#but a lot of people couldn't afford a plane ticket or to travel that far...

[eleyhsa]

one more earlier episode of valtteri's podcast i never translated, this is the last one i promise 😅 episode title: money

oskari: let's start with how much money do you have? valtteri: it's pretty hard to say because i have invested quite a lot of it, but yeah, a lot i guess. enough that i don't need to back my bags and go drive cars around in circles if i don't want to. oskari: do you consider yourself rich? valtteri: yeah of course, compared to where I came from, yeah i'm rich in a money sense -------

oskari: forbes does these, sophisticated guesses let's call them, every year and they say your payroll is around 8-10m every year, how close is that to the truth? valtteri: if the season goes well, meaning i get all the bonuses i'm supposed to get, it's more than that actually oskari: how much was your payroll at williams? valtteri: 2010 was kinda my first year working for them and at the time it was 40 000 pounds a year, and then it rose some amounts every year, and my first year as a f1 driver i think it was around 300k -------

oskari: you already mentioned that considering where you came from you feel very rich, so what was your background like, because we are not talking about a rich kid right? valtteri: yeah no, to me i'm from a pretty basic finnish family, priviledged in a sense that we had our own house and i could go to school, start playing hockey which is not a cheap sport and do karting since I was 6, with a used car, used overall and a used helmet, a used helmet is something I do not recommend! karting took more and more money every year and I was lucky that a lot of local companies helped me financially because they saw how much I loved karting and that i had some talent as well. some of these companies also supported me long term when my family truly couldn't pay for it any more. oskari: where was that line for you when the family money wasn't enough anymore? valtteri: we got quite far i think, it was my first year in formula renault with the Koiranen team. We found just enough outside help that with not testing as much as maybe other kids were because I couldn't pay for it, I could drive for them and Koiranen kinda met me halfway with that. But yeah, at that point no change to pay for it yourself because I think a season cost around 100k at that point.

---------

rane, valtteri's dad: we got around 300k from finland and even that was thight, meaning we couldn't afford any crashes. but after he won his first race in 2008 my phone started ringing with people like mika häkkinen and toto wolff and then there was some difficulty to choose, renault was really interested at the time about valtteri, so we had kind of three directions to go, and i told valtteri and he has to choose for himself what feels right and he told me he liked toto. i think both me and valtteri also liked the idea of not being tied to any team, not to renault or even ferrari who he also visited that season.

oskari: have you ever tried to calculate how much you have spent of your own money on valtteri's career? rane: i have tried at some point, i definitely think it's more than this house we're sitting in now, luckily my cleaning services were often needed (laughing) oskari: i don't think many people know that you have a cleaning company and this is something that interests me because i think people learn a lot from their homes, do you see any "entrepreuner spirit" in valtteri? rane: quite a lot actually, when he turned 18 he started doing his own negotiations. when he was trying to get into f1 he was alone on the road, i paid for plane tickets and he would call me and explain what was said. of course we travelled a lot together in his early career so we know each other quite well and i think doing that on his own helped him learn a lot. even back in karting i took him with me to see sponsors so he would understand how much this all costs and because it's no rocket science you know, a lot of people are ashamed to ask for money but it's quite simple: you put a budget on the paper, here's our season targets, how much money can you give. valtteri learned to do that quite young. oskari: do you remember the day valtteri signed his first f1 contract? rane: yeah, very well! they were some special moments, and you actually sent me a text to congratulate me as well! oskari: yeah i did! rane: i went to see his first race and i definitely actually pinched myself in melbourne

---------

valtteri: 2008 was a good season so I got my managers in toto, mika and didier coton, and whatever i couldn't get from sponsor they would give from their own pockets oskari: how much was that do you think? valtteri: probably around 2.5 million that I have paid back now, so it's no charity in this sport. but i definitely wouldn't have made it to f1 without them.

-------

oskari: you're going into alfa romeo, while recording this it's still quite a new contract, you do your own negotiations is that correct? valtteri: most of them yes, for example all my mercedes contracts, but didier helped me with this one because the season was so busy and intense and i didn't really have the time oskari: how many options did you have? valtteri: pretty much two clear possibilities oskari: and after signing the contract you got a pretty interesting call right? valtteri: like two days after signing i got a call from an another team and they basically said "we can pay twice as much, and we want you", i just told them that you're a bit late. it just shows what kind of circus this thing is *laughing*

-------

oskari: what kind of money user are you? valtteri: when i first started making it pretty stingy, for example i wanted a simple rowboat for my cottage so i started asking around for a used one, and i had been a f1 drivers for like two years at that point already. it still hurts to pay 10 dollars for a goddamn water bottle in a hotel but I guess I'm not that stingy anymore because I still buy it *laughing*

#valtteri bottas #f1 #formula 1

[someoneintheshadow456]

Y'all I was doing research for my Ace Attorney fanfic on which were the first places to legalise gay marriage because my story is set in the 2000s and I wanted to make sure it was accurate.

I also remembered that a lot of BL/GL anime of the time period used "marriage in San Francisco" as a plot point (like how "divorce in Reno" was in ye olde Hollywood), because San Francisco was one of the first places to issue same-sex marriage licenses in the USA. Massachusetts luckily legalised gay marriage in May of 2004, a little bit after San Francisco did. But for some reason the San Francisco one was better known internationally. So I wanted to see if that was actually accurate and googled it...

Found the Wikipedia article and came across this:

The San Francisco 2004 same-sex weddings took place between February 12 and March 11, 2004, after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom directed the city-county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and a number of interest groups sued to end the practice. About 4,000 such licenses were issued before the California Supreme Court ordered a halt to the practice on March 11. On August 12, 2004, the California Supreme Court voided all of the licenses that had been issued in February and March.

For additional context San Francisco City Hall looked like THIS for those two months, there were queues going on for miles. And it wouldn't be implausible if foreign LGBT couples came to America to marry upon hearing the news. In fact, such a thing STILL happens even to this day:

Imagine finally being able to get married after YEARS of persecution, waiting in mile long queues to get your license, maybe you and your spouse even flew thousands of miles to do this... only for said license to be rendered null and void in six months, out of the blue... all because of political lobbying. 4000 marriage certificates... rendered about as good as toilet paper. In the span of six months. 4000 people's hopes... dashed.

I would have been too young and living too far away to know about this when it happened. But older LGBT people living in the area may be able to actually attest to it, maybe they were even one of the 4000 people affected. And actually, I'm wondering if perhaps the numbers were downplayed.

This... still haunts me. The fact that you could have your marriage license taken away like that... legitimately horrifying.

#y'all I just wanted to write Wrightworth fanfiction I didn't expect to learn this very scary and depressing part of LGBT history #THANK GOD masachussets was there #but a lot of people couldn't afford a plane ticket or to travel that far... #thank GOD things have gotten a little better #if ONLY those BL/GL writers KNEW...

[chibimyumi]

Wait - so if I got this right, Furukawa is tohos favourite cow and he belongs to their company. And they're paying a lot for kuromyu. So why do they let him continue in a musical, which basically can't afford anything and would go down without him? As far as I understood, Toho gains as much as nothing from that. So couldn't it be as well possible to tell Furukawa to stop playing Sebas or is this his own desicion wether to do that or not? Greetings from a confuzzled fan °A°/

【Related Post】

Dear anonymous confuzzled fan,

It seems like you understood it perfectly! Furukawa is indeed TOHO’s favourite cow. My friends and I call him “Furucowa”, he has played “Moowzart”, starred in “Lady Bessie”, and is most well known as “Sebessie” in this fandom.

Okay, okay sorry, I’ll be more serious now.

Why does TOHO let Furucowa continue in Kuromyu?

Despite the Imperial Theatre’s esteem as the most elite form of entertainment, the fanbase is - though incredibly loyal - still relatively small. TOHO is not very accessible, and they only have Tokyo and Osaka as their theatre bases. So even if people would like to see a TOHO production, they’d still have to travel all the way to either Tokyo or Osaka. Japan is a big country; most people have to book a plane/shinkansen ticket and a hotel to watch theatre. The traveling costs on top of the expensive ticket can quickly become an astronomical sum.

In contrast, manga and anime are very accessible. Compared to the fanbase manga has, theatre’s is but a niche minority.

Though theatre is niche, Kuromyu can ride the tailcoats of the manga/anime’s immense success. Most people did not see Kuromyu because they are theatre fans, but because they are Kuroshitsuji fans.

By letting Furukawa partake in Kuroshitsuji, TOHO managed to market Furukawa not just in the niche world of theatre, but also in the wide world of manga. Indeed, after Furukawa’s major success in Lycoris 2015, the Imperial Theatre noticeably gained an increase in spectators; most of these were Kuroshitsuji fans. (When I went to Romeo & Juliette in 2017, half of the people standing in front of me had the Kuromyu Tote bag.)

Not only did TOHO manage to gain more customers whenever Furukawa is performing, but Furukawa also became the gateway for many manga-fans to liking theatre in general. Ever since Furukawa’s skyrocketing success, TOHO also began to aim their marketing strategies at late teens and young adults. Before, it were mostly rich madams who set foot in the Imperial Theatre, but nowadays we see increasingly more young people attend as well. Furukawa has managed to widen the age demographics of theatregoers.

Symbiosis - TOHO’s Side

Even though TOHO spends quite a fortune on sponsoring MKP (Musical Kuroshitsuji Project), that money is basically their payment for grandiose advertisement.

No matter how many posts TOHO would make on social media, on their own they could never beat the publicity gained from a praising tweet by Yana herself, and they don’t even have to pay Yana a single yen for that!

The reason TOHO does not often produce DVDs is because they usually lose money on the sales. However, when the Romeo & Juliette 2019 Black Version DVD with Furukawa was released on August 1st, it sold out almost immediately, whereas White Version (Ohno Takuro’s Romeo) didn’t. A DVD being quickly sold out was unprecedented for TOHO. They were not prepared for this, so they had to rush the reprint. This again was evidence for TOHO that Furukawa is indeed their best cow.

Like I said before, it seems like MKP is going to struggle very hard without TOHO’s aid now, simply because the bar has now been raised too high for MKP to reach on their own. As it is now, TOHO has demonstrated just how powerful they are, how much of a difference they can make. Besides, they also won the reputation as ‘the charitable senpai who looked out for poor little 2.5D kouhai’. Perhaps they will also lend their other cows to other manga franchises in future. Who knows?

No matter how much they spent on MKP, TOHO probably earned that back multifold.

Symbiosis - MKP’s Side

Even though it is a risk to rely on TOHO, MKP did manage to make a noteworthy break through a glass ceiling; the glass ceiling of 2.5D theate’s reputation of being amateurish. Even now, Kuromyu is acknowledged to be one of 2.5D’s leading productions. Though the risk was high, the fame they got in return was phenomenal. What other “amateurish” 2.5D can say they have had the honour of starring actors from the esteemed Imperial Theatre? What other 2.5D could say their Troupe Lead is THE Prince of the Imperial Theatre?

Furucowa’s Decision

Furukawa honestly loves Sebastian from the bottom of his heart, and he did once say that as long as the material is canon and things within his power, he would guard the role of Sebastian like a mad dog.

Ever since he played Sebas he has changed for the better. He has come to see the source of many social judgements stemming from other people’s insecurities, for example. Playing Sebas taught him how to objectively assess human behaviour, allowing him to better deal with anxiety.

As an additional bonus, he also shared with us how this new skill of objective observation turned out very helpful in studying and interpreting different roles. Nowadays, Furukawa often drops phrasings like: “humans this, humans that”… It is truly beautiful how much Sebas still lives in Furukawa.

I am not sure whether TOHO has the right to “make Furukawa STOP” playing in Kuromyu. But again, as long as the material is from canon, it would probably be very hard for anybody to actually make him give up on Sebastian.

#Kuroshitsuji #Black Butler #Musical #Kuromyu #Furucowa #Furukawa Yuta #Yun #Yunbastian #TOHO #MKP #Symbiosis man...