#that was a show in which the xmas villain does Not try to fuck the krampus lmao. comparing; contrasting; titrating; examining swatches)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

looking like another genevieve rafter keddy photo i haven't seen elsewhere already (where are we getting these lol) and when things seem to be the krampus onstage with a mic i am Looking. i am looking directly at that....

[lovenliterature]

evermore thoughts

willow

I wasn’t sold on this on first listen but I really liked it on second listen with more attention to lyrics

video is also really lovely, big fan of that

really really like the difference in melody for the diff appearances of “life was a willow and it bent right to your wind”

favourite lyric: “I come back stronger than a 90s trend” - the look she does at the camera cemented this as my fave line even more

champagne problems

down as one of my faves from the start

love love love the narrative

proper late night with cider, melancholy vibe

kind of like a grown up/worse feeling august in terms of vibes?? as in like the experience described feels like a more intense heartbreaking august in a way

really like the conclusion too

favourite lyric: I really struggled to pick here but: “you booked the night train for a reason/so you could sit there in this hurt” for sheer visceral emotion, “dom perignon you brought it” for the way its sung, “How evergreen, our group of friends/Don't think we'll say that word again” and “she’ll patch up your tapestry that I shred” for lyricism

gold rush

again, one i wasn’t super sold on the first listen, music and the vibe didn’t really interest me

first notes made me think of epiphany

but then i listened to it watching the lyric video and holy shit

now v appreciative of the melody and bass and the pace of the lyrics

really really like her embracing talking about jealousy

love love love the ending and beginning being the same holy shit

favourite lyrics: “at dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit” and the way she sings “with your hair falling into place like dominoes”

‘tis the damn season

again preferred on second listen, wasn’t on the list of early faves

the best xmas late night walks vibe, walking through frosty streets at home between houses, embracing the only time you get to think, losing yourself in music and nighttime with freezing hands and cloudy breath

would’ve fit my 2019 xmas vibe too

melancholy and nostalgia

favourite lyrics: “sleep in half the day/just for old time’s sake” and “and the heart I know I’m breakin’ is my own”

tolerate it

god girl you deserve better

kinda like a sad last great american dynasty in terms of searching for approval

naive innocence taken advantage of

drunk in my garden walking round to try and forget my life kinda vibe

favourite lyrics: “i know my love should be celebrated/but you tolerate it” and “now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life” 

no body no crime

holy shit did i sleep on this at first but oh my god its so good

start gives me show of hands vibes which is great

her husbands acting different and it smells like infidelity - just the way she sings this is so so fucking good

this is the easiest song to listen to and holy shit its just great

favourite lyric: “she said “that ain’t my merlot on his mouth/that ain’t my jewellery on our joint account”

happiness

“all the years I’ve given/is just shit we’re dividin’ up” - v v true, you have to rebuild your life after every relationship and taking it all apart is so much more sudden than building it up

like an alternative to the 1 which I LOVE

but also some parallels to this is me trying: “I hope she’ll be a beautiful fool..... sorry I didn’t mean that” vs “my words shoot to kill when I’m mad”

the whole bridge is iconic - “I can’t make it go away by making you a villain” - in the short term, anger at an ex can help, but eventually you have to move on, and its easier to accept that there was good in the relationship after a while, and it makes looking back on it better

“no one teaches you what to do/when a good man hurts you/and you know you hurt him too” - blame on both sides is much harder to take and grieve and its hard to know how to cope with that. it also makes advice more complicated because there isn’t much you can say to help

favourite lyric: “both of these things can be true” - always love duality and nuance in literature and its nice to hear it acknowledged in a climate of binary oppositions and no shades of grey

dorothea

nostalgia for the future

now prob my most listened, gets stuck in my head and one of the few i do listen to in isolation - like august

Reminds me so much of Ella - each other’s history, not each other’s whole future but in there somewhere

again sapphic vibes, real strong esp because of the ella vibes its the whole in between romantic and platonic affection

“hey dorothea, do you ever stop and think about me” - that’s the way I think of people I love esp ella and people from that era of my life, and anyone where its kinda open ended or just grown apart

favourite lyric: “and damn dorothea, they all wanna be ya”

coney island

instant fave - marked down from first listen and probably still one i actively look forward to 

much like with exile, the male vocals GOT me

“did I shatter you” that line broke my goddamn heart

favourite lyrics: both for the sheer feelings of the vocals and the lyricism “were you standing in the hallway/with a big cake, happy birthday/did I paint your skies the darkest grey” and “and when I got into the accident/the sight that flashed before me was your face”

ivy

the way she sings goddamn could be the whole fucking song its so beautiful

“my pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand/taking mine, but it’s promised to another” - the passive here is great

“he wants what’s only yours”

the trilogy of these lyrics “what would he do if he found us out?”, “he’s gonna burn this house to the ground”, “and drink my husband’s wine”, the recklessness, the drinking his wine like a secret defiance

“my house of stone/your ivy grows/and now i’m covered in you” - fucking hell this is the best imagery - even with the strongest walls and foundations, the love crept through and grew inside her til she was covered in it

favourite lyric: quite literally just the words “oh, goddamn”

cowboy like me

“dancin’ is a dangerous game” - hell yeah I get so many feelings from this, it just reminds me of the intimacy of dancing and the feeling of swaying in someone’s arms

“and the skeletons in both our closets/plotted hard to fuck this up” - both like active interference of exes or just simply trauma, unresolved issues

“forever is the sweetest con” - believing hurts and everything ends but its worth it for the time you have

favourite lyrics: “now you hang from my lips/like the gardens of Babylon”

long story short

first notes make me think of between the saltmarsh and the sea even though its SO different but also a bit like august idk why

“if the shoe fits walk in it/til your high heels break” - i just love the imagery of this line

“fell down the rabbit hole” - living for this line and the wonderland vibe

“but if someone comes at us, this time i’m ready” - the vibe of like not looking for a fight but defending what you love

favourite lyric: “past me/I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things” - YES BITCH also the energy I give to past me and future me gives to me now or “long story short I survived”

marjorie

another song I come back to on its own

this is the exact wistful vibe i look for in calm ish songs, can be sad, can be happy depending on a mood and this is perfect

the video is incredible and marjorie providing the backing vocals made me cry also it being in the same place on the record as epiphany was on folklore

“never be so polite/you forget your power/never wield such power/you forget to be polite” - love the use of wield, it also feels like the medium women try to find between being a “bad bitch” and being ladylike, but not a medium society will accept bc fuck that, the exact way THEY wanna do it instead

really the song i needed after the year of so much grief, and i know it’s gonna bring me comfort when grandma goes, especially the line “what died didn’t stay dead”

favourite lyric: “watched as you signed your name: marjorie” - the way this is sung will literally stay with me forever, its like a legacy in one line

closure

again, instant fave

the vibe of you don’t owe someone shit just bc they feel guilty is so good

“yes I got your letter/yes I’m doing better” “I know that it’s over” - I’ve moved on and I don’t need your permission for that or your well wishes thanks

Moving on doesn’t mean forgiveness

I just love the melody so much and its such a good song agh

favourite lyric: “I know I’m just a wrinkle in your new life/staying friends would iron it out so nice”

evermore

“grey november/I’ve been down since July” - most explicit pandemicy vibes i get, I was home and it was almost possible to just regard it as a normalish summer, looking after the dog and living at home and now its coming up to Christmas and I’m living away from home, our family is split across 5 homes in 4 cities and its fucking hard (not even sure if its that type of down but that’s how it made me feel)

“writing letters/addressed to the fire” - literally just picked up on this lyric and has kinda a dual meaning for me. 1 -feeling shit about things you create, putting in effort, just to throw it away. 2 - tactic for tackling anxiety, just getting rid of thoughts and releasing them from my brain

“Cannot think of all the cost/And the things that will be lost/Oh, can we just get a pause?” - again, v pandemicy and so relevant to the fam’s 2018-2019, we just needed a pause, we had to keep going and not process what we’d lost or we’d never carry on

such a good depression song

favourite lyric: “staring out an open window/catching my death”

[thecorteztwins]

@askprofessorx  SO I'M REALLY SORRY THIS IS A BIG FUCKING INFO DUMP but these are my muses and my ideas for what we could do with them and Charles

The Acolytes on this blog refers to Fabian Cortez, his sister Anne Marie, and their teammates Chrome and Delgado.At the beginning of the 90s, Magneto had basically retired and fucked off to live in space alone on the humbly named Asteroid M. Then all of a sudden, four mutants show up on his doorstep being chased by SHIELD agents and proclaiming loyalty to him. He lets them in. Three of them are sincere in their claims, but their leader, Fabian Cortez, has a plot. He starts manipulating Magneto, pushing him back into villainy, into doing things that scare the hell out of humans (like collecting fucking MISSILES) because "self-defense". This leads him into conflict with the X-men, who until now he'd actually more or less made peace with, and he sustains grievous injury from Wolverine. Psychologically, this makes him feel that much more isolated and rejected, making him that much more prone to Fabian's manipulation...and physically, he now needs to rely on Fabian's healing powers. Things get worse as Fabian also uses his ability to boost other mutants powers, because it's established that Magneto's powers are to blame for his mental imbalance, so more power equals more crazy for Mags. Fabian's plans all come together when Magneto gathers Xavier and the X-Men aboard Asteroid M, intent on brainwashing them to his side, and the governments of the US and Russia, motivated by Magneto's actions, decide that Asteroid M, and all those upon it, must be destroyed. Fabian, knowing this because THAT WAS HIS PLOT, gets in the only escape pod, leaving the others to die. The X-Men are able to escape, and offer a way out to Magneto and the remaining Acolytes, but Magneto chooses to stay, to use the last of his abilities to hold the asteroid together so the X-Men can make it to their ship...and the other Acolytes choose to stay with him and die at his side. So, why did Fabian do this? Why did he want to get rid not only of the X-Men but also his supposed "leader" Magneto, and his own team, his own sister? Power. Fabian had made Magneto a martyr now, instead of someone who abandoned his cause, and he used his name to rally a cult of new Acolytes, far more bloodthirsty and genocidal than the original squad had been...with himself leading them, of course. These new nasty Acolytes did a LOT of awful things, but Fabian got his when Magneto returned from the dead (typical!) bringing a super duper powerful mutant named Exodus with him who gave Fabs the boot.  Fabian flees to Genosha, kidnaps Luna (Pietro's daughter) to use as a human shield/hostage, demanding that Pietro, Wanda, Crystal (Luna's mom), and the Avengers all protect him from Exodus and Magneto or else he’ll kill Luna. He also gets the Genoshan mutants on his side (damn, this guy is charismatic!) and rallies them into causing a civil war so he can use the chaos to hide. Yeah, seeing the country “awash in a raging river of bloodshed!” is just to save his own slimy hide. What a charmer. Anyway, the good news for Fabian is that Magneto is braindead at this time due to Xavier finally whipping out the telepathic big guns on him after he ripped Wolverine’s skeleton out. The bad news is that Exodus is alive and well and shows up, kills Fabian. But Fabian doesn't stay dead. He comes back to caught more trouble, first with manipulating Joseph (Magneto's clone) and then when Magneto gets his mind back and becomes ruler of Genosha, Magneto comes back to recruit Fabian onto the Genosha cabinet (because as shitty as Fabs is, he's a good politician) and to be his personal battery since his powers are now depleted. Fabian starts secretly working to backstab Magneto AGAIN but then when Magneto's powers fully return, Magneto kills him. It mostly sticks this time. Mostly. He does show up during Necrosha though (an event where another villain mass-resurrected a bunch of mutants, of which Fabian was one, but that was a temporary thing) I play Fabian and the other original Acolytes as having been resurrected by unknown means (that's...not uncommon in Marvel tbh) Chrome, Anne Marie, and Delgado don't remember that it was Fabian who was responsible for their deaths, and have resumed their lives as terrorists with him as their teammate and leader. Naturally, Fabian doesn’t want them finding out the truth, and thus does everything he can to keep them from finding out Magneto is alive and at large, lest they seek him out and he tell them what really happened. Fabian himself also wants nothing more than to leave supervillainy at this point and have a normal life, not because he’s seen the light and turned good, but because he’s tired of getting beaten up and dying. Unfortunately, he doesn’t dare run for it, as he (rightly) believes his sister would kill him as a traitor if he did, and he doesn’t think he can escape her by murdering her again either, since he’s learned nobody stays dead (but he still doesn’t want to go through death again himself because IT’S HORRIBLE) With that setup, we've got the enemies deal down pat. Anne Marie will try to kill Xavier on sight. She can't be talked to or talked down. Chrome, it's possible to engage, and Delgado is actually unlikely to try to hurt Xavier UNLESS Xavier is getting in the way of something they're doing. As for Fabian...he might well try to get Xavier to help him out of this mess. Convince him to wipe the Acolytes minds, or rewrite their memories so they think Fabian is dead, enabling him to escape them before they can find out it was him that betrayed them and Magneto. In an XMCU verse, none of this would have happened. I'd picture it instead as Fabian and the others being fresh Brotherhood recruits, with Fabian having all these schemes in mind to betray and usurp Magneto, but not having done it yet. We could have a plot where they capture Xavier, or the X-Men have captured them, or things like that. Finally, in Evo, they're not terrorists yet, they're just teenagers. Fabian and Anne Marie are a couple of mutant kids, and they're not bad either! So, possibly students. They've actually got their powers perfectly under control more or less, and are quite comfortable with them, but they're interested in meeting others like them...and, frankly, Anne Marie needs to be taught responsible use. Because she's growing up with the ability to control the minds and emotions of other people and no one can tell her "no" on anything and it's not that she's evil but she doesn't have a concept of things like telepathic ethics and telepathic consent so she's kinda super dangerous despite being a sweetheart with no malicious intent. I do the 616 verse a lot so I'd actually be more interested in the XMCU and Evo options? I haven't seen any of the films after First Class, but your About section says that's where your default verse is, after FC but before DOFP or XMA. Over on @mypralaya I've got Haven, aka Radha Dastoor, she's a villain who showed up in seven issues of X-Factor during the 1990s. She's a woman who from an early age felt a calling to help ease the suffering and pain in the world, and worked in the streets of her native India helping the poor, caring for the sick, etc. Great person, total saint. Unfortunately, she fell in love with some cad, he knocked her up and then left her. Then things got worse, because a top-class demon known as The Adversary (demons = pretty regular things for the X-Men to deal with in the comics, actually) possessed her unborn child and started feeding her some major lies. Fast forward twenty years. She's still secretly pregnant, eternally in her first trimester. Her child is a mutant, and she can access its immense powers. She also believes it speaks to her with a divine voice, but that's the Adversary, who has made her amass a cult dedicated to spreading chaos and destruction in hopes of bringing about the Mahapralaya, a sort of Hindu apocalypse after which a beautiful age of painlessness and peace and joy for humanity will come, ending suffering forever. But Haven herself was still a really nice woman who advocated for mutant/human peace as a public figure (international best-selling author + lecturer) and in fact greatly admired Professor Xavier. But the whole "secret terrorist cult causing mass suffering" brought her into conflict with X-Factor, despite her desire to have them as her friends and allies. There's no shortage of bad guys with good intentions in the X-Men, but Haven was especially unusual in that she was a pacifist villain. She actually never attacks the good guys, even when they attack her. In fact, she tries to help them---she rescues Polaris from government agents, she heals Wolfsbane of the Genoshan brainwashing she underwent as a slave, and tries to heal Multiple Man of the Legacy Virus (X-Factor blames her for his death when she fails) We're told her cult is doing all these horrible things offscreen, but it's kinda hard to root against her when she barely even threatens anyone onscreen. Her story ends when the Adversary decides it's time to be reborn into this world and Haven...does not survive that in canon. I decided that she does, because I felt she deserved a better ending. In XMCU, demons don't really fit with the canon, so she could be a human or a mutant. Either way, not a villain, because not being influenced (and I don't really play her villain incarnation anyway, I'm more interested in what comes after) so not an antagonist, but more likely a friend or staff member? I feel like the "inspired by Xavier" thing would also be different, because she's in her early 40s, so she'd be older than your Charles, and that could be neat to explore. I mean, hell, maybe she could be a mentor figure to him, or at least a colleague in the same field (mutant/human relations) I'm guessing that it's rare for him to even meet a mutant who is older than he is, since he and Erik and the original X-Men/Brotherhood are kinda the OGs in the XMCU aside from Apocalypse. Then there's Shaw @sebastianshaw He's not a Kevin Bacon Nazi, he's not concerned with mutant supremacy, he's just concerned with money and power, to the point he'll happily throw other mutants under the bus to human bigotry if it makes him a profit. Seriously, this guy built SENTINELS for the government because it made him money, he gives no fucks about species solidarity. As for the Hellfire Club, rather than being a proto-Brotherhood, they're a worldwide social club for the wealthy elite. Most of its members (which includes the Starks, the Worthingtons, and the Braddocks) are just that, regular super-rich people who wanna hob-knob with other super-rich people at fancy parties, but behind closed doors, the Inner Circle that runs in (Shaw, Emma, etc.) are mutant bad guys bent on political and economic domination of the world. This has brought them in to conflict with the X-men several times, the most notable of which was the Dark Phoenix saga, in which the Hellfire Club recruited the telepath Mastermind to brainwash Jean into their service, resulting in her becoming the Dark Phoenix and the resultant horrors that followed, which ended in her death. Shaw's not liable to just attack Xavier, he's more like Delgado in terms of "I'm not after you, just don't get in my way" but there's still room for conflict there, as well as standard "good guy and villain have a chat" things like Xavier does with Magneto, with none of the affectionate history there. Shaw's shown to put himself on the same level of mutant influence as the likes of Xavier and Magneto  even if he's way overestimating himself (I mean, he's got a lot of economic/political influence on the world but he doesn't influence mutant culture like Magneto and Charles have, he's too private/on-the-down-low as a mutant) and to have opinions on that, as well as the typical 'thinks the heroes are fools wasting their powers' gig. He's also shown to be immune to Charles' telepathy, probably due to the same Hellfire Club technology that keeps Cerebro and other psychic stuff out of the building's walls, and even without it he's trained enough in telepathic resistance he was able to give Emma a very hard fight in trying to telepathically 'get' him.  So Charles can't just tell what he's thinking which makes for a more...normal/even conversation. Not that Charles goes around reading everyone's mind but like, Shaw is a bad guy, so it would be understandable if he tried just to be sure Shaw wasn't up to something, but he can't, so like...he's in the more normal person position of not being able to be sure. Also, he and Charles met in 616 before Charles formed the X-Men and before Shaw joined the Hellfire Club, but the details have never been revealed beyond that Charles embraced him as a friend and that the same young mutant (Tessa/Sage) saved both their lives, but Shaw rejected Xavier’s path and went his own way. In Evo, it's pretty easy to just introduce Shaw and the Hellfire Club as new foes on the scene, probably initially posing as a benign group with similar goals to Xavier, complete with a school of their own for young mutants (Emma Frost ran one in her Hellfire days in the comics) In XMCU...it's more complicated/difficult given the existence of Shaw there, but since that Shaw's real name is Klaus Schmidt, it's not impossible to say he stole this Shaw's identity or something, possibly along with taking/copying his powers via some kind of scientific experiment (since he doesn't display these abilities when he met young Erik) I also play Shaw's son @shinobixshaw and Fabian's son @malcortez. Shinobi is a 616 canon too, he "killed" his dad (Shaw got better) and took over his position in the Hellfire Club...and then proceeded to do nothing except drink and party and be lazy. Shinobi is not a serious threat in any way, even if he thinks he is, and thus really cannot make a decent antagonist, but he can certainly be annoying in his stupidity and arrogance and drunken shenanigans. Malcolm, on the other hand, is not from 616. He's from the Marvel Zombies universe, but has canonically access to a machine that can take him to other dimensions, including, oh, say, the XMCU! So it's perfectly plausible for him to be able to pop up in the mansion or wherever as a fish-out-of-water who needs help getting acquainted with this world. He's technically a villain in his own world, but his goals of "rule my village" won't really apply in any other world, he's just interested in his own home, not anyone else's. So he'd be more like a...very confused guest than anything else.