#yes but i may very well be taking the netflix stance in matters of such

[leejihoonownsmyheart]

Sehnsucht (M)

Summary:

You and Wonwoo have been rivals since your first of University, and despite it being your final year, that rivalry doesn't seem like it's going anywhere soon when you both end up in German 101.

-

Tags: dub con, academic rivals to fucking academic rivals, mean!woo, both are super smart, german- BECAUSE OKAY IM IN GERMAN RN AND I WAS LIKE WHAT IF I ADD A LITTLE BIT OF GERMAN AND THEN I ADDED A FUCKING LOT SO language kink 😊, a HUGE abuse of the german language, ALSO IM IN GERMAN 101 SO GOOGLE WAS MY BEST FRIEND SO IM SORRY IF ANY OF IT IS WRONG I DONT UNDERSTAND VERB PLACEMENT, okay, Wonwoo is genuinely mean okay? Keep in mind, creampie, public sex because we know I love it, wonwoo rawdogs it, lots of teasing, brats all around, rough sex?

I did end up with my own German consultant, thank you @hyunjins-dimples and I did ignore some of their german language advice because I just did, anyways I will be ignoring any and all german language critiscism from anyone other than my beautiful, perfect, amazing, german friend tyvm : )

-

“Alright, and when you conjugate the verb komme, as in to come, where would you place the verb?” Your professor asked. His eyebrows furrowed slightly in thought as his gaze crossed over the class. “As in a sentence like. I go to Germany?”

You thought over your answer in your head, clearly for too long as suddenly your professors’ eyes were across the room.

“Uh, Wonwoo?”

“Ich komme nach Deutschland.”

“Good!” Your professor said with a nod. You could feel a gaze land on you, and you didn’t have to look over to know that a smug look was being shot at you. You rolled your eyes and pressed your cheek into your hand. “In some sentences there are two verbs. Does anyone know what we would do if we had kommen and an in the same sentence. As in to say something about August?”

Your hand shot up before you could think about it. Your professor nodded at you, and you tried to cooly answer.

“Ich an komme im August?” You murmured, unable to keep the question out of your voice. You knew you had made a mistake when you heard a stifled chuckle from the other side of the classroom. And your professor’s eyes drifted to the side, his mouth falling open as he tried to find a nice way to say that you were wrong.

“Right well, if you said that it wouldn’t be quite right.”

You pressed your eyes closed in frustration as Wonwoo spoke without even raising his hand.

“It would be Ich komme im August an,” he said, and there was no doubt in his voice that he was right.

“Richtig, gut,” your professor praised lightly, before continuing to tell you all the nuances of where the verb was placed in sentences and when it should be where. You felt your fingers clasp at your apple pencil tighter and this time you looked over at the gaze across the room.

You glared at Wonwoo, wishing he wasn’t so good at this.

You had been fighting in classes with Wonwoo since your freshmen year of college. You weren’t sure how come your classes always collided so much. After all, he was an English major, and you were in Zoology. It didn’t make sense for you two to meet in so many classes, past of course, gen eds but regardless you saw Wonwoo practically everywhere that you went.

It was so frustrating. You hadn’t known him in high school and in high school you had been the valedictorian. You were in the honors college, and you already had plans on where exactly you were going to go for your Bachelors. So, when you sat down for your first Chemistry class, buzzing with the excitement of knowing exactly what you were going to say. You were a bit annoyed to find that somebody else was raising their hand just a millisecond faster than you were.

Your very first day in Chemistry ended up being a fierce race between you and this Wonwoo on who could answer the fastest, and you were both very good at Chemistry.

In every class that you two were in whether it be Chemistry, Biology, Writing, or gender studies and attitudes of the world, you and Wonwoo were sat down after about the second week with your professor, encouraged to let other students answer questions in class.

Sometimes you two just immediately turned to each other and whispered the answer at one another with sharp gazes.

So, you were a bit pissed when you sat down for German 101 at the beginning of your last semester and stupid Wonwoo was in your class.

How could you have possibly had at least one class with him every single semester at this university? Would it go on to grad school? Would you two be stuck at an internship together? God forbid you two visit Germany at the same time.

You shivered at the mere thought.

What was an English major even doing taking German? For goodness sake, you only chose the class because you thought it would be the last class he would be in.

And to add onto that, why the fuck was he so good at German?

It was German 101. Literally elementary German and sentence structure in German was confusing as hell so why was he finding it so easy.

You tried not to scowl too hard as you thought about it, wondering what gave him the right to just be good at everything he did. You would have to stay even later at the library tonight if you were going to manage to keep up with him.

After class, as you packed your things, you made a point to brush past Wonwoo, ‘accidentally’ bumping your shoulder into his. You never knew why you did that really. He was practically immovable.

You wondered if it was possible for him to study and workout at the same time.

Maybe he just didn’t work.

But you did and you worked quite a bit. Which meant jam sessions where you tried to force the material that you didn’t know down your throat in only a manner of hours.

Which meant you were at the library late a lot.

Not that, that was the only place that you ran into the asshole.

“You must be a bit desperate to even be studying at lunch time,” Wonwoo commented. You looked up from your little hole in the dining room- The one spot in the whole cafeteria that you felt completely comfortable in. Tucked in a corner where no one could see you.

You couldn’t hear the buzz of the students around you in this little corner booth, and you had every opportunity to just pull your legs up on the seat, and enjoy the world around you.

“What are you doing over here?” You hissed, instead of arguing the desperate allegations. You definitely were desperate, to be studying while you were eating lunch, and there was no point in arguing that.

Unfortunately for you, Wonwoo was a good study. And that meant that he had been able to study you over the years, along with all of his other assignments. Frustratingly enough, he always knew when you were lying. So, there was no point in trying to pretend like you weren’t.

“I just came to eat as well,” he stated.

He took a seat right next to you, forcing your feet to the floor. He didn’t have any food with him, and you wondered why that was until he reached around you and plucked one of the fries off of your plate.

“Hey-”

“What are you even studying?” He asked you. You rolled your eyes. Advanced biology.

“Nothing you would know,” you grumbled. He took a single glance at your screen, and mumbled the answer to the question that you felt like you had been thinking about for hours. You tried to keep your anger to a minimum. “Well, duh, that’s easy.”

How did he know that?

“If it’s so easy, why have you been here all day?” Wonwoo pressed. He didn’t even have his own things with him.

“Have you been stalking me?” You blurted, noting that it did sound a little shrill.

“No… I could just hear you trying to think from across campus.”

You started to spew insults at Wonwoo because, well, how else were you supposed to respond to him? But they fell on deaf ears. Wonwoo simply plucked a few more of your fries from your plate, and then walked away as if the conversation had ended ages ago.

You got your chance for proper payback a few weeks later.

When you saw that there was going to be a mandatory lecture for English majors by James Franco… Well, you just knew you had to be there. A study on english composition and how it is seen in history and therefore portrayed in film. You had been studying english and film in your free time for almost your whole life.

For you, it was a pipe dream… Which meant that if there was anything that you were going to show up Wonwoo in…

You excitedly sat next to him in the lecture hall, shooting him a bright smile despite the early hour.

“Coffee?” You offered him. Wonwoo looked exhausted, you’d heard there was a mandatory frat party the night before. Poor guy was probably up all night.

He gave you a suspicious expression while he looked at the cup, but he seemed to remember quickly that he was a bit too tired to say no to it. He took the cup and took a swig from it.

“Poison?” He asked you, even though you both knew you had ordered him his favorite kind.

“I’m thinking of a much slower death,” you replied lightly. You tapped the desk in front of you. “Aren’t you excited? James Franco… Wow, imagine that… One of the only notable PhD holders in English and he’s an actor.”

You seemed to think over your words.

“It’s almost as if being an English major is just a hussle for most people… Must be an easy way to get a doctorate.”

You kept your voice airy.

“How does that sound, Doctor Jeon Wonwoo?”

It was all meant to strike a chord in him but something about using such a high title with him made your mouth go dry. Wonwoo’s eyes darkened a bit, and you knew that he wanted to press the way that you had addressed him. You didn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Well,” you said quickly. “I hope you’re ready for this lecture. I would hate for your head to hurt too much to enjoy it.”

Wonwoo grumbled.

“You talk too damn much.”

-

It was always like that with Wonwoo, a constant game of pushing and pulling and before you knew it your first test was coming up in German. You weren’t sure how things were going to go with it, but you did know that between all of your other classes you hadn’t had much of a chance to study for German.

And that meant cramming.

And cramming on a normal day was a lot and on days especially like this one. It left you feeling very delirious.

“Ich bin nicht klug…” You mumbled to yourself, not only furrowing your eyebrows at the fact that you were pretty sure you said it wrong, but also trying to figure out when the fuck you were supposed to use not, and how the fuck you added it to a sentence.

“Richtig,” a voice mumbled, dragging you away from the quizlet open on your tablet. “Du bist nicht klug.”

You glared at Wonwoo.

“I don’t need you to tell me I’m not smart. I was just talking,” you grumbled at him. He hummed, placing a hand in your little cubicle, leaning over your head to look at your quizlet.

“Well, it’s true,” Wonwoo commented. “Du bist sehr schlecht im Gebrauch von Verben im Deutschen.” You were frustrated to find that no matter how hard you thought about it, you had no clue what he had just said. Not that he even gave you time to process. “Oh, es tut mir leid. I said that you are very bad at verb usage in German.”

You elbowed Wonwoo as you wheeled your chair to the side, trying to get out from under him. He let his back press against the divider to your left, so you got to your feet.

“Why the fuck are you so good at German anyways?” You blurted. “Why the fuck does an English major need to know German?”

Wonwoo shrugged.

“Just thought it would be fun to take.”

You were furious. German was the only thing that you weren’t able to keep up with Wonwoo in.

You two had been matching rivals in Chemistry and your gender studies class. You had smoked him in Biology, but he had never been able to beat you in a class before. Even in writing you both ended up with the same exact grade on every assignment. So why German?

Why was he so good at German?

“You know you’re disrupting my studying,” you grumbled, a bit annoyed by his interruption. You slid your tablet to the side, and picked up your water bottle, taking a sip. As you did Wonwoo held out his hand, clearly expecting you to share your water with him.

You rolled your eyes at his audacity.

You handed him your water bottle. 

“Do you need help studying?” Wonwoo asked, and it would seem genuine if it weren’t for that condescending look in his eyes. “I bet even after hours of studying you don’t know how to form a sentence.”

You knew enough German to say: “Ich hasse dich.” Because you had learned the phrase, I hate you specifically to say it to Wonwoo.

He stepped a bit closer to you.

“You could also say Dich hasse ich,” Wonwoo clarified. “It’s interchangeable in that sentence.”

You two stared at one another, and it was only then that you realized exactly how close you two were to one another. Your eyes flickered across his perfect face. Smooth, glassy skin, gorgeous dark eyes framed in glasses that should make him look like a nerd but instead just made him more handsome, and pretty pink lips that you just wanted to-

You felt your cheeks redden and you knew you had to act fast. You reached forward, grabbing the frames from off his face.

“Are you ever embarrassed by the fact that your genes are so awful you have to wear glasses?” You mumbled, trying to hide your moment of weakness. You two were so close to one another that you could barely even hold his glasses up between the two of you without your knuckles brushing his chest. You raised his glasses to your face, sliding them up your nose.

You frowned.

“God your sight is awful. You reall-”

Before you could finish your sentence Wonwoo had grabbed your wrist and holy shit he was a lot stronger than you had imagined he would be.

He gestured towards your skirt, which barely even fell halfway past your thighs.

“Are you ever embarrassed to walk around like some sort of conceited slut?”

Your mouth dropped open, and you knew that you should be angry and push Wonwoo away and yell at him because you had both taken the same gender studies class and you knew that he knew better than to talk to anyone that way, and you knew that he was respectable to people of all genders, but instead you just stood there, shocked.

There was a tightness in the pit of your stomach, and your hand fell to your side, gripping at the edge of your desk. You struggled to find something to say back, and your hesitance made Wonwoo’s expression which, by the way, had turned to shock as soon as the words left his mouth, to confusion.

“Bist du dumm?” He mumbled, and the question went right over your head. You suddenly weren’t able to think about anything. He flicked your forehead lightly. “I said are you dumb? Don’t you know you’re supposed to argue it when someone says something derogatory like that to you?”

His voice was veiled a bit in concern. Like he was worried that people were walking around calling you a slut to your face and you weren’t saying anything about it.

… You certainly hoped that Wonwoo never found out about your book preferences. Maybe you should try and hide Haunting Adaline from your bookshelves on Goodreads.

“I was just caught off guard,” you mumbled. “I thought you were more intelligent than needing to resort to such derogatory terms.”

Bold-faced lie. Your face was red. Why were you growing so warm at the implication. Why were you thinking about the fact that nobody was ever in this corner of the library this late at night. Why were you thinking about the window that was right in front of you two looking out on the water fountain outside of the library? Why were you thinking about the absence of cameras on this floor? And most importantly why were you wondering what Wonwoo’s hands would be like with your skirt bunched into it?

You two stared at one another, and Wonwoo took a step closer (you were surprised that was even possible) his gaze becoming a bit sharper.

“Es gefällt dir…” You like it.

“Nein…” You mumbled back. Wonwoo’s hand came up to your chin, his thumb brushing it at first, making your chin tilt up a bit, encouraging the touch. When you did that Wonwoo clasped his fingers on your chin, holding it where you presumed, he wanted it.

“Yes, you do,” he said in awe. He leaned forward, his eyes flickering down to your lips.

“You look hot in my glasses,” he mumbled.

You made a noise that was not a response. 

His lips ghosted yours.

“Keep them on.”

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to yours. At first, it was hesitant. He was a bit unsure of if he wanted to actually kiss you, or if you actually wanted to kiss him. That was a fair thought of him to have because you were unsure if you even wanted to kiss him, until his lips were on yours and then your arms were wrapping around him, the palm of your hand pressing on his neck so that he was forced closer to you.

One of Wonwoo’s hands came up to your hair, and he pulled you back by your ponytail. You hissed at the action, but the way that it sent a coil of heat through your body was enough to stop you from complaining.

“Ich will dich ficken,” Wonwoo mumbled, as your lips parted. Your eyebrows furrowed in frustration.

“You want to…” You trailed off, your fingers balling into his shirt. You didn’t know that verb, you were sure your professor hadn’t covered it.

“Fuck.” Wonwoo twisted your body so that you were pressed against the edge of the desk, and his pelvis was pressed to yours. “I want to fuck you so bad.”

Your breath hitched in your throat.

“So? Are you going to be fucking good and let me take you?”

You were already nodding when the word good left his lips. So, when he finished the question, you were nodding rapidly.

“Yes,” you mumbled. “Oh god please take me Wonwoo.”

A smirk flickered across his lips.

“In German.”

Frustration bubbled up in your body…. Or was that arousal?

“Uh… Ja… ich will dich ficken… Too?”

That must have been good enough because the next thing you knew, Wonwoo’s lips were on yours again and he was hiking you up onto the desk, pushing your skirt up to your waist with ease.

“You don’t even have shorts under this,” he mumbled against your lips as his hand ran over your thigh. He slapped you there, hard. You yelped and your fingers tightened in his shirt. “Du bist ein Depp…" 

You vaguely registered he was calling you an idiot, but before you could respond he was sliding down your body, his fingers on your sides making you shiver despite being over your shirt. He got to his knees in front of you and took the hem of your underwear with his fingers.

“Let me get this off of you your highness,” he said mockingly. Your body grew even hotter, and you leaned back on your hands, lifting your legs a bit so he could easily pull your underwear off of you. You could feel a string of wetness drawing from your pussy as he pulled your underwear off and you wanted to hide your face in embarrassment at the truth of just how much Wonwoo had turned you on. You pressed your lips together tightly.

“God you’re fucking soaked,” Wonwoo mumbled. He slapped your thighs apart again, and you obediently spread them for him. “You want me to treat you like mein kleines Schwanzluder?”

You had no clue what he was saying, and your silence in response made him pinch your inner thigh. You bit down into your fist.

“Are you really that bad at German?” He asked you. “If you can’t even respond to a question as simple as, do you want me to treat you like my little cock slut than I don’t know how you are going to pass the final.”

“Ja,” you blurted, scrambling to drag any German you knew out of your mind. “Bitte.” Please. “Ich bin dein…” You hesitated on the last word. I am your…

“Schwanzluder,” Wonwoo said softly, his eyes focusing on you. “Cock slut.”

“Schwanzluder,” you repeated, your voice barely there. Wonwoo hummed.

“Bad pronunciation,” he mumbled. “But then again, you’re also bad at that.”

You went to protest him because you thought that your German pronunciation was pretty good, but then you thought of something better to argue with him about:

“Are you even going to be able to do anything down there?” You asked him tauntingly. “You probably wouldn’t be able to find a clit even with your glasses o-” Before you could finish, Wonwoo was shoving something wet and salty into your mouth, Your eyes widened in surprise when you realized you recognized the feeling of the cloth of your wet underwear from when you had done this to yourself while masturbating in the past. Your face burned in shame at the way that this only turned you on more.

“Halt die Schnauze…”

You didn’t have to know German to know that he was telling you to shut up.

Wonwoo’s hands pressed at the insides of your thighs, high enough that he was able to feel the dampness that had soaked through the thin cloth of your underwear. He massaged his thumbs into your thighs, and beneath the blurriness of Wonwoo’s glasses you could see him smile slightly. His hands slid further up your thighs and one of his thumbs prodded at your folds, dragging them to the side so that he could see your wet pussy even better.

“Fuck…” He mumbled. “You’re wet like a bitch in heat.”  You let your head fall back and hit the glass of the window behind your head. You couldn’t deny what he was saying, as badly as you wanted to. He had eyes, and even though his glasses weren’t on… He could certainly feel how wet you were beneath his fingers.

His thumb plunged into you suddenly, feeling thick and short as he delved inside of you. His fingers brushed your clit and you whined against the cloth in your mouth, your eyes falling shut. He pulled his thumb out of you after a few moments, seeming to be in thought, and then he was suddenly pressing two fingers at your entrance.

It was a lot… Especially for someone who had not been prepped, and he seemed to figure out with the way that the stretch felt around his fingers. He retracted and then pushed a single finger inside of you. The feeling was intoxicating. Even though you had felt yourself that you were not stretched enough for two you felt like you needed it.

It wasn’t long until you were begging for more as desperately as you could from behind your gag. Your fingers were gripping desperately at the desk, and it had Wonwoo chiding as he finally eased a second finger into you.

“Du bist erbärmlich…” He mumbled and you had no fucking clue what he had said but it sounded so hot with the little twinge of accent in his voice. You rolled your hips down onto his fingers, and the action made Wonwoo press a hand to your pelvis. “Hör auf.”

Again you whined, but your body stilled under his command. The pressure of him pushing down on you pushed his fingers even further inside of you and if you thought that was hard to handle, you couldn’t imagine what it would be like with his dick inside of you.

As if to read your thoughts, Wonwoo leaned forward, his hot breath teasing your clit.

“Oh Engel… I’m going to fucking destroy you,” he mumbled. He leaned forward, and he began to suck on your clit. His tongue flicking over it as a way to distract you as he stuffed a third finger into you.

The burn was amazing, and the distraction of his wet tongue on your clit was so welcoming that you about came just from that.

You had always wanted Wonwoo to just shut up. Thought that there was no use at all for his mouth.

But here he was… Proving that he had at least one very good use for his mouth. You tried to fight the urge to move under him, going as far as to slap the palm of your hand against the desk you were being eaten out on, but as soon as his mouth completely replaced his fingers, and you felt your wetness on your thigh, you couldn’t stop yourself from rolling down against him.

Somehow his hot mouth felt just as good as his fingers did, and they were making your core burn in a way that was fucking painful. You needed his cock in you right now.

Wonwoo moaned against your cunt- The first indicator that he was enjoying this just as much as you were, and he suddenly pulled away from you. His fingers dipped into you again but only briefly.

“Bend over,” Wonwoo murmured, twisting your body so that your ass was against his bare wet dick. You could feel it poking at your ass and you quickly bent over, placing the palms of your hands to the window.

“Not good enough,” Wonwoo mumbled. He pressed his hand to the small of your back, forcing your ass up more, and with his other hand his fingers knotted in your hair and he shoved your face into the window. “That’s better…”

He trailed off as he moved the hand not in your hair to (you assumed) take hold of his cock. You stayed there for seconds that felt like hours, skirt bunched around your waist, ass out for Wonwoo, your rival, and your face smashed up against the window just enough to see that there were people walking outside, presumably to their dorms.

Frustration began to bubble inside you, which expressed itself in small tears in the corners of your eyes.

“Ich möchte hören, wie Du darum bettelst.”

The german made you let out a sob of frustration as it was paired with Wonwoo sliding the tip of his cock between your soaked and already abused folds.

“Wonwoo, I don’t fucking know what you’re saying,” you cried out. You bucked your hips, trying to force his cock into you which worked except it didn’t because just his tip slipped inside of you.

God you felt like you were going to go feral at the feeling of his bare cock inside of you, you were already thinking about him pumping you full of cum…

“Guess you better figure out what I’m saying.”

Your mind raced, trying to figure out what Wonwoo could have possibly been telling you to do. You didn’t really recognize any of the words… Ich… I… hören… hear…? Will… want-

“Bitte, bitte, bitte,” you pleaded desperately. “I want your cock so badly… treat me like your own schwandluger or… Whatever it was- Please Wonwoo, I’m beggi-”

Before you could finish speaking Wonwoo was shoving himself into you. Your fists lightly hit the window at the feeling, so relieved to finally have him inside of you. You understood now why he had deemed only fingering you on three fingers as a punishment. You felt like you were being split open on his cock, and he had decided that he was going to go easy on you.

“You’re so small like this,” Wonwoo mumbled. “I mean look at you, unable to move under me… Someone you despise… How’s it feel to not only be physically overpowered but also to be intelligently inferior to me?”

Humiliation boiled through your veins, and each hard thrust of his cock sent him deeper into you than the time before.

“Genau so mag ich dich…” Wonwoo mumbled, a hint of admiration in his voice. He tugged you up by your hair, arching your back. His arm wrapped around your body, right under your breasts, pushing them up as he brought his face right up next to yours.

He stared at you, his eyes squinting as he took in your already fucked out expression. He watched you bounce for a few seconds, each thrust drawing out a loud and desperate cry from you. Then, finally, he leaned forward and kissed you again.

This kiss was just as hot and heavy as the way he was fucking you, and you really ended up just screaming out in his mouth with every single thrust.

“You may not be good at German, but you are damn good at taking my cock,” he hissed out. “So, it turns out you are useful.”

He suddenly pushed you back down onto the table, smashing your face onto the cold surface.

“So why don’t you be a good cumdump and take all of my cum?”

You hadn’t even realized how much the pressure of needing to come had been building up in you until you felt the first warm spurt of cum fill your cunt.

There were a million reasons why you shouldn’t be excited by the fact that not only was Wonwoo fucking you raw but he was coming inside of you but all you could remember was how hot Wonwoo sounded when he was speaking to you in German, and how much you liked him controlling you as you began to come as well.

Your whole body shook as Wonwoo fucked you full of his cum, and he continued to fuck you until your body had stopped shaking. His fingers released in your hair, and the sound of both of you panting filled the air. You two were completely still for minutes that felt like hours, before finally you peeled yourself off the table.

You stared at Wonwoo, who was staring right back at you.

“Take your fucking glasses back,” you mumbled. He smiled at you, dragging them off of your face.

“Happily,” he replied. He ran his fingers through his hair, and he almost looked completely the same as he had when he first started to fuck you. “You know what the best part about this is?”

You stared at Wonwoo, the humiliation burning on your face.

“What is the best part?” You asked him, your voice low.

“You have barely studied,” he said, and his voice was heightened in amusement. “Good luck on the test tomorrow.”

His eyes swept over your body, clearly noting the fact that you were in no shape to study anymore. He gestured towards his phone- the time- reminding you that your class was so early that you wouldn’t even be able to study before it if you went to bed now.

Your mind raced with the implications.

“Get home safely y/n,” Wonwoo said, his voice light. You went to protest, but before you could he had pushed his fingers deep inside of you. Your fingers clutched the desk, immediately remembering who had been fucking you not long before. Who you had been begging to dominate you just moments ago.

He pulled his fingers out of you and sucked them into his mouth with a smile.

“Maybe we’ll do this again.”

And then he was gone. Your blood was boiling, from satisfaction, humiliation, and pure anger at Wonwoo for having fucked you so that you would do bad on the test tomorrow, but one thing proved true between all of it. For him to think about fucking you to sabotage you, there had to be an initial wish to fuck you to begin with.

And if that were the case then… Well, you could certainly use this to your advantage…

May the games begin.

-

Taglist:

@starlight-night0, @alltheshineofthestars-blog, @park-hera-gi, @melodicrabbit, @jeanjacketjesus, @sparklyshuji, @woo8hao, @toruro, @wonudazed, @kkakkameori

(you can join my taglist here)

[aikoiya]

Fear The Man That Fears No God

My mom was watching something on Netflix a bit ago called the "3 Body Problem" about aliens coming to earth to kill us & take over.

You know, the norm.

But she & I both noticed some very antireligious ideas in it.

Something that really stuck out to me was something that this nuts-o physicist lady named Ye Wenjie said.

Turns out, she was the one who first contacted the aliens as a young woman. Her father had just been killed by a group of atheists who were mad that he wouldn't say that there was no God.

Instead, he said the most honest thing from his perspective, that there was no conclusive (secularly accepted) evidence one way or the other.

And they didn't like that answer.

She contacted the aliens & essentially said, "help us, we've messed things up."

Which is what drew them there.

Now, what got me sputtering like an idiot in confused disbelief was this weird, sacrilegious story that I have zero idea where it came from.

---

"So Einstein dies. He finds himself in heaven, and he has his violin. He's overjoyed. He loves his violin more than physics. Even more than women. He's excited to find out how well he can play in heaven. He imagines he'll be pretty damn good. So he starts tuning up, and the angels rush at him.

'What are you doing?' they say.

'I'm getting ready to play.'

'Don't do that. God won't like it. He's a saxophonist.'

So Einstein stops. He doesn't play. But it's difficult. He loves music. And there's actually not much to do in heaven. And sure enough, from high above, he hears the saxophone. He's playing 'Take the 'A' Train', do you know that one? Einstein knows it too. And he thinks, I'm going to do it. I'm going to play with him. We're going to sound great together. So he starts playing 'Take the 'A' Train'. The saxophone stops, and God appears. He marches over to Einstein and kicks him in the balls, which hurts, even in heaven. Then he smashes Einstein's beloved violin to bits. Eternity without music. Heaven has become hell for Einstein. And as he writhes on the ground, holding his smashed balls, an angel comes over and says: 'We warned you: Never play with God.'"

---

Like, I get that it's supposed to be some sort of joke that's supposed to help Saul later, I think.

But this when added with the Sophons, which feels like an attempt to suggest that anything miraculous that happens is just a delusion. (Which is dumb, because miraculous things happened even before Ye made contact with them, so the Sophons weren't behind them at all.)

As well as the portrayal of a handful of religious individuals as following the Sophons despite the fact that they themselves say that they are just microscopic computers the size of a photon. They also say that they are incapable of telling lies, which is their purported reasoning for wishing to get rid of humanity. As they believe it means that they are incapable of co-existing.

Seems to suggest that this was a very antireligious show. Not just anti-Christian. Not just atheistic or areligious. Antireligious.

Which... considering how religion is one of the cornerstones of culture, isn't a great stance to take.

But, I can't help but wonder if the author of the books missed something.

Like, yes, people do terrible things in the name of God, but what I fear most is the sort of things that people would do in the name of no God.

For one, it's speculated that Hilter may have been antireligious. That the only God he worshipped was the laws of the universe & is quoted as having said that science, not religion, that would pave humanity's way forward. Heck, he used science at the time as an excuse for his antisemitism.

And Stalin was an atheist.

In other words, it matters not who they pray to, if someone wishes to do terrible things, then they'll do them regardless of whether they have an excuse or not.

Fear the man who fears no God. Fear those who worship only science, for it is ever-changing & they will use the current understanding of it as an excuse to commit evil. But even more than that, fear he who worships only himself. For they who do will commit terrible acts far beyond any other.

Aikoiya's Writing Tips Masterlist

[sassy-starker]

I have a prompt for peter to be a senior in HS and he always gets picked up in a fancy car and people never know why and who's picking him up. Then one day Tony comes into school and is eating lunch with him or something.

Ask and ye shall receive!

Of Senior Year and Mystery Lovers

Word Count: 3680

TW: Bullying (but it’s not too serious. There’s very little violence)

Peter Parker was just about three-thousand percent done with high school.  He just couldn’t bring himself to care anymore.  Aunt May would joke about him having senioritis before senior year, but didn’t stop the boy from staying home from school when he genuinely felt like he couldn’t make himself get up and deal with it.  On those days, Tony would come over and whisk Peter away to Stark Tower, where they would sit around all day, eating Chinese takeout and binging shows on Netflix.

That was one more reason Peter was sick of high school: he just wanted to come forward about his relationship.  The media was going to tear him and Tony apart anyway for getting together when Peter was seventeen, so why did it matter if they just went ahead and told the world? At least, that was what Peter thought.  Tony wanted to wait a bit longer, just to make sure his younger boyfriend would be safe and wouldn’t be bombarded during school.  But as the summer after junior year passed and he began his last year of high school, the couple began to not care as much, becoming more and more reckless with each passing day.

+++

“Flash, you’ve gotta see this!” Aaron called from down the hall.  The final bell had just rung and everybody was milling in the halls, grabbing their stuff, and leaving the building.  Flash gave his friend a look, but followed him nonetheless.  The boy led him out the front doors of the school and down the steps until they were standing in the front courtyard.

“What are you-” Flash stopped himself as he realized where everybody was looking. “Holy shit. Whose car is that?!”

In one of the parking spaces closest to the building, there was a sleek, white Bugatti Centodieci, just sitting there like it was nothing.

“Nobody knows! They just pulled up!” Aaron replied, not taking his eyes off of the expensive car.

“Who the fuck would even be picked in a car like that?!”

The doors to the school opened and Flash looked back to see who it was, only to find Peter Parker standing at the top of the stairs and staring out at the car, an eyebrow raised and an unamused look on his face.  As if it didn’t even matter, the brunet walked down the stairs and began to walk along the main path to the parking lot.

Peter paid no mind to all the eyes on him and whispers that arose as he approached the 8.9 million dollar car.  As he approached the passenger’s side, the window rolled down.  The brunet leaned over, resting his forearms against the windowsill and smiled at whoever was in the car.  The students in the courtyard went quiet, hoping to hear what he was going to say.

“Really? A Bugatti?” Peter asked, his voice laced with fond exasperation. “What happened to not drawing attention to us?”

Somebody replied from inside the car, but it was too muffled for anybody to hear, except for Peter, who laughed a bit at whatever was said. “Yeah, sure,” the brunet replied sarcastically.

Another muffled response.

“Okay, okay,” Peter relented, putting his hands up in defeat before stepping away, opening the door, and getting in.  The window rolled back up as the car drove off with the high school student inside.

“What the actual fuck?” Flash muttered, still staring at the spot where the car had left his sight.

+++

The incident had happened on the first Friday of the school year, and by the time Monday rolled around, everybody had heard about Peter getting into the expensive car.  Some people had taken photos, which got spread around too.  When the brunet walked into school after the weekend, all of his peers were giving him sneaky glances and whispering speculations as to who was in the car.  The theories ranged from Peter having an estranged father who was rich to his aunt winning the lottery, but nobody really knew.

Peter walked down the hallway with an easy air, ignoring all the looks.  He was so tired of Midtown and was prepared to just turn around and walk right back out of the school while flipping off everybody in the hallway.  Of course, he didn’t do that, not wanting to face the repercussions.  So he just continued on his way to his locker, uninterrupted.

Well, he was uninterrupted until Flash came out of nowhere and slung an arm around Peter’s shoulder, walking with him.

“Let’s talk, Parker.” It wasn’t a question.

“No thanks,” Peter replied, using his hand that wasn’t carrying some of his textbooks to grab Flash’s arm and pull it off of his shoulder.  Without another word, he sped up and continued on his way.

Flash froze for a few moments, staring at Peter’s retreating figure and wondering when the boy got the balls to stand up to him.  Eventually, he snapped himself out of his and ran to catch up, taking his spot next to the brunet once more.

“What’s up with that stunt you pulled last week, Penis?” he asked with a snarl, getting up in Peter’s space as the boy opened up his locker and began to put his books in.

“What stunt?” he questioned innocently, a bit of smugness in his voice.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Flash growled.

“Oh, you mean when I got picked up?” Peter closed his locker and turned to the bully. “It wasn’t a stunt. He was just doing something nice for me.”

“Stop lying to-” Flash cut himself off, staring at the necklace Peter was wearing. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

“This?” Peter questioned, brows furrowed as he held up the charm on the necklace. “It was a gift. Why?”

“That . . . that’s a pendant from Graff’s solar collection.” Flash looked dumbfounded and his face scrunched up in concentration as he stared at the necklace. He grabbed it in one hand and leaned forward to examine it.

“What the hell?!” Peter exclaimed as he jerked back, forcing the necklace out of Flash’s grip. The bully didn’t give him an answer, only staring at him in shock. “Why do you even care?”

“My mother wanted that exact same necklace when the collection came out.”

“And?”

“And that necklace costs thirty-four-thousand dollars. How the fuck did you afford something like this?”

“I told you; it was given to me as a gift,” Peter replied with no hesitation, eyeing the other student warily.

“Nobody gives a necklace that expensive as a gift!” Flash was about to say more, but the warning bell rang, prompting Peter to run off with his things, leaving the bully alone by his locker.

That afternoon, the same car from the week before picked Peter up.

+++

The more Flash paid attention to Peter over the next few months, the more he noticed the weird things about the brunet.  There were so many things off about him and it just didn’t add up.  It was like he was missing a factor that helped it all make sense.

One of the first things he noticed was that Peter had started wearing designer clothes.  It wasn’t like the boy had just stopped wearing all of his nerdy t-shirts, he still did, but he was always wearing something designer along with it.

Peter always had on that damn Graff necklace, which was way too expensive for a poor kid from Queens to own.  Beyond that, Flash saw him wear ripped Gucci jeans that could be mistaken for any other brand.  The next week, the boy wore high waisted Guess jeans and a tucked-in Givenchy button down.

Peter’s old bag that he’d been using for years was suddenly replaced with a Burberry backpack and his barely working phone was abruptly substituted for a top of the line Stark Phone, and nobody said anything.  He felt like he was going insane and, by the end of the fall semester, he was more than ready to get away from Parker for a couple weeks.

+++

The two week break didn’t feel long enough to Flash, but he felt confident as he walked into school on the first Monday of the spring semester.  He was determined to solve the mystery that was Peter Parker and nothing was going to stop him.

Flash’s cockiness was quickly replaced by dread, however, as he turned the corner and saw Peter standing in the hallway, talking to some people from decathlon.  The brunet had been a bit of a loner ever since MJ moved away and Ned went off to a nice boarding school, but he had become closer with some of the people on the team after becoming the captain for their school’s AcaDec team.

That wasn’t what caught Flash’s eye, though.  What he immediately noticed was the outfit Peter was sporting.  He had on a gray turtleneck, an unbuttoned brown trench coat, black dress pants, and black loafers, the entire outfit being Louis Vuitton.  He looked like the epitome of dark academia, sleek and mysterious despite the bright smile on his face as he talked to his teammates about the national competition.

“Hey, Parker, can we talk for a second?” Flash asked, walking up to the small group.  He didn’t wait for an answer, instead grabbing Peter by the arm and dragging him away.  The brunet called out an apology to Betty and Abe as he was pulled down the hall.  Eventually, Flash yanked him into a rarely-used men’s restroom and released his arm.

“What the fuck, Flash?!” Peter exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air. “What was that all about?!”

“That was all about the fact that you’re entire outfit is Louis Vuitton!” Flash shouted back, confusion and aggressiveness present in his voice.

“Why does that matter?!”

“Because you’re some poor kid from Queens! How the fuck do you have designer clothes?!”

“It’s none of your business!” Peter’s stance was defensive, but he still stood strong.  The way he looked so unafraid only served to piss the bully off more.

In a fit of anger and frustration, Flash lunged forward and socked him right in the jaw, causing the brunet to stumble back a bit.  After a few moments, Peter regained his balance and brought a tentative hand to his face, lightly holding the place where he had been struck.

“Nice hit,” he said dryly, letting his arm fall back down to his side.  He whipped around and began to leave the restroom.

“You’re not gonna do anything?” Flash asked, making the brunet stop in his tracks. “You’re not gonna fight back? Scream? Cry? Go tell a teacher? You’re just gonna do nothing?”

“Exactly. I’m gonna do nothing,” Peter told him in lieu of an answer.  Without another word, he left the bathroom.

Flash didn’t see the boy in any of their classes that day.

+++

For the rest of the week, Peter didn’t wear any designer clothes.  He was only seen sporting old jeans, beat up sneakers, and his usual nerdy shirts.  Some people asked about his sudden change in clothes, along with the bruise on his jaw, but he remained tight-lipped, allowing nothing to slip about what had occured in the restroom on Monday.

Flash felt guilt bubbling up inside of him every time he passed Peter in the halls, but he pushed it down.

+++

By the beginning of the third week of school, Flash had pretty much gotten over his guilt.  It seemed as if Peter didn’t really care about what had happened, so he attempted to let it go as well.  He ignored the brunet and let the incident fall into the past.

On that Monday morning, Flash was sitting outside on the steps with his little posse, all of them just talking about what they had done over the weekend.  Their conversation stopped, however, when the rumbling of a car sounded.  A polished silver Ferrari pulled up in front of the school and parked in one of the spaces before turning off.  It had caught the attention of all the students hanging outside of the school, everybody turning to look at the car.

It was like a scene from a movie.

The door on the driver’s side opened up and Peter Parker stepped out coolly.  He nonchalantly closed the door behind him before using the car keys to lock it.  As if the whole thing was normal, he casually walked down the path towards the stairs.

The crowd of high schoolers were captivated by the strange scene.  Their nerdy classmate, who had an almost faded bruise on his jaw, had just stepped out of a sleek, expensive car like it was nothing.  Flash took a moment to take in Peter’s outfit, confused and frustrated at the fact that he had practically come back twice as hard after the bully took him down a notch.

Peter was sporting a tan wool turtleneck tucked into a pair of grey checkered pants along with a pair of black oxfords, the ensemble pulled together with a long, olive green overcoat.  His hair was neater than usual, with his curls being less frizzy and more skillfully arranged.  His Burberry backpack was nowhere to be seen, and an expensive-looking leather messenger bag was slung over his shoulder in place of it.

Nobody said anything as the brunet made his way up the stairs, expensive shoes clicking against the cement steps.  Flash, of course, had to ruin the quiet atmosphere.

“Parker!” he called, making the boy stop in his tracks and turn to him with an exasperated look.

“What do you want, Flash?” His tone conveyed his irritation.

“I just wanna know how much dick you sucked to get enough money to buy a Ferrari.” His little friend group laughed, but none of the other students joined in.

“None,” Peter told him, unfazed by the comment. “But not all of us get whatever we want handed to us. Though, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, trust fund baby?”

Some of the teens in the courtyard let out an ‘oohh’ while others laughed at the mockery.  Peter just gave a smug smile and turned back around, heading inside the school before Flash could get another word in.

The two boys didn’t interact for the rest of the day, but Flash spent a good amount of time glaring at Peter, especially when he got back into the expensive car at the end of the day, the vehicle giving a thunderous rumble as he drove off.

+++

That’s how a good portion of the semester went.  Peter would show up in a fancy car, sometimes the Ferrari and sometimes a different one, and people would watch as he stepped out in an expensive outfit.  Flash would try to insult him at several points in the day, but Peter would either shoot an insult right back or ignore the bully completely.  Peter would sit at one of the picnic tables outside for lunch, where only seniors were allowed to sit, with Betty, Abe, and Cindy, while Flash and his posse would glare at them from another table.  Finally, Peter would get into his car at the end of the day and ignore Flash scowling at him.

Finally, after what felt like centuries, they had reached the last day of school.  Everybody was excited, but the seniors especially.  They didn’t have to do anything in their classes, seeing as their graduation ceremony was the very next day, and there was a senior tradition that they finally got to do.

For years, on the last day of the school year at Midtown, the seniors were allowed to have a family member or friend eat lunch with them, and they often did so on the picnic benches in the courtyard.  Afterwards, the seniors would be allowed to leave.  Most students would invite a parent or guardian, many of which would bring lunch for themselves and the student they were with.  A few of the teens would invite a friend who went to a school that was already finished with the school year.  Every once in a while, though not very often, a student would invite their significant other to the senior lunch.

Seniors and guests were milling around the picnic tables, chatting and catching up.  Some of the teachers were around too, conversing with the parents about graduation and how well the students had done in their classes.  Peter was sitting at a table with Cindy, Betty, and Abe, who had all brought a parent along with them for lunch.  They were all making small talk, trying to ease the tension and break the ice between them.

Unsurprisingly, Flash noticed that Peter wasn’t eating anything and that there was nobody there with him.  He used this to his advantage, of course, and easily thought up something to say to the brunet.  When Peter stood up and walked a bit away from the picnic tables to check something on his phone, the bully struck.

“Who are you waiting on, Parker? You know your parents aren’t coming, right?” Flash mocked, no sympathy for bringing up his dead parents.

Peter stayed quietly, continuing to type on his phone.

“Are you texting your aunt? Lemme take a guess, she’s too busy to show up for you,” Flash tried again, but to no avail.

Peter didn’t even grace him with a look.

“Are you deaf or something? Why aren’t you saying anything?! Just insult me back or some shit! Tell me to go away already!” Flash’s voice slipped into something desperate.  All he wanted was for his words to have some effect on the boy.

“You’re an asshole,” Peter told him, finally looking up.  He turned his phone off and slipped it into the pocket of his pants.  He crossed his arms over his chest, crinkling his button down shirt a bit and slightly pulling it out of where they tucked into his pants, not enough to completely come out, but enough to make the shirt look a bit looser on him.

The two stayed silent for a few moments, staring each other down.

“You’re an asshole, but even more than that, you’re an absolute idiot.”

“What are you getting at here, Parker?” Flash snarled, eyes shining with rage.

“I’m not getting at anything. I just thought you should know.”

Before Flash could get another word in, a thunderous rumbling sounded and the car that dropped Peter off at school that morning pulled up into the parking lot.  Once it had stopped, the driver’s side door opened and somebody stepped out.  Flash’s eyes flickered between the stranger and the brunet beside him, who had a big smile on his face.

The car door closed and somebody walked around the car, making their way straight towards the picnic tables.  The students and guests eyed the man as he sauntered forwards, taking off his sunglasses.

It was Tony fucking Stark.

Everybody was too in shock to say anything as the billionaire scanned the crowd.  He locked his gaze on Peter and strided over to the brunet.  He stopped less than a foot in front of him, the younger man having to tilt his head up a bit to look at him.

“You’re late,” Peter notified him teasingly.

“I’m not late. Everybody else is just early.”

“You’re not the queen of England, Tones.”

“In that case, I am late, but fashionably so.”

Peter rolled his eyes fondly as the billionaire gave him a loving smile.  Their little moment was interrupted though, by none other than Flash.

“What the actual fuck?!” he exclaimed, eyes trained on the two men. “You’re Tony Stark!”

“Am I?” the billionaire asked. “I didn’t notice.”

Peter lightly slapped his arm for that comment, giving him a warning look, though it was more amused than angry.

“This all makes so much more sense now,” Cindy said from her spot at the picnic table.

“The car, the clothes, it’s all coming together,” Abe added on, looking over at Cindy.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see it before!” Betty exclaimed, making eye contact with Peter. “You’re a sugarbaby!”

Peter choked on his own spit while Tony raised an eyebrow at the girl.  Flash blanched, eyes full of realization.

“I’m not a sugarbaby!” Peter defended once he had gathered himself.  The statement was met with a lot of confused looks and furrowed brows.

“You’re . . . you’re not a sugarbaby?” Cindy asked, looking like she had never heard something more puzzling.

“No!”

“So . . . you guys are just in, like, a real relationship?” Abe questioned them, bewilderment laced into his tone.

“No, we’re sworn enemies, destined to have one final fight and battle to the death,” Tony replied sarcastically.

“Be nice,” Peter scolded him before turning back to his peers and their guests. “Yes, we’re in a real relationship.”

“Nothing makes sense anymore,” Mr. Harrington mumbled. “I give up.”

Peter just gave him a sympathetic nod.

Most of the guests, especially the parents, were still in shock, eyes trained on the teen, whom they had seen at school events for so long, as he casually stood next to his boyfriend, Tony Stark, and acted like everything was normal.

“Wanna get going?” Tony asked Peter, drawing his boyfriend’s eyes away from the group of students and guests. “We could go hang out at the tower for a while before dinner. I made reservations for seven-thirty tonight at that restaurant we went to for Pepper’s birthday.”

“The place with the tiramisu to die for?” Peter looked excited when his boyfriend gave him a nod in confirmation. “Fuck yeah!”

Tony laughed a bit and the two began to walk towards the car, ignoring all the eyes following them.  When they reached the car, Peter looked back and called a quick “see you guys tomorrow!” to the people gathered around the picnic benches.  The couple got into the car and drove off, the thunderous rumbling going with them.

Flash stood there, frozen, until he felt his phone buzz.  He pulled it out of his pocket and looked down at it, only to see a text from Peter.

‘I told you so.’

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@darkerstarker @dim-ships-johnlock @ashleybeattie @haylove5

[skrillahead]

Ten years ago, when I was 23 an old friend introduced me to @taylorswift music. I had just gone through a horrendous breakup to a guy named John and she mentioned how she felt I would appreciate the song “Dear John.” To my surprise it resonated every thought and feeling I was going through. It didn’t take long before I begged her to let me borrow her Speak Now album. I’ll admit here and now that it was one of the fundemental albums I listened to help me recover from one of the worst relationships I’ve ever been in.

Two years later in 2012, history repeated itself. The relationship wasn’t as dramatic or eventful but it still hurt like hell. I mean, how could it not? when no matter how many times you put your love out there they never want to stay. To my surprise Taylor Swift put out her singles for her Red album that fall and I can’t even begin to describe how therapeutic it was to listen to “I knew you were trouble” but also how much I cried every time I listened to “Red” because it really did feel like driving a Maserati down a dead end street *cries even now*

Two years after that in 2014, Taylor’s 1989 album was released and at the time I hadn’t really cared to date anymore. I was happy being on my own and wasn’t looking to detox of any sad emotions but I bought the album because “Shake it off” was just super fun to listen to and I’m so glad that one song convinced me to buy the album because that year I had a falling out with the very friend who introduced me to Taylor’s music. So one can only imagine what song I had on repeat that fall. You guessed it “Bad Blood” it was almost as if she had premeditated my life. Like she knew what was coming before I did and said, “here. This might help”

In 2015, an ex bf from 2006 (my first real bf) sent me a text one night after not speaking for about six years because he was in a new relationship and wouldn’t stop messaging me. Keep in mind, I had never gotten over this guy because he was my first everything. It was hard to forget him (up until this series of events of course) but as hard as it was to ignore him i knew it wasn’t right to talk to him while he had a girlfriend because yes, I believe in karma. The night he textd me we talked for hours. He says “we broke up” and “she wasn��t you” I fight it for a bit but eventually I bite. Not long after, I see him and get to kiss him again. It felt like magic all over again, he even mentioned going on vacation together and getting married but as fast as he came he left. Turns out he was still seeing his “at the time ex” (you can see where this is going) I eventually put all the pieces together and tell him to never speak to me again. I felt so broken and stupid for believing every word he said and for thinking that I could even mean anything to him when he had been with this other girl for 7 years at that point. So what did I do to heal? Like most people I hung out with friends and kept busy but honestly, none of that helped as much as listening to “You’re not Sorry” from the Fearless album on repeat. It was the one album I hadn’t listened to in its entirety yet and when I heard that song I cried like someone spilled onion juice in my eyes but I kept moving forward and eventually got out of my depressive state. So again, thank you for that. Btw fast forward to present time and they’re now married. So, congratulations Mr and Mrs Muir. Side note: there are so many details missing from this but I don’t want to bore anyone with that in the middle of an already long post.

Flash forward to 2016, there wasn’t a new Taylor Swift album. Which almost felt odd considering there had been 2 year gaps between her albums before but I did read a lot about her in the tabloids that year so I figured her absence might’ve been related to it. Regardless, my own personal and very unrealistic agenda for Taylor made me angry with her that year. 2016, was the year Trump ran for President, and as we all know he won. For some crazy reason my head went crazy. I strongly believed that Taylor could’ve kept that man from winning had she used her voice because of how strong her following is but we couldn’t find her until voting day. I conjured up this idea in my head that she was more concerned about losing followers over where she stood in politics than what actually happened to us as a nation. I really don’t know what I was going through that year to be so delusional. It probably didn’t even have to do with Taylor Swift but I did become angry. There was just so much uncertainty by the end of that year that maybe I used her as a scape goat and just started believing all of the negative things that were being posted online about her which in retrospect, wasn’t right and wasn’t fair. She’s still a person with not only her own thoughts and feelings but also her own struggles. So if by any crazy chance you happen to read this I want to say I am deeply sorry.

Okay, so now it’s the year 2017 and I am celebrating one year of living with my awesome new roommate, who legitimately has been one of the bestest if not thee best friend I have ever had and Taylor has released her Reputation album BUT I do a personal protest to not listen to it (because remember? I’m still angry) but it was inevitable. She was everywhere! and while I may not have been a huge fan of the first single, I have to admit when I heard “Ready for it” in that one commercial it got so hard to not want to just listen to it on Spotify because the whole song just sounded so good. Yet, somehow I kept strong.

Flash forward to 2018, and what is this I see? Taylor Swift finally voiced her opinion on politics? Let me tell you, when I say I ran so fast to the Spotify app so fast it felt like my life was depending on it. I relapsed the second Taylor Swift announces her political stance because I may have been wrong about her but I was wrong for a good reason. She showed what she truly valued and it wasn’t numbers. Thank you by the way because I was aching to listen to “Ready for it” on repeat for about a year at this point. Not only that! But she released her 2 hour Reputation Tour documentary on Netflix that year and now I was upset that I let my emotions get the best of me because it looked like such a fun tour to be a part of.

2019, wasn’t too eventful from what I can remember. Well, with the exception of Taylor fighting for the rights to her music which by the way, what the hell is up with that? Just give her work back! Still I hoped that regardless of that her and her boo Joe Alwyn were doing well. I personally loved the story I read somewhere about how he told you he wasn’t giving up that easy or something along those lines. I’m personally a hopeless romantic and like cheesy stuff like that even though I may come across as tough ogre. In the words of Shrek himself, I’m like an onion. I’ve got layers.

So now we’ve finally reached present year 2020, a whole 4 years since I got irrationally upset with a person I’ve never met before except through her work. It’s 6 days before my 33rd bday and the Miss Americana documentary is released on Netflix. I felt angry once again but this time at myself. I was upset with this artist I had admired for so long who had helped me mend wounds and collect broken heart pieces. All while she was dealing with her own family issues, her breakups, sexual abuse, body image issues, scandal, and finding the strength to voice her political opinions. I really had the nerve to be upset? I’ll admit another thing on here at the risk of someone I know reading this and thinking I’m overdramatic for doing so but I cried. I genuinely felt terrible. How she’s been able to keep such a strong and wise head on those shoulders after everything that’s been thrown at her is admirable. I can only dream of being that damn strong and I find refuge in the fact that while everything may not be perfect in her life at least she has a good support system whether that be in the shape of her parents, her brother, her boyfriend, or her friends (yes, that includes fans.)

Anyway, I wrote all of that to show you guys that while we’ve been in quarantine I’ve found solace in bullet journaling and had added a bunch of my favorite Taylor Swift lyrics from the last 4 albums she’s released. It helped me let go of a lot of old thoughts and emotions to rewrite them myself. Your music, your words, and your values have helped me and so many others so much Taylor. I know it’s selfish to ask but please keep writing even when you get married or when you have kids and they need their diaper changed (shoot I’ll babysit if you need me to) or til you get old lady fingers and they’re all spotty and wrinkly. I’ll even send cookies as a thank you. If you’ve read this far I hope Ive made you laugh even a little. Stay, stay, stay, safe and quarantined guys :)

[tentative-wanderer]

Shout My Love For You (Actually, No)

Grandmaster of Legal Cultivation 律道祖师 - Chapter 3 (standalone)

Valentine’s Day Special (a day and a half late)

Law Students + Flatmates AU (though the legal aspect isn’t apparent in this chapter)

I intended to write this for the WangXian Week prompt “Valentine’s Day”, but it evolved into something else. 

***

A heavenly aroma wafted through the kitchen as Xiao Xingchen pulled a tray of cookies out of the oven. His gaze raked over the black, white and grey lines and curves decorating each heart; the unconventional colour scheme worked surprisingly well. Biting into a cookie, he let the fragrant sweetness suffuse his senses and concluded that he was satisfied with the result.

It was a shame that Song Lan wasn’t here to taste his handiwork, but at least A-Qing would like them. Jiang Cheng, who lived in the opposite flat, would probably enjoy some cookies too—Xiao Xingchen guessed that as a currently single gentleman, Jiang Cheng was planning to spend Valentine’s Day with Netflix for company, so snacks would be in order.

At that moment, the doorbell rang and a bright voice sang out: “Gege! I’m—huh? Why are you...”

Xiao Xingchen was bemused for a second before a cacophony of screams penetrated the wooden door and rattled his soul.

His heart lurched. What on earth was going on? “A-Qing!” Dumping his tray onto the countertop, he raced to the front door, fumbled with the lock and slammed the door open.

A-Qing was right in front of him, but her back was turned. She was facing a young lad in a neat white shirt, whose cheeks were as pink as the delicate bouquet of roses he held. Behind him, a horde of boys vibrated in excitement, grinning from ear to ear. Half of them were still screeching until they locked eyes with Xiao Xingchen, whereupon they ceased abruptly.

An eerie silence rapidly descended on the scene as all the boys stared at him. The colour drained from the face of the lad with the roses. Clear as day, every one of their expressions read: I think we just botched our mission.

A-Qing noticed the change that befell them and whipped around to face Xiao Xingchen’s wild eyes and tense stance. “Gege!” She paused, noting that he was poised to beat the living daylights out of any potential threats, and continued in a more placating tone: “Gege, it’s nothing.” She gestured at the boys. “They’re my friends from school. Sorry for making you worry.”

Roses Boy regained his senses the fastest among the lot. He gulped, then rallied and bowed. “I’m sorry that we disturbed you! We didn’t mean to.” His buddies (including the Lan kids and Jiang Cheng’s nephew, Xiao Xingchen noticed) quickly chimed in with a clumsy chorus of apologies.

Xiao Xingchen’s brow unknitted. “It’s fine. I’m glad no one was being murdered outside my door.” He assessed Roses Boy. Despite his ashen complexion, the lad had a winsome air about him. There was an open, earnest look in his gaze that was offset by the nervous way he gripped his bouquet, lending his mien a certain charm.

Xiao Xingchen made a split-second decision. He flashed a reassuring smile at everyone and said, “I’ll go inside to pack my cookies. I’ll leave the door unlocked so you can come in whenever you’re done.”

After he shut the door, he heard a low bubble of very, very suppressed squeals and hollers, presumably as Roses Boy made his heartfelt declaration of affection.

Roughly twenty minutes later, the group of teenagers hesitantly filed into Xiao Xingchen’s flat and were treated to cookies. A-Qing, looking uncharacteristically shy, rummaged around in the cupboard for a vase for her newly-acquired flowers.

Xiao Xingchen had just found out that Roses Boy was the Ouyang Zizhen that A-Qing had been talking about for the past five months when a terrified shout ripped through the air.

It came from the opposite flat.

“Stay here!” said Xiao Xingchen hastily to the kids before rushing over to Jiang Cheng’s apartment.

He hammered on Jiang Cheng’s door. “Jiang Cheng? What’s going on?”

From this close, he could make out the content of the frantic yells. “Go away! Make it stop!”

To his surprise, that sounded like Wei Wuxian. Weren’t he and Lan Wangji supposed to be out on a date?

“Wuxian?” Xingchen called, but received no reply except panicked yelps.

After a number of bangs and scuffling noises, the flat turned quiet. Then the door opened and Wei Wuxian tumbled right into Xiao Xingchen’s arms.

Xiao Xingchen steadied him and gave him a once-over. He didn’t seem physically hurt. “Are you okay?”

Wei Wuxian shuddered. “No.”

Lan Wangji came out of the apartment. Running a hand across Wei Wuxian’s back in comforting circles, he enlightened Xiao Xingchen with one word: “Dog.”

Lan Wangji steered the quivering human-shaped jelly aside, giving the doorway a wide berth. Jiang Cheng exited the flat, somehow wearing a frown and an expression of resignation at the same time. A Shih Tzu wriggled innocently in his arms.

“I’ll take Dolly home.” Jiang Cheng stroked the lapdog soothingly in a way that was uncannily similar to how Lan Wangji was rubbing Wei Wuxian’s back.

Lan Wangji nodded. “We’re sorry for inconveniencing you.”

Jiang Cheng gave a small shrug. “Not a problem.” Grudgingly, he added: “Sorry for the scare. I didn’t expect you to be home until a lot later, so I thought I’d bring Dolly over to visit.” Even more grudgingly, with a look faintly reminiscent of someone having his teeth pulled out, he continued: “It’s decent of you to think of me and come back, though I really wouldn’t have minded if you two went for a good meal to celebrate.”

“...It’s not like Lan Zhan and I don’t eat together often,” said Wei Wuxian, eyeing Dolly warily from the safety of Lan Wangji’s arms. “I wanna watch the new episodes of Shadows of the Burial Mound with both of you. It’s fun to host a running commentary together throughout the show.”

This made Jiang Cheng’s semi-permanent scowl almost nonexistent—a rare and admirable feat.

“Mmh. I’ll be back soon.” He strode down the corridor, nodded to Jin Ling—who, alongside the other kids, was craning his neck to watch the drama unfold from Xiao Xingchen’s doorway—and vanished around the corner.

Wei Wuxian looked at Xiao Xingchen ruefully. “Sorry for the ruckus.”

Xiao Xingchen shook his head. “Don’t apologise. It’s not your fault that you’re afraid of dogs...Hang on.” He went into his flat and brought out a container of cookies. “Eat the remains of your shock away. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

***

When Xiao Xingchen resettled back onto his couch, his handphone rang. It was a call from Song Lan.

A-Qing eagerly grabbed the phone from the coffee table, pressed “accept”, and put it on speaker mode. “Song-gege, hi! Xingchen-gege baked cookies but you’re not here so don’t mind if I eat your portion!”

The response was a series of piercing shrieks which sent them all reeling backwards. Lan Jingyi gaped at the phone. “That’s one heck of an overreaction!”

Xiao Xingchen massaged his temples. Why was everyone screaming on Valentine’s Day?

Staticky crackles emanated from the phone, but they failed to completely obscure the voices crying: “Put the scorpion down!”

“EEEEYAAAAAGH!!! Song Lan, throw it away!”

“Shit, this is the biggest one so far, it’s almost bigger than his palm!”

“Why are you using your bare hands?!! Get the tweezers!”

Everyone in Xiao Xingchen’s living room felt their eyes widen inadvertently. Xiao Xingchen sighed.

Song Lan’s level tone cut through the clamour as smoothly as a blade cuts through tofu. “There’s no time to find the tweezers; it was almost in our food. Calm down, I’ll take it somewhere far away.”

The racket gradually died down to an indistinct hum as Song Lan put more and more distance between himself and his groupmates. Then the only sound left was Song Lan’s measured breaths, followed by a quiet “Off you go.”

Unbeknownst to Song Lan, his audience on the other side of the world let out a sigh of relief for him.

“Sorry, A-Qing. Dealt with some trouble just now. You were talking about cookies?” Song Lan resumed his phone conversation as casually as if he had merely stopped to tie his shoelaces.

“...Yes. Xingchen-gege baked Valentine’s Day cookies. I was going to eat your share but I’ve decided against it, because I hope the cookies can incentivise you to come back alive, preferably without missing an arm or an immune system. Are you sure you’re okay?”

There was a pause as Song Lan presumably checked his body for injuries. “I’m fine. I...” He hesitated.

“Please continue,” urged Xiao Xingchen.

“...I have one cut where the grave robbers tried to stab me when they tried to grab the artefacts we were transporting from Empress Minyan’s tomb, but it’s completely healed already. Just a scar.”

“What the hell,” mouthed Lan Jingyi silently to Lan Sizhui. Then he nudged Ouyang Zizhen and whispered, not too quietly, “Zizhen, this guy is gonna be one of your in-laws.”

Both Ouyang Zizhen and A-Qing elbowed him. “We aren’t engaged!” A-Qing hissed, also not too quietly. Even louder, she said, “Also, Xingchen-gege and Song-gege aren’t in that kind of relationship...yet.”

Xiao Xingchen wanted to bury his face in his palms. Song Lan probably heard that last part. It was devoid of all subtlety, volume and content-wise.

Song Lan asked: “May I talk to you in private?”

“Sure.” Xiao Xingchen picked his phone up and switched speaker mode off, ignoring A-Qing’s waggling eyebrows.

In the safety of his bedroom, he said, “I’m alone now. Zichen, are you hurt anywhere else?”

“No. Only one scar this time, and it’s painless.”

“Please be careful. Just let the scorpion eat your food, it’s better than risking a sting.”

“I can’t do that. This is the first proper meal I’ve had in a month. We mostly subsisted on canned food at the excavation site, but that’s over now.” Song Lan said all of this matter-of-factly, without a hint of joy or complaint. But he sounded more appreciative when he added: “Now we have proper showers.”

Xiao Xingchen felt a grin spread across his face. That was so like Song Lan; stoic in the face of danger, enduring challenges with fortitude, only allowing his mysophobia to surface once the need for grit in the circumstances had passed.

“That sounds very nice, after so long. And good job for completing your task. Proud of you.”

Song Lan was silent for a few seconds—Xingchen could imagine him almost-smiling—before he said, “I look forward to having your cookies, if A-Qing hasn’t eaten them all by then.”

“She won’t.” I wouldn’t have used the monochrome colour scheme that you like if I didn’t intend to save some for you.

“I have something for you too," Song Lan informed him. "It’s supposed to arrive in the mail at our flat today."

Right on time, a knock sounded once on his bedroom door before A-Qing bounded in. “Song-gege sent you something! Thought you’d want to see it before you end your call.” She dropped a package onto Xiao Xingchen’s lap.

Xiao Xingchen’s curiosity soared. He and Song Lan hardly ever did surprises, so receiving a mystery package was extra exciting. “A-Qing just brought it in. May I unwrap it?”

“Go ahead.”

Xiao Xingchen eagerly peeled away the layers of cardboard and cushioning material and pulled out a small rectangular picture frame. Splashes of purple, white, yellow and pink spread from one end to the other, a demure palette of tiny pressed desert blossoms.

A card was attached to it. High on anticipation, Xiao Xingchen flipped it open.

It read:

“I tried very hard to find flowers in the Gobi Desert, and I was lucky to have found them.

I hadn’t tried very hard to find someone I love among the billions of people in this world, so I am incredibly lucky to have somehow found you anyway.”

A-Qing was unabashedly peering over Xiao Xingchen’s shoulder and reading the card. Then she shrieked in his ear.

Dazedly, Xiao Xingchen thought again, today is full of screams.

“FINALLY! Song-gege, you finally found the guts to spit it out!” Bouncing on the bed, A-Qing grabbed Xiao Xingchen’s phone and yelled: “CONGRATULATIONS!”

Outside, Lan Jingyi commented to Ouyang Zizhen: “She’s a tad more excited now compared to when you confessed.”

Ouyang Zizhen ground his knuckles against Jingyi's abdomen, making him squawk. “That’s probably because I haven’t waited for years and years before saying the things I should say!”

Dimly, Xiao Xingchen noticed that his fingers were trembling. He put the card down and fumbled for his phone from A-Qing. He let out a helpless sort of chuckle, overflowing with fondness and warmth.

“...I love you too,” he said, a little hoarsely.

He thought he was acting in a frankly ridiculous manner—he already knew he held a treasured place in Song Lan’s life; it was evident in the way Song Lan treated him and looked at him (attentively, tenderly, eyes an inky, endless depth of unspoken but understood promises and everlasting faith), but he couldn’t help but metaphorically jump for joy to have those feelings irrefutably manifested in clear words.

He heard Song Lan let out a small gust of a breath, like a laugh, but one that was incomplete because he was too overwhelmed to do it properly.

When Song Lan spoke, Xiao Xingchen could hear the smile in his voice, a tinge of sunshine through the leaves. “See you soon.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

***

Click my AO3 username in my profile to read the other standalone chapters in this fic :) Kudos and comments are appreciated! What do you think of this sort of Xingchen and Song Lan? Are their characterisations okay?

IS SONG LAN SMOOTH OR NOT? Because that’s how I’m gonna woo a boyfriend if I ever go to the desert ahahahahaha 😄🔫

[restlessmuseum]

nomen amen (or “paraphernalia”: back by popular demand)

                                    (where books compete for space with pottery)

We were already halfway through interminability. Away all redundancy of deficiency from the page, the tear from the past to mend us about to rampage. This far we had not said anything good but perfection required, in tone and content, inexplicable. (1) I found the crux in the posture to device, like an impostor happens in his tender, (2) a damage done like the wrapping paper of a ducked present. (3) Under the stance of unison, the shallower I read between the lines the further I'm improved from the time of my oversight, (4) the unison becomes the sound she phews down to my very being, like but the rest I forgot about... Sorry, got it wrong. Actually, I wanted to continue this something started spreads ago, but the prose screeches and cackles around its ineliminable inexactitude. I really don't feel like resuming anymore, or should I say, I'm done boggedly running after the end of my premises. Yes something happened, something to investigate in a whole other direction. So, gonna take all, this will be the first part. I wish I could express revolutionary philosophisms, I thought I could be a poet because I'm unable to be an essayist and a novelist. I'm not good at public speaking. I entered Tumblr to be found by publishers and make money: I had a system of truths and truly nothing else to say. Besides, what did this idea of klein Lebensdarbietung mean? Is the text doing its characters or are these ones setting out their own words? Text's abolition of today, which is nothing but "the sentences already written, the sentences that people say, the sentences yet to write; verses, words, spacings, texts' dissemination, whatever you want, about the purely sign-linguistic-textual" (cit.) verbatim et literatim, and here is another example of my strugglings to go on properly. In any event it is clear that we are moved when required, except the exempts. (5) It is always the most unexpected time to undergo the aha entanglement. In constant foresight I guiltily prepare to hindsee the neglect and with confambulatory prowess I succumb to the development in this underpass of construes. How much do we match with our sounds? — asking myself. In this respect I'm afraid to surprise me onstage like the surrenedered one (and here onpage, ah foolishness, as playwright). But if I leaf compulsively through hundreds of pages, that's to find my words not belonging to me, and the others to fight (me) with. As I am nearing the open conversation, I make up my mind never to read me. Tons of notes, reproaches and scratchpads. Tons of work to do. And I have to get rid of the old adjustments once and for all. (6) Electra the yet-signed. You like the simple words, the ones you recognize already written, the crystalline syllabification that enoculates the wholeness of an order babbling sibyllinity downstream. You carry on with the work of literature: how the body absconds at the risk of space and time with them. Imperfect doubling, mirror images, and repetition in her practice. Topical scratches. Interceptors sought in everyday life — like unspeakables — that she then distorts to create the straight path in reverse. Poetry will not touch her, because poetry is just the unwritten complexity going wrong side along the process of self-becoming, a recent installation, midway between marble and corporal desires in an ascending scale of hardness. (7) Listening to the closest friends, the process of self-becoming could only linger primarily in the sight of aesthetic, then morality, then religious status quo. But friends come always as a closer, blind alley, at the end of tears: a misunderstanding at first, then never read enough. (8) It is often the case that the practice of consensually agreeing to one's own mental performance and self-image by means of meddled languages and lineages may become a genuine bondage of freedom. The restrained partner can derive any drift in the set of possibilities so that we use to say the doing is more important than the outcome. (9) The doing is in uncomfortable or painful positions, for example as a punishment: then, easily it tends to be forgotten, because unforgivable. That's why the effect is the same as a verbal collage, but 1) rips are often behind schedule or on borrowed time, "out of sync with the fade" (cit.) hearth of what seems to be the Pentecostal tongues of fire; and 2) metaphors like "the rope of telephone charades" or "the coils of something wound in the form of a revolution to come is the licking of sugar injury, met since the starting point" are not allowed. "Real me is way more concerned with" (cit.) the Transcaspian line that follows the pattern of a crosswording of the desert. (10) Rather than holding on to me tight I choose to distance myself from what I'm being forced to watch daily. Dies irae dies illa desirable. Without prejudice to this last inescapable point, the first issue represents the Derridean crux of the matter, about which I will be saying something bad in the wrongest moments, since my voice is as effective as my unsuccessful rewrites. I just want, by using the instruction books, the border of this drama, accelerated and hence trespassed in time into ridiculousness, to be experienced as the comedy it is. There is a hour of the wolf and there is a hour the wolf is afraid of. When the time is right I'd like you all to be safe to be spared in my turn from this construction beyond good and better. (11) Here you shine white with noise. "Sonorous cobweb" (cit.) made of only one thread, the unbent line of homeostasis at long last kept in crisis. (12) This narration should have had a different common thread. "And yet", imprint, "it moves" (cit.) as sensible prose. Prose of proses. The dispelled thing, spilled on Tumblr, disseminated. The seedbed: descendants, everspring off, family. The planting postdisposed. All going as planned. (13)   When I know that I don't know where to start a carving, I start a list of synonyms or unyoke a fable from a series of rereadings. What excommunication if you can't subvert the strainer? (14) Once upon a time Electra, beloved only sign of her father, has a brother. Agamemnon possesses the actuality and practicality of the dead: he wants to see water circulate water in laminar rheumatology and freshness sculptures out of tempered air. [director's note: the Argolis' scene isn't even entitled to melt!]. She eats anise candies and unwarmed foods without a problem. She is so lovely when she urinates first thing in the morning, holding the head in her hands, graeaean ownership. Yes, I'm worthy of attending to the offertory on the altar of love. So many congratulations against my behalf that the opposite seems true. (15) "A woman with long hair is not a simple point of view" (cit.). She's got a prompt night's sleep and reasonable. We cling to angelic accidents. We are clung to our soundtrack. (16) Indeed love is not "the panic subsidence onto the body" (cit.) [director's note: can we let the body become finally soaked in real pornography and never mind, here?] but sheer faith for a symbolic subject who's shattered fully loyal. Intermediate sprint of a life midpoint crossroads that lead at the same destination to flee from. (17) Because, as it goes, her staple is such a volitive confidence meaning to me the wait of the powers that created us, the coincidence of both of us makes our skewness on my side of the derangement. Averted word, when addressed. I am a bad Greek at the time of Christianity and a bad Christian on such dysfunctional divertissements. Who knows how ethically important it is today? I retain it, ending up forgetting everything else, and am lookin' very bad. (18) Of course the movement is diminished in certain directions; the style more flattened upon my chosen sickness that we now have no use for, after the setting of the starting stances; I suffer from more severe erections. An acquired kurtosis distributes my monodimensional remarks as the fourth cumulants in order of precedence. Still a lot of exercise to get. Busy like the evermentioned forgettables I'm at that stage where it's difficult for me to even do difficult things. Wrongstaged, I can't compete. I only challenge. (19) Therefore coincident like the two norths of which one is sinking liminal in the perfectly unsaid of your perfect cues. In one fell swoop you pone the part and mastery. And in the next. And the apnea for the answer back. Teeth gouged by the opposite of words in formation for a smile. The winky face par excellence. Here's the real spectator of my vocalized character. I wedge the self with a puny malapropistic idioticon to spread now that I'm a simplex person. As long as I continue to improve in (furtive, it has to be) apprenticeship I'm losing abilities. Old mistakes reappear, no inspiration from mumpsimuses. (20) Where adults flutter, she, disemvowelled and free from frills, spoken by the plural to be inscribed in the Sophoclean, in the Euripidean, in the Hofmannsthalean, in the Yourcenarian script, lost in tv shows and blatant phone calls, is, for me, abused of notations but who am I to denounce such an effusive happiness? There's nothing she can't Netflix. (21) No banana peel on the slope of her singularity — reversible up to a point, interchangeable up to a point, genderbending up to a point from the same side of view. Slotting minims in the same tone as the main characters. That the same out-of-turness is imbricated. (22)

Virtuosity was painlessly flaying the secret from the kids. This is tragedy. We all know what everyone should have said, sorrows come only after. We see each other for sure and too well. Find your trace in the deep of your prompter's heart. Dimmable glow of ancient times. Under guillotine percentages, under curtain at half-mast, under the veils in the dance of the seven veils. What am I trying to say? (23)

In the floodlights' gloom, without changing the rules of the game, exit khorós. With whom would you listen to you speaking? (24) Woods of brightness wherever, it makes me want to expect your coming deaf-handed right therever, the braindomed untrodden order of phrases where roommouths around it are opening. (25) A substratum, but rather as two shadows they finally vest themselves without amendment, and just drag on this semi-detached ward where it just doesn't feel like our theater anymore. So that there may well be the laetum and lethean occurrence of a new polarization. (26) It is no coincidence that here you're always cold and pale. What a cutie! (27) But maybe that's just too much information. Now would be the time to shut up even more. Already being in the manner for that: being at one with the template versus falling back into the patient subjectivity to agency, to make war and to make love with the weapons of the unconditional surrender. The book is that inferring the timbre of each Klagesprache. (28) Like the current situation could return to equilibrium because of an indefinite vocabulary which is still fighting us pressurers. We come across the unilaterality of it every day. Its constitution. (29) But infinity alive doesn't exist. We can approximate it in the endless rummaging and musing. (30) Approximation is worth nothing. We get sick for the words that once beguiled us. The limits of infancy don't set. And now I just -ess the world in voluntary silence nonexperienced. (31) With plex I brux my certainty and centuries. Party time abounds. (32) Clause: applause. (33)

[doomonfilm]

Shorts : The 93rd Academy Awards (2020 Nominees)

Even before my days as a film blogger, I always made a concentrated effort to try and see as many films nominated during awards season as I could... I would hope to have seen them throughout the course of the year in the natural flow of of my viewing, but inevitably I end up playing catch-up in the span of time between the Golden Globe nominations and the Academy Awards ceremony.  One unfortunate consistency, however, is the fact that I often fall short (no pun intended) in my coverage of short live-action, animated and documentary films that receive recognition from the Oscars. 

With streaming ruling more than ever in the wake of COVID-19 and the pandemic, and more access to films regardless of the current state of world affairs, I wanted to make sure that my attempt to cover as much ground in the Oscar nomination pool as possible included shorts, and thanks to a bit of sleuth work, I was able to see a large slice of the nominated material.  This article will focus solely on my thoughts about what I was able to see, but more importantly, it will allow me to include these categories in my prediction post, as they are often overlooked.

Editor’s note - Due to a lack of access, the following films will be excluded from this list :  - Oprea (Best Animated Short nominee) - White Eye (Best Live-Action nominee)

Burrow (SparkShorts/Pixar, dir. Madeline Sharafian) Best Animated Short nominee

It’s easy to see why Burrow was paired with the wildly successful and stellar animated feature Soul, as both tell a similar tale about independence in the face of community, albeit one is much more layered and textured than the other.  That being said, Burrow is able to transmit its message without the use of dialogue, instead utilizing a bouncy soundtrack and sound design to match both the underground and animal-based aspects of the short.  The lighting techniques in particular stand out, especially when the bunny finds himself digging tunnels.  The menagerie of animal characters are each given unique design to reflect the vast number of subterranean dwellers in the wild, but the designs also share enough similarity to keep the overall world aesthetic uniform and enjoyable.  This one is definitely highly recommended for children, although its extremely short runtime may leave them demanding more.  Major props to Madeline Sharafian for making such a dynamic piece of traditional animation in a company known for pushing the realms of digital animation and 3-D character rendering.

Genius Loci (UniFrance, dir. Adrien Merigeau) Best Animated Short nominee

Genius Loci should be framed and presented to the masses a motion-based art.  The way in which each sequence is laid out like some sort of abstract piece of artwork is stunning, and as the narrative unfolds in its powerful minimalist take on surrealism, we are given a creatively intriguing blend of symbolism and stimuli that is nothing short of breathtaking.  Genius Loci harkens me back to the days of programs like MTv’s Liquid Television, where I wasn’t even registering how much the lines between entertainment and artwork were being blurred.  Even in its abstraction and heavy symbolism, it is extremely easy to recognize the variety of human interactions that Merigauh parades in her dreamlike animated sonnet.  In all honesty, words do not do this modern masterpiece justice… it simply must be seen to be believed, especially for anyone who was a fan of any aspect of Waking Life.

If Anything Happens I Love You (Netflix, dir. Will McCormack and Michael Govier) Best Animated Short nominee

If Anything Happens I Love You is an incredibly artistic (and seemingly deeply personal) rumination on grief in the  wake of sudden and tragic loss.  Aesthetically, the film has an elevated Plymptoons style to it, with an excellent use of minimalism and abstraction that simplifies ideas of memory, personal regret and reconciliation with grace, thoughtfulness and nuance.  While absent of dialogue, the use of sound design, illustration and a well-placed King Princess song says more than any dialogue or exposition could ever manage in a package like this.  The way that memories blend together and introduce color in a world where the presence is absent of it leaves a lasting impression.  Short projects like this show animation’s capacity to elicit a deep emotional reaction and touch upon topics that may seem to step into the realms of exploitation if done traditionally.  The emotional gut punch delivered by If Anything Happens I Love You in its waning moments is as touching as it is heartbreaking, and is likely to pull tears out of even the most hardened moviegoer.  

Yes-People (The New Yorker, dir. Gísli Darri Halldórsson)

One thing about Yes-People that immediately stands out is the character design... I am unsure of whether it is a stop-motion film, a computer-generated animation, or some other technique made to emulate these others.  There is a minimalist aspect to the film similar to that of Aardman Animations, particularly in terms of the narrative hook involving the use of a single word : “Yes”.  We are shown a wide range of individuals with distinct looks and seemingly distinct purposes in life, and although all characters use the same word (and are tied to the same use of a single song throughout the film), it is the way in which these particular elements are displayed and presented that gives the world a sense of variety and distinction amongst its participants.  The look seems geared towards children, but the subject matter and tone seem to be geared more so towards adults, especially in the way it deals with finding joy and pleasure in the mundane nature of living.  While not the most moving piece of animation for me out of the bunch, I can certainly recognize art when I see it, and Yes-People deserves all of the recognition and accolades it is currently attaining. 

Colette (The Guardian, dir. Anthony Giacchino) Best Documentary Short nominee

While not the first documentary on the impact of the Nazi party during World War II, Colette does more to humanize the tragedy than any other piece of media I can recall.  To clarify, many documentaries have shown images and footage of prisoners, but Colette does so without taking a morbid tourist, exploitation or self-gratifying stance.  In contrast, we are taken to a World War II museum prior to visiting the concentration camp where Jean-Pierre (brother of documentary subject Colette Marin-Catherine) was held, where we see items, portraits and registration cards meant to contextualize the scale of the Nazi atrocities.  Rather than utilize shock and despair, we are given a very welcoming presentation, which makes it easier to understand and accept how recognizing and understanding our past downfalls can help avoid them in the future.  Colette Marin-Catherine and Lucie Fouble have a wonderful synergy together, and their conversations serve to further illustrate the nuance that comes with recognizing the past, based on your personal past and point of view.  Colette Marin-Catherine is not only extremely honest about herself, but she is quick to hold up a mirror to those who exploit the tragedies Germany committed during World War II, and it’s this ability to be forthright and unwavering that makes her a fascinating subject.

A Concerto Is a Conversation (The New York Times, dir. Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers) Best Documentary Short nominee

This short documentary uses the hook of music and its ability to communicate the unspoken as an introduction for a story surrounding up and coming composer Kris Bowers (who co-directs the documentary with Ben Proudfoot) and the historical significance of his current rising star.  Framed as a conversation between Bowers and his grandfather Horace Bowers, A Concerto Is a Conversation allows the elder Bowers to break down for his grandson the reason why his past drive has allowed his grandson to achieve.  Horace Bowers recounts the story of his early life on a plantation in Florida, his literal escape across the country to California, his search for employment that turned into business ownership, and how all of this inspired Kris to chase his dreams.  As an inspirational story and an opportunity for personal testimony in a historical context, the documentary certainly has value and impact, but may find itself happy to just be in the conversation among the likes of such heavy and emotional content.

Do Not Split (Field of Vision, dir. Anders Hammer) Best Documentary Short nominee

No matter what happens for Do Not Split in terms of award season success, this is a film that should not be ignored due to its current relevance on numerous levels.  First and foremost, we are given a glimpse into both modern protesting and modern policing, and how protestors have attempted to counter the militarization of police forces via the implementation of technology and guerilla tactics, which in turn shows viewers how chaos is formed when antiquated tactics are used in the information age.  We are also given a glimpse into how divided the world is becoming socio-politically, with this particular lens turned on the struggles of Hongkongers in China fighting to keep some sort of independence from the mainland while maintaining a true freedom of expression.  Based on political and power shifts surround China, Hong Kong and Great Britain, the common ground is already unstable, and Do Not Split gives insight into how the aforementioned freedom of speech is slowly being turned into a privilege based on class or ideology, rather than a universal right.  Viewers are also given education and context surrounding the 5 Demands, calls for political reformation, and the eventual National Security Law implemented during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.  While the score does teeter a bit on the overly-cinematic side, it does sell how drastic the situation is in Hong Kong.  Director Anders Hammer presents us with a documentary saturated in brutal truth that is captured in an intimate and unflinching manner.

Hunger Ward (MTv, dir. Skye Fitzgerald) Best Documentary Short nominee

The juxtaposition of aesthetic creative beauty and true life human tragedy never ceases to amaze me in terms of how compelling it can be, and Hunger Ward continues this tradition in terms of both technical prowess and subject matter.  The film is possibly the most traditional documentary of the bunch outside of Do Not Split, and while I doubt it had the budget of A Song for Latasha (which is my guess based solely on it being a Netflix project), it cannot be ignored how well composed and visceral nearly every shot is.  When it comes to the subject matter, the topic of malnutrition in Yemen is certainly jarring for the uninformed, and with the lack of resources available in the war-torn region due to the nearly decade long civil conflict, the stress and emotional wear and tear the volunteers is truly unimaginable.  Skye Fitzgerald steps back and takes a hard look at the situation in an observational manner, allowing the state of the malnourished victims and the stress of those attempting to care for them speak volumes.  The documentary is not an easy watch, but for anyone unaware of what life is like in a Third World country, it may be necessary in order to allow the broadening of world perspective to occur on a viewer by viewer basis.

A Love Song for Latasha (Netflix, dir. Sophia Nahli Allison) Best Documentary Short nominee

Lately, Netflix has been establishing itself as a force in the documentary world, and I believe part of this dominance has to do with the extremely cinematic recreations these documentaries use to depict events from the past.  Based on this observation, it makes total sense that Netflix would pick up A Love Song for Latasha, an ode to former South Central Los Angeles resident and race-based violence victim Latasha Harlins directed by Sophia Nahli Allison.  The death of Harlins, who was killed in the Empire Liquor Market just under two weeks after the beating of Rodney King, was a key element in the buildup to the L.A. riots, and normally when she is mentioned it is in this light.  What is great about Nahli Allison’s memorial documentary, however, is that we are given recollections and memories that not only humanize Latasha Harlins, but recontextualize the environment and interactions leading up to the riots in a way that can give outsiders a deeper understanding of why the race-based violence erupted on such a massive scale.  The stories are told in a testimonial manner rather than an interview style, very similar to the This Is Actually Happening podcast, and the method is a powerful companion to the artistic footage and animations that make up the visual stimulus.  The competition in this category is some of the fiercest of the night, but A Love Song for Latasha is a strong contender to bring an Oscar back home.

Feeling Through (Omeleto, dir. Doug Roland) Best Live-Action Short nominee

What a thought-provoking and compelling film, not to mention groundbreaking in ways that many possibly wouldn’t recognize, specifically the fact that casting DeafBlind actor Robert Tarango may mark the first occurrence of a DeafBlind actor in a leading role.  His extremely natural presence, physicality and innate spatial awareness would give one the sense that he is an actor simulating deafness and blindness well, and his chemistry with co-lead Steven Prescod is impossible to ignore.  Prescod’s Tereek characterization gives a tale of a homeless young man attempting to find a safe place to sleep for the night, which could make a compelling short film in itself, but his journey of discovery via his intense immersion and understanding into the world of Tarango’s Artie opens up avenues of sacrifice, self-discovery and humanitarian understanding that make accepting viewers better people at the completion of the short film than when they began it.  If we start to see the name of writer and director Doug Roland attached to major projects in the next few years, don’t be surprised, because if he has any ability to transition his knack for storytelling into the realm of the feature length film, we are all in for possible treats in the future.  For a deeper look into the process of making Feeling Through, and the real-life events that inspired the film, seek out the short behind the scenes documentary Connecting the Dots.

The Letter Room (Salaud Morisset, dir. Elvira Lind) Best Live-Action Short nominee

The Letter Room has a number of things going for it that make it crystal clear why it finds itself nominated for an Oscar.  First and foremost, to address the obvious, the inclusion of Oscar Isaac in anything immediately gives you a quality boost across the board, and Isaac is doing some of his nuanced best work in this short.  The film also looks absolutely great, with its cold and institutionalized look that is further hardened by the cold color temperature applied.  The character building done for Richard is immediate but impactful, as we learn he is observant, pensive, kind-hearted and motivated in relatively short order and in the natural flow of events.  The story is an engaging one that manages to present a number of emotional tones without having to resort to standard prison fare such as violence, sexual tension, terrorism, the exploitation of human labor and so on.  The score, in tandem with the vocal performances that accompany the letter text, transitions viewers into another world within the world of the film without us even realizing it.

The Present (Netflix, dir. Farah Nabulsi) Best Live-Action Short nominee

If one were pressed to find a palatable illustration of how trauma is formed by negative experiences that occur when young minds are most impressionable, I’d point them in the direction of The Present, a Palestinian short from from director Farah Nabulsi.  While crossing an Israeli border in hopes of finding his wife an anniversary present in Bethlehem, Yusef finds himself searched and detained, all in front of the eyes of his daughter Yasmine.  In the wake of the stressful event, Yusef attempts to complete his romantic gesture (not to mention supply his family with a much needed appliance upgrade) while continuing to be aware of his daughter’s extremely fragile emotional state.  In a short and efficient span of time, the narrative presented brings up thought-provoking reflections on humanity, authority and sensitivity with style and grace, which is all the more impressive when one realizes that the checkpoint scenes were shot verite’, guerilla style.  Like the other nominees in the Live-Action Short category, the appeal to humanity is extremely powerful, and it sticks with you long after the film is completed.

Two Distant Strangers (Netflix, dir. Travon Free, Martin Desmond Roe) Best Live-Action Short nominee

Of all the nominees for Best Live-Action Short, I can confidently say that Two Distant Strangers had the biggest direct impact on me.  Tension between the Police and Black Americans is certainly nothing new, with much of that tension having been baked into the origins of Police as a national institution created in response to newly freed slaves, but what really makes this film poignant is the timing, with 2020 showing absolutely no let-up in the occurrence of these incidents despite an on-going pandemic and shelter-in-place orders.  Using the formula made iconic by Groundhog Day, directors  Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe are able to make some striking points on how frustratingly impossible curbing these killings seems, no matter what one does on a personal or neighborly level to change things.  In displaying how fruitless the venture seems, we are indirectly reminded of the many, many incidents that have claimed the lives of Black Americans unjustly, only to be directly reminded by a credit crawl prior to the acting and production credits rolling.  If you find yourself struggling to understand the perspective of #BlackLivesMatter supporters, or even those who may not wholly agree with that specific movement but voice their very real concerns about being Black in America, a film like Two Distant Strangers can help put one into the state of mind that Black America finds so hard to make real for others.

[coyote-spark]

Inknatonoberwrivemober - Day 4: The Rovers

Plus a bonus sketch! I was watching Monster Fish on Netflix. Don’t know what Noodling is? You should totally Google it.

Day 1

Previous Episode

Next Episode: The Old Scientist

Story below (updated!):

A sharp knocking sound startled The Dreamer out of his sleep. Disoriented, he looked around, trying to find his bearings. He was no longer in the escape pod, that was certain. From the bed he could see he was in a small but cleanly furnished room, designed with natural flowing shapes. The design was very alien to him, but still lovely. 

The knock sounded again and he finally found his voice. "Yes? Who's there?"

A stern male voice from the other side spoke in a firm, matter-of-fact way, like a soldier delivering a report, "I am here to inform you that we will be landing shortly on the third moon of Hersirod to obtain supplies and make more substantial repairs. You may remain here if you wish."

Unsure of how to respond, The Dreamer stared at the closed door, still dazed. Finally, he stood and approached the door. "Okay... Well I have a few questions... Can you open this door for me?" he asked the voice on the other side. The ovular entryway slid open like an aperture to reveal a taller, broader, and slightly impatient-looking Mai'tonDahrian.

"Yes? What questions do you have?" he replied with a frown.

"Um... where... am I? ...Exactly?"

With a sigh, he responded, "You are on the Empress Shil'kaLáh’s personal cruise ship. She insisted on bringing you along for her journey to Galactic Central. You've been unconscious for several hours, and as I said before, we are approaching the third moon of Hersirod for a supply run."

The Dreamer seemed to soak in the information slowly, but he nodded. "How did I get here though? I guess that shrinky thing worked, huh?" He pointed to the glowing bracelet on his arm.

"Yes, of course it worked,” he replied tersely. “Those have been used for centuries. Some races don't respond well to the transformation and they pass out from the shock." The soldier, looking mildly irritated and even more impatient, continued: "Will you be joining us on the surface or not? I need to know soon so that I may assign an escort to you."

"Oh! Uh. Sure! I could really use some solid ground." The Dreamer glanced up at one of the large ovular windows in the hallway, which revealed a starry spacescape, slightly dimmed by the light of the approaching moon.

The soldier nodded curtly. "Very well. Please remain here until you are summoned." He then turned and strode briskly down the hallway and out of sight.

The Dreamer, all too curious and not keen on following orders, wandered down the hallway for a better view of their destination. He smiled in wonder as it grew ever larger. "Hersirod, huh? Never heard of it. This is going to be fun!"

After they landed, The Empress, along with the same guard and Lis'Andra (the engineer from before), summoned The Dreamer to accompany them, and the four departed the ship on foot.

They had touched down nearby some kind of compound in the middle of a dusty plain and they had hardly begun the trek to the main building when the ground began to rumble.

"W-what is th-that??" The Dreamer shouted in surprise, bracing himself.

The others frantically looked all around with their antennae up and alert, but no one responded. Suddenly, from the other side of a mountain, an enormous machine appeared and rolled toward them at an alarming speed.

The Dreamer froze in place. He had never seen anything this colossal move so quickly. Lis'Andra bolted immediately, heading for the ship. "NOPE. NOPE. I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS."

The guard assumed a defensive stance between The Empress and the approaching titan, ready to fight the monstrosity in the hopes that he could slow it down. The Empress turned to run, but when she spotted the still-frozen Dreamer she shouted, "THE BRACELET! Take it off!! You can stop that thing from crushing us and the ship if you return to your normal size!"

Shocked out of his paralysis, he stared at her for a moment, trying to comprehend what she was saying. "Bracelet...? OH!! THE BRACELET!!"

"Don't you dare pass out, human!" the guard shouted. 

With a snap, The Dreamer yanked off the bracelet and with a startling amount of force and speed, the ground seemed to drop out from under him as he shot upward. The others dove for cover from the resulting dust storm he kicked up, and with a dizzying lunge, The Dreamer hurled himself at what he could now identify as a rickety little rover. He tackled the thing to the ground and its wheels spun pathetically, trying to figure out where the horizon had gone.

The Dreamer let out a huge sigh of relief, swallowing back the wave of nausea that followed the sudden transformation. He looked over his shoulder in concern, just in time to see The Empress's light shine and the dust cloud blow away with some force. 

"You guys alright down there?" he asked, still holding down the struggling robot.

The guard helped The Empress to her feet and glared disapprovingly at Lis'Andra as she shuffled back to them in embarrassment. "Yes, I do believe we are all unharmed," he replied.

Seemingly from thin air, another voice screeched, "UNHARMED?? UNHARMED, YOU SAY?? I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU APPEARED OUT OF THIN AIR LIKE THAT, BUT RELEASE MY ROVER IMMEDIATELY, YOU VAGABONDS! YOU... YOU... HOOLIGANS! I'VE HAD IT WITH YOUR DELINQUENT PRANKS!"

The three Mai'tonDahrians clamped their hands over their ears and grimaced, and The Dreamer nearly jumped out of his skin. He stared in shock at the rover, which was still struggling for freedom. 

"...Pranks...?"

[verdigrisprowl]

Oct 5 random movie night - Poriot: Five Little Pigs

Prowl’s mad at himself for not picking up enough of the clues, even though he picked up a damn lot of them and had the actual solution as one of the theories he was juggling. This did not stop him from flirting with Soundwave.

They ended the night by cuddling in Soundwave’s room.

Today ItsyBitsySpyers 8:40 pm ((back in JUST a jiffy)) ItsyBitsySpyers 8:44 pm ((OKAY r u ready)) ItsyBitsySpyers 8:48 pm ((it working now?)) FakeProwl 8:48 pm ((think so!)) ItsyBitsySpyers 8:48 pm ((i am sorry for crappy YT quality but they took 'em off netflix 😐 )) FakeProwl 8:49 pm ((alas)) ((YT will do)) ItsyBitsySpyers 8:50 pm *Anyway. Soundwave is nice and comfortable on their usual couch, though that space is the only one there this time. His legs are stretched across it; Prowl is welcome to wiggle beneath them and have a lapful or push them to the floor as he pleases* *He may or may not also be nibbling straight off a little bar of silver because he can.* FakeProwl 8:51 pm *Exactly at the appointed time, Nova Prime appears.* *And looks down at himself in confusion.* ... What. ItsyBitsySpyers 8:51 pm *Aaaand that's him jolting upright in some alarm* (txt): Bonecrusher? FakeProwl 8:52 pm Oh. Hold on. *NOW it's Prowl.* He left his art project as the default setting. ItsyBitsySpyers 8:52 pm *Slow, slow squint.*

(txt): ...Prove this: Prowl. FakeProwl 8:53 pm ... For starters, I'm not paranoidly watching every camera in the room. Or you, for that matter. Well—I mean—I AM looking at you, but not paranoidly. ItsyBitsySpyers 8:55 pm *Soundwave relaxes and nods, resettling himself. He gestures to Prowl's usual space, satisfied.*

(txt): His fate: deserved. However, note: Prowl lacks full camera location knowledge.

*Quiet huff.* FakeProwl 8:56 pm This is true. I could use "antidisestablishmentarianism" correctly in a sentence? ItsyBitsySpyers 8:56 pm *............*

(txt): ...Proceed. FakeProwl 8:56 pm *His usual space is occupied by legs. Is he supposed to go under or over them? After a moment of thought, gently sits down on them.* ItsyBitsySpyers 8:57 pm *You know what, he'll take that for now. It's an avatar anyway, it's not like it's going to do him much damage.* FakeProwl 9:04 pm Despite what philosophical scholarship such as that penned by Beachcomber of Ibex might suggest, not ALL early-war Autobot antidisestablishmentarianist rhetoric was from the religiously faithful who were enraged that the newest Prime did not explicitly endorse the exact same Primalist scriptures that the Senate had, nor indeed any given scripture or sect at all; instead, a statistically significant amount of the criticism lobbied at Prime came not from the religiously faithful at all, but from atheistic bots who believed that, because so much of the Prime's legitimacy came from the Matrix's socioreligious role in society and the associated role of its bearer, refusing to endorse the same mythologies that grant the Prime sovereign power would weaken his legitimacy in the eyes of those that DO believe in said mythologies, thus potentially crippling his support base just when he needed it most at the outset of an already divisive war. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:06 pm *Soundwave's optics widen as Prowl keeps talking, up until the midway point of the speech, at which point they crinkle up again in a growing smile.* FakeProwl 9:06 pm ... I used "antidisestablishmentarianist" instead of "antidisestablishmentarianism." Partial credit? ItsyBitsySpyers 9:07 pm *And it just got about twice as big.* (txt): Partial credit granted.

*Because he caught himself before Soundwave could pick out the letter change for fun.*

(txt): More lectures wanted, in future. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:09 pm (txt): Before movie: started, single question. Prowl's stance? FakeProwl 9:09 pm You can have them. *He's going attempt to lean over onto Soundwave. Hold on.* FakeProwl 9:12 pm I'm with the atheists who believe it was bad propaganda. When seventeen percent of the Autobots, give or take eleven percent, follow the Prime MAINLY because their religious beliefs command it, said Prime is an idiot for telling them their beliefs "carry no greater weight than any other belief, or even no belief at all." Never mind the fact that it's true, it's also a good way to lose the loyalty of potentially up to twenty-five percent of your soldiers. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:17 pm (txt): If Soundwave: Autobot, that: expected personal stance. However, Soundwave: ex-Decepticon. Current Prime office form still disliked. Disillusioned mechs: welcome then, now. That, return answer.

*Because it was fair to offer one.* *And now if Prowl has somehow managed to get himself leaned up,*

(txt): This, not previewed. Solution: unknown, events: unknown. Prowl: ready? FakeProwl 9:18 pm Ah yes, there's that, too. Disillusioned Autobots make future Decepticons. Hold on. *He's completing the slow, awkward process of leaning against Soundwave's torso.* There. I think. Ready. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:19 pm (txt): Some, neutrals.

*Wait. It needs an arm. NOW it's ready.*

(txt): Acknowledged. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:21 pm (txt): ...Solution: first? FakeProwl 9:21 pm ... I'm going to bet she was innocent of whatever crime she was hung for. Mainly because that's how these stories usually go. Hm? ItsyBitsySpyers 9:22 pm (txt): Prowl's point: reasonable. Disregard comment. FakeProwl 9:22 pm And it DID say "fourteen years later." ((can we turn on the subtitles?)) ItsyBitsySpyers 9:23 pm ((that's why they're not on heh)) FakeProwl 9:23 pm ((fair)) ((that's right. youtube.)) ItsyBitsySpyers 9:24 pm ((these are close enough i suppose)) FakeProwl 9:24 pm ((im amazed when they line up)) ItsyBitsySpyers 9:27 pm (txt): Prowl enjoys... phrase uncertain. Iced cases? FakeProwl 9:27 pm Cold cases. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:27 pm (txt): Cold cases. FakeProwl 9:29 pm They're frustrating, usually. Very satisfying when they're solved, but only because they usually AREN'T solved. But I like them just fine in mystery stories, because stories come with a guarantee that they WILL be solved. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:31 pm (txt): Perhaps Soundwave seeks film without answer. Then, Prowl's insight: fascinating. FakeProwl 9:32 pm Oh, don't. I can't stand mysteries without solutions. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:33 pm *He holds a hand up.*

(txt): Prowl's insight: always fascinating. That, more. However, request: acknowledged. FakeProwl 9:35 pm ... Mmmaybe someday. If you tell me first it's going to be one without a solution. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:35 pm *Nods. He'd only meant to clarify his earlier thought, not to wheedle, but so noted.* ItsyBitsySpyers 9:38 pm (txt): Presumptuous. FakeProwl 9:38 pm Very. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:39 pm *And yet intriguing. He can't resist a good tangle of problems.* FakeProwl 9:40 pm The friend calls the wife unpleasant, but it seems to me like she has a fair reason to be. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:41 pm (txt): Agreed. This, not amicable arrangement. Permission never given, nothing discussed. Reaction: fair. FakeProwl 9:41 pm Indeed. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:41 pm (txt): Own arrangement appreciation: increased. FakeProwl 9:42 pm Mm. *Slides arm around Soundwave.* ItsyBitsySpyers 9:43 pm *Hm, comfortable.* FakeProwl 9:44 pm We see her with the bottle, but not the glasses. The judge said the poison was in the glass, correct? We don't see how the glasses were dispersed. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:45 pm (txt): In glass, pipette, not bottle. FakeProwl 9:46 pm ... I think he's figured something out. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:46 pm (txt): Early, if true. Perhaps more confirmation wanted? FakeProwl 9:46 pm Perhaps. Or perhaps he's figured out something, but not everything. ... Well, THAT'S suspicious. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:47 pm (txt): ...Would refuse suspect drink. ((LMFAO THEY SAID OMG)) FakeProwl 9:48 pm ((they translated "oh -- YES)) ItsyBitsySpyers 9:51 pm *Every once in a while he has to admire a human's efforts to manipulate someone else. This approaches that mark.* *But doesn't quite cross. Too obvious, too loud.* FakeProwl 9:52 pm ... I think your first assessment was correct. Presumptuous. I don't think she WAS going to get him. And I bet that statement she says she overheard—that he was going to marry her—was a lie. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:53 pm (txt): What reason? FakeProwl 9:54 pm The way she commented that the wife stayed so calm. I bet it's actually because she knew he wasn't going to leave. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:55 pm *Points at the screen*

(txt): No glass interruption. FakeProwl 9:55 pm "Glass interruption"? I saw that the wife poured the glass. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:56 pm (txt): Liquid in bottle, into glass. Where poison implement? FakeProwl 9:57 pm A good question. ItsyBitsySpyers 9:59 pm *Amused puff* FakeProwl 10:00 pm Hm. Perhaps she meant to kill the girl. FakeProwl 10:03 pm ... If he thinks she took it then, then why did he get up during the night to check? FakeProwl 10:06 pm (("OMG")) ItsyBitsySpyers 10:07 pm (txt): Noise. However, obvious possibility: open window, theft related. Overlook not understood. (txt): Guilt: muddling. FakeProwl 10:08 pm Indeed. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:08 pm (txt): Also not understood: reason judge, jury overlooked. One person, easy. All? Strange. *And not good for his opinion of human intelligence overall* FakeProwl 10:11 pm Occam's razor. If all the evidence appears to point toward one suspect, the trial will focus on the apparently relevant details. FakeProwl 10:12 pm That would APPEAR to cast suspicion on Angela, but Angela only had the bottle, not the cups. FakeProwl 10:16 pm ... Hm. Another possibility: she was cleaning up the evidence to protect someone else. She wouldn't want to protect one of his friends, or the girl. Perhaps her sister. FakeProwl 10:19 pm HE said "it was a joke." HE didn't think he was going to marry her. FakeProwl 10:21 pm Whether or not the sister did do it, the wife thought she did it. Which is why she sent her away. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:22 pm *Taps his fingers, thinking. Hopefully Prowl won't mind, since it's on his arm.* FakeProwl 10:23 pm ... Possibly. *He's not going to conclude anything.* FakeProwl 10:25 pm *Sighs.* He said he solves cases by psychology. If THAT'S what the solution is going to be, rather than evidence, then I won't get it. FakeProwl 10:27 pm See? How did he figure that out. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:27 pm ((omg i was trying to word something on soundwave what was it)) FakeProwl 10:28 pm ((poirot figured out by some magic that meredith hit on elsa after the trial)) ItsyBitsySpyers 10:32 pm ((do you want a moment for last minute thought working out?)) FakeProwl 10:32 pm ((nah)) ItsyBitsySpyers 10:33 pm *Soundwave jerks a little* (txt): Herself. FakeProwl 10:33 pm Either the sister did it or she at least thought her sister did it. FakeProwl 10:34 pm ... He wasn't packing Angela's things, it was Elsa's? Was Angela's name mentioned? ... Bottle. She didn't know it was in the— dammit. I should have picked up on that. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:36 pm (txt): Soundwave also missed. FakeProwl 10:37 pm You're not a forensic investigator. FakeProwl 10:39 pm All that in the letter I got, just fine. But it only says the wife thinks the sister did it. I got that. But I should have picked up that she wiped the bottle. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:39 pm *....TAP TAP TAP* [][][]Everything tastes foul today[][][] FakeProwl 10:40 pm It could be literally foul or he could be speaking metaphorically. What's the significance? Ah. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:41 pm (txt): What other, "everything"? FakeProwl 10:41 pm ... But I still don't know who actually did it. I should know by now. Yes. Yes—I picked up that he wasn't going to leave his wife. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:44 pm (txt): That, also predicted. FakeProwl 10:44 pm Yes. It was. FakeProwl 10:45 pm THAT bit of evidence was a stretch. The fact that she was in the right direction to see a theft doesn't mean automatically that she did see it. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:47 pm *Is pleased with his one notice, late as it was* FakeProwl 10:50 pm ... So self-absorbed. She murders two people and talks about what a wounded victim she is. FakeProwl 10:51 pm Not shooting her was... the correct decision. But she could have at least decked her across the face. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:51 pm (txt): Should. FakeProwl 10:55 pm ... The true story was one I theorized. But I didn't assign it a high enough probability soon enough. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:55 pm (txt): Outcome: pleasing. Elsa human's guilt: not passed. If trial, amends demanded. If not, name: smeared, Caroline's torment: shared. Satisfying. ItsyBitsySpyers 10:58 pm (txt): Understandable. Prowl stated psychology not own forte. FakeProwl 10:58 pm No. But there was evidence I should have picked up on. I didn't catch the bottle. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:03 pm (txt): Prowl: without practice, oiling skills again. Today, already improvement.

*He'd been a bit of all over the place last time, constantly picking up little things but never settling on any one. Except the drugged bottle, which was on the nose.* FakeProwl 11:04 pm ... I didn't think I'd ever stopped practicing. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:09 pm (txt): Practice access: reduced. Few cases within apartment, on-site. Last -personal- recollection... torn piece, Lost Light after hours. Closet incident result. FakeProwl 11:10 pm *mumble* Wouldn't mind more of THAT practice. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:10 pm [][][]My pistons may be rusty, but my hearing is sharp as ever![][][] FakeProwl 11:12 pm I take it back if Ratchet is coming along. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:12 pm (txt): Negative! ItsyBitsySpyers 11:15 pm (txt): Limited offer, collection location: nearest Soundwave. (txt): Limit: Prowl. FakeProwl 11:16 pm I think I meet that criterium. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:20 pm (txt): Recommendation: Prowl turns, unless lick wanted instead. Soundwave's mouth: here. *Lifts a free hand to tap his own chin with a finger. Tink tink tink behind Prowl.* FakeProwl 11:22 pm ... That's a difficult choice. *That said, though, he shifts around to face Soundwave, and leans in to kiss him.* ItsyBitsySpyers 11:27 pm *Good, because another moment and he would have started thinking about ways to amuse himself in that sense.*

*Soundwave tugs Prowl down and snatches that kiss up for himself without a moment's hesitation. A short one, followed by a brief break for tiny nibbles down to Prowl's chin, and then something a little more enthusiastic. Yes. Good.* ItsyBitsySpyers 11:29 pm *...You know, if this is what happens when he tries to solve murders with Prowl, he might've spent his life in the wrong line of work.* FakeProwl 11:30 pm *Prowl gladly leans into the kissing, tilting his helm to give Soundwave better access to his jaw and chin (and neck, should he care to venture that far). Soundwave may be pleased to discover that the strut structure under Prowl's face and the facial mesh texture on top is MUCH more realistic now.* ItsyBitsySpyers 11:39 pm *May, nothing. He's delighted - as Prowl may be able to tell by the fact that Soundwave's attention keeps wandering to different places so he can test it all out. Or the one mandible that's unlatched itself and keeps tapping Prowl's cheek every time it has the opportunity.*

(txt): Not squishy. Closer...

*The smallest puff. He quickly gathers himself again and nudges under Prowl's jaw to prick at the cables there with his pincers. He's almost sorry he tormented Bonecrusher, if this is what the mech's been up to.* *Not quite. Just almost.* FakeProwl 11:39 pm *Hook helped.* ItsyBitsySpyers 11:40 pm *Someone remind him to send Hook copies of Remedy's rarer medical texts.* FakeProwl 11:44 pm *Prowl is going to try to lean against that mandible every time he gets. He stretches his neck again as Soundwave relocates to the cables, nuzzling his cheek against Soundwave's crest.* It should almost all be accurate now. Hook said the only struts that still need adjusting are mainly the ones in control of fine facial expressions, so I told him to worry about those last. ItsyBitsySpyers 11:53 pm *Soundwave lets a soft rumble slip out at the nuzzle, already imagining the feeling of it in a half-dozen other places, some of which are more innocent than others.*

*But the little voice he's been trying to ignore simultaneously whispers in his audial, reminding him that this means the only other thing keeping Prowl from living as an avatar forever is reduced physical sensation.*

*He suddenly stops biting and pulls Prowl in as tight as he can, going so far as to squeeze with his legs as well.*

(txt): Soundwave:... happy Prowl likes changes.

*They don't have time for him to say more. He'll just have to take this form of closeness while he still has it.* FakeProwl 11:54 pm *... Something changed, and Prowl's not sure what or why.* In... in general, or specifically in my face? In general I wouldn't actually say I like changes all that much, but... ItsyBitsySpyers 11:56 pm (txt): Face, avatar. FakeProwl 11:58 pm Ah. Yes. ... Do YOU like them? Yesterday FakeProwl 11:59 pm It's my face, but I don't exactly touch my own face very much, the upgrades are more—er—not—not for my own benefit, per se. ItsyBitsySpyers 12:05 am (txt): Soundwave likes consideration, sensation, Prowl, Prowl's comfort, physical access. Avatar importance, symbolism: understood.

*Leans back enough to look Prowl's helm over and trace one side with his fingers, optics darting from this feature to that.*

(txt): Soundwave - also likes real Prowl. Liked first. ... Misses.

*He shakes his helm.*

(txt): Difficult subject. Longer. Additional time needed. Tonight, this preferred. FakeProwl 12:10 am *Prowl's face stills, ever so slightly.* ... It's a spare part for Devastator. This is closer to the "real Prowl" than that is. FakeProwl 12:11 am Anyway, the intellect, deductive reasoning skills, and personality that you curiously don't find insufferable are all the same. *He leans against Soundwave's hand.* And that's all here. I'm here. ItsyBitsySpyers 12:17 am *But that's not everything he - well.*

(txt): Soundwave knows.

*He'll bring this up again later, when they can spare... a couple of hours, probably. For the moment, he wants to rest with those things Prowl listed instead of ending their night on a bad note, and Prowl said he should do what he wants more often.*

(txt): Come. Join upstairs. FakeProwl 12:18 am All right. *Expects he's going to be carried through a bridge again, so wraps his arms over Soundwave's shoulders and prepares to be lifted.* ItsyBitsySpyers 12:19 am *He huffs through a kiss to Prowl's chevron, silently thankful Prowl isn't the telepath here, and twist-rolls them off the couch and onto his feet. Through a bridge it is, if only because Prowl already prepared for it, and to the berth.* ItsyBitsySpyers 12:21 am *For once, he might try to settle himself as the one being held instead of holding or snoozing face down.* FakeProwl 12:21 am *Prowl will be happy to accommodate.* ItsyBitsySpyers 12:21 am *So be it, and defrag dreams that are neither giddy nor nightmarish.*

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 14th July 2019 (Post Malone, Young Thug, Lizzo, Dave)

Top 10

This week, we actually have a new number-one, but I find it hard to be invested in “Senorita” by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello hitting the top after moving up one spot from last week, especially because their limelight will be taken back by Ed Sheeran next week with the No. 6 Collaborations Project, although again, Sheeran has ran himself into a corner if he wants an album bomb (None of his singles released between “BLOW” and “Antisocial” could have possibly charted in the UK). This is Mendes’ second UK #1, his first since “Stitches” in 2015, and Cabello’s second as well, her first since “Havana”. It shouldn’t matter, it’ll be Ed’s next week.

After eight weeks at #1 since its debut, “I Don’t Care” by Ed Sheeran featuring Justin Bieber, a pretty pathetic song in my opinion but far from the worst on the project, is now down one spot to number-two. Once again, it’ll rebound, and if it doesn’t, there’ll be a Sheeran debut to replace both this and “Senorita” pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah, speaking of an Ed, “Beautiful People” featuring Khalid has surprisingly kept steady from its debut last week at number-three.

“Hold Me While You Wait” by Lewis Capaldi is up a single spot to number-four... why?

We also have our first and only top 10 debut, “Goodbyes” by Post Malone at number-five, featuring a verse from... Young Thug. I couldn’t tell you if this is Young Thug’s anything since his Wikipedia discography page is incredibly uncooperative, but this is Post Malone’s tenth UK Top 40 hit and seventh UK Top 10. We’ll talk more about it later, and I have some things to say about it to say the least.

“Crown” by Stormzy takes a two-space hit down to number-six.

Somehow, whilst now assisted by a (Pretty bad) remix with Young Thug and Mason Ramsey, the kid who yodelled in Walmart a couple years back, and a new animated music video about Area 51, “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas  X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, etc. is still at number-seven for like the fourth week in a row. We’ll see if this is in freefall or not next week.

Oh, and “Cross Me” by Ed Sheeran featuring Chance the Rapper and PNB Rock is down two spaces to number-eight. Whether this means it’ll rebound or be completely replaced by another Sheeran track like “Antisocial” or probably “Take Me Back to London”, again, we’ll find out next week.

“Wish You Well” by Sigala and Becky Hill isn’t moving at number-nine.

Finally, Mabel’s “Mad Love” has dipped down two spaces to #10 but I don’t think this is the end of this song, this can be a genuine summer smash; it fits all the requirements.

Climbers

We have a couple of climbers within the UK Top 40 but not many and none of these are even all that good. I mean, I’m not complaining about “Higher Love” by Kygo and Whitney Houston jumping up ten spaces to #26. Oh, yeah, and by not many I meant none at all, this is the only climber above five spaces in the entire UK Top 40.

Fallers

We have a lot more of these, though; in fact we have plenty here to talk about. “Kilos” by Bugzy Malone featuring Aitch is once again down ten spaces, this time to #40, so sadly Bugzy doesn’t get that summer hit he was expected to reach in terms of longevity but I’m sure a top 20 hit will look good down the line, and we should be thankful it didn’t drop out from the debut entirely, because honestly I expected it to. Elsewhere at #33, “Summer Days” by Martin Garrix, Macklemore and Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy (Yes, that’s how it’s been credited since release) is down seven spaces, nearing “Piece of Your Heart” by MEDUZA and Goodboys at #32, down eight spots from last week. Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” is slowly making its way out now, down five to #23, with Drake’s “Money in the Grave” featuring Rick Ross doing the same, but prematurely at #22. Otherwise, yeah, there’s not much to speak of here, so let’s move on.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

There’s one drop out here that’s gone from the top 75 here and it’s unfortunate but seems to be because of streaming cuts, and it’s “Guten Tag” by Hardy Caprio and DigDat, out from #35 after nine weeks, but it had its run and never really exploded as much as it could have, but again, top 20 hit for a week, nobody’s complaining, The biggest fall otherwise is “If I Can’t Have You” by Shawn Mendes which probably also had that streaming cut in its tenth week, falling out from #19. Elsewhere, “Don’t Check on Me” by Chris Brown featuring Justin Bieber and Ink is out from the debut at #29, “Easier” by 5 Seconds of Summer is finally out from #37 and the deplorable “Heaven” by the late Avicii featuring Chris Martin is out from #39. Oh, and “Giant” by Calvin Harris and Rag’n’Bone Man is out from #40 AGAIN. It’ll be back next week or in a couple of weeks, but its chart run has been pretty interesting to follow recently. There aren’t any returning entries, so let’s get straight to the new arrivals.

NEW ARRIVALS

#37 – “Truth Hurts” – Lizzo

Produced by Ricky Reed and Tele – Peaked at #5 in New Zealand and #6 in the US

Our first two new arrivals are songs that are at least two years old and are just now charting for various reasons, and I’m just glad the UK Top 40 has no recurrent rule because there are some chart moments that could never happen in the US without Billboard getting a bit stingy and inconsistent about what’s allowed and what’s not. This song in particular was dropped in 2017 with a music video and didn’t exactly make waves, mostly because Lizzo wasn’t as known but she does well critically (And did at the time too with her two studio albums she abandoned once she blew up and the image changed), and it was never planned to be on an album. When the song was featured in a Netflix film, Something Great, it clicked with audiences, who would later use it as a TikTok meme because of course they did, and then it replaced “Juice” as the promoted single. Viral sleeper hits from years ago in your career breaking out in the midst of an album cycle is naturally pretty awkward. Anyways, this eventually debuted at #50 on the Hot 100 and became an unexpected massive worldwide smash for the rapper-singer, becoming a US Top 10 hit and now entering here in the UK charts, becoming her second UK Top 40 single after “Juice”. And now for the song itself, I’ll try and keep it brief because I don’t have much to say about it. My stance for now is that it’s pretty good, I like the gliding strings and synths that build up to a pretty fun drop, especially with Lizzo’s vocals and lyrics, which are about boy problems but in a way that’s very sassy and seems oddly personal, directed to someone from Detroit, who she replaced with someone on the Minnesota Vikings team. Some of these punchlines are pretty witty and especially well-delivered with her messy, off-key singing and constantly shifting flow, often with janky overlap between bars. The chorus is really catchy, like it’s not “Baby Shark” level infectious but it’s up there, especially with the little backing vocals accentuating the lyrics. I like the voice cracks in the second verse, and it demonstrates a point where I have an issue with the song, but that may be the point. For a song that seems so confident and full of braggadocio, everything around it wants you to think it’s a lot less stable, with synths that kind of just glide in, the off-key singing, and the badly-mixed trap percussion that’s especially noticeable when watching the video. That could be really clever as it shows the lyrics are mostly a front to cover how pained Lizzo is after this break-up, or maybe I’m completely over-thinking a trap-rap song about being “100% that b****”. Probably that one.

#36 – “Thiago Silva” – Dave and AJ Tracey

Produced by 169

Now, this is a less gradual rise to popularity. It was released all the way back in May 2016 by the two UK rappers who have later blown up and made separate names for themselves. It didn’t get much notice in the mainstream because of course it didn’t, it was 2016. British hip hop was only starting to get more chart presence, and the general public isn’t going to gravitate to two newcomers without an album out at the time, more likely a legacy artist who makes safer variations of grime and trap. Nevertheless, Dave and AJ Tracey are now pretty massive, so their collaborative single from three years ago was later certified Silver (No pun intended) in December of last year, and eventually charted because of a viral performance from Glastonbury 2019, where in the June festival, because AJ Tracey couldn’t make it, Dave called up a fan called Alex who knew all of the lyrics to recite them with Dave. He killed it, did an incredibly awkward interview on Good Morning Britain afterwards, and here we are, with Dave’s twelfth UK Top 40 hit and AJ Tracey’s sixth. I have no idea who Thiago Silva is or what his prominence is, but I know he’s a Brazillian footballer and that the song isn’t actually about Thiago Silva, it’s actually surprisingly generic coming from Dave, but you shouldn’t expect much substance from a grime track made for clubs, and he still has his typical puns that are almost so awful that they tread the line between being so bad it’s good and just circling back around to being awful again.

True say, I ain’t really a drinker / But I got love for brandy like Ray J

The beat is a re-work of influential grime group Ruff Sqwad’s song “Pied Piper”, and I always like when artists of a similar genre call upon some of the works that inspired them for samples... the instrumental takes that low-fidelity sample, add some bumping 808s and trading verses from Dave and AJ. AJ Tracey kills it, and you can tell he was perfectly prepared for “Ladbroke Grove” years later, because he knows how to flow on a grime beat, and actually sounds quite professional. You can’t really blame Dave since he’s very young at the time this was recorded and released, but his verses all suck here, his performance overall is often somewhat off-beat, and sounds really janky anyway, mostly because of how it’s mixed (Badly, if you couldn’t figure that out) and how Dave isn’t recognisable, he sounds like AJ a lot of the time and switches through a lot of different simple flows and cadences without ever keeping his character. The lyrical content is nothing to speak of either. I wish I liked this a lot more, to be honest, but it’s not bad at all.

#34 – “Castles” – Freya Ridings

Produced by Dan Nigro, Mark Crew, Dan Priddy and Yves Rothman – Peaked at #3 in Scotland

Remember Freya Ridings? I sure don’t, she’s boring and unrecognisable from a set of “genuine, down-to-earth” singers, and not just female singers; she’s very much from the same strand of bore as Lewis Capaldi. Her last two singles, including UK Top 10 hit “Lost Without You”, were pretty, I guess, and that’s the main reason I tend to give her a pass over Capaldi – her singles actually sound decently produced and competent, despite overly breathy singing and mostly consisting of a few piano notes and string loops. Her writing isn’t recognisable at all as I said and she doesn’t have a signature style, but she doesn’t need to be. Just deliver it well, and that’s all that should matter, but she’s not convincing. She’s also not everywhere like Capaldi, so I guess that explains my preference. Anyway, this is her second UK Top 40 hit and I don’t care. It’s cut from the same cloth as a lot of indie-rock, which I’m surprised by, but it lacks any weight and gut, it feels like it doesn’t have much grandiosity in its production as a build-up until that chorus comes in, and to be fair to her and her writers, it’s a pretty incredible chorus. I feel like Ridings’ vocals aren’t mixed all too well, they’re a bit quiet until they become multi-tracked in the pre-chorus. That’s enough complaining though, because honestly this is a pretty good song. The use of Ridings’ vocal runs as a synth that goes from the left to right channel in the post-chorus is inspired, the addition of the children’s choir is nonsensical but as a kiss-off that is not grounded at all, hell, I’d be surprised if Freya Ridings literally didn’t build a castle out of this guy’s love, or whatever she’s saying, she has a bit of indie girl enunciation syndrome. Overall, it takes a while to get going and there a couple of nitpicks but this is pretty above average at least and it might grow on me.

#20 – “Home P***y” – D-Block Europe

Produced by Pro Beats

These guys suck. Young Adz and Dirtbike LB, because, yes, those are their names, are pretty painfully bad singers covered in cheap auto-tune with bland trap or Afroswing beats leased off of YouTube, and have a name as a collective that they’ll probably have to legally change after Article 50 kicks in. I don’t hate these people directly, obviously, but their music bothers me mostly because British hip hop is peaking right now in critical acclaim and popularity, and there’s a bunch of these no-names like B Young and Aitch taking advantage of that. Aitch has charisma and unwarranted enthusiasm, B Young is an awful songwriter and is unintentionally pretty hilarious because of that... so what do these dudes have? Anyway, this is their third UK Top 40 hit (Second UK Top 20) and I feel like I should explain the name first, and that’s because this song is about getting all types of girls as you’re on the road touring, but the sex from your girlfriend, or alternatively, from people in your hometown, keeps you “safe”. That’s kind of creepy and also kind of... sweet(?), but who cares? This is trash appealing to the lowest common denominator with barely any thought put into it that’ll be out of the charts in four weeks and that’s being generous. What’s funny enough here to mock then? Well, they start the song with “This ain’t no love song, this is a thug song”, in a childish inflection with a lot of reverb as if it’s some kind of dramatic profound quote, before he makes an incoherent noise and the producer tag shows up, and it’s one of those tags you can get for cheap, I imagine, it’s that robotic female voice you hear on a lot of no-name producer tags. The way Young Adz says anything is in a very childish manner, so it’s always really odd when he says he’s got hitters, or just the words “home p***y” in general. It fits when he’s shouting “skrrt skrrt” ad-libs over the whole track, because his multi-tracked vocals clip and there are no dynamics here at all. Dirtbike LB gives up his rhyme scheme with an Auto-Tuned moan two bars into his verse. Here are some stupid lyrics.

This the last time but not the last time like befooooooooooore

Is that a sentence?

Talkin’ on the net, you’ve got a voice now?

Why are you angry? It’s a sex song about people you trust, why would you go off on women you don’t trust? This is a pretty toxic attitude to have too, that people can’t speak up about relationships after they’ve ended because they stayed quiet and subservient throughout, and that’s not just women, that can be anyone in a relationship.

I hate your friends, I think they’re fake, I hope they all down

Oh, Jesus, okay, well, on that note, I’ve got to stop talking smack about Young Adz.

#11 – “So High” – MIST and Fredo

Produced by Preditah

Okay, this is another trading-bars cut from two British rappers that are very similar musically and in terms of media personality, image, popularity/status and everything else. Essentially, this is our third twin-rap cut that debuted in the Top 40 today, and it’s MIST’s second UK Top 40, first Top 20 and highest-peaking song ever, as well as Fredo’s sixth UK Top 40 and third Top 20. I’m not expecting this to be anything good but I am expecting it to be much more professional in comparison to our last song, and I’m really not surprised that I have next to nothing to say about this song, like at all. It’s not bad, and I love how Fredo flips Fred Gibson’s “Fred again” producer tag in his voice, with the vocal sample acting as the refrain being actually pretty crisp, but MIST is kind of off-beat and the lyrical content is really uninteresting, it’s about treating a woman right but still being a boss or whatever, I don’t know, it feels very much like an early-mid 2000s rap/R&B fusion. I don’t care, though, because I can’t tell MIST and Fredo from each other and wow, this write-up is short.

#5 – “Goodbyes” – Post Malone featuring Young Thug

Produced by Brian Lee and Louis Bell – Peaked at #1 in Belgium and #3 in the US

This is the new surprise smash single from Post Malone, “Goodbyes”, and I said on Twitter the day this was released that it was exactly what I expected from Post as I follow his career path, becoming less of a trap-R&B crooner and much more of a massive pop star who incorporates a lot of hip-hop flows into his brand of depressing, alcohol-induced bouts of strained vocal performances, as well as trap percussion into his often kind of bubblegum pop hits. He hasn’t walked too far away from trap yet, so I think this is where he takes himself away from the SoundCloud rap scene he burst out from, as he uses somewhat of a rap flow in the verses but it is definitely infused with melodic inflections and some syllable-stuttering that reminds me of an awful emo-pop or pop punk song that Post probably would have been into.

Me and Kurt feel the same / Too much pleasure is pain

Yeah, emo-rap guys tend to cite Kurt Cobain although I see more resemblance in Sum 41 than I do Nirvana or any grunge band for that matter. “Need to take off the e-e-edge,” “I’m addic—I’m addicted to you”, it’s one in the same. Anyway, after an unnecessary bout of silence, the song starts with some wavy, dreamy synths, before Post comes in with that “rap” flow that sounds great in that raspy voice he can put on, but that pre-chorus that slowly quiets down and drifts off at the end of each line is perfect as it shows a muddled mindset when a break-up happens, and that’s why some of the lyrics here are janky or even toxic, it’s the initial jerk reaction and all of the awful flaws that Post can think of are coming up at once because he’s confused and just wants this woman out as soon as possible so he doesn’t do something on impulse that can be dangerous, and he knows that he’s not in a place where he’s safe and he could hurt someone, he’s mentally unstable, and is almost scared for the girl he’s breaking up with, which is all heavily implied by the chorus, which by the way when that hi-hat kicks in and later the sub-bass with the contrasting synth melody, oh, man, that’s great. The drop is effective too, and I love how Post flip-flops tonally, from the silly e-e-edge refrains to precision f-strikes in such a way that is as messy as the relationship. God, and then Thugger comes in. Now, I thought he was jarring at first but after having this in rotation, oh my God, this verse is incredible. Thugger’s verse is more generic about these struggles and uses some... questionable language about slicing and dicing this woman, but those first two lines are perfect.

I want you out of my life / I want you back here tonight

It demonstrates greatly in an almost bipolar fashion how unstable this relationship and by extension, Post himself, is in this song, and pretty much sums the whole song up. Then Thugger starts belting about not wanting her to turn the TV off because he’s watching a fight, because, he’s Young Thug. The way he just yells all this mundane problems he has with this woman is cathartic in a way I didn’t initially expect it to be, and it’s actually really powerful, especially that last “YEA YEA YEAH”. It’s a bit dodgy structure-wise, though, and the mixing is actually pretty awful, with the trap percussion sounding quite cheap, Post’s wailing sometimes being overproduced, the clipping on nearly every instrument here showing how rushed it was and it’s essentially unfinished mixing and mastering-wise, but God this is a perfect song otherwise. I love this, I hope it gets a remix but when everything’s peaking in the mix, honestly, it might just add to the power of the lyrics. I’ll be talking about this more in my best list, I’ll elaborate then.

Conclusion

It should be pretty obvious that Best of the Week is going to Post Malone and Young Thug for “Goodbyes”, with Honourable Mention being Freya Ridings’ this week for “Castles”. I know, I’m surprised too, but it’s slim pickings and while I think “Truth Hurts” is probably a better song, I want to shout out the lesser-known song. My goal here is to talk about British pop music critically because there’s not many people who do as regularly as I do, and honestly I’ll be biased to British artists due to this. Lizzo is still cool though. Worst of the Week goes to D-Block Europe for “Home P***y”, with Dishonourable Mention going to... okay, well, there’s none this week and the Honourable Mention is tied with Lizzo for “Truth Hurts”. I forgot most of this stuff was just kind of okay. Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank for more musical ramblings and I’ll see you next week!

[brentrogers]

Podcast: BoJack Horseman and Celebrity Mental Health Advocacy

 

Rich celebrity on TV: “Have you ever been sad? You might have depression.” If scenarios like this make you want to throw a rock at a window, you aren’t alone. In today’s episode, Gabe expresses his distaste for celebrities posing as the “face” of mental illness. He feels further validated after watching a satirical episode of BoJack Horseman, in which Mr. Peanutbutter, a cheerful canine celebrity, becomes the new face of depression — first as a “sad dog” meme and then as a depression spokesperson.

What do you think? Tune in to hear Jackie and Gabe get into a thoughtful discussion on whether celebrities acting as the “face” of mental illness is a good or bad thing.

(Transcript Available Below)

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW

About The Not Crazy Podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Jackie Zimmerman has been in the patient advocacy game for over a decade and has established herself as an authority on chronic illness, patient-centric healthcare, and patient community building. She lives with multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and depression.

You can find her online at JackieZimmerman.co, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “B0Jack- Mental Health” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer-generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a Psych Central podcast. And here are your hosts, Jackie Zimmerman and Gabe Howard.

Gabe: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Not Crazy. I’m here with my co-host, Jackie, who lives with major depression.

Jackie: And you know my co-host, Gabe, who lives with bipolar disorder.

Gabe: And today we are going to talk about BoJack Horseman. The show is ending. The show’s on Netflix. Most people have heard of it, but it did something exciting. Longtime fans of the show know that there’s this thing that I dislike and they sort of did it on BoJack, which validated me in ways that I cannot explain. It just made me so happy, Jackie.

Jackie: So much so that you sent me a text that said, have you seen this? And I was like, no. And then you said, I feel so heard and validated. We must talk about this. And I said, OK, fine.

Gabe: And you agreed to watch three episodes of a show that you’d never watched before. What did you think of it? Did you like the show?

Jackie: I hated it.

Gabe: Hate is a strong word.

Jackie: I literally hated it.

Gabe: Ok. But Adam liked it.

Jackie: Adam and I watched it together and Adam cursed Gabe a few times, like, why the fuck did Gabe tell us to watch this show? The general consensus over here, it’s pretty awful.

Gabe: It is a very popular show and people are sad that it is being canceled after hearing Jackie’s scathingly mean review. I kind of wish BoJack was real because he’d be like, Not Crazy podcast. I hated it. It was awful. And then he’d drink and pass out drunk, which if you’re a fan of the show, is hilarious, but just a meaningless aside that makes Gabe very, very happy.

Jackie: Well, you asked me to watch three episodes. I fell asleep through two of them. But I will say that the moment that I saw what you were talking about, I recognized it and I was like, OK, I see you. So do you want to tell everybody what happened?

Gabe: To back up just a little bit, BoJack Horseman, it’s a cartoon and all of the characters are very one dimensional. BoJack, he used to be famous. He’s narcissistic. He’s an alcoholic. And he has depression. And that’s just who he is. The character that we’re gonna be talking about for the remainder of the show is a character called Mr. Peanutbutter. Mr. Peanutbutter is also famous. He’s also an actor. He’s a yellow golden retriever. And he’s very happy. He’s basically my wife as a cartoon character. He’s just eternal sunshine. He’s Pollyanna. No matter what happens in the world, he can find the good in it. And that’s his one dimensional character.

Jackie: This character’s so happy and positive that in the show they’re trying to find ways to keep him in the public eye or something. I don’t know, I fell asleep. But his assistant maybe, I don’t know, somebody was like, we’ll make these memes with your face on them. And the memes were sad dog memes. And he was like, I’m not a sad dog. I don’t like these. I can’t relate to them because I’m not sad. Like his whole point on the show is to be like a peppy dog.

Gabe: Yeah, he is an extraordinarily happy dog and he’s famous. That’s all you need to know. They do find a picture. Just a single picture of him looking sad. And they make their memes. They’re called the sad dog memes and social media being what it is, it takes off like gangbusters. The sad dog meme is everywhere. People love it. And that gives him a small amount, just a tiny amount, of notoriety as a sad dog. And sadness is a quick jump over to depression. Mr. Peanutbutter has depression. So the powers that be decide that they want to make him in the face of depression and they pay him to go on tour and to make PSA’s and to do all of this stuff to advance the cause of mental health advocacy, of getting checked for depression. For this guy who doesn’t have it.

Jackie: And Gabe is so furious that they’ve given a cartoon dog, this stance where he is the face of depression, which is ridiculous. This is where I was like, OK, I see what Gabe is talking about. Where somebody who probably is not clinically depressed

Gabe: No, there’s no probably. He doesn’t. He does not have it.

Jackie: Well, I meant like in like real life. Like transferring to real life, not cartoon world now, the face of mental illness slash depression in huge mental illness advocacy spaces, celebrities who may or may not live with an actual mental illness, who are now speaking on behalf of us, for us, to the whole world for lots and lots of money. So I see your point. But – no, that’s it. I just I see your point.

Gabe: In the show, Mr. Peanutbutter actually has a conversation where he says, look, I don’t have depression, and the person who is trying to encourage him to take this cash grab says, well, that’s one of the hallmarks of depression, not thinking that you have depression. So I should point out that in the show, he’s sort of tricked into being the face of depression. But I want to be clear, he doesn’t have depression. He’s not depressed. He’s never been mentally ill. None of these things are true. But he becomes the face of depression and people start listening to him on what he thinks they should do and the world should do to be better. And suddenly he becomes the expert. This dog who has no mental illness, who’s never suffered from depression, who’s never researched depression, who is not a doctor, a therapist. He’s never even been a mental health advocate. All of the sudden becomes who people are listening to to get their information and to make their mental health decisions. I see this happening in the real world all the time and it drives me crazy. In fairness, for two reasons. One, because I want all that money not going to lie. I want the money. It should be me. But two, because this is dangerous. We’re following people who don’t understand our lives, who don’t understand what they’re doing or talking about. And we’re listening to them as if their opinions or information is accurate and valid. I believe that hurts people.

Jackie: Ok, questions. First question. Let’s say these spokespeople don’t live with mental illness. But what if they just really support the cause? They have a loved one with mental illness?

Gabe: Then say that. We see this in the case of Bring Change to Mind and Glenn Close. Glenn Close supports her sister and her nephew, who live with severe and persistent mental illness. Glenn Close says that. She founded an organization. She gives a stage to people like her sister, who lives with bipolar disorder, and her nephew, who lives with schizoaffective disorder, and helps them get their message out there. I think that that is a very positive use of celebrity and yeah, I’m a fan of Glenn Close.

Jackie: Well, mee, too. Who isn’t, right? But next question, even if they are not somebody who lives with, but they are somebody with a lot of clout. They’re well known. They are super famous and they’re bringing attention to the cause and or organization. Maybe fundraising for a lot of money, is it really so bad?

Gabe: So yes and no, right? In your example, you’re like they have a lot of clout. They’re bringing a lot of attention and they’re raising a lot of money. Is that bad? No. If you consider those four things then no, of course not. Where would that be bad? But that’s generally not what’s happening. Because if that was happening, you probably wouldn’t know they were behind it. The number of people that don’t realize that Glenn Close started Bring Change to Mind is staggering because she’s not front and center. The organization is I’m talking about the people that are charging $25,000 for speeches, who are travelling the circuit, who are doing PSA’s. But, I almost question who wrote these things. They don’t even look accurate. Are you feeling sad? You might have depression. Why are we equating sadness and depression? This is like saying, are you feeling wet? You might be drowning. There’s a world of difference between having water on your skin and drowning. But this is the kind of misinformation that gets perpetuated by, I’m gonna say, well-meaning people. But just because you’re a celebrity, that makes you a good celebrity. It doesn’t make you a good spokesperson for an illness. And I don’t think people have an understanding of this because celebrities aren’t used to being told no and they can afford to run their own campaigns.

Jackie: So in this scenario, what should they be doing? Right? Mental health organization needs a spokesperson. What should they be doing?

Gabe: In your example, if they want to lend their names, celebrity and money to a mental health organization, I think that is very appropriate because what they would say is, hi, my name is Joe Celebrity and I want you to support Mental Health United States of America Nonprofit with your time and energy. They have the correct information. They have vetted it, and I am using my celebrity to raise attention for it. And also, here’s a whole bunch of money so they can offer their programs, their information, etc. for free. I think that’s extraordinarily appropriate. But that’s not what a lot of these folks are doing. They’re showing up on late night TV saying I have depression and anxiety and it was so awful for me and the stigma was great. And you should hire me to tell you my story. How is paying you $25,000 to tell me what it’s like to be a multi-millionaire with an anxiety helping people with schizophrenia? And I’m being serious. If you can tell me how that is helping, I will back off immediately.

Jackie: I see your point here, and I could probably argue it either way. Right. I can say yes. Clearly, celebrities with all of their money and assistance and whatever their stories are not as relatable as, let’s say, you or I. However, does it make their stories any less true or meaningful?

Gabe: This is where life is hard, right? Because there’s a real human element here. I don’t want to tell Joe Celebrity that his story isn’t relevant because he is famous and rich. But I do want Joe Celebrity to understand that his story is not typical and we get into this, I’m going to call it a problem, with all forms of advocacy. It’s like white privilege or male privilege. You know, women are like, look, you’re getting extra because you’re a man. And then the man says, well, that’s not fair. I worked hard. Nobody’s saying that you didn’t work hard. We’re just saying that you didn’t have to overcome your gender. If you are wealthy and you have access to money and resources. Your situation is not the same as the average Joe non-celebrity who is being diagnosed with these things. And I would just like to see one of these people stand up and say, you know, I’m a multimillionaire. I’m a millionaire. I have been world famous for a decade. And I just now came out because that’s how terrified I was of admitting that I had a mental illness. So I don’t know what hope the rest of you have that aren’t multi-millionaires, that aren’t world famous, because I was terrified to do it with all of my resources. And you’re just a regular person who may or may not have health insurance, but that’s never the message, is it? The messages is that they’re so brave that they’re so brave and we must embrace them by hiring them to speak and tell us how they’re exactly like us, except they’re not exactly like us at all. I want some acknowledgement that they’re not exactly like us.

Jackie: They’re not. I don’t want to defend celebrities here, but I could argue, if I was going to argue this point, I don’t know if I am. But hypothetically, if I were to argue this point, they have a lot more to lose than your average person, let’s say their career. Yes, you or I could lose our career as well. But my career doesn’t mean losing millions of dollars. It is worse because then I would probably for sure be homeless. They probably wouldn’t be homeless. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not arguing this appropriately because I am talking myself out of the argument as we’re doing it right now. I don’t know. On the show, somebody who is not depressed acts as a depression advocate. That is not OK. Right? If you don’t have it, don’t pretend you have it. No good. We can both agree on that.

Gabe: And it’s important to recognize that the reason that a show that is watched by millions of people is lampooning this is because it’s relatable. It’s because it happens. It’s because it’s occurring. I always said that I want to be so famous that The Simpsons make fun of me on The Simpsons because The Simpsons only make fun of you on The Simpsons after you’ve made it. They’re not making fun of people you’ve never heard of. The reason that BoJack Horseman, the television show, was making fun of this is because it is so consistent in our culture that they made fun of it and they knew that it would get laughs and people would relate to it. They’re not making this up out of thin air. This happens constantly, constantly. Our top advocates in the space are suddenly people that what? What did they do?

Jackie: Well, first of all, excellent use of lampooning, just saying,

Gabe: I’ve been using big words.

Jackie: Well, that was a good one.

Gabe: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Gabe: We’re back discussing the role celebrities play in mental health advocacy.

Jackie: Can we stop beating around the bush here? Who are you talking about?

Gabe: I mean, I don’t need a bunch of famous people pissed off at me. I don’t know that I want to name people because I cannot possibly have an exhaustive list. And one of the reasons that I can’t have an exhaustive list is because, you have like, who I consider probably the most dangerous mental health advocate, and that’s Kanye West. He’s extraordinarily dangerous. And what he’s saying, and his message, and he’s extremely popular right now. But then you have sort of the less offensive people. And I’m not going to name them because they’re not necessarily charging even for speeches. They just bring it up. They’re just minding their own business one day. And they’re like, hey, by the way, I have depression, too. And then there’s a whole article about how, I’m going to say his name, and I feel bad because I love this guy. And I just saw his movie, Dwayne Johnson. And all of a sudden there’s an article about how The Rock has depression. Now, that’s not necessarily his fault because he’s not offering himself up as a mental health advocate. He didn’t give a press release. He just said it in an interview. And now it’s everywhere. So he’s become a de-facto depression advocate, even though he never asked for it and isn’t trying to be. And that’s why I use him as an example. This is really rough. If you’re somebody suffering from depression, right? Because after all, The Rock did it, why can’t you? And is his information correct? But it’s not his information, it’s the media’s information that’s twisting it. Then we’d have to do a show on how the media fucks everything up.

Jackie: Which we totally could. But here’s the thing. There’s no winning, everybody loses because.

Gabe: Right.

Jackie: Either The Rock in this example, which first of all you said Dwayne Johnson, I was like, who is that? Because.

Gabe: He’s always going to be The Rock.

Jackie: He’d, just say The Rock. Everybody just knows him.

Gabe: The Rock.

Jackie: Because he says, hey, I’m depressed, which is what we want everybody to do. We want it to be normalized, we want to talk about it and then the media runs with it, which they will. He’s a celebrity and you’re like, that’s annoying. I hate that. But if they wouldn’t have done that, you wouldn’t have known he was depressed. It wouldn’t have been more normalized. He’s just a normal dude living with depression. It feels like a celebrity cannot come out in your perspective here as living with mental illness unless they are saying now I’m going to be a top advocate because I actually live with this. If they’re just casually telling the world I have mental illness, it’s not OK with you.

Gabe: See, and that sounds really awful to me,

Jackie: It is.

Gabe: Like I want to beat Gabe up.

Jackie: Yeah.

Gabe: This is what I struggle with, I am really, really, really upset when I think about all of the mental health advocates that have literally lost everything. A long time ago, people were like, Gabe, will you volunteer to do X, Y, and Z at my conference, my nonprofit, my event, my drop in center? And I would always point out that they’re not asking me to work for free. They’re asking me to work for negative money. I’m losing money because websites and gas and podcasts and microphones and studio time, all this shit costs money. So I’m taking my own money and dumping in thousands upon thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. And I don’t have the clout as a casual mention by The Rock. Now, that’s not his fault. That’s just our celebrity-obsessed culture. But it does get to me. It does. I’m not going to lie. It bothers me that celebrities casually mention that they suffered from depression 10 years ago for 20 minutes and they immediately have a platform one hundred million times the size of people like me who have been paying my own way, doing my own research, and talking to thousands of people for a decade. And nobody wants to listen to me because, hey, I wasn’t in Jumanji.

Jackie: But Gabe, this is advocacy, right? Like I see what you’re saying. It’s valid, but one, there there’s a space for every advocate in advocacy. Even if The Rock doesn’t want to be an advocate, the people he’s reaching by admitting being depressed are probably not the same people we’re reaching. Let’s be real. Our audiences, I think, are maybe a little bit different. Also, I don’t know, maybe I have this grandiose opinion of the advocacy that we do, and it’s not nearly as impressive as I think it is. But I look at it like look at the work people did in the LGBTQ space 30 years ago. Right? They did so much work. They were protesting. They were rioting. They were doing all this bananas stuff. They put their lives at risk. They were arrested. All this bananas shit, so people today can just live their lives. And while the example is not lateral, I feel like you’re doing all this work. You’re spending your money, your time, your energy, all of these things for not a ton of clout. But the whole point is to make this easier for people in the future. Right? We want them to feel like there’s less stigma. We want them to feel supported. We want them to get help. That’s why I do this.

Gabe: Yeah, I’m doing it for the money and the fame.

Jackie: You’re in the wrong business.

Gabe: No. No, I’m not doing it for the money and the fame.

Jackie: But a little bit of money and fame would be nice.

Gabe: I do need to eat. I would just like to pay my bills. I want to break even a little bit. Nobody should feel sorry for Gabe Howard and I’m genuinely and honestly not advocating for that. I don’t want a bunch of emails saying, you know, Gabe, you know, we’re sorry that you can’t eat. I’m a fat guy. I can eat just fine. I’m good. But this is hard work. And sometimes it gets to me as a patient because it. Mental health advocates in general don’t have a lot of clout and patients have even less clout than that. And I know it’s a lot to be said, and I’m probably picking on celebrities. They’re an easy target, but it’s hard to watch a multimillionaire cry about living with anxiety. When I go down to the prisons and the jails and I watch them live with severe and persistent mental illness. When I’ve gone to funerals of people who have died by suicide. When I look at all the states that can’t pass Medicaid expansion. So even though we have people ready, willing, and able to get treated for their mental illness, they can’t see a doctor because they don’t have insurance. When I see homeless camps get raided by the police because they’re a blight on the community and I watch people die in winter because they can’t find shelter. And I’m supposed to shed a tear for a multi millionaire? And then I see all of these groups paying them tens of thousands of dollars to come speak at their events, knowing the horror show that people with severe and persistent mental illness are going through. I’m sorry. I just want to call bullshit and walk out of the room. I do. I can’t help it. I’m sure they’re fine people and their mothers love them. And I want to hug them. I do. I’m sorry they went through this, but my initial response is, please, you’ve gotta be kidding me.

Jackie: I think it’s fine if that’s your initial response. One of my favorite things I learned in therapy is that your first initial response is basically what you were conditioned to think throughout your whole life. Right? So if your first response is something that’s arguably negative or racist or sexist or something terrible, it’s kind of that deep rooted thing that you’ve learned from society, your family, whatever. The second thought that comes a split second later, that’s really what you think. And that has been really helpful for me in therapy. And I think, I’m assuming, I am putting words in your mouth, one hundred percent. The first thought is this is bullshit. That’s not fair. They have all the resources in the world. They are not recognizing their privilege. And the second thought is they’re still people. It’s all relative. And if they’re feeling anxious because of whatever’s happening in their life, that’s still valid.

Gabe: That’s my third response. My second response is, use your privilege, use your celebrity. Use your money to help the people that I just mentioned and the celebrities who are doing that, my hats are off to them. And Lady Gaga is one. She is using her position to raise money for the National Council to offer Mental Health Youth First Aid to teachers and coaches and help stem suicide. Hats off to her. Hats off to her and Carrie Fisher. She’s gone now, but she really did a lot of great work. But I’m not seeing a lot of that. I’m not.

Jackie: How do you know that that won’t be like what The Rock does? You have to sort of come out, right? This is him saying, hey, I have depression. If he was to be a mental illness advocate and just came on the scene and was like, hey, everybody, I’m depressed, let’s do this together, you’d be like, what the hell? Since when is The Rock depressed? This is bullshit. He’s not even really depressed. They all do. They have to establish a baseline of like, hey, I have this. A lot of celebrities do this where they sort of come out to the media of like whatever health ailment they have. A lot of them then take that as a stepping stone to doing advocacy. But I think that if he just came out and was working with whoever as their new spokesperson, you would have exactly the same issue that you had with BoJack Horseman. You’d be like, this is bullshit. That guy does not have that thing.

Gabe: So you’re right. When The Rock, and I don’t know why we’re picking on The Rock. That guy is so strong. Couldn’t I have picked on a weaker guy and one that I liked a lot less? I just love The Rock. Please, don’t body slam me if you’re listening. But right now, he’s got a lot of words. You’re right. I will respect him more when he has a lot of actions. But to the most pressing point, he doesn’t have to and he didn’t do anything wrong. I’m kind of a little bit sad that we’re using him as an example because all he said was I suffer from depression. He didn’t charge anybody $25,000 to talk about it. He just said it out loud. So actually, my hat’s off to people like him. I’m really focusing on the people that are making money, being famous and having mental illness.

Jackie: I think we’re saying the same thing in a different way. So maybe we should just agree to agree with a slight side of disagreement.

Gabe: Oohh, a side of disagreement, I like it. And of course, I’m a hypocrite. The biggest hypocrite in the room. I don’t want anybody to charge for a mental health speech except me. It’s kind of hard to get around that, right? I mean, if you want me to come speak at your venue right now, I’m going to send you a contract and you got to give me a stack of money. And I justify that by saying, well, hey, I’m not a multi-millionaire because I don’t have my own TV show. I think that there is some some justification in that. But where does it end? Like, how many speeches should I give for free versus how many are charged for? Because I do speak for free. I do volunteer. And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know. But it does rub me the wrong way. And when I saw BoJack Horseman talk about it on the show, it validated that because it shows that other people are seeing it that way, too. And this is cause for concern. And maybe we should make some changes. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t run the world.

Jackie: Gabe, if you’ve been listening to this, if you’ve listened to your speech, we know you’re not a bad guy. We just know you got bills to pay. Right?

Gabe: And these are hard conversations, right? I don’t get to decide. And that is one of the things that I do like about the world, that Gabe and Jackie don’t get to decide. But we do get to share our opinions, and I’d be interested in hearing what your opinions are. Jackie, what’s the e-mail? So people can tell me how wrong I am?

Jackie: Show@PsychCentral.com. Send hate mail with subject line to Gabe.

Gabe: Should we send like positive mail with subject line to Jackie?

Jackie: Absolutely.

Gabe: Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Remember, wherever you download this podcast, rank it however you feel is appropriate and use your words, tell people why you like it. We would also love to come to your next event. Not Crazy travels well. Hit us up at show@PsychCentral.com and book us to do this live. Gabe and Jackie in person are a lot more fun than we are in your ears. We’ll see everybody next week.

Jackie: Have a good one.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Not Crazy from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. To work with Jackie, go to JackieZimmerman.co. Not Crazy travels well. Have Gabe and Jackie record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

  Podcast: BoJack Horseman and Celebrity Mental Health Advocacy syndicated from

[positivepsychologyinterventions]

Podcast: BoJack Horseman and Celebrity Mental Health Advocacy



  Rich celebrity on TV: “Have you ever been sad? You might have depression.” If scenarios like this make you want to throw a rock at a window, you aren’t alone. In today’s episode, Gabe expresses his distaste for celebrities posing as the “face” of mental illness. He feels further validated after watching a satirical episode of BoJack Horseman, in which Mr. Peanutbutter, a cheerful canine celebrity, becomes the new face of depression — first as a “sad dog” meme and then as a depression spokesperson.

What do you think? Tune in to hear Jackie and Gabe get into a thoughtful discussion on whether celebrities acting as the “face” of mental illness is a good or bad thing.

(Transcript Available Below)

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About The Not Crazy Podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

        Jackie Zimmerman has been in the patient advocacy game for over a decade and has established herself as an authority on chronic illness, patient-centric healthcare, and patient community building. She lives with multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and depression.

You can find her online at JackieZimmerman.co, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

    Computer Generated Transcript for “B0Jack- Mental Health” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer-generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a Psych Central podcast. And here are your hosts, Jackie Zimmerman and Gabe Howard.

Gabe: Hey, everyone, and welcome to Not Crazy. I’m here with my co-host, Jackie, who lives with major depression.

Jackie: And you know my co-host, Gabe, who lives with bipolar disorder.

Gabe: And today we are going to talk about BoJack Horseman. The show is ending. The show’s on Netflix. Most people have heard of it, but it did something exciting. Longtime fans of the show know that there’s this thing that I dislike and they sort of did it on BoJack, which validated me in ways that I cannot explain. It just made me so happy, Jackie.

Jackie: So much so that you sent me a text that said, have you seen this? And I was like, no. And then you said, I feel so heard and validated. We must talk about this. And I said, OK, fine.

Gabe: And you agreed to watch three episodes of a show that you’d never watched before. What did you think of it? Did you like the show?

Jackie: I hated it.

Gabe: Hate is a strong word.

Jackie: I literally hated it.

Gabe: Ok. But Adam liked it.

Jackie: Adam and I watched it together and Adam cursed Gabe a few times, like, why the fuck did Gabe tell us to watch this show? The general consensus over here, it’s pretty awful.

Gabe: It is a very popular show and people are sad that it is being canceled after hearing Jackie’s scathingly mean review. I kind of wish BoJack was real because he’d be like, Not Crazy podcast. I hated it. It was awful. And then he’d drink and pass out drunk, which if you’re a fan of the show, is hilarious, but just a meaningless aside that makes Gabe very, very happy.

Jackie: Well, you asked me to watch three episodes. I fell asleep through two of them. But I will say that the moment that I saw what you were talking about, I recognized it and I was like, OK, I see you. So do you want to tell everybody what happened?

Gabe: To back up just a little bit, BoJack Horseman, it’s a cartoon and all of the characters are very one dimensional. BoJack, he used to be famous. He’s narcissistic. He’s an alcoholic. And he has depression. And that’s just who he is. The character that we’re gonna be talking about for the remainder of the show is a character called Mr. Peanutbutter. Mr. Peanutbutter is also famous. He’s also an actor. He’s a yellow golden retriever. And he’s very happy. He’s basically my wife as a cartoon character. He’s just eternal sunshine. He’s Pollyanna. No matter what happens in the world, he can find the good in it. And that’s his one dimensional character.

Jackie: This character’s so happy and positive that in the show they’re trying to find ways to keep him in the public eye or something. I don’t know, I fell asleep. But his assistant maybe, I don’t know, somebody was like, we’ll make these memes with your face on them. And the memes were sad dog memes. And he was like, I’m not a sad dog. I don’t like these. I can’t relate to them because I’m not sad. Like his whole point on the show is to be like a peppy dog.

Gabe: Yeah, he is an extraordinarily happy dog and he’s famous. That’s all you need to know. They do find a picture. Just a single picture of him looking sad. And they make their memes. They’re called the sad dog memes and social media being what it is, it takes off like gangbusters. The sad dog meme is everywhere. People love it. And that gives him a small amount, just a tiny amount, of notoriety as a sad dog. And sadness is a quick jump over to depression. Mr. Peanutbutter has depression. So the powers that be decide that they want to make him in the face of depression and they pay him to go on tour and to make PSA’s and to do all of this stuff to advance the cause of mental health advocacy, of getting checked for depression. For this guy who doesn’t have it.

Jackie: And Gabe is so furious that they’ve given a cartoon dog, this stance where he is the face of depression, which is ridiculous. This is where I was like, OK, I see what Gabe is talking about. Where somebody who probably is not clinically depressed

Gabe: No, there’s no probably. He doesn’t. He does not have it.

Jackie: Well, I meant like in like real life. Like transferring to real life, not cartoon world now, the face of mental illness slash depression in huge mental illness advocacy spaces, celebrities who may or may not live with an actual mental illness, who are now speaking on behalf of us, for us, to the whole world for lots and lots of money. So I see your point. But – no, that’s it. I just I see your point.

Gabe: In the show, Mr. Peanutbutter actually has a conversation where he says, look, I don’t have depression, and the person who is trying to encourage him to take this cash grab says, well, that’s one of the hallmarks of depression, not thinking that you have depression. So I should point out that in the show, he’s sort of tricked into being the face of depression. But I want to be clear, he doesn’t have depression. He’s not depressed. He’s never been mentally ill. None of these things are true. But he becomes the face of depression and people start listening to him on what he thinks they should do and the world should do to be better. And suddenly he becomes the expert. This dog who has no mental illness, who’s never suffered from depression, who’s never researched depression, who is not a doctor, a therapist. He’s never even been a mental health advocate. All of the sudden becomes who people are listening to to get their information and to make their mental health decisions. I see this happening in the real world all the time and it drives me crazy. In fairness, for two reasons. One, because I want all that money not going to lie. I want the money. It should be me. But two, because this is dangerous. We’re following people who don’t understand our lives, who don’t understand what they’re doing or talking about. And we’re listening to them as if their opinions or information is accurate and valid. I believe that hurts people.

Jackie: Ok, questions. First question. Let’s say these spokespeople don’t live with mental illness. But what if they just really support the cause? They have a loved one with mental illness?

Gabe: Then say that. We see this in the case of Bring Change to Mind and Glenn Close. Glenn Close supports her sister and her nephew, who live with severe and persistent mental illness. Glenn Close says that. She founded an organization. She gives a stage to people like her sister, who lives with bipolar disorder, and her nephew, who lives with schizoaffective disorder, and helps them get their message out there. I think that that is a very positive use of celebrity and yeah, I’m a fan of Glenn Close.

Jackie: Well, mee, too. Who isn’t, right? But next question, even if they are not somebody who lives with, but they are somebody with a lot of clout. They’re well known. They are super famous and they’re bringing attention to the cause and or organization. Maybe fundraising for a lot of money, is it really so bad?

Gabe: So yes and no, right? In your example, you’re like they have a lot of clout. They’re bringing a lot of attention and they’re raising a lot of money. Is that bad? No. If you consider those four things then no, of course not. Where would that be bad? But that’s generally not what’s happening. Because if that was happening, you probably wouldn’t know they were behind it. The number of people that don’t realize that Glenn Close started Bring Change to Mind is staggering because she’s not front and center. The organization is I’m talking about the people that are charging $25,000 for speeches, who are travelling the circuit, who are doing PSA’s. But, I almost question who wrote these things. They don’t even look accurate. Are you feeling sad? You might have depression. Why are we equating sadness and depression? This is like saying, are you feeling wet? You might be drowning. There’s a world of difference between having water on your skin and drowning. But this is the kind of misinformation that gets perpetuated by, I’m gonna say, well-meaning people. But just because you’re a celebrity, that makes you a good celebrity. It doesn’t make you a good spokesperson for an illness. And I don’t think people have an understanding of this because celebrities aren’t used to being told no and they can afford to run their own campaigns.

Jackie: So in this scenario, what should they be doing? Right? Mental health organization needs a spokesperson. What should they be doing?

Gabe: In your example, if they want to lend their names, celebrity and money to a mental health organization, I think that is very appropriate because what they would say is, hi, my name is Joe Celebrity and I want you to support Mental Health United States of America Nonprofit with your time and energy. They have the correct information. They have vetted it, and I am using my celebrity to raise attention for it. And also, here’s a whole bunch of money so they can offer their programs, their information, etc. for free. I think that’s extraordinarily appropriate. But that’s not what a lot of these folks are doing. They’re showing up on late night TV saying I have depression and anxiety and it was so awful for me and the stigma was great. And you should hire me to tell you my story. How is paying you $25,000 to tell me what it’s like to be a multi-millionaire with an anxiety helping people with schizophrenia? And I’m being serious. If you can tell me how that is helping, I will back off immediately.

Jackie: I see your point here, and I could probably argue it either way. Right. I can say yes. Clearly, celebrities with all of their money and assistance and whatever their stories are not as relatable as, let’s say, you or I. However, does it make their stories any less true or meaningful?

Gabe: This is where life is hard, right? Because there’s a real human element here. I don’t want to tell Joe Celebrity that his story isn’t relevant because he is famous and rich. But I do want Joe Celebrity to understand that his story is not typical and we get into this, I’m going to call it a problem, with all forms of advocacy. It’s like white privilege or male privilege. You know, women are like, look, you’re getting extra because you’re a man. And then the man says, well, that’s not fair. I worked hard. Nobody’s saying that you didn’t work hard. We’re just saying that you didn’t have to overcome your gender. If you are wealthy and you have access to money and resources. Your situation is not the same as the average Joe non-celebrity who is being diagnosed with these things. And I would just like to see one of these people stand up and say, you know, I’m a multimillionaire. I’m a millionaire. I have been world famous for a decade. And I just now came out because that’s how terrified I was of admitting that I had a mental illness. So I don’t know what hope the rest of you have that aren’t multi-millionaires, that aren’t world famous, because I was terrified to do it with all of my resources. And you’re just a regular person who may or may not have health insurance, but that’s never the message, is it? The messages is that they’re so brave that they’re so brave and we must embrace them by hiring them to speak and tell us how they’re exactly like us, except they’re not exactly like us at all. I want some acknowledgement that they’re not exactly like us.

Jackie: They’re not. I don’t want to defend celebrities here, but I could argue, if I was going to argue this point, I don’t know if I am. But hypothetically, if I were to argue this point, they have a lot more to lose than your average person, let’s say their career. Yes, you or I could lose our career as well. But my career doesn’t mean losing millions of dollars. It is worse because then I would probably for sure be homeless. They probably wouldn’t be homeless. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not arguing this appropriately because I am talking myself out of the argument as we’re doing it right now. I don’t know. On the show, somebody who is not depressed acts as a depression advocate. That is not OK. Right? If you don’t have it, don’t pretend you have it. No good. We can both agree on that.

Gabe: And it’s important to recognize that the reason that a show that is watched by millions of people is lampooning this is because it’s relatable. It’s because it happens. It’s because it’s occurring. I always said that I want to be so famous that The Simpsons make fun of me on The Simpsons because The Simpsons only make fun of you on The Simpsons after you’ve made it. They’re not making fun of people you’ve never heard of. The reason that BoJack Horseman, the television show, was making fun of this is because it is so consistent in our culture that they made fun of it and they knew that it would get laughs and people would relate to it. They’re not making this up out of thin air. This happens constantly, constantly. Our top advocates in the space are suddenly people that what? What did they do?

Jackie: Well, first of all, excellent use of lampooning, just saying,

Gabe: I’ve been using big words.

Jackie: Well, that was a good one.

Gabe: We’ll be right back after these messages.

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Gabe: We’re back discussing the role celebrities play in mental health advocacy.

Jackie: Can we stop beating around the bush here? Who are you talking about?

Gabe: I mean, I don’t need a bunch of famous people pissed off at me. I don’t know that I want to name people because I cannot possibly have an exhaustive list. And one of the reasons that I can’t have an exhaustive list is because, you have like, who I consider probably the most dangerous mental health advocate, and that’s Kanye West. He’s extraordinarily dangerous. And what he’s saying, and his message, and he’s extremely popular right now. But then you have sort of the less offensive people. And I’m not going to name them because they’re not necessarily charging even for speeches. They just bring it up. They’re just minding their own business one day. And they’re like, hey, by the way, I have depression, too. And then there’s a whole article about how, I’m going to say his name, and I feel bad because I love this guy. And I just saw his movie, Dwayne Johnson. And all of a sudden there’s an article about how The Rock has depression. Now, that’s not necessarily his fault because he’s not offering himself up as a mental health advocate. He didn’t give a press release. He just said it in an interview. And now it’s everywhere. So he’s become a de-facto depression advocate, even though he never asked for it and isn’t trying to be. And that’s why I use him as an example. This is really rough. If you’re somebody suffering from depression, right? Because after all, The Rock did it, why can’t you? And is his information correct? But it’s not his information, it’s the media’s information that’s twisting it. Then we’d have to do a show on how the media fucks everything up.

Jackie: Which we totally could. But here’s the thing. There’s no winning, everybody loses because.

Gabe: Right.

Jackie: Either The Rock in this example, which first of all you said Dwayne Johnson, I was like, who is that? Because.

Gabe: He’s always going to be The Rock.

Jackie: He’d, just say The Rock. Everybody just knows him.

Gabe: The Rock.

Jackie: Because he says, hey, I’m depressed, which is what we want everybody to do. We want it to be normalized, we want to talk about it and then the media runs with it, which they will. He’s a celebrity and you’re like, that’s annoying. I hate that. But if they wouldn’t have done that, you wouldn’t have known he was depressed. It wouldn’t have been more normalized. He’s just a normal dude living with depression. It feels like a celebrity cannot come out in your perspective here as living with mental illness unless they are saying now I’m going to be a top advocate because I actually live with this. If they’re just casually telling the world I have mental illness, it’s not OK with you.

Gabe: See, and that sounds really awful to me,

Jackie: It is.

Gabe: Like I want to beat Gabe up.

Jackie: Yeah.

Gabe: This is what I struggle with, I am really, really, really upset when I think about all of the mental health advocates that have literally lost everything. A long time ago, people were like, Gabe, will you volunteer to do X, Y, and Z at my conference, my nonprofit, my event, my drop in center? And I would always point out that they’re not asking me to work for free. They’re asking me to work for negative money. I’m losing money because websites and gas and podcasts and microphones and studio time, all this shit costs money. So I’m taking my own money and dumping in thousands upon thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. And I don’t have the clout as a casual mention by The Rock. Now, that’s not his fault. That’s just our celebrity-obsessed culture. But it does get to me. It does. I’m not going to lie. It bothers me that celebrities casually mention that they suffered from depression 10 years ago for 20 minutes and they immediately have a platform one hundred million times the size of people like me who have been paying my own way, doing my own research, and talking to thousands of people for a decade. And nobody wants to listen to me because, hey, I wasn’t in Jumanji.

Jackie: But Gabe, this is advocacy, right? Like I see what you’re saying. It’s valid, but one, there there’s a space for every advocate in advocacy. Even if The Rock doesn’t want to be an advocate, the people he’s reaching by admitting being depressed are probably not the same people we’re reaching. Let’s be real. Our audiences, I think, are maybe a little bit different. Also, I don’t know, maybe I have this grandiose opinion of the advocacy that we do, and it’s not nearly as impressive as I think it is. But I look at it like look at the work people did in the LGBTQ space 30 years ago. Right? They did so much work. They were protesting. They were rioting. They were doing all this bananas stuff. They put their lives at risk. They were arrested. All this bananas shit, so people today can just live their lives. And while the example is not lateral, I feel like you’re doing all this work. You’re spending your money, your time, your energy, all of these things for not a ton of clout. But the whole point is to make this easier for people in the future. Right? We want them to feel like there’s less stigma. We want them to feel supported. We want them to get help. That’s why I do this.

Gabe: Yeah, I’m doing it for the money and the fame.

Jackie: You’re in the wrong business.

Gabe: No. No, I’m not doing it for the money and the fame.

Jackie: But a little bit of money and fame would be nice.

Gabe: I do need to eat. I would just like to pay my bills. I want to break even a little bit. Nobody should feel sorry for Gabe Howard and I’m genuinely and honestly not advocating for that. I don’t want a bunch of emails saying, you know, Gabe, you know, we’re sorry that you can’t eat. I’m a fat guy. I can eat just fine. I’m good. But this is hard work. And sometimes it gets to me as a patient because it. Mental health advocates in general don’t have a lot of clout and patients have even less clout than that. And I know it’s a lot to be said, and I’m probably picking on celebrities. They’re an easy target, but it’s hard to watch a multimillionaire cry about living with anxiety. When I go down to the prisons and the jails and I watch them live with severe and persistent mental illness. When I’ve gone to funerals of people who have died by suicide. When I look at all the states that can’t pass Medicaid expansion. So even though we have people ready, willing, and able to get treated for their mental illness, they can’t see a doctor because they don’t have insurance. When I see homeless camps get raided by the police because they’re a blight on the community and I watch people die in winter because they can’t find shelter. And I’m supposed to shed a tear for a multi millionaire? And then I see all of these groups paying them tens of thousands of dollars to come speak at their events, knowing the horror show that people with severe and persistent mental illness are going through. I’m sorry. I just want to call bullshit and walk out of the room. I do. I can’t help it. I’m sure they’re fine people and their mothers love them. And I want to hug them. I do. I’m sorry they went through this, but my initial response is, please, you’ve gotta be kidding me.

Jackie: I think it’s fine if that’s your initial response. One of my favorite things I learned in therapy is that your first initial response is basically what you were conditioned to think throughout your whole life. Right? So if your first response is something that’s arguably negative or racist or sexist or something terrible, it’s kind of that deep rooted thing that you’ve learned from society, your family, whatever. The second thought that comes a split second later, that’s really what you think. And that has been really helpful for me in therapy. And I think, I’m assuming, I am putting words in your mouth, one hundred percent. The first thought is this is bullshit. That’s not fair. They have all the resources in the world. They are not recognizing their privilege. And the second thought is they’re still people. It’s all relative. And if they’re feeling anxious because of whatever’s happening in their life, that’s still valid.

Gabe: That’s my third response. My second response is, use your privilege, use your celebrity. Use your money to help the people that I just mentioned and the celebrities who are doing that, my hats are off to them. And Lady Gaga is one. She is using her position to raise money for the National Council to offer Mental Health Youth First Aid to teachers and coaches and help stem suicide. Hats off to her. Hats off to her and Carrie Fisher. She’s gone now, but she really did a lot of great work. But I’m not seeing a lot of that. I’m not.

Jackie: How do you know that that won’t be like what The Rock does? You have to sort of come out, right? This is him saying, hey, I have depression. If he was to be a mental illness advocate and just came on the scene and was like, hey, everybody, I’m depressed, let’s do this together, you’d be like, what the hell? Since when is The Rock depressed? This is bullshit. He’s not even really depressed. They all do. They have to establish a baseline of like, hey, I have this. A lot of celebrities do this where they sort of come out to the media of like whatever health ailment they have. A lot of them then take that as a stepping stone to doing advocacy. But I think that if he just came out and was working with whoever as their new spokesperson, you would have exactly the same issue that you had with BoJack Horseman. You’d be like, this is bullshit. That guy does not have that thing.

Gabe: So you’re right. When The Rock, and I don’t know why we’re picking on The Rock. That guy is so strong. Couldn’t I have picked on a weaker guy and one that I liked a lot less? I just love The Rock. Please, don’t body slam me if you’re listening. But right now, he’s got a lot of words. You’re right. I will respect him more when he has a lot of actions. But to the most pressing point, he doesn’t have to and he didn’t do anything wrong. I’m kind of a little bit sad that we’re using him as an example because all he said was I suffer from depression. He didn’t charge anybody $25,000 to talk about it. He just said it out loud. So actually, my hat’s off to people like him. I’m really focusing on the people that are making money, being famous and having mental illness.

Jackie: I think we’re saying the same thing in a different way. So maybe we should just agree to agree with a slight side of disagreement.

Gabe: Oohh, a side of disagreement, I like it. And of course, I’m a hypocrite. The biggest hypocrite in the room. I don’t want anybody to charge for a mental health speech except me. It’s kind of hard to get around that, right? I mean, if you want me to come speak at your venue right now, I’m going to send you a contract and you got to give me a stack of money. And I justify that by saying, well, hey, I’m not a multi-millionaire because I don’t have my own TV show. I think that there is some some justification in that. But where does it end? Like, how many speeches should I give for free versus how many are charged for? Because I do speak for free. I do volunteer. And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know. But it does rub me the wrong way. And when I saw BoJack Horseman talk about it on the show, it validated that because it shows that other people are seeing it that way, too. And this is cause for concern. And maybe we should make some changes. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t run the world.

Jackie: Gabe, if you’ve been listening to this, if you’ve listened to your speech, we know you’re not a bad guy. We just know you got bills to pay. Right?

Gabe: And these are hard conversations, right? I don’t get to decide. And that is one of the things that I do like about the world, that Gabe and Jackie don’t get to decide. But we do get to share our opinions, and I’d be interested in hearing what your opinions are. Jackie, what’s the e-mail? So people can tell me how wrong I am?

Jackie: Show@PsychCentral.com. Send hate mail with subject line to Gabe.

Gabe: Should we send like positive mail with subject line to Jackie?

Jackie: Absolutely.

Gabe: Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Remember, wherever you download this podcast, rank it however you feel is appropriate and use your words, tell people why you like it. We would also love to come to your next event. Not Crazy travels well. Hit us up at show@PsychCentral.com and book us to do this live. Gabe and Jackie in person are a lot more fun than we are in your ears. We’ll see everybody next week.

Jackie: Have a good one.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Not Crazy from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. To work with Jackie, go to JackieZimmerman.co. Not Crazy travels well. Have Gabe and Jackie record an episode live at your next event. E-mail show@psychcentral.com for details. 

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[theconservativebrief]

Until very recently, it felt like romantic comedies — at least the big-budget Hollywood kind — finally might have died. The culprits blamed for the genre’s decline ranged from the death of mid-budget movies to the genre’s reputation for being “unserious” to, uh, Katherine Heigl.

But this summer, it’s come roaring back, specifically thanks to three movies that made waves with audiences: the big-screen hit Crazy Rich Asians, and the Netflix sensations Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. All three hew to romantic comedy conventions but with a twist, and suddenly it feels like rom-coms may be back after all.

Vox’s culture writers love a good romantic comedy. So to celebrate the burgeoning rom-com renaissance, we sat down to discuss the limits and possibilities of the genre, the hang-ups that hold it back, how rom-coms can be more inclusive, and what (and who) we’d like to see in rom-coms in the future.

Alissa Wilkinson: Some of the most beloved films of all time are rom-coms, but the label is often used as shorthand for “unimportant,” “fluffy,” and “inconsequential.” There are a few reasons for that, one of which is that rom-coms are seen as geared toward a female audience, and films for women have often been considered less important or less substantial than “prestige” films. Couple that with the lasting sense, in some quarters, that comedies just aren’t as worthy of serious consideration as dramas and you end up with rom-coms being sidelined.

Yet I believe, and I think you all do too, that there’s a lot of value to rom-coms, and a reason they endure as one of the oldest and most beloved forms of storytelling. What, in your view, do rom-coms do well? What makes them have so much staying power?

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail. Warner Bros.

Constance Grady: I think any defense of rom-coms has to begin with the idea that it can be enjoyable and worthwhile to watch two attractive people trade banter, face complications, and eventually fall in love, and there is nothing wrong with that. That basic plot template is not inherently less valuable than the one about the sad, mean man who is really good at something and so has no excuse but to be terrible to the people around him, or the one about the people who fight in a war and are very brave. The fact that we treat rom-coms as frothy nonsense for dumb people stems from the fact that romantic comedies are generally marketed to women, whom our culture does not like — not from the genre’s inherent value.

At their very best, romantic comedies are sheer joy. They are about forging human connections and people changing each other for the better — all of which is complex stuff that is worthy of sustained aesthetic attention — and they approach their subject matter with glee.

I was reminded of that fact when watching Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, two of the best rom-coms of the summer and the result of Netflix’s decision to try to fill the long-ignored rom-com market niche. Romantic comedies are about happiness! It’s a joyous experience to watch Set It Up’s Charlie and Harper accidentally fall into a slow dance and then painstakingly drag a pizza up a New York fire escape. It’s a joyous experience to watch To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Peter Kazinsky bashfully splash water at Lara Jean because he can’t quite bring himself to tell her he likes her.

This is a genre that’s about delivering joy to the audience, and what is wrong with that?

Genevieve Koski: It’s also a genre whose success is heavily dependent on charisma, which is the sort of cinematic juju that’s tough both to define and to replicate. Note, charisma is not the same thing as chemistry — I’d argue that a lot of the most successful rom-coms of the past 30 years or so feature leads with chemistry that’s lukewarm at best. But at least one half of your romantic duo, and ideally both halves, need to possess that tricky balance of relatable and aspirational qualities that makes it possible to engage with and care about characters whose narratives are usually, but not always, defined by contrivance. (See: the notorious “meet-cute.”)

Rom-com nonbelievers love to roll their eyes at this kind of narrative, characterizing it as cheesy or clichéd while willfully ignoring the fact that this type of storytelling has been around since the days of Shakespeare’s comedies. But with the right character(s), played by the right actor(s), those contrivances become a path to the sort of joyful human connection Constance is talking about. You need to care about the characters; even if you don’t necessarily like them, you need to be invested in them, and by extension their journey. And while that starts on the page, with the writing, it’s ultimately dependent on the people who bring those characters to life onscreen.

Ugh, as if! Paramount Pictures

So when we talk about the rom-com drought (and possible resurgence), for me one of the biggest issues at the heart of the trend is, as Vox’s own Todd VanDerWerff put it, many actresses’ reticence to do rom-coms. This is all tied up with a lot of other issues facing the genre, like the perceived lack of prestige that you note, Alissa — and which I definitely want to come back to, since some of the most beloved and respected films of the 1940s and ’50s are rom-coms, directed by legendary directors and featuring some of the biggest movie stars in history!

Somewhere along the way, they took on negative (and, yes, gendered) baggage, thus limiting the pool of actors who are both capable of and willing to bring life to this kind of story. The fact that this baggage has denied us the Rachel McAdams-led rom-com wave we all need and deserve is a grievous wrong that must be righted.

Aja Romano: I think another significant factor in the denigration of the rom-com is that they are built so heavily on tropes; their predictability is a huge part of their appeal, but like every other genre that relies heavily on genre tropes, the rom-com has been treated contemptuously by “serious” creators and authors for decades.

The mainstreaming of geek culture has gradually granted legitimacy to all the other heavily trope-based genres — comics, fantasy, sci-fi, video game narratives, horror — because they appealed to men, and male nerds have been ascendant. Yet trope-heavy genres dominated by women, which are mainly rom-com, erotic romance, and young adult at this point, have continued to struggle to gain any kind of cultural legitimacy.

I think it’s significant that a lot of the most critically successful recent films in this vein (Silver Linings Playbook, Young Adult, Lady Bird, Eighth Grade) generally attempt to layer a rom-com structure onto another kind of narrative — the teen comedy or the family dramedy. It suggests to me that Hollywood is most interested in giving these tropes attention when they’re approached ironically or at angles.

That makes the recent immediate success of Netflix’s rom-coms, as well as Crazy Rich Asians, an ebullient reminder that the audience for these tropes is mighty and vocal, and they know what they want and are very interested in owning it, being positive about it, and having it delivered unto them. I see Jupiter Ascending as a significant precursor here: Female fans lost their minds over that movie precisely because it was so open and unabashed about embracing its romance tropes and catering to viewers’ desire for self-indulgent id-fantasy — which, of course, was the very same reason it was critically trashed.

This also plays into the huge dominance of fanfiction culture’s sincere embrace of tropes, where fans are very upfront about wanting endless repetitions of coffee-shop meet-cutes and high school teen romances and office rom-coms, and there’s no high/low cultural divide, or any shame attached to loving these tropes. There’s a huge overlap between these transformative fans and the audiences turning out in droves for To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Crazy Rich Asians, and that is, I hope, a sign that the female-dominated side of geek culture is finally starting to make inroads toward the cultural mainstream, and that its desire for these kinds of stories is starting to become more widely understood and accepted.

Todd VanDerWerff: Allow me to say a few words in favor of my beloved television, where the romantic comedy has migrated in these recent years of trial. You’re the Worst has had its rough patches, but whenever it turns its eyes toward being a straightforward rom-com with an acerbic point of view, it’s aces. Similarly, Jane the Virgin has had, like, 17 different rom-coms stuffed into its candy-colored confines, and that’s only a slight exaggeration. And Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deconstructs rom-com tropes better than almost anybody else.

You’re the Worst is one of TV’s most acerbic — and funniest — comedies. FX

But there’s also something to the idea that the best format for a romantic comedy is a movie, because you get to have the happy ending climax of the lovers walking blissfully into the sunset without any of the complications that follow, which TV inevitably has to get into. You also get to see attractive people enacting those tropes, which gives film a boost over novels in this regard. (At least for me. I’ll take the controversial stance of saying that I like pretty people.)

I wouldn’t say that the rom-com completely disappeared in the past 10 years, so much as its many tropes got submerged into different movies. Judd Apatow’s entire oeuvre is based on transplanting rom-com tropes into movies aimed more explicitly at the guy-heavy raunch-com audience. (I like a lot of his films too! I’ll even stan for Funny People, which I realize isn’t his most popular title.)

And a lot of the very perfunctory romantic subplots in superhero movies feel ripped directly from the rom-com playbook. Like, it’s really easy to imagine a version of Iron Man that’s just Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow falling in love, with him occasionally flying off to fight evil. That’s how much fun it is to watch them banter.

But I look at rom-coms and see something similar to what happened to horror, where the genre got laden down with a bunch of relatively unpleasant movies in the mid-2000s, which turned off a more general audience, and it went into hiding. But where horror has experienced a resurgence, thanks to the rise of a whole new indie horror aesthetic and the relentless work of horror super-producer Jason Blum, rom-coms are still searching for their next big launchpad. My hope is that the rom-coms of summer 2018 are that launchpad, but I’ve been burned before.

My question has always been why some Jason Blum wannabe doesn’t just make a deal with a studio to make a bunch of cheap ($5 million and under) romantic comedies, just as Blum did with Universal and horror. But my fear is that for a variety of reasons — including the genre’s perceived appeal only to women, and the fact that its dependence on strong actors means studios have to pay those actors more, which adds up quickly — this is unlikely to happen.

That leaves Netflix. And while I love some of its movies, a lot of its rom-coms are kind of reprehensible. And a bad rom-com too often isn’t just a bad movie; it’s also propping up some pretty toxic worldviews. So I want to believe in Netflix as a savior, but I have my doubts.

Will Netflix save the romantic comedy with films like Set It Up? Netflix

Alissa: What we’ve been saying, in many ways, is that what makes a rom-com great has a lot to do with who is in it and how it uses (and sometimes messes with) the tropes of the genre, many of which have been around for centuries. The rom-com is surprisingly durable, and as Genevieve pointed out, some of the most respected films of the 1940s and ’50s are rom-coms — it’s just that they’ve attained such canonical status that people talk about them as “classics,” not “rom-coms.” (As if “classic” can be a genre anyhow, but I digress.)

That does lead us down an interesting path, though: If the story and the stars are a lot of what makes great rom-coms work, and Hollywood is feinting toward more inclusive casting and storytelling, how will rom-coms evolve going forward? The rom-coms marketed at the “mainstream” audience have often starred white actors portraying straight characters. Is that going to change? And are there films, maybe some that have flown under the radar for some moviegoers, that have already challenged those rom-com conventions?

Constance: For my money, part of what makes this year’s rom-com revival so exciting — and what gives me hope that it will have some sort of enduring effect on the industry — is the kind of stars it’s making.

We’ve talked a little already about how vital the charisma of a star is to making a rom-com work, but the reverse is true as well. The rom-com and its stars are in a symbiotic relationship: The right stars will make a romantic comedy sing, and the right romantic comedy can jump-start its stars’ careers. Because when you watch a really good romantic comedy, you fall a little bit in love with the actors involved. You want them to succeed. You might even be willing to go to a different movie just to see them again.

Landing the leading role in a good romantic comedy can transform a working actor into a household name. And right now, the stars that the rom-com revival is making aren’t just white people.

One of the biggest narratives of the summer has been that with movies like To All the Boys and Crazy Rich Asians, Hollywood is finally letting Asian people fall in love. It’s hard to say for sure if this is a blip or a genuine sea change (way back when The Joy Luck Club came out in 1993, the narrative was that Hollywood was finally telling stories about Asian people, and then no one made another Asian ensemble film for 25 years), but while this moment lasts, it’s putting incredibly talented and previously overlooked actors into the spotlight.

Constance Wu has been killing it on Fresh Off the Boat for five seasons, but after Crazy Rich Asians, now she’s a movie star. Lana Condor has spent years languishing in action movies, not even daring to hope that she could get placed in a romantic comedy, and now she’s the face of one of the buzziest hits on Netflix.

For as long as Hollywood continues to make romantic comedies that center on marginalized people — and there’s no way of knowing for sure how long that moment will last — it’s going to keep giving actors from marginalized communities the chance to make audiences fall completely in love with them. And that means there’s a shot that they’ll become genuine stars.

Aja: I think, too, that we’re seeing a renewed awareness that you don’t necessarily have to subvert rom-com tropes to create fun and enjoyable stories that people respond to — you can just have fun retelling them again and again, because so much of the validation does come from watching charismatic actors carry the storyline.

And that makes the rom-com a really fruitful space, I think, for marginalized communities of actors and creators who’ve traditionally been barred from telling stories like these, because now there’s nothing stopping anyone from remaking It Happened One Night or Bringing Up Baby with a whole new ensemble. There’s every indication that the audience will be there — for instance, look how successful K-dramas, with their shameless embrace of rom-com tropes and their tendency to retell well-known storylines, have been, both overseas and in the US.

Zoe Kazan and Kumail Nanjiani starred in The Big Sick in 2017. Amazon Studios

I also want to mention Love, Simon and perhaps even Moonlight and Call Me by Your Name here, because while those latter two aren’t rom-coms, and Love, Simon might be arguably more of a teen comedy than a rom-com, they collectively indicate an emerging positive space for queer romance. It pains me endlessly to realize that the last queer rom-com I can remember making a mainstream splash is 2005’s Imagine Me & You — which is also one of the few really pure, trope-a-licious queer rom-coms.

That film capped a decade starting in the mid-’90s when indie queer rom-coms (Jeffrey, Trick, The Opposite of Sex, But I’m a Cheerleader, Big Eden, Touch of Pink, the long-rumored original cut of Bend It Like Beckham the world deserved, sigh) were pretty easy to find but often deeply flawed, tinged with understandable sadness and sociopolitical edge, and more than a little weird. We are overdue for a queer romance renaissance in which the gays just get to have fun and fall in love without having to undergo a social reckoning.

That’s a huge part of why Love, Simon is so important — and I’m hopeful the love and support queer romances have been getting lately will open the field for more mainstreamed queer and genderqueer rom-coms that allow queer people to participate in universal love stories. In other words, I want to see queer and genderqueer remakes of His Girl Friday and The Women, let’s do this, Hollywood!

Todd: It’s also exciting because this is really one of the first times in Hollywood history where you can just make a rom-com around LGBTQ themes, aimed at a large audience, that doesn’t need to be explicitly about the larger experience of being LGBTQ.

Even 10 years ago, there was at least a minor expectation that these stories needed to be filtered through a cis/hetero lens, and they always contained a certain element of, like, “being gay, explained.” There’s less of that now. A movie like Love, Simon can just exist, can just be thoroughly adequate. That’s revolutionary in its own way, but we’re rapidly approaching a point where it won’t feel revolutionary, which is even more impressive.

Love, Simon garnered mixed reviews, but that’s part of why it’s important. 20th Century Fox

But I think the larger point I’m nodding toward here is cultural specificity. There’s far less need to indulge in explaining things to the audience over and over again, out of fear that not everybody will “get it.” The mahjong scene in Crazy Rich Asians simply flies by, trusting you to get the emotional impact of what happens even if you can’t explain all the machinations within the game itself. It works because we’ve all freaked out about pleasing the parents of someone we really care about.

Similarly, The Big Sick trades on a conflict rooted in incredible cultural specificity — the main character’s desire to choose his romantic partner, rather than his parents getting a say in the process — that broadens out to a more universal consideration of the way family can make it harder to fall in love.

This means a lot of the old rom-com tropes feel ripe for exploration again. And thus, I hope more actors try their hand at the genre. Which performers would you like to see appear in a romantic comedy? I’d love Michael B. Jordan to get a shot at one after seeing the romantic scenes in Creed. I suspect we’d all fall in love with him.

Genevieve: I’m going to table that question for just a moment, Todd, because this is probably a good place to acknowledge that the past 20 years or so have seen their fair share of black romantic comedies, very few of which have been able to break out of that unfortunately niche distinction but have collectively established a roster of black actors with a proven history of carrying a rom-com.

Taye Diggs, Gabrielle Union, Sanaa Lathan, and Queen Latifah have all had multiple go-rounds in a subgenre that has produced a handful of “surprise” box office successes in the past decade or so, some of which trade in exactly the sort of cultural specificity Todd is describing.

I’m thinking of 2011’s Jumping the Broom, which “overperformed” in its debut and went on make back five times its production budget; 2012’s Think Like a Man, a cameo-festooned adaptation of a Steve Harvey book that took in $33 million its opening weekend — that’s right around what Crazy Rich Asians pulled in — and produced a 2014 sequel that opened nearly as big; and 2013’s The Best Man Holiday, a sequel to Malcolm Lee’s beloved 1999 film The Best Man, whose $30 million-plus opening weekend debut “trounced all expectations.”

The box office performance of The Best Man Holiday in particular started a dialogue about the assumptions around these films that lead to these “surprise” big openings, assumptions that combine misconceptions about the rom-com with misconceptions about black films: that mainstream audiences don’t show up to black films, and that, as one studio executive told Brown Sugar screenwriter Michael Elliot, “Love does not really resonate with black people. Comedy does.”

Think Like a Man was a big box office hit in 2012. Screen Gems

What exactly am I getting at here? I’m honestly not entirely sure, and I don’t want to suggest I’m some sort of expert on black romantic comedies — I’ll guiltily admit that I haven’t seen most of the films I just mentioned, though I am quite aware of how they are often misperceived by the industry, and of how my ignorance of them contributes to those misperceptions.

But I think if we’re talking about the broad assumptions surrounding romantic comedies, and if we’re talking about more inclusive storytelling, and if we’re talking about bankable romantic leads who aren’t white, and if we’re talking about whether romantic comedies can succeed at the box office, we can’t not talk about the lack of consideration that’s been afforded to black romantic comedies over the years by the broader film community.

When Vulture published its 2015 list of the best rom-coms since When Harry Met Sally, a list that included no films with black or LGBTQ leads, it did so with the admission of its own “blind spots,” conceding in its intro that “there are movies this list needs.”

All that said, there has not been, to my knowledge, a financially successful black rom-com film since 2014’s Think Like a Man Too, which came out almost five years ago at this point. (Diggs co-stars in Set It Up, but he’s more of a romantic antagonist there, and I don’t think anyone would dare categorize it as a black rom-com.) If we are indeed in the midst of a rom-com renaissance, I hope those looking to revive the genre remember the legacy-within-a-legacy of the black rom-com, if for nothing else than to help correct what might be the mainstream rom-com’s biggest, most shameful blind spot.

Anyway, please cast GuGu Mbatha-Raw, of Beyond the Lights and Black Mirror’s “San Junipero,” in a romantic comedy, thank you.

Alissa: Speaking of dictums aimed at Hollywood! Suppose a studio executive approaches you at a cocktail party and says that they think the rom-com is about to have a resurgence, and wants your best piece of advice for making a great one.

What do you say?

Constance: I’m going to take my inspiration from To All the Boys and get really earnest here: I think the most important thing for a romantic comedy to have is emotional honesty.

Part of what killed the romantic comedy in the mid-’00s was that the biggest studio rom-coms, your How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or your Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, were getting increasingly slick and smarmy and cynical. They followed the formula of a rom-com on a surface level — aspirational jobs, fancy clothes, beautiful people — but they were made with a palpable contempt for both their characters and the people who enjoy watching romantic comedies. These movies didn’t care about their characters or why they should fall in love; they were just putting them through the motions. And watching them didn’t feel escapist and joyous and fun. It felt gross and slimy.

That’s part of why it’s felt so refreshing and exciting that this year’s best romantic comedies are suffused with sincere affection for the genre and for their characters. It’s because we can feel that these movies love their characters that we’re able to fall in love with them too, and that love is something that can’t be faked. It has to come from a place of honest respect and affection.

Crazy Rich Asians loves its characters, so we do too. Warner Bros.

Todd: I would double up on Constance’s suggestion: Sincerity is key. If you don’t believe in the love story, then there’s no good reason to tell it.

But I would also encourage this imaginary exec to continue exploring the ways that falling in love can feel universal, even when rooted in very specific experiences. A film I didn’t talk about earlier was Azazel Jacobs’s The Lovers, which is maybe a little too dark to be a classic rom-com but definitely has the trappings of one. What I liked about that movie was how it rooted its rom-com shenanigans in the very specific milieu of a long-lasting marriage, between two people exiting middle age for their elderly years who are just pretty sick of each other. It gave what could have been a tired story an extra boost of dramatic stakes, and that was all it took.

But really, so long as Matthew McConaughey is nowhere near this rom-com renaissance, we’re doing something right. Sorry, Matthew. Love your smarm, but not in this genre.

Aja: My suggestion is probably why I don’t wind up getting invited to many cocktail parties: I’d tell them to read more fanfic. Because in fanfiction, especially queer fanfiction, writers tend to simultaneously embrace and explode rom-com tropes. They do that by treating them extremely seriously and with that much-coveted sincerity, but also by centering them within very self-aware lived experiences, making conscious choices about how to either subvert the tropes they’re working with or reframe social issues in order to shamelessly leverage those tropes to create even more shameless fantasy.

Fanfiction is all about cultivating a fantasy version of reality where challenging romances can thrive, but fanfiction also never lets us forget that its creators are driven to build that fantasy version of reality because the real one sucks. I’m reminded of the 2009 sci-fi romance Timer, which is explicitly about that fantasy/reality divide. It’s not a happy movie, but it inadvertently created a massively popular recent fanfiction trope, because people who write romances have increasingly used the genre and its tropes to thwart socially imposed norms that tell us what love should be and look like.

I believe the way to keep this genre resurgence going is to keep writing it within that framework — by embracing romantic fantasy as a powerful palliative and social remedy. Tension between fantasy and reality makes romance stories more passionate, and the more people we have telling these stories, the more diverse and fascinating real-world experiences we can draw on as we create new fantasies for everyone to enjoy.

Genevieve: I’m going to second all of this, but conclude with some cold pragmatism that might seem to undermine what we’ve been talking about. Just bear with me, because studio execs in particular need to hear this: Please don’t think of rom-coms as potential blockbusters.

So much of Hollywood’s modern movie model is built on the quest for big openings and big international box office tallies, and those are not expectations that this genre is in a position to meet. The latter is particularly tough for a genre built on two things — comedy and romance tropes — that don’t easily translate between cultures (give or take the occasional cross-cultural property like Crazy Rich Asians).

I worry that a studio exec who’s deeply internalized this model might hear the words “rom-com resurgence” and be tempted to throw millions at these movies, paying through the nose for bankable international stars and big-name directors with the expectation of a return on investment that is unlikely to happen.

As previously mentioned by Todd, the recent indie/Blumhouse horror revival is the model to follow here: Think small but distinctive, cheap but memorable. Invest in lesser-known talents with a passion for the genre who are eager to bring something new to it while respecting its roots. At the very least, you’re likely to get a good return on investment; if you play your cards right, you might even get some prestige shine in the deal.

The rom-com could and should be a strong part of a studio’s portfolio, but overinvesting in a genre that tends toward the small and the intimate by design is a recipe for a resurgence that’s DOA. As I think we’ve proven with this discussion, there’s plenty of enthusiasm out there for the genre; if Hollywood wants to capture that enthusiasm, it needs to let the rom-com succeed on its own terms.

Original Source -> Why romantic comedies matter

via The Conservative Brief

[duo-log]

Us & Them

I sometimes wonder, which is more valuable to us -- us as in the current generation, me, you and our friends -- watching Netflix on a lazy Sunday afternoon or voluntary community service? Are we driven by the materialistic values more than the innate values that make us human beings? Ask this question to the previous generation and the answer will unequivocally be the former while we would laugh that opinion away and would like to believe that it is coming from a bias that they never can overcome. Ironically enough, the idea originated from the rather dry and dark take on the current generation's priorities in Schitt's Creek which we have been binge watching on, you guessed it, Netflix. So then who is right? It's one of those us vs. them situations where consensus may be an impossibility.

It is worth looking at what divides the two age groups -- the last generation that grew up with the war at their heels or the one before which fought the war, and the ‘you,’ ‘me’ and the ones of our ilk who grew up in the shelter of assurance of peace. The war, in short, was the great divide and it might be the crux of what set the great divide in motion -- a gap concerning how and what contemporaries hold in higher value as well as the societal progression that fed into such stance. The generation and the one before grew up at a time that was the very definition of the word scarcity. Resources, jobs, value for human life and everything that we, the current generation, take for granted, was available in minimal quantity. The nature of such time left people with no other choice but to adapt, and we are as adept a species as there is.

They say time heals everything. I don't know how much of that is true in terms of broken heart or a broken mind, but it sure did smoothen out the rough state that our predecessors were left with after decades of global unrest. Or maybe it was their acute sense of conservation and respect for human values helped move the needle of progression ahead and we as a species arrived at today's favorable circumstances. As geopolitical peace began to prevail, the known challenges of our society were addressed. The favorable situation thus created was then ready to address other contemporary issues. Population growth, equality, racism, sexism and challenging job market caused by technological advancements, are among many other matters that our generation faces and naturally that's what we are adapting to. We are not as worried about thrust into a war zone as much as being awkwardly placed into a society where human beings are not respected just as the way they are. We are not worried about living in perpetual fear that was created by cold war, but we are sensitive to how Brexit or a Trump presidency will affect the global job market that we worked so hard to create. In other words, our priorities are simply different and therein lies the secret of survival.

Survival is the key word here. Call me hopelessly optimistic or just a fool, but I truly believe our generation has wished and done nothing but well for the world. Yes, we prioritize what we need to, given the situation, but that does not necessarily mean that we are losing touch with intrinsic human values. We may choose to look a lot of times inwards and sometimes even act as though the world revolves around us, but one thing is for certain -- we have not lost focus on human values. What our parents did was extraordinary. They brought the world, the society to where we can afford such luxury. Their relentless and unwavering focus on intrinsic values that make us “good” citizens helped deeply embed those values in our psyche and we carry those in our subconscious minds in all our deeds. We do not further those values in any direct or obvious ways because we believe the course to advance, is to address the issues we face today which has a different facade but prioritizing them contributes to the same progression. An evolution of problems warrants an evolution of priorities. We are after all a species that is driven by evolution.

As usual, you can read the other part of this Duolog(ue) here.