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kimmyyang · 3 years

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210408 Zhang Zhehan's interview with Elle Magazine

"I want to be like Ah-Xu, be a gentle yet strong person."

On the day of the photoshoot, it was a rare windy day in Bei Hai. The weather forecast reported it will rain, which made everyone slightly heart-stricken. "Can we still take photos by the seaside?", "how about changing the location?", we were worrying, but fortunately it didn’t rain, only left with steer drop in temperature and roaring wind.

On the way to the photoshoot location, Zhang Zhehan recorded the sound of wind outside of the window. To be able to use the last bit of daylight before the sun sets completely, after filming, he only had one hour and a bit to go back to the hotel, have dinner, change clothes, and get his makeup done. And now, when we have done everything, he uses the time in the car to chat with the long-waited fans in the drama interactive zone.

Busy is an expected state. But when we saw him at the location, you can’t tell any trace of being busy from his face. The strong wind blew the gravels on the beach in the sky. During the interval of the photoshoot, everyone couldn’t help but complained about the cold wind and getting sand all over their faces. Only Zhang Zhehan looked more relaxed as if he came back from a different beach as us.

When we moved to the coffee shop, we finally had time to sit down and talk. He asked the staff to give him a cushion for his back, at that moment, it was probably the first time that made us realize that he is actually very tired. "It’s tough and tiring to be an actor, right?" we haven’t even finished the sentence, and he disagreed, "it’s all the same, every job is tough and tiring."

It seems that he has a big heart.

He chose to ride to Tibet with his friend for his graduation trip. Like his mum said he always has the spirit of seeking out suffering. Speaking of this journey, he said: "we’re living too happily, most families don’t have to worry about clothes and food, don’t need to go through a lot of hardships. I like what Huang Lei teacher once said, ‘people will only have faith after suffering, people will understand kindness after suffering.’ I think after seeing the suffering in the world and feel the suffering yourself - you will be kind to others."

After hearing what he said, you will realize that ‘big heart’ could have been a misunderstanding. He can’t dilute ‘sufferings’ more than others, instead, in the moments of ‘seeking out sufferings’, his feeling towards ‘sufferings’ is stronger and more abundant compared to most people.

He has a very meticulous side, he feels, understands, and hides his ‘sufferings’. Then, those experiences and feelings related to sufferings become something that is hard for others to spot on him.

He said, "when we’re going through a hardship, we can only see the hardship itself, you don’t realize that it’s actually reminding you something and teaching you something else." This is also his understanding of being mature – you can see the many sides of one thing.

‘Bruce Almighty’， ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’， ‘The Bucket List’ are his favorite movies. He said, "there’s a line from Bruce Almighty that left a deep impression – do you really hope God will give you happiness? Maybe everyone’s interpretation of happiness is different, but in the movie, the protagonist only realized it at the end, God was giving him happiness, but not the so-called happiness, God taught him the ability to gain happiness." He pressed his thumb again his chin, slightly looking down, earnestly sharing his impression of the movie.

He added, "you’re actually changing your perspective of the problem." Like what he wrote before, "being mature is being able to see the things that you couldn’t see before."

Maybe if the settling time is long enough, you will be able to stay calm in the change of tides and guard yourself in the quicksand under your feet. Speaking of popularity, he was calmer than we expected.

He said, "popularity is very important for an actor. I think it’s complementary, when you’re popular, you will receive more attention. You will be able to carry some things on your shoulders, first, it can prove that you have the ability, second, it can prove you’re acknowledged by the market."

He continued, "as actors, we also need to be acknowledged by the market. I have seen some amazing actors, they put so much effort into every character but maybe haven’t been acknowledged by the market yet, so they remain unknown. Therefore, a lot of great characters won’t fall into their hands.” It sounds cruel but it’s an undeniable fact. He added, “if you’re not popular, good scripts won’t even land in your hands."

The success of ‘Word of Honor’, to Zhang Zhehan, is like winning the lottery.

He said, "the success of a drama depends on timing, geographical and social conditions, none of these is dispensable. There are hundreds and thousands of dramas filmed each year, but in the end, there will only be one or two that everyone would love. That kind of feels like winning the lottery."

Working hard is very common, it’s nothing special, he thinks it’s unreasonable if you just use ‘working hard’ and ask why you are ‘under appreciated’. Just like how everyone praises him for being an experiential actor and praises his immersive acting. But he thinks, this is the passing line to be an actor, this is what actors are supposed to do.

He said, "if you’re an actor and you don’t experience the character, how could you portray it well, if you don’t get into the character, how could you make the character come to life?"

Working hard, experiencing, and immersing… he views them as a refined definition of actor, these are the preconditions of the lottery ticket. As for whether you can win the lottery in the end, no one can predict it. At least in his experience, he waited for 11 years for that winning lottery ticket.

After the filming ended, he wrote ‘jianghu, goodbye’ on Weibo, when the last episode aired, it was exactly 6 months after the last day of filming. His Weibo is on the setting of showing only the recent 6 months’ posts, as if it was a ‘long been destined’ farewell.

Perhaps the character Zhou Zi Shu is destined to be his. During the four months of filming, he had to gradually reveal Zhou Zi Shu’s two thousand layers of gray, he had to find him, become him, and lastly live the rest of his life for him.

Actors are probably all like this, they always must pour in their own life, emotions, and experience to make the character come to life. The process of making the character come to life means the actors get to experience life and emotions once again.

"Life is experience, you need to put some of your experiences into your characters."

Hegel mentioned in ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ - 艺术通过供观照的形象可以缓和最酷烈的悲剧命运, 使它成为欣赏的对象。(thank you @sixteenthshen for providing the original quote!)

the specific lines zzh mentioned is bolded: If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short, to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.

The reason why those so-called pains are endowed with aesthetic tension may lie in ‘being watched with pleasure’. Those most beautiful things aren’t been torn in our real lives, they become one ‘tearing performance’ after another, being shown on the stage, shown on the screen. The existence of aesthetic distance made ‘those so-called pains’ into something that can be bearable, having its own appreciation.

That so-called ‘pain’ experience comes more direct towards actors, there’s not much room for leeway. In his previous interview, he commented that Zhou Zi Shu is the most memorable character, the character that hurt him the most. Talking about ‘getting hurt’ again, he thinks that is unavoidable.

"I say that an actor has to get into the character and get out of character quickly. But when you’re acting in a happy scene, that happy feeling might last for a day or few days. When you’re acting in a sad, heart-broken scene, even you say it’s ok, it’s fine, it won’t affect me. But it will affect your mood, including your actions. When I go back to my room, I can’t help but to think about that scene, I might not be willing to go out and walk around."

"So, do you think acting is a process of wearing yourself out and wearing emotions down?"

"Of course, of course, of course, it’s wearing myself out." He said of course three times consecutively, "it’s not just wearing my emotions down, it also wears my physical strength out, wears my experience out, and a lot of my own things. So, if I want to do well in a piece of work, I can’t go into the next crew right after I have finished filming. Because you will have traces of the last piece of work, it’s actually hard to accept and get into the next character."

"I personally really like to stay in the filming crew, the reason why I said Zhou Zi Shu is great is that we couldn’t have any other work due to COVID-19 restrictions. I was in the crew for 4 months, in peace. I was looking into and experiencing the character carefully."

On the day of the interview, the Q&A part about acting was the most ‘unrestrained’. Every time we throw out a question, we would always get a powerful and resonating reply. From the perspective of a bystander, you could feel that he is the kind of person that is shining in his professional field.

At the end of every drama/ film, he would choose to leave that environment, and go out to have fun for few days. "I’m not insisting that I need to disengage from the drama/ film, I just want to relax, return to myself, return to Zhang Zhehan’s life."

"So, when you’re looking at Zhou Zi Shu again now as a viewer, do you have any different sentiment?"

"Of course, I would think of the funny parts and incidents. A lot of interesting bits that I’ve added in myself, you can see it in the character." Fortunately, as an actor, he can also feel the happiness that ordinary viewers have.

In our conversation, the words that he mentioned the most were 'gentle yet strong'.

"I really like netizens' comments that Zhou Zi Shu is gentle yet strong."

"The quality that I admire the most now is gentle yet strong."

"I feel like now I want to be like Ah-Xu, someone who is gentle yet strong."

"I want to be like Ah-Xu, become a bit gentler."

He thinks this seemingly contradictory combination is very interesting, "strong describes a person who is strong, whereas gentle is soft. These two words may seem to have no connection, but when they’re put together, it’s also a perfect connection."

"I didn’t feel this way before. I used to think people have to be strong, powerful, how can you be gentle yet strong? I think that’s something I need to learn now. This person must make everyone around them feel comfortable and think of others, but at the same time he/ she is also an individual who’s very strong and full of capabilities."

"Like water, it’s like this when it’s calm, it’s like that when it’s surging high."

He used as many hand gestures as he could as he wanted to express what’s on his mind as much as possible.

Gentle yet strong, this is what he saw, felt from Zhou Zi Shu, and it’s also the character experience he most wants to leave behind.

"Speaking of what hasn’t changed for 11 years, is that I’m still acting; speaking of changes there are a lot. All these years of experience, it became my understanding of each character, in contrast, 11 years of acting experience allowed me to learn a lot from my characters."

To him, every big or small character he had in the past 11 years is a mutual encounter, he gave something to the characters, and the characters also left him with something.

Those who have seen his acting praise him that he truly understands Zhou Zi Shu, so we asked how he could stand in the perspective of Zhou Zi Shu to understand his words and actions. He doesn’t think that it was understanding, it just naturally happened.

"I didn’t deliberately try to understand him, I think what he did was just following his heart, that’s how I feel, so that’s how it should be. I would ask if it was myself, can I do that? Is it acceptable? If I think it’s ok, then it’s right. If I think it’s unacceptable, I will definitely tell the director - 'I don’t want to act this way.'"

"I read another book today, the main idea is the most important thing for people is to know themselves. Know yourself, know what kind of person you are, then you will know the world. You need to learn how to reconcile with yourself, learn how to communicate with yourself, tell yourself when you need to keep going, when to compromise, when you need to understand, when you need to be strong… you need to keep being yourself and convince yourself at certain times."

Meeting Zhou Zi Shu, to Zhang Zhehan is also the process of meeting and knowing himself. "But I’m probably not as mighty as Zhou Zi Shu," he laughed.

He thinks that he’s not at the age of looking back, the things that have happened, just let them go. "There’s nothing to remember in particular, there’s nothing memorable. And my occupation, a lot of people will remember for you, they will remember your good, remember your various moments, so I don’t need to remember. What I need to do now is to live well, my current life, future life, and get into the next role."

"When I can’t act anymore, I think I will look back more."

Now, he wants to challenge a new area, "I really want to act in movies, act in more movies. 40 episodes of acting and 2 hours of acting are different, condensed acting is the quintessence. I still need to learn how to act well in the 2 hours."

And "I hope I can be a director one day."

The beautiful scenery in spring is as deep and wide as the sea, it’s fortunate that we get to meet.

"My occupation, many people will remember every moment of yours."

"Immerse into my next character, and live well - that's what I need to do now. "

Translation by: KIMMYYANG

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mcustorm · 4 years

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In Defense of a Black Cyclops

In case my username didn’t make it clear, the single most anticipated visual project for me is the MCU’s interpretation of the X-Men, which hasn’t even been announced yet [officially]. And ladies and gents, I have found your Cyclops:

Good ol’ Alfred Enoch, who we all know from Harry Potter and How to Get Away With Murder. If you’re not familiar with HTGAWM, know that his character goes from the de facto leader of the ragtag (murderers) and most cherished protege of Viola Davis’ Professor X to taking more of a grimdark turn after his girlfriend’s death. Sound at least somewhat familiar?

Enoch also embodies the physicality of the character well, seeing as to how he’s “slim”, 6′4(!!), black, and notoriously lanky. Wait, one of these isn’t like the others.

In general I hate fancasting. Everyone generally picks from the same pool of about 30 actors (Peeps, neither Taron nor Daniel is a good Wolverine choice. Argue with your mother!), and most all of it is based on physicality, except when it absolutely should be (like say, choosing a ~5′10 dark-skinned black woman for Storm).

And I think there’s some malarkey afoot. I think there needs to be some serious consideration on part of fancasters and actual casting agents alike to rethink race when it comes to the [white] X-Men, especially since they’re the X-Men of all teams. So I’ll make the case for a black Cyclops:

1. There is no quota on Black X-Men: There’s a bug in your ear that’s been whispering lies to you for years, it says something to the effect of “We need a black person on the team for diversity. How bout Storm?” And you’ve gotten complacent. Storm does not have to be the only black person on your X-Men roster.

2. The X-Men represent diversity: Iceman is gay, Cyclops and Prof. X are disabled (sorta), there are plenty of women, oh and everybody except Storm is white. Of the A-List X-Men, there is only *one* POC character. I’d argue that an MCU X-Men needs to champion diversity like never before.

3. The X-Men represent minority struggle while being mostly white: There’s a cognitive dissonance in the metaphor that has always been there, and for the most part, nobody cares. To appeal to the white readers of the 60′s, the X-Men were all initially white. That way, the message of the mutants could be related to the audience with a familiar face. We don’t need to approach the problem that way in 202?

4. Just because that’s the way it’s always been, doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be: The first line of defense. Sorry, that will never be a good justification for literally any idea. It’s time for some more critical thinking.

5. We don’t all want to be Bishop: So say you’re white and you have a kid who for his birthday having a costume party. You’ve bought some X-Men costumes and you want each kid to pick one. 9 white kids and one black kid show up to your house. As the kids deliberate who gets what costume, be it Cyke or Wolvie or whatever, you yell at everybody to “STOP!”, point to the one black kid and tell him “You’re gonna be Bishop. That’s it, end of story!”

We don’t all want to be Bishop. The black child could have the best Cyclops interpretation within him, but you’ll never know if you don’t let him try. And that’s no different from the Black actors of Hollywood. There’s no reason why all of the black talent should *have* to compete for the role of Bishop or Storm, which I’ve discussed, while Joe Schmo can walk up and audition for literally anybody he wants.

Jharrel Jerome is 23 and has an Emmy to his name. He needs to be in the MCU in some capacity, period. Stephan James is another. How bout Damson Idris. Ashton Sanders. But no, no, let’s fancast Dacre Montgomery or Ansel or Joe Keery again as [Human Torch, Wolverine, Iceman, Angel, I’ve literally seen it all.]

6. Nobody wants to see the B-team if it comes down to it. The next line of defense from your racebending naysayers after “That’s the way it’s always been!” is “Well, what about Psylocke, Bishop, Forge and Jubilee?” who are otherwise known as B-tier X-Men. The problem is, we’ve got limited time and limited spots.

So since the X-Men is all about wonky metaphors that make half sense, let me give you another: Let’s say somebody approaches you and says “Hey buddy, I got two free concert tickets for ya! You can either see Michael Jackson Sings the Blues, or you can go see Justin Timberlake. Free of charge!”

Now, are you used to MJ singing the blues? No! Do you have a problem with going to see Justin Timberlake? No, he’s fine on a Wednesday! He had that one little diddy we liked that one time. We’d love to see him eventually! But are you gonna say, “fuck that, I’m going to see MJ Sings the Blues” regardless? Hell yes, because that’s still Michael Jackson. He’s gonna give the same amazing performance he always does, it’s just gonna be the blues. And speaking of blues...

7. Black is not Blue, Brown is not Blue: Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard this one: “I don’t care if you’re black, white, purple, or green, I’m going to treat you all the same!” I will not say all have this intention, but some fancasters have noticed that the racial diversity is kinda low within the A-List X-Men, so they oh-so-generously give the following roles to a black or brown person: Iceman, Nightcrawler, Beast.

Notice the pattern? It’s a microaggression, and it’s bullshit. What these fancasters are implicitly telling you is that, yes the actors will be black or brown, but when the action starts we can ignore that. They’ll be blue by then. In other words, you in fact do care if they’re purple or green. Nobody will cry foul if Dev Patel gets to play Nightcrawler (because that’s a common one I see), but should Anna Diop be Starfire or Michael B. Jordan be Human Torch, I bet there’d be backlash. Oh wait. If that’s you, please stop acting like you actually value diversity. You don’t want to see black or brown skin, period. Unless of course, it’s Storm (refer to point #1).

But wait, there’s more! When brown characters get whitewashed in these movies, it’s crickets! So eventually it’s revealed implicitly that proclaimers of point #4 only care about it one way.

8. Professor X should not be black if you’re not willing to change anyone else: The next line of defense is that some people say the professor should be black, if anybody HAS to be racebent. Something something MLK Jr., Civil Rights or some shit. Number one, I’m not reducing Professor X to being a magical negro for 9 white people (and Storm!) who for all intents and purposes get to have all the action. Number 2, the Professor X/MLK/Magneto/Malcolm X comparison is an oversimplifying disservice to ALL FOUR of those people. I hate that line whenever I see it, please watch a documentary my friends.

9. The Candidates for Racebending: For me, the A-List X-Men are Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel, Beast, Wolverine, Storm, Gambit, Rogue, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Kitty Pryde. Now, who should be exempt from the racebending? Storm, she’s our designated minority. Gambit, he’s Cajun and they’re white (generally speaking, that’s a fun bit of research). Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler, because their nationality/ethnicity was the whole point of the Giant-Size premise in the first place. Angel, because his character embodies a privileged white male. Beast and Iceman, I don’t care one way or another (Point #7).

That leaves Cyclops, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Kitty Pryde. Now Jean Grey is a redhead, and we all know that every time a redhead is racebent people sharpen their pitchforks (Mary Jane, Wally West, Iris West), so I will cede the ground on Jean if only so that my ginger friends can get their rep. Kitty Pryde is Jewish, but Jews of color exist. Rogue is from the South. And Cyclops is, well, just Cyclops. That makes those three characters good options for more diversity. But allow me to make the case for Cyclops, specifically.

10. It’s not just diversity for diversity’s sake: If you had to pick who the main character of the X-Men is supposed to be, most would say Cyclops. And so in a series that highlights racial discrimination in society, it makes sense that our main character be black. While changing Cyclops’ skin color should not change who he is as a character, it *should* recontextualize it. Now, as an eventual increasingly radical leader of the X-Men, Cyclops would evoke real life figures such as Colin Kaepernick or, shall I say, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not that most X-Men fans and writers truly think about what it means to be black anyways. Storm’s minority status is almost always put through the lens of her being a mutant and not her being a black woman. In other words, you can’t argue that making a character black will fundamentally change his or her character when you haven’t even analyzed the racial context of the black character(s) you already have. Another concept that the MCU X-Men should tackle: intersectionality.

11. Representation matters: I have to say it: Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther hit different. And now he is tragically gone. At the end of the day, the MCU moving forward is down its most prominent black male superhero. Which has implications beyond just the movies themselves.

The women are in good hands. Shuri, Okoye, and Nakia are badasses in Wakanda, Valkyrie is ruling Asgard, Storm is almost assuredly on the way, RiRi Williams has already been cast, and Monica Rambeau is here and she’s not even at her most glorious yet. That doesn’t even include variable Δ, or the number of characters who can and will be racebent. And I’ll note again that to me, Gamora doesn’t count, because she’s green (#7 really pisses me off because it’s so blatant. I hate it). Of course from a behind the camera perspective we love black women getting work.

The men are a completely different story. Imma just go out and say it, I can’t stand Falcon and War Machine [in the MCU] because they’re not characters, they’re just two of a slew of MCU minority sidekicks who have essentially been at the beck and call of Captain America and Iron Man, respectively. You cannot tell Falcon’s story without mentioning Cap. The reverse is not true. There’s a whole essay that could be and have been written on “Minorities in the MCU, pre-Black Panther”. Remember, there’s a reason BP made so much noise in the first place.

So excluding those two we have, let’s see, M’Baku, Blade, and Fury who aren’t exactly the most superheroic superheroes, Eli Bradley is proooobably coming, I doubt Miles Morales is coming (because he’s just Peter Parker in the MCU), Luke Cage(?) Bishop(??), Sunspot(???), Blue Marvel(????). Not only are they not A-List, I would not put money on any of them being in the MCU any time soon.

Cyclops is thee Captain America of the X-Men. He’s the frontman. He’s the poster boy. He’s the “boy scout”, which in other words means he’s the hero, if there has to be one. It would mean a lot right now, and specifically *right now*, if he were to be black. The MCU needs it. It NEEDS it.

12. The X-Men is the Summers Story: I’ll even make the case that if just one character needs to racebent, then it should be Cyclops, because that of course implies that other related characters need to be black because half of the X-Men universe is in fact a part of the Summers family.

So now Cable is black. Corsair is black. Havok is black. And one of the most central stories in the X-Men mythos, the Summers family drama, is now a black family drama set in space or the future or where the fuck ever. The concept is boundary pushing. When white families have drama in the media, it gets to be Game of Thrones or Star Wars, while when black families have drama in the media, it has to be black people arguing in a kitchen or living room about their various earthly traumas (I’m @’ing you, Mr. Perry). I mean, that’s all fine and good often times, but I want my black family drama in space, dammit.

And again, this is the X-Men, the series that’s all about *minorities* and their struggle, so again, why not?

Oh, and I’ll even throw out a Havok fancast for you: How bout Jharrel Jerome?

#cyclops #scott summers #the mutants #monica rambeau #X-men #xmen #marvel #MCU #fancast #jharrel would actually be a better sunspot #but you get the point #my man would have OPTIONS

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hamiltonimagines · 4 years

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It’s Been a While

Pairing: Daveed x Reader

Request: “Hey girl! Can you do a Daveed imagine where you and Daveed used to be best friends in high school and y’all kept in touch a little after but once he joined Hamilton he stopped talking to you. You posted something about being excited to go see the show and Daveed sees it and he like brings you backstage to talk, but y’all get into a fight about who stopped talking to who and eventually you give up and leave and he shows up to your apartment and does something really cute! Thanks 🥰🥰🥰” - @roxanne2020

Word Count: 1.8k

I had never been more excited, I was going to see Hamilton tonight. I had gotten a text the other day from the one and only Lin-Manuel Miranda. He had told me that he was friends with Daveed and that Daveed had mentioned me and our past. Lin said that Daveed had brought up how he regretted that we lost contact. Lin gave me a ticket for the show tonight so that I could finally see Daveed after all these years.

Daveed had been my best friend in high school. We were the friends who told each other everything and we valued our friendship more than anything. We both went to different colleges and we started talking a lot less. Then he got cast in Hamilton and moved off to New York. We hadn’t spoken since besides a few texts on birthdays or holidays.

I wondered if Daveed would even want to talk to me. It had been so long and I was unsure if we could be friends again or if too much time had passed.

I had gotten ready for the show and took a picture in my outfit. I posted it to Instagram with the caption: Seeing Hamilton tonight, let’s see if it’s as amazing as everyone says it is.

I checked my hair in the mirror one last time and then left my apartment. Ironically, I had moved to New York after college. I always wondered if I would randomly run into Daveed in the street, it never happened though.

I got on the subway and checked my phone. I saw a new comment on my Instagram post. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was from Daveed. It said “Looking forward to seeing a familiar face in the audience”.

I felt my cheeks heat up a little and I felt a familiar warm feeling in my chest. With all this time apart, I may have developed the slightest crush on Daveed. I knew it was weird, especially since at one point he was my ride or die.

I eventually got to the theatre and I went in and found my seat. I got chills when the show started. Then Daveed walked on stage and it was like the world froze. It was then in that moment that I realized how much I had missed him.

The show ended and I was beyond blown away. My expectations had been high, but this surpassed any expectation I had. I didn’t think this show could truly be as good as everyone said it was, but they were all right. This show was phenomenal.

I was standing, along with the rest of the theatre, and applauding as the cast took their final bows. Daveed made eye contact with me as he walked off the stage and he froze for a second, as if it was too good to be true. His eyes lit up and he gave me a soft smile, before leaving the stage.

Then, a few minutes later, my phone started to ring. I saw Daveed’s name on my screen. I answered the phone with a smile on my face. “Hello there stranger” I said, giggling. “So you’re really here?” He asked. “Yeah, I am” I said. “Can you come backstage? I need to see you” he told me. “Anything for you” I told him, smiling.

He told me who to talk to and then he hung up. I found the person who worked for the theatre and told them what Daveed told me to say. The employee let me backstage.

I was in a hallway with a bunch of the cast and ensemble running up and down the halls. I was overwhelmed to say the least. How would I find Daveed? Then I saw a familiar face. I recognized Lin.

“Hey Y/N, you made it” he said, running over and giving me a hug. “Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it. The show was fantastic. If you don’t mind, can you tell me where I can find Daveed?” I asked him.

“Come on, I’ll bring you to his dressing room” he said, as he started walking down the hallway. I followed him, “I don’t know how you don’t get lost down here” I told him, honestly. “You have no idea how many times I got lost during the first few weeks of rehearsals” Lin said, laughing. Then we walked up to a door that said Daveed’s name on it.

Lin knocked on the door and I heard Daveeed say “come in”. Lin opened the door and stuck his head in. “Someone's here to see you Diggs” Lin told him. “Send her in please” Daveed said, knowing it was me.

“Have fun” Lin said to me, before he walked away. I carefully walked into his room and his eyes lit up when he saw me. He ran over and picked me up into his arms and spun me around.

He carefully placed me back on the ground. We both had the biggest smiles on our faces. It felt like no time had passed at all.

“It’s been a while, you look good Y/N” he told me, still smiling. “You too, so is the success treating you? You were amazing tonight by the way” I told him. “Oh thank you, I had to put on a great performance, I had someone important in the audience” he said.

He grabbed one of my hands and pulled me over to the couch. He sat down and I sat next to him. He grabbed my legs and put them across his lap. Daveed and I had spent many nights as teenagers in this position, talking for hours and watching movies.

“It’s been so long” I said, staring into his eyes. “I’ve really missed you” he said, grabbing my hand. “I’ve missed you too” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder.

“Y/N, why’d you ever stop talking to me?” He asked, seriously. “Are you kidding? You were the one who stopped talking to me. You moved to New York City and fame happened and you never reached back out to me. I was giving you time to adjust to the move and I figured you would call me when you settled in” I told him, so confused as to how he thought I ended our friendship.

I pulled my legs off his lap and stood up and walked to the other side of the room. “Yeah right Y/N. You never reached out to me either. And when you moved to New York a year later and you still didn’t reach out. Don’t try and pin this on me” Daveed argued.

“I can’t even listen to you anymore, you used to be my best friend and I told you everything. And one day you just started treating me like I didn’t exist and it broke my heart. Now, you’re sitting here and you can’t even take responsibility for what you did” I yelled. I walked out of the door and slammed it behind me.

I quickly started to walk down the hallway, I had tears welling up in my eyes. I ran into Lin and he looked confused. “Hey what’s wrong? What happened?” He asked me. “Thank you for being concerned, I just really have to get out of here” I told him. He nodded, understandingly. I rushed past him and eventually ended up out on the cold New York street.

I called a cab, not wanting to risk the subway at night time. I got in and told the driver my address. After a few minutes, we pulled up out my apartment complex. I thanked the driver and gave them a tip. I quickly rushed inside my apartment.

I changed into some sweatpants and a hoodie. I couldn’t believe that I actually thought Daveed and I could be friends again. I had been looking forward to things just feeling natural again. I made myself a cup of tea and curled up on my couch and looked out my window.

Then I heard a knock at the door. I put down my mug and walked to the door. I looked through the peephole and saw that it was Daveed.

I unlocked the door and opened it. Only then, did I realize what he was holding. He had a huge bouquet of flowers, a teddy bear, and my favorite candy bar. “Uh...hi” I said, shyly. “I brought you some stuff” he said, smiling.

“Isn’t this the same stuff you brought me when I got dumped by Harley Simmons?” I asked, only then remembering it. In high school, I dated our school’s star football player and he dumped me in front of the whole school and I was devastated. “It cheered you up then, so I hoped it could cheer you up now” he said, hopefully.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked him. He smiled at me and followed me inside. He set down the gifts on my coffee table. I sat down next to him on the couch.

“I am so sorry for how our conversation ended. I was being selfish and I didn’t look at things from your perspective. I never should of ignored you. I don’t want argue over who should of reached out first, I just want to tell you that it was mistake of me to not reach out. I never wanted to make you upset, I was only caring about myself and it was wrong. I really hope you can forgive me, I want us to move on and be friends again” Daveed confessed.

“I could’ve reached out just as easy as you could of, but I didn’t. This falls on both of us. Of course I want to be friends again. Not being friends with you felt so lonely, I felt like you had forgotten all about me” I told him. Then I saw Daveed smirk.

He held his hand out in front of me. I saw a bracelet on his wrist that I had given him when we were saying goodbye before we both left for college. “You never forgot me?” I asked in shock. “How could I forget the first girl I ever loved?” He asked me, interlacing our fingers.

I was so shocked, did he reciprocate my feelings? “You loved me?” I asked him. I was praying he wouldn’t say that he used to love me and didn’t anymore. “I always have” he said, smiling. I smiled back at him and he leaned in and kissed me. He cupped my face and I held onto his forearms.

We both pulled away and I started to blush. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that” he said. “You want to know something?” I asked him, excitedly. “Tell me” he said, chuckling at how excited I was. “I never forgot about you either” I told him, rolling up my sleeve and revealing the matching bracelet.

taglist: @someinsanefangirl @laurens-interlude @geekycatlover @fanfic-addict-98 @romanoffs-heart @multifandomwriterx @andreasworlsboring101 @criminallyhamilton @imatyoursurrvicesurr @irlydontknoanymore @sayweird99 @nyxie75 @rileygene11 @daveeds-whore @trost-town @notebookgirl30 @teenag1jealousy @royalstans @elizasfaith @kmsmedine @brunadesuu @lilangeldevil006

Let me know if you want to be added to my taglist for all my imagines!!

#daveed diggs #daveed diggs x reader #daveed diggs fanfiction #daveed diggs angst #daveed diggs fluff #hamilton #hamilton cast imagines #hamilton cast member x reader #hamilton cast imagine #hamilton cast x reader #hamilton x reader #hamilton imagine #hamilton imagines #daveed diggs imagine #daveed diggs imagines #lin manuel miranda #daveed x reader #daveed imagines #daveed imagine

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girlsbtrs · 3 years

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How Being a Woman in Hardcore Helped Me Learn to Love Myself

Written by Jen Moglia. Graphic by Laura Cross.

Since this is my first piece written for Girls Behind the Rock Show, I figured that I should introduce myself; hi, my name is Jennifer, but most people call me Jen. I live on Long Island in New York, and my favorite things include my cats, the color pink, giving gifts to my Animal Crossing villagers, and watching sports. Above all else, however, I love music.

I frequently refer to music as the love of my life. It somehow plays a role in everything that I do. I got my first iPod when I was five years old, stacked with everything from Miranda Cosgrove and Avril Lavigne to Tool and Deftones. Some of my favorite memories growing up are sitting in my pink and purple bedroom singing and dancing along to Paramore’s crushcrushcrush and Fall Out Boy’s Thnks Fr Th Mmrs on the local alternative radio station. I danced for 12 years, played cello for seven, and am currently a wannabe ukulele rockstar after buying one on impulse and starting to teach myself how to play four years ago. Even on the simplest, barely noticeable levels, music has been everywhere in my life for as long as I can remember; even now, I can’t complete a basic task without a song playing in my headphones.

Music became an even bigger part of my life when I started attending live shows. I went to my first concerts at age 10, seeing my two favorite artists - Nickelodeon boy band Big Time Rush and classic progressive rock band Rush - within one month of each other. By the time I was 15, I had been to my fair share of arena/seated shows with one or both of my parents, from Fifth Harmony to Fitz and the Tantrums to Alice in Chains. My first general admission show was seeing the Foo Fighters at Citi Field with both my mom and dad when I was 12, but my first pop-punk general admission show (yes, they’re different) came a few years later. I had the typical list of favorite bands that you would expect from a young teenager getting into alternative music: Neck Deep, Knuckle Puck, Real Friends, and State Champs.

In late 2018, I was able to see all four of these bands for the first time, and I am a firm believer that it changed the course of my life. I met, cried-during, and eventually got the setlist for Neck Deep at Stereo Garden on Long Island in September. I sang all of “Untitled” at the barricade for Knuckle Puck at SI Hall at the Fairgrounds in Syracuse in October. I had my first minor concussion scare (yay!) before Real Friends’ set at Irving Plaza in New York City in November. Finally, I crowd surfed for the first time during State Champs’ anniversary show for The Finer Things at House of Independents in Asbury Park in December. After just a few shows, I had fallen in love with this new brand of live music that I had just been introduced too. There was something so magical to me about skin covered in sweat and Sharpie marks, feet hurting from dancing in the pit all night, and meeting strangers on line outside the venue who would become your best friends and know your deepest secrets by the end of the night.

After making some friends at all of the pop-punk shows I was going to, they started to tell me that I should get into hardcore music. I was hesitant at first - the heaviest thing I had listened to at that point was nowhere near the snippets of hardcore that my friends had played for me - but, eventually, I decided to give it a chance. I was bored and home alone with nothing to do one night over the summer of 2019 when I listened to my first hardcore album, Laugh Tracks by Knocked Loose. Immediately, I got that gut feeling that you have when you know you’ve heard one of your favorite bands for the first time. I knew that this was something special that I was meant to find at this point in my life. For the rest of the summer, I worked my way through the rest of my friends’ hardcore and hardcore-adjacent recommendations, with Cost of Living by Incendiary, Stage Four by Touche Amore, You’re Not You Anymore by Counterparts, Time & Space by Turnstile, Springtime and Blind by Fiddlehead, Smile! Aren’t You Happy by Absence of Mine, Bad to my World by Backtrack, and Reality Approaches by Harms Way being some of my favorites. By the time the next school year started, I was hooked, and I already had tickets to my first few hardcore shows in the fall.

My first hardcore show was in November 2019, seeing Knocked Loose at Webster Hall in New York City - fitting, right? They were on tour supporting their new record A Different Shade of Blue, which I had become obsessed with the minute I heard it for the first time. Although I was ridiculously scared of getting stepped on and breaking all my bones (yes, that was an actual fear of mine), I had the time of my life at that show. There was something about this newer kind of live music that prompted a cathartic release, one that I hadn’t found anywhere else before. As soon as the show was over, I was counting the days until my next one.

My love for live hardcore music (and live music and hardcore music in general) has only grown since then, and that story sort of ends there. However, I want to go back to that first hardcore band that I listened to, Knocked Loose, and the album they put out that first summer that stole my heart. I was taken by storm as soon as the first notes of A Different Shade of Blue rang through my headphones, but something was different about the third track, A Serpent’s Touch, particularly the ending; I heard a voice that sounded a little bit more like my own.

This song features Emma Boster, who does vocals for one of my favorite hardcore bands right now, Dying Wish. When I heard A Serpent’s Touch for the first time, though, I had no idea who she was. I was used to the aggressive vocal delivery of frontmen in hardcore, particularly that of Knocked Loose’s Bryan Garris, but hearing it come from her changed my perspective on a lot of things. It’s not like the song was super angry and changed its tune to be lighter once the token girl came along; in her verse, Boster sings, “I watched the venom / Overcome your spirit / Jealousy holds you now / Distorting your appearance / Bleed out.” These were lyrics that held the same intensity that the lines screamed by the men held, and they sounded just as cool coming out of her mouth. As cheesy as it sounds, it had never even occurred to me that women had a place in this new world that I had discovered. The audiences in the live videos I watched (and eventually at the shows I attended) were made up of mostly men who looked bigger and older than me. When I did start going to shows, most of the non-man population consisted of my friends and I. Emma Boster, along with so many others, began to open my eyes to the fact that a place for people like me existed in this community. It didn’t matter that I had bright red hair or liked butterflies or wore pink - I was just as much a part of this magic as the men multiple feet taller than me with tattoo-covered arms, and I belonged there just as much as they did.

As time went on and I got more involved in the genre’s music and community, I discovered more bands with women in them, and it only fueled this fire of empowerment inside of me. When I felt insecure, I’d watch live sets from Krimewatch, a hardcore band from New York City, just half an hour away from my hometown. They have multiple women as members, including their energetic badass of a vocalist, Rhylli Ogiura. Year of the Knife became one of my all-time favorites, and their bassist Madison Watkins became a serious inspiration to me; the way that she can balance killing it on stage and running the cutest, most pink apparel brand I’ve ever seen (aptly titled Candy Corpse) amazes me. Even some of the bands I’ve found more recently have had an impact on me. I started listening to Initiate last year when their EP Lavender came out, and their beautifully colorful cover art caught my eye before I had heard any of their songs. Their vocalist, Crystal Pak, is also a woman, and she’s insanely talented. Discovering this kind of representation in this new universe that I had come to feel so at home in introduced me to a world of confidence and determination that I had never known before.

When people ask me why I love hardcore so much, I often give the easy answer; “the music sounds good.” If the person allows me to ramble on for a little longer, the answer becomes much more emotional and cheesy. Hardcore taught me that speaking up for what I believe in is important, and if there’s something I’m passionate about, it’s worth shouting about. I became familiar with this when listening to one of my favorite bands ever, Incendiary (the second hardcore band I ever checked out), before quickly realizing that politics are a pretty common topic within the genre - it’s what this music was practically built on. The first time I heard their vocalist Brendan Garrone singing about police brutality and injustice on songs like Force of Neglect and Sell Your Cause, I realized that there is so much more to music than just sounding good.

However, at its core, the thing I love so much about hardcore is what it taught me about being a woman. Growing up, I was the loud girl with the personality bigger than the room who always had something to say and had a never ending supply of excitement about just about everything. As I got older, I was taught that this was not okay. People didn’t like how enthusiastic I was about everything, or that I constantly had new ideas and new discoveries I wanted to talk about. As cliche as it sounds, I felt like everyone around me was trying to dull my sparkle, especially some of the men that I was encountering on a day-to-day basis. Even when I started to come to terms with my big and bright personality, in turn also coming to terms with my own femininity, I was told that this wasn’t how girls acted. I had to pick one - I could watch Disney princess movies and wear Hello Kitty hair clips, or I could be outspoken about my beliefs; but never both. The women that I mentioned earlier, along with so, so many more, helped me unlearn these toxic mindsets. Seeing someone like Emma Boster take the stage and scream ferociously for a full set helped me see that I could be a girl and still be a powerhouse. Following Madi Watkins around on social media showed me that I could love bands like Year of the Knife and also love heart-shaped purses and wear pink from head to toe. My aggression and passion didn’t make me any less of a woman, and my femininity didn’t make me any less of a force to be reckoned with.

So, at the end of this love letter to hardcore and the women who run it, I say this; thank you for teaching me that I don’t have to shrink myself anymore. It has made a world of a difference.

#jennifer moglia

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lingthusiasm · 4 years

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode! It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 53 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about imperatives. But first, we’re going to do a Lingthusiasm liveshow – a virtual liveshow in late April brought to you on an internet near you for everybody who’s a patron of Lingthusiasm, which there is still time to become. Keep an eye out in late April 2021. We’ll be announcing the dates on social media and the website a little bit closer to the time.

Lauren: This liveshow is our current Patreon goal. All tickets will be for patrons. That is available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon. If you’re listening to this in the future from beyond April 2021, patrons will also be able to listen to the recording of that liveshow event as a bonus episode – along with over 50 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is also part of LingFest, which is a bunch of other fun linguistics events that are happening in late April. Stay tuned to our website for more information about that. Also, in late April, we’re doing a virtual conference for linguistics communicators called “LingComm.” That’s people who make linguistics communication materials online – modelled after SciComm for science communicators. This is gonna be happening online. You can find more details about LingComm on the website lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms.

Lauren: Our most recent Patreon bonus episode was an Ask Us Anything episode in celebration of our 100th overall episode. It is our 48th bonus and, along with our over 50 main episodes, it means there is twice as much Lingthusiasm. If you’ve worked your way through all the main episodes, they are all available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon.

Gretchen: Thanks for asking us such great questions on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. Go hang out in the Discord if you haven’t yet. It’s fun!

[Music]

Gretchen: Start the episode!

Lauren: Go on!

Gretchen: Be interesting!

Lauren: Do linguistics!

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

Lauren: All of these sentences are giving some kind of command.

Gretchen: These are all what’s known grammatically as “imperatives.” They have the function of giving commands, but they also have the imperative, which is this particular grammatical thing where, in English, an imperative may begin with the bare form of the verb – like “start” and “go” and “be” and “do” and “stay.” That’s a particular grammatical concept that we wanna talk about today.

Lauren: The function of giving a command means that now, Gretchen, I expect you for the next half hour to be very interesting and very linguistic – if you’re going to obey the command that’s been given.

Gretchen: No, I was telling you to be interesting, Lauren.

Lauren: Oh, okay. Well, now we’re in trouble. It is possible to do things that have the function of giving some kind of command that’s not an imperative – that doesn’t have the grammar of an imperative structure. So, “I order you to be interesting,” is not actually an imperative.

Gretchen: It is a command, but it is not an imperative. Sometimes, you have this – I wanna say – this very imperial Ancient Rome – [imitates imposing voice] the Imperator or the Emperor is saying, “Take this man away,” is sort of a command thing. But you can also use imperatives – the form of the imperative – to do things that are very polite. You can say something like, “Come in,” “Sit down,” “Make yourself at home!” All of these are also imperatives, but they’re polite imperatives.

Lauren: I hope that people don’t think we’re being imperious when we use the imperative to tell them to “Stay lingthusiastic” at the end of an episode.

Gretchen: Secretly, this episode, we’ve been building up to it since the very first one.

Lauren: “Emperor” and “imperative” are related etymologically, I assume.

Gretchen: Yeah. The “emperor” is somebody who has the authority to give commands, and it’s definitely the core function of the imperative is that commanding function. But when I think of imperatives, I think about a young adult novel that came out in 1997 called, Ella Enchanted.

Lauren: Did this also become, I remember, a movie?

Gretchen: No, don’t talk to me about the movie. The movie is bad.

Lauren: Okay. Well, I haven’t seen the film, so that’s fine. We can just talk about the book, which I also have not read. Enlighten us about Ella Enchanted.

Gretchen: Ella Enchanted is one of those fairy tale retellings. In this particular context, the main character has a blessing/curse put on her by a fairy at her birth where she has to be obedient.

Lauren: Is this one of those blessings that inadvertently become a curse?

Gretchen: Yeah. The fairy’s like, “I’m gonna give you this blessing. Ella will always be obedient. Now, stop crying, child!” And the baby has to stop crying because she’s been given this command to stop crying.

Lauren: Very useful.

Gretchen: I mean, like, who amongst us could not find this useful? Unfortunately, she grows up, and if people give her a command even inadvertently, she has to obey it. What’s interesting from a grammatical perspective – and I feel like why I always felt like I had a very solid grasp of what an imperative is – is because she only has to obey things when they’re imperative commands and not when they’re more indirect commands. If somebody says, “Stand up,” “Sit down,” she has to do it. But if someone says, “I wish you would stand up,” or “Why don’t you sit down,” she doesn’t have to do it at that point.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, she’s a walking grammaticality test. She’ll tell you if something’s grammatically an imperative. This is fabulous.

Gretchen: Right?

Lauren: It would be amazing to have someone like this while you’re trying to figure out the grammar of an imperative.

Gretchen: Well, because then you could try it in different languages. Every time I see a stop sign, I’m like, “Ella would just be stuck here. She’d just be stuck here until someone told her to go again.”

Lauren: I assume it’s a pre-technology world because –

Gretchen: It’s like a fairy tale world with horses and stuff. She didn’t have any stop signs.

Lauren: Thank goodness she doesn’t live on the internet because the amount of, like, “Subscribe,” “Click here” – you would be ruined.

Gretchen: Right? Every time she got told to “Like and subscribe,” she’d have to do it. It’s a fairy tale world, so she only has the usual problems with imperatives. But it really – if you ever want a book to just tell you which things are imperatives for 286 pages of a charming young adult fantasy novel, I would recommend it.

Lauren: I feel like if you have very small children in your life, you’re also quite sensitive to imperatives and using them. There’s a lot of having to be very direct at children. Even if you have a habit of maybe doing things more politely and indirectly while talking to adults, you just have to tell children to do and to not do things quite a lot. If you have small children or maybe cheeky pets in your life –

Gretchen: [Laughs] Pets. “No, get off that! Don’t run into traffic!”

Lauren: “Sit.” Perfectly efficient.

Gretchen: “Sit!” “Stay!” “Eat your breakfast!”

Lauren: Yeah, I was gonna say I can’t tell if you’re giving that example to a child or to a pet but, honestly, pretty much the same.

Gretchen: Does it matter?

Lauren: If you have small people in your life, you’re probably quite sensitive to imperatives.

Gretchen: Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here with my tomato plants being like, “Grow! Grow!” That’s one of the things that’s really interesting about a part in Ella Enchanted. At one point she gets a letter from her father, and then she’s like, “Wait, I gonna make this other person read it and summarize it to me” because if there are commands in it then she could summarize what they are in ways that aren’t actually commands. In another context, she’s interacting with a character who she doesn’t really like but because that character is only saying, “I wish you would do this,” or “Why can’t you stop doing that,” she doesn’t actually have to obey that person because that character is still trying to be polite. Imperatives have this interesting interaction with politeness and with how we relate to each other as people – who is it okay to give a direct imperative to, and what level of politeness does that have?

Lauren: It seems like giving direct imperatives to kids is something that occurs across a lot of different cultures. We don’t have the data to say with confidence that it happens across all languages. In some languages, it’s weirder to give direct imperatives to people who you’re not familiar with. Maybe if you’re more familiar with someone – you might give more direct imperatives to someone you live with and spend a lot of time with. It really can vary across cultures and across individual contexts. One particular example I like is Sara Ciesielski’s work on the acquisition of Sherpa by children. Sherpa is a Tibeto-Burman language. It’s in the same family of languages I work with. In Sara’s work – there’s a great three-minute thesis video summarizing it – what she found was that parents give a particular type of direct imperative to small children. As the children grow older, they give those imperatives less. Children stop doing particularly foolhardy things, and they start to become more socialized into behaving in a socially appropriate way. In her data she found that, as those children got older, they were given fewer imperatives, but if they were talking to younger children, they would give them in the way that the adults do. You could see them getting socialized into this process of, “If I’m talking to someone younger than me, and someone who’s very young, I have to give them lots of direct imperative commands.”

Gretchen: I feel like I remember something about children learning a lot of imperatives very early in Mayan languages as well. I’m not sure. Now, I’m trying to find the paper. Of course, I can’t find it again. But I remember reading a paper in grad school about Mayan children learning a lot of imperatives. I think it was Ki’che’, maybe, or some combination of Ki’che’, Yucatec, and possibly Mam. These are languages that do a fair number of things with the verbs, but the imperatives tend to be morphologically very short and very simple and not have a lot of prefixes and suffixes. They also make really good words for children to start learning more complicated verbal structures with.

Lauren: Right. So, they learn these structures, but they also learn who it’s socially appropriate to use them with. I mean, it’s one of those things – I have no real depth of knowledge about child language acquisition – but I’m always amazed by like, children are given so many imperatives, but they still manage to use verbs and acquire verbs in all their other forms even though, for some cases – and I know in Sara’s work – the number of verbs in the imperative form that children are exposed to is multiple times more than some other grammatical structures. But they manage to all grow up using more than just imperative forms of verbs.

Gretchen: Well, and kids also overhear speech of adults between each other even if they’re not addressed like that themselves.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: You have a variety of things that you’re exposed to. But yeah, the imperative is this interesting – it’s like how linguists often observe that words that are for close family members have certain sounds that tend to be cross-linguistically easier. You know, “Mama,” “Baba,” “Dada,” “Nana,” “Tata,” “Papa.” There’s a small set of syllables that are pretty easy for kids. Often, the names for close family members are from some subset of those syllables. They’re not necessarily exactly the same from language to language, but they’re a bit more similar than you’d expect coincidentally. I think that imperatives often being a little bit easier, a little bit shorter, having a little bit less-complex verbal morphology on them – I don’t know if someone has done that official typological study, but it seems like there’s a general trend in that direction.

Lauren: Which you’d need when someone is dangerously going in the wrong direction and you need to tell them to stop, or someone is just being a little bit too hectic and you need to tell them to sit.

Gretchen: You can imagine early humans – like a kid putting their hand into fire or something – and you have to be like, “No, stop!” Kids can try to do very dangerous things in lots of contexts. It’s useful to have language that’s accessible to tell them how to not do that.

Lauren: Those short forms, we often talk about them as being bare because they don’t have any extra morphemes that we stick on. Some languages do have a specific grammatical suffix that they’ll stick on for an imperative. In Yolmo and other Tibetan languages, the politer form of the imperative has the suffix “-tong” or “-dong.” There are some that just are bare if you’re being very direct at someone.

Gretchen: English for the most part has a bare imperative as well. You have, “Sit,” “Stand,” and it’s not like “sitting,” or “stance,” or “walked,” which would be adding some sort of morpheme on there. I guess, in principle, you could add a prefix on there. I’m not aware of a language that does, but there probably is one somewhere.

Lauren: It’s always dangerous to say languages don’t do something because they’ll be some awesome language somewhere that does the thing.

Gretchen: There’s probably some somewhere that do a prefix. I wouldn’t put money on that not happening. Often imperatives are a bit on the short side, especially ones that are informal or singular – like the kinds you would use with a child – compared to polite imperatives. Oh, you could put lots of morphology on to be polite.

Lauren: There’s the suffix in Yolmo, and then there’s a whole different form if you’re being very polite in the honorific register. We’ve talked about honorifics in a bonus episode before, and I’ve talked about that vocabulary there. Again, that’s that thing about giving a command is not necessarily impolite, you just have to use the correct honorific verb form to be polite when you’re asking a visiting guru to come with you or to please sit down. There’s a way to do that politely.

Gretchen: I first, I think, encountered “imperative,” at least as a term, when I was studying Latin. They have a singular and a plural imperative, so if you’re giving a command to one person or if you’ve giving a command to multiple people, which many languages do something like this. The singular imperative is just the bare root of the verb with the theme vowel. You have something like, “Veni,” which means, “Come,” singular, and then “Venite,” is “Come,” plural, “All of you come.”

Lauren: Good for specific command giving.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s this extra morpheme on the plural form, but the singular one, which is your “Am I giving this command to a child,” is the very simple form.

Lauren: I did say Yolmo had that suffix, but there are a couple of verbs where, instead of using a suffix for the regular, everyday imperative, there’s just a completely different word. The most common one is – Yolmo has the word, “sa,” for “eat.” If it was just a regular imperative based on the model of almost every other verb, it would be, “Sadong.” But for this verb specifically, you have a completely different form of the word. You just say, “So.”

Gretchen: And there’s no “-dong” at all?

Lauren: There’s no “-dong” at all there. There’s no suffix there. It’s just a very short form. It’s a word I heard a lot – people asking me to eat as a guest. It’s one I’m very familiar with.

Gretchen: This actually happens in a variety of contexts where you’d expect one specific thing with the prefixes and suffixes, and then you get a different form of the root entirely. In French, for example, most of the imperatives do a very similar thing. You have, “parler,” is “to talk,” and “parler” is also the imperative and the plural imperative. But then for a few words – and one of them is “be” – you have “je suis/tu es,” so “you are” – “es.” But the imperative, like “Be quiet,” which you would say to a child perhaps, is “sois” – “Sois tranquille.” Literally, “Be tranquil,” I guess, but it’s used for “Be quiet.” Or “soyez” if it’s plural. Like, “Children, soyez tranquille,” like, “All of you be quiet.” English actually also kind of does this.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: This is the one maybe true imperative that you can test like, “Is this verb being imperative right now?”

Lauren: You told me this the other day, and I was wracking my brain for ages trying to think about something where it changes completely in English.

Gretchen: Have you figured it out yet?

Lauren: I’ve not figured it out, but now you’ve given me that example, I be it’s something to do with the “is/be” copula. That verb is a mess in English.

Gretchen: Yeah, it is “be.” “Be” is just one of those really neat verbs because it’s historically three different verbs all with their different forms glommed onto each other. Like, the “is/are” one, and you have the “wesan” with “was” and “were,” and then they also have “be” and “being” and “been.” Those are all from three different roots that get glommed together to make one mega verb.

Lauren: Yay, language!

Gretchen: Yay, language! This is a process that actually happens fairly often in languages just for a small handful of very, very common words. So, “be,” or “have,” or maybe something like “eat” – very, very common words. Sometimes they get really irregular or they get made out of combinations of several different verbs. Because they’re so common, people can just remember this, whereas if it’s really rare verb that maybe you don’t encounter until you’re a bit older or you don’t encounter very often, it’d be hard to remember like, “Oh, this verb has completely different letters in it.”

Lauren: It would be very weird for English to have a completely different form of the word “to crochet” for an imperative because most people don’t talk about crocheting a lot, and if you do, you rarely tell people that they have to as a command. When you have this pattern that fits for every verb except maybe one or two for the imperative or for other things as well. English is great with this kind of thing in tense when you have, “I go/I went.” “Went” is absolutely a completely different word to “go,” but we use it in the past. This happens often enough in English that when we have these forms that don’t fit the pattern, we call it a “suppletive” form.

Gretchen: Sometimes the imperative is where a suppletive shows up. Sometimes it’s also a past or something else you could do with things. Sometimes you can have a suppletive imperative, which kind of defies the point about maybe them being easy for children to learn, but they are super common.

Lauren: You tend to hear suppletive forms with lots of frequency. That’s how they manage to stick around.

Gretchen: Sometimes you also get a negative imperative.

Lauren: Yes. As with the fact that some languages use particular morphemes and some languages don’t use any morphemes, which is a nice throwback to our zero morphemes in the “Nothing Means Something” episode, if you remember that sometimes the absence of something is still functional, there’s a whole range of different ways that negating can interact with imperatives. But the thing that I find most charming about the relationship between negating and imperatives is that a negative imperative, as a category, can sometimes be called a “prohibitive,” which is just one of those, “I get that. That does exactly what that label says.”

Gretchen: Yes, the “imperative” is you command someone to do something. The “prohibitive” is you prohibit them from doing something, which makes sense. I have definitely just encountered the terminology “negative imperative.” I hadn’t encountered “prohibitive.” I think maybe a little bit of the literature, or until you mentioned it, I was like, “Oh, I guess you could call it that. I dunno if I would though.”

Lauren: I think it’s the kind of thing where if your language does something interesting around negative imperatives, you’re more likely to come up with the name “prohibitive,” whereas, for example, in Yolmo, you don’t use that imperative suffix with the negative. You just use the negative and the verb. Because it acts a bit differently to the imperative, I’m more likely to think of it as a prohibitive because it’s a slightly different structure. I think this comes back to a larger conversation about whether you lump certain phenomena together because they’re all similar enough in the languages that you encounter or if you split them up because they behave very differently.

Gretchen: I think I’m maybe more of a lumper than a splitter, but it depends a lot on the context because what sort of thing you’re exposed to can lead you more into lumper-ish or splitter-ish directions for particular things. Some languages just throw in a negator. Some languages, the negative bit for imperatives is a different negative morpheme than the negative morpheme in other contexts. Some languages you use a different form of the verb. When I was learning a lot of romance languages, the thing that always used to really just kind of grind my gears and show my lumper-ish tendencies was they’d be like, “Okay, here are all the different ways of doing the imperative,” and there’d be two that would correspond to the Latin one of the singular and the plural one, and then there’d be the polite one, and there’d be the ”we” form for like, “Let’s this,” and there’d be the negative ones. Those would all be borrowed from the subjunctive.

Lauren: Which is an entirely different category with an entirely different set of functions but kind of borrowable.

Gretchen: We’re not gonna get into the subjunctive right now because the subjunctive is a whole other episode someday. But I’d be like, “These forms are not some weird, surprising thing that you actually have to memorize 17 different things.” What it is is, “Look over here in this table on Page 56 and just borrow the ones from the table on Page 56.” You only have to memorize one bit of information, which is the “Go to Page 56 for this form.” You don’t have to just suddenly memorize this whole other table as if it’s some sort of surprising thing that’s unconnected. It’s really just borrowing from a different part of the paradigm.

Lauren: Yeah, sometimes imperatives do share features or functions with other categories, which is a thing that crops up a lot in different categories of grammar. It’s part of the fun of human languages and how they evolve in different directions and borrow things from themselves and copy across from different parts.

Gretchen: It’s interesting to think, “Okay, what was the historical version of this?” What was the version of this language early on when they were like, “Oh, we don’t quite have an imperative for this particular context – where else can we get something from the set of verbs that we do have or something from the set of things we’re used to doing with verbs?”

Lauren: Another thing that makes imperatives particularly interesting to try and elicit from someone if you’re doing elicitation to figure out the grammar of a language as a linguist or if you just want to learn a language through politely interrogating native speakers is that it’s actually really difficult to ask someone to tell you how – that they should tell you to do something. It’s a socially complicated little situation.

Gretchen: Because if you say something like, “Tell me that I should sit down,” they’d be like, “Okay, you should sit down.” And you’re like, “No, wait! That’s not imperative. That’s a different statement.”

Lauren: Asking someone to tell you to do something directly, when they clearly don’t actually want you to eat, so it feels weird and unnatural to be like, “Eat!”

Gretchen: And some people find it more fun to join that play space about language like, “Let’s imagine that we have a dog, and we’re trying to get the dog to eat” or “Let’s imagine we’re trying to tell a child to eat,” or something like that. It’s trying to figure out, okay, what is the exact context that can create the scenario which it would be said even though it’s said a lot.

Lauren: That’s not even taking into account that you might be working with someone in a culture where it is just so rude to give someone a direct command and that you need to observe them hanging out with a child or a pet or a person they’re really close to to get actual uses of the imperative because you’re some outsider to whom it would be incredibly rude to do that.

Gretchen: Some places you can use imperatives politely as well. But there’s often this additional social context. I think that there’s also – we were talking about earlier about like, well, you have this polite imperative or you have this plural imperative or this honorific imperative, and in a lot of the European languages that have these polite second-person pronouns, “vous” or “sei” or “Usted” or something like that, they also figured out some sort of imperative there which is borrowed from some other bit of the verbal thing there because like, “Oh, we need an imperative, but this was actually originally a third-person” or a plural or something, and you have to grab it from somewhere else. Imperatives start you in into, “Okay, what do people do in this language and in this particular culture when they’re addressing somebody? What are the ways you address somebody? What are the ways you don’t address somebody? Which things are polite? Which things are impolite? What are all the things you can do?” There’s this word in French that I don’t actually know what it means so much as I know how it’s used, which is just the word you add to something to make it a polite imperative.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: It’s “veuillez.” It’s got a lot of Ls in it. That’s what French does. You’ll see it on a lot of official signage. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say it out loud, but it’s on so much signage. You’d have like, “Veuillez sit down when the train is in motion,” or something like this.

Lauren: It’s where you’d use “please” in a polite English imperative.

Gretchen: But it’s not “please” because you can put “s'il vous plait” in there as well, which is “please.” It’s just the polite verb that you use for the polite things. I’m sure it has a literal meaning, but that literal meaning is not as relevant as the fact that it’s the polite verb you use for the polite things.

Lauren: The social function of giving a command is also why imperatives are discussed as a thing where you direct it toward someone else who’s also there – a second person, “You do this” – because in order for a command to be effective, it has to be a person delivering it to another person.

Gretchen: It sort of depends on how lumper and splitter-y you wanna get. If you wanna talk about first-person plural imperatives, if you wanna talk about something like, “let’s,” as an imperative or using other words like a hortative, it depends on what the grammar of a particular language is doing whether it makes sense to group it with the imperatives or not. Sometimes, like, “Let’s go,” or like, “Let him go,” “Let them eat cake” – sometimes those are treated with the imperatives and sometimes they’re not. But there’s also a core set of imperatives of like, okay, well, what do you do if you’re addressing one person, maybe a few people? And then there’s all of the ancillary stuff around imperatives which is still just not that big of a space. I think it’s one of those things where there’s something about how humans organize their societies and their culture and their notions of self-hood and –

Lauren: And how human brains are constructed.

Gretchen: How human brains are constructed. It’s kind of like how human societies have words for day and night cycles because we live on a planet that has a certain day and night cycle that’s really salient to everybody who’s here. That doesn’t mean, in theory, you couldn’t have humans who lived on a different planet that had drastically different day and night cycles that could have words for those sorts of things.

Lauren: This is why I love speculative science fiction because you get to build worlds where if you had people who could melt their consciousnesses together, then the distinction between giving a command as an imperative to a second person becomes less meaningful if you’re all the one consciousness.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you had neuro links or a society with magic or something where certain imperatives come with the force of commands where they’re magically enforced and certain ones are suggestions, maybe that ends up showing up in the grammar at some point. Or if you had, I don’t know, swarm consciousnesses or something, or diffused consciousnesses, maybe the first and second persons would work really differently because your notion of consciousness would be different.

Lauren: If you had multiple consciousnesses within one body, would you use a third-person imperative to talk to yourself?

Gretchen: I think there are people who have distributed consciousness or multiple consciousnesses, and they do various things – sometimes a “we,” sometimes, addressing other people.

Lauren: There’s so much scope for possibility, and humans occupy a tiny piece of that real estate, usually.

Gretchen: In Embassytown by China Mieville, there’s this thing where you have two brains that are occupying – they have to say all of the words together at the same time.

Lauren: Ah, yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve read that book, and it is so full of fantasticness that I can’t even remember how those multiple-brain persons exist.

Gretchen: It’s been a long time since I read this book as well. I did not re-read it like Ella Enchanted, but I remember that in text, the words that they say simultaneously are written above and below a long line – like an em dash or a long em dash – and the words are written above and below. You have two mouths but one consciousness. It’s a surface-level treatment there because it’s not asking the question of, “What would that mean for first persons and second persons and third persons?” It’s just like, they say all of the words all at once even if it’s just a noun.

Lauren: Gonna write a grant application to do fieldwork with fictional aliens in a sci-fi fictional world.

Gretchen: I just think the space is really underdeveloped and some people should be working on it.

Lauren: There’s so much possibility for what an imperative could do in other consciousnesses, but in the human languages that we know about and have been discussed, in general, it’s doing something with the verb. That’s where it tends to hang out. That’s what we’ve been discussing so far. As always, I’m sure there are many caveats and complications, but it’s doing something to the verb that’s different from, say, something like tense, which is looking at time and where in time the verb is situated. It’s turning something that’s an action into a command.

Gretchen: There’s a distinction – I think the easiest one to notice is the distinction between something like, “I see,” “I look,” “I sit,” “I go,” versus, “See,” “Look,” “Sit,” “Go,” where one of them is describing something that’s going on, and the other one is giving a command which could have all the functions of polite command or impolite command in that range. It does change the vibe of the verb. The Romans, who did a lot of the descriptive grammatical tradition that we’ve inherited in the European language space, called this the “mood” of the verb. I think we should maybe rename it the “vibe” of the verb because it seems very intuitive to me. “Mood” in this context is not like, “Is the verb happy or sad,” it’s just a vowel shift from “mode.” Like, what “mode” is this verb in? It’s in the command mode. It’s in the declarative mode, the describing things mode. It’s kind of like, you know, set your gears to start or to reverse or to –

Lauren: And look, I’m not gonna lie. I think when these labels got added – around 500 years ago they became really consistent with grammar teaching – when they chose this word, I’m pretty sure they chose it for a really similar reason that you chose “vibe.” “Mode” is just this general word. It’s still a pretty general word. We use it for fashion or, as you said, a mode of a machine.

Gretchen: You’re mode of transportation.

Lauren: It’s just one of these wonderfully convenient labels that you don’t have to interrogate too deeply.

Gretchen: “Mode” seems to imply that you can have a given verb, and it can sometimes be in this mode and sometimes be in that mode, whereas “class” implies you have, you know, some verbs are in this class and some verbs are in that class, and they don’t correspond. But they’re all generic categorization words. They kind of just picked one. As far as I can tell, they just picked one and then that became the name for this distinction that they were trying to talk about of “Is the verb like this or is the verb like that?” Well, that’s it’s “mode.” Then we had an unfortunate vowel shift, and it seems like it corresponds to a mood like happy or sad. “Mode” is sort of the more intuitive way of thinking about what the difference is between these categories.

Lauren: People will sometimes use “mood,” and they’ll sometimes use “mode” and talk about “modality” If you see something that’s talking about “modality” in linguistics, it’s generally talking about, well, is it just a declarative sentence explaining how the world works or is it in one of these other modes like the imperative. There are a whole bunch of others in this category.

Gretchen: Well, and sometimes “modality” is also used for modals, like “can” and “must” and “should” and stuff like that.

Lauren: Oh, we should talk about modal verbs.

Gretchen: Yeah! We should do a whole episode about modals.

Lauren: With evidentiality, which is something we’ve done a whole episode on, there is a lot of discussion about –

Gretchen: Which is your favourite thing.

Lauren: Which is one of my favourite things. There’s a whole discussion about whether evidentiality is its own category separate from mode, or if it sits within a more lumper definition of “mode,” or whether we split it off as its own, or if it sits in a subcategory. It reminds me a lot about how I imagine the early discussions around biological classification must’ve happened.

Gretchen: Because at a certain point you’re like, okay, so we need to have all of these different sorts of levels of “Are these just different species of birds or are they all birds together? Here we’ve got the mammals. Here we’ve got” – I’m not a biologist; I’m not gonna torture this metaphor too far – but which of the things are more closely related? Which are the things that are more distantly related? There’s several levels here, but some of them you’re like, “Well, they just needed to come up with another name for this.” It’s useful to have a name as a handle so that we’re all talking about the same thing, but sometimes those names don’t always have a very good etymological reason for why they’re called that thing in particular. Sometimes it’s just like, “Well, we needed a name for this group.”

Lauren: And sometimes a level – because there are classes in biological animal kingdom hierarchies, right. So, the word “class” there has a really specific meaning, whereas we could just talk about a general class of objects or a particular class of students. It has all these different meanings. I think “mode” is one of those similar words that has lots of different meanings but in linguistics tends to have this specific meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah. And this is a thing that academic disciplines, especially, in the natural philosophy vibe of categorising the world and trying to figure out which things are more related to each other tends to go into common words and say, “Ah, we’re gonna come up with a technical definition for this one,” and be like, “Well, technically, this is what a reptile is now,” or like, “Technically, this is what a mood is now. This is what a mode is.” You end up with this situation where the technical definitions and the vernacular definitions co-exist. That can sometimes lead to almost more confusion where you’re like, “I need to figure out, first of all, is this person using the technical meaning right now or are they using the vernacular meaning. Which one am I trying to use? Which one is appropriate for this context?” In addition to “What is this word?” Whereas, sometimes, if there’s an entirely new word for something, it’s just like, “Oh, well, I’ve learned this new word and it refers to this specific thing and it always refers to that.” There isn’t this competing vernacular definition that also exists. The way that this often gets taught in classrooms is like, “Well, the vernacular version you learned is wrong. This is the real definition.” But I think we’re interested in describing language and saying, descriptively, people use “mode” in all sorts of different ways – people use “mood” in all sorts of different ways. It’s just that in certain contexts there’s this one very particular definition that it’s used with in this one case. Oh, “case,” that’s another one. Look, you can use “case” to mean a whole lot of things! There’s one technical linguistic meaning of it, but there’s also a lot of other ways you could use “case.” Sometimes the metaphor goes in the other direction. Sometimes a word gets borrowed from grammatical terminology into the more generic life circumstances as well. “Gender” initially referred to just a class, like a genre, and then it gets used in a vernacular sense as well.

Lauren: I have a sense that imperative – if something is very important, it’s “imperative” – came from the urgency of a command as well.

Gretchen: That’s possible. The idea of like, okay, well, this is this particular grammatical thing but also can get used metaphorically for the whole related set of ideas.

Lauren: In much the same way that the Linnaean biological classification system owes a lot to Latin terminology and that Western tradition of classification, I can’t help but feel that part of the reason we have a category of imperatives is because, as you mentioned earlier, Latin happens to have a very clear imperative form of the verb. I wonder what would’ve happened to a grammatical tradition and how we classify modality and mode and imperatives if we started with a language that didn’t have those structures.

Gretchen: I think it’s a difficult to answer question, but it’s a really valid question. I found Latin has a reputation of like, “Oh, I didn’t understand grammar until I studied Latin.” That’s not because other languages don’t have grammar. It’s because a lot of our grammatical terminology was invented specifically for Latin and to work really well with Latin. Then you end up learning about how English grammar works because you learn Latin in a very translate-y sort of way, and you learn what the reflexes are of particular English-y things in Latin or of things in another language in Latin. It feels like Latin grammar is easier because the grammar as we learn it was invented to fit Latin really well.

Lauren: As someone who didn’t study Latin, I’m very happy to say that I didn’t understand English grammar until I studied linguistics. It achieves similar ends but from a very different perspective.

Gretchen: I think, having studied both Latin and linguistics, there’s a sense in which the grammar of Latin is very catalogued in many cases, it’s very pinned down, because it’s not a language that’s actively being spoken by people. It has been finitely described. The thing that excites me about linguistics is you can approach grammar in this more experimental way where you can say things like, “Is the imperative really valid in this language?” Or “Does this language have a prohibitive?” “Is this useful categorization to make?” “Is this a useful distinction to make?” That’s something that’s less the case when you’re talking about one very well-described language and something that’s more the case when you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do languages compare with each other or what’s going on in language in general or what else is going on here or what’s going on in the language that isn’t as well described. It’s a more expansive look at how grammar can work than just like, okay, here’s a list of all the stuff you learned. You can be trying to figure out what’s going on with grammar.

Lauren: One of the joys of the imperative, as we said, it’s really relatively uncomplex grammatically across a lot of different languages and that it’s so interactively complicated and fascinating. I think that’s what keeps bringing me back to this category.

Gretchen: Which makes it a good introduction to the idea of, okay, how could we do these categories? What does it mean for a verb to have a “mood” or a “mode”? Whereas something like with the subjunctive, which is another mood, is harder to wrap your head around. If you’re trying to get a handle on both of things at the same time, it can be overwhelming. Whereas the imperative is a good slice to break off of “Here’s this thing that we know how to do the command thing. Someone wrote a YA novel about it in 1997.” But also, it’s this gateway into considering this broader question of like, yeah, what sort of vibes can the verbs have.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA greeting cards, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

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[Music]

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chattegeorgiana · 4 years

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If Kishimoto has no idea of love, I'm not surprised that he left the NH and SS as canon. Saying that love is complicated explains his ignorance in that regard, but it still doesn't explain how he developed Narusaku in a good way, because Narusaku is the proof that love is not complicated. That relationship was the most natural and healthy, everything flowed well even if it's not canon. Kishimoto is pure contradiction.

I know, right? He contradicts himself at every step of the way.

That’s why I say that this was a move on his part to hide the real reason: that he did this because he was commanded to by the higher ups at SJ/SP who thought that going with NH/SS will bring the franchise big bucks.

When in reality LOL, look where we’re at now. Boruto is not making even half of what the OG did.

It’s barely alive.

They thought that if they listen to the apparent “majority” of the internet, that’s a success. BUT NOPE!

The reality of the fact is that the internet is an outlet for people to venture their stuff. Now, experience in work has taught me that the complainers will be loud they’ll always be the ones who have something to complain about (why isnt Hinata in team 7, why isn’t she Naruto’s love interest,yadda yadda).

It’s usually the negative outlet that it’s poured out more on the internet, rather than the positive one. Thus, this gives you the impression that the negative ones are the majority.

It’s like a false positive test, for example. In our case, a false positive reception to Hinata’s character, for example. And thus it gives the impression that the loud minority = the silent majority.

A situation like this made the higher ups at SJ and SP think that well Hinata is the preferred one so okay, let’s make NH canon and let’s make HER the heroine.

People like to dismiss NS but then why the need to replace Hinata with Sakura? If we think about it, the general consensus was that we would’ve had the Hero x Heroine pairing. The only issue here was that from the false positive reception, they understood that the one who should be there should be Hinata, not Sakura.

Thus they made the change. And this way they thought that they satisfied their consumer base.

Only that SURPRISE! IT FLIP FLOPPED!

Now, idk who was in the marketing/branding/sales department of SP/SJ but rule no. 1 is that people with positive experience are LESS LIKELY to leave a review.

They show their support differently. The way it matters. They just enjoy your product, show their support in real ways that matter to your business, rather than comments on the internet/reviews.

In our case aka people were buying manga and that was that. No big fuss about it, no nothing. Manga sales were going good, anime viewership as well, other media products such as figurines as well. All was good.

So good that it allowed the franchise to have 1 movie / year.

And theen the end happened.

Think a bit about it in perspective. Of course, being the end there was a lot of fuss around it: people bought the tickets pre sale (who weren’t allowed then to ask their money back), the novels as well because they thought it should answer some of the unanswered questions and whatnot.

And then, here came Boruto. For nostalgia reasons, it held it’s ground for a bit.

But then, it dropped. It’s best results are 183,413 copies peak.

The series has one million copies in print as of January 2017. Between 2017 and 2018, it became the 8th best-selling manga from Shueisha.

But then put things in perspective with Naruto:

2008 - 4,261,054 total sales

2009 - 6,836,494 total sales

2010 - 7,409,068 total sales

2011 - 6,874,840 total sales

2012 - 6,495,240 total sales

2013 - 5,553,933 total sales

2014 - 5,505,179 total sales

2015 - 3,498,177 total sales

In total, Naruto sold 250 million copies on a span of 15 years.

How did Boruto do? In a span of 5 years, it barely sold ONE million. And if you add on the sales over the years and make an average adding the 12 volumes in circulation already, you should have an average of 5 millions.

Yet it has just one...

So I think the reception here is pretty clear.

Thus let’s get to my second point.

RULE NO. 2 YOU GOTTA BE COHERENT as a brand.

What Naruto did at its end with NaruSaku NOT canon, changing the heroines and all that jazz we know screamed DECOHERENCE from the heavens.

What the brand did is show disrespect to its audience. Which one? THE SILENT MAJORITY.

A brand is an emotional connection between its audience and the brand itself.

And no matter how these kiddies nowadays like to discredit it, people were invested in Naruto’s emotional journey the most.

Naruto’s emotional journey was simple: get acknowledgement from the village so he can become Hokage, fight/save his rival, get the love of the girl he wishes for.

Did we get ANY of that? Well, he fought and saved his rival indeed, but then the Naruto becoming Hokage stuff was treated poorly while the same happened with the love of the girl he wished for.

So 2/3 experiences are bad. How did the audience respond to that? Well, you can find the response in the sales of Boruto, as simple as that.

And that’s what happens when you treat your audience like crap. Because you know what? People might excuse some mistakes you do (like the horrible war arc), but NOT staying true to yourself is one of the things they’ll never forgeet you for.

And that’s what happened with Naruto as a brand and character: it didn’t stay true to itself/himself.

So people just left.

As simple as that.

That’s why at the end of the day, no matter how much some that are still in the fandom try to downplay it, the reality of the facts is this... by comparison, you can very well see it as a flop.

Of course, it benefits from the fact that anime is put in a runtime that has no competition while the manga in V jump which is kinda the same.

But oh well, talk about Karma, I guess... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#anti-naruhina #anti-sasusaku #anti-boruto #narusaku

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marina-roslinka · 4 years

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This is my first time writing something like this, so it's a little bit sht, but I'm posting it anyway since I promised it to you guys.

Michael, Trevor, and my rant.

The first thing I want to say about those characters is that I believe they meant to be together, they cannot exist without each other. Yes, I know it sounds like cheesy line from romantic novel. But before you roll your eyes, let me explain.

Let’s remember their signature colors: blue and orange. You see, I think they play a big part in understanding them as individuals and as a relationship and their dynamics. You can read about the color analysis here if you like to.

I personally want to look at it from a little different perspective. To be more precise about elements Fire and Water: Trevor represents fire and Michael is water of course.

Those two men have a different understanding of what life is supposed to be and what it means to be alive. Trevor being a fire element is always trying to rile up Michael, making him angry and emotional like himself.

Michael on the other hand obviously thinks that Trevor is too much, that he needs to calm down and too bright, too hot, that eventually, he will burn not only himself but also everyone else around.

We see examples of that a few times throughout the game. For example when he tried to convince Trevor to change his current lifestyle and “grow up” and it’s not good for him.

“M: Alright man, here we go. Tough love time. T: I'll take it tough, I'll take it sissy, I'll take it any way you're giving it. M: When you gonna get it together, bro? Most guys as they get older, they pull their foot off the gas. T: You always did like to judge people. M: I ain't judging, I'm trying to help. T: Help with what? You think I need help 'cause my lifestyle is worse than everyone elses? M: The speed, the horniness, the killings. T: You kill, and you satisfy your urges - only you think you're above everything. Tough love time! M: Fine. Fine! You think what you like. But you know I care, and you know I tried.”

Going back to the whole "They can't exist without each other" thing.

Why?

Too much fire you will burn. Too much cold, you will freeze. This is the exact reason why I think that they need each other. To create a balance. Again, you can clearly see this in the story. Michael is depressed, sad and bored out of his mind by the pool.

Trevor is crazier than ever with no direction and no purpose. Just pure chaos.

“T: Mas o menos. Michael didn’t have a nerve back then. I didn’t have a direction”

It’s obviously not perfect since they both are fucked up people.

You can describe Michael's attitude towards Trevor with the same example. You can love fire for numerous reasons, right? You can look at and feel calm, feel warm or maybe it helps you to reflect on yourself. However, fire is also very dangerous. It can be unpredictable. One spark can light the fire and it may not even possible to stop it.

But Michael is able to.

Throughout the game Michael said and done things that made Trevor very angry. Like, other people would have been dead angry. He can make him change his mind or even stop him from killing someone. Because, as I said, he represents water.

This is why I believe that Michael’s fear of Trevor is not usual. He is afraid of those big sparks that out of his control like when he betrayed him for example. He was afraid Trevor would find him and kill him. Part of him believes he deserves it because of all the guilt. Trevor is the face of karma and he came back to collect the debt.

However, thirty seconds in the car since they left the house he felt that everything is ok and that he is not in any danger so he had no problem with insulting and overall being an asshole to Trevor right away.

Unfortunately things not that easy and simple as always. They can be good for each other just as bad. Fire can be dangerous to water and water can be dangerous to fire. (This is why Trevor doesn’t like to take showers xD) It reminds me of all those scenes when they get angry at each other, but stepping away so they won’t hurt one other.

I am going to leave Fire/Water here, just keep it in mind for the rest of analysis or whatever this is. I’ve never done it :D

Now for the ultimate question. Do I think they love each other or they hate each other?

Well… Just as their history together it's complicated.

The very moment Trevor pulled the trigger of his flare gun with no hesitation, Michael definitely knew that Trevor is a dangerous person. Then he definitely knew Trevor has serious mental issues.

Why did he stick with Trevor before and even after? Well, the most obvious answer is that he just cares about him. They instantly clicked together or as Lamar said “Love at first sight”.

The other thing that played a part in Michael’s affection at the start is that Trevor is like a shining loud toy for Michael's brain. I see M as someone who grasps at every opportunity to experience intense emotions. Trevor is like a walking time bomb that won’t explode around you. It also perhaps made Michael feel special. It’s not healthy but happens to people nonetheless.

I believe that Michael does love Trevor, but he also hates the things that he does and Michael hates himself for still loving someone like Trevor.

“Why do I love him why do I care for him, I'm not supposed to. He is a horrible person. He is a monster. What is wrong with me?”

The other thing is very common for people to have desire to help another person who's hurting. No matter how much messed up they are we still can feel sorry and I'm sure Michael felt the same and still feels the same. This also leads to his frustration about Trevor.

“Why can't you be normal? I had a hard childhood but I didn't turn out that bad”

He’s also repressing his feelings because of internalized homophobia. In addition, it's just frustration on top of frustration on and on.

Michael hates himself for many things he's done. When Trevor came back he got so overwhelmed that all of this just start boiling inside of him. And when you can handle it he just surrenders to the common emotion – anger.

(It seems to me that fans expect Michael to figure out why Trevor is doing this, why he says that what real feelings are behind the words and actions. You know, be the wise one. )

At first glance it may seem that Michael does not care about T and I can see why. Since the game does it like we see Trevor as the one who tells the truth and Michael as the one who lies. Especially on the first playthrough you can easily fall for this little manipulation. Because of this we perceive Michael as a liar. I mean, yeah, he uses lies as a defense mechanism. Therefore, it��s natural for us (and Trevor) not to believe him when he said “I care. I missed you”.

Trevor is a liar too. Yes, I know, shocker.

The most common thing I see people say about Trevor is that he is a loyal person. All because of this rule about “brothers”. Nope. Maybe he likes to say that, but in reality he is not.

Take Brad as an example. Bless him.

Trevor talked about how he planned to stop working with Michael, but pushed him away because he thought he would leave him. If you hang out with Lamar, T admits he was literally going to kill Brad. Not like Michael of course. He wasn’t gonna stab him in the back. Just stab him in the face I guess.

Trevor didn't kill Michael, not because of some creed. It’s just because he still loves him and cares about him. In the core of everything it’s just love.

Trevor is obviously a dick to Michael because he's hurt so much. Can you imagine how painful it was, to lose the only person you loved and loved you back? Then to find out they betrayed you. Like, Trevor literally thought, Michael was using him from the start. Though, he doesn't hate M, like he said so many times. Trevor hates himself for being this way, for being not good enough, for Michael to choose him. Again and again.

Betrayal.

“M: I don’t know, man, I’ve made such a mess of things. Constantly…my whole life. Chase things. Get them. Hate them. Chase things, get them, hate them…”

I feel like often people don’t even consider Michael's feelings or mental issues. Trevor also says very hurtful words to M. Yes, he understands the reason behind Trevor’s anger, but this doesn’t negate the fact those words hurt a lot. I mean, he was even offended by the fact T didn’t hug him. As usual, he cannot cope with feeling of guilt and everything again comes down to aggression.

I also want to remind, that despite the killings, Michael didn’t abandon Trevor. He was even letting him to see his children. Also name Tracey is suspiciously similar to name Trevor. Isn't it a display of love? Can you imagine how many times Michael forgave T for doing something crazy?

Well, Michael was just afraid of Trevor hurting him or his family if he tells T they’re done.

Trust me, if M didn’t give a shit about his best friend, he would’ve just killed him.

However, Michael and Trevor's relationship before Ludendorff wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

I personally think there were four main reasons:

1. He was just tired of living the way he did. 2. Safety of his family. 3. The FBI breathed down their backs and suggested him a ticket to freedom.

In fear of losing Michael Trevor pushed him even more. Most likely thought their relationships could only last if they were connected by the partnership. An example of this is Trevor’s negative reaction to Michael's words that he wants to be done with robberies and make movies.

“T: I could feel like I was losing you, so I pushed you harder. I thought that how to keep you in the game and I didn’t want to lose you. I’ve said it already, haven’t I?”

4. As ironic as it may be, in the desire not to lose Michael, Trevor himself turned out to be the last drop, for his best friend’s decision.

Conclusion: they should stop being dumb-dumbs and be honest about how they really feel.

And therapy. A lot of therapy.

#gta 5 #michael de santa #trevor philips #trikey

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daggerzine · 3 years

Text

A chat with Kiki of Kiki’s House of Righteous Music in Madison, Wisconsin (by Eric Eggleson)

A friend and I recently had the pleasure of attending a show at Kiki’s House of Righteous Music. It’s truly amazing what Kiki Schueler has put together in her basement (and in her backyard as well). I had heard about her shows, but I never got the chance to go to one. When Jason Ringenberg was scheduled; I knew I had to go. Think of a bunch of friends gathering together in someone’s basement listening to music you love. There are gig posters all over the walls from many great concert venues in the Midwest. And then, in walks a national recording artist who begins sharing his life and his music. Needless to say, we were amazed. Kiki welcomed us into her home and her love of music is obvious when you meet her. I asked her if she would answer a few questions for Dagger and she agreed.

When did Kiki’s House of Righteous Music start?

Back in 2005, I had just read an article about house concerts when my friend Tim Easton sent an email looking for show ideas in between Chicago and Minneapolis. I cautiously offered, “you could play here…” He immediately wrote back, “I was hoping you would say that!”

How do you choose artists?

It has to be someone I love. I don’t book artists I haven’t seen. I’ll do a show anytime someone I want to play can play. Sometimes I contact them; sometimes they find me.

Which artist has played the most?

Jon Dee Graham. He first played show #3 in 2007 with The Silos and has played a total of 23 times. Although Robbie Fulks (18) and Jon Langford (21) are threatening for the lead.

What are some of your most memorable artist performances?

The Baseball Project show after Scott McCaughey had recovered from a stroke. It was their first show outside the Seattle area, and it is always surreal to have half of REM in my basement. Robbie Fulks has brought some truly amazing musicians with him, and his shows are always transcendent. Andre Williams with the GoldStars; he’s still the only artist to have changed his outfit for the encore. The Figgs have played marathon thirty plus song shows, and no one is ever ready for them to stop. Jon Langford and John Szymanski playing for a dozen people in the backyard last fall. This was the only live music anyone had seen in months.

Who would you like to perform?

Lou Barlow, Joe Ely, Dave Simonett, MC Taylor, Craig Finn, Bill Kirchen, John Darnielle, the list goes on, some more realistic than others.

How has Covid-19 affected you?

I watched a lot of streaming shows in the last year and a half, and it totally worked for me, so I didn’t miss live music as much as some people did. I still went to work most days. I missed doing the shows of course, but I was just as happy reading books and watching movies. Turns out I might be an introvert, who knew?

How many shows have you lost because of it?

I think I had to cancel about fourteen. Since I usually do thirty plus shows a year, it’s safe to say I lost at least that many.

What’s your day job?

I work at UW Madison as a researcher in a lab in the Biochemistry department.

You have a great situation happening, what suggestion would you give to help other people to start doing what you do?

It never hurts to ask. If there is someone you want to play, just ask.

A good place to start is with Undertow (https://undertowshows.com/pages/about-undertow). They set up living room shows for a number of artists, and they make it really easy to do your first show by walking you through the how to’s. Bonus, they take care of tickets.

For the show I went to, Jason said he gets all the ticket sales. Who pays for the sound guy? What’s in it for you?

I’ve been very lucky to find sound people who volunteer their time in exchange for dinner and a few beers. And of course, a great show. For me, I get to see a band I love in my basement.

Have you had any backlash or bad situations with artists/neighbors?

Never anything bad with the artists, everyone has been great and very happy to be here. Most of my neighbors think what I’m doing is cool. In the early days, they would see all the cars, but no people inside, so I think they were happy to find out that I was having music in my basement and not something else. There have been a few complaints about parking, but none about noise.

I loved the Sessions at McPike Park concert you set up in Madison with Chuck Prophet and Bonnie Whitmore. How did that come about? Do you do this kind of thing often because of your connections?

Bob Queen asked if I��d be interested in curating a night of the Sessions back in 2018, though I still don’t know what prompted him to ask me. I think he was looking for someone with a different perspective. This year was my third, and every show has been a blast. I don’t do it often, just the Session once a year; for the most part, the basement is big enough for me.

Top Ten desert island discs? (If you were stuck on a desert island, what 10 albums would you HAVE to have with you?)

There’s only two I have to have- Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks and Chris Mills The Silver Line, three through ten probably change on a daily basis.

First record or piece of music you bought?

Billy Joel The Stranger

What are some of your favorite concert venues?

The Hideout in Chicago, Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn, The Turf Club in St Paul and Café Carpe in Ft. Atkinson.

Favorite live shows? Bob Dylan, Robbie Fulks, Ha Ha Tonka, Dead Man Winter, and Hiss Golden Messenger.

Finish this sentence: I want to be remembered for…

My band T-shirt collection? I don’t need to be remembered, I just want everyone to have a good time right now.

That is so true. Kiki’s love of music is something she has to share with other like-minded people. At first I thought it was the joy of finally seeing a live show because of Covid-19 cancelling so many concerts; but watching, fully masked, made me realize it’s the warmth Kiki’s shows brings to the music scene. My friend and I hope to go back soon. We missed Steve Wynn, but maybe we’ll catch him next time around.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/363474586571/

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nicknellie · 4 years

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Honestly when Tumblr crashed I just thought it was my Internet being wonky but that stinks that it got rid of everything you said, I completely agree it’s really fun to bounce ideas off of each other.

Agreed, although the show kind of says that Luke wrote the songs that Julie mentioned I feel like the band probably did help out with those songs but those exact ones may have been a bit personal to Luke hence the extreme reaction ‘My Name is LUKe’. However an idea that I have is that Alex write songs as well (also just because I want his version of unsaid Emily in my life) (and the show mentions that Reggie wrings county music) also it would make more sense for the band to bounce ideas off of each other (as we see Luke do with Julie) then just Luke writing every single part of those songs by himself. also the show never really confirms when he wrote the songs so easily could be that he wrote them while he was still grieving because he was thinking that was the best way to honour them and then later down the road he realized that wasn’t the best. And the show doesn’t mention if he gave money to charities in their name or what he did just that he didn’t give them credit.

I agree I feel like part of it may have been that he didn’t want their deaths following him because reporters would definitely be like oh how are you recovering and etc. also as you said he was going through a lot of trauma from losing his family and although that may not have been a lot of people’s gut reaction it is understandable. I just think that’s how the boys saw it just because unexpectedly they hear that someone stole their songs and then all the sudden it’s not someone who’s not close to them but someone who it feels like they stabbed them in the back kind of.

Honestly the fact that he meditates is kind of what made me think of the idea just because he would be able to calm himself and think rationally which I don’t feel like Luke and Reggie could do if they thought someone who they cared about was hurt. Maybe back then it was Bobby and Alex who shared the single brain cell that was Sunset Curve (but only Bobby when Alex was upset any other time he was just as chaotic as Luke and Reggie)

Crossword: that is totally what Reggie would do and he would totally just blurred out the words before Alex even had a chance to think about them just because he loves Alex so much and he was so excited. (Also I feel like Reggie would be the sentimental one who would make a scrapbook and just give Alex a photo album to show that no matter what they will always be here for them)

Reggie owns so many flannels, yes!! (also double yes, because I definitely feel like those piece meant something to them especially if that’s what they had before they died, also it would just be so adorable if the band members just gave each other items to show support and unconditional love)

Awe, now I’m thinking about Bobby sobbing after they passed just because he loved them so much and that for the longest time he couldn’t get back into knitting or jewelry making because it reminded him of the boys (similar to how Julie couldn’t play music after her mom passed)

Necklace: But he definitely would, he probably put so much research into it as well and chose colours that held meaning and stuff, also the necklace helped Reggie so much when his parents were arguing because just like with Alex’s bracelet they were made with love and it remindes him that he always has a place to go.

Yes, when Luke ran away they were all sobbing however that’s exactly what they did. You described it perfectly, also because I feel like it’s canon that Alex gives the best hugs so he was giving Luke huge hugs while Reggie was trying to distract Luke and Bobby was trying to figure out arrangements. (also I feel like Alex would help Bobby would as soon as he can, I feel like Reggie would try to get movie night as a way to distract Luke).

With the jigsaw I could definitely see Luke trying to pretend like he isn’t interested well just focusing on Bobby putting the jigsaw away. (The point with Reggie is perfect and reminds me of that meme with the guy who is looking at a butterfly and it’s just Reggie being like is this a reason to get distracted and then dropping the jigsaw)

Yeah I totally agree that the mentioned ones were more personal. I reckon all of their songs came from some sort of struggle and to have that kind of erased when they weren’t mentioned must have been another thing that really hurt them when they found out what had happened. So yeah, I think they would all bounce ideas off each other (when they would all talk again after one of their quiet jigsaw/knitting/crossword/Rubik’s Cube sessions) and Luke would sort of put the pieces together to make the song. When Julie says ‘none of his latest stuff is as good’ I think that maybe Bobby had been trying to emulate their old song-writing sessions, trying to recreate the way they had given each other ideas and stuck them all together, but it just wasn’t quite working with just him because he couldn’t make it alone. Which maybe is when he realised even further that it had been the wrong thing to do, not credit them for their music. He would definitely write out of grief and pain and then later realise that he hadn’t really done them justice or kept their memories alive in the way he had tried to because he had unwittingly done everything he could to erase them. I’ve thought in the past that Mitch Patterson would have set up some sort of charity or foundation in Luke’s name that set to bring help and music to kids in need and now that you’ve mentioned charities I have decided that Trevor/Bobby makes hefty donations to that whenever he can.

An Unsaid Emily-style Alex song would kill me. His would be more focused on how his parents view of him changed. I headcanon that Alex’s parents were very kind and loving and they doted on Alex. They loved him with all their hearts and none of them ever thought that would change, so he was confident when he came out to them. But obviously they weren’t cool with it and we get very little detail about what happened next. I think Alex would have written about his memories and how lonely it felt and how shattered he was that he hadn’t been accepted. There’d be undertones about him missing them and missing the old days and part of him wishing he’d never told them (although he is really glad that he did).

Yeah, you’re totally right about the fact that he didn’t want their deaths following him. For a teenager to be thrown into stardom is one thing, to be constantly bombarded about his trauma would have been another. It wasn’t that he wanted to escape the boys or forget them, he wanted his memories of them to remain untainted by flashing cameras and cruel interviews. And YES, that brings us back to the fact that they’ve grown at different rates and the last two and a half decades were nothing for the boys but likely hell on Earth for Bobby. The guy they used to know is suddenly someone seeming cold and distant and because they didn’t experience losing each other they can’t understand how it must have been for him to lose them. They never really give themselves a chance to see it from Bobby’s perspective - even when they begin to move on in episode 6 Luke says Bobby ‘has to live with that guilt’, he immediately discards it as a bad thing and none of them begin to rationalise his actions. They don’t make any effort to see the situation from Bobby’s point of view (although admittedly I can’t imagine that would be an easy thing to do).

Totally - Bobby and Alex shared the brain cell but Bobby was the only be who could really use it to it’s full potential. He was so ready to be there for all of them when they needed it. Luke and Reggie would want to fight the problem head on while Bobby knew it was best to take their time and figure it out like one of Alex’s beloved jigsaw puzzles.

Kind of off-topic but I think he’s very spiritual too (I kind of get it from the meditating in a way I can’t quite explain) and if he wasn’t so certain that he was finally losing it after all those years of guilt then he would have believed and been happy that the boys were back as ghosts when they haunted him. Like he thinks rationally until it comes to supernatural stuff and then he’s all over the idea of ghosts and monsters.

Omg ok the scrapbooking!!!!! I am so here for this!!!!! Reggie had tons of scrapbooks and photo albums - he writes silly little captions underneath the photos, gets Bobby to make things that can be stuck in as decorations, and will take a camera with him wherever he goes. I think cameras were very different in the nineties and I wasn’t born then so idk how it all works but didn’t you have to go somewhere to get them developed?? Well, Reggie loved doing that and he’d always get one of the boys to come with him so when he saw the photos for the first time he would have someone to look through them with. He made special scrapbooks for special occasions: Alex’s coming out, Christmases, birthdays, holidays they all went on together. He would collect things and add in little envelopes to the scrapbook if it wasn’t flat enough to be stuck in. He kept everything from tickets to candy wrappers because he wanted to remember everything they all did together.

I definitely think the boys’ signature clothing is important to them. Reggie loved his flannels and his favourite was from the boys; Alex loved his hoodie which the boys got him (and his fanny pack may have been a gift from them too so he wouldn’t have to carry whatever’s in there all the time); our theory that Bobby was the one who knitted Luke’s beanies. It makes me wonder if Bobby had anything from them he still wears. He probably would have grown out of clothes, but maybe his sunglasses were a gift? Or they made his necklaces? Or he has a jacket that used to be one of theirs and still fits him?

Oh my god no that hurts 😭 Bobby trying to make himself a necklace or bracelet out of colours that reminded him of them (pink for Alex, blue for Luke, red for Reggie) but his hands shaking so much that he can’t thread the beads and had to stop. Him trying over and over again but not being able to do it because he gets bombarded with memories about Luke knocking over all his beads that one time, or Reggie accidentally breaking the clasp on his necklace so Bobby had to replace it, or the tears in Alex’s eyes when he was given that rainbow bracelet. Oh my GOD.

Alex definitely gives the best hugs. I would kill for an Alex hug. For a while, Luke just needed to be held so Alex did that, Reggie started talking about something completely unrelated, and Bobby started making phone calls and looking things up to find out what the best way forward was. Alex of course helped, like you said, as soon as Luke was fine to be left with just Reggie. I feel like it was kind of similar within the band - Bobby was the one who booked gigs and made deals, he did all the managerial stuff while the others focused more on the performances and the music. He missed rehearsals because of meetings with record execs or whatever sometimes but he could pick things up very quickly so it didn’t really matter.

And because I couldn’t not do this:

(Also is it cool with you if I make a mini masterlist of all these things we’ve said? I’m definitely going to want to find these again but at some point they’ll be buried deep within my blog so I want easy access lol)

#anon #asks #emily answers #sunset curve #bobby wilson #I took so long writing this that my phone charged by 50%

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innittowinit · 4 years

Text

Abandoned amusement parks are the best place for young children (chapter 15)

Fic summary:

Techno, Tommy, Wilbur and Phil have been hanging out at the abandoned amusement park in the woods since they moved in. Techno likes knowing he's definitely alone with his brothers Tommy likes climbing on the old rides Wilbur likes having a place to play his music Phil likes spending time with his younger brothers

That is, until a group of brothers calling themselves the 'dream team' move in down the road. Will the sleepy boys give in and share the park or will they succeed in scaring the new kids off?

Chapter summary:

same time period as last chapter! Techno and dream perspective this time

Chapter word count: 2849

AO3

Listen, he didn’t want to leave. Techno knew that neither him nor Wil were able to function very well apart. He knew he’d hurt Wilbur if he ran off, but it’s not like he had predicted the door getting stuck, truly he had thought once Wilbur realised he was gone he would just come over and chill out with him.

The yelling had just gotten too much. There had been so much noise and he just wanted a break, his mind had felt fuzzy and it was getting hard to distinguish his own thoughts from what was going on around him, an anxious pressure built in his chest that made him want to either scream or hit someone.

It was just so loud.

Tugging on Wilbur’s sleeve was usually the sign he gave when things were getting too much, countless times he’d done so in school and Wilbur had rushed him out of the situation, without any kind of hesitancy or worry that he might get in trouble for doing so. Which he had. That being said, he wasn’t sure if Wil had ever been the reason he was feeling this way before, he was always considerate and tried his best to do what was best - of course he was still human and had blips where he might get overwhelmed himself, or maybe he was too stressed about something and wasn’t able to help.

Those situations always felt terrible to be in, they made Techno mad beyond belief but he always calmed back down eventually. Whilst he was pretty closed off, he was never one to hold a grudge and he generally understood that Wil was his own person with his own emotions and he couldn’t always rely on him to do everything.

He didn’t want to rely on him. It felt stupid and infantilising to not be able to do things yourself, That being said, he appreciated his brother greatly.

So, when Wil was far too heated to help, Techno had tried his best to endure the situation. No matter how light headed he got, he knew Wil would freak out if he left, so he stayed. For a while it was okay, it was stressful and awkward but he was okay.

That was until the proper yelling started. When they had moved from calling each other annoying and selfish to genuinely attacking each other as people. As much as he wanted to stay, he knew he needed to just take a break, Wilbur would understand. He knew Wil knew he was getting overwhelmed so of course Wilbur would understand.

Nobody noticed when he left, that’s what he had thought, despite the fact that he had been frantically running for a place to calm down. Since they had been sitting on the coaster just moments before, the most logical place to hide seemed to be the ticket booth. Wrapping his long hair back into a ponytail, the boy carefully crept into the old building, keeping the door open behind him as he hadn’t planned to stay long.

The floor had speckled pieces of glass all over it, stemming from vandals that had come over the years, the old counter was surprisingly clean though so that’s where he decided to sit, back leaning against the rusted old shutters. The idea that one day someone had closed this place up after work and never came back was a weird mix of haunting and calming, like it showed just how easily places can get lost to time. Not wanting rust in his hair, he had pulled the ponytail out from behind him and placed it over his shoulder, braiding it slowly to pass the time.

The braid wasn’t exactly good or pretty, Niki was usually the one who would braid his hair, she was the one who had taught him too but he supposed he didn’t have the coordination or patience to make it look presentable at all.

From inside the booth, he could still hear the echoes of yelling but it was much more muffled now, it provided a nice easy middle-ground where he wasn’t too far from his brothers and could easily go to them if he heard anything bad happen, but it was also quiet enough that he was able to hear his own thoughts again. Thank god.

Peace never seemed to last long anymore though, not now that the Dream Team were apparently so adamant on becoming friends. He guessed so anyway, he had been listening to the start of the argument and George seemed genuinely sorry about everything.

“Hey!” A voice had come from right outside the booth, footsteps of someone jogging along with that too.

Before he knew it, Dream had ran into the booth, closing the door behind him -out of habit, Techno guessed- and then started walking towards Techno. There was a crash and a blur of green before the boy was on the floor, having tripped over some of the debris, reminding Techno that the majority of people weren’t used to the vast amount of shit that was just spewn over the park from it’s previous owners.

Maybe if it was any of his brothers he would have laughed at the trip, it was comical to say the least. But the floor was covered in glass and dirt and God knows what else.

Not the best stuff to be laying in, that’s for sure.

Hopping down off the counter and running his hand through his hair to get rid of the braid, he made his way to the boy and tried to help him up, at least he didn’t seem to be upset.

“Oh god!” He chuckled, his laugh was almost a wheeze, Techno thought if they were ever friends he might tease him about it. “Dude! You ran off, I just wanted to make sure you were alright”

He rubbed his hands, scratched and dirty, against his hoodie to get some of the grime off as he sat against the wall, seemingly not caring about everything he was sitting in.

It was almost like a movie, Techno thought, how he laughed and got up only for everything to come crashing down.

There was a thin crack going from the top middle to the bottom middle of his mask, admittedly it didn’t look all too serious until Dream had sat up, laughing like a kettle, that it had snapped in two, both pieces of plastic dangling off his ears while the elastic held them pathetically.

The boy’s face displayed genuine horror and embarrassment, as if he had been caught without trousers on or something. To Techno, the idea of wanting to hide your face to the same degree you’d hide your privates seemed crazy, that being said he couldn’t fully judge him for that when he wouldn’t even talk.

Snapping back to reality, Techno looked away sharply. He might not fully understand why he was hiding his face but he wanted to respect his privacy nonetheless, he knew he’d feel pretty mortified if Dream listened to him talk or something, he guessed it was the same kind of thing.

He hated to admit it, but he had got a glimpse of his face, there was a purple coloured mark that spread over half his face, he wasn’t sure if it was a burn, scar or birthmark since it had been such a short glimpse though. Speckled across his cheeks, light orange freckles decorated his face, reaching from his lips,squeezed shut in embarrassment, to his eyes, wide and wild.

As if it couldn't get any better, apparently the noise of Dream’s fall had been loud enough to alert everyone that they were in the booth and very quickly Wilbur was banging on the door in hysterics. Hiding his face in his dirty palms, Dream attempted to open the door but found that it wasn’t moving.

Well fuck.

To say that Techno felt guilty would be an understatement, not only was Wilbur outside the door, practically taking it off its hinges with the amount of force he was exerting on it, Dream too had got hurt from Techno running off, he had fallen and scraped up his hands but, more importantly, he had broken his mask.

“It’s me and Techno!” Dream had called out, once he realised there was no point waiting for Techno to do it. “I think the door’s stuck”

Wilbur seemed to fumble with the door a little while longer before giving up and leaning against it, his voice sounded like he was in physical pain from not being with Techno, it felt horrible knowing he’d caused this. The brunette gave him simple instructions, one knock for yes and two for no. It was an easy way of communicating when they couldn’t even read body language

“Are you mad at me?”

He knocked twice, why would he be mad? Wil messed up but so had he. They’d both made emotional decisions without regard for the other, they’d screwed each other over and it could have easily been avoided with communication.

That being said, communication was hard when you’re seething with rage, so of course Techno wasn’t mad.

“Did I piss you off?”

Honestly? Yes he had. Whenever Wil, or any of his brothers, did something like this it pissed him off. It had been a small decision but it had hurt him so of course it pissed him off, so he gave one knock, not wanting to lie to his brother about how the situation made him feel. They had had plenty of conversations with their Therapist about how if they aren’t honest, situations can repeat themselves.

The next thing he heard was an apology, then he assumed Wil was talking to the other two members of the Dream Team since the conversation trailed off more into them trying to help him.

He was glad Wil wasn’t alone right now.

Looking behind him, Dream was still curled up, trying to hide his face with his grubby hands but it wasn’t working very well, there were still parts peeking through and that was obviously upsetting him by the way he frantically tried to move them into the right position. Not only that but it wasn’t like his hands were exactly clean either, they probably still had glass on from when he fell and they definitely were still covered in dirt.

The idea of him getting something like that in his eye made his stomach flip so, trying his hardest not to look directly at his face area, Techno took off his red coat and handed it to Dream, making a motion of putting it to his face before sitting down next to him.

Thankfully Dream was smart. He put his face in the hood of the coat and fasted the button on the back of his neck so it wouldn’t fall down.

“God, I bet I look like an idiot don't I?” The boy chuckled, using his hands to smooth it out to make sure nothing was visible.

“Thank you, I know we’ve been kinda the worst to you guys the past few weeks. I know it sounds like an excuse but we really didn’t mean to hurt you, we thought it was all a game y'know? You’re nice though. We kinda think the same, I think”

Techno nodded, Dream was intelligent and strategic and strong, they both had their problems but despite that they both also had their own personalities. While Techno was more reserved in public, being more assertive and confident when he was with his loved ones, Dream was the opposite, strong and assertive until he was comfortable, which is when the insecurities came back.

They were both very similar people, Dream knew they had the capacity to be friends if he worked hard at it.

“You didn’t….You didn’t see anything right?”

Above anything else, Techno hadn’t been expecting him to say that, of course it made sense, he didn’t show his face for a reason, but his demeanor had shifted so easily.

Dream was hard to read, he wasn’t even sure if he should tell the truth here. Lying was bad, he knew that, but sometimes telling the truth could hurt people.

Eventually, after almost a minute of staring blankly, Techno decided telling the truth was always the correct thing to do, even if it hurt in the short term maybe it would be better in the long term.

With extreme hesitancy, Techno nodded his head.

Dream’s breath seemed to hitch.

“It’s just- We moved around so much growing up right? I’ve had that mark for as long as I can remember! But people don’t understand when they see it, they think it’s weird and ugly and they’d always make fun of it when I went to new schools! And then...Then one day I bought a mask and it was so much better! Nobody thought that was ugly, they thought it was weird but weird is better than weird and ugly”

Words seemed to be coming out a mile a minute, if Techno didn’t know better, he would have guessed Dream had never had anyone to vent like this to before. Thinking back, he tried to remember how Phil comforted him whenever he was upset. It was mainly hugs and kind words.

Wrapping an arm around Dream had been the easy part, he may not have an intense craving for contact but if someone was upset he was hardly going to deprive them of it. The hard part was the ‘kind words’ section, for a moment he wondered if he could get away with staying silent but he distinctly remembered that Phil’s kind words were really the main thing that helped.

Fuck

Tuning everything out, Techno tried to focus all of his energy into talking, his throat and tongue felt swollen and his mouth felt like it had been stuffed with cotton wool. Thinking back yet again, he tried to remember techniques his speech therapist had taught both him and Wilbur. He wasn’t even trying to say anything yet and the sheer thought of talking had him feeling like he might hurl. There was one in particular that he was good at; Wil was supposed to say one number and Techno would say the next and so on. It was designed to slowly ease him into talking without the added stress of accidentally saying the wrong thing.

Wil wasn’t here right now though.

So he tried the next best thing, Dream.

Just rip it off, like a band-aid. Just rip it off, like a band-aid. Just rip it off, like a band-aid.

“One..” he muttered, almost inaudible as anxiety coursed through his veins, praying that Dream would understand what he was trying. Every bone in his body was telling him that he was somehow playing a dangerous game by talking, he just had to keep reminding himself that objectively there was nothing to be afraid of, he reminded himself of how proud Phil would be when he was able to tell him that he had managed it and on his own.

Dream didn’t seem to understand. He just sat staring at Techno with wide eyes, having clearly become accustomed to the boy being silent.

“You spoke?”

Techno nodded and then nodded again, towards his hands, showing one finger, then two fingers a couple times.

“Two?”

The smile on Techno’s face said it all, they’d practiced this technique so many times that he was sure he could get the words out now that Dream knew what they were doing.

“Three.”

Despite his smile and seemingly confident nature, his voice was evident that he was still very much anxious about what was happening.

“Four!”

Dream was smiling too now, not that Techno could see it through the hood, but it showed in his voice. He wasn’t sure if Dream really knew what was happening or if he thought they were counting for fun but he was glad the boy was helping anyway.

Together, they counted up to 30, Techno’s voice very slowly getting more and more confident and stable. By the time they were at 30, Techno’s voice still wasn’t exactly perfect, or nearly as strong as it was when he was with his brothers, but it was decent.

Looking away made talking easier, so he looked at the old rusted shutters and fiddled with his hair, absentmindedly braiding it as he sorted out what he was going to say in his head.

Phil was going to be so proud of him.

“It’s going to be okay. You’ll feel good about it one day”

The words were cut short and stiff, it had felt like he was having to physically push them out of his throat as he said it but God. He was so proud of himself.

“Techno!!” Dream had practically squealed as he hugged the other boy “Thank you so much. I hope you know the same applies to you! One day you’re gonna be as loud as Tommy”

Techno smiled but rolled his eyes at that.

Nobody could ever be as loud as Tommy.

#technoblade #dream #sbi #sleepy bois inc #dream team #fanfic

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purplesurveys · 4 years

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1130

survey by nadine07

Where were you three hours ago? Was passed out on the living room couch and probably dreaming away, lmao.

Were you with anyone? Both my dogs were in the living room with me, if that counts.

Have you had anything alcoholic in the last 24 hours? Hmm, I’m trying to remember but I don’t think so. I went outside to eat, but I doubt they put any alcohol in my meal since I literally had a truffle-based pasta. No plans to drink this weekend, either.

Are you wearing shoes right now? Nope, I’m always barefoot around the house.

How long have you known your 1st phone contact? At least since the 6th grade cos I think that’s when she had transferred to my school.

Are they a relative? Nope, I went to school with her. We were seatmates for a while in sophomore year and that’s when I was able to see how talented she was at drawing and painting. She ended up transferring to UP as well after getting accepted to the fine arts program so we got to be collegemates as well, though I don’t really remember what university she initially got admitted to.

Would you ever consider getting back together with any of your exes? Yeah, because I’m a dumb fuck when it comes to these things. I WILL SAY though that I’ll be so much kinder to myself should this ever happen, and no longer tolerate her bullshit and emotional/mental abuse under the guise of ~unconditional love. There’ll be a lot of shit she’ll have to pick up and fix, and I wouldn’t get back with her unless she acknowledges her mistakes and seek to correct them.

Would you ever go skinny dipping with the last person who commented you? That would be Leigh, and no. Idk if I’ve shared this or if this has ever come up on a survey but Andi actually once asked me if I’d like to be a part of a threesome with them and Leigh, and I just had to immediately decline because I view Leigh as a younger sister more than anything and I can’t bear to see her all naked loooool.

When was the last time you saw a movie in theaters? December 2019.

When did you last talk to the last person you shared a kiss with? I think the morning of New Year’s Eve. I was already starting my healing process by then and the holidays were getting me feeling kind of peaceful, so I sent her a few voice notes thanking her for the year that was but giving her a heads-up that I might not talk to her for a while, because I realized I was starting to get happier on the days I didn’t force conversation with her.

I honestly thought ‘a while’ would only take a couple of weeks, but I’ve since gotten used without her presence and it’s been 3 1/2 months since our final encounter; and I think it will stay this way now.

Has anyone called you beautiful today? No.

Are you still friends with the last person who broke your trust? That would be JM, and yeah. I find him ridiculous for lying to our faces about joining a fraternity in law school (frats are a big yuck where I live because of their toxic hazing and misogynist culture), but I mean I still sort of understand why he had to do it - obviously not for the above reason, but for the perks and support that usually come with joining frats. From now on I’ll always see him as someone who can smoothly lie to my face, though.

Does drama seem to follow you everywhere? No. I would hate that lol, that would just be too much to handle.

Do you feel like anyone is playing mind games with you right now? No.

How would you feel if your best friend hooked up with your ex? I think my literal first reaction would be to laugh out of sheer disbelief, and then proceed to call her stupid for cheating and for choosing to cheat with her. After that’s died down, I think I’d mostly feel disappointed and betrayed.

How long did your last relationship last? The stint lasted 4 years, but we were technically together for 6 years if we’re counting the whole on/off thing.

If you knew you had the right person, would you marry them today? No. That’s what I had thought and they left. I’ve stopped trusting my feelings about these things anymore, and will assume anyone is capable of leaving.

Does it make you uncomfortable to talk on the phone around people? I just don’t want to be loud enough that I’m almost screaming around other people, but I can’t always monitor that since I have to concentrate on what I’m hearing on the other line.

Would you rather be 10 years older or 10 years younger? Probably 10 years older so that I can see into my future.

Have you ever kissed someone the same night your met them? No.

Do you bite your fingernails? Occasionally. I pick at them more frequently.

Would you consider yourself very flexible? Nah. Like I said on a previous survey, I can’t even reach my toes either while standing up or stretching on the floor.

Do you embarrass easily? Yeah.

Have you ever tried to talk your way out of getting a ticket? Yup. It’s happened twice; one of the occasions I was able to handle by myself and the other time Gab had to step in to talk to the officer because he was adamant about the ticket and I had started crying.

Did it work? Yes, both times. I’ve only been issued a ticket once, from this annoying grumpy officer in Alabang.

Have you ever been banned from anywhere? Trying to remember if I have been, but I don’t think so.

Do you have a ringtone or do you leave your phone on vibrate? The important messaging apps are on vibrate. I’ve turned off notifications for some apps and I have just the silent banner notifications for others.

What was the last thing you drank from a mug? I’m drinking coffee from one right now.

Has your #1 ever seen you naked?

Does your #2 know your deepest secret?

Will your #3 repost this?

Does your #4 smoke?

Were you born in the 90's? Yes, but by the end of it so I never considered myself a 90s kid.

When was the last time you paid less than $1 for something? The parking fee in Feliz.

Have you loaned anything out to anyone recently? Nope.

Are any of your siblings married? None of us are.

Who was the last person to spend the night with you at your house? Gabie.

How many different picture ids do you have in your wallet? Just my driver’s license and TIN ID.

Do you have a hard time making decisions? Depends on the weight of the decision. The heavier it is, the more I seek out friends who can provide fresh perspectives.

Has anyone kissed you when you weren't expecting it? Idk, Gabie probably snuck in some surprise ones a few times. IBetween the two of us I was more likely to do so, though.

Did you like it? If she did then I probably did during that time.

Who was your date to senior prom? We have junior prom, not senior prom. I just bought my favorite cousin since I had no interest in boys and was still learning how to make guy friends at that point.

Does your dad smoke? No, he’s never tried.

Is your mom over 50? She is turning 50 this year, but not until September.

Do you want to get married? It would be nice to experience it.

Have kids? Yes.

Are there any movies coming out you wanna see? Not that I know of. There are movies I do want to see, but they’ve already come out, like Ammonite and I Care A Lot.

Do you ever feel like you're leading a double life? No.

Do you have any plans to get a new tattoo or piercing? Tattoo, yeah. I’m just super chill about said plan and am not really in a hurry about it. I’ve yet to think of a design and where on my body to place it.

Do you know anyone named Christine? I know several people named Christine but they go by a nickname, like Tin.

Do you know anyone who's biracial? Sure, I went to high school with a couple of girls who are both half-brown and half-white as they both have European dads. I believe one of them is part German while the other girl is part Swiss.

Do you know anyone who works at Walmart? I don’t think so. I know my aunts who live in the US will occasionally shop there though, hahaha.

Has the last person you rode in a car with seen you in your underwear? I mean yeah, as a baby and as a young kid (it was my mom).

Are black bras sexy? They can be, sure.

Spell your full name without 'C','I','R', or 'Y': Obn.

Open the nearest book, turn to page 11, and type the first sentence: I’m at a Starbucks rn and didn’t bring any books with me.

Are you currently listening to anything? There’s jazz music faintly playing at the moment.

Would you ever consider getting breast implants? Before I definitely used to, when people still liked to make fun of small boobs. Nowadays I don’t feel the need to anymore.

If you could spend 30 minutes with someone who's gone, who would you pick? I’d probably pick my great-grandpa over my grandpa. I never met the former; and if I only had 30 minutes with my grandpa (who I did grow up with) I think it would just fuck with me psychologically.

Are you on birth control? Nopes.

Do you know anyone who is bisexual? Lots.

Would you walk into Walmart naked for $10,000? Yes.

Does anyone call you babe? No.

Do you hate it when people try to play with your hair? If I’m not close enough to them I would feel bothered, yes.

Who would you tell, or who did you tell when you lost your virginity? I think I had just told Sofie then.

Were you in a relationship 6 months ago? Yeah but it was cracking and it was cracking fast. It’ll be hitting 6 months this March, actually.

Are you still with that person? No.

Are you the kind of person who has crazy mood swings? No. This happens to my mom and I hate it very much, so I try to watch my actions and not switch rapidly between different moods.

This is question 69...so have you ;)? Sure.

How long is it until your birthday? Around a month and a couple of weeks.

#survey #surveys

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harveywritings92 · 5 years

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Someone flirts/asks you out in front of them: Ezio,Connor,Jacob,Arno

Ezio Auditore [modern Au] : You were a temporary sub for the local high-school while the math teacher was on early maternity leave, due to getting sick...And due to your young and pretty appearance, these over hormonal charged teens were smitten with you! Well the boys are anyway...

the girls on the other hand, were very passive aggressive towards you! in their young developing minds they saw every little praise or smile as you hitting on or attempting to steal their crushes. So, of course you'd find someone had vandalized your desk or left a message on your blackboard calling you a very colorful name, of course one of the boys would jump over their desk in a heartbeat to clean up the mess or tattle on whoever did it.

Needless to say You found the whole thing hilarious! You thought if the girls were upset now, they'll be royally destroyed once they find out who you're married to! that was until Travis transferred to your class He was tall, blond, and had blue eyes and was very good looking...Well at least to a teenage girl's perspective, To you? he was another pimply faced teen with a crush, He'd often offered to help with carry boxes, clean up after class, and was always volunteering to get something for you.

His flirting wasn't subtle either more then often you have to duck or walk around to avoid him touching you, since that was big no-no in the school [unless he was dying you can't touch him and vice versa] that and he started asking for your number and address to hang out, You shot him down everytime, even made sure to mention your husband and flashed your ring a few times, but the blond was persistent! then the rumor started that Travis was planning to ask you out after class was floating around... Maybe he'd get the hint if he saw you with Ezio?

3rd pov

Y/n pretty much clung to her husband after explaining the situation to him, Ezio downplayed at first thinking she was just overreacting, "He's a kid Mi Bella, they get crushes all the time!" He said trying to calm her nerves, But seeing how shaken up his wife was, caused his protective instincts to go on high alert! right as her class was ending everyone who had heard what Travis was planning stuck around curious to see where it goes.

Y/n was on edge Ezio was late and Travis was eagerly waiting for the bell, which went off as she felt a bead of sweat fall of her chin, she watched the blond teen get up Y/n tried not to cringe as he approached her desk. "Hey, Miss L/n." purred leaning on her desk she wince hearing his voice crack a little.

"Hi Travis." Y/n said trying to back away from him trying not to gag he was wearing way too much axe. "I wondering if you wanted to go out, maybe see a movie or something." he muttered looking her up and down before the y/hc teacher could open her mouth a smooth Italian voice answered "Well it depends what are we going to watch?~" Travis jumped back in shock that it wasn't Y/n's cute voice answering him and saw Mr. Auditore standing in the doorway large bouquet in hand.

"Wh-what?" Travis sputtered out confused as the Italian teacher walked over to Y/n's desk handing her the flowers kissed her on the cheek, then turned to the gobsmacked teen. "I said what are we..." he gestured the three of them. "You, me and my wife. what are we going watch? Hopefully nothing R Rated or keeps you up passed your bedtime, it's a school night after all." Ezio said in a matter of factly way, But it was obvious he was teasing the boy causing the other students to snicker, once they got over their shock, Travis's face turned red with embarrassment.

When he heard Miss L/n was actually a Mrs. he pictured some plain nerdy looking dude... Not Ezio frickin' Auditore! the Italian history teacher and to quote the girls "The sex-bomb of [School-name] high!" His ego deflated immediately crush fucking over! he can't compete with that! Travis left the class with his tail between his legs...

Connor Kenway [Cannon Time]: [This the albino Reader from my Connor Oneshot]

Otsi'tsa was looking trough some documents an apprentice had pocketed from a templar envoy, she used a candle to see in there was hidden message or code was written in invisible ink, when she heard footsteps coming up the steps to the library, she briefly glanced up to see the newest Novice to join the creed standing in the door watching her.

The albino cocked brow at the young man curiously. "What can I do for you John?" she hummed as the man glanced around to make sure they were alone, He hadn't noticed Connor obscured by the book shelf. "Miss Y/n I have to confess something." He put his hand on her shoulder the native woman tensed, and slowly looked at the black haired novice like.

*what the hell, why are you touching me?...

He didn't seem to notice her discomfort "What?" She said trying to shrug his hand off. "I liked you for a while now, And I'd like to perhaps court you..." the white haired woman gawked at him in disbelief before finding her voice. "...I..o-oh, I'm sorry." his hopeful expression dropped. "but... I'm already spoken for." Y/n explained confusing the novice farther he hadn't heard of or seen any signs of miss Y/n in courtship with another? "You..With who?" the green eyed man demanded.

A loud bang caused John to jolt, he looked behind him and saw Master Connor standing by the center table; with a stack of heavy books he'd slammed down on the table lips curled into a snarl. "That would be me..." Connor hiss as he scrutinized the novice who still hadn't taken his hand off his woman the green eyed man saw the way his mentor was eyeing his hand on the albino woman's shoulder, the larger man's eyes darkened with a very clear message.

*Take it off or else I'll rip it off..*

John withdrew his hand like Otsi'tsa was made of hot iron and apologized before scurrying away as soon he was sure John was gone Y/n was suddenly pulled into tight hug by Ratonhnhaké:ton He started talking to her in Kanienʼkéha "You wouldn't leave me for a man like John, would you?" He croaked warily the Albino looked at him surprised. "No, never! I made a promise to you, And I intend to keep it." Her fiancee smirked before suddenly latching his to her collarbone.

She squeaked feeling him nip and suck on a sensitive spot before pulling away from her looking satisfied. "That should tell unwanted guests to back off for a while." He hummed in english giving her a peck on the forehead before setting her down and leaving, Otsi'tsa's whole body had turned pink as she threw her hand over the mark Ratonhnhaké:ton left on her neck.

Jacob Frye [Modern AU]: [Reader is Bi and the girl is an ex]

"Oh, fuck me sideways!" Y/n groaned in annoyance as Jacob pulled away from her small baby bump; ever since she told he was going to be a father Jacob makes sure to talk to and cuddle her belly every chance he gets, his hazel eyes scanned the park to see what's got his wife riled up, and saw this fake tanned blond woman looking their way. "Friend of yours?" He asked unsure Blondie didn't seem the type Y/n would associate herself with, the y/hc woman snorted in disgust. "Hardly, that's Vanessa she and I dated for while..." She mumbled knowing Jacob doesn't like discussing exes.

"For how long a while?" the brown haired man pressed. "three years then she ghosted me, found out through a mutual that she had been seeing some rich bloke..."Y/n told him how the blond had gotten married that man who was like thirty years older than them, while just a week before she told Y/n marriage was stupid, the y/ec woman cussed as her ex seem to recognize her. "Turns out she never cared about me, I was just her string along if sugar daddy ever dumped her ass." Jacob looked pretty pissed that someone had the audacity to do such a thing to his wife, and gonna ask if she wanted to go home, but a nasally voice cut in. "Y/n, oh my god! I haven't you been returning my calls babe?" Vanessa rudely pushed herself between Jacob and the pregnant woman.

"I tried your apartment and some old creeper opened the door." She whined as Y/n cringed bemused. "I move outta that flat six yea-" The blond put her figure over the y/nat woman's lips and shushed her. "That's nice honey, I'm talking now!" she started gave the y/ht the run that her husband croaked and left all his money to his gross kids, the blonds lips curled in disgusted as she mentioned her step children, how dare he?! such selfish asshole then turned to Y/n with her fake smile.

"But I know my little n/n will never do that me.~" she purred trying to kiss her the h/c leaned away from the skinny woman who was confused when she felt something on her stomach and saw Y/n's pregnant belly "Ew, what the fuck is that, Why are you so fat?!" Vanessa demanded in disgust as she shoved her away, luckily the y/nat caught herself before she fell off the bench and Y/n saw Jacob's lips do that little twitch when he's about to fuck shit up.

Before Vanessa could try something else she was suddenly tossed off the bench and she hit the ground with a yelped, then looked up to see a pissed off Jacob holding Y/n bridal style whiles glowering at the gold digging tramp, who was about to demand his name only for him to bark "Shut up!" the blond flinched at his tone as Y/n carefully rubbed her belly. "Now you listen here and you listen well you plastic tart, Y/n isn't your bloody meal-ticket anymore..." He growled enjoying the blonde squirm like a child who just got caught stealing cookies.

"She moved on married and happy..." His lips formed thin as people were watching. "And if you or anyone wants my wife, they'll have to go through me." he hissed before carrying Y/n out of the park and away from her toxic ex who just sat there gawking at the man's back, Jacob carried her all the way to their car he opened the backseat and climbed in with her still his arms and closed the doors and just held her...she felt his hand slip under her shirt and feel her belly. "Mine..." he sighed kissing her forehead.

Arno Dorian [Cannon time]:

Arno was free running in the city being careful as he kept out of her sight if his wife knew he was following her, she'd have his head on a pike! It not like hasn't Y/n hasn't gone out alone before! She can handle herself, he's never had any problems with it before! It was just different now...this was the first time Y/n had gone out for a walk a month since giving birth to their daughter, said babe was currently napping whilst carefully wrapped save and snug in a sling against her mother's chest...

So, of course Arno was wary he just wanted to make sure his girls were okay! It was fifteen minutes in when Arno spotted him. A man following his wife, The assassin had see the man before! but Arno couldn't quite place where... He managed to get closer and realized it was one of his novices! what could they possibly want with Y/n? she was civilian not an enemy!

He followed for while before doing leap of faith into a hay pile neither Y/n or the novice had noticed the master assassin who was listening to conversation. "Uh, Bonjour madame!" the younger assassin greeted Y/n who jumped from the sudden voice , and subconsciously held her daughter closer. "Who are you?" Y/n ask as she scrutinized the hooded stranger. who staring at her nervously Arno could see and blush from under the gray hood...his stomach churned when he realized what was happening. just then D/n's eyes looked over at the hay and she got fussy.

Y/n didn't notice as her eyes were trained on the assassin in front of her who introduced himself as Rodrick. "And what do you want Mr. Rodrick?" she asked still cautious as the gray hooded, shifted uncomfortably. "I've seen at the cafe a lot, I enjoy your singing.." Her brows furrowed as she thanked him still lost on where this red bearded man was going with this. "I was wondering if you would be interested and in perhaps g-going out with me?" he stammered at little as the y/ht woman's brows shot up to her hairline.

"I'm sorry I misheard you..." He shook his head now hopeful and a bit more brave. "You do realize I married, right?" she pointed at her ring the man's demeanor hadn't change. "And yet he let's you wander the streets alone and never once seen you preform, tell me what kind of husband does that?" Y/n frowned and sighed as agreeing with him as she looked down at D/n little brown eyes that mirrored her father's blinked tiredly at her before closing again. "Maybe you should ask him..." she then looked up at the rooftops. "Arno?" she called out to her husband Rodrick blanched as figure rose out of the hay pile whilst glaring at daggers at the red bearded novice who just realized he tried to steal his mentor's wife!?

"M-master Dorian! I-I though she I- didn't know she was yours!" Rodrick stumbled over his words trying to apologize as the master came up beside he wife with a stern expression. "I think you need to leave, now." Arno growled the gray clad novice didn't need to be told twice! and ran disappearing into the crowds, Arno made a mental note of dealing with him later, He then turned to his wife intrigued and bemused.

"How did you know I was following you?"

"I didn't...D/n did."

" What...how?"

"I don't know how, but she always knows when her papa's nearby..."

Arno's heart sped up at the prospects that his daughter may have his gift and wonders what future she'll have when that time comes? But for now he opted to just finish having an afternoon walk with his girls.

#assassin's creed x reader #Ezio auditore x reader #connor kenway x reader #jacob frye x reader #arno dorian x reader #scenario #assassin's creed

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dalegoldberg · 3 years

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Will movie theaters be relevant in a post-pandemic world? It's now up to you.

On Monday, the beloved Arclight and Pacific Theaters announced they’re closing for good. ArcLight Cinemas is arguably Hollywood's most cherished theater and Pacific has been a mainstay in Los Angeles since 1946. The announcement of their closing shocked many as another casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the company announcement, they said "This was not the outcome anyone wanted, but despite a huge effort that exhausted all potential options, the company does not have a viable way forward." One can understand how a movie theater might go under in the middle of a pandemic but I did find it interesting that they felt there was truly no way forward.

One might've expected some members of the Hollywood elite to come clamoring forward with a bucket of cash to at least front the company long enough to sustain it through the pandemic so that it could reopen when the time was right.

Back in 2014, Kodak faced a similarly dire situation (for different reasons, obviously) and was ready to close its doors. That was until J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow and other filmmakers banded together to save the floundering company. Their shared love of film compelled them to save the dying medium and, thanks to those filmmakers and their studio backers, the company is still alive today.

But that hasn’t happened with these theaters. I'm not saying that can't happen, of course. The announcement just came this week so time will tell. I will say, however, it sounds like the company may have already exhausted their options (in light of the no "viable way forward" statement).

The death of ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theaters may not just signify another casualty of the pandemic but may actually be a sign of the times. Even prior to the pandemic many were wondering, amongst cord cutting and increasing interest in streaming content, how much longer would movie theaters stay relevant?

The pandemic has shifted the world in general, of course, and one of those big changes coming post-pandemic may be a world where movie theaters have a drastically different business model. Perhaps, one that makes them unrecognizable to us as we know them today.

Does that seem like too bold a claim? Perhaps. Let's just look at the state of the business now.

The state of the business pre-Covid

Prior to the pandemic, movie studios were beholden to the theaters to release their movies in theaters for a certain period of time. So if Warner Brothers wanted to release "Godzilla vs Kong" in theaters, they would have had to wait 90 days before releasing the film on Blu-Ray or to a streaming platform. There was a bit of flexibility on this when it came to digital rentals but otherwise 90 days was the standard. Now, movie studios did have the option of by-passing the theatrical exhibition altogether if they wanted and just going straight to people's homes. Why didn't they?

One reason might've been the Paramount Consent Decrees. The Consent Decrees date back to 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios had to separate their distribution operations from their exhibition operations. Essentially, studios were barred from owning movie theaters as it was seen as a monopolistic practice and not fair to consumers. At the time, the only way you could see a movie was in a theater. Gradually, over time, of course, that changed and technology enabled us to watch movies at home. We got VHS, then DVD's, then Blu-Rays, then iTunes Movies, then Netflix and so on. But the theaters remained as a mainstay. Why?

I know many of my friends would argue it's because there's no better way to see a movie than in a theater. If you said that twenty years ago I would have agreed. But today, I'd say that's become largely subjective given the technology available at home. From a purely business oriented perspective, though, there's a host of little reasons theaters remained important such as films not being eligible for Oscar nominations without a theatrical release and, possibly, because studios worried that bypassing theaters would result in further regulations by the courts.

But mostly, it's because we, the audience, were accustomed to theaters. It gave a film legitimacy when it was presented in a theater. It used to be that if a movie went “straight to home video” it was considered cheap and probably low budget. Because of that, even though the studios were giving up 50% of their revenue to the theaters, their gross still was greater than what home distribution netted them in the initial release window.

Even after the invention of Blu-Rays and iTunes Movies, studios were still sending movies to theaters (1) because it was a huge source of revenue and (2) because it helped market the movie. The movie’s success at the box office gave us a reason to want that movie at home.

A shift in Public perceptions

There's a growing number of people that no longer think that way. If a movie goes to streaming now (the new home video), we no longer assume the movie is cheap or low budget. The content on streaming is just as good as the stuff we're seeing in theaters. There’s been a massive shift in our perception of what great “cinema” is. Yeah, you might still wanna' see some things in theaters but it doesn’t cheapen the movie for you if you don't.

And that’s a big problem for theaters. The leverage they’ve had over the studios up till now has been the Consent Decrees and our perception of what great cinema is. Significant, no doubt, but those two things have changed. In August of last year, the Paramount Consent Decrees were terminated with a two-year sunset period on certain aspects of the Decrees all but ensuring that studios could now vertically integrate if they wanted to. Or just bypass the theaters altogether - as some studios already have been experimenting with.

Even at the start of the pandemic, many movies were removed from theaters and sent straight to streaming with studios reporting that the revenue gained from VOD and online rentals rivaled the profit gained from theatrical distribution. As various studios like Paramount and Warner Brothers enter the streaming game alongside Disney (Disney Plus, Hulu) and Netflix, they too are experimenting. As you may have heard, Warner Bros. is releasing all their movies this year on their streaming platform HBOMax on the same day the films are released in theaters (a practice known as "day and date"). No doubt, the bean counters at Warner Bros. will be looking to see if this is a practice that should stay. It’d be fair to say that these experiments are not true representations of reality given the state of the world we’re testing this new distribution model with. But it is changing our perception of how important movie theaters are.

Studios are altering the deal

During the pandemic, theaters have been brought to their knees and have been forced to renegotiate certain terms with the studios including the release window between theatrical and home distribution. Most studios now have negotiated a home release date that comes just 17 days after the movie debuts in theaters - far shorter than the original 90 days.

This, of course, can be argued to just be a by-product of the pandemic. Theaters don't have leverage now but once the pandemic is over they will and they'll renegotiate. Right?

That really hinges on whether or not audiences still think a movie has more value if it was presented in a theater before they got to see it at home. Does it enhance the movie for me if it gets shown in a theater or am I just as interested (or maybe even more interested) in seeing it if it is sent straight to my home?

Other big changes are happening

There's other factors to consider as well. One might be the massive shift of homeowners into the suburbs and away from the city during the pandemic. Many employers are making it possible to work from home (a trend that will likely continue post-pandemic as the internet improves and more businesses see the benefits of a remote workforce) resulting in a mass exodus from cities to suburbs. Living in the suburbs means you don’t have the same pull of massive audiences in large gatherings the way you used to. We’re also investing more in our homes to make them enjoyable places to not only live but play as well. It’s a shift in our culture.

Another factor is that our perception of long form content has changed. Episodic television used to be where big movie stars went to end their careers after a career starring in movies. Now, it’s the reverse. A lot of stars are starting in television rather than finishing there because we (the audience) love binging on serialized content and when we’re not binging episodes we’re watching four hour movies (The Irishman, Zack Snyder's Justice League). Those experiences don’t work well in theaters where you’re stuck sitting in the same place and can’t hit the pause button.

Ultimately, the biggest factor might be what it usually comes down to - money. Before the pandemic audiences were already lamenting about the cost of movie tickets. A single afternoon of me taking my wife and kids to see the latest Disney movie in a theater could cost me $50 - $60 just for admission (not to mention the cost of food and drinks). But during the pandemic I was able to rent “Mulan” for $30 from comfort of my own home. Or, if I wanted, I could just wait three months and then see it as part of my regular Disney Plus subscription (which I was already paying for anyways so I could watch “The Mandalorian”).

As things open back up, many people are not necessarily swimming in money and, while I think the Covid relief packages have probably helped, a lot of people are still hurting and will be looking for any which way to save money. It seems unlikely that theaters will be able to lower their costs at this point given the need to recoup their losses from the pandemic and the probable need to make new investments in their facilities to stay competitive. They will need to get creative to show real value to audiences that might be reluctant to rush back in to theaters.

So what will happen to theaters post-pandemic?

For those of you worried I’m predicting doomsday for theaters - relax. I think theaters are probably here to stay regardless of what happens. They’re too much a part of what movies are to simply disappear. That said, they are a business and, currently, a failing one. What they look like post-pandemic doesn’t look great, from my perspective, unless the business model changes.

One possible scenario is that theaters become like playhouses or music festivals. In other words, they’ll still exist but in fewer quantities and will become more niche, featuring elevated experiences centered around tentpole movie properties which audiences are willing to pay a premium for (think “Top Gun: Maverick” or “Godzilla vs Kong”). I can see this form of adaptation working well in everyone’s favor.

Another possibility is that the studios buy out the movie theaters. The termination of the consent decrees has made that a real possibility. And then, once they’ve purchased them, build brand experiences centered around their properties. Something like miniature Disney Lands. They would most likely close a significant number of locations leaving only the flagships they felt would bring in a large audience and use them to promote the movies on their slate. A company like Disney with a large library of films could also use the theaters as a means of re-presenting old films from their library, borrowing a tactic from LucasFilm, and refresh old content to make it new again for theatrical. In essense, the net effect would be the same as in the first scenario: fewer theaters, more niche experiences.

I say this because it is somewhat unclear, to me at least, how the current model can persist if studios own theaters. Yes, they’d control theatrical distribution but they’d likely only be purchasing a theater to distribute their own movies. Would a company like Paramount, who’s only releasing seven movies this year, see the value of owning a theater chain? Even Disney’s slate only consists of 14 movies. To make the business viable (at least as it exists now), they would have to present movies from other studios. Would one studio trust that the studio in ownership of the theater was giving them a fair number of screens for presentation? It seems untenable under the current model.

What happens next is really up to you

The biggest change from the pandemic is that we as audiences have changed the way we look at movies. We’re ok with watching movies at home and, thus, the leverage theaters have to negotiate longer release windows between theatrical and home distribution has all but disappeared. The artificial pillars that made theaters a necessity are all but gone. And yes, the Oscars will likely still require that movies be released in theaters to be eligible for nomination but the standards of what a "theatrical release" means do not require as vast a distribution as you might think (see page 2, sub-section D of the General Entry rules). Plus, let's be honest - not all movies are meant to be Oscar contenders.

So really, the only thing to keep theaters relevant now is you - the audience. My prediction is that we’ll initially see some high demand for theaters as cities are re-opened and we try to return to our regular lives. But after we get back to a sense of normalcy (whatever that means in the future) we’ll see how much audiences really want to keep paying $20 per ticket to see a movie when they could just pay $30 once to rent it at home with the entire family or binge the new hot show on Netflix / Amazon / Apple TV/ Paramount Plus / Disney Plus / Hulu / Peacock / whatever else is out there.

At that point, the studios will do some math and if the profit they’re making from streaming outweighs the profit from the box office, theaters won’t have much of a leg to stand on. That is, unless audiences continue to demand theaters be a relevant part of the movie watching experience. Without considerable innovation on behalf of the theaters, though, I question how likely that is to happen.

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erosjock · 4 years

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27 Ways to Get Over a Breakup, Like, Right Now

Going through a breakup is low-key the best time to rebrand yourself. You can be whoever you want to be, do whatever you want to do, and try anything you want to try without having to consider anyone but yourself.

But considering breakups = losing someone who was consistently in your life, it can be easy to dwell on the past instead of looking at what your future self can bring to the table. Completely understandable.

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So to help you cope with all things breakup (since, hi, your future best self is waiting), we’ve sourced a bunch of tangible, practical ways you can actually get over someone according to experts who want to help. Because yes, sometimes buying yourself flowers at the grocery store is a lil start.

Sex Expert Reacts to Iconic Sex Scenes on RIOT TV

How You Get Over a Breakup, by Zodiac Sign

1. Shower daily. I know this seems small, but trust, it makes all the difference. “Prioritizing your hygiene and taking pride in how you look can often make you feel better inside,” says licensed clinical psychologist Kristie Norwood. So get yourself a morning and nighttime routine that requires a rinse in the shower. After all, shower thoughts are the best kind of thoughts, and it might be super therapeutic. Small wins are the best wins.

2. Create a vision board. Yup, it’s time to paint a badass picture of what your future is about to look like. (Time to get on that manifesting kick). “After breakups, it’s important to figure out what your life will look like without the relationship as it was,” says Norwood. So pick up some magazines—yes, full permission to grab some Cosmos— and cut out images that you put into art your life goals and desires.

3. Treat yourself to a new sex toy. Luckily for you, vibrators come completely drama-free (and in some cases, are better than the real deal). “Cleanse yourself of any negative energy through an orgasm,” says sex educator Yael Rosenstock Gonzalez. An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away (...that’s the saying, right?).

4. Go to therapy It’s time to make an appointment for therapy, suggests licensed clinical social worker Amalia Miralrío. Especially considering an unbiased perspective could offer you insight that you weren’t able to process yourself. Get started with some free options here.

Benefits of the No Contact Rule Post-Breakup

5. Buy yourself a big bouquet of pink roses. Put them in a vase, water them, and wait for them to wilt. When it’s time to throw them out, check in with your feelings. Guess what? By the time those roses die, you’ll already feel better. Then, keep buying yourself roses, recommends Veronica Yip, a San Diego resident who swears by this hack.

6. Visit a rage room. It’s…a legit thing. “Get out all your anger and smash objects to your heart’s content,” recommends Lauren Cook, who holds a master’s in marriage and family therapy.

7. Go on that vacation you’ve been dying to—even if it’s by yourself. “Getting away to an exotic location or somewhere peaceful is a potent source of distraction,” says therapist Rev. Sheri Heller. What’s better than lounging beachside with a good book, frozen drank, and the ocean waves? Talk about self-care.

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8. Rearrange your home. Get rid of all those bad memories. “A new look creates space for new memories. Out with the old, inviting the new,” recommends Krysta Monet creator and founder of The Feminine Truth.

9. Purge your relationship junk drawer. Yes, this includes that ticket stub you’ve kept from your first date. “You don’t need the reminders of a relationship that is no longer,” says Robyn Koenig, professional dating coach and CEO at Rare Find.

How Long It Actually Takes to Get Over a Breakup

10. Write hate mail to your ex. But don’t actually send it (and tell your sister not to either, à la Lara Jean). “The caveat is not to mail the letter but to do a ceremonial burning to get rid of the toxic energy,” recommends Samantha Gregory, author of No More Crumbs: How to Stop Dating for Crumbs and Get the Cake You Finally Deserve.

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11. Say yes to everything. “This is especially useful if you’ve been in a long-term relationship where you’ve compromised and negotiated what you ate, where you went, what you watched, and who you socialized with,” says Trish McDermott, CEO of Meetopolis Dating. “Who are you and what makes just *you* happy? Now is the time to find out.”

12. Eat alone. Whether you take yourself out to your favorite Thai place or make a home-cooked dinner, sit at the table and eat in silence. “Becoming comfortable with newly found silence is part of the recovery process,” says Megan Cannon, owner of Back to Balance Counseling.

13. Sign up for a boxing class—or any other type of fighting class. “Sometimes you need to find an outlet to divert the negative energies you get after a breakup,” says Celia Schweyer, dating and relationship expert at DatingScout. Trust, punching the eff out of something will *def* help with this added stress.

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14. Block them from your Instagram/Snapchat. If the temptation to see if they’ve been paying attention to your Stories is too much, just block them. This way, when you do start to get out there and share your day-to-day activities again, you’ll know there’s zero part of you that’s performatively “acting over it” in the hopes your ex will see it.

15. Don’t shit-talk your ex too much. Sure, it feels good to trash-talk your ex with your besties, and hearing that you were better than them from the start feels like a drug, but don’t rely on it. Hearing your friends bring down someone who made you feel shitty feels like it should be justified in the grand karmic scheme of things, but your health and happiness need not be contingent on someone else’s pain and suffering.

16. Don’t immediately suggest to “stay friends”—and if they do, tell them you need to think about it. This is an impulse because you don’t want to seem like you care too much about the breakup. Because you’re so chill. You’re so chill that your heart isn’t beating. Aaand, you’re dead. But truthfully, during this stilted, awkward breaking-up period, it’s hard to tell whether you’ll be able to be friends. Generally, one person wants to be friends and the other wants to be more. Gotta work that shit out before it can be a healthy friendship…if it ever can be. You’re not admitting defeat by not staying friends with them.

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