#these soundtracks go hard tol

[swampghouls]

the urge to rewatch the kdramas i watched during like 2012/2013 is OVERWHELMING

[disaster-j]

Hello! This is a theory of love ask I guess (Though I haven't watched it yet, I am counting the days to)

So, I've seen a lot of posts saying they use the Theory of Love ost everywhere (not me, bad buddy, and more) and I wanna ask what it is...Coz well I don't know the ost for theory of love but I've watched bad buddy and not me so I couldn't figure out which one it was.

(P.S I'm planning to watch Theory of love in a few weeks, any things I need to keep in mind while watching it?)

Hi! So here's a playlist I found for the tol ost. I'm not familiar with all the songs used in the show so I can't say if it's complete or not. Overall, tol had a very iconic and recognisable soundtrack and many of the songs used in the show have later been used in more recent BLs and as tol is a fan favourite among international fans people usually talk about it when they notice it. The main ost hat tol is known for is Fake Protagonist by Getsunova and it is an absolute bop I still have it on my playlists after two years since first listening to it, it's that good.

As for things to keep in mind when watching tol-

1. Third is not the most reliable narrator

2. Khai seems like a jerk but he's really just a dumb slut (affectionate)

3. Third looks like a sweetheart but he's the meanest bitch in town (affectionate)

4. Their story is essentially about the disconnect with their feelings, when one is in love the other is not, which makes it hard for them to figure their shit out. But they're perfect for each other once they're finally on the same page.

5. Best friend group in a thai show. I'm just saying they were a cohesive unit throughout and their brotherhood was just incredible. Thai shows don't execute friend groups very well most of the time with how disconnected the friends can feel but here even when they were all off doing their own things they never felt disconnected from the group. 10/10 execution definitely something to look forward to.

6. The show villainises Khai in the beginning a little for the drama but pls don't go too hard on his he's a good egg! Just a bit self centred...

[sunsetofdoom]

And another OC thing for Xiya

Yet again, I can’t make a picture for Xiya because SWTOR hates me. 

The Seidala Squad’s medic is a 6′0 Sith Pureblood with a runner’s build and a hawk’s stare. She has a gold ring through her eyebrow and a few ear piercings, high cheekbones thick with Sith ridges. She wears her hair long enough to braid it back tight to her head. Always wears short sleeves.

Full Name: Rhexiya Kiroq

Gender and Sexuality: Femaleish. Open-minded.

Pronouns: She/her

Ethnicity/Species: Sith Pureblood. Not Force-sensitive, which makes her life much harder than it has to be.

Birthplace and Birthdate: Kaas City, born at home in the Sith Enclave with a midwife’s help. Her mother’s a traditionalist. Xiya is 29 when she gets recruited to the squad.

Guilty Pleasures: Romance novels. Bad ones. If they’re physical copies, she’s the type to dog-ear and highlight and underline all over her books.

Phobias: Not being able to save everyone. Sometimes she worries that her drinking problem is getting out of hand, too, but then she looks at her entire extended family and she’s like, no, actually, I’m good.

What They Would Be Famous For: Getting published in medical journals, hopefully. She keeps trying and getting rejected.

What They Would Get Arrested For: She has a slight Thing about being given orders by Sith. If she were attending a patient and a Sith Lord tried to take them- either for healing, or for interrogation- she would kick up a fuss and probably get a lightsaber to the face for her trouble.

OC You Ship Them With: Rora? Maybe? Possibly? But also Ruusan, maybe. I might just give up and ship the whole squad in a puppy pile at this point, it’s so up in the air.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: She and Sixer might strangle each other, once they get going. He thinks he knows everything and she has absolutely no choice but to correct him every time.

Favorite Movie/Book Genre: Romance, especially historical romance. She leaves it playing in the background while she writes or studies.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Anything loud. Action movies, musicals, epics- if the soundtrack soars, she mutes it.

Talents and/or Powers: A spectacular medic and field surgeon. In a league with Doc and Lt. Dorne for people saved and repaired in the field.

Why Someone Might Love Them: Intensely competent with a dry sense of humor, Xiya looks after Her People with a passion and fervor only matched by a mated-for-life apex predator. She commits 100% of herself 100% of the time.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: The ridiculous superiority-inferiority complex of being a Force-blind Pureblood doesn’t make her the easiest person to get along with. She can be extremely hard-edged and unforgiving.

How They Change: Relaxes at least a little of that racial nonsense as she gets plopped into a multiracial, multicultural group of assholes that really don’t have much of a concept of that “Purebloods inherently better” rhetoric. Learns to work with Seidala and trust another Sith. Maybe falls in love; definitely gains another family. Also one of her birth sisters dies on Korriban, which I think is gonna kick off some character bullshit.

Why You Love Them: *petting my tol stick-thin Pureblood medics* I just think they’re neat!

[princeandreis]

great comet -- explained!

so I was talking to @viennaleia who just recently started listening to great comet, and I remembered how hard it was for me to figure out what was going on. it involved a lot of googling, re-listening, genius lyrics, and wikipedia summaries. a mostly enjoyable but rather difficult process. so I decided I’d make an easy summary for those of you who are as confused about great comet as we all were when we started out!

warning: there are obviously hella spoilers ahead for great comet (and war & peace), so read at your own risk!

a few things -- 

one, this summary goes song-by-song narrating the plot and filling in gaps. great comet is an entirely sung-through show, so you aren’t missing any scenes by listening to the soundtrack. 

two, I’m using the Broadway version of the soundtrack to narrate. I’m not sure how different the off-Broadway version is.

three, I’m gonna try to keep this as bare as possible. I love great comet with my whole heart and I could talk about all of the themes and motifs and everything forever, but I’m trying to keep this just as a summary so people have less of a hard time with the plot.

so here we go!! this is gonna be super long so buckle tf up!!

act one

prologue ~ introduces the characters and tells you what you need to know about them. pretty self-explanatory so I’m gonna leave this one here.

pierre ~ he’s so complex that he can’t be summed up in a few words like all the other characters, so he gets his own introductory song. puts pierre’s existential despair on full display.

moscow ~ natasha and sonya, the two cousins/bffs, arrive in moscow to spend time with natasha’s godmother, marya dmitrievna, who is well-respected in society. they’re there to pass the time before their fiances get back from the war (in the book the circumstances are a bit more complicated, but we’ll ignore that for now). natasha talks about how much she misses her fiance, andrey, whose family she’s about to meet for the first time. marya assures her that all she has to do is make sure she gets along with andrey’s sister, and everything will be fine.

the private and intimate life of the house ~ offers the audience a look into how things are at the house of andrey’s family (princess mary and old prince bolkonsky, their father). bolkonsky is abusive and manipulative, which has left mary feeling like she’s the only one who can take care of him. she expresses her loneliness, and she and her father discuss natasha, who is coming shortly for tea. bolkonsky shows off his crazies.

natasha & bolkonskys ~ natasha arrives for tea, and it’s awkward. I mean awkward. natasha and mary immediately hate each other, but try to mask it with cold politeness. bolkonsky shows off his crazies, pt 2, and is super rude to natasha. she leaves in tears, leaving mary feeling horrible.

no one else ~ natasha sings about her love for andrey, begging him to come home. it’s beautiful and sad and fantastic. she just really loves him, dude

the opera ~  marya takes natasha and sonya to the opera, which is natasha’s grand moment of coming out in society. she’s wearing a more revealing dress for the first time, since she’s now considered a woman. she is flattered and bewildered by the attention she receives for her beauty. helene and dolokhov come in together, and it’s revealed that she’s cheating on pierre (her husband, who’s not there) with dolokhov. the opera begins, and natasha doesn’t understand it. she becomes kind of intoxicated (idk this part’s super weird sghjfdkhsdjfmv) by the lights and the crowd. anatole enters in the middle of the opera, and natasha is captivated by his looks. the opera continues, and anatole and natasha ogle each other from their seats and it’s weird. the opera concludes and anatole enters natasha’s box.

natasha & anatole ~ natasha and anatole get to know each other a little. and by that I mean anatole is super thirsty and natasha doesn’t know what to do about it. she is frightened of how much attraction there is between them. anatole asks her to come to a ball that’s happening at his house soon, but she doesn’t give him a straight answer.

the duel ~ anatole greets pierre, his friend, and invites him to go to the club with him and dolokhov. pierre accepts. they go to the club, where a raucous party is happening. pierre drinks a bunch and talks about his alcoholism and sadness. anatole tells his sister helene (whom he’s probably sleeping with on the side OOF) and his friend dolokhov about how thirsty he is for natasha. he knows she’s engaged, but doesn’t care. it also turns out that anatole is also married, but it’s a secret to everyone except pierre, dolokhov, and helene. dolokhov taunts pierre about how he’s sleeping with pierre’s wife and everyone knows it. pierre drunkenly challenges him to a duel (for honor reasons and whatnot). dolokhov agrees, because he’s a bitch and a “crazy good shot.” pierre shoots dolokhov, but he doesn’t really mean it and regrets it right away. he stands straight up, fully ready to die, but dolokhov misses, and is taken away to be cared for. pierre is declared the winner. anatole asks helene to get natasha to come to their party, and she agrees. he helps the inebriated pierre get home.

dust & ashes ~ pierre reflects on his brush with death, and regrets how much of his life he’s wasted looking for truth in places he’d never find it. he also talks about love and stuff and it’s full of cool themes. it’s drunken existential crisis 101, but he decides he’s ready to change and live a better life. inspiring af 10/10.

sunday morning ~ natasha and sonya light a candle in front of a mirror and look into it, which is a russian fortune-telling tradition. natasha thinks she sees andrey lying down, and is frightened because she doesn’t know what that means. she reflects on what has happened with anatole, and wonders if she’s being unfaithful to andrey because of her confused feelings. marya leaves to confront prince bolkonsky about how rude he was to natasha. helene shows up while natasha is in her room trying on dresses.

charming ~ helene uses her charms and flattery (and a fair amount of bad logic) to convince natasha to come to the party at the kuragins’ (her and anatole’s) house. natasha agrees to attend.

the ball ~ natasha and anatole dance together, and anatole tells her he loves her. she resists his advances initially, but he puts a lot of pressure on her and kisses her. she admits she loves him, too, and they promise their love to each other.

act two

letters ~ people write letters. pierre writes to andrey at the war, updating him on life in moscow. he reveals that dolokhov will recover from his gunshot wound, and discusses natasha’s arrival in town. (if you didn’t know, pierre is super in love with natasha, who’s an old family friend, but he doesn’t really know that himself yet.) pierre talks about how he’s done a lot of reading as he searches for the meaning of life, and he’s used that study to do some funky math to “prove” that he’s meant to kill napoleon (yes, that napoleon. pierre really hates napoleon). natasha struggles to write a letter to andrey explaining what’s happened. she receives a letter from princess mary, who still feels awful about what happened between them and wants to try to be friends. natasha has no idea how to answer. anatole sends a love letter to natasha (which was written by dolokhov). he asks her to elope with him, and she agrees. she falls asleep with his love letter in her hand.

sonya & natasha ~ sonya finds and reads anatole’s love letter, and figures out what’s going on. she tries to convince natasha that what she’s doing is a terrible idea, and not just for her sake. sonya worries also for the sake of their family’s honor and wellbeing, since a scandal like this would ruin them. natasha doesn’t listen, and scorns her cousin’s advice, even telling sonya she hates her. she writes a letter in response to princess mary, telling her that things are over between her and andrey.

sonya alone ~ sonya resolves to protect natasha from ruin at all costs, even though natasha is extremely upset with her. she watches her cousin become distant and dreamy, and figures out that natasha has some kind of plan in mind with anatole. she misses natasha’s friendship, and will do everything she possibly can to keep her from harm.

preparations ~ anatole runs into pierre, and tells him he’s running off to get married. pierre, not knowing who he’s talking about, teases him since he’s already married. anatole and dolokhov prepare for anatole to abduct natasha, carry her off to poland, and marry her. dolokhov tries to convince anatole it’s a stupid idea, but anatole won’t listen and he relents. balaga, the driver they hired, arrives.

balaga ~ this is a fun song that’s just kind of a break from plot. it explains how balaga is a longtime friend of anatole and dolokhov’s, and is an absolutely insane driver who loves drinking (especially while he drives).

the abduction ~ anatole throws his “bachelor party,” so to speak -- it’s his last hurrah before eloping with natasha. pierre joins in, still unaware what exactly is taking place or who anatole’s running away with. the party sets out for natasha’s house, where anatole’s plan is set in motion. a maid leads him into the house to collect natasha, but he is stopped by marya. he and dolokhov make their chaotic escape.

in my house ~ marya scolds natasha for her actions, and sonya tries to comfort her. natasha throws a temper tantrum, and refuses to admit she or anatole did anything wrong. she goes back to waiting for him at her window.

a call to pierre ~ marya sends an urgent letter to pierre, begging him to visit her. she explains the situation, and he’s infuriated. he reveals that anatole is already married. marya asks him to send anatole away from moscow, and he accepts.

find anatole ~ pierre rushes around moscow trying to find anatole. he enters a club, where patrons are gossiping about the elopement. pierre shuts down the rumors, preserving natasha’s honor. natasha is told that anatole is married, and she is destroyed by the news. pierre returns home, where helene is with her brother. pierre insists on speaking to him alone, to which he agrees.

pierre & anatole ~ pierre confronts anatole about what he has done, threatens him, and demands any letters he has from natasha. (onstage, natasha poisons herself.) he then tells anatole that he must stay out of moscow forever. anatole leaves for petersburg.

natasha very ill ~ sonya reflects by herself. natasha has poisoned herself and is safe now, but is still very sick. andrey is due to return, and tensions in the house run high.

pierre & andrey ~ andrey returns, reunites with his old friend pierre, and they discuss what has happened with natasha in his absence. he has heard the rumor that she wanted to elope with anatole. andrey tells pierre that even though he knows it would be the right thing to forgive natasha and ask for her hand again, he just can’t do it. he leaves pierre with all the letters natasha had written him.

pierre & natasha ~ pierre visits natasha to return the letters. he fully intends to despise her for her foolishness, but his heart is broken by her childishly pitiable state. he does his best to comfort her, even though she despises herself for what has happened. he tells her that were he not a better man -- and unmarried -- he would propose to her right then and there. grateful, natasha gives him a loving glance and leaves the room in tears of relief.

the great comet of 1812 ~ getting into his sleigh, pierre reflects on all that has happened. something has radically changed within him because of the way natasha looked at him, and he feels hope for the future. he sees the great comet of 1812 in the sky. this specific comet is supposed to be an omen for terrible tragedy, but for pierre it symbolizes joy and new life. the show ends with a sense of peace, hope, and love.

[circe-pendragon]

Ayy I got tagged

By the lovely @cherryskies13! Rules: Answer all 85 questions and tag 20 people

The Last Drink: Fruit juice Phone call: @beyondtheradiowaves Text message: @cherryskies13 Song you listened to: Like a Star  (Mike Krol) Time I cried: Can’t remember Dated someone twice: ? Kissed someone and regretted it: Haven’t had my first kiss yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Been cheated on: Hasn’t happened yet and I hope it never does Lost someone special: Hasn’t happened yet and I hope it never does Been depressed: Eeehh Gotten drunk and thrown up: I don’t drink, so nope (except some wine like once a year)

Three favourite colours: Purple/Violet Blue (any shade) Rose/Pink

In the last year, have you: Made new friends: Yup, The Best Fallen out of love: Nope Laughed so hard you cried: I’m pretty sure that happend, I just can’t remember it Found out someone was talking about you: My coworkers, yeah, but no one that actually matters Met someone that changed you: Yep, definetly. Found out who your friends are: I guess? Kissed someone on your facebook list: what is facebook lol

General: How many facebook friends do you have in real life: Fortunately, I don’t have a facebook. Do you have any pets? None, except for Kiki,  my cat plushie Do you want to change your name? Nope mine is okay I guess What did you do for your last birthday? Ate pizza, drank wine, watched a movie What time did you wake up? Today exactly at 12 (midday) What did you do at midnight last night? Played games with my friend and talked to my friends on tumblr Name something you can’t wait for: Meeting my online friends. Also, LiS: BTS. When was the last time you saw your mom? When she said Goodnight to me earlier What are you listening to right now? Steven Universe soundtrack ^w^ Have you ever spoken to someone named Tom? What even is this question Something getting on your nerves? The knowledge that tomorrow is monday and I’ll have to work Most visited website? Tumblr, ofc (stuck forever) Hair colour? Blonde Long or short? My height? Tol. Do you have a crush on someone? Not right now, no.

What do you like about yourself? My hair. Also I might not be doing much for my own life, but I will always make my friends a priority, and try to help them out as best as I can. That’s pretty much the only thing I can like about myself. Piercings? None Blood type? Good question! Nickname: Rob, Nerd Relationship status: single Zodiac: Gemini Pronouns: He/Him Fav TV show? Aaah that’s hard, but I’ll go with Steven Universe. The favourite of all my favourites. Tatoos? Nope, but I wanna get one eventually Left or Right handed? Right Surgery? When I was really young, yeah, but it’s really embarassing and not worth talking about Sports? …not really into it Vacation? Italy *_* Pair of trainers? Uhm, I…guess I have one?

General: Eating: Food?? Drinking: Juice, Ice Tea, water I’m about to: Sleep Waiting for: Things to get better Want: For things to get better for the people I love and for me (also hugs would be nice) Married: Nope Career? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Which is better Kisses or hugs? Hugs! Lips or eyes? Eyes, I suppose Shorter or taller? Both is great! Older or younger? Huh? Nice arms or stomach: doesn’t matter as long as they’re both soft Hook up or relationship? I’m not interested at all in hook-ups or one night stands. Trouble maker or hesitant? Def Hesitant

Have you ever Kissed a stranger? Nah Drunk hard liquor? Nope Lost glasses of contact lenses? I don’t ever lose my glasses, glasses are better than contacts anyway imo Turned someone down? In what context…? Sex on the first date? Never had sex or my first date before Had your heart broken? No Been arrested? Nope Cried when someone died? My granddad, but that was years ago and I can’t really remember Fallen for a friend? Not that I knew

Do you believe in: Yourself? I’m trying Miracles? Yea Love at first sight? Eeh, not so sure Santa Claus? Aw man I wish Kiss on the first date? Rather not Angels? I know some of them personally, actually

Other: Eye colour? Grey-ish green Favourite movie? SCOTT PILGRIM!

I tag: Uhm, anyone who wants to do this! Feel free to feel yourself tagged when you read this!

[nacchi-nacchi-nacchi]

Troubling of the Water: A Todd Howard Story

Wilt thou be made whole? By Nacchi.

On the Production of Compact Discs

Information is stored in CD format as a series of microscopic burns. The useless unblemished disc is covered with millions of tiny wounds until it is assigned order, given utility and thus meaning; its identity is nothing more than a shorthand for the arrangement of its injuries. Hundreds of thousands of identically-scorched discs are mass-produced in factories devoted to this purpose, and then they go out into the world—momentarily useful and then left until they are forgotten, soon obsolete and eventually unreadable. But the marks remain, scars gone illegible within environments alien to them.

CDs are fragile things, damaged in just the right way. Cracks and gouges, records of less useful traumas, form mnemonic ravines into which meaning and memory disappear. And then, the greatest tragedy for a compact disc: to be discarded before even the moment in which its constellation of injuries--that is, in which itself--might be recognized, and so fulfill its destiny. What is to be done with these CDs, and all the CDs waiting for an eternity in landfills and forests and everywhere else on earth? What is the fate of objects with no use?

Chapter I: You Can Climb That Mountain

"I want to change the world.”

Every child believes this; every child is a fool. I certainly did, and was. But then, if I have ever deserved sympathy, it is in that distant past. I was made a fool, as we all are; Even as they nursed their injuries, those around me encouraged me toward lethally high aspirations of my own with patronizing smiles—under the pretense of indulging me, they cultivated my naivety as material for fresh bandages. Surely, someday, for someone—perhaps me—a dream would come true, and the world would open up for everyone. From the very start of my life, I was merely a thing to be used until I was exhausted and then thrown away.

By the time I had grown to understand my position, I was already fatally misaligned with the reality of my circumstances. Stupidly, I had told myself over and over again that, not having any say in the circumstances of my arrival, I was at the very least owed entry into the warm world I had been weaned on stories of. But, I had been given a gift after all, though I didn’t know it at the time: the very things which had finally been destroyed within me, my favorite parts of myself, were the few sacred qualities which might which might have prevented me from becoming the sort of monster that survives in this world—This was the expression of love I had been searching for all along, one I failed to recognize until much too late.

All but forgetting even the ruins of those painful, incongruent parts, I became capable of accepting, even almost of desiring, a life of fighting as hard and as cruelly as necessary to secure my own lowly position. I had made it, whatever it was. I had became the shape and hardness required of me, and had limited the bounds of my imagination to the realities of my existence. Insofar as every part of me that might have been crushed within my confines was gone, I was perfectly accommodated. Insofar as every noncontiguous region of myself had been excised, I was a complete being.

And yet. Even knowing that I could never claim to deserve anything beyond this pathetic life, my mind still wanders from time to time. I remember all sorts of things, stupid fairytales about finding some small, radiant thing, and exclaiming—as the narrator gave a tranquilized smile, or a soundtrack swelled—”Ah, I’m so glad to be alive!”

No matter how I tried, I could not shake those irritating thoughts. This, I believe, is referred to as the death drive.

November 11, 2011. Veterans Day. Already tasting vodka on my lips, I follow the advertisements promising hundreds of hours of velvety unconsciousness to my local GameStop. As I enter I am immediately assaulted by three screens blasting three different advertisements for three different video games. It would seem that if I am to return to the grace of nothingness, I must willingly plunge myself into hell.

“J-just this, please,” I stammer, holding out an empty box and a scuffed plastic card as meager offerings to let me pass through the store unmolested.

In this, as in all things, I am disappointed.

“Oh, you’re a fan of Elder Scrolls, huh? You want that for PC? You know, PC is really the best, since you get all the mods…”

As my mind drifts off, I recall being limply hit on in college—beneath all the token effort, the worn promise of pleasure is nothing more than an excuse for accepting the comfort of a night—or a few months, or years—spoken for, populated with enough distractions to sustain yourself, for a while. After the longest forty-five seconds of my life I am finally permitted to leave the store with my game. Driving home, I wonder when I stopped liking video games (did I ever like them?), and why I keep buying them. Well, what else would I waste my money and time on? Best to devote myself to whatever keeps me staring at a wall; after all, to raise my eyes further would only invite deeper injuries. It’s a strange kind of responsibility I practice, but then responsibility is always painful.

The game disc feels light and cheap in my hand as I place it into my computer’s CD tray. And then it is drawn into the machine, and with a click and the whirr of a laser everything is set into place.

The game installs. The world is gray and filthy. I walk for some time, talk to some people, do what they want; it feels more or less like having a job. I had told myself that as a child, these games held some magic for me, something I could recapture; instead I am left with stinging eyes and an inventory full of meaningless words. There is nothing there to grasp on to, no substance to all the various weapons and armor and pre-appraised treasure. A sickness overtakes me, lying atop the one already provoked by the cheap alcohol I had been drinking. I just want to stop playing and... do... anything, maybe take a walk outside—when was the last time I had been to a park, or really, anywhere without a specific purpose? For one moment, I feel the resolve to go building within me—and then a corpse intersects with a door and begins to twist rapidly around, writhing about with an indescribable cascade of layered thuds.

I begin to cackle, a laugh I cannot even recognize as my own. A sword, battered by the flailing limbs, goes spinning upward with another sound—I double over. This, surely, is why I purchased this game. This is why I spent the money I earned with my long hours of work. At last all the years have led me somewhere, a path back to the sundrenched fields in which I passed some carefree childhood: this cloying, slapstick meme.

There is a kind of love so pure that it can only be understood as a species of gravest perversion. A love which tolerates no artifice and suffers no consideration of the demands of the outside world; a transcendent, fatal, repulsive sort of love. This is the love that I, miserable human being that I am, hold for this “meme” in its raw, unattenuated form. It is the only sort of love which a creature like me can muster.

Meme is the cold hamburger served up at a drive-thru with half the toppings forgotten, and it is the accompanying chuckle. It is the momentary warmth from a trash-heap of disappointments burning to nothing, the measly payment for the copper stripped from the last obsolete office a nameless architect ever built, a final betrayal of hope itself that some small scrap of emotion, whatever it is, might still be salvaged—return to a hometown you feel nothing for, find where the stain of hemolymph crushed into the pavement might remind you of sunlight—and that is meme.

If we are to live submerged in industrial waste, I choose to bend down at each iridescent pool and drink as deeply as I can—that I might at least get drunk on my own suffering, and perhaps even hallucinate some specter of amusement. If nothing else, at least I have that knowing smirk, unseen by anyone but myself; I’m really better than this, you know. It may be worthless, but there was never anything to extract worth from in the first place; I’ll take my silly little laughs. I have no idea what it means to love myself, or anyone else, but perhaps loving these stupid, malfunctioning pieces of debris is as close as I can get.

The following day I discover console commands, and my passion burns even hotter in my chest. So hot even that it melts the chains I had fashioned from the iron of my own blood, chains binding me to the hard edges of that putrid concept known as survival. I am not set free, of course. A malformed entity like myself is incapable of understanding freedom, even if I were to somehow earn it; given wings and set loose with an open sky, I would only bash my head to bits against the ground. No, I am more of a slave than I ever was—a slave to that neon, excruciating joy which in a single instant melted me down and shaped me anew.

Less than human, I have become a gamer.

Chapter IIa: Put What You Want in Your Hands

Having broken free of those chains which I chafed against for most of my life, I began to tumble painfully through my new, larger cage. The next two or three years progressed uneventfully despite the constant drip of new adventures and alterations in my beloved game—I had nothing to lose, and I lost it.

Taking advantage of a departmental reorganization, I left my job behind. Nothing could have mattered less to me at the time; I had only settled for the position in the first place to advance a career about which I cared nothing, chosen only on the basis of a few romantic fantasies. Still, the manner in which I made my exit left me with no hope for further employment in the field, and about as many friends. Loneliness changed, from something I experienced as I ran against the shallowness of my friendships to something I experienced in solitude; truth be told, I found that I vastly prefer the latter.

A far more dire consequence was the rapid depletion of my savings. I had perhaps overestimated how easy it would be to find some stop-gap job and how willing I would be to do that work, and the costs of living piled up frighteningly quickly. There were always new consoles to buy, new Skyrims to experience with their own unique flaws native to each platform, and the few income sources I drifted between came to hardly anything at all. Finally, too broke even to acquire new debt, I remembered why I had choked down the humiliation of employed life for so long.

I had only just purchased a PlayStation VR when Skyrim was released for the Nintendo Switch, and I desperately needed the funds to buy it. There was nothing left to sell, nothing but my piles of Skyrim games and the consoles to play them with. I had even given up alcohol, having found a more effective means of self-destruction. I was at wit’s end; I would wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning, scour YouTube for any bug videos and scrub through those grating Let’s Plays, unable to get back to sleep unless I found some collision error or AI failure.

Finally, I contacted Todd Howard himself, hoping against hope that the man behind it all might take some mercy upon his most loyal fan. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the consequences of this action. Whatever sort of creature I might have been, I held only a human understanding of this reality at best; I was incapable of comprehending the level at which a being like Todd operates.

And so it came to be, though even now I’m not really sure how, that I was in Maryland, face to face with Todd himself. He said nothing, his cold silence a marked contrast to the nervous energy he overflowed with in interviews. It gave me the impression that there were really no words to be said, no words but those listed on the contract before me.

I saw my whole life laid out there, neatly bound in threads of black ink. It was in tracing those threads across the page that I saw my life, for the first time, as truly my own. This was not the account of a character I was forced to suffer with; it was me, body and mind tied to a clearly-formed existence.

I earnestly believe that each of us desire, at our core, to be bound by something greater than ourselves. Floating freely through the horrible emptiness, crashing into others as we tumble about, we have no hard form, no justification for the parasitism of existence. And so we cage our dispersed conscious in a flimsy, prefabricated frame of lies, that that cage, those lies, may become our body and their borders our self. Having changed my cage was tantamount to rebirth. But was I entering a higher cycle of existence, or one of atonement?

Perhaps if I knew either way, I would have refused to sign the document. But the thrill of unknowing set down roots in that same part of my breast which had torn me from my dull life, putting forth a bloom of seductive crimson. At last, I remembered that I had a heart, and that it was filled with blood; I dripped that blood down the pen and across those neat threads, and my mind, body and life came together in a blaze of warmth.

Todd picked up the contract, wordlessly looked over my signature, nodded. I suppose the taste of my blood was to his liking.

Chapter IIb: Make Yourself Proud

A car soon arrived to pick me up. As it wound its way along the highway, I stared out into the sky—today it was brilliantly, crushingly blue, and, perhaps because I knew this would be my last sight of it, I couldn’t drink in enough. It was the kind of sky that had always set my thoughts wandering, and I sank softly into daydreams of the past. Not in regret, but as a way of basking in the satisfaction of having my affairs settled, really settled.

The feeling was itself nostalgic. How long had it been since I could complete everything I hoped to and enjoy a clear mind like this one? Even since I had given myself entirely over to Skyrim, I never found the time, or more accurately the mental discipline, to feel satisfied with my progress when it was time to sleep. There was always some other barrow, another Draugr to sneak attack, ten more frost trolls to spawn in. But, sometime before that, surely...

In truth, I’ve always found it better to avoid thinking too much about the past, but being that I was in a rare whimsical mood I chased the thoughts as they rolled around.

Where exactly had my life diverged from the tangle of paths collectively known as human society, and when had the gap between the two become too wide to cross? Though I no longer felt any pain when considering that sort of thing, the answer remained hazy, somewhere just out of reach. Maybe it never existed in the first place... Even as I tried to turn my memories over I found myself refashioning them, reshooting events and adjusting details until they supported convenient interpretations. By this point the original memory, if such a thing could be said to exist, had long since been lost.

In the back of that car, in that tiny world populated only by me, I invented a past self to bid farewell to.

What sense of obligation drove me? It must have been something like going to a distant relative’s funeral—unable to feel the emotion I had been expecting, unsure of even what that emotion was, I made a stiff attempt at propriety in its stead. Naturally it was an awkward affair, a lot like meeting an old friend one has long ago fallen out of touch with. Actually, it was exactly that—the sense of trying to reinvent an already-vanished identity, working backwards to justify a bundle of artificial feelings, all wrapped up far too neatly.

I, whose parts had never quite fit together properly, couldn’t be satisfied with an answer that tied a neat bow on my life. In other words, I refused to accept an explanation that “just works”—Surely I must myself be as full of meaningless switchbacks, unintended paths and misplaced objects as the game I had chosen to devote myself to.

A sharp turn pulled me out of my half-dreaming state, my mind still trailing somewhere behind me. We had arrived, and it was time to leave the beautiful sky behind.

Chapter III: You Can Play Forever

My thoughts hardened again as I approached the Bethesda offices, and my heart pounded in my ears. There I stood, at the edge of eternity, awaiting the consummation of my obsession. My driver came too, standing wordlessly behind me in a smart suit and dark sunglasses that, taken together, gave him a cartoonishly coherent image. I wondered if he wasn’t a beginner at this too, momentarily crossing paths with me as he strode out to the fringes of his own world with the same affected confidence.

All of my earlier contentment evaporated in the heat of that moment, a heat that seemed to exude from the manila walls of the office as surely as if they were the sands of a far-off desert. It was almost as if the golden sunlight which lapped against the outer offices of the building but went no farther had given them some extra warmth in compensation—It was strange to think that those walls would soon separate me forever from that light which had been shining down on me for all of my life. The glass door, when I pushed it, seemed impossibly heavy despite the smoothness with which it opened.

As the door came to a close behind me with a puff of air, I was determined not to feel even a single moment of anxiety or regret. What was I leaving behind? A life worth less than nothing. Having entered the (figurative) dungeon with no (figurative) means of healing and suffering deep (figurative) wounds, I had been tip-toeing around trying futilely to avoid further damage even as I knew deep in my heart that I would be broken the moment I tried to do anything.

I had been wrong my whole life; the thing at my core, the thing that had died, it had been a strand of that sunlight which would have pulled me out of that building. There is a place for the injured in society, in the same way that everyone sometimes indulges in a sad song. There is a place for those things which shatter and then go on bandaged in tape and patches, those things that glow with the rainbow promise of the resilience of the spirit, of that distant day when scars will have become old friends.

There is no place in this entire world for those who have broken irreparably. For those who cannot move on, for those who have no future, whose lives are forever sent spinning out of orbit from consensus human existence. There is no promise of the infinite and indefinite palliative care needed simply for that kind of person to survive each day. And, instinctively sensing that shortcoming, fearful that understanding the curse would be to invite it, those fortunate, blind souls for whom tomorrow will surely come are repulsed by the existence of those like me—Those left with no foundation on which to rebuild. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

But Todd was different. Ever since our meeting I believed, I had to believe, that he was one of the few members of this pathetic species with an unwounded heart in his chest. Or rather, I had to believe that that heart pulsed with such a vulgar, careless muscularity that injuries which would tear a more sensitive man to shreds could not stop its beating, but only wreathe it in a rosy mist of rich, hot blood as it pumped—Driving him, I presume, ever northward to the frozen mounts of Skyrim, like the engine of a locomotive rushing monomaniacally toward the next sales pitch.

I would be crushed carelessly by the weight of that existence, a bug upon a windshield. The thought excited me beyond comparison. If I met that sort of end, lower than a stray dog, I was certain that in my last moments I would blaze incandescent. A life so perfectly brought to nothing... That peculiar alchemy had become my last hope.

I was led deep within the bowels of the Bethesda facility, through winding halls and past unmarked doors. I was fairly confident that I had been descending underground from the first floor, but I soon lost all sense of how deep I might have gone. As I passed each silent chamber, I wondered if some other contractee was within, and for the first time in years I felt true jealousy claw at my heart. I was motioned through another door, shut inside, and then with the click of a lock I was left in darkness with only my strange emotions for company.

How much time did I spend drifting through that abyss? It was only when I realized that I couldn’t make out my hand in front of my face that I started to fret about my appearance. I had first come to Todd on my knees; now that I had incurred a debt of gratitude too heavy to ever repay, I could at least have kept myself presentable for his sake. But there was nothing to be done about it, and so, brushing my hair frantically with one hand, I set about groping around the limits of my chamber with the other.

It seemed I had been granted a bed with a cold steel frame of the sort hospitals have in period films, a large, rectangular dresser of some sort and an exposed toilet and sink shoved awkwardly in a corner. Beyond that, there could have been anything or nothing at all. Even my thoughts seemed to dissolve into the endless night, and soon I was almost unsure if I was asleep or awake.

It was in this state that he came to me, emerging from a thin slit of light and into the darkness of my dream like the negative image of an infant poking its head into the world. He clapped twice, waited. Clapped again.

The darkness erupted into light.

“You, uh, you could have… They were supposed to…”

So this was the real Todd after all. The weight of Nirn and beyond, all in the body of this strange, overgrown teenager. Even as my earlier fantasies evaporated, I drew a certain confidence from his awkward manner. Smiling slyly, I took my first steps toward him.

Todd continued stammering out an introduction. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable with the words people use, piling up phrases and cutting himself off in a spectacular tangle of conversation. The nervousness on his face grew as I approached, and I took a cruel delight in embracing him mid-sentence. His monologue, hardly a viable birth from the start, died in his throat as he hesitantly placed his hands around me.

No matter how quickly I tried to dispel the thought, his unsure touch reminded me of nothing so much as a child grasping out for its mother as he searched my body. As if to exact revenge for my shattered image of him, I took the lead with a perverse poise, patiently but firmly guiding his faltering touch.

Suddenly, Todd found what he sought, and began to move with a feverish brute force. The strength of an adult man erupted awkwardly from his lanky frame, a weird mixture of the figure I had imagined him to be and the one I saw clearly before my eyes. Carelessly, roughly, like the tugging of a newborn animal yet to even open its eyes, those hands pulled at me with such raw, artless desire that I thought I would surely be torn apart.

I gasped into the wrinkled collar of his shirt. For just a moment we were entwined in the stagnant, torrid air of the chamber; it was as though I was reliving a memory, one I had recalled many times before but in a concentrated form, crystallized until it had taken on a physical edge. Thought became plastic, molten, until I had forgotten where one of us ended and the other began, who was who and who held what and how desire flowed between us. Even before the moment had passed, I knew I didn’t want the tragedy of waiting for it, for something that would be like it but never quite the same, to take hold of me again—I wanted nothing more than to keep my eyes closed forever, burrowed within the same sensation for eternity.

And then, in an instant, it was over. We tumbled apart from other, spent and complete.

The copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox 360 Todd had shoved into my waistband sat cold against my stomach, stretching the fabric. Across from me, Todd clutched the sixty dollars he had extracted from my back pocket to his breast as he lay on his back staring blankly up into the concrete ceiling. It was the look of a man who had found all that he wanted and spent all of himself in consuming it, a vacant gaze turned upward at nothing at all.

We lay like corpses, like beings reverted to clay, in that chamber where time did not pass.

Once again I was filled with a terrible sadness even before the moment ended. It seemed impossibly cruel that the rotation of the earth and caprices of biology would soon reassert their tyranny over the world in which we two had found some fleeting shelter. Tears fell wet and hot down my cheeks, streaming soundlessly onto the hard floor. Todd, I realized in some periphery of my mind, was also crying.

Gently, apologetically, Todd slaughtered the moment before it could be taken by decay.

“I’ll be back tomorrow the same time,” he said with a sad smile. “I—I always operate in the same routine.”

And then he was gone, and I was all alone with myself. Myself, the disc and a cabinet stuffed with consoles and topped with a small television. All according to contract, all belonging to Todd—and yet I could hardly bear even this brief custodianship of everything I had dragged around for so long. Not any more. They had become so, so awfully heavy.

Long after he had disappeared, three more twenty dollar bills appeared from the crack beneath my door.

Returning uncertainly to life, as if awakening from a heartbreakingly beautiful dream, I breathed three words into the emptiness:

"I'll be waiting."

Originally posted November 2017, and revised for this blog. Todd Howard the meme figure in my meme hell world should not be conflated with Todd Howard the actual flesh-and-blood person in the actual hell world.

[james-bionic-barnes]

11 Questions Tag Game

I was tagged by the lovely @captain-purpledino to answer their eleven questions, come up with eleven of my own, and then tag eleven people. 

1.) Have you ever gone to see a play or musical on Broadway?

I haven’t, unfortunately! I love theatre too, so I’ve only listened to soundtracks/seen shows that come to small theatres where I live. But one day I hope to see one!

2.) What’s your perfect idea of a lazy day?

For starters, sleeping in at least past noon. Then waking up and playing some videogames, and then writing on my laptop while listening to music.

3.) If you could eat anything, anywhere in the world, what would you eat where?

One of my favorite foods ever is pasta, so I guess I’d go to Italy and eat pasta. 

4.) What color is your room? Is it something bright and fun, or calm and neutral?

All of my walls except one are this cream color. The other wall is painted a dark red to match my cherry blossom bed sheets (they’re my favorite flower/tree).

5.) What is/was your favorite subject in school?

BY FAR English/Literature, and it still is. 

6.) Do you know what you want to have as a career/How did you figure out what you wanted to do for a living?

Yes, I do know! And ever since I started writing when I was six years old, I knew I wanted to eventually be an author.

7.) When was the last time you had ice cream?

Just last night lol. I have a pint of mint chocolate chip in my freezer.

8.) What’s your dream car?

I own it! It’s a 2016 Jeep Renegade Trailhawk. 

9.) Do you know how to swim?

Yeah, I do, but I’m not a strong swimmer. But my physical therapist told me I float easily, so that’s a plus lol. 

10.) How hard is it for you to wake up in the morning?

Almost impossible - I get disturbed sleep from my chronic pain/disability, so when I have to wake up in the morning it’s extremely difficult. I love my sleep lol.

11.) What’s your one security item? (Like a stuffed animal, or a good luck charm/keychain?)

I’d have to say my huge Squishable Mantee plush. His name is Squishy (my mom called him that and it stuck), and I snuggle with him every night lol.

~~~~~~~~~~~

My Questions:

1. If you could live in any time period, which one would you choose?

2. Favorite movie?

3. If you could have any non-domestic animal as a pet, which one would you have? (and it wouldn’t eat you, either)

4. If you could switch bodies with anyone for a day, who would you want to switch with?

5. Favorite mythical creature?

6. If you could live in another country, which one would you pick?

7. If you had to choose between having the power to read minds or to move objects with your mind, which one would you want?

8. Marvel or DC?

9. Favorite book series?

10. If you had to live without one, would you rather live without chocolate or pizza? (or, if you’re lactose intolerant, fries or donuts?)

11. Sunrise or sunset?

I tag: @tol-sam @xenaathena @bucky-plums-barnes @just-call-me-mrs-captain @hymnofthevalkyries @oneshot-shit @thejamesoldier @buckybarnesismypreciousplum @caplanbuckybarnes @iwillbeinmynest @hello-sweetie-get-the-salt

[diabolikotaku]

Otome Heroines as Kpop Idols

Yui Komori:

- Lead Vocal

- Religious

- Peace-Loving

- If you give her a hat or something at signings, she’ll wear it for the rest of the day

- Does cooking at dorm

- Powerful & Soft Voice

- Has the most pictures of her laughs paused on the internet

- Basically carries a convenient store with her 24/7 

- mUST PET PUPPER

- Knows the most girl-group songs

- Brings sewing kit with her to fix up last-minute holes in one of the girls’ clothing

- Becomes sadistic during games like Rookie King

- ‘Angel’

- Is willing to free the spider

- Sad that she isn’t allowed to have a pet

- Could rap if she tries, but doesn’t

Haruka Nanami:

- Leader (18)

- Writes the songs (obviously)

- Main Vocal

- Easily embarrassed

- International Sweetheart 

- Does laundry 

- Easily scared (see: J-Hope) 

- Brings blankets to award ceremonies when her group doesn’t go up so that everyone’s warm

- gets lost easily

- Someone collect her

- Knows a lot of idols

- Very calm and happy around idols as the rest of them fangirl

- Will bump into every wall possible

- One time she fell down the stairs

- Featured in ‘We Got Married’ , other members would shut up about how cute she looked with her husband.

- Has her fair share of Oppas and Dongsaeng

- Knows a little bit of English

- wHY ARE YOU SO SHIPPABLE?

Ema Hinata:

- Lead Dancer

- Main Rapper

- Rarely Sings

- Caught playing video games in dressing rooms

- Knows how to deal with full house because of step-brothers

- That awkward moment when you have to do a photo shoot for a collaboration with your younger brother

- That other awkward moment when press think you’re dating one of your step brothers

- Works very hard with choreography 

- Can be savage

- Has a lot of Oppas

- Very flexible

- Small 2-pack

- Always wears sweatshirt/sweaters

- Helps Komori cook

- Slow to Fast rapping jUST LIKE THAT

- Watches Anime on phone

- Is use to being teased (siblings)

- Will run around like idiot

- Meme-like faces

Chizuru Yukimura:

- Main Dancer

- Vocal

- Very Traditional

-Very sweet and supportive of her Hoonbaes

- + Respect for her Sunbaes

- Polite Speech 

- Mom of family

- Mainly wears pink

- Can also pull off Tomboy Aesthetic (just not often)

- Knows older idols

- Can’t pull her from her 2 o’clock drama

- Most people are shocked when she dances sexily

- Like look at that face, she’d give you cookies or something

- Does most chores in dorm

- Okay with sharing room

- Go-to pose is double peace sign

- Gets the most flower crowns

- Photogenic 

Yui Kusanagi:

- Lead Rapper

- Sub-Vocal

- Also Religious

- Very Comedic

- Amazing how much food she can eat

- Manger stares at her

- She don’t give 2 fucks

- Has a little bit of experience with foreign language (Greek/Norse/English)

- Fan of Rilakkuma

- Her voice can go DEEP

- Been in like 3 dramas

- Her non-idol friends are surprise to hear her rap

- It’s funny to see their reaction though

- ‘Fairy’ of the group

- Moderate Aegyo

- When she sings, HOT DAYUM

- Has the most funny moments on the internet

Heroine (Lin):

- Lead Vocal

- Very quiet and timid

- Doesn’t speak much at interviews or program segments

- Speaks when everyone’s doing the intro, when she has to, and the occasional V-live

- ‘That Cool Unnie’

- Literally the Unnie...She’s 19

- Didn’t want to lead tho

- Soft & soothing voice to slow songs

-Can pick up for faster songs

- That one who wears heels all the time

- Awkward tol bean

- Can play piano

- Very caring 

- VERY forgetful

- Only carries phone with her because it’s the only thing she knows she won’t lose

- Savage AF

- Victim of hair-playing

- Did some stuff for a soundtrack in a drama once, it was nice to watch

- Literally perfect in photos

Haruhi Fujioka (yes she’s not otome but I wanted to add her):

- Maknae (15)

- Main Rapper

- CAN’T SING FOR SHIT

- Tomboy aesthetic

- ‘Reasoner’

- Pretty good dancer it there’s a lot of time put into it

- Kill her before you ask her to do an Aegyo 

- Natural Personality

- When she does aegyo, it ends up in a fail because everyone’s snickering at her

- International Host in the house

- Knows fluent English

- Kinda weird when fans recognize her at school, but is respectful 

- Most memes of her on internet 

- Couldn’t act for the life of her

- likes to wear character print snap-backs

- When she was a trainee, she had long hair and when she debuted she had to cut it because someone stuck gum in her hair.

- gets asked out by lesbians

- politely turns them down

- Eyes light up like a Christmas tree if someone gets strawberry cake

Ritsuka Tachibana:

- Sub-Rapper

- Main Vocalist

- Religious

- Aegyo Queen

- Dances for no real reason

- Kinda self-conscious about what citizens say

- “Sorry speak no English”

- Spaces out in English conversations

- Been to like, every bakery in the area for some cream puffs

- Hard to keep in touch with the Lindo because she’s busy

- President of (Insert Boy Group) Fan Club

- Funny to see others react to her performances (Mainly Lindo and Rem)

- Dusts the dorms

- Pretty much has to pick up for some of them

- oHHHH pUPPER!

- Gets late night cravings

- ‘Ritsuka, it’s 3 in the morning. Why are you eating chicken skewers?’

- Has to answer to Lindo if he sees dating rumors made up by reporters that involve her.

Kohana Aigasaki:

- Main Vocal

- Lead Dancer

- CALM YOURSELF WITH THE SUGAR CHILD

- Artsy 

- The one who joined in later

- Leave it to her for MV aesthetics

- Living Aesthetic

- Motivator

- Would sometimes doodle on fan’s hand if they asked (They aren’t the greatest, Flowers are more her forte)

 - Angelo was impressed with her dancing and asked to do a duet with him one day

- Teika loves her voice

- Literally has her own fan club at school

- ‘Happy Virus’

- Child, why do you know like...Every dance?

- Dictionary to Songs

- Most abused in games like Rookie King

- Can break dance moderately

- Puts up flowers in dorm

- Most likely to have less lines :,(

- Comes to know a lot of Sunbaes

(I’m so bored, you cringing yet?)

[lodelss]

So Much More Than Enough

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,564 words)

Lynn Shelton was the kind of artist no one asked for, but the only one you really wanted. The kind of person who was so good — so empathetic, so altruistic, so honorable — her work couldn’t help but be good in all the same ways. But in the face of what film became — a monstrous inequitable monopoly — she played too kind, too female, too independent, too old. When Shelton died suddenly on May 15 at only 54, from a blood disorder no one knew she had, artists more famous than her surfaced one after the other to remember her flawless reputation, critic after critic to fawn over her career. It was so familiar, all those people so quick to praise in private but almost never in public, until, you know, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. The reality was that Shelton had made eight films, directed countless television series, and still had to audition for jobs even when she knew the people giving them. The reality was that she had to work in TV to pay for the work she really wanted to do. The reality was that people in the industry knew her name, but no one outside of it did. “The main reason women make inroads in independent film is that no one has to say, ‘I pick you,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “I’m not pounding on anybody’s door. I’m just making my own way.” 

As existence increasingly became exhibitionism, Shelton made being a private success — being a good person making good work — more valuable than being a public one. Which is why I loved her more than any other artist around. Because it wasn’t just about loving her films, it was about loving her as a filmmaker, as a woman. Because, somehow, over two decades, she was always pure independence — fervent, uncompromising, relentless and humble, humble, humble — despite the constant pressure to be otherwise. To me, she was the only kind of artist to be.

* * *

If I met Lynn Shelton, I don’t remember it. I probably saw her and would have undoubtedly come across her name more than a decade ago, in the summer of 2009, when I interviewed actor Joshua Leonard about her third film, Humpday. It irritates me that I can’t remember. She was at the very least on the fringes of mumblecore, a no-budget indie film movement which really got going in 2005 with The Puffy Chair, Mark and Jay Duplass’ $15,000 parent-funded road trip movie. These films were hipster-style verité, with mix-and-match personnel and, according to Film Journal International, a “highly naturalistic feel, a fascination with male/female relationships and low-fi production values.” Originated by writer-director Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls), the movement also established the Duplasses, triple-threat bros with their fingers in every indie pie — from Jeff, Who Lives at Home to Amazon’s panegyrized series Transparent — and Joe Swanberg, the guy behind Netflix’s Easy. It was less of a vehicle for women. Even the It Girl.

In 2008, about a decade before she became GRETA GERWIG, I profiled Greta Gerwig for a now-defunct magazine called Geek Monthly. She and Swanberg had co-everything’ed the long-distance relationship drama Nights and Weekends. (As it happens, Shelton, who started out as an actor before it began to feel like “an exercise in narcissism,” appears briefly on screen though I don’t mention her in the interview.) I somehow addressed mumblecore’s gender divide while missing Shelton’s two features, We Go Way Back (2006) and My Effortless Brilliance (2008). “It can really feel like boys[’] town,” Gerwig confirmed at the time. She mentioned being broke, despite her omnipresence on the mumblecore scene: “There have been nights where I sit and stare at the wall and say, ‘What am I doing? What’s going to become of me?’” She was 24. 

Shelton was 43. Maybe that’s why I missed her, along with the rest of the world. Even the oldest mumblers, the Duplasses, were several years younger than her. Shelton had taken a while to get into film, the same way it took me a while to get into writing. She started acting in theatre, then studied photography before moving into experimental film, editing, and documentary. “I just did not have the confidence to do it,” she told The New York Times in 2009. “And then I had to find a backdoor way in.” Shelton was intimidated, just like I would be intimidated, but the pull landed her there anyway, as it did for me. She joked that her version of film school took two decades. It sounded familiar, that long way around. The way she finally gave herself permission also sounded familiar — through a female artist, Claire Denis, who was almost two decades older than her (I was more promiscuous about my idols). “I thought: ‘Oh, my God. She was 40 when she made her first film,” Shelton told the Times in 2012. “I thought it was too late for me, so in my head was, ‘Oh, I still have three more years.’” I’ve had this exact thought about writing: that it took me too long to get here, that I’m past the point of it being worth it. You may find that many artists — many women artists, who, if they weren’t actively discouraged from pursuing art, weren’t actively encouraged, either — have had this exact thought.

Shelton beat Denis by a year. Her first movie, We Go Way Back, is probably her most autobiographical, perhaps because she had just come from the world of documentary. It follows a 23-year-old woman (Amber Hubert) as she floats through life, acting in a theatre production she doesn’t really feel and doing men she doesn’t either, until she unearths a series of letters to her disconnected adult self from her confident 13-year-old self (Maggie Brown). This specter, her own past, helps her find her way back (so to speak). Shelton has said she herself had a similar trajectory, a trajectory familiar to so many women, where she started out with all this bravado and, slowly, bit by bit — as she became a woman, as her body changed, as society encroached — she lost it. It reminds me of all those typewriters I got as a child, all the writing I knew I would do, until I suddenly felt not good enough to write, not smart enough, not allowed enough. When Shelton got some semblance of her confidence back, she was already 39. And it showed. Though she was skirting the edge of mumblecore, her films just felt more baked than the others on every level, from screenplay to soundtrack: more considered, less flip (less male?). They weren’t sentimental romances; the relationships were more complicated, the dialogue funnier. Her films weren’t self-serious, they were mature. They were about people making messes and then cleaning them up.

It makes sense that in an industry that prefers men, Shelton’s third film, Humpday, about “two straight dudes, straight balling,” would be the one to get attention — it won the Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence at Sundance in 2009. As she herself says exasperatedly in the film, in which she plays a polyamorous boho den mother-type, “Boys. Fucking boys.” By that point, three years into the career she took so long to get to, Shelton had already settled on the formula that served her best, one that reflected the realism of life through the realism of her characters. She molded the movies to her muses, most of them men, from Mark Duplass (Humpday) to Josh Pais (Touchy Feely) to Jay Duplass (Outside, In). She limited the set to a small crew, cut down the takes, and shot with many of the same people (including musicians — do yourself a favor and listen to Tomo Nakayama’s “Horses” from Touchy Feely) in her drizzly home state of Washington, before sculpting it all in the editing suite. 

That she worked so organically, so modestly, from the place she grew up — not New York, not L.A., not some soundstage — was part of the whole thing. It wasn’t about careerism (repulsive), it was about her doing her best work. As for the money, if Shelton wasn’t funding her films through her own television work (she has said she only really felt professional after she directed Mad Men in 2010, while being named executive producer on Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere last year was a whole new level of arrival) it was through grants and fundraisers, with the crew paid through a profit-sharing system. When no one was getting money, at the very least they were getting warm meals. As Shelton told Anthem magazine two years ago: “I want to create this emotionally safe environment as much as possible for [the actors] to take the risk of opening up their hearts and their faces and their eyes.” 

This is the opposite of how art is made now, where everything is about money — huge studios, huge budgets, huge concepts, huge stars. Mid-budget films, which thrived in the indie boom times of the nineties, the most formative films for me and for the last Gen-Xers, the ones that started to sputter in the aughts when Shelton came around, have virtually vanished. What passes for mid-budget now has no less than $10 million behind it and a marquee name slumming it for cred. The few earnest indie directors left, like The Rider’s Chloé  Zhao, are snapped up for superhero content — even Shelton was in early talks around Black Widow. I can’t imagine a Marvel movie by Shelton and I’m not sure I want to, but I would still see it. I would see it because she made it.

Shelton’s plots were not high concept; they were barely plots at all. Which is just how I like it. I like my movies with nothing going on: just people living their lives. Maybe it’s my processing speed — even the simplest plot can be hard for me to follow — or maybe it’s being the kid of psychiatrists. Shelton always said she wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was fairly sure she had pretty high emotional intelligence. She was the daughter of a psychologist. Her interest was in tangled relationships, often with multiple family members involved, and the discomfort that emerges from within them. “I’ve always been that close observer of human behavior,” she told Slant last year. “I feel like the thing that makes humans human are their flaws.” 

The scene that touched me most in a marathon re-watch of Shelton’s eight films was in Touchy Feely — neither my favorite of her films nor the one featuring an actor I particularly like, which proves how skilled she was with performers. Ellen Page, playing Jenny, a sheltered, existentially morose twenty-something, sits on on a couch opposite her aunt’s oblivious boyfriend (played by handsome indie regular Scoot McNairy), staring at his lips, laughing tightly, nervously, her eyes bigger than the whole room. With no music, and just the two of them, side by side, quietly talking late at night in a dingy apartment, Jenny’s lust is so powerful it’s practically a third character and her words, as though overflowing from her loins, come out almost despite her: “Have you ever wanted to kiss someone so badly that it hurts your skin?” Yes. Right now. This isn’t cinema, it’s a conduit for intimacy. Which maybe says more about me than I want it to. But I have a feeling this approach — slow, humane, in no way prescriptive or showy —  is what led so many critics to dismiss Shelton. That scene, and Shelton’s movies as whole, remind me of a quote from Before Sunrise, a movie made by a man, but as collaborative in spirit: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.”

My favorite Lynn Shelton movie is Laggies. I’ve probably seen it ten times. It’s the story that gets me. Which is the same reason Shelton made it, the only movie she did not have a hand in writing (Andrea Seigel is the screenwriter). It’s about a 28-year-old woman (Keira Knightley) having a quarter-life crisis, a woman who in the end describes herself as a snake carrying around her dead skin — old life, old relationship, old friends. Until she can shed all of this (will she?) she is in “this weird in-between place,” eventually befriending a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz) and falling for the kid’s dad (Sam Rockwell), who is not unlike her. “You know, I never anticipated still having to find a place where I fit in by the time I was an adult, either,” he says. “I thought you automatically got one once you had a job and a family. But it’s just you, alone.” God, yeah. You don’t see much of this on screen, the female midlife crisis, though you do see a lot of the male version. And that sucks. Shelton refers to it as floating, but to me, when I have experienced it, it feels more menacing — like you have no tether, like you’re one of those astronauts who becomes detached from that shuttle cord and disappears into the black. Shelton questioned whether she was selling out by making a movie someone else wrote, a glossier movie than usual, starring real life celebrities. But she couldn’t resist the story in the end, a story that essentially defined her. “She doesn’t know what she wants to do but she knows what she doesn’t want to do, which is to fall in lockstep with this conventional timeline of what quote-unquote adults are supposed to do and that all of her friends around her are doing,” Shelton told The Georgia Straight in 2014. “I’ve tried to do things on my own terms and it took me 20 years to get to doing what I’m doing so I really relate to that prolonged journey of self-discovery.”

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“I’m sorry,” one of my best friends said when I told him Lynn Shelton had died. I’ve never had someone I know respond that way when someone I don’t has died. “I wouldn’t normally say that,” he explained, “but I know how you feel about Lynn Shelton.” It’s true that I didn’t know her, but I knew her films, and the two were inextricable. Just like her and Marc Maron, her creative partner and her partner in life. Maron was Shelton’s last muse. She made Sword of Trust for him, a film in which he plays Mel, a pawn shop dealer, who is brought a sword by a couple that supposedly proves the south won the Civil War, which they collectively sell to a pair of loony right-wing conspiracy theorists. Shelton appears as Mel’s ex, a woman with whom he fell into drug addiction and whom it is clear he still loves but can’t trust. But it’s Maron you can’t take your eyes off, maybe because it’s him Shelton can’t take her eyes off.  As he said on his podcast, “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.” Everything was. When Shelton was walking around, it meant that, despite how bad it was, the world was still a place where a woman could be an artist, a woman could be a woman, on her own terms. What Denis did for Shelton, she continued to do for me. I don’t want to think of what her death means for film, but I know for me, as a woman, as an artist, it makes the world a whole lot harder to bear.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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