#when the first Hollywood romance was crafted

[greatmuldini]

Any household equipped to receive the television service of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1954 would almost certainly have done so on a “table-top” set not unlike the moderately priced and now iconic “TV-22,” which featured a circular 9-inch Mullard “television picture tube” capable of displaying the 405 lines its electron beam had to travel to draw the “high definition” images coming from London’s Alexandra Palace or the Birmingham transmitter in Sutton Coldfield. First manufactured in 1950 by Bush Radio, then under the umbrella of the Rank Corporation, the Bakelite-clad receiver came with connections for a dipole aerial and AC mains power, and no option at all to change the channel. What today would be considered a serious limitation was in fact a pragmatic decision as long as the country's airwaves remained limited to a single channel. (The set would have been ready for three additional channels which were proposed but never implemented.)

Growing audiences and an expanding schedule forced the new medium to create new content if it intended to fulfil its mission as a public broadcaster to “inform, educate, and entertain.” While the BBC's radio service had famously been on the air since 1922 and earned its merits during the war, television remained for a long time an experimental technology of questionable utility. Early programming therefore relied heavily on the spoken word and the conventions of live theatre, including the singular, and ephemeral, nature of each performance: very little was pre-recorded (on film), and once a programme was broadcast it ceased to exist. Much of the BBC's live programming and even material recorded on tape is now lost; what we do have from the era before and just after the introduction of magnetic tape in 1956 was routinely filmed off the television screen in a process known as kinescoping. Preservation of its output did not rank among the BBC's priorities; recording everything on film would have required vast resources dwarfing the convenience of "canned" content: repeat showings on the BBC often meant repeat performances – bringing the original cast and crew back to the studio was, after all, a well-rehearsed operation and more efficient than any existing technology. Similar traditional arrangements continued well beyond the arrival of effective technical solutions.

The lack of definition, in every sense, at first prevented the new medium from being recognized as such not only by those who worked in it but also the sceptical consumers into whose living rooms the images would be beamed. The privacy of the viewing experience would prove decisive: like its theatrical rival, television was visual, and it was live. With radio it shared the spontaneity of the live broadcast and a large audience that would not need to come together in a single room. Film could offer none of the above, certainly not in combination, but where television (and radio) opted for intimacy on the small screen, film went big and promoted the communal experience – a very basic, fundamental division which remained in place for more than half a century and is only now being challenged by the most recent innovations in streaming and subscription services.

In 1954 the BBC, as the sole operator of the new technology in the United Kingdom, looked to other pioneers abroad for suitable formats with which to fill their expanding schedules. In the United States, commercial television was in full swing by the early 1950s, with major broadcasters such as NBC and CBS competing for viewers and, more importantly, advertising partners – sponsors in the terminology of the scheme developed for radio that had businesses pay for the right to name an entire programme (today's wealth of "archival" recordings from the era is a direct result of the legal requirement to provide proof to the customers that their money was well-spent). Here, too, tried and tested radio content was being adapted for television and, in the process, began to take on hybrid features. One promising concept on the CBS network that appealed to the BBC decision makers was a former radio show turned televisual experiment: You Are There fused (fictitious) contemporary radio reportage with historical re-enactments – easily done on radio but more challenging – and more rewarding – as a live spectacle for audiences to see. Not quite ready, in technical terms, to rival the offerings of the film industry but arguably an alternative to a night out at the theatre, the "night in" promised to become an event in its own right.

You Are There set out to transport the viewer back in time and to bring them face to face with historical figures, who are moreover prepared to pause and be interviewed by modern-day (all-male, often real-life) TV news correspondents. The deliberate anachronism of the programme, examining a fictionalized version of history with the most modern tools available and presenting it to the viewer in the privacy of his own living room was the message and the medium rolled into one: the historical subject under scrutiny was by no means chosen at random or pre-determined by the American creators; licensees around the world dramatized historical events from their own national perspectives. Only seven episodes were produced for the BBC in 1954, none of which exist today. Press reviews and summaries confirm the use of exterior location sequences pre-recorded on film to supplement the live performances in the Alexandra Palace studio, but we can only speculate on the precise treatment of each subject.

The series opened, appropriately, with the Charge of the Light Brigade in the year of its centenary, followed by the trials (and tribulations) of Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I, Captain Dreyfus, and Julius Caesar. Joining this eminent circle were, somewhat less obviously, the instigators of a minor mutiny, as well as a major figure, arguably, of the Anglo-Irish political struggle whose historical – and literary - significance has only grown since 1954. The Fall of Charles Stuart Parnell has inspired generations of writers engaged in the fabrication of alternate histories. The enigma of his personality, and the complex set of circumstances surrounding the events of 1890 continue to be explored in imaginary what if variations. You Are There, by contrast, portrays a moment in time that must contain a myriad of possibilities. [Part 1 of 2]

[nevermorgue]

Nevermore Hollywood AU Part 2

2004, LA Annabel Lee Whitlock is a well known actress known for historical dramas and romances. She always goes viral when she's spotted at an event or a party because of her fashion choices. She always dresses straight out of period dramas with long gowns and intricately crafted gloves and fans. It is as if she were stepping right out of her films and into present day. She does this in fear of being cared about less as a normal person. By being kept on a parasocial pedestal, she ensures that she is always seen as a perfect, elegant actress. She is signed under Spectral Talent, a very prestigious talent + modelling agency with a small talent pool of important, famous names.

Lenore is an actress that was known for always starring in Theo Vandernacht productions. After his sudden passing two years ago, she resorted to doing quite literally everything else but acting. She has done screenwriting, producing, modelling, and even dabbled in camera work. But last year, Lenore Vandernacht left the spotlight permanently. Some say she snuck off to a tropical island to live out an early retirement. Others say she died. In reality, she has just decided to start over under the alias "Leo Vandernacht". She decides to break back into the industry (at her + Theo's old company, Nevermore Co.) as a talented writer and director, hoping to continue her brother's projects that only the two of them ever knew about. Lenore and Annabel meet through the casting for Leo's directorial/writer debut; a period piece with supernatural elements simply called "The Raven". It was Theo's story that he started and never really got to expand on. Nobody was really all that interested until Annabel Lee expressed public interest in auditioning. And from the moment they locked eyes for the first time, they both knew that it were as if they were destined to meet in that audition room. Pluto: An intern that JUST graduated internship and is now a gaffer. Has really nothing else going for him, spends ALL DAY on set if allowed, just doing whatever needs to be dealt with. He really wants to eventually become the assistant art director for Nevermore Co. Duke: Another famous actor, definitely not as easily recognized as Annabel Lee but still VERY well known. He rose to fame after appearing on an AGT-esque show in which he did incredible magic and illusion tricks. He ended up launching a career after that, traveling to perform as well as making cameos in movies and television. These cameos are how he ended up meeting and working alongside Annabel Lee at one point. They dislike each other greatly, but their on screen platonic chemistry is VERY well received. Knew Lenore before her 'retirement' is one of the few people who knows that Leo and Lenore are the same. He's done some modelling and small roles with her (before Theo's passing), despite not being signed under Nevermore Co. His agency, Magie, is a close partner to them and like to share their talent pool. This is how he knows Pluto as well. PART ONE (Prospero, Will)

[corvid-gae]

I believe i can make a better Minecraft movie than the garbage that is being produced rn. This isn't even "oh i'm totally a better writer than these professionals" this is because they seem to be ignoring the 'themes' of Minecraft in favor of corporate sanitation, and I can do better than a corporation.

So where to start? Well, by analyzing the 'themes' of Minecraft I mentioned. And what are those? Well, 3 major things imo.

Number 1; Creativity; Minecraft itself is a sandbox game, naturally one of the major themes it carries is creativity. You can create anything you want, the worlds your oyster in Minecraft.

Number 2; Community; While Minecraft can be a single-player game, the whole of the game has become about a community of people. SMPs, Minigame servers, even outside the game Minecraft is about community. As much as people may not like the mob vote, we come together as a community to decide things that we want to come to the game!

Number 3; Love; Now you might look at me weird for this one, but Minecraft is full of love. Love by Minecraft content creators who LOVE the game for all its worth, mod makers who love to create new content for the game, even the Minecraft End Poem. "And the universe said I love you, because you are love-" the game is full of love.

Now are these things the end all be all of 'themes' in Minecraft? No, of course not. It's a sandbox game which means themes can be all over the place, but these are the themes I personally would use in a Minecraft movie since without these themes a movie would fall flat. And if we're all honest with ourselves, just from that newest trailer the Minecraft Movie has NONE of these.

There's no creativity (just another jumanji isekai ripoff) no community (aka no one in the community seems to be liking it) and no love (it's a corporate cash-grab through and through)

But how would i fix that? Well, I have a few ideas.

First and foremost; who are the protagonists and antagonists? Well OBVIOUSLY Steve and Alex are our protagonists. Steve has lost his memories and must find out what happened to them, and Alex? Well she is related to his missing memories (also NO, no romance between them. No "oh she's a STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER" in the Hollywood way) And the antagonists? Well, one would first assume Herobrine- but i think that's too easy. What about the Piglins like the actual live action? Also no. So who the hell is the antagonist? Well that depends, an antagonist would be in opposition to all of the themes that I listed- Creativity, Community, and Love. What in Minecraft fits this? A destructive force that acts alone and out of hate (or at least some kind of hate.)

The Wither.

But hasn't Minecraft Story Mode used the Wither for its story? Yes, yes they did. But why fix whats not broken? The Wither is a GREAT antagonist if the themes of Minecraft are as I listed above. Not to mention you can do a LOT with the Wither. It doesn't just have to be a large monster, it can be many things. For this movie the Wither is akin to a blight spreading across the land, killing anything in its path, reducing it to a greyed out violent form of its past self.

Next; What would the general plot be? Well, the general idea is that Steve wakes up without his memories. All he has is a journal with his name on it and a few entries (how to craft, certain creatures and what they drop, etc. The basics of Minecraft) but there's also a map that leads him to a village, which is when the plot truly kicks off when he defends the villagers from some Pillagers (Villagers who have been affected by the Wither blight.) The story follows Steve as he finds Alex (who is related to his unknown history. She admits she also has very little memory. All she knows is that she knows HIM and they need to stick together) and then they travel to find what caused the Wither blight; what happened to their memories; and how the hell are they going to stop the blight/get their memories back. The climatic point of the story reveals that THEY are the reason the Wither blight is spreading, both had accidentally unleashed it while exploring a Stronghold that held the Wither, which also explains their lost memories (somehow, i don't have the specifics its OKAY- this is a concept for a reason)

At the climax itself Steve is dying. There's a reference to the End Poem, he comes back to life (because obviously it's Minecraft. You revive) and him & Alex manage to stop the Wither blight as well as reverse it, obviously saving the day.

Now there's a lot of holes in the idea, but as I said it's a CONCEPT i'm toying around with because I do believe this basic structure would provide a much more fulfilling movie than game isekai with popular actors #12. I'd love to see people add on to this since as I said, COMMUNITY is one of the largest parts of Minecraft, and personally i love building on others ideas.

[sparkymalone]

Have you watched Scott pilgrim the anime?

How about an actors au: "wanna run lines in your trailer?"

Just, maybe with real sparks after the kissing scene instead of the one-sided first love…

D-D-D-DOUBLE POST!!

Here is an ask from fucking January. I'm so good at deadlines, guys.

Anyway, I had not seen the Scott Pilgrim anime at the time of getting this request, so part of the time delay was me thinking I needed to watch it to get the full context. And that took forever, because I have about a million things that I need to watch, but haven't. I'm that kinda bitch.

SO! I have seen it now lol. But really, this fic has very little to do with SP. I really leaned into the sparks thing, though. Uh, maybe more than is reasonable, but here we are.

“...And cut!”

The actors on set all breathed a sigh of relief and turned to the director expectantly. The director walked onto the set to describe what she was picturing to the actors, while some of the extras slipped away to the catering table.

Hajime sighed and set down the tray of coffee cups he was holding, offering one to each person that approached him. This definitely wasn't what he had had in mind when he signed up for film school. All he wanted was to direct, but here he was working craft services instead.

He had applied to Hope's Peak Film School right out of high school, and had taken out a hefty loan to pay for tuition. The school promised results, and Hollywood was positively packed with Hope's Peak graduates, so Hajime had high hopes going in.

Unfortunately, even Hope’s Peak couldn't do anything for someone with no talent. Turns out Hajime didn't have the eye necessary for directing, or for cinematography. He wasn't any good at screenwriting, lighting, or much of anything else, either.

But the school had promised results, so they couldn't very well tell him to leave. Instead, they had bounced him from program to program, trying to find a job he could excel at. Finally, they had stuck him in a “work study” program, which basically meant he was an intern on the set of another student's project.

Currently, he was being used as a gofer by the people on set, going on frequent coffee runs and helping out with catering in between. It was thankless work, and Hajime thought about just quitting every single day. But then he remembered how much money he had spent on this bullshit school, and that kept him from leaving.

That, and getting to see so many beautiful actors. The movie seemed to be some sort of gay romance drama, and as such, all of the lead actors were hot. As much as Hajime hated being there, his inner bisexual disaster was satisfied.

The guy in the lead male role was particularly gorgeous. His name was Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, he was in the same year as Hajime but in the acting program, and somehow this was his first film. Hajime found himself staring whenever he was on set, finding him oddly captivating.

And maybe it was his imagination, but he could have sworn he caught Kuzuryu staring back once or twice.

The actor playing his love interest was good-looking, too, but he didn't seem to be very good at acting. Not that Hajime could judge, really. He had never tried acting, so what did he know? Maybe the guy was actually great.

Judging from the way Kuzuryu snapped at him when the camera was off, however, it seemed like he was pretty bad.

The director resumed her seat and everyone took their places. “Action!”

Hajime watched the scene unfold, and found himself enthralled when Kuzuryu began giving a heartfelt monologue to his love interest. He moved closer to the other man, gazing up into his eyes. The other actor gave a brief response, cupped his cheek, and kissed him.

The kiss looked… bad. Even ignoring the weird twinge of jealousy Hajime felt watching it, the kiss just seemed kind of awkward.

Kuzuryu apparently thought so, too, because he jerked away. “Are you fuckin' serious?!” he growled.

“Cut!” The director hopped out of her chair and approached the scene. “What's the problem?”

The taller man crossed his arms, glaring at Kuzuryu. “I don't know, ask him.”

But the director narrowed her eyes at him. “I'm asking you. That looked terrible. Have you ever kissed anyone before, Leon?”

The actor, Leon Kuwata, balked. “What?! Of course I have! If it looked bad it's because-”

“Hell no, don't try and pin this on me,” Kuzuryu snapped. “You're a shitty kisser.”

Kuwata glared at him. “It's just awkward ‘cause you're so damn short!”

This sparked a shouting match between the two actors. Hajime rolled his eyes, but decided that this seemed like a good opportunity to give the director her coffee.

“Miss Nevermind?” he called as he approached. When she turned, Hajime held out her coffee cup.

“Thank you,” the director sighed, clearly dismayed by the lack of chemistry between her two leads.

“Height has nothing to do with it, you're just a shitty actor!” Kuzuryu was shouting. He caught Hajime's eye and the brunette froze, trying not to notice as Kuzuryu quickly looked him up and down. “I'll prove it to you.”

The diminutive blonde walked up to Hajime, glancing between him and Kuwata. Apparently deciding that they were close enough in height, he looked up into Hajime's face. “What’s your name?”

Blinking in surprise, the intern replied, “Uh… Hajime Hinata…”

Kuzuryu nodded in acknowledgement. “Hinata. Okay. Run this scene with me real quick.”

Hajime was shocked. “W-What? But… I'm not an actor…”

“Doesn't matter,” the blonde replied, waving his hand dismissively. “That's even better, actually. I'm just trying to prove a point.”

Kuwata gritted his teeth. “Fuck you, man.” Still, he obligingly stepped off to the side.

A script seemed to come out of nowhere, being shoved into Hajime's hands. The director, Sonia, cheerfully told him which page to turn to, and then where to stand.

Completely out of his depth, Hajime looked helplessly between the others before taking his place in the scene.

Sonia went back to her chair to watch as Kuzuryu resumed his own spot. “I'm going to start with the monologue again, okay? You just say the bit after that and then kiss me, got it?”

Hajime blushed brightly, but tried to force it down. “Uh, got it.”

Clearing his throat, Kuzuryu once again began reciting his monologue. Seeing him perform up close like this felt totally different, and Hajime felt himself getting swept up in the scene. When the blonde man stepped closer, Hajime instinctively put a hand on his waist. Kuzuryu seemed surprised, but kept going.

The actor finished his line and looked up at Hajime expectantly. Hajime swallowed hard and glanced at the script in his hand. Putting as much feeling into it as he could, he recited his part before meeting Kuzuryu’s eyes. He tucked the script under his arm, cupped the blonde's cheek, and leaned down.

When their lips touched, Hajime felt a strange little jolt, almost like a spark. He chose not to focus on that, though, instead giving all of his attention to the kiss. His lips pressed against Kuzuryu's, both of them tilting their heads to allow their mouths to slot together. The shorter man's lips parted and Hajime, caught up in the moment, slipped his tongue into his mouth. Kuzuryu made a soft noise, somewhere between surprised and pleased.

They kissed for a long moment, mouths moving together naturally. The hand Hajime had on Kuzuryu's waist slid around his back, pulling their bodies flush against each other. Kuzuryu moaned quietly, bracing his hands on Hajime's chest.

Finally, the blonde pulled back, and the two of them gazed into each other's eyes. Hajime's skin felt electric, and he desperately wanted to kiss him again.

Someone off to the side clapped, breaking the spell, and both of them whipped around to face the director. “That looked amazing!” Sonia beamed. “Hajime, how would you like to be in my movie?”

The offer completely caught Hajime off guard. He glanced back at Kuzuryu, who stepped out of his arms. “Uh… I mean… Is that really okay?”

“What the fuck?!” Kuwata demanded, stomping over. “You can't just give him my part-”

“I can and I will,” Sonia declared, her tone leaving no room to argue. “What do you say, Hajime?”

Feeling a jolt of excitement, Hajime nodded. “S-Sure… I'd love to!”

The redheaded actor stormed off, but Hajime found his attention commanded by Kuzuryu, who was idly touching his own lips with his fingertips. When he noticed Hajime staring, he stopped, giving the taller man a confident smile.

“Welcome to showbiz,” he teased. Hajime couldn't help smiling back.

***

Never in a million years would Hajime have expected to be good at acting, but apparently he was. Sonia was thrilled with his performance, and Fuyuhiko (he had insisted Hajime use his first name) seemed to approve, as well.

And that was good, because Hajime would've given anything to keep the role. Playing opposite Fuyuhiko in such romantic scenes was intoxicating, not to mention the electric feeling he got whenever they kissed. Even if it was just for the movie, Hajime was going to treasure every second.

He wasn't entirely sure how Fuyuhiko felt about it, though. The blonde would often look at him strangely, especially after kissing scenes. He was generally pretty easy to get along with, though, once Hajime got past his grumpy exterior.

After a long day of filming, during which there had been a particularly steamy kiss that left Hajime's lips tingling, Fuyuhiko approached him. “Hey, you've been doing really well,” he told Hajime, expression neutral. “But there's still a couple of places I think you can improve. Wanna run lines in my dorm?”

Hajime's eyebrows shot up. He certainly never would've expected Fuyuhiko to ask him to go anywhere, let alone his own room. “Oh, sure. Thanks.”

He followed Fuyuhiko back to the dorms, noting how much nicer his room was than Hajime's. There was enough space for a sofa and a table, in addition to all of the bedroom furniture. Fuyuhiko sat on the couch and gestured for him to do the same.

The blonde looked at him critically, but said nothing. Feeling nervous, Hajime offered a smile. “Thanks for helping me out. I've never acted before, so I'm happy for any pointers you can give me.”

Fuyuhiko was silent a moment longer before finally speaking. “Yeah… Happy to help.”

Hajime furrowed his brow. “Um, is something wrong?”

The actor sighed and leaned against the arm of the sofa. “Look, I kinda had an ulterior motive asking you here.”

Immediately, Hajime's heart sank. This was it, Fuyuhiko was going to tell him he was actually awful, tell him to quit or just straight up fire him - could he do that?

His panicked thoughts were interrupted when Fuyuhiko spoke again. “When we… kiss,” he began cautiously, “do you ever feel anything… weird?”

Hajime's eyes widened. “...Yeah, actually.”

Fuyuhiko looked at him, seeming surprised even though he was the one who brought it up. “You do?”

Nodding, Hajime considered all the on-screen kisses they had shared. “I always feel kinda tingly… electric, maybe. Like-”

“-Sparks,” Fuyuhiko finished for him.

“...Yeah.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. “That's the feeling I get, too,” the blonde told him quietly. “I just wanted to find out… if it was just me, I guess.”

Hajime licked his lips nervously. “What do you think it means?”

Fuyuhiko shrugged. “I don't know.” He paused. “...Maybe it would help us figure it out if we kissed right now.”

The brunette looked at him in shock. Fuyuhiko wasn't facing him, cheeks flushed, and Hajime felt his heartbeat speed up. Finally, he nodded. “Sure, if, uh… If you're okay with it.”

The smaller man slowly turned to look at him, cheeks rosier than ever. “Of course I'm okay with it, dumbass. I suggested it.” Despite his words, he still sounded unsure.

But if he said he was fine, Hajime certainly wasn't going to pass up a chance to kiss him in private.

Hajime scooted closer on the couch, not breaking eye contact. He slowly leaned in, giving Fuyuhiko ample time to change his mind. He was apparently taking too long for the blonde, however, and Fuyuhiko lunged forward, crashing their mouths together.

The kiss was a lot more aggressive than any of their on-screen kisses, but Hajime still felt that familiar tingle. After a moment, he pulled back.

“Sparks,” he breathed.

Fuyuhiko studied his face nervously. “What the fuck does it mean, though? Maybe we should-”

He was cut off as Hajime moved in and kissed him again. This time he parted his lips, carefully licking Fuyuhiko's bottom lip. The blonde made a soft noise, but opened his mouth, allowing Hajime access. As soon as their tongues met, he felt more sparks, exploding across his skin and behind his eyes.

It seemed like Fuyuhiko felt it, too, because he threw his arms around Hajime's neck and pulled him closer. Hajime obligingly wrapped his arms around the other man's waist, kissing him deeply.

After several minutes of passionate kissing, Fuyuhiko pulled back, panting. “Holy shit,” he murmured. “Why does that feel so good?”

“What do you think it would feel like if I kissed you somewhere else?” Hajime heard himself ask.

The blonde's eyes widened, but he didn't move away. Instead, he slowly tilted his head to one side, baring his neck invitingly. Hajime only took a second to be flustered by the situation before leaning in and kissing Fuyuhiko's neck.

The tingle in Hajime's lips was less noticeable than it had been when he kissed Fuyuhiko's mouth, but apparently the effect it was having on the smaller man was much more dramatic.

Fuyuhiko let out a soft moan as Hajime pressed wet, open-mouthed kisses along his neck. “Fuck,” he gasped. “Ngh, that feels fuckin' amazing…!”

Encouraged by his partner's moans, Hajime kissed slowly up his neck, paying special attention to the sensitive spot just below his ear. He kissed Fuyuhiko's ear, as well, tracing his tongue along the shell before sucking gently on his earlobe.

The blonde moaned and squirmed, hands fisted in the front of Hajime's shirt. “S-Stop…!”

Immediately, Hajime stopped what he was doing and sat up, breathing heavily. “Uh, sorry… Was that too much?”

Fuyuhiko didn't answer, instead pushing Hajime against the back of the couch and climbing into his lap. He straddled the shocked man, looking up at him with half-lidded eyes. “Kiss me again, you bastard.”

Hajime didn't need to be told twice. He dove in, kissing Fuyuhiko deeply, arms wrapping around him and pulling their bodies flush together. The blonde gave a pleased moan, throwing his arms around Hajime's neck and pressing himself closer.

In this position, Hajime could feel the bulge in Fuyuhiko's pants, and he was unsurprised to realize that he was just as hard. He was surprised when the smaller man began grinding against him, sending waves of pleasure through both of them. Hajime gasped into the kiss and rolled his hips to meet Fuyuhiko.

After several minutes of desperate making out and grinding, Fuyuhiko pulled back, grasping the collar of Hajime's shirt. “Hah… That feels fuckin' incredible…” He rocked his hips again, moaning at the sensation.

The taller man hummed in agreement, leaning in to kiss his neck again. Hajime relished every gasp and moan he drew from Fuyuhiko's lips, nipping at the sensitive skin. The whole situation seemed unreal, but he was still going to enjoy it to the fullest, cupping Fuyuhiko's ass and rutting hard against him.

Biting his lip, Fuyuhiko pulled away just enough to get Hajime to meet his eyes. The brunette couldn't help thinking how beautiful he looked, with his flushed cheeks and kiss-bruised lips. He was so enamored that he barely registered when Fuyuhiko spoke.

“...I want to feel more,” the blonde told him, almost shyly. “I want you to touch me more.”

Hajime couldn't believe his ears. Never in a million years would he have expected a hot, talented person like Fuyuhiko to be interested in someone like him. Still, he knew better than to question his good fortune.

Lunging back in, Hajime kissed the other man roughly. Fuyuhiko didn't seem to mind, kissing back with equal ferocity. Hajime pulled his partner tightly against him before slipping one hand under the waistband of Fuyuhiko's pants, sliding down to cup his bare ass.

The blonde moaned encouragingly, raising his hips, urging Hajime further. The taller man took the hint, sliding his fingers along the cleft of Fuyuhiko's ass, down to his entrance. He stroked the puckered opening, causing the man in his arms to gasp and break their kiss.

“Fuck,” Fuyuhiko breathed, gazing at Hajime with half-lidded eyes. “Just you touching me feels so fuckin' good…”

Hajime smiled slightly, rubbing more firmly against Fuyuhiko's hole. “Yeah?” he purred, feeling a sense of confidence he had never felt before. “I bet it'd feel even better with my fingers inside you.” Heat rose in his face at how forward he was being, but he didn't back down.

Fuyuhiko licked his lips seductively, draping his arms over Hajime's shoulders and arching his back to give him easier access. “Mmn, I bet it would.”

Breathing heavily, Hajime pulled his hand out of Fuyuhiko's pants just long enough to shove his fingers into his mouth and coat them with saliva. He quickly slipped his hand back under the fabric, trailing down Fuyuhiko's ass to rub slick fingertips against his hole. Watching his partner's reaction, he slid one finger inside.

The blonde's mouth fell open soundlessly, but he didn't look uncomfortable, so Hajime pushed a second finger into him, pressing in deep. Fuyuhiko's eyelashes fluttered and he moaned low in his throat. “Holy shit,” he breathed.

Hajime paused. “Is this okay?”

Golden eyes fixed him with a smoldering gaze. “It feels fucking amazing. Don't you dare stop!”

Biting his lip, Hajime gently slid his fingers in and out, pleased when another breathy moan escaped from Fuyuhiko's throat. Hajime slowly pumped his digits into the other man, watching the way he squirmed and whined.

The taller man swallowed hard. He didn't really have experience doing anything like this, so he was mostly just going off of what he had seen in porn or heard from his friends. It seemed like he was doing a good job, though, with the way Fuyuhiko was moaning and clenching around his fingers.

After a moment, the blonde grasped Hajime's face between his hands, trying to look at him seriously even though he was still being fingered open. “H-Hajime,” he started hoarsely, “I, mmn… I want you… I want you to fuck me.”

Hajime tried to ignore the way his heart leapt into his throat. “...Are you sure?”

Fuyuhiko gasped and rocked back against Hajime's hand. “Hah… Of course I'm sure. With how fuckin' good everything else feels… ahh… I have to know what your cock feels like…”

Letting out a shuddered breath, Hajime felt his erection strain against his pants. “God, I want to know what you feel like, too…”

“So fuck me!” Fuyuhiko moaned, hips bucking.

And god, Hajime wanted to fuck him. Unfortunately, his nerves were still getting the best of him. He decided it was probably better to just confess. “...I, um… I want to, I've just never… done this before,” he said lamely.

Fuyuhiko looked at him in surprise. “What? Then how the fuck are you so good at - mmn~!” He cut off with a sweet moan as Hajime's fingers brushed his prostate.

The brunette shivered as the other man squeezed tight around his fingers. He groaned softly, watching his partner's face. “...Just tell me what to do,” he told him quietly.

Licking his lips, Fuyuhiko reached back and pulled Hajime's fingers out of him. He stood up, looking appraisingly at the tent in Hajime's pants. “Hurry up and get your dick out.”

As Hajime scrambled to comply, Fuyuhiko made his way over to his nightstand, pulling out a bottle of lube. He returned to the couch, excitement flashing in his eyes as he caught sight of Hajime's exposed cock.

“Damn,” he chuckled, handing the lube to his flustered partner. Fuyuhiko began shedding his own clothes, undressing completely, much to Hajime's surprise. He climbed back into the taller man's lap, straddling him once more.

Hajime quickly poured some of the lubricant into his hand and began rubbing it over his cock, trying not to get too caught up. Having Fuyuhiko completely nude in his lap while he was still fully clothed was weirdly sexy, and he couldn't wait to finally be inside of the smaller man.

After only a moment, Fuyuhiko batted Hajime's hand away and took hold of his erection. He positioned it beneath him and slowly began lowering himself. The first touch of Hajime's cock against his hole had both of them gasping, an electric feeling running across their skin. Fuyuhiko bit his lip and lowered himself further, allowing the tip to breach his entrance.

The taller man dug his fingers into Fuyuhiko's hips, trembling with pleasure already. Something about the touch of the other man's skin was sending sparks through his entire body. As his cock slowly slid inside, the feeling only got more intense. Tight heat engulfed his cock and his whole body felt like it was on fire, but in the most euphoric way.

Fuyuhiko didn't stop moving until he was fully seated on Hajime's cock, breathless moans pouring from his lips already. “Holy fuck…!” he whined, muscles clenching and unclenching reflexively, making Hajime hiss. “S-So… So fuckin' big, so fuckin' good…!” He rocked his hips as he adjusted, making both of them moan.

Hajime was already completely overwhelmed. The feeling of being inside Fuyuhiko was incredibly intense and he couldn't keep himself from bucking up into him, making his partner cry out. “Sorry,” he breathed, but he was still pulling Fuyuhiko's hips down hard against his own.

Thankfully, Fuyuhiko seemed to be just as eager for more. He carefully raised himself up, almost to the tip of Hajime's cock, before sliding back down. A pleased purr left his throat and he repeated the action, this time slamming himself down roughly.

The blonde started up a slow rhythm, bouncing in Hajime's lap and coming down hard. Both of them gasped and moaned at the sensation, hungry for more.

“Fuck, Fuyuhiko,” Hajime panted, watching the other man's face. “You feel amazing…”

Fuyuhiko met his gaze, not slowing his pace at all. “Mmn, so do you…!” He bit his lip as Hajime's cock brushed against his sweet spot.

“God, you look so fucking good like this,” Hajime murmured, feeling almost delirious from the pleasure. “You're so fucking beautiful, so tight around my cock, so-”

His rambling was cut short when Fuyuhiko lunged forward and kissed him. Hajime wasn't complaining, happily kissing back as his partner rode him harder. He rocked his hips up to meet each of Fuyuhiko's movements, making both of them gasp and moan.

After a moment, Fuyuhiko broke the kiss with a loud cry. He had found exactly the right angle, causing Hajime's cock to hit his sweet spot with every bounce. The blonde arched his back, moaning sweetly as his lover's cock slid even deeper inside.

“Mmn, Hajime~” Fuyuhiko purred, burying one hand in Hajime's hair and looking into his eyes. “You're gonna fuckin' cum in me, right~?”

Hajime nodded obediently. “Hah… Fuck, yes…!”

The smaller man gave a pleased chuckle, muscles clenching around his partner. He leaned forward to nip at Hajime's lower lip. “And you're gonna cum hard, right~? Fill me up~?”

Again, Hajime moaned his agreement. “Please!”

Fuyuhiko slammed himself down harder with every bounce, feeling his climax rapidly approaching. He reached down to stroke his own cock, gasping and moaning. “Ngh…! Fuck, Hajime… I'm so fuckin' close, mmn…!”

“Me, too,” Hajime breathed. He leaned in, pressing sloppy, open-mouthed kisses against Fuyuhiko's throat as he bucked into him. His body felt like it was on fire and the only cure was the gorgeous blonde bouncing in his lap.

With a loud cry, Fuyuhiko finally reached his peak, slamming himself down and grinding onto Hajime's cock. He moaned hoarsely as his inner muscles fluttered around his partner and he spilled over his own fingers.

Hajime was right behind him, bucking desperately into him as he toppled over the edge. Fireworks exploded behind his eyes and he bit down on Fuyuhiko's neck. He buried himself as deeply as possible, filling his lover with his seed.

The two of them collapsed against the back of the couch, holding each other tightly. They were both breathing heavily, gazing into each other's eyes as they tried to get their thoughts in order. It took several minutes for either of them to form words.

“...Wow,” Hajime panted, still grasping Fuyuhiko's hips.

The blonde huffed out a quiet laugh. “Yeah… wow.”

Smiling softly, Hajime tried to formulate another thought. “So, uh… Sparks?”

Fuyuhiko leaned his head against his partner's shoulder. “Still don't know what it means, but… yeah. Sparks.”

“I think,” the brunette began slowly, “it means that there's… something special between us. Don't you think so?” He looked at the other man, eyes hopeful.

It took a moment for Fuyuhiko to respond. “...Yeah. I think you're right.”

Hajime felt his heart leap into his throat. “Yeah?”

The blonde slowly lifted his head, meeting Hajime's gaze. His face was flushed, but he looked determined. “...I like you. The whole reason I wanted to test the whole ‘sparks’ thing was because I like you. And now… I'm sure.” He shifted his weight, reminding them both that Hajime was still inside of him. “Mmn… Be my dumbass boyfriend,” he murmured shyly.

Hajime's heart was pounding, and he immediately lunged in to kiss the man in his arms, feeling ecstatic. Between kisses, he managed to reply, “I like you, too… Of course I'll be your boyfriend.”

Fuyuhiko hummed happily, kissing him back. The two of them stayed entwined on the couch for a while longer, just kissing and muttering words of affection.

Hopefully that was worth the wait?? IDK anymore. I liked it.

[lazyghostcoffee]

Magical: A slice of life, My Oc

I wanna make this very clear that I’m going to post a bit slowly as I can be very inconsistent when it comes to posting.

Dream

Age: 19

Gender: Female

Nationality: Mexican-american

Magic: Water and Dark Magic

Height: 5,9ft

Sexuality: Asexual

Personality: quiet, very smart, semi-sleepy, always curious

Likes: dry and dark humor, reading, sleeping, modifying weapons, milkshake and practicing with magic

Dislike: missing mechanical parts, fancy dresses, early morning, loud music and using magic used discretely.

Small facts: nothing more than a government experiment she was sent off to the first dimension that being earth to have a normal life even though when she got older, she was aware of what she was she doesn’t really seem to care about it.

Snowy

Age: 26

Gender: Female

Nationality: French and Mexican

Magic: Sown

Height: 4,11ft

Sexuality: Bisexual

Personality: clever and witty, dramatic, headstrong, sassy, yet open-minded

Likes: sewing, listening to music, making fashionable clothes, her business, and romantic novels

Dislike: horror movies, rude customers, horrific fabric, pranks

Small facts: she runs a fashion website and store for her clothing. She is well-known both on earth and on the federation she loves making clothes so much that she often makes clothes for her friends and she hates seeing them shop and other clothing brands.

Sam

Age: 26

Gender: Female

Nationality: Black, Half-French and Russian

Magic: Fire

Height: 5,8ft

Sexuality: Lesbian and she's married to Ellie

Personality: outgoing, loud, has a good heart but can be aggressive at times.

Likes: Her wife, her little brother (Leo) and her two older brothers, Fighting, her boxing ring, music (surprisingly, she likes jazz and classical music), drinking, and her bar

Dislike: rude customers, fights in her bar, sour foods, cold weather

Small facts: Came from a wealthy background has two older brothers and has a younger brother that she’s currently taken care. She used to went to Juvie six times as a teenager.

Ellie

Age: 27 (though she is deceased)

Gender: female

Nationality: British

Height: 5,6ft

Species: Ghost

Sexuality: Also Lesbian and she's married to Sam

Personality: Perfectionist, but understanding of indifference; stern but loving

Likes: Her wife, Ann-Marie, her diner, reading, soap opera and her friend

Dislike: spicy food, messy rooms, messing up recipes and seeing her wife going into trouble

Small facts: She came from a wealthy background, depending on the person she was blessed or cursed within her bloodline to control the weather with her emotions on a small scale.

Note: Ellie is blessed (or cursed, depending) with the ability to control the weather with her emotions

Inky

Age: 4.5 billion years old (35)

Gender: Female

Nationality: None

Species: Ink-hearts

Height: 5,9ft

Sexuality: Straight

Personality: patient, quiet, lovely, smart, semi-tired and perfectionist, a bit flirty

Likes: Old Hollywood, film, and singing, reading, baking, five year red wine white roses, acting

Dislike: tight clothing, sleazy agents, bad romance movies, and cheese

Small facts: [Classified]

Isabell

Age: 4.5 billion years old (28)

Gender: Female

Nationality: None

Species: Ink-hearts

Height: 5,6ft

Sexuality: Pansexual

Personality: hyperactive and patient, open-minded and sociopathic

Likes: Her Sister, Scary B Movies, Rainy days, Fight choreography,
Milkshakes, Radio dramas and Romance novels

Dislike: Tomatoes, Plagiarism, Bad craft services and "Apple juice"

Small facts: [Classified]

C.A. Brook

Age: 29

Gender: female

Nationality: Black

Height: 5,4ft

Species: Tanuki and Experiments

Sexuality:???

Personality: “Big sis cool vibe’s”, Optimistic, but is it insane? Caring, but "head empty, no thoughts."

Likes: Weed, nap’s, Horror-B movies and camping

Dislike: Unknown

Small facts: She can transform into anyone she desires. Due to the fact that her species is so rare, she's often on the run from the government. And she is great friends with Sam.

Honey

Age: 48

Gender: female

Nationality: Half-Black and Dutch

Height: 5,3 ft

Species: Slim-honey experiment

Sexuality: Straight

Personality: gives off mother or grandmother vibes could be strict, but it’s very loving, although most of the time she’s tired with everyone’s bullcrap.

Likes: unknown

Dislike: unknown

Small facts: She is the group's grandma. Due to the fact that she would give advice, however, she would probably be more strict and willing to talk to and smack anyone who tried to disrespect her. She came from a wealthy, and more specifically, a military, background. As of now, she currently runs an apartment complex and runs her own store.

Yugiri

Age: 39 (though she is deceased)

Gender: female

Nationality: Half-Chinese and Japanese

Height: 6,5 ft

Species: undead

Sexuality: Straight

Personality: has a motherly personality and is overly protective of her friends, obstinate and confrontational.

Likes: sleeping, poison, medicine, reading and cooking

Dislike: stubborn people, getting into fights and being brought into other people's problems

Small facts: She is an undead; she runs a hospital in the forest and takes refugees into her care. More specifically, for children, she is often the doctor and the therapist within the group, but she does not seem to mind.

Mistress

Age: ???

Gender: female

Nationality: None

Height: depends

Species: Shadow soul

Sexuality: ???

Personality: milfs vibe, flirty and sexy, a big tease

Likes: unknown

Dislike: unknown

Small facts: She is a shadow soul, a purple blob of an unknown soul that has been corrupted; however, mistress does not know anything about her previous life or how she is one of the few that has their own self-awareness. Even though she was considered a big bad, she was mostly corrupted; however, she does not have any prior memory of what she has committed.

. . .And that it. :)

[paracunt]

As emo nostalgia crests, Paramore returns, with a new sound and a healthy outlook

by Suzy Exposito

Twenty years ago, if you told Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams that she’d become one of the most influential pop singers in America, she might have offered little more than a scowl. As a DayGlo-haired punk sprite, miraculously gifted with the lung capacity of a Southern church choir, she couldn’t have seen it then — nor could her childhood friends-turned-bandmates, Zac Farro and Taylor York — but Paramore would go on to craft songs that would alter the trajectories of rock and pop. 

Artists such as Olivia Rodrigo, Demi Lovato and Willow Smith have all cited Paramore’s music as the blueprint for their own snarling pop-punk confessionals. For her 2021 hit “Good 4 U,” Rodrigo gave Paramore a songwriting credit, citing the verses of their 2008 song “Misery Business,” a scathing missive to Williams’ teen rival.

“What feels most merciful about it is that we didn’t know we were doing anything different back then,” Williams tells The Times inside the band’s North Hollywood studio, her neon locks now a mulled shade of amber. “I use the word ‘merciful’ because we could not have predicted that people would give a s— 20 years later. We were just eating peanut butter and living the dream.”

Behind a wall of Marshall stacks and assorted trunks of gear, Williams, 33, drummer Farro, 32, and guitarist York, 32, nestle into a leather couch. Williams’ charismatic goldendoodle, Alf, holds court in the studio: he tramples over Williams, curls his body around Farro’s neck like an exquisite wriggling scarf, then finally curls himself into a ball next to me. Williams, donning a white hoodie emblazoned with the words “Main Character” in rhinestones, chuckles at her dog’s audaciousness; “I’m so sorry. He’s such a star,” she says.

The band has officially just wrapped production on its upcoming album “This Is Why,” set for release on Feb. 10. The lead single of the same name — and the band’s first new offering since the 2017 album “After Laughter” — is a funky tapestry frilled with tambourines and angular dashes of guitar. Paired with a crisp “Mod Squad”-evoking video, directed by Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates, “This Is Why” weaves in tendrils of rock ‘n’ roll’s past but lodges the band firmly back into the foreground of pop’s present.

The band first teased “This Is Why” in September, with a photo of the players’ faces smushed against glass. It called to mind the stifling social restrictions brought on by COVID-19, and the residual hostility between people. “This is why I don’t leave the house,” Williams sings bitingly on the new track, “You say the coast is clear / but you won’t catch me out!”

“How sad it is that we’ve gone through this horrible thing globally, as humans,” says Williams. “Whether it’s racism, or conspiracy theories … I think about how the internet is supposed to be this great connector, but drives us further inward and further apart. I’ve watched people be so awful to each other. How could we go through these things together and come out worse?”

Ironically, Paramore is gearing up to greet more people than they have in the last four years combined — this fall, they will hit the road for the first time since 2018. Kicking off on Oct. 2 in Bakersfield, the tour includes shows in L.A. on Oct. 20 and 27, and three nights at the sold-out pop-punk and emo festival When We Were Young, scheduled for Las Vegas on Oct. 22, 23 and 29.

Paramore will co-headline the fest with another essential emo group, My Chemical Romance. Yet there’s a catch: They may have to perform at the same time on opposite stages.

“They want war!” jests Williams, a longtime MCR fan. “We did not think there was going to be the kind of demand there is. We’re careful about how we engage with nostalgia; five years ago we would have said ‘absolutely not’ to this. But I think it’s significant that we feel confident enough to maintain the journey that we’ve been on and celebrate with these fans.”

Some of the fanfare hasn’t computed for Williams, who came to fame during a vastly different time for women in rock music. Paramore used to be relegated to smaller, designated female stages at festivals, such as the Shiragirl stage at the Vans Warped Tour. While still a minor, Williams was written off as sexual fodder by punk gatekeepers; and by her own admission, “Misery Business,” which viciously dressed down another girl, has aged poorly since the 2000s. Williams retired the song from the band’s repertoire in 2018, citing sexist lyrics like “Once a whore, you’re nothing more,” but the song briefly resurfaced at April’s Coachella festival, where Williams performed a course-corrected version with pop superstar Billie Eilish.

“It wasn’t cool to be feminine back then,” Williams explains. “I put a damper on that for my own confidence, because it was hard to go into a male-dominated space — not even as a woman, but as a little girl.”

“I think that’s why a feminine perspective is really important in this day and age of music,” offers Farro.

( For the record:

1:52 p.m. Sept. 28, 2022 Producer Richard Williams was incorrectly identified as a manager in an earlier version of this article. )

Williams’ dreams of rock stardom were realized early in life. After her parents divorced in 2002, Williams and her mother relocated from their hometown of Meridian, Miss. to Franklin, Tenn., a 30-minute drive south of Nashville. A prodigious singer-songwriter new to the Music City circuit, Williams was discovered by manager Dave Steunebrink and producer Richard Williams; she then signed a deal with Atlantic Records in 2004, when she was 15 years old.

The label primed Williams to be a solo act, in the same vein as pop-rock virtuosas Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne. Yet Williams, already promised to punk, insisted on sticking with her band of friends: bassist Jeremy Davis, guitarist Josh Farro and his kid brother Zac. (York opted to graduate from high school before joining the band as rhythm guitarist in 2007.)

While Williams retained her solo deal with Atlantic, the label decided to release Paramore’s thunderous 2005 debut, “All We Know Is Falling,” via the Florida label Fueled by Ramen: a launchpad for pop-faring emo bands like Jimmy Eat World, Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. With the release of Paramore’s 2008 breakthrough LP “Riot!,” the band rose up the ranks of the Top 40, continuing with 2008’s “Decode,” their moody cut from the “Twilight” soundtrack.

However, the separate record deal with Williams, as well as differences in faith and lifestyle, sparked discord between bandmates. After releasing their 2009 album, “Brand New Eyes,” the Farro brothers departed in 2010, stating wishes to be closer to family. Davis worked intermittently between the years of 2005 and 2015; after his resignation, he filed a lawsuit claiming credit for songs on their 2013 self-titled record. (It was settled in 2017.)

The group’s remaining members, Williams and York, won the Grammy for best rock song in 2013 for Paramore’s guitar-gospel hit, “Ain’t It Fun.” Yet the two found it difficult to celebrate; Williams began floundering in the throes of what she’s come to understand as depression and PTSD, while York says he developed symptoms of acute anxiety. “I was struggling with agoraphobia before the pandemic,” he says, with a hint of levity.

In 2016, Williams married her partner of nine years, Chad Gilbert, lead guitarist in New Found Glory. The marriage ended the following year in divorce, due to what Williams has described as issues with his infidelity. She began a course of therapy thereafter.

“In retrospect, I can see clearly that I was looking for a family unit that I didn’t have,” says Williams. “I was angry about that for a long time.”

During this period, Williams exchanged messages with Zac, who had started his own projects, Novel American and HalfNoise, and relocated to New Zealand for two years. Zac returned to Nashville to record drums on the band’s 2017 album, “After Laughter” — a 12-track dance-off with depression that conjured the world-music infatuations of new wave groups like Talking Heads.

“Somehow we metabolize all these styles that we loved growing up, or that we randomly discovered, and it still sounds like us,” says Williams.

The band further indulges their sonic curiosities on “This Is Why,” which is accentuated by syncopated rhythms and jagged guitar rock riffs. The band absorbed the sounds of U.K. acts like Radiohead and Bloc Party, says their L.A.-based producer Carlos de la Garza; the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1985 funk-punk LP, “Freaky Styley,” also played a pertinent role during the recording process.

“You just have a new animal,” he says of the trio.

“It’s only lately that my outside and my inside world are kind of congruent, where I feel safe,” says Williams, motioning at Farro and York. “I think as more LGBTQ people [enter mainstream] conversations, people are now familiar with their term ‘chosen family.’ This band kept me out of a lot of trouble. It gave me a place to belong and identify with.”

Paramore’s live shows have served a similar purpose for its diverse fanbase. Prior to the pandemic, Paramore shows culminated in Williams picking a fan from the crowd to hoist onstage and sing along with the band.

On social media, people share videos of Black and brown Paramore fans — long marginalized in emo and the music industry surrounding it — shaking and crying with glee as they sing their favorite Paramore songs opposite Williams.

“I feel a very ferocious passion and want to protect people that don’t look like me,” says Williams, who used her Instagram page to platform anti-racist activists during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020.

“Not that there’s any comparison, but there’s something that we learned from not knowing where to fit in growing up,” adds Farro.

“We benefit from the joy of people feeling free and welcome at our shows,” says Williams. “I want people to see different fans onstage. If everyone had the same opportunities, I think we’d be surprised [to see] who would step up when given the chance.

“It is our responsibility to uplift new artists and young people,” says Williams, who has amplified indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Nova Twins and Pom Pom Squad on her podcast for BBC Sounds, “Everything Is Emo.”

“I’m stoked it’s turning around, that there’s more people of color in the scene, and so many rad new bands that are teaching bands like us,” says Williams. “We have to continue to make it easier and more hopeful and more equitable as a scene.”

[newbookcats]

Book Review: Truly, Devious by Maureen Johnson | How to Solve a Century-Old Murder as a Teenage Prodigy

Review also available to read at https://newbookcatsreads.blogspot.com/2018/01/book-review-truly-devious-by-maureen.html

Stevie is experiencing a My Lottery Dream Home moment; however, instead of a multi-million dollar prize leading to a new house and bonding time with the show's host David Bromstad, Stevie is enrolling in Ellingham Academy, a school known for teaching the brightest teenagers as well as the site of the near-century-old murder of previous student Dottie Epstein and the kidnappings of the school founder Albert Ellingham's wife and daughter. Both the murders and kidnappings are known to be done by the anonymous Truly Devious -- evidenced by a ransom poem crafted and sent nights before the terrible night in April 1936. 

Inclined to solving the school's cold-case with her passion for forensics, Stevie becomes engrossed in a group video project staring the school's Hollywood star Hayes Major. Their focus is to recreate the series of unfortunate events after Albert became aware of his wife and daughter's kidnappings; unfortunately, Hayes is murdered after a night of filming the group project. 

Amidst her awkward attempts at romancing an upperclassman and balancing her school work, Stevie investigates if Truly Devious has made a possible return to the school. However, with stolen badges, the school's underground tunnel network, and teenage drama, Stevie begins to wonder if she can really trust her classmates, especially the ones in her own dorm, in this young adult mystery. Discussion:⭐⭐

A girl from Pittsburgh came to Ellingham Academy and she wanted to see a dead body. She got her wish.

A story involving two murders, separated by nearly a century, at a famous entrepreneur's school for prodigy children should be exciting. A story of the young woman solving these crimes should be inspiring, if not jaw-droppingly impressive. Truly, Devious should be a novel of twists and turns, consistently leaving readers in awe as the main character Stevie navigates the mysteries of Ellingham Academy. Rather, this novel leads with the above interesting premise, struggles with a slow middle section to attempt a concerning romance, and attempts to redeems itself with 50 pages of absolute adrenaline. 

The writing itself is not an issue -- I absolutely adored Johnson's wit and humor she instilled in her characters and their dialogue. For example, within the first paragraph, the reader meets Dottie, one of the brightest students in Ellingham's 1936 class. Dottie is meeting with her school counselor and is berated for "acting smarter than everyone else," to which Dottie blatantly replies with:

"But I am." Not out of arrogance, but because it was true. 

Dottie's personality is reminiscent of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory/Young Sheldon, and I am here for the sassiness. Even Stevie's friend Nate quickly becomes my favorite character with his Dottie-esque straightforward replies and limited social skills, though he initially presents as stoic and nearly as infuriating as an angry hormonal teenager.

Instead, my main issue with the novel is the lack of depth and development in the characters, particularly with the main character. Johnson's original image of a quirky, rebellious, and "super" intelligent female lead are consistently undermined by Stevie's inability to handle simple situations, such as crossing the boundaries of her boyfriend's past or withholding crucial information from police. Although her passion for solving crimes and her ability to use her experiences with anxiety and panic attacks as strengths are redeeming qualities, Stevie's isolation tactics and poor decisions lead to the demise of her friendships and ultimately leave a bad taste in my mouth. Overall, Stevie as a relatable main character has yet to capture my love for wearing black hoodies and listening to My Chemical Romance songs on-repeat when I need to mourn a heart-wrenching book. And, I promise this is not just a phase, mom!

 As for the rest of the novel's innards, it appears that Johnson is attempting to throw diverse cultures and relationships into the story without much regard. In the beginning of the novel and when Stevie first enrolls at Ellingham, a female student wearing a hijab is mentioned; however, this student never reappears within the novel. Maybe, Johnson is attempting to show the wide range of students accepted into the prestigious school; however, 'hijab-wearing student' doesn't even get a name or an interaction with Stevie. Then, Johnson introduces Stevie's best friend Janelle as lesbian and eventually writes a romantic relationship between Janelle and a classmate. At the discretion of the publishing author, including a diverse array of relationships and characters is essential to represent our community and its values; however, the relationship is not given the quality or the depth of even being a side romance. Not even Stevie and David's back-and-forth flirting and eventual kissing sessions are given time to develop or mature into a realistic relationship. In a romance, I am looking for a slow burn; unfortunately, this novel was unable to accomplish what Johnson may have sought to do although she had enough pages to build the storyline and develop the characters and their relationships with each other. Moreover, Janelle's relationship launches Stevie into fits of jealousy in fear of losing her relationship with Janelle. Consequently, I wish Stevie had shown half the support that Janelle responded with to her passions and overall respect for their friendship; unfortunately, Stevie remains self-absorbed in her own drama throughout the story's entirety.

Lastly, despite the flaws of Truly, Devious, I appreciate the attention Johnson brought to Stevie's passion for forensics. As someone who meticulously researched cold cases in high school and now hopes to enter a career in medicine, it has been essential for me to remember that there is face to every situation or problem encountered. Bettering or fixing a problem can lead to intense focus for solely the solution; however, the spreadsheets of data and creativity needed to address an issue all stem from the individuals directly affected by the case. 

"This is about real people, not figures from fiction. [C]rime itself is popular. But crime has a human face. If you're going to study crime, you have to remember the people involved."The above quote sums up the previous paragraph and includes an important lesson. Stevie, as she typically does with adult advice, shrugs it off in the moment but does use it to her advantage when working through Hayes crime, which did surprise me in the end. 

Overall, I will stick to the Sherlock Holmes, the Agatha Christie novels, and many other of my beloved mystery stories rather than trial the subsequent books in this trilogy. I'll never say never; however, from my reading experience with Truly, Devious, I expect for the other books of this trilogy to be drawn-out versions of the main murder mystery that ominously attracted me first. Additionally, I do not have the patience for Stevie's irrational antics or the troubling romance between her and David. 

What are your thoughts of Johnson's Truly, Devious or the complete trilogy? What are some of your favorite mystery books, young adult or not? What steps would you take to solve the murders of your new friend and a previous student from 1936? Hopefully no steamy make-out sessions, but it's your case! Chat with me in the comments below or via any of my social media.

Love, 

newbookcats

[warningsine]

A compelling character-based drama that reveals the interior life of a young trans man over roughly 24 hours in New York City, “Mutt” follows Feña (Lío Mehiel) as he tries to navigate a series of events that would be stressful for anyone. Piling on setbacks that specifically challenge someone still working out how to reintroduce himself to old friends and family members, writer-director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz — who is also trans — makes audiences acutely conscious of Feña’s emotional state at every turn. “Mutt,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, sees the first-time helmer creatively using the medium to illustrate how small incidents can chip away at a trans person’s self-confidence and the strength it takes to stay true to that identity.

Feña’s day starts simply enough, focused on trying to borrow a car to pick up his Chilean father (Alejandro Goic) from the airport. Before long, it becomes a day from hell. He gets locked out of a friend’s apartment. His teenage sister (Mimi Ryder) decides to skip school, experiencing her first menstrual period while spending the day with him. As brothers go, Feña’s uniquely qualified to help her handle the situation. In fact, the night before, Feña hooked up with an ex-boyfriend (Cole Doman), sparking a pregnancy scare that also calls for a visit to the pharmacy, where he hopes to acquire a morning-after pill for himself.

Could so many problems befall a single person in such a short period? It’s a tad unrealistic, perhaps, but easy to forgive, as Lungulov-Klotz cleverly demonstrates how seemingly mundane activities can be uniquely complicated for a trans person like Feña — as when a bank clerk misgenders him and refuses to cash a check that doesn’t match the name on his driver’s license. Each encounter feels genuine and moving, such that everything resonates emotionally. Feña’s identity is constantly on his mind as these mishaps occur. It’s also on the minds of everyone he interacts with because his transition has affected them too.

Lungulov-Klotz has an authentic grasp of New York City — its streets, buildings and locally owned businesses. Each of the locations that Feña visits rings true as a real place and not a film set. Collaborating with cinematographer Matthew Pothier, they create a vision of the city that’s unlike what is usually presented in so many American indies, giving audiences images that are tangible and instantly recognizable, rather than trying to show the city in attractive light.

Mehiel, who’s in almost every scene of the movie, carries it with aplomb and is always immensely watchable. However their performance becomes even stronger when they are playing off other actors with whom they have noticeable chemistry, particularly the charismatic Doman and the heartbreaking Goic.

In an affectionate but also palpably sensual scene, Feña reconnects with his ex-boyfriend, who last saw him before the transition. Fraught with both tension and heat, the encounter begins with discomfort as Feña tries to avoid revealing his body. But as the lovers recall their strong physical connection, the moment becomes as much about discovering Feña’s new identity as it is about two lovers falling into old habits.

There’s a charge to this interaction, which is sensitively filmed and portrayed with tender affection by Mehiel and Doman. Beautifully shot and romantic in its setup, as the two lovers escape the rain to seek shelter in a laundromat, the scene becomes a transfixing moment of movie magic, a modern twist on those larger-than-life moments from the golden age of Hollywood that mixes old-fashioned romance with a sexuality that defies labels.

In queer narratives, the gruff unapproving parent is commonplace. “Mutt” presents something different: Feña’s father is skeptical and questioning of his son’s transition, but also supportive. Adding complexity to the characterization is the culture clash between a traditional Chilean father and his American son. Goic toes the line between those differing states so well, elevating his scenes with Mehiel and making them the most resonant of the whole endeavor.

While Feña’s journey may contain some contrivances, the way this young man adapts to each predicament feels authentic and emotionally potent. That’s a testament to Lungulov-Klot, who succeeds in placing vivid characters in slightly heighted situations — amplifying our connection in the process — without sacrificing the sense of realism that makes “Mutt” so relatable.

[denimbex1986]

'4.5 stars

One wouldn’t take the masterful British filmmaker Andrew Haigh as a horror director, yet his most recent cinematic venture, All of Us Strangers, is his second ghost story in under a decade. His first, 2015’s 45 Years, was a little more metaphysical, exploring the ghosts of one’s past who return to taunt you, whilst his latest tale is more visceral, a complete haunting that speaks to the spectres that fester in the loneliest parts of the human soul.

Set in two vastly contrasting locations, the drama of Haigh’s extraordinary fantasy is split between a vast London highrise, where the sound of solitude is filled with the empty bang of the clunky lift shaft and an old suburban family home that shimmers with life. The former is a cold industrial complex occupied only by the troubled screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott), who is trying to pen a story about his youth, and Harry (Paul Mescal), a charming rogue whose bedroom light catches Adam’s eye at night.

As the pair form a close relationship, Adam ventures to his family home to curiously gather notes about the home he shared with his parents before their untimely demise when he was just 12 years old. Walking on a journey through the streets of his past, he comes across his father’s ghost, who leads him home, where his mother eagerly awaits, prompting a coming-of-age tale that occurs decades after adolescence.

A perfect adaptation of an imperfect 1987 novel by Taichi Yamada, All of Us Strangers ditches trying to legitimise the supernatural elements of its conceit to instead focus on the central relationship between the two male protagonists. Having previously shown his cinematic proficiency in exploring the tenderness of human connection in 2011’s Weekend and 2015’s 45 Years, Haigh once again fuses a beautiful on-screen romance that flourishes thanks to remarkable turns from Mescal and Scott.

Crafting unique characters that creak with fragility, both lead performances carry the earnest nature of Haigh’s screenplay, with their relationship and innate desire for human connection resonating through the screen. Such quiet, delicate characters are not easy to bring to vibrant cinematic life, yet Mescal, Scott, and supporting stars Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, as the ghostly mother and father, pull off the remarkable feat.

Much like the horror material that the story tentatively pulls from, Haigh’s film, too, has a shroud of dread, exploring the existential terror of one’s own mortality and place in an ever-more isolated universe. Such is compared in the film to a knot of complex emotions in Adam’s chest that can only be untied through human connection, communication and the power of love, underlined by the regular sound of the song of the same name by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Such may all sound a little saccharine, but Haigh delicately balances each ingredient, playing off the ghostly apparitions as if they were physical facts rather than remarkable fantasy feats. It all creates a moody, nostalgic piece of storytelling that glows with cinematic vigour, punctuated by a final sequence that tosses the audience into the stratosphere, weightless in a crescendo of transcendent emotion.'

[creativecourse]

James Cameron Teaches Filmmaking Information James Cameron Teaches Filmmaking is an online course where James shares his approach to storytelling, filmmaking techniques, and his overall philosophy. From The Terminator and Titanic to Avatar, James Cameron has directed some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. Now, for the first time in his 40-year career, he opens up about his process. Through behind-the-scenes breakdowns, James shares his approach to developing ideas, storylines, and characters; harnessing technology; and worldbuilding on any budget. Explore the innovation and imagination behind epic moviemaking. What You’ll Learn In This Course? Meet Your Instructor: James Cameron Pursuing and Developing the Idea Toying With the Audience: Building and Releasing Tension THE TERMINATOR Club Scene Breakdown ALIENS Egg Chamber Breakdown ALIENS Newt Introduction Scene Breakdown The Art of Low-Budget Filmmaking THE TERMINATOR Arm and Eye Repair Breakdown From Sketch to Spectacle: Creating Set Pieces THE TERMINATOR Future World Breakdown: Creating a Set Piece on a Budget Crafting and Introducing Compelling Characters TITANIC Rose Introduction Breakdown Developing Dread Through Adversaries AVATAR Creating Technology Making Your Way and Leading With Passion About Author James Francis Cameron was born on August 16, 1954 in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He moved to the United States in 1971. The son of an engineer, he majored in physics at California State University before switching to English, and eventually dropping out. He then drove a truck to support his screenwriting ambition. He landed his first professional film job as art director, miniature-set builder, and process-projection supervisor on Roger Corman's Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and had his first experience as a director with a two week stint on Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) before being fired. He then wrote and directed The Terminator (1984), a futuristic action-thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. It was a low budget independent film, but Cameron's superb, dynamic direction made it a surprise mainstream success and it is now regarded as one of the most iconic pictures of the 1980s. After this came a string of successful, bigger budget science-fiction action films such as Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In 1990, Cameron formed his own production company, Lightstorm Entertainment. In 1997, he wrote and directed Titanic (1997), a romance epic about two young lovers from different social classes who meet on board the famous ship. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned eleven Academy Awards. It became the highest grossing movie of all time until 12 years later, Avatar (2009), which invented and pioneered 3D film technology, and it went on to beat "Titanic", and became the first film to cost two billion dollars until 2019 when Marvel took the record. James Cameron is now one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. He was formerly married to producer Gale Anne Hurd, who produced several of his films. In 2000, he married actress Suzy Amis, who appeared in Titanic, and they have three children. More courses from the same author: James Cameron

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week # 144 (Year 3/Week 40):

“Are you girls ready for the greatest weekend of your life?"

- You say that every weekend! -

"Well, yeah, we’re doing that again”

People, places, things used to be my one of favourite movies to re-watch with Adora 6-7 years ago, as we were all struggling with the dynamics of the similar, sudden changes in our lives. A very sweet Brooklyn Indie about a single dad to cute 6 year old twin daughters. Genuine and delicate romance with sharp dialogue about love and hurt. It was my introduction to a group of ‘minor’ actors I had followed since, Jemaine Clement, Regina Hall, Jessica Williams, Michael Chernus. Feel Good and heart warming. 10/10.

🍿

3 Film Noir with Gloria Grahame:

🍿 The Big heat, Fritz Lang's 1953 paranoid Noir about honest homicide detective Glenn Ford going against all-city police corruption. With young Lee Marvin, playing a creepy “Heavy”, as well as Marlon Brando’s sister. 8/10.

🍿 The following year, Fritz Lang again directed Glenn Ford as a straight up train engineer as he falls again for Gloria Grahame in Human desire. But the woman is not a heartless Femme fatale. She's an abused wife, with a history of being harmed by men her whole life, who can't find any easy way to survive. Based on 'La Bête humaine' by Émile Zola (which I didn't read).

🍿 Re-watch: Nicholas Ray’s In a lonely place. Humphrey Bogart is rage-filled, entitled writer, who becomes a suspect in a murder while falling for Grahame who lives across the courtyard of his Hollywood apartment. A mystery about a dark and self-centered male, who's allowed to be aggravated and aggressive when he doesn't get his way. (Photo Above).

🍿

“Oy! Keep your fingers out of my soup!”

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, my third Guy Ritchie / Matthew Vaughn crime caper. I really don't understand why I resisted checking them out up to now. This, Snatch, Layer cake, all terrific, gritty, multi-layered Tarantino-style black comedies. 8/10.

🍿

2 by French screenwriter Emmanuèle Bernheim, both directed by François Ozon:

🍿 My favorite random discovery of the week: Swimming pool. An erotic thriller with bookish Charlotte Rampling as a middle-aged British author, single and reserved, who travels to a summer villa in Avignon. Like most stories of Northerners in the South of Europe, she falls into a trap of unexpected dreams and desires, when a young promiscuous girl invades her vacation. Ambiguous play of realty and fantasy leaves this a bit of a mystery, like the books she usually writes.

🍿 5X2 is a small story about the disintegration of a middle class marriage, told in reverse order. The first of five episodes, (each lasting exactly 18 minutes), starts at a lawyer's office, reading the terms of the divorce between a husband and wife. And the other chapters go back into other times in the relationship. All the way to the first one years ago when they met at an Italian resort. It's an engaging and bitter-sweet drama, but without any conclusive and clear insights: Yes, love is impossible, sex is unexplained, nobody is at fault.

Between each episode, Italian pop songs from the 1960's comment on the meaning of each move. 7/10.

🍿

Gregory’s Girl, the feel-good Scottish comedy by Bill Forsyth, about an awkward teenager who falls for a soccer playing girl. A wholesome coming-of-age, sweet and charming.

🍿

Martin Scorsese X 2:

🍿In a 25-minutes conversation with GQ, Scorsese breaks down his most iconic films, 'Taxi Driver,' 'Gangs of New York,' 'Goodfellas,' 'The Departed,' 'Raging Bull,' 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' 'Mean Streets,' 'The Irishman,' 'Silence,' and 'Killers of the Flower Moon.

🍿 I wished I had seen Mean Streets decades ago, before all of his other gangster movies; Now I must compare it to 'Goodfellas' and 'Casino'. Obviously it's still a younger filmmaker at the beginning of his mastery of the craft. It's odd to observe De Nero as a total 'Loser', a small time, good for nothing, deadbeat wannabe. A character study more than an action film.

🍿

Ram Dass, going home, a quiet documentary about spiritual "guru" Baba Ram Dass at the end of his life, dispensing ancient words of wisdom as he reflects on life and death at his home in Maui. Sagely, meditatively, peacefully, it's a simple and peaceful poem of spirituality.

🍿

3 classic comedies:

🍿 The bank dick, WC Fields as Egbert Sousé, a goofy drunk. Written by his alias Mahatma Kane Jeeves, filmed and presented in Lompoc, CA, and much of the story centered around The Black Pussy Cat bar. It ends with a hilarious car race that is both wild and hilarious.

🍿 First watch: Buster Keaton’s last great film, the 1928 The Cameraman. "The worst mistake of his life" he called it, because with his move to MGM and various studio politics, he lost his ability to control his productions. Agile and romantic.

🍿 Triple trouble is an unusual Charlie Chaplin 2-reeler from 1918. It combines a number of primitive Chaplin-directed scenes, which were edited by Essaney Studio, against his wishes, as he left them to form his own. A patchwork of pratfalls, slapstick, and visual jokes, that don't form a coherent story.

🍿

The trailer for the restored Belle De Jour tempts me to watch this subversive masterpiece again and again!

🍿

An experimental short by infamous Danish surrealist artist Wilhelm Freddie, (together with Jørgen Roos) Eaten horizons. 21 years after Buñuel‘s ‘Andalusian Dog’, it demonstrates unfiltered inspiration from the master.

🍿

While waiting for his ‘Zone of interest’, here is Jonathan Glazer’s banned commercial for Cadbury’s Flake chocolate. Recently I watched the many commercials he directed on his old YouTube channel, (for example, his Guinness black swim),

but now I also saw his music videos, which he directed between his four features. 33 in total. "Today I learnt" that I don’t care much for music videos.

🍿

(My complete movie list is here)

[theartoflovingthomashunt]

Forbidden Romance

[All Thomas Hunt x Alex Spencer Masterlists] [HollywoodU]

Characters: Thomas Hunt x Alex Spencer (F!MC / OC) Book: HollywoodU Word Count: <;550 Rating/Warnings: Teen (to be safe, lots of kissing) Prompts: ​@choicesjuly2022challenge: Secret/Forbidden Romance ; @choicesmonthlychallenge HWUAW ; also for the IG prompt: Titanic

Setting: This is an addition to the Drive Me Crazy canon HWU date, where Hunt and Alex try to have a normal date at the Drive In.

Synopsis: Hunt can't stop himself from critique films, even on a date.

"That's what you took from the film?" Hunt's brow quirked at her reference. 

Alex smirked. Her fingers treaded through his thick, black hair as his head tilted into her tempting touch. "Well—" She licked her lips. "I could think of another memorable scene to discuss. How are your art skills?"

His gaze was lost for a moment, filled with lust as she inched closer. He nodded, the words to reply failing to reach his lips as he closed the gap instead.

Her lips brushed teasingly over his a moment before pulling back. "Why? What did you take away from it?"

A low growl left his barely parted lips. He shook his head, torn between his emotions and his head. He cupped her face, kissing her briefly. "Since you asked—" he pulled back to speak, kissing her again, and again, between sentence fragments. "Making the film was a considerable risk, financially and productionally...Much like the ship it's named for,...Titanic was the most expensive film to produce at the time... Both celebrated grandeur and boasted a good time... Despite its flaws, it's well crafted and intelligent—"

Alex chuckled into the next kiss. "Is this really how you want to spend our time?" She knew the answer before she asked. 

"I'm multi-tasking."

"I'd expect nothing less. If I must be instructed I can think of far worse ways." She kissed down his neck, allowing him unrestricted access to speak. "Carry on, Professor."

Hunt needed little encouragement as he continued his critique. "The illusion of the model ships to the real thing approaches passable. The characters are believable and propel the narrative forward. The forbidden romance is even almost palpable."

"Almost?"

His lips found hers once more, unable to stay away, as the headiness of their kisses grew. 

The windows of the black sports car once more filled with condensation. Alex chuckled at the discovery as the moment returned full circle. "That almost sounded like a rave review."

Hunt tucked her tousled strands of hair back behind her ear. "It does, doesn't it?"

"Wellll... since you're in the mood to critique, how does it compare to this—" She brushed a tender kiss to his lips. Not one out of lust, need, or longing; rather, one filled with openness, that ends quickly, but leaves you breathless all the same. "What about us— our forbidden romance?"

He rested his forehead against hers. "You're bewitching, Alex. You've eclipsed the world I knew into something more. Despite my better judgment, I've concluded that you are worth every risk, and I don't regret a moment spent with you."

Her nose scrunched as her grin widened. She entwined her fingers with his, settling more comfortably into his arms as the movie's commencement drew near. "I knew you couldn't resist me and my charms," Alex teased, nudging him playfully. "From that first night, I knew you felt it too."

"Yes, you were persistently vexing about that fact."

"I prefer being assertive and compelling."

"You would."

"Thank you for taking a chance on this—on us," she continued. "Thanks for not letting go."

He exhaled a chuckle as he pressed a kiss to her forehead. "No matter what trials await us, I'll never let go... that's a promise I intend to keep."

😭😭😭😭 I am so not ready to let go of Hunt or Hollywood U, the thought of the app being gone in 2 weeks is breaking my heart.

I hope you enjoyed this silly little drabble. When I got the prompt for Titanic, this scene came to mind. No way Hunt let's her reference to the car scene slide without discussing the full film.

Thank you for reading. Your support means the world to me!

[sugar-petals]

Group Sex With SuperM

SUMMARY: creating a group chat is all it takes.

↳ A/N. yep, we’re going there. 

words. 14k

WARNINGS ⚠️ friends to lovers hc, porn with plot, idol au, sex w/ all members individually and together, dom/sub dynamics, corruption kink, sexting, blowjobs & cunnilingus, gaping, graphic, pegging, bondage, light foot fetish, sex toys, spitroasting (m receiving), brat taming, dick riding, protected sex, doggystyle, cuddling aftercare

curious about an eightsome are we

understood

how’s the state of things then?

last september you decided to open an entire group chat just for planning your juicy sexual activities together

and oh lord is it active

and full of ideas

and explicit videos

and emojis

and excitement

yesterday taemin sent a clip of lusciously covering himself in champagne foam for you

wearing close to nothing

in fact just a piece of gauze, a snake-shaped necklace, and probably a bit of perfume

oh boy

watching that was an out-of-body experience for sure

the entire chat basically imploded with reactions

but hey hey

not so fast

we need to go through everything from the start

to see how all these utterly historic events happened to unfold

so where did all that come from?

first off 

befriending super m outside work (eating together, fooling around, bingwatching stuff, you know)

...means there’s no point nor chance in having a permanent favorite with a group like this

every member truly is the creme de la creme

super m is the package of the entire packages

they are so legendary you can bias each member for one day of the week 

and never run out of that pure bliss

in fact 

you all agreed to do exactly that on a regular basis to get to know each other casually

it just naturally happened

seven days seven members that’s just logical

you can’t always hang out together in full attendance so you split up your times and set specific days

you change that routine very often depending on your individual moods

but it usually goes like this because you want to develop closer bonds with them one-on-one

so this is how it ends up

mondays you work out with xuxi. oh, that sexy smiley man. his body is the ultimate bomb. is there something better than doing sit-ups next to him? anybody’s sports motivation would go through the roof. and if there’s someone you call to share a pile of food with? it’s just gotta be him. being with yukhei is self-care.

tuesdays, you visit ten to check out his latest dance moves. and: to have a huge cuddle session with the cats. sometimes, you watch whatever series you’re in the mood for. it’s always a time to slow down and mend your sore muscles from monday anyway. you think ten is so interesting and talented, and super pretty, truly one of a kind.

on wednesdays jongin and you often end up on long midnight walks with the dogs or you both look after his cute nieces. meeting up at the river han is a staple, you get ice cream and snacks. you adore kai because he’s a sweetheart and steadfast person, and admittedly... so damn hot, holy hell. being with him makes you feel great.

thursday is baekhyun day and full of cheeriness as you’d expect. long hours of gaming, cheeky skinship, banter, and pizza eating await you at his apartment. you adore this mochi for his everything, he makes you laugh uncontrollably so much. sometimes, you also comfort him when he doesn’t feel good about himself or exhausted from practice. he will sing anything you want, baekhyun is like your personal 24/7 radio station.

fridays it’s time for the studio. mark is crafting his most fire bars and loves to have you around there. you inspire him a lot. he’s just completely astounding and the sweetest to you. friday most people would go clubbing, but super m just has to meet up in the studio. no paparazzi, and the music is obviously danceable. i’m telling you: this mob can jop, duh.

saturday is for handsome taeyong who loves coming to your home. cooking, organizing, doing the laundry, and browsing youtube together is the best thing. taeyong is the shyest goodest boy and a great listener. he gives great advice and is the epitome of respectful. you just vibe very well together.

sunday you dedicate to taemin. you watch artsy films, experiment with outfits, and he plays the piano for you so expertly. man, you are lucky. he’s like a fairy to you, and a connoisseur, a mythical figure almost. since he’s a newly-found cat dad, you easily fill your day playing with the most interesting kitten that is lee kkoong. sometimes, you even meet shinee members dropping by.

so yes this is what paradise looks like

and they all love to engage with you in their own way and you develop favorite ways to spend time, they put so much effort into this

it goes without saying that you all realize how hard you’re crushing as the weeks pass

like can you imagine

all the hormones i swear

you’ve already been joking to them that you have seven boyfriends some months ago

well the prophecy is fulfilled faster than you can blink

when you meet up as eight for a movie night at baekhyun’s, the atmosphere feels pretty frisky

because lucas is sending you ten thousand glances and certainly nobody misses that

if this guy is laughing at your every word i mean

meanwhile taeyong is having a nervous meltdown at your every comment about the movie, it’s ridiculous, he’s smitten as fuck, he looks at you like you’re an actual goddess

mark keeps on making glimmering eyes at you as well, and he asks you if you want popcorn every two minutes

baekhyun is all curled up close to your lap and not even watching the movie because his face is almost nuzzled into your sweater for fuck’s sake

taemin has spent the entire preperation in complete frenzy making sure there are scented candles everywhere and the snacks are exquisite and costly. mother taemresa? at full throttle. he even used his own damn credit card.

meanwhile kai suffers from his fidgety legs, constant hair fixing and even more inability to concentrate on the movie 

because damn, he knows he wants your attention. he literally came around with the tightest shirt he owns so there’s that. you can see every little muscle doing its thing when he does as much as breathe. kai is now well aware he came to impress. it won’t take him a lot to realize he wants to be even closer to you than doing midnight walks.

ten is so firmly snuggled up next to you, he might as well be your cat himself. if ten starts acting like a clingy feline instead of being in roast mode, you know he’s lovestruck i’m telling ya

needless to say

the mood in the room is hard to ignore

hell there are romance candles everywhere all those hecking rose fumes are to blame

surprise surprise all the members try to sit as close as possibly to you the more the movie progresses

even abandoning the couch and seats to sit on the ground in front of you instead

“you want popcorn?”

“like some more popcorn?”

“here, have my popcorn!“

“more popcorn?”

“hey do you want popcorn?”

from all sides, constantly

the m in super m stands for making sure you have popcorn

you never run out

like when the leading lady is pulling out a cigarette in those old hollywood flicks and at least twenty guys are scurrying to offer a lighter

i’m exaggerating but

nobody even knows what kind of movie they’re watching tonight though

the elephant in the room is trumpeting too loud to understand the dialogue

you’re surrounded by seven big ole hotties who have fallen for you

it was inevitable

it’s more than clear to everyone that they all like you and you couldn’t be any more fluttered yourself

let the hunger games begin

i’m jopping i mean i’m joking

this is not the wwe

it’s pretty clear to the boys that if they fight you’re gonna be so unhappy and your quality time together is ruined

you adore them all, and they’d be regretful about hurting their own bonds 

and anyway

if it came down to it and the bad blood was really escalating um...

...ten would destroy all of the competition

there’s no denying

by the simple virtue of his badassery and winning disease

quickly reducing all his opponents to a pile of dust so fine-grained, the great freddie mercury himself would resurrect to sing the soundtrack in the background and pump his fist

imagine that. superm actually being gladiators i mean wasn’t that the entire jopping mv

baekhyun would try to pull the leader authority card and use his hapkido martial arts skill but ten would obliterate him anyway so

even if taemin put on a dark robe and drew a salt circle to summon a million snakes from hell, ten would win the fight to a fault

but that’s too apocalyptic and outside of that thought experiment the boys are actually kinda shy so... let’s scratch that

there are seven days of the week with good reason 

you ease the uncertainty and tension by saying you’d truly fail as a tv bachelorette

everyone understands that deciding would be impossible and cheating is shit

why give someone a rose and break 6 hearts when you can hand out a whole damn bouquet

it’s more stylish my friend

and for what reason would ten want to face off against taemin and his army of snakes in the first place. they’re ten’s greatest inspiration

nor does kai have any tighter shirts 

he already ran out, he brought his A game from the get-go

on top of that the popcorn is empty there’s no more to offer

so you remain with the idea to just keep your daily routine

xuxi monday, ten tuesday and so on

keeps everything in order

it’s fair

plus it doesn’t mess with their schedules

usually unless a big award show is coming up but that can be re-planned in advance as well

you know... things can develop in their own timing with each member

it’d be awkward to expect everyone to be on the same stage at once

baekhyun is comfortable with all kinds of back hugs while taeyong and taemin are still completely flustered and turn all wobbly at just a greeting wave

you know what i mean

it’s already clear everyone loves you very differently 

some members are more straightforward, others take it slow, it’s just a normal thing

that’s when the group chat is born

it’s still very sfw 

compared to how explicit it’ll be in the future ahem

and everyone is overcautious with writing something except baekhyun, the eternal extrovert

for now you keep each other updated on how it’s all going with trivial details

earlier you just had individual chats and baekhyun arranged the group meetings since he knows the schedule best

now it’s all in one spot so that works

everyone’s curiosity is quenched at least a little bit

and they see each other anyway and put their heads together

baekhyun will be the most open about how far your skinship slowly develops followed by lucas and kai who oggle each other in their usual tom and jerry manner

which you have an eye on

you tell the members something very important for when they’re envious

or feel the need to one-up or catch up

it’s the sign to get closer to you and that they’re ready for taking another step. that’s literally what jealousy is all about

that advice helps them out a lot actually

kai takes that to heart in particular because he knows he’s prone and feels bad about it

and they also learn from ten who carries a quiet happiness with confidence that doesn’t need comparison, but he can also talk very honestly about how he’s standing with you to the point

ten knows how it’s done

as expected of such a competent man

like he’s kissed your hands very lightly but he doesn’t feel the need to show it off all day

and he also leads by example together with taemin and taeyong how one can give compliments even when not being involved in something 

“you’re looking adorable together“ as taemin would often say about you hanging out with kai or baekhyun

a lot of praise culture is developing in the group chat

you like to see it 

and now for the other elephant in the room

as for who will ask you to sleep with him first

(and mind you at this point they’re all walking around with condoms in their backpacks and jackets)

believe it or not

after the finishing touches on his latest mixtape (oh yes), and those tracks have you feeling some kind of way oh shit, mark gathers all his courage

yes it’s mark lee 

literally he steps into the blaze of bravery of jongin when he first put on a crop top

and gets out a little “can we... some time... you know...” after you’re having some pretzel sticks together and awkwardly sitting around

oh what's gonna happen next huh?

you say you’ve been thinking about it a lot

that he has a great body doesn’t go unseen

and tell him how you imagine it with him

long story short you’ll have your first quickie in the sound booth that night

cutting straight to the chase

him steadily penetrating you from behind, you leaning closely with your back to his chest

just standing and enjoying the rhythm

that dick. is amazing.

oh god, mark lee

long, curved, smooth, a classic

meanwhile your fave rapper is definitely going through it

his arms tell you everything

that’s an embrace for the books

he’s hugging you like his life depends on it

you can just take in how he’s been showering twice today this guy is clean as fuck he smells so good

getting off from shampoo and fabric softener is not what you expected but it definitely makes you clench

you both know he’s not gonna last for more than six minutes and that’s ok

that’s a lot of long-held frustration released into that condom

and a lot of passion put into how he puts his guitar fingers to work on your clit afterwards

jimi ‘lee’ hendrix has arrived

oh yeah mark, you fucking treat, fuck it up

that way you won’t last long either since you guide his finger tips to your favorite spot and the motherfucker completely goes for it

“like this, like, um?”

and he goes off with the wrist

oh shit

it’s all kept so short and simple and you’re on the oldest mustard-colored studio couch that ever existed but mark lee is mark fucking lee nothing can obstruct his quality

like this guy has some serious skills with the angles

that orgasm is gonna get some moans you didn’t know you were capable of out of you

never wasting time, that guy is he

mark definitely fucks like he raps. fast and good

you cool down together looking each other in the eyes, forehead to forehead, for like fifteen minutes, and you give each other little chaste kisses all over your faces and he melts every time

your little rendezvous was definitely so needed 

you ask if you can bring some vibes to play around with and a watermelon next time

you don’t have to ask twice

mark is so damn happy

and the timing was right

straightforward and spontaneous. that definitely works well with mark

no complaints, you go home feeling comfortably refreshed. you’ve told him he could tell the others or wait to do it, this is up to his comfort because he is shy

neither happens

after just one glance at him the next day while the group is doing a photoshoot

baekhyun already knows mark slept with you 

he just knows

and makes a loud “ohh wow, you did it” noise

ten takes two only glances to understand what’s going on too

mark nods and the whole group is highstrung for the entire day

like a hive of bees oh yes

kai is massively proud of raising mark so well but also really surprised

unlike taemin who calmly advised mark on many things in advance

guess where mark’s fingering skills originate from

he took some secret pointers from the king 

taeyong is shook at his rap buddy’s singleminded grit to just spontaneously ask you

while baekhyun...

is keeping it together repeating the anti-jealousy mantra you gave him in his mind

“jealousy means to get closer jealousy means to get closer jealousy means to get closer jealousy means to get closer....“

it makes him realize oh god he really wants to be inside of you badly as well

you ain’t dumb, you see his change of tone from cute to sexy in the group chat even if he might not notice

baekhyun is trying extra hard to make you react to him

he posts so many cute selfies with kissy faces

needless to say taeyong’s time slot gets postponed to next thursday while you visit baekhyun this evening

it works for taeyong because he still needs to think some things through

the news overwhelmed him a little and he is shy about meeting up but that’s not a problem for you

and it’s better to get together with your mochi sooner because you both know there’s a lot of banging to do

like seriously

your mood tells you that candy’s on the menu today

oh yeah. it’s time to be all over your clingy lil’ honey bunny 

there’s not much endless wooing involved it goes to the point very fast after you arrive at his home

you just wanna stop pretending and fuck like animals and see his brain melt from it

remember how baekhyun once said he doesn’t fancy nice girls

that’s what he meant by that

mattress earthquake

he wants you fully riled up with arousal and addicted to touching and grabbing him

yeah baekhyun gets off on your desire

that’s not hard to accomplish when he makes big puppy eyes and puts his tongue on your neck

with that gomez addams shit... kissing up your arm and then popping off as soon as he gets there

congrats morticia

here is a man who can handle ya

he’s being so slobbery and moany about it that it knocks the breath out of you 

that shit is so good

baekhyun is not just a pro at giving head my friend it’s also giving neck

and unlike mark, may god have mercy on you, baekhyun keeps on going and going and kissing and kissing and he wants to lick up all of you so bad 

we know how needy and stamina-heavy this fella is

baekhyun is super m’s most insatiable member by fucking far

he’s like just give it to me and you’re like ok here we go

this guy is burning up oh god

that’s an evening of ten thousand positions, fearless cumplay, and a lot of face-sitting

super m’s most unleashed tongue right here

thank god you worked on your fitness with xuxi otherwise you couldn’t do this

he’s moaning in some harmonic scales or something it’s a whole concert

baekhyun is fully at it with you in every room of his flat with his whole neck and underarms looking mighty veiny

yeah he even carries you around to make it short and simple he’s one impatient bun

he can lift up sehun bridal style so no worries

mochi is smol and thin but he won’t drop you i promise

he’s fueled by horny boyfriend hormones and wants to give you the greatest night of all nights

and hit all the amazing spots

baekhyun aims to make your pussy lips throb and fall completely in love with him

and the bridge of his nose if you get what i’m saying

he’s also versatile in his clothing choices

if you say keep your nerdy glasses on, oh yeah they stay on

just a little challenge to see if you can ride him hard enough to see them fall off

and that dick is not some extra long lasso mark lee calibre

so he can really bend it more and thrust with ease at many angles

talking about mark

he regrets not asking you earlier but you tell baekhyun that this way was much better because you unceremoniously skipped to the fucking instead of messing around

if it wasn’t for mark’s courage to break the ice even with a choppy sentence 

you’d still be awkwardly looking each other in the eyes while munching pizza

all hail mark lee nervous legend

this way, baekhyun goes all out with fewer restraint and the burden of being first with making the impression that comes with it

we all know he’s too self-conscious for his own mochi good so that’s a better way to start out

this way baekhyun will have sex with you until he’s passed out on his bed

knocking him out like that might as well become your favorite hobby

even minutes after your tongue still feels like it’s knotted together with his honestly, the muscle memory is kicking in

and this must be the most dick thrusts you’ve ever gotten in one night

baekhyun really wants to be all inside you, make you feel him

if the condom broke at least his baby will be easy to identify from day one

it’ll come out and belt a perfect G#5

he gave it all my god you stopped counting the times you came your pussy is just dripping wet it feels crazy

and his voice has become all raspy i—

that was baekhyun’s hardest vocal run yet i swear

the contraception shelf in the convenience store next to his house is close to empty

but there’s no need to buy more

what you two perverts have been up to is enough for comfortably going through 10 years of celibacy

baekhyun is content and sleeps like a baby

you hold your bun for like two hours afterwards and never want to let him go

you are as wobbly as taeyong after getting a head pat from you

and the most well-kissed girl in this city tonight

both sets of lips

what a smoochy boyfriend

you even get the chance to jerk baekhyun off in his half-sleep after he wakes up and asks you to put your hand in his pants

guess who opens his mouth very wide to lick his own semen off your fingers with some really obscene noises

it’s his royal nastiness byun baekhyun 

who sucks your tiddies to drift back into sleep again

with his hands in your pants

god bless this man

the group chat is sending 👀 emojis all the way throughout the night

your boys know love is in the air

they’re loosening up the timing is right again

you send cute smiling emojis 

a bunch of “ahs” and “ohs” come through via voicemail

and lucas even writes: “so who’s next? 😳”

damn

you reply boldly: “the one asking that”

the group chat becomes a buzzing beehive again

from which you extract that kai is also very interested while ten, taeyong and taemin prefer waiting a little more

but this time you don’t switch time slots since you’ll meet xuxi on monday already 

kai wants to set up something nice and prepare the catering and whatnot (alright you rich man)

so it’s gonna be wednesday as usual with him

so far so good that’s the plan

sunday being taemin day, you get together to read and paint and listen to music

you feel like just doing some sensual kissing with him and taemin is very down

yeah baby he is the kissing king, taemin is hot stuff, he knows exactly what he’s doing, those lips are the pillows at the gates of heaven

losing your mind is a staple when you do that with him

just making out on the couch surrounded by the nicest arrangement of pot plants you’ve ever seen while it rains completely relaxes you and the serotonin is off the charts

he holds you so gently and tastes so good

what is it, rose water or something like that

he even put on his coziest sweater so you’ll love leaning against him

TL;DR taemin is the biggest fucking romantic in the history of SM

that was so seductive you’ll be dreaming about it

applause for lee taemin please

perfect contrasting programme: just hours later

yeah here it goes now

monday starts with xuxi stripping more than he usually does 

at the makeshift gym in his room while he’s on the treadmill

with his hair freshly dyed the most himbo shade of blonde ever

and yeah that’s blonde with an e because yukhei is too sexy to be called a blond. what an ugly word to look at

he’s a blondé

so that’s nice

he’s so dtf you just skip the workout 

time for lubed condoms.

i don’t have to tell you that you literally jump on him 

or that you’ll be dealing with super m’s singlemost biggest equipment

he doesn’t even have to drive it home an inch by himself you’re already riding him

he can’t handle all that gear in the first place

because how do you even develop a technique with such an unrealistic dick

hell how do you even exist like that

so it’s clear who’s taking the lead

all he has to do is work that body but it sort of happens on its own

himbo autopilot

you are going hard and chaotic on this man

xuxi doesn’t even know what hit him

he’s so vocal and excited 

you fuck him while he holds you up, get down on several gym benches, have him bend you forward at the bathroom sink... 

...and you attend business in ten’s room on a desk and window sill

because it’s the most silent there and doesn’t disturb xiaojun’s beauty sleep

ten has discreetly ushered you there and preoccupies himself in the kitchen with the cats

he knows how the game is played

either floor ‘em all or always watch out for others

MVP

but you are secretly wondering what ten is plotting because he has some serious self-control and observation skills

given how tidy his room is... whatever his plans are you can look forward to it

xuxi is definitely suffering from your heavy duty cock destruction in the meantime while being in heaven at the same time

that dick is worn out and dripping 

so much bouncing is even gonna make the biggest boy lose it

milking that orgasm out of him is gonna be so gratifying yum

the deep and defeated moans, my god he really surrenders to the pleasure

wow that was almost as to-the-point as studio sex with mark

no idle talk in nct huh

you clean each other all exhausted and then gobble up three bowls of noodles each

then sleep for two hours in each other’s arms

then do a second round because this guy is really getting you going and yukhei wants to live this monday to the fullest

like this man gives you previously unknown levels of energy

must be the blonde hair. it does sexy things when yukhei is twitching

this time it’s a dick blowing festival

oh yeah

the type where you’re so sloppy with your head bops, he doesn’t even know where to put his hands and needs to think emergency thoughts

oh yeah big dicks make for some nice slurpy noises that sound really plump you know what i mean

he’s gonna realize very soon you do this shit for your own entertainment

and get all kinds of squeaks and faces out of him

only little pauses help him keep up the stamina so he asks you to pull off for a bit every two minutes or so

he has to look elsewhere and distract his mind with thinking about washing the dishes

girl... your tongue has this man sweating major bullets

you’re big on the corruption kink are you

once again 

xuxi is gonna be so shaken and pass the fuck out from cumming

and he thought he was a horny guy

his soul must have left his body and that scalp is probably dead

but bleaching was worth it (he looks like a sleeping angel now)

not to mention banging all over the wayv dorm

ten got a preview of what’s expecting him

not that he doesn’t know he reads you well

lucas promises to return the oral favor next monday and finally collapses entirely in the living room wearing only boxers

nothing new for wayv, great sight for you

not a single workout routine has exhausted xuxi this much

he needs 10 hours of sleep to reboot

“she’s so wild 😲😂😍” is gonna be what he’ll summarize it as in the group chat later

first big boy taken down

the second one follows

wednesday is right around the corner 

oh yes

kai definitely goes off with the preparation you are not ready for this spectacle

he redecorated his entire kitchen and bathroom to perfection with flowers, lanterns, dim light, petals, expensive fabrics draped from the ceiling, and there’s a great view on night time seoul

you can tell he’s best friends with taemin

i mean they’re the greatest entertainers of their time of course their taste is great

always going the extra mile

the black, sheer shirt with a deep cleavage that kai put on is nothing short of a treat

is that a lace choker he’s wearing

and his hair is pushed back lord have mercy

you get pretty weak in the knees at that

the catering leaves nothing to be desired either. a full 3-course sicily-style italian meal with 100% organic ingredients and beautiful basil and thyme garnishings

to set the mood afterwards jongin does what he does best

don’t tell me you didn’t see this one coming

just a chair for you, some music, and him

is this like a whole damn private concert?

he has prepared an entire setlist to thrill you with selected styles of dance

even a rendition of salsa, swing, and tango argentino

i’m telling you...

if kim jongin moves his body for you like that you’ll be fucking hooked and honored and not believe your eyes

what a feast

prepare for a serious case of dropped jaw

and jongin being an absolute daredevil dancing incrementally close to your chair

he incorporates all these little moments of skinship

where he strokes your hair, your jaw, or takes your hands

while at the same time he’s completely destroying it on the dancefloor

with those scorching hips and how he works it on the carpet right in front of you

you’re about to fucking melt

what a time to be alive

the sheer shirt’s buttons are holding onto dear life as do his pants

kai’s movements are becoming extremely ecstatic

what a fucking lapdance 2.0

men have clearly evolved otherwise this wouldn’t be happening

kai dances like a king on a stage but jongin? is god-like when he dances with just one person as the audience

shiit

and because he’s very nervous

he work particularly hard to ace it

in his mind he’s already underneath you judging by how he’s moving

...you can definitely fancy a luscious private concert each wednesday

and for designated activities in the bathroom

he even made a whole 5-hour playlist of the finest songs

so he can make you grind on top of him

don’t tell me kai isn’t the master of courting

king of effort

i don’t have to tell you that this is gonna be the most sensual night you’ve ever had

kai will get to know your body very, very well

those hips never stop do they

the fact that thursday is baekhyun day right after this?

wow aren’t you exhausted

the orgasms just seamlessly continue huh

everything goes on like that 

friday you have a toy-filled, passionate evening at the studio with mark who’s doing the most 

let’s say mark just has good ‘vibes’ indeed

this almost gets as messy as your first time with lucas

have fun cleaning up that couch, canada

what a sex marathon

if you don’t have your period

there’s always a lot of action going on 

or actually. you do catch a break for the weekend

saturday you bake delicious, pistacio and pecan-crusted sticky buns with taeyong 

who also shows you the new fledgelings that have hatched in his apartment

so adorable

sunday you endlessly make out with taemin in the sheets who has of course heard of jongin putting on a show

so he dances for you as well and even does the hands-tied criminal choreo in an especially luscious rendition (aka extra heavy breathing and grinding on the floor, and doing splits that almost rip his pants)

oh yes my love

nothing really happens afterwards you just have dinner completely flustered

if lee taemin dances, sex becomes redundant and doesn’t compare anymore

but really now

the slow burn is unbearable with him for fuck’s sake

taemin knows how to work up the seduction bit by bit

you basically masturbate all evening after returning to your house

god. what to do with this guy

on monday you ravage yukhei’s dick and get all that head 

xuxi is a chaotic fella but he keeps his promises

plus you get the best full-body massage of your life

and for the first time pull out your phone to basically livestream yourself riding him

so the whole chat can watch for five minutes

yep. you learned that courage thing from mark lee

the camera work is obviously subpar but the video definitely has maximum effect

kai and baekhyun stream their reaction right alongside your broadcast

“woah woah oh my god oh my god!!”

everyone’s freaking out, everyone stops whatever they’re doing, everyone is glued to their screens, they love your body moving

you’re having a blast 

especially when you stream another round an hour later and lucas holds the camera now

his arm is perfect for that by the way

strong and stable and high up in the air

so you can do your thing on that fat dick with a bonus of the sexiest xuxi moans ever

that deep but soft tone... yukhei really got a perfect groaning voice huh

after getting steamy for almost ten minutes, you get some great close-ups of your pussy after having yukhei pull out mid-romp

because that gape is for the gods

don’t kid yourself with a dick like that inside you’ll be opening a little wider

it looks and feels even better with lucas tracing his long fingers inside of it

with the closeup zooming in even more while he’s putting his thumb on your clit 

mmh that’s good stuff

six very shaky boys are sitting in front of their phones right now being able to look um very deeply inside of you

baekhyun is basically frozen to a statue on the reaction stream and salivates nonstop it’s just running down his neck at this point

his wettest dreams are right in front of him

stretched out pussy all juicy and swollen? baekhyun’s lifeblood. he’s seeing god 

he turns up the brightness of his phone to maximum so he can see every little detail 

remember. this guy loves to be inside of you so obsessively he wants to pay rent to live in there

so he’s appreciating an HD view of his favorite place, really deep and really pulsing and really soaked

yukhei has slathered you in lube and really pushed apart your muscles very gently, no abrasion, you relaxed so nicely around him

it’s feeling good as fuck

kai who’s watching right next to baekhyun just stares with big eyes

every injury he ever got while dancing is suddenly healed 

he’s a new man his spine has put itself together his legs are reborn

taeyong almost falls off his chair when he tunes in

he’s that bewildered

he just types a big WOW and a wall of blushing emojis

the explicit songs he’s been listening to and whatever he’s been rapping about recently are nothing in comparison to this

finally someone climbed up to taeyong’s level of nastiness

and he thought he’d never find someone on eye level

secretly he loves the nice view but he won’t admit how much

meanwhile he will rewatch this over and over for the whole week at least five times a day

and then there’s taemin

| adorable 😊🤗🎀 6v6

| can you put the camera a bit closer again 👉👈

| and turn on the flash if that’s ok 😳

| ah thank you 💟

i don’t know what taemin has seen or heard or experienced in his life and what made him this way but damn he loves that graphic shit

turning on the flash makes even yukhei’s jaw drop and rub your clit even faster

he’s damn proud he could make your pussy open up to him this way as he should be 

cuz he’s really been improving his Big Cock Techniques (BCT)

mark doesn’t write anything but he’s online and streaming so yeah he’s jerking off

with two hands

baekhyun is typing how much he loves the wet sounds and how great the fingering action is

and he’s damn right. telepathy 

that’s your favorite pervert right there yeehaw

in the meantime yukhei’s brain is empty he’s just smiling bright and enjoying the moment and the attention and your body

ten is basically next door because this is the fucking wayv dorm 

you can hear him choke on his coffee and whisper ‘oh my fucking god, oh shit’ to himself

the phone almost topples into the sheets while lucas is putting all those rubs and circles into your clit but the audio is already telling the boys to watch very closely anyway because here it comes

taeyong is probably falling apart by now given how he’s posting a couple fragmented sentences that you try to decipher on yukhei’s phone

until you get close and take up filming yourself again 

so yukhei can make a video with his own phone as well

yep that’s two cameras on you by now not just one

xuxi’s been such a steadfast babe 

and he gets to see the fruits of his work. for one, just how much of an imprint he left with his cock inside you 

and second how hard he can make you cum now

those big fingers are magic on you

taemin gets all the closeups he ever needed from your camera because you hit the zoom even more

yukhei starts kissing you twice

not as carefully as he often would

it’s the really wet and passionate version this time

he films your lower faces as good as he can

those big fucking lips 

they never fail to make you get the hots

they’re really made to do all this are they

his tongue nips into you with extra saliva on board

you suck it into your own mouth and mix it with yours, and gather some more

and slip your tongue above his in return

yukhei makes sure you can hear him swallowing all that warm runny spit and moans into your mouth

guess who just blew one big juicy load into the condom

and he’s not even inside of you

jesus christ yukhei

looks like french kissing is his orgasm button 

you start sucking on his tongue when it slides back between your lips and you make them really tight and puckering

the noise is so delicious

yukhei shoots the rest of his semen into the condom

you go even harder on him, the kiss gets really deep

kai and baekhyun are literally jumping up and down on their beds by now

taemin and mark are sending star-eyed emojis

ten is definitely beating the meat next door

yukhei’s hand is massaging incessantly between your legs

he makes you feel. so. good.

when he retreats from the kiss you’re ready

you can hardly keep the phone stable in your palm

yukhei also points his camera back at your pussy again

and makes sure to catch every contraction

you know an orgasm is good when you’re going all “oh... ohh...”

even taeyong goes online to stream his reaction because you cum so beautifully

he’s actually crying and can’t close his mouth he can’t believe what he’s seeing

your pussy lips are so sloppy and stretched apart and twitching and you make sure the camera catches every bit

it takes almost half a minute until your muscles calm

you tell yukhei to clean it up with those plump lips of his

baekhyun and taemin are violently agreeing with thousands of “YESS EAT UP!!!” and “yes!! 😊♥︎🌹” text bubbles in the chat

your guys are so cute do you realize that

in order to have both hands free, lucas ends his video, puts his phone aside, and is already licking you up like a whole bowl of whipped cream

you keep on streaming on your own phone and brush the hair out of his face

the best part is catching yukhei’s tongue winding between your lips and then spoiling your pussy with big kisses very very slowly as not to overstimulate you

he’s such a fast learner he’s doing it really well

once you’re satisfied and cool off, you stroke the back of his neck and his favorite boyfriend duties are officially on pause

so he can go to pull off the condom and clean himself up, and get ready for bed after a quick mini snack

while you blow kisses into the camera, flirt with all your babes while they flirt back and even bow to you

and film your pussy all swollen and licked up but slowly closing a little bit again, ever so slightly

ten sends two little black hearts and a little “that was the most amazing thing i’ve ever seen thank you 😽”

you make sure taemin gets an extra close view of your clit and taeyong is making high-pitched squealing noises in his reaction video stream

mark goes like “yea that’s the spot!”

kai has joined baekhyun with the mouth and saliva action, they’re both licking their lips all over the place and make lewd lusty faces

they’re literally sucking and eyefucking your pussy through the camera bitch they want it so goddamn bad

oh to have their mouths on you right now to come down from your high and chill

you tell everyone how much you miss them and how badly you want them to be here

and how you want to feel all of them all over, on your skin and inside you

the chat is full of yearning and horny crying emojis now

yukhei helps you clean up the rest while you text how it felt with mark and baekhyun because they wanna know more

you talk about how yukhei’s girth is always rubbing that one spot inside and his breathing changes when it does

and you say you really loved their reactions

the members promise to be careful and discrete when they re-watch the stream and ten also says that if you don’t want it to stay in the chat some day you should never hesitate to delete it

you say no problem boys you should know me inside out, just remember to use head-phones when yukhei starts slurping at the 01:27 min mark

taeyong and mark are losing it at your puns

then you have a glass of water taller than yukhei’s dick and basically dance to the bathroom

lucas talks to the boys with his big ole smile in his pyjamas while you’re busy

oh god he is so shy

but very very blissed out. it really takes only two things to make this man happy. big plates, twitchy pussy.

a truly simple man. you like that

kai is definitely evolving from his teasing yukhei agenda in the meantime

he is sending thumbs up emojis instead of raised eyebrow ones

you lay down in xuxi’s big embrace and say goodnight to your boys

yukhei buries his nose in your hair, and kisses you on the forehead so innocently, taeyong melts in his little video square on screen

taemin is a big fan as well

he’s living true to his “explicit shit and romance” life motto isn’t he

you ask if everyone was enjoying themselves

big positive reactions all over the chat

you coo how you adore them all so much and want more of things like this where everyone is involved

eight people are going to bed very happy today

yukhei waves and baekhyun goes offline as well, as does taeyong who’s beaming

end stream

it was a masterpiece

that mark needs to recover from the very most, his entire bed is full of used tissues

and basically

over the next few hours the chat is losing their minds over and over again

everyone can’t stop gushing and telling you what their favorite part was

kai says how turned on you were was making him hard all night

ten enjoyed the wild kissing part and how wet everything was

naughty boy taemin keeps on talking about how — i quote — your insides are the best ever!! while sending flower emojis

your stream has unleashed a gigaton of sexual energy

and that basically goes on and on

until tuesday arrives

oof 

today’s the day

you know that ten is up to something 

except the little hearts and kiss comment

he hasn’t written much in the chat

oh shit oh shit what is he planning

he truly is a pisces

you know that some epic stuff is about to go down since the cats are with yangyang 

and — what

there’s a large canvas in his room with a piece of cloth to cover it

lord have mercy

he’s bringing the big guns

ten will even hold a little speech on how he got inspiration two weeks ago

only to proceed to unveil the art very shyly

it’s an elaborate pencil drawing standing about as tall as him

immaculately sketched in a realistic way

have a guess what he’s been drawing

exactly right it’s an erotic depiction of you

laying on your back, thighs spread, head thrown back

and to make it mysterious you see more of the legs rather than the crotch area

so whatever or who is giving you pleasure is entirely up to you to imagine to your liking

it’s more about how the person he drew feels lust rather than the onlooker. he drew this for your own enjoyment

he did that very cleverly and classily 

this canvas will be your utmost treasure and get such an intimate spot in your home

it doesn’t take very long until you’re mounting him and get those hips moving in a circle

ten is just full of surprises

you ask if you can photograph the drawing and upload it to the chat

ten is like ohhh!

but why not, now that he thinks about it. he secretly likes praise and visibility for his drawings so much

the post is definitely a success 

lots of exclamation marks and reaction memes for three hours straight

but who would’ve thought otherwise

ten is just massively talented, always on point

and hits the right nerve with his line of work

as your pussy can attest

yukhei is gonna tease in the chat that he heard you in the dorm and that it sounded mega hot wink wink wink

ten writes:

| my tongue hurts 

| let’s do it again next week

| i feel inspired to draw more as well

the chat explodes with hype for another two hours

multiple members come up with their own artistic takes on you

on wednesday kai presents a feral dance he choreographed for the whole morning. showing a representation of what you are to him and what he feels for you

very beautiful

on thursday baekhyun gifts you a deliberately humorous doodle titled mochi mama in the style of i dunno, probably picasso on crack

you have not seen anything like it

it’s gonna make you laugh in sad hours for many days to come

talk about come

baekhyun will have his hands busy in and on you all night

he wants to feel mama mochi and please you and make you smile

try not to climax challenge: failed several times

on friday mark blasts a song he wrote about you as soon as you put your hand bag down in the studio

100% of the lyrics are about how sexy and charming and special you are to him and how infatuated he is and how much he thinks about you all the time and how much you knock him off his feet, and how he has the biggest hots for you, jesus christ

that mark lee canada flow wants to make you fucking nut right then and there

the fandom just got his lit mixtape and he’s already working on another one i guess he sure has enough nsfw inspiration for it

all the more reasons to cum hard on his dick tonight

and make sweet love to that sexy body because mark lee isn’t the only one with the hots

then comes saturday

taeyong day

the tension is rising

you’re at his place

the sweet boo comes to put some chirping fledgelings into a towel on your lap as usual

there’s a big crispy lasagna baking in the oven, dripping with cheese and sauce with the most full-bodied herbal mix ever

damn tasty 

gordon ramsay would rate this particularly well on twitter

honestly man

we all know gordon ramsey would like taeyong’s dishes

the evening passes as it always does

so he didn’t jump on the bandwagon that’s interesting

it’s almost as if the stream didn’t happen or anything

just as you expected

taeyong doing his own thing and being just very consistent makes him so sexy and desirable to you it’s hard to explain

you just like his style of going about things you know

he’s very receptive to your impulses

you figure it’s up to you to make some steps

so when he opens the fridge to pull out a self-made, perfectly swirly vanilla-chocolate vortex pudding that’s just at the right temperature, you can’t help but hit on him like the world is ending 

but as you learned from taeyong’s example: your way

you ask him to open his mouth and maneuver spoon after spoon of pudding into it for him to deliciously savor it

giving him compliments on always making your day along with that

that bowl is empty very fast my loves

and taeyong very happy

oh yeah he was enjoying that

with his eyes closed

oh fuck

the sexual tension could rip the air in half like a mark verse

you decide to sit down on his lap all nonchalant and finish your own pudding... more than suggestively

taeyong is basically holding his breath at this point he’s a puddle

you tell him he can put his hands on your waist if he wants to

no answer needed his fingers are already on their way

you can hear how his heart is approaching a techno music BPM

at this point all you can do anymore is lean in to whisper if he likes to go to the bedroom with you

he can keep the apron on

taeyong tastes deliciously of pudding aye

you roll around in the sheets kissing so heavily

this is pure indulging you just feel how you’re sleeping with a chef

who happens to have the veiniest dick of all time

you’re definitely filled up well

sliding up and down on him deliciously for twenty minutes

really slowly and hugging each other tightly

and saying romantic things

that’s the good life

by the end of the evening the group chat gets a picture of taeyong’s world class lasagna 

and a ‘very random’ shaky picture of your hand in his hair

which baekhyun instantly comments as:

“now tyong knows how great you taste as well 🤓😁🤗“

yukhei agrees wholeheartedly and ten starts making baby don’t stop puns

kai is totally in love with the quality food 

baekhyun voices his interest in making more pictures of that kind with you. you know, hand in the hair, no big deal

kai says hurry up with it hyung, all the hair dye makes you balder every minute

baekhyun reprises his doodling and now draws a couple

it’s mama mochi with byun baldhyun

“this will be the next selca“

glorious

you’re having a damn good time

but later you feel something is going on

the whole week passes and taeyong seems to be brooding

next saturday he has a hard time expressing himself when he comes to your home 

you ask if he’s not comfortable having more sex or if he struggles with the relationship setup

taeyong says it’s not that but can’t explain any further

you go on a whim and ask if it’s a confession he has on his mind

bingo

“taeyong... if you think i’ll judge you for something. remember we’re only doing this since a couple weeks. it’s hard to know how the person really reacts if you don’t know each other inside out“

he is still hesitant

you ask him if it’s something taboo

“yeah...”

you thought so. taeyong is the least basic person you know along with taemin

guess why these two are saved for last my dear readers

you tell him that how he’s in his own lane is what you appreciate him for in the first place, it’s why you’re here with him, you love your duckling chef so much

if he wants a different kind of sex that’s perfectly him

he looks relieved and understood hearing that

and confesses that yeah... he wants to go a little kinkier with you

now you know why taeyong was acting with so much restraint

and put all of his feelings and sensuality into food pretty much

in fact the kinky sex has already started whether you noticed or not

indirectly. as in, the dynamic

truth is he wants to be a service sub

oh yeah lemme introduce you to some new things

service subs like to really cater to their dominants and fulfill their every wish not just in bed, but around the house as well

and there’s even more to it as you will soon discover talking to him about it

an apron is only the start

in case you have been living under a rock

taeyong’s duality is nuts 

he’s a completely shy mega pervert

it’s not a secret that this guy wants hardcore bdsm torture sex

you letting all that aggression loose on him for fucking sport

and being cold to him

with a bit of soft domme action as the perfect balance 

yep 

he wants you to take him out and take care of him at the same time

he’s perfectly aware he’s among the freakier and more deprived members

even ten is just casually freaky and just open for a lot of things. taeyong is deliberate

and pretty deep in the femdom community as far as his browser history is concerned

we all know assertive partners are his thing

but he’s afraid he’ll get you into something that’s a lot of responsibility

you say mister i’m familiar with your interests 

my dear you never made them hard to guess

you tell him it’s no problem for you to give it to him raw

you’ll be doing disgusting things to him that sexy face will straight up drown 

did you know?

our dear boy taeyong loves it when you spit in his mouth and do virgin roleplay

if he asks you to break him don’t be surprised

he wants to release control completely

he goes by all the rules

and i guarantee. when he comes along your dominatrix mood is gonna skyrocket he just brings that shit out in people

his mere naked body is just... how not to go nuts on him how he wants it

long story short tied up taeyong head to toe ends up immortalized as a vertical photograph

the group chat is overwhelming your notifs with wide-eyed emojis and all caps

amping up the game a little more each day are we

without even trying. hell, this just happened

where this is going is gonna be fun

sunday goes down with you grinding yourself all over taemin but you’re both clothed

you grab the back of his neck to lean in for kisses over and over and over

yes kisses are key

if not the favorite thing he does

let this sink in. if taemin overwhelms a little kitty with a hundred thousand smooches, just how kissy is this guy gonna be 

and have fun teasing his erection through his pants

lee taemin a squirmy mess? hell yeah

in classic fashion he will spend the most time of the evening on his knees getting slapped around in several blindfolds, harnesses, and wrist ties

his fantasy finally came true

i repeat what taemin has been dreaming of is reality

thank god for taeyong having you second guess his private tastes. otherwise you would not be on your dom grind now

taemin even goes as far as ordering lingerie for your encounters — to wear himself because he’s taemin

satin and silk blouses he already has in his wardrobe so there’s no shortage

i don’t have to tell you that you can spend hours grinding on his cock in a room full of candles while taemin is in head-to-toe bondage

that’s his idea of a good time and hell you are really treated to perfect eye candy, taemin’s hotness will bring your pleasure to a new level

the group chat will definitely love your photography taken from your sessions

taemin is just an utter no-compromise kinda man to make kinky love with. everything is planned he’s never settling for less than a perfect evening

where both of you really experience the ultimate satisfaction from treating your bodies to the best of clothes and toys and scenarios

give me an amen for taemin being your sunday guy because this legend of a man is your personal church

and his discography is the bible

and cum play is the baptizing my friend

so yeah huh

every day you can look forward to. monday to sunday

and not a day goes by without someone in the chat reminiscing the steamy video you did with lucas

you end up repeating what you wished that day

for everyone to be with you

so you could feel all of them 

and you say maybe it’s time to arrange something 

you’ve gotten to know each of them personally and intimately by now

and integrated them into your personal life

hell when you wake up the first thing you see is ten’s drawing across your bed

or baekhyun’s funny mama mochi art on your phone background

and you start your day literally selecting from a pile of taeyong’s freshly washed and ironed clothing stacks in your wardrobe

sitting at your breakfast table with a bouquet of flowers that kai and jongin brought you

eating food you bought together with lucas

listening to music that mark made especially for you

they’re all in your life together so it’s the right time to make some heated love together

the chat is all down you don’t even have to ask any further

baekhyun volunteers to go about his leader duty to organize the best possible venue and best possible date

cause with superm things do go 100

he asks what kind of atmosphere you have in mind

you say hard and nasty and kinky

which will definitely make the chat interested

and baekhyun was about to rent a huge modern art penthouse in gangnam

you say no need to go that expensive. you just need a large bed, no paparazzi, and an area where you can be loud. sculptures you could care less about

you have yukhei on your team, so that’s a living sculpture already 

it needs a safe haven essentially, with a dark and lusty atmosphere would be so nice

ten steps in saying he has the exact spot you’re looking for 

he has a friend who runs a declining night club in the suburbs, with some pretty attractive and grungy backrooms with plenty of space to fuck

yeah a club is exactly what you’re looking for that’s a good idea

it’s closed on monday so baekhyun and ten arrange a rental just then

of course way in the evening

with the guarantee of nobody else around

baekhyun knows how this rigged game rolls he says they need the club to perform a dance practice, overnight stay, and shooting a music video

which is only a half-lie

not “hey we are super m planning an orgy wanna invite dispatch and tell lee soo man”

regardless ten’s friend is pretty chill and indifferent anyways

and baekhyun’s money is doing the talk

you’ll be guaranteed to be left by yourself

monday evening it is. 

you already have a whole bunch of fantasies to let loose on your boys

and put it all in the chat

yo it’s called brainstorming and it sure has brain in it

you discuss

and it goes down next week 

you encouraged the members to wear what they feel best in, no dress code, no comparison thinking. you want to meet them like you got to know them, each in their favorite expression

taeyong dons a mass onslaught of fetish gear underneath a trench coat, including a fancy collar, lots of hairspray

and latex gloves. shit he’s a freak

baekhyun puts on the coziest clothes he finds and his smol sneakers but they are secretly expensive, his hair is curly and big, he put on a nice scent

kai can’t help but go black suit and lace underneath, you know him

bleach blonde yukhei gets out the tight white tee and smug jeans

creative genius ten goes all out designing his own fashion (!) with paint, he puts on sexy af glasses and goes for his signature ‘cleavage down to the belly’ look underneath a bomber jacket

mark goes for a casual suit but make it swag, with a sleeveless top underneath, yeah those mark arms go crazy 

taemin — picks his most dazzling silver outfit that looks like a rendition of mermaid scales, pointed shoes, princely hair, famous i’m so fabulous

and it’s already starting out sexy in the car before you even arrive 

because this is all gonna be glorious from the first second to the last

baekhyun and kai will do the driving

you have not one but two classy and sexy chauffeurs you hear me

yeah in their shiny black german cars with those sleek comfortable seats

baekhyun, taeyong, ten and lucas are a team

and then you get kai, mark, and taemin, including your group luggage because such a trip needs a lot of things to pack trust me

you’re with team kai on the way to the club and with team baekhyun the way back 

it’s already lit and steamy on your way there

nothing better than getting in the mood held by the greek god arms of none other than lee taemin with mark lee assisting

you’re entirely wrapped up in kissing taemin so passionately, his tongue melts into your mouth like the finest chocolate

thinking about how you were making out last week gets you going even more

as does feeling up his bulge, ugh taemin is so sensual

mark sitting on your other side being eager to attend to your thighs, your waist, your back, your hands, your hair, your stomach

yep

yukhei has been telling him about the wonders of a whole-body massage since you like it so much

mark gets his hands all over you to provide a sexy caress and wow he’s doing it well, giving everything the perfect kind of attention, always asking if you want more of this or more of that

mark loves everything about you and he knows how to make your anticipation become even more intense by dedicating time to all areas generously

you feel like he’s worshipping you head to toe

it’s the way to get turned on

mark has great soft hands and knows your best spots by now

that’s exactly why it was a good idea to sleep with the members individually at first

you could figure it all out in detail and each member could show their style of doing things, and you could teach them

mark has become an expert in skinship

while he’s kissing into your neck whispering revering things to you nobody else would understand

they’re intimate, spicy details from your studio lessons

with a romantic twist even because mark is giving you his entire arsenal, the entire palette

“i’ve been thinking about you so often...”

with jongin driving carefully and taking the lesser frequented roads 

kai is really keeping it together

the maknae backseat party is faithfully photographed by mark who sends it to the other team after taemin and you select the best shots, giggling

your favorite is a bird’s view of your cleavage with taemin kissing right between your breasts, slightly below the sternum

his hair is softly splayed over the area

taeyong and ten reply with heart eyes in the chat

on you go kissing and touching

taemin is so gentle with you and easily accepts your wild licks and bites, leans his head back so you have perfect access to his neck

by the time you arrive at the club’s back entrance, he’s marked up and his lips are mighty used

ruined neck, ruined mouth

taemin’s favorite two accessories to walk into a club with 

including a hard-on

with mark and kai strutting right after, chewing mints

...both getting hard themselves because mark loves your body and jongin has very good ears when it comes to picking up things that happen in the back of his car

and this bitch got a raging libido, so

the best part is everything is prepared

the other team already parked their car there earlier

ten had the keys to every needed lock, showed everyone around, and then baekhyun went into organization overdrive

this is the first time he didn’t clown around to distract from work since debut

if baekhyun ever means serious business... wow

your best boy taeyong has located the perfect backroom that’s shaded inside and neon-lit from the outside

the window’s aren’t particularly low-sitting so that’s a privacy plus

there’s a huge white extra oversized bed with some more great furniture and a sofa landscape

he desinfected everything to a T

and pulled out every utensil you might need from a large black bag

he walked in like he just commited a bank robbery but in reality there’s cutesy pink rope in the bag

oh well

classic taeyong

yukhei sorted and handed out the condoms plus water bottles for everyone

he’s the expert for the basics don’t come at him he’s doing a great job

after you reminding everyone of the safeword 

taemin sits down with you on the bed and you keep kissing

keeping up the flow right there

//

you beckon your lil’ adorable mochi who’s been dying for skinship

baekhyun is so turned on he wastes no time joining

still fully clothed while the other members are about to undress

you actually like baekhyun huddling up against you in his oversized hoodie it’s cute

so hey, change in plans

everyone ditches the protocol and climbs on the bed only without their shoes 

lot of ties and belts to pull them closer to you

you bring all of them together on the bed now

the feeling of having everyone around you is so electrifying, you have to distance from taemin’s seductive lips not to get some kind of adrenaline overdose

jesus this guy is trying to soak your pants like baekhyun forgot to turn off the shower

you get to enjoy five minutes of relaxed massaging from all sides to cool everything down a little

baekhyun and yukhei alternate with kissing you

yum

big plush lips plus a horny tongue

that’s a good combination

kai is definitely setting the pace of how to massage you, and how to move the body while doing so, and what expressions to make 

instead of sitting there awkwardly staring into space

remember? master of courting — that’s kim jongin

even baekhyun follows his example a bit

you’re entering cloud 9 from that whole-body massage

you can tell they’re all dancers. there’s rhythm involved

having the seven of them attend to you at the same time just hits different

that are 14 hands

70 fingers

all in sync with kai’s physical ideas, carefully yet purposefully kneading and stroking 

kai also helps everyone find a good area and makes sure everyone stays away from any precarious or sexy zones

because you’d probably get off from that in the matter of a blink

to be honest you’re already feeling heated you can’t help it

but that’s a good sign you’re definitely feeling this 

and there’s not a single limp dick in this room at this point already

baekhyun being the best people reader all over again manages a seamless transition to some water drinking

so everyone is ready to go

you wish you could do everything at once but decide to get a load of some slow body rolls against you because hell yeah

courting expert kai is sure to oblige, dance god taemin joins right in, and ten completes the holy trinity and hell does he go off

photographer mark on duty again. this moment has to be captured

baekhyun does his mood management magic and encourages ten and taemin to let out their little sounds more

kai he doesn’t have to tell

nor you because you’re already moaning

shit these guys are just too good

these bodies are machines

again bless your xuxi workout sessions

you wouldn’t keep up otherwise

you curse them because your pussy feels creamy way too early

switching to grinding on their bulges is not a better idea because it’s making you even hornier but anyway it’s your favorite activity

yukhei takes time and some effort to get fully hard so that’s a grateful job now

because you can gather yourself

you resort to using your cleavage to stop turning yourself on completely

and then your hands to palm his pants because that’s even more inconspicuous

group sex with superm? hardest early orgasm avoidance challenge EVER

is there some kind of legally accessible viagra for women

there’s no way you could turn yourself off help

you either get the first orgasm out of the way or keep it together to have some suspense in here and see the boys work hard

the decision is clear

time to bring out the toys that taeyong assembled on a table

baekhyun, taemin taeyong and ten are in the down to get tied up in various ways

lucas and kai get blindfolded and get a sexy task from you

slowly humping the mattress just for your viewing pleasure

topless for that matter

no need to ask twice there they go

photographer mark stays free and flexible. it’s always good to have someone outside bondage just in case with such a big group

anyway so you will be busy for sure

the rest of the boys strip down to only their briefs and get a good dose of spanking

ten is definitely moaning the loudest there

taeyong ends up with tied wrists in a prayer position and has his fun getting slapped around by you 

until he’s breathless and smiling to himself with his tongue hanging out

someone got his daily meal of smacking

taemin highly approves 

nobody’s surprised

baekhyun gets a quick and simple upper body rope harness that’s very easy to grip him by

and just to tease him you add some nipple pinches

result: loud baekhyun noises

cute as hell

so that’s how he’s been training himself to reach all those high notes

interesting

taemin, completely naked, has his hands and ankles tied, looking so beautiful all helpless and his cock itching for stimulation

and because taemin’s strange ‘artistic’ kidnapping fantasies that he never stops talking about cannot be ignored he gets a mouth gag for good measure

you know you just roll with their ideas

he’s a simple man that’s all he needs

you decide to put a bigger bondage piece on ten who ends up in a hogtie aka his new favorite place to be in

if there’s one guy who’s flexible like that it’s him

let’s see for how long he can take it

ten likes a challenge

you tell mark exactly what kind of pictures you want of your tied darlings and he’s well-engaged with that task

baekhyun is clinging to you a lot in the meantime

he gets kisses on the mouth 

and your open ear 

because you can tell there’s something on his mind

or rather

his ass is telling him something after you activated it with spanks huh

what does baekhyun want?

baekhyun wants the strap

and the strap he shall get

his time has come

this time the safeword won’t do so tapping yukhei’s thigh is the deal

taeyong’s kinky tool collection has a nice and thick equipment to offer, jet black black straps, jet black dildo, like it’s some kind of secret agent gear

it takes a lot of lube to get it into baekhyun’s tight and tiny ass but what’s new 

he’s not the gaping expert 

and way too busy laughing at the members’ reaction faces so his damn asshole is contracting god dammit

what a brat

next time he gets a toy for prep

only when you grab him by the harness and get into a rhythm, baekhyun throws it back

good boy

kai and xuxi are allowed to take off their blindfolds now because you have a task for them

taeyong’s toy collection features one extra long double-ended dildo, transparent and neither too slim nor too wide

if baekhyun doesn’t have that thing inside his throat i don’t know who

this shit is made for him

and you can tell he’s salivating for that

you tell yukhei to use those big hands to keep baekhyun’s head steady

and oh wonder, his long fingers enclose it perfectly

kai gets to go hard on baekhyun and fulfill his lifetime fantasy that he has had for over a decade now and jerks off to every night:

baekhyun not talking

so while baekhyun’s ass is getting properly stuffed

so is his mouth

kai has no qualms squeezing the toy into baekhyun’s throat a little more roughly

those are some pretty intense choking noises

mark steadily hits the snapshot button

some people go to pound town

baekhyun goes to silicon valley

kai is not afraid to push that thing as far as it can physically go

you’re pleased with how he’s doing it

and with baekhyun’s blowjob abilities anyway

is there a better throat in this industry? probably not 

he’s pretty surprised himself with how much he can take it

that poor ass is getting more than it can handle in the meantime, baekhyun is throbbing and whining

little did you know his prostate is so sensitive and makes his dick leak

such a shame you fully exploit that

you tell yukhei to have baekhyun move his head on his own to get into the rhythm

and get taeyong over to suck on the other end of the toy because oh yeah

let me just say these two are amazing

god bless sm entertainment 

not for any executive decisions

but for their uncanny ability to attract and assemble all the subs

lee taeyong giving head like the rent is due is a sight you need in your life

like everything, he does it roughly and properly

baekhyun is barely even sucking anymore just straight up gagging and seeing stars

because uh-oh here comes a big fat prostate orgasm

mark is clever enough to hit record on his phone

and capture a shaking baekhyun travelling through a whole bunch of universes, at least in his mind 

because that’s how strong his climax is

all he can say is thank you mama mochi and recover from this on his back

kai is satisfied with the result as well because baekhyun managed to not say anything for fifteen minutes

kai never had this much silence in his life

taeyong is still not done sucking the toy off and you let him

never step between a man and his favorite dildo

lucas takes up the task of untying ten who wants to share the other end that’s free now

and mark hands over the camera to kai who films just that

which also means mark is in the mood for you

about time to get some dick

and have taemin watch right next to you

being able to delight in mark’s wonderful technique

doggystyle

which ends up in kai joining 

which causes yukhei to join

and baekhyun to film 

the three are literally queueing while waiting for their turn

you tell them when to pull out and let the other member have you

until mark is riddled with so much suspension, the fifth thrust on his turn ends up in an unexpected hard climax

“oh my god oh my god!“

obviously kai will let loose now and cum as well, accompanied by really breathy groans

yukhei takes his time to make you moan which gives both taeyong and taemin a good show and an untouched orgasm

eventually you get to hear lucas growling his soul out

and kai bickering to pull out already

because it’s time for buffet

after getting rid of his condom, mark has been untying the very resilient ten who’s been in prawn bondage for like half an hour and five minutes now

respect

he and baekhyun team up to eat you out

yeah prepare for a dream team

while mark and kai chill on the other side of the bed

lucas on the other hand still doesn’t have enough and ends up licking your legs with his cock firmly palmed in those big hands

baekhyun and ten are doing the most meanwhile, lapping you up all sloppy

the job of the cameraman goes to a wild taemin who’s undone his safety hook 

he can’t stand this shit anymore he has to join the action instead of lying around in ropes

jeez the guy has the fun of his life playing with filters

silently giggling to himself

until kai finds out that taemin has been putting cat ears on ten and cowboy hats on lucas

kai confiscates the phone from naughty taem and decides to take up that task himself

so taemin can eat you out himself now

alright there are three heads bumping each other between your legs now

and yukhei close-by, currently nibbling at your outer thighs

can you imagine how crowded and crammed that is

you tell mark to get taeyong out of his ties as well

if you’re gonna cum he has to join the party as well

and he will not hesitate my friend

taeyong’s kinky tongue (which can make all kinds of completely unprecedented moves and slurping noises) riles up the other three to put all their effort into this

you order baekhyun and ten to line you left and right of your hips, fingering you from there

and let both taeyong and taemin get you to the point with their tongues at the same time

it’s a busy day innit

the reason is that baekhyun and ten didn’t come but you plan to change that with some dual handjob

baekhyun lets out some pretty hoarse panting noises

(yeah jongin destroyed him with that toy in his mouth for real)

once your hands grip onto their erections, almost automatically baekhyun’s fingers start going crazy on your clit and ten goes mad with his thumb right next to it

yeah he’s kept his rings on this is gonna be a sexy sight

mark and kai retire from their pillows to join at your request

mark kissing you, jongin sucking on your breasts

from this point on things are pretty much just a daze

two tongues two hands? oh shit

four people are trying to make you cum what did you expect

and three other people are licking you all over

yukhei doesn’t even care at this point he’s just straight up kissing your feet

ten is silently groaning it out, he’s pouring his seed into the condom with little twitches in the hip and shoulders

taeyong’s tongue is gonna finish you off, taemin’s lips will make you feel so good, your legs will be a shaking mess in yukhei’s hands

how to even describe this

it’s an explosion of heat and contractions

you’re going fucking crazy from all that head and tongue action god damn

mark definitely has to swallow a lot of your moans all over the place

and taeyong

also swallows

what a god-loving man

your pussy is leaking enough to feed baekhyun as well

who still strokes himself off while he’s cleaning you up with his mouth, oh boy he really developed a lot of stamina

you have your fun telling him to stop jerking himself off

so his orgasm ends up being ruined

those always mess him up

always a nice sight to have him shaking and whining and gasping

you have to roll over at some point before getting overstimulated

phew that takes quite a couple of deliberate breaths

now you have seven hot guys with sopping wet mouths on your hands, looking at you exhausted and infatuated

that’s super m for you

yukhei, man for the basics he is, hands out towels

you really gotta say he’s kept a clear head in all of this except maybe the sudden foot fetish reveal

of course taeyong towels himself down the most he’s basically covered himself with anything he could get his hands on

that face is dripping like his saturday evening lasagnas 

you help clean mark who kinda lost his mind and heart while kissing you, he needs your care a little more now

baekhyun soon snaps back into organization mode and has the brilliant idea to unpack xuxi’s and jongin’s luggage

to have everyone wearing their gigantic hoodies and sweaters

it’s warm in the room anyway but this feels so much cozier

after going to the bathroom

a ball of cuddly guys is snuggled up all aroud you faster than you can think

mark and taeyong are already sleeping they really knocked themselves out

champs

kai finds the completely forgotten phone somewhere in the sheets and turns off what seems to be a 50 minutes video

that’s gonna be fun to watch some time

baekhyun nuzzles himself to sleep against your sweater, right between your breasts

“mochi mama thank...” are his last words before he drifts off to pineapple pizza land or whatever dreamscape is in his head

probably something much dirtier but anyway

lucas and kai steal kisses from you and go off to sort out the room

jesus christ they still have the energy

taeyong’s nasty lil’ toy collection gets cleaned and reassembled, the ropes get coiled up, the towels wander into a washing machine in the other room

whose steady bumping lulls the rest of you to sleep

while taemin, epitome of taste he is, plays his best of hits on low volume with his phone

dozing off between seven guys while “heaven” is playing? 

best thing ever

the rest is history. you’re surrounded by sleepy cuddly sweater men

you actually sleep for a couple hours

dawntime you wake up cozied and sandwiched between yukhei’s tiddies and jongin’s back

which is the most protected, snug place on earth

even a nuclear superweapon couldn’t explode past that spot

they’re fast asleep

giant baby and teddy bear

safeguarding you in unison

ain’t they adorable

baekhyun is awake silently doing pilates, smiling cutely at you when he sees you’re awake, and he gets a big load of kisses i’m telling you

miraculously everything is tidy and smells fresh, and there’s a light soup in the air...

... lee taeyong got up at 6:30.

he was a whirlwind

the group gets to enjoy a 3-course classic korean breakfast 

because taeyong found the club kitchen

what kind of godly entity is this man

how did he do all of this

the club is the cleanest it’s ever been

taking care of 24 people is probably so difficult, this is actually easy to him

you depart in a good mood because damn that soup was restaurant quality and baekhyun had the idea to give you morning head to which everyone joined in

good thing the club has showers

baekhyun is still horny as hell and you want that D(elight) any time of the day 

so you fuck for a bunch of minutes in his car after dropping off the team and they giving you playful winks

you park the car behind xiumin’s house because that’s the most calm place to be

people are sleeping on xiumnin so hard, no paparazzi are around, ever

baekhyun settles there with you smiling

he didn’t sing “get you alone” with no reason

baekhyun needs that one-on-one time with you to ground himself and love you all over again big time

plus you are dying to cum bouncing on him on the driver’s seat 

while he is desperately gripping the steering wheel to have something solid to hold onto

yeah baekhyun is always ready to lose it for ya

it’s literally such a good spot to fuck

he’s strapped in all underneath you and you can see him squirm and get heart eyes from up close

you also love how your thighs meet the fabric of his pants

baekhyun’s tiny lap is already worth a huge nut you love grinding on him

those shapely thighs

with his cock peaking out from underneath his sweater

what his morning head tongue can do, his dick can do twice with ease so time for round two today

glad you have your bag with some utensils

you’re generous with lube on the condom

in fact you love spilling it over his pants a little

it looks like you’ve been squirting on him that’s why

baekhyun is down for your pervy imaginations

and gets even harder

not bad lil’ guy

time to make him moan with the grip of your walls

mochi breathes pretty hard because damn... more dick destruction

you love burying your hands in his sweater at the shoulders and just fucking ride

his hair gets messy, his bedroom gaze is so intense

his ass still hurts from yesterday but it seems to turn him own judging by the high-pitched groans and his begs for you to bounce on him harder

no problem his dick is just made to be ridden

if this wasn’t a high-tech car from the future with carbon and whatnot anybody could hear baekhyun’s um ‘vocals’ from the outside

this is so much fun oh my god

baekhyun releases with his eyes shut and teeth pressed together, his nose is all scrunched up

jesus this one got to him

he drives you to his home with his fingers shaking a little on the steering wheel

literally tapping like they do in his microphone on stage

yep this shook him up

and insatiable byun is now satisfied byun

nothing better than knowing you ruined your cupcake boyfriend in the best of ways

back at his apartment and after some extra carbo hydrate heavy food, as a pre-nap treat you grind on his thighs and his ass because why not

and gyrate him to sleep with his arms and legs stretched in all directions

both of you are still in disbelief that all of this happened

legend has it you’re dreaming of more group sex ideas that night

the next day taemin sends the champagne video to celebrate your first time together

which brings us back to the start

and that’s how it all happened

now you know

congrats on being a lucky girl

related: super m as subs

FINAL NOTE. ah shit i love this dynamic, thank you for reading 🎊

© 2017-2021 submissive-bangtan. all rights reserved. no reposts or translations allowed. all depictions fictional.

[oscopelabs]

Isn’t Everything Autobiographical?: Ethan Hawke In Nine Films And A Novel by Marya Gates

When asked during his first ever on-camera interview if he’d like to continue acting, a young Ethan Hawke replied, “I don’t know if it’s going to be there, but I’d like to do it.” He then gives a guileless shrug of relief as the interview ends, wiping imaginary sweat off his brow. The simultaneous fusion of his nervous energy and poised body language will be familiar to those who’ve seen later interviews with the actor. The practicality and wisdom he exudes at such a young age would prove to be a through-line of his nearly 40-year career. In an interview many decades later, he told Ideas Tap that many children get into acting because they’re seeking attention, but those who find their calling in the craft discover that a “desire to communicate and to share and to be a part of something bigger than yourself takes over, a certain craftsmanship—and that will bring you a lot of pleasure.”

Through Hawke’s dedication to his craft, we’ve also seen his maturation as a person unfold on screen. Though none of his roles are traditionally what we think of when we think of autobiography, many of Hawke’s roles, as well as his work as a writer, suggest a sort of fictional autobiographical lineage. While these highlights in his career are not strictly autofiction, one can trace Hawke’s Künstlerromanesque trajectory from his childhood ambitions to his life now as a man dedicated to art, not greatness. 

Hawke’s first two films, Joe Dante’s sci-fi fantasy Explorers with River Phoenix and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, set the tone for a diverse filmography filled with popcorn fare and indie cinema in equal measure, but they also served as touchstones in his development as person drawn to self-expression through art. In an interview with Rolling Stone’s David Fear, Hawke spoke about the impact of these two films on him as an actor. When River Phoenix, his friend and co-star in Explorers, had his life cut short by a drug overdose, it hit Hawke personally. He saw from the inside what Hollywood was capable of doing to young people with talent. Hawke never attempted to break out, to become a star. He did the work he loved and kept the wild Hollywood lifestyle mostly at arm’s length. 

Like any good film of this genre, Dead Poets Society is not just a film about characters coming of age, but a film that guides the viewer as well, if they are open to its message. Hawke’s performance as repressed schoolboy Todd in the film is mostly internal, all reactions and penetrating glances, rather than grandiose movements or speeches. Through his nervy body language and searching gaze, you can feel both how closed off to the world Todd is, and yet how willing he is to let change in. Hawke has said working on this film taught him that art has a real power, that it can affect people deeply. This ethos permeates many of the characters Hawke has inhabited in his career. 

In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) tells the boys that we read and write poetry because the human race is full of passion. He insists, “poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.” Hawke gave a 2020 TEDTalk entitled Give Yourself Permission To Be Creative, in which he explored what it means to be creative, pushing viewers to ask themselves if they think human creativity matters. In response to his own question, he said “Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems, or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of the sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and ‘has anyone ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?’ Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can’t even see straight, you know, you’re dizzy. ‘Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?’ And that’s when art is not a luxury. It’s actually sustenance. We need it.” 

Throughout many of his roles post-Dead Poets Society, Hawke explores the nature of creativity through his embodiment of writers and musicians. Often these characters are searching for a greater purpose through art, while ultimately finding that human connection is the key. Without that human connection, their art is nothing.

We see the first germ of this attraction to portray creative people on screen with his performance as Troy Dyer in Reality Bites. As Troy Dyer, a philosophy-spouting college dropout turned grunge-band frontman in Reality Bites, Hawke was posited as a Gen-X hero. His inability to keep a job and his musician lifestyle were held in stark contrast to Ben Stiller’s yuppie TV exec Michael Grates. However in true slacker spirit, he isn’t actually committed to the art of music, often missing rehearsals, as Lelaina points out. Troy even uses his music at one point to humiliate Lelaina, dedicating a rendition of “Add It Up” by Violent Femmes to her. The lyrics add insult to injury as earlier that day he snuck out of her room after the two had sex for the first time. Troy’s lack of commitment to his music matches his inability to commit to those relationships in his life that mean the most to him. 

Reality Bites is also where he first positioned himself as one of the great orators of modern cinema.” Take this early monologue, in which he outlines his beliefs to Winona Ryder’s would-be documentarian Lelaina Pierce: “There’s no point to any of this. It’s all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know, a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle, and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.” 

Hawke brings the same intense gaze to this performance as he did to Dead Poets Society, as if his eyes could swallow the world whole. But where Todd’s body language was walled-off, Troy’s is loud and boisterous. He’s quick to see the faults of those around him, but also the good things the world has to offer. It’s a pretty honest depiction of how self-centered your early-20s tend to be, where riding your own melt seems like the best option. As the film progresses, Troy lets others in, saying to Lelaina, “This is all we need. A couple of smokes, a cup of coffee, and a little bit of conversation. You, me and five bucks.”

Like the character, Hawke was in his early twenties and as he would continue to philosophize through other characters, they would age along with him and so would their takes on the world. If you only engage with anyone at one phase in their life, you do a disservice to the arc of human existence. We have the ability to grow and change as we learn who we are and become less self-centered. In Hawke’s career, there’s no better example of this than his multi-film turn as Jesse in the Before Trilogy. While the creation of Jesse and Celine are credited to writer-director Richard Linklater and his writing partner Kim Krizan, much of what made it to the screen even as early as the first film were filtered through the life experiences of Hawke and his co-star Julie Delpy. 

In a Q&A with Jess Walter promoting his most recent novel A Bright Ray of Darkness, Hawke said that Jesse from the Before Trilogy is like an alt-universe version of himself, and through them we can see the self-awareness and curiosity present in the early ET interview grow into the the kind of man Keating from Dead Poets Society urged his students to become. 

In Before Sunrise, Hawke’s Jesse is roughly the same age as Troy in Reality Bites, and as such is still in a narcissistic phase of his life. After spending several romantic hours with Celine in Vienna, the two share their thoughts about relationships. Celine says she wants to be her own person, but that she also desperately wants to love and be loved. Jesse shares this monologue, “Sometimes I dream about being a good father and a good husband. And sometimes it feels really close. But then other times it seems silly, like it would ruin my whole life. And it’s not just a fear of commitment or that I’m incapable of caring or loving because. . . I can. It’s just that, if I’m totally honest with myself, I think I’d rather die knowing that I was really good at something. That I had excelled in some way than that I’d just been in a nice, caring relationship.”

The film ends without the audience knowing if Jesse and Celine ever see each other again. That initial shock is unfortunately now not quite as impactful if you are aware of the sequels. But I think it is an astute look at two people who meet when they are still discovering who they are. Still growing. Jesse, at least, is definitely not ready for any kind of commitment. Then of course, we find out in Before Sunset that he’s fumbled his way into marriage and fatherhood, and while he’s excelling at the latter, he’s failing at the former. 

As in Reality Bites, Hawke explores the dynamics of band life again in Before Sunset, when Jesse recalls to Celine how he was in a band, but they were too obsessed with getting a deal to truly enjoy the process of making music. He says to her, “You know, it's all we talked about, it was all we thought about, getting bigger shows, and everything was just...focused on the future, all the time. And now, the band doesn't even exist anymore, right? And looking back at the... at the shows we did play, even rehearsing... You know, it was just so much fun! Now I'd be able to enjoy every minute of it.”

The filming of Before Sunset happened to coincide with the dissolution of Hawke’s first marriage. And while these films are not autobiographical, everyone involved have stated that they’ve added personal elements to their characters. They even poke fun at it in the opening scene when a journalist asks how autobiographical Jesse’s novel is. True to form, he responds with a monologue, “Well, I mean, isn’t everything autobiographical? I mean, we all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe, you know. Have you ever seen that little one page note to reader in the front of Look Homeward, Angel, right? You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, he says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.”

While Before Sunset was shot in 2003, released in 2004 and this monologue refers to the fictional book within the trilogy entitled This Time, Hawke would take this same approach more than a decade later with his novel A Bright Ray of Darkness.

In the novel, Hawke crafts a quasi-autobiographical story, using his experience in theater to work through the perspective he now has on his failed marriage to Uma Thurman. Much like Jesse in Before Sunset, Hawke is reluctant to call the book autobiographical, but the parallels to his own divorce are evident. And as Jesse paraphrased Wolfe, isn’t everything we do autobiographical? In the book, movie star William Harding has blown up his seemingly picture-perfect marriage with a pop star by having an affair while filming on location in South Africa. The book, structured in scenes and acts like a play, follows the aftermath as he navigates his impending divorce, his relationship with his small children, and his performance as Hotspur in a production of Henry IV on Broadway. 

Throughout much of the novel, William looks back at the mistakes he made that led to the breakup of his marriage. He’s now in his 30s and has the clarity to see how selfish he was in his 20s. Hawke, however, was in his forties while writing the book. Through the layers of hindsight, you can feel how Hawke has processed not just the painful emotional growth spurt of his 20s, but also the way he can now mine the wisdom that comes from true reflection. Still, as steeped as the novel is in self-reflection, it does not claim to have all the answers. In fact, it offers William, as well as the readers, more questions to contemplate than it does answers.

The wisdom to know that you will never quite understand everything is broached by Hawke early in the third film in the Before Trilogy, 2013’s Before Midnight. At this point in their love story, Jesse’s marriage has ended and he and Celine are parents to twin girls. Jesse has released two more books: That Time, which recounts the events of the previous film, and Temporary Cast Members of a Long-Running But Little Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting. Before Midnight breaks the bewitching spell of the first two films by adding more cast members and showing the friction that comes with an attempt to grow old with someone. When discussing his three books, a young man says the title of his third is too long, Jesse says it wasn’t as well loved, and an older professor friend says it’s his best book because it’s more ambitious. It seems Linklater and company already knew how the departure of this third film might be regarded by fans. But it is this very departure that shows their commitment to honestly showing the passage of time and our relationship to it. 

About halfway through the film Jesse and Celine depart the Greek villa where they have been spending the summer, and we finally get a one-on-one conversation like we’re used to with these films. In one exchange, I feel they summarize the point of the entire trilogy, and possibly Hawke’s entire ethos: 

Jesse: Every year, I just seem to get a little bit more humbled and more overwhelmed about all the things I’m never going to know or understand. 

Celine: That’s what I keep telling you. You know nothing!

Jesse: I know, I know! I'm coming around! 

[Celine and Jesse laugh.] 

Celine: But not knowing is not so bad. I mean, the point is to be looking, searching. To stay hungry, right?

Throughout the series, Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke explore what they call the “transient nature of everything.” Jesse says his books are less about time and more about perception. It’s the rare person who can assess themselves or the world around them acutely in the present. For most of us, it takes time and self-reflection to come to any sort of understanding about our own nature. Before Midnight asks us to look back at the first two films with honesty, to remove the romantic lens with which they first appeared to us. It asks us to reevaluate what romance even truly is. 

Hawke explores this same concept again in the 2018 romantic comedy Juliet, Naked. In this adaptation of the 2009 Nick Hornby novel, Hawke plays a washed-up singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. He had a big hit album, Juliet, in the early ‘90s and then disappeared into obscurity. Rose Bryne plays a woman named Annie whose longtime boyfriend Duncan is obsessed with the singer and the album, stuck on the way the bummer songs about a bad breakup make him feel. As the film begins, Annie reveals that she thinks she’s wasted 15 years of her life with this schmuck. This being a rom-com, we know that Hawke and Byrne’s characters will eventually meet-cute. What’s so revelatory about the film is its raw depiction of how hard it is for many to reassess who they really are later in life. 

Duncan is stuck as the self-obsessed, self-pitying person he likely was when Annie first met him, but she reveals he was so unlike anyone else in her remote town that she looked the other way for far too long. Now it’s almost too late. By chance, she connects with Crowe and finds a different kind of man.

See, when Crowe wrote Juliet, he also was a navel-gazing twentysomething whose emotional development had not yet reached the point of being able to see both sides in a romantic entanglement. He worked through his heartbreak through art, and though it spoke to other people, he didn’t think about the woman or her feelings on the subject. In a way, Crowe’s music sounds a bit like what Reality Bites’s Troy Dyer may have written, if he ever had the drive to actually work at his music. Eventually, it’s revealed that Crowe walked away from it all when Julie, the woman who broke his heart, confronted him with their child—something he was well aware of, but from which he had been running away. Faced with the harsh reality of his actions and the ramifications they had on the world beyond his own feelings, he ran even farther away from responsibility. In telling the story to Annie, he says, “I couldn’t play any of those songs anymore, you know? After that, I just... I couldn’t play these insipid, self-pitying songs about Julie breaking my heart. You know, they were a joke. And before I know it, a couple of decades have gone by and some doctor hands me... hands me Jackson. I hold him, you know, and I look at him. And I know that this boy. . . is my last chance.”

When we first meet Crowe, he’s now dedicated his life to raising his youngest son, having at this point messed up with four previous children. The many facets of parenthood is something that shows up in Hawke’s later body of work many times, in projects as wholly different as Brooklyn’s Finest, Before Midnight, Boyhood, Maggie’s Plan, First Reformed, and even his novel A Bright Ray of Darkness. In each of these projects, decisions made by Hawke’s characters have a big impact on their children’s lives. These films explore the financial pressures of parenthood, the quirks of blended families, the impact of absent fathers, and even the tragedy of a father’s wishes acquiesced without question. Hawke’s take on parenthood is that of flawed men always striving to overcome the worst of themselves for the betterment of the next generation, often with mixed results. 

Where Juliet, Naked showed a potential arc of redemption for a father gone astray, First Reformed paints a bleaker portrait. Hawke plays Pastor Toller, a man of the cloth struggling with his own faith who attempts to counsel an environmental activist whose impending fatherhood has driven him to suicidal despair. Toller himself is struggling under the weight of fatherhood, believing he sent his own son to die a needless death in a morally bankrupt war. Sharing the story, he says “My father taught at VMI. I encouraged my son to enlist. It was the family tradition. Like his father, his grandfather. Patriotic tradition. My wife was very opposed. But he enlisted against her wishes. . . .  Six months later he was killed in Iraq. There was no moral justification for this conflict. My wife could not live with me after that. Who could blame her? I left the military. Reverend Jeffers at Abundant Life Church heard about my situation. They offered me a position at First Reformed. And here I am.” How do we carry the weight of actions that affect lives that are not even our own? 

If Peter Weir set the father figure template in Dead Poets Society, and Paul Schrader explored the consequences of direct parental influence on their children’s lives, director Richard Linklater subverts the idea of a mentor-guide in Boyhood, showing both parents are as lost as the kid himself. When young Mason (Ellar Coltrane) asks his dad (Hawke) what’s the point of everything, his reply is “I sure as shit don’t know. Nobody does. We’re all just winging it.” As the film ends, Mason sits atop a mountain with a new friend he’s made in the dorms discussing time. She says that everyone is always talking about seize the moment—carpe diem!—but she thinks it’s the other way around. That the moments seize us. In Reality Bites, Troy gets annoyed at Lelaina’s constant need to “memorex” everything with her camcorder, yet Boyhood is a film about capturing a life over a 12-year period. The Before Trilogy checks in on Jesse and Celine every nine years. Hawke’s entire career. in fact, has captured his growth from an awkward teen to a prolific artist and devoted father, a master of his craft and philosopher at heart. 

[noramoya]

“I don’t consider myself a singer,” says Paris Jackson. “I can carry a tune. I can sing in key. But there are people who are professional singers n’ they will blow your socks off. I don’t do stuff like that.” “I can reach a register that is so high that it sounds like I’m whistling,” adds the L.A. native. “but the only time I really use it is if I am singing along to a Van Halen song. I can scream like David Lee Roth, but it’s more of a party trick. That’s not how I express myself. I’m a songwriter more than anything else.”

“It’s a hot, midsummer afternoon, and the 24-year-old musician, model and actress – the only daughter of the legendary Michael Jackson – is settled into an armchair in the lobby of a West Hollywood hotel. Jackson, whose layered blond hair is lightly streaked red, is wearing dark, loose clothing – an unbuttoned billowy burgundy blouse over a brown cropped tank top, and grey, three-quarter-length pants with a pair of sandals. Except for a touch of makeup on her striking green eyes, her face is otherwise bare. With Jackson’s acute sense of fashion, her Prada bag, John Lennon-style sunglasses, rings on almost every finger, nose piercings, plus a necklace, anklet, and toe ring, she looks every bit boho rock star chic. Over the last several years, Jackson, who has been playing guitar since age 13, has been establishing a solid music career, which began with The Soundflowers, an indie folk duo with her then-boyfriend, Gabriel Glenn. The pair met at the famed Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip in 2018 and immediately began dating. Within a week they were living in Glenn’s van and making music together”.

“In June 2020, they officially launched The Soundflowers with a self-titled EP and a six-part Facebook Watch docuseries, Unfiltered: Paris Jackson & Gabriel Glenn, providing an intimate view of the couple and their musical journey. With strife brewing in their relationship in the final episode, however, the pair broke up shortly thereafter, leaving Jackson heartbroken. “It was the deepest I’ve ever loved someone. It was the most intense that I’d felt so far, and the most intense betrayal that I’d felt so far and experienced...,” Jackson told Willow Smith on Red Table Talk last year. Jackson is reticent about discussing her breakup at this point, preferring to speak, instead, through her art. Politely, she says answers to questions about her former relationship can be found in her music, which is where she turned, writing songs to channel her pain. The end of Jackson's relationship sparked the start of her solo musical path, and it didn't take long before she landed her first record deal, signing with Republic Records in fall 2020. From there, she wasted almost no time, releasing her debut solo LP, “WILTED”, a melancholy, ethereal alt-folk concept record about love, heartbreak, grief, and rebirth”.

“Called “well-crafted indie pop” by Rolling Stone, “WILTED” reached #1 on the U.S. iTunes Alternative Albums chart. Lead single “Let Down” racked up 1.5 million streams within the first two weeks of its release and was accompanied by a gothic music video that was executive-produced by horror director Eli Roth and directed by Meredith Alloway. The video opens with the sound of a heartbeat as Jackson wipes away blood streaming down from her eye. “Head hanging down / Shredded evening gown / Eyes painted black / A tragic paperback,” she sings plaintively, reflecting on a tragic romance. Wearing flowers in her hair and a Victorian gown, Jackson dances with her lover at a masquerade ball. As the night progresses, things take a dark turn, leaving her anguished and alone. “Let me down again / Break me, flush me down the drain / Let me down again,“ she sings, reuniting with her beloved for a final dance that turns fatal when he dips her, rips out her heart, and sets it down next to Jackson’s dead body lying on the floor. She’s like, ‘Here’s my pain and struggle and what I’ve gone through and, boom, here are my songs.’ It’s all so personal and I respect and admire that,” says Manchester Orchestra singer/songwriter Andy Hull, one of Jackson’s songwriting heroes, who co-produced “Wilted” with his band’s lead guitarist, Robert McDowell. “I love anyone who is willing to let it out in the open, especially somebody like her who deserves as much privacy as she wants.”

“Indeed, it’s a testament to Jackson’s strength of character that she writes unguardedly, with a down-to-earth quality that belies growing up in the spotlight. With raw, personal and earnest lyrics, Jackson articulates her pain and longing with rich metaphors and vivid imagery, effectively conveying the emotional trajectory of her broken heart, and expressed by her sweet, warm and soulful vocals. “I want to be descriptive and poetic,” she says. “I like to go into deep detail and see what I can get out of it.” For years, Jackson kept her soul-baring songs to herself, afraid to reveal them publicly: “The songs I write are very vulnerable, and we can all be scared to be that level of vulnerable — not just with another person, which is already scary, but with a crowd of people, it’s pretty terrifying.” It was even more terrifying for Jackson to conceive of releasing music while shouldering the weight of her father’s legacy. As she carves out her own musical path, she faces the understandable yet wholly unfair pressure, both from within and without, to live up to an impossible standard. The intensity ebbs and flows: “It depends on the day,” she says. “Some days I feel that pressure, and some days I feel…well, the music I make is completely different. I’m not making R&B and soul and funk.” The media often calls Jackson “pop royalty,” but she is extremely talented in her own right. When reminded of the nepotistic title, she says, matter-of-factly, “I don’t use labels.”

“Jackson is quick to set straight her father’s title, though, when he is referred to as the “King of Pop.” “Pop, rock and soul. That is actually the full name that he was given,” she says. “When he was introduced [at the 1989 Soul Train Awards], it was Liz Taylor …she labeled him the ‘King of Pop, Rock and Soul’… Everyone else decided to shorten it to ‘King of Pop,’ but it’s a lot more than that. He had Eddie Van Halen and Slash play on some of his [music] and Carlos Santana. That’s not necessarily pop. There’s nothing wrong with Pop, but there are a lot more layers to it.” There are also more layers to being the musician offspring of an icon beyond being planted in the obvious shadow. While most performers have the freedom to develop their skills in anonymity, Jackson was under the microscope right from the start. “Those first couple of tours that you go on are where you put your hours in, you find your way, get comfortable and you learn how to handle mistakes,” she says. “Every artist that is going to go on tour and play has that experience but for me…those mistakes that everyone makes…mine will get magnified.”

https://open.spotify.com/artist/11I8qWK4foqycuPFRDFH6e

@swift-fated @mjslays @mj-fans-alliance-blog @mj-confessions @mjvideos @mjjsecretlovers-blog @mjjproductionz @mjjsourcesblog @mjjofficial @mjjalways @anneke-treasure @annievvv7 @annievvv77 @anniemjjloverr @anniemjjloverr @jackson-royalty-blog @jackson8520yuleidy @jacksonprince @michael-jackson-blog @michaeljacksonslegend @michaeljacksonlooks @michael-jackson-is-invincib-blog @kingofpopmichaeljosephjackson @kingmjjpop @kingmjjpop

[themovieblogonline]

Jenna Ortega: Confidence of an “Average White Man”

Jenna Ortega is the kind of actress who doesn’t just play a role—she owns it, flips it upside down, and makes it her own. At just 21 years old, she’s become a powerhouse in the industry, effortlessly navigating between horror, comedy, and everything in between. Whether she’s slaying vampires in Wednesday or preparing to haunt us in the upcoming Beetlejuice sequel, Ortega’s got the kind of presence that commands attention. From Disney Darling to Hollywood Darling Ortega’s journey to stardom is the stuff of Hollywood dreams. She kicked off her career on Disney Channel, where she won hearts as the lead in Stuck in the Middle. But it wasn’t long before she traded in the teen comedies for more complex roles that showcased her range. Ortega’s breakthrough came with Netflix’s You, where she played Ellie Alves, a role that proved she could hold her own in a psychological thriller alongside Penn Badgley. But it was Wednesday that truly catapulted Ortega into the spotlight. Playing the iconic Wednesday Addams, Ortega managed to bring something fresh to a character who’s been haunting our screens since the ‘90s. Ortega’s take on the stoic, cello-playing goth girl is equal parts hilarious and haunting—a perfect mix for a Tim Burton production. And it’s not just her acting that’s been making waves. Ortega’s commitment to learning the cello for the role shows just how dedicated she is to her craft. After all, when was the last time you heard of an actor learning an entire instrument just to make sure they don’t get roasted by YouTube musicians? Channeling the Confidence of an “Average White Man” In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Ortega dropped some wisdom that might just be the secret sauce behind her unstoppable rise: she approaches everything she does with the confidence of an "average white man." It’s a piece of advice she received from her cello instructor on the set of Wednesday, and it’s something that’s stuck with her ever since. Ortega explained that this mindset shift was life-changing. Suddenly, all those moments of self-doubt didn’t seem so daunting. Instead of worrying about what people might think, Ortega leaned into her roles with a newfound bravado. And honestly, if it means we get more of her fearless performances, we’re all for it. Maybe she’s onto something—after all, confidence can be a game-changer, especially in an industry as cutthroat as Hollywood. What’s Next for Ortega? More Horror, Less Romance Ortega’s next big move? Diving even deeper into the horror genre. With Wednesday returning for a second season in 2025, fans can expect the show to lean more heavily into its horror roots. Ortega has been vocal about wanting the series to focus less on romantic storylines and more on the eerie, supernatural elements that made The Addams Family a cultural phenomenon in the first place. And with Tim Burton at the helm, you can bet Season 2 is going to be a spooky, action-packed ride. But that’s not all—Ortega is also set to star in Beetlejuice 2, which is already generating serious buzz. If her performance in Wednesday is any indication, Ortega is going to bring some serious attitude to the role. And honestly, we can’t wait to see her go toe-to-toe with Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice. Final Thoughts: Jenna Ortega Is Just Getting Started Jenna Ortega is a force to be reckoned with. Whether she’s battling supernatural forces or breaking down Hollywood’s confidence barriers, she’s doing it all with a style and grace that’s hard to ignore. As she continues to take on more challenging and diverse roles, there’s no doubt she’s going to keep surprising us. So, keep an eye on this one—Ortega’s just getting started, and we’re all here for the ride.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iKWeRPDsaE (Source: Variety) Read the full article