#love the part about the grotesque belonging in art

[absolutely-not-my-main-blog]

2 and a half hour Glenn Howerton podcast, save me

Save me, 2 and a half hour Glenn Howerton podcast

[j0kers-light]

Heyo!!! So I’m recently on a joker kick, so here’s a little thought I was having. Maybe joker with a reader who is an artist, and one day paints him! I have drawn joker before and everytime I draw him I find the scars so comforting to draw for some reason!

Love the series btw!!!

Hey hi anon!! 🖤✨

Lol I've been on a Joker kick for two years now. I LOVE THIS THOUGHT! Thank you for loving my series, in return I give you a little head canon! (that almost turned into a oneshot:)

I hope you enjoy anon!

You were big on the Gotham City art scene with your giant portraits, famously painted in black and white with intricate detail.

The only color it held would be splattered on last minute without abandon. It was different, bold, and it paid the bills with money to spare. For three years now you turned your bottled up emotions into a living.

An original Y/L?N would take a week or two to paint before the buyer would select their splatter color.

Critics said you 'ruined works of art' whereas others stated the angry marks you left behind were your version of a signature.

Joker saw your work and instantly fell in love. There was so much pain and turmoil in the flecks of paint. He had to have one.

So he sorta kinda stole a piece until it was stolen from him. So Mac did his thing and tracked it down... right to your front door.

You were so happy to reunite with one of your original pieces! If not for your devoted fans and their detective-like skills, you would have never seen it again.

It was a self portrait (or at least what you wanted yourself to look like) with crimson red paint streaked across your throat.

Safe to say the critics hated this piece, deeming it too dark and grotesque to be considered art. Funny how it was auctioned off for a quarter of a million dollars...

Moving on! It went missing right before the final bid only this time you would never part with it again! These days you kept it in your personal living room as a reminder of how far you became as an artist.

It was a slow month in terms of commissions. You had just finished up a fun piece for a local celebrity and you were still picking pink and gold paint off of your skin.

You had some downtime so you found your trusty sketchbook and let the open window carry the sounds of Gotham’s busy streets into your apartment as you doodled some new ideas.

A series of knocks on your front door made you wary. Not too many visitors came by if it wasn't more art supplies being delivered.

So sat your book down and slowly walked towards the door only for it to be kicked in— followed by three men you never wanted to see walk in.

One man was blond, like any college frat boy blowing through daddy's money, who scanned your apartment in unveiled disgust.

The second male was a strong and burly that reminded you of a character from the game Call of Duty. He stayed near the door and you had no doubt he was the one who kicked it in....

But the last guy, there was no mistaking who he was.

The Joker was in your apartment and he had his eyes set on your beloved art piece.

Neither of them acknowledged your presence. The Joker picked up your self portrait and sighed. "Come to Papa..."

He nodded at his two henchmen as they prepared to leave. "Let's go."

You were flabbergasted. How this man bust up in your place, take your ish, and then leave?! Like? Rude.

"Um? Excuse you!?" You said.

All three men froze and stared at you; however, each one held a different emotion. Indifference, annoyance, and oddly... intrigue.

The latter belonged to Joker. He handed the blond the painting and sauntered closer to you. "Why.... hellooo beautiful. You. You must be the artist."

Not too many people knew what you looked like since your work and media appearances were all handled by your manager and dear friend, Cindy. You weren't offended by Joker's comment but you weren't about to let him take your work— no matter how dangerous he was.

You huffed and crossed your arms, "And if I am? Its rude to break into people's homes and take their stuff."

There was a calm before the storm then Joker burst out laughing. You looked on in confusion as he doubled over and slapped his knees as if what you said was really that funny.

His two henchmen weren't phased in the slightest. You eyed them briefly as Joker closed the distance and held a knife to your throat. You had little time to react before the cold metal touched your skin.

"Shhh shhh. I'd hate to make a ah.. mess. Do we have a prob-lem doll?" He squeezed your face tighter in his grip. The texture of his leather gloves made you wince.

"OW! Yes... we.. do! You're not taking my work!"

He blocked your poor excuse at kneeing him in the groin and tutted his lips. "Yeah? Well let's see. Why don't weee.. make a uh, deal? so we all end up happy, hmm?"

Did he hear how insane that sounded? You didn't have to make deals with criminals over your property!

You glanced around the room and noticed all three men's body language was relaxed. It wasn't fair how they had the advantage here.

You could talk a mad trash and hold your own in any normal brawl but Joker was a different level of crazy. You couldn’t take him on. He was too unpredictable and you knew both men blocking the only exit could fight too.

It would be a mess for sure if you resisted. You had no other choice but to strike a deal.

“Fine. You want my work so badly? I’ll paint you. I will paint a piece for you, I mean.” You tried not to stare at his scars but they were so intricate. The artist in you screamed at the chance to draw him.

You wanted to sketch Joker’s scars out with charcoal, outline them with ink, and master their design with any available media you had. You were itching to get started.

The Joker noticed your sudden antsy behavior and read into it wrong.

“Wanna know how I got ‘em?” He craned his neck so you could see his scars better.

“Yes.”

Oh.

He wasn’t expecting such an honest response from you. He stuttered and lowered the knife from your neck in shock. He thought you would create some distance after he let you go, but in fact, you moved in closer to him.

“May I touch them? FOR RESEARCH! To s-study them! I need to get a feel of what I’m… I swear there’s a reason..”

Mac and Frost shared a quick look (none one touched Joker's scars and lived to tell the tale) but much to their horror, their boss agreed.

Joker looked unsure as your hands hesitated, but slowly but surely came up to touch his face.

Time stood still for Joker as this beautiful stranger mapped out all the lines in his skin. He took in your hooded eyes, the slope of your lips, and the way air escaped between them as you discovered each crevice and outline. In contrast to his own, your skin was smooth and a warm brown, a hue he wanted to discover more of.

Your hands felt too good on him. He craved more contact. Joker wanted so much more but you pulled your hands back the moment your thumb slipped into his mouth.

Did he... lick it? Lawd harmacy..

That was enough art study. You had to part ways before you turned into a whore.

You backed away just for safe measure.

You cleared your throat, “I’ll um.. wow. Um I’ll start licking your face, I MEAN PAINTING YOUF FACE!” If your skin complexion allowed, you would be redder than a tomato. Why did you say that out loud? And why wasn't he saying anything back?!

“Um y-you can come by next week or so. I should be done then. Oh, and um what color do you—"

“Green.” Joker muttered. He already knew what you were asking. The accent color you splattered on the finished piece. Your signature in the art world.

He picked green since he didn’t know your favorite color yet. He didn't know why but he wanted to know.. amongst other things about you.

“C-Cool. I’ll use green. Usually a commission comes with a deposit but um since you’re sparing my life, I guess that’s enough payment.” You looked away and locked eyes with your sketchbook.

Without a single word you crossed the room and began sketching out samples of Joker’s mouth before you forgot. Not like you ever could.

By the time you looked up, he and his men were gone.

You could call it an obsession the way you strived to perfect Joker’s smile.

The apartment was littered with your many demo sketches before you finally went with your gut and put a paintbrush to the easel. For the next week, you barely slept and only ate enough to keep yourself alive so you could complete The Joker's commission. Your life was kinda on the line here so it had to be perfect.

And you finished right in the nick of time.

Joker came alone this time and he strolled into your apartment as if he owned it. You had yet to get the lock fixed after his henchmen kicked it open but regardless. Joker did not have any manners. Or a sense of personal space.

You were standing back to gauge where you wanted to begin flinging paint when his voice startled you.

“Leave it as is.”

You jumped in fright and Joker steadied you with a firm grip to your waist. You didn’t know that he brought you flush to his chest until you felt his breath hit your neck. You didn't question how he got inside or how you failed to hear him in the first place.

Joker was so warm, it erased all conscious thought from your mind. It sounded insane, but you felt safe in Joker's arms and the relative ease that you relaxed into his hold terrified you more.

The two of you stared at your art in silence even as your heart hammered out of your chest. Was this seriously happening? What did he say?

Oh right. Leave it as is.

You took in your final painting and you had to admit. He was right. It was perfect as is, no color required. There was no pain to purge onto this canvas; a first in your collection. You couldn't bring yourself to tarnish the mysterious beauty you painted in black and white.

As Joker’s scars grazed your skin, burning a clean path up to your neck, the both of you knew..

This wouldn't be the last time you painted Joker.

I feel awful that I didn't find any credit for this beautiful fanart.

[marauderseraplz]

Keysmash by AllThisAndLoveTooWillRuinUs

The Star, The Moon, The Lovers by Raging_queer

French kissed by MarvelousGinger

The Mirror Of Ecidyrue Series

Kill your darling by messermoon

Sometimes it’s easier to be invisible by introvertedhufflepuff

Cadence of part time poets

edge by pinkpalaceapartments

[Marauder ink by jennaandblitz

Or.

Marauder’s Ink by stonecoldhedwig]

Art heist by babyotrtbs (I think??)

Choices by messermoon

Crimson river by zeppazariel

Away childish letters by lettered (Drarry I believe)

Whatever happened to the young young lovers by georgia_sk

plutomoony in general tbh

Best Friend’s Brother by zeppazariel

All American Boy by moonyslovergrl

Once Upon A Green Haze by Kris678

Im raking through all the open ao3 tabs in my phone for this and there is more i just don’t wanna write it rn :)

Shaping his future by queermicah

The miseducation of Draco Malfoy by magpie_fngrl

To make it better by izziecalloway

Teach them how to dream by im_still_tryin_to_find_it

Like real people do by third_crow

A big mass over highway ninety by greenvlvetcouch

What about the plans we made? by maraudersalyssa

Better off dead by skylarihardlyknowher

Teeth by amour_anguis, regularis_vas (So good omg)

The horcrux hunt by Keysie

Obliviate by endlesspossibilities

Howlr by partialtopotter

The star, the moon, the lovers by Raging_queer

The hot barista by WhyTFNot

I’ve loved you in a million different ways by dotty456

set those ghosts alight by justwhatialwayswanted

Harry Potter and the welcome to the world of grey by sobsicles

Did you miss me? by Fantasimal, Krethes

I see the light by messrfeli, serendipitysirius

When its warm again by moonymoment

Best friend’s brother by zeppazariel

Dropped classes and assigned seats by kirabasai

Coiled by cinnamonrooibos

Romeo save me (they’re tryna tell me how to feel) by Allthegaydudes

Grotesque by deadwizardskinnie

If an injury is to be inflicted by shealwaysreads (onereader)

Invisible string by moonysmirrorball

you belong to me (i belong to you) by Child_OTKW

The hand that feeds by rollercoasterwords

I want to be good by mightydolphin

Lethal combination by olivieblake

Let the light in by Eniaos

Away childish things by lettered

The prom date by xivz

Speak now by moonsblack

The blood in your mouth by moonysmirrorball

I could be a better boyfriend than him by 70deadgays

The secret language of plants by Endrina

Dwelling by aideomai

pink lemonade by moonysbookshelf

French kissed MarvelousGinger

Truth, lies, and storytelling by BreathOfThePheonix

Staying strangers by 3amAndCounting

disintegration by moonymoment

lyrics can’t explain this by vampireboyluvrr

all my cards are here by haey1

A Certain Mood by ???

[carminavulcana]

I could really use some TLC right now. There was a huge fire in my home yesterday. Large parts of my home are completely destroyed. With God's grace, everyone is safe though my sister injured her hand and some of her hair got burnt.

Barring two rooms, everything else has been burnt.

Years and years worth of memories— just gone. Appliances worth lakhs of rupees— melted into a black, unrecognisable mass. Our fridge (and the fridge magnets on it collected over the years from our travels), which my late mother had bought and which still worked perfectly after over 20 years— destroyed to the point it hurt to look at it. Aged and flavored cheeses bought lovingly for pasta dishes and handmade artisan pizzas, homemade fruit preserves and relishes, a rich fruitcake sitting soaking in rum, de-seeded and sliced calamansi from my music teacher's own garden which was to be turned into a jam, spices collected and blended painstakingly over a long time— nothing but a heap of charred carbon.

Years and years worth of school books and children's magazines collected with care— ash. Clothes and toys and memorabilia from competitions won during our formative years— charcoal. My only photograph from my high school farewell— I can't say what even became of it. School supplies, art supplies, shirts and pants and dresses that belonged to the youngest children of our family— indistinguishable from the smithereens that covered the floor in heaps and heaps of utter ruin. A doll I bought 25 years ago before my baby sister's birth— a twisted and grotesque mocking reminder of what fire can do when it turns into a destructive force.

There is so much that I cannot really even catalogue. But imagine for a moment, if you can, what it feels like to walk through a field of debris that used to once be everything you loved about your home and took for granted.

And as you shuffle your feet around thousands of shards of broken glass, trudging past soot-blackened walls, melted tubelights and fans, broken pieces of the ceiling, and melted jars and boxes of tea and coffee, the smell of burnt organic and inorganic matter hits your nose and gives you a nausea-inducing headache.

You wonder if it is an emotional response or a physical reaction. And when you don't know what to settle for, you crack dark jokes before falling into a troubled sleep on a bed not yours, hoping this would all just turn out to be a bad dream.

I pray none of you ever experience something like this. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

[theonlinebrat]

*G Note intensifies*

Dear reader,

If there's something I don't like music-wise, besides the entirety of the dupstep genre, it's what I consider generic-sounding songs.

Of course, as Chat GPT says, music taste is subjective, so what sounds generic to me might not be the same as what sounds generic to you, but there are certain production trends across all genres that don't sit well with me.

B-sides and most independent independent artists' songs are more prone to be a hit or miss for me exactly because they use those same production techniques I don't like.

But do you know what rock band has never sounded generic to me and has been able to impress me with each and every single one of their (own) spectacular songs?

Well, besides Rammstein and System of a Down, it's My Chemical Romance! My personal favorite from the Emo Trinity. Or quartet, if we also count 21 Pilots, another favorite of mine.

I somehow discovered MCR's 'Helena' back in 2015 as I was coming out of my Pop & Dance music phase to dive into the Rock world. I think I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me, and I've been in love with their entire discography (and existence) ever since.

As a big fan of them, I've been dying to have one of their albums or merch in my hands. So I almost fainted when I found out that this online store that was selling the CD version of The Black Parade a few months back was accepting special orders for Valentine's Day!

After pondering my options for a bit, I reached out to them and discovered that there was a special offer in which I could snag the CD version of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade bundled up at a lower price, and didn't think a third time before saying yes.

The CDs arrived just in time for my bestie Nin and I to go out on Valentine's Day to pick up the CDs and have a nice brunch together. It was like making two of my teenage dreams come true all at once, minus my job starting in the afternoon.

Now, here are a few pics I took that day as soon as I got home:

I regret nothing.

In terms of judging the book by its cover, the album art is beautiful and completely worth displaying somewhere. I particularly like the TCFSR cover, so much that I drew it once when I was a teen (and lost it :c), but I love that TBP has three times the drawings that TCFSR does:

C'est magnifique.

It's something a Rammstein album couldn't have outdone because, even though their music is amazing, their art leans more toward the grotesque.

In terms of music, all I know is they have a unique sound to them, and you most likely will enjoy it as long as you like any of these music genres from their Wikipedia page:

According to my ears, both albums' songs could easily be listened to on their own or on shuffle, as if they were singles, at the same time they can be listened to in sequence to follow their respective stories, which is quite a feat. 

You can tell that they belong to the same artist without going overboard like AC/DC, who are known for their production consistency and structural simplicity, which can make a lot of people choose about 2-3 songs to listen to and drop the rest. Well, as Angus Young himself said:

I'm tired of people saying we have ten albums that sound the same. We have eleven albums that sound the same.

That'd be me.

Ok, now, as I was saying, let's get to the juicy part: the lore.

Both records are what we can consider a "concept album", those "whose tracks hold a larger purpose or meaning collectively than they do individually", according to Wikipedia. And they have nothing to do with each other.

I feel like TBP is concepting more than TCFSR with how the music videos and songs are much more related to the core story.

Anyway.

In case you didn't already know about this, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is widely thought to be a continuation of their previous and very first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.

I mean, based on this Reddit reply I just found, it looks like Gerard's ONLY weak point was giving these two concept albums a solid story progression, allowing us to theorize at will, but he did confirm what the real ending was in this 2005 interview.

So, the way I understood this, there's this pair of lovers who get in a gunfight, which is believed to be the same one from 'Demolition Lovers', right? Per 'Helena' and 'Cemetery Drive', it looks like the female lover dies, but the male lover doesn't, and misses her so much he goes on a downward spiral full of drugs and other ways of self-destruction. He makes a deal with the devil where he gets to see the female lover again in exchange for the souls of 1000 evil men, a long quest that begins with 'Give 'Em Hell, Kid'.

The male lover seems to realize he's far too gone by the time he has already unalived 999 evil men and, thus, became an evil man himself. So he unalives himself, completing his side of the deal, and either the woman goes back to life without him, or they do reunite... in Hell. 

Way knows - pun intended. Either way, it's fire.

Now, The Black Parade.

What an album.

As usual, no one knows for sure what's the actual linear full story, but the thing is there's this main character known as "The Patient":

He ✨ flatlines ✨ of cancer from the very beginning of the album (see 'The End.' - the irony). The remaining of the songs talk about his reflections on the life he lived, whatever 'Teenagers' represents in the plot, and his journey navigating the afterlife, represented by a "black parade" that resembles the marching band his father took him to see in the city when he was a young boy.

Because of 'Sleep' and 'Mama', I thought this patient guy was a war veteran. And I'll keep thinking that because they kinda make sense together, even if it's not official.

Like Mic The Snare said, TBP was indeed one of the most memorable events in Rock history with its level of theatricality and visual presentation almost comparable to Michael Jackson or Queen themselves.

As a side note, until very recently, I had no clue that Liza Minnelli, whose vocals are featured in 'Mama', was Judy Garland's mom!

Alright, now, to sum things up, I don't have a ton more to say that hasn't already been covered by other folks, because I haven't really watched or read that many My Chemical Romance interviews. I feel like I'm every fandom's ghost, you know?

But, these two albums are pretty special to me. They got me through tough times, kinda like how K-Pop did a few years down the road.

Hopefully soon I'll complete my collection by getting my hands on Danger Days, Bullets and, maybe, Conventional Weapons! I'd consider the live albums, too, but... haven't decided.

So, what about you? What were the first one or two music albums you owned physically?

Until next time!

- N

[pb-dot]

Film Friday: Malignant

This week's Film Friday is a bit late because I've been out of town, and since I spent significant amounts of time ruining my voice and sparse dignity at a karaoke bar last night, I am going to be nice to myself and talk about a movie that's a bit on the easier side to talk about. With that in mind, let's take a dive into the Giallo madness of Malignant.

First of all, I must emphasize, this movie is ridiculous. The whole thing starts with a strange set of video logs by some medical professional in a general style that brings the FMV cutscenes of yesteryear to mind. Even as things develop into a more James Wan-esque direction as we meet the struggling young woman Madison whose sorrows are compounded by her abusive boyfriend being quite messily murdered, and the subsequent apparent mental connection to the killer, there's a faint layer of ridiculous to the whole affair. The cop who heads the murder investigation is named Kakoa Shaw, Madison's sister greets her in the hospital dressed as a party princess because she came straight from her side gig, the kind of source of minor oddness that makes the artifice of the whole setup feel acutely fictional, or even heightened in some way.

It's not what I'd call a criticism of the movie though, more observing that the movie is attempting, and I would argue succeeded in creating a modern equivalent of the stylized unreality one can find in the Italian Giallo-style horror slashers. It's a functional justification of the more out-there plot elements, but it is also fun in its own way. Of course Madison's sister Sydney has to brave the world's creepiest condemned hospital to recover a vital pice of the puzzle, of course the killer wears the thickest, longest raincoat in the world, and of course a central part of the soundtrack all but screams the upcoming twist through metatext for the duration of the movie.

There really is something to be said to just hitching your wagon to the cheese train, and in the context of this movie it allows it to build to a act 2 climax that is equal parts ludicrous, amazing and spectacular while not feeling a touch out of place in this coherent unreality that it has created. It helps, I suppose that James Wan inhabits the gothic-adjacent "spooky things happening in artfully decrepit houses" horror niche that he has crafted many a nightmare out of. In this particular Wanesque fallen manor, Wan seems to delight in the control a well-constructed house set gives him with a series of artful tracking shots that, although not particularly spooky, are a delight to look at and interact with the plot of this glorious silly thing in interesting ways.

Honestly though, why this movie really works for me is because under all the silliness and artful camp reproduction, there's an earnest story about belonging, family and empowerment going on there which I think makes the movie less cynical. Now, it could just be my rosy-cheeked idealist self, but I think there's something to that. Granted, we're here watching a grotesque theatre of murder and obsession, but just because we're watching otherworldly fleshpupetry that's occasionally offensive to both senses and sense doesn't mean we have to be all nihilistic about it.

Another thing I appreciate about Malignant is how it could be viewed as a bit of a breather in the wave of serious minded "elevated horror" that break with observable reality in very limited, tasteful ways and often to deliver some bleak but artsy point. This isn't to say I don't love this particular movement of course, but it's fun with a little brain break that goes "Fuck a whole load of this, the villain is an underdeveloped mutant twin with electricity powers that dresses like a Giallo murderer (because he is one) and he's ultimately defeated by the true bonds of family that transcends those of blood. Blood of the covenant, water of the womb and all that." It's cheesy, it's stylized, it's earnest and also yes, it knows exactly what it's doing but it's not going to wink-and-nudge at you.

[armchairambrose]

Ugly Art

Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor was released October 3rd 2007 and is likely not a piece of media that has been heard of or watched before by the majority of individuals with an interest in anime, even should drama or psychological suspense genres be a favorite of theirs.  It is not a memorable show to many because of a simple unfortunate factor about it; the anime is Ugly.  

Kaiji is a tense dramatic social commentary about the Japanese economic state and the failures of the government to provide for individuals.  It is about the desperation that Japanese men have become accustomed to when the most they could hope for is a part time job that pays too little.  Their bills climb, income is stagnant, and those who retained wealth from the last economic boom and were safe from the recession are flaunting wealth and driving imported cars, wearing Italian suits and have watches worth more than the average youths yearly salary.  The show centers around a young man with no income wasting away in a small room that costs a pittance to rent, with nearly no belongings, the only decorations to his borrowed home being a collection of Mercedes car emblems from the vehicles he vandalizes, and a poster with a governmental slogan used to shrug responsibility for correcting the economy onto the citizen.

“The Future is in Our Hands” 

The show is memorable, it keeps attention and deserves plentiful rewatches.  I spent nine episodes on the edge of my seat watching a man play Pachinko in this, and loved it.

But it was never popular, and even today more than a decade later, it is not accessible media to any outside of Japan, even the manga version has only got three volumes (Less than half) translated officially.  Because it's Ugly.

We don’t put much value on Ugly Art.  We easily look away from anything outside of conventional standards of beauty, and with as much media to look at in our lives it doesn’t feel like missing out on anything to turn off something grotesque and look at what we are used to instead.   

But what if it is ugly on purpose?  I chose Kaiji as my example because it is one of my favorite pieces of media as of late, but also because it has to be Ugly, it HAS to look rough and jagged, because it IS a rough and jagged world.  People are cruel and willing to stab a man in the back, people will lie to and cheat you on a whim and drown you for their own benefit.  The Art reflects the values, and lack of, in the media.  Characters are drawn with thick sharp outlines and bodily flaws are magnified and exaggerated, making the black-heartedness of everyone in the world more apparent, including our protagonists.  

Ugly Art serves a purpose of its own, but this purpose is no different than any heartfelt medium. To break the mold, to stand out, be different, to get across your message and feelings.  By refusing Ugly Art for the sake of its differentiation from the more common or traditional media in its field, we have shut away a world from ourselves, lost out on an unquantifiable amount of potential.  

Claymation will inspire thoughts in your mind of movies you have seen as a child, Chicken Run or Wallace and Gromit, and many people will remember those fondly, as a product of the time and forgive it as such for the awkward uncanny effect it can have.  Then they will no longer consider claymation or stop motion media, perhaps they will look away from a new movie for no other reason than this.  Isle of Dogs, for instance.  

A youtube account, Takena, is a longstanding and still likely unknown now creator of cinematic masterpieces, less than ten minutes at a time.  Takena makes claymation short form horror films ranging from the campy pleasures of Chainsaw Maid, involving a young woman in a maid outfit running down zombies with a chainsaw, to Pussycat, which has one of the single most disturbing lingering shots in the genre.  This is Art, these videos do invoke carnal emotions and apprehensive or elating reactions in the viewer, and yet again, this is Ugly.  As it needs to be.  The heart stopping anxiety that you’ll feel on seeing a drugged woman faint before her enceinte assaulter is infinitely enhanced by the unmolded lumpy nature of the medium, and would not carry near the same weight were it performed in a more conventional medium or even with more conventional habits of this same media.  

And this is not even to state that Ugly Art needs be utilizing its Ugliness for effect.  What value do we lose in Art by not being beautiful?  It is not the sole purpose of Art to be pleasant to look at.  We don’t create just for others to look at our work and appreciate it for a purely aesthetic validity.  

Art is for the creator to express themselves.  Emotionally, Idealistically, Politically.  For social value and to convey their opinions or desires, dreams they can’t actualize alone in the world.  We use Art to put ourselves out there in the world, or to find others like ourselves, or to make some call to action or radicalize others.  We use Art to educate, and to complain, criticize, love, and to appreciate other Artists.  

Art is not all meant to be a Mona Lisa and Artists are not supposed or need to all be Da Vinci.  It does not mean to be a failure if you create Ugly Art, you do not NEED to improve your visual aesthetical prowess to be a “Real Artist” so long as you are able to make a piece of Art that you find value in, that you put yourself in, your heart, your opinion and your beliefs.  No Art is more beautiful than that which is meaningful to the creator and touching the hearts of another like companion.  The point of Art is to bare yourself to another, something that can be done without beauty, without convention or forcibly exacting your work into the narrow constraining box of what is “An acceptable level of talent to be an Artist”  

In this modern day we are looking at a new trend of “AI generated ‘Art’” which threatens not only Artists and their livelihoods, the security of their employment and their futures, but also the potential Artist of the future.  We see people out in the world who want to be an Artist, but live with the fear that they will not be able to match the expectation of creating something traditionally beautiful.  Being an Artist to these individuals, who have had the rejection of Ugly Art burned into their minds as the only possibility, carries a weight of looking forwards to years and years of study and practice to create the media they wish, to put what they envision to paper, which is unbearable to them in the face of a program which can attempt to make what they wish, for them.  You need only put in the prompt words you think will create the Art you wish for, and the names and works of an Artist that you find the work of beautiful (But don’t respect enough to not steal from,) and then you have a priceless piece of work.  Or one without value.  You might have something beautiful, after enough attempts on the program, but to others, it may be empty.  After all, a robot does not convey; Non Habet Animum, the emotions, values, beliefs, and convictions of the Artist who paints their painstaking creations themselves.  

Even Ugly Art, amateurish and unpolished, rugged, jagged thick lines and error, carries the weight of the Artist.  We should not reject our Ugliness, it is our most human quality.  We should create Ugly Art, we should consume and cherish it as anything beautiful, for the work is meaningful, it is matter.  Make your Art, share, and let it be Ugly without shame. 

[xoruffitup]

Annette: The AD Devotee Review

So I saw Annette on its premiere night in Cannes and I’m still trying to process and make sense of those 2.5 hours of utter insanity. I have no idea where to begin and this is likely going to become an unholy length by the time I’m finished, so I apologize in advance. But BOY I’ve got a lot to parse through!!

Let’s start here: Adam’s made plenty of weird movies. The Dead Don’t Die? The Man Who Killed Don Quixote? There are definitely Terry Gilliam-esque elements of the unapologetically absurd and fantastical in Annette, but NOTHING comes close to this film. To put it bluntly, nothing I write in this post can prepare you for the eccentric phantasmagoria you’re about to sit through.

While the melodies conveying the story – at times lovely and haunting, at times whimsical, occasionally blunt and simple – add a unique sense of the surreal, the fact that it’s all presented in song somehow supplies the medium for this bizarre concoction of disparate elements and outlandish storytelling to all coalesce into a single genre-defying, disbelief-suspending whole. That’s certainly not to say there weren’t a few times when I quietly chortled to myself and mouthed “what the fuck” from behind my mask when things took an exceeding turn to the outrageous. This movie needs to be permitted a bit of leeway in terms of quality judgments, and traditional indicators certainly won’t apply. I would say part of its appeal (and ultimately its success) stems from its lack of interest in appealing to traditional arbiters of film structure and viewing experience. The movie lingers in studies of discomfiture (I’ll return to this theme); it presents all its absurdities with brazen pride rather than temperance; and its end is abrupt and utterly jarring. Yet somehow, at the end of it, I realized I’d been white-knuckling that rollercoaster ride the whole way through and loved every last twist and turn.

A note on the structure of this post before I dive in: I’ve written out a synopsis of the whole film (for those spoiler-hungry people) and stashed it down at the bottom of this post, so no one trying to avoid spoilers has to scroll through. If you want to read, go ahead and skip down to that before reading the discussion/analysis. If I have to reference a specific plot point, I’ll label it “Spoiler #___” and those who don’t mind being spoiled can check the correlating numbers in my synopsis to see which part I’m referencing. Otherwise, my discussion will be spoiler-free! I do detail certain individual scenes, but hid anything that would give away key developments and/or the ending.

To start, I’ll cut to what I’m sure many of you are here for: THE MUSICAL SEX SCENES. You want detailed descriptions? Well let’s fucking go because these scenes have been living in my head rent-free!!

The first (yes, there are two. Idk whether to thank Mr. Carax or suggest he get his sanity checked??) happens towards the end of “We Love Each Other So Much.” Henry carries Ann to the bed with her feet dangling several inches off the floor while she has her arms wrapped around his shoulders. (I maybe whimpered a tiny bit.) As they continue to sing, you first see Ann spread on her back on the bed, panting a little BUT STILL SINGING while Henry’s head is down between her thighs. The camera angle is from above Ann’s head, so you can clearly see down her body and exactly what’s going on. He lifts his head to croon a line, then puts his mouth right back to work. 

And THEN they fuck – still fucking singing! They’re on their sides with Henry behind her, and yes there is visible thrusting. Yes, the thrusting definitely picks up speed and force as the song reaches its crescendo. Yes, it was indeed EXTREMELY sensual once you got over the initial shock of what you’re watching. Ann kept her breasts covered with her own hands while Henry went down on her, but now his hands are covering them and kneading while they’re fucking and just….. It’s a hard, blazing hot R rating. I also remember his giant hand coming up to turn her head so he can kiss her and ladkjfaskfjlskfj. Bring your smelling salts. I don’t recommend sitting between two older ladies while you’re watching – KINDA RUINED THE BLATANT, SMOKING HOT ADAM PORN FOR ME. Good god, choose your viewing buddy wisely!

The second scene comes sort of out of nowhere – I can’t actually recall which song it was during, but it pops up while Ann is pregnant. Henry is again eating her out and there’s not as much overt singing this time, but he has his giant hands splayed over her pregnant belly while he’s going to town and whew, WHEW TURN ON THE AIR CONDITIONING PLEASE. DID THE THEATER INCREASE IN TEMPERATURE BY 10 DEGREES, YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT DID.

Whew. I think you’ll be better primed to ~enjoy~ those scenes when you know they’re coming, otherwise it’s just so shocking that by the time you’ve processed “Look at Adam eating pussy with reckless abandon” it’s halfway over already. God speed, my fellow rats, it’s truly something to witness!!

Okay. Right. Ahem. Moving right on along….

I’ll kick off this discussion with the formal structure of the film. It’s honestly impossible to classify. I have the questionable fortune of having been taken to many a strange avant-garde operas and art exhibitions by my parents when I was younger, and the strongest parallel I found to this movie was melodramatic opera stagings full of flamboyant flourishes, austere set pieces, and prolonged numbers where the characters wallow at length in their respective miseries. This movie has all the elevated drama, spectacle, and self-aggrandizement belonging to any self-professed rock opera. Think psychedelic rock opera films a la The Who’s Tommy, Hair, Phantom of the Paradise, and hell, even Rocky Horror. Yes, this film really is THAT weird.

But Annette is also in large part a vibrant, absurdist performance piece. The film is intriguingly book-ended by two scenes where the lines blur between actor and character; and your own role blurs between passive viewer and interactive audience. The first scene has the cast walking through the streets of LA (I think?), singing “So May We Start?” directly to the camera in a self-aware prologue, smashing the fourth wall from the beginning and setting up the audience to play a direct role in the viewing experience. Though the cast then disburse and take up their respective roles, the sense of being directly performed to is reinforced throughout the film. This continues most concretely through Henry’s multiple stand-up comedy performances.

Though he performs to an audience in the film rather than directly to live viewers, these scenes are so lengthy, vulgar, and excessive that his solo performance act becomes an integral part of defining his character and conveying his arc as the film progresses. These scenes start to make the film itself feel like a one-man show. The whole shtick of Henry McHenry’s “Ape of God” show is its perverse irreverence and swaggering machismo. Over the span of what must be a five minute plus scene, Henry hacks up phlegm, pretends to choke himself with his microphone cord, prances across the stage with his bathrobe flapping about, simulates being shot, sprinkles many a misanthropic, charmless monologues in between, and ends by throwing off his robe and mooning the audience before he leaves the stage. (Yes, you see Adam’s ass within the film’s first twenty minutes, and we’re just warming up from there.) His one-man performances demonstrate his egocentrism, penchant for lowbrow and often offensive humor, and the fact that this character has thus far profited from indulging in and acting out his base vulgarities.

While never demonstrating any abundance of good taste, his shows teeter firmly towards the grotesque and unsanctionable as his marriage and mental health deteriorate. This is what I’m referring to when I described the film as a study in discomfiture. As he deteriorates, the later iterations of his stand-up show become utterly unsettling and at times revolting. The film could show mercy and stop at one to two minutes of his more deranged antics, but instead subjects you to a protracted display of just how insane this man might possibly be. In Adam’s hands, these excessive, indulgent performance scenes take on disturbing but intriguing ambiguity, as you again wonder where the performance ends and the real man begins. When Henry confesses to a crime during his show and launces into an elaborate, passionate reenactment on stage, you shift uncomfortably in your seat wondering how much of it might just be true. Wondering just how much of an animal this man truly is.

Watching this film as an Adam fan, these scenes are unparalleled displays of his range and prowess. He’s in turns amusing and revolting; intolerable and pathetic; but always, always riveting. I couldn’t help thinking to myself that for the casual, non Adam-obsessed viewer, the effect of these scenes might stop at crass and unappealing. But in terms of the sheer range and power of acting on display? These scenes are a damn marvel. Through these scenes alone, his performance largely imbues the film with its wild, primal, and vaguely menacing atmosphere.

His stand-up scenes were, to me, some of the most intense of the film – sometimes downright difficult to endure. But they’re only a microcosm of the R A N G E he exhibits throughout the film’s entirety. Let’s talk about how he’s animalistic, menacing, and genuinely unsettling to watch (Leos Carax described him as “feline” at some point, and I 100% see it); and then with a mere subtle twitch of his expression, sheen of his eyes, or slump of his shoulders, he’s suddenly a lost, broken thing.  

Henry McHenry is truly to be reviled. Twitter might as well spare their breath and announce he’s already cancelled. He towers above the rest of the cast with intimidating, predatory physicality; he is prone to indulgence in his vices; and he constantly seems at risk of releasing some wild, uncontrollable madness lingering just beneath his surface. But as we all well know, Adam has an unerring talent for lending pathos to even the most objectively condemnable characters.

In a repeated refrain during his first comedy show, the audience keeps asking him, “Why did you become a comedian?” He dodges the question or gives sarcastic answers, until finally circling back to the true answer later in the film. It was something to the effect of: “To disarm people. It’s the only way I can tell the truth without it killing me.” Even for all their sick spectacle, there are also moments in his stand-up shows of disarming vulnerability and (seeming) honesty. In a similar moment of personal exposition, he confesses his temptation and “sympathy for the abyss.” (This phrase is hands down my favorite of the film.) He repeatedly refers to his struggle against “the abyss” and, at the same time, his perceived helplessness against it. “There’s so little I can do, there’s so little I can do,” he sings repeatedly throughout the film - usually just after doing something horrific.

Had he been played by anyone else, the first full look of him warming up before his show - hopping in place and punching the air like some wannabe boxer, interspersing puffs of his cigarette with chowing down on a banana – would have been enough for me to swear him off. His archetype is something of a cliché at this point – a brusque, boorish man who can’t stomach or preserve the love of others due to his own self-loathing. There were multiple points when it was only Adam’s face beneath the character that kept my heart cracked open to him. But sure enough, he wedged his fingers into that tiny crack and pried it wide open. The film’s final few scenes show him at his chin-wobbling best as he crumbles apart in small, mournful subtleties.

(General, semi-spoiler ahead as to the tone of the film’s ending – skip this paragraph if you’d rather avoid.) For a film that professes not to take itself very seriously (how else am I supposed to interpret the freaky puppet baby?), it delivers a harsh, unforgiving ending to its main character. And sure enough, despite how much I might have wanted to distance myself and believe it was only what he deserved, I found myself right there with him, sharing his pain. It is solely testament to Adam’s tireless dedication to breathing both gritty realism and stubborn beauty into his characters that Henry sank a hook into some piece of my sympathy.

Not only does Adam have to be the only actor capable of imbuing Henry with humanity despite his manifold wrongs, he also has to be the only actor capable of the wide-ranging transformations demanded of the role. He starts the movie with long hair and his full refrigerator brick house physique. His physicality and size are actively leveraged to engender a sense of disquiet and unpredictability through his presence. He appears in turns tormented and tormentor. There were moments when I found myself thinking of Conan the Barbarian, simply because his physical presence radiates such wild, primal energy (especially next to tiny, dainty Marion and especially with that long hair). Cannot emphasize enough: The raw sex appeal is off the goddamn charts and had me – a veteran fangirl of 3+ years - shook to my damn core.

The film’s progression then ages him – his hair cut shorter and his face and physique gradually becoming more gaunt. By the film’s end, he has facial prosthetics to make him seem even more stark and borderline sickly – a mirror of his growing internal torment. From a muscular, swaggering powerhouse, he pales and shrinks to a shell of a man, unraveling as his face becomes nearly deformed by time and guilt. He is in turns beautiful and grotesque; sensual and repulsive. I know of no other actor whose face (and its accompanying capacity for expressiveness) could lend itself to such stunning versatility.

Quick note here that he was given a reddish-brown birthmark on the right side of his face for this film?? It becomes more prominent once his hair is shorter in the film’s second half. I’m guessing it was Leos’ idea to make his face even more distinctive and riveting? If so, joke’s on you, Mr. Carax, because we’re always riveted. ☺

I mentioned way up at the beginning that the film is bookended by two scenes where the lines blur between actor and character, and between reality and performance. This comes full circle at the film’s end, with Henry’s final spoken words (this doesn’t give any plot away but skip to the next paragraph if you would rather avoid!) being “Stop watching me.” That’s it. The show is over. He has told his last joke, played out his final act, and now he’s done living his life as a source of cheap, unprincipled laughs and thrills for spectators. The curtain closes with a resounding silence.

Now, I definitely won’t have a section where I talk (of course) about the Ben Solo parallels. He’s haunted by an “abyss” aka darkness inside of him? Bad things happened when he finally gave in and stared into that darkness he knew lived within him? As a result of those tragedies, (SPOILER – Skip to next paragraph to avoid) he then finds himself alone and with no one to love or be loved by? NO I’M DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT IT AT ALL, I’M JUST FINE HERE UNDER MY MOUNTAINS OF TISSUES.

Let’s talk about the music! The film definitely clocks in closer to a rock opera than musical, because almost the entire thing is conveyed through ongoing song, rather than self-contained musical numbers appearing here and there. This actually helps the film’s continuity and pacing, by keeping the characters perpetually in this suspended state of absurdity, always propelled along by some beat or melody. Whenever the film seems on the precipice of tipping all the way into the bleak and dark, the next whimsical tune kicks in to reel us all blessedly back. For example, after (SPOILER #1) happens, there’s a hard cut to the bright police station where several officers gather around Henry, bopping about and chattering on the beat “Questions! We have a few questions!”

Adam integrates his singing into his performance in such a way that it seems organic. I realized after the film that I never consciously considered the quality of his singing along the way. For all that I talked about the film maintaining the atmosphere of a fourth wall-defying performance piece, Adam’s singing is so fully immersed in the embodiment of his character that you almost forget he’s singing. Rather, this is simply how Henry McHenry exists. His stand-up scenes are the only ones in the film that do frequently transition back and forth between speaking and singing, but it’s seamlessly par for the course in Henry’s bizarre, dour show. He breaks into his standard “Now laugh!” number with uninterrupted sarcasm and contempt. There were certainly a few soft, poignant moments when his voice warbled in a tender vibrato you couldn’t help noticing – but otherwise, the singing was simply an extension of that full-body persona he manages to convey with such apparent ease and naturalism.

On the music itself: I’ll admit that the brief clip of “We Love Each Other So Much” we got a few weeks ago made me a tad nervous. It seemed so cheesy and ridiculous? But okay, you really can’t take anything from this movie out of context. Otherwise it is, indeed, utterly ridiculous. Not that none of it is ever ridiculous in context either, but I’m giving you assurances right now that it WORKS. Once you’re in the flow of constant singing and weirdness abound, the songs sweep you right along. Some of the songs lack a distinctive hook or melody and are moreso rhythmic vehicles for storytelling, but it’s now a day later and I still have three of the songs circulating pleasantly in my head. “We Love Each Other So Much” was actually the stand out for me and is now my favorite of the soundtrack. It’s reprised a few times later in the film, growing increasingly melancholy each time it is echoed, and it hits your heart a bit harder each time. The final song sung during (SPOILER #2), though without a distinctive melody to lodge in my head, undoubtedly left me far more moved than a spoken version of this scene would have. Adam’s singing is so painfully desperate and earnest here, and he takes the medium fully under his command.

Finally, it does have to be said that parts of this film veer fully towards the ridiculous and laughable. The initial baby version of the Annette puppet-doll was nothing short of horrifying to me. Annette gets more center-stage screen time in the film’s second half, which gives itself over to a few special effects sequences which look to be flying out at you straight from 2000 Windows Movie Maker. The scariest part is that it all seems intentional. The quality special effects appear when necessary (along with some unusual and captivating time lapse shots), which means the film’s most outrageous moments are fully in line with its guiding spirit. Its extravagant self-indulgence nearly borders on camp.

...And with that, I’ve covered the majority of the frantic notes I took for further reflection immediately after viewing. It’s now been a few days, and I’m looking forward to rewatching this movie when I can hopefully take it in a bit more fully. This time, I won’t just be struggling to keep up with the madness on screen. My concluding thoughts at this point: Is it my favorite Adam movie? Certainly not. Is it the most unforgettable? Aside from my holy text, The Last Jedi, likely yes. It really is the sort of thing you have to see twice to even believe it. And all in all, I say again that Adam truly carried this movie, and he fully inhabits even its highest, most ludicrous aspirations. He’s downright abhorrent in this film, and that’s exactly what makes him such a fucking legend.

I plan to make a separate post in the coming days about my experience at Cannes and the Annette red carpet, since a few people have asked! I can’t even express how damn good it feels to be globetrotting for Adam-related experiences again. <3

Thanks so much for reading! Feel free to ask me any further questions at all here or on Twitter! :)

*SYNOPSIS INCLUDED BELOW. DO NOT READ FURTHER IF AVOIDING SPOILERS!*

Synopsis: Comedian Henry McHenry and opera singer Ann Defrasnoux are both at the pinnacle of their respective success when they fall in love and marry. The marriage is happy and passionate for a time, leading to the birth of their (puppet) daughter, Annette. But tabloids and much of the world believe the crude, brutish Henry is a poor match for refined, idolized Ann. Ann and Henry themselves both begin to feel that something is amiss – Henry gradually losing his touch for his comedy craft, claiming that being in love is making him ill. He repeatedly and sardonically references how Ann’s opera career involves her “singing and dying” every night, to the point that he sees visions of her “dead” body on the stage. Meanwhile, Ann has a nightmare of multiple women accusing Henry of abusive and violent behavior towards them, and she begins growing wary in his presence. (He never acts abusively towards her, unless you count that scene when he tickles her feet and licks her toes while she’s telling him to stop??? Yeah I know, WILD.)

The growing sense of unease, that they’re both teetering on the brink of disaster, culminates in the most deranged of Henry’s stand-up comedy performances, when he gives a vivid reenactment of killing his wife by “tickling her to death.” The performance is so maudlin and unsettling that you wonder whether he’s not making it up at all, and the audience strongly rebukes him. (This is the “What is your problem?!” scene with tiddies out. The full version includes Adam storming across the stage, furiously singing/yelling, “What the FUCK is your problem?!”) But when Henry arrives home that night, drunk and raucous, Ann and Annette are both unharmed.

The couple take a trip on their boat, bringing Annette with them. The boat gets caught in a storm, and Henry drunkenly insists that he and Ann waltz in the storm. She protests that it’s too dangerous and begs him to see sense. (SPOILER #1) The boat lurches when Henry spins her, and Ann falls overboard to her death. Henry rescues Annette from the sinking boat and rows them both to shore. He promptly falls unconscious, and a ghost of Ann appears, proclaiming her intention to haunt Henry through Annette. Annette (still a toddler at this point and yes, still a wooden puppet) then develops a miraculous gift for singing, and Henry decides to take her on tour with performances around the world. He enlists the help of his “conductor friend,” who had been Ann’s accompanist and secretly had an affair with her before she met Henry.

Henry slides further into drunken debauchery as the tour progresses, while the Conductor looks after Annette and the two grow close. Once the tour concludes, the Conductor suggests to Henry that Annette might be his own daughter – revealing his prior affair with Ann. Terrified by the idea of anyone finding out and the possibility of losing his daughter, Henry drowns the Conductor in the pool behind his and Ann’s house. Annette sees the whole thing happen from her bedroom window.

Henry plans one last show for Annette, to be held in a massive stadium at the equivalent of the Super Bowl. But when Annette takes the stage, she refuses to sing. Instead, she speaks and accuses Henry of murder. (“Daddy kills people,” are the actual words – not that that was creepy to hear as this puppet’s first spoken words or anything.)

Henry stands trial, during which he sees an apparition of Ann from when they first met. They sing their regret that they can’t return to the happiness they once shared, until the apparition is replaced by Ann’s vengeful spirit, who promises to haunt Henry in prison. After his sentencing (it’s not clear what the sentence was, but Henry definitely isn’t going free), Annette is brought to see him once in prison. Speaking fully for the first time, she declares she can’t forgive her parents for using her: Henry for exploiting her voice for profit and Ann for presumably using her to take vengeance on Henry. (Yes, this is why she was an inanimate doll moving on strings up to this point – there was some meaning in that strange, strange artistic choice. She was the puppet of her parents’ respective egotisms.) The puppet of Annette is abruptly replaced by a real girl in this scene, finally enabling two-sided interaction and a long-missed genuine connection between her and Henry, which made this quite the emotional catharsis. (SPOILER #2) It concludes with Annette still unwilling to forgive or forget what her parents have done, and swearing never to sing again. She says Henry now has “no one to love.” He appeals, “Can’t I love you, Annette?” She replies, “No, not really.” Henry embraces her one last time before a guard takes her away and Henry is left alone.

…..Yes, that is the end. It left me with major emotional whiplash, after the whole film up to this point kept pulling itself back from the total bleak and dark by starting up a new toe-tapping, mildly silly tune every few minutes. But this last scene instead ends on a brutal note of harsh, unforgiving silence.

BUT! Make sure you stick around through the credits, when you see the cast walking through a forest together. (This is counterpart to the film’s opening, when you see the cast walking through LA singing “So May We Start?” directly to the audience) Definitely pay attention to catch Adam chasing/playing with the little girl actress who plays Annette! That imparts a much nicer feeling to leave the theater with. :’)

[theeslytherinslut]

12 Grimmauld Place (8/?)

Pairings: Sirius Black (post-Azkaban) x reader, Remus Lupin x reader’s brother, Sirius Black x Slytherin!reader

Word Count: 2,130

Warnings: gross imagery

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 9 |

A/N: Next chapter will have the trio! Don’t worry the smut is inbound, I love me a slow burn lol. I have a feeling this will be a fairly long story, possibly pushing 20 chapters cause I’m only just coming up on the storyline I had in mind lmao

As Snape pushed open the hospital wing doors, the girlish voice you'd heard earlier returned, and this time you were stunned to find it was arguing with Dumbledore. Surely no student in their right mind would argue with Dumbledore.

“I’m afraid that whatever is behind that door doesn’t concern you, Madam Undersecretary,” Dumbledore said serenely. Glancing warily at Sirius, you found him giving you the same look. So it wasn’t a student. You recognized the title as well, possibly from filling out paperwork for work. Work...the Ministry...Sirius Black sitting right next to you, a very much wanted Sirius Black. 

“Sirius, it might be best you transform now." Madame Pomfrey said before you could. Sirius shot her a shocked look, and she shook her head. "Oh, don't look so shocked. Of course I know--and I'm not the only one, you know. Now, go on. I don’t believe that woman is going to be sated by Dumbledore.” 

And sure enough, a second later, the woman pushed open the doors, and Sirius’ hand slipped from yours. Looking over, in Sirius’ spot sat a large black dog, panting slightly. Bewildered, you stared at Sirius’ new form as a small, toad-looking old woman pulled back your separating curtains. 

“What is this?” she hissed, looking to Madame Pomfrey. She was dressed entirely in an alarming shade of pink, which made her resemble a bubblegum ball. Feeling slightly nauseated, you tore your eyes away from her vivid color, but not before noticing her face was also pink in agitation. 

“This is a patient,” Madame Pomfrey responded icily, barely looking up from your leg. Thankfully, it seemed she’d ceased her draining until Sirius was able to support you once more. 

“She isn’t a student, what’s she doing here?” the woman asked, barely looking at you.

“She used to be,” you retorted, stung by the lack of empathy. She seemed not to hear you, but instead stared expectantly at Madame Pomfrey. 

“I shall treat any who seek medical attention, regardless of their status within the school.” Madame Pomfrey said, drawing herself up to her full height. 

“I don’t believe that’s your decision to make, dear.” the woman said in a sickly sweet voice. Your temper flared.

“As Headmaster, I bestow upon Madame Pomfrey the ability to treat whoever she sees fit. So, unless you plan to bodily remove Mrs. Y/L/N, I don’t see why this conversation can’t be continued in a more conducive setting. I do believe we’re keeping Y/N’s wounds from being drained.” Dumbledore said, gesturing down to your leg. “Decaying drought,”

The woman let out a ghastly noise as she looked down, and you rolled your eyes.

“Oh, that’s nice. Really love being gasped at, as if being mauled weren’t enough.” you quipped, unable to hold your tongue. Sirius growled at the woman, and her eyes fell to him.

“There! Now that can’t be sanitary, can it? It’ll have to go,” the woman said, reaching out to pull Sirius from the room. It seemed she was determined to assert some sort of authority over the situation. Sirius growled more loudly and now raised himself to stand on all four legs; whatever dog breed he’d chosen was massive, and he stood almost as tall as she did. Looking at him, he looked truly terrifying. His long fangs glinted in the light pouring in from the massive windows and his hackles were raised as he viciously growled at the squat woman before you. He looked more wolfish than like a dog. 

“I’d advise against that, Madame Undersecretary. I do believe he holds a certain affinity for Y/N. Dragging him from her bedside might not get you the results you so wish to receive.” Dumbledore smiled fondly down at Sirius, who still stood barring his long fangs at the woman. 

“Well,” she gasped, pulling her short, stubby hand from Sirius’ reach. “Cornelius shall be hearing all about this, Dumbledore. I must say it is most unusual for a prior student to be treated by staff during the school year, nevertheless joined by her mangy mutt.”

“I should expect nothing less,” Dumbledore said, serene as ever, “Now, shall we? Unless you wish to see the effects of an expertly made decaying drought on the human body?

She made a face and peered back down at your angry leg, and you were sure to meet her gaze with an icy glare. She cast a look around at the group of you, and you suddenly remembered Remus’ unconscious body in the next compartment. Hoping she wouldn't look around, you held her eyes with a glare. Thankfully, she seemed unable to find anything worth staying for and allowed Dumbledore to sweep her from the room.

Madame Pomfrey let out a string of words that made you proud, and you smiled at a now human Sirius, his hand slipping back in yours.

“That was Dolores Umbridge. Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, and by all accounts, simply the very worst of humanity.” Sirius explained, absentmindedly running his thumb along the outside of your hand. Madame Pomfrey still bustled about agitatedly, but you knew she’d soon return to you. 

“What’s she doing here? Surely Dumbledore would never hire such a horrible woman?” you asked. It’d been a while since you’d been at Hogwarts, but that you knew.

“Of course not. She was placed here by the Minister. Fudge is becoming intensely paranoid--and about all the wrong things. As I’m sure you’re very much well aware of, he refuses to acknowledge,” and casting a look at Madame Pomfrey, he cut himself off, “You-Know-Who’s return. Instead of dealing with the real enemy--the only true enemy of the whole of the wizarding world--he instead has set his sites on Dumbledore. As I’m sure you’ve read, he’s already got the Daily Prophet to work on subduing and poisoning the public against him and his claims. They’ve even begun to go after Harry now, too. Cowards. Complete and utter sodding tossers, the whole lot of them--”

“Sirius, there are students in here,” Madame Pomfrey hissed, swatting him lightly with an empty medicine bottle.

“Sorry, Poppy. Anyway, Fudge -is so deluded he thinks Dumbledore is using Hogwarts to train up young wizards for a fresh, formidable, wizard army.” Sirius said

“He’s what?!” you laughed, sure he must be exaggerating.

“He’s gone completely round the twist. Thinks Dumbledore’s training up all these children to get them to storm and take over the Ministry. Utterly fuck--sorry, completely nutters. So, he’s placed Umbridge at Hogwarts, fulfilling both the vacant position of Defense Against the Dark Arts and a fiercely loyal mole. Word is he’s working on drawing up the plans to take over the school completely. This just being the first of many steps.” Sirius explained. Madame Pomfrey leaned in and gasped at his story.

“Take over the school? That wretched woman?” she said, holding her hand to her mouth in horror. Sirius nodded grimly, and a look of intensity came over Madame Pomfrey’s features.

“Well, I don’t cave so easily,” she said, sniffing haughtily at the thought of being under Umbridge’s thumb.

“Spoken like a true Gryffindor,” Sirius smiled up at her.

“Gryffindor?” you said, shocked. I mean, it made sense for Madame Pomfrey to attend Hogwarts in her youth, but you’d never really thought about it--much less what house she’d belong in.

“Yes, Gryffindor, but I never let that cloud my judgment, Slytherin,” she sneered playfully at you. You and Sirius let out a laugh, yours dying much quicker as she came back towards you.

“Alright, dear, last one. It looks like his pinky claw didn’t quite reach you,” she said, grimacing as she spoke.

Wrapping my fingers around the bed frame and Sirius’ hand, you nodded. 

And like always, it was hell. Screaming, you tried to quiet yourself, but it was to no avail. Your mouth seemed to have a mind of its own as she worked her way down your leg, pushing out the rotting flesh

“Y/N?!” a voice yelled groggily. Cursing, Sirius slipped from your grasp and disappeared from view. Despite Sirius’ absence, Madame Pomfrey continued. 

“Almost done, ‘few more seconds, dear,” she said.

Casting a look down, your head spun at the image below you. Your limb looked more zombie-like than human. It was a horrible mixture of deep burgundy, black as the infection ran down your leg, and purple from your enlarged veins highlighting here and there.

“Remus! Contain yourself!” Sirius scolded. You knew you should shut your mouth to calm him, but it didn’t seem possible with the imagery added to the sensation. Finally, she stopped, and you fell back against the pillows once more, vision blacking round the edges as you fought to regain your breath. 

Then, what sounded like a dull thud followed by a groan sounded, and Remus burst through the curtains. What he saw brought him to his knees.

“Would you believe me if I told you it’s not as bad as it looks?” you said, trying to force out a laugh. It came out as a strangled cough, though, as your throat was raw from yelling.

“It’ll be alright, Remus. She’ll be fine by this time tomorrow, come on,” Madame Pomfrey fretted over Remus, and you could see her soft spot for your brother remained.

“But...” he trailed off. Words seemed to fail him, and he gestured weakly to your grotesque limb.

“Well, sit down, drink this,” she said, forcing a lavender-colored liquid into his slightly shaking hands. “Calm down, and we’ll explain. If you go roaring off again, I’ll have to knock you out with something much stronger than the last,” she threatened, lowering her eyes at Remus. With a sudden fondness, you remembered her disdain for chaos in her wing.

“Oh, Sirius,” she sighed. He’d just come in clutching a bloody nose, but seemed amused rather than angry.

“Remus!” you said, shocked at your brother.

“It’s quite alright, love. If someone were trying to keep me from you while you were screaming like that, I’d do the same.” Sirius smiled at you. A tingly feeling brewed in your chest at his words. “Excellent right hook, Moony,” he complimented, bowing slightly at his friend.

Tonks followed in soon after, rolling her eyes at the two of them. You met her eyes, and the both of you mouthed ‘men’ at each other whilst shaking your head.

As Remus laughed weakly at Sirius and downed the rest of the liquid, a small boy in scarlet and gold came to collect Tonks. With a wave and a glance back at Remus, she was gone. The effects of the potion were instantaneous; his hands ceased their shaking, he sat up a little straighter and took a deep breath.

“Now, then,” Madame Pomfrey sighed, “Her leg. It seems our favorite furry little friend seemed discontent with the marring effects of his claws alone and dipped them in what we’ve found to be a decaying drought.” 

Bracing yourself for his reaction, you were extremely shocked to find him reasonable still.

“You’ve got Severus making the antidote, then?” Remus asked logically. 

“I’ll take a dozen of whatever that was for later,” you breathed at Madame Pomfrey. Remus was such a reasonable, logical person in every situation, except when it came to you. When it came to you, however, he was much more reminiscent of his wolfish counterpart.

Everyone laughed lightly at your comment, and you sat up slightly, most of the pain fading. 

“So, what now?” I asked.

“Now, dear. You rest. Though, I daresay at some point your friend here will have a trio of visitors,” she said, twinkling at Sirius.

Sirius smiled in realization, and you were happy he got to see his godson early--even if it did take you suffering from a poisonous werewolf attack.

“I’ll be staying, Poppy,” Remus said, pulling up a chair. You opened your mouth to reason with him, but he stopped you by lifting his hands, and you sighed--there was only so much the potion could do.

She cast wary glances at Sirius and Remus.

“You know, I don’t believe there was a single night in which the two of you were in here that didn’t end in various bangs, pop, and screams.” Suddenly, her demeanor was very intense and McGonagall-like. “The first will be tonight. Or you’ll both end up in an empty cot!”

“Poppy, we are adults, you know,” Remus reminded her, smiling lightly.

“Oh, like that ever stopped you lot,” Madame Pomfrey said, giving them each a stern stare as she left.

“We’ll be on our very best behavior, Poppy,” Sirius said solemnly, though the mischievous twinkle in his eyes gave him away.

 “You two will be the death of me,” she sighed, whisking away back to her desk, a concerned look on her face. 

******************************

Taglist: @geeksareunique @fredweasleysbitchh @green-intervention @stopbeingcurious @ @blackbirddaredevil23 @pan-pride-12 @deathkat657 @theeicedamericano

[legoshi-plz]

Late Night Visitor (Riz x Reader)

Summary: It’s late at night and Riz catches you by yourself. Looks like Herbivores aren’t his only prey. Dark!Riz x Domesticated Dog! Reader

Part Two

Warnings: Smut (NSFW +18), Dark! Non-Con. TW: For Rape, Abuse, Mention Of Past Victims, etc.

///////////

“H-Hello?” Silence. It must have just been the wind.

You knew you shouldn’t be alone in the auditorium by yourself this late at night and that a teacher could come give you detention at any moment but you really needed to practice. Louis said the dance solo slot in the next Drama Club Showcase was as good as yours if you could prove to him you were the best dancer there. You knew you weren’t but you were the most creative by far and as long as you could perfect the routine you had fine-tuned especially for your body and capabilities, there was no way he couldn’t give it to you.

You knew there was always the possibility he wouldn’t give it to you anyway just because you were a Carnivore. Not just any Carnivore, a domesticated dog, the clumsiest your Canine clan had to offer. Certain moves that were cakewalks for the more graceful and agile Carnivores, like Juno, had you stumbling in seconds. But what you lacked in equilibrium, you made up for in determination.

The auditorium doors opened and shut. Your ears weren’t deceiving you, you definitely weren’t alone.

“Hello?” More silence.

“I know you’re there.” More silence. You walked to the front of the stage and saw a large figure standing by the door.

“I was just about to leave,” you called out in case it was a teacher. Something in the back of your mind told you if it was a teacher, they would have spoken up by now.

The figure stepped closer, approaching you slowly. Your eyes finally adjusted enough to the lack of light and you could make out who it was. It was a grizzly bear, he was in the same year as you in the Art Department of the Drama club. You were a little embarrassed to admit you didn’t really know anything about him, you had never really noticed him. What was his name again? Ralph? Razz? Rick? Ri-Riz!

“Riz, is that you?” You said lightly. He was now directly in front of you standing below the stage.

“What are you doing here all by yourself?” He asked. His voice was so friendly. You could recall speaking to him a few times before in passing, he was always so friendly. It was such a contrast to his aura, which your dog instincts found downright menacing. You scolded yourself for your own ingrained prejudice. You had to give him the benefit of the doubt, you were both Carnivores after all. If Carnivores didn’t stick up for each other, who would?

“I was just practicing. The Winter Showcase is right around the corner.” You laughed dryly. His beady eyes never left you for a second. It was unnerving.

“You shouldn’t be here all alone. There’s monsters out there.” He stepped onto the stage as if it was any other measly step and not nearly a four feet drop.

“Monsters....? Like who?” you noticed his frame, where intimidating before, was downright massive now. He hadn’t always been this big, you were sure of it. You would have noticed right?

“Like me.” Silence. More silence.

Once your mind finally wrapped around what he had said, your legs immediately took off only to have him slam you into the ground before you could even make it off the stage. When you tried to crawl away he grabbed you by your ankle and drug you back to him.

“Now you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” He growled, his sharp fangs barred.

You knew occasionally when an animal was extremely desperate, they would eat other Carnivores but it was such a rare occurrence, nearly unheard of in today’s society. It was especially rare for female dogs, their meat was highly unfavorable to the palette so they were rarely devoured however they did come in as the number one demographic of victims for a.... different type of assault.

Riz ripped away your uniform, tearing it nearly to shreds. Your blood turned cold as you realized exactly what he planned to do.

“No... no Riz, please!” You begged trying to cover yourself. He chuckled then proceeded to rip your underwear off, not worried about your bra.

Domesticated Female Dogs were the number one victims of rape from male carnivores of all species. They were seen as docile, weak, and in some instances, traitors to the animal race. They were also easy targets. No one ever believed a Carnivore when they were attacked. They were supposed to be able to defend themselves right? Right?

Riz seemed intent to show you just how wrong you were.

“Please, Riz, you don’t have to do this!” You screamed thrashing beneath him. He grabbed you by your neck, lifting you slightly then slamming you back down to the ground. Your ears started ringing.

“You sure have a lot to say to me now? I can remember you not even knowing I was alive.” He grumbled, unbuckling his pants and pulling them down. Of course he went commando.

“I’m sorry! Please, let me go, I’ll do better!” You were near hysterical now, the panic having fully set in.

“Too late,” He sighed in content, ripping your legs apart and settling between then. His menacing girth already standing at attention.

He spit into his hand, pumping his swollen length then lining himself up with your entrance. He thrust once, stretching you way beyond your limit.

“Wait, please, just give me a second. You’re gonna tear me in two with that thing!” You cried, placing a hand on his stomach to try and keep him at bay.

“That’s the whole point,” he chuckled, pushing more, “ but I’m not a total bastard. I’ll make you a deal, kiss me and I’ll think about going slow.”

“Y-you can’t be serious-“

“One time offer, take it or leave it,” he pushed further and you could have wept at the pain.

“Fine, fine, fine! I’ll do it, I’ll kiss you just please give me a second!” You sat up on your elbows, wondering how the hell you were going to reach up to kiss his massive form.

He leaned down to meet you halfway before murmuring, “Try anything funny and I’ll break your jaw.”

You gulped and allowed him to kiss you. Without warning, he pushed his entire length into you, making you cry out in pain. This was all the opportunity he needed to shove his tongue down your throat to silence you. Just when you thought you were about pass out from lack of oxygen, he finally let your lips go with a cocky grin.

He wasted no time pumping into you, each thrust feeling like a punch to the gut. He was way too big for the shamefully inadequate amount of prep you endured. If things were different, if the two of you were actual lovers, if he actually gave a damn about this feeling good, you knew it would. There were small wisps of pleasure mixed in with the overall guilt and pain of him fucking you and you couldn’t help but imagine how amazing this would have felt if any other circumstances had brought the two of you together. But not this. This was demeaning. This was force. This was ra-

“The least you could do is look at me when I fuck you!” Riz’s voice thundered. Your eyes shot to his hulking form sweating on top of you. Something was wrong with him, besides the fact he was forcing his dick inside you. He didn’t look like he usually did, something in him had snapped. Even his eyes, which were almost friendly twenty minutes ago, looked absolutely feral now. He almost looked... wild.

“Tell me how good this feels! Tell me how much you love this,” Riz was going at a near bone breaking speed now and you were struggling to stay in rhythm just so you could avoid the worst of his strength. He was too caught up in his own delusional fantasy to realize you were gyrating away from him.

His claws suddenly wrapped around your throat. His fangs were glistening in saliva, his entire disposition showcasing his carnal hunger.

“Do it or I’ll fucking rip your throat out?” He growled, one claw hovering over your kill point. Your body clenched in fear.

“It-It f-f-fee-“

“Louder!”

“It feels so good! Nobody’s ever fucked me like this! Your cock’s so huge! I love it!” You yelled but you were only rewarded with his muderous laughs.

“Fuck! You just got so fucking tight! That does it for you, huh? You get turned on when I threaten to kill ya?” His grip tightened on your throat, this time completely constricting your airways. You thought this was going to be the time you actually passed out but right as your vision turned tunnel, he let you go, cumming deep inside you.

“Fuuuuuuck, if I had known it was going to be that good, I would’ve done this a long time ago.” He panted on top of you. You were still gasping for air, having finally been released from his hold.

He pulled himself out of your wrecked womb and watched completely mesmerized as his cum leaked out of you. He tucked himself back into his pants and stood, adjusting his uniform.

“Tell anybody about this and I’ll have to kill you, just like I killed the last one,” Riz said casually, hopping off the stage and out the auditorium doors.

Your entire body felt grotesque. It was like your fur wasn’t your fur anymore, like your limbs weren’t even your limbs anymore. You couldn’t even bare to pick yourself up you were so ashamed. It was as if he took your body with him, as if... as if...

As if you belonged to him now.

[captain-emmajones]

Love, Emma (6/7)

(Art by the wonderful @carpedzem​ <3)

Loosely based on Love, Rosie (2014).

Killian and Emma are best friends and neighbors. They’ve always been – until he leaves for the Navy when his brother dies. When he comes back, nine months later, summer has begun and childhood is ending. Emma can tell something is changed in him, but she doesn’t know what. Until she does. He’s fallen in love with someone else.

And then, suddenly, they’re kissing on her nineteenth birthday. When she asks him to forget their night out, and never talk about it again, Killian thinks she means to tell him she regrets the kiss they exchanged. Except she has no memory of it.

Killian and Emma will dance around each other, until their heads spin and their legs hurt, and everything becomes blurry and it has to stop – for both of their sake.

A huge thank you to @profdanglaisstuff who beta’d this and gave me her precious thoughts <3

Friends to Lovers - Mutual Pining - Angst - Fluff - 6000 words - ao3

Part 1 - MIRRORBALL, Part 2 - AUGUST , Part 3 - HOAX, Part 4 - PEACE, Part 5 - THIS IS ME TRYING,  Part 7 - INVISIBLE STRING

Note: Everyone gives a lot of love to @carpedzem​ who drew this wonderful art for this fanfic :’)) 

Quick Summary: Last chapter ended on Neal finding Killian's love letter to Emma. This chapter opens on Emma, a week after Killian and Emma's kiss.

Reminder: Present time is Emma’s wedding to Neal, and that scene on the balcony during which Killian congratulates Emma on her wedding -- although he’s mostly dying inside. The words “I love you” slip out of his mouth, however he’s quick to add “as a friend” which leaves us with two very sad individuals who are both committing a grave mistake.

PART 6 - CARDIGAN

Six months before Emma’s wedding, a week after Emma and Killian’s kiss.  

Emma tosses and turns in her bed. She does not want to glance at the clock sitting on her bedside table. It’s probably joyfully, painfully displaying a horrendous number set between 1am and 5am and Emma wants nothing to do with it.

 There is not a spark of light in the room she shares with Neal, the heavy window shutters closed down.

 Emma wishes there was some kind of light. Perhaps then the weight over her chest would feel less terrifying, would feel less like the terrible, dark blue waves of a tormented sea she watches swallow her alive and spit her back onto the sand. 

 She’s battered between the waves, back and forth, back and forth, skin rocking against water, until she manages to reach the surface and breathes in deeply.

 But she’s only inhaling sea water and it fills her lungs and brings her to tears and it’s bitter, and it’s shit, and she cannot forget the taste of Killian’s lips.

 Another turn, a grunt of anger and despair.

 How dare he kiss her and let her leave him when he was in pain. How dare he.

 It was inevitable, whispers another part of her, but that part she ignores diligently. 

 Nothing is inevitable. Especially cheating on her future husband. With her friend whose feet were barely out of the surgery block.

 Well, she didn’t properly cheat if he was the one to kiss her…that would have been true, had she not furthered their kiss.

 Had she not backed him into his chair and sucked his breath away and marked his scalp with her fingers and tugged on his hair and filled his entire being with her, and her only. It was long overdue, after all.

 She turns, more aggressively this time, nearly knicks Neal out of the bed, her right foot whizzing past him. 

 She kissed him back because he was clearly seeking support and comfort and because a part of her will always love him, has always loved him and there’s nothing wrong with that.

 Horseshit.

 It is wrong. Utterly, completely, wrong.

 Nobody deserves to be cheated on. Nobody. Period.

 She’s just a piece of shit, now, is she?

 She glances on the side. Neal is still laying on his back, peacefully snoring, one arm flung across his face. She nearly hates him for it. She totally hates him for it.

 His chest raises up and down, comfortably, peacefully. What would Emma give for just an ounce of peace in her veins.

 Her breath is coming out in short puffs.

 It was inevitable, stammers once again her inner voice.

 “NO.”

 And the scream she thought only existed in her mind causes Neal to startle next to her, and this time she’s thankful it is complete darkness in their room, because he cannot see the flush on her cheeks.

 She can make out the shadow of his head lifting in the dark, and she imagines his features groggy with sleep. “You okay, Emma?”

 She turns back, grumbles. “Yeah, don’t worry. It’s just a nightmare.” And she definitely sounds like she’s blaming him for it.

 .

A long, tortuous week flies by. Emma’s under-eye circles darken with each passing day, and she is alarmly pale when Graham asks her in a weary tone: “You’re sure everything’s okay, Emma?”

 She nods and glances down at where Graham has been looking, and she realizes she’s been holding the files upside down.

 Well.

 “Shit. Yes. Sorry, Graham. I’ve been having a rough couple of days, is all.”

 And then Graham does this thing where he leans into her space, with his big brown eyes, and this kindness in his smile, and he inquires again: “Everything okay with Neal?”

 And Emma nods a bit too abruptly for it to be believable, and she knows Graham is smart enough to see it, but she nods harder, it’s the only movement her brain seems to know. “Neal? It’s never been better.” And a quick, lively chuckle to seal the deal. 

 And really had she laughed harder she would have choked on her fears.

 (Her fears have blue eyes and are missing a limb now, and she does not dare to send him a text, to ask him “How are you?” because he must be feeling like shit, and in part it is because of her, she left him, but he had no right to kiss her like this and she had no right to kiss him back.)

 .

 She has David on the phone later this week.

 “Hello, Emma. I’ve arrived in Portsmouth. I’ll be spending the week with him.”

 She hates the feeling of guilt that circles her heart, even as she sighs her biggest sigh of relief. 

“Thank you, David, it means the world. I would have come, you know, but I’m so busy with the wedding and the sheriff station and—”

 “Sure thing, Emma,” he blurts out and Emma thinks he sounds so accusative, it nearly knocks her out. She is convinced she deserves it. “I’ll take care of him, don’t worry.” A few words more, and he hangs up.

 For the first time in ages, Emma feels like Killian and she are on opposite teams, and David has chosen his.

 She swallows a lump down her throat. 

 .

 Emma caves in on Saturday night. Outside, the rain is pouring heavily against her windows. The wind is also howling, curling around the walls of the house and threatening to crush it under its strength. 

Neal is out at Granny’s watching a soccer game with friends when Emma sits down on the hard wooden floor of their living room. Her legs are crossed and her heart is drumming in her ears, and she calls him. There’s a bottle of red wine in front of her, and it’s looking at her with a lot of judgement in its glassy eyes but Emma doesn’t care.

 She cannot go on like this. She needs to know that he is alright, and that this was all a grave, stupid mistake, and she needs him to say something like “I’m fine, Emma, I’ll survive this” but also “I meant to do that for years” and then it would be her cue to nod under the ceiling light, tears in her smile and she’d say some stupid shit like “Oh god, I’ve been waiting for you to say that” and then she’d drop everything to fly back to him and they’d be happy together or some shit.

 Ring, ring, ring.

 That’s a lovely dream indeed.

 Ring, ring, ring.

 And just as Emma gets impatient, not to say she gets scared, a voice answers her. It’s a groggy, foggy voice, and it does not belong to Killian.

 “Hello, what is it?” The voice echoes, chuckles, as music resonates behind it, and it is the voice of a woman.

 Emma figures they must be in some kind of pub, just like Neal is.

 “Is this Killian’s phone?” attempts Emma, fingers clutched onto the phone, and heart on her sleeves.

 “Yup...” Another giggle. Emma decides she hates the voice. “But he is currently unavailable. Do you want me to give him a message?”

 And then Emma hears his voice, emerging from a twirl of songs and other talks. “Why are you using my phone, Tink?”

 Emma thinks Killian’s voice irrupts into her empty house just as a gust of wind rattles her shutters. She flinches. And for a minute, glances above her shoulder, afraid that he might appear behind her back. 

But silence is her only companion. And this house is so impressively, distinctively silent. 

 Something clicks inside of Emma’s brain. Tink. She knows Tink. What’s her real name? Mary something. They went to high school together, and she had a disgustingly big crush on Killian, and, and –

 “I dunno, some chick.”

 And Emma barely has time to hear Killian’s “Which chick?” before she hangs up on a whim.

 She heaves, hands trembling around the phone, and something grotesque disfigures her face.  

 She was worried about him and he’s been having the time of his life with this Tink, and, and – what was she expecting?

 She stares at the floor as though she is able to distinguish the broken bits of her heart spilled there, and the bloody marks they leave, and it’s such a goddamn mess, and how could she allow herself to feel this way after all these years, after having been shown all the goddamn reasons why Killian Jones will never love her back a hundred fucking times.

 .

 Rose-Mary, of her surname Tink, tosses and turns in Killian’s bed. He is fast asleep next to her, one hand thrown across his face. He snores lightly.

 Tink has this tingling desire deep within her, this desire to grab the phone he left on his nightstand and delete Emma Swan’s call from it.

 “Give me the phone, Tink!”

 Back in the bar, she was quite lucky to find out in the shape of his raised eyebrows that Killian Jones wasn’t actually serious, that he was seriously hammered and couldn’t have cared less for his phone if he had tried. As her only answer, she had simply locked her lips to his and pressed his phone’s home button to switch it off.

 Because Tink knows Emma Swan.

 Killian Jones was already in love with her when Tink asked him out, during their senior year. She cannot forget the look on his face, as she was standing in the middle of the hallway, risking her heart. Behind her, Emma Swan was leaning against a locker with Mary Margaret and Ruby, and Killian simply, positively wouldn’t look Tink in the eyes.

 “I’m sorry, love,” he said, “but my affections lie elsewhere.” And Tink remembers thinking he surely didn’t have to sound like he escaped from one of Shakespeare’s plays, and she turned to discover the pretty blonde smiling at Killian, waving with mischief, and his arm around her shoulders as soon as he reached her.

 Some things were truly unfair.

 As luck would have it, Killian’s path crossed hers years ago – when he moved to Portsmouth to join the Navy whilst she began Nursing school. But even then, he didn’t seem interested, was dating an older woman.

 And then, finally, two days ago, their paths crossed again in a bar. He is missing a hand now, but he is still the same handsome guy she crushed on in high school. Perched on a stool, he looked disheveled, desperate, nose in his rum glass, and he welcomed her into his warm, solid arms.

 “Still in contact with Emma Swan?” she asked, and it wasn’t like she cared. She didn’t want more than he could offer. But still, she asked.

 “Emma? Who’s Emma? I only see you.”

 Although she knew that to be a lie, she still decided to kiss him back, knowing the instant Killian Jones heard Emma Swan’s name again, well then, he would find a very gentle, delicate way to make her go away.

 And that’s fine. But if she can prevent it, well –

 Tink stands up as silently as she can, and like a feather in the wind, grabs his phone. He casually gave her his pin number earlier during the night — change this bloody song Tink will you — and Tink deletes Emma’s call in the blink of an eye.

 Satisfaction sparkles in her heart. No one will bother them anymore.

 .

 As Neal and Emma go on tasting wedding cakes, Emma thinks about how Killian never called her back. Not the morning after her conversation with Tink, not the night after, not the day after, he did not call. Period. It’s the only answer he is willing to give, and she accepts it.

 He doesn’t care about her. Not like she cares, anyway.  

 “The chocolate one,” Emma mumbles, trying not to spit crumbs of cakes out of her mouth and failing, “it’s perfect.”

 Delicacy remains a skill she has yet to learn.

 But Neal doesn’t seem to mind when he chuckles and kisses her cheek. Emma grabs his face and doesn’t care that there are still chocolate chunks in her mouth and she kisses him, hard, to forget the taste of Killian Jones’ lips.

 .

 Killian stares at the picture of Emma and himself on his fridge. It’s been a month, stammers his heart. She will not call, now.

 Tink is still sleeping in his bed. He needs to call things off with her as well. She’s too attached, he’ll break her heart. That’s one too many hearts to be responsible for.

 He swallows stone, but he takes the picture off the fridge. It’s too painful to stare at what ifs.

 .

 A few minutes before Emma and Neal say “I do”.

 Taking a picture off a fridge is simple enough. Not racing towards the town hall of Storybrooke to try, one last time, and stop Emma’s wedding, isn’t nearly as easily done.

 Hope and denial are, after all, two very close kingdoms and both of them inhabit Killian’s heart.

 At least he’s got that going for him. However, Mary Margaret and David – who are also running beside him – really have nothing going for them except for their foolishness.

 How dare they show up in his home and tear him out of his cobweb of misery and self-pity. How bloody dare they.

 “There’s no use arguing, I’m not going!” he yelled, and then Mary Margaret had this very dangerous smile, and before he knew it, his ass sat on a plane between the two of them and he was wearing his most expensive tie.

 “And look sharp, Killian.” 

 Which is why, as Killian races down that street corner, and up that small hill by Granny’s, and then down again Main street, towards the town hall, Killian no longer expects Emma and Neal to come out of the building, holding hands, married. 

 But that’s exactly what happens.

 They come out as a crowd of strangers surrounds them, and they look like the sun has set all of its rays of sunshine on them, they are shining, shining, much like the waves of fear down Killian’s belly because he is too late. Of course he is. 

 And he wants to turn around and hit David in the face. 

 But what’s the use of fighting anymore? The war is lost. Lay your weapons down. Bring the soldiers home.

 And in that moment, as the sun seems to align with some divine power and its golden beams shine on Emma’s eyes, glittering green lakes, she gazes at him and he holds his breath. In spite of everything, he still thinks she is the most beautiful woman on earth. He smiles, as his heart shatters to the ground, as Neal kisses her open mouth. 

What is there else to do but smile?

 “Fuck,” exclaims Mary Margaret next to him, and Killian sure does nod.

 “Aye. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”  

 .

 Present day – Neal and Emma’s wedding reception.

 Neal watches as Emma shuts the large French windows that lead to the balcony behind her. He puts down his glass of champagne on the white table in front of him. The bubbles fizz inside, as if to mock him.

 For there’s not the shadow of a smile on his wife’s face. In fact, she looks utterly devastated. Her complexion is pale, her cheeks have lost all the colors they gathered during their dances, and there is not one sparkle of happiness left in her green eyes.

 A frown. Why does his wife look devastated at their wedding?

 He sees her glance down, seemingly lost, and she does this thing when she doesn’t know where to put her hands, so she folds them in front of her. And she plays with the bracelet around her wrist, twists the little charms, twists, twists his heart.

 And then he realizes. She’s waiting. But for what? Or rather, for whom?

 He wishes the answer didn’t come quite as soon, not quite as sharply, he wishes the room did not start spinning as Killian Jones leaves the balcony in his turn – devilishly handsome as he’d say and looking entirely like a mess.

 What a picture. They both look devastated. They look like the bride and groom, him in his white shirt and her in her white dress. Two bleeding snowflakes under a golden chandelier.

 Neal watches as Emma risks a glance back, but Killian doesn’t look up, only stares at the hard wooden floor, Neal watches as she presses her lips together and straightens her back, but still glances back at him.

 Always back at him. Of course. 

 And that’s when one realization hits Neal quite hard.

 His wife… His wife is in love with someone else. He just married someone who is irrevocably and for all of eternity in love with someone else.

 Why did he do this to himself? For the longest of times, Neal thought it didn’t matter that Emma’s gaze was filled with green, shimmering clouds of pain whenever Killian Jones’ name was mentioned in a conversation, he really thought it didn’t matter that her cheeks would always flush whenever she received a text from him, because he was the one kissing her lips and sleeping between her sheets.

 He was such a fool.

 He married a woman in love with someone else.

 Such a fool.

 Neal grabs his glass of champagne again, downs it in a few angry mouthfuls, and gathers courage and legs to stand and stride towards his wife.

 Emma might be in love with Killian, but she loves him too, surely she does, or she wouldn’t have agreed to this marriage, right?

 And there is something very scary vibrating in his chest, fear, a green and viscous fear, he’s losing her, she’s slipping between her fingers…

 “Neal,” Emma’s voice is very soft as it greets him, but her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

 How dare she, how dare she be in love with Killian, when Neal gave up everything for her, when he…

 From the corner of his eye, Neal can see Killian lean against the wall. He is looking at them. Perfect. Now watch, you little fucker.

 “Hello, baby,” two words, and Neal dips Emma and savagely presses his lips onto hers.

 A burst of applause rattles the crowd. 

Neal tries his best to muffle the voice inside his head that sneers that the only thing their guests are cheering at, is the end of their love.

 .

  “I’m going back to our room, I’m really tired” mumbles Emma over her empty mojito glass.

The sea whispers behind her back. Neal doesn’t look up from his piña colada. 

 On the terrace of this luxurious hotel by the French Riviera, Neal and Emma are sitting and everything sucks.

 It is the third day of their honeymoon, and for Neal, it is the last straw. There is no way in hell he can keep up this charade. They both deserve better than this.

 She’s been looking miserable since they arrived here – it isn’t for a lack of trying to conceal it. Actually, no, it’s worse than that. She’s been looking miserable since Killian Jones left their wedding without a look back at her. Should have seen her face, Eurydice left by Orpheus in the depths of hell.  

 It’s killing him to see her like this, to know there’s nothing he can do to make things better. Purely and simply because, as much as he’s tried to, Neal Cassidy will never replace Killian Jones in Emma Swan’s heart.

 And as she bends towards him to give him a quick peck on the lips, a very vicious sentence tickles his tongue and he lets it out without a second thought.

 “Bet you looked more eager to kiss Killian.”

 It is a dick move, yes, but after all he isn’t the one who cheated on her, and Neal thinks she deserves a little karma.

 The look she darts on him then would have probably killed him, had there not been empty glasses standing between the two of them to shield him.

 “What the hell are you talking about?” she spits out in a sharp, defensive tone. 

Neal is surprised she tries to deny it all.

 “Your lover sent you a letter,” he hisses back.

 Satisfaction sparkles in his heart at the sight of her face turning crimson under the moonlight.  

 He watches as she angrily gulps a last mouthful of rum, watches as her knuckles whiten around her glass and her jaw clenches. “Who are you talking about?”

“Who the hell do you think I’m talking about?” 

And then the god forsaken, sacrilegious name. “...Killian sent me a letter?”

 And from guilt to anger, there is only one, treacherous step. And she seems eager to jump it.

 “Oh yeah, he did. Said it all about your kiss and loving you, and I nearly vomited…”

 And then it is really upsetting because he wants to be mad but her face does that thing where it just freezes, mouth open wide and eyes even wider, and it would have been funny had he not been putting an end to their short-lived marriage.

 “He…he loves me?”

 She cannot possibly not know it. She can’t be that oblivious to reality.

 “I’m telling you I know you cheated on me and that’s your only reaction?” A roll of eyes, his voice coming out shriller, to mock her, mock her pain, because he wants to hurt her like she hurt him. “ “He loves me?” Of course he loves you, Emma!” he blurts out, because the entire world knows it except for her, apparently.  

 He can’t have married someone as oblivious.

 Well, you did marry her knowing she was in love with someone else.

 And she stands up, cheeks hot and burning and red, and she isn’t making any sense anymore. “What the hell are you talking about? Killian doesn’t love me, he never has.”

 And seeing her wrath, the way her body trembles and shakes, he knows she is truly convinced Killian Jones isn’t in love with her.

 But how…

 “You really don’t know, do you?”

 “Where is that letter?”

 “I got rid of it, of course!”

 “Then you have no proof! How convenient.”

 He wants to stop her then, to yell “Hey YOU cheated on me,” but he can tell that in her grand order of things, her cheating on him has nothing on Killian Jones possibly loving her.

 And then a small, mad chuckle jolts out of her mouth. “Killian would never write a letter. You made that up.”

 “But how would I know about the kiss?”

 “I don’t know, and I don’t care, and I, I—” A turn, and then she is gone, disappearing in a tornado of anger and guilt and sand.

 Neal doesn’t try to hold her back, remains very still on his seat, lets her go, much like he should have years ago. He glances down at the empty drink between his fingers.

 The waves crash against the sand, whoosh, whoosh, and Neal feels terribly lonely.

 But at peace.

 But mostly lonely.

 Damnit, she is stubborn, and she is lucky he’s in love with her. That he’ll always be, somehow, even if he is a fucking idiot who probably blew his only chance at love when he stole those watches.

 .

 Later that night, Neal finds her sitting on their king side bed and its perfectly white blankets, hands folded in front of her like he knows them to, shoulders down and head bent towards the floor, and Neal desperately wants to hug her.

 There is not an ounce of anger left in his body. Only sadness. 

 There’s not a flicker of light in their room as he sits down by her side. The rustle of the waves can be heard from their room. It’s the only reason why he chose it. He knows she loves that sound. 

(He doesn’t know she loves it because of him, but that’s fine.)

  “Hey…” he begins softly, and his shoulder gently bumps against hers. “You okay?”

 She’s twirling her wedding ring around her finger. Of course she is. She always has been. And that should have been a clue, too.

 “Are you being sincere right now?” she asks, and her voice is nothing like the voice he’s grown to love.

 Emma’s voice has always been soft, but vibrating with a very triumphant confidence as well.

 “What do you mean?” he asks, because precisely he doesn’t know what she means.

 He’s never understood her like Killian can, in spite of how much he loves her. And while he spent most of the beginning of his adulthood hating him for it, he realizes now it is simply a battle he cannot win.

 She lifts her face up, and he makes out her shimmering eyes in the darkness.

 “I cheated on you. Aren’t you mad?”

 A gigantic sigh shakes his shoulders as these past six months flash before his eyes.

 “I was angry, Emma. But it’s been too long, I’m not anymore.”

 “Too long?”

 Oh, right, that. She’ll hate him, but well, she deserves the truth. He winces, fidgets with the collar of his shirt.

 “I might have been hiding this letter from you for a good six months now…” he whispers, and forces a smile on his face as an apology. 

 “You what?”

 She doesn’t sound nearly as angry as he expected her to. In fact, she doesn’t sound angry at all. She sounds defeated, hopeless.

 “I was so scared that if I confronted you, you would just run and never marry me, and I thought I could hold on to you by not telling you…But I was wrong. There was no holding on to you.”

 And something terrible rattles her body then, as she cups her face and disappears even more in a small, scared puddle over the bed.

 “Fuck. I’m sorry Neal. I ruined everything.”

 And he shakes his head then, grabs one of her hands. “There’s no need to apologize, Emma. We both fucked up. I should have let you go a long time ago.”

 His throat is tight, but he knows this is the right thing to do.

 “What are we going to do now?” she whispers, just as one of his arms comes to wrap around her shoulders.

 She muffles a sigh in the crook of his neck while he gently brushes her hair.  

 “I don’t know. Is there some kind of three weeks wedding notice?”

 She chuckles then, but he can clearly imagine the tears rolling down her cheeks as she sniffles into his neck.

 “You’re an idiot.”

 “I am.”

 Silence. By then, it’s somehow raining in the room and his shirt is soaked.

 “I’ll always love you. You know that, right, Emma?”

 She nods in the darkness, her hand clutching onto his shoulder, and she seems to him a firefly caught between a child’s chubby hands.

 “I know, Neal.”

 “Good.”

  .

 Moving out of this house is one of the weirdest things Emma has ever had to do.

 “Emma, you’re not coming?” calls David’s voice, and Emma looks up to see his head peering from the driver’s seat of his old, orange truck.

 Safely packing all of the pieces of furniture was a collective effort. Mary Margaret, Ingrid and Ruby also came to help, and Emma is quite thankful. It’s such a blinding, sunny day of August, and if not for the fresh breeze that swirls between the tree branches, it would be unbreathable.

 Emma simply shakes her head. “No, don’t worry. I’ll join you guys later at Granny’s.” 

Her right foot nearly knocks out the small cardboard box at her feet, sending a loop down her stomach. 

This one she’ll carry herself.  

 Neal and Emma agreed to sell the house and the furniture, and Neal – well Neal decided to move to Boston, and Emma cannot quite blame him.

 This last month has been…weird, on so many levels, and Neal wasn’t the weirdest thing about it.

 “Alright. Call us if you need anything.”

 As David drives away, Emma stares back at the house. Her feet seem buried into the doormat, the door still open wide, and her fingers clutch onto the keys.

 It is a bittersweet sight, those empty walls.

 She thinks life has a funny way of coming around. She thinks she thought she’d have a family there, with Neal, she thinks she thought this was what she wanted, what she could bear to have and risk losing.

 She’s glad that Neal showed himself braver than she ever could. That he refused to settle, for both of their sakes.

 She inhales deeply.

 Exhales.

 And lets it go. All of it.  

 Click, she locks the door, and turns her back on her past.

 A summer breeze greets her face, swirls around her legs and tangles her hair, and she closes her eyes into the warm embrace. It carries childhood smells, this smell of burnt wood, and Rocky Road ice-cream, and Killian’s cologne.

 “Heard you needed help moving out?” Her eyes snap open. Her heart skips a beat.

 It’s August in Storybrooke, Maine, and anything is possible again. 

 The wind carries the first fallen leaves to her feet and his scent to her heart. Something mystical splits her face as she takes a step towards him. She nearly trips on the cardboard box at her feet, again, grunts and picks it up in a blink, and she hears it – his laughter in the wind.

 As she looks up, a flower blooms in her chest, carries blood to her heart and her face with its roots, and her lungs are soon filled to the brim with petals. 

 “Yeah.” A quivering whisper, it is hard to breathe when the sun drops golden and blue beams into his eyes. “Thank you, Killian.”

 And in a few strides he imprisons the cardboard box she held against her chest, the one containing memories of her childhood, and his eyes are so warm on her face that he steals her breath away.

 “Any baggage left?” he asks, and it is a hoarse whisper as well. 

She swallows hard.

 She shivers beside him. She’s a fallen leaf herself, caught in a whirlwind. Her eyes are open wide and she feels completely swallowed by his gaze but it is a wonderful kind of fear.

 “Not at all.”

 And he smiles then, and it is one of the most gentle smiles she’s seen on his face, and at last, he is Killian and she is Emma.

 “Good.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[chiseler]

Stolen Faces

Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?

Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

The Truth of Masks

Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.

Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre.  The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.  

The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.

When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”

Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.

At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,��� with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside

Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s  Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.

Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.

People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.

The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.

Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.

A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”

Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.

Car crashes are a kind of refrain in the film. The doctor’s routine existence veers off course when a taxi knocks down a nightclub singer, Nora Prentiss (Anne Sheridan), across the street from his San Francisco office. Talk about a happy accident: the nice guy trapped in an ice-cold marriage to a rigid, nagging martinet suddenly has a gorgeous, good-humored young woman stretched out on his examining table. Nora may sing for a living, but her real vocation is dishing out wisecracks (her first words on coming to are, “There must be an easier way to get a taxi.”) When the doctor mentions a paper he’s writing on “ailments of the heart,” the canary, her eyelids dropping under the weight of knowingness, quips, “A paper? I could write a book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic pair of adulterers, but the doctor is so daunted by the prospect of asking his wife for a divorce that it seems simpler to use the convenient death of a patient in his office to stage his own demise and flee to New York with Nora. It’s soon clear, though, that some part of him did die in San Francisco. Cooped up in a New York hotel room, terrified of going out lest someone spot him, the formerly gentle man becomes an irascible, rude, nervous wreck. When the faithful and incredibly patient Nora goes back to singing for Phil Dinardo (Robert Alda), the handsome nightclub owner who loves her, Talbot becomes hysterically jealous. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he slaps Nora and almost kills Dinardo before fleeing the police and heading into that fiery crash. He becomes, as the film’s evocative French title has it, L’Amant sans Visage, “the lover without a face.”

When his bandages are removed, he is unrecognizable, wizened and scarred, his face a creased and calloused mask. His own wife doesn’t know him, and when Nora visits him in prison his damaged face, shot through a tight wire mesh, looks like something decaying, dissolving. He’s in prison because, in an even neater bit of irony, he has been charged with his own murder. He decides to take the rap, recognizing the justice of the mistake: he did kill Richard Talbot.

This same ironic plot twist appears in Strange Impersonation (1946), albeit less convincingly. This deliriously far-fetched tale, directed at a breakneck pace by Anthony Mann, stars Brenda Marshall as Nora Goodrich, a pretty scientist whose glasses signal that she is both brainy and emotionally myopic. She is harshly punished for caring more about work than marriage: her female lab assistant, who wants to steal Nora’s fiancé, tampers with an experiment so that it explodes, burning Nora’s face to a crisp. Embittered, she retreats from the world, and when another woman, who is trying to blackmail her over a car accident, falls from the window and is mistakenly identified as Nora, she seizes the opportunity to disappear, have plastic surgery that miraculously eliminates her scars, and return posing as the blackmailer, to seek revenge. She goes to work for her former fiancé, who strangely fails to recognize her voice or her striking resemblance to his lost love.

The plot plays out as, and turns out to be, a fever dream, but this last credibility stretcher is too common to dismiss as merely the flaw of one potboiler. Plots involving impersonation and identity theft rely not only on unrealistic visions of what plastic surgery can achieve, but on the assumption that people are deeply unobservant and tone-deaf in recognizing loved ones. A film that underlines this blindness with droll irony is The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph and The Man Who Murdered Himself, 1948), a convoluted but hugely entertaining little B noir in which Paul Henreid plays dual roles as a crook on the run and a psychologist who happens to look just like him. John Muller, pursued by hit men sent by a casino owner he robbed, stumbles across his doppelganger and decides to kill him and take his place. All he needs to do is give himself a facial scar to match the doctor’s. Only as he is dumping the body does he notice that he has put the scar on the wrong cheek—the consequence of an accidentally reversed photograph. But the irony quickly doubles back: Muller decides to brazen it out, and in fact no one notices that the doctor’s scar has apparently moved from one side of his face to the other—not even his lover. (Joan Bennett glides through this awkward part in a world-weary trance, giving a dry-martini reading to the script’s most famous lines: “It’s a bitter little world, full of sad surprises.”) The assumption that people pay little attention to the way others look or sound seems directly at odds with the power that faces and voices wield on film, and the intimate specificity with which we experience them. But noir stories often turn on how easily people are deceived, and how poorly they really know one another—or even themselves.

In The Long Wait (1954), perhaps the most extreme case of confused identity, a man with amnesia searches for a woman who has had plastic surgery. Not only does he not know what she looks like now, he can’t even remember what she used to look like. Since the movie is based on a Mickey Spillane story, he proceeds methodically by grabbing every woman he sees, in hopes that something will jog his memory. The film is fun in its pulpy, trashy way, provided you enjoy watching Anthony Quinn kiss women as though his aim were to throttle the life out of them. Quinn plays a man badly injured in a car wreck that erases both his memory and his fingerprints. This is lucky when he wanders into his old town and discovers he is wanted for a bank robbery—without fingerprints, they can’t arrest him. Figuring he must be innocent, he goes in search of the girlfriend who may or may not have grabbed the money and gone under the knife. It’s an intriguing premise, but the ultimate revelation of the right woman feels arbitrary, and the implications of all this confusion of identities are left resolutely unexamined. Nonetheless, there is something in the film’s searing, inarticulate desperation that glints like a shattered mirror.

Under the Knife

The promise of plastic surgery is a new and better self, the erasure of years and the traces of life. Taken to extremes, it is the opportunity to become a different person. Probably the best known plastic surgery noir is Dark Passage (1947), in which Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, who visits a back alley doctor after escaping from San Quentin. Parry was framed for killing his wife, so the face plastered across newspapers with the label of murderer has become a false face that betrays him. A friendly cabby who spots him recommends a surgeon who is he promises is “no quack.” Houseley Stevenson’s gleeful turn as the back-alley doctor is unforgettable, as he sharpens a straight razor while philosophizing about how all human life is rooted in fear of pain and death. He can’t resist scaring Parry, chortling over what he could do to a patient he didn’t like: make him look like a bulldog, or a monkey. But he reassures Parry that he’ll make him look good: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

During the operation, Parry’s drugged consciousness becomes a kaleidoscope of faces, all the people who have threatened or helped him swirling around. His face is being re-shaped, as his life has already been shaped by others: the bad woman who framed him and the good woman who rescues and protects him, the small-time crook who menaces him and the kind cabby who helps him. Faceless for much of the movie, mute for part of it (he spends a long time in constraining bandages), Vincent Parry is among the most passive and cipher-like of noir protagonists. When the bandages finally come off after surgery, he looks like Humphrey Bogart, and the idea that this famously beat-up, lived-in face could be the creation of plastic surgery is perhaps the film’s biggest joke. But Vincent Parry remains an oddly blank, undefined character, and he seems unchanged by his new face and name. In a sense the doctor is right: he only looks as though he’s lived.

The fullest cinematic exploration of the problems inherent in trying to make a new life through plastic surgery is Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer’s flesh-creeping sci-fi drama about a mysterious company that offers clients second lives. For a substantial fee, they will fake your death, make you over completely—including new fingerprints, teeth, and vocal cords—and create an entirely new identity for you. There is never a moment in the movie when this seems like a good idea. The Saul Bass credits, in which human features are stretched and distorted in extreme close-up, instills a horror of plasticity, and disorienting camera-work creates an immediate feeling of unease and dislocation, a physical discomfort at being in the wrong place.

Arthur, a businessman from Scarsdale, is the personification of disappointed middle age, afflicted by profound anomie that goes beyond a dull routine and a tired marriage. When the Company finishes its work—the process is shown in gruesome detail, to the extent that Frankenheimer’s cameraman fainted while shooting a real rhinoplasty—the formerly nondescript and greying Arthur looks like Rock Hudson, and has a new life as a playboy painter in Malibu. He’s told that he is free, “alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility.” He has “what every middle-aged man in America wants: freedom.”

At first, however, his life proves as empty and meaningless in this new setting as it was in the old; even when the Frankenstein scars have healed, he remains nervous and joyless as before. After he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde neighbor, who introduces him to a very 1960s California lifestyle, he begins to revel in youth and sensual freedom. Yet something is still not right; at a cocktail party he gets drunk and starts talking about his former existence—a taboo. He discovers that his lover, indeed almost everyone he knows, is an employee of the company or a fellow “reborn,” hired to create a fake life for him, and to keep him under surveillance. His “freedom” is a construct, tightly controlled.

Arthur rebels, making a forbidden trip to visit his wife, who of course does not recognize him. Talking to her about her supposedly deceased husband, for the first time he begins to understand himself: the depth of his alienation and confusion, the fact that he never really knew what he wanted, and so wanted the things he had been told he should want. Seconds is a scathing attack on the American ideal of a successful life, a portrait of how corporations sell fantasies of youth, beauty, happiness, love; buying into these commercial dreams, no one is really free to know what they want, or even who they are. Will Geer, as the folksy, sinister founder of the Company, talks wistfully about how he simply wanted to make people happy.

There is a deep sadness in the scenes where Arthur revisits his old home and confronts the failure of his attempt at rebirth—beautifully embodied by Rock Hudson in a performance suffused with the melancholy of a man who has spent his life hiding his real identity behind a mask. Yet Arthur still imagines that if he can have another new start, a third face and identity, he will get it right. Instead, he learns the macabre secret of how the Company goes about swapping out people’s identities. Seconds contrasts the surgical precision with which faces, bodies, and the trappings of life can be remade, and the impossibility of determining or predicting how or if the inner self will be changed. For that there are no charts or diagrams, and no knife that can cut deep enough.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[littlemomountain]

TianShan, Fallen Angel

This was commissioned to me by HWAN @Hwan_97 on Twitter. I have been given permission to post, please give all the love to the artist. This is my story to go along with the art.

——————————————

The chains bit too closely into Mo’s wrists, chafing at the skin enough to draw blood. The feelings of physical pain and unease that he had not experienced in a long time were resurfacing, and he now had to contend with the harsh voices of mockery at his ear, the unruly crowd of demonic beings, most grotesque and abominable in their appearance, gathered to watch the fallen seraphim be led through a broken, stony path towards the most imposing tower of the dark world.

“It is so hard to breath,” Mo Guan Shan thought, as searing heat emanated from everywhere, from everything. There was no surface that did not feel as it were burning under the slightest touch, no gust of wind that brought relief from the oppressive air, humid and tortuously dry in its wake. He desperately needed a drink of cold water; even the fewest drops of it on his tongue would have brought the greatest sense of relief.

Suddenly, Mo Guan Shan felt the unmistakeable slash of a whip across his back, hearing the snap of it and holding in the cry he knew the guard wanted to elicit from him. He gritted his teeth and pushed forward, unable to understand the insults hurled at him as the creature spoke in an unfamiliar dialect. If he had enough strength, he would have fought back. Even bound as he was and having been stripped of his rank, he was by no means weak. However, he knew it would be a losing battle with the number of demons surrounding him.

After what felt like hours, Mo Guan Shan found himself standing before an enormous gate of steel, the tower strategically situated on a mountainous terrain and structured to be a fortified stronghold of great, deadly power. The height of the tower appeared to have no end in sight, but undoubtedly culminated with the sharp pinnacles that gave the tower its menacing form.

A loud horn sounded from behind him, loud enough for Mo to feel the ground shake underneath his feet. There was a horn that sounded from inside the tower in response, and then the gates began to open slowly. Mo was pushed forward roughly and he stumbled, recollecting his balance with his next couple of steps. He was surprised to find that while there was still a sense of dread within the walls, it was also rather beautiful in a gothic way. The dark corridors were lined with statues of what he presumed to be important figures of this world, and the stone walls were lined with torches of fire that illuminated the pathway.

He was not able to get a closer look at his surroundings as Mo was led hurriedly up an old world spiraling staircase, catching glimpses of the outside with each window they passed. Mo felt they had been walking for a long time before the creatures handling him stopped before a large and elegantly crafted, carved cedar wood door. It felt so out of place in this setting, but Mo didn’t think too much about it as one of demons pounded the door with the brass door knock, engraved with the face of a devil. Footsteps could be heard from the other side, and the door was unlocked.

Expecting to see another creature, Mo was surprised to see what appeared to be a human-like figure with light-gray hair, tall and built with tattoos lining his right arm, but was immediately corrected in his view as he saw the devilish wings. The wings distinguished this one apart from the creatures that had bound him. He was higher in rank, his blood running with that of greater beings. Like him.

After giving Mo a once-over, this demon only permitted Mo to follow, leading him deeper inside the room which was clearly more grandiose than when they had come in. Dark roses embedded the walls along the floor-to-ceiling windows, hundreds of books were lined inside a shelf that covered the entire length of the left wall, and at the very end of the room, Mo could see a large desk built of black marble that was adorned with semi-precious stone. A demon was seated at this desk, and he remained transfixed at the sight of Mo. He wore a military jacket that had crimson shoulder epaulettes connecting a cape which draped along his sides. His black hair was neatly parted, with some of it curving slightly over his forehead. Horns crowned both his head and the top of his wings. His eyes locked onto the studs on Mo’s ears, and he smiled. “They look better on you then I could have ever imagined, Mo Guan Shan.”

“He Tian.” Mo said nothing else and watched as He Tian stood up from his desk. In a few strides he was in front of Mo, and began circling around him as if he were surveying a prize. That really wasn’t far off the mark, as Mo Guan Shan was nothing more than the spoils of war. He Tian froze behind him, and his voice grew hard. “Who did this?” Mo felt a touch at his back and along his wings, and winced. Fresh blood coated He Tian’s fingers. “I did not give anyone permission to touch you, much less to draw blood.” The way his voice dropped unsettled even Mo. “Qiu.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the other responded. As soon as Qiu left the room, Mo heard low voices outside followed by a sharp screeching that died out almost immediately after. Qiu re-entered the room as of nothing had happened only to briefly announce he was being summoned by He Tian’s brother. “Will you be alright without me?” he asked.

“More than alright,” He Tian responded. There was amusement in his voice, and a different emotion Mo couldn’t understand. With Qiu having left, Mo now found himself alone with He Tian. The pace of his heart quickened, and he hoped to appear as unconcerned as he would have liked to have felt.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you,” He Tian started. He came around to stand in front of Mo and began to remove the chains binding his hands. He surveyed the bruising on his wrists and his eyebrows furrowed. He Tian let the chains drop to the floor with a loud clunk and held on to Mo’s hands, being so attentive to them that Mo’s ear began to tinge red. “Forgive me,” He Tian said.

“You don’t need to ask a prisoner for forgiveness,” Mo Guan Shan replied dismissively.

“We both know that’s not what you are,” He Tian countered softly.

“Really? The chains speak differently.” Mo Guan Shan withdrew his hands and turned from him.

“That was a precautionary measure. You can have quite the temper.” Mo turned back around to glare at him. “Like that,” He Tian added.

“It doesn’t matter now. Our deal. How can I trust you won’t break your promise?” Mo Guan Shan asked.

He Tian didn’t say anything for a while. He moved forward and leaned in close to Mo. “Your life for Jian Yi’s, you mean?” He Tian whispered, and then stepped back, beginning to pace around the room as he spoke. “He is much too curious for his own good. How he managed to stumble his way down here is anyone’s guess, but he must be very loved, considering how all of you were ready to reach havoc on existence as we know it for that one angel. But why didn’t you let Zhan Zheng Xi take the fall? He was more than willing to.”

“We both know neither of them belong down here,” Mo Guan Shan’s voice hardened.

He Tian stopped mid-pace, and cocked his head to the side. “And you do?”

“Yes,” he answered immediately. “I do. I can handle the pain. I don’t care about getting hurt, or dying a thousand times over if I have to. But they... are much too pure for that, and I am not. I was never meant to be like them.” His hands shook slightly as he said this.

“You don’t think you were meant to be an angel?” He Tian asked in astonishment, and then shook his head. “You are wrong though, and your actions prove it to me. From the moment I laid eyes on you, and saw your determination to fight and your willingness to risk everything you had, from that very moment I knew I had already lost to you.”

“Lost to me?” Mo Guan Shan asked. He Tian wasn’t making any sense. Mo Guan Shan bet that He Tian never lost a day in his life.

“Do you know what it means to be in love?” He Tian asked as he began to come towards him once more.

Mo Guan Shan blushed profusely at this sudden question. “What does that have to do with anything?” Mo Guan Shan looked up at He Tian who was now standing in front of him, but the longing in He Tian’s eyes made him look away.

“It means everything. It’s the reason you’re here now.” He Tian’s breath tickled his ear. He was too damn close.

Mo Guan Shan knew he should hate He Tian. He had to give up his place as an angel in order to allow Jian Yi to be released from this hell, to then be safely returned to heaven. This truce was decided upon after several days of war had been waged, with much blood having been shed on both sides. The conditions were ultimately set forth by the prince of this world, and this prince was now speaking to him of love. Mo Guan Shan should hate He Tian more than anything, and yet...

“I know you felt something, too,” He Tian continued. “When we fought. The look in your eyes should had been the death of me. I’d never seen so much hatred, can you believe that?” He Tian smiled to himself, reminiscing. “You looked so beautiful out of breath, and with your face flushed wonderfully red. I hadn’t had such a good sparring session in a long time, and you really had me close a couple of times. Do you remember what you said to me?”

“Stop.” Mo Guan Shan didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t want to feel anything for him. He began to walk towards the door. Where would he go? Where could he escape to? Was this really his new life now? The reality was beginning to sink in, and he was starting to become afraid.

Mo Guan Shan felt strong arms wrap around from behind him, but the hold on him was gentle, soothing almost. “You told me to go fuck myself,” He Tian began to laugh softly, and Mo Guan Shan felt his body quiver against his own. His laughter relaxed him, and for some reason he found himself not pulling away from He Tian. “No one had ever dared speak to me that way before. It was because you were not afraid of me.” His grip on Mo’s waist tightened. “You will never have to be afraid of me.”

“I’m not welcome here,” Mo Guan Shan said, bringing light to the fact that while he didn’t have to fear He Tian, he didn’t feel safe here. “I have no freedom.” Rather than answer him, Mo Guan Shan felt He Tian’s breath against his neck, and then a kiss. “What are you doing?!” Mo grabbed the arm at his waist in surprise.

“No one will ever touch you again once they know you are mine.” He Tian kissed his neck once more, and then brought his hand up to Mo’s chin, turning his head so their eyes would meet. “Are you scared?” He Tian asked him.

Mo Guan Shan gazed back into He Tian’s coal eyes, indecision flickering across his face. He forced himself to remember why he was doing this, and found the resolve to follow through when the thoughts came to him. Could he trust He Tian? Mo Guan Shan didn’t have to think long on that question as he looked at the earnestness in He Tian’s eyes. “I’m not scared,” he answered honestly.

He Tian smiled against his back, and then he turned Mo’s face forward. “Little Mo,” He Tian whispered endearingly, and then he opened his mouth to bite at the nape of Mo’s neck, closing his eyes to relish the taste of him. Mo Guan Shan’s lips parted in a silent cry, and he felt He Tian’s finger slide through them sensuously. He Tian ran his tongue along the length of the mark to soothe it, causing Mo’s head to roll back in spite of himself. “There,” He Tian said, releasing his hold on Mo Guan Shan and admiring both the bite and the studs on Mo’s ears.

“That’s it?” Mo Guan Shan asked. Mo was surprised that was all it took to be veiled under He Tian’s protection.

“Oh, you want more, do you?~ He Tian opened his arms and grinned widely. “I’m all yours.”

Mo Guan Shan turned five different shades of red after realizing what he said. “Th-that’s not what I meant! Fuck you!”

“You hurt me,” He Tian said, not looking hurt at all, and then remembered the cut on Mo’s back. “Which reminds me, let’s get your wound cleaned up so I can show you something fun.”

Mo Guan Shan looked at him incredulously. “Something fun?” He Tian saw the glint of curiosity in Mo’s eyes and without thinking about it, his hand reached out to caress Mo’s neck.

He Tian smiled darkly, and leaned in to whisper into Mo’s ear. “Have you ever wondered what a shark looks like in hell?”

-littlemomountain

[blue-analytic]

Project: Crossover

As soon as I’ve got some time, I’m going to work on my new project, which is a Crossover between the fandoms Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. The story will be centred around Nico di Angelo and his twofold mission:

1) collecting Death’s tools and giving them back to Thanatos as the latter no longer wants to be caught off guard by enemies 2) learning more about his family, a part of which seems to be connected to Death Eaters and Grindelwald. In so doing, he will understand their motives and forge his own path

Important characters:

Draco, Hermione

Minor characters whose POVs you will occasionnally see:

McGonagall, Snape, Lucius

Themes:

uncanny, grotesque, friendship, discrimination

General info / warnings:

(probably) no pairings, rate 16+, graphical descriptions / allusions to uncanny / grotesque elements

Autho’s Notes:

I’m not sure if people here or outside of this site are even interested in my ideas, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give a first impression and see if people are intriguied by it. Bear in mind, though, not much happens, and the first chapter is incomplete. It’s just a teaser, after all.

The Uncanny: The Man is a Portrait

His smile was straining, his eyes narrowed to slits. There was no hiding the sweat, nor the vein bulging out of his head. If people found him in this current state, news would spiral out of his control: How he no longer took care of his well-being. How he derived satisfaction from scaring people off with his stench and grimace. Or even more ludicrous: how he was turning into the next Bellatrix. The conclusion was obvious to even a troglodyte: The mighty had fallen from grace. That thought alone made his fist clenching and his stomach revolting. It only made him wish even more fervently he didn’t have breakfast this morning. 

Yes, he was a tragic man in a tragic situation for sure. And it was all thanks to the pathetic excuse of wizard in front of him. If only he had a knife, he would gladly ram it into the man’s eye. Just to see if he was dealing with a puppet or a person with good poker-face. Any kind of reaction would be welcome if it meant he could explore the victim’s weakness to the fullest potential. But if there was one aspect of his life he abhorred more than losing control, then it would be becoming as savage and as mindless as a muggle. Which is precisely what resorting to barbaric means would lead to. And so, he resumed his silent fury and reflected.

Torturing the man in front of him wasn’t as easy as he thought. He didn’t like dirtying his hands, and he certainly didn’t like wasting his time for something any servant or maniac could have done. Especially the latter who loved nothing more than the pathetic whimpering and the grotesquely distorted faces of their victims. Those psychos bathed in their fun, always excited at the prospect of having found ways to unravel new emotions and prolong the torture session. 

One person in particular was gifted in the art of mental affliction and always insisted everyone watch her treatment towards these sad excuses of a wizard. Why anyone would shower these traitors with attention was beyond him. Were it up to him, he would deal with this affair swiftly and efficiently. No need to make them feel worthy; they all deserved to be ignored, rotting alone like an old black widow in a broom closet. But of course, in their master’s absence, it was Bellatrix who called the shots, she whose eyes wandered over every member like a predator sorting their conspecifics from their prey. A beast, that was all what she was in his eyes, a savage beast. 

Although she came from a prestigious family, her lack of any sense of decorum didn’t really surprise him. It was, however, unbecoming to lower yourself to the level of a muggle. Ever since the start of the First Wizarding War, her greasy hair was hideous to his nose, and her moments of sweet affection made his skin crawl. I am no toy to be played with, he didn’t say whenever she would put an arm on his shoulders, purring like a cat. Were he to push her away, she would dig her nails only deeper into his arm while making a pouting face. He would never give her the satisfaction of knowing how her very presence irritated him, and he certainly would never submit to her however hard it was to keep his emotions under control. But of course, he wasn’t a public figure for nothing. Luckily enough, he didn’t have to deal with her; she was where she belonged, in prison.

Lucius quickly shook his head, then turned his attention to the man, his nose wrinkling. The man’s curly hair had a dark glamour, likely from spending all his time in this shabby department. The shady lines made his grey hair stand out as if he were proud to show this unfortunate mess to the world. How unfortunate indeed. In France, nobles used to wear a wig in public. Whoever went against the dressing code was considered eccentric, a deviance that was simply outrageous. Because to expose your hair to the public eye was like revealing an intimate part of your body. If the man’s hair was in such a horrendous condition, he didn’t want to imagine how the rest of his body was. With no sense of shame, the man was just one step away from turning into a pig, ready to be slaughtered by those simple-minded muggles. At least, that was what they were good at, to dispose scum. If only the British wizards shared the same sense of decorum and fashion as the French ones did. But alas, he belonged to a small minority.

Lucius sighed. Then, he eyed the man’s robe. It was covered in fuzz and emitted an unpleasant scent of perspiration. What was most insulting were those sleepy eyes, showing no care in the world. They did not budge when he used crucio on the man after having paralysed him. It was most unusual. Did he not mean it enough? Preposterous! He was once prefect at one of the most prestigious school in the world, later one of lord Voldemort’s most useful acolytes, and then proud chairman of Hogwarts’ Board of Governors. Every resistance he met, he nipped it in bud—sooner or later, at least. How hard could it be to subjugate a person’s will, let alone a shabby one at that? Bellatrix always made it seem so easy. There was no way he was inferior to her. His spell had to work, it simply had to. He would certainly not lose his lord’s favour and made a mockery by her. The success of their campaign depended on him. 

Unlike her, he could still move politically so long as no one suspected him of dubious actions. It was a great responsibility for sure, but his throat tightened and his heart grew heavy the more he thought about his situation. To this day, he could still recall that young girl, clutching a hand of what appeared to be her stepbrother, his body as motionless as her face. Lord Voldemort had made it his goal to erase out of existence any connection to muggles in the wizarding world, and he had started with the first pureblood family in his vicinity. As the girl didn’t have any choice who her family were, she had been left alone. Her father, on the other hand, had committed a great crime by marrying someone outside their community. In the name of justice, he, alongside his wife and stepson, had received the full brunt of the killing curse. Afterwards, it had been left to Bellatrix to disfigure their faces in order to make sure they were unrecognizable to the world. Not worthy to be remembered, she had argued, her smile a smug and her eyes shining like cat’s eyes at night. 

If her victims’ groans and contorted faces elicited feelings of thrill and desire from her—a desire for more painful reactions—, then this dehumanising process only managed to raise his eyebrows. It was simply revolting, an unnecessary display of barbarity he had quickly wanted to get away from, lest she might have forced him to partake in her follies. However, no matter how much he had tried to push the incident into the darkest corner of his mind, he still couldn’t help but recall from time to time what had been left of the stepbrother’s face: There weren’t any traces of eyes and mouth as if they had all been molten away. Where the nose should have been, only nose hair remained, trenched in blood. Bellatrix had been gaggling in light of these events as if proud of her art d’œuvre, but he, on the other hand, could only shake at the insult to his eyes.

When he had spotted the blond hair, the same colour that his son had, and taken notice of his size, he was now reminded of Draco and the gravity of the situation he found himself in. If he failed, he did not want to imagine the kind of punishment lord Voldemort would reserve for him and how his very absence would impact his family—a family he didn’t count Bellatrix in, he grimaced. That love-sick fool was utterly loyal to the dark lord and would not hesitate to abandon her own blood if it were to please him. Lucius was quite sure she would try to disgrace him to the best of her abilities. 

Then, there was her savageness and persistence which would overwhelm his wife and encourage his son’s rash behaviour. Already, Draco’s promotion to prefect required a lot of responsibility. Gone were the days where he had stormed into his office, demanding a new broom for his team like some monkey on tantrum and without coming up with a strategy in the first place. Such alacrity to back up his comrades, but also such foolishness and recklessness to not expect any resistance in his endeavour. Had he not realised how important it was to be able to adapt to any scenario if he wanted to succeed? Now that Draco was a bit older and, hopefully, more mature, Lucius only hoped his son was ready for the school’s position so that he could prove his readiness for more important missions. After all, it was only a matter of time until he was forced into his father’s business, for the dark lord demanded proof of loyalty from everyone. 

Until then, Lucius had to keep reminding his son of their family’s duty to lord Voldemort and giving him some small tasks that would groom him into a strong and respectable person, worthy of his name, just like his father. Most importantly, however, he had to keep him away from any silly lessons Bellatrix might impose on him as soon as she got out of prison. But first, Lucius had to deal with the man.

The sight of him drained his energy, left him with a headache. It still boggled his mind how well the man could resist his spells. The imperius curse that Lucius had used on the man in his last visit didn’t seem to work anymore. He couldn’t find any traces of outside influences that might have helped to dispel the curse. It was as if the man had never been hit by the spell to begin with. Did the man really manage to break it on his own? But as soon as the thought crossed Lucius’ mind, he dismissed it. There was no time to entertain some delusional ideas. Don’t be ridiculous. He would have been in danger if that were the case; the man would have notified the head of the Department of Mysteries or the security—if such a thing existed here at all.

Lucius turned around to take a good look at his surroundings, assuring himself no unauthorized parties were observing him. While he carefully examined the place, his eyes were soon drawn towards the wall. It was adorned with bronze mural paintings, glowing eerily in the dark corridor. In one of them, a corpse was trapped between two boats and exposed to the sun. From all sides of the boats, ants, ticks, and leeches were crawling towards the body while flies and wasps were descending on the face. There were so many of them, he could barely make out the facial features, just the empty eye sockets and the small mouth, open as if crying and from which insects were rising. 

Crying, when was the last time he had cried? He had felt immense joy at Narcissa’s smile the moment she had accepted his marriage proposal, then a sense of achievement when he had held their child in his arm, deeply breathing in the sweet air of their garden and enjoying the tranquillity. However, pitying an unknown person who more than likely had committed a crime? That was such a foreign concept, it was almost ludicrous. Right here, right now, he shouldn’t let his emotions run free in his mission; in fact, getting Potter’s prophecy was of utmost importance. For the sake of his family and for the betterment of the wizarding world, he had to get a hold of himself. 

But then, his eyes fell on the jelly, bubbling with thousands of eggs and worms. He shuddered. There was no mercy for the victim, and there would be no mercy for him the longer he remained in this place. Wherever he looked, each illustration showed a cruel scene: a woman sewn into a sack and torn apart by a monkey, rooster, snake, and wolf while drowning in the sea. Then, there was what seemed to be a big straw voodoo doll, hiding under a bed and clutching the head of a crying boy with its long fingers as if sucking his blood dry. Over him was a bleak image; it looked like as if a child was running away from a pale skinned man with eyeballs in the palms of his wrinkled hands. A look of utter horror appeared on the boy’s face when he was tripping over the remnants of newborn children. A few seconds later, his arm was ripped off like some feathers of a chicken, never to be seen again.

Lucius startled. As his heart was racing, a sense of foreboding overcame him. For a moment, he felt like a child, intruding on a private session he wasn’t privy to and about to face severe consequences. His mind was telling him again and again to run away. If he was caught, he didn’t want to imagine the kind of pain being inflicted on him and the grief his absence would cause to his family. It all reminded him of the Triwizard Tournament where Cedric Diggory just happened to die at the wrong time and at the wrong place. Did Lucius want to share a similar fate as him? He had already seen the devastating face of Amos Diggory, the red eyes and the shaking arms as if in shock or denial. While he did not approve of his friendship with Mr. Weasley, he, at least, understood why a parent would mourn the loss of an heir, no matter how foolish Cedric had been to help Harry Potter. After all, there weren’t many pureblood families left, and sons were prone to foolish acts. Lucius should know; he had a son quick to anger, after all. No doubt an unfortunate trait of his father as his wife loved to remind him. Hence why he was glad for Snape and her taking care of Draco and disciplining him in his absence.

Lucius sighed. All his planning and political dealings left him little time for his family. When was the last time he had enjoyed a cup of tea with Narcissa? When was the last time he had played chess with their son, lecturing him on the importance of planning moves in advance? He could have it all again. Yes, he could see himself passing through the exit and leaving behind that dreadful place of Ministry, then buying some fancy jewellery to please his wife and a new broom for his son to calm him down. It would be a good start to make it up to them. The most logical thing to do was to never bother the Unspeakable again and go home, fulfilling his duty as a husband and a father. There was no need to risk his life if the horrendous paintings here were anything to go by.

At the mention of immediate danger, he stopped, his eyebrows raising. He was no Gryffindor, true, but he had been once accepted into the great house of Salazar. Slytherins were not easily cowered when promised a high reward. Any threats they faced, they solved it with the cunning of a chess player. The grotesque drawings on the wall, however, they were just that, scaring people with splatter and cries. How utterly barbaric. How very, and here Lucius paused before spitting, muggle like. Didn’t they keep strange souvenirs at home: dead skulls of animals and people to boast of their cruel deeds and some creepy masks born straight out from a dark fairy tale? He still remembered from one of the forced muggle lessons at Hogwarts: a werewolf in disguise of a human simpleton, indulging itself in fornication with a sick grandmother. Then, as if it wasn’t scandalous enough, it even seduced some virgin before devouring her. Or was it her who wanted to explore her carnal needs? Mad. They were all mad.

Lucius could only shake his head. He had never understood the value of muggle studies. They merely filled heads with moths, just like how the scribbles at the wall tricked people into a false sense of fear when there was nothing to worry about. What did it matter if the owner of the paintings had a morbid sense of cruelty? They were just inanimate objects; they couldn’t do anything to him or report to their master. He snorted. Master? More like a weebie obsessing over satanism. 

Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t believe how poorly he had reacted to the pictures. It was illogical to expect any threat from them; it was downright ridiculous. There was nothing that might have excused his inappropriate reaction. He had been a fool if he was honest to himself. No, he thought. It was more like he had been played a fool. Under no circumstances would he have done any foolish acts. That might have been acceptable and even expected from a child like Draco; however, he had long since grown out of this phase. There had to be some kind of spell on the paintings to ward off any intruders, there simply had to be. 

Unfortunately enough, he didn’t have the expertise to detect any traces of magical defence mechanisms to appease his mind. On the other hand, he didn’t want to activate any traps. Who knew what mad ideas some employees of this department might have come up with to trick people like him. For what else could it be than the work of a sad bogeyman if the paintings were any indication? Those punishments and cries, it was Bellatrix all over again. Except, even she was not mad enough to satisfy her hunger and thirst in a way these misshapen figures did. One of them was slurping in a child’s head as if it was some cup of tea while the other one used fork and knife to eat some legs of a crying baby on a plate. The civilized manner with which these mindless beasts enjoyed their dinner and drink simply bewildered him, gave him goose-bumps. It was almost enough to vomit. Almost.

[ozu-teapot]

I was tagged a few days ago by @justscreenshots to post nine albums that are important to me. There are so many records and so many artists I love that it’s been hard but I’ve ended up with a mix of albums which are significant and/or all time faves. I’ve done the one album one artist thing like I do for directors in my end of year film faves. I’ve gone a bit “in depth”, I’m sorry...

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road / Elton John GYBR was the first album I owned, sent to me out of the blue one Christmas by my Dad’s cousin Bella, a relative I’d never met and never did meet, and at a time when we didn’t own a record player! It made a big impression on me with it’s double gatefold sleeve, illustrations by Ian Beck (I was into art), and a few slightly risque lyrics. It’s not even my favourite Elton album but it’s the first music that actually belonged to me, and because I got a cheap Woolworths portable record player to listen to it I was then able to buy my own records, make choices, and begin to form my own musical tastes rather than being more of a passive listener to whatever I was exposed to. It’s of huge historical importance on a very personal level!

Hunky Dory / David Bowie A few old timey followers may remember from long deleted posts that Hunky Dory is the first full Bowie album I heard and is important to me for it’s connection to a girlfriend from the early 80s. Her death in 2016 hit me really hard in a way my brain tells me is illogical but my heart still feels and consequentially it’s taken on an even greater significance. I’m not sure I’ve listened to it as an album since, just on shuffle with other tracks.

The Akron Compilation / Various Artists Let’s lighten the mood with this Stiff Records compilation LP of bands from Akron Ohio with it’s scratch-n-sniff cover featuring the authentic odour of Rubber City! For many years I would state that this was “my favourite album OF ALL TIME” and I’m sure I thought I was very funny championing this new wave obscurity against the Unknown Pleasures and Bat Out Of Hells of friends, but the fact is I really do love it! It also includes “my favouite song OF ALL TIME” The Comb by The Waitresses. My most re-bought album. If someone could release this on CD that’d be great, thanks!

Nina Hagen Band / Nina Hagen Band Times were tough back in the day before iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube and if you heard a song you liked sometimes you just had to bite the bullet, roll the dice, and buy that whole LP on the off chance that the rest of the album would be as good. That’s what happened after I heard a Nina Hagen track (probably Heiss or Naturträne) on an episode of The Old Grey Whistle Test accompanied by some old black and white stop-motion animation involving plants, elves, and faries, a common practice in the pre-MTV days. Anyway Nina Hagen Band turned out to be a firm favourite. I don’t speak German but it just shows that in music, film, or art sometimes you don’t have to fully understand something for it to be great.

This Year’s Model / Elvis Costello & The Attractions Just what was it about the bespectacled unnatractive man singing bitter and/or melancholy songs of jealousy and failed relationships that resonated so much with my teenage self? Costello made such an impression that I asked my Mum to cut my hair from it’s previously scruffy Peter Noone style to something more like Elvis’ (No Mum! Not that Elvis!). Me and Elvis kind of drifted apart after Spike but those early albums are a huge part of my life.

Grotesque (After The Gramme) / The Fall The Fall are my favourite band so this is the one where I had a hard time deciding which album to choose and if I wasnt sticking to my one artist rule there would be more Fall albums in the nine. I went with Grotesque because it may be the first full album I bought by them and it certainly comes from the time I was first getting into the band after hearing tracks and sessions on John Peel’s radio show. Country ‘n’ Northern music is born!

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain / Pavement My other favourite band! Perhaps not surprising as they were often accused of being Fall imitators, something I couldn’t really hear on this the first album I bought by them after seeing their videos on MTV’s 120 Minutes, Alternative Nation, and so on (but more apparent on the earlier Slanted And Enchanted). A Fave.

The B-52’s / The B-52’s The B-52’s seemed to sound like nothing else when I first heard them and this debut is a perfect LP IMO. Subsequent releases didn’t quite reach this standard but they’re still a favourite band and Love Shack is one of the few songs I might dance to (if drunk).

Disguise In Love / John Cooper Clarke The Bard of Salford. I’ve often seen criticism of the decision to set JCC’s poems to music but I really like the contribution of The Invisible Girls and at least Disguise In Love has a mix of “songs” and spoken word.

I won’t put pressure on by tagging anyone but I’d be very interested to see the choices of any mutuals!