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sage-nebula · 3 years

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I started typing up a post on my opinions of the characters in Neo TWEWY, but when I got to Neku's segment it got so long that I realized it needed to be its own post. So if you want me to elaborate on how I feel they did my favorite boy dirty, head below the cut.

First of all, to get it out of the way: his English voice is absolutely atrocious. Given that he has the same voice actor here as he did in the original, I really don’t know what went wrong. Was Mr Corti mentally checked out and only doing this for the paycheck? Was the voice director high on cough syrup on the days Corti was in the office? Who the heck knows, but it’s bad. Not only is Neku’s voice way too deep (he was fifteen in the first game, he’d already been through puberty, his voice shouldn’t have broken again, it’s not like Beat’s did!), but there was pretty much 0 acting to be found. The closest we got to an actual performance is when Neku yelled Beat’s name a couple times during the chaos that went down at the end of Week 3. That was it. Otherwise, it sounded like Corti was just reading his lines with zero surrounding context and zero effort into actually acting them rather than just reading them while either half asleep or bored out of his skull. It’s supremely disappointing and an honest disrespect to the character. Again, I don’t know if this was because of the voice direction or what, but whatever it was, I hated hearing Neku actually talk and that kills me considering he was my favorite of the main cast in the original game.

Which brings me to the bigger issue, which is his characterization. Neo!Neku has zero personality. I’ve said this on multiple posts, and I’ll say it again. He has no personality. It’s gone. I think that when Coco shot him at the end of “A New Day” she not only killed his physical body, but also any semblance of personality he once had, and honestly it kills me because, again, he was my favorite of the original cast.

To elaborate:

Over the course of the original game, Neku goes from a closed off, snarky, trauma-ridden jerkass to a more open, snarky, loyal friend and defender of those who need it. By the end of Week 3 Neku is open to meeting new people (though he’s not completely open either; as he tells Joshua in his ending monologue, it’s still hard for him, but he’s trying), he’s more patient with those around him, he sees more value in the people and the world around him and he’s learning to open himself up and actually enjoy the moment, rather than just saying he does. Moreover, whereas he was fully ready to kill in order to escape the Game at the start (thank god for Hanekoma stepping in), by the end he breaks down crying over . . . well, everything, but in that exact moment it was because Joshua was hinging Neku’s own life on Neku’s ability to pull the trigger on Joshua, and he couldn’t. Neku underwent remarkable change over the course of the original game and I would never, not even once, say that I’d want Neku in Neo to be characterized how he was at the start of (or even in the middle of) the original game.

However.

There is no semblance of Neku, period, in the character that we get in Neo. The closest that we get to any kind of snarky humor from him is when he asks Beat if Beat died again, and that’s why he’s in the UG. Despite being fiercely loyal to his friends (and despite knowing that Minamimoto is a shady bitch out for himself first and foremost), he says with a smile that Minamimoto has ~changed~ or is ~trying to~ despite having absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever, and walking in on Minamimoto literally trying to murder Beat. He’s BFFs with Coco despite the fact that Coco killed him, purely because her motivations were good, and he chastises Beat for not trusting her even though Beat witnessed that murder and has had to live with it for the past three years. Many of his voice clips don’t sound like him (“well done,” for example, just sounds too proper for him, it doesn’t sound like the way he talks; “nice one” or “good job” would be more appropriate), he’s perfectly fine and not awkward at all with everyone calling him a legend, he seems to have no issue whatsoever with the fact that he’s been trapped in Shinjuku’s UG (or in-between the UG and the RG) for the past three years, and overall it feels a whole lot less like Neku-as-a-character and more like Neku-as-an-exposition-mentor. Like he wasn’t here to be himself, he was here because a.) it was expected because this was the sequel, and b.) he’s the closest to Hanekoma they could get, even though he’s not acting like Hanekoma either.

Here’s the thing.

Yes, it’s expected that Neku would have matured even more by the time this game rolls around than he had by the end of Week 3. It’s expected that, much like Beat, Neku has grown up and changed as a result of that maturation as well. However . . .

1.) Beat is still noticeably Beat despite his maturation, and

2.) Neku didn’t get to grow up in the same way that Beat did, by virtue of being dead and stuck in hell for the past three years.

Neku’s life for the past four years has basically been a rollercoaster of trauma. First, his friend dies on his way to meet Neku, which Neku blames himself for (and I’m pretty sure this takes place about a year before the original game, though I could be wrong on that). Then, while he’s still struggling with processing his grief, he’s murdered by Joshua and put into the Reapers’ Game. He has to go through three extremely difficult weeks with his life on the line, during which he learns to process his previous trauma in a healthier way while getting a bunch of fresh new trauma dropped on his plate. He escapes that Game with his new friends, but then less than a year later he is murdered again, and this time he’s locked in a hellspace where Shinjuku used to be, and not only that, but he is trapped there with his murderer, who is not sorry at all that she killed him and instead believes that it was the right thing to do despite the fact that Shinjuku has already undergone the Inversion and Neku is just stuck there now with the thoughts of the nonexistent swirling through his head. Presumably his powers, which were already incredibly powerful, grow exponentially during this time as a result of the space he’s in, but that’s not really the point. The point is, Neku went through a trauma conga line with no time to really breathe or process any of it, and while I can believe that he came to trust Coco enough so that they could both get out of Shinjuku, I can’t believe that going through all that trauma without any chance to live a normal, happy life would produce a smiling mentor figure who’s just here to blithely exposit without any real emotion, or any of his trademark snarky humor. It’s not realistic maturation, especially because maturation isn’t supposed to stamp out aspects of your personality that make you, you. Just as Beat is able to still recognizably be Beat while also being more mature, Neku should have been recognizably Neku, and he isn’t. If you were handed the script with all the names blacked out, you would never be able to tell his lines were his. And honestly, that absolutely crushes me, especially since I was so excited for him to come back since I love him so incredibly much.

Honestly, I’m tempted to rewrite that last portion of the game so that Neku acts more like himself—so that we can actually hear him instead of this bland exposition fairy they put in his place. But whether I do that or not, just know that I found Neku to be incredibly disappointing, and I think he deserved better on just about every front. The only really good thing about him was his design, and the fact that he still did the fingers-to-temples gesture when he reached out to the minds of Shibuya during the end segment. (I was literally chanting, “do the thing, do the thing!” so I was very happy when he did, in fact, do the thing.) And considering how important he is as a character in this series, that was just . . . so incredibly disappointing.

#neo: the world ends with you #neo: the world ends with you spoilers #ntwewy spoilers #neo twewy spoilers #sakuraba neku #my boy deserved better #he deserved SO much better #hate that they did him like this. i really do.

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baecvlt · 3 years

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First Love

Pairing: Sougami (Byakuya Togami x Kazuichi Soda)

Warnings: Smut (all wholesome tho bc they barely met in this one)

A/N: Decided to write this up for the bestie (komaedanovio on TikTok; follow them). Azul would die for them and there are 0 fics abt them sooo. Yeah.

“So you’re part of the Future Foundation, huh?”

Byakuya pushes his glasses back as they were falling off his nose, then turning around to see the person who spoke. “Uh, yes,” he answered the pink haired man behind him, he stuck out his hand that he’d covered with a handkerchief,“Byakuya Togami”. They shook hands.

“Name’s Kazuichi Soda”

“I know. The ‘Ultimate Mechanic’, is it not?”

“Yeah! You look really rich. Valentino Couture?”

“Yeah—,” Byakuya answered, then looked down at his suit,“How did you know?”. “My mom was somewhat a tailor. She’d help fix and sew up suits such as yours, so I obviously had to recognize Italian threads,” he explained,“Made sure I washed my hands before approaching you, can’t stain a fine suit like that”. Byakuya was somewhat impressed. No one has ever appreciated his attire, he looked like a snob to most people.

Then again, Kazuichi isn’t most people.

“She taught me to sew, never let me handle suits,” Kazuichi added,“But I’d always see them in the closet hung up nicely”. He had a warm smile on his face, reminiscing tends to bring a little joy to him. “I think that’s just honorable,” Byakuya said warmly. “You think so?”. Byakuya nodded, the smile on Kazuichi’s face spreading. “Thanks,” he mumbled, but spoke up,“We should keep in touch, y’know?”. Byakuya began to think. He wasn’t really one for friends, Kazuichi was extremely beneath him. On the other hand, he was interesting to talk to and didn’t seem like a pest, right?

“That’s fine”

“Alright! How about we meet up during the island celebration? Tonight?”

Byakuya nodded, he didn’t know why, but he nodded. “Cool! See you later, Togami”. Kazuichi ran off, going to see if he can help with cleanup someway. As he ran, Byakuya had just realized he agreed to hang out with someone who he had just met. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, but it was just weird to him. I guess, he just seemed nice enough. Whatever. Now that the Tragedy is over, it’d be nice to return things to normal. Byakuya was ready to make new partnerships and if his first besides his classmates was to be Kazuichi, so be it.

Later that evening, Byakuya made sure to attend. He got there early, making it easier to spot Kazuichi. He was around Gundham and Sonia, who had begun warming up to him. Their eyes locked, Byakuya waved. Kazuichi waved back as he called for him,“Togami! Wait up—”. He ran from his two classmates and to Byakuya. Everyone had gotten dressed up, Kazuichi in a nice little suit that complimented his hair. He had glasses on this time. “What a surprise!,” he cheered,“I thought you would’ve bailed!”. That was sad to say the least. “How could I do such a thing? I had to come anyway,” Byakuya explained,“Makoto can’t drive...he’s also in the Future Foundation”.

“So I’ve heard. Can I offer you a drink?”

“Why not?”

Byakuya was a pessimist, this we know. He was as pessimistic as they come. Hanging out with Kazuichi was something he told himself wouldn’t be worth his time, but he agreed, so he had to suck it up. To his surprise, hanging out with him wasn’t so bad. In fact, he’ll never admit it, but Byakuya actually enjoyed Kazuichi’s company. They went for a glass of punch, enjoyed the feast, danced with friends till dawn. Around 4am (because damn, this party was just never gonna end), they took it upon themselves to walk along the beach. As they walked, conversations took place. Byakuya went off on a rant about his limousine life, riding in one everyday and how he feared for his life when doing so. His limo made a sound that sounded as if it were going to fall apart any time soon.

“It was a scratching noise against the asphalt and absolutely terrorized me as a child. To this day, I won’t enter a limousine. I just can’t”

“Scratching? Gee, only thing that comes to mind is the exhaust coming down. Wish I could’ve seen it and told you for sure”

“I still have it in a hidden garage. It’s that valuable”

“Oh, nice! Maybe, I can stop by and see what’s wrong. You’ll have to drive it though”

Byakuya raised a brow. “You’re the mechanic, are you not?,” he asked. Kazuichi laughed nervously, nodding. “See, thing is...I get terribly carsick”. Well, that was new. It was confusing to Byakuya, just as the confusion hit, Kazuichi added:

“Isn’t that funny? The rich guy who’s scared of limos and the mechanic with carsickness”

Byakuya snickered,“Yeah, I guess that’s unheard of”.

They laughed, finding a perfect place to sit down. It was late. Dark and late, the sand was cool against their hands. They took off their shoes, setting them aside. The waves crashes on the shore, “So, what next?,” Kazuichi asked. His voice was softer, Byakuya took notice. “What do you mean?,” he asked. Kazuichi pushed back his hair and shrugged. “I mean, now that we’re all free”. Byakuya took time to give a proper answer, he had a plan.

“Well, for starters, after we finish cleanup, do the very best to rebuild homes. Slowly as we become civilized again, I rebuild the Togami Conglomerate. It’s what my family would’ve wanted and for them, I’d do just about anything” “Wow” “And yourself?”

Kazuichi smiled, facing him. “I’ve been working on blueprints here and there to, get this, introduce new transportation for us all!”. Byakuya shrugged. “You haven’t heard the best part, though,” he added,“You’ll never guess what it is!”.

“Flying car?

“That sounds awesome— No! That’s not it at all!”

“What is it?”

Kazuichi bit back his smile and answered,“A monorail! One that goes super fast! I just know it’s possible! Average monorail? 70 miles per hour, but if I get it right, It could go 200 miles per hour...ore more!”. Now, Byakuya was smiling. “Impressive,” he responded,“It’d be very convenient for people to get around”.

“I’m glad you think so”

Kazuichi faced the ocean, sighing deeply. “I’ve just always wanted to build transportation, really fast ones,” he said,“My old man doubted me, though. He didn’t think it was realistic. He said cars I can do, but never anything past that. Something about cars is all the family knows, I dunno”.

“I think you can do it”

“You’re just saying things—”

“No, I know you can. You have something other geniuses lack. You have the heart. Where there’s heart, there is will”

“That means a lot coming from you”

“Why from me?”

Kazuichi explained that he knows about Byakuya’s family and they didn’t sound any easier, either. “We didn’t have good upbringings,” he said,“But you, you had it so hard. Yet, you overcame all of that shit. If you survived that and all of this, I know you can rebuild your conga line”

“Conglomerate?”

“Yeah, that”

They smiled. “Man to man,” Kazuichi added,“Is settling down in that plan?”. Byakuya hadn’t thought of that at all. Would he even want to settle down? Jesus. That was the last thing he expected to think about. “I’m going to be completely honest with you,” Byakuya answered,“I have no idea. That isn’t something that’s come to mind. While I’d like to have someone to continue my legacy, I just don’t know. Tell me about your plan?”. Kazuichi was confused now, he didn’t think Byakuya was gonna return the question. “I would like to, but who’d love me?,” he muttered. He continued.

“I never had the best luck with women, but then sometimes, I sit and wonder,’Do I really feel this way about women?’ I try to be such a people pleaser, I sometimes don’t even know if I genuinely like something or if I say I do because that’s what’s expected of me and I’ve never told anyone else that, wow”

Byakuya sucked at being comforting, we also know this, but he really wanted to be there for Kazuichi. “I think I’m gay,” Kazuichi blurted, covering his mouth. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that”. Byakuya shook his head,“First of all, congratulations”. Kazuichi couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Second of all, don’t apologize for being truthful to yourself,” he said,“I’m not exactly of heterosexual persuasion either”.

“Oh, thank god. I though I was going to be killed and thrown into the ocean”

“Nah, because who on this island is straight? Absolutely no one”

“You might be right...wow. I’m gay. I’m gay. I’m gaaaayyy”

Byakuya laughed,“Let it out, I guess”. “I’ve just never said that out loud! It feels so freeing!”. Kazuichi stood up and ran to the ocean. At the top of his lungs, he professed his attraction to men. He ran back, only for them to hear someone say. “You love who you love, man, more power to ya!”. They laughed at that moment, laughed so hard their stomach cramped. “Who even was that?,” Kazuichi sobbed.

“I think that might’ve been Yasuhiro”

“O-Oh, at least you know him”

They calmed down, enjoying their time on the sand. “This was fun,” Kazuichi mumbled. “I agree”. He scoot closer to Byakuya, who unknowingly wrapped his arm around his waist. He caressed his sides, softly. Kazuichi lay his head on Byakuya’s shoulder, which he didn’t mind. There was just something really comforting about this. “What’s most important to you in a relationship?,” Kazuichi asked. His voice was still soft, but unlike before, it wasn’t stern or blue. “For both of us to have ambition and goals set,” he answered,“What’s important to you?”.

“I just wanna trust someone. It’s hard for me to trust anyone, really. So as long as I can trust them and they’re kind, that’s all I want”

“Well, I’m a brutally honest cunt”

“I love brutally honest cunts”

He laughed as he continued to rub down his sides. As the saying goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Plus, tonight was going just great. “Look at me,” Byakuya said. “Hm?”. Kazuichi faced him, only to be grabbed and pulled to Byakuya’s lips. He gasped, a blush coming across his face as Byakuya kissed him ever so tenderly. They pulled away slowly. Kazuichi covered his face, Byakuya reaching for his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “No! Its okay!,” he blurted,“It was more than okay! I-I’ve just never kissed another dude before. Okay, I’ve never actually kissed anyone else”.

“Oh?”

“Well, I have, but not like this”

“I can tell. Your lips, they were so soft and inexperienced. Untouched, I’d say”

As Byakuya said this, he placed his thumb gently on Kazuichi’s lips, sliding it down soft and slowly; he shuddered before he spoke. “I want you to kiss me again,” he muttered against his sliding thumb. “Good”. Kazuichi’s breath hitched as Byakuya grabbed his jaw, gently kissed him. He kissed back now with more readiness, his hand digging into the sand. Byakuya’s hand moved from his jaw to his throat, gripping softly. A sweet moan escaped Kazuichi’s lips, making him bite Byakuya’s bottom lip. He winced, pulling away momentarily. “Sorry,” he whispered. Byakuya reassured him it was okay, but Kazuichi shook his head. “Let me kiss it better,” he cooed, pushing Togami on his back. Soda straddled him, pecking his lower lip.

Now, Byakuya was blushing.

“Ah, don’t hate me, but I kinda drew blood”

“You? Withdraw blood? With those teeth? Also unheard of”

“Hey! Shut up about my teeth”

“I like your teeth”

“I like you”

“Really? Prove yourself truthful”

“Say less”

“WHAT THE FUCK”

Soda quickly got off of Togami, who sat up just as fast. There stood Hiyoko, Mahiru, Ibuki, and Mikan. “Hey girls!,” Kazuichi waved,“Togami was just helping me find my glasses. We found them know, so there’s no need to worry”. “Oh don’t worry, we were just on our way to the cabins,” Mahiru explained. “What goes on in the cabins stays in the cabins! Wooho- ouch!”. Hiyoko acting as if she didn’t just nudge the fuck out of Ibuki. “Y-You know, if you two are going to, uhm, continue what you were d-doing here,” Mikan began to suggest,“Maybe you c-could go get a cabin too. The others are headed over here”. Kazuichi looked at Byakuya, who nodded. “Okay then! Let’s go!”.

So there they were, following the girls to the cabins. “I say we go to mine, just to be safe,” Kazuichi explained,“Besides, I got to clean up. It looks greats now”. Byakuya just nodded, he couldn’t utter a word. For some reason, his heart was pounding out of his chest. The girl’s split from them, giggling as they entered their room. “Home sweet home,” Kazuichi said as he opened the door. They stepped in, Kazuichi locking it. He had turned the lights on, but once he jumped on his bed, Byakuya turned them off. “Oh, you’re straight to the point, aren’t you?,” Kazuichi teased as he held his arms open for Byakuya to crawl in. He did just that, kissing him all over. He focused on his lips for about 30 seconds, before moving on to his neck, and finally he unbuttoned his shirt a little to kiss along his chest. Feeling his shirt unbutton, Kazuichi took it upon himself to do the same to Byakuya, except unbuttoning it all.

“Togami..

“Yeah?”

“Lay down”

“Alright”

Byakuya lay down as Kazuichi got between his legs, hands on his belt buckle. “Can I...?”. Byakuya nodded, giving Kazuichi permission to take it off. Carefully, he slid off his jeans and briefs, exposing his pale cock. At that point, it was quite obvious that Kazuichi had no idea as to what he was doing and supposed to do. He began by grabbing his cock, licking at his tip a little, stroking him. Byakuya snickered as Kazuichi’s eyes met his, but breathed deeply. He put his mouth over it, bobbing his head, accidentally hitting his throat. He gagged, but not loudly. Byakuya played with his hair, not yet grabbing it. “Take your time,” he comforted,“I want you to enjoy this as much as I am...Fuck~ you’re doing so well”.

Kazuichi was really, really struggling. He had to think back to the most realistic porno he’s ever seen. What were these people doing that he hasn’t? Try being sloppy maybe? Cursing himself for his lack of education in gay sex (well, actually, just sex in general), he worked with what he knew. The last thing he wanted was to embarrass himself. Little did he know, he was actually putting Byakuya on edge. Byakuya hardly cursed and when he did, it was for good reason. Like right now, Kazuichi was giving him the sloppiest head in that moment. He was doing so well, Byakuya became fixated his mouth. Something about his mouth drove him insane.

And then there was Kazuichi, still believing he was doing terrible. His thoughts were racing.

I know I’m doing something wrong...

Is he even enjoying it?

God, I’m so out of his league...

Maybe if I just spit...

What would my dad think of this? Wait, my dad’s dead—

Kazuichi allowed himself to drool all over his cock. Byakuya moaned, pushing his head back. “No more, I’m so close...,” he gasped,“I’d prefer to finish elsewhere...”. Kazuichi’s stomach sank. “O-Oh,” he stuttered,“Okay, I guess I’ll just lay down”. Byakuya got in between his legs now, removing his jeans amd boxers, examining him, realizing he’d look better completely nude. Kazuichi shivered, which he also took note of. “Let me pull a bedsheet over us,” he said,“You look cold”. “Thank you,” Kazuichi muttered as Byakuya fumbled for the covers.

“Better?”

“Still a little chilly”

“Okay, Uhm- how about now?”

Byakuya held Kazuichi with his arms wrapped around him, bare chests making contact. “Feels so nice,” he mumbled. Byakuya placed a kiss on his chest before warning him about prep.

“Please be gentle”

“I will be, just relax. Breathe”

Kazuichi was shaking at this point, he was so nervous and didn’t know why. Byakuya held him tightly, stopping himself from entering even a finger in the guy. “You’re shaking,” he noted,“Is everything okay?”. Kazuichi nodded, explaining,“This is my first time, I just want you to be gentle”. Byakuya helped him work on his breathing. He placed a warm hand on his chest, making sure his heart rate slows down. “There,” he whispered,“I’m gonna go slow”. Kazuichi nodded, bracing himself.

Prep wasn’t actually bad?

He took Byakuya’s first two fingers well, but then the third one made him whine (and cry a little). Nonetheless, he just wanted to get it over with. The pain had gone away once Byakuya had curled his fingers a few times. Kazuichi made small noises as he took his fingers, whining when pulled out. With his other hand, he cupped Kazuichi’s jaw, but slowly slit it down to his throat. Kazuichi gasped as he felt Byakuya’s grip tighten. “I’m going to ruin you ever so softly,” he whispered,“Understood?”.

“Yes...”

“Good”

Byakuya took his cock out, placing Kazuichi’s legs on his shoulders. Still tight, he groaned as he pushed in. “Ah! Fuck...”. Along with being filled by Byakuya’s cock, the grip on his throat remained, sending a wave of pleasure through him. Byakuya kept his thrusts slow, just like be promised. “I-Is this okay?,” Byakuya managed.

“Harder”

“I just started. D-Don’t you want to ease into it first”

“No, just— please. Also...”

Kazuichi moved his hand to Byakuya’s choking hand, pressing it down harder against him. “What you’re asking for could hurt you, um...Are you sure?,” Byakuya asked. Kazuichi nodded, fisting Byakuya’s hair and pulling him in for a heated kiss. In response, Byakuya only thrust harder into him. He knew he wouldn’t last long, seeing Kazuichi’s already fucked out face. Each thrust only made his blush deepen and his stomach acids find new ways to make him feel sick. Byakuya came to the realization that his cock already had the guy in shambles and in a trance, almost. He was making him feel good, but he knew that he wasn’t exactly fucking him the way he should be fucked, deserves to be fucked. He wasn’t hitting his sweet spot just right, Byakuya taking it upon himself to experiment with his thrusts.

“Ngh! Hey, why’d you stop doing that? It felt— Ah!”

Found it.

Byakuya tried thrusting with his cock in that angle, but realized it was harder in this position. “Ass up,” he sighed, slightly out of breath. Kazuichi didn’t hesitate whatsoever, immediately laying on his stomach with his ass in the air. Sure, he already felt weak in his knees, but that wouldn’t stop him from letting Byakuya do him the way he was about to.

It didn’t take long for Byakuya to rediscover this new spot, hitting it repeatedly. Kazuichi dug his face into the soft, white pillows; practically screaming as he was unraveling underneath Byakuya. His whines were perpetual and if you listened closely, you could hear exactly what he was saying in a quiet breath.

“Yesyesyes, oh! Please don’t stop now pleasepleaseplease I can’t take it anymore, Ah! I love you, I love you so much, I really love you, o-oh thank you..”

Byakuya smiled at his low, yet raspy words. I love you? “How cute,” he muttered, pulling his messy pink hair back. Kazuichi’s hand shook as he moved it too his leaking cock. “I’m close, Togami, please don’t stop”. Byakuya snickered,“I don’t plan on it”. Gently, he shoved his head back down onto the pillow, also nearing his high. Without warning, Byakuya came after a few thrusts. Feeling his warmth, Kazuichi came right after. He collapsed onto the mattress, head in the pillows and trying his very best to catch his breath. As he took deep breaths, Byakuya smiled as his fingers walked up the blushing boy’s back, tracing small circles and figure eights.

“You’re too kind”

“You deserve it,” Byakuya whispered, placing a hand on Kazuichi’s hip and kissing up and down his back (and to his neck). Kazuichi turned around, Byakuya getting to kiss his stomach a few times before being pulled up by Kazuichi. “Ah!”. He laughed as he held Byakuya tighter, nuzzling him. Byakuya may have been taller, but Kazuichi was definitely stronger.

“Gotcha”

Byakuya would be annoyed, but not when Kazuichi has the goofiest and most smug look on his face. Eventually he let him go, laying by him. Kazuichi’s hair was ruined by their little night Basically, he ended up with his tiny braid undone. Kazuichi twirled his excess hair in between his fingers. “Oh- Allow me,” Byakuya said, finding the rubber band used to fasten the hair, braiding. Kazuichi’s eyes stared at him lovingly, watching Byakuya put his glasses back on just to redo his braid. “Annnnnd...done”. Byakuya rubbed his chest before reaching for the the ground and picking up his briefs, putting them back on. He tossed Kazuichi his boxers.

“Thanks”

“Of course”

They lay next to each other, Kazuichi playing with Byakuya’s hair. “I’m so glad I met you,” Byakuya admitted. “Ditto”. Byakuya grabbed his chin, pulling him in for a slow, passionate kiss. Suddenly, the door creaked open, but two girls rush in, already fondling each other.

“Excited, aren’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t I be when you look so—”

Kazuichi and Byakuya stared at the two women, who awkwardly stared back.

“Togami?”

“Fukawa?...WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH NAEGI’S SISTER?”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THE MECHANIC?”

“I won’t say anything if you don’t”

“Sounds good to me! Come on, Komaru”

The girls ran out, thus allowing Kazuichi and Byakuya to finish their little makeout session. Eventually, it tired them out, sleeping in each other’s arms. Before sleep, Byakuya wondered something, but decided it could wait. The next morning, Kazuichi woke up first, planting a small kiss on Byakuya’s lips. As his eyes fluttered open, Kazuichi gasped. “My prince has finally awoken”.

“Silly”

“I know”

Byakuya kissed him properly, getting up to bathe. Upon entering the shower, he heard the door open. “Can I join?!”. Byakuya invited him in, closing the shower door. “Did you want something before we go?,” Byakuya asked, making Kazuichi blush. “Uh, no, um...did you?”. Byakuya shook his head.

“I just wanted to shower with you”

“I see. Help me with my hair, I’ll help you with yours”

Kazuichi nodded, grabbing the shampoo and lathering it into his hair. It didn’t take long to add in the conditioner in too since his hair was short. Now, Byakuya got to Kazuichi’s hair. He took care of Kazuichi, being less awkward about washing him up. It’s not that Kazuichi wasn’t into helping him, he was insecure about touching him. He wanted to do it right, sometimes doubting himself and what he was doing. Byakuya on the other hand, was confident in what he was doing as he massaged Kazuichi’s scalp whilst washing him. “Did you mean it?”.

“Mean what?”

“Last night while I was destroying you from the inside out—”

“Of course”

“—you said you loved me....well, did you mean it? I know people say things they don’t mean in a state of bliss, but-”

“Togami, I meant every word”

Byakuya’s heart skipped a beat as Kazuichi spoke. “If you mean it, tell me right now that you love me,” he ordered. “I love you, Togami. Do you love me?”. Byakuya held onto him, hugging him tightly. “Well, I guess this is my answer,” Kazuichi laughed,“Hey— Are you crying?”. Obviously crying, (because he was emotional for some reason) Byakuya backed away.

“Of course not! Me? Crying? No, never!”

“I love you”

“I love you too”

“Was this too fast?”

“What? You’re telling me you don’t believe in love at first sight?”

“I guess I do”

They finished up their shower and got dressed, heading out. Everyone had already met up at the dock. “Jesus, where the hell were you two?!,” Makoto asked, genuinely concerned. “Yeah, we were about to go search,” Hajime added. “I was helping Kazuichi pack something. I saw him struggle in his room with it,” Byakuya said, calmly. Kazuichi just went along with it. “Yeah, my tools wouldn’t pack well,” he explained,“Togami was just helping me stuff everything into my toolbox”. A low mutter was heard, but you’d have to be close enough to understand it.

“Yeah, right. That toolbox wasn’t the only thing Byakuya was stuffing...—”

“FUKAWA!”

“Alright! That does it for the headcount!,” Makoto announced,“Let’s get going. We have a rebuilt city to settle into!”. As everyone cheered on boarded the boat with their own individual classes, Byakuya rushed closer to Kazuichi. “Will I see you again?,” Kazuichi asked.

“Soon. May I kiss you goodbye, or would that be too much a cliche?”

“Yeah, but I love cliches. All the best movies have ‘em”

“So do I”

They kissed tenderly, Byakuya holding his waist. They pulled away, smiling. “See ya around,” Kazuichi mumbled. “Goodbye, Souda”.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Friday Night Dinner: the Best Episodes

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Friday Night Dinner is ten.

That’s ten years of crimble-crumble, humble bumbling, manic misunderstandings, and more lovely bits of squirrel than you could shake a dead fox at. For thirty-seven Friday nights across six glorious seasons the Goodman family – shirtless dad, Martin (Paul Ritter); long-suffering but ever hopeful mum, Jackie (Tamsin Greig), and their visiting prank-wanker sons Adam (Simon Bird) and Jonny (Tom Rosenthal) – served up a banquet of laughs to a hungry nation, ably assisted by chronically persistent, reality-adjacent next-door-neighbour, Jim (Mark Heap) and his faithful dog, Wilson, and a host of other regulars and monstrously memorable one-offs besides.

In celebration, then, of one of the most smartly-observed, perfectly-cast comedies of recent years, in chronological order, we count down ten of the show’s best.

The Sofabed

Series 1, Episode 1

Most first episodes – nay entire first series – of new comedies can be scattergun. Maybe the characters haven’t quite coalesced, or their fictional universe doesn’t feel ‘lived in’ yet. Not so with Friday Night Dinner. The show arrived fully-formed, with the Goodmans seeming as real as any family in your street; perhaps even your own family.

All of the gags, rituals and dynamics destined to run and grow and fold back in upon themselves throughout the series’ run are here: Martin’s secrets, conspiracies and hearing difficulties; Jim’s constant interruptions; Adam and Johnny’s brutal one-upmanship; the salt-in-the-water prank; Martin’s fondness for shouting ‘shit on it’.

The first episode revolves around the selling of a sofabed (with a brief sojourn into conspiracy when Martin inveigles his children into helping him hide the old magazines Jackie has ordered him to destroy), a simple enough transaction that turns to tragedy when death comes (quite literally) calling. Martin’s mis-hearing and misunderstanding of a crucial piece of information whilst standing at the bottom of a stair-and-couch-based conga line brings the series first proper belly-laugh, and with it the realisation that Friday Night Dinner is going to be something special.

Mr Morris

Series 2, Episode 2

Mr Morris, played by Harry Landis, is a marvellous comic creation. With his predilection for getting topless and dressing people down at the dinner table, he’s like a malignant, mirror-universe version of Martin. With the eyes of Mr Magoo and the moustache of Adolf Hitler – and something of the bearing of both – Mr Morris, Granny’s new and very married boyfriend, quickly establishes himself as the dinner guest from Hell.

After crashing into their house and blaming them for the damage, the pugilistic, preening, proud, petty, and pretty much certifiably insane pensioner goes on to engage in horrendously public displays of affection with Granny; shout angrily over the phone at his 95-year-old wife; make Adam and Johnny pay for the, well, johnnies he later planned to use on their grandma; accuse Adam of sexual assault, and then challenge the whole household to a half-naked fist fight. Just another Friday night at the Goodman’s.

The Mouse

Series 2, Episode 6

‘Mouse’ marks the first time that Jim manages to get his feet under the dinner table of the Goodman home, and it’s everything you could have hoped for. And more.

Normally the family manufactures its own chaos during the weekly meal – with extra helpings of misunderstandings, feuds, schadenfreude, embarrassment and horror – but here the Goodmans are cast as the straight men to Jim’s one-man reality-wrecking crew. While interpersonal connections and rituals are alien to Jim, the Goodmans’ set of mannerisms and catchphrases are his greatest challenge yet. His interpretation of their Jewish faith is equal parts sweet to absolutely bonkers, and only Jim’s anxiety, eagerness to please, incomprehension, and molten naivety keeps things from becoming insulting.

All of the Goodman rituals to which the viewer has become accustomed rain down on Jim in a hail of friendly fire, leading him to gargle on ‘Jewish water’ and scrutinise his dinner plate for hints of squirrel. The moment where Jim briefly considers whether he should eat the episode’s eponymous mouse as it scurries onto his dinner plate is pure comedy gold.

Christmas

Series 2, Episode 7

This episode features the first appearance of Rosalind Knight as Martin’s mother, or ‘Horrible Grandma’ as she’s known to the family. Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace and celebration, but that’s not an easy ask when your guest of dishonour is a terrifying little lady who’s equal parts Livia Soprano to the Shushing Library Spook from Ghostbusters. Very few Christmases contain the line, ‘Thanks for raping our grandma’s dog on Christmas day’, fewer still see a grandson sharing his grandma’s dog’s oxygen mask, but then nobody does Christmas like the Goodmans. And they’re not even supposed to be doing it.

There’s a surprisingly beautiful moment at the end of this episode, courtesy of resident oddball, Jim, that – like all of the other rare occasions on which the show veers towards sentimentality – is quickly undercut by a well-timed, and very welcome, gag.

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The Girlfriend

Series 3, Episode 1

Adam finally meets his match: an eight-year-old girl who blackmails him into a chaste but never-the-less irritating and inappropriate ‘relationship’ following the discovery of a racy, unsolicited picture of his girlfriend’s sister on his phone, while his girlfriend is there at the Goodman house for dinner. Thus unfolds an evening of unusual foot-washing, forced transvestism, secrets, lies, panic, and a stunning coup de grace from Jonny, who helps put the final nail into the coffin of his brother’s fledgling relationship.

The Fox

Series 3, Episode 2

Martin likes to squirrel away a great many things, many of them ridiculous, most of them out of sight of his wife. But Johnny and Adam probably weren’t expecting to discover a dead fox in their father’s chest freezer, much less find themselves enlisted to help move it around town like a hitman’s hairy bounty until the heat died down long enough for their father to have it stuffed. The funniest thing about Martin’s many hare-brained (or, in this case, fox-brained) schemes is the energy he throws at them, the sort of logistical chicanery seldom seen this side of the CIA. Watching the men of the family toddle around hither and thither with a dead fox, hiding it in the dining room, hurling it in cupboards, wedging it through windows, is exactly as funny as it sounds, and – as always – just when you think Martin’s got away with it… he hasn’t.

The Two Tonys

Series 4, Episode 1

Martin is an exceptionally quick-thinker. Unfortunately, his speed of thought is seldom married with precision, and he usually finds himself blurting something out at the start of an evening and spending the rest of that evening teetering on the edge of oblivion, with his long-suffering wife ready to push him off. His blurt-out in ‘The Two Tonys’, though, is perhaps his most desperate and ill-considered. In a bid to encourage Jason Watkins’ Tony – a loathed associate from years ago Martin had invited to dinner believing him to be another, better Tony – to leave the Goodman home, he forces Jackie to go along with the ruse that her mother has just died. This gambit, like all Goodman gambits, backfires spectacularly, and what follows is a farce worthy of Frasier, everything culminating in a desperate chase and the furious weaponisation of a pineapple.

The Funeral

Series 4, Episode 5

Friday Night Dinner deals with death incredibly often, and incredibly well, wringing joyous laughter from that most terrifying and inevitable of our shared fates. Here we have another delicious dose of Horrible Grandma, who’s in town to lay to rest her dear departed brother, Saul. Martin is pressured into giving Saul’s eulogy, even though he never really knew or liked his uncle all that much. Cue a day of stress, arrests, tense stand-offs and tantrums, ending with an uninvited Jim appearing at Saul’s graveside clutching four black balloons, while Martin proceeds to recite Saul’s death certificate in lieu of a proper farewell. Immediately following a Grand Prix-inspired coffin malfunction, Jim’s dog Wilson enters stage-left to put a necro-quasi-cannibalistic spin on the ending of Todd Solondz‘s Happiness.

Dad’s Birthday

Series 6, Episode 4

Horrible Grandma might make for a terrible dinner guest, but she makes for a perfect guest star. This time, we bid her goodbye for good, but not before a great deal of caustic put-downs, cathartic showdowns and perhaps the funniest, most macabre magic trick of all time, courtesy of resident ‘magician’ Jim.

Females

Series 6, Episode 6

‘Females’ wasn’t intended to be the final episode of the series, at least according to comments made by series’ creator Robert Popper immediately following its transmission. And it still might not be the end. But it’s hard to imagine a better, funnier or more touching swan-song for the show, with or without the tragic death of Paul Ritter.

Adam and Jonny finally have ‘females’ (as their progressive dad has always called their prospective girlfriends) in their lives at the same time, and Jackie is overjoyed to be welcoming them into her home. She thinks the evening is going to be perfect, which is rather naïve of her considering that she’s married to Martin.

Sure enough, Martin manages to contaminate every course of the meal with shards of broken glass, a calamity he’s forced to reveal to everyone but Jackie, going on to enlist their help in somehow preventing the matriarch from choking to death, while simultaneously preventing her from discovering the depths of his dangerous ineptitude. Martin is, of course, thoroughly rumbled, but before Jackie can strike him down with great anger and furious vengeance, two pregnancies are announced in quick and joyous succession.

‘Females’ is solidly, classically funny, but it’s the episode’s smaller, more intimate moments that will linger longest in the imagination: the brothers’ new-found, prank-less affection for each other; the subdued but sincere affection between Jackie and Martin as they discuss their new roles and the future; and the now suddenly larger Goodman family dancing as one in the living room. As codas go, it’s a damn near perfect one.

If Friday Night Dinner comes back, let it be in twenty years when Adam and Jonny are middle-aged. For now, I hope Martin gets to enjoy many long years as a granddad.

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Friday Night Dinner series 1-6 are available to stream in the UK on All4 and Netflix.

The post Friday Night Dinner: the Best Episodes appeared first on Den of Geek.

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minoacat · 3 years

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Space Soup

We were the first. The first life I mean, best we can figure. And we've had a long time to figure, so I'm just gonna leave it as is. We were the first.

Started as some little worms feeding on primordial soup I suppose, but we grew into proper humans quick enough. 'Time we got radio telescopes we were a hell of a lot cooler than soup. Soup can't build a spaceship. Still, it's got its place. We can't build spaceships without air to stick on 'em, and most o' that air comes from bacterial soup. Thanks, soup.

But who gives a shit about soup. We built huts, then we built spaceships, then we built huts on spaceships, and off we went. Into the sky! We couldn't just stay put, now could we? We wanted to explore. So we did. We fanned out across the universe, looking. Looking for homes, looking for wonders, but above all, looking for people. 13.8 billion years since this whole shebang started, there's gotta be someone else out there besides us apes, right? Anyone? No one?

Down we settled. Back to the humdrum day-to-day. We reached out, we did our due diligence, and we found nothing. Zilch. We did our jobs, and now it was time to put up our feet and have a smoke. Shoot me if you like, I still say we earned it.

Everyone's got their own guilty pleasures though, y'know? Not everyone wants the same smoke. So some of us, we settled down on a rock and made it nice and homey, others of us built our own rocks outta the crappy natural ones – dyson spheres and rings and shit – and still others went roaming off into the cosmos in world-ships, taking bits of stars with us as we went. It was a grand old time, I tell you. Still is, I guess. Oh, yeah, there's war, there's strife, but there always is. But we had world-ships. Doesn't get much better than that, now does it?

Well, it didn't.

See, all this time while we'd been colonizing the universe and all that jazz, we'd been yapping at each other across the stars. But stars are loud. Like, really loud. Which means we had to yell over them. And that takes energy. And what happened to the energy once we were done yapping? It went out into space like so much shit. It got wasted is basically what I'm saying. For millions of years it got wasted.

Well, somewhere down the line, someone looked at that and said, “Well ain't that a cryin' shame. We oughtta make use of some o' this stuff.” No idea who, that kinda stuff gets lost way too fast to try to keep track of, and who gives a shit anyway? But someone saw the millions of years of high-energy communications clogging up the works and decided to do something about it.

See, it turns out if you take the stuff we use to send signals and bend it just right, you can catch the signals that are already out there and make 'em follow the same path. Then if you make it bend back around to you, you can snatch up all that energy and use it for whatever ya like. It's like a net, but instead o' catching fish, it catches energy.

The first energy net sucked, I won't lie. Barely picked up anything, and it ate up all the useful communications besides. But you know what, it worked. It took all that energy we poured out into space yapping, and it made it useful again. And it was only the first one! By the time we got around to building the second one, we were way better at the whole thing, I promise you. And the third. And the millionth.

It was a revolution, it was. Sure, it only worked because there were so many of us normie colonists around sending signals, but it was so much easier, so much faster than anything we could do before. First few net colonies just zoomed around spreading love and knowledge and all that crap. First time one of them started feeding though, that was when we knew something was up. Because that's what it was. It wasn't a war, it was a slaughter, and when they had picked the bones clean, they just picked up and moved on like nothing had happened. Scared the shit out of, well, out of just about everyone to be honest. That's life though, I guess.

Anyway, we passed resolutions, made alliances, yelled ultimatums, but let's be honest, when has that ever worked for us? Cat's out of the bag, my little mousy friends, time to run! So, we got used to it. Us humans are good at that. Sure, maybe a few thousand colonies would get killed off from time to time, but that's just the way it is. Life lives, life kills, and life dies. Why should this level be any different?

Once the net colonies started joining together though, that was when it went from scary to just plain cool.

We had never seen anything like it! Different parts each doing their thing to make it all work like one big organism. They weren't people like us anymore, they were pieces of some kinda grand dance. Is a skin cell its own person? Not really. Not anymore. Don't mean it ain't alive and doing its best. It's like if galaxies started doing a conga line, only no one had seen a conga line, a dance, or a galaxy before. Some of us normie colonies set up shop in the conga line and had ourselves a good ride. Some of us stayed in our little sea of stars and just watched the dancers from afar. Mostly though, life went on. We lived at our level, they lived at theirs. It's not like they could get rid of us completely, and we couldn't get rid of them, not that some of us didn't try.

And that's how it is. We're living, building, thriving, and the dancers, they're doing the same. Us normie apes aren't the bigshots anymore though. We all know that. I mean really, one time we found a wall just chilling in the middle of space so big it took us a million years to measure it, and by the time we got to the other side we still didn't know which one of the dancers built it. Maybe all of them did. I bet it was just one though.

It's hard as shit being down here, I won't lie to you, but there's a peace to it too. We've learned to cope. Move on. We live, we kill, we die, same as always. Just because we can see the shoulders of giants doesn't mean we gotta stand on 'em. Go out, get wasted, build a spaceship, crash it maybe. Go be happy. That's all we got now, and y'know what, it's a pretty good gig. It ain't so bad bein' small.

#space #humans #soup

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sailor-cresselia · 5 years

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Zi-O 39: Team Den-O... has arrived!

Insert Den-O Shenanagins here~~!

Zi-O Episode 39 liveblog under the cut~

So, Grand Zi-O can just. Summon the Legend Riders themselves out of some point in time by pressing their statues. This is fine.

And it’s almost definitely summoning them, because while Build and Kuuga had their general Rider Kicks going… OOO was lifted directly from Episode 3, one of the few times he used the Tatoba Scanning Charge Kick. You can tell because of the broken columns that showed up with him – he kicked straight through them in the episode, and they’re here again.

… Actually… That was the moment that the OOO arc showed Eiji losing his powers. Him landing on the ground after that specific kick, without the yummy in sight.

HUH.

Also, pressing the statues to trigger the summon makes their emblems show up, which is a nice touch.

Hi Deneb! Hi Yuuto! I’m only just starting Den-O, so it’s going to be a while before I get to you, but I liked you in the Rider 4 special, so I’ll probably like you back in your home series, and here!

I can’t say I blame you for being concerned about that power, either. Grand sure is something.

We have a Woz Speech! IWAE! For he is now UNSTOPPABLE!

Wait. Unstoppable?

WOZ, DON’T TEMPT FATE LIKE THAT! You have just triggered the flag that will make this go very, very poorly!

Either Sougo starts going Bad because of this, or…

Well.

Final Forms in Phase Two Rider usually come about after a very specific circumstance. A very unpleasant circumstance.

…dying. I’m saying they usually come into existence after/because the rider dies.

I can’t even exclude Wizard and OOO from that, either. Haruto got Infinity after basically forcing his phantom back to life after it had been killed. And Eiji… well, I hold that his final form as OOO is Tajador, because screw the dinosaur medals, but Tajador is inherently a boyfriend form when he teams up with Ankh. And we can’t have that happen unless we get Ankh BACK.

(I HAVE seen this episode raw, as it aired, but Zi-O IS an arc-based show, so we don’t know what’s gonna happen in two weeks to keep the pattern going~)

Woz has officially skipped from accidentally spoiling by reading a sentence ahead, and is just showing us the spoilers now. Time travel, man.

Woz: “Oh, whoops, were you reading over my shoulder? Never mind all that.”

Woz: “Anyway, let’s go back a few days, to when we’ve still got two watches left...”

Me: “When’s the Drive Arc?!”

Poor Geiz and Tsukuyomi. First they come across this random train, crashed in a construction lot. Then four monsters come out – and start arguing with eachother. You know, as Imajins are prone to doing. And then they go to ‘ask the locals for help.’ Because that’s such a good idea, Urataros.

HEY. URATAROS.

DO NOT HIT ON TSUKUYOMI.

BAD TURTLE.

YOU’RE GROUNDED.

(I have literally two episodes with you under my belt and I’m already fed up with the constant flirting and lying. This does not bode well for my Den-O experience.)

Woz: (stops time to recap)

Woz: “And then there’s these assholes.”

… You know, intellectually, I knew that the clock in Woz’s Recap Vault was the one they used for Cronus back in Ex-Aid. But knowing that, and finally seeing that they didn’t even bother filling in the weapon icons that are in the ‘interior’ circle…

Toei, please. I know that usually Woz is in front of that side, so it would usually go unnoticed, but… come ON. If you’re going to repaint the thing, at least put something over that very distinctive part of the face.

Aw, drat, there isn’t enough of OOO visible in the opening of the OP to see if the columns are there. If we could tell, then that Twenty Years of Rider Kicks Vault could be the ‘and you thought this was just a flashy part of the opening’ callback at the end of the season.

(Can’t see him in the ‘everyone completes their frozen kicks after Zi-O and Geiz go by’ segment, either, at the “we’ll slip through the raindrops of time, together” line. DRAT.)

UNCLE TOKIWA. You need to start questioning things more. Although him assuming that the Imajin are Oni because of Sougo’s ‘important oni friend’ is actually really clever.

Geiz and Tsukuyomi are just so tired, they must have had to wrangle these four dorks over here… and said dorks want Uncle Tokiwa to repair the Den-Liner.

The train.

This poor old man. He just wanted to fix clocks for a living, is that so wrong?

...Well, Urataros isn’t quite lying, I guess? I mean, a time traveling train is clock… adjacent. Technically.

AND THEN RYUTAROS IGNORES HIS PROTESTS. BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THE PURPLE DRAGON KID DOES, APPARENTLY.

AND JUST HOPS ON IN.

THIS IS FINE.

And proceeds to literally lead the imajin in a conga line out of the shop.

This is a thing that is actually happening.

Nobody knows what to think, least of all Sougo.

Woz: “…I’m really sorry… these four idiots are our lead to the next watch…”

Sougo: “I have more pRESSING CONCERNS RIGHT NOW!”

Geiz and Tsukuyomi: (are exhausted)

Okay, first off, Heure, Hora, you didn’t actually need to stop time for this conversation. There wasn’t anyone around as it was.

Second, thank you for reiterating the ‘two watches left’ comment. It’s a bit redundant, but my reiterating my “where’s my Drive Arc” comment is too, so. Y’know.

Third…

I’m really glad that Heure, at least, is noticing that this is too easy. That something is leading the other riders to him.

(It’s Swartz. I’m telling you, he’s got ulterior motives, that nobody is going to like. It’s Swartz.)

Pity that Hora doesn’t seem to care.

(You two need to GET AWAY FROM THE MAN IN PURPLE. He has nobody’s best interests in mind, including yours! GET OUT OF THERE!)

Victim of the week time!

Coming up to a grave… Angry guy in hoodie says that the guy in a button-up shouldn’t be there. That he’s the reason his (hoodies) sister is dead. So, Button-up’s probably the late sister’s boyfriend, then.

Hoodie chases Button-up off, and is approached by Hora, who offers him a chance at revenge. She promptly shoves a watch in him, turning him into Another Den-O.

…So, since we’re getting a proper Den-O arc, with Another Den-O and everything… does this mean we can get proper arcs for W and Kuuga, too, or are they just stuck in the movie? Because I really want to know if Another Double was actually two guys, the way he sounded like he was. And Another Double’s design is SO cool, I just really want to see it actually interact with people.

Hora: “Come with me, we’re stealing a time-train.”

Another Den-O: just goes along with this

Button-up: TAKUYA’S A MONSTER WHAT DO?!

Small floating orb of light: it’s free real estate!

Button-up: sand everywhere

Back on the train…

It. Really does have more similarities to a clock than a train?!

This shouldn’t surprise me, but somehow it still does. It definitely confuses the heck out of Sougo, despite it being his clocksmith uncle saying that he can definitely do this.

...Said uncle then proceeds to imitate Ryuta’s dance moves. This is fine.

And then everything starts shaking, because OF COURSE Another Den-O is outside. Kudos on the train-track patterns to the energy projections in his attacks, though. That’s a nice attention to detail.

… his name and year are on his butt. On the little half-skirt he has, actually, but right over the butt.

This is ‘fine’.

Sougo: “Another Den-O? Okay, Trinity time, then, since we still don’t have this watch!”

At least he gave them a little warning. Not MUCH, but the guys WERE transformed this time, at least!

...Sougo, I know that the name and year are usually on the back, but were you actively checking out Another Den-O’s butt?

Sougo?

Sougo, I’m waiting for an answer.

Oh, no? Just gonna go fight? Okay then…

Except the Zeroliner says no, you’re not, because here it comes, cutting you off and dropping off Yuuto and Deneb!

:giggling: THEY DID THE ACTOR THING AGAIN!

Sougo: “?!?! Kiriya Kyosuke?”

(flashback with Hibiki sounds)

Yuuto: “Whomst?”

Sougo: ‘Have they started forgetting, again?’

So, Deneb brings a whole new meaning to ‘finger guns’, huh? Fair play isn’t exactly going to cut it with someone as potentially overpowered as Zi-O, especially when you’re trying to prevent him from becoming a terrible overlord.

Ooo! So the others CAN see out of their shoulderpads! Otherwise, Geiz wouldn’t have been able to key Sougo and Co in that Another Den-O was about to make a break for the train! (Yuuto, please stop distracting the boys, they do actually have a job to do outside of yoinking everyone’s powers)

Okay, good, Yuuto does agree that stopping the evil doppleganger from getting the magic train is probably a good idea. Pity that Hora then warps a de-transformed Takuya back out of there.

So… Deneb’s basically The Mom Friend to Yuuto, right? That’s the impression I’m getting, anyway. “Please make friends with Yuuto, he’s so lonely. He does it to himself, but I’ve been trying to break him of it since 2007. Here, have a candy!”

(MOM. FRIEND.)

Yuuto’s trying to stop Sougo from becoming Oma Zi-O – and we have confirmation once again that Geiz knows that this Zi-O never could. That Geiz still says he’ll take him out if he does.

Yuuto, much like me, doesn’t think he can, and is also determined to Stop Zi-O From Obtaining Grand.

(IT’S SO GAUDY someone PLEASE teach Sougo how to dress himself I BEG you)

(HE’S STILL WEARING AN OVERSIZED BELT UNDER HIS SHIRT. SOUGO PLEASE.)

Sougo has zero intentions of becoming anything but a beloved overlord… and Yuuto’s not having any of it.

Deneb: “I’m sorry about Yuuto, he has trouble interacting with people sometimes, gets a bit rude, please stay friends with him!” hands Sougo the basket of candy ‘Okay, bye~!”

Momo: “HI THERE! I’M HIJACKING YOUR FRIEND, DON’T MIND ME!”

That feeling when you realize that even if he were changing outfits, Momotaros wouldn’t have to do much of anything to make Geiz fit his aesthetic…

Uncle’s almost done fixing the train! He’s not so sure about it being a clock, but… well, he’s almost done! And. Is lifting. A giant gear. The width of his torso…

KINTAROS! He is an old man, and you’re always going on about how strong you are, aren’t you?! HELP HIM LIFT THAT!

Also, the picture Ryutaros drew is adorable and I hope that he lets Uncle Tokiwa keep it.

Momotaros: “Anyway, I’m here to take care of that little copycat problem. I’m insulted, he’s doing a terrible job of copying my look – ooh, some of Deneb’s candy? Thanks!”

Tsukuyomi runs off in hot pursuit – somehow not realizing that it’s not Geiz speaking. Momotaros, you should have actually used your name, for crying out loud. I get you’ve got an ego, but really.

Sougo… looks really hesitant and broody.

He’s not sure about doing this anymore.

Meanwhile, apparently Button-up didn’t move in the last, like, hour since he was hit by that Imajin… who’s just a generic Mole Imajin. Lame, but fine. He asks him to help save Takuya. That’s so sweet of him! I mean, it’s going to backfire horribly, because Imajin, but still!

Sougo’s really quiet as he asks if Yuuto’s right – if getting all the RideWatches will grant him ultimate power. When Woz says it will, that he’ll be undefeatable…

Sougo just wants it so he can defeat Oma Zi-O. That’s the only reason he’s still gathering the watches.

Thanks for the flashback the completely brutal beating that Sougo took in episode 15! That didn’t hurt to watch again at all!

Woz: “To have power equal to Oma Zi-O’s would mean you can stand on equal ground with him. Only you are capable of that, my overlord.”

Sougo: “So I don’t have to have any doubt. I’m going to obtain that power.”

Sougo, you are raising all sorts of death flags here! Death of personality, death of moral compass, normal death, any one of these could happen! Please don’t do this to us.

Another Den-O is even carrying his sword like Momotaros does! Nice touch!

…Tsukuyomi, you need to start researching people as soon as you guys meet them. You saw Ryutaros take over Uncle Tokiwa, and apparently Momo’s told you he was Momotaros. And yet you still look super confused when he tells you again.

...and then she has to do Geiz’s transformation for Momotaros. This is shenanigans, pure and simple. And I love it.

MOMOTAROS. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PUNCH YOUR PALM WHEN YOU ARE HOLDING A BUZZ SAW.

And then here we go, Let’s Us And Them Fight time! We’ve got… Four teams, this time around? Another Den-O, the Mole Imajin, Team Zi-O (currently with special guest Momotaros), and Team Zeronos.

:rubs hands together:

LET’S DO THIS.

Trinity Time~!

Except for the part where Geiz isn’t home right now~ I guess it’s been a while since Momotaros has run into Tsukasa, because now he’s super confused about going through a form change again. To be fair, usually he’s just getting his own form – not getting turned into a watch and dropped into a Psychic Sentai Cockpit.

Momotaros, externally: “Aw, man, it was just getting good!”

Momotaros, internally: “Why can’t the reality warpers let us not feel these changes?!”

(I will never be over Final Form Rides, and neither will ANYONE who got pushed into them.)

So, in the Trinity Team Chat, Sougo and Woz are incredibly confused. Momotaros is there. Geiz is also there, and apparently Sougo’s subconscious psychic powers have given him a chair so that he’s not out cold on the floor.

…Well, at least Momo’s used to bodysharing? In more ways than one? Because there’s Climax form, and that’s the four main Imajin.

This is too many people in one body – mOMO NO YOUR FIGHTING STYLE DOES NOT MESH WITH THIS SKINNY NOODLE THAT FORMS THE BASE!

Oh no, Yuuto and Deneb are just so confused. “Why is the red asshole in the cataclysm asshole?! WHATEVER! Deneb, let’s go!”

Deneb’s still mom-friending on main, even in Vega form, much to Yuuto’s despair.

Ohh noooo. Takuya – Another Den-O – wanted the powers so he could save his sister. HNG! MY HEART!

And there’s the Denliner, right on time! So Uncle Tokiwa managed to fix it, after all!

…Oh my Gaim. Oh. My. Gaim.

The Imajin let him drive the train.

OKAY, OKAY, YOU WIN.

Junichiro, you’ve got name privileges back! That’s just TOO COOL.

Woz: “Guys, wasn’t Another Den-O after the Denliner?!”

Sougo: “OH NO! YOU’RE RIGHT! GUYS! WE HAVE TO FINISH THIS UP!”

Why are you guys attacking ZERONOS?

BOYS.

that’s the wrong person.

See? Now look at what you’ve done! Another Den-O just hijacked the Denliner!

And since Button-Up’s contract was to help Takuya… well, he meant ‘help’ as in ‘save’, but Be Careful What You Wish For. The Mole Imajin takes off into the past.

So, Trinity breaks up for now. At least Geiz is awake again! And goes immediately to try and beat up Momotaros. He has it coming.

Woz mentions that if they had the Den-O watch, they might be able to find out where they went…

And Momotaros, aka the Main Imajin who fights as Den-O, tries to tap out from the choke hold Geiz has him in, holding up a red-and-white watch.

He already trusts Sougo, after all. Has since HeiGen Forever.

… … …

nani the fuck?

The Den-O watch starts glowing.

The watches back at the shop start glowing… and warp themselves over to Sougo, coalescing into one large, gold, gaudy-as-all-get-out watch.

Grand Zi-O~

“So this is supreme power...”

Sougo, I don’t think you should be excited about that…

Also, that Drive watch is the one that Geiz brought back in time, so. Um. That one shouldn’t count towards Grand. (WHERE’S THE DRIVE ARC, TOEI?!)

We’re going to get Momo-Woz in the next episode! Whooooo! This oughta be FUN!

Also, more Zeronos Altair form, Den-O CLIMAX FORM, and…

Uh-oh.

That’s Oma Zi-O. Not just in appearance – he’s talking to Sougo, too.

Uh-oh.

This episode was a RIDE you guys!

#kamen rider zi o #sailorcressy says

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theenronblues-blog · 5 years

Text

My Favourite Babar Characters

It comes to four characters who are my absolute favourites (I can’t decide between them): Basil, Pompadour, Cornelius and Troubadour.

Basil... who wouldn’t love Basil? That little rhino is both admirable and humble, and he always treats just about everybody with respect, regardless of their species or alliance. To quote King Babar, “that Basil is quite a guy!”. It was so sad yet so beautiful that Basil was willing to throw away a chance at fame just because of how glad he was to see his boss respected by his people and loved by his family in “Unsung Hero” (if only more human beings in this day and age could be a bit more like Basil, am I right?). He’s also not portrayed as a bumbling servant, but instead as a resourceful and dedicated friend to Rataxes who helps keep everything in-check while still watching from the sidelines. I just wish he had appeared in more episodes! His origin and backstory, much like Pompadour’s, is rather ambiguous, but Basil was even less developed as a character and we never really got much in that regard (I was always hoping they would do an episode on how Rataxes came to meet and hire Basil, since Rataxes always seemed like the last guy who would admit to wanting an assistant).

Pompadour was always a favourite of mine; he’s adorably conservative and high-strung, but I’ve always loved how well-developed he is. He completely shatters the overused trope of the pompous, snooty bureaucrat who only cares about himself (yes, I’m looking at you, Chi-Fu from Disney’s Mulan!). Pompadour can be very snooty, but he isn’t mean-spirited, and throughout the show he shows a great deal of compassion for others. Wanting to build shelters for the homeless was just one example, but it’s most evident when he expresses how much he actually values his friends in spite of his general attitude. Rushing in to save Cornelius during a kitchen fire, being very patient with Isabelle when he was babysitting the children even though he definitely wasn’t a fan of the job, trying to stay behind under the guise of “proper protocol” in the episode “Remember When...” so Babar could board a plane with his family and get to safety first, turning on all the lights in the palace to try and lead Arthur and the children back home after they get lost, being so understanding when Babar doesn’t want the Celesteville Express to destroy Pleasant Valley, the list goes on. It’s a wonderful change from similarly aristocratic fictional characters, e.g. Squilliam from Spongebob or Gilbert from King of the Hill, to have a character who behaves similarly but is a genuinely good soul at the end of the day. When he does go out of line, he usually offers a genuine apology as well and acknowledges his wrongdoing, something similar characters simply never do.

Cornelius is a character who I not only saw on TV, but who appeared in the original books decades earlier. I do wish he and Pompadour had more adventures on-screen together; they are such wonderful friends and the depth of that is something which has always been endearing. Cornelius is always very caring towards Pompadour, and their relationship was never portrayed in a preachy or bizarre way. Cornelius is probably the wisest character on the show too; playing Hide & Seek with the children in “Conga the Terrible” and then tricking them into thinking he’d fallen asleep, his heartfelt talks with Babar and his role as almost a surrogate father, it’s all so simple and yet so powerful simultaneously. One of the episodes which really made him memorable and a favourite of mine was “A Child in the Snow” - he’s like that wise old grandfather who understands the motives behind everything and who appreciates the mysteries of life, yet he’s rational enough to also know when to leave the past behind. In the more recent “Babar and the Adventures of Badou”, he’s still present but portrayed as sillier than in the 1990′s show, a change which I’ve never appreciated. I’m still glad though that he has managed to hold on as a character and keep reappearing in adaptations instead of being forgotten like some of the others.

Troubadour, finally, is a character who never speaks (except in the tie-in picture book series) and he’s shrouded in mystery (how old is he? Where did he come from?) but somehow he’s still hands-down one of the most endearing characters in the whole series. He idolizes Cornelius and Pompadour in a sense, always there to assist them, but at the same time he’s got his own opinion on everything, expressed only in his own mannerisms. It’s wonderful how he becomes such a beloved friend to Queen Celeste and the children, too. He even seemed to share a rapport with Celeste, something which otherwise is mostly limited to Babar himself. This was especially evident in “The Celesteville Enquirer” when she knows he was just teasing about Flora’s newspaper photos - and Troubadour hugging the children really shows how he, like Cornelius and Pompadour, is a member of the family in his own right. He was always an adorable little elephant too, scurrying instead of walking, playing along with Pompadour’s antics in “Double the Guards” and “The Missing Crown Affair” (speaking of “Double the Guards”, the way he just ate several carrots at once so nonchalantly was hilarious), but I think what truly made him stand out was his personality. He never spoke yet he was such a defining character in the series, giving him an enigmatic role so he wasn’t just reduced to a background prop.

Runners up: Rataxes, Lady Rataxes, Jacques, Victor, Chef Truffles, Isabelle, Ursula, King Babar, Madame, Babar’s mother, Queen Celeste and Conga the (not so) Terrible.

#Babar the Elephant #Babar #elephant #cartoon #cornelius #pompadour and cornelius #queen celeste #pompadour #celesteville #basil #isabelle #troubadour #mulan #chi-fu #nelvana

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margridarnauds · 5 years

Note

Ship Meme: 7, 16, 30; Ronan/Laz or Bres/Sreng

Since apparently I’m in the mood for these two losers...

7. What do they get up to on a night out?

Even though Ireland will always be Bres’ main stronghold (out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else), he also has a bit more of an international reach than the rest of the Tuatha dé and is overall much, much happier just being around mortals. (He and Manannan will both STAUNCHLY deny having that in common, but. Well. Like uncle, like nephew.) Most of the Tuatha dé have a disdain for the mortals, still holding them responsible for them losing Ireland, perfectly content to stay beneath the earth in their Sidhe-mounds and keep to themselves as they’ve done for centuries, but does Bres REALLY care about that? No. He's actually FONDER of them for that reason.

He’s perfectly happy in Paris, Boston (though the Dagda is oddly fond of that one, for reasons that Bres quite frankly can’t understand), or Las Vegas, where he’s one more face in the crowd. (As opposed to, say, Dublin, which, as much as he likes it for its Viking origins, there’s a not-inconsequential possibility that he’ll run into someone that he cares about or, God help him, Lugh, on the rare occasions Lugh bothers with mortals.) He also tends to avoid Scotland and Norway, because there’s a little too much Fomorian influence for him to be happy, and the LAST thing he wants is for his father to be there when he’s on a nice, happy date with his boyfriend.)

Their nights out tend to be when both of them relax around one another. Both of them are a lot more animated than they tend to initially come off (post CMT, Bres has really sobered for the most part, ESPECIALLY after the little incident with the red liquid), going from one thing to another. Bres tends to look up everything beforehand that they could go to and drags Sreng from place to place, though sometimes he’s perfectly happy just to go for a walk, now that they’re both at a place where they can HAVE that kind of liberty. Back in the old days, there was such an emphasis on status and having a proper retinue that there were few enough times that they could actually have any time to themselves. Taking aside all the touristy options, arcades seem to be a particular favorite. Bres is a GENIUS at pinball. Meanwhile, he totally takes advantage of having a tall boyfriend to get a ton of tickets in the little basketball courts. They get VERY competitive when it comes to laser tag, to a frankly ridiculous extent.

(Lugh is always constantly on the lookout, because he believes that it’s part of some diabolical scheme that Bres has to conquer Ireland. It’s been centuries now. He still has no idea.)

16. When the zombie apocalypse comes, how do they cope together?

Honestly, Bres and Sreng are SET for the zombie apocalypse. The two of them are, in their own time, two of the most competent men from their respective sides. (Bres is a bad KING, but look at his kill count in Cath Maige Tuired Conga. He’s a very, very pretty killing machine.) There would be NO problem as far as whether or not they could, like, drive a knife through someone’s brain. The answer is an obvious “Yes.” Personally, I see Bres becoming disgusted with the Tuatha dé fairly early on with things, since they would obviously leave those who don’t fit their Ideal to the zombies (which would include the Fir Bolg, the slaves, the ones who don’t fit into that artistic elite, etc), defecting to Sreng and the Fir Bolg.

(”Oh no, Lugh’s a zombie, whatever shall we do?”)

I do think that Sreng would be tested to his extreme, because in-canon (I know, always a funny term to use with these texts), Sreng DID have to deal with a situation where their population was depleted that MASSIVELY. And, if we’re assuming this is taking place post-Cath Maige Tuired Conga, it would be CRUSHING to him because their population is so small that ANY Fir Bolg that’s killed would be someone he KNEW. He would have to make a lot of high pressure decisions really quickly, and I think it would haunt him. There would be all those thoughts of “What could I have done differently?” In which case Bres would really be the best person to deal with it, just as a source of stability. But, from what we see of Sreng, he’s level minded, he’s NOT stupid, and he’s not keen on taking huge risks. He’d honestly probably be the best guy the Fir Bolg could have on their side.

30. Why does it work (or not work) between them?

Bres and Sreng honestly have a LOT in common. One thing that I don’t think I really discuss as much with them is that BOTH of them start out at this place where they’re essentially outsiders in their own tribe.

It’s not mentioned in-text, but Sreng’s father, Sengann, was one of the initial Fir Bolg kings who first landed on Ireland, and he would be killed fairly early on in things. It’s not mentioned how old Sreng was when that happened, but I tend to lean towards “YOUNG.” And then Sreng’s brother, Fodbgen became ruler after killing the man who killed their father, only to die shortly thereafter at the hands of Eochaid mac Erc, who was king of the Fir Bolg when Sreng fought Cath Maige Tuired Conga and who would die then. The homefront for Sreng at the beginning of things has GOT to be tense when they send him out to meet with Bres, he’s got to be in this very odd position as far as everyone EXPECTING him to one day kill Eochaid, because that’s been the pattern.

And meanwhile, Bres isn’t REALLY in with the Tuatha dé either; his father’s a foreigner, his connection to the Tuatha dé comes from the maternal line. And, like with Sreng, it’s pretty easy to read between the lines with Bres and at least guess that he’s not exactly had a childhood as we’d know it (not that a lot of Irish heroes did, given the love that the texts have for the Prodigy Hero). Growing at twice the age of a normal kid, I think that his bonds with kids his own age would have been very stunted, I tend to think that he probably was subjected to taunting because of his status. (Judging from some bardic poetry where Lugh gets bullied for his Fomorian ancestry, along with the little moment in Tochmarc Etain where Aengus is given a difficult time for not knowing his father and mother.) Bres is probably married to Bríg at this point (though there’s such little info available on that one, you could HC it any number of ways), but she’s part of that literary elite that Bres doesn’t fit in with.

So, when they meet up, they’re both really at this place where they’ve managed to work their way into the tribe, but they’re also not content there, and then they meet someone who GETS them on a fundamental level. Which is why I tend to HC that Bres goes downhill once the Fir Bolg leave. He had a chance at someone who UNDERSTOOD him and who loved him outside of his looks or what he could do for them, and suddenly that was ripped away. And that’s how I tend to see their dynamic going throughout the years afterwards, as the two of them really ARE the only stability that they’ve ever had. They’re really kind of an inversion of the later Cú Chulainn/Ferdiad dynamic, where they met young, got that attachment to one another, and then let their peoples tear them apart. Bres looked at that society that said “You have no choice but to choose us over him, if you’re lucky we might even forgive you for replacing Nuada” already exhausted and heart-sick and said “I have one option left: Break society.” Bres ISN’T the faithful dog to them that Cú Chulainn or even Lugh is but he’s a better man, because he still has a conscience, even if he buried it deep for Cath Maige Tuired, and so he ends up breaking, and suddenly him and Sreng are at this place where they’re free to start things, and Sreng’s stable enough and puts enough of a focus on family ties that he’s perfectly fine acting as another parent to Bres’ kids. And because of the way that things ended initially, Sreng totally didn’t think that there would ever be a chance that Bres could requite things. Like, he’ll still sometimes turn over in bed and go “WOW. How did that happen?”

Basically, unlike, say, Ferdiad/CC, which starts off as Friends-Lovers-Rivals, they go from Rivals-Friends-Lovers. And if Bres is away from Sreng for more than, like, a few days, he goes into full-blown pining mode. It’s pathetic. The TDD have accepted that The Fir Bolg has to be there, because NO ONE wants to put up with an irritable, pining half-Fomorian former king. Because Bres has more or less forgotten how to sleep on any other surface that isn’t Sreng’s chest throughout the years. Yet another advantage of the height difference.

#bres mac elathan #sreng mac sengann #i am always emo for these two #long post #irish mythology #otp: my flesh and tongue were gladdened #fallenidol-453

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thesinglesjukebox · 6 years

Video

youtube

THE 1975 - GIVE YOURSELF A TRY

[6.56]

Dawn of the Second 1975 Day...

Claire Biddles: If I Like It When You Sleep... was characterised by its excess of drugs and sax solos and pathetically doomed romance, perhaps the next album will be characterised by its excess of earnestness. "Give Yourself a Try" spills over with sincerity and solemnity. These characteristics have always been present in The 1975's music, hidden with irony, or in the last two tracks of a long, long album, or buried in parenthesis -- "Before you go (please don't go)" -- but they have never been so pronounced. From the gentle encouragement of the title to the wise old man lyrics, a millennial "My Way," any worries of self-help corniness are instantly dampened by Matty Healy's careful, generous, knowing delivery. The characteristic musical steals are earnest too: Joy Division, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Postal Service, bashed-up CDs on a Mancunian teenager's shelf; the return to the parental home in a crisis. There are quotes from their own songs, too, because The 1975 are the only (white, rock-adjacent) band audacious enough to position themselves as equals to their greatest musical influences. Irony is present ("getting STDs at 27 really isn't a vibe"), but spoken in the deadpan voice of a friend who has only ever been able to tell you that he wants to kill himself in the format of a joke. There are the familiar competing layers of profundity and jokes psyching each other out: Matty's wide-eyed tribute to sincerity in the context of getting clean and surviving his 20s that introduced the song's first radio play is repeated almost verbatim from a therapist's couch by the coked-up rock star cliche he plays at the start. He knows that advice from a famous rich man is laughable, but he's going to do it anyway. And I'm glad he has -- maybe I'm projecting, but I can hear the exhaustion that comes from rapidly switching emotional states for months, and specifically the hopeful exhaustion of getting to the other side: a culmination of the self-knowledge, the diagnosis, the reflection, the therapy. Even though I don't know him, and it's childish, it feels like Matty is two steps ahead of me, like he always is. Listening to "Give Yourself a Try" feels like readying myself to be exposed to the viscera of life while having my hand held by the person I love the most after months and months and months of mutual struggle, and I am so, so glad that The 1975 are back. [10]

Vikram Joseph: Like Matty Healy, and like a lot of my friends, I've found myself with my toes dipping into the cold waters of my early 30s without really knowing how the fuck I got there. And for the most part, I feel pretty good about it, more at ease with myself than I've ever been. But there are questions, and they don't disappear quietly. Surely I should be more settled by now? Have I wandered too much, or not enough? Why did a lack of self-confidence hold me back from what I really wanted for so long? "Give Yourself A Try" addresses all of these, in its own way. Healy's lyrics scan like a good Twitter feed -- scattergun and conversational, flipping from jokey to profoundly sad without any warning at all. There's a fair bit of Los Campesinos! in its twitchy, propulsive angst, and a lot of LCD Soundsystem buried in its DNA -- this might be "All My Friends" for those of us who deal with our problems exclusively by making jokes about them. Most of all, it sounds like Pulp would if Jarvis Cocker was a millennial and grew up dancing to The Strokes and Robyn. It's emotionally generous and exhilarating and kind of heartbreaking. [9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hell yes it's jaded and encouraging and sincere and the guitar line is emblematic of how dizzying life feels in your late 20s and the repetitious chorus acts as a soothing repose to Matt's typically loquacious verses and the balance he finds between unapologetically honest and crass allows for an internet-era relatability that succeeds because of how his self-deprecation creates a familiar distancing. The 1975 are truly the greatest guitar band around. [2]

Alfred Soto: With the drum machine as intentionally tinny as a TV on the Radio single and guitars echoing "She's Lost Control," the latest by The 1975 buzzes and grinds through its insights into male aging, insights that, in Matt Healy's reckoning, depend on one's attitude toward possessions. I don't know if a 20-year-old kid in Sarasota will make as much money as Healy, certainly not enough to start coffee collections. So Healy replaces the dreams of youth with the vanities of being 30. Advice or self-medication? Give it a try. [7]

Jessica Doyle: So my theory is that Matty locked himself in a room with 12 Rules for Life for a couple weeks, and anyone who banged on the door got back only Berlin's "The Metro" on repeat. (Which, fair: there are few better songs to play on repeat while contemplating that time you can't get back, when conspicuous self-destruction was a lot more fun, only now the past is the past and the present is ashes and you're tempted to romanticize your own self, against your better judgment.) And by the time Matty said, "This is gobshite; I'm going to write about character and self-improvement THE MATTY WAY," and emerged with the lyrics, the reluctance to work further on the music was severe. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Shrieking guitars, a near invisible bass and flat, plastic drums gird Matt Healy's soft, tasteful vocal without really ever bounding into something bigger -- or better. [4]

Maxwell Cavaseno: For all Matty Healy's seeming openness and saliva-mouthed TMI dribblings, he's got his masks of self-effacement and insipid wit that work their best to deflect and refract so you can never ever properly judge him for his narcissism being cushioned by a gaping chasm of self-loathing. "Give Yourself a Try" nags with a guitar whine that works more like a dental drill than a riff, while Matty performs verbal capoeira as a furious abandon of implication. The song itself feels surprisingly without footing compared to a lot of 1975 singles, yet doesn't ever sound like a proper retreat from what's already worked for the band. If anything, the insistence to proceed feels less determined and more avoidant, as if the weight of actual self-realization could sink the whole rush to flight. [6]

Edward Okulicz: I detect a twinge of genuine sympathy in Matty's delivery of the chorus. His cocaine-and-breasts arseholery of previous songs tells me not to accept it at face value, because it's probably being delivered to himself in a mirror, but I like it anyway. The 1975 do not chuck out the biggest riches as the first single, anyway. [7]

Scott Mildenhall: For a song that near enough espouses stepping away from the internet, "a millennial that baby boomers like" is a real step away from the internet line (and not least when you look at the country-by-country data on the use of those terms). At times the meandering lyrics veer so close to the least insightful marketer's flipchart -- coffee! vinyl! beards! -- that they come to seem like they were written about Shrimpy from EastEnders. But simultaneously, they sound clawingly human. Semantically ambiguous as the title is, it caps off a sense of someone seeking self-acceptance with a desperation, uncertainty and self-laceration that makes any resolution of their unease hard to imagine. When contentment is a high bar, committing to it might just cause more anxiety. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: I have listened to Colleen Green's "Deeper Than Love" far too often to non-hypocritically comment on the quarterlife angst here. But this is still Father John Misty for people who secretly miss Cobra Starship. Docked a point because the vocals make the Dirty Projectors sound like the Three Tenors. Docked another point because "like context in a modern debate, I just took it out" is so sneeringly self-satisfied that repeating it three times in a mirror -- where you probably were already -- will cause Betelgeuse to appear with tickets to a Reddit convention. Docked infinite points because bloviating that "the only apparatus required for happiness is your pain and fucking going outside" right before mentioning a teenage girl's suicide is either staggeringly oblivious, staggeringly callous, or staggeringly misjudged sarcasm. [1]

Nicholas Donohoue: I hate being so disarmed by a song that I'm fundamentally at odds with. This still has the usual The 1975 habit of being too verbally erudite for its own good in the verses while being direct to the point of passing as kindergarten lessons in the chorus. But there's a spark here that I haven't felt from their prior songs. Somewhere in the conga line of listing your own issues and then counterpointing with how your own genuine self is mired in the bullshit, I feel it. Even referencing the specific instance of a fan's suicide, which reads as exploitative to me, I let slide. The best case I could give for my unabashed love of this song is that I love songs that are about accepting culpability, and somehow The 1975 is taking the blame and responsibility without ever saying so. They're less asking for my sympathy as they are for their own forgiveness. [10]

Ryo Miyauchi: The titular advice in the chorus is meant to be sardonic, I'm guessing, as most of Matty Healy's gestures tend to read. But "Give Yourself a Try" is not entirely dismissive of life. The crude, motorik version of the band's "Sex" that jitters underneath him is too restless to let him give up; I would hope for this to be the case in a song throwing in a questionable aside about suicide. Instead, it's just accepting of how pathetic all of it can be, and Matty once again stands in as the clown to represent that idea. As much as he beats on with an groan-inducing gallery of personal anecdotes, his lyrics are too cloyingly specific, more than the previous album, for his lessons to speak for experiences beyond his own. Honestly, in the case of The 1975, that's for everyone's own good. [7]

Elisabeth Sanders: When "Sex" hit the scene what seems like at least two, maybe three lifetimes ago it felt revelatory, electric; equal parts yearning and snide, that strange knife-edge of wanting somebody and wishing you didn't, of being hurt by rejection and not even, like, caring, anyway, so like, whatever. The 1975's subsequent debut album rolled that vibe out into a whole mood, intensely specific, rude and depressed and kinda horny, taking place in real space, youth's graceless moments tinged with the romanticism that sits inside most kids that wish they hated everything more than they actually do. But as they moved away from talking about dirty floors and the curve of somebody's mouth and into the inevitable arrogance of young men who think they understand the whole world, the freewheeling idiotic heart that once made the band great became tiresome and thoughtless. I'll listen to almost anybody, no matter how myopic, examine their own interiority; I'm a lot less interested in those people's general thoughts about the state of the world. If I wanted to hear a guy with a guitar tell me about what's wrong with society I'd still be straight. [4]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Millions of people in their late 20s may (and will) deeply relate to the words of Matty Healy in "Give Yourself a Try", not because he's a bearer of truth -- he's equally prophet and charlatan -- but because these are times so confusing, we tend to turn to the unreliable narrator to make some sense of them. Only in this generation, where the lines between irony and sincerity are so blurred, could we use (and need to use) the language of self-deprecation to convey hope, speak of isolation to form of communal bond, and take a freakin' Joy Division guitar line for a track that we can all agree to call uplifting. [8]

Stephen Eisermann: Hearing Matty be so open and playful about the hardships he's faced is refreshing and inspiring, but it's made better due to the guitar loop that serves as the anchor for this track. Life is noisy, like this song, but you have to find your path through all of the ruckus. And with this song on repeat, I'm confident you'll at least start to see the path. [7]

Will Rivitz: For me, songs are most alluring when an artist takes a limited number of musical ideas and milks them for all they're worth, enmeshing me in a hypnotic loop of sound that morphs and evolves so glacially that I have no choice but to be pushed along with it. I'm having trouble thinking of a song that embodies exactly what I love about music, particularly pop music, quite so well. The instrumental entrances, mirage-like, precisely three notes of bass counterweighting precisely two notes of guitar so accurately that I'm not sure why we'd ever need more frets. Those three seconds' worth of a perfect loop distort and compress over time, Matty Healy singing ever more desolately as his band disintegrates behind him. So much is made from so little, like a clown car if each clown that stepped from the buggy were Dr. Manhattan. "Give Yourself A Try" is an atom bomb: only one or two nuclei need tear apart, and the whole world follows suit. [10]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#The 1975 #matt healy #matty healy #new music #music writing #music reviews #music

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margridarnauds · 6 years

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Top five characters from literature (and why, if you're feeling chatty)

I tend to forget about literally everything I’ve ever read when I’m in a position to talk about it, so I’m going to do my best.

(1) Bres mac Elatha - Cath Maige Tuired, Cath Maige Tuired Conga, and a load of other assorted medieval Irish myths.

My boy. My son.

There’s a lot I could say about him, and a lot of it I wasn’t able to fit into my 45 page Capstone. Sometimes, in my (fairly short) life, I’ve been lucky enough to come across something that happened to be exactly what I needed at the time and, for my 14-15 year old self, that happened to be an obscure Irish deity who ends up choking on bog water. As you will.

I didn’t start out liking him; it’s very, very easy to accept a simple version of the text where he’s just a moustache twirling tyrant, and even though it’s not an interpretation I AGREE with, seeing as it’s…boring, as a concept to me, it’s just as valid as anything, given these texts were meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted and transmitted and then rewritten from the ground up to suit the times. Cath Maige Tuired Bres is actually an anomaly; before that, he seems to have been an esteemed member of the Tuatha dé.

Which, I suppose, is part of why I like him. There’s an ambiguity about him, a crossing of lines. Even in CMT where he’s at his most villainous, he’s fairly unique, having many of the traits of a hero and, I would argue, he is as much the protagonist of the text as Lugh is. He has the heroic birth with a missing father, the strange childhood, the trial by combat, etc. And yet, in the world of CMT, with the context of the Viking invasions, he just doesn’t have a chance. He’s a fundamentally doomed character from the beginning, with his own actions damning him in the end.

His very existence in the tribe, the son born out of the most “proper” form of medieval Irish wedlock (seeing as there were nine, I hesitate to apply the term “bastard” to Bres, but the circumstances were NOT the ideal) to an unbetrothed noblewoman of the Tuatha (THE FUCKING SOVEREIGNTY OF IRELAND) and the king of a neighboring tribe, really warps the social structure, and it’s something he kind of carries throughout his life. He isn’t like Cú Chulainn, who is probably the one character who comes closest to him as far as his place in the tribe; he’s not content to serve the maternal side of his family as a champion, doing as he’s commanded. He wants power, and, when he’s removed from power, he takes desperate measures to take it back and, in the process, loses everything.

And, really, that essential liminality extends into his relationship with gender and power structures. While he’s supposed to represent order, as the king, he has no taste for the nobility; he makes them work (!!!!), he doesn’t give a bard due hospitality, he doesn’t give the warriors ale and meat. You get this image of him as this kind of distant, isolated figure in the tribe; not particularly JOYLESS, per se, at least in my interpretation of him (given we don’t see him happy all that often, the interpretation is open), but one who takes joy in things very, very different from the rest of the tribe, or at least from the men. Instead, his closest relationships in the tribe are to the women, who are the ones who elect him. His mother is his most constant ally, being willing to travel with him to see his father, even if it means leaving her own tribe to do it, and she’s the one he goes to IMMEDIATELY for help. And, when his mother addresses her father, it’s notable that SHE’S the one who takes control of the narrative, not Bres. Bres only confirms it when his father asks him. I wouldn’t say that he’s a feminine-coded character, specifically, though I think there are elements of that, but he definitely does not fit the expectations of how a medieval Irish nobleman is to behave with his own sex and with the opposite sex. At the risk of going full-on Pretentious Academic here, it reminds me of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote in his Seven Monster Theses, where he wrote, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.”

And, in other texts, I think there’s decent enough subtext to do a queer reading of Bres. Like, in Cath Maige Tuired Conga, which is a sort of prequel to CMT, Bres appears as the champion of the Tuatha dé, a completely normal part of the tribe, and he meets with Sreng mac Sengann, the Fir Bolg champion, and their meeting is…interesting to me, in how intimate it is, as far as two men from opposing sides sent to essentially size up the enemy. There’s a certain…familiarity with one another. They know that if their tribes go to battle, it’s going to be a bloodbath, and there’s really no personal dislike for one another. They even ask each other where they spent the night! (Which, it’s a common enough phrase that I’m not going to tie it to The Wooing of Emer, but…) And then, at the end of their meeting, they each give each other one of their sharp, pointy weapons to bring back to the tribe as a show of what the other tribe can do, and the text says, “They parted in peace after making a compact of friendship with each other.” It’s just…a very unusual scene, in terms of champions meeting up with one another, and it’s one that I think I could spend a lot more time with if I was given the opportunity. And curiously enough, they keep the vow of friendship! Throughout the rest of the fight, you see everyone being paired off against their equal, but Bres and Sreng never go head to head even when Sreng takes the arm off of Bres’ king. Instead, Bres goes for Sreng’s king.

Personally, for me, he only really clicked when I was going over CMT again and I was looking over the scene where Bres meets his father for the first time and he says, “Do you have any advice for me?” and I was like…fuck. This is the first time he’s ever met his father, and the first words that his father’s ever said to him are essentially, “Why aren’t you leading your own people? What have you done wrong?” which is doubly painful when you realize that his father was one of the Fomorian lords who were raiding Ireland earlier. At the risk of going personal here, at the time when I read those lines and had them hit me, I was in the process of divorcing myself from my own father, who, like Bres, I had had a distant relationship with, as he lived across the country and was happier with the idea of having a picture on a mantelplace than a daughter who wanted something as inconvenient as his attention. Reading that, and thinking about my own situation, I was like, “Yeah, I get you” and, from then on, I really read him and the text in a wildly different light, especially when I started to think about the repercussions of, say, Bres having the growth of a 14 year old at the age of 7. Like, if you take this text realistically (which…you can or you can’t, because these texts are over the top by their nature), he never had a childhood. He was just moving from one stage of growth to another, with the tribe probably being all too eager to put a spear in his hand because Well, he has the growth for it now and That’s Just What a Man Does. Which is something that I ALSO understood, deeply, and is something that I wish more adaptations of CMT would take into account besides just forcing Bres into the role of “Entitled Brat.”

Also, if my dissertation up there wasn’t enough: According to some genealogies, he’s The Morrigan’s nephew, given that both Eriu, Bres’ mother, and she are both listed as daughters of Ernmas. Like, if you don’t love him for the batshit insane, Extra antics he finds himself in (like the time the Dagda, his half-brother/father-in-law decides to distract the husband of the woman he’s banging by sending him on a mission to Bres), you’ve got to love him for his batshit insane, extra, goth family.

(2) The Countess - Makt Myrkanna (AKA Weird Ass Swedish Dracula.)

This will hopefully be briefer than my little essay up there, mainly because there’s really not all that much information on her in text and it’s been awhile since I read her scenes (and even then, a lot of that was me rereading it so that I could write the Countess/Lucy smutfic that I am probably never, ever going to let see the light of day. Which. Vampire smutfic. Light of day.)

BUT…why I like her. Makt Myrkanna is a very, very different work than the original Dracula, extending the scenes in the castle while condensing the rest of the novel to a truly dizzying extent, to the point where we have no idea whether Arthur Holmwood’s actually…alive by the end of the book given that the last time he was mentioned, he was stalking Lucy’s grave given that he thought she’d been buried alive. RIP Artie. To me, though, it really, really shows in the figure of the Countess, who is very different from the three women Jonathan meets in the original novel. There, even though there is a lot of subtext about what their relationship to the Count is, some of which might not have been printable in a Victorian novel (at least not one to be sold to the public), the brides really only have the two key scenes: Once when they tempt Jonathan and Dracula intervenes, and then again when they try to get Mina to join them and then Van Helsing goes down and stakes them. They’re probably one of the most memorable parts of the novel and certainly a BIG influence on the portrayal of vampire women in fiction, but they’re not…there all that often.

The Countess, however, is a far more formidable figure. She does not seem nearly as pleased in her current position, seeming to be held in place by Dracula, who it’s heavily, heavily implied might have been her husband (?), though he also shows just as much disdain for the man’s actions towards her in life that it’s kind of hard to tell one way or another. (Like a lot of things in Makt Myrkanna, it’s toyed with and then never picked up again.) No matter what, he definitely wants to bang her and probably has on multiple occasions, given that he describes her, uh, attributes to Thomas while showing him his collection of dirty paintings. (Yes, Dracula has a porn collection in this one.) For the Countess’ part, there seems to be a certain…fear that the Count inspires in her, or at least a sense of caution with her quickly ushering Thomas Harker (inexplicably, Jonathan becomes Thomas in this translation) away. Obviously, she’s on Team Dracula in the end, she very much wants to eat humans, and she’s not a Broken Bird, but you do get the sense that she has some sort of agenda of her own and that, perhaps, there’s a sort of power struggle being waged in Castle Dracula that Thomas is more or less oblivious to (he’s a bit busy dodging human sacrifices).

She also represents far more of a temptation than the original brides, who Jonathan…is interested in, with the reference to “almost wanting them to kiss me” (or something; I don’t have Dracula on hand and, if I spend too long searching, I know I’ll never get this done), but it’s still not…..in depth. Like, Jonathan loves and is faithful to Mina, even though he’s ashamed when he shows her his diaries because of that line. Thomas Harker, his counterpart here, though, reacts…very differently, trying to keep his calm but, “The moment she turned towards me and locked her incomparable eyes with mine, it felt as though an electric current surged throughout my body. I grabbed a nearby chair and held onto its backrest. She looked steadily into my eyes, and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have greeted her, or that my behavior was doltish. But evidently neither did she see a need for salutations. It felt as though we had already known each other for a long time and therefore didn’t need to explain ourselves.” There’s this hypnotic effect that she has on him, and unlike her three counterparts, she is perfectly willing to wait and talk with him for long periods of time.

Also, unlike her other counterparts, we get her backstory detailed to us, with her being described as being just as ruthless and cunning as the Count even as a child, with her being described as, holding, “the hearts of men at [her] fingertips, playing with them as a child plays with grapes before sucking out the liquid.” And in her lifetime, she was powerful, with Dracula saying she, “Held the destinies of whole nations in her hands, though few suspected it. Heads of state, kings, and emperors, lay at her feet–or in her arms.” Ultimately, her only downfall was when her husband ended up locking her and her lover in the bedroom together so she could sex him to death. Literally. He jumps out a window. And then her husband had a funeral service performed but, given she’s walking around the castle, we can presume it didn’t stick.

(3) Asriel/Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials

I’m including both of them because it’s not necessarily the two of them I like as individuals; it’s their dynamic. I mean, I do very much like them as individuals, they are each favs in their own right, but their dynamic is essential to that as well. They both complement and bounce off of each other very well, having this kind of spark where, even though they absolutely despise each other for most of the trilogy, they are really the only two who match each other. They’re both incredibly magnetic; like, in his first scene at Jordan College, I was pretty blown away by Asriel’s presentation, in his confidence, his ruthlessness, his intelligence, his pride and his ambition, all of which are also mirrored in Mrs Coulter. They simply happen to have landed on separate sides, with Asriel trying to essentially tear down everything that Coulter stands for and Coulter seizing control in the Church because it’s the only thing she really has as far as options, since she lacks the privileges Asriel has as a man.

They both do horrible things in the pursuit of their goals, including killing children, with Coulter being essentially the embodiment of Stranger Danger, and they both harm Lyra both physically and mentally. Still, when they let their guard down, on the FEW occasions they let their guard down, it is shown that they have some amount of love for Lyra, but they fundamentally don’t know how to be parents when all their lives have been spent in the pursuit of power and knowledge and all the ways those two intertwine.

I’m not sure how much I fully believe in Mrs Coulter’s swerve to motherhood, whether it was the best writing decision, whether it leans into the overall weakening of female characters in the last book or so, with Lyra being another notable victim, but I do think there’s a tragedy in there, as far as her trying but failing. And there is something in the classic femme fatale, generally seen as sexual but cold and unmaternal, dangerous in her embracing of sexuality sans procreation and motherhood (and monogamy!) being allowed to HAVE those kind of feelings and to have a complicated dynamic with the father of her child who she still has obviously holds some feelings for. And for Asriel’s part, he WAS ready to sacrifice Lyra, but he was also HORRIFIED by it, and in the end, he does repeatedly show that he cares, I just think that ultimately he let his own lofty goals get in the way of that until it was almost too late.

I really think that the best showcasing of them as characters tends to be with them together, such as in the third book when she steals the Intention Craft. She comes in there a prisoner, Asriel doesn’t WANT her there because he knows she’ll pull something, but she’s able to trap him in his own words by playing his commanders like a fiddle, and then she takes advantage over his desire to show off his new toy to get her an in, with Asriel then letting her go with one of his spies in the craft with her, knowing fully well what she’s going to do next and then going back to his improved prototype for more scheming. Like, they’re always trying to one up the other; it’s essentially a form of foreplay for them (as much so as you can get in a kid’s series about killing God), and I can only imagine what they were like when they were actually in a relationship, because they must have been terrifying and yet, for whatever reason, they both fell in love with each other to embark on a forbidden affair with each other, when she was married to a highly powerful man, risking everything.

So, I’m going to be curious to see what the new BBC series ends up doing with them, both as individuals and as a pair.

(4) Morgan le Fay - Like, a hundred different Arthurian adaptations

I’ll be honest: Morgan le Fay in The Magic Treehouse was one of my first crushes. I was always strangely drawn to books with her in them, looking at the pictures for a while.

These days, I have broadened my Arthurian knowledge significantly, though not nearly as much as I’d like to, but she’s still my eternal favorite. (Literally any book or film that tries me to root for Arthur over Morgan is going to fail miserably.) She is the embodiment of the Other in a woman, being otherwordly in her name and in her powers, but, like Bres and any other character from a long tradition, she is ambiguous in her presentation. Sometimes, she loves her brother and truly wants to expose the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere to save his honor. Sometimes, she wants to create destruction for destruction’s sake. Sometimes, she reconciles with her brother and gives up the fight, sometimes she only relents when she sees his dead body there. She is always powerful, but the way that power is applied and, at times, not applied is part of what makes her fascinating and why, I believe, she is still subject to so much study after all these years.

The backstory as far as her mother and Uther gives her VERY strong motivation for why she would be less than pleased with Arthur, though I tend to favor the story of her expulsion from Camelot for having an affair with a kinsman of Guinevere’s for the delicious, delicious irony involved.

She is more of a schemer than her sister Morgause who, despite the oddness of her family, tends to be a loving mother (who just…happens to take a lover many, many years her junior and pays the consequences) in works that don’t take off from sexist Victorian bullshit. (I have many, many feelings over the portrayal of Morgause, and they’re very complicated so I won’t vomit them out.) Like, she successfully steals the sheath of Excalibur, and came very, very close to killing both Arthur AND her husband with the whole Accolon thing.

Also, she literally has a dude come into Camelot dressed in green so she could terrify Guinevere AT CHRISTMAS and then continues to troll her nephew for a year (and a day!) Like, name a greater icon.

(5) Shiloh - Saving Shiloh

A Very Good Boi. Doesn’t die at the end, unlike SOME literary dogs that I could mention whose authors thought that kids needed the slow, creeping inevitability of death forced into them. A+ pupper.

#fey-and-sudden-and-unholy #about me

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