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softtofustew · 4 years

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an odyssey | afterword

rating: T

pairing: Hwang Hyunjin/Han Jisung

summary: Somewhere in the galaxy of the Stella Primum, Lieutenant Han is the best fighter on his team, a real ace shooter, with five gold stars to show. Too bad Second Lieutenant Hwang is not only great at battling the Ordinem, he’s also got disgustingly perfect looks to match, and now Jisung’s stuck in the same spaceship with him for possibly the most impossible task of their lives. Or the one where a rivalry is brewed across the skies and stars, until Jisung realises what there is to flying beside Hyunjin on a mission to save the galaxy.

if you haven’t read it yet, read here.

this is an afterword to ‘an odyssey’, where i write about the origin of the story, the characters, and my struggles of writing :’)

(i) The Origin

I’ve had this work in my WIPs since, believe it or not, January of this year. I’ve had this idea for so, so long. I wrote it intermittently throughout this year, with a scene or two in September, then October.

Due to my exams, though, I couldn’t write as much as I wanted to. That’s why I only really started writing ‘an odyssey’ back in mid-November. The good thing was that I had more time to plan this out, because frankly, this is perhaps the heaviest fic I’ve written in terms of plot so far.

I can’t for the life of me remember where this story idea planted itself in my head. All I knew was that I like space AUs, I adore Hyunjin and Jisung’s friendship, and I love enemies to lovers. Realising there weren’t any fics out there that combined the three, I knew it was my time to shine. Or something.

(ii) The Plot

The plot was the trickiest to pull off. I’ve written an urban fantasy here and there, but I’m pretty sure if I reread them thoroughly, I’m bound to find a couple of plot holes.

There were a lot of elements to cover: the Prophecy. The five gems. The push-pull relationship between Jisung and Hyunjin. The journey to discovering the whereabouts of the last Gemma. The last boss fight with a Governor who could wield the Force. There was!!!! So!!!! Much!!!! Going!!!! On!!!!!

Perhaps if I reread ‘an odyssey’, I might find another plot hole or two; who knows? For now, though, I feel quite contented with this work of mine. Considering it’s my first time writing something as long as this (50K+ are you kidding me?), I feel this is a first step for me to continue expanding my horizons when it comes to writing, to continue to challenge myself to write something different, something bold. Something new.

(iii) The Characters

I rewatched the Two Kids Room and One Kid Room episodes so many times, over and over again. There’s a reason why this story is centred around Jisung and Hyunjin, and why it’s written from Jisung’s perspective.

Their relationship is, after all, something coherently interesting. They really said “enemies to friends but make it irl”. I guess I took that concept and sort of exaggerated the extent of their ‘hate’ for each other, which isn’t exactly hate to begin with. The further you read on, the more you’ll realise that they don’t exactly hate each other — they just got off on the wrong footing, and have never tried turning back to start over once more.

It’s written from Jisung’s perspective because personally, I wanted the story to be told from the eyes of someone who was prideful, who was eager and determined, and who wanted to show his worth to everyone else. I feel like perhaps I didn’t expand on characterising Jisung to the fullest advantage possible, though, which remains a slight regret of mine.

Another reason why I wanted this to be written from Jisung’s POV is because we can find out how Jisung feels about Hyunjin throughout the story. When he realises whose son Hyunjin is, he’s torn between wanting to pity Hyunjin and keeping things between them the same as they always have. (If I were in his position, though, I don’t know what I would have done lol.) It was hard to try and interpret his emotions, but there’s that.

Someone commented once asking if we’d ever get Hyunjin’s POV. Sadly, one of my biggest turn-offs is the switching of POVs in stories when it’s not entirely necessary haha. As much as I would want to know what Hyunjin is thinking when they’re arguing, or when they’re fighting, I like to keep on the suspension line. It gives you the feeling of immersing yourself as the Jisung in the story, of only seeing things from one perspective.

As for the other characters, there wasn’t enough time to expand on all of them (for example, I mentioned Seungmin several times throughout the story, but really, he speaks only once haha). And as your fellow StayDay, it was definitely fun for me to include a few members of Day6. (please don’t ask me why I thought of ‘PJ and Honey’ while writing. I was probably hungry.)

I don’t know if I’ll continue to expand on the characters in this same universe, but it would be fun to think of the other relationships, for example Chan and Felix, or Changbin with Minho and Seungmin. (someone please save the seungbinho tag!!!!!!)

As far as characterisation goes, I’ve still got so much to learn. For now, though, I hope you enjoyed the dynamics between the characters and how Jisung and Hyunjin learnt to grow within a span of six chapters.

(iv) The Writing Process

Granted, the writing bit was a little easier in the beginning, but as I delved myself deeper into the story, I found it harder and harder to express the emotions I wanted to deliver in the story. One of the hardest chapters for me to write by far was the last chapter. I wrote two versions of the last chapter, simply because I felt the first version was too lacklustre for the ending of such a long story haha.

I had a clear outline of my story, but I did end up extending it from the initial 5 chapters to 6. For the first time, though, I didn’t add any random elements to the story, unlike how i wrote this story last year haha. The lesson I’ve learnt is that I should ALWAYS have a brief outline of the plot — detailed enough to cover the entire story, but brief enough to give me some creative freedom mid-writing.

The excitement of writing honestly wore off near the last few chapters. I’ve realised the importance of reading unfinished works in this way. Writers really need some form of motivation to keep them writing their chaptered works. So if you’re one of the real ones who started reading this even before it was completed, kudos to you. I really appreciate it.

Overall, writing this was fun. Hopefully I don’t need to do this again though; I absolutely hate writing chaptered fics because of all the time and effort put into them. I’d much rather be a ‘One-Shot Hotshot’ lol.

(v) The End (?)

I left a bit of wondering for the readers in the last chapter. If Atkins was able to wield the Force despite the false pretence that there was no longer any Force-wielders left in the universe, how many more of them could there be?

That leaves an opening for me if I ever wish to return to this alternate universe sometime in the future. The Universe is ever-expanding, and so is our imagination.

(vi) The Inspiration

Obviously, I need to thank Star Wars. I also need to apologise because I absolutely butchered their universe. Fun fact: there was one huge plot hole I had to cover up halfway through writing.

If you’re observant, you might remember the scene where Hyunjin asks Jisung why they didn’t just jump into hyperspace to reach Ilsanis. That’s because I was watching an episode of The Mandalorian where the Mando was forced to fly a ship without a hyperdrive engine, and I almost freaked out right there in the middle of the living room realising how weird that would be if I left the issue unattended in my own work (yikes).

Long story short, I drew elements from the Star Wars universe and created a story of my own. I’ve been asked how I came up with the idea of the Prophecy. Frankly, I don’t know. My brain farts sometimes, I guess. Brain Farts = weird ideas that somehow make sense sometimes.

(vii) Lastly

If you have any more questions you’d like to ask (or plot holes to tell me about *shudders*), do leave me a question in my CC, or holler at me on Twitter (I’m hardly alive here on Tumblr haha). To anyone and everyone who has read ‘an odyssey’, I thank you.

This year has been a funky year, and even worse, it’s the year I had to take my IGCSEs. Writing has always been a way for me to create my own universe and release my tension and emotions, so not being able to write as much as I used to was a little tough.

Writing will continue to be a medium for me to express my emotions and my thoughts while creating stories of my own, so simply by giving my fics a read, you’ve already fuelled my reason to continue to write. Thank you for all the support in ‘an odyssey’!

(why did i write this entire monologue like i’m giving a speech at the Oscars or something lol im so dramatic :”))

#mycommentary

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hetalia-pjo-au-hub · 4 years

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Welcome to the APH Percy Jackson AU!

INTRO

Hello! Welcome to the APH PJO AU. We’re the creators, Wonder and Theo, and this is our first time running an au. You may know us from our involvement in the My Heta Academia AU as the muns of ask-hetaaca-nyoprussia and ask-hetaaca-nyogermany, as well as many others. Before we ramble about us, this is what the au is about:

The APH PJO AU is an ask blog based group run by us (Wonder and Theo) that takes place in the Percy Jackson Universe at Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter where the countries are mortal demigods instead.

In this AU, there are endless possibilities for which godly parent your muse has! This means that your muse can’t be a god or a normal human. This also means that your character cannot be the oracle; and only a second muse can be a satyr.

The Hunters of Artemis are available! They are the only characters that can be either demigods or just plain mortal.

Hera, Artemis, and Hestia are not on the table for being godly parents. Hera won’t have relations outside of her marriage, and Artemis and Hestia are maiden goddesses*

*Athena is also a maiden goddess, but her children come out of her head

The Major Gods and Goddesses**

I. Zeus/Jupiter

-Zeus is the god of the sky, lightning and the thunder in Ancient Greek religion and legends, and ruler of all the gods on Mount Olympus. Zeus is the sixth child of Cronos and Rhea, king and queen of the Titans.

II. Hera/Juno

-Hera is the Queen of the Gods and is the wife and sister of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon. She is known for being the Goddess of Marriage & Birth. Despite being the Goddess of Marriage, she was known to be jealous and vengeful towards the many lovers and offspring of her husband Zeus.

III. Poseidon/Neptune

-Poseidon was god of the sea, earthquakes, storms, and horses and is considered one of the most bad-tempered, moody and greedy Olympian gods. He was known to be vengeful when insulted. He is the son of Cronus and Rhea and was swallowed by his father along with Hades, Demeter, Hestia and Hera.

IV. Demeter/Ceres

-Demeter is the goddess of the harvest and presides over grains and the fertility of the earth. Although she was most often referred to as the goddess of the harvest, she was also goddess of sacred law and the cycle of life and death.

V. Ares/Mars

-Ares is the Greek god of war. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, the son of Zeus and Hera. In Greek literature, he often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality, in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena, whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and generalship.

VI. Athena/Minerva

-Athena is the Olympian goddess of wisdom and war and the adored patroness of the city of Athens. A virgin deity, she was also – somewhat paradoxically – associated with peace and handicrafts, especially spinning and weaving. Majestic and stern, Athena surpassed everybody in both of her main domains.

VII. Apollo/Apollo

-Apollo is a god in Greek mythology, and one of the Twelve Olympians. He is the son of Zeus and Leto and the twin brother of Artemis. He is the god of healing, medicine, archery, music, poetry and the sun. He is the leader of the Muses. He also is a god of prophecy, and his Oracle at Delphi is very important.

VIII. Artemis/Diana (Hunters of Artemis)

-Artemis was the Greek goddess of hunting, wild nature, and chastity. The daughter of Zeus and sister of Apollo, Artemis was regarded as a patron of girls and young women and a protectress during childbirth

IX. Hephaestus/Vulcan

-Hephaestus was the god of fire, metalworking, stone masonry, forges and the art of sculpture. He was the son of Zeus and Hera and married to Aphrodite by Zeus to prevent a war of the gods fighting for her hand. He was a smithing god, making all of the weapons for Olympus and acting as a blacksmith for the gods.

X. Aphrodite/Venus

-Aphrodite is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess Venus. Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans.

XI. Hermes/Mercury

-Hermes is a deity in ancient Greek religion and mythology. Hermes is considered the herald of the gods, as well as the protector of human heralds, travellers, thieves, merchants, and orators. He is able to move quickly and freely between the worlds of the mortal and the divine, aided by his winged sandals. Hermes plays the role of the psychopomp or "soul guide" — a conductor of souls into the afterlife.

XII. Dionysus/Bacchus

-Dionysus was the ancient Greek god of wine, winemaking, grape cultivation, fertility, ritual madness, theater, and religious ecstasy. His Roman name was Bacchus. He may have been worshiped as early as 1500-11000 BCE by Mycenean Greeks.

XIII. Hades/Pluto

-Hades, in the ancient Greek religion and myth, is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although the last son that was regurgitated by his father.

XIV. Iris/Iris

-Iris, in Greek mythology, the personification of the rainbow and (in Homer's Iliad, for example) a messenger of the gods. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, she was the daughter of Thaumas and the ocean nymph Electra.

XV. Hypnos/Somnus

-Hypnos, Latin Somnus, Greco-Roman god of sleep. Hypnos was the son of Nyx (Night) and the twin brother of Thanatos (Death).

XVI. Nemesis/Nemesis

-In ancient Greek religion, Nemesis, also called Rhamnousia or Rhamnusia ("the goddess of Rhamnous"), is the goddess who enacts retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods).

XVII. Nike/Victoria

-Nike, in ancient Greek religion, the goddess of victory, daughter of the giant Pallas and of the infernal River Styx.

XVIII. Hebe/Juventas

-Hebe in ancient Greek religion, is the goddess of youth or the prime of life (Roman equivalent: Juventas). She is the daughter of Zeus and his older sister, Hera.

XIX. Tyche/Fortuna

-Tyche, in Greek religion, the goddess of chance, with whom the Roman Fortuna was later identified; a capricious dispenser of good and ill fortune. The Greek poet Hesiod called her the daughter of the Titan Oceanus and his consort Tethys; other writers attributed her fatherhood to Zeus, the supreme god.

XX. Hecate/Trivia

-Hecate or Hekate is a goddess in ancient Greek religion and mythology, most often shown holding a pair of torches or a key and in later periods depicted in triple form. She is variously associated with crossroads, entrance-ways, night, light, magic, witchcraft, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, ghosts, necromancy, and sorcery.

**There are plenty of minor gods, and we are willing to work with muses that are children of the minor gods but please try to stick to the main 20 we have listed

WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS TO BE PART OF THIS AU?

- You must apply according to the application form

-You have to follow the set rules

-You need to be a writer and/or an artist

-You need to have at least one visual reference of your muse. This does not have to be good or in the application, but it does have to be somewhere on the blog.

-You don’t have to be fluent in English, just decent enough to be understandable, as most interactions will he in English.

APPLICATIONS

There will be announcements as to whether or not applications are being accepted. The applications are to be submitted before creating a blog. The application form can be found here.

FAQ

“Can I join even if I’m not that good of an artist/writer/not that popular?” Absolutely! Your skill level and popularity don’t matter, just follow the rules and have fun!

“Can I apply a second time if I wasn’t accepted in the first application phase?” Yes, and we encourage you to do that!

“Is it possible to be part of this au even if I don’t know much/anything about Percy Jackson?” You can join even if you know nothing about the series, just please don’t appropriate the gods.

“Can I have two muses?” Yes, but you can only apply for one at a time, and have to have been part of the au for at least a month before getting a second muse.

“Is Discord needed?” No, but it is recommended as it makes interactions and event planning easier.

“Can I apply even if I know I will not be able to update regularly?” Yes, but update at least once a month. Real life comes first, but if something major comes up, talk to one of the mods. We will try to be understanding.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

It's important to mention that there are people who do follow/work/worship these gods, and that while this is an AU, some Pagan/Wiccan followers may not be too keen on how gods are presented in the PJO series. Please be respectful of their beliefs, and listen if they wish to further educate you. Please make sure that you do your own research into modern practices and interpretations as well, it is one thing to understand ancient practice and mythology, but another to understand modern practice. There are many resources and people online more than willing to help educate, please take advantage of that. And please understand that media portrays the gods and goddesses in ways that are not completely accurate and it is best to be somewhat critical when enjoying media such as PJO, Lore Olympus, Marvel, etc.. Followers of the pantheons should also understand that not everyone knows what you know, and to understand that this is an AU and does not reflect the true beliefs and practices one may come to learn and practice under their own deity work. Please be gentle and kind when correcting or educating those who are not practicing. This AU is not meant to be a completely realistic and accurate interpretation of the pantheon(s) and some wiggle room is acceptable when interpreting. Please only correct and educate if it is a common mistake. Please think critically before you jump in to correct, and remember that not everyone is involved on quite an intimate level of knowledge.

#auinformation #intropost #mod theo #mod wonder

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nightmaretyrantvantas · 6 years

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So I have a rant and a half build up of rambling about my very first Percy Jackson Oc Elysia and I need to let it spill so all of you get to hear this info dump about her and my feels

Im putting a trigger warning here I made her when I first read the whole series a few years back. Her backstory isnt the happiest. So im going to put trigger warnings for mentions of (but not going into detail of) abuse, self harm, suicidal thoughts, so if you cant handle mentions of that please dont read this I dont want to upset you

Anyways I have years of work into this bab of mine and I need to get it all out

Also An important thing to note is the timeline of her(and my other ocs) stories. Basically it kinda takes place...as if Trials of Apollo didnt happen?? Sorta? I made her before it ever came out and set her story after Blood of Olympus before trials of apollo was announced so its basically diverges after Blood of Olympus...if that makes sense...I hope it does.

So basically....At the start of her story Elysia is 13 Nico is 16(from what I remember its been about two years since I read the books so please forgive me)

Ok this might jump around alot because im kinda word vomiting and info dumping about her so if something doesnt make sense please feel free to ask me to clarify I love to

OK SO MY BAB

So her full name is Elysia Angela Melina and shes a Daughter of Hades. At the start when she gets to camp shes 13.

Im going to attatch two pictures ive drawn of her to the post here

This is her with a referrence sheet of her at 13-14 and the digital picture is one of her at the present time that I tend to write about her at age 16.

So Elysia doesnt have things easy. She comes from an abusive household that really fucked her up mentally and emotionally before she got to camp. She ran away at 13 after getting kicked out of her sixth or seventh school and thigs got ugly at home. Stuff happened and she was brought to camp(im refining and probably going to redo how that happens) and well...she doesnt exactly fit in.

Shes on the shorter side for her age and shes lanky and skinny(partially from both skipping meals and sometimes only eating when she can sneak food at home) and she comes onto the scene wearing oversized hand me downs in all dark colors and long sleeves thats got a clear fearful and insecure posture and stance and is always trying to blending into the background and hide from being noticed. Shes got a thick mane of not very well cared for black hair and eyes so dark in color they look completely black, sometimes even in the light with pretty dark bags under them highlighted by really really too pale skin. So it makes her an easy target to be bullied ya know? But she silently takes it like she always does while clutching this beat up little backpack she ran away with as shes put in the Hermes cabin until she’s claimed(which has a 1-3 day delay depending on the god, because a lot of kids come to camp especially at the start of summer)

When she gets claimed she freaks out and panics because everyone is staring at her and shes suddenly the center of attention because it happened in the middle of the campfire.

So begins the bonding with her big brother.

Shes got alot of inner turmoils and traumas and problems and inner demons and as a result she has undiagnosed anxiety disorders, depression, and some PTSD along with a very low amount of self-esteem and confidence in herself from the ordeals of before reaching camp. Though once shes at camp and she eventually settles in she starts recovering bit by bit. She slowly gets close with nico(it starts kinda awkward for both of them and she comes off really quiet and shy and terrified of sudden movement so its a little hard but they overcome it)

By the end of her first year at camp shes gotten close to Nico but has a really hard time making friends with other campers her own age so she ends up sticking close to Nico and following him like his shadow because theres a period of time that heś the only person Elysia feels even remotely safe and comfortable around. And as a result at first she spends alot more time with Nico’s friends and various members of the Big Seven and she gets close to them as well(more to her siblings at first but she gets there shes a nervous bean give her time)

Though in the middle of that first year she meets a girl that soon becomes one of her best and closest friends, a daughter of Hephaestus named Karter Becks(the second oc for this fandom I made) and I’ll get to more about their friendship later.

So by the second year at camp shes settled in a little, shes decidedly become a year-rounder because she would rather be eaten by a harpy than go back to “that horrible place”as she dubs it(not to mention its very very dangerous for her outside of camp)

More things about Elysia!!!

At thirteen she had absolutely NO control of reign of her abilities. She couldnt raise or summon the dead, her shadow travel was horribly spotty and half the time she couldnt even do so correctly and her most experience with spirits is that she can sense them and she can hear and speak to them but she cant really see them( they appear as really really blurry shapes that hurt her eyes to look at for too long) of course she beats herself up over this lack of skill, mostly because she(stupidly but understandably) compares her lack of teaching and training and beginner skill level to Nico’s at the time current skill level. Yeah its dumb and yeah in the back of her mind where her common sense is she realizes this but she cant stop herself from doing so, just like she unfairly to herself compares her sword fighting skill to older campers that have been there longer.

She eventually gets her own sword of Stygian Iron, because no matter what else she tries no other swords feel...right to her. They’re always too heavy or too light too awkward to hold dont work right with her swings or just dont feel right to her so at some point shes overthinking herself to death about it and beating herself up for being too picky when Karter suggests innocently that she tries swinging around her brother’s sword. “After all Elys, whats the worst that would happen, that it feels too heavy?”

But what ends up happening is that though its too heavy for her, it still feels...right. The best way to describe it is that she feels more connected to her powers and to herself in a way. After hearing that she gets her own of Stygian iron and its...perfect to her. Its not too heavy on her wrist or too light to wield. And afterwards she actually starts getting some more confidence which helps her improve a little faster than before.

Once Elysia is fully apart of camp life it takes a long time for it to fully click that her belongings...are hers and her likes and interests and likes are respected. They wont get taken away or threatened, she doesnt have to hide what she likes or pretend she doesnt like one thing or another. She’s free to be her own person for the first time in her life and she struggles for awhile to adjust to that and accept it. Those struggles result in alot of scattered breakdowns and even one or two...relaspes that for once in her life she has a support system of her half brother and half sister, his friends, her two close friends, and chiron to catch her and help her back to her feet. She has people to lean on and depend on and not have to be afraid of and this helps alot into her recovery and acceptance of herself and her mental illnesses. It takes her two of the three years shes been at camp for her to get at the better place shes at when shes 16, where she now has a small group of good friends, shes managed to bring up some of her self-esteem and self confidence, shes been clean for a year and shes in therapy for her PTSD and depression and shes opened up more to those around her and shes not the terrified jumps at her own shadow kid but a more quiet but kindhearted and sometimes even giggly teen whose slowly getting her life back together with plans for the future.

But on the topic of things she likes...

This girl loves-no ADORES animals, all kinds mythical or not. She didnt show it at first but she was so SOOOO excited when she realized the camp had Pegasi even though she tried to keep a distance from them because she realized she made them nervous. Oh man you shouldve SEEN her when Chiron took a group of campers her age into the woods and they caught a glimpse of a passing through unicorn. She was giddy about it for DAYS guys. She just...she has so much love and admiration and excitement for animals its so cute you guys.

Elysia also loves(ironically) learning about Mythology, from all over the world. Its her special interest and when she finds and buys a old broken touch screen phone(or one of those touch screen i-pod or something) and gets Karter to fiddle with it and (eventually after shenanigan filled misadventures of trying to upgrade it to not be detected by monsters and fix the cracked screen) she fills that thing to the brim of downloaded auidobooks of different mythologies as she can and she listens to them when doing schoolwork(she ends up having do be “homeschool” by online classes because things just do not go right when trying to attend schools outside of the protected borders)

She also loves anything soft. Especially stuffed animals. Oh my god she loves stuffed animals, well into her teens. She had one she managed to bring with her to camp that is her ultimate comfort object, a older beat up and been through a life time of ringers and back stuffed husky doll that she cherishes and takes care of like one might take care of gold. Over time (once they found out her birthday--October 5th) she starts getting stuffed animals as presents or just even as little splurges on herself . She also loves soft blankets soft clothes soft anything. She loves the texture and feel of it and it makes her happy.

She’s an aspiring writer and songwriter and can even sing a little but she has no confidence in her ability in any of those. But she has boxes and piles of notebooks and journals filled with little cartoony doodles and pages upon pages of stories and songs shes been writing for years now

Fun fact during her first year at camp Percy and Annabeth dropped by for a visit during their winter break to visit friends and I have this whole little story I might post about hoe when Percy’s walking to go meet someone he finds Elysia sitting alone at the beach doodling animals in her journal and he goes up to her(shes sitting all curled up so at a distance it probably looked like she was crying or something) to see if shes ok and because Nico had been telling him about her via iris messages and updates since she got there but he didnt get to meet her during the summer(stuff happened and she kinda hid from alot of people) but he finds her and he sits with her(after announcing his presence because Nico has told him about her being very jumpy and easily scared and that at that point hes the only one she really opens up to so dont take offense to it) and they sit for a bit and Percy asks her about her doodles and she just, for the first time like ever, she starts to open up because she gets so freaking excited and hyper about it that she just starts babbling away about her doodles and the animals of them and then about animals in general and she goes on this whole, like 30-40 minute info dump/ rant about them complete with diverting tangent questions that she answers herself before continuing with this just lit up and openly happy and ecstatic expression as she goes on and on while hes sitting there just listening to her and smiling down at her partly nostalgically because at that moment she reminds him so much of how Nico was when he first met him and you got him started on Mythomagic and that shes being so open about her excitement and then she looks at him and realizing what she was doing and she shuts herself up now panicking about how much she just word vomited on her big brother’s friend and more importantly this huge shot demigod Son of Poseidon whose saved the world not once but TWICE and who is probably very busy too busy to be hanging around with her--you get the idea of her panicking until Percy slowly reaches out his hand and she nods to let him know its ok and he ruffles her hair and tells her its ok he liked listening to her and holy shit I went on a tangent about that.

She also has alot of sweet bonding moments with Nico and Hazel because they teach her about having a loving and caring family and what thats like and its really sweet and cute and emotional

Did I mention she likes taking Nico’s shirts? Oh yeah she likes “borrowing” Nico’s shirts, and some of his jackets, mostly t-shirt and long sleeved shirts because once they get close his scent and presence really relaxes her nerves if she gets anxious. Of course its not stealing, its just borrowing and eventually giving back on laundry days...or he just lends it to her without being fully aware of it. Its cute because shes so short that they end up really big on her and she loves flapping the sleeves and the feeling of being engulfed in the safety of his presence without him even being there

ANYWAY COUGH COUGH

uhhhhhhh....yeah thats alot about her huh I think i’ll leave you all with that to take it and make sense of and I might make a part two(or you guys can ask about her too)

and yeeeeeeeeeee thats my PJO oc Elysia Melina!!

@phantommoonpeople

@kid-crashed

@demidorks (im sorry if im bothering you by tagging you youre one of the pjo blogs I follow and one of my favorites)

#percy jackson #percy jackson oc #percy jackon and the olympians #my oc #oc info #oc introduction #i guess #my art #my artwork #art wips #pjo #pjoverse #tw abuse #tw self harm mention #tw suicidal thoughts mention

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casualarsonist · 6 years

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Shorties - Spider-Man (PS4)

Take one part Arkham City, one part Watch Dogs 2, one part Grand Theft Auto IV. Blend well. Bake for roughly two years, and you’ve got Spiderman for PS4. Is it a good game? Yes. Is it a great game? Possibly. Does it do a single thing that hasn’t been done before? Not a damn one. But if you consider Marvel’s habit of releasing reasonably consistent, enjoyable films that lack a single original bone in their body, you can quite clearly see the cloth from which Spider-Man has been cut. For what it’s worth I enjoyed this game far more than I enjoy any of their movies, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game itself is hugely derivative. There’s not going to be a lot to this experience that you won’t have indulged elsewhere, and perhaps enjoyed more, but I don’t think that should overshadow all the things Spider-Man gets right.

The Webbed One is one of the biggest comic book characters that I’ve never had a particular interest in, and despite being one of Marvel’s most well-known superheroes, he seems to be one of the only main-line Marvel icons that hasn’t been treated particularly well by media outside the comics. His movies are largely tat, the TV shows largely forgettable, and his games range from fairly good to outright poor. I’m not sure what it is - the difficult balance of tone, or his rather inconsistent and sometimes goofy skills, but the man in the bright red leotard has always come off more a figure of ridicule than a lot of his contemporaries. What Spider-Man the 2018 game shows us is that, when given a decent writer, and the technology to properly bring to life his abilities, Peter Parker becomes quite a thrilling character to watch. Yeah, he’s a goofball whose jokes are a little too in-your-face, and yeah most of his emotional turmoil is wrought upon himself by his own juvenile emotionality, but he’s so...different...from so many of the others. He’s the antithesis of Batman with his youth and his eternal light-heartedness. He’s brilliant like Tony Stark, but completely lacks the means to finance his pursuits, and regularly suffers from the fact that saving the city is pro-bono work. He LOVES his hometown, and unlike many superheroes who protect primarily out of a sense of duty, he does it out of a genuine adoration for the city he lives in, and the people in it. And this is all translated so well by the game - through the writing, through the acting, and through the mechanics. Swooping around New York City is an absolute joy - I think I only fast traveled a handful of times, and only because you get an achievement for doing so. NYC is large, but not so large that webslinging becomes cumbersome, and the act itself is so fun, especially as you get a hang of his skills, that the act of *traveling* becomes one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. That’s unheard of in an open world game.

On top of that, Peter and his family and colleagues are, for the largest part, a well-rounded and likable group of people. Even the villains - well-known or otherwise - are entertaining to witness, despite only having a handful of scenes cumulatively. Taking place eight years after taking on the Spider-Mantle (ayyyy), Peter works in a lab with his mentor Otto Octavius. In this incarnation, Otto is a brilliant scientist, but stricken by a degenerative motor neuron disorder. This inspires his tireless and dedicated efforts to develop dextrous artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought - not ‘as good’ as real limbs, but better. When Otto’s former friend and now-rival Norman Osborn confiscates some of Otto’s work and sets him back at square one, Otto is struck by a frustrated vengeance that precipitates his downfall. It’s a compelling story, and a superbly acted and animated one to boot. The characters look photorealistic a times, and together with some excellent performances from skilled voice actors, including that of prolific Spider-Man voice actor Yuri Lowenthal, the stories of the characters are brought to life in as true a fashion as any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. You might not notice as you fly around the world, but many of the lines delivered by Lowenthal have been recorded twice - once for when you’re standing around while he delivers them, and once for when Spider-Man is exerting himself. Yeah, they recorded the dialogue twice, so that it would sound different if Spider-Man is in transit. It’s something they didn’t need to do, but once you notice it, you realise that you couldn’t live without it. Details like this indicate a serious dedication on the part of the creative team to make a game that is greater than the sum of its parts, which is really one of the main reasons Spider-Man lives to be a success story rather than a disappointing footnote.

It cannot be understated how derivative it is - Horizon: Zero Dawn caught flack for failing to reinvent the wheel, and yet Spider-Man has garnered nothing but praise despite being a far-greater offender when it comes to regurgitating cliche mechanics. Offsetting this, however, is the fact that it makes an effort to scatter its content - releasing it upon the player piecemeal, rather than vomiting markers all over the map from the get-go like the Assassin’s Creed series. It takes a break every couple of story missions in order to let the player indulge the side content, and when all that side content is done, it won’t give you more until you complete the next few missions. This simple factor makes the environment of Spider-Man feel as if it’s responding to the story, rather than the story simply occurring within the environment, and this ties the entire experience - gameplay and mechanics - together as one long reciprocal arc as opposed to leaving it feeling like the static sandbox that it could otherwise have easily turned into. But the same ol’ fatigue did set in once or twice during my 20-odd hours of play. The game is riddled with tired open-world sandbox tropes that might have killed it, had they not just been ever-so-slightly tweaked in the way that they have been.

And I suppose that this goes to show just how little effort it can take to separate a tired release from a lauded one. Spider-Man does have a lot more going for it than this one thing - the writing, visuals, and mechanics, as mentioned, are all top-notch for the most part - but had the rest of the game more closely mirrored some of the more lackluster open-world games, then it would almost certainly have taken the entire product down a few notches on everyone’s list. In short, Spider-Man for PS4 is no game-changer, and if you’re even the slightest bit over the typical open-world formula, then you’ll feel the familiar pangs of weariness at certain times, but these feelings appear only as a shadow of what they might otherwise have been. The game’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and while the best of the Arkham series still trumps this game in terms of overall quality and relevance in pushing forwards the superhero genre, you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here.

8/10

#spider-man #marvel #ps4 #playstation 4 #video games #review #insomniac games #comic book #superhero #doc ock #rhino #scorpion #electro #mr negative

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nightmareonfilmstreet · 6 years

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GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH – A Retrospective Interview with Brain Gremlin

First, keep them out of bright light—especially sunlight! It’ll kill ‘em. Second, don’t give them water. Not even to drink! And third, the most important rule of them all, one you must never forget. No matter how much they cry. No matter how much they beg. NEVER feed them after midnight!

These three vague yet specific rules governed a new breed of movie monster whose impact would send shock-waves through Hollywood. This seemingly cuddly creature would rise from the ranks of B-movie monsters to find its way into multiplexes, toy stores, and our hearts. That creature was called a Mogwai and the movie was 1984’s Gremlins. It was a genre blending Christmas-horror-dark-family-comedy whose mismatched pieces came together so seamlessly that Dr. Frankenstein himself would have been jealous. Joe Dante (The Howling), Chris Columbus (The Goonies), and Steven Spielberg (Duh) teamed up to tell the story of a small town overrun by gremlins after a blundering inventor gifts a Mogwai named Gizmo to his son Billy for Christmas. Audiences were delighted and disgusted. They eagerly lined up to gut their wallets and disembowel their purses for any trite bit of plastic with Gizmo’s face on it. The studio wanted a sequel.

After an agonizing six-year wait, Warner Bros. finally got their wish. Gremlins 2: The New Batch hit theaters on June 15th, 1990 and fans relished in a sequel like none they had ever seen before (and will probably ever see again). Raising the stakes, Billy (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates) leave their small town and move to New York City to work in Clamp Tower, the automated office building of the future. After Gizmo winds up in Clamp Tower’s genetics lab, chaos reigns throughout the malfunctioning superstructure. Like a cyclone on a fishing line, the film is a masterfully crafted frenzy of satirical in-jokes, social commentary, and outlandish characters. The studio, however, was not so enthused.

To celebrate this triumphant marvel of zany anarchic chaos, we sat down with one of the film’s stars, Brain Gremlin, to gain some insight into the box office blunder and cult phenomenon that is Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Mockbuster Beginnings

NIGHTMARE ON FILM STREET: Thank you so much for joining us today, Brain.

BRAIN GREMLIN: Think nothing of it, the pleasure is all mine.

NOFS: Before diving head first into Gremlins 2: The New Batch, I’d like to set the stage and touch briefly on the first film. I understand Spielberg and Dante’s relationship didn’t start on a high note.

BRAIN: It is a bit of an irregularity that friendship develops from artistic larceny. I suspect Steven was first acquainted with Joseph’s attempts at cinema after Roger Corman hired him to direct that bottom-feeding horror film Piranha. It was a flagrant attempt to capitalize on Steven’s film Jaws and everyone knew it. Universal Studios undoubtedly knew it. If memory serves there may have even been a cease and desist. Steven, being the magnanimous man he is, watched Piranha and was moved to benefaction, and the film moved forward undeterred.

NOFS: From such a rocky start, how did the two come to work together?

BRAIN: Well, imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Also I believe Steven saw something in the fledgling director. After having sent him Chris Columbus’s Gremlins script, Steven also invited Joseph to direct a segment of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie. The man’s generosity is unparalleled. As you know Gremlins was an unprecedented success and gave Joseph’s career a real shot in the arm. It grossed close to 150 million domestically against an 11 million dollar budget. And that isn’t even taking into consideration the film’s inexplicable licensing potential. Naturally, talk of a sequel commenced immediately.

NOFS: Why then do you think it took Warner Bros. so long to produce a sequel?

BRAIN: Despite my antipathetic opinions toward him, Joseph Dante is an artist. He had little interest in rehashing his own work. He and Steven had both received scripts but declined due to their sheer redundancy. It wasn’t until a chance encounter years later, truly an act of providence, when Joseph ran into Terry Semel, then president of Warner Bros. Studios, on the studio lot. The man must have radiated desperation. With the promise of a new Gremlins film by the following summer, Joseph was given a sizable budget and full creative freedom. But ne’er the company man, Joseph would prove Terry’s confidence to be misplaced.

NOFS: You don’t think Dante was right for the job?

BRAIN: As I said, Joseph is an artist, but he is also an anarchist with little respect for convention. A saboteur. The sequel was a Trojan Horse from its inception. Gremlins 2 was to eliminate any possibility of a Gremlins 3. He and his screenwriting cohort, Charlie Haas, masterminded the demise of a budding franchise. The two had met on the 1979 film Over the Edge and Joseph obviously had an immediate affinity for Charles. In Twilight Zone: The Movie he named the character Charlie after his beloved chum.

Gremlins on Broadway

NOFS: I understand it was Charlie Haas’s idea to set the film in New York. How was filming in the Big Apple?

BRAIN: The studio was apprehensive about setting the film in New York City. They expected it would be quite costly. As a result, only three days of shooting actually took place in the city. Filming began in Times Square on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. A dreadful bit of scheduling. Some of the exteriors of Clamp Tower were filmed at Park Avenue and 40th Street while the opening aerial footage of the city was pilfered directly from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

NOFS: If not New York, where did they shoot the rest of the film?

BRAIN: For a contributing writer at a film news source, there are some alarming gaps in your knowledge of the filmmaking process. Gremlins 2: The New Batch was filmed on a studio set. Set 15 at Warner Bros. Studios to be exact. Jim Spencer designed the interiors of Clamp Tower and really went above and beyond. The set featured functioning elevators and fully stocked retail stores. He even built a portion of the exterior of the building on set. It was truly a marvel to behold.

NOFS: Joe Dante has disclosed in interviews that 1984’s Gremlins was incredibly challenging to make and those difficulties were a large part of why he was reluctant to make a sequel. Would you say his concerns were validated?

BRAIN: Joseph approached making Gremlins 2 with the wisdom of experience. When working simultaneously with human and gremlin actors, problems can arise. I’m all for peace and harmony but some cultural gaps are just more difficult to bridge. We’re not exactly cut from the same cloth. We’re hardly the same material. With this in mind, Joseph filmed all the scenes with human actors first and then spent the remaining six weeks of production filming us gremlin actors. The most arduous scene to film was undoubtedly Gizmo’s dance number. To say he has two left feet would be an understatement. To make matters worse, once the ineffectual furball finally executed the number we learned that Billy Idol wasn’t going to grant us permission to use his tune. Thankfully, a Fats Domino number with an identical rhythm was found and Gizmo’s efforts, although pathetic, were not in vain.

NOFS: While things went a little more smoothly during the filming process, I understand the writers did not share that good fortune.

BRAIN: Joseph and Charles endured weeks of misery locked in an office as they tried to liberate themselves from the corner they had dim-wittedly written themselves into. They had planned a finale where the heroic humans would fill Clamp Tower with wet cement, trapping all the gremlins. This proved to be too expensive and the two were swiftly returned to the drawing board. The climactic scene as it appears in the final film is much more satisfying than previous iterations. The ending also further utilizes Electricity Gremlin, a first-rate character whose role up until that point had been on the chopping block.

NOFS: Famous special effects artist Rick Baker was brought on board to lend his talents and I understand he also had input on the script.

BRAIN: Chris Walas helmed the special effects department in the first film but had a scheduling conflict as he was directing another sequel, The Fly II. Rick Baker was offered the job but turned it down. To further entice the creative genius, the Slice-o-Life Genetics Lab subplot was added to the film. This gave Rick much more creative freedom and essentially the ability to alter the story through the introduction of new characters. His inclusion in the film was the impetus that essentially launched my acting career. We were tremendously appreciative of his work. Joseph was too, although he had a strange way of showing it. Octoman, Rick’s first film, appears as an in-joke during a broadcast of Grandpa Fred’s horror TV show.

NOFS: The Slice-o-Life Genetics Lab is without a doubt an essential component of the film and it’s in the lab that we meet Dr. Catheter, played by Christopher Lee. What was it like working with the horror legend?

BRAIN: Working with Christopher was a delight and a true honor. The poor boy was indeed unprepared for the degree of adoration he received from the cast and crew. Upon the completion of his final scene, to celebrate his 200th film, a small party was thrown in his honor. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house as all involved lined up to shake the hand of a true professional. I had the pleasure of filming one scene with Christopher, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde transformation that births my character’s superior intellect. Sadly Christopher’s genetic transformation into Elvis Presley was cut before it even touched celluloid.

A Star is Genetically Engineered

NOFS: Your role is by far one of the most memorable in the film, can you tell us a little bit about the character you play?

BRAIN: Well, I essentially play myself. Go ahead, lump me in with your Fred Astaires and Bill Murrays. My character though, unlike other one-note trumpeteers, has an agenda. I recognize the potential of my race and believe we deserve more. I plan to lead my deranged brethren out from the seductive trappings of savagery to attain all the plentiful riches civilization has to offer.

NOFS: In the film we’re introduced to our first female gremlin who falls in love with Forster, a human character played by Robert Picardo. How do you feel about interspecies relationships?

BRAIN: Yes, Girl Gremlin is a truly bewitching vision of elegance. Her musical send up of Dames was inspired. On the topic of interspecies relationships, we intellectuals are a forward thinking lot. As far as I’m concerned the film has a happy ending, demonstrating the resolute tenacity of true love.

NOFS: You have a musical number as well, right?

BRAIN: Yes, an apropos tune by Frank Sinatra. It appears towards the end of the film just before little Zachery Galligan’s character unleashes his genocidal rage.

NOFS: There are a number of spectacular gremlin deaths throughout the film but the climax really manages to pack them in, including a hilarious Wizard of OZ reference. Who comes up with all these great deaths?

BRAIN: I also enjoyed the Wicked Witch death. The appearance of Lon Chaney’s Phantom complete with drop focus as he approaches the camera had me chuckling as well. The answer to your question, however, is everyone. Similarly to the first film, a morbid bit of paper scarred the set where cast and crew would scrawl their sick suggestions for gremlin death. We loathed that sheet of paper.

NOFS: Gizmo also has his fair share of torturous scenes in the film.

BRAIN: And you can bet they all made it onto my highlight reel. Gizmo embarks upon a heroes journey where he must rise to the challenge and become a warrior. He predictably fails and must rely on his human companions to shield him from harm.

NOFS: I understand many gremlin scenes were cut from the film?

BRAIN: Steven had final cut and found the film to be unbalanced. He said there were too many gremlin scenes. I’m all for equality but how many films have you seen with an entirely gremlin cast? No, don’t even bother. The answer is NONE!

Satirical Genius

[At this point in the interview Brain was becoming increasingly agitated and I had begun to fear for my safety. The question regarding gremlin scenes being cut from the film seemed to set him off. Suddenly his sharp teeth became more apparent to me as he spoke and he had a maniacal glint in his eye.]

NOFS: Let’s talk about the film’s tone. It has a cartoonish quality and even starts with a Looney Tunes cartoon.

BRAIN: Joseph grew up watching anarchic cartoons by the likes of Frank Tashlin. He applauded their irreverent lack of convention and aspired to sustain that restrained chaos throughout the film. Transcendent rebellion and subversion of popular culture were his objectives but along the way he took a wrong turn. He became the thing he sought to destroy. Joseph had become a part of popular culture. Like the man who learns he can never truly return home, he must burn it down.

NOFS: Perhaps we should shift gears a little and discuss a lighter topic. Let’s talk about cable TV and frozen yogurt.

BRAIN: Oh no, [Brain chuckles] you can’t pull the wool over these reptilian eyes. This is the dreaded prophecy question. For the sake of good sportsmanship, I’ll take the bait. Gremlins 2 has been praised for its prophetic satire of popular culture. Concepts that were conceived as jokes are now accepted norms of modern society. Some of your younger readers may not bat an eyelash at the idea of an entire channel devoted to cooking, but to audiences in 1990 it would have been comical, if not grotesque. The intent was to provide a gross exaggeration in order to highlight the excesses of the medium.

NOFS: Dante didn’t just poke fun at popular culture in general, he takes a few jabs at his own work.

BRAIN: Joseph’s self awareness is an admirable trait to be sure. He and Charles shine a light on the sheer absurdity of the supposed “cardinal rules” of rearing Mogwai as Zach’s character does his best to explain them to a skeptical audience in the building’s control room. Phoebe’s traumatic memory of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is a call back to her laughably tragic Yuletide tale from the first film. References to Joseph’s other work crop up from time to time as well. Vectorscope Labs from the film Innerspace makes an appearance as well as a theater marquee that reads Howling 11. Not to sing the man’s praises too much but upon meeting, Christopher [Lee] apologized to Joseph for appearing in Howling 2. Real stand-up chap.

NOFS: Is Donald Trump the inspiration for the character of Daniel Clamp?

BRAIN: He may have been at one time but also remember that public perception of Donald in 1990 was very different. Clamp was originally intended to be the villain but John Glover played the role with such boyish charm that it really altered the tone of the film. However, Grandpa Fred is without a doubt modelled after Al Lewis’s Grandpa Munster.

NOFS: Did anyone have issue with the film’s satire and social commentary?

BRAIN: I can’t say Steven and Chris Columbus entirely appreciated it. There was also some controversy surrounding jokes made about the marketability of Gizmo. This was somewhat unheard of at the time. Joseph was essentially mocking the marketing and cross promotion for the film within the film itself.

The Gremsters Vs. The Hulkster

NOFS: After Leonard Maltin had given the first film a bad review, was it satisfying to see him get his just deserts in the sequel?

BRAIN: Oh yes, the gremlin community had a bit of an axe to grind with Mr. Maltin. His appearance was a way to, forgive me for mixing metaphors, bury the hatchet. We would extend the olive branch of peace but upon bending him to our will, reveal it to be the olive branch of victory.

NOFS: Did he bend to your will?

BRAIN: Well, my dear fellow I’d have to say the proof is in the numbers. Going from 2 out of 4 stars on the first film to 3 out of 4 on the second is nothing to turn your nose up at.

NOFS: Leonard Maltin was just one of many celebrity cameos in the film, but none were quite as outlandish as Hulk Hogan’s fantastic 4th wall breaking appearance.

BRAIN: It is an oddity, isn’t it. Joseph wanted to do a William Castle gag and chose 1959’s The Tingler for his inspiration. Similarly to The Tingler, our titular creatures wreak havoc inside the projection booth. However, in our film the hooligans are set straight by World Wrestling champion Hulk Hogan. The studio was dead set against this narrative detour. Joseph set up a test screening in order to prove to them that audiences would, in fact, get a kick out of it. On home video an alternate scene appears to suggest the viewer’s VCR is on the fritz. The poor gremlins would then wind up in a western. The 1970 John Wayne film Chisum was intercut with shots of gremlins and using Chad Everett’s impeccable John Wayne impression, the audience would watch as The Duke himself sends the mischief-makers fleeing back to their own film.

Box Office Blunder

NOFS: Gremlins 2: The New Batch is often referred to as a “flop” or a “bomb”. Not only did it fail to live up to its predecessor but the film didn’t even turn a profit.

BRAIN: This is true, the film had a 50 million dollar budget but only brought in 41 million.

NOFS: The film had an extensive marketing campaign of which you were prominently featured, including cross promotional ads for Comfort Inn and Clarion Hotel chains. It seems the studio had very high expectations for what Dante considers to be possibly the most unconventional studio picture ever made.

BRAIN: Call it overconfidence. The film was originally scheduled for a May 3rd release date opposite the Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawn picture Bird on a Wire. Based on high test scores, the studio got a bit big-headed and pushed the date back. We would now open opposite the highly anticipated film, Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. The material girl was quite frankly the biggest star in the world at the time and she and Beatty were a bit of a hot item. They were 1990’s Brangelina. Wadonna. Determined to protect their box office records from the previous years Batman, Warner Bros. went after Dick Tracy with a herculean might. As it turned out, the Beatty/Madonna picture posed little threat to Batman’s record. This battle of studios only had one casualty, Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

NOFS: Despite its theatrical failings, the film found a cult following on home video. What do you believe the film’s appeal is to these die-hard fans?

BRAIN: While striving to destroy his legacy, Joseph managed to touch on a societal note that, at the time, was only just a whisper. But over the years it has grown into a symphony. The veil of ignorance has fallen. Joseph and Charles created a world closer to reality than they could have possibly envisioned. Given a parodical hyper-realist version of their everyday life, the viewer steps outside of their own existence to properly examine what is truly of value in this world. What holds meaning, what creates meaning, and what destroys it. Shown what happens when our automated lives break down, the audience revels in an existential awakening. They can now leave the theater a free people once again.

NOFS: Beautifully put, Brain, and thank you again for joining us. I thought we’d end the interview by addressing a little rumor that’s been popping up on message boards in recent years. Is there going to be a Gremlins 3?

BRAIN: [Brain chuckles] Considering the current state of that vacuous void known as Hollywood? I suppose only time will tell.

The post GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH – A Retrospective Interview with Brain Gremlin appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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thorne93 · 7 years

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The Right Path (Part 2)

Prompt: (From request) Hi! I was wondering, would you it be okay to request a Charles Xavier x telepath!reader? Where they have a mind link since their ability first showed up and so they already know each other even before theyve actually met and then he finds her when he first uses Cerebo and he and Erik go to her first?? Its an idea ive had for a while, but im not nearly an amazing writer like you!

Word Count: 1410

Warning: language (maybe??), child abuse, mental and physical abuse, depression…

Note: I LOVED this request. Thank you for sending it in. I am so sorry it took so long to write. I hope I did it justice dear. Plus, thank you for the super sweet note ; ) Beta’d by none other than @like-a-bag-of-potatoes

Forever Tags: @capsmuscles @cocosierra94 @essie1876 @magpiegirl80 @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked @harleyquinnandscarletwitch @iamwarrenspeace @marvel-imagines-yes-please @superwholocked527 @myparadise1982sand @missinstantgratification @thejemersoninferno @rda1989 @marvelloushamilton @munlis @thefridgeismybestie @bubblyanarocks3 @random-fluffy-pink-unicorn @hardcollectionworldtrash @igiveupicantthinkofausername @kaliforniacoastalteens @feelmyroarrrr @kaeling

James McAvoy: @bohemianrhapsody86 @lenawiinchester

Charles Xavier: @bohemianrhapsody86 @lenawiinchester

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“What else can I say to her?” Charles asked as he and Raven sat over a hot breakfast.

“Who?” Raven questioned as she bit into pancakes.

“The girl...in my dreams. Or...the girl whose dream I enter,” he corrected, a bit of a frown coming to his handsome face.

“Oh, her? You’re still doing that?” she asked with a raise of her eyebrow. “I thought you’d be past this by now.”

“Yes, Raven, I am still doing that,” he remarked, a touch of anger in his voice. “She’s a telepath like me, I’m sure of it. She must be a strong one because I can sense her from wherever she’s at, even when she’s unconscious, just think what she’s capable of when she’s awake,” he commented, more to himself than to her. He was in awe of you but other than your face in the dreams, he couldn’t get anything else from you. He was only able to hold up signs because he was awake in your dreams, manipulating himself and what he could do, but you still seemed bound by your dreaming mind.

“Why don’t you just give her your number?” she asked with an eyeroll.

“You know you’re not exactly delicate,” Charles said, his face pinching into annoyance as his eyes slid over to his adoptive sister.

“And you’re in a bad mood because your dream-girlfriend isn’t talking to you,” she retorted as she lifted her coffee mug with a smug look and left the breakfast table.

He contemplated all week on a way to communicate more with you. Questions weren’t going to work because you couldn’t answer him, but he didn’t want to blather endlessly on signs in your dreams. You might think he was crazy, or you might not care who he was or what he wanted. He also couldn’t say he was a telepath or ask if you were, because if you weren’t, that was probably going to alarm you more than anything.

He couldn’t get past your dreams so far, probably because you were sleeping, and your mind had taken the wheel as far as where and what it was accessing so he couldn’t get a name, address, family name, last name, pet name, state you lived in, school you attended if any...He was at a loss. How could he get to know you more? He wanted to get to know you more than anything. He was utterly obsessed with you now that you visited him during the night.

Finally, he decided if he couldn’t get to know more about you, other than your eccentric dreams, he would have you get to know him.

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Three more years passed. The dreams and Charles still appeared off and on, periodically. As soon as you graduated high school, your parents kicked you out of the house. At first, you had no idea how to deal out in the real world. First and foremost you needed a place to stay, and with no friends and family that would take you in, you sought refuge at the church. You only spent a few months there before you were granted a full ride scholarship based on your exemplary marks to a decent college and you clawed at the chance like it was your last ounce of air.

Now you were twenty-one, over halfway through your academic career. You still weren’t sure what you wanted to do, not entirely. Your ability to read minds seemed to make it difficult. You didn’t want any sort of job that would have anyone looking down their nose at you. Perhaps you could get into a scientific field, and only work with esteemed colleagues.

Charles was twenty four, in graduate school now. You knew this because he periodically updated you on his life. He told you when it was his birthday and gave you the age. He told you when he was accepted to graduate school and what he was studying. Psychology. It was fitting. You had a feeling he had the same power you had, but perhaps he could only communicate with those who were dreaming.

He was perfectly charming, or so he seemed. All you could go off of were his face, his body, and signs he held up in your dreams. But even if he had the personality of a potato, his face alone would probably make you walk on broken glass for him. You learned he had a sister, her name was Raven. You learned he was doing well in graduate school, in fact he was about to graduate. With a smiling face and a simple sign, he told you the date. Somehow, you wanted to give him a graduation present. Absurd though, considering you technically didn’t know this man and he didn’t know you. But still, you were bonded, shared a mind-link going on four years now. That must mean something, right? It wasn’t a coincidence?

He lived in New York, not the City. He lived in a quieter town up north. Quite a change of pace from you in your South Carolina home. You wanted to meet him, to hear his voice, to actually touch him, but alas you didn’t have a car. All you had was a lousy job as a waitress at a diner up the street to help pay for things the scholarship didn’t cover, there was no way you could afford a car or even a bus ticket there. Besides, what would you do once you found him? If you found him.

“Oh hi, you visit me in my dreams so I thought we could chat in person,” you thought sarcastically.

You wished you could talk with Charles. Find out all about his abilities. If he was able to control it. If he really is just confined to dreams or if he could hear anyone’s thoughts like you. You had a million questions for a complete stranger, but at least, after everyone, he seemed to be the only one who still wanted to be around you.

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“Okay, so, uh, the electrodes connect Charles to the transmitter on the roof. When he picks up a... mutant, his brain sends a signal through a relay, and then coordinates of their location are printed out here,” Hank McCoy, the young genius in the room, explained to Charles as he was getting ready to put Cerebro’s helmet on his head. Erik was circling him, amused, as Raven watched on with curiosity and impressiveness.

“What an adorable lab rat you make, Charles,” Erik mused with a coy grin.

“Don't spoil this for me, Erik.”

“Oh. I've been a lab rat. I know one when I see one,” Erik commented.

Hank fussed over some more mechanics and dials before rushing back to Charles to check the device. “Are you sure we can’t shave your head?”

Charles calmly warned, “Don’t touch my hair.”

“Okay. It's working,” Hank informed triumphantly.

Charles could touch every mutant’s mind on the planet. Every one of them. And while he wanted to help them all, reach out to all of them, show them they’re not alone, he had one particular mutant in mind - you.

After four years of a mindlink, he finally had a chance to meet you. To find you. To help you. Hear your voice. He knew nothing about you, and yet, he felt like you two were the greatest of friends. He hoped that you wanted to be his friend too, perhaps his ever constant presence in your dream has been a nuisance and you wanted nothing to do with him, but he had to check. He had to see if you wanted to meet. Surely you were at least curious.

He concentrated hard and you were the first one he saw. In his mind’s eye he saw you in your true form for the first time, not in the dreamy, blurry, hazy world that was your sleeping mind. You were sensational. Simply stunning. He saw you sitting at a small desk, your face buried in textbooks. He marveled at the sight of you, nearly giddy with happiness as he saw the coordinates to you were printing out.

Now, he literally had a map to you and after all these years of yearning to meet you, to actually know the first thing about you. He could barely contain his excitement. So he and Erik set out, together, to find all the mutants on the eastern coast that they could for their mission.

#the right path #Charles Xavier #charles xavier fic #charles xavier x reader #erik lensherr #erik lensherr fic

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davidcampiti · 5 years

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OLD FRIENDS

When I entered Warwood High School, ninth grade, most of the kids I was friends with at Corpus Christi School, like Mark Michaels and Christine Galloway and Tom Schroeder, went off to Wheeling Central High. So I felt like a fish out of water until I connected with the likes of Mike Darby and, around the same time, this funny smartass kid Scott Rockwell, who sat in the back of Spanish class and made a smart remark to me about collecting comics.

It turned out Scott wasn’t berating me for it; he and his brother Doug were comics fans, too. We joined the Journalism Class together and were soon contributing to a lot of the school newspaper. We became the best of friends, and I spent chunks of nearly every day hanging out with them in the basement of his home. We shared comics to read, had similar joys and similar complaints, and we wanted to become comic book professionals — him drawing, me writing.

I recall trying to get a portfolio of original scripts and art off to Marvel one summer day. We were pedaling our bikes as fast as we could to get to the post office before 5 pm. It was like life-or-death important we get that thing out to them that day. We shipped original art; it never occurred to us to mail photocopies. Scott crashed his bike into a parked car. “Go on! Go on!” He yelled, waving me to get to the Seventh Street Post Office in time. The portfolio was rightfully rejected; we weren’t ready. So we wrote fan letters, many of them quite critical of the sub-standard comics we read. We knew they could be better, but we at the time hadn’t lived our ives enough to do them better.

In 1975, I had my driver’s license, and Scott, Doug, and I went to our first comics convention — PittCon! — run by Ben Pondexter. Other people sharing our interests! Plus we’d get to meet real, working comics professionals whose names we’d recognized! It was a heady experience.

As we wandered through an art display, a canny mix of fan and professional artwork, we saw Marvel editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman talking to a tall young kid with a strong Pittsburgh accent, who looked quite a bit like a teen John Travolta. “Marv! My brother Marc drew this! Whaddaya think? Whaddaya think?” He was gesturing toward a pair of pieces of art — one was a Tarzan illustration, the other a published Marvel Spider-Man page.

Marv stroked his beard and said, “Well, it’s not too bad,” he said. “Spider-Man’s perspective’s a little off and the faces could be better. A bit more work, and he might be professional some day.”

The tall kid burst out with the loudest, most infectious laugh I’d ever heard. “Marv! My brother drew the Tarzan page. You just critiqued a PUBLISHED Sal Buscema Marvel Team-Up page!”

As Marv ducked away, embarrassed, we stepped up and introduced ourselves. The kid was David Lawrence, with whom Scott and I developed lifelong friendships. We sent each other comics and scripts we wrote, and Scott drew dozens of cartoons -- all in-jokes -- on manila envelopes that we mailed practically every month.

There’s a picture somewhere, maybe in Scott’s files, of him and me posing with Stan Lee at West Virginia University in ’78, where Cynthy Wood took a picture for us. As the photo was shot, Scott was saying to Stan, “Smile, and look as much like our Uncle as you can.”

Scott and Dave and I made a vow, which ever of us got into the comics business first, we would bring the others with us. A few years later, me being the most headstrong, I got in first. I brought Dave and Scott with me. David Lawrence developed the mega-popular series The Ex-Mutants and its spin-offs, and I brought in Scott as a designer, art director, writer, cover artist, and colorist. He was a talented guy.

Scott and Dave lived together for some months while we packaged comics for various publishers from my Campiti & Associates office in Warwood, WV. In later years they wrote stories together. We all wrote stories together, in fact.

When I launched Innovation Publishing in ‘88, of course both Scott and David were a part of it. Scott was briefly art director before becoming a writer and colorist for the company; I even hired Scott’s Dad to color for me. You’ll see Robert Rockwell’s name in the credits of some early Innovation books. Scott and I wrote issues of Dark Shadows together. Scott and Dave wrote issues of various Ex-Mutants and The Lunatic Fringe and Overture and other projects together. Some of the things David Lawrence wrote, like Hero Alliance scripts, Scott colored those. Although Dave lived in Pittsburgh and Scott and I lived in Wheeling — a good 75 minutes away with a good tail wind — we never really seemed to be apart.

When I left Innovation in ’93 to launch Glass House Graphics, Scott Rockwell and David Lawrence were both was part of it. Dave has been writing projects through Glass House on and off for decades, officially becoming a movie screenwriter and a New York Times best-selling author in the process — in fact, he’s writing a new project now.

Scott wrote and colored projects with me until about 1995, when his life changed via a gal he’d met at Innovation. He drove me to the airport on his birthday on July 13, 1995 for a trip I was making to Brazil. It was the last time I saw Scott, though he called me once a few years later.

When his favorite book series The Lord of the Rings came out as movies, I sent him a card with a Ring of Power engraved in Elvish; I sent him an invitation to my wedding in 2001. He did not respond or attend. I learned he had essentially become a hermit, rarely if ever venturing out of his home and working mainly on paintings for private commissions to pay the bills. Even David Lawrence had not seen Scott face-to-face in years, as hard as Dave tried to keep in touch with Scott.

He had almost no internet presence, so I tried my best via mutual friends to stay current on his life. Every time I returned to Wheeling to visit family, I’d bring along a stack of books I’d written — such as Stan Lee’s How To Draw Comics, which I wrote to sound like Stan for 240 pages; I figured Scott would appreciate that. But I could never manage to connect with him, despite the best efforts of David Lawrence and of Jeffrey Burton, another great and mutual artist friend since our college years.

I was scheduled to fly back to Wheeling over this past weekend to attend my high school reunion and hoped to try again to see Scott; I had to cancel the trip last minute. Had I gone, I would have still been in Wheeling today.

And today I learned that Scott Rockwell died of a massive coronary at 61 years old.

We did not see each other in decades, but I will cherish those many years of friendship, of humor, of deep affection and camaraderie that we shared, from kids who thought we knew it all to established professionals who did finally know most of it.

I would never have tried to become a professional writer, or book packager, or a publisher, or even an agent, if Scott Rockwell hadn’t been there at the beginning. He inspired me; I brought him along into the business. We shared many joys and sorrows and ups and downs.

I missed you for the past 20 years, and I’ll miss you even more now. I think you really would’ve liked my books, Scott. And I think you would’ve adored meeting my wife Meryl, telling me I finally got it right.

And David Lawrence? You better stick around a fucking long time, goddamn it.

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raitrolling · 8 years

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i fucked up and answered the wrong symbol but fuckit im still doing this

☾ - What was the first idea that inspired the creation of each of your trolls, and do they still embody that idea now?

listed in order of creation, and some of these answers are gonna get really fuckin long so prepare yourself for masses of textwalls

charon: ive gone over his history in this ask here, so tl;dr version: i wanted to make a light greenblood who was creepy and loved blood and fighting. thats it. why people like this guy even though his origin is literally being Edgy(tm) is beyond me. while blood and fighting are still his main interests, his creepiness is no longer being creepy for the sake of being ‘ooh hes so evil and InSaNe xD xD xD’ to actually having motivations and becoming a legitimate threat to others.

skathi: I DONT THINK IVE EVER ACTUALLY TALKED ABOUT OLD!SKATHI BEFORE SO ONLY FORMER MSPAF MEMBERS REMEMBER THAT DUMPSTER FIRE LMAO. but basically skathi’s original concept was vaguely inspired by The Importance of Being Earnest since i was studying that play at the time, but rather than being a british gentleman who invents an alternate identity as an excuse to fuck off to the country or invents a sick relative as an excuse to avoid boring social events, she was a lowblood posing as a highblood because people she fucked over burned down her hive. however that idea didnt work at all because she was complete shit at hiding her blood so that got scrapped, and shes been completely remade twice. now the only concepts that have stayed through the revamps is that she’s an axe-wielding Flarper who uses poisons and got her hive burned down.

cvetka: cvetka’s another character who’s been completely revamped and reset, but her concept hasnt really changed as much. originally she had chlorokinesis that went awry all the fuckin time because whatever man im 16 i can write whatever bullshit i want (aka no reason at all). also she was inspired by the Victorian Era + the language of flowers because i was studying that at the time (you will see this becomes a common thing). then i cant remember if it got confirmed in the comic or if it just because a commonly accepted headcanon on mspaf that highbloods didnt have psiionics at all (whats a vriska) so that got scrapped. then in her revamp she became a complete recluse because pacifism is a no-go on alternia, and while i find that shes become a much better written / well-thought out character as a result, my chances to rp her have become severely limited.

katrin: was my self-insert. originally she was painfully shy and couldnt really talk to anyone without get super embarrassed, and also she was an artist instead of a writer. then everything changed when the fire nation attacked she got a boyfriend. its kinda funny tho because she had no interest in working or getting rich until she met gerrel, yet she ended up on the complete opposite path to him by becoming a thief and running scams with her moirail at the time. then a shitload of events occurred (most of them retconned out of her backstory but their effects on her character still remain. also we dont talk about 90% of those events because i was a Bad Writer at the time and im embarrassed by everything and nearly anxiety-vomit whenever people go ‘hey remember this’ BYE) and we got the piece of shit raccoon thief we all know and love. also ive mentioned this heaps of times before but at one point she had robolimbs cuz both her arms got shot off but i retconned that to having the bullets graze her because i hated drawing her cybernetics lmao. the only things that’ve really stayed with her is that she’s still really awkward and a little shy, as well as still retaining a lot of my negative traits from her self-insert days.

viltau: ive also talked about vil’s history in another ask, but tl;dr wanted a Gatsby troll cuz i was studying the book at the time, ended up making an Edgelord. he’s still pretty gatsby-esque, being a rich guy who worked his way up to the top (tho nowhere near as drastically since he’s already a highblood) and throws a lot of parties, but since he’s a huge literature nerd now he’s a lot more self-aware and aims to purposely embody tropes from his favourite novels. i still like the idea of yellowblood!viltau (and his old sprites are adorable i mean look at him), but i have a lot more fun writing him as he is now. he’s almost a parody of himself, yet simultaneously played completely straight.

somerl: he was originally inspired from me going through my photo albums from times ive been to Hamilton Island on holiday, and in particular the one night i went on a cruise on The Banjo Paterson. i liked the idea of a cute sailor troll, and that was all he got characterwise. then, like katrin, he developed as a result of a bunch of events occurring to him and that’s how he gained a personality. he’s still a cute sailor troll, but now he’s a paranoid insomniac sailor troll with an obsession for superstitions and hatred for seadwellers and women. seadweller women are his worst nightmare.

dismas: his origin is actually kinda funny cuz i was watching this amv, and around about the time that Birthday Massacre song starts playing there’s this white-haired kid who appears and i thought he was the coolest thing ever. to this day i still have no clue who he is or what anime he’s from. also because it’s still 2011 and I Was A Teenage Edgelord i had an embarrassing obsession with Izaya from Durarara so of course dismas had to be an informant who fucks with everyone. originally he was yellow!viltau’s assistant who carried out all the shady jobs and was my go-to troll for killing off ocs i got bored of but they had history with other people’s trolls so i couldnt just get rid of them. then his original concept got combined with vil when i retconned vil into being an indigoblood. when i brought him back i kept the informant stuff and the Edgyness, but now he’s edgy to make fun of the fact he was a legitimate edgelord played 100% straight back in the day. also his roboarm switched sides because i forgot which arm he lost lmao.

aegiel: did a complete 180 in terms of character concept, and went through a bunch a revamps before i even started rping her. originally she was inspired by Hollywood Undead (particularly the song city), and was actually a super hemorebel who managed to escape capture and culling by having probability manipulating psiionics that ensured luck was always on her side. then i scrapped that entirely because at the time i was studying the Chinese revolution and the topic of the cultural revolution came up. so then her concept switched to being based on the Chinese Red Guards, as well as partially the Russian Cheka since i studied the Russian revolution the semester prior. I thought the concept of a super hemoloyal lowblood with a fanatical dedication to the Empire would be interesting, since most hemoloyalists tended to be highbloods. the only things thatve stayed from her original concept are her name and symbol, as well as her laughing quirk being a remnant of how her lusus was originally a cheshire cat.

aiolos: i dont really remember where his original concept came from, apart from i remember seeing a fanart of a 1920s style Scout from TF2 and liking the idea of a courier troll. i know i drew his original design in history class while watching Doctor Zhivago but i dont remember anything about that movie to know if that had any bearing on his character lmao. originally he was pretty rude and kinda sleazy, which ended up morphing into the sass you see today. he hasnt really changed much from his original concept, but its more that his character has grown over time.

kalpan: ok i have a confession to make. the reason why i made kal was because there were a shitload of anonbloods on mspaf that were either A. really bad at hiding their anonblood status, or B. were all almost always tyrianbloods in disguise who would pull rank every time someone gave them shit for being anon. and me, being the egotistical piece of shit i am, decided that i wanted to make a good anonblood. so kal’s blood was kept secret and she stayed out of trouble so that itd never get revealed, and her reasoning for being anonymous was just that she didnt really care my dude. she hasnt really strayed too far from her original concept, but rather expanded on the reason why shes so casually apathetic and gave her more of a backstory.

leithe: leithe’s original concept was something i dreamed up, no joke. from what i remember from the dream, i went to like a superhero school or something, and there was this one kid whose power was to cancel out other people’s powers so he’d be the one to save other kids when they lost control of their powers. his power also looked like a bubble that’d envelop himself and the other person whose powers he was cancelling out, so when i made him a fantroll that turned into an invisible field in which his psiionics were constantly active. and instead of being a hero, leithe was just an average dude who’d take up odd jobs here and there so he could have the skills to get a good job in the fleet. conceptwise he hasnt changed much, although hes become less tolerate of other lowbloods over time and he grew 500% more eyebrow.

pratap: was the first new troll i made after starting this blog. his first idea was a cute little seadweller who didnt really understand why other trolls were suspicious of him and his innocent offers to take them to his cafe for coffee. then shortly after making him, I studied Great Expectations in my uni literature class, and loved the idea of pratap getting a mentor who turns him from an innocent little kid to a typical shithead member of high society. that plot was going pretty well but fell through because of Reasons (read: i no longer associate with the other rper), so now he’s stuck in limbo characterwise but id love to pick it up again sometime.

errett: i say this every time i bring up errett’s history but haha remember when this guy was supposed to be cute. so errett was supposed to be in a group of trolls inspired by the four main elements from the game OFF., but pwo and i never got anyone to fill the spots for the elements of metal and plastic so it was just errett and his troll karnvr. and yeah, errett was supposed to be cute and his rudeness was meant to just be cutesy ‘ill puff up my cheeks and get angry and everyones gonna think im adorable’ but that got thrown out the window the moment i started rping him and he became a complete cunt. then we started thinking up a backstory for him and he became even more of a Bitter Angry Baby, so now the only elements that’ve really retained are his design and references to the game OFF..

sigrun: was inspired by those gifs of penguins falling over and the fact that i fucking love penguins and cry whenever i see cute penguin-related things. apart from being a bit more aggressive in their first draft, they havent changed much at all (probably because i never use them ever oops).

kisert: i have another confession to make. the reason why i made kisert was because i thought the whole ‘creepy little kid who talks to ghosts’ troll was overdone to hell and back so i wanted to make a parody of it by making a troll who pretends to be creepy and talks to ghosts to con people. he’s always been a massive childish brat, but his brattiness and childishness has gotten even more apparent over the years. tho at the same time, because those tendencies have been played up, he’s become a lot more emotionally stunted and stuck in the past as a result, which i think is more interesting than his original concept.

raesul: also hasn’t really changed from her original concept. i had the Danger Days album on repeat and really liked the idea of a hemorebel radio host, and so rae was born. she’s also partially inspired by Motorcity which i was watching at the time (and never finished oops), hence her radio station being called radio BRNR, after the Burners group. while rae was always supposed to be completely different from her miss summertime identity, the differences have become a lot more pronounced now that rae is super awkward and insecure while miss summertime is loud, proud, and always in control. also miss summertime’s wardrobe went from being super girly to more punk and rock-and-rock inspired, originally i wanted to avoid that because i thought itd be too cliche but then somewhere along the line i decided ‘lol fuck it’.

shirei: is based off the pokemon pangoro, cuz one of it’s pokedex entries states how its tough and aggressive but doesnt tolerate bullies, so i thought the idea of a tough but almost motherly gang leader would be neat. i was also watching Kill La Kill and Revolutionary Girl Utena at the time, so she gained some tomboyish but also princely/fairytale-esque qualities as a result. she hasnt changed much in terms of concept and ideas, but she kinda retroactively got inspired by quite a few of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure protagonists (particularly Jolyne and Giorno, but also a bit of Josuke) because they were kind of similar in concept.

redeti: was made as being a part of a group for trolls based on santa’s reindeer that i was doing with pwo. red is a combination of the ideas i had for Dasher and Vixen, and when i first designed him we joked that he looked like a lovechild between viltau and kitaer, so his interests became snowcones and murder to reference that. while he’s still a part of the Northern Lights crew with all the other reindeer inspired trolls we made, he’s become more detached from everyone else as a result of making friends with people outside the community. but in terms of original concept and ideas, he hasn’t really changed apart from probably becoming a lot more naive and dense over time.

fannar: is another troll from the Northern Lights crew, although they were made about a month after. they were kind of based off my idea for Donner, but also a mix between one of my older trolls i got rid of and my old Hetalia oc Antarctica. since they werent going to be a reindeer troll, i wanted them to be an outsider to the group, hence their polar bear lusus and their sickly constitution making it difficult for them to live in their current environment. originally they legitimately hated redeti’s guts and wanted him dead, but over time it’s become more of just a simple blackcrush that’s made them very protective of him.

nancor: ive mentioned this before, but his original concept came about because of this video and me deciding i really liked xatu. i had also seen The Book Thief recently, and loved the character of Death (i havent read the book yet tho dont judge me), so that’s where nan’s whole ‘pleasant but morbid angel of death’ came from. he’s also somewhat based on a couple characters from Hamatora (which is an alright series but the 2nd season is a complete dumpster fire and you should only watch if you want to watch a show fly so far off the rails it becomes hilarious), such as Ratio’s power requiring him to cover up his eye, and Moral’s design (as well as Izuru Kamukura from Danga Ronpa being another design insp). he’s always been kind of a silly character with his dumb puns and the fact that he walks around wearing a blindfold and fights with semaphore flags, but the more serious aspects of his personality didnt come in until much later.

eichio: another troll that started out as a huge fuckin joke, i saw this vine and wanted to make a troll who used noisemakers as their strife weapon. his mimicry and talent with musical instruments was just random brainstorming, and his whole ‘mimicking other trolls so he can learn how to act properly and pick up their behaviours to become likeable’ became a thing because i didnt know what personality or interests to give him. then i really started to explore the concept of a troll who has been raised to be nothing but the perfect people pleaser and even more perfect servant, and the effects that would have on someone’s mentality. he also developed an anxiety disorder cuz i got diagnosed with GAD and realised how much of myself id unintentionally put in him. its kinda amusing how a character who was originally supposed to just be a blank slate ended up so complex, but i really like how much hes grown as a concept.

davitt: dav was made for that meme that went around where you and a friend had to come up w. 2 ocs in secret and not reveal them until they were both done, and then you had to figure out how to ship them together, so i came up with him while pwo made walker. i was watching How To Get Away With Murder at the time, so i really liked the idea of a corrupt lawyer who used loopholes to get all his clients out of being found guilty, and was only in the job field for money and the fact it was really easy for a tealblood to become a Legislacerator. but, since im incapable of making trolls that arent also huge fuckin dorks, he was also a huge lazy piece of shit cat who hoarded random garbage and came up with dumb ways to be efficiently lazy. over time his corrupt and greedy ways have fallen to the wayside in favour of the more comically serious side to his personality, though they’re still slightly there since he is primarily a defense lawyer and we all know those types of lawyers are the devil.

ananta: ana is based off the game OneShot, which i played and fell in love with instantly. a lot of their concept stems from the game, ranging from superficial stuff such as their appearance resembling Niko and how their strife weapon is a lightbulb, but also the technical aspects of the game such as their unforgiving personality being a reference to how you only get one shot at the game, and their hobby as a hacker referencing how the game does shit to your computer as part of a puzzle. the resemblance was apparently so close that the creator of the game reblogged my concept art for ana, which im both still flattered and embarrassed about. like a lot of my recent characters, their core concept hasnt really changed, but rather ive focused a lot more on aspects of their personality like their extreme bitterness to hide their vulnerablity, and their loneliness as a result of the events in their life and the facade they put up.

soroll: is a literal meme. hes based off the ‘scream at own ass’ opossum meme, and is part of a group of meme animal trolls owned by pwo, who is also a huge memer. again his concept hasnt really changed since hes always been kinda dumb but with a huge heart, but over time hes become more of a mother hen type since he ended up unintentionally gravitating towards trolls who never took care of themselves so hed fuss over them. also i have no clue what happened to his quirk over time or even what accent its meant to resemble now lmao.

benrii: is based off Sanetoshi Watase from one of my favourite anime of all time, Mawaru Penguindrum. like ana, he’s not so much a direct rip of the character (apart from appearance) but more of an amalgamation of references to the series, so you have things like his obsession with fate mirroring the theme of the show, his apple bombs referencing the symbolism of apples that appears constantly, and the fact that he’s 9.5 sweeps refers to the 95 arc number in the show. also at one point i fell into a huge rabbit hole and ended up reading up about cults and biblical shit so that’s where his god complex came from. the whole ‘being addicted to praise and acting out for attention’ aspect of his personality didnt come about until much later, and thats now the dominant part of his character as a whole.

rosato: is another troll based on memes and joke posts on tumblr rifp, but this time its those posts on modern vampires and people not recognising they’re actually vampires and seeing things like their sudden aversion to the sun and garlic to just be weird coincidences. so then i came up with the idea of a forgetful rainbowdrinker who refused to believe theyre actually dead because they forgot how they got killed and assumes all the associated Weird Vampire Shit are just coincidences. he’s also got a shitload of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure references in him because this was around about the time i got into the series. after errett failed, rosato was my second attempt at making a shy and cute but kinda mean troll, but once again he ended up becoming a full-blown rude asshole.

zotick: i was reading Vento Aureo and thought ‘you know Gold Experience is a fuckin cool power, what if I tried to make it less OP and turn it into a fantroll’. thus, zot was born. like rosato, his design and personality are a bunch of references to Giorno, and his love of bugs/scorpions/lizards/etc came from the fact that whenever Gold Experience turned something into an animal, its always something gross and dangerous. like eichio, i couldnt decide on any interests so i took the cheater’s way out and made it that he got bored easily so he doesnt stick to any main hobbies apart from bugs and pranks. Over time, he became more obnoxious and annoying, which was mostly because every single bug-related post on this site i could find was a fuckin meme.

Indi and Kaiman: im putting these two together because i came up with their concepts at the same time. firstly, i wanted to make trolls who were interested in the paranormal and aliens and shit, and secondly, i wanted them to be not quite siblings but grew up so closely they could basically be considered the Alternian equivalent of brothers. They were supposed to look similar in appearance and clothing too, but when i drew my first concept of indi i really liked what i came up with but it didnt suit how i envisioned kai so they ended up becoming completely different. i also wanted indi to be the quiet one and kai to be the loud one, but then i liked the idea of them being completely conflicting in terms of first impressions and ‘real’ personality. while their concepts never strayed away from their original idea, they definitely became a lot more developed and evolved once i started talking about them to ez, who was designing mauban at the time. from their interactions with mau, indi became a lot more extroverted but also trusting and optimistic, whereas kai became more judgmental and standoffish than i had initially intended, which i thought was a neat contrast.

mikiel: he’s Ghiaccio from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. that’s it. character analysis over. ok i lied, but a lot of his character concept came from the fact that i really loved Ghiaccio’s design, personality, and powers, and really wanted to make a troll like that. funnily enough his gang affiliation is not a reference to Passione / La Squadra, but rather because i wanted to add more characters to the red scarves. the whole mutant thing is because i really wanted him to have psiionics but also wanted him to be a blueblood, and the fact that his powers are nigh uncontrollable is me reusing original!cve’s chlorokinesis idea, this time the reason being because his body cant handle an ability that supposed to be only seen in lowbloods rather than just Because Shut Up. he was actually supposed to be aggressive and Angry(tm) all the fuckin time, but after a while i considered that his life is actually really fuckin depressing so he gained ‘depression’ as his second emotion. now i try to focus more on his defeatist nature as opposed to anything else because otherwise he feels just kinda one-note.

aislin: is based on Alphys from Undertale, because i really like making characters based on my fav indie rpgs apparently. i got to that part in the game when you realise that alphys has been watching you from the very beginning, and thought a troll with surveillance-based psiionics would be a really neat concept over making Yet Another Geeky Scientist (although ais is interested in science to reference alphys, she just doesnt practice it). in terms of personality, she’s katrin 2.0, because as much as i love kat how she is right now, i really missed her adorably yet painfully shy personality that she used to have. i am also v. protective of ais and the types of trolls she interacts with because i refuse to have another Incident. so its more of a return to original concepts that earlier characters once embodied.

lanthi: came about because A. I was watching Owarimonogatari and i fuckin love Ougi and B. it was finally time for me to make a subjug. her chucklevoodoos are a play on the fact that Ougi is scarily good at prompting people into figuring out the exact answers they’re looking for, and especially in the Sodachi arcs how she was able to make Araragi remember everything about his past that he’d blocked out of his mind just by asking the right questions and the right time. for lanthi, i interpreted that as fabricating memories through suggestion, so her targets become more receptive to listening to her since they suddenly recall her as a familiar face they can trust. i havent really done much with her so i dont rly have anything to say, other than i still have no clue what the fuck she is.

velour: oh boy, velour. i had so many concepts for this fucker that it was hard for me to settle on one. along with being a celebrity fashion designer and vlogger who happens to be a lowkey con artist, other concepts i had in mind were a matchmaker, and a borderline yandere who uses his celebrity status to lure in targets to fall in love with him. i scrapped the latter two ideas (tho now the yandere thing gets referenced by the fact he gets fans paying him to act out their own weird celebrity stalker fantasies LMAO), and somehow managed to mash together all my concepts into an actual troll. he took the longest for me to figure out, and it wasnt until after i made liiore and gave him a past with him + mikiel where everything started to click, but now everything works and im super happy w. him.

liiore: was somewhat of an offshoot of my many velour concepts, since along with the celebrity idea i was also thinking of an ex-celebrity concept as well. also one night i was reading the PokeSpe page on Bulbapedia and it mentioned one of the main characters being an ex-celebrity who became a shut-in after he got too overwhelmed by the lifestyle, and i really liked that concept. so then liiore was born. he was also my 3rd attempt at making a cute shy boy character, except this time i nixed the ‘but also grumpy in a cute way’ so i wouldnt end up with Yet Another Errett or Rosato. now hes a huge dopey ball of adorable shyness.

daimon: so when i first played Awakening i made a Fire Emblem-inspired troll who didnt really click with me so i scrapped them almost immediately. then Fates came around and I fell in love with every single archer but especially Niles and Takumi, so i was like ‘yknow what lets try round 2 for an FE troll’. so dai is a mishmash of all the Fates archers (but Niles remained the main inspiration so that’s why his appearance and personality is closest to him), as well as kinda more Arthur than Setsuna simply because i thought a troll with impossibly bad lukc would be hilarious. and also hilariously tragic, hence his backstory. since i havent really rped him that much he hasnt really changed in concept, but he also became inspired by Jake Peralta from Brooklyn Nine-Nine after i started watching that and now i cannot unsee dai in jake help me.

callan: is based on a combination of ‘The Phantom Thief’ trope, Bungou Stray Dogs (particularly Dazai and Chuuya in terms of design), and the fact i was talking about my faceblindness issues with my parents and thought ‘hey a character who no one can remember what they look like would make a great thief’. and i was thinking about rosato’s backstory and really wanted to make an npc to fill in the gaps re: how he died but whoops i got attached to the concept and now ive got a legit troll on my hands. i was also thinking about how i have way too many pretty + well-dressed + cultured male trolls so i kinda made callan a different spin on my own predicability by making him look smart and cultured but really not giving a shit about anything of the sort. he loves the theatre but only if theyre musicals with a lot of comedy, he steals art and knows his art history but only so that he can definitely steal something of worth that isnt going to end up a forgery, he’s sharp dressed because it attracts attention given his caste, and he drinks beer because he looks like a guy who’d prefer wine.

#headcanon #EVERYONE #jesus christ its finally done #im going to bed now its 5am and my parents are already awake RIFP

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

Fair warning: spoilers for Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers are to be found herein!

In 1989, a twenty-something professional computer programmer and frustrated horror novelist named Jane Jensen had a close encounter with King’s Quest IV that changed her life. She was so inspired by the experience of playing her first adventure game that she decided to apply for a job with Sierra Online, the company that had made it. In fact, she badgered them relentlessly until they finally hired her as a jack-of-all-trades writer in 1990.

Two and a half years later, after working her way up from writing manuals and incidental in-game dialog to co-designing the first EcoQuest game with Gano Haine and the sixth King’s Quest game with Roberta Williams, she had proved herself sufficiently in the eyes of her managers to be given a glorious opportunity: the chance to make her very own game on her own terms. It really was a once-in-a-lifetime proposition; she was to be given carte blanche by the biggest adventure developer in the industry at the height of the genre’s popularity to make exactly the game she wanted to make. Small wonder that she would so often look back upon it wistfully in later years, after the glory days of adventures games had become a distant memory.

For her big chance, Jensen proposed making a Gothic horror game unlike anything Sierra had attempted before, with a brooding and psychologically complex hero, a detailed real-world setting, and a complicated plot dripping with the lore of the occult. Interestingly, Jensen remembers her superiors being less than thrilled with the new direction. She says that Ken Williams in particular was highly skeptical of the project’s commercial viability: “Okay, I’ll let you do it, but I wish you’d come up with something happier!”

But even if Jensen’s recollections are correct, we can safely say that Sierra’s opinion changed over the year it took to make Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. By the time it shipped on November 24, 1993, it fit in very well with a new direction being trumpeted by Ken Williams in his editorials for the company’s newsletter: a concerted focus on more “adult,” sophisticated fictions, as exemplified not only by Sins of the Fathers but by a “gritty” new Police Quest game and another, more lurid horror game which Roberta Williams had in the works. Although the older, more lighthearted and ramshackle [this, that, and the other] Quest series which had made Sierra’s name in adventure games would continue to appear for a while longer, Williams clearly saw these newer concepts as the key to a mass market he was desperately trying to unlock. Games like these were, theoretically anyway, able to appeal to demographics outside the industry’s traditional customers — to appeal to the sort of people who had hitherto preferred an evening in front of a television to one spent in front of a monitor.

Thus Sierra put a lot of resources into Sins of the Fathers‘s presentation and promotion. For example, the box became one of the last standout packages in an industry moving inexorably toward standardization on that front; in lieu of anything so dull as a rectangle, it took the shape of two mismatched but somehow conjoined triangles. Sierra even went so far as to hire Tim Curry of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame, Mark Hamill of Star Wars, and Michael Dorn of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the CD-ROM version’s voice-acting cast.

Jane Jensen with the first Gabriel Knight project’s producer and soundtrack composer Bob Holmes, who would later become her husband, and the actor Tim Curry, who provided the voice of Gabriel using a thick faux-New Orleans accent which some players judge hammy, others charming.

In the long run, the much-discussed union of Silicon Valley and Hollywood that led studios like Sierra to cast such high-profile names at considerable expense would never come to pass. In the meantime, though, the game arrived at a more modestly propitious cultural moment. Anne Rice’s Gothic vampire novels, whose tonal similarities to Sins of the Fathers were hard to miss even before Jensen began to cite them as an inspiration in interviews, were all over the bestseller lists, and Tom Cruise was soon to star in a major motion picture drawn from the first of them. Even in the broader world of games around Sierra, the influence of Rice and Gothic horror more generally was starting to make itself felt. On the tabletop, White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade was exploding in popularity just as Dungeons & Dragons was falling on comparatively hard times; the early 1990s would go down in tabletop history as the only time when a rival system seriously challenged Dungeons & Dragons‘s absolute supremacy. And then there was the world of music, where dark and slinky albums from bands like the Cure and Massive Attack were selling in the millions.

Suffice to say, then, that “goth” culture in general was having a moment, and Sins of the Fathers was perfectly poised to capitalize on it. The times were certainly a far cry from just half a decade before, when Amy Briggs had proposed an Anne Rice-like horror game to her bosses at Infocom, only to be greeted with complete incomprehension.

Catching the zeitgeist paid off: Sins of the Fathers proved, if not quite the bridge to the Hollywood mainstream Ken Williams might have been longing for, one of Sierra’s most popular adventures games of its time. An unusual number of its fans were female, a demographic oddity it had in common with all of the other Gothic pop culture I’ve just mentioned. These female fans in particular seemed to get something from the game’s brooding bad-boy hero that they perhaps hadn’t realized they’d been missing. While games that used sex as a selling point were hardly unheard of in 1993, Sins of the Fathers stood out in a sea of Leisure Suit Larry and Spellcasting games for its orientation toward the female rather than the male gaze. In this respect as well, its arrival was perfectly timed, coming just as relatively more women and girls were beginning to use computers, thanks to the hype over multimedia computing that was fueling a boom in their sales.

But there was more to Sins of the Father‘s success than its arrival at an opportune moment. On the contrary: the game’s popularity has proved remarkably enduring over the decades since its release. It spawned two sequels later in the 1990s that are almost as adored as the first game, and still places regularly at or near the top of lists of “best adventure games of all time.” Then, too, it’s received an unusual amount of academic attention for a point-and-click graphic adventure in the traditional style (a genre which, lacking both the literary bona fides of textual interactive fiction and the innate ludological interest of more process-intensive genres, normally tends to get short shrift in such circles). You don’t have to search long in the academic literature to find painfully earnest grad-student essays contrasting the “numinous woman” Roberta Williams with the “millennium woman” Jane Jensen, or “exploring Gabriel as a particular instance of the Hero archetype.”

So, as a hit in its day and a hit still today with both the fans and the academics, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers must be a pretty amazing game, right? Well… sure, in the eyes of some. For my own part, I see a lot of incongruities, not only in the game itself but in the ways it’s been received over the years. It strikes me as having been given the benefit of an awful lot of doubts, perhaps simply because there have been so very few games like it. Sins of the Fathers unquestionably represents a noble effort to stretch its medium. But is it truly a great game? And does its story really, as Sierra’s breathless press release put it back in the day, “rival the best film scripts?” Those are more complicated questions.

But before I begin to address them, we should have a look at what the game is all about, for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure of Gabriel Knights’s acquaintance.

Our titular hero, then, is a love-em-and-leave-em bachelor who looks a bit like James Dean and comes complete with a motorcycle, a leather jacket, and the requisite sensitive side concealed underneath his rough exterior. He lives in the backroom of the bookshop he owns in New Orleans, from which he churns out pulpy horror novels to supplement his paltry income. Grace Nakamura, a pert university student on her summer holidays, works at the bookshop as well, and also serves as Gabriel’s research assistant and verbal sparring partner, a role which comes complete with oodles of sexual tension.

Gabriel’s bedroom. What woman wouldn’t be excited to be brought back here?

Over the course of the game, Gabriel stumbles unto a centuries-old voodoo cult which has a special motivation to make him their latest human sacrifice. While he’s at it, he also falls into bed with the comely Malia, the somewhat reluctant leader of the cult. He learns amidst it all that not just voodoo spirits but many other things that go bump in the night — werewolves, vampires, etc. — are in fact real. And he learns that he’s inherited the mantle of Schattenjäger — “Shadow Hunter” — from his forefathers, and that his family’s legacy as battlers of evil stretches back to Medieval Germany. (The symbolism of his name is, as Jensen herself admits, not terribly subtle: “Gabriel” was the angel who battled Lucifer in Paradise Lost, while “Knight” means that he’s, well, a knight, at least in the metaphorical sense.) After ten days jam-packed with activity, which take him not only all around New Orleans but to Germany and Benin as well — Sins of the Fathers is a very generous game indeed in terms of length — Gabriel must choose between his love for Malia and his new role of Schattenjäger. Grace is around throughout: to serve as the good-girl contrast to the sultry Malia (again, the symbolism of her name isn’t subtle), to provide banter and research, and to pull Gabriel’s ass bodily out of the fire at least once. If Gabriel makes the right choice at the end of the game, the two forge a tentative partnership to continue the struggle against darkness even as they also continue to deny their true feelings for one another.

As we delve into what the game does well and poorly amidst all this, it strikes me as useful to break the whole edifice down along the classic divide of its interactivity versus its fiction. (If you’re feeling academic, you can refer to this dichotomy as its ludological versus its narratological components; if you’re feeling folksy, you can call it its crossword versus its narrative.) Even many of the game’s biggest fans will admit that the first item in the pairing has its problematic aspects. So, perhaps we should start there rather than diving straight into some really controversial areas. That said, be warned that the two things are hard to entirely separate from one another; Sins of the Fathers works best when the two are in harmony, while many of its problems come to the fore when the two begin to clash.

Let’s begin, though, with the things Sins of the Fathers gets right in terms of design. While I don’t know that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to lock yourself out of victory while still being able to play on, you certainly would have to be either quite negligent or quite determined to manage it at any stage before the endgame. This alone shows welcome progress for Sierra — shows that the design revolution wrought by LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island was finally penetrating even this most stalwart redoubt of the old, bad way of making adventure games.

Snarking aside, we shouldn’t dismiss Jensen’s achievement here; it’s not easy to make such an intricately plot-driven game so forgiving. The best weapon in her arsenal is the use of an event-driven rather than a clock-driven timetable for advancing the plot. Each of the ten days has a set of tasks you must accomplish before the day ends, although you aren’t explicitly told what they are. You have an infinite amount of clock time to accomplish these things at your own pace. When you eventually do so — and even sometimes when you accomplish intermediate things inside each day — the plot machinery lurches forward another step or two via an expository cut scene and the interactive world around you changes to reflect it. Sins of the Fathers was by no means the first game to employ such a system; as far as I know, that honor should go to Infocom’s 1986 text adventure Ballyhoo. Yet this game uses it to better effect than just about any game that came before it. In fact, the game as a whole is really made tenable only by this technique of making the plot respond to the player’s actions rather than forcing the player to race along at the plot’s pace; the latter would be an unimaginable nightmare to grapple with in a story with this many moving parts. When it works well, which is a fair amount of the time, the plot progression feels natural and organic, like you truly are in the grip of a naturally unfolding story.

The individual puzzles that live within this framework work best when they’re in harmony with the plot and free of typical adventure-game goofiness. A good example is the multi-layered puzzle involving the Haitian rada drummers whom you keep seeing around New Orleans. Eventually, a victim of the voodoo cult tells you just before he breathes his last that the drummers are the cult’s means of communicating with one another across the city. So, you ask Grace to research the topic of rada drums. Next day, she produces a book on the subject filled with sequences encoding various words and phrases. When you “use” this book on one of the drummers, it brings up a sort of worksheet which you can use to figure out what he’s transmitting. Get it right, and you learn that a conclave is to be held that very night in a swamp outside the city.

Working out a rada-drum message.

This is an ideal puzzle: complicated but not insurmountable, immensely satisfying to solve. Best of all, solving it really does make you feel like Gabriel Knight, on the trail of a mystery which you must unravel using your own wits and whatever information you can dig up from the resources at your disposal.

Unfortunately, not all or even most of the puzzles live up to that standard. A handful are simply bad puzzles, full stop, testimonies both to the fact that every puzzle is always harder than its designer thinks it is and to Sierra’s disinterest in seeking substantive feedback on its games from actual players before releasing them. For instance, there’s the clock/lock that expects you to intuit the correct combination of rotating face and hands from a few scattered, tangential references elsewhere in the game to the number three and to dragons.

Even the rather brilliant rada-drums bit goes badly off the rails at the end of the game, when you’re suddenly expected to use a handy set of the drums to send a message of your own. This requires that you first read Jane Jensen’s mind to figure out what general message out of the dozens of possibilities she wants you to send, then read her mind again to figure out the exact grammar she wants you to use. When you get it wrong, as you inevitably will many times, the game gives you no feedback whatsoever. Are you doing the wrong thing entirely? Do you have the right idea but are sending the wrong message? Or do you just need to change up your grammar a bit? The game isn’t telling; it’s too busy killing you on every third failed attempt.

Other annoyances are the product not so much of poor puzzle as poor interface design. In contrast to contemporaneous efforts from competitors like LucasArts and Legend Entertainment, Sierra games made during this period still don’t show hot spots ripe for interaction when you mouse over a scene. So, you’re forced to click on everything indiscriminately, which most of the time leads only to the narrator intoning the same general room description over and over in her languid Caribbean patois. The scenes themselves are well-drawn, but their muted colors, combined with their relatively low resolution and the lack of a hot-spot finder, constitute something of a perfect storm for that greatest bane of the graphic adventure, the pixel hunt. One particularly egregious example of the syndrome, a snake scale you need to find at a crime scene on a beach next to Lake Pontchartrain, has become notorious as an impediment that stops absolutely every player in her tracks. It reveals the dark flip side of the game’s approach to plot chronology: that sinking feeling when the day just won’t end and you don’t know why. In this case, it’s because you missed a handful of slightly discolored pixels surrounded by a mass of similar hues — or, even if you did notice them, because you failed to click on them exactly.

You have to click right where the cursor is to learn from the narrator that “the grass has a matted appearance there.” Break out the magnifying glass!

But failings like these aren’t ultimately the most interesting to talk about, just because they were so typical and so correctable, had Sierra just instituted a set of commonsense practices that would have allowed them to make better games. Much more interesting are the places that the interactivity of Sins of the Fathers clashes jarringly with the premise of its fiction. For it’s here, we might speculate, that the game is running into more intractable problems — perhaps even running headlong into the formal limitation of the traditional graphic adventure as a storytelling medium.

Take, for example, the point early in the game when Gabriel wants to pay a visit to Malia at her palatial mansion, but, as a mere civilian, can’t get past the butler. Luckily, he happens to have a pal at the police department — in fact, his best friend in the whole world, an old college buddy named Mosley. Does he explain his dilemma to Mosley and ask for help? Of course not! This is, after all, an adventure game. He decides instead to steal Mosley’s badge. When he pays the poor fellow a visit at his office, he sees that Mosley’s badge is pinned, as usual, to his jacket. So, Gabriel sneaks over to turn up the thermostat in the office, which causes Mosley to remove the jacket and hang it over the back of his chair. Then Gabriel asks him to fetch a cup of coffee, and completes the theft while he’s out of the room. With friends like that…

Gabriel is turned away from Malia’s door…

…but no worries, he can just figure out how to steal a badge from his best friend and get inside that way.

In strictly mechanical terms, this is actually a clever puzzle, but it illustrates the tonal and thematic inconsistencies that dog the game as a whole. Sadly, puzzles like the one involving the rada drums are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, you’re dealing instead with arbitrary roadblocks like this one that have nothing whatsoever to do with the mystery you’re trying to solve. It becomes painfully obvious that Jensen wrote out a static story outline suitable for a movie or novel, then went back to devise the disconnected puzzles that would make a game out of it.

But puzzles like this are not only irrelevant: they’re deeply, comprehensively silly, and this silliness flies in the face of Sins of the Fathers‘s billing as a more serious, character-driven sort of experience than anything Sierra had done to date. Really, how can anyone take a character who goes around doing stuff like this seriously? You can do so, I would submit, only by mentally bifurcating the Gabriel you control in the interactive sequences from the Gabriel of the cut scenes and conversations. That may work for some — it must, given the love that’s lavished on this game by so many adventure fans — but the end result nevertheless remains creatively compromised, two halves of a work of art actively pulling against one another.

Gabriel sneaks into the backroom of a church and starts stealing from the priests. That’s normal behavior for any moodily romantic protagonist, right? Right?

It’s at points of tension like these that Sins of the Fathers raises the most interesting and perhaps troubling questions about the graphic adventure as a genre. Many of its puzzles are, as I already noted, not bad puzzles in themselves; they’re only problematic when placed in this fictional context. If Sins of the Fathers was a comedy, they’d be a perfectly natural fit. This is what I mean when I say, as I have repeatedly in the past, that comedy exerts a strong centrifugal pull on any traditional puzzle-solving adventure game. And this is why most of Sierra’s games prior to Sins of the Fathers were more or less interactive cartoons, why LucasArts strayed afield from that comfortable approach even less often than Sierra, and, indeed, why comedies have been so dominant in the annals of adventure games in general.

The question must be, then, whether the pull of comedy can be resisted — whether compromised hybrids like this one are the necessary end result of trying to make a serious graphic adventure. In short, is the path of least resistance the only viable path for an adventure designer?

For my part, I believe the genre’s tendency to collapse into comedy can be resisted, if the designer is both knowing and careful. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, released the year before Sins of the Fathers, is a less heralded game than the one I write about today, but one which works better as a whole in my opinion, largely because it sticks to its guns and remains the type of fiction it advertises itself to be, eschewing goofy roadblock puzzles in favor of letting you solve the mystery at its heart. By contrast, you don’t really solve the mystery for yourself at all in Sins of the Fathers; it solves the mystery for you while you’re jumping Gabriel through all the irrelevant hoops it sets in his path.

But let’s try to set those issues aside now and engage with Sins of the Fathers strictly in terms of the fiction that lives outside the lines of its interactivity. As many of you doubtless know, I’m normally somewhat loathe to do that; it verges on a tautology to say that interactivity is the defining feature of games, and thus it seems to me that any given game’s interactivity has to work, without any qualifiers, as a necessary precondition to its being a good game. Still, if any game might be able to sneak around that rule, it ought to be this one, so often heralded as a foremost exemplar of sophisticated storytelling in a ludic context. And, indeed, it does fare better on this front in my eyes — not quite as well as some of its biggest fans claim, but better.

The first real scene of Sins of the Fathers tells us we’re in for an unusual adventure-game experience, with unusual ambitions in terms of character and plot development alike. We meet Gabriel and Grace in medias res, as the former stumbles out of his backroom bedroom to meet the latter already at her post behind the cash register in the bookstore. Over the next couple of minutes, we learn much about them as people through their banter — and, tellingly, pretty much nothing about what the real plot of the game will come to entail. This is Bilbo holding his long-expected party, Wart going out to make hay; Jane Jensen is settling in to work the long game.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GK.mp4

As Jensen slowly pulls back the curtain on what the game is really all about over the hours that follow, she takes Gabriel through that greatest rarity in interactive storytelling, a genuine internal character arc. The Gabriel at the end of the game, in other words, is not the one we met at the beginning, and for once the difference isn’t down to his hit points or armor class. If we can complain that we’re mostly relegated to solving goofy puzzles while said character arc plays out in the cut scenes, we can also acknowledge how remarkable it is for existing at all.

Jensen is a talented writer with a particular affinity for just the sort of snappy but revealing dialog that marks that first scene of the game. If anything, she’s better at writing these sorts of low-key “hang-out” moments than the scenes of epic confrontation. It’s refreshing to see a game with such a sense of ease about its smaller moments, given that the talents and interests of most game writers tend to run in just the opposite direction.

Then, too, Jensen has an intuitive understanding of the rhythm of effective horror. As any master of the form from Stephen King to the Duffer Brothers will happily tell you if you ask them, you can’t assault your audience with wall-to-wall terror. Good horror is rather about tension and release — the horrific crescendos fading into moments of calm and even levity, during which the audience has a chance to catch its collective breath and the knots in their stomachs have a chance to un-clench. Certainly we have to learn to know and like a story’s characters before we can feel vicarious horror at their being placed in harm’s way. Jensen understands all these things, as do the people working with her.

Indeed, the production values of Sins of the Fathers are uniformly excellent in the context of its times. The moody art perfectly complements the story Jensen has scripted, and the voice-acting cast — both the big names who head it and the smaller ones who fill out the rest of the roles — are, with only one or two exceptions, solid. The music, which was provided by the project’s producer Robert Holmes — he began dating Jensen while the game was in production, and later became her husband and constant creative partner — is catchy, memorable, and very good at setting the mood, if perhaps not hugely New Orleans in flavor. (More on that issue momentarily.)

Still, there are some significant issues with Sins of the Fathers even when it’s being judged purely as we might a work of static fiction. Many of these become apparent only gradually over time — this is definitely a game that puts its best foot forward first — but at least one of them is front and center from the very first scene. To say that much of Gabriel’s treatment of Grace hasn’t aged well hardly begins to state the case. Their scenes together often play like a public-service video from the #MeToo movement, as Gabriel sexually harasses his employee like Donald Trump with a fresh bottle of Viagra in his back pocket. Of course, Jensen really intends for Gabriel to be another instance of the archetypal charming rogue — see Solo, Han, and Jones, Indiana — and sometimes she manages to pull it off. At far too many others, though, the writing gets a little sideways, and the charming rogue veers into straight-up jerk territory. The fact that Grace is written as a smart, tough-minded young woman who can give as good as she gets doesn’t make him seem like any less of a sleazy creep, more Leisure Suit Larry than James Dean.

I’m puzzled and just a little bemused that so many academic writers who’ve taken it upon themselves to analyze the game from an explicitly feminist perspective can ignore this aspect of it entirely. I can’t help but suspect that, were Sins of the Fathers the product of a male designer, the critical dialog that surrounds it would be markedly different in some respects. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this double standard is justified or not in light of our culture’s long history of gender inequality.

As the game continues, the writing starts to wear thin in other ways. Gabriel’s supposed torrid love affair with Malia is, to say the least, unconvincing, with none of the naturalism that marks the best of his interactions with Grace. Instead it’s in the lazy mold of too many formulaic mass-media fictions, where two attractive people fall madly in love for no discernible reason that we can identify. The writer simply tells us that they do so, by way of justifying an obligatory sex scene or two. Here, though, we don’t even get the sex scene.

Pacing also starts to become a significant problem as the game wears on. Admittedly, this is not always so much because the writer in Jane Jensen isn’t aware of its importance to effective horror as because pacing in general is just so darn difficult to control in any interactive work, especially one filled with road-blocking puzzles like this one. Even if we cut Jensen some slack on this front, however, sequences like Gabriel’s visit to Tulane University, where he’s subjected to a long non-interactive lecture that might as well be entitled “Everything Jane Jensen Learned about Voodoo but Can’t Shoehorn in Anywhere Else,” are evidence of a still fairly inexperienced writer who doesn’t have a complete handle on this essential element of storytelling and doesn’t have anyone looking over her shoulder to edit her work. She’s done her research, but hasn’t mastered the Zen-like art of letting it subtly inform her story and setting. Instead she infodumps it all over us in about the most unimaginative way you can conceive: in the form of a literal classroom lecture.

Gabriel with Professor Infodump.

The game’s depiction of New Orleans itself reveals some of the same weaknesses. Yes, Jensen gets the landmarks and the basic geography right. But I have to say, speaking as someone who loves the city dearly and has spent a fair amount of time there over the years, that the setting of the game never really feels like New Orleans. What’s missing most of all, I think, is any affinity for the music that so informs daily life in the city, giving the streets a (literal) rhythm unlike anywhere else on earth. (Robert Holmes’s soundtrack is fine and evocative in its own right; it’s just not a New Orleans soundtrack.) I was thus unsurprised to learn that Jensen never actually visited New Orleans before writing and publishing a game set there. Tellingly, her depiction has more to do with the idiosyncratic, Gothic New Orleans found in Anne Rice novels than it does with the city I know.

The plotting too gets more wobbly as time goes on. A linchpin moment comes right at the mid-point of the ten days, when Gabriel makes an ill-advised visit to one of the cult’s conclaves — in fact, the one he located via the afore-described rada-drums puzzle — and nearly gets himself killed. Somehow Grace, of all people, swoops in to rescue him; I still have no idea precisely what is supposed to have happened here, and neither, judging at least from the fan sites I’ve consulted, does anyone else. I suspect that something got cut here out of budget concerns, so perhaps it’s unfair to place this massive non sequitur at the heart of the game squarely on Jensen’s shoulders.

But other problems with the plotting aren’t as easy to find excuses for. There is, for example, the way that Gabriel can fly from New Orleans to Munich and still have hours of daylight at his disposal when he arrives on the same day. (I could dismiss this as a mere hole in Jensen’s research, the product of an American designer unfamiliar with international travel, if she hadn’t spent almost a year living in Germany prior to coming to Sierra.) In fact, the entirety of Gabriel’s whirlwind trip from the United States to Germany to Benin and back home again feels incomplete and a little half-baked, from its cartoonish German castle, which resembles a piece of discarded art from a King’s Quest game, to its tedious maze inside an uninteresting African burial mound that likewise could have been found in any of a thousand other adventure games. Jensen would have done better to keep the action in New Orleans rather than suddenly trying to turn the game into a globetrotting adventure at the eleventh hour, destroying its narrative cohesion in the process.

Suddenly we’re in… Africa? How the hell did that happen?

As in a lot of fictions of this nature, the mysteries at the heart of Sins of the Fathers are also most enticing in the game’s earlier stages than they have become by its end. To her credit, Jensen knows exactly what truths lie behind all of the mysteries and deceptions, and she’s willing to show them to us; Sins of the Fathers does have a payoff. Nevertheless, it’s all starting to feel a little banal by the time we arrive at the big climax inside the voodoo cult’s antiseptic high-tech headquarters. It’s easier to be scared of shadowy spirits of evil from the distant past than it is of voodoo bureaucrats flashing their key cards in a complex that smacks of a Bond villain’s secret hideaway.

The tribal art on the wall lets you know this is a voodoo cult’s headquarters. Somehow I never expected elevators and florescent lighting in such a place…

Many of you — especially those of you who count yourselves big fans of Sins of the Fathers — are doubtless saying by now that I’m being much, much too hard on it. And you have a point; I am holding this game’s fiction to a higher standard than I do that of most adventure games. In a sense, though, the game’s very conception of itself makes it hard for a critic to avoid doing so. It so clearly wants to be a more subtle, more narratively and thematically rich, more “adult” adventure game that I feel forced to take it at its word and hold it to that higher standard. One could say, then, that the game becomes a victim of its own towering ambitions. Certainly all my niggling criticisms shouldn’t obscure the fact that, for all that its reach does often exceed its grasp, it’s brave of the game to stretch itself so far at all.

That said, I can’t help but continue to see Sins of the Fathers more as a noble failure than a masterpiece, and I can’t keep myself from placing much of the blame at the feet of Sierra rather than Jane Jensen per se. I played it most recently with my wife, as I do many of the games I write about here. She brings a valuable perspective because she’s much, much smarter than I am but couldn’t care less about where, when, or whom the games we play came from; they’re strictly entertainments for her. At some point in the midst of playing Sins of the Fathers, she turned to me and remarked, “This would probably have been a really good game if it had been made by that other company.”

I could tell I was going to have to dig a bit to ferret out her meaning: “What other company?”

“You know, the one that made that time-travel game we played with the really nerdy guy and that twitchy girl, and the one about the dog and the bunny. I think they would have made sure everything just… worked better. You know, fixed all of the really irritating stuff, and made sure we didn’t have to look at a walkthrough all the time.”

That “other company” was, of course, LucasArts.

One part of Sins of the Fathers in particular reminds me of the differences between the two companies. There comes a point where Gabriel has to disguise himself as a priest, using a frock stolen from St. Louis Cathedral and some hair gel from his own boudoir, in order to bilk an old woman out of her knowledge of voodoo. This is, needless to say, another example of the dissonance between the game’s serious plot and goofy puzzles, but we’ve covered that ground already. What’s more relevant right now is the game’s implementation of the sequence. Every time you visit the old woman — which will likely be several times if you aren’t playing from a walkthrough — you have to laboriously prepare Gabriel’s disguise all over again. It’s tedium that exists for no good reason; you’ve solved the puzzle once, and the game ought to know you’ve solved it, so why can’t you just get on with things? I can’t imagine a LucasArts game subjecting me to this. In fact, I know it wouldn’t: there’s a similar situation in Day of the Tentacle, where, sure enough, the game whips through the necessary steps for you every time after the first.

Father Gabriel. (Sins of the fathers indeed, eh?)

This may seem a small, perhaps even petty example, but, multiplied by a hundred or a thousand, it describes why Sierra adventures — even their better, more thoughtful efforts like this one — so often wound up more grating than fun. Sins of the Fathers isn’t a bad adventure game, but it could have been so much better if Jensen had had a team around her armed with the development methodologies and testing processes that could have eliminated its pixel hunts, cleaned up its unfair and/or ill-fitting puzzles, told her when Gabriel was starting to sound more like a sexual predator than a laid-back lady’s man, and smoothed out the rough patches in its plot. None of the criticisms I’ve made of the game should be taken as a slam against Jensen, a writer with special gifts in exactly those areas where other games tend to disappoint. She just didn’t get the support she needed to reach her full potential here.

The bitter irony of it all is that LucasArts, a company that could have made Sins of the Fathers truly great, lacked the ambition to try anything like it in lieu of the cartoon comedies which they knew worked for them; meanwhile Sierra, a company with ambition in spades, lacked the necessary commitment to detail and quality. I really don’t believe, in other words, that Sins of the Father represents some limit case for the point-and-click adventure as a storytelling medium. I think merely that it represents, like all games, a grab bag of design choices, some of them more felicitous than others.

Still, if what we ended up with is the very definition of a mixed bag, it’s nevertheless one of the most interesting and important such in the history of adventure games, a game whose influence on what came later, both inside and outside of its genre, has been undeniable. I know that when I made The King of Shreds and Patches, my own attempt at a lengthy horror adventure with a serious plot, Sins of the Fathers was my most important single ludic influence, providing a bevy of useful examples both of what to do and what not to do. (For instance, I copied its trigger-driven approach to plot chronology — but I made sure to include a journal to tell the player what issues she should be working on at any given time, thereby to keep her from wandering endlessly looking for the random whatsit that would advance the time.) I know that many other designers of much more prominent games than mine have also taken much away from Sins of the Fathers.

So, should you play Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers? Absolutely. It’s a fascinating example of storytelling ambition in games, and, both in where it works and where it fails, an instructive study in design as well. A recent remake helmed by Jane Jensen herself even fixes some of the worst design flaws, although not without considerable trade-offs: the all-star cast of the original game has been replaced with less distinctive voice acting, and the new graphics, while cleaner and sharper, don’t have quite the same moody character as the old. Plague or cholera; that does seem to be the way with adventure games much of the time, doesn’t it? With this game, one might say, even more so than most of them.

The big climax. Yes, it does look a little ridiculous — but hey, they were trying.

(Sources: the book Influential Game Designers: Jane Jensen by Anastasia Salter; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Spring 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1993 and March 1994. Online sources include “The Making of… The Gabriel Knight Trilogy” from Edge Online; an interview with Jane Jensen done by the old webzine The Inventory, now archived at The Gabriel Knight Pages; “Happy Birthday, Gabriel Knight“ from USgamer; Jane Jensen’s “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. Academic pieces include “Revisiting Gabriel Knight” by Connie Veugen from The Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet Volume 7; Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers: The Numinous Woman and the Millennium Woman” by Roberta Sabbath from The Journal of Popular Culture Volume 31 Issue 1. And, last but not least, press releases, annual reports, and other internal and external documents from the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is available for purchase both in its original version and as an enhanced modern remake.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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writingguide003-blog · 6 years

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10 inspiring female writers you need to read

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/10-inspiring-female-writers-you-need-to-read/

10 inspiring female writers you need to read

As a response to Gay Taleses failure to name any inspirational female writers, we asked our readers to explain why and how these authors changed their lives

It is hard to believe that this piece is still necessary. We long for the day when we dont have to single out authors or anyone of any walk of life, for that matter for their gender, but here we are again. Last weekend, author and New Journalism father Gay Talese was asked to name women writers who had inspired him at a Boston University event, to which he answered: None. He reportedly went on to say that educated women dont want to hang out with anti-social people, according to what journalist Amy Littlefield, who was in the audience, told the Washington Post.

Undoubtedly, the hashtag #womengaytaleseshouldread started bubbling on Twitter, and plenty of suggestions were made here is a tiny selection from authors:

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

Women writers who inspired me: Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, PL Travers, Margaret Storey, Ursula LeGuin, Baroness Orczy, Diana Wynne Jones

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

More women writers who inspired me: Wilmar Shiras, Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle, Mary Shelley, Anne Rice, Scheherazade, Judith Merrill…

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) April 5, 2016

Even More Women Writers Who Inspired Me: Joanna Russ, Hope Mirrlees, Joy Chant, Angela Carter, Madeleine LEngle, James Tiptree Jr, Kit Reed

John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 4, 2016

And Now, An Incomplete List of Women Writers Who Inspire Me: https://t.co/mxrYOFFE5r pic.twitter.com/7H8JaWgTgQ

roxane gay (@rgay) April 2, 2016

I hope no one expected Talese, who doesn’t wear jeans, to think well of women. IDGAF about his opinions.

We have celebrated female authors on the Books site before, but we contacted some of our readers and asked them to tell us which female writers shaped their lives. Here are 10 of the most mentioned authors, in no particular order, and what our readers had to say about them:

1. Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013)

Doris Lessing working at a typewriter, circa 1950. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

In my twenties, I was a foreigner in London. Reading Lessings subtly brilliant short story Out of the Fountain, I had that Keatsian feeling of a new world coming into view. As I read my way into the books of this fellow exile, her range and depth emerged from psychological portraits in granular detail, to vast explorations of cataclysm and survival. Class, sex, old age, childhood, the inner workings of politics, the wilder shores of the psyche she embraced complexity and got under the skin of the human condition with piercing acuity. This was writing from the frontiers of experience and utterly mind-stretching.

The two landmarks, for me, are Shikasta, her monumental portrait of humanity, and The Four-Gated City (part of the Children of Violence series), Lessings visionary mapping of London and the no-mans-land between psychosis and sanity this book opened doors for me. Her understanding of resilience and transformation in the midst of upheaval is profound. In our obfuscating times, we continue to need that eye. barbkay.

Start with: The Golden Notebook Hailed as one of the key texts of the womens movement of the 1960s, this study of a divorced single mothers search for personal and political identity remains a defiant, ambitious tour de force, wrote Robert McCrum.

Further reading:

I was the cuckoo in the nest Writer Jenny Diski tells the story of how she lived with Lessing as a teenager

My hero: Doris Lessing by Margaret Drabble Doris would invite herself to lunch with me in Hampstead, when the mood took her. I never dared to say no

Doris Lessing in her own words on the Guardian books podcast

She helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves by Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice

2. Toni Morrison (born 1931)

Toni Morrison in a 1982 image. Photograph: Reg Innell/Toronto Public Library

When we asked readers for their favourite books by women, many replied with anything and everything written by Toni Morrison. Here are but a few.

Toni Morrisons Beloved is the best book I have ever read. A horror story in every sense. I re-read it as soon as I had finished it. Chilling, difficult, painful, but absolutely brilliant. afiercebadrabbit

Beloved. Its odd reading a book at which you are simultaneously repulsed at how you feel and yet you understand exactly why you feel that way. Shes a terrific writer. getebi

I love every word shes written, with Beloved at the top of my list. Im also sad to see few writers from non-Anglo Saxon cultures listed as there are so many superb writers from other traditions. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is my favourite book of all time, and I also adore Elif Shafak, whose fiction and essays as well as her talks are outstandingly fresh and insightful. Read The Flea Palace and The Bastard of Istanbul. spraos

Start with: Beloved If Beloved represents the terrible pain and suffering of a people whose very mother-love is warped by torture into murder, she is no thin allegory or shrill tract. This is a huge, generous, humane and gripping novel, wrote A S Byatt

Further reading:

Im writing for black people I dont have to apologise interview by Hermione Hoby

Tea with Toni Morrison, by SL Bridglal

Toni Morrison on her novels: I think goodness is more interesting

Her 1993 Nobel lecture

3. Ursula K Le Guin (born 1929)

The Earthsea trilogy is absolutely magnificent: poetry, wisdom, sadness, satisfaction, fantasy, realism. Far better dragons than Tolkiens or George RR Martins, far better written the whole shebang, except for humour. But then, Tolstoy didnt go in for jokes much either. She taught me that there is nothing wrong with life or with death: the one is to be delighted in, the other accepted Daniel Mccormick in Coatbridge, Scotland

The Earthsea books by Ursula K Le Guin, which as an adult I find have greater moral depth than Tolkien and are better written and more focused than George RR Martins. QuesoManchego

The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin has been something of a personal bible since I was a child. punkmonkey

Ursula Le Guin during an interview in San Francisco in 1985. Photograph: M. Klimek/Bettmann/CORBIS

Start with: The Earthsea series or The Left Hand of Darkness they are some of the very few titles which I would be confident enough to name as true classics, novels that will endure well beyond our lifetimes, wrote Alison Flood

Further reading:

My inspiration: SF Said on Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin: Wizardry is artistry

Gentlemen, I just dont belong here her fantastic 1987 letter, responding to a request asking her to write a blurb for a science fiction anthology that contained no female voices

4. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Jacobs Room. Virginia Woolf. Because you can taste every word. Lope82

Mrs Dalloway, elegant and lyrical stream of consciousness that I prefer to Joyce. alloleo

Virginia Woolf. Photograph: George C. Beresford/Getty Images

I would like to put in a word for Virginia Woolf, and especially for the under-appreciated Orlando, where the long-lived protagonist starts out as a young nobleman before becoming a wife and mother. The book runs from Elizabethan England to 1928 and says a lot about the position of women while being both clever and funny. Perhaps Woolf is a bit too literary for some tastes, but Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse , The Waves and A Room of Ones Own must surely speak to many. I think (hope) she will come to be recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. JackSchofield

To The Lighthouse, it had a huge impact on me when I first read it. It really made me consider and reconsider how I think and find direction. I loved Lily Briscoe and that devastatingly matter-of-fact middle chapter/section that splits the novel. There are so many books by women that I love, but TTL is my favourite. daveportivo

Pretty much all of Woolf, whom I read voraciously during the late 90s and still dip into now and then for a quick dose of writerly inspiration. Hard to pick any one favorite, fiction or non-fiction. But A Room of Ones Own changed my life.Jenny Bhatt

Start with: Mrs DallowayWoolfs great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness, wrote Robert McCrum

Further reading:

Portraits of Virginia Woolf: here, the true face of the modern writer

Virginia Woolf should live on, but not because of her death, by Holly Williams

Woolf it down: on how the Bloomsbury set shows they were almost as obsessed with eating as with art

5. Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977)

If a writer such as Clarice Lispector is to be considered significant from a feminist point of view, then it would probably be due to the absence of anything in her work or life which could be said to resemble the stereotype of the Lady Novelist. As well as living like a sort of secular hermit, her writing is elusive and mystical, being much less concerned with plot and character than with abstract ideas, such as The Apple in the Darks consideration of the nature of artistic creation or Agua Vivas obsessive focus on trying to isolate single moments in time. Although she could write movingly about womens experiences (especially in The Hour of the Star), her almost stubborn unworldliness otherwise gives the lie to the awful old clich that women are somehow deficient in considering the abstract, and shows that women are as unrestricted in subject matter as men. She really is one of the oddest and most individual writers Ive read.Jacob Howarth in Oxford

Clarice Lispector. Photograph: Courtesy Paulo Gurgel Valente

I heard of her just a month ago, from a Korean American friend. All I can say about her at this stage is that she knows me better than I do. I am reading The Complete Stories published 2015, which is full of lovely and shocking surprises. I finish one of her stories with a huge grin that lasts all day, another story may leave me arguing with myself … each one is having an profound impact on me.

She inspires me more than any other author in this second half of my life. Her uniquely fluid style reveals a mind so perspicacious, so permissively poetic and utterly radical. As a feisty feminist, I find peace in Lispectors reveries; she defies convention at every level by writing from deep within her psyche, embracing human flaws and foibles as perfectly natural. Her trademark self-acceptance is so refreshingly robust that I have found myself at times interrupting my reading with whoops of awe and admiration for her freedom of thought and spirit. Mars Drum

Start with: The Hour of the Star all the Brazillian authors talents and eccentricities come together in her most famous, final novella about a poor typist in Rio, says Colm Tibn

Further reading:

A brief survey of the short story, part 56: This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures, wrote Chris Power

The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser for the New Yorker

Brazils Virginia Woolf, by Brenda Cronin for the Wall Street Journal

6. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Americanah has moved me like no other in recent memory. I would describe it as transformational because it provided an insight into the reality of what it means to be a young, ambitious, highly intelligent, sometimes single black woman in contemporary America. Its an honest book about race, identity and the constant longing and nostalgia one feels for this metaphorical place called home. I was also moved by the story because it touchingly describes the loving relationship between the two central characters, showcasing that neither space nor time can erase love.

We usually go back to the same desires and preferences we had as 15-year-olds, and Americanah captures this sentiment. Moreover, it is a transformational book because it portrays Nigeria as a place that is mythical, marvellous, chaotic and slightly dangerous, yet also wildly fascinating, with a magnetic power to attract its brightest emigrs back to its shores. Reading this has made me realise that some of the most powerful narratives in contemporary fiction have been written by young, highly educated female African writers, who are tired of the old clichs frequently bandied around about Africa. Ngozi Adichie is a new, powerful and incredibly talented voice; her novel Americanah is the expression of a different African tale, of a continent and its people that have many more magnetic stories to tell, as well as critiques to raise about the so-called enlightened West. beograd

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, photographed in 2007. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Start with: Americanah a superb dissection of race in the UK and the USA, wrote Elizabeth Day

Further reading:

I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist her world-famous TED talk

Dont we all write about love? When men do it, its a political comment. When women do it, its just a love story interview by Emma Brockes

Every 16-year-old in Sweden will receive copy of We Should All Be Feminists

7. Margaret Atwood (born 1939)

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood. She predicted all that is happening today in that book. shofmann

Everything about it is scarily easy to imagine. Her descriptions of how women began to be punished for abortions reminds me of legislation happening right now in the USA, for example. getebi

Start with: The Handmaids Tale Atwoods chilling tale of a concubine in an oppressive future America is more vital than ever, wrote Charlotte Newman

Further reading:

Haunted by The Handmaids Tale – Atwood on the legacy of her iconic novel

Margaret Atwood webchat her answers to your questions

I set myself a schedule of three to five pages a day Atwood on writing

8. Zadie Smith (born 1975)

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. Could read it over and over again. Sarah Hassam

Zadie Smith, photographed at the Edinburgh books festival in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

On Beauty by Zadie Smith is absolutely brilliant. Smith is often categorized first by race and gender and thus is never considered the peer of other modern literary fiction writers like Franzen and Rushdie, but she easily beats them at their own style. emason1121

Start with: White Teeth, a novel on the lives of various multicultural families living in London; an audaciously assured contribution to this process of staring into the mirror, wrote Caryl Philipps

Further reading:

Fail better: What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, an escape from personality? Thanks to Jenny Bhatt and MildGloster for pointing us towards this 2007 essay.

Windows on the Will: Smiths essay about watching the new Charlie Kaufman film Anomalisa, and Arthur Schopenhauer, was recently published on the New York Review of Books. I went to see Anomalisa, largely because of how interesting Smith made it seem, shared MildGloster.

9. Elena Ferrante (born 1943)

Of the many beautifully wrought themes explored in Elena Ferrantes masterful Neapolitan series, one that especially speaks to me, as a woman, is the question of what it means to attain presence versus what it means to disappear. Lila and Len, the central characters, each struggles to not disappear, despite the forces of class, history, and violence conspiring against them as women. Each tries to avoid what Lila loathingly describes as the problem of dissolving margins, when the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. Reading Ferrante has led me to wonder: How many times have I, as a woman, faced being erased in relationships, in career, in the larger social order? How many far less-privileged women, in hostile corners of the world, face the threat of vanishing completely, dissolving into the boundaries of others without a trace? Veronica Majerol, New York, NY

Start with: The Days of Abandonment, a short novel Ferrante wrote before her famous Neapolitan series a great taster, and brilliant in its own right.

Further reading:

Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows

Elena Ferrante: Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing an interview by Deborah Orr

10. Angela Carter (1940 – 1992)

When I was at university I saw someone give a paper on Angela Carters dystopian masterpiece The Passion of New Eve. It was probably another year or so before I got my hands on a copy but I was not disappointed.

The premise alone a man captured by radical feminists and surgically transformed into a woman so that he may bear the messiah was enough to pique my interest, but it was Carters hallucinatory prose and rich symbolism that made this novel unforgettable. elbartonfink

Start with: Nights at the Circus the story of winged circus performer Sophie Fevverss travels through 19th-century Europe, that was named the best-ever winner of Britains oldest literary prize, the James Tait Black award.

English novelist Angela Carter sitting on a park bench in Paris in 1988. Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Corbis

Further reading:

Angela Carter: a portrait in postcards

A brief survey of the short story: Angela Carter, by Chris Power

Femme fatale: Angela Carters subversive take on traditional fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber is as shocking today as when the collection first appeared in 1979, wrote Helen Simpson

We are painfully aware that this list could go forever. So, please, add more authors to the conversation by leaving your thoughts in the comments.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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tammiedamon77-blog · 7 years

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VW Beetle Inspired Home And Also Dining Establishment Layouts

Life can throw you some difficulties, most of the times, all of a sudden. There are much too many tales of people cannot live the life they have actually constantly dreamed of. By devoting to ending up being another instance of an inspirational person, you can influence those around you because when they see that a person they understand can accomplish their dreams, it will create a better idea in themselves. If you adored this write-up and you would certainly such as to receive additional info relating to please click the up coming website page kindly see our site. For $150 you will certainly receive a prototype copy of the game, and the very best part is that it will certainly ship out in 3 days. Having a watch style background, a passion for watches and working for firms such as Movado, I might not assume of a better means to do this than to develop a watch. The phrase that keeps showing up in talks with crucial Apple figures is Steve's gift." 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The old saying states, 'You take a male angling and feed him for a day; you could educate him how to fish and also he will consume for a lifetime.' I think that is the significance of real empowerment It is educating an individual how to encourage and motivate themselves. Those heavy aspects of guide, for those of you neither familiar nor comfy with them can be viewed as allegories for all manner of 'sensible' aspects, such as the subconscious mind, the central nerves, and possibly those parts of the brain they claim we don't use. Analogbook is a collection of particularly developed note pads made particularly for specialist digital photographers, musicians, and also photography pupils. Some years ago, the prominent scientist James Lovelock got the idea for a publication. For the downloadable follow-up to Bioshock Infinite, developer Irrational Games brought players back to the undersea city of Rapture for a new story called "Burial at Sea." Episode one of the growth introduced in November, while episode 2 is slated for next month. When an opus reverberates with individuals, we could certainly likewise be able to value the value of the existence of musical skills, which help to properly express the feelings that reverberate. Since 1997, Jonathan Ive has looked after the layout of every Apple item-- consisting of the business's new headquarters. Next, you'll invest 3 evenings at the stylish Chongwe Safari Residence, by a gentle river that's excellent for canoeing - as well as includes strolling safaris, and also day and night game drives. TYPE: The beyond the base light has been created as well as produced to resemble a note pad making use of top notch American walnut or Bamboo, with paler plywood in the center to produce the appearance of having web pages. There is plenty to pick from if you ever need any ideas for new suggestions for your next scrapbooking project. Don't hesitate to differ or include your own suggestions below. Yes, we could produce an all-glass structure, yet in this environment we have to shade it-- you need to have some serious baseball-cap action." Foster + Allies' and Ive's teams made the outcroppings, as well as Seele needed to determine ways to make them, with the direction that they must be as white as feasible. By understanding that the target market is, you will certainly have the ability to design a lifestyle around that to interest that particular team of possible customers as well as the property agent can develop a marketing plan especially to attract those exact same individuals. Inspirational songs accepts all spiritual ideas but advertises no spiritual theology. I tried to place the awkward feelings to the rear of my mind yet the next early morning as I scrolled through messages on Facebook I melted with shame when I saw the party pictures people had actually shared. He started making the tech-media speaking circuit reviewing his increase to popularity (and also some lot of money) through his bitcoin financial investments and his start-up suggestions. As for Amin, he intended to rebrand the firm from the day he began in the springtime of 2012. Generally mentioned dangers in these kinds of jobs are the capacity to obtain right components in the right time. "You have these film-school individuals who are like, 'Allow me inform you exactly what you're really feeling intuitively about just what Spielberg is trying to do to your mind,'" states Jason Kottke, a noticeable blog writer and also YouTube Movie School follower whose blog posts transformed me on to much of these makers. What familiar with be taken into consideration the back-end" is currently upfront in creative growth, and rather than restricting creativity, it can open doors to new, differed creative suggestions that are measurably much more efficient in producing company outcomes. This site has a collection of inspiring quotes, poems, prayers, ecards, short articles, videos, and lessons made to encourage you to live the life of your desires.

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mtwy · 8 years

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Record

UK March 1985

Maybe She’s Good - 10 Theories on How Madonna ‘Got It’

By Laura Fissinger

Usually it takes a while for a pop star to earn heavyweight hatred from a significant percentage of the press and public. But like everything else in her (very) young career, fear and loathing have come quickly indeed to singer/ writer/ dancer/ hot number Madonna. Loathe her or love her, it’s interesting to try and figure this one out. Theories abound, including a few from the lady herself.

I. Phyllis and Bob Theory As Madonna puts it, “I seem to be the girl they hate to love.” No kidding. Private citizens tap their feet to “Lucky Star” or “Holiday” while wondering aloud if anything short of exorcism will get her off their radios and MTVs. The press file reads like she’s a ghoulish maidservant of notorious anti-libber Phyllis Schlafly and notorious Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, sucking all the feminism and IQ points from the fragile neck of popular culture. Fans and foes alike seem to agree that she’s an ’80s incarnation of the “It” girl – blessed/cursed with a charisma that makes skin goosebump as well as crawl, something beyond her prettiness or infamous tummy. It makes her videos, records and (soon) movies impossible to dismiss. It’s there in person, too. She comes down a corporate hallway in a big black jacket and modest red-knit dress, looking like the video Madonna sans the bare belly and excess Catholic iconography. There is absolutely nothing solicitous in her manner of greeting, nothing straining to charm, nothing yanking at you for approval. Her handshake (a tiny red glove conceals the hand) is firm, and brief. Even so, the force is with her; it swallows her little frame as she walks toward a vast conference room like a sixth grader going to a hard math exam. Undoubtedly, her mind is elsewhere. Just this week, “Like A Virgin” has gone to Number One on the pop charts, and its namesake LP to Number Three, only five weeks after release. Her first LP took almost a year to happen, but once it did it sold two million-plus copies. It’s not quite finished yet, either. Nor is the fallout, which so far includes the four hit singles, three videos, one starring film role and one small part in a movie for which she sang three tunes. Oh yeah, and the lousy reputation. Part of that reputation says that Madonna is simply not a nice person, but superb at appearing so when someone‘s approval could be useful. On this particular day, anyway, she is kind of bristly. A little sharp-tongued and self-satisfied. But she makes no effort to hide any of the warts. More than a few rock stars are downright oily and self-protective when they need nice press. Madonna answers questions straight out, is only pretty nice most of the session, and leaves the warts right out there. If she’s such a master at showbiz politics, where’s the politicking? Where’s the manipulation? II. The Wedding Dress Theory Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone was born in Detroit on August 16, 1958. Veronica is her Catholic confirmation name, chosen because St. Veronica “wiped the face of Jesus and then carried around the cloth with his blood and sweat on it — it was so passionate and weird.” The French-Italian family had five boys and three girls who lost their mother when her namesake, Madonna, was six, Madonna didn’t much like the stepmother that appeared two years later; no doubt the woman felt it. Even in grade school, Madonna apparently had extraordinary intensity; it both scared and fascinated her. “I felt overwhelmed by it at points in my life. People didn’t understand me, especially when I was young; I’d realize I’d just alienated someone and scared them away, a boy or a friend or whoever. I handled it in a number of ways — either I’d get more arrogant and say ‘I don’t need you, I don’t care if you understand or I’d get upset and cry. You can get hurt by it, or you can give them the finger. But it still hurts.” She learned to be defensive then, and still practices, frequently, “It’s easy for me to come out and say stuff. I think I was naturally a verbal and defensive kind of person, but I think I really developed that aspect of my personality growing up in my family, not feeling happy, feeling like I had to defend myself and make a statement, you know? It’s about insecurity? There are mementos of that time. “Just the other day I found a photograph of me dressed in my mother’s wedding gown when I was five years old. It was very strange.” III. The Barbie Doll Dishwashing Theory “Oh yeah, I played with my Barbie dolls all the time — I definitely lived out my fantasies with them.” Madonna lets loose a naughty chuckle. “I dressed them up in sarongs and mini-skirts and stuff. They were sexy, having sex all the time. I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And they were bitchy, man, Barbie was mean.” She hoots. “Barbie would say to Ken, ‘I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight, I’m going bowling, okay, so forget it!’ You know? She was going to be sexy, but she was going to be tough” A quote from a recent story is brought up in which Madonna had claimed sexual awakening at age five. “Made it sound like I masturbated all the time, didn’t it?” she says with a raised eyebrow. “I really do remember from when I was very, very young, being really attracted to men, and being real flirtatious. The power of my femininity and charm, I remember it was just something I had, that I’d been given, you know what I mean? From the age of five I remember being able to affect people that way. I felt something but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was just very aware of it.” IV. The Boyfriend Theory In the teenage years, two things were pure pleasure — dance and music. Madonna studied ballet as much as her father and her legs would allow. As for the music, it was on her radio, and the more radio-perfect, the better. “My favorites when I was little were Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, the Motown sound. But then I really like ’60s pop songs too — “The Letter” by the Boxtops, “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, Gary Puckett, Bob by Sherman, “Happy Together” by the Turtles. I loved all those innocent little pop songs. No hard rock, no heavy metal, no jazz. Pop and soul were it.” Dance won her a four-year free ride at the University of Michigan, but the prognosis for toe-shoe stardom was lousy. As would be the ease for years to come, Madonna saw no reason to follow rules, and that rubbed the rulemakers the wrong way. After one school year, she moved to New York City. Hometown friend Steve Bray had started her on drums and singing and a little songwriting. It didn’t take long in New York before dance stepped aside to make more room for music. The next teacher/companion was Dan Gilroy of Queens, whose adoration of the Beatles and their melodies shaped Madonna’s sense of how to construct a song; Gilroy also had the instruments and the patience to start her with the C chords. Madonna left for a frustrating European tour singing and dancing behind a disco singer, then came back to spend a valuable year in the Gilroy brother’s band and home. Eventually she wanted things in the band her own way, although that way wasn’t entirely clear yet. Manhattan and new compatriots beckorted. Bray came out to work with her through two rock ‘n’ roll bands. They didn’t turn out to be the way either. “I didn’t want to go in a rock vein, and that’s what created the schism between my manager of that time period and myself. I was really being influenced by the urban radio stuff that was starting to be everywhere, on the streets and in the clubs. I love to dance in clubs, and I love all the music they play. It made me really want to dance, it was so soulful. I thought, why can’t I do that? I wanted to make music that I would want to dance to when I was out at the clubs.” Logically, New York nightclubs is where she went next. It came down to peddling R&B demo tapes done by her and Bray, at the places where the songs’ magic would get their roughest test. If the songs made people dance in New York’s hippest hothouses, that would be the sign that her way, finally, was the right way. DJ boyfriend Mark Kamins remixed one tape and then took it to Sire, where a deal was made. But neither Bray nor Kamins got to produce the first album, a job they each felt had been promised, and earned. Instead, Madonna was done by veteran R&B producer Reggie Lucas (Stephanie Mills, Phyllis Hyman). Madonna knows it didn’t seem right. She also knows what else it seemed like. She looks the reporter straight in the eye: “If anybody wants to know, I never f*cked anyone to get anywhere. Never.” V. The Trickle-Down Theory Stories about Madonna’s method of career advancement started to circulate shortly after the debut LP came to life on the pop charts. How did this woman with no band or playing credits on her record and no known credibility connections score such a surprise hit? Awfully, uh, juicy looking, isn’t she’? “Some of the things people say are so ridiculous, it’s not even worth defending yourself. The guy who wrote one recent long story, – he got his facts right, all my boyfriends’ names right and how they helped my career, but he wrote the article from just one corner of the room. He just talked about what he saw from that one corner.” She speaks with a tiny shade of sadness, but no rancor. “Yes, all my boyfriends turned out to be very helpful to my career, but that’s not the only reason I stayed with them. I loved them very much.” A pause, then a smile and a shrug. “I’m not Alexis from Dynasty. And going around in corsets is not all I am either. People hone in on what they want to hone in on. They rarely go for the sum total of someone’s personality.” Madonna is not the only one who got helped. Gilroy’s debut with his band, Breakfast Club, is due soon. Kamins is collecting royalties from Madonna and working on new projects. Bray is working with the Breakfast Club; he also had four cowriting credits on Like A Virgin. And Lucas, who lost his slot to Nile Rodgers on LP #2, is reportedly busier than ever. VI. The Bathroom Theory “Reggie was about one thing,” explains Madonna. “He did R&B. He’s a good producer, very open and sensitive. But Nile has worked with so many kinds of musicians, and every record he’s made is a great one as far as I’m concerned. He has the pop thing in him really strong, and he’s done great dance stuff with Chic and Sister Sledge and all those others, and he’s worked with a lot of female vocalists like Diana Ross. I identified with him, too. He’s a real street person, and we hung out at the same clubs. Even before I started to interview producers I thought he was the one I wanted for the second record.” Rodgers is getting to be a popular interview these days for people writing about Madonna. The implication is, of course, that Rodgers is legit, see, and if he likes Madonna without being her boyfriend, then maybe she’s not a total bimbo. Rodgers is affable and willing to talk, even with a mean head cold and a long airplane trip only a few hours away. “Someone like Iggy Pop can get out there and be super-sexual and wild and that’s great. But Madonna is a woman, so they say she’s sleazy? Madonna is blatantly sexual and sensual, but not sleazy, not even a little bit. In my opinion, she’s an excellent natural singer, a natural musician, a serious artist. It would be real nice if some ostensibly smart people who know about music would get past the image and get into the music. I’m hoping she can just ride out all the crap people are saying about her. I think a lot of the real nasty stuff is coming from men. And all that arrogance bit — she sticks to her guns, that’s all. It’s that attitude that comes from growing up in a huge family, you know, always having to fight and yell for things like time in the bathroom.” VII. The Chauffeur’s Friend’s Theory “I was making this movie, Desperately Seeking Suson. One of the drivers that took me to the set every day was this kid, and one day he said to me, ‘I have this bet going with my friend, he told me that all the music you do was done by someone else and they picked the songs and did it all, and all they needed was a girl singer and you auditioned and they picked you. And Madonna isn’t your real name and all of it is fabricated.‘ And I said, ‘WHAAAAATT?? Are you out of your mind??!’ But that’s what his friend told him, and it suddenly hit me that that’s probably what a lot of people think. It hit me.” VIII. The Phyllis and Bob Theory, Part II Here’s the catch for the modern girl: you can be self-determining. You now have the right. You should be self-determining, you must. But. If your self determines that it wants to be smart and sexpot at the same time? You got the power to choose, honey, but you chose wrong, “I thought the Gina Schock quote was pretty funny,” grins Madonna, referring to Schock recent statement to the effect that Madonna makes it hard for people to take women seriously but that Schock loved the record in spite of it. “I think people want to see me as a little tart bimbo who sells records because I’m cute and record companies push ’em because they know they can make a quick buck on my image.” Madonna gives another eyeball to eyeball look. “People don’t want to like me. And that’s because you’re not supposed to be flirty unless you’re an airhead. And they say I do all this stuff to my appearance and look the way I do because I want to please men.” The blue eyes roll toward the ceiling. “I’m doing it because I like it. If I don’t like it, no one’s going to. I do it because it turns me on.” Any female role models or heroes? She sighs. “Carole Lombard. She’s my all-time idol. I love her so much. She’s real sentimental and vulnerable, and funny, and sometimes she’s real bitchy and tough, too. She’s it.” IX. The Sheet Theory You gotta pay if you wanna play, says the firm set of her mouth. “I try to have a thick skin, but every once in a while I read something that someone says about me and it’s so slanderous and moralistic, and it has nothing to do with my music. There was this one review that said things about me that boys said to me in the seventh grade.” For instance? “For instance – ‘slut.’ Yep, they called me that in this review. And ‘cheap coquette,’ a girl who made her way into lots of back seats in the drive-in theater, the kind of girl that made your father slip you a Trojan and pat you on the back and say, ‘Have a good time, don’t stay out too late.'” Her eyes focus across the room as if she’s watching a movie. “I remember guys saying that sort of stuff to me when I was really young. I thought suddenly that the whole experience was repeating itself all over again. Those boys didn’t understand me, and they didn’t like me because I wasn’t stupid, and I was blunt and opinionated, but I was a flirt at the same time. They took my aggressiveness as a come-on. They didn’t get it. And they didn’t get it, if you know what I mean, so I guess they had to say things because they knew that was the only way they could hurt me. That review felt like junior high all over again. And check this out! This reviewer also said that every guy across the country is stroking himself under his sheets thinking about me.” Madonna’s face creases in mischief. “Maybe he’s doing it himself and he feels guilty. Or maybe he asked me out on a date five years ago and I snubbed him.” It’s not out of the question. X. The Time Theory Madonna has to vamoose in 15 minutes, cover story and unanswered questions notwithstanding. This week preceding a needed vacation is crammed with band auditions for the boys who will go on the “Virgin Tour.” The trek will start around March and cover the States as well as Europe. Before and after and probably even during the tour there are TV tapings, fashion layouts, photo sessions, videos, commercials, movie scripts to consider and on and on. And then, “I’ll check into Bellevue, or maybe the Betty Ford Clinic, huh?” Any positive press along the way will be nice, of course, but serious reputation repair can only come if she keeps going, going, going. And she knows it. “The fact of the matter is that you can use your beauty and use your charm and be flirtatious, and you can get people interested in you. Maybe at the start they’re only interested in your beauty. But you cannot maintain that. In the end, talent is the only thing. My work is the only thing that’s going to change any minds. The videos, the records, the movies are the things that will eventually make them think that I’m more than just a girl with a pretty face who’s had some pop hits. It’s just going to take some time.”

Photo Credits: Deborah Feingold, Laura Levine

#1985 #thevirginera #magazines

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dannick99 · 8 years

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18th Birthday - Landmark for Mom

Just do it. Just pick one and run with it, like the wind. No looking back. Pick your *1 *out of 20 to 25 viable creative ideas that have been stirring in your head for years and fleshing themselves out as you age and grow and learn. Take it and run with it -is what I keep hearing… From God and from good understanders of me and my ideas and how I tick. Run with it, WW! Like the wind. No looking back and questioning whether it was the right one to start with......or not. The others aren't going anywhere any time soon, hopefully(?). Just do it, I hear Nike reverberate between my ears. Just take the first steps and God will bless it. God and other "importants" in my life are well aware of my ADD 'stuck' struggle for years. Too much creativity flow at times can be a problem when life is already slam- jam packed, full of necessary responsibilities and life's necessities beaming at you. That rare gift can be a gift(ADD), a blessing to be thankful for, which I am, but it can be a curse in other ways. So they say, and I believe them more every new year, indecisiveness is for sissies.....so here I go… Out into the wild blue yonder of this "reveal yourself" blog world. With my music, writing, photography, painting, appreciation of all things beautiful and creative/artistic, all based in love and positivity, it's time to Flow🌬🌬🌈☀️ And to start on the night after my son's 18th birthday (appropriately sentimental, as it should be), i'm tending towards introspection. First of all, I feel enormously blessed and gifted as a mom in the parenting department of my three. They're the only three I can speak for. Parenting is NOT for sissies, especially single parenting(🙃), or lazy or settled or self-centered or too-busy-to-get down-to-it parenting. Ha, or all of the above, for that matter.. Judge not that you be not judged :-&! I'm the last to throw stones, at anyone, for anything, especially parents. I have had my share of plenty well-deserved stones thrown and plenty not-so- deserved stones. Something my parents didn't tell me enough… Life isn't fair! Don't expect it to be. Even when you make mistakes and you fess up. Or even when others who have left you come back and beg your forgiveness and fess up themselves, (although, admittedly, that part Does feel more fair;)!) If nothing else, being the target/the focus of the gossip tree, will humble you and teach you to look outside of the box when it comes to what I may hear about others. I don't succeed 100% of the time, but I try to hear it from all sources before I speak. I'll make my own decisions based on proper, well gathered facts, thank you very much ;) So, BY THE WAY, welcome to my free-falling (Tom Petty style🎵) - mostly - unapologetic first blog entry of 2017!! 🎬🏹🔛🥂🆓🈂🔓✒️📆📬🎉🔮💡⌛️🌠🛤🎡🗽🚥🚀🎤🍻🌛🌙🌒🌝🌻🐶👢💃💁🗣👉🏼👻🤔🙀👣🇺🇸☮️ On THAT note, I'm already apologizing…😑- lol. I'm not one to go on an emoticon binge like this, but I have to say it's a pretty good description....one by one by one.....of where this, my new stream of conscious blogging very well may lead! 9 and 17 are my lucky numbers, I was born on July 17 and my son was born on January 17. J and A seem to be my letters. Numbers are always coming into play in my life in the wildest of ways. And lately #1 has been pretty damn cool (but more on that later). Craziness with that number and I've got photographic proof! For months now… Weirdville, I'm telling you! But more coming...soooo much more later. On so many subjects! Flatlining has not been my norm. I was born and taught by all the right folks in my life along the way, definitely including my parents and family, a very strong message of "Love is the most motivating factor, think for yourself, make things better for everyone, be authentic at all costs, keep God first and then, truly, in all manner of things, all shall be well😇. I am no angel but a very gratefully content 53-year-old mother of an awesome grown daughter (28) and two sons I adore as well - 18 and 15. I've been divorced a time or two, which yes deductibly means I've been married a time or two. More to come on that subject. Ive never been afraid to take chances and speak my mind when strong opinions and convicted convictions submerge. That may just set the stage for the up and coming Blogtone (shouldn't that be the name of a band?!) as its gonna pour outta me a couple nights a week. I'll try to choose a theme each time (So many to choose from, and yes, I'm sorry - and happy- to tell you, if you don't know this about me, that I have significant ADD! ). You'll see… If you look for it. Its that freefalling thing I was talking about earlier :-& Anyway, this blog (I hate that word!? Come on… What else can we call it??) will always be supported with photographs, quotes, lyrics, songs, videos, and hopefully good writing along the way. Its part of a vision/dream in the making and something I feel led to get a move on with right now! January 18, 2017. Without long intro, the subject of the night is my oldest son turning 18 yesterday. It's a definite thing to take note of as a parent and as an 18-year-old. We did last night. I have two sons and a daughter I adore equally. Really, for all their different reasons and beings. But tonight I want to honor my son who's become man. Because he deserves it. Here's my letter to Brade: You've been through a lot son, and I only see that you come out stronger. Yes, I am a proud mom and a pleased one with who I can see you are today. God knows I've been learning as I go with boys, but you have paved the way, Brady, and while I couldn't adore or respect your sister any more than I do, you have paved your own way and I have done my part and been able to sit back and be mightily impressed with who this little boy has turned into and applaud the decisions YOU've made to be your own person. You are kind, loving, empathetic, stubborn, demanding at times, messy as hell, but somehow stay on top of it all just enough to pull off a darn good balance in being a good well-rounded human being. Your 18th birthday was and felt significant. You're my son, a friend, one of the greatest companions ever, and still learning, until the day you leave for college! And this last semester of your senior year seems to have freed you from all the burdens and responsibilities that have fallen on your shoulders. Yay!!🎉. As you know, I'm already crying....just with your 18th birthday, graduation tears on the way (it's OK, you know your mama ;)). Anyway, the birthday night looked like it might not go super smoothly, but God had his hand in it and all went just perfectly👍🏼. Brady got to eat his favorite cake and eat it too. And more cake coming his way. The beauty of a divided family… Many many celebrations for someone we/they all love. What can be better than to be loved that much that there are too many celebrations to plan in a birthday week?!❤😘. Now he's looking for the perfect present to give his best friend Cameron, whose birthday is around the corner and who has life-threatening melanoma. Cameron is my early-on dubbed "third son". Brady and Cot (my youngest and a true soul) and all of Cameron's closest friends are keeping him strong along with his incredible fighting spirit. He's going to beat the odds💥🎯#cameronstrong! All this in the middle of my daughter's long life BFF almost dying through childbirth a week ago. Very scary situation, Campbell took off work and went to Birmingham for a week to help, as any bestie would do ;) through a gazillion prayers and a lot of true faith, and miracles no doubt, she is not only surviving but thriving and more and has been able more every day. Her baby Max is too! Looked mighty mighty dicey there for a while. We are all Thanking God, literally. I am a single mother, with a good supportive father, who has my kids half the time, who tries hard to make a difference when I do have them (and every day I don't) in the ways I feel matter as far as raising the best absolute human beings to go into the world and contribute in all the right ways and feel good about themselves in the meantime - that's my style of kid raising. And I hope that they will always know that they can ask God for the answers and he will provide. Because he does and as, hopefully, they will I've seen enough of that after a while to really know they can believe in him and his goodness and his ways. Anyway, to sum up Blog No. 1, from my Deck of Declarations, i'll say that my views good. Life is hard at times. My children inspire me to be a better person, so I can keep teaching them about all the things that matter the most and being a good human being on this planet... whether they become a sports star, a corporate magnate, a starving artist of some sort, a sitcom writer, a Brooklyn bridge salesman, a waiter, a rapper or a baker, or anything else (other than a drug doer/dealer or a criminal

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