#because the difference between what you sing and the note played is way more obvious then

[millenari]

you ever think about the difference in how bomba and demeter talk about Macavity in his song and just OOUUGGHHHH

Look. Listen. When Demeter talks about Macavity in the song she mostly touches upon his abilities and achievements to describe him. It almost sounds like she's bragging about him- she mentions twice that he can outsmart Scotland Yard and refers to his reputation as a criminal and also a magical cat. The only time she refers to his appearance is when she says he is 'outwardly respectable' which -as we all know- is either totally untrue or, at the very least, not true anymore.

Meanwhile Bomba focuses on his physical appearance, and when she describes him it sounds like a completely different guy than Demeter's supposed 'respectable' criminal mastermind: he's unkempt, he's uncombed, his eyes are sunken in, etc. Also in almost direct contradiction to the 'outwardly respectable' line, she additionally claims 'you'd know him if you saw him'. She compares him to a snake, an animal most cats sure as fuck don't like, and calls him a 'monster of depravity'. I'd say her descriptions lean towards accusing him of being inhuman, but these are... you know. Cats. None of them are human. But either way she certainly labels him as completely 'other' than the rest of them: he is a 'fiend in feline shape'.

(And certainly this can be explained away as the two of them just having difference preferences. Bomba, as we know, likes Tugger, and she describes him as a 'curious beast' so clearly she has a type here. Meanwhile Demeter is sometimes depicted as having some kind of love affair with Alonzo, but nowadays she's usually paired up with Munk, a guy who doesn't really seem to display much sexuality in comparison to the other male cats, and demonstrates a lot of competence and emotional intelligence throughout the play. So it does make sense that these two specifically would fixate on these two different aspects of the same man.)

However they almost seem to be in conflict about their hot takes on Macavity. Take the middle section I marked off for example: the first time that 'there's no one like Macavity' bit is sung, Demeter sings it. Then later on, Bomba sings it. But when Bomba sings it she changes the second line, which goes from 'He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity' to 'For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity'. She also mirrors Demeter's choreo from the same section as she sings it.

That makes her slight change feel very pointed, especially with the how she gestures towards Demeter during that line.

Demeter, fundamentally, is saying, 'there's no one like Macavity, he can do all of these insane things', and meanwhile Bomba is saying, 'there's no one like Macavity, he's a fucking monster' and she makes sure Demeter knows that's exactly what she's saying too.

& on that note there's even more context there when you look at their demeanor. Demeter seems to have a lot of conflict about her feelings, which is portrayed through her expressions mostly, while Bomba remains almost kind of playful and certainly enthusiastic through the whole song. Demeter --who is vastly conflicted-- tries to talk about Macavity's achievements when describing him. Bomba --who knows exactly what Macavity is and was and feels no shame about it-- is happy to talk about what an abomination he is and how attracted she is to him anyways.

And that makes the 'outwardly respectable/cheats at cards' moment feel really important, because Demeter tries to claim something that may be one thousand percent not even remotely true, (potentially to justify her attraction to Macavity), and Bomba cuts in --sometimes with amusement, sometimes with annoyance, sometimes without particular tone-- and retorts, 'i know he cheats at cards'.

Which regardless of if you interpret that line in the manner that seems most obvious: 'I know he cheated on you' (especially when there's a loaded pause between 'cheats' and 'at cards'), or if you take it to be more general ('I know he's more nefarious than he seems' for example) that line very much seems to be Bomba cutting in there and essentially expressing 'girl, give me a fucking break'. And well, one of Bomba's character words isn't 'frank' for nothing.

I also don't have it pictured in the screenshot, but the third time that 'there's no one like Macavity' bit is sung, it's sung by them both at once, and that notable second line that keeps changing says 'There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity,' which labels Macavity as 'deceitful' but also 'suave', almost as if the two of them decided to compromise on their respective perceptions of the man. Which matches how they, by that point, have begun to dance in sync as well.

#cats fan on main #cats the musical #this is just one interpretation of many of course #tho if you stack on that almost competitiveness that they might seem to have in their descriptions of him #(or how demeter sometimes seems to be surprised or annoyed by bomba's additions) #(or how bomba sometimes is sort of playful or even mean with her delivery of the lines where she contradicts demeter) #(while keeping in mind at the forefront that these two characters obviously love each other and share a deep and protective bond) #then at the end of it all you have a relationship that seems very layered and complicated and dynamic #makes my brain go brr #demeter: macavitys a ~mystery~ cat-- #bomba‚ cutting her off‚ hands cupped around her mouth: BOOO HES A FUCKING GINGER #jelliclerants

[ashleywool]

I still don't know my "type" and I'm sick of caring about it

In the early years of my Broadway dream-chasing, I often had to grapple with the concept of "type." That is, what is someone's "type" as an actor? How does the industry view them physically and energetically?

Maybe this is an autism thing, but I still don't really get it.

I get it in theory, but in practice, it always feels...wrong. Because you're told that there are rules, but there are always exceptions to the rules. You're told that your "type" will naturally emerge depending on the roles you get callbacks for, the roles you get cast in, the roles you almost get cast in but someone else just fits better.

It is very easy for me to define my type in negatives, by the things I can't do. There are "obvious no" roles, and there are "roles I could theoretically play but am not a natural fit." The "obvious no" roles are things like Effie White or Lady Thiang. The theoretical-but-not-perfect roles are sometimes harder to define, especially to people not "in the business." It's a game of "just because I can doesn't mean I should."

For instance, I can hit the high notes, but I don't have the right "flavor" of soprano for Christine Daae. I can cut my hair and don overalls and Doc Martens, but I'm not convincingly butch enough to play Enid Hoopes. I can learn and capably execute most of the choreography in A Chorus Line, but I don't have the nuanced, expressive qualities required for Cassie or Sheila. I played Eva Perón in a community theatre setting ten years ago, and I'm still really proud of the work I did on that show, but I'm not Latina, so I wouldn't try to play the role in a professional production nowadays, because the culture has shifted to prioritizing ethnic authenticity in a way that historically we haven't. And sure, the real Eva was a white Latina with a similar ethnic background to mine, so my playing her is "passable" in that it's not as blatantly inappropriate as Effie or Thiang, but there's still a difference between being a "passable" fit and being the "right" fit. And those differences become all the more important when it comes to representing marginalized groups who have traditionally been denied opportunities to play roles that they are authentically right for. (See also: autistic actors.)

All this to say: between the shifts in the culture and my increased maturity and introspection as a theatremaker, I've gotten pretty good at typing myself out of things. But that still leaves a lot of stuff that I can do, and The Industry People™ expect me to define myself even more specifically within that pool. I am nowhere near as good at that as I think I'm supposed to be at this point in my career. What I think of my type still conflicts annoyingly often with what others think. Or at least what others think upon first impression.

As far as I can tell, the biggest reason for this is the "wait, how old are you?" factor. Apparently, I look a lot younger than I am. Okay, fine. I'm short and I moisturize. Presumably, this is a good thing, especially for women. Because, the patriarchy, I guess. But for me, it's been...confusing.

A common thread in my community theatre experience was, I would initially get cast in a "younger" role, and would then get to play the "adult" roles in later shows after the directors got to know me better. This was all well and good as a tiny baby actressling hungry for the diversity of experience, but those are the experiences that built my resume--and The Industry People™ have told me that from a professional standpoint, my resume gives them whiplash.

The same year I played Eva Perón, I played Logainne in Spelling Bee. The next year, I was in final callbacks for Star-to-Be in the national tour of Annie, but they also had me sing "Tomorrow" because they thought maybe I could swing for the orphans too. I was 28. The year I turned 30, I played a twelve-year-old Alice in Wonderland in a children's theatre production, and then played Amy in Company.

Then, I got my Equity card, which apparently knocked another fifteen-to-twenty years off my playable age. I am thirty-six. In the EPA casting breakdown for HTDIO swings, Jessica's age is listed as 20. Last week--last week--I was called in to read for a 16-year-old in a feature film.

And look, I'm not complaining about the teens-to-early-20s roles. They're not bad roles. I'll happily play them until you decide I can't get away with it anymore.

But it's getting really weird to still not be at that point, and to still not know when I will get to that point. It feels almost like I'm being gaslit. I say I want to audition for a role that's closer to my actual age, and someone says "oh no, you're far too young for that," and I say "I'm actually five years older than the age range listed," then they look at me like I have three heads. Like I'm the one who's confused about a basic, quantifiable numerical fact of my existence.

But what do they expect me to do? Lie about my age? I might have been able to get away with that before the Internet, but not now. One slip of "hokay, so here's the Earth" gives me away instantly.

So...where does this leave me and my whiplash resume?

Do I keep listing Alice and Logainne and Wednesday Addams and Iola the factory girl in Parade even though I know I'm too old for them now? How do I know when to remove them?

Do I keep listing the roles that are closer to my actual age--or roles that I was probably too young for when I played them but have now appropriately aged into--even though I know there will still be people who think I'm too young? How do I know when the pushback will stop?

And most of all, how do I know when it's finally okay to stop caring about any of this? Because I'm sick of caring about it, and so is every other actor in the world, because none of us signed up to care about it in the first place. I just originated a principal role on Broadway that defied all the odds of what people thought was possible on Broadway, and it's REALLY tempting to say "you know what, maybe this is just evidence that I'm a really good actress who can do a lot of different stuff, and I am not going to make other people's whiplash my problem anymore."

But...I don't think I get to do that yet.

I don't think the systematic machinations of the theatre industry have caught up with the multifaceted humanity of its actors.

I'm using this downtime to try to figure out what I can do to get there. For myself, and for all of us.

#broadway #musical theatre #actually autistic #acting #theatre #showbiz #typecast

[mischieffoal]

LotR Musical: round 2

This is just a stream of consciousness, and I won't pretend it's a review or anything, it's just extra thoughts I had the second time I saw the musical. This is from September 20th, I've also just posted my notes on 4th October's show

Pre-show

Picked up friends along the way - we were all cloakèd this time! I saw Kelly and told her I loved her Instagram takeover!

Sadly raining, But! The pre show was still done, just indoors!! Met and chatted to Legolas, and Bilbo, and LOBELIA and I gave her a SPOON. Loved that they came upstairs to talk to us, it was well done for what is clearly a back up option. They still had fun dancing and playing hoopla etc downstairs on the stage

New cast member joined literally last week (Zara Naeem) and she just looks so natural and like she's always been there! R described Rosie as "the most wonderfully hobbit like person" (round face, amazing hair, and sheer energy at Bilbo's party)

I really love the ringle dance at the beginning, I think I am even more impressed by it and how tight everyone's choreo is because they're mostly dance moves I know from ceilidhs etc. Also very fun and not sure if intentional or just in character that someone in one of the 5 hand stars ended up facing the wrong way

I absolutely love knowing who they all are now. Aragorn and Arwen were dancing together!! And Pippin is often in the background of the next few scenes, playing her mandolin. I am now so much more cognisant of the foot tap greeting like I loved it last time but now I know how it's done I'm obsessed

Bilbo introduces the story with the “tell us a story” but it's clearly meant to be self-deprecating. Bilbo disappeared into the carved doors, and there's entire smoke, lighting and sound effects that don't happen outside that make it magical in a different way!

Act 1

I'd forgotten that after the party Frodo just... stands by himself in Bag End for a bit. He's burning papers - I wonder why. Just standing and thinking to himself - sings "road flow past your doorstep". Sam comes in, has a chat, then Rosie enters as well, and they're off to the ivy bush (apparently a phrase meaning ‘in secret’??). They are clearly inviting Frodo along, and Frodo is clearly not wanting to third wheel them, but as E said, they are trying to make it obvious that this is a tricycle, Frodo! He doesn't go with them. They foot tap goodbye. 

Frodo carries on reading things, then hides what he's reading when Gandalf knocks...?? Frodo protecting Sam from Gandalf is very cute and also gorgeous parallels to Sam protecting Frodo from Gollum just before mount Doom

Sam packs Mrs. Bracegirdle's plum cake - this man is always thinking of rations unlike anyone else in the entire musical (also E did eventually come to like Mrs. Bracegirdle's ever growing bakery but was at first incensed because "Bilbo makes his own plum cake!")

I love Merry and Pippin. So much.

The elves' lighting is just gorgeous and wonderful and I love how obvious the elf moments are and the clear differences between Rivendell elves and Lothlorien elves, and that Legolas is different again from both of them (it helps with important character status but also that Mirkwood (the northern forests) is a different group of people). However. We couldn't see the elf speaking to Frodo for shit (too high up). Sitting at the back of the balcony was definitely better for comfort but we did miss anything high on the back of the stage

I LOVE Saruman's line "a Dominion of light"

E pointed out that no one has mentioned that Hobbits are a different species yet. Barliman's opening different doors is absolute nonsense if you don't know they're tiny. Bill Ferny being racist is helpfully telling the audience that they're not human. I loved watching so many different characters this time! I was definitely trying to see everything I could, and I loved seeing extra things, but I'm glad I'm going again so I can truly sit back and enjoy it more calmly

Glorfindel is played by Folarin, a bald black dude. Incredible. 

Arwen's song of hope is called "lullaby" in the score, so she's diegetically singing it to Frodo, whilst Aragorn watches on. At the council - the rotation is SO COOL I noticed multiple characters who spoke as they reached the point where they were facing the audience. Insane detail to do 

Star of Yarandil my beloved. Arwen's HANDS they are just ALL OVER THE PLACE. She gives each member of the fellowship a blessing, and she lingers looking at Aragorn as she goes on to bless Boromir... also the hand movements. Damn. She's casting spells/blessings with her song and hands, and the whole ensemble then picks it up as well. They're VERY precise - literally each finger is doing something different, and they all do it in unison

Holy shit quick change - the fellowship finish star of Yarandil at Rivendell with Elrond, he leaves, then comes back on practically immediately as Saruman. I continue to be very attracted to Elrond/Saruman. They both stand very upright, but they have such different affects that they're just so clearly different characters - how?!

Frodo's face. So many emotions. My god that man. Thank you Samwise - so I'm wiser than a wizard? Extremely epic burn. Gimli's song isn't long enough!! I really appreciate it but it doesn't get enough time to shine! 

The songs really aren't musical songs - no character development or plot moments or emotions boiling over into song. They're just people singing songs. Here is a song I'm going to sing you about a story that is completely irrelevant, whilst some other characters have conversations about an entirely different bit of exposition. And that's what Tolkien is all about.

Yeah, compared to Gollum's death, Gandalf's death is sadly underwhelming

The Lothlorien elves do bird calls and Legolas calls back to them!! Hurrah for the stiff necks of elves and dwarves. Why did the movie cut this. Pippin is adorable. E also thought Legolas was in love with galadriel. Musicals out of context, y'all. Loooove the bollywood dancing here. Pippin is SO in character ALL of the time. Her facial expressions and how she dances - she's followng the choreo precisely but it's still clearly PIPPIN. They all sing with their characters voices as well, which is actually i think very hard and you don't really notice it because it's so seamless, whereas it's so easy to be dragged out of the story by singing not matching speaking voice. Galadriel's songs are a bit less fun when you can only see her legs... 

No Anduin we go straight to Boromir. Realised that there's no real explanation of the ring’s power over him, he just seems like an arsehole. I think that's why it's key that Frodo is shown more obviously corrupted, otherwise there's just no reason to like him. The three hunters are so so sweet with his death. Quick stormy music afterwards, including evil piccolo we love it

Act 2

Interval, still very rainy alas. I love Gollum so damn much . Ent moot is not actually plumbing, it's specific pipes they've added. I really really liked the scene with Denethor but it just wasn't dramatic enough. Needs opulence and significant lighting and timing and stuff I think. But I like the bones of it. The *words* of a king are healing. I love the 4 of them fighting together it seems so desperate but hopeful. Fucking love Saruman dude

Now and for always is about how hobbits don't like change. In the stories, they come back from their adventures and everything goes back to the way it was. That won't really happen here. Sam sings it to Frodo when he's stressing about destroying the Ring and losing the elves. Gollum joins in the chorus whilst hanging *upside down*. It feels so meaningful when Frodo joins in

God Aragorn and Arwen"s duet is so hot, they're so in love with each other and in each other and they kiss and yesssss (but also imagine aragorn just singing the harmony to himself alone in a room somewhere)

So Frodo decides to take the ring,  runs away to shelob's lair. Shelob doesn't get enough time to shine. She's wonderful and we don't see enough of her. Also Sam's final stab is a brilliant piece of blocking but didn't even get a second to land.

Sam saves Frodo, helps him better takes the ring to stop his burden. Isn't at all affected. Frodo wakes up, Gollum returns, they say thief, they all fight, Sam gives in and gives the ring back, then Gollum attacks. Sam protects Frodo so hard, don't talk to me or my friend ever again. God I love him. 

Wonder (again we can't see her singing) is a combo last battle build up, Mordor walking, last battle into mount Doom. Legolas and Gimli promise each other if they don't die today :) four orcs fighting. Sam hoists Frodo on his shoulders and carries him through and it has SO MUCH WEIGHT. Denethor is killed. One of the orcs is playing the trombone

Once again, I LOVE gollum's fall. Frodo and Sam put their waistcoats on as soon as they get out of the volcano before they even collapse! Aragorn fucking caresses Frodo. Our lives are forever entwined or some ridiculous romantic thing

I love Rosie!!! She's coming next time! Also who's Galadriel should she be worried

"You love the morning and my love is given to the evening" (apparently this is a Gimli and Eomer line) "But I thought we'd do it together" Fucking tear my heart out why don't you.

Sam is the aro friend when their best mate gets a girlfriend. He didn't realise what Frodo meant to him. Didn't realise Frodo didn't realise it. But I thought we'd do it together. Sing a duet and break my heart, yeah

Also now I've heard it more the dance version of now and for always is a banger 

Post-show

And then after! We spoke to Aoife! Folarin! He said that I gave Lobelia a spoon! We took a photo and he signed my art! Aaron! Peter! Matthew! Aaah!! Everyone on the train home is still insane about it all!! Hobbit step goodbyes!!

#lotrm #tolkien #lord of the rings musical #lotr musical

[herearedragons]

The Sea And Her Child

AO3

“...Hey. Hey, you alright?”

Selene looks up. Opposite of her, Edér is leaning all the way across the table, to the point of being awkwardly close. The sudden eye contact seems to startle him; he rapidly pulls back, but then collects himself.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

“Yeah, sorry about that. You were making that - ” he waves a hand in the air - “soul-staring face, but you were just looking down at the table.” His expression becomes suspicious. “...There isn’t someone in there, right?”

Selene checks.

“There isn’t.”

“Whew. Would’ve been awkward.” 

His thoughts are somewhat cloudy, stumbling over each other. So are Kana’s. Aloth’s asleep; Sagani has drunk about as much as each of them, but she’s much clearer. Devil, for obvious reasons, isn’t drunk at all.

Selene skims surface thoughts, catching up on what happened in the last few minutes. Kana and Sagani are still talking; Devil’s bored, amusing herself by putting things in and taking things out of Kana’s pockets. Edér zoned out of the conversation a while ago, then noticed her not moving and spent the last few seconds trying to understand whether she’s conscious.

In the background, the singer of the Gréf’s Rest is performing what’s either the only song she knows, or the only song the patrons here want to hear.

“The sea beheld her love…”

Selene takes a sip from her own tankard. It’s just water. Being drunk makes the voices much worse.

“I’m fine, Edér,” she says. “Just thinking about - ”

“Ondra?”

“That too.”

“You can tak about it, you know,” he says. “It helps. I’ve tried to wrap my head around the whole Eothas thing for ages before talking it out with you, and… Well, can’t say I have it all figured out, but it’s better.”

“I’ll… keep that in mind.”

“Maybe don’t talk about it to Durance, though,” Edér adds. “I don’t think I want to see him that happy.”

Selene chuckles.

“I’m with you on that.”

“And all who saw her grief that day…”

The tune, which she didn’t mind that much in their first days in the inn, is definitely becoming grating now. It’s a shame, because the singer’s voice is beautiful, but the repetition strips a lot of the charm away - and with the sense of wonder gone, the song just reminds Selene of the entirety of this last week.

Voices screaming in flooded tunnels. A hike in the show, weaving between a giant’s bones. Everything she was trying to escape crashing down like a wave, as if nothing she did ever mattered; as if the years of running away were just stalling before the inevitable happened.

Cold water rising, rising, rising around her.

“I just wish they’d play another song,” Selene murmurs.

And then the idea comes. She reaches for the backpack tucked firmly under her seat and pulls out her journal; a weathered thing that contains mostly half-drawn maps and short notes, its more densely written pages filled with Lady Webb’s hand, not her own.

Selene tears out a page and begins scribbling on it.

“Excuse me.”

The brightly dressed, dark-haired and dark-skinned singer glances up at her. She’s a young woman, and one of the few people in town Selene has seen with visible jewelry. She’s a musician by trade; her thoughts are melodic, but structured. That’s as much as Selene knows about her.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Selene says. “What’s your name?”

“Leah,” the singer says. “And you’re the Watcher. I’m… We’re all thankful for what you did here. Can I help you with anything?”

“Actually, yes.” Selene takes a deep breath. What she’s about to do is absolutely not her thing, but if she can do it without going deeper into the Leah’s mind, she will. “The song you always sing… Where I come from, it’s… different. I mean, we have a different version of it. The melody is the same, but we have different words.”

Leah patiently waits for her to finish stumbling through that sentence. Selene doesn’t sense hostility from her mind. At least there’s that.

“Can you sing our version, once?” Selene asks. “Just… for the occasion.”

“Sure,” Leah says. “What are the words?”

Selene hands her a folded piece of paper.

“Wait,” Kana says. “Is it just me, or…”

“Yup,” Devil says. “She learned a second song. That’s almost the same as the first one.”

Kana frowns.

“And the words… They sound an awful lot like - ”

“Like what really happened,” Selene says, taking a seat at the table again. “That’s because I gave her the words. I’m not a poet, but I think it gets the idea across.”

Devil gives her a look.

“Oh, so you do have a death wish. Good to know; I wasn’t sure after the caverns.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Kana says, “But… Will the goddess of oblivion not… object to this, to say the least?”

“I don’t think so,” Selene says.

“Last time I checked, she was trying to drown us about it,” Edér points out.

“She was trying to drown me,” Selene corrects, “And I’m still there, so I think that maybe she wasn’t trying that hard. If she wanted the secret buried so badly, she would have killed us all, and without warning.”

“So you think she wants you to tell everyone?” Devil asks.

“No,” Selene says. “I just think she won’t mind this one song. It’s not going to spread to the whole world.”

“...Well, I’ve already written it down,” Kana says.

Selene just shrugs and leans back in her chair, drinking her water and listening to Leah’s voice as she sings:

The sea beheld her love

As he was struck from above;

She called out, “Back down”,

But he stayed and stood his ground.

Her love would not be swayed,

So he took a shard into his skull,

And all who saw his fall that day

Sleep in the silent sea.

And all who saw her grief that day

Sleep in the silent sea…

Maybe, Selene thinks, she is taunting Ondra again. Maybe that’s a terrible way to deal with what happened, and she should just take Edér’s advice and talk to someone.

But there’s a part of her that feels otherwise, and she suspects that it’s the part that still belongs to Ondra - even if Selene, and maybe even Ondra herself, is no longer happy about that. 

It’s funny; the more she despises Ondra, the easier it is to understand her. For all the talk of oblivion and casting memory into the sea, Ondra herself can never truly forget. If she wanted her crime to be forgotten, why build an abbey on Abydon’s bones? Why immortalize that crime in the flesh and blood of her godlike? 

Why let Selene live, again?

The only logical answer is that Ondra doesn’t want to forget. Or, at the very least, she wants somebody else - anybody else - to know what she did and why; and to know that she loved a person, not a stupid piece of rock.

Selene can understand that - and, silly as it seems, the song is the only way she can let Ondra know that she understands.

#pillars of eternity #the watcher #eder teylecg #devil of caroc #kana rua #the white march #poe #the white march part 2 #herearedragons writing #oc: watcher selene #so playing the white march with a moon godlike was An Experience #is this a correct interpretation of ondra? I don't know but in my headcanon it is

[night-unfurls-its-splendour]

When the Longing Returns (Phantom of the Opera Fanfiction) || Erik x Christine

Ch. 1 Author's Notes

Read the Fic here on tumblr or on AO3

First things first! The Title! I'm terrible at titling fics (It's one of a multitude of reasons I don't write more). This one is taken from the lyrics of "Sister of Night" by Depeche Mode

One of my top ten DM songs without a doubt.

Sister of night

When the hunger descends

And your body's a fire

An inferno that never ends

An eternal flame

That burns in desires name...

Sister of night

When the longing returns

Giving voice to the flame

Calling you through flesh that burns

Breaking down your will

To move in for the kill...

Oh sister, come for me

Embrace me, assure me

Hey sister, I feel it too

Sweet sister, just feel me

I'm trembling, you heal me

Hey sister, I feel it too...

Sister of night

In your saddest dress

As you walk through the light

You're desperate to impress

So you slide to the floor

Feeling insecure...

Sister of night

With the loneliest eyes

Tell yourself it's alright

He'll make such a perfect prize

But the cold light of day

Will give the game away

Oh sister, come for me

Embrace me, assure me

Hey sister, I feel it too

Sweet sister, just feel me

I'm trembling, you heal me

Hey sister, I feel it too...

I think the lyrics speak for themselves. This song speaks to such a specific scenario, and one that seems to match up with Phantom really perfectly, particularly with the direction I'm taking the time-line in. But believe it or not, I was not actively listening to this song when I wrote the fic, so the themes must have worked their way in subconsciously. But when I did listen to it again I realized it fit so seamlessly, so I decided to use part of it for my title.

I originally tapped this out after imagining probably six or seven other different points in the story where it could diverge and go down a happier, sexier time-line--from the first lair to the last--and this scenario seemed by far like the most satisfying in terms of character choices and romantic potential. That led to the question of what kind of balance would be necessary for a kiss to even happen and how Erik would react to Christine returning to him willingly (eagerly, even), and being bold about it too.

This specific moment in the story seemed particularly apt as a turning point for Christine. There's so much in it that points to her softening to the Phantom's addresses. It started at the masquerade, with her moving inexorably toward him, her decision to sneak past Raoul, and the fact that the carriage-ride is overlayed with Christine singing the opening lines of the title song all indicate that her motive for seeking solitude is to work out her inner conflict. Adding to that, the music playing over the sequence of her preparing to go to the graveyard is, what later became, "Beneath a Moonless Sky" from Love Never Dies. I know that Webber didn't officially begin work on the music for LND until 2007 and adapted this theme as Moonless Sky, but it seems plausible that he already had it in his head that this musical phrase could be of use and significance in LND. Or he just liked the drama of it and totally reverse engineered it. I guess I'd have to ask him ~shrugs~. Either way or seems very apropos.

Erik's voice vs Gustave's - I had a little bit of fun with this. I'm not sure which draft I was on when I decided to add this paragraph. Three or four, I think. I'd been listening to a lot of comparison videos and my beta reader, @l10ng1rl was really trying to sell me on Ramin Karimloo's Phantom. (I like it, but i don't love it--idk) but I got thinking about the huge difference in pitch and vocal quality between him and Gerry, and then the fact that Ramin had a cameo in the movie as Gustave made me think about who and what exactly Christine perceived the Angel to be? Her father's spirit or a separation entity sent on his behest. The latter seemed like the obvious choice because it would be too much of a coincidence for Erik and Her father to have similar voices. The huge difference between Gerard and Ramin, and given that Ramin was Gustave, I modeled the the comparison of Gustave's voice off of Ramin's and had her discount the possibility of the Angel out and out being her father right from the get go.

Erik's ring - I believe in the movie, the ring Erik gives her (in the lair, which is so lame--why not on stage like in the play?) is just Raoul's ring that he stole from her neck. In the musical Erik gives Christine a gold ring with a dark/black stone, visible here in the 25th Anniversary at The Royal Albert Hall production

I infinitely prefer this, because I just don't truck with the idea that Erik would use Raoul's swarovski disco ball ring to propose marriage. First of all it's tacky (both him using it and the ring itself), and secondly, he's a creative genius with a flair for the dramatic. That man is making his own jewelry, and it's gonna be archane looking, and classy, and goth. The idea of him giving her one of his own personal rings is also very precious to me (more on that in Chapter 2!). Now when I wrote this I think I had the idea of what Erik's ring looked like but I didn't check, and I prefer silver to gold, so that's what I wrote.

I was imagining something along these lines.

But since I have a solid image of the musical!ring in my head now, I've gone back and edited the description to match, because gold really is more Erik's style. Like I said, the ring will naturally be getting more mentions in Chapter 2, so more details on it are forthcoming.

I also wanna talk about the décolletage bit. The first time I watched this movie I was like "girl it's like, January, and that's what you're wearing to go visit your father's grave? Are you trying to catch your death of chill?"

I guess Alexandra Byrne did me a solid, though, because this provided a nice opportunity for Christine to lean further into her acceptance of sexual attraction and remember that, yes she actually enjoys the fact that Erik desires her, just like she did in the First Lair.

~~~~

Think that's everything of note for chapter one!

#Youtube #the phantom of the opera 2004 #poto fanfiction #poto 2004 #christine daae #christine x erik #depeche mode #sister of night #poto musical #authors note

[aggix]

Ally

Aemond Targaryen x fem!reader

Summary: All Aemond ever needed was an ally. Someone who would understand him, support him, take his side. Unexpectedly, he finds one in Y/N, a girl from a lower noble house. Soft Aemond. Basically cute fluff. I dedicate it to all of the Aemond girlies who just wish they could have been there for him! Word count: 6,874

Authors note: English is not my native language, so I’m sorry in advance. Also, it’s my very first fic I’m posting on Tumblr, so I don’t entirely know what I’m doing 😆. I also posted it on my AO3. Y/N = Your name Y/H = Your house

***

You looked through the window of your carriage for the hundredth time. It was your first time outside the walls of your humble castle and everything was so fascinating – after all, you were but a girl of mere nine years old, and even the peasant villages were something new and captivating.

But nothing could compare to the excitement of seeing the capital on your own eyes. You have heard the stories and liked to imagine yourself as a queen or princess, but even at your age you knew these were but silly dreams.

You were from lower nobility, your house ancient and respectable, but never got bigger or more significant than bannermen to the bigger Westerosi houses. Your fate was already known and planned – you would most probably be wedded to one of your house’s allied families, all lower houses like your own.

Your father has secretly hoped to strike a deal with the bigger house you were sworn to – that’s why he made sure your education wasn’t lacking, and thank gods for that – because now everything was turned upside down and you were glad you’re not going to look like a fool in the capital.

When your father was very much unexpectedly chosen as an advisor in the small council, this was seen as an honour no one from your house has ever been graced before. If only your dear mother was here to witness it. But your septa keeps telling you she’s still with you, watching over you.

It must be true, because now you’re on your way to King’s Landing, and you’re going to see things you thought were only possible in your silly dreams about becoming a queen.

The journey took few days and the closer to the capital, the braver you were in peeking out of the carriage window, completely unable to listen to your septa’s teachings about the manners and how you’re supposed to behave around people of higher standing.

The Red Keep stood tall and menacing, visible from far away, and the city shocked you with amounts of different people and how loud it was. Septa shooed you from the window and closed it as soon as she spotted people she deemed ‘less that appropriate for a young lady from a good house to see’.

Everything in the castle was so much different than you were used to – it was so busy, and so easy to get lost. You had your own chambers and it already made you feel special, almost like a princess, though you were far from that and other children in the castle made it very obvious for you from the start.

As your father began his office, you were sent to be educated with other girls, almost all of them high born. They liked to emphasize the difference between your statuses more often than not.

This only gave you more motivation to show them you’re not worse than them in any regard, let it be sewing, singing, dancing, playing an instrument or even the histories. Your father already showed he’s worthy of being in the small council, and he gave you an example. Be humble and hardworking – that’s what he always said to you.

The first time you saw Aemond was when Otto Hightower, Hand of the King and the man who recommended your father, has introduced you to the Queen and her children. He stood beside his older brother Aegon, a frown on his face. Aegon looked very bored, his attention on a cleaning servant girl, and Helaena at least tried to pay attention to you.

“My Queen, my Lord Hand, this is my only daughter, Y/N.”

Queen Alicent smiled at you delicately when she saw you giving her the best curtsy you could muster.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Your Grace.” You said elegantly, just like you practised. You could see your father smiling at you, proud.

“What a pretty and well-mannered little lady you are, Y/N.” she said, and when she turned to her children, she quickly smacked Aegon so his attention returned to you. You could see Aemond rolling his eyes.

“These are my boys, prince Aegon and prince Aemond. Princess Helaena you should already know from sewing practise, I presume?”

“Yes, your Grace.” You smiled at Helaena, she was nice, but not very talkative and always preferred to keep to herself during practise.

“Y/H? Is that even a noble house?” you heard Aegon snicker at you, before Alicent scolded him.

“If you’d paid attention you’d know. They are bannermen to---“ you heard Aemond sigh before he was interrupted by Aegon laughing.

“*cough*Twat.*cough*” He coughed in between that insult, but Alicent still heard and smacked him again.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Prince Aegon, Prince Aemond.” You curtsied again, and you could see Aemond slowly nodding at you, Aegon ignored you. Both of them not really interested in you.

But that was to be expected, they are princes after all. Targaryen princes. They say Targaryens are closer to the gods than men.

This short little encounter was all you could count for as a member of not very wealthy nor prestigious house, but you were happy nevertheless.

Although, you couldn’t help but notice the youngest prince’s eyes were very sad.

Aemond, was his name?

He was probably your age, but he looked quite small and scrawny for a boy.

You wondered what could be the reason of his sadness. What problems a Targaryen prince could possibly have? Surely something trivial.

Few days passed, and after finishing all your studies for the day, you begged your septa to go to the training grounds to watch the knights fighting. You missed observing the daily practise, back at home in your family’s humble castle it was your usual entertainment.

But instead of the knights you saw the young princes practising – you noticed prince Aegon and prince Aemond, and two other brown haired boys, most probably the rumoured bastards of princess Rhaenyra.

They seemed to bicker from time to time, but soon you noticed the only person who wasn’t laughing was Aemond. You couldn’t hear what they were exactly saying, but once you heard something about a flying pig Aemond dropped his wooden sword and ran away. Ser Criston Cole tried to yell after him, but he was already gone.

You were naturally a very curious person, but also an empathetic one. Could this be the reason why the young prince’s eyes are so sad?

Without thinking much, you ran in the direction where Aemond was running, hearing your septa calling out for you just like ser Cole did for Aemond, but you too were quicker.

Finding him wasn’t easy, and you were almost about to give up, when you heard some noises from behind a stone wall in the stables.

They sounded like sniffling and made you approach quicker.

When he saw you, he immediately cleaned his eyes with his hands and made a tough face.

“What do you want?” he grumbled, avoiding your gaze.

“Are you crying?” your curiosity got the best of you and you asked simply because you weren’t sure, but he took it as an offense.

“Of course I’m not, stupid. I never cry.” He snarled angrily.

“They weren’t nice to you back there. I think I would.” You said sincerely. This caught him off guard, and he finally met your gaze, surprised at what you said.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say and felt stupid.

“I-it’s because you’re a girl.” He blurted out, awkwardly. “I’m a man. I can’t cry.”

“You’re not a man, you’re a boy.” You chuckled a bit, seeing how he’s not even bigger than you. You thought you made a light-hearted joke, but he frowned again.

“But soon I will be.”

You just nodded, noticing his puffy eyes. He didn’t look very manly right now, nor did he resemble the Targaryen prince who is supposedly closer to the gods than men. To you, he currently looked more like your friend from your hometown, the butcher’s son, when he cried about his father scolding him too harshly.

“Why are they so rude to you?” you asked sooner than you thought. Somehow, you completely forgot that he’s a prince and you’re not really showing him any respect. But he didn’t seem to care. Without any adults around, you could just be children.

His face soured when he heard your question. You almost thought he’s going to snap at you, but he just kicked a nearby stone, frustrated.

“Because I’m the only one without a dragon.” He mumbled, his lip trembled a bit.

Ah, the dragons. You have seen them flying around on the sky a few times, but that’s about it. You really knew nothing about them or the customs regarding them. But you were a smart girl, and you could already conclude that being the only one without a dragon must be a bad thing for a Targaryen prince.

“And why is that?” you didn’t want to annoy him with more questions, but you really wanted to understand.

“I never got an egg. Even the bastards got theirs.” He seethed angrily and kicked some more rocks.

“That’s pretty unfair.” You concluded. “You’re Kings son, shouldn’t you get one before them?”

“I know, right?!” he huffed, and then started to vent his frustrations to you.

“But Father doesn’t seem to care!” he finished his rant, breathing heavily. You listened carefully to all of that. It all made you a bit sad too, it wasn’t his fault he didn’t even get an egg, and now his brother and nephews were being cruel to him because of it.

“I’m sorry.” You said simply. It felt like a natural thing to say. “If I was a boy and trained with you, I would protect you.”

Aemond looked at you, a bit suspiciously. But when he saw your sincerity, he felt awkward again and looked away.

“I’m not weak! I don’t need your protection!” He huffed, but he wasn’t angry anymore, just embarrassed.

“Even if you were as big as a tree I would still protect you from all the rude people!” you chuckled, and made him red on the cheeks.

But then, sadly, your septa found you.

“Here you are--- oh gods, my prince! Ser Cole is looking for you everywhere. Y/N, come with me, at once.”

You couldn’t even say goodbye to him properly, but it didn’t matter. You haven’t yet realized it back then, but you managed to make a friend that day.

Every now and then, Aemond seemed to seek you out in the castle, even if just to say an awkward greeting. One time he gave you a single white daisy. Or rather, more like he shoved it into your hand.

“Huh?” you looked at him, dumbfounded.

“Mother said girls like flowers.” He blurted out awkwardly, not meeting your eye. Then he ran away before you could say anything back to him.

You weren’t from a rich house and you were hardly ever spoiled with gifts, so you decided to put that daisy in between the pages of your favourite book, tales about Visenya Targaryen and her many adventures.

Your first and only gift from a prince – you giggled to yourself. It will be a good memento to remember your days in King’s Landing, when you are back in your hometown, or already married off to some lowly local lord.

Well, you may be from a lower house, but your manners were no worse than any other young lady’s from a great house, so you decided to reciprocate and for the next few weeks during your sewing practise you worked on a little handkerchief with a dragon embroidered on it.

You hurried to give it to him before he leaves for the funeral of the late Laena Velaryon.

“I’m sure you will get a dragon, big and strong like this one.” You showed him the embroidery. Your craftsmanship certainly wasn’t perfect just yet, but you made sure to make the dragon look big and imposing. Even added some flames around it to make it look more spectacular.

Something flashed in his eyes and he gave you a shy smile and a little nod.

Once the gossip of what happened after the funeral finally reached you, you couldn’t believe it.

You saw the giant dragon approaching King’s Landing, everyone did. The beast covered the whole sunlight under the capital. But to think that Aemond…

You really wanted to catch him somewhere, but he was nowhere to be seen. Your father kept telling you the prince is indisposed. You knew from the gossip that he’s been hurt, but you just refused to believe it’s that bad.

You needed to see him for yourself, as you even started to worry it was you who brought him bad luck with your gift.

Your desperation finally brought you before his chambers, as you managed to sneak in when the guards were changing.

The thick curtains were closed off and the room was filled with heavy incense smoke, tables filled with flasks of milk of the poppy and bowls full of maggots moving around.

You slowly approached his bed, seeing half of his head covered in bandages. So the rumours were true…

You thought he’s asleep, but he heard you coming.

“Y/N.” you heard him croak. He wasn’t asleep, just heavily drugged. “Thank gods. I’m so bored. They won’t allow me to go out.”

“Aemond, you lost your eye.” You were devastated and felt your eyes begin to water.

“But I gained a dragon.” He tried to cheer you up with his weak voice.

Tears fell down on your cheeks.

“H-how did that happen?”

He took a deep breath.

“The four of them caught me when I was coming back. Said I stole Vhagar. The girl pushed me, so I pushed her back. Then all of them were on me and they kicked me when I fell down. I picked up a rock, but then that bastard took a knife…”

“What did the King say?” you sniffled.

“Nothing. He… he wanted me to confess who told me that the bastards are bastards.”

“Huh?” you let out a confused sound and cleaned your face from tears with your hands. “What do you mean? Everyone says that.”

Aemond cackled bitterly in his drugged state.

“That’s what Aegon told him. And my dear half-sister wanted to question me sharply for that.”

“This is horrible.” You felt more tears coming, but this time held them in. “This is so unfair.”

He smiled at you weakly and wanted to say something, but then the maester came from the room next door.

“You! What are you doing here? Guards!” he started, but Aemond interrupted him.

“No. I want her here.”

“My prince, you need to rest.”

“I won’t complain about the maggots, just let her stay.”

The maester sighed and decided to ignore you for the time being. You sat silently next to Aemond’s bed and observed how the maester unwrapped the cloth around his head. Your heart sank when you saw the full extent of the damage.

Aemond’s face scrunched in pain and disgust when maester spilled a whole bowl worth of maggots on the damaged half of his face. They were moving around and feasting on the dying flesh.

When the maester had left the room again you held Aemond’s hand in yours and started babbling to him about your favourite parts of the book about Visenya’s adventures, hoping to distract both of you from the harsh realities.

One maggot fell from his face on your hand, and you tried your best not to flinch.

You stayed there as long as you could, until the maester finally kicked you out.

You didn’t know it yet, but it was the last time you saw Aemond before you and your father were sent back home. Apparently, your father has served his purpose as an advisor and wasn’t needed anymore.

You wanted to say your farewells, but Aemond was still confined to his chambers and this time you had no chance to sneak in.

You couldn’t hold back the tears while sitting in your carriage, as you watched the Red Keep becoming smaller and smaller. It was only barely a year in King’s Landing, and you would never forget it.

 ***

 Eight years have passed, which you mainly spent on helping your brothers becoming a worthy successors of your father.

Unbeknownst to you, though, your mundane, quite uneventful life was about to come to an end when your father knocked on the door to your chambers one day.

He was as busy as always, but finally decided to be sincere with you and explained why you have remained unmarried for so long. After all, you were eight and ten already, and you were starting to wonder if he has forgotten about your existence.

Few years ago, there was a short period when you were betrothed to an heir of the house you were sworn to, but he died tragically in a jousting accident, and your father hasn’t made any moves regarding your marriage ever since.

“My dearest, the matter of your marriage has caused me many sleepless nights. Many neighbouring local lords pressured me, but I have always wanted the best for you. I still remember you back in the capital, you presented yourself as well as all the highborn daughters, if not better. You are my only girl, giving you away to some… mediocre man would be such a waste. During our short time in King’s Landing, I have managed to make some important connections, and I think that finally I can make use of them. As lady Lysa Lannister’s lady-in-waiting, I’m sure you will be able to find a suitable husband from a greater house. With your charm and wit, I have no doubts. It would be such a shame if you wasted yourself here, my dear.”

You were very grateful for your father’s encouraging words, he always had a little soft spot for you, as his only daughter, but you were no fool and you knew that behind all of that also lied another reason – with your marriage, your father had ambitions to bring your house higher. He had only one pawn of your kind in his hand – and he wanted to use it wisely.

So here you were – back in King’s Landing again.

So much has changed, and yet at the same time, so little.

You wondered what became of Aemond, you have only heard about his older brother’s marriage to his sister. So you listened very carefully to all the gossip around you.

Apparently, Aemond was rather infamous.

Aemond One-Eye they called him.

He was said to be cold, cruel and quick to anger by the men, ladies on the other hand found his disposition harsh and appearance rather terrifying. You wondered how his face healed, reminiscing how it looked like before. It would seem that after all he’s been through, this sad little boy grew up to be a vengeful, vicious man.

Listening to lady Lysa and her other handmaid ladies’ gossip about the young lords yet again, you couldn’t help but feel sad you couldn’t be there for him. Life must have been very difficult for him with only one eye. Is he even a swordsman like the rest? Your middle brother was a cripple too, he was born without pinkie fingers – a seemingly small defect, but it made it impossible for him to hold a sword correctly, and he couldn’t fight because of it.

You imagined Aemond’s brother’s and nephew’s jests didn’t get any better if he can’t fight.

One day, you decided to pay a visit at the training grounds, just to satisfy your curiosity.

And oh how surprised you were.

You recognized him immediately – the silver hair and prominent scar made him impossible to mistake with anyone else. His eyepatch covered the eye socket, but not the scar.

Gone was the small, scrawny boy you remembered. The man fighting with ser Cole like an equal was tall and well built, and no one in his right mind would call him a cripple.

He carried himself with such dignity and confidence. You noticed he wasn’t slouching anymore like he used to as a child, instead his posture was straight and he walked like he owned the place. He even seemed to instil some fear in his nephews, you could conclude from their face expressions.

Oh how the tables have turned.

This made you smile a bit. You were glad he seemed to be doing well, way better than you feared.

But even from afar you could see the intensity of his eye. His stare was fierce, always alert, always anticipating danger.

With sadness you had to admit there truly was anger and hate in that eye, he regarded people around him with cold indifference. You understood where all the gossip came from.

You briefly wondered if he would recognize you at all. After all, you didn’t have any distinct features like Targaryen hair or a scar on your face.

Well, soon you will find out.

Princess Helaena’s nameday feast was approaching, and it was your official debut as a lady eligible to marry.

Lady Lysa was nice enough to be supportive of your search for husband and even borrowed you some of her golden jewellery. She was looking for a husband herself, but apparently didn’t even consider you a competition. You could feel insulted, but in all honesty, you were rather glad. She had that Lannister temper and it was better to stay on her good side.

You decided to go all in and appeared at the feast in your best gown, and together with the beautiful gold-emerald jewellery you looked your absolute best. You have never seen yourself looking that good, and almost didn’t recognize yourself in the mirror.

Sitting at the table with other ladies, first thing you did was to look up to the royal family table. You easily spotted Aemond in there, sitting next to his brother, looking very disinterested, irritated even. His stare harsh and unforgiving when he gazed down at other guests.

You quickly stopped looking at him for fear of being caught by that cold gaze of his. It wouldn’t be the greatest start if he caught you staring.

Instead, you looked at other lords present in the hall, and you had to admit now you understood all that excitement lady Lysa and the rest of the handmaids showed before. Lyonel Tyrell, Tommen Baratheon and Randyll Arryn were quite handsome. All of them rich and without a wife. There even were rather pleasant looking Martell and Greyjoy men present, and from what you’ve heard, they were quite popular among the ladies – lord Martell had this free-spirited charm, and lord Greyjoy this ragged pirate way of carrying himself.

But to you, all of them looked rather bland compared to Aemond.

You tried your best not to look in his direction again and focus on the conversation with the ladies, but after a while you allowed yourself a little peek and you were shocked to find Aemond’s intense stare was directed right at you.

It burned like dragonfire.

You averted your gaze immediately and felt like prey. The need to run was immense.

But of course you couldn’t run, so you decided to dance. Way better option than just sitting there.

Has he recognized you? Or maybe he’s still trying to figure out if he knows you from somewhere?

You approached a random man to start the dance with, and when you looked up at him it happened to be the eldest son of princess Rhaenyra, Jacaerys. He smiled at you before the customary bow.

Well, the more you looked at him the more you were sure of it – he definitely looked very Strong to you too. But his grasp on your hand was very gentle and you reciprocated the little smile, good manners and maintaining the decorum are important.

When you twirled and changed partners your gaze landed on Aemond once again and – oh goodness – he looked furious.

Was it you? Did you do something?

A couple more twirls, lord Tully exchanges a couple of words with you, more twirls and lord Tyrell sent you a rather seductive smirk, you wanted to look at Aemond again, but his seat was empty now.

Did he leave so early? He could, considering how foul his mood was.

More twirls, lord Westerling and his lecherous stare at your rather modest cleavage, another couple of twirls, lord Manderly and his almost-funny jokes.

Next was a flash of silver hair and when you saw him in front of you, taking your hand in his, your heart almost gave up on you. The very same hand you were holding when the maggots were eating on the dead flesh of his face. Not so childish anymore, but delightfully manly, calloused from many hours of sword practise.

But he looked so different now.

All the anger left his features, his eye softened when he looked at you.

“Lady Y/N, it really is you.”

When you looked at him, you almost forgot you still need to dance.

“My Prince.” You nodded respectfully.

“I thought you were married.” He almost whispered this, like he couldn’t believe it.

“I w-was betrothed, but he died in an accident.” Your voice trembled a bit.

“What a shame.” He almost smirked.

You fought the smile with all your might, and it felt almost painful for his hand to leave yours when your partners changed. When you peeked in his direction, he was still staring only at you, paying no attention to any of his dancing partners.

So he remembered you after all.

Your heart started beating faster.

When you returned to your table, you noticed the ladies were all stirred up. Apparently, Aemond never dances. Ever.

“He stared all the time at you, Y/N.”

“You must be mistaken.” You tried to avoid all of that, but the ladies were relentless.

“It seems unbelievable, but he must fancy you.”

“You poor soul.”

Some of the comments were honest, some were insincere, stinking of jealousy. No matter how repulsive to the ladies Aemond was, he was still a prince, and many women would kill to join the royal family.

“Even now he’s looking at you.”

“Be careful, Y/N. Watch where you’re going from now on. I can escort you back to your chambers.”

“Wait, what? Why?”

“You’re not a halfwit, Y/N. You know what it means when a high lord or a prince looks at you like that, I’m sure. Prince Aegon looks like that at every woman, be it a lady or a servant girl. And you know what happens, right?”

You were speechless when you finally understood what she’s insinuating.

“Prince Aemond would never---“

“Of course he would. If they want it, they get it. He’s not going to marry you for it, after all.” She laughed.

You highly doubted Aemond would do anything to you, no matter his current bad reputation, but still you indulged the other handmaid and allowed her to escort you back to your chambers.

Few days later, you noticed a small package delivered to you.

Beautiful sapphire earrings with a note.

“Sapphires suit you better.”

Somehow you knew who gave this to you.

You decided to wear them when you went to the training grounds to observe him.

There it was, that cold, hateful look in his eye again.

But it softened immediately when it landed on you.

He called for a break and approached you.

“Lady Y/N. I see you enjoyed the gift.”

“I came to give my thanks. I’m not sure… what have I done to deserve such favour from you, my prince.”

“What haven’t you done to deserve it.”

He said it with such reverence, it made you blush.

“I remember the short days we spent together as children very fondly. Even if… the circumstances weren’t the most fortunate.” You smiled at him sincerely, and you could swear you saw the corners of his lips moved upwards in a small smile of his own.

“I share the sentiment. I must admit, I’m indebted to you, my lady. No amount of jewellery is going to repay for the good luck charm you provided me with.”

You wondered what he is talking about, but then he took out from one of his pockets the small handkerchief you gave him. It was all rumpled and had some old blood stains on it, but it was undoubtedly that same embarrassing dragon you embroidered when you were ten. You could do a hundred times better one now.

“You’re still keeping it?” you breathed out, speechless.

“I had it with me when I claimed Vhagar. It gave me courage. Sword practise proved to be very challenging after I lost my eye, so henceforth, it became a habit of mine to bring it with me.”

Suddenly, you felt a strong surge of emotions hitting you and your eyes started stinging.

“I-I just hope it didn’t bring you bad luck that day, my prince.” You were barely holding the tears from falling.

Seeing you’re almost crying, his expression changed to a bit panicked, and for a second he reminded you of that little boy he used to be long ago.

“Oh no, my lady. It gave me resilience.”

You sniffled and the tears finally fell down your cheeks.

As inappropriate as it might have been, he took your hands into his and looked deeply into your eyes.

“I’ve missed you, Aemond.” You finally said, dropping all the courtesies. You were too emotional for that.

“I’ve missed you too, Y/N. Greatly.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you.”

“But you were. You always were.”

He carefully cleaned your tears with the handkerchief and put it back into his pocket.

“I can’t help but be impressed with your swordsmanship. You won with ser Cole despite… being disadvantaged.”

“Still want to protect me from ‘all the rude people’?” he smirked, trying to make you smile, and succeeding.

“Yes. A promise is a promise.”

For a while you just stood there and looked in each other’s eyes, until you heard some commotion coming from the armoury.

You let go of his hand when you noticed a knight passing by dangerously close. Sadly, it wasn’t private enough anymore to speak freely.

He gave you a one last look of pure adoration and bowed his head slightly, returning to his usual cold indifference once he was back to practise.

When you arrived to your chambers, you found your father waiting for you there.

“Y/N. I have to speak with you.”

You sat down beside him and listened.

“I have always known you are a smart girl, Y/N. I knew what I was doing by bringing you here. The lords seemed to be smitten with you on the feast, but I must admit… I have not expected you to be that ambitious, child. People of our stature… we need to be more careful. I’m worried we may be overreaching here, darling.”

He looked at you like he thought you knew what he’s talking about, but you didn’t have the slightest idea.

“Father, what do you mean? Overreaching, how?”

“Prince Aemond came to me yesterday, asking for my permission to court you.”

You blinked a few times and didn’t know what to say.

“He… he really did?”

“He did. And I of course granted it. But I can’t help but worry, Y/N. This is surely going to put us at the centre of attention, and if you were to be betrothed… this would cause quite a scandal. Many greater houses may not like this at all. Lord Tyrell or lord Arryn would be much better choices, Y/N.”

You bit at your lower lip.

You didn’t want to be with any other man.

“Prince Aemond is dear to me, father.”

Your father let out a heavy sigh.

“Then gods help us all.”

In next few days you learned that your father’s fears weren’t unfounded.

All the gossip reached you, and some of it was… not very pleasant, to say the least.

Lady Lysa stopped borrowing you her jewellery and was more guarded around you. Guess she started to consider you a competition now, as it seemed.

Even your fellow handmaids stopped caring for you when they noticed you actually like the attention from the prince.

Aemond continued to send you various gifts – from books he wanted to discuss with you, to Targaryen-styled clothing and accessories.

Today you received a heavy, multi-layered richly decorated black-red gown with dragon-shaped clasps around your neckline area.

It was so like him, he barely started to court you and he already needed to claim you as his own.

You were feeling brave today, so you actually decided to wear it.

And oh boy, did it cause people to stare and whisper behind your backs.

You even heard a single hushed ‘whore’ somewhere in the corridors.

All of it was worth it when you saw Aemond’s reaction when he noticed you.

“Ñuha perzys.” He whispered. My flame.

“I managed to cause quite the scandal wearing it.” You let a cheeky little smile appear on your face.

“Nonsense. You should already start getting used to being a Targaryen. They will get used to it too, whether they like it or not.”

You couldn’t help but blush at his heavy implications of wanting to marry you.

He offered you his arm and you took it as you strolled around the gardens.

“I wonder what lady Lysa will say about it when I get back.” You sighed, not looking forward to it in the slightest.

“She will congratulate you on your courtship, unless she wants to be reminded that a dragon can easily eat a lion.”

“Ever gentle with the ladies, my prince.” You giggled.

“Only one lady is deserving of my gentleness.”

“She’s never been openly rude to me, but I noticed everyone turning rather cold towards me ever since they noticed your interest in me.”

“Let me release you from the service. I can’t bear the thought of you acting a servant in my home. I find it abhorrent.”

“I can’t act too spoiled. I’m already pushing it far. If wearing the gown makes some whisper ‘whore’ behind my backs, I can’t think what they may do if I pushed it further.”

He stopped in his tracks as soon as he heard the word ‘whore’ from your lips. You looked up at him and saw that frightening fury in his eye again.

“I wish to see them try in my presence. I may need to set an example in the public for all the others to remember.” He seethed.

Here is that infamous Targaryen fury.

They say each time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin. For a second you wondered on which side it has landed for Aemond.

“And here I thought it was me who was supposed to protect you from the rude people.” You tried to lighten up the mood, giving him a calming smile.

You felt his tense body relaxing and saw his features smoothing, fury in his eye going from a blazing forest fire to a gentle candle flame.

“I may occasionally do that for you too.” He resumed his walk, and you followed, giggling.

“Occasionally.”

“Whenever the need arises.” He smirked.

You continued the silent giggle, but stopped when people staring caught your eye.

“My prince,” You started, a bit officially, but couldn’t help it since you felt watched. “You have graced me with immeasurable kindness, but...”

He immediately sensed the shift in your mood.

“But?”

“I can’t help but ask about your intentions about me.”

“I thought my intentions are very clear, my lady.”

You stopped walking, hiding conveniently behind a tall rose bush to get at least a bit of privacy from the prying eyes.

“Aemond.” You dropped the courtesies and looked deeply into his eye. “Do you truly wish to marry me?”

“Y/N.” he grasped your hands in between his. “You are the only one I desire. Of course I wish to marry you.”

You pressed your lips.

“But there are so many other ladies---“

“You have seen me at my weakest, Y/N. You have shown me kindness when I was vulnerable. You have been my ally when I barely had any. You, no other lady, not even my own father.”

You looked deeply into his eye, so soft now, but you already learned this softness is reserved only for you.

“The truth is, I can trust no other lady but you. I can love no other lady but you. So it’s only natural for me to choose you as my wife.”

You felt his grasp on your hands tightened, almost as if he was afraid someone else may take you away from him.

“If you will have me, that is.”

For a second this insecure little boy from the past flashed in front of your eyes again, and you knew that he still lives somewhere in there, buried deep inside, covered by the thick layer of a hardened man he is now.

You were baffled that he may even begin to think your feelings aren’t mutual.

“Of course I will.” You blurted out, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He raised your hands to his lips and kissed them way too long to be appropriate. Thank gods for the rose bushes.

“If only I could, I would strive for us to be betrothed tomorrow, but I’m well aware how sudden betrothal without a proper courtship tarnishes a lady’s honour. I do not wish that upon you.”

It was true, betrothals were hurried in cases when a pregnant lady rushed so the babe is not born before the wedding.

“I’m thankful. There is enough gossip, it’s not my intention to give them more reasons.”

“Agreed. Make sure to wear your gowns tight around your belly, so they can see my intentions towards you are those of a wife, not… an entertainment.”

“I shall do so.” You smiled mischievously. It felt fun to conspire like that with him.

“We have all the time in the world, Y/N.” the fire returned to his eye, but a different kind. Not the angry, violent kind, but a warm, passionate one. It complimented his smirk very well.

“Before a little dragon starts growing in your womb.”

It made you feel the tingle in your lower abdomen.

“Nothing else I want more, Aemond.” You replied with a smirk of your own.

It was the most difficult thing in the world to leave the little privacy of the bush and part your hands from his loving grasp to return to the official, proper walk, to the prying eyes, gossiping mouths.

“My father worries that our betrothal will bring the wrath of other houses on us.” You could not help sharing some fears with him. Your small house would never survive the attack of stronger enemy.

“Tell your father that if they dare, I shall come to your aid. With fire and blood.”

You imagined people burning from dragonfire, flesh melting, the stench and screams making your face twisted in disgust.

He noticed and decided to change the topic.

“I have told my mother about you. She wishes to meet you properly at the luncheon tomorrow.”

“Oh my, the Queen? I must admit, I am a bit scared.” You giggled nervously. A meeting with future mother-in-law sounds frightening.

“You have no reason to be. What you did impressed her. I think she may actually find a kindred spirit in you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If not for her, I would not have a single ally in that room, on that day.” He spoke like you knew what he’s talking about, and you did. “She stood up for me, alone, against everyone, against the King.”

“Then she impressed me too.” You smiled delicately. There is surely going to be a time when you’re going to have to protect your own children. And you’re going to do it, no matter who or what is standing against you.

You finally finished your slow stroll through the gardens and reached a wide courtyard with a balcony, and the view for Blackwater Bay. You both looked at the setting sun glittering on the surface of water, in silence.

“I don’t need anything more in the world, as long as I have you.” He whispered so silently, as if he was talking to himself.

You grasped his arm tighter and wondered how glad you were that on that day you decided to run after that scrawny little boy with puffy eyes who most certainly never cried.

#aemond targaryen #aemond fanfiction #aemond one eye #aemond stannies #aemond fanfic #aemond x reader #aemond x you #aemond x y/n #aemond #hotd aemond #aemond fluff #pro aemond targaryen

[flowerboycaleb]

(repost because the original post was marked as NSFW) still trying to tweak a few things with this series. i think i will present the songs in an unranked fashion, but i will still note which song is my favorite of the month! every song will be linked below and i rlly hope y’all enjoy this month’s list. (i’m surprised i was even able to get this done because i’ve been playing Zelda nonstop lol)

also feel free to follow me on rate your music and twitter

‧₊˚✧ BEST SONG OF THE MONTH ✧˚₊‧

“Tears Can Be So Soft” - Christine and the Queens

◇ featured on Paranoïa, Angels, True Love - Christine and the Queens (not yet released) ◇ genres: trip-hop, alt-pop

To be completely honest, I’m not super familiar with a lot of Christine and the Queens work. I love his feature on Charli XCX’s “Gone” and I thought his 2020 EP La vita nuova was pretty decent as well, but other than that I’m pretty much clueless. Despite that, his latest single absolutely blew me away. “Tears Can Be So Soft” takes obvious inspiration from 90s trip-hop, but god it sounds so incredible. The wispy, dreamy vocals backed against a string arrangement sampled from a Marvin Gaye song is a combo that works extremely well. I absolutely love this song and its probably my favorite of this month. If his next album is gonna sound like this, I’m super excited.

“Babylon By Bus” (feat. ShrapKnel) - billy woods & Kenny Segal

◇ featured on Maps - billy woods & Kenny Segal ◇ genre: abstract hip-hop

Maps, the latest collaboration between billy woods and Kenny Segal, is probably the most standout album of the month. Many of the tracks on the album could’ve made this list, but I wanted to limit it to a single one. “Babylon By Bus” is the song I’ve revisited the most. Like a lot of billy woods’ work, this song has that eerie and off-putting feel that makes him stand out. The verses from woods are very strong, but so is the verse from rap group ShrapKnel. I hadn’t heard of them until this and I will probably listen to more of their stuff in the future! Excellent song and an incredible album that I highly recommend.

“Justify Your Life” - George Clanton

◇ featured on Ooh Rap I Ya - George Clanton (not yet released) ◇ genres: chillwave, baggy, neo-psychadelia

George Clanton’s previous single, “I Been Young”, was my favorite song of last month and his latest single is one of my favorite songs of this month. “Justify Your Life” follows the 90s nostalgia of the previous single and I love this sound so much. Judging by the art direction of these two singles, it seems like this sound is what Clanton is going with for this new album which is super exciting. This track sounds a bit darker than the last, but it still has one of those choruses you just wanna obnoxiously sing along to. This upcoming album has the potential to be my album of the year given how incredible these singles have been.

“AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM” - Beyoncé & Kendrick Lamar

◇ genres: electro, pop rap

Breaking down this song and explaining why its good feels a little bit pointless. Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, two of the most important artists of our time, team up on a remix of a song from her excellent 2022 album RENAISSANCE. Obviously it’s great, look who is involved. Go listen.

“The Blades” - Squid

◇ featured on O Monolith - Squid (not yet released) ◇ genres: experimental rock, art rock

This new Squid album comes out in a few weeks and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve enjoyed the bands earlier EPs and Bright Green Field, but I think this new album could very well be their best so far. “The Blades” is yet another great single. The band has been playing around with added touches of different genres into their sound and it just keeps paying off. The little elements of krautrock are especially a nice touch. I have very high hopes for this new album and I can’t wait to hear it.

“Space Orphans” - Ichiko Aoba

◇ genre: chamber folk

I’ve been slowly working my way through Ichiko Aoba’s discography after adoring her 2020 album Windswept Adan. I wasn’t aware of this new single until after this post was published so I’m adding it in post. This new single is a gorgeous, spacey, chamber folk ballad that is very easy to listen to. The soft strings that occasionally accompany her voice and guitar are a very nice touch. Every time I dive into the world of her music, I am completely captivated. 

“Cops and robbers” - underscores

◇ genres: noise pop, indietronica

I absolutely loved underscores’ debut album Fishmonger and I have been anticipating whatever they were gonna follow it up with. Their latest single “Cops and robbers” builds upon the sound of their last album, but with a bit more polish. It has elements of hyperpop mixed with noisy instrumentation and a chorus that is clearly inspired by pop-punk of the 2000s. These all work together so well. Hopefully this is leading up to a new album.

“sulky baby” - yeule

◇ genres: dream pop, indie pop

yeule is an artist whose music I need to dive into further. I enjoyed a good bit of their last album Glitch Princess, but I couldn’t have anticipated how great this song is. “sulky baby” is one of the finest dream pop songs I’ve heard in a while. I absolutely adore the way the hazy guitar lures you into the track before everything comes to create this incredible burst of dreamy goodness. This is without a doubt one of my favorite tracks of the year so far.

“Zeitgeist” - Maruja

◇ genres: experimental rock, art punk, post-punk

Fresh off of dropping a really impressive EP, Maruja returns with another great song. If you liked their debut EP, I’m sure you will love this new single. One thing I love about this band is their consistently interesting instrumentation. The bass towards the start of this track is really cool and adding saxophone into a post-punk song is always a recipe for something great. This band is on fire right now and I can’t wait to see what they have coming up.

“Master P (feat. Big Sean)” - KAYTRAMINÉ

◇ featured on KAYTRAMINÉ - KAYTRAMINÉ ◇ genre: pop-rap

KAYTRANADA and Aminé joined forces to make a very good summer album. There are plenty of highlights across the project, but I wanted to shout out this track in particular. “Master P” isn’t the most summer-y on the album, but I think its one of the biggest highlights on the album. I think this track has some of Aminé’s strongest rapping in a while and when Big Sean’s verse comes in the track is elevated even more. Really loving this one.

“Infinity Repeating (2013 Demo)” - Daft Punk & Julian Casablancas + The Voidz

◇ featured on Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) - Daft Punk ◇ genres: disco, electronic

It kinda feels like cheating putting this on here, but I feel like I have to mention it. The 10th anniversary edition of Daft Punk’s magnificent final studio album dropped this month alongside a handful of new demos and extra songs. One such demo is a collaboration with Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas. Daft Punk and Casablancas teamed up for the incredible “Instant Crush” which ended up on the album. I guess this demo was what eventually evolved into that song and I think it holds its own pretty well. If you liked their previous collab, I think you will find something to love about this demo!

#my favorite songs of the month #2023 #music #rateyourmusic #christine and the queens #billy woods #kenny segal #george clanton #beyonce #kendrick lamar #squid #ichiko aoba #underscores #yeule #maruja #kaytranada #amine #kaytramine #daft punk #julian casablancas

[betty-bourgeoisie]

51 , 35 , and 28 for the ask meme please !!

28) What are their thoughts on pet names? Do they have any?

Lamo, I'm so aro it took me like a good five minutes to realize this question wasn't about actual names for actual pets but anyways -

I think Alfred uses a lot of pet names. His go-to pet names for Emil are "sugar" or "sugar cube" but he also uses "honey" and "baby" a lot. If they're in a historical setting I'm also a big fan of Alfred calling Emil "doll" or "dollface". Sometimes if he's joking around/ being sarcastic he'll use "dear" "darling" or "dearest".

Emil doesn't use as many and the ones he does use are almost always in Icelandic. I honestly really like the idea of Emil using "Dúlla min" for Alfred - which I know is usually an endearment used between women who are good friends, but I always view AmeIce as being a relationship that's kind of between romantic and platonic and I headcanon both of them as being pretty genderfuck so it works for me.

35) Who's more artistic?

They're both artistic in different ways!

I think Alfred is very musical - he's the kind of person who's constantly singing show tunes regardless of the setting, and he has a collection of obscure instruments, all of which he can at least kind of play. He probably doesn't do too much composing himself, but he can tell you a lot about music theory and how it applies to different songs.

Emil's art usually takes the form of poetry, creative writing, or oral storytelling. Historically this probably meant working on things like eddas and sagas, beating his siblings in flying matches and spending a lot of time around monks, but I think in the modern-day he probably just does a lot of slam poetry competitions and writes fanfic.

51) What’s a non-verbal way they say I love you?

Alfred is a big gift giver! This man is out here buying a new book that he thinks Emil would like every week and writing little love notes on the cover page. He's taking notes on his phone every time Emil even suggests he might like something. It's all about the quality of gifts with him - Alfred is the type of person who will spend hours in a store looking for exactly the right present for someone he loves.

Emil shows love through quality time and acts of service. This can sometimes come across to outsiders like he's not as invested in their relationship because it's not always as visible or obvious as Alfred's gifts, but if Al ever needs anything Emil is right there. Alfred is dreading a boring political function? He's blocking out his schedule so he can come along and keep him company. Alfred's not feeling well? He's taking the whole week off to go look after him. If Emil doesn't have time for his loved ones he will make time for them - it's very important to him that the people he cares about think of him as someone they can ask for help.

#hws iceland #hws america #ameice #hws ameice #thank you for the ask!

[thesinglesjukebox]

ADDISON RAE - "I GOT IT BAD"

Next up, Oliver brings us a star who rose to fame from the unlikely medium of (checks notes)... TikTok!

[5.28]

Brad Shoup: This is so Swedish it hurts. It sounds like a 2020s producer trying to make a 2000s hit using a 1980s suggestiveness. It's uncanny. I like it. [6]

Oliver Maier: Some obvious Britneyisms at play here: the punctuative orchestra hits, the B-chorus near the end and the siren at the very beginning, as if Rae is literally sounding the alarm about this dangerous boy. She's blowing bubblegum on the EP cover; the genre influence is not subtle. It works though, in part because Rae winks at the camera just the right amount. There's levity when she sings "He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster," stacking two outdated pop culture tropes on top of each other and almost rendering the whole thing pointless, but she never prods hard enough it to collapse into pastiche. The horned-up glee of a line like "It's definitely something that could ruin my life" would have been subtext about 20 years ago, but now that's just a thing we invite people to do (incidentally, the track after this one on the EP is called "2 Die 4"). There's plenty else to enjoy in the lyrics besides all that, like the in media res opening line and the way she sings "He calls on me late at night, and he calls me baby," her voice dripping with pride at earning such an accolade. But the most impressive thing to me about "I Got It Bad" is that it obviously apes a vibe without being overtly, offputtingly cynical, because the the songcraft is fucking there: a glossy, 500-horsepower instrumental where you can barely discern an instrument and a big fat chorus. Delightful stuff. [9]

Frank Falisi: Nominally, the nostalgic urge is anathema to the writing of pop songs; how can something be the most monolithic feeling you've ever felt -- and the only song your head's ever managed -- if you're remembering something else? The pureness of plastic is how it can be melted down to cover old things and if it leaves a tacky taste in the mouth, it's only after the song ends, which is to say, after the pop. You could say that "I Got It Bad" references, however obliquely, a certain millennium-break sound-strand: the production is visible, busy but submissive, never invisible but an apparatus that produces the voice as much as the vocal cords. Even more so, 2002 haunts the way the personal pronoun dominates the territory of the song, from the verse's aspiration to ascension (love or lust, or somewhere on the way) to the divinity of a pre-chorus: "Take off every piece of me/until there's only skin on my body." Who's who? Addison Rae is different from Addison in the same way Britney Spears is different from Britney. The former are screens and their signifiers, the latter the heat bodies give off, intake, machinate. "I" signifies a space between the singer and the listener, a space that only happens in the duration between the start of the sound and its end. Will we ever be able to remember the start of this sound without saying the words "Britney Spears"? Or is that part of the song ending: once the feeling severs, we're left only with the ache. Restart the song or re-find the sound, it's all relative. I got it bad. [8]

Rose Stuart: This song violently throws you back to the 2000s, when every Disney star tried their hand at being a pop diva with lyrics sexy enough to remind you the singer is now a grown woman, but with vocals kept squeaky clean lest some emotion trick you into thinking the singer was actually into it. Everything -- from the beat to Rae's singing -- sounds both awkward and bored, sliding off your brain like an advertisement's first draft. [3]

Vikram Joseph: This is what you've all been hyping? This particular iteration of "You won't believe this but I have bad taste in men!" in a year where we had Olivia Rodrigo? I mean, this is so competently executed and so utterly devoid of personality, I really could not pick this out of a line-up. With a gun to my head to name an interesting thing about this song I'd go for the early Britney cosplay in the delivery of "ruin my li-i-uh-ife", or then again I might just gamble that it wasn't loaded. [3]

Will Rivitz: I've been only partly plugged into Extremely Online pop chatter the last few years, so forgive me if I'm not currently fluent enough in its current morphology to know whether or not this is a silly question: are we serious about Addison Rae? Like, yes, I get that there's been an unceasing stream of SHE ATEs since the EP dropped, and I also get that sometimes we support camp simply for camp's sake, and I also get that some of these people unironically go to bat for Sabrina Carpenter, so please be sympathetic to my inability to parse the semiotics of this past summer. Because the EP is indisputably mid as hell! Every song is a flimsy facsimile of a different recently relevant pop girl, the lyrics read like they were written by an AI trained on Netflix-reject teen romcom scripts, and somehow everything ends up sludging out into Disney's pop bargain bin. "I Got It Bad," naturally, is no different, a forgotten *NSYNC demo spruced up by Kim Petras's producers in which every verse has about five percent too many words and a syllable or two delivered as though Rae only realized two lines didn't rhyme halfway through the second. Rae doesn't have the juice to land tricky constructions like "take off every piece of me/until there's only SKIN on MY boDY" (is your skin not a piece of you? Are you wearing someone else's???) or the pacing to make "definitely something that could ruin my life" sound like she's delivering the words in her 20s. I love oodles of popstars who Do Not Have The Range, but Addison Rae so remarkably Does Not Have The Range that the Not Range is impossible to ignore. What gives! [3]

Will Adams: I have little interest in indulging the "um you guys Addison Rae's music actually kinda slays??" bit as much as it attempts to grab me (look! a Charli feature! an exhumed Gaga demo!). But it's hard to resist the charm of "I Got It Bad". The Max Martinisms are off the charts -- orchestra hits, alternate final chorus, the "it's gonna, gonna gonna" vocal stacking, absolute nonsense lyrics -- and Addison's blankness makes way for all of it to shine. [6]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: A terrific song performed so listlessly that I am absolutely unconvinced that Addison Rae does, indeed, have it bad. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: The arrangement is great: a little freestyle, a little 2010s-era Max Martin electro, a little 2000-era Max Martin staccato stabs and final counterpoint chorus. (It's produced by Rami Yacoub -- close enough.) Everything else is not: Addison Rae's vocal nonpresence, the incompetent lyrics (Addison is credited; I believe it), and a supposedly magnetic crush that makes Taylor Swift's undangerous lovers seem like goddamn incubi. [5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: "I don't want something right down the middle," Addison Rae shrugs on this middling track. "I Got It Bad" isn't bad, just mediocre with its anonymous pop vision. [4]

Ian Mathers: "Generic" is not necessarily a synonym for "bad." [6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It's definitely something. [4]

Kayla Beardslee: First time listening, and I can see why this release made noise: it's a surprisingly good Pop Girl Song from an artist whose TikTok background wasn't guaranteed to translate well to pop music. Of course, once you get past the "oh, it's good" phase, it just sounds like a run-of-the-mill pop single -- nice chorus, but there are a thousand other songs that do the same thing. [6]

Michael Hong: "She's definitely improving," goes the top comment on YouTube and you can definitely see "I Got It Bad" as something in Addison Rae's transitional stage between "Friday" and whatever the hell Rebecca Black is doing right now. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: What does it say about the continued hegemony of the Long 1980s that, even in a song with those signature Max Martin orchestra stabs and a clumsy "boy band poster" line, there's still a perceived need to drench it in a blanket of heady synthwave fog? Like, if we're going to be doing anachronisms like that, can we at least skip to the point in the nostalgia cycle where we can start having gratuitous dubstep interludes in pop songs again? Because the 2:09 mark here would be the perfect place for one. [5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums in this song sound like they were made by Adam Feeney for the 1986 electro pop pack. BTW, pls check that out, and if you find any drum packs or loops in it, use them better than just looping them at the bottom of the track and not doing anything with them. Who did produce this btw - one of them made "My My My" and another made "Stars"? rage quit blurbing, pls finish with joke about rami youssef is the one true Ramy - [2]

Claire Biddles: Not to sound exactly like a 36 year old who always has to check if the second "T" in "TikTok" has to be capitalised, but I had no idea of the vast lore behind Ms Rae's pop career. "I Got It Bad" has the whiff of a lost golden era of pop that could easily cause commotion in parts of the internet, but it's not specific or muscular enough to carry it past pastiche for me. Still, points for the pitched-up orchestra hits and points for the unexpected body horror of "Take off every piece of me/Until there's only skin on my body." [5]

Alex Ostroff: Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he's long since moved on from but which his old Cheiron Studios colleagues and his newer students nostalgically wheel out every so often. Addison herself is completely blank and uncompelling -- a delivery mechanism who does nothing to get in the way of the hooks but nothing to sell them either. Some of the lyrics are genuinely terrible in ways reminiscent of the Swedes' early work with Backstreet. "He gives it to me more than a little"? "He got me close, but now it's official"? But "He looks like the boy next door from my boyband poster" is a pop music snake eating its own tail that verges on charming. And then the bridge ends with those gradually stacking *NSYNC vocal harmonies ascending up to pop music heaven, then slides right into a Britney-style B-chorus! None of it is as impeccably constructed as its inspirations. For one thing, Max would have had the B-chorus repeat as a counterpoint harmony under the final reprise à la "...Baby One More Time," "(You Drive Me) Crazy," and "Oops!... I Did It Again". The last time he wrote an alternate chorus without immediately repeating it as a closing harmony was Robyn's "Show Me Love" (and he could have -- try singing it over the final chorus for yourself and you'll see that it marries up just as smoothly as Britney's!). In the hands of a real Pop Star and with a bit more work, this would be excellent. As it is, it's merely a very good pop song performed by someone utterly unable to convince us to make it as massive a hit as it would be in an alternate universe. Which should probably merit a [4] or a [5], but... Your enjoyment of this will entirely boil down to how easy a mark you are for retro Max Martin 1.0 tricks that he's long since moved on from... and unfortunately when it comes to classic era Max Martin pop music tricks, "I knew I should walk away, but I went closer". It's definitely something that could ruin my life... cause I... I got it bad. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#addison rae #music #pop music #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

[selfcallednowhere]

February 6, 2020 New Haven, CT

Pictures

I'd only seen them previously play in New Haven at Toad's Place, but this venue, College Street Music Hall, seemed nice in a way some of the other places they've been playing lately that feel like a step up from their usual basic clubs seem nice. There did seem to be an unusually high percentage of obnoxious fans, but I will leave that topic at that because I'd rather concentrate on writing about the enjoyable parts.

This was the first of the shows I attended on this big Flood 30th anniversary tour, meaning of course that I went into it knowing that they'd be playing all of Flood in some form or another, but they'd already previously announced that they were gonna be finding different ways to mix it up, which I really don't blame them for if only as a way to keep it interesting for themselves, but I was also curious about it with my own plans to attend multiple shows. I have previously been to full album shows (or "album themed," which seems to mean "almost the entire album except for just a couple of songs, one of which may be one of your absolute favorites that you would've most liked to see") where they just sprinkle the featured album's songs throughout the whole set, and that arrangement I am generally not too keen on, but this feels different since it's an entire tour and the variety should keep things exciting for both the band and multiple-show-attenders like yours truly.

So all of this meant not being quite sure what to expect with the songs they were playing, and as a person who really loves surprises I enjoyed that. This time the Flood songs were all sequestered in the first set, and I discovered maybe 2/3 of the way through that damn, I am just not good at keeping a mental tally of all the songs on an album, because I kept thinking there were only one or two of the really obvious ones (as in, the songs they inevitably play even when it's not a Flood show) left, but then they kept playing songs I'd totally forgotten about and I'd be like "Oh right, this one." I wish I could chalk this up to feeling extremely loopy due to a combination of sleep deprviation and show excitement, but really I think mentally holding on to 19 different items that are getting tossed around willy-nilly is just a tough thing to do. I think it would only be easy if one of the not-yet-played songs was a particular special favorite of yours that you were especially eagerly anticipating.

They opened with "Dead," which I was very happy about since it's my second fav on the album. There was a resounding chorus of seemingly the entire crowd (including me of course because I do it with everything) singing along, which really was apparent for the entire first set, but it was just particularly audible on this one since it's such a quiet song. There are times when everyone around me loudly singing along can get on my nerves a little, particularly if it's a song I'm not too fond of myself, but in this case it felt like a shared moment of joy and humanity in which this entire room of strangers and I were sharing this beautiful moment together, which is one of the things that can make TMBG shows so magical.

Next up was "They Might Be Giants." This is a great song and one I've only seen a handful of times, so it was one of the ones I was particularly looking forward to on this tour, but somehow it still managed to be even more fun than I was expecting, particularly singing along on the "we can't be silent cos they might be GIants" part. The song also had, according to my notes, an "unexpectedly rockin' end."

They went from one kickass Flansong to another by following that up with "Twisting." On one of the choruses Flans flipped the pronouns from "she wants to see you again" to "she wants to see me again"--I've seen him do this from time to time with this and a handful of other songs, and like with so many other lyrical alterations he (and John for that matter) make it's hard for me to tell the difference between "conscious choice" and "just can't remember how the song actually goes." That being said, it does provide an interesting different perspective on the song.

Afterwards Flans said they'd been backstage before the show trying "every non-flavored" Keurig they had (those things are so wasteful anyway and I shudder to think how much trash a bunch of notorious coffee fiends like them would generate using one). John said they start out offering normal flavors but then move into really weird ones. Flans said it was like visiting a rest stop on 95, and it's been way too long since I've done any interstate driving around the Northeast to remember if the rest stops on 95 are actually markedly different than the rest stops anywhere else, but it sure got a big laugh from the (presumably almost entirely local) crowd.

Then John said that he noticed he and Flans were both wearing plaid, and they hadn't called each other to plan it or anything. For the record, what he was wearing was not plaid, it was just a blue shirt with a white grid pattern on it--I even looked up the definition of plaid just in case and the closest I could find was that sometimes certain checkered patterns are called "windowpane plaid," but what he was wearing wasn't even that, because a checkered pattern means alternating squares of distinct colors and yeh this shirt was just blue with white lines on it. However, even if he was wrong I did like the idea of them intentionally planning matching outfits--it reminded me of (amongst other adorable examples) the Conan taping I personally attended where the whole band wore matching red jackets with "Hello my name is" labels on them.

Then Flans said this was "a unique show," which seemed like an obvious setup for discussion of it being a Flood show (although I don't know how much one can really consider something they're doing for the entire tour and also have done on plenty of previous occasions to be "unique"), but instead he said that while they have so much new stuff they were really not rehearsed. John pointed out that "some people like it when we're disorganized," an assertion that seemed to be confirmed by the number of people who cheered in response, but he quickly added that he wasn't saying this meant it was something they should do intentionally in the future. Flans said that their shittiness is not an act. Then he made a joke about reading off a Teleprompter, then said he'd actually recently gone to see an expensive show by some big-name band (he diplomatically avoided naming names) that featured multiple Teleprompters, which was quite distracting. John said if they ever get to that point they'll have a real human prompter instead, which reminded me of my jokes about bringing a posterboard for him with the correct lyrics for "Mrs. Bluebeard" on it after I saw him fuck it up many times on the 2018 tour.

Then Flans explained that all the Flood stuff will be happening in the first set, after which they will just "watch all the friends and relations leave" and be acting as their own opener for the second set.

Then:

JF: What's next? JL: Well...it's from Flood. *JF approaches the keyboard stand where the setlist is* I can point at it, so as not to give it away, on the setlist you wrote.

The next song turned out to be the one of John's I was most looking forward to, just because it's the only song of his on the album that I completely adore and have not already seen quite a few times (I was looking forward to those too of course but not with the same level of intensity): "We Want a Rock"! It was, predictably, superfun.

Then Flans informed us that we were "just five songs away from a live video taping event," and that we should make sure we had our cameras on if we were currently just using our phones to email work. I had no idea what exactly this "event" was going to be, but I was definitely intrigued.

After "Minimum Wage" and "Your Racist Friend" (Flans seems to really like arranging the setlist so the latter is Curt's first appearance, and with good reason, he really shines on his part of the bridge and even though I know it's coming the excitement of all the people who are surprised and thrilled when he makes his big entrance definitely rubs off on me), they played "Particle Man," which was notable for the following two things:

1) For part of it I noticed Flans had wandered over behind Marty and was just hanging out back there playing his guitar for a bit. (I'm not actually sure how notable this is as I'm not exactly world-renowned on what counts as normal on-stage behavior for anyone other than John, but I just know that I haven't seen him do it, I've seen him sometimes dramatically climb up on the drum riser during the big jam session at the end of "Istanbul" but that's it). 2) I am very familiar with John's habit of throwing a (sometimes lyrically modified) bit of someone else's song into the bridge, and also normally very familiar with the songs he likes to use (even if sometimes I only know them in this context), but for I think the first time he was doing something I'd never heard him do before, and it wasn't a song I knew from anywhere else either. I later discovered via wiki edits that it's apparently something called "Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus" by Sun Ra (who from what little I know of him seems to be a trippier sort of musician than the pedestrian sort of stuff John's more often on the record as liking). Anyway it was cool, and made even cooler by Curt busting out his euphonium.

After that Flans was explaining how they've performed all of Flood a lot of different ways, including in order and in reverse order, "but doing it in a way that's a surprise for ourselves is really the most rewarding." Then he was talking again about this show he went to where they were using Teleprompters, and how he really wanted to ask for a partial refund, but this probably wasn't the place to be getting into that.

Then he asked John what he'd done today, and he said he just drove down with "this guy" (I'm not totally sure who he was referring to but I think it was Danny as he was standing right behind him at the time), and that they'd had an "excellent shouting discussion." Flans asked, "Let me guess--politics?" and when he confirmed Flans said, "Same old, same old." I'm assuming that what he meant was not that it was an argument of major political differences but rather the sort of disagreements I have with my friends who are liberal like I am but might have very different ideas about choice of candidate, how different policies should be enacted, etc.

Then Flans said he'd gone to Guitar Center to get a cable, and that the shape of the place made it clear that it was previously a Lowe's with all the Lowe's stuff removed, and that the recognizability of it was "like when an IHOP closes." John: "It's like when they spraypaint over obscene graffiti but it's still in the shape of the graffiti." Then Flans started to say something but stopped and there was a long pause like he was deciding if he was going to follow up on that with something even more explicit, or was waiting for John to (I was on the edge of my seat over the prospect of the latter as you can imagine), but then finally he just said something about covering the "no" in "no regrets" tattoos.

Next they played "Hearing Aid." Of all the songs on Flood I think this is the one that best lends itself to some experimentation in a live setting, since even the album version is already cacophonous and full of all sorts of weird sonic shit, and apparently the band was in agreement with this idea, because John did some screwing around on his Kaoss Pad during the outro.

So then came the big mysterious "live video taping event" they'd alluded to earlier. Well actually, first came a whole lot more talking about what exactly the "event" even was. Flans said they'd spent several weeks rehearsing and there was no way for them to know for sure if they were playing it correctly until they went home and listened to the bootlegs we were surely recording, and encouraged us to make use of our friend's stolen copies of Final Cut Pro. Then John said that in watching it backwards we'd also be able to see them "getting younger and more nervous," which was a very Him joke to make (and of course also made me think about how much I love and how attractive I find him exactly how hold he is now, althoooooough I mean if we really are talking about rewinding back to Flood time, man, that "Birdhouse in Your Soul" video...)

So then finally they explained what the hell they were actually going to do. Flans said they'd been working on learning how to play one of their songs "sonically backwards," and that they weren't sure why they were doing it because it was a whole lot of work for very little satisfaction. He referred to it as "anti-music," and then John said that all this talking about it they were doing now was actually going to be the most interesting part of the whole thing. Then: "Well, I guess we have to play it."

So then they did, and you may note that in all this explanatory pre-song buildup one thing was never stated, which was what song it was, and I gotta say, it took me about half the song to manage to identify it as "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love"--I was finally able to thanks to this particular distinctive sound that I'm not quite able to identify or describe (I'm bad at that sort of thing when it comes to music, and I don't see anything unusual instrumentation-wise listed on the song's credits page) but I can definitely recognize as part of that song, apparently even when it's backwards, it just takes some extra time in that case.

Anyway, for all their self-deprecating "why are we even bothering to do this weird dumb thing that was all this work and isn't even enjoyable to listen to" talk ahead of time, I must say that I certainly found it to be interesting and hilarious and bizarre in the best way, and judging by the enthusiastic reception of the crowd around me (not to mention the multiple articles about it that popped up online over the next few days) I was not alone in this assessment. I should also mention that it involved some very silly (and cute) coordinated arm movements (that also happened the next couple of nights so I guess it's just a set part of the thing) and also John slowly backing away from his keyboard at the end of it (that, sadly, did not).

After that they played "Letterbox," which is definitely one of the songs I'm quite happy to have a guarantee of seeing at every single show on this tour, because although I've already seen it a fair amount it's one of my all-time favorites. This was followed by "Lucky Ball & Chain" and "Hot Cha," which began with John playing a doorbell sample (I can't remember what he's done the couple of other times I've seen this song, but this works well).

Then Flans said something about how earlier he'd gone to the "modern pizza place," and John clarified that this must be as opposed to old pizza from ancient times. Flans said it was in a "steel structure" but otherwise didn't seem very modern at all.

Then John said the next song would be on accordion--my favorite thing to hear! Even the accordion songs I'm not really too fond of (which are few and far between) are redeemed at shows by just the excitement of getting to see him play it. The song in question was "Whistling in the Dark" and it was fun, though I'd still really love to see Flans resurrect the marching band bass drum for it (I know he lost the original one in the equipment trailer fire awhile back but he could always get a new one). I've never gotten to see it played with that and it would be so cool.

Next they did "Birdhouse in Your Soul" (John was doing the thing he sometimes does with pointing at himself on the second "I'm your only friend" part and it was cute as always) and then "Road Movie to Berlin," which really startled me when it got superloud just before the very end (a reaction I immediately realized was silly since it's like that on the album too, but I for some reason just wasn't thinking about it), and then "Women & Men."

After that Flans said there would be a "programming change" with Curt playing both valve trombone and trumpet on the next song, which was of course the intro for "Istanbul." Every time I see him play valve trombone I think about Mr. Barker, my 6th grade band director, bringing one in to show us and informing us that it "takes all the bad aspects of a trombone and all the bad aspects of a trumpet and rolls them up into one bad instrument." (This is not to say that I don't enjoy seeing Curt do the intro cos I certainly do, I just thought that description was funny which is I guess why it's stuck in my head all these years.)

Flans reminded us that they were the opening band and thanked TMBG for having them, then did some quick band intros, except for Curt because "you met Curt before." Then he said they'd be ending with the first song on the album, which turned out to not in fact be correct. So then he caught himself by telling us the song is just the opener of side 2 and "I made a mistake on my vinyl selection tonight."

He was correct on that point, as the song was "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair" which is in fact in that spot in the album sequence (I know this well because this album, along with Lincoln, was one of the two I originally had on cassette and spent many happy teenaged hours listening to both of them on the tape deck in my good ol' car as I drove). I have forever held up performances I've seen of this song to the high point set the very first time I saw it, at the Halloween 2001 Sapphire Bullets show, when John (sorry, "Jared") wintro, but he has never done that again and likely never will. However, this time he was at one point gazing upwards and being all smiley, which was also adorable. As for the merits of the performance that are not just about the relative adorableness of John Sidney Linnell, it's pretty fun, very peppy.

Then:

JF: Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen! We're about to take a 15-minute break and make some serious damage on those Keurig...French vanilla...coffee things. JL: We'll be back in like 40 minutes. JF: We will be freaking out on Keurig coffee, ladies and gentlemen. We wanna do this song perfectly... JL: But we can't.

So the final song (as already spoiled by Flans with his screwed up intro to the previous song) was of course "Theme from Flood." Seeing that song at the end of the set really amuses me--seeing them sing "It's a brand-new record for 1990" all these years later is already amusing enough (which was surely a conscious and intentional forward-thinking move on their part when they wrote it), but having what so clearly feels like an intro appear as a closer makes it even funnier to me.

Set Two kicked off with Quiet Storm. I wasn't sure what songs were going to be in the rotation for it this time around since the tour was really just starting. I had heard tell of just a couple of them that were revealed via a special IFC video that was sent out shortly before, but I hadn't yet watched the video so I had no idea what those songs were actually going to sound like. This is a good thing--I intentionally try to keep what I know about shows I'll be attending to a minimum, because getting to be surprised by things is part of the excitement.

When they first came out Flans was whispering (whispering quietly enough that he was difficult to make out even with the amplification of the microphone) about how he was being lit by the ghost light, which is a tradition in all old theatres, and that it's there so the ghosts can read, and that it's a little-known fact that ghosts have terrible eyes. (Honestly the idea of being a ghost who just gets to hang out in a beautiful building and read sounds pretty damn sweet to me, and hey, I already have terrible eyes so no adjustment required!)

The first song was "Music Jail, Pt. 1 & 2," which has always been a fav of mine in any context. I've already seen it live a bunch, but with this performance I discovered it belongs to the "songs that become immeasurably better when they're played on accordion" club, which I must confess is not exactly the most exclusive of clubs, since literally every single other song of theirs is also a member.

Then:

JF: We'd like to welcome you to our acoustic set. We call it the Quiet Storm. We don't know why. [intro of Marty and his "electronic drum stylings"] We have the loudest quiet part of the show in rock music today, ladies and gentlemen. We take pride in that. Um, John? JL: Yes. JF: I'm going to play the electric guitar in the acoustic set. JL: Ok. Just--that's the Storm part. "Quiet Storm" covers all the bases.

Flans did indeed switch guitars then, and never gave anything in the way of an actual explanation. I haven't seen him do this any other time, and I'm curious about why he decided to--maybe it was just a random whim, or maybe he was experiencing some sort of technical difficulties frustration with his acoustic guitar that he didn't feel like messing with trying to fix.

Next they did "2082," which was one of the "I know they'll be playing this but I have no idea what it's going to sound like" songs--in this case that didn't just mean not being sure what it would sound like with the special setup of Quiet Storm but not being sure what it would sound like in a live context period, as the song was making its live debut on this tour. I've always considered the song to be a special little Join Us gem, and I am pleased to report that it was quite fun live.

Next they did "Meet James Ensor" (not on the setlist, so it must've been a last-minute switch), which was fun as always, and then "Wicked Little Critta," which John switched to his keyboard (and Kaoss Pad) for, but to my great disappointment its position in the Quiet Storm section meant that the song lost the one thing I really love about it live, which is the sexy-as-hell closeups of his hands on the aforementioned keyboard and Kaoss Pad being projected on the screen at the back of the stage.

Then The Johns and Marty depared the stage and that screen showed the video for "Underwater Woman," which (I didn't figure this out until later) is what they're doing to give the roadies time to break down and put away the Quiet Storm setup. I make no secret of the fact that I don't really have any interest in music videos The Johns aren't in (and from what I understand with the new Dial-A-Song ones they aren't even really involved in the creation of them in any other way either), so this was actually the first time I'd seen the video (not counting a couple of GIFs of it floating around the fandom internets). It was all right enough, but definitely not interesting enough to convince me that I'm incorrect in my feeling that I'm not missing much by not bothering with these vids. John himself seems quite fond of it, I remember him talking it up several times on the Glean tour (always something along the lines of "the video of this song is so cool that it tricks people into thinking they like the song more than they do"), but (as I alluded to previously) John's media opinions on things besides his own songs are usually quite baffling to me.

Next they played "Let Me Tell You About My Operation," which just a few days before this lost its crown of my personal #1 Flansong to "Authenticity Trip" but is still very high o the list, especially live, so that was superfun. Both Marty and Dan got solos on it--the other times I've seen it it's been just Marty.

Next they played "Wearing a Raincoat," which was quite unexpected--I'd only previously seen it at the 2015 duo show (when it was even more unexpected, because I went into the show figuring they'd only be playing stuff that was actually from their early days as a duo but then they threw in a few much newer full-band things like this), and the wiki informs me that that show is in fact the sole appearance of the song between the tour for The Spine and this one. The regularity with which they do this, reaching deep back into their catalog (granted, a catalog that provides much more opportunity to do this than the average band due to the combination of their longevity and their insane prolificness) and just throwing stuff that they haven't really played in a decade and a half or more into the set, is absolutely a big part of what makes going to as many shows as I do worth it. (I expect it's the same for other overachiever show-goers, in addition to keeping things interesting for the band themselves.) I also gotta say that I had the experience I sometimes have where I either am pretty much neutral on a song or I like it but mildly, but then I see it live and something just clicks and I suddenly start appreciating it a lot more.

Next there was a very large chunk of banter with lots of quite good bits:

JL: So Flans--there's this thing online that somebody put together, which is like a--it's like a--a kind of quiz, and what it is is every--every song--every word that appears only once in a They Might Be Giants song in one column--like, every word that only happens one time, which is a considerable number of words, and then next to it is the blank space that you're supposed to guess which song it's in. And admittedly I was--I had just woken up from a nap and I was a little groggy, but I--I tried to take--and it's, there's like a 20-minute time limit or something like that, which is a long time--but, I got less than half of them. And a lot of them were songs--my songs. It was embarrassing. A good wake-up call. JF: I think that sort of--that sort of confirms a few things. JL: It confirms a lot. Yeh. JF: One of the--one of the strange things about--about being in any band, probably, but especially a band that is as linguistically, uh, decisive-- JL: [simultaneous to JF's last word] Fussy? JF: As wordy as this band, is like a lot of times we'll be, you know--launching into some song that we're not quite prepared for, and there are people--like you--standing directly in front of us...who know every word. And it's just--it's so cruel. For everyone involved. JL: It's cruel but it's exciting to think we will one day be one of those bands that flips the mic around! "Here, sing it! Go!" It might be sooner than you think.

GUY IN AUDIENCE: DO IT NOW! JL: We have too much dignity.

I know the quiz he was talking about, my friend Aubrey showed it to me some time ago, and yes he was absolutely right about it being significantly harder than it seems like it should be, but I seem to remember getting half of them or maybe slightly better when I took it, and I didn't write a bunch of the songs in question! So that was really funny. I also was joking a lot with my friends after this show about how I'm surprised every single story he tells doesn't start with "I had just woken up from a nap" considering how many naps he seems to take.

Anyway, then Flans said the creator of Bob's Burgers emailed him wanting them to do a song for a new project for Apple TV, which was met with many cheers. John: "God, this has turned into a band meeting!" Flans said they would have to do it right away, like tomorrow morning, and John asked if it could at least wait until after the show. Then Flans joked that the name of the song would be "It's Like Bob's Burgers, But It's on Apple Plus." (I actually started watching the show shortly after this, which I'd been meaning to do for awhile anyway but this definitely provided some extra incentive.)

John then introduced "Trouble Awful Devil Evil" as being "from our recent work, which we proudly defend." After the song was over, he was just messing around a bit on his keyboard, and Flans said (mock angry) "No noodling before the song!", and John replied "And no shakin' hands on the bandstand!"

Next they played "All Time What," which was one of my favorite set regulars from the last tour, so I was happy to see it still making an appearance, although it definitely lost quite a few of its coolness points by now being performed on keyboard rather than the contra-alto clarinet (in case it is not blindingly obvious by now, given the choice between seeing him play keyboard and seeing him play literally any other instrument he ever plays I will invariably opt for the latter).

Afterwards Flans (still thinking about the word quiz) asked if "soliloquy" appears in any of their songs besides this one. John said he didn't know. Someone yelled that they should google it, but Flans said they don't have that kind of time.

Next they played "Mrs. Bluebeard." I noticed John moving the mic stand at one point in the middle of it, which was only notable because at one of the shows I was at on the I Like Fun tour he used the fact that he needed to do that so he could reach the higher part of the keyboard but was unable to because the roadies had screwed it in too tightly as his excuse for screwing up the lyrics. As far as that goes, he did do the repeating the wrong chorus at the end thing again but at some point after seeing him do that so many times on that tour I accepted it as a standard live lyrical variation and am now able to just enjoy the song (which is one of my favorites on the album) without worrying about it too much (though not not worrying about it so much that I don't still feel the need to mention it here, apparently).

Next they played "Pet Name," which was another massive surprise for me--the wiki informs me that they played it at the Australia shows on they did last year, and there are a couple of other appearances in the decade before that, but other than that this tour is its first appearance since 2003. My good fandom buddy Chris has this story about how one time a year or two before we met he was in line waiting for a show and Flans just came out and asked if anyone had requests, and he requested this song and then they did actually play it, and it's a very cool story, but I must admit I always thought the choice of song was a bit odd, just because the Flansongs I really love live are the really upbeat rockin' out ones--I can sometimes enjoy the slower, quieter ones live too, but I definitely find them much more hit-or-miss overall.

But I fully retract my skepticism after this show, because it turns out that in fact the song is great live. I have a well-established tendency to transform into a Flansgirl for a few minutes on songs where he's singing but not playing anything, but again that rule usually applies to the high-energy ones where he's struttin' all over the stage like the coolest dude alive (the aforementioned "Let Me Tell You About My Operation," for instance). This one was very different, more things like him holding the mic stand and bending over it crooner-style, which I unexpectedly still found very compelling. Also I gotta say, at this current moment in time "You say I'm ok for a guy, but I can tell that you are lying" is really fun to sing along with.

Speaking of songs that are really fun to sing along with, the next one, which Flans introduced as "the song that has the video with the giant papier-mache monster truck hearse" ("When Will You Die," of course) remains one of the absolute top songs in that category--it's just so gleefully terrible and that makes it amazingly fun.

After that they played "Spy," and I do always adore the improv part, but I gotta say this was perhaps the all-time winner out of the many, many times I've seen this song. John continued the thing he's been doing for awhile with using a sample from some other song as part of his half of the improv conducting. This time the song was "Our House" (the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young one, not the Madness one, or to put it another way the one that goes "Our house is a very very very fine house," which is probably the only part a lot of people can easily remember and was also the part the sample consisted of).

So like I said he's been doing this sample thing for awhile and so that was not at all unexpected, but let me explain what made this particular time so incredible. First of all, he usually will play the sample for maybe just a minute by himself before getting the rest of the band to join in, but this time he was just doing it by himself, and then he very quickly started screwing around with it, doing things like making the "very" repeat and repeat and repeat, or altering the speed so it was playing supersloooooooowly. Does this sound not very interesting, possibly even stupid or annoying, to you? Well, you're not alone, because I got the feeling from the total non-reaction of the crowd that that was the general consensus. But then meanwhile I'm over here just completely cracking up, because no one else seemed to like it but he just kept doing it anyway, and really for a much longer time than was necessary, and the fact that it felt like all that mattered to him was amusing himself, with a complete and utter disregard for whether anyone else cared, was just beautiful to me.

Next up was "She's an Angel," deeply emotional and lovely for me as always. I did notice at one point some sort of laminated card thing falling out of John's pocket, which made me curious because everything connected to him makes me curious. I'm not sure what it was, but my best guess is one of those passes venues have for performers and whoever else is actually authorized to be backstage--from what I could see of it it looked similar to those that I've seen, and it would make sense for him to have one.

Next Flans thanked us all for coming and then did band intros, which included telling us that Danny was "tuning before the last song because he CARES!" and informing us of some "showbiz insider stuff about bass players--that kind of dedication is rare," that "only swear words can describe my feelings for Mr. Marty Beller, ladies and gentlemen" (he did not in fact follow this up with the use of even a single swear word), and then after he introduced Dan John pointed out that he was also tuning, to which Flans replied "We only have one song left, who cares?"

Flans introduced the final song of the main set with "Here's a brand-new song, it's on somethin'." The song was "The Communists Have the Music," and considering the song was released like a year and a half ago now I think he was perhaps overextending the definition of "brand-new," though I will grant him that it is also true that there hasn't been too much they've released since then. Anyway, the song is definitely one of my top top favs of all the stuff they released that year, and I think it's really fun live, so I was quite happy to find it still in the set.

The first encore consisted of "Damn Good Times" and then "Doctor Worm," both very fun as always--I was a bit surprised to see the former show up in this spot, as the vast majority of times I've seen it it's been the show opener, but I do always love really high-energy songs in the encore (I love them anywhere in the set really, as should be abundantly clear by now, but I love them extra in the encore cos it feels so great to end the show on that sort of high note), so I was definitely not complaining.

When they came back for the second encore, Flans said they'd be doing a live fadeout for the last song. He thanked us for going along with the untested experimental stuff they'd done earlier in the show, "but now we're gonna do something that we already know is a bad idea. But it's interesting, so we're sticking with it." Then he asked John if they should also walk backwards while they were doing the fadeout. "Well now that you've suggested that, then I think we have to do that. It's too good of an idea to drop." Flans suggested they could bring back The Wave, which they have done previously (mostly just as part of "Violin" as far as I know), but when John objected he said "It's like two bad ideas."

Then John asked Flans to "tell me more about this Loren Bouchard project," and after a moment of confusion Flans realized it was the thing he'd mentioned earlier with the creator of Bob's Burgers and he just didn't realize that was the guy's name. (I found the fact that John did interesting and it led me to believe he's a fan of the show--he rarely discusses TV so this was an exciting bit of info. Or maybe he just remembers from when they previously worked with him when they were on that episode of Home Movies?) Flans replied that he didn't really know much, he just got this email between sets asking them to do a song. John suggested they should conference call him into this discussion, and Flans said "If only everyone had telephones!"

Then he jumped from that thought to the idea that we should all take selfies while standing with our backs to the stage, while the band would all be posed on the stage "like Queen Elizabeth photobombing you." I did my best to do it (of course using my real camera rather than my phone cos fuck that), but sadly the combination of me being so damn short and the fact that at this show I happened to more center-right and the band was posing in the center of the stage meant that rather than getting a picture of me + TMBG I instead got me + the random people who happened to be standing near me (most of whom were still facing the stage so I guess not even trying to participate). It was a bit disappointing cos it would've been cool, but also even as it was happening my expectations were low because I was well aware of the aforementioned factors.

So anyway, the final song was "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal," which remains my most favorite song to see them do with Curt, so it was the usual amazingness and me having no choice but to bop all over the place as I sang along and generally rocked out. They did indeeed do both the "live fadeout" thing (which was really just playing increasingly more quietly for a few minutes and then abruptly stopping) and then the "everyone slowly walking backwards" thing as promised, so that added some extra fun silliness to an already fantastic song, a perfect cherry on top of a terrific show! I'd had a particularly hellacious time making it to this one (a whole thing involving a big winter storm, a cancelled flight that left me unexpectedly stranded in Chicago, and a mad all-day rush to still make it on time), and in the course of all that I was grumpily telling some friends that this better be a damn good show to make up for all that trouble, but yes, yes it certainly was.

I already did my requisite JL wardrobe report earlier, his decidedly not plaid shirt, but there's something else that merits discussion. One of my big concerns going into this trip was the state of his hair. I used to be able to take its perfection for granted, but on far too many of my show trips over the past few years I've had to be concerned about it because he keeps getting it cut stupidly short and often does so just before they leave on tour, when it's most important. But I was extra-concerned this time because in the most recent picture I'd seen of him, one Flans posted on Instagram of them in the studio about a week prior, it looked really really good, which made me hopeful but also meant if he got it cut in the intervening week and what I was really wishing for got snatched away at the last minute I'd be even more upset. But I am delighted to report that it remained uncut and gorgeous and perfect, and to have that in combination with the now-constant-bespectacledness (which I'd gotten to experience several times already by this show but still have not gotten used to and probably never will), well, just about everything a girl could possibly wish for!

#tmbg #show reviews

[isa-renee]

sometimes piano tuning bothers me so much I just have to get up and walk away and give up on music for the day

#it’s so annoying #and the worst part is there isn’t a better way to do it! #equal temperament is great except for when it isn’t hope this helps #but actually like I know it’s a very convenient way of tuning and like all modern western music is written like that etc etc #it just bothers me #the notes are all wrong! #octaves sound too dissonant! #there’s no distinction between sharps and flats! #like I’m trying to sing along to some chord progression or whatever and I’ll play the v chord while singing the seventh #and it all sounds wrong! #either I’m sharp or the piano is flat that doesn’t matter what matters is that it sounds off and I’m upsetti #and it’s even worse when you go up by a half step! #thankfully I rarely write in phrygian #or any other scale with a lowered second #because the difference between what you sing and the note played is way more obvious then #at least to me for some reason #anyways this is such a tiny annoyance but I am very annoyed #so I guess I’ll just scroll through tumblr instead of writing

[kimnjss]

[ part seven of a new series called: ‘clips with context’ - feel free to request your own! ]

>>

BACKSEAT BUSINESS

jungkook picked you from the crowd with one thing in mind. and he can’t wait to get started, no matter who’s around. // explicit. requested. 1.8k words

warnings: cursing, dirty talk, fingering, slight exhibitionism, taehyung knows exactly what he’s doing, mentions of oral (m. receiving), a smidge of angst at the end... jungkook is spoiled and entitled.

+ this is the first thing i’ve written in like a month, so if it’s trash go easy on me... i need to get used to writing again lmao

“kook's always gotta find a girl,” yoongi says with a roll of his eyes, words falling on deaf ears as the other six guys chat loudly about who's going in what car. plucked from the crowd toward the end of the show, you had no idea that the singer had spotted you. just assumed the extra time he was spending near your section was pure coincidence. imagine your shock when security was escorting you backstage.

he barely spoke when you were presented to him, just gave you a once over before waving off the man that had brought you. he's dropping his arm around your shoulders and leading you to the couch in the middle of the room. you're tucked into his side the entire time they stand around talking. he's not listening and you're too starstruck to chime in. although, you wouldn't have much to say on the topic.

they were deciding car sharing arrangements from the sound of it. the seven gorgeous men you had watched dance and sing their hearts out on stage, stood right in front of you, paying you no mind.

jungkook sits lazily spread out on the couch as if they're not discussing him not even ten feet away. the tips of his fingers have started drawing light patterns against your naked shoulder, causing goosebumps to lift. his words come as a whisper against your ear: “you look so good in your little dress...” middle finger tracing the hem of it for emphasis. “i can't wait to take you home with me,”

 he notices the flush that rises on your cheeks at the end of his words., a smirk playing on his lips as he leans down. his lips are soft, warm against the clammy skin of your neck. at first, he lands light kisses on your skin – testing the waters... then all of a sudden his tongue is pushing out, rolling over a very specific spot before he's sucking that bit of skin past his teeth. you're letting out a gasp in surprise, hand shooting down to clutch his thigh as your eyes widen.

the sound pulls taehyung's attention. it's the first time he's looked at you and yes, he's just as intimidating up close. not a hint of what he's thinking is behind his stare and it has a thump of anxiety growing in your chest. you're just about to start full-on squirming when the corners of his lips lift into a small smile. “i'll ride with them, then. i don't mind.” he says with a shrug and as if that had been the dilemma all along, they're packing up to leave.

all jungkook had done, up til now, was kiss your neck a bit... honestly, you've done a lot more than simple necking – but by the time you're settling the backseat of the tinted window car, you're basically panting. he makes a show of waving off his fans, shouting promises of returning for another show.

as a fan, you're giddy to know that sometime soon they'd be coming back to perform again. as the girl seated beside him, waiting to be felt up – you were quickly growing annoyed... and impatient with his drawn out goodbye. he must sense that the moment he's rolling his window back up because he doesn't waste any time with crowding you.

one large hand laid flat on the center of your stomach while the other pushes your hair on the way, making room for the wet kisses he drags across your skin. it's hard to keep quiet with the way his skilled mouth works. love bites placed so deliberately there's no way you're able to fight the soft hums that fall from your lips. even with the full knowledge that kim taehyung is sat right next to you. like right next to you, his thigh pressed against yours as he manspreads... you could smell his cologne for crying out loud!

taehyung's sole focus is his phone, paying no mind to the way his bandmate pulls your legs apart or the way he nuzzles his face into the crook of your neck. as if it's far from the first time something like this has happened. and that's when it's clicking in your mind. this isn't the first time this has happened. it's routine, he didn't spot you in the crowd and have this unbearable need to be close to you.

he wasn't going to fall in love with you either. he simply wanted you and he was jeon jungkook, he got what he wanted. and as odd as it was, something about that turned you on even more. he wanted you. out of the ninety thousand people he could've chosen from, he chose you. for the night of course, but you were willing to take what you could get.

you're so lost in the fantasies and scenarios you're whipping up in your head, you don't even register the way he's pulled your legs apart. not until you're feeling the nudge of his fingers against your heat through the fabric of your panties. “make those pretty sounds for me,”

he's pushing your panties to the side, just enough for his fingers to reach through and brush against your exposed slit. the moan you let out isn't even all that loud, yet it catches the attention of the man seated beside you. tae tries to be subtle with the way he watches, holding his phone up as if that's where his focus is. it's obvious that's not the case and something about him watching you has a rush of excitement pooling between your legs.

jungkook chuckles fingers making their way to your now dripping hole. he doesn't say much else, eyes on you as he slowly pushes a finger through. and then another. he's moving at an agonizingly slow pace, enjoying the way you squirm beneath him desperate for more. “you're squeezing me so tight... can't wait to fuck you open.” lips pressed to your ear as he speaks, pulling a desperate whine from your lips.

“jungkook, please...” legs spreading wider for him as your hips grind down into his palm. he's grinning, eyes flickering to the man next to you before he's picking up the pace of his fingers. fucking into you at such a rapid pace, you're not even able to contain the squeal that falls from your lips.

his thumb lifts to meet your clit, circling roughly against it with each thrust of his fingers. he can tell you're close to falling apart, from the way you grip his shirt and the untimed twitch of your hips. “think you can handle one more, baby?” mouth lazily tugging on your earlobe as he speaks.

and you're nodding frantically, spreading your legs wider for him paying no mind to the way your knee knocks against taehyung's thigh. “such a good girl. can't wait to feel you cum all over my dick. you want that too, huh?” three fingers pushed into the knuckle while his thumb slowly rolls your clit underneath it.

he's making you feel so good, you'd agree to anything at this point. which is why you're agreeing to his words instantly, begging him not to wait that long, to make you cum now. and he takes you up on that, pulling his fingers back before quickly pushing forward. the snap of his wrist has enough force behind it to make your hips hit against the seats.

urging you to cum with each push of his fingers, reaching deep enough to just barely brush up against that rough patch of skin inside of you. he doesn't let up on the circle on your clit, adding more pleasure and it's only a few moments until you feel yourself unraveling completely.

your orgasm washes over you entirely, head lulling back while you let out a gasped scream. legs shaking and fingers wrinkling the fabric of his shirt. chanting jumbled syllables that are meant to be his name, judging from the laugh he lets out you're not even slightly close to making sense.

jungkook only pulls his fingers down once you've calmed down completely, lifting the wet digits to show off how your juices glisten in the dim light. and then he's pushing them into his mouth, sucking your taste from them while humming softly. you're watching him, not being able to pull your attention from the way his tongue moves.

you barely register the way he leans down to press his lips to yours, not until the taste of you fills your own mouth. but, just as you're about to kiss him back, he's pulling away. dark eyes drinking you in before he's leaning back against the seats, hands moving toward the buttons of his jeans.

“get down and suck me off,” you're shooting him with a wide gaze, eyes shifting over to where taehyung sits, fake watching the same tiktok on his phone for the tenth time. jungkook follows your gaze, laughs softly before he's dropping his stare back onto you, forehead resting on your temple. “he's not even looking,”

the boner straining against his jeans says otherwise. sensing your hesitance, jungkook tries a different approach, lower lip pushing out to form a pout. the same pout you have saved on your phone over a thousand times. “but, i worked so hard today... don't i deserve a reward?” he's looking up at you through his lashes. “i'll fuck you so perfect when we get to the hotel,” heat pools between your legs at his words.

you make a mental note to end the weeks-long debate with your friends on who's the most spoiled out of the group. it's jungkook, hands down. the youngest in the biggest group in the world, of course, it was him. he expected the entire world to get down on their knees with a simple pout of his lips... which is exactly why you're lowering yourself onto the surprisingly soft car carpet.

--

he does, in fact, as he put it 'fuck you so perfect when you get to the hotel'. from the moment you're closing the door to well after two in the morning, he's inside you. tossing you around, holding you down... fucking you open until your body shakes with overstimulation. and then some more after that. 

he calls you baby, but you're sure it doesn't mean anything. just that he never bothered to get your name. even in the early hours of the morning when you're being woken up by his security guard, ready to escort you out. he tosses his phone in your direction, half awake and telling you to put your number in. you know he won't call as you type out the digits, but you're still giddy that he asked.

eyes still closed as you leave, not even bothering to muster a proper goodbye. and while for you, this night will be a story you tell the grandkids... you know it'll end up being just another blur in his wild rockstar life.

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#jeon jungkook #jungkook #jungkook smut #jungkook fluff #jungkook fic #jungkook x reader #jungkook imagines #idol!jungkook #idol au #bts #bts imagine #bts smut #bts x reader #bts scenarios #bts jungkook

[humanwheatleyslefttoenail]

why do you ship chell and glados if glados is basically her mom

Okay this is actually a pretty common misconception in the fandom that unfortunately a lot of people have taken as canon, but I’m feeling nice so I’ll answer your question.

Basically, anon is referencing a theory from around 2012 that Caroline is Chell’s mom. The evidence for the theory is as follows:

- The turret opera calls Chell “bambina”, which means “little girl” in Italian

- Chell’s name can be found on a Bring Your Daughter To Work Day science project

- GLaDOS references the possibility of Chell being adopted multiple times

- GLaDOS is significantly nicer to Chell after discovering she’s Caroline 

And, anon, you’re right, it does sound like a pretty good argument at first glance. The problem is that a lot of these points don’t actually hold up to scrutiny.

For example, although “bambina” literally translates to “little girl,” it’s often used in the same way “baby girl” is used in English - it can mean child, but contextually it’s usually a flirtatious term. (Source: Cambridge Dictionary)

For Chell’s science project, it doesn’t work as evidence for the theory because GLaDOS killed the scientists around 1998-ish, when Caroline had presumably been uploaded several years earlier and Cave was already dead. Also, Chell’s in her 20′s, and since we know from Lab Rat/Portal 2 that people don’t age in stasis, and that Doug put Chell at the top of the test subject list only weeks after the takeover, Chell was 28 at the time of the takeover. The science project is really only an Easter egg and doesn’t actually fit into the canon timeline let alone prove anything about Caroline and Cave. 

GLaDOS talking about Chell being adopted is a pretty strong point, I’ll admit, but also it’s important to remember that maybe half of what GLaDOS says is true. And even if we take what she says at face value, she also says there’s a man and a woman in stasis with Chell’s last name, which could not have been Cave and Caroline because they were already dead at that point. And the official book Final Hours Of Portal 2 confirms Cave and Caroline were not married and could not have shared the same name anyway. It was also the 50′s, an an unmarried couple of two likely famous people having a child would’ve been scandalous, and yet we see no hint of something like this affecting their company. 

Also, although GLaDOS is nicer to Chell after the Caroline reveal, that’s not necessarily indicative of a mother-daughter relationship, and neither is any of their interactions. It’s just. GLaDOS being friendlier. 

Finally, when this theory was made (and let’s be honest - it still is happening) Chell was constantly whitewashed to hell and back. 

Chell is Japanese-Brazilian, and Cave and Caroline are white, so it would be a near impossibility for her to be their biological child (and insisting otherwise is kinda. just. whitewashing). And although people will cry “adoption!”, based on what I’ve previously proven, that’s pretty much impossible. This theory that somehow she’s Cave and Caroline’s daughter erases an important part of her identity. [Disclaimer, I am white, but this is what I’ve heard from around the fandom]

With all that said, the idea that she’s the daughter of Cave and Caroline really doesn’t hold weight when you really analyze the canon. It’s surface level analysis that doesn’t hold up. And honestly? The idea kinda cheapens the story. It’s much more powerful that GLaDOS learns to care about Chell and becomes kinder than just. Oh, she remembered she’s related to Chell. 

But to actually answer your ask. 

Why do I ship them?

Well, they aren’t mother and daughter, I think that’s pretty obvious now. But if you actually look at a lot of subtext in Portal 2, without the lens of the mother theory, it’s actually pretty romantic! 

I know that sounds ridiculous, but bear with me!

Now - it’s totally okay if you don’t ship them. I get it. Their interactions in Portal 1 and the first half of Portal 2 are toxic if not outright well. Y’know. Murderous. I completely understand why that turns people off from shipping them, and ultimately, shipping is a personal thing. To each his own. 

But before you judge me, let me present my case.

Exhibit A: Portal 

Portal is kinda gay. No, really. Chell and GLaDOS are enemies in this game, but the entire focus is on their relationship (good or not) and the power struggle between them. They are opposites, two sides of the same coin, different representations of opposite ideologies. People have analyzed Portal as a relationship metaphor, or as a metaphor about women’s role in society - either way, the heart of Portal is the complicated dynamic between Chell and GLaDOS. 

That’s not necessarily enough to code a romance, but a lot of popular (and especially popular queer ones) ships begin with opposite ideologies, symbolic powers colliding. Portal cements their relationship as a toxic one, something on the verge of falling apart and hurting both parties in the end. The ending image, of Chell and GLaDOS side by side after the battle, reinforces the symbolic parallels between the two. 

The companion cube is also pretty symbolically important to this interpretation. It’s literally a representation of someone’s heart, and you are told to protect it and preserve it under GLaDOS’ orders, and then you have to destroy it regardless of how you actually feel about doing that. You are destroying GLaDOS’ heart, so to speak. 

There’s also the ending song, Still Alive. The lyrics speak for themselves.

They hint that GLaDOS’ feelings about Chell are more complicated than they may appear (if she’s not being sarcastic...) and she literally talks about Chell breaking her heart (also, think back to the companion cube. Yeah.). The entire song is structurally similar to many a breakup number, with the laments of “I’m glad it happened, but also leave.” 

At the end, we also see that the long promised cake GLaDOS was supposedly lying about was real the whole time. Before Portal 2 came out, it was mostly interpreted as a stinger ending (along with the nicer lyrics of Still Alive) to make you question GLaDOS’ true motives and intentions.

She actually did have a real cake waiting for you. (Side note - not really evidence, but in Argentina, “torta” means cake in Spanish. It’s also a slang term for lesbians. So. Do with that what you will). The cake is what GLaDOS offers you to lull you into the sense that she cares about you, so discovering that “the cake is a lie” wakes you up to the realization that she doesn’t. Except then the idea is subverted one last time, at the very end, showing that the cake is real and at least some of what she said she meant. 

You also see the companion cube. You know, GLaDOS’ symbolic heart?

Now, okay, you might be thinking I’m extrapolating a bit too much. And you might be right. But Portal is not the only game in the series, and if you’re asking me about Cave and Caroline you obviously know about Portal 2.

Exhibit B: Portal 2

If you thought Portal was gay, Portal 2 turns that up to 11.

Even before GLaDOS wakes up, you’re treated to some visual subtext. A few of Rattmann’s drawings representing the events of Portal 2 focus a lot on the relationship between GLaDOS and Chell, with more of the cake symbolism.

In this, you can see a face layered on top of GLaDOS. This could be foreshadowing about Caroline, and likely is, but also resembles his other drawing of Chell. It insists that Chell is a part of GLaDOS, or reinforces parallels between Chell and Caroline, hinting at something either way. 

In this picture, we also see Chell standing on top of GLaDOS, in the same position where the overlay of the feminine face was, again referencing the parallel. It also presents them as opposites, fundamental parts of the same thing and both connected to the same basis, but on opposing sides. 

When GLaDOS wakes up, she returns to her antagonistic role, but there are more hints to something deeper just like in Portal. 

Here, in her awakening lines, she references Chell not unlike an estranged ex. Also worth noting that GLaDOS is pretty much the personification of testing (in a sense, she is testing since she can control all of Aperture like an extension of her body), and insinuates that Chell loves to test. And that she reciprocates that feeling.

In test chamber 10, she says this:

It’s supposed to be threatening, but it does read as almost... sentimental. 

There’s also another chamber with companion cubes in Portal 2. I already talked about their symbolism in Portal, and the same pretty much applies to them here. However, GLaDOS says something interesting about them during this level:

Once again, meant to be intimidating, ends up coming off as “well, GLaDOS, why were you going to give Chell a heart shaped representation of yourself that says ‘I love you?’” And you might think I’m stretching the GLaDOS’ heart metaphor thing a little far here, and I might agree, if the companion cubes didn’t literally sing Cara Mia for you. 

Cara Mia is the turret opera from the end of the game, which is all about how much GLaDOS cares about Chell. More on that later. But the companion cubes play a song called Love as A Construct, and when you get close to them, they sing a specific part of the song that has the tune of Cara Mia. These things literally exist to sing about GLaDOS’ feelings. 

Which makes this line a lot more. For lack of a better term. Tsundere-ish.

Then, right before the escape, she starts talking about the confetti from her fake surprise. 

I really don’t have to explain this one. What else does GLaDOS consider an inconvenience but might miss anyway? Or, more aptly, who else?

Then, during the escape, she teases a (fake) final test chamber in front of you, and forms the panels in the shape of a heart. No, really. 

Up to this point, a lot of the points I’ve presented are interspersed with a fair amount of antagonization on GLaDOS’ behalf, more Foe Yay than anything actually hinting at something deeper than GLaDOS being conflicted about whether she loves or hates Chell. But things really ramp up after Wheatley’s betrayal, when the two of them are forced to team up. (I should also note here that “enemies to lovers” is a pretty classic queer romance trope.)

Here, GLaDOS is put on an equal level with Chell and they have to rely on each other if they want to survive. For the rest of the singleplayer campaign, GLaDOS becomes a lot nicer and even friendly to Chell. There comes a point where she starts referring to Chell as a teammate, calling them “we.” She begins to consider them one unit, two opposites unified. Here’s what she says after the lemon rant:

You can not only see her using we, but actively talking about how her and Chell are going to fight Wheatley together. There’s also that last line - “let’s explode with some dignity.” GLaDOS has fully accepted the very likely possibility that she and Chell might die together. That she might die on the same level, and the same team as Chell. And she seems... surprisingly okay with that, as long as she and Chell go together. 

It’s during the Old Aperture levels that Chell and GLaDOS also discover that they have a lot in common. This is the part of the game where GLaDOS figures out she’s Caroline, that she’s human. Or, that she’s like Chell. And Chell discovers (from what we can tell anyway) that Caroline is kind, that she’s funny and smart and so many of these things she never noticed about GLaDOS before. Now also with the knowledge she is fighting alongside another human being. 

You can also draw parallels between Chell and Caroline, both intelligent women ultimately betrayed by their seemingly innocuous male friends before being trapped in Aperture and forced to team up with one another in a way that will free both of them. We see that really, GLaDOS isn’t that different from Chell - she too has been imprisoned in this place against her will, but in a completely different way. Once again, the idea of two sides of the same coin applies here. 

I’ve written another meta about this before, but I also think the whole idea of repressing a part of your identity and hating it, before bonding with another woman and then realizing that it’s okay to be like her and to be on her side. It’s okay to be yourself and meeting her is what helps you discover this new part of yourself. Is kinda inherently gay. GLaDOS’ discovery of her own humanity just fits so well into a queer realization narrative, to me at least.

Then, Chell and GLaDOS escape Old Aperture and have to get through Wheatley’s tests. 

Here, GLaDOS isn’t just begrudgingly on Chell’s team. She’s actively helpful. She wants to help Chell solve tests, defends her from Wheatley’s insults, and makes jokes to lighten the mood. Things that can really only be explained by her caring about Chell, especially the part about the insults. See below.

After the two escape Wheatley’s testing track, right before the boss fight GLaDOS has a few other things to say.

GLaDOS is not going to betray Chell, because of some kind of conscience. But she could easily ignore that back in her body, and yet? Here she’s deciding not to, and for no good reason. She didn’t have to say that to Chell, but she did, because she cares and she wants Chell to live.

And then, moments before the fight:

The final lines imply that GLaDOS does not think of Chell as an enemy anymore, and that it doesn’t matter what Chell thinks because they are in this together and they are getting revenge together. It’s pretty heartwarming to be honest, to know that even in a fight that will almost certainly kill you, she is there rooting for you and caring about you, even if you don’t feel the same way about her. It no longer matters to GLaDOS whether you even reciprocate - you staying alive, you making it through is enough for her.

So Chell fights Wheatley and sends him into space, all well and good, and at this point, GLaDOS has the option to kill Chell. But not only does she not, she actively saves Chell, and holds her hand in the process. If you don’t believe me:

And not only that, but when Chell goes unconscious from her injuries, GLaDOS sits and waits for her to wake up. It’s also implied that GLaDOS carries her to the elevator, since it’s where she wakes up but not where she passed out. In the scene where Chell blacks out, you can also hear the part of Love As A Construct that sounds like Cara Mia. Yeah. Yeah.

If you think that this cannot possibly get any gayer, you are wrong again, because then GLaDOS makes her final speech. Which is really just a love confession, let’s be honest.

The “surge of emotion?” Do you mean love, GLaDOS? And the idea of GLaDOS considering Chell her best friend, despite everything these two have done to each other? The idea that GLaDOS, out of all people, forgives someone?

Except this isn’t even Chell’s final send-off. GLaDOS writes her an entire opera of turrets, that sing a literal love song. (Note what I said earlier about the use of the word “bambina”).

It really can’t get any more obvious than that. “My (affectionate romantic term here), my dear, I adore you.” How. Is. That. Heterosexual. In. Any. Way.

So Chell goes to the surface, set free by GLaDOS (think of the saying “if you love something, set it free), and you think that’s the end. Until GLaDOS gives you a companion cube so you aren’t alone on the journey, and from the burn marks, you know it’s your first companion cube. Her original heart, her first gift to you, a piece of her that she wants you to carry with you to remind you that she does care about you after everything. It also gives the lyrics to Still Alive a much more genuine meaning. 

Portal 2 ends, and then the ending song, another GLaDOS number plays. Just like Still Alive, Want You Gone is structurally a break up song and very obviously about GLaDOS missing Chell and “counting on” (read: caring about/loving) Chell’s tendencies and quirks. 

She’s accepted Chell completely, and yet also given Chell the one thing she wants most. Only wanting Chell gone can mean GLaDOS not wanting Chell in her life anymore, but can also mean she wants to give Chell the freedom she’s wanted for so, so long. It’s the best thing she can give.

In the co-op campaign, GLaDOS also references still caring about Chell.

And that’s the end of the Portal series. Except. Brace yourself. Despite the games being over, there is STILL more subtext somehow. It gets. Even gayer.

Exhibit C: Supplemental Evidence

Valve has made a lot of extra/cut content for the Portal series, and I’ll be looking at some of it below.

This official valentine from Valve shows GLaDOS offering a romantic partner cake, which as we’ve established before, is very symbolic of GLaDOS’ feelings about and/or relationship with Chell. 

There’s a lot of other concept art and official art that emphasizes their relationship too. See below.

There’s also some cut GLaDOS lines that are even gayer than the source material and again, sound like confessions or references to a breakup:

The idea of “discovering things about someone”... how much more obvious can it get?

The developers have even confirmed a lot of my commentary on Chell and GLaDOS’ relationship in The Final Hours Of Portal 2. See these quotes from the book/this post:

The devs literally describe it as a romance. They use terms like “cheating,” they wanted to write a romantic duet, JoCo purposefully wrote the endings like love songs. It is literally, blatantly said by the creators of the game that their relationship is interpreted romantically. By the creators of the game. 

And if Word of God confirmation isn’t enough for you, have a song written for a cut alternate ending by GLaDOS’ voice actress, Ellen McClain. The song is literally nothing but GLaDOS talking about caring about Chell, about not wanting her to die/leave GLaDOS alone, about wanting to bake a cake with Chell, about waiting for Chell to wake her up. It’s so genuinely sweet and sad, and really, really romantic in the most heartwrenching way possible. 

JoCo also came back for the Portal levels in Lego Dimensions, writing one final breakup song for GLaDOS to sing about Chell. It comes off as GLaDOS not wanting to admit she misses Chell even though she obviously does, trying to replace their relationship but failing, and even explicitly forgiving Chell/wanting her to come back.

Also, the “finally I understand,” as if only now GLaDOS understands just how deep her feelings for Chell are... What else can I say?

In Lego Dimensions, GLaDOS also outright rejects anyone who isn’t Chell.

In Conclusion:

Why do I ship Chell and GLaDOS? 

Well, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether I ship them. 

Because I think it’s glaringly obvious Portal does.

#chelldos #chell #glados #portal #portal 2 #tw fatphobia #whitewashing #fandom racism #long post

[imaginemcyt]

sisterinnit!

cc!wilbur soot x tommy’s older sister

tw: language

note: this one uses specifically she/her pronouns, however, you can replace them with your pronouns. it won’t change the story at all. sorry that this is kinda shit but tumblr deleted my draft and i had to completely rewrite it so this is what i’ve got. hope you enjoy! <3

“y/n this is wilbur, wilbur this is y/n.” tommy gave the basic introductions with a bored look on his face.

“y/n simons, pleasure to meet you.”

“wilbur soot, the pleasure is all mine.”

as he shook your hand, you stared into each other’s eyes. he wore a small smile, that was almost a smirk. was it just you, or was there electricity when your hands touched? that had to be in your head, right? your gaze lingered on the other for perhaps a little too long before you let go of each other’s hands.

“now get out, y/n.” tommy pushed you towards the door.

•••

“y/n can you see wilbur out? i’m busy!”

wilbur looked at you with a smile, causing you to blush. you nodded and yelled back at your brother, “yeah!”

you led wilbur to the front door, opening it and stepping to the side. you looked at him to find he was already looking at you. he grabbed your hand and placed a kiss on your knuckles.

“it was nice meeting you, y/n.”

as you stuttered out a reply, he gave you that same almost-smirk and turned away, walking down your driveway.

•••

“what are you doing up?”

you jumped, not expecting to see someone in your kitchen at two am. then you remembered tommy had invited friends over.

“oh, it’s you. i… i can’t sleep. what are you still doing awake?”

you filled a glass up with water and began to drink it, putting it in the sink when you were done.

“tommy snores really loud.”

you both let out a light laugh at your younger brother’s expense.

“well, since we’re both awake, do you want to do something? we could watch friends? that’s all i was doing anyway.”

“that sounds great.”

you both made your way up the stairs and into your room. you sat on the bed and set up the laptop with the episode you were currently on. eventually you were laying down together watching joey do lunges in all of chandler’s clothes.

(like this ^^^)

you were about halfway through a second episode when tommy interrupted.

“what the hell are you guys doing?”

you both looked up at the tired gremlin child.

“watching friends.” wilbur gave him a cheeky smile.

•••

“hello?”

“oh! uh, hello…?”

“oh it’s you, wilbur!” you spoke over your brother’s headset while he was in the bathroom.

“y/n? hi! what are you doing?”

“well tommy’s in the toilet so i wanted to see who he was talking to. turns out it’s you!”

wilbur let out a chuckle. “it’s me!”

“GET OUT OF MY BEDROOM!”

“uh oh, gotta go!” you threw down the headset before running for your life.

•••

“y/n, hang out with us!”

you stopped at the doorway, looking back at the group of boys all sitting on the floor. jack manifold, tubbo, and wilbur all stared up at you.

“no, y/n, get out of my room.” tommy spoke from his spot on the bed.

“aww, why can’t she stay?”

“yeah, tommy, don’t be a dick, man.”

“y/n, stay!”

“no, y/n, leave.”

you looked nervous, being pulled in two different directions, before ultimately deciding that you had other things to do.

“sorry guys, i should probably go.”

a chorus of disappointed groans and “aww”s left the group before you waved and closed the door behind you.

you went back to your room, deciding to give your brother his space despite your loneliness and boredom. you knew you’d want the same from him.

you decided to mess around with your ukulele to pass the time. you played your favorite song, singing along quietly. it wasn’t long before a knock on the door made you stop.

“come in.”

the door opened and none other than wilbur soot popped his head in.

“hey.”

“hey. tommy asked me to tell you to shut up, but i think you sound lovely.”

you turned slightly pink. “oh, uh, thanks. tell tommy i’m sorry and i’ll keep it down.”

“no need, he’s a prick anyway.” he made his way to where you sat on the bed, taking a seat next to you.

“what are you playing?”

you smiled and told him about how it was your favorite song by your favorite artist and you loved how fun it was. he requested you play a little bit for him, so you did. when you were done, you started to talk about it a little more.

at least until you realized he wasn’t listening. he was staring at your lips, leaning in. you followed suit.

the door burst open, causing you two to spring apart.

“wilbur, what the hell is taking so long? and what are you two doing in here with the door closed?”

wilbur smiled at tommy. “playing music, of course.”

tommy gave a skeptical look, dragging wilbur out of the room with a “keep it down, y/n!”

wilbur stopped at the doorway. “by the way, i quite like hanging out with you, y/n.”

•••

“your hands are so tiny!”

“they are not,” you gasped. “your hands are just huge, probably because you’re a giant of a man.”

wilbur laughed. “put your hand up,” he instructed. he touched his to yours gently, showing off the size difference.

you both giggled before stopping and looking into each other’s eyes. he gave you a gentle smile and slipped his fingers in between yours, interlocking them and holding your hand in his larger one.

you looked back at him and smiled.

•••

you knocked on the door three times, and he answered not long after.

“y/n? what are you doing here?”

“tommy thinks he left his sweater here and asked if i could drop by and pick it up on my way home.”

“oh yeah, one second.”

he disappeared for a moment before returning, holding your brother’s red hoodie. “here you go,” he said with a smile.

“thank you. sorry to bother you.”

“it’s no trouble. can i walk you home?”

you felt yourself heating up and smiled. “if you’d like.”

he nodded and grabbed his jacket. then you both started off toward the simons residence. you almost made it before it started raining.

it was light rain at first, so you carried on. however, it got heavier by the second, and pretty soon it was pouring on you two.

wilbur took off his jacket and held it above your heads. “we’re almost there, run!”

the two of you ran the rest of the way, only stopping once you got to your porch. you looked at each other for a moment, catching your breath. then you started laughing. you were both soaked and standing there like idiots, laughing at yourselves.

your laughter soon died down, and then you were just smiling at each other. he reached over to you and brushed a wet piece of hair behind your ear, getting it out of your face.

you weren’t stupid. you knew the look he was giving you was a lovestruck gaze, but you decided to play dumb.

“what?”

then finally it happened. after months of flirting and mutual pining, he closed the gap and kissed you. with his right hand on your face he crashed his lips to yours (a/n: that sounds violent but it’s not meant to be lol), pulling you closer with his left. you wrapped your arms around him, hands tangling in his hair.

passion mingled with desperation and you kissed long after you were breathless. you didn’t part until you heard a loud yell of disgust.

you instantly sprang apart with swollen lips and red faces.

“are you fucking kidding me? that’s my sister, man!” tommy yelled, glaring at wilbur.

he then looked to you. “and you, kissing my best mate?!”

you stood there shocked for a moment before coming to your senses.

“uhhh, I wasn’t kissing, were you kissing?” you said, turning to wilbur and praying to god he caught on to your obvious lie.

“no, i wasn’t kissing.” he shook his head.

“neither was i! see, no kissing here.”

“i’m not stupid,” said tommy, voice low and angry as opposed to the shock and disgust from before. “i saw everything.”

he then turned and walked away from the door, leaving you two alone again.

a moment of awkward silence passed. “i should probably… you know.” you said, pointing to the house.

“oh yeah, no, definitely.” he rubbed the back of his neck.

“and look, i’m sorry if i ruined your friendship with tommy. i know you guys are close, and i hope he forgives you.”

he gave you a sad smile. “same here, love.” he then kissed your cheek and took off into the rain once more.

you went inside and tried fixing things with tommy, who refused to speak to you. after sitting outside his bedroom door for nearly an hour, you finally gave up and headed back into your room. you opened discord.

[your username]: tommy’s ignoring me. i’ve just sat outside his room for an hour and he refuses to talk to me.

WilburSoot: i’ll give it a go.

he did not speak to wilbur. tommy left him on read every time.

•••

tommy avoided you entirely for two weeks. he left the room if you walked in, and he wouldn’t speak to you at the dinner table. your mother was curious what was going on between you two, but neither of you would say anything about it.

finally, you’d had enough.

you asked your mother to call tommy out of his room, since he wouldn’t answer if you were to try. she did, just wanting you two to speak again. once he arrived in the living room, you jumped him. you grabbed him around the middle and threw him on the couch, planting yourself on top of him so he couldn’t run away. your mum left the room.

“hey, you asshole, get off of me!”

“no, tommy! enough is enough! you’re not leaving until you hear me out!”

“no, i don’t want to talk to you!”

“too bad because i’m not moving until you hear what i have to say! i don’t want us to keep avoiding each other like this.”

he went silent and thought about it for a moment, an angry and skeptical look on his face. “…fine. get it over with.”

you took a deep breath.

“tommy, you’re my little brother, and i love you. i’ll always love you, even when you hate me. just know that i never meant to hurt you or make you angry. however… you can’t tell me how to live my life, or who i can be with. i want to be with wilbur. i can’t help it, tommy, i love him. you can be happy for me or not, that’s your choice. but what isn’t your choice, is who i love.”

by the end of your speech, your voice was shaking and your eyes were watery. you got off of tommy and helped him sit up.

his face softened. “you… you love him?”

your tears ran down your cheeks. you nodded. “i do.”

tommy sighed before pulling you into a hug. it was rare for him to show affection, especially to you, but after everything that happened between the two of you, he felt it was important.

“i love you, y/n. you’re my sister, i could never hate you. i’m happy for you. but just know, best mate or not, i’ll castrate him if he makes you sad.”

you laughed, wiping away your tears.

“i should… probably speak with wilbur, yeah?”

you nodded. tommy stood and went back to his room. you followed not long after, and even though you knew it was frowned upon, you stopped to listen at his door.

“tommy, thank god you’re speaking to me. listen, man, i–”

“do you love her, wilbur?”

“what?”

“my sister. do you love her?”

“i– yeah. yeah, i do.”

“good. listen, all i want is for y/n to be happy. meaning if you make her cry, i’ll murder you.”

wilbur chuckled on the other line, making you smile.

“you won’t have to worry about that. i promise you i’ll take care of her.”

“just don’t make my sister cry and don’t be gross in front of me, alright big man?”

“you’ve got yourself a deal, tommyinnit.”

you smiled again before heading off in the direction of your room.

#wilbur soot #wilbur soot x reader #wilbur soot x you #wilbur soot x y/n #wilbur mcyt #wilbur dsmp #wilbur dream smp #tommyinnit #tommyinnit x sibling reader #sisterinnit #dsmp x reader #x reader #dream smp #tommy dream smp #tommy dsmp

[angelsndragons]

*sing* it's been ~a while~

and i have been watching vm vs the nein a lot so let's talk about it. as always with me, this is a very long word vomit.

i said over on my mechanics post that the vm playbook requires urgency while the nein's playbook requires setup. here's what i mean. if the nein can make it to round 3-4 intact, that is if all of them are up, they are going to win. period. the nein simply have too many ways to steal turns from their enemies or to maximize their own effectiveness for things to go any other way.

if you want to see this in action even with a reduced roster, go watch the fire elemental fight in episode 129 and count the rounds. between caduceus' mass cure wounds and spirit guardians, caleb's slow, veth's sneak attacks, and jester's guiding bolts, the nein were able to scrape out a win thanks more to their bag of tricks than the damage output. veth only got sneak attack because of guiding bolt's secondary effects, slow kept veth safe from an opportunity attack and jester from a multi-attack, mass cure wounds gave caleb that round to cast slow, and the spirit guardians passively whittled down the enemies into KO range. the accumulated secondary effects were too much for the enemies to withstand and they fell hard. notice how everything built on one another here. that's what cockroach parties learn to do well. it was sloppier than a normal nein fight but they did it with a reduced roster AND with nearly all of their high level spell slots spent before the fight. yeah, they're fucking scary.

vm, however, is a whole different kind of scary. this team can put you down before you even know what's happening. it's harder to target the group's biggest damage dealers because you have a hulking barbarian and often an elemental up front locking down combatants. the dagger rogue can teleport and fly. oh, and give himself an extra action each round. the ranger and the gunslinger can stand back and just go to town. the freaking bear can maul you. the bard can make your life a living joke in your final moments. the cleric is a wildcard because the group is built to fight without her; if she's around, good luck because that's another round of attacks you have to take and an extra round vm can take. their DCs are ridiculous, as are their overall ACs.

but the thing to know about vm is that they have to put you down fast. they don't have the hit points for longer fights and they definitely don't have the utility for longer fights. their druid is offensively oriented, their cleric is often absent, and their bard is mostly support. he's often the only one running that bag of tricks. he can and will fuck up an opposing team given the chance and bolster his own, the problem is that he has almost no backup here. it's a giant hole that is begging to be exploited. it's an even bigger hole when that bard can only cast one spell per round.

so, going into the battle royale, the vm side had to down one member of the nein as fast as possible preferably in two rounds or fewer. it almost doesn't matter who, because if you down beau or fjord, that forces jester or fjord to spend their action or spell getting the downed member back up. if jester goes down, fjord has to do something about it. well, i say it almost doesn't matter but beau's deflect missiles makes her the worst target of the trio and yes, i'm including fjord's half-orc bounce back in that calculation. that gives you one round where the person healing isn't fucking up your team. vm's secondary objective was to monitor and control beau. her movement is nothing to compared to a hasted vax but her stunning strike is the most lethal weapon the nein brought into this fight. vm overall is not a melee group to begin with and their con saves are all garbage. vm has to find a way to keep her off their tails if they want a chance. we also know that vm's plan was to try to take out jester first so throw that objective into the mix as well.

all the nein have to do is survive the first couple rounds, monitor scanlan and pike, and get into position. that's basically it. the nein can absolutely withstand vax and percy's damage output for the first two rounds. pike and scanlan's damage output can be scary but pike in particular has to decide whether she wants to hold high level slots for healing. and she would need those higher level slots to get close to percy and vax's damage output. the nein know from experience that the support caster is where the real trouble will begin.

but before we kick things off, remember that matt specifically designed this battlefield to take turns away from the teams. the chests are an action to search and are located far out of the way in the field. the gem requires an action to activate, which basically means sacrificing your action for someone else's, and shifts between six designated points on the field. matt, who has a deep understanding of how both teams operate, decided to play on the nein's insecurities that they were at a severe item disadvantage and see if he could get them to bite. high risk, high reward. granted, this is me speculating but it does look like matt saw the fight very differently from the players and readjusted the field accordingly.

so we kick off and immediately scanlan proves why he is the top priority on the nein's list. he gets the gem, gets fjord prone on the ground, and comes within a hair's breadth of turning the fight into a five on two potential slaughter. travis brilliantly responds to these circumstances in the best of ways. see, fjord isn't the nein's utility magician for this fight; fjord's the bait. travis makes a very big spectacle of himself and fjord's predicament. and vm buys it hook, line, and sinker. ashley tries to continue with the original plan of gunning for jester only to discover that jester is who knows where.

vax, percy and scanlan? immediately take their shots at fjord. but fjord's on the ground which puts percy's awful misfire mechanic into reasonable play. so fjord gets lucky and doesn't take anywhere near the amount of damage he could have from percy. scanlan, after percy is removed from the field, decides he's better off trying to finish fjord but only hits a 3rd level thunder wave instead of a higher level one, which sam was probably saving for some counterspells or such. i don't think a higher level would have made that much of a difference but it is important to note.

more importantly, vax gets greedy. he got two good hits on fjord with his two actions, he could have left and hidden for the next turn. yes, vm has to down fjord as fast as possible. however that haste is going to be more effective over the long term if vax can keep it. but fjord's easy prey and he thinks vm can down him before jester can get over there to do anything about it. so he goes for the bonus action attack. pike eventually joins this mad dash scramble and like scanlan, she absolutely needed to throw something huge at fjord to get past his half-orc racial trait to have a prayer at downing him. but she did not because ashley seems to have been saving all her high levels for healing so fjord survives the round in honestly a very good position. vax can't target him from range with the cloud up, scanlan now has bigger problems than fjord with molly right up on him, and pike ran, taking damage and healing fjord in the process.

meanwhile, the nein's ladies are free to run and play the field as they see fit. jester has a big opening round flame strike. beau decides she can hold off on her round 2 blitz run to vm in favor of bringing molly onto the field. remember kids, never let a monk with 55ft of movement have the run of the place, it's bad for business. jester then makes a great play with her dispel magic at vax's haste. hashtag thanks, fjord. remember, kids, cockroach parties excel at taking turns and actions away from their opponents. in round 2 alone, the nein successfully remove percy from the field and remove vax's extra attack. that's both big damage dealers hobbled in one round. they also gave themselves an extra turn, adding molly onto the field. and oh boy, molly.

here we see the utility martial fighter molly could have been. sam's confused by the low damage that molly's doing his first round but the damage isn't really the point of the attacks. that brand of tethering is far more important, as are taliesin keeping an eye on which reactions will support the nein and molly's second attack wasting scanlan's reaction. counterspell is off the table for the back half of round 2-beginning of round 3, which is important if fjord wants to get the heck out of dodge.

in case it wasn't obvious earlier in the match that the nein are absolutely gunning for scanlan, round 3 begins with beau's blitz against scanlan. fjord's luck against the dominate person balances out with scanlan's save against the stun and beau missing one attack. here, vm starts to get distracted. they chose their focus fire target, fjord, but now do not, arguably cannot, follow through on it. we'll never know what could have happened had vm said to hell with beau and molly in our faces, we have to finish fjord.

vax tries to retaliate against beau but here's where the cockroach starts to come into play. molly blood curses vax, which saves beau a full sneak attack+ worth of damage. it also utterly wastes vax's turn. fjord manages to escape (and damage pike while he's at it) and regroup where it's safe. scanlan tries to dimension door but fails due to the brand. literally any other move scanlan could try on the pair of them had a better chance of success. instead, another vm turn is lost. taliesin recognizes the importance of getting beau advantage and supports her at the cost of two of his attacks missing, but not before scanlan is forced to cutting words one of them. another potential counterspell and cutting words lost. neither jester or pike contribute significantly to this round; the nein have done so much damage to pike in three rounds that she is forced to heal herself while jester chooses to dimension door herself to the gem and only a low damage roll lets it evade her.

beau takes molly's setup and gets the critical scanlan stun. he loses his full round. fjord takes the opportunity molly provided him to polymorph into a t-rex, bringing him fully back into the fight. vm is really going to have a time and a half trying to finish him now unless they can put up a big single damage attack. jester builds on beau's setup by casting flame strike, whose dex save scanlan automatically fails. he goes down. if you're the nein, this is exactly where you want pike focused, on her team and not on yours. she has access to most of the same spells that jester has and the more you pressure her to focus on her team, the better. it's not wasting her turn, precisely, but it is controlling what she can reasonably do with it.

now we come to percy versus beau. i don't want to diminish the insane good luck beau had to take only 26 points of damage from six shots because what matters here is that percy absolutely could not down beau. period. her hit points were too high and after she took almost nothing from the first two shots, it should have been clear that she was going to get her turn and she would absolutely attempt to stun and down pike and scanlan. i'm not going to monday morning quarterback this fight but i will point out that the more rolls travis has to make to maintain concentration, the greater the chance he fails and you get to hit fjord's actual hit point pool and trade fjord for scanlan. and if you can get him before he can get back into the fray, even better.

beau stuns the gnomes and drops scanlan again. her inner cockroach rears its head once more as she negates more than half the damage on vax's critical hit sneak attack. fjord-rex downs scanlan and grapples pike. the stun on pike here really helps negate that high AC of hers. after scanlan's death, it's a long slow death spiral. vax abandons the fight in the next critical round in favor of keeping the gem instead of targeting fjord. percy attacks beau once more instead of fjord due to fjord dangling pike over lava. he starts to focus on fjord only to get distracted by jester. pike goes down but vax gets caught by beau before he can get her back up. and so it goes with vm losing turn after turn after turn until finally the nein poof percy out of existence and bring molly back. a fitting end for the team who started their final boss fight with eight and came out nine.

bottom line here, the vm team played like they had way more time than they actually did. they had to commit to a target and see it dead as fast as possible. they had to control the battlefield quickly and keep it. they didn't so they couldn't. aside from building on damage dealt, they couldn't create advantages or opportunities for each other nearly as effectively as nein did. all of these factors meant that the nein did what they always do: grind their enemies under heel.

#critical role #cr meta #critical role spoilers #vm vs m9 #vox machina vs mighty nein #d&d mechanics #vox machina #mighty nein #the mighty nein #cr spoilers #my meta #long post #don't let your opponents run circles around you kids #control the battlefield or the enemy will control you #teamwork makes the dream work

[babyboibucky]

Obvious

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Summary: You and Bucky are more than friends but less than lovers.

Word Count: 1,700

Warnings: slight angst??? mention of injury???

A/N: Inspired by Ariana Grande’s “obvious” because I fucking love that song lmfao. Let me know if anyone wants to be included in my Bucky Barnes tag list! Will do separate tag lists for everything Bucky and Babysitting Bucky. Feedback is highly appreciated!

MAIN MASTERLIST

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You and Bucky weren’t lovers, no. But you were definitely not just friends either.

There were kisses early in the morning, while both of you were cuddled in bed basking in the warmth of the sunlight spilling through the thin curtains; soft and subtle touches in the afternoon as the two of you navigated through the kitchen in an attempt to bake together. Slow touches late at night, cold metal fingers grazing you in just the right places that made you feel like on fire. And the exchange of whispers in the wee hours of night after coming down from the high of exploring each other’s bodies, uttered so softly, words meant only for each other to hear.

More than friends indeed, less than lovers? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it matter though? Because even without the words of affirmation, you loved Bucky and was sure that he loved you just as much.

Besides, you were obviously head over heels for the soldier. Not that you were denying or hiding it, in fact, you felt like you showed it a tad bit too much.

“Leaving so soon, soldier?” You’d asked with a pout as you watched Bucky leave your side on the bed.

“Duty calls.” He told you as he began to dress up.

Noticing your frown, he chuckled and approached you on the bed, bending down to press a kiss on your forehead.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He reassured you, smoothening out the crease on your forehead with his thumb.

“But I wanna cook you dinner.” You told him.

The thought of you and Bucky spending a domesticated evening together always elated you. You loved daydreaming about it, about sharing a life with your super soldier. Him coming home after a mission and you making sure to take good care of him. Maybe run him a bath while you prepared dinner. Silly, it seemed but you couldn’t help imagining all the possibilities with Bucky. Letting him sleep in on Sundays while you go on a jog, only to come back home with pancakes and bacons waiting for you in the kitchen. And Bucky of course, fresh out of bed with his hair sticking up in different directions.

Being with an Avenger of course, made it difficult to experience all these things. Sometimes you’d wake up alone but Bucky always made sure to leave you a little note.

I’ll be back soon, beautiful.

His notes found a home in one of your drawers. There were plenty and although these notes symbolized his absence on most days, they also meant promises. Promises to make it up for the lost time, promises that were never broken nor forgotten.

Dinner dates were often postponed, sleepovers a rare occurrence— spending time together in general, wasn’t as easy as it was for other couples out there.

But that’s okay. Because you’d always wait for Bucky. You’d wait for him to come home and even if it’d take him three days, one week, two months or even a year, you’d still wait and welcome him with hugs and kisses and affectionate whispers.

Sometimes you wondered whether Bucky knew how much you loved him.

Disagreements were of course, unavoidable even between you and Bucky. Oftentimes, the arguments would stem from his carelessness and selfless decisions during missions. Your super soldier, always so giving and generous and kind. You couldn’t care less about what others thought of him and his days under the influence of monsters. The moment you knew you loved Bucky, you had already accepted him. And that included his demons and dark days too.

To you, Bucky had always been kind and put others first before himself. Sometimes a little too much that you couldn’t help but feel hurt that he didn’t seem to care how you’d feel if ever he wouldn’t make it home.

If Sam hadn’t called you that night, you wouldn’t have known about the serious injury inflicted on Bucky while on a mission.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” You asked as soon as you barged into the medical bay, ignoring the nurse who immediately scrambled out of the room.

Bucky laid in bed, bruised and wrecked and unable to respond upon seeing you seething with anger for the first time ever.

“Were you even planning to tell me in the first place?” You scoffed.

They needed to infiltrate another Hydra base. Raid the base, get all possible information and blow it up to ashes. But then Bucky found a secret basement at the very last minute, young women and men were kept— future Winter Soldiers. The serum hadn’t been injected into their systems yet, they were merely poor teenagers in captivity. Bucky knew he couldn’t let these young people suffer the same fate as him. With barely a minute left before the bomb was set to explode, Bucky did his best to save everyone in that basement.

Never mind the Falcon’s orders to abort his mission, never mind the back-up they had called for to help them out. Bucky knew the choices he had: walk away unscathed knowing that the back-up wouldn’t arrive in time to save the children, or stay behind and do his best to make sure that no one will become another toy for Hydra to play with.

Even if it meant risking his life, even if it meant leaving you back home unaware of his fate.

“They needed me. I couldn’t just leave them behind.” Bucky explained.

“And you didn’t think I needed you too?” You asked, eyes rimmed with tears.

God, you knew you were selfish for feeling hurt but you couldn’t help it. Did it not cross Bucky’s mind that if he had died, you’d be left behind too? Did you not cross his mind during that time?

“Look, I understand what the superhero life is all about. And I know that it’s fucking selfish of me to say this but...Bucky, I need you too. As much as the world does.”

It was a conversation that you and Bucky had many times now. But with how your love grew for him with each passing second, the thought of losing him, it had become too much for you to suppress.

Waking up without his little notes of reassurance that he’d be back soon, no more cold fingers tracing against the smooth expanse of your skin and having to sleep knowing that the next day, Bucky wouldn’t be there anymore— just the mere thought of losing him broke your heart.

“I can’t...” you breathed out, “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, Buck.” You admitted with a shaky sigh as your tears continued to fall.

Bucky wanted to get up and pull you to an embrace, but he was too injured to do so. How we wanted to kiss your tears away, all he could do was extend a hand towards you, inviting you to come closer and touch him.

“I’m sorry.” He mumbled. “I should have told you, I’m sorry. C’mere.”

Despite your anger, you didn’t think twice and immediately went to hold Bucky’s hand, squeezing it tightly as if you were trying to make sure that he was fine and real and that you didn’t lose him.

“Please stop being so reckless. With how much I love you, it drives me crazy whenever you come home all wounded and bloody and now—“

“You love me?”

Bucky had asked the question as if he couldn’t believe that yes, you do love him. Sam really wasn’t kidding when he said how dense Bucky was.

“Is it not obvious?” You asked, wiping away your tears.

“I mean yeah but...I just didn’t want to assume that you do because we never really talked about it.” He explained, rubbing the back of your hand with his thumb.

His metal fingers, although cold and hard against your skin, had always been your favorite. They were gentle when they needed to be, or at least whenever Bucky touched you. They were cold and made you shiver but always in a good way.

“Bucky, I’ve talked about wanting a future with you. You still didn’t think that that was love?” There was a hint of playfulness in your tone despite your deadpan expression.

Oh no, what if you interpreted everything the wrong way?

“Do you not...oh my god, Bucky am I the only one in love?” You asked, panicked.

“Oh god, no.” Bucky immediately clarified as he pulled you to sit down on the bed beside him.

“I love you. So much. Please don’t think otherwise.” He said, cupping your face and wiping away the remnants of your tears.

A smile followed by a quick peck on the lips. Bucky moved and gave you enough space to lay down beside him on the hospital bed. Suddenly, everything felt right. Not that it wasn’t before but with the both of you finally uttering those words, it felt different.

The perfect kind of different.

You laid your head against Bucky’s chest and listened to his heartbeat as his hand rubbed comforting circles on your back. You can’t imagine a life without being this close to him, your super soldier.

“I thought of you, you know.” His chest rumbled as he spoke.

You lifted your head up to look at him in confusion. He smiled at you lovingly, “During the mission. Every mission I go to actually, I thought of you.”

Bucky thought about how you always waited for his return no matter how long he took. He imagined what you’d be doing when he’d come back, would you still be asleep? Perhaps you’d be in the shower, singing. Bucky thought about how he’d kiss you as soon as he comes home, how he’d make you feel how much he missed you and your scent, how your smooth skin felt against his.

Every single time, Bucky thought about coming home to you. It was his motivation to stay alive no matter what. He knew you needed him as much as the world does.

Because he needed you just the same.

More than friends, indeed. Less than lovers? No, you and Bucky were more than that.

You were each other’s worlds.

#bbbwrites #oneshots: bucky barnes #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky x you #bucky x reader #sebastian stan