#we’re a massive community it’d be really cool to do something like this.

[restnowyourhardshipisover]

Hey! Dream SMP friends! Shhhh… secret plan! Everyone listen up! BoomerNA just uploaded a DSMP video to his YouTube!

Let’s all go over and watch it all the way through and leave nice comments give him tons of love for being so kind and welcoming and supportive. Let’s show how much we love our streamers and their block game and their silly lovely Minecraft server and its perpetual cycle of arson.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language. 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 54 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about how grammars come into existence. But first, we are doing a liveshow in April. We will be doing a liveshow recording on the internet so that we can all be in the same place at the same time on Saturday the 24th of April, Eastern Daylight Savings Time in North America, which will be early on a Sunday morning for us here Australia.

Gretchen: That’ll be 6:00 p.m. for me on Eastern Daylight Time. We will include a link to a time zone converter so you can figure out when that is for you.

Lauren: We’ll be doing the whole show about backchanneling, which is all those ways that you –

Gretchen: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: – actively listen to someone as they’re talking. Thank you for that excellent backchanneling, Gretchen. Something I think a lot about in our era of lots of video calls and online chats.

Gretchen: You can’t see me, but I’m doing a thumbs up right now.

Lauren: Excellent backchanneling.

Gretchen: These are some kinds of backchanneling. We’re gonna be talking about lots more. I think it’s fun to do a liveshow about backchanneling because it means that you get to backchannel in the chat while the show’s going on and chat with each other. That’ll be fun. We’re running the ticketing of the show through Patreon. If you’re a patron, you’ll automatically get a link to the liveshow to join. If you’d like to become a patron, you can also do that to get access to the liveshow stream.

Lauren: Patrons also get access to our recent bonus episode on reduplication as well as 48 other bonus episodes because we have almost 50 now.

Gretchen: That’s a lot! Lots of Lingthusiasm for patrons, which helps keep the show running.

Lauren: Our liveshow is part of LingFest, while will be taking place across the last week of April, which is an online series of events about linguistics. You can find out more about LingFest at lingcomm.org/lingfest.

Gretchen: That’s “comm” with two Ms as in “communication.” Speaking of LingComm, if you’re interested in communicating linguistics to broader audiences, you can also join the LingComm conference, which is a conference for practitioners of linguistics communication such as ourselves and many other cool LingCommers to learn from each other and help produce more interesting and engaging materials for all of you.

Lauren: LingComm, the conference, is taking place online the week of April the 19th.

Gretchen: You can also go to lingcomm.org/conference to see the schedule and other details there.

Lauren: That’s “comm” with two Ms.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, how many people would you say you know who have written a grammar of a language?

Lauren: Hmm, okay, well, both my PhD supervisors. I’d say half the people in the department that I current work in. I have written a grammar of a language. This is a perfectly common activity among my professional cohort. I assume it’s a thing most people do and know about, so we don’t really have to explain it for this episode at all. This is fine.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Yeah, I would say that at least several of the people that I went to grad school with – not necessarily at my university – people I knew from conferences, professors that I knew – one professor I knew had her grammar come out the same year that her baby came out, and she posted a photo of the grammar and the baby, which were about the same size, on Facebook after that happened. It was really cute.

Lauren: Grammars definitely take longer than nine months to gestate. I can definitely confirm that.

Gretchen: I have not written a grammar. So, when someone’s going about writing a grammar, what – okay, here’s a language. There isn’t a grammar written or the grammar that’s written of it is not adequate. What do I do to start?

Lauren: What you’re talking about is taking all of the amazing complexity of how humans use language and finding the rules that reoccur within a particular language and then finding a way of articulating that concisely in written form in a grammar so that, by the end, you’ve worked through most of the common features you find in this language – all of the variations and irregularities – and you’ve put that into some kind of readable book format for other people to then learn about how the grammar of this language works. That is the overarching aim of this endeavour.

Gretchen: I’ve consulted grammars in the process of doing linguistics. I have the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sitting on my desk. When I was in grad school, I spent a lot of time consulting Valentine (2001)’s grammar of Nishnaabemwin. There are grammars that I’ve consulted. They’re 1,000 pages, 2,000 pages long. Sometimes you’ve got a really massive grammar. Sometimes you get a shorter sketch grammar. They have certain similarities in the structure and the types of things that people cover in a grammar.

Lauren: Absolutely. You tend to start, traditionally, with smaller bits and work upwards. You’re likely to find a description, if it’s a spoken language, of the sound system or, if it’s a signed language, of the hand shape and body space phonology at the beginning of the book and then work up to word-level – you probably expect if a language has adjectives, a section on adjectives, which we’ve talked about before.

Gretchen: We have talked a little bit about adjectives.

Lauren: And then if you’re look at sentence-level stuff, like asking a question, how you do that, it happens at the level of the sentence, that tends to be more towards the end. You’re going from smaller bits up to bigger bits. It really depends on the tradition. We talked about lumpers and splitters before. If you like to split things down, a grammar is great because you can have so many sub-headings. I remember reading the rules for one set of grammars where it was like, “Please do not go beyond five layers of headings,” and I was like, “That’s actually quite a challenge.”

Gretchen: Because you have your chapter level headings, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay, if this chapter’s about verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs – within the transitive verbs, you’ve got this type of verbs and those type of verbs,” and so on and so forth.

Lauren: Then you’ve got the irregularities. They might need their own subset. You can go from – the table of contents, you can get this big picture and then go down and down and down into the different sections. The grammar that I wrote of Lamjung Yolmo was a sketch grammar, so it’s only a couple of hundred pages. It makes sure to knock over – it would be very weird to have nothing about nouns in a language that very obviously has nouns – but it doesn’t go into the deep level of detail on some things that a longer grammar gets to. There’s always more to be done as well.

Gretchen: Any grammar is gonna be incomplete – even these massive doorstop-sized grammars. You’re gonna leave some stuff out where you’re a speaker and you’re like, “I know this,” but you don’t necessarily include it in a grammar. I’ve also read, in grad school – I don’t remember what language it was of – but I picked up this grammar that was written in, like, I wanna say maybe the 70s or 80s. There was clearly some sort of fad for doing this very abstract schematic thing of sentences or verbs or something. It didn’t have any complete sentences or complete verbs just written there. It drew them all on this diagram that I have never encountered before or since where everything was piece-able together. I was like, “Oh, wow. You’re participating in some sort of grammatical tradition that I’m just not aware of here.”

Lauren: I mean, I think the important thing is that grammars are written by humans, and humans are trained by other humans within particular traditions. I remember when I was building my sketch grammar, it was while I was also working on my thesis because I was looking specifically at evidentials, but you can’t know what’s happening with evidentiality without understanding how verbs work and how verbs relate to other parts of the sentence. And then I realised I was accidentally on my way to writing out the bones of the grammar of Lamjung Yolmo.

Gretchen: Sometimes you just accidentally write a grammar.

Lauren: That is how I accidentally started and very deliberately finished writing that sketch grammar. But I remember talking to my supervisors. One of them found it quite unusual that I wanted to include the methodology in my grammar. I wanted to explain specifically who I’d worked with, what I’d recorded, what kinds of elicitation I’d used. That wasn’t in that supervisor’s grammar tradition, but it was something I wanted to include.

Gretchen: A lot of grammars aren’t gonna include the gestures of the language or something, which I know is one of your things that you enjoy.

Lauren: Yes. There are traditions that do focus more on narrative structure, and you might find more about the structure of narratives in a grammar, and others that focus more on verb structure. There’s a very brief few pages on phonetics and then a really massive chapter on verbs. It’s sometimes because the language has lots of really fun, complex things happening with the verbs, but sometimes it’s just because that’s what that person was interested in.

Gretchen: This person was a verb fan.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Some parts, you know, it’d be pretty hard to do a grammar without doing some level of phonology at the beginning. But, yeah, what level of pragmatic stuff at the end, discourse stuff, or like, “How do people of this language talk to children?” or something like that – that might not be in a grammar.

Lauren: I’m doing a paper with a colleague on onomatopoeia at the moment. Some grammars will have a separate section on that. Because it’s not as central to every single sentence as, say, nouns and verbs can be for a lot of languages, it doesn’t tend to crop up as its own specific subsection in a lot of grammars.

Gretchen: Which doesn’t necessarily mean that language doesn’t have onomatopoeia. It’s just that it didn’t get the focused attention that got put there.

Lauren: This is always the question that you have while reading a grammar, right. It’s about what makes it in, but it’s also what doesn’t. Sometimes things don’t make it in because of trends or because of what people are focusing on or sometimes just because they’re important but incredibly low-frequency things that happen. Or if someone is doing fieldwork, and they come into a community as a man, they might spend a lot of time around other men and recording a particular variety. That’s where the methodology was really important for me to make clear why I was making choices. Also, the title of a grammar – I find it really interesting whether people say, “The Grammar of” or “A Grammar of.” I, very consciously, called it, “A Grammar” or “A Sketch Grammar of Lamjung Yolmo” because this is just my analysis and my take. Other people might come to exactly the same data with different conclusions. Or they might be way more into adjectives than I am, and that section is way more fleshed out in someone else’s analysis.

Gretchen: That’s an interesting side effect, as you were saying about, okay, well, if we wanna look at onomatopoeia in a bunch of languages, or if you wanna look at any sort of thing whether it’s verbs or sounds or handshapes or something in a bunch of different languages, okay, how can – if you’re making those beautiful graphs like are in the WALS database, which we’ve mentioned before, or if you’re gonna write a Wikipedia article about like, “Here’s how this language works,” or “Here’s how this phenomenon works,” the grammars turn into this input material of what gets cited there.

Lauren: Those big overviews are often built up from these grammars of different languages. That’s where having structures that are easy for people to access in the table of contents becomes really easy because, just as a human writing the grammar, there’s another human reading that grammar to put into those databases.

Gretchen: Dictionaries are often a very collaborative project where you have a bunch of people contributing words or contributing entries. You can say, “Okay, you need to take care of the letter P and see what’s going on here.” But a grammar is often written by one person, and so it reflects that one person.

Lauren: Almost, like the very overwhelming majority of the time, it’s people who aren’t members of that community. It’s a linguist who’s trained as a linguist and then come into this community and often built incredibly long-term, deep relationships with those communities and speak the language but not always. I know I’m kind of – it’s very easy to over-problematise something you do and spend a lot of time thinking about but, again, it’s worth remembering while reading a grammar.

Gretchen: Right. And what types of things you think are interesting, what types of things you think are novel or worth drawing attention to, or what types of things you think are common is a function of what you’ve been exposed to from a grammatical tradition. I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of “What do we put in a grammar” and “How is a grammar constructed by the societal context in which it’s written” because I’ve been reading this book called, Grammar West to East, by Edward McDonald. The subtitle is “The Investigation of Linguistic Meaning in European and Chinese Traditions.”

Lauren: Cool.

Gretchen: I will say, at the beginning, this is an academic book. It is a monograph. If you don’t have a background in linguistics, you’ll find it fairly dense going, potentially. But, as someone who does, it’s really interesting.

Lauren: Awesome! Pick out the anecdotes for us.

Gretchen: One of the first observations that it makes – and, when you think about this, it’s totally true – is that – so the European grammatical tradition is based on Latin and Greek. Latin and Greek are languages where you do a lot of changing the endings on words – sometimes the prefixes, but often the endings – on words to make them do grammatical things. The European grammatical tradition is a lot about making tables of all of the different ways that a word can inflect and being like, “Well, it does this and it does this,” and giving names to the different sorts of groupings and patterns that you find out of that.

Lauren: Which is great, but doing those things, it makes it a little bit confusing sometimes when you apply it to a language like English that doesn’t have the same ending changes, but we give them the same labels. That’s because the analysis of English is very much in that Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s inherited from the Latin tradition. There’s a pedagogical motivation for some of this because Latin and Greek were not just the languages that started out analysing themselves, although they were that as well, but they were also considered prestigious languages that you needed to learn. So, a lot of the grammatical analysis of Greek and especially Latin were in terms of how to teach them to speakers of other European languages. And it’s like, “Here’s a bunch of endings, and you need to learn them, and you need to learn what they correspond to and what their function is.”

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: What’s interesting is that the grammar of Chinese is different from that. They don’t do endings. What they do instead is you have things that have a grammatical function, but they’re considered to have the same status as full words. And so, the Chinese grammatical tradition is concerned with looking at those particles that have grammatical functions but are hard to write definitions of and cataloguing them and figuring out what’s going on with them and grouping them into groups. There are some words in the European tradition that are invariant – they’re often all lumped together in “adjectives” – words like “often,” or “always,” or something like that, which are – they just look like that all the time. They don’t have endings like the verbs and the nouns do. The Latin tradition grammarians didn’t care about those words, and they were really into the endings. The Chinese grammarians were really interested in, first of all, this fundamental duality between words that had a meaning to them, had what they called, “full words,” and words that were only for their grammatical function, what they called, “empty words.”

Lauren: That is a great metaphor. I like it.

Gretchen: Also, because culturally they were really interested in dualities, you know, the sun and the moon, and the full words and the empty words, and having a nice, mirrored duality was really appealing to them for aesthetic reasons in the same way that the European grammatical tradition is often descended from the rhetorical tradition because they were really interested in the aesthetics of rhetoric when it came to doing that sort of analysis. What your culture’s into aesthetically brings forth, okay, what are we trying to explain this. So, both of these are sort of ancient history, you know. Around 2,000 years ago they were the beginnings of this doing their own analysis grammatical traditions. You get this really interesting descriptive grammar that was published in 1898 by China’s first grammarian, Ma Jianzhong, called, Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar, which I think is great.

Lauren: That is an excellent late-1800s name of a book.

Gretchen: It is exactly of a particular era. It’s “compleat,” E-A-T, not E-T-E, which is just –

Lauren: Perfect.

Gretchen: He was a native speaker of Chinese who had also been educated by Jesuits in French, and so he had exposure to both the French and the Chinese grammatical traditions. He writes this grammar where he distinguishes between full and empty words the way that the Chinese had – introduced these particles to be these “empty words” – but he also further subdivides the full words into the lexical categories that Europeans had been doing, which are verbs and nouns and so on. This distinction between verbs and nouns and so on was really important to the Europeans because verbs and nouns have different types of endings. You know whether something’s a verb or a noun because the endings are all different because this is a really endings-based grammatical system. The modern linguistic conception of how languages and their structures work is, to a certain extent, a hybrid of that because these full and empty grammatical categories is now reflected in what linguists call, “content words” and “function words.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: You have words like, “dog,” and “cat,” and “run,” and “see,” and stuff like that where you can actually write a definition, and then you have your grammatical words like “of,” and “is,” and “to,” and stuff, which just have this grammatical function. So, this category that’s still really relevant in modern linguistics is there in one country’s grammatical tradition, but also modern linguistics does also still talk about “nouns” and “verbs.”

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: The history of the contact between these two grammatical traditions and how they figured out how to adapt things to each other is an interesting way of looking at what is it that we think of as important when we’re trying to write a grammar of a particular language or we’re trying to do grammar. A lot of ancient grammar traditions were really concerned with describing one very prestigious, golden-age language – or one or two – you’ve gotta write your grammar of Latin or of Greek or of Old Chinese because that’s the one everyone thinks is fancy. And the local vernacular that ordinary peoples talk, like, no, no one’s gonna write a grammar of that. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about, okay, what were people concerned about and how did those interests derive from the structure of the language or languages that they were familiar with.

Lauren: This book sounds so great, but I wonder if actually the title of it should be, “Grammars from East to West,” because if we look where our modern tradition of writing grammars in Europe is, it’s very much motivated by those Latin grammars and grammarians of old, but it’s also very influenced by Paṇini and the Sanskrit grammarian tradition that is two-and-a-half, three thousand years old as well.

Gretchen: One of the things that I was thinking about reading this, being like, “Wow!” – I knew some of the stuff about the European tradition, not all of it, but I didn’t know most of the stuff about ancient China – thinking, “I know that there was a really interesting grammatical tradition going on in India, like, right between these two major geographical regions.” There’s a bunch of stuff going on in Arabic as well, at a slightly later time. Can I have a book that writes about all four of these, please, in comparison to each other?

Lauren: Yeah. I know very little about the Arabic tradition. Most linguists at least know the name “Paṇini” That first N has a little dot under it in English, so it has a kind of palatalised vibe, but it also means his name is great. I know more than one university that has the “Paṇini Café and Sandwich Shop” because that’s a great multilingual pun to use.

Gretchen: Who can resist a pun? I learned a bit about the Arabic grammatical tradition when I was taking a bit of Arabic in undergrad. There are a whole bunch of things that that grammatical tradition does also in the tradition of “We’re going to look at our language and catalogue it in exhaustive detail and figure out exactly what’s going on in it.” One of the things that I remember was that there’s an exhaustive catalysation of what they call the “binyan,” which are the templates that you can slot your three-consonant roots into, and how you put the vowels in between them that mean all of these different things.

Lauren: Because Arabic is very interested in what happens in shifting the vowels of the language rather than what happens at the end of a word like the Latin tradition.

Gretchen: It’s very relevant in Arabic all of the different things you can do with the vowels in between them and whether, maybe, you double a consonant in a particular context or you put this vowel here or that vowel there. The classic tri-consonantal root that everybody cites is K-T-B, /k/-/t/-/b/, which has to do with books and writing. “Kitab” is “a book,” and “kutub” is “books,” and “maktab is “office,” and “kataba” is “He writes.” You can do all sorts of things with those three consonants and how you arrange the vowels between them. There’s an abstract way of representing “Here’s what the patterns are” with a template verb that you can show all the patterns with and going through and exhaustively cataloguing the patterns. This is the exciting thing to do if you’re an ancient Arabic grammarian. I’m excited by just thinking about it. But that’s very much influenced by the structure of the language. I don’t know as much about what Paṇini was doing except for the fact that he gets cited in a lot of Intro Linguistics classes as the first grammarian.

Lauren: Part of why he gets cited a lot is because he’s excellent. I’ll talk about that. I think part of why as well is that Paṇini synthesized and brought together everything that had been happening in the Sanskrit grammar tradition. Sanskrit is kind of like the Indian linguistic area equivalent of Latin, which is that it was the language of sacred texts and religion. It’s a language that is still handed down. People still learn Sanskrit in the way they learn Latin. But in that area, languages like Hindi and Nepali, the Indo-Aryan languages, are all later siblings and children of Sanskrit. It’s a very convenient analogy to Latin to draw with Sanskrit. I think, also, the motivation for thinking a lot about the language came from a theological attempt within Hinduism to understand truth through language and understand how language works. It was one of the core areas of study within the larger religious tradition. So, that was the motivation. But Paṇini – we know his name. We know not too much else about him except that he wrote at least two-and-a-half thousand years ago. He synthesized this work, and he name drops ten other people whose work he draws on. We’ve lost the record of all of their work. I think he’s excellent. That’s not in dispute. But it’s also just a convenient prominence he receives through being the kind of earliest record we have when the work was going on for thousands of years behand.

Gretchen: The person whose manuscript survives with his name attached to it.

Lauren: Absolutely. A very convenient way to appear to be very excellent is just to have none of the foundational work you draw on exist still.

Gretchen: No. This is like the Library of Alexandria all over again.

Lauren: What made Paṇini’s approach really distinct – and distinct from what was happening with those learner-driven motivations for analysing Latin – is that there was a logical progress to how he set out his description of Sanskrit. Similar to what we talked about with modern grammars where you start with the base elements of the sound system and then build up to words and parts of words. If something goes on a word after another bit, so you’ll describe the earlier bits first and build outwards. It’s this logical order and progression.

Gretchen: In a very real sense, the order that Paṇini devised over 2,500 years ago is reflected in the order of the grammar that you wrote a few years ago?

Lauren: It’s absolutely not an accident. The early 20th Century linguists like Saussure, Franz Bopp, where directly reading Paṇini and going, “This guy was doing this stuff thousands of years before we started thinking about it” and were directly influenced by Paṇini’s approach to thinking about how the language worked and thinking about it very descriptively. This is why he’s known as the first grammarian within even the Western tradition because he was like, “Look, there’s these words and they have these histories, but actually, the important thing is that we think about how the words are being used by people now.” The funny thing is he wrote that about what we now think of as Classic Sanskrit. People have not moved on from thinking about Classical Sanskrit in that way, and it’s become a learning tool, but –

Gretchen: We should all just be speaking Classical Sanskrit.

Lauren: The motivation is exactly the same motivation we use in a descriptive grammar now. It’s not about setting out the rules of a language and how it has to work, it reflects how a linguist has analysed that people are using that system.

Gretchen: I think that’s one of the things that comes up when we talk about a grammar is, particularly because grammar in the Western tradition is associated with Latin, and, okay, you’re learning about the grammar of English only so that you can translation Latin into English better rather than learning about the grammar of English as an object of its own study. This translates into, “Okay, well, what if we made the grammar of English more like Latin because that would obviously be better.” That’s where this secondary meaning of “grammar” as, you know, “Thou shalt not split an infinitive,” does – because in Latin an infinitive is all just one word. You can’t split it. It’s just one word.

Lauren: You can’t split it.

Gretchen: This idea that grammar is a tool to beat people over the head with comes from this, “Well, you’ve got to learn this language in school because this is how you’re gonna access all these classical texts that you are supposed to access, and you need to do it a certain way because it’s dead now, and it’s not evolving, and so you’re just learning to do this very particular thing,” that’s where this additional connotation of grammar as a stick to beat people over the head with comes in.

Lauren: That’s that very Latin tradition that we still have.

Gretchen: And it’s not only English that had a grammar as a tool to stay in touch with a lost golden age. This is also what they were doing in ancient Chinese of like, here’s this older thing. One of the other interesting things that I learned about the Chinese grammatical tradition, in particular with the writing system – because the writing system in Chinese can obscure different pronunciations – you could have a poem that you could still read in the written sense that’s very old but, for a modern reader, it doesn’t necessarily rhyme. At a certain point, when they were doing more historical linguistics, they realised, “Oh, this poem actually rhymed back in the day.” The pronunciation has changed so much that we weren’t really thinking about it because the characters look the same, but it actually used to rhyme, which sometimes shows up when you’re reading Shakespeare or something, and it’s got “thrown” and “drown” or something. Like, “Wait, those probably were supposed to rhyme based on where they are in this poem.” You can use that to reconstruct what was going on.

Lauren: It can feel a bit anxiety-provoking about committing an analysis to paper because you are pinning a butterfly for a moment in time. People are still speaking the language, and it moves on. As long as you don’t think of the descriptive grammar as anything more canonical and authoritative than people’s actual intuitions, that’s an important thing to remember. Especially if you’re working with a grammar that’s more than a few generations old, it may be that the person didn’t quite capture what people were doing. It may be that the language has changed again.

Gretchen: Another thing that I found really interesting about “What are the ideas that people were thinking about at the time” – so this is from Grammar West to East again. The author points out that when Chinese characters first became known in Europe, it was late 16th Century and, in Europe, for unrelated reasons, the idea of a universal language was the hot philosophical topic. You had people like John Wilkins, who ultimately created Roget’s Thesaurus, but he was really just trying to make a universal taxonomy for understanding the world, he ended up making quite a nice thesaurus but not with making a universal way of understanding the world. What was actually going on in China at the time was that Classical Chinese was a scholarly and diplomatic lingua franca of the East Asian region. It was acquired as a learned language in the different parts of those regions. The Chinese words were given a local pronunciation. So, children in different parts of China would learn to read using a literary register of the local dialect, and there wasn’t the idea of a standard spoken language for the whole country. That’s a modern innovation. This is a situation that was a lot like Latin in Europe at the time. But Europe, you know, “Oh, you learn Latin in school so that you can do the literary thing.” But European scholars misunderstood the situation and thought that this meant that Chinese characters were interpretable by speakers of any language without them being based on one language, even though they were very much based on an ancestral language of the region.

Lauren: Oh dear. And their obsession with universality that they came to this very functional but still based on a language thing. Oh dear. I see exactly where this is going. That’s not good.

Gretchen: Also, they did the same thing with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had not yet been deciphered yet. They were like, “Guys, we found it! We found the universal language of ideas, and it’s not tied to a particular language!”

Lauren: Not translated adds an extra air of mystery.

Gretchen: European scholars thought this was great. Francis Bacon thought this was amazing. It’s interesting to see not just, okay, here’s this thing that was going on in China at the time, which is interesting, but also, here’s how these things get reflected and refracted, whether that’s the Europeans approaching Chinese grammar as maybe this is a thing that’s universal or this Chinese grammarian, Mr Ma, looking at it and saying, “Okay, how can I merge these two grammatical traditions of the full words versus the empty words?”, and then also “What if I have nouns and adjectives and stuff?”, and “How could I group them in ways that make sense for the grammar of the language?” Everyone’s bringing their own preconceived notions to this space.

Lauren: I think the descriptive grammar has really figured itself out as a genre in the 20th Century. A lot of the discussion around how to make sure people aren’t just bringing themselves to it has been to widen the scope of what gets included. One really big influence has been the idea that you need to have the grammar, but it has to be presented alongside the wordlists because the grammar just tells you the rules not which words go in which places and also a collection of texts that are broken down and translated so that people can access what’s happening in narratives. That solves a little bit of that what gets included problem.

Gretchen: Because somebody could always go back and look at the text again and say, “Well, what if I interpreted them differently or wrote this grammar differently based on what I can see here in this longer thing?”

Lauren: Yeah. “The author didn’t get around to a section on the use of particles in narratives, but there’s enough texts here I can see what’s happening.” This little trio of publications is sometimes known as the “Boasian trinity,” which sounds a little bit more pompous and religious than it actually is, but it’s part of this expanding what gets included.

Gretchen: This is after Boas, whose first name I have forgotten.

Lauren: Franz Boas.

Gretchen: Franz? Franz Boas. He was one of the early grammarians in this descriptive and comparative tradition where it’s not just, okay, every intellectual in this one country or this one society is devoting themselves to this one language but, “Oh, what if we looked at lots of languages? What if we compared them?” This goes along with the colonial project of like, “What if we went and conquered some people?”

Lauren: Yes, there’s a lot of scientific rationalism happening here.

Gretchen: This is not entirely unproblematic either. It is interesting how the forms of the grammars start shifting when it stops being this sort of seeking this one language of like, “Oh, everything descends from Greek” or “Everything descends from Sanskrit.” Even the Europeans, at a certain point, when they encountered Sanskrit, were like, “Oh, everything must descend from Sanskrit,” and said, “Okay, well, what if we realised that we can’t actually know what the first language was? This is lost in the midst of time,” and figured out “What can we know about relationships and what is the possibility space for what are different things that languages do?”

Lauren: I mean, I think it’s also worth pointing out a lot of 20th Century language description has happened to try and translate religious texts and political documents and that is a subset of problematic colonisation within the grammatical tradition.

Gretchen: The longest text that’s been written down in a lot of languages is the Bible, which has all sorts of really weird consequences when you start using those parallel texts as the input for something like machine translation because you can have machine translation systems start spitting out things that sound like religious prophecies because they’re just regurgitation versions of that Bible input, which is pretty weird.

Lauren: Such a weird consequence of a weird set of earlier decisions.

Gretchen: Exactly. Here was this earlier decision that maybe this was even a religious text that was created 100 years ago by some missionary, but it’s the longest text that’s available in this language, and the grammar is more or less accurate – and yet. It wasn’t trying to record the stories and the oral histories of the people who actually spoke that language that they cared about themselves, it was trying to introduce this foreign religion to them.

Lauren: Again, it’s one of those things that is hard to avoid and so it’s just important to be aware of when you’re looking at some grammars. They may have a lot of Christian religious texts. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the religion of the speakers so much as the religion of the person doing the documentation.

Gretchen: Going back to that theme of grammars that are made by people and sometimes people’s agendas for making a grammar is –

Lauren: A different endpoint.

Gretchen: It’s less about like, “Oh, I want to help this language be taught in schools and support its speakers in their own goals” and more “I wanna impose my goals on the speakers.”

Lauren: I think another important change that has happened across the 20th Century in terms of grammars is the increasing availability of recording equipment and, therefore, the ability to make recordings of the language as a fourth part of that three-part collection of what’s important when documenting a language.

Gretchen: There are some really interesting ancient recording technologies like the wax cylinders that were used –

Lauren: You say, “ancient,” but you mean, like, 150 years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah, not ancient compared to Paṇini.

Lauren: Not Paṇini ancient, just, it’s really that the story of the 20th Century descriptive tradition is the story of embracing these recording methods.

Gretchen: There was a really cool thing where they had these old, cracked wax cylinders, I think it was in the Smithsonian, and they couldn’t put them on a machine to read them because, obviously, the needle would stumble over the cracks. It’s kind of like a record.

Lauren: They just fall apart.

Gretchen: Picture it as a tall record with all the lines tall rather than a flat record. But it was cracked, so they couldn’t put it in the thing, and they eventually figured out a way with lasers to read the recordings. I got to hear, you know, here’s a song in this language that hasn’t been heard for 100 years because the cylinder cracked. If it’s online, I’ll try to find a link to it.

Lauren: With recording technology, early on, and even for some linguists, it’s mostly about doing recordings so you can go back and listen yourself and really identify that you’re correctly analysing structures. But I think the more exciting thing is that it lets you really observe more people using language in more natural ways. The “Can you say this?”, “Can you say that?”, “Does that sound grammatical?” way of eliciting stuff can lead to an unusual way of approaching the language, but really drawing on people singing songs and telling stories not only makes for a richer, more realistic grammatical description that allows you to see those fuzzier, more complicated bits of language, but it also means that you can make those recordings available for speakers who are interested in going back to an oral history of the language for people who might come in the future and go, “Ah, you didn’t look at the way people’s prosody goes up and down and their intonation changes in stories. I’m gonna look at that, and I have access to these recordings.” I think this is where grammars are more exciting as we integrate more of that richness of actual language and bringing the people who speak the language back into real prominence within the grammar document.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because there is a certain way of writing a grammar which is very old which just assumes that whatever bits you have about “Here’s how this language works,” that information just exists at this abstract level, and it’s not necessarily tied to particular speakers or particular communities, and saying, “Oh, it would be good to give credit to the speakers who were saying this, or to identify this is a particular way that a language is spoken in a particular region,” or “Here’s something that’s going on here.” There have been some initiatives to do things like pair people who are trying to revitalise their languages with linguists to try to understand what’s going on in some of these older grammars because they can be hard to decipher without the special training. The one that I’m familiar with is Breath of Life.

Lauren: There are the Paper and Talk Workshops in Australia as well where you’re coming full circle and making sure that you give people the tools that they need to access the materials about their own language because you can make grammars for many reasons, and we’ve discussed some of them but, at the end of the day, the most important reason to me is that speakers of a language can access the materials that were created for that language.

Gretchen: I think when we look at the multi-thousand-year-old history of making grammars and the very different sorts of questions that people had about language thousands of years ago, I find it very humbling because we can think about what are the questions that people might be asking in another thousand years, and how can we make things that would help with that?

[Music]

Lauren: 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, schwa pins, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found at @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can get access to 49 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards, as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include reduplication, Q&A with a lexicographer, and a Q&A with the two of us in honour of our 100th episode. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[shihalyfie]

Adventure and 02′s production philosophy and its impact on the storywriting (or: “a series made with love is best understood with love”)

It’s hard to really judge a series too much by its production details, but Adventure and 02′s staff has been very open about discussing background and production to the point we’re able to involve it in discussions. In fact, to a certain degree, we’ve gotten rather reliant on said production notes to explain too many things that weren’t clearly depicted or stated in the series -- I’ve spent a fair share of time complaining about how frustratingly subtle this series is -- and you see a lot of strange conspiracy theories or myths about production that circulate in all sorts of different directions. Undeniably, it’s a series that spoke to a ton of people, but there are still so many things that have perplexed people over the last two decades, and when you ask someone “what’s good about this series?”, people struggle to say it in clear words, often only able to resort to a rather oversimplified explanation like “the character development is good” (but what is character development, anyway?). A lot of times, some small things that initially don’t seem to track have led to some pretty wild, far-reaching fanbase-endorsed theories, when in fact the actual reality of the situation is much more mundane.

I think, in general, the best way to “understand” Adventure and 02 is simply to have an open mind about everything in regards to it. This is something I can only say because we currently have more than enough evidence, given production testimony, that this is the kind of series that was made with that kind of philosophy -- I will not shy away from the fact that there are things in this world that are made maliciously, meant to “one-up” the audience or using half-baked explanations as a way to cover up the fact that it wasn’t well thought-through. But in the case of Adventure and 02 specifically, almost everything we have heard about it is to the contrary, and, in practice, I find one can get much more out of the series by adjusting one’s mindset to think about what they’re looking out for and not, because once you have, the beauty of the series opens itself up even in places you’re not looking for it.

Let’s talk a little about the production philosophy behind Adventure and 02 and how it shaped a series that left such an impact on so many kids, and what we can learn from it!

“Something important that we wanted to tell the kids who were watching”

The two most important figures to know when it comes to Adventure and 02 production are its producer, Seki Hiromi (who would eventually go on to produce Tamers and Frontier as well, along with being supervising consultant on Kizuna), and its director, Kakudou Hiroyuki. I would say that both of these figures are probably the most influential people in shaping the series as we know it, but in different ways -- Kakudou was the one most responsible for building the world of Adventure and 02 and setting up the standard for having all sorts of background worldbuilding details that weren’t shown in the series, whereas Seki was the one who pushed for them to include family backgrounds and things that ought to be relatable to the average kid, so that they could empathize with the problems shown on screen.

Both of them had different ways of going at it, which is all for the better because it allowed the story to be enriched from both sides, but the common thread between the two was that they wanted to use this opportunity to “show the kids important things”:

Kakudou is the kind of person I would say is very “media literate” -- he was very well-read in books and well-versed in cinema, not just Japanese but also internationally, and also very in-tune with the Internet by the standards of a director in 1999. (Part of the reason we know so much about Digimon production now is that he still keeps up with everything on social media and throws in a few comments here and there.) His comments on the final episode of Adventure include a list of all of the things he credited for inspiring him during this series, and he later stated that he had a goal of conveying all of those “interesting things” to the kids watching, so that they could also find it interesting. So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically his love letter to everything in media that he’d come to appreciate.

Seki was the one who pushed for humans to be involved in the series so that the audience could empathize with them, and for all of the “real world worldbuilding” like the kids’ family backgrounds. She’s also functionally responsible for the base premise of 02 at all, having been thoroughly alarmed by the story of a young boy skipping grades into university (to the point this plotline resurfaced a whole 20 years later in Kizuna). It can be said that the heavy “human drama” elements and family background emphasis continuing into Tamers and Frontier are probably her doing, and in terms of Kizuna, she also was responsible for personally vetting the dialogue to keep the kids in character, and it was said that it came off like she loved the characters as if they were her own children.

The result is that, firstly, Adventure and 02 is a series that is very well-thought through. Ridiculously well thought-through, in both background lore and character backgrounds and mentality. So many surface-level criticisms of Adventure and 02 come with an accusation that the writers were “lazy” or “did a writing cop-out”, but we actually have more evidence that the Adventure and 02 staff thought out so many details in the background that they kept forgetting that they hadn’t actually told the audience about it yet. (No, seriously, there’s a thread of official staff repeatedly forgetting that they may not have actually outright mentioned one of the background details they’d planned out in advance.) Even despite all of the extra information we’ve gotten since in the drama CDs and Animation Chronicle and such, it seems there’s still way more information that was planned out that we still haven’t learned about, and it’s presumably why there are so many little things that are too consistent to be coincidental and yet were still never actually stated. It may have been awful at communicating those details well, but those details were most definitely there, and both series have a shocking amount of consistency in adhering to them.

The second is that not only did the producer and director want to convey those important things, they also encouraged the rest of the staff to do it too:

One of the concepts behind the prior series was for us to pack in as many interesting things that we’d seen, heard about, or read about as we could into it, so for 02, we thought, what else could we put in beyond even that?, and so we looked over what we needed to have, and put in all the things we could so that they wouldn’t be left out, and the story became a multi-layered one, overlapping and accelerating. It was to the point that, after we’d gone through 02‘s story, the scriptwriters told me that they’d worn everything they had out to the ground.

So in other words, Adventure and 02 were basically a sort of potluck where they encouraged everyone on staff to come up with interesting things that they wanted to show the kids, and throw it all in -- and it’s presumably why the second half of 02 is so “crowded” (more on this later), because you had everything from all of the writers on staff adding another thing into the potluck, until everyone could get it out of their system. Yoshimura Genki, one of 02′s head writers, said outright that she used the famous 02 episode 23 to convey her concerns about some very real and horrible things happening to kids at the time, and it’s easy to imagine that all of the other writers and staff members were given similar encouragement to do so. Even the (in)famous 02 episode 13 was something originally created from Kakudou seeing Dagomon, thinking he was really cool and wanting to make an episode about him, and remembering that Konaka was good at Lovecraft and basically going “he’s gonna love this, we should get him to do an episode.” In fact, it’s said many times that a huge attitude behind production was to “not be ashamed of anything” and try whatever they wanted.

Which means that the result is a series that isn’t actually all that well-organized in plot or structure -- 02′s plot writing is of course an infamous pile of knots, but even those who are willing to be a bit more critical of Adventure often point out that its plot is simply more linear, being basically a video game-esque boss rush of “evil enemy, followed by even more evil enemy”. Most people do not watch Adventure or 02 for the actual plot writing. What they do watch it for is all of this stuff mentioned above -- that all of these different people on staff were given the question “what do you want to say to this audience of kids?” and took the opportunity to say something fun or meaningful. And, hence, why it’s best to understand Adventure and 02 not necessarily by the minutiae of its plot, but rather, “what was this series trying to say?”

Writing the series as it went along, under massive constraints

In general, Japanese anime is produced as it goes along -- even the character writing is subject to change depending on the voice actors’ performance (this was cited for Adventure specifically, but it’s well-known common practice for non-adaptation anime in general). That said, Adventure didn’t even have a guarantee of how long it was going to be at first -- it was generally expected that it’d be a one-year series (like most Toei series), but they weren’t even sure about it. This resulted in a very “loose mindset”, in which they decided to basically wing it, and the only thing determined for sure was that the epilogue (that we now know as the 02 epilogue) was going to be at the end of it.

As I mentioned above, scrutinizing the plot of Adventure too closely reveals that it’s not actually that coherent of a narrative, just more linear -- and, even by official admission, Hikari wasn’t planned to be the eighth child at first nor was the Tokyo arc of episodes planned to be that long, and yet this entire section is one of the most famous parts of Adventure. A lot of the best parts of Adventure and 02 seem to be the result of sheer accident...

...Or was it accident? Can you say that “going in with a positive mindset and a desire to do something meaningful” is accident? Even if you didn’t plan things out from the beginning, if you go into everything with an attitude of wanting to make the best out of something and make the best out of opportunities you see and hear about, is that really an accident? Couldn’t you perhaps say that this kind of thing is why Adventure and 02 hit so well with people to begin with?

By the time we get to 02, 02 started off as a very different series from the get-go, and it’s always struck me as very odd that people act like 02 was tacked on and didn’t have nearly the exact same staff. It was Kakudou himself who petitioned for 02 to start off with a light atmosphere, and the series itself was fundamentally meant to be addressing the new concepts of “relationships” instead of Adventure’s “self-assertion”, and explore concepts that hadn’t been covered in Adventure. The reason 02 is so different from Adventure is exactly because the staff didn’t want to rehash things for another year, and instead wanted to take the opportunity to cover stuff Adventure didn’t. And the fact that 02 is lighter than Adventure at first, but quickly gets darker, is also by design:

The story had gotten rather heavy by the time of Digimon Adventure, so we decided to make it come off as brighter. And then, it actually ended up getting even heavier somewhere down the line, but there was no way we could just avoid depicting important life problems.

Which is also a similar sentiment reflected by Seki herself, when thinking about how her suggested plotline ended up making the story darker:

An overly intelligent child, prone to falling into loneliness, cut off from his friends and family, and with a Digimon slowly coming and staying close to him…I remember that kind of image forming. We were supposed to have been aiming to have them going to the Digital World with the mood of a picnic, but the fact it didn’t end up so easy for them may have been my fault…or so I remember thinking as I reflected on it.

02 didn’t get dark for the sheer sake of getting dark, and in fact it’s not like the staff necessarily wanted it to get that way, but there were so many meaningful things that they wanted to tell the audience of kids that they allowed it to. It’s also kind of odd how the fanbase has this idea of there somehow being staff conflicts or people bickering in order to produce 02, but there’s no indication of this at all -- at most, 02 unusually had two head writers instead of one, Yoshimura Genki and Maekawa Atsushi, but it was even said that they had a clear division of roles, with Yoshimura on the “villains” side and Maekawa on the “protagonists” side, and there’s no sign of conflict.

(A lot of people also tend to give more credit to Yoshimura since the villains are some of the most masterfully crafted part of both Adventure or 02, but this is still somewhat reductive; Maekawa is very open about the fact that he was rather inexperienced during 02′s production, and considering the fact that the 02 protagonists aren’t nearly as underdeveloped as the fanbase claims they are, and Maekawa would later go on to write a PreCure entry that basically saved the franchise and a very well-acclaimed Super Sentai entry, both with many parallels to 02, his role should not be discounted, especially since 02 is often liked by its fanbase for the duality between both its lighter and darker sides.)

So we had the staff basically on a roll of throwing in everything important they wanted to say to the kids, both “fun” and “meaningful”, and then, two things impacted the way it ended: firstly, they weren’t allowed to go with their initial proposal for the final enemy because it was too gory, and secondly, the decision was made midway through that they would not be making a third Adventure series, and would have to end more quickly than expected.

I think, whenever you hear stories of “we were originally going to do this but couldn’t,” people generally tend to assume that they should have done the original plan (especially if the original plan was particularly gory or brutal, because everyone loves to think that edgy is better), but, perhaps fittingly for a series that’s about not drowning in past regrets of “what should have been” and learning to move on, the staff has never really shown any indications of really, thoroughly regretting any of the decisions they made for 02, even if the second half came out messy. If you look at that original proposal they had for 02′s final enemy, in which it would be an enemy “reduced to an idea”, it certainly explains a lot about why BelialVamdemon was defeated by the power of sheer positivity in the final ending -- obviously that would make a lot more sense with a conceptual embodiment of malice, instead of a returning enemy from the prior series -- but at the same time, that loss of that concept led to the creation of Oikawa, Archnemon, and Mummymon, which have consistently been praised as one of the most compelling parts of 02 and its finale, and Yoshimura herself even gushed about the concepts they got. So it’s not “we couldn’t do what we wanted,” it’s more “we couldn’t do what we initially wanted and made something out of it, arguably an even better something in certain ways.”

And as for the lack of the third Adventure series, all indications point to the fact that this was something by personal choice of the staff, not by higher-up mandate -- not that I enjoy speculating about other people I don’t know, but if you actually follow what Kakudou has said about his work on Adventure and 02, and the fact that he considers his later work on X-Evolution to functionally be getting everything else out of his system (even saying that he liked Bandai doing a lot of the work for him), Kakudou doesn’t seem to want to be the main leader of his projects for the most part, mostly seeing Adventure and 02 as the one time he got to dump all of his one-time ideas that he personally wanted to accomplish, and otherwise being satisfied doing episode direction work for others -- testimony as to the handoff between 02 and Tamers consistently depicts him as expressing sentiments similar to “please let me have a break.” (As of this writing, he still does work for Toei, but has never been lead director on a full series since.) Kakudou didn’t like having to deal with a bunch of increasingly canon-contradictory works because, as an infamously detail-oriented and consistent person, dealing with that kind of thing didn’t really seem to agree with him, and moreover it’s understandable that he (and the other staff) would feel that it was better to end it there instead of overstaying its welcome and stretching things out.

Certainly, when you look at the second half of 02, its plot is “crowded” in nearly every direction (not as incomprehensible as people like to claim it is, but definitely going in a lot of places at once). The infamous 02 epilogue is probably the biggest example of the disparity between staff thought and how it came off; remember that it was one of the first things decided about the series at all, meaning that the staff was deliberating over it and under the impression they were building up to it for a whole two years, but when it finally dropped everyone was blindsided and even often made accusations of the staff coming up with it at the last minute while drunk or something (not helped by the staff clearly being so fixated on their own production that they even included details that were completely incomprehensible to anyone not aware of the potential third series plotline). Yet, ever since then, many people who have sat down with it have figured out that it’s not that incomprehensible and that many of the aspects of it make sense on a theoretical level or are foreshadowed in the series -- it’s just that they tacked it onto the end of an excessively crowded finale with no warning and didn’t sufficiently communicate their reasoning for it, requiring people to spend the next 20 years puzzling it out and Kizuna to come around to drop even more clues, and also failed to realize that one of humanity’s most die-on-a-hill issues about media (shipping) would make people a lot more offended than they likely intended. (PreCure has successfully pulled off “adult timeskip” epilogues in recent years, and they’ve all been received well, but the difference is that they actually pad out the episode with a proper lead-up instead of just chucking it in your face right after Oikawa dies.)

And, ultimately, the staff has never shown any signs of having regret over this. Kakudou takes the stance that they were able to close out 02 in a good way, despite all of the circumstances. The rest of the staff, including Seki herself, and overall Toei as a whole, has doubled down further on the latter half of 02′s plot events and the epilogue’s place in canon despite the infamous controversy around it, and I have to say that I do at least understand why they’re like this when you consider the circumstances and their likely feelings on it -- regardless of everything, they’re proud of the work they did on it, and even if not everything went according to original plan, they loved taking the opportunity to use the sandbox to express things they may not have been able to in their other projects, and the epilogue was their baby that they’d been raising for two years. It’s the ultimate question of “satisfying the creators vs. satisfying the audience” -- not to say that I completely agree with the call to be this unaware of how people were going to read this, because it’s not good to blindside your audience or hurt their feelings, but at the same time, it’s said that you will never be able to satisfy an audience at all if you’re not satisfying yourself first. And in the end, despite everything, that something in Adventure and 02, built out of that earnest desire to say something, came across in some ways and touched the hearts of kids all over the world.

So the result was that the Adventure and 02 staff did everything they wanted, got it out of their system, and handed an imperfect but carefully-crafted baton to Seki, who decided that it was a good opportunity to do something completely new, and deliberately picked Tamers’s director Kaizawa on the grounds that he’d had no experience with the series before. Remembering that Seki was on Adventure and 02 and was clearly happy with it, her decision to do something new with Tamers was just that -- to do something new -- and it’s honestly kind of saddening that the series’ respective fanbases treat each other with significantly less respect than their actual creators do, since both series still shared a lot of staff, Kakudou went on to be an episode director for Tamers (and even calls it a “masterpiece”), and Konaka clearly has a lot of respect for his predecessor series as well, with Tamers being its own product made with conscientiousness and a desire to make things meaningful for kids (Kaizawa himself has expressed a lot of strong opinions on this topic). A lot of anti-02 folks have often spread a conspiracy theory that Tamers came out of a “writer revolt” because they hated being “restricted” by 02 and wanted “more freedom” -- but that is completely contrary to the above evidence where 02′s production process arguably gave the writers too much freedom, and Tamers head staff was picked deliberately due to their lack of connection to the prior series so that they could do something conversely new and fresh...

One thing that’s interesting about Kizuna is that its director, Taguchi Tomohisa, has spoken very often about his love for the original series, right down to respecting its ability to cover very serious topics. His recruitment philosophy for the movie also seemed to have “being a fan of the series” as a big plus factor, and he moreover shows a lot of respect for the staff members involved in production, both the people he recruited and the long-timers like Seki. “Being a fan of the series” doesn’t necessarily constitute skill by itself, but there’s a lot of similar sentiments in “let’s make something that shows respect and does something interesting and important” and “let’s make sure the staff gets to do something without regrets” also seem to be pretty huge factors in consideration here, rather similar to the original series...

What this means in terms of understanding the series

I do not think that, just because a creator clearly had good reasoning for putting in what they did, the audience necessarily has to accept that. It may have had good intentions, but "intentions” don’t justify things coming off the way they do, or at least, the 20/20 hindsight can make us all get together and think “if that was your intention, there were probably a million better ways to execute that.” And, as someone writing this blog, there are times I really think “if you could have please just thought a little harder about making those ideas clearer so we wouldn’t have to have these arguments...”

However, I do think there is something illuminating about the idea of “adjusting one’s mindset” in response to the above revelations, and going in with an open mind when trying to get something out of the series for one’s own sake. I mean this truly in the sense of encouraging others to find something interesting and new -- this is not a blog I write expecting people to see things the same way I do, as much as I like encouraging people to look out for things they might have not noticed beforehand.

I started writing for this blog regularly last year (I hadn’t even planned to start regularly doing it) after a rewatch of Adventure and 02 with some friends and some honest discussion about the series after it, and one thing we all agreed to do when we did that rewatch was “we are not going to go in with the intent to criticize it.” That is to say, we decided to throw out all of those sentiments that you have to “admit” everything wrong with any series when even bringing up its name -- which is not to say that we’re glossing over potential criticisms or their validity, just “we’re doing this rewatch to have fun and to enjoy and appreciate things, and that will be our priority going in.” After making that agreement, something really magical happened, and it was that we started catching things without even looking for it, things that had clearly been planned but hidden in the background, or things that were caught by one person in the group watch chat and pointed out to the others, and it turned out that a huge chunk of the “criticisms” we might have originally gone in with actually did have answers, we just hadn’t realized it because we were too brainwashed into the mindset of dismissing things as “well, that part’s just bad writing.”

Of course, we’ve seen bad writing -- it’s not like we were going out of our way to absolve everyone for every mistake -- but that base mindset allowed us to better appreciate things we might have missed earlier that weren’t immediately apparent. I’ve said many times that I don’t think the things I write on here are that huge speculation -- in fact, in writing meta, I often throw out a lot of stuff because I think “yeah that’s too absurd, let’s just stick with the simplest explanation” -- as much as I just thread things that are in the series but are frustratingly subtle, because I’m taking things that seem like throwaway details and going “hm, well, instead of just dropping it the first time like ‘probably bad writing’, let’s maybe look at this one more time and see if there was a reason?” And those reasons present themselves surprisingly easily without even that much effort, and after a while you come to realize: this is a really consistent series!

It’s actually very rare that things outright contradict themselves, because it really does not take long to piece together a rational explanation (because those things are in the series, just buried)! This was a detail-oriented series that had a ridiculous amount of attention paid to it, even if it didn’t communicate that! Whenever I post meta, I often get comments from people who say outright that they’d had the same impressions, they just didn’t know how to put it in words! There’s been multiple cases of people independently coming up with readings of the series that the fanbase historically dismissed as a reach, only for official to come out and confirm they were absolutely correct, and a common thread between all of these is that they were referenced in the series, it’s just that people kept wanting to dismiss them because “there’s no way they’d be that detailed”! A truly contradictory series falls apart when you subject it to higher scrutiny (even when you’re being optimistic about it), but there’s a strange thing about Adventure and 02 in that they actually fit together even more when you look closely -- and, again, things start coming in when you don’t even expect it, just because of your mindset.

I suppose the take-home here with all of this is that a series like this is best understood when you have an open mind and a desire to listen to what it has to say. As I said before: Adventure and 02 (and especially 02) are not series that most people watch for the plot, and, to be honest, it’s clear that plot wasn’t even a priority for all of the staff in the first place as much as it was about conveying important ideas and sentiments. And I’m not going to say whether not prioritizing plot or not is a “good” or “bad” thing -- for some people, that kind of thing is understandably very important, and a series like 02 can be very frustrating to deal with as a result! -- as much as, for those who have a genuine interest in sitting down and understanding these series, I cannot recommend scrutinizing the plot too much simply because it will not get you very far, and, to be honest, whenever I see a lot of analyses of Adventure and 02, I really do often wonder if they actually understand the core of the series and the sentiment and emotion behind it, or whether they’re just doing it on a technical surface level so they can say they did (which is usually partially as a bid to passive-aggressively dunk on later series to prove Adventure is superior). The entire concept of objectivity is a lie in itself, but this is not a series that you can get much out of if you try to evaluate it with that kind of detachment; it’s a series that spoke to you through theme and passion first and foremost, and to receive that message and “enjoy” the series is most effectively done when you detach all of those doubts and approach the series without malice.

(By the way, this is not me claiming I’m inherently a “better” analyst just because I also prefer to use this mentality when approaching it; it’s just that I’m a bit frustrated that this kind of approach is so hard to find, despite Adventure’s popularity, because losing out on the heart causes so much rich potential to get lost. This is also the reason I recommend @analyzingadventure‘s work so much -- I’m so sorry about tagging you for the third time here! -- because they’re as positive about Adventure as I am about 02, and their insight and thought into the series coming from the angle of “appreciating” it with genuine positivity is something I believe is truly valuable in a climate where this is very hard to find.)

And this is what I mean, “to approach it without malice”. I don’t mean that you should go in prepared to never have criticisms of it ever again, nor that you should just absolve everything and assume that everything is fine, but rather that going in with a mindset of “we’re going to look for things to love” instead of “we’re going to ‘look past’ the bad” alone has the magical effect of shifting your entire view of the series, way more than I would say with any other. And, again, that’s only something that can happen when the base product was made with this much sentiment and honesty to begin with, and moreover fighting against the mindset to criticize is tough when we’re dealing with a fanbase that’s acted like being “fair” requires “acknowledging” the faults of everything in the same breath you praise it until the horse is beaten for two decades and everyone’s exhausted. (And then yells at you if you dare criticize anything that’s put on the fanbase’s pedestal.) It’s kind of the question of: should this really be about media criticism and whether it’s “objectively” good or bad, especially since this has been brought up so often for two decades now, or might it be better to think about how to have a more positive experience with something that you may not have had before?

Once you get rid of that mindset of “critical by default”, you start to realize things that the series did knock out of the park, or were exceptional, that got too obscured by the distractions of fixating on its plot -- 02 is a plot mess for sure, but I have never seen any series that is so sincere and earnest about its actual themes and things it wanted to say, and it’s something I love it even more for. And buried under that criticism of everyone not getting “equal attention” from an evolutionary forms perspective is the fact that, from a story perspective, they deliberately went out of their way to make sure everyone gets mostly equal focus, which is something that sticks out especially when you start watching other long-running series that aren’t as good about this, and although it’s not completely perfect by any means, they do a damn good job keeping everyone in the 8- and 6-person groups relevant to the very end, which is pretty impressive! And, in the end, you end up having a much healthier relationship with the series -- again, it’s not glossing over everything to pretend nothing is wrong per se, but rather, you’re able to appreciate it and love it for what it is, instead of constantly feeling like you’re making up for its “mistakes”.

[carminite-wyrm]

Its an Empires SMP + Wynncraft crossover AU I guess

So, I’ve been playing a lot of Wynncraft recently, and man, the Wynncraft lore sure is wild. Halfway through doing a quest I suddenly remembered that hey, nether corruption sure is a thing over here, and isn’t there Also an invading corruption storyline going on over in Empires?

Anyways so here I am with yet another niche AU idea lmao (though also with the latest videos from Pix and Gem I...kind of already am thinking of a variant on this one lmao)

- Some indeterminable point in time in the future, the Empires gang are having the final fight against Xornoth, ready to take out the demon and cleanse their world of the corruption that had been taking hold of their kingdoms.

- Its down to the final few blows, with the Kings and Queens coming together, despite their grievances with one another, despite all the differences that had once been between them, to finally strike down the demon.

- Naturally, of course, it goes a little sideways.

- The final blow lands, and the hellish arena disappears in a flash of unholy light.

- When the heroes awaken, they find themselves in a spider-infested patch of woodland.

- Upon fighting/running their way out, they quickly realise that yeah, this sure isn’t the Empires SMP anymore.

- There are some shenanigans, probably, upon that realisation, but eventually, the group makes their way to the nearby city of Detlas, severely disconcerted by the clear presence of corruption in the land around them.

- They’re fairly certain that they saved their own land, only to land right in another world also beset by corruption.

- Their various communicators also seem to be displaying a different HUD from what they’re used to, including an actual mana bar along with their health, and more equipment slots and most baffling of all: the option to level up and increase a variety of skills.

- Also, there’s magic, though a different magic than what they’re used to

Added to that, the monsters are far more different to what they’ve encountered in their home world. Zombies, fairly standard, even if the ones in this strange land seem somehow more powerful than theirs. Spiders, easy. And then Joey stumbles across a flaming horse rocketing straight at him at roughly 40kmph, screeching demonically all the while. It narrowly misses pummelling him in the face with its hooves and oh, looks like this isn’t a standard world after all.

Character classes and more thoughts under the cut!

Character classes! (Wynncraft currently has 5 classes people can choose from!)

Warriors (uses polearms/hammers, generally the dps/tank build)

Scott – He has a pink battleaxe, yes of course he’s the heavy-weapon-using class. Also, bc I think it’d be really amusing to see this elf dude w/ an antler crown charging straight at someone with a massive axe/hammer/polearm.

Fwhip – King of the Grimlands, projecting an image of strength even as the corruption ran rampant and clashed with the inherent darkness of his own kingdom.

Lizzie – Ocean Queen w/ a Trident, enough said. Sure, there might not be any axolotls in this world for some reason, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the powers that made her one of the most powerful Empires back home. Probably mains thunder elemental magic, bc sending chain lightning at enemies is very cool.

Mages (Magic staff goes brr. Also they can heal)

Gem! – I imagine she’d be highly adept at hitting enemies with the regular attack spell, and then suddenly casting a meteor and crystalline ice to obliterate her foes as the rest of the party watches on.

Katherine – Teleporting + fast attacks = magic menace. Also bc I think it’d look cool for her, and honestly that’s the majority of my decision-making here w/ the class selections

Pixl – Idk, something about the vigil and the whole candle thing makes me think he’d make a pretty damn good healer. Calm, collected, and the most unshakeable amongst the chaos of the Empires gang. (This AU idea was written like, a week before the latest video lmao so we're just gonna...gloss over the most recent plot developments for a bit until I can figure out how to make it make sense in the AU)

Assassins (Stabby stabby DPS)

Joel – Look I just think the imagery of Joel + Lizzie absolutely wrecking shit together on a battlefield is too good to pass up on.

Sausage – Man literally ran an assassin guild back in their home world, of course he’s an assassin here in this one. Probably has several sets of daggers hidden up his sleeves, and probably ends up with a life steal build.

Pearl – Pearl with knives would be terrifying and amazing to behold. On the other hand, I was considering either Mage or Shaman but we already have like three Mages, and I don't really have any ideas for how Pearl would utilise the Shaman abilities atm.

Archers (Ranged DPS or support)

Jimmy! – Swamp boi deserves to pop off and what better way than to be able to cause arrows to rain from the sky. And also to backflip out of danger. I imagine navigating a swamp has given him an actual dexterity or agility score.

Shaman (Buffs + support)

Shubble – Honestly I think she’d really vibe with the nature-y vibes this class kind of gives me, what with her mushroom kingdom vibes and the magic. Also, one of the most complex classes, but considering Shubble and her whole researching the corruption thing, I think it’d fit.

Joey – I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know much about his POV beyond ‘wants to court the demon’ at the moment, so contributions welcome here.

- Gem and Shubble’s initial investigations (because they absolutely hit the first library or archive they could find) whilst the others explored/adventured around the area eventually lead them to determining that in order to return to their own world, they’ll have to make their way to the most dangerous region of the Wynn region: The Silent Expanse.

Defeating whatever entity is chilling deep in that eldritch hellzone that’s pinging off Gem and Shubble’s (w/ machinery assistance from Pixl) cobbled-together ‘machine for detecting their world’s own magic’ should be enough to trigger the same event that sent them to this world. They think. Its enough for them all to hope, at any rate.

- Its an odd feeling, being at the height of their powers only to be thrust into a world where a tap from an armoured skeleton can take them down to a third of their health in one hit, at their current ability level.

- The party starts off at roughly level 5-7 btw, because I’ve had to do the tutorial quest and Enzan’s Brother quest like six times and I want to skip that here thanks.

- Eventually, the group does have to split into smaller parties for efficiency, though they’re understandably hesitant to be separate from everyone else in an unfamiliar world.

- Obviously, the parties do shuffle around a bit depending on what quests they end up undertaking, to play for each of their strengths and to cover for their weaknesses.

- Because they’re the Kings and Queens of the Empires SMP, they climb up the levels fairly rapidly, racing through quests in Ragni, Detlas, Nemract, Almuj, before finally venturing across the ocean to the province of Gavel.

- They’re well aware that something rather bad is going on in this world, something that looks and feels so similar to the corruption back home, but yet not.

- Their first encounter with the Parasites in the Dark Forest has those more in tune with the currents of magic, or the natural world, recoiling from the feeling of ‘wrong wrong that should not be in this world-‘

After that harrowing encounter, they are very, very glad, that in their world, the source of the corruption was clearly from a pesky demon, and not the result of warring planar powers.

One would think that, as the resident swamp dweller of their motley group, Jimmy would have been a tad more relaxed in the Olux Swamp. And yet, the magic from his Empire has him on edge throughout their travels in that area, the lingering sense of foreign magic, of what the locals refer to as the Decay, worrying away at the familiar scent of the swamp.

[catfe-overlord]

“Cold”

Part 1

::In which Bakugou causes a massive avalanche and pays the price for his mistake. He and Kirishima must survive trapped in a cave until class A finds them::

•••••••••••••••

Bakugou awoke to pain. His head was pounding, his back was on fire, but his arms—dammit, his arms hurt.

He tried to speak, to call out for Kirishima. He needed to know he was okay, that he’d survived. He needed to see those red eyes looking back at him. He needed to say I love you one more time.

“K-Kiri—shima…” he managed. He tried to flip himself onto his stomach, but the pain in his arms that flared when he attempted to use them was excruciating. He couldn’t stop himself from crying out.

This whole mess was all Bakugou’s fault. He’d been an idiot, and now his whole class could be in danger. Some of them could even be dead because of him.

It was supposed to be a simple training exercise. Aizawa had brought the class to a secluded mountain a couple hours from UA. They were all given backpacks with everything they’d need to survive the harsh, freezing climates if anything were to happen, but he said they wouldn’t need them. Their teacher had been so wrong.

It was just a game of capture the flag. Piece of cake, right? The class was split into two teams and either had to hide their flag somewhere within their zone. Once they saw the glow of the red flare shoot into the sky, that marked the start of the exercise. They had three hours to retrieve the opposing team’s flag and cross the border back to their territory.

Bakugou and Kirishima were placed on opposite teams, much to Bakugou’s dislike. He didn’t complain though. He wasn’t that clingy.

It was when he’d had a run in with that IcyHot bastard and Deku that things went south fast. He should’ve thought better than to use his quirk on the side of a snowy mountain. He’d caused a massive avalanche, jeopardizing everyone’s safety, all because he wanted to win.

He remembered seeing Half and Half throw up a barricade of ice to save himself and Deku, but Bakugou was too far away for it to protect him. He’d fallen victim to the plummeting wall of snow, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Using his quirk again would only make things worse.

The last thing he saw was a flash of red before he tumbled over the side of a cliff, then everything went black.

He just hoped everyone else was okay. That they hadn’t been hurt because of his fuckup. Some hero he was, eh?

Now he was here, surrounded by darkness and cold, with no idea where he was or how to get back to his classmates. He was in too much pain to get up and it was too dark to see the damage. His eyes stung but—goddammit—Bakugou Katsuki was not about to cry.

He tensed when suddenly there was blinding light assaulting his eyes, followed by a voice—a manly voice that made every muscle in his body relax. His brain melted with relief.

“Katsuki! Babe, oh god, I’m so glad you’re awake. I’ve been so worried.”

Kirishima turned the flashlight away from his face but kept it trained on Bakugou’s body to assess his injuries. With the faint glow, Bakugou could just barely make out his boyfriend’s face, but there was one prominent feature that stuck out like a sore thumb.

“Ei, you’re bleeding,” Bakugou stated. Blood soaked half of Kirishima’s face, coming from a gash hidden within his hair.

“It’s nothing,” Kirishima answered, waving it off. “Head wounds bleed a lot. Just a cut. It’s you I’m worried about.”

Bakugou scowled. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Well, for starters, you have two broken arms.”

That explained a lot. Both arms out of commission? That made things a lot more complicated. Getting out just got a lot harder.

“Shit,” Bakugou cursed. “Do you know where we are?”

“A cave,” the redhead explained. He pulled his emergency backpack over and pulled out some bandages and gauze. “We fell pretty far, but I managed to drag you in here before we were crushed by the avalanche. Now the problem is we’re snowed in.”

Bakugou frowned. “What about our communicators? Did you contact Aizawa yet?”

Kirishima pursed his lips. “I tried. The signal is too weak in here. I’m just hoping our trackers still work.”

Bakugou let out a breath, and he could see it cloud above him in the cool air. If they stayed here too long, they’d freeze to death. He figured they had a few hours at best.

“Here,” Kirishima said as he tugged his jacket off. Bakugou was about to protest when he took his shirt off too, but he immediately pulled the coat back on and zipped it up. He started tearing the shirt. “I’m going to make you a couple of slings for your arms.”

Bakugou held his tongue. Kirishima was the most caring person he’d ever known. He was literally giving the blond the shirt off his back. How Bakugou landed someone like him was beyond his comprehension.

Once the slings were all said and done, getting them on Bakugou was a whole other story. Kirishima helped him sit up, but the pain in his spine was absolutely awful, to put it lightly.

“Ah!” Bakugou gasped as the first sling was tightened. His arm throbbed painfully in the aftermath. Kirishima had a guilty look on his face that Bakugou didn’t like.

“Just one more time, Kats. We’re almost done.”

Bakugou chewed on his lip. He let Kirishima continue to wrap another piece of cloth under his other arm and tie it off. This one didn’t hurt as bad as the last.

“Finished!” Kirishima exclaimed. He looked so relieved to have it over. “Alright, next I’m going to try and make a fire. Hopefully there’s something around here I can burn.”

Kirishima pulled the thin sleeping bag from his backpack and unfurled it. “You should get in here. You’re not going to be doing much moving around and you won’t be producing enough body heat, so we need to keep you warm.”

Bakugou kept his mouth shut as he allowed Kirishima to help him into the sleeping bag. It was designed to insulate body heat even in freezing temperatures, so they wouldn’t have to worry too much about hypothermia.

Except Bakugou was worried because he’d lost his own backpack somewhere during the fall and this was their only insulated sleeping bag.

Kirishima took the flashlight and searched the cave for flammables, only coming up with a small pile of sticks and dead leaves. It would last them maybe an hour.

“Back up,” Bakugou said. “I’ll light ‘em up.”

“No you won’t,” Kirishima retorted. “You’re only going to hurt your arms worse. I’ve got matches, dude. Just relax.”

There was no way Bakugou was just going to relax. He’d gotten them into this disaster and now he couldn’t even help to get them out of it. He was forced to rely on Kirishima, who deserved better than such a shitty boyfriend.

“Hey,” Kirishima said then, kneeling beside Bakugou. He placed a calloused hand on his cheek. “I can see you beating yourself up. Stop feeling guilty.”

“I want to help.”

“It’d really help me if you didn’t injure yourself more than you already are,” Kirishima chuckled. “Listen, the others will find us and everyone will be fine. You should lie down and get some rest.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone, Shitty Hair.”

Kirishima sighed, but a small smile remained on his lips. He gently kissed Bakugou on the forehead and stood again. “I know how stubborn you are so I won’t push it. You should rest though.”

“Not tired,” Bakugou mumbled.

“Then are you hungry? I have a thermos of soup and some Gatorade.”

He shook his head. “We should save it. We don’t know how long we’ll be stuck here.”

Kirishima nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”

He swiped a match against his boot and a small flame burst to life. The twigs caught fire easily, and soon Bakugou could feel the warmth on his skin. Kirishima sat beside him so Bakugou could lean on him as they nestled together. Bakugou ended up using Kirishima’s lap as a pillow while the redhead fiddled with the communicator.

Bakugou could feel his eyes drooping shut as he slowly sank into sleep.

•••••••••••••••

Read part 2 here

Read part 3 here

Yes yes I hope you guys liked it! Kinda short and the next couple parts will probably be too. This was supposed to be a one-shot but of course I can’t help myself. Anywho, hope you have a swell day ! ~

9/3/2020

[ahsoka-lives]

Iris pt. 3

Part 3 of my Inquisitor!Cal series!!

A/n: I’ve decided on a series name!! Im calling it Iris because thats what fake moon they live on lmao. Thank you sm for all the love on parts one and two, it means so much to me. I will try to keep posting updates frequently for my sake and yours :) also this gif is by @sovahunter​ !!

Warnings: Using the force mildly inappropriately, things get a lil handsy but nothing serious yet.

Word Count: 3k

  The sun was beginning to go down on the moon. There were only a few hours before you were meant to meet with Cal for dinner. You sat in your office in the maintenance hall filling out the completion forms from your appointments. You found yourself taking your time and looking for any way to drag out the time. Maybe you could give him a rain-check, say you got caught up with work? 

Yes, that’s perfect. You wouldn’t be turning him down necessarily, you’d just be postponing so there would no reason for him to be upset or disappointed, right? You nod to yourself and place your papers into your bag. 

“BD-5, are you there?” You say into your comlink. 

“Yes, y/n. What is it?” 

“I’ll be there soon, would you mind getting dinner started? Oh and are you up for a movie tonight BD? My plans have uh, changed.” Your voice becomes quiet as you go on. 

“You are exceedingly predictable, Y/n, I’ve already begun dinner.” 

“I don’t remember programming you to analyze behavior“ You retort as you exit your office.

You giggle and shake your head. Your companion was your closest friend on the base and listened very well when you ranted about your problems, including earlier that day about the Inquisitor. 

The halls of the base were quiet as they usually were at the end of the day. As you neared the training room you came to a halt. What if Cal was in there again? If you run into him, you couldn’t rely on yourself to talk your way out of dinner. BD-5 was to send a note to him explaining that you had too much work to do and couldn’t join him tonight. 

You decide it’d be best to take the long route to the living quarters and avoid the risk. You head toward the building exit, there was a stairwell for the service workers that led to a large bridge that you could access and get to the living quarters without having to pass any officers or Inquisitors. 

The bridge had large windows that overlooked one of the landing pads that held personal ships making easy access for when an emergency calls. The echo of your shoes hitting the smooth concrete filled the bridge, there was a peacefulness that came with the vacancy. The vents allowed for the sounds of the waves crashing to flow inside with the mist of saltwater. 

You pause for a moment and take in the view, only to be interrupted by the whirring of an imperial ship coming down onto the landing pad below you. You were several floors up but the ship still looked massive. It was a newer model of the tie fighter, with nearly transparent wings and more black detailing than silver. Whoever was inside was lucky to have it, or just skilled enough to have earned it. 

Against your better judgment, you decide to wait for the pilot to exit. There was still dust settling around the ship as the cockpit opened. Time seemed to have slowed with your anticipation. 

Inquisitor combat gear head to toe stepped onto the black sand. You stood in awe of the confidence and power that radiated off of the individual standing below you. A helmet covered their face and head as they marched forward toward the pad guards. 

The guards bowed their heads slightly to the Inquisitor before handing them a small holo-communicator. You hadn’t made out what the communicator was showing and your attention was taken from it before you could. A small and familiar BD unit was hopping toward the Inquisitor. 

Then it clicked. 

It was Cal.

Your eyes snapped toward the Inquisitor who had given the communicator back to the guards and began to remove his helmet. Cal turned to face his companion and the two seemed to be having an exchange. 

Cal’s arm abruptly shot out and reached into the empty air. A few seconds later a small cylindrical piece of metal caught in his hand, his saber. He stood completely still for a moment and his head bowed slightly with his eyes closed as if he was saying a prayer but you knew better than to think the man was praying. 

His head tilted slightly and a small smirk crept onto his face. An empty hand rose and gestured toward the cliffs, reaching once more before closing into a fist. His eyes were still shut as his fist raised, reopened, and two fingers gestured in an upward motion directly at you.

You covered your mouth to stifle your gasp, which was useless as it was clear that he knew of your presence. You backed away from the windows and tried to collect yourself. Adrenaline was coursing through your veins, how long had he known you were watching him again? 

Your thoughts were interrupted by something fluttering inside the bridge from a vent. You felt your curiosity pique as it was carried to you by the wind, hovering right in front of you before dropping to the floor. 

Resting in perfect condition at your feet was a flower. 

- 

Cal pulled his helmet back onto his head and looked to the window he sensed you at moments before. He waited a moment before allowing BD-1 to jump onto his place by his shoulder. 

He hoped you liked your gift, he knows you hadn’t seen any of flowers in a long time. Most don’t know of the flora covering the stretches of the land beyond the facility, and for good reason, the fauna was territorial and most are not as prepared to defend themselves. 

He was disappointed in you for canceling dinner but he certainly wasn’t surprised. After all, when he saw you last that morning he had been quite forward with you. He also knew that he couldn’t rely on you to be as forward with him, you were afraid of him. However, he couldn’t help but he enjoy the fear he inspired. But he didn’t want it to be that way for long, his plan was to turn that fear into something else that would be much more enjoyable. 

“What am I going to do about our little stalker, BD?” He was asking himself more than his droid. If you really were busy with work he wouldn’t want to disturb you but he was sure you made it up. Of course, there was no way to tell from the message since your droid spoke in it and the robotic voice held no trace of inconsistency that would indicate a lie. 

Maybe he just had to see for himself.

-

You seemed to have gotten to the elevators before Cal, you’re surprised, to say the least. Upon entering your apartment you immediately head to your room, not wanting to explain the flower or your flustered appearance to your droid. You sigh loudly and look at the flower still in your hand. 

Why was it still in your hand? 

Truthfully, you loved it. You didn’t even know there were flowers on this moon and since it came from him... well let’s just say it felt important. You carefully place it into your bedside table before going to your washroom. You splash the cool water onto your face and calm yourself down. You probably won’t see him until the start of the next work week in two days. 

You pause at the sound of voices coming from behind the two doors blocking you from the main living area. Maybe BD-5 had the television on. You shrug it off and dry your hands before making your way to the kitchen. Once you opened the bedroom door, the voices ceased. 

Your droid appeared in front of you

“Y/n, I told him to wait outside but he insisted on entering. I see what you meant by ‘He has no sense of boundaries!’” BD-5 hurriedly explain.

For a moment you were confused until you remembered 'He has no sense of boundaries’ was something you said to BD-5 about Cal. 

Cal, the Inquisitor who you cancelled dinner plans with. Cal who you just ran from again. Cal who was comfortably sitting on your couch staring at you. Yes, that Cal. 

“ ’No sense of boundaries’ is actually a direct quote from my last performance review.” He chuckled and put his hand on his chest in mock exasperation. “I’m a little hurt, though.” 

You sat there in shock at the Inquisitor sitting in your home as if it was his own, arms stretched, legs relaxed, now in his regular clothing. When did he even have time to change? 

“Oh, you get used to changing quickly when you have less than 60 seconds to be ready for a mission.” He chimed, bringing you out of your thoughts.

“Get out of my head.” You snapped. 

His eyebrows raised and a smirk came over his handsome face. He raised his hand and flicked his wrist. 

You winced expecting something to smack you in the head, only to turn and see BD-5 leaving the two of you. 

“Relax, I don’t want to hurt you” He stood up and took a step toward you. “I was disappointed to hear you can’t be with me tonight so I thought I’d stop by and see you for a few minutes.” He spoke so kindly. 

Your heart swelled at his apparent thoughtfulness and you almost felt bad for telling him you were too busy.

“Th-that’s very sweet of you, Cal.” You stuttered out as you tried to remain as calm as possible. He was just back from some kind of mission and obviously still on high alert. 

“Why are you doing that again? Is there something you don’t want me to know, flower?” He was speaking so gently now, it didn’t match who you saw minutes ago on the platform. 

“Doing what?” You asked, playing dumb once again. It was now that you noticed he had taken several steps toward you and your heart jumped. You nonchalantly turned and walked into the kitchen, knowing he would follow. 

He huffed and rolled his eyes, ‘so that’s is how we’re playing this’, he thought to himself. He followed you into your kitchen where you had put your island between the two of you. 

“Why are you trying to keep your thoughts about me hidden from me? It must be tiring to put all that effort into keeping me out of that pretty little head of yours.” He decided he would play along, that is until he becomes bored. “I haven’t even tried to pry my way in yet, do you think you could keep me out if I did?”

“I-I probably not.” You nearly choked out. His eyes were burning into you now and you felt like you could faint. He was right, it was draining to be tightly wound for so long. 

“Probably?” He scoffed playfully and almost showed you a full smile. “That’s really cute, flower. You know I can take what I want when I want it.” 

Your heart must’ve given out. At first, from the compliment that made your face burn slightly from blushing, then again with his second statement. You knew he could take what he wanted in more ways than one and it made you feel a different kind of weak.

“Why can’t you just ask me what you want to know instead of looking for it in my head?” You were surprised at how brave you were being and there was no turning back now. 

“Will you be honest with me? Or did you want BD-5 to come back in and lie on your behalf?” He thought that would stun you for a moment and he was right. You stood there, eyes opened a little wider, mouth agape, processing his words once again. 

“That’s what I thought. You know, I’m not mad, flower, I’m just disappointed.” He tsked and leaned his back against the counter. “When will you learn that you can’t keep things from me? Or is the better question, How?” 

“H-how?” You could admit, you were scared. But you couldn’t ignore the arousal swelling inside of you from him being so forward. You couldn’t help but think that he was similarly assertive elsewhere. His lips were pinkish red and it looked like there was a small cut on it, maybe from today’s mission. Wondering what they felt like against your skin was probably, no, definitely not what you should have been thinking about but you couldn’t catch the thought from coming forward in your head. 

“Yes, y/n. How will you ever learn?” His voice was low and steady, his eyes still on you only now they looked different. His normal green was tinted lightly with yellow. 

You opened your mouth to question it when his hand raised and his wrist flicked to the side once again. This time you didn’t flinch, instead, you watched in near amazement to see what he did. Only, what he did was not something that called for amazement.

The door to the kitchen slid shut and locked. Your eyebrows raised and you looked at him again, only to find he was now only steps ahead of you. You felt a small panic ensue and start to move to the other side of the island, hoping to make space between the two of you, only to feel two strong hands grip your waist and pull you back. 

You let out a small yelp as you’re set onto the countertop with Cal standing in between your legs. Your breathing is all too heavy as you place a hand on his chest and one on the counter to balance yourself. 

“Is this so bad?” He coos and gently moves a piece of hair from your face. 

“N-no, n-not at all.” You felt frozen in place, unsure of his next move. His eyes still have a light yellow sheen over the iris and you’re just about to ask when his thumb moves to caress your cheek. His hands were soothing but slightly rough,  you assumed from time spent with his saber. Stunned, you stay silent and watch his face for any signs of what he might do next. 

He then gently moves your chin up to make you meet his eyes and moves two fingers to press to your temple. Your body runs cold as the realization hits you. 

“Now, are you going to let me in, or am I letting myself in?” He growled lowly, his other hand on your waist holding you steady. 

You didn’t know what else to do besides, you definitely did not want him poking around in your head so you closed your eyes and tried your best to clear everything out, just like Trilla taught you. But you were no force-sensitive warrior. No, one of those was standing against you with his fingers pressed to your temple. 

He really should commend Trilla for her teaching effort, but he was sure she didn’t tell you that some force users are especially gifted in mind reading. Usually this would hurt whoever was on the receiving end but Cal was better at it than most.

“You need to relax, flower, or it may hurt.” He muttered. 

You felt the idea of letting him in creep forward in your mind and it was all too tempting. Was this a mind trick? Wait, did he say it’d hurt?

Suddenly a soft kiss was pressed to the side of your neck, then another, and another. Your hand pressed into his chest and grabbed his shirt in your fist. He hummed against your neck before his hand left it’s place at your temple. You relaxed for a moment and closed your eyes feeling content, his lips were soft and warm against your skin. You would never expect him to be so gentle. You moved your hand up to his hair as he continued peppering kisses to your neck and slightly exposed shoulder.

And as quickly as it came, the moment left. Your hands were suddenly moved behind your back to support you, only this wasn’t you. Your eyes flew open and a gasp left your mouth as his teeth dug into your neck. Two fingers returned to your temple as he sucked a mark onto your skin, as if to distract from the pressure he was applying to your temple. And distract it did, your mind was left vulnerable and all it took was a light push to open up for him.

He pulled away from your neck to look into your hazy eyes. He read through your many, many thoughts of him as you stared back into his, unable to move. His eyes were now nothing short of golden and it would’ve caused a shocked reaction if you didn’t feel so dazed. Him being in your head felt good, like a spice high.

He hummed again and a small smile formed on his lips. Who knew you could have such inappropriate thoughts of him. Having gotten what he came for, he released his hold on your mind and body. Knowing you would be weak from the high, he moved to support you.

He hooked an arm under your knees and one behind your shoulders. This time, with only the movement of his eyes, the kitchen door slid back open. He carried you to your bed and laid you down, noticing you had fallen asleep in his arms. He stilled for a moment and took note of how you furrowed your brows slightly even in your sleep.

You were so cute.

He pulled the covers over you and placed a kiss to your forehead.

As he turned to leave he felt a pull back toward the bed. Against his deepest wishes, it wasn’t you. It was something in your bedside table. A small part of him thought about respecting your privacy before remembering that he really didn’t care.

Sliding open the drawer, he didn’t know what he was expecting but he felt almost relieved by what he found.

“Good girl.��� He muttered before shutting the drawer again and leaving you to dream of him again. 

[mikeo56]

Zayner, who has a PhD from the University of Chicago, worked for NASA researching the terraforming of Mars, and is the inventor of a musical instrument called the Chromocord that creates sound when light reacts with bacteria, was and is one of the world’s leading “biohackers.” He defines the term to mean “constantly pushing the boundaries of science outside traditional environments,” which he certainly did in this case, taking a radical approach to combating longstanding intestinal troubles. In layman’s terms, his plan was to nuke his natural bacteria with antibiotics, and replace them with bacteria from the feces of others.  

“I wanted to see if, by transplanting different bacteria in my body, they would change the way my gastrointestinal system was functioning,” is how he explains it now. “Because, at the time, it wasn't functioning very well.”

On that May, 2016 podcast, neither science reporter Liz Lopatto nor Arielle Duhaime-Ross, who wrote the story for The Verge, had much that was positive to say about either Josiah or his experiment. In fact, in an eerie preview of the anger of self-proclaimed “experts” that would become ubiquitous among pundits after the arrival of Covid-19, they sounded downright furious.

“Extremely dangerous, possibly stupid,” said Lopatto, of Josiah’s gambit.

“In his mind, it made sense to tell people about it, and inspire them to take their health into their own hands,” said Duhaime-Ross. “The risk of copycats is really real with this.”

“This is one of the things that does bug me about biohackers,” agreed a put-out Lopatto. “I don’t want people playing with pathogens in their bedrooms. Like, I’m not interested in that, personally, as a person who lives in this society.”

A less judgmental New York Times later produced a short film about the episode called Gut Hack:

Whether it’s Zayner gulping down a massive antibiotic cocktail in a WU-TANG FOREVER t-shirt, or repeatedly grimacing as he swallows home-crafted feces capsules in a hotel room, the short documentary is a parade of scenes make your eyeballs pop out in shock and amazement, cartoon-style. Zayner, by any measure, is an extraordinarily interesting character. He has a mind almost perfectly engineered against obedience: brilliant, fearless, and not accepting every assumption but checking the validity of each. He alternately bristles at or ignores judgment, seeming to draw inspiration from it in either case. At the end of Gut Hack, we see him standing on a subway platform, shaking his head as he listens to the two Verge journalists denounce him. We hear their audio:

“Not putting your life in danger unnecessarily is pretty basic,” they complain, adding that his experiment was “not even a blip in the scientific radar.”

“There’s a fine line,” Zayner later sighs to the Times, “between being crazy and knowledgeable.” He goes on to talk about growing up poor, and different, in the Midwest. “When you grow up on a farm, you have all this freedom,” he says. “We don’t have any neighbors or anyone to interact with, so we’re used to just doing what we want. And when you get to this environment were people don’t do that, you’re immediately pegged as, you know, a weirdo.”

Some weeks after, he’s shown feeling better, but he wants more than a placebo result. The film ends with him receiving the results of genetic sequencing tests that appear to show his “gut hack” experiment worked. He bursts into tears. The Times reporter asks, “Do you feel vindicated?”

He seems surprised by the question. No, he says, it’s not about that. “It’s one of those things,” he says, “where you’re so moved and impressed by how science works.”

Zayner went on to claim his battle with irritable bowel syndrome had been won, only to be replaced by a new malady. “My physical signs of IBS were gone,” he said recently. “But so was my privacy. This is when the deplatforming began.”

Around the same time Gut Hack was being made, Zayner founded ODIN, which he describes as “a company that sells science and genetic engineering supplies to people so that they can do science experiments in their homes.”

ODIN’s product line, which includes CRISPR gene-editing kits, seems designed to give ordinary people the tools to experience science as Zayner does, almost more as artistic expression than means to any end. He describes his Chromacord, for instance, as “something more purely inspirational, just outside the average notion of what science even is. In a manner of speaking, it was simply magic.” Or, as he said in another interview, “People having access to this technology allows them to do crazy and cool shit.”

Unfortunately, after the notoriety he gained from Gut Hack, bringing the “magic” of genetic engineering to the layperson suddenly proved a little beyond what science-journalism scolds or the faceless executives at tech platforms felt comfortable allowing.

Amazon and Facebook began delisting his products, and Patreon, PayPal, and Square all shut him down in short order. Sometimes he was told why, sometimes he wasn’t. He was forced to move on, and doesn’t want to jinx his relationship with his current payment processor by mentioning their name.

In between, the State of California brought a case against him on the somewhat preposterous charge of practicing medicine without a license. He won, but California state authorities were so peeved that they passed a law appearing to target his company alone, declaring that firms must append their wares with labels announcing “not for self-administration,” if they’re in the business of selling home “gene-therapy kits.”

In a piece called “Don’t Change Your DNA At Home,” the MIT Technology Review noted with amusement that, even if one includes ODIN, “We’re not sure any such kit exists.” The sponsor of the law, Republican State Senator Ling Ling Chang, appeared to think ODIN’s products were a lot more Frankensteinian and terrifying than they are.

“It was really weird,” Josiah says now. “It’d be like, I don’t know, labeling a computer: ‘You shouldn’t eat this computer.’ I mean, obviously.” Regarding ODIN’s home experimentation kits, he adds, “How would you use it on humans? I don’t even understand. I guess somebody crazy enough could just take some of the DNA that we sell and try to inject it into their body, but it wouldn’t even work in humans because it was meant for other organisms.”

Zayner didn’t comply with the law, and instead just moved to Austin, Texas (“Land of the free, home of the brave,” he laughs) and set up shop there. Then Covid-19 arrived, and Zayner’s biohacking got him in trouble again.

In May, 2020, he read a scientific paper that claimed a DNA-based vaccine against Covid-19 had been successfully developed and tested on macaques.

“I was like, ‘Why isn’t anybody working on this or trying this?’ Why don’t I go and order up the same DNA vaccine, have the company produce it for me and actually test it and see if it works on humans?” he said. “It worked on monkeys.”

Zayner followed through on his idea, contracting with a company to make the vaccine described in the paper. Then he and two other scientists/bio-hackers live-streamed the process of injecting themselves with it. He claims they all had antibody responses, but even at the time — his experiment was covered by Bloomberg — he said, “I’m very suspicious of my own data.” Here is how he describes the results, and his thinking, in a recent essay:

I’m hesitant to say it worked because vaccines are complicated and we’d need further testing to confirm our results. But, even if it didn't work, the fact that someone could have designed a vaccine, and contracted a company to manufacture that vaccine in June 2020 for under $5k is fucking profound — and that is what, at the time of releasing our video, I felt people needed to know.

At the time, there was no action taken against him. But just as mRNA vaccines began to be distributed across America and other parts of the world, he abruptly received notice from YouTube that he’d been banned for “severe or repeated violations of our community guidelines.”

[2manyfandoms2count]

#MarichatMay Day 31

I can’t believe I’m finally done with Marichat May! It’s been really fun, thank you to everyone who read/liked/reacted/reblogged any of my entries, you guys are the best ❤ Also massive thanks to @marichatmay for the prompt list and for hosting the event! 

Have a double dose of Marichat: I decided to use Mini Mari and Kitten Noir as names for the young ones when older Marinette and Chat Noir step in  because it was getting too confusing XD Struggles of having several copies of a character in the same place, right? Hope you’ll enjoy this! xxx

---

Day 31: Time travel

Chat Noir balanced on Marinette’s balcony railing, his arms spread out and a concentrated frown on his face. Marinette held his hand and tried not to chuckle at his tongue sticking out. So he was one of those people, then. She couldn’t believe her type was blepping-when-they’re-focused, green-eyed, blond boys. It just seemed very precise.

Her feelings for Adrien had gently faded away as she spent more time with Chat. She still liked him, of course, but she was happy having him as a just-a-friend, as she liked to call him. She’d had enough time to take a step back, and could now joke about his epithet for her. The thing she hadn’t had much time to do, though, was plan how she would confess to Chat. Unlike with Adrien, where her feelings had impeded their friendship by preventing her from communicating with him, her relationship with her Kitty was actually fine as it was. She just didn’t want to risk losing it.

Up on the railing, Chat was trying not to let the fact Marinette was holding his hand disturb him. He didn’t particularly want to test the theory that cats always landed on their feet. It had been a while since he’d discovered his feelings for her. It had hit him in the face at full speed; one second he’d been watching his good friend (c) talk with Alya and Nino, and the next he’d felt his heart try to escape his chest as she laughed about something. That was the sound he wanted to hear every day, for the rest of his life, he’d realised. 

Gripping her hand tighter, he cautiously moved his back foot, taking a step forward. Satisfied that it had gone well, he repeated the movement, Marinette accompanying him as he went. It was the least she could do; as soon as Chat had thought of the idea of playing funambulist on her balcony, there hadn’t been any talking him out of doing it -he really wanted to impress her. Just as he was about to let go, having established a nice little walking rhythm, a giant circle appeared near Marinette’s skylight, distracting him. He yelped, wobbling on the edge. Marinette yanked him back before he could fall, a lot stronger than any of them had anticipated. They rolled on the floor, Chat ending up pinned under her. They stared at each other, slowly registering their compromising position. They both turned crimson as they heard someone clear their throat behind them. 

Three pairs of eyes were trained on them, two of which were very amused, and also very familiar. 

“I’ll be back in five minutes, you better be done by then.” Bunnyx rolled her eyes as an older version of Marinette and Chat stepped out of her burrow. The entrance disappeared in a small flash.

“I told you we’d find them... us here!” Older Marinette said, holding out a hand to help her younger self up. Chat... Kitten Noir got up on his own, still confused, and to be honest, slightly shook, about the succession of events. 

“I mean it’s not like you didn’t choose the most obvious place, Purr-incess.” Chat Noir elbowed her. “Hey mini us!”

“Hello?” Kitten Noir and Mini Mari asked tentatively, eyeing each other as they spoke at the same time. 

Mini Mari cleared her throat and stepped forward. “What are you guys doing here? Did something happen in the future?” 

“And where’s Ladybug?” Kitten’s eyes were darting from Marinette to Chat Noir, trying to figure out why the two of them were together. His eyes lit up as he came up with what he thought was the most plausible explanation. “Is she busy holding the fort? And if you guys are here, does that mean Multimouse plays an important role in the future?” He looked at Mini Mari in awe. “See, I told you Ladybug would end up seeing the light!”

Marinette chuckled, and exchanged a knowing look with Chat. “Sorry to disappoint you kids, but we can’t really answer any questions or Bunnyx will kill us. The only thing we can say is there’s no immediate threat, but we’re hear to warn you guys.”

“The Guardian isn’t eternal.” Chat continued. “And when he passes on his powers, you’ll need to make sure you have all the information you need to continue the fight against Hawkmoth, even if some of it ends up in the wrong hands.” 

Mini Mari and Kitten Noir looked at each other, hoping the other had understood the cryptic message. The way they shrugged indicated they were both in the dark about what was happening.

Marinette shook her head. “What Chat is trying to say is, tell the Guardian to back up everything he finds out, either numerically or the old school way, so his successor has access to the information. It’ll save you guys some time.”

Kitten Noir put his hand up out of habit before realising he could ask his question freely. He camouflaged the movement by scratching the back of his neck. “Does Ladybug know? Why come and see us,” he gestured between Mari and him, “when you could’ve met me and Ladybug on patrol?” 

Chat’s panicked glance went unnoticed as Marinette answered. “Oh, we already took care of Ladybug. There were a couple extra things we needed to tell her, without any other Miraculous holders around. You’re right when you say I’m quite key to operations in the future, though, which his why it was okay to meet you guys here.” She ruffled Kitten Noir’s hair. He let out a surprised purr in answer, his cheeks ablaze.

“I forgot how cute you were when you did that!” Marinette chuckled, turning towards Chat, who shook his head.

“Are you implying I’m not cute anymore?” 

Before she could reply, Bunnyx’s burrow reopened. Marinette quickly embraced Mini Mari in a hug, shoving a piece of paper against her chest. “Open it later.” She whispered in her ear before letting go. Mini Mari nodded.

Chat fist-bumped his younger self. “Stay cool, Kitten.”

“Wait!” Mini Mari called out before they could go through the entrance. They turned around expectantly. “Do we... I mean, us Miraculous holders, do we know who’s behind everyone’s mask?” 

Marinette pursed her lips and shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s up to you to find out!” She waved and walked back into her own reality, Chat hot on her heels. Mini Mari clutched the note, and Kitten Noir seemed completely lost.

“You know, in hindsight, it was so obvious you liked me.” Marinette laughed, lightly punching Chat on the shoulder as they walked towards the Eiffel Tower. Although it had been the middle of the afternoon in the past, it was night time in the present.

“Excuse me, but it was so obvious you liked me.” He answered, putting an arm around her shoulders and kissing her on the temple.

“Well, maybe seeing us together will give them ideas.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’d be a shame for them to wait for years before they get together.”

“Agreste.” He leaned his head on top of hers.

“Did you just use your own name as a pun?” 

“Purr-haps.” He smirked. 

“You’re such a dork.” She laughed, straightening up to kiss his cheek.

“But you love me.” Chat smiled at her, all his love for her pouring out of his gaze as he looked into her eyes.

“That, I do.” 

She kissed him in the moonlight, like she had many times before, and was likely to do many times in the future as well.

[zxanthe]

magic

super duper ultra mega late entry for @soulxmakaweek day 7. this summer is an extremely busy one. glad i could finish out the week, even if it was late as all hell lmfao

also available on ao3 and ff.net

“So, how was your day?”

“Job hunting not going well, huh.”

“No! I got rejected again. Do you think it’d make a better impression if I put “savior of the world” or something in my header?”

“They probably wouldn’t take you seriously.”

“Well, I did. And they should. I could kick all their asses back to back on my worst day.”

“Yeah, but ass-kicking isn’t exactly required to be like, a bank teller.”

“Uh, robberies?”

“Yeah, okay, you got me there.”

“I’ve been thinking about college, honestly. Ridding the world of madness qualifies you for your GED, right?”

“I’d check the record on that one. They didn’t exactly teach us calculus here, you know.”

“Drat. Well, I’ve still got time, I guess. I’m still trying to figure out what I even want to go to college for.”

“Eh, personally I think college is overrated.”

“Says you, slacker.”

“Listen, if your freakishly large brain got any bigger I think it’d collapse into some kind of nerdy bookworm information singularity.”

“First of all, that’s not even physically possible. Second of all, if you got any lazier you’d melt into a puddle of goo.”

“Demon steel, thanks.”

“I’m talking about your soul, dumdum.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. So, uh. Where are you thinking of going to school, if you do decide to go?”

“Something Ivy League, ideally.”

“That so.”

“Yeah. Got a problem with that?”

“No…”

“Then what’s with that tone? Harvard too snobby for you?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“Okay, Mr. Cool Guy Rich Boy.”

“Ugh, don’t lump me in with those people. They all have their heads so far up their own asses, it’s awful.”

“You included!”

“Listen, I was thirteen and I thought I knew everything. I’m much older and wiser now.”

“You still forget to close the fridge door sometimes.”

“Not the point and you know it. Look, what’s wrong with going to college in Vegas or something? You don’t have to spend nearly as much money and plus it’s waaaaay easier to get into.”

“Soul, are you seriously telling me that a community college education is comparable to an Ivy League school?”

“Since when did you become such a snob?”

“I mean, I’m right for thinking that the two are on completely different levels!”

“Yeah, okay, okay. You’re right. Happy? But still, I mean a degree is a degree at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

“Nope. A degree from Harvard could open way more doors. Plus I could rub it in Ox’s stupid face that I got into an Ivy and he didn’t.”

“Heh, true. But like. What could you do there that you couldn’t do here?”

“Harvard is the world leader in soul research, for one thing. I think they’d be super happy to have someone like me work there.”

“Yeah, okay, but consider: DWMA has a lab too.”

“Yes, but here we’re more focused on combat techniques and stuff like that. Besides, Stein just got the research division off the ground like two weeks ago. I’d prefer to go somewhere that’s been around a little bit longer first.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Hmm…probably since the beginning of the month.”

“How come you didn’t tell me?”

“Because it didn’t occur to me to until now? Get your soul untwisted, geez, it’s not that big a deal.”

“Uh, yeah, it kind of is. You’re talking about moving a hell of a long way away.”

“Well, yeah. It’s something new, and different, and exciting. Not all of us can get paid ridiculous sums of money to go to fancy parties and important diplomatic meetings, you know.”

“…”

“I’m sorry, that was mean. Don’t look at me like that. I know it’s hard on you, with the training, and I know you hate parties. I’m sorry. I’m just. Feeling trapped, I guess. Everyone else is off doing cool things and I’m just. Here, by myself, because you’re gone most of the time anyway.”

“…”

“…I’ll miss you a whole lot. I already miss you a whole lot. We hardly talk anymore.”

“That’s not – “

“It is. You get home after I go to sleep and leave before I wake up. I think the last time we said anything to each other was good morning three days ago before you hurried out the door.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Not much different, then, if you moved 2,000 miles away, huh.”

“It would be very different.”

“…”

“Are you even a little happy for me?”

“Definitely.”

“Thanks.”

“So, uh. If you do go. Don’t forget about us back here, yeah?”

“Of course not. I never could.”

“Well, uh. If you meet some cute boy over there, or something – “

“Soul, wha – “

“Maybe uh. Just. Shit, I’m fucking this up, I’m so sorry, I know we haven’t spoken and I’m an asshole and I’ve really been meaning to say this for a while, but Maka, I uh. I.”

The sun is setting spectacularly in Death City. Orange light lights up the surfaces of the buildings, giving them a soft and faintly unearthly glow. The clouds are suffused with pinks and purples and golds. Across the sky, the moon is rising, an opaque disc blacker than the deepest-buried spaces in the most secret parts of the human heart. The DWMA looms at the city’s pinnacle, its massive white staircase glowing in the dying light. Two tiny figures are visible three-quarters of the way down. The taller one has its hand on the other’s shoulder. Their faces are touching, front to front. They stay like that for infinite moments. In that time the second figure’s hand comes up to tangle itself in the other’s snowy white hair.

Don’t leave me. It’d feel. Empty. Without you here.

“I know. I’d feel it too.”

I’m sorry.

“Don’t be. It’s a big decision. Death City will always be home, though. You’ll always be home. No matter what.”

“We can make it work?”

“Of course. Together we can do anything.”

“You dweeb.”

“You know I’m right. If we can kick a Kishin’s ass this’ll be cake.”

“Heh.”

The sun sets. The moon rises. Two figures descend the rest of the way down the stairs, hand in hand, soul in soul.

I love you.

I love you too.

[becausewerehere]

Hello! I thought I’d write something for tumblr, as it’s been a couple of months now. Even around the time I was posting semi-regularly on twitter (circa the Act II release in Sept), I wasn’t always posting here as well - and I feel like I should try to rectify that! It’s nice to have a devlog.

So, here’s an extremely general BWH update! I mean, I’ve not got a huge amount to say. And I’m aware that’s a pretty bad start to an update post! But I really must stress that if you want to enjoy this post to its fullest, it’s very important that you immediately please lower your expectations. Have you done it? Are they low? I’m going to trust you! If they’re sky-high, I’m going to be livid.

This isn’t a 100% exhaustive list of current BWH developments, by the way! There are one or two things I’m saving for their own post sometime soonish~

Act III Development Update!

Act III is going swimmingly! I took a little time away from BWH after the exhausting last couple of months of Act II’s development, and it was nice to come back with a fresh perspective on Act III. It’s very handy to take a step back and look at it all from a distance! As you may know, the entire BWH story was planned out in 2015, but there were still a handful of plot elements that I’d drafted in that period that I really wasn’t happy with, so I wanted to make sure I’d managed to fix them before starting on the nitty gritty of the actual script. And I’m very happy to have done so - that ought to be the ‘plotline revisions’ stage of Act III sorted now, and it’s definitely much better for it. (Parts of Act II had the same journey! And parts of Act IV definitely will as well, ha.)

So I’ve now started on the script itself! I was very curious to open up the files again - the last time I’d touched the draft was early 2018 (i.e. before BWH went episodic) so it was a bit of a shock to see just *how* rough a lot of it was, hahaha. But it’s nice to finally be fixing it all up into something real, after it’s spent so long as a cluster of chaotic shorthand~

I’ve also been talking to some of the game’s various artists, and I’m very excited to see the new artwork for Act III! Some of it’s arrived already and it’s excellent. But, as always, a huge amount of it is currently top secret. ;)

So I’m happy with how everything’s coming together! As I said on the Steam forums recently - I’m not really giving estimated release dates for Act III because I’ve learned my lesson after my optimistic ETAs for Act II kept being pushed back!! But, extremely unofficially, I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t in 2020, and most likely at a similar time of year to the past two acts~

Minor Updates to Acts I + II

I’m working on these right now! They should be up before too long. They don’t change a massive amount, but just do a little bit of tidying. The Act II one is slightly bigger - I was playing through it again and I’ve found quite a few lines of dialogue I thought could be sharpened up. And they’re generally concentrated in the same scenes! So it’s not a huge overhaul or anything, but still, if you were planning on starting Act II soon, I’d hold off for a very short while until v1.3 is out.

Revamping Publicity

I’ve been fixing up the Itch/Steam pages over the past couple of weeks! I’m not sure they’ll look much different if you’ve not looked at them in a while, but there have been lots of small changes, and hopefully they give off a better first impression now. I’ve also been making new versions of the Character Profiles here on the devlog! They were a little ugly before, but I think they look quite nice now. And a lot of them have been rewritten, to get rid of slightly clunky phrasing from when I originally wrote the descriptions. Check them out!

And Remember! We have a Discord!

A timely reminder about the existence of Windmill Corner, the Because We’re Here Discord! I hadn’t previously linked it on the Itch page / the devlog sidebar - but I realised I should, uh, probably do that. So take a look if you haven’t already! It’s a very nice community, and it’d be great to get some fresh members. (And I’ll post it on the Steam forum near to Act III’s release, I think!)

So! That’s it!

I’ll try not to leave it so long before the next update! But there’s not much to say in the long periods where I’m just working on stuff. Especially as the further BWH progresses, the more spoileriffic the screenshots and artwork become! So there’ll likely be a lot of nice Act II art used for social media over the next few months and precious little from Act III, haha. Anyway, thanks for reading this absolute marathon of a post! You are cool and decent.

~~~~~~

Because We’re Here is a bittersweet otome visual novel in an unforgiving WW1-inspired setting.

Acts I + II are out now on itch.io and Steam!

You can also support Studio Elfriede on Ko-Fi! You’ll help towards the cost of the new Act III artwork, and get in the Special Thanks if you’re not already~

[inventors-fair]

Commentary: “New” Name

So let’s try this: Under the cut, I’ll do everything card by card and commentary for each. Every card will be included, and you’ll see whether or not they’re a runner-up in the name. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s not, and how the card can be improved. Sounds good? Sounds good!

In general: It’s interesting how a majority of these cards opted for “cool mechanical aspect” over pure flavor, and I like it! Wording for most of these was on point, and there were a couple of tricky ones that you guys handled quite well. Don’t forget that if you need help rendering a card in text or with MSE. That’s what we’re here for!

@dabudder — New // (in) Town — [RUNNER UP]

I’m a huge fan of Aftermath/Split naming conventions being broken. You could do “Best (in) Show,” “Tongue (in) Cheek,” etc. I believe that first ability should read “Target creature...of turn. If you control no other creatures, put a +1/+1 counter on it.” The “Then” isn’t exactly necessary. I think Town is fine as well, and I appreciate how it works late-game. It’s an interesting flavor choice as well, and I don’t know if you need the text for it. You have a loner at first, and a community later, right? But I saw your original flavor text, and I’m not exactly sure what you were going for. Regardless, though, the gameplay is good enough.

EDIT: I completely forgot to give this card Aftermath when rendering it! My apologies, Budder. Everyone, uh, just ignore that.

@fractured-infinity — Rite of New Beginnings

I appreciate the simplicity of this design. As a sideboard piece, I don’t think it necessarily has to be rare? It’s narrow enough for uncommon in my opinion. I have questions about whether or not the first wording has any precedent, or if it should simply be “destroyed.” Land sacrifice makes the breadth of this card a little awkward. I’m enjoy how the recursion calls back to the “Rite” aspect, how it’s almost like a seasonal ritual, a renewal.

@gollumni — Ignite Anew

The flavor here is interesting. We should talk about proper modern wording, though, and how cards should be formatted. The first thing to keep in mind is to have clear sources and complete sentences: “Ignite Anew deals 3 damage to target creature. It can’t be blocked this turn.” And with a card like this, I highly encourage you to add flavor text. Even if it can be conveyed through a card like this (and I understand where it’s coming from), you should take up that space on the card and expand it into its world. Very few cards with that space can get away with it.

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes — Unknown Newcomers

This is a fun little effect that prevents precombat ETB effects and hasty attacks, which I like. It is quite narrow, though, considering that they can play things during their second main phase. In terms of wording, I think you can change “at least one” with “a” and get the same effect. I feel that the flavor text is telling a story in medias res, which is fine, but there’s not a whole lot to resonate with it. I feel that a broader method of storytelling would make it more effective; it’s still entertaining, though.

@illharg-the-rave-boar — New Friends

I was wracking my brain the other night, and I’m just wondering what sort of deck would need this card, and I’m not sure. In order for the card to be effective, you’ll need a couple creatures on the battlefield, and a couple creatures in your hand - and by the time you get to nine mana, shouldn’t you have a more or less empty hand? If you’re trying to get around counterspells for your creatures, what’s to prevent your opponent having a spell for this card as well? Instant speed is good, and makes me think about Dramatic Entrance, but with this I’d rather be playing something like Through the Breach or a similar effect. It’s just too big at a point in the game where the effect is almost negated by how far ahead you should be already.

@mistershinyobject — Embrace the New

Oh how I would have loved for this to be an enchantment. This, I believe, is a card where the “Then” clause should follow and be one sentence. What a build-around-me card. As a sorcery, it doesn’t really feel great to play because of how easily it could be responded to to negate the effect. An enchantment with the breakthrough counter being an ETB could make for a buildup long-term effect that I think this card is going for without the one-or-nothing potential failure. Good ability in theory, but I’d feel terrible about a four-mana cantrip in practice.

@misterstingyjack — Renewed Bond

Actually, behind the scenes, this inspired some designs with having Character Pair Decks, with two planeswalkers that share a kind of bond and play with each other. So there’s that! in terms of the card, it’s a decent uncommon in a post-WAR world, although it is rather narrow. Because of the “this way,” I believe that the if-clause should make this one large paragraph. It feels odd, as in-pie and in-flavor as it is, to have damage prevention on a Gruul card at first. But I mean, I get it, it makes sense. It’s unfortunate that you have to control two planeswalkers for this to work. I imagine if WotC made this card it would have to be a rare because of the reference. Then again, you’re the one bringing Chandra and Nissa together and not them, so who am I to talk.

@nine-effing-hells — A New Road Beckons

There’s a lot of nice stuff happening with this card and a lot that can be improved upon. As a mythic, what is this doing that would necessarily warrant that rarity? Getting lands is powerful, but not so much that it would warrant that much warning. This isn’t the green mythic I’d like to see in my pool. As a rare, I’d be much more receptive. I do enjoy how synergistic things look here. Why does III have you put the cards down from your hand? How many lands are going to be in your hand at that time, and what is the purpose of that effect? Two wording things: firstly, you don’t need that reminder text on the III ability; secondly, because a card you own can’t be put into a graveyard that’s not yours, you can say “your graveyard” instead of “a.” I believe that’s proper.

@partytimesdeluxe — Begin Anew — [RUNNER UP]

I used to play a Brago deck, you know! And it was powerful. And it had a lot of infinite combos. And it was a pain in the butt. This card? This card would have made a LOT of infinite combos happen a lot easier. Now, it’s a runner-up because of the idea and because Boon turned me onto it. I’m realizing now that it should at the very least be a rare, and hoo boy there’s the chance IMO that this could break UW in commander. For a powerful card, you pushed the envelope, and that’s commendable. In limited, this card would be quite interesting.

@reaperfromtheabyss — Patron of New Zendikar

At eight mana, this card in limited says “you get a bomb and draw no lands for the rest of the game.” And that’s a little bit of an issue. It’s a 16/16 all upside almost at a minimum. It’s easily blinkable, and massive in every regard. In short, good gracious, this card is just a little too powerful in anything you’d want to play it in. The ideas are all sound, mind, but man, this card would be an auto-include. Still, nothing like a giant thing to put into perspective how crazy card effect combinations can be.

@shakeszx — New Ideas

Again, we highly recommend adding flavor text, to add depth to the world and space to the card. I’d like to know more about where this character is, where things are taking place, all that good stuff. As-is, the strength of this card feels undermined. Additionally, a three-mana instant that can draw you four cards and discard one for UUR? I don’t like calling “busted,” but that’s a bit of a busted effect. It’s wording in an interesting way, though, and I’m wondering what else can be used with doubling effects in this capacity.

@teaxch — New Tricks — [RUNNER UP]

Again, Boon turned me onto this card. It’s super flavorfully cute. At first I misread this like Demonic Pact, but nope! And I liked it a lot more. And I realized that this card should be at least four mana. Kenrith comes to mind, and goodness gracious this is an equally almost-mythic effect. It’s just a fun card with a bunch of goodness attached, but I would cost it a lot less aggressively to prevent it from taking over games.

@tmstage — On Wings of the New Dawn

Just for wording’s sake, I think there should be a second line instead of an “if” clause: “As long as you control an Angel, creatures you control have first strike.” I don’t know how constructed formats would take to this card, if it alone would make mono-white viable. It’s a major and massive effect! If it was +2/+1, it might be a little more balanced. I’m worried right now about it potentially warping the environments in which it’d be present. But the feeling that you were going for in flavor text and flavor in general is pretty awesome, so there’s that!

@top-hat-von-rattle-bones — New // Known

I’m a little confused as to what your naming intentions were. New to Known? It’s a concept but not a common phrase like “rags to riches” or the like. Conceptually, I think this card would play well, and there’s not much else to say there. The self-exile on Aftermath works well. Don’t forget to ctrl+R to get reminder text in MSE. For “New,” I believe it should be two separate lines like in Opt. For “Known,” “graveyard” needs to be uncapitalized and it needs to target a card in your graveyard, I believe. Should it say “another” since it can target itself? That’s a question for the ages.

VasNirada — Festival of the New Dawn

I was warming up to this card, but the fact that you have to leave the cards in exile for seven turns feels rough, aligned with the fact that you have to exile your hand upon entering. I’d rather be playing something like Outpost Siege which lets me have an option and doesn’t make me exile my hand, or Light up the Stage which gives me another turn to play it. I think the fact that I wanted to love it makes up for it somewhat, right? Let’s talk about wording. Here’s how I believe each line should be edited:

“When ~ enters the battlefield, exile all cards from your hand. // At the beginning of your upkeep, exile the top card of your library. You may play that card this turn. // At the beginning of your end step, if there are seven or more cards exiled with ~, sacrifice it and return all cards exiled with it to their owner’s hand.”

How do you guys like this method of commentary? Is it too long, too much? Any comments or critiques are welcome! New contest tomorrow, so be prepared, and thank you for all your entries.

[ckret2]

If you had the chance to write a free for all continuity for transformers what would you write? I think writers are allowed to write with whatever character too. Any pairings you’d be interested in exploring?

I’m gonna give you two ideas.

Number one:

What I kind of want to do is rewrite Energon.

It’s a series that had a whole lot of potential. You start the story with the war having been over for ten years, with the Autobots in charge, and the surviving Decepticons uneasily working alongside the victors. Unicron is dead and floating out in space—but might not totally be. The prequel series, Armada, was all about the Autobots’ and Decepticons’s fight to control and/or “liberate” (depending on how benevolently you interpret the Autobots’ actions) a subrace of tiny Cybertronians who easily serve as weapons, and who, it turns out, are also thousands of tiny Unicron-spawn; what’s their position like ten years on, with the side fighting to liberate them in charge but the knowledge that they’re offshoots of the world-eater out there? Energon barely touches on it.

One of the early antagonists is a Quintesson trying to resurrect various powerful dead Decepticons to further help him resurrect Unicron; when he wakes up Megatron, Megatron ousts him as main antagonist, after which he very slowly becomes a protagonist, and we find out that his homeworld was devoured by Unicron and he’s looking for a way to make Unicron upchuck it. That’s great! That’s a compelling storyline and could be made even tighter!

In Armada, Starscream sacrifices himself in a hopeless attack on Unicron in order to provoke Unicron to counterattack solely to prove to Megatron just what a massive destructive power Unicron is, forcing Megatron to realize that he has to set aside his fight with Optimus to address Unicron. In Energon, he’s a memoryless ghost the Quint finds wandering Unicron and uses as a minion, only for Megatron to seize control of him and brainwash him into loyalty, where he remains for the series. This is after the series with the Starscream who revolted against Megatron for truly noble reasons, to attempt to better the Decepticons, spent a stint as an Autobot before returning to the Cons, and died a hero. So much more could have been done with a ghost of Starscream that started slowly remembering his past life while Megatron struggled to suppress his memories—or, a Megatron ambivalent about psychologically beating this shade of Starscream back into place, or acknowledging the hero he became and the important lesson he taught Megatron.

There’s a plot arc where an Autobot is half-brainwashed by Megatron, and ultimately sacrifices himself to avoid being forced to turn on the Autobots—which is stupendous! He’s uh resurrected in a couple of episodes though. Why not make that sacrifice worth something? Why not make him wooed to the Decepticons for more compelling reasons than brainwashing? Or: why not dig deeper into the brainwashing plot, have him realize that on some level he’s truly deeply beginning to agree with the Decepticons, and even though he knows that he only agrees because he was reprogrammed to believe he still finds the rhetoric compelling? Make him fight with himself!

One of the Decepticons from Armada gleefully returned to the Decepticons as soon as Megatron shows up; but his best friend struggles between rejoining Megatron or staying with the Autobots in the peaceful post-war life he’s found. Eventually he throws in his lot with Megatron… dies in the process, and is casually revived as a completely loyal Decepticon with a rather new personality. Beginning to catch a pattern, here?

There were so many compelling storylines in Energon—a morally gray but ultimately sympathetic Quintesson, multiple characters grappling with their loyalties and with the fallout of the recently-ended war, a story that starts with Unicron rather than ending with him, more I didn’t mention like Cybertron/Earth politics—but most of the most fascinating storylines were truncated with abrupt kill-offs and next-episode resurrections that wiped away all complexity, ambiguity, and internal strife, or else sudden snap decisions that instantly resolved what could have been interesting character strife; and meanwhile the main plot dragged on twice as long as it needed to, reaching two or three events that could have been a satisfying climax to the ongoing plot but then lumbering on to another new unrelated plot twist. I’d love to dig my hands into Energon to tighten its main story, expand its best subplots, and make something more coherent out of its best themes.

If I were to write a totally new storyline, though?

Number two:

Okay first off it would be Decepticon centric so jot that down. A fully Decepticon-centric storyline might be cool to do as, like, a paired series, with somebody else writing the Autobot line and me writing the Decepticon line, showing the same events from both sides so that each story is complete on its own and you don’t need to read/watch the other, but if you do it’s practically a whole new story. It’d mean a lot of Teamwork and Coordinating but I’ve got years of RP experience under my belt doing just that, and what would this be but a two-person RP where we’re each responsible for playing a whole faction and coordinating a storyline accordingly?

The grody machinations of Decepticon leadership inner politics could certainly run an entire storyline all on its own. As it is, usually when we look in on Decepticon politics, it mainly ends up being brief interludes that are mainly important in the way that they affect the Autobots. But let’s just have nothing but politics between awful people! Awful people who have their own compelling complexities and moments where you can sympathize with them, without stopping them from being awful! Maybe redeem one or two. We’ll see what feels natural.

Or, if I can grant myself a token Autobot, and REALLY make this a dream story: give me a Prowl who’s been captured by the Decepticons. I’ve got a little AU I’ve never done anything with where the Decepticons capture Prowl, try to torture him for information, and instead he flips a little self-destruct switch in his mind that renders him nonverbal (possibly unable to write as well—possibly he’d just pretend so), and thus unable to spill any secrets even if he wanted to. The Decepticons assume that he fried his processor, not just his ability to speak, and keep him around as a potent hostage but put laxer and laxer holds on him the less they think he’s a danger, to the point where soon he’s wandering the base as long as he’s like, wired with a killswitch so he can’t go outside alone or something.

So our viewpoint character is Prowl, wandering around with Decepticon High Command as the audience’s eye into their drama, learning about the intricate politics and interrelationships between the leaders and the followers they keep closest just by observing; and all the while seeking a way to escape them, to forward all his intel to the Autobots, or to sabotage the Decepticons from the inside; without being able to communicate, and all while knowing that he’s only allowed this freedom and safety as long as the Decepticons think 1) he’s harmless, and 2) the Autobots are going to desperately want him safe regardless. The story, therefore, progresses on two levels: we’ve got both that wider expanse of Decepticon politics—which we only ever glimpse parts of, limited to Prowl’s POV, learning more about it at the same time he does—and the far narrower story of Prowl’s attempts to Save Himself And/Or Win The War weaving through the Decepticon political games.

Ships, I’m not sure about off the top of my head. Poly Constructicons would be a delight. And I like the idea of a Con falling for Prowl just by paying enough attention to realize that the fact that he can’t talk out loud doesn’t mean he isn’t still the very sharp strategist he’s always been, and perhaps ultimately getting swayed into helping him and, by extension, the Autobots. One of the Waves would be my top candidate for that. They seem the most likely Decepticons to recognize that silent doesn’t necessarily mean stupid and take a closer look; and “cool-headed logical pragmatist who has a passionate need to Protect but unlike the average Autobot can’t be lured into doing something stupid to save one that would endanger ten” would probably appeal to either of them: Beyond that: anything that hasn’t been done before, I like the thought of taking what was once a crack ship and justifying it in such a way it makes other people see it too. Need at least two ships with absolutely zero canon basis.

[theonewiththefanfics]

Pinky Promise (one-shot)

Synopsys: Even though the rest of the Avengers are enjoying their summer, the Reader and Bucky get sent out on a mission in the middle of Siberia. What should have been an easy in-and-out, turns into them becoming stranded. And even though they both seem to be have gotten out pretty unscathed, one of them might be lying and is in mortal danger.

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Genre: fluff with some teensy bit of angst

Warnings: swearing, mentions of blood, so nothing unusual coming from me

Word count: 2775

   It was summer. Everywhere was summer. Pinacoladas were being drunk, bodies were getting tanner or they cooled off in the ocean, sea, lake, wherever they got the chance to. Yet here was Y/N and Bucky- stuck in the middle of a snowed-over Siberian forest, trudging their way to a safe-house. Oh, and it didn’t hurt that the rest of the Avengers were relaxing in Bora-Bora.    “When I get back, I’m taking a month off and leaving those assholes behind as I go to Bali,” Y/N muttered through chattering teeth as she tried to see something through the heavy snowfall.    “Can I come?” the man threw the girl an amused smile. He didn’t necessarily like the cold, but it didn’t bother him the way it used to.    “Be my guest,” she replied, pulling her furry hood over her head. “As long as those idiots ain’t coming. And we’re taking Stark’s credit card.”    “Wasn’t planning on paying with my own money. Not after this.”    Y/N snorted despite the inability to feel her toes, nose or any protruding limb.    It was supposed to be an easy in-and-out mission from a HYDRA base. Nothing they hadn’t done before and seeing how neither had gone on one in a long time they were put on a jet and flown there. Twenty agents, Fury had said. A day or two max, Bruce had promised. Instead, they had been surrounded to what rounded up to a hundred and fifty agents, barely gotten out alive, Y/N sporting a dislocated shoulder and a massive bruise forming on her ribs and add to that, their jet had been blown up. Obviously, the pair immediately contacted Stark and SHIELD, but when they informed the two Avengers about an incoming snow storm and the fact that their specific part of the woods would be unreachable, it really just put the cherry on the top.    Tony had said there was a hidden cottage about twenty miles from the base, so Bucky and Y/N had set off on their journey. With the girl’s injuries, it complicated things and the fact she refused any help from the super soldier was an added bonus.    “You know, you can go ahead. I know you’re only trailing behind because I can’t walk as fast as you.”    “If you would allow me to help, we wouldn’t be moving at a snail's pace,” he had smirked at her, right as the first snow fluttered to the ground.    “Bite me, Barnes.”    “Any time, babydoll.”

   That had made Y/N smile. They had formed an incredibly close relationship since the second they met. Teasing was a must,  but it never overstepped a boundary, always with the intention of fun, not harm.    She had been a new addition to the team, almost right after Bucky had been introduced. Literally, two days later, in comes Y/N Y/L/N, strolling behind Bruce and Tony, chatting with Scott Lang and Hope van Dyne.    His blue eyes only saw her. There was something fresh about the girl, something pure and untainted. Immediately Bucky wanted to know her, wanted to explore why his heart thumped faster with every second that he gazed upon the woman. Yet the dark thoughts, the blackness pressing upon his mind, told him no, she wouldn’t want to know him, hell, probably wouldn’t want to be associated with the ex-Winter Soldier in any capacity. So he admired her from afar.    Even though he was cold and distant towards her, she responded with affection. And Y/N didn’t give him much choice in how they were going to communicate, changing his mind on the third or fourth day completely.    Bucky had been lounging on one of the expensive leather sofas, watching a show called ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S’, trying to catch up on what he'd missed in pop culture during the years when suddenly had Y/N slipped up next to him on the couch. Bucky didn’t move nor did he say anything, receiving the same reaction from the girl, though what he did not expect was her sliding her hands around his metal arm and taking it between her palms.    He pulled in a harsh breath, head whipping to look at her, but something in the way her Y/E/C eyes glinted made his body relax. Y/N put a finger to her lips in a ‘shh’ motion and once again took a hold of his palm. Bucky felt every little touch of her skin, setting the rest of his body aflame, because for once in his life, somebody else apart from Steve was touching him without disgust or fear or the intent to harm. At least not harm him. Because as it turned out her movements with the vibranium were deliberate as it caught the sunlight and she positioned the plates where the beam bounced off directly into Sam’s eyes.    Bucky had to contain a snort seeing what Y/N’s plan had always been and instantly a warm feeling spread through his chest. It was something akin to content, to peace. His heart rate slowed down and all the bad thoughts disappeared. Just from a single touch. Ever since that day he craved for Y/N’s presence, to have her glide her fingers against his, to feel her soft skin on his or simply be near her.    The crunch of her boots upon the snow brought him back to where they actually were.    “Buck, really, just go. We’re almost halfway there, so I’ll be fine.”    “I’m not going to leave you behind. The night is almost over us, so you’ll need protectin’.”    “What? You think I can’t hold my own?”    Bucky shook his head, smiling down at the woman. “I know you can. Have seen it in person. Though if a bear comes, don’t want to sound too cocky, doll, but I don’t think you could take it.”    “Pff, easy. I’ll just whine until it starts to regret it decided to eat me.”    “Well, you wouldn’t have to fight off a bear, if you just allowed me to carry you.”    “I said,” Y/N gritted through her teeth. “Bite me.”    Bucky huffed what now had turned from amusement to annoyance. “What do you have against me helping? No one would think you’re weak.”    “Buck, it’s freezing cold outside. You pick me up, I might just fall asleep and die. I need to move my body, because at this point, I can’t feel the shoulder, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”    “Don’t worry, it’ll hurt like a bitch when I pop it back in.”    She stuck her tongue out at the man. “How generous of you.”    They walked twenty more minutes in silence, but then from the corner of his eye, Bucky saw Y/N shudder. At first, he thought it was just the cold getting to her, eyes having completely adjusted to the pitch black sky of the night but then she stumbled and fell into the deep snow.    “Doll?” worry instantly colluded his mind. In a matter of seconds, he had turned her over and he was plunged into a nightmare. Her face had gone at least three shades lighter, an ashy colour having settled underneath her closed eyes, but what was worse- Y/N wasn’t breathing. No little puffs of air escaped her nose or mouth.    “No, no, no, no, no,” Bucky exclaimed, ridding her from the winter clothes to assess what had happened. There was no way that the shoulder could’ve made her lose consciousness, let alone the ability to breathe.    He ripped open the front of her tactical suit only to be greeted by a stream of blood. There, right underneath the bulletproof sports bra was a bullet hole, scarlet spilling out of it.        “Come on, Y/N, you absolute idiot!” a stream of profanities echoed throughout the silent forest as he pressed down onto her chest, starting CPR. When his lips touched Y/N’s to push air into her lungs, it was not how he had imagined it. Butterflies invaded his stomach, not because of excitement, but because of terror, his eyes were wide, not because of the impossibility of the girl reciprocating, but because he was watching her chest rise and fall with the motion. After a full-blown minute of doing so, her body shuddered, mouth pulling in a painful breath of air. Bucky was on the verge of crying, yet there would be another time for rejoicing.    With trembling hands, he picked up the girl and ran. There was no time for Bucky to stop the damage the bullet had caused, nor was it the place, so with fear pumping through his veins every step of the way, the ex-Winter Soldier dashed through the darkness as fast as he could towards the safe house.

***

   The cottage was a little bit run down, but if Stark had anything to do with it, it’d be occupied by the top-tier technology. And the billionaire did. The second Bucky walked inside lights went on and F.R.I.D.A.Y’s voice invaded his ears.    “Good evening, Mister Barnes. Congratulations on the successful mission.”    “Thanks, F.R.Y. Now tell me where the first aid kit is. Also, monitor Y/N’s vitals. Anything goes out of proportion, I need to know,” he said placing her down on an expensive looking leather couch.    “Of course.”    With the A.I. guiding him around the house, Bucky gathered every medical supply he could, starting from gauze and stitching thread to a some nano-foam Tony had invented a little while before his showdown with Thanos. It had saved the man’s life on Titan, so the super soldier could only hope it would work in this situation as well.    “Why do you always have to be such an idiot? Why in the hell would you not tell anything? God fucking damn it, Y/N, you absolute git,” the accusations and questions Bucky muttered underneath his breath while his whole attention went to the now clogged wound.    He knew how to safely remove a bullet, how to stitch up things and do it in a way that avoided infections, but he wasn’t a surgeon with any kind of expertise in mortal wounds. In his HYDRA days, they only thought him about minuscule things. Anything that even had a whisper of potential death was disregarded. After all, anyone who couldn’t pull through wasn’t worthy nor strong enough to be part of the great organisation. Luckily Bucky had always valued human lives, especially the ones of who he cared for.    “Stay with me, doll. I can’t lose you.”    Sending a little prayer to whoever might be listening upstairs, he disinfected and removed the dried up blood. Immediately a small stream started to pour out again, so he pressed the white gauze against the hole, turning it scarlet in seconds.    “What’s the damage F.R.I.D.A.Y?”    “My scans show that the bullet seems to have not penetrated any vital organ nor slashed any major artery. However, the bleeding is major and could result in death.”    A hologram appeared in front of Bucky’s face of what he could only describe as Y/N’s blueprint. Every organ and artery was shown, every bone, ligament and muscle was highlighted. By a narrow slice, the metal had missed Y/N’s lungs and the man himself sighed in relief. Now the most important thing was to stop the bleeding.    He didn’t bother pulling it out, most times no one did and the A.I.’s x-ray clearly showed other little souvenirs from battles Y/N had gotten injured in.    “If I leave the bullet in, will it cause any permanent damage or worsen her recovery?”    “If everything goes accordingly and she does not injure or overwork herself, Miss Y/L/N should be just fine.” "So maybe. Okay," he huffed and leaned in.    Trembling hands grasped onto the can of foam and unclasped it. Just to be safe, he treated the nozzle with some disinfectant before pushing it inside of the wound.    “I’m so sorry if this hurts you, darling.”    But she didn’t even flinch as the nanotech entered her body and started patching things up. It was in greyish colour which Bucky was not a fan of, but when he removed the red bandage he stared in awe as the skin moved together, leaving only a barely visible scar, a few shades lighter than Y/N’s own.    “How’s she lookin’?”    “Perfectly stable, Mister Barnes.”    His whole body sagged in relief and he rested his forehead against Y/N’s, noticing how even only after a few minutes of being treated, her cheeks had returned to their healthy glow.

***    While Y/N rested, Bucky took a quick shower and changed out of the bloody gear. There were three bedrooms in the place, wardrobes fully stocked with clothes in all different sizes and for different occasions, though he had no idea what someone could use an evening gown for in the middle of nowhere.    Once he came downstairs, gently he popped Y/N’s shoulder back and put a makeshift sling around her arm, securing it. The wood had just barely started crackling in the fireplace when Y/N slowly opened her eyes.    “Hey there, doll,” a gentle smile washed over Bucky’s features finally able to look into those Y/E/C orbs that had enthralled him so much.    “Hey, Buck.” Y/N’s tone was soft as a feather and he swore he saw love shine in her gaze.    “How ya feelin’?”    “Like a bulldozer ran over me and Hulk bashed my head against a wall, but other than that- perfect.”    Bucky threaded his fingers through her matted down hair before leaning against the couch, placing himself on the ground in front of the girl so she wouldn’t have to strain.    “You scared me. Like really scared me. I’ve never felt so helpless when you collapsed. Why- why did you not say anything?” he choked out, tears threatening to slip down his cheeks.    “I-“ Y/N huffed before pressing her palms against the couch to sit up, “I honestly don’t know. At first, I didn’t even feel it. The adrenaline and everything that was going on around us… it was all clouding my head. Hell, I didn’t even feel it while walking. I think I was just so cold to the point nothing mattered. It was only when you mentioned something about me fighting a bear I realised things were not at all peachy. But we were just so close, I thought I could pull through it until we got here. Guess, I was wrong.”    “Severely,” Bucky snorted through a sob. He stood up on his knees and leaned, in. His mind screamed at the man to stop whatever he was about to do, but the ex-Winter Soldier had run out of fucks to give. With a small touch to her cheekbone, his nose caressed hers before their lips met.    It was sweet, tentative, a barely-there caress, but it expressed more than a thousand words ever could. Her own hand traced Bucky’s jawline, nails scraping along his scruff before settling on the nape of his neck, making him smile into the kiss as Y/N seemed reluctant to break apart.    Only when it was apparent she was struggling for a breath, did Bucky disconnect, followed by a long whine from the girl. She tried to pull his face back towards her own, but he laid a palm on her chest, making her drop back onto the couch.    “I’ve had enough of you not breathing for one day. Don’t wanna be the cause of you getting put seven feet under.”    Her adorable pout made him chuckle, before Bucky stood, picking Y/N up like she weighed next to nothing and sat back down together, her head resting underneath his chin.    “Pinky promise you won’t die on me ever again?” Bucky extended his waiting finger for Y/N to grasp it.    “Well,” she whined out, cheek resting comfortably against his chest, but it was cut off by a giggle as he dug his fingers into her sides. “Okay, I promise, if you stop doing that.” Her laughter encased them, trapping the pair in a little bubble of happiness.    When Y/N finally linked her pinky with Bucky’s, it was like a boulder had rolled off of his chest. Such a simple and in all actuality meaningless motion, but it held such weight, such promise and care.    “I love you, Buck,” her warm lips pressed against his knuckles.    “I love you too, doll,” Bucky pecked her nose before burying it in her Y/H/C hair. “So fucking much.” "I guess being stuck is not gonna be that bad." He lifted an eyebrow at her. "We still going to Bali, right?" "Oh, definitely," and their happiness echoed through the cabin as the two people in love let their minds be washed clean of everything that wasn't their little moment of peace.

Tags (crossed out wouldn’t take): @thunderous-flower @who-cares-rn @projectxhappiness @callmebucky-doll @coal000 @killuaenthusiast @courtneychicken @sophiealiice @raquelbc2003 @watch-out-for-thorns @potentially-kinetic @thatonegirljessy99 @proxinge @bbkenna @buckysclub @ulired @fangirlofeverythingbasically @mrsalh32611 @horrorx570ximagines @the-nargles-made-me-do-it @pooslie @itsisabelanotisabella @httpmcrvel @nerissa98 @happyseagrill @asguardiansoftheavengers @lumelgy @palaiasaurus64 @supernaturalbaesduh @breezy1415 @pizzarollpatrol @crazy--me @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @sea040561 @staryeyedgirl @deathbyarabbit @s-c-a-r-e-d-po-t-t-e-r @reblogger-not-a-blogger

A/N: I have barely two weeks left before I go back to uni and I’m stressing out :D

P.S. if you wanna be tagged in future works, drop a message or if you have any requests :)

P.S.S. please, don’t repost without credit :)

[thedailyrindblog-blog]

Ten Minutes with NoEXIT

In case you missed the memo, boy bands are back. Left and right, boy bands have been reuniting, and this doesn’t exclude British boy band, NoEXIT aka Derek Mcnally, Mark Jeremy Barry and Stephen Adel Burns.

We had a chance to catch up with them after a 15 year hiatus and asked the trio a few questions about their careers, families, and upcoming album.

NoEXIT will be touring across the US in the upcoming months, so make sure to grab your tickets and  check out their new album Powerstation coming October 11 via Topanga Creek Records.

Tell us about how you became NoEXIT and your first few years as a group.

We got together in 1996, a long time ago now. We were just playing with different bands. It was more of a hobby at the time. We met in Liverpool, you know, going to different shows. One thing lead to another and we decided to start our own band together and that was the beginning of it, really. We said, “Alright, let’s take it seriously” and we all just quit what we were doing at the time and said “Let’s just get together and lets do this,” and we took it completely serious and we locked ourselves in a bedroom for about six months, just writing and singing everyday full time, all day and that’s how we did it. I remember being in college at the time and having a bunch of exams to do and just walking out.

What made you take that leap of faith?

We were in it, we were gonna give it 100% and we all committed. We moved to Liverpool and lived in a house together and we just wrote songs. We believed in what we were doing as well. We thought we were doing something different, something unique to us and we believed in it. We thought, “if we’re gonna do this, we gotta give it everything, even if it’s for a year or two.”

What does fan engagement look like now compared to when you first started out?

Well fan engagement back then was in person, there was no social media. We were on MySpace and everything, but now it’s great because now it’s a touch of a button you can engage with potentially millions of people. It’s great for us, especially because we don’t have to be together; one of us is at home, or LA or wherever. We try to post and share and interact with fans as much as we can. It’s important because the fans that were there for us back then are still with us now and we massively appreciate the support we’re getting up to this day. It’s a direct line of communication for all kinds of reasons, you know: picking singles, albums, we can post questions like ‘what’s your favorite song?’ You can get a lot out of social media. We wish we would’ve had it back in the day. Back then you had to go to every city to do TV promo.

In the 2000s, I was saying in an interview I did that I had a diary in which I wrote everyday and I found out we did a total of 180 flights that year; it was like every corner of America. We’d get up in the morning and be in one state then another state doing a photoshoot then we’d be on the tour bus overnight driving through the desert, it was surreal. It was constant, it was just nonstop for 3 years.

Would you change anything from those early days?

No, no. It was amazing! It was just a different time. But you know social media and the way people interact with fans has changed. You had to be on the road and physically go to each state. It was living out of a suitcase for months.

If you could give your younger selves advice, what would you say?

“Don’t have that last drink on the road!”

“Get some sleep.” I think it’s crazy because back then we were going out, we were making the most of it, enjoying it, but we were still sensible to a point.

I’d say to my younger self, “just take it all in.” Last time around everything was moving so quickly and we didn’t really get to absorb it. It was the airports, the venue, then the airport again, we didn’t have enough time to process everything. It was like ‘where’s next, where’s next, where’s next, let’s get it done.’ Ticking every box that we had. I’d say to my younger self, don’t take it for granted because one minute it’ll be here, the next minute it won’t.

I’d say to my younger self, don’t take it for granted because one minute it’ll be here, the next minute it won’t.

Do you feel like you did take it for granted?

You know what, I did to a point, I mean I appreciated it but I was 22 years old. What an amazing experience to have in the world. Now cause I’m older, we got kids, you know it’s weird. It seems like a dream because we’ve had that amount of time away from it. There was a focus on other things: family life, kids, and al. It wasn’t quite the right time to get back together with the lads. Now it’s like we’re enjoying it more because we appreciate it more. We’re getting that second chance that not many bands get. We did vanish for 15 years, so to come back and do shows and to have Good Morning America want us on there, it’s amazing.

During those 15 years, were you still playing music? What did you need during that time in order to come back?

We all did different things, fitness, music, one of us was in a band, did our own thing, family and stuff, and before you realize it 15 years had gone by. We got offered some cool reunion shows previously, but it just didn’t feel right at the time. It felt like we were forcing it. We decided to get back together and do it all ourselves, have full control, have our own team. Instead of someone saying ‘You’re gonna get back together, you’re gonna have a full itinerary and full schedule.’ That was important this time, especially with family. We wanted to be in control, it’s not like we were mistreated before or anything, but we were out there for three or four years non-stop and this time we wanted to be in control of the tour, schedules, and stuff like that.

We decided to get back together and do it all ourselves, have full control, have our own team.

Musically, how would you say you transitioned over the years?

I think we’ve all transitioned. We’re definitely better musicians, better singers, better songwriters. We’ve all transitioned lyrically especially. We’ve always had really catchy songs and melodies, but lyrically it’s matured a bit. We’ve obviously experienced a lot more in the past 20 years, so we have a lot to write about.

So what does the future hold for NoEXIT?

Were always gonna continue to write music and perform. We’re not gonna be taking a break anymore. We’re just gonna give it our all, perform, write music, record great songs, create a bigger fanbase and reach out to the people that still don’t know we’re back together yet. There’s so many people that aren’t aware that we’re back together so we’re just gonna continue doing what we’re doing. We’ll write an album every year if we can, and do bigger tours, and if any songs become a hit… (which we do want, I mean what band doesn’t?). We’re really enjoying it, not that we didn’t enjoy it last time but we’re really enjoying it this time. That’s the main thing, as long as we’re enjoying it, doing it together, we’ll be around for a long time.

How about your families? Do you talk with them about the origins of NoEXIT?

I’ve told the guys this story: my oldest son, got an Ipad. He says to me, ‘Dad, what was that band you were in?’ I said to him, “NoEXIT” and didn’t think anything of it. Then I was walking past his bedroom and I hear our song playing and I hear him singing. He got a guitar for Christmas and I showed him a few chords and then again I walk past his bedroom and I hear him playing my song.

For me, I have a two year old son and a seven year old son as well. I’m never going to force music on them, but I’m always playing music around them. When we’re in the car I’ll play them stuff from NoEXIT. I hope they do follow my footsteps because they can sing, they actually can sing, and I’m not being a biased dad, but (the seven year old) he really can sing. There’s something there. Knowing what music has done for me, it’d be great for them to do it as well. I’m hoping to be a great role model for my kids. The seven year old is taking it in but not as much as he would in the next three or four years, but he’s happy; he’s proud. All our families have been supportive. I play the new songs in the car all the time and my son goes, “Daddy put “Bullet Train” on!” Now they love “Wolves,” and they’re singing, they know the words. They sing the songs to their mum. It’s a great feeling.

What does your creative process look like? Do you write together or individually?

We all write individually and write together, and co-write. For this album, we did some of it in Los Angeles and some of it in England, in Yorkshire and Liverpool. We just do whatever we need to do to get it done. We swap and send ideas back and forth from Los Angeles and England. The great thing now is with the internet, you can collaborate with anyone around the world, at anytime. We just shot videos the other day, one of us filmed our bit in LA, the other in another place. We put the files together and many thought we had filmed the whole video together.

Walking down memory lane, what was it like to perform songs like “Back Here” and “Out of My Heart” to million and millions of screaming fans?

It was amazing, it was a different time. You can see things working correctly when you go to a show and everyone’s singing along. We have nothing but great memories; like the tours we did with Britney Spears and NSYNC at the height of their career. Giant stadiums doing two or three nights in a row. It was just surreal. We were then able to do our own and sell out a House of Blues tour. Just looking back, it was pretty mental but so enjoyable.

Just looking back, it was pretty mental but so enjoyable.

How do you get over those nerves when you walk out to face a stadium-sized crowd?

I remember we did our first show in London, I was sweating and dropping picks. When it’s smaller crowds it’s harder because it’s so intimate. When it’s a sea of people, you’re not really connecting with anybody. The first few shows we were all nervous. It comes with experience. Even now, we’re not going out on stage totally relaxed. We still get nervous. We still get butterflies. When we just did Good Morning America, we felt the adrenaline.

Were you at all nervous to come back after all that time?

Well, we’ve still been singing and performing. Stephen was doing shows with Train and if anything, the feeling that we get now instead of back then is different. We really take it in. When you’re on stage and the fans are connecting with you and you can see that they’re really getting into the performance; I’m getting a better feeling of that now than I used to. I can’t describe it. You get lost in it on stage. You get lost in the music, in your own world. It’s a great feeling.

I can’t describe it. You get lost in it on stage. You get lost in the music, in your own world. It’s a great feeling.

What does it mean to you to be independent?

We need to be independent now and have that control, especially with a family. We [Mark and Steve] couldn’t do this the way we could back then. If someone said ‘get back together’ and we had to do that same level of work like before, I wouldn’t have done it. Family is our priority, family is number one.We can still do the work, but we don’t have to be out [on the road] all the time. Social media frees us up a lot and allows us to be present everywhere. It’s a good feeling. Before social media, all you could do was go on TV or do interviews for magazines. That’s what we were worried about when thinking about getting back together — our control being taken out of our hands. This time we’re going to do it ourselves and we got a great team around us. You guys (The Orchard), a manager, a great tour promotion company working with us…we got a great team. When you do it independently there are obstacles but it’s just about getting the right people. There’s pros and cons. We’re not signed, and we got on Good Morning America and to be able to say that while not being signed… hopefully it will snow ball and that’ll create more interest.

What can we expect from the new album?

It definitely has that NoEXIT sound in the guitars, vocals, and harmonies, but it’s very contemporary in the production. I’d say there’s elements of the first and second album on there, and other elements that no one’s heard yet. The three voices make it sound like NoEXIT. We were a bit worried in the studio, thinking, ‘It doesn’t sound like anything NoEXIT’ then we put the vocals down. Lyrically, we’ve moved forward in the right direction with catchy songs. The old NoEXIT fans won’t be disappointed.

[fangirlingtodeath513]

the future is bright | a 13x15 coda

read here on ao3

The door to Dean’s room creaks open at nearly four in the morning, and he’s facing the door with his gun pointing at whoever it is within a second. He can make out the sound of a swishing trench coat, so he removes his finger from the trigger and lets the gun drop to point at the floor when Castiel flicks the lights on. Dean rubs his eyes, stashing his gun back under his pillow after putting the safety back on.

“Hey, Cas. You just get back?” Castiel nods as he sheds his trench coat and suit jacket, laying down next to Dean once the hunter moves over.

“A few minutes ago. I put the fruit in the area we agreed upon. You found the blood?” Dean yawns, nodding and pulling the blankets over both of them.

“Yeah, couple days ago.” He chuckles, shaking his head. “We got in the middle of this weird artifact war between this rich dude and the head of the Scarpatti mob. They stole the skull of Saint Peter from Malta and this priest from there came after it. Turns out he was the holy man the whole time.” Castiel hums softly beside him.

“At least you got the blood and made it home safely.” Dean hums and nods slowly, taking a moment to yawn before pressing himself against Cas’s side.

“So you found the fruit?” Cas nods, smiling softly as he cards his fingers through the hunter’s hair.

“I did. It took me a while, but yes. It’s locked safely away. So we’re halfway there.” Dean shifts, looking up at Castiel.

“You ever think this is a bad idea?” Cas raises an eyebrow.

“The spell? Are you having second thoughts?” Dean shrugs, sighing softly.

“It just seems like whenever we try to do something for ourselves, we screw it up and bring on another apocalypse. Maybe we just… shouldn’t.” Castiel hums thoughtfully.

“Perhaps.” Castiel’s hands stop in his hair, so he turns to look at the angel again. “I’ve been thinking along the same lines.” He confesses, meeting Dean’s eyes. “This spell is… risky. We don’t know much about it, and we don’t know if both Mary and Jack will be able to make it through.” Castiel sighs, resting his hand between Dean’s shoulder blades. “It would be ideal if we could get Jack to open a portal on his own and close it once they’re both back. That way we know for sure that Michael and his army can’t make it through.” Dean nods his agreement, rubbing his eyes. “Perhaps we should discuss this in the morning, with Sam, when we’ve all had our rest.” Dean nods again, closing his eyes.

“You’ll stay?” Cas smiles gently.

“Of course, Dean.”

                                            ·     ·     ·     ✤    ·     ·     ·

Sam is the first one up the next morning. It’s not entirely surprising, since he has a habit of going for morning runs when they don’t have a pending case. Dean and Cas shuffle into the kitchen once Sam is showered and halfway through making coffee.

“Sleep okay, Sammy?” Sam nods, hitting the button and watching as the coffee starts to brew.

“Yeah. Better than I have in a while.” Dean nods, grabbing a few things from the fridge and setting about making breakfast. Castiel hovers nearby, glancing at Sam once he settles at the table.

“I don’t think the spell is a good idea.” Sam’s eyes flick up to meet the angel’s, surprise written on his face.

“You… what?”

“I don’t think the spell is a good idea.” Castiel repeats, adding a small shrug at the end. “We don’t know that it will allow both Mary and Jack through, and we don’t know that we’ll be able to close it again.”

“I’m not leaving them over there, Cas.” Dean winces at the harshness of his brother’s tone.

“That’s not what he’s suggesting, Sam, come on.” Sam’s glare turns to him and he feels like shrinking.

“Then what exactly are you suggesting?” Dean rubs the back of his neck, pouring himself some coffee and sitting.

“Jack opened a portal. If we can get in contact with him, then maybe he can do it again and close it behind them. Then we won’t have to worry about Michael.” Sam rolls his eyes, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Right, and how do you propose we get in contact with them? Kaia is dead, the dreamwalker Jack found is dead. We don’t exactly have a magical world-hopping phone lying around.” Dean sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

“Look, man, I’m not saying we abandon the spell altogether. I just… think it’d be good to consider other options.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Sam pushes his chair away from the table, storming away in a way very reminiscent of his childhood.

They eat their breakfast in silence, cleaning up the dishes afterwards. Dean motions for Castiel to follow him, and the angel doesn’t even hesitate to do so. Dean leads him to one of the untouched wings of the bunker.

“Sam and I got talking about the future the other day. Got me thinking.” Castiel raises his eyebrows, waiting for Dean to continue. “We’ve got this whole bunker here, and all the knowledge the Men of Letters collected, and right now it’s just… sitting here. We’ve got hunters out there putting themselves in danger and living out of shitty motels to save other people.” Castiel hums, nodding and pushing one of the doors open.

“Have you spoken with Sam about this?” Dean shakes his head, glancing at Castiel. If the angel didn’t know any better, he’d think the look the hunter was giving him was a shy one.

“I wanted to get your opinion first. See if you thought it was a good idea before I asked him.” Castiel smiles reassuringly.

“I think it’s a great idea. We’ve got more than enough rooms, and we’re centrally located in the U.S., it would be more than feasible to turn this into a hunter’s headquarters.” Dean nods, glancing past Castiel into the bedroom.

“It’ll be a lot of work.” Castiel hums, nodding.

“It would. I’m sure we could handle it. I have faith.” Dean smiles softly and nods, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I’ll talk to Sam about it. See if we can’t get a few of these rooms cleaned out and reach out to a few hunters.” Castiel smiles and squeezing his shoulder gently.

He gives Sam a few hours to cool down before bringing the idea to him. He agrees to it, so two weeks later they’ve found the Seal of Solomon and cleaned out six of the rooms in the other wing of the bunker. Dean reaches out to a few different hunters and invites them to the bunker, with the condition that they help clean out more rooms and organize the massive amount of artifacts in the bunker’s storage rooms. The few hunters that aren’t busy take them up on the offer, and Garth and his wife come to visit as well. They’ve got the rest of the wing cleared out in a week, and between the three of them, Garth and his wife, and the three other hunters staying with them, they’ve got a steady stream of artifacts being examined and catalogued. A couple of the hunters even speak French and Arabic, so they help translate some of the books in the bunker.

They get Mary and Jack back a month later. Turns out Kaia didn’t really die. Long story short, she helped them get in contact with Jack and he opened a portal. He and Mary made it through and it closed well before Michael and his army are anywhere near close. With Lucifer in their world, Michael doesn’t have any archangel grace aside from his own, so they feel relatively safe letting thoughts of that world go.

Six months after that, the bunker is up and running as a hunters safe haven. Sam doesn’t hunt anymore, he mostly stays behind to help out with research and make sure those staying there are comfortable. Dean and Cas hunt seamlessly as a team, and the hunting community is more competent than it’s ever been. With ideas from all over the community, they’re able to help monsters cope without hurting anyone, and keep an eye on the monsters that don’t cooperate.

Turns out, the Winchesters get to leave a good legacy after all.

[podcake]

Podcasts & Genre: Noir

When one thinks of the noir genre, the most common association is film noir, a style of film making sparking in popularity many, meany years ago but still carries some relevance today. Though no one really makes genuine noir films anymore, unless you count a few with noir inspired elements, noir mostly lives on strictly as short parodies while mystery stories stay as mystery stories without the usual aesthetic qualities you’d identify a noir film with. 

Noir brings up ideas of stylishly produced, sexual, and cynical stories sparking during the 1940′s that normally focus on a detective that one might describe as hardboiled, a femme fatale or two, and some type of mystery plot to tackle, often involving murder. 

One of the core reasons noir is mostly treated with a certain level of parody in modern work is due to how dramatic these productions could be. The whole vibe of theatrics that came from these productions could be perceived as laughable nowadays. Though much like Broadway musicals could be given a massive reboot through the success of Wicked and later the phenomena of Hamilton, the same could be said for noir that will occasionally slip its way into more modern interpretations while still maintaining an authentic narrative. 

While this is fairly evident in film, we all know that things with more than one picture attached to it isn’t really my specialty. You’re here to hear things and then read about the things you heard. How can sound effectively get an idea across when we only have our imaginations and common sense to tell things apart?

As a whole, this article will be delving into the complexity of translating genre through sound with noir being the main focal point due to its rarity and presence in a different medium of entertainment. 

This might just be a theory though I believe that noir managed to flow pretty well into the audio drama realm mostly because one of the most vital parts of these films is a consistent narration. This aspect alone is oddly enough the real driving force behind noir getting a second life.

And yet I do realize that noir is a kind of genre that is very selectively put to use. It’s relatively rare for a new noir show to pop up, only ever making common occurrences around early to late 2016. Rex Rivetter: Private Eye and Neon Nights: The Arcane Files both debuted the same year with only a few months difference between their publications. 

The same could be said for The Penumbra that came out in March. If this is merely a coincidence or not is on the table as all of the shows came from different producers and are essentially different products in their entirety.

These shows are not the only podcast noir shows in existence, though it’s hard to ignore just how few their are in comparison to the abundance of horror and sci-fi shows that come out every few months.

Among these, The Penumbra and it’s tales of private eye Juno Steel are the most openly successful. The Penumbra takes a creative approach to both the noir genre, with a helpful touch of sci fi, and the fantasy-adventure genre in their Second Citadel series. But if we are to focus on Juno Steel stories in particular, it’s not hard to see why it’s gotten such positive press.

Normally taking place over the course of two part episodes, Juno Steel delivers some strongly written individual mysteries that work their way up to being a whole story with recurring characters and an intriguing central plot. We get some colorful one shot villains, a likable though also dysfunctional lead, and a touch of romance that works to reveal the character’s personal insecurities. 

The Penumbra’s specialty is to remix and retell classic story genres with a touch of modern edge and originality that lets them stand as great individual stories and joins The Bright Sessions and Wolf 359 as some of the most well known modern fiction podcasts. 

A little while later came Neon Nights and Rex Rivetter that I combed through back to back to form a proper opinion on. Though they’ll most definitely be the topics of some future reviews, I do enjoy the air of the occult with Neon Nights which gives it a sort of Dresden Files vibe and Rex Rivetter that’s a touch more old fashioned through presentation which gives it a certain air of glamour that is sometimes delightfully camp. 

The newest contender for the noir genre is What’s The Frequency? which has already made quite the splash in this mostly independent art community with a strong first episode that left a lot to the imagination. Though I’ve always liked the level of absurdity that the noir genre can dig up while still maintaining an air of mystery, What’s The Frequency? is one of the most downright bizarre products to come out in recent memory that’s equal parts eerie and engaging. 

What’s The Frequency? truly commits to the style with its innovative use of static and the inclusion of voice work that invokes just the right vibe of psychedelic 1940′s it’s aiming for. It truly does feel old unlike the usual crisp and clean audio we get from the previously mentioned work. 

Something that has fascinated me is that when you take the film out of film noir you still get a genuine experience. Even without the gray scale, even without the crafty use of silhouettes and dramatic framework, noir has managed to ooze itself into the crevices of fictional podcasts from a purely audio based perspective.  

This I perceive as interesting as noir is noteworthy for its creative cinematography-Dutch angles, night-for-night shots, and silhouettes being the most common. Not to mention clothing like the iconic trench coat and hat approach, women with lipstick we could all assume was red, and people in formal dress for the sake of making every second look as classy as the last.

With podcasts, we only have so much time to get a visual across to listeners without loading them up with pointless filler, most of the run time consisting of dialogue meant to push the story forward to a conclusion. Though audio drama certainly isn’t limited to a purely linear story structure, it does have to pull through a bit more in certain aspects such as writing, sound editing, and acting to hold someone’s attention.

While film gives us more visual shorthand and generally does the settings and characters for us, audio drama leans heavily on getting its story out first and letting the listener fill in the blanks. In audio, visuals are an afterthought but imagery is still roughly where half of the writing effort goes into. It is much easier to look pretty than to sound pretty and this is why podcasts tend to be more ambitious since they can do more with less.

All of these individual shows have some sort of unique quality that gives it its rightful spot as separate stories, and yet you’d be hard pressed not to describe them as noir. Noir is so grounded in film that the idea of translating it to a purely audio based format almost seems to go against what noir is supposed to be, and yet we never run into these complications when we stumble upon them.

We can still identify a horror show without visual blood splatters and can still consider a sci-fi a sci-fi even if we never actually see the interior of a space ship we’re inside of. For example, Wolf 359 is very much science fiction with some strong comedy writing, though it’s also an entirely different beast than Hadron Gospel Hour that may be in the same boat but clearly going up a different stream. 

Audio Diary of a Superhero and The Bright Sessions both tackle ideas of disability outweighed by extraordinary power, and yet it’d be near impossible to get the two mixed up. Presentation and packaging can really make or break a show and how one plans to get these ideas across is the real definitive element at hand. 

While, let’s say for now, horror and science fiction don’t have any definitive visuals, only some recurring ones, noir is different in that it’s almost entirely built on a very specific list of cliches for it to be truly considered part of that group. You kind of need murder, you kind of need a detective, you kind of need a morally ambiguous seductress-so in that vain, noir can very much exist without the usual attributes as long as the audio can get these ideas across.

But let’s say, hypothetically, that these tropes aren’t being put to use. How exactly does one gain the right to consider their story a noir? Well from my understanding, these shows have leaned on a few common trends: a deep voiced protagonist with a definitive, world weary perspective, a jazz score, and taking place in a stylish but troubled city where all the conflict boils. 

It’s truly here that the idea of style and substance, narrative and aesthetic, play into one another for the better. 

Since this article is one part history lesson and another part describing things that are barley a year old, I do feel the need to dig up some facts. A detail many tend to forget is that audio drama was a vital form of entertainment years ago, it getting its start on nighttime radio broadcasts that were tuned into the same way we would watch prime time TV. 

Though this type of entertainment hasn’t entirely died, the radio part of radio drama has leaned more towards desktop computer drama or smartphone drama if we’re going to be taking about technology specifically. 

The thing is that podcasts got a hard reboot when Welcome to Night Vale reminded people how cool that was and everyone followed Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor’s breadcrumbs to make their own stories that were slightly less time consuming than writing a book and less expensive than making a movie. 

The strive for authenticity is strong in any artistic medium and podcasts are no exception. We may have our trends and sometimes repetitive structures and dynamics surfacing every few years, though the final product is what really gives anything its identity. What we consider truly authentic for anything or anyone can be boiled down to aesthetic value, narrative value, or something else entirely depending on your perspective. 

The same could be said for me as the whole purpose of Podcasts& is essentially to cover topics with a little more complexity than I’m normally able to. Reviews are restricted to whatever podcasts I managed to finish and pair up on slim similarities, Teatimes have the creators do most of the talking, and Palettes, one of the main support beams of the PodCake empire, are the equivalent of a “best of” reel-a first impressions, if you will. All the while I keep things interesting with flower emoticons and some cute girls over a pink backdrop. These are certainly accessories to my persona, though not the entirety of my work. 

With Podcasts&, we’re given just a little more time to look back and breathe in just what audio drama is capable of. If there’s anything about this medium that has fascinated me it’s the way it can transcend the typical confides of storytelling to still give a satisfying and unique experience. Many audio dramas exist in the same subgroups but I’m hard pressed to find any that are near identical to one another. 

Be it The Penumbra or Neon Nights-they may be fruit bared from the same garden, but their taste and textures are clearly being grown from different kinds of people. What makes each one interesting is that while noir is normally considered an exercise in creatively crafted footage, audio still manages to capture its identity and mood nonetheless. Noir audio dramas have to flex a little more muscle to really get their aesthetic qualities to matter since that is what defines their genre in the fist place.

Interesting how these articles tend to tie into one another. 

As I get to the conclusion of this editorial, I realize I have opened up a whole new can of worms when dealing with genre construction that is such a broad topic that I’ll need more than one text document to talk about it. Maybe some other day in some other month when all the Palettes and reviews are done and I can work up something proper worthy of being the first article of the new year. 

We can discuss comedy and horror and science fiction and surrealism. We can talk about all that has come of it and how there is no one way to tell a tale or represent a genre. 

So consider this little piece a...prelude for what is to come. Let’s talk about history, let’s talk about audio entertainment in its entirety, let’s bookmark Wikipedia articles, because the topic of genre is barely even at its peak when it comes to noir, though the fact that it exists at all says something about what just a few sounds are capable of.