#monster mash

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[thisphantomlife]

Not to take away from the more serious and interesting parts of this interview but this bit was genuinely so funny. He’s so quick witted.

[supernovalunare]

In my mind she’s dancing “monster mash”

[aneverlastinghalloween]

Two of my favorite albums as a kid!

[horror-aesthete]

The Shape of Water, 2017, dir. Guillermo del Toro

[green-elf-magicks]

"Thou Shalt Not Kill"

The Lost Boys was a subtextual homoerotic love story between David and Michael and you can't convince me otherwise.

[omaano]

"How do you even wear this thing?"

Wearing each other's clothes for the Domestic Dincobb Bingo

[kettle-bird]

Insert some song by The Offspring here or something idk Commissions are open! | Ko-Fi

[lesserknownwaifus]

skeleton girls from monster mash

[maithefluffychicken]

So... ascended Astarion.

No, I'm not gonna argue about if it's good or evil and what you should choose (I'm gonna play both bc I'm curious and I wanna know all the possibilities this wonderful videogame offers).

No, no, it's not about that...

It's about... I had this idea.

Ascended Astarion / Bram Stoker's Dracula mash up fic, or something.

Tav and Astarion fight against Cazador, but Cazador kills Tav in front of Astarion.

Astarion goes crazy, witnessing how the love of his life dies under Cazador's cruel hands, and it's not quick and easy. This is Cazador Szarr, Tav suffers, and Astarion's sanity dies with them.

So, fueled by red, blinding rage, Astarion finishes the ritual, kills Cazador and ascends - he becomes the most powerful vampire, a la Dracula, with his heart broken and his hopes to be finally free, happy, shattered in the ground. Without Tav, nothing matters to him.

He starts fading away, rotting in his new acquired castle, controlling the Sword Coast in the shadows.

Until, a few centuries later, he feels Tav's soul. So he starts looking for them.

Imagine Astarion, in Neil's voice, saying "I've crossed oceans of time to find you". JUST IMAGINE IT!

Anyway.

Ascended Astarion angsty times today cause I'm in a mood.

[ari-a1357]

Happy Halloween everyone :3

(Made with objection.lol. Original audio is from Studio C)

[meetmeinthesandbox]

Rock n Roll Monster Mash

[onbearfeet]

Bloodstone Manor Location Masterpost

Okay, since the next bit of Monster Mash is gonna have to happen at/near Bloodstone Manor and Ted needs to go for a walk in the woods nearby, where do we think it is? The US and UK are the leading candidates in the fandom, but I need to pick a spot so my characters can get the fuck out of Ohio. My money is on the US, but I'm open to counterpoints.

Things to bear in mind:

1. Ulysses had a British accent. Elsa's accent is posh British. Verussa had an American accent, with some Broadway Mid-Atlantic that could suggest fancy New England OR just putting on airs. It's entirely possible one of the couple moved to be with the other, but that doesn’t settle which side of the ocean it happened on. Elsa's accent could be from a UK childhood OR a UK boarding school OR a choice to emulate her mother and annoy Verussa.

2. The house is old--or at least full of old stuff--but there's something of a history of Europeans bringing their weird-ass shit across the Atlantic and building absolutely batshit mansions in the US. Probably because there's more open space for it here.

3. The establishing shot of the rotunda shows it in hilly or mountainous terrain, with what looks like pine forest around it, and it sits on a parcel that is either big enough or far enough from neighbors that no one expects any outside response to roars, screams, explosions, etc. Either there's no one around to hear it or people REALLY mind their own business.

4. Of the hunters who make it to the funeral, one has a Scottish accent, two have American or Canadian accents, and one has what sounds like a South Korean accent (although apparently the actor was born in Argentina and moved to the US in the 90s, and I'm going off the many Korean-American voices I've heard at work, so "Korean-American" might be a better descriptor). Those are the people with connections to Ulysses and the time, resources, and motivation to show up to wherever this is. That suggests the location is most accessible to these people and not others. (Yes, I know, I've left out Jack's accent, but he was going to travel to wherever Ted was anyway; he had enough motivation that distance alone wasn't going to stop him.) North America has the numbers here; it's more likely that one Scot got on an international flight than that two North Americans did.

5. The guards are wearing "tacticool" BDUs and carrying some kind of zappy sticks or stun batons. The lack of guns is interesting and may indicate a location with stricter gun laws than the US ... or just that Verussa didn't want to accidentally kill her captive and that a lot of monsters are bulletproof anyway. The guards look and move a hell of a lot like an American tactical team and sound vaguely American when they're screaming. Would Verussa import guards, or hire local muscle? My money is on the latter.

6. Ulysses was old as balls. In the comics, he was positively ancient, and the opening narration implies he was old enough to be wearing pre-20th-century clothes in a flashback. He's definitely old enough to have gotten his hands on a nice piece of property in the UK, but also rich enough to have just bought a mountain in the US. He was also around for the last century-plus of history, and that may have affected his choice of headquarters. If the original Bloodstone Manor got bombed out during World War 2, for example, he might have moved to a less bomb-filled location.

7. Corpse Muppet! Verussa found somebody willing to turn her husband's remains into a Cryptkeeper animatronic. I have no idea whether that's a thing in the UK, but there are definitely enough weirdo taxidermists, puppeteers, and general pieces of work here that someone would take Verussa's money to do it. There are even subcultures here that traditionally sit the corpse up at the table for the wake, so it might not even be that weird to the right professional.

8. Flaming Tuba Guy is available for the funeral. Real Flaming Tuba Guy is American and takes his flaming tuba to Burning Man. I have no idea whether the UK is also a likely place to find a dude with a flaming tuba, but I have difficulty imagining a smooth process for getting a combination brass instrument/flamethrower through customs. I don't think there's a lot of international Flaming Tuba action unless private jets get involved. Wherever Flaming Tuba is from, I'm betting that's the jurisdiction where Bloodstone Manor is.

9. Jack makes it to Bloodstone Manor. Now, I've talked before about his being highly motivated and distance not being an obstacle for him, but if we assume he didn't use a magic portal or something (big if, I know), he had to go by land, sea, or air, and that takes time, no matter how motivated he is. Jack is centuries old, has a history of involvement with violence, and speaks with a Mexican accent. Wherever the Manor is, a dude matching that description was able to get there in time without setting off a ton of international alerts. The fact that Jack is as old as he is AND unknown to the hunters despite being a werewolf suggests that he prefers to keep a low profile, and by now he's practiced at it. He wouldn't want to leave a paper trail, especially when he's on a rescue mission that he knows will likely involve killing people. (I know he doesn't WANT to kill anybody, but the odds of him and Ted getting out of there with a zero body count were always slim. And he brought a bomb in his pocket.) Between his money and his accent, Jack would have an easier time moving around undetected in North America; he could reach a North American Manor by car rather than having to smuggle himself on a boat, charter a private plane (with a flight plan!), or go through customs at Heathrow or wherever. Not that he wouldn't risk getting on SHIELD's radar to save Ted, but if the hunt happened soon after Ted's capture, Jack would be more likely to physically reach the Manor in time if it were in North America.

10. Ted! Ted is at the funeral, obviously. In the comics, Ted canonically lives in the Everglades and honestly that's the best place for him. Verussa would have to have Ted transported from Florida to wherever the Manor is. All the logistical problems of moving Jack across an ocean are magnified in moving TED across an ocean. Again, it's much easier to move him within North America, which I'd consider a point in favor of a North American Manor. If the Manor were in the UK, wouldn't Verussa have gone for a victim based closer to home?

11. Sushi. "Let's do sushi; I owe you that." Apparently Jack and Ted have a history with sushi. I have absolutely no idea how common sushi restaurants are in the UK, but on the west coast of North America, you can pretty much throw a stick and hit one. (I know this because I moved last fall, and one of my first priorities in the new place was Find The Good Local Restaurants. Google was like OH, YOU WANT SUSHI?! HERE ARE TWENTY PLACES. Seriously, it's almost as common as pizza, at least in California.) I assume the boys aren't heading into a major urban center for food after their escape, so wherever Bloodstone Manor is, Jack thinks he can find a rural, exurban, or suburban sushi restaurant within a couple hours' travel (close enough that he can go, pick up their order, and make it back to Ted before raw fish goes funky). Sushi restaurants, at least in the western US, tend to be run by East Asian immigrants--part of the larger culture of immigrants starting restaurants within the first or second generation of arriving here. For stupid racist reasons, most East Asian immigration to the US took place after 1965, so there are a lot of sushi restaurants here that were established in or after the 1980s. Sushi restaurants also tend to be more common in coastal regions here, presumably because REALLY fresh ocean fish get more expensive and harder to acquire farther inland. Jack proposing sushi, if he and Ted are sitting on a log in the US, suggests they're somewhere near a coast, in a region with a sizable post-1965 East Asian immigrant population. (BTW, the reason I keep saying "East Asian" instead of "Japanese" is because a LOT of these restaurants in my area are run by Korean families, more rarely Chinese or Vietnamese ones. I've been in exactly one sushi restaurant here that was run by a Japanese family, and it was 40 years old.) Of course, I don't know shit about the takeout culture of the UK; maybe Yorkshire is full of sushi restaurants or something.

Conclusions.

Between the geography, the accents, the material culture, and the logistics, I think the balance of probability suggests that Bloodstone Manor is in North America, most likely the United States. There are multiple hilly or mountainous regions with pine forests near coasts, close enough to centers of East Asian immigration that the boys can reliably get their sushi.

So with all that in mind ...

[thestuffedalligator]

I’m always thinking about the Monster Mash. Bobby “Boris” Pickett accidentally made the most iconic Halloween jam of the 20th century and he decided to go all in on it for the rest of his life. The man spent the rest of his professional career wearing a lab coat and singing goofy Halloween novelty songs. The Monster Swim. The Monster’s Holiday. Have you listened to The Monster Rap? You have to listen to The Monster Rap. It’s about Frankenstein’s monster learning how to rap because Igor went to DJ school.

[horror-aesthete]

Christine, 1983, dir. John Carpenter