#well the thing is I decided to make the charts based on the initial impressions or at least the extent of their interactions in the demo

[adastra121]

Touchstarved OC Relationship Charts

I made the relationship charts for my Touchstarved OCs!

More about their relationships with the Touchstarved LIs below!

Person who made these templates is @deiimi

Jin the Abandoned Alchemist

“Friendship is...a new venture for me. But I promise, I'll do my best!”

Likes Kuras — “You take care of everyone, but who takes care of you, doctor?” Admires Kuras for his skills as a doctor and his selflessness. Finds his presence very soothing, which is great because he is a ball of constant anxiety.

Jin and Kuras have a lot of similarities in some ways. They are both naturally curious, they both seek to help others, they are both introverted, and they are both avid readers.

Oh, and they’re both INFJs and earth signs.

Kuras seems like the kind of person Jin would like to read next to. He wonders what sort of books Kuras likes. Perhaps he would have some recommendations.

Conversation is never boring with Kuras. Jin loves to discuss alchemy, theories, and experiments that he’s pondered attempting with him.

Jin insists on helping Kuras around his clinic where he can, since he believes he owes the latter a life debt now.

He stops by to gift Kuras something every now and then, like some food or tea, because have you ever seen the doctor eat or, gods forbid, cook anything? He worries for Kuras sometimes, even though Kuras would say there’s nothing to concern himself over.

Close with Leander — “Something about you makes me want to be more than I am — and yet, whenever I’m with you, I feel like…I’m enough.” Jin’s never met anyone so friendly, generous, and brave. Leander makes him want to be brave, too.

He wholeheartedly believes Leander is a good person. A mage of that kind of power and he uses it to help people for free. He lives in Lowtown. He’s given a home to the Bloodhounds.

Leander strikes him as a kind, dazzling, and genuinely good person.

And more puzzlingly, he’s fearless. Offered to let Jin — a complete stranger — inflict his curse on him, even tie him up so Jin could feel safer.

Try as he might, Jin just can’t understand why Leander is so kind to him. His whole life, he’s never been enough just as he is. His curse — his existence — is a blight he’s always had to seek atonement for. Not even the mage who basically raised him thought otherwise.

So for someone so bright and fearless and good to offer everything he yearns for like he’s actually worthy of it…that feeling is addictive. Almost more addictive than the feeling of warm, trusting flesh and blood under his fingers.

He can’t let Leander down. It has to be different this time.

Dislikes Vere — “I never know what to expect with you. I’m still working out whether that’s good or bad.” Everything about Vere startles Jin. Not just because he’s a killer, but because of his shamelessness and Jin flusters easily.

Vere is a bit unpredictable to Jin and that makes him nervous.

Vere’s constant games and teasing will probably take some getting used to. As well as the flirting and the innuendoes.

Doesn’t know whether to take Vere seriously a lot of the time.

Most honest person you’ll ever meet if you don’t listen to a damn word he says. Jin’s starting to learn what that means.

It will take a while for Jin to warm up to Vere.

Likes/Dislikes Ais — “You are everything I have been warned against and you seem to have made it your life’s mission to piss me off at every turn! So why do I trust you?” Despite not knowing each other very long, Ais has somehow managed to push every one of Jin’s buttons. But he’s also honest, and that’s something Jin respects.

Ais challenges Jin in ways he isn’t used to, and he finds that both frustrating and frustratingly enlightening.

Ais is intriguing to Jin, unlike anyone he’s met before. His cool, relaxed, and honest demeanor — his entire character is so different from Jin, who is anxious, cautious, and constantly worried about not being a burden, not making his existence harder for others to deal with.

Jin has a bad habit of lying to himself — sometimes he doesn’t even realize it — so whether subconsciously or not, he finds Ais’s honesty refreshing and…safe. Jin feels oddly safe around him.

Ais feels like the eye of a storm. A moment of clarity in the midst of desolation.

In some ways, Jin finds the most freedom in Ais. He allows himself to get upset, to make demands, to say aloud the sarcastic comments often kept in his head. He allows himself to take up space in a way that he usually doesn’t and it terrifies him, because what if he likes it too much? What if he can’t go back to the way he used to be?

Likes Mhin — “Ah, are you busy? Sorry, I’ll try not to get in your way!” Mhin seems very reliable to Jin, but also very focused on their goal. Jin doesn’t want to bother them.

To Jin, they feel like a startled animal in an unfamiliar place. He’s very cautious around them, tries not to upset them.

Jin would leave Mhin alone for the most part, wait for them to approach him.

They’d probably end up with each other in a rowdy tavern, Mhin being a loner and Jin being a bit of a wallflower.

If they end up conversing, I think they’d bond over their interest in alchemical experiments.

Alon the Stray Hound

Likes Kuras — “I like you, Doc, maybe a bit too much. You know, you’re not giving me much incentive to avoid getting hurt.” Already liked and found him curious when they first met, but after discovering his mischievous streak? She wants to team up to pull the prank of the century.

Like Mhin, Alon admires his selflessness and how he helps the people of Lowtown, seemingly for free.

Kuras piques their curiosity. He’s graceful, mysterious, unshakable. They want to know if there’s anything more beneath that seemingly untouchable image.

He’s like an impenetrable safe they’re trying to crack. She doesn’t know what’s inside until it opens, but they’ve decided it’s worth the effort. There’s something invaluable in there, she just knows it. He’s a puzzle to them and they like puzzles.

Evading an angry Senobium cleric through Eridia’s labyrinth of a city with Kuras was the first time she felt at home since her old crew’s betrayal.

Likes Leander — “I’m no mage, but even I know you and I could make magic together.” Instantly clicked with him due to their similarities. There’s two of them now. And that’s everyone else’s problem.

Looking at both their relationship charts, it looks like they’re fighting for the Protagonist role.

Being the Hound, they’ve got good instincts and they know Leander is putting on a show most of the time. Alon’s not too worried because they’re also a performer — a jester who works and charms the crowd, both to survive and because they genuinely love it. So as far as Alon’s concerned, Leander can keep his secrets — at least, until it hurts others.

Look this is what happens when you put two people with a hero complex together okay they can end up being heroic against each other

They’re both magicians, though Leander does actual magic and Alon does sleight of hand.

Alon also probably had a Robin Hood thing going for them and their crew in the past.

Likes Vere — “You’re trouble, Foxy. I like that in a man.” Finds his assholery hilarious, shares his love for mischief and distaste for rules. The chain and collar plays right into her hero complex, though, so that might be concerning…

Loves to match Vere innuendo for innuendo. Vere’s insinuations tend to be more elegant, though, while Alon has a whole arsenal of “deez nuts” or “your mom” jokes.

Genuinely wants to help Vere out of his imprisonment, but how to make him see…

“I mean, yeah, so you killed some people — Not saying I condone it! — but the Senobium deals with that crime by…forcing you to kill people? Sheesh, and authorities call me an outlaw.”

Likes Ais — “Hey there, Soup Guardian. Guardian of the Soup. Ocudeus quivers before him.” Admires Ais’s straightforwardness and cool charisma. Thinks he’d be a loyal friend, or at the very least, a fun drinking buddy.

I don’t think Alon would be romantically attracted to Ais. They’d find Ais attractive, though. Like, they have eyes.

Would visit Ais to chat or play with Princess and the other Soulless creatures.

Finds his calm presence grounding, and likes that he listens to them ramble on about whatever pops into her mind at the moment.

Would join him in a bar brawl. Would help him start one, would help him end one.

Loves to banter with him since they’re both sarcastic little shits.

Okay, I’ll give him a serious quote from them: “Let me know if you need someone to take Princess out for a walk! I’m your guy.”

Likes Mhin — “You helped me, now I’ve got your back! So what d’ya say? You with me, partner?” Finds them interesting, cute and fun to fluster. Wants to get to know them better.

Remember when I said she likes puzzles? Mhin is a sort of puzzle to them, too. Full of odd contradictions and pieces that don’t fit together. They are lonely and they need help, but they insist on doing everything on their own. They say they don’t care, but they keep helping her. What’s their deal?

They find Mhin fun. Fun to figure out, fun to fluster, fun to chat with.

Mhin strikes Alon as lonely and in need of a friend — maybe it’s their hero complex saying to lend a hand or maybe it’s because they’re in the same spot, but Alon wants to reach out to them.

She believes they share the same goals. Of course, Mhin doesn’t have to accept her ambitious propositions of teaming up to pull a Senobium heist, but she can’t shake this hopeful feeling around them — that if they worked together, maybe neither of them would be alone anymore.

I did not intend to make them Mhin’s foil in my playthrough but um. So far…

They are both cursed. They are both newcomers to Eridia. They are both seeking to get into the Senobium. They are both lonely.

Alon is charming and outgoing and always seeking to make new friends, even if she ends up getting hurt. Mhin is the opposite, pushing people away to protect themselves, prevent themselves or others from getting hurt.

Mhin is sullen and short-tempered whereas Alon is optimistic and hard to ruffle. Though I guess that’s already evident in how she likes everyone already.

Mhin is blunt and straightforward — they have their secrets, but this is the vibe I get from them. They’re usually honest with their feelings, emotionally constipated as they seem. Alon is also emotionally constipated but in a completely different direction. She deflects and covers up their unpleasant feelings and other uncomfortable topics with jokes like it’s an Olympic sport and she’s the defending champion.

Alon is adventurous, impulsive and adaptive. They thrive in change and chaos, but deep down, they crave stability and a home. Meanwhile, Mhin strikes me as someone who prefers the security of the familiar, when they need a change.

Their fighting styles would be so different. It’s like earthbending vs airbending (if any of you guys are ATLA fans). I think Mhin has a very efficient and precise method of taking down enemies. They make every strike count and they don’t hesitate. Alon, on the other hand, likes playing tricks, using traps and diversions, discombobulating and dancing around their enemies. Mhin is a hunter, Alon is a thief — her goal isn’t usually to take down her opponents, it’s to escape or avoid direct engagement. Not that they can’t fight — they did grow up on the streets — but Alon will always choose to sweet talk, confuse, incapacitate, or run where they can.

Alon’s colour is orange to contrast Mhin’s blue. Similar to how Leander’s green contrasts against Ais’s red and Kuras’s yellow contrasts Vere’s purple. And although I wish I could say otherwise, it is completely unintentional. I wanted to give Alon a bright colour that stood out from the others because that’s their character. They are bright and colourful and fun.

Alon’s colour scheme is semi-inspired by the sun (bright orange, yellow, and pinks like the sunset) and Mhin’s colours more closely resemble the moon.

I just think this is cute. Mhin likes stargazing. Alon has freckles. And you know how there’s always poems and metaphors about freckles being constellations on skin?

[helianthus-tarot]

Hello. How do you know if you have stronger masculine or feminine energy? :3

I got this ask after posting that one PAC on my Patreon, so I assumed you asked because of what you saw in the PAC. The question is, which one resonated with you more, the masculine part or the feminine part? That's how you know.

I see masculine as the energy that moves outward and is obvious; feminine as the energy that moves inward and is subtle. Everyone has both; but some people are more masculine or more feminine, some people are balanced. Also, who you are in sexual situations may not be the same as who you are in other situations.

You can try these but keep in mind, there's no step-by-step guide that can provide definite answer to these things, your personality isn't a MCQ exam paper with correct and wrong answers:

Personality, astrology:

Look at your top 4 dominant planets and see if you have more masculine or feminine planets.

I read somewhere that Sun, Mars, Jupiter are masculine. Moon, Venus, Neptune are feminine. Some people say Mercury and Uranus are neutral and Saturn is masculine. Pluto is feminine, but in sex it may... not be, especially in cis men (male socialisation could.. kinda.. intensify Pluto's control and power issues if they have this energy and they could express it in a masculine way).

In my humble ass opinion, for Mercury and Uranus, if you have more masculine planets in your top 4 list, they can be more masculine leaning. For Saturn, if you have more feminine planets in your list, it can act more feminine. I meannn hey people can disagree with me, I just get those impressions from the planets.

Example: I have Pluto (1), Mercury (2), Jupiter (3) and Sun (4). Now that I think of it, this is probably why people keep telling me I give off masculine energy. I personally don't feel masculine.

Personality, E/I:

Extroverts tend to be more masculine than introverts; simply because they push their energy outward and seek external stimulation. Introverts often preserve and protect their energy more.

Intimacy:

Sex I mean. But I guess this applies to romantic situations as well. To make it very simple for the sake of convenience, at the risk of parroting questionable gender stereotypes; who seeks control more often? Is it you or your partner? Do you usually take charge, decide things, exert your influence, make things happen, OR give hints, flow more, wait to be seduced and wait to be led? Masculine energy initiates, feminine responds.

I'm not asking about what you prefer, I'm asking about what you do usually, whether you like doing it or not. If you do both or like doing both, then you're probably balanced, at least in sexual situations. You could act more feminine or more masculine in other situations. Don't ask me why it can change, I have no idea, I'm basing this on my observations.

Conclusion

Again, these cannot provide a definite answer, these are just possible ways you can use to figure it out and these methods are not perfect either. A lot of things in a person's astro chart can influence it; so you can also try looking at your dominant planet and its domicile or chart ruler, etc. Socialisation can also influence it I guess, like the Pluto situation, yada yada.

At the end of the day, you kinda have to reflect on it. Honestly, imo it doesn't matter much in real life, it only matters if you want to read PACs with a clear separation of masculine and feminine energies like what I did in that PAC.

[moonylvi]

Hey lucy~ can i request reaction nct 127 how their met their s/o?

A/N: Of course you can ^^ Thank you for requesting this.💕 Also please tell me if I made a mistake, English isn't my native language. Disclaimer: This is purely fictional, means it's an AU and in no way meant to harm anyone. Pairings: ¹/9 Nct 127 x gn!reader [Taeilxnormal!reader; Johnnyxbarista!childhoodfriend!reader; Taeyongxfamily-friend!reader; Yutaxtourist!reader; ...]

Warnings: I don't think there's anything that needs a warning except for my cringey writing XD Genre: Fluff, maybe bits of crack?, slice of life Taeil: You and him would probably meet in a situation where he was struggling with something little and you decide to help him. Maybe it was in a supermarket out of Korea and he couldn't find any salt. Nowhere! He checked the whole store, but didn't find anything. So he just stood there, looking utterly lost and confused. But don't worry, you're here to save him. Not only do you know the store like your own room, if not even better, you also showed him which salt is the best and helped him counting the money. He couldn't help but to invite you to have dinner with him one day.

Johnny: I needed to think a lot about this. He loves his parents so much and he would want a relationship which is similar in the closeness, based on trust. I could see him falling in love with a childhood friend. Or maybe a person he used to know, that he met again after not having any contact for years. Yeah, I think that's it. I'll just write the reunion :) Johnny and Mark just finished filming a new episode of JCC, when the staff suggested to stop by a small café they knew. Not expecting anything special, they entered and looked at the big chart which presented the different drinks and the small cakes coming along with it. Your café was something you were really proud of. Ever since you were little, you dreamed of owning a little space where people could step by to have a break from the rest of the world. Hearing the little bell ring, you quickly smiled at your reflection in the fridge door and hurried over to the counter. "Welcome to the small Refugium! How may I help you?" Upon hearing your voice Johnny's gaze switched from the chart to your direction, eyes widening in the process. "Y/N?" Your name fell from his lips before he could think more about it. Luckily you recognized him too, preventing an embarrassing situation to arise. "Johnny! Long time no see. How are you?" The small grin that adorned your lips, turned into a bright smile. Happily chatting, you nearly forgot that you had actual customers. Ignoring a confused Mark and an annoyed staff. That was, until the staff cleared their throat and brought you back to reality. "Oh, I'm sorry. What can I bring you?" You quickly switched back into your professional mode, taking the orders and preparing three cups, slipping a small note with your phone number between Johnny's cup and the paper sleeve. "Thank you for visiting, step by anytime soon again." Adding a little wink in Johnny's direction, you turned back around and started cleaning the surface of the counter, while they walked out of the door. Taeyong: He is the type to want his s/o to get along with his family. So maybe he finds himself having a particular interest in one of his sisters/her husband's friends or maybe a relative of his nephews friends, who already is close to his family, or at least to a few of them. Happily chatting with your little sister, you walked to her friends house for a birthday party. You knew his family, the Lee's, pretty well. Especially since not only your sister and their son were the same age, but you were just a few years younger than his mother, getting along with both parents easily. Which was one of the reasons you were invited along with your sister. The other reason was to have someone with experience helping of keeping a bunch of children happy. However what you didn't expect, knocking on the door, was the extremely handsome man opening it. "Oh, welcome. You must be Y/N and Y/S/N? I'm Taeyong,  I'm..." "Oh, hi Y/N. I'm so glad you could make it. My brother just ruined the cake frosting and I need your help to fix it." Sparing him a glance, she pulled you and your sister to the kitchen, not giving you any chance to properly introduce yourself to Taeyong. Nearing the end of the party, the children happily ate their dinner, while you plopped down on the couch, groaning in relief of finally sitting down and closing your eyes. "Kids can be exhausting, huh?" Your eyes snapped back open, meeting his curious ones from the opposite side of the couch. "Yeah, they can. I never got to introduce myself properly though. I'm Y/F/N. Nice to meet you." Chuckling he responded with the same phrase. Yuta: Someone who loves his home. And by that I do not only mean Japan, his hometown or house, but also the people who mean a lot to him. He's the type to connect the feeling of being home with his s/o. Someone who stays by his side no matter what, someone who will always support him and care for him. Ethereal. There were no other words inside his head. Just Ethereal. Cherry blossoms decorated the floor, the trees and... you. It could've been a scene straight out of those

romantic movies which were full of cliches. Yet it was pure reality. YOU were real. As soon as that realization came, he walked into your direction, unsure what he was going to say. Reaching you, Yuta simply let the word that spooked around his mind since he saw you fall from his lips. Startled by his voice you spun around. "Wha...What?" "You look so ethereal! I couldn't stop myself from telling you, sorry if I scared you." A burning heat made it's way to your cheeks. "Oh, no, don't worry, I just got lost in though. It's my first time i Japan and all the impressions are so overwhelming and..." While you rambled on and on about how much you liked his country, he felt a warm feeling bloom in his chest, deciding to ask you out, once you needed to take a breath. Doyoung: He's the type to have a very passionate relationship Someone who worships his work. A person that admires him on a whole different level, not in an obsessed way though. Maybe in a way where they tell him about all the things barely acknowledged by everyone else. Someone who gives him their all, so he can give them his.

Jaehyun: I don't know what to say except for Love at first sight. He could fall in love with someone in the most random situations. Many say that love at first sight doesn't exist and that you first need to get to know them better, but I see Jaehyun as a person who notices the small things and habits far before everyone else.

Jungwoo: Decisions, Decisions... After having a pretty long thought about him, I decided that he is most likely to want to get to know the person better before truly thinking of them as a possible s/o. He would initiate the romantical part once, he's completely sure about his feelings and knows that his interest is likely to be returned. But before that he rather stays back, gathering as many facts about them as possible without obviously showing it. Mark: Our confused boy would find himself falling for a person who leaves a big impact in his life without him being prepared. Haechan: I'm quite unsure if he's genuinely a romantic person, dreaming of meeting his s/o for ages, or more of a flirt, having no fixed picture of the situation in mind. I think it mainly depends on whether he wants the relationship to last since the beginning or slowly falls harder for the person, he initially wanted to just flirt with, not expecting much from it. If he has the fixed image he would be rather shy and far less annoying with them. However if it's 'just' a flirt, he does exactly that. Flirty small talk, clinging to them, bad pick-up lines and winking.

[riversofmars]

I have an idea for a prompt! How about 13 becomes human again for whatever reason, she meets River, and without either knowing the other still manage to get together?

Thank you for this brilliant prompt! Not gonna lie, I was thinking coffee shop AU initially but I think I’ve come up with something better! 

For River this is set post Manhattan pre Darillium while she’s teaching at Luna U, she hasn't met 13 and obviously doesn't recognise her. 13 - for whatever reason as per the prompt - is under the influence of the Chameleon Arch and human, not remembering who she is.

Hope you like it!

Rating: G

Word Count: 1800

AO3

Stuff of Legends

“What are you doing in here?“

The Doctor jumped when a voice cut through the silence at Luna University Library. It was late, very late, in fact. 2am was fast approaching and the library had been empty apart from her. She had chosen the time deliberately, she had banked on people being asleep or off partying for fresher’s week.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t realise anyone was…“ She looked around anxiously to see a figure approaching along the rows of shelves.

“You know this area is restricted, right?“ A woman came into view, wild curly hair, silky blouse and a keen sparkle in her eyes. There as a sort of amusement in her voice and she tilted her head as she looked her up and down. The Doctor got the sense she wouldn’t tell on her, at least not yet.

“Yeah, well, uhh… my archive request was denied so I thought…“ She didn’t really know what to say. She knew access to this section of the Library was restricted but she had come a long way for it and when her request was denied by the Academy of Time Travel, she had decided to go about it another way.

“You thought you would sneak in here instead?“ The woman concluded with a smirk.

“Well, they didn’t really give an explanation so…“ The Doctor scratched the back of her head. She was anxious about having been caught but so far, the other woman didn’t seem to mind too much. Perhaps she had snuck in here as well.

“Oh there was this incident, quite a long time ago now, a student snuck into the Academy’s archives and took an ancient vortex manipulator to have a sneak peak at her future essay papers… I mean, you can’t plagiarise yourself so they could hardly expel her but they did get a lot pickier with admitting people to their archives.“ The woman explained pleasantly.

“Well, firstly, that’s very clever of the student and secondly, very unreasonable to restrict everyone else’s access to the archives when some of us have actual research to do.“ The Doctor huffed, somewhere between admiration and annoyance. “Surely the student in question has long graduated…“

“And is a professor now. Professor River Song.“ River extended her hand to her with a smirk and the Doctor’s face fell.

“Oh, uhh… you’re a professor? You work here, I…I shouldn’t be here…“ She stammered, realising her mistake. This woman was staff! And she had caught her red handed.

“No, you shouldn’t be and yet you are.“ River observed sounding surprisingly unbothered about it which sort of made sense if she had been the student in question. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or worried. “What are you doing?“ River asked curiously and looked to the books the Doctor had gathered on a desk.

“Uh… just some research…“ The Doctor answered nervously.

“What are you studying?“ River picked up a book that she knew well. It was one of the more comprehensive guides on supposed Timelord meddling through time.

“Well, not technically a student…“ The Doctor admitted. She wasn’t sure what to say. This woman was thoroughly confusing. She was a professor here but also seemed to have an affinity for bending the rules. Could she trust her not to rat her out?

“So you didn’t just sneak into the Academy’s library section but into the university in general?“ River sounded impressed.

“No, I mean, I’m not a student, I’m a doctor, visiting lecturer… Luna University is meant to have the greatest collection of Timelord artefacts so…“ The Doctor felt the need to set the record straight.

“A doctor, huh? You sure you’re old enough?“ River smirked and the Doctor found herself blushing under her appraising gaze. Was she flirting with her?

“You don’t exactly strike me as a stuffy old professor either.“ She retorted before she could think better of it.

“Touché.“ River laughed lightly and looked back at the collection of books, scriptures and star charts. “Why the interests in the Timelords? Most people don’t even believe them to be real.“ She observed picking up another book to read the back of it.

“I don’t know, I just… personal interest, I guess. Something about them just intrigues me.“ The Doctor replied growing more self conscious. She felt a little silly. A lot of academics looked down on those paddling theories that the Timelords actually existed. Most people believed them to be the stuff of legends. While time travel was certainly real, the idea of almost celestial beings able to live forever seemed too fantastical to be true. While there was certainly something the legends were based on, there was no way of knowing which bits were fact and which were fiction.

“What’s your field?“ River asked curiously putting the book down.

“Astrophysics.“ The Doctor answered slowly. “Yours?“

“Archeology.“ River replied in amusement. “I’m much more likely to take an interest in this sort of thing than you, how do the Timelords relate to your research?“ It was a fair question.

“Star charts… well, that’s where I started. Everything else doesn’t really relate. I’m just… curious, they’re fascinating.“ The Doctor admitted, sticking her hands in the pockets of her coat before shrugging.

“Well, the stuff of legends always is.“ River chuckled.

“Unfortunately, I’m not likely to getting any answers here.“ The Doctor sighed feeling a little bit more comfortable now. It didn’t look like this woman would tell on her but it seemed to have been a wasted trip regardless.

“Answers to what?“ River asked and the Doctor shrugged again, with a little laugh this time:

“You know, I don’t even know… I can’t really explain it… never mind.“ She waved it off. “I can’t read it anyway, whatever this language is, I don’t understand it.“ She opened one of the books and held it out to River, pointing out the circular writing.

“It’s High Gallifreyan.“ River answered as she took the book off her. “The language of the Timelords, that’s what it’s called.“ Her eyes skimmed the page.

“You make it sound like they actually existed.“ The Doctor chuckled. “Is that your field of archeology? Mystical civilisations?“

“Perhaps.“ River winked. “Would you like some help?“ She handed the book back over with a smile.

“You can… you can read this?“ The Doctor exclaimed in shock, surprise and delight all at once.

“Don’t tell anyone.“ River chuckled and looked around to check no-one had heard her.

“How?!“ The Doctor didn’t know what to say. “How do you know how to read this? It’s not like you can just take language classes in this, can you?“ She was in awe.

“My husband taught me.“ River revealed with a sly sort of smile.

“Your husband?“ The Doctor’s face fell, she didn’t even know why she felt disappointed but she did. She had only just met this woman.

“Is that disappointment I hear in your voice?“ River had picked up on it right away and the Doctor blushed scarlet.

“What? No, I mean…“ She stuttered. “Uhm, your husband… does that mean, are you telling me you’re married to a… Timelord?“ The Doctor tried to deflect.

“If you presume that to be his one defining feature, I suppose so.“ River shrugged.

“So they are real? Timelords are actually…“ The Doctor didn’t know what to say.

“He is also the last Timelord. Or was… I’m not actually sure where he is these days, we haven’t seen each other in a while.“ River sighed with another shrug.

“But you just said he’s your husband.“ The Doctor frowned, she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

“He’s not the type to allow himself to be held too tightly.“ River smiled though the Doctor was sure there was a sadness behind her eyes. “We… things are complicated, when you’re married to a time traveller. For all I know I might never see him again.“

“And you’re just fine with that?“ The Doctor asked softly.

“Like you say, if he’s really a Timelord, he’s the stuff of legends. An ageless god. You don’t expect the sunset to admire you back.“ River retorted returning her attention to the books on the table, she ran her fingers over one of the ancient star charts absentmindedly.

“That sounds painful.“ The Doctor mused sharing in her sadness.

“Makes you appreciate the shared times all the more.“ River grinned as her wistfulness passed and the Doctor smiled and nodded, she understood. “To be honest, I don’t like being tied down either so we suit each other very well.“ River smirked gaining her swagger back.

“I see.“ The Doctor chuckled.

“That means if you would like to get a drink sometime, or if you would like some help translating these, I’m available.“ River elaborated when her initial statement didn’t have the desired effect of flustering the blonde. She looked up from the star charts to the Doctor waiting for the penny to drop. Her explanation did the trick as the Doctor went red in the face again.

“Really? I mean… you’re not… he’s not gonna…“ She stammered.

“Every time could be the last time, every Christmas could be last Christmas, that’s the thing about time, something you learn as a time traveller, you have to learn to live in the present.“ River winked and reached out and ran her fingers along the yellow braces the Doctor was wearing. “You do remind me a lot of him, you know, I don’t know… probably just my imagination. Or the fact that I’m really very attracted to you.“ She smirked.

“You’re uhh… very forward…“ The Doctor swallowed nervously.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.“ River’s confidence faltered for a moment, genuine concern came over her. “If I misread the situations, I…“

“No, no, it’s fine, I mean… I’d like a drink. With you.“ The Doctor burst out quickly, she didn’t want her to change her mind. “I’d like to go for a drink with you and spend some time together…“

“Good. I mean, great!“ River grinned, relieved. “There is this nice little bar across campus… You don’t need these books, I can tell you everything you could possibly want to know.“

“Lead the way, Professor.“ The Doctor nodded, a grin spreading across her face.

“I don’t think you ever told me your name, what do I call you, Doctor?“ River asked mirroring her expression.

“Maybe just that. I know it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but I never really… felt comfortable with my name… Jane Smith… just doesn’t mean anything to me. Most people just call me Doctor.“ The Doctor shrugged with an apologetic smile. She wasn’t sure if River would understand but she thought it best to be honest.

“Is that so…“ River gave her a smile, her expression incredibly hard to read. “It’s a funny old universe, isn’t it.“ She held out her hand to the Doctor. “You never know what the future holds, you just live it.“

[thecassadilla]

Fix You Up

Pairing: Kristanna

Word Count: 3,375/AO3

Summary: Winding up in the emergency room isn't fun, but it's certainly a bit easier to endure when there's a beautiful doctor taking care of you.

Author’s Note: This is called “I’ve been re-watching way too much Grey’s Anatomy and I decided to write a completely self-indulgent/kind of ethically wrong but it doesn’t really matter because it’s fiction” fic based off of it. I’m not a doctor/nurse/medical professional of any type so I apologize if I got something wrong. Enjoy!!!

The last thing that Kristoff Bjorgman needed was to wind up in the emergency room. He hadn’t intended for the knife to slip and slice his finger open. But going to the hospital, getting through triage, and waiting in a white, sterile room to see a doctor made him re-evaluate his initial thoughts.

The last thing he actually needed was a pretty, perky, red-headed doctor taking care of him. And yet, it was happening whether he liked it or not.

“Hi, Mr. B - ooh,” she laughed as she walked into his room, attempting to read his last name off of his chart. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh, it’s just that they teach you how to pronounce words like ‘choledocholithiasis’ in medical school but they don’t teach us how to pronounce our patients’ last names.”

“Oh, it’s -”

“No, I think I got it. Bjorgman?” she raised an eyebrow. 

“Yup, that’s it,” he nodded, pursing his lips. She seemed way too young to be a doctor; her hair was tied up in a high ponytail that bounced when she moved, and combined with the scrubs and white coat she was wearing, she looked like she was supposed to be trick-or-treating instead of practicing medicine. 

“Alright, Mr. Bjorgman, I’m Dr. Anna Andersen. What brings you in today?” She walked over to the sink and began to vigorously wash her hands.

“Apparently, I need stitches.”

She turned off the water and dried her hands with a paper towel before walking over to his side. She glanced down at his outstretched hand, inspecting the laceration for a few seconds. “I would say that I agree with your diagnosis. You definitely need a few stitches.”

“Fantastic,” he groaned.

“I’m sorry, I know this probably isn’t fun,” she frowned, grabbing a pair of gloves from the dispenser and snapping them on. “But we’ll try to get you out of here as quickly as possible.”

“I appreciate that.”

She sat down on the chair and rolled over to the side of his bed, inspecting his wound more closely. “How did this happen?”

He hesitated, and contemplated lying to her; maybe because he was certain that she’d laugh at him or think he was stupid for cutting himself open while chopping vegetables. He decided to tell the truth anyway. “I was cooking and the knife slipped.”

“Okay, do you mind if I -?” She motioned to his finger, a sense of relief washing over him; there was not a laugh or even a lip twitch in sight. 

“Go ahead.”

She gently placed her fingers on the area surrounding the cut. “Does this hurt at all?”

“Just a little,” he grimaced.

“I’m sorry,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “But you can feel my fingers, yes?”

“I can.”

“Good.” She rotated his hand, surveying the damage from all angles. “Are you able to bend your finger?”

He demonstrated for her, despite the fact that it hurt every time he moved it.

“And how long ago did this happen?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to think how long it had taken him to stop the bleeding and get in the car and fill out all the paperwork. “Like, two hours ago.”

“Okay, and are you allergic to any medications or anesthetics?”

“No,” he sighed.

“Sorry for all the questions, it’s procedure. Are you currently taking any medications?”

He shook his head.

“Alright, last one. Do you remember how long ago you had your last tetanus shot?”

“I don’t.”

She gently placed his hand back on the tray, then stood up, pulled the gloves off, and threw them in the trash. “Well, the good news is that the edges aren’t jagged and this should heal very nicely with a few stitches. The bad news is that you won’t be able to bend your finger for a few days.”

“Great.”

“Now, I’ll be right back, I’m just going to get the stuff I need to fix your finger and a tetanus booster and then we’ll get you out of here.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said in a low voice.

She smiled before ducking out of the room. Though he had yet to see her put her actual skills to the test, he was impressed by her bedside manner; she was actually quite adorable. Perhaps he had judged her too quickly. 

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said when she returned a few minutes later, setting down the materials she’d need on the tray next to his hand. “Ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

She walked over to the sink and washed her hands again before putting on another pair of clean gloves. She sat back down in the chair next to his bed and scooted in as close as she could.

“Now, before I start stitching you up, I’m going to give you a local anesthetic so you won’t feel any pain,” she explained, as she pulled a syringe from a plastic package. “Speaking from experience, this will sting a bit.”

“Experience?” he questioned, furrowing his eyebrows together. “Like from your personal experience or what other people have told you?”

She filled it up with liquid from a tiny clear vial. “Both.”

“Do you warn all of your patients that it will hurt?”

“Only the ones I like,” she winked. “I’ll have to poke you a few times, okay?”

“Okay,” he nodded, and she began to anesthetize the area. She poked him once, and then again, and again. He gritted his teeth.

“Almost done, you’re doing great,” she said, noticing his discomfort. She poked him one last time. “Okay, the worst is over.”

She stood up and deposited the needle in the sharp materials box next to the bed before taking her seat once again. “In just a few minutes, you’ll be numb and I can start.”

“You weren’t kidding when you said that would sting,” he remarked.

“I also wasn’t kidding when I said I only warn the patients that I like,” she grinned. She had such a beautiful smile. “A lot of people come in here and try to undermine my medical experience. I don’t warn people who think they know it all.”

He immediately felt guilty for thinking she looked more prepared for Halloween than for being a doctor. “No offense, but you do look very young.”

“Because I am young. I’m twenty-six,” she confessed with a shrug.

“They let you be a doctor that young? Not just you, but people in general.”

“Oh, yeah,” she laughed. “Medical school is only four years, and you’re officially a doctor when you graduate. Then you do a residency, which is what I’m doing right now, and that can be up to seven years. I’m still in my first year.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said. “That’s a lot of learning.”

“They don’t really advertise how many years of training you have to go through,” she said, tapping on his finger. “Can you feel that?”

“No.”

“Wonderful, now it’s time to party,” she announced. “First, I’m going to clean your wound with some saline solution.”

Though his finger was numbed, he could feel the sensation of the liquid trickling down his palm. 

“And now, I’m going to put some antibacterial liquid on your skin,” she explained, doing so as she spoke. “And I have to drape it with a sheet before I suture it…”

She unpacked the blue paper from it’s plastic package, and unfolded it. Conveniently, there was a hole right in the center. 

“Here,” she said, holding it up. “Slip your finger right through here, and...perfect!!”

“Do you always narrate what you’re doing for your patients?” he asked in a sincere tone. It was a genuine question.

“Yeah, it usually makes them feel better, but we can talk about something else if you want. Or, if you’d prefer me to be quiet, I can do that, too.”

In any other situation, he would have preferred the quiet, but she had a very appealing voice. “No, you can keep talking.”

“Good, I like talking,” she remarked with a smirk. She was now holding what looked like a pair of scissors in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other. “You ready?”

“Yup.”

She leaned over his hand, which obstructed his view. “So you may feel the needle going in and out, but it shouldn’t hurt. There, did you feel that?”

“No, not at all.”

“Good,” she said. “So, what do you do for work?”

“I’m an engineer,” he answered, shortly. He didn’t want to bore her with the details. 

“Is that a job where you use your hands a lot?”

“Yeah, it is.”

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him, her bright, blue eyes nearly boring a hole into his own. “You’re either going to have to take a few days off from work or do something that doesn’t involve your hands, okay? Doctors’ orders. You shouldn’t bend your finger or do any heavy lifting until the stitches come out because you don’t want to accidentally rip it open.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. “Fine.”

She turned away again and resumed what she was doing. “Did you drive yourself here or did someone give you a ride?”

“I drove myself.”

“Now, I don’t advocate for reckless driving and I would strongly recommend that you call someone to pick you up. You won’t be able to bend your finger around the wheel.”

“I don’t really have anyone that I can call, but I’ll be fine.”

“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that.”

Though he couldn’t see what she was doing, he could see the concentration on her face. She was so close that he could practically count the freckles that were scattered across her nose and cheeks. “So, uh, why did you become a doctor?”

She chuckled. “That’s a bit of a loaded question, but it’s practically a family business. My parents were doctors, my sister’s a doctor. I’m just following in their footsteps.”

“That’s cool that you can say that you all have the same career.”

“I suppose,” she said, her voice twinged with uncertainty. He wasn’t sure how to interpret her tone, but before he could even think about asking what she meant, she placed her tools down on the tray. “And just like that, you’re all stitched up.”

“That was fast,” he remarked as she removed the drape from around his finger. He was able to see it for the first time and counted six tiny knots.

“It isn’t really a time-consuming process,” she shrugged. 

“Well, you did a really good job.”

“Thank you,” she blushed. “Now, I’m going to put some antibiotic ointment on it and then wrap it in gauze. You’ll have to keep it clean and dry for the first twenty-four hours. I’ll print you out some more detailed care instructions, but I’m going to recommend that you come back here in ten days to have them removed.”

“Gotcha.”

“Also, don’t rub any alcohol or hydrogen peroxide on it. And if you see any signs of infection - swelling, pus, increase in pain - you can come back or you can make an appointment with your primary care physician.”

“Understood.”

“I just have to give you the tetanus booster and then I’ll get your discharge papers. Sound good?”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

She prepared the vaccine, then stood up and ripped open an alcohol pad. She lifted up the sleeve of his shirt and cleaned off a small area. “This shouldn’t hurt at all,” she said, before injecting the liquid into his body. Seconds later, she was pulling it out, covering the tiny wound with a bandage, and dropping the needle into the sharps container.

“That was a walk in the park compared to the other one,” he chuckled.

“Easy peasy,” she smiled, gathering up all of the items that needed to be discarded. She walked over the garbage, and tossed it away before removing her gloves. “You stay put, okay?”

“Okay,” he answered, inspecting his finger as soon as she left the room. There wasn’t much to see, since the wound was covered by gauze.

“Alright, so this is a bag of stuff to take care of your finger - a few single-use packets of ointment, some gauze, and some tape. You’ll have to stop by a drug store to get enough ointment to last you for the entire ten days, though.” She handed him the small plastic bag.

He nodded. “Alright.”

She shuffled through the papers before handing him on. “Those are the wound care instructions. Please try to follow them as best as you can. When it’s time for the stitches to come out, you can come back here or go to your regular healthcare provider, it’s up to you. And last but not least, these are your discharge papers. We just need you to sign this page and then you’re a free man.”

She placed the papers and a pen on the tray and pushed it closer to him. He signed them without hesitating and she took them back once he was finished.

“Do you have any questions?”

“No, I think you covered everything.”

She smiled. “Alright, then you’re free to go. Take care of yourself, Mr. Bjorgman.”

“Kristoff,” he corrected, holding out his hand for her.

She accepted, and shook it, keeping her eyes locked on his and allowing her fingers to linger for just a second when she pulled her hand back. “Be well, okay?”

Though he was free from the confines of the hospital, he felt almost as if he’d left a piece of himself there. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, for some reason. Not on the drive home, not when he was cleaning up the massacre in his kitchen, and not when he finally crawled into his bed that night but found himself unable to sleep. She was a beautiful, compassionate doctor and he was the idiot who showed up in her emergency room with a gaping hole in his finger. Remnants of their conversation played over and over again in his head, and though he didn’t know her at all, he found himself creating scenarios in his head where they would have the opportunity to meet again. He kept having to remind himself that she was only being so nice because she was a doctor.

As luck would have it, he would find himself back in the emergency room just two days later, for a rather unfortunate reason. Doubled over in pain, he spotted her in the hallway talking to a colleague as he was wheeled toward his room by an orderly. He couldn’t help but notice her eyes following where he was going until he couldn’t see her anymore, and he fervently hoped that she’d be the one to treat him, again.

She walked into his room shortly after, looking quite concerned. “Hey, what are you doing back here? Infection?”

“No,” he breathed. “I’m having really bad abdominal pains.”

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve been nauseous and I haven’t been able to keep anything down, and I have a fever. And the pain is really bad. Do you think it could be appendicitis?”

“It could be, but they’ll have to run some tests on you to confirm,” she said, shoving her hands into the pocket of her coat.

“Are you the only doctor that works here?”

“It feels like that sometimes,” she remarked. “But I’m not your doctor today.”

His face fell. “You’re not?”

She shook her head. “I just saw you from the hallway and I wanted to see what was going on, make sure that you were okay.”

“I wish I could say that I was making this up just so I could see you again.”

“You know, you’re really handsome and I like looking at you, but I’d prefer if we didn’t keep meeting like this.”

Feeling bold, he decided to press on. “What if we met somewhere else? Like a grocery store or a bar?”

She cocked her head, a smirk plastered across her face. “It would be a miracle because I don’t have a social life and I survive on takeout. I can't say I wouldn't like that, though.”

He laughed, but it only caused his pain to intensify and thus, remind him of the seriousness of the situation. He exhaled a few times through his mouth before speaking again. “What will happen if it is appendicitis?”

She sighed. “You’ll have to have surgery.”

“Oh,” he frowned. “When it rains, it pours, huh?”

She gently squeezed his arm. “We’ll take really good care of you.”

His memory got a little foggy after that; he remembered his actual doctor coming in, the nurse putting in an I.V., someone coming in and drawing his blood, and an ultrasound machine being wheeled into his room. He concluded that they must’ve given him some painkillers after that, because the next thing he remembered was waking up after surgery, the doctor telling him that it went well, and then promptly falling back to sleep. 

He didn’t know how much time had passed when he finally woke up.

“Hey, how are you feeling?” a soft voice asked. Suddenly, Dr. Andersen was by his side; she looked quite concerned and she was wearing normal clothes, not her scrubs or white coat.

He cleared his throat. “I’m okay.”

“Your surgery went really well,” she assured him. “You came in at just the perfect time.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to make sure that you were okay before I left for the night,” she explained, gently resting her hand on his arm. “Is there anything that I could get for you? Anyone I can call?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Thank you, though.”

“You’re welcome.” She gave him a small smile. “Get some rest, alright?”

“Wait,” he called, just as she was about to walk through the door. She obliged, and turned around. “They say lightning never strikes the same place twice. I’ve never been to the emergency room in my entire life, and now I’ve been here twice in three days. That has to be some kind of coincidence, right?”

“Today was my last day on rotation for emergency medicine. I’m moving on to pediatrics.”

His eyebrows furrowed together. “Because of me?”

“No, not at all,” she assured him. “That’s just how being a first year resident works.”

“I don’t...” he trailed off.

“The reason I brought it up is because you were talking about coincidences,” she said, in a low voice.

Suddenly, it clicked. “That’s a pretty big one, huh?”

She nodded slowly. “I would say so.”

“So what does this mean?”

She walked back over to his bed, sat down on the edge of it, and dropped her bag on the floor. “I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t worried about you all day.”

No use in being anything but honest now. “I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t been thinking about you since the other day.”

“I may have been thinking about you, too,” she smirked. 

He raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean I can ask you on a date?”

“You may,” she blushed. “But only after you recover from your surgery. Don’t forget that you’re supposed to spend the next couple of weeks recovering.”

“So I won’t be able to take you out for, like, three weeks?”

“Don’t forget that I work eighty hours a week, too,” she laughed. “But I’ll give you my phone number and you can text me as much as you want. I may not be able to answer right away, but I enjoy reading my messages on my breaks.”

“Deal,” he agreed and he recited his number to her, so she could text him and he could save it.

“You really should get some rest now, though,” she insisted, standing up and straightening his blankets. 

“You should really take your own advice.”

“I know, I know,” she rolled her eyes. She picked up her bag and slung the strap over her shoulder. “Have a good night, Kristoff.”

“You too...Anna,” he called. She beamed at him and as soon as she was out of sight, he found himself unable to control his own smile.

[and-damntheconsequences]

Alright, here we go: Merlin astrology

Immediate disclaimer: I'm not good at this.

(Scroll down a little way to see what I've actually given them — you'll see where to stop — I just wanna mention some stuff first.)

*

Exactly two people want this and one of them is me, but that's good enough so let's go.

So, I've gone through some of the episodes to see if the show actually tells us when their birthdays are, but even though Arthur's birthday is shown and feasts for festivals for Beltane and Samhain are held (May 1 and November 1 respectively), there doesn't seem to be much overlap that I can see. The closest I can find is that in 5x03, Gaius briefly mentions that the Horn of Cathbhadh was traditionally used at Beltane, so Arthur's birthday would have been a short while before then, if he had done the same. But I'm not convinced that tradition matters all that much to Arthur, and there doesn't seem to be anything to suggest it wouldn't work just as well on other days — plus Arthur would have missed the Beltane feast had he gone then, and people would have been far more curious of where he was, which they don't seem to be.

So we don't know when either he or Merlin have their birthdays. Also since King Arthur doesn't have a specific set of years it took place in (only roughly 6th century AD), I have no point of reference for any other astrological placements.

I could be very wrong, and I definitely could have missed other things in different episodes, but this essentially puts it as a completely clean slate, so this is based just on my own thoughts about them.

Again, I'm not good at this. This is just based off of my own past knowledge and lots of Google to check everything. Lots.

I've also based their birthdays off of a completely different type of astrology that I'll do a post on later.

**

Okay here we go:

Arthur:

Birthday: July 28th

Sun Sign: Leo

A person's sun sign represents their most basic personality, and the traits they hold that remain constant throughout most of their life. At it's most basic, the sun sign says "I am."

For Arthur, Leo seems like a perfect fit. Leos are the Kings and Queens of the stars, the leaders and front runners of the sky. Their element is fire, which shows their driven, passionate, and warm hearted nature, and as Leo is ruled by the Sun, these qualities go double. Leos are confident, self aware, and have a personality that can dominate others, which can often lead to them displaying extreme arrogance or being very egocentric. They are able to speak their mind, but if not reminded, can sometimes neglect the feelings of others on a quest for status and influence.

Leos are represented by the lion, which symbolises the qualities of power and courage. These animals are known as fearless, able to withstand great challenges, and assured in their own strength. They can sometimes be a little aggressive or overbearing, but they have the power to walk with great dignity, and both give and receive high respect.

Moon Sign: Leo

A person's moon sign represents their emotions and deeper, more veiled, identities and subconscious tendencies. They may also show a person's more instinctive self, or the potential that they could reach. Where the sun says, "I am", the moon says "I feel"; the sun is action, and the moon, reaction.

Leo moons are bright with energy, and best in their element when they are shown admiration and respect — especially for their charm and wit. They may struggle due to a demand for respect, but the respect is well deserved for the leadership and willpower they show in order to help others. They are sharp and have intellectual potential, but can sometimes try to process things far too quickly, missing subtler clues in communication and jumping to rash conclusions. Some misunderstandings can take them completely by surprise, which other people may be confused or thrown off by.

Leo moons enjoy having an outlet for their energy, seen as the "wild child" of the zodiac moons. This often manifests as taking risks, but they are naturally lucky, so this usually pays off. They are also often optimists, perhaps for that reason.

I've also given Arthur the same sun and moon sign, and not only because they seem to fit the best. Those with sun and moon signs in the same zodiac are associated with a dark or new moon, and that energy drives them to influence change, and create their own mark on the world.

Ascendant: Aries

A person's ascendant, sometimes called their rising sign, is the sign that was on the horizon at the time of their birth. It represents the public mask a person may show to others, and the impression they may give off, as well as their own personal outlook on life. If the sun and moon signs are "I am" and "I feel" respectively, the ascendant probably says, "I seem".

For Arthur, I considered a few, but decided that Aries was the best fit — in doing so, making all of his main three signs fire signs.

Aries ascendants are seen as brave, fiercely opinionated, and independent. They have a strong and commanding presence, the warrior of the zodiac, and that can come off as a little intimidating at times. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, and Aries ascendants will be the ones seen to lead the battles. They are trailblazers and initiators, who base their actions heavily on instinct and quick pace decisions, though that leads them to be very short tempered, rash, and often bossy. They may leap before they look, and choose just to deal with the consequences later, but they have strong intuition, and a determination to succeed.

Merlin:

Birthday: Dec 23rd

Sun Sign: Capricorn

I've already given the meanings for the signs, so I won't rewrite those. I'll just go straight onto the individual sign meanings.

For Merlin, I wasn't so sure of his signs as I was Arthur's, and I actually decided his birthday based on a different and lesser known type of astrology, which I'll make a post on later, because it makes more sense for them both.

However, Capricorn actually does fit moderately well for him. Capricorns are the hard workers of the zodiac, the ones with the determination and resourcefulness to get stuff done when it most needs doing. Their personality, and most innate knowledge of who they are is based on purpose, and the need to feel as if they have contributed something important. They are patient and brave, and perhaps the most traditional of the zodiacs, which in turn makes them incredibly stubborn. Their earth element means their stamina is unmatched, and in times of crisis, they are the most reliable and efficient, and have an unparalleled devotion and loyalty to those they have allowed within their circle of friends and loved ones. While they can be seen as boring, overly practical, and responsible, I believe that a major presence of other zodiac elements in Merlin's chart would help to balance that out.

Moon Sign: Cancer

Again, this one might seem a little controversial, but I do believe Merlin's moon being in cancer makes the most sense, and I have a lot of reasons. The sign of cancer is itself ruled by the moon, which means that by having the moon in this placement, the influence it has over Merlin's life would also be amplified. This means that his inner self and deeper, hidden, identity, would play a major role in who he is, and how he views himself, more than any other moon sign.

Cancers moons are one of, if not the most, emotionally sensitive moon signs, though its not often so clearly shown. They have a true depth to their feelings, which is often hidden away out of a need to protect themselves. It is assumed that this depth and complexity makes them weaker, when in fact the complete opposite is true — they are able to develop true resilience, and won't crumble under under emotional pressure. They are always struggling to be better, and working towards self improvement and reaching the best of their own potential, which compliments a Capricorn sun very well.

In turn, they are incredibly nurturing and gentle, with a generous and family-oriented approach to many aspects of life, whether that be oriented to biological or found family. They work towards long lasting relations, and form deep connections with the people they allow to become close to them. They are also incredibly selfless, and can easily fall into the trap of allowing their self worth to be decided by their worth to others, as in their heart they truly want to do good by others. There are the kindest of souls, always hoping to see the best in people, and often allowing others to let that kindness go underappreciated — they aren't doing the right thing for the sake of recognition. At the same time, they can have a competitive nature, and are deeply intuitive and receptive.

They can be deeply hurt when betrayed or unappreciated, and will often close off and seek to hide away at times as a means of defence. This would be especially true for someone who's sun sign is contradictory, and Capricorn is Cancer's opposite, often putting up walls against vulnerability because they fear what they may lose if they show it.

Again, his moon sign has a secondary meaning when put with his sun. Cancer and Capricorn lie at opposite ends of the zodiac, and people with moon and sun signs which conjuct in this way are associated with the full moon. This energy means they will be someone of diversity and conflict, who will struggle with the differences of what they need and want, and who they are and who they should be. They will need to create compromise, and seek to find happiness within themselves, instead of desperately reaching out to find purpose and contentment elsewhere.

Ascendant: Sagittarius

For Merlin, his drive and goal is based on what he is told is his destiny. Right back in the first episode, his pain is that he doesn't understand why he is the way he is. When Kilgharrah tells him that he has a destiny, he latches on to it, and that is the nature of a sagittarius ascendant.

Sagittarians are the adventurers of the zodiac, the explorers who see life as a quest, and for a Sagittarius Ascendant, the prize they seek is meaning and truth. They are deeply philosophical people who will see every moment as an opportunity, and will use it to infinitely expand their own horizons, in whatever form that takes. They often may have a lot of faith in things greater than themselves, and that hope is integral to the interconnected way they view themselves and the world.

They are sometimes restless individuals, and value fun and adventure. They have an urge to explore in every sense of the word, and I believe that Merlin would have indulged that far more had he been given the safety and change to do so.

They are also social, and make friends effortlessly and sometimes in the oddest of circumstances. It may be the optimism that they seem to radiate upon first meeting them, although his Capricorn sun sign would dampen that when around those he is closer to.

Sagittarian Ascendants are often unapologetically outspoken and harshly opinionated. They are naturally witty, but can be blunt, or come across as rude when that isn't their intention, and this backfires all too often.

Capricorn and Sagittarius don't have much in common, so they would both conflict. His sun sign would make him more serious and realistic than his ascendant would otherwise allow, and in turn, his ascendant would make him more impulsive and social, as all signs within a person's chart have a great affect on each other. Someone with both will often flick back and forth between positive and negatives. The contrast may also lead him to keep secrets, as his "public mask" and true desires and sense of self are quite different, but in time, these two aspects can make space for each other, and productively blend the heavenly kindness and earthly wisdom that these signs bring.

Again, I won't do his whole chart, but I believe Merlin's chart is one that conflicts in many ways, as he has many things pulling him in many directions. Many times, he struggles to choose between what he knows to be necessary, and what he believes to be right, and I think his chart would reflect that. However, I think that in time and away from the pressure he has always been under, these aspects would blend together in a very beautiful way.

******

To put it very simply, Arthur's a King and he knows it, and Merlin's a mess.

So there we go. Several hours of research and writing to create something that will never be useful to anyone ever, but it was fun to do at least.

I'll do the other type of astrology soon, I have that all decided, it just might take a while to decide how I want to write it. And then actually write it.

[readingsbylibramc]

birth chart reading for @leah-sletzion

hello! welcome to your reading. I’m gonna give you a quick overview of what I’m going to analyze about your natal chart. feel free to ask me anything if something isn’t clear, of course. you’ll find out your dominants’ influence on your persona, your physical appearance, impression on others and the way you approach the world; your ego, identity, the real you; your reactions, your desires, inner emotions; your way of expressing your feelings, your mind and ideas; your desires and approach to love; your energy tank, instincts and temperament; in-depth analysis of each house with their rulers and analysis of heavy aspects; love life + soulmates/karmic partners interpretation; your relationship with your friends; your family life; your approach to career and work in general + possible jobs suggestion; your style, fashion sense analysis; life purpose and past life description; basic transits’ analysis to describe your current mood and, last but not least, your secret skills, how to make the most out of your soul and manifest what you desire based on your birth chart.

🦋 chart shape, dominants

your chart is a splay shape, meaning that your planets are located randomly in different groups in your chart. people with this type of chart are usually very talented at different things. they can focus their attention on different matters, from family, to work, to love. everything is important for you, and you try to live your life to the fullest. you may be particularly talented at things that require action, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical or mental. you may be very good at sports, dancing… or maybe you’re good at leading, you could easily be the boss on your work place. since you’re interested in so many things, you could easily be skilled at all of them to be honest. my advice would be to pick the hobby that is most important for you and care about it more than the others. that’s because people with this chart usually tend to do so many things that they may lack precision. it’s better to give all of yourself to what’s important for you.

your dominant planets are the moon, saturn and mercury. you are a very emotional person, you're quite sensitive and you always try to make people feel safe when they're around you. you're also very responsible and smart, you're very mature and probably have leader qualities, you like being in charge and leading people but not in an oppressive way.

your dominant sign is cancer. you seek emotional security in life. you need to feel grounded, you're most likely extremely cautious about the decisions you make. you're also very sensitive and compassionate of others, even though you could get slightly passive from time to time.

your dominant element is water. you're very intuitive and empathetic, you care a lot about others, and you may seem like a healer to people you know. in fact, you always try to help them if you can, almost in a therapeutic way. you're also very spiritual, and you're attracted to anything related to discovering your higher self and soul purpose.

🌎 ascendant in libra, 0° / 1st decan ruled by venus

you're naturally likeable, you have a particular charm to you that makes everyone drool over you. you're very nice and outgoing, you always try to make others feel at ease. you're very considerate of others' feelings. you strive for fairness and justice, it's the way you approach others and the world. basically, you treat others like they treat you: if they're kind with you, you'll be very sweet. otherwise, you'll turn very sarcastic and harsh, almost cold at a certain point. you're very opinionated, you always feel the need to express your thoughts as you're very proud of them. in addition, since you always decide whether something is right or not, you may come off as a know-it-all. on the other hand, you're very sociable and you enjoy being in company, doesn't matter whether you're with your family, friends, lover etc. you may get to know many people throughout your life, but your friendships may not be much stable. you are surrounded by people, but you could feel lonely particularly often. I also need to point out that libra is ruled by venus, the planet of beauty. you're most likely very attractive and magnetic. even if not necessarily conventionally, people find themselves attracted to you. you may have sparkling doe eyes, with also full lips and a defined cupid's bow. your face is more on the longer side, perhaps you have an heart-shaped face, with high cheekbones and a pointy chin. you may also have naturally amazing, fluffy and flowing hair. your body is also very feminine, with a lot of curves and softness to it. it's very romantic, to sum up. also, your hair is probably naturally beautiful; it could be curly, or at least it's very thick and healthy-looking, even if you don't take much care of it.

libra ascendant opposite aries saturn: you may be shy and have self-esteem issues, especially during your early years. because of that, you may often appear as insecure to others, or even unreliable. you have a strong desire to be with someone and commit to them, you despise supertificial bonds, but at the same time you may find yourself being too shy to approach others, especially during your early years. this may apply more to the younger you, actually. you don't feel much comfortable around other people, and others can sense that; your insecurity is exposed to the world, and some may take advantage of that to hurt your feelings. you're afraid of being judged, whether it's for your appearance, or maybe because of your ideals or interests. hence, you end up becoming reserved. this is something that will be solved through growth and time; the older you get, the easier you'll be on yourself. also, thanks to this aspect, you're a responsible person with defined values. to cope with this placement, I'd suggest you to do what makes you feel the best. there are different ways to boost your self-esteem, so maybe you can work on that and then start expressing yourself freely; if you do it without the fear of being judged, you will shine even more.

🌞sun in cancer, 17° / 2nd decan ruled by the moon and pluto

this is the darkest, most intense cancer decan. you’re very vulnerable and sensitive; you may be a crybaby, as crying is a way to vent your emotions. you may even overreact, and be considered too dramatic. you’re extremely moody; you could be all happy and relaxed with your friends, then suddenly you get sad, or even angry. it’s hard to deal with this, especially because your emotions are quite intense. this could make you argue a lot with your peers. even though it takes you a while to find someone willing to stay, when that moment finally comes you’ll embody cancer’s best trait: that is, you’ll become a ‘mother’ to your friends, lover etc. you have a very nurturing soul, you have a knack for affection and care, and you could even get kind of clingy, even though you may feel limitated to give your love to someone else. cancer is a cardinal sign, hence you may be the one to take initiative, yet you do it undirectly. you’re probably the passive-aggressive type, even though this may be mitigated by your impulsive venus-mars conjunction. you’re most likely also quite patient, even though you don’t forgive easily. once someone tries to take advantage of you, it’s over for them.

cancer sun conjunct cancer mercury: you express your ego and identity through your words and ideas. you’re very opinionated and you protect strongly your beliefs. after all, you probably came up with your ideals after thinking deeply about them, you were too precise to be wrong. you’re also probably an avid reader, and you could do well in writing yourself, as you’re able to properly convey your ideals with your words. also, your heavy libra dominance makes you naturally good at writing poetry, or even romance. your mind is very active, and you feel comfortable letting all your thoughts out. it’s actually a way to relieve stress. you also have a wide vocabulary, and you’re capable of making a formal speech if you have to. you have a memorable way of speaking, as your words are very sharp. it’s hard for you to be ignored for your intellect.

cancer sun opposite capricorn jupiter: this is a hard aspect, which could make you feel even more proud of yourself due to your taurus moon. you may feel like the universe is constantly against you; you may feel unlucky, or even overindulge in things you like to cope with sadness or anger. you may have the tendency to overeat, buy useless things etc. you go from having a low self-esteem, to even looking very bossy without even realizing it. you struggle to keep your identity balanced, even though you might have not been aware of it at first. to achieve fortune and joy in life, you need to work hard for it. to do so, you have to learn your karmic lessons in this lifetime, which probably revolve around family issue and their impact on your interactions with others.

🌙 moon in taurus, 10° / 2nd decan ruled by venus and mercury

the moon is exalted in taurus, so it's definitely a good placement! you're very peaceful, you try to avoid conflicts when you can. taurus' most striking feature is that they crave stability, whether it's financial, in love etc. you must be very stubborn, as taurus is a fixed sign, this placement, paired with your imaginative cancer energy, makes you settle on making your ideas concrete, and it's very beneficial. it makes you capable of achieving any goals in your life. you're also very artsy, and you may fancy particular art styles. you have a good eye for aesthetics, and you care a lot about the looks of your house, body, clothes etc. you have excellent concentration, and that is another thing that helps you achieve your goals and make your ideas concrete. last but not least, you're amazingly patient, and that makes you a great friend. probably, they vent a lot of their worries to you, as you're also a great listener.

🗣 mercury in cancer, 15° / 2nd decan ruled by the moon and pluto

you don't really rely on logic. you're very emotionally intelligent, and you take in consideration others' feelings when you speak. even though you may be impulsive and blunt sometimes, you don't do it with malice at all. you may actually feel guilty after you realize that you've hurt someone. you may be sort of manipulative, as you're very observant of others' behaviours. because of that, you may be extremely good at interacting with others, since you know how to speak to people when you don't let your impulsiveness get over you. you know how to persuade others, even though you may not even realize it. if you manage to balance your moon and your mercury, I think it would give you great social skills. you'd be able to stand up for yourself, while also being mindful and conscious of the effect of your words on others. you may get defensive quite easily, and because of that you may become a bit secretive. that's because, deep down, you feel the need to be understood to fully convey and express your emotions. you want to feel at home with your interlocutor, otherwise you'll just be awkward. on the other hand, you have a nice sense of humor, you're able to light up the room with your jokes. your voice may be a bit high-pitched, almost like a child's, but pretty much very gentle as well.

cancer mercury opposite capricorn jupiter: this placement emphasizes your intellect. your mind is so broad that you can come up with different theories and philosphies, making you a sort of genius. you're probably good at memorizing things, and you could even have a photographic memory. yet, with this aspect, you may have troubles being consistent with your ideas. you may overestimate your needs and thoughts; for example, you may promise yourself to get all As in maths, then you get tired and bored and you end up getting Cs. same goes for your handwriting, for example: you may start writing in the best way possible, then you get lazy and end up writing in a sloppy way just to take notes. you also overthink a lot, and that causes you self-esteem issues. on the other hand, you're very open-minded and objective, as you look at the big picture. you'd do very well as a journalist, for example, or perhaps also as a judge of any kind. you may also be naturally skilled at foreign languages, you can mimic accents pretty well. you're probably also very poetic and / or wise, you're like a teacher for your friends.

cancer mercury square aries saturn: this placement gives you limitations and lessons regarding the way you think and talk. it may be that you’re too shy to approach others and to say what you think, so you just don’t try. otherwise, if you actually take action and try to overcome this problem, you could get into troubles. that’s probably caused by the fact that you don’t really pay attention to your words. you’re quite straight-forward and you may be particularly pessimistic, or maybe you lack confidence in social interactions due to these problems, which could be possibly caused by your parents, or perhaps interfer in your relationship with your family. in fact, you may argue quite often, and misunderstandings are also common. this is something that gets naturally better with time, but in order for it to happen you need to take action. you may for example start speaking more in school, perhaps you could apply for class president. anything that allows you to challenge your mind and voice, in order to make you gain experiences and become a master at it. many celebrities, once they mastered this hard aspect, got loads of success. you can do that too, you just need to work on it.

❤️ venus in gemini, 12° / 2nd decan ruled by mercury and venus

this is the flirtiest, most romantic gemini decan, but also the flakiest and most indecisive. your flirting style most probably includes jokes, teasing… stuff like that. even though you may seem flaky, as you like experiencing romance with different types of people, you’re actually quite picky. in fact, in order to fall for someone, you need to feel mentally attracted to them, not just physically. someone ignorant and stubborn that doesn’t care about learning something most definitely isn’t for you. you’re not the type to be super romantic and sweet with your partner or just people in general. you show your affection for example by sending them memes, making ironic jokes about them etc. also, when you’re into someone, you probably get very talkative! you start asking them simple questions about their life, even things like 'did you have lunch?’. also, you talk about them with all of your friends, and you find yourself thinking costantly about them. you’re very curious of nature, but you’re only interested in getting to know what catches your eye.

gemini venus conjunct gemini mars: you are very serious when it comes to love. you seek intense, long-lasting relationships, filled with both romance and passion. ironically, you tend to attract people that are the opposite, who are only looking for fun and casual romance. that could afflict your self-worth significantly, as you feel unlucky in love. this is also another placement that indicates that one of your parents, probably your father, or still anyone of the opposite sex probably influenced your approach to romance and sex. there are different scenarios I have in mind, but I'll talk about it later in the family life section.

☄️ mars in gemini, 19° / 2nd decan ruled by mercury and venus

you’re driven by the sense of intelligence. your intellect is your greatest strenght, it’s your energy tank. you’re interested in a bunch of things, and hence you may have troubles staying focused on one thing at the time. you probably have tons of hobbies, and you may end up not being much precise since you have tons of things that you have and want to do. you can’t stand boredom, you need your day-to-day life to be exciting and, above all, offer you something new to learn and / or experience. you probably fancy being very active: you go out often, you workout, you may also be the type to love partying and things like that. you’re extremely witty and curious, and you want to live your life to the fullest. you may often change your style, your opinions, maybe even your personality, and that could make you seem confusing and / or unreliable.

🏡 houses

your 1st house is in libra. you always try to be kind and friendly with people you don't know; you most likely don’t like conflicts, you prefer avoiding them. you probably care a lot about your appearance, and because of that you could get insecure from time to time. usually, people with libra in their 1st house look for themselves in others, as their chart is basically upside down. the ruler of the 1st house is in the 9th house: you may come off as a very approachable and easy-going person! possibly, people could mistake you for a foreigner, it could be that you have certain characteristics of your appearance that make you look more 'exotic' or just foreign in general.

your 2nd house is in libra. you find beauty and aesthetic in material things; you most probably love clothes, art, music… anything that isn’t exactly a priority in life, but that allows you to express your personal taste, which is very refined. with this placement I’d suggest that you should pursue a career that allows you to express your creativity, as arts and beauty allow you not only to make money, but also to increase your security and confidence. you could also spend money in venusian things like clothes, make-up, decorations and anything that involves beauty and aesthetic. the ruler of the 2nd house is in the 9th house: you may earn money through foreign cultures and languages, hence you could be particularly skilled at them. you may work in a multinational agency, or perhaps as an interpreter or translator. you could also earn through teaching or travelling, so perhaps you may have to move constantly for your job.

your 3rd house is in scorpio. you probably love witty jokes and sarcasm. you’re extremely honest when you think and speak, and most of the times you have no problems expressing your opinions. you could possibly be very good with words and be good at convincing and manipulating others. usually this placement makes someone kind of mischievous when it comes to words, but I think that with all the venus influence in your chart and your well-aspected mercury, you’re able to control this in order not to hurt others. your mind is very deep, you’re probably not really into small talks. you may also love anything that is considered taboo, like astrology, horror, nudity, death… you’re also quite secretive, you’re seen as an enigma. you don’t want to share much about you. last but not least, you value honesty above all. you only speak the truth, and hence you also want it back. you may as well be into conspiracy theories, science and anything that can expose what’s behind the universe, the government etc.

your 4th house is in capricorn, with also your jupiter and neptune placed in this house. I can tell that your childhood was quite complex. not necessarily bad, I don't see any kind of trauma, but you probably had to grow up way sooner than other kids. your parents could have been very hard-working and focused on their jobs, possibly wealthy too. they were very responsible and cared a lot about you, they always made sure you had everything you needed, even though they could have been slightly absent from time to time due to their jobs. people with a capricorn ic usually find something missing in their childhood, they had to deal with responsibilities from a young age. it could even be that you started working when you were still a teen, or maybe you had to take care of the house or of your siblings for them. you weren’t much extroverted, you preferred staying in, drawing, playing games etc. it could also be that one of your parents may be absent; they could be divorced, or in the worst case they might have died when you were pretty young. on the other hand, it could be that you have a complex cultural background to you, perhaps someone from your family is foreign. you might have travelled a lot during your childhood, and you got to make lots of experiences.

your 5th house is in aquarius. you’re extremely creative, your ideas are very innovative, and you may have particular hobbies, interests or taste than others. when you’re able to fully express yourself, you gain full security and you start experimenting and inventing new things. you could be the type to start new fashion trends, music styles, art styles… basically, you’re a creative genius. your hobbies may also involve astrology, as well as human studies like psychology, or also anything that has to do with technology. you may be into videogames for example, tv series, social media… they’re your way to spend your free-time and relax. your relationships may also be very unconventional; you could usually date people online, or perhaps you may have the potential to meet someone through dating apps. they’re quite unstable, they may end out of the blue for example. you may also dedicate yourself to fashion, art, music, etc., anything that stimulates your creativity.

your 6th house is in pisces. in your daily life, you hardly ever have a structured schedule. you go with the flow, you take things as they come. you may often have your head in the clouds, you could get distracted easily and you may literally creative oscar-worthy movies in your head instead of doing what you need to do. your job may involve arts, images, possibly even fame. you should definitely use your creative talents for your possible career. also, you could benefit from helping others; you could be a psychologist or therapist of any kind, a nurse… any place where you’re able to help others. again, you could also help others through your art, hence with your lyrics, books, etc. when it comes to diets, workout routines, skincare routines etc. you could lack consistency, even though your libra energy makes you more motivated to take care of your appearance. you may sleep a lot, it’s easy for you to feel tired and stressed even when you’re not over-working yourself.

your 7th house is in aries, with also saturn conjunct the descendant. love is most likely not your priority in life. you need independence, and you’re able to stand up for yourself on your own. you don’t need someone else to help you. you tend to attract partners in your life that are hot-headed, stubborn, assertive and goal-oriented. they strive to be the best at everything they do, they’re extremely competitive and willing to do anything to achieve their goals. basically, you attract very dominant partners, but you don’t want to be dominated or controlled. you may often experience power struggles between you and your partner, which cause you issues in every relationship you get in. at the same time, you wouldn’t stand someone too submissive either, as you still need someone that would mentally stimulate you. they may actually be quite selfish and self-centered, they’ll care more about their own development rather than that of you two as a couple. an aries 7th house indicates that while you’ll have a very active, passionate spouse, you may also experience lots of arguments and discussions in your marriage life, perhaps even physical violence. saturn here makes things a little bit complicated, though; you’re probably attracted to partners that are older than you, or at least that are very mature. there is a lot of karma surrounding your relationships; a few unsolved issues from past lives may make them challenging. I feel like you probably don’t really date anyone. I assume that you dream of finding your true love, but at the same time you’re also extremely picky with who you date, you have high standards. even though it looks like the safest way, you should actually try to solve these issues. some hardships may arise, but what matters the most is that you learn from them. don’t be afraid to date people, and above all don’t expect every relationship to be good. it’s also recommended to get married after your saturn return with this placement, hence after your 27/28 years.

your 8th house is in aries, with also your moon placed there. generally, people with aries in their 8th house are very confident when it comes to taboo topics; they have no problems showing their interest in them, especially with people they're intimate with. you may also be particularly sensitive to or even tame physical pain. you constantly try to improve yourself by coming up with new projects, you love challenges. they help you growing up into the person you want to become. you may come across some hardships regarding yourself, your identity. but, when you face those fears and start loving yourself, you’ll naturally become more mature and 'transform’. last but not least, this placement can also indicate that you're going to have a painful death. the moon here takes on scorpio qualities; as a result, you’re way more secretive and cautious than most libra people. you tend to preserve yourself, even though it’s hard for you to repress your emotions, as they’re too to intense to bottle them up. you absorb people’s feelings like a sponge, there’s no way that you won’t instantly understand their real emotions. overall, you tend to overreact a lot; you have cancer's sensitive energy on one side and scorpio’s mysterious, almost scary vibe. dealing with these emotional burnouts may be stressing to you, as you totally get caught up in them. even if it looks like you get to know other people often, you actually don’t let others know you. you’re the type of person to talk and socialize, especially after your saturn return, but you never reveal your deepest fears and thoughts to strangers. you only open up to people you’re sure you can trust. when you’re angry, you can literally go as far as using violence; you need to let out your emotions by screaming, swearing… anything that can make you feel better. there’s a secret, sensitive side in you that needs passionate and romantic partners in love. yet, you can’t help but feel more attracted to the ones that may hurt you badly. you’re possibly quite sensitive to higher entities too, like ghosts, spirits and stuff like that.

your 9th house is in taurus, with also your venus and mars sitting there. with this placement, I feel like you may use your intellect to gain financial security and material possessions. while this is a good thing, as it helps increasing your confidence, don’t forget that your intellect is more important than money or any other thing. don’t underestimate it. you’re totally capable of learning and understanding things by yourself, hence don’t wait for others for help. you should start dealing with your own experiences alone, without anybody else’s help. this placement can also be someone a little close-minded; in fact, you're probably very stubborn and firm about your beliefs. you hardly ever allow others to change your mind. with venus here you may be the type that likes making new experiences regarding love, and you often date your crushes. yet, you feel too limited in a relationship. you don't enjoy committing to someone if that someone isn't perfect for you, you're only completely loyal to the one you consider your true love. you can't give up your freedom, your thirst for adventure and experiences for someone else. basically, your ideal partner would be a risk-taker, someone loyal but not too clingy. you may also find yourself being attracted to unavailable people; that is, you could fall for people that are already taken, or maybe they're physically unavailable, e.g they live abroad or in another city in general. you're also attracted to foreigners, and people that have a wise, yet bubbly aura around them. mars here indicates that you hate lies of any kind, you want sincerity from those around you and you're the first to be constantly honest. you value your freedom a lot, your life motto is most likely 'live and let live'. you think everyone should live their lives by their own standards, without feeling afraid of being judged or criticized. you're a very pure and genuine person, you hardly ever judge a book by its cover, and you're also extremely open-minded. you're thirsty for knowledge of any kind, you're always up to learn something new. you may also be interested in foreign languages and cultures, as well as philosophy, literature... anything that can teach you something new about the world.

your 10th house is in cancer, with also your sun and mercury here. your career needs to be private. that doesn’t mean that you can’t become famous of course, but you prefer being more hidden at job, you may even work from home or from a young age. many celebrities with this placement, in fact, started working when they were still young. also, cancer indicates that your future job will give you the opportunity to express and / or deal with your / others’ feelings and emotions, and considering that mercury is also in this house I can see you working in the communication field. you could become a writer, a singer, an actress, as well as a nurse, a therapist… anything that allows you to express your emotions while also communicating something is suitable for you. you could possibly also choose the same career as your parents, or you may handle the family’s business for example. you could also end up doing the job of your childhood dreams. you feel the need to pursue a meaningful career in your life, you want to feel emotionally connected to it. you don’t only want something that allows you to earn money, you also want to gain wisdom and maturity from a job, and hence you could even be a bit picky in choosing your future career.

your 11th house is in leo, with also your mars placed there. with this placement, you’re probably very popular among your friends, you’re most likely the most talkative or funniest member of your group. you may also attract very popular people yourself in your friendships, perhaps even celebrities. possibly, you could even make friends that allow you to gain recognition and / or popularity, doesn’t matter whether it’s in school, job, etc. you could also have very big dreams for your future, probably regarding your career and finances. you most likely aspire to be wealthy and financially independent, you are very hard-working and possibly even a bit materialistic. the ruler of the 11th house is in the 10th house: you may make lots of friends thanks to your job, or perhaps you're going to start a business with your friends. you may also achieve your biggest dreams through your career, as they probably revolve around finances.

your 12th house is in virgo. this is another placement that indicates that you are an amazing writer! in fact, the 12th house is about secret skills too, and virgo is ruled by mercury, the planet of communication. you do the math. with this placement, though, I feel like you may feel restricted from pursuing your goals, or even a career in the public eye, as you’re quite sensitive to others’ criticism about you. you strive to be perfect all the time, and your libra rising wants to constantly have a nice reputation. a scandal, or even simple haters, would probably be the end of you.

❤️ love life, soulmates

in love you attract aries, aquarius, capricorn and cancer placements. your future spouse will most likely have aries and cancer traits placements; they’ll be very impulsive, creative, bold and confident, but also with a warm heart and a hidden insecurity to them. it could be love at first sight, and you may meet them abroad; you could meet them on a vacation, or perhaps they travel to your city. they could also be foreign, bilingual or have a different cultural background from yours. your children will have strong aquarius placements; they’ll be very dreamy, they’ll have big goals for their life, and they’ll also be extremely intelligent and creative as well.

👶🏻 family life

your father is probably a very caring person that knows how to stand up for himself when he has to, but he may struggle to do that. he’s very smart, caring and empathetic, even though he may be a bit childish at times. he could have cancer placements in his chart, possibly virgo, gemini and leo too. your mother, on the other hand, is a bit more serious and focused on work, but she always made sure you always had what you needed. she was probably the strict parent in the family, but she still has some sweetness and nice humor to her. also, she may have capricorn, aquarius, sagittarius or pisces placements in her chart. if you have siblings, they most likely have scorpio placements in their chart; you’re able to both relax and have fun together, even though you may discuss often. you could have been very jealous of each other when you were kids, maybe. you have a very intense relationship, but you surely learn a lot from each other.

📊 career

as I've already mentioned above, you're going to pursue a career that will allow you to interact with others. you would probably do amazing at a job that requires you to help people, you could make a great nurse or psychologist for instance. you may also work as a teacher of any kind, not necessarily a professor or school teacher. you could also work with children or for family, as a counselor for example. anything that allows you to interact with and help others would be great for you, as it would make you more empathetic and sensitive to the external world. last but not least, you may also work in a place related to food or money, such as a restaurant or even a bank as notary for instance, even though I see you pursuing a more creative, emotional career.

👕 fashion sense, style analysis

I imagine you put a lot of effort into your outifts, yet you don’t show it. you want to look effortlessly good, you don’t want to give the impression that you tried. your style may be quite minimalistic and simple, with lots of jeans, sweatshirts, plain t-shirts… I see you being more into natural shades, like white, grey, beige etc. you’re also not very fond of using too many accessories, you’re stylish but still very simple. you have this natural charm to you, hence you still look good even though your outfits may not be too complex.

👁 past life, life purpose

in your past life, the focus was on your relationships with others. maybe, you had troubles with self-esteem and identity in general and you used to depend on others. you had to work hard and finally understand how to build healthy relationships with others to fulfill your past life purpose. hence, this lifetime your focus will be yourself. even though at first you might feel quite insecure, especially due to saturn being opposite your ascendant, this lifetime you're here to develop this matter. after all, saturn will give you many lessons in order to transform yourself and grow into a better person.

🤔 major transits analysis / may 10

the sun is currently transiting your taurus 8th house, exactly conjunct your moon. you could be feeling very needy lately, but very sensitive as well. you want to be with people, maybe with your loved ones, you feel like you need a lot of care and attention and as a result you're literally craving human interactions. you may get angry or disappointed easily though, as you could be quite impulsive as well, so beware of that. jupiter, on the other hand, is in your 5th house; you may be lacking discipline in these days, perhaps you tend to procrastinate as you feel quite tired and you have to relax. of course it's ok to take some time for yourself, but remember to be responsible as well; hard work pays off.

🧿 manifest what you want, secret skills

your secret skills revolve around finances and just security in general. with a positive attitude, you may attract material luck: money, clothes, houses… everything that you desire. since you’re a logical person, I assume the most efficient way for you to manifest through the LOA is writing! take a notebook and just write down positive affirmations, such as 'I have the car of my dreams’ etc. you may also write them on post-its and glue them around your house, so that you can accelerate the progress. you can also try to idealize your wish before trying to manifest it. for example, if you want a new sweatshirt, try to imagine yourself wearing it. you could also go into a shop and actually try that sweatshirt it on; being in contact with it will boost the law of attraction even more.

and this is it! thank you again for booking a reading, hope it resonated with you :)

[marcmyworks]

Ranking the albums of Björk

Today I will be ranking the albums of the fantabulous and wonderful Björk. She has been an influence on me ever since I first heard “It’s Oh So Quiet” back in 1995 and since I have been following her career extensively. Although her later albums are a bit less accessible commercially to her early work, I don’t believe she has released a bad album. I will be charting her work starting with her first solo album in 1993, and not including her work with Icelandic Punk-Pop group the Sugarcubes. I also will not be including her soundtrack to the film ‘Drawing Restraint 9’, as this was mostly instrumental.

10. Volta (2007)

Volta seemed like Björk’s attempt to gain radio play again after having an experimental phase working with her ex-partner/filmmaker Matthew Barney. The album’s first two singles, “Earth Intruders” and “Innocence” were both produced by hip-hop giants Timbaland and his protégé Danja and featured a very electronic dance aesthetic. Though the album did quite well critically and is packaged beautifully, it does not feel cohesive or really as forward thinking as most of her work. Also, the Mark Stent remixes of each single, released separately, seem to outshine the album versions.

Listen to: Earth Intruders, Declare Independence, Wanderlust, Innocence.

9. Utopia (2019)

Most Björk fans find this album to be a triumph but I currently still cannot enter the world of Utopia or find it interesting enough to warrant repeat listens. The album is her lengthiest (at over 70 minutes) and is a mixture of folk, electronic and studies more ethereal themes. Björk works with the brilliant producer Arca to help shape the landscape of each song, and at times it really works, but overall it feels overly long, and almost like a Björk parody.

Listen to: Arisen My Senses, The Gate, Sue Me, Saint

8. Biophilia (2011)

A concept album that deals with nature meeting technology. Each track is tuned to a different note on a tuning fork and sets of these tuning forks were even released as exclusive boxsets. Overall the album is well conceived and produced but does suffer from being a bit ‘samey same’, as some of the tracks blend together. I did see a concert on the three year tour for the album and I was incredibly impressed with how she was able to translate the sound live.

Listen to: Mutual Core, Crystalline, Thunderbolt, Moon

7. Selmasongs (2000)

This is the first soundtrack album conceived by Björk and contains the songs written for the film Dancer in the Dark. The film is a wonderful and sad story of an immigrant woman named Selma who is going blind, and who makes her days brighter by conceiving there is a musical happening when things seem to go wrong. The songs are quite good but not her strongest, though this may have been due to her tight time constraints and working with an orchestra.

Listen to: Cvalda, Scatterheart, 107 Steps, Overture

6. Debut (1993)

Björk’s first album post-Sugarcubes is a trip-hop masterpiece that not only launched her career but also brought London’s underground dance scene to the mainstream. This was thanks to producer Nellee Hooper who had previously won Grammy Awards working with Soul II Soul and Sinead O’Connor. Five singles were released from this album (four initially, and one on the re-issue) and all charted on the UK singles chart, with the album selling around 4.5 million copies Worldwide.

Listen to: There’s More to Life Than This, Venus as a Boy, Violently Happy, Human Behaviour, One Day

5. Vulnicura (2015)

Vulnicura in my opinion is probably the first album in Björk’s career where there were no radio-friendly tracks but rather a continuation of her wanting to push the experimentation of song constructs. Rather than release singles to promote the album Björk decided to create innovative music videos which tested new technology, such as 360-degree cameras. This later lead to a virtual reality exhibit entitled “Björk Digital” which went on an 18-month tour around the World. I still kick myself for missing it. Each song is produced by either her now long-time collaborator Arca (whom she met on her Biophilia Tour) or new collaborator The Haxon Cloak.

Listen to: Lionsong, Stonemilker, Family, Notget, Mouth Mantra

4. Medúlla (2004)

Being asked to write the theme for the 2004 Summer Olympics is an honour, but also to have its musical themes continue onto a full-length album is superb. Björk started writing Medúlla as “The Lake Album” in which she would strip all instrumentals from tracks and simply focus on voices. As she called it, a “very introverted” album and the title changed to the latin word for bone marrow, as it is the base building block of a person. Though some of the tracks do contain some synthesizers, 95% of the album’s beats and rhythms are made by mixing the voices of throat singers, beatboxers and choirs.

Listen to: Oceania, Where is the Line, Pleasure is All Mine, Sonnets/Unrealities XI, Triumph of a Heart

3. Vespertine (2001)

It took me a few years to get into this record as Vespertine was so far and beyond what anything Björk had created. I was used to the incredible experimental electronic sound on first three albums that when I listened to #4, which contains mostly micro-beats and soft vocals, and not to mention the infamous swan dress on the cover, it was a bit of a shock. Björk felt the energy of her 1997 release Homogenic was very masculine and aggressive and she wanted her new album to sound more feminine and explored her mindset during the filming of Dancer in the Dark as well as her relationship with Matthew Barney. I always felt Vespertine was a winter album as it feels quite Nordic in its soundscape. I’m glad I kept listening as it turned out to be one of my favourites. 

Listen to: Harm of Will, Pagan Poetry, Hidden Place, It’s Not Up to You, An Echo A Stain

2. Homogenic (1997)

Wowser, already at number 2. I remember the first time I heard this record with my friends; they would think it too strange though I would think it magical. It became one of my most listened to records of my teens. Its glamorous and punk and the artwork is extreme. Björk’s album look was envisioned and created by genius designer Alexander McQueen, who would be her frequent collaborator until his death in 2010. Homogenic was produced by Howie B and Mark Bell, and Björk wrote the album as a tribute to Iceland, wanting the songs to create the landscape of her homeland. The album released five singles, three which would enter the UK top 40. 

Listen to: The whole thing.

1. Post (1995)

Post is probably one of my top 10 favourite albums of all time. I could listen to it over and over again on repeat without being bored. The year 1995 was big for me in terms of musical discovery. I was 13 around the time I started buying my own cassette tapes and CDs. My Aunt came home from a business trip in London and brought back this CD. “It’s Oh So Quiet” was a massive hit in the UK and she wanted my brother, my cousins and I to hear this unusual and brilliant artist. The next year the Mission: Impossible film would come out and the song “Headphones” was featured, to which Björk sings to a friend about the feelings she has listening to his mixtape. I in tow would listen to that song every night on my Walkman before I fell asleep as it was a perfect way to end each day. Post was incredibly influential to me and to this day is a staple in my life. I can’t thank Björk enough for creating this iconic piece of music history.

Listen to: The whole thing.

Please, if you are so inclined to let me know in the comments how you’d rank Björk’s albums.

[smuttymess]

bts astro soulmate reading | for anon

sign: libra sun | aries moon | libra rising

lover: Min Yoongi | soulmate: Jung Hoseok

This reading is for my cute anon moot. Honestly this one was tough because your chart is quite unique, but I am really happy with how it turned out - I fuckin snapped on this one. I hope you enjoy & it feeds your inner delulu ;)

A sun in Libra means that your soul craves balance, harmony and peace in your life and your relationships. Due to your caring, optimistic, and encouraging nature you happily boast a large circle of friends and acquaintances who adore you. Generally, you are known as a king person who people can rely on for a vent sesh or some good advice in a pinch. Upholding your integrity and high position in these interpersonal relationships is one of your highest priorities, as you want to maintain the persona you’ve established at all costs. Above all, you want to be respected and loved by those who you are close to and even sometimes those you are not, fearing unsteadiness and turbulence in terms of your image. If your sun sign represents what you want, you moon sign represents what you need. And you, Aries moon, needs fire, excitement, stimulation, and adventure. Your Aries nature is at odds with kind, harmonious Libra, wanting to disrupt, rebel and shake things up. This creates quite an interesting contradiction within your truest self, which desires both balance, security and stability but also independence and unpredictability - a dilemma that you may struggle to find peace with throughout your life.

Charming, attractive and strong, it is likely that you have your share of admirers. You can’t help it (you flirt as easily as you breathe!) plus your slightly mischievous demeanor only makes you more alluring to those you meet. This works out for you nicely, as given your Libra nature you love nothing more than to be adored romantically. One of the most passionate signs in the zodiac, it’s not unlike you to be involved in many romantic relationships, falling in love easily and unabashedly with a variety of people who come into your life. While one day you may envision an a home and a more stable life (your Libra heart at work) that thought can feel somewhat foreign when there are just so many people, places and things to explore.

Your adventurous spirit and joie de vivre makes you the life of the party, the one people call for a good conversation or a night of debauchery. It is not uncommon for your friends to entrust you with scoping out the next opportunity to get into a little trouble, knowing you will find the best option. While your Libra is happy to have a wild night out, your Aries moon usually wants to up the ante - why go to a regular old bar when you could go to a secret, underground lounge that boasts go-go dancers and fire eaters. It is at one of these events, a lavish multi-course dinner at a downtown music venue to kick off a long, eventful night, that your attention is drawn to the stage for the night's entertainment. From the minute you lay your eyes on the performer on stage, his hands gripping the microphone as his piano accompaniment dances through the air, you are fully entranced by the artist. Your Aries moon makes you much more decisive than others who share your sign, and you decide quite quickly that this boy with the black hair and broody mannerisms is what you need. Soon after leaving the stage, you make a flimsy excuse to get his attention, sauntering up to him and immediately making yourself known - his dark, slightly glossy eyes penetrating every inch of you as he introduces himself as Min Yoongi. There is a strong physical attraction here, and when he asks what you're up to after the show, you have no choice but to invite him along to the next spot.

In the hours, days and weeks that follow in getting to know Yoongi, you learn more about the beautiful soul that lies beneath the very strong, masculine persona that owns the stage. As air and water signs, you two connect quickly - fucking after a couple rounds of whiskey back at his place - after which you spend hours tapping into the mind of the soft and creative Min PD. Yoongi is a true Pisces, his caring, romantic and sentimental nature clear very early as he sits back and enjoys simply basking in your company, letting you open up and taking you in as your eyes light up, energetically moving from thought to thought (as you are ought to do). His dreamy, patient and sensitive quality is heightened by his Neptune in Capricorn, providing a softness that makes you fall hard and fast. He is drawn to your demonstrated strength, his more reserved, thinking Virgo Moon latching on to your confident, optimistic Libra Aries duality.  He possess a graceful, calm quality from his Libra Jupiter that you deeply admire, as it is something you seek within yourself. You are both generous, peace-loving people, finding comfort in each other's propensity for pleasing each other. This extends into your sex life as well, which is equal parts passionate and intense.

You and Yoongi are both wired for pleasure and togetherness, and as a duo you are able to satisfy both of these desires, devoting countless hours to daydreaming, cuddling and fucking in his studio or at home. You two enjoy switching up power-play dynamics, you straddling him and pinning his hands to the bed while gently marking his neck to release moans from his lips before he uses his strength to flip you over and return the favor. Your sexual compatibility is not to be understated, the passion both of you possess being some of the most powerful in the zodiac.The concept of time ceases to exist when you find yourself intertwined with Yoongi, his hardness pressed into your center as he grinds against you, his lips expertly tracing your ear, and neck before moving to your breasts to tease your nipples until you're practically falling apart. For however soft and gentle Yoongi is, there is nothing that turns him into an animal quicker than hearing you beg underneath him as his fingers trace lower, slipping in between your thighs and onto your clit. He craves this level of intimacy with you, the moment you melt and truly become his. Say my name baby, I want to hear you.

It is only after months of amazing sex and pillow talk with this dreamy duo that he differences between you become very stark. Yoongi is a diehard romantic at the core, often making decisions in love that are more emotion-based - the main reason why he keeps his Pisces Sun and Mercury quite guarded. You, on the other hand, tend to be wary of commitment and tend to keep things casual and light, your Aries moon wanting freedom and autonomy. This scares Yoongi, who is quite willing to be loyal to the right person and wonders if he can really be enough for your highly sociable and outgoing Libra spirit. This is heightened by your strong need to be around people, receiving stimulation from the outside world, fueling his increased neediness (his Venus in Aries) that eventually transforms into resentment as he cannot see a future wherein you are ready to give it all up just for him. Ultimately, this relationship unable to move past a very intense friends-with-benefits scenario given your places in life, and you both need ample space to heal your wounds after going your separate ways - though you are not alone for long.

A double Libra, the way you present yourself - poised, polished, and elegant - and how you want to be perceived are very much in sync. You exude luxury, and and while your fashions may not be the loudest or most expensive in the room, you know how to make an impression even in a room filled with trendy, designer-clad fashion types. On a particular night out at a gallery opening, dressed in one of your newest thrifted and expertly styled pieces, you find yourself approached by a handsome stranger. Great find. Where did you get that that? Turning around, you are surprised by man who the voice belongs to - a tall, slender gentlemen dressed head to toe in contrasting prints: an asymmetrical color-blocked striped sweater and denim cutoffs paired with orange slides and a green beanie. His look is unusual, something that just anyone could pull off, but it striking nature of his posture and his face that truly has you staring. His hair parted to the side, you're able to take in the full visual of the man: his piercing dark brown eyes, sharp nose and defined jawline. After some light conversation, he offers to grab a drink sometime, which is less of a request than a demand as before you know it he hands you his card, the length of his fingers brushing yours and sending chills up your spine. He flashes you a devilish smirk before exiting the exhibit almost as swiftly as he arrived, prompting you to exhale as you begin to feel the ground beneath you once more.

In the early stages of dating, you two are both delightfully hard to get, the ego of his Aquarius Sun exhilarated by the chase and you turned on by the charming elusiveness of his personality - classic Air sign energy at play. Initially, see each other as enigmas, as things to be explored and conquered. You soon realize that his emotional detachment is merely a facade, a way to protect his fierce independence and ensure he does not get hurt again - something you can relate to quite well. Aquarius Hobi is highly perceptive, quickly able to put a finger on the pulse of who you are and what you want, seeing past your gentle, calm persona and tapping into that very restless, energized and mischievous Aries that beneath the surface of your do-gooder Libra. Initially, what starts as a more physical relationship and attraction to each other's complexity blooms into something much deeper and more profound as you get to learn each others shared insecurities and powerful internal worlds that are constantly thinking and reaching for new challenges. While you typically want to be fawned over and doted on, you enjoy diving beneath his into his independent, strong-willed and no-nonsense exterior (hello director Hobi) and accessing his softer sides - something very few people can do - through intellectual communication and shared experiences in your various social groups. Though slow to commit emotionally, once you are able to tap into his Venus in Pisces, you get to unearth the beauty of his dreamy, playful, sweet and adoring persona, which is in endless supply once he feels that he can trust his heart with your compassionate Libra soul.

By the time you find yourself naked in Hoseok's room for the first time, you are keenly aware that your physical relationship together is a space wherein you will surrender in ways you haven't been able to with anyone else. You in your Libra/Aries combo you possess both masculine and feminine features and an ability to both disarm and enchant but also dominate, but in bed it is Hoseok who more often than not holds the keys to your pleasure. His Aquarius ways makes him one of the least conventional and spontaneous partners in the zodiac, and this paired with his intense and impulsive Jupiter in Scorpio makes him an extremely passionate and engaging lover. He instinctively knows where to touch you to send you over the edge, having an awareness of your body that is almost unnerving - his ego loves knowing he has that control and you enjoy his slight posessiveness, enjoying role play during your regular nights out on the town. There are few things sexier to you than watching his eyes peering over his glass from across a room as he watches you so casually flirt with strangers, his gaze moving from your lips down over the curves accentuated by your outfit fo choice, knowing full well that the same outfit will be ruined within seconds of getting home. Your Aries moon is exhilarated when paired with the inventive Aquarius, who does not even think about fucking you until you've achieved your third consecutive orgasm by his fingers and tongue in the backseat of the car on your way home, you legs draped over his shoulders as he purrs into your folds. It isn't until after he feels satisfied that he unbuckles his pants and thrusts into you vigoursly, hitting your walls as his low voice coos into your ear. Are you thinking about him, baby? You know damn well only I can fuck you like this. Now be a good girl and tell me who you belong to - don't be shy now.

You and Hoseok are like-minded, airy souls, and together you are an extremely sociable and likable pair that enjoys life’s many pleasures and pushing the boundaries of the status quo. You work well as unit to achieve your individual goals, affording each other the delicate balance of freedom and togetherness your signs both truly need in a partnership but few others are able to provide, effectively eliminating the desire to stray. At the end of a long day of independent endeavors, you are both able to come home to each other and keep the fire burning in creative ways - think candlelit nights at home in with a personal chef followed by Hobi tying your wrists up and enjoying you for dessert. Your inner worlds compliment each other: the boundless encouragement of your double Libra serves as a healing tool for his relentless perfectionist and self-critical nature, while his dedication to excellence helps push you away from your indecision and people-pleasing ways and towards your goals. Given your shared taste for novelty and tendency to break from convention, you two may decide to push a traditional life of marriage and family to the back burner for many years, choosing to dedicate your lives to your work and each other as you continue to build, learn, and experience the world around you on your own terms. Together, you create a minimalistic home that serves as a base for you to quickly touch down and recharge before stamping your passport en route to your next delightful adventure.

[obscure-sentimentalist]

Part 2: Categorizing Works within AO3 Tag

[Part 1]

Introduction

While there’s plenty of data to be found when looking at the Flommy AO3 tag as a whole, given that this is a fairly rare-pair, the composition of the tag is worth getting into. How much of the tag actually focuses on this ship? Into what other categories can works be broken based on other relationship tagging? Are there particular trends over time that may vary depending on the category? 

Let’s break the data from Part 1 into some smaller pieces, and zoom in for a closer look.

Methodology

The dataset and primary measures overviewed in the Part 1 Methodology still apply with this installment, but we’re going to expand on the Additional Relationships measure and break it into the following five Work Category subcategories:

Flommy Only

Tommy/Felicity is the only romantically-tagged (/) relationship on the work

Other platonic/familial (&) relationships may still be featured and tagged 

[Non-O/F] Flommy w/ other pairings

There are other romantically-tagged pairings besides Flommy, but Oliver/Felicity is not one of them

Flommy may be the focus pairing/share equal spotlight with another, or may only be a side/referenced pairing with another as the main ship--this difference is not taken into account; categorization is solely based on relationship tagging

[Compilation] Flommy w/ O/F

Works that are tagged for both Flommy and O/F, but are intended as collections of prompts, unrelated ficlets, etc. posted as a single work 

Pairing may vary by individual entry in work

[Smoaking Billionaires] Flommy w/ O/F

Both Flommy and O/F are tagged, and work is inclusive of some indication that the focus pairing is an OT3 (i.e. remaining individual pairings of the ship are tagged, “Smoaking Billionaires” and/or “OT3″ are included in additional tagging, etc.)

Clear distinction that work is meant to depict a three-person ship rather than a love triangle

[Other] Flommy w/ O/F

Both Flommy and O/F are tagged, but work does not fit in any of the above categories

Works may have platonic/familial (&) relationships incorrectly tagged as romantic (/), love triangles that resolve with one particular endgame pairing that is not the OT3, are otherwise unclear, etc.--this difference is not taken into account; categorization is solely based on relationship tagging

As noted under particular categories, further subcategories are possible, but in the end were not factored into this research. Additional narrowing would require deeper examination of works and would be more subject to researcher bias, so the more objective relationship tagging-based approach seemed like the best fit.

Share of Works by Work Category

Let’s see the composition of the Flommy tag when broken down into our five subcategories:

Ooh, yeah, no contest there. That’s a 59% majority share for [Smoaking Billionaires]. The OT3 rules over the tag.

In (a really not close at all) second, we have our sole-ship Flommy Only category! I was actually pleasantly surprised by this, as I had anticipated that the tag would be largely comprised of works that fall in the [Other] category. Granted, that one does come in a close third to Flommy Only, but still.

Publish Year

I pulled this one together in a few different ways, flipping the axes and changing the chart type, but I felt the measure is best shown this way:

Well, we can now see that the spikes in 2016 and 2017 from Part 1′s yearly analysis were almost singlehandedly driven by [Smoaking Billionaires]. This category has the clearest shape in terms of trend, forming a sort of bell curve as more and more works are published from 2013-2016, stay fairly level between 2016 and 2017 while rounding the hill, and then zoom down into a continuing decrease from 2018-onwards. Our other categories have more unique patterns of increases/decreases, with various spikes and dips.

Interestingly enough, most categories have a different Publish Year high point than the others. For the Flommy Only crowd, 2015 was The Year to be publishing works focused solely on this ship. (Interestingly enough, this puts us in the later season 3/beginning of season 4 timeframe, and from my own personal experience I feel that there are a few more things that timing could tell us, but we’re not going to get into that.) On the other hand, the [Non-O/F] category experienced its spike in 2017, while both [Compilation] and [Other] had their highest publish counts in 2014, but with varying significance in YOY change.

What’s more, this breakdown shows that, even though the tag overall has had fewer works published in 2020 so far than in 2019, some individual categories have actually seen growth. [Non-O/F] saw its first new works published in 2020 after a net total of zero in 2019, and there was a slight uptick for [Other] . But once again, Flommy Only shows the most notable growth and work count, and can only continue to rise!

Some other Publish Year Fun Facts:

Really, 2015 was a good year for both the Flommy Only and [Smoaking Billionaires] categories. The only two to show any increase over 2014, Flommy Only had a YOY variance of 57%, while [Smoaking Billionaires] enjoyed a nice 286% increase. (That’s even more than the change in 2016, one of its peak years--YOY increase there was 196%.)

Rating

I also had a couple different ways to lay this one out, but given the abundance of [Smoaking Billionaires] works, sometimes the results for the other categories were hard to see. Let’s take a look at the share of Rating by each individual category:

Keeping with what we were seeing in Part 1, T-rated works are the majority shareholders across all Work Categories. In most categories, this rating accounts for just under 50% of that category’s works, but [Non-O/F] is the exception, with T-rated works holding a 65% majority.

The remaining placements of ratings beyond that are a bit all-over-the-map depending on the category. There are a few two-way (M and Not Rated, for [Non-O/F] and [Other]) and three-way (M, E, and Not Rated for [Compilation]) ties for second place, while Flommy Only favors G-rated and [Smoaking Billionaires] E-rated. Even the least popular rating varies, but those can more easily be discerned in the chart.

Work Length and Completion Status

Similar to the above, let’s look at these measures in terms of how they comprise each category:

Part 1 found that about 71% of all Flommy-tagged works were Oneshots, and it certainly looks like the top-two categories--[Smoaking Billionaires] and Flommy Only--are carrying most of that weight. The three remaining ones have a Multichap majority.

Interestingly enough, Flommy Only and [Other] are near-exact inverses of each other in terms of their Work Length splits. About 78% of Flommy Only works are Oneshots and 22% Multichaps, while the [Other] category is a 20/80 Oneshot/Multichap split.

Now let’s look at the Completion Status:

While [Smoaking Billionaires] was about 87% Oneshots, the category’s completion rate is about 95%--pretty impressive! [Other], on the other hand, has a considerable majority in Multichaps and overall completion rate of about 38%--a little under a quarter of the multiple-chapter works have been completed alongside the Oneshots.

Wrap-Up and Bonus Part

This concludes the main analysis of the Flommy tag as a whole--hopefully there were some intriguing and enjoyable factoids. I certainly found more than I expected when I started out with my tag-digging and data-collecting. 

But here’s the thing: when I began my research, I actually started with a narrower dataset than the full tag as is presented here. Because I had a specific goal in mind (determine the split of Flommy-tagged works by Work Category), I did a bit of filtering to make things a bit easier to track down. As I was already aware of the category into which it fell, my original dataset did not include the highly prolific “Infinite Love” series, and I initially worked solely with the remaining works in the tag.

A fair number of the results in that smaller collection of data looked a bit different from those in the tag overall that we’ve discussed in these first two parts, as this series has a bit of an outlier effect on the total tag results. Due to this, I decided to add on a third, bonus data post to examine the Flommy-tagged works unrelated to this series, and how that data compares to what’s been collected from the tag overall. It’ll be a bit of supplemental material to these first two posts, to come soon.

[kuriboo]

so here we are, y’all. i’ve finally reached the end of the zexal anime, and, uh, it sure was a ride. a ride from start to finish. i’m gonna write out some final thoughts, if i end up forgetting something i might make another post of this, but, don’t count on it. but, before anything, i do intend to read the zexal manga at some point as well, and when i do, you might see me post some funny or interesting screenshots in this tag too? probably not a lot, i don’t know, i’ve never read the zexal manga either. just be aware that the zexal liveblog might not actually be over.

i know people like to talk in terms of zexal i and zexal ii, but hulu doesn’t split up zexal like that, it’s actually in three seasons? i think i generally know what people are referring to with zexal i and zexal ii(?), but i’m genuinely not sure and the terms feel super weird to me anyway, but just to be safe, i’ll refer to things as the first half and the second half. the first half ends with the duel against dr faker and yuma vs kite, part 2 picks up with...whatever the hell happened after the yuma vs kite duel, which certainly wasn’t a continuation of kite’s character arc, but we won’t worry about that.

with that, uh, let’s go high-five the sky

before starting zexal: i’d pretty much watched all the other yugioh series, and was keeping up with vrains as much as i could as it aired. i saw one episode once, before i started watching the whole thing, that aired on some channel we normally don’t get but got a like free preview weekend of it or something. the episode i saw was the episode where yuma meets the guy who makes the statues, i think. whatever it was, the impression i got from what i saw was: this yugioh protagonist is really bad at card games, whines a lot, and his voice kinda grates on me, and also this protagonist is younger than i was at the time, which tended to lead to more annoying behavior. this kid didn’t want to shut up, man. couldn’t sit through the whole thing

so, this was how i rated zexal against the other yugioh series, keeping in mind that this is a rating of series, and not yugioh protagonists, and noting that the members of the A tier are not in any sort of order and all members have equal ratings: 

(sevens is unrated because it’s just barely started.)

(there’s not really much of anything that could top gx, tbh, because gx got me through the hardest time, the hardest year, of my life, and i don’t know where i’d be without it. gx helped save 17 year old me from myself)

now, i’ve finished zexal. i’ve watched every single episode of zexal. it’s important to note that i watched the dub of duel monsters, the dubs of gx and 5ds along with the sub of their non-dubbed final seasons, the dub of zexal, the sub of arc v alongside a stretch of dubbed episodes towards the end, and the sub of vrains along with the dub of the first 20 episodes. i’m aware zexal’s sub was better than the dub, but i generally prefer dubs when possible and also i’m largely comparing it against every other yugioh dub. it’s not an unfair comparison. 

so, here is how i now rate zexal against the other yugioh series, keeping in mind the members of the A tier aren’t in any sort of order:

you may have noticed this is the same as the previous rating. that’s correct. zexal was my least favorite yugioh series before i began watching it, and now that i’ve finished, it’s still my least favorite yugioh series. i know for a lot of people, zexal was their favorite yugioh series, but i simply can’t vibe with that. i’m sorry. i’m also aware the dub of zexal is a lot worse than the original. that doesn’t change the fact that i’m mostly rating dubs against each other here (haven’t seen enough of the arc v dub to account for that, but every other series i’m strongly thinking about the dubs). also, i’ll still give zexal credit for that. i’ll excuse some of its bad points as bad dub writing. some.

this chart, though, doesn’t paint a complete picture of how my opinion of zexal has changed. because it has. i like zexal a lot more now than i did before i started really watching it.

we’ll address good points first, so if anyone wants to bail for the bad points to avoid any sort of hurt feelings or anything like that, they can while still reading good stuff. again, i know a lot of yugioh fans’ favorite yugioh series is zexal, and my opinions are directly opposed to that, and again, i’m sorry. 

there was some pretty cool new cards in this one, particularly in the numbers side of things. shark drake was cool. i liked all of the arclights’ numbers; honestly, how could i not love dyson sphere or number 69? i’ve forgotten a lot of it by now but there was some cool stuff especially in the first part. 

the two best characters in this series, in terms of both writing and personality, were easily astral and shark. astral’s probably my number one, shark’s probably my number two.

astral was definitely great. his observations he kept making about humanity based on yuma was definitely one of the funnier things in the series, and the last duel of the series ending with astral’s last observation was poetic. he talked smack about yuma a lot, and a lot of the time it was pretty well deserved, and that was very cathartic and very good humor. his whole arc where he learns to trust yuma in part 1 and they truly become partners, then yuma meets vector who convinces yuma to keep pretty big secrets from astral, then astral realizes yuma’s been keeping these big secrets from him which is something astral never thought would happen by that point, and astral almost loses himself in that darkness of feeling betrayed and angry and sad, that was all really really good. yuma and astral not not immediately going back to loyal trusting partners and needing time before astral could truly trust yuma again also felt natural and real and i enjoyed it a lot. i like astral’s hairstyle, i like his dub censored ass, i like his whole ghost-like vibe. i don’t appreciate that astral is a nudist, even among the other residents of astral world who all wear actual clothes. i kind of wish astral would wear clothes but i would still want his ass to be censored because it’s hilarious. there is a lot i like about astral. i also just think he’s neat. my easy favorite. cannot go wrong with snarky glowy alien boy.

shark surprised me. i didn’t like him for a fair amount of part 1. he hurt yuma’s feelings a lot and i hated that. but when he started accepting yuma’s repeated attempts at friendship and turned around, i liked him a lot. he’s got purple hair, he plays a guitar (i think electric guitar? might’ve been electric bass), and his development was super interesting. i figured he had some kind of shitty home life that yuma would help him cope with using the power of friendship, but it was quite a bit more than that. he got disqualified from a tournament he desperately wanted to win because of a trick his opponent pulled, eventually evened out and became a pretty cool chill dude, and then it turned out he was like the head emperor of an alien planet that astral had set out to destroy?? he was the leader of a group of people and then blamed himself for their destruction?? he felt torn between his guilt/duty to his people and the new friendships he’d made with yuma and astral?? and he ended up deciding to go back to his alien emperor ways even though it pitted him against his friends which was hard but he had to make it up for the people he’d lost before?? but then he learned don thousand had been manipulating for a long long time and then faced against don thousand at yuma’s side een though he chose to turn his back on that friendship?? he didn’t let some fanfic choose his life for him??? he had shark drake??? there’s a lot of cool shit about shark and he’s got a lot of interesting shit going for him. i love a character that gets me to analyze what’s going on in their mind as they do certain things or make certain choices. i also love me a character who ends up getting/remembering magical powers. sorry shark astral’s in first but i still think shark’s neat too.

byron arclight!!! byron arclight! he’s not on the same level as astral and shark, but mAN i love byron arclight. he was constantly roasting everyone when he appeared and had some of the funniest dialogue in the entire series. anyone he looked at he’d be like “look aliens made me physically look like a child, my sons are taller and look older than me now, i couldn’t possibly give a shit about whatever your deal is.” he got super strong magic powers and used them to kidnap a small child. he became evil and told his sons to be evil with him because he was mad at dr faker, but they all kinda sucked at being evil and decided to be good guys instead by part 2. it’s honestly a shame the arclights didn’t appear in the series, especially part 2 (and especially byron, i’m p sure he appeared the least of the arclights) because i like them all actually. that episode where trey erased yuma’s like most important memories... dyson sphere... quattro telling off shark for dueling poorly while shark was sufferering the effects of POISON... what absolute legends. also byron had number 69.

yuma’s pretty cool, ended up being a more compelling character than i thought he would be. he’s a sweet kid, he’s annoyed initially by astral’s presence but he still helps astral with his quest to gather all the numbers anyway and he likes astral the more they hang out. that episode where yuma loses his memories because of trey really showed yuma’s pre-series development pretty well. yuma talks a lot and shouts the same few catchphrases a lot and it can get annoying, but there’s a lot more to yuma then that. at his core, he’s actually a pretty scared and lonely kid who doesn’t believe in himself, he looks at his current situation and goes “there’s no way i can win this duel there’s no point i might as well quit”. he’s not inherently upbeat and positive and self-confident like he usually appears. “feel the flow” is his source of strength, it’s what gets him going, gets him to believe in himself and inspires bravery in him. he’s actually one of the strongest people in the show for it, to be honest. his friends are so important to him, he cares about them so much and would do anything for them, even when his friends aren’t acting so friendly to him. even when his friends want conflicting things he tries his best to appease both sides. he becomes a voice of reason a lot in part 2, honestly. he kept voicing my thoughts and things i said throughout the season, which at times was really cathartic honestly. he kept challenging the status quo. why do we HAVE to do this, why can’t we find a compromise for THAT. he’s a good kid. i’m adopting him.

kite in part 1 is a cool Strong Opposition To The Number Hunt guy. he needs a glasses prescription but refuses to do anything about it and dies on the moon for it apparently, which i think is pretty funny of him. since he’s not astral he has to number hunt differently and the way he does it hurts people, but he’s only doing it because if he has all the numbers, then there might be a way to help his little brother who is suffering some big shit. his life literally revolves around his little brother who wants kite to just live his life for himself and be happy and have fun, to which kite replies “i don’t know how to do any of that”. relatable. eventually he realizes his dad is a dick. and beats him up until his dad says okay i’ll be good now. i won’t throw trash at astral world anymore i promise. kite’s hear to kick ass and take names and he runs out of names before he runs out of ass. but he gets new names by the time he runs out of ass so it’s okay. kite does some pretty fun stuff in part 1 and actually gives astral a run for his money which doesn’t happen often in part 1 so that’s pretty fun. also. his name is kite and his brother’s name is heart. dr faker is the worst at names but i’d expect that from someone who’s name is faker. it’s pretty funny, honestly

dumon is great. he’s a nice guy who is always trying to help out his friends. him first meeting shark and them pretty much despising each other and then realizing hmm maybe that other guy isn’t as obnoxious as i thought all before shark even realizes he’s nasch and nasch and dumon are like best friends? top-tier, def funny. after like that first meeting though dumon always came off as a nice guy. i like dumon. also, his dub voice actor voices dub yusaku and i was assigned yusaku by the government so i really appreciate that. he does a good job as yusaku. and honestly a good job at dumon, too. dumon is one of the best voices in the whole show. he’s great. i just think he’s neat

rio!!!! once rio wakes up, she’s great. you can tell like within an episode that she and shark are the kind of siblings that constantly snark at each other but would do literall anything for each other. shark tried to do anything he could to help her before she woke up, and rio stuck by his side no matter what in the barians vs astral conflict. the foreshadowing in that episode where she pretended she was knocked out like the rest of yuma’s friends but she really wasn’t!! within like a week of waking up she reveals shark can’t sleep in the dark and i think that he hates onions. she’s the picture of confidence, and it seems to come more naturally to her than yuma’s forced and learned confidence. she believes in herself for sure, she’s a great duelist and she knows it, she’s got that ice aesthetic that i love, she’s cute... i’m gonna go adopt shark and rio right now. she’s also fiercely protective of her friends. but she’s not afraid to tease them either! and she will do it! she’s unrepentantly herself and i love it. 

vector is funny. vector had some great lines in part 2. “ray shadows” was always predictably not what he seemed at first glance but that’s not a bad thing. just because i knew “ray shadows” was bad didn’t make the reveal of him being vector any less satisfying, honestly. that whole sequence of what happened when vector revealed himself was one of my favorite parts of the second half. vector constantly leading yuma into “the ray way” (usually a poor way), then after reealing himself talking about doing things the ray way, absolutely poetic. that reveal causing a huge shift in yuma and astral’s relationship, beautiful. did you just say the b word??? he also had funny lines. most major villains in zexal (byron and vector) were pretty funny honestly. neither of them were the ultimate antagonist which is fine, but probably the best humor in the series to me came from the major villains. it made them less intimidating, maybe, but it made them a lot more enjoyable to watch.  

number 96 looked like a dark version of astral, which is essentially what he was, but like, he literally looked like astral. but you know what? while astral’s ass was censored, number 96′s wasn’t censored in the slightest.  to this day i don’t understand why but this is so funny to me. 4k media really said astral wasn’t valid but number 96 was. 

there’s a lot of good stuff in zexal. and i enjoyed it! at the end of the day, that’s what i care about the most. doesn’t matter as much if something’s good or bad as much as if i’m enjoying it. and i enjoyed quite a bit of zexal. 

i did say it was my least favorite yugioh anime currently, however. which means there must be parts of this anime i didn’t like. so let’s get into the aspects of zexal i didn’t like. feel free to bail now if you’re not interested in that. i’m not interested in hurting any feelings or tarnishing anyone’s love for zexal. 

yikes

for what it’s worth, i like the first half a lot more than the second half. most of the problems i have with the first half are also present within the second half, but the second half has a lot of unique things i don’t like.

i know i said something doesn’t have to be good to be enjoyable. anyone can enjoy bad things. i enjoy plenty of bad things! look, i watch sword art online!! i’m no stranger to the concept. but a lot of things i didn’t like about zexal were just...too glaring for me to enjoy anway.

let’s start with cards.

i think xyz summoning should’ve been pronounced as x-y-z and not x-eez. i hated it from episode one and i am still holding to that.

i don’t like tori’s whole fairy cheerleader archetype. i don’t like the way they all look. these things were in arc v, too, and given to a slightly better character but i didn’t like these things in arc v and i don’t like these now. arc v gave me something to look forward to when i needed it most, i don’t say many bad things about it. but i hate these things in both series they were featured in. i think that says a lot. it’s the combo of the hair and the eyes. their hair is way too big. their eyes tend to look bad. it’s just not a great look.

the series started off with a very simple set of rules for number cards: number cards come from astral, and there are 100 of them (and only number cards can only destroy other number cards, which is less important here). the first half of zexal stuck to that prett well. the second half of zexal just laughed at the idea of rules and said i’mma break them. characters are suddenly given number cards that go over the number 100. all these characters are barians. and these cards didn’t come from astral. what the heck! you’re breaking rules left and right! and then don thousand comes out with his stupid imaginary number, and then two duels later yuma comes out with his own new number, future number zero. you’re breaking all the rules. you’re breaking all my trust in everything. you’ve stopped pretending there’s any sense of rules entirely and you’ve started making things up as you go. i don’t like that!! especially imaginary number and future number zero had basically no explanation as to where these things come from, how do these characters have these cards? it’s one thing when yuma comes out with a new gagaga card or something, that’s acceptable and makes plenty of sense, but the new number cards don’t. also, don thousand, yuma doesn’t know enough math to know what an imaginary number even is.

astral’s whole deck angers me. astral is one of the most important characters of the series, and you couldn’t bother to give him any non-xyz monsters. his whole deck is spells and traps. you gave tori, who only duels once and isn’t very good at it, her own whole archetype, but you couldn’t bother to think of a single monster to give astral. and even then, the only xyz monsters astral uses are utopia forms, (not including shark drake and galaxy-eyes, who were only brought out to serve as material for a utopia monster. this is the laziest deck in the whole series, and you gave it to a major protagonist. like, the second most important protagonist in the whole series. i get he only duels without yuma once, but dude. i hate this.

i also really don’t like that the only number yuma and astral use most of the time is utopia. i know utopia was the first one they had together and it’s popular and shit. but there are other numbers! other numbers yuma gains! that i would like to see him use! but instead the show just...keeps giving him new forms for utopia? for some reason? at least on one occasion one of yuma’s new forms has like the same exact ability as another number yuma has at the time. it’s infuriating. to me, at least. plenty of other characters only really use one number most of the time the duel, but most other characters only really have that one number and maybe another form of it or maybe two other forms. yuma doesn’t have that excuse. i’m not saying i never want him to use utopia ever. i just like variety. if you’re introducing the idea of collecting a lot of things, i wanna see those things used.

i hate don thousand’s dueling gimmicks most of all. he gets access to the numeron code and uses it to cheat in his duels, even though kite has it and zexal really gave the impression before this point that you needed to obtain the numeron code to use it, but don thousand’s just like, i fused earth and barian world and somehow i can use the numeron code now. ??????? no fucking sense. on top of that, his cards are super unbalanced. i could not stand watching this duel.

i don’t like the literally no excuse given of other characters besides yuma, the arclights maybe, and the barians maybe, the literally no excuse given for other characters suddenly being able to see astral. being able to see astral required either special powers or special circumstances but then at the end of part 1 going in to part 2 characters were just like “i can see astral now!!!” and that was the end of this and this was the stupidest laziest thing ever. dunno if this was a dub-only thing, maybe the sub explained it, but it really bothered me and still does.

i don’t think chaos was explained very well, at least in the dub, and i looked it up later on and know pretty much what it is now but when you introduce new concepts and ideas, please explain them to me or else i feel like there’s literally no rules to the universe and characters are just making things up as they go.

a lot of the time in the second half, astral is written really weirdly and, not as good. especially post-vector reveal. i’m not talking about any stubbornness on astral’s part because that’s who he is. part 2 starts going in and after a while of it already going, astral just comes in and explains things to yuma that astral definitely didn’t know before. i know astral starts out with almost no memories and regains them all throughout the series but i don’t think any of this like came right after astral regained some memory. the numeron code seems to come out of nowhere, and oh, by the way, this thing can rewrite the entire rules of the universe. it’s a race to see who gets the numeron code first! except, uh, kite ends up winning it i think but that ends up literally not mattering because don thousand and astral both finds ways to use it without even having it. so there wasn’t much of a point of a lot of the duels before the don thousand duel, huh. that’s a lot of time wasted. and apparently astral can use the numeron code after regaining all 100 numbers, but. i don’t remember when astral first introduced that fact and when he got all 100 numbers. but it only is relevant after the duel against nasch and astral only makes any attempt to use the numeron code then. i don’t even know how he got the numeron code after that duel anyway. kite had it and he died on the moon. don thousand could use it without actually having it but then he was defeated. was astral always able to use it without actually having it like don thousand? why didn’t he does this before, then? everything related to the numeron code is vague and explained poorly and every time the numeron code comes up someone makes up some new bullshit thing related to the numeron code and i hate it. i hate the stupid numeron code.

back on track with astral. there’s other stuff besides the numeron code he seemed to know about without any real explanation. i do not remember a lot of them. besides the numeron code. i think i repressed the rest of out of annoyance. i think the worst astral was written was right before his duel with yuma. i get that astral intended to use the duel to help yuma and not hurt him. but he could’ve accomplished this without being an entire jackass. yuma’s mourning the loss of friends that he’s also blaming himself for. and then astral decides to resolve that by telling yuma that astral’s gonna go kill a bunch more people and yuma can’t stop him? that’s uh, not helping anything astral. you had other options to get yuma to duel (while yuma was in a state of not wanting to duel ever again) rather than telling yuma more people are about to die. the point of the whole duel was to remind yuma how to have fun in duels. but uh. when you put a bunch of lives at risk like that after a bunch of people just died, that’s not a great way to introduce fun. yuma promised astral to duel against him before astral left earlier on in the series! you had other options! astral acts like he doesn’t have other options but he literally does! there’s stupid stuff like this astral does earlier in the second half but i have forgotten the details. i get astral’s an alien who’s pretty socially awkward and doesn’t get earth people super well, but b the end of the series he certainly should understand them a little better, or at least, he should understand yuma pretty well, after hanging out with yuma literally all the time. it’s stupid! astral’s better than all this! there’s no way this is the fault of dub writing! unless 4k media made entirely new animation for multiple episodes. like. of the entire episode. 

there were multiple times in the second half i didn’t understand character motivations in certain events at all and had to really come up with my own weird headcanons to make sense of it. this is probably largely a result of dub writing.

i wish the arclights were more relevant in the second half. most of all they did was watch things happen. they’re cool and powerful give them something to do.

kite felt extremely pointless in the second half of zexal. he was given a clear character direction to go after the first half and basically abandoned it the second the second half started. he had this pointless rivalry with mizar that only ever felt relevant when they dueled each other on the moon to get the numeron code. kite realizes he needs glasses. he wins the duel. and then he fucking dies somehow. and everyone else gets access to the numeron code. it’s all really stupid and makes no sense. i wouldn’t care about him not being as narratively important as yuma, shark and astral. kite’s not from astral world, kite’s not from barian world, and he doesn’t have any partnership with anyone from either world. at most, he thinks astral’s neat now. but they keep dragging along this stupid rivalry between mizar and kite that literally amounted to “my galaxy-eyes dragon is better than your galaxy-eyes dragon”, these two idiots dueled about it multiple times, and it was just pointless. it ate up too much time. i could feel myself aging. the second half of zexal had enough filler episodes that made me want to tear my hair out without this stuff.

i hate mizar so much. he’s probably my second least favorite character in the series. all mizar EVER does is duel kite over who has a cooler galaxy-eyes dragon, which isn’t even a question because kite’s is cooler and he had it long before mizar ever showed up which at most makes mizar a copier idiot. the most relevant thing mizar does is duel kite on the moon for the numeron code, but i’ve been over that. you could take mizar out without changing much. he’s by far the least interesting barian emperor. mizar is more annoying than kite ever was, and is more annoying than the other barian emperors ever were. and yet mizar lives longer than pretty much every barian emperor except nasch. he got the honor of being written out of existence by don thousand himself. radical. cool. get him out of my sight. i can’t stand him.

there’s a point where there’s a number shown on baby vector. i really wanted to know what was up with that and how it was relevant. this was never explained at all. i’m gonna assume this was don thousand altering vector’s memories or something and move on and never address it again because this show just did and said so many things without explaining any of it whatsoever. this stuff needs established rules and explanations. otherwise it just feels like everythings made up on the fly, it’s all completely random shit with not much planning behind it, that the writers don’t care...it feels insulting. i had this same issue with the infinity stones in the marvel cinematic universe. this is not something i just don’t like because it happened in zexal. i like knowing things.

so if mizar’s my second least favorite, who’s my least favorite character overall? i’ll tell you who

tori fucking meadows.

tori. geez. has there ever been a worse character? yes, mineta from my hero academia exists. but what exactly is tori’s crime? what has she done to make me dislike her so much. well, nothing. ‘nothing?’ yes. she didn’t do anything. but at the same time, she didn’t do anything. my problem with her is she literally does nothing, she barely has any sort of relevance to anything, and she’s annoying. i’m very serious. there’s only two things she’s ever done: she got possessed by a barian emperor to duel against yuma once, and there was that time she challenged yuma to a fashion contest, which was a little entertaining. those are the only things she’s ever done. and yet, somehow, she finds her way into every single episode. it is rare for an episode to go by without her. well, if she’s in so many episodes, surely she must be doing something of importance? nah. her only purpose is to cheer yuma on when he’s discouraged and to get distressed when yuma looks like he’s in a bad spot. this is not a joke. this is not an exaggeration. there are entire episodes where her only dialogue is “(sad voice) Yuma...! Astral...!” i constantly forget she’s there and then the show reminds me she’s there and i get mad because she doesn’t do anything. it’s either be sad about duel going well for yuma, or tori going “yuma you can do it” and yuma going “YEAH YOU’RE RIGHT THANKS TORI”. yeah, she doesn’t even give good motivational speeches, she just says the laziest most generic thing possible, and yuma just cheers himself up anyway because that’s usually what he does anyway. there’s not point to her being there. oh, and she got to be the damsel of distress once to convince yuma to duel. that’s great. lovely. that’s definitely not shady/shifty as hell. all girls are only good for fueling boys’ pain and suffering, right. 

but lemme ask this. let’s replace tori with a very pretty lamp for the entire series. how much of the show would change? and honestly? it’d mostly be just like, bits and pieces of three episodes. she’s literally just taking up space. she doesn’t need to duel to be relevant and do meaningful things. maybe she could do more to help yuma convince astral that blowing up barian world is a bad idea, maybe she’s able to come up with the right words where yuma isn’t. maybe she catches on that something’s wrong with shark before shark switches sides, she doesn’t have to convince him not to and i’d rather she didn’t but she can be an uninvolved person to listen and tell shark it’s not an easy choice for sure but she supports him whatever he does and she’s sure whatever he chooses will be the right choice for him. maybe she could get astral some fashionable clothes. i don’t know! she could actually do something! i’m not asking much here i just want her to be something besides a generic love interest (gross) or a generic supporter with generic advice (annoying).

a lot of yuma’s friend group have similar similar issues, but at least they have parts to play. bronk’s probably the best written of the bunch in part 1 before he dissolves into randomly in love with rio taking over his entire life (gross). cathy honestly is better than average too. rio is exempt from this paragraph because she doesn’t spend too much time in the friend group before bailing to her past life which is valid. yuma starts out with only bronk and tori for friends but he gains a lot of friends during the number hunt. most of these friends were possessed by numbers and yuma befriended them afterwards because ultimately his goal is to have fun and make friends by dueling. but they all stick around and don’t not hang out with him and don’t do much after yuma helps them. yuma has way too many friends that he drags around with him everywhere, and then some combination of the arclights, shark, kite, vector, and rio is often there as well. It’s way too many people and no wonder most of them never do anything because often all the things that could be done are taken. Most of these kids need to stop following Yuma everywhere. For the most part, they’re all annoying, too. I really only care for Bronk and Cathy.

i get it. the protagonist always has friends that are ride or die and help them out no matter what. i get it. but there was never this many constantly around, often times they’d switch around each other if anything, and they always all were either relevant to the plot or played good important roles in helping the protagonist, and they always had development. i think the most development any of yuma’s friend group (ignoring brinks negative development) had was cathy’s hatred of dogs getting a bit less intense. flip’s literally a shitty dude who cheats and yuma told him “hey maybe be less shitty next time” a couple of times and flip said “sure” each time but then never put any effort into being better and just kept being shitty towards other people. caswell just...reiterates what’s happening half the time ans starts literally every sentence with “in the end”. all they’re good for is filler and zexal has really bad filler. they’re not good for anything. they should’ve showed up less at least after the heartland tournament arc if not sooner. i get that the whole thing is to show that yuma wants to make friends through duels but this is unnecesasary and eats up time that could be better spent on other characters who actually do things and who actually are relevant and develop and stuff. the protagonist’s friend group was never this annoying before zexal and it never was after zexal either. when they all got sent to barian world and stopped showing up for like ten episodes i almost finally new peace if those ten episodes weren’t like some of the worst content zexal had to offer.

there’s a lot of pointless boring uneventful unnecessary hetero shit all over the show, too. obviously, the whole deal with yuma and tori, while yuma really has no interest in romance at all and tori can’t take a fucking hint and then somehow the last episode decides to make them start dating for some reason. bronk falls for rio (understandable) and then in a filler episode asks for shark’s permission to date her (gross), shark misunderstands what bronk’s asking and is like “if you wanna deal with me or rio you gotta beat yuma in a duel first”, bronk gets it in his head that means yuma likes rio and duels yuma over rio (gross) and this is all supposed to be a funny whole series of events but it’s not funny and it’s kinda gross actually. orbital and lillybot!! yikes!! i don’t like orbital anyway. lillybot is amazing and great. the show decides to assign lillybot female (tori just says lillybot’s a girl and we’re supposed to take tori’s word for it i guess) so obviously the assigned male robot and the assigned female robot have to date, right! they MUST like each other because he was a boy robot, she was a girl robot, can i make it any more obvious. it’s annoying and stupid. they have kids!!! they have kids for some reason!!! why do they have kids!!!!! zexal never interact with me about romance again.

the girls in this show really get the shit end of the stick, huh. i feel really bad for them. obviously we have tori. who was there the whole time but really didn’t do anything except be generically sad or generically positive. cathy’s a little better than that. she has a bit more personality going for her. she likes cats, she makes cat puns, she duels a dog, she did get possessed by a number... she’s got a few things going for her, but she doesn’t do much either. she doesn’t do anything worth noting in the tournament in heartland, she barely does anything of note related to the barian emperors or don thousand. so that’s not much better. rio probably got the best treatment of any of the girls in zexal. she is a major player in the second half of zexal, being one of the barian emperors. she’s got a very strong personality and did plenty of important things. she helped her and her brother deal with the barian emperors before realizing she was one herself, she reclaimed her title of barian emperor and tried to kick vector’s ass. rio and shark brought a lot of life to each other. she revealed her brother’s need to sleep with a nightlight and she was allowed to be good at dueling! but also, she spend the entire first half of the show in a coma. she wasn’t allowed to have any part in the show before astral and the barian emperors did their thing. so in a way, rio also got the worst treatment, too. discounting rio, though, i think the girl who got the worst of it was actually kari.

i know, i know. kari’s an investigator, a journalist! she’s always after a scoop, she’s always looking after yuma, and she deals with old friends/enemies. she’s not just some generic friend like tori, she’s not in a coma like rio! kari’s great! and i love her! but this isn’t just about girls not getting to do things that matter or girls not getting to have personalities. this goes in a bit different direction than that. she wanted to go out and explore with her dad, just like yuma did, but her parents always brushed her aside and made her do more “girly” things because “girls can’t do what yuma and your dad are doing”! she didn’t get a wole lot of agency in her own life. her parents all but told her that yuma was more important than her, that he had this big destiny related to dueling and that all she was good for was watching out for yuma and making sure he was okay because she’s his older sister. and then both her parents disappeared! and she was just left with that! she grew to hate dueling, to push yuma away from it because their parents basically told her yuma would be in danger because of dueling. which is a totally understandable reaction to your parents telling you that out of seemingly nowhere! except the show doesn’t treat it that way. the show puts her in the wrong for not liking dueling! because everyone has to like dueling kari!! how dare you not like card games. how dare you have any interest in anything else. i’m surprised she’s not more bitter towards her parents for this whole fiasco. she just gets slammed into a caretaker role because girls can only be love interests or caretakers! (tori, cathy, and rio were all set up as love interests at least one time or another, while yuma would rather eat another hot dog than deal with that) but honestly, she does her best to do what her parents told her: take care of yuma during his big dangerous dueling destiny. she watches out for him, she tries to steer him clear of the thing that’s supposed to be dangerous for him. and as a journalist she has to be constantly up to date on current events and happenings, so if something happens that might endanger yuma with his big dangerous dueling destiny, kari’ll probably be on of the first people to know about it in all of heartland. that’s not to say that’s not the only reason she took up the profession. she definitely seems passionate about what she does, she takes it seriously, i’m sure she does actually like being a journalist, but it does help with yuma, too. her parents basically forced her life to go exactly one way. and that’s not shown in a bad light against her parents! if anything, the show basically acts like it’s kari’s fault for not being happy about it every second. all this while yuma gets to be whoever he wants to be and do what he wants to do their whole childhood, he gets a lot more freedom than kari for sure. yuma got the childhood kari wanted and she’s not allowed to grieve what she could’ve had. because it’s not just “kari’s parents forced her into a very specific role for her life and gave her no choice in any of it”. that can actually be a really cool thing to explore. i love chazz princeton! kari has plenty in common with chazz! but i don’t like this setup like this. chazz got to be right about being bitter about what his brothers did to him, about breaking away from them and living life the way he wanted to. but making kari’s parents the right ones in this whole situation is just kinda gross and disgusting. if you’re gonna frame it like that don’t bother. cannot stand the “your parents are always right” sort of shit.

speaking of? goddamn i hate kazuma. i hate yuma and kari’s dad. i would say he’s the worst dad in all of yugioh, but he didn’t start an interdimensional war, so we’ll say he’s the second worst dad in all of yugioh. ...if i tie dr kogami with leo, but either way, leo, dr kogami, and kazuma are the top 3.

how can kazuma be in the top 3?? with leo and dr kogami?? leo and dr kogami are evil villains!! kazuma’s not a bad guy! he helped give yuma more self-confidence! he wanted peace between astral world and barian world!

first of all, if you skipped the paragraph related to kari, go back and read it. it’s required reading for the “why kazuma sucks” portion of our program tonight. okay good, you read it. here’s more reasons why kazuma’s a pretty sucky dad.

this here is a bullshit man.

kazuma had good intentions, i think. he wanted to be a good dad but intentions don’t really mean a damn thing when you look at the results.

pre-zexal, kazuma tsukumo knew about yuma’s destiny and told kari about it. how did he know this? how did he figure this out? that’s a good question. i have no idea why he knows about yuma’s destiny, or how he knows about it. the wiki just says he “showed great intelligence and foresight”, whatever that means. my best guess is that honestly? once kazuma saw what was happening in astral world, he created yuma’s destiny himself. he gave the key to yuma, and then he fucked with astral’s shit so that astral would meet yuma. yeah, kazuma looked at everything going on and was like “i’ll put it on my 12 year old son to save three worlds at the same time! what could go wrong”, and told kari about it beforehand and was like “lol kari can’t do it she’s a girl so i’ll just decide her entire life for her a different way”

uh, clearly yuma was not emotionally capable of dealing with the shit kazuma pulled him into. yuma was ready to never duel again because dueling killed his friends. and then kazuma talks to astral about the whole thing and is weirdly smug about the whole thing related to yuma’s lost friends and lost love for dueling. so like...was that part of your plan or not? do you give a shit about your son’s feelings regarding your whole plan for his life or not? 

after yuma falls into a portal in the hell dimension he ends up being a prisoner on astral world. which was definitely not explained well in the dub. but he and his wife just hang out freely and openly in remote parts of astral world so he sure as shit doesn’t look like a prisoner. and while he’s there he certainly looks like there’s no place he’d rather be. wait, his wife? how did she get in astral world? that’s a good fucking question and i sure would love to know. i guess she’s not allowed to exist outside her relationship with kazuma.

after kazuma is stuck in astral world, everyone thinks he’s dead for a while, but then when everyone finds out he was alive, he’s treated as this all-knowing projection/recorded hologram who is always right about everything. he always has all the answers and if we don’t know what to do about something then kazuma definitely knows! and after he appears to die he can sometimes appear to people somehow, how he can do that is never explained well at least in the dub, and there are arbitrary conditions to it also never explained in the dub. he can appear in the emperor’s key. he only really seems to do this once to have a weird conversation with astral, and then he also...was able to help vetrix make a barrier during yuma and nasch’s duel, somehow? i mean, i get tron’s whole thing, but kazuma, not so much? if he can appear to astral and vetrix why does he never try to connect with yuma? i’m guessing he probably can’t appear to yuma directly but he never tries to leave a message with astral either. he has these arbitrary weird abilities never explained well (in the dub, at least) and it feels like he’s playing calvinball to make himself seem like a hero or something.

honestly, everthing about yuma’s dad being seemingl dead but still alive, creating his son’s destiny and being this vague benevolent being who is always right and is never allowed to be seen in a bad light related to the consequences to his kids for his meddling, it all seems familiar....

that’s right! it all comes back to sonic!! once again i am literally unable to talk about anything without bringing up sonic, i always bring everything back to sonic!!!

i explained this all a lot better a year ago so i will let myself speak i guess

obviously kazuma isn’t as bad of a person as locke the echidna, not nearly as bad, but there’s parallels, anyway.

so if you agree that yuma is the old comics knuckles of yugioh, if you look at the bad dads section of this article (in case you think i wrote it for some reason, which i didn’t, thankskenpenders did) you can understand why locke is a horrible dad, and looking at the similarties pointed out between locke and kazuma (again, locke is a much worse father than kazuma) you can understand more why i hate kazuma.

so, yeah. i can go on and on about all the things i don’t like zexal. the writing is sometimes sexist and lazy, there’s way too many characters hanging out with the protagonist and most of them have nothing to offer. sometimes things just don’t get explained, or are barely explained. it’s a big ol’ game of calvinball sometimes. and i am aware and accept that some of this is the fault of the dub writers. but there’s also a lot of good things i like about zexal! astral, shark, and yuma were all written really well! there were some really cool monsters in this show! there were some moments of good jokes! the show had good messages and a lot of characters had complex motivations you can sympathize with even if you don’t agree with what they’re doing. this show was very good at being yugioh. and it’s a pretty good show in my book. i enjoyed watching it! it just doesn’t happen to be my favorite yugioh. or like. anything but my least faorite yugioh. but that’s okay. really, the most important thing with watching a show isn’t how well it’s written, how good the visuals are, or anything like that, the most important thing is whether you enjoyed it. and i enjoyed it!

i enjoyed watching yugioh zexal.

if you followed me through my journey watching the anime, thank you. i appreciate it.

this isn’t the end of my journey through zexal. i intend to read the manga too, so when i do get to that, if i end up wanting to post any screenshots or anthing i’ll be using the same tag. that’s sure to be an interesting journey as well.

but anyway. if you read this entire post, thank you. this is over 8,000 words long, damn. 

[randomvarious]

Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam - “Lost in Emotion” I Know What Boys Like! Song released in 1987. Compilation released in 1996. Pop / Freestyle

From an old biography on Billboard.com:

Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam were one of the most musically diverse and successful recording acts of the '80s. With hits produced and written by Full Force, the six-man performing/songwriting/production team from East Flatbush/Brooklyn, NY, they scored million-selling hits with dance-based tracks ("I Wonder if I Take You Home"), beautiful ballads ("All Cried Out"), and unabashed pop tunes ("Head to Toe," "Lost in Emotion"). They were one of the early exponents of what later became hip-hop R&B. With five gold singles, two number one singles on both the R&B and the pop charts, two platinum albums, and inclusions on various compilations and movie soundtracks, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam were the most successful act of Full Force's "One Big Family" roster of acts.

A constant theme throughout Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam’s history is the influence of Motown. Motown music is what seemingly brought them together and it’s what ultimately led them to achieve gargantuan levels of success throughout the 80s and early 90s. But it all started in 1984 with a struggling New York-based hip hop / R&B / funk / electro band called Full Force. They couldn’t get a label to bite and decided that they needed a change in direction. Having witnessed the success of R&B boy band New Edition, who were transparently packaged as an 80s rehash of the Jackson 5 (a new edition, if you will, of a Motown group), the members of Full Force formed an idea that they thought was sure to hit: an 80s rehash of The Supremes (an all-girl Motown group!). Full Force would write,  produce, play the music, and provide backing vocals while a group of girls would take care of the main singing parts.

Full Force percussionist and roadie, Mike Hughes, would then come upon a 17-year old girl named Lisa Velez at a New York club called The Funhouse, which is also where Madonna ended up being discovered. Velez, who had visions of pop stardom, was a member of a traveling troupe in school that performed Motown hits and showtunes. Initially impressed by her looks, Hughes would invite her to an audition at a house in Brooklyn where three brothers from Full Force resided. Velez wouldn’t tell her protective older brother (she had nine siblings, by the way!), probably out of fear of him denying her request that she be allowed to go, and hopped on the D train to chase her dreams.

But it wasn’t all initially hunky dory. In fact, Velez’s first time meeting Full Force was rather creepy. From a 1988 interview and profile of Lisa Lisa in Spin:

...”I sit on a stool in the basement, and I’m looking around, and I see pictures of these big, big guys. Six big guys. I’m saying to myself, ‘Oh shit, they’re gonna kill me.’ I didn’t know what to think. I had just met Mike. Enter the six big guys, and I almost shit in my pants. Paul Anthony was the first one to come up to me, and he bent down and he kissed me and he says, ‘God, you’re very pretty.’ That’s when I thought, ‘Oh Jesus, he’s gonna rape me now.’”

But her fears were soon alleviated.

...Lisa started to sing. “She was singing this song that Mike Hughes wrote for her to do,” says Lou George, “and it wasn’t kicking at all. It was horrible, plain and simple. Because it had her singing so off-key, because the way the song was written, she was singing all off. I was just laughing until my tears came down because of the fact that she was off and Mike had wrote it, and it was just so funny the way the notes was going. And I was by the bathroom crying in tears, and Lisa couldn’t see me.

“Then she sang ‘For Your Eyes Only,” [the theme song from the 1981 James Bond flick] and that’s what got it. Everything fell into place. 

Full Force would end up auditioning more girls, but in Velez they had found the Diana Ross piece to their 80s Supremes puzzle: an attractive young woman blessed with a high-pitched and innocent-sounding voice that MTV-watching teenybopper types could fawn over and try to emulate. Rather than wait to fill out the rest of the group with more singers, Velez and Full Force got to recording. She would be given the stage name Lisa Lisa, a sort of play on the Full Force-produced, 1984 breakthrough hip hop hit, “Roxanne, Roxanne” by UTFO. Mike Hughes and a guitarist and bassist who was associated with Full Force named Alex “Spanador” Moseley would make up Cult Jam. LL&CJ would then debut in 1985, finding decent chart success in a platinum-selling album with songs like “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” “Can You Feel the Beat,” and “All Cried Out,” the last of which would reach the top ten in the US. A couple years later, they followed up with Spanish Fly, achieving platinum status again thanks to two chart-topping pop singles, “Head to Toe” and “Lost in Emotion.” Both songs would be noted for their clear infusion of Motown influence.

“Lost in Emotion” really is just a perfect piece of sun-drenched 80s pop. And yet, despite the fact that it’s clearly such a bop, and that it reached #1, it still feels a bit overlooked today. Throughout all my years of listening to the classic pop and rock radio format, I feel like I’ve never heard it on there. Similarly, I also feel like I don’t see it included on all that many 80s mixes or playlists. I mean, this song has over 4 million plays on Spotify, which is a lot, but “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul, which hit #1 the following year, and has that same type of young and innocent girl vocal affect, has over 40 million plays. They’re both good songs, no doubt, but go listen to both of them back to back and tell me which one holds up better today. The answer is “Lost in Emotion” and I will fight you if you disagree.

Ultimately, this song reflects a fantastically catchy pairing of an in vogue and upbeat, poppy freestyle sound with old chunks of Motown mixed in. Alongside slapping percussion, flooding synthesizers, and twinkling, sort of tropical-sounding melodies courtesy of a combination of xylophones and bells, Full Force divine their main inspiration for this song from a pair of Mary Wells hits (she was a Motown star!), “Two Lovers” and “You Beat Me to the Punch.” And if you listen to those songs, you can hear the bits and pieces that ended up motivating Full Force to write “Lost in Emotion.” 

But this sweet 80s jam struts with more than just Motown flair. The main, funky bassline that undergirds the whole thing has a definite Ben E. King “Stand by Me” feel to it, which is still 60s, but not Motown, and the extended bridge section, which also contains a nice sax solo, showcases even more glints of non-Motown 60s sounds. The male bass baritone backing vocal that briefly swoops in the outro portion is a clear callback to doo-wop groups of the 50s and 60s, which wasn’t Motown’s lane, and Lisa Lisa also appears to give tribute to Del Shannon with her own backing vocal by briefly wailing an “aye-yai-yai,” mimicking the iconic “why-why-why” from the early 60s rock-and-roll-pop masterpiece, “Runaway.” It’s these combinations of Lisa Lisa’s naturally nubile voice, not to mention her sheer attractiveness, along with Full Force’s expert mixing of both old and contemporary sounds that would enable “Lost in Emotion” to be the most popular song in the US during the summer of 1987. It’s also a tune which proves that, when done right, Motown doesn’t go out of style. At least it clearly hadn’t by then.

Of course, there was a music video for “Lost in Emotion,” too, which plainly shows Lisa Lisa lip syncing the whole song as she and her friends move through a crowded street fair rigged with carnival games and a stage, which Lisa Lisa graces at the end. According to Wikipedia, it was the fourth-most played video in 1987 on MTV.

An absolute classic banger of an 80s pop song that shows Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam at their peak. You ignore this flawless summer earworm at your own peril.

[eclectia]

Breath of the Wild: Fostering Exploration

Breath of the Wild is an open-world game, a genre characterised by the ability to go out into the world and explore freely – albeit with caveats and limitations often implemented in order to guide the narrative in certain directions. Breath of the Wild is almost unique within the genre in that it encourages exploration and adventure in spite of these things; difficult enemies can be overcome with quick thinking or avoidance instead of direct battle; the narrative explicitly tells you to “go out and explore” to complete your objectives, and the abilities you receive at the start of the game are fundamentally identical to the form they will take at the end of it. This works in its favour, offering a wholly unique experience in open-world games and presents itself as a game primarily about having an adventure.  Concerning the world of Breath of the Wild, there are several aspects to the world design which compound and encourage the players' ability to go out into the world and explore, find and create an adventure for themselves.   The game environment and world design are at the very crux of this design choice, designed from the bottom up to be interactive and engaging, aided, not hindered, by the open-world structure. Instead of how prior Zelda games have handled world design -more as a series of levels designed differently and with themes in mind, in an insular sense-, Breath of the Wild is one big level, one big mystery. In this, the land is divided up into areas each with their own “rules to learn”: you may have an area prone to rain, or a swamp for example, but the mechanics and skills needed to traverse the terrain stay mostly the same and within an interconnected world. You will still be walking, climbing, swimming, gliding, riding, jumping, and ultimately exploring.   The world is built up in such a way that from the very start, looking out over Hyrule, you are tantalised and offered a sweeping panorama. In this initial glimpse, you might well view landmarks or interesting geographical features in the immediate area, which will pique curiosity and make the player want to go out as well as create anticipation in the mind: what is there? What will I find? In this sense, the player is motivated to go out for themselves, to experience the world, to scratch that itch of discovery and this gameplay loop of anticipation vs discovery is recurrent throughout Breath of the Wild. This aspect repeats in smaller ways with the towers you must scale and can peer out from, which reveal aspects of the map but not any marker: therein meaning the onus is on you to explore and decide where to go; that hillock over there? That ruin? That shrine? That smoke signal, viewed as you crest the hill? Map markers are readily available, and player-controlled, for you to pin and mark your own way over the land putting exploration firmly in your hands – it is you who decides where to go, what hill to conquer, what enemy encampment to battle. Both of these features incorporate verticality and scale, as well as player agency and freedom to further impress upon the player both the size of the land and the multiple ways you can explore therein.   Compounding upon this intended design is the fact that the player is expected to engage with the world while exploring instead of just passively going through the land and listening to the same NPC dialogue over and over. Instead of following markers, as many other games have -which is in itself an inorganic, inelegant way of navigating a world- you instead have to ask for directions, follow sign-posts, and use landmarks as wayfinders and perhaps most importantly and most shockingly of all, decide where to go yourself. You have to actually look and engage with landmarks in the land to work out where to go.   The reason the former feels clunky is that you are not engaging with the game world in any meaningful way, simply following a marker. You can do this automatically and without having to think or treat the game world as anything but a construct that lends itself to passive experience and the sense of following instructions, not charting your own path. The latter, instead, encourages you the player to treat the game world as a tangible object that needs traversing, and as a larger puzzle to solve – you might be told to look for two rocks nearby to a lake, and then, as you explore, you are actively searching for these features instead of just going from A to B. These deliberate design choices make the world feel more alive for the player, more of a character in of itself as well as impounding upon us that the world is in itself a big “level”, that requires understanding and patience to traverse.   The ways in which you traverse this world, as mentioned, depend upon such non-verbal cues such as landmarks and sign-posts. However, another way in which the game encourages exploration and discovery, as well as engagement with the world and characters, is by talking to NPCs. Many non-player characters have quests and often, disappointingly, these amount to “go here and get this thing for me!” which is one of the ways in which Breath of the Wild fails. However some of the more interesting NPCs also dish out directions and riddles for the player to go out and solve; locations of treasure caches, landmarks to look out for, riddles passed down through the ages and now left for you to solve. The ways in which these mini-quests are revealed to the player is often subtle and whilst some are spelled out directly, others are ambiguous enough that they require, again, engagement and exploration with the environment and mechanics rather than simply just following a marker or direction. This compounds the core design philosophy of the game – that exploration, and adventure both, are key, rather than following instructions or being passive.   Further impounding upon this feeling is the fact that exploration is in itself its own reward, but that by exploring every nook and cranny of the various lands of Hyrule you may, in fact, come across ancient hidden treasures, shrines, or Kokiri puzzles to unlock. To explore is, in of itself rewarding for the small incidental player experiences but to have extra content such as shrine quests to complete, further changes up the pace of the game and rewards the player with rare items, weapons, and ways in which they can power up is only further incentive. Exploration is only as much as you put into it: and the more you put in, the more you get out, the more chance you have to master the games' world. Optional boss fights, in the form of Stone Talus which are scattered throughout, are another fun change-up of gameplay; as are the environmental puzzles proffered by Kass' songs: you may hear him first, and spend time tracking down where he is based on how loud or quiet his trademark accordion is, and then he will give you a puzzle in the form of a song relating to the immediate area, often leading to a shrine. Fairy Fountains, where you can unlock fairies and better equipment, are another entirely optional, entirely incidental, aspect to exploration and discovery within Hyrule but one which comes with good reward. That traversing the world is in of itself incredibly fun and varied further compounds upon this design philosophy and encouragement to explore. There are many ways to explore Hyrule: by foot, by climbing, by horse, by sledding down a  hill on your shield or by gliding from the heights of its numerous peaks. In this way, the very act of going out into the world is never dull; you could gallop through the fields and experience the tiny, incidental music cues that compound upon the feeling; you could simply walk, and experience a leisurely pace; if you are atop a hill, you can sled down it on your shield for some fast-paced thrills and even tackle monsters as you do so; and finally, you can glide down using a hand-glider, slowly taking in the scenery as you waft down.   These latter two are important because they allow you to get down a hill much quicker than you got up there in the first place – turning what could have been a repetitive slog up and down into an extra, fun mechanic. It changes up the pace of exploration, too, so that instead of depending only upon walking, you can have a high-action moment that looks, and is, fun to play. That some of these activities, primarily horse-riding, are turned into mini-games in of themselves only adds to that extra layer and depth of the game. You could go through the game with the very first horse you take the time to tame or you can seek out more talented mounts, or special, unique ones. The very act of having a horse also changes up both the speed of which you navigate Hyrule and impacts upon combat – you can fight atop your horse, as can enemies -. And, like so many other quiet, incidental moments of Breath of the Wild, having a horse feels unique and personal to you. When you approach a herd, you can single out which horse you would like to tame and you must then sneak up on it, tame it with fruits and mounting, and then finally, claim your reward. That each horse has a unique look, personality, and set of stats, further adds to the personal feeling: this is your horse, and you must care for it, treat it, tack it and so on. Much like how Shadow of the Colossus has Wander and Agro, often, your horse will be your only companion as you venture through the loneliest spaces of Hyrule. These mechanics and design choices all lend themselves to a game that feels at once very small-scale and personal, and impossibly large, which puts focus upon the way the player avatar – Link – must feel too, creating a sense of connection and individual player experience. As he explores, so do we: as he is dwarfed, so are we.

[sweetdreamsjeff]

That Was So Real: Jeff Buckley's Collaborators Tell The Story Behind 'Grace'

8/23/2019 by Steven Edelstone

Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the album is being reissued today alongside the release of four full live sets.

“Hey remember that riff you played me at your parents’ place when we were playing guitar on your bed?”

It was April 1994 and singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s classic debut album, Grace -- which turns 25 today (Aug. 23), and is being celebrated with a major reissue via Columbia/Legacy Recordings -- was essentially done, set to come out in just a few months. Buckley, then 27, had recently enlisted his friend Michael Tighe, just 19 at the time, to play guitar in his live band as he was gearing up for what would become a grueling, almost two-year world tour.

He convened the rest of his band, made up of bassist Mick Grøndahl and drummer Matt Johnson, to record some B-sides at Sony Studios in Midtown, Manhattan. It was Tighe’s first rehearsal and it began with Buckley asking him to play a guitar riff he showed him at his parents’ place in the West Village about a year and a half prior.

The song quickly became “So Real,” a track that would eventually be situated at the heart of Grace, a stunning alt-rock track that would break up the hushed fingerpicked guitars of “Lilac Wine” and “Hallelujah" -- the latter of which has remained in the public memory long after his death, and still serves as the introduction to his back catalogue to many.

“I played it, and he got behind the drums and started singing the melody to the chorus, and we kind of knew it was something special,” Tighe remembers. “We did the instrumental and that night, he just took a long walk around Hell’s Kitchen and came back and had the lyrics and the melody for the verses and he laid it all down in like two takes. Afterwards, he was like, ‘I want this song to go on the album.’”

“When Jeff took what he did and put his vocals on it and his lyrics, I couldn’t believe it,” Johnson adds. “I thought it was unbelievable. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this guy is amazing!’ I loved what he did, and I was so impressed with the way his melody was so unimaginable, given the instrumental track. In a million years I never would have thought about that.”

But there was one issue: Buckley wanted to add “So Real” to the tracklist in the place of “Forget Her,” a sorrowful and dark, yet direct song that higher ups at the label, including producer Andy Wallace, wanted as the lead single. Buckley now wanted it to remain unreleased entirely.

“It’s the one thing with the album that I wasn’t happy with, that “Forget Her” was left off -- because it was absolutely intended to be part of the album,” Wallace explains, noting that the song was 100% done at the time. “I remember we took him out to dinner, Don [Ienner, Chairman of Sony Music Label Group], Steve [Berkowitz, A&R executive at Columbia who signed Buckley], and me. If I recall correctly, the main point of that dinner was, ‘Reconsider Jeff, blah blah blah.’ He was adamant, and God bless him, he stuck to his guts.”

                           Read More            

Jeff Buckley's Manager On Why He Waited 21 Years To Release Memoir: 'It's Raw To This Day'

For as great as the ultra-personal “Forget Her” was -- the song was eventually given a legitimate release years after Buckley’s tragic 1997 death on the Grace (Legacy Edition) compilation in 2004 -- it wasn’t necessary to launch the New York-based singer from legendary local live act to a worldwide cult phenomenon. Though the album was dogged by slow sales Stateside, eventually peaking at No. 149 on the Billboard 200 albums chart almost a year after its release (he was initially much more successful in Europe and especially in Australia), it was eventually certified Platinum by the RIAA in 2016, 22 years after it hit record stores.

Now, 25 years after its release, the album is being reissued by Columbia/Legacy Recordings, complete with the release of four full live sets: Live at Wetlands, New York, NY 8/16/94; Live From Seattle, WA, May 7, 1995; Cabaret Metro, Chicago, IL, May 13, 1995; and Live at Columbia Records Radio Hour.

But what became Grace was almost a radically different sounding album. Signed on the strength of his renowned residency at the now-closed East Village venue Sin-é, which saw Buckley perform a wide array of covers and original material each Monday night beginning in April 1992, Columbia initially mulled the idea of a debut release that would have reflected the sparse, solo-electric spirit of the shows, which were marked by his sense of humor and incredible crowdwork (check out his mini cover of Pakistani legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, sung over the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff). Though some songs in that vein would make the eventual album -- his covers of “Hallelujah” and “Lilac Wine,” originally by Leonard Cohen and James Shelton (and made popular by Nina Simone and Eartha Kitt), respectively, were the most prominent examples -- Buckley, as well as Wallace and Berkowitz, decided to go in a different direction.

“He wanted to do a band album; he didn’t want to do a solo thing,” Wallace says, who has since worked with Coldplay, Paul McCartney, and The Strokes, amongst dozens of other high profile bands. “There was some talk about that, whether it was best to do something that reflected what he was doing at Sin-é, because he was so good at it. It’s hard to do a full album of just the solo thing, especially because so much of his magic had to do with his persona and his live interaction with the audience. That’s virtually impossible to capture on a record, at least with the same impact.”

The label agreed on the condition that they would put out an EP recording of one of the Sin-é gigs, which was later stretched out into a full LP in 2003. Released in late 1993, it included two originals, as well as stunning renditions of Van Morrison’s “The Way Young Lovers Do” and his take on an old French song, “Je n’en connais pas la fin.” This served as a way to introduce Buckley to an audience outside of Lower Manhattan, hint that more music was on the way, and allow him to pursue forming a real band.

“He just always wanted to be in a band, that was his dream,” Tighe says, who has since written songs alongside Andrew Wyatt for Liam Gallagher, and worked with Adele. “He idolized Led Zeppelin and the chemistry that bands have -- to a degree, the family unit that a band has. I think he really wanted that for a long time.”

Though he now had a trio, made up of Grøndahl, Johnson, and himself, to record with -- Tighe wasn’t added until the recording sessions were largely completed -- Wallace still wanted Buckley to record a bevy of paired-down solo versions of all of the songs. Most nights while recording in Bearsville, New York, a small town in the Catskills, Wallace would have him go out to the live room after dinner -- maybe with a glass of wine -- and perform his Sin-é gig without stopping.

                           Read More            

Live Jeff Buckley Recordings Will Soon Be Available for Streaming

It was in this setting that Buckley was most relaxed (“He definitely seemed like he was most comfortable when he was playing live in general,” Tighe believes), and it allowed him to unwind a bit, while still recording. This is one of the main reasons why so much solo material has been released since his death on various legacy albums and compilations: There’s a still-unreleased version of “Hallelujah” with an extended minor key intro floating around somewhere, Wallace says.

While a lot of the song arrangements were hammered out in pre-production rehearsals, this was an incredibly new band, very much still feeling each other out. Some of these songs were born in the recording studio, including “Dream Brother” -- which, like “So Real,” was marked by the instrumental track being recorded before Buckley had even written the lyrics or melody.

“My musicianship I wouldn’t say was great at the time, but I did feel like I was resonant with Jeff emotionally -- and just in terms of the raw quality of listening to music as music,” Johnson remembers, now the drummer for St. Vincent since 2011. “The depth of his listening showed me how to play music in many ways. The sensitivity to his voice… It was kind of scary sometimes. I felt like a bull in a china shop. I felt like I wasn’t good enough to be in his band. It was formative, and it made me who I am.”

Song after song was then cranked out in that big, ambient room in Upstate New York. From the wild quiet-loud dynamics of “Mojo Pin” to the magical Kerl Berger-arranged strings on “Last Goodbye,” it was obvious that they were working on something extraordinary.

“There’s never a turning point where a light goes on, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is an incredible album!’” Wallace says. “But I can remember the first time that I really went, ‘Wow, this is not just a young guy with a great voice and a great ability to entertain an audience. It was probably the first time I went to see him at Sin-é and he played ‘Grace,’ which I had never heard before... I remember very specifically, looking over at [Buckley’s manager] George [Stein], ‘Where did that song come from? I’ve never heard that!’ And he said, ‘Oh that’s one of Jeff’s originals.’ That was the first time I felt, ‘Wow, there’s something really special going on.’”

The album would take Buckley and his band around the world multiple times over, even returning to play the same metro areas multiple times in the same year to develop his fanbase, with a heavy investment by Columbia. Always the consummate live performer, Buckley would sometimes leave his own bandmates stunned.

“There would be some nights where he would do some things with his voice where it would completely blow me away,” Tighe remembers. “The thing about performing with him is that he managed to cast a spell over the audience and because of that voice he had, he did the same with the band members. It was like we were in a bit of a trance most of the time. He really had that kind of power to his voice.”

If anything, those around him remember Buckley most for his passion and his sense of humor. Whether it was seeing him light up when meeting his hero, Jimmy Page, after a show at a beautiful theatre in Melbourne or just joking around in the tour van, he had a sensitive and magnetic personality that lives on in everyone that knew him personally.

“There’s a line in one of his songs on [the posthumous release, Sketches for] My Sweetheart the Drunk, ‘I miss my beautiful friend,’” Wallace says, tearing up over the phone as he recites the lyric from “Morning Theft.” “Every time I think of that, I miss my beautiful friend. And I’ve never stopped missing him.”

[kaelin-bct-blog]

Data Objects - All By Myself

I left the group and decided to focus on my own interpretation of our assessment. Leaving so late in the project may have been a risk but it is one I am satisfied with. During my time working with the others my biggest struggle was gaining motivation to work on something I was not particularly interested in. It's not that we had a bad concept it was a combination of it being about something I had little personal interest in and a lack of chemistry amongst our group members. Initially, as I mentioned before, the idea was to spread our group into working on several objects that would tie into each other which was logical due to the size of our group. Unfortunately, this proved very ambitious, as we had a tenuous grasp of the concept of a data object at best. If we had a better understanding of what kinds of data set would translate effectively things might have been easier. After a few days of searching for the right data we found ourselves falling behind other groups, and decided instead to focus on a singular topic with more readily available data that would be hopefully more straightforward in mapping it to a garment. Perhaps our determination to use clothing as the object blinded us to other avenues of exploration and design, regardless we gave in to our tunnel vision.

We started work on a shirt that would provide a physical interaction based on our data. The data was oriented around the Body Mass Index, and we were going to try to create a garment that would loosen or tighten based on that data. We got conflicting reactions from several lecturers, in fact so conflicting (as in completely opposite) that I was personally left pretty confused and ultimately hopeless. I did not understand the purpose of this assessment, and almost every idea that popped into our collective heads seemed to be simply another bar graph or pie chart plastered onto some normal boring object. It felt like we were taking two very incompatible things and simply ramming them together like a child pretending to make their toys fight until something bloody clicked.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t.

So we tried to reorganize and breathe some life into our group, start fresh and continue ramming things together making various forms of onomatopoeia but THIS time we’d do it right. We had a pretty good plan to be fair, we split into smaller teams of roughly two to three, each focused on a specific aspect of human health in relation to fast food diets. Keeping in line with at least an element of our original statement of intent, and helping divide the work into smaller packages. One group would focus on the mental health complications, another on skin and libido issues and myself and several others on various diseases such as diabetes associated with a poor diet. We would then attempt to design a garment for each of these data sets, creating an outfit to communicate the effects of junk food on the human body. So while this all felt very organized and had a taste that resembled progress it very quickly proved to be naught but a taste. Again I believe this was simply my lack of interest as I did more research. Not only that but it turns out medical datasets to do with diabetes risk factors in people with poor diets are designed for medical professionals (funny that) and as a result were pretty much impossible to understand.

So I gave up. Yes, you read that correctly. I stared into the mirror and mouthed the letter ‘F’ for a while till I got bored of that too.

Then it struck me, why don’t I just do something I find interesting and fun? That was my focus from the very beginning, I knew everyone would jump on the depressing and serious issues bus as soon as we started this project. That is why I had made a silent oath to myself to do something that didn’t make me incredibly sad the minute I tried to work on it. And I want to be clear that although I may sound like I’m making fun of those serious subjects, I am not. Laughing at the fact that many people jumped on the same incredibly sad datasets does not remove from the seriousness of the data itself and why people chose those datasets. Moving on.

So I went back to good ol’ video games. And boy am I glad I did. It turns out being interested in the thing the numbers relate to makes the numbers less mind-numbing and allows the brain to actually think about what to do with the numbers. I scrawled through some interesting sites and found a data set that grabbed my attention, highest number of players in a game in a one hour period. This inspired me to track down where the figure came from, and of course, I ended up at Steam. Steam for those who are unaware is a very popular marketplace for games on PC, probably the biggest in the world. It has various other things like forums, guides, achievements, chat rooms and any number of gaming peripherals (software based) and is thus probably one of the biggest gaming communities on earth. It also helps that the company that runs it, Valve, keeps track of pretty much every statistic involving games and player bases that it gives to the public for free. I felt like I had struck the most obvious vein of gold in the world. Now for an object.

The fact that the first statistic that caught my eye was the fact that Player Unkown’s Battlegrounds had three million players on in one hour came to mind. What exactly was it about that fact that made it so impressive? Well, I believe it was the time frame. Three million is not exactly a large number in our day and age, especially in relation to the internet and video games. The fact that we managed to have three million human beings in one tiny online world that makes up an impossibly small sliver of cyberspace real estate in the same hour is fairly mind-boggling. Every time I try imagining it I see the Tron equivalent of New York. I understand that this image isn’t accurate or even relevant, but it's what gave me some scope as to why it was so cool. If you want a practical or marketable reason (I don’t know why you would, they always suck the soul out of cool stuff) as to why this is important, it's very simple. Three million people passing through a single digital space is basically a license to print money in our modern economy. You could potentially advertise to just under the population of Los Angeles in one hour. So there, practical reason tacked on to the fact that this is simply a cool statistic. Not only that, but this to me is one of the biggest harbingers of what is to come. If you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snowcrash’ you might understand why this makes me so excited. If you haven’t, please go read it then come finish reading this.

So this was why I decided to see if I could map the peak player populations of the biggest video games on Steam to an analog clock. Not only that but I find something vaguely entertaining in the irony of using analog to symbolize the fact that we are so deeply into digital it's not even funny.

I have two prototypes and my final product all done. The first prototype involved taking the top four game populations at the respective peaks they reached and mapping them to four sections of the clock. For example, I mapped the population of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PubG) between numbers twelve to three on the clock. I took the peak population (3,227,432) and divided it by four. I then took that result and listed it at the number twelve, then doubled it and put that at the one hour mark, then tripled it and so on. This means that on the clock the population starts at a quarter of its total and over the course of four hours reaches its peak. This is done with four games in total, PubG, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Fallout 4.

The issues with this prototype were that it was very simple, there was little more to it than a pie chart in my mind. I wanted the population distribution growing by the hour to help communicate how massive these figures were, to truly get across the significance of this kind of population growth in such a short time. So how could I add complexity to this design, avoid the pie chart aspect while still showing multiple game populations and the significance of their size?

The second prototype used a different method of mapping the data. I decided to use the hands themselves and the way in which they moved to map the data. So, in this case, the second hand would go from a lower number and work it's way around the clock until one minute had passed. On the minute mark (once returning to its starting point) it would have reached the full peak player population figure. This would be repeated with the minute and hour hands, each one representing a player population. This meant that I lost one population figure as there are only three hands. However I think there is something sleeker about the top three populations being mapped, it is generally how we rank competitions so it was fitting that three would have to do. I followed a similar principle to the first prototype, dividing the final population figures by sixty for the second and minute hands and by twelve for the hour hand. I knew that I would not be able to fit sixty different figures on the clock face though, so I placed a figure on the twelve, three, six and nine hour marks. This would allow for an easy enough distribution while still retaining a good sense of how massive these populations could be. There were three sets of figures on each of these hour marks, which got a little difficult to read in some cases. Not only that but I had not realized that placement of the numbers would not clearly show which hand was relevant to which number. I liked the idea of using the turning of the hands themselves, it made sense to utilize the primary mechanics of my chosen object to display my dataset. The issue was making it clear how the mechanics of the clock would ‘point’ to the appropriate data.

With the final step in creating my object, I decided to use the same method as my second prototype, but in this case I created a key to label which number was represented by which hand on the clock itself. They also happen to be colour coded in order to help make it more clear which number relates to which player population by video game. As simplistic as the design has remained I am satisfied that it breaks down a large number that can be easily glossed over without understanding its significance, and by causing a person to have to see as it gradually gets to the final figure it highlights just how large these numbers are.

[peppersjam]

My Top 10 Albums of 2018

In March of 2018, Spotify released the “Smirnoff Equalizer,” a web app that analyzed the percentage of Spotify listens by non-male artists. My results were embarrassingly dude, so I decided that I needed to devote more of my ear-hours to female artists. Thanks, Smirnoff!

The results of this initiative aren’t perfectly reflected in my top 10 list because I devoted a lot of spins to albums that didn’t come out in 2018 (in an attempt to correct my blind spot). Key new-to-me non-2018 albums:

Phoebe Bridgers - "Stranger in the Alps" (2017) (My Jam: Motion Sickness)

Waxahatchee - "Ivy Trip" (2015) and "Out in the Storm" (2017) (My Jam: Recite Remorse)

Carly Rae Jepsen - "E•MO•TION" (2015) (My Jam: When I Needed You) and "Cut To The Feeling" (2017) (on repeat, forever)

Charli XCX - "Pop 2" (2017) (My Jam: Out of My Head)

Paramore - "Riot!" (2007) (My Jam: Misery Business, duh)

But, time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future, so I have to talk about how I did with last year's list, and move on to this year's releases.

So, what's still in my current rotation from my 2017 top 10? More than half of them: Sleep Well Beast, Turn Out the Lights, Flower Boy, Ctrl, Melodrama, and DAMN. And, of couse, the Frank Ocean singles.

Runners up:

Kendrick Lamar et al. - "Black Panther: The Album" (so, so close to cracking my top 10. Sets a new standard for pop/hip-hop soundtracks. This decade's O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack? Does that make any sense at all?)

BROCKHAMPTON - "Iridescence" (I had BROCKHAMPTON's "Saturation" trilogy on repeat this year, but their new one didn't quite do it for me. I think they're still trying to figure out how to be their best musical selves post-Ameer Vann. Oh, but: 1999 Wildfire is THE BUSINESS so I'm not worried)

Pusha T - "DAYTONA" (Good, mean. Classic Pusha)

Nils Frahm - "All Melody" (Saw him live this year; he's going to be one of those artists that I see as many times as possible, a la Andrew Bird)

Other highlights: Drake released another bloated album. I blocked Kanye on twitter and didn't listen to ye. Had frequent fits of emo obsession, like getting into American Football many years late. Listened to Frank Ocean's "Moon River" and Spotify's POLLEN playlist a bunch.

Mistakes I'm probably making: underrating Mitski. Not mentioning Soccer Mommy in this post. Sleeping on Vince Staples's FM!

10. Cardi B – Invasion of Privacy

Many people wrote many things about Cardi B this year. I have nothing original to add: she is charismatic, unique, and good at rapping. She made good rap songs and put them on a good rap album that I listened to a bunch.

9. Mac Miller – Swimming

This is the first Mac Miller album I've latched onto. It's partly because of his tragic death, but even before that, I was impressed by his effortless flow and the way the entire album meshes together. In a year where rap underwhelmed me, it was nice to see real growth from a guy that I mostly only liked before because he gave beats to Vince Staples when no one else would. Ugh. Rest in peace, Mac.

8. Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino

I finally realized that the reason Arctic Monkeys have such staying power (for me and for the world in general, I guess) is that their lyrics are consistently delightful:

Take it easy for a little while Come and stay with us It's such an easy flight Cute new places keep on popping up since the exodus It's all getting gentrified I put a tacqueria on the roof It was well reviewed Four stars out of five And that's unheard of

7. Mitski – Be the Cowboy

"You know how you all loved Puberty 2? What if I did that but literally every part of it was better?" – Mitski, probably.

6. Big Red Machine – Big Red Machine

It's the folktronica The National and Bon Iver mashup that I've been waiting for. This album didn't have to be good. It could've ended up more like EL VY's Return To The Moon which was fun and listenable, but ultimately a B side. But nope: these songs are excellent, and wouldn't be out of place on a The National or Bon Iver record.

(I don't mean to outright diss the EL VY record. I love that the whole Eaux Claire bunch are playing around with projects like that, and like Big Red Machine. It seems like a pragmatic way to keep the mother bands from getting stale. But, like, pragmatic in a fun way, not in a robotic, soulless way.)

5. SABA – Care for Me

Saba's a kind of parallel universe Chance the Rapper where everything is sad. I know that's not fair - Saba isn't characteristically sad; it's just a sad album (and, weirdly, it's easier for me to love overly sad albums than overly happy albums). The album is good enough that I can forgive the cloying "Logout." And I can finally forgive the occasionally tasteless skits on Bucket List Project.

4. Beach House – 7

I was out on Beach House. I saw them live when they were touring for Bloom and I was underwhelmed by their live performance. It was fine but it wasn't for me. Not only did The Fox's acoustics muddle everything, the band didn't seem to have much energy for the set. I get it. It's Beach House. There's not going to be a mosh pit.

I still listen to every new Beach House album, though, mostly because Teen Dream was an important touch point in my indie rock awakening. And I'm glad that I do, but otherwise I would have missed 7, Beach House's best album. It's like they took Teen Dream and turned the "sleepy" dial down a notch or two. *chef's kiss*

3. boygenius – boygenius

Julien shredding on "Stay Down" is probably enough to warrant a spot on this list. It's fun to see these three women -- who are generally all about the introspective/sad vibes -- rock out. I feel lucky to have seen them perform these songs, and I'm crossing my fingers for a full-length in the future.

This entry also serves as a proxy for Phoebe's "Stranger in the Alps" which (boo) came out in 2017.

2. Lucy Dacus – Historian

It's not just that the songs are expertly crafted emotional indie music; Lucy's voice is stunning, and it's even more stunning live. Seeing her perform live bumped this album up a few spots for me for sure. I know this isn't supposed to be a "good stuff I saw live" list, but seeing these songs live helped to contextualize the lyrics and helped me understand Lucy as an artist (I hadn't heard of her before they announced the boygenius tour).

1. Tierra Whack – Whack World

I haven't been as excited during a first listen of a non-Frank/Kanye/Kendrick/Vampire Weekend album as I was for Tierra Whack's brilliant debut. It's got everything you need: fun beats, memorable hooks, and creative verses. It's only fifteen minutes long, so I naturally listened to it over and over again that first day, excitedly Slacking my co-workers in the #jams channel. Like the rest of the known universe (i.e., indie rap twitter) I wish that these songs were longer, but the silver lining is I don't ever listen to any of these songs without listening to all of these songs, which is a treat. Man. Just thinking about this album makes me smile. You could've listened to the album instead of reading this post! Go!

Next year is going to be the tenth year of compiling my top ten albums! I'll definitely do something to celebrate – maybe a top ten of the decade? Maybe a retrospective of all hundred albums that made my lists? Maybe some fresh charts and graphs? Will tumblr even still exist next year? Will the United States? Stay tuned!