#to be clear I don’t think Taylor is a psychopath

[taylorrepdetective]

I’ve mentioned the young swiftie in my life. She’s a young adult who has grown up on Taylor since she was 6. She loves her with her whole heart and was extremely invested in Toe. I think Taylor’s idea of Joe is her dream man so she really bought into it. Nice, intellectual/well-read, artistic renaissance man, humble, no fragile masculinity. You get the idea. She was very sad over the break up 7 months ago.

Then Matty showed up. She is a mild fan of The 1975, so she knew about Matty and thought he was terrible and was not happy at all about it. At some point she mentioned maybe it was just for PR ( I think someone else planted that idea.) she hung onto that idea but expressed a lot of concern about Taylor’s character if she would date a man like that.

She’s heard rumors of her being a bit fruity and I think she thinks it’s probably true but absolutely 100% believes in Toe and hasn’t talked about her bearding, just dating for PR more as a regular celebrity like a Kardashian might do. I do not talk about Taylor being gay and bearding with her. I’ve never mentioned it once, I have always indulged her toe fantasies because it’s nice. It doesn’t hurt anything at all.

But the thing with Matty really shook her. When they broke up she moved on but I think she had been exposed to a lot of the negative stuff that was going around after Matty. Her silence on politics. Working with That Director, etc… and we talked about it just a tiny bit. It seems her Pollyanna view of Taylor had been a little bit tarnished because of Matty specifically because it exposed her to this other stuff. But they broke up and we all moved on and we didn’t really talk about Taylor again much.

But then last night I happened to be with her during the concert. I knew she wasn’t super thrilled with Travis (she sees him as a meathead and not attractive at all. She’s more into the Timothee Chalemet type.) And I told her about Taylor changing the guy on the screen coming home to me to “guy in the chiefs coming home to me,” and let me tell you, I’ve known her throughout her teen years, but when I say she gave me the BIGGEST eyeroll that’s ever been rolled. I laughed and said “yeah it’s a bit extra” and then she just went on this rant. It was fascinating.

Basically she told me that ever since Matty, she’s had to reconcile with herself that Taylor is not the person she thought she was. Keep in mind that throughout her teen years, Taylor was with Joe, so that’s the Taylor she knows. The Taylor that spoke out in 2018-2020 as well, just as she was growing into her own political mind and out there at women’s rights and anti-gun and BLM protests. She basically said “I think there’s a 50-50 chance Taylor is a sociopath” (in all seriousness, not joking around like we do.) We talked about her being a bit messed up by fame and how she has to compartmentalize her public and private lives in order to stay sane. Then she said “but has she? Stayed sane? I don’t think so.” I mentioned about how Taylor has said her life makes her sometimes question if she’s a real person and she’s admitted struggling with this, and all this did was confirm to her that yes, she may very well be a psychopath, and she specifically clarified to me that she meant “evil” psychopath. I tried to be nice and say that her actions generally were pretty benign even if she has a bit of that tendency, and she was unconvinced (see above for the problematic stuff.)

Then I said, “yeah I think about some of this a lot. And you know what, when you hear Dear Reader in this context, it really hits home.” And she said. “Yes! I love that song...”

And that was the end of the conversation. But what I really wanted to say is “but if she’s closeted, she looks a lot more sympathetic and a lot of this makes a lot more sense.”

Maybe that conversation will come in time.

[denimbex1986]

'“So you gonna go have another beer in this beautiful light? Let’s see what the light looks like.”

Andrew Scott moves over to the window. It’s early evening. Early summer. We’ve been talking for more than an hour at Sunset Studios, where Netflix has set up an Emmys FYC space. To be clear, Scott hasn’t been drinking. Maybe later. He’s going to be participating in a panel for “Ripley,” the streamer’s acclaimed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s crime novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in which he plays the striving, cunning psychopath of the title. Me? I’m availing myself of the bar that’s already open.

The Dublin-born actor has visited Los Angeles eight times already this year, and while he loves hiking the canyons and swimming in the Pacific, the thing about the city that he finds extraordinary is the quality of light this time of day, the last hour before the sun sets over the ocean or, in the direction we’re looking right now, the Hollywood Hills.

“When you go for a walk when the day is over in L.A., there’s nothing like it,” Scott says. “And I know people don’t walk a lot here and people definitely think I’m ...” He pauses, searching for the right word. “Like, almost mad. But I walk a lot here. I like a good walk. You need nature. You just need it.”

There’s one other thing Scott needs right now. Maybe needs is a bit strong. But as he made the rounds promoting his Emmy-nominated lead actor turn in “Ripley,” Scott took every opportunity to plead his case that he has been taken far too seriously for far too long as an actor (not that he’s complaining) and what he’d really like to do is — cue the fanfare — star in a musical.

“Yeah, I have been,” Scott says, chuckling when I note all the lobbying he’s been doing. “What can I say? When I was a kid, I loved watching musicals on TV and singing. I just think it’s joy. And I feel like I have good access to joy in my life.”

If you saw the video of Scott at one of Taylor Swift’s eight London shows in June, wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt and dancing with his “Fleabag” co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge to “Shake It Off,” you know this to be true.

“I’m trying to put that energy out there,” Scott says. “You saw it. Why won’t anyone else see that?” He stops, laughing uproariously. “But I do love romantic comedy. I really think that a good one is absolutely joyful. And I love laughing and having a good time.”

Scott has shown glimpses of that throughout a career that has seen him play a villain gleefully embracing anarchic chaos (Moriarty on “Sherlock”), a boyishly seductive priest whose heart belongs to God (“Fleabag”) and a lonely writer beginning a passionate affair with a neighbor just as he’s reconnecting with his mom and dad — parents who died in a car crash when he was 11 (“All of Us Strangers”). He has also played Hamlet on the London stage and, last year, all eight characters in a one-man adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

So if he wants to do a musical, who’s to doubt him? Scott just likes to, as he puts it, “change the dynamic,” constantly shuttling between moods and media, which probably means he won’t be playing Ripley again, even though the series’ finale sets up the possibility of further adventures in a most delicious way.

“The ending is beautiful,” Scott says. But in a “leave them wanting more” way? “Yeah, that’s the thing.”

“The reason Ripley is so enduring is that Patricia Highsmith allows you to imagine what it’s like to be Tom Ripley, a murderer, rather than inviting you to imagine what it’s like to be a victim of Tom Ripley,” Scott says. “When you put someone like that as the protagonist rather than the antagonist, that’s interesting because that side of us exists. I’m not saying we’re all murderers. But it’s human to have that darkness within us. And it’s not healthy to deny that side of ourselves.”

He grins, mischievously: “Or, to put it another way: It’s better to pretend to hit someone over the head with an oar than it is to actually do it.”

We talk about “All of Us Strangers,” how I sat next to writer-director Andrew Haigh at a Telluride Film Festival screening the night after I saw his film and asked, “Is anyone alive at the end of your movie?” Because you can make a case that the film’s near-empty apartment building serves as a stand-in for purgatory.

“That’s not how I saw it, but I’m always fascinated by the superiority of the audience’s interpretation of things,” Scott says. “I remember all the suggestions about what the fox motif in ‘Fleabag’ was supposed to represent. The Angel of Death? Wow! Really? But I love that a piece of creativity can give birth to so many other forms of creativity.”

Discussing “All of Us Strangers,” a movie that Haigh says is about the ways grief and loss encompass so much of our day-to-day existence, feels raw for both of us at this moment. Scott lost his mother, Nora, in March after a sudden illness; I have a dear friend about to enter hospice. He asks me about my late mother — Scott possesses a curiosity born from a need to understand things and make sense of them — and how I process grief today, nearly a quarter-century after her passing.

“It’s interesting that we don’t talk about death as a society because we think it’s morbid,” Scott says. “Maybe I’m just interested in it at the moment. I find myself asking about other people’s experiences. Perhaps I wasn’t as curious before because it wasn’t a need before. And I see that now, and I think talking about it increases your compassion.”

“Do you believe in coincidences?” I ask. “Many of your projects, particularly ‘All of Us Strangers,’ but also ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Vanya,’ had you playing characters dealing with grief.”

“It hasn’t escaped me,” Scott says. “When I was making those things, I was experimenting imaginatively with my own life. ‘What would it be like if I suffered great grief?’ ‘What would it be like to lose my parents?’ And now I have lost my mother. Does that make that experience any less authentic? No. In fact, it has helped me.

“One of the great comforts I have is that the last movie my mother saw was [the filmed version of] ‘Vanya’ because I know that she saw me and she knows the depth of my love for her because I channeled it in that role,” Scott continues. “Her last ever voice message to me was her reaction to that play, and it’s incredible to have that.”

Nora’s influence on her son’s life was enormous. She introduced Scott to acting as well as art; drawing and painting have remained passions throughout his life. “She left me a huge fortune, an emotional fortune,” he says. And now she has gone to what he, like Hamlet, calls the “undiscovered country from which no traveler returns.”

What do you imagine that country to be like?

“I’m trying to read a lot about it at the moment, and the idea of faith, the idea of holding onto something,” Scott says, telling me he’s making his way through C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” a collection of essays on bereavement, doubt and faith he wrote after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman.

“You know, if you believe in something and it turns out not to be true, then, well, OK. But then if you believe in something and it turns out to be true, then, brilliant. Why not have faith in something? And it has emerged that I do have faith in something. I definitely believe in things that cannot be seen or felt. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Sure, I reply. There’s that verse in the New Testament. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Scott grew up Catholic. He recites the verse along with me.

“I think it’s so moving to have faith,” Scott says. “Like the idea of love. How do you define it? Like if somebody said, ‘Show me the proof of love.’ Because the person, what, bought you a car? Because you spent 40 years with them? Neither of those things are proof of love. Love is something that you just feel and sense and it’s a spiritual thing. An awful lot of us still have faith in love, even though that can’t be seen. I believe in love. I really do. I have no degree of shame or embarrassment or self-consciousness that I believe, to my core, in the power of love.”'

[bisluthq]

what makes you think that just because taylor started dating--as in literally just meeting and going on dates with another guy, it's not like she just fell madly in love again and jumped into a serious relationship and all was dandy--like 2-3 months later that it means she was just fine and over everything? you can work on moving forward with your life while still processing the things that happened to you. i think taylor would be a psychopath if she wrote music like that attacking someone, released it into the world months later in an album complete with a 'summation' that AGAIN, attacks them directly, takes personal digs at them AGAIN, explicitly calls them a bad person and lovebomber-- all because she was super sad for a few weeks and then got over it. i'll acknowledge that she's dramatic but I don't think taylor's a psychopath who would do that, while also making it so obvious who she's talking about, just because she's a drama queen. the 'summation' was written after the songs and even there, she makes it clear she saw it as a harmful experience and that's why she's willing to put this out there and frame it the way she has. but people would rather call her insensitive and overdramatic than think no, actually, maybe she really did have a terrible experience and turning it into art has been cathartic for her.

bro idk what to tell you - it was obviously a terrible experience BUT THE ASYLUM/MANIA, PRISON IMAGERY AND ALIEN ABDUCTION ARE METAPHORICAL. I really don’t know how else to explain it. So if you’re someone who struggles with bipolar and the use of the word mania bothers you, I can see your argument. I am not bothered by and of this because I can SEE it is a SET OF METAPHORS. The conversation started because some people - justifiably - feel the imagery is in poor taste. Some people started arguing it’s fine because… *checks notes* Taylor was very upset and was checked in a Victorian asylum?? What the fuck is this conversation even?? You can find the imagery offensive, you can not find it offensive, but it’s obviously just imagery/metaphors???

[backalley-requests]

The Proposal | Chapter One

The Proposal Masterlist

Summary: The Proposal™ au, where Ivar gets swept away in a lie about a fake engagement to stay in the country and needs to convince everyone (including his family) that he’s genuinely engaged to a woman he works with

Warnings: use of the word cripple, mild swearing

Word Count: 1,967

With two cups of coffee in hand and a binder under your left arm, you exited the elevator. It was a delicate balancing act and you already managed to drop the binder once... five blocks from here. Admittedly, the coffees were far more important than that.

“Good morning, Y/N!”

Your head spun around to greet your coworker, a grin on your face. “Well good morning, Paola.” Work was always more pleasant before the boss came in. You walked over and sat upon her desk, enjoying the few minutes of chatter everybody engaged in. It wouldn’t last much longer.

“Did you enjoy your date this weekend,” Paola asked as she looked up on you.

You gave an over dramatic groan and rolled your eyes. “I’d rather not be reminded of it. All he did was talk about his exes. Look, here’s some solid advice, Polly. When a guy says all his exes are crazy he’s probably the problem.”

Granted, you still went out with him to begin with. It was a testament to your own bad taste. “What a shame,” Paola huffed as she leaned back in her seat. “I made a bet earlier with Kara that you’d really hit it off with him.”

“I’ll consider that your karma for making bets about my love life then,” you teased.

The building settled into small talk. You talked more about past relationships and Paola encouraged you to find someone. She was currently engaged, and you figured she wanted someone to relate to her.

“The Tyrant has entered the building!”

A quick warning call from the cubical closest to the elevator. All chatter immediately stopped and people rushed to their desks and pretended to be busy on sight. You hoped off of your friend’s desk and picked your stuff up again. “I’ll talk to you later,” you winked at her.

Right on cue the sound of heavy steps and a cane came from the elevator and out stepped your boss. Ivar Lothbrok. He wore a permanent scowl on his face as he walked by, straight to his office.

When you first got transferred to the department you had been excited to finally get to work with him. The man was handsome as hell. Dark hair, piercing blue eyes, tall. He looked like a dream. His accent didn’t help either. Your dreams had prepared you for some steamy forbidden love office romance, and instead you woke up to the realization that the man was the closest thing to a psychopath you ever met.

As Ivar headed to his office you immediately followed. You knocked twice on the door and entered as usual. “Good morning, Mr. Lothbrok,” you grinned. He didn’t glance up from his desk, his eyes buried in paperwork.

“Set it down on the desk.”

You placed the coffee on his desk and left. There was a routine to things. He stopped being as angry with you even if he was never friendly. You were probably the only person in the office who didn’t get yelled at anymore. Any anger on your end was hidden behind locked lips.

On your way out the door you bumped into Trevor Taylor, the man not bothering to mind his steps as he stormed into the office. You didn’t bother looking back and whistled. It was difficult to hide your amusement. Every so often people came in, screamed obscenities, and got dragged away by security.

—

“You’re firing me!” The voice boomed through the office and every worker immediately stopped. “You can’t fire me, you need me!”

Ivar didn’t glance up, ignoring the postering.

“And you can’t even look at me,” Trevor shook his head. “What are you? Deaf now too? Answer me!” His hands slammed down on the desk.

“Don’t you think an outburst like this is exactly why you’re getting fired?” Ivar’s blue eyed remained frozen. Normally he wouldn’t hesitate to get into a shouting match, say something to make the man cry and watch him leave. The difference today was that Trevor Taylor desired attention so badly that to deny him was more satisfying. Trevor worked himself up to a breaking point. “You should pack your things before we throw them out, Trevor.”

“I’m invaluable to this company. You know that. You’re bluffing.”

“You’re a bad worker. You turn things in late and underperform in everything you do.” The words easily slipped out as Ivar flipped through a file.

“I’m not getting fired from a guy who can’t even chase me down a flight of stairs.”

Those words got to Ivar. The man had had it coming for a while now. “The only reason you lasted this long is that everyone pitied you after your wife slept with your brother. But I didn’t. And I still don’t.” He closed the file and stared up at Trevor.

“You crippled fuck!” Trevor grabbed the coffee and squeezed until it burst open across Ivar’s face and down his suit.

“Get the fuck out of here!” Ivar stood up, grabbing his cane as tightly as he could; thankful the coffee didn’t drip down to his braces. It took everything to avoid throwing something at the man, but he couldn’t deal with another lawsuit like that. “Security,” he called out.

__

Two men came in and Trevor was dragged out kicking and screaming. Everyone in the office watched with great intent. Ivar came out of his office next, drenched in coffee and thankful he preferred cold drinks.

You eyed him and hesitated for a moment before you decided he might need help, even if he didn’t want it. You got up and followed behind him, grabbing the spare coffee.

You found him just inside a private bathroom. The door wasn’t locked and you entered as if you weren’t straight up entering a bathroom.

“I take it that was another successful firing,” you teased to lighten up the mood. He glanced back, his stare shot daggers into your soul. “He had it coming. I don’t think anyone’s taking his side.” You had heard the words being shouted. It hadn’t taken long for Trevor to bring up the man’s legs a few extra times before security arrived times. He had done it in private many times before.

Ivar took off his suit jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. Your eyes couldn’t stop themselves as they stared down his chest. You bit your bottom lip and pried your eyes away. “I don’t care what they think.”

You knew he did. It was your job to know everything about him. You hated him half the time but there was no way Ivar was as evil as he portrayed. “You can have my coffee,” you placed it on the sink counter next to him.

He grabbed it and took a sip. A moment later he eyed you with amusement. “And I’m assuming it’s not a coincidence we have the same taste in coffee.”

“I’m clumsy. Plus, I had a feeling Trevor wasn't about to respond well to being fired,” you admitted sheepishly.

“I should have you fired for ass kissing.”

“What—“, you blinked in surprise.

“Grab my spare from the office.” He didn’t elaborate and sent you on an errand. “And then take these to the cleaners.” He handed you the stained close.

You nodded your head and left.

—

“What do you mean my visa is revoked?” Ivar demanded as he sat before his superiors in his office. “I’m supposed to get my citizenship by Friday?”

“You violated the terms of agreement. You left the country.”

“I went to Quebec! It’s hardly outside the US! And mind you, it was for this company.” Ivar was angry now, this whole thing was ridiculous. “Look— I’ll just reapply again and figure it out all. In the meantime I can relocate back to Europe for a little while.”

“We can’t have you employed here if you aren’t a citizen or have a visa.” The man before Ivar admitted, “and the process is going to take over a year.”

“So what are you saying?”

Ivar already knew the answer, but he needed to hear them say it.

“Unless you can find a way to legally stay here you can’t work for the company.”

Ivar laughed, “you don’t have anyone else even half as qualified as me.”

“Trevor Taylor.”

“I just fired the guy, he doesn’t even work here,” Ivar scoffed. His hands crossed over his chest as he leaned back in the chair. This whole ordeal was ridiculous. Why was he even putting up with this?

“Well I’m sure he’s looking for a new job then.”

Ivar remained silent for a moment, his brain worked fast to find some sort of loophole. He couldn’t just go back home unemployed to his family.

The sound of the office door opening pulled him from his thoughts. He turned his head and saw you there, anger swelling up inside him. You had came to bring back his dry cleaning. Ivar was on edge and anything would set him over expect—

“Actually this won’t be a problem at all,” Ivar stood up and he walked over to you and placed his free arm over your shoulders, confusion clear on your face. “Because we’re getting married.”

“You are?”

You were frozen, unsure of what you walked in on.

“Exactly. We didn’t want to spoil the whole thing, office etiquette and stuff. But it’s true, we’re madly in love. And since we’re getting married I’ll be staying in the US just fine,” Ivar said.

“I get it, we’ve all had an office romance or two. So long as you get it approved I don’t see a problem with it.” The man said. It was clear he was also looking for any plausible excuse to keep Ivar around. Despite the fearsome reputation, Ivar was great for the company.

The two men exchanged goodbyes while you remained dazed, but rather than question things while Ivar’s boss was in the room you waited until the man left.

“I’m not marrying you.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What just happened?”

“That trip to Quebec cost me my visa. If I don’t have one I can’t stay.” Ivar said so simply, moving back behind his desk.

“I’m forgetting the part where this is my problem?” Considering the fact that Ivar was suddenly pairing you off as engaged you figured you deserved to sit in the chair as you argued with him.

Ivar paused for a moment, the gears turning in his head. “Trevor will replace me if I go. He hates you as much as me right now, so unless you don’t want to be out of a job I suggest you agree. It’s only three years. We don’t even have to live together.”

The whole idea sounded ridiculous but in some aspects he was right. You’d lose your job. You spent far too many souless years working here and the idea of starting over was terrifying. “Well— what if I actually wanted to get married?”

“It’ll take a lot longer than three years for you to convince anyone to marry you,” Ivar said simply as he went back to his work. The deal was sealed in his mind.

You struggled to formulate a response. “Fine. But I get a promotion.”

His blue eyes found yours. “And why would I do that, Y/N?”

You blinked in response. It should’ve been obvious why. “I— well I’m the reason you’re keeping your job. You owe me too. That’s three years of my life for your benefit.”

The offer was made and he was forced to think. “Fine.” His hands were tied and he hated it. “Do you want anything else”, annoyance was evident in his tone.

“A proposal.”

“What?”

“A proper one.”

Ivar’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t care for the idea and admittedly a part of him wasn’t sure he could. He couldn’t get down on one knee. “I’m not doing that.”

A moment of silence passed before you gave up. “Fine. But at least say it. Like you mean it.” You were being petty but it was the least this guy could do.

He took a deep breath and stared at you with intent. “Y/N—“ Ivar stopped himself and paused.

“Do you not know my last name?”

There was more silence as you both eyed each other.

“Will you just marry me.” Ivar concealed any embarrassment he felt over the situation. He appeared tense and a little angry. This was a better proposal than you expected from him, all things considered.

“Yes.”

[perfectmusicdestiny]

1989-Blank Space (Lyrical Analysis) Part Two

I had to divide this into 2 parts. There’s just a lot to say here. If you want to read part one, click here. 

Cherry lips, crystal skies I could show you incredible things Stolen kisses, pretty lies You're the King, baby, I'm your Queen Find out what you want Be that girl for a month Wait, the worst is yet to come, oh, no

She’s back to listing the incredible things that she can show him. As opposed to the first verse, which lists “magic, madness, heaven, sin, cherry lips and crystal (clear) skies are more mundane. The relationship is starting to degrade. They have stolen kisses and pretty lies. The pretty lies in particular is a reference to the weak foundation the relationship is on. Their relationship is almost like two kids playing pretend. He’s the King and she’s the Queen. This period of pretending cannot last long. She can only make the bad guys good for a weekend. She can only be the girl he wants her to be for a month. Then, the dam breaks. 

Screaming, crying, perfect storms I can make all the tables turn Rose garden filled with thorns Keep you second guessing like "Oh, my God, who is she?" I get drunk on jealousy But you'll come back each time you leave 'Cause, darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream

As opposed to the crystal skies of the previous verse, we now have “perfect storms. It has been noted that the way the Taylor character is described in this song is reminiscent of some of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. I don’t really have time to get into that on this post, but for those who are unfamiliar with the disorder, people with BPD basically have trouble regulating their emotions. This lack of ability to regulate emotion often leads to very shaky, tumultuous relationships. The narrator is now having strong emotional outbursts. She is a “rose garden filled with thorns”, pretty to look at, but you best stay away. Her partner now realizes that he does not know who she is She gets drunk on jealousy, meaning that on some level she enjoys it or it’s like an addiction for her. What comes out of being drunk though? Being hungover. She will probably regret this in the morning. He, on the other hand, can’t resist coming back to her. She is addicting to the men that she attracts. The Taylor character is dressed like a daydream, like she’s a pleasant escape from the real world. Once the facade falls though, she’s a nightmare that he needs to wake up from. 

Boys only want love if it's torture Don't say I didn't say, I didn't warn ya Boys only want love if it's torture Don't say I didn't say, I didn't warn ya

Finally, we’re at the bridge of the song. It’s interesting, because I almost get the feeling that the narrator is trying to convince herself that boys only wanting love if it’s torture is true, because on the very next line, she says “Don’t say I didn’t say, I didn’t warn ya”. 

What’s fascinating to me about this song is that Taylor Swift took what the press was saying about her, and made a complex character.  A lot of people when they listen to this song seem to think that it’s about a psychopath who just enjoys ruining men’s lives. Now this character on some level does enjoy messing with men, but I do think that there’s also some sadness there too. She’s looking for a relationship that will fill the blank space or emptiness inside of her. She on some level hopes that it will be forever, even though she knows that it’s going to go down in flames. What I’m saying is that this character has layers, like an onion!

[crazygirlsworldofbooks]

Review: No Exit

“Sometimes God puts people exactly where they need to be. Even when they don’t know it.”

Book: No Exit

Author: Taylor Adams

My Rating: ✯ ✯ ✯ ✯ (4 Stars)

Read: May 4, 2021

Synopsis:

A thriller about four strangers, a blizzard, a kidnapped child, and a determined young woman desperate to unmask and outwit a vicious psychopath A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do? On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers. Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate. Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her? There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one? Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape. But who can she trust?

My Review: 

Woah, okay! I wasn’t sure at all what to expect from this novel, mostly because it’s beloved on bookstagram and I haven’t seen many bad reviews about this novel whatsoever and I gotta say, it did not disappoint. It was one hell of a rollercoaster ride and even when I felt like it was over, it revealed another humongous drop and it became clear that it wasn’t. The shock factor is definitely at an all-time high with this one and it doesn’t really take a break, like at all. 

To begin with, No Exit is about a woman, Darby, who is driving home a long way to see her mother ,from college, because her mother is sick. However, she gets caught in a snowstorm and pulls over at a remote rest stop, where she finds a child locked in a cage, in a van. A lot of things happen after this and it’s hard to ever be bored with this book because the pacing is on the faster side and the plot just keeps you guessing because nothing is as it seems in this story. I enjoyed the plot immensely, however it was a bit too much for me at times and I wish it would have slowed down sometimes, even if for just a second. I usually love fast paced thrillers, but this one felt a bit too fast paced for me and I felt like I didn’t have even a moment to catch my breath because the action just kept coming. It definitely feels more like an action thriller than a mystery thriller, so if that’s what you prefer I don’t think you would be disappointed whatsoever.

Further on, the characterization was pretty spot on all throughout the book. Even though it was super fast paced, the author was still able to take us into the minds of the main characters and show us how they see the world. I would have liked to see a bit more into their souls but what we were given was amazing, especially given how much action was packed into this novel. I liked that all the characters had backgrounds and flaws and they all seemed like potentially real people to me. I felt like I could relate to certain aspects of most of the characters, which at least made me slightly care what would happen to them.

Finally, the writing style was precise and to the point, exactly as it should be in my opinion, especially in an action thriller. I was able to picture things as they were happening and could even get a sense of the setting surrounding them, so it was definitely a very atmospheric read and I enjoyed almost everything about it.

In conclusion, if you want a super fast paced, action thriller, then this one is definitely for you. For my personal preference it was a little too action packed and didn’t have enough of the mystery aspect to it. I did, however, have no problems getting through this book because it’s also packed with some intricately flawed characters and the writing just flows without any effort on the reader’s part. Glad I finally got to this one!

[taylorswifthongkong]

Global icon, noted Easter egg dropper, and recent EW cover star Taylor Swift is a pop culture obsessive. Here, in her own words, she gives us a run down on the musicians, TV shows, movies, and authors she’s currently fanning over.

Lady Gaga

“When people think she’s gonna go one way, she goes the exact opposite. She did that Tony Bennett record and won a Grammy. And then she pivots and goes and wins a Golden Globe for American Horror Story: Hotel. And then she pivots and does Joanne. And then she pivots and wins an Oscar for A Star Is Born. That’s so cool, that ability to be so capable in so many different worlds. There’s so much dexterity to her career.”

Amazon Prime’s Fleabag

“I’m really, really obsessed with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her writing. I love Fleabag. I just am so impressed by her body of work, her humor. What I love about is she makes you crack up laughing, shocks you, and breaks your heart all in the span of a few minutes in that show.”

King Princess

“I love the romantic ambience of what she is doing. It is very nostalgic.”

Lana Del Rey

“Her imagery. It’s poetic. It’s also full of modern pop culture and throwback nostalgia. Anything that she puts out, I’m going to not only listen to but do a full read-through of the lyrics.”

Tayla Parx

“There’s a song called ‘I Want You’ by [veteran pop songwriter] Tayla Parx. She’s amazing. I love what a great writer she is. Her catalog is so impressive.  I’d always seen her name credited and I’d always thought, ‘She’s incredible. This writer is so on fire.’ But you hear her voice and you see that she really is a force.”

Sally Rooney

“I really like her book Conversations With Friends. I like the tone she takes when she’s writing. I think it’s like being inside somebody’s mind.”

BBC America’s Killing Eve

“I’m just sort of obsessed with all things Killing Eve. I just watched the first episode of season 2. Jodie Comer doing all those dialects is absolutely incredible to me. Also, I don’t think we’ve really seen such a lovable psychopath, where you really want to hang out with her but you should not. It’s amazing. Oh god, it’s so intoxicating. We’ve only ever seen that kind of endearing badness in men until recently, where we start to see female characters that are able to breakthrough that constant likability challenge we find ourselves in — where men are allowed to be bad but also, you know, wink, it’s very sexy.”

Drake

“I love his one-liners. Like ‘You say I led you on/But you followed me.’ Or ‘This a Rollie, not a stopwatch/It don’t ever stop.’”

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

“I was watching this movie sitting in bed bawling when all of a sudden, society decided that Mister Rogers had poisoned the youth of America by telling them each that they’re special. And I was so upset because my mom raised me with [his] same mindset: You’re special, everyone’s special, everyone’s an individual and deserves to have a beautiful, happy life and do what they love. And I would come home and I would watch Mister Rogers every single day when I got home from school. And that’s the mindset that I try to tell fans. Like, you’re special. You actually are. You’re not replaceable, you’re not worthless. Even if sometimes you feel those things, that’s not true. And so when they’re demonizing someone who tried to do nothing but lift up the imaginations and self-confidence and self-esteem of kids, I was weeping. So I called my mom, and she’s like, ‘Are you okay? Have you been in an accident?’ I was like, [mock cry-shouting] ‘He was just trying to do a good thing!'”

Ciara

“I think that Ciara’s song ‘Thinkin Bout You’ is amazing. I listen to it every day when I wake up. It has the cutest video ever. She’s so nice too. She’s been working hard and just being a gracious, wonderful person to everyone she meets — and challenging herself and making cool stuff. I just love it when people do that.”

Alanis Morrissette

“I love the idea of a confessional songwriter — what Alanis Morissette was doing back in the ’90s [where] she’s just unafraid of expressing raw emotion. That was really inspiring to me. We’re constantly moving further away step by step from the old, horrendous mindset that when a man shares his emotions, it’s brave. But when a woman shares her emotions, she’s oversharing. I think that the more women that tell their stories in an unapologetic, detailed, honest way, the better off we are.”

Dixie Chicks

“The Dixie Chicks were making such interesting music and doing it in such an unapologetically feminine, imaginative way. I was very inspired by the album Fly and the aesthetics, because it was very clear they had really put a lot into the artwork. And so it got my brain thinking bigger in terms of, you know, you make an album, but then you can choose an entire look and color palette and aesthetic and symbolism and imagery and backstories — that you can really make an album even more of an experience if you so choose.”

Dermot Kennedy

“I think it’s very poetic what he says, you know. Like he’ll include the word ‘reverie.’ I’ll be like, thank you  Dermot Kennedy for saying reverie in a song in 2019. We need that.”

Britney Spears’ Laughter

“It’s heaven. It’s like a summer’s day. And it makes you so happy. You wish you were there laughing with her and having a party.”

[michaelmilkers]

I saw in one of your tags that you mentioned how 21 pilots made emo pretentious and im actually curious about why you say that (not hate i just never knew about them that much)

my friend you have asked me about a topic i am very knowledgeable and very angry about so prepare yourself for what you have wrought

it isnt just twenty one pilots but theyre just the biggest and most popular example

like. take my chemical romance in the early-mid 2000s aka the peak of emo. it was very melodramatic and theatrical, the way emo should be. there was a presence of “we are not like other people” in a lot of the songs, but it was never just that. it was more of a “we have been cast out and we kinda suck but thats okay.” one of the best examples of this is, ironically, i’m not okay.

take, for example, the opening to the mtv music video:

[Ray] You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini and croquet. You can't swim, you can't dance and you don't know karate. Face it, you're never gonna make it. [Gerard] I don't wanna make it, I just wanna...

this immediately establishes the song as being about social outcasts and people who dont fit the mold. the fucking tag line of the song is “i’m not okay” ffs, that really tells you all you need to know about the song. but the important thing is it doesnt take itself too seriously either. the music video takes place in a private school, and shows scenes of the band members eating lunch alone, being bullied by jocks and preps, etc., but it ALSO shows scenes of frank putting swim goggles on in chemistry class and ray drawing on his test with a crayon and then licking it, and at the end they all ambush and beat the shit out of a guy in a mascot costume. all of this is cut up by text saying things like “if you ever felt alone” “if you ever felt wronged” “if you ever felt anxious”

do you see the juxtaposition here? the music video could very very easily be a fake deep bullying psa, but its not, because while theyre getting bullied and playing their music in a garage they are also, unequivocally, total fucking losers for obvious comedic effect. it is a very exaggerated and lighthearted version of real phenomena, which makes it more relatable to a wider audience.

the same can be said about the song itself. it has some pretty heavy and angsty lyrics (”i’m not o-fucking-kay”) but the instrumentals are punchy and energetic and catchy and gerard’s vocal delivery is very theatrical but also very deliberate and he still puts real emotion in the words. it sounds like its taking the piss out of not being okay, which is exactly what i as a clinically depressed 13 year old needed, and i bet a lot of other people can say the same. i’m a loser and thats okay. i fucking suck in school and thats okay. i feel shitty and thats okay. i’m not okay and that, in itself, is okay.

with twenty one pilots, on the other hand, there is no theatrics, theres no taking the piss, theres no over-the-top melodrama that made emo what it was. 

take, for comparison, the opening lines of heathens:

All my friends are heathens, take it slow Wait for them to ask you who you know Please don't make any sudden moves You don't know the half of the abuse

and this presents, immediately, one of my biggest criticisms of twenty one pilots: their rampant appropriation of mental illness.

because my first thought when hearing this is as an abuse survivor and someone with ptsd they can kiss every single square inch of my ass.

Welcome to the room of people Who have rooms of people that they loved one day Docked away Just because we check the guns at the door Doesn't mean our brains will change from hand grenades You're loving on the psychopath sitting next to you You're loving on the murderer sitting next to you You'll think, "How'd I get here, sitting next to you?"

they try to do the same kind of nuanced poetic lyrics that my chemical romance did and in my opinion is just doesnt fucking work because they take themselves SO. FUCKING. SERIOUSLY. it sounds JOYLESS. 

and the song closes out with this:

Why'd you come? You knew you should have stayed (It's blasphemy) I tried to warn you just to stay away (Away) And now they're outside ready to bust (To bust) It looks like you might be one of us

this is what i mean by pretentious. there is a clear separation of the person/people from whose point of view the song is told and the people the song is meant to be listened to by from the greater population, but theres no high energy or comedic self deprecation to counteract it. 

now take some lyrics from heavydirtysoul, a song i actually really like the sound of, im not just shitting on this band bc its not to my taste yall:

There's an infestation in my mind's imagination I hope that they choke on smoke 'cause I'm smoking them out the basement This is not rap, this is not hip-hop Just another attempt to make the voices stop

Nah, I didn't understand a thing you said If I didn't know better I'd guess you're all already dead Mindless zombies walking around with a limp and a hunch Saying stuff like, "You only live once." You've got one time to figure it out One time to twist and one time to shout One time to think and I say we start now Sing it with me if you know what I'm talking about

right back at it again with that appropriation of mental illness symptoms! and some dumbass critique of our generation that doesnt fit in with the rest of the song at all, closing out the verse with “we are not like you” shit. the vocal delivery at least has more energy than heathens, but the lyrics just feel like a mishmash of different points theyre trying to make that have nothing to do with each other.

the best line of the song is undoubtedly “death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit” but its poetic just... for the sake of being poetic? its one of those lyrics that sounds like someone came up with and was like “bro we gotta put that in a song” but then couldnt actually figure out how to fit it into a song in a way that would flow. another example of this is “i cant drown my demons they know how to swim” in bring me the horizon’s can you feel my heart. not shitting on bring me the horizon, i really like sempiternal, but thats another line thats just poetic for the sake of being poetic. and to be put on t-shirts. i know this because when i was 12 i had a shirt that said “i cant drown my demons they know how to swim” on it.

i could do more analysis on other mcr songs, namely welcome to the black parade and famous last words, but i would be here for literal hours and idk if people actually care that much.

to sum my points up:

they take themselves too seriously. they appropriate and romanticize mental illness (forgot to mention that top’s website, at one time, described their music as “schizoid pop” lol). they pull a lot of “We Are Not Like Other People..,.,.,,...” shit. 

that last point is not inherently a bad thing, for example the new slipknot album is literally called “we are not your kind” but the song that contains that line as a lyric is all out life, and corey taylor is screaming that entire song and the instrumentals are reminiscent of speed metal with how fucking energetic they are. its edgy and its GREAT. twenty one pilots just sounds like they think theyre the shit.

also, and i want you to read the following sentence in a bass boosted voice to best understand how i feel when i say this:

the twenty one pilots cover of cancer is an embarrassment that completely misses the point of the original song and changed it into a weird amalgamation of lo-fi synth pop.

emo music is dead. thank u and goodnight.

[mst3kproject]

Psychomania

MST3K featured some British movies; they had a couple of zombie movies; and they did way too many biker movies.  So here is a British zombie biker movie, because of course that exists.  I don’t think anybody in it was ever on MST3K except for Rocky Taylor, who was an extra in Gorgo, but director Don Sharp did make a couple of Fu Manchu movies and you know my stance on those.  And if you’re interested, the butler is George Sanders, who sounds familiar because he was the voice of Shere Khan in the original Jungle Book.

The Living Dead are a biker gang I just cannot take seriously, mostly because their helmets look so much like something Kinga’s Boneheads would wear.  Leader Tom is obsessed by the idea of becoming one of the undead.  He’s pretty sure his mother – a psychic who holds seances in her incredibly mod dining room – and her ageless butler know something about it, and tricks them into revealing the secret.  The next day he commits suicide, but he’s back soon after, encouraging his friends to join him in zombiehood.  One by one they off themselves in spectacular fashion, but Tom’s girlfriend Abby wakes up in the hospital instead of the morgue, and realizes this is madness.  How can she take on an entire zombie biker gang all by herself, though?

Spoiler time: she can’t.  Tom’s mom casts a spell that turns them all to stone, Abby has a nervous breakdown, and I guess the butler was the devil the whole time.  It sucks.

Weirdly, I’m one of the few people who seems to think so.  This movie has an eighty percent on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described with words like ‘effective’ and ‘tightly-knit’.  I have no idea what drugs the people who said that were on, because it is definitely neither of those.  As crummy movies go it’s pretty coherent and you do care about Abby, who is the nearest thing to a heroine (although Tom is closer to being a POV character), but the plot is dumb and the zombies are about the least interesting undead I’ve ever seen in a movie.

I’m gonna keep calling the revenant bikers ‘zombies’ but they don’t rot or eat brains, so it’s mostly for lack of a better word.  You’d think being undead would come with both powers and drawbacks, but this seems to involve neither.  They can’t die, and they may or may not have super-strength (I can’t tell), but other than that they’re exactly the same as they were when alive.  Undead bikers walk into churches and wander around in broad daylight with no problem.  They can apparently still eat and drink, although I guess they don’t have to. They’re not even cold to the touch… in fact, when Abby pretends for a while to be a zombie, it turns out even they can’t tell the difference between the living and the undead!

Tom’s mom is delighted to see him back from the dead but when the others start joining him she freaks out, saying it’s evil. I think it was okay when he did it because he had a magic toad amulet to protect him and his friends didn’t, but exactly what the difference is and what it means for them, we’re never told.  If they’ve lost their souls or whatever, we don’t hear about it.  They don’t seem to be any more callous assholes than they were when they were alive. Nor do we learn anything about the locked room where Tom’s father died, even though it sounds like it’s gonna be a big plot point.  There’s a flashback in which Tom’s mother sells him to the devil but that doesn’t seem to relate to anything much.

Based on the setup, I figured Abby would eventually go to Tom’s mother for help and the two of them would defy the satanic butler end the zombies’ reign of terror together, but no.  Instead, the Mom’s getting off her ass to do something about the situation is prompted by Tom’s decision to murder all the police officers and teachers in the country, and it’s the butler who helps her with what she does… which makes no sense after it’s been repeatedly implied that he’s the devil!  The ending we get is one in which Abby’s life is saved by mere coincidence, and it feels like a cop-out.

Toads are a motif of sorts in the movie. There’s the toad amulet Tom carries for protection, and the satanic butler wears a toad ring.  There’s also a toad that Tom catches at the beginning and that the butler seems to keep as a pet until Tom’s mom uses it in her dark ritual at the end, when she turns into a toad as a punishment for breaking her pact with the devil.  It’s obvious that toads are supposed to be connected with evil, but exactly how the symbolism works here is never clear.  I kept wondering if the explanations were cut to fit the time slot… but then I remind myself that this wasn’t actually on MST3K.

I’m equally confused about what we’re supposed to think of the bikers.  The only time we really see them out of their leather jackets and bonehead helmets is when they’re holding their own funeral for Tom – and it’s a pretty hippy-dippy funeral for a bunch of death metal bikers, too.  They all wear bright colours and make flower wreaths to throw into the grave, which doesn’t exactly make them seem like murderous psychopaths. Tom’s the only one who has any prior interest in suicide, and it seems odd that they’d all just hop to killing themselves when they know there’s a chance they won’t have enough ‘faith’ to rise again.  None of them regret it.  I guess why would they, when the difference between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ is minimal.

Some of the badass bikers go by have nicknames like Hatchet, Gash, and Hinky.  The others use their own names, like Tom, Abby, and Bertram.  Yep, Bertram.

The very concept of zombie bikers is one that seems to call for excess, for wild stunts and body parts strewn across the screen, for dark rituals or people losing arms in accidents and then just stapling them back on.  There is absolutely none of that in Psychomania, and it’s weirdly indecisive about the violence it does show. There’s a scene where Tom begins to strangle a barfly, and the bit where a truck rolls down a hill and explodes in a huge fireball, but actual deaths are kept tastefully offscreen (there is a pretty neat shot in which three murders are hidden by a pan around the room, but it stands out as a ‘neat shot’ rather than a storytelling device) and I don’t think I saw a drop of blood or heard a single swear word in the entire movie. Although there was a scene in which one of the bikers pulls up and parks next to a ‘no parking’ sign.

Almost the entire movie is shot outdoors on sunny days, in bright 60’s technicolour, which has killed the mood of many a horror movie of this vintage.  Tom even emerges from his grave in broad daylight, where any self-respecting undead abomination would surely wait for nightfall!  Also, oddly, it seems to take Tom way longer to resurrect than it did his friends.  They woke up in the morgue, before their autopsies even began, while he had time for a whole funeral.  Is there a reason for this?  I have no idea.

I have to admit, there’s some fairly nice choreography (car-eography?) in some of the scenes where the bikers disrupt traffic. There’s also a pretty cool use of mirrors while Tom explores the locked room, although as I mentioned, that’s rendered ultimately pointless.  The hallucination Abby has after her overdose is okay, too – it presents on the one hand the potential eternity with the man she loves, and on the other the horror she will visit upon her family through her suicide, and it’s quite a bit clearer about that than just about anything else in the movie.

The fact that Abby chooses an overdose as her way to die is telling.  The others all choose far more spectacular methods: motorcycle crashes, leaping out a window or off a bridge, drowning in a river.  These are all events that will definitely kill or maim, things there are no turning back from, while an overdose can be treated with minimal ill effects if it’s caught in time.  This goes with what she tells Tom later – she doesn’t really want to die.  She wants to be saved, and so she is (although who found her and got her to the hospital is another thing we never find out).

I guess this is a movie about the romanticization of suicide.  Tom wants to make a suicide pact with Abby so that they can be together forever, and the song performed at his funeral is all about how death is better than being a law-abiding member of society!  Unfortunately, there’s only the most minimal attempt to deal with a suicide’s effect on loved ones, and besides Tom, none of them seem to bother contacting anybody else they knew while alive.  The story does make the point, with Abby’s reluctance, that suffering is temporary but suicide is forever, yet the lack of consequences or limitations on the zombies means there’s no real force behind it.  Free spirited types are known to describe others as ‘zombies’, and inverting this into them being literal zombies could have been cool, but it wasn’t.  The whole movie feels like everybody was too shy to take it far enough.

As a final note, I am obsessed with the set design in Tom’s mother’s house, which is the only thing here that really counts as outrageous.  She’s got one wall painted with a nebula and another with a giant geometric fish.  The latter looks like something you find in bits at the Goodwill and buy even though you have nowhere to put it, and it steals every shot it’s in.  I want to knit a sweater with it as a motif.  Hands-down, the best thing in the whole movie.

[thatyanderecritic]

First Impressions: XOXO Blood Droplets

Hey there everyone, Kai here! As everyone knows, Julie and I are at the end of our rope when it comes to content for the blog. But just yesterday, a saw the download link for XOXO Blood Droplets demo being shared around. Normally, I much rather wait for the full game to be released instead of playing a demo; it’s just not a satisfying experience for me. But I decided to change my tune and give it a try. This is just my impression of the game so far and not a review, since the game isn’t even finished. That being said, here’s my opinion.

TL;DR

Well, I have a lot to say about the game since I’m an otome fan (I’m a picky highly opinionated girl). But I’m sure everyone here cares more if the guys are really yanderes or not based on the screenshots on the game that has been floating around. And my answer to that question is… I guess? Like I said, it’s way too early to give anything concrete. But from what I have seen, the guys are more… how to put it… they all give me this “psychopathic oresama” feel than a yandere feel. The way they all treat the MC rather cold or dickishly, just like an oresama or a kuudere (in Pran’s case). The only real exception to this behavior was from Shiloh, who was far better on the yandere scale since he’s more open with his affections with the MC. I guess we can think of them all as Yandere Hybrids… an oresama-yandere mix but they don’t feel particularly lovesick unless you forcibly trigger that side. They’re all in a 2-4 range on the yandere scale… Shiloh being obviously a 4 and Bae being the lowest with a 2. The MC is on the same boat in that she’s more of a “psychopathic oresama” or maybe a Yandere Hybrid. But unlike the guys, she’s like a flat out 1 on the yandere scale. Let’s just say… she’s not much of a fighter (What a surprise for an MC). But does this make her a bad MC? Nah, she’s actually pretty good and I really like her. She’s just not that great of a yandere herself.

For the story and otome game itself… eh, it’s alright. Besides the psychopathic/yandere gimmick it has, it’s pretty ordinary in terms of otome game. High school setting, check. Slice of life, check. Literally no plot besides trying to get with the guys (and the emotional baggage they come with), check. The most interaction is just the choices and figuring out where the guy hangs out, check. It’s just a solid 3/5 otome game. I’ll toss in half a point, making it a 3.5/5… I can appreciate the quirkiness of it.

Below the cut, I have a more detailed opinion piece that you can read.

Music

Normally, I don’t really mention something like music when it comes to media. It’s mostly a “meh” topic since music is subjective and isn’t something to mention unless there’s something remarkable about it. And the music in this game is pretty… bad. When you first hear the music playing in the background, it’s your generic otome music that you could easily zone out. But then there’s certain scenes where the story turns “twisted” and the music follows suit. Fucking yikes on the twisted music my dude. Shiloh’s twisted music is fine and there’s this second one that isn’t bad either. But there’s this particular song that’s on the tip of being almost ear r*pe. This twisted song is used way more than I would like. Like, headphone users be weary. How to describe the sound… it’s like that weird pitch a mic would do if you scream in a mic and your scream is so loud that it doesn’t even sound like a scream anymore… just pain. It’s that sound that comes up at random intervals of the song… it’s almost like the sound mixer realize it’s a bad idea to make the song completely ear r*pe. I had my computer at 5 volume and it still hurt my ear like a goddamn dog whistle for a dog. Either mute the sound or don’t use your headphone when playing the game.

Art

Again, like music, I don’t particularly like mentioning this since art is subjective. I’m just talking about it since this is an otome game, so I’m just going “why not toss in my opinion on it.” In general, it’s alright. At first, I didn’t particularly like it. But after playing the game, I started to dig it. It’s very cartoony… reminded me of the sort of art a kid would doodle when they’re bored in math class. And I find it rather cute. But I really like the expressions and the eyes… reminds me of twitch emotes for some reason.

Story

Story? What story?

Well, joking aside, there’s really no story here. Not like I was expecting anything. Practically all otome games are like this. Slice of life and the only “drama” would be the emotional baggage the guy you’re chasing after carries. But there’s two things that bother me about the general story. The first thing is that it’s very obvious that it’s trying to push you to play the original game. If no one knew, XOXO Blood Droplets is actually an AU spin off of their original game XOXO Droplets. In the original game, the gimmick there was that everyone and the MC are a bunch of assholes. Since Blood Droplets isn’t the original game, the story progresses as if you should already know the “overall story”, character background, and character family life. Everyone just drops information like it’s the most obvious thing and clearly we should know this shit; stupid players. Well… it’s not like I’m expecting much. Blood Droplets is an AU spin off after all.

The other thing about the story is the over the top/shock value scenes the story would have sometimes. This isn’t exactly a bad thing in my opinion. But some parts feel kinda forced for the whole “OoooOOoOo they’re crazy! They’re psychopaths!” It’s a comedy game and it is a bit funny. But sometimes it’s just cheesy. I think the one scene that got me to roll my eyes was the very first scene where all the guys were going “Sooooo, who do you want to kill the most~?” Context wise, it’s funny but it was made to be an abrupt cut to break the illusion that “everything is normal~” to the audience. We already know this game is supposed to be fucked up and crazy in a funny way, don’t pretend that we don’t already know that.

Love Interests

From all the otome games I played, the love interest cast here… aren’t my favorite. I prefer different casts than this one. Though no one should be surprised seeing how all these guys original counterparts were assholes. If you know me by now, y’all should realize I hate the asshole/oresama type in otome games. I don’t find them fun to chase after and go through the verbal abuse for. That being said, their asshole nature is reflected here… even if they’re “yanderes” now. It’s just not fun. And now, I shall break down each character and why they’re weak yanderes.

Pran Taylor- One word: Kuudere. Based on his looks, he should be my type. But that cold attitude isn’t something I was keen on. But personal taste aside, he was so cold to the point that he straight up just abandons the MC after Shiloh taunted Pran about his parents and the MC not needing him. Not very yandere of him to just ditch the MC once the going went tough. He’s also not particularly affectionate either. If we recall back to the Yandere Hybrid post, I mentioned Kuudere-Yandere mix. To handle them well, we need to really see how the character’s mind is working. But since we don’t see that, Pran just doesn’t seem lovesick. But I have to say: the scenes that he does act yandere was fun and rather cute. He’s probably the cutest with the yandere actions, second to Shiloh.

Jeremy King- What a weird character. He’s a bit of a tsundere besides being a misanthropic clean freak. Unlike Pran, Jeremy’s asshole side and yandere side are more balanced. But since he’s a bit of a tsundere, he doesn’t seem very affectionate. He’s pretty cold actually. Don’t have much evidence for him being a yandere but him overreacting about someone puking on the MC’s shoes and jumping to the solution in cutting off her feet isn’t very… smart? I can’t blame him too much since his quirk is that he’s a germaphobe.

Bae Pyoun- Now here’s the perfect oresama for you all. Probably my least favorite, imo. While Bae does have his moments in being slightly fond of the MC, he pretty much doesn’t care about her interacting with others or showing his ownership of the MC. Like there’s one scene where a side character tells Bae that he’ll take the MC out on a date. Bae just went “Okay then.” I get he’s confident that the MC won’t leave him, there wasn’t even a tinge of jealousy. Not very yandere like of him. While Bae isn’t social cold, he’s emotionally cold. He’s like the least affectionate of the bunch.

Shiloh Fields- I really like Shiloh, lol. He probably has the best yandere potential out of all of the guys. When the MC asked him to kill someone for her, he did. When people try to get in the way of their relationship, he kills them, threatens them, and manipulate people to doing his dirty work. He also stole the MC’s phone and he’s obviously a stalker. His affections for the MC is also very clear too. Really, the only thing that was bad on his part was that he killed the MC by pushing her to oncoming traffic.

Nate Lawson- Probably the next best yandere potential surprisingly. His affections for the MC is there and he’s shown to get jealousy, easily I might add. He’s a bit possessive of the MC too. And… that’s about it. There are a couple of scenes where Nate is clearly jealous and about to snap but that’s about it. He’s mostly a workaholic and cares more about his work than the MC. Wrong priority there for a yandere…

Everett Gray- Eh… I don’t know what to say about this one. Third most likely to have yandere potential. He’s clearly the “flirt” love interest otome games would have. He’s shown to be possessive of the MC and has affections for her. But he has the same problem as Nate in that he has a priority issue. Though his priority list was probably a joke in the game, there was some truth to it. Andddd, that’s about it. Everett wasn’t really remarkable.

MC

As everyone knows, here at ThatYandereCritic have our issues with MCs. Nine times out of ten, the MC usually sucks. But surprisingly, the MC here wasn’t that bad. She’s like a breath of fresh air for MCs. She is an asshole but she’s one of those charming asshole that are actually passible in media. The only issue is her “yandere” side. It ain’t that strong fam. Someone fucking with her man? Eh… let’s just simmer down here fellas. Someone threatening her and telling her to give up on her love interest? Lol you funny… anyways, have a nice day! :-/ I guess it’s just nice that she’s ride or die. Though, she does give up on Nate in one of the paths.

[okdeaky-blog]

don’t smoke

Summary: roger is an asshole and you know it.

Pairing: roger taylor x reader

Warnings: verbal abuse?

A/N: this is my first baby boy please love me idk this is a oneshot because i say it. //lowercase intended//

•••

you took the package of cigarettes out of your bag, that little thing you carried away always was you best partner since that day.

the party was loud and you decided it was best to stay out of that sweaty crowd. you took one cigarette out and with the lighter you started your cancer journey.

you stared to the empty blue sky, just that night the sky was clear and you could see the stars brian talked so much about.

you started to remember some things.

brian was looking at you carefully and you were sobbing softly. roger was flirting with some girls after the gig and you just saw him with his arms around two giggling girls.

“wow roger, you didn’t take any time to replace me.” the girls could touch the tension and left quickly.

“shut up, y/n. i was only talking to them.”

“sure roger, talk me when you know what were your doing.” you turned around and walked away to the bar were brian was drinking.”

“are you ok y/n?”

“no brian, i’m not okay.”

you prayed to be alone, you needed it so bad. and maybe god didn’t exist because you heard a voice.

“so, you smoke now?”

“i always smoked, roger. if you didn’t notice my presence in all the parties is something else.” you snorted.

“you became pathetic with the time huh, always letting down everyone.”

“you don’t have the right to tell me that, roger.”

“i have my rights, y/n. you broke up with me because according to you, we didn’t work.”

“or course we didn’t work, you were always flirting with other girls, making me jealous on purpose. i can’t be with someone who doesn’t respect me.” you spit with rage.

“how many times i have to tell you that i didn’t flirt with anyone. that’s only on your head, love,” you looked away. “maybe i never should asked you for a date.”

“why you have the need to tell me all of this right now? you’re the worst person i’ve ever met.” roger barely saw the tears that fell from your eyes.

“i didn’t came here with that intention to be honest, i wanted to say to you that all the times i said that i loved you, the times i said i dreamed about you, all the cuddling and kisses, all of that were fake. i never loved you and i never will.”

“i don’t care about you anymore, roger. you better get over me soon.” you wiped your tears and looked at him with indifference.

“whatever y/n, you can kiss all the people with you want but be clear that we will never be together again. you can drink all the alcohol you want to avoid the pain but you will always think of me. you can smoke everything you want but you will never feel younger and better, and you will get home to cry alone everytime.”

“you’re a psychopath, roger.”

roger left you closing the door loudly. and that’s how you ended alone in that balcony of roger’s best friend house (and yours too for some good reason) john deacon.

maybe you should smoke to death in there.

[anomiezine-blog]

The Tyranny of the Narrative

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.” ― Hunter S. Thompson

You clicked on the article because of the cool image, right? And you’re still reading because I quoted Hitler, right? In a nutshell I’ve just demonstrated my core point without having to write a complete paragraph. I should quit while I’m ahead!

I’m not quite the nihilist that Hitler was, but like all true Psychopaths, he picked up on an unpleasant weakness in human psychology. For most people, slogans and soundbites have always been the main conveyance of ideology, if you can even call it that. In reality, most people don’t have an ideology (sorry left wing nerds). They form their opinions and prejudices through day-to-day lived experience. How something or someone makes them feel is the prime motivator of mankind not whether rationality is present. Nothing exists in a vacuum however, and I’m not implying that the world is devoid of ideology. Quite the opposite! Forever and always, there has been a ministry of propaganda, and rarely has it been titled as such. For most of history it was the media, whether state or corporate controlled, that provided the majority with their emotive slogans. As long as there has been newspapers and journalists there has been fake news and manipulation. They understood long ago that to appeal to emotion, to employ slogans and soundbites was all they needed to do to see the results they desired.

We must also share some of the blame, we are the product of our evolution and a celebrity obsessed culture. I mention evolution not to imply permanence. There was a time when strict hierarchies, fearless leaders or messiahs might have been useful, clearly that’s no longer the case. It is also clearly true that we have a penchant to idolise celebrities and move with them like a shoal of fish. The fact that 20% more young Americans registered to vote after Taylor Swift told them to, speaks for itself. This has allowed the media to ignore complicated issues like the reality of poverty or direct provision, and instead faun over Ariana Grande’s love life. To ignore our lemming-like desire to follow celebrities, or even worse demagogues, and their self-help slogans doesn’t help us one jot to come up with a response.

If that sounds like a relentlessly cynical view of human society, congratulations you’re beginning to understand what it’s like being a historian. To step back from the precipice for a second, I’m not trying to imply you can’t find unbiased news or that people can’t become informed citizens. You can, but it is exceedingly rare and time consuming. A good rule of thumb for me is, if I’m looking for information on Brexit, I don’t go looking for it from the BBC or Channel 4 News. I might, however, try Al-jazeera English or even Euro News. At least in the case of the former they don’t have, as the Americans would say, skin in the game. Most people simply don’t go to those lengths, they believe the BBC or Fox News in America and therein lies the problem. But to avoid going down a rabbit hole of what media can ever be truly honest or for that matter a philosophical discussion on the nature of truth or bias, I want to focus on why I am writing this article: what are we as Anarchists meant to do about this unpleasant reality?

The simple fact is if you don’t have a media imprint, you have very little chance of convincing anyone that your ideas aren’t the insane ramblings of a pseudo-cult leader (the frequent use of the label comrade doesn’t help). The internet has helped open up the discourse to new ideas, the importance of Breitbart News and Infowars to the Fascist movement in the US is a clear sign of that, but no such platform has emerged from the Anarchist movement (I love Libcom but it’s not being name checked by major news outlets as an imminent treat to capitalism). In any case the google algorithms are beginning to filter out even the limited alternatives that do exist. So what should we do?

In every sense this article is what we shouldn’t be doing, analysing to death something that is rather simple: how do we convey our propaganda effectively through emotive soundbites? Personally I think the only way to do this is to accept two inevitables: The first that we have to fundamentally reconsider the language we use to talk to people, and if that means embracing slogans and simple emotive narratives, then so be it. And secondly either upping our internet game at a time when the state and global capital is shutting off this avenue as an option, or embrace the style of door-to-door decades-long campaigning that no one with an ironically named cat is currently willing to do. Sounds horrible, huh? Do you feel grimy? Need a quick shower to rinse off the cynical slime I’ve coated you with? I understand how you feel, but I also know that part of the reason you’ll stay in the shower an extra few minutes is because I’m right.

[theendlesssummerstory]

Endless Summer, Chapter 1/44 - One magical week in paradise

I lay there, asleep, haunted by a dream.

“Stay down! It’s coming this way!” warned a man in a green jacket.

“Taylor! Give me your hand!” said a man in a white T-shirt.

“You don’t understand yet... do you?” taunted a man in a grey suit. “Of course not. But you will... in time.”

The plane I was on shuddered, waking me up. My best friend Diego gave me a goofy smirk.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.” he mocked me.

“I’m not still dreaming, am I?” I asked him.

“Doesn’t feel right, does it? But we’re finally on our way!” he replied.

Ten students from Hartfeld University had won a contest - a one week holiday in the tropical island of La Huerta. I didn’t know any of the others except for Diego, but I could overhear some of them.

“One magical week in paradise, here we come!” said a ginger-haired female student, smiling.

“All expenses paid, what whaaaat!” cheered a male student in a orange jacket.

“Good thing too!” said a male student in a cranberry T-shirt. “I’m so deep in student debt, I can’t even afford instant ramen.”

I barely took notice though. I was thinking about my dream, because I couldn’t quite fathom what it meant. Diego noticed my weird expression.

“Hey... Taylor? You ok? Bad dream?” he asked me.

“Just a weird one.” I replied. “I dreamt about... him!”

The man in the white T-shirt, the one who told me to give them my hand in my dream, was walking down the aisle of the plane. Noticing this, Diego smiled mischievously at me.

“You dreamt about Sean Gayle? Then what are you waiting for?” Diego asked me. “Talk to him!”

As Sean passed us, Diego pushed me into the aisle, and I bumped into Sean.

“Oh!” he gasped, then smiled. “Hello!”

“My friend Taylor wants to say something.” Diego told him.

“I...” I tried to speak, but I was still a bit flustered. "I... just dreamt about you!”

In hindsight, I’m extremely embarrassed, but at the time, that was all I could manage. Sean, however, didn’t seem to notice how flustered I was.

“Is that so?” he replied. “A good one, I hope.”

“It was actually pretty terrifying.” I admitted, truthfully. I instantly realised how this must sound. “Not because of you though!”

It was then that Sean noticed how embarrassed I was, and smiled gently at me.

“Don’t worry about it.” comforted Sean. “I take people dreaming about me as a compliment.”

Sean excused himself as he passed me. Diego was crying from laughter, barely managing to hold onto his phone.

“Oh man, I’ve got that whole thing on camera!” Diego laughed. “You’ve gotta see your face.”

He handed me his phone so I could watch the video, when I noticed something off about the time.

“Is it really quarter past five?” I asked him. “We should’ve landed an hour ago.”

Diego took the phone back and frowned.

“How strange...” he agreed. “It didn’t seem like you were snoring that long.”

“Hilarious.” I replied. “I’ll go ask the pilot if something’s up.”

“Ok. His name’s Jake.” Diego informed me.

I started to make my way towards the cockpit, when I heard some of the other university students talking. I stopped to listen.

“Can you please cease your babbling?!” snapped a male student with white hair. He was clearly annoyed. “The tour guide is trying to speak!”

“Thank you, Aleister!” replied the tour guide, whose name I knew was Lila - it was on a badge on her yellow T-shirt.

“As your tour guide for the week, I just wanted to say that we should... you know, be friends!” she proposed, cheerily, which made some of the students snort derisively. “It is an island after all, so... you’re stuck with each other! Hee hee!”

Her giggle made me shudder. It bordered on psychopathic.

A female student with maroon streaks in her hair only had one question for Lila - “Is it too late to jump out of the plane?”

Figuring that there would be no more use in listening to the conversation, I entered the cockpit to talk to the pilot, who had his combat boots up on the dashboard.

“Excuse me... Jake, is it? Shouldn’t we have already landed-”

I stopped when I heard him, snoring.

“Hey - are you asleep?!” I asked him, shocked.

He opened his eyes and turned to face me. I recognised him from my dream - he was the man in the green jacket who warned me that someone, or maybe something, was coming this way.

“Boy scout, don’t you know it’s rude to wake someone up while they’re napping?” he asked me.

“Boy scout?” I asked him, stunned. I had a name, Taylor... why did he give me a nickname? And boy scout of all nicknames?

“I give nicknames to people who annoy me.” he explained, seeing my stunned expression.

“What if I gave you a nickname?” I asked him. He looked at me, frustrated, but was clearly trying to hide it.

“You can’t be givin’ people nicknames. That’s my thing. And it takes work to be as good as me.” he said, then looked away from me. “... but give it your best shot.”

"Well... given how you’re a pilot, and you seem to have a slightly rebellious and impulsive attitude, I’m gonna call you Maverick.” I decided.

“...alright. Maverick it is.” Jake relented. “And anyway, about the time, relax. We ain’t landing until-” he stopped abruptly when he looked down at the time and saw how late we were.

“The hell?!” he exclaimed. “That time ain’t right...”

Jake whacked the instrument panel a few times, as if that would make the time go back to normal, but it didn’t.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry boy scout.” he replied calmly. “If you knew half the things I’ve been through-”

It was then that turbulence struck the plane... and I was thrown into the wall of the cockpit! The sky darkened - we had flown into a storm.

“Aw, great!” said Jake, sarcastically. “This storm, appearing out of nowhere, wrecking my beautiful plane... great, just great.”

He turned to face me.

“Get your ass in a seat.” he ordered. “And tell everyone to buckle up.”

I didn’t need to be told twice! I went back to my seat, and tried to get everyone to listen to me, but they were shouting, totally panicked.

“Oh, I am really regretting that airport Chipotle!” shouted the male student with the cranberry T-shirt.

“Don’t puke bro!” the male student in the orange jacket told him. “If you puke, I’m gonna puke!”

“Where the hell did this storm come from?!” exclaimed a female student with a pink shirt and lots of make-up. “The sky was clear minutes ago!”

Jake activated the plane’s intercom.

“Don’t worry, people! This is normal! This happens sometimes!” he said, but I could hear in his voice that this was the worst storm he’d ever faced.

The female student with maroon streaks looked out of the window, where balls of orange lightning were targeting the plane.

“Yeah, sure.” she managed, her eyes wide. She spoke in a sarcastic manner equal to Jake’s. “That is completely normal.”

“It looks like ball lightning...” observed a girl with black, curly hair. She was shaking. “But I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“This is wrong, all wrong...” Aleister complained. “I should not die here, surrounded by these morons!”

Sean, hearing the panicked group, tried to comfort them, as he had comforted me.

“Just breath, everyone! We’ll get through this!”

“Oh no, oh no...” said the ginger-haired girl. She was shaking, unable to stay calm.

Jake activated the intercom again, after a particularly rough spot of turbulence.

“The engine’s just lost power!” he announced. “I’m bringing her down manually! Hang on, everyone!”

All the students were panicked... except one. A female student in a blue hoodie, with her hair in a ponytail and a scar across her right eye, sat a few seats in front of me, silent and unfazed.

Too late, I realised I’d forgotten to fasten my seat belt. The next spot of turbulence threw me off my seat, and I found myself near an empty seat next to the ginger-haired female student. I got in the seat and buckled up, bracing myself for landing. Panicked, she squeezed my hand. I hesitated... then squeezed back. She let out a deep sigh.

“Thank you.” she sighed, then turned to me and smiled. “I’m Quinn.”

“And I’m Taylor.”

The turbulence then disappeared as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had appeared. The intercom came to life once more.

“We’re almost out!” Jake announced.

As he said it, we moved out of the storm, and into clear weather.

“Wooooooohoooo!” cheered the male student in the cranberry T-shirt. “We’re alive!”

A few minutes later, Jake landed the plane on an airstrip at the edge of the island, having to execute an emergency landing.

We climbed out, and I approached Jake.

“Rough landing, Maverick.” I teased him. “Hope you don’t live on tips.”

“Please. I’m a damn hero for getting any of you onto the ground alive.”

Jake wondered off, looking for a guy called Carlos, who could pay Jake and re-fuel his plane. The other students chatted amongst themselves, and I overheard Quinn talk to the female student with black, curly hair.

“Isn’t this exciting Grace!”  she squealed. “This island’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth, with all its beaches and waterfalls!”

“And it’s also home to a plethora of rare flora and fauna!” Grace added.

The male student in the orange jacket shook his head, clearly annoyed.

“Only ten spots on the trip, and they had to go ahead and give one to this dork.”

Sean heard him and scowled.

“Knock it off, Craig.” Sean intervened. “No need to be mad just because no other guys from the American football team made it.”

Craig wouldn’t meet Sean’s gaze, but didn’t argue either. It was clear that he respected Sean.

Diego came to join me... and that’s when I realised that we were being watched. By that female student, the one in the blue hoodie. She was watching us... watching me.

“Got eyes for the mysterious hottie, Taylor?” Diego teased me.

“I can’t put my finger on it Diego, but there’s something off about her.” I said.

“And what would that be?”

I thought about everything I’d seen and heard... and that’s when I realised it.

“There are too many of us, Diego.” I concluded. “Ten university students won the contest, and including the tour guide and pilot, that should make twelve of us. But count us off, Diego. She makes thirteen.”

Diego counted to make sure... and then nodded.

“You’re right. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen her at Hartfeld. So... who is she?”

I looked back at her... and she met my gaze. She quickly looked away, blushing subtly.

“If everyone can please come with me, we’ll make our way to The Celestial!” Lila proposed. The Celestial was the hotel we would be staying at.

We walked on, and I found myself walking next to the female student in the pink shirt with the make-up.

“Hello, I’m-” I started, but she cut me off.

“Listen to me.” she snapped. “I saw you talking to Sean earlier. And I’m telling you, back off.”

She wrapped an arm around Sean.

“Michelle, don’t-” he started, but was also cut off.

“Sean doesn’t need pathetic, desperate famehounds and losers stealing his valuable time.” Michelle told me. “So leave him alone.”

I was angry. Michelle had no right to tell me who I could and couldn’t hang out with. And I knew she was just jealous, probably because she couldn’t have Sean for herself. So I decided to insult her back.

“Exactly. Sean doesn’t need losers. So what are you doing around him?” I asked her.

“Excuse me?!”  Michelle glared at me. It was clear she wasn’t used to people challenging her, and I could tell that she now disliked me, but that wasn’t going to put me off.

“You heard me.” I told her. “And now, you’re probably trying to think of a comeback. One that’ll probably be bad. Don’t worry... I’ll wait.”

Michelle couldn’t reply. She was shaking with anger.

“Michelle, you need to chill.” Sean told her. “And I don’t mean Netflix and chill, I mean actually chill. Please.”

After what felt like years, probably due to the awkward silence, we reached The Celestial. Lila fell into a pre-rehearsed speech.

“The Celestial boasts 25 stories containing 1,200 suites of the finest accommodation you can imagine! Travel and Leisure magazine nicknamed The Celestial the “Jewel of the Caribbean” and included it on their Top 5 Caribbean Hotels list!”

We walked through the automatic doors, and found ourselves in the hotel lobby... greeted by a deafening silence. The front desk had no receptionist, and suitcases and luggage carts lay unattended.

“I... I don’t understand.” managed a confused Lila.

“If this place is so great, Lila... where the hell is everyone?!” asked the female student with maroon streaks.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/23 & 10/25/2018: HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN II (2009)

By the time Rob Zombie made the bold move of remaking John Carpenter’s name-making classic HALLOWEEN, the horror rock-star’s directorial career had already proved to be incredibly divisive. His 2003 film debut, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES drew a cult from among diehard fans of his music, but was largely panned by critics who identified it as a ramshackle, self-indulgent disaster. The movie was little more than a Frankensteining-together of Zombie’s favorite things, but he managed to follow it up swiftly with 2005′s semi-sequel, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. With this project, he appropriated three of the principle characters from his cartoony, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW-like first feature, and reimagined them as the redneck antiheroes of a story that plays like a cross between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE WILD BUNCH. While DEVIL’S REJECTS showed major improvements in terms of drive and focus, it still felt unsettled. It is an emotionally confused movie that has trouble deciding whether its tale is more tragic for the innocent victims of its psychopathic protagonists, or more triumphant, for the Rejects’ anti-establishment swagger and charisma. Rob Zombie displays a refined aesthetic sense, and seems sincere in his storytelling, but he didn’t have much time to let these things ferment into a more potent cinematic brew before he stepped up to bat again with his controversial remake of the beloved HALLOWEEN in 2007. 

Reviled even by the likes of John Carpenter himself, Zombie’s dour, ponderous retelling of the archetypal slasher story was baffling to critics and genre buffs alike. Loaded up with clunky psychoanalysis that flies in the face of Carpenter’s original intention--Michael Myers is PURE NO-REASON EVIL, FULL STOP--this iteration of HALLOWEEN worked for few people besides Zombie’s hardcore stans. In spite of that very large and general problem, the writer-director was back again in 2009 with a sequel to his own remake. With HALLOWEEN II, he took two major creative risks: Bringing the ubiquitous Sheri Moon Zombie back even though her character died early in the first film, and centering the narrative on Laurie Strode’s psychological recovery, or lack thereof, from her original ordeal. It is easy to see how this setup would draw more complex and ambivalent responses. Mrs. Zombie’s appearance as the ghost of Myers’ mother, whose character is plagued by a lot of Jungian nonsense, was identified fairly as ludicrous by many viewers. On the other hand, Scout Taylor-Compton’s return as Laurie Strode takes a character who was little more than a cardboard cutout in the first film, and turns her into a convincing mass of trauma who undergoes a profound transformation over the course of this sequel. As with THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, HALLOWEEN II suggests that even while Rob Zombie can be an incredibly frustrating filmmaker, he still seems to be on to something. Even in my most stuck-up moments, when his smug use of slow motion and arias of unshocking cuss words make me want to forget everything I just watched, his movies nag at me in a way that I have a hard time describing.  I’m just now starting to formulate an understanding of why.

Often, I find myself asking: Who is Rob Zombie? First and foremost, he is a professional nerd. His music, art, videos, and feature films are strung together by his scholarship in all things genre, whether he’s invoking Tobe Hooper’s snuff-like realism, or the innocent sitcom pleasures of the Munsters. Zombie is vastly erudite about horror, and really anything remotely culty. This is actually to the detriment of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, which is so bloated with pop culture references that it almost chokes out the movie’s dubious originality. But while he has that irritating nerdy compulsion to competitively show off what he knows, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who buys and bags comics without even cracking them open. Rob Zombie is clearly, legitimately passionate; it’s heartwarming, and enough to make you want to root for him even when you don’t totally love what he’s doing. His craftsmanship is on point, too, as a multimedia artist whose talent has been abundantly evident since the early band flyer days. It comes as no surprise that he attended Parsons School of Design, and he occasionally shows his hand as an amateur film historian with a love for golden age Hollywood. So, whatever he wants you to think about his hellbilly stage presence, he’s clearly no hick, and no basement-dwelling dweeb either. He’s an educated artist with a background in New York City’s brainy ‘80s noise rock scene. It’s because of this that I find the worshipful attitude his films take toward their sociopathic murderers to be, well...kind of annoying. Why am I supposed to think it’s so cool, as the movies’ punk rock tone suggests, that the Firefly family tortures random bystanders to death for no apparent reason? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie know how tired the whole “scary clown” thing is, and has been for a long time already, even when it’s someone as magical as Sid Haig under the greasepaint? Why do I feel like Zombie’s interest in pimps and ho’s is deeper than just exploitation pastiche, which makes it potentially worse than if it were just a shallow affectation? The thought of this Massachusetts-born college boy fantasizing obsessively about being so crude and violent and salt-of-the-earth is kind of lame. So, instead of just, you know, being a hater as usual, I looked it up--and discovered that Rob Zombie’s roots are actually in the fairway. As Wikipedia aggregates from various interviews: 

While raising their sons, Rob's parents worked in a carnival, but they chose to leave after a riot broke out and tents were set on fire. Zombie recalled the experience in an interview, stating, "Everybody's pulling out guns, and you could hear guns going off. I remember this one guy we knew, he was telling us where to go, and some guy just ran up to him and hit him in the face with a hammer – just busted his face wide open. My parents packed up real quick, and we took off."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Sure, the costumed popstar isn’t an undead cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles Starkweather in real life, but he isn’t a complete poseur either. It isn’t immediately clear, from underneath his mountain of collectory movie references, that he is, more or less, writing what he knows. He isn’t just emulating his cultural heroes, he’s mythologizing his own childhood. 

In view of this, the key to Rob Zombie’s movies is not an awareness of horror history and semiology; it’s actually all about outlaw culture. So, back to 2007′s deeply flawed HALLOWEEN. It’s a heavily bro-y movie, in its outsidery way, that breaks up the Dr. Loomis-Michael Myers-Laurie Strode love triangle, and focuses almost entirely on building a Myers biography. The fascinatingly sullen Daeg Neergaard Faerch plays young Michael, a fatherless boy on the verge of snapping from the relentless torment coming at him from all directions: his slutty sister, school bullies who fixate on his stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), and his mother’s latest violent, depraved boyfriend. Michael follows the serial killer script perfectly, graduating rapidly from torturing animals to brutalizing other kids to annihilating his sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s beau one Halloween night when his sibling chooses sex over taking her little brother trick-or-treating. He soon finds himself installed in a mental institution where he moves on to slaughtering the staff. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) spends years evaluating the boy, though he is ultimately stymied by Michael’s profound lack of humanity. As Michael increasingly retreats behind the folksy homemade masks he spends all day crafting, the opportunistic Loomis gives up on him, instead committing his energy to a money-making true crime/pop psychology book about Myers. Flashing forward, we find the hulking adult Michael Myers (played by the 6′8″ wrestler Tyler Mane) getting ready to bust out of the asylum and wage war on his home town of Haddonfield. There we finally meet teen dream Laurie Strode, a spunky babysitter with a gaggle of gal pals who are perfect grist for the slasher mill. In the final leg of the film, Myers carves his way through Laurie’s social circle, in an apparent attempt to reunite with his sister: Laurie herself. Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) reveals that when Michael’s despairing mother committed suicide years ago, he took her infant daughter and had her adopted out anonymously to insulate her from her family’s tragic history. Laurie, for her part, is unaware of anything other than her need to survive, which she only barely accomplishes.

Naturally, Laurie’s story is the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise so focused on male experience. That is, the experience of needing a father, the ambivalent and ambiguous craving for maternal intimacy, the trauma of having your masculinity impugned by your (fag-obsessed) peers, and perhaps even the undermining influence of academia and capitalism on a man’s natural-born strength and worth. When the newly-freed Michael Myers storms through a truck stop to begin his pilgrimage to Haddonfield, and Rob Zombie chooses to accompany this scene with Rush’s regal outlaw anthem “Tom Sawyer”, it tells you everything you need to know about this take on HALLOWEEN. Like the rampaging Firefly family in DEVIL’S REJECTS, Michael is certainly evil, but he also represents something essential about the formation of and reinforcement of one’s individuality in the face of castrating societal norms--something the carnies among whom Rob Zombie grew up would have found very relatable.

It’s worth noting here that, while the sexuality of the women in Michael’s life plays a role in his distorted development, he is not reacting to their sexuality in and of itself. Michael Myers is not driven by the kind of covetousness that we associate with the archetypal slasher, who gives sexually frustrated male viewers a vicarious thrill by punishing sluts and teases. Michael’s problem is that his mother and sister’s sexuality contributes to his isolation. His classmates use his mother’s profession against him, and that profession keeps her from being able to tuck him in at night. Similarly, Michael doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween with his family and the other neighborhood kids, because his sister is too busy getting laid. Michael is abandoned, even while he still has a home to return to, an outsider even in his own house. 

This leads me to an important point about why the portion of the movie that is devoted to Laurie's struggle is so ineffective. It is a flaw in the film, but a virtue of the director: Normal, attractive teenagers are not Rob Zombie’s people. He doesn’t even participate in traditional slasher movie misogyny, he’s so far away from thinking about them. His movies are full of badass women who are fully possessed of their sexuality, and who wield it like a weapon against hypocrites and assholes, and this is always shone in a heroic light. Moreover, he delights in casting women of all shapes and ages, often assigning them immense personal power, as in LORDS OF SALEM, an enormously satisfying movie about society’s original persecuted outcasts: witches. Rob Zombie is deeply committed to outsiders, and his definition of them isn’t limited to banal lawbreaking--he also rejects conventional beauty and our cultural obsession with youth. His films are populated by all manner of human beings, and the farther away they are from looking like model material, the more likely it is that they’re meant to be the heroes. On that note, whatever you think of his movies, you have to acknowledge that they are almost never dehumanizing. Zombie is an accomplished actor’s director who gets a full spectrum of emotion out of his performers, and who excels at creating a feeling of camaraderie within his ensemble casts. It is this surprising sweetness, and compassion even for the victims of the villains he lionizes, that makes HALLOWEEN II so peculiarly effective.

If 2007′s HALLOWEEN was a remake on which Rob Zombie couldn’t resist draping some of his personal hangups, HALLOWEEN II is almost a completely original and separate entity from what one thinks of as the franchise started by John Carpenter. In it, Michael Myers is presumed dead but his body is missing--and indeed, his character is missing for much of the movie. We find a disturbed, scarred-up Laurie Strode living with her surviving friend Annie, and Annie’s father, Sheriff Bracket. Laurie is dealing, poorly, with a heavy dose of PTSD. Along with nightmares and flashbacks, she also has trouble just being nice to people, or accepting affection. Annie and her father’s attempts to be charitable with their adoptive family member are no match for Laurie’s increasing surliness and mistrust of the world. Once a good-natured and optimistic young woman, her appearance becomes vagrant-like (curiously similar to Rob Zombie’s own casual look), her attitude is more and more nihilistic, and she develops a drinking problem. I’ve always wanted to see a movie with a slasher-like narrative foundation, but that focuses on aftermath and recovery, and recent gimmicky efforts like FINAL GIRL and LAST GIRL STANDING did absolutely nothing for me. HALLOWEEN II--at least, the superbly-acted Strode part of it--is the movie I’ve been asking for.

The other part of the movie is also interesting--or more specifically, it’s as ballsy as it is flawed. The movie gets off on kind of a bad foot when a title card quotes an obscure psychology text book called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams: 

WHITE HORSE - instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.

This is the excuse we have for the fact that the ghost of Deborah Myers arrives with a white horse to compel her son to find his sister Laurie Strode, aka Angel Myers, to reunite their family, presumably in the afterlife. Deborah Myers is kind of a spectral cross between Glenda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, at once welcoming and sinister, drifting in and out of Michael’s consciousness in the company of a sort of ghost of his childhood (Chase White Vaneck, who is no Daeg Faerch honestly). It might be easy to dismiss this anomaly as an expression of Michael’s mental illness, and his desire to experience an idealized version of his youth in which his mother still looks after him--except that later in the movie, during the final standoff, Laurie is shown to be physically affected by these spirits. Maybe the implication is that she and Michael suffer the same psychological ailments, but for them to share such specific hallucinations without speaking is borderline supernatural in and of itself. So, while Sheri Moon Zombie does her best with her impressive force of personality and compelling physical presence, it’s hard to say what this part of the movie serves. When I first saw the film, I was completely outraged by this, not only because it made no sense to me, but because it felt like a cheap ripoff of Sarah Palmer’s similar prophetic visions of a white horse in Twin Peaks. That was all I managed to make of it. 

Today, I still don’t love it, but I have more trouble faulting Rob Zombie for trying to make HALLOWEEN his own, something more than a remake. He also does this by truly letting go of the Shape. The famous William Shatner mask was blown in half by Laurie at the end of the 2007 HALLOWEEN, and scarcely makes much of an appearance in this movie. Michael Myers is a disheveled drifter, literally haunted by his past, whose only real aim is to find a place to belong. It’s sort of funny, in retrospect: When John Carpenter made the first HALLOWEEN, he-by-way-of-Dr. Loomis declared Michael an empty shell of a person, someone who was simply born evil, as reflected by the empty-eyed mask he wears. For some reason, though, a whole legacy of directors just couldn’t resist trying to explain Myers away. The original HALLOWEEN II then says, “Well...what if Michael Myers is on a rampage because LAURIE STRODE IS HIS SISTER? What’s that you say? Why is that a reason to rampage? Ummmm...” And then HALLOWEEN 4 sees him pursuing other young female relations of his, and then in subsequent movies there’s an accursed rune, and druids, and immortality rites, and by the time you get to HALLOWEEN 6 you have this absurd stone soup of bad ideas. It’s a miracle that this franchise became such a thing. Rob Zombie makes the same fundamental mistake, but at least he tries it in the simplest possible way, asserting plainly that Nurture, not Nature, made Michael into a killer. Now, terminally lonely, he’s like a clown waking up in his trailer to find that the carnival left without him. Exiled from mainstream society, he seeks out what remains of his family, who, due to his own violent actions, has grown up more like him than he may have imagined.

I’m not saying I think this was the best thing to do with HALLOWEEN 2. Personally, what I crave in horror movies is something that is farther beyond explanation than this--something that gesturally resembles my life experience, but that plunges past the veil of mundanity into a deeper, darker world of primordial fears and urges, addressing things that unsettle me because I cannot rationalize them. For me, horror is definitionally incomprehensible, and Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN diptych is fundamentally sane. But, I think what I’ve discovered is that these movies are not proper horror movies, in spite of their relentless sadistic violence. They are outlaw fables, with more DNA in common with something like EASY RIDER, than with FRIDAY THE 13TH. It’s funny to watch myself coming to a compassionate understanding of these movies that are themselves about outsiders and rejects who are specifically deprived of understanding. My goal in all this was not so much to convince people of the value of these movies, which one might reject on any number of reasonable counts, but to explain to myself why I keep coming back to them. It isn’t to condescendingly heckle them, and it isn’t just because they’re often handsome-looking, or because they’re so emotionally authentic even when the narrative is less than compelling. It must be because, even when I’ve found him challenging, I can’t help seeing Rob Zombie as a person with vision, someone who heroically eschews common consensus on taste and sense-making--the consensus even among horror fans and his own cinematic heroes--in order to say what makes sense to him personally. Finally, he has begun to make sense to me, too.

[justjessame]

Babysitting Butcher Chapter 44

Our first day back could be considered pretty boring by most standards.  I went through the files and mail that Anthony had handed me upon arrival, Billy dealt with emails and voicemails.  Nothing was too extreme, for the most part Congresswoman Neuman had kept the office running by keeping the chain of command the same, just without me or Billy in the loop.  Simple enough.  MM and Frenchie were unofficially official enough to contend with most issues, so they did.  

Paperwork and requisitions went through Joseph and his group, Anthony manned the entry point and the building didn’t go to shit without us. 

We went out to lunch and when we came back we were ready to get back in the true swing of things, with an after lunch mini dessert break, when we heard the type of ruckus that only occurred when a supe showed up unannounced.  One particular supe.  A massive asshole of a supe who wore a cape and chemically raped me to the point that I almost fucking died, type of supe.  

Billy looked like he wished he had the laser eyes that Ryan had been gifted with from birth at the cacophony coming from the direction of the front of the office.  And honestly, there was a part of me that kind of wished that I hadn’t been so damn insistent on them being light-handed with the Compound V in my own recovery.  Super strength or flaming breath would come in real handy when faced with a fucktwat who caused the need for my recovery.

“Ah, Dr. Taylor,” the blonde haired, crinkle eyed, grinning psychopathic superpowered fucker greeted me when I opened my office door to the noise of his adoring fans and found him standing just outside.  “I heard you were back at work and couldn’t help from wanting to come see that you were truly completely well again.”  He was holding a bouquet of- was that fucking cookies?!  “Here, I had Ashley check to be sure that you didn’t have any food allergies,” he held out the cookie bundle.  “She promised she did her due diligence, so I got you dessert.”  Fuck you, I wanted to say, but we had an avidly watching audience.  

Forcing my lips to cooperate and arch into a semblance of a smile, I took the cookie arrangement from him, careful to not touch his glove covered hands.  “Thank you, Homelander, how kind of you.”  Sick fuck, bringing a fucking gift to your victim.  Jesus, the amount of shit wrong with you could fill a fucking entire goddamn book.  “You probably have a strict schedule so-”

“No, I cleared my day,” he announced and I wanted to be able to maim him so badly that I felt certain that it was telegraphed on my face, my thoughts had to be so loud that beings in space could hear them.  “As the head of this very important office, your wellbeing is paramount, Dr. Taylor, Veronica, if I may?”  I stared at him, wondering how it was possible for one body to hold so many fucking behavioral and mental issues.  “If you’d step aside,” his voice had lowered, and I felt my hackles raise automatically at the intimacy of it.  “I won’t have to continue this farce where the entire fucking building can watch.”

“Please come in,” I stepped back, feeling Billy’s body head close to my back and the tension that had built throughout my interaction with Homelander start to untwist.  Once inside, the door snapped shut behind him and I allowed the false smile to drop.  “What the literal hell do you think you’re doing here?”  

“We all have parts to play,” Homelander offered, moving further into the office and looking around with interest.  I watched as his eyes landed on the spot where I’d nearly bled out and I nearly threw the fucking cookies at his head, but his shoulders drooped and I stopped myself.  “I didn’t know that the mix would have that effect.”  His tone was quiet again, less intimate, I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to hear him.

“Might not have known it, but it did.” Billy snapped, taking the cookies from me and sitting them on the desk so my hands were free.  “Nearly killed her, right here.”  He pulled me behind the desks, and sat in his chair, pulling me to sit next to him.  “If you came to apologize, we don’t accept.”

Homelander turned, and for a moment I thought he looked almost shocked that we were even in the room.  “Apologize?  For what?”  The ego was firmly back in place, spine ramrod straight, tone condescending.  “I told you not to be so quick to rush to decision making.  You chose to rid yourself of my parasite,” he was staring at me, to him Billy seemed invisible.  “It nearly killed you, that was your choice, not mine.”  

“My choice,” I stared up at him, listening to what he was saying through a filter of who he was, how he’d come to be who he was.  “I made my choice after you chose to chemically rape me.  After you chose to take away my choice in having your parasite injected into me and then, as if that wasn’t nearly enough, you had me chemically modified with a contagion that was in the reject pile at the lab that created you.”  I shook my head.  “Get out.”  

“Get out?”  He was smirking and I could feel the tension that I’d felt at the door building in Billy with every moment that he lingered.  “Now, Veronica, is that anyway to treat someone who brought you a welcome back gift?”  

“Get the fuck out,” I corrected, not raising my voice, not showing him a moment of fear or hesitation.  “Now.”

“Fine.”  He agreed, eyes finally sliding to Billy.  “I’ll go, but I do have to ask one last thing.”  I reached out and took Billy’s hand in mine, linking our fingers to keep him calm.  “How does it feel to know that even if you decide you want kids, you can’t have them with her?”  

I’m not entirely sure how I managed to keep Billy from attacking him.  Perhaps it was because the question wasn’t one that triggered him, not like one Homelander might have landed had he physically raped me like he had Becca.  Billy wasn’t interested in having kids, I knew that, he knew that, hell I think even Homelander knew it.  I also know, and I think that the caped Asshole was banking on it, that when you’re definitely NOT going to be able to have something that’s when you REALLY want it.  

He left, more loud announcements, more confirmations of how happy he was to see the ‘fearless’ head of the Office of Supe Affairs in her rightful place, more vomit worthy bullshit and then he was gone.  

Billy was a ball of tension that I feared would take me days to unwind, but then another knock came to the door and in walked Hughie and for a moment I saw what my report mentioned.  Hughie and Lennie, the way Billy connected the two of them, and even after how Billy had tortured the younger man with Annie’s former superhero boyfriend, they still had that sibling-like relationship.  

I was typing up the rest of the week’s schedule, thinking that getting back in the true swing of things would do a body good, so their banter didn’t fully register until Billy’s hand touched the back of my neck.  Looking up at his smiling, dimpled face I knew I missed something I was expected to catch.

“I was telling Hughie that I think we should have a party at the house,” I raised an eyebrow.  Billy wasn’t the most social of creatures.  “Our new house, Ronnie, since the boys helped get it safe and orderly, why not?”

“Mom and Dad should be included,” I reminded him, and his smile grew, now that my parents had managed to get their matching sticks removed from their asses they were much more fun to hang out with.  “When?”

When was two weekends out, so we could plan and get enough food and everyone could be sure to be able to come.  Hughie made Billy promise that he WOULDN’T invite Soldier Boy for shits and giggles and I swore that I’d make him keep it.  When the smiling boy left, I turned to the love of my life and asked the one question that popped to mind.

“What the hell got into you?”

He pulled my chair closer to his, and leaned forward so our foreheads could touch.  “I love you.  I love our house and our new life.”  I nodded, smiling as he rubbed his nose against mine.  “I wanna share it with them, our people.”  

“Our family?”  He smiled and I felt my heart catch.  “What about Terror?”  His grin grew and I added in his aunt.  Then pushing my luck a little further, I asked for something that I knew might be a bridge too far, but it was something I wanted.  “Can I meet Ryan?”

[heff88]

20 albums and 1 EP: my 2017 in music.

Hello all and welcome to my favourite records of 2017!

2017 has been quite a year for many reasons and musically is no different, as this has been one of the strongest years for new music in some time (which may or may not have to do with the current president in the white house and for one of these at least, Brexit). It has been a particularly great year for female voices in music - just under half the acts here are, or include, women or at least are female fronted, with Björk surely to join them - and I'm not sure there has been a time where women have been so well promoted. It is a stupid thing to have to say of course, but it is at least encouraging that change is happening in a positive way. It is also encouraging given the latter half of the year socio-politically has largely been concerned with how much assault and sexism women have to put up with in a very public but important manner (although again, this doesn't seem to be deterring the president, yet anyway.)

This year, I have chosen 20 (and 1 EP because I like to cheat) albums to feature, something I don't think I've been able to do before. This probably has much to do with this being my first full year as a (semi)-professional journalist, something I feel I really marked properly this time last year when I was sent to Prague to interview The Lumineers, which was a fairly mad-yet-incredible experience. However, it's not like I wasn't paying attention before, and I have made a playlist including 50 different records from 2017 I have enjoyed in some capacity and a more concise one for this list.

Since that Lumineers interview, I've had the opportunity to cover from great events and records in 2017, as well as meet a whole load of very welcoming and great people to whom I must say thanks (especially as today is Thanksgiving). To Derek of Drowned in Sound, Tallah from The Skinny, Caitlin from Uproxx and many others, thank you for your continued support and friendship, I couldn't have done it without any of you. In 2017 I got to:

Cover the BBC6 Music Festival in Glasgow, which was a really rather special weekend in my spiritual home. Interview some really excellent people, including: Jeremy Bolm, Touche Amore Angus Andrew, Liars Barry Burns, Mogwai Alex Cameron And finally, Joe Casey of Protomartyr (twice) which was by far the most difficult one, but ended up being pretty great.

I also got to keep travelling in the name of music journalism (what a trip!) by covering Mikkeller and The National's inaugural HAVEN Festival in Copenhagen (a city long overdue a visit - I loved it!) and got to see Iggy Pop be the absolute boss-man, and drink SO. MUCH. GREAT. BEER.

And even more crazily, I got sent out to CALGARY, ALBERTA CANADA to cover Sled Island. There I got to see the likes of Low, Mono and Waxahatchee play in a church, Converge play in a weird British Union Vets centre, Wolves in the Throne Room and Daughters in a dive bar and I got to see The Rolling Stones' mobile studio (which my parents visited just before I was born.) It was an amazing week I will never forget, full of incredible music and new friends, and while I didn't find Bret Hart I did get to tour the city's rather amazing beer scene, which I'm still in disbelief about, to be honest.

I also got to see and have many special live experiences this year less further afield, such as The XX's triumphant show outside SWG3, Glasgow, getting to see City of Caterpillar (!) after all these years in Berlin, Julien Baker play one of my all-time favourite songs, St. Vincent transcend mere mortal status, Mogwai play in a famous Berlin gay club for TV and Thee Oh Sees play in a tiny, cramped basement this summer.  

And finally, I RELEASED MY OWN ACTUAL, PHYSICAL ALBUM THIS YEAR!!! It was tough and stressful at times, but I am immensely proud of it and owe so much to my boys Kenni and Joe Campbell who make up FRAUEN, as well as the people around us who supported it, including Lewis Glass, Gary Taylor, Kyle Wood, Sean Campbell, Louise Grace Kenny (& Owen) my wonderful partner Ann-Christin Heinrich, and everyone who put on shows and came out to see us in our favourite haunts of Glasgow, Manchester, London, Brighton, Leeds and Newcastle (to name a few!) put us up for the night, drove us, bought a record, said a nice thing and generally were awesome.

So, onto the list. As a result of my year, I've decided to order this in release order rather than ranking, although I will point out the top five. A quick glance at this suggests that September was an absolutely ridiculous month (it was) and no I didn't forget LCD Soundsystem, whereas I have nothing in May (Do Make Say Think and Slowdive were... fine but nothing special.) I am currently catching up on stuff I missed as I am writing this, so to Julie Byrne, Aldous Harding, Kelly Lee Owens, SZA, Big Thief, Idles, Sampha, Jlin, Jay Som, Lorde, Vince Staples and as mentioned, Björk you could all find yourself making up your own list in a month's time.

A glaring but now expected omission is Science Fiction by Brand New, which up until a couple weeks ago I ranked as one of my top three records of the year. While of course, everyone should be wary of what we read online, Jesse Lacey's frankly embarrassing and vague response to the matter has, quite likely, put a disastrous end to a previously remarkable and canonised career which was setting itself up for a glorious and perfect ending in 2018. Now, it's very difficult to separate the art from the idea that this is an unsavoury at best, psychopathic at worst, white male who took advantage of his status and the surrounding scene towards young girls and called it a "sex addiction" which is highly troubling. Even his movements towards a "perfect end" to the band now feels slightly chilling, and at the time of writing, it seems as though he will (rightfully) not be rewarded with that. What a horrible turn of events for an artist and a band who have meant so much to so many people for well over a decade, the one band many have kept with them since their adolescence only for it all to go up in flames in an instant. The one (pyrrhic) positive from all this is that the continued conversation is finally giving victims a voice, and that is the most important matter which should never be forgotten.

OK, that unpleasantness behind us, let's get on with the list:

Priests - Nothing Feels Natural (January) *4th

So, just to completely undermine my ordering here, I slept massively on this band and album until the summer, almost six months after release. Thankfully, I caught them just in time to see them play live in Hamburg this June shortly after moving to Germany (oh yeah that happened too, what a year eh?) after seeing they were playing that week at the legendary Hafenklang venue. I checked out 'Jj' and was immediately bowled over, something a completely new artist to me hadn't done for some time. There's a moment in that song, a couple minutes in, where the sensation of "lifting off" occurs both in the music and listening experience, it is a thrill, to say the least. The rest of the album thankfully stood up just as highly (especially it's title track) and I admonished myself for not checking out this band clearly designed for my exact tastes. Live they were a force of nature, each member bringing something exciting, while collectively they reminded me of a tougher version of ESG's "dance-punk". So while I may have missed the boat initially, this record has quietly grown and grown in my estimation, to one of the year's standouts, and will be excited to see what they do next.

Thundercat - Drunk (February) *2nd 

The absolute boy does it again. Anyone who knows me knows Thundercat is one of my all-time boys, he'd be in my wrestling stable without a shadow of a doubt. I've been largely obsessed with Stephen Bruner since his fantastic turn on Flying Lotus's Cosmogramma and he has just got better ever since. For the first half of the year, Drunk was comfortably my favourite album of the record, knowing it would take something special to knock it off its perch (it did, but we'll come to that later). This is, paradoxically, both his most cohesive and chaotic album yet, detailing the wide range of emotions a drunk night on the tiles can elicit while also being his most confident statement musically yet. On top of that, Kendrick Lamar returns the favour for that 2016 Grammy win Bruner played a part in winning for To Pimp a Butterfly, the legendary Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald show up on the lead single, and in the album's clear highlight, Bruner completes his Tron suite with an ode to his cat of the same name.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - The French Press (March) - EP of the year, for whatever that's worth.

Australian music, from Melbourne especially, is in a pretty impressive state right now. Along with the above, Alex Cameron, Royal Headache, Julia Jacklin, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Total Control (to name a few) have in recent years created a formidable scene down under, making them a globally recognised force to be reckoned with in the music world. Despite the slightly annoying name, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever hit the BBC Radio 6 Playlists around March (though sadly not the Glasgow Music festival at the time) and with the song 'The French Press' turned many heads. The song gave 'Cause = Time' (a song somehow nearly 15 years old already) by Broken Social Scene a most welcome reboot while maintaining their own charming style. One would be forgiven for thinking this EP of the same name is just a vehicle for that one single, but no, to those who went out in search for more were rewarded with an excellent six tracks from top to bottom. This was only their second release after last year's Talk Tight so it will be very exciting to see what their first full-length LP brings us, hopefully, next year sometime.

Kendrick Lamar - DAMN. (April)

What can I say, it's Kendrick. Like Priests, I took a strangely long time to get round to DAMN. and not even really for any particular reason other than... just listening to other stuff and quietly knowing this would be great when I did finally come around to it. Though DAMN. for me doesn't quite meet the insanely high mark of Lamar's previous two albums, it's still a very, very strong album from one of the best artists of the generation. While this may have the bombast of Good Kid or the sheer scale of Butterfly DAMN. still shows Lamar's incredible skill as a storyteller, dropping the listener into a fully realised world, largely because it's his reality. On top of this, he manages to write a song featuring U2 and it not be the worst thing ever! Outside of that, however, James Blake gets to return on his sparse roots on 'ELEMENT.' ahead of their co-headline tour next year, which singles 'HUMBLE.' and 'DNA.' prove Lamar's chops as an artist able to step back from his bigger concepts and make his point in three-minute bursts.

Timber Timbre - Sincerely, Future Pollution (April)

One of the most perennially underrated bands out, Canadian creepers Timber Timbre had one of the most quietly solid records of the year with Sincerely, Future Pollution. I've never been sure why they haven't quite caught the wider imagination as some of their peers, such as Grizzly Bear for instance, who sonically have had a very similar trajectory from lo-fi "freak-folk" to a more electronic indebted sound. Whatever it is, in a year where everyone and their dog were (understandably) wanting to comment on the state of things in a post-Trump/Brexit world, Timber Timbre took a more subtle approach (a word that perfectly describes the band overall) as they brought up 80's, Reagan-era sleaze into a modern context, with a healthy dose of Lynchian nightmarish images and structures. Through 9 feverish trips to the classical image of the decaying (in this case, swamp-ridden) city, we see the toxic nature of contemporary Western society poisoning everyone who embraces it, all soundtrack to lounge-jazz samples. It is perhaps the darkest, most sinister record of the year, a prevailing sense of creepiness and uneasiness permeates every beat, every noise, every line of frontman Taylor Kirk's deadpan delivery in a completely different way to say, Alex Cameron's multi-coloured coke-ridden characters. As the album's alluring cover suggests, this is all your favourite black-and-white 70s paranoia films come to life.

Listen: Sewer Blues

Hey Colossus - The Guillotine (June)

Speaking of underrated, how the hell did everyone sleep on Hey Colossus this year? Perhaps they overshot themselves on their epic 2015 double albums In Black & Gold/Radio Static High, but this for me was the best British album of the year and one of the only to really address the mess the UK has got itself into. While the sludge/psyche rock act may not be quite as chaotic or as heavy as some of their earlier output, this is easily their sharpest to date, pinpointing the rage, anger, frustrating, sorrow and even humour in the current idea of being an "Englishman". This is a loose concept album, based on very similar themes and sounds as Timber Timbre's (albeit heavier) which skewers the current public conscious, but also provides genuinely breath-taking moments on songs like 'Calenture Boy'.

Englishman

Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up (June)

Robin Pecknold's triumphant return to music and to Fleet Foxes has been one of the major stories of the year, though he received mixed responses for it. In preparation for this album, Fleet Foxes' third and first in 6 years, Pecknold debuted a few of these songs, solo, supporting Joanna Newsom last year. At the time it was just good to know he was still writing songs, but the sheer ambition and kaleidoscopic scope of Crack-Up is incredible, for a band largely known for kicking off the folk resurgence in earnest. This record is rather like an intense, feverish, psychedelic vision in which Pecknold leads our hand, a singular voice in the void, while the music moves from madness to calm and back again across 11 beautifully composed tracks. The first time opener 'All That I Need' kicks in, it takes the listener completely off-guard, washing them away in the oceans and the incoming storm on the album's artwork sleeve, and the only hope is to try to ride it out and hope you survive. It is a genuinely impressive return to form, one I'm not sure many people thought Pecknold and Co still had in them.

Fool’s Errand

Sheer Mag - Need to Feel Your Love (July)

It's not often where a band, especially as politically fierce as Sheer Mag are, just consistently put a smile on your face and make you raise a fist and shout "YES!" But that's the Philadelphia punk-via-70s-radio-rock band do in spades. They manage to elicit a feeling in their music of so-called "simpler times" while simultaneously bludgeoning you in the face with the bullshit attitudes that were just as much of a problem in the 70s as they are today (in fact, an era partly responsible for them). Led by perhaps one of the best frontpeople in music today, Tina Halliday and guitarist co-writer Matt Palmer, Sheer Mag are the quintessential punk band in everything but their sound, one which the original punks would have openly mocked at the time. The irony, of course, is that those original "punk" acts, The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Clash etc. took largely from 70s glam-rock, they just sped up the songs and make the themes and lyrics angrier. Sheer Mag in many ways remind me of Fucked Up, another punk-band obsessed with 70s revivalism. Both bands understand with loving care and passion that to create truly great punk music, one has to look outside the obvious influences, while keeping an ear open for a catchy hook to couple with prescient themes on oppression, race, sexism, homophobia, police brutality which still plague us today. We need acts like Sheer Mag in these troubling times to remind us, there is another way.

Suffer Me

Waxahatchee - Out in the Storm (July)

Processing a rough break-up is one of music's classic tropes (hell I did it on that album I put out this year - I promise to shut up about that now) but if the recent re-evaluation of the early-to-mid Emo/Pop-Punk scene has taught us anything, it's that even these so-called "sensitive" boys can be just as much of the patriarchal problem as more aggressively "macho" acts out there (and in some instances, actually worse).  This is a round-about way of saying, traditionally, we rarely get to hear the female side of the story, and if we do, it is often met with patronising audiences of "poor little girl" syndrome. So what a breath of fresh air it has been to see Katie Crutchfield's Waxahatchee project break free of the shackles of a somewhat suffocating relationship that involved both her romantic and music life and create an album that deconstructs relationships and toxic masculinity in such brilliant fashion. Over the course of these 10 songs, Crutchfield proudly wears her battle-scars and reflects upon where she was and where she is now on Out in the Storm. I saw Crutchfield twice this year, first in the aforementioned church in Calgary, solo, essentially introducing this album to a new audience, and then later, all-female live band featuring her sister Alison (who also supported and is an excellent talent in her own right) and British guitarist Katie Harkin (Sky Larkin, Sleater-Kinney) who really helped make this album shine. Every song here is a stunner, but in 'Sliver' we have one of the best songs of the year, an anthem of defiance that neatly sums up this great, great album.

Silver

Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins (August) *5th

One of the big narratives of music in 2017 was the "comeback" of mid-to-late 2000s indie-rock having a resurgence. Along with the aforementioned Fleet Foxes, we also had return records from The National, Wolf Parade, LCD Soundsystem and Liars, for instance, most of whom will show up later in this list (because I'm a nostalgic mark apparently). Grizzly Bear have been one of the most consistent acts in that world and with their 5th album Painted Ruins only continued to prove that. While I'm not sure they'll ever top my personal favourite, Yellow House, in fairness, the band made a statement that they were moving away from the more lo-fi, freak-folk and more towards chamber pop on Veckatimest. Grizzly Bear remain an amazing and consistently surprising act who reveal themselves with every listen, a tactic they've still not lost in over a decade. They can do a big pop song 'Mourning Sound' and the more subtle 'Neighbors' but they still after all this time have the ability to pull the rug from underneath you 'Three Rings', 'Four Cypresses'. While this certainly was a great year for "indie" music (whatever that really means) but Grizzly Bear remain the torchbearers.

Neighbors

Liars - TFCF (August)

I'll admit it, this album may have eluded me if I hadn't been commissioned to interview Angus Andrew this summer. I've never been a huge fan of Liars, but I've always liked their style and ambition to always try something new with every record, even if with varying results. But man, I am glad I had that experience with Andrew, because TFCF, striking artwork and all, is a mini-career benchmark for him. Liars is now just a solo act, after Andrew's partner in crime Aaron Hemphill suddenly departed from the band when recording sessions for TFCF began initially in Los Angeles. Andrew's world was turned upside down by this revelation, so his reaction was to move back to his native Australia, and become a hermit in the bush in New South Wales, outside of Sydney. The result is an album where Andrew fully immerses himself in his surroundings, using field recordings of the natural world he is currently living in as the background sound for him to write songs over. It's an intriguing experience, especially as I don't believe Liars' music have ever really been described as "emotional" before leading TFCF to sound almost like The Moon & Antartica-era Modest Mouse in places. This isn't the only characteristic though, as Andrew jumps around from genre to genre, all unified by this... buzzing of the bush that sits underneath it all. While not quite Andrew's peak of records like Drum's Not Dead or the self-titled album, this is a small renaissance in his career, and it will be interesting to see where he goes next.

Cred Woes

Mogwai - Every Country's Sun (September)

Yeah, it's another Mogwai album, which at this stage feels like a warm cup of tea and a hug, but there's no denying they keep on keeping on. In recent years Mogwai have slowed down their studio album production, favouring soundtrack work for TV and Film in recent years - such as last year's Atomic and Before the Flood, but they remain a solid act and for my money the greatest Scottish and further, British, act outside of Radiohead. Every Country's Sun is a mere reminder of the band's consistent greatness in a year where similar acts Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Do Make Say Think also had strong entries. While there are some familiar tropes on Mogwai's latest, their 9th studio album, they did add one of their poppiest songs ever 'Party in the Dark' and a more subtle use of the Carpenter-esque electronics that characterised Rave Tapes on tracks like 'aka47'. The best is indeed saved for last, however, as the album's excellent title track that closes the album is perhaps one of the band's most epic yet, one I wouldn't be surprised if featured at Celtic or Scotland games in the future.

Party in the Dark

Alex Cameron - Forced Witness (September)

Well, this one came from left-field. Again, like Liars, I may well have missed this one had I not been sent to interview him, and even then, my enjoyment wasn't assured given Cameron's retroactive sound and questionable lyrical content. However, when it quickly became apparent that Cameron is playing a role lampooning the toxic masculinity his characters exude which is seemingly openly everywhere in 2017. While some fans were disappointed Cameron moved away from his singular, lo-fi sound of his debut Jumping the Shark, his move towards 80s sleaze-pop, like Timber Timbre, is an excellent vehicle in which his rather pathetic characters exist. It's an intriguing idea, as rarely do musicians or artists "play the loser", something that only tends to exist in the world of acting. In many ways, Cameron is a performance artist, although in seeing him live (in his semi-hometown Berlin where he recorded the album) he unmasks and speaks about his songs candidly. Whatever it is, Forced Witness is an excellent album full of excellent, catchy ditties, especially his duet with Angel Olsen, who plays her own interesting role in the background of this album, that explore some fairly dark themes with a sense of humour and irony that stay, just about, on the convincing side.

Stranger’s Kiss (duet with Angel Olsen)

The National - Sleep Well Beast (September)

Another year, another solid National album. The National will, it seems, always have a spot on my list, though Sleep Well Beast didn't crack the top 10 when I was voting in my respective publications. Sleep Well Beast, The National's seventh studio album, sees the band try and mix things up with the seemingly inevitable turn towards electronic music that basically every guitar-based band eventually dabble in. The results are mostly successful, though in many ways this isn't as much of a departure as first suggested, remaining very much a National album. The one disappointment, in fact, is that it _doesn't_ go further in it's "electronica" as tracks like 'Guilty Party' prove there are some legs there, but towards the end, they become a bit over-reliant on pretty much one style which gets a little trying. In fact, Sleep Well Beast is probably their most piano-based record as opposed to guitars or electronica, which leads to beautiful opener 'Nobody Else Will Be There'. Meanwhile, the band step back into their older territory on tracks like 'Day I Die' and the somewhat unfairly maligned 'Turtleneck'. It's nowhere near the band's best, but The National are like a familiar friend you can not see for years and dip in with and catch up like no time has passed and will always be welcome to visit. (Fun fact, Ann and I were present for the shooting of the ‘I’ll Still Destroy You’ video as it was at their HAVEN festival, however sadly we didn’t get in!)

I’ll Still Destroy You

Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun (September)

Chelsea Wolfe has slowly been getting better and darker throughout her career. Personally, I'm a little surprised Hiss Spun hasn't featured on more end of year lists, as it is a star turn from the still young LA-based goth, aided massively with Kurt Ballou's MASSIVE production and guitar chops from Queens of the Stone Age's Troy van Leeuwen. Perhaps its because she's fully embraced her "metal-side" that critics have been a little allergic to it, I'm sure there would have been a few raised eyebrows at Aaron Turner (ISIS/Old Man Gloom)'s roar at the end of the excellent 'Vex'. Either way, this is an album from an artist clearly in the ascendancy, and may well prove to be a stepping stone to a masterpiece in the future. Of all the artists currently out there, she's certainly got the most potential for it.

16 Psyche

Wolves in the Throne Room - Thrive Woven (September)

Continuing on with Metal, here is by far the heaviest entry on this list (though Converge, of course, run them close) from Olympia, Washington's Wolves in the Throne Room. I had the pleasure of getting to see the American Black Metal legends (I think we're good to give them that title now) this summer in Calgary and it was an overwhelming experience. To those who don't know, it may seem at odds to describe extreme, heavy metal as "beautiful" but that is Black Metal. Its atmosphere achieves a sensation that is transcendent when done right and WITTR are masters of it. From the second 'Born in the Serpent's Eye' begins, the listener is immediately fully submerged. From there on, this is yet another masterpiece in the band's already exemplary canon and it is good to have them back to winning ways after the disappointing left-turn 'Celestial'.

Born from the Serpent’s Eye

Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent (September) *1st place

Head and shoulders above, this is the best album of the year. Protomartyr have been quietly getting better and better with every record, and almost achieved a perfect record in 2015's The Agent Intellect, a record that has aged incredibly well since its slightly underrated release. Now, there's no avoiding it, the band's first album for Domino records is seeing a much bigger audience for the Detroit post-punk band who next year could well see themselves at the higher end of many festival slots. Simply put, Protomartyr are the most exciting punk act in the world right now. No one is doing anything as interesting, exciting, challenging as Protomartyr, their heavy, philosophical themes mixed with their highly original sounds. Just listen to the opener 'A Private Understanding' and see. Who else would dare open an album and a lead single with one of the weirdest drum-beats every committed, an off-key guitar line, frontman Joe Casey delivering the line "Not by my own hand/Automatic writing by phantom limb/Not with my own voice/Pleurisy made to stand on two legs". While Casey is pretty humble and coy about his band's success and journalists (myself included) who wanted to impose mad theories about "BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?" when really the answer is "truth is a slippery thing, just listen to it." Sage advice indeed, when the music is this good.

A Private Understanding

Wolf Parade - Cry, Cry, Cry (October)

Wolf Parade's triumphant return last year with an EP and Tour was one of the highlights of 2016. Their show at the Scala was one of the best of the year, a renewed vigour that was clearly waning by the end of the previous run was back and they looked fresh and happy to be here. It is perhaps no surprise then that they were able to translate that to the follow-up LP, 'Cry, Cry, Cry' (which came out on my birthday this year). Yes, it's a cleaner more polished sound, but goddamn they can still write a song. In 'You're Dreaming' and 'Valley Boy' we have great pop songs from Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug respectively, but it's when the album goes BIG that it really shines, on such epics as 'Flies on the Sun', 'Baby Blue' and 'Weaponized'. Of course, 'Cry, Cry, Cry' isn't close to their incredible debut, but that's an impossible standard to meet, so the band don't even try it, instead streamlining their later sound into something more confident and coherent (see: 'Am I an Alien Here') and it's a very welcome to have them back.

You’re Dreaming

St. Vincent - MASSEDUCTION (October)

A bit like Alex Cameron's Forced Witness, MASSEDUCTION is very much a response to celebrity and paparazzi. Though Cameron doesn't really sing about that (it doesn't really fit with the character) the title and artwork certainly do allude to it, while one of the major themes of MASSEDUCTION is on this. Annie Clark had a very public break up with Cara Delevingne which also takes up much of the record, but you can't really pin this album on any one particular event or theme, other than Clark's re-evaluation and sexual freedom. MASSEDUCTION is an experience worth seeing live, which made the album work for me, which I was initially a little tentative about. I saw glowing reviews but didn't quite match them up to the music. Then, seeing Clark "live" (which has caused much controversy), everything made sense. After a first half set where she ran through her greatest hits in release date order, the second half saw her perform the album in full and it really was a performance. Then everything clicked, in what could be Clark's best record to date, which is an already very high benchmark to clear.

New York

Fever Ray - Plunge (October)

Speaking of sexual liberation, (what a segue!) a couple weeks after St. Vincent's album, Karin Dreijer Andersson, better known as Fever Ray, surprised fans with a new album which plays on similar themes to Clark's. While Dreijer's not quite in the public eye the way Clark has become, she instead crafts an album about sexual politics which is dangerous-yet-endearing and seems particularly pertinent in this current spate of highly public reportage of sexual assault incidents currently ongoing. As ever, Dreijer proves why she is such a force of nature in composing these tracks, which are challenging and danceable, poppy and angry etc. with 'To the Moon and Back' she has a defining statement, a manifesto and a rallying cry, carrying on the theme's from The Knife's possible final record Shaking the Habitual perfectly.

To the Moon and Back

Golden Teacher - No Luscious Life (November)

One of Glasgow's best bands, Golden Teacher's debut full length has been waited on for some time. Really, this sextet are best experienced live, as every show immediately becomes a party. It can be difficult sometimes for highly-energised acts to capture that on record, but thankfully Golden Teacher manage it with the help of Emily McLaren & Stuart Evans at Green Door Studios. Golden Teacher are for me the quintessential Glasgow band. They exist in a liminal zone that links the city's art-punk scene with the world-famous electronic scene, hence their inclusion on the legendary Optimo's label. The record mix funk, world and electronic music with a punk energy and are an absolute thrill to experience, it would be impossible to not put this record and not feel the groove.

Spiriton

Converge - The Dusk In Us (November) *3rd Place

And finally, rounding out this excellent year are one of my all-time favourite bands, Converge. While I don't really listen to much heavy music these days, Converge are the exception to the rule in many ways. They exist in their own space within music that is fiercely inventive and original. I recently had an argument with a few people about what genre to classify Converge as and simply put, it's an impossible and unnecessary task. Converge simply don't fit into any easy genre classification, they are just Converge. What is a surprise was that, though Converge have never really had a dip in quality, the fact they have been able to produce such a career highlight this late into their salad days is nothing short of remarkable but also typically them? The Dusk in Us is an incredible achievement by all involved. It is perhaps Ballou's best production job to date, Newton and Koller's most controlled performance and, crucially, Jacob Bannon's most assured vocals to date. It seems ridiculous that the 25-year-old band keep finding ways to better themselves, but here we are. Kudos to you Converge for remaining such an inspirational figure not just in the heavier genres, but music as a whole.

A Single Tear

Thank you for reading! Have a happy new year and great festive season.