#weird how sometimes you write a whole novel and parts of its sequel and then you realize the story isn't actually about the main characters

[antique-symbolism]

A BRIEF FAMILY HISTORY OF THE MAGICAL MUNDANE || a contemporary fantasy 

Jacket Asanbosam has eagerly awaited their father's Sanguine Quarter celebration ever since they were a little kid. A vampire's 250th anniversary is already the biggest blowout a magical family could throw, and with the Asanbosams, every event is a boisterous family reunion. There's just one problem -- obviously, Jacket's sister Tala is invited, too.

What better way for Jacket to distract from the impending anxiety of confronting their estrangement than to invite their best friends Holly and Bash as their +1 and +2? Turning the roadtrip into a sightseeing tour of magical America will be more than enough to get their mind off their troubles with Tala, but the three friends will soon find that the Asanbosams aren't the only family with secret tensions bubbling below the surface.

[ixcaliber]

Cool Games I Played May 2022

My time on twitter somehow convinced me that posting on tumblr is only worth it if i have a small novel to write so here’s a new something i want to do more often

1. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (2010)

I already spent a couple of thousand words saying, essentially, that the game’s plot had some wasted potential. I missed the open world, even though there wasn’t really anything to do in it, having it there added a sense of scale to the world that simply wasn’t present when you were always just a second away from any location that you had to go to.

It’s not the worst suda51 game i’ve played (Shadows of the Damned), it’s just sort of okay. Squanders its potential and some of the fights are really annoying but it does have the best cat massaging animations in any video game I’ve ever played.

2. Bugsnax (2020)

Bugsnax is a really good game. I love the cute creatures. I love repeatedly saying Bunger to Forgie. The characters are neat, nicely varied and well voice acted. Eggabell and Lizabert are great I love these gay girls. I may or may not have gotten a little emotional with some of the background film reels you can find and relating a little too hard with Eggabell and anxiety. Floofty is also really great, I love the game’s absolute non-issue with them being non-binary. It’s cool and good. I did eventually turn them entirely into Bunger, but I eventually did everyone dirty like that it’s just the nature of the game.

The puzzles are sometimes kind of frustrating though, usually in the way that, you know what you need to do but managing to execute on that can be really tough, especially when the hot and cold elements start coming into play.

I won’t go into the story but like maybe skip ahead if you’re not interested in very vague spoilers. I was also really impressed how the game did eventually address the innate body horror of its premise. It was way past the point where I thought that the game was going to actually address any of that. Part of me wants to make an argument for the game secretly being a horror game, that even the cutesiness of the premise is an intentional malicious camoflauge. It’s obviously not that, but it is fun to think about how easily, how just a little redesign on some of the bugsnax at that key moment and tonally it would fit.

3. Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (2019)

My favourite suda51 game is Killer7. I love the inherent weirdness, the strange characters who recur with strange, idiosyncratic dialogue. A lot of people did not enjoy Travis Strikes Again from what I understand, but for me this game is the closest any suda game has come to recapturing the things I liked about Killer7.

And hey, the gameplay is fluid and fun. The only real downsides for me is how padded out the game feels and how little variation there is from one game to another.

And hey should I be including little summaries as to what these games are? Okay so Travis Strikes Again is a side game in the No More Heroes series. Renowned assassin Travis Touchdown is in hiding. The father of one of his victims is given a Death Ball; a thing which is simultaneously a video game to be played in an extremely discontinued games console the Death Drive, and also a mystical artefact capable of summoning a dragon and granting the user a wish. Collect the Death Balls, play the games on them and bring Bad Girl back to life.

With the premise involving going into different video games I was sort of hoping that the gameplay would be wildly varied from game to game. It isn’t so much. Each game has a slightly different structure but only the racing game offers a variation on genre.

Also the game, in the final level, doesn’t so much homage Hotline Miami so much as attempt a full on crossover. I was just sort of weirded out by that whole part of the experience. I never really know how to feel about Hotline Miami in general after that game’s sequel.

Aside from the crypticness, the amount of worldbuilding detail spent explaining the Death Drive, its creator and her goals and beliefs, the other thing that I really love about this game is, it’s a bridging of so many Suda51 games. There’s so many cameos; an entire level which is a full on sequel to Shadows of the Damned, Mondo Zappa from Killer is Dead appears, an implied grown up version of Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw, a bunch of people I don’t know because I’ve never played The Silver Case. Even a character from Killer7, even if it is a character I don’t care for.

Overall it’s not a perfect game but I got to put Travis in a Disco Elysium shirt and I think that’s pretty fun.

4. Supraland: Six Inches Under (2022)

Premise: Essentially set in an enormous sandbox populated by tiny living meeple figures, this is a sequel to Supraland (2018). A great cataclysm has come to the land. You are plunged into an underground world where class disparity and capitalism must be overcome before you can return your people to the surface. Mechanically it’s a difficult one to place. Sort of open world sandboxy but most of your interactions with the world are puzzles to solve and slowly you amass an arsenal of different tools that allow you to solve different puzzles and to progress along the game’s narrative.

I would absolutely recommend Supraland, and who knows this game might even be better. Its certainly more focused in on its puzzles and exploration. Combat is at a minimum as compared to the first game and it’s sort of a blessing and a curse. The combat was the weakest part of the first game it makes a lot of sense to pare it back, but it leaves you with a problem; I was always broke. Never had enough coins to get all the upgrades I wanted, even into the post-game. In Supraland I’m reasonably sure that any coin shortage was solved by going and finding a room full of enemies, and the same just isn’t available here.

There’s also a lot more post game content to puzzle your way through, and weirdly that sort of put me off. I 100% completed Supraland because by the end I was just mopping up the few remaining things I hadn’t been able to get my hands on earlier. In Six Inches Under I felt I’d already experienced a conclusion and didn’t have the patience for the amount of content still remaining.

And, one weird personal preference but the order in which the upgrades are given to you in this game kind of irritated me. The first upgrade from the first game is the last thing you get and by the end I really wanted that cube.

I sound pretty down on this one, but honestly the puzzles are good, the sense of humour is extremely silly and often reference based but you’re likely to get some chuckles out of it at least. I guess I was just a little underwhelmed only in comparison to the original.

5. A Juggler’s Tale (2021)

Premise: The game is presented through a puppet-show. Abby is a juggler at a cruel circus. They keep her in a cage when she is not performing. It’s weird. She escapes from the circus and is finally free, however the ringmaster and hired goons pursue her. She must fight for her freedom. Mechanically it’s very much like a Limbo, or an Inside or Little Nightmares. Easy to fail 2d platforming with emphasis on hiding, evading, simple physics puzzles.

The thing about this one is that

Well I kind of really hated this one. Its such a waste of its own premise. Skip ahead if you’re averse to spoilers because I’m just going for it.

Part of what’s interesting about this game is that the puppetry isn’t just an aesthetic of the game. It has a gameplay purpose. Abby cannot go underneath certain objects, her strings get stuck, so you have to find some way to navigate around this obstacle. And it has a narrative purpose.

This game has a narrator who early on emphasises how free Abby is once she’s run away from the circus. It immediately put me in mind of The Stanley Parable (2013), a game with an incredibly voiced narrator which is entirely about choice and the illusion of freedom in video games. Immediately I feel as though this is going for a similar idea; Abby is technically free of the circus but not free of the narrative. As the game progresses Abby gets recaptured and as the narrator gloats about how foolish she was to try to run away she eventually snaps her strings and she is free. Here the narrator turns full on antagonist and you play out the rest of the game escaping from a hunter under his control before going back to free everyone at the circus from their strings.

1) This game isn’t about juggling. If you idle you do a juggling animation. There’s no reason this should be a Juggler’s Tale specifically.

2) The comparison to the Stanley Parable is unfortunate because the voice actor for the narrator in this cannot hold a candle to the voice actor for the narrator in the Stanley Parable. I know that’s a particularly high bar, it’s an unfair comparison but the game is invoking the same ideas in the same ways I can’t help that my brain made this connection.

3) Also every line the narrator says is in a semi-rhyming couplet. Except they more often than not don’t rhyme even slightly. Just like a similar sound maybe. And the attempt to bring them into this rhyming scheme creates the most disjointed and unnatural sounding sentences. God I wish I remembered some examples here but it was really distracting. It was distracting enough that I was debating turning the sound of the narrator all the way down and only didn’t because I could tell it was going to become a vital plot element.

4) The metaphor falls apart when you continue to control Abby after her strings are cut. She has no palpable difference in her own freedom, her own agency before and after they are cut. Before and after she is under your control, still under the control of the narrative, not the narrator’s narrative but the structure of the video game. For this to really work, to really click, either the game has to end when her strings are cut, or you have to take control of someone else.

The game has her running from a hired hunter at this point and the much more interesting version of this game would be you are now forced to play as the hunter by this furious narrator and maybe there’s a way that this part could be structured so that you could play it straight, play your role as intended and capture Abby, or you could intentionally play in such a way that ends with her cutting your strings too. There was such potential here. Such a clear and direct metaphor for control in video games and it was so frustrating to see it underutilized.

6. Pokemon Shining Pearl (2021)

You have to complete the entire national pokedex before the game will even let you see an eevee. Not recommended.

7. Patrick’s Parabox (2022)

It’s a sokeban puzzle game where the boxes you push around can contain entire rooms and it takes this concept and exhaustively works through every possible permutation of what it could mean, what could be done with it. Every set of levels pushes the concept in some new direction, or toys with some aspect you may not have even considered up until that point. It’s probably going to be one of my games of the year just based on how thoroughly and effectively it explores its own premise.

8. #AkiRobots (2020)

#AkiRobots is a simple puzzle game about guiding a robot through a side on 2d level to an end point. It has growing complexity with different kinds of robots introduced that follow different rules.

It's kind of a disservice to have played this one immediately after Patrick’s Parabox. It’s a fine puzzle game, but it doesn’t have as concise or unique a mechanic as Parabox. It iterates on its own mechanics well enough and it has the added complexity that you control all of the robots in a level at once, requiring you to think more strategically about your moves. It’s neat but its not the puzzle game I would recommend this month.

9. Lost Nova (2022)

Premise: Ami is something of a workaholic, her best friend Quinn desperately wants her to take a vacation and suddenly she crash lands on an alien planet. She must repair her spaceship to leave, making friends and learning how to relax as she does so. In terms of gameplay it’s mostly exploration and resource collection focused. There’s no combat, just a fun little world to explore and lots of characters to meet.

It’s a really cute and chill game. It wears it’s themes pretty openly and manages to tie it into the narrative in a pretty neat way. I enjoyed it quite a bit and also by the way in the post game you can get a cute little axolotl friend. I love them so much.

10. The Room Two (2013)

Premise: There’s some kind evil black goo that your friend A.S. found and it’s making you solve puzzle rooms forever but maybe you can escape? God I do not even pretend to know the plot of this game series. It’s all told through little documents and seems to assume a baseline of knowledge that maybe I would have if I��d played the original recently but my memory is atrocious and I’m not actually convinced I ever really acquired the knowledge the game expects of me.

The point of the game is to solve intricate little puzzle boxes. To manipulate switches and push buttons and occasionally find a code elsewhere and find a place to input it. The strange arcane set dressing is sort of unnecessary to the experience. As inpenetrable as the plot is it does provide a variety of interesting locales for puzzle solving.

The worst part of these games is the moments where you missed some small hidden compartment and the puzzle solving grinds to a halt for a minute as you have to comb over the entire room looking for the next spot you need to interact with. There is a hint feature that does at least point you in the right direction but the pixel hunting is definitely a problem.

The best part of these games is simply the intricate nature of the puzzles, sliding open secret compartments, unfolding elaborate contraptions. In writing this I learned that they were originally made for ipad and that makes a lot of sense to me. The focus on the tactile seems like it would be pretty well served for touchscreen devices.

11. The Room Three (2015)

The first two games in this series are very similar in pacing, in fairly incomprehensible narrative, in mechanics. I was expecting pretty much the same experience here, I was taken by surprise to find that the puzzles in this one were a lot more intricate and involved and that the story was a lot more approachable.

The big improvement mechanically is the ability to walk around between multiple set locations. Imagine Myst. It’s that. It was playing this game that I suddenly noticed the similarities to Myst. Lots of puzzles involving complicated machinery, and a plot I generally had a bit of a difficulty getting a handle on, delivered primarily through notes dotted throughout.

It’s not one to one though, Myst games are usually fairly sprawling with puzzle elements sprinkled around its world, here the puzzles are very condensed, just a couple of rooms per chapter. Also this game doesn’t present the same kind of beautiful otherworldly environments you might want from a Myst.

One of its other new mechanics is an upgrade to your looking glass that allows you to shrink (?) or if not actually shrink then somehow project yourself into a metaphysical space that exists within certain objects and machines. Allowing you to manipulate a puzzle from the inside. It’s essentially just another screen you can go to but it is used well to create some memorable moments and puzzles.

I was genuinely surprised how much The Room Three did to elevate itself. I don’t know if I’d suggest skipping the first two, they’re not bad they just lack some of the complexity.

[jeannereames]

Writing Historical Fiction (Well)

From an anonymous ask:

"What advice would you give to someone who wants to write about Alexander?" Sorry I didn't clarify, I was thinking of writing a fictional novel (but do not plan to publish it, lol)

If you’re just writing for yourself with no plans to publish, you don’t have to worry about constraints like wordcount and publishability. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to sell mainstream historicals. Selling a genre historical is easier (historical fantasy, historical mystery, historical romance). But there’s a reason it took me 30 years to get Dancing with the Lion into print. Yes, some of that time I was actually writing it, but much more was devoted to finding a market for it, and notice that I did, finally, have to sell it as genre even though it isn’t really. (It was that or shelve it forever.)

Yet if you’re asking for my recommendations, I assume you want to write something that’s marginally readable. Ergo, what follows is general advice I’d give anybody writing historical fiction.

For historicals, one must keep track of two things simultaneously: telling a good story, and portraying history accurately enough. It’s possible to do one well, but the other quite badly.

First, let’s look at how to write a good story.

There are two very basic sorts of stories: the romance, and the novel. Notice it’s romance small /r/. A romance is an adventure story; in romances, the plot dominates and characters serve the plot. A novel is character-driven, so plot events serve character development. Dancing with the Lion is a novel.

Once you’ve decided which of those you’re writing, you have a better handle on how to write it. You also need to know where you’re going: what’s the end of the story? What are the major plot points? Writers who dive in with no road map tend to produce bloated books that require massive edits. That said, romances will almost always be faster paced, in part because “what’s happening” drives it. Whereas in novels, the impact of events on characters drives it. Exclusive readers of romances are rarely pleased by the pacing of novels. They’re too slow: “Nothing is happening!” Things are happening, but internally, not externally.

Yet pacing does matter. Never let a scene do one thing when it can do three.

You will want to pay attention to something called “scene and sequel.” A “scene” is an event and a “sequel” are the consequences. So let’s say (as in my current MIP [monster in progress]) you open with a fugitive from the city jail racing through the streets with guards following: he leaps the wall of a rich man’s house and ends up in the bedroom of a visiting prince. That’s the scene. The sequel is the fall-out. (House searched, prince hides fugitive, prince gets fugitive to tell him why he’s running.) Usually near the end of the sequel(s) to the first scene, you embed the hook to the next (a slave of the rich man has been found murdered outside the city walls). The next scene concerns recovering the body and what they discover (then fall-out from that). Etc., etc., etc.

That’s how stories progress. Or don’t progress, if the author can’t master scene-sequel patterns.

It also means—again—you need to know where you’re going. Outlines Are Your Friends. But yes, your plot can still take a sharp left-hand turn that surprises you…they almost always do.

When I sat down to write Dancing with the Lion, I knew three things:

1)     I wanted to write about Alexander before he became king.

2)     I wanted to explore his relationship with Hephaistion.

3)     I especially wanted to consider how both became the men they’d did.

With those goals in mind, I could frame the story. Because I always intended Hephaistion to be as important as Alexander, the novel opens in his point-of-view to establish that. And because I didn’t want to deal with Alexander as king, the novel had to end before he became one. History itself gives a HUGE and obvious gift in the abrupt murder of Philip. Where to open was harder to decide, but as I wanted to explore the boys’ friendship and its impact on their maturation into men, I should logically begin with their meeting, and decided not to have them meet too young. From there, I spun out Hephaistion’s background, and his decision to run away from home to join the circus, er, I mean Pages. 😉

IMO, Alexander’s story is Too Big to do in a single novel, or you get an 800+ page monstrosity like Chris Cameron’s God of War. The author must decide on what piece of the story she wants to tell. (Or, like me, view it as a series.)

So that’s (in a nutshell) how you construct a story.

As for the historical side, there are three levels here:

1)     What the world looks like (details).

2)     The events that take place.

3)     How people living in that world understand life, the universe, and everything.

Number two is probably the easiest. Numbers one and three require deeper research on all sorts of things. Sometimes historical novels spend all their time on number one and completely forget number three exists.

The past is a foreign country. Just as you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) write a novel set in Japan (if you’re American) without learning something not only about the physical country but also the customs…same with stories set in the past.

This is why the Oliver Stone movie failed. He put modern people in a costume drama. He didn’t understand how ancient Macedonians (or Greeks or Persians) thought. So he committed crazy anachronisms like the oedipal complex between Alexander and Olympias. Freud may have named his theory after a Greek hero, but it’s largely a foreign idea to the Greek mind. (Whether it’s valid at all is a topic for another day).

The author has to let ancient people be properly ancient.

Problem: what do you do when they’re SO foreign they’re impossible to understand for modern readers—or their attitudes are outright offensive?

Well, if you don’t plan to get your story published, you don’t have to worry about that. Or not as much. But if you want to share it with others, you might still want to consider it.

There are two basic approaches:

1)     Introduce your world through a “stranger” who enters it.

2)     Spread out more “modern” views among various characters in the story, to give modern readers something familiar to hang onto.

The first of those is by far the most common. So in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, Claire Randall—quite literally a modern woman—introduces the modern reader to Jacobite Scotland. As she learns about her new world, so does the reader, and in Claire, the reader has a voice to express both their fascination and their horror of that world. In Judith Tarr’s Lord of the Two Lands, she uses Meriamon, an Egyptian priestess, to enter the Macedonian world of Alexander. Judy can then contrast Egyptian and Macedonian cultural values in order to explain them. Meriamon asks questions the reader wants answers to—or Niko (or Alexander) ask questions of her about Egypt.

The second choice (which is what I did in Dancing) is to identify cultural mores likely to offend modern readers: indifference to slavery, glorification of war and conquest, Greco-Macedonian attitudes towards women, and Greco-Macedonian attitudes towards sexuality. Then to assign one of the characters to voice a more modern view. Alexander gets to be a proto-feminist, and I gave points of view to two women. One of those women, I made a slave. Hephaistion gets to express a more modern view regarding the horrors of war. Sexuality was a bit tougher, but I used the boys’ atypical relationship—that the younger is the one of higher status—to illustrate Greco-Macedonian assumptions about what a male-male relationship should look like.

That approach presents more hurdles, but for my purposes, I preferred it.

I harp on this because it’s the biggest problem for historical fiction: not having historical characters! It wrecks what might otherwise be decent research into the details. No matter how much you look up what they ate, how they dressed, the way their houses were laid out…if you have them behaving anachronistically, it’s a bad historical. Or if you have circumstances that just wouldn’t occur.

Let me give an example. I’ve said before that, when I started writing the novel in December of 1988, Dancing always began with a run-away boy (Hephaistion). But in my initial version, he showed up in Pella incognito. The more I read about Macedonia, however, the more I realized that was virtually impossible. There just weren’t that many Hetairoi. He’d have been recognized, and probably sooner rather than later. So I went back to the drawing board and, instead of having him try to hide, he comes right out and says who he is, and that he wants to join the Pages. It might take away the “mystery,” but set up more interesting dynamics: would Philip let him stay? What would his father do? Etc.

That requires the author know enough about the culture to know what’s possible, probable, and impossible. It also requires the author to be willing to change original plans in order to reflect reality, not insist on doing ___ anyway.

A good example of jettisoning history in favor of “what I want to do!” can be found in David Gemmell’s Lion of Macedon. So many, many things wrong with that book, starting with his choice to make Parmenion a Spartan for no historical reason whatsoever—but (I assume?) because Spartans Are Sexy. Parmenion likely belonged to the royal house of Upper Macedonian Pelagonia. Although even if he didn’t, absolutely nothing suggests he wasn’t Macedonian, and quite a lot says he was. The whole duology (with included The Dark Prince) was essentially Blue Boltz ™ Epic Fantasy Does Greece. The fact he actually included a bibliography in back, and got weird, isolated details right only added insult to injury.

Yet Gemmell was a best-selling British fantasy novelist who knew pacing and how to spin a good yarn. For a reader with zero knowledge of Alexander, it would stack up as a predictable but tolerable fantasy set.

Remember that as an historical fiction author, your job is to practice the art of getting it right. If that isn’t important to you, please God, write something completely made up.

At the spectrum’s other end is Showing Notecards on Every Page. You’ve done ALL that hard research, and you’ll be damn sure the reader knows it!

Um, the reader doesn’t care. The reader wants to be transported to another world. How locals in that world shoed horses (or if they shoed horses at all) is irrelevant. It matters only if your main character’s a farrier. And even then, it matters only if said-farrier is having a conversation with someone else while shoeing a horse.

If people want all the little details of history, they’ll read a history book.

Now, how much detail is “too much” can vary from reader to reader, and often has something to do with the genre.

Regular readers of historical fiction are fans because they enjoy history. So they’ll expect proper world-building. But they don’t want the Dreaded Information Dump. Weave in details. The Dreaded Information Dump is a common beginning-author error across the board, but especially bad in certain genres, such as historicals, fantasy, and SF.

What’s an “information dump”? It’s where the author provides details the reader doesn’t need at that point in the story. What the character looks like, is wearing, their family background, what they had for breakfast….

As mentioned, details should be woven into the story organically. What your character had for breakfast matters only if, later, it’s giving him/her gas: “Damn those beans in my breakfast burrito!” Some details may be useful to set a scene and prevent characters from walking around, having conversations in a void, but again, a light touch.

Similarly, One scene, One head. We do NOT need to see everything from each character’s point of view. No, really. We don’t. And dear God, please don’t “head-hop” inside of scenes (unless you’re writing omniscient, but be sure you know what omniscient IS). Drives me BUGGY.

Anyway, back to the Notecard Showing Problem. As noted above, genre expectations and reader preferences often dictate what IS “too much detail.” Generally, historical Romance (the genre) and historical mysteries go lighter on detail than historical fantasy or plain historicals. That’s because the former two have genre conventions that work against it. Romances preference the love story front-and-center at all times, and mysteries have a mystery to unravel. E.g, they’re plot driven. By contrast, historical fantasies tolerate more world building because world building itself is a feature of fantasy (and science fiction too). And the appeal of mainstream or literary historicals IS the world building, so you get massive novels like Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth.

I’m blathering now, but hopefully this gives pointers not just about writing Alexander, but writing fiction period, and historical fiction in particular.

[maddiethebull]

May I request a scrnario with leviathan with an s/o who's a closet otaku (like she rlly tries hard to hide it from him lmao) and how would he react when he manages to discover her otome/male idol merch (like enstars, tsukiuta or a Idolish7 lololol) hidden in some part of her room/closet

Levi (Obey Me!) - Prompt - Being with a secret otaku MC

Sorry that this took fucking forever, I had my Mid terms which was a ride and a half, but heres the story. I used the power of my own weeb knowledge to write this, hope you love it!! Thank you for making a request

You, Satan, and Asmo were sitting in the living room watching The Real Housewives of Devildom when you all heard an ear shattering seemingly female scream. Asmo jumped like a baby into your arms while Satan, who was off in his own world reading a detective novel since you got so caught up in the show that you weren’t even looking at your Spells notes anymore, looked up and straight to the source. It came from your room. The biggest problem was that you guys had no idea where Lucifer fucked off to so you couldn’t ask him to go check it out. 

Asmo quivered in your arms, saying, “M-MC, go check it out.”

“WHAT? Me? You want me to check it out?” You? The weakest of the bunch??

Satan spoke up, “why don’t we all go check it out, that way we’ll have MC with us to make sure she’s okay and have two demons to protect her.”

Reluctantly, you and Asmo got up to follow Satan’s lead.

-Five hours ago-

Levi was so far ahead of you in Mario Kart : Journey into Devildom ™ that he passed the finish line nearly a minute before you. 

“Hah, normie!!” he said. 

You had been not only defeated, but defeated so badly that you silently declared Mario your arch enemy. You looked to Levi, 

“Hey, that level was really hard, okay?” you said with puppy dog eyes, hoping to avoid his taunts about your gaming abilities. 

“Nahhhh it wasn’t you’re just such a normie that you couldn’t finish it in first place like me.” He said it with a taunting smile and a sly look in those orange eyes. 

You decided to repay his taunts; you stood up and then kneeled, your hand on your heart, 

“Forgive me, your weeb highness.”

You grabbed his hand, you were going to kiss it to really drive the whole weeb highness joke in but he tugged away immediately. He was blushing the color of a fuji apple. He put his wrist over his mouth and avoided eye contact, he was slightly embarrassed from your joke, but it was you grabbing his hand that sent the flush to his cheeks. Of course, he would never admit that to you, so he said, 

“H-hey, you don’t have to make fun of me.”

“You just called me a normie, Levi,” you said, looking up at him with a beaming smile. 

He blushed more, “G-get up MC, it’s w-weird l-looking at you like that.” In a desperate attempt to hide his blushing cheeks, he wasn’t even looking at you now. This is why you loved teasing him back, he would always become so flustered when you teased him back and seeing him blush was the cutest thing you could ever imagine.  No matter how much Levi called you a normie or made fun of you for being bad with the video game controller, you never turned down a chance to give him a taste of his own medicine. He didn’t even know the best part. You were totally an otaku! Just like him – well, maybe not just like him, you left your room much more than him and another tiny detail is that you had gone to the ends of the earth to hide your otaku side from everyone you came into contact with. 

“Hah,” Levi laughed, “when you were being all butthurt about being a normie, you sounded like Suki from My Heartless Father Threw Me Out At Birth But It’s Fine Because He Died and Left Me With A Fortune But My Angry Mother Tried To Kill Me But I Killed Someone, Who Is It? When her heartless father threw-”

“I understand Levi.”

Realizing that maybe the name was a little too forth-giving to the plot, he tried a different reference just so he could see you not understand it. 

“Okay what about this one, you sound like SHEba at the final battle when she gave a speech to the dog-humanoid overlord.”

“Pfft, no I didn’t, she was way more worked up okay. And that was the same day that she found out her father was the villain so that’s two people betraying poor SHEba. Also, what was with the ending, was that a set up for a sequel or something? I think that a sequel would be dragging it on too much just like when ‘Did She Do It?’ came out after ‘Do What I Say! : Should We Have A Courtship?’”

Levi was looking at you, mouth hanging open, “Uhhh MC, you’ve seen ‘Bone Catcher: The Planet of the Dogs’? AND ‘Do What I Say!’????”

“Oh, uh, no, not really, only a little bit of it. Just some snippets because you were talking about it so I watched like five minutes, not really my thing………”

“ASDFGHJKL only this meme can describe how I’m feeling.” It was a deep fried meme written in ancient devildom language over the picture of what seemed to be a demonic pikachu with its mouth open. 

You sigh, “Levi I can’t read that.”

“Hm, maybe a NORMIE (lolololol)  like you shouldn’t read it!”

You laughed, “okay, Levi.” 

To this he smiled, you didn’t know why but he smiled nonetheless. In truth, he was just happy that he could have a conversation with you like this. You were the only person he’d ever met that went to such lengths to hang out with him, I mean Satan sometimes came around to watch dramas and Mammon came around to ask for money, but you didn’t want that. You wanted to hole up with him, hear his voice, see his smile, play the games you weren’t accustomed to. You just wanted to be with him and that was the most profound realization that came upon Levi after you two first began hanging out like this. You were his first best friend and his first romantic interest that wasn’t 2D, so it was a big deal when you came to hang out in his room.

He didn’t want you to leave so he spoke,

“So, wanna play another game so you can lose?”

“Very funny,” you said, giving him a smirk.

“For reals though, I have this new game and it’s a two player.”

You stretched your arms out as you stood up from where you were sitting on the ground, “maybe tomorrow, I have a big test coming up in Spells class and I really need to study for it.”

He looked down to the controller that was still in one of his hands, “oh, okay, just do your normie studying but tomorrow you have to be here to play it with me, like blood oath promise me.”

“I feel like a blood oath is a little too serious for this situation, pinky promise,” you said holding out your pinky.

He couldn’t help but blush at the thought of touching your hand again. 

“Pffft, w-what a lame normie thing to do, l-let’s do a pinky promise t-then.” 

“Okay,” you linked your pinkies together and looked into his eyes that were surrounded by a rose color that crept up to his entire face, “I pinky promise you that I will be here tomorrow so I can be your player two.” 

He blushed even harder, “okay, w-whatever.” And you were on your way out, but just before you opened the door, “oh, by the way, I lost my headphones at R.A.D., can I borrow some earbuds for tonight?”

“Hmph, okay but JUST for tonight, the premiere of Generic Anime Name is gonna be on Devflix tomorrow morning and I can’t miss watching that.”

And with that, you were off to study in your room until Asmo yanked the headphones from your ears,

“Hey MC, guess what show is on?”

“Asmo I’m trying to study,” you put Levi’s headphones in your pocket as to avoid further ear pulling. 

“But it’s ‘The Real Housewives of Devildom!’ Remember how you promised me last week that you would watch the new episode with me?”

“Asmo, not now, I need to study for this test

“MCCCC, you SAID you woulddddd you prommmisssed”

“Ugh fine but only if we bring Satan along to help me study during commercials.”

“Yayyyy!” 

Meanwhile notification beeped on Levi’s D.D.D.,

“As a present we’ll be releasing the premiere of Generic Anime Name a little early for our loving fans

Levi rushed to your room and walked right in, not bothering to knock. It was a good thing you weren’t there because you would’ve punched him in the face if another person had come in while you were studying. He wondered for a second where you had gone, but that wasn’t the issue at hand, he HAD to find his headphones. He rummaged through almost your entire room. ‘Where would they be?’ ‘Maybe she dropped them and kicked them under the bed?’ So, he went looking under your bed and found tons upon tons of anime and otome merch. He saw a body pillow of Gavyn from Mr. Passion: Monarch’s Decision and that’s when he lost all composure and let out a scream. About five minutes of digging through your stacks of posters and T-shirts and yet another body pillow, the door was nearly busted open by you, Asmo, and Satan. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He was hurt, really hurt you could tell because he didn’t even have the strength to call you a normie. He figured you didn’t tell him because you didn’t think he was cool enough or hot enough like Gavyn. Maybe you even didn’t like him at all. 

“Uhhhhh, I’m going to leave now, bye,”Asmo said, sprinting out of the awkward situation and Satan soon followed seeing that there wasn’t some ghost wandering about in your room. 

“Levi-”

“Are we friends?” This caught you off guard, why the hell would he think you weren’t friends? He was your best friend and at the same time your biggest crush. 

“Of course, Levi, we’re friends,” your head hung low, you felt slightly ashamed of hiding this side of you from him. 

“Then why did you hide all of this from me?”

“Because I was scared of how you would react. In the human world, there was a guy I used to really like, he was my only friend at the time, but when I showed him these things, he stopped talking to me; he wouldn’t even look at me in the hallways. I felt so alone. He thought it was weird and childish and- and he said I was creepy. I just-” tears began rolling from your eyes from remembering this and realizing that Levi was nothing like that guy. Levi, even though he didn’t show it much, actually cared about you and he was even into some of the same things you were but you were just too damn scared of something like that happening again.

You choked back your tears, “I just didn’t want to lose you.” 

He stood up and walked over to you, “MC, you don’t need to hide from me… I would never stop talking to you, even if you were into stuff I didn’t like. I just like being around you and having a friend to play video games with and watch anime with and you listen to me talk about Ruri-chan and- and,” his voice shook. Now both of you were crying as he pulled you in for a hug, you were both such softies that you couldn’t help but get worked up over your emotions. Neither of you wanted to lose the other, and Levi didn’t want you to feel like you needed to hide any part of you from him because, after all, you were his player two. 

“Y-you should never leave your player two behind,” he said with his face buried in the crook of your neck. Lucifer gave a passing look in your room when he got back to see that you were alright but saw two emotional weebs crying and hugging instead. 

“MC, Levi, I beg of you, whatever it is that you’re doing, just finish and go to sleep.”

You and Levi separated but instead of going to his room, Levi stayed with you to watch that new anime premiere episode. You shared the headphones even after you nodded off to bed and Levi was just sat next to you, listening to whatever was on his computer while smiling gently at you, studying your features as you lay peacefully asleep. Finally around five in the morning you were both asleep as Levi unconsciously held you close, in his arms, never wanting to let go of his Player Two.

—————————————————————————————————-

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Bad Vegetarian | Feeding Habits #1

Hey People of Earth!

As you can see from the title, not only do we have a new series of writing updates, we have a new series of writing updates for a whole new novel that was! not! supposed! to! happen!

For any of my friends who miss Moth Work (aka myself), guess who started writing a sequel literally no one asked. :)

I’ve had ideas for spinoff stories for Moth Work (as if MW wasn’t enough of a spinoff) and was peer pressured into starting this novel by @sarahkelsiwrites​ and I’m really happy about it! I have yet to come up with a title, but the moment I do, shall inform you, but for now, we’re calling this MW2!

This book (if it even ends up being a book) starts with chapter one, Bad Vegetarian. Unlike MW, MW2 starts in Lonan’s POV (not sure I’ll switch but I’m sure it’ll be inevitable), and I’m here for it!

I’ve been wanting to explore Lonan and Eliza’s relationship in more detail since having them come together in MW by complete fluke, and oh! is the tea piping!

This chapter really illustrates how truly dysfunctional this relationship is on both sides. Here’s a break down by scene:

Scene A:

Lonan is paint shopping with Eliza who has just gone vegetarian (which is the def the most normal thing she’s spontaneously done lately). Eliza feels like celebrating by painting their entire kitchen red.

Lonan particularly is drawn to blues, but since this ain’t what Eliza wants, they go with a brilliant red.

Scene B:

Lonan lines the kitchen with painter’s tape as Eliza bothers their neighbours for paint rollers, while trying to convince himself this relationship is still somewhat okay.

While doing this, he gets his weekly call from Unknown Woman who he’s been in contact with for the last few weeks. What for? We don’t know! They talk in code, and he realizes Unknown Woman’s situation is getting worse, and impromptu, tries to do something about it.

Scene C:

Lonan and Eliza bump into each other as he’s exiting the apartment and she’s entering, and have a short, strained conversation about why he’s leaving (she’s not aware of top secret phone calls that make this book feel lowkey like the old dystopians!)

Scene D:

Lonan attempts to drive to Unknown Woman but only knows she lives in Arizona (not great for directions lol). While in the car, he realizes it’s essentially impossible to get there without knowing where he’s going, and eventually gives up and heads home.

Scene E:

TW: blood

Lonan re-enters the apartment only to find Eliza “bleeding” in the kitchen. She’s actually just being wild and this “blood” is wall paint.

Scene F:

If we haven’t already seen the dysfunction, oh does it get worse! As Lonan and Eliza try to have a *moment* Eliza has a conversation by herself and gets a lil gaslighty.

Halfway through this, Lonan gets a phone call from Unknown Woman who we finally find out is his ex-girlfriend Glenne. Sounds like tea but he’s genuinely only helping her out of her toxic situation (which will be clarified later) though Eliza’s skeptical.

This chapter was a lot of fun to write! I wrote a majority of it today, and am really happy to have a *chill* project. While I love my other books (the three I am apparently now working on at once), it’s nice to have a place to dump my ideas with characters I know very well in situations I’m comfortable in whenever I feel like writing but don’t have tons of time/ideas/energy.

Excerpts:

Here are the opening three paragraphs! The first sentence sets up the POV a little weirdly, but I think it works with a later sentence that sort of mimics this “reminder” kind of style:

There are no rules, just remember, Eliza is vegetarian. She’s into earth tones, neutral tones, leafy greens, root vegetables. It’s all new. The day she announced her diet change, she also announced a desire to repaint the kitchen, to fit the new aura, to fit the new ethics, but she wants to paint the kitchen blood red, and Lonan is still a meat-eater. He reminds himself: there are no rules, just remember, Eliza is vegetarian.

In the hardware store he thumbs paint chips. They’re set up in an array, almost like checkers, dissolving in a gradient from reds to purples. Eliza wants red, “Not necessarily earthy, but the root of organism, of life,” so Lonan looks at the blues. They’re all a variant of a seaside theme—Sea Breeze, a cloud-like blue, Beach Umbrella, a wispy aqua, Seafoam Serenade, muted like the soft side of a turquoise. Repainting the kitchen matters little to him, and so do the blues, but the red section, devilish, makes him shuffle his blue deck faster.

Radio from the store’s intercom tins through the speakers, dampened by the hustle of carts, the thud of bodies against the concrete flooring. He holds many cards up to the light, Secret Getaway and Parisian Summer almost the exact shade, but still he flicks through, until half the pile is indistinguishable, and the other half are blues he likes and not reds, like Eliza’s asked.

The next excerpt sort of highlights the last six months of Lonan’s life as he’s been on this whirlwind of keeping up with all the things Eliza has tried. I have added kudzu pudding and other kudzu food just for my pals @sarahkelsiwrites​ and @shaelinwrites​ (rlly want kudzu pudding):

Her sudden vegetarianism is not confusing to him. Eliza tries new things all the time, something he’s learned after living with her for half a year. One time, she brought home four different kinds of dried beans to make into tea, and together they drank it atop the balcony, the Vegas strip across them somehow tasting better. One time, they ate a variety of kudzu foods for a week because Eliza said invasive species had to be killed somehow, and so they spooned kudzu pudding into their mouths, kudzu root powder into their water, kudzu salads with salted almonds. One time, she put them on a warmth ban, and they ate only frozen peas, potatoes, raspberries, turned the thermostat down until every surface crackled. She liked the feeling of subtle frost on the countertops, how it jolted her when she touched it accidentally in the morning. He found her many mornings awake before him, transfixed to the table with both palms soldered to its surface, like she’d forgotten she wasn’t a part of it. One time, she paid to have the furniture in the house rearranged, not good enough for her spirit, and then reverted it two days later. “The couch doesn’t like being so close to the refrigerator,” and he could’ve asked “did you ask it?” but said, “Understandable. It shouldn’t be forced to catch a draft.” So her vegetarianism is normal. Already, she’s switched their meat supply to beetroots, chickpeas, tofu she rips apart bare-handed. For the last three mornings, they’ve both taken a shot of spinach and gingerroot, a liquid that burns to make you feel alive, as if you weren’t already.

The next excerpts kind of surprised me with their amount of humour! Not something I expect from Lonan, but I’m glad he has some sass back lol (CW: some upsetting animal imagery):

There is nothing wrong in this relationship. Everything is Eliza’s new favourite adjective—stunning. Everything is scrubbed with kitchen bleach, glittering like a plasticky pool float in the shallow end, stunning. Everything is planned, put in a calendar, a notebook, a flitter of receipts, but always planned, stunning. Everything is better, even better than better, a better that can only be described as stunning.

Lonan uses this word frequently now, rolling out a strip of blue painter’s tape and trying to find different ways it stuns. Sticks when he sticks, peels when he peels, keeps its edge when it needs to keep its edge, so it’s stunning. The bubble television is turned onto a channel about sheep, and as he lines the baseboards, outlets, catches glances of a sheer buzzing against skin, sometimes a hunting knife slicing until there’s blood. 

Eliza is asking a neighbour for paint rollers because they bought four cans of wall paint, two paint trays, a box of garbage bags, three rolls of painter’s tape, and a small paintbrush each for both of them but forgot the rollers. Stunning.

The following excerpt highlights that Lonan has a cellphone! Is Fostered just a bizarre alternate reality of a time period that doesn’t exist? Perhaps! (CW: some upsetting animal imagery):

Today, they’ll prime the cabinets, the walls, and tomorrow, scroll a coat of red onto both. The kitchen will look more like the inside of an anatomical heart, the sinks and drawers like ventricles, but this is Eliza’s vision—her tastes come alive.

The sheep are being herded by a collie. As Lonan rips another strip of tape with his teeth, he stares at the screen mounted in the corner, at the almost-naked sheep dashing across a field. How many will be slaughtered, he doesn’t know. The narrator must’ve said that, but there is no plan, really, for death. Even for sheep.

He kneels toward the kitchen vent, the tape roll linked around his wrist, and smooths a line of tape down. Eliza doesn’t want to paint the vent—it wouldn’t complete her vision—and so it will remain the original wall colour, a square of cream so worn, it’s almost grey.

Here we have some hints at Eliza’s weirdness:

He straightens and looks at her. She’s bundled in her fur coat even though she has always insisted she’s good at even Vegas’ warm winter. Since going vegetarian, she’s insisted it’s fake, even though he’s read the lining tag—100% mink. He doesn’t know why she’s needed her coat when she’s only walked up a few flights of stairs but doesn’t care to ask.

She approaches him with her thumb out, and when that thumb presses into his eye socket, he flinches.

“What happened here?” she smooths the dip of his under eyes, her fingertips cold. He smells her perfume, different today, always different, a smell like cloves and lavender. “Are you sleeping?” She presses onto her toes, examines the other side, and her frown deepens. “This doesn’t look like eight hours.”

“I’m sleeping,” he says, though they both know this is a lie. It’s taken her two weeks to notice.

“I can run to the pharmacy,” she says. “If you need a refill.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“I didn’t notice this morning—I would’ve given you another energy shot.”

Here’s a line I like because of a) skin and b) sun:

Lonan goes nowhere. This is not his plan. Asphalt whips under the skin of each tire, the setting sun wringing him blind. 

Fully sharing this for the verb zags (and also because I accidentally roast cities tho I love them I am one of these blink-less people):

He doesn’t know where he’s going. Arizona is the only thing he knows about her, doesn’t know if she lives in an apartment, a duplex, a house—fully detached, semi-detached. As he pulls into a residential neighbourhood somewhere along the vague line he’s drawn on the map from Las Vegas to Arizona, he watches for all these options. In the distance, a jogger zags across the street with her golden retriever, children play basketball on a driveway, still in their school uniforms, another woman clips the wilted stems off a magnolia bush. 

It’s when he gets closer to the apartments that the sameness is noticeable. High-rises with pearlescent windows that go pinkish in the sunset—all of them identical. Each building evenly spaced, more like a board game than a place to live. Even the space around each building is the same—the same rose hedges, the same iron fence, the same people bustling in and out, all wearing some variation of the same pantsuit, all holding some other hand—child, partner, lover. The same haircuts, smiles, eyes like marbles, as if there’s a store somewhere that sells copies, a catalogue for eyes that don’t blink. He’s been looking into the sun for too long, there must be a difference, but the longer he looks, the more indistinguishable they become.

To get out of explaining where he wants to go when he and Eliza bump into each other, Lonan says he’s visiting his sister (Reeve), and because she’s iconic and must make an appearance, here’s a line ft. our queen:

He could make the lie true. Reeve is somewhere in the country, he imagines, dancing in a faceless city, living in a motel room, tipping everyone well. 

(^^ all true)

Here we have Lonan identifying with the animals more than anything else for the second time in one chapter (TW for more blood imagery):

Lonan hooks the car keys onto the lanyard by the front door and slings his coat across the couch. The television is set to the same channel as before, though the program has switched from sheep slaughter to birdwatching. On screen, a heron perches by a riverbed, opalescent in the sunshine.

“Did you hurt yourself?” he asks, the heron now frisking up the white bark of a tree. He glances at the fluorescent red dripping between her fingers, pattering against the tile.

“I was opening the paint cans.”

“With a kitchen knife?”

He gestures to the blade on the counter, blood-free, newly sharpened.

“It’s all I had on hand.” She pulls her wrist closer to her, runs her index finger along the injured area.

“It’s clean.”

“I washed it, Lonan.”

This next one has some blood imagery so TW for that!

The heron has moved closer to the riverbed. It watches the water knowingly, its subtle simmer of movement, and after a moment of watching, strikes its beak down so it spears a trout. He misses the part where it eats. Eliza’s clicked off the TV from behind him.

She slams the remote onto the counter so hard, its back clatters off and onto the tile. “I cut my arm with a kitchen knife while opening paint cans. It happens.”

“I don’t see a cut.”

“Why would I make that up?”

“I don’t see a cut.”

She walks toward him. He expects her to shove her wrist in his face, but she doesn’t. She just holds it, some of the blood fluorescing pink, splashes onto her toes.

“You got to see your sister?” she asks.

“She cancelled.”

Eliza clucks her tongue, examining her wrist, and then she extends her arm, revealing the full patch of pale skin gone red.

Lonan takes it, and with his fingernail carves a line through the red to reveal the healthy patch of skin, painted, uncut.

And finally, here’s the last line of this excerpt that essentially explains where the title comes from ft. predator VS prey symbolism:

He’s reminded once more of the heron, how it plunged into the riverbed with ease, and the trout dangling in its beak, its commitment to life most fervent the moment before being consumed. 

So that’s going to be it for this update! I don’t know how frequently I’ll be writing this, but it’s been a lot of fun so far. I’m excited to explore more relationships I haven’t turned over in a while as a little side project while I do other things! Hope y’all enjoyed!

--Rachel

[blakemetothemoon]

Your Love’s My Ritual

Summary: “I don’t want to break up with you! I want to fuck you!” or: Zon wants to top. Predictably, he sucks at bringing it up.

Pairing: SaifahZon / ZonSaifah

Rating: Explicit for smut. First time topping, blow jobs, fingering, angst, oh my.

Notes: Request: “Would you be okay writing another SaifahZon where maybe Zon is actually afraid to ask Saifah if he can top because he wants to try but now he’s so used to their dynamic that he is nervous about asking Saifah ? Maybe a little bit of angst where Saifah knows something is up but Zon avoids the question so much that he thinks he did something wrong?”

Did my best to touch on all of that D: I hope you all enjoy! Please let me know if you notice any typos or anything like that! This has only been seen by myself and eye, so it’s definitely possible I missed something LOL

This can be read as either a sequel to Smiling Stupid or on its own! Read here or on ao3.

Thank you for reading!

“Do you want to be on top tonight?”

Zon shoots off the pillow so fast he gets whiplash and his shoulder barely misses breaking Saifah’s nose. “Really?!”

Saifah crinkles his brow, confused by the outburst. And Zon doesn’t blame him. He gets on top of Saifah all the time. Riding Saifah, they’ve discovered together, is one of Zon’s favorite things. Saifah’s fingers have already made their way into the back of Zon’s boxers and are sliding over the curve of his ass. Normally, the way his hand perfectly cups Zon’s cheek and can still tease him melts Zon like ice cream left in the sun.

But “normally” isn’t “lately”.

Because here’s the thing: Zon does want to be on top.

He just…means it in a different way than Saifah does.

And Zon has brought it up no more than absolutely zero times.

To say he plans to bring it up is a lie. What if Saifah makes fun of him because Zon has never actually put his dick in someone’s ass before? What if Saifah gets weirded out? Sure, he offered the first time they had sex but now they’ve only done it with Zon on bottom, so changing at this point would be wrong, right? And what if Saifah gets upset or offended? Zon loves sex with Saifah. He doesn’t want Saifah to think differently. Like he isn’t pleasing Zon— with all those explosive orgasms and his throat going hoarse from moaning so much, god, Saifah is most definitely pleasing every inch of him.  

Still, none of that changes how much Zon thinks about giving it to Saifah like Saifah gives it to him. About long legs around his waist and his cock inside hitting that bundle of nerves to drive Saifah crazy. Sometimes he thinks about how he pinned Saifah to a wall once already; he could do it again. Except they could both be naked and—

Zon doesn’t know why he wants it so bad. Somewhere between imagining fucking Saifah and the anxiety of bringing it up, his brain kind of stales.

It’s fine, though. Zon’s got this. He can hide his dirty little fantasy away and be so chill about it that Saifah will never know anything is amiss.

“Um,” Zon replies, “I’m actually pretty tired.”

Immediately, Saifah’s fingers stop. For a brief second, Zon’s legs open slightly on their own, waiting for Saifah to continue, press in and make Zon moan, and he hates part of himself for making the excuse but he would have to explain if he took it back.

“It’s only 9 PM,” Saifah says.

“Uh, yeah. Headache.” 

Eyes search his face. Saifah’s hand retretes. It slides out of Zon’s boxers to trace his thumb over Zon’s hip, soothing. “Do you need to go to the doctor? You’ve been getting those a lot lately.”

Shit, Zon should’ve thought of a better excuse. He’s used the headache one five times already, and there’s definite annoyance in Saifah’s tone.

Not getting laid isn’t what Saifah’s annoyed about. It’s obvious Zon is hiding something and Saifah isn’t big on Zon refusing to talk to him. The last time that happened, Zon was convinced the novel was real and his feelings for Saifah weren’t. Back when he would throw them into that stupid cat and mouse game, flinching away from each of Saifah’s advances and kicking Saifah right in the heart.

Zon knows he’s probably kicking again as he rolls away to avoid any further conversation. There’s a moment of silence. Then a kiss is pressed into the spot where Zon’s neck meets his shoulder. It is the same spot Saifah always nips, either because he wants to give Zon reassurance or he wants Zon to arch his back and shudder. It almost works for both, but Zon freezes when Saifah winds his arms around his waist because being the little spoon makes Zon think about wanting to not be the little spoon, and his anxiety skyrockets.

Saifah mistakes it for outright rejection; he is quick to withdraw his arms. Zon isn’t sure how to reassure him without bringing up the whole “I-wanna-top-you” thing, so he lets Saifah shuffle away to the other side of the bed. 

Zon barely sleeps. 

* 

Contrary to what Tutor is currently saying, Zon is not ignoring Saifah. Frantically sprinting off whenever he sees that sexy, tall giraffe walking his way is not ignoring—it’s self-preservation. It’s driving him crazier and crazier whenever he’s in close vicinity to Saifah to keep his hands off him.

“Zon, Saifah said you haven’t talked to him all week,” Tutor says, “and now he’s all mopey like a kicked puppy.”

“He’s mopey?”

“Wouldn’t you be if you thought Saifah was planning to break up with you?”

The thought of him and Saifah not being together instantly makes Zon want to puke. “I’m not going to break up with him!” Zon grabs onto Tutor’s biceps, making him jump, but he quickly resigns himself to the oncoming rant. “Tutor, listen to me! I want to fuck Saifah so bad, I can’t stop thinking about it. Like, all the time! Any time I see him! And it’s wrong because we’ve always done it the other way, and we both really like it, and Saifah is taller, and I think he’ll hate me if I bring it up, and I don’t want him to hate me when I’m in love with him!”

Zon is used to long pauses after he talks, so he’s a little shocked when Tutor immediately replies, “Are you a moron?” Tutor shakes his head and wiggles his way out of Zon’s death grip. “Who do you think tops—Fighter or me?”

“Uh,” Zon crinkles his brow. “I’m not sure. You’re scary when you’re mad, but Fighter is scary all the time. You can both be intimidating. You’re both pretty equal height, so—”

A rolled up notebook smacks him across the head.

“What the hell kind of logic—” Tutor remembers who he’s talking to, so he bites off with a sigh. “We both like it both ways, so we do it both ways. We switch.”

Zon’s eyes go impossibly wider. “You switch? You can do that? That’s allowed—ow!”

The notebook remains rolled, like Tutor is convinced he’s not done using it. “The things allowed in a relationship are what’s consented between the people in it. Have you talked to Saifah about…Zon!”

Zon throws up his hands before Tutor can smack him again. “I don’t know how to bring it up!”

Tutor briefly glances over Zon’s shoulder, then back to Zon’s face. “Try this: ‘Saifah, I need to talk to you about something.’ Now, you say it.”

Zon pouts and shuffles back and forth on his feet. “‘Saifah, I need to talk to you about something.’”

“That’ll involve actually talking to me.”

It’s that deep voice Zon hasn’t heard all week. Saifah drapes his arm over Zon’s shoulders and begins steering him away.

“Tor,” Zon yells, drawing the attention of everyone in the canteen, “how could you!”

Tutor throws him a cute little wave like he hasn’t just sentenced Zon to death.

*

Saifah is mad. Saifah is really mad.

“So you’ll talk to Tutor about whatever’s bothering you, but not me?”

Zon is usually quick to rise to Saifah’s anger with his own, but this time he knows it would be unwarranted. “He cornered me—”

“Now I’m the one cornering you. What the hell’s going on with you?”

And when Saifah says he’s corning Zon, he’s very much cornering him. Saifah has dragged them to an empty stairwell and he’s got Zon back up against the wall. The coldness of it does little to stop the heat pooling in the bottom of Zon’s stomach reminding him they haven’t even kissed in five days. But Saifah doesn’t seem like he would appreciate Zon trying to make out with him right now.

Saifah takes Zon’s distracted silence as another rejection. “I thought we were past this, Zon. If you’re gonna break up with me then—”

Hearing the words from Saifah’s mouth is worse than hearing them from Tutor’s. “I’m not!”

“You expect me to believe that when you’ve been running away from me—”

“I don’t want to break up with you! I want to fuck you!”

The words bounce off the walls in an embarrassing echo. 

“What?” Saifah replies.

“I want… tofuckyou.” Zon says, timid and quick. He starts doing that jaw working, bouncing from one foot to the other thing. His hands are cold and his chest is tight. He wants to puke. He shouldn’t have said anything, not even to Tutor. “All the time. It’s all I think about when we’re together and I don’t want you to think I don’t like doing the other way because I still do. It’s just—”

“That’s why you’ve been ignoring me?” If anything, Saifah is angrier now that Zon has started explaining himself. “I’ve already offered to do that.”

“Yeah, but that was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before you started doing me!” Zon wipes his clammy hands on his pant legs. “You really like doing it that way.”

“Obviously!” Saifah shakes his head and steps away, giving Zon space to breathe. “It feels amazing, but that’s not why I like it so much. I like it because it’s you, Zon. I like being with you. It’s not about whose dick is where.”

“It’s…not?”

Saifah’s face softens. It barely takes him two steps to close the distance again. He wraps Zon up in a big bear hug. Zon likes that he’s small enough for Saifah’s arms to envelope him. To pull him into his chest where it’s warm and he can hear the rhythm of Saifah’s steady heartbeat. 

“I know I’m usually good at reading you,” says Saifah softly, “but when it comes to things like this, you have to say it clearly, okay?”

“Okay,” Zon replies, soft and muffled. He clings to the back of Saifah’s shirt like it’s a lifeline. “I’m sorry for making you think I wanted to break up.”

“Hmm, you’ll have to make it up to me,” Saifah says. Zon can hear his smirk. “You’re staying over on Friday, right?”

Zon tilts his head up to look at him. “Y-Yeah?”

Saifah doesn’t explain because he doesn’t need to. He waggles his eyebrows. Red stains Zon’s cheeks to his ears, and he buries his face into Saifah’s chest again, shy and trying to hide his smile.

Friday. Two days. Zon has never been more ready for anything in this life. 

*

Zon is not ready. 

Saifah is in the shower when Zon gets in. Most likely getting himself ready. Zon thinks about how often he’s done that himself, then he pictures Saifah doing it—

Zon drops his bag somewhere random and sits down, heavy, onto the edge of the bed. He wrings his hands between his legs. They’re already sweating. Is he allowed to finger Saifah if his hands are sweaty? Saifah is always so in control when he’s topping and takes care of everything—Zon should do the same, right? Should he pull out the lube and condom to have it ready? Maybe he should make this extra special since it is the first time they’re doing it this way. He didn’t bring candles or rose petals, though. He did bring some popcorn and candies he knows are Saifah’s favorites, but those were for later. At least he figures they should be for later—

Hands warm from the shower wrap around his.

“Don’t you dare say anything about being in a K-drama,” Zon pouts. He’s so out of it, he didn’t hear Saifah getting out of the shower or kneeling in front of him.

Saifah raises an eyebrow. “You don’t think you can do it?” he asks instead.

Zon glares and clenches his teeth. “Of course I can do it, asshole.”

“Agreed,” says Saifah, smiling, hands still massaging Zon’s even though Zon is considerably calmer now. “You don’t need to be so worried.”

“But what if I mess up, or you don’t like it, or—”

“You won’t and I will.” Saifah kisses Zon’s knuckles. “It’s not like I’ve never done it before.”

Zon’s mouth drops open. “You have?!”

“To myself.” Saifah’s grin is downright dirty.

Zon pictures it and his mind goes white for a second, then he blushes. "You’re so shameless.”

That devious smile grows. “Which I know you appreciate.”

Saifah presses against Zon’s shoulders and together they fall backwards onto the mattress. Usually Zon is the one on his back with Saifah staring down over him, always equal parts hungry and adoring. But this time, Saifah rolls them; with a grip on Zon’s hips, he pulls Zon on top of him, and, suddenly, it’s Zon’s turn to loom.

Drying hair frames Saifah’s face, bangs slightly matted to his forehead. Water drops are scattered over his neck and collarbones. Zon wants to drag his tongue over every inch and leave marks behind.

Saifah smirks when he feels Zon grow hard. He uses the hold he still has on Zon’s waist to pull him down at the same time he grinds up, showing Zon he isn’t alone in being excited about what they are about to do.

Weirdly, it makes Zon more confident.

Unlike the first time they had sex, they don’t take time removing each other’s clothes because dragging this part out gives Zon too many opportunities to think. Saifah nearly rips off the buttons of Zon’s shirt and has him naked in record time. Zon pulls Saifah’s towel loose and tosses it somewhere they can find later. He’s seen Saifah naked tons of times now, but never like this: spread out across the navy blue sheets beneath him, legs open and inviting Zon to make his move.

It takes Zon a moment to figure out what ‘his move’ is. He knows he’s spoiled. Saifah has always been the giver between them, both in the bedroom and out. Not that Zon doesn’t…do things when he’s on the bottom. Once he does something for the first time and finds out he likes it, he kind of becomes insatiable afterwards. He’s gotten pretty good at giving blowjobs like they’re going out of style. Saifah shows off those scratches Zon leaves on his back like they are battle scars he’s proud of, and Saifah comes every time which is always the ultimate end goal for Zon.

But this is different. Now that he’s here between Saifah’s thighs instead of wrapped around his hips, there’s so much more…access. He can trace each line of Saifah’s abs and see them jump beneath his fingertips. Saifah’s neck is long so Zon has plenty of space to experiment with slow, dragging kisses, sucking when Saifah’s breathing stutters. Saifah has porcelain skin; Zon enjoys how it instantly reddens beneath his lips. With each new mark, Saifah rubs himself harder up against Zon’s stomach, encouraging him to keep going. He sighs when Zon pulls back to look down to where their bodies are touching.

The first time Zon saw Saifah’s dick, he was fascinated. Apparently switching roles makes him fascinated again. His eyes linger on how hard Saifah is and it’s slowly dawning on him, Saifah really likes this.

Zon lines up their cocks perfectly, spurred on by knowing he is the one controlling every slide and grind, holding Saifah’s hips steady because Zon’s shorter, but he’s still strong. Zon almost apologizes for the red blossoming beneath his fingers. Starts to ask if he’s pressing too hard. But then Saifah desperately tries to rut up against him—

Because I like being with you, Zon.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why Zon wants to be inside Saifah so badly, it’s surreal he finally will be. Zon wants to make Saifah feel as amazing as Saifah makes him feel. Give him the same attention he covers Zon with. Take care of the technicalities so all Saifah needs to do is feel good and sated and spent. 

Saifah makes an amused, startled noise when Zon surges up to kiss him. 

“I’m gonna make you feel so good you can’t talk,” Zon says in a rush of words against Saifah’s lips. The enthusiasm takes away any attempt at sexiness.

Still, Saifah laughs. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and barely has to stretch up to kiss Zon’s forehead. He does it three more times, then flops back down on the pillow and says, “You can do it, my Zon.”

Breathing gets harder once Zon has the lube on his fingers. He drags his other hand down over Saifah’s ribcage to his stomach to his cock. He tries to think of how Saifah takes care of him, so he bends forward and takes Saifah into his mouth at the same time he pushes his finger in.

The first thing Zon notices isn’t how tight Saifah is or how hot (though those are very fast to follow). What he notices is how Saifah’s entire body reacts. He bites his bottom lip and his stomach flexes and he thrusts into Zon’s mouth like he can’t help it. For a moment, Zon’s gag reflex activates but he doesn’t care—all his focus is on making Saifah lose control bit by bit.

Zon may not have experience in fingering someone else yet but he’s fucking determined, so he adds a second finger when Saifah tells him to, then immediately spreads them and searches. Saifah’s resounding, deep moan when Zon finds that spot has Zon grinding himself against the sheets for minor relief.

Saifah really is shameless. He has never been shy about his moans when he’s fucking Zon, never holds them back. Zon should have known Saifah would be responsive this way, too. And since Zon secretly loves hearing Saifah come undone as much as he likes coming himself, all of Saifah’s noises are loosening Zon’s remaining nerves. 

Zon pulls his mouth off a minute later when he feels Saifah’s entire body shivering, a sign Zon knows means he’s close. But Saifah tightens around Zon’s fingers, warning him not to stop, and Zon can’t help but groan and give Saifah what he’s asking for.

"Does it feel good? Sai?” He can’t decide what is sexier: his fingers disappearing into Saifah’s heat or the microshifts in Saifah’s expression when Zon goes from teasing him to actually pressing repeatedly against his prostate.

“Yeah,” Saifah says, breathless. “Yeah, feels so good. You’re doing amazing.”

The nerves return once Zon has the condom on and is lining up, but Saifah knows when Zon needs encouragement. And, honestly, there’s something incredibly hot about how Saifah grips Zon’s cock and guides him forward. About how Saifah wraps his legs around Zon’s waist like a vice and tugs. Zon has nowhere to go except in and in and in.

‘Tight’ and ‘hot’ are the first thoughts this time. He’s pretty sure he blacks out for a second once his hips meet Saifah’s ass, and then again when Saifah digs his nails into Zon’s neck and forces him down so he can bite at his lips.

Somehow Saifah manages a smirk. "Try not to come right away, virgin.”

Zon groans into Saifah’s shoulder. “Shut up, jerk.”

Saifah has to be uncomfortable, but he’s running his fingers through Zon’s hair, soothing and grounding. Zon returns it with a soft kiss to Saifah’s throat and a shallow thrust, enjoying the way Saifah’s hand tightens around the strands. Enjoys it even more when he thrusts again and Saifah tightens around him everywhere and starts whispering, “Zon, c’mon. Zon, my Zon.”

And, well, Zon doesn’t mind Saifah pleading his name like this.

In novels, shyness is a common theme. “Don’t look!” and “It’s embarrassing!” And Zon gets it—he’s still the embodiment of that kind of bashfulness sometimes.

But Saifah seems to like the complete attention, and Zon doesn’t want to miss a single thing, so he sits back on his knees. Their movements are a bit awkward at first, but Saifah drags one leg over Zons shoulder. Zon grabs the other, digging his fingers into the back of Saifah’s knee and pressing it forward. Saifah has to bend further than Zon ever does in this position but he does it with a gasp instead of a complaint. Zon kisses Saifah’s inner thigh like he’s passing on a reward. 

Zon refuses to come first. He always comes first. Not this time. This time it will be Saifah and Zon will even drive himself crazy to make sure that happens. He keeps the pace slow to start, pulling out then sinking deep and grinding to make sure Saifah gasps each time. When it’s time to go harder, his body does it on its own, like Zon was made to make Saifah throw his head back and moan.

Then they’re moving together, thrusting and meeting and moaning. Saifah runs his hands anywhere he can, leaving fire with each glide. They’re so long he can grab Zon’s ass and sink him deeper still. Zon bends Saifah even more. The changed angle makes Saifah’s eyes go from half-lidded to full blown with desire and Zon hits it again and again. Saifah is muttering nothing but Zon’s name. He cradles Zon’s face between his big hands and draws him into a desperate kiss.

Soon, they are just panting into each other’s mouths. Zon kisses Saifah’s nose like he did the first time they kissed and he couldn’t speak from the overwhelming happiness.

Now, it’s Saifah who is unable to find words; his nod is as subtle as Zon’s had been. I’m ready, please, I want you to.

Zon grabs onto Saifah’s cock and strokes him in time to their thrusts, pulling, pulling, pulling until Saifah is shaking and coming all over his stomach and Zon’s fingers. Between whimpers he sings Zon’s name, and he looks blissed out, and is so perfectly tight around Zon’s cock—

HIs orgasm hits him suddenly and sends lightning from his head to his toes. He can’t stop his hips from moving, thrusting deep into Saifah, but Saifah doesn’t care; he hoarsely gasps and still has his legs wrapped around Zon, ankles crossed and thighs keeping Zon in place until he’s done shivering through his high.

They’re panting when Zon collapses next to Saifah, both covered in come and sweat, and not caring at all. For once Saifah doesn’t have the energy after sex to continue doting affection on Zon. Zon does it instead. He reaches over and brushes Saifah’s bangs off his forehead. Traces mindless shapes onto his chest. Nuzzles Saifah’s neck so he can feel Zon’s smile. 

“You’re amazing,” Zon says, “How are you always so amazing?”

“I think you’re the amazing one here, My. Best. Zon,” Saifah says, accentuating each word with a playful tap to Zon’s nose.

Zon preens. “It felt good?”

“You know it did. How about for you?”

“Yeah, yeah, definitely.” Zon licks his lips and he doesn’t mean for his voice to go so high when he asks, “So, you would want to do it like this again?”

Saifah drags a hand slowly up and down Zon’s arm and smiles. “I think we can do it however we want.”

Zon smiles back. “I think so too. Wait, where are you going?”

Slowly shuffling out of bed, Saifah raises an eyebrow. “To grab the towel—hey!”

Before Saifah can process it, Zon rolls over him and leaps out of bed. Still naked, he races to the bathroom for a wet towel. Along the way back, he grabs some muscle relief cream and the snacks he brought for Saifah.

“My towel from earlier is right here,” says Saifah, amused as Zon cleans them with the fresh towel. “Should I expect this service every time?”

Zon gives him a cheeky grin in reply, then sees how happy Saifah is, and he can’t help kissing him again.

They spend the rest of the night laughing, eating the snacks Zon brought, and singing stupid songs. Eventually, Zon rolls onto his side, burying his face into his pillow and snuggling deeper into the mattress. Saifah’s arm wraps around Zon’s stomach and holds tight. He kisses the spot where Zon’s neck meets his shoulder, then pulls him back until they’re practically plastered together. Their legs become a tangled mess. Soon, Zon can hear Saifah’s gentle, even breathing.

That night, Zon doesn’t mind being the little spoon.

[deltaengineering]

Fall Anime 2019 Part 4: also, he has a gun for a head

Beastars

So here’s the CG anime that everyone for some reason decided way in advance would be the best show of the season, more or less by default. I was very skeptical of this for a multitude of reasons. First of all, that is a bad name for a show and you can’t convince me otherwise. It’s actually even worse because you’re supposed to write it in all caps, but I refuse. Second, it has a terribly on the nose conceit in which all sorts of animals live together in a high school setting and it’s all metaphorical ‘n shit. The main character is a wolf but get this, he’s actually all sensitive and quiet! Yeah, this is definitely rated D for Deep. And finally it’s by Orange, the CG studio that got an inordinate amount of acclaim for making Houseki no Kuni, the show that everyone thinks looks great and finally made CG anime worthwhile (actual real fact: HnK does not look great most of the time and CG anime was worthwhile well before it). 

But enough about my preconceptions since Beastars is... pretty good, actually. If you ignore the setting, which is indeed terribly on the nose. And there’s not much else to say about the story so far besides it. However, it looks significantly better than Houseki no Kuni because it actually has really good character animation throughout instead of a one-minute action scene with flashy spinny camera tricks every other episode. The directing’s strong too, even if the show conspicuously mainly consists of obvious manga panels. I’m still not too hot on the animal stuff but the general writing seems to be sufficiently competent it would work simply on a character level. So I don’t love it, but it seems solid enough to see if it goes somewhere with its “Zootopia but also Beverly Hills 90210 but also they eat each other sometimes″ plot.

Rifle is Beautiful

Remember the whole “anime about some assorted anime girls joining a club doing an oddly specific activity” thing? This is another one of those, and now it’s about air rifle sports shooting. Except it’s not about air rifle sports shooting because that’s apparently way too violent, so they use rifles that look like exactly like air rifles but are actually based on lasers or really bright flashlights (they can’t keep their bullshit straight between scenes, sorry) instead. I just don’t think “girls doing activities” anime should blatantly misrepresent their subject matter like that, you know? With the possible exception of idol anime that is, ain’t nobody who wants to hear about that shit. Apart from that it’s nothing special, so if you are really into air rifles and wish to watch an anime that’s not about those, knock yourself out. It goes through a whole “club needs 5 members” arc in the first half of the first episode, so I really can’t say where it goes next. Nowhere much, I would guess.

Oh right, there’s one more thing: They frequently render the bodies in CG and the heads in traditional drawings, and they do it every time when they’d actually have to draw a rifle otherwise. It’s a weird effect that I think I haven’t seen anywhere else before, and it’s not great but also not terrible. And it’s the most interesting thing about the entire show.

Kabukicho Sherlock

“Let’s take a bunch of public domain characters and put them into a hip modern setting” seems to be its own genre at the moment, and not only because the BBC did that with S. Holmes, Esq. already. Obviously this show is influenced by that (besides other public domain namedroppers like Bungou Stray Dogs), mostly in Watson and his relationship with Sherlock, but Sherlock-san is rather different here; he’s neither the classic Victorian bohemian nor the abrasive sociopath of the BBC version, and tends more towards a bumbling 90s pop culture version of autism and/or general wackiness here. These two are surrounded by a bunch of campy transvestites for some reason, and I’m not quite sure whether I’m supposed to find this particular stereotype offensive or empowering this week, but it sure is annoying. And it has the same character designer as Joker Game, so if you like chiseled, angular anime men, you’re in for a treat here - even if they tend to wear a lot of makeup and dresses sometimes. I don’t know man, it seems sort of okay-ish for the most part but it’s neither as funny as they think, nor as weird as they think, nor is the murder of the week intriguing at all. Oh yeah, he’s hunting noted public domain character Jack the Ripper. Because of course he is.

 Shin Chuuka Ichiban!

I am told this is the sequel to episode 19 of a 52-episode anime TV show from 1997. Okay. I am also told to not dare watch this without the important setup therein, which makes me think I should pay less attention to what I’m told because understanding Shin Chuuka Ichiban and its backstory is not hard at all. Kid is superawesome cooking champion in ancient China and goes around clowning on lesser cooks, got it. It’s not a complicated setup and it’s not a complicated genre either: This seems to be mostly about sick shounen cooking duels. Besides the setting, the main difference between this and Shokugeki no Soma seems to be that SnS goes for ridiculous and Chuuka Ichiban goes for epic - which is to say that it fancies itself emotional as well. Apart from that it’s what you’d expect from a cooking shounen, big moves, big reactions, huge twists and so on. One notable thing is that this show looks really, really nice. Production I.G seems to be establishing a sideline in taking stuff from the 90s and updating it with smoother animation and shinier lighting, while keeping the overall look intact; They did it for Mahoujin Guru Guru, and this looks much the same. Still, I’m just fundamentally not really interested in what appears to be a very straightforward cooking shounen from the 90s.

Assassins Pride

Straight from the Department of Chuuni, we have this light novel masterpiece about a cool as fuck teenage assassin who teleports behind u and nothin personells fools all day. He then meets a princess he’s supposed to off but just kinda decides not to, probably because she seems to be smitten by his m’lady act. Now he has to use his sick skillz to keep them both alive. It’s awful and terrible and no good and also kind of adorable. This truly is the most 13 AND A HALF MOM years old anime in a while, and it’s not even isekai! The writing’s just so amateurish and corny you can’t help but smile when princesses exposit their backstory for no reason while being accosted by pumpkin monsters (without knowing that Awessassin McCooldude happens to be listening in, which is certainly convenient). Or when the episode ends with the man just reading the synopsis of the show out again, in case you were too fascinated by this plot to pay attention to what it’s about. Yeah I’m not going to watch this in a thousand years, but it sure made me chuckle. Your mileage may vary.

Mugen no Juunin - Immortal

Speaking of 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔢𝔰 𝔢𝔡𝔤𝔢, another anime adaptation of Blade of the Immortal appeared! You know, the manga for the cultured and historically minded guro fan. The first episode of Blade of the Immortal runs with this and is an arthouse production that someone most definitely directed the shit out of. I don’t think I’ve seen this much directing since, well, Sarazanmai, but “Ikuhara amounts of directing” is pretty much the idea here. And most of the time it even works! The quickly edited, disorienting style gives episode 1 a feeling closer to horror than to a cool swordmen action show, and that really brings out the best in the material, which is grotesque splatter bordering on the comical - It’s somehow a better Junji Ito anime than the actual Junji Ito anime. I think it tries too hard in a few places, but at least it does try.

But then I watched the second episode and that one’s a fairly conventional splatter-comedy swordin’ anime. I am not at all pleased with this development. The third episode was better again and seemed to split the difference between 1 and 2, even if it mostly uses the tricky editing to save on effort in the action –  I would much prefer actually readable fights and the wacky mannerisms in the more psychological stuff, thank you very much. Based on episode 1 I thought we might have something special here, but as of episode 3 I’d already merely call it pretty decent. I guess I’ll still stick with it but man, that’s a real bummer.

No Guns Life

No Guns Life is a neo-noir thriller about a guy who has a gun for a head. That’s fuckin rad and exactly the kind of silliness I am totally down for. He also has a gun for a hand, and there’s also some battle nun’s who carry revolvers with two cylinders, so in short I think the title is false advertising. This sounds very wacky (and it is), but it also takes its noir very seriously, down to details more wannabe neo-noirs tend to neglect (like being set right after a big war). The look and feel is pretty excellent, with sharp design and high-contrast artwork, and the music goes all in on the moody saxophone as you’d expect. And there’s some really adorable “look mom, I’m writing” stuff about how Man With Gun For A Head really “needs someone to pull his trigger” and so on (which is, as the astute reader might remember, at the back of his head). It feels like a throwback but then I can’t really think of many 80s/90s shows like this, so it’s actually more like the sort of faux-retro idea Trigger/Imaishi would come up with on a lark. Trigger/Imaishi would, of course, make a far worse anime out of it, so it’s all good. Well, it has some pacing problems and as always it’s a fine line between amusingly camp and not so amusingly camp anymore, but No Guns Life seems to have enough real qualities that it can probably stand on its own even when its conceptual gimmick eventually doesn’t suffice anymore. I give it a two gun’s up.

Hoshiai no Sora / Stars Align

And finally, here’s an anime about middle schooler softboys playing a tennis just as soft as themselves, while being henpecked by the elites on the girl’s team. This is not an “actual” sports anime though: for starters, it’s not based on some shounen manga and is an anime original with quite some staff pedigree instead. It’s also more of a character drama that already goes to some surprisingly real places by the end of episode 1, reminiscent of the recent and quite good Run with the Wind. Furthermore, it looks delicious, with minimalist but distinctive and varied character designs and animation that’s both extremely detailed for a TV anime and also not trying to shove that fact into your face with flashy stunt cuts. In short, this show seems very simple at first glance but every aspect of it just oozes quality. If nothing else, it’s already worth watching just for the excellent ending sequence where the characters show off their “best” dance moves and the chunky student council president dunks on everyone. This one caught me by surprise and it’s an easy pick for most promising show of the season.

[elliepassmore]

The Never Tilting World Review

4/5 stars Recommended for people who like: fantasy, multiple POVs, goddesses, magic, demons, LGBTQ+ romance, strong female leads, kick-ass women, women engineers, disability representation, mental illness representation, characters of color, complex morality I will say that for the most part I really enjoyed this book. The concept is fascinating and the characters and world were splendid. I took off a star because, as nice as it is sometimes to not have every detail of a world explained, with something like magic, it does have to be explained to a certain extent. By-and-large I understand how the 'gates' work, but we're dropped right into the terminology within the first couple of pages without explanation and it was a little confusing and took me a few tries to get at it. Then, I just wasn't a huge fan of Odessa and it does take away from the book a little when you just don't like one of the MCs or narrators, but I'll explain more about Odessa when I get to her. Lan, Tianlan, is the first narrator, so I'm starting with her. She's what's called a Catseye (also something whose we had to figure out figure out ourselves), which means she can heal people or inflict sickness upon them in a form of dual magic. Two sides to every coin, right? I really, really love this idea and think it's a fantastic spin on the typical 'healer' character you see in fantasy. I suppose, theoretically, healers could always turn their magic to use by harming people, in fantasy books healers are relegated to only healing, save for here and in Leigh Bardugo's Grisha and Six of Crows trilogy, where healing and harming are seen as two sides of the same magic, though a person typically has more strength in one than the other, so it doesn't come out quite like it does here. I enjoyed being in Lan's POV because she's caught between wanting to do the right thing by the world that's been plunged into eternal night and also wanting to keep Odessa, her lover, safe. I also thought that Chupeco writing Lan has having PTSD after a pre-book incident was refreshing considering the number of books that just skip over the psychological effects events have on characters. This was also an area where Chupeco turned the 'healer' trope on its head a little, as Catseyes can work with physical illnesses and injuries, but also mental ones, taking on the role of healer and therapist (though obviously not for themselves), so not only do we get to see Lan experiencing PTSD, but we also see her coming to terms with it and seeking therapy-like treatment for it, which is pretty unusual in most novels. Despite being in the 'healer' role and having magic that can infect and destroy if she wishes, Lan is also skilled with a blade and hand-to-hand combat and has something of a quick temper. She's definitely the 'protector' type more than anything else and is striving to make sure everyone comes out alright in the end. Odessa comes next, because I'm grouping the characters based on where they're from and Lan and Odessa are both from Aranth. Odessa is one of the daughter-goddesses in the novel who is unaware her twin is alive. She has some kind of chronic illness that prevents her from being very active without tiring out and that Catseyes have been able to treat but not cure. In the beginning Odessa seems like she'll be a pretty good character, a little too doe-eyed and teary for my tastes, but has plenty of potential. Then she starts to get bratty and doesn't seem to have the ability to logically think things through. From a writing standpoint I really appreciate how complex Chupeco makes Odessa and I think within the plot it's super fascinating. It's even explained to us toward the end why Odessa made the sudden turn from teary-but-okay-princess to brat-with-little-rationale, so I appreciate the cleverness of how the reason was woven throughout Lan and Odessa's chapters for us to find but maybe not pinpoint exactly. However, the great reasoning behind it doesn't stop me from not liking Odessa. The weird power-imbalance Odessa has going on with Lan and their relationship that I'm not a huge favor of. They love each other, great, fantastic, I believe that and I actually think they make a great couple in the beginning of the novel. They certainly have a better set-up for a romance than Arjun and Haidee do, though their 'love' is only marginally slower moving, but I'm just a teeny bit uncomfortable with the power imbalance of Odessa being a goddess/princess and Lan being the person assigned to guard and protect her. It's one thing when Lan is serving the crown in some general 'technical' sense and the two of them are in a relationship and it's another thing entirely when Lan is serving Odessa and her mother directly. It would be better, I think, if Lan wasn't serving directly under Odessa or it was like Lan's previous relationship where both girls were rangers. While Lan has no issues disregarding Odessa's commands, the imbalance is still there and becomes a bit of a problem later, but is never fully addressed, so I'm not sure how I feel about that or about some of the scenes with Lan and dark!Odessa. The relationship has the potential in the beginning and it is, for the most part good, but then once the difference in rank and power becomes clearer and Odessa becomes darker I get just a little uncomfortable with it. Haidee is the other daughter-goddess and she lives in the Golden City on the always-day side of the planet. She's what's called a 'mechanika' in the world, but what we would classify as an engineer. She's quick on her feet, fiery, stubborn, and extremely empathetic. In one of her very first scenes she's crying over a days-dead whale, if that's any indication. As much as I love her determination, smarts, and stubbornness, her ignorance of the world and optimistic attitude do grate on my nerves at times. She's just a bit too happy-go-lucky in some instances, though it largely works out for her. I will be fair, Haidee is one of my favorites, but I feel like Chupeco set things up so that Haidee would always have things work out for her and it seems a bit too obvious at times. Despite my dislike of Odessa, things go wrong for her, sometimes very wrong, and while things do occasionally go wrong for Haidee and seem like they'll be bad, I don't ever really get the full-on sense of dread like I do with Odessa. Arjun and Haidee meet by the whale and their first scene involves them trying to kill each other. Naturally, he becomes her love interest. Arjun is, hands down, the funniest person in the entire book. He has a very dry sense of humor and can be extremely sarcastic. He follows along with the idea of prophecies and with Haidee's ideas a little to mellowly for what I'd been expecting given our introduction to him, which I think says more about the whole 'everything works out for Haidee' but than about him. I also enjoy that Arjun decided to go with a prosthetic magical rifle after he lost his hand (not a spoiler, it happened pre-book). I don't know how they engineer the things they do in the desert, but I just found it amusing that instead of engineering a hand or hook or knife or something they went with a rifle that could channel his fire magic. It really fits his personality, honestly. While Arjun's and Haidee's romance is definitely more power-balanced than Lan's and Odessa's, there are still some holes in it. Mainly that they meet and fall in love within the span of the book, which I'm pretty sure takes place over, like, a month. I love fantasy and dystopian, and sci-fi, but oh my god I am getting sick of the quick romances. Chupeco did a decent job of showing why they fell in love and how they respected each other and became friends before they fell in love, but it's still only been a month. Sorry, but I know 19-year-olds, being one and being in college, and I'm just really not certain that your 'month to love' romance is gonna last. There are different depths to love and you can love more than once, but the insta-true-love, will-survive-anything has just, for some reason, been getting on my nerves lately. Maybe in a couple months or years I'll be fine with it again, but right now I'm just not a fan, even if I do like the characters together. The mythology and general world-building in the book is also something I enjoyed. Chupeco keeps the ideas of duality, sacrifice, and "a demoness is what they call a goddess that men cannot control" going throughout the book. It centers around two young goddesses whose mother(s) are goddesses and a world that somehow stopped spinning and split into only-night and only-day, so there's obviously a lot of mythology and magic going into the base of this book. Since the 'Breaking,' as they call it, neither mother-goddess has really told the twins much about previous generations of goddesses. Odessa gets more of an education about it than Haidee does, but both are still largely left in the dark about their world's mythology, which allows Chupeco to reveal it to the reader in a way that feels natural without info-dumping. There's a lot to do with goddesses, prophecies, and rituals that starts to get unpacked in this one, but which mainly sets up for the sequel. I'm super interested in learning more about the goddesses and rituals in the next book and have plenty of theories regarding them. The duality piece of things is interesting, because you don't necessarily recognize it in the beginning or even halfway through the book. It was more toward the end that I began to see what Chupeco was doing with the night-day, ill-healthy, healer-'plague-giver' sort of balance. The goddesses are twins, as all goddesses before them have been, and that set-up is a fantastic literary device for setting up dualities. You can have the good twin vs. the evil twin, the knowledgeable vs. the ignorant, and so many other varieties, and Chupeco plays with a bit of each in each twin. Odessa knows more about their past from the start, but it's Haidee who learns more about it and their world on the way. Odessa starts out as the chronically-ill sister, but Haidee ends up drained and exhausted. Odessa becomes more and more morally complex and dark but still has soft spots, Haidee is blindingly optimistic but has moments of destructive rage. They're set up to mirror and foil one another, yet each still comes together in the end and finds strength in knowing their twin. The girls are quite similar even though the book sets up a lot of their differences. Without giving too many spoilers I can say that this is 100% reflected in where the plot takes us and the things that are revealed. In terms of world-building I thought Chupeco gave us very distinct settings, creatures, and peoples. The night-side of the world is described as very rainy and cold, with threats of storms, kraken, and icebergs. Though Lan and Odessa are only in the city for a short period of time, I remember the impression I got of it. Old bookstores, tall buildings, dreary because of the rain. This is set against the next setting Lan and Odessa experience, which is the borderlands near the Abyss. While these lands are still dark, there's more foliage described as well as eerie lakes, currents made of air that are strong enough to hold ships, and creatures of darkness and shadow. It is also here where the sky begins to lighten as they move closer to the Abyss and the always-day side of the world. This is even more different from the settings Arjun and Haidee encounter. The desert is vast and deadly, full of dangerous scorpions, an acid sea, and a sea of sand complete with sand-dolphins and sand-sea creatures. The desert is full of raiders and nomadic clans instead of shadow people, but the former can be just as deadly. The Golden City is more steampunk than the night city, Aranth, is described to be. It also seems to be full of snootier people than Aranth does, and all-in-all, despite it being a city run by a twin goddess with a twin goddess daughter, Haidee's city is a very different city from the one Lan and Odessa left. Then there's Inanna's Temple and the Abyss itself, which remind me of dawn and pure darkness, respectively, but still have their own distinct feelings and descriptions. It's very easy to get immersed in the world Chupeco has created here and it's one of those rare world-building experiences that makes me wish I could see it artistically rendered. The Never Tilting World is a good book with unique, distinct characters each with their own strengths and weaknesses that are explored throughout the book. Chupeco writes the characters relatively realistically, meaning they deal with physical and mental trauma as well as tough decisions they sometimes respond to poorly. The Arjun-Haidee romance felt kind of rushed and the Lan-Odessa romance felt like it had a power-imbalance I wasn't 100% comfortable with. Since there is another book, however, and since the Lan-Odessa romance had a lot more promise in the beginning than the middle and end, I'm hoping it'll get itself sorted out. I also dinged the book's score because of terminology that we're left to figure out for ourselves that really would've been better if it had just been explained outright. Definitely think it's a good read, though and would recommend picking it up if you enjoy fantasy.

[wigwurq]

WIG REVIEW: LITTLE WOMEN

You guys. I have a lot of feelings about this movie so buckle up - many spoilers (if one can even spoil the plot of Little Women?) ahead! Note: this is one of my favorite childhood books. I had very strong opinions about it when I read it then. When Jo turned down Laurie, I honestly threw the book across the room, I was so upset. I grew up in the wilds of CT and felt a strong connection to Jo always. Our New England roots are so intertwined that my mom (who I saw this with) and I even knew the carriage master who worked on this film! We are so very white! I have seen every movie version (excepting the Lea Thompson modern day version which clearly DOES NOT COUNT). I even watched the Maya Hawke PBS cinema verite version last year! I did not like it! Clearly, the gold standard remains the 1994 Winona Ryder adaptation but what about this one? And what about the wigs? Let’s discuss.

We begin at the end. Because that is what Greta Gerwig has decided! Rather than make a strict adaptation of the novel, she turned the whole story on its side, its inside, and its outside. So the end somehow runs parallel with the earlier events in the story leading to a bizarre non linear narrative which honestly must have been really difficult to follow if you didn’t already know the story. I kept feeling grateful that my husband didn’t see this because he would have been so confused! And as someone who is very familiar with this book, I even was confused sometimes and had to use wigs to help me know where in the narrative I was! THANK YOU, WIGS!

The main hair that helped here was Florence Pugh’s bangs. THANK YOU, BANGS! When Amy is young, she has them and when she is old (aka 20) she does not. And here’s the thing: ALL THESE WIGS WERE GREAT. So great, in fact, that it was sometimes difficult to even determine who was wearing a wig, a fall, or just using their own hair. WHICH IS THE SIGN OF GOOD WIG WURQ!

The main wigs were that of Jo, Beth, and Aunt March with random bits and pieces on the others. I gotta say - I guess Florence Pugh and Emma Watson just have really nice hair?

Saoirse’s wigs were consistently good - even in the part where she sells her hair and has this sort of pixie cut! This could have gone the way of many a man wig where the back taper juts out but it did not! YAY!

And then there’s Beth. Here played by that chick from Sharp Objects and in this very ok red wig, for the first time I wondered: was Beth supposed to be on the spectrum? She was always the “quiet” March sister, who is shy and only likes playing the piano and taking care of poor kids with scarlet fever (warning: that does not end well!) But in this version, she seems to have seriously troubling social skills, plays with dolls well into her mid-teen years, and generally seems a little...slow? Was this a choice? My mom also took issue with the fact that she looked way too healthy, with red ruddy cheeks, to be dying of scarlet fever. ALSO! The non-linear storytelling of it all compresses both bouts of scarlet fever into one sequence, with the March patriarch finally coming home in the middle, which you can’t even celebrate for more than two seconds because then BETH DIES OF SCARLET FEVER YEARS LATER! WHAT.

And the patriarch of the March family SHOULD be celebrated because he is played by BOB ODENKIRK!! Obviously, as a man he plays second fiddle to the little WOMEN in this movie (get it?) but I could always use more Bob Odenkirk, always because he is wonderful.

The matriarch of the March family is played by Laura Dern, whose hair and acting are always flawless. Truly, I think having Laura Dern and Bob Odenkirk as your parents is already WINNING.

But then you get Meryl Streep as your aunt! Which means that Bob Odenkirk and Meryl Streep are siblings and I COULD WATCH AN ENTIRE MOVIE OF JUST THAT PLEASE. Anyway, Meryl Streep is of course perfect as is her old lady wig.

It should be noted that I could definitely watch an entire movie of just Meryl Streep turning down various men who offer to dance with her at Meg’s wedding. Please give me this sequel, I demand it.

Speaking of Meg’s wedding - it was nice! This was definitely THE YEAR of Florence Pugh to be wearing flower crowns but this time it did NOT end it with the death of a bear or boyfriend (#Midsommar). Again, Laura Dern is amazing and I worry for Beth. Not pictured: Meg’s hot husband! 

Speaking of hot husbands! The main issue with Little Women (as I reported at the beginning of this review) was always Jo’s refusal to marry her bff Laurie and instead marry this old German dude named Professor Bhaer. It was always confounding and bizarre, but this time Greta Gerwig explained it perfectly by casting this HOT AS HELL dude to play Bhaer and now all is understood and forgiven except for the fact that he’s French now for some reason and there wasn’t really any romantic buildup for them (mainly due to the weird non linear storytelling) but still: HE’S HOT SO I’LL ALLOW IT.

Also making Jo’s romantic decisions easier: Laurie was played by Timotheeeee Chamalet. I do not like Timotheeee Chamalet except that one time he played a total asshole in Lady Bird. My mom spent most of the movie asking me why Laurie was played by a 12 year old and I still don’t have an answer for that! He also wears these billowy shirts the entire time that a friend of mine compared to the Seinfeld puffy shirt and I can’t unsee that because it’s too accurate. ALSO! After (rightfully! For the first time!) turning Laurie down, this time Jo considers actually marrying him while he is off getting married to Amy in Europe seconds after her sister died and Jo even writes him a letter trying to take him back when she then has to go tear up and throw in a river like she’s the old lady in Titanic and honestly: THIS WHOLE SECTION OF THE MOVIE MADE ME VERY ANGRY! HARRUMPH! SAOIRSE YOU STAY, NOW CHAMALET AWAY!

Oh! Also! Chris Cooper plays Chamalet’s granddad and I cannot argue with this casting or this hair. Also: I totally forgot that Beth made him these truly outrageous slippers once and why did she never consider a career in cobblery? I feel like for her social condition, this would be a good idea? Also this screenplay leans HARD into the plight of 19th century womens’ finances so: this could have been an option were it not for the goddamned scarlet fever.

This movie almost won me over in the end with the lovely way it showed Jo’s school at Aunt March’s old house and how it allowed for all (living) March girls to explore their artistic eccentricities while also presenting Laura Dern with a cake with goddamned leaves on top of it AND WITH HOT BHAER YES. Still: the storytelling here is GARBAGE as is Chamalet as was that whole letter to Chamalet section. STILL: I must admit the wigs were good. 

In conclusion, THE WINONA RYDER LITTLE WOMEN IS THE ONLY LITTLE WOMEN PERIODT. But on the wig front....

VERDICT: WURQS

[annacwrites]

the wip list

Alright, gang. Buckle up. This is going to be a long one, and at this point I can’t even bring myself to be sorry about it. I meant to put this off but then I started thinking about it, so here we are (at 1:05 in the morning when I have to work at 8:30, what am I doing?). 

I’m going to break this down in a couple of ways—fanfiction vs. original fiction, fandom (if it’s a fanfic), series/universe (if it’s in one), and then the individual books themselves (if I have the ability to do that, because quite frankly, for some of these I don’t because I have no idea what the titles are or where I’m splitting the story yet).

Also, “WIP” is an incredibly broad term here. In some cases it means I’ve already written the whole thing but I plan to 100% rewrite it (and haven’t started yet). In some cases it means I’ve written half of the thing but haven’t finished yet. In some cases it means I have it all outlined but haven’t started writing yet. In some cases it means I haven’t really touched an outline on paper yet but I have it all worked out in my head. Take the “in progress” part of WIP with a grain of salt.

(Putting this whole thing under the cut because it is so freaking long. I apologize if the read-more doesn’t work on your dash. Idk what tumblr is doing.)  

Starting off easy—the fics:

Harry Potter: (JKR can fuck off with her transphobia and cultural appropriation and all the other stupid and fucked-up shit that she’s done/promoted but, as I said to my friends, she can pry my next-gen fanfics from my cold dead hands. Cursed Child is not canon in my life because I’ve never read it and I don’t care what nonsense she came up with.)

The “In Your Arms I’ll Stay” universe (Tedtoire/Scorose): 

The first fic in this universe is the first fic I ever finished. 110k words followed up by a ~137k word sequel. It is a disaster and a half but it’s also my baby and I fully intend to rewrite it one of these days. It is full of standard Tedtoire trope-y nonsense—best friends since childhood! two-year age gap! jealousy about other relationships! obliviousness!—and at 15 I thought it was a really good idea to try to turn it into a mystery too, which is a mistake that I have every intention of rectifying because it was unnecessary and I just didn’t know how to do drama and tension back then. 

Anyway. It will probably be two parts again when I rewrite it because one part per school year just works, yeah? We’re covering Vic’s fifth/Teddy’s seventh year and Vic’s sixth year/Teddy’s first year out of school over the course of these parts.

Within this universe we also have Heartbeat and Bone, which is a Scorose fic that I’ve written probably 75% of already but have no intention of actually finishing before I rewrite it. I want to get the stories in the right order so that I can get details straightened out, so Teddy and Victoire get the rewrites first and then I’ll be revisiting this fic. Also full of trope-y nonsense (and my continued acceptance of the headcanon that the Heads have their own dormitory at Hogwarts, because it’s just too much fun that way).  

some things were meant to be (Tedtoire):

Oh god, another fic with a cliché title taken from Can’t Help Falling In Love. I have zero regrets because it fits them perfectly.

This one is... half-done? I fully intend to finish it but I need to finish the outline first. It was my 2019 NaNoWriMo project and I am 100% just writing it for the lols (and because Teddy and Vic are like... my comfort ship where writing is concerned). I wanted to play with a different universe and change up their relationship and roles at school a bit, but once again... trope-y nonsense. It’s unavoidable with them. There is obliviousness everywhere. 

Star Wars: (it’s Reylo, okay? It’s Reylo. I don’t want to hear it about how the ship is ~so terrible.~ That is literally the furthest thing in the world from a hot take, you can’t say a single thing that I haven’t heard before, and I’m a grown adult and can do what I want. Bite me.)

looking for the map that leads me home (Reylo): 

Stole the title on this one from We Take Care of Our Own by Bruce Springsteen, because why the fuck not, right? 

To put it simply: musician AU. To put it a little less simply: he’s got a dead career, she wants to have even the slightest shot at one, Rose is the best, Poe’s a singing heartthrob, Finn is a love-struck goofball. You know, all that fun stuff. The entire thing is based on a playlist that I made and every chapter has a song that acts as its theme. I haven’t touched it since January 2018. I want to finish it eventually but it’s not really at the top of the priority list. 

There’s a few other fics from other fandoms that I’ve started and never finished but the odds of me touching them again are like... nonexistent, so I’m not including them here. I’ll update this post if anything changes on that front (but it probably won’t).

Now for the complicated part—the original fiction:

Maker’s Magic 

This is a trilogy (or at least, it’s supposed to be). This is also a rewrite of the first story I ever finished—the fantasy novel that I wrote for my first-ever Camp NaNoWriMo back in August of 2011, when I had literally no clue what I was doing at all and essentially stole the plot structure from The Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and built my own story around it. This is not a good way to write a piece of fiction that you want to publish, kids, but it is a damn good way to get your feet wet when you’ve never really written before.

I am reworking this story entirely from scratch. The characters are... kind of the same as the original story. Kind of. Maybe. I’ve changed a few names and merged a few people together and scrapped some others and entirely shifted the backstory of pretty much everyone, but... they’re definitely still the same, right? 

Basically, at this point the plot is really only similar to The Obsidian Trilogy in that we’ve got a trilogy, we’ve got some elves, and it’s your standard good vs. evil fantasy story (in its own unique fashion, of course). I’m still working out the details of this rewrite, but this is kind of the Holy Grail of all of my writing projects and the one that I’m most concerned about getting right, so I’m anticipating that I’ll be in it for the long haul on this one. I’m hoping I might be able to get a draft of the first book done this year, but... we’ll see.

(I also don’t want to give too many details about this project, ‘cause it’s the one that I’d really like to maybe publish one day, so...)

The Willow Hill universe

This started as a single story plus a standalone sequel set in the same universe, conceptualized when I was fourteen and missing horseback riding terribly (so yes, it is a story for all those Weird Horse Girls™ out there). I wrote a good portion of it, then deleted it, then rewrote the entire thing, then deleted it again a few years ago because I was no longer satisfied with the writing quality (after hitting top 100 on the Teen Fiction list on Wattpad way back when, so... I didn’t do too badly as a 16-year-old, but the writing still sucked). I’ve been promising a rewrite to my Wattpad followers since 2016 or something like that (2014? Whenever the hell it was that I deleted it the second time) but haven’t delivered at all.

I now envision this universe as a duology plus the aforementioned standalone sequel, except it’s not entirely fair to call it a YA duology in that the first book is definitely YA, but the second is more romance-y?

I originally just revealed the main character’s endgame relationship in the epilogue of the story, but I love both her and her boyfriend and their relationship so much that I decided that I’m going to be self-indulgent and write the story of them actually falling in love with each other, so that’s book two (so really, you don’t actually have to read book two to understand anything, I’m just writing it because I want to and it’s also kind of a present to anyone who read the original story when they were also a teenager and is now an adult who wants to read other stuff). 

Book one is now about the teenage struggle of crushes and trying to figure out what it is that you actually want out of your life and what you value (I say “now” because it was definitely way more self-insert-y the first time I wrote it and it is decidedly not at this point). It’s also sort of a love letter to trainers who are amazing and the kind of person we should all be so lucky as to be coached by.

These characters are my comfort characters where original fiction is concerned since they’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last ten years or so, and I’m hoping I can get at least the first book rewritten in the next year-ish, partly because I’ve been promising it for so long, and partly because I just really enjoy this world and I want to get back to it again.

The Coffee Shop Chronicles

AKA, I lived in one coffee shop on my university campus for pretty much the entirety of my college experience and it was a very inspiring place to be, so this has less to do with coffee shop AUs and more to do with the fact that I met several of my favorite human beings on this earth over a vanilla chai latte and mutual sass with the baristas.

(One of said baristas is very near and dear to me and introduced me to another regular who is now a very good friend with the statement “You’re both sarcastic assholes. You’ll love each other.”) 

None of the characters in this universe are based on actual human beings whom I know, but I liked the idea of the campus coffee shop serving as this thing that tangentially connected all of these people to one another, much in the way that I am tangentially connected to god knows how many people via my barista friend. Essentially, the idea is that the stories in this universe are all standalone, but the characters sometimes cross paths with one another at Caffeinated, so it’s sort of... Easter-egg-y in terms of who pops up where in which story. 

Currently I only have two stories in this universe that are legitimately plotted out, but there is room for any number of spin-offs based on whichever characters show up in those stories (or don’t—that’s the fun of it being a coffee shop. The barista is the only reliable character). Those two stories are as follows:

Chance Encounters (title so totally subject to change, also stealing the terribly summary from the Wattpad draft that never saw the light of day):

For Bennett McGuire, things with guys just didn't seem to want to go her way. From the disasters that were her attempts at dating in high school to the problem that had been Elijah Becker, she hadn't exactly had the best luck. With all that in mind, it made perfect sense to swear off dating until she finished college—that is, it made sense until one frozen day in February when Gordon Evans walked into her life. After that, who was to say what would happen?

What’s Your Metaphor? (once again, enjoy the terrible summary from the Wattpad draft that never was. I am cringing reading it but also too tired to come up with anything better):

"What's the point?" 

It's a question asked widely, for all sorts of reasons, and it's one that April Hayes didn't know the answer to any better than anyone else. All she knew was that she had her plan, and she was going to stick to it, because it was the only thing that seemed to have any sort of logic to it in her life. The things she thought, the things she believed—well, they all fell before the plan, because she didn't have time to ask herself "What's the point?"

That is, she didn't have the time to know the answer—her answer—until one guy by the name of Drew Collier showed up and made her consider things that she had never even thought of before.

High Blood

Yinz can go read my WIP introduction post for this one. It’s a fantasy story. Just for the hell of it, here’s the summary from said WIP introduction post: 

At the age of seventeen, Thessaly of Averak had a choice—take the crown of her people and her place as her father’s heir, or set it aside to become one of the High Warriors, dedicated to protecting their people and the country that her long-dead ancestor Enred built after leading its citizens out of a long and bloody war. Amidst raids and famine at the borders, she gave up her crown to better serve the people that her family rules.

Ten years later, all is quiet. At least, all is quiet until Beca’s pendant is stolen by a thief who disappears into the night on the journey back from the summer palace, Tess gets herself stabbed, and the discovery is made that the rock-solid foundations of their family’s claim to the throne—and the peace that depends upon them—are laced with hairline fractures.

(I didn’t write anything to speak of for Camp NaNo July 2020 and actually wound up deleting my project for this on the NaNo site because my dad was hit by a car while cycling the Friday before the weekend when I was planning to write like... 30k words to catch up, so obviously I gave up on that plan (he is doing well now, thank you for asking). I’m hoping I’ll get around to this one eventually because this particular universe arguably has the most potential for having multiple stories set in it, fantasy-wise.)

Emerson’s Lights

Natalie Flynn has been best friends with Evan Acheson practically since birth. They've stuck together through thick and thin, from her braces in seventh grade to his jump to stardom as a singer-songwriter their freshman year of college. 

She’d do anything for him, but spending a week with him on tour involves a lot more than she bargained for, culminating in the turn of events that is Caleb Blake, lead singer and primary songwriter of opening act Emerson’s Lights, moving into her house for the better part of a month.

She always knew there would be complications being the best friend of a rock star, but this? This was one that she didn’t bet on.

(Aka, girl meets boy in a band trope. Yay.)

(NaNoWriMo 2020 project)

The famous musician story (this thing doesn’t have a title right now and I’m not even going to try)

Stupid, trope-y nonsense idea that I came up with for my own personal amusement and nothing else. I’ve written a few chapters of it but genuinely have no idea where this falls in the hierarchy of things that I want to get done. Long story short, she’s in grad school for history, he’s a famous musician in town recording for a new album, they meet in the library, she pretends she has no idea who he is, and shenanigans ensue.

And that is where I think I’m going to leave it. There’s four other stories that I can think of off the top of my head that I could theoretically add to this list, but they are legitimately just ideas right now so they can be added at a later date when they’ve manifested themselves a little more strongly. There’s also another quartet in the Willow Hill universe that I came up with in high school that could theoretically be added but I think I might just steal those character names and give them their own little world instead. We’ll see.

Basically, if you didn’t get the point from this list: I am working on a lot of things, and when I say I’m writing, it could mean literally anything on this list (or any of the other ideas that I have floating around). The stories/universe here are the most likely candidates for my time, depending on whether I’m doing a deep dive into my writing or just playing around with something fun, and hopefully (god, hopefully) I’ll be able to move one or two of these to a “completed works” list in the next year(ish). 

(Or at least, as complete as a draft ever gets before you start going in on it again.)

[faneliacosplay]

Top 10 of 2018

C2018 was a year is this nicest way I can sum it up. My precious fur-baby passed away after fighting a horrible illness and is in a happier place, my health went crazy (still is as of writing), and I finally broke free from an abusive toxic person who had been controlling me for a huge chunk of my life. Despite the bad things that happened, I want to focus on the good things of 2018. One of things I began doing in January of 2018 was at the end of every week, I would write down all of the good things that happened to me, be it sewing, watched a good movie, spending time with a friend, etc. So without further ado, here’s my Top 10 of 2018! (I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S ALREADY MARCH!!)

1. The Ancient Magus’ Bride

-      I’ve been a lifelong fan of Beauty and the Beast-like stories ever since I watched the classic Disney film. The manga kept popping up in my recommendations for the majority of 2017 and I remember seeing a poster at my local theater for a premiere showing of the first 3 episodes of the then-upcoming anime (I have since regretted not going to this showing). I finally caved and bought the first two volumes of the manga and literally went back to the store two days later and bought the next 2 volumes. I’ve always been a very picky person with my romance be it movie, novel, anime, manga, etc., but this quickly became one of my favorites with it’s excellent world-building, relationships, and don’t even get me started on how gorgeous the animation is! If you want an excellent Beauty & the Beast adaptation, you won’t be disappointed. (I am unashamed of crying happy tears in public while watching the final episode)

2. Satoshi Kon’s Filmography

-      My New Year’s resolution was to watch all of the late Satoshi Kon’s works, starting with his debut film Perfect Blue. I had wanted to watch this film for several years, and it did not disappoint. (I kept spamming for people to go and see it when it got a theatrical re-release in Fall 2018) Next was Kon’s final project Paprika, which I watched about 3 times in May and many times over 2018 and still notice something new every time I watch it. Finally, I watched *the* film that I have wanted to watch for many, many years (since 2004 to be exact): Millennium Actress. I was not prepared for how moving this film would be with its themes of the past vs. present, how an ordinary encounter can lead to something so much more, and lastly: love transcends time. If you could only watch one of Satoshi Kon’s works, please choose to watch Millennium Actress. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch Kon’s other two works, but I aim to in 2019 (along with reading his works)

3. Slayers

-      I watched some of Slayers back in middle school and in summer 2016, but never took off with it until in 2018. I knew I would like this funny series about the adventures of a fiery sorceress, dumb as a stump swordsman, optimistic hero-in-training, and an overly-serious chimera, but I had no idea it would become one of my top 10 favorite anime series! I haven’t laughed so much with an anime in a while, and I greatly appreciated it since my fur-baby passed away and this was one of the last anime we watched together. There’s just something about 90s fantasy anime that’s just so appealing. I will throw in that while I love the tv series, the films are worth watching too, with The Motion Picture being my favorite. If you need something to cheer you up, I highly recommend Slayers!

4. Venom

-      Confession: I did not have high hopes for this movie. I was the only one among my friends who was uninterested in this film whenever we would watch the trailers/promos/etc. Eventually after this movie came out, my friends and best friend convinced me to see it. My sociology buddy told me “This movie wasn’t marketed right! Go see it!!” and another told me “This is the best action rom-com of 2018.” The next day my family asked me if I wanted to see it and Bohemian Rhapsody (also an excellent film) and I said “Sure!” This film has since spawned never-ending jokes between me and my best friend. (I ended up making her a Venom scarf for Christmas!) If you’re trying to get someone to see this film, don’t show them the trailers depicting it as a dark, gritty, action thriller, show them the home video trailer depicting it as a rom-com because that’s exactly what it is. I still can’t believe that a movie about a human falling in love with a man-eating gooey alien is real.

5. The Shape of Water

-      “2017 will be remembered as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.”- Jimmy Kimmel, 2018 Oscars. I’m beginning to see a pattern for stories of humans falling in love with monsters. My mom and I wanted to see this film after the trailer dropped in summer 2017 and were disappointed when the film didn’t play here. However, sometime in February 2018, this film played in our town for one weekend, so we dashed to the theater. I don’t even know where to start with how beautiful this film is and since several people I know still haven’t watched it I’ll just state this: Please watch this film. It earned the 4 Oscars it won. (It earned all 10 it was nominated for!)

6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

-      I almost didn’t see this film. 2018 was a pretty hectic year for me and I didn’t really keep up with films/entertainment news, so I saw no trailers for this film (except for a really short tv ad). All I knew was what my best friend had said: “Brianna, let’s go see Spider-verse. In 3D.” (y’all, 2018 was the year of listening to my best friend) It was so nice not only to see a different Spider-Man, a diverse cast, a well-curated soundtrack, and a completely new style of animation that makes you feel as though you’re reading/watching a comic book??? Sign me up! I’m so happy this film won the Oscar!!

7. Macross Frontier Movies

-      I’ve fallen deep into the Macross hole in the past year or two and have no plans of crawling out. The 2008 series Macross Frontier was my first and favorite entry in the series so far. I knew that there were two recap/alternate retelling films made, so when I was free one day I watched them and I was really surprised that I enjoyed them more than the tv series!? I haven’t really mentioned this, but my big problem with the tv series of Frontier was it’s ending being not too good. I don’t want to ruin it since Macross (particularly made after 2001) is a bit unknown in the USA, but I will say that if you want to get into this franchise, start with the Frontier movies or with the iconic Macross: Do you remember love? film. The music is just as good as the tv series, same with the costumes, and the writing is much better! The performance of Northern Cross at the climax of The Wings of Goodbye was really moving. Not “Do you remember love?” moving, but pretty close.

8. Sailor Moon Theatrical Double-Feature

-      Everyone who knows me knows that I’ve loved Sailor Moon for pretty much all of my life (ever since the 3rd & 4th seasons aired on Toonami back in the day!) A holiday tradition for me was to watch the 2nd theatrical every Christmas Eve, unfortunately my two VHS tapes finally gave out in 2016. Thanks to Viz Media, this past summer saw theatrical re-releases of all 3 Sailor Moon films. Shockingly, my local theater was showing the films subbed so my mom and I bought our tickets right away. It was so surreal seeing these films that I grew up with on the big screen, and I know non-Sailor Moon fans won’t get this, but hearing/watching the whole “Moon Revenge” sequence in the theater was so intense. This part never got to me as a kid for some weird reason and I had no idea I was crying until my mom pointed it out at the end of the film. With the 2nd film, seeing Luna transform into a human was emotionally moving as always, just 10 times more since it was on the big screen with that nice surround sound system. That night when I got home, I didn’t get any sleep since I still couldn’t believe that this happened. The now 20+ years old Sailor Moon movies got released for the first time in USA theaters. This is an experience I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.

9. Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc

-      I was so excited when a sequel to Cardcaptor Sakura was announced. Like Sailor Moon, I watched this series as the heavily-edited Cardcaptors on Toonami. When I got older and learned that there was more anime out there besides the ones I saw on TV, I went back and watched Cardcaptor Sakura to get the whole, magical story and even read the manga, which I believe is the greatest children’s manga ever made. I loved every single moment of the new series and felt as though I were watching another episode of the classic series. The only thing that felt different was that the animation is no longer hand-drawn. (it’s still good) When you reboot or make a sequel to a series be it tv, film, or book, sometimes it’ll miss the charm that made it so enjoyable in the first place. Clear Card thankfully still carries the charm its predecessor had.

10. Little Witch Academia

-      I had started this anime around holiday 2017 but didn’t finish it until early 2018. This was one of the most optimistic series I’d ever had the pleasure of watching. I don’t want to compare the two, but the inspirational message that Kiki’s Delivery Service gave me when I was 10, was the exact inspirational message you will find in Little Witch Academia. (and that I needed to hear as a 20-year-old) I was starting to get a bit depressed and losing confidence in myself with my science grades getting lower no matter what I tried, as well as other things in my personal life. After dropping Science, I had a long wait between classes, so I decided to start watching Little Witch Academia again. Seeing our protagonist Akko trying her best at flying a broom and failing was me with my science grades, but her determination to get her broom just a few centimeters off the ground was so inspiring to watch. After this I watched the other Studio Trigger works I had yet to see, and while they’re all good in their own way, none of them have left the imprint LWA left on me. Sometimes when I get frustrated or lack confidence in myself, I tell myself Shiny Chariot’s words of wisdom that motivated Akko throughout the series: “Never forget your beautiful dreams. Believing is your magic!!”

[takerfoxx]

The Rise of Skywalker Review

All right, new year, new decade, and all that jazz. Now, I do have a few things I wanna say about reflecting back on where I was and where I am now, personal growth and all that, but first, I have some major I need to get out of my system, something that’s been eating at my mind all week, something I really need to sit down and dissect to properly suss out my thoughts and feelings.

And that thing is this: what the fuck happened with The Rise of Skywalker?!

Now, just for the record, I’m that lapsed Star Wars fan who grew up with the original trilogy, who had a full shelf of EU novels that I read and reread over and over until their covers fell off, who spent untold hours replaying both of the Knights of the Old Republic games, was majorly let down by the prequels and became disillusioned by the franchise as a result, who reacted to the news of Disney’s acquisition of the franchise with cyncisim, who thought that The Force Awakens was decent but otherwise substance-less knock-off of A New Hope, who was bored to tears by Rogue One, who skipped Solo entirely, but who actually was surprising engaged and receptive to the subversive themes and new places that The Last Jedi took the franchise even if it was very flawed structurally and thought that it was the best Star Wars film since Return of the Jedi.

And hell, let’s just state my reasons right now. The Last Jedi came out at a time when I was just so tired of people trying to recapture lightning in a bottle with once-great franchises that had lived on long past their expiration date with trying to pass off clearly inferior knock-offs to their original installments as sequels. I mean, it can work, sure. Both of the Creed movies followed the Rocky movie formula pretty closely but were still great, and even if it didn’t click with me the way it did with other people, Fury Road was a fantastic film. The thing is though, both of those movies were still being handled by their original creators, specifically Sylvester Stallone and George Miller, while my beloved Star Wars and Jurassic Park had become divorced from their daddies and were now being handled by people who just. Didn’t. Get it.

And then The Last Jedi came along and was all, “Shut up about bloodlines, they don’t matter! Your main character is not the descendant of some already established character, she’s just some rando Force-sensitive that caught up in all this and decided to answer the call, so let her stand on her own! The Jedi were a well-meaning but immensely flawed, so leave them in the annuals of history and stop venerating them! Same with your heroes! Also, your Resistance has its hands dirty too because it’s a fucking war and war makes monsters of everybody while the little people suffer, sometimes you need to listen to the people in charge instead of being a hothead bucking the system, and the intimidating villains in black are in truth a bunch of insecure man-children playing dress-up to make them feel better about themselves and are pretty pathetic until they take that last step and become actual threats because that is how fascism works!”

Do you realize just how refreshing all of that was? Oh my God, is the Star Wars franchise actually…moving forward? Are we getting new stuff that’s not hampered by George Lucas’s unbearably hackneyed writing?

Yes, the whole Finn and Rose sidequest contributed nothing to the plot and ultimately went nowhere. Yes, the whole Poe vs. Admiral Holdo had the looming question of “Why doesn’t she just tell Poe that she’s got a plan instead of doing everything to set the team rebel off?” which undercut its message. These are major problems, I acknowledge that. The thing is, they are easily fixable problems that would have been smoothed out by a few more script treatments. It sucks that they weren’t, but as for me, they were roadbumps, not dealbreakers. I noticed them, I saw that they were major problems, but they didn’t make me angry, and I liked what they were trying to say enough for me to still be with it. And I felt that all the Luke/Rey/Kylo stuff was gangbusters (yes, I loved cranky, disillusioned old Luke. I know Mark Hamill didn’t care for it, but that’s fine, it worked great for me), so I ultimately left feeling pleasantly surprised. As if in, it was a flawed but very refreshing experience, one that said things I had been feeling for a long time and took things to interesting places that I actually wanted to see play out. I even got choked up when Luke let himself fade away when feeling absolutely nothing when Han died the previous film.

Unfortunately, that seemed to be a minority opinion, with many other Star Wars fan outright detesting it, sometimes to a pretty gross level (you know what I’m talking about). So when JJ Abrams was brought back on board to try to salvage things for the final installment, my reaction was, “I’m going to hate it, aren’t I?”

Still, I knew I was going to see it anyway, just to say that I did. And…welp.

…

Dafuq was that?

All right, all right, now before I continue, I need to acknowledge something. First of all, I have nothing against JJ Abrams as a person or even really as an artist. From all accounts he’s a cool guy who’s been taking all the backlash he’s been getting with a commendable amount of maturity, and he was placed in a very unenviable position by taking the reins in the midst of a very volatile situation. Plus, he had set a ton of things up in TFA that TLJ burned to the ground. Granted, it was a bonfire that I thoroughly enjoyed, but as the person watching his ideas just get cut off, that must have been frustrating watch. Like, what was he supposed to work with once he was brought back on after Colin Trevorrow had gotten the boot? And on a side-note, they really need to stop bringing Colin Trevorrow into big blockbuster franchises.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had the tragic passing of Carrie Fisher, which, in addition to being a terrible loss in general because she was a wonderful person that we’re all the poorer without, this movie was supposed to in some way revolve thematically around her, much like the TFA did with Han and TLJ did with Luke. But with her gone, they were just left with footage and recorded dialogue from deleted scenes from the first two films, which is next to nothing to go off of. Now there’s a debate to be had about whether or not it would be appropriate to CG her face onto a different actress, and I do get them feeling that doing so would be ghoulish…but they kinda already did that to bring Tarkin back in Rogue One, so…

Even so, that really sucks, and as awkward as the Princess Leia scenes are as a result, it isn’t their fault, so I’ll leave it at that.

And finally, it must also be acknowledged that a lot of the things I’m going to criticize them for were present in the original trilogy, and were just as awkward then. The OG movies weren’t perfect, folks. We’ve come to accept these flaws, but they were just as clumsy asspulls back then as they are now.

All right, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I actually want to start off on a positive note, specifically talking about the stuff I liked.

Let’s begin with the thing that I consider to not only be good, but actually kind of great: the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. Their weird Force-link in TLJ was one of the few new ideas that everyone seemed to like, especially since neither of them could really control it and were equally befuddled by it. It’s just a cool idea, a new aspect of the Force we haven’t seen before, and it’s slowly built upon, actually affects both the plot and the characters, and leads to some great scenes between the two of them.

And you know what? I was actually surprised by how much I liked these two together. After the wooden pile of bleh that was Anakin and Padme, I was bracing myself for more of the same. But as it turns out, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver have an incredible amount of chemistry, and Adam especially was able to pull off the whole tortured bad boy who’s trying to be a villain but feels endlessly conflicted in a way that Hayden Christensen never could (though to be fair, Adam had way more to work with). So giving them that weird link where they’re forced to interact at different points despite being galaxies across from one another is a fantastic idea.

And I was happy to see that not only was this idea not walked back on, they actually built on it. Without giving too much away, there’s an amazing scene where they actually have a lightsaber fight despite being in two completely different locations and not really knowing where the other is, with the camera jumping back and forth from each other’s perspective and items from each other’s surroundings keep getting thrown into the other’s area and it’s honestly really great.

There were also a lot of visuals that were pretty great. The whole indoor lightning of the Sith Planet was neat, as was the flying stormtroopers, and that festival was pretty cool, and…

Actually, come to think of it, most of the scenes in this movie are, when viewed in isolation, pretty good, and could have worked if they had been buffeted by, you know, proper buildup, actual pacing, and taking the time to let events have weight.

But that leads us to this movie’s biggest failing, the problem that bring the whole thing crashing down. And that is it will just. Not. Slow. Down!

Seriously, don’t take a bathroom break, because if you do, you’ll come back to find everybody on a totally different planet doing something completely different, and the plot point you left on is completely in the rearview. It’s exhausting how quickly this movie jumps around from place to place, where we get a look at a setting and characters that might have been interesting if we got to spend actual time with them, only to drop it and we’re onto the next part. This isn’t a story, it’s a list of bullet points! It’s a three hour highlight reel of a whole-ass fourth trilogy, one that could have been cool to watch if they had chopped it up into three parts and fleshed them out into three movies. Hell, I’ll tell you where to end each one: Rey vs. Kylo on the Star Destroyer, Rey vs. Kylo on the wreckage of the Death Star, and the actual finale. Expand on the stuff in between, flesh things out with actual, you know, character development and consequences instead of zipping around, trying to come up with as many places as they can to cram into Star Tours’ randomizer.

And that’s what this basically is, an overly long Star Tours ride! Now I like Star Tours just fine, because it visits places that hold actual meaning due to being properly developed in actual movies, but these places just left me feeling hollow. And while we’re on the subject, did we really need another desert planet, ice planet, and forest planet combo? Spice things the fuck up! Say what you want about the prequels, but at least they tried to take us to cool new places.

And you know what? I’m going to say it. This movie is actually worse than the prequels. Not because it’s nearly as clumsily written and woodenly acted, or because it’s dragged down by dumb attempts at comedy; it’s none of those things. But at least the prequels were trying! George Lucas might be totally inept as a writer and should not have been given free reign, but there were attempts at things like proper plot and character development, pacing, plot twists, mystery, building things up and paying them off. Just go read the novelization of Revenge of the Sith. It’s fantastic! Same plot, same events happening, same conversations, but the dialogue is reworked to give the characters actual personality and it’s narratively told in an awesome and creative way and it’s overall just a great book. So George Lucas’s movies had the framework of a good story, he just wasn’t the right person to tell it.

In contrast, this movie has actual good acting, and the dialogue isn’t anywhere nearly as corny, but it’s just so unbelievably basic. It’s surface level writing, with barely a hint of cleverness and very little personality other than what the actors are about to wrangle out through their performances. But structure-wise, other than to expand it into a full trilogy, I don’t see how anyone can turn this mess into an engaging, single-movie narrative. So much happens, and it just feels so empty.

And…okay. Let’s address the Bantha in the room. Let’s talk about Palpatine.

Why is he back? Why? Just…why? He doesn’t need to be back! He doesn’t! It’s stupid, it’s hackneyed, it’s not even explained! I mean, there’s an offhand mention of cloning, so yeah, it’s feasible, it just makes no narrative sense! Hell, the fucking opening title crawl just plain says, “Yeah, he’s back. No reason, he just is” and goes on from that. And apparently he’s been behind everything that’s happened, like Snoke and Vader’s voice in Kylo Ren’s head and stuff, because things just can’t happen without being masterminded by someone I guess.

Really? This is the best they could come up with? I know TLJ cut off a lot of their plot branches, but goddamn it, this is the best you’ve got? Resurrect Palpatine? They do remember that the first two movies from the trilogy barely had the emperor as a presence, right? Vader carried them all just fine! Just run with that! Have Kylo Ren be the main antagonist! Have this be able his ascension to actual mega threat instead of Darth Vader cosplayer. If you want Ian McDiarmid to ham it up in the robes one last time (and hey, who wouldn’t?) just give him a cameo! Like, a holographic message to any potential successors Kylo Ren is looking for. Have him be the devil on Kylo’s shoulder in a is-he-real-is-he-just-a-hallucination sort of way. Make him something tempting Kylo Ren to fully embrace being the new Sith Lord, something Kylo has to overcome if he wants redemption. But don’t bring him fucking back! That’s just so, so stupid.

And Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter kind of pisses me off. Her being revealed as a nobody from nowhere in the last film was great! I loved that idea! But no, let’s just retcon that whole business because we’re trying to apologize for the only one of these movies that had any balls and everybody has to be the descendant of someone important. Even fucking Lando gets a long-lost daughter in this! No, I’m not joking, he totally does.

Now, could Rey’s Sith heritage have worked? Sure! In of itself, it’s a rad idea, one that could have been used to explore all sorts of awesome themes…if that had been their plan from the beginning instead of a cheap attempt to replicate Empire’s big plot twist. But let’s face it: they threw it in as a desperate attempt to placate the fans. There never was any sort of plan. Abrams made the first movie with the sole intention of trying to recapture that nostalgic feel and fucked off, Rian Johnson took over with no notes and decided to do what he wanted, Trevorrow got fired, and Abrams got brought back for PR reasons because hey, people liked his movie, and he had to scramble to piece something together! Damn it, Disney! You literally have infinite resources! Hire someone with actual creative talent!

Oh wait, you did, and people hated it. Fuck.

So yeah. Rey’s parentage? Total waste, raises more questions than it answers. Chewie’s apparent death? Total waste, because he was actually on another ship! Though you could Force sense these things, Rey! Dark Side Rey in the trailer? Total waste, just a Force vision. That whole bit with C-3PO potentially sacrificing his entire identity? Total waste. No one seems to care, he gets no say, and after his memory gets wiped it’s treated as comic relief. Yeah, one last look at your friends indeed, Threepio. Some friends you have there. Oh, except Artoo’s got your memory backed up, so it doesn’t matter, just like everything else.

Oh yeah, and fuck Chewie’s medal! Who was really asking for that?

What a mess. What a disjointed, soulless, pandering mess. What a waste of potential, squandered on nothing. Bleh.

Oh well, at least we still have the Mandalorian. I’ve started watching that and it’s really cool so far.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2018 (In No Real Order)

Man! Wow! 2018! 2018 was a wild year for me. I managed to deliver those elbow drops I talked about last year and ended up doing a lot of of things. I left my job and moved cross-country in the span of like 2 and a half weeks! I took a new job in the video game industry (play Ninjin and Override)! I took a trip to Vegas a week after that! I got in a relationship! I got out of a relationship! It’s been a ride. A ride that hasn’t left me a ton of time to play video games or write about video games, but I’m like 1000 times happier now so it’s probably a fair trade. No matter what though, I will always be here at the end of the year to make a bunch of terrible MSPaint banners and provide you with another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2018.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PlayStation 2, 2004)

Nocturne is a game that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I beat it. It’s so damn cool. It starts with you witnessing a demonic apocalypse where only you, your two friends, your teacher, a reporter, and the man with the world’s wildest widow’s peak survive. These people are, with a couple of notable exceptions, the only real characters in the entire game. You barely see them, and when you do your meetings are usually pretty brief. Sure, you talk to and recruit a horde of demons to your side as party members, and you interact with a handful of demonic antagonists and various demonic NPCs, but for the most part the game is just you. You, alone, wandering the weird hellscape remnants of Tokyo. It’s one of the most solitary-feeling video games I’ve ever played, and it nails this atmosphere flawlessly. The music, the visuals, the writing, every element gels with every other element so smoothly to create a prevailing, almost overbearing feeling of loneliness. The combat and gameplay mechanics are what I understand this series to mostly be like (this being the only mainline SMT I’ve played), and are fun and engaging in a way that’s not too dissimilar from the Persona series. The only knock I have against Nocturne is that the dungeon design super sucks. I’m fine with endless corridors, my love of the PS2 Persona games can attest to that, but almost every dungeon in Nocturne has an annoying gimmick to it, and they all essentially boil down to different takes on a teleporter maze. I was kind of almost dreading navigating dungeons by the time I got to the last fourth of the game, but my intense love for literally everything else saw me through. For those of you who like JRPGs and haven’t played Nocturne, I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times, and I was like you once. I didn’t listen. But now I’m on the other side of the tunnel, so I get to say it. You should really, really play Nocturne. It’s good.

Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

Octo Expansion is what Splatoon 2′s single player mode should have been from the start. Don’t get me wrong, the packed in single player campaign is fine, but it’s basically a level pack for Splatoon 1′s. Octo Expansion, on the other hand, is 100% fresh. Structurally it’s much more diverse, with the campaign taking place over 80 mostly-bite-sized missions with varying objectives. There’s a couple of stinkers in there, but overall the quality of the missions is much higher than what was in the original single player campaign. They can actually be pretty tough sometimes too! It was fun to see some actual challenge in a Splatoon campaign. Everything wrapped around the core gameplay of Octo Expansion is kind of phenomenal. The setting and visual design is super weird, the music is way more mellow than anything else that’s come out of the series and creates a great sense of atmosphere, and the writing is actually genuinely pretty great. There’s a lot of funny dialogue and good character moments. They made me like Pearl! The weird gremlin that eats mayo! She’s my friend now! The last half an hour or so of Octo Expansion is also straight up my favorite sequence from a game I played this year too. Don’t sleep on this thing just because it’s DLC. It’s legitimately great.

Monster Hunter: World (PlayStation 4, 2018)

At the outset I was incredibly skeptical of Monster Hunter: World. This wasn’t entirely fair to the game, as a lot of this feeling was based on its initial E3 reveal trailer kinda sorta matching up to some mostly not true pre-E3 leaks, namely that it would be much more action heavy to cater to Western audiences and tie into the then unannounced Monster Hunter movie (which, as an aside, looks like a trainwreck that I desperately want to see). You can probably pretty easily find some tweets and posts from me around that time saying that the game looks like trash because of some misinterpreted new game mechanic. I am here to say that I am a big wrong dumbass and Monster Hunter: World is very good. You might be surprised to hear this, but it’s Monster Hunter! With a bunch of good and well-executed gameplay refinements! And graphics that aren’t repurposed from a PS2 game! It’s a ton of fun and I put a lot of time into it, but it’s not without its flaws. The number of monsters and weapons is comparatively way lower than in previous games, mostly due to that whole not repurposing PS2 models thing. It’s still kind of clunky in a lot of the places Monster Hunter has been historically clunky in, but also in some pretty big new ways, mainly around playing multiplayer. Also the story, while it’s as bland as it’s ever been, is exponentially more intrusive thanks to the addition of voiced cutscenes (which need to be triggered before the game lets you bring other players into story missions, causing a lot of that clunk I mentioned earlier). It’s all nothing game-ruining, of course. The game wouldn’t be on the list if it was! Monster Hunter: World exceeded my expectations, and I’m super looking forward to playing the recently announced G Rank expansion when it comes out next year.

Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis, 1994)

I wish I could go back in time and kick my own stupid ass for not playing this sooner. I’d written off Contra: Hard Corps for the longest time based solely on some bullshit I read on the internet at an age where I just took other peoples’ opinions and made them my own. This and Castlevania Bloodlines were the bad ones, the ones some weird b-team crapped out for the Genesis while the SNES got the good stuff like Contra 3: Alien Wars. Well, it turns out... they were right about Bloodlines. But MAN were they wrong about Hard Corps. Hard Corps is the best Contra game. It fucking rules. I would have gone on with my life never giving the game a glance if not for this excellent Giant Bomb feature happening, and a couple of episodes in I knew I had to play it for myself. Contra: Hard Corps is fucking nuts. It’s balls to the wall 100% of the time. There’s so many unique enemies and wild bosses and they’re all never not exploding. The game has four characters with unique weapons and multiple different level paths that have totally different levels, bosses, and story beats. Oh, and the soundtrack fucking rips. Sometimes it’s a little too much, and there are definitely some sequences and boss attacks that are total gotchas that you can’t survive without prior knowledge of how they work. I’d also be remiss not to give a special shoutout to level 4′s awful, tedious, unskippable-on-any-route boss. But god damn if the rest of Hard Corps doesn’t outshine these flaws. It’s the high water mark for insane non-stop 16-bit action.

Deltarune (PC, 2018)

Does this count? It’s a demo for a full game that won’t be out for a real long time... I suppose it does, it’s self-contained enough. Deltarune, the free demo for the sort of but also sort of not sequel to Undertale, is unsurprisingly good as hell. Less surprising for sure, as Undertale is a known quantity these days, but I’m still way into it. The story is interesting and full of charming characters, and the battle system has been overhauled to include things like multiple party members with different abilities while still keeping all the things that made Undertale’s battles novel. The music is, of course, fantastic, and the visuals look much nicer while adhering to the same general style as the previous game. It’s fairly short, and some character development feels a little rushed because of it, but again, it’s a small chunk of the beginning of a much larger game. I can’t imagine any of this stuff wouldn’t be expanded upon. It’s hard to judge this thing story-wise due to the nature of it being a demo. I thoroughly enjoyed what is there, though, and look forward to playing the rest of the game in 50 years or whatever.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

This game is so much. Even though the first thing I learned about this game was “everyone is here”, I still wasn’t ready for how much it is. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is maybe too much. Of course, as previously stated, everyone (meaning every single previous playable Smash Bros. character) is here. Most of the previous stages are also present. This was all known. Where the game really, truly goes overboard though is in the single-player content. There’s the usual classic mode for every character, this time specifically structured around a theme for each character, but the vast majority of it is actually comprised of the all-new spirits system. Spirits are non-playable video game characters that you can collect and equip to your fighters for special abilities, sort of like a less terrible version of Smash Bros. Brawl’s stickers. You collect these spirits through spirit battles, which are fights themed around the character the spirit represents via extremely clever usage of already existing fighters and mechanics. These battles range from the obvious (Big the Cat’s battle tasks you with fighting a giant purple Incineroar), to the obscure (fight the main characters from Zangeki no Reginleiv as represented by Link and female Robin while you’re giant-sized), to the creative (Porygon’s spirit puts you in a fight against wireframe Little Mac and Akira from Virtua Fighter, normally an assist trophy), to the downright in-jokey (the spirit of Ness’s Father, displayed as the telephone spirte from Earthbound, makes you fight an invisible Solid Snake). There are like 1200 spirits. The vast majority of them have an associated battle. And you don’t just experience these battles through a menu, at least half of them are implemented into the 30 hour long adventure mode, World of Light, which has you fighting spirits, navigating dungeons, and facing bosses. It’s insane. They focused on spirits in lieu of collectible trophies this time around and they absolutely made the correct choice. The trophies in the last two Super Smash Bros. games were fine, but easier access to existing 3D models of most represented characters made them inherently less exciting than Melee’s tailor-made collection of high quality (considering the time period) renders, many of which would never receive a 3D model again. The spirits system manages to be exciting in the same way Melee's trophies were, fostering a genuine sense of anticipation to see what they cooked up next, but in the context of gameplay. They completely knocked it out of the park. Smash 4 made it on one of these lists long ago, and I essentially just said “it’s more Smash Bros. and that’s good”. Smash Ultimate is also more Smash Bros., but it’s SO much more Smash Bros. It’s so much more extremely good Smash Bros. The only things I can ding it for are some totally subjective stage preferences (where the hell is Poké Floats) and some slightly less than optimal music sorting decisions. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, ultimately, the ultimate Super Smash Bros.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Nintendo Switch, 2018): Remember Castlevania 3? Inti Creates sure did! This prequel to the still unreleased Koji Igarashi Kickstarter project Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an unabashed love letter to Castlevania 3, and it’s pretty good. Mom Hid My Game! (Nintendo Switch, 2017): A charming little game in the style of those old escape the room Flash games. It even looks like one (in the literal sense, not the pejorative). It’s not tough or replayable really, but it is $5 and consistently absurd and surprising. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PlayStation 4, 2018): Yakuza 6 is kind of a weird juxtaposition. It’s the final chapter of Kazuma Kiryu’s story, but also the first game to use the Yakuza team’s new Dragon Engine. The story end of things is a good, solid sendoff for a bunch of characters I’m going to miss very dearly, but the gameplay feels very formative and limited in a way that sort of reminds me of Yakuza 1. I had a good time with it overall, but I hope they manage to dial it in like they did with the previous decade of Yakuza games and make something truly excellent again. Looking at you, Judge Eyes. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth (Nintendo 3DS, 2017): Etrian Odyssey V is a return to basics for the series, ditching things like overworlds and sub-dungeons and just pitting your party against one big labyrinth. Honestly, gotta say, I miss the stuff they left behind! The core of Etrian Odyssey is still super strong so I had fun regardless, but the overall simplicity of the game and the changes to how classes work had me missing EOIV more often than not. Soundtrack’s great though, as expected. Sonic Mania Plus (Nintendo Switch, 2018): To be completely honest, most of the stuff they added to Sonic Mania in Plus really isn’t that fantastic. Mighty’s spike and projectile immunity is fun, but Ray’s flying is more interesting than effective. Encore mode is largely disappointing, with most of it feeling identical to the base game outside of its all-new (and too hard for their own good) special stages. HOWEVER, Sonic Mania Plus was an exceptional excuse to play through Sonic Mania another six or so times. Congratulations to Sonic Mania for being game of the year for two years in a row. WarioWare Gold (Nintendo 3DS, 2018): A good compilation game, executed much better than in the team’s previous Rhythm Heaven Megamix, but lacking in reasons to come back after you’ve played all the games. There’s the usual toy room stuff WarioWare has had since Touched!, but it’s bogged down by reliance on a currency system and the fact that sooooo many things you unlock are just parts that feed into a larger, not that interesting thing. The part where you play WarioWare is great though, and the new visuals make it all feel fresh even though it’s mostly older games. Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo Switch, 2018): I had a brief, passionate love affair with Mario Tennis Aces. The core gameplay is rad as hell and more like a fighting game than a tennis game, with multiple different special shots and a focus on meter management. I played like 40+ hours of it between the full game and the demo and never even touched the single player (which makes it technically not count for this list, but, shut up). I got 2nd place at its very first tournament at CEO 2018. Then I... stopped playing. It had some weird balance issues, sure, but I think it was more a victim of circumstance rather than anything else. I moved basically right after CEO and just never went back to it. It’s still incredible though. I hope this game’s systems are the standard for Mario Tennis games going forward.

We made it! Bottom of the list! It was a shorter trip this time, but I’m still proud of you for making it here all the same. Thank you for reading the words I typed about video games. I’m looking to get this web page back into gear in 2019, so you can probably expect part 2 of The Best Babies sometime in January. Hopefully I’ll actually play some video games too so I can bring back Breviews on the first of February. Until then!

[buildarocketboys]

Books read in 2018

It's been a pretty good year for reading for me, and I actually kept a list of all the books I read, so I thought I'd make a list and write a mini review about each one. I've read 22 (and a half) books this year in full - this doesn't include any that I just started, or have read bits of.

1. When The Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore

Magical realism + gay and trans characters! Pretty great although I wouldn't necessarily read it again. Mostly read in lunchtimes at work.

2-4. LOTR trilogy by J R R Tolkien (started somewhere between 17 and 29 March) (first book finished 4 April) (finished 30 May)

Dates on this one as I spent most of the first half of the year reading the Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Ring was almost certainly my favourite, got a bit bored towards end of Two Towers/start of Return of the King, and the long descriptions and battles (and long descriptions OF battles) are something I generally prefer to do without. But they're really good books with a lot of cool (and gay!) stuff in them, and though the films don't include everything from them, they're pretty damn good adaptations. (I only wish the films had kept Beregond).

5. The Inescapable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

By the author of Aristotle and Dante, I actually can't remember much of this book, I remember it being pretty good though. It may have made me cry?

6. Cloudbusting by Malorie Blackman (REREAD)

Easily the shortest book here, this book used to make me cry. It's a simple story told through different types of poetry, but it's so beautifully done. Didn't make me cry this time sadly, but still good. Read it sitting by the river taking a break from working on a job application.

7. Nation by Terry Pratchett (REREAD)

I reread this pretty much every year (I found myself a few weeks back wanting to reread it again) and it's brilliant every time, enough said. Think this is the only Pratchett novel I've read this year, which is a shame. Thoroughly recommend it though, even though it's not part of Discworld.

8. And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Bought this from a stall in Bristol, at the time it was the only one of his I hadn't read. It was one of those novels I just ploughed through, really quickly. Really good, really sad (and a gay character where you least expected it).

9. Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Borrowed this from my girlfriend after having seen the musical in May. The book is...really weird, but really good. A lot more of an obvious dystopia than the musical is, right from the get go pretty much and Elphaba is an icon - grumpy, traumatised, irritable, angry, hopeful, guilty, revolutionary. I love her. Oh, and her and Glinda are still really gay.

10. Harry and the Wrinklies by Alan Temperley (REREAD)

Now we come to the books I reread in August when I had some time off work. Harry gets orphaned and is sent to live with his elderly relatives and their elderly friends (hence the title). Little does he know, they're all ex-cons and pretty much modern day Robin Hoods. Also, badass. Still a great book, even if it's technically for kids. I need to reread the sequels sometime.

11. Maximum Ride by James Patterson (REREAD)

Edgy as fuck but I still kind of love it. Ngl the younger kids and Iggy are a lot more fun than Max and Fang though.

12. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (REREAD)

This one I reread every couple of years or so. One of my favourites, the way the non-chronological (by design and necessity) plots works so well, in both building and retaining suspense, the prose is beautiful (if a little pretentious at times), the characters are...mostly kind of dicks, but in a real, multifaceted kind of way. I kind of love all the references to various books/authors/bands, even if it is kind of pretentious. I discovered Rilke through this book. Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

13. Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Read this a little while after seeing the film. Obviously they changed a fair amount, but I love them both. Really easy to read in about a day.

14. Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli

Read this on the same weekend as Simon. Loved it a LOT. I relate to both Leah and Abby a whole lot and it just felt so real to the experience of being a (bi) teenage girl. Wish there'd been a bit more to the ending maybe? But maybe that's just me being greedy. Still trying to persuade @judasisgayriot to read it. This might well be my book of the year.

15. Vox by Christina Dalcher

After I finished Leah on the Offbeat I was looking for something else to read. Picked this up in Waterstones because it sounded like an interesting concept for a dystopia (women are only allowed to say 100 words a day - if they say more, they get electrocuted by a bracelet attached to their wrist). The main character is white, straight and middle class, so that's definitely the majority of the experience we get to see, but there is some examination of being gay and/or a poc in this dystopian culture. Overall an interesting examination on how language can be used as a weapon, and to control people. A Handmaid's Tale with a difference and (spoiler!) a happy ending.

16. The Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli

I didn't get/read this one at the same time as Leah and Simon because I was put off by how het it sounded, lol. The main character is straight (afaik) but it's still a pretty great book and she's pretty relatable.

17. My Mum Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson

Tracy Beaker all grown up! As told through the eyes of her (much quieter and less troublesome) daughter. Pretty great and interesting to see Tracy all grown up but still very much Tracy. Lots of drama and Justine Littlewood ruining everything as usual. Complete with an implausible happy ending (but it's great anyway, and tbh we all need those sometimes). Also, Cam is a #confirmed lesbian.

18. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (REREAD)

I'm not sure how many times I've reread The Book Thief now, but it must have been at least ten. I reread it at least every year but often it's been more than that. Still amazing, obviously, but I dunno, I didn't feel as into it this time? I didn't cry (for the first time ever!) while reading it, although that might have been because I read it at work. Mostly I was reading it to prepare for Zusak's new book, which I got for Christmas.

19. Holes by Louis Sachar (REREAD)

First time I've reread this since high school, and it's still brilliant. 'Nuff said.

20. The Bi-ble: An Anthology of Personal Narratives and Essays about Bisexuality edited by Lauren Nickodemus and Ellen Desmond

Bought this from Gay's The Word when I was in London back in May, only got round to reading it in December. Some really good stuff in here, I related hard to a lot of it (and not so much to other parts). Recommended reading for anyone who's bi or wants to understand more about bisexuality.

21. Call of the Wild by Guy Grieve

I picked this up on a whim from my pile of unread books because I wanted something to read before I got new books for Christmas. (Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I only finished it on Boxing Day). Really interesting, I'm so fascinated by life in very cold, harsh, unforgiving places (only partly because of the wolves) and this was a really interesting true story of how a guy (called Guy) from Scotland manages to build his own cabin and live out in the wild of the Alaskan Interior through the Winter.

22. Combat Magicks by Steve Cole

A Doctor Who novel (the first of three I got for Christmas!) and the last book I read in its entirety in 2018. At the site of a battle between the Romans and the Huns (which is why I chose it first, sounded really cool), so-called "witches" manipulate everything both sides do. Surprise! They're aliens. The Doctor calls Yaz her bestie a lot and it's adorable. Ryan gets a girlfriend who stans the Doctor (she's basically part of Roman Torchwood and she's awesome). Graham has a bath with a witch (well, nearly).

Currently reading:

Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh

I'm about half way through this, so it doesn't quite count as a book I read in 2018, but I thought I should include it. Anti-diet culture, embracing food for what it is, everything it is, while examining the different things (gender, race, class) that affect our relationship with food.

[incorrecteragonquotes]

Eragon Movie Recap Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

It’s Part 2 of the Eragon Movie Recap! There’s a second part now! That you can read!

Part 2 picks up where Part 1 left off. Arya’s been captured by Durza, Eragon has found a cool rock, and Galbatorix can’t win the geology convention. All of this makes for one eventful night! Let us see what happens next.

As Eragon returns to town after his hunting trip, we get a nice look at Carvahall in all of its ramshackle glory. As Eragon walks across the frame, we see a small patrol of soldiers walk by as well. As we’re about to see, the soldiers and the villagers could be considered distinct factions within Carvahall, and they do not get along. Though, if the soldiers aren’t considered villagers, I wonder where they live. How many of them are there? What’s the soldier-to-villager ratio? Why do they care this much about Carvahall? Does the army have this many resources to spare on every village? It would make sense to me if the soldiers were to be here temporarily, as they tour the countryside accosting all of the villages, but the way the soldiers are treated by the film makes me think that no, they just live here.

A bunch of soldiers haul Baldor and Albreich off to conscription land, wherever that is. Baldor and Albreich are, of course, not named, and I’m-pretty-sure-that’s-Horst complains about their sudden departure in an expositional manner. This is one of many ways in which the filmmakers ruined their planned franchise - these characters do a lot of things in the later books. I suppose Baldor and Albreich could return later as a part of the army and then rejoin Carvahall’s forces, which would fit well enough, but still, the writers just sabotaged any future attempts to adapt the later novels.

Additionally, this soldiers’ attitude here is quite confusing to me. They’re all very snide about this abduction, while they, too, must have joined the army somehow. If this is how they treat the villagers of Carvahall, they must have come from somewhere else. Were they conscripted as well? Is this whole conscription business a recent development? Maybe they joined voluntarily. They could have signed on because they wanted to bully people for a living, though I’m not convinced there are all that many people joining the army for that reason. People have better ways to spend their time, after all. So what’s with the attitude? If they stay in Carvahall for long enough, they’re bound to become part of the community in some capacity. But they clearly aren’t. What gives? I am by no means an expert on this subject, but the soldiers in this film bother me to no end.

Eragon walks into Sloan’s meat shop, and is immediately intrigued by the prime cuts Sloan has on the chopping block. Sloan appears to be cheery enough, even becoming the first person in the film to refer to Eragon by name. He’s downright educational until Eragon expresses an interest in making a purchase, at which point he switches to some rather forced (and expositional, because why not) mockery. But Eragon’s serious, so he proposes a trade.

Sloan accuses Eragon of stealing the cool rock, but this doesn’t seem to put a damper on his interest in the Big Shiny Thing. Just as Eragon’s about to complete the trade, he remembers that it is his solemn duty to behave as stupidly as possible, so he leans in conspiratorially and tells Sloan that he found the cool rock in the Spine. This is true, but it’s also the one thing he could have said to immediately convince Sloan to cancel any and all trading plans. Sloan’s very targeted dislike of the mountains may have been replaced in this film by a generic sense that the cool rock belongs to the king, which is somehow determined by its being found in the mountains. Maybe the Spine is state-owned land? As he’s booting Eragon out of his shop, Sloan goes on to tell Eragon to keep his cool rock a secret, because it could endanger the whole village. Somehow.

This detail opens up a rather peculiar possibility. Film Eragon keeps the cool rock and everything that comes of it a secret from his family. Does he only do this because Sloan told him that less paranoid courses of action were a bad idea? That’s an awful lot of trust for Eragon to be putting in Sloan here. Surely some of that should be reserved for Eragon’s own family.

Outside, we get to meet Brom! He’s being pestered by some soldiers who are accusing him of theft. They apparently don’t think too highly of his hunting skills, and they don’t buy his story about acquiring his dead birds by way of strange weather event. Personally, I think he should get to keep the birds on account of his story delivery skills alone. Jeremy Irons is a blessing to this film and I sincerely respect his performance as Brom. Regardless, the soldier’s don’t care, and just as a fight is starting to break out, Brom sees that Eragon is watching.

Seeing Eragon The Impressionable Youth prompts Brom to stand down and hand over the birds. He clearly doesn’t want to set a bad example for this kid, though it’s unclear if this attitude extends to kids in general, or if it’s specific to Eragon. He’s very bitter about having his birds confiscated with such little justification, but he lets the issue go after a few cutting remarks.

With the spicy conflict over, Eragon walks the long distance home. But what’s this? Garrow’s awake now! He waves at Eragon from the field he’s working in.

Roran charges loudly into the scene to tease his cousin. He has a sense of humour and an upbeat attitude. One could almost call it a… personality? Weird.

Roran acts unsurprised at Eragon’s lack of hunting spoils. Insinuates that Eragon is something of a coward. Gets a little rowdy. Eragon decides to push back, and they have a little fight.

It’s all fun and games. There are some bad quips, and Eragon gets to show a little resourcefulness. Garrow walks in after a few moments and breaks up the fight.

Eragon returns to his room and drops off his stuff. Takes out his weird cylindrical bean. Knocks on it. It makes a hollow, metallic ringing noise. That’s not the sound an egg makes, dragon or no. Certainly not the sound of a cool rock. Eragon is, finally, weirded out by this.

Later, Eragon and Roran are out working the fields. Roran decides that this is the time for an important chat. He’s leaving town! It turns out that this film is really committed to the whole army conscription thing, and Roran must consequently skip town to avoid becoming a soldier. He intends to settle somewhere, eventually, at which point he will send word. Eragon is saddened by the prospect of life without his cousin. Eragon doesn’t know where Roran will go. Neither does Roran. Roran doesn’t seem to mind.

While we’re on the subject of Roran’s departure, I’d like to point out that Movie Roran doesn’t have a definite plan at all, much less one that involves returning to Carvahall. I’m going to go ahead and assume that this also wrecks any future attempts at sequel adaptation. Let’s not forget, though, that this change in Roran’s behaviour is attributed to army conscription. This suggests that Galbatorix needs a bigger army than the one he has. It’d be silly of him to conscript so many people otherwise, since armies are costly to maintain. So Galby needs an army, and a big one at that. Why? What could he possibly be using it for? Is he planning ahead for when his cool rock doesn’t come home? This whole army situation makes no sense!

Eragon and Garrow are… cleaning a horse or something. I don’t know enough about farms to judge this action. Eragon is bummed out, and Garrow guesses immediately that Roran told him about his plans to leave. Garrow knows how to lighten the mood, so he spouts some words about theme! He talks about how one day, Eragon will decide what kind of life he wants to lead. Eragon protests that he likes the life he’s already leading. Garrow concedes that lots of people have their life goals very near, but some people are just the adventuring type.

At the mention of adventure, Eragon spots an opportunity, and asks if that’s why his mother left. Garrow pauses, and then takes the time to clearly state that she was his sister, lest the audience be confused, and he’s happy that he had the chance to raise his nephew alongside his own son. Gotta keep that exposition train a-goin’. Garrow says she left because of reasons. In a twist that should really not surprise you at this point, the reasons are not elaborated upon.

Now Roran’s leaving! Garrow gives him some money that he’d been saving up for this exact purpose, gives him a hug, and sends him on his way. Eragon stands awkwardly in the background, before walking his cousin to the edge of town. As a part of his goodbyes, Roran tells Eragon to work on his aim. It was at this point during the film that I realized they might be saying that Eragon’s hunting skills are legit bad. Eragon sits on a rock and mopes while Roran walks off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

And that’s it for Part 2! This one took a little longer to write than I had hoped, but between life being what it is and these dang soldiers continuing to exist in this movie, sometimes that’s just how it goes. Thank you all for reading, and thanks to everyone who left comments on Part 1! It was great hearing from you. This part covered about 8 minutes of screentime. A lot happened in those 8 minutes… Maybe things will also happen in Part 3! In the meantime, be sure to let me know If you have any thoughts, feelings, questions, conspiracy theories, or favourite rocks.

Remember to tune in next week when we visit such questions as “will Roran be able to capture the Avatar and restore his honour?”, “how many corners will the writers back themselves into?”, and “how will Eragon handle the newfound pressure of geology fame?”. See you then!

[skyplayer37]

Worm Liveblog: End.

   So thats how Worm ends.... where do I begin?

   I haven't done a serious liveblog for the second half because I just wanted to take it all in, but I guess I'm at the point now where the taking it in is over and I need to vomit out some words. The fact that I'm writing this one in a word processor instead of the Tumblr text editor means I'm already subconsciously knowing that this is going to be pretty long, so buckle up.

   In short? It was awesome. Everything in the story came together perfectly. At the beginning I just couldn't concieve an ending that would involve Cauldron, Scion, Endbringers, Passengers, and all the various capes in a way that was satisfying. But it was pulled off pretty damn well.

   Let's take a look at some of my predictions and use those as launch points for some discussion:

   - Arc 1: "Taylor remains adamant about being good even after enjoying the company of the villains. Her descent to evil will be a slow corruption, but the story will justify it by making the superheroes look bad."

   She did indeed descend into madness as Khepri, with a large focus on self-justification. Taylor always thinks she's doing the right thing, which is a staple of any good villain. Except she wasn't truly a villain and did save the day in the end. Except she accept her villainy and wanted to die in the end. Except the heroes decided to keep her alive. So the morals are all over the place. In the end, Taylor gets a happy ending. With  (kinda) both her parents, and a self that isn't defined by her powers.  Skitter and Weaver were personas shaped by her Passenger, and for all intents and purposes were actually killed in the end. But Taylor, the little girl from the beginning of the story, gets the happy ending.

   - Arc 3: "the Birdcage sounds like an interesting location. And no story ever says “No one has ever escaped that prison!” without the protag later escaping that prison (or the big bad to show how big and bad they are)."

   Nope. The  Birdcage was made rather pointless by Doormaker, despite the set-up that teleportation tricks wouldn't work. Even Kehpri, without much practice with Doorman's power, was able to break in and out easily. There wasn't the all out war in the Birdcage that I expected, but I expect a similar prison to be used in Ward, perhaps the same Birdcage but upgraded. At the very least it made Panacea much more tolerable and brought in Marquis, one of the coolest parahumans. But it also introduced Teacher, one of the more boring ones. Assuming Ward is a true direct sequel, I expect Teacher to go down in the first few arcs as the intro-villain before being surpassed by someone a thousand times more evil.

   - Arc 5: " It’s too obvious that Grue’s little sister will get powers".. " Regent’s gonna die real soon. He’s expendable."... "Taylor is going to get a good boost to her power soon"

   Correct on all accounts. Imp is one of the best characters left alive by the end. Regent had to go because Taylor just ends up with a better version of his power. It's left pretty vague when she had her second trigger event thought. I'd guess sometime during Leviathan? It was after that, when she took over her  territory, that her multi-tasking powers really ramped up.

- Arc 10: "Everything happening went right over my head until they arrived at the Wards after being “caught”, which is to say I didn’t realize we were being introduced to Regent’s actual power of body possession. A power eerily similar to what I guessed Taylor’s endgame powers would be, just a bit more limited and requiring conscious movement on Regent’s part for every motion and not how Taylor just taps into natural instincts."

   So let's talk about Khepri. Taylor finally thinks she has the power-limitation thing figured out, so she goes to Panacea who just... kinda gets it instantly? A bit odd that the ability for Taylor to go crazy like that was so easily reached and out of nowhere. But I guess Panacea had gotten to the point where she barely needed to second-guess messing with someone's head. So Taylor comes up with a crazy idea and 5 minutes later has powers worthy of instantly jumping to Class-S, taking control of every parahuman in existence with some quick synergy, combining Doormaker and his clairvoyent bf and ballooning in power like a good Binding of Isaac build. Thematically though, it works beautifully. She's become the Queen of her swarm, with all of humankind nothing but insects in comparison to a mighty godlike entity. Scion treated humans like we would ants, toying with them as one would burn ants with a magnifying glass. But as Taylor proved with her insects against humans, enough humans working together through a hivemind can overcome an entity thousands of times their scale. She killed the impenetrable Alexandria by commanding bugs, and now the immortal Scion by commanding humans. Wow you can really look back at the first few arcs where the teenage girl is learning about the heroes and say "yeah she fucking kills all of them eventually, weird huh?"

- Epilogue

   Where does the story go now? Assuming again, that Ward is a standard sequel. Which it heavily implied by Bitch's epilogue, with trigger events now going haywire without Scion and being a very cool way to get his POV on the last few moments of his life. Teacher is doing his thing but again, I assume that wouldn't last for long into a sequel besides getting a new hero protag set-up with someone easy to fight. Dragon and Defiant had a very touching epilogue, and I'm excited that at least they might be around for a whole other 2 million word story. Unsarcastically: these characters are good enough to warrant ~44 YA novels worth of story.  I'd hope that Taylor doesn't make much more than a cameo though, her story is over. But if this story grew to be so epic in scale, its hard to imagine a sequel that wouldn't involve Earth Aleph getting fucked up. Imp is set-up to get a pretty good protag role, I'd wager one of the Heartbreaker kids as the most likely to get the main POV. Someone with the birthright of a villain proving themselves to be a Hero, in contrast to Taylor being a hero trapped as a villain and succoming to the role. Although I've figured out myself that Dragon already fills the role as her foil, being coded and trapped into being a Hero against her will, with the pun of being a "Wyrm". Which might have made for a cool sequel name, albiet a very confusing one when talked about out-loud.

   Is a sequel to a nearly 2 million word story needed? I'd say.... yeah. There's still plenty left unanswered. The Endbringers for instance. It's implied that Eidolon made them, outside the knowledge of anyone else, but only really implied. They go silent after Scion goes down for some reason. How much did The Simurgh know of the future? She was responsible for setting up Panacea's stay in the Birdcage (fitting name here) and of the Yang-Ban Emperor being one that was critical for Taylor to have control over after Panacea fucked up her head. So did she know about Khepri? She was, after all, responsible for setting up Echidna, the only other Human-Turned-Endbringer. And what of Scion's partner? How did Cauldron kill something like that? Granted it was the more passive of the cherubic-twins. (Aranea's talk about Cherubs was before the Interlude about the Entity right? Let's check... Aranea's was in March 2013, 26.X Interlude was in August 2013.... pretty crazy to both have the idea of invincible serpents flying through the multiverse, reproducing by tearing their scales off, with one more aggressive and one more focused on passively studying humans, granted I’m taking some liberties but you get the idea) (Chuckles the Clown raised Scion calling it now).  But I guess the same odds as Vriska/Marceline being introduced the same summer with the defining traits of "grey skin, gay, and loves wearing red-colored boots".

   This would be the part where I talk about how emotionally wrecked I am from this journey being over. Of investing in these characters and seeing them grow up. From clueless children to powerful pseudo-gods with the power to kill unfathomable monstrosities. Of the good times and the bad, of the nostalgia of the simple bank heist scenes, of taking a moment to remember those that didn't make it. Regent, Emma, Clockblocker, Grue, Taylor's virginity. Damn, Clockblocker dieing actually hurt me the most. Maybe I should say a few words about how Worm has changed me as a person and become one of those major pillars supporting my future that I'll someday look back on with "that specifically effected the way I Create" as Homestuck once did.

   But no, I don't get to say that quite yet. Because even after 6 months. Of reading almost nightly since I started on the plane-ride home from spending a weekend across the country with my boyfriend, knowing it would be this long and still not see him again and deciding to start on this  journey to take my mind off being in such an emotional ride home. Thousand of feet in the air and reading about some girl trapped in a bathroom stall having juice poured on her head... Half a year dedicated to Worm, around 5 times longer than it took me to read Homestuck. Nearly 2 million words, an estimated 22 regular novels in length, longer than the entire Percy Jackson series I was obsessed with as a teenager (probably not anymore, theres way too many of those) and now, having read that much, what can I say now?

   There's still more I haven't read.

   Guess this liveblog is gonna keep going into Ward