#Literary Fiction [sic]

[pers-books]

ur called pers-books so can u recommend a good book?

Oh now you've done it, Anon!

I can ALWAYS recommend a good book!

You haven't specified which genre interests you, so here, have a handful of books which I've really, thoroughly enjoyed in the last year or so. Blurbs from and links to GoodReads.

Sistersong by Lucy Holland:

My sister’s heart broke on the river—and the river took it and bore it away.

In the ancient kingdom of Dumnonia, there is old magic to be found in the whisper of the wind, the roots of the trees, and the curl of the grass. King Cador knew this once, but now the land has turned from him, calling instead to his three children. Riva can cure others, but can’t seem to heal her own deep scars. Keyne battles to be accepted for who he truly is—the king’s son. And Sinne dreams of seeing the world, of finding adventure.

All three fear a life of confinement within the walls of the hold, their people’s last bastion of strength against the invading Saxons. However, change comes on the day ash falls from the sky. It brings with it Myrdhin, meddler and magician. And Tristan, a warrior whose secrets will tear them apart.

Riva, Keyne and Sinne—three siblings entangled in a web of treachery and heartbreak, who must fight to forge their own paths.

Their story will shape the destiny of Britain.

Finding Jessica Lambert by Clare Ashton

Jessica Lambert, movie star and ingénue, is in danger of burning out. Returning to London for the premiere of her latest film, she’s recognised everywhere she goes. When she runs away through the streets of London, she’s taken in by the beautiful and more mature Anna. The two hide in the sanctuary of Anna’s roof-top flat, a haven away from the crowds, but why has Anna removed herself from the world?

As the two women get to know each other, stripping away the layers, both appreciate what each does for the other. This could be the start of something wonderful, more than either of them know.

Wishyouwas by Alexandra Page

It's 1952 in smog-shrouded London. Christmas might be fast approaching, but with her mum away and Uncle Frank busy running the post office, Penny Black is lonelier than ever.

All that changes when Penny discovers a small, fluffy, funny, springy and – most importantly – talking creature in the post office one night, trying to make off with a letter.

But Wishyouwas is no thief. He's a Sorter, and he soon introduces Penny to a fascinating secret world hidden in the tunnels underneath the city's streets. Self-appointed guardians of lost mail, the Sorters have dedicated their lives to rescuing letters that have gone astray and making sure they get delivered to their rightful owners.

Penny is determined to protect the Sorters, but how long will she be able to keep them safe with Stanley Scrawl, the sinister Royal Mail Rat Catcher, on the prowl? Can Penny save the Sorters and deliver a joyful Christmas?

Stay by Catherine Ryan Hyde 

In the summer of 1969, fourteen-year-old Lucas Painter carries a huge weight on his shoulders. His brother is fighting in Vietnam. His embattled parents are locked in a never-ending war. And his best friend, Connor, is struggling with his own family issues. To find relief from the chaos, Lucas takes long, meandering walks, and one day he veers into the woods.

There he discovers an isolated cabin and two huge dogs. Frightened, he runs. And the dogs run with him. Lucas finds unusual peace in running with the dogs, and eventually he meets their owner, Zoe Dinsmore. Closed off and haunted by a tragic past, Zoe has given up. She doesn’t want to be saved. She wants out. But Lucas doesn’t want her to go, and he sees an opportunity to bring more than one friend back into the light. It’s either the best or worst idea he’s ever had, but Lucas isn’t giving up on Zoe or Connor.

Their unexpected connection might be the saving grace that Zoe thought she’d lost, that Connor needs, and that Lucas has been running toward.

One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter

What would happen if you were cycling to the office and just kept on pedalling?

Needing a change, Mike Carter did just that. Following the Thames to the sea he embarked on an epic 5,000 mile ride around the entire British coastline - the equivalent of London to Calcutta.

He encountered drunken priests, drag queens and gnome sanctuaries. He met fellow travellers and people building for a different type of future. He also found a spirit of unbelievable kindness and generosity that convinced him that Britain is anything but broken. This is the inspiring and very funny tale of the five months Mike spent cycling the byways of the nation.

(This is non-fiction in case it’s not obvious!)

The Last Act of Love: The Story of My Brother and His Sister by Cathy Rentzenbrink

In the summer of 1990, Cathy's brother Matty was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out. It was two weeks before his GCSE results, which turned out to be the best in his school. Sitting by his unconscious body in hospital, holding his hand and watching his heartbeat on the monitors, Cathy and her parents willed him to survive. They did not know then that there are many and various fates worse than death.

This is the story of what happened to Cathy and her brother, and the unimaginable decision that she and her parents had to make eight years after the night that changed everything. It's a story for anyone who has ever watched someone suffer or lost someone they loved or lived through a painful time that left them forever changed. Told with boundless warmth and affection, The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink is a heart-breaking yet uplifting testament to a family's survival and the price we pay for love.

(Another non-fiction book.)

Nala's World: One Man, His Rescue Cat, and a Bike Ride around the Globe by Dean Nicholson

Instagram phenomenon @1bike1world Dean Nicholson reveals the full story of his life-changing friendship with rescue cat Nala and their inspiring adventures together on a bike journey around the world. When 30-year-old Dean Nicholson set off from Scotland to cycle around the world, his aim was to learn as much as he could about our troubled planet. But he hadn't bargained on the lessons he'd learn from his unlikely companion. Three months after leaving home, on a remote road in the mountains between Montenegro and Bosnia, he came across an abandoned kitten. Something about the piercing eyes and plaintive meowing of the bedraggled little cat proved irresistible. He couldn't leave her to her fate, so he put her on his bike and then, with the help of local vets, nursed her back to health. Soon on his travels with the cat he named Nala, they forged an unbreakable bond - both curious, independent, resilient and adventurous. The video of how they met has had 20 million views and their Instagram has grown to almost 750k followers - and still counting! Experiencing the kindness of strangers, visiting refugee camps, rescuing animals through Europe and Asia, Dean and Nala have already learned that the unexpected can be pretty amazing. Together with Garry Jenkins, writer with James Bowen of the bestselling A Street Cat Named Bob, Dean shares the extraordinary tale of his and Nala's inspiring and heart-warming adventure together.

(More non-fiction!)

Murder on the Menu (The Nosey Parker Mysteries #1) by Fiona Leitch

Still spinning from the hustle and bustle of city life, Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker is glad to be back in the Cornish village she calls home. Having quit the Met Police in search of something less dangerous, the change of pace means she can finally start her dream catering company and raise her daughter, Daisy, somewhere safer. But there’s nothing like having your first job back at home to be catering an ex-boyfriend’s wedding to remind you of just how small your village is. And when the bride, Cheryl, vanishes Jodie is drawn into the investigation, realising that life in the countryside might not be as quaint as she remembers… With a missing bride on their hands, there is murder and mayhem around every corner but surely saving the day will be a piece of cake for this not-so-amateur sleuth?

No Rings Attached (Ms. Right #2) by Rachel Lacey

Lia Harris is tired of being the odd one out. She’s never quite fit in with her uptight family, and now that her roommates have all found love, she’s starting to feel like a third wheel in her own apartment. Fed up with her mother’s constant meddling in her love life, Lia drops hints about a girlfriend she doesn’t have. But with her brother’s London nuptials approaching, she needs to find a date to save face. Lia turns to her best friend, Rosie, for help, and Rosie delivers—with the fun, gorgeous Grace Poston. Grace loves to have a good time, hiding her insecurities behind a sunny smile. Her recent move to London has provided her with a much-needed fresh start. Grace isn’t looking for love, and she hates weddings, having weathered more than her fair share of heartache. Friendships are different, though, so for Rosie’s sake, she reluctantly agrees to pose as Lia’s adoring girlfriend for the wedding festivities. Both Grace and Lia are prepared for an awkward weekend, complete with prying family members and a guest room with only one bed. As it turns out, they get along well—spectacularly, in fact. Before they know it, the chemistry they’re faking feels all too real. But is their wedding weekend a fleeting performance or the rehearsal for a love that’s meant to last?

We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

Everybody's getting one. Val and Julie just want what's best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all. Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device. Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it's everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot's powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.

To Boldly Go by Em Stevens

When life gives you lemons, drink limoncello. 

Taryn's trip of a lifetime is finally happening. She's saved money, researched, planned, and created an itinerary that will allow her to travel Italy...and finally tell her best friend that she's in love with her. But those plans are ruined when she wakes up alone, her crush gone. Her plans did not include being alone and stranded in Milan. Now Taryn's dream vacation is a nightmare.

Enter Holly, a fellow traveller: young, full of life, and comfortable traipsing off the beaten path. Holly feels a connection with Taryn and wants to salvage her trip. After all, they're in freaking Italy! But their radically different travel styles and age differences make for rough terrain. Together, they boldly go into unexplored territories of the heart, and may just discover love.

The Full Scoop by Kitty Jones

Leanne didn’t expect to be spending the rest of her life alone, but when her wife passes away unexpectedly, she’s thrust right back into the world of dating – but it’s one she no longer recognizes. With apps and websites and a million different things to learn, she wonders whether she’s ever going to find someone to fill the hole in her heart from Sherry’s death. When a hundred-year-old bookstore goes on the market, Leanne takes a spontaneous leap and buys the place. She’s got nothing but time on her hands, after all? What harm could come from buying an old building, anyway? Unfortunately for her, the building has secrets. 29-year-old Billie Wise is the epitome of clumsy, which is one of the reasons she’s basically the world’s worst reporter. When her boss gives her a bogus assignment – to get the inside scoop on a new bookstore that’s opening in town – she knows it’s simply something to do to shove her out of the way so she isn’t eligible for a promotion. Irritated and tired, Billie walks into the bookstore expecting to be greeted by someone who is as angry as she is, but she’s not. The owner is gorgeous, caring, and compassionate. She’s everything that Billie could never be. When Billie finds herself falling for the bookstore owner, she wonders if their worlds could really ever collide. Will Billie be able to get the full scoop on what it takes to make Leanne fall in love with her?

Vile Stars by Sera Milano

(TRUE) LOVE (TOXIC) LOVE (LOST) LOVE This is a different kind of love story. 17-year-old Luka isn't looking for love. She's trying to piece her life back together after a heart-breaking loss. But when she meets the gorgeous and charismatic Cosmo under a meteor shower at the Greenwich Observatory, it feels like destiny has played a hand. Surely theirs is a love written in the stars. But Cosmo isn't what he seems, using Luka's love for him to slowly take control of her life. As the pandemic starts to make headlines and lockdown sets in, she is trapped emotionally and physically in a coercive relationship. Luka's friends and brother can see what's happening, but struggle to reach her. Something will have to be sacrificed so Luka can set herself free - but what will be left of her when she does? Luka's story is told from many points of view: through her letters, and through the voices of her brother, Alec, his boyfriend Theo and Luka's best friend, Roisin. Each of them holds a fragment of the story - it's time to put it all together.

(Be warned, this is a difficult read as it features Covid-19, gaslighting and manipulation, and homophobia. But it is a bloody brilliant book!)

This Can Never Not Be Real by Sera Milano

FIVE TEENAGERS WITH NOTHING IN COMMON, THROWN TOGETHER BY AN ACT OF TERRORISM, CAN'T SURVIVE THE NIGHT WITHOUT EACH OTHER. In the unremarkable town of Amberside, the unthinkable has happened: Terrorists have attacked a local festival. No one knows why, and no one knows who the attackers are, but that doesn’t matter. What matters first is survival. And what matters after that is survival, too. In this brilliantly written account of hope, humour and humanity, five ordinary teenagers are caught up in a truly extraordinary situation. It’s a heart-pounding and gripping account of the fight for survival, told from multiple perspectives, as the attackers prowl the festival grounds. A book for anyone who needs to see that behind the hate that makes the headlines, there is always love.

(This is also a difficult book, but again, bloody brilliant and compelling. Sera Milano is an outstanding writer.)

Hope you find something to enjoy in there, Anon.

#A Nonymouse #Ask and you shall receive - possibly! #Books #Book Recs #wlw fiction #murder mysteries #YA and Children's books #Non-fiction #SFF #Literary Fiction [sic]

[arthurmorganwateringhole]

Hi! I wanted to comment on a post a while back, in regards to Gaming with a Therapist? And you criticizing his reaction to Mary's character. I'm not objecting or anything, I just thought I could maybe provide a little more context as someone who watches his streams. He's a family therapist who specializes in relationships, and his whole thing with his channel is approaching games from that viewpoint. He's not actually trying to do a literary analysis it's pretty explicitly a specific lense (1/2)

Posting a screenshot of your second ask for convenience

I get it absolutely. I think that is a noble cause to take up. I still take issue with how he phrases things. Not to be harsh, but a therapist should know better. It’s more productive to phrase his analyses as “This behavior we see in Mary is an example of x.” Instead, he said, “Mary is not empathic [sic]… she doesn’t respect their breakup” etc. do you see how this looks? If he wants to help people, he needs to take greater care in how he frames his practice and professional opinion. Because so far, the only reaction I’ve seen to his Mary tik tok is in support of misogynistic hatred for her. I haven’t seen anything like, “This helped me get out of a bad relationship.” Not to mention, he takes a lot of the picture out of context. You don’t need to be a literary critic to do that correctly, and I believe I was fair in criticizing that TikTok within its own context as the platform encourages short form consumption.

All that said, I hear you. I appreciate what you’re saying. He might not be manipulating people, but I’m uncomfortable with how he touts his expertise to then misrepresent a piece of fiction. As we like to say in academia, stay in your field. Interdisciplinary scholars spend years perfecting their craft to be able to discourse outside their first expertise. If he wants to psychologize fiction, he should study literary analysis as well.

Anyway thank you for your input!

[birdiereviews]

Number Call by Nagisa Furuya, reviewed by Jay Sapinski

Nagisa Furuya’s newest manga volume, Number Call (Kodansha Comics, 2024) is a sweet high school meet-cute romance.  The story centers around Eito Tachibana who despises how his name is associated with the number eight meeting Tomoya Hatta whose nickname is Hachi, the Japanese word for the number eight.  Initially drawn together by their names having a connection, they eventually find themselves chasing after each other.  The story is certainly cute and heartwarming, but the plot delivers the elements of a romance in a way that is almost too straightforward.  Although there is romantic tension between Eito and Hachi, it never really felt like there was a threat to their bond.  Even in a wholesome story, there should still be stakes for the choices that the characters make.  Nevertheless, I found myself turning to the next page to discover how they would grow closer.

Additionally, unlike many other BL manga, this one features a story that stays far from depicting toxic relationships and the fetishization of gay people that plague the genre.  Eito and Hachi meet when Eito’s test papers are knocked out of his hand and float out the window where Hachi picks them up.  After Eito runs down to get them, they have a short exchange:

Hachi: You got an 88 in Japanese history.  Eito Tachibana. Eito (thinking): Why’d he read that out loud? Hachi: Haha.  You got an 88 and you’re [sic] name’s Eito?  It’s like a pun. Eito: I guess… Eito (thinking): Uh, did he stick around to just say that?  Is he making fun of me? Hachi: I thought it might blow away again if I put it down. Eito: Okay… Hachi: Plus, I can kind of relate.

From chapter 1: Call 1

The interaction between the two sounds completely natural for two high schoolers who don’t really know each other.  There is no stalker behavior, coercion, or bizarre pairings for the sake of reader fetishes.  It’s all very cute, wholesome, and heartwarming.  It’s great to see more BL manga representing gay love as being completely normal.

That being said, the story would have been taken to the next level had there been more build towards their relationship.  It’s difficult to tell why Eito or Hachi hold affection for each other or how their shared experiences contribute to them liking each other.  Show us a date, a stolen moment in a classroom—anything that would solidify the reasons why they like each other beyond their names relate to the number eight.  The times when they are alone together don’t give readers enough information about what makes Eito or Hachi interesting and attractive in the eyes of the other.

Number Call is an excellent addition to BL manga as a whole.  Steering away from the problems of the BL genre, it highlights how cute and sweet romance can be.  Hopefully, this isn’t the last wholesome BL meet-cute to grace our shelves.

An advance copy of this volume was provided in return for an honest review.

Number Call becomes available on March 12th, 2024.  Pre-order Number Call here.

~

Jay Sapinski (they/them) is a college student studying English. They are an editor of their college's literary magazine as well as a fiction editor of miniskirt magazine. Jay loves Japanese culture and Japanese style media and consumes it whenever possible.

#reviews #number call #nagisa furuya #manga #recommended #review #jay sapinski #slice of life #romance #school life #stories #story #completed #one shot

[dwellordream]

“Modern fantasies of medieval chivalry imagine a world of vulnerable women who disappear behind the glorious exploits, or villainous intrigues, of men. Popular culture’s idea of the medieval past may not be “men only” in the same way that it is “whites only”—women do appear in our imagination of the Middle Ages. But they are limited to a few, restricted roles in medieval-themed entertainment: virgins, prostitutes, witches, queens, or victims.

As much as anything, this is a result of how the Middle Ages are portrayed in our culture. There have been decades of excellent, groundbreaking scholarship that has done away with those simplistic categories and elevated stories of remarkable women. But that shift has been slow to filter into curricula and textbooks, and slower still to be seen in popular culture. You don’t have to be a misogynist to think that medieval women’s lives were a thousand-year tale of woe. You just have to watch TV.

Films and TV shows that depict the Middle Ages rarely pass the Bechdel test (which famously only requires two women to talk to each other about something other than a man). We have plenty of “exceptional women” in medieval fantasy settings—women like Game of Thrones’ chivalric warrior Brienne of Tarth, The Lord of the Rings’ shieldmaiden Éowyn, or the various “feisty” iterations of Maid Marian. But inevitably, those women are surrounded by hordes of other, nameless women exploited in the background, either as victims of violence or rewards for a man’s quest.

Pushback against these stereotypes, or any insertion of feminism into a medieval setting, is met with cries of “historical revisionism.” Some men seem terrified that their favorite things (video games, Star Wars, and even medieval history) will be “ruined” by being made more inclusive. But few things draw the trolls out from under the bridge more than putting women on the battlefield. For example, the latest outcry has been over historical video game Total War: Rome II adding female generals, despite both the literary and historical lineage of women at war with Rome. But their rage about inclusivity is a tale even older than Gamergate, the 2014 explosion of misogynistic harassment that targeted women video game developers and journalists.

When the 2004 film King Arthur turned the (fictional) character Guinevere into a leather-clad warrior queen, the internet went up in arms in a totally predictable way. A now-defunct IMDB discussion board entitled “Guinevere as Warrior” was full of complaints before the movie even came out, labeling her character “a triumph for femenazism” [sic]. One user complained, [Guinevere] happened not to be depicted as a warrior until the PC generation, and we’re supposed to swallow it whole and like it?

Most of the resistance was based on the perception of ahistoricity. This included vast, sweeping assertions about the roles of women, such as this gem: In general, almost all women of ancient and medieval cultures subscribed to traditional gender roles, not only because of male chauvinism, but also unfortunate necessity. Life back in those times was much harder, and work was divided into what was thought best for each gender.

This person imagines medieval life as an ant colony, without room for diversity, choice or free will. But nothing could be further from the truth. Others insisted that the movie’s “realism” had been compromised: Its okay if Charlie´s Angels do rather unrealistic stuff, because that movie is meant to be hilarious. But you cannot pretend to make a more “realistic” movie of the King Arthur legend and then drop in the en vogue, pc Warrior Woman.

There are myriad historical issues with this film. Not least is that it marketed itself as “the untold true story” of King Arthur (who is, himself, probably not real). But the (Badon) Hill this commenter chose to die on was women who fought. This is despite historical evidence of warrior-queens who inhabited the British Isles during the Roman occupation. And maybe the medieval literary Guinevere didn’t leap into battle with a flaming bow, but she did hold the Tower of London against Mordred’s invasion.

In fact, women have always been involved in war. This is true both in the twentieth century and in the twelfth. And the battlefield wasn’t the only place that women had power: they brewed beer, wrote books, led religious movements, healed people, and even ruled nations. Those who dismiss a broader range of roles for women as “activism” or “anachronism” refuse to acknowledge real women’s real experiences. They deny them the rich and varied lives led by actual, real people. And worse, they deny that women—past and present—have the capacity to learn, to grow, to fight, and to lead.”

- Amy S. Kaufman, “Gender, Sexism, and the Middle Ages: No More Fairy Tales.”

#amy s. kaufman #history #medieval

[nomanwalksalone]

FROM INSIDE THE VELVET MASK

by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

We cannot outrun history’s arrow. d’Artagnan and his boon companions the Three Musketeers learned that over 5,000-odd pages of Alexandre Dumas’ rambling historical fiction.  History’s arrow? I should have said history’s cannonball, since that is what ended the real d’Artagnan’s life at the siege of Maastricht, an inevitability Dumas had to write into the life of his invented d’Artagnan, at the very end of the last Musketeers romance, The Man in the Iron Mask.

It’s that mysterious masked man, himself a historical mystery, who’s responsible for d’Artagnan’s isolation at his death. Out of the true historical footnote of a mysterious masked prisoner, Dumas constructed an entire, lengthy, laborious novel embroiling the four friends in a failed plot to replace absolutist horndog King Louis XIV with a lookalike. As Quentin Tarantino was not yet even a gleam in some foot-fetishizing ancestor’s eye, Dumas’ narrative had to follow the broad lines of history, rather than warp it in some vernacular virage. The gang’s attempt agley, the impostor is arrested, imprisoned for the rest of his life and made to wear an iron mask so that no one ever sees his face and notices his resemblance.

An iron mask. The more one thinks about it, the more frightening it seems. Heavy, suffocating with smothered hot breaths, hard and harsh, a portable prison.

Except it wasn’t. There was a real masked prisoner, who ended his days in relatively comfortable confinement, his name even noted in prison records, although many still insist it was a pseudonym for some more scandalous personage. He did indeed have to wear a mask, but generally only when he was going to be seen by others, and it was a somewhat less frightening velvet, rather than stark iron. Less a muzzle than a muffle.

A life of velvety confinement seems apposite right now. A strange isolation, where we are our own jailers. No iron mask or bars, but dusty carpets and omnipresent screens. No luxurious prison this – to complain of having to work while confined with children to self-teach [sic] is to demonstrate the most entitled of humblebrags, because so many of us during this period have no job at all, or risk ruin as we all curtail our behavior, including our spending habits. Still others of us have no chance to self-isolate, having to serve others – whether as servers, providers of emergency services, or health care providers – as a vocation.

I fall into the first category, which has to inform what I write, and I take blame for all undeserved entitlement of which its exhalations – as humid and stale as those of Dumas’ literary Iron Mask ‑‑ may reek. I faced up to the near future with an understanding and decision. As long as I had to work at home, I had to set both routine and ritual. Routine: the schedule of activities I know I need to put in place for my seven-year-old, lest he become a prisoner of the screen dimension in all its forms, from supposedly educational apps and virtual museum tours to video games and hot and cold streaming animated movies. Routine for myself, too, finding the rhythm that allows both my partner and I to work and supervise our child. But to enforce that routine, ritual is necessary for me. Just as mysterious prisoner Eustache Dauger donned his velvet mask before interactions, I need my own textile barrier.  Clothes don’t make the man, but they help him assume – or hide-- different identities. That ritual is dressing for responsibilities, a clear change from the slouchiness of what most of us otherwise wear at home, even if dressing for responsibility at home does not mean suit and tie.

A favorite suit and tie, clothes I feel good in, have been the armor of the workplace, both protection and plumage. They made me feel professional, calmed the worries and the impostor syndrome that everyone (you feel it too, don’t you? Please say yes) of my generation feels. It’s thus a pity that I haven’t finished saving up for, and perhaps, in this cratering economy, never will, a dressing gown, not the ratty bathrobe of disheveled shut-ins but the regalia of drawing-rooms past, put on in place of a suit coat as soon as one came home, piped, silk-lined, tasseled… a garment whose sumptuousness could, in my mind, provide a similar, though softer, barrier as my office armor.  Why not? Noel Coward’s heroes donned them as protection from the poisonously witty barbs of his dialogue.  

In a spate of unfounded optimism I already had put aside a length of velvety Suri alpaca, and some vintage silk scarves to line it, all to send to my favorite shirtmaker after I saved up for my fantasy.  Well, nightmares cut short fantasy. I must face responsibility and confinement as they take me. Nonetheless, it was a pleasing confirmation of instinct on our first day of distancing to see my son, immediately after getting dressed, decide that his day clothes needed one finishing touch, march decisively back to his room, and select his fuzzy green robe with a dragon-headed hood, belting it with panache. Fantasy may be genetic.

Among our responsibilities, in our plaster cells, are understanding, patience, empathy, and self-restraint both physical and figurative. Remembering how taxing all of those can be, and how valuable it is to show them to someone momentarily short. Renew bonds of friendship virtually, support those in your local orbit, virtual or physical, with advances, gift card purchases, contributions to wage support. And if you exhaust all other pursuits, Dumas’ million-word oeuvre is in the public domain online. From our own cells, the Iron Mask awaits.

#rjman #reginaldjeromedemans #theironmask

[weaselandfriends]

Hymnstoke Intermission

Andrew Hussie had the courtesy to drop some thoughts on the Epilogues, the full text of which can be found here. As you can probably tell, it’s dense, so I’ll summarize what I consider the key points.

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be “conceptually distinct” from the main narrative of Homestuck (i.e., Acts 1 through 7).

2. Hussie intended the Epilogues to set new narrative stakes and establish a way for the narrative to continue (as opposed to the traditional idea of an “Epilogue” as something that resolves what came before).

3. By labeling the Epilogues as “Epilogues” while not adhering to traditional expectations of what an epilogue entails, Hussie intended to prompt readers to question storytelling concepts and the agenda of the storyteller.

4. Hussie intended to cede his authorial control over the Homestuck story and “pass the torch” to the fandom.

5. Hussie intended to prompt the fandom to develop skills like “critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time.”

I actually disagree with several of Hussie’s conclusions, which probably sounds hilariously presumptuous. But if Hussie truly wants the fandom to develop skills in critical discussion, and to foster and understand different viewpoints, while also ceding his authorial control over the work, then his word being “Word of God” has to be called into question. Act 6 of Homestuck already does this; Hussie’s author avatar is literally killed followed by a flash titled DOTA. DOTA, of course, being short for “Death of the Author,” a frequently-cited essay by Roland Barthes that argues that author's intentions can neither be wholly known nor taken as the sole interpretation of a work.

It’s arguable whether Hussie’s shout out to this essay is meant to be an endorsement of its thesis, and I think a claim could be made that the DOTA in Homestuck is inherently parodic; Hussie’s author avatar continues to exist and influence the story even after his “death,” and at times (such as the Meenah walkarounds) the author avatar appears to give direct statements of the author’s intentions behind certain creative decisions. In fact, the DOTA flash itself marks one of the Hussie avatar’s most direct interactions with the story, as it is during this flash that he gives Vriska the Ring of Life.

Even now, Hussie’s actions contradict his claims, at least to some extent; he cedes narrative control and promotes differing critical interpretations at the same time he dumps a tremendous block of text explaining the intentions and goals of his work. An author’s statement on “what the story means” usually affirms his or her control and quashes differing viewpoints, after all. But it’s not something new. Homestuck has always blurred the line behind author and fan. Some of Hussie’s statements I don’t take as major revelations but rather reiterations of themes that have been clear since Act 1.

If you have read my more recent Hymnstoke posts, you can probably guess which of Hussie’s points I disagree with. In particular, I think the Epilogues are too thematically important to Homestuck to be treated with the kind of “take it or leave it”/“canon or non-canon” ambivalence Hussie claims in his post. Or maybe it’s more that I wish it didn’t have that kind of ambivalence? Because his logic is sound; the Epilogues are presented in a way that sets them apart from “Homestuck Proper.” The AO3 fan fiction cover page, the prose, the way they’re organized as a distinct entity on the website, all of these elements contribute to and support Hussie’s claim of separation. Perhaps, then, my counterargument is that the Epilogues shouldn’t have been displayed this way; that they should have been a fundamental part of the story, one that is unquestionably considered “canon.”

Without the Epilogues, the ending of Homestuck is bad. Really bad. Game of Thrones bad. The original ending of Homestuck fails Homestuck on every conceivable level. It’s a poor resolution of the plot, as it relies on a deus ex machina (Alt!Calliope) while leaving tons of smaller narrative elements completely unresolved. It’s a poor resolution of the characters, as most of them wind up being irrelevant (even those given absurd amounts of screen time, like Jake) and their personal issues are resolved off-screen during a timeskip. It’s a poor resolution of the themes, as despite constant statements that one can’t cheat their way to “development,” that is exactly what happens when Vriska is revived and fixes everyone’s problems instantly. It’s a poor resolution of the structure or form, as what was a tightly-wound machine narrative that relied on innumerable tiny parts sliding into perfect order ended with a big dumb fight scene where people just whap each other over and over until the good guys whap hard enough to win. Beyond the fact that the ending is “happy,” I still can’t find much good to say about it even after years of turning it over in my head.

And during the hiatus-strewn period that marked Homestuck’s end, Hussie was noticeably scant on dropping essays about his intentions.

The Epilogues redeem so much of what went wrong with the ending of Homestuck. I won’t delve into the specifics in this post, as I should probably save it for a more comprehensive series of posts about the Epilogues. But from that perspective, it feels to me as though the Epilogues should not be divorced from Homestuck so thoroughly.

But see, my disagreement with Hussie on this point is a bit disingenuous for another reason. Because, like his claims of ceding authorial control, he’s contradictory here too. Consider these points:

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be the launching point of future story developments.

2. Hussie, ceding his own control, intended these future developments to be created by the fans.

3. Hussie designed the Epilogues so that the fans could accept or deny them outright, consider them “canon” or “non-canon.”

If the Epilogues are the breeding ground for Homestuck’s future, then that part of the fandom that denies them renders themselves inert. Without the Epilogues, Homestuck is over. It’s done. The window of our Pynchonian party is closed. All life has petered out; no energy enters to sustain it. The Epilogues open the window. Denying the Epilogues kills the story, and thus the fandom; accepting them leaves room open for the future. And if the part of the fandom that rejects the Epilogues withers and dies, that means only the fandom that accepts them will remain. Ultimately, the Epilogues will be considered canon by the Homestuck fandom, because those who disagree will no longer be part of the fandom, at least the active one.

That probably sounds imperious. But it’s not something I want; the people who deny the Epilogues ought to have a voice as well, and nobody is stopping them from providing their opinions. But I have a hard time imagining that people who deny the Epilogues will stick around in a fandom for a work now defined by the Epilogues. As such, many of Hussie’s conciliatory claims fall flat or seem overly idealistic. Can the fandom continue as a divided house on such a fundamental line when future developments to the Homestuck story will be based on the Epilogues? The canonical arguments for which books belonged in the Bible did not end in blithe harmony; one viewpoint prevailed and all schismatics extinguished. Obviously there will be no burnings at the stake over Homestuck canon, but in a world where there are so many options for entertainment, those who do not accept Homestuck’s active element will probably leave of their own volition.

There's also a third option, expressed by one of the commentators on the Reddit thread I link at the beginning of this post.

Here's my suggestion for you, Hussman. Big subversion, you'll like it: Make "Homestuck 2" and then not have anything form [sic] Homestuck in it at all and just make the story you actually want to make.

The Homestuck fandom might die, but the “Hussie” fandom will survive, as long as Hussie himself continues to create art. Before the Epilogues, I often expressed a similar sentiment. I wanted Hussie to get away from Homestuck, make something new, even if it was just something short and far less ambitious than Homestuck. I think Hussie is a strong storyteller and writer in his own right, and he did not merely “get lucky” with Homestuck the way a hack gets lucky when their trashily-written novel strikes a perfect chord with the culture and sells millions. If Hussie does actually intend to cede authorial control and leave Homestuck to the fandom, then what is his next move? Retirement at 40? I hope not.

Those were my hastily-written thoughts on Hussie’s commentary. While at times contradictory, I consider Hussie’s claims and actions in line with themes established throughout Homestuck. But I also question whether his storytelling decisions will be able to achieve the result he desires for the fandom.

Whether he or we can achieve it, I do agree with Hussie’s hope to create a fandom that is smarter, more willing to view the work with a critical lens, to discuss with one another, to understand each other’s viewpoints, to deal with difficult subject matter. I think a lot of people can be scared to delve deeply into a work, either because they only want their entertainment to be light escapism or because they feel gatekept by not knowing a lot about literary criticism as a field of study. Maybe escapism is fine, but it’s not the only use of art. Treat the stories you like as art and really ask yourself what you like about them, what makes them good, and especially what it means that those things make it good. Those questions will serve a fitting substitute for an understanding of postmodern literary trends of the 20th century.

#homestuck #hymnstoke

[dweemeister]

Deliverance (1972)

Different genres of film appeal or repulse people to differing degrees. I can stomach an average musical, but I find that I have little patience with an average modern-day action film. The reasons for that are numerous, to be described in another review. John Boorman’s Deliverance is an action-survival film that might seem out of place today – there are long stretches without dialogue or violence and it dares to examine its protagonists’ mindsets as they become victims of violence. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by James Dickey, Deliverance is a solid entry into the action-adventure tradition. A harrowing film even after the violence has passed, it is nevertheless hampered by its controversial rape scene and reductive depiction of those in the Appalachian American South.

Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty in his film debut), and Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox in his film debut) are four Atlanta businessman looking forward to a weekend canoeing down the Cahulawassee River (this river is fictional) before the river valley is flooded by a dam. In the opening minutes, Drew – a guitar player – spots an implicitly inbred boy (Billy Redden) at a gas station. The two share a duet of “Dueling Banjos”, in the film’s most famous scene.The men soon travel downriver, hoping to take in nature’s beauty and to escape from life’s responsibilities. Their desires, however, are shattered when Bobby and Ed are confronted by two men of the mountain (Bill McKinney and Herbert “Cowboy” Coward). For no understandable reason, Bobby – at gunpoint – is forced to strip his clothes. Ed is sexually assaulted as Bobby looks on. One of the rapists is killed by Lewis, unnoticed by the assailants, and the survivor runs deeper into the forest. The men resolve to head to their downriver destination, Aintry, as soon as possible.

The film’s infamous rape scene does not explicitly show the worst moments, but what is heard is horrifying enough. The cameras show Ned Beatty’s face, distraught and dirt-filled, for far too long. Burt Reynolds himself noticed the camera operators squirming away while director John Boorman continued. Disgusted, Reynolds stood in front of the cameras, asked Boorman why he let the scene run that long, and Boorman responded: “I wanted to take it as far as I could with the audience, and I figured you’d run in when it got too far.” The final cut of Deliverance lingers over the rape; for the audience’s sake, an implied or suggested assault would have been preferable and still respected Dickey’s adapted screenplay of his own novel. Boorman’s lack of restraint – even though some modern directors have even less restraint when presented with such a scenario – damages the film.

Since its release, Deliverance has helped solidify stereotypes about those who live in the American South and how Southern masculinity – bathed in humanity’s and nature’s violence – manifests itself. There is banter aplenty among the protagonists about their physical prowess; the weapons used in this film are phallic suggestions. Much of the pre-release promotion of Deliverance focused on Reynolds’ physicality and how Boorman’s direction pushed his four lead actors through physical pain and natural peril. The four leads, whose characters are from Atlanta, are distinguished from the mountainous locals they encounter at the gas station, during their trip, and in Aintry. Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew represent a suburbanizing, “new” South – a departure from the increasingly urbanized and less white urban South.

In Deliverance, the suburban “new” South meets the Appalachian “old” South. The latter, accustomed to the wilderness surrounding it and wary of the former’s intrusions, is shown as humble and skeptical in Deliverance’s opening minutes to assertive and suspicious by the end of the film’s first act. Boorman depicts the Appalachian Southerners as backwards, their technology and understanding of the outside world decades removed from the present. Their paranoia, Boorman (a Brit who, in post-release interviews, showed little understanding of the poor white Southerners he encountered while making the film) will show, and aggressive territorial behavior can also be argued as self-defense. As Lewis explains to his friends about why they are going on this canoeing trip:

There ain’t gonna be no more river… You just push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners [sic] for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna rape this whole goddamned landscape.

The rural Southerners in Deliverance can be interpreted as reacting against industrialized modernity and a white middle class, in defense of an individualistic naturalism that those in cities and suburbs cannot fathom. Their way of life, threatened by the damming project, is endangered – and most likely without their permission. Violence, when law enforcement is sparse, is an acceptable recourse to these people as is sexual assault, Boorman notes. And given how Boorman portrays the poor white men – snaggle-toothed, bone-thin, and underdressed – he is uninterested in providing any depth to these characters. Deliverance sides with the four middle-class whites, never affording the lower-class white characters anything more than their violent “nature.” These stereotypes that Boorman perpetuates are fixtures in how America media views lower-class white Southerners or, in common parlance, “poor white trash.” Look at the lengthy connections page on the films’ IMDb entry; notice how many films and television shows have featured footage or references to Deliverance without context. Numerous mentions and variations of the notorious “squeal like a pig” line appear when one character is threatening another with violence; a child with a banjo or a reference to “Dueling Banjos” brings up character’s fears or perhaps discussion of inbreeding and territorial violence.

Unfortunately, Boorman and Dickey’s approach to how the antagonists are portrayed works just as they want it to. The images that Boorman, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and editor Tom Preistley (1965’s Repulsion, 1984’s 1984) summon play into a fear of the “other” – placing the antagonist above the protagonist during a frame, keeping the antagonists faceless by positioning them into the background, and wary glances from the four businessman towards the riverbanks as if looking for hidden threats. Not knowing what to expect from this film, I – in my first viewing – found myself unconsciously retreating to damning assumptions even in the opening moments as the Atlantan friends drive up to the gas station (nothing sinister happens at the gas station). My preconceptions have been shaped by various media, assisted (and not started) by Deliverance. In its bourgeoisie discomfort towards underclass whites, Deliverance has helped continue its dreadful ideas about “white trash” – treating them as an existential threat to urban-suburban prosperity and order. This anxiety, an offshoot of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, persists. This reality is, as the locals of Rabun County, Georgia (where this film was shot and where many of the film’s extras resided) will tell you, unfair.

Where Deliverance succeeds is in its psychological treatment of violence. The final twenty minutes of the film – where the men must contend with the police investigation and the personal, extralegal consequences of their actions – would be ignored by many other filmmakers. Beyond the physical acting required for the canoeing scenes and combat against their assailants, this is where the actors shine. Jon Voight is the standout in the closing act, even if Burt Reynolds somehow retains his charm in an otherwise grave moment. The actors convey their characters’ swirls of emotions oftentimes without saying a word in an excellent ensemble performance.

The canoeing scenes in Deliverance were shot on the Chattooga River, which divides northeastern Georgia from northwestern South Carolina. The series of rapids that the production shot on contain some of the most dangerous waters for canoers, kayakers, and rafters in the United States. Such is the Chattooga’s reputation that the likes of Marlon Brando and Henry Fonda backed out of roles when they learned about its rapids. A famous stunt of Burt Reynolds volunteering to send himself over a ninety-foot waterfall in a canoe was inspired by the fact that Reynolds believed that using a dummy was unconvincing. Reynolds break his coccyx on the way down. After returning from the hospital, Reynolds asked Boorman about how the new footage appeared. Boorman’s response: “Like a dummy going a waterfall.”

Whether or not one has seen Deliverance, this is undoubtedly an influential American film – especially how it portrays its Southern characters, the violence they sustain against each other, and the environment surrounding them. A technically effective movie, the stereotypes within have proven resilient before and long after its initial release. It is the film’s undoing and, because of how dominant these views are, its ballast.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#Deliverance #John Boorman #Jon Voight #Burt Reynolds #Ned Beatty #Ronny Cox #Bill McKinney #Herbert Coward #James Dickey #Billy Redden #Vilmos Zsigmond #Tom Priestly #Eric Weissberg #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

[kongnextdoor]

Iam Innocent

//Also back in March, Steve would constantly tell people that I was “worst than Iam” [SIC] for role playing as an adult who wanted to have sex with other adults. Well, I finally got a hold of him and got his side of the story. ‘But Stacy, of course everyone’s innocent if you ask them!’ I didn’t call him up and say, ‘hey bud, you guilty?’ I got the full story... actually there’s practically nothing to tell.

This is his call out post, and it’s exactly like you would expect it to be... completely ridiculous. The first point is that in his rules he warns you that he is willing to RP darker themes like rape. That’s not for everyone, and if that’s a deal-breaker then just unfollow... it’s literally that simple. There’s no reason in the world this should have even made it into a call out, I mean he did put the warning there for specifically that reason. I also assume he tagged any applicable threads, if there even were any. Seriously though, rape & death are literary things that have existed forever. Personally, I wouldn’t RP either of them, for fear that it might be misconstrued as glorifying them, but I’m not about to condemn a man for thinking he might want to write about one of them someday.

Next up, we have the part you’ve all been waiting for, the pedo accusation. And, it’s just as bad as mine... in fact I think Puffmun used this post as a base for her half-logic when approaching me. Whoever clawheir was... I just find it hard to believe that there’s two prudes out there who literally say one thing and link to a post of something saying the literal opposite. At least two. How can anyone be that sure that not one single person is going to click on the link and read where he specifies Adult Simba? I was going to underline it, but no, take a look at it as is. Does this look confusing, or the slightest bit ambiguous to you?

The only thing this screen shot proves to me is that he seems to be oblivious to the fact that ‘this hellsite’ implies that saintalia is actually complaining about pseudo incest. And, I agree, an authority figure who raised you since before you were legal has about a million ways it could be problematic. But just like before, if a power imbalance that creates a toxic ship is a deal breaker, simply unfollow. Maybe request that he adds ‘pseudo incest’ to his warning list or something, there’s no logical reason for a call out.

And that was it, just those 2 points, that’s why clawheir claims they made the post. I’m not sure when Tails entered the discussion, but it seems like after months of sealioning and gaslighting, maybe you should forgive him for saying ‘I don’t care.’ Because what he didn’t say was that he wanted to do anything to Tails, just that he was fictional and that you should calm down. In any case, after some explaining, he no longer ships Timon & Adult Simba, or believes that fiction can’t affect reality.

So was he a perfect little angel? No. But he has changed what little problematic behavior he actually had, and deserves a second chance.

#kirmunsdrama

[scotianostra]

Author and journalist Neil Munro was born on June 3rd 1863

Neil Munro is best known for his ‘Para Handy’ stories these days but his writing career encompassed journalism, poetry and criticism, as well as his novels, making him one of the most visible literary figures of his time. His books fell out of fashion for a while but reprints of his work in the early 1990s and the appearance of a biography has brought him to the attention of a new audience.

Born in Inveraray in Argyll, in 1863, he came from a family of Gaelic speakers and though the language was beginning to lose its currency in that part of Scotland and Munro wrote in English, its influence can be felt strongly in his writing.

He began his career as a journalist on newspapers in the Glasgow area. After the publication of a short story collection, followed by two or three novels, he cut back on the journalism to concentrate on his writing. The appearance of a new character, Para Handy, in a short story in 1905 introduced a new comic strain in his work and the three collections of Para Handy stories (including The Vital Spark) were immediately successful. They transferred to the small screen in two separate sitcom series with the eponymous hero played by Duncan Macrae in the 1950s/60s and Gregor Fisher in the 1990s.As well as Para Handy he also wrote many poems and historical fiction books, like Doom Castle, s et in the Highlands in the years following the Jacobite Rebellion this story tells of an aristocratic Frenchman, on a mission to solve a murderous secret. At every turn he uncovers new twists in the web of mystery surrounding the castle. ‘

Munro returned to journalism during the First World War, becoming editor of a Glasgow evening paper in 1918. He died in Helensburgh in 1930.

John O’Lorn

My plaid is on my shoulder and my boat is on the shore, And it’s all bye wi’ auld days and you; Here’s a health and here’s a heartbreak, for it’s hame, my dear, no more, To the green glens, the fine glens we knew!

‘Twas for the sake o’ glory, but oh! wae upon the wars, That brought my father’s son to sic a day; I’d rather be a craven, wi’ nor name, nor fame, nor scars, Than turn a wanderer’s heel on Moidart Bay.

And you, in the day-time, you’ll be here, and in the mirk, Wi’ the kind heart, the open hand, and free; And far awa’ in foreign France, in town or camp or kirk, I’ll be wondering if you keep a thought for me.

But nevermore the heather nor the bracken at my knees, I’m poor John o’ Lorn, a broken man; For an auld Hielan’ story I must sail the swinging seas, A chief without a castle or a clan.

My plaid is on my shoulder and my boat is on the shore, And it’s all bye wi’ auld days and you; Here’s a health and here’s a heartbreak, for it’s hame, my dear, no more, To the green glens, the fine glens we knew!

#Scotland #Scottish #author #journalist #poet #History

[cromulentbookreview]

Die Doppelgängerin

Dopplegängers are weird. I mean, the idea that there’s someone out there who looks almost exactly like you, even though you’re not related in any way whatsoever is just a little bit creepy. The whole concept is so weird, of course we have to use the German word for it. Just smush together the verb doppeln = to duplicate and gänger which isn’t it’s own word by itself, but a Vorgänger is a predecessor, and a Fußgängerzone is a pedestrian area, so assume it refers to a person. I suppose you could translate it as “goer” so your Doppelgänger is your double goer...yeah the original word sounds way better. And if you want to make it female, make the article Die and add -in. Voila! Female Doppelgänger.   

Anyway, Doppelgängers are like catnip for fiction - remember how I was just talking about Tana French’s The Likeness? Or Edgar Allan Poe’s short story William Wilson? Or Fyordor Dostoevsky’s The Double? I mean, what would you do if you discovered there was someone out there who, despite not being related to you by blood, looked exactly like you?

Which leads me to: Mirage by Somaiya Daud!

I’m pretty sure I don’t have a doppelgänger out there anywhere. If I do, I feel so bad for that person. Sorry you have the misfortune to look just like me. But you have to wonder: what if you have some sort of Twinstranger or Evil Twin out there? What happens if you see them? What if you meet at summer camp and discover you’re actually long-lost twins and have to get your divorced parents back together? What if Evil Twin is out there committing crimes and framing you for them? What if your double is the president and you have to impersonate him, with hilarious results?

What if someone from history is your doppelgänger? I probably don’t have a living doppelgänger, but if I had to figure on my historical doppelgänger, I’d say it was Anne of Cleves. Don’t knock Anne of Cleves, of all of Henry VIII’s wives, she got the best deal: money, court precedence, castles, not having her head chopped off, not having to be married to Henry VIII anymore and outliving all the other wives. Pretty sweet deal for a woman in the 16th century. 

Fuck yeah, Anne of Cleves. Even if that portrait is an exaggeration, she was definitely better looking in real life than I am currently.

Anyway!

Mirage goes the “my living doppelgänger is a person in power” route. Amani lives in a Star Wars-esque system of planets controlled by the cruel Vathek empire. Amani and her family are just trying to keep their heads down and not get killed or tormented by their Vathek overlords. During the “majority day” celebrations (the day you, and all the other girls your age officially turn 18 and become adults) Vathek droids crash the party and start scanning girls’ faces. They get to Amani and, lo and behold, they’ve found what they’re looking for, and they drag her away, leaving her family with zero idea why she’s been taken, where she’s going, or anything. We learn pretty quickly though that Amani is being taken to the royal court because she’s a dead ringer for the half-Vathek princess Maram, whom everybody hates. Maram doesn’t really go out of her way to seem like a very nice person - I mean, the first thing she does to her  doppelgänger Amani is sic an attack bird on her. Anyway, being so disliked by other Vathek and the people of their conquered star system alike, Maram is in danger of being assassinated, so Amani gets the superfun you-have-no-choice task of being Maram’s body double. 

Noncompliance is not an option, by the way. 

So Amani gets the fun of being forced to mimic Maram exactly, and, after the literary equivalent of a training montage, Amani is ready to appear in public as Maram. With Maram’s appropriately named fiance, Idris. 

Not exactly Idris Elba, but, hey, go ahead and picture book Idris as Idris Elba. It’s pretty great.

Maybe the rest of this review should just be Idris Elba gifs. I mean. Why not?

I’m sorry, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, Mirage and the use of doppelgängers in literature as a representation of our fears of what we’re capable of...

Idris Elba...

No. I can focus! I can avoid looking at Idris Elba gifs for five more minutes. 

Alright.

Anyway, Amani gets all tangled up in Vathek politics, a burgeoning rebellion against the Empire, and her growing feelings for Idris, the fiance of the person she’s pretending to be. All while maintaining her own identity, though she has to essentially become Maram. And potentially be killed in her place.

Mirage is really, really, really quite good. If you’re into an exploration of identity with doppelgängers in a Star Wars-esque Moroccan and North African-inspired sci-fi world, then seriously, read it. Not just to picture 18 year old Idris Elba in your head every time the fiance is mentioned. Though that is a huge bonus. The only downside is that Mirage is another one of those YA books that is meant to be the first in a series. So it ends kind of abruptly, with lots of loose ends to be tied off in future books. 

How come I seem to never be able to find standalone books? Will I be doomed to be waiting for sequels forever? 

Eh, worth it.

RECOMMENDED FOR: Fans of YA sci-fi, YA fans of Star Wars, anyone looking for some awesome diverse YA featuring droids, blasters and a complex exploration of the self in light of meeting your doppelgänger in a world inspired by North Africa and the Middle East. 

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Non-YA fans, people who insist on sci-fi being exclusively white and male, identical twins, people employed to act as body doubles.

RATING: 4.5/5 

RELEASE DATE: August 28, 2018 (ha! I finally got the point of an “advanced” review!)

ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL: Chhogori

IDRIS ELBA:

#mirage #somaiya daud #young adult fiction #young adult sci-fi #sci-fi #non-western sci-fi #we need diverse books #book review #amani #idris #idris elba #maram

[lagren0uille]

I think what tires me a little about the whole credo that the healing power of art defines its value, and that books/fictions ought to be lifeboats that « save » you from (a politically and socially oppressive/traumatic) reality is not the idea in itself but the way it’s treated as an absolute. Of course wanting to heal the self is a perfectly « valid » reason to want to write or read a piece of fiction. But it absolutely does not work for all artistic productions and reading experiences, has not always been a commonplace of literary criticism, and as such should not be elevated as a kind of universal criterium of judgement, especially when it comes to the subject of literature and ethics or « problematic fiction » (sic)

Yes, sometimes you write to build a boat for yourself and your reader, not so much to escape the prison (because it’s absolutely not escapism we’re talking about here), than to find within it a place of kindness and healing. And it’s good ! but it’s not always the case either ! Sometimes you write simply because you want the prisoner to see the walls. Or maybe because you want him to shoot the guards, or start a riot with other prisoners, or burn the prison down.

The reason why i’m saying this is because i feel that people here keep using that vision of « art as healing » as a prerequisite when talking about morally tangled fiction, without any distance or will to discuss the relativity of it. And there is already a lot to be said about this whole trend of « feel good literature », and the way it interacts with a depoliticized vision of trauma studies to produce the idea that the ultimate power of literature is to console or mend the self (and once again i have no issue with it, but it’s important to note that « healing the self » is not healing the world, least of all changing it). But somehow it becomes way worse on tumblr dot com, where it encounters the whole moral purity police and gives birth to the frankly absurd idea that one could only want to write or read about problematic stuff either because they want to cope with it, or because they want to romanticize it. 

Except that, you know, art doesn’t necessarily have to be redemptive. It can be there to help you explore deep, weird places of yourself, to anger you, to terrify you or to make you feel frankly bad. And it’s ok ; it doesn’t make it unethical. What’s wrong is to handle lightly complicated, traumatic events ; or to justify violence or abuse or oppression and the either personal or political ideologies that sustain them. Not to wish to write about them for another reason that wanting to console, heal, or save. The ethics of a piece of fiction is not always defined by its therapeutic power.

#i have a lot of complicated feelings abt this and i'm not sure i'm clear here #literature meta #l #literature and ethics #literature #my posts

[altsoph]

PARANOID TRANSFORMER

Today starts NaNoGenMo, the annual challenge for automatic text generation. To participate you have to write and publish a code that generates a literary text at least 50K words long. I have not yet decided whether I will participate this year, but last year I took part, and now I will tell you what came of it, just to close the gestalt.

A year ago I made and submitted a combination of two neural networks: the first is a conditional GPT generator, pre-trained on a bunch of cyberpunk and cypherpunk texts, aphorisms, and complex authors like Kafka and Rumi. The second is a BERT filter, which rejects boring and clumsy phrases and keeps valid and shiny ones. I trained this filter on a manual markup, the main part of which was done by Ivan Yamshchikov. In the end, it turned out as a pretty good generator of cyber-paranoid delusions in English. I named it Paranoid Transformer if you understand.

NaNoGenMo ended quietly, but in mid-December, Augusto Corvalan, editor-in-chief of the strange DEAD ALIVE magazine, wrote and invited me to participate with the same project in their competition THE NEW SIGHT. I decided that it's boring to use the same thing twice, and added the following twist: I took an existing recurrent neural network trained for generating handwritten text, made the "nervousness" of the handwriting to depend on the emotionality of a particular sentence (determined by sentiment analysis) and "hand-wrote" the whole text of Paranoid Transformer. It turned out quite atmospheric so that at the end of January I even took first place according to the results of that competition.

In February, as the winner of the competition, I was offered to publish this text. Again I decided that it was not very interesting to re-use the same project without changes, so I added a few more things: I made the generation of dates for the sections, as in a real diary, added round coffee mug marks here and there; Dmitry Kuznetsov suggested an idea for drawings in the margins, and I used something like a Sketch-RNN, pre-trained on Google's Quick, Draw! dataset, so that every time a word from the dataset categories appeared in the text, scribbles appeared in the margins, corresponding to this word. The publishers read the entire generated text (sic!) and sent me a list of potentially offensive statements (a lot!). I decided it's too lame to just delete them, and instead made a heuristic that aggressively crosses out such areas right in the text, which added some emotion.

In the meantime, Ivan Yamshchikov and Yana Agafonova helped me write the text of the gonzo paper "Paranoid Transformer: Reading Narrative of Madness as Computational Approach to Creativity", which in September got to the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2020, and just a week ago its expanded version published in the Future Internet magazine.

At the stage of searching for authors for the preface and foreword to the book, I had a hard time. Borislav Kozlovsky gave me a spontaneous master class on writing "cold" requests to unfamiliar celebrities so that they at least answer my email, so I asked a review from a couple of the most relevant to this project and indeed important for me people: Luba Elliott, a producer of creative AI projects, co-organizer of NeurIPS Creativity Workshop, and Nick Montfort, a poet and professor of digital media at MIT and the known narrative and interactive fiction enthusiast. Their reviews completed the book. The cover with the generative pattern was made by Augusto Corvalan.

The Paranoid Transformer book itself is now available for pre-order on the publisher's website, the shipping should start in December, however, I personally do not bear any responsibility for the sale of the book, and delivery can take quite a lot of time especially during the quarantine period. Judging by the signal copy that I have in my hands, the book turned out to be quite solid. Check some pictures and quotes in my Medium post.

#ai #creativity #nlp #nlg #art #generative #neural network

[unfoldingpavilion2020]

Hejduk in Venezia

by Unfolding Pavilion

long wait from blackness to the blue anticipation of dawn morning breeze through dark windows chalk white waters frozen moss voices bird and man*

Between 1974 and 1979, American architect and educator John Hejduk worked on a series of three allegorical projects conceived for different areas of Venezia. The first project was presented on the occasion of the exhibition A proposito del Mulino Stucky, which was organized in 1975 by Vittorio Gregotti as part of that year’s Biennale. The project consists of two structures: the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought and the Wall House 3. The Cemetery is composed of a dense series of long, parallel walls running along a rectangular site on the back of the Mulino Stucky building (a site now mostly occupied by Gino Valle’s Giudecca Social Housing Complex). Each wall is pierced by cubic niches containing ashes, and under each niche there is a bronze plaque with the title of a literary work. Plaques with the names of the authors of the works are placed on the interior walls of the Mulino Stucky building. Right in front of the Cemetery, in the middle of the lagoon, a small artificial island is built on top of which stands the Wall House 3. The House, which can be inhabited by only one man for a limited period of time, consists of a square wall crossed by differently shaped volumes on both sides. On the side facing the lagoon, three blue-painted volumes host a redundant set of climbs of stairs, while on the side facing the Giudecca island, four interconnected and organ-like volumes host the rooms of the house, from whose windows its inhabitant can contemplate the Cemetery.

The themes of the cemetery and of the wall house return in the second project for Venezia, which Hejduk worked on between 1974 and 1979: the New Town for the New Orhtodox. It is his “very first piece of urban planning”, as he writes in Mask of Medusa, and it consists of a city for 18,000 inhabitants built on an artificial island somewhere in the lagoon. The city is made of 18,000 little wall houses, one per inhabitant, and of a series of public buildings: a market, a hotel, a customs, a park, a hospital, the Orthodox (sic) and a cemetery. The cemetery is rectangular in plan and triangular in section, and it contains 18,000 slots for coffins stacked on top of each other. Burials proceed from the lowest to the highest level of the cemetery, progressively filling its triangular volume with 18,000 coffins. When the last coffin is buried the cemetery is complete, and the New Town is abandoned.

The third project of the series was presented by Hejduk on the occasion of a seminar held at IUAV in the summer of 1978, whose outcome was made public two years later in an exhibition and book curated by Francesco Dal Co, titled 10 Immagini per Venezia. The aim of the seminar, which was the Venetian response to the famous Roma Interrotta exhibition of the same year, was the redesign of an empty area in the sestiere of Cannaregio (now partially occupied by Vittorio Gregotti’s ex-Saffa Social Housing Complex). Bringing further the fictional nature of his work, Hejduk’s project consists of an interrelated network of two sets of architectures whose protocols of inhabitation are meticulously defined. There are, first of all, the Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio: a dense row of very slender residential towers clustered inside of a rectangular plot surrounded by four canals. Each tower is inhabited by one man, and the thirteen inhabitants, who are chosen by the City of Venezia, are the only ones allowed inside of the towers, where they are supposed to live for the rest of their life. In the middle of a nearby campo, connected to the towers’ plot by means of two bridges, stands a little wall house inhabited by a fourteenth man, whose role is to wait for the death of one of the occupants of the thirteen towers. When this happens, the fourteenth man becomes the new inhabitant of the just-emptied tower, leaving the wall house ready for someone else to occupy.

Somewhere else in Cannaregio, in another campo, stands a counterpart of the project: an empty, fourteenth, tower and a second wall house, for only one man - the House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate. The House, which is another variation on the type of the wall house, features a 3x4 vertical grid of box-like units hanging from the front-side of a square wall. On the backside of the wall, the twelve units are connected on each level by a corridor and two cylindrical circulation cores. The opposition between the visible front and the hidden back of the House is not only functional but also symbolic: if the former shows a postmodernist composition of windows and wall, in fact, the latter features modernist elements such as pilotis and strip windows. Each hanging unit corresponds to one room of the House and contains only one piece of furniture - a fridge, a sink, a bed, and so on - with the exception of the seventh unit (the units are numbered from 1 to 12) which, instead, is left completely empty. Each piece of furniture identifies, isolates and allows only one domestic action, while the emptiness of the seventh unit is meant to orient the gaze of the inhabitant outside of the room and towards the tower, which is built right in front of it, on the other side of the campo. The relationship between the two buildings is subtle, and one of the most interesting elements of the project. On the tower's wall, at the exact same height of the seventh unit, there is a one-way mirror on whose surface the inhabitant sees a reflection of himself every time he stands inside of the empty room. Behind the one-way mirror, citizens of Venezia who enter inside of the tower can spy on the inhabitant of the House without being seen, thus forcing the inhabitant to become part of another, even more perverse ritual than the one he refused to participate in (the one of the Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio). A voyeuristic game raising issues of privacy, isolation and control, the House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate exacerbates the social, spatial and perceptual dynamics experimented in the Mulino Stucky project, giving shape to a kind of architecture that functions as a sort of fiction-making machine.

  * John Hejduk, Venice (1953), in: John Hejduk, Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953-1996, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

                                                                            Illustrations:

1. John Hejduk, The House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate. Source: John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947–1983 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1985). >

[margarittet]

Why the SPN mixtape scene from 12x19 is screenwriting gold, and should be taught to the next generations of screenwriters everywhere - analysis

20 seconds. Two lines of dialogue, three gestures, a couple more camera angles. Episode 19, season 12 of a genre TV show “Supernatural”. A single strike of screenwriting and cinematic genius. The mixtape scene.

Robert Berens and Meredith Glynn, I bow before you.

This scene should be used as an example for future screenwriters how you can put maximum of meaning into minimal time and dialogue. Should be analyzed and taught at universities everywhere, how to achieve the most using the least. How to write for TV, where you only have less than an hour to built something spectacular.

WOW.

Let’s just peel off all the layers of these 20 seconds of footage and these 13 words. 13 WORDS.

(Cas knocks, Dean doesn’t say anything. Cas opens the door, apologizes for disturbing Dean in his room, and then takes a cassette tape out of his left inside coat pocket, and puts it on the desk, while tapping the label on it that says “Deans (sic!) top 13 Zepp traxx”.)

Cas: Um, I just wanted to return this.

Dean: It’s a gift. You keep those.

13 tracks. 13 words. The future. So number thirteen is important for the future. I mean, are you trying to tell us something here, writers?

(Dean takes the tape, oustreches his arm, and gives it back to Cas. We see Cas’ hand grabbing the tape, and taking it back.)

That tiny scene is ENORMOUS from the perspective of the narrative and the characterization. Let’s see what we can get out of it. (Prepare yourself: it’s gonna be long. Damn, how much meta can you write based on 20 seconds of television and two lines of dialogue?) (Hint: A lot.)

Thoughts in no particular order.

LotR reference

Let’s start with text, because text is kinda my thing. This is this:

I half expected Dean to roll his eyes at himself for acting like an elvish maiden - maybe he did internally. Anyway, we all remember how Aragorn and Arwen’s story ended, right? (In the movies at least.) 

It’s great how Cas and Dean re never strictly cast as a female mirror or male mirror in any of the romantic pararells that the show does. Their gender roles and characteristics are extremely fluid, and it’s wonderful.

2) The label

Deans (sic!) top 13 Zepp traxx”

First thing: “Deans” - not “Top 13 Zepp traxx”, not “The best of Led Zepp”. DEAN’S top 13 Led Zepp tracks. This shit is personal. Your favourite music says a lot about you, it’s like showing somebody your favourite book, or your favourite fictional character. ONE favourite track says something about what you like, feel, think. 13 songs of your favourite band, especially if that band is Led Zeppelin? You may as well get naked, because you can’t uncover yourself much more than that. This stuff makes you open and vulnerable. They will know what you like, what you enjoy, what you feel, what kind of stories your favourite music tells. It’s a mirror of you. Led Zepp is not a band with three beats and five words in the lyrics. It’s long, it’s literary, and it’s epic. It tells a lot about the person, especially a person who loves music and stories as much as Dean does. By showing Cas that he loves these 13 songs of Led Zeppelin, he told Cas he loves cock rock, sexual innuendos, shameless romanticism, fantasy references, biblical imagery, American blues, stories about life, death, love, sex, angels, Satan, mythology, science-fiction and Lord of the Rings. If this band is not a metaphor for the many sides of the real Dean Winchester, I don’t know what is. Dean showed Cas his non-performing side.

This is not even good gift giving, Dean, darling - a nice gift would be giving Cas music HE would enjoy, not you. Give him Beyonce (“Halo” would be nice, lol), give him rap, give him some Britney Spears. No, you gave him Led Zepp, with a NOTE that these are your favourite songs.

You wanted to show yourself to him. This is fucking intimate.

The cassette is a symbol for Dean, for Dean's heart, like the necklace was a symbol of Arwen's heart. That is why no matter what Cas did in 12x19, Dean is still on his side. Why he fixed his truck, gave him the Impala keys without thinking, tried to talk to him instead of fighting him, why he was so hurt Cas left before. That's why he didn't even consider taking the cassette back. Because he has made his decision, he gave himself to Cas, and he will not hear of Cas giving it back (you can't give it back, really). Just look how quickly Cas grabs the tape back. He even uses it later to highlight "we", waving it between him and Dean. This moment is showing us Dean has given his true self to Cas, and he is not changing his mind. This happened already, and no one witnessed it but the two of them. Cas only tried to give it back, because he thought that after what he was about to do, Dean would want it back. Nope.

Nothing to see here. Moving on.

“Top 13”

Yeah, these are his favourite songs, but not all of them, just the best ones. Why thirteen? This is actually a weird number of songs for a cassette tape, especially for a band like Led Zeppelin. It’s too few for 90 min, and too many for 60 min (usual lengths of tapes). So I see three reasons:

Dean just chose songs that send exactly the message he wanted to send, so he didn’t need more songs.

It’s a reference to season 13 - which, I believe, will be romance heavy and amazing.

It’s a reference to “13 Reasons Why”, a show about a girl’s suicide and cassette tapes since this is the same episode where Kelly kills herself, dies, and is revived by the Nephilim, (and therefore it’s canon that the Nephilim can bring people from the dead. Cas, anyone?)

All of the above.

“Zepp”

Besides the fact that liking Led Zeppelin says tons about the real Dean Winchester, it has also different meanings:

Led Zeppelin is a shorthand for seduction, but also for a cosmic romantic connection.

We know two situations where Led Zepp is mentioned in terms of seducing somebody. Jo mentions that hunters want to get into her pants with “some pizza, a sixpack and side one of Zeppelin IV”. This means pretty much the same as “they think they can impress me with cool music while they only know four songs played frequently on the radio, fucking posers.” See, I know Dean is better than to put Stairway to Heaven or Rock n’ Roll on his mixtape, since these are the most popular, i.e. impersonal of Zeppelin songs (although he may be partial to “Battle of Evermore”, since he is a huge nerd). Aaaaaanyway, the other time we see Led Zepp as a seduction technique is when Nick the Siren talks to Dean about some more obscure Led Zepp records - he outdid Dean with his knowledge of Led Zepp trivia - and Dean is bought. This is exactly the opposite of knowing only side A of Zeppelin IV. This is a real deal, and Dean is so mesmerized.

And then we have the literal “match made in Heaven” of John and Mary - and we know she used Led Zeppelin to test John as a potential lover. He knew all the lyrics (again, real, deep knowledge of the subject vs the superficial one), and she knew he was worth going for. I don’t think Dean is testing Cas, but I think that since John and Mary connected over Zeppelin LYRICS, the lyrics are as important for Dean as the music is. That’s why he used them to show Cas what he feels. And it also reminds him of his parents.

Plus, honestly, if reciting/playing Led Zepp lyrics to somebody doesn’t feel dirty and/or disgustingly romantic, you’re doing it wrong. “Squeeze me baby, ‘till the juice runs down my leg”? Really? 

Led Zepp is connected to John

Remember how, when we see Dean for the first time connecting with a kid in season 1, he teaches him that “Zeppelin rules”? That’s because Zeppelin is in Deans mind “father’s music”. It’s something you show your kid, something you can bond over. 

It’s a well known thing that we choose partners similar to our parents, so it’s not a shocker that Dean connects John’s music with his love interests. It’s nothing weird. If he was going for a girl, he’d look for somebody who is like more like Mary (and since she also loved Led Zepp - well, remember Jo?)

Led Zepp is connected to Mary. 

Since Dean and Mary are so similar, it’s not surprising that his first thought how to connect with his love interest is through Led Zeppelin (just how her was, when she met John).

“Traxx”

Ha! This one is great. They spelled it this way probably mostly to get our attention. “Tracks” was a legendary gayclub in Washington DC, and even now there is a gay club under this name in Denver, plus there are gay clubs all around the US and Canada that are called “Trax” or “Traxx”. Subtle and awesome. It’s a nice shout out to Dean saying he was in Purgatory in Miami.  

(Edit: Plus, as many people pointed out to me since I wrote this piece, XX is also a common shorthand for kisses. I knew that, but I wasn’t sure it was something Dean would do. But now I agree. I guess I didn’t give Dean enough credit for being sappy. :)

The whole “Deans top 13 Zepp Traxx” label is Dean “no-homo”ing the tape - “Dude, look how cool I am, ain’t got no time for good grammar and proper spelling, dude. Bro.” You know, in case Sam sees the tape, and there are questions. *eyeroll*

3) Music as a non-textual device

It was said once that even though Led Zeppelin is Dean Winchester’s favourite band, we will not ever hear it on the show, because the royalties are just too. Damn. Expensive. The show can’t afford it in their budget to put Led Zeppelin on the soundtrack, even though the band’s music is crucial to understanding Dean Winchester’s complexity. So instead of scraping more money, they pulled “High Fidelity”, and put music IN THE NARRATIVE. This, my loves, is pragmatism 101. Why to spend a fortune to put ONE Led Zepp song in the episode, when you could just send your viewers to their Spotify account and listen to ALL the songs there, thus creating their own soundtrack for this episode and the relationship between the characters. I wish I would be this smart. This actually achieved several goals at once.

All Led Zeppelin music is now a textual part of the universe and Dean’s character, not just two songs that he mentioned in season 4. We know the tape has 13 songs, but we don’t know which ones, which means all the songs can be there, until we are told differently - “Schroedinger’s Mixtape”. Some viewers can even no-homo the tape by picking the songs that are neither sexual nor romantic, but it will be HARD.

4) Michelangelo’s “The creation of Adam”

In the way this moment is shot, we are reminded where they stand in the beginning of this episode - Cas is the celestial being (who just has been to Heaven), and Dean once again represents humanity - the humanity that Cas is canonically in love with.

(On another note: Michelangelo is one of the most famous gay icons in history.)

5) This short moment showed us as well that there is so much stuff happening off screen that we never get too see. Who knows what else we don’t know? What else happened between these two characters that we never heard about? This made me think we should always be careful with the new showrunners, since they love puzzles, games, and pieces of information peppered over the whole season that are not always what they are. There is ALWAYS MORE. They love playing with meta reading, and it’s glorious. 

Also, instead of showing us the moment where Dean gives Cas the tape (what would be a regular thing to do), they showed us the BACK END of the situation. We have to construct what happened from the end, backwards. We know Cas got the tape, both characters know what happened between them when he received it from Dean, but we HAVE NO IDEA. We don’t get to see it because we were not privy to that moment. It was JUST BETWEEN THEM. It was an intimate moment that no one else got to witness, even the audience. And it makes it so much more important. It adds a new level of privacy and intimacy to their relationship, and it’s amazing, especially since the last few seasons seemed like they never are alone anymore. 

6) Why a cassette tape? Especially since we don’t even know if Cas has a way to listen to it? 

Because it’s a frikkin’ romantic trope!

In the world of storytelling mixtapes scream romance, and not much else (well, parental love, but that is so not the case here). It’s a thing that made me sit up and stare at the screen the moment it arrived, because I couldn’t believe they went there. I thought it was another queerbaiting moment, like the infamous boner prom-shot, but once they started sharing with each other how they felt, ALONE, ON SCREEN, IN WORDS, I knew it wasn’t. It was a way to show more casual viewers a symbol they would understand, while still staying in character. Dean would not write a love letter, or a poem, or even speak openly about his feelings, but he so would take time and effort to create a tape, especially since mixtapes were the language of showing your feelings that was in use when he was young and had his first crushes. And if Cas was more human, he’d understand it immediately. I hope he did anyway, he has got his pop culture references from Metatron, maybe some John-Hughes-references there.

The tape is new, the label is clean, words visible, plastic unscratched. If it was a tape Dean had before, it’s be dirty from lying in his car forever. Plus, noone makes mixtapes for themselves, especially when they already have albums - it’s too much effort for too little gain. It’s not John’s, because it cleary says “Dean’s”. Ergo - it’s freshly made. For Cas.

In conclusion: with the shortest piece of dialogue possible, and exactly three movements of the actors, they shot the narrative onwards and upwards on so many levels: 

Dean’s performing facade falling down,

Dean showing (and giving) his true self to Cas,

Hints of off-screen moments between them that we know nothing about (added a new level of intimacy), 

Cas being linked to the textual and intertextual codes for eternal love and sexual seduction, 

Some hints for the future,

Dean is humanity (and Cas loves humanity),

Bisexual!Dean,

Binding the show to its earlier seasons.

20 seconds. 13 words. I am blown away.

I probably could find more layers, but I think four pages of meta for 20 seconds of TV is enough for now. Thanks for reading! It was fun!

#supernatural #spn 12x19 #the mixtape #destiel #dean winchester #castiel #cas #screenwriting #brilliance #robert berens #meredith glynn #bobo berens #spn meta #dean is bi #season 12 #mind blown