#the narrator in playing god sounds like shes talking to the narrator in anti-hero | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

houseisekai · 3 years

Text

House Miisekai Prologue: The Adventure Begins!

House Miisekai Masterlist Here

====

Our story begins in the land of Miisekaitopia! (No, I couldn't think of a better name.)

It is a world where everyone from both storylines and unholy amounts of AU's can live in peace without worrying about wars breaking out every 4 seconds.

At least it was.

The darkness came without warning, a great and terrible shadow threatening all of Miisekaitopia! An unspeakably huge dick came and stole everyone's faces! Then, to add insult to injury, put those faces onto monsters across the land!

But, we shall follow the perspective of Sara Valestein, Instructor of Class VII and the original House Isekai...

Sara casually strolled through the hills, enjoying the sunlight and wind blowing gently across her.

(Sara) "...Goddess I am so bored."

She had been kicked out of yet another bar recently for drinking too much.

Again.

Left with nothing to do, she decided to take a trip to nowhere in particular, going wherever fate took her.

Sara continued muttering to herself, mocking the established "rules" for drinking in a tavern until she noticed something flying in the air.

(Sara) "Is...that a face?"

She rubbed her eyes to make sure she wasn't seeing things, and saw the eyes slowly float over to a nearby butterfly.

(Sara) "Uh...?"

(Sara) "GAH!"

The horrific creature began floating faster towards Sara, which prompted her to run full speed ahead towards the closest town.

As she ran out of breath, she ran towards anyone would even take a minute to listen.

(Sara) "H-Hey, there's some freaky bug thing out there with a human face!"

BE-LOP!

Tiny lines of text ran down the guide's face.

It showed too many messages at once for her to properly read it, and the person remained completely still.

(Sara) "...Hello?"

(Everyone) "..."

(Sara) "...Right."

Sara moved to the next person she saw.

...

Sara saw a platypus with a name tag 'Perry' calmly sitting on the market stall.

(Sara) "Hello, anyone here?"

The platypus stared at her, not saying a word.

(Sara) "...What in the hell is with this town?"

Next try. That would probably work.

...

(Anakin) "What did we get ourselves into this time?"

(Obi-Wan) "I'm not sure but...I do not like this a single bit."

(Anakin) "At least you're in a taller body, my head barely reaches your stomach!"

(Obi-Wan) "It's not the first time."

(Sara) "Hey, excuse me ma'aaaaaaaaaa...What in the?"

(Anakin) "Listen lady, we got our own problems right now. We're not in the mood-"

(Obi-Wan) "What my young padawan means is that we unfortunately cannot spare any help if you need it ma'am."

(Sara) "...Evidently."

Sara nervously walked away from the two grown men in a child and woman's body.

(Sonia) "Did we get transported again?"

(Gundham) "By the works of dark magic, no doubt..."

(Sonia) "Oh, looks like there's someone over there. Hello ma'am, do you know where we are?"

(Sara) "Eh?...Huh. That's a good question. Where is this?"

(Sonia) "Oh well, I'm a bit more comfortable knowing that someone I like is with me here!"

(Gundham) "I...uh...er..."

(Sara) "That's cute. Ah, to be young again..."

Sara left the two to talk amongst themselves before finding the next...person?

It was an extremely fat rabbit that was grey and white.

(Sara) "What in the hell-"

BIG BIG CHUNGUS, BIG CHUNGUS, BIG-

(Sara) "Okay, screw that."

Sara finally saw the mayor and approached him, and when he turned she almost jumped.

It was a Piranha plant. She thought so anyway, it was covered in white polka dots and bright red.

(Plant) "Ah, welcome to the town miss?"

(Sara) "Uh, Sara. Sara Valestein. Listen, there's this weird face that attached itself to a butterfly outside your place! You're gonna do something right?"

(Plant) "Did...did you say a face float down? OH NO."

(Familiar Man's voice) "OH YES."

(Sara) ?

(Anakin) "Uh, master?"

(Obi-Wan) "I've got a bad feeling about this..."

The platypus, fat rabbit, and the discord notification looked up into the skies, getting increasingly alarmed.

(Gundham) "THIS DARKNESS...IT'S...IT'S OVERWHELMING!"

(Sonia) "His voice sounds grating like Souda's..."

(Plant) "COINS PRESERVE US! IT'S..."

[Imperial Will - Final Fantasy XIV OST]

(Dark Lord Chris) "KNEEL BEFORE YOUR GOD, AND OFFER YOUR FACES UNTO ME!"

(Sara) "...Faces? You mean like services or...?"

(Anakin) "Maybe that's metaphorical?"

(Obi-Wan) "I'm not sure I want to find out-"

(Chris) "NO, YOU REALLY DON'T. ALSO NO. I MEAN IT LITERALLY!"

Several faces began to fly off the townspeople.

First was the platypus's face, quickly followed by the discord notification and Anakin's.

(Obi-Wan) "ANAKIN!"

Then it was Sonia and the fat rabbit's faces that floated next to Chris.

(Gundham) "AAAAAAAGH!"

(Plant) "OH MY GOD, THIS IS HORRIBLE!"

(Sara) "Can someone tell me what the hell is happening?!-"

(Chris) "THESE NOW BELONG TO ME! NOW, GO TELL THE OTHERS WHAT YOU'VE SEEN HERE, FOR I WILL BE COMING FOR THEM NEXT!"

Chris flew off into the skies, the faces following closely behind.

(Sara) "What an asshole!"

(Plant) "ADVENTURER, PLEASE YOU HAVE TO HELP US!"

(Sara) "Right uh..."

Sara reached for her sword and pistol, which was nowhere to be found.

(Sara) "Well, that's just great..."

Obi-Wan struggled to walk over to here, still not accustomed to his body and looked at Sara.

(Obi-Wan) "Ma'am, I'm afraid I cannot go into battle myself to assist with this matter. And we don't appear to have our weapons either..."

(Sara) "So, what do you reckon I do? Ask nicely?"

...

(Sara) "Damn it."

OUTSIDE OF TOWN...

Chris was floating away from the town when Sara finally caught up to him.

(Sara) "HEY, JACKASS!"

(Chris) "...Oh, you mean me. I-I mean, OH, IS SOMEONE TRYING TO BE THE HERO NOW?"

(Sara) "Don't play smart with me you glasses wearing freak! Give back their faces!"

(Chris) "Or what? You're going to fight me?"

Sara cracked her knuckles.

(Chris) "...Oh shit. Uh, here have it."

The face slowly floated over to a slime, which reattached itself and began hopping towards Sara.

(Anakin's voice) "OH MAN, I THOUGHT THE KID BODY WAS BAD!"

(Chris) "Uh anyways, LATER!"

Chris quickly flew away from Sara, leaving her and Anakin's face on a slime.

(Sara) "Alright, LET'S GO!"

Sara drove her fist into the slime, which quickly bounced off.

(Sara) "...Oh right. It's a slime."

The slime retaliated by knocking Sara onto her back.

(Anakin's voice) "Sorry!"

(Sara) "Damn, my weapons aren't anywhere to be found either!

"I AM THOU...THOU ART I..."

(Sara) "Oh, what is it now-HURK?!"

Sara reached for her head as the voice boomed thunderously.

"THOU ART...Okay, no we're not rhyming. I'm your guardian spirit, Sara!"

(Sara) "Really now? And where were you during Erebonia?!"

"ANYWAYS, it seems you're in a bit of trouble! Do you need some help?"

(Sara) "It's either getting help or getting killed by a damn slime of all things, so...Yeah, sure."

"Good choice! Now, I bestow upon you the awesome power of the guardian!"

(Sara) "You're gonna explain later where I got this from, right?"

"That depends, do you want the plot to get moving? Our other posts are slowed down as it is, and this has gotten too meta in just the first few lines of this."

(Sara) "Ugh, fine."

Sara's outfit shined forth and became donned in armor, wielding a new sword.

(Sara) "Hey, you cheap bastard, where's my gun?!"

"This is a fantasy RPG, why would you get a gun? Just kill the damn slime already!"

(Anakin's voice) "WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?!"

(Sara) "Hold on, I'll getcha outta there, HIYA!"

[COOL QUIRK: WEAK POINT]

Sara took one swing of her sword and smacked the slime into the floor, it quickly disappearing.

Anakin's face floated off the slime and back to the town.

"That was..."

(Sara) "Really anti-climatic."

"You should uh...probably go back to the town and check up on Anakin."

INSIDE OF TOWN...

Anakin's face slowly floated back onto the child's body, making him trip over.

(Anakin) "AGH!"

(Obi-Wan) "So, how was it?"

(Anakin) "I was just put into a slime's body, how do you think I feel?!"

(Obi-Wan) "Same as usual, got it."

Obi-Wan turned to Sara, who now looked like a proper knight.

(Obi-Wan) "You have our thanks for helping us, Miss?"

(Sara) "Name's Sara."

(Anakin) "Thanks for helping me out there. What are you gonna do? We'd join you but our bodies would just get in the way."

(Sara) "I'm going to uh...Hey, what is the plan?"

"What do you think? You're the only hero in a fantasy land."

(Obi-Wan) "Is she alright?"

(Anakin) "Yeah, she started doing this earlier, no idea what's up with it."

(Sara) "Might as well go after the others, see what happens I guess. Anyways, I'll be back once I restored this town, until then!"

Sara held onto her sheathe and ran out of the town, those still faceless watching her leave.

(Gundham) "Please hurry. Sonia is...unsettling me."

(Plant) "Miss Valestein, you're our only hope...!"

(Anakin) "Think she'll be okay? That talking thing is really concerning me."

(Obi-Wan) "Probably...?"

[Chase Me - Faky]

(Sara) "Right so...do I just go forward?"

"Where did you see him fly off to?"

(Sara) "Was a lot more focused on trying NOT to get murdered by the slimes."

"It was just a slime, you've killed enemy mechs and demonic beasts like it was nothing!"

(Sara) "That's when I had my weapons and ARCUS unit!"

"..Still. Should've had no problem. I probably didn't even have to interfere."

(Sara) "Good goddess, am I going to be stuck with you? Actually WHO even are you?"

"The narrator! In a sense anyway."

(Sara) "What-"

And so begins the tale of Sara Valestein and her quest to defeat the Dark Lord Chris!

What friends will she encounter on the way?

How much of the meta can we break more than we have?

How many more jokes will the writer run into the ground as this series goes on?

FIND OUT NEXT TIME, ON HOUSE MIISEKAI!

(Sara) "...What?!"

STARRING:

And yours truly as the antagonist for this story!

Here's to some more god-awful written meme stories like this one, everyone!

#House Isekai #House Isekai ARR #House Miisekai

8 notes · View notes

haec-est-fides · 5 years

Text

Octavian in The Tyrant’s Tomb

Or rather, the lack thereof. You all know I’m salty about this, so here’s the official rant.

First, let’s look at where he was mentioned. Exactly twice.

“The legion had no high priest, no pontifex maximus. Their former augur, my descendant Octavian, had died in the battle against Gaia. (Which I had a hard time feeling sad about, but that’s another story.)”

This one really hit me because it’s primarily just another instance of Apollo’s unnecessary sass. In The Hidden Oracle, he seemed to at least recognize his own fault in the matter for a split second: “A voice whispered in the back of my mind. This time I thought it might be my conscience: Who was the stupid boy? It wasn’t Octavian.” What happened to that? I get it, Rick knows that most fans hate Octavian. Ha ha. What’s important is that Apollo also thinks this way about Gaius Caligula and Nero, who are also his descendants. For all his character development, and for all the similarities between himself and these people he despises, Apollo can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that yeah, they all got this from him. It’s one of the last bastions of Apollo’s ego and hypocrisy, and I don’t think it’s ever going to be addressed.

It’s half-heartedly joked that there are no “adults in the room” in New Rome anymore. Reyna notices a difference in the dynamic of the Senate. Apollo is expected to do all the ceremonial duties regarding Jason’s funeral. Beyond this, the book never once directly admits that Octavian’s absence has otherwise impacted New Rome. Or how his family reacted to his death. Sure the chaotic state of the community may play a role in this, but more on it later.

Apollo has mentioned in ToA that, of all his godly memories, he specifically remembers his talks with Octavian. I for one am very interested in this “other story” that Rick refuses to explore.

““Praetors often partner up. In power. But also romantically, I mean. I thought Jason. Then for a hot minute, Percy Jackson. Gods help me, I even considered Octavian.” [Reyna] shuddered.”

This mention is purely throwaway; it’s meant to show how truly desperate Reyna was feeling. For the record, I respect Reyna’s subplot, for all I care about it at all. I think it’s hilarious how clearly repulsed she sounds at herself for even considering dating Octavian. Let’s be clear: this isn’t her admitting she ever liked him, or - gods forbid - had a crush. This is Reyna commenting on how oppressive the expectations of society are on single women. What’s funnier to me is that Octavian would have 100% turned her down, and her self esteem would have been toast. Good for her for sticking to her heart and not letting the world tell her what to do.

Moving on, what’s more important is how Octavian wasn’t mentioned. I've said before that Riordan’s decision to flat out ignore Octavian has led to some minor but annoying continuity issues.

On a purely practical note, Octavian was a prominent, active member of a religion, a government, and a military. New Rome doesn’t have an augur. As Jason’s funeral shows, Apollo had to take up the associated religious duties. But how did New Rome handle honoring those who died in the war with Gaia? Or those who were more recently lost, in the fighting with Tarquin? How has the operation of the legion and senate shifted? Who replaced him as centurion of the first? What is it like to not be able to seek the gods’ approval via augury? Who approves new recruits, checks their credentials and assigns them to cohorts, and eventually gives them their tattoos? Who awards mural crowns and other military distinctions? New Rome has been without an augur before, as it’s a rare gift, but these questions still need to be answered for the community to operate.

Back to Octavian’s family! His family is said to have been the oldest, richest, and most influential family in New Rome. Octavian is at least a 3rd generation camper, his family going back a hundred years or more. This is stressed in HoO because it’s used to show just how “entitled” and stuck up he is, but now? It’s not mentioned at all. No mourning, no help in Rome’s time of crisis, nothing. Unless by Octavian’s “family” Riordan was solely referring to the Triumvirate and Octavian was a member of an Imperial Household the whole time, this is ridiculous. I need to write a whole post about this, because Octavian’s life is fascinating when you consider what implications this has.

As Gaius and Commodus are attacking New Rome with their fleet of yachts, New Rome’s navy gets brought up. I know Apollo isn’t the best narrator on this point, but all that’s mentioned is the sad boat Percy used for the Alaska quest. That small fleet of very nice speedboats that Octavian funded for the attack on Camp Half-Blood? Nope. Is this just Apollo being out of the loop? What happened to New Rome’s fleet?

With New Rome in chaos, this last point is really more of a nit pick, but can we please remember that Octavian led a very willing camp to war? Even before the Argo II disaster, even before Octavian spoke out at the Senate, the lares and legionnaires in the streets showed anti-Greek sentiment. The 5th cohort was “Greeks and geeks.” When Octavian proposed war, he had the legion on his side. As soon as Reyna left to go help with the Athena Parthenos, the centurions were ready to disobey her and follow Octavian. Even in the final battle of HoO, only the 4th and 5th cohorts really start to turn against him. All of this backs a very important, but largely ignored, point: you can lead a horse to the Senate, but you can’t make it vote. We see none of that tension in New Rome now. I get that most of the legion is dead, and that’s a huge part of it, but no one spoke out at all. We don’t see anyone with the opinion that Octavian did save Rome and defeat Gaia. We don’t see him get any funerary honors (which makes the book’s message concerning death all the more hypocritical). When Gaius confronts Frank - “Praetor Zhang, you are duty-bound to recognize Roman authority, and we are it! Together, we can rebuild this camp and raise your legion to glory!” - he’s right. But we don’t see a single legionnaire hesitate.

I get that New Rome isn’t Riordan’s favorite, and that to develop the Romans would require a whole series of its own, but the sheer shallowness of New Rome just felt lazy. Even mentioning Octavian’s legacy would have done so much to show us more about Camp Jupiter. How is he remembered? A hero? A tyrant? A martyr? A fraud?

#octavian #trials of apollo #toa #heroes of olympus #hoo #new rome #camp jupiter #rick riordan #filodox!

83 notes · View notes

morlock-holmes · 5 years

Note

I never said that I expected you to have *positive* strong opinions about that story :)

2) Damn, what I wrote could be interpreted as tumblr-style not-so-passive aggressiveness, “of course you'd dislike it because it shows how horrible you sound :) ” — it wasn't that, honest.

Oh, no, no, that's okay, I was theatrically overreacting, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.

It turns out that I have a lot to say about this story, it's just all of it is negative.

Here are several billion more words of close reading that you may feel free to skip.

Everybody in the story talks like they're on the internet all the time. Tony Tulathimutte has a relatively good ear for how people talk about this shit on the internet, and I won't lie, one or two passages even moved me, but this is because we are projecting our own knowledge of why people talk like this onto the story, not because Tulathimutte has given any of his characters any real internal life.

The fact that his feminists and Bros are just as much two-dimensional troglodytes as the story's anti-hero doesn't make it better.

Also this character is not an overly scrupulous feminist. The entire first half of the story is meant to be an ironic send-up of the way his feminist pieties contrast with his actual behavior, and I'm surprised people don't see that.

For example:

One classmate junior year had a crush on him, but he wasn’t attracted to her curvaceous body type so felt justified in rejecting her, just as he’d been rejected many times himself.

"Curvaceous" is a euphemism for "Fat". Notice that the first time he rejects someone is given significant time in the story; this character later reappears, complete with eating disorder. The first time someone rejects him is entirely glossed over, with the woman who did it never appearing in the story and the whole thing glossed over and forgotten in a few words.

Wouldn't we expect this character to obsess over those first rejections? To play them over and over in his mind?

This is why I say that, as much as any individual passage might be moving, this character has no real internal life.

Note also that the woman's disquiet about her body is expressed in neutral, sympathetic terms ("eating disorder") and given a sort of origin story: we are told she was fat in high school, was rejected for it, and has since developed an eating disorder.

In contrast, the main character's dislike of his body is expressed in absurd, satirical terms (his obsession with "narrow shoulders") and we are never given any insight into why that became his focus.

Now that he’s self-conscious, he realizes he can’t compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever.

How did he realize it and when? Has he ever been shamed for his body? Notice that this realization predates his internet radicalization. Why did he fixate on his physical attributes, rather than, say, his economic situation? Tulathimutte shows no indication that the question has even occurred to him.

Nor, for that matter, does Tulathimutte spend much thinking on why feminism in particular appealed to this character.

Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values.

Ah, see, he always viewed feminism instrumentally, never as a serious deep down commitment.

But why did he choose that instrument rather than another?

Again, we won't be shown.

Also, in a different thread @thefeministthrowaway spoke very emotionally about going through high school and even into college terrified that any expression of sexual interest in a woman would constitute a terrible burden on her or even become sexual harassment, and scrupulously avoided it.

Our main character did not go through such a phase; he had, according to the narration, already been rejected several times in High School.

Which leads me to the question of why on Earth this is written in third person. A first person account might allow us to read the narrator as unreliable, reading between the lines to see that what he viewed as a lifetime of rejection was really him blowing a small number of incidents and misunderstandings out of proportion; the third person narration invites us to see it as fundamentally honest and accurate: he has already asked many girls out by the time he leaves high school.

Certainly he asks out several more in college; and rather than the exagerrated fear of imposition we have, he sends several pestering, passive-aggressive emails to a woman who turns him down.

This exact scenario happens four or five more times.

He's not scrupulously terrified of women; he pursues them to an uncomfortable and borderline stalkerish degree.

Later, he has an exchange about sexual mores with men who are identified not as friends, but "co-workers", and he calls them out for their anti-feminist ways. This is part of a general issue where everyone acts like they're on the internet all the time.

I was once out with a friend of a friend who convinced us to go meet some girls he knew (No shit, part of his pitch was, "They're real dumb") and when we got to the bar they had an elaborate drinking game from their sorority days and part of the mnemonic for the rules was about "bitches."

So, as a brittle feminist, I of course got up and made a big speech about how they shouldn't devalue themselves-

Of course I fucking didn't. I privately thought "that seems like a gross way to think about yourself" while being God damned terrified of what I'd have to do if someone asked me a question about sex during the truth or dare part.

There's no awareness in this story about the difference between real life and internet behavior, or how they modify each other. (The same problem crops up later when QPOC friend calls him out in a way that, if we saw it as a Tumblr anecdote we'd all respond with, "And then everyone got up and applauded")

“Go ahead then,” his coworker smirks, “ask your female friends what they think.”

Bristling, he calls his QPOC agender friend from his college co-op, whom he’s always gotten along well with, in part because he’s never been attracted to them.

It took me a while to twig that QPOC here was assigned female at birth, even though on a second read the juxtaposition is obviously deliberate, but I just can't fathom why our main character appears to have no male, or even AMAB friends. Doesn't that seem utterly bizarre? That he's so self-conscious and self-hating and also totally willing to expose himself and his questions to women and co-workers?

Shouldn't that be explained?

This time she gives him a two-armed shove, sending him to the ground, and instead of yelling, her mouth opens into a smile and she says, “Oh my god are you wearing shoulder pads?”

Tulathimutte knows that sport coats and suit jackets can have shoulder padding, right? Like as a completely normal thing? Why wouldn't our main character wear a suit?

Does Tulathimutte not know about suits?

Anyway... I have trouble placing this story ideologically because the main character is an awful person but his feminist "friends" are gaslighting assholes and I'm really not sure if that part is deliberate or not. They tell him that he should never act like his bro-y co-workers while privately resenting the fact that he doesn't just go ahead and do what it takes to get laid again.

There's also his date with the girl from high school; her neediness and damage turns him off as much as his turns off other people, and also she treats him like shit, but his friends ask why he doesn't see her again.

I have trouble understanding whether we're supposed to see this double standard because, as I said earlier, her damage is comprehensible and sad while his is portrayed as a sort of BOGO deal, where every bad feminist dude has bonus body image issues shrink wrapped to him when he comes out of the factory.

Nothing in this story gives us any sense of why the actions any of the characters take appeal to those characters.

@self-winding I believe it was, said that the main character can't get laid because his try hard feminism is a turn-off and I really hope that's not the point because if it is, Jesus Christ this is just a circa late 2000s Amanda Marcotte style rant about "Nice Guys" that has been sitting in the back of the fridge gathering mold for a decade.

I know I said that I went in wanting to hate it, but I don't want it to be that awful.

47 notes · View notes

yearsblog · 6 years

Link

“I’m glad you noticed!” says Olly Alexander with one of his impish smiles. “I’ve come a long way since then.” We’re talking about the difference between the first time I saw him sing with his band, Years & Years, and the strutting peacock that he has since become. In 2015, fresh from winning the BBC Sound Of . . . poll, Alexander had a mean falsetto and a clutch of killer synth-pop ditties (Shine, King), but he cut a diffident figure during his show at the Heaven nightclub, dressed down in a T-shirt and beanie.

The second time I saw him, a year later, he was rising on a hydraulic lift through the stage of a rapturous Wembley Arena, wearing a red tunic with silver shoulder pads, and garlanded with laser beams. Alexander’s ascent to serious, tabloid-baiting stardom continues. Years & Years have a dazzling album out this week and days before we meet he was on Graham Norton’s sofa, regaling Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock with the story of how Meteorite, the song he wrote for Bridget Jones’s Baby, was about “a big dick”. Diffident no longer.

“Looking back, it’s quite overwhelming,” says Alexander, 27, as he lunches on quinoa in a restaurant in King’s Cross, north London. He is slight and conspiratorial, with tiny safety pins through his ears, a ring through his nose and his cropped hair dyed scarlet. “At first you really don’t know what support from an audience is going to feel like. But when people started showing their support for me being honest and being a camp, gay frontman — I just never really expected it and it added so much fuel to my fire.”

Among the things he has eloquently spoken out on are LGBTQ rights (he presented a BBC Three documentary called Growing Up Gay), mental health (he extols the virtues of therapy, which he started pre-emptively, before he became famous) and bullying (at school in Gloucestershire he was regularly “bushed”: thrown into the bushes next to the assembly hall). He is far more vocal than he was at the start of his music career, when an industry person advised him not to talk about being gay. “She was, like, ‘Why do people need to know your sexuality?’ She wanted to protect me.”

Well, it turned out that he didn’t need protection, he needed confidence. That came with experience and a changing musical landscape in which artists as diverse as Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, Frank Ocean and Perfume Genius felt able to be candid about their sexuality. “It’s quite astonishing,” Alexander says. “We’re seeing a lot more visible queer artists and visible gay people.”

Pop has been missing male stars with strong views, especially those with a sense of theatre; it’s all uber-polite George Ezra or anti-glamorous Ed Sheeran. “It has its place, having someone who’s not dressed up,” Alexander says, trying to be diplomatic. “But the thing I love most about pop music is the fantasy, the escapism. I had this moment when I realised I’m in the best place to engineer that for myself. I realised you could go as far as you want on stage.”

A few weeks ago at Radio 1’s Biggest Weekend in Swansea he wore a lime-green Freddie Mercury leotard and led an onstage conga of his dancers, who seemed to be styled as drugged-up zombies. It felt like a long way from Mike Read and Bruno Brookes. “There was a point where I realised if you embody supreme confidence, you can get away with anything,” Alexander says. “It is quite a religious experience for me, to be on stage.”

Religion is a bit of a theme for Years & Years, whose other members are the keyboard player Emre Türkmen and the bassist Mikey Goldsworthy. Their first album was called Communion and their new one is entitled Palo Santo, after a mystical South American tree burnt as incense. Its literal translation, “holy wood”, joins the dots between spiritualism and smut (“It’s a Carry On album!” Alexander says with a giggle). So too does the recent single, Sanctify, partly inspired by a relationship with a straight-acting man, which refers to two very different things that one can do on one’s knees. “See?” Alexander says, turning to his publicist, who is sitting near by. “Ed gets it!”

He has always been into spiritualism and the occult, he says, albeit in a slightly sceptical way. “The first place I ever had a job was in this shop called Moonstones — it sold gemstones, pagan spellbooks and chocolate dildos.” He grew up loving fairytales and fantasy fiction: Lord of the Rings, The Magic Faraway Tree, Harry Potter. You can see why he might have wanted to escape to other worlds, such was the rotten time he sometimes had at school, where he was mocked and sometimes “bushed” for wearing eyeliner, nail varnish and choker necklaces.

Has being a posterboy for LGBTQ and anti-bullying issues become a burden? He gets Instagram messages from fans every day. “It doesn’t feel like a burden. I think it would be more of a burden to not acknowledge any of that. But I’ve had to learn the ways to cope with my own mental health along the way, and I feel like I’m in a good position now, but if you’re having a bad day and you’re suddenly having to talk about things that you experienced when you were 13 years old, it can feel a bit challenging.”

He’s talking about the break-up of his mother, who ran community craft groups, from his father, who worked at amusement parks, but, tellingly, dreamt of being a musician. After the split Alexander moved to Gloucestershire with his mother and brother; his father has only been in contact sporadically. Alexander has sometimes shied away from the subject because “I was trying to protect him, and I was, like, ‘Why am I still trying to protect someone who hasn’t been in my life for over a decade and who’s actually very difficult and caused a lot of pain to my family?’ ”

They hadn’t been in touch for seven years when his father broke the silence in wincing fashion, by tweeting him. Matters got worse when Alexander’s fans started replying to his dad, even trolling him. It sounds horrific. He has seen him once since then, last year. “It was quite triggering,” he says. “I just couldn’t deal with it at the time, it was too overwhelming.”

Social media can be a perilous place for him, especially deciding what to keep private. “I’ve always been fairly ‘Here’s everything!’ ” He’s also prone to “stalking someone that I fancy, and then getting upset because they like so-and-so’s picture and not mine”.

Yet the lure of Instagram can be irresistible. Take his appearance on The Graham Norton Show, when he met Rihanna, one of his heroes, and posted a picture of them backstage, in which he wears an expression of volcanic ecstasy. He was more nervous about meeting Ri-Ri than he was about singing on the show, he says, but she was lovely. “She was, like, ‘My fans love you.’ I feel like we’re destined to be friends.”

Or, perhaps, rivals. Palo Santo, with its mega-hooks, shimmering melodies and sumptuous production, is an album built to take on the superstar Americans at their own game. It was inspired by the R&B and pop that Alexander grew up on: Timberland, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and, before them, Prince and Michael Jackson.

He’s a better fit for music than he was for his first, slightly accidental career as an actor. “It just feels like people can express their identity easier as artists in the music industry.” Still, acting was where he initially made his mark, straight out of school, first in the film Summerhill and later playing a Bullingdon-style posho in The Riot Club, Herbert Pocket in David Nicholls’s TV adaptation of Great Expectations, and a stage role in Michael Grandage’s Peter and Alice, during which he befriended Judi Dench.

He was quite intimidated, but Dench turned out to be “very cheeky. One day she brought in biscuits that had dicks and balls on them; she was, like, ‘Do you want a cock biscuit?’ ” She has since narrated a short film to accompany Years & Years’s new album.

Acting has some happy associations for him, then, but “Hollywood is the worst culprit” when it comes to diversity, he says. “It’s just so far behind the times, it’s disgusting.” He even felt a subtle pressure not to reveal his sexuality on God Help the Girl, a low-budget British indie film directed by Stuart Murdoch of the band Belle & Sebastian, in which Alexander played a straight musician.

“It gave me a lot of anxiety. It was one of the reasons I wanted to stop acting. I definitely felt at the time it was something you had to be quiet about, because otherwise directors wouldn’t believe you could pull off the part.” That was nothing to do with Murdoch, he stresses. “I got on with Stuart really well, and I felt guilty because I never told him I was gay. I kind of tried to play up to the fact that I could actually be straight still, based on lies, even though everyone else knew I was gay.” During the shoot he met a man in a club. “After filming every day I’d just go straight to his house and spend the night with him. You just feel like you’re living a bit of a double life.”

I tell him my editor will tell me off if I don’t ask about his romantic status. “I’m single,” he replies with a smile. “Let everyone know, including your editor! Is he gay? It’s a she? Maybe she has gay friends. Yeah, I am happily single. It’s been like . . . almost two years. Not that I’ve been a nun in that time, I would like to stress.” Celebrity is double-sided in that regard: adulation on one hand, lack of anonymity on the other. “It obviously has positives,” he says with a smile, “but my sex life’s taken quite a beating.”

Don’t buy the mock self-pity — Alexander is doing just fine. There’s the stellar album and an arena tour in the autumn. Nor have his experiences put him off acting. “I feel like I could do something really, really fun and weird, like play an alien,” he says. “Or, you know, a goblin king!” From dressed-down diffidence to a budding Bowie in three years: he really has come a long way.

Palo Santo is released tomorrow on Polydor. Years & Years play the Roundhouse, London, July 10; Manchester Arena, July 14 and tour the UK from November

#olly alexander #article #the times #interview

32 notes · View notes

ollyarchive · 6 years

Photo

Years & Years’s Olly Alexander: ‘Celebrity has positives, but my sex life’s taken quite a beating’

Olly Alexander is Britain’s most exciting new pop star, but the Years & Years singer has also become a poster boy for social change

Ed Potton

July 5 2018, 12:01am, The Times

“I’m glad you noticed!” says Olly Alexander with one of his impish smiles. “I’ve come a long way since then.” We’re talking about the difference between the first time I saw him sing with his band, Years & Years, and the strutting peacock that he has since become. In 2015, fresh from winning the BBC Sound Of … poll, Alexander had a mean falsetto and a clutch of killer synth-pop ditties (Shine, King), but he cut a diffident figure during his show at the Heaven nightclub, dressed down in a T-shirt and beanie.

I tell him my editor will tell me off if I don’t ask about his romantic status. “I’m single,” he replies with a smile. “Let everyone know, including your editor! Is he gay? It’s a she? Maybe she has gay friends. Yeah, I am happily single. It’s been like … almost two years. Not that I’ve been a nun in that time, I would like to stress.” Celebrity is double-sided in that regard: adulation on one hand, lack of anonymity on the other. “It obviously has positives,” he says with a smile, “but my sex life’s taken quite a beating.”

Palo Santo is released tomorrow on Polydor. Years & Years play the Roundhouse, London, July 10; Manchester Arena, July 14 and tour the UK from November

#olly alexander #years & years #yearsandyears #interviews #articles

9 notes · View notes

ricardosousalemos · 8 years

Text

Weezer: Weezer (Blue Album)

Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo was such a somber kid that his second-grade teacher trained the other students to tell him, in unison, “Let me see the smile.” Childhood in Yogaville, the ashram and Integral Yoga HQ led by “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda in eastern Connecticut, was isolating, devoid of much pop culture and adventure—until Cuomo heard Kiss. When a family friend brought their fifth album, 1976’s Rock and Roll Over, to the Cuomo house, it sent Rivers and younger brother Leaves launching off furniture in a way only formative music can. “I’ve pretty much based my life around that record,” he has said. With their comic-book personas and distorted riffs, Kiss cracked Cuomo’s young brain wide open and rewired it for good. He had little idea what debauchery they were singing of, but from that point on, Cuomo began having intense dreams about becoming a rock star, and he began obsessively studying the work of his songwriting heroes.

For Rivers, music offered both a coat of armor and an identity. As a pre-teen enrolled in public school for the first time, Cuomo went by a different first name and his stepfather’s last name (Kitts); his chosen moniker—Peter Kitts—was awfully close to that of Kiss drummer Peter Criss. And while Cuomo was still picked on as he made his way through puberty, he eventually found his people: the metalheads. In 1989, Cuomo moved from Connecticut with his high school band to Los Angeles, ground zero for the AquaNetted and Spandexed. There, he found himself in the midst of shifting tastes, both culturally and personally. He started working at the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records, where he was schooled on quintessentially “cool” music like the Velvet Underground, Pixies, and Sonic Youth.

Also in the mix at this time was a new band called Nirvana. When Cuomo first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio in late 1991 while washing dishes in an Italian restaurant, he was sorta pissed he didn’t write it himself. “Rivers says, ‘I should have written that,’” remembered early Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper in John D. Luerssen’s band biography, River’s Edge. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah. That’s totally true.’ Because the music he was writing was improving in quality every day.” Cuomo’s interest in Nirvana became an obsession. He’d taken notes from Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Scorpions, Yngwie Malmsteen, and, of course, Kiss. But for all his knowledge of rock history, he still cared deeply about writing anthems that spoke to his generation, even if he had trouble looking his peers in the eyes.

Weezer anthems were destined to be different. In 1994, the acts dominating the modern rock charts were pushing against something, from the British aesthetes (Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey) to the singular weirdos (Beck, Tori Amos, Red Hot Chili Peppers) to the disenfranchised youth (Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam). With rebellion came a facade of cool, and that was something Weezer could never manage, at least not in the traditional way. Cuomo always tried a little too hard. He would become the fidgety anti-frontman with a thousand “revenge of the nerds” taglines and a Harvard degree to prove it. That dichotomy—the big-time rockstar in khakis and Buddy Holly glasses, who never seems totally comfortable in his own skin—is what launched his cult and anchored his unlikely sex appeal. And his band—drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp, and guitarist Brian Bell—played along, accentuating their innate geekiness to make Weezer feel like a unified front.

By the summer of 1993, Cuomo had written a number of songs strong enough to convince the alt-rock major DGC to sign Weezer (this despite a lack of buzz around the L.A. scene) and have the Cars’ frontman Ric Ocasek produce their first album. When the group’s self-titled debut—typically known as The Blue Album—arrived in May 1994, Cobain had been dead for a month. A feeling of dread hung over the alternative rock world whose prominence was ushered in by the Seattle sound. With their wired energy, effortless power-pop-punk hooks, and Beach Boys harmonies, Weezer took the alt-rock explosion in a new direction. You couldn’t quite tell if Cuomo was mocking his song’s regressive narrators or sympathizing with them. But once you got past his defense mechanisms and sorting through the humor and cultural references, you found a portrait of a young man’s psyche, riddled with angst and insecurity. And it arrived on the wings of massive riffs and gnarled guitar solos that sounded like they were emanating from a Flying V—on every single song.

The Blue Album’s exploration of the fragile male ego is in full swing by the record’s second track, “No One Else.” Taken at face value, this is likely the most misogynistic song Weezer has ever released. “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else,” Cuomo sings while the band rushes through the fuzzy pop-punk changes, evoking the hyperbole of masculinity. But there’s more beneath the surface. “‘No One Else’ is about the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend," Cuomo has said. The song acquires even more resonance in the context of its sequencing on the record. Cuomo described the following song, “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” as “the same asshole wondering why she's gone.” In actuality, he spends most of “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” muttering to his ex’s wallet photograph and masturbating to her memory, getting in a joke along the way, saying she enjoyed the sex “more than ever.” It’s an absurd scene, but imagine the sentiment coming from the wrong person and it’s suddenly not so funny. Weezer were masterful at walking this line between knowing jokiness and legitimately creepy dysfunction.

This base kind of arrested development shifts back and forth between the narrator’s relationship with girls and his views on himself. If “No One Else” and “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” are mirror twins, so are “Surf Wax America” and “In the Garage.” Given that Weezer were named after a common term for asthma sufferers, no one expected them to be out on a board riding the waves. That tension animates “Surf Wax America,” a well-crafted jumble of harmonic puzzles and barreling punk guitars where the hedonistic surfer lifestyle is both celebrated and chided for its simplistic worldview. Even while the song sneers, the ferocity of Cuomo screaming “Let’s go!” juxtaposed with the solemnness of the band’s Wilsonian harmonies make you believe, once again, in Weezer’s sincerity. Meanwhile, “In the Garage” is an homage to that happy place where no one judges you for your comic books, D&D figurines, and Kiss posters. It seems like over-the-top self-parody, but the garage was indeed a real place where early Weezer practiced and recorded when Cuomo, Sharp, and original guitarist Justin Fisher lived together in the “Amherst House” near Santa Monica. The hopeless ambition of “In the Garage” would make it the defining song of nerd-rock.

In between “Surf Wax America,” a fantasy about someone completely different, and “In the Garage,” a hyper-detailed song about himself, lies a song about his father. There are two more nakedly emotional songs on Blue, which are set off further by Cuomo’s rare embrace of laid-back guitars. Atop a bluesy jangle, “Say It Ain’t So” details the moment when Cuomo’s deepest worries are realized: He sees a beer in the fridge and, remembering how his father drank before he walked out, he senses his stepfather is doing the same. He fears now that he, too, is destined for this fate. Pinkerton, Weezer’s sophomore album, is often described as the tortured confessional to end all tortured confessionals, essentially a diary of Cuomo’s notorious Asian fetish. But “Say It Ain’t So” is just as raw, and arguably has more that its listeners can use, throwing its arms wide open to anyone who’s known the trauma of dad issues. The music is constructed perfectly, building and building until what's left of Cuomo's vulnerability comes out as a bitterly frayed "yeah-yeah," all capped by a guitar solo worthy of the Scorpions.

The desire to write a perfect song can drive some songwriters mad, as their belief in music as a vehicle for emotional expression reconciles itself with the belief that pop is a puzzle that can be solved. On Blue, Cuomo found the ideal balance, as he rarely has since. He understood the rules so well that he also knew when to break them, from Sharp’s super silly new-wave keyboard in “Buddy Holly” to the mumbled dialogue that runs through “Undone” (the band and their friends chatting were a backup plan after DGC refused to clear dialog from an old sci-fi film, “Peanuts,” and more).

The fact that “Only In Dreams” is eight glorious minutes long is Blue’s greatest example of self-indulgence gone right. It confronts the two most perilous teen-boy anxieties—talking to a girl you really like and dancing in public. It’s fiery, gorgeous, well-played, and devastatingly sad. Sharp’s trudging bassline guides the way forward for the narrator, whose fear of stepping on his crush’s toenails is temporarily silenced by the band’s total calamity. Rock’n’roll teaches us that extreme volume can quiet the voices of doubt inside our heads and numb the pain of living inside our awkward bodies. In this sense, the climaxes on “Only in Dreams,” starting around the song’s midpoint, are rock’n’roll lessons of a lifetime. But it’s the big build at the 6:45 mark that plays like a beta male transfiguration. Having re-recorded Cropper’s guitar parts in one take after essentially firing him following Blue’s 1993 recording at Electric Lady, Cuomo ends up axe-battling himself until he’s soloing like the metal gods he grew up worshipping. Wilson’s drumming—an underrated and idiosyncratic force throughout Weezer’s discography—drives home the catharsis. His cymbals crash from every angle and his tricky rolls play like percussive triple axels. By the end of the song, you’re back to reality, exhausted but ready for a fight—even if it’s just against your own doubting voices.

For all the talk about Rivers Cuomo’s anemic masculinity, The Blue Album has a unifying thread of identity that supersedes gender. An essay on the Smiths pointed out that, “Asking people about their interest in the Smiths is another way of asking this question: ‘How did you survive your teenage years?’” The same could be said of Weezer’s debut. Blue quivers with isolation if you look past the pastiche, the deflective humor, and the guitar lines that make you sit up tall. The emotion Weezer tapped into is echoed in music sometimes considered distinctly millennial due to its high levels of anxiety, from Death Cab for Cutie and Carseat Headrest to Mitski’s Puberty 2 and even Drake at his most neurotic.

For as classic as the album is considered now, Blue didn’t make the 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll. Back then, Weezer were considered alt opportunists or even Pavement ripoffs—a comparison that seems silly now, looking at the distinct rock strains since indebted to Cuomo. But MTV and radio airplay for “Buddy Holly” and “Undone — The Sweater Song” made Weezer huge, and The Blue Album went double-platinum within 15 months of its release. Over the next three years, as Weezer 1.0 slowly imploded (bye-bye Matt Sharp, hello rotating door of bassists), the record would sell a million more and be well on its way to canonization. By 2003, Pitchfork named it one of the best records of the 1990s; two years later, Rolling Stone heralded it as the 299th greatest album ever. And so Blue now sits in a sweet spot of commercial accessibility and critical adoration, a combination that guarantees the album will make its way into the hands of a certain kind of bespectacled teenager for decades to come—the ones who really need it. Cuomo never wrote a song as indelible as “Seems Like Teen Spirit,” but he did reach generations of rock kids, proving that coolness is optional if you study hard enough.

#reviews-albums

0 notes