#this book is really good but its a lot. transgender house of leaves. to me. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jack-is-lost · 4 years

Text

PATCHES & PINS (CH 1)

A/N: This story revolves around a transgender, female to male, original character. LGBTQ+ topics are a given within this story. Gender and body dysphoria will come up as well since he is not out to his family — only close friends. If you dislike such a story premise please understand you do not have to interact with it at all. Leaving hate comments will be removed. Of course, constructive feedback is always welcomed.

Pairing: Eventually Marko x OTMC

Story is still in progress and updates will be slow

Eventually it will be posted on A03 once I’m a few chapters in

Currently on Chapter one | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 coming soon

Chapter one

My life, for the most part, has always been unusual — a little different. Despite having parents that looked like any successful mom and dad ought to, and an older brother willing to stick up for me, things just didn't go according to plan.

You see, my mother was excited to have a daughter finally. Someone to doll up and buy dresses for, maybe even enroll in a dance class. A stark difference to her firstborn, Tyler, who was all about karate lessons and throwing the ball with dad. Which eventually evolved to working on cars as he grew older. Our mother wanted somebody to share girly interests with, understandably. And, for a while, she was able to have it. The baby pictures are proof of that. Yet, as I grew older and became more aware of what I liked, the fewer things seemed cookie-cutter-perfect for my family.

"Are you not taking your bag to school, Jacklynn?" The mentioned item was nowhere in sight as the youngest of her children poured coffee — the action resembling someone needing every drop left in the pot as if to survive.

"It's the last day," came the grumbling response after a long, soothing sip. "I doubt most kids will even be showing up."

"Yeah, about that," Tyler, the oldest, spoke around a bite of toast. "Can't I be a minority and just stay home?"

"No, you only have one day left, guys." She smiled at her two kids. A graduate who had already filled out college applications, and is ready to further his engineering career. The other, soon-to-be senior, that seemed to have no real drive in anything but drawing and reading — and staying up too late apparently.

"Seriously," she spoke up again as they sighed in unison, deflating with their last hope crushed. "You two will survive."

Tyler nudged his sister, who leaned across the counter, jostling the coffee dangerously enough to receive a seething glare. "Want me to take you?"

It wasn't like Tyler to offer that too often, "Sure."

They both pulled away from the kitchen and made their way to the door, hollering goodbyes as Tyler grabbed the keys — the other sibling still nursing the coffee.

"Don't stay out too late!" Their mom called back, knowing full well she wouldn't see her kids after school. It seemed the closer summer drew in — the fewer tests to study for and homework to do, the more they came home later.

Tyler stepped into the car, unlocking the passenger door as he slid inside his cherry baby — A beaming red, 1983 Audi Sport Quattro, followed by his sister plopping down less elegantly. He glanced at her while starting the car.

"Talk to me, Jay." It was the last day, after all. Weren't kids supposed to be excited about that? "What's bouncing 'round that head of yours." He barely received any notion his sister was listening till she drew out a long sigh, head hitting the back of the seat.

"I don't know, man." It was drawn out, tired. "Didn't get much sleep, I guess."

Tyler nodded while giving the steering wheel a turn, making his way down the road. The school building wasn't very far when on wheels, and he pulled into a parking lot marginally less filled than it ought to be.

As his sister made to get out, he placed a hand on her shoulder, their eyes meeting as she paused halfway out the door. "Ever need to get a chip off your shoulder come talk to me, okay?" Her eyes rolled to the side, and Tyler gave her a little reassuring squeeze, "I'm serious. What are big —"

"— bro's for? I know, I know."

Tyler chuckled as he released her shoulder, "Good. Now," he slammed the door shut and leaned over the roof, "Go sleep in class or something." That at least drew a chuckle out of his sister as she turned away from the car.

The last day of school went how one could expect it to go. Some teachers put on movies and had extra treats for their students. Others went over lessons in the last semester, hoping it would stick to impressionable minds before three months of freedom — minds that were only thinking about freedom and not math.

It was by mid-day when a note made its way into Jay's locker. In gruff, almost unreadable handwriting, it merely said, 'Meet us by the big tree'. Jay instantly knew who it was from and folded the paper up.

A long night was probably ahead.

When the final bell rang, Jay had to wipe the drool off an impromptu pillow-desk before heading out and down the hall. Many of the kids loudly boasted about their summer plans while cleaning out lockers, jostling each other, and hurrying outside. Jay maneuvered around the hoard and quickly escaped out a side entrance, locker already empty since lunch.

It didn't take long to walk a block to the park, down a jogging trail, before splitting off into a cluster of trees. There, in the center of it, laid a large trunk of a dead tree. Upon it splayed out a makeshift map, bags, and — unsurprisingly, two brothers.

"Finally," Grumbled Edgar while raising his head, a red marker still poised over the map. "Where's Sam?"

Jay stared, unaware that Sam was supposed to tag along for the stroll after school let out. "Was I meant to wait for him or?"

"Forget it," came the short grunt, and Edgar was back to the more important matter at hand as Alan turned around to face Jay.

"I'm sure he'll show up. He's got the same note as you," he started to unravel what appeared to be a chaotic ball of cord in his hands. "Oh, hey—" he stopped as a thought struck him, "—Still a no go on the knife?"

Oh, not this again.

Jay leaned against the bare trunk, arms crossed and brow lifted. "Alan, we've been through this. Keep me on the books, but hand me a knife, and someone will lose a finger."

Of course, no one knew if Jay meant their fingers or not, and that was on purpose.

"Maybe some training will help," Edgar spoke up again, pausing on circling locations. "You need to prepare yourself for—"

"— the unexpected. I get it, Ed." Jay cut him off while peering closer to get a look at the map.

"Edgar," he corrected with a tired mutter despite it being useless. They've known each other for an entire year now. One would think it wouldn't matter at this point.

Jay tapped a finger on the closest circled spot, the cemetery. "Thought you marked this off?"

"One can never be certain," He nodded to his own words of wisdom. "It is a common ground for the dead."

"I'd say," Jay suppressed a snort, "It is where the deceased go to be laid into the ground."

Rustling noises announced Sam’s arrival as he pushed through, almost smacking himself in the face with a thin branch. His strained voice drew attention to him. “Guys,” he dusted a leaf off his overly styled coat, “We really need to find a better spot to meet.”

Jay lazily offered a salute wave, “Hey to you too, Sammy.”

“I’m serious,” Sam huffed while taking up a spot near Alan, hands shoved into his pockets. “What about the shop? Y’know, with school now over and stuff?”

Edgar grunted in thought. “Yeah, that ought to be doable.”

“Your grandpa still against us being at the house?” Alan spoke up.

Sam gave a partial shrug. “Sort of,” he eyed the map, then glanced at Jay, who returned the unspoken question with a tired look. Sam returned to explaining when Edgar motioned for him to continue. “You guys can visit, as you have, but you can’t — you know —” he shuffled his hands for the right phrasing, “— bring hunting business there.”

Jay had never actually been to Sam’s place, but the stories shared made it sound like a lot of stuff went down there — destroying property kind of stuff. So Jay could understand what the man was trying to avoid. The Frog Brothers being walking time bombs of destruction, after all.

“The cemetery again?” Sam squawked at noticing it. “I am not doing that again.” The sound of Jay snickering redirected Sam’s defiant stare. “Make Jay do it this time.”

“Wait, wha—”

“—He doesn’t have the qualification for it, Sam.” Edgar cut in before an argument could occur. This only made Sam huff, arms crossed and brows furrowed.

“So? I didn’t either last year.”

Alan stopped weaving the cord at this point, placing it down on the dead trunk. “Jay needs the experience. It could be good for him.” He simply spoke, agreeing with Sam.

“Hey, Jay’s right here,” he had pointedly avoided parading around Santa Carla for a whole damn year. Sure, his knowledge of supernatural things is what drew the Frog Brothers to him in the first place — and the free charge of ordering books at their shop kept Jay in the circle, but he was a good year older than them and didn’t feel like playing make-believe.

Sam smirked in the way that screamed challenging, “C’mon, Jay, or are you scared of the dark?”

Jay narrowed his eyes, “I know what you are doing.”

“Then prove me wrong,” Sam continued.

“No.”

Despite that, Jay found himself amongst the dead at one in the damn morning. It was eerie, the cemetery, sitting in absolute silence and blanketed by a coat of darkness. The only noise now filtering through was shoes scrapping against the ground and low grumbles around him, voices hushed as not to alert anybody — or anything. Even their flashlights were ordered to stay off unless it called for it, as directed by Edgar.

“Exactly what should we be expecting to find here?” Jay spoke up quietly while trailing behind the two brothers, hands stuffed into his jacket. It was chilly tonight.

“Any signs of the undead.” Edgar simply said without much explanation, to which Alan filled in.

“Disturbed graves, tombs broke, drag marks.” he ticked off like a list.

“Ah,” Jay deadpanned. “So zombies?” the brothers turned to him, the moonlight hitting their frames but leaving their faces shadowed. “What?”

“Could be vampires too.” Edgar simply grunted. “Fresh ones crawling out of their dirt bed.” Alan nodded along with his brother, and Jay sighed.

“Sure, yeah. That too,” It wasn’t like anything of the sort actually existed, but Jay would humor the guys. They put up with his oddities, after all, so he could continue to do the same for them.

“Didn’t any of your books mention that?” Edgar continued while turning around, walking along a worn-out path again, and avoiding stepping on actual graves.

“A little,” Jay admitted as they continued on their trek.

A majority of Jay’s supernatural books were all about how one became something, the signs, and lore behind creatures — not exactly if they crawl out of graves or not. It made sense, though, if considering how people feared vampires in the past. How they would stake and behead someone during burial just in case their loved one decided to raise again.

Same could be said about leaving a bell.

Alan suddenly crouched down near the edge of a grave. “Look,” his flashlight clicked on to bask the empty hole in light. Edgar followed promptly as Jay stared at the two figures eyeing an obvious dug hole for a burial happening soon.

“It might be a sign.” Edgar rubbed a finger over the crumbling edges, dirt smearing and falling back inside the pit.

“Or,” Jay leaned over them to get an exact look at the perfect outline, “It is the groundskeeper getting ready for a funeral. There’s not even a casket down there.” Jay simply summarized before leaning back.

Alan clicked off the light and stood, “He’s right, Edgar. It is too perfect.”

“Hey!” the voice resonated out, cutting the muffled talking off as a beam of light frantically flailed in their directions. “What are you kids doing?!”

Without a shared word between the three, just mere glances at one another, they quickly split. Or at least Jay tried to do just that, but the brush of Edgar flying past him in a rush entirely threw him off balance. It wasn’t until tailbone smashed into dirt that Jay even figured out what happened.

“Fuck…” he muttered, then covered his mouth as the light grew brighter over the grave from above, rushing footfalls growing closer before fading away in the direction the brothers ran. Once it was clear, the curse slipped again with more fever.

Jay eased to his feet and stared above his head, the wall towering almost a foot over him. “They truly mean six-feet-under,” he muttered while raising a hand to the ledge, just able to cup fingers over the lip, only to stumble back as it gave away.

The recent rainfall was not making it easy.

Again Jay tried to grab, shoes scraping along the wall in an attempt to gain some height — thinking if he just rushed up the wall it would give him enough momentum, only to fall back against the adjacent wall.

“Shit — fuck,” Jay didn’t even care if his voice traveled that time. He was stuck in a damn grave, after all! Screw it!

“Need a lift?” came a voice from above, and Jay shot his gaze upward to see a hand reaching down toward him. The moonlight didn’t offer much else to see but light curls and the frame of a coat.

Even if it were the security guard, Jay knew this would be his best bet. It wasn’t like waiting till daylight to be discovered was an option. It would not help much in regards to needing to be home before Jay’s parents could find out he even snuck out.

He reached for the hand, feeling leather against palm and uncovered fingers wrap around his wrist. It took only one good heave, shoes against the wall and other hand clinging to the edge, to be entirely pulled out. Despite mud caking Jay from front to back, he could even feel it in his shoes; it felt good to be back on the surface. It wasn’t like he had a fear of enclosed places, but it still sucked regardless.

“Thanks,” he looked over at the stranger, still only catching the slightest glimpse of a smirk within the darkness. It was hard to make out any features, and the way the guy stood didn’t help anything.

“Were you takin’ a dirt bath?” he joked inquisitively, and Jay chuckled under his breath.

“No, not exactly.” Who would want to do that in a cemetery anyway?

The beam of a flashlight washed over them again as rustling sounds drew near, and Jay stepped away from the pre-dug grave. Definitely not wanting to repeat that incident all over.

“Looks like we should start running,” spoke up the other guy, head turned away from Jay to peer toward the security guard.

What was once hidden was now lit up like a spotlight. A smooth curved jawline, willowed eyes bright with brown, and curly dirty blond hair glowed on display for a split moment. Until the flashlight jostled by the running security guard fanned over the area. And Jay would be lying if he said he didn’t stare.

“Avoid any more holes, yeah?” he easily teased before seemingly stepping in a direction with no real speed.

Jay floundered for a moment before taking off after him. “Wait.” Jay didn’t know the grounds that well, and the two idiots that did had left him.

The guy laughed while reaching behind him, grabbing Jay’s wrist again with no problem, then started to run as the worn-out guard hollered something. He seemed to avoid any lifted tombstones, flower arrangements, and small fences like it were daytime. All while Jay tried his best not to stumble, gaze more on the ground than anywhere else.

When they neared the exit gate, chained to prevent people at such odd hours to visit, he let Jay’s arm go and placed both palms out while crouching down. Jay didn’t have to ask and quickly stepped into the waiting hands. He felt the guided push upward as his own hands grabbed for purchase, trying to avoid being nicked by the gothic-style fence. Yet, as Jay’s leg swung over, his pants snagged and ripped — the gravity of his body spilling over the other side holding little resistance.

Surprisingly Jay landed on his feet, if not a little wobbly, and quickly looked through the fence to see the guy still standing there undeterred. “You coming?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he simply said. Jay wanted to comment, but the sight of the guard pushing past the nearest tombstones shut him up. “Go.” he laughed again — actually laughed as if nonplussed by the whole thing. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep him distracted.” Then he turned around and fanned his arms out as if directing air traffic before darting down the side of the fence.

And that was the last Jay saw of the guy before quickly hiding behind the bushes lining outside of the cemetery, not wanting to be seen as the flashlight shown in his direction.

The walk home was slow as he picked flakes of mud off his jeans. Jay could feel the dry mess on his face and in his hair. A shower was needed as well as a talk with the Frog Brothers tomorrow. No way were they getting off free from abandoning him in the damn graveyard! Even as he climbed back through the bedroom window, Jay was envisioning how he’d throttle them. It wasn’t until he was in the shower, scrubbing extra hard to clean the grime off, that his thought wavered to the stranger.

“Why was he even there?”

#My writing #the lost boys #fanfiction #LGBTQ+ story #transgender fanfiction #Marko x OTMC #patches & pins

18 notes · View notes

ultra-super-definitely-yes · 3 years

Text

Incantatio – An enchanted forest and its new protectors:

Genre: Adventure, Magic, Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Mentions of doctors and medicine, and almost spiralling

Chapter 1- The Search:

Summary: Johnathan Dimalanta isn’t afraid of going into Taiki Thickets, nope. He has to get the magical valerian to save his Ina (mother) after all.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday, October 11, 2019

5:43 p.m.

Valerian: a perennial flowering plant native to Europe and Asia. But there’s more to this herb than that. It can be very helpful to patients with sleeping disorders; as well as ease anxiety, depression, menstrual and stomach cramps. Upon studying about this herb, I know that it will help her.

I’m aware that in this era of modern medicines, the doctors won’t listen to this idea and brush it off as outdated. They’re just in it for the money. They don’t really care about Ina.

But I’ve got something better than plain old Valerian. No, I’m talking about the magical type. Laugh at me all you want, but all I wish for Ina is a good night’s sleep and good health.

So where would I find it? Just a little on the outskirts of Quinliang, in Taiki Thickets. The locals call the forest “haunted”, because of what happened to the people who dared to venture in there. Some were reported to have found at the edges of the forest; half-dead or amnesic. Some were never found. But it was only because of their ignorance, greed or incomplete knowledge of that enchanted thicket.

There are few things I want to be sure of so that I don’t suffer the same fate as them:

1: Don’t go too far.

2: Don’t take anything else on the way.

3: Leave the forest before sunrise or sunset, never during either.

This may be the last entry I write in here, so wish me luck.

-Johnathan

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inserting the pen into a make-shift pencil-holder, Nathan closed his book shut and laid it on the glass coffee table. The sun was going to set soon; he had to get going.

He planned to leave quickly, so he didn’t pack anything. Just a zip-lock bag tucked into his old quilted cardigan-sweater that his Ina bought for his 20th birthday. It was still a little too big for him, the sleeves reaching his knuckles. He also took a greyish-pine knit cap with him, just in case. He shut the door of his apartment and went two stories down to the parking lot. Pinsan Steve was kind enough to have let him rent his old Suzuki after he had got his driving license. And for half the rate anyone else would offer! He couldn’t say no to that now, could he?

He unlocked the maroon door and sat down on the leather driver seat. The custom-made air freshener swayed impulsively in no particular direction at the impact of the door slamming shut. “Woo boy! We’re actually doing this then.” he thought out loud, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

But that’s when the anxiety set in. He was actually doing this.

“What if this is the last time I drive this car?”

“What if I never see her again?”

“What if she dies alone- no. We’re getting out of there alive, stupid.” Nathan took a deep breath.

The aroma of mint and green apple grounded him as he looked up at the little apple hanging from the rear-view mirror.

“Right. Let’s do this.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The indigo sky slowly faded black as Jon rode through the busy roads. White and yellow streetlights overlooked the traffic like beacons of light. However, the more turns he took, the traffic reduced slowly. Then the car reached the unmetalled roads that took him away from the suburbs of Quinliang. There weren’t as many artificial lights as there were in the city, but that didn’t discourage him. Soon he saw huts and small, single-storey houses. He passed a few neighborhood markets every now and then.

Sure, everyone was happy but there was a hint of something on their faces that unnerved Nathan. Was it fear? “I’ll find out soon enough,” he supposed.

By 6:30, the sun had already set. Stars decorated the ebony black sky, and the single storey houses disappeared from sight. Only plenty of huts and stone-and-brick buildings. The children who were playing outside were ushered back inside or went in themselves.

Then he stopped.

There it was.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: Hey, so this is a reupload of this story Incantatio so you might have seen this before. This is kinda old so my writing style will change in the next more recently written chapter. I hope you enjoy this story!

Taglist: @transgender-er, @sovereign-of-the-skittles, @poisonedapples, @nanashi-rei-official, @romanapologist, @illogicallyinclined, @fibi-draws, @aidensm8, @somniumm-art, @aimasup, @briandthemoon

#gbs #jo writes #gbs incantatio #incantatio #magic forest #incantatio johnathan #tw anxiety #tw doctor mention #tw medicine mention #diary #old writing #this story is set in the phillipines #yay

2 notes · View notes

strahd-von-asthmavich · 3 years

Text

The Dread Lands of Ravenloft - Mod Van Richten’s New England In-Table Campaign [Session 6]

Session Highlights

Did you know that this is technically the party’s third official combat? We’re a pretty role-play heavy group.

They’ve angered six very hungry vampire spawn last time! During the lead-up to this session, my players were so scared of TPK. But, spoiler alert, I’m not that cruel. I planned this out to a T!

Side Note: Any art that I share of NPCs within these highlight posts is my (Mod Van Richten’s) original and fan art. Any art that I use for my players that wasn’t created by myself but by other artists is kept private and within our friend circle.

Abrascus Barbarian (4) Path of the Ancestral Guardian Race: Tortle Background: Haunted One

Direthorn Rogue (4) Swashbuckler Race: Drow Background: Urchin

Flopsy Barbarian (4) Path of Wild Magic Race: Rabbit Man Background: Experiment

Mangus Monk (4) Way of the Open Hand Race: Half Elf Background: Urchin

Neracahne Wizard (4) School of Evocation Race: Eladrin Background: Noble

Nyra Rogue (4) Phantom Race: Fairy Background: Noble

CW: decapitation, sensual themes, gender dysphoria

Let’s see how the battle went under the cut!

I made a grave error when writing session 5's recap. I missed a lot of details! Good thing my players don't read these bc they would laugh at me for missing this!

Nyra made two discoveries during the day. While inside the Blue Water Inn, she notices something while Ismark is flirting with Rudy. There's a spirit hovering near the half elf. He looks like a young human boy, and he seems slightly surprised when Nyra suddenly tries to talk to him aloud. After the spirit fades, she hears a voice telepathically:

"I wonder if she can't hear me either."

At the dinner, Nyra can't help but notice the same phenomena again. Instead, she sees multiple tortured spirits around the dinner table and throughout the mansion. It appears that they're all in agony.

The session begins back on Direthorn, who was away from the other adventurers most of the day. They’ve been trying to scavenge for where they can find more pie, without realizing that Flopsy still had pie left despite not being addicted anymore. They’ve gone through garbage cans and different alleyways in vain, scaring townspeople all the while with feral noises.

They’d been so caught up in trying to find pie that they’d completely forgotten about the Baron’s dinner. The only thing that snaps them out of it is Vasili, who catches them scavenging through garbage in the noble district. He snaps them out of it by asking where their friends are. They have no idea, for they weren’t with all of them when they went to the coffin shop earlier that day. Shortly after the conversation starts, however, Adelaide rushes out of the manor and comes up to Vasili to exclaim her worries. She was worried about Escher, but she was also able to tell Vasili and Direthorn where they were. With that, they head straight to the shop.

By the time that the official combat begins, Direthorn, Vasili, and Adelaide are at the entrance. Here are some very notable highlights:

(A/N: Nyra’s player wasn’t able to play for the encounter, but she allowed me to use Nyra’s stats to run her on autopilot during the fight. Unfortunately, I had shit dice rolls)

We had two critical hits: One from Mangus and the other from Abrascus.

Vasili was able to very quickly join the fight, and he had a very powerful rapier. Its blade was pure black, and a lot of its damage was necrotic.

This is the first time that Adelaide shows off her spellcasting to her new friends, but unfortunately it’s not as effective as she’d want it to be.

Izek and four guards arrive at the scene a couple rounds into the fight to help.

Mangus got the first kill of the fight.

Flopsy dealt the most damage in the fight.

Direthorn spent most of the fight antagonizing one vampire spawn in the back corner of the shop. They have spiderclimbing ability and were able to climb up to the window right above the door. Afterwards, they proceeded to mess with this one spawn until it got bored of them (aka: Izek hit them with his hurl flame ability)

We had four critical failures:

Vasili accidentally stabbed Flopsy with his ridiculously powerful rapier.

Mangus lost his quarterstaff by throwing it across the room.

Nyra accidentally pierced Neracahne with one of her arrows.

Abrascus accidentally strikes Adelaide with his greataxe, which leads to major consequences.

After Abrascus hits Adelaide with his greataxe, she looks so angry as she tries to cast a spell on him with little success. However, Escher also saw what happened, and he then cast the same spell on Abrascus, which did success. Abrascus ended up going unconscious because of seeing horrific images.

After the fight was over, Henrik was under arrest. Henrik was terrified and constantly tried to say that he was innocent and was framed. Izek did let the party briefly talk to him, but that ended up being inconclusive. Henrik said he couldn’t say the name of the person that made him do it. Aloud, Flopsy simply said, “It was daddy,” which made everyone very uncomfortable. Again. Henrik was crying out that he was innocent as he was being dragged out of the shop. Vasili left shortly after.

Because the investigation was a success, the adventurers are all considered “guests of honor” during the Festival of the Blazing Sun. What this means for them is that food expenses are all paid for during the festival, and they’re allowed to spend the festival with the baron at his table whenever they wish to.

Ismark arrived with Rudy during the aftermath. One of the vampire spawn was burnt to a crisp by Izek, and Rudy proceeded to decapitate the body. After this, Rudy looked at everyone in confusion, claiming that they needed to decapitate the corpses and then burn the bodies in order for them to die. Flopsy looked confused and told him about how he killed Doru. Even though Doru’s head was bashed in, Rudy tells Flopsy that because he wasn’t decapitated, then he’s technically still active and can eventually regenerate from that.

Rudy is dumbfounded by the party’s lack of knowledge, until he realizes that they’re not really from here. He explains to them that because Barovia is run by a vampire, then vampires that live here are stronger than vampires that would typically be found in the Material Plane. So, it takes more effort to kill them. However, after seeing that Flopsy has Van Richten’s Guide to Vampires, he seems really disappointed that he doesn’t know more about vampires. That is, until he’s given the book and sees that many pages on how to kill vampires are missing. Flopsy tells him that he’d gotten the book like this from Vasili.

When Abrascus wakes up, he’s suffering from an effect of longterm madness, experiencing tremors and feeling shaken up. Rudy quickly takes care of it before it gets too out of hand, and he and Ismark work together to heal the adventurers. When Rudy does this, he holds onto his pan flute while Ismark plays his balalaika to cast his healing spells.

More Content Warnings: Misgendering, trans pregnancy mentioned

Before resting…

Abrascus ended up staying behind at the coffin shop to sleep in one of the coffins. Rudy took exception to this, and he told Flopsy to place a holy symbol on top of the coffin. Just in case. Ismark stays the night with Rudy when they all part ways.

When the rest of the adventurers return to the manor, Flopsy goes inside and can hear Adelaide crying while Escher is tending to the wound caused by Abrascus’ greataxe. She’s devastated that someone she thought was her friend would hurt her like that. Escher tries to assure that things like that happen sometimes, but he will do anything to defend her. Adelaide then asks him, “Is Father going to do something to him?” His answer to her is to not worry about that, for that’s his business.

Flopsy soon makes his presence known, or rather, Escher begins to notice him. He stops talking with Adelaide, and she decides to go see what the girls are up to at the guest house. This leaves Flopsy to continue the conversation he had with Escher earlier that day.

Flopsy insists that Escher needs to tell him who his host was so that he could become a vampire too. Escher refuses to give the name, for it’s too dangerous, but Flopsy can conclude that Strahd is Escher’s host. To challenge that, Flopsy asks, “What if I ask her other dad?” That makes Escher go from deflective to immediate defensive, now that he knows how much Flopsy heard. It’s then that he tells Flopsy that Adelaide having two fathers was supposed to be kept a secret. Escher is transgender, and he left his old life to escape a forced marriage. How that led to him being in Barovia and being one of Strahd’s consorts is unknown.

Escher makes a promise to Flopsy. If he were to tell anyone that Escher was a vampire and that Adelaide is a dhampir, he would know that it was Flopsy that did it. Essentially, he was going to kill him if he told.

Direthorn, Nyra, and Neracahne all go back to the guest house when everything was cleaned up. Some time later is when Adelaide comes over to see them for comfort. They all decide to have a girls’ night where they drink wine and get to know each other. Adelaide quickly starts getting tipsy, and Neracahne and Direthorn immediately pounce on that as a way to get information out of her. They ask her about her papa, and she tells them that he had raised her mostly on his own and that she’s her favorite person. They then ask about her mom. She seems confused, and after some explaining, she tells them, “I don’t have a mom.” They ask if she’s adopted, but that also needs to be explained to her. She says no, and then she explains how Escher came out to her when she was a child.

Even though Escher had said that her body is similar to hers, that doesn’t change the fact that he is a man. Even if he gave birth to her, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s her father. She’s very adamant about that, but she’s relieved that Neracahne and Direthorn respect that. The conversation gets a little more personal when they start asking about who her other dad is. They’d noticed that when she laughed, Adelaide had fangs. She gets scared when trying to explain herself, and it eventually comes out that her other father is Strahd.

When Escher came to Barovia, he was with his party of adventurers in Vallaki. The way that Adelaide described their union was that it was… not exactly a conventional one. But in the end, they’d “married,” but before Escher could be turned, they found out that he was pregnant with Adelaide. They had to wait until after she was born, or else risk her dying in the process. Escher had almost died when she was born, but Adelaide perceives that her papa turning into a vampire saved him. She also tells them that although Strahd hasn’t really been in her life during her childhood, she knows that he cares about her.

She begs them not to tell and makes them promise. Even though they promised her that they wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, Adelaide knows that people will kill her if they find out. They will also kill Escher, and even though it seems like she knows a lot of people hate Strahd, she doesn’t want him to get killed, either. She soon relaxes once she’s reassured, and they’re all able to open up about their personal lives and experiences.

Direthorn talks about being orphaned and running away from the orphanage at thirteen. They’d been alone for the longest time, after they’d lost their best friend. That makes Adelaide feel a little sad as she expresses her sympathy. Neracahne then talks about how she ran away from an arranged marriage. As she’s explaining her story, Adelaide perks up. She exclaims, “That sounds a lot like my papa!”

She then tells Escher’s story to them, or at least, what she knows of it. Escher was a student at a wizarding school before he came out, and he excelled in his studies. Something happened, however, that made him earn his teachers’ ire. He had crafted his very own spell, which was the spell demonstrated at the coffin shop against Abrascus. In response, the teachers lambasted him and told him to stick to his studies. Escher was angered by this and felt like he was being held back.

That story felt so familiar to Neracahne. She’s heard something similar to this in the past.

Adelaide continues the story. After Escher dropped out of school and took up apprenticeship with a necromancer, he started his transition. It was shortly after this that Escher was forced into a marriage. She didn’t quite remember the name of his husband. “...Reginald?” It was their wedding night that Escher used his spell against someone for the very first time. After his husband was knocked unconscious, Escher escaped and became an adventurer.

Now this was too familiar to Neracahne. It’s then that she remembers a story that she overheard when walking through town one day. That person’s name wasn’t Reginald. It was Roland, who was a middle-aged elf that was a well-respected noble. He’d just stepped out of a chapel holding his head. Different people asked what happened to him, and he started talking about his wedding that was roughly a week earlier. He took a young wife and thought that the union was a success. But then, “that crazy bitch stabbed me in the shoulder,” and she then had cast a spell on him that made him go crazy. She then disappeared without a trace.

It’s then that recognition spread across Neracahne’s face. She realizes in that moment that her old friend is Escher.

After the revelation, the night between the girls continues as normal until they all fall asleep together.

There’s one unfortunate problem that night. Mangus was left alone to wander. He didn’t know where to meet everyone, so he ended up in the dark manor while everyone else was at the guest house. Not a single light was on inside the manor, except for in the closed off study. He checks the door and sees that it’s locked, annoyed that he didn’t have any thieves’ tools on him to try and break in. He doesn’t dwell on that thought for long. When he realizes that whoever’s in there is coming out, he hurries to hide so that he’s not noticed.

From his hiding spot, he can hear Vasili walking out of the study, lightly beating something against his hand. He didn’t see what it was, but it was something with a bit of weight to it. Mangus then hears Vasili go back into the room and douse the fire before leaving it with the door locked shut behind him. In the pitch black manor, Mangus hears Vasili walk up the stairs. Mangus tries to go back towards the study to check the door, but in the process, he hears Vasili call, “I know you’re down there.”

Vasili then walks down the stairs in the pitch black manor, appearing to navigate fine despite being a human. Mangus is a little perplexed and tells him that he was trying to find the others, to which Vasili laughs and tells him that he’s in the completely wrong build. But Vasili does offer to take him back to the guest house.

On the way there, Vasili engages in small talk with Mangus in the dark. He asks about Adelaide, but Mangus can’t seem to get his words out. During his fumbling, Vasili asks Mangus to look at him. It’s here that suddenly Mangus finds himself to be charmed. He sees Vasili as a trusted friend to be protected. He can tell him anything, so he does. He’s able to get his words out that he’s interested in Adelaide in a romantic sense, but he’s still trying to process his feelings. It’s what Vasili says that causes the air around them to still.

“You better be careful with that. You do not want to get on Escher’s bad side. Or mine.”

It’s then that Mangus let’s Vasili bite him, revealing himself to be a vampire. After a considerable amount of damage, he says this to Mangus:

“You will not speak of what happened here, you will not tell anyone I spoke with you, and, if I can help it, you will not remember what happened here.”

Flopsy soon comes to the door to the guest house after they’re done, and Vasili briefly engages in pleasantries before going back to the manor. Flopsy drags Mangus into bed to sleep, and from the other room it sounds a little bit awkward. But the session ends there, as the adventurers take their rest.

#curse of strahd #curseofstrahd #curse of strahd campaign #ravenloft #ravenloft 5e #ravenloft campaign #dungeons and dragons #dungeonsanddragons #dungeons and dragons campaign #dnd campaign #mod van richten #dread lands of ravenloft

5 notes · View notes

alarawriting · 4 years

Text

Inktober 2020 #3: Bulky

The entity scowled, tapping his (its? Their?) foot impatiently. “I told you, you get to bring one thing.”

Sara smiled brightly at him. “This is one thing. My garden.”

Ganymede looked down at her, his expression even more supercilious than usual. “Do you honestly think I’m going to allow an entire garden as one thing?”

Sara sat down on the tree stump. Part of her still couldn’t believe she’d lost the house, that all of this – the tree stump her father had cut down to prevent the wind from knocking it onto the house, the tire swing he’d put up for her, Mom’s rose trellises all around the house and the herb patch she’d had Sara weeding and tending from the age of 5, the screened-in porch, the attic bedroom – all would be gone in a matter of weeks. The bank would take it, and sell it to someone who would probably destroy everything her parents had built to make the place special and unique, and she would never see any of this ever again.

She’d thought Ganymede’s offer would allow her to take at least a part of her home with her, but he was balking.

“When you think about it, can we describe anything as just one thing?” she asked. “Everything we have is made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks. We’re all a multiplicity. We all have legions contained within us. So how is a garden not ‘one thing’ but, say, if I wanted to bring a bicycle, that would be ‘one thing’ even though it’s made of so many things?”

Ganymede’s expression went from deeply irritated to reluctantly amused, and he chuckled. “A nice argument, but no. Your garden’s too bulky. It can neither transport you, nor can it be carried around with you.”

“You never said there was a weight limit.”

“It’s not a weight limit. If you wanted to bring a car, you could. I don’t advise it, but you could.”

“Are any of the others bringing a car?” Sara asked.

Now Ganymede laughed. “Tsk, tsk. I told you I wouldn’t tell you anything about what the others are choosing.”

Ganymede – who appeared to be a tall, slender man with pale skin and curly green hair, like he was some kind of comic book character, and who claimed to be a very bored alien with godlike powers who was taking human form so that he could interact with Sara – had showed up at the café Sara waitressed at, three weeks ago, and was apparently very impressed with Sara’s ability to put up with entitled idiots and even get them to calm down and do what they were supposed to do. He’d ordered cherry pie and asked her if she’d ever wanted to travel into the past, and when Sara had pointed out that in the past, she would have had her rights severely curtailed because she was a woman, he’d asked, what if she could bring one thing from this time, one thing in her possession?

Sara’s master’s degree in the history of plant cultivation in Europe and how it impacted society had never done her a damn bit of good. It had resulted in crushing student loans that a job as a waitress couldn’t keep up with and still pay the mortgage her parents had left to her when they’d died in a car accident, and it hadn’t resulted in a good-paying job in academia like she’d expected when she started college. She was about to lose her parents’ home, the only place she’d ever considered home in her life. And before her boyfriend had dumped her last month, he’d turned most of their friends against her with lies and distortions.

Sara didn’t want to die, but she had lately been seriously reconsidering how badly she actually wanted to live.

So she’d agreed to Ganymede’s offer. Go back to the pre-Renaissance medieval era – or something very much like it – with one thing brought from the future. He’d explained that she wouldn’t actually be going to her own world’s past, so she couldn’t create a paradox by changing the future – she could freely do whatever she wanted without worrying about making her grandparents never born or something. He’d also told her that he was making the same offer to several other people, but that she wouldn’t necessarily get to meet them unless they happened to run into each other by chance in the past-world. And she had a month to get the thing she wanted to bring to the past.

Sara had spent the last three weeks digging up her garden and potting everything in ceramic pots, figuring ceramic wouldn’t be an issue in the past like plastic would be. Sadly, she’d had to abandon the apple trees, the peach tree and the grapevines – she couldn’t exactly dig out trees and pot them – but she’d gotten everything else. The potatoes had been a challenge – exposing potatoes to light while they were growing would make them inedible, so she’d had to dig them out on a cloudy night with no moon, more or less digging by feel instead of sight. Carrots, potatoes and onions had needed very large, deep pots. She’d wound her zucchini around a tomato cage in the large pot she’d put it in. The small fruit bushes – the blueberry bush, the raspberry bush – were already in pots. She had her peppers, her tomatoes, her tiny soybean bush, her arugula.

And now, after she’d done so much work to pot everything, Ganymede was telling her she couldn’t bring it?

“Look, if I had a caravan wagon and a horse, I could definitely carry all of this.”

“But you can’t bring a caravan wagon and a horse back with you.”

“No, but I could get one there.”

Ganymede chuckled. “You think I’m sending you with money? You get period-acceptable clothes, the ability to speak the language, immunity to all the local diseases, and the thing that you bring with you, and that’s it. If you appear in the middle of a field, or a town square, surrounded by potted plants, how are you going to bring them with you to whatever shelter you need to take?”

“They’re plants. If I have to leave them out in a field for a few days while I carry them all to wherever I end up going, nothing bad’s going to happen to them.”

“And what if you appear in the middle of the town square?”

“Then I prevail upon some good gentlemen to help me move them someplace safe.”

A deep sigh escaped Ganymede. “I’m almost tempted to let you. Just to let you find out first hand how much your plans are not likely to work. But no. An entire garden is too bulky, and I’m quite certain that most humans would define a garden as a collection of things, not one thing.”

“Come on! I did a lot of work to put all these plants into pots! Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Sadly, no.” Ganymede walked around the garden of pots, randomly touching most of the plants. “You did do quite a lot of work. I tell you what, I feel bad for you. Pick something else to bring and I’ll make sure all your plants get donated to people who like to grow things and are good at it.”

“And aren’t racists,” Sara insisted.

“It’s interesting that that matters to you; aren’t you part of the dominant ethnic group in this nation? Racism doesn’t affect you, generally speaking.”

It was true that Sara was white, and therefore, racism rarely directly affected her, but she had an answer for that. “Racist people in this country have been brainwashed into believing that climate change is a hoax, that gay and transgender people are some kind of terrible threat, and that it’s more important to make sure the government doesn’t tax rich people than to put any accountability on big corporations. Everything bad that we can’t get solved in this country and we can’t even begin to start solving it, because people won’t let us… it’s because rich people have figured out how to use racism to brainwash white people into voting against their own interests.”

“Oh, I understand.” Ganymede grinned broadly. “You’re a hippie, aren’t you?”

“Uh… not really? That was sort of my parents’ generation? I think of myself more as solarpunk. But if what you’re trying to get at is that I’m someone who cares about the environment and wants people to be happy and healthy and to care about each other, then yeah.”

“All right, very well. I’ll hand them over to people whose political beliefs generally track with yours, who are good with plants, and who have space to grow them. Now, pick something else.”

“A big sack that I can carry on my back, maybe 50 pounds, and I get to fill it with seeds and bulbs and anything else plant-related that I can fit in the sack.”

Ganymede raised his eyebrows. “You’re really dedicated to this bit, aren’t you?”

“I know how to use plants to change history. I don’t know how to change history with anything else – not in a way I might want to. I mean, I could bring a gun, but after I was out of ammo, what good would it do me? And also, I don’t like guns.”

“All right,” Ganymede said. “I’ll allow it. As long as you can carry the sack on your person, you can stuff as many seeds into it as you want.”

Sara smiled at him with her best customer service smile. “Thank you, I really appreciate that.”

“One more week,” he said, and vanished.

One more week and she’d leave all this behind. One more week and she wouldn’t have to worry about the foreclosure and impending eviction anymore, because she’d be in a whole other world.

#inktober 2020 #isekai #pick one thing #alara's october 2020 prompt fics

14 notes · View notes

angst-king · 4 years

Text

Glad I ran

(this is a trans kirishima x Bakugou..Kirishima hasn't picked out his boy name yet so he'll go by his last name through most of this. WARNING: contains homophobic parents, abusive actions and language. You've been warned..this is also on my DA page..i wont be linking it on here)

Kirishima was in his room shaking when his mother was screaming at the poor boy. "What the bloody hell is this huh?!" She yells holding up Kirishima's 'dream journal', it only had his last name on the front since he hated his first name his mother gave him."m-my dream journal" She flips open to a couple of page reading it and a look of anger appeared."So you hate the name Ijima? You hate your body so much, you hate being a pretty girl? I thought I was doing a good job as a parent but I guess not since you wanna be a mental faggot!" Flinching at her blooming voice, Kirishima was scared about what would happen next. Then his heart began to crack as the red head watched his mother rant and shred up the pages of his journal.

The journal contained drawings, rants, and goals he made for himself, and other things. "I can't believe I actually kept you!..I should've just gotten an abortion like he'd offered!" Trying to speak through tears Kirishima stammered "m-mom pl-please" his voice quiet, the book flew at his face. "SHUT UP YOU BASTARD!" Mrs Kirishima then went to grab something, chucking books at him, and getting other things. Hurling more physical and verbal abuse at Kirishima who was to scared to use his quirk fearing if he did the torture would grow worse. Even with rough hands squeezing and throttling him by his neck hitting his head against the bed frame all Kiri could do was take the pain. 'I deserve this' 'I'm useless and a coward who doesn't deserve to be accepted.' His mind brought more thoughts, finally when he heard the door slam was when he realized that he needed to get out of house now but that was already taken care of. Ms Kirishima stormed back in ,"GET OUT NOW, I DON'T WANT YOU HERE ANYMORE YOU PIECE OF SHIT! GO SOMEWHERE ELSE LIKE ON THE FUCKING STREET AND GET HIT BY A DAMN CAR!" that really killed the boy who just wanted to be loved. He tried in the past to be just like his mother wanted but, this was the flag that said. 'it'll never happen' Shakily standing to his feet, the redhead's legs carry him out of the house after he grabs his phone that needs to be charged. He thinks about where he should go as he heads for the door, when the thought of his fiery blonde crush Bakugou. The Bakusquad knew about Kirishima being a transgender male, and with Mina's help he'd had a chest binder he could wear to school. He could even wear it with his hero costume with more help from Mina's awesome design skills.

Forgetting to put on some shoes, he heads out into the rainy cold outside world. Holding himself shivering and sniffling, wiping is tear, bruised, cut, and rain stained cheeks. He's weak, he hadn't eaten much that day and his anxiety is high enough to make him have a seizure. Kirishima had anxiety induced epilepsy, he's had anxiety in school but its never been high enough for him to fall to the ground and convulse. His mother refused to believe that he had it and would even just leave him on the floor at home to go do stuff, or would 'accidentally' stepped on him. When he gets to a familiar house he's feeling very weak and tired. Just barely able to hold himself upright but, its long enough to knock on the door before leaning against the door railing. Mitsuki was folding the laundry while Masaru was in the kitchen and Katsuki was in his room when. Mitsuki hears a knock at the door, she puts down a shirt she was folding and gets up. She didn't expect any visitors, and she knew that Katsuki didn't either nor Masaru still she goes to answer the door. Opening the door a shaking soaking wet, barefoot, and beaten Kirishima stood at the door. "Kirishima honey what are you doing here? what happened to you!?" But before he could answer he fell to the ground and had a seizure making Mitsuki yell for her boys to come over and help. "Katsuki! Masaru!" Both rushed over, Bakugou was acting his usual self before seeing the scenario. "what is it old ha-" He paused when he saw his friend convulsing on the floor, Masaru immediately went into the action after the seizure slowed enough to drag the other inside until the seizure stopped. It actually made Katsuki freeze seeing his friend like this, but there wasn't time to do this when Masaru was giving orders. "I'm gonna get him to the couch, Mitsuki can you clear it off for me. Katsuki grab the first aid kit, a towel, and one of your shirts please." Only a nod was the response an the two blondes were put to work. Masaru was never a loud man, he could be timid and quiet, but he knew how to command a room and get things done

. Once the couch was cleared, Masaru carries Kirishima's limp but slightly jerking body to it and carefully lays him down elevating his head. Katsuki came back with what he was asked to get and Mitsuki was trying to help wake the boy up. Though when she looked him over she noticed marks and bruises scattered along the boy's body. "Masaru look at all the marks" Masaru looks to and frowns, Katsuki couldn't help but have a sick feeling in his stomach at all the marks he was seeing. Mitsuki helps dry Kirishima off which wakes him up slowly. His eyes fluttered open dazed and trying to focus, though hearing the soft voices calling for him he looked around. "wh-where am I?" Mitsuki felt so bad that the kid didn't even remember, but told him. "You're at our house hun, you came over knocking and had a seizure." Kirishima seeing all the familiar faces now remembered why he came here. "th-thanks you, I-I'm sorry about the s-seizure." A gentle hand rest on Kirishima's tender shoulder, he looks to Masaru.

"Its no trouble bud, you come here all the time but. You never come like this, is everything okay?" Biting his slightly busted lip Kirishima whimpered, Bakugou's family didn't know about him being trans, he just passed pretty well with a bit of make up. "I-I'm sorry but I d-don't wanna talk about it, i-it was scary." Masaru nods, and thank god Bakugou offered. "Hey come on you can change in my room." Kirishima nods but is interrupted by Mitsuki. "gotta bandage you up first hun" "th-thanks a lot" He smiles tiredly while the two adults work on bandaging Kirishima up. Kirishima would only wince every so often but didn't whine or whimper at them. When he was bandaged up, Bakugou leads Kirishima up to his room so he could change. Up in Bakugou's room Kirishima was wearing Bakugou's shirt that was a bit big on him. Sitting on the bed a curled up Bakugou had a feeling about what happened. "You okay red?" Bakugou sits next to him his usually rough and explosive palms gingerly fall upon Kirishima's back. His voice is soft and sweet, the kindness soothed him a little. Kirishima only nods though still Bakugou asks the question. "Red, did something happen for you to come here bare foot in the rain?" Kirishima looked down at his feet but sighed and nods. Bakugou was testing the water now. "Was it your mom?" Kirishima only nods while wiping tears away, Bakugou started to feel angry hearing this information. He pulls the other close until the his arms are wrapped around him while Kirishima's facing his chest.

"Its gonna be okay I promise red." Kirishima cried into his chest for a little while until he could pull himself together in time for dinner. Coming down stairs when Masaru called them for dinner. "Hey boys you ready to eat?" The boys nod while going to grab their bowls and taking them to the table and eating after thanking Masaru. Matsuki was happy to see Kirishima eating, as he looked like he was really hungry and feeling a little better. Neither parent questioned why Kirishima came here feeling as if it was a sensitive situation for him. "Thank you Mr and Mrs Bakugou" Kirishima smiles before shoveling food into his hungry mouth. "You're quite welcome hun" The blonde woman smiles, she always saw Kirishima as the son she and Masaru didn't have to make or legally adopt so she didn't mind having him over. Kirishima did help Masaru or Bakugou with the dishes when ever he did come over and stayed for dinner, so that's what he did when he was done. After dinner both Bakugou and Kirishima headed back up stairs to hang out. While watching a movie Kirishima sat close to Bakugou who was tempted to hold him. Bakugou had a soft spot for Kirishima but didn't know how to say it, his parents told him to just be honest about it don't beat around the bush so that's what he did. "Hey red, can I tell you something?" Kirishima turned looking at Bakugou curiously "yeah bro what is it" "I like you" "...like best friends?" Bakugou grabs him by the shoulders, "I want to be with you" then slamming their lips into a sweet soft kissed. Kirishima kisses back, shocked at how soft the blond's lips really were. It felt like fireworks and a surge of happiness went through Kirishima's body. His crush liked him back, and he was just kissed by him. "So we're boyfriends?" "mhm" "good."

Crawling into Bakugou's lap they went back to watching the movie while Bakugou plays with the red mop of hair. When they grew tired enough to get under the covers, Kirishima's head was on Bakugou's chest while his arms were around hid torso. "Bakugou" His soft sudden voice said "yes Kiri?" "so you love me even though I'm not a real boy?" "Kirishima you are a real man, no matter how you look or what's under your shirt or in your pants." "thanks Bakugou" What they didn't know what Mitsuki could hear the two as she walked passed her son's door, smiling as she walked to her shared room with Masaru. She told him about it, the two were very supportive of Bakugou. When he came out he was actually pretty shy when he did it but they didn't care they thought it was brave of him to do it. Mitsuki would tease him sometimes asking 'any cute boys at school yet?' The next morning Bakugou woke up to Kirishima's phone going off with multiple text and voice messages. "hmmng?" Tiredly grabbing the red and black phone of the charger, Bakugou go sees some of the text on the lock screen and he's getting angry. 'How could someone treat such a sweet person so horribly?' He thought to himself while reading the text, he then decided to unlock the phone, he knew the password. Reading more of the text he then forwarded them to his own phone as evidence if they needed it.He then goes to his own phone after turning off Kirishima's phone and texted his mom. 'Hey mom read these text when you wake up, these are from Kirishima's mom. I had a feeling this is why he came over here' It'd only been ten minutes when Mitsuki texted back 'what the hell, so I take it he came out to her and it went wrong?!' 'Maybe' 'well thanks for sending me this' 'welcome' When it was around the time most of them got up on the weekend, Kirishima got up and got ready with Bakugou. Kirishima had slept without his binder, so Bakugou helped him put it on. Bakugou wanted to make breakfast so he was in the kitchen today while the others were in the living room. Kirishima's phone continued to dings with text or ring. He'd groan irritated and answered it, he'd went into another room when he saw it was his mother. By the time breakfast was ready Kirishima looked ready to cry again after the phone call. He'd endured more screaming from his mother and it was really getting to his head. He quietly sat down at the table and thanked Katsuki for making breakfast. The table was quiet with the small talk from Masaru.

"How'd you boys sleep last night?" "Slept pretty well thanks" Katsuki answered, the usual sunshine red head was quiet and seemed anxious. He didn't wanna go home, but he also didn't wanna over stay his welcome. "Kirishima hun, you alright?" Mitsuki noticed this, Kirishima nods even if he did wanna cry right there and then, he held off. Mitsuki before getting out of bed showed Masaru the text Bakugou showed her, so they all had a gist of what was going on. "Kirishima is something going on at home with your mom?" Asked Mitsuki, Kirishima bites his lip putting down his utensils, he felt nervous. What if he gets in trouble for telling them? Will they make him go back anyway? will they believe him?

"Kiri hun whatever's going on you can tell us...look Katsuki saw the text from your mom on your phone and forwarded them to me. What's going on hun?" Kirishima's anxiety started up but he knew he couldn't hide from them anymore. If he wanted his problems solved he needed to man up and tell them. "Sh-She found my dream journal, i-it had goals, ra-rants and w-what I'd like for the future. Sh-she must've read about me being a transgender g-gay boy...She sc-screamed and beat me up and t-told me to get out....hoped I get hit by a car and various other things. I-I was scare to use my quirk because she might make it worse." Shaking a little with sympathetic eyes all watching and listening, Bakugou slipped a hand under the table and held Kirishima's shaking one to calm him. Mitsuki looked down while grabbing a napkin and wiping her mouth. "Kirishima I'm sorry to hear that-" Masaru was interrupted by an angry wife but she wasn't angry at Kirishima no. she was angry at how Kirishima's mother could do something like this. "M-Mitsuki?" "M-Mrs Bakugou?" Mitsuki sighed and talked in an all to calm voice "Kirishima call me mom, that woman is no mother to you." Only a nod was his response, breakfast continued quietly with an awkward silence and thick tension from Mitsuki.

While Kirishima helped wash the dishes with Bakugou, he spoke. "i-I'm sorry for ruining breakfast" Bakugou's fist tightened up then loosened before wrapped his strong arms around Kirishima's smaller frame. "Don't fucking be sorry, that woman who's supposed to be your mom is to blame, not you." "th-thank you Bakugou" Kirishima earns a soft kiss on the forehead and then went back to washing the dishes. When they finished Mitsuki came out with her keys and jacket. "Hey boys go put some shoes on and a jacket, its chilly out." Both boys were confused as to why they were to get ready to go somewhere but didn't question it. Kirishima wore more of Bakugou's stuff, Misuki giggles. "You look cute in your boyfriend's clothes" Both boys blushed and Mitsuki smirks."Mother knows all~" She teases while walking to the car, the boys follow her and get in the back seat. Both are curious as to where their destination was and why they were going so suddenly? Mitsuki gave no hints, the sounds of Kirishima's mother spamming his phone only drove her to wanting to drive faster and to be more determined. When they entered Kirishima's neighborhood, he got a bad feeling in his stomach that he hoped would go away soon but. When they got close to his house the feeling grew, and then filled him with dread as they stopped in front of his house. "Alright lets go" Mitsuki says while unlocking the car, so Bakugou and Kirishima hop out and Mitsuki leads them to the front door. Mitsuki stood in front of the boys and knocked on the door, Kirishima feels an arm around his waist as they waited.

It only took a few minutes for a young black haired woman answers the door. She frowns seeing Kirishima but jumps an punt on a front as soon as Mitsuki clears her throat. "I believe this is the Kirishima house hold" "Yes oh my god, you found Ijima thank you so much!" Mitsuki could see right through her and thought 'two could play that game'. "Yes I found him on my front door, barefoot, covered in bruises and having a seizure as soon as I opened the door." "Oh gosh thank you so much, she ran away last night be-" Mitsuki smirked with her folded arms she looks into the red eyes of the shorter woman who glared at Kirishima. "Yes he ran away because you told him to leave and to get hit by a car. You told him how much you didn't want him because of who he wants to be, not who he chose to be." Mrs Kirishima still kept up her facade "what are you talking about I would never do that to my daug-" "I have the text that you sent your son, he told us everything." Mitsuki's bluntness didn't silence Mrs Kirishima who huffed. "Well then what did you come here for?" "To get Kirishima's stuff, he's staying with us." Both Kirishima and Mrs Kirishima raised a brow confusedly. "No she's not she's my daughter not yours!" The raven haired woman's voice rose making the red head flinch but Mitsuki didn't budge. "You didn't want your son, you told him to get hit by a car and numerous other things...remember I can just call CPS you know. He's obviously more welcome and comfortable at our house." Mitsuki's tone left no room to argue and Mrs Kirishima scoffed. "Fine then get your shit and get out" She growled lowly, Kirishima rushes passed the woman with Bakugou in tow.

Kirishima grabs a bag and Bakugou helps him pack what he can while Mitsuki waits out front with an ace up her sleeve. She'd set her phone to record before getting out of the car, so the whole conversation was being recorded. She'd edit out all of the long pauses of silence that she needed to in order to hand it over to the correct professionals. Only fifteen minutes and the boys were back and Kirishima had all he needed, shoes included. When exiting the threshold, Mrs Kirishima pushed him out before slamming the door. Katsuki caught him and held him steady as they headed back to the car. "Th-thanks M-..Mom" "You're welcome Kirishima" They headed back to Bakugou's house and Kirishima went up to Bakugou's room while Mitsuki disgusted things with Masaru.Talking about the recording, calling CPS, and what to do with Kirishima. While they did that Kirishima and Bakugou cuddled on the bed. "So I'm gonna be with you guys...I'm glad" "Me too, I would've punched that bitch if she wasn't a woman..though mom would've beat me to it I'm sure if she didn't show restraint." Kirishima chuckles and nods "I'm sure both of you would've went to town on her but seriously. I'm glad I'm with you. I couldn't have picked a better how to run away too."

#Bakushima #bakugou x kirishima #transgender kirishima x Bakugou

5 notes · View notes

genderdysphoriablues · 5 years

Text

29/9/’19

Today was my one Sunday out of the month that I am scheduled to work. Church is at noon. Work is at 1. I still wanted to attend what I could of church because I love it but it could take more time to come home and change, and there was no way in heck that I was going to wear a dress to work. Solution?

Why, wear a shirt and pants to church, of course.

I wore my black jeans and a nicer looking button down shirt with short sleeves tucked in, just to look a little bit more dressed up for church without going the full nine yards. Not too different from my normal wear, but also not so much just street clothes.

My parents were not happy about it, and I think we all would have been fine if they’d just accepted that it wasn’t going to be end of the world because the person they perceive as their daughter decided to not wear a dress to church probably for the first time since being born (at least, as far as they know). But then my mom, right as I was walking out the door, decided to comment ever so passive-aggressively, “you could have work a skirt or a dress to work...” After that I was very glad to be out of the house for a few hours because I needed to be away and work through that a bit.

So of course I didn’t mention to them that I was going to be wearing a bow tie as well.

I showed up to my own ward looking like a dude, and I loved it. I mean, I was a bit nervous, mostly because I wasn’t sure how people-especially my good friends-would react. But one girl that I don’t know too well actually asked if she could sit by me right before Sacrament Meeting started. My friends had come in almost late, and so had sat on the other side of the chapel, so I was alone. So she sat by me, and then after the Sacrament was passed her fiancee came and joined us. Not only that, but during quiet parts, or bits she found interesting, she actually would initiate conversation with me or comment to me. I think she could tell I was uncomfortable and nervous and decided to help me feel better by showing me that it didn’t matter what I wore, I was still her friend. She’s a good soul and I’m so glad there are people like her in the world.

I had to leave in the middle of the talks (one girl spoke about the love of our Heavenly Parents and even brought up the retraction of the 2015 LGBT policy, and let me tell you, the Spirit I felt was powerful). I was initially going to take off the bow tie and untuck my shirt to look more casual for work, but I decided to keep it. Good choice, on my part, because I got a lot of compliments for it.

Work was quiet, just how it should be. I mean, it is a library, after all. Haha. But for real. We almost got all of the children’s books out, but we had to close up before we got to that point. I guess I’ll finish what I can tomorrow.

After work I went to the weekly study group with @closetmormon. It was good because I needed to be away from the house a little longer. Plus, I got to see my friends! We talked a lot about the gospel and of the changes that we hoped to see. One of the people there very sincerely talked about how she hoped we’d have a day where transgender men (her fiancee is a trans guy as well) would be able to hold the Priesthood. That hit me like a spiritual brick. It had crossed my mind before but I had never really had the strong desire to hold that authority. At least, I didn’t think so. But once she said that it was like, Yes. That’s something that I want, if God is willing that I should be able to do that. The thing about the Priesthood it that you cannot use it for personal gain-it is impossible. And as long as I’m surrounded by people who are worthy to bear that responsibility I will have access to its blessings and benefits. But if one day it were possible, how great would that be to be able to bless my family like that? Especially if I ever have children of my own.

At one point I was flipping my new balisong (yes, I was casually showing off), and Closetmormon’s roommate asked to see it. From that he showed me really cool videos about karambit combat, which lead to him asking if I’ve ever had knife combat training. When I said no, he left for a bit and came back with two practice knives, and then proceeded to show me how to use them. It turned into an extensive crash course where he taught me basic hand to hand and knife combat skills. It was awesome. He told me about how a class I could attend, and also offered to teach me more next time. I am looking forward to it very much.

I got home before my family did (they were visiting grandparents) so I did some dishes and watched some YouTube. I don’t normally do that on Sundays (the YouTube bit), but I needed some Vine compilations. I had also mostly calmed down about earlier and had texted my mom about two hours into the study group that I was there. She seemed happier too, which was confirmed when she got home. Our whole family can react to things pretty rashly and spontaneously, and my mom is no exception. She probably reacted the way she did without thinking and then later realised that it wasn’t that big of a deal. That’s been happening a lot with the whole me being trans thing. I mean, I understand: this kind of goes against everything she’s known her whole life, whether it is correct or not, and she truly and sincerely believes that I will not find true happiness in transitioning. I guess one day we’ll see.

#mormon transgender #lds transgender #mormon lgbt #lds lgbt #queerstake #transgender #lgbt #mormon #lds #the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints #martial arts

13 notes · View notes

neriad13 · 5 years

Text

Best of the Best Media Consumed 2019!

This year I had a whole lot of focus on nonfiction, film and comics. Resolution for next year: read more fiction. Seriously, I read over three times more nonfiction than fiction this year. I read a little over one novel a month. But I really do love picking up a book on something I know nothing about and coming away knowing more than something. X-P

Anyway! The list!

Books - Fiction

Out of the 17 works of fiction I read this year, the best of the best is...

The Snow Queen, by Joan Vinge

The Snow Queen was one of my absolute favorite fairy tales as a child. The 2002 film adaptation of it was one of the things I watched endlessly.

It was SO MUCH FUN picking apart this sci-fi retelling and discovering which characters are meant to represent the ones from the original story (of particular interest: the character representing the reindeer is human in this...and he has a one night stand with the character representing Gerta. Yes, I’m still cracking up about this. Yes, it actually was a pretty well written scene).

But the absolute best part of it was the masterful characterization. Every single character has ulterior motives and often heartbreaking reasons for why they are the way they are - especially including the Snow Queen herself, whose final scene is horrifying, tragic and beautiful.

I always like me some solid villain characterization.

Runner Up:

Fairy Tales: Traditional Stories Retold for Gay Men

I am not a gay man...but this very much spoke to me. It was at turns heartwarming and hilarious and the turns these fairy tales took felt so natural, like they’d been told that way all along.

There are also many allusions to AIDS in the stories - sometimes as something a character is directly dealing with whether in himself, or a loved one and sometimes under the guise of a metaphor for inevitability. These ones were my favorites (aside from The Frog Prince, which was turned into a metaphor for accepting the process of aging with grace).

Books - Nonfiction

Oh boy. There’s...definitely going to be more than one here. Of the 65 works of nonfiction I read this year, my favorites were...

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons From the Crematory

A memoir about the author’s time spent working as a crematory operator and her entry into the funeral business. This book was absolutely hilarious (it contains a story about the author getting absolutely soaked with corpse fat that wouldn’t stop flowing straight out of the incinerator), tragic (a 12 year old girl is cremated and her ashes are mailed back to her parents as part of a cremation mail-in program) and extremely poignant (the author talks openly about the time she was contemplating suicide).

I love Caitlin’s youtube channel and I loved this book even more.

My Age of Anxiety

Partially the memoir of a man who has battled his extreme anxiety his entire life, a historical study of famous figures who have also endured it and a scientific look into why it exists at all.

Ultimately, it offers no answers. As of the writing of the book, the author has found no treatment that helps him for longer than a few months. But what he has found over the course of his research is that he is not alone - that anxiety has historically been a factor in scientific breakthroughs and artistic accomplishments. And that perhaps most importantly, that anxiety has been a key part of human evolution from the start, which served a vital role in the survival of the species.

Mental illness or evolutionary adaptation? Is there even a line between them?

Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit

This is the only book, period, devoted to queer mythology, that I have ever been able to find. But the good news is that it’s fairly extensive (though the authors themselves admit that they had trouble finding as much information about non-western mythology as they did for western mythology), is chock full of references and is extremely thorough in the information it presents.

I’ll admit that it was a slog to get through at times, but what it’s provided has been invaluable to my conception of history and my own place in it.

Also, I can now say beyond a shadow of a doubt that almost every culture on earth has at some point in their history had a tradition of transgender shamans.

Hope After Faith

This is the memoir of a charismatic Pentecostal pastor turned atheist. It follows him from teenagerhood and the beginnings of his dream to be a preacher to a little bit after his deconversion decades later.

The eventual crumbling of his faith was something that spoke to me on a deep level. The scene that I still think about months later is the one in which he finally gives up his belief in the afterlife and accepts the finality of death by saying goodbye to everyone he ever loved who has died with the words “I love you, but I’m never going to see you again.”

I was not a huge fan of the writing style at first, but this one won me over totally and completely. It touched me immensely at the time when I needed it most.

Comics - Fiction

I read 52 fictional comics this year and 46 nonfiction. I absolutely raided my library’s graphic novel section for months. It was a good time.

Beautiful Darkness

A French graphic novel wherein tiny people survive and feud over the corpse of the child they came from. It’s...hard to explain. Kind of a fairy tale Lord of the Flies, but more subtly horrifying. It’s a story about decay and collapse - of society, of the physical form, of the dreams of a child. It has no single interpretation and different people may take something very different from it. The most inventive horror story I read this year.

My Brother’s Husband

A story about microaggressions and how their buildup over time can drive a wedge between people without them even noticing. I cried. Go read it.

Mis(h)adra

A semi autobiographical account of a college student learning how to live with his epilepsy. I also cried over this one.

The art is stunning, the metaphors are amazing (the main character’s epilepsy is visually portrayed as a set of ghostly knives that follow him around) and the ending is extremely affecting if you’ve ever dealt with any kind of chronic illness.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

The absolute most fun I had reading a comic this year. Gets extremely dark and incredibly sad but never feels overwhelmingly heavy, thanks to its great sense of humor.

Edward Scissorhands: Parts Unknown + Whole Again

A series of adventures set decades after the movie, after Kim’s death, in a time when her granddaughter begins wondering if the stories about the castle on the hill are true.

It deals with such issues as the difficulties Kim had with her daughter growing up, when all she would do is tell stories about Edward rather than give her the emotional support she needed, whether removing the thing that both makes you unique and brings pain is worth it and how to stop angry villagers from burning down your house (again).

Also, seeing Edward be surrounded by a group of friends who care about him was extremely healing.

Comics - Nonfiction

My Solo Exchange Diary vol 1-2

A series of updates about the author’s continuing battle with mental illness and about how recovery is anything but a straight line.

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Finally, some light reading!

It’s a memoir about the decline and death of the author’s aging parents.

I found it...extremely comforting. Extreme old age, whether in one’s self or in one’s loved ones, is a scary and often obscured prospect, despite being a near-universal human experience. This book took the mystery out of aging and the fear out of taking care of aging parents. I’ve seen it done now. I’m more ready to do it myself.

The Best We Could Do

A memoir of the author’s family’s flight from Vietnam and their immigration to America, through the lens of the birth of the author’s first child. About how being a refugee changes a person in small, often unexpected ways, how trauma leaves its mark on families - and how, knowing all this, one can still keep living and raising the next generation.

Film - Fiction

I caught up on a lot of classics I’d not seen before and really got into Jidaigeki this year. Me putting only four of them on the list is a show of restraint. Of the 64 films I watched this year...

The Fall of the House of Usher

Impeccable costume and psychedelic set design. The unanswered question that bounces throughout the entire movie: is it the curse or is it the fault of human belief in the curse?

Patch your walls, dude.

A Monster With a Thousand Heads

A Mexican thriller about a woman whose husband is denied cancer treatment for seemingly no reason. The doctor gives her the runaround. No one can answer her questions. No one listens to her.

So, naturally, she and her teenage son spend a night kidnapping and holding at gunpoint every person she needs to get her husband’s cancer treatment approved. Wild and intense and timely.

Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I watched a couple of Kubrick movies I hadn’t seen before and of them...I died laughing at this one. The tight plotting! The inevitable buildup to disaster over something so insanely stupid!

I did not live during the Cold War, but damn do I feel for the inherent ridiculousness of it now.

Seven Samurai

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAFGFTRTRNHUKIJUHNJNHHHHHHHHHHHHYHYHYHYHYHYHYHYHYXCVVGGERDSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

...this movie is insanely good. I watched Citizen Kane this year. This movie’s better.

It has a plot which can be described in its totality, in a single sentence - a group of samurai are hired to defend a village from bandits - but what they do with that premise is so much more than that.

This movie is three hours long. It did not lag once.

Hara Kiri

As the Tokugawas secure their grip on all of Japan, war ceases. Great houses are dissolved and their retainers, cast into the streets. The relevance of the samurai is ending and the cities are awash in starving ronin.

Once, one of these starving ronin approached a great house, asking if he might be able to end his life honorably, in front of witnesses there. So impressed was the lord with this ronin’s resolve, that he instead hired him on as one of his retainers.

Hearing this story, other ronin, having no intention of actually offing themselves, tried the same trick in the hopes of securing a job, or at the very least, a little something to eat.

It became a common scam which, in the end, fooled no one. Most houses gave the ronin a handful of cash and sent them on their way.

But one house, seeking to preserve their warlike spirit in these peaceful times, chooses to treat one beggar ronin very differently.

This is the story of vengeance taken for that death.

Yojimbo

A ronin enters a town that is being torn apart by gang warfare and decides to play both sides in order to end the conflict. It contains such comedic gems as:

- the ronin suddenly deciding not to take part in a street battle, leaving both sides evenly matched and extremely nervous about fighting each other, while he watches it all from the top of a watchtower, laughing his ass off

- the ronin is critically injured and being smuggled out of town in a coffin. A fight breaks out while this is happening and scares away one of the people carrying the coffin. A less intelligent goon of the gang he just escaped from is cheerfully recruited to carry the coffin the rest of the way

- standing up in the coffin, declaring that he’s fine and immediately fainting

Also, you should totally bring a knife to a gun fight.

Ran

A jidaigeki reimagining of King Lear.

A visually astounding, sweeping epic with amazing acting and a complex interplay of conflicting passions which might just be more bleak than the original play.

The scene in which the main character goes mad and is cast out into the wilderness is especially haunting.

Jojo Rabbit

I don’t think I’ve EVER experienced such violent mood whiplash in a movie before. One moment you’re crying-laughing from a joke that hit with absolute perfection and the next you’re...actually crying. In the same scene. Within thirty seconds. Multiple times. It is the oddest feeling to be so elated by the best joke in the entire movie while every character we’ve come to know across the course of the movie is in the process of dying violently. It’s not a feeling everyone’s going to like, but for me it was completely new and fantastic.

The best part of the movie is the main character’s relationship with Imaginary Friend Hitler. He’s wildly funny and relentlessly charming. I got excited every time he appeared in a scene and was, oddest of all, actually comforted by his presence.

He was all of these things until, in the most terrifying scene in the movie, he was not.

This movie shows you the mechanisms through which fascism becomes an appealing idea for a lonely child by putting the audience through a version of the same process. It’s so clever, so funny and so sad.

What do you do when your world is destroyed by absurdity and there is nothing left for you to return to?

You dance in the streets.

TV Series

Good Omens

Wildly hilarious comedy, fantastic costume design, multiple androgynous characters for which NO ONE bats an eye and honestly?? the best queer love story I’ve ever seen in television or film.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

I am not sure if I have ever seen a production with so much love poured into it. The dozens of painstakingly crafted sets and characters, the sheer level of artistry on display - the next thing I saw was always more amazing than the thing I’d seen before it and the amazingness just kept coming with no end in sight throughout the entirety of the show.

And the story itself! The way it deepened and played with the lore of the original movie in the most perfect and unexpected ways! It felt like I was watching the most fantastic and labor intensive piece of fanfiction ever conceived, that was written by a person with a deep passion for and knowledge of the source material.

Speaking of fantastic throwbacks...

Dororo

I’ve said a lot about this one already. While it ultimately fell kind of flat, what it did get right was phenomenal. The motherfucking FIGHT SCENES! The love between bros! The fascinating reconception of Hyakkimaru’s powers and its emphasis on a disabled character actually being portrayed as disabled! The journey of good characters going down the path of evil with good intentions!

Mwah!

Primal eps 1-5

Genndy Tartakovsky’s next big project after the completion of Samurai Jack!

It is gory. Like, extremely gory. Do you know how much gore a thing has to have before I consider it ‘extremely gory?’ It’s a lot. Like...really a lot. There’s a thirty second (or possibly longer. time lost all meaning as I watched it) sequence in which the main character punches the intestines out of a horde of hominids in loving, exacting detail. It’s like Genndy’s letting out all the pent-up gore he was forced to keep in check during the years when he was working on Samurai Jack.

But it isn’t just gore. It’s a journey about the main character’s grief over the sudden, horrific, unexpected death of his entire family. A story which is also mirrored by that of the dinosaur he joins forces with. There were parts during it in which I literally felt my heart being torn in two over the travails of these two, as well as wildly funny and completely adorable parts.

The settings, creature design and fight choreography are insanely creative, as is the decision to do it with no dialogue whatsoever.

And that cliffhanger, DAMN!! They’d better get the next five episodes out soon!

Honorable Mention:

Rick and Morty S4 eps 1-5

This one doesn’t entirely make the list proper because the latter two episodes...were rather subpar. But I can’t entirely keep it off the list because the quality of the first three episodes was off the charts. A particular shoutout to ‘The Old Man and the Seat’ and ‘One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty’ - the former, which somehow managed to use toilet humor, of all things, to reach a crushingly tragic conclusion and the latter, which has a twist better than that of some of my favorite horror movies.

Games

Shogun 2

I didn’t do a whole lot of gaming at all this year. But what I did do is have a fantastic time getting into the Total War franchise. Shogun 2 was my entry point and a FANTASTIC game. The ninja animations! The tiny, exacting animations of every single person running around on a sinking ship! The way Realm Divide changes the game into something much more dangerous and the way I learned to dance on the edge of it until I was good and ready!

Plays

Love’s Labours Lost

One of two Shakespeare plays I saw this year, the other being The Tempest - which was also excellent (especially the part where it legit started raining when Ariel summoned the storm in the first scene and then that showing had to be cancelled. The second time was the charm).

Love’s Labours Lost had some excellent comedy and the usual absurd web of misunderstandings you’d expect to find in your standard Shakespeare romcom. But the thing which pushed it over the edge for me was that...it had a sad ending. It goes against the definition of comedy and has a sad ending. Because it was so unexpected, it hit unexpectedly hard and made it that much more memorable.

#jojo rabbit #akira kurosawa #rick and morty #the dark crystal: age of resistance #good omens #primal #a thought #long post

1 note · View note

suchagiantnerd · 6 years

Text

54 Books, 1 Year

2018 was my first full year back at work after my mat leave, and thanks to all the time I spend on the subway, my yearly reading total is back up to over 50 books!

2018 was a dark year, and I made a conscious effort to read more books from authors on the margins of society. The more those of us with privilege take the time to listen to and learn from these voices, the better we’ll be as friends, colleagues and citizens.

You’ll also notice a lot of books about witchcraft and witches in this year’s list. What can I say? Dark times call for resorting to ANYTHING that can help dig us out of our current reality, including putting a hex on Donald Trump.

Trigger Warning: Some of the books reviewed below are about mental illness, suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, and violence against people of colour, Indigenous people and people in the LGBTQ community.

Here are this year’s mini reviews:

1. The Lottery and Other Stories / Shirley Jackson

Jackson’s short stories were published in the late forties and fifties, but their slow-burning creep factor holds up today. The stories involve normal people doing normal things until something small gives, and we realize something is really wrong here. As you read through the collection, take note of the mysterious man in blue. He appears in about half of the stories, always in the margins of the action. Who is he? I read him as a bit of a trickster figure, bringing chaos and mayhem with him wherever he goes. Other people have read him as the devil himself. Let me know what you think!

2. The Ship / Antonia Honeywell

I was excited to read this YA novel about a giant cruise ship-turned-ark, designed and captained by the protagonist Lalla’s father in a dystopic near future. The premise of the book is great and brings up lots of juicy questions – where is the ship going? How long can the passengers survive together in a confined space? How did Lalla’s father choose who got to board the ship? But the author’s execution was a disappointment and focused far too much on Lalla’s inner turmoil and immaturity.

3. The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex and Murder / Carolyn Murnick

My book club read this true crime memoir detailing the intense, adolescent friendship between Carolyn, the author, and Ashley, who was murdered in her home in her early 20s a few years after the girls’ friendship fizzled. Murnick is understandably destroyed by the murder and obsessed with the killer’s trial. The narrative loops back and forth between the trial and the girls’ paths, which diverged sharply after Ashley moved away in high school. Murnick (the self-proclaimed nerdy one) muses on the intricacies of female friendship, growing up under the microscope of the male gaze, and the last weekend she ever spent with Ashley (the hot one). This is an emotional, detailed account of a woman trying her best to bear witness to her friend’s horrific death and to honour who she was in life.

4. The Break / Katherena Vermette

Somebody is brutally attacked on a cold winter night in Winnipeg, and Stella, a young Métis woman and tired new mother is the only witness – and even she isn’t sure what she saw. The police investigation into the attack puts a series of events in motion that make long-buried emotions bubble to the surface and ripple outwards to touch a number of people in the community, including an Indigenous teenager recently released from a youth detention center, one of the investigating officers (a Métis man walking a fine line between two worlds), and an artist. This is a tough read, especially in the era of #MMIW and #MeToo, but all the more important because of it.

5. So You Want to Talk About Race / Ijeoma Oluo

Probably the most important book I read this year, I will never stop recommending this read to anyone and everyone. This is your Allyship 101 syllabus right here, folks. Do you really want to do better and be better as an ally? Then you need to read every chapter closely and start implementing the lessons learned right away. This book will teach you about tone policing, microaggressions and privilege, and how all of those things are harmful to people of colour and other marginalized communities.

6. The Accusation / Bandi

This is a collection of short stories by a North Korean man (written under a pseudonym for his protection as he still lives there). The stories were actually smuggled out of the country for publication by a family friend. The characters in these stories are regular people living regular lives (as much as that is possible in North Korea). What really comes across is the fine line between laughter and tears while living under the scrutiny of a dangerous regime. There are several scenes where people laugh uncontrollably because they can’t cry, and where people start to cry because they can’t laugh. This book offers a rare perspective into a hidden world.

7. Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen / Jazz Jennings

Some of you will be familiar with Jazz via the TLC show about her and her family, “I Am Jazz”. I’d never seen it but was inspired to read the book to gain a better understanding about what coming out as trans as a child is like. Jazz came out to her family at 5 years old (!) and her parents and siblings have had her back from the beginning. If you are still having a tough time understanding that trans women are women, full stop, this book will help get you there.

8. A Field Guide to Getting Lost / Rebecca Solnit

When it comes to the books that gave me “all the feels”, this one tops the 2018 list. Solnit is everything - historian, writer, philosopher, culture lover, explorer. Her mind is always making connections and as you follow her through her labyrinthine thoughts you start to feel connected too. Her words on loss, nostalgia and missing a person/place/time actually made me cry, they were so true. For me, an agnostic leaning towards atheism, she illuminated the magic in the everyday that made me feel more spiritually rooted to life than I have in a long time.

9. I Found You / Lisa Jewell

Lots of weird and bad things seem to happen in British seaside towns, don’t they? This is another psychological thriller, à la “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl”. One woman finds a man sitting on the beach one morning. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Miles away, another woman wakes up one morning to find her husband has vanished. Is the mystery man on the beach the missing husband? Dive into this page-turner and find out!

10. The Midnight Sun / Cecilia Ekbäck

This novel is the sequel to a historical Swedish noir book I read a few years ago. Though it’s not so much a sequel, as it is a novel taking place in the same setting – Blackasen Mountain in Lapland. This story actually takes place about a hundred years after the first novel does, so it can be read on its own. Ekbäck’s stories dive into the effect of place on people – whether it’s the isolation of a harsh and long winter or the mental havoc caused by the midnight sun on sleep patterns, the people on Blackasen Mountain are always strained and ready to explode. (Oh, and there’s also a bit of the supernatural happening on this mountain too – but just a bit!)

11. After the Bloom / Leslie Shimotakahara

Strained mother-daughter relationships. The PTSD caused by immigration and then being detained in camps in your new home. Fraught romances. Shimotakahara’s novel tackles all of this and more. Taking place in two times – 1980s Toronto and a WWII Japanese internment camp in the California desert – this story of loss, hardship, betrayal and family is both tragic and hopeful.

12. Company Town / Madeline Ashby

In this Canadian dystopian tale, thousands of people live in little cities built on the oil rigs off the coast of Newfoundland. Hwa works as a bodyguard for the family that owns the rigs and is simultaneously trying to protect the family’s youngest child from threats, find out who is killing her sex-worker friends, mourn her brother (who died in a rig explosion), and work through her own self-esteem issues. Phew! If it sounds like too much, it is. I really did like this book, but I think it needed tighter editing and focus.

13. The Power / Naomi Alderman

In the near-future, women and girls all over the world develop the ability to send electrical shocks out of their hands. With this newfound power, society’s gender power imbalance starts to flip. The U.S. military scrambles to try and work this to their advantage. A new religious movement starts to grow. And Tunde, a Nigerian photographer (and a dude!) travels the world, trying to document it all. This is an exciting novel that seriously asks, “what if?” in which many of the key characters cross paths.

14. Milk and Honey / Rupi Kaur

Everyone’s reading it, so I had to too! Kaur’s poems are refreshing and healing, and definitely accessible. This is poetry for the people, for women, for daughters, mothers and sisters. These are poems about how women make themselves small and quiet, about our inner anger, about sacrifice, longing and love.

15. Tell It to the Trees / Anita Rau Badami

In the dead of winter in small-town B.C., the body of big-city writer Anu is found outside of the Dharmas’ house, frozen to death. Anu had been renting their renovated shed, working on a novel in seclusion. As we get to know the Dharmas – angry and controlling Vikram, his quiet and frightened wife Suman, the two children, and the ghost of Vikram’s first wife, Helen, we feel more and more uneasy. Was Anu’s death just a tragic accident, or something else entirely? There is a touch of “The Good Son” in this novel…

16. You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life / Jen Sincero

This book was huge last year and my curiosity got the better of me. But I can’t, I just can’t subscribe to this advice! All of this stuff about manifesting whatever you want reeks of privilege and is just “The Secret” repackaged for millennials and Gen-Z. Thank u, next!

17. All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness / Sheila Hamilton

Shortly after a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Hamilton’s husband, David, took his own life after years of little signs and indicators that something wasn’t right. Her memoir, in the aftermath of his death, is a reckoning, a tribute, and a warning to others. In it, she details the fairy tale beginning of their relationship (but even then, there were signs), the birth of their only child, and the rocky path that led to his final choice. Hamilton’s story doesn’t feel exploitative to me. It’s an important piece in the global conversation about mental health and includes lots of facts and statistics too.

18. This Is How It Always Is / Laurie Frankel

This is a beautiful novel about loving your family members for who they are and about the tough choices parents have to make when it comes to protecting their children. Rosie and Penn have five boys (that this modern couple has five children is the most unbelievable part of the plot, frankly), but at five years old, their youngest, Claude, tells the family that he is a girl. Claude changes her name to Poppy, and Rosie and Penn decide to move the whole family to more inclusive Seattle to give Poppy a fresh start in life. Of course, the move has consequences on the other four children as well, and we follow everybody’s ups and downs over the years as they adjust and adapt to their new reality.

19. Dumplin’ / Julie Murphy

While I didn’t love the writing or any of the characters, I do need to acknowledge the importance of this YA novel in showing a fat teenager as happy and confident in who she is. Willowdean Dickson has a job, a best friend and a passion for Dolly Parton. She also catches the attention of cute new kid, Bo, and a sweet summer romance develops between the two (with all of the miscommunications and misunderstandings you’d expect in a YA plot). This is an important book in the #RepresentationMatters movement, and is now a Netflix film if you want to skip the read!

20. Kintu / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

This was touted as “the great Ugandan novel” and it did not disappoint! The first part of the novel takes place in 1754, as Kintu Kidda, leader of a clan, travels to the capital of Buganda (modern day Kampala) with his entourage to pledge allegiance to the new Kabaka. During the journey, tragedy strikes, unleashing a curse on Kintu’s descendants. The rest of the novel follows five modern-day Ugandans who are descended from Kintu’s bloodline and find themselves invited to a massive family reunion. As their paths cross and family histories unfold, will the curse be broken?

21. The Child Finder / Rene Denfeld

I bought this at the airport as a quick and thrilling travel read, and that’s exactly what it was. Naomi is a private investigator with a knack for finding missing and kidnapped children. This is because she was once a kidnapped child herself. The plot moves back and forth in time between Naomi’s current case and her own escape and recovery. There was nothing exceptional about this book, but it’s definitely a page-turner.

22. Difficult Women / Roxane Gay

Are the women in Gay’s short stories actually difficult? Or has a sexist, racist world made things difficult for them? I think you know what my answer is. The stories are at times beautiful - like the fairy tale about a woman made of glass, and at times violent and visceral – like a number of stories about hunting and butchering. Women are everything and more.

23. My Education / Susan Choi

I suggested this novel to my book club and I will always regret it. This was my least favourite read of the year. I thought it was going to be about a sexy and inappropriate threesome or love triangle between a student, her professor, and his wife. Instead it had a few very unsexy sex scenes and hundreds and hundreds of pages about the minutiae of academic life. I can’t see anyone enjoying this book except English professors and grad students.

24. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities / Rebecca Solnit

This series of essays was a balm to my soul after Ford won the provincial election. It reminded me that history is full of steps forward and steps back, and though things look bleak right now, there are millions of us around the world trying to make positive changes in big and little ways as we speak.

25. The Woman in Cabin 10 / Ruth Ware

Another novel in the vein of “The Woman on the Train”, that is, a book featuring a young, female, unreliable narrator. Lo knows what she saw – or does she? There was a woman in the now empty Cabin 10 – or was there? And also, Lo hasn’t been eating or sleeping. But she’s been drinking a lot and not taking her medication. I’m kind of done with this genre – anyone else?

26. My Brilliant Friend / Elena Ferrante

After hearing many intelligent women praise this novel (the first in a four-part series), my book club decided to give it a try. I didn’t fall in love with it, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the intense and passionate friendship between Lila and Lenu, two young girls growing up in post-war Naples, that I will likely read the whole series. Many claim that no writer has managed to capture the intricacy of female friendship the way that Ferrante has.

27. The Turquoise Table: Finding Community and Connection in Your Own Front Yard / Kristin Schell

This is Schell’s non-fiction account of how she started Austin’s turquoise table movement (which has now spread further into other communities). Schell was feeling disconnected from her immediate community, so she painted an old picnic table a bright turquoise, moved it into her front yard, and started sitting out there some mornings, evenings and weekends - sometimes alone, and sometimes with her family. Neighbours started to gather for chats, snacks, card games, and more. People got to know each other on a deeper level and friendships bloomed. This book is a nice reminder that small actions matter. A small warning though – Schell is an evangelical Christian, and I didn’t know this before diving in. There is a focus on Christianity in the book, and though it’s not quite preachy, it’s very in-your-face.

28. Sing, Unburied, Sing / Jesmyn Ward

This was hands-down my favourite novel of the year. It’s a lingering and haunting look at the generational trauma carried by the descendants of those who were enslaved and lived during the Jim Crow era. One part road trip novel, one part ghost story, the plot follows a fractured, multi-racial family as they head into the broken heart of Mississippi to pick up the protagonist’s father, who has just been released from prison.

29. Full Disclosure / Beverley McLachlin

This is the first novel by Canada’s former Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin. As someone who works in the legal industry and has heard her speak, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this. But, with all due respect to one of the queens, the book was very ‘meh’. The plot was a little over the top, the characters weren’t sufficiently fleshed out, and I felt that the backdrop of the Robert Pickton murders was somewhat exploitative and not done respectfully. Am I being more critical of this novel than I might otherwise be because the author is so intelligent? Likely yes, so you can take this review with a grain of salt.

30. The Long Way Home / Louise Penny

This is the 10th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series. As ever, I fell in love with her descriptions of Quebec’s beauty, the small town of Three Pines, and the delicious food the characters are always eating. Penny’s books are the definition of cozy.

31. In the Skin of a Lion / Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje has the gift of writing novels that read like poetry, and this story is no exception. Taking place in Toronto during construction of the Don Valley bridge and the RC Harris water treatment plant, the plot follows a construction worker, a young nun, an explosives expert, a business magnate and an actress as they maneuver making a life for themselves in the big city and changing ideas about class and gender.

32. The Story of a New Name / Elena Ferrante

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s four-part series about the complicated life-long friendship between Lila and Lenu. In this installment, the women navigate first love, marriage, post-secondary education, first jobs and new motherhood.

33. The Happiness Project / Gretchen Rubin

In this memoir / self-help book, Rubin studies the concept of happiness and implements a new action or practice each month of the year that is designed to increase her happiness levels. Examples include practicing gratitude, going to bed earlier, making time for fun and learning something new. Her journey inspired me to make a few tweaks to my life during a difficult time, and I do think they’ve made me more appreciative of what I have (which I think is a form of happiness?)

34. The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides

I loved the film adaptation of this novel when I was a teenager, but I’d never actually read it until my book club selected it. Eugenides paints a glimmering, ethereal portrait of the five teenaged Lisbon sisters living a suffocating half-life at the hands of their overly protective and religious parents. The story is told through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who longed for them from a distance and learned about who they were through snatched telephone calls, passed notes and one tragic suburban basement party.

35. Time’s Convert / Deborah Harkness

This is a supernatural fantasy novel that takes place in the same universe of witches, vampires and daemons as Harkness’ All Souls trilogy. The plot follows the romance between centuries-old vampire Marcus, who came of age during the American Civil War, and human Phoebe, who begins her own transformation into a vampire so that she and Marcus can be together forever.

36. The Saturday Night Ghost Club / Craig Davidson

Were you a fan of the TV show “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” If yes, this novel is for you. Davidson explores the blurred line between real-life tragedy and ghost story over the course of one summer in 1980s Niagara Falls. A coming-of-age novel that’s somehow sweet, funny and sad all at once, this story delves into the aftershocks of trauma and the way we heal the cracks in families.

37. Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right / Jamie Glowacki

I hoped this was the book for us, but I don’t think it was. Some of the tips were great, but others really didn’t work for us. The other issue is that the technique in this book is much better suited to kids staying at home with a caregiver, not kids in daycare.

38. The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One / Amanda Lovelace

This is a collection of poetry about women’s anger, women’s long memories and strength in sisterhood. It’s accessible, emotional and a bit of a feminist rallying cry. As someone who is obsessed with the Salem witch trials, I also loved the historical backdrop to the poems.

39. The Rules of Magic / Alice Hoffman

I love to read seasonally, and this prequel to “Practical Magic” was a perfect October book. Remember Jet and Franny, the old, quirky aunts from the movie? This novel describes their upbringing, along with that of their brother Vincent, as the three siblings discover their powers and try to out-maneuver the Owens family curse.

40. Witch: Unleased. Untamed. Unapologetic. / Lisa Lister

This book has a very sleek, appealing cover. Holding it made me feel magical. Reading it really disappointed me. From Lister’s almost outright transphobia to her unedited, repetitive style, this was a huge disappointment and I don’t recommend it.

41. The Death of Mrs. Westaway / Ruth Ware

I liked this novel a lot more than Ware’s other novel, “The Woman in Cabin 10”. Crumbling English manor homes, long-buried family evils and people trapped together by snowstorms are my jam.

42. Weirdo / Cathi Unsworth

Another British seaside town, another grisly murder. Jumping back and forth between a modern-day private investigation and the parental panic around cults and Satanism in the 1980s, Unsworth unpacks the darkness lurking within a small community and the way society’s outcasts are often used as scapegoats. The creep factor grows as the story unfolds.

43. Mabon: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Autumn Equinox / Diana Rajchel

And so begins my witchy education. I have to admit, I really liked learning about the historical pagan celebrations and superstitions surrounding harvest time. I also liked reading about spells and incantations… ooooOOOOoooo!

44. From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death / Caitlin Doughty

In North America, we are so removed from death that we are unequipped to process it when someone close to us dies. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In this non-fiction account, Doughty, a mortician based in L.A., travels the world learning about the business of death, the cultural customs around mortality, and the rituals of care and compassion for the deceased in ten different places. It seems that the closer we are to death, the less we’ll fear it, and the better-equipped we’ll be to process loss and grief in healthy ways.

45. Samhain: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Halloween / Diana Rajchel

Did you know that Samhain is actually pronounced “Sow-en”? I didn’t until I read this book, and felt very intelligent indeed, when later, while watching “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” on Netflix, the head witch pronounced the word as “Sam-hain”, destroying the writers’ credibility in one instant. I am a witch now.

46. See What I Have Done / Sarah Schmidt

This novel is a retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders, illuminated through four characters – Lizzie herself, the Borden’s maid Bridget, Lizzie’s sister, and a mysterious man hired the day before the murders by Lizzie’s uncle to intimidate Mr. Borden (one of the murder victims). I knew very little about the murders before reading this book, but this version of the tale strongly suggests that Lizzie really is the murderer. Unhinged, childlike, selfish and manipulative, I hated her so much and felt awful for everyone that had to live in her orbit.

47. The Nature of the Beast / Louise Penny

In the 11th installment of Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series, she sets the story up with a parallel to the boy who cried wolf and introduces us to her first killer without a soul. Crimes of passion and greed abound in Penny’s universe, but a crime of pure, cold evil? This is a first.

48. How Are You Going to Save Yourself? / J.M. Holmes

This is a powerful collection of short stories about what it’s like to be a Black man in America right now. It’s about Black male friendship, fathers and sons, outright racism and dealing with a lifetime of microaggressions. Holmes makes some risky and bold decisions with his characters, even playing into some of the harmful stereotypes about Black men while subverting some of the others. This book really stayed with me. One disturbing story in particular I kept turning around and around in my mind for days afterward.

49. Split Tooth / Tanya Tagaq

This is a beautiful story about a young Inuit girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, combining gritty anecdotes about bullying, friendship, family and addiction with Inuit myth, legend, and the magic of the Arctic. The most evocative and otherworldly scenes in the novel took place under the Northern Lights and left me kind of mesmerized.

50. Motherhood / Sheila Heti

Heti’s book is a work of fiction styled as a memoir, during which the protagonist, nearing her 40s, weighs the pros and cons of having a baby. I’ve maybe never felt so “seen” by an author before. I agonized over the decision about whether to have a baby for years before finally making a decision. The unsatisfying, but freeing conclusion that both the author and I came to is that for many of us there is no right choice (but no wrong choice either).

51. The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories / P.D. James

This is a short collection of James’ four “Christmas-y” mysteries published over the course of a number of years. It was a perfect cozy read to welcome the holiday season.

52. The Christmas Sisters / Sarah Morgan

Morgan’s story is a Hallmark holiday movie in book form. A family experiencing emotional turmoil at Christmas? Check. Predictable romances, old and new? Check. A beautiful, festive setting? Check. (In this case, it’s a rustic inn nestled in the Scottish Highlands). This novel is fluff, but the most delightful kind.

53. Jonny Appleseed / Joshua Whitehead

Jonny is a Two-Spirit Ojibway-Cree person who leaves the reservation in his early 20s to escape his community’s homophobia and make it in the city. Making ends meet as a cybersex worker, the action begins when he has to scrape together enough cash to make it home to the “rez” (and all the loose ends he left behind there) for a funeral. The emotional heart of the novel are Jonny’s relationships with his kokum (grandmother) and his best friend / part-time lover Tias.

54. Yule: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Winter Solstice / Susan Pesznecker

Do you folks believe that I’m a witch now? I am, okay? I even spoke an incantation to Old Mother Winter while staring into the flame of a candle after reading this book.

55. Half Spent Was the Night: A Witches’ Yuletide / Ami McKay

Old-timey witches? At Christmas time? At an elaborate New Year’s Eve masked ball? Be still my heart. This novella was just what I wanted to read in those lost days between Christmas and New Year’s. You’ll appreciate it even more if you’ve already read Ami McKay’s previous novel “The Witches of New York”, as it features the same characters.

#50BookPledge 50BookChallenge

0 notes

fallenloverecords · 7 years

Text

Questionnaire: Sleuth

Hi lovers! Secret Gardens is a picnic pop compilation of songs about spring. Pre-orders are now open.

Sleuth are an indiepop band from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Secret Gardens features their unreleased song "A Point Of View." Fallen Love head Harley spoke with Jasper. Fallen Love Records: Who are Sleuth? Jasper: As of today Sleuth is a fake gang with Julian, Oliver, Jon, and me. I always liked the idea of gangs, outside of the violence and negative connotations. More like the gangs in S.E. Hinton novels. Even when she was trying to portray all the violence and dangerous sides of masculinity she also got to the heart of sensitivity and camaraderie. So, in my mind, Sleuth is a bit like a gang in an S.E. Hinton novel and I'm too old to be in the gang but you're never too old to have friends. FLR: How did Sleuth start? J: Originally I played as The Lion In Love, which is my less catchy version of an elaborate S.E. Hinton gang nickname. (You've got your Ponyboys, Soda Pops, and so on.) It was a solo project using my songs with Julian accompanying mainly on drums. We noticed that our writing styles are similar enough that pretending it was a solo project would have been a disservice to Julian's talents so we decided to call ourselves a band and named ourselves after a play. I wanted something funny like Joan Crawford's Eyebrows but then I think the joke would've grown old quickly so I'm glad he vetoed. We recruited Oliver a couple months later as he was one of my only friends in art school and he dabbled in keys. I love synthesizers and used to know quite a bit about them but I'm not a talented pianist at all. Jon joined us on bass only last year when I was bemoaning the state of not being able to find a good fit at his house during dinner. I guess it's been around seven or eight years if I count the initial solo project which got absorbed into Sleuth material but, then again, who knows? I still get mistaken for being underage so maybe we were only ten when we started. FLR: What's spring like in Vancouver? J: I have a saying, which I'm going to pretend is wholly original: in Vancouver it is always raining or about to rain. This is especially true during springtime. When it's not raining and it's just a little overcast and a little warm because it's later in the season, that's my favourite. I especially enjoy watching the birds return to the city because I have a soft spot for birds. Like all seasons here I tend to spend much of it under an umbrella, consuming overpriced coffee in various forms, possibly getting struck by a moment of inspiration and writing a song in ten minutes and then not writing another for six months, wishing I was going to NYC and SF Popfests, and seeing movies. For me, spring is something that is more interesting when it's not around, what I pine for when the weather is cold. It symbolizes potential for change in my surroundings and, ultimately, my circumstances and myself. FLR: What would you pack for a picnic? J: I've tried picnics. The problem with picnics is that each time I've attempted the picnic I seem to get attacked by all manner of ants, wasps, and flies. So while sandwiches and tarts (for portability, otherwise a pie is preferred) sound like the perfect picnic foods to me, functionally, I imagine myself bringing some cherry Coke, ideally in a bottle so I can trap out the wasps, and a bag of chips with a clip. Essentially things I can stow away quickly and won't cause crumbs that attract bugs. FLR: Tell us about "A Point Of View." J: One of my favourite writers, Jeanette Winterson, talks about love and its many multi-facets - the slow burn, the white hot fuse that goes out quick. I think I was probably reading a lot of her work around the time that the lyrics came about, possibly The Passion and Written On The Body. I don't think I've ever been able to write a real love song and that's part of what I'm saying in the song in acknowledging my own flaws. Although I think here I may be thinking more about kinds of love, not just sexual love but also familial, platonic, and self-love, or at least acceptance. The line "I am callous(ed), sinking and standing on what I have left", for example, alternates from self-criticism to self-affirmation in the context of the song. It's difficult to see yourself reflected in books when you're a transgender person and, when you do, often it's tokenism at the best of times. Therefore having a point of view that can expand outside of yourself in order to reflect back upon yourself and those you know can help in refining a definition of selfhood and the nature of relationships. That said, I feel like the specific and personal becomes universal. We have all felt most of the things I describe in the lyrics, like when you're so in love that you feel powerful and can do and be anything. Eventually, like all emotions, that leaves. Musically I think I accidentally channelled a lot of Biff Bang Pow!, perhaps an embarrassingly big nod in their direction. I was listening to Love Is Forever quite a bit. FLR: What's a work of art that always makes you think of spring? J: A poem I read when I was 16 seems to sum it up. "The Possibility" by James Fenton. Just because, if all stories with happy endings are really just the middle of another longer story, and the seasonal association of spring with potential, growth, possibilities, and renewal are typically happier, that poem includes the epilogue at least. My other pick is "Iris" by Burning Hearts because it captures the sense of openness and lightness that I imagine when I'm waiting for spring. FLR: What do Sleuth have planned for the upcoming spring and summer? J: It's the dream that the record we began immediately after we completed Out Of The Blue Period will be done by this summer. A massive portion is already done but we also tend to write parts as we record and we record by ourselves, stealing moments and vacancies whenever they pop up. This time around I'm feeling less like a perfectionist and relying more on the the art to come out in the frayed edges and happy accidents. I genuinely feel that nothing is finished until it is heard by people so playing live is always a must. And you must catch us live because I think we sound pretty good. Sleuth on Facebook Sleuth on Soundcloud

#interviews #Sleuth #Secret Gardens

16 notes · View notes

trendingnewsb · 7 years

Text

Glenn Close: You lose power if you get angry

From vengeful mistress to Agatha Christie matriarch: the actor talks about Harvey Weinstein, mental illness and growing up in a cult

Glenn Close and I sit at the corner of a large boardroom table in an intimidatingly minimalist office on the 14th floor of a Los Angeles talent agency. Its the kind of environment in which Patty Hewes, the ruthless lawyer Close played in Damages for five seasons, would feel at home and Im almost waiting for her to stand up, slam both hands on the table and shout, Ill rip your face off or any of the other terrifying put-downs that defined her double Emmy award-winning performance.

But Close is in high spirits and radiates such warmth I barely notice the chill from the tower blocks air-con. After we fiddle with the settings on our swivel chairs, which are so high they make anyone under six foot kick their legs like a child on a swing, the 70-year-old, six-time Oscar nominee and star of stage, television and film starts telling me about her dreams. I have had a lot recently, full of this wonderful love for a younger man. The dreams just keep coming and I wake up thinking, that was wonderful! It wasnt necessarily us doing the sexual act, just the feeling of love.

With her white hair cut to a sharp crop, and wearing a relaxed navy blazer, chinos and black scarf on account of the arctic corporate temperature, she looks stylish and fit. I have never felt better in my life, and I am, like, 70, she says. Im really a late bloomer.

She says she feels a disconnect between how she sees herself and how people may view me when I walk down the street, like: Theres an old lady. You know, there is now this cult of the model. Everyone on the red carpet is made into a model. That is very hard to not play into I have a bit of podge I am trying to get rid of, but its hard. I just think, Oh fuck, Ive been doing this my whole life! But the irony is, you just get better and better with age. You dont feel less alive or less sexy.

In Agatha Christies Crooked House. Photograph: Nick Wall

We are here to talk about Crooked House, the Agatha Christie adaptation debuting on Channel 5, before its theatrical release, in which Close plays Lady Edith, a matriarch of a very dysfunctional family. Close says, Christies grandson came to the set and he validated the fact that it was her favourite book, and the one that had never been adapted. He said when she handed it to the publisher, she was told she had to change the ending, because it was too upsetting and controversial. She refused. Its still pretty controversial.

This production, co-written by Julian Fellowes, might not be as spendy as Kenneth Branaghs $55m Murder On The Orient Express, but the ensemble cast is equally starry: joining Close are Gillian Anderson, Max Irons, Terence Stamp and Christina Hendricks. Close presides over her co-stars with gravitas and grace, in an understated performance that finds the humour in an otherwise bleak setup. But youd expect nothing less from the actor whose 40 years in the business started with star turns in Broadway productions (she won a Best Actress Tony in 1983 for Tom Stoppards The Real Thing). Her first film role, at the age of 35, was with Robin Williams in The World According To Garp, for which she received an Oscar nomination as she did for her supporting roles in The Big Chill and The Natural. Her performances in Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and Albert Nobbs, about the life of a transgender butler in late 19th century Ireland, which she also co-wrote, racked up further Oscar nominations but still no win. This is seen by many as a travesty: Close brings a precision to her film work, honed through her years on stage. She has that rare taut quality Jack Nicholson also has it where you believe that beneath the steely control she is capable of snapping at any moment.

It was this that led Andrew Lloyd Webber to cast her in 1993 as the tragic silent movie star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway. Close reprised the role 23 years later, getting her old costumes out of storage (she has kept all her costumes and recently donated the collection to a university in Indiana) for its revival in Londons West End.

As Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction: Clearly she had mental health issues. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

But it was her Oscar-nominated turn as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction in 1987 that proved career-defining. Thirty years on, Close still counts Forrest as the character of whom she feels most fond; she has admitted to fighting tooth and nail against the films eventual denouement, which turned the character into a bunny-boiling psychopath and Close into the casting directors go-to woman on the verge for years afterwards. Now we have the vocabulary to talk about these things, clearly she had mental health issues, she says.

Close sits regally still as she speaks, emphasising her points by leaning forward and locking eyes. Shes comfortable with silences and often takes a theatrical beat or two before answering questions. Shes all poise and control, but does she ever lose her temper?

I express my feelings quietly. I am not afraid of confrontation, but I am not particularly good at it. If I get attacked, I am not good at attacking back. There is fight, flight and freeze and I tend to freeze. That is not a strength of mine. I love the fact that my daughter Annie [Starke, an actor] is more of a fighter than I am. She doesnt let people get away with shit. While she agrees that women have a harder time being angry, publicly, than men, she says, I have played a lot of characters, and actually anger makes you lose power. Patty Hewes [in Damages] she hardly ever lost her temper, but when she did, it was very specific. I have always felt you lose power if you get that angry.

The collective outpouring of anger among women in Hollywood right now is something of which Close is acutely aware. She says that sexism in the industry has shifted more slowly than it should have done throughout her career: It took Harvey Weinstein and someone calling him out [for real change to happen]. I know Harvey, and he has never done that to me, but people would say he was a pig. I never knew that it was that bad and I dont personally know anybody who has endured that. I would like to think that I would have done something about it.

We discuss whether its possible to separate the work from the personalities involved in it. News has just broken that House Of Cards will be back for another series without Kevin Spacey, after it was originally canned because of harassment claims brought against its leading man. Close wraps her scarf around her chest and fixes me with her electric eyes. Artists, to make a huge generality, walk on a very thin line. Sometimes, like my beloved friend Robin Williams, who was one step away from madness, whatever makes them a great artist also makes them very complicated human beings. Again, that doesnt mean they can prey on and abuse people.

With Harvey Weinstein in 2013. Photograph: Mike Coppola/Getty Images

At the root of the problem of sexism in Hollywood right now is, Close says, biology. I think the way men have treated women, from the beginning of time, is because they have different brains to women. So I am not surprised by it at all. I say to a guy, Tell me the truth, if you see a woman walk into a room, what is the first thought that goes through your head? His answer, always, is, Would I fuck her? It doesnt mean they act on it. If you can evolve into a society where men know that they should not always act on it then there has been a positive revolution. But you cant just say that theyre not going to have the thought that is ridiculous. It also has to be the women, who are not powerful, to be OK to say no and leave the room. I think its unrealistic to say were going to change but we have to evolve.

I ask Close who she thinks is a great man today. She is silent, thinking, for what feels like a full 60 seconds in which I am so tempted to throw out some options: Barack Obama, the Pope, the friendly security guard on reception who let us in

Nelson Mandela, is her final answer, but Im not sure shes convinced. I guess for me, she says, greatness is taking your humanity and still doing the good thing. Its sad to say that there are very few men, who are leaders, who have some sort of moral code that they dont deviate from because of popular opinion.

She thinks we are undergoing a crisis of masculinity: In the public mind, yes. I was outraged when I heard that there was a war against men I was like, are you joking? What do you think has been happening against women for centuries?

Close knows all too well about the misuse of power, because her own upbringing was, as she puts it, complicated. When she was seven, her parents joined a cult. Moral Re-Armament or MRA was a modern, nondenominational movement founded by an American evangelical fundamentalist which extolled the four absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Her father, a physician working in the Congo, sent Close with her brother and two sisters from the family home in Greenwich, Connecticut, to live at the MRA HQ in Caux, Switzerland (Closes mother, Bettine, was a socialite).

She is vague on the details but clear on the impact this experience had on her as a teenager: I was repressed, clueless and guilt-ridden. The timeline is patchy, but Close travelled with MRA in the 60s as a member of their musical groups, and spent time back in Connecticut at an elite boarding school. I had a wonderful time at Rosemary Hall, a girls school, she says. I was in a renegade singing group called the Fingernails: A Group With Polish. But she remained, as she calls it clueless. A lot of my friends knew boys youd have these horrendous dances with boys schools and they would get the guys they wanted and I would just stay with the person I was with.

As Patty Hewes in Damages. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

She was briefly married before going to university. It is a complicated story for me. I was married before college, and kind of in an arranged marriage when you look back on it, and my marriage broke up when I went to college, as it should have. I was 22. But my liberal arts school had a wonderful theatre that was my training, my acting school.

Was that where she finally learned about sex, popular culture, the ways of the world? Not really, she says. I still am learning.

Close has two sisters, Tina the eldest, and Jessie her younger sister; and two brothers, Alexander, and Tambu Misoki, who was adopted by Closes parents while living in Africa. At the age of 50, Jessie spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a weight that had been hanging over the family, undiscussed, for years. Talking about mental illness just wasnt done, Close says. You dont have a vocabulary for it and youre also very aware of appearances. You dont want to appear a crazy family.

In 2010 Close founded Bring Change to Mind, a charity that aims to end the stigma around mental illness by talking openly about it and its effect on families. It was my nephew who was first diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. This is basically schizophrenia with an ingredient of bipolar. And when that happened, it was like, What? My sister Jessie, his mother, didnt know what was wrong. He went to the hospital for two years and that saved his life. Then Jessie was, finally, correctly diagnosed herself.

With sister Jessie in 2009. Photograph: Getty Images

Close felt a duty to her family to give them a high-profile person who is not afraid to talk about it publicly. It affects the whole family. We always knew my grandmother and mother had depression my sister does, I do to a certain extent. But I didnt know my great-uncle had schizophrenia. I knew my half-uncle died by suicide. There was a lot of alcoholism addiction, self-medication. Nobody ever talked about it. I knew my grandmother was depressed, but at first I thought she lived in a hotel, not a hospital, because she always said how good the food was.

Close says she and her siblings are of one mind politically, but admits she does have members of her family who voted for Trump. I tried to understand that. Theyre not crazy people who have been brainwashed by Fox News, but I try to understand the anger, because I think that has been building up ever since Watergate. It was watching that scandal unfold that made her realise Americans have always been naive, we just take for granted what we have, and we always thought of our leaders as good people. With Watergate, people became cynical about government.

Today, she says, Washington is a bunch of self-serving She searches for an expletive and after a second settles on men. She says, Its hard to believe that people are so out for themselves. It goes against what you would like to believe about your country. I feel eloquence is incredibly important for a leader, and we had that with Barack Obama, who made his initial impact because he gave that incredibly eloquent speech, but he lost his eloquence in his presidency. We always need someone to say, I hear you, someone who can put their words into unity and hope and we dont have that. I think the last person may have been Robert Kennedy.

And now you have Trump tweeting nonsense.

Its devastating. Social networks are now like our nervous system, and if you keep pumping that kind of crap into the nervous system, it is going to have an effect on a population.

With Kevin Kline in The Big Chill. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

Close doesnt talk politics with her friends because she doesnt really have many friends. I have always forced myself into situations I am not comfortable in. I am an introvert, and I was painfully shy as a child. I think I still have a big dollop of that in my persona. I read a book called Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Cant Stop Talking and it was a real comfort to me I realised I was that person I had always been. And it was at that point I told myself to stop pushing myself into situations that I dont enjoy. I dread cocktail parties.

She tells me shes pretty reclusive and can count her closest friends on two fingers. I ask if shes still good friends with Meryl Streep.

I have never been close friends with Meryl. We have huge respect for each other, but I have only done one thing with her, The House Of The Spirits.

I apologise for assuming they were pals, being of a similar age and stature in Hollywood, and admit this negates my next question: Who would win in an arm wrestle, you or Meryl?

Close laughs. Oh, I would, because I am very strong.

***

The tightest bond Close has is with her only daughter Annie, 29. Annies father is the film producer John Starke whom Close dated for four years from 1987, but never married. Annie was never a door-slamming, difficult teenager. Close tells me: When my Annie was three, she looked at me, and said, I want you. I knew what she meant. I, at the time, was a single working parent, sometimes even when I was home, working or producing something, I was there and not there.

With daughter Annie Starke in 2010. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

She doesnt think its any easier for working mothers today and acknowledges, I had it easy because I could afford to have help think of the women who cant afford it and have to put their child in some shaky childcare centre. No, I think it is incredibly hard for women. Any person, in any profession, feels that tug [of guilt]. We discuss the intimacy of the single-parent, only-child bond. Once, I went to vacuum Annies car seat as we were moving house, and a lot of life had happened there, so I was crying. She said, Mummy, are you OK? I said, Yeah, Im OK. And she said, Here I am.

She was married to businessman James Marlas from 1984 to 1987 and then, following other relationships, including that with Starke, she married again, in 2006, to venture capitalist David Evans Shaw, divorcing him nine years later.

Would she marry again?

I dont know.

Does she think marriage is important?

I think it is a positive evolutionary component that we are better with a partner. I think to have a partner that you can go through life with, creating a history with, that you can find a comfort with, have children with there is nothing better. This is an opinion I have come to very late in life, at an ironic moment, where I dont have any of that. I dont know if I will again. But I do think its a basic human need to be connected.

Despite this, shes happy on her own right now. This is a good time in life. I do think, what would it be like to have a partner again? But it would have to be very different from what I had before. Then I have that great dream and wake up happy.

Crooked House is on Channel 5 at 9pm on 17 December.

Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazines letters page in print, please email [email protected], including your name and address (not for publication).

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/16/glenn-close-harvey-weinstein-mental-illness-cult-fatal-attraction

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2npFUB4 via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

0 notes

clockworkfromspace · 4 years

Conversation

The Book v2 chapter 2

*Andrè begins to walk about the halls toward the door*

Chris was in there even though he was an Ultrabeings

Jea: Hi Chris!

He waves

Any teachers?

No? Good.

Mr. Taio: Okay everyone. Welcome to Ultra Study. If you took this class with me before, you should know that I am one of the seven most capable people equipped to teach this class.

*Andrè runs outside*

FREEEEEEEEDOMMMM

...

Freedom feels the same as being imprisoned

After school

Jea and Jenifer get on their bus

Josh goes to the car rider exit

*The next day*

Chris was already there

-Josh waits outside the bus ramp for the twins-

-their bus originally shows up-

Chris walks to the bus ramp but sees Josh and walks away

*Andrè shows up to school with a knife on his belt*

Morning

Chris was walking back needing to talk to jea

-the twins walk off the bus but Jea dresses like Jenifer so it's harder to tell them apart-

"Uuhh....jea?...."

-Jenifer subtlety points at Jea-

He looks at jea "Can I talk to you privately please?..."

Jea gasps

"How'd you know it was me? Do wolves have one sort of 6th sense or something?"

"No not really but this is important..."

Weird humans

Imma go inside

Jea: What do you need?

"Something happened yesterday and I need your help...."

Jea: Go on

"Can I talk to you without people around? Please"

Jenifer: I got where she goes

"Fine i-i'm...homeless my abusive brother threw me out yesterday"

Live in a tent-like I do

"So...the reason I wanted to talk to jea is that I trust her..."

Jenny: Need me to pound on your big bro? -she cracks her knuckles-

Need a hit?

Jea: No more fighting! You promised Jenny.

Just stole a night vision scope yesterday

Jenny: I promised I'd fight less.

Well I'm a free spirit

No parents

No relatives

No love or compassion

Jenifer: You dude, who are you anyway?

Andrè

I'm a hitman

Sorta

If someone would hire me

Jenifer: I have a few enemies.

Jea: Jennyyyyy

Jenifer: Kidding! -she mouths- "Sort of"

Heh

Who are you, people

Jea looks at both of them

"I'm not leaving the two of you alone. Now back to Chris"

Jea: I'm Jea and this is my sister Jenny. That's all there really is to us.

"Really...."

So Chris

"Hm?"

Tents are 15 bucks at Walmart

"I am not living in no tent!"

Man up

I live in one

"And I have no money my brother has it all"

Get a job

Jea: No one should have to live in a tent.

Jenifer: I agree but it's not like there's a variety of options

Jea frowns

Welp

My mom left and my dads dead soooooo

Jea: Oh! I know. He can live with us

Jenifer: Dad would never let that slide

Jea: You're right

Jenifer: Though, they don't really need to know...

If they found out

I don't think they'd appreciate having enough bombs in their basement to cause world war 3

Jenifer: Then I'll take the heat.

Jea: Jenny no.

Jenifer: Were not debating this.

Well

It's nicer than waking up to 3 wolf spiders

Jea: By the way, you weren't serious about the bombs right?

Ummm

Maybe

But I do have sniper rifles and assault rifles

Jenifer: Dude, as cool as it sounds, no heavy artillery in the house. Maybe a few handguns. Something easy to hide.

Where the hell am I supposed to keep my mini-nuke?

I'm joking

Jea: Thank god

But where am I supposed to, keep my guns

Jea: How about you keep all of your things that could be used to incriminate you in your tent.

Jea: and OUT OF OUR HOUSE

Jenifer: Also, where are we going to keep them? Andre and Chris I mean.

Jea: no one uses the attic.

Jenifer: Too many webs to clean.

Jenifer: though, if they're willing to clean it out.

Meh

Can't be that bad

Jea turns to Chris

"What do you say?"

He smiles and nods

-later that day, at the end of school-

Jea: Our dad shouldn't be home but just in case, well sneak you through the back door

"And your mom?"

Jea: Dead.

"Oh.....i'm sorry for asking...."

Jea: Its fine.

Jenifer: Come on, our bus is this way

He nods and follows

*Andrè follows*

They get to the house-

-Jenifer leads them to the attic-

"thank you again"

Jea: Anything for a new friend.

Thanks

I only have my micro smg and my 2 revolvers

That's it

Jea: NO GUNS!

Jenifer: Chill out sis

"Dang.."

Hm?

Jea: what's wrong Chris

"N-nothing..."

Jea: Why'd you say dang?

Hello strange human

"Forget i said anything"

hello

my name’s jeff

Jea: What are you doing in our house?

idk i just popped into existence

so who are all of you?

Jea: I'm Jea, this is my twin sister Jenny, this our friend Chris, and some random guy named Andre

I'm a psychotic motherfucker with guns

-You all hear the front door-

Great combination

Chris turns into a puppy and hides

dude that is awesome

Jenifer: Quickly, get into the attic

Jea: And you, mystery guy, sorry but you've got to go

me?

Jenifer: Yeah you

ok *dissappears and reappears in the attic*

Mr. Kon: Girls I'm home!

-Jea walks to the living room- "Hi daddy"

Jenifer: Andre hurry up while Jea distracts him

*wonders why I had to go into the attic*

*Andrè sneaks to the attic*

*whispers*oh hey.

*whispers* why are we in here?

We're not supposed to be here

oh ok

-Jenifer closes it-

wanna see something cool andrè?

Sure

watch this... *morphs into a pit viper and slithers around andrè*

Cool

I would shoot you but that would compromise us

*morphs back into a human*

That would*

don’t shoot me

Mr. Kon notices Christ's tail

Mr. Kon: Jea, did you bring home another stray?

I’m an animagus. I can transfigure into a snake at will

Jenifer whispers: go with it

He yelps scared and runs off

Jea: Yeah. But don't be upset.

don’t laugh at me... *disappears and reappears behind André*

behind*

I can teleport too

Jenifer: I told her not to but look at his eyes.

Mr. Kon: I can't he keeps running off.

so whatcha wanna do why we’re stuck up here

Chris sits down in front of Mr. Kon and looks at him with sad eyes

Jea: Can we pleaaaase keep him?

-Mr. Kon notices a lack of man parts- "I think you mean her and..... Sure."

Jenifer: She meant him. Meet the world's first transgender dog.

Mr. Kon: The fuck?

Jea: SWEAR JAR!

The dog smiles at jenny

Mr. Kon: Are you kidding me?

Jea: Nope!

His tail wags a lot

He jumps on Mr. Kon

Mr. Kon: Ah

-the next day-

Chris wakes up

He gets ready and heads to the bus stop without being seen

*Andrè sneaks out the house and walks to school

Out*

*teleports from the attic to the first block*

Chris was in his first block

ooh hey. I remember you. u were that puppy!

He blushes "y-ya...."

*teleports behind Chris* I can transfigure into a snake

Chris stabs jeff before he spoke not knowing who it was

*writhes in pain* ow-owwww

"Oh god...... I'm so sorry" he bandages it up

i-it’s fine

I heal fairly fast too

*wound stops bleeding*

"So your not human either?"

idk what I am

I’m a teleporting animagus

and I have fairly fast healing abilities

"Which is not human"

yeah

"And you already know I'm not human but anyway what's your name I forgot to ask"

it’s jeff

yours?

"Chris"

well nice to meet you, Chris! *sticks hand out to shake Chris's hand*

Chris shakes his hand

so, who were the other people?

"Idk their classes...."

well, who were they?

"Jea and jenny"

*time skip to lunch*

Jea, Jenifer, and Josh show up

Together

Chris walks up to them he looks at jea and jenny "please don't be mad at me because of yesterday"

Jea: Mad about what?

*walks into the cafeteria and over to Chris*

hey guys

"About your dad seeing me... And hey"

*whispers to Chris* do other people at the school know about us having abilities or do we have to keep that hidden?

Jea: That wasn't your fault

Jenifer: It was a little. He could have stayed calm and rushed to the attic instead of running off as a puppy.

"Keep them hidden"

Jenifer: Though things worked out for the better

"Y-ya...."

damn... that means I gotta walk places

Jenifer: It's better to have him disguised as a puppy then hiding him like Andre

you guys must me Jea and Jenifer. I’m jeff

Jea: We already met

oh yeah

Jea: You popped into our house

still don’t know how I got there

"Ya"

thanks

I wanna pull a prank *smirks*

"On who?"

I don’t know

we gotta find a group of preppy girls

Jea: That would be mean.

I know

Jenifer: Yet funny.

but hella funny

Jenifer: I'm in.

Jea: Jennyyyyy.

ayy... i like your attitude *smiles and looks at jenifer* u seem pretty cool.

well chris can turn into a puppy, correct?

Jea: You're a bad influence -she glares at Jeff-

i know *smirks*

Jenifer: Not really, sweety. I was born this way. He has nothing to do with it

Jea: Yeah but he came up with the prank idea.

"Ya jeff i can.."

Jea: Besides, you've already been written up 11 times and it's only the third day of school.

Jea: Make that 15

Jea: CHRIS NOT YOU TOO

so the plan is, you’re gonna lure them over to you with the adorable puppy eyes

Josh: Can I help?

Jenifer: ew, no way.

"Oh no...."

and then i’m gonna be in snake form and i’m going to teleportin between them and you

teleport in between*

it’ll be great.

Jenifer: More of a jump scare than a prank.

and sure josh i guess you and jenifer can point chris out

yeah but still funny as hell

so you guys in?

"Yes!"

Jea turns around and crosses her arms

Jenifer: Hell yeah

Josh: Yep

-jenifer pushes Josh aside-

#AST

0 notes

holbyconfessional · 7 years

Text

Casualty S32 Episodes 8-14

Finally got caught up. Since this is SO historical now, I’m going to put the whole lot under a cut, save dashboards!!!

Casualty S32 Episode 8

I found the COTW here pretty heartbreaking, the elderly couple with the woman dying from COPD.

Connie finally confirms to Ethan that the patient she's been discussing with him is herself. And then proceeds to blackmail him about his role in Scott Ellison's death, in order to force him to perform an off-the-books emergency embolectomy to save her arm. Great leadership skills!

Alicia passed her driving test, despite being a shockingly awful driver, already responsible for several accidents. Nice.

Casualty S32 Episode 9

Nosy and unpleasant Louise has discovered Sanosi. It gives her an excuse to be rude and aggressive to Dylan, lots. But, don't forget folks, we're supposed to like Louise because she always does the 'right thing' in the end - in this case, spiriting Sanosi off Dylan's boat, just in time to save the day as Connie goes barrelling in, expecting to find something.

Lily is jealous of Iain and Sam's easy relationship. She can't see that Sam is 'a lad' and Iain is so much a lad that he barely hit puberty, and frankly, she's never going to get the grown up relationship she wants from him.

A return of the transgender morgue worker, which was good - I like her. And most of all, I loved the chat between her and Max, where he tells her all about Zoe, and how she left because she was afraid of happiness, and how he thinks about what his life with her would have been like every day. It broke my heart a little. You don't get chemistry like theirs every day, and I wish she hadn't left - him or the country!

Casualty S32 Episode 10

Elle and Marty. Here is where I amuse myself with my outraged old lady rant... Now, I'm not a single mother of three boys, but I'm pretty sure if I was, I wouldn't be having men over to shag in my house unless I was sure that a) it was a solid relationship, and b) they had met my kids in a low stress environment. I don't deny the fact that Elle has a right to a life, including a love life, outside her role as a mother, BUT, as a mother, her kids need to come first when managing such a life, and part of that means setting an example. In this day and age where kids learn WAY too much of their sexual knowledge from porn, I'm not sure it pays as a parent to model anything like a promiscuous lifestyle, and for her kids to come in and find a complete stranger in bed with their mother... Well... You see where I'm coming from. On the flip side, I may not be an Elle fan, but anything that highlights any sort of relationship chances for us older women, in whatever orientation, then I say, you go, girl!

But, also in the story. I don't know how old Blake is supposed to be, but isn't he a bit old for the 'if Mum gets a partner, I'm afraid she won't love me any more' thing? I don't know that much about teenaged boys, but it didn't ring entirely true for me. Going with the chilli powder being nothing more than a practical joke would have sat with me better.

Dylan. I feel really awful for him right now, as someone who doesn't forge relationships easily, he was clearly really attached to Sanosi. Of course, he did the right thing, he's perfectly right that Sanosi could never have the life that he dreams of when always on the run and in hiding, and it was perfectly valid that Sanosi wouldn't be able to see that, and would only see how Dylan had let him down. With Dylan's own history of OCD and mental health problems, I will be interested to see where this development drives him. I am always happy for more Dylan on the screen.

Connie. Right, so her tumour is malignant. Worst possible news. And she's still burying her head. I'm all for not rushing storylines, but I think we need to move on this one, folks. I love Connie, and like Dylan, I am happy for her to have screen time, but dragging this storyline out much more risks losing its momentum, and for it to just become boring. IMO!

COTW, I'm still not sure why the girl was put into care. As a mother, if there is any risk that your partner might in any way hurt your child, don't you ditch the partner and keep the child, rather than ditching the kid??!! I know that jury was out as to whether partner hit mother, but surely all the more reason? Incidentally, I do appreciate how hard it is for some people to escape from domestic violence, but the mother didn't seem like an utterly downtrodden victim to me. Comments welcome from folk who may know far more about it than I do, and no offence meant if I've shown ignorance.

Casualty S32 Episode 11

So, there's a new F1 called Rash, who pukes when he gets nervous and makes lots of mistakes.

Lily and Iain's relationship is a little strained after her jealousy toward Sam, and Lily wants to apply for the project in Hong Kong, but after Iain comes back round and stops giving her the cold shoulder, she self sabotages her presentation so she doesn't have to make a decision. Everything I've just said is wrong on so many levels. I think the way Iain treats Lily is pretty vile. He has a right to be angry over the ketchup/Sam incident, but not to give her the cold shoulder every time she doesn't behave according to his doctrine. He's just a spoiled little brat. And as for self sabotaging for a man, well, need I say more about the stupidness?!! Still, good for her for finally making the right decision, even in the face of Iain's grand and embarrassing karaoke gesture!

COTW continues the theme of unhealthy relationships, with the love triangle of man leaving partner for her best friend. Wake up, best friend, like that dude was ever going to be trustworthy! Proven by his about face at the end. Good for the woman to turn him away in favour of supporting her friend. Who is still her friend, despite the attempt to run off with her man? I'm all for sisterly support, but even I think that might be going a bit far...

Casualty S32 Episode 12

'I know what you did'! Perhaps a wee bit childish of Max, but pretty serious overreaction from Ethan! I hope this Scott Ellison guilt won't be everlasting, because although in reality, I'm sure it will stay with him forever, as a viewer, it's a bit like flogging a dead dog...

I was intially pleased when it was announced Sam was to return to Casualty. And happy to see her for her first couple of episodes. But tonight has helped to remind me just how annoying she could be. I mean, she threw Iain's phone out of a moving ambulance window!! In WHAT UNIVERSE could she possibly imagine that this behaviour might be acceptable??!!! Phones aren't 50p, and people rely on them (rightly or wrongly) to live their entire lives! I can't even begin to articulate how disgusting I think her behaviour was. And Iain more or less let her get away with it. Euch.

Slightly different COTW in the former abuse victim ambushing then manipulating the paedophile into holding up a store. I think the storyline was all kinds of uncomfortable, from witnessing the psychological damage to the victims, shown in the evidence of Ocean's self harm, and the fact that she feels the only think open to her now is to mount a personal vendetta on abusers, by deliberately seeking them out through chat rooms, and attempting to force their arrests through other means. I think the fact that she didn't seem to understand the gravity of what she had done, in terms of the safety of innocent bystanders (collateral damage?) spoke volumes to the degree of psychological trauma that she had experienced. And that is not even mentioning the presence of the paedophile himself, a father to two young children.

The other COTW was the homeless man, who had been picked up for a one night stand by someone of some seeming privilege. I'm not sure what this story was designed to highlight - perhaps a seasonal reminder that homeless people are rarely homeless by choice, but rather caught in a cycle that try as they may, they're unable to break. Perhaps this could have been a more powerful story if it hadn't been chosen to play against the far more hardhitting paedophile case.

Casualty S32 Episode 13

It's about time we got some closure on the Robyn/Glen storyline. I rather enjoyed the huge flashback/fill in the gap section of this episode, I'm not saying I was ever a massive Glen fan, but it was an interesting and refreshing change. I felt a little bad for him at how badly people treated him - on the one hand, I know he walked out on Robyn at the altar, which is an unbelievably shitty thing to do (he should have done it before 'the day' ;-)), and I really dislike people's propensity to 'know' what's best for other people - by and large, folk should have the right to make up their own mind; but regardless of all that, I think it's safe to say his heart was in the right place, and there was of course a little more to it than your average jilting.

Robyn 'He's here to hold his daughter. Who was here to hold me through all of this?' Selfish, selfish person, surrounded by family and friends, support on every side - Charlie and Duffy giving her and her daughter a home, everyone rushing round to be there for her at every turn. I shake my head at her.

On the plus side, lots of 'Dee Dee' in the flashback, which was a winner. I like the mention of his past drunken reveal to Zsa Zsa about his crazy family. Do we know much about his crazy family? Has it been covered before? I'm dredging my memories, but coming up blank. If anyone does have any recollections, do tell me...

One thought I do have about this episode, which is likely highly controversial - as a non-religious person, why is Robyn getting Charlotte christened? I could understand (although not really agree) if Robyn was a churchgoer herself, but why do it since she's not? To cover bases? I think that's rather missing the point of religion, no? (This taken from E12, where Max says he doesn't know why she's doing it as she's not religious and neither is he...) Now, I could continue talking about my opinions on this for some time, but I don't want to get soap boxy, so I shall desist. Plus side of this part for me? Yay, Lexy!

Casualty S32 Episode 14

So, last episode wasn't merely closure for the Robyn/Glen storyline. Because Glen is back. As a porter. Short or long term, I wonder? After all, we know his tumour hasn't been cured, although it's at bay. Ah, well, we'll see. Still, lots of chances to see people be unnecessarily mean to him.

Thank goodness Connie has finally started her chemo. Ethan in charge of the ED, fairly unsurprising that he should initially make a hash of it, only to save the day! I liked that he took Connie there, then went and collected her afterward, though.

COTWs, young boy looking after younger brother suffering from CO poisoning. I really hoped they could stay together.

Priest with a tattoo trying to remove it because he thinks his new congregation won't like it. Is that a thing? I thought priests only felt guilty in the eyes of their god? After all, if he was comfortable enough to get the tattoo in the first place, why on earth would other peoples opinion matter that much??!!

#Casualty #BBC Casualty #Connie Beauchamp #Charlie Fairhead #ethan hardy #lily chao #iain dean #Dylan Keogh #Sanosi #louise tyler #sam nicholls #robyn miller #Max Walker #zoe hanna #Lexy Dunblane #lisa duffin #Scott Ellison #elle gardner #alicia munroe

0 notes

helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog · 7 years

Text

EXCLUSIVE: Jill Soloway on Patriarchy, Privilege and Flipping the Male Gaze

In 2014, Jill Soloway burst onto the digital TV landscape with Transparent on Amazon and quickly became an Emmy darling for its portrayal of a complicated Pfferman clan in transition. Now Soloway, who identifies as gender nonbinary and uses the pronoun “they,” is serving up a second helping of their particular brand of art house matriarchy in the messy, cerebral, hilarious series I Love Dick.

Based on the 1997 book of the same name by Chris Kraus, the story follows a married couple, Sylvere and Chris (played by Griffin Dune and Kathryn Hahn), as they move to Marfa, Texas, where the husband attends an art institute run by a cowboy named Dick. On its face, the show is about Chris falling in love with the idea of Dick (Kevin Bacon) and using that stolen sexual excitement to reinvigorate her marriage and artistic direction, swapping filmmaking for the performance art of writing lusty love letters to Dick, which she pastes all over town. In reality, I Love Dick depicts Dick himself as a muse and explores how that designation unravels him and sends him and the rest of the characters down a rabbit hole of feminism, the male gaze, sexuality and gender norms.

Unsurprisingly, the show was able to plumb those depths courtesy of an all-female writers’ room. “It’s about wanting to keep pure that rage [of growing up other] and not feel like it had to be softened to keep the peace of the room,” Soloway says of the show’s writing staff.

MORE: Kathryn Hahn on Her Most Important Working Relationship

Soloway was born and raised in Chicago and got their start on shows like The Steve Harvey Show, United States of Tara and Six Feet Under. At home, they say they were “lucky enough” to have one parent come out as transgender. That experience became the basis for their understanding of that community, the foundation for Transparent and the inspiration for their own nonbinary identification. Soloway says they spent years as a femme lesbian but eventually identified as butch; however, the weight of that box’s trappings was crushing. Now, they’ve carved out a new path as nonbinary.

“For me, I still have all the rage [of growing up other], but identifying as nonbinary really calms me because I don’t have to go, ‘This is my lot as a woman. F**k, this is what’s expected of me,’” Soloway explains while stressing that they’re not abandoning women.

If I Love Dick, another Emmy frontrunner, is any indication of Soloway’s feminist dedication and furthering their goal of toppling the patriarchy (also referenced in the name of their production company, Topple Productions), the plan is working. On the heels of the release of their newest Amazon hit, Soloway spoke to ET about flipping the male gaze, female empowerment and that pesky patriarchy.

EMMYS 2017: The Standout Performances of the Season

ET: At first, I Love Dick seems to be about unrequited love. Then I realized it’s about turning the male gaze on its ear, and how most men can’t handle that constant attention. It’s also about the male act of looking at women together, whether it’s in porn or just in the everyday.

Jill Soloway: In the pilot, when they’re at dinner and Dick and Sylvere are looking at Chris together and ask each other whether or not she’s a good filmmaker, this is the moment where Sylvere leaves her and joins Dick in this corroboration of male gaze. It is the inciting incident of the whole series, where she’s like, “I will not be the object of the male gaze. I am going to try to find my own way of seeing the world.” The truth is women are used as the conduit for men to be able to enjoy sexuality together.

How has your own identity played out in your work?

One of the things that’s been so enlightening has been moving from femme to butch. When I was more femme, it was my job to hold the beauty. Now that I’m butch and am dating more femme women, I’ve noticed that both men and other butch women want to see a picture of [the woman I’m dating]. They want us to talk about her together because images of hot girls are conduits for men to get together and talk about their desires and their worship of beauty. That’s one of the hardest things about the male gaze as you try to understand it, the ways you’re asked to participate without your consent.

I love when Sylvere asks Dick, “You don’t like being the muse?” and Dick replies, “It’s humiliating.” It reminded me of my high school dream to have a video where I’m fully clothed, wearing a turtleneck and fur coat, surrounded by nearly nude men -- as a reaction to music videos featuring nearly nude women dancing around fully clothed men.

You could see that male gaze back then; you could watch and feel that.

Do you think women can objectify themselves for monetary purposes instead of the male gaze?

If you monetize it, you own it -- and that could be anyone from a stripper to a Kardashian. These are people who are incredibly empowered, who recognize their body is a tool for empowerment. My problem is that empowerment comes one degree away from the male gaze, because you’re trying to get a man to do something by engaging their gaze. For me, the dream of being in the center of the video in the turtleneck is that you aren’t actually being looked at, you’re doing the looking. The fantasy for women, for me, is to be invisible and have my work investigated.

I can’t outrun the problem of people talking about my looks, but I do suffer from having spent years working on how I look as a way to feel powerful. Now I feel this tragic sense of “Oh, my God, I missed so many years of having a full mind.” I could’ve been becoming smarter and creating.

In I Love Dick, the women are speaking from positions of power, regardless of how they identify, their jobs or how much clothing they’re wearing. Did that come from the years you wasted on beauty, like, “Let me allow these women to be their full selves?”

Power is the word of the moment for me. It’s shorter than intersectionality or solidarity, and both words create questions about who stands for whom. We all want power; women want it, people of color want it, queer people want it, gender nonconforming people want it. We all want the power that comes with being the default subject, that’s why we’re full of rage. No man will ever understand what it feels like to grow up other, no white person will ever understand growing up as a person of color. There’s so much rage over not only wanting to be recognized as we are, but also who we would be had we been the original subject, and not been born into this other.

You hired an all-female writers’ room. What was the purpose of that, aside from creating an authentic female experience?

You’re always silently clocking your allies in whatever room you’re in, and the idea of what is “good story” or whether a story is “working” is the kind of thing that people who’ve had more time in the business might say. Like, “Alright, it’s all well and good that we’re just having fun here, but as a person with experience/the guy -- and I’m not criticizing what’s going on -- I just want to make sure you guys are getting this right.” In doing so, cisgender men might be unconsciously advocating for what makes them feel comfortable, and that would be versions of the male gaze. That could damage a blossoming possibility when you have a group of people in a room together who’ve never had the opportunity to do that before. It’s exactly the same thing with people of color. I’m sure if Donald Glover had an all-black writers’ room…

He did for Atlanta; I was just going to say the same thing.

What if someone would’ve said to him, “You need to have just one white person in there. It’s their job to rein you in because you’re going be too black!” Or, for a women’s writers’ room, there was a guy in there like, “Too much period blood!” You don’t even want that physics, so that choice was to create a room without the male gaze.

I think that space made deeper women-centered scenes possible. Like when the lesbian character, Devon, calls out the woman she’s dating, Toby, while the latter is completely naked for a performance piece that Devon thinks is exploitive. It was a rabbit hole of white feminism versus brown feminism, art for art’s sake versus creating something purposeful and a conversation between lovers.

Thank you for seeing that! I think women viewers do go down a rabbit hole with our show. One woman’s empowerment is another people’s disempowerment, and how does that get talked about in a story between two people who are falling in or out of love? So much fun for a feminist intellectual to think about!

Circling back to the man as muse, what kind of direction did you give Kevin Bacon in playing Dick?

I don’t really get too micro when it comes to a scene, I’m more creating a space for everybody to let loose. I’ll talk to Kevin about a larger emotion he’s playing and he takes care of the pain and sorrow. I do think that who Kevin Bacon is, the six degrees of separation, means something. In looking for real connections, he probably felt a little about Hollywood the way Dick feels about Marfa.

How does being nonbinary affect your work and topple the patriarchy, your goal and the name of your production company?

Luckily, I have the privilege to try being femme, butch or nonbinary. I don’t want to be frivolous about that.

You don’t want to be privileged about your privilege?

No, I don’t want to be privileged about my privilege, because there are so many people who would like to walk into another experience and for whatever reason, they can’t. I’ve been able to create space in my life to experiment, and my parent coming out was a big deal because it allowed me to notice, besides my age and where I am in life, “Where and how do I want to be today?” It’s a very strange thought experiment that feels like a little bit like your turtleneck: I’m not what you see. I’m not even the other thing, like, “Oh, Jill’s a guy now and she’s failing at that!” I don’t want to be failing at my butchness either! I just want to be. The nonbinary thing is great because I just step out of all of the questions of what I am.

I don’t hassle people about pronouns because I know how hard it is. But when people get my pronoun right, it’s such a lovely feeling to not say, “Women are this” or “She is this” or even “Butch is this, masculine is this.” I’m neither, I’m both, I’m constantly changing. It really removes me from my own self-talk of failure, a lot of which was gender.

So, the nonbinary identity itself is fighting the patriarchy by not subscribing to a label.

Yeah, it is all off my table.

What does toppling the patriarchy look like for you?

If Donald Trump could dream of being president, we can dream of anything. Things are happening so quickly; I couldn’t have even imagined I Love Dick five years ago, let alone that it would be on television. I have to believe that there could be a world where the shared values that are currently thought of as religious values, like God, actually become shared values like love and justice. I think most people prefer peace, but because of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism or any of the -isms, we’re where we are right now.

A toppled world means that the kind of masculine, war-mongering, dominance-obsessed men that have their hold on our planet would evolve in a positive way. To me, believing that I can change the world through culture, television, books or movies, that’s how I get out of bed. I don’t see it happening in my lifetime, but I have an 8-year-old, and this could be his future.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

#_revsp:new_provider_with_logo_342 #_uuid:b5419843-89a2-3749-8ce8-b60c66444723 #_lmsid:a0VK0000001yfWcMAI

0 notes

global-journal-blog1 · 8 years

Text

With Her Dating App, Women Are in Control

Ms. Wolfe, a founder of the better-known rival dating app Tinder, which was the subject of a damning Vanity Fair article suggesting that it promotes hookup culture disadvantageous to women, left the company in a tangled manner stemming from her relationship and subsequent breakup with another founder, Justin Mateen. She later sued for gender discrimination, accusing her ex of publicly calling her a “whore,” charging that the chief executive had dismissed her complaints as “dramatic” and that her male colleagues had stripped her of her founder title because having a woman on the founding team would “make the company seem like a joke.” The case was settled out of court, with Ms. Wolfe receiving a reported $1 million and company stock.

GJtm.

“I think everyone in this room has had terrible dating experiences or been in an emotionally unhealthy relationship,” Ms. Wolfe said carefully.

It is no secret her relationship with Mr. Mateen fell into that category, in part because dozens of their text messages were published on gossip blogs like Valleywag and TMZ. “But I’ve thought long and hard about this,” she added, “and I think a lot of the dysfunction around dating has to do with men having the control. So how do we put more control in women’s hands?”

Most heterosexual women who have played the online dating game have cringed or worse on occasion. Accounts like Tindernightmares, detailing the most horrific pickup lines, and ByeFelipe, which calls out men who turn hostile when rejected, don’t have millions of followers for nothing: They are snapshots of what it is to be a woman swiping online, for whom harassment is a rite of passage. There are men who won’t swipe a woman above a certain age (often 29), unrequested crotch shots, that notorious OKCupid report about racial preferences and all sorts of other depressingly archaic behaviors, as detailed in pop psychology studies and books like “Dataclysm,” by Christian Rudder, the founder of OKCupid. According to a study from the American Psychological Association last year, Tinder users report lower self-esteem, self-worth and dissatisfaction with their looks, with women more affected.

GJtm.

Enter Bumble — or what has been called “feminist Tinder.” It won’t change the rules of dating overnight, but in the ecosystem of online dating, it aims to be a little less agonizing for women. It features photo verification that assuages users’ fears that they might be getting catfished (lured into an online relationship with a false identity) and security that makes it easy to report harassment. The company says its abuse report rate is among the lowest of its competitors, at 0.005 percent.

Photo

Whitney Wolfe, far left, holds a meeting at headquarters. The app is two years old and employs about 35 people. Credit Drew Anthony Smith for The New York Times

And the tolerance for nastiness is low. After a female user sent screenshots to Bumble of a conversation with a guy named “Connor,” in which he ranted about “gold-digging whores,” the company barred him, detailing its thinking in an open letter that ended “#LaterConnor.” Another man was barred for fat-shaming. Users regularly receive notifications to “bee nice,” sometimes with saucy emojis.

GJtm.

But its main innovation may be that it lets women be the hunters, not the hunted.

“I always felt that for me as a woman, I always had to wait around,” Ms. Wolfe said. “In all other arenas, I was ambitious and a go-getter, but when it came to dating, I wasn’t supposed to go after what I wanted. And so I essentially said, O.K., here’s what we’re going to do: Women make the first move. And they’re going to do so in 24 hours or the match disappears, so she feels encouraged to do it.

“Much like Cinderella, if she waits, the carriage is going to turn into a pumpkin.”

Of course, not every woman wants to make the first move, or feels comfortable doing it. “It strikes me as just another thing that we as women have to do,” Meredith Fineman, a digital strategist in Washington, said with some weariness.

GJtm.

And if you’re one of those people who still subscribes to “The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right,” the 1995 self-help book that advised women to act elusive and demure, wait for the guy to make the first move and thus end up with a wedding ring, Bumble may seem radical.

GJtm.

But have we really moved on from the old-school rules of attraction?

Ms. Wolfe thinks technology turned the traditional mating dance into more of a rumble. “I’d read a lot about the psychology around rejection and insecurity, and I had noticed that when people feel insecure or rejected, they behave aggressively, erratically,” she said. “Especially when you can hide behind a screen name or a profile picture. So I thought, how can we reverse-engineer that?”

GJtm.

Her solution: Men have to wait for a woman to reach out — they can’t initiate the conversation — so rather than feeling rejected if a woman doesn’t reply to their pickup line, they feel flattered if she reaches out to pick them up.

Emily Witt, the author of “Future Sex,” which documents her experience as a single person in her 30s trying to understand dating and courtship today, thinks the app helps clear up confusion. “A lot of contemporary dating, a lot of the kind of sense of unease,” Ms. Witt said, “comes from people not knowing how they’re supposed to ask and roles they’re supposed to play, because so many of the dating rituals are so patriarchal. Yet even so, a lot of women are still reluctant to ask a guy out. So I think the revolution of Bumble is taking that uncertainty completely out.”

GJtm.

Ms. Wolfe did not initially plan to change the dating game. She was 23, unemployed and living with her mother when she took a trip to Los Angeles to visit a fellow alumna of Southern Methodist University. The hot water went out, so they went to another friend’s house to use the shower. That friend was Mr. Mateen. That night, they had dinner with his buddy Sean Rad, who was working at a tech incubator owned by IAC, which would eventually become the birthplace of Tinder. He needed someone to run marketing, and Ms. Wolfe was available.

She didn’t have a career plan, exactly, but she had had plenty of jobs. In college, she sold tote bags to raise money for animals affected by the BP oil spill. Later, she volunteered in orphanages in Southeast Asia, excitedly phoning home to tell her parents she was going to start a travel website. “They were like, ‘Can you just focus on not getting malaria?’” she said. After college, she spent a month in a photography program in New York and worked a few odd assistant jobs before moving back in with her mother.

At Tinder, Ms. Wolfe said, she took the app to S.M.U., got sorority women to sign up, then immediately crossed the street to the fraternities and told them all the hot girls were on the app. When she started Bumble, she did much of the same, taking it to universities, signing up college women and assuming — as good marketers do — that where the women went, the men would follow. It was a crowded market, but Bumble now claims 800 million matches and 10 billion swipes per month. It ranks second in top grossing Apple downloads in the Lifestyle category, second only to Tinder.

It was a condition of Ms. Wolfe’s settlement with Tinder that she not discuss its terms. But she made it plain that leaving the company came at considerable cost, not all monetary. Almost overnight, she became what one reporter called the “Gone Girl” of Silicon Valley. To some, she was a heroic survivor of toxic male start-up culture. Others felt that she had manipulated her way to power and that the text messages showed her to be as volatile as any angry ex.

GJtm.

“For a good amount of time I didn’t feel like me,” she said. “And I think eventually my subconscious just said, ‘Go to work. Just go to work.’”

GJtm.

She eventually began working on a social network for teenage girls called Merci, focused on compliments (the tagline: “compliments are contagious”), and it became the basis for Bumble. The Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev, of the European dating behemoth Badoo, stepped up to invest.

GJtm.

The company, which now has 35 employees globally (including two former Tinder colleagues), has added Bumble BFF, a matching service for platonic female friendships; is preparing to roll out Bumble Bizz, a networking app; and has acquired Chappy, an app for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

All of this expansion, however, has not been without hiccups.

Recently, Bumble introduced a subway campaign in New York that used the slogan: “Life’s short, text him first” — only to realize that not every woman is looking for a him, and some “hims” now identify as “hers” or something else. “We really regretted that,” Ms. Wolfe said, noting that Bumble users will soon be able to choose from a number of gender identities. Now the slogan reads: “Make the first move,” which also happens to be the working title of the memoir-meets-dating guide Ms. Wolfe recently signed up to write for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin.

GJtm.

The company is also offering webinars for college users in which experts advise on subjects from “how to do your taxes” to “how to recognize sexual assault,” and getting ready to roll out a Siri-like character called Beatrice, which will call you during a date to make sure you’re fine. Ms. Wolfe also said users would soon be able to chat with an on-call gynecologist (her own).

“Look, are we solving the world’s problems by allowing women to make the first move on a dating app? No,” Ms. Wolfe said. “But I do believe we are helping to change some very archaic norms.”

As if on cue, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery man with a bouquet of flowers for Bumble’s head of college marketing, from a guy she had met on the app.

It had been going well — they had been on a half-dozen dates — until her friends found a video of him engaging in a lewd act online. She didn’t want to ghost him. But for the moment, she wasn’t responding to his texts.

GJtm.

With Her Dating App, Women Are in Control was originally published on GLOBAL JOURNAL

#control #dating #women #news #trump #usa #turkey #erdogan #london

0 notes