTION 8. For what purpose do you think someone sold Kestrel the cursed orb? How does this tie into the axe theft mystery Lave is asked to solve? What overall is going on regarding these illegal items, and how will it tie into the story?

Capitania do Azar

7. Anything that comes out of Kestrel's mouth is gold, but when he and Lave bicker it's even better!!!

Please just let them bicker more for my amusement

8. It really feels like someone's around trying to spread SOME mayhem and if one object was possessed then maybe it's not the only one... could be a tricky situation

Delphina

Will second that Lave and Kest definitely need to bicker more

RebelVampire

5) im kind of cheating by saying i really like the extra page about the leylines http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/index.php?comic=20160620 its really simplistic yet i think the illustrations work super well to help convey all the world-building information. its just a nice combo of huge info drop with some pleasant visual accompaniment 6) I assume Jake is probably an orphan from some important family? Or that Jake's family is super high up in rank somehow and just went "nah man we dont want this kid no more." while i def think some of jake's hate comes from ignorance, i also get the impression that jake had a bad experience with non-humans. something about jake's reactions just really strike me as ptsd. overall yeah, i think jake is gonna have to overcome it. plus, exposure breeds familiarity. its hard to be in the lion's den and continue to hate the lions.

7) jake and basically any non-human. I really just enjoy seeing jake's various reactions of "eww no" and then having to be confronted with the fact that not all non-humans are bad. It just makes me more and more curious about jake's past. plus, all these interactions really serve as a great tracking devices for how jake evolves in opinion. 8) With Kestrel, I kind of think someone is trying to draw Aishe out. I mean Aishe does have pretty neat butterflies and powers, so I can't blame them. Though I assume its a revenge thing cause I get the impression ppl arent all that happy with Aishe. But thus why other illegal items are being involved because you need powerful stuff to get to the powerful people.

Desnik

That leyline page is gorgeous and informative, I love the combo of worldbuilding and infographics

RebelVampire

QUESTION 9. What sorts of art or story details have you noticed in the way the comic is crafted that you think deserves attention?

QUESTION 10. Who exactly is Aishe and what are their goals? What does this have to do with the undead from the first chapter? Why did Aishe help Jake? What will Lave do when she learns about Aishe?

RebelVampire

QUESTION 11. What do you think are this particular comic’s strengths? What do you think makes this comic unique? Please elaborate.

QUESTION 12. What do you think the story with Chiro is? How did he wind up as Lave’s roommate? Will Chiro and Jake learn to get along? Also, do you think there might be anything special about Chiro that might affect the story?

AshAngelV

6. I think he's come from an entirely different world that doesn't have non humans and magic.

AshAngelV

11. The world building and color scheme are definitely strong points. It feels fully fleshed out and magical, but also very grounded like it's this amazing magical place that's also totally normal. Also, the characters. Having a bunch of flawed characters with baggage is always more interesting than having perfect characters with no problems and even the bit characters feel dynamic. Like they have their own story and interests rather than being part of the scenery exsisting only for the MCs to interact with.

RebelVampire

9) The thing I appreciate the most details wise is just the physical flaws. Especially Lave's scars. Adding details like that can be really tedious, yet it really helps deliver so much character that I always enjoy when the time is taken to include things like that. 10) I feel like Aishe is probably some necromancer from the past who is trying to rectify a mistake that was made. I think Aishe helped for the reason they said: Jake did a kindness and gotta pay that shit forward. I feel like Lave is 100% not going to trust aishe and basically just encourage everyone to do the same. Maybe suggest Kestral seek professional help. But yeah, I don't see a green butterfly person flying with Lave XD 11) I think this comic's strengths lie in two areas. First, the implementation of magic. There are clear rules, there's enough deviations from the standard to be interesting, and the fact its presented as a normal culture thing is well-integrated. second, the color palettes are really amazing and suit the tone and atmosphere of each scene really well. 12) I feel like Chiro might be a bit special since that one person did wonder what species Chiro was or something like that. And that because of this specialness Chiro was outcasted. Hence why he wound up with Lave cause ya know, outcasts gotta stick together. I think Chiro and Jake will bond for sure down the road. Cause i mean Chiro did just help save Jake's butt, and thats gotta earn him some Jake points right?

AshAngelV

12. I think Chiro might be a vamp that just stays in bat form or maybe only has bat form.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 13. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

QUESTION 14. What do you think Kestrel’s role will be in regards to the larger story? Can Kestral and Aishe be detached from one another, or is the attachment permanent?

AshAngelV

14. I think he'll be the guy that's in a constant state of terror and peril. And I think the detaching will be up to Aishe.

ClauseArt

man its super hard not to chime in on these ahhh D8

Delphina

Rebel makes such good questions XDD

varethane

I am looking forward to several things! - what is Jake's deal and how is he linked to aishe -Lave's bite mark scar!!!! what is it!!!!!! -what will Kest do next -more Lave plz(edited)

RebelVampire

@Delphina thank you for saying so~!

13) im looking forward to more aishe doing aishe stuff just cause i dig that aesthetic a whole lot. im also looking forward to learning more about jake so more concrete theories can be made about wtf jake's deal is. and also why nobody else could take jake besides lave cause i mean seriously...theres gotta be more sane choices XD 14) Kest is gonna become a real mage and do magic stuff. also ya know, hide out with lave cause now the ppl he owes money too are probably gonna be out for blood. as for detaching...maybe not so much. i more feel like once Aishe is done with their tasks, their essence will just kind of disappear and merge with kest.

AshAngelV

Hang in there Clause.

ClauseArt

@AshAngelV I will try D8

I can at least promise a lot of these theories are gonna be answered sooner or later

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Damsels Don’t Wear Glasses this week! Please also give a special thank you to J Alice Bown for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Damsels Don’t Wear Glasses, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://damsels-dont-wear-glasses.com/

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J Alice’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlicesBrainPad/

[cheekygosling-bct-blog]

Reflective Journaling: The Kolb Cycle

THE KOLB CYCLE

Concrete Experience: Cards for Play

Cards for Play was a group project that took place at the beginning of the year, with the brief being: Design and make a deck of cards that encourage, frame and/or facilitate play. A group consisting of myself and 6 others initially planned to create an experience based upon the concept of nostalgia, and reliving one's past by revisiting these memories, primarily by using popular culture, like movies, music and TV. Upon playtesting our concept, we found it played like an awful trivial pursuit knockoff, being much slower and easier, and that it did not represent the play aesthetics we were going for (fellowship, narrative and challenge).[1] At this point, we were more than halfway into the time for our project, and that our concept was boring at best, and a rip-off at worst. The group and I decided that it would be best for us to completely start from scratch, with a completely new concept and throwing out all our previous ideas. This concept used the same play aesthetics as before, but with the concept being using a variety of random items to solve different tasks.  

Reflective Observation

We submitted this as our final concept, and while we did receive a good grade, and I was overall happy with what we had created, I felt jaded about it. In my opinion, it seemed unoriginal, taking ideas from other similar card games and merging them into one. Even though our original, nostalgia-based concept ended up ultimately failing, and costing us a lot of time, I wonder if we decided to persevere with that idea, and overcome the hurdle that it was unfun to play, that we could have continued to develop it and ultimately have made a concept that was much more original. I understand the idea of “there’s nothing new under the sun”, but it felt as if our submitted idea was a lot more unoriginal, as it eventually boiled down to “pick the funniest answer”, which has been overdone recently with games like Cards Against Humanity.  

The decision to start over after our failed playtest seemed to be a very unanimous decision. The group was very passionate about the nostalgia idea, as it meant we could explore media and objects that we felt were important and meaningful to us during our own childhood. We had so much fun with revisiting and researching for these objects, I think it resulted in us becoming quite “tunnel-visioned”, we only saw the positives, and didn’t look at the negatives or any other ideas that could’ve resulted in a good project.

While starting over was good for group morale, it put us under a lot of pressure. We were back at the beginning and now had less than half the time we had originally planned for. I think this time pressure led to us cutting corners and creating a less developed concept. Each new iteration of our problem-solving game concept was only tested quickly, and further testing may have exposed new flaws. For example, we only tested on small groups of 3-4, whereas the game can be played with many more than that. Even coming up with the concept was rushed. We had a couple small ideas that went nowhere, and as soon as a group member came up with this, we took it and got started. There was little evaluation of the idea and the pros and cons it came with.

Abstract Conceptualization

How entrepreneurs craft strategies that work [2]

I wanted to look at originality, specifically from entrepreneurs, who’s entire business and success is based on risk, which I view as what happens within the BCT.  I wanted to compare success between entrepreneurs whose ideas and concepts are new and innovative and those that are less original. From the paper, How entrepreneurs craft strategies that work, it theorized that the success of entrepreneurs varies, but all should consider 3 things:

Objectives of the venture

Leverage provided by external change

Basis of competition: Proprietary Assets Versus Hustle

Looking at these factors, I think it shows that both of our concepts have merit in different ways. Both concepts meet the objective of the venture by following the project brief (deck of cards, encouraging/facilitating play). Both ideas don’t particularly break into new opportunities and industries, but like I said before, there is nothing new under the sun. There are already card games based on being funny within a group and there are plenty of ways one can explore nostalgia, especially on popular culture with the prevalence of the internet. And both ideas have low costs associated with the physical item (Proprietary Assets), while being unique enough from similar concepts to pique interest that we could pitch it as a different idea (Hustle). I like these factors, as I think it is good to find a balance between artistic expression and business and marketable value.

The effect of time pressure on risky choice behavior [3]

I also wanted to investigate time pressure, specifically how decisions are impacted depending on the amount of time one has. The book, Acta Psychologica (Volume 47, Issue 2), details this. Subjects chose between pairs of gambles under different time pressures (8,16 and 32 seconds). The results showed that subjects with less time to decide took gambles with less risk. It appeared that subjects with higher amounts of time to decide were able to way up the pros and cons, calculating what choice was optimal. I think this applies to our project. After starting again halfway through the project, we didn’t want to take any risks, as it took time to weigh up the pros and cons. If we took the chance and it did not pay off, negative consequences would have been detrimental, hurting our team's morale and impacting our chances of finishing on time. We took all the low risk chances, as just like in the study, those under greater time considered the negatives much more than the positives.

Active Experimentation

Easily, I think the best way of using what I have learnt from this is to just plan-ahead. Our nostalgia concept was our first proper idea. We didn’t explore anything else, and as soon as we had come up with it, we dived straight in, developing card ideas and ways to make our experience enjoyable. We didn’t have a backup plan or other ideas that we could use if this didn’t work out. While this did put us ahead in the short term, allowing us to work on the content for our experience much earlier than expected, it was our downfall in the end.

Another thing I want to consider is trying to stay “grounded”. What I mean by this is taking a step back and looking at the project as a whole. Our nostalgia concept was planned to use an app and incorporate NFC tags. The time we were given was 3 weeks, nowhere near enough to develop our ideas into what we had envisioned. We needed to be realistic in our abilities and the time needed to implement each idea. I think it's about finding the balance between a unique and creative idea, while also not shooting down every idea that is suggested because its “too hard” or “we don’t have enough time”. By making sure that we know what we are creating and how we can achieve it, I think it can result in much less problems later down the road.

One more thing I want to consider is looking at the way we can overcome problems. Our nostalgia idea was thrown out after one failed playtest. Maybe if we tested more, we could have identified the real problem, but we instead started all over again. While I'm not saying this was the worst option, we could have tried to fix the problem, or even keep the research and overall theme we had done and shape it into a different project. I think the best way to avoid this is to keep an open mind. We were tunnel-visioned with our first idea, and when that failed, we wanted nothing to do with it. If we branched off into different directions, we could have salvaged it, saving us a lot of time and stress.

Finally, I want to consider the entrepreneurial factors I looked at in the Harvard Business Review paper in my next projects. I think it would be a great learning experience to consider the business aspects of my project, rather than just meeting what the brief wants me to.

[1] Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research (Vol. 4, p. 1). Presented at the Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI

[2] Bhide, A. (1994). How entrepreneurs craft strategies that work. Harvard Business Review, 72(2), 150-161.

[3] Zur, H. B., & Breznitz, S. J. (1981). The effect of time pressure on risky choice behavior. Acta Psychologica, 47(2), 89-104.

[eldritchabominationsuggestion]

And now a word from your eldritch host.

Normally I’d put this in my RPG blog, but I want to put this here because way more people follow this blog and what I want to do is derived from the themes here.

Some time ago, someone tried to make a Lovecraftian splat for Chronicles of Darkness called Outsider: The Calling.  It more or less died five years ago but did have substantial framework set up yet was still in a very draft stage.

Some time ago after being introduced to Chronicles of Darkness (a.k.a “New World of Darkness”) I’ve felt that Mage: The Awakening had some aspects of it that could neatly segue into a Lovecraftian game as illustrated by a variant someone made in one of the expansion books where mages risked madness the more powerful they got, or suggestions in another expansion book about the gods mages favored having Cthulhu-esque tendencies (and yes they are called “The Old Gods”).  However after reading these it seemed for a time my idea was not that unique, and even throwing hints that the mage’s ideas of reality were distorted was something people did experiment with.

So then I thought about going back to that idea of a Lovecraftian inspired fan-splat.  My approach to the idea would be different from Outsider.  In Outsider, you play as humans touched by the eldritch gods and becoming ever less human, meanwhile reality rejects you as a disease.  My approach would be more focused on the idea that the eldritch is the true face of reality and not the abberation.  

More under the cut.

So here is the pitch:

The world is teeming with supernatural societies; vampires, mages, werewolves, ghosts, mummies and beasts roam the Earth.  These societies have concerns that fix their attention to the going-ons in Earth, within the span of time that humans have tred upon it.  

Of course, what they are looking at is merely a tiny, micro-thin sliver of what is.  All the empires of the world, hopes of humanity, the squabbles and intrigue of various human and non-human societies in a tiny speck of dust in space from a very brief blink on the timeline.  Your situation on the other hand, falls outside of that’ you are, quite bluntly, an alien.

This is not about helpless, xenophobic professors and private investigators who happen to stumble upon bizarre artifacts, nor is this about scientists and secret agents who desperately borrow another day from the unforgiving maw of squamous primordial titans.  This is about those that they hunt- or rather those that hunt them.  This is about those whom the dark secrets of the universe course through their flesh, blood, and soul. This is about the ones with icthyous deformities, impossible anatomies, black blood, and struck by reasonable madness.

Maybe it is because your heritage comes from beyond the stars and into great fathoms down below.  You may have seen human your whole life, but why did your grandmother's face look like a fish?  Was your invisible friend actually your brother?  Does your body somehow form a symbiotic relationship with a vampiric force from a crashed meteor?    

Or you are among those touched by the alien forces that lie outside our cosmic speck of dust.  Your body and soul touched by gazing into the abyss and it burrowed into you and never let go.  Whatever pathogenic truths you discovered can never be unlearned; once one awakens to the horrid vastness of what lies beyond, all attempts at sleep only become infested with nightmares.  You have been forever marked as an outsider, but is it so bad?

The forces that you deal with on a regular basis are completely alien to the senses and understanding of other supernatural beings, they hail from the places like Yuggoth, Carcosa, and the center of the Big Bang known as Azathoth.  Yet, despite being removed from the rest of the world of mere mortals, you know that it’s as much a part of everything.  We are all cosmic remains of a dead star that screamed its death throws eons ago before even great spirits or beings came into existence.  What divides the alien and the native is ultimately arbitrary, a comforting lie people tell themselves seeing an abomination against all nature and reason-as they understand nature and reason.  What lies out in The Deep is more real, more apparent to you among most others.  Your eyes gaze into the night and while others see specks of luminescent gas, you see the great cosmic dance of black holes hunting stars, tendrils of nebulae that spit out new worlds, the song of trillions of stars, the pulse of a living, breathing ecosystem that spans eons in time and space.  The day will come when Earth is merely a berry picked by a hungry celestial predator.  

In the end though, you are just another marionette in a vast cosmic game, or are you?  Will you take your alienness and embrace it?  Reject it?  Rise up and become a player and take your throne as the next cosmic tyrant?  With knowledge comes power, with knowledge and power comes madness.  What will you do?

Ideas: 

Instead of the typical X & Y formula, there will be an X,Y, & Z formula because extra dimensions.  They will be: 

How you are connected.  Are your ancestors from beyond?  Did what lies beyond affect you?  Did you get infected by a symbiote?  Are you the reincarnation or facet of an eldritch being?  Maybe something else?

To whom you are connected.  Instead of a specific god, you are connected to vague archetypes of forces out there, and these categorizations are more useful tools to understand than actual factions.  For example, you may be connected to “The Masque”, which covers trickster or drama-type beings like Nyarlathotep or Hastur.  Or maybe you are connected to the leviathans that dream below the surface like Cthulhu, Rhan-Tegoth, or Glaaki.

How you are taking it.  The typical social or faction aspect.

Powers groups are called “Paradoxes” and are categorized in broad domains that cover a group of ideas that are intertwined yet contradictory.  Example:

The Paradox of Life and Death covers healing, necromancy, creating plagues, draining life, resurrection, etc.  There is no distinction between powers of life and powers of death; they are the same here.

The Paradox of Order and Chaos covers your blasty stuff like fireballs, but also things like entropy, gravity, and matter.  You might also be able to scramble forces that are put in a delicate order like radio signals and spoken words.

The Paradox of Meaning and Nothing- This is probably the weirdest and most abstract.  Such abilities include toying with meta.  For example at higher levels you might impose a rule toward an enemy that in order for them to succeed they must roll a failure instead.  

According to the backstory, Earth was changed drastically when it was taken, stolen or conquered from it’s rightful owners.  In this drastic change was when humans were made and thus later became the pawns to reconstruct the world as how another eldritch god wanted it to be, so this sort of explains the “humancentricism” of the world but not that it actually is for the benefit of humans.  Some groups of humans touched by the forces of the eldritch gods seek to return it to its rightful owners, whatever “rightful” means anyway.  

[averagemovieg0er]

Captain Marvel Movie Review Spoilers

Captain Marvel introduces a new character into the already well established MCU and struggles to be a character people care for.

While Captain Marvel is a badass superhero who does some serious ass kicking, she lacks any empathy people could feel for her. While I’m myself a very emotional movie goer who cries at virtually every minor human conflict in every movie there is, Captain Marvel only managed to make me tear up on one occasion. While that’s a very subjective assessment it does say a lot about the movie. The movie has a rather weak opening, compared to the recently released DC Superhero Movie Aquaman it doesn’t capture the audience from the very beginning but rather leaves them hanging waiting for the feeling of having arrived in her world. The audience is waiting for the ‘I’m about to go on an adventure’ moment for essentially the whole movie. I never got to the stage of being completely invested in her story which usually happens at least at the end of the first act of a movie. Aquaman is a good example of a very immersive opening scene by opening Aquaman’s journey with a loud bang of a window blind slamming against a wall during a heavy storm. American Animals is another good example of a completely immersive opening, where over the course of a couple minutes the moviegoers are immediately captured by the story and intrigued. At the end of the scene the audience has arrived in the world of the protagonists and thereon begins the adventure. 

Sadly Captain Marvel doesn’t do that to the point that I barely remember how it begins and I left the theater roughly 3 hours ago. The opening sequence is interrupted by her waking up and revealing that she just had a bad dream. She then continues to look for Jude Law’s character Yon Rogg and their first interaction already tells you what kind of Character Carol Danvers is, she’s kind of sarcastic and has a dry humor I would say which I normally prefer and can relate to. However the first words she said  didn’t do anything for me and most of the audience members and I thought it was very bland and uninteresting. This conversation sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s not that she’s not funny or annoying or a bad person, but she has nothing distinctive to her. Anyone could’ve said these things, they’re not unique to her character. I know that it was only two lines but my point is that that’s how it continues. She does get funnier and more charismatic when she interacts with Fury and I do think that these scenes make her likeable and give her a certain edge, however these moment are quite rare and any other dialogue she has or decisions she makes are simply boring and almost predictable. I did enjoy that she feels like more of the girl next door type of character, as opposed to Gal Gadot’s Wonderwoman for example,which would make her more relatable, but somehow it doesn’t fit the story. They try to give her a backstory and some motivation but the scenes where they do try are never paid off. We see a couple flashbacks over and over again where she fails at go-karting or rope climbing, and they are supposed to be symbolic for her being human and never giving up, but the audience doesn’t feel that. To me it just showed that she fell down a couple of times and got up again but there’s no real plot twist in that narrative. They show a man in the Airforce telling her that she can’t control her emotions and therewith won’t ever be any good as an army pilot, but that moment is never paid off. In the first act they push the story line of her not being able to control herself because there’s more to her than being a fighter, like emotions and a moral compass, they just don’t bring that across. The pay off for all these scenes is the moment where she stands up to the higher intelligence by accepting that she’s human and therewith unlocks her full powers. It sounds great on paper but in reality the scenes didn’t do anything to the spectators. The person she stood up to has almost no significance, and it just continues the repeatedly shown narrative of her getting back up after she’s been down but we still don’t really understand her motivation. Also she doesn’t face any obstacles of trying to unlock her powers, she just does so by using them to its full extent. The idea of her humanity being the main hardship she has to battle with isn’t shown in an emotionally investive manner, she just says it. They showed her struggle with coming to terms with who she is in a way better sequence when Maria Rambeau tells her that she’s there for her and emphasizes on their strong friendship in the past. Maria Rambeau is the best written and most human character in the movie in my opinion. I truly feel for her and because she’s such a great character her words towards Carol have such a big influence that she is able to benefit from them and show her vulnerable human side, but unfortunately that’s the only thing where we see it because the climax just uses dialogue without any emotionally investing background. That was also the only moment that made me tear up because you could feel the confusion and hopelessness Carlos must’ve felt the whole time, discovering she was  brainwashed for the past six years and missed out on this great connection with Monica.

Another reason why the movie feels a little shallow are the stakes, who are basically non existent. I know that a lot of people say there aren’t ever real stakes in a Marvel movie which I fundamentally disagree with, BUT in this one there really aren’t any. She is already super powerful at the very beginning of this movie, and we’ve seen in the trailer that she can fly. Even without seeing the trailer they tease from the very beginning that she’s even stronger than we see in the first parts of the movie because characters like Yon-Rogg continuously tell her to hold back. Her ‘opponents’ don’t really seem to have any superpowers and she can easily overpower them mostly even in hand to hand combat. She’s never in any real danger which wouldn’t really be a problem if there were other obstacles she has to overcome but as I already stated her back story doesn’t really work and doesn’t prevent her from kicking ass at all. There’s no real inner or outer conflict. The big enemy Ronan just flees the scene upon seeing her powers, which is kinda cool at first glance and symbolizes how powerful she really is but it’s also insanely underwhelming. It’s very atypical for these powerful characters to just give up that easily. Imagine the Avengers just fleeing the scene everytime they see someone more powerful than them . Every Avengers movie would result in them giving up. I know that there’s more complexity in Avengers’ motives of why they keep fighting even in hopeless situations, but Ronan giving up that easily just seems like lazy writing and he’s only being used to demonstrate how powerful Captain Marvel is supposed to be, which just makes him a disposable plot device. The moment where she discovers her true strength comes as no surprise and there’s not even a visually satisfying scene of her coming into her full powers, other than the one we’ve already seen in the trailer countless times and a short cool scene of her falling, her eyes lighting up and realizing that she can fly. Also her powers aren’t very well established I still don’t know what her powers actually are, they seem boring and that thing she did which resulted in Ronan leaving was very abstract and not really a tangible concept to grasp, which I do realize sounds ridiculous because it’s a Superpower, but it still leaves me kinda confused of how she would for example try to defeat Thanos. I don’t know the full scope of her powers, other than people outside of the movie telling me that she’s supposed to be the strongest Avenger.

Talking about the visuals is also important when reviewing this movie. They’re just kinda bland. The only visually pleasing scenes are of her flying into space and preventing Ronan’s bombs to hit earth, but it’s too short and the badassness and the seriousness of her powers and that moment are taken away by her screaming about how much fun she’s having. Now it is a fun character trait to include her acting like that but it seems out of character, because she’s never seemed like the ‘screaming because of happiness’ type of character. Also in comparison to Thor in Ragnarok, who became this really funny goofy character, he doesn’t squeal of joy when he unlocks his full powers on the rainbow bridge. It’s a serious moment, it’s life or death for his people, but these stakes and the seriousness is never present in the third act of Captain Marvel.

To add another comparison of these two movies, Captain Marvel doesn’t really have a tone. It has semi grungy visuals but that’s it as far as that goes. Certain parts of the movie are too dark, like the very first Starforce mission and Captain Marvels battle against the Starforce at the end of the movie. The music isn’t special but a rather obvious choice and sometimes doesn’t go with the scenes at all. For example when Carol has to fight Yon-Rogg and the Starforce on Lawson’s Ship. The music and the seriousness and badassness of the scene don’t go together at all. The visuals alone can’t carry the theme of the movie and much like in the first Thor movie they chose a location that’s rather bland to begin with, which is parts of Los Angeles where you don’t see any landmarks and then somewhere in the desert. The switch from a beautiful outer space civilization to the plain desert hasn’t worked in Thor and didn’t work in Captain Marvel either. On top of that the space station of Dr. Lawson felt like an unfinished set piece in my opinion. It was just a room with space ship looking like walls and a couple of artifacts from earth randomly placed in the room, it again didn’t have a distinctive feeling to it, nor did it set any specific atmosphere for the scenes.The MCU has stepped up its game and knows what it’s doing with essentially every movie but Captain Marvel doesn’t portray that and feels very forgettable. If that was the first superhero movie I’ve ever seen I would’ve been amazed but only because of the visuals and because she’s a superhero and that’s always exciting. But we’re long past that. We live in a post Infinity War era, where Superhero movies have exceeded their genre and they tell the most human and grand and mind blowing stories in cinematic history. At first it might just be unfair to expect such a standard from an origin movie, but then I realized that I can still go back to Dr. Strange or Black Panther and be just as excited for their story as I was when I watched them the first time and they totally hold up even in the face of Infinity war, so Captain Marvel really has to step her game up, other heros have done it too. I really wanted to see the movie succeed considering Carol Danvers is going to be part of the MCU for a while now but I was disappointed. It was still an entertaining movie at times and I don’t regret going to the movies to see it but at its best it’s just mediocre which no superhero in the MCU deserves at this point. Captain Marvel is going to join the Avengers in Endgame and I hope that she’ll be ‘Russo’d’ just like Cap, Spider-man and Thor. I still believe in Marvel to make the right decisions to bring a glorious end to the first 10 years of the MCU. The clock to Endgame has begun !

Overall score: solid 5/10 

Quick complaints and thoughts:

(Goose’s eye-scratching scene should have happened at a different time in the movie, it felt kinda forced and short cut, but I liked the idea)

(The Avengers Initiative being named after Captain Marvel felt a little disrespectful to all the other heroes we’ve been with for the past 10 years, just didn’t feel deserved)

(Coulson was way underwritten, but I liked him more than I did in The Avengers)

(Did they have to release Captain Marvel before Endgame because they needed to introduce Goose as a Flerken in order to use her dimensional pockets to defeat Thanos ??)

[orpheus-type-beat]

Hadestown

First off Hadestown was phenomenal. I legit almost cried at the end; even though I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending, the musical did such a good job of creating and then destroying hope for the characters. It was probably the most religious experience I’ve ever had doing laundry, so props to that.

All of the songs were bangers, and the casting of the voices was really well done. Orpheus makes sense as a pretty boy with a gorgeous falsetto, Persephone sounds world-weary but has the capacity to harken back to a time of youth and innocence, and Hades sounds menacing without totally getting lost in the maniacal villain thing (except for the part where he yelled about the electric chorus that was a little much).

I love how this version made explicit the parallels between Hades/Persephone and Orpheus/Eurydice, and also how this version gave both women way more depth. This not only fleshes the story out and makes it feel a lot less misogynistic, it also just makes the story better. In the original story, Orpheus was just a stupid musical fuckboy who couldn’t follow orders for more than two minutes. Whereas in this version, while I was still like “why would you look around?” his doubt makes so much more sense. She left him once before, and so its natural and human for him to doubt her loyalty now. 

At the same time, Orpheus turning around is extra tragic for Eurydice, who left him because of his inability to provide for her. We get the impression that Eurydice, who was doing all of the hard work, felt neglected materially but also emotionally — he was more focused on music than her. By coming to save her, he proves his love, but his inability to do the hard thing and not look back proves that he hasn’t really matured. The same impulse that led him to neglect food and shelter for his music also preventing him from following Hades’ instructions. So really they couldn’t be together, even if Eurydice had escaped — nothing had changed, they were caught in a cycle.

That cyclic feeling to this story is obviously thematically in conversion with Hades and Persephone, which is so cool and deepens the story. It also redeems the musical as a musical. From experience, it’s hard to practice and perform a musical over and over again if there is no sense of redemption at all, and if you don’t fundamentally enjoy the story, the characters, and the themes. The closing song, with Hermes talking about how it’s the same song, and we sing it over and over again, hoping it’ll change even though we know it won’t, is conversation not just with the nature of myth and storytelling, but also the nature of performance. 

Myth and stories are told over and over again, and what Hadestown does it what all good retelling of myth do — they make the same story feel alive and vital again. I knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending, but I felt the tragedy as is if it could have ended another way. That ability to imagine what could have been is, according to Hermes, Orpheus’ true gift. Orpheus is generally just a metaphor for all artists, so it’s kind of also a statement about all art.

What makes this link compelling is the fact that, for the performers in the musical, the have to literally tell this story over and over again, and in order to make each performance good that have to basically trick themselves into thinking it could end differently. That’s just what performing is, being able to replay these emotional beats over and over again and keep them fresh. So Hermes, who addresses the audience and is a really cool meta-textual character (which is stylistically very resonant with the way that ancient Greek poems started with 4th wall breaking invocations to the muses), is also making a commentary about the play itself. The fact that this is a performance is called out, but rather than weakening the story is strengthens it — it calls attention to how this story is an eternal loop of hope and pain, just like the seasons are eternal. So it explains the purpose of the musical in the same way these myths were explained in the past — they both do explanatory work about the world, and the cyclic nature of the seasons, and of love and loss. It’s just more abstract than literal explanatory work (which is probably more accurate to the ancient view of myth, honestly, than an overly literal one).

Hadestown also does what ancient myths did, which is reify abstract concepts in a way that makes reasoning about these concepts easier. Hadestown plays up Hades’ relationship with wealth, and so to me a lot of this reads as an interesting critic of capitalism in the face of environmental destruction. Hades’ constant industrial expansion is destroying his relationship with Persephone, who is emblematic of the natural world. The moments of beauty in this play are all related to nature and the natural — most poignantly, the description of Hades coming to the Persephone in “her mother’s garden,” and sleeping with her (which is an incredible finesse, mixing Christian and Greek spirituality pretty flawless and concisely, wow). A parable about success destroying a marriage that started beautifully is a perfect metaphor for the destruction of the planet by human beings that are uniquely situated to enjoy and appreciate its beauty. That’s the kind of thing that myth is excellent at, casting abstract struggles in personal terms that make those abstract struggles real.

Also, the whole wall thing is even more effective today than in 2016, and like makes the whole Hades=capitalism even more interesting and powerful

[flarebossmalva]

okay i have a long rant in my system about this game and i haven’t even finished watching the let’s play, but fuck it, i gotta talk about it. bullet points to make this more coherent hopefully also under cut

of our three main characters, markus is by far the most interesting right now and i’m thrown because i didn’t even know he, like, existed. all i’ve heard from the fandom is connor this connor that and markus is right there? anyway. markus is in a pretty unique position because he’s been taking care of this elderly artist, who’s disabled — confined to a wheelchair with some kind of chronic or terminal condition — and the artist treats him like his son, in a way. in one scene i liked, he encourages markus to try painting; markus’s first attempt is technically skilled, but just a straightforward representation of what he sees, so the painter encourages him to try again and this time try to depict something abstract, like a feeling. now, most humans don’t seem to think robots have feelings, and connor even said that only deviant (rogue) androids experience emotions, but i don’t think that’s true, because 1) markus was able to paint his own feelings just fine and 2) it seems that the androids experience things more or less the way humans do, they’re just programmed not to have free will, which makes them appear unemotional. anyway, this artist does have an actual son, but he’s kind of a fuckup of a young man who’s also got a drug problem; the three of them get in a confrontation after the artist refuses to help his son financially (because it’s obvious he’s withdrawing from something and plans to spend the cash on drugs), and i’m sure there are a lot of different ways this can play out but the way it went in this playthrough is that markus was provoked into self-defense, accidentally killed the son, and was then shot by cops and left for dead in a junkyard full of not-quite-dead robots. he put himself back together and i’m quite interested to see what he does now; his story seems like it has the potential to play out in a lot of different ways.

then we have connor, who is a top-of-the-line prototype model assigned to help a cop who, as it happens, really can’t stand androids. unfortunately for this cop all the cases he gets involve rogue androids. his bits of the story are pretty interesting because we get to see how the cops deal with androids, which... well, they don’t deal with it very well at all, let’s put it that way. humans investigating crimes involving androids don’t seem to be very good at it, because the usual markers of bloodstains and fingerprints can’t be relied on (android blood is blue and doesn’t leave traces visible to the human eye, and they don’t leave fingerprints) and also because the department doesn’t really seem to give a shit about androids and all crime involving them seems to be low-priority work that no one wants to do. that means the spike in rogue android activity is being taken way less seriously than it probably should be, but considering that the cop solution is to immediately start shooting i guess it’s good they don’t grasp what’s happening. the cop connor is assigned to work with seems like he could potentially change his views on androids depending on choices made throughout the game, and there’s actually one thing i do like about this mechanic — what seems to work best is having connor be honest about the ways in which he’s not human, because i think the root of this particular cop’s issue with androids is that he feels they’re essentially faking being people. i don’t like this as an oppression allegory but i like it as a trope about robots when the robots are allowed to be nonhuman; i think having robots who were created to mimic humans learn to embrace their differences from humanity is the most interesting way to go about it and i hope that this game is gonna do more than flirt with that, despite its title lol

connor himself is hard for me to get a read on, but at this point in the game he’s just been following orders and directives. i do know that there seem to be a lot of opportunities for him to get his ass murdered, but if that happens they just replace him with an identical model who i guess has the same memories too. in this lp he’s only died once but it was a close thing enough times that i think you could definitely kill him a lot if you were actively trying to do it. honestly that mechanic alone is so far the only interesting thing about connor.

and then there’s kara. since she’s the only playable woman, i assume we’ll eventually get a shower scene or an attempted sexual assault scene, because david cage is like that. however so far her scenes have mainly been about trying to protect alice, the little girl i mentioned in previous posts. in one scene that felt like it could have gone a lot of different ways, kara intervened to stop alice’s dad from physically abusing her and the two of them fled on foot. kara’s now attempting to pass as human while keeping alice out of harm, which makes her parts of the story by far the tensest scenes because you constantly have to look out for the kid. i know this is a gimmicky way to up the stakes, but i’m not mad about it because it seems to work. i suspect alice is actually of pivotal importance to the game as a whole, if only because she’s by far the most sympathetic human character, but that remains to be seen. i’m cautiously interested in this part of the story, because while it’s got my attention so far i cannot trust this game to be smart about things.

and now we get to my main gripe with the whole thing. i’ll try not to go on too long about it, but here’s my issue with DBH in a nutshell: it’ll give you fucking whiplash from how fast it goes from being an engaging story about androids navigating a world in which they quite literally lack free will to making incredibly dim-witted and outright insulting comparisons between the struggles of androids in the game and the struggles of oppressed humans in real life. one minute the game is doing what sci-fi should and giving us an insightful take on the imaginary issues it’s set up, one that you could even relate back to real-world happenings if you wanted, and the next we have a scene where the androids have to sit in the back of a bus because the front of the bus is reserved for humans. if it was consistently stupid i would have given up on it right away, but it’s not, and that pisses me off more than if it was dumb from start to finish. honestly i’m mostly watching because i’m writing my own story dealing with very humanlike androids in a near-future setting and this explores some of the same stuff i’m aiming to get at, but fully half of it is so dumb i wanna cry. at least hopefully the popularity of this game and the conversations happening around it will inspire more intelligent fiction about androids?

lastly. this game is only set like forty years in the future. you cannot convince me that forty years from now racism will be a non-issue in america, or that americans forty years from now aren’t gonna be like “hey, segregating androids and humans in exactly the same way we used to segregate white americans from black americans might make us look really bad, maybe we should come up with different ways to be bigots so we aren’t instantly called on it.” yet this game has so far completely avoided discussing actual racism, or even indicating to what extent it’s still a problem. i’m not even gonna get into how Bad that is when you’re trying to do social commentary because it’s bad enough just as a writing decision. exploring how the way humans treat other humans affects the way humans treat androids is an obvious thing to do with this premise and i don’t know why this game seems to be actively avoiding it. 

anyway. i’m gonna keep watching, i want to see this through to the end, but i already know it’s gonna keep pissing me off. at times this flirts hardcore with being an intelligent piece of writing but it seems more enamored overall with being stupid. 

[jardindesoi]

The Garden’s Harvest, a collection of poems.

For my first blog post, I decided to analyze some of the poetry I’ve written in my free time through an outside lens. I compiled all the pieces I’ve written whose main themes deal in some way with my experience as a queer person: this theme shows up a lot in my private work, so I wanted to see what the poetry I write reveals about my relationship with my queer identity.

When I get inspired by something I experience in the world, I open a note in my phone and use a specific artistic style to try and articulate the “truth” I am grappling with. This style depends entirely on how I feel in the moment: some of these pieces use specific parallel structures or references, while some are bursts of words and phrases written down as they occur to me. I title and very sparingly edit them after finishing. If I were to compile these for some formalized assignment or other publication, I would likely edit them for either length or clarity of thought, but as of now they are the raw “flashes” of creativity I felt over a period lasting from some point in my senior year of high school (“History”) until a few weeks ago (“Sterilization”). 

I looked at these pieces from the point of view of an outsider, with the help of my friend, another queer person who writes poetry. The first thing I was able to notice about what I’ve written so far is that they all contain elements of three specific themes. I’ve arranged them below in order of which of these themes they fit most: the social perception of queerness, then anger at this perception, and finally yearning and love. 

Most prominent in the first section but present in all three is the impression that I am very in touch with both my queer identity and how it is perceived by the wider society. I wrote “Work for It” such that each stanza discusses a different marginalized group that suffers under American capitalism, and this fragment demonstrates how I am conscious of the queer community’s place in this suppressive system. “History” was me coming to terms with the fact that the history I was learning in school excluded the stories and challenges of the queer community as it recognized itself and grew, requiring me to seek out this knowledge without any formal guide. 

What queer representation I am able to find, both in history and in present-day media, is the object of “Sterilization:” the “idols” are the whitewashed, well-behaved, stifled image passed off by mainstream media as the epitome of how queer people are expected to act to gain acceptance in majority society. “I AM MORE” was a rage-fueled vent spurned by frustration at queer identities being treated as jokes even in spaces that claim to be accepting of them. These two pieces together show how I see the queer community as double-edged sword: I am thankful for the ability to find and relate to other people like me, but the injustice and separation both within and without the community lead to stereotyping and a monolithic view of queer people as a whole. 

The last two pieces are unique in that they don’t have an explicit theme of social or political commentary: rather, they are raw and unfiltered expressions of love, the same love felt by heterosexual couples. “He’s Beautiful/or Something” muses on men I have found attractive with the underlying idea that beauty can be found in any kind of person, while the “Wanna” fragment is an expression of the desire to be close to someone. Although these two deal explicitly with my own emotions as a gay man, they portray emotions and desires shared by anyone with the capacity for love; the only difference between these poems and identical ones dealing with heterosexual love would be the use of a differently gendered pronoun. Yet they are still queer pieces, because they were written by a queer person who experiences love. I used the act of writing these expressions of love as a method of authenticating those same feelings: being able to articulate my emotions like this allowed me to further settle into my identity as a queer person and a queer lover. 

Here are the pieces I used for this analysis (CW: f-slur in “I AM MORE”):

fragment from “Work for It”

The queer, commodified 

Into company pandering one month yearly, 

Whose battle for the rights to marriage, adoption, and healthcare has been one of distracting White noise?

“History”

My history is not taught.

Students don’t read about my predecessors—

Unless they read between the lines,

Under Achilles’ heel,

Under Shakespeare’s pen,

Under Caesar’s fist.

Their eyes must strain under and between,

For my history is beaten and burned and buried.

My history is uncovered in late night dives through Wikipedia,

Following a scent trail of shining blue words,

Digging up fragments of a story with no words,

Of a movement with no motion,

Of a revolution with no goal.

We have no manifesto, no agenda.

We have identity, 

Love, 

Art,

Life...

Mere abstractions, whose essences are eroded by the sands of time.

I gaze at the past through a rose tint, and cannot see the blood that drowns our past,

Soaks our present,

Steeps into our future.

For who can stare agog at the glitter and self-expression of the balls,

Without also bearing witness to the sicknesses and deaths of the models, the dancers, 

The lovers?

We are all lovers.

Our Hearts are Normal,

But our history is not.

“Sterilization,” unfinished

Are these to be my idols? These totems of plastic and glitter, these mannequins adorned in the clothes of the everyman, these peacocks who preen and strut and jape and dance and sing for their audience? 

Am I to learn their dance, learn how they imitate those traditions which for so long were closed off from them? Am I to fall, as they do, at the feet and mercy of the audience, performing and receiving as payment the permission to be like them? 

/////

They are Not Us, and We are Not Them. 

They are Not Us, so We become Them. 

They are Not Us, but We are Not Us.

They are Not Us, yet We are Them.

“I AM MORE”

I AM NOT YOUR JOKE

I AM A HUMAN

I AM BEYOND THE STEREOTYPES I PUT ON FOR HUMOR, IN CONFIDENCE THAT THEY ARE UNDERSTOOD FOR THE NONSENSE THEY ARE

I AM NOT YOU

I AM EVERBEING I AM MULTITUDES I AM BEYOND I AM MORE THAN YOU AND I WILL NOT DIE

I AM A FAGGOT

I AM NASTY

I AM NOT A HILARIOUS FAIRY

I AM SOCIETY’S DISGUSTING LEFTOVER MISTAKE

AND I LOVE IT

“He’s Beautiful/or Something”

He has long, curly, blond hair that falls almost to his shoulders, a mane that shakes when he laughs.

Or his hair is long, but silky smooth and straight, and he wears it in a tight ponytail when it gets in the way.

Or his head is buzzed almost to the scalp and dyed crimson red, or sea-foam green, or blinding white, or any other beautiful color.

His eyes are dark, almost black, but they shift with the sunlight to a shining amber or gold.

Or they’re sky-blue, shimmering with a reflection of the world they gaze upon.

Or they’re green, but sometimes they’re hazel, or cerulean, or mint—but they’re always beautiful.

He’s tall, and when we’re together he envelops me in his embrace and surrounds me.

Or he’s my size, and we share clothes, and when I wear his sweaters I lose myself in the scent he left behind.

Or he’s small, almost dainty, and I hold him tightly when we’re together, as though to protect him from the world, or selfishly preserve his beauty for myself alone. 

He’s an academic, his eyes glazed over as he devours the heavy tome before him, hardly noticing me until a small kiss on his head brings him back.

Or he’s an athlete, running or jumping or swimming, hitting or kicking or just moving, his kisses full of a passionate spirit.

Or he’s an artist, creating from nothing pieces that speak to the heart, that are at once uproarious, haunting, and as beautiful as the face I kiss every day.

I am his.

Or, he is mine.

fragment from “Wanna”

I wanna

Be close,

Closer,

Closer,

So close that the atoms that separate us break apart

And we are left with our spirits,

Ebbing and flowing in an eternal cosmic dance,

Fundamentally connected,

Never to leave the warmth of the other.

I wanna

I wanna

[italicwatches]

My Hero Academia, season 2 - Episode 27

(Deku tank rollin’ on in chuggada chuggada chug)

SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH SMASH

what were we talking about?

…Oh, right, I recap anime for internet points.

Well we need some way to make December seem closer. It’s My Hero Academia, episode 27! Here we GO!

-PREVIOUSLY ON My Hero Academia, it was established that everyone would be getting an internship, and that Deku got picked by Gran Torino. Who is built like a super fighting robot.

-Opening! THERE’S that new opening! Okay, that’s pretty hype.

-PRESENTLY ON My Hero Academia, Gran Torino insists he tripped while carrying his lunch of ketchup-covered sausages. I refuse to believe this is true. Also he’s so very old and is acting like his brain is swiss cheese.

-Then he gets all serious, and asks Deku to suit up and throw a charged punch at him right now to see what he can contain… And when Deku tries to protest, Gran snaps around him like a pinball! A small, angry pinball, demanding Deku fire off a shot!

-Episode 27: Bizarre! Gran Torino Appears

-Mmm, there’s that tasty vintage anime episode title format.

-So he saw Deku’s fight. And you fought like a beast, a wild animal. All Might’s a hell of a hero, but he’s a pathetic teacher. Now suit up and get ready, brat!

-And thus, Deku gets a little more serious, as he gets a proper look at his suit…His new suit, to be precise. The professional supersuit company designed one proper for him based on the rough concepts of his original suit, with a look more suited to his actual personality and abilities. And the letter that came with it outright admits that the designer did it so it would look cooler. Deku is quietly realizing that the entire support industry is full of countless Meis.

-So where is my support-industry spinoff?!

-Anyways, it’s a pretty solid suit, with extra elements. Heavy padding on his gloves and boots to handle strong impacts, as well as solid pads at all the joints. A classic utility belt. An easily removed hood, and a collar-mask that abandons the faux-grin of his original for something more abstract and knightly. It’s an excellent suit to handle what he’s working with…And Gran Torino is getting real tired of Deku being so hesitant to let loose. To think the latest holder of One For All is such a wet blanket!

-And Deku’s left trying to figure out a plan. Gran Torino’s moving fast, but he doesn’t seem to be able to redirect himself in midair, just rebound. Deku doesn’t know what his Quirk’s mechanics are, but in a tight space with little cover, just shutting down that movement is key. So, draw in power…Just a little power…Wait, and when he comes in…STRIKE!

-It’s a solid plan. An excellent plan. But Gran Torino predicts it, slips around it, and catches Deku, pinning him to the ground! You’re a quick thinker kid, but your mind is in the wrong place. You’re letting comparisons to All Might and your duty are just slowing you down. …Now get to cleaning up, while he goes and gets food. And then he’s gone.

-Cut over to Tenya on patrol, working with the local pro Manual. Who has a fish theme. Things are generally quiet here; they work more on street patrol and working the beat than on being ready for big fights. And Manual’s honored that Tenya would pick their little agency to intern at…While Tenya, Tenya is just focused on trying to find a lead on Stain, on the bastard that took down his brother…!

-Speaking of, Stain is in front of Tomura and Kurogiri at their vaguely swanky styled bar, because they want to recruit him. And Tomura would sure like a proper killer who can help take down All Might…And some of these kids who proved far too presumptuous.

-…Yeah, Stain’s out. His whole deal is a very specific motive and focus, not some childish tantrum. He’s not just out, he draws a set of knives, ready to fight his way out.

-Back with Deku, he’s trying to sort out what Gran told him…And he starts to put together some ideas, as out comes the notebook. He’s been too busy thinking of One For All, and the smashes, as a special move, a singular technique, but it’s not…It’s a state of being! An enhanced state, a super mode! It can affect every movement, every thought and strategy! Yes, yes, he can use that! Soon he’s frantically making notes, as Gran listens in. The kid’s sharp as a tack, when he’s pointed at a problem the right way…

-To the center of Tokyo, where Katsuki finds himself working under the highest-rank hero who he could…And the man who’s going to be handling him, Best Jeanist, knows it. He doesn’t like the rough types…But that’s also why he put the call in. You’re good, Katsuki. You’re skilled, and he freely admits that. But, you’re brash. Rough. Violent. And above all, unfocused. Getting you to dial back and dial in, that’s his goal.

-So Katsuki’s pissed. And then he’s wrapped up in threads when he steps forward without paying enough attention. Threads under Best Jeanist’s control. The entire point of you being here, is to learn to hone yourself. To be a hero, and not just a natural disaster waiting to happen.

-Let’s see some others. Kirishima and Tetsutetsu are at the same agency. They’ve completely given up on fighting it and are just glad to be able to work hard, under the four-armed hero Fourth Kind, who wants to teach these two kids finesse. And some proper respect.

-He also lays out the unique nature of pro heroes as a lifestyle. There’s a base stipend from the government as your official employer, but this is not some office job of civil servitude, oh no.

-Cut to Ochaco working with Gunned on a patrol, as he continues a similar lecture. A lot of their job is about controlling crime, keeping it limited, since you can’t really prevent it. It’s ultimately a job of response, and paperwork. Lots, and lots, of paperwork, since filing your heroic actions is how you get paid beyond your stipend. Also, Ochaco’s thing for manly men with gentle hearts and hard abs is kind of kicking on full blast right now.

-To a local TV station, where the snake heroine Uwabami explains that heroes are allowed to do side work and promotions…For example, she’s about to do a commercial. Which her new interns for the week, Momo and a redheaded girl from class B, Kendo Itsuka, should stick around and watch. Itsuka is unsure, Momo is more ready to take any lesson she can get. And Uwabami outright admits she picked them because they’re cute and she likes cute girls.

-To Jiro working with the big man Death Arms, who’s making her do a lot of running. She is…Unhappy about this.

-Hard contrast to Mt. Lady, who is lounging and snacking and reading comics, while she makes the human trash clean her apartment. This is good.

-Tsu’s out helping a ship crew, and doing pushups with them.

-And then, to Shoto…Who’s working under his father, to make a point.

-To the end of the first night! Deku’s left all alone, still awake and trying to figure out anything about Gran Torino. But his record is…Spotty, at best, with little to no information on him available online. He taught at UA, so he has to be good, but he only taught for one year, so…

-So Deku puts that aside, and goes out to an empty part of town to think. Right now, he has to turn One For All on, and it takes some buildup. He needs to be able to just have a low-level amount of it going through an entire fight…And so he starts by focusing, putting a low amount of power into his legs as he stands in an alleyway, and makes a leap, trying to walljump!

-And cracks his face on the wall. This is a perfect test, because he has to be able to do it on sheer instinct. Ahead of time, he can see the plan; charge for a leap. Charge in his hands to take the impact, then a push from his legs to leap off the wall to the far one, where he repeats and repeats until he’s on the roof. None of the actions are actually that hard…But they all call for him to be able to flip back and forth, from hands to legs, in a split second.

-And he tries again, and again, as a pair of passersby just make damn sure it’s not their problem.

-By the time morning arrives…Deku never got any sleep, so now he’s exhausted and bruised when Gran checks on him. Also that gets him to briefly talk about how All Might was as a student.

-…The guy figured out the basic use of One For All pretty much right away, but he was such a meathead that getting tactics out of him was just a matter of practical training. Which is to say, he kept punching and punching and punching All Might every single day until he figured out how to actually fight.

-And it was what he had to do. His dear friend entrusted him with All Might’s training in the wake of his own passing…Which is the first Deku’s hearing about this. He doesn’t know about the seventh holder…

-But also they have a new microwave to replace the one Gran Torino shattered under his body yesterday. In go treats, as Deku keeps trying to figure it out…Also he didn’t make the food right because he put a plate too big for the microwave in so the food didn’t turn properly. …Wait…Wait wait wait!

-He always used the metaphor of a microwave. But his microwave at home was an old style, without the rotating platter. So he was always thinking of putting energy into one place, then stopping and putting it somewhere else. The way you do when cooking food in that kind of microwave. Not just suffusing it through his entire body at once! In that moment, Deku manages to pull it together, pulls on One For All, and manages to hold 5% across his frame…It’s tough. It’s intense. It’s like nothing he’s felt before. And it’s fucking amazing. He’s got to see how this works now!

-Credits! With fantasy versions of our heroes! So someone’s already done a big writeup on this as an entire setting, right? Also are we gonna talk about shirtless barbarian Katsuki and what I’m sure that did for the Deku/Katsuki shippers, or…?

Okay, that’s a hell of a way to open up the next wave. I cannot wait to see what comes next. We’ll find out next time, in episode TWENTY EIGHT of My Hero Academia! Wait for it!

[sinceileftyoublog]

Makaya McCraven Interview: Changing Structures

Photo by David Marques

BY JORDAN MAINZER

You could call Makaya McCraven a global artist, having been born in Paris, grown up in Amherst, Massachusetts, exemplified the Chicago jazz scene, and collaborated with artists on multiple continents. But as a drummer truly influenced by genres and traditional music the world over, to McCraven, he hasn’t quite reached that designation. His most recent album, the incredible Universal Beings (our #21 favorite album of 2018), is the most “global” album he’s released yet, recorded live in the three biggest U.S. cities and London, each location given its own unique band and section on the album. At only 35 years old, though, and with McCraven’s clear ambition and vision, the possibilities seem far beyond the scope of Western music.

A label that McCraven might agree with is “versatile.” For a number of year’s, he’s played Chicago’s most prominent jazz venues, opened for Kamasi Washington and Lee Fields, participated in multiple “Round Robin” experimental performances with other local artists of all genres, and most recently, played in a tribute concert to J Dilla. We’ll catch him at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville next week. In preview, we spoke to him over the phone earlier this year; we talked about his beginning years, playing live and touring, and the often paradoxical nature of improvisation.

Since I Left You: Do you feel like you came up in the Chicago scene? Or did your pre-Chicago musical endeavors set the bar for you?

Makaya McCraven: All of the above. I had a strong musical career from a young age, and I had very strong mentors and a musician family. I was already on my way. When I came up here with my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, and I started to check out the scene. I felt a certain kinship with where I came from and just in terms of musicians I came up under. I made good relationships. The Chicago scene, and everybody around me here--my collaborators, teachers, mentors--really came to me at a formative time when I was creating my own musical identity, the one bouncing around groups. I had been working with lots of bands for a long time. I was co-creator of a lot of projects since I was a teenager. Chicago definitely has a big part of my creative identity as an artist.

SILY: Over the past few years, I saw you open for Kamasi Washington at the Bottom Lounge and then for Lee Fields at the Pritzker Pavilion. Do you look back at your opportunities to play with other artists as equally formative?

MM: Absolutely. Working with a lot of musicians as a side man and collaborator, a different team under different circumstances, is a big part of my identity and how I came up as a musician. How I worked myself as a human being in the arts. I feel fortunate for that. The crux of my career is being able to work with and be open to working with a lot of different people. Commitment to self-growth is within that.

SILY: Universal Beings is a very global kind of record, and you’ve gotten a lot of opportunity to play globally. Do you still feel pretty embedded in the Chicago scene though?

MM: Yeah, definitely. A lot of the musicians I work with are Chicago-based or from Chicago or come to Chicago. I’ve always worked with a lot of people in and out of Chicago, so that doesn’t feel new, either. Being here, I get to take part in the community and work with the musicians here. I definitely feel part of it. When you’re on the road a lot, it’s not the same as being home. You’re always out at every gig and every spot. It’s definitely different.

SILY: Do you have a favorite place to play?

MM: That’s always difficult. I could point to markets where I have lots of fans--I like to go to London because I get a lot of support and people show me lots of love. But I don’t really like to pick favorites.

SILY: Maybe an easier question: Where haven’t you played that you’re dying to play?

MM: Yeah. The idea that Universal Beings is global is narrowly defined because we visited only English-speaking places during the creation of the record, while we have influences from all over the world. So most of my touring has been in Europe and through North America. We’ve gone to Asia before as well, and I’ve done some traveling on my own. I have yet to travel around Africa. I’d love to go to South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Mali. All of these places have such rich musical cultures unique to each place and diverse within each place, as well. South America as well. Again, rich in diverse musical culture. It’s a big world out there.

SILY: Are you playing Universal Beings at Big Ears?

MM: I have no idea. But most likely. That’s the material we’ve been touring on. A lot of the performing I do at festivals, I like to perform a lot of my repertoire, probably from Universal Beings but also throughout my catalog and the music I’m making.

SILY: Who is in your touring band?

MM: The fun thing about my touring band is it kind of rotates between different core musicians. I like that--I like to switch it up and play with different people.

SILY: Both Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming are at Big Ears. Will [saxophonist] Shabaka [Hutchings] be in your band?

MM: No, no, no, no.

SILY: That’s too bad!

MM: It’s fun. Me and Shabaka met on the road 3-4 years ago, and we’d always bump into each other on tour for a while. But playing with each other is a rare occasion.

SILY: How many days will you be at the festival?

MM: Just a couple days passing through. Gotta keep on moving. Too often, there’s a really great festival and we don’t get too much time to enjoy it.

SILY: Are you productive on the road, writing-wise?

MM: It really depends. I’ve had tours where I’ve had a whole stack of work I’ve been able to get through, music and otherwise. Other times, I’m on the road, and I’m just in that zone. I have a lot of responsibilities on the road. I’m the band leader and the tour manager as well. I may have some interviews to do, I have soundcheck, we have pretty intensive travel itineraries. And we have to play shows. And eat dinner and things like that. Maybe general hygiene. When I’m productive, it’s always great. But sometimes, you don’t really have the moment or the mental space.

SILY: A lot of Universal Beings was recorded live. How do you approach playing it live?

MM: I like to think of the writing process--collectively brainstorming with a group of musicians and trying to make some composition sense out of it. Improvisation I like to think of as spontaneous composition rather than non-idiomatic. After going through that process, when I have recordings, that little tune in the sonic space has a “thing.” To represent that thing, I transcribe it onto sheet paper or learn it by ear, and create a form to play it or improvise it as a song structure the way jazz musicians do, because not all jazz is free-form improvisation.

SILY: Do you think when people talk about improvisation they tend not to distinguish between different levels or types of it?

MM: Yeah. I think when we talk about improvisation in music, there are a lot of blurry lines. Somebody asked me after playing a jazz standard, “How much of that was improvised?” And the band leader said, “All of it.” What I loved about that comment was that no matter how much structure we were playing, we were fully improvising in the moment around that structure. We were still fully improvising even within the confines of the structure. This is the natural state of being--interacting with the world in real time. We put structure into our lives, and we still follow it, but we improvise in the way that we have to react and respond in real-time. Playing is the same.

Improvised music also has strong cultural meaning behind where that type of music was started or played. Sometimes it’s about abstraction; sometimes it’s about creating together or avoiding traditional time or within the confines of time. Or, if you wanna have no rules, does that mean if you’re playing with other people, they can make up their own rule because you can’t make a rule that they can’t make up rules? It’s a lot of give and take, improvising with other people. Trying to find common ground in your goals and missions and where the music is taking you.

For me, wanting to re-purpose the music in some way and make some piece out of it born from its roots, I can pick textures I like and edit them or find the right point for something else to come in.

SILY: Do you think the different parts of Universal Beings share the same improvisational philosophy?

MM: With these types of spontaneous compositions, I try to direct the music in some degree with musical action. Being the drummer, I have a lot of power to decide to set a groove or push the dynamics one way or another or do a drum call to cue something that could be an unidentified moment. It’s like, “Hey everybody, we’re gonna do something! Nobody knows what it is, but I’m cuing it.” Usually, in those improvised sessions, I don’t want to drag on things too long. I love trying to get more information out of the musicians, but I don’t like to improvise for a very long time. We play for a while, if something cool happens, we stick on in. Or I might scramble it up with some free play.

SILY: What’s next for you?

MM: I always got a few things cooking. I have a couple projects in different stages of completion. Producing some projects for some other jazz artists. We’re about to tour quite a bit starting in the spring. [doing his best advertiser voice] Coming to a city near you!

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading that’s caught your attention?

MM: The news?!?

SILY: I meant something positive.

MM: [laughs] I wish I was more engaged. Right now I’m swamped in my work...[pauses to think]...Nothing. I’ve just been deep in these projects I have due. I listen to the radio in the car.

SILY: What station do you listen to?

MM: I listen to Vocalo in the morning with my kids.

[theparaminds]

It’s not as though Ryan Daley always knew himself as clearly as he does today. Often, the path has been muddled and near endless, seemingly never with a light at the end. Yet, through time, patience, and hope, Ryan has learned his purpose. He has learned why his existence matters.

For him, it is a pursuit of true art. It is his goal to create with the limitlessness of a child, to inspire the world to be better, to live with a passion unfelt prior. Whether it be in music or film, he expresses a soul honest, one understanding of youthful confusion, knowing full well the strength of his vulnerability. 

Armed with a tool belt of truth, artistic integrity and a grasp on the human experience, Ryan Daley is more than ready to tackle his greatest goals, and greatest fears, head-on. No longer will he allow himself to be boxed in by his damaging anxieties, instead, he looks forward to living carefree, finding beauty in every step of the way.

First question as always, how’s your day going and how are you?

What’s up man! My day is going well, thanks for asking. I hope you’re having a good day as well! I just got back from Toronto with my girlfriend, Steph, so I’m a bit all over the place at the moment, forgive me.

Overall, what is your best childhood memory of all time?

Man, I have so many good ones. All of which seem so far away right now, but whatever. There are two really fun memories from my childhood that will always make me smile no matter what. Both memories took place at the same location, Union Station in Washington, DC. One was with my mom and the other was with my dad!

So my mom would take my older brother and I to the parking lot of Union Station and let us drive around in circles. We would just sit on her lap and steer while she would press the gas to go. It was totally safe and we always had so much fun doing it. This was around the same time Big Willie Style by Will Smith came out so I had to be like 3 or 4 years old. That was the first rap album I ever heard. Just the two of us was my shit. I would think about me and mom whenever that song came on. She drove a sky blue Volvo back then. It was an older model too. I think it might have been from the 70’s or something, I don’t know. I don’t remember the exact model either but I would know it if I saw it. That car was so cool and it means so much to me now. Volvo is one of my favorite brands of all time because of the nostalgic connection that comes with it. I love Volvo!

Anyway, my second best childhood memory is going to the movies with my dad. He would take my older brother and I to the AMC theater at Union Station all the time. I’m sad it no longer exists, but yeah. It wasn’t the best movie theater either, but it was closest to our house. I still remember what it looked and felt like and everything! I wish I could go back. We saw so many good movies there.

What influences around your environment pushed you towards your creative path? What was it about them that spurred the decision?

Well honestly, I don’t know man. I went to elementary school in Washington, DC and every Wednesday my class would go to a place called Fillmore Arts Center. That’s where I was first introduced to Photoshop and the whole Adobe suite shit. I always looked forward to Wednesdays because of that. Art just always made the most sense to me, looking back. Visual art definitely sparked my interest first as a kid and my love for music and writing came later on. Fillmore Arts Center is definitely when and where a lot of it started for sure though.

I’m from DC, and there’s a lot of culture and cool history there but as of lately I’ve been constantly moving around, searching for inspiration elsewhere. A lot of my recent inspirations have come from movies and museums. I love to travel so I’m never anywhere for too long, ever. Going to college in downtown Richmond, Virginia and just traveling a lot in general helped me to be myself creatively and really come of age in my own skin.

You have the unique quality of not being just inspired by music, but also a strong love of a film, where did this emerge for you and how has it shaped your artistic output?

Of course, I’m inspired by a lot of movies as well. I always loved how movies and music both made me feel. And they both go hand in hand in a lot of ways too. Just as a music video can strengthen a song, a song or score can strengthen a movie. During the summer of my last year of high school, I went to New York Film Academy filmmaking program for teens. It was a 3 week intensive program in New York City. I was 17, living my best life running through Soho and Tribeca with friends! Shout out to my parents for paying for that program too. But yeah man, that’s when and where my love for film really started to transpire. Looking back, I wanted to be a filmmaker before anything else.

Watching and studying movies has me looking at things from all different angles and perspectives. Recently, I started questioning a lot of things I thought I once knew or believed and I’ve developed a pretty big imagination because of that. I’m like a newborn, everything is still so fascinating to me. Also, incorporating movies into my music is super important to me too. This technique adds another layer to my music and gives it a little bit more depth overall.

What’re three films you believe describe your artistic taste the best? Not necessarily your favorite, just the ones that describe.

Great question. Slacker and Boyhood by Richard Linklater both capture my style of artistic expression the best right now. I’m very much a minimalist in a lot of ways but I’m also always discovering new shit so my style and taste change constantly. But yeah, right now those movies are me, 100 percent! If you haven’t seen them yet, definitely add them to your list. They’re really good! Honestly, I feel like I am any and every coming of age movie. Lady Bird is another great movie that describes who I am at my core. Recently, I’ve gotten into a lot of independent shit. As I got older I started realizing independent movies and music are a lot better than mainstream, Hollywood studio shit. I don’t know why, they just are to me. They���re just so much more relatable and real. That’s what I want my music to feel and sound like.

On to music, what is the message you hope to explore within your music, and is it a goal of yours to resonate with others?

Self expression and vulnerability are really big components that exist within my music right now. Always make what’s on your heart. That’s what I want all aspiring artist to remember the older you get, the more aware you become. That’s one good thing about aging, you get wiser. I struggled a lot with finding myself for years growing up and I still do, even today. But I’m constantly evolving and changing. 5 years from now I don’t know what I’ll be like, or what I’ll be listening to. I’m sure I’ll be into things I have yet to be exposed to. I’m still figuring this shit out like everyone else. Growing up I couldn’t understand a lot of what I’ve come to terms with now. Artist like Kurt Cobain and Kevin Abstract really helped me find myself through the darkness though. I’m so much more accepting of myself than before. Who gives a fuck what anyone else thinks of you, love yourself no matter what. People will always judge, that’s life.

A lot of people don’t understand me and they alienate me. I’m definitely weird and I’m definitely crazy. I have multiple personalities and I struggle with anxiety, awkwardness, and a lot of overthinking too. I’m far from perfect, and I know that. This shit is just therapy for me though. Artist like me make shit just to stay sane and write off our demons. So thank you so much for this interview and to everyone that’s reading this right now, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!

Anyway, I definitely want my music to resonate with people who might be going through similar issues. This is for the kids who are confused and misunderstood. My story is all of our story and vice versa. Growing up fucking sucks man.

Sonically, how will you develop over the next year and what plans and goals do you internally hold for yourself?

So I tried some super experimental shit for my last album. There’s an app on iPhone called Auxy that I downloaded last april and made 13 random beats from. At the time I felt super good about them. Keep in mind, I don’t produce whatsoever but I tried. There’s a lot of singing on my last album too. Shit was super experimental for me. Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. I just made something out of what I had around me at the time. This summer’s project will sound more familiar to my beginnings. I want to get back to actually rapping, and maybe have real instrumentation this time around too. That would be tight.

Also, I want to be able to play more shows this year. Right now it’s hard for me to perform in a room full of unfamiliar faces and connect with them on an emotional and genuine level. This year I want to be able to do that, or at least try. I’m tired of overthinking shit.

Do you believe that future projects will build upon or subvert much of what you’ve released previously? And to add to that, what’s your vision with your upcoming work?

This summer’s project will look, sound, and feel like the year 2004. That’s the year I graduated elementary school. H2 Hummer’s and Cadillac Escalade’s were popular in hip hop back then. There will be some pop and r&b elements throughout but the majority will be rap. The thing is, I don’t want it to sound like anything being played right now, it has to be 2004, 100 percent. Everything must be done with precision.

I’m going to keep building upon what’s already out there for me and continue to curate my catalog in a unique way. Everyone always does the same shit. I want to go in the opposite directions always, even if that means going down a one way street. I’m always breaking rules and going against the grain. I want that same energy to translate through my art and music.

When approaching this new work, what changes or improvements have you made to your creative process? Or, is it barely a process and more so something random?

I’m approaching this new project in a similar way as my previous, starting with mood boarding and a lot of research! Since this next project will be inspired by a specific era, I’m going to travel backwards for bit. Inserting myself back into 2004 will really help me when coming up with ideas and other concepts. I’ll ask questions like; what were people wearing back then? What were people listening to? What did shopping malls look like? What were the commercials on tv selling? What dreams were being sold to the youth of my generation?

These are all questions that will need to be answered while starting this new project. I’m going to watch a lot of movies that were released that year as well. Ultimately, I want to fully immerse myself in 2004 rap and pop culture because that’s when I fell in love with music. When G-unit and D12 were the focal point of rap. 50 cent and Eminem were my idols back then and before rap music I was listening to alternative rock and shit like that.

As far as idea building goes, this new work will be treated more as a group project rather than an independent release. I’m working alongside Unit 4, a creative union me and my friends Deontae Murphy and ATF started back in 2014. Having a group of people around me to help with writing and song arrangement will make our final product that much better. There’s power in numbers when it comes to product building. Working from this angle, all successes will be shared and valued. My goal is to do peer evaluations at the end of this project too, so we’ll all know who held their weight and who didn’t. We’ll post our grades online after we’re finished so everyone can see who was in charge of what. Team building is really important and I always had a hard time working w others so this will be good for me. This is all trial and error.

While a large question, what do you hope your artistic legacy to become? What is it you hope to leave this earth having accomplished?

Another great question man. This one is loaded but overall, I don’t know. Right now, I’ll take whatever the people decide for me. My legacy is up to them. They’ll decide if I’m a huge star or not. As long as I’m remembered as a kind, genuine person, I’m happy. That’s all that matters to me. Jim Carrey and Shia Labeouf both helped me realize this. Those are two idols of mine who helped shape my most recent beliefs and ideologies on success. They’re both insanely brilliant and understand that ego should not exist. We are nothing without each other.

So a small community of like minded people who celebrate my music and artistry in unison is more than enough for me. Less is more. Plus, a lot of celebrities are bozo’s and a lot of great artist won’t ever make it A list because they’ll never sell out. When you reach a certain status you lose control of your product too. I’m too much of a perfectionist to ever let this happen so who knows how far I’ll actually get. People are just so lost in the game that they don’t even realize the game is now playing them. Just play to play and you’ll win every time.

I’m trying to be organic and iconic at the same time while telling my story and getting my points across. And I’ll still have some years left when I leave earth. I’m going to die on mars with Elon Musk. We won’t die on impact and I’ll leave mars having made a better tomorrow for our future generations. Before leaving earth I’ll play a really big festival somewhere, make a cool movie with friends and marry the girl of my dreams.

And one more thing before we move on, I want everyone to remember me as the guy who wore the same shit every day and never changed. White t-shirt, blue khaki pants, and vans. That’s my uniform now. Basic is the new weird. Basically.

Is it within your plans to begin exploring the live setting more? How it that you hope to innovate the live show experience?

Yes, definitely. Playing more live shows is one of my biggest goals this year! They have to be an experience that people will remember forever though. People should feel something when seeing me live. Everything from sound to stage design should be carefully thought out and curated. I’m hoping to have a band on stage with me soon too. There’s nothing like live music.

Projection mapping is something I would love to get into as well. It would be tight to display cool shit during my sets. Just a lot of next level shit. I’m really into technology too so maybe incorporating that into my shows somehow. I’ll have to get with Yung Jake on some shit.

On the live show topic, what have been the best concerts you’ve gotten the chance to see?

Well my first real concert was Kanye and Jay Z’s WTT tour in 2011. Their production was insane! This was hands down the best concert I’ve ever been to in my entire life, maybe because it was my first but yeah. Their shit had fire dog, real fire! Then me and a friend went to Kanye’s Yeezus tour in 2013, amazing experience also. The 1975’s shows are pretty well arranged as well but WTT in 2011 definitely takes the cake for best of all time.

They really pushed boundaries and set the bar for a lot of artist. Super out the box shit. I need to come up with stuff like that but on a smaller scale, like how BH had swing sets and grass on stage. I think that was pretty creative and well executed too. I’m so mad I missed Frank at Panorama, I think that would have been the best show of my life had I witnessed it.

As a final question, what is one lesson you would hope to pass one to any creative minded person reading to this currently? What is it you would love for all to understand and believe?

Anything is possible. There is no spoon. Don’t let your mind consume you. Don’t overthink, just do. Regardless if you fall flat, at least you tried. A lot of people won’t accomplish much in their lifetime due to fear, fuck fear. There’s only so much time we have here. Create as much as time will allow. Be a vessel and make an impact. Your work will out live you so make sure it’s good. Post nice things online because your profiles will out live you too. Travel as much as possible. You’ll learn more on road than you will at home. Comfort kills.

I hope this interview inspired you, now go make cool shit.

These kids still have dreams.

Follow Ryan on Twitter and Instagram

Listen on Soundcloud and Spotify

[csprousedaily]

COLE SPROUSE | THE LAST MAGAZINE (30/1/2017).

 When Riverdale, Greg Berlanti’s dark, contemporary take on the Archie comics, premiered on the CW last week, it marked the return of the actor Cole Sprouse to television in a project worlds away from the one that first brought him to prominence as a teenager. Sprouse and his twin brother Dylan are still best known for playing the titular brothers on Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and its follow-up The Suite Life on Deck, which took place, respectively, in a hotel and on a cruise ship and made the Sprouses the most famous television twins since Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Broadly humorous, loudly acted, and, as Sprouse politely puts it, “boisterous,” the shows fit neatly in the Disney stable alongside Hannah Montana, which starred a young Miley Cyrus, and Wizards of Waverly Place, which introduced Selena Gomez to the world. And just as Cyrus and Gomez have successfully managed to move beyond their child-actor days and reinvent themselves in recent years as international pop stars, Sprouse sees Riverdale as a chance to prove that his Disney phase is behind him. “I think while it’s easy to group us all into a similar category, all of our paths have remained unique,” he explains. “We end up having to show the same maturation, just in different ways. We’re consistently trying to prove our humanity to a group of people that has a really hard time believing it.”

Born in Italy, the Sprouse twins began acting as babies to help their mother pay the bills. They appeared in films like Big Daddy with Adam Sandler and as Ross’s son on Friends, and were tapped by Disney in 2005 to headline The Suite Life, which would go on to run for four years before spinning off as The Suite Life on Deck. “The show gave me a profound work ethic,” Sprouse says. “I never missed a day of work in the eight years I was there, and it really taught me to push myself and drive myself. But the danger of being on a show like that for eight years is that you lose purpose. Continuing the show is oftentimes the most dangerous thing to do as an actor because purpose is the currency for quality work as an actor.”

Besides the increasing monotony of playing Cody, Sprouse now says that he is still trying to sort out what being so closely linked to a fictional persona throughout his teenage years has meant for his personal development. “When you’re a child and you’re growing up and you’re mimicking a certain character or you’re trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you’re playing into your real life and kind of become that thing,” he explains. “You end up having to figure out where you separate from the thing you’ve played for eight years when you leave it.”

Sprouse, now twenty-four, says that the unique strictures and tone of the Disney studio also may have served to sharpen some of the developmental struggles its actors had to endure, due to the contrast between the roles they were playing onscreen and the people they were still in the process of become themselves. “Disney acting as a style is very large. It’s designed to capture the attention of children, so it often comes off as immature and youthful,” he says. “That gets complicated when you’re starting to develop personally and sexually through puberty and you’re starting to have these opposing ideas of yourself as a young person. Oftentimes that leads to some form of cognitive dissonance where you are being sold as something you truly don’t identify with and you have this rebellion that takes place.”

Having successfully made the transition from child star to grown-up actor without scandal, Sprouse is nonetheless quick to come to the defense of his peers who have had rockier paths, heightened by the intense scrutiny of the public eye. “It’s one of those things that gets written off as humorous when you watch a child entertainer try to redefine themselves, but it can be an intense identity crisis,” he says. “I think in our modern society we have a much greater understanding of the importance of personal identity and how we see ourselves and I’m hoping that over time people latch onto the fact that this hurts people and they have a little more respect for something like that.”

In lieu of “We Can’t Stop” or Spring Breakers, Sprouse turned to school. After taking a year off after The Suite Life, he enrolled at NYU at nineteen and eventually decided to major in archeology. Fascinated by the earth sciences since childhood thanks to a geologist grandfather, Sprouse jokes that he wanted to live out “tales of adventure,” which he was able to do after he was accepted into an exclusive program to work on an excavation site in France. He moved decisively away from acting during his four years as an undergraduate, and admits that he very seriously considered the possibility of never coming back. “When we were younger, it was a business choice for us and I realized that I couldn’t live like that anymore and there was no fulfillment in that sort of acting,” he explains. “I needed to take a break and reassess, and I did. My brother and I had sort of reached a plateau and there was nothing we could really do there so we chose to go into education and embrace an interdisciplinary world of knowledge.”

Faced with the choice between (expensive) graduate school and (relatively lucrative) television work, Sprouse says he decided last year to take a shot at pilot week, the annual busy period when studios and networks cast many of the new television shows they want to try out. “I was planning on continuing with archaeology, but when I auditioned and I got the part and we did that pilot, I had a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I didn’t really think of it, but it felt fulfilling again, which is really the only thing you should honestly pursue in art. And as long as it feels fulfilling, I’ll continue.”

Having just come off a Twilight Zone binge, Sprouse says he was immediately attracted to the role of Jughead, Archie’s best friend who also takes on a voiceover role in Riverdale that is reminiscent of Rod Serling’s narration for his influential television series. Full of sex, scandal, and the sort of heightened drama common to most shows about teenagers, Riverdale will come as a surprise to most people who know Archie only as a cheerful, lighthearted slice of midcentury small-town American life. The series opens with a death, Archie sleeps with his music teacher, and Veronica comes to town disgraced after her family loses all its wealth when her father is jailed for financial misdeeds. There are notes of Twin Peaks—although Sprouse is loathe to compare anything to David Lynch—and Brick, the 2006 Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie which took a film noir sensibility to high school life.

 Sprouse himself admits to having been put off by the initial descriptions of the show, but says that further reading helped him understand that Riverdale fits easily into the world of Archie, as the new leadership at Archie Comics has pushed in new and surprising directions to make the brand relevant again today. “When I first heard the abstract, it kind of put a sour taste in my mouth,” he says. “I come from a comic background—I worked at a comic shop—and when you hear about a dark and gritty take on an otherwise beloved franchise, that’s all the wrong buzzwords for the right project. Nothing really dubious happens in the original Archie Digests, but as I started to do more research, I realized the universe of Archie is really wide open. The Punisher comes to Archie, Archie dies when he gets shot trying to protect his friend, and in the new comics, zombies come to Archie. So it seemed like the road had been paved for a while for something like this. My knowledge now is that the Archie universe is wide enough for something like this to take place.”

In refashioning an idyllic American icon for a confusing and complicated new world, Riverdale is also, Sprouse contends, a tacit reflection of today’s political climate. “We live in a society right now that’s obsessed with this golden-age America mentality,” he explains. “Trump’s whole campaign was built around ‘Make America Great Again,’ which essentially is a play towards the same era that Archie arose out of that is this golden, perfect world. I don’t mind how we may be tampering with this idea of a golden age because of my personal political stance. I don’t think that ‘everything is perfect and jolly’ is a perspective that makes any sense. Our society is either primed perfectly for a more contemporary view of this classic American property or they’re going to rebel against it. It’s the same political division within our society right now.”

Currently based in Vancouver shooting Riverdale, Sprouse is also continuing to pursue a photography career on the side. He’s been commissioned by Condé Nast Traveler and shot a story for Teen Vogue earlier this month, and says that what began as a hobby has quickly turned into a passionate vocation. He finds that the travel photography, especially, has been helpful in shaping his perspective. “Travel photography is difficult in that you’re very reliant upon the place you’re going to be a sort of beautiful that can sell,” he explains. “You end up having to be really critical and quite aware at all points of your environment. It’s a very different way of looking at the world, but you end up internalizing a lot of that way of seeing. Most of us were quite nomadic through human history, and I think that part of us still very much exists in a yearning for adventure and worldliness. What travel photography is aiming to do is to inspire a love of something different than yourself.”

And though they require work on different sides of the camera, what connects Sprouse’s acting and his photography is that he plans to continue both as long as they remain “fulfilling.” With over two decades of experience under his belt, he knows what he wants and he knows when it’s time to move on. “Riverdale is a much more human project than the last one and I realize now that though I’ve had enough time to step away and to take a breather, my main challenge if I’m going to continue acting is to discern the things that were valuable about my childhood and the skills I acquired as a child and the things to keep and the things to let go,” he says. “It’s more real, and I don’t think just because it’s on the forefront of pop culture that it should be treated any less than something very ‘noble.’ I’m going to try and do that and see how it ends up.”