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pale-silver-comb · 4 years

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So I know absolutely nothing about Leverage except what I've been seeing you post lately and I have to admit you're making it look tempting to watch! Can I ask what are some of your favorite things about the show/reasons you would suggest people watch it? And is there really a poly relationship that is canon?

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I am going to do my best not to just “asdfghkjl” at you and answer coherently.

In a nutshell, Leverage is about 5 people. 4 are criminals (Parker, Hardison, Eliot and Sophie) with different and unique skill-sets and 1 is an ex-insurance investigator (Nate) who, at one point or another in his career, has tracked down (or at least attempted to) the other 4. The whole show is essentially: man reluctantly reforms 4 criminals to use their criminal powers for good and 4 criminals move into man’s life and stubbornly refuse to leave because, goddammit, now they have morals.

I’ve got a lot of favourite things about the show but the main ones are as follows:

1. Found family. And I’m not talking about loners who come together to fight crime and happen to co-exist to the point where they realise they happen to have found themselves a family. I mean, Nate and Sophie are the Drunk Uncle and Wine Aunt who somehow become Mom and Dad to 3 beautiful criminal children. Mom and Dad love their criminal babies and the kids love them (as well as each other, but we’ll come to that in a moment). You get amazing family moments such as: Mom and Dad packing the kids lunch before sending them out to kick corporate greed’s ass; Mom and Dad giving the kids ridiculously expensive and personal Christmas presents causing their most Grumpy Kid to go very very quiet and soft as he runs off to gleefully play with his new murder toy; the kids interrupting Mom and Dad’s big Movie Style Kiss to ask if they can please keep their new underground layer and huffing and puffing when Dad tells them no.

2. Found family: the OT3 edition. To answer your question, the OT3 is indeed canon, confirmed by the creator. Now, usually, “confirmed by the creator” infuriates me because most of the time it’s a way for a creator to be seen as “progressive” without doing anything to actually be progressive. That isn’t the case here. The OT3 are built up carefully and while it is obvious the creators didn’t originally intend for all 3 of them to become a relationship in the romantic sense, by mid-season 5 we are given a very clear picture of where Parker, Hardison and Eliot are heading in their relationship. There aren’t any kisses at the end to signal this but there are solid marriage vows in not only one but two episodes. (And by marriage vows I mean literal equivalents of marriage vows: “for better or worse” and “’til death do us part”. I’m not even exaggerating). The OT3 also doesn’t need explicit romantic narratives to convey how much they love each other. Their love is laced through the whole show, from the way they teach each other things to the way they respond to each other and work as a unit. The way they fiercely protect and admire each other. Like someone once said, if you need characters to kiss or say I love you to let the audience know they love each other, you are writing them wrong.

Aside from that, each of the parings in the OT3 are just. Gah. They are so well done, with friendship being the solid basis for them all. The creators never expect the audience to assume anything about them or fill in the gaps. They give us their relationships on screen and reference many things off-screen to show us how these relationships continue to build in between episodes.

Hardison and Parker are a canon couple and date in the show: it’s approached slowly and they are so goddamned sweet. They are basically every fluffy slow-burn trope with a healthy dash of mutual pining in the mix. They are basically that quote “love is patient, love is kind”. (I would like to add their romance never becomes the focus of the show or overrides the importance of any other relationship they have with the other characters, especially Eliot.)

Hardison and Eliot are the Old Married Couple and from day one are already bickering and looking at each other/making comments that are found in every UST fic ever (not to mention Hardison has a very good knack for making Eliot grin like a little kid, when usually he’s basically an Angry Little Chef Man). They argue, they play, and love each other plain as day.

Parker and Eliot are more subtle but every bit as wonderful. They have an unspoken connection and understand each other on a level no-one else can. Parker and Eliot are not good with giving themselves over to affection for different reasons (and Hardison plays a central role in helping them realise it’s okay to want it and have it- that boy has endless patience) but there is something so beautiful in the way the two of them come together on their own and develop their own special bond that works for them. Parker and Eliot are that trope where the characters don’t need to speak to understand each other perfectly. They just do. Their love language is a lot of the time non-verbal but speaks volumes. (Parker also likes to annoy the hell out of Eliot and Eliot....just.....lets...her. Because he’s soft. The softest, grumpiest boy.)

I could go into so much depth for each pairing and their dynamics as a 3 but that's for another post.

3. Subverting stereotypes. There is the occasional hiccup in the show regarding stereotypes but ultimately, Leverage gets an A+ when it comes to writing characters and making them 3 dimensional people who are not defined by certain characteristics or events. Nate could so easily fall into the White Man Pain trope where he uses the trauma of losing his kid as a reason as to why he is entitled to act like a dick. Nate is a dick but he doesn’t use his pain to excuse it and I appreciate that. Hardison is a black man who is soft and nurturing. Easily the most empathetic and patient of the group. He’s nerdy, an actual genius, and has the biggest heart of all the characters. Nate is maybe the glue but Hardison is definitely the heart. Media’s usual aggressive, amongst other, racist stereotypes can fuck right off. Parker is canonically autistic (I am sure this was confirmed by one of the creators) and she is not defined by it. It’s not written as some kind of singular personality trait. It’s part of what makes up Parker but it’s only one facet of who she is and not once is her actions, thoughts or feelings treated like a joke. Sometimes people don’t understand why she does and says the things she does but it’s met with patience and fondness over the course of the show. Equally, it’s not met with over-caution. Parker is just Parker. No-one tries to change her. The other nice thing is Hardison, who always makes sure Parker knows she’s amazing because of who she is and not in spite of it. Finally, Sophie is in her 40s. She’s not treated like she’s past her prime. Ever. She’s sexy, smart and never is she pitted against or compared to Parker (who is younger) for anything. Sophie is amazing and there’s never even a conversation of “I may be older but I am still *insert adjective typically associated with younger women here*”. Sophie is possibly the first female character I’ve ever seen who isn’t just unapologetic about her age but has never had to apologise for her age. It’s a non-issue and that’s that. The women on the show are written so well, right down to secondary characters and it’s beyond refreshing.

4.) It’s just fun. The show has a “monster of the week” type format. Except instead of a ghoul or a ghost, the monster is some corrupt wealthy and powerful individual or organisation. The show draws on real-life individuals to do this and therefore closely parallels real-life people and events. It addresses important political, economical, social and environmental issues while at the same time remaining fun and light-hearted. The characters constantly get the chance to play dress up and by GOD do they have fun with it. You get to watch Eliot beat up bad guys in the most delightful of ways, usually after a witty non-sequitur and with a weapon you’d never think could be a weapon. The dialogue and back and forth between the characters is everything. And finally - my favourite thing- the team can never resist striking a dramatic pose after they’ve taken down the bad guy, making sure the bad guy sees them. I mean, they COULD just walk away, satisfied they’ve taken the person down, but nope. They gotta be dramatic bitches 24/7 and pose like they are models for every single month of this year’s Criminal Calendar.

5.) Competence Porn. So. Much. Competence Porn.

Honestly, I could list a thousand reasons for why Leverage is amazing but to list them would to be spoiling so many amazing moments you’d get to discover for the first time on your own if you do choose to watch it. It’s the kind of show you can watch with an eagle-eye and sink your teeth into. But it’s also the kind of show if, you would prefer, put on in the background for something entertaining while you do something else. Each episode is about the job at hand but it’s made up of so many moments between the characters that show how much the creators and writers care about them. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll do whatever it is you do when something Soft and Wonderful happens that makes your heart melt. I am so beyond grateful for Leverage. It’s everything I always wanted in a show. Nearly every show I’ve watched in the past 10 years has disappointed me in some way, usually either because the writers run out of steam or characters who I love are treated poorly or given some kind of unnecessary “shock value” arc. Leverage doesn’t do that. Leverage is what it says on the bottle. Fandom isn’t something I joined because I needed canon fix-its. Fandom only enhances and celebrates an already excellent canon.

#leverage #leverage ot3 #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #sophie devereaux #nate ford #talk leverage to me

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vickyvicarious · 3 years

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how would you write a fic where: Nana meets Parker and Eliot

well, I wrote one possible version of Nana meeting Eliot in my fic 'Food Is', so there's that, but it wasn't really the focus of the story. But there's a ton of ways to go with this one, it's really hard to choose one method.

I think if it's something I would write then I'd leave off all my ideas about possible heist-related meetings where the team has to help Nana simply because the cons intimidate me too much to write in any detail. So, the first one to come to mind is something like:

Hardison has been uncharacteristically dragging his feet on introducing them to Nana. Parker brought it up, like, the once, and Eliot never has - they both don't have anywhere near the kind of family background where they'd feel comfortable on insisting. And it's not that Hardison doesn't want them to meet her, but he hasn't really taken the initiative to make it happen, and they certainly won't, so it just... hasn't. They all lead busy lives after all.

(Hardison talks them up to Nana all the time over the phone and whatnot. But it's. It's different, he wants her to love them as much as he does and he's kinda afraid she wouldn't. She knows what he does, knows what they as a team do... but the messy reality of it might put her off. Seeing the three of them in a romantic relationship might be something she objects to when it's in her face. What if she tells embarrassing stories about his childhood and they never let it go? What if Parker or Eliot don't like her? Her health isn't super great and he doesn't want to stress her out! She always polices his orange soda intake and he'd need that to handle the stress of such a meeting! He's never really been in love before, never had to do the whole 'introduction to your parents' thing and he wants it to be PERFECT when it happens. He knows most of his fears aren't realistic at all, but they're still making him super nervous and it's just easier to plan that he'll make it happen at some point in the future.)

But Nana gets impatient. She takes things into her own hands. By which I mean, she just shows up one day.

Of course, the crew is in the middle of a con at the time. Like, fully in the middle, on a timeline, can't stop what they're doing now. This means that despite all his best efforts to manage the entire meeting, Hardison physically isn't able to be there half the time. Nana's weekend visit or whatever involves her sitting in on strategy meetings, cooking with Eliot, talking knots and knits with Parker, playing video games with Hardison, just various snatched bits of time with all of them in between them running out to do things for the con. At one point she absolutely grabs the phone and plays the role of FBI handler or whatever. Maybe she plays a key role at the end of the con. She's definitely interested in what they do.

Hardison is all freaked out and overprotective, Eliot is terrified and trying to be very nonthreatening since he has no idea what's been said about him, Parker is openly and deeply curious about every single detail of this woman's life but also nervous about interacting with her. Nana meanwhile is trying to assess these people her son loves so much, and also have some fun while away from home. Since the focus is mainly on her POV/moments with the crew, I wouldn't have to write in a full con, just maybe snippets of what the others are up to at any given moment (sort of like in the Broken Wing Job).

Anyway, it obviously ends with her giving her approval and bonding with them all. She talks to Hardison about his lifestyle (in all senses) really being okay with her in practice, not just theory, and maybe gently scolds him for even unreasonably fearing otherwise. (Would she have preferred something safer? Yes. But he has people who will take care of him, he loves what he does and it uses his big brain to the fullest, and he is helping people. Of course she isn't disappointed. And, what. The two people thing? Maybe she hasn't been telling him enough stories about her wild youth if he thinks that's gonna phase her.) She teaches Eliot some family recipes and also definitely some funny Alec stories. She 'lets Parker talk her into' trying out a climbing rig (Nana's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, Hardison is way more concerned for her health than she is) and essentially adopts her and says she already considers her family and she has an open invite whenever she wants to come by. She kicks everyone's butts in any variety of videogame (Hardison wins there but it's decently close) or board game. She is openly affectionate and loving and everyone loves her deeply.

FLUFF FLUFF FLUFF

There's a family dinner, and then she goes home. The fic ends with her arriving home, talking a bit to Breanna maybe, etc. etc. ...and then she goes up to bed or something and finds a stuffed animal on her bed, with a little note from Parker. She must've left like right after Nana did, beat her home somehow, broke in and gave her a little gift. Something to show she loves Nana too, and wants to be in her family as well.

Nana's heart is full and warm and she is so so happy for her baby boy that he has found a place to belong and people to do so with. She sends him a picture of the bear. Picks it up to move it, and notices it's weirdly heavy. Opens it up. Finds the inside is full of gems or something, and there's one more note saying 'just in case'. Nana laughs out loud.

#leverage #thiefsome #nana hardison #inbox games #my fic #how would i write this fic #(also. my own grandma before she died used to take in foster children for most of her adult life. adopted one of them. but anyway her house #was FULL of pictures of them all. she had this row circling through the whole kitchen and down the hall and so on. and i hc that for Nana #dunno if hardison and breanna were the only ones she raised fully to adulthood but she definitely fostered a whole bunch of kids and #very proudly displays their photos/award/etc. everywhere. certainly a scene of her bragging on them all)

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hmgfanfic · 3 years

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Talk about all the Fillory worldbuilding in LQoF, please :)

THIS IS INEXCUSABLY LATE. I’m so sorry!

And I wish I could say it was just my scatterbrainedness, which is definitely a constant factor, but it was also that when you sent this, I was deeeeeeeep into writing the final few chapters of Little Quirks of Fate and I was kind of... in my head about it. It took a lot longer to finish than I had planned (a cardinal sin to my particular combo of severe ADHD and Type-A personality) and I was spending excessive amounts of time making sure I figured out a satisfying ending by my own exacting standards, so I just didn’t have the headspace to think through my early process yet. Very sorry about that :( But now that I’m finally done, I’m excited to look back! So if you’ll indulge me a very late answer, I’d be tickled. 💗

Long ramblings and major fic spoilers under the cut.

The truth is a lot the world building came down to character stuff foremost, followed closely by my preferences as a writer. I adapted the world to the story I wanted to tell, while using the little bits of information we’re given in canon as a baseline, rather than building the story around the world. And that was a lot more fulfilling for me, since I only really love worldbuilding through the lens of character, rather than as an exercise unto itself (though it’s super fun once you get rolling.)

To explain what I mean by that, you need to know that Little Quirks of Fate was originally going to be a oneshot. My plan was about 25-30k (lol) of a pure S2 retelling, only with Quentin in the role of Fen. It was also going to take a much more traditional enemies-to-lovers’ path—with Quentin as an active member of the FU Fighters—and the whole thing was going to be in his POV. Also, they weren’t even going to kiss until after the bank heist (which, yes, was going to be a thing here), but that got abandoned the fastest in favor of trying my hand at smut. But two things made me realize I needed to significantly shift course:

1) I was struggling to make Quentin actually feel like Quentin. I wrote this very atmospheric early scene at the FU Fighters encampment, with lots of description of the bonfires and the way their shirts dyed in Fillorian red looked like blood (you get it.) It took place in the black of night, shrouded in secrecy, and when Bayler questioned Quentin about his new husband, Quentin said something like, “He’s a drunk idiot, we have the advantage.” It was all very lush and dramatic, but it really, really, really didn’t feel like Q in any recognizable way to me. Now, I’m not someone who thinks Q needs to be a precious sweetheart all the time, but what I was writing didn’t have his idiosyncrasies or a motivation that felt true to who I feel he is.

2) The draft was DEFINITELY missing Eliot’s story and his perspective. I certainly don’t think Eliot’s POV is always necessary (sometimes not having his direct thoughts heightens tension in romance especially), but it felt really necessary here, to fill in the gaps of what Quentin was assuming and also—more importantly—because the events were just as impactful on him, but in a very different way. So I knew I was missing half the narrative, but that meant I would need to deal more explicitly with the Beast (i.e., Mike, the most devastating storyline to me, personally) and I really, really didn’t want to do that.

My first step in making a more recognizable Quentin was figuring out a way he could more or less use the same syntax that he does on the show. Voice is the first way I connect with a character, so while many writers in this fandom thrive at modifying speech patterns and keeping the heart of a character alive, keeping close to Quentin’s canon speech was an easy fix for me in a story I was excited to get rolling. Sort of like the old adage of uplifting your strengths before putting outsize energy into things you struggle with.

The easiest way I could think to give him the same syntax was to figure out a way Quentin spent some significant time on Earth during his formative years. And once I rewatched 2x06 and was reminded that Ess went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school, I lost my damn mind. I started sketching out ways that Quentin could get there too and that’s how I built out the idea of Umber brokering a marriage deal with the actual landmass of Coldwater Cove, which included an education opportunity for the boys (in a nod to Fillory’s patriarchal nature), and also the reason why Umber did that, which was to take advantage of his brother’s orgy mistake with the first Children of Earth to usher in a more productive and orderly Fillory. So that created a whole new set of rules and essentially a whole new world for me to play with... all for the sake of Quentin getting to say “fuck.” It was that important to me. :p

And as I worked through all that, I realized I also wanted to give Q magic, since Quentin’s relationship with magic is something I’m interested in. But I had read on ye olde Tumblr that the reason Illario uses a wand in 2x06 is a nod to the books, where Fillorians specifically aren’t Magicians and that’s the rationale for the Children of Earth royalty. And while I generally see the books as interesting supplemental material with zero bearing on the television show canon, I still said to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be kind of funny if Quentin was the only native born Fillorian who had magic and so the FU Fighters believe he’s the chosen true High King, but instead of it being because he’s ~special~, it’s because Umber made a clerical error? Lol! Hilarious!”

So while all my questions for how to explain all THAT spun out into more and more detail, at the same time...

I caved to the idea that this story was going to be a No Beast AU, just like my last two stories, mostly because I really couldn’t bring myself to deal with the Mike of it all, even tangentially. I could have just changed that single element, but I’m not a half-measure gal! But I still wanted to stick with the vague background theme of Fillory = adulthood from a questing perspective and I wanted Julia leading the charge this time, but without the sexual assault that occurs in canon. So obviously, the answer was avenging all of the murdered and cannibalized “grown-ups,” i.e., master Magicians, by seeking out help from the gods in a balanced Fillory free from the devastation of the Beast. Duh! ;)

So then, like anyone would do, I rewatched every episode up to 4x11 that makes a mention of Fillory and took about twenty pages of notes on the canon worldbuilding, along with an analysis of how much a particular piece of information would be impacted or not by balance in the realm. For instance, the existence of geraniums (per The Fillorian Candidate and Tick’s misunderstanding of “power plants”) and the lack of diamonds as a precious stone (per the River Watcher not knowing the value of Margo’s earrings in Knight of Crowns) struck me as static facts unaffected by Ember’s reign of chaos. But I shifted the overall feel of Fillory to one that’s more functional and a lot more bureaucratic, leaning on things like the existence of socialized health/vision/dental insurance (the idea of which is canonical, per a petition from the beavers requesting dental coverage from acting High King Josh in Ramifications), strict taxation plans, and an overall sense of thriving Ceremony to show Umber’s influence.

Basically, I wanted Eliot to inherit a much, much easier Fillory to rule—especially with the highly educated Quentin as a built-in and passionate advisor—mostly so it wouldn’t completely strain credulity when a lot of his energy goes toward his love life rather than the intricacies of ruling (though Margo would say he still favored his personal life more than he should have, and she wasn’t... wrong. He wants to be a husband more than a king!) But I specifically made it so most of the chaotic elements were played as whimsical (sorry) quirky shit or smaller hints of greater injustice (see: Ember getting rid of STDs, but still letting magic-poor citizens die of sepsis because that’s too boring to deal with), all while a cataclysmic danger lurked under the surface.

After that, I just filled in details as they worked with character stuff and plot stuff, and I tried to make sure they didn’t contradict each other in a way that couldn’t be chalked up to “chaos.” I basically lived with the Fillory map open all the time and also took screenshots of Benedict’s map of Loria, which gave me alternate ideas for the overall feel of the landmass rather than just the kingdom. And pretty much that’s the basic process I used to create the world! It was extremely fun, and I learned a lot, though I’m *definitely* focusing on some pure relationship kind of stuff for a while because... oof, sometimes it was a lot.

Annnnnnnd if you’re still with me, here’s some stray observations, for funsies:

I wanted Quentin and Eliot’s starting points to be more mature than in the show. Quentin when we’re introduced to him as an adult in LQoF is a lot more jaded and cautious than S1 Q, which is because in this world, his S1 mentality happened while he was on Earth and came to a head during the throes of his fucked up relationship with Bayler. Similarly, Eliot had already gone through a lot of shit too, and was much more self-actualized by the time he agreed to be High King here than in the show. It was still out of desperation for purpose, but not coming out of a direct trauma spiral. I think if they had been younger, both in age and mentality, the story wouldn’t have worked because they would’ve blown it up day two. They’re both still disasters, as we like to say, which is why the... everything happens, but they’re not disasters in the exact same way as in early canon. I thought of them as closer to their S3 selves, pre-Mosaic.

While I mostly kept Quentin’s syntax the same as on the show, I did change it up in some ways to reflect his Fillorian upbringing. The most obvious was replacing “goddamn” with “godsdamned” and “Jesus” with “Hades,” but I also made him slow on the Earth idiomatic uptake and slightly more likely to use passive voice and less likely to use contractions, especially early on and especially when speaking with Fen. He also said slightly out of date things even for someone who last remembered 1999, since Earth was still overwhelming despite his immersion. E.g.: In the epilogue, he asks Eliot if he can spend some time “Googling the World Wide Web” instead of watching Gossip Girl together, even though by 1999 most people were saying “on-line” or “the internet” by a pretty wide margin. But in my mind, the first term he learned was World Wide Web and he stuck to it like glue.

I originally had a full-blown coronation scene, where Quentin helped Eliot with the answers to the 90s questions via subtle charades, such as flapping his hands at his sides to give him the answer “Wings” (and Eliot was eventually going to Eliot-Logically use that moment to argue to Quentin that maybe Q really is the true High King since he was the one who actually answered the Knight’s questions, etc.), but I cut it and only showed bits and pieces in flashbacks because it didn’t really matter. They had to treat it seriously because it was An Event in this version of balanced/un-Beasted Fillory, with a full audience bearing witness, but the whole thrust of the external plot was about dismantling that moment and the concept of monarchy in general, so giving it too much weight outside of the Eliot and Julia friendship felt disingenuous to the story I was telling.

This is also why it was important to me that Margo hated the title High King Eliot the Kind, even though I only brought it up textually once or twice. But in my view, she fucking hated it and never came around to it. Which isn’t because she doesn’t think Eliot is kind, it’s that it felt like a simplification of all that he is, and the coronation ceremony in general felt similarly shallow. It wasn’t just the four of them working out their shit on the beach; it was true ceremony after a year of questing toil and a lot lingering uncertainty/resentments (especially regarding Julia), so it was too Big Shiny Happy Bow to her.

Yet on the same theme, my greatest regret was not being able to work in the fact that Margo’s title for Penny (King Penny the Persistent) was supposed to be half-sincere and half-sex joke. She did genuinely admire that he stuck it out even through his initial heartbreak because he gives a shit about his people underneath it all, but—and this is a very important headcanon to me—she admired his dedication to the art of the female orgasm even more.

I was originally also going to include the One Day More sequence with way more details—such as Umber taking the Javert lines, Ember taking the Thenardier lines, Bayler taking the Enjolras lines, and Penny taking the Marius lines, but... uh... writing a musical number is apparently not in my skill set. Also, honestly, the weirdness of the original is its whole charm and so I didn’t want to improve upon perfection. See also, in a more serious way: Eliot bowing to High King Margo on the Muntjac, the events of Plan B, and Quentin & Penny in the Flying Forest. Would not touch it!

My favorite Fillorian detail was either the guy who sent a citizen petition requesting a “smidgen” of Eliot’s earwax for an undisclosed purpose, or the use of the verb “to peg” to describe a Pegasus flock greeting an outsider with honor. They encapsulate the obscene yet pristine feel I always tried to give Fillory.

My favorite subtle(-ish?) ironic moment is Ess, the heir to a hereditary monarchy, taking Quentin to task for not honoring the anarchy patch on his high school backpack. In general, I don’t like everything being neatly resolved, including on an overarching world level. And I very strongly felt they had ZERO business meddling in Loria, so it left some fun-to-me unanswered questions. Will Ess usher in democracy for Loria based on his experiences on Earth? Maybe! Maybe not, since tradition’s a hell of a drug and Loria has its own history and complexities. Who knows?

I misread the town name Sutton as Sultan on the map the first time I referenced Bayler’s hometown (Sultan’s Ridge), but instead of going back to fix it, I just made it a sister town. Whatever!

I do not know how Quentin got a full bookshelf of Earth literature back to Fillory with him. Magic, I guess. (That’s the answer to anything I didn’t totally think through.)

I occasionally get asked whether Quentin and Fen were physically related. The answer is no, though it doesn’t totally matter. But I intended heart-cousins to be more like close family friends. (Though I actually originally had a joke where Eliot still wasn’t sure by the epilogue, but it didn’t land/feel realistic so I cut it.)

The details of the magic frequency poisoning were DEFINITELY what I thought through the least. My main goal was to have something catastrophic happen to Fillory based in part from the historical actions of the Children of Earth and Ember, patently ridiculously but with lasting consequences. Hence, god orgy that took away Fillorian human magic and sent out a slow poisoning of the overall magic “frequency.” It sounds all well and good, but it’s definitely something that would fall apart with even the lightest bit of prodding. It serves it’s purpose though, so I figured the gaps could be filled in or politely ignored. ;)

This question was way too much fun and a helpful retrospective for me! Thank you so much for indulging me, many moons ago. 💗

#little quirks of fate #harri writes #anon asks #ze process #<3 thank you i love you #this one is a long post even for me #dialogue asker if you’re reading this you’re up next I promise!

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leverage-commentary · 4 years

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Leverage Season 2, Episode 2, The Tap-Out Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

Marc: Hi, I’m Marc Roskin, Director and Producer on Leverage.

John: Hi, I’m John Rodgers, Executive Producer and Writer on Leverage. Hold on, let me open my beer. Albert.

Albert: I’m Albert Kim, I'm the writer of this episode of Leverage.

John: I'm gonna jump straight to Marc Roskin, because we are jumping straight into the action here. Marc, this is a gym, or looks like a gym, starts with a fight scene. How hard was it to find this space, and what did you do to make it shootable?

Marc: We had a handful of gyms to choose from, but what we liked about this was the elevated ring. We were able to center it in the middle of the ring and it had a good work space and of course, as you know, Dave Connell likes a lot of windows.

John: Yeah. So you're bouncing light in through those outside windows, then.

Marc: Yes. Even when we’re playing these scenes at night, we were still streaming lights in through the blinds. And as you can see, we have vertical blinds all over. We put those up as well. It just had a- also a good, central location for us to shoot in other areas as well.

John: Cool. Now this is the most involved fight shooting we did the entire year. How did you prep for it?

Marc: Well, the gentleman- the bald gentleman on the right, is Matt Lindland, who is a high school champion wrestler, college wrestler, Olympic silver medalist, and a real mixed martial arts fighter who fought in the UFC. So when we were looking to cast someone, we wanted to cast someone who knew the sport, who knew the ability, and because later on as you see our Eliot character in the ring, we wanted someone who could be safe with Christian. Because, since Christian does all his fights, we wanted someone who wasn't gonna try and show off for the camera and end up hurting one of our stars.

John: Not that Christian doesn't get hurt on a fairly regular basis anyway, but yeah, it was a nice try. And this was a really fast start. This is- you know, we bang right into the villain, we bang right into the victim. Our- this, however, was not our usual episode. Why don’t you tell us how this got started?

Albert: Well this was our- this was essentially our fight episode, our boxing episode, and except we wanted to update it, so we set it in the world of mixed martial arts.

John: To explain to people who don't know con shows, there are certain prototype con shows and movies-

Albert: That’s right.

John: The boxing con is a big one. And so we’re constantly looking at these older cons to update them and so we landed on alternate fighting. So what sort of research did you do?

Albert: That's the first thing I did. My background is in sports journalism, and so my first instinct was to start doing a lot of research. So I read a couple of books, I interviewed fighters, I interviewed promoters and managers, I spent some days in the gym.

John: You went to a gym here in LA, right?

Albert: Yeah I went to the Legends gym here in LA and spent a couple afternoons there, and talked to a lot of the fighters there. And one of the first things I learned was that, if people know the sport at all, they know the UFC and Las Vegas and things you see in pay per view, which is kind of the upper tier of the sport, but I learned that there's also this huge grassroots level of the sport, where they’re fighting in small towns all through the Midwest and everyone is out there trying it to make it to the big time. I knew right then that that's where we had to set the story somewhere, because it’s a wilder and wollier world with less regulation and more people are being taken advantage of.

John: What sort of money they fighting for at that level?

Albert: They're fighting for- if they're lucky, they're fighting for maybe two or three thousand dollars; more like 500 dollars a gig sometimes. Sometimes they work as bouncers at a club and then after they're done with their shift, they're allowed to come in and fight. It's literally a step above amateur night.

John: And this is a really nice sequence, by the way, the spin around to reveal Nate. Was it really raining? Did you get lucky or-?

Marc: No this was- I wanted to have at least one night scene in the episode.

[Laughter]

Marc: Dean gets lots of those.

John: Dean gets the- Dean cake; we've explained the Dean cake.

Marc: This was my night episode and I thought, ‘well maybe we'll have it rain, just to have some sort of effects.’ The previous shot was a stock shot and then that one I just thought it would give a nice night look to the scene.

John: And this also takes us out of our comfort zone. Albert why- what was- yeah, we’re in- where are we, Nebraska?

Albert: Nebraska.

John: We originally didn't set it in Nebraska.

Albert: It was originally set in Iowa, except Portland doesn't look a lot like corn fields and stuff, so we moved it to a slightly- we moved it to Nebraska. It's not a huge difference.

John: It's a little more mild, a little more hilly.

Albert: A little more, yeah. It's also realistic because a lot of- both Iowa and Nebraska and a lot of the midwestern states, they're really big into the wrestling tradition and that's where a lot of the MMA fighters are coming from today. And we make a point of in the episode, that the- that's where the grassroots talent is. So- and the other thing about this episode is, you know, knowing that it was gonna be set in the world of fighting, we knew it was gonna be very Eliot centric.

John: Yeah.

Albert: So this is definitely gonna be an Eliot character episode, and I remember one of the first things I talked to you about when I started working on this was, we talked about the Eliot character, and one thing I remember you saying was that Eliot is really good at the violence, but he doesn't necessarily like it.

John: No, no, the violence- Eliot Spencer is a- considers himself a negotiator, and occasionally negotiations need to be resolved with short, sharp bursts of violence. He's not a hitter- he's not a hitter by nature; he's a hitter by choice, by job.

Albert: And that immediately suggested to me this whole theme of, sort of, self control and this had to do with episode, has to do with him being able to control the violent impulses he has, as well as, you know, externally in this story, and the bad guy is someone who sort of exerts control over all these guys.

John: I would like to say, by the way, this is the perfect locked off comedy frame. The whole idea of Nate sitting there quietly; he's not even going to dignify what the kids are doing behind him at this moment, he's busy thinking. Also a lot of interesting fan mail about being trapped in Beth’s thigh grip; really, don't ever email us about that again. But this was a ton of fun. What was it like shooting this?

Marc: It was a lot of fun, but it was also helpful to explain some of the fight scenes. And, you know, to have Matt Lindland teach Beth Riesgraf how to put Christian Kane- or to put Hardison in a triangle choke hold, was very fun. And Albert and I had the experience of having Matt put us in that hold as well.

Albert: Oh man.

Marc: And I swear to god, he must have just given me five percent of the pressure in a fight; I had a headache the rest of the day.

Albert: Oh my gosh, it was unbelievable. But Beth picked it up really fast; that was scary.

John: She's got good physical- she's got good physical memory, actually, she picked up the pickpocketing really fast.

Albert: I love this shot.

John: This is a great shot now; this is the classic golf con; this is very Rockford. This is the classic Rockford, is that Jim Garner would show up as Jimmy Joe Meeker or somebody else at your celebrity play- like your bad guys place, piss him off, and then ingratiate himself and force him to seek him out for vengeance. It's a great roping technique, actually, rather than looking like your seeking him out - force him to seek you out. Now where is this?

Marc: This is at one of the golf courses outside of Portland, the Oregon Country Club. And they just opened the doors to us and we had a really good time shooting this. And fortunately for us, Brian Goodman is, I would say, almost like a scratch golfer.

Albert: Yeah, he's single handicap.

Marc: He had a really good time doing this.

John: And Brian is the main villain.

Marc: He's our main villain.

John: He’s Jed Rucker. And now, is he from LA or from Portland?

Albert: Yeah, LA.

Marc: No he- he came from LA, but he's a Boston guy; he had a really real, rough Boston upbringing.

Albert: Oh yeah, Boston.

John: Oh that's right, yeah, he came up in like the- he came up in the less than lawful element, if I remember it correctly.

Marc: Yes he did, and he's put that energy into acting and I think he handles it very well.

Albert: But he also brought a lot of grittiness to the role which was really nice.

John: Well he's one of the few physically menacing bad guys we have. Usually the bad guy has what we call the Busey, which is your sidekick meant to inflict pain or do your dirty work. While he really looks like he would be the dude driving you to the crossroads of a shallow grave.

Albert: Definitely.

John: Now it- was it raining? I mean were shooting in Portland, so...

Marc: Not at this sequence; when we get to later parts of the con, we did have some rain.

Albert: But pretty soon after we shot this it started pouring, and because- it was cold there. It was really cold out in the morning, I remember that.

John: I love the fact that Hardison, in theory, has a way to put nanites in a golf ball, just in his luggage. Or he knows hackers in Nebraska that he can get that from. You know the Omaha hacking scene, it's really, really vibrant. Good lift. Beth, as always, doing her own lifts, and this is- this is one of our few big montage sequences.

Marc: Yes.

John: Usually they are very self contained; one, two, three beats.

Marc: No, we actually went out and shot a round of golf and were able to- and Tim, who has never really played before, picked it up really quickly and developed a really good swing, and we were actually using a lot of his shots in the actual montage.

John: Now that’s cool.

Albert: Well what's funny is that he’s you can tell he's an actor, because all of his best shots came when the camera was on. Turn the camera off and he couldn't hit the ball for his- to save his life, but then once the camera was rolling, right down the middle; he would strike it.

Marc: And Brian was nervous that we were gonna ruin his swing cause we kept telling him to shank things, cause the ball was supposed to go off.

John: Yeah once you learn, you're done. And this is where- yeah this is the beginning of the montage. Now I’m gonna jump ahead cause the montage will give us enough time to do so. When you were talking about- when you were breaking this episode as a director, you knew you were gonna do that gym. Did you reference look at any specific reference materials? Did you look at any fights? Did you look at mostly MMA footage? Or what'd you- what was your homework there?

Marc: I looked at MMA footage and I also looked at some of those fights that Albert was talking about - the grassroots fights. I- you know, I'm a fan of this sport so I have been following it, and I was looking up footage, and looking up rings, and looking at the magazines as well, and just trying to study up on it as best as I could.

Albert: And you had also done all that research previously for a feature project, right? So you had all that information as well, which helped.

Marc: Yeah, so I'd been to the UFC matches; I've been, you know, to the gyms; I've been to some of the smaller venues as well.

John: I love the choice Beth always does in these scenes, is to put on a very sort of frowning concentration? Like Parker finds human tradition fascinating. Tim sank this right?

Marc: Yes he did.

Albert: Yeah.

Marc: We kept telling him to- ‘don't worry, we'll put it in CG.’ He said, ‘no I'm gonna get it, I’m gonna get it’ and he did.

John: And that is the- I don't know what number hat that is for this season; that is a really obnoxious hat, that's nicely done. Tim- I forget where it started, probably last year Bank Shot? Where we put the cowboy hat on? It just started, the shorthand for Tim’s character, which is now which hat he's wearing. Because in it- really in this one, he really is in that tradition - that Rockford tradition that we hit again in the Lost Heir Job, and that sort of big city/city slicker, just kind of weasel, that just gets under this dude’s skin.

Albert: Well this is one of the episodes where we actually take the action out of the Boston area, or wherever our team’s headquarters is, and we went- we traveled to the midwest. So part of the idea is to take our team out of their comfort zone, so they don't exactly- so they're a little uncomfortable being out of their element, and then it actually comes to play in this story. They don't exactly- they are eventually subverted because they can't really figure out the relationships in this community.

John: Well they're- well they can't cover everything, you know. And that's a big- that was a big challenge in season two, is the fact that by the end of season one, these guys had done a lot of really amazing stuff. And how do you continue to throw obstacles in their way? And so a lot of the first half of season two was: ‘okay, let's take them out of Boston; okay, let’s constrain them in time and space; alright, let's give one of them an emotional interest that derails them’. And this is really a perfect example. This episode’s one of my favorite examples from making one season to making five. Is figuring out how to take the characters out of their comfort zone in an interesting way that's still- that still tells a character story, a really good Eliot story.

Albert: Now what’s interesting in this is also that a lot of the fighters were real MMA guys that Matt actually- Lindland has a gym in Portland.

John: Oh cool.

Albert: So he brought a lot of these guys from his gym and they were background, later on they'll be in some of the fight scenes. So that was really helpful for the reality of the of the look as well.

John: Yeah, that’s Chris showing off the fact that- I forget when we told him, but we were like, ‘you got an MMA episode.’ He was like, ‘oh I gotta go train.’ He couldn't- we couldn't find him for two months.

Marc: And he thought it was gonna be in episode six or- no it’s now episode three; he's like ‘oh no!’

John: Yeah and this now- this sort of- What'd you call this? It’s kind of a gauntlet.

Marc: Yeah this is what he calls it, and this is what something I wanted to just try and do with one shot and keep everything pushing in on him, pushing in on Christian. The cars converging, everybody just converging. Just to show how outnumbered he is.

John: And it's a good cliffhanger. And yeah, Eliot's about to fight. And now the promised fight.

Marc: Exactly.

John: You know, we have made a bargain with the audience and now we're delivering unto them.

Albert: So all these guys were real fighters.

John: No stunties? Or most of them fighters?

Albert: No, they were local fighters; all local guys.

Marc: These were all local fighters.

John: That's tough, because getting fighters to throw stunt punches is tough.

Marc: Yes. And the last guy you see him fight was someone from the ultimate fighters, this guy Ed Herman. Who unfortunately lost his last fight at the UFC cause his knee went out, but he was really great to work with and train with.

John: Yeah. There's a nice cornered- cornered dog moment here where you are fairly sure Eliot will choke this dude out if he needs to. Now why don't you explain- I just said that fairly cryptically as if everyone would know. Why is it difficult to get real fighters to look good on camera?

Marc: They did- a lot of times- they just don’t- they don’t how to sell it for television, or for film. It's just- it's really about camera trickery, and where it should be, and sometimes some of these guys, they punch too fast, or too quick, and they think it's real, but it doesn't register enough; so you're always trying to tell them- I mean, I'm even telling Christian this a lot of times, dude, take 10% off so I can really see it.

John: Yeah. That’s a lot of the thing is, you know, since he does all his own stunts, it becomes a sort of a matter of pride between him and the stunt man to move as quick and fast and hard as they can. And, you know, we do have to photograph this stuff.

Marc: Well I mean, the beauty of having Christian do his own stunts is you never have to hide a stunt person when it’s Christian and-

John: You just move the camera how you want.

Marc: And he's a very fast learner. He really learns a routine quickly; he helps choreograph them, and you never- you can always tag Christians face and that's what this is about, so it's great to have the ability to keep Christian in. This is one of my favorite shots - we craned through the actual ring all the way to Rucker and Eliot.

John: You got a crane?

Marc: We had- yeah.

John: Wow, that's really nice. Now I'm gonna ask the- the controversial chicken fried steak scene was just up. We were really trying- it's interesting, we were really trying to show that Sophie was out of place, and a lot of people took it as we were making fun of food in that part of the country. And it's just interesting that as writers, you forget that the protagonist is assumed to be speaking the truth at all times in the audience members mind. When, a lot of times, for us, they're characters that we move around the chessboard; we have no problem making the characters be jerks, or selfish, or small minded.

Albert: It was in no way meant to put down the quality of cuisine in Nebraska, in Omaha, in Lincoln.

[Laughter]

John: Really, stop your angry angry tweets and emails.

Albert: Please stop the emails.

John: The chicken fried steak in the FedEx box, stop it.

Albert: I'd like it, for the record, I've actually been to Nebraska many times for my past jobs, and I’ve had wonderful meals there, including some very good chicken fried steak.

John: There you go. This- it's interesting here, Eliot, when we were writing Eliot playing the cons, he tends to- and this is a lot of Christian’s acting choice, he tends to play the character very power negative. You know, it’s a subtle thing, but he's actually the second best- Eliot is the second best after Sophie on the cons. Parker isn't comfortable enough with people, Hardison always goes over the top, and Nate is too distracted, and to a great degree, particularly in this season, really is working through his addiction to vengeance and control. And it's interesting, you know, we write these things, and the actors always put a little spin on it, but that's the spin Chris tends to put in it. Sort of hard done by jamoke.

Marc: Well what I loved about this sequence, is we just saw him kick some serious ass on a bunch of guys in a parking lot. Now he's in the lion's den, he's showing this vulnerability; it really just felt so honest and sincere.

John: He's in over his head.

Marc: Yeah.

John: He's just a guy who’s really good at fighting. And you had that great line later in the script ‘you fight like something’s trying to get out of you’. You know, that's really the dynamic of the- this episode is ‘what is Eliot's relation to violence’? You know, where you can’t be a totally sane human being to be able to inflict that amount of pain on a regular basis. But he's someone who’s very controlled.

Albert: Yeah. It was great trying to dive into Eliot's character ‘cause it's something I haven't done before on this show, and plus the person that he ends up- who plays his foil, really, is Sophie. Because she ends up becoming the natural, I don't want to say mother hen figure, but she's the one who has the serious concern for what he's going through. So they end up having some very nice moments later on.

John: Because of her discomfort with violence.

Albert: Yes. She’s- that’s the diametric opposite of how she works. She's very physically disengaged whenever she runs her cons; it's all about the artifice and the person, the personality that she's putting on. And his job for the most part is physical. And it's sort of the cross between those two worlds which makes the interaction interesting.

John: It's also a nice speech about exploitation for the guys just running these guys out on cash.

Albert: That evil speech of evil.

John: It's our evil speech of evil for this episode. Do you know that phrase?

Marc: No.

John: The evil speech of evil is- we finally came up with a name for it in the writers room. It is the speech, every episode, the villain gives to justify his world view. Wherein this world view, he's not the bad guy, cause nobody is the bad guy in their own mind. He's just gonna explain why he does what he does. And, you know, but however, as normal sane humans, we look at that and go ‘oh my god that's evil’! And it really came about because we were researching all the Madoff variations early in the season and we were reading all these justifications by these guys who ripped off 50 million to 100 million dollars and in their heads, they weren't the bad guys.

Marc: Right.

John: You know? This is also great; Parker, while Sophie cannot get into the whole Omaha scene, Parker loves it. The -

Albert: She’s got the Nebraska cap on, got the cuisine.

John: Did that start as a wardrobe thing or-? Cause I was on the set for this one.

Albert: No, I put that in the script, and we had to clear various Nebraska logos and caps and stuff like that. But that was a fun little thing just to put in the background, sort of a grace note, with Parker’s character. This is the first Eliot/Sophie interaction where we start to see what Eliot is thinking and what Sophie’s concerns are and they were great in this scene.

Marc: Really great.

John: Yeah. This is- I remember watching the dailies on this, and even the dailies, the untreated dailies, you know, we kept flipping back and forth looking at the performances. Cause these are not characters that really rubbed up against each other in the first season a lot, and they really wound up being, kind of, the anchor pair for the first half of the season.

Albert: That's right.

John: And then, sort of, you know, there was a really interesting evolution on the Eliot/Parker relationship in the second half of the season; the sort of big brother thing really kicked in there. And the brother/sister teasing really said a lot.

Albert: The other thing Gina does great here in this scene in particular, you know, I wrote the character as a sort of LA agent, very type A personality without any real specifics in terms of how to approach it as a character. And she just nailed this accent. I think it's one of the best accents she's ever done, and it sounded so natural. Like, I swear I’ve met this person before.

John: It's so hard with Gina's accents because she studies them so meticulously. We always get one of two reactions. The people who aren't from there going, ‘That feels a little over the top’. And the people that are from there going, ‘Oh my God, that's perfect’. You know, because she- what was the name of our accent person? Our dialect coach - Mary...

Albert: Mary Mack.

John: Mary Mack. Up in Portland. So we have- we have found someone in Portland, Mary Mack, was actually the voice of Wonder Woman on Super Friends.

Albert: That's right.

Marc: That's right.

John: And she does a lot of dialect work, and she happens to live in Portland, so we had a full time Portland person out there who really made life a lot easier. And Gina insists on meticulous.

Albert: Yes.

John: It was also, now we’re getting into the nuts and bolts of how you actually make money in here with the cable bill, so I know you researched the hell out of this so-

Albert: Yeah, you know, the big money in any of these martial combat sports comes from the television contracts. And the UFC, in particular, has taken advantage of the pay per view deals they have. And it's- when they started looking at numbers, it's gigantic; they make so much money off the pay per view deals, they really don't need steady cable contracts or television contracts. So that suggested to me to build a con out of that, because in any of these cons, what you're trying to do is prey upon the greed of the bad guy.

John: The bad guy- the rule we always have is, the bad guy’s undone by his own sin.

Albert: Exactly. You can't con an honest person, that's how the saying goes. So what- the basic idea of the con is to dangle the promise of huge money in front of the bad guy and let him go after it, which is basically what we're doing here.

John: Sorry we’re totally distracted by the tracksuit here.

Albert: By the Velour tracksuit.

John: I love also- I never caught the first time around when Hardison ‘white people doing white people things’ the events they've got on the-

Marc: Drunken tractor pulls.

John: Which, by the way, there was a lot of that stuff when I worked the midwest. But it's interesting about the name Triana for the teen bopper act that we wind up hijacking the concert- we steal a concert. We tried eight names.

Albert: At least.

John: We tried the most ridiculous- maybe we tried a dozen of the most ridiculous one word names we could come up with for teen acts - they were all taken; every single ridiculous name was being used by some Disney girl. So we wound up using the first name of a character in the cartoon the Venture Brothers assuming there's no possible way anyone could be using this. And now this includes- this was great. How- do we start with we’re gonna steal the truck or we look at how they were shot and then steal the truck?

Marc: Steal the concert.

Albert: Steal a concert. And again, for this I did a fair amount of research I went to one of these production trucks here in LA at Staple Center and spent an evening watching them as they produced a Lakers game, and then just picked up the way the things moved there, the dialogue, and what was going on. And I learned- and this is all true to life, that the director and the producer of these telecasts often fly in from out of town and never meet the crew, the crews are all local. So as we do in this story, you can easily bring in two people that the crew has never met and they would just listen to every word, which is how we-

John: And it's another great thing where the research just gives us- a lot of times we have these giant mountains of crime in front of us, and the research gives us this much easier version. That, you know, any- it's amazing what you can get away with in America with a clipboard and a nametag.

Albert: Yes.

John: Yes. This is another thing, by the way, whenever we burn someone who is not central to the con, we have to take at least 30 seconds to establish they're an asshole. We, a lot of times, run into trouble when writing episodes where like, we need to con this person, but they're kind of an innocent bystander, so there's always a dial of how mean we can be, but this guy’s from LA and America hates people from LA, so...

Marc: Yes, and he's yelling at the limo driver.

John: We actually at one point had him- to really scunge him up, have him asking for the local prostitutes, but luckily we didn't really need that. Corn dog. My god, does she actually eat that?

Albert: She did, and this was probably like seven in the morning; it was the first thing she was eating in the morning.

Marc: But notice how she tosses it. That was a choice Beth made.

John: Yeah.

Marc: There it goes.

John: Just, yeah, again, this is the sort of thing that I really notice during the commentaries. Beth really dials in when Parker knows she has to act like a human being and not act like a human being when nobody's looking at her. And we actually had a Parker flashback - her first concert - which we wound up cutting where-

Albert: We didn't use.

John: Which we didn't use, but it ties into another episode. But we can tell you really quickly, everyone was talking about a first concert, and everyone had a really different band they’d gone to. And Parker- the flashback was 12 year old Parker, everyone raised their hands up with the lighters and she picked the pockets as they went through. We didn't use the sequence, but the actress wound up in the Top Hat Job, and that's the little girl we buried alive.

Marc: Yes.

John: And by buried alive, I mean we just pretended we buried her alive.

Marc: Yeah I felt like I broke her little heart, she was all ready and we decided to cut it, but she got to come back.

Albert: Yeah. This is a real truck, we rented a real production truck and those guys-

John: Was it easy to rent and build?

Albert: Yeah.

Marc: Oh yeah.

Albert: And those guys in the background are- actually work in the truck, so they were familiar with all the equipment and they were in the middle of, I think this was around the NBA playoffs time, they were on their way from here to go cover a real game.

Marc: Yeah, not a lot of room to work in these trucks, for filming.

John: What was the shoot- now that’s the great thing about the RED, though. We couldn't have shot this with the genesis that things like an engine block

Marc: We were able to just put on shorter lenses; some of the pieces do move. But you can tell just some of the blocking I had to do was a little static - besides doing steadicam to bring them in and out - but I think we got plenty of coverage that really tells the story. And it was great to just have all those monitors just come to life to keep it busy.

John: Well it's real depth- it’s real depth on the set; it makes it feel real. There's actually- the first director I ever worked with told me the most important thing to do is to make sure something's going on behind the actors. That's where everyone fails - if you're making your first little indie, be aware of that. That's where everyone fails, is you forget to put action behind your actors. And where were we on this? We were outside-

Marc: We- this is one of the other reasons we chose the gym that we worked in. This was just a few walking blocks from the gym. This was a high school that had shut down and we are using their parking lot.

John: Well that's good. The children of Portland don’t need an education - we have important filming to be doing. We just actually also, that's where Gina gives a parallel version of the evil speech of evil. About how the cable companies, or the sort of teen singer industry, is exactly like fighting; it's the girl version.

Albert: Her character views the singers as products, they're not people, just the way that our bad guy sees the fighters as products.

Marc: And there's the ladder cross; you have to have the ladder cross.

John: Is there a ladder cross?

Marc: Yeah there's a ladder cross.

John: Nicely done. Did you- you had werewolves in one, didn’t you?

Marc: Yes we did.

John: You always got interesting stuff going on in the background. Where are we here? Oh, this is where they find out they can’t hack a hick. I'm trying to remember how we wound up with that being the problem.

Albert: Now this is the complication. This is before- this is when, basically, you realize, yeah, you can't hack a hick. It's nothing that they- that our team could plan for; there's nothing on the computer networks that could do, nothing they could cut off, because it's basically the bad guys henchmen calling his cousin Jimmy and finding out these people are not who they say they are.

John: They tried to get into a network that's not- that- the data is not maintained by computers, it's maintained by people. That's actually a big challenge on the show, is that when you have a complication on a show, a lot of tv shows just have it be the characters have screwed up in some way, or just some random bad thing happens. The rule we try to maintain is either they succeed too well, or there's something specific about the setting that screws them up. You know, it drives me crazy when some sort of blind anvil falls out of the sky in the middle of a show. Or in particular the characters have been dumb and failed in that way. There's an expression in television called the idiot ball, where a character will carry the idiot ball and will act- just act stupidly in order to advance the plot.

Marc: Right.

John: You know the thing here is, we have five very smart characters. This is a creepy threatening moment particularly because Gina's pregnant here. That's if you actually know that, the look of Matt about to beat the hell out of Gina is very nasty. And also you get a really scary vibe off of Goodman there.

Albert: He's a very menacing character. Going back to the other thing here you're saying, is thematically the other thing at work in the story is the idea of family, so the twisted version of family, which is where our bad guy calls his cousin Jimmy and that's what undoes their team. On the flip side, you have the father and son who are fighting for their livelihood who are the victims. And in the end what brings- what actually allows our team to complete the con is the fact that they call on one of the members of the family.

John: Yeah.

Albert: So it's all about good family/bad family and how those relationships wind through the story and this particular community.

John: You're making it sound like we do a lot of work in the writers room.

Albert: Sometimes we actually do some work on these things.

John: Not often. A lot of times it just starts with a setting. And yeah, this is where they decide to do the bluff. And this is interesting - this is another thing we decided to address this year, which is our guys swan in, they change people’s lives, they jet off. And this is one of the times we really wanted to talk about the fact that in this situation, once they’re blown, there are repercussions.

Marc: There could be repercussions. Yeah.

John: You know they're- they live ruthless lives, and a lot of this year, is about them learning the limitations of their lives. Of how the world view it’s given them. How they relate to people. They don't always understand how other people behave.

Marc: Right.

John: For example, Eliot in Order 23, Eliot just wants to beat the hell out of this abusive dad in that episode, and he just realizes it's not gonna work

Albert: Once he leaves there- he's back to his old tricks.

John: Yeah exactly, and the same thing here once they leave- you can’t stay there forever.

Albert: Right. Well Rucker, the villain here, is actually very smart. When he finds out the truth, he doesn't threaten their team; he knows that he'll never get away with that. He threatens the victims. And he knows that that's what he has control over; that they live in his world.

John: He's one of the best villains.

Albert: He was a fun one.

John: Particularly just because you really felt there’s this series of escalating moves and counter moves. The Jury Job last year was good for that - the idea that our team makes a move, the other person makes a move not always knowing, but it's a logical counter move to whatever occured. He's actually, probably one of the smarter bad guys we've had. And this is the- our traditional roundy round.

Marc: This is our roundy round.

Albert: This is the converse shot right.

Marc: Yes, towards the end of the walkaway, but this is where the plot’s taken a turn for our team.

John: Now actually, why don’t you just describe the visual? Because if you watch the episodes on a regular basis, you'll see certain techniques used at certain times.

Marc: This is one of our moves where the tables have turned and we now have to change our plan. And at that point, I changed direction because Eliot brought up the point ‘no, I’m gonna fight,’ and it changed again. So then I changed direction and, you know, it's a timing thing, and it looks like you're doing it all in one, but there are many pieces and you just have to keep score of who gets what line and when. So you really have to trust your script supervisor.

John: And also in the writers room, we try to make a point of figuring out, like, now we've done it enough times, we know how many lines each person can have, and you’ll actually see dialogue in a lot of the episodes skip one to one one to one to one cause we know we’re gonna hang the director otherwise. That's also the last time we use the overhead shot in the season. That was our family overhead shot and it's the only time that one person has walked away from it and you used it for that to isolate him.

Marc: Yes. Yes.

Albert: This is my favorite scene of the whole episode. It's the emotional climax, really, because it's the traditional- in any of these fight scenes or movies fight stories, you have the night before the fight, which is when our champion-

John: Henry the 5th. You have the night before the fight.

Albert: Rocky. All of them have the night before the fight. So this is Eliot's night before the fight where he's girding himself for battle, and everything he and Sophie have been through up to this point comes to a head here. Plus the way Mark framed this was so gorgeous. You knew it was gonna be a beautiful shot because right before the camera started rolling, you saw all these members of the crew bringing out their cell phones and just taking pictures.

John: You know it's a good looking shot when it's like, ‘I wanna remember this one’. And there is- you know, a lot of people look at this one, and Order 23, to think that maybe Eliot had been abused or something as a child, and it’s- that’s facile. This is just a guy with a relationship with violence. He's beaten up, he's been tortured, he’s a guy who has learned bad things can happen to you and this is how he internalizes it. That's a great shot.

Marc: My lockoff transition.

John: Nice. Eliot transitioning into a girl with a bikini, that’s- was that placement intentional?

Marc: The placement- no, it just worked out. It just- we just wanted- Dave Connell wanted to come up with a cool transition, and we just locked off an XD camera and just left it there for the whole shoot.

John: Now did you have a little extra prep time on this or was this the normal?

Marc: This was the normal prep time.

John: Normal crazy Leverage-

Marc: Seven days of Leverage prep time.

John: Yeah. The- now the ring collapsed at one point, right?

Marc: Yes, the ring collapsed during Eliot's fight. And- you know, we had a lot of bodies up there. You have two camera men with big long lenses, a lot of moving around, and at one point it gave out and god bless, fortunately nobody got hurt.

Albert: That was scary. It was this huge bang right in the middle of the scene. One of our cameras was right there, and it avoided him and then it was this big crease in the middle of the ring.

Marc: And fortunately our grip department was able to just pull out some speed rail and get it ready.

Albert: Yeah.

John: Yeah, cause there's no- there's not a lot of time to waste on a Leverage shoot. Now you've got a lot of, just, wild grabbing stuff-. Oh, they were re-establishing the water. And this is another nice thing, by the way. It's a nice touch, Albert, that they're not dumb enough to fall for it again.

Albert: No.

John: You know, the tough thing with writing a con and heist show, audiences have seen a lot of con and heist shows, so they're playing by a different set of rules. And they're constantly trying to outguess you, and with a lot of stuff we do is we play with the metastructure of television, what you think a show like this would do. Yeah.

Albert: Especially with a fight con, because it is a familiar story. I mean, I think anyone who's watched any of the movies or tv shows in this genre has probably seen some variation of this, so you have to assume that people know the various tropes that go into a fight con. And then what- who’s gonna be drugged, who’s gonna be knocked out, what's gonna go on. You just have to make sure you don’t over use any of those.

John: You on the crane there?

Marc: Just for a little bit. We had a crane constantly moving. We had two handheld cameras. There was a lot of dailies on this episode. There was a lot of dalies. And we also wanted to just make sure we had all of the fight covered. We needed to get the perspective-

John: And the audience members.

Marc: -from the audience members. From our victim who we saw in the opening.

John: How long did it take to shoot this sequence?

Marc: We shot this in an evening.

Albert: It was this and the opening fight all in the same day.

Marc: Yeah, we did it all in the same day.

Albert: That was a bear of a day.

John: One 12 hour day?

Albert: Yeah.

John: Holy smokes.

Albert: It was a long day.

John: Thank God I wasn't on the set for this one - it sounded brutal. It sounded unspeakable.

Marc: You know, Matt and Christian had a routine worked out, and we were able to just pick our moments of when we needed to move the camera, and really trust our operators to make sure that they got it.

John: How many operators did you have in the ring?

Marc: Two operators. At times they were both in the ring, and sometimes one was just on the sideline getting to have some foreground ropes in it.

Albert: Yeah and all those flips that you see, Christian really took those. I mean, by the end of this scene his knees and legs were just totally banged up; he could barely stand.

Marc: And Matt, of course, who, you know, did this fight numerous times and also the opening fight numerous times.

John: Yeah.

Marc: Let’s just say there was the real odor of sweat in that gym.

John: I love the hulking out moment here.

Marc: Yes.

John: Just where he just snaps. I wish we could have done the green overlay on the eyes at that point. And what's great going back and watching this again, when you watch the episode, to see how they are putting the places in the con. How this behavior has to be read both ways. We’re not usually a closed mystery. There's two types of mystery shows - closed and open. One- like Columbo was open; we knew who the killer was and how he did it - the fun was watching Columbo finding the problem you had. And closed is, you don't know who did it. Which is most television shows. We usually show the audience how the con’s gonna run, and the fun of the audience is knowing what's supposed to happen, and it going wrong - it's one of the few times this sequence could play either way. This whole act- this whole two acts, could play either open or closed.

Albert: Yeah. That's actually the trickiest part of figuring out the- making sure that if someone goes back and watches it all again, it still makes sense knowing what you know at the end, as well as what you think you know the first time through.

John: We don't do it a lot.

Albert: Yeah, it's hard; that’s why.

John: Yeah, it’s really hard cause it’s usually only have to do one or the other. You know, entire movies have made millions and millions of dollars based around doing that well once. And we can't do it all that often. And also, to a great degree, I think a lot of the fun for the audience is watching our characters do what they do. That's really cool; a skillset they don't have. And so you want to get them invested in success, you know. And this is where it all starts to go to hell in a handbasket and the alert audience. Notice that the characters are recurring from the audience. I don't know anyone who figured it out; a couple people I know figured it out because of the metastructure. They figured Eliot couldn't have killed somebody, but haven't really figured out the con at this point.

Albert: Well the traditional fight con, the way it works is- and in con terminology they call it the Cackle Bladder. That's when someone dies - or supposedly dies - to scare off the bad guy. And this is a plan that- because normally in the fight con, the way it would work, the Eliot character would be the one who would die, but we did a little flip here and they staged the death of the bad guy, which- and the only way to do that is to get the help of the cousin.

Marc: And it's something I really wanted the actors to hold on to, is that one shot of Eliot; he really feels bad for killing this guy. And there’s a shot coming up after Rucker leaves that I really wanted to get across. And I just told ‘em there's a moment where we’re gonna release the valve, and I really want to see it on all of you. And it- and fortunately it really works.

John: Now the- it’s interesting with Eliot, because once you sort of know the character, you know he wouldn't actually feel bad about killing this guy. Eliot Spencer killed people. I mean, that's something that's kinda easy to go away, because Chris Kane is a very charming actor, and he plays the character in a very charming way. But especially in the second half of the season, you really get back to the idea that Eliot Spencer is a dude with a price on his head.

Marc: Here's the moment I was talking about, as soon as Nate gives the cue.

John: And you're lining them all up for that shot. And Albert you shot that, you were up on the roof of the building.

Albert: Yeah. It was raining, it was wet, it was cold. We were up on that roof, very slippery ladder.

John: And there's sending him across the state line with various bad stuff in his truck. Who came up with the saxophone?

Albert: Saxophone was something that actually came up in the room. I wrote the flashback of her going to the pawn shop, and in the room we were just sorta tossing around what are the funny things she might buy in the pawn shop?

John: Cause Parker just wouldn't buy the guns.

Marc: No, of course not.

John: This actually really holds together, too, because the original amount he wins in the golf game winds up being the money they use to buy the guns for the frame up later. This is- if you're gonna write a Leverage spec, this is kinda the one to look at. I mean this - I'll tell ya, this one really holds together in ways that a lot of the ones- not because we don't care, but because we're 42 minutes, that you're like ‘alright we’re just gonna assume people know that this is what's going on,’ cause you know. Or even stuff we shoot that we wind up cutting.

Albert: Well I will say this, if you are gonna write a Leverage spec, you know, we say this is the room all the time - research is your friend, because it starts from there. Because once you find that world you're gonna live in and you research the hell out of it, then a lot of the details become a lot clearer.

Marc: That was the actual pawn shop owner.

Albert: Yes.

John: Was it?

Marc: Yeah, and he donated his fee to a local charity.

John: Oh that’s great; that's really nice; that's really cool. Yeah, a lot of people were like, ‘c'mon he's not in that much trouble’. You know, you cross state lines with a bunch of cash and guns, I assure you, you're not coming back for a while. Yeah, and then we establish the whole problem Hardison seemed unprepared was because the guy was crooked, which we then used for this setup. This one came together nicely. It's also- its interesting - the pairings again. Parker and Hardison - Parker is next to Hardison in a lot of shots, and there's little bits where Beth gives- has Parker give Hardison just a little reassuring look like, you know, ‘I agree with you. Everyone else thinks you're crazy; I'm here.’ It’s a way of advancing the relationship without us having to do it textually.

Marc: Right.

John: You know, and there's a great moment- there's a great moment in the finale, which- are we actually releasing these separately? Did we decide? I don't know. If you're gonna watch the finale, there's a moment where Hardison- something happens with Hardison's van and I didn't notice it the day we shot it, but Parker kisses the van goodbye. And it was- no one asked her to do it, but it was just that little thing of Parker acknowledging this was important to Hardison, and so she was gonna, you know, she was gonna make that choice. Wow it’s- I like our actors. We’re lucky.

Marc: Yeah, we had some really good local talent here as well.

John: Yeah, cause the dad was local, the son was local.

Marc: Yeah.

John: And he did all his own fighting, too, right?

Marc: Yeah I- we were gonna- I even had in the budget a stunt person to do it, and we had a stunt person there, but it he just felt that he could do it and he actually did a really great job.

John: It's pretty hard when you’ve got one of your leads doing one of the fights to wimp out and take the stuntie; it’s a lot of pressure. And this is- a lot of people ask - we’re just handing over a business. We assure you Hardison has set up a DBA, he's taking care of all the paperwork. Don't worry - these guys aren't gonna get hit by the IRS five years from now. And it's really about them trying to- again, like you said, family- family owned business trying to rebuild the local community.

Marc: Right.

John: And, you know, one family saying goodbye to the other. The key toss. I think we should make a collection of Tim’s key tosses, cause that's a little signature bit, ‘Here you go.’ Here are the bad guy’s assets to use as your own. Good makeup on Christian, too.

Marc: Yeah, we gave him a nice shiner there.

Albert: We got a lot out of this gym. We spent a lot of time in this gym; we got a lot out of it.

John: Well that's another big thing when we’re shooting in seven days is - trying to find combination locations. The combo burrito we call it.

Marc: The combo burrito, cause once you start base camp - it’s expensive.

John: Ends on a hug. That's a great episode.

Albert: That’s the Tap Out Job.

John: Thank you very much guys. That was one of my favorites of the year; that was really great.

Marc: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure shooting .

John: Anything you wanna add?

Marc: No, I really enjoyed it. Albert and I- was the second episode that I've done with Albert. In the first season I did the Stork Job, and I really enjoy having Albert there by my side. He helps me out so much, he helps the actors out so much.

John: It's a relief to have him out of the writers room.

[Laughter]

Marc: It's really a team effort.

Albert: Thanks.

John: Thank you for watching.

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 2 #Episode 2 #The Tap-Out Job #Season 2 Episode 2

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shireness-says · 4 years

Text

skating in circles (with no way to stop)

Summary: Anne Elliot likes her life just the way it is. The last thing she needs is her handsome, charming, professional hockey player ex... something to show up during lockdown and prove just how wrong she is about that. ~7.9K. Rated T for language. Also on AO3.

~~~~~

A/N: For @welllpthisishappening, who is going a little stir-crazy during the NHL break. Also because it is absolutely her fault I ever thought “What would a hockey-flavored Persuasion AU look like?”

Special thanks to @snidgetsafan for her beta skills. Any mistakes, hockey-type or otherwise, are absolutely my own.

Tagging the potentially interested parties: @profdanglaisstuff, @thisonesatellite, @ohmightydevviepuu, @thejollyroger-writer, @snowbellewells.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

~~~~~

Social distancing almost doesn’t seem so bad in weather like this, the snow outside Anne’s window falling in huge flakes more furiously each second. Weather like this is designed for staying inside, curled up in an armchair with a cup of tea and a soft knitted afghan. It’s almost enough to soothe the little voice in her head that chides her for not working; there’s genuinely little for Anne to do from home as a school nurse, beyond writing and filing the reports she usually puts off until the end of the year, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling guilty at not doing more. Even if she isn’t expected to. Even if she is actually supposed to bunker down.

It’s been odd, adjusting to a life of jigsaw puzzles and overly involved embroidery projects and all the books she swore she’d read two years ago and never did. Hell, she’s even taken up online archiving projects after an old friend from school sent her a link, just for something to do. Her social life hasn’t particularly suffered; she’s a transplant to this town, anyways, drawn back by the memories of one beautiful, peaceful year, only really meeting with folks from work or her old roommate, and infrequently at that. Every few days, she’ll go through the motions of calling her sister Mary just so the younger woman can chatter away about all her own complaints; truthfully, that’s all the socializing she can handle. Anne has always kept to herself, and usually even likes it; the only difference now is that it’s by governor’s decree, not by her own introverted preferences.

Way out here, it’s not surprising that the power eventually goes out; it’s not uncommon, when the snow gets too heavy on the power lines in heavy storms like this. This is exactly why she has a generator - it’s all but a necessity when you’re living here year-round. Sure enough, the generator roars to life a moment later - an auditory nuisance, for sure, but a necessary one when you like such things as central electric heating and wifi and refrigerated items not spoiling.

The crunch of snow under tires outside her little cottage is more surprising, however, especially under the circumstances. She hasn’t ordered takeout, or grocery delivery; there’s no reason anyone should be pulling up to her house, especially in this weather. Peeking out the window reveals the kind of SUV only people with money buy, and the last person in the world she ever expected to see climbing out of it; she’d almost think it a hallucination brought on by isolation, if she hadn’t already seen him from a distance at the grocery store, earlier in the week.

Anne barely has a chance to pull herself together before the knock at the door sounds, bouncing off the walls of her little house. Opening the door reveals Frederick Wentworth, the dream she put away nigh on nine years ago, standing on her stoop in a ridiculous hat and a peacoat that’s not remotely suited to the practicalities of winter in rural New Hampshire.

“Believe me, I hate this just as much, if not more, than you do,” he begins, plowing forward before Anne can even remember to reassure him that it’s not true, “but my power’s out, and I need your help.”

As it turns out, Frederick - her handsome, charming, professional hockey player ex… something - is all that’s required to upset any equilibrium the snow might have brought.

———

Frederick Wentworth hadn’t intended to return to Kellynch, New Hampshire. Then again, he hadn’t intended to be sitting out indefinitely with the rest of the league because of the current pandemic.

New York just feels odd like this, the tourists all gone, the streets practically empty. Fred has never credited himself as one of those maniacs who claim that New York is the only city in the world, and there’s nothing like it; he’d been happy in a small town, and he’ll be happy in a different city if the worst happens and he ends up traded. That’s the way these things work. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t formed opinions over the last years about how this city is supposed to feel, and it sure as hell ain’t this.

So he gets in his car, arranges for a rental house, and drives up to Kellynch. If nothing else, he hopes it will be easier to look outside in a place he’d expect to see barely a soul even under the best conditions. Nothing ever happens in Kellynch, after all; maybe that will include the virus too.

(Well, that’s a lie. Exactly two things have ever happened to Kellynch, and he’s one of them. The other… if they’re very, very lucky, they’ll never have to deal with egotistical directors and their ilk again. Even pretty, quiet brunettes aren’t worth that trouble; in fact, sometimes, they make things worse.)

The irony to all this is that usually, Frederick craves a little bit of solitude. He spends essentially his entire life around the same group of guys, at practice and in games and especially on the road, when he’s got to share a hotel room to boot. Hell, he even lived with them for years, sharing an apartment with Harville and Benwick. A man can be forgiven for wanting some time to himself.

And he’d gotten it, at least for a while. Harvey had met his now-wife and moved out, and now Benwick’s got a girlfriend who giggles and his own place to giggle with her in or whatever. Fred can finally come home and just collapse in the closest thing to silence one ever gets in New York, and truthfully, he’s been enjoying every moment of it.

There’s a difference, though, in solitude on your own terms and solitude on others’ terms, and Frederick can’t help but feel lonely as he remembers that in the middle of all this, his friends and teammates are cozied up with those they love, and he’s all by himself in the empty apartment he once yearned for. In Kellynch, at least, it’s a solitude of his own making; his parents are long gone, Sophie out in Virginia with her husband, and for the most part, he hasn’t talked to his old school friends in years. There won’t be this constant awareness of all the people he can’t see if there’s no one about that he’d want to.

Maybe he ought to try dating again, he thinks as he drives. Obviously, there’s nothing to be done in the moment, what with social distancing and impending stay-at-home orders, but maybe later. Maybe Harvey’s wife has friends he’d like - he’s always liked Amelia and her steady personality and good-natured humor, so unlike Benwick’s high-maintenance Louisa and her ear-piercing squeals. Her friends have got to be similar, and Amelia would probably even be kind enough not to make him sound completely desperate.

It’s not that he hasn’t found anyone interested in the past years; he’s got a decent face, after all, and a better paycheck. But the thing about that face and that paycheck is that it’s hard to trust that any woman is interested in him, him alone, the person he is without all that. It’s not a great way to live, but it’s hard to move past.

There’s also the matter of the pretty quiet brunette who came to Kellynch when he was 16, seized his heart, and never really gave it back. Walter Eliot may have been an asshole - every cliche of the self-absorbed Hollywood director, convinced that their town was “quaint” and “just what he needed” to spark inspiration while demanding kowtowing and wrecking havoc wherever he went - but his daughter, Anne, had been of a different mold altogether. He’d met her at the annual Fourth of July parade, of all places. It was obvious she hadn’t intended to be noticed; indeed, she’d blushed and done her best to fade into the background while her father and older sister had made some kind of scene that Frederick can’t honestly remember anymore. He’d been too intrigued - and later, enchanted - by Anne to pay much attention to the rest of the fiasco she’d called a family.

She’d probably felt then the same as he feels about people now - some strange boy coming up to her out of nowhere with mini-donuts, someone she’s never met but undoubtedly knows her and her family, stuck wondering if he was interested in her or all the rest of it. But it had always been her; she’d initially been fascinating just in the contrast, but as he’d talked to her Fred had gotten to see her sense of humor and her brilliant mind and caring heart, and been smitten with the whole package.

That was, until she’d ended things between them, insisting that they’d never work across such a long distance, that she didn’t want to try. Maybe they’d only had 8 months, but he’d been all in, with all the conviction of youth that this was it for them, in some kind star-crossed true love way. She was the first thing, besides his family, that he’d loved more than hockey; truthfully, he still hasn’t found anything or anyone else to match that. It’s hard to move on from that kind of heartbreak. Maybe it’s finally time he tried.

The house he’s rented proves to be up a winding, hilly road lined with pine trees stretching in every direction. The seclusion is its own kind of calming - exactly what he needs, when the rest of the world feels like it’s going to hell in a handbasket. There’s something about being alone amongst the trees that feels comforting in a way that being alone in the city can never touch - almost like a hug. Or something else less weird-sounding. English was never his thing. The house itself is just a little two-bedroom cottage, but that’s more than enough space for just him. What’s more important is that there’s a TV and WiFi and plenty of blankets to bunker down with for however long this lasts.

What he doesn’t expect is to see Anne Eliot - the same Anne Eliot who he thought had left Kellynch for good, who’d broken his heart - at the supermarket like any other local, presumably looking to stock up on supplies just like he is. He doesn’t think she spots him - Frederick ducks into another aisle as soon as he spots her - but just the briefest sight of her sets his heart beating faster in a way that he doesn’t really want to examine closer.

(It would be ridiculous to still have feelings for her after all this time, even if that’s sure what it seems like.)

He tells himself that it’s just a fluke; that they won’t run into each other again; that they can avoid each other without any problems, given the situation. He is wrong on all counts. The cottage sits at the top of a hill, and on days where the fog hasn’t settled around the tops of the trees, he can see just a peek of a few houses and driveways down below.

And just who should he happen to see wrestling with her trash bin one evening, but the woman herself?

(Some higher power really has it in for him, he’s certain of it.)

Still, they don’t call it social distancing for nothing. It’s easy to avoid the people you don’t want to see when you don’t even leave your house. He naps a lot and catches up on Netflix and even attempts a puzzle that he finds in the hall closet (though it just winds up abandoned on the dining table).

In eight years, though, he’d forgotten about the weather up here. It’s late March, technically spring; the worst of the snow should be over. Should be over isn’t the same as is over, though, and he’d forgotten about the late-March snowstorms that pop up more years than not. They’d had them in Minnesota, too; the locals there had always joked it was because of the college basketball tournament. Well, the NCAA tournament may have been cancelled, but the weather sure didn’t get that memo, as the flakes start falling huge, heavy, and fast just outside the windows, almost pretty in a way that’s only possible when you know you don’t have to go outside in the storm.

Fate has other ideas, though. At least, Frederick has to believe it’s fate, otherwise this is all a cruel, cruel trick, and he doesn’t like to think about what he might have done to deserve that. Where he’s going with this is that the power goes out, knocking out the heat and the lights, as well as all those systems he’d been so thankful for until now. There’s a fireplace, but he hadn’t planned for this, and there’s not enough logs and he doesn’t know where or how to chop more and as much of his life as he spends at an ice rink he is not prepared to spend the night in these kind of temperatures without heat and —

— and when he looks out his window, he can just see a hint of light from Anne’s house, just hear the hum of a generator.

And he really doesn’t have any option at all but to throw himself on the mercy of the last woman he wants to see.

———

Anne’s house is neat, from what Frederick can see - small, but cozy, with everything obviously in its very particular place. It reminds him of her, in a way, or at least the her he remembers - quietly comforting and well turned out. It’s exactly what he expected, somehow - just the kind of house he’d expect her to inhabit.

The woman herself, on the other hand, looks tired - vastly different than what he remembered. Anne is worn down, somehow, in a way that makes her look older than she is. Frederick supposes that’s what happens when she’s undoubtedly been carrying her family members in the way she always has; it would exhaust anyone, especially under pandemic circumstances.

“Nice place,” he comments as Anne leads him towards a promised spare bedroom once he’s retrieved his bag - more out of an effort to fill the empty space than anything. Anne was always quiet, but this is just unnerving in its discomfort. They’d always been able to talk, or at least exist contentedly in the quiet; this is the opposite of all that.

“Thanks,” she replies. “I like it.” Just the kind of response a person makes when they don’t know what the hell else to say.

And maybe that’s what makes Fred dive straight into topics they should politely ignore - the absolute blandness of everything else they could say.

“I didn’t expect to find you here,” he tells her foolishly.

“In my own home, during quarantine?” She says it with a slight smile and the tone of voice she’s always used to hide her sense of humor, and suddenly Frederick is hit with a powerful wave of nostalgia.

“No, here. Kellynch here.”

The amusement flits away just as quickly as it had appeared, the smile turning polite and wooden. Another look he vividly remembers. “I didn’t plan to come back, either,” she tells him softly, “but I like it here. I got out of school and there was a position open and… it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I’m a school nurse,” she clarifies. “Over at the elementary.”

And that… fits, in a way he should have realized. She’d talked about going into nursing way back when, back when they were still practically kids, but this makes a lot more sense than trying to imagine Anne in some busy hospital. More tender, more stable.

“I bet you’re great at that.”

“Thanks. I like it. You’re… good at your job, too,” she finishes awkwardly.

(Even if the words are halting, uncomfortable, they send a little thrill through Frederick’s veins. Does that mean she’s watched, sometime in these past couple of years? They’re decidedly out of Rangers country and New York broadcasting range, way up here, but there are ways around that and she’d said…

Had she watched? For him?)

“Just doing my best,” he replies, just as uncomfortably. What a pair they make now.

“I don’t know if you’ve eaten already, but I was about to make up some dinner,” Anne tells him - an abrupt, but welcome, change of subject. “I’d be happy to do up another serving if you like.”

“That’d be great, thanks.” He has no idea what kind of meal he’s committed to, but who the fuck cares; right now, it’s a way to get a moment to collect himself.

“I’ll see you in a little bit then.”

(If he’s not mistaken, Anne flees the room with just as much relief as he feels watching her go.)

(Kellynch was supposed to be his getaway, his haven - but right now, all it seems like is a terrible mistake as Frederick wonders what the fuck kind of situation he’s gotten himself into.)

———

Dinner isn’t exactly an illustrious start to this whole thing, to say the least. Anne stresses about every step of making spaghetti - spaghetti, for goodness sakes, jarred sauce and boxed noodles, nothing a normal person could possibly find a way to stress about - only to realize as soon as they sit down that this is what they really should have worried about: what in the world two people who have unwillingly been forced into the same space have to discuss.

(“How’s your family?” he asks at one point - probably a subtle dig, if he’s remembering the same uncomfortable dinner that she is, in which her father had done his best to treat Frederick like an utter idiot. Fred had always thought she’d let them walk all over her, anyways - an accusation that isn’t far off.

“Mary is fine. She just got engaged to a lawyer,” Anne relates as neutrally as she can. “I don’t much talk with Walter or Elizabeth anymore.” There’s a variety of reasons for that - especially their tendency to never listen to a single word she’s ever said in her life and making snide comments about how she’d rather live in some backwoods nowhere than in someplace with civilization like LA or New York - but the memory of the way they’d treated Frederick, and everyone else not like them had contributed too. “And your sister?” That’s a safer topic; Sophie and Anne had liked each other.

“She’s good. She lives down in Virginia now - her husband’s some big shot in the Navy.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”)

(And that had been the end of that feeble attempt at discussion.)

Anne thinks a lot that night about what she must have done to deserve this. Clearly, something terrible in some past life to have earned this particular variety of torment. Frederick is everything she remembered, only colder - not that she can blame him. After what she did, all those years ago, the way she broke them… she’s more than earned it.

Still. She can be strong, Anne tells herself. She can remain detached, and collected, and unaffected by his presence. She’s had years of practice, after all, pretending that she still isn’t carrying a torch.

(It was always a foolish idea to watch him play online - but then again, she’s always been a fool.)

It’s a little harder to keep up that calm facade, however, when Frederick is walking out of the bathroom in the morning with nothing more than sweatpants and wet hair. God, but he’s handsome, between that face and that wonderful smile and the fit frame he must be displaying just to taunt her, like a reminder of all she rejected. Naturally. It’s no more than she deserves. Her relief is near palpable when he emerges from the spare room in another bright blue t-shirt.

It gets easier as the hours pass and one day bleeds into another. It’s not Frederick’s fault that she’s so shaken by his very presence, and he really is trying to be a good houseguest. He picks up after himself and helps with the dishes and doesn’t argue with whatever she puts on TV. It could be worse.

Still, she can’t help but feel like everything from their past sits between them, unspoken, in every interaction. It’s the elephant in the room, the loudly unspoken words in every little mundane interaction they share. They can reach a point where they’re able to converse without the overt distrust and borderline hostility of where they started this, but comfort is too much to ask.

(Does he feel it too - the pressure of all the what-might-have-beens, pressing down upon them? Or is she the only one that’s haunted?)

She can do this - survive Frederick’s presence when every moment is a reminder of all she threw away. But that doesn’t mean it won’t just crush and kill her.

———

Frederick finds that he doesn’t mind being cooped up with Anne, likes it much more than he anticipated or planned. It’s not that they do much of anything - there’s limits in a small cottage like hers - but the companionship is nice. As it turns out, he was maybe lonelier than he’d wanted to admit. Even the stupid jigsaw puzzles go easier in her company; she’s got a system of sorting that Fred never would have had the patience to implement.

Really, Anne is better equipped, literally and emotionally, for this whole isolation situation. Frederick has always needed to be out and active and doing, little planning involved; Anne, on the other hand, has all the supplies she needs, and the temperament for these kinds of quiet, time-wasting tasks to boot. It’s so entirely in character; he should probably have guessed. Then again, he was trying very hard not to think of Anne until he was forced to show up at her door, practically begging for shelter.

Anne, of course, has plenty of firewood, unlike him, stacked neatly under a tarp at the side of her garage where it’s protected from the elements. She lives here year-round, after all; unlike his own dumb ass, she obviously remembers that it’s not uncommon to receive snow all the way through March and into April, and planned accordingly. Her central heating works fine, obviously, but there’s something about this weather that calls for a roaring fire. Plus, retrieving the firewood gives Frederick a chance to think away from Anne and all her distraction.

He’s not sure what he expected of her - tears? Begging? Apologies? The kind of aloofness the rest of her family has so perfected? None of that is Anne; she’s always been too accepting of her circumstances, even to her own detriment. Once upon a time, Frederick had viewed that tendency with a kind of fond exasperation, had wanted to help her understand that she deserved more than she had always settled for; now it just makes him sad, and angry. She should feel more than this, should be angry or distraught or anything now that he’s here.

He should be paying more attention to the task at hand than the woman in the other room, unfortunately, as the end of a twig clipped off a log slices the skin of his palm as he deposits his load by the hearth, causing Frederick to hiss in surprise at the mild pain. It’s not a deep cut, or hurt that badly - he plays a contact sport for a living, for fuck’s sake, this is nothing - but he can already see blood starting to bead. After making sure the logs are stacked as best as he can one handed, Fred quickly crosses to the kitchen sink to rinse it out. Anne finds him moments later as he examines his hand for splinters.

“Are you alright?” she asks, that soft voice filled with the kind of concern that sends a pang through his heart.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just scratched myself on one of the logs. No biggie.”

Still, Anne pulls his hand closer to examine the little cut herself - gently enough that he could easily pull away, but somehow, too tenderly for him to ever want to. This is her life now, Frederick realizes suddenly - scrapes and bruises and doubtless all other kinds of minor playground injuries that need more tenderness than true care. School nurse, after all.

“I’ll get you something for that.”

“Oh, you don’t have to —” but it’s too late; Anne is already walking down the hall with her determined pace, disappearing into the bathroom. Resistance is futile, or something. Faintly, he hears the squeal of a cabinet hinge before Anne pads back into sight in her stockinged feet, carrying something he can’t quite make out clutched in her hand.

“Just a bit of neosporin,” she explains, tugging his hand back towards her to apply the cream before peeling open the wrapper of a band-aid - the skin-toned butterfly kind.

He nods towards the little adhesive. “What, no fun prints? I’m appalled.”

“Left all my princesses and superheroes back in my office at school,” she smiles back. “You’ll just have to make do, I suppose.”

“I guess I’ll make it, somehow.”

(When she smiles, the ridiculous urge to ask her to kiss it better pops into his head with an ease that nearly frightens him. With a care that would impress even her, he shoves it back down.)

———

It gets easier to share the same space as the days drag on - to learn to expect another person in her space, to expect that other person to be him. It would be overstating the matter to say that she’s not affected by him anymore; indeed, Anne is almost painfully aware of his presence at every moment. But she can prepare to face it when she’s come to expect him, and that feels like a victory all its own. She is braced and ready, long since versed in ignoring and minimizing those feelings that still linger from so long ago. Frederick’s physical presence in her space is a complicating factor, but certainly one that she can overcome.

If she can ignore the way her heart aches, it’s almost kind of nice, having him around. They fall into a pattern of meals and Netflix and quietly finding their own distraction in between. It’s the kind of mundane existence she could almost dream of sharing with him if she was foolish enough to entertain those thoughts.

(She can’t afford to be such a fool - not when it’s only a matter of time until the snow stops and the roads clear and he leaves once again. She likes her life as it is, and that will have to be enough.)

It’s probably inevitable that, on the fourth night, when the snow has finally let up but the temperatures have turned bitter and icy, they find themselves huddled up next to the fireplace with a strong drink apiece. Frederick sips on a glass of the nice whiskey Anne keeps in the back of a cabinet for occasions that call for a little something stronger, barely kissed with enough soda to call it a mixed drink; Anne, at least, pours the same stuff into a whole cup of tea. She’s never been much for liquor, especially straight, but there are occasions that call for it, and being cooped up with a man she never expected to see again is certainly one of them.

“What are the fucking odds?” Frederick declares after his second glass. “I come out here, trying to get away, and I find you. What are the odds.”

“Well, the last couple of years, I’d say pretty good. Since I live here and all.” He’s kind of cute like this - drunk and verbose. It’s something she never had a chance to see, before.

“Oh. Yeah. That.” He takes another swig. “Still. What are the odds that I came back while you’re here?”

“It’s a mystery, I guess.” Maybe it’s the last few days; more likely, it’s the drink. Whatever the case, Anne finds herself telling Frederick something she should never admit. “I’m glad you’re here,” she tells him softly. “I… missed you.”

He tenses up at the words; not the reaction she expected, honestly. A feeling of dread starts to bloom in her stomach instead. “Really,” he comments, utterly flat.

“Well… yes. Is that so hard to believe?”

“A little bit,” he tells her bluntly. “Especially since you’re the one that wanted me gone in the first place.”

“It was for the best.” For him, that is; this was never about her, anyways.

“Was it now?” His laugh is bitter, utterly devoid of joy.

“Frederick…”

“I just want to know what the hell is going on here,” Frederick demands, a liquored slur rounding out his consonants. “Because I’ve been here for days, and I can’t get my feet underneath me where you’re concerned. You sit there with that sad smile and you say it’s for the best and yet you don’t seem happy. And I don’t fucking get it. You’re the one who wanted to break up, but you don’t seem happy that we did.”

“I wasn’t,” Anne admits softly. “I’m not.”

“Then why? Because I’ve been trying to figure it out for nearly nine years, and all I’ve ever figured out is that you must not have felt anything. And after a week spent here, I don’t know that that’s true. So tell me, why?”

“I did it for you!” Anne finally bursts out, more a plea that a shout. “And I know that sounds like a lie and an excuse, but that’s why. We were so young, but God, I loved you. And you loved me, so much that you were about to throw away your chance at everything, ready to find some lesser school near Kellynch rather than taking Minnesota’s offer just so we’d be closer to each other. And I wanted it too - God, Frederick, you don’t know how much I wanted it, how close I was to letting you do that, because I wanted that too. I wanted you close. I loved you.

“But then… it wasn’t even some big game, but you wanted me there, so I went. And you looked alive out there on the ice, throwing insults and elbows and grinning like a maniac. I realized… that’s who you were supposed to be. I couldn’t hold you back from that, just to keep you close to me. Minnesota was your path to the kind of career that would last. How could I ask you to throw away your future?”

“Why didn’t you just say that? We could have figured something out. Done the long distance thing, I don’t know.”

“And you would have been hopelessly distracted from the start. Your mind would have been halfway across the country when you needed to be focusing on hockey and classes and everything else.”

He doesn’t have any response to that, not that Anne expected one. Frederick has never been great at admitting to things he doesn’t like.

“It was never because I didn’t care enough, because I didn’t love you,” she finishes softly. “I did it because I could see everything you could be, and I love - I loved you too much to let you waste that.” God, Anne hopes he didn’t hear that slip of the tongue, even if it’s true. “We were seventeen, Frederick. Kids. There was so much still ahead for you. I couldn’t be the reason you hindered your own dream, or even let it slip away. And you made it, didn’t you? You’ve reached that dream. No matter what I wanted for myself… I had to. For you, so you could have this.”

“I wanted you more than any dream.” Frederick has practically collapsed in on himself in the armchair, the very same one Anne was occupying when he’d showed up and shattered her quiet little world. It seems almost fitting that he sit there while she does the same.

There’s no words for this; nothing that could make it better. Telling him I wanted that too won’t fix what’s already been done, even if she wishes that was the case, even if that’s true. “Frederick…” she finally whispers for lack of anything else to say.

It’s too late, though - though that’s not quite the right phrase, not when it was already too late before this conversation even started, before he even showed up at her door in the snow. Now is just when he pries himself out of her armchair, standing with a finality that’s impossible to miss. “I’m tired, Anne,” he tells her. Anne doesn’t think she imagines an extra level of meaning to his words. “Goodnight.”

There’s nothing left to say - and no use saying it to an empty room anyways as she hears the spare bedroom door click shut down the hall.

There’s no changing the past, but not enough words to explain it either.

———

The next morning, the roads are finally clear, and Frederick can go back up the road to his own cottage. Anne watches silently as Frederick emerges from the guest bedroom, his duffle bag in hand. The silence only becomes more tense as they stare at each other, the luggage a physical barrier between them, both blessed and cursed.

“I suppose I should thank you,” Frederick finally says, breaking the silence.

Anne shakes her head. “It was nothing. Basic kindness. You don’t need to thank me.”

(Can he see the way this pains her? Read the plea in her eyes - for forgiveness, for understanding?)

After another beat of silence, Frederick finally nods decisively, turning towards the door. “Take care, Anne.”

“You too, Frederick.” It feels final; it feels like a farewell, of a permanent kind.

And then, with a last soft click of the door, he’s gone.

And Anne is left to herself again.

———

He should feel peace, now that he’s back in his own space, away from Anne and every memory that she’s dredged up.

He doesn’t.

Because now, back alone in the little house at the top of the hill, Frederick once again has to face the particular kind of loneliness that comes with knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way.

What it all circles back to is this: he should feel smug. After all, this is everything he’d wished for in his most bitter moments over the years: Anne, all alone, with no real support system, just living a quiet little life of little note and, to all appearances, little true happiness.

But it doesn’t feel good - not even remotely. How has he suffered? Sure, he hasn’t had her, but he got drafted, went to a top rate school, wound up playing hockey for a living in the NHL. By any measure, it’s a damn good life - all while Anne has been left to become the shell of herself he found four days ago.

And that shouldn’t be his problem. Technically, you could argue that she brought this upon herself; dug a hole of her own making. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel… sad, he supposes, to see what she’s resigned herself to. Maybe a little guilty, even.

And still, he can’t help but feel like there’s questions left unanswered. They’d talked plenty about the past, how they’d felt and why they’d acted the way they had, but that hadn’t touched on where they stand now. If there’s one thing he’s learned in these last few days, it’s that his own feelings aren’t nearly as dormant as he’s tried to convince himself all these years. If there’s any chance Anne might still feel the same… well, he owes it to them both to find out.

This chapter of their history doesn’t seem quite finished yet, and Frederick knows exactly what he has to do.

———

This time, she should have expected the knock on the door - social distancing be damned.

It’s been three days since the storm’s finally stopped - three days since snowplows had cleared everything out, three days since Frederick had left, back to his own little house up the road.

She’d been content by herself for so long - happy with her plants and her books and all the little hobbies that take up her time in the evenings and weekends. Anne had even found a new kind of solitary contentment in the pandemic, discovering tasks to give her days purpose and goals. Frederick was here for a matter of days, not even a week; it’s absurd to think he could change any of that.

And yet somehow, he has.

Because Anne had been… content by herself for so long - not happy, per se, but satisfied - but the house feels empty now without him. Even when they’d barely talked, or were in separate rooms, he’d been there, the energy of another person making the whole house feel full. She’d grown used to him, she supposes; allowed herself to remember, for once, all the reasons she had loved him, and all the dreams she once had had of what a life together could have been like .

She chose this life - here, in Kellynch, by herself. But for the first time in the only place that’s ever really been hers, she feels not just alone, but lonely. As much as she’s always claimed to like her life, just as it is, there’s no denying that the past days have illuminated all the ways that she’s been lying to herself. She tries to pass the time the same way she always has, but it’s just not the same; she even calls Mary at one point, hoping her sister’s dour moods might be an efficient distraction, but Mary is even more snippy than usual. It’s been days since Anne last called, and her sister feels an outsized outrage about the so-called abandonment; truthfully, Anne hadn’t even noticed it had been a week since her last call. Moreover, she finds that she doesn’t really care about Mary’s bad mood the way she always has, doesn’t feel the need to fix it or blame herself for the outburst. It’s easier just to hang up the phone.

(Maybe this is the first step in moving on: accepting that you deserve more than you’ve ever settled for. That doesn’t stop the yearning; moving on isn’t the work of a couple days, especially when the man himself has only just exited her life again, and is staying just up the road.)

As if she’s summoned him, tires crunch on the drive outside, heralding his reappearance. It isn’t right, the way her heart lurches with happiness and hope and excitement when she peeks out the window to once again see his SUV, once again see him climbing out in that ridiculous blue hat and shuffle to her front door without once slipping on her icy walk. There’s a sense of déjà vu as Anne draws a deep breath before she opens the door. There’s only so many times she can go through this, be subjected to such a blast from the past, before it will eventually break her. And yet, like a fool, she keeps opening the door.

“Can we talk?” Frederick asks. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders are hunched inwards, but there’s a look in his eyes that Anne is afraid to name.

(It almost looks tender - almost looks like hope - but it will hurt far worse to be proved wrong if she allows herself to believe that.)

“Of course,” Anne says softly, stepping aside just enough to let him in. It touches a special little bit of her heart to see the way that Frederick carefully knocks the snow off his boots at the threshold as he pulls his hat off his head, trying his best not to track anything in to her rug and floors. It’s such a simple little thing, but it’s care for her home - and, in a way, care for her. More than she ever expected again from Frederick Wentworth.

“Anne…” he begins, reaching out a hand for her, but she quickly takes a step back. Touch will be too much, too permanent a memory if this is the end.

“I think we ought to keep a bit of distance,” she explains at his odd look.

If anything, that only serves to confuse him further, his brow crinkling up in that endearing way she remembers. “We already spent days together. I think social distancing is kind of a lost cause, at least where we’re concerned.”

Anne shakes her head. “It’s not about the virus.”

She can see the moment it hits him, just exactly what she means by distance, as he physically flinches with the realization. She can also see the moment he decides to plow forwards anyways with whatever he came to say.

“I’ve been thinking, these last couple of days,” he tells her, “and I’ve had a lot of time to consider things. Everything you said and did, the other night and way back when. And I realized… I did a lot of talking about what I wanted, and what I felt. And in the middle of all that shouting, I never asked about what you wanted, or want, or how you felt. And you never told me, because that’s what you’re used to - people not caring enough to ask. That’s on me, and I’m sorry. But —” he swallows heavily, as if he’s forcing down the nerves he evidently feels — “but I’m asking now. I want to know what our break-up meant to you. Because the more I think about it, the harder it is for me to believe you did all this because you didn’t care.”

Anne fights the urge to turn away from Frederick; he deserves that much, after everything. Meeting his eyes is too much to ask, however, and she fixes her gaze instead just over his right shoulder, crossing her arms over her body protectively. “I loved you,” she tells him quietly. “I knew what I had to do, but I loved you. I hated every word that came out of my mouth.” Anne smiles sadly. “You weren’t the only one who wanted. You were the first person - the only person to look at me and see something wonderful and worthwhile, and it killed me to throw that away. I’ve had to live with that ever since.”

“And now?”

Anne turns pleading eyes upon him, sure that every emotion is now splashed across her face and too distraught to care. How dare he do this? How dare he make her speak this into existence if he’s only about to crush it all? “Don’t make me say it,” she begs.

“Please, Anne.” His voice is nearly as desperate - and that’s, ultimately, what breaks her, leaving the words to spill forth almost without her permission.

“And now… that doesn’t go away, you know. A love as big as that. You got to go be this success story, doubtless had all kinds of… distractions over the years, but when you have a quiet little life like mine, you don’t forget. It doesn’t go away. There’s a large part of my heart that is still yours - probably always will be - and I have to find a way to deal with that.”

“You still love me?”

Anne nods, whispering her response. “I do.”

She suddenly feels his hand trail down her arm, causing Anne to jerk abruptly to meet his eyes again. “Well that’s lucky,” he smiles down at her, achingly gentle, “because I haven’t forgotten either.”

Even as Anne’s heart lurches with hope, she shakes her head. “Don’t tease, Frederick. Don’t be that cruel.”

“I’m not,” he assures her, twining their fingers together. “Because you’re right, I’ve tried to distract myself, but… you have no idea just how unforgettable you are, Anne. How could anyone ever compare? And I tried so hard for so long to move on, to hate you, but I never could. You were a little spark in my heart that I could never quite stamp out. And now…” Frederick pauses as if to gather his breath, squeezing her hand as he does so. “And now, I hope I won’t have to.”

“You’d want that? You’d want to…” Even with new-found hope singing through her veins, Anne still hesitates to finish the sentence. This all feels like a wonderful dream; she’d hate to wake up and discover that’s all it was.

“To try again?” he finishes. “Yeah. Yeah, I want that. The real question is… do you?”

And she does, she wants that so terribly much, so badly that it aches, even as she hesitates. How could he want that, after everything she’s done? When their separation was her fault in the first place?

“I don’t deserve you,” Anne murmurs into the miniscule space between them, caving to the urge to brush his hair back from his face. It makes him smile, just a little bit, just a twitch of his lips, but that more than anything else sends a flood of peace rushing through her soul.

“I think we deserve each other,” Frederick tells her in return, his voice almost unbearably soft. “I believe that, and somehow, I’m going to make you believe that too. We deserve this, Annie.”

And he kisses her, like he wants to, like he’s thought about it just as much as she has. His lips are soft against hers - just like she remembers, all those years ago - but there’s a surety to his hands now that wasn’t there before, in the way he pulls at her waist to bring her closer and his fingers thread through her hair with purpose. There’d been a handful of ill-advised attempts at dating in the past eight years, but nothing ever came close to this joyful swooping sensation in her stomach or the feelings of safety and love and home. That’s something only he can manage; something that only exists between the two of them.

Her hands find their way to his chest as the kiss deepens, becomes more passionate, heads adjusting their position to allow tongues to tentatively begin to prod and search. Anne had known the difference 8 years had made on Frederick’s body, had seen with her own two eyes the way he’d filled out with more muscle, but feeling it is something else altogether, even through his shirt where his coat gaps open. It’s a reminder that they’re not the same - they’re older and more mature and have experienced different things than they had at 17. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, change can be good; it’s brought them here, together, at what otherwise feels like the end of the world.

Even as they break apart - to get a breath of air, to process what just happened - Frederick continues to stroke his thumb across the round of her cheek, like he can’t bear to stop touching her. It warms her heart in a whole new way, like it’s proof that he meant every word he told her - as if she needs any more after that kiss. It would be easy to let herself get swept away on that little touch, perhaps into another wonderful kiss, but Anne forces herself to meet his eyes.

“Stay.” It’s more than a question, but less than a demand - a plea, the dearest wish of her heart that she’s never admitted, now given voice.

“For as long as you want me, Annie.” His voice is tender and husky as he smiles down at her. “Because I really don’t want to ever leave you again.”

And that’s awfully lucky, as Anne doesn’t ever intend to let him go again.

#Persuasion #Persuasion ff #Jane Austen ff #Anne Elliot x Frederick Wentworth #Modern AU #my writing #skating in circles (with no way to stop)

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inawickedlittletown · 4 years

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The Magicians - Season Four

(Spoilers)

So I’ll admit that going into watching The Magicians, I knew about Quentin’s death. I knew it would happen in S4, so it was the season I was a bit more cautious about. But I still enjoyed S4 a lot.

The Magicians as a show embodies a very specific type of storytelling in that you have a big bad per season and a lot of little complications and other story threads that in the end wind up connecting in a way that leads to the end of the big bad. What The Magicians does well is that it doesn’t shy away from there being consequences to everyone’s actions.

The season begins with everyone not having any memory of themselves, the library controlling magic, and The Monster. I think it was such an interesting way to start the season to see them all in different roles essentially and then to watch them all come back together. I also think it was an excellent choice to not erase Alice’ memories and have her dwell on her actions.

Eliot as The Monster was a joy to watch. Hale Appleman is just so good at portraying the insane childlike quality of The Monster and making it so completely not Eliot. I enjoyed every scene that he was in, even when he was murdering someone or other. The first bits with him and Brian (Quentin) were such good scenes. I also loved that we got to dive deeper into Eliot and see parts of his past and more specifically his trauma.

And then we get to the memory that lets him out of The Monster for a moment and omg. The love between him and Quentin. That scene — the declaration of love and how determined Eliot is to tell Quentin if he survives in that moment it is amazing and uplifting but it’s heartbreaking and knowing that Quentin died meant that I knew Eliot wouldn’t get to tell him and that makes that scene hurt so much more. But the moment where Eliot has taken back his body and Quentin is right there and the acting in that scene was just amazing. “Peaches and plums, Motherfucker.” Thinking about it just breaks my heart so much.

The rationing of magic aspect of this season was really interesting due to how inconvenient that made things for everyone. I liked that we got to see the hedge witches again and that their help became a part of the finale and I think it was an interesting aspect to show how they were affected by the control that the library kept on the magic.

The library has interested me since we were introduced to it and Zelda as a character was developed in such a way that her complexities made her interesting and a bit of a villian and I think her involvement this season and how much she didn’t know or expect really gave us an interesting perspective. And I loved that she and her daughter were reunited and that the mirror world came into play there and then it was important at the end of the season. This show really does well with how they tell the story from start to end.

Julia’s arc this season was something I enjoyed a lot. Powerless but unbreakable and trying to figure out what she is felt really good and I loved how that brought her closer to Penny 23. But then to have Julia be taken over by The Monster’s sister was cool too. And I really appreciated that it was Julia’s search to figure out what she is and her powers that led to the Binder and to the background on The Monster.

Generally I wasn’t too fond of Alice this season but I did appreciate that she wasn’t forgiven immediately. I wasn’t fond of her and Quentin getting together or how that was all just prompted by them seeing their past selves. And how it was done before Quentin died. It felt like the writers throwing the shippers a bone there or just a way to make Alice’s grief that much greater.

Kady never really interests me but I appreciated that she took on the Hedge Witches. Josh and Margo was a surprise and the whole werewolf thing was still perfect and I loved their connection. Margo is always a delight and her episode in the desert and the journey she goes through was amazing. Her grief for Eliot was portrayed so well right through when they’ve captured The Monster and Eliot is hurt.

Overall, I think this season was good. The storylines were interesting and complex and all the characters grew in one way or another. And then they have Quentin die.

Quentin dying was entirely shock value and no one can tell me otherwise. It was just so unnecessary. It is especially so because Quentin’s mental health has always been a part of the show and he’s not doing okay by the time he dies so that while it isn’t suicide, killing off the character with mental health issues just isn’t right. And the worst part about it is the lack of closure for Eliot and Quentin. Quentin never gets to see Eliot again after S3 aside from that one small moment in S4. And Eliot never gets to tell Quentin that he loves him and that he was scared when he turned him down. And all of that just hurts so much.

My Meta/Reviews

#the magicians #meta #review #season 4

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dailyaudiobible · 4 years

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02/20/2020 DAB Transcript

Leviticus 9:7-10:20, Mark 4:26-5:20, Psalms 37:30-40, Proverbs 10:6-7

Today is the 20th day of February, welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian it is great to be here with you today are coming to you from Eliot, which is the southernmost tip, southernmost city in the land of Israel. We journeyed through the wilderness yesterday all the way down here to the shores of the Red Sea, which is where we spent the night. And, so, obviously can't go further south and stay in this country. So, we will begin journeying north today. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But before we do, let's…let's do what we've come here for. Let's allow all of the cares of life…they won’t…they have a way of coming back…they won't…like they’re not going anywhere, we’re not gonna lose them…or…or maybe we are. Maybe we’re coming here every day to learn how to live. And, so, it's good for us to just exhale the world and inhale the serenity and peace that comes from allowing the word of God just to wash over us. So, we’re reading from the New International Version this week, continuing through the book of Exodus. We’ll read chapter 9 verse 7 through 10 verse 20 today.

Commentary:

Okay. So, yesterday in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is using an agricultural story about planting seed and it falling on different types of ground and so what happened to the seed because of the soil. And, so, in today's readings He’s kinda continuing with…with that kind of agricultural motif or background but expanding it to…to encompass the entire kingdom of God. So…so He’s like, “the kingdom…the kingdom of God is like a farmer who scatters seed on the ground.” Then He’s explaining the growth of the plant, that it’s happening both day and night and the farmer doesn't even know how it's happening. It's just happening. The growth is taking place as he waits for the harvest. And then He’s like, “the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny mustard seed, a tiny little seed but it…it sprouts up into the largest of all the garden plants.” Okay, let's remember Jesus is describing the kingdom of God with these parables, with these metaphors. So, what then can we say about the kingdom of God? We could say that the kingdom is happening right now all the time, right, day and night. Like the farmer planted the seed and then day and night it grew, and the farmer didn't know how. It just did because the seed and the soil collaborated. So, the kingdom is a collaboration between God and His image bearers on this planet - seed and soil, collaboration. And…and although it begins small, it grows and flourishes and gives life as we cultivate and participate, which brings us to the harvest. We could also say that Jesus is using a physical parable, a physical reality that people can understand to explain an inward process that is taking place because you can't go to Walmart and buy seeds of the kingdom of God and then throw them out into the air and just see what sprouts up. The seeds of the word of God are spread into our lives and we collaborate by understanding the kind of soil that is in our hearts. And, so, we could also say the kingdom is here and now and we are in it because it is in us as we explored when we were going through the book of Matthew. This isn't something we’re waiting for. This is something that's happening. What we’re waiting for is for its fullness, for its fullness to be revealed. And so often where just like waiting…we’re just like…life is about waiting, right? Like, I'm here. I'm confused. I'm not exactly sure what's going on. I believe in God and I believe this is all going somewhere but I'm here to wait to die and then I can understand or be involved somehow in this kingdom when we would wait our whole lives and miss it. It's happening. It's among us. It's within us and the transformation isn't for us to go to battle with the Romans or for us to defeat some kind of doctrine that we don't agree with, its to be transformed from within by becoming good soil so that the kingdom can flourish within us and then we will know what to do with ourselves in this world. This is essentially what Jesus was trying to awaken people to, right? He's looking for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. And, so, once again we get that opportunity. Do we have eyes to see, do we have ears to hear? If this kingdom is happening then I should be able to see it, I should be able to see the goodness of God sustaining everything in this world. I should be able to see it, but I'm so focused on the evil in this world. But if we have eyes to see and ears to hear we can't look anywhere without seeing the presence of God in action and understanding that we are collaborating in it and that it is happening by transforming us from within.

Prayer:

Jesus, we invite you into that as we go through this day asking once again that your Holy Spirit would bring these things to mind and help us to contemplate on…contemplate on them as we move through this day. Give us eyes to see. We’re…we’re opening our eyes. We’re cleaning out our ears. We want to see this kingdom. We want to reveal it through our lives. So, come Holy Spirit into all of this we pray in the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

Okay. So, this is the day two of our...of our pilgrimage in the land of the Bible. So, our first day was yesterday. And we left Ashdod which sits right on the Mediterranean coast. It's an ancient Philistine city. I’ve mentioned that before. We began to head south, moving into the transition zone into the desert and we visited a very ancient site called Beersheba. And it’s a southernmost boundary of ancient Israel right? It was from Dan to Beersheba. That's pretty popular…popularly known. So, Beersheba is the southernmost point. So, we've reached that. And then we just kept going into the desert into the deep, deep wilderness and we had the opportunity to overlook the wilderness of Zin and just…there’s just a really, really great place to kind of get a look at the barrenness of the desert. It's quite striking actually. It's otherworldly. It's very, very beautiful. So, we had some time throughout the day to get these vast vistas of empty barren wilderness and to just think about what that would be like because it's hard for us to even wrap our minds around traveling as a caravan with a million people in the wilderness and it becomes very apparent we would not be…like our modern…we would not be prepared for that at all - no cars, no cell phones, no social…like there's no way to post a selfie. Like, all things we’re just used to doing, like running to the convenience store to get some convenient food, none of that would be possible. And, so, you begin to see the…certainly the isolation of the wilderness, but the simple fact that God was deeply embedding into His people that there was no hope outside of Him. And, so, we had some time to just kind of think about our own wilderness experiences because I….so far in all of my years of life that I've been paying attention I haven't met anybody who's never had a wilderness experience of some sort and that a lot of us are going through them now, whether on this pilgrimage live here in the land of Israel or whether you’re virtually in this community. There’s all kinds of things going on all the time that we face. And usually all of our energy is spent trying to get out of the wilderness while ignoring what the wilderness might be saying to us, what we might need for our lives when we…when we exit it. And, so, that's kind of…that's kinda some of the things we’ve been thinking about as we’re traveling.

And we got to have lunch with the Bedouins, which is always a highlight just because it's such a different experience. Like I can’t say it’s this unbelievably five-star dining experience with multiple courses and everything. It's just engaging with a culture, a people that we would never really encounter outside of this part of the world in any way. And, yeah, there’s plenty of Bedouin people still kind of wandering in the wilderness, as it were.

And, yeah, so just continuing south, south, south, wilderness, wilderness, wilderness until we get to this little oasis where there is a kibbutz which is sort of like communal living…like where everybody is working and living for the community and sharing everything in common. And, so, these are dairy farmers. And, so, there’s this little shop and some of my favorite ice cream I’ve ever had in the world, I don’t know why, maybe just because it's in Israel, but I’m not like a super big ice cream eater but every year I look forward to it…every year I even talk about it. And, so, it’s…it’s…so we get we get to stop and have it. We get to stop and have it again today. And, so, we did that and, you know, it’s a chance to stretch the legs a little bit, go to the bathroom and all that.

And then we…we made it down to Eliot to the shores of the Red Sea. And, yeah, that…that's also just a really, really interesting point in this journey because we’re kind of…it just…it's…it's a good place for this to sort of hit you that where…where we are because from that point you can look into Egypt, you can look across into Saudi Arabia, you can look across into the country of Jordan even as you’re standing in the…the nation of Israel and realize, yeah, I'm in the Middle East and this is the Red Sea and…and man this was…this was divided and the children at some point somewhere along this shoreline that stretches way, way, way further south into the Sinai Peninsula, somewhere along here they crossed…they crossed over. And, so, it's like I'm in the Middle East and I'm in the Bible, like I'm standing in the book of Exodus right now, So, it's…yeah…and plus the jet lag and all the adrenaline and everything that just goes into day one. So, that's what we did.

And then had some dinner and try to relax and get some rest and gear up for this day.

And yeah, so we’re the book of Leviticus and reading about all of these sacrifices at this…at this tabernacle that has been erected and it’s that these dimensions and it's got these kinds of cloths and it's like all of the specific details and instructions that we've been reading, today we’ll actually kinda get the chance to see that in person because there is…yeah….there’s a life-size replica out in the wilderness of the tabernacle. So…so yeah, there's lots of instructions and lots of sacrifice and regulations and how to do this and how to do that. And as we mentioned, this this is the law. So, it's not always the most rivetted…riveting reading but this is what will establish this culture in the wilderness that are the Hebrew people, that are Israel, ancient Israel. And, so, this is…this is what will shape them. And, so, we’ll kind of get a chance to step into that a little bit.

And then we’ll keep heading North but none of that's happened yet so I can’t exactly tell you about it. I’ll have to tell you tomorrow.

Thank you for your continued prayers overall of us, over the buses, over the drivers, over the guides, over health, over whether, over logistics, over technology, over everything that is involved in keeping this going every day, even as we travel here internationally.

And also reminding you that our next year’s pilgrimage is planned and registration is open at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section. Just for Israel 2021, and you can get all of the pertinent details that you would need and hopefully we'll see you next year.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com is well. There is a link and it just lives on the homepage and I thank you with all my heart for those of you who have been partners over the years. If you're using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And as always if you a prayer request a comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Dear Michael, I am so sad about the loss of your mama. I want to let you know how much the community loved her. And I grew to love her through her poetry and her words, and her book and I could really feel her heart. You must have had one heck of a mama. She sure was a nice lady, wasn’t she? I just wanted to let you know that your mom’s book, I bought it before Christmas for a friend and I couldn’t give it away. Something about it, it just touched my heart so much that I wanted to keep it for myself. And, so, I kept it on the corner of my counter in my kitchen and every time I walked by it, I would see the picture on the front and I would pray for your mom and I would pray for you and your family. And I’m so thankful to hear that you have a relationship with your dad. I’m sure that’s going to be very important real soon. So, I’m glad that you’re doing well and just let you know that you are in my thoughts and in my prayers my brother and your brother also and your dad. Okay? And I love you very much and I am so thankful to know that your mama is in heaven with Jesus right now and I gotcha she’s looking down at you and praying for you to. Alright brother? I will talk to you soon. This is Annette Allison from Oklahoma City. Bye-bye.

Hello Daily Audio Bible this is Kim in Las Vegas and I just heard from the DAB that one of our own, Diana Davis has gone home to be with the Lord. And, so, I’m thankful that we got to spend time with her and that we got to hear her voice and her prayer requests, and we’ll see her when it’s our time. But It’s always hard to let go, you know, The earthly flesh, it hurts and it grieves and I didn’t really, of course, know her well but I love all of you and every voice that I hear and even if you don’t hear me call in and pray for you specifically or you hear anybody call in and pray specifically, you should know that we care about you. We love you. When we lose a member it’s a sad day and a day to rejoice because they’re going home and we all want to go home and be with the Lord but it’s hard, especially for people that we care about while we’re still in the earthly flesh and just thank God for the time we have. Lord just be with her family and friends and may her loved ones be their comfort and let them know that they’ll b seeing her again. Thank you. I love you all.

Good afternoon Daily Audio Bible community, I am putting my log on at on February 12th at 320 in the afternoon and I just got done reading the reading for today and I went back and found out that I hadn’t read or listened to January 27th. So, I listened and a wonderful lady with a kind of a British accent came on and she sang, it is no secret what God can do. And she wanted to encourage people and she said that when she was three years old her whole family of seven children was removed because of the abuse of her father but that she was restored after 50 years to her sister. And I would like to add my Amen. I am one of seven children. We weren’t removed but our father abused my mother and us. And my…my stepfather who I prayed in, recently moved to heaven on…in January I think, the 17th. And I have a song. [singing] slow down you move too fast. You’ve got to make the morning last. Just sitting down at father’s feet listening and feeling groovy. Shalom, shalom.

Hi Daily Audio Bible family this is homeward bound just calling for my friend. I put her on the prayer chain a few months ago and she went through as anonymous. She has suffered for 4 years with severe depression and last time I put her on the prayer line when she was feeling suicidal, she said she noticed a significant improvement from everyone’s prayers. And she is asking again today if I would put her back in the prayer chain as she is in a tremendous amount of pain mentally and is suicidal again. Please, family could you pray for my friend? She’s about 42 and she loves the Lord and is just full of deception. If you could just…just lift her up before the Lord again that would be just wonderful. God bless you all. Thank you for all of your prayers. Bye-bye.

Greetings this is Artifact in Bakersfield California. I’m asking for the DAB family to pray that my doctors can find the cause of me blacking out. And I did the first time on a big scale last March of 2019 and I had another episode yesterday. In March when it happened, I stopped driving that day. Later they did take my license, but I was grateful that I stopped before I had. I’ve been through an entire battery of tests, but they still have not been able to find what the answer is. Please pray that we can resolve this issue and if it can be taken care of by a simple pill, that’s okay but I really do prefer that the power and the might of the Holy Spirit will bring healing to my body and would be the marrow to my bones. So, in all reality that is my request. Thank you so very much for your prayer and support for myself as well as for my beloved. I do look forward to His healing power and I ask it all in the name of Jesus the grace, anointing, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen and Amen.

Good morning this is Valerie from south of Atlanta and I just heard about Diana Davis and immediately I just burst into tears for her family and for her sons. And I know that she’s in heaven and I know that she’s healed but I just…I just felt like I lost something. And I didn’t even know her, but I just felt so moved that I just needed to call. And I just needed to send my condolences. And her life and her story and her sons and her struggle and her victories and everything has just really affected me in a way that I wasn’t even aware of until I heard of her passing. So, I just wanted to call, and I just want to offer my condolences to her family, to her friends, to her loved ones and to let you guys know that I’m gonna be praying for God’s comfort and peace during these next few difficult months and years. God bless everyone.

Hey DAB family my names Mitch from the UK. Good morning to you all. I’ve been listening for about a year now but first-time caller. Really just wanted to reach out to the lady who called in a couple weeks ago. I don’t think she left her name but she was asking for prayers for her family, specifically her daughter who…who had some pretty profound learning difficulties by the sounds of it and really just wanted to let her know that I’m thinking of her, I’m praying for her and her daughter. My daughters in a very similar situation, had some really poor…some really poor care, poor housing and I prayed, I prayed really hard that she would get some rest back and a little bit of God’s grace would fall upon her and help her find what she needed. And, you know what? Prayers were answered. She’s moved into a lovely new home, great new carers, and life’s looking really good for her. She seems really contented and I thank God for that. So, I really…I just wanted to say to that lady, just keep asking for the grace of God, keep praying. He will answer your prayers and I’ll be praying for you also. Okay. Thank you.

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phantasieandmirare · 4 years

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Okay so this is going to be fun. I haven’t seen Cats yet and I’m torn between wanting to just for the Experience and not wanting to to preserve the love I have for the musical itself. But I know a lot about the musical and characters (and I’ll be sharing my/the fandom’s general headcanons with you) because I watched the 1998 TV film on repeat when I was younger. So here’s what happens in the musical (keeping in mind that I’ve only seen the 1998 movie and not the actual show but I know that the show is different) that y’all are missing.

If you didn’t know at this point, the entire musical is based on the book ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ by T.S. Eliot which is a book of short cutesy poems. This was one of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s favorite book when he was younger and he wrote the entire musical as a composition exercise to see if he could write music with predetermined lyrics.

There are so many interviews of Andrew Lloyd Weber explaining what the musical is about in the 80s and it’s just as awkward as literally anyone trying to explain Cats right now. But he’s trying his best. Cut him some slack.

I am literally watching the 1998 movie on YouTube as I type this. It’s all available there. Please watch it if you need to purge the Cats movie from your brain and replace it with something watchable.

I used to have all of the names of the cats memorized. I’m not kidding. I could tell you who was singing what line in every song. I knew the background characters. I could look at a picture and tell you who everyone was in it with extreme accuracy. I had every song memorized. I knew everything. I am the Cats God.

Munkustrap is the narrator of the musical. He’s also the de facto leader/protector of the Jellicles when Old Deuteronomy isn’t there. He’s like the prime minister to Old Deuteronomy’s queen/king. From what I understand he does not have the same sway in the movie which sucks because he’s my favorite and I love him.

There are two cats in the musical who are psychic. They’re twins. Their names are Coricopat and Tantomile. I’m not making this up. I think this is only mentioned in the stage show itself but on the off chance that it’s not and I just happen to know this now you know too.

“There’s a man over there with a look of surprise. As much as to say ‘well now how about that’. Do I actually see with my own very eyes a man who has not heard of a Jellicle Cat? ‘What’s a Jellicle Cat? What’s a Jellicle Cat? What’s a Jellicle Cat?’” Please tell me this line is in the movie. I’m begging you. Because this is hilarious now that this is now every single person’s reaction to the very concept of Cats.

From all the reviews I’m guessing that The Naming of Cats is not in the movie or it’s not played the way it is on stage. Which is a shame because that would be another delightful moment that confuses and horrifies everyone who has no idea what Cats is. If they played The Naming of Cats the way that they do on stage that alone would have cleared the movie theater instantly. For about three minutes they tell you how cats are named. In complete sync. They get louder and move closer to the audience as they go on. It’s low key terrifying. I also had this memorized. It was one of my favorite songs in the musical.

Our boy Mr. Mistoffelees is not named Mr. Mistoffelees for most of the show. He’s called Quaxo. The consensus is that ‘Mr. Mistoffelees’ is a separate identity and/or personality. I swear I’m not making this up.

Victoria and Quaxo/Mistoffelees are brother and sister. That’s a general headcanon that either I came to or is a consensus in the fandom. Not making this up either. Bustopher Jones/James Corden is their father. This is all assumed based on their coloration. This is also where I mention that I used to know all the family dynamics in this musicals and who’s with who.

It’s also a general consensus that Victoria isn’t ‘new’ but has just reached the age where she can be involved in the Jellicle Ball. She has the very first dance solo in the musical and is the one to finally accept Grizabella but that’s the only importance she has for the entire musical. She doesn’t have any lines or her own song but is instantly recognizable in every picture ever.

Jennyanydots is introduced wearing a large fur coat/get-up that she can barely stand up in and then removes it to reveal a flapper dress later. I assume that’s what they were going for with the whole ‘Rebel Wilson takes off her skin’ issue. Her song/dance is tap-based. She’s the wine aunt of the group. She never eats the cockroaches. That’s never mentioned in the song. I don’t know why they did that.

Rum Tum Tugger is supposed to be based on Mick Jagger. I don’t know how well that translated into the movie but I hear they tried to redesign him into a more modern version on stage recently that did not go well at all because it was kinda racist. So let’s just stick with the Mick Jagger version cause it works better. All the girls in the group are obsessed with him/groupies. All the moms/queens are so over it. He and Quaxo/Mistoffelees have a love hate relationship. I used to read fanfiction and people ship the heck out of them. General consensus is that he and Bombalurina/Taylor Swift are a thing.

Grizabella’s entire deal is that she used to be a show cat who got dumped/a mangy stray who used to be beautiful but then got into too many fights/it’s vaguely implied that she was a cat prostitute.

Elaine Paige originated the role of Grizabella and then reprised it for the 1998 movie and that is the only reason that I know who Elaine Paige is.

The entire plot of this musical is that Grizabella is touch-starved.

Is Demeter mentioned in the movie? She’s also my favorite. Does she have a major role? Where’s my girl? Where is she? Anyway Demeter and Munkustrap are often shipped together too.

Bustopher Jones is essentially the Godfather and is the 1% of the Jellicles. Everyone loves him. He’s like Tugger for the older ladies/queens because they all also adore him. Quaxo/Mistoffelees chases him and plays with his tail and stuff like that a lot in the stage show and generally has this really proud air around him/is center stage in the song during his song which adds to the headcanon that Bustopher Jones is his dad.

To clear it up, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer are brother and sister, they are not together. They’re also twins.

Old Deuteronomy shows up. The psychic twins say that he’s coming. As far as I know that’s the only indication we get ever that they’re psychic.

Tugger and Munkustrap are friends/frenemies. The headcanon is that Tugger wants to be the leader or just doesn’t like that Munkustrap tries to keep them all in line/doesn’t let Tugger do whatever he wants but besides that they’re buddies.

I think it was also implied somewhere/I had the headcanon that Old Deuteronomy and Grizabella are brother and sister. I think. I also think I had the headcanon that he’s Quaxo/Mistoffelees and Victoria’s grandfather because they also hang around him a lot. Ken Page who you may recognize as the voice of Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas plays Deuteronomy and originated the role and casually mentions that he’s probably the father of most of the cats so there you go.

They cut this from the movie and I understand why now but there’s a musical number about a battle between two tribes of dogs that they put on as a performance for Old Deuteronomy. Yes it’s musical inception. This is a big song for Munkustrap because he narrates and sings the entire thing. At one point Tugger plays bagpipes in it. I’m not kidding. Munkustrap spends the entire song being an exhausted stage manager trying to keep everything under control and it’s not going well and I feel that.

There’s a cat superhero called the Rumpus Cat. Yep.

The Jellicle Ball begins proper. There’s a lot of flirting and dancing and acrobatics and generally wild stuff for a good ten minutes. Generally it’s framed as Old Deuteronomy deciding which one of them gets to enter the Heaviside Layer through dance. What is his criteria for who gets to die? They never tell us.

Anyway Victoria performs the mating dance with a cat named Plato/Admetus (again, Victoria and Quaxo/Mistoffelees are never together and they are siblings thank you very much). The orgy is real folks. We don’t talk about it. I think I watched this scene once when I was little (also when I say little I mean like 12/13) and then never again because it’s extremely awkward to watch. I would just skip right over it as soon as the music started getting slow and move on to Memory. This right here is the first time that I’m watching it in literal years. It’s still as awkward as it was then.

There’s a cat named Jemima/Sillabub (a lot of these cats have multiple names/their names are different between productions/regions if you haven’t picked up on that already). She’s basically what they made Victoria into in the movie and is important for the plot. I don’t know why they focused in on Victoria when Jemima/Sillabub is right there.

Gus the Theater Cat sings his song and I also cry every single time because Gus is the sweetest cat in the entire musical and I love him and also the song is sad as heck especially if you think about how this is an older man playing this role and talking about how his acting days are past him. There’s another musical number about one of Gus’s most famous roles but they didn’t put that into the 1998 movie because of budget issues and not having enough space on the set to do it anyway.

I do not remember this moment but for about ten seconds a specter of Gus as his most famous character comes out, walks around menacingly, and then leaves and I DON’T REMEMBER THAT AT ALL. Anyway Gus follows it around because it’s his memory of his younger self and the heartbreak on his face when it disappears and the fact that this character cries at the end of the song and doesn’t even finish it shatters my entire heart. Gus has six minutes and then he leaves and we never see him again and sometimes I think about Gus and cry.

So after breaking your soul with Gus we jump directly into Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat who is also a delight and from what I hear people in the movie really liked him too. If you like nothing else about Cats you have to agree that Skimbles is wonderful.

Macavity the Mystery Cat is my second favorite song in the entire musical. Bombalurina/Taylor Swift and Demeter both perform it together (I listened to Taylor Swift’s version after I finished watching this and I am so mad that they cut Demeter out of it entirely because Demeter makes this song and she’s another one of my favorites). It’s the female power ballad of the entire musical and their voices/belting is sick as heck and also I used to have the choreography memorized on top of everything else. It’s implied that Demeter and Macavity used to be a thing before she escaped him. There are layers to this.

Macavity tries to sneak back in dressed up as Old Deuteronomy but because Demeter is his old flame she sees right through it. The cats all fight and then Macavity escapes and is never mentioned again. We can safely assume that he does this every year.

My absolute favorite song in the entire musical/the first one I ever heard is Magical Mr. Mistoffelees. Tugger introduces him and sings most of the song. Mistoffelees actually doesn’t sing for the entire thing, it’s all Tugger. Tugger keeps singing about how Mistoffelees has a signature move called the ‘conjuring turn’ which on stage is twenty-four consecutive fouettés en tournant and it’s impressive as heck. Mistoffelees is one of the most demanding dance roles in the entire musical. Here’s the thing though, they don’t have the conjuring turn in the 1998 movie, the way that the music is cut we can assume that they filmed it and then it got cut or they lost the footage or something so for a long time I never saw it and then I looked it up and it was awesome. Anyway this is my cat son and I love him.

Onstage Grizabella ascends to the Heaviside Layer in one of two ways: either by a staircase that descends from the ceiling, or (again I’m not making this up) in a flying saucer. If you’re still confused about the plot of Cats take the fact that they ascend to cat heaven on a UFO and go forth knowing that the answer to ‘What is Cats?’ has a legitimate answer of ‘Aliens’.

So that’s Cats. Namely the version that I hoped we were getting and that we were robbed off in favor of God-awful CGI and a lot of uncomfortable horniness (or at least more than there normally is in the actual show) and Rebel Wilson tearing off her skin.

#cats #cats the musical #cats 1998 #the only version of cats that matters #be quiet sarah #i don't know how to end this post #i took an entire day of my life to write this post please appreciate my efforts #anyway #ok goodnight

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warlocked-blog1 · 5 years

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Do you draw parallels from the myth of Merlin into your portrayal of him? What is your biggest source of inspiration when it comes to him?

i don’t quite know how to answer this one...

i guess, the biggest source of my portrayal involves my personal opinions on how i see mark strong play merlin in the film? there is plenty of media and snippets that discuss how he is the ‘general’-type, and he is a man of specific tropes, but when watching the film, it’s the questions from that that draw my interests.

for the myth and magic of merlin and arthur and the knights of the round table, i do try to look into as much media as i can ( from the magical tv shows and such to whatever snippets of the history and lore that come with merlin ), but it’s more for the image that is meant to be portrayed - what is it about these people that make them the merlin, the arthur, the lancelot, etc. so i guess there are some drawn parallels in there, tweaked and adapted to the non-feudal system we now live in. it makes sense - merlin the wizard / magician / warlock and the association with technology. merlin and essentially what his role was as standing by arthur’s side, and seemingly in films and such, him being ‘the immortal’, and ‘the watcher’ among other things.

i suppose for the most part it’s how i build what i see kingsman as / what i see merlin would like kingsman to be and what their roles / titles embody.

i do watch a lot of spy films and i have a personally severe weakness to the whole ‘brothers and sisters in arms’ trope. eliot was my favourite character in leverage, and the snippets you get from him regarding the military do have some influence, as well as personal influence knowing people who are in the royal airforce / those who trained to be fighter pilots and such.

my interpretation i think does fall into the more military general research than something like ‘q’ from james bond - and whilst i do have in my hc that that was merlin beforehand as per lovely writing partners i’ve had and developed background with, the soldier / military aspect does tend to bleed out a whole lot more.

i guess some inspiration also involved when i went to scotland a few years back, and i listened to some history about the magical place. it’s i guess, the ‘home’ aspect of merlin i envision, and the core beliefs and pride that i think he has and i think that his character has been portrayed to have.

tl;dr though, my biggest source of inspiration involves the questions asked, and they’re mostly encouraged by beautiful people like you ;)

#marwnad #headcanon tag

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docmurph12 · 4 years

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Ok. So two parter on CATS coming up. POSSIBLY a three parter depending on how long it takes to get through background. Here we go......

So my first request review comes from my good friend. I'm not sure how this is going to go, because I'm going whole hog on this one, again in the interest of pure objectivity.

My understanding of CATS is this. It was a Broadway musical based very loosely on T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". My friends in and fans of the theater community have told me there isnt really an intended overriding plot. The Wikipedia page I found begs to differ, but they insisted it really is just a collection of vignettes, told through the perspective of a cat. Simple enough? I believe so. Now, I also understand this stage musical to have been adapted a number of times, largely for Broadway and for specific actors and actresses, with the noted exception of the film CATS (2019). Yes that one. Yes I intend to watch it. On purpose. But wait there is more. The 2019 film was trashed nearly universally but everyone before they finished the trailer and after the film was released and viewed. Most people said the performances were fine but visually it was recieved as, to put it simply, fucking wierd. I saw one review that said it was released unfinished, with a CD character model floating into the middle of a scene out of context and with no animation, a mess with texture rendering (apparently Ian McKellan has a scene where his fur just doesn't show. Like the texture is flat. Like it looks like it was published on a floppy disk alongside the original Doom). Not to mention the myriad questions that seem to come up in conversation about the character design choices as a whole. Jesus, how bad is this thing??

My resources tell me a BUNCH of super important contextual things about this one, most important of them being that this is SUPER META Broadway at it's best. Like this is the most Broadway that has ever Broadway'ed. This could be a good thing (one of my favorite musical pieces is fucking everything from Les Miserables), or it could be a bad thing (anyone that knows me knows that with notable exceptions I am NOT a big fan of musicals AT ALL, which is strange for me given my proclivity for weirdness, good storytelling, and music). This is going to be fun for everyone I think so strap in folks. This is going to be a wierd ride through furry land with a guy that wants nothing to do with it, lol. (SCORE, looking like 2 parts)

First I'll be looking at CATS (2019), because I am a glutton for punishment, and my wife says that the best way to get through this is to chew through the shit sandwich first, and then to get through the good stuff, so the good stuff is what sticks. I'm not sure I am going to enjoy either part, but I am open to it so here we go. I'll try to keep my writing as live as possible, per usual.

RIGHT AWAY, as I'm completing the Amazon rental purchase, this cast is fucking loaded. Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson. Judi Dench, Jason Derulo (wait, he acts too? Maybe his part is the worst part in this, I hate his music worse than I dislike Taylor Swift), Idris Elba, Ian McKellan, Rebel Wilson, and more. And that doesnt even include any love for people I am not familiar with that might carry some star power over from Broadway. So this thing is loaded for bear with acting heavies. That said, I really don't understand the comic appeal of Rebel Wilson. I don't think she is funny. You already lost me with Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo. All that said, this cast roster looks expensive.

Ok I am a minute and 47 seconds in and my first thought already is what the hell am I listening to? If this was originally put together in the 80s, and its either loved (ironically I guess?)or reviled, why would you stick with the same musical choices as instrumentation is concerned? I'm guessing I am going to have more on this later.

So completely inconsequential to the actual review the word jellicle as it relates to cats is totally ruined thanks to my learning of a word not in may people's vocabularies. Farticles. Thanks to my cousins for that one.

Alright, so full disclosure. I am not a fan of Rebel Wilson. I enjoy aspects of characters she plays, and she can be funny at times, but when your whole act revolves around one aspect of you (in her case it is that she is a large woman. Seriously its like every joke in all 3 Pitch Perfect movies) it says a lot about your ability to tell a story or joke. That said, it is so nice to not hear Rebel Wilson tell fat jokes. She is genuinely talented. It's hard to watch her in this cat suit (? Cat body? Cat war crime? More later), but it's interesting to see someone explore another side of their craft.

The sound design is...off. I'm not sure how else to describe it. You can LOUDLY hear body parts hitting set pieces. Footfalls, people jumping and grabbing on things. Like seriously you can hear it over the music. It sounds like someone got lazy in the mixing room, or they were trying to make it feel more like a stage production. News Flash. It doesn't make it feel like a stage production. It makes it feel like nobody in the production staff cared as much as the actors. I am beginning to suspect that ALL the money on this movie was spent on casting. And concept art.

I am genuinely confused by the choice to have only a couple cats wear clothes, and when they remove them, their fur looks exactly like the clothes they removed. I'm finding myself looking at things they did that wasted money. Money that could have been spent anywhere else to improve this thing.

All things considered, I could watch Idris Elba play the title character in Jaws, and enjoy it.

I'm pretty impressed by the entire cast's commitment to everything they picked up from their movement coaching. It is obvious that they were trying to incorporate a lot of typical feline movement and habitual aspects, even going so far as utilizing ballet movements for some of the dancing (probably because it is more "feline", to use the word again.) Nobody has really slipped yet. It's pretty impressive.

I think the thing that has me most surprised throughout is that this thing has the ability to elevate some (Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo, Francesca Hayward, Jennifer Hudson, the VFX artists) and drag others through the dirt, (Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, the VFX artist team), most times in the same scene. It's crazy how on one hand someone truly can astound you with their performance, blow you away with a wonderful rendition of a song some people know well, and on the other hand you see wonderful, well established actors really putting their asses into a performance that has no way of doing them service because there isn't anything there. For comparison, look at Ben Kingsley in Ghandi, or Lucky Number Slevin, versus his performance in Bloodrayne. It's really hard to watch these respected thespians work their asses off for something that won't ultimately pay off for them because it doesn't have the capability to.

Ok so halfway verdict here:

This was a fucking mess. Now I didnt see the original theatrical release, so I have no idea how truly barrel bottom things got here. I CAN say, that I can see the bones of what this is supposed to be buried in the mess of cat shit (see what I did there????).

The concept of the costuming is essentially what I imagine it is for the stage show, but seeing it in it's execution is.....disturbing. The movement coaching was pretty solid and worked well with the dance choreography, but in combination with the actual character design there is an implied sexuality in the feline-ness that makes you uncomfortable, but not in the thought provoking way, just in the "forced to look at naked people covered in cat fur for an hour and a half" kind of way. Like I was even kind of into Idris Elba's performance of Macavity, until he took off the hat and trench coat and now I'm just watching a naked Idris, but with cat ears and a tail. To be honest seeing this throughout the film really took you out of the immersive aspects of it. Not to mention that while lighting was ok, the actual character models pasted on the motion capture actors moved strangely, sometimes the faces were disjointed with the heads, sometimes textures looked unfinished (not as bad as I thought it would be but I know people that could do better than that on their computers at home.) Just a jarring experience visually overall.

The score was ugly and dated too. Or maybe not the score, so much as the instrumentation. Sound design was atrocious throughout, it seemed like the intent was to make it feel more like a stage production, but if that's the case, why go the route they did in terms of set design and all that? Being able to hear hollow flooring under heavy footfall, or people loudly slamming hands into bars they need to grab to catch themselves, or the piss poor choice in instrumentation, the whole thing feels like B roll for the DVD extras. You know what actually did great in updating the music for a more immersive experience? Aladdin. Check my first review out for more on that one.

So halfway verdict? I say a rough D. I dont see myself going back for this one, but I'm not unable to see the appeal. I just am sort of anticipating the 1998 Broadway production (part 2 of this review) so I can see what this is really SUPPOSED to be. Watch for part 2, coming later!

#cats #cats 1998 #cats the musical #broadway #movie #review

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spamzineglasgow · 7 years

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(REVIEW) Tinkering with the Code of Reality: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Michael Crowe (Studio Operative)

Text by Denise Bonetti

>Between the 18th and the 20th October 1974, Oulipo BAE Georges Perec - a Pisces - sits in a Parisian cafe on Place Saint-Sulpice, meticulously recording in his notebook every detail of the busy life of the square. His eyes are alert to 'what happens when nothing happens'. The more inconsequential the particulars he manages to pick up on, examine, or classify, the more excited he seems to become:

'Means of locomotion: walking, two-wheeled vehicles (with and without motor), automobiles (private cars, company cars, rented cars, driving school cars), commercial vehicles, public services, public transport, tourist buses.'

>The conceptual/obsessive experiment in cataloguing is a response to a writing prompt of his own devising, published about a month before in a collection of essays on public and private spaces (the adorably-named Species of Spaces and Other Pieces). Perec's practical exercise calls for the reader/writer to carefully observe the street around them and note *everything* down: one must set about it slowly, 'almost stupidly'; forcing oneself to see the space 'more flatly'. 'If nothing strikes you', says Perec, then 'you don't know how to see'. As it turns out, Perec himself is really good at seeing: after 3 days on Place Saint-Sulpice, his notes are over 50 pages long - mainly one-line annotations about buses, passersby, pigeons, gestures, more buses. He calls it An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.

>Perec made of this modality (a dry and neutral encyclopedic gaze at the unnoticed) a manifesto. In both writing and living, he called for a shift of attention from the exceptional to the ordinary, for an abandonment of the charmingly exotic in favour of the invisibly unexceptional - according to a philosophy he labels 'anthropology of the endotic'. In the essay 'Approaches to What?', in a somewhat self-referential aphorism, he remarks that 'railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the trains exist.' That the ordinary, in other words, only lives in our attention as soon as it stops being ordinary.

>If this statement is true as it sounds, then, the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online must without a doubt be more real than the one we live in. The game's universe is expansive and hyperrealistic to the extent that navigating its space is an experience of an undecidable quality; the abundance of detail is so accurately mimetic and uncannily convincing it that the digital artifice both disappears into an ambient background, and never leaves the centre of the stage. The minutia of IRL city-walking, and of existing in a world that follows its own will (flecks of dust dancing in the wind, catching the sun; overheard fragments of strangers' phone conversations; the gas station attendant's body language in between serving customers), are alienated from us, digitally re-engineered, and presented back to us in the guise of a crime-ridden fictional world. In this sense, the GTA series is one of the most Perecquian exercises to ever exist. (Of course, amusingly enough, Perec's aphorism is also appropriate here on a more literal level: the game franchise is entirely built upon the premise that derailing trains - but also provoking car accidents, and especially murdering innocent pedestrians - is recommended if not required).

>Because of these underlying continuities between Perec's 'infraordinary' and the process of hyperrealistic world-making in sandbox video games, when I first read about Michael Crowe's re-enactment of Perec's experiment in GTA online (in a cafe, open-mouthed, holding a scone mid-air), I just blurted out 'Of course!' to the stranger sitting across from me. It made complete sense; the connection was there all along, only no one had ever written about it. In his wonderful introduction to the small volume, Jamie Sutcliffe confesses that he is 'jealous and frustrated [Crowe] got there first'. Although he follows this with praise for the book's undeniable 'inventiveness, inquisitiveness and relentless mirth,' I think the underlying reason for the (admittedly shared) envy is not only that Crowe exhausted a conceptual exercise skilfully, and in beautiful prose. He also hit a nerve, exposed a crucial side of the relationship between video games, literature, realism and simulation - and he did it playfully.

>At times, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online time follows closely Perec's model: it obsesses over weather, numbers and registration plates, the colour of people's clothes, passersby (especially women) eating things, commercial slogans, etc. Of course, these strong echoes can only highlight the essential polarities between the two universes: what in Perec's Paris is nature or chance (clouds, the pedestrians' trajectories, their conversations), is always artifice and intentionality in GTA. Even if the the game's phenomenology might be randomised, it is always layers of carefully contrived code that engender it: the player can never forgets this.

>One other definition that Perec devised for the kind of everydayness that escapes our perception is 'the infra-ordinary' - the swarm of details that hover just below the threshold of attention. If Perec's term is certainly appropriate for his preferred subject of writing, the choice of word seems even more significant in the context Crowe's Attempt because its meaning necessarily expands to the digital nature of the space explored. In the city-space of GTA, the 'endotic' and the 'infra' quite literally consist of the hidden workings below (or behind) the surface of game: the structure of its programming, the software's rationale - mechanisms that Crowe often lingers on, his phenomenological descriptions often slipping into conjectures about the game's logical engines:

'That woman is still parked at a green light. Melt down. As other cars approach they brake differently, some jerkily in stages, others in a smoother manner. The computer players seem to have different levels of driving proficiency.'

'There's a pristine jewellery exchange store opposite. Dilapidated buildings probably cost more to design and create in this game, as they would generally have far more detail. ... Directly opposite is the Elkridge Hotel. It can't be entered. I wonder what's inside. Is the book/cube poured full of colour, or transparency, with the road/pavement continuing on the floor? If hollow, how thin are the impenetrable walls?'

Crowe's asides often touch - more or less directly - upon questions of realism and effective simulation:

'The palm trees in front of me are slightly different heights. None look copied and pasted'

'It would be great if learner driver were going around, veering off cliffs, etc.'

'It's a shame there are no birds, it would add greatly to a sense of realism ... Perec had all kinds of pigeon action in his book'

>Even more interestingly, at times his observations go as far as hinting at the inherent opacity of the concept of mimetic representation itself: what is realism, when truly accurate depictions often seem even more surreal in their uncanny effect? Doesn't GTA's lifelike graphic rendering - like meticulously inventorial writing - draw attention to the very artifice of artistic creation?

'Very light rain. This slight rain seems realistic, but in Perec's reality the rain stops "very suddenly". If that happened in GTA it would seem like poor attention to detail'.

>In a review of Auerbach's Mimesis, Terry Eagleton elaborates on Brecht's idea that realism really is a matter of effect, not a matter of technique. The definition cannot be applied at the level of production or its methods, it has to depend on reception - at the level of reading, or, in this case - playing. Realism happens between the artwork and the audience's expectations; it's not about verisimilitude, or about whether a text (or video game) recalls something familiar; it's about whether or not the experience of the work matches an unmediated experience of reality: 'Realism is as realism does'.

>Eagleton concludes that 'artistic realism, then, cannot mean "represents the world as it is", but rather "represents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing it". Realism as we normally understand it, then, has more to do with convention; it is more like an autonomous process of creation than a neutral mode of reporting. At one point, Crowe wonders 'what poets like T.S. Eliot would've added [to the game] by way of details within details'; the underlying idea here is that a deeper and deeper level of realism can only come from fabrication and designed artifice. A truly realistic world doesn't exist, it has to be manufactured and carefully weaved together. Perec, Eliot, the nerds at Rockstar Games: all mods, tinkering with code to fashion a world that feels more real than the invisible one we live in.

>The most prominent strand of reflections in Crowe's Attempt, however, is dedicated to imagining a future in which GTA is so utterly realistic that it surpasses reality itself. Crowe pictures the horizon towards which the GTA series is moving not only as a simulation indistinguishable from its original, but as a utopian uber-world populated by perfect AI characters:

'In future games, players will be able to chat with all computer characters about any topic, for any length of time. The only problem would be that the computer characters would likely find us too boring and go off to chat with another computer character that has also read every line of text and seen every film/artwork.'

'I wonder how detailed these games will become. Could growing a zit in the game affect your character's day? ... Could millions of players all live as microorganisms on the face of a GTA character?'

>The beautifully apocalyptic scale of Crowe's prophecy is made somewhat more ominous by the hazy, yet closed, temporal arc that his little book follows. Whereas Perec opens and concludes every section of his Attempt declaring the time window of his observations, Crowe rarely if never talks about the passage of time in the game ('I dont keep track of time as i should, here or irl'). The only real time marks - vague, atmospheric, possibly just conceptual - are in the names of the 5 sections the book is divided into: '(Daybreak)', '(Morning)', '(Break)', '(Nightfall)', '(Night)'. Crowe's 24-hour cycle - whether referring to IRL or GTA temporality - is possibly more compellingly symbolic than Perec's 3 days. The self-contained movement from dawn, to sunset, and then darkness, lends the volume a sense of closure that it would otherwise lack - given its status as a semi-conceptual exercise aimed at an inherently unattainable objective ('exhausting' a place).

>This explicitly closed timeline also means that Crowe's subject, and thus his literary project, assume more gravitas than one might expect. What could begin in the reader's mind as a playful pastiche actually becomes more like a tragedy, with Crowe's avatar helplessly standing and witnessing unstoppably violent events, most of which utterly gratuitous. The text is so ridiculously faithful to the Aristotelian unities of time and place (one day, one place), that one might turn a blind eye on its complete lack of any unity of action ('events strictly tied together as cause and effect, adding up to one single story' sounds pretty much like everything this book is not). The book does funny, but it also does serious, poetic - although possibly not cathartic. In a sense, Crowe's avatar is a bit like a postmodern Hamlet: a passive and melancholic intellectual antihero, surrounded by farcical death in a corrupted society.

>In the last section of Crowe's Attempt, '(Night)', the more beautifully poetic descriptive fragments that populate the book gradually increase in number as if to signal the nearing calmness of closure. These are nominal phrases that choose to go nowhere; many are about things that are far away, abandoned, or circular:

'A very high crane in the distance.' '1000s of lights visible from my spot.' 'The window lights have different hues, every light isn't just white. Slight yellow, greens.' 'One side of the sky is pink, the other blue, held apart by purple.' 'A plane flying by way off in the distance.' 'An ambulance is burnt out, two people inside burnt entirely black.' 'A human is spinning around in circles in their car (...).' 'Dropped cigarette on the floor.'

>Before you know it - much, much before the last section - you'll feel stupid for ever thinking this book would be just a parody to lol at, or a kool koncept show your other Highbrow x Lowbrow friends and pat each other on the back for knowing the experimental French literature reference. You'll be moved by how beautiful Los Santos can be - the geometry of its facade architecture; its computer-generated clouds drifting above sports cars, reflecting the light in coupé red or neon purple; private (NPC) citizens relaxing on benches or outside cafes, smoking, eating donuts, eating bagels, talking into their phones to their private (NPC) citizen friends about their job, their boyfriends, their drug problem. I won't say you'll forget the world you're in is a video game you're in - because Crowe won't let you - but I think you will stop caring.

>An Attempt at Exhausting a Pace in GTA Online is published by Studio Operative, and can be bought at Glasgow's Good Press, or here.

#review

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kelasparmak · 7 years

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001: Vorkosigan Saga. 002: Charles Gunn/Wesley Wyndam-Pryce.

OH MAN THIS GOT LONG

Vorkosigan Saga:

Favorite character: Hmmm, tough one. No, just kidding, everyone who’s ever met me knows Bel’s my favourite, hands down, no contest.

Least Favorite character: I mean, there are a lot of baddies to pick from. Ryoval, Ser Galen and Bruce Van Atta all rate highly.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): This one actually is tricky, since I really really like a lot of the canon relationship dynamics. Byerly and Ivan definitely, Aral and Cordelia (and Oliver Jole, though it’s Aral and Cordelia’s dynamic that I’m particularly fond of), Ethan and Terrence, Simon and Alys, and I think Miles and Bel. (Honourable mentions go to Bel and Nicol, Ivan and Tej, and Elli and Elena, which is a pairing I’d not actually really considered until I got desperate for Vorkosigan fic and ran the Russian works on AO3 through Google Translate and found some really interesting fic.)

Character I find most attractive: My mental images of book characters are generally super vague and I’m eh about attractiveness anyway, but thinking about it I’d probably say Rish, Taura or Dono Vorrutyer.

Character I would marry: I’d be quite happy marrying an awful lot of them, really. Bel, for preference, since I’m practically in actual bona fide love with it.

Character I would be best friends with: I’d like to say Bel, but I don’t think I’m exciting enough. My actual best friends through life have mostly been more like Tej or maybe the younger Kareen, so maybe one of them? Tej and I could definitely bond over language learning. (I would also love to be best friends with Byerly, but again, I don’t think we have the same idea of a good time.)

A random thought: The first thing that springs to mind is my fascination with the fact that Bel and Jole had a fling back in the day. When was this? How (hilariously) would Miles react? I would love for Bel, Nicol, Garnet Five and Corbeau (since he’s the Barrayaran Imperium’s ambassador or attache or whatever to Quaddiespace) to visit Sergyar and pop in on Miles, and have that awkward ‘yes, we’ve met’ conversation when Miles tried to introduce them to each other. Well, awkward for Miles and Jole, at least; Bel and Cordelia would no doubt find it hilarious.

An unpopular opinion: Iiiii don’t really like that more or less everyone ended up paired off to an Appropriately Gendered Spouse, with a bureaucratic position and babies ever after. I mean, that’s an oversimplification and there are exceptions (like Elli, or Ethan and Terrence, though that’s implied rather than explicit and since Athos is men-only it feels a little ‘for lack of alternative Terrence might end up with a guy and if he does it’ll probably be Ethan’) but that’s how it feels to me. I don’t know how unpopular that opinion is, though.

My canon OTP: Aral/Cordelia

Non-canon OTP: Byerly/Ivan (I mean, we’ve essentially had this question already)

Most badass character: I think Taura or Elli, probably? Miles is definitely a contender too, but I suppose because you see him wallowing in self-pity or making it up as he goes or doing extremely silly things pretty often the overall effect is perhaps diminished a little. Though I think overall the sheer amount of obstacles, self-imposed as well as external, that he manages to overcome, might put him at the top of the list.

Pairing I am not a fan of: Leo/Silver, probably. I don’t think it was very ethical for Leo to get involved, at least not at that point - I’m not sure if she was canonically a great deal younger than him or if I’ve just imagined that, but there’s a huge gap in terms of life experience, and I think that given the way Van Atta had exploited her very very recently, Leo should have given her some space and time and the tools to figure out what she wanted before he got involved with her.

Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): Bothari’s portrayal made me pretty uncomfortable at times. Not sure if it was necessarily a screwup because she writes other mental illnesses pretty well, at least as far as my understanding of them goes, but I felt like with Bothari there was a very fine line being tread between a very complex depiction of schizophrenia (specifically traumagenic schizophrenia) & cyclical abuse on the one hand, and the ‘dangerous and barely-human crazy person’ stereotype on the other.

Favourite friendship: So many. In the interests of not just repeating myself from the shipping questions, though, I really like the development of Miles and Ivan’s relationship from not really Getting each other at all in the first book (and Miles in particular being pretty contemptuous of Ivan), to a close (if constantly mutually exasperating) friendship once they’re a little older.

Gunn/Wesley

when or if I started shipping it: Gosh, it’s been absolutely years since I watched Angel and I only watched it the once, so any of these answers may be completely wrong, but honestly I think it was from the first time they argued.

my thoughts: I really liked their 'odd couple’ dynamic - it reminds me a little of a much more extreme version of Eliot and Hardison’s initial impressions of each other, in that they each have a lot of preconceptions about the type of person the other is and about their worth, but pretty quickly get over it and come to respect each other and (shockingly enough) realised that it was actually really useful that they’d had such different experiences and that they worked much better together than separately. I’d have liked more episodes dealing with their very different backgrounds and attitudes in a more casual setting - I don’t remember how often that came up but I don’t feel like it was very often, or at least not often enough for my liking :P I just wish that phase

What makes me happy about them: I guess I’ve just said it. Got a bit carried away there I guess.

What makes me sad about them: The goddamn unnecessary love triangle! And everything getting fucked up! Why did this happen! I prefer to pretend that storyline, and the Illyria storyline, and the Grimdark Wesley storyline, didn’t happen, because they were silly and unnecessary. Whedon, you didn’t even have to let my kids be happy, but making them miserable because of internal conflict that wasn’t even in-character for them wasn’t even lazy writing, it would have been lazy writing with different characters, but this required effort! To be bad! Why! (Caveat: possibly the Grimdark Wesley storyline isn’t so much objectively bad as I just didn’t like it. I don’t mind him being emo, that’s a-ok, but his behaviour toward Gunn and Fred was straight-up gross, and while I quite liked Wesley dealing with the consequences of his mistakes, I’d have been happier if he’d learned from them instead of getting worse, lol.)

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: Iiii actually have never read any fic of this series, I don’t think, so I guess I don’t know. I can imagine some things that would and that I wouldn’t be surprised to see done.

Things I look for in fanfic: Well, nothing, but I guess it would be the dynamic that I liked between them in the Good Times. Preferably a ridiculous shenanigans, some near-death experiences, actually talking about their feelings, and a healthy dose of fluff (or h/c). And Gunn being smart as hell, because he is and arguably is better at applying that in practice than Wesley.

My kinks: I am a pure and innocent soul and I don’t even know what a kink is. (Okay, but leaving out the sexual element, I guess even though I was talking about how much I hate Grimdark Wes, I’d probably be interested in hatesex fic set during that period if it was concerned with working out their frustration and betrayal rather than just uncomplicated angry sex) (Also, I can see Wesley being super into Gunn being smart as fuck generally, and specifically into his Lawyer Talk after he got essentially the entire corpus of law and G&S downloaded into his brain. In my head this is not a very sexy thing, it’s very ‘Ooh Mr Darcy’, Wesley is hopelessly enamoured and Gunn is initially bemused but flattered and very quickly gets tired of Wes swooning every time he says something smart, which is way too often for it not to have lost its effect AND YET. And especially if they’re working for Wolfram & Hart together in this scenario, in which case Gunn uses advanced legal terminology often on account of it being his job, which makes it hugely impractical for Wesley to try and jump his bones every time it happens. He’s probably just into the legal jargon and not the Gilbert and Sullivan because that would be a very weird kink and not one I can imagine being sexy at all, but now that I say it, if someone wrote that fic I would read it just out of morbid curiosity.)

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: Fred! As well as each other! Guys, polyamory, it’s a thing! (If it had to be other people, I’d probably go for Gunn with Fred and Wes with either Angel or Spike. Probably not Lilah.)

My happily ever after for them: No one dies and Gunn has high self-esteem and Wesley stops fucking up everything he touches. Nothing bad happens and The Gang never have to deal with apocalypses or implausibly huge conspiracies or anything, they just hang out being supernatural detectives and doing Season 1-2 type stuff forever. Possibly they are in a triad with Fred but this is not necessary.

#cosmictuesdays #ask games for ts #a third tag #a fourth tag #a fifth tag #that should now be enough tags to keep these out of the main tags!#ats #vorkosigan saga

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neyveliwriter-blog · 4 years

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MY CPU CRASHED INTO THE ASHPOND

MY CPU CRASHED INTO THE THERMAL STATION ASHPOND

Yes. You heard it right.

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of my Computer crashed into the Thermal Station Ash Pond.

How? You may ask.

Ok. Here is the story.

I have to go around 100 years back – to the beginning of the 20th century. Yes. I have to. No, don’t stop me, you had asked for it. So to the beginning of the 20th century when Modern English Literature was being created.

Modern English Literature at that time saw several new trends. Writers started experimenting in the background of a shell shocked society which saw the First Great World War (1914-1918).

In sharp contrast to the Romantic age which preceded this era, the beginning of the 20th century saw the revival of stark realism pervading all spheres of life, including literature.

Writers like Ezra Pound, Hume and T.S. Eliot wrote about decay, decadence and destruction more than anything else. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” famously wrote Eliot. Carrying the baton forward was a writer called – James Joyce. Experimenting being the buzzword, James Joyce took experimentation to the next level. His most famous work was published roughly around 1920 – the famous Novel called ULYSSES. No, it is not to be confused with a poem by the same name composed by Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose lines we might have come across at school. (The most popular line in that poem being – “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield….” which may ring a bell)

I am talking about ULYSSES the Novel (if it can be called one). The novel, written in an experimental mode, had a bizarre singularity. James Joyce himself had reportedly felt that the novel would keep professors of Literature engaged in debating over what he meant to say! The Novel consisted of roughly 300-400 pages. The biggest unique character about the novel was – the whole novel talks of 1 day in the life of one character, one Mr. Bloom, I think. The second stupendous fact is that the whole novel is all about the thought processes in the mind of this only character. This kind of technique, where an attempt was made to record the plausible flow of thoughts in the mind of a man in 24 hours, was called the “Stream of consciousness”.

Plainly put, “Stream of Consciousness” meant the flow of thoughts that keep streaming into our mind without any real logic or coherence or relation.

Essentially, it is extremely difficult for us to recall our thoughts in their entirety that go through our mind even in the last couple of minutes! And we must have all experienced the way our mind “connects” thoughts that seem illogical and devoid of any sequence.

For example, I see my son just idly kicking the football around, I think of Pele, the footballer, then suddenly it strikes me that Pele was of Black race and that Lincoln had fought for the rights of the Blacks and how I did not know much about Lincoln during school days as our history teacher probably did not deal much with this topic and it was one Mr. Arul Mary Joseph who taught us history and yes, I had seen Mr. Arul Mary Joseph this morning as he lived near my house, but why did the NLC Management not yet allot him a higher Type of Quarters to the Vice-Principal of a school, the NLC Management’s policies were baffling, must find out the logic behind this from the Allotment Section of Township Administration Department and yes, today, someone had asked me to clarify some doubt with the Allotment Section of Township Administration as I was working in the Township Administration Department, who was he?, Yes that newly appointed Graduate Engineering Trainee, of course he was from Andhra, that’s why he had approached me, by the way, this Andhra state seems to be going from bad to worse……….. So many thoughts flowing in probably less than 2 minutes!!! My mind had traversed from my son to Lincoln and to Mr. Arul Mary Joseph and so on and if you asked me to recall these thoughts in the exact sequence that they went through my mind in those 2 minutes, I really would find it extremely difficult to do so.

Keeping track of this stream of consciousness in the mind of a fictitious character is an onerous task indeed and that is what James Joyce attempted. It was a path breaking attempt but of course, did not find much acceptance among common people as the novelty was probably too complicated to be appreciated by the common reading public.

Now, when I was replying to a Mail from my friend, explaining the reason for the delay in sending him a reply, I started to say “My computer crashed”. But I had to be truthful and more specific, so I corrected myself by providing the specific - the problem was with the Central Processing Unit, the CPU, the small fan inside the CPU was not functioning and the computer serviceman had replaced it with a new one.

But this “crash” theory stuck in my mind. I wanted to use the phrase “computer has crashed” as everyone says, fashionably!!! (like it is a fad to say nowadays that the movie “hit the screens”; we used to say “the film released”) So, I finally settled the issue by saying – The CPU of my Computer crashed instead of using the more common colloquial “Computer repair”.

Immediately, the Stream of Consciousness manifested itself.

Somewhere in my sub-conscious mind, “crashed” related itself to a Plane Crash and in turn my mind reasoned that it is common for planes to crash into the ocean…..later, the black boxes are “recovered”, so now, my computer has also crashed into some body of water, and its Black Box, the CPU was “recovered”…..Neyveli had no ocean or sea or river or lake except the Thermal Ash Pond….. so yes, my computer had to “crash somewhere into that Ash Pond…”, the Thermal Ash Pond…………….it’s the Stream of Consciousness, folks…!!!

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uxoversight · 5 years

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When legendary IBM industrial designer Eliot Noyes expressed this opinion in 1944, he was referring to how the best everyday physical objects wed functionality and aesthetics. Now, seventy-five years later, that same focus on intentionality and un-fussiness also serves as true north for digital design — especially user experience (a.k.a. UX) design.

Often conflated with digital graphic design, UX is essentially the process of improving and simplifying the user experience for a digital product — it's not all about how a tech product looks when you use it. The way a brand’s logo pops up when you click on an app isn't really UX. But the way your favorite restaurant directory or weather app defaults to your current location — that’s a deliberate UX choice.

We talked with four UX design pros — some emerging, some long-established thought leaders — about breaking into the industry, how to advance, how they approach projects and what they love about their work. Those who shared their insights include: Sydney-based Adham Dannaway, a freelance UX designer and UX Twitter luminary who’s worked for Qantas, Growth Giant and more; Kevin Lucius, creative director of SmartFinancial (and HGTV-featured printmaker); Lauren Howerter, senior UX designer at Solstice; and Laura Klein, an industry veteran who co-hosts the What is Wrong with UX podcast and has written two books about UX.

HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTO UX?

ADHAM DANNAWAY

Freelance UI/UX Designer and Front End Developer

I actually started out studying computer science at UNSW Sydney. I was lucky enough to get an IT internship after that, where I discovered my passion for websites and design. I then studied a Master of Digital Media to learn more about design, and built websites on the side to pay the bills, mainly helping small to medium-sized businesses with branding and site design. After my master's, I worked at start-ups, tech companies (Campaign Monitor, Freelancer.com), agencies and larger corporations (including Qantas, St. George Bank and Westpac) to gain experience and build my skills.

KEVIN LUCIUS

UX Designer at SmartFinancial

I always loved art and design as a kid, so I decided to pursue it as a career without knowing exactly what I wanted to do. I got a bachelor's degree in technology and studied visual communication. The curriculum included web design, photography, graphic design and marketing. One of my first jobs out of school was at a commercial sign company. We designed way-finding signage for hotels, airports and hospitals. That was my first experience at a professional level designing something with a user in mind. Our goal was to move people through a space and guide them toward an endpoint. So later on, when I got more into web design, I found it interesting that the same concepts applied. I picked it up quickly and really enjoyed it.

LAUREN HOWERTER

Senior UX Designer at Solstice

Like many Freelance UX designers, I started off in a more traditional graphic and print design job then worked into digital. UX design is similar in that, as a designer in general, I follow the same core design principles that a graphic designer or print designer or web designer might follow. But as a UX designer, the scope of my responsibilities and work has increased. I'm thinking big picture, thinking strategically. And that involves a lot of not-so-glamorous design work, like diagrams and whiteboarding — a lot more collaboration than any other realm of design I've worked in.

It's really a more objective design practice in that very little of what I do is dictated by subjective opinions, whereas marketing design or brand design is very subjective. You collect feedback that's like, "I don't like blue," or, "I don't like the color of this thing," or, "I don't like the type style." And in UX, I’m thinking so much more about how someone interacts with what we're designing. What's legible to them, what colors are visible on a screen in daylight. The mindset is very different in that way.

LAURA KLEIN

Principal at Users Know Author (Build Better Products, UX for Lean Startups)

I started off doing user research at a think tank. I was very low level but got to learn from some really experienced folks and got really lucky. Then I went and learned how to program. People who were actual interaction designers at that point, the ones that I knew, all had master's degrees in it — and that was not me. So I went off, learned how to program, then became an engineer.

I had started a master’s program in computer engineering, but then a friend offered me a [role] at her design boutique she had just started. They liked the fact that I knew how to do research, how to write well and how to do end programming, so I could do prototyping (creating early test models of designs in order to gather feedback). Turns out, if can do research and know how to prototype, they can teach you the middle part, which is the actual design part. So mine was a weird kind of wandering road.

DO YOU THINK THERE’S A “TRADITIONAL” PATH TO BECOMING A UX DESIGNER? IF SO, DID YOUR OWN PATH MIRROR OR DEPART FROM THAT?

Dannaway: Back when I finished high school, there was no such thing as a “UX designer.” These days there are private courses you can study to get into UX design. My path wasn’t a particularly efficient path, but it made me the designer I am today and gave me strong technical foundations in development, which have been helpful in my career.

Lucius: There are plenty of educational opportunities to learn UX now, but when I was in college the term wasn't widely used, if at all. I probably followed the same career path as a lot of other designers from that time. I graduated with a basic foundation of web design knowledge that I continued to build upon. As the industry has changed, I’ve had to adapt and learn a new set of skills — which is not a bad thing.

Howerter: I think it's very common for UX designers to have a background in print design, and it's also common to see people that come from a lot of different backgrounds. I've known engineers who’ve converted to design. I was a biochemistry major and ended up taking the long, scenic route to a design career. I don't think UX design is brand new, but I do think tech is so booming and changing and evolving that it’s attracted a lot of different kinds of specialties in the industry. And I think you see that in design as well.

Klein: I started working in the mid-'90s, so there was no traditional path into any of this. None of this existed yet. When I started, I think there was still a website that listed all the new websites on the web. If you talk to folks who've been doing this stuff since the early- to mid-'90s, some were doing it as human vector stuff (for example, creating scalable, digital illustrations) or information architecture. We all had super weird career paths — because that's what there was. And there were way more generalists back then. There was a point where I was a webmaster because I could kind of design and kind of code and kind of write, so that meant you were a webmaster!

IS A MASTER'S DEGREE NECESSARY FOR GETTING A GOOD JOB IN UX?

Dannaway: Even though I gained a bachelor's degree as well as a master's, I don’t actually think either of them are necessary to be a good UX designer. The most important thing in my opinion is the practical experience gained by working on projects with other skilled people. There are also a lot of UX design articles and books to learn from, and you can always get involved in a side project for some extra practice. [Note: Dannaway compiled this list of 10 must-read UX design books in 2015.]

Lucius: I would never discourage someone who’s considering expanding their education, as I’m sure it would be very beneficial. But in my opinion, there’s nothing more important than experience. To be hands-on with different projects, make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, is what makes you better as a designer. I had a professor in college who would often say, “The most important thing we’ll teach you is how to learn.” That’s always stuck with me and is a good reminder to always keep pushing to get better.

Howerter: That's such a difficult question, mostly because of the astronomical cost of education. There are some really good programs out there. I think if you do post-secondary education, do a lot of research and figure out what programs are best. Even an MBA coming into the field with exceptional business knowledge can be super valuable, or coming with a human-computer interaction degree could be super valuable in this realm. I think there's plenty of opportunity for people who study outside the direct realm of design to get into the field. Channeling those different backgrounds can really set you apart.

Klein: Let's just say that I’ve seen people with those degrees and without those degrees, and I have not seen any sort of pattern. The interesting thing is that some of the best design and product people I know just seem to think in a particular way. They're able to think at the high level and low level at the same time. They're able to think strategically about what the user needs, and they're very good at digging down into the details and all the secondary stuff. They don't get hung up on just doing the process. So, yeah, I know good designers who had all kinds of education and I know good designers who I would also say that wasn’t true of.

WHAT ARE THE CAREER ADVANCEMENT PROSPECTS LIKE IN UX?

Dannaway: In terms of career advancement, I think the career of a UX designer is quite flat. You can stay a UX designer for a long time and progress to work on larger more complex products. Some UX designers become team leads or managers, others go into product management or service design. Once you’re confident enough, you can become an independent consultant and contract directly with companies (rather than being an employee). Some UX designers use their unique skill set to start their own businesses. It really depends where your passion lies.

Lucius: Absolutely. It’s a growing field, and it feels good that so many companies now understand the importance of design. In the past, I think it was oftentimes overlooked and sometimes written off completely. But good design is what makes things work. It attracts customers, builds desire, solves problems and makes things easier.

Howerter: It depends on where you work. I work at a consulting firm and there’s a lot of potential to move up quickly, but it might be different in house. I think a good question to ask going into a job is what sort of advancement structure exists. How many levels do you have for UX design? Within the realm of design, what are the levels? Is there a director position? Is there a VP position?

And then if you have an opportunity as part of an interview process to talk to other designers, you can ask how many times they've been promoted, how long they've been there, where did they start that. But in general, in tech, just the way that companies are scaling up quickly, a lot of opportunity comes with that.

CAN YOU CLARIFY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A UI AND UX DESIGNER? HOW INTERRELATED DO YOU SEE THE TWO?

Dannaway: User interface (UI) design is simply part of the user experience design process, which roughly includes: researching user needs, defining the problem, coming up with ideas to solve the problem, creating prototypes (this is done by a UI designer), validating the ideas via user testing and finally creating the visual designs (this is also done by a UI designer). As you can see, UI designers perform a subset of the tasks that a UX designer does.

Lucius: I think UI is very important, but it’s just one small subsection of the overall design process. It sits alongside research, analysis, prototyping and testing. UX is the all-encompassing communication that a company has with a user.

Howerter: It's a common point of confusion. As the industry has evolved, we've started to hear the phrase “product designer” come up a lot more. And I think part of that term is an attempt to eliminate confusion between UI and UX. At Solstice, UI and UX are very interrelated. We expect the UI designer to do typical UX activities like wireframing and information architecture and things that are less visual design-related, as well as the visual work. And then work with developers to make sure the thing is being built to spec. So our UX design role is really more like what you might hear in the industry as a product design role, which is somebody who can use design from end to end. Some companies separate it out, which allows for someone to hyper-specialize in one thing over the other and get really, really good at it.

I've worked at companies where the two are split out, but I really like an approach where, as a designer, I'm able to see something through. And I think that also eliminates any gaps that exist in handoff. Anytime you hand off, say, wireframes to a visual designer, there's always potential for things to get lost in translation, which can cause delays and just not be the most efficient.

WHAT'S THE SCOPE OF YOUR WORK?

Dannaway: I like to be involved in the entire design process. It usually involves conducting research to understand user needs, defining the problem, coming up with ideas to solve the problem, creating prototypes, validating the ideas via user testing, designing the interface and building the front end (although I do less development work these days). It’s also important to balance the user needs with the business needs during the design process, which can be tricky.

Lucius: SmartFinancial is both a B2C and B2B brand, so I'm constantly shifting back and forth between the two. Each one has its own unique audience and objectives, so it can sometimes be tricky. On the consumer side, we provide a library of articles and guides to help shoppers fully understand the complexities of insurance. We also provide a platform that allows customers to compare insurance rates side-by-side from national carriers and filter their options however they want.

On the business side, we provide insurance agents and carriers with tools to help them reach new customers and grow their business. In either case, it’s my job to oversee all design and interaction we have with our customers. I fall somewhere between a creative director and UX designer. We’re a small company so we have to be lean and aggressive and work very closely as a team.

Howerter: My role at Solstice encompasses everything from early strategic work with clients — figuring out what to build, which usually includes a lot of workshopping, an ideation session. From there it usually involves collaborating with product and engineering to figure out, now that we know what to build, how should we build it. So that's really early, like wireframing (outlining a design layout) and just putting things in a loose framework. Usually that includes testing. So we have user experience researchers and bosses who own most of the user research that we do. Then once we collect user feedback, we take our designs to high fidelity — so design that's ready to be developed, basically. So we'll have good documentation for all the animations or interactions that we want to include, and then working with developers when they're being built to make sure that they're doing so correctly.

WHAT DO YOU FIND MOST REWARDING — AND CHALLENGING — ABOUT WORKING IN UX?

Dannaway: I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of solving problems and the creativity required to build things. I think that’s why I love designing websites and apps so much. There are always new problems to solve, and in my field these problems are usually solved by building a new website or app feature, or tweaking an existing one. It’s rewarding to make problems disappear and to have some fun in the process.

Lucius: I love solving problems using design. It is, however, certainly challenging at times. It’s a delicate balance of art, design and science. The key is to solve the problem, but do it in a way that’s beautiful, sexy and meets the needs of both the business and customer.

Howerter: I love how fast tech, and the digital realm in general, moves. I love that I can design something and two weeks later it's a real thing that real people are using, and we're getting live feedback. It's such a close feedback loop, and it's really gratifying to either have success really fast or fail really fast.

Also, you learn at an accelerated pace. And as a UX designer, I love working with people from different walks of life. I was on an agriculture project about six months ago and went to farms and saw how it all works. You realize it's really not about the tech; it's about the lives of these people. It's about how they do their work, and finding opportunities to make that easier. Being able to connect the work I do on my computer screen to real people in real situations is always really motivating and inspiring.

Klein: I still just really like making things that make people happy, things that they like using and make their lives better. The other day we were testing out features and someone who had just received access to a new feature Slacked me and said, “Oh my god, I showed this to my associate, and he was so jealous and wanted to know why he didn't get access to it!” She was like, “I just did the tasks I had to do in record time, and it was so great.” And hearing that is the best feeling in the world. So that's why I do the challenging stuff.

I spend a lot of my time talking people out of ideas and kind of having the same conversation over and over. “Oh, that’s an interesting feature. Why do you want to do that? What do you think you're going to get from it? What other things do you think we could do in order to achieve those same results?” Like, some people just come and say, “We should add machine learning.” And it's like, no, we 100 percent should not. Or maybe we should, but let's talk about what you think you’ll get from machine learning and figure out if there's a cheaper way to get something similar.

WHAT’S A TYPICAL PROTOTYPING PROCESS LIKE FOR YOU? HOW MANY ITERATIONS DOES A PROJECT NORMALLY GO THROUGH?

Dannaway: Every project varies in size and complexity, so I don’t think there’s an average or “correct” number of prototype iterations. You need to keep iterating on a prototype until it works. For example, you might be tweaking a sign-up form to try and reduce the number of drop-offs. You may only be able to come up with one new idea that you believe is worth testing. Whereas if you’re lucky enough to start building a new app from scratch, you might have several different directions you’d like to test.

I think a prototype should look and feel as close to the final product as possible to yield the best results. Sometimes I create a quick website with a dummy back end; other times I can get away with an InVision prototype (a set of images linked together using clickable hot spots). Once you’ve validated that the prototype meets the user needs, it’s time to build the real thing.

Lucius: I like to go a bit old school and begin with paper and pen sketches. To me, that’s still the best way to start getting your initial ideas flowing. From there, I’ll continue to refine the design, build a prototype and then start getting some feedback from users. At SmartFinancial, it’s sort of an unwritten company motto to not overthink things too much. By that I mean, we’re given the time we need to research and design a product, but we also try to get it in front of our customers as soon as we can. That can sometimes be hard to do when I feel it’s not yet perfect, but it always pays off. We’re able to get real, actual feedback from customers and then continue to improve it. None of our projects are ever really done; we’re always adding new features and improvements.

Howerter: Iterations vary. It's very rare that you'll do anything right the first time — extremely rare. So an early prototype, we'll go through five, six, seven revisions, until it’s at a place that’s ready to be tested. And then after testing, depending on the question you hope to answer, it might go through several more rounds of iteration. It’s all really determined by the confidence level that the team and client have in investing and building that thing. That's what that early phase is all about: Is this at a place where we all feel confident that our users are going to be able to use it, engage with it, find value in it. Then at the point where we feel confident that it's worth the investment, then usually you pull the trigger.

I've used everything from framers to Proto.io to InVision. I think it's always determined by the objective of the prototype. So if I know that I'm prototyping something that we're going to put in front of our client customers and we want to learn about how they place the return online or something like that, we'll figure out what we want to put together. I like to create a storyboard. Sometimes we'll use sticky notes so they can move things around. And then based on that storyboard, based on what we know we want to learn from the test, I'll figure out what tool does the job most easily. And I think fidelity in the prototypes means a lot too.

So if you're trying to learn a really specific thing, and you need some interactions in there to really get close to what the actual experiences look like, then it's a good time to move into something like Proto.io, where you can really do some careful animating and create interactions to give customers a real feel of the experience. But if you're early on and you're like, “Hey, is this even a feature that you would find valuable?” It’s not necessary to get to that level of detail. You can do something more low fidelity. So it varies on the objective.

Klein: I wrote a blog post about this called "The Right Deliverables," which talks about all the different kinds of prototyping. Well, more deliverables and artifacts, but that includes a lot of prototypes and all the different levels on how you might decide: Do you need a sketch? Do you need an interactive prototype? Do you need a pixel perfect mockup? Because those are all things I've heard people call for. So I’ll do anything from a description and a user story to a Balsamiq mockup to a quick sketch with the engineers to a fully interactive prototype to a somewhat interactive prototype with annotations. That's my favorite. It just depends on what I need to do.

WHAT’S YOUR USER RESEARCH PROCESS LIKE? ARE THERE ANY METHODS YOU SWEAR BY OVER OTHERS, OR IS IT ALWAYS SITUATIONAL?

Dannaway: User research in a nutshell is asking users the right questions to figure out their needs. Interviewing users or watching them as they perform their tasks is usually what works best. During an interview it helps to have two people; one doing the talking, and the other observing and taking notes. You can also record the interview session to play back later to take further notes.

Lucius: This might sound obvious, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to fully understand the problem you’re solving and clearly define the goals before you get started. It’s easy to get caught up and breeze through this step faster than you should. This part of the process should not be overlooked. It’s where you can uncover possible issues and determine the best way to solve the problem.

Klein: Direct observation and contextual inquiry are the gold standard. I can even do remote contextual inquiry in many cases, especially if it's a screen-based [project]. Remote is not the same as unmoderated, obviously. But again, it depends on what I want. I’ve written a lot about [the decision-making process of] when to use qualitative, when to use quantitative, when to interview people, when to observe them, when to run a diary study, when to do a survey.

Do you find that what clients say they want and what you observe differ at times?

Yes, 100 percent. And in fact, I almost never ask people what they want. I mean, I'll ask people what they want. And then the follow-up question, of course, is, “What do you hope to accomplish with that?” Or, “What do you think that will give you, or how will that help?” In some nice, non-confrontational way.

WHERE DO YOU SEE UX DESIGN HEADING NEXT? WHICH MAJOR TRENDS EXCITE YOU?

Dannaway: UX design is still in its infancy, especially in larger corporations. I’m hoping that the user-centric design principles that underpin UX design will continue to spread across different industries and technologies, like AI, voice interfaces and virtual and augmented reality. UX principles are already being used by service designers to help improve services.

Lucius: When someone thinks of UX, their mind probably goes straight to digital. But it’s more than that; it extends to the physical world as well. I think you’ll continue to see more of that. Companies are understanding and embracing the idea of looking at the big picture. Every interaction a company has with a customer, whether in the digital or physical world, is now being looked at in the overall design strategy — especially as the two worlds are becoming more interconnected. I think that’s really exciting.

Howerter: I think “product design” is a term you're going to continue to hear more and more frequently as more companies embrace the idea that design is really not limited to a certain skill set or creating certain deliverables. It's really about creating an experience. And I think there's going to continue to be a move toward leaner and more nimble teams. So designers who are really collaborative and work closely with product people and engineering leads on a daily basis will have the most success moving forward.

Klein: This may just be the circles I run in, but I’m seeing more ops stuff — design ops, research ops. We just did a podcast on this. I'm seeing more research around that and talking to more people who are keeping design consistent across large organizations and coming up with tools to support — which is great. You know, something beyond the shared sketch file, which is a lovely start, and 100 percent not the final answer. So I’m seeing more, “How do we make it easier for large groups of designers to design collaboratively across teams?”

Interviews were edited for length and clarity.

#freelance-ux #freelance-ux-designer #freelance-ux-researcher

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

Not Quite a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by Wardog

Friday, 26 December 2008

Wardog would have been impressed with The Pearls That Were His Eyes if she hadn't paid for it.~

The Pearls That Were His Eyes - a yarn of mythology and politics set in a baroque fantasy world, partly inspired by Shakespeare and partly by T.S. Eliot - is vanity published, which should have warned off any sensible person but since it's Xmas and I was feeling generous and it's creating something of a small-scale stir on LJ, I decided to give it a go, just on the off chance it was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Sigh. When I am I going to learn?

The thing is ... it's not ... bad ... actually. It's just the problem arises in that I paid money for it (and, yes, I know I that did voluntarily). It's probably symptomatic of my conventional nature or something, but I actually believe that books that don't get published don't get published for a reason. The Pearls That Were His Eyes is not a work of undiscovered genius that the publishing world is just too hidebound to recognise/appreciate - it's a promising book that needs a lot of work and a good editor. If someone (by which I mean the author, friend of the author, me - not a pirate, if you even get literature pirates) should ever giveyou this, then I heartily suggest you read it. It's well-written, imaginative, original and atmospheric. Do not, however, think about buying it because, in its current state, it's an amateur work with nothing to recommend it but potential.

The Pearls That Were His Eyes is set in the partially drowned, fog-wreathed city of Cittavecchio, which is, like most fantasy cities, a little bit of this, a little bit of that (in this case, London and Venice). It's a city with a dark, legend-shrouded past, suppressed and half-forgotten in the current Age of Reason. Needless to say the mythology of the city doesn't stay suppressed for long and rises up to consume the lives of, well, some dudes. I can't really summarise the plot much beyond that because ... it's not so much that it's incoherent as it's rather muted: there's a web of intrigue, there's a conclusion to the web of intrigue, but it's hard to really get a grip on what's going on.

Oh for God's sake: spoiler-time, let's try to untangle this:

So the City of Cittavecchio was drowned by the Old Gods for reasons not entirely specified except that they evidently didn't like it much. And The Tattered King, the Last King of the City, wanders around the edges of reality waiting for a moment to reclaim the city for himself again. And all the rich people go to parties and gossip all the time and wear masks and have masquerade balls and festivals. And all the poor people live in the Rookeries and are beggars and get killed. God knows how this city supports itself. And the Duca who rules the city is mad and corrupt - except we never really see this, so it's a bit hard to see why people are so down on the guy. And there's also a secret senate who are supposed to be the true power in the city. And there's a dude going around killing people in a particularly gruesome way. And there's this deck of tarot cards, right, called the Re Stracciati (the Tattered King) deck, that had been originally created to contain and control the spirit of the very city itself and was capable of drawing forth the spirit of the Tattered King. Wrap this all up in a motley of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot and you get, if you'll forgive me, a heap of broken images: in short A Big Pile of Awesome with no actual structure to it.

What works about the Web o' Intrigue that leads, as you may suppose, to the very-near resurrection of the Tattered King is that it's a genuinely intriguing blending of huge political plots, personal vendettas, cruel coincidences and base human pettiness. It all comes together very satisfyingly indeed, except the journey to the point where it does is just a little bit tedious. For fantasy, it's a remarkably slim volume (weighing in at a mere 300 pages), so really you'd think, with all the necessary world and character building, it wouldn't have space to be dull. But somehow it manages. Part of the problem lies with the need to acquaint the reader with an already complicated personal/political background that has been created long before the story itself begins; therefore the book kicks off with an awful lots of "as you know your father the king" style exposition, which is both blatant and extraordinarily clumsily executed. Characters can tell other characters information they presumably already know for pages at a time. Let me quote you a chunk to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem:

'Is it worth taking [this quite significant information we've just gathered] to the Lord Seneschal yet?' 'No. Cittavecchi society is riddled with secret societies, clubs, political movements and the like. Masks breed them like flies. For the moment we have nothing more than my disquiet and a series of coincidences that seem too convenient to go on - that is not enough for any kind of legal process. If we have nothing but innuendo and we take it to the Seneschal, then he will take it to the Duca, and the first thing the Duca will do is order another round of hangings and gibbetings for no better reason than it is you and I who raise the matter. And if he executes any more members of the nobility on our say, it will probably trigger the very open revolt we seek to avoid at the moment and, worse, it will make our own position untenable. Everything is finely and I do not want to try and provoke and other of the Duca's funny turns. They are inevitably bloody in consequence.'

Aaaand breathe.

This problem is particularly marked at the beginning of the book, which is, you will agree, a particularly bad place for it to be marked. Although it eases off a bit as the plot (finally) picks up, the pacing as a whole remains awkward throughout. This isn't helped by shallow characterisation. The characters are painted in broad strokes but since they're all some variation on "courtier" (ruthless courtier, party courtier, naive courtier, hot courtier, woman courtier etc. etc.) and they all have extravagant Italianate titles, it's actually quite difficult to untangle them and their agendas. They all talk pretty much the same way and although they do have relationships with each other, it's hard to know why they think and act they way they do. Gawain, Lord d'Orlato and Xavier, Lord di Tuffatore are, apparently, in love but I never had any particular reason to believe in it or care about either the relationship or the inevitable shocking betrayal that accompanies it.

Actually since I've already spoilered this to oblivion and back, I may as well clarify. It turns that Gawain is the friendly neighbourhood serial killer, acting out of what he sees as being his "love" for Xavier, taking out those who threatened or inconvenienced his lover (handy). Their confrontation is genuinely arresting and dramatic, except it's got no context to it so it has no emotional resonance to it. Why does Gawain love Xavier enough to turn himself into a monster for the sake of it? And what on earth does Xavier see in Gawain?

This afflicts most of the characters in the book, although it seems less important for the others since they don't carry as much of the story. Essentially they're all cool but not interesting: little more than a parcel of bon mots and extravagant costuming. I know they're probably meant to be like that but it does leave the novel without any kind of emotional dimension. I think Xavier is meant to be the least psychotic of them and that we're maybe meant to like him, or at least be sufficiently invested him that his eventual fate is tragic ... but although I was sensible of the mechanics of said tragedy I didn't actually feel it.

This is not to say there's nothing to like about TPTWHE. There is good stuff in there. The city of Cittavecchio is trying very hard to be cool and, well, I have to admit it is pretty cool:

It's said ... that every night the Tattered King throws his cloak over the ancient and crumbling city, his constant lover and royal consort. Centuries ago ... the old Gods tried and failed to wash her iniquities away with the great deluge; she endured, half-drowned, half-dead, knee deep in silt water and floodwater, a sunken shadow of her Imperial past.

The whole brooding atmosphere of the book is excellent. And, despite having more than a whisper pretension about it, the Shakespeare / Eliot / tarot card motifs really contribute to it. Also Andrews writes well. I was rather taken with: "in his eyes, hysteria hovered like a solicitous relative, ready to take him by the arm and guide him into the gentle uplands of shrieking madness." And when it isn't bogging down in exposition, the rhythms of his dialogue are equally stylish:

'I have given a commitment to my brother ... and matters of policy must come before my own amusement.' 'It gratifies me nonetheless that you regard me as an amusement and not as a matter of policy...'

Unfortunately this isn't quite enough to pull TPTWHE together. It's a shame but a book I'd be willing to pay for is more than flair and imagination.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Self-Published

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Michal

at 00:52 on 2013-09-18This is an old article, but I'm gonna comment anyway 'cause that's how I roll.

I'm not sure if this restores my faith in conventional publishing as the article implies it should, since the book is, despite a shoddy cover and wandering plot, still apparently "well-written, imaginative, original and atmospheric." And this strikes me as a lot better than certain other debut novels that publishers have paid an advance for. I guess I'd want to know what the history behind this book was, if it was self-pubbed or vanity-pubbed from the get-go or if no one was interested in it or what, in that it obviously could have benefited from a professional editor or even the opinion of a good friend with an editing mind and the potential was there to make it a whole lot better. Or, in simpler terms: did Andrews simply release this book too early and should've worked on it more until he eventually found an agent, or should it have stayed in the trunk since no publisher would ever pick it up at all?

Mostly, it's a bit harsh to say "read this book if you don't pay for it" which seems to imply there some worth to the thing being printed in the first place, whereas large publishing houses have put out books where I really do wonder "what did any editor ever see in this thing?"

#Ferretbrain #Wardog #The Pearls That Were His Eyes #Ian Andrews #Self-published

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