#so the feminine princess is more than incidental

[tinygameroom]

Have we even talked about the trans implications of being a god of change...

Editing to add my tags and context

When I say 'incidental' at the beginning I'm saying it feels incidental and artificial and then go on to partially deconstruct the idea that it actually is incidental and give examples of why it's not. This is not a full analysis which is why the concept is not explored with the clarity and structure that that would imply, but I'm not actually calling gender irrelevant to the game because it's clearly an ongoing part of the text. I didn't intend this to get reblogged at all much less with responses to my tags, so any issues you have with my rambles are due to lack of clarity and finished thought, due to them being rambles, not a correct understanding of my actual point.

Anyway I think there's tons of interesting analysis to be done about how the game approaches gender, and I don't have the energy or interest to actually analyze about it right now which is why I was more just spitballing about it. What's most interesting to me tho is that contradiction where the Princess being perceived as a woman seemingly has nothing to do with anything, yet is ever present as a commentary on agency and perception, and how people who have experienced misogyny will connect with that. I am also fascinated by the Genderlessness/Genderfulness of the Shifting Mound as an entity of change, how she appears so very feminine but her entire philosophy rejects the idea of simple classification, etc.

As a transmasc nonbinary person the ideas of being perceived as female/feminine (and therefore feeble, innocent, alien, small, stupid, etc etc) and the idea of having a feminine role that doesn't quite or always fit me assumed by others despite that are ideas that resonate a lot. I have lots of thoughts and they're unorganized!

[love-takes-work]

I've seen a fair number of people interpret Rebecca Sugar's (and the Crew's) decision to put Ruby in a dress as subversive, and I want to discuss why that feels like a clear miss to me.

Every time--every single time--I've heard Rebecca Sugar talk about the queer relationships on this show, it comes with this expression of wholesomeness, and often glazed with a sheen of wistfulness, flavored something like "I needed this as a child and young person, and I didn't have it." Much of Rebecca Sugar's work to bring this wedding (and other unapologetic queer relationships) to the screen was framed as an emergency--as in, we HAVE to get this out there for those kids we used to be, because we know they're drowning.

Yes, it's funny sometimes when people make jokes about Sugar deliberately "adding more gay" or "making it gayer" as a big eff-you to the people who spoke against it, but that doesn't sit right from where I'm standing. It took so much strength (and resulted in so much battle damage) to fight that fight, yes. But from everything I can see from the interviews and conversations I've seen and read, this wasn't served up in a "ha-HA, take THAT!" kind of way. These characters having these kinds of relationships should have been a non-issue, and the fact that their very wholesome kids'-show wedding and very sweet kiss and very adorable love for each other was seen as Political when it should have been just two characters in love is so sad to me.

I've seen dozens of people suggest that Ruby is in a dress and Sapphire is in a suit "to fuck with the bigoted censors in other countries" or "to give the finger to gender roles," but again, I think it is simpler and sweeter than that. Rebecca's said that Ruby in a dress is how she feels in a dress. Celebration and exploration of feminine-coded stuff felt wrong to Rebecca for a long time, like it wasn't hers, because she wasn't really a woman and didn't want it forced on her. As a result she was robbed of all the beauty that should have been a non-issue, from what TV shows and toys she was supposed to enjoy as a kid to what kind of person she was supposed to marry and what she should wear as an adult.

Ruby never got a choice about how she looked really. Once she got to choose her presentation for a significant event, this is what she chose. It means so much more to see that than to construct it primarily as a reactionary measure, as if it would somehow foil the sinister censors in more homophobic countries (who, incidentally, are not therefore forced to show Ruby in a dress even though they tried to hide that Ruby was a "she" or that she was in a romantic relationship with another "she"; y'all, they just don't show the episode).

We see plenty of other examples of gender-role-related expectations being casually stepped on and squashed, like when they took the trouble to give traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine "clothes" to some watermelons to make the audience think there was a husband and wife watermelon only to have the wife be the warrior and the husband stay home with the child. With stuff like that, yeah, sure, maybe it's designed to make you think "oh isn't that very feminist of them!" Or maybe it's more "well why do I see this as a 'reversal' when it's just a thing that happened?" This show is full of ladyish beings who fight and have power. And as for Steven. . . .

Nobody has negative reactions onscreen (or even particularly confused reactions) when Steven wears traditionally feminine clothes, and it is (of course) also not presented as a "boy in a dress gag"--it's not supposed to be funny. When they go all in slathering Steven in literal princess tropes throughout the final act of Season 5, we understand that it's because the powerful Diamonds expect him to be Pink Diamond, not because the show is trying to girlify him or embarrass him or even make the audience think positive thoughts about boys in girls' clothes. It's more neutral than that in my interpretation: "these are literally just pieces of cloth, and while some of them have meaning, they don't inherently have a gender." I don't see this as transgressive. It's just in a world where putting on what you want to wear doesn't HAVE to be a political statement. (Though obviously it CAN be, and plenty of people wear a variety of clothes as a fuck-you to whoever they want to give the finger to. I just don't see that as happening here.)

Don't get me wrong; Rebecca Sugar certainly knew about the politics (intimately) and has lived at many of their intersections. She was not ignorant of how queer people are seen in this world. She was silenced as a bisexual person because her identity supposedly didn't matter if she was with a man and planned to be with that same man forever. She was shunted into "omg a woman did this!" categories over and over again, which she wore uneasily as a nonbinary person while accepting that part of who we are is how the world sees us. But what is it like if everything someone like her embraces is seen as a statement synonymous with "fuck you" to someone else?

She is married to a person who happens to be a man and happens to be Black. Her relationship isn't a "statement" about either of those aspects of his existence; her love is simply something that is. She is Jewish working in a society that's largely Christian. Her cultural perspective to NOT center her cartoon around Christian holidays and Christian morals; her choices to make an alternate world in this specific way is simply something that is. Her queer perspective as a nonbinary bisexual person has helped inform the Gems' radical philosophy of "what if we learned to explore and define ourselves instead of doing the 'jobs' we're assigned and being told it's our nature?" Her decision to include queer people in a broadly queer cartoon isn't designed PRIMARILY as a battle against baddies, or to drown out all the relentless straightness, or to deliciously get our queer little paws all over their kids' TV. It's an act of love.

So this is just to say that though I DO understand that sometimes subversion and intentional transgression are very necessary, I do not think that's the HEART of what's going on at this Gem wedding. We got a wholesome marriage scene between two of the most lovely little flawed-but-still-somehow-perfect characters, and I very much want to see their choices as being about them. About how Ruby feels in a dress. About how Sapphire feels about not having to always wear a dress. About them incorporating a symbol of their union into their separate lives so they can have some independence in their togetherness. About them celebrating their love by letting Steven wipe his schmaltz all over them.

There are many choices in the show that ARE carefully constructed to counter existing narratives, you know, giving the Crystal Gems' only boy all the healing, pink, flower imagery; having a single-sex species that's ladyish with all the members going by "she"; featuring many nurturing male characters who cry and cook and raise kids without mothers; pairing multiple fighty ladies with gentler guys; and importantly, intentionally loading up the show with stories, characters, and imagery any gender will find appealing despite being tasked with expectations to pander to the preteen boy demographic.

But it's very important to me that the inclusion of queer characters and the featuring of their choices be seen primarily as a loving act, and way way less of a "lol screw the bigots." I want our stories to be about us. Yes, I know it's a necessary evil that sometimes our stories are also about fighting Them. But every time I see someone say they put Ruby in the dress to "piss off the homophobes" or "stump the censors" I feel a little gross. Like the time I picked out an outfit I loved and my mom said I only dressed in such an obnoxious way to upset her, and I was baffled because my aesthetic choices, my opinions, my choices had nothing to do with her. Yet they were framed like I chose these clothes primarily to cause some kind of petty harm to her, when not only was it not true but I was not even that kind of person who would gloat over intentionally irritating someone.

The queerness of this show isn't a sneaky, underhanded act trying above all to upset a bigot or celebrate someone's homophobic fury. It lives for itself. Its existence is about itself. It's so we can see ourselves in a show, and it's so people who aren't queer or don't have those experiences can see that we exist, we participate, we want very similar things, and definitely are focusing way more about celebrating our love at our own weddings rather than relishing the thought of bigots tearing their hair out and hating us.

It's dangerous to turn every act of our love into a deliberate movement in a battle strategy when their weddings just get to be weddings.

I think there’s this idea that that [queer characters] is something that applies or should be only discussed with adults that is completely wrong. And I think when you realize that talking to kids about heteronormativity is just like air that you breathe all the time, it’s kind of amazing that that is not true in any other capacity. I think if you wait to tell kids, to tell queer youth that it matters how they feel or that they are even a person, then it’s going to be too late! You have to talk about it—you have to let it be what it gets to be for everyone. I mean, like, I think about, a lot of times I think about sort of fairy tales and Disney movies and the way that love is something that is ALWAYS discussed with children. And I think also there’s this idea that’s like, oh, we should represent, you know, queer characters that are adults, because there are adults that are queer, and you should know that’s something that is happening in the adult world, but that’s not how those films or those stories are told to children. You’re told that YOU should dream about love, about this fulfilling love that YOU’RE going to have. […] The Prince and Snow White are not like someone’s PARENTS. They’re something you want to be, that you are sort of dreaming of a future where you will find happiness. Why shouldn’t everyone have that? It’s really absurd to think that everyone shouldn’t get to have that! --Rebecca Sugar

[basedkikuenjoyer]

Y’all sure seemed to enjoy the last one, how about another round of late-night YuYuposting? Because threads from Chapter Black echoing into what we just saw of Wano is far from isolated to the chilling tale of Amanuma & Kurama. Didn’t think about it a whole lot til the end, but this One Piece arc was very Chapter Black through and through. Starting with this excellent, layered callback.

This “many faces” theme is one of the biggest we’ve talked about here on hour Kiku-centric journey through Wano. We see it through her in a more mundane way, all the faces a young woman has to juggle to live under an oppressive culture tied up with a theatrical bow. But the motif is a lot more blatant in both Kaido and Orochi.

We’ve also talked about the echoes of Shishio & his Juppongatana from Rurouni Kenshin, which obviously has a much more direct (and relevant) meaning for Oda’s career. But Shinobu Sensui...he manages both. Hence the picture. We got both the charismatic leader and the hearts he took advantage of and the fractured personality. That’s what Kurama’s referring to. A prophetic motif that was originally interpreted as referring to Sensui and his allies but we’re finding out here was about his own sevenfold psyche all along. I’ve always loved this little extra bit of flair about “Naru” as well, even though it never goes anywhere. The thought of the fractured big bad having a soft, feminine side. Yeah...shame that didn’t come up in anyway like Kaido having a flirty drunk phase or something. 

Doesn’t stop there though. Chapter 148, “Moment of Awakening.” Because...it was very much the same kind of story beat. Yusuke gets beat. Dies even but something seems off. Reawakens with a massive power up. Not much more to say about the beat itself other than that. I’m far from the only person who thought of the Atavism of the Mazoku here in YYH when we saw Gear 5 in One Piece 1044. I want to end on my real thoughts about how this might apply to One Piece going forward, but first an aside about Luffy and the girl tied up in the story elements that facilitated that transformation and are already back in play this soon into Egghead:

Context. This is a flashback from the guy in the first clipping. Itsuki, villain Sensui’s right-hand man. Lover as well, but seemingly unrequited like Honjo to Shishio. Gets weird with Sensui’s multiple personalities. Not what I really care about. No, this is how they met. It was a turning point for Sensui, who prior had a very black-and-white “humans good, demons bad” worldview. Was about to kill Itsuki but a simple ripple of fate gave him pause. In his last moments, Itsuki bemoaned wanting just one more day. For no other reason than wanting to see a favorite musician on a TV show tomorrow. As you can see, Sensui was a fan too which started a conversation that’d, to quote the series, “introduce a truckload of gray.”

Incidentally, Jun Togawa is a hell of a reference. She was a popular underground musician at the time. Kickass figure in her own right. Famous for like, paroding idol girl groups and being much more real about women’s perspectives and issues than most Japanese pop stars. Especially for the 80s/90s. Imagine half Nina Hagen, half Alanis Morisette. Gotta wonder if Oda’s a fan given potential nods like a first solo album titled “Princess Tama” and being the front for a band named “Guernica.” Speaking of CP0, of course it all comes back to Kiku. Long way around to a simple idea. One of the big things I always felt about Kiku & Yamato’s roles in the arc together is that it reminded me of the feeling of this simple but powerful moment. It’s the difference between casual fate and grandiose (but empty) destiny. 

I still don’t think it was an accident you have your two most featured new faces set up like that. Yamato comes bursting in halfway through talking about how long he’s been waiting because of Ace and reading about the crew in the papers and it feels like fate...but way less so when you remember Luffy stumbling into being buds with the little sister of one of Ace’s big bros. How he casually has no trouble finding out her secret because of the people he just happened to meet saving Ace. How following her heart and helping Luffy for its own sake led to reuniting with her lost family members. That rumination on fate and what it actually looks like is too good to pass up, especially with how well it aligns with Luffy stepping into this role as a “chosen one.” It mirrors; were you destined to be here just because, or because the sum total of your actions made you the right person?

Of course, I wouldn’t go on such a big detour without a point. Even if talking Kiku is always a good enough point for me. Still, this is where I’m wondering if we’re headed. The most poignant aspect of Yu Yu Hakusho’s Chapter Black is where it heads after. A shonen hero...reflecting on what it means being able to destroy it all if he wanted. Realizing he could become Sensui and not having any good answers. Sadly this is where we transition into an infamously rushed final arc for the series due to Togashi’s declining health, but it doesn’t undercut the power of seeing this in a power fantasy battle shonen.

And I can��t help but think about the role Oden plays in the story. How it all comes together. That was Oden’s example. A great man who didn’t really learn about the concept of collateral damage until it was too late. This certainly feels like part of the lesson Luffy learns through his time in Wano. That paired with a heaping helping of Kaido, the spectre of a powerful man who never learned to maintain composue. Deal with expectaions and emotions to the point he was a fractured drunk not unlike Sensui. 

Yeah...I think Chapter Black was a pretty damn big influence on Wano. Up there with RuroKen’s Kyoto arc. If you’re gonna drop homages you’d be hard pressed to find a better one to shout out and build off of.

[aspoonofsugar]

Rwby Chain of Faves: Songs

Hello anon!

Ooooh! Thank you for this fun ask :)

So, I love character songs! To be more specific, I like character songs that are from the characters’ povs, use imagery linked to the them, explore their arc/themes, their psychology and/or foreshadow something about their story...

So, in no particular order, here are some of my favourite RWBY songs!

1) Red Like Roses (both parts, especially when put together)

Ruby has only two songs, but they are both faves!

I like Part I music and how it is used in the Red Trailer. It is interesting that it is really about team RWBY, rather than Ruby herself. It foreshadows their stories and central struggles. Moreover, I really love the dreamy, fairy tale-esque tone and symbolism. It really leaves you wondering about these characters :)

Part II is a conversation between Ruby and Summer and it is interesting that so far it is really the closest we have come to Ruby expressing her anger and resentment over her mother’s death. We have had glimpses and cracks in the show, but the song itself really foreshadows that there is more. I am really looking forward for all these emotions to emerge in the show :’’’). Moreover, I am interested in how the theme of death and sacrifice will be explored, when it comes to Ruby’s story.

In the end, for a character like Ruby, who puts the world and her team before herself, to have a song that reveals us nothing about her and another that hints there is more under her facade is really perfect, so far.

2) This Life is Mine

I love Weiss’s long conversation with the Mirror :’’’)

It starts with Path to Isolation (chronologically), where she loses herself:

Mirror Help me Who am I?

It goes on with Mirror Mirror where she answers her own question, but the answer is a negative one:

Mirror, mirror, tell me something, Who's the loneliest of all? I'm the loneliest of all.

And after this loss and sad realization, we see her progressively getting better with Mirror Mirror Part 2 and It’s My Turn.

Finally, it all comes together in This Life is Mine. In this song we finally see Weiss finding who she is, breaking the mirror and freeing herself from Jaques’s influence:

Now this conversation's finally over, Mirror Mirror, now we're done I've pulled myself together now My mind and heart are one Finally one.

The fact that Weiss is talking to both the Mirror and Jacques is really powerful and it conveys how Jacques’s evil magic is not really about killing Snowhite, but about transforming her in a mirror of himself. He has tried to turn Weiss into his own reflection, but failed.

Musically, I just love how it starts slow, as an opera song, but it becomes more and more powerful as it goes on. It just sums up Weiss’s arc and character very well imo. Weiss is both a feminine princess and a powerful warrior. She is elegant, but has spunk and this song is like that.

Incidentally, I like the idea of Weiss having so many songs because she is canonically a singer :’’’).

3) Ignite

It is my favourite of Yang’s songs even if it is not relevant to her arc like Armed and Ready (which I also love).

Mostly, I love Ignite because it uses one of my favourite techniques in character songs aka combining powerful rock music about punching people with poetic stanzas that reveal more than you think about the character’s interiority:

Crash and burn (crash and burn) Some lessons are just hard to learn Scathing eyes (scathing eyes) That see things from only one side Yet every misshapen spark Suffers the judgment and pain But just as light conquers dark There's a beauty that's greater Than pure symmetry can contain So let's start the game!

Ache and yearn (ache and yearn) Can't wait for the pages to turn Play both sides (play both sides) When truth you cannot recognize And any remarkable heart Has gone through the hardship and shame That's born of standing apart From the easily processed The uniform army of "same" And that's just so lame!

I love these verses and the asymmetry motif in Yang’s arc is one of my favourite things about her character, so I hope it gets touched on more in the future :)

4) Nevermore

So far, all Blake’s songs have been duets. This is interesting considering her shadow motif and her allusion being The Beauty and The Beast. Basically, she starts the story as Adam’s shadow, but then she rebels and starts a healing process that goes through many positive relationships.

So we have Sun (Like Morning Follows Night), Ghira (This Time) and we finally arrive to Yang aka Nevermore.

I love this song, how it comments Blake and Yang’s fight against Adam, it deconstructs Adam’s Lionize and it plays with the fairy-tale’s language.

It is not a Happily Ever After... It is a Nevermore... it is not about being forever happy, but it is about not letting pain ruin your life and relationships. It is not about a perfect love with no struggles, but it is about struggling and becoming stronger together:

I won't stay a martyr It's my turn to take back what you stole And this time I'm smarter I made a vow I'm not alone Not dying now we're protecting our own Nevermore Nevermore You'll torture my heart and my head Nevermore Nevermore Will I be afraid Nor will I run away It's behind me Freedom is finally here You may have taken the lead but I'll even the score You won the battle you won't win the war Not now and Nevermore

It is a song of power and healing, but it is also a song of violence and sadness. And I like how it manages to convey it all beautifully.

5) Big Metal Shoe

I just love this one because of the music and the many nursery rhymes and fairy tales references :’’’)

It is officially Cordovin’s character song, but Cordo herself is not such a deep character, so the song really comments on the theme her character embodies in volume 6, rather than on Cordo herself.

The basic idea is that Cordo, who presents herself as a “responsible adult” is really more childish than the kids she is fighting. So, her songs is full of nursery rhymes to drive the concept home.

Her character is clearly a parody of Ironwood and the climax of volume 6 clearly foreshadows what the Atlas arc will be about. Because of this, I would not be surprised if among all the plays of words and rhymes, they put a little bit of foreshadowing of the next two volumes... sure vague enough, but also rather suggestive...

Like Atlas falling:

You're heading for a fall And you're nearing the end Like a house made of straw No one's putting you together again

Or Jacque Schnee losing it all:

Mirror, mirror, who will lose it all? Soundly whip those children or your cradle's gonna fall

Or the appearance of some new characters:

You better make a wish like the fisherman

You're gonna wind Up like that robin at your last tweet

And the return of a well known one:

Cuz I'm alive Like a puppet with a heartbeat

And finally, which character will be key:

Ashes, ashes guess who's falling down Sparring in glass slippers and you're bound to break your crown

6) The Truth

Clean the linens, sweep the floors Shut your mouth and do your chores Scrub the dishes in the sink No one said that you should think Shine the silver, wash the clothes And when you're finished, darn the socks, draw my bath Fetch my slippers, fill my glass And rub my feet; Hurry up, you're so slow You're no good I hope you know That your life is of no use And the truth is that No one's ever loved you

Short, but poignant and strongly tied to Cinder’s background and allusion as Cinderella.

I would have loved to have a longer version because I was interested in how it would have been musically. That said, it still makes the favourite list because it does in a concise way what all character songs do (and sometimes fail to do) with many verses.

It tells us what Cinder’s character is really about (the truth) aka an unloved child abused by who should have cared for her.

7) Forever Fall

I love this song. It is slow, but shines because of its lyrics.

It explores Pyrrha’s relationship with Jaune, but it is more than that, for me.

It is really another perspective of Pyrrha’s arc, I would say a more personal and intimate one.

The focus of her arc in the volume 3 finale is really about her role into the bigger picture. Her death is tied to the main themes and kicks off the conflict.

This song is more about Pyrrha’s most intimate wishes (her being a normal girl in love with Jaune). So, we see imagery linked to her arc, but we discover new meanings in it.

So, her fall motif, which in the show is about the Fall Maiden and her tragic death becomes this:

Some people fall in love for life Others never get it right Love's fickle when it calls One thing that I know for sure Longer than our lives endure You're my forever fall

It is about the Forever Fall forest at Beacon where she shared important moments with Jaune and the act of falling is not about dying, but about loving.

Arkos being linked to fall as a season, when Spring is the season of lovers also foreshadows their tragic ending.

And we discover Pyrrha had another destiny, another final goal, other than being a Huntress:

And I know, for some, it's temporary Like a shooting star soon out of view But this will always be It's my destiny To be in love with you

More personal, but not less important and this is why her legacy keeps living in Jaune:

Every life is filled with passing moments Like the seasons change, they come and go But this is infinite Nothing, even death Could separate our souls 'Cause you're my final goal

Ok, before going on with my two...super faves, some honorable mentions!

8) One Thing

I don’t have much to say about the song, but I quite like it musically! All in all, it does not really say much about Neo’s character, but I think it is justified since by that time they had probably still to clarify many details of her background. I think they were good at reusing some ideas present in the song (like the one thing) in Roman Holiday and to twist it a little bit in the novel. In this way the song itself gets more personality, I think.

9) Smile

I love Ilia’s background and I like that we have a song about it! In general, I think Ilia’s character is very well done, even if she is a minor one in the show.

10) Be Strong and Hit Stuff

Ironically, I did not like it when it played in the show, but the complete version is great!

I like how it incorporates Nora’s imagery:

No one's gonna break Your heart in two No one in this world Is gonna have The strength it takes The force to make The power to take you down

The pain you face Is no disgrace You're made from All those scars

And how it musically comments her leaving her dependency on Ren behind to become her own person.

In general, the song playing when team JNR, Oscar, Emerald and Winter fight Ironwood is about the whole team pulling itself together after the mistakes and sitbacks of the previous volume.

Like, the whole fight is meant to be an inversion of JNRO losing against Neo in volume 7. We have seen Ren being affected by their failure and Nora and Ren discussing about it in risk. The fight is important for Oscar as well, who ends volume 7 being shot by Ironwood and talks with Ruby about this at the beginning of volume 8.

Finally, the song fits Emerald and Winter as well. Both characters made mistakes and this fight is a chance for redemption.

In short, the song plays during this fight and not in a Nora moments because Nora’s arc really comments her team arc in volume 8 (I mean... she is the heart :P, just look at her symbol) and it clearly fits with all the people involved in the fight. It is a successful moments for all the characters that either failed, made mistakes aor felt useless in the previous two volumes.

Ok, now we arrive to my two favourite songs!

11) Friend

Penny’s character song is wonderful like her whole arc :’’’)

It just mixes together a lot of feelings and it is clearly written to punch you in the gut.

It makes you relive her story by referencing many lines and moments throughout it:

Do hugs always make you feel this warm?

My wish came true That day that you appeared And called me friend

I'm so excited We'll do so many friendship things Paint our nails Try on clothes Talk about cute boys

You saw my soul Through the nuts and bolts You're the friend I can trust Helped me see I'm not just a machine

It clarifies her arc’s themes:

But I found that humanity It came with sacrifice, A pact To shield you from the Wicked even if I can't Live for real It was worth it to know you My wish came true The day that you appeared And called me a friend An answered prayer A chance to Share the world To be a girl Who fin'lly felt alive

And it plays with the Pinocchio’s allusion referencing When You Wish Upon a Star.

Like, I really can’t comment this song without writing a whole new meta on Penny’s arc (which I might just do because there are still things to say about it :’’’))

Anyway, it is the perfect image song, especially how it ends when it is at its most vibrant, exactly like Penny’s life did.

12) I’m the One

Really surprising no-one :’’’)

But the truth is that I’m the One is a great image song because it conveys a lot about Emerald and Mercury, it foreshadows things and it can be read on many levels (literally like them).

A quick list of what this song tells us about the murder kids...

a) Them sharing a character song and their voices mixing to the point that it is difficult to understand who is singing what at times strengthens the idea that they are a set. It also conveys the importance of their bond and foiling. I mean, the song is literally titled I’m the One and it is about two characters.

b) It is a two faced song, just like them. By that point Em and Merc are tricking the Beacon students and the song is meant to convey their true antagonistic personality. So, the song is essentially them just trash talking Coco and Yatsuhashi and making fun of them.

However, they end up sharing a little too much of themselves in this song, so we realize that Em and Merc are not just tricking the protagonists, but themselves as well.

They think they are these:

I'm the one that your mama said 'Don't mess with them or you'll end up dead That type they don't follow any rules'

When they are really these:

I'm the one That was born in a nightmare a murderer's son

I'm the one Who rose out of filth and was loved by no-one

c) The song has four key stanzas that basically foreshadow everything about them (especially when it comes to Mercury).

For Em we have:

I'm the one Who rose out of filth and was loved by no-one Delusion I'll steal til your blind and defeat you from inside your mind

I'm the one I'll race with your eyes and you'll never outrun Illusions Will conquer your mind and will make you fulfill my design

We have a little bit of her background and the rest is all about her semblance. This is obviously because it is a key ability to Cinder’s plan, but also because Emerald is rootless. She has no family and symbolically no background other than her being unloved and alone.

Her own surname means both thief and roots after all... what she is and what she wishes...but also...how she presents herself (a thief) and who she deep down is (a rootless child). Basically her own surname is an unsolvable illusion. So, really all Emerald has at the beginning of the story is a semblance powerful enough to survive.

And the next verses really explain what this power is about.

It is a power to create illusions, to mess with someone’s minds, to trick and manipulate until she leaves people blind. All Emerald’s major motifs are already present here.

For Merc we have:

I'm the one That was born in a nightmare a murderer's son Got no gun But I gleam like a blade and I'm harder than iron

I'm the one That was ripped from the earth and exposed to the sun Overrun By the hate and the beatings defiled by a father

Apart from a couple of lines on his abilities, the majority of the lines are about Mercury’s background because he is strongly defined by it.

Mercury’s whole background is foreshadowed here.

From his dad being an assassin:

I'm the one That was born in a nightmare a murderer's son

To him having no semblance

Got no gun

But having metallic legs

But I gleam like a blade and I'm harder than iron

The lines about Marcus hating and beating him are basically taken almost word by word in his conversation with Emerald in Lost.

So, we basically have Mercury’s background in a nutshell!

Thank you for the ask and a Happy New Year!

[dweemeister]

Movie Odyssey Retrospective

Cinderella (1950)

In the first few decades of Walt Disney Productions’ (now Walt Disney Animation Studios) existence, the studio veered perilously between periods of feast and famine. The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Dumbo (1941), and the modestly-budgeted films of the package era kept the studio afloat despite Walt Disney’s occasionally disastrous business instincts and rotten luck due to World War II cutting off European audiences. With WWII concluded, Disney’s propaganda commitments to the federal government and tightened budgets were no more. With the exception of the aftermath from the release of The Black Cauldron (1985), the studio’s survival has not been seriously endangered since. That is in large part because of the gamble that is Cinderella, directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson.

Any rebirth for Disney animated features depended on Cinderella’s success. Not since Dumbo had so much been riding on one of the studio’s movies – especially now as Walt was dividing his attention between animation, live-action features, television, a preliminary plan to build a small play park, and collaborating with the FBI to root out suspected communists at his own studio. More later on Cinderella’s legacy (I think you, the reader, have an idea about what happened to the Disney studios after this), but the film was the fifth highest-grossing movie in North American theaters that year, ahead of Born Yesterday and behind Cheaper by the Dozen and Annie Get Your Gun. In various ways, Cinderella is among the most important movies in the Disney animated canon, even if it does little to nothing to elevate animation in cinema and contains issues that have metastasized in subsequent Disney animated features.

Decades before the Disney name became synonymous with fairy tales and princesses, the writing team assigned to Cinderella used Snow White as their template on this film. The opening minutes of Cinderella share much of Snow White’s alchemy: the opening of an ornate storybook, an orphaned young woman whose lot in life is to be a rag-wearing scullery maid, that same woman singing about dreams to an audience of animals that instinctively know of her kindness. What starts off too similarly like the second coming of Snow White then descends into an overstretched sequence of the animals’ tomfoolery (half the film is dedicated to the animals’ hijinks!).

Cinderella’s animals, unlike those in Snow White, are fully anthropomorphic – they wear clothes, converse with Cinderella in their high-pitched squeak-talking, tiptoe around the obviously villainous cat named Lucifer, and make fools of themselves to entertain the youngest set. In the opening minutes, Cinderella squanders its serviceable musical opening for vapid hilarity as it unlearns the lessons that began with Snow White and reached its apotheosis with Bambi (1942). In works where animals live alongside humans, animal side characters serving as comic relief are most effective and timeless when they behave like animals, not humans. Disney’s animated canon has been hampered by this development – one codified by Cinderella and, in its foulest iterations in recent decades (e.g. 2005′s Chicken Little), originates from commercial, not artistic, decision-making. The excessive screentime for the animals in the film’s opening third and especially the heavily gender-coded dialogue and behavior by the mice – “Leave the sewing to the women!” – is enough to eject Cinderella from the upper echelons of the Disney animated canon.

In my review to Snow White, I wrote that the writing of female characters in Disney’s animated canon films reflects the writers’ understanding of gendered roles in their respective times. Cinderella expressly looked to Snow White for inspiration after two decades where the Great Depression and World War II upended traditional gender norms. In the 1930s and ‘40s, thousands of American women found themselves in traditionally male occupations, altering – if only for a time – popular beliefs about what might be considered masculine or feminine behavior. Over in Burbank at the Disney studios, its departments were segregated by gender (its ink and paint department was solely staffed by women, and there were no significant clusters of women elsewhere in the studio) – insulating it from this phenomenon.

As if foreshadowing the gender-conforming atmosphere of the 1950s, it should not be a surprise that Cinderella cannot envision women beyond a vessel for marriage or a homemaker. With an eye towards a prince to sweep her away from her stepmother and stepsisters, an interesting protagonist Cinderella does not make. And with Cinderella not showcasing as much of her personality as Snow White did, she feels far more inert as a character than her predecessor. However, comparable to Snow White, Cinderella’s life has been one of deprivation and a lack of healthy human interaction – one without quarter, love from others. Knowing little else about life beyond her scullery duties, it is easy to see why she holds such retrograde beliefs for her own salvation.

Cinderella’s rough beginning is nevertheless the prelude to its visual wonderment. The visuals in animated feature films are the collaborative work of hundreds – credited or otherwise – of animators, background artists, character designers, painters, inbetweeners, cinematographers, and more. Sometimes, one particular artist wields an influence that extends across an entire feature. In the correct set of circumstances, they set an aesthetic that alters the artistic direction of animated films for an entire national film industry or a single studio. For Cinderella, its visual beauty is set by its backgrounds. Tyrus Wong’s background art defined Bambi a decade earlier; here, it is Mary Blair’s work that defines Cinderella.

Blair, a modernist whose style fit the films at United Productions of America (UPA; a breakaway studio which was founded by striking Disney animators) better than Disney, had been working at the studio since 1940. She worked through the package films era and on two live-action/animation hybrids in Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948). But it is Cinderella where Blair’s style – flat, graphic, abstract – is the dominant force of the film. Blair’s buildings and their arches shoot upwards, supported by architecturally impossible reed-thin columns, making rooms cavernous and façades larger than life. The sprawl of these interiors suggests not only the fantastical atmosphere that this fairy tale inhabits, but the grandiosity of Cinderella’s story. The vertical frames of Blair’s buildings are elegant and abstract, never intimidating, as if hailing from a children’s storybook. With the exception of when Cinderella is dancing with (and fleeing) Prince Charming, blues, whites, and sometimes muted greens dominate the scenes of her regal desires – as if shimmering in moonlight.

In character design, three men – all part of the “Nine Old Men” fraternity – served as supervising animators for Cinderella. I find Cinderella’s character design plainly uninteresting, but it is how she moves that will leave awestruck this film’s most vocal detractors. Marc Davis (the three principal animated characters in Song of the South, Alice in 1951’s Alice in Wonderland); Eric Larson (Peter Pan in 1953’s Peter Pan, Mowgli and Bagheera in 1967’s The Jungle Book); and Les Clark (1928’s Steamboat Willie, 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians) made heavy use of rotoscoping in their attempts to animate Cinderella. Rotoscoping, developed by Max Fleischer (and made exclusive to Fleischer Studios by patent from 1915-1934), involves an animator tracing the movements over projected live-action footage as opposed to animating something from scratch or some other form of reference. As an animator traces over the footage, they may add a personal flourish – a delay or embellishment of movement – in the process. For animating humans, adhering completely to human movement via Rotoscope results in footage that looks stilted, as if hailing from a different universe than one created for an animated film. For Davis, Larson, and Clark, there hardly is a scene where Cinderella is not benefitting from rotoscoping. The rotoscoped animation allows Cinderella to move more fluidly than any human character drawn by the Disney animators at this point in the studio’s history. Whether she is scrubbing the floors, waltzing with her animal friends or Prince Charming, or making herself scarce before the stroke of midnight, there is a majestic grace to her movement – and yes, that includes the moment where she loses her glass slipper.

The less cartoonish a character acts in Cinderella, the more they are rotoscoped. So alongside Cinderella, Prince Charming and especially stepmother Lady Tremaine – the latter’s supervising character animator was Frank Thomas (an animator for the Seven Dwarfs on Snow White, supervising animator for Tod and Copper on 1981’s The Fox and the Hound) – are the two other characters heavily rotoscoped in the film. Lady Tremaine’s imposing posture and manner of dress gifts her a wordless authority over everyone residing in the Tremaine château. In contrast to Cinderella’s stepsisters – characters who act and look in ways that one might expect in a bawdy animated short film – her stern demeanor, realistically angled long face, and deliberate movements effuse opportunism, menace, spite. Lady Tremaine’s appearance, in respect to how much it contributes to the film, is a pronounced upgrade from the Queen in Snow White. She relates a spectacular amount of characterization in just a glance, a scowl. Yet, Lady Tremaine’s darkly charismatic character design would only be the appetizer to even more iconic villainous designs to appear later that decade.

The incidental score by Oliver Wallace and Paul J. Smith is dominated by quotations from the songs, and is not nearly as independent from the soundtrack as previous Disney animated canon scores. For the first time in a Disney animated feature, the studio looked outside its Burbank campus for its songwriters. Looking towards Tin Pan Alley, Disney hired Mack David (the title songs to 1959’s The Hanging Tree, 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World); Al Hoffman (“Papa Loves Mambo”, “A Whale of a Tale” from 1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea); and Jerry Livingston (the title songs to The Hanging Tree, 1965’s Cat Ballou). Cinderella possesses a wonderful musical score, headlined by “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, and “So This is Love” – ignoring “The Work Song” (squeak-sung by the mice in something that set a precedent for Alvin and the Chipmunks), of course.

One of these, obviously, is unlike the others. “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, sung by the Fairy Godmother (voiced by Verna Felton, who voiced the Elephant Matriarch and Mrs. Jumbo in Dumbo and, over the 1950s, became a Disney voice cast regular), is an exuberant frolic, and easily one of the best songs with nonsense lyrics in film history. Nonsense and novelty songs in Hollywood typically wear out their welcome, running a minute or more longer than they should. Clocking in at roughly one minute, the Fairy Godmother performs her magic, and promptly whisks Cinderella away to Prince Charming’s ball by song – a musical exemplar in narrative brevity.

Thirteen years following Snow White, Cinderella benefits from advances in recording technology and a richer – if not necessarily fuller – orchestral sound. Ilene Woods was primarily a radio singer, and her voice’s timbre is suited to play Cinderella. “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” parallels Snow White’s “I’m Wishing” in its exceptionally early placement and nowadays-formulaic function. But it is a serviceable introduction to Cinderella as a character, even with no specific dream mentioned in the lyrics. Sung with Mike Douglas (as Prince Charming), “So This is Love” is a dreamy duet, a waltz that musically defies a typical waltz. Waltzes, in ¾ time, usually have a pulse that even those not versed in music can “feel”. That pulse is usually on the downbeat, the “1”. Yet “So This is Love” generally begins its phrases and pulses on the “and” of the second beat (as one would count a measure as: “1 and 2 and 3 and”). The song’s frequent use of slurred notes, even fermatas, gives it its romantic flow and dramatic ebbs. This is an unconventional waltz, one that resists categorization and a song that would have been quite difficult to compose – despite its outwards simplicity.

Walt Disney appreciated the financial cushion that Cinderella provided (funding for the project met fierce resistance from his brother and the company’s CEO, Roy), and never truly worried about funding issues after the film’s release. The funds from Cinderella were injected across the company: for feature animation, live-action narrative features, the True-Life Adventures nature documentary series, Disney’s eventual television presence, and into purchasing a tract of orange groves in Anaheim. As for Cinderella itself, Walt could see the artistic shortcuts (rotoscoping included) in most every frame. It was no Snow White, he thought to himself. And though this 1950 adaptation was technologically superior in every way from the 1922 silent Laugh-O-Gram* short based on the same story, there seemed to be no artistic fulfillment for Walt in this Cinderella’s success.

Cinderella heralds the start of the Disney studios’ “Silver Age” – the second half of Walt Disney’s tenure as the creative ringleader at his namesake studio. Various film writers will provide conflicting definitions for these periods in Disney animation history. According to this blog, the Silver Age (1950-1967) is named as such due to the cessation of the package films and the return of more traditional animated features, Walt retreating from his once-omnipresent role in the artistic decision-making for those animated features, and the limited animation of the 1960s. However, the Silver Age is also the beginning of the studio consciously crafting large portions of these movies (if not the entire movie) explicitly for children. This is not to say films specifically for children are not worthwhile – Dumbo being a prime example. But to introduce characters, plot devices, and humor geared for children at the expense of the film’s storytelling or thematic resonance to viewers of all ages is the Disney studios at its most cynical and business-minded. These trends – that are not solely the fault of any single film – have persisted into modern animation, and are artistically incompatible with Disney’s Golden Age animated features. Those cynical trends are absent in the next Disney animated feature – an adaptation of a Lewis Carroll work that embraces a tsunami of colors and its own looniness.

To audiences in North America who had not seen a non-package animated feature in almost a decade and to war-weary audiences abroad reintroducing themselves to Disney films, Cinderella must have been an astonishing work after episodically-structured movies without a natural through line. In this Silver Age, Walt Disney and his animators would define the studio’s hallmarks – princesses, fairy tales, comic relief intended for children inserted for non-artistic reasons, and the distinctive visual style of artists like Mary Blair. Cinderella is the genesis for these developments. The Silver Age’s most innovative, accomplished work would still be several years away.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

* Founded in 1921 by Walt Disney, The Laugh-O-Gram studio was located in Kansas City, Missouri, and was the short-lived predecessor of the modern-day Walt Disney Animation Studios. Alongside future animation industry stalwarts Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng, the Laugh-O-Gram studios made short animated silent films. Many of these films were based on fairy tales – including Cinderella (1922).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

This is the twentieth Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include 12 Angry Men (1957), Oliver! (1968), and Jingle All the Way (1996).

[porkchop-ao3]

A Thrill I’ve Never Known (Chapter 60)

Ambush

Sorry for the big gaps between chapters. I’m just not full of motivation anymore, but I’m trying. I hope this chapter is entertaining enough to make up for the wait. Lots of talk of prostitution in this one (and not respectfully), gunfights, conflict etc. 

Tagging @emily-strange and @actuallyhansolo ❤

(All chapters tagged with #ATINK and also posted on Ao3, username PorkChop)

-

"You know Freeman went upstairs with Rose on Friday."

"Rose? The blonde one with the, uh–"

"Yeah you know the one."

"Jesus. You know a friend of mine's had her before."

"Yeah I know. And I know what you're gonna say." 

I heard the two men laughing. 

"Five bucks says Freeman's firing razor blades from his pisspipe as we speak."

More laughter and the sound of someone smacking someone on the shoulder. I sighed and rolled my eyes. I didn't know what to expect when the Pinkertons captured me, but sitting in the corner of an abandoned trading post for what felt like hours, listening to the irritating, dull chit chat coming from the four agents guarding me, was wearing thin startlingly quickly. I was starting to think physical torture would've been easier to endure. 

"He's a dirty dog, that one."

"Ain't got no shame, neither. Good job he ain't here, you just know he'd…" the man who was speaking trailed off, and a shuffling sound alerted my senses to the fact that they were all looking at me. I lifted my head and met their gazes. 

Of the four, two had been waiting when we arrived; the other two were Wilson and the one who'd carried me on his horse. All four of them were fairly young, probably around John's age, though they somehow looked older. Something about the suits they wore or the way they styled their moustaches aged them, though one of them was clean shaven; he looked the youngest as a result. They looked so ordinary. So unassuming and dull, you wouldn't look twice if you passed them in the street and I certainly wouldn't've called any of them handsome. But despite that, they all had rather high opinions of themselves.

"I'm sorry, Ma'am, I keep forgetting we're in the presence of a lady," the clean shaven one, the one who'd been speaking before, said to me with a twisted smile that showed his apology wasn't a sincere one. "Though I suppose you're quite used to the rough ways a man might talk, considering the company you keep."

"Actually they're far more polite," I answered. 

I was sitting on the ground in the corner of the room furthest from the door. A lantern sat beside me, illuminating me the most out of everyone; the men were only just touched by the light and everything looked like it was in sepia tones. They were all by the doorway, carrying guns and leaning casually against the decrepit walls, though one had found something to sit down on and was smoking a cigarette, his gun sitting on the floor by his feet. I eyed it. They'd taken my gun and left me with my ankles and wrists chained together and for the past hour or so I'd been subtly searching for a way out of the predicament. 

I was starting to regret my compliance, but I supposed it was better to be captured than dead. I knew which one Arthur would prefer, even if I did grow more and more concerned as time marched on about what had happened to him. I could only assume that while the men were still waiting around, Arthur was a free man. Surely I'd hear about it if they'd been successful in capturing him too, considering that was all they wanted me for. They hadn't been keeping it much of a secret.

"That so? So what're you? What's your role in the gang? You don't look like much of an outlaw," the guy continued, staring me down, his gun incidentally pointing in my vague direction with how he was holding it.

"I ain't, really," I admitted. "You think I'd've let you chain me up and keep me here so easy if I was confident enough in my ability to kill all'a you? I'm just… just ordinary."

"Come on, you know what she is," another man muttered to the first, nudging him with his elbow. "She's just like pretty little Rose. Ain't too many ways a woman can make money in their world, gunning down bank managers is often too much for their feminine sensibilities."

"So you're saying she's a whore? I ain't seen her in any of the saloons, and she weren't working earlier," Wilson said. 

"A whore can walk into a bar and have a drink, you know, they ain't always working," the one sitting down argued.

Wilson snorted, "you show me a whore who ain't always working to some extent, and maybe I'll believe you." 

"Maybe she's just the gang's whore. They all have a go. Morgan, though, he's her favourite. Opens wide for him for free," the one who first suggested I was a prostitute added, staring me down with a perverted smile, like he was enjoying the topic far too much. "Bet that's what they was out here for."

"That's unseemly, Thompson, shut the hell up," Wilson snapped, smacking him over the back of the head.

"Sorry, fellers. My wife's been giving me a hard time, tells me she don't want another baby, you know how they are," Thompson sighed, and the men around him hummed in varying tones of acknowledgement. My top lip curled mildly in disgust. 

"You didn't answer us, missy," the seated agent prompted, and all eyes were on me again. 

"You never gave me the chance, too busy coming up with your own narrative about my life," I murmured. They all kept their mouths shut and I filled the silence with nonsense. "Well I ain't a whore. They just keep me around to wash their drawers. Don't you know a bunch'a men can't live a comfortable life without having a band of women to pick up after 'em?" 

"Ain't no use if they don't put out."

"Thompson!"

"So all you women are like housemaids?" 

"Most of us. We all joined 'cause we're excited by the idea of handling gentleman's underthings, 'specially those belonging to dangerous, murderous outlaws," I murmured drily. "Nothing gets the heart going quite like it."

"She's having us on," Thompson hissed and I snickered. 

"If only. We do special little jobs for 'em. They all have a thing they like," I began, looking up towards the roof in thought. "Your friend Mr. Bell, he likes us to rub vaseline into his hands before bed to keep 'em soft. Says it's 'cause he likes to pretend that they belong to a lady, though I can't fathom why he'd wanna do that," I frowned to myself. 

I peered up at the men, watching their expressions twist in all different directions, some were confused, others were amused. 

"Then Dutch likes us all to call him Master, and bow in his presence and not make eye contact, 'cause we ain't worthy. I mean, it's only fair. He's Dutch Van Der Linde! The biggest and baddest of them all," I carried on.

"She's talking shit," Thompson reiterated, and the others glanced at him like they knew full well. Well, they'd be stupid if they didn't. 

"What about Mr. Morgan?" Wilson asked regardless.

"Mr. Morgan? Well, Mr…" I trailed off, my eyes drifting to the doorway where – speak of the devil – Arthur appeared. He met my eyes and his shoulders sagged with relief and I froze.

"Officers," his voice was deep and quiet but it got their attention. They all gasped and turned around, swinging up their guns. Arthur stood there with his hands up. It was impossible not to notice the large deep crimson patch on his shirt at his side. My mouth hung open as I stared at him. 

"Mr. Morgan! Keep your damn hands up and don't move an inch!"

"Wait, hold on a second," he said, tone exasperated. "I got every intention of coming with you, and I'll go easy. Just let me watch you let the girl go."

"I don't think so. Thompson, cuff him," Wilson snapped, waving the man forward.

Arthur stepped back slowly. "Come on, now, I'm offering you a fair enough deal. All I want is for you to let the girl come out here, and ride off on my horse. As soon as I see that, and she's okay, I'm all yours. I ain't lookin' to fight no more. You'll catch me sooner or later–"

"Arthur," I squeaked, shaking my head.

"Don't worry princess, you're more important, just let them do their job," Arthur responded, not looking at me, his eyes keenly focused on the agent in front of him. "Please, officers. You want me, not her. Like I said, I'll go easy if you just do this one thing."

"We've got you outnumbered, and you're bleeding. We could make you come with us whether we let her go or not–"

"I'm also armed. And I also killed every one of those useless pricks you had waiting on me back there," Arthur cut him off, jerking his head in the direction of the camp, "I'm more than capable of killing you lot too, but frankly I'm tired. All I want is her safe." 

"Get the girl," Wilson barked at the clean-shaven fellow and he approached me, dragging me to my feet by my arm. I grunted as he pulled me and the cuffs around my ankles dug in, and I tried to keep up. I was led outside, closer to Arthur, I stared at him with my eyes wide and my mouth in a little 'o'.

"Arthur, don't… don't–" I whispered.

"This is a long time coming. Better they take me now than later, and risk you getting wrapped up in this any more," he looked me in the eye, his expression was so difficult to read. My heart pounded so hard I felt sick. 

"Please," I begged, a sob exploding from me. 

"Be a good girl, come on," he said gently, his eyes drifting back to agent Thompson. 

"They'll hang you!" I cried.

"For God's sake, Thompson, unlock her cuffs and get her on that damn horse. Get her out of here," Wilson snapped irritably and the clink of keys sounded behind me. He pulled my wrists towards him and I turned as he unlocked my hands first, then crouched down to unlock my ankles. 

"Sweetheart, I'm asking you... to do as you're damn well told!" Arthur spat those final words with sharp and bitter venom in his tone that made me flinch. It was that deep growl of a tone. That one he had never, ever used on me, the one that I knew was carefully curated for his enemies and took a conscious decision to use. It was enough to clear my head, make me look at the bigger picture. That wasn't an accident, I knew Arthur would never speak to me like that; especially not if he believed it'd be the last he saw of me.

I placed my trust and my faith entirely in him. "I love you," I breathed, and then I was shoved towards Jet, standing a few feet away. 

"I love you too, princess," Arthur replied quietly. My eyes blurred as I reached his horse, pulling myself up into the saddle. I turned to look at Arthur as I rode away, and his gaze stayed locked on me as long as distance would allow. 

I was breathing fast and heavy and every bone in my body was telling me to turn around and go back, to do something in case he really was handing himself over– and then I saw Taima. And Old Boy. And Bob! And I knew that my gut instinct to trust Arthur and to follow his advice was not leading me astray. I slowed and stopped by the horses, which were waiting out of view from the trading post, and there was about three seconds of silence before there was gunfire. Not a lot. A sudden flurry of blasts, an ambush, which went on for a few unsteady breaths before there was silence again. 

I stared in the direction of the trading post, my eyes focused on nothing but fog and trees. I waited, itching to turn back, to see what had happened; but I gave it time. I trusted.

And in a few moments, I saw them all. John, Charles, Sadie and Arthur, walking back over towards the horses and I. I exhaled a sharp breath, a smile spreading across my face, relief seeping into every corner of my body and making me feel as though I could scream. The appreciation and love I felt for those four people far surpassed anything I had ever felt in my life, and before I knew it I was crying. I urged Jet forwards, closing the distance between us all, and the other horses followed. 

"You… you–" I exclaimed nothing in particular, shaking my head in astonishment once I reached them all. I slid down off of Jet, my foot catching in the stirrup and propelling me face first towards the ground. Arms jolted forwards to catch me, and Charles and Sadie broke my fall, holding me upright. I used the excuse to throw my arms around them, squeezing them tight. "Thank you so much!" 

"Steady on," Sadie chuckled at my overzealousness, but her tone soon turned serious, “are you alright?”

I let them go, leaning back to look at her. I nodded firmly when I saw the concerned look in her eye.

“They didn't hurt you?” She asked, her brows raising in a way that told me she wasn't just asking about cuts and bruises.

“No, I’m fine, honest,” I offered her a reassuring smile, and she squeezed my arm, relief making her shoulders drop. 

I took a breath and spun to plant a hug on John too. He laughed and patted my back.

"What's with all the hugging these days?" He teased. 

"I just feel so lucky to know you all," I sighed, letting him go and looking towards Arthur. He was standing there with his hand on his side, his other hand holding my satchel and gun belt. I stepped forward and hugged him more gently than the others, my arms around his neck, my fingers combing through his hair and cupping the back of his head. "Those bastards, what've they done to you?"

"I'm okay. Nothing serious," he whispered to me, wrapping one arm around me, unable to grip as it was full of my stuff. I kissed the side of his head then I pulled away and took my things from him, fastening the belt around me and throwing the satchel over my shoulder.

"I'm so sorry, Arthur," I whispered. He shook his head, kissed my forehead and then gestured to the horses.

"Come on, we'd best go. We'll pick up the tent on our way and then we'll… we'll head back to camp," he said. My mouth opened at the mention of camp, Micah's face suddenly taking up every corner of my mind. Arthur and the others mounted up and I stood there, shell shocked. "Sweetheart?"

"It's Micah," I blurted out. Arthur frowned immediately.

"What is?"

"The rat. Micah is the rat," I stammered, eyes jerking between each of their faces. They were all blank for a moment as it sunk in. Then there was rage. 

"They said that?" John hissed. 

"I figured it out. I-it had to have been, there was no other– they picked me up after they saw me in Van Horn, but Micah was there! It's gotta be him– it has to be–"

"Slow down, tell us everything, we can't go in there half-cocked, not having all the facts," Charles held his hand up to me and I hesitated, staring at him for a moment. 

"Get up here, princess, explain on the way. We can't stay here," Arthur said, holding his hand out to me. He helped me up onto the horse and we all started riding.

[sorcerorsutrascroll]

some nb (neat buddhism) hcs

One of my favorite parts of this excellent set of Okina headcanons is the following:

the first visual image showed Matara-jin as a combination of two female gods and one male god. There are a number of ways you can interpret Okina’s gender, but in light of this I tend to assume Okina has been both male and female from the outset. 

Turns out Buddhist lore is an absolute goldmine of material for those of us who like to take our nonbinary headcanons a little more seriously. And so, in addition to throwing my full support behind the above nb Okina headcanon, I would like to offer my own takes on nb Miko and nb Byakuren.

Let’s start with Miko. 

If we don’t buy the “woman in disguise" and/or “historical revisionism” handwaves, then it’s natural to assume that Miko is a binary transwoman since her new body and pronouns match a binary female identity. But the explanation for Miko’s choice of new body is a little odd:

豊聡耳神子は現代に合わせた姿に変えたそうだ。

Toyosatomimi no Miko seems to have changed to a look more suited to modern times.   

If we take this to be just about Miko’s fashion and not her body, then we’re willfully ignoring the part about shikaisen abandoning their meatsuits. But fitting in with the times is a very impersonal thing that has nothing to do with the very personal matter of gender identity. We could try to dismiss the entire line as Akyuu’s wild speculation, but ZUN gives very clear indicators of when to doubt her, and I don’t think casual transphobia is one of them. 

If this isn’t just about fashion, and Akyuu isn’t being transphobic, then perhaps Miko’s choice of body is more about presentation than identity, which in turn suggests that she might actually be nonbinary since her transition rationale works against “binary woman” and her lack of dysphoria works against “binary man.” And there’s plenty of evidence that Miko simply prefers to present along binary lines without intending for that presentation to reflect a binary identity:

- uses she/her pronouns but title of 太子, which is intended for male heirs and is much closer to western “crown prince” than “crown princess”

- switches between feminine "schoolgirl with ribbon” look and masculine “Nobunaga-esque image” (SCoOW profile ZUN comment), always with skirt, sometimes combines masculine cape + feminine ribbon

- initially uses typical polite-feminine speech (identical to Byakuren’s), but permanently switches to aggressively masculine speech after HM (you can actually see her switch between the two patterns in HM)

Of course gnc binary women (both cis and trans) exist, but the point is that Miko mixes and matches from both halves of the binary in all aspects of her presentation, and there’s no reason to believe this doesn’t extend to her body, which means the usual pronoun + post-transition body combination is no longer a reliable indicator of her gender identity. She might identify as a binary transwoman, but she just as easily might not.

The case for nonbinary Miko only gets stronger as we move from canon to Kannon - specifically, the Guze Kannon mentioned in a number of Miko’s spells. At some point people started worshiping Shoutoku as a messianic (guze = ��世 = world-saving) manifestation of Kannon, and one of these people was a monk named Shinran who wrote an entire set of hymns praising Shoutoku, including:

Prince Shōtoku was born as Queen Srimala in India and appeared as Master Hui-ssu in China. 

He appeared in China to help people; he was reborn as both man and woman five hundred times.

Miko’s spells are a clear indicator that she’s based on this mythic version of Shoutoku, which means any contribution to this lore is fair game for her lore. And even if we had to pick and choose, Shinran’s contributions to Shoutoku lore would absolutely make the cut given just how hard he stanned the dude (expect to hear a lot more about this in future posts). Who am I to question the headcanons of Shoutoku’s #1 fanboy?

As for Byakuren, all we need is the fact that she’s the only Myourenji monk who actually takes the sutras seriously. And the Vimalakirti Sutra, which is pretty damn important in East Asian Buddhism, features a goddess who reminds a guy named Shariputra that Buddha cancelled binary gender:

If the elder could again change out of the female state, then all women could also change out of their female states. All women appear in the form of women in just the same way as the elder appears in the form of a woman. While they are not women in reality, they appear in the form of women. With this in mind, the Buddha said, "In all things, there is neither male nor female."

If Buddha says binary gender is cancelled, and Byakuren lives by Buddha’s words, well, you do the math.  Also cis-passing fembies are extremely valid and deserve more rep.

Incidentally, that Wikipedia link says, “another significant commentary is the Yuimagyō gisho 維摩経義疏, or Commentary on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, ascribed to Prince Shōtoku.” As will become apparent from future posts on this blog, historical Buddhist lore is the real HijiMiko MVP.

In conclusion, Okina-Miko-Byakuren medieval Buddhism enby trifecta rights.  

[calleo-bricriu]

what's the de sade ripoff book like anyway?

It’s like listening to someone who thinks they’re a genius but who’s really sort of–slightly below average at everything ramble on and on and on for over 400 pages about how they’re a genius and everyone around them is making their life horrible because they don’t understand how much of a genius he is.

Also, alcohol isn’t a stimulant at all, let alone a strong one. I guess, to be entirely fair, if I found out my Mum had a sex dungeon in the house I’d probably need a drink as well.

A lot of drinks.

And an Obliviator.

Finding out your mum has a sex dungeon is a pretty reasonable excuse to drink a lot.

Anyway, this author is allegedly a doctor, he ought to know damn well alcohol isn’t a stimulant.

I really do just love how it’s the same exact story, only with worse writing and set in Dresden–then Hamburg–then…New York City.

Some guy named Newcomber completely flips out any time someone says a woman’s name around him in his own house. It’s never explained why. I feel like that should have been an important plot point? Maybe he’s assuming everyone’s already read the book he blatantly lifted from.

Men just need to not be allowed to describe women in their books if they’re going to do it like this: “Seated in a large leathern chair was a dainty piece of pink-cheeked, dark-haired, ebon-eyed femininity. Her sealskin jacket fitted snugly her lithe form, and a fascinating toque rounded off the saucy, childlike appearance of the young woman.”

That’s the sort of description that makes you feel like you need to run a Scourgify through your entire brain.

I’ve read, as I mentioned yesterday, de Sade; all of his uncensored garbage and the difference is, de Sade knew he was a shite writer.

He was just one of those obnoxious people that feels the need to be edgy for shock value; to get a reaction. He wasn’t ever trying to be good at it, he just wanted to get a reaction and have people pay attention to him, which he got–usually in the form of prison.But, the end result of that is that his writing aged in a way that makes it so completely off the wall ridiculous that it’s more funny and less shocking now.

Like–right, if you’ve never read 120 Days of Sodom you should, because all it is is this list of increasingly improbable to impossible scenarios, in actual list form, that are discussed by the characters like they’re going over a list of chores they need to do that afternoon.

One involved mice and cannons, actual cannons, that somehow didn’t result in death or injury to anyone (including the mice), another had to do with somehow arranging it so a woman would give birth to a goat, which would then become a sex slave–the goat, not the woman, I think he forgot there was a woman involved in that one by the time he got to the impossible goat baby–and when you read something like that, you know damn well the person writing it was writing what they were writing as bait to see how mad people would get about it.

This idiot, however, didn’t appear to get the joke and is taking his own…version of Justine very, very seriously which leaves you more with a really creeped out feeling than a, “HA! I can’t believe anyone fell for this, it’s so obviously written as over the top with intent to offend people too stupid to get the joke,” sort of thing.

So, moving on from the creepy description of childlike femininity–and who says woman like that anyway?

Ms. Femininity gets up and gives the, “Never Say A Woman’s Name In My House For Any Reason Ever” Newcomber a kiss and he just sort of shrugs it off, which makes her concerned but since he never bothered detailing whatever backstory these two have I guess I’m just supposed to make one up. Guessing that, because it was described as “armorous” they’re lovers but, it might have had more of an impact if he’d–mentioned that previously at some point?

This is only page sixteen, as an aside.

She was gossiping with his mom and mom let slip that he was leaving Dresden and she’s upset but again, no backstory given between these two so we don’t even know how or why she knows his mother. All we know about that relationship is that his mom grosses him out probably because of the sex dungeon thing, which is a fair reason to not want to visit your mother’s house.

So he’s pretty meh about the kiss hello, she loses her mind about it and says he’s being cruel then flings herself onto the sofa for a good cry about which he doesn’t even care.

His name is Leigh, apparently, which is a perfectly common German name, as is Newcomber..

And she’s–Tahitian (but upper class, he’s emphasised that, can’t have him screwing around with a commoner from Tahiti, obviously) and grew up in…Honolulu and got married to a US Navy officer two years before she met the guy in Dresden that she just kissed and is now crying over while the author scrambles for a backstory.

Great, got married at sixteen, is now referred to as a “child-wife” and somehow his deployment from Honolulu landed her in…Dresden.

He should have known not to leave her alone in Dresden because, since she’s Tahitian, that means she’s just going to start cheating on him the second his back is turned (which appears to be what’s happening here).

An entire page later, we find out her name is Obera, and the guy whose mom has a sex dungeon who straight up ignores her is apparently the love of her life despite the fact that all we’ve seen so far is that he’s straight up not the least bit interested in her.

That finally ended and we’re back to her crying on the sofa and he tells her to knock it off because it makes him feel mean–when he was just mean to her not even two full pages ago. Leigh’s got a terrible memory, I guess.

“Finely-molded limbs”. Stop it.

A few paragraphs of Obera going on about how Leigh’s sister, Mizpra, is a complete and utter bitch and Leigh agreeing with her that Mizpra is, in fact, a complete and utter bitch. I might be too if my name were Mizpra.

At this point, in the middle of Obera trying to explain some theological lecture she attended, the author butts in to tell us that the lectures are FACTS then references some article in Popular Science Monthly from May 1989 called, “Witchcraft in Bavaria” right after Leigh starts talking about how Dresden has lousy weather and they’re going to the Rhine because the climate is that much different–five hours barely South and mostly West of Dresden, though it might be closer depending on where along the Rhine they’re going; its a river, and it’s not exactly a short one.

It also apparently has a climate similar to Honolulu which tells me he’s never been to either place but, it’s fiction, so why the hell not?

I’m only on page 22 now, as an aside.

Suffer with me, this is awful.

So he’s already planned this whole thing, someone named Frau Leidmann will lie to everyone and tell them that Obera is traveling with some old woman, he’s sending a telegram from…New York asking her to meet some made up person in Hamburg which, incidentally, is five hours North of Dresden and if you’re trying to aim for a warmer, closer to Honolulu climate here, you don’t want to be going North but okay, fine, we’re going to Hamburg.

Author really ought to have consulted a map before writing this.

“Was it right that he should take her with him and wreck her life?” Um–if you have to ask…

Wonderful, well, at least by now she’s 18 because she got married two years previously at 16.

By page 23 he’s essentially admitted he doesn’t like her much at all but she’s hot and young so he’s going with that. Not creepy at all.

“He would throw her aside as he would any other obstacle. Was this love?” …no. We established that two paragraphs ago when his thought was straight up that he didn’t love her.

Can’t take her back to the US with him but–he’s–that part was never mentioned at any point, as far as we’ve known until page 24 is that the guy lives in Dresden, his sister is a bitch, and his mom has a sex dungeon.

Nothing dignified about his appearance, likes his laboratory, doesn’t have a real job, nobody understands him, I’m starting to think it’s less that his sister is a bitch and more that he’s just kind of a whiny creep.

So, that’s the end of chapter 1.

Chapter two starts with him explaining why he named one of his dogs Bridget and why he’s mad that Obera could not possibly care less. I couldn’t possibly care less either but he explains it anyway in the weirdest possible way, “They do not associate the name with the beautiful, refined, and historically interesting woman who gave it such prominence. How can you associate a noisy, china-breaking, red-headed, befuzzled, opinionated ruler of the kitchen with Bridget the Goddess of Poetry, the Gaelic Muse, the sentimental, impulsive Sappho of ancient Ireland?”

Man, don’t talk about your dog that way, just don’t. I don’t like where you’re going with it.

Dagda gets a much shorter, “he was the all-king, almost the Zeus of ancient Ireland.”

Ah, and Obera is, of course, a princess. A Tahitian princess.

From Honolulu.

Which is famously in Tahiti and not a six hour flight–a thing that didn’t exactly exist in 1901 so I’m assuming it would have taken a hell of a lot longer by boat–North on an entirely different set of islands.

Okay.

You know, at least de Sade knew where physical locations of places were.

Do you know how bad something as to be that, not even 35 full pages in, you can not only recognise it as a direct derivative work of the Marquis de Sade but also have it be abundantly clear that it’s, like, a version of it so poorly done that the only reason you’re still reading it is because you kind of now want to see just how much more idiotic the story can get?

That’s what this book is like.

“He arose and went to her, took her on his lap, and talked to her as though she were a child.” No. No, stop that right now.

Four pages of him explaining that the reason why he ordered, ordered, her to read a childrens book was to prove to her how all folk tales are all the same and nothing is original and something about random Greek philosophers, then Why Catholics Are Right.

I might have been as bored reading that as Obera probably was having to listen to it.

HA! SHE FELL ASLEEP WHILE HE WAS TALKING!

She has a nap, wakes up later, and has somehow…uh…received a letter from that guy she married in Honolulu basically saying, “We both made a mistake. Divorce time.” and is somehow upset by this despite it being established in the last chapter that she wasn’t super interested in him anyway as the first thing she did when he ended up deployed was start fucking this idiot of a pseudo-intellectual.

…and this is somehow Mizpra’s fault, so I’m assuming she tattled, then he straight up jumps from, “Yeah I don’t love her, she’s just hot I guess” to “I LOVE YOU LET’S GET MARRIED DEFINITELY NOT TO SPITE MY SISTER!”

That’s not sarcasm. That’s exactly what it was. Right after he does the, “I love you! I’ll marry you!” (twice in a row at that, nobody talks like that) he moves right onto “the bitch can’t laugh at you getting busted cheating if we get married” which is not entirely sound logic but that’s where we’re going.

Robert Mesney hopefully got out of this stupid plot by realising what was going on and filing for divorce.

Actually, he doesn’t even ask her  to marry him he tells her that he’s going to marry her and doesn’t give her the option to object which I guess is just fine because at some point during his rant about his sister being a tattling bitch Obera fainted and he just…didn’t notice until he let her go and she fell over because of the being unconscious thing. Even then he didn’t really care, he just sort of went, “Oh.” and dropped her back on the bed.

Now she’s talking about his “aged countenance” which might be a little more fair if it hadn’t been mentioned that he’s 25. It’s not exactly old enough to count as “aged countenance”.

Apparently he’s also an alcoholic, which they keep referring to as dipsomania. Good idea, marry the 25 year old alcoholic who the plot has established doesn’t even love you (nor has he shown it at any point in their interactions apart from shouting it at her after finding out his sister told her soon-to-be-ex-husband that Obera was cheating on him), that’ll go well for everyone involved. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong here.

The servant at this place in Hamburg has been going on for five and a half pages about how Leigh is a drunk and how it’s his mother’s fault or something then just rambling on about his own family tree for no actual reason and how he’s somehow related to Leigh but also is looking forward to the time when the last Newcomber dies.

That’s chapter 2.

Chapter 3 starts with the fact that Leigh said he’d be back by lunch and it’s been three days and he’s still not back; I guess, to be fair, he didn’t say by lunch on which day.

He’s just out binge drinking in Hamburg.

Shows up four days later at four in the morning and immediately starts drinking again and none of this is a red flag for her.

Now they’re–he’s going to Paris, she’s going back to…the US from Havre, and he’s somehow decided it’s a better idea for him to not also go to the US via Havre but to instead go to Liverpool and leave from there. Okay.

This is only page 44 out of 408.

Mizpra wants to control their mother to snag most of her estate out from under Leigh, it appears as though she’s just his stepsister anyway, Mrs. Kassel is apparently a nice lady because the author hammers that point away for a good two solid pages and she’s going to New York with Obera because she apparently owns a house on Fifth Avenue.

All right.

She just randomly tells Obera that crooked noses and mental illness (sorry, “bad psychic quality”) runs in the family. Still no red flags for Obera.

Skips right to the wedding which has…no detail at all. Literally the only mention it gets after all of that build up is, “The wedding took place at Mrs. Kassel’s, who attended to every detail,” then moves right on to Leigh getting a flat in uptown and a job at a hospital and to mention that his mother’s letters were “curt, unresponsive, and insulting” for which he blames Mizpra.

Couldn’t be the fact that he ran off to the US with a still married 18 year old without telling anyone, why would that bother someone’s mother?

He either gets fired or quits at the hospital, it was never mentioned either way, and has irregular work so now they’re behind on bills and Obera’s “condition” requires quiet and rest and…Mrs. Kassel to take her on a vacation I guess. Time skip from spring to autumn and, to nobody’s surprise, Obera comes back with a baby and her idiot of a husband is still unemployed and also didn’t seem to notice or care that she was gone (because that’s never mentioned) for almost a year.

By this point, Leigh straight up hates his mom and Mizpra is a “moral criminal” but it’s not explained how, just that she is.

Mom, Mizpra, and a whole bunch of their maids suddenly turn up at an uptown hotel and he just–takes off to go and see them despite having spent the last few pages going on about how he can’t stand either of them.

Sister’s got masculine handwriting which is somehow important to know.

Oh, let’s see, what else are we learning about Mizpra: Large jaws, muscled neck, small hips, uncomely waist, large hands, bold frame, coarse features, a “masculine larynx” and she–author keeps refering to Mizpra as she so that’s what I’m going with here–tells him to fuck off and that she’ll call the police if he tries to see mother.

So, instead of trying to reason with her (also why did they come over from Desden if they didn’t want to see him?) he just tells her she looks like a man.

“Mother doesn’t want to see you.”

“YEAH, WELL YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN! CHECKMATE! I AM SUCH AN INTELLECTUAL!”

Great display of the long winded nonsense the author gave everyone about what an intelligent intellectual this idiot is; best he can come up with is to tell his sister she looks like a man.

He still doesn’t have a job.

It’s been almost an entire year, how have they not been evicted from that flat yet?

Oh, but he has money to go out and get trashed again, though.

And he’s rambling to the bartender about people staring at “crippled children” for some fucking reason while the bartender pretty much pretends to listen.

He drinks because he’s a genius. That’s it. That’s the reason. He’s a genius and nobody gets him so he drinks.

58 pages in and I can kind of see why this guy’s sister doesn’t particularly care for him. I don’t particularly care for him either and, so far, am kind of on Mizpra’s side on this one.

Random name dropping list of famous people who had epilepsy or who were alcoholics or drug addicts. For an entire five pages. Nothing else, just a list, until he gets to Edgar Allan Poe who apparently had a psychic incubus problem instead.

One long paragraph held together by semicolons that says nothing at all.

Five pages about how his drinking problem is literally just like lycanthropy only, instead of turning into a wolf, he just goes to a pub and does so more often than once every full moon.

Same thing though. Exactly like lycanthropy which we all know is caused by thinking you’re a genius then being mad that nobody else agrees with that self-assessment.

More internal dialogue about how everybody is an idiot except him, because he’s a genius that nobody understands.

Somehow.

A few more pages of comparing himself to Nero which is not strictly the best comparison someone could make unless he’s planning to burn New York City down.

Couple of pages of internal dialogue about how he shouldn’t have to get a job because he’s a genius and people should just pay him to grace them with his presence.

End of Chapter 4 and I can’t keep reading this anymore today. This might be the worst thing I’ve ever read and not at all for the reasons the author was intending; it’s not shocking unless you’re shocked by how badly it’s written.

It’s so bad it’s almost exhausting.

[prokopetz]

I'm in the early stages of worldbuilding for a D&D 5e play-by-post, and it's Pride Month, so I was thinking I might include some queerness in my game world. Not just representation (I'm a ways off from making NPCs anyway), but larger-scale queer-coded setting elements. An obvious way is to put queer deities in the pantheon, and I'm definitely going to do that, but I'm looking for others. Can you assist?

A couple of less obvious things to consider when putting together a queer-friendly fantasy setting:

Titles and peerages. In the real world, the consort of a royal or noble gets an “equivalent” title because masculine titles outrank feminine ones: a king outranks a queen, a prince outranks a princess, and so forth. That means it’s never unclear who holds the title by right and who married into it. (This is why the consort of a reigning queen is a prince rather than a king, incidentally; otherwise folks might get confused about who’s really in charge!) In a milieu where the precedence of titles is not based on gender, or where both the title’s bearer and their consort may be the same gender, some alternative mechanism of clarifying precedence would be needed. What is it?

Succession and inheritance. Both are very big deals in a typical fantasy milieu, and in a setting where married couples can involve any configuration of genders, couples who can’t produce heirs of the blood without magical assistance are likely to be fairly common. You could do an end-run around the issue by proposing that such magic is ubiquitous, but it may be more interesting to say: okay, given that heirs of the blood are off the table for many couples, and presuming there’s no social pressure for people to go against their natural inclinations in order to fix that, how would succession and inheritance need to work differently?

[queermediastudies]

Photo Essay: Queerness in Disney Villains

The focus of these images is on how Disney villains are incidentally queer, and how this representation reflects a negative image for queer people. Generally, villains are conquered by heteronormative characters, whether that be through a failed plan or death. This is harmful because it paints queer people in a villainous way and as being defeated by hetero-norms rather than accepted.  Disney should move away from only having queer representation in the form of a villain and instead, have queerness portrayed across all types of characters (protagonist, side characters, etc). This will give more positive representation for those in the LGBTQ community, making Disney a more inclusive fantasy world.  This approach is more effective in embracing queer identity. The characters we will be focusing on will be grouped into three categories: ambiguous relationships, mannerisms and gender roles, and breaking notions of normativity. 

Ambiguous Relationships:

These images portray different characters that have relationships the audience may deem ambiguous. These relationships are not heterosexual ones either, making them appear queer. Though none of the texts outright say there is a relationship between these characters, there are moments that feel outside of heteronormative traditions.

(Gaston and Lefou, “Beauty and the Beast”, Disney, 1991)

This image is from the song sequence in Beauty and the Beast (1991) where Gaston basically brags about how manly he is. However, though the song focuses on his “manliness” there is a moment in which Gaston and his goofy henchman, Lefou, dance intimately for a moment. This moment is similar to the W.K.L Dickson short film of 1895 that depicted two men dancing intimately together. Benshoff and Griffin (2004) say, “Without a narrative context, the meaning of ‘two men dancing together is left open to interpretation. One thing is certain however-- the dancing pair is queer: they are not the usual expected heterosexual couple” (p. 6). Different from the “dancing pair” video, Gaston and Lefou do have a narrative that may challenge their queer image (since Gaston is actively chasing after Belle). However, as the text states this moment does not have a heterosexual pairing and features two men, making them queer.

(Captain Hook and Mr. Smee, “Peter Pan”, Disney, 1953)

There has been much speculation from Disney fans that Captain Hook could be gay due to his flamboyant mannerisms, but when one takes a closer look at his relationship with his first mate, Mr. Smee, it is clear that they are extremely close (Benedict, 2017). What is queer about their relationship is the way Smee dotes on Hook, something that is characteristic of the gender roles of a woman. Seen here, Smee is taking Hook’s temperature while Hook is feeling unwell. The purpose of Smee’s character is to be the person that cares for Hook, the way a woman stereotypically cares for a man in a heterosexual relationship. Hook, on the other hand, is the leader and provider of the crew (what could be seen as a family). Having them be two male characters that embody the heteronormative traditions of a man and woman is what makes their relationship queer and ultimately relates to the historical use of queer gender-bending as a technique to gain laughs as well as to signify evil (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004, p. 7).

(Ratcliffe and Wiggins, “Pocahontas”, Disney, 1995)

Ratcliffe and Wiggins are both queer characters due to their mannerisms. Ratcliffe portrays a flamboyant image that is not of traditional masculine stereotypes due to the way he dresses and enjoys “finer things”. He does not follow the rugged, hard working stereotype that heteronormativity often gives. Wiggins also has a queerness about the way he acts, but it is different from Ratcliffe. Rather, Wiggins likes things that are stereotypical of gay men/of being “girly”. Here, he is offering that Ratcliffe and Wiggins give gift baskets. He also is seen making a unicorn shaped bush, bathing a dog and talking cutsey with it, and getting teary-eyed when Ratcliffe is taken away. These interests deviate from stereotypical masculine interests, making Wiggins queer. Together, Ratcliffe and Wiggins create a queer duo, with Ratcliffe being the snobby,arrogant stereotypical gay man and Wiggins being the flowery, girly stereotypical gay man. They are not openly gay, but connotation is a tactic often used in film to deal with onscreen homosexuality, that makes the characters more queer than openly gay (Benshoff & Griffin, 2004, p. 7).

Mannerisms:

With the following images, we can see how characters are made inherently queer through their mannerisms. Disney uses stereotypes of queer people such as their behaviors, to reinforce stereotypes of queer people. Cover (2004) discusses how “stereotyping reduces individuality and diversity, into wrongful notions of behavior” (pg. 81). In class, we’ve discussed how queer people are represented: flamboyant, hyper feminine, fashionable, etc. By assigning queer people these stereotypes, and by continuing to portray characters with these stereotypes, we will continue to see these mannerisms and behaviors as negative.

(Scar, “The Lion King”, Disney 1994)

This gif shows Scar from The Lion King. In this scene, Scar is speaking XXX. One way Scar is made incidentally queer is by the placement of his paw. He has the back his paw placed on his forehead, and his eyes are closed. From the gif, it looks like he is speaking dramatically. Queer people, gay men in particular, have been typically portrayed as over the top and dramatic. In this scene with Scar, we can see this stereotype being played out. Because By portraying queer men as “drama queens,” we are reducing their emotions down to say they aren’t valid because showing emotion is only acceptable for women. By doing this, we are also saying that drama is only associated with women. This actions continue to place gender roles on both men and women, and acting out of your gender roles is queer.

(Gaston, “Beauty and the Beast” Disney, 1991)

This GIF shows a scene in Beauty and the Beast where the villain Gaston is upset about Belle’s behavior; she rejected him in public and now he sits in a pub is singing about how great of a man he is. His friend Lefou is joining in on the song and gets other men in the pub to sing about Gaston as well, making the entire scene fairly queer. In this GIF specifically, Gaston is acting queerly from your traditional, heterosexual, masculine, male. While Gaston’s physique is that of a traditionally masculine man, his mannerisms suggest queerness. Gaston sits on the chair, with his leg pointed in a feminine manner. He is also singing about using antlers in all of his decorating. Traditional gender roles assume women do housework, including any decorating. In the GIF, Gaston is breaking gender roles and is inherently queer while doing so.

(Hades, “Hercules”, Disney, 1997)

In this image, the villain Hades from Hercules is inherently queer by the way he dresses, and holds his drink. Hades sits on his “throne” and sips what appears to be a martini. A stereotype of gay men, is that they drink “girly” drinks including martinis. Hades’ drink is pink yet he is portrayed as blue. Historically, blue is associated with boys, and pink is associated with girls. This juxtaposition of color as well as Hades’ mannerisms, questions these roles of gender. Hades’ clothes also questions normative gender roles; Hades’ wears a long garment that resembles a dress. As we know, dresses are “for women.” His neckline is also fairly low-cut and shows off parts of his skin. One stereotype with gay men and queer people is that they can be hypersexual and show off lots of skin. By having Hades break these normative gender roles, he is inherently queer.

Breaking Notions of Normativity:

In these images, we can see how Disney used villains and the concept of villains, to queer their films. By queering films, we are gaining representation for queer folk, and we are also breaking away from historical representations of characters. However, using the representations of queerness for villain's only is not something Disney should continue doing. We can see how much representation matters, and how Disney is creating breakout texts through their representation that is beginning to deviate from exclusively villainous roles.

(Ursula, The Little Mermaid, Disney, 1989, and drag queen Divine)

In the 1989 film The Little Mermaid, the villain Ursula was modeled after drag performer Divine. This depiction is a double edged sword because on one end, basing a character off a queer personality means representation. Making them a prominent character forces a dialogue that couples with the AIDs epidemic at its height. However, this depiction is ultimately harmful because the representation affirms the notion that queerness is a villainess trait. Furthermore, this depiction was strictly visual as Divine was not going to voice the role. This ultimately harmful depiction relates to DeClues notions of visibility, “The violence of erasure, the refusal of visibility, the pain of a contingent inclusion.”.The result is a villain whose inspiration blurs notions of normativity, but only for the sake of harming queerness.

(Te Ka, The central antagonist of Moana is full of fury and rage. Her spirit is eventually quelled when Moana tells her of her true identity)

Moana is a unique in the world of Disney. In many ways, this film queers the very tropes Disney is known for founding. With Pacific Islanders as the central cast, the film breaks the mold of standard western depictions of Disney Royalty. Moana is also unique because her Disney princess status is not correlated with a Disney prince. Furthermore, her final conflict with Te Ka does not involve the classic Disney Fall. The Fall is a trope where in a Disney villain falls to their death. This releases the protagonist from accountability or moral ambiguity. Instead Moana reminds Te Ka with who she really is through the song “Know Who You Are.”

Based off of these unique perspectives and the commercial success (grossing over $640 million), one could argue that Moana serves as a breakthrough text. Cavalcante notes this relevance in Communication Culture and Critique. “...Beyond their content, breakout texts are largely defined by their reception, their use, the sociality they facilitate, and their everyday life context.” This example shows that breaking notions of normativity, can be successful.

(The news anchors in Zootopia, a cheetah (predator) and a moose (prey))

While this example is not a villain, we can see the villainization of predators in Zootopia. The central conflict involves society that villainizes predators and looks to wedge a division between the population; predators vs. prey. In the above image, there is something that can be considered as progressive; we have a predator cheetah, co-hosting the news with a moose (prey). This is inherently queer because it breaks the barriers between predator and prey, similarly to how barriers may be broken between heteronormativity and queerness.

Disney is willing and able to make accommodations. The strength of representation cannot be stressed enough. Each region can find something to relate to. The benefits of this depiction also come in the form of normativity. These anchors do not have an impact on the story. They are neither antagonist or protagonist. Instead they exist on a periphery that enforces diversity is normal, commonplace, and apolitical.

Conclusion:

Although Disney is moving toward more “queer” representation in their animated films, there is still progress to be made. As these images show, Disney has primarily used villains as a way to portray queerness (likely not even intentionally) and that is problematic for the queer community due to the negative connotations villains have. Disney needs to make a move toward including queer characters in protagonist roles so that there may be positive representation for queer audiences to relate to. It need not be made a huge event or publicity stunt, but it could be done tastefully in a way that makes it present without becoming problematic as well as being the forefront and not just background characters

Resources

Benedict, R. (2017, March 3). “13 Classic Disney Characters Who Were Probably Gay”. Retrieved from https://hornet.com/stories/classic-gay-disney-characters-probably/

Benshoff, H.& Griffin, S. (2004). “Queer Cinema, The Film Reader”.

Cavalcante, A. (2017). Breaking Into Transgender Life: Transgender Audiences’ Experiences With “First of Its Kind” Visibility in Popular Media.

Cover, R. (2004). Bodies, movements and desires: lesbian/gay subjectivity and the stereotype, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 18(1), 81-97, DOI: 10.1080/1030431032000181012

DeClue, J. (2017). To Visualize the Queen Diva! Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2).

Goldstone, A. D., Hahn, D., McArthur, S., Schumacher, T., Allers, R., & Minkoff, R. (1994). The Lion King, United States: Walt Disney Pictures.

Goldstone, A. D., Clements, R., & Musker, J. (1997). Hercules, United States: Walt Disney Pictures.

Hanh, D., Trousdale, G., & Wise, K. (1991). Beauty and the Beast, United States: Walt Disney Pictures.

King, B.  (2017, October 9). 10 Fictional Characters Surprisingly Based on Real People | Film Daddy. https://www.filmdaddy.com/all-articles/characters-based-on-real-people

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations. To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process. Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever. --- SOPHIE OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES [Future Classic] [WATCH · READ] Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi --- Playboi Carti Die Lit [Interscope/AWGE] [LISTEN · READ] The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood --- DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda [All Possible Worlds] [LISTEN · LISTEN] On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut --- Grouper Grid of Points [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart --- Seth Graham Gasp [Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom] [LISTEN · READ] A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner [pagebreak] Klein cc [Self-Released] [LISTEN · READ] “Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White --- Beach House 7 [Sub Pop] [WATCH · READ] Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein --- Eartheater Irisiri [PAN] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli --- THE HIRS COLLECTIVE FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES. [SRA/Get Better] [LISTEN · READ] For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma --- Delroy Edwards Rio Grande [L.A. Club Resource] [LISTEN · READ] Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6 [pagebreak] emamouse X yeongrak mouth mouse maus [Quantum Natives] [LISTEN · READ] Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller --- Félicia Atkinson Coyotes [Geographic North] [LISTEN] I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook --- Pusha T Daytona [G.O.O.D. Music] [LISTEN · READ] DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster --- DJ Koze Knock Knock [Pampa] [LISTEN · READ] Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl --- Elysia Crampton Elysia Crampton [Break World] [WATCH · READ] Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage [pagebreak] The Caretaker Everywhere at the end of time - Stage 4 [History Always Favours The Winners] [LISTEN · READ] The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral --- Lucrecia Dalt Anticlines [RVNG Intl.] [WATCH · READ] OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver --- Tierra Whack Whack World [Self-Released] [STREAM] In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ --- GAS Rausch [Kompakt] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti --- The Body I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer [Thrill Jockey] [LISTEN · READ] It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno [pagebreak] serpentwithfeet soil [Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin --- Sara Davachi Let Night Come On Bells End The Day [Recital] [LISTEN · READ] I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow --- Jenny Hval The Long Sleep EP [Sacred Bones] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle --- Gemini Sisters Gemini Sisters [Psychic Trouble] [LISTEN] How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer --- Christina Vantzou No. 4 [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall --- Kanye West ye [G.O.O.D./Def Jam] [LISTEN · READ] Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott --- The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.   http://j.mp/2Kt2EKx

[diaryofanobsessivefangirl]

Masterlist of Ships Subtropes

Dynamic tropes

Puppy love

Romance between children.

Examples: Gendry x Arya, Arnold x Helga, Mike x Eleven, Shaoran x Sakura

Childhood Acquaintance

They meet when they were children, regardless of the frequency or how close they were. They may have been raised together, may have saw each other every now and then, or even just once.

Used to be Friends

Examples: Petyr x Catelyn; Erik x Christine; Mina x Lucy

Used to be Lovers

Couples that were officially together (At least had sex) before everything went to hell. Ships that only flirted, such as Anna/David (The Guest) and Jackson/Lisa (Red Eye) are not included.

Examples: Athos x Milady; Tom x Elizabeth (The Blacklist); Dolores x William

Love Makes You Evil

A character who was originally good but did things for love that turn him to the dark side.

Examples: Anakin, Petyr Baelish and Claude Frollo

Love Makes You Crazy

A character driven to the brick of sanity because of love.

Example: Claude Frollo from Notre Dame de Paris and Ram from Princess Daisy

Not So Different After All

Opposites/rivals/enemies that actually have many hidden similarities. They are canonically each other’s shadow and are compared as two sides of the same coin.

Example: Anne x Vincent, Steerpike x Fuchsia, Kylo x Rey, Jackson x Lisa

Love Beyond Death

Meeting in the after-life, meeting reincarnation or person coming back from the dead.

Example: Catherine x Heathcliff, Petyr x Catelyn, Dracula x Mina, Naraku x Kikyo

Dragging You to the Gutter with Me

A villain turns a heroine into a brutal lonely broken thing only he can understand what it’s like to be, and still she won’t come to him. So what keeps them together is also what keeps them apart. Read more.

Example: Naraku and Kikyo; Alina and Darkling; Petyr and Catelyn; Dolores and William

In Love with the Mark

A man who works for some really big, bad guys. He may or not believe in their ideology; that is not the point. He is there for the money and he prides himself of his professionalism. For some reason, this organization working on the shadows have “business” to deal with this ordinary everyday woman. So he is hired to stalk, threaten, or even kill her. Turns out, Stalking is Love, and he develops feelings for his target. That doesn’t stop him from keeping up with the job, thought. He had to be undercover to get closer, so cases of Used to be Lovers/Friends are probably included. You will likely hear from a character In Love With the Mark the quote “It wasn’t personal.”

Example: Jack/Angela; Jackson/Lisa; Vincent/Anne; Tom/Lizzie (Jacob/Masha); Skye/Ward

The Queen and her Champion

Woman occupies traditionally feminine roles of power and the man is an example of masculinity for others. She uses clever words, social understanding and schemes. He is her sword and her armor, but nothing more. Because of their different stances, he is bound to be close to her he protects, but never with her.

Examples: Maly and Alina; Zelda and Link; Lancelot and Guinevere; Rhaenyra Targaryen and Criston Cole; Daenerys and Ser Jorah; Every Elizabeth Tudor romance, Queen Anne and Aramis; Lucrezia and Cesare; Cersei and Jaime.

Art Inspires Love

When character A realizes or falls (more) in love with character B after watching him dance, sing, or doing something artistic.

Examples: Frollo/Esmeralda, Christine/Erik, Hap/Prairie, Isaura/Leôncio, Anne/Vincent, Sandor/Sansa and Babydoll/Blue Jones.

Supernatural Connection

The characters have a psychic or physical connection. Maybe they can communicate through telepathy or can feel each other’s presence and emotions when they are nearby. There might be a spell connecting their hearts in a way one can only die when the other one does. Maybe they are twins. Whatever the reason, these characters are bonded in a way no one else could be.

Examples: Kylo x Rey, Nuada x Nuala, Darkling x Alina and Cersei x Jaime.

The Frollo Effect

A guy falls in love with a girl he is suppose to reject, repulse or dehumanize, and fights against it. By trying to suppress it, her converts love into hatred against her and himself, and probably punishes both hoping it will make the feeling go away. It does not work and the guy starts doing things he never thought he was capable of in order to deal with this unbearable need. He is usually proud, rational and very in control of himself until she comes along. Her initial dismissal as a suitor commonly starts out as social expectation - in which the characters are from divergent social segments and ideologically separated -, but it’s always a expectation the guy has over himself, regardless if anyone else imposes this on him.

Examples: Esmeralda x Frollo (Gypsy and priest), Amon x Helen (Jew and nazi), Isaura x Leôncio (Slave and master), Daisy x Ram (Sister and brother), William x Dolores (Host and guest) and Hap x Prairie (Subject and scientist)

Bonding undercover

When the bad guy pretends to be a normal person long enough to befriend the good girl and make her fall in love with him. This is usually how tragically two-sided vxh happens, because she gets to know his other side before the bad one gets in the way, but they can still have a happy ending because it also establishes they could have the base for a healthy relationship if only he could abandon his malicious quest. This only happens when the girl develops deeply romantic feelings for him; if it's only a crush or devilish attraction (Red Eye, The OA and Agents of SHIELD) than it doesn't count. She must be sobbing on the floor when this is done. May also involve an amnesia period in which the antagonist approaches the hero as an old friend or a lover.

Examples: Steerpike and Fuchsia, Christine and Erik, Kiara and Kovu, Elizabeth and Tom, Dracula and Vanessa

Generation Parallel

A love story doesn’t end up well. Years later another generation repeats the first one in a slightly different manner. Most of the time, the parallel between the two affairs means the characters from the first one have the chance to develop as we wished they would, and that their love might have grown roots under a different field. Sometimes it just means shit happens no matter the circumstances, and that people will make the same mistakes of their elderlies despite that they should have known better by now. If we are talking about the first generation’s offspring (Incest not necessarily included), it might mean their love is on their DNA and they would fall over and over again under different names and places. In any case, this trope is the romantic side of History Repeats Itself.

Very common theme in incest, because their birth requires a previous affair between their parents, but it only counts if it is a story on its own, full of ups and downs, and people talk about it. If it’s not mentioned or important to the plot, there is no point in calling it Generation Parallel.

Examples: Jaime and Cersei (Joana and Tywin), Arya and Gendry/Jon (Lyanna and Robert/Rhaegar), Catherine and Hareton (Cathy and Heathcliff), Abby and Henry (Wakefield and Sarah), Rey and Kylo (Padme and Anakin), Isaura and Leôncio (Almeida and Juliana), Leonardo e Marina (Pilar e Murilo).

Roaring Rampage of Romance

Love that starts a war and the main plot. Characters that destroy cities and galaxies because Love Made Them Evil, because they are trying to be with whom they love or to secure their safety and happiness. It might be on purpose, in which they have foreseen the consequences but choose to take them anyway as a means to an end, or it was accidental. There may be decades of conflict and the count of a hundred corpses, or maybe a famous massacre with a handful dead extras. Maybe a murderer is hunting down everyone on an Island so that he can be alone with his beloved. Anyway, innocent people that had nothing to do with them nor interfered with the couple’s happiness will suffer the collateral damage.

Common trope among royalty, since marrying or bearing the children of someone you were not supposed to could have disastrous consequences to the State, still people would do it for love.

If the character is causing the rampage in search for something else, like power, and to secure his beloved is an incidental bonus, it isn’t considered Roaring Rampage of Romance, unless he is doing it because Love Has Made Him Evil. Alina/Darkling and Nuada/Nuala, for instance, don’t fit this category.

Examples: Penny Dreadful, Inuyasha, ASoIaF (Rhaegar x Lyanna, Jaime x Cersei, Petyr x Catelyn), Harper’s Island, Westworld, Notre Dame de Paris, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom of the Opera, Bram Stroker’s Dracula, Apollo and Cassandra, Star Wars (Anakin and Padmé)

Taboo Tropes

Incest

Self-explanatory. Cousins will not be considered incest in here. I’m brazilian.

Subtrope: Decadent Aristocrats

Ho Yay

Homosexual couples

Age gap

Ships with age gap between then, 10 years at least. Supernatural/immortal beings won’t be taken into account unless the other part is a child or coming of age.

Wife Husbandry

A man adopts or temporarily takes care of a little girl. She may or not develop a precocious crush on him. Little girl grows up into a extraordinary and desirable woman. She had him on a pedestal all these years and has been saving herself for him. Man is distressed bc he can’t reconcile the image of the child he cherished as a father and the provoking woman she turned out to be. He mostly resists her advances, but they work that out by the end.

Example: Older!Mathilda/Leon AU, Nancy/Hartigan (Sin City), Veronica/William (Final Girl)

Development Tropes

End game ship

Is not everyday an OTP becomes end game

AU ship

A.k.a. “Canon? Who needs canon?” ships. OTPs that had a lot of potential but were ruined by canon. So either I ignore the end they were given, either some parts in the middle. Unlike Not Canon ships, these were meant to be romantically involved, but the way it was executed ruined it.

Secondary Interest ship

That One Scene ships are the ones with nothing shippable except for one or two scenes. Sometimes is not even canon and are more anti-recs than anything, but it’s still about villain x heroine, so it’s relevant to this blog.

Not canon

Word of God stayed silent and, according to my best judgment, the subtext was not enough. If something sexual or romantic happens between the characters but isn’t based on desire, such as the villain seducing the heroine for his advantage, it’s not canon.

Example: Scream (Billy/Sidney), Kim Possible (Kim/Shego), Mulan (Mulan x Shan Yu), World Without End (Carys x Edward), Sky High (Layla x Warren), Star Wars (Obi-Wan x Padmé), Richard III (Anne x Richard), Tesis (Angela x Bosco)

[zaritarazi]

Please tell us your Kendra/Rip feels *chinhands*

okay well we have 2 aspects of this honestly- first the parts we saw in show, and then just really funny filthy stuff that NEVER happened in canon but that is the best thing to me and you’ll see why

so like, in show, kendra and rip have this very interesting relationship because vandal savage is rip’s villain- but only sort of. savage actually has very little interest in rip. he only cares about kendra. and it’s not rip’s hatred of savage that unites the team, but the fact that he kills carter- the team comes together essentially for kendra, so that she can succeed. and from episode 2 onwards, rip and kendra have this mutual understanding of each other that i think only ray shares with them, but they don’t really bring ray into it- it’s the fact that they’ve both lost the person that means everything to them, and they have no way of getting it back, and they sort of rely on each other in a lot of silent ways.

in 1x02, rip is the one who cradles kendra as he sobs, who relieves his own trauma (and ray is too, btw) by watching her live through this brand new hell. she’s the only person that can get him his wife and son back, and you watch him start to struggle with that vs the idea that the person that she has to kill is her rapist- but above all else, rip truly believes in kendra’s heroism. and more than that, he has unwavering faith in kendra’s heart- she’s the one he asks to talk to sara, and she’s the one who he thinks has the best chance of making sara feel human- and he’s right. 

which is incidentally hilarious bc he’s lowkey in love with sara episode 1 onwards and he’s trying to put distance there bc lmao dead wife but so he’s like i know who can help- kendra! sara: falls for kendra (and caity did play it like that we’ve discussed this) rip: oh…. balls

and they’re just like, the balance the other needs in s1, in a different way than sara and rip or sara and kendra or kendra and ray- they’re both the driving forces, here. she’s the soft, beautiful princess that needs to save the world, and i don’t know when rip realizes it but i think it’s around the time that she can’t kill savage- like in that moment he hates her but he also hates himself and she feels the same way and they KNOW the other feels the same way and even THEN, even THEN, he protects her from carter and savage still. 

when she gets kidnapped i think a part of him really gives up, i think he’s stunned that ray doesn’t- and he’s the one that kills savage along with her and carter, because more than anything, this is THEIR fight. this belongs to THEM, together, and sure, carter’s there too.

anyway the fun filthy part is imagine that since kendra is a reincarnation of chay-ara who is some kind of demi-goddess related to hathor and horus (and everything about jesus is 100% real in legends so let’s just not split hairs) and since hathor is literally fertility and beauty and feminine love kendra hits a point where she’s like, i really do need to have sex with someone very badly can you please help me like once or twice a week so i can just breathe again ffs, i don’t trust anyone else to really do this but you’ve got your wife to think about and i’ve got carter so it’s fine and rip is like well. i mean, for your health. of course

at some point during a team argument mick goes “kendra and rip are having secret sex” and sara, gasping in betrayal, is like, HOW DARE YOU??? and rip is like I ASSURE ALL OF YOU WE ARE DOING THIS FOR KENDRA’S HEALTH AND WELLBEING. IT IS 100% MEDICAL, PLATONIC SEX

and sara is like i don’t care what shit you’re into weirdo i just want to know!!! WHY I HAVEN’T!!! BEEN INVITED!!!!! 

anyway kendra and rip were really really important to each other end rant 

[sage-nebula]

What's your general opinion on the first 5 pokeani girls prior to SM? I mean I obviously know Misty is your favorite, but just curious what you think of the others. You just listed what you thought of the recent Sun/Moon girls in the anime, so it would be nice to hear your thoughts on the older ones.

Misty — I really love how much dimension there was to Misty’s character, how she wasn’t boxed into a trope or even a stereotype. She’s The Tomboyish Mermaid (like, that’s literally her Gym Leader Title in the games), but although she does have some tomboyish traits like keeping her hair short, wearing shorts and kicks, and liking some rather … unusual pokémon (looking at her love for tentacool and tentacruel here), she’s also still allowed to have and champion feminine qualities as well without ever having that called into question. She can really want her own set of princess dolls, and love dressing up and looking cute, and get daydreamy over romance and the like without being doubted or treated like she’s lesser, and I really appreciate that. I also really appreciate the fact that she was considered to be one of Ash’s coaches from beginning to end, that although they were rivals at times, although they were friends and though they clearly had crushes on each other (yes, it was implied mutually in the Japanese version as well), Misty was still the more experienced trainer at the time they met and this was remarked upon even near the end of Johto. I do wish that Misty had been allowed to do more as the seasons went on—I feel that, especially in Johto, she was often sidelined in favor of Ash—but this was a fate that also befell Brock and Tracey in the OS, and so I don’t consider it a slight against Misty’s character in particular. MIsty was compassionate and brave, spunky and sarcastic, could at times be immature and impatient, but also had nice insight and patience at times. Misty was great. I loved her.

May — I really find that May was #relatable in a lot of ways. She was a brand new trainer (and Ash was sort of her coach, given that he was the more experienced one for once, which was a nice change), she loves food and never misses a chance to get a good meal in (and god help you if you stand between her and food), she has an annoying little brother that she still loves with all her heart and will protect, and initially she sets out on her journey not because she wants to be a trainer, but because she wants to travel. I think the fact that she didn’t like pokémon at first wasn’t very relatable, and I wish they had given her a better reason for it (I found the pokéball story to be a bit weak—wouldn’t that make her afraid of pokéballs instead?), but I think the fact that she just wanted to travel and have an adventure, that she didn’t really know what she wanted to do at first, that she found her goal along the way and fumbled her way through to success was pretty relatable, especially for kids who had just found the series and really were starting anew with AG. I think that May was really down to earth and overall was a great character, and even though I know some people took issue with the fact that she was so great at being a Coordinator right off the bat, I personally don’t mind that. She has a natural knack for it, and I think that’s something to be celebrated instead. May is awesome, and I love her, too.

Dawn — Dawn is the first true deuteragonist that the PokéAni has ever had and I think that was pretty excellently done. I love the fact that the heroine of the show finally got to be a true heroine, rather than just being a side character to Ash, and that she got a fully fleshed out story arc and her own character development and everything. Her relationship with Ash was downright adorable; I love how they were best friends, how they sometimes squabbled but also supported each other, how they always gave each other high-fives (and wasn’t High Touch!! a duet between them?). I also really do think that Dawn’s loss arc was really well done, how—in an inversion of May’s story—she always had her heart set on being a Coordinator, her mother was a Top Coordinator and so she thought that she could achieve that goal as well, and yet she was met with loss, after loss, after loss that crushed her confidence. I find the fact that she tried to keep a smile on during all of this and tried to insist that everything was fine to be pretty relatable, too. Overall, Dawn was pretty fantastic, and to be incredibly honest (and I mean no offense to Brock when I say this), she and Ash could have carried DP by themselves. Brock was really unnecessary and actually kind of suffered by being part of that squad. I’m sorry, Brocko, but it’s true. No offense. But yeah, Dawn is great, and I love her, too. (And yes, I do also ship Pearl. Still prefer Poke, but Pearl is a great ship.)

Iris — Iris gets so much hate in fandom and she honestly deserves none of it, do you hear me? None of it. I love Iris. I love how she teases Ash (and honestly, it’s just teasing, like ffs stop roasting her over the coals for it when practically all of Ash’s other companions have teased him at times as well), I love how she is free-spirited and brave, I love how she still has fears that hold her back (ice-type pokémon heyooo), and insecurities that make it difficult for her to achieve her goal (which is living up to her in-game Gym Leader Title, “The Girl Who Knows the Hearts of Dragons”), but that she eventually manages to overcome them and bond with Excadrill and later Dragonite. Iris is brave and spirited, but she’s also compassionate and gentle deep down. It just takes her time to access that part of herself and open up so that she can connect with the dragons she’s meant to connect with. And you know? Sometimes her teasing does go too far, but she acknowledges when this happens and makes sure that she makes it right (such as when she accidentally hurt Cilan’s feelings, but made a remark within his earshot about how he’s great and they all liked having him around anyway, and he bounced back as a result). Iris is adorable and lovable and I think the writing team did do a good job with her, even if her ending was rushed and awkward and weird. Love that girl.

Serena — Serena is a character that I think had a lot of potential, and that I do like in some ways, but ultimately I feel that she was rather shafted by the writing staff, who a.) didn’t know what they wanted to do with her for most of the XY series, and b.) created her to be a Love Interest™, which is a separate thing from creating her as a character who also happens to have a love interest. This one actually has some legitimate criticism (aimed at the writing staff, not Serena herself—I actually feel that Serena was a victim of the writing staff and deserved better, tbqh), but since that can be seen as negative, I’m putting the rest under a cut.

Serena was created, in the words of the producers, so that they could tell the story from the perspective of a girl who had feelings for Ash. This means that, from the get-go, the only concept behind Serena’s character was that of Love Interest™. This is different from, say, Misty, who did develop a crush on Ash as time went on, but who was created first to be a Gym Leader and a trainer with experience who could help Ash along the way, and also a Gym Leader who aspired to master water-type pokémon. Misty’s crush on Ash was incidental; it happened over time as a result of their interactions. Serena’s crush on Ash was part of her childhood backstory because it’s literally the focal point of her entire character, it’s why she was written into the show. Everything else—her personal desires outside of Ash, her goals and objectives—came secondary. Whereas May’s lack of a goal outside of “I want to travel and save the world!” felt like a reasonable part of her character, Serena’s lack of a goal ended up feeling like the writers honestly forgot to come up with one for her, because their sole concern was getting her to travel with Ash so that they could have her there to swoon over him, and that’s not cool. She deserved better than that.

Now, I’m not saying that she couldn’t have had a crush on him. Ash has had a myriad of characters crushing on him over the course of the series, to the point where even back in the OS Misty was far from the only person to like him. For fucksake, Ash’s own Bayleef is in love with him. A freaking Latias fell for him, like—that’s not the issue here. The issue here is that I feel as if the writers were so focused on having Serena swoon over him that they forgot to develop her outside of him. When they finally started to do that with the Showcases (and those are another issue in and of themselves, again for several reasons), it was inconsistent and often out of focus. The Master Class Showcase was rather rushed because, in all honesty, that’s not what the writers cared about with regards to Serena. Serena’s dreams, her goals, her ambitions—to the writing staff, it felt like they put that in there because they had to have her do something, but like it wasn’t really that important to them. And I feel that we really see this in the last episode, where, yes, she decides to go to Hoenn to try her hand at being a Coordinator (much better than being a Performer tbqh), but just before she leaves she tells Ash that she’s going to be a much better woman by the next time they meet and kisses him. The writers have said that this is supposed to imply that they’ll be married in the future. Well, okay—but a.) why is THAT the last thing you want to leave us with as far as Serena is concerned, and b.) Ash was still never shown throughout the entire saga to reciprocate her feelings, not even in ever feeling jealousy over her, so like?? Again, if this really was the ending you wanted for her, couldn’t you at least show the boy liking her back over the course of the saga in something other than shiny eyes in the last scene? Doesn’t she deserve at least that? Well, in their eyes, no, because it wasn’t really about Serena and her feelings, it was about making Ash look special by having a girl fawning over him, which is gross af.

Ughhh, I’m sorry—I really don’t want to rant about this, and this is technically supposed to be about Serena rather than the ship, but because Serena was created for the sole purpose of the ship it’s difficult to talk about one and not the other. In truth, I think Serena had so much potential. I like that she was stubborn about what she wanted to do, that she didn’t let her mother dictate her life, that although she loved her mother and knew that Grace wanted was best for her, she refused to give in and settle down to be a rhyhorn racer just because Grace wanted her to. I love that she has a natural big sister instinct, that she bonded with Bonnie and was shown taking care of her. I love that she flubbed the Showcases at first, but that she resolved to do better, that she cut her hair and decided that since she had her heart set on this, that she was going to see it through until the end and get those Keys, her own way. I think that she’s clever, creative, and genuinely sweet. I like that we see her open up over time, that while at first she was just there for Ash, she came to really care for Bonnie and Clemont as well (even if her relationship with Clemont could have been much better developed). And lbr, that episode where she cosplayed Ash was adorable af, and I loved her relationship with Manon.

Overall, I really do think Serena’s good, and I think that she had the potential to be a great character. However, I think the writing staff fucked her over by creating her to be The Love Interest™ and showing determined reluctance to think of her outside of that role. Serena deserved better. Misty might not have gotten to do a whole lot with regards to her goal, but at least she was allowed to exist as her own person first, and someone with a crush on Ash second. Serena was not given that, and it’s a damn injustice, especially since, again, they put in absolutely zero effort into developing the ship from Ash’s side, because Serena’s feelings truly did not matter to them. It’s a shame and she deserved better. 

Also, Misty and Serena would be adorable af girlfriends, I’m js.

(All of that said, @ everyone, don’t reblog this just to start Discourse™, I’m not here to debate it, never hear to debate it, want no part in your fandom wank, kthx.)

[oneent-blog]

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

via WordPress ift.tt/2lRq7dZ

TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations.

To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process.

Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever.

SOPHIE

OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES

[Future Classic]

[WATCH · READ]

Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi

Playboi Carti

Die Lit

[Interscope/AWGE]

[LISTEN · READ]

The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood

DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom

Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda

[All Possible Worlds]

[LISTEN · LISTEN]

On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut

Grouper

Grid of Points

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart

Seth Graham

Gasp

[Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom]

[LISTEN · READ]

A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner

[pagebreak]

Klein

cc

[Self-Released]

[LISTEN · READ]

“Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White

Beach House

7

[Sub Pop]

[WATCH · READ]

Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein

Eartheater

Irisiri

[PAN]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

THE HIRS COLLECTIVE

FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES.

[SRA/Get Better]

[LISTEN · READ]

For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma

Delroy Edwards

Rio Grande

[L.A. Club Resource]

[LISTEN · READ]

Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6

[pagebreak]

emamouse X yeongrak

mouth mouse maus

[Quantum Natives]

[LISTEN · READ]

Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller

Félicia Atkinson

Coyotes

[Geographic North]

[LISTEN]

I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook

Pusha T

Daytona

[G.O.O.D. Music]

[LISTEN · READ]

DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster

DJ Koze

Knock Knock

[Pampa]

[LISTEN · READ]

Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl

Elysia Crampton

Elysia Crampton

[Break World]

[WATCH · READ]

Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage

[pagebreak]

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time – Stage 4

[History Always Favours The Winners]

[LISTEN · READ]

The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral

Lucrecia Dalt

Anticlines

[RVNG Intl.]

[WATCH · READ]

OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver

Tierra Whack

Whack World

[Self-Released]

[STREAM]

In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ

GAS

Rausch

[Kompakt]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti

The Body

I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer

[Thrill Jockey]

[LISTEN · READ]

It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno

[pagebreak]

serpentwithfeet

soil

[Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin

Sarah Davachi

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day

[Recital]

[LISTEN · READ]

I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow

Jenny Hval

The Long Sleep EP

[Sacred Bones]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle

Gemini Sisters

Gemini Sisters

[Psychic Trouble]

[LISTEN]

How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer

Christina Vantzou

No. 4

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall

Kanye West

ye

[G.O.O.D./Def Jam]

[LISTEN · READ]

Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott

The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites published first on medium.com/@buydigitalpiano

Posted by HomerAltizer on 2018-07-04 01:14:14

Tagged: , Uncategorized

The post Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites appeared first on Good Info.

[newyorktheater]

Britney Spears, 20 years ago

Will Roland in Be More Chiil

Cast of Mean Girls

Andrew Barth Feldman in Dear Evan Hansen

Isabelle McCalla and Caitlin Kinnunen as high school girlfriends in The Prom

“I’m not a girl, not yet a woman…I’m in between,” Britney Spears sang some two decades ago, and it could almost be the new anthem (gender-adjusted) for Broadway. The opening of Be More Chill this week adds yet another to the New York stage shows that focus on teenage characters (mostly portrayed by non-teenage performers), many of which attract a large teenage audience. These include Dear Evan Hansen, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Mean Girls, and, yes, ok, Wicked. (The Prom has a dual focus; and the audience for, if not the characters in, Frozen skew younger.) Teen angst has made its way Off-Broadway as well, with Superhero.

Shows about teens and tweens are hardly new: 13, Bye Bye Birdie, Carrie, Hairspray, Matilda, Newsies, School of Rock, Spring Awakening come to mind. But we’re seeing a particular trend now, and not an especially welcome one. It’s of course a good thing to broaden the demographics of the Broadway audience, and at least one of these shows is widely viewed as of high quality.  Yet their focus is largely on angst and on stereotypes.  How accurate or fair are the depictions of teenagers in these shows?  Yes, high school may be a time when some people are trying out identities, and too many of them might like to assign reductive labels to their classmates or even to themselves.  But surely this is not the full picture, nor a constructive one. As I say in my review of Be More Chill, the actual high school students we see regularly in the news are  taking the lead in attacking such crucial  problems as climate change and gun control — problems that have stalemated adults.

Incidentally, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” along with “Baby One More Time,” Spear’s first pop single when she was 17 years old, are likely to be two of the 23 songs from her repertorie that will be in the new musical “Once Upon a One More Time” aiming for Broadway, announced today.  The book, thankfully, is not about teen angst. (For more details, see Week in NY Theater News, below.)

The Week in New York Theater Reviews

THE B-SIDE: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation

In “The B-Side,” three men sing along with an album on a record-player —  or, as people prefer to say these days, a vinyl on the turntable. But there’s a reason why the Wooster Group’s encore presentation of its simple and odd hour-long piece, first performed at the Performing Garage in 2017, is filling St. Ann’s Warehouse every night. The album is “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons”…

Austin Scott as Alexander Hamilton and Carvens Lissaint as George Washington, the new cast members of “Hamilton” on Broadway.

  Hamilton on Broadway 2019: New Cast, New Clarity

I recently saw Hamilton again on Broadway, during a rare open captioned performance, and it was a revelation in several ways.

  I would love to see this show but there are not enough OC performances for those of us who want to attend. It’s nice to pat yourself on the back about access, but the reality is that an occasional Wednesday OC performance with limited tickets is not access. #captionallshows

— Dr. Petrified Tree Sap (@a_joy_martin) March 9, 2019

The Cake Review: “This is Us” writer on Christian baker’s Lesbian wedding dilemma

In “The Cake,” Debra Jo Rupp (the mother on “That 70s Show”) portrays Della, a Christian baker in North Carolina who refuses to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. If the story is inspired by the Supreme Court case decided last year, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, playwright Bekah Brunstetter, who is a writer for “This Is Us,” makes it personal in several ways…One of the future brides, Jen (Genevieve Angelson), is the daughter of Della’s best friend, who died five years ago. Della, who is childless, views Jen like a daughter…Bekah Brunstetter has told interviewers that she wrote “The Cake” as a way to explain her support for gay rights and same-sex marriage to her parents. Her father, Peter Brunstetter, is a Republican politician from North Carolina who supported an anti-gay state bill that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Be More Chill on Broadway

Somebody wrote “NYC Loves BMC” in chalk on the sidewalk outside Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, the new home of “Be More Chill,” the high energy, high decibel pop-rock musical that stars Will Roland as a self-proclaimed high school “loser” who swallows a pill containing a supercomputer and becomes cool. I tweeted a picture of the scrawled public love note; the tweet was retweeted nearly a hundred times. “Be More Chill” has some seriously devoted fans, most of whom seem to be 15 years old. It’s a thrill to see such teenaged enthusiasm for live theater.  I wish I could share more fully in their ardor for this show

  The Week in New York Theater News

The first annual Rave Theater Festival is asking for submissions. Artistic director @kendavenportplans roughly 20 plays, musicals, multimedia, and cross-disciplinary projects, as well as family shows, which will each receive up to five performances, August 9-25, 2019 at Clemente Sito Velez Cultural and Education Center on the Lower East Side.

Simpsons theme song composer Danny Elfman will make his Broadway debut by composing music for “Gary: The Sequel to Titus Andronicus.”

Twenty-three of Britney Spears’ songs will form the score for a new Broadway-aiming musical, “Once Upon a One More Time” with will have a try-out in Chicago from October to December of this year. “Once Upon A Time… Cinderella, Snow White, and the other fairytale princesses gather for their book club, when – oh, baby baby! – a rogue fairy godmother drops The Feminine Mystique into their corseted laps, spurring a royal revelation.” The Times reports that the run at the Chicago theater “had been set aside for “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” a Michael Jackson jukebox musical that canceled its Chicago plans on the eve of an HBO documentary detailing abuse allegations against the pop star. That show’s producers say they are still hoping to come to Broadway.”

The Arts Are Good For You

Three articles that show that the arts are a good thing.

Article 1, by Isaac Kaplan in Artsy:  Arts Sector Contributed $763.6 Billion to U.S. Economy—More Than Agriculture or Transportation, New Data Shows

Article 2, by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard:  How arts can help struggling science students do better

A large study released last month found that Florida middle-school students who study music, theater, or visual art subsequently get higher overall grades than their peers.

Article 3 by Robert Ruffin in HowlRound (from 2018) We Need Theatre to Exist, and Maybe Research Can Prove Its Necessity

A new Broadway By The Year, musicals of 1943 and 1951, will be presented at Town Hall of March 25th, “created, written, hosted and directed” by Scott Siegel — for whom 2018 was not a great year, having gotten into a bad bicycle accident. Here is an article about his accident and his show in the Times, written right before the last Broadway By Year, last month.

Alexa’s new skill lets you scour Ticketmaster using your voice

  Robert Barry Fleming has been appointed artistic director of Actors Theater of Louisville, the theater that brings us the annual Humana Festival. He’s been an actor, director, choreographer, arts administrator (at Arena Stage and Cleveland PlayHouse), and championed or commissioned such shows as Dear Evan Hansen and Sweat.

Daryl_Roth – Producing with a Purpose. Theater producer for 31 yrs “Marvel action hero” – Paula Vogel. One of the few female producers on Broadway…she chooses work by women, LGBT folks, and people of color not usually seen as commercially viable

Daveed DIggs is back in New York, for the play White Noise at the Public Theater, and he’s happier to be here than last time.

The last few years I have had not a great relationship with New York, but this time feels really good. The Hamilton experience here was so intense, and it became a pretty stressful place for me to be. That was a show that, at the bottom of it, it’s a bunch of friends getting together and making rap songs. I was involved with that show for a long time because my friend wrote it and asked me to come along for the ride. Everything on the inside of it felt very small, and everything on the outside of it felt very big.

…I love performing in smaller houses. I think you get a different kind of connection there. I’m excited to be doing any play, period, after spending a couple years being in front of a camera. This is a very welcome return. You get a different kind of intimacy in a small space, and I think everybody gets to know each other a little better.

As much as I loved performing on Broadway, I don’t care if I ever do that again. I like telling stories in places where everyone is part of the storytelling.

Oskar Eustis and Suzan-Lori Parks chat with one another about their new collaboration as director and playwright, White Noise, It begins: Oskar Eustis doesn’t believe in giving audiences a heads-up. “When you have a trigger ­warning, you’re implying that people need to be protected from pain,” says Eustis, the artistic director of New York’s Public ­Theater. “I think real art says, ‘No, you don’t. What you need is the chance to face it.’”

If you’re working on a play– especially a new one– and you’re not checking in with your ushers on a regular basis during previews, you don’t actually know how it’s going.

— Evan Cabnet (@evancabnet) March 11, 2019

Thanks Broadway Twitter for having my back. Being a working parent in any profession is really challenging. I never want to disappoint audiences as I am beyond grateful to them, but the health of my family will always come before my job. Thanks to those who understand that 💛

— Laura Benanti (@LauraBenanti) March 11, 2019

.@FosseVerdonFX cast includes: Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse & Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon@kelli_barrett as Liza Minnelli@biancamarroquin as @Chita_Rivera +@BranUran as Dustin Hoffman @TheTylerHanes as Jerry Orbach@ethansaslater as @joelgrey Premieres on FX April 9th. pic.twitter.com/lvokxwZUFl

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 11, 2019

If you’re an aspiring playwright, this thread by @MikeLew4 might change your life. https://t.co/WouQGQXNUh

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) March 8, 2019

My favorite line: “Get that EXT/INT shit outta there! Dead giveaway your “play” is a pilot.”

Play Formatting PSA: In undergrad one of the 1st things Donald Margulies did was teach us proper play formatting. Which felt like a huge bummer. Shouldn’t it be story first? Who cares about formatting?! Don’t you see that l WILL CHANGE THE FORM, WITH THE POWER OF ART? 1

But now that I’ve done a ton of reading committees, I can see he was right. In the same way you wouldn’t show up to a job interview dressed wrong for the job, when I’m reading a ton of plays my first cut rejections boil down to, “Does this manuscript LOOK like a play or not?” 2/

And the most screwed up thing is that published plays don’t look like manuscript-form plays, so you can’t just learn by picking up an acting edition at the bookstore or your submission’ll look weird. To wit, a thread about formatting. ARE YOU EXCITED?? 3/

A full-length play is approx 100 pgs in length (50 pgs per act). Sure your length may vary. You may have a lean 75 pg straight-through-no-intermission piece or a 120 pg 2-act that “should read really really fast”

Now the formatting nitty gritty! *character names in all caps & centered *dialogue left-justified *in-dialogue stage directions like “(she exits)” should be in parentheses and italics *longer stage directions should be tabbed in and (optionally) italicized 10/

New scenes get their own line (i.e. “Scene 1”) – bolded and numbered *Get that EXT/INT shit outta there! Dead giveaway your “play” is a pilot. *Start a new pg for each scene *End the act on an all-caps “END OF ACT 1” “END OF PLAY” etc – and bold it too cuz that feels GREAT 11/

Teens Take Over Broadway (but is it real?). A Britney Spears Broadway musical? Hamilton Reconsidered. #Stageworthy News of the Week “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman...I'm in between,” Britney Spears sang some two decades ago, and it could almost be the new anthem (gender-adjusted) for Broadway. 2,063 more words